Man Farm

They laid the train tracks back to front and this caused a great deal of confusion – you’d think you were on the train to New York and arrived in Kinshasa, or to Shanghai and found yourself lost in Istanbul.

At least that’s what was rumored about the way it used to be. Before the fall.

Thing is, the men on the train didn’t actually care where they were going. We just needed to get out of the god-forsaken hole reality had become for us since the Women took over. It was a case of putting your head down, and hoping like hell you ended up somewhere you had the remotest chance of being free again. What we didn’t realize was that it was hopeless from the start. Time looped like a broken gramophone, and just kept damn pulling us back. Even the train felt like it was stuck on a precipice of paradox – like it was simultaneously moving in two directions. Like some crazy glitch. They’d set it up as part of the Man Farm experiment, I think it must have been the first structure in the institution. Looking back – it was the first time we, men, collectively realized life had stopped making sense. We blinked and confusion between Shanghai and Istanbul became this Bermuda Triangle of life as we knew it. But I could hear the wheels, metal on metal turning, scraping their way through the darkness, sparks shooting sideways into the night like our hopeless escapee terror.

There we sat, heaving, breathless, broken warriors of some seemingly ancient past. Lost; without ever having tasted battle. Outsmarted by a physics we thought we created, a logic we imagined only we really understood. But the logic of treachery, female treachery, took us down like a kid’s kite – crashing, tearing and finished in an instant. There we were, stuck beyond redemption, beyond any figuring out, victims of a quantum mystery, a nature which totally eluded us. A realised algorithm of the female psyche keeping us absolutely imprisoned.

As blades of light flashed through the carriage, I squinted my eyes to look around. I guess we could have predicted none of the older men were going to make it through the twisted week long mission we had to fight through just to stow away. The filth and the risk. I could smell sweat like… fear. Sebastian sat on my left. His muscles seemed to be trembling in the half-light, but he smiled and handed me the smouldering last drags of his hand-rolled cigarette. He’d fought a war. He’d dug up his old war gear; I could barely make out the camouflage through the mud. His tattoo – 6993657, across his shoulder, and beneath it, much older, and as faded as everything else that defined us, Carly 2075- 2103. 2103. Fuck. We’d been enslaved for a decade. I wondered what the hell had happened to Joe. Last thing I heard was an electronic female voice, his screams, and real neat automatic gunfire. To this day, it amazes me how clinical a woman’s wrath can be. Clinical, with blood.

Opposite me, Ataru – the hardest man, I reckon – to join us. His face was covered in Joe’s blood. He was the only one with the courage to go back. But then maybe it wasn’t courage. Sam would have called it misogyny. He could never accept we’d been beaten by dames. He was sharpening his machete on a tiny remnant of a knife-sharpener.

Most of us accepted things had gone too far before the takeover. Days of the naked female form, plastered across the side of every building, gargantuan moving billboards advertising some entirely unrelated thing, strip clubs on every corner, not one new thing on the internet besides women, exposed and laid totally fucking bare in just about any way a man could imagine, the sudden almost malignant explosion of our own desires, to the point where you could barely make it to the supermarket without seeing some ice-lolly sucking 16 year old taking a buck or two in an alleyway, and we’d just tell them they had their rights. Consent’s consent right? After the initiation year though, the agony, I think we all finally got the dehumanization of what it had become- The Patriarchy. That word just makes me think of fire, I can still see the letters burning, lighting up stunning faces of fury, shrouded in wild locks of long hair. Whatever they took from us, man, they deserved it.

“Hey!” Sebastian tapped my arm “man if you aint gonna smoke it…”

He grabbed the cigarette from my fingers.

“Man – don’t you think it’s weird how only the fittest made it this far? We were fifteen guys at least.” Sebastian read my mind. “And I still can’t shake that damn feeling man.” He pulled the last life out of the cigarette. “They’re watching us man.”

I looked around the carriage, and the shards of light showed beads of sweat tracing through mud-covered bulging triceps, and thick beards, beneath eyes shining with courage. Man, yeah. We were one fit group of runaways. I guess the Darwinian nature of the outcome kinda suited our logic. That’s how they always stayed ten damn steps ahead. They knew how we worked inside and out. That wasn’t a mission, it was a damn obstacle course.

“Hell – Lo, Men”

Damn electronic voice – all broken and un-meaning and all we really knew of women.

“We are approaching the station. Thank you for volunteering as donors for the annual drive to perpetuate the population. We hope that you will cooperate once we arrive. Bionazons will be awaiting you at the arrival point, where you will be taken into the Palace of Fruitfulness. We assure you, you shall be richly rewarded for your cooperation and sorely punished should you resist. But, we know your wants, and the fruits are most effective ….irresistible. We wish you a pleasant stay.”
Rain dripping from the rusty gutters made a curtain between the platform and the tracks.

**First and last lines not my own. Taken from Joust compo OneThrone Mag