Posted by Veronika Kill-O-Matic on October 16, 2000 at 14:20:52:

Passion? I was an art student. I smeared red paint on the floor with my bare feet as though it was blood and screamed iambs into the video cameras, as though volume made it real. Banged garbage can lids on the concrete floor of an empty bunker filled with black-clad students and their smoke. Dressed like a mental patient in a white frock, barefoot, frizzy hair, one spotlight. Noise. That was passion.

Show over, vampire mood music filtered out from the speakers, and I went for a quick change in the back to jeans and a heavy red leather jacket with lots of pockets and epaulets, zipped up high to hide my fat, which by then was only half gone. I met my peers, and giggled over drinks at their compliments of my work, which they padded in the sophisticated irony that substitutes for a lack of wit. My reservoir of love was drained again, already then. Resisting the urge to bite, to slap, to stab, I let everyone imagine I'd go to bed with them that night, knowing I'd sleep alone. The owner of the bunker paid me half the door. I got good reviews one day. I was forgotten the next. Buzz buzz, click click.

Now I know better. Now I know real. I am an animal. I love and kill to eat. I eat and kill to love. All that's left from that time is the red leather jacket, which I have so often patched and modified to meet the needs of my new profession. But I remember the day before cannibalism. I remember yesterday. I remember trying to be good. Before the Virus. When I had it all wrong. When the men were still around.

I never got to kill one before they all died. I was close, I know I would have. If I got the chance again, I would take out as many as I could. If I had known I was the future. I'd like to see ten of them resurrected for a day, so I could blast them back to hell.

I'm in the little car, parked across from Grauzone, about a hundred yards up the street. The engine is running, I could pull out and drive past, drive away. Is this how the movie always ends? Must I settle the score? In Kraut, Grauzone means the Gray Zone.

This whole street is abandoned. Has been, for the ten years since the men went, because it used to be porn and peep shops. A short little red light strip for a little city. Now it's just dead, not even boarded up. There are plenty of better places for the survivors to inhabit. The wind lifts trash that looks like it's been blowing in the same circles for ten years. The rats here are so fresh they've practically set up a disco in the middle of the street. Forgotten. Forbidden. Sealed.

Except for Grauzone. The headquarters, only place with lights on. Where Lisa is, Madame my Boss, right this moment, celebrating her triumph, oh great Gangster of the Airheads. Clueless as to how she earned it. Just clever enough to know how clueless. Silently fearing me, with every precious heartbeat.

And Anya, my sister, my love, who to my great regret, having chosen the wrong place one time too many, must die horribly in the cross-fire. Partying. Bitch. And Tong, the only one who even thinks she could kill me. Sullen beast, reminds me of me ten years ago. She is the one I will kill first, just to make sure. Nothing personal.

I put the eyedropper up my nose and give it a squeeze. The synth is called Thread. It has a bad reputation, because it kills one out of every six people who try it on the first shot. Shorts out every cell in their nervous system in a couple of seconds, which is why it's also called the Russian Brainfuck. The lucky ones, the ones who roll snake eyes, get every pleasure, every pain, every memory, every dream, every fear and tickle, all at once. They leave an exquisite corpse.

This is my sixteenth hit. I have no complaints.

Thread. Your brain, your spirit, your eyes ears and nose expand to fill the space from stratosphere to bedrock, horizon to horizon, tapping into each crevice and nuance. Nothing escapes you, you mete out time as slowly as you like. I have counted the raindrops as they land and flatten on my scalp. I have entered into remembered scenes like opening a door and seeing myself. I have split my field of vision into six vertical strips and followed, with six brains and six pairs of eyes and ears, everything that happened in each strip. I have juggled six flaming knives while sipping a martini and reciting Hamlet's speech, a line in English, a line in Russian, a line in German, then on to the next line. Laughing, of course. I have had two lovers in the present and four in the past, all in one night, one bed. I have stood motionless as a rock and brought on orgasms by power of thought. I like this drug.

I have felt a shriek impact and ripple out over wallpaper and return as filigreed echoes to envelope me, bouncing in the air against its own reflections. This was not good. Someone you're killing should be too busy flapping and gurgling to shriek. If you're doing it right. Shrieking means wrong.

Today, I, Veronika Kill-O-Matic, never get it wrong. Today I shall enter Grauzone and kill everyone I meet. All fourteen of my heavily-armed, hardened sisters, every one a seasoned killer. Silent, smooth as Superman. Heartless as Kryptonite. Cool as Clint. Watch me now.

Okay. I'm still in the car. The Thread is kicking! In nominal time, the trip lasts about an hour and twenty minutes. Then you black out into a three-hour coma. The first five minutes, before you get a hold of the rush, and burst like a comet striking the continent, you're as good as paralyzed from the thoughts. Anyone could stroll down the middle of the street to the car, light a cigarette, put in a clip, and blow my brains out through the windshield.

Fuck, the motor is running, I forgot to turn off the headlights, and my fingers are frozen on the wheel. Last chance, girls.

Naturally I'm thinking it's been ten years. I don't think much about it anymore, but today is, after all, Virus Day. Tenth anniversary. Hard to forget Man the Creator, who made me in a way he never understood, and after many centuries of eternal wisdom died out in two weeks time, leaving me, his predatory daughter, to inherit the planet He had wasted. Amen.

About a year before it happened, not long after I quit school, I had the premonition. A wave of stories on what they called ethnoviruses washed through the media for a fortnight. This was a couple of years into the great genetic code crack. Some Third World politicians started yanging that the Pentagon was cooking up fatal pathogens designed to attach to genes occurring in specific ethnic groups, which the Pentagon then turned around and accused them of doing.

I remember thinking this: until then, they were saying that humans shared 98 percent of their genome with chimps. Of the other 2 percent, maybe a fifth of a percent accounted for racial differences. These would be countless tiny gene fragments sprinkled over many chromosomes; hard to isolate, hard to hit without maybe taking a shotgun to all races.

Then I saw it, like an overripe plum on a string of four dozen stones. A vision. The Y chromosome. The maker of men. Compared to finding an ethnic marker for the angle of the nose, this was a whole chromosome, a separate structure fat and rich for the bombing. You didn't need a pinprick. You could probably hit it five different ways at once. Yes. It was possible to make a highly selective pathogen. If you wanted to kill men. It was hard to imagine the same for women, at least not based on genetics, because women are double-X and men also have the X, so it would get both sexes.

Well, the big boys had their round of protests and counter-accusations and letters to the UN, and then the next thing came along, and then the next thing. It was a usual year in global Disneyworld. I remember something about Madonna shaving off all her hair again, and rumors about beaver pictures of it circulating somewhere. Then there was OJ in Africa, Sean Connery starring in The Death of James Bond, last forest gone in Thailand. That July a plane crash killed the New York Mets, including the first female shortstop in history, and they were nine ahead in the loss column when it happened. Oh, that one was endless, three months total coverage at least, and just when, of all the jobs in the world, I had to be serving drinks to perverts at a sports bar in Queens. Pretty much all of whom I would have enjoyed seeing die horribly.

And then? Elian defects to North Korea, Charles has sex change, President attends wrestling match in Mexico. The lousy thing about Thread and the other memory synths is, you can't just edit out all this shit you saw ten years ago on TV. Not when you're getting complete episodes of Seinfeld from when you were fourteen, each flashing through your mind in a quarter second, commercial breaks intact.

A year after the ethnovirus story, which kicked off my first heavy man-hating episode, I found out I was not the only one to be inspired by the idea of an androcidal pathogen. Today, certain sisters who haven't figured out that college is cancelled forever still want to know who else had the idea. They blow dust around the military archives of ten former nations, and call academic panels to bore each other with their findings.

Who cares who thought the Virus up? Genius biologists rose to the challenge of research, pure and free, in underground bunkers. They were only serving contingency plans, mind you, to deal with worst case scenarios. In the name of deterrence.

My bet is, they were trying to combine a Y pathogen with one aimed at an ethnic marker, and succeeded so well at the first task they didn't a get a chance to perform the second. Or maybe, in their plans, they wanted to innoculate themselves before releasing it, but it released itself first. Should it surprise anyone? It's a simple matter of updating the historical classics of warfare to use modern means. The pattern is ancient. Kill all the men. Keep the virgins to impregnate. Sell the children and the used bitches into slavery. That is a direct order from Jehovah, your merciful God. Yes, sir! You can read it in the Bible. A hilarious book.

There's one story where Jehovah gets pissed off at the Israelites for showing mercy to some Canaanites, and smites them with pestilence to teach them next time to kill everyone He tells them to kill. The Athenians did it to the island of Melos. Dirk told me that one, in Nepal. He was well-read, he really knew his Greeks. The Assyrians, the Serbs, the Mongols, the Spaniards, Operation Lebensborn, the baboons, fuck all I know. I slept through History, it was just the same thing, over and over. Maybe something was telling me not to waste my time, because soon it would end. Because soon enough, it would all be mine. Veronika's Planet.

How did I find out it was my planet? Consider this. On Virus Day, ten years ago, I was in the fucking Himalayas with Anya and our late friend Dirk. My separatist episode was at least six months behind me, I was talking to men again. Dirk was a very nice guy, a German like Anya, studying math in Gottingen for going on ten years. He visited us in New York, and four months later we were here. He was into all this mysticism, hash sticks. He had a trimmed but still scruffy beard, and he was always very polite, and almost scared, whenever he started correcting your misconceptions about the world. The whole time I kidded him that he was the last of his kind.

The trip was supposed to be adventure, not suicide, and we had reached our planned high point, well below the snow line. We had all paid, Anya and I in a thousand hours waiting tables, Dirk probably with some German student loan, to get something really remote. One of the last unbeaten paths.

They brought us to nirvana on a ridge above a purple valley. If I'd ever understood the damn name of the place, the funny way Dirk pronounced it when he was trying to mimic the Sherpas, I'd remember it still. If I'd ever bothered to look at all the maps he had. Instead I spent the days loving the mountains, and the air, and the sky, and the way Anya's bowl cut, bleached pale with brownish red roots, fell around her rosy cheeks when she turned to the sun and closed her eyes, and the firm roundness of her hips and shoulders, compared to all my bulky bones and joints and longshoreman's arms and stretch marks from balloon days, and now the ever-leaner hardness that, to my continuing mystery, seemed to attract men and women in equally large numbers. She was so beautiful. What made so many people want me, with all this hate in my heart?

One day Anya and I wake up at sunrise, and Dirk and the two Sherpas are dead. Just that. Finding it out was a lot slower and dramatic than I tell it now, of course, with lots of prodding and panic and screaming, but I'm going to telescope here on the details. After all, in this story we have four billion deaths to go. Four billion and quite a lot of change.

So. Three dead men. On the mountain. In their sleeping bags. Wet with piss. No marks, no symptoms, no clues, no warning. Healthy at dusk. Dead at dawn. Peaceful looking. Natural causes.

Spooky.

At some point I'm actually trying to digest it, but Anya is only beginning with her all-time bug out. Raving, screaming, inventing a scenario a minute: Poison. Gas. Wrath of the gods. Vampires. Brain parasites. Some monster like Freddie Kruger. And me.

At that, she bolts out over the ridge like a blind maniac. With just the coat on her back and her boots. So what do I do? I figure one live lunatic must be worth more than three dead experts, so before I lose her, I grab the first small pack I see - hers, as it turns out, same model as Dirk's. I followed her at a fast jog, figuring I have the endurance and patience to catch her, if I conserve my energies. By then she's got five, six hundred yards on me. She's faster, and this cunt is convinced I killed them and I'm going to kill her, too. I almost do, when I finally get her. Miles and hours later. In the valley. I thrash her ass until she finally stops screaming. I surprise myself.

After all those years of wanting to smash, it was the first time I ever beat on anyone. We cried, we held each other tight. This went on for hours. I cried for poor old Dirk, me, the famous man-hating ogre. Crazy with grief and fear, both of us. Among a thousand things, what's funny in retrospect is, I was thinking in the back of my mind that I'd finally found my peace with the man's world.

Finally, we calmed down. Where were we? A fog started rolling down on us from big daddy mountain. In ten minutes we had no visibility and no idea where we came from. One half-filled canteen, a pack full of Anya's flowery little girl diaries, no food, no equipment, no Sherpas, no maps, no lighter, none of Dirk's hash sticks, both of us crazy exhausted, and I just beat Anya halfway to pulp. And what does she have to say about all this, in her best German girl-before-breakfast voice?

"Veronika... We have to go back and drag them to the village. We have to bury them."

I slugged her a last time, to the chin. It slipped out. She went out like in the movies, or at least pretended to. In that moment, as only once before, a thousand years of rage lifted again, and I was filled with a love and purpose as I had never known. I would get Anya back down, alive. If I had to kill us both doing it.