Anti-Im! Anti-Im! Day Four, a Modern Parable

Anti-Im! Anti-Im!

DAY FOUR

a Modern Parable by

C.N. Bean

Copyright © 2019 by C.N. Bean. All Rights Reserved.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination, interpretations of commonly known historical events, or used in a fictitious manner.

No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without the written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in book reviews.

Table of Contents

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

About the Author

Chapter Seventeen

I woke up the next morning filled with a sense of dread, splashed my face with water and ruffled my hair. I didn’t eat the breakfast they slid through a portal in my cage. It wasn’t much anyway: a metal cup of milk, a donut and an apple. I dressed in my courtroom clothes and barely had enough time to consult the laptop once again before the guards escorted me to the courtroom.

I sat at the defendant’s table until the jury arrived and took their seats in the jury box. Afterwards, the Anti-Im High Priestess arrived. We stood until she announced that my trial was back in session. I went to the jury box.

I said, "Let me tell you why I believe in four. I’m not really a religious person, but I did occasionally attend a local Baptist church back in Galax, Virginia. We always went at Easter and Christmas. I struggled to figure out what people meant when they talked about a Father, Son and Holy Spirit, which they called the Trinity. That troubled me because I figured there had to be a fourth part to that equation, me. I knew I had a father, and he had a son who had been killed in a war. I knew I had a mother who got in a lot of trouble but somehow got rescued by religion. The person I eventually came to know as my mother, I would say was filled with the Holy Spirit, or some new spirit that transformed her. My father had wanted another son to replace the one he lost, but he got me instead. No one seemed to be able to figure me out. I was for the most part rejected everywhere I went. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why I was the way I was but could never get any closer than to conclude that I existed, and that was that. In that respect, you might say I’ve been a prisoner all my life, never quite able to escape circumstances that always seemed beyond my control.

"Now and then in church, I would listen to a sermon and remember parts of it. That’s why I asked the High Priestess for a laptop. I wanted to check out a few things I distinctly remembered.

"For example, I once remember a lady preacher visiting and preaching from a book called John. It was a story about a man called Jesus who was accused of calling himself the Son of God, a crime that carried the death sentence. He used as a defense an old record found in Psalm 82, where all people are called sons and daughters of the Most High God.

"Last night when I was researching, I found it strange that the very next chapter in John’s book has a dead man who had been in the grave four days. In terms of this closing statement, I guess I have been in the grave for four days, given that this is the last day of my story. I will either rise from this grave I am trapped in or die in it.

"In any case, all the books called Gospels, which means ‘good news,’ have those soldiers who carry out the execution of the man who called himself the Son of God give away the clothing he wore before his execution. They did so by a system you also believe in, called casting lots. Three of those four books have the soldiers divide the clothing into four parts. Why? I guess there must be a fourth person in the Trinity, me.

I think that’s what’s about to happen here, I concluded. I will be condemned, and the High Priestess will cast lots to see which four of you will take away one day of my four-day statement as a reward to share in your own regeneration, or rebirth.

The High Priestess interrupted me, booming, You’re straying here. Please return to the facts of your defense.

I pushed to explain myself by saying, Even your symbol of our medical Caduceus—I didn’t even know what it meant until I looked it up—with four gold mice imprisoned, at the top of which is a fifth mouse, larger than the rest, proves my point. I am the gold mouse at the top. I am the one that has confused you, the one who eluded all your perfect, but quite artificial intelligence. You say you knew my every move, but that’s not true, which is why you have allowed me to make such a detailed closing statement. You hope to fill in blanks.

The High Priestess boomed, Continue with your factual statement, or I will have you removed from the courtroom. Jury, erase all her words from this day up to this point.

I returned to my story, knowing that an erase of memory was a selective erase of history. I told the jury that as I sat next to Cap in a stripped-down, cold Air Force plane, I watched the Anti-Ims’ response to the Blu-Rays I had given them. According to Cap, the response had already been widely distributed and was being shown daily on required TV.

In the video, Honzo, a skinny man in his 60s, owned a small restaurant in Brooklyn. The name painted on the windows was The Two Lampstands. There were landscape views of Brooklyn and Manhattan, and all looked normal, not the Manhattan Cap and I had seen not that long ago. I knew it had to be doctored background footage.

Inside the restaurant, there were two silver candlesticks that Honzo had displayed in a glass case framed with wood.

He stood at a table watching two young women taste each other’s drinks as he explained that the candlesticks had been passed down from relatives of victims who had been murdered at Auschwitz. Sitting with them was an older woman, who went by Lydia. After his explanation about the candlesticks, she asked Honzo if he could create a martini from scratch. One of the young women looked to be two or three years older than the other and both were obviously younger versions of the older woman. The message I thought I was supposed to receive, I told the jury, was that a mother and her daughters could once again enjoy lunch together in a public restaurant, in a world that wasn’t as bad as it could have been.

He told Lydia, List the ingredients and I’ll see what we can do.

Reading glasses on, the mother held a menu close and rattled off ingredients, including cilantro and hot sauce.

The younger women seemed happy that she was getting into the spirit of the moment. Honzo said, It’s so nice to see people happy again. The one thing I can assure you is this is nothing like another Holocaust as some have claimed. Never again, my great uncle used to say before he died long ago. He survived Auschwitz.

The younger of the two told him, The Anti-Ims reassigned us here, it’s safe and we’re living as well as, if not better, than we ever did. Everything they said has come true.

As Honzo went to the bar to work on the drink, he talked to the camera. My patrons are right, he told the camera that tracked him. The Anti-Ims are very pleasant, easy to get along with and make sure we have anything we want or need. For example, they supply me with all the fresh ingredients I need for gourmet meals and there never seems to be any shortage of anything. They even advertise locally to send customers my way, not be force, but knowing that when people try my home-cooked meals and specialty drinks, they will be amazed and return again and again.

He made the drink, the mother tasted it and said she loved it. The daughters sampled it and gave it mixed reviews.

Dinner went the same way, with the main course being almond-crusted tofu.

Cap handed me another Blu-Ray, created by the resistance in response to the propaganda film.

I removed the one Blu-Ray and inserted the next.

Honzo slammed a fist through the outer wall of the restaurant, showing that the wall was fake. The Anti-Ims suddenly appeared and dragged him away.

The three women were, indeed, mother and daughters, but the new footage showed them changing from their street clothes to orange prison suits for transport back to their prison.

I paused the film, removed the Blu-Ray from the laptop and put the laptop away as the plane landed at the Tampa International Airport. On our way down, I told him I hadn’t had the courage to watch Brittany’s entire film, sickened by the images and black-and-white allusions to Auschwitz.

From there, I told the jury, Cap and I rode in a jeep to a rocky road that led to the Gulf.

Accompanied by Secret Service agents and heavily armed Marines, we walked down the sun-bleached road of crushed stone. What about QB? I asked, ending the long silence between us.

He told me, "They used her blood to study her genetics. Maybe something will come of it,