C.M.L.T.
“God damn it! God fucking damn it! ANOTHER DNA verified paternity test? Fuck my ass to Sunday, how the fuck do we deal with this?” Niel Stine, Chief Analyst for the United Nations C.M.L.T. Foundation, was screaming into the C.M.L.T. Foundation Public Service Discord channel. “Are you fucking kidding me? We really have to keep profiling this mother-daughter-sister-fucker as a net fucking positive?”
Stine was bitching about serial murderer and rapist Adrien Dandie, who was swiftly approaching an overwhelmingly healthy paternity-to-murdernity ratio by the C.M.L.T Foundation metrics. Human Twitter was already blowing the fuck up over Dandie’s C.M.L.T. WikiProlifieration Profile showing a bright green Human Race Proliferation Ratio of 5.6, and now it was creeping up towards 7.0 where, god forbid, they’d have to add a little picture of a smiley face climaxing or whatever. The man had really raped a whole lot of ladies (after he’d murdered their men, in many cases), and since proliferation potential was considered the most positive possible trait in a potential offspring, there wasn’t really any way to get an abortion approved, legally speaking. Quite a few unexpectedly expecting mothers came out feeling grateful for the trade-up from the now-dead deadbeats they’d been dating (with their deadbeat ratios starting at 0.0 and not likely to go anywhere fast), after they’d recovered from the shock.
Dandie was still on a rampage. Murder was murder, but he was untouchable. Half of the Human Twitter posts were cheering him on towards a top score. Ever since the legal systems had switched over to the Progeny basis, your personal Net Population Effect was the only number that mattered, and it was public knowledge. Murder was murder, but what the fuck could you do? Dandie was a fucking alpha, according to the numbers. He had sired ten kids, killed his wife, bought out his sentence with a ratio hit, and started a cold, calculated, long-term campaign of gruesome rapes and random murders that kept his kid-count on the fucking rise, outpacing the murders by a long shot. He was the most prolific bad guy since the Foundation had started tracking badness, but nobody could call him bad, legally. He had a ratio of 5.6 for fuck’s sake, and it kept going up.
Back in the C.M.L.T. Foundation Public Service Discord channel, Stine was still seething. He hadn’t had any kids yet, hadn’t met the right person yet–but with a ratio that looked like a surprised rabbit, he wasn’t going to meet anyone worthwhile any time soon.
Re: In the Quake Zone
Consider this anonymous analysis of a mysterious gay story:
That said a few years back I was reading one of the Years Best Science Fiction anthologies (it would have to be a few years back since the editor Gardner Dozois has been dead for a while) and it had an especially infuriating bit of heavy handed pro-gay propaganda. Something about a heterosexual guy from the future who was sent to the 1950’s to investigate the disappearances of gay people in some midwestern US city. The assumption was a homophobic serial killer, so the hero befriended a gay dude to keep watch for when the killer would show up. Various stuff went on for a while, gay dude falls in love with the hero, hero eventually agrees to have his brain remodelled to be gay as well. Turns out the disappearances were actually the time travel agency rescuing gay people by sending them to the future and the entire thing was an elaborate scheme to make the straight guy gay so everyone could live happily ever after. This was not ironic. The writer legitimately thought it was cool to manipulate someone into changing their sexual orientation against their will, provided of course it was straight to gay. And since the story was included in the anthology the editor must have felt the same. I was not impressed.
The poster was so furious that I tracked the story down to read for myself. It’s called “In the Quake Zone” by David Gerrold; you can read it in the 23rd “Year’s Best Science Fiction Annual Collection” at your local library or here.
Since the poster mentioned the gay angle, I was paying attention to sexuality from the start. Our hero exclusively notices and thinks about boys. He has multiple quiet monologues about boys and their troubles. He thinks a lot about holding boys. How soft the boys are. Boys boys boys. He projects homosexuality on other men through one-off interactions. How the boys struggle. He has multiple words for categorizing the types of gay boys. He has no history with women and never mentions his mother. Women in the story are almost absent from his notice and considered entirely robotically, i.e. in terms of efficiency. He uses “girl” more often to refer to boys than to females. He kisses a boy. He kisses his dad. He also beats up a bad dad (not his dad, who is soft and kind). He immediately thinks about marrying the barely-legal waif-boy whom he rescues off the street and who acts exactly like the feminine ideal: gentle, pitiful, probably loves him, makes dinner. Our hero is thinking about boys all the time. I doubt he was really straight in the first place.
Now, the brain remodeling. After being forcibly transported from 1967 into 2032 by his boss, our hero is given not one but two special blue pills: one for him and one for his waif-boy. If he accepts the pills, he’ll be allowed to rescue the boy, who killed himself after the MC effectively rejected him by disappearing into the future. The pills “shift your sexual orientation such that same-sex attractions can overwhelm inhibitions, programming, and even hard-wiring”, and if he and his partner take one, they are pheromonally drawn specifically to each other. The hero rejects this at first, but changes his mind after realizing: “I might actually start feeling again.” He remembers a rare feeling of desire when his darling boy was waiting, nude in our hero’s bed, to be taken; a desire which he immediately quashed, thinking: I’m not queer! He wishes that he could feel things, which I suspect really means he wishes he was okay with feeling certain things.
If you follow the main character’s thoughts it’s clear to me that our hero has been boy-obsessed this whole time. So why has he been presented with two pills that “shift” and “overwhelm” instead of helping him to accept himself?
Well, the MC’s boss, who gives the MC the pills and has been training him for some purpose, is absolutely insane. The book starts out with this premise: for about 200 years, random “time quakes” strike Los Angeles which randomly move people back and forth in time. They disappear suddenly in their timeline and reappear in the past. In-universe, it causes an epidemic of disappearances, get-rich-quick schemes, crime and death prevention, all sorts of “wreak havoc on causality” stuff somehow restricted to LA. All of the time quakes turn out to be aftershocks of this guy, the boss, using real time travel to move gay people a few years into the future to give them better opportunities (some implied to be world-changing). All of the people he chooses are young, feminine, homosexual boys who are shy, have some artistic longing, come from broken homes, and all coincidentally have IQs in the 111-143 range. The boss destroys reality in order to become a savior for twinks. He calls it “harvesting.” He also says this…
“Yes, [part of the stage that comes after being human includes being queer]. And so is being black. And female. And body-modded. And everything else.” Eakins [the boss] leaned forward intensely. “Your body is here in 2032, but your head is still stuck in 1967. If we’re going to do anything with you, we have to get your head unstuck. Listen to me. In this age of designer genders, liquid orientation, body-mods, and all the other experiments in human identity, nobody fucking cares anymore about who’s doing what and with which and to whom. It’s the stupidest thing in the world to worry about, what’s happening in someone else’s bedroom, especially if there’s nothing happening in yours. The past was barbaric, the future doesn’t have to be. You want meaning? Here’s meaning. Life is too short for bullshit. Life is about what happens in the space between two people—and how much joy you can create for each other. Got that? Good. End of sermon.”
“And that’s trans-human — ?”
“That’s one of the side effects. Life isn’t about the lines we draw to separate ourselves from each other—it’s about the lines we can draw that connect us. The biggest social change of the last fifty years is that even though we still haven’t figured out how to get into each other’s heads, we’re learning how to get into each other’s experience so we can have a common ground of being as a civilized society.
Despite being in the future where apparently no one cares, the boss is outraged, terrified, furious enough to rant about how much no one cares to a totally helpless man from the past who wants to save someone he cares about. His goal is not for the MC to accept himself and his love for a cute boy who loves him, but to become useful to this enlightened society of his. And to be “useful” would be to support the boss’s fervor: to become a force that implements the end result of no one caring, i.e. make more people gay without any inhibitions, i.e. why do you think he had those pills ready to go in pairs when he was talking about harvesting probably-gay boys? He doesn’t know anything about or give a shit about what’s going on in the MC’s mind, he just wants him to be a representative of his perfect trans-human world. Of course there are no personal-acceptance pills. The boss probably hasn’t ever thought about making them, because he’s never considered that the thoughts and feelings of the people he interacts with are precious, despite his stated ideology. He believes in a dream world and discards the reality of the people in front of him, unable to accept or even consider their feelings.
There’s a lot of fucked up shit in this. “Life is about what happens in the space between two people—and how much joy you can create for each other.” Really? The guy who said that intentionally triggered the miserable suicide of the only truly innocent person in the story.