The Love of Ace Piper

I’ll start in the year 2950. That was a long time ago, fifty years before I was born. Before then, everything was sound, and the oceans had long been replaced from barren, open wastelands to underwater cities with an abundance of life, and nobody was trying to take over anybody else. Rumour has it that mankind still projected their voices to another person by an old fashioned telephone, that involved the old useless satellites floating around my city. My city, New New York, the newer, cleaner, better version of the New York in the 2940’s, in a country called the USSA, which stood for the United Soviet States of America. Before the 2940’s, it used to be the United States of America, but in 2951, Russia took it under their power.

They sent over Mr. Viktor Snoe as our president. Viktor Snoe ran the USSA a lot like the past presidents had, and it wasn’t much different. But Snoe was evil. More evil than any tyrant of today—he lulled the citizens into thinking that nothing much had changed, when really nothing would ever be the same. Starting in about 2962, he started converting the southern districts (then called states) into a horrible form of communism. He hid this from the other states until the whole of the USSA was a communist society.

During this time, a small group of men and women had noticed what the snake had done, and were rising against him. They sent out many decoys, small rebel groups from small districts trying to overthrow him and failing on purpose to give the bigger group time to plan their attack. Finally, in 2976 (Snoe lived this long, and lived until 3020. At the time of his inauguration he was in his early twenties) the rebels attacked. They were all either captured or killed during their siege of the castles. The ones who were captured, they were tortured and mutilated beyond imagination. I once saw a poor man in the streets, a survivor of the tortures. His right eye was missing, but in the socket was a hunk of crude metal. The man was short, about 4’ 11”, because the experiments done on him shrunk him from 6’ 4”. He told me he had had a baby son, and they had cloned him after a long period of painful tests. His wife wasn’t tested on, but suffered a different but equal torture. His name was Amir and we were friends. We met in secret, and I fed him and tried to shelter him without prevail. I saw him killed by the Berets one day. It was a Sunday. I’ve always hated Sundays.

On the streets, I saw a lot of things that are forever burned into my brain—a woman, scantily clad, trying to get some money, maybe to feed a family or to get herself acceptance into one of the many homes for women and children, hidden from the cruel Berets that patrolled the roads. So this woman was trying to sell herself to one of the few men who lived on the streets and had enough money to have her for the night. A car full of Berets came by. Filthy, horrible men with no dignity. They were worthless, even lower than the rats with which I sometimes shared my dinner. I sometimes spit on them as they drive by. They stopped at the corner, and I saw on the woman’s face a mixture of hope and reverence, that maybe one of these rich men would take her home for a good price. They all piled out of the vehicle. I knew they had one thought on their minds—either murder or rape…or even both. There was nothing they wouldn’t do. The Berets pretended they were better than the homeless men or the whores, or the small-time rebels like me. I laugh at that. I suppose I’m not that great either, because I just stood by and let them rape the woman—really, she wasn’t much more than a girl, it seemed. All of them, inside of her at the same time. It was horrible, but I couldn’t peel my eyes away. It wasn’t like I got off on it at all; in fact, I was about to throw up. But I was fascinated in a disgusting way. The rape wasn’t even about pleasure on their part; it was more about showing her that they ruled these streets and showing each other that they were man enough to rape a woman. Once they were finished with her, she collapsed on the ground and I could see the sobs wracking her body. They laughed and kicked her in the ribs, each taking turns at first but then they were all going at her at the same time. It killed me that this was what they did with their time. After they had kicked her enough, one of them pulled out a gun and shot her between the legs. The thing about it was that she didn’t die right away; she started screaming in a language like Spanish, screaming to her god to help her. I wanted to go tell her that there’s no help for her now, there never has been and never will be. There’s no help for our battered country anymore.