creepy stories, These Fantastic Worlds, sf and fantasy podcast, jakejackson451, Prophecy, Quantum Police, Feathers, Surreal Revolution, Bodies, Clone, obsession

Micro-fiction 090 – Surreal Revolution (Echoes series)

The fateful, dystopian tale of a painter and the power of art …


Surreal Revolution.

“The artist Abigor shuffled in a long queue for bread. The tall towers that surrounded her in the Central City District were quietly occupied by those who had bowed their heads when the Auto-Generals swept to power. The streets too were subdued except for the faint purr of government vehicles and the occasional scream that created a pulse to the rhythm of everyday life. Normally Abigor would be found creating her unnamed paintings in her loft, but today she had sent her children away for their protection and given them her last food.

“The queue disappeared around the corner and sank into the harsh light of the body scanners which the Auto-Generals used as their primary instrument of population control. Simple commerce had long closed as all non-essential retail was administered centrally– the markets had been shut down, and the external online world blocked from the City. Everyone was promised food and shelter, but only in exchange for scanning. The internal communications, an intranet created and used solely by the Auto-Generals was operated by handheld devices and personalised bar codes. The codes gave access to food, clothes and medicine but only if you submitted to the scanners.

“Abigor wore a full-face skull mask. Everyone in the queue wore a mask of some sort, and it had become the one part of life where people could express themselves as individuals in the face of repression. Some masks bore flowers, or a geometric pattern, while most found another face, a placid, submissive expression that covered their anger. It seemed that the Scanners were content to reveal the humiliating detail of each body scan on huge screens, several stories high, but did not worry about scanning the heads. The people learned to avert their eyes as the large bellies, breasts and naked sex organs of friends and neighbours were displayed hundreds of meters high, cast onto the bare walls of the City, scan after scan in the harsh light spilled from the huge scanners that squatted around the entrance of every public building. For the more religious amongst us the shame had led to despair and suicide, for the adolescents their bodies felt violated, for those of us a little older and less invested in our body image, we learned to live with the humiliation as a means of survival.

“Abigor was different. She was an artist. She created something indefinable that the Auto-Generals did not understand, and so did not control. The Scanners were designed to find armaments, suspicious tools, illegal substances but the brushes and pigments of the artist were not deemed to be dangerous and in the high-tech world of the Auto-Generals art was dismissed as ineffectual and harmless, so they were blind to it.

“Abigor though held many secrets, all in plain sight. Her home had been invaded and searched many times, the rooms of her neighbours below and on either side too were broken and devastated time and time again by the Robot Scanners, the human sized versions of the giant building Scanners. Each time they smashed through her door she understood the protocol: stand still, do not move even as all that remained of her furniture was trodden and crushed. If they arrived while she was painting she knew it could be cast aside from the battered easel. She had built a false ceiling and kept her paintings stored out of sight, but even those she left on her walls, knowing they would be destroyed at some point (she could not bear to live a life without art around her) often lasted longer than she might have hoped. The Robot Scanners seemed intent on intimidation rather than finding anything, for they always ignored the paintings, scanning Abigor, broadcasting her naked body onto the building outside, while ignoring her skull mask and her art.

“What they missed of course was the importance of the paintings themselves. If they had understood, if the scanners had passed the images to the Command and Control Units of the the Auto-Generals, perhaps they might have analysed their content and realised there was more to them than just the foolish fantasies of an old-fashioned artist and her peculiar taste in masks.

“Abigor gave her paintings to many people, so many it would have been difficult to realise what was happening. She painted quickly, in flat colours, with distorted buildings and high contrast. Bright light illuminated figures and creatures, and she added incongruous details, such as a yellow chrysanthemum on a body, a skull in tree. Sometimes she painted a still life of beautiful flowers, the heads of which if you looked closely were all skulls, in reds, purples, blues and creams, their grinning rictus hidden by the foliage, a dim light in the eyes always looking in opposite directions.

“Abigor was the messenger of the Resistance. For every ten paintings she gave away, at least one was received by someone who could decode her art, see that they contained a place, and a time, an instruction for action, all hidden as symbols in the painting. The wild deer wandering in from the corner referred to the old fields on the edge of the city, the fallen hourglass gave the time, the small pile of chopped tree trunks meant bring firearms.

“Everyone who understood the message fled to the forest behind the fields, and waited as their forces of desperate, angry folk gathered and planned, waiting for the moment long-promised.

“Abigor eventually gave up queuing, knowing how long it took to wait for the simplest of provisions. She was hungry, starving even, but carried on with her work, promoting the forces of the resistance, using every scrap of pigment and paper she could find she made over 2000 paintings, and many more sketches as she began to run out of paint. 

“The last drawings she distributed contained a skeleton in the foreground, with a yellow chrysanthemum for a head, a trickle of grey blood decorating the edge of the artwork. This was her sign.

“On that fatal day, the day she knew would come, the day she had planned for years she was raided once more. This time she was too ill to stand up, to be still, so the robot scanners carried out their threat to fire on those who moved during their inspections. As they scanned her room, casting the images of her and her paintings onto the walls of the large grey building opposite, Abigor flinched, her legs too weak to maintain her, the Robot Scanner nearest to her raised its titanium fist and smashed it against the side of her face, knocking off her skull mask, tearing her cloak. 

“She fell to the floor, her emaciated body, like the skeletons in her paintings, was scanned and the image cast onto the building outside.

“It was the sign everyone knew to look out for. Across the city everyone took off their masks, to reveal guns and lasers fixed to their heads, and they stormed the Headquarters of the Auto-Generals. Thousands were killed as they flowed in from the forest and the fields but they overwhelmed their oppressors, and reclaimed their own City.

“Sir?” a voice from the back of the lecture hall floated up, “Are you ok?”

The professor had removed his glasses, staring up at the painting that shimmered behind him, the foretold events of that fateful revolution marked across its panels.

“I am fine, thank you, it’s just that—” The Professor faltered, “Abigor was my mother.”

The voice at the back continued, ignorant of the emotion gripping Professor Artur’s body, “Is it true she had the face of a sunflower?”

“She had the yellow fever, and I believe she painted her face more yellow to make herself feel happy. Beneath the mask of the skull was her real face, half-starved, desperate and ill, she died for the cause, the symbol of her own fall she knew would be the trigger for the revolution. She knew her art was power, and she gave her all.”

A quiet murmur fluttered across the lecture hall. All the students, tapped their fingers and their feet, a gathering breeze of appreciation that ended in a storm of clapping as everyone stood up, applauding the self-sacrifice of Abigor and the paintings that changed the world.

[End]


Part of a new series of micro-fiction stories, released as These Fantastic Worlds SF & Fantasy Fiction Podcast on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, Vurbl and Stitcher  and more. Also on this blog, These Fantastic Worlds.

Text, image, audio © 2021 Jake Jackson, thesefantasticworlds.com. Thanks to Frances Bodiam and Elise Wells,  Logic ProX, Sound Studio, the Twisted Wave Recorder App, and Scrivener.


More Tales, More Audio

There are many other great stories in this series, including:

And a carousel of 10 audio stories from the podcast with information about submissions.

Here’s a related post, 5 Steps to the SF and Fantasy Podcasts.