Page 89 of A Better World

“Gladiatorial games functioned to build consensus—awe versus youmentality. Said poet Juvenal,they were the circus to Caesar’s bread(1). The Mayans cracked skulls on the steps of Chichén Itzá (2). We can also see community-building in Plymouth Valley’s skin furniture (3) and through blood sacrifice in Holland’s 8,000-year-old peat bog fossils (4). In times of greatest scarcity, bodies were hung, stabbed, and castrated by entire communities, each playing their part as executioner, in what archaeologists termoverkill(5).”

—AI-generated library research using the keywords “Human Sacrifice,” “History,” and “Scarcity,” Kings Public Library, Main Branch, 2079.

Blutkitt(blood cement)—the tendency for morally corrupt actions to calcify group attachments.

For example, when groups commit murder together, their individual guilt has the opposite of the expected effect. Instead of leaving the group, members feel they’ve passed a point of no return. They’re bonded, perceiving those outside the group as lessreal.

Members tend to be groomed, given morsels of knowledge and responsibility, tasked with proving loyalty at each step. By the time they commit violence, they’ve typically transgressed so far past their moral codes that they can no longer conceive of the deeper line they’re crossing.

It’s only after gang and cult members commit murder that they’re assigned the greater honors and leadership responsibilities of indoctrinating new members. This is because they’reBlutkitt.

—CORPORATE CULTS FROM SEOUL TO PLYMOUTH VALLEY, by Trebor Meier, Verlag Press, 2074.

Mirage

The Parker childrenwere small for their ages, possibly from prolonged sickness. Their hair was black, their eyes brown. Around them, the world moved. People laughed and hugged and balloons fell. But the children were still.

In screenies about the great deserts of South America, people often imagined water shimmering off the great sand expanse. With each step, the water shifted farther away, luring coyotes crossing borders to their deaths. She thought about that as she advanced through the parlor, and the children seemed to fade.

Everything else could be ignored. But not this.

Linda pushed through the crowd of people like wading through animated dolls. Tania Janssen hugged her. “May this be the most fruitful of all years!” she cried with drunken delight, her shirt stained with wine, her mouth red with it.

“Fruitful of years,” Linda parroted.

Jack Lust stalked past the altar, a murderous dandy. His body obscured and then revealed two wraiths holding hands. Linda came closer, and as she did, she remembered the nightmare house. She thought of Gal, who’d once sewn all her children’s clothing, married to Trish, a woman who’d never examined her patients with her hands. More balloons. One of them popped with abang!

The path opened again, and there was Zach the unctuous tour guide, who’d made PV look so fine, ushering the children to the recesses of the closed-off parts of the mansion.

Linda weaved through hugging friends and lovers and more gunfire-popping balloons. Like canned music or hundred-year-old screenies in black-and-white, it all felt dead to her, the whole valley a tomb.

She chased Zach to a hall beneath the stairs.

“Linnie?” Russell called.

He’s dead, too, a dreadful voice whispered.

She went deeper, but the door she’d seen Zach and the children pass through was gone. Did the walls move here, like in the Labyrinth?

Slow and boozy at first, Russell followed.

“Where are they?” she asked. The house steamed from so many warm, crowded bodies. Sweat rolled from Russell’s matted blond hair and down his neck. His eyes widened with terror: his wife was about to make a scene. He lowered himself, a tall man extending his arms, tucking his head over hers to keep the party from seeing her. To undo her, like a thin and badly knotted chain.

She raced around him but now all the doors were walls. She searched with blind hands for a secret passage. Everything was cold and dark and smooth.

“What are you doing?” he hissed. “Don’t you know we’re not supposed to be here?”

“Sebbie! Katie! Do you hear me?” she shouted, loud as a horn.

No answer. She swerved back along the short hall. Some revelers stayed celebrating, but just as many stopped their blessings and hugs. In bespoke Fabric Collective ball gowns and black ties, they paid witness.

“Katie! Sebbie!” she bellowed.

Everything stopped, even the music. Eyes drilled.

This felt like a nightmare. How could this be happening? How was she a screaming woman at a party? “Katie! Sebbie!” she shouted as she raced through the pool house, and then around the corner, to passed-out Rachel. The party cleared a path.

She was panting, hands on thighs beside gawking caladrius, when Russell caught up. “There you are!” he cried, affable and stage loud. “Honey! What’s the joke? Let me in on it!”

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