Short Story: Birthday Wishes

BIRTHDAY WISHES

By Tom Olbert

 

Mary screamed and fell to the dusty ground, pressing her hands to her ears against the deafening burst of gunfire.  The light show was brilliant in the black Utah night as the underground soldiers around her fired on the government robots surrounding them.

Hideous things, like gigantic eight-legged metal bugs blasting with built-in machine guns.  As her life flashed before her, she happened to glance at her wrist comp and saw the red digits come up 12:00 midnight.  She realized it was now May 14, 2042.  She was 17 years old as of this moment.  Happy birthday, me, she thought, laughing hysterically, the light blurring through her tears.  An ice-cold skewer thrust through her as she thought of the unborn life she carried.  The one that would never see a 17^th birthday if she made it to the Canadian border.  As a rebel fighter fell dead into the dust two feet from her, half the man’s head blown away, the guilt vanished.

“That’s the last of the bots, Nick,” Carlos called over, his plasma rifle still smoking.

Nick ran over to Mary.  “You okay, darlin’?” he asked softly, kneeling by her.  She held back the tears and sniffed, nodding.   “All right, turn loose the decoys,” Nick ordered.  “They’ll have DNA trackers out lookin’ for us.”

Mary drew a deep breath, looking up at the stars and trying desperately to hold on to sanity. 

                                                                                                #

Nick took a swallow from his flask as Mary patched his ugly shoulder wound, using one of the black market nano-probe surgical devices outlawed in the American Heartland, for their detrimental effect on healthcare profits.  “We’ll camp here for about an hour, to give the trackers a chance to fan out,” the big man said, wiping his whiskered mouth with the back of his hand.  “We should make the Nevada border before first light.”  Nevada.  Mary trembled just at the thought of it.  The Republic of Greater Canada.  Freedom.  “I’m gettin’ too old for this,” Nick said with a chuckle, putting away the flask.  “Don’t worry, kid,” he said, winking at her.  “We’re almost home.”

She was almost afraid to ask the question that had burned in her mind since Nick and his squad had rescued her from the redemption camp where her parents had sent her.  Where she’d been raped by those men who’d promised to “cure” her of her unnatural attractions.  She shuddered as she shook off the memory.  “Why are you helping me?” she asked.

He leaned back and lit a cigarette.  “We all got our stories.  Me…I’d just got back from droppin’ bio-toxins on civvies in Venezuela an’ Mexico…stuff that made unborn babies die in their mothers’ wombs.  I came home to our beloved nation of life and they told me my baby sister Rose was dead.  Rufied and raped by her college prof…who I killed, by the by.  Rose tried to escape to Canada to abort, and they stuck her in one of those machines where pregnant girls are fed through tubes like veal until the baby’s ripe.  Then, the second the robot cuts the newborn out of the womb, the blade comes down and chops the girl’s head off.”  She winced and lowered her head.  “I ‘aint looked back since.”

She touched his hand.  It was the first time she’d been able to touch anyone since the night her baby was conceived.

                                                                                                #

Mary trembled in fear as she saw the ominous dark shapes of the cyborg troopers marching towards them out of the night.  The cold chorus of their artificial voices blared through the darkness:    WE ARE A NATION OF LIFE.  The cyborgs and the rebels opened up on each other, the night exploding with gunfire.  Mary screamed in rage as men and women died around her.  For her.  “No!” she screamed as she bounded forward and stepped protectively in front of Nick, just as one of the black-armored, faceless monstrosities closed in on him.  Its laser site fixed on her chest.  It didn’t fire.  It couldn’t.  It was programmed to protect the life inside her.  Nick rolled and fired, blasting the cyborg wide open.

“Don’t look,” he said as she started towards the smoldering ruin, but she ran over and looked.  She gasped, looking away in disgust and crying on Nick’s shoulder as he held her.  There, inside the cyborg’s shattered chassis, hard-wired into its A.I. was the organic component that served as its brain.  A new-born baby.
***
Originally presented in the Science Fiction Microstory Contest:
https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/175537-science-fiction-microstory-contest
  

Two Faces of Alabama

 

 

Alabama has just passed the most restrictive anti-abortion law in the history of the United States.  One that could send a doctor to prison for 99 years for performing an abortion beyond a designated  stage of pregnancy.  (What, they couldn't pass a death penalty?  Wait.) A 12-year-old rape victim would find no escape from this law.

Alabama.  A state with a dark history of hate and oppression.  Odd that a state that has certainly never embraced a culture of brotherly love or Christian compassion should now violate a woman's constitutional right to control her own body in the name of defending the value of human life or of denying man the role of Almighty God.

This same week, Alabama was also in the news for having a prison system like something out of the dark ages.  The mentally ill and the helpless are often left to die in their prisons, the most fundamental legal proscriptions against cruel and unusual punishment callously disregarded by those charged with upholding the law.  No, Christian principles like compassion, redemption and forgiveness are certainly not at the heart of Alabama's attack on a woman's right to choose.

What is it, then?  Why do conservatives in general, people who have no moral qualms about bombing cities to rubble, killing scores of women and children in the name of geopolitical strategy, who openly practice execution in the name of revenge (assuming the role of God) and who will let innocent children die of disease or malnutrition or thirst in cages or on deserts rather than pay higher taxes or open our precious borders, suddenly and conveniently find religion when it comes to a woman ending her pregnancy?

The answer, I suspect, lies in one of the defining pillars of their ideology:  patriarchy.  Women must in their minds be allowed to control nothing of their own lives.  They can be domestic servants, nannies...and, of course, incubators.  But never self-determining free beings.  The irony is that a woman signed this bill into law.  (A woman too old to bear children, but not to run for re-election.)

The right wing hope is that laws like this one in Alabama may be the wedge they need for a right-leaning Supreme Court to overturn Roe vs. Wade.  It may well happen.  And, what then?

Will there be choice states and handmaiden's tale-type states?  Will the latter establish armed borders to prevent pregnant women from escaping to the former?  Will underground railroads appear?  Could interstate border clashes occur if one too many pregnant women attempt to escape?   Will abortion pills be the next great prohibition nightmare? Might we come to see floating abortion clinics; vans on lonely country roads in the dead of night, and trigger-happy militias opening fire on them? Will murders of abortion doctors become the norm in states like Alabama, as lynchings once were?  

The idle speculations of a science fiction writer?  Or America's future?  We'll see.