Microstory 1474: New Mayor in Town

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The mayor of Aljabara was not the president of the whole planet, but they did enjoy some de facto influence that went beyond the city. When their former mayor was taken to Earth by the salmon battalion, the city knew what to do. They had a long history of special elections, so this would just be one more. Hopefully this sort of thing would end after this one, though. They now had a Constitution, and an easy-to-follow set of protocols for abiding by the law, and making it fair and safe for everyone. A lot of people started up campaigns, but most of them did not procure the necessary minimum signatures to even officially declare their candidacy. Still, there were fourteen people who felt up for the job. Only one of them was a woman. Other women were part of the new government, but none so high up, because they hadn’t before been given the education or experience to make policy. Voters weren’t trying to continue the misogyny; there just weren’t many women who felt comfortable running. Merrill Panders was different. Her father gave her mother a little more leeway when it came to them being alone together. He wouldn’t have approved of his wife educating her child against social conventions, but they were sneaky about it. She taught Merrill everything her mother had taught her. She had learned it from her own mother. They came from a long line of educated girls, who passed their skills on to the next generation; both the knowledge itself, and the expertise to get away with it without the men in their lives knowing. Merril ran to be a member of the president’s cabinet during the last election, but she lost. Now, though, she was famous and popular, and people were ready to hear what she had to say about the future of Aljabara, and Durus as a whole. She quickly became frontrunner. Merrill campaigned well, and kicked butt at every debate. As the list of hopefuls were whittled down one by one, she remained strong, and moved up in the polls. She had some strong competition, however. Her primary opponent’s platform was very similar to hers, and a lot of voters couldn’t decide between the two of them, because it didn’t seem like there would be much of a difference. In the end, however, Merrill nabbed too many of the votes. While women were fully free to vote in the first election for the Democratic Republic, many of them still chose not to. They weren’t used to it, and to be honest, they were a little scared. They were less underconfident and bashful about it by the time 2170 rolled around. Merrill was a good leader, and helped develop Aljabara into a thriving city during her many years as mayor. She was particularly focused on female education, which was no surprise, but wasn’t the only thing that she cared about. She also pioneered technological innovations, hoping to one day match progress with Earth in more ways than just social. She would go down in history as one of the best governmental officials Durus ever saw, and many assumed she would eventually run for president, or some other higher station. She never did, though. She just kept running for mayor, and kept getting reëlected, and Aljabara was better for it.

Microstory 1471: Salmon Battalion

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In an alternate timeline, the paramounts on Durus started a war with the regular humans. Most of them didn’t actually believe that those with time powers were superior to those without, but they were tired of the Provisional Government, and they wanted to see real change in their world. They figured creating a common enemy for the native Durune, and the Earthan refugees, to fight would unify them. Well, that part of the plan worked, but the part where they would arbitrarily end the war, and try to form a peaceful union for all, was lost. Some of the paramounts decided they were happy with this new direction. Yeah, people with powers were better, and they ought to be ruling the planet. As one might imagine, this caused a lot of problems, and the sort of fake war transformed into a real one, with plenty of empowered people on both sides. This meant that it would probably end in the total destruction of humanity on the rogue world. Worried this would happen, and not wanting the fighting to continue either way, a time traveling paramount went back to the Deathspring in 2161, and purposefully made sure that he was sent to Earth. Once there, he contacted someone named The Overseer, who was the go-to leader for any major endeavor that involved salmon and choosing ones working together. Salmon were a subspecies of humans who experienced nonlinear time, but lived under the control of a mysterious group called the powers that be, while choosers were people with powers, who could choose to use them at will. They were the Earthan equivalent of paramounts, and they had a pretty reliable network, which could make things happen. One of these groups was called the salmon battalion. It consisted of a few hundred people from all over time and space. They fought in various wars throughout the timeline, turning the tide to their leaders’ will, which was generally to ultimately create peace. Some members fought only in one battle, while others were more long-term participants, and these people cycled in and out of the battalion as necessary. The Overseer was not in charge of the battalion, but she could petition for aid if she felt it was warranted, and the powers that be were obliged to at least consider the request. Though Durus was beyond their scope, they agreed to come set things right. The highest number of simultaneous battalion members transported to Durus, and created a new timeline, which wiped away the formation of the New Crusades. They took control of the government, just for the time being, and started the Salmon Battalion Military State.

Now, this was a scary thing to call it, and though they kept the peace through peaceful means, the battalion did use that fear to keep people in line. They didn’t tolerate violence, or bigotry, or the infringement of people’s rights. They let protestors speak their peace, but most people eventually became glad that the battalion was here. They brought with them people who were experienced with democratic procedures, and though these experts didn’t dictate how the new republic would be set up, they did provide them with a lot of great advice. They helped them figure out what the Durune leaders would be called, and what responsibilities they would have. They helped build the capitol, so the new government would have a place to work out of. They helped set up the 2168 Special Election, so the first administration could star making decisions on their own. And finally, they helped them draft the Constitution, so that everyone would understand what the laws were, and what was expected of them as citizens. To that end, they wanted to ensure that every single person on the planet was considered a full citizen, whether they descended from Earthans who came in 2016, or if they just had arrived in 2161. Everyone, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, race, color, religion, disability, age, or temporal status would be treated as an equal, and enjoy the same rights as everyone else. As far as what the paramounts were allowed to do with their time powers, the battalion left that up to the administration, and the people of Durus. Immediately following the special election, which established the leadership until at least 2175, nearly all members of the salmon battalion left Durus, and returned to their respective time periods on Earth, or on to the next mission. Only a few key officers remained behind to tie up loose ends, and answer any lingering questions. In the end, the people were grateful to the battalion for them having been there.

Microstory 1470: The Transition Continues

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Since 2100, the city of Aljabara had not gone more than five years without holding an election. Most of these weren’t fair or legitimate, but they did take place, and those who the government decided were worthy of casting votes were free to do so. After the fall of the Republic, there were a lot of decisions that needed to be made in order to sustain the Provisional Government, but these weren’t determined through formal votes. They were polls. A special committee formed which did what they could to understand public opinion, and then used the general consensus to form policy. But no woman alive today had been free to cast a real ballot on Durus, except for Ecrin. The year 2165 was meant to be the time to do that, but this temporary governmental body wasn’t quite prepared for it. The greatest number of people ever, by a huge margin, would be voting in this round of elections, and no one around knew how to handle that. Even the visitors from Earth who had always been part of a democratic system didn’t know how to organize it, because none of them had experience in that field. They did their best, and tried to include everyone, but ballots were lost, or miscounted, or damaged, or people weren’t registered correctly. It was a huge mess. They would have remained in the transitional period even if it had gone smoothly, because no one had written a new Constitution...because no one knew how. Even so, it was a requirement for full-fledged governmental recognition, according to a recent poll. So new people were elected into leadership positions, and new committees were formed to make decisions, but nothing was official, and not everyone recognized the authority bestowed upon certain people from the votes. No one knew whose ballots were counted, and whose weren’t, but people whose preferred candidate lost tended to believe that their voice had been ignored. However close to accurate as it might have managed to be incidentally, no one was completely happy with the results, since it was so unclear. People began to protest, and demanded a revote. Few people were against this happening, except of course people who were still, or now, in power. It didn’t start a war, but the whole thing might have collapsed in a few years if something wasn’t done about it. Fortunately for them, a threat was on the horizon that galvanized the people of Durus into action, and finally forced them to form the Democratic Republic. But until this was official, the people lived under something called the Salmon Battalion Military State.

Microstory 1249: Aqil Saqqaf

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Until Valda Ramsey’s mother returned to the timeline from the past, and finally gave birth to her child, Aqil Saqqaf was the youngest source mage in Springfield, but it was not originally meant to be like this. Aqil’s father went on an extended business trip shortly after he was conceived. He was gone for four months, and returned to find his wife pregnant. About a month after the Deathfall sent the entire town to Durus, the baby’s due date came and went. Then more time passed, and then more. Aqil ultimately gestated in his mother’s womb for a total of 380 days, which they would never have access to the internet to discover was the longest overdue pregnancy in recorded history. The father didn’t believe it anyway. He was completely convinced that his wife had cheated on his while he was away, even though she claimed that she was always faithful. At first, things were bad. He refused to take care of the boy who was indeed his child, but the survivors were all in this together, so little Aqil was not lacking in love and care. They would get through this as long as things didn’t escalate beyond this. The problem was that things got much, much worse. His father’s anger grew as time went on, and possibly thanks to the influence of the time monsters that plagued this world, he fell off the deep end. He eventually killed his wife for her supposed infidelity, leaving poor Aqil with no parents. Smith tried to take responsibility for him, but Dar’s parents, the Treslers knew that Aqil would grow up maladjusted if they allowed this to happen. They took him in instead, and raised them as Dar’s brother. They quickly realized how intelligent Aqil was. Had school, in the traditional sense, existed on this hell world, he would have skipped at least three grades by the time he graduated from high school. He actually struggled with finding the resources to satiate his thirst for knowledge, and understanding of how things worked. With no way of reaching Earth, there were just some ideas he couldn’t explore beyond reading about them in library books. Still, his limitations didn’t stop him from being the driving force in curating the Mage Protectorate’s laws and policies. He borrowed from preexisting constitutions, and other law documents, but a lot of the way the government on Durus would come to function safely and effectively were from his new ideas. He ignored past procedures he felt were detrimental to a progressive society, and enjoyed the benefit of being born at a time when equality was at least already established as desirable. He never, for instance, had to give white land-owning men exclusive civil rights, and then gradually start including everyone else. These rights existed for all citizens, right from the start, which made moving forward that much easier. People almost even thought being portaled to the rogue planet was a good thing; a way to start fresh. Aqil wouldn’t take it that far, but he did want to make the best of their situation, and the new world was better for him having been part of it.

Microstory 844: Remake a Killing

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In the old days, there were virtually no rules when it came to what you were allowed to do when it came to art, and what you couldn’t. Basically, the only things prohibited were things that were illegal anyway. One guy tried to film a dog literally starving to death once, but his local law enforcement put a quick end to that experiment. In the film industry’s heyday, there was almost no originality. Nearly everything released was a remake, reboot, sequel, or adaptation. When you thought you were watching something you hadn’t seen before, there was often a small article that proved it was actually ultimately based on something prior. When the New Rule came to power, they made a lot of decisions that harmed people’s ways of life. They created inequality, and made it harder for some to find steady work. While rebels were fighting against these atrocious conditions, they largely ignored the smaller changes the New Rule made, because they didn’t threaten anybody’s life, or livelihood. Though one could argue that hindering what type of art an artist is allowed to make does indeed damage our freedoms, their reasoning was not completely absurd. There is something to be said for requiring every new entry in the pantheon of films to be fresh and new. Once the rebellion successfully put an end to the New Rule administration, the Originality Clause was left in the revised Constitution, because there wasn’t enough outcry against it, and we were already changing too much of the document, which has been through oh so many iterations throughout our entire history. So now we live in a world without remakes, except for one...well, seven.

A Killer Remade was the last remake to be released before the New Rule instituted their laws, its fitting title a mere coincidence. Its predecessor was created only one year prior, but audiences and critics were disappointed in it, so the filmmakers hastily shot a new version that was even worse than the last. It involved an all new cast, save for the actor who played The Rainbleeder; a chiefly ad-libbed script, built from what the new actors simply recalled by having seen the original a few times; and a wildly different ending. At the time, this debacle was ignored by most the majority of moviegoers, because they were too busy being oppressed to worry about it. Shortly after the government stabilized, though, a particular fan decided to remake it for a second time, even though this was still against the law. In a surprising turn of events, our interim leaders decided to not prosecute the filmmaker, but instead declared that this would be the only legal remake in existence, and that it would continue to be remade year after year, until there was no longer anyone interested in being part of it. The same actor still plays The Rainbleeder, but that’s not part of the agreement; it’s just an interesting bit of trivia. And so this is how it started, the Curse of A Killer Remade. A new version is made every single year, and every single year, at least three people are killed in parts surrounding the annual festival where the film is screened. No matter how much security, or how many cops, are placed at the scene, a serial killer will always find his targets, and never be caught. Some call him a maniac, others a genius...but we just call ourselves The Council of Killers. We’re not sure why no one has figured out that there’s a whole group of us yet, since that was the twist ending from the second version, but we’ll keep doing this until someone stops us.

Microstory 836: Goodbye Children

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I’m standing in the corner. I’m the one who first discovered the message, but I’m nobody, so I just need to leave it to the professionals to deal with all this, and figure out what’s going on. When I noticed it, I thought it was some kind of hoax, but it still meant someone had tampered with one of the most precious documents in our nation’s history, so I had to alert my superior. She didn’t understand it either, so she reached out to her own boss. He didn’t know what it was about, so he went up the food chain, and on and on it went. No one knew what to make of it. We hear footsteps out in the hallway, and this feeling that we’re in the presence of darkness. A man walks into the room, immediately commanding it, even though no one seems to know exactly who he is. “What does it say?” he asks. The woman with the highest clearance there steps back from the table, and hands him the magnifying glass. “Goodbye, children. Please pretend you’re fighting for our cause,” he reads aloud. “Hm.” He’s thinking these words over. In the more than two hundred years that the United States Constitution has existed, no one has ever seen this. These words suddenly just appeared, right before my eyes, like they had been written in invisible ink. But I was just selected to place the document in a new encasement. Was that it? Was exposure to the air in the lab what revealed these words? Or was it something else? The mysterious man continues to think over what he read, then he nods. “So it’s time.” He leans over to someone in his entourage, and issues some kind of order, which prompts the lackey to leave. Then he scans the rooms, ensuring that he’s made eye contact with everyone here, but he misses me, because like I said, I’m nobody. “In May of 1836, President James Madison requested access to this copy of our Constitution. His petition was granted, not only because he was a former president, but also the Father of the Constitution, so it belonged to him. Acting as the last surviving member of Constitutional Convention, he encoded this message, designed to appear at a grave time in the future, when the country was at a turning point. The reëlection of a black man to the presidency seems to have triggered this event, and called my people to action. We were created decades after Madison’s death, interpreting his words to mean that our country must remain great. It will take the world four years to fully understand, but we are in charge now.” Then he takes out an assault rifle, and kills everyone here, but misses me, because I’m nobody.

Microstory 365: The Right to Not Be Raped

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Basic Romantic Involvement

I can’t remember what was supposed to go in this slot, but I removed it because it wasn’t that important, and because this is. I’m not going to worry about word count with this one, not as a joke, but because I just need to say what I need to say. Earlier this week, I was watching Nikki Glaser’s Not Safe. The whole premise of the show is to discuss sex openly. The program is informative, humorous, and a welcome relief after a week in a world like this. During one segment of this latest episode, she and a fellow personality took a small break from comedy to discuss rape as it pertains to current events. They still cracked a few jokes, but all in all, it was rather serious. They laid out some staggering statistics concerning recent court circuses—I’m sorry, I mean “cases”. But I guess that’s the real joke. Our adjudicative system is one big first draft that should be thrown out and rewritten. Seriously, if I tried to turn in a paper of the same caliber as the judicial branch, I would receive the only F I never had for writing. Instead of finding the truth, we only care about what can be proved, and if a woman comes forward with an accusation of rape or sexual assault, the first thing people do is try to figure out how to make her look like she’s lying. Victim-blaming should be a concept reserved for academic arguments, right at the top of the fallacy section in your debate handbook. Though I guess it’s already in there with ad hominem, isn’t it? It’s probably in a few more places too.

Rape is real. And it alone is a huge problem, I’ll give you that. But one rape survivor that Nikki interviewed made an insightful point when she said that a majorly overlooked problem is how everyone treats the situation following a rape. Judges, college authorities, and others are constantly telling women what they should wear, or how they should act, or what else they can do to keep from being raped. One dumbass politician even made the completely unscientific supposition that rape victims with ovaries have some sort of visceral “feature” capable of preventing unwanted pregnancies. These are baseless and ridiculous claims that so many idiots believe, if only to justify their own apathy or fear of dealing with the issue. It’s a lot easier to throw out a case and pretend the survivor is lying than it is to punish some stupid fucking football player because he brings in money. That nonsense makes me want to cheer for the Joker in the scene in The Dark Knight where he burns a giant pile of cash. Rapists need to be imprisoned, not just to punish them, and not just to keep them away from society, but so that maybe they can learn that rape is, ya know, wrong? They can’t do that if they get to move on with their lives. In fact, it encourages recidivism. And I know, rape is happening in prison as well, and it sounds like my suggestion wouldn’t work, but that’s an entirely different area where the judicial system has failed us.

Assume the fact of rape is a given, and just about everybody will—at least publicly—agree that rapists should pay for their crimes, but there’s one thing you may not agree with. Judges, and other people who actively support the “rape culture” should too be punished. Every school dean who sweeps the accusation under the rug, every judge who finds a very clear rapists innocent, every defense attorney who conducts oppo research on accusers just to defame their character and detract from the issue; they all deserve jail time. Judges, in particular, have far too much power over what the fuck happens in my country, and I for one am sick and goddamn tired of it. Where in your precious constitution does it say that they’re immune to the law? Why is it that, if a judge has a bias against someone, they get to do whatever they want, because they can always make the claim that they’re not really biased? Oh, they can’t lie? What a relief. If it is in the constitution somehow, then I implore you to get rid of it, because it’s a bullshit document anyway. I’m not sure why we’re still basing our lives on an old document that had no way of predicting present-day society. You don’t put so much trust in the bible, do you? Oh. That’s right. Now it all makes sense. I’m bested again by religion. Women have a history of being subjugated and objectified, so why should I expect things to be any different today? There’s gotta be some way for us to fix things, though. These are your religions...any ideas?

Intellectual Stimulation

Microstory 53: “Mar” Laws

• Martial Law: state of emergency when the government is taken over by the military.
• Martian Law: a set of laws developed and enforced by the Mascos.
• Marshal Law: when the government is decentralized and each region is run by local militia.
• Marshall Laws: a set of amendments designed to limit law-making so that local law enforcement does not contradict, override, or otherwise interfere with parent-state law (named after primary advocate Frederick K. Marshall).
• Marshell Law: commonly used slang term to describe environmental laws and regulations specific to bodies of water and adjoining land (marshell is a synonym for seashell).
• Mere-shill Law: derogatory term used to describe incompetent elected officials who rely too heavily on advisors (not necessarily the mother), and who are merely a mouthpiece for the true leader.
• Marital Law: a set of conventions specific to married persons.
• Marcia Clause: the only in-text amendment to the constitution, clarifying child labor to be any work performed by persons under the standard age of 12 that is either paid, or resembles a position that is more often paid (created after the case of Marcia Atenheim v. Blanchard Atenheim in 1746 which involved household chores that were unreasonably strenuous for Marcia's age).
• Margin Laws: set of laws that regulate both the physical and virtual distances an adult-oriented product or service must be from children or child-oriented products or services. It also established a "half the age plus six" rule that governs age of consent (with a minimum age of 13).