by James Heissner

“PEOPLE ARE FUCKING DEAD!” Taro bellowed.

“Yes, Taro, we’re aware. Please sit down,” his father, the Shogun, said in response.

It’d been quite the day.

The planet of Tsukuyomi was an oddity in the Amaterasu Commonwealth of human space. Some would go so far as to call it an eyesoar. Amaterasu was the largest single dominion in the Human Quadrant of the Milky Way galaxy, controlling three entire solar system under one banner. Well, almost three entire systems: one lone planet stood in obnoxious defiance, the needless contrarian to the agreeable Amaterasu residents, a zit on its otherwise pristine face. That zit was Tsukuyomi, originally the capital of the Commonwealth when it was merely one system (also called Tsukuyomi, naturally). Unfortunately, they’d become so aggressively introspective and isolationist that they hadn’t even noticed when their neighboring planet of Amaterasu declared themselves independent, moved the capital to their own planet, took control of the system from them, and began expanding outwards under a new flag (an act the Tsukuyomi considered akin to a teenager dying their hair and taking a pretentious nickname).

“WELL THEN WHY AREN’T YOU DOING ANYTHING ABOUT IT!?” Taro Tanaka, age 34, said from across the boardroom. His father, the Shogun, sat at the other end of the long white table. Everything in the room was white like it’d been bleached: the table, the chairs, the clothes the council members wore. It was all so terribly clean.

Outside was their world: everywhere were pure green-leafed trees and sparkling blue rivers. Their sun, Taiyo, burned bright above them. The people of their capital city, New Tokyo (not to be confused with the similarly named capital city of Amaterasu, disparagingly referred to as ‘Newer Tokyo’ or ‘New New Tokyo’ or, in less than polite company, ‘Jailbait Tokyo’), was a buzzing hive of white marble and limestone and silicon buildings with happy citizens, many of them government employees, in clean white clothes. And they were all in perfect health.

On Tsukuyomi, everyone was in perfect health.

Nobody was injured.

Everyone lived a very long time.

And everyone was beautiful.

Except Taro. Taro had what those on Old Earth called ‘the Hapsburg Jaw.’ He wasn’t entirely sure what that was, and he decided at a relatively young age he could live without a definitive answer.

But everyone else was beautiful. The air on Tsukuyomi was the cleanest any human had ever breathed. It had been clean when humans first arrived there- they hadn’t needed to do much terraforming at all! And they’d only made it cleaner. The soil was so rich and the crops so nutritious on Tsukuyomi that everyone’s dietary needs were met by plants alone. The situation was so good that when Tsukuyomi was first discovered, a bidding war occured in regards to who would get to settle it. An intense court case and a massive amount of boardroom meetings occurred as a result, and the winner was Taro’s answer, Shiro Tanaka. The second highest bidder had been a sore loser and moved to Amaterasu.

What was eventually found was that the air was so clean, the inhabitants could no longer go to other human planets without the aid of air filtration system- this was discovered when a group of spies went to Susanoo, the fifth planet from the sun called Taiyo, and dropped dead and were found lying in the street by local authorities. It… It had been an ordeal. Lotta paperwork, lotta proverbial (and less than proverbial) dick-sucking had been needed to soothe that particular injury.

“Junior Vice Undersecretary Tanaka, we’re doing everything we can,” his father said. Of course he referred to him by his title- he always did when he was irritated with him. It reminded Taro of how far down the ladder he was, and how he’d only gotten where he was in the first place because his father was Shogun.

What was eventually found, by Taro himself, was that everything was a bit too clean, and that everyone was a bit too healthy. And then one night, his girlfriend, Karen Callahan, introduced him to her parents, and found that she looked exactly like them. Both of them. To an uncanny degree. And that all her siblings looked like that too. And her grandmother. And her nieces and nephews. And the photographic projection of what their child would look like. And all their eyes were far too close together- they practically just one large eye, quite frankly.

It was at that point Taro began to see these things everywhere: people with eyes too close together, or too far apart; people with ears almost as big as their heads, or ears on different spots on each side (up to an including on their necks); people with necks the size of torsos, or as small as their thumbs. And a whole lot of people, based on a skim Taro then made through the marriage certificates, who got married despite having the same last name, or almost the same last name but spelled slightly different, or the same spelling but an annotation claiming they were pronounced differently. Also, awfully high infant mortality rates for those considered to have incompatible genes.

It was… An alarming discovery, to say the least.

“Oh really, Dad?” Taro said to his father. “And what exactly are we doing about this?”

“I said ‘we’, son, not ‘we’.”

“That’s the same thing, Dad. You literally just said the same thing.”

Taro’s father, the Shogun, briefly put a ponderous hand to his chin and said, “Oh, why so I did. Well, I meant ‘we’ as in the Council and I, not ‘we’ as in the Council and I and you.”

Taro blinked.

Taro had brought all this to his father, who had done the exact same ponderous pose when confronted with the realization that they were in fact a eugenics-based state. And that they had a tendency to decide people’s careers for them before they were born- since Taro had the genetic markers of a politician (which made sense- both his parents were politicians), he was a politician, despite most people who’d met him (including his father, the Shogun) confessing he had the disposition of a street cleaner (and, statistically, over 73% of Tsukuyomi citizens had two politicians for parents, and the federal government used their society’s unemployment rate of 0% as a massive point of national pride).

This had been a revelation to the Council, who took immediate action: they opened up Tsukuyomi to international trade for the first time in over a hundred years. They reopened official channels with Amaterasu, said that their rich soil and produce could be of immense value to their massive commonwealth. The Prime Minister of Amaterasu, Jose MacDonald, agreed immediately. And perhaps even more significantly, Prime Minister MacDonald decided to visit Tsukuyomi, the first non-native to do so in over a hundred and ten years.

Parades were prepared. People gathered in the federal district of the capital. And landing pad was built specifically for the Prime Minister who had gone to Tsukuyomi (whose approval ratings had back home had gone through the roof).

His Ornithopter landed on the pad. There were no bad days on Tsukuyomi (save for perhaps, somewhat subjectively, when the Shogun (Taro’s father) felt like rain)), and thus the momentous day was marked by clear skies and warm winds.

The Prime Minister stepped out into the sun and immediately dropped dead.

He then fell off the landing pad and broke his neck for good measure.

And, befitting of a member of the recently deceased who had eaten a hearty breakfast that day, the corpse proceeded to shit itself.

There was a very long, very pregnant (it called to mind Taro’s mother’s own twelve-month pregnancy for him) pause of abject silence settled over the capital. Everything was so white and clean that the sun shined off it a little too well; it got in everyone’s eyes, made them squint, preventing them from looking directly at what had happened and processing it in earnest.

The autopsy revealed the cause of death as asphyxiation: as it turned out, the Tsukuyomi’s inability to breathe the air of other human planets cut both ways. The air on Tsukuyomi was so clean it barely counted as air anymore. It was missing several trace elements that the body required to register that what it was breathing was in fact breathable.

The same fate befell the rest of Jose MacDonald’s entourage, as the overly-sterile air had made it into the cockpit of the ornithopter as well.

Hence, people were fucking dead, rather than a person, in the singular, was fucking dead.

“I see,” Taro said to his father the day after the entire traumatic affair. “So am I not welcomed here?”

“No,” Taro’s father, the Shogun, said. A member of the council, a woman named Zari Applebright, whispered into his ear. “Er, I’m sorry, I meant ‘no’ as in ‘no, you’re not not welcomed here,’ not ‘no’ as in ‘no, you’re not welcomed here.”

“So am I welcomed here?” Taro wrinkled his very, very large brow.

“No.”

“But you just said-”

“I said you’re not not welcomed here. Try to keep up, son.”

Taro blinked.

Taro exhaled through his nostrils.

Taro left the room and came back with an antique tommy gun, which he then used to mow down absolutely everyone present. People were fucking dead, indeed.

He screamed.

He kept screaming.

Literally would not stop screaming, even after everyone was dead and he was completely out of bullets;

Even after his co-conspirators came and grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him back;

Even after someone tried to pry the gun from his hands, and he responded by crashing the gun into their face; still screaming;

Even after he was forced to fight off five other people with the empty gun as a blunt instrument; he won the fight, using the gun like an escrima stick and beating the piss out of everyone who got near him while moving throughout the room like a trained ballerina;

He would not stop screaming. He never even paused for a breath, it was all one continuous, pained scream.

Finally, however, he ran out of breath. As he groped for air, he was sucker-punched and lost consciousness.

As stated above, it was quite the day.

***

As it turned out, Taro’s co-conspirators were less on the ‘co’ and more on the ‘conspirators.’

As it turned out, while they had not instructed him to kill anyone, they knew full well that someone with his mental instability would absolutely do so. In fact, he’d exceeded their expectations quite magnificently.

As it turned out, they were fully prepared to lock him away in a padded cell when it was all over. They let him watch a broadcast of the new Shogun’s inaugural speech. It was the man who’d approached him about confronting the council in the first place, whom he’d first met with after realizing all the inbreeding and eugenics their society was indulging in. His name was Seth Galloway. Seth Galloways’s inaugural speech went a little something like this:

“My fellow citizens, we live in trying times. Our society is broken, clearly. We have been wallowing in our own stagnant decay for years. However, I do not blame you. I blame the former council. They were all killed today by disaffected youth Taro Tanaka.”

Youth? I’m thirty years old!

“Taro was the son of our former Shogun, and, in a state of outrage, killed his father and the council. Taro saw the truth of what our world had come to. While I don’t agree with his methods, his heart was in the right place. He is currently in an undisclosed facility receiving treatment for condition.”

I… I spent all day fingerpainting.

“While their end was rather inhumane, the former council did need replacement. Wholesale upheaval. And that is where we come in. The new council and myself will be treating not just the symptoms, but the disease itself. Starting today, we shall be a more open and less binding society!”

Bullshit!

Bullshit indeed.

Taro was allowed to watch the news once per week. Taro saw updates on the so called ‘cure’ Seth kept talking about:

To combat the lack of genetic diversity in their society, everyone under the age of fifty and above the age of eighteen was required to procreate with at least one complete stranger. It was known officially as ‘the strength of difference’ and unofficially ‘your societal obligation to BREED!’ And yet people went along with it;

The children produced by these strange affairs of sorts were given over to the government as state wards, raised in the long-neglected agricultural sector of the planet’s economy. When there were too many children for the available farm jobs, they started giving some of them over to the even more neglected factory sector;

Everyone was obligated to spend at least one full day a year picking up trash. If there was no trash, they had to make trash in order to then clean it up. They also had to have an officially licensed federal sponsor with them when doing so;

Drugs and alcohol were reintroduced to society. Children were required to have had their first cigarette by age six;

Everyone had to at some point in their lives come to visit Taro, who was kept in his padded cell and forbidden from bathing.

Eventually, Taro stopped watching the news.

Years passed. Taro recalled the mandatory five baths a day every member of their society had once been required to take, the requirement to report any person who might be blind or deaf or autistic or hyperactive or (God-forbid) bow-legged to the government for ‘processing’, the fact that biting your nails was an offense punishable by a fine of considerable heft. He was almost nostalgic, but couldn’t manage to delude himself that much.

Taro woke up one day and realized his gray hair was down to his waist. He did what he was required to by masturbating in front of his fans at the window in front of the padded cell. Then they all cleared away suddenly, before he’d finished masturbating (he’d managed to learn to hold off orgasm for as much as five hours at a time).

Someone had come to visit him: it was Karen. Or it was someone who looked a lot like Karen. Maybe it was her daughter. Or her granddaughter. Or her grandmother. It was hard to tell.

She pulled out a gun and fired a bullet into the glass. It shattered, and Karen extended him a hand. Taro, lacking any other source of stimulus even mildly more interesting, accepted it, and they walked out. He was bathed, trimmed, and clothed.

Karen, as they sat inside her ornithopter, said, “We need to stop the current administration. They’re doing-”

And then she told him a bunch of things he already knew.

“So basically we want your help overthrowing the government,” Karen concluded.

“Lemme guess,” Taro said, “You wanna put me in a room with Seth and the others and then I’ll lose my shit and kill them all, and then you’ll lock me up again and take over and pull a complete one-eighty?”

“Um…,” Karen stumbled.

“Well too bad,” Taro said, “Because I’ve already lost my shit. Just now, in fact.”

And then, before she could ask what in the fuck that meant, he threw her out of the ornithopter. She plummeted to her death. Taro’s only regret was not asking her how her mother/daughter was doing- he was genuinely curious. Taro took the ornithopter and flew to the nearest transit off-world. He purchased an air-filtration masked and hopped a flight- nobody recognized him with his beard shorn and hair cut and while wearing people-clothes.

Taro went to Mars, not sure what else to do. And on Tsukuyomi, everything changed, and absolutely nothing did, once again.