(Editor’s note: This text was discovered by the editors accidentally. It is written in ordinary post-Newspeak, that is, in English, free from political correctness. As our readers know, the cleansing of the language began immediately after the Kneeling Party leader was defeated in 2020. His name, unfortunately, got lost, but in the annals of history, he is known as The Sniffer. The author of the text, apparently, was very familiar with Newspeak. In his narration, there are many archaic and incomprehensible terms, many of which required additional clarification).
The time machine was second-hand, and John certainly should not have run the way he did. The old engine overheated and had to stop. He started the time equalizing procedure, although, like most people who had never opened up the hood of their car, he didn’t understand anything about how it worked. John had heard that the technology was similar to that of pressure equalization for deep-sea divers, and that was enough. When his biological clock became equal to local time, he realized that he was hungry – it was breakfast time.
He enjoyed the breakfasts of the 20th and 21st centuries to a large extent because he had a long history of cooking simple food himself. John noted with pleasure that he was at the very end of a large parking lot, and the aborigines would not bother him or ask unnecessary questions.
He was finishing his eggs and bacon when a car drove up to him at high speed, and the policeman’s carcass clambered out of it. “Exactly a carcass,” John thought, “not just a body. With his ammunition, he would be just under three hundred pounds, no less.”
But this was not just a policeman, whom John met quite a few in all without exception temporal eras. It was vaginahatter. A policeman-vaginahatter, or rather, not a policeman, but a “Preventor of Violence.” (That was the name of the members of the Revolutionary Pyramid’s Guard squad after the defunding for the municipal police. – Translator’s Note.) Instead of the standard police equipment, he had a bottle with a Molotov cocktail, a pink hat, and in a place of a police badge, a pin with a hammer and sickle, on which the address of his personal cryptocurrency wallet was stamped.
At the sight of the bacon, Preventor grimaced, making it clear that they, vegetarians, did not even like the view of meat. However, this rejection was mutual – his smell was insufferable, which, however, was immediately confirmed. Indeed, until recently, this individual was one of the Occupiers, but the waves of the ersatz revolution carried him near the top of the Revolutionary Pyramid. (The Occupiers were a popular form of unsanitary protest of young people at the beginning of the 21st century, which promoted public defecation. – Translator’s Note.)
The Preventor’s voice was unusually high, and John had to look at him once more – and, to his amazement, he was she, or rather, this individual was a menstruator. (It was a Newspeak term for those who were capable of it after the Occupiers abolished the words “lady,” “wife,” and “mother.” – Translator’s Note).
The Preventor of Violence commanded, “On your knees!” but from John’s reaction, the menstruator realized that John had never kneeled in front of anyone in his life and was not going to start now. For the Preventor, this meant only one thing – the stranger did not belong to the Kneeling caste.
John was familiar with the ancient caste of people who knelt before other people. The Kneeling caste did not last long, but John did well to remember that school lesson where the teacher spoke of the Kneelers. An overheated engine and a forced stop brought John into that short, but vague and turbulent past that gave rise to the Kneeling caste, their militant wing – the Preventors caste, and the Ordinary American caste.
It was immediately clear to both the Preventor and John himself that he was an Ordinary non-menstruator. This meant that he was not even a second-class citizen. He was not human. He is an enemy of the people and an enemy of the Kneeling regime.
Both the Preventor and John knew exactly what to do in such a situation.
The Preventor called for help and ran after John, who rushed toward the nearby forest as fast as a man born in the 31st century could. Three hundred pounds of vegetarian menstruator were far behind. John did not run to the woods because he was afraid of the Preventors – he had enough skills and enough gadgets from the 32nd century, from where, in fact, he arrived at this damn parking lot – to deal with a small army.
John ran towards the forest because the Instruction required it. In such situations, it was necessary to lead the pursuers as far as possible from the time machine. No, no one was worried that the secrets of time travel would be discovered – after all, everyone knows that this discovery was made only at the end of the 30th century. The authors of the Instruction were worried about only one thing – that the time machine could be destroyed by the natives in a fit of anger. In this case, the return of the time traveler would be impossible under any circumstances.
The Preventor saw the Ordinary one running in the distance, and no matter how difficult it was, continued the pursuit. The run was going to be a long one, and he recalled how he, a provincial menstruator, got so close to the top of the Revolutionary Pyramid.
He, like many other menstruators, chose the noble profession of a teacher. But she came out of college already a convinced vaginahatter. She well remembered the day when the very creative idea came to her mind, which, in fact, lifted him so close to the top of the Revolutionary Pyramid. On that day, at a meeting of the Commissars, she simply announced that the time had come to burn unwanted books. In fact, all ideological predecessors of the vaginahatters had burned the books of the unwanted, so why should they abandon such an idea?
This old idea in the 21st century required modifications – not only books but also all media should be destroyed if they do not conform to the official party line. When there was a pogrom at her former University, the history professor recognized her and remarked with a surprise, “I thought that you only hated statues …” Her answer was the answer of a sincere lumpen-intellectual, “What reason did you have to think that we would stop at statues?”
At some point, the vaginahatter suddenly realized that both the Ordinary and she were no longer running, but merely walking and going back to the parking lot. When she approached her car, the backup crew she called for was lying in various positions, groaning in pain, around the car, and the Ordinary stood nearby and looked at her with a strange expression on his face. She did not know that John decided to violate not only the first but also the second paragraph of the Instruction. When John turned on the time equalizer, she felt a fantastic lightness in her plump body. The last thing she thought of him was, “Misogynist!”
She woke up in a hospital room, and the first thing she saw was her cell phone and the hammer and sickle badge on the nightstand. She tried to call the Commissar of the First Rank, but the phone was completely dead. A nurse entered the ward, and the menstruator involuntarily thought of her, “How slim, how beautiful!” The Preventor asked the nurse how to charge a cell phone, but she only laughed in response. Soon John entered the room with a large mirror in his hands.
“Judging by the equipment, this hospital is a special hospital for the members of Central Committee of the Revolutionary Pyramid,” she thought and glanced at the mirror. The beauty looked at her, like two drops of water in comparison to the nurse. “Yes, John is not that imaginative,” the nurse remarked with a smile. “When you were brought to us, he did not really know which model to choose, and he just pointed at me. But do not worry, I am also in a modified body. All our women, starting from the 23rd century, go only in a modified one. And some men too.”
“What words – men and women!” vaginahatter thought. “Forbidden words!” Systemic sexism was evident; it only remained to find out the other incriminating details. John himself answered the question, “You are in the century in which I live – the 32nd. This hospital is geographically located about two miles from the parking lot, where we met eleven centuries ago. Our country bears the same name – the United States of America, but now there are not fifty states, but many more. Also, all leftist ideologies are prohibited in our country, and you can only get acquainted with them in our libraries. Therefore, you have to choose – stay here or return to the parking lot.”
The vaginahatter had been very close to the top of the Revolutionary Pyramid for a long time, and he knew that in such critical situations, it was necessary to consult with the Commissariat of Ideology or even with the entire Occupy Council. After all, a collective decision is always better than an individual one. “And the collective good is always superior to the individual good,” he thought aloud.
“Such a worldview could prevent you from staying in the 32nd century,” the nurse suddenly answered disapprovingly. “When the collective good dominates the individual good, this is a manifestation of the form of a leftist ideology called fascism. It is customary for us to collect all of its adherents from all available centuries and throw them into the dustbin of history at the beginning of the 20th or the beginning of the 21st century.”
“But the comrades from Antifa,” she tried to object. “Your comrades from Antifa practically don’t differ from the fascists. There were so many of these thugs that they had to be divided into two groups – one was sent to the 20th century, and you met with the group sent to the 21st century,” the nurse snapped.
At that moment, the vaginahatter felt the same surge of mental energy that several years ago allowed her, an unknown menstruator, to enter the circle of those close to the top of the Revolutionary Pyramid.
Yes, she always noticed some signs of abnormality in the Commissars, but she and all the other revolutionaries simply brushed aside such politically incorrect thoughts. “So that’s why so many left-wing radical ideas – global warming, systemic racism, political correctness, shared bathrooms, and toxic masculinity – suddenly turned out to be so suspiciously concentrated in a short historical period of time,” she thought and shuddered from the unusual courage of her understanding and from the horror of the conjecture that struck her.
“Are you not afraid of,” she began to think aloud again, but the nurse interrupted her, “No, there is no danger. The concentration level of the left-wingers is much lower than the critical. The level is strictly monitored. They will never come to power again. Believe us, we know.”
John entered the conversation, “You see, we, conservatives, consider it inhumane to destroy people for their worldview, no matter how wild their ideas may seem. Therefore – expatriation. All leftists are prohibited from going beyond the 21st century. Without exception, all the Commissars of the First Rank, whom you personally know, were precisely those whom humanity meticulously collected in various centuries and exiled into two specially designated dumps of human history.”
She looked in the mirror again. Remembering her once foul-smelling heavy body, she whispered, “My name was … Pat … Patricia … I am… vaginahatter, but I … no longer want to be. I just want to be … just a woman. Please leave me here …”
“We knew you would choose to stay,” John said with satisfaction. “This will be … no, more precisely – it was written in the New York Times in 2020.” Pat was surprised, “About me in the New York Times?!” “Yes, you can see it for yourself,” and the well-known to Patricia front page of the Primary Mass Media Outlet of the Revolutionary Pyramid appeared on the computer screen. The article stated that several rioters had gone missing during the arson of cars in which the American flag was found. Among the missing was a very progressive Commissar of the Second Rank.
At that moment, a doctor entered the room. He looked closely at Pat, and that glance made her knees weak. For the first time in her life, she felt with what she had never felt – with a woman’s heart – that she had made the right choice.
[Originally published at Peritum Media]