Projekt ☆M@rlene☆

On the day of the fight with Anya I had come home late, and in very bad shape.

 


Mom had immediately started to attack me. 
When she had realized what had happened to me, however, she had mellowed, even going so far as to propose that we order our own pizzas and some desserts for the evening, which we spent watching an overprehistoric comedy I love, ‘Mean girls.’
Curled up together under the fur blanket I had finished a whole jar of cookie ice cream with whipped cream and toasted marshmallows, giving me a big stomachache that I did not regret at all.
I knew that my mother was so loving not because she was grieving over what had happened to me, but because breaking up with Anya was something she had been wishing for a long time. 
It was one less problem for her to have to think about.
She was so pleased with the turn things had taken that she did not refuse to let me have her old cell phone and allow me to miss a week of school. 
She also personally notified Mr. Lynch of my condition (exaggerating a little..), apologizing for not submitting my weekly report. 
Finally, I was excused from reporting to the Artificial Fertilization Center. 
I was officially on vacation.
The first few days I didn’t even want to leave my room. 
I just stayed buried under the blankets, limiting myself to passively consuming episodes of a reality show filmed in a Brazilian Purgatory, ‘You may choose…,’ in which the participants, recruited from among the inhabitants of the same Purgatory, in the challenges of their daily lives, in addition to having to try to eliminate the other contestants, were forced to constantly choose between two options of conduct proposed by the viewers at critical moments; for example, do you want to sacrifice that starving old woman or would you rather cut off your right arm to get food? Would you rather have a good arsenal of weapons but be homeless or have the house and have nothing to defend yourself with?

You may wonder why a wretch living in a precarious situation would agree to make it even more challenging: well, the prize for those who would make it to the end of the challenge alive was entry into one of the Fortress Cities as an honorary member, as well as a person of their choice. 
They would, in addition, be able to choose their own accommodations from the most prestigious ones offered, and all the benefits assured to every other inhabitant.
The reality show had been a worldwide success, so much so that they were counting on making different versions of it in different countries.
I had become attached to and was rooting for Rainha. 
Rainha lived with a boy named Carlos who was paralyzed from the waist down.

The woman had preferred to burn herself with acid in order to save him from the other participants, and she had never agreed to trade his life for some desirable thing like food or money. 
Onlookers proposed more and more spectacular advantages in order to see Rainha sacrifice Carlos, but she held firm.
She spoke very little and seemed to get by in every situation, even though to punish her for her behavior so uninterested in the voyeuristic itches of the audience, they had gradually taken away all her weapons and even safe shelter. 
Yeah, because viewers can also vote to make the contestants’ experience easier or harder, regardless of the choices they may make.
The one who had the least complicated life of all was Felicia, a gorgeous and unscrupulous girl.

Everyone adored her, so much so that it was quite fashionable to dress according to her style and to request cosmetic procedures to resemble her in face or in the gorgeous, long blond hair.
The adoration had peaked when it was discovered that Felicia was transgender, and.. Well, she had not completely renounced her birth sex, something the inhabitants of Alma Mater or any other Fortress City had never seen.
Felicia had to know this, and she did everything in her power to create situations in which to highlight this characteristic of hers. 
To take out one of the most feared participants, Ramon, she had pretended to fall in love with him, going so far as to surrender to him all the weapons in her possession and suggesting ingenious strategies for defeating some of the participants. 
But during a sex game, in which she had bound him with strong leather straps and forced him into a passive role, she had bitten off his ears and cut off his head without ceasing to sodomize and brutalize him, finally tying his corpse outside the windows and setting it on fire in the night.
The episode had reached a frightening share. 
Andrés was also an audience favorite, endowed with such strength that he could rip an arm off another man’s body if necessary. 
And he seemed to deem it necessary quite often.

Andrés especially hated old people, and whether they were competitors or hapless bystanders, he never gave up on them by stealing what they had and tearing them apart with his bare hands, even going so far as to eat them if he was particularly hungry.
I let myself be passively rocked by the events, which were increasingly bloody and violent, forcing myself not to think and to move as little as possible, paralyzing even the smallest and most forgotten muscle or ligament in my body. 
I went so far as to give up getting up to go to the bathroom, except that Mom promptly intervened, worried that I might infect my kidneys.
Eventually, however, I emerged from my depression quickly. I had a mission to accomplish.
Fortunately, I discovered that Mom’s old cell phone still worked, and it connected perfectly to the old Internet line.

Early one morning, with shaking hands, I dialed the studio number of Francesca Pessoa aka Julianne, trying to think quickly about what to say to her when she answered.
“Good morning, welcome to the gynecology office of Dr. Francesca Pessoa; press one for a complete screening; press two to book a hysterectomy; press three if you are a cancer patient; press four for other services.”
Four. I waited for a few seconds, then a persuasive synthetic voice asked if I wanted to book an outpatient visit to discuss in person with the doctor, “Yes, I..I think that’s best. Is it also possible to book a virtual visit?”
“May I ask from which sector of Purgatory are you calling, please?”
“I.. From a rather distant one.” 
But what answer is that?
The voice was silent a few minutes, I guess because it was busy tracing the call.
My heart hammered in my chest and I felt my face boiling. 
Then it resumed speaking, as zealous and polite as before: “Perfect. To access this facility, you will receive the information and codes you need at the ‘Lapine Agile’ on Rue Saint-Vincent in the MetaParis, at 3:15 p.m. Thursday. You will have to ask for Marcel. Is everything clear?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
“Thank you for your trust! From now on, you will be applied the identification number 109-X. Please remember it. See you soon.”
Then the call ended.   
It was Tuesday, so the appointment was only two days away.
I turned off the phone and hid it in a drawer full of junk and clothes to prevent my mother from finding it, in case she changed her mind and wanted to take it back.
Then I put on the viewer and lazily scrolled through the messages I had ignored in my depressed days; classmates asking me what happened to me, a summary of classes I was supposed to catch up on, notifications from the Artificial Insemination Center and a confidential message from Mr. Lynch. 
As I wavered in the face of that dreaded notification, I saw a new one arrive, from a much less disturbing person: Masao Pedersen.
I immediately opened it. 
Masao wrote: ‘Dear Marlene, I hope you are well. I am writing to let you know that I have gathered the information you asked for your term paper. When you have time, I look forward to a good cup of tea and a nice conversation. See you soon, M. Pedersen’.
That was the code language we had agreed on so Masao could notify me when the parrot egg would hatch.
What happiness! I responded by telling him that I was indisposed, but that as soon as I recovered I would gladly come by to see him.
I felt like running there immediately, but it would have seemed too strange and my mother would have become suspicious. I had to be patient for a couple of days.
I let myself fall backward on my fluffy pink comforter, sighing.
My life was advancing fast, in a direction I never expected. 
I was thrilled. 
The pain Anya had caused me was already almost completely gone, and I felt some twinge only when I thought back to the last, bleak words she had spewed at me.
In the past few days I had thought a lot about that episode, so much so that I had a headache and cried myself dry. 
It was all over with Anya. I could never have forgiven her. 
I had also wondered if deep down I hadn’t longed for that breakup: I had been feeling discomfort in her company for a while, ever since I had found out about my fertility and had begun to seriously question why I cared to find my birth mother again. 
A desire that had only become overpowering when it was Masao who had made it clear on our first visit, an insight so surgical that even I had not had it with myself. 
Anya’s reaction had been one of sympathetic understanding, and only now did I realize that I had immediately understood her for what she was, which was a falsehood.
Besides, she had said it herself: she was convinced that love and motherhood were forms of captivity and need that we had done well to live without it. 
Now I rejected this idea with all my might, and I was grateful to have someone like Mr. Masao by my side, who in his loneliness did not give up the truth.
I was basking in these thoughts when my mother discreetly knocked on the door.
“Yes?”
“Are you presentable?”
“I think so.”
She opened the door, poking her head in to cast a circular glance around the room. 
She wrinkled her nose when she could see that the level of chaos and disorder had increased exponentially over the past two days, but surprisingly she did not lecture me.
“Do you think this period of seclusion of yours can be called over?”
“I think so..I was just about to come and tell you that I feel much better.”
“I’m glad to hear that. It’s time for you to resume with your institutional commitments…. You haven’t received any communication from the Council?”
“Mr. Lynch wrote me a message, but I thought I would read it later, after I had something to eat.”
“All right.”
I looked at her curiously; Mom was pacing back and forth vaguely moving some abandoned items on the desk, smoothing down the tight shocking pink skirt she was wearing and fixing her already perfect hairstyle every few seconds. 
“Why do you look so nervous? Did something bad happen?”
“I wanted to talk to you about something.”

She sat stiffly poised on the table and looked at me with an expression between embarrassed and excited, “I applied for clearance so I could have another baby.. I’ve always wanted two, but it’s very difficult to get this chance because of the shortage of healthy gametes, and considering my role of responsibility that many people look to as an example, I had decided to give it up…. But now, thanks to you, things are changing. I have therefore reconsidered the matter and … Here.”
“You mean you want to use my eggs to..To conceive a child?” 
Please tell me I misunderstood.
“That’s right. Isn’t that wonderful?”
I snapped to my feet, trembling, “Wonderful?! That would be MY SON.. But how can you.. How can you come up with that..”
My mother had stiffened immediately, “It is MY will to have a child, certainly not yours. 
The fact that you can put in half of the necessary biological material does not make you a mother, dear Marlene.”
She looked at me with a mixture of anger, and something I could not understand. Something I had never seen: “You are at the disposal of this government. You are at the disposal of our need to have new and healthy generations. What would be the difference between me and another woman?”
“That you are my mother?”
Technically she wasn’t. Sure, she had raised me, educated me, maybe even loved me in her own way. 
But was that enough to really make her my mother? There was no natural bond between her and me. Rosaline could never have borne children of her own, even under ideal conditions. 
For despite that manicured and perfectly constructed femininity, my mother was biologically a man. 
If I had dared to say it out loud, it would have been disaster; a transsexual woman IS a woman, especially since worldwide infertility had leveled the differences between them. 
To say otherwise has been punishable by law now since as far back as 2027. 
At Alma Mater today one risks one’s life for such statements, as it would be to question one of the foundations of the New Order: only what is decided to be true is true. 
There is no objective truth, a racist and discriminatory concept that has been banished forever from our consciousness. Or at least, that is how it should be.
I don’t understand this reaction of yours. You should be happy that you can fulfill this awish of mine. It is what one would expect from a courageous Donor who is aware of the importance of her service. I must assume that your oath was not genuine.”
“It was, but this seems to me..”
“What, it seems, Marlene.”
“Let it be.”
“I can’t leave it alone, the implications of this behavior of yours could be very serious.”
“I don’t want you to do that, okay?”
The divine Rosaline loosened her arms tightly around her slender torso and made to leave the room. 
She stopped at the threshold, and without turning around said, “I will have a Moral Ethics Vigilante summon you. I don’t want to think you are corrupt, but neither can I overlook what has happened. You have greatly disappointed me by showing yourself so uncooperative. And the worst thing is that it won’t do any good: I will go ahead with the procedure for artificial insemination in utero, and if it goes well, we will soon have a baby. Your eggs do not belong to you. Nothing belongs to you, my darling. I’ve been telling you that all my life. Perhaps it was time you had a practical taste of the implications of this fact.”
She walked out, calmly closing the door, leaving me stunned.
It was true though; now I really understood what it meant to not even belong to oneself, and it was disgusting.

Thursday finally arrived. Mom and I meanwhile spoke very little to each other. 
She flaunted an utterly false tranquility, keeping me up to date on the paperwork involved in having her baby and thinking about how to rearrange the house for him. 
She had in fact decided that he would be a boy, with her dominant genetic make-up. 
He would have light eyes and blond hair and, so she hoped, her moral temperament. 
Also she already had me summoned for questioning about our discussion, and the one who would conduct it would be none other than Lynch himself. 
He cared to do it himself, even though it was not his role; in fact, in the message he had sent me days ago, he first manifested his desire to question me about the, as he called them, ‘ambiguous positions’ I seemed to be taking with respect to the works whose account I had submitted.
It seemed, in short, that my interpretations were not clearly and distinctly condemning the authors of those works. He would then seize the opportunity to shed light on the episode with my mother as well, and figure out whether my mind was corrupted or whether it was just nonsense, due, again in his words, ‘to the unquestionable youth and stress due to the new social role.’
These were no small matters. 
I was counting on asking Masao’s help for advice on how to get through the interrogation without arousing too much suspicion, but first I had to focus on one of the most important events of my entire life.    
It was just half an hour before my meeting at the ‘Lapine Agile’ in the MetaParis, and I was so nervous. 
I had spent two hours just deciding how to dress my avatar and how to comb her hair to make her look presentable and reassuring, since she was normally used to fighting in a rebellion-ravaged Fortress City….

I logged on to the Metaverse a little early, just to take a little walk around the city; I’m not sure at all that the real Paris was exactly like this, but it must have looked at least a little like it.
Lots of people were strolling through the romantic little alleys and parks of the imposing, gilded palaces, enjoying their well-deserved vacation.

I entered a bar near the Eiffel Tower to have a drink and studied how to get to the ‘Lapine Agile’. 
Eventually I opted to rent a bicycle, something that was so old Europe in my imagination.
It was so nice to pedal through those narrow streets overlooked by flower-filled balconies and bakery entrances packed with customers! 
The virtual simulation also allows you to smell the smells, and the aromatic combination of freshly baked bread, freshly cut grass and pungent whiff of gasoline filling the air tickled my nostrils, which were only used to the cloying scent of Alma Mater’s millions of flowers.

I arrived at my destination: the ‘Lapine Agile’ seemed empty, only the bartender was at the counter.
I entered, stammering good morning in a stunted French, and the man absentmindedly returned the greeting without even turning around.
I took a seat in a small, secluded spot and consulted the clock: it was 3:14 p.m. 
The bartender seemed completely absorbed in mixing different cocktails, which he tasted himself, critically.

I approached the counter, “Excuse me, do you know someone named Marcel?”
“Sure, Marcel is me. Would you please taste this and tell me what you think? Just honest opinions, please.”
That cocktail had an awful taste. It sucked: “I don’t know, I’m not an expert.”
“Well, either something is good, or it’s not. You don’t need to be an expert to figure it out”
“It reminds me a little of the cleaner my mother uses to polish her reclaimed briar furniture. I tasted it as a child because I liked the color.”
“Perfect. Just perfect. Good thing this isn’t my job. You must be 109-X, right?”
“Yes, that’s me.”
“These are your directions” He slid a sealed envelope across the counter, “The codes can only be used once, and are used to open only one door of the Naval’nyj building in Fortress City New Moscow..Does that ring a bell?..”
Of course it does, it was the invented Fortress City in which the game of the moment, ‘Dawn of the New Rebel’ was taking place. 
As I had already mentioned, we guys often exchanged music and other encrypted content in role-playing games, but I didn’t know they could also serve as gateways for virtual encounters with Purgatory.
And I hoped no one knew that at all.
Suddenly I realized the danger I was in: the Metaverse is not like the old Internet line, it is constantly patrolled by virtual agents and constantly monitored.
“Are we in danger?”
Marcel looked at the clock hanging on the wall, “Not for the moment. We are blacked out from 3:15 p.m. to 3:25 p.m. More is not possible, it would be immediately reported as a malfunction and they would intervene immediately. So in less than a minute we would have to be interrupted. In any case you have everything you need, and I can go back to testing the different types of alcoholic beverages for a couple more hours.”
“Okay. Thanks for everything.”
“Good luck, 109-X.”
Once out of the club I again straddled my bicycle for one last spin before disconnecting. 
I admired the Seine tinged pink under a sunset so saturated it hurt my eyes, and returned to reality. 

The codes were safe in my virtual Wallet, far from Mom’s freshly lacquered nails.
I stretched my sore leg muscles and decided to raid the kitchen. Maybe I could find something appetizing to eat. 
As I rummaged through the fridge, assisted by our very anxious TÆD-4, the service android, the virtual assistant alerted me about a call from my mother, “All right, I’m listening.”

“I have bad news.”
“Oh.. What. What’s going on?”
“The two embryos they had selected did not survive. Probably by setting the genetics we wished for we weakened the natural one too much” You wished for something that I didn’t wish for at all, I thought to myself. ”In any case, I had a couple more embryos stored, let’s see what the results will be.”
Sigh. Maybe she was expecting me to feel bad and sorry about this, but that wasn’t the case: “Who knows, maybe your genetic makeup is strong and it’s better not to intervene. I must say that I am not a great admirer of ancient Asian traits, but if that is the case, it must be. We could in any case resort to cosmetic surgery if it was deemed necessary.”
New silence. She was provoking me, clearly. 
I drew a breath and told her, in a neutral tone, “You’ll see that everything will be fine.”
“Sure, I’m just a little worried. Are you going back to school tomorrow?”
“I think so. Ah, I have to stop by Pedersen’s, I had asked him for some material I could use for the neobiology paper, and he was kind enough to get it for me. I’ll take the opportunity to go back and see him tomorrow…. Do you want me to record our conversation again?”
“No, I don’t think it’s necessary, but thank you for bothering to ask me. I’ll see you for dinner. See you later.”
“See you later.”
I hadn’t realized that while I was talking I had squeezed the disgorged tangerine so hard that it had squeezed completely onto the floor. TÆD-4, as responsive as ever, was already running for cover to clean everything up. The assistant observed, “Your reaction seems to be one dictated by anger, treating a fruit like this.”
“Not at all. I just learned that unfortunately the artificial womb insemination was unsuccessful. My mother was very keen on it. The whole procedure will have to be repeated all over again, hoping for a positive outcome this time.”
“I understand. However, you have not expressed much regret or sympathy for this loss.”
“You should know that I am not in favor of this decision. I will also be questioned about it.”
“You have not updated me on your use of your mother’s old telephone device”
“That sucks. It doesn’t work. It’s to be thrown away. I was just curious what they looked like. Let go of me, you’re heavy.”
“I’m just doing the job I’m programmed to do.”
“Could you make yourself more useful by looking up the new installment of ‘You may choose…’ for me, please?”
“Certainly.”
I threw myself onto the couch, waiting for my mother to arrive and then for bedtime. As gallons and gallons of blood were poured into the reality show, I fantasized about my newborn parrot, and the joy I would feel when I would see it for the first time. 
I felt I had to focus on my secrets and be grateful for them. 
Everything else now just seemed like a graveyard.