Ethan struggled a little putting on the tie, but he felt it was important to dress up a little when he was being subversive. The yuppie drone outfit acted as camouflage, turning Ethan into just another one of the sheeple bleating their way to work or school or off to their corporation-approved entertainments every day. Nobody paid attention to a man with a tie and a briefcase, and nobody would ever connect one with the kind of cultural sabotage Ethan was about to commit. He slicked his brown hair back with a comb and some water to complete the look, and checked himself in the mirror to make sure not a trace of inventiveness or originality showed in his cloudy gray eyes.
Perfect. He picked up his briefcase and overcoat and left the apartment to begin his rounds, after first taking a moment to make sure all four of his deadbolts were secured. His neighbors probably thought he was paranoid, but they didn't understand the kind of people Ethan was defying with his activities. They couldn't understand that the quiet guy next door was secretly the kind of corporate terrorist that America's fascist police would love to find any excuse to get rid of. He wasn't about to give someone the chance to plant drugs under his bed or kiddie porn on his computer. Four locks wasn't paranoia-if anything, it was probably too little security.
He took the side stairs down and out of the building, huffing a little by the time he walked down the thirteen stories it took to get to the street. Still, if he wanted to keep Ethan Pasternak, scourge of the corporate underworld, separate and distinct from Faceless Yuppie Drone #4184, he couldn't just walk out of his own lobby like a putz. He slipped out into the alley, took a winding path past the dumpsters behind the Chinese restaurant next door and the tiny grocery store down the street, and emerged at the other side of the block to merge into the crowd with no one the wiser.
Not a single person even glanced at him as he got onto the subway, heading downtown with the rest of the mindless mass of humanity. They probably thought he was just another lawyer or ad executive or insurance salesman, a boring nobody contributing a boring nothing to a society of boring nowhere. They didn't know what was in his briefcase. If they did, they'd probably descend on him in a mob right there on the train.
He walked the last five blocks to his first destination, a seedy little adult bookstore with a crude drawing of a winking face in the window. He glanced left and right just once before entering, to make sure that nobody was watching, and slipped inside. The clerk looked up for a moment, then glanced back down with a disinterested grunt. Perfect.
Ethan sidled over to a small table near the front, where the owners of the dingy little porn shop had a small collection of free newspapers and magazines. Ethan set his briefcase on the table and wiped his sweaty hands on his overcoat. Then he entered the combination and popped the lock to reveal his devastating payload.
'Girls With Guns'. Fifty-six copies, the absolute most he could squeeze into the briefcase at a time. Each one made from eight sheets of 8 1/2 x 11" paper, photocopied and folded over and stapled, with a slightly thicker stock for the cover. It probably didn't look threatening to the sheeple, but to Ethan, it was a memetic weapon designed to bring down an empire.
The cover depicted a Girl-Ethan mentally edited out the little trademark symbol with a roll of his eyes-standing on top of a prone, struggling man. She had one inhuman plastic foot pressed against his throat, and her hands held a massive Desert Eagle that she had pointed square at his throbbing erection. His face had the plummy, reddish-purple quality of someone struggling to draw breath; Ethan was glad that he'd decided to spring for color on the covers, it really brought the work to life. A blurb on the front said, 'They're Choking the Soul Out of Us!'
Ethan took five copies out of the briefcase and quickly relatched it again before anyone noticed. He flipped through one briefly, smiling with pride at his own art-every page had a drawing of a Girl, drawn with careful detail from the images Ethan found online. But these were the Girls as Ethan knew them, not the simpering images of pliable sex toys that populated all the fan forums that infested the Internet like ants at a picnic. These were the real Girls, soldiers of the corporate kakistocracy with their weapons of violence against the human spirit turned from metaphor to chilling reality.
They wielded rifles, herding naked men and women into cages like so many obedient dogs. They held cold steel revolvers to men's heads while they locked their cocks into chastity cages. They teased women's nipples with the point of a knife, reminding them that their true roles were nothing but objects for the gratification of others. They held sawed-off shotguns at crotch height, forcing humans to fellate them like the grotesque parodies of phalluses that they extruded from their bodies. They pinned men down and forced them to fuck at gunpoint. They controlled humanity's sexuality with ruthless, clinical efficiency, just like in real life.
Ethan tossed the copies onto the table quickly, overcome with emotion, then stepped out into the chilly morning air with an awkward haste. He stood there for a long moment, trying to get his body under control-his face felt prickly with heat, and he had to angle his overcoat to hide his erection. He hated himself for his weakness-seeing a Girl should inspire nothing but revulsion in him, but his stupid cock didn't care that it was giving in to the oligarchy's latest tool for social control. It just wanted to spurt. Ethan had to masturbate three or four times a day some days, just to keep from getting distracted when he drew.
He made his next stop about four blocks away, at a strip club where a naked woman danced for five or six heavily drunken patrons. Ethan remembered over two dozen people in the same room when he first started distributing 'Girls With Guns'-the bigger the hold the Girls gained over society, the less they cared about actual sex. Even if this was a bourgeoisie tool used to narcotize the proletariat through the twin opiates of sex and alcohol, it was still somehow purer than the shiny new techno-fetishism that the Girls popularized. No wonder the owners let him put out his magazines here.
Ethan fumed silently as he dropped off another six copies. He flipped through the top one again, reminding himself that regular people could fight back against the soulless corporate takeover of humanity's deepest instincts; he knew exactly what pages to look at to find inspiration in that regard. Interspersed with the drawings of Girls torturing and threatening humans were pictures of humans fighting back, crushing Girls with baseball bats and beating them with tire irons until they were nothing but crumpled piles of metal and plastic, barely even recognizable as humanoid. Ethan's breathing quickened as he stared at the images, and he found himself once again having to quickly dash out into the cool air to calm his nerves.
The next few places got four copies each-a head shop, another strip club and a local peep show. Ethan had a rough idea of how much each issue 'sold'-he had an email address in the back of each copy, run through an anonymizing service in Finland, as well as as a request to his readers to tell him where they found the issue they were reading and instructions to pay in bitcoin what they thought the zine was worth. Ethan didn't get many responses, but he understood why. Some people almost certainly suspected a trap. The Internet wasn't as free as it used to be, not since the big corporations got their claws into it. Anyone could say they were fighting the system, but that didn't mean they could be trusted.
Ethan hit three more adult bookstores and two more strip clubs, distributing twenty-seven more copies of the zine before he stopped for lunch. His legs ached from the long walk, almost a full thirty city blocks from start to finish-it would be so much easier if he could just distribute this online, but Ethan knew better than to purchase something as traceable as a web domain. These days, with big corporations using the DCMA like a club to censor anything they disagreed with, Ethan's art would only stay up for a matter of hours before the shadowy corporate overlords behind the Girls took it down and tracked his financials back to his efficiency apartment. He sometimes wondered what they would charge him with, when they came for him. Free speech wasn't a crime yet, but Ethan was sure they could find a pretext.
Finally, Ethan deposited the last six copies of 'Girls With Guns' at a pair of fetish clubs on the fringes of the red-light district, then got onto the subway for the ride home. He meticulously failed to retrace his steps back to his apartment building, instead stopping off at a local coffee shop along the way to remove his tie in the restroom and put on his overcoat. He probably looked incredibly silly, especially once he put on his thick glasses to further obscure his appearance, but Ethan took no chances. He walked into the lobby of his apartment, rode the elevator back up to the thirteenth floor, and unlocked each of his deadbolts one by one. Then, breathing a sigh of relief, he slipped inside and closed the door behind him.
There was a Girl(tm) waiting for him.
*****
She was silver all over, gleaming chrome highlights from head to toe, and she sat on his bed with her legs crossed demurely like she'd been waiting for him since the second he stepped out of his apartment. Her facial expression was perfectly composed, completely neutral, with only the tiniest hint of a polite and non-threatening smile at the corners of her perfect lips. Her fingers were laced together, her hands resting in her lap in plain view. She looked up at him with a calm prepossession that Ethan could tell was intended to put him perfectly and completely at ease.
"I knew this would happen some day," Ethan said, his voice almost resigned. He reached around behind him and slid shut each of the deadbolts, one by one, making sure that no reinforcements could get into the apartment. "I knew you wouldn't let me get away with it forever. I'm a threat to your New World Order, aren't I? A subversive element you have to get rid of before you take over the world and make everyone a fucking corporate drone who can only get hard for a fucking spreadsheet. How did you find me? You followed me, didn't you? Some kind of satellite surveillance, watching me educate the masses from on high? Spyware in my computer, capturing my keystrokes when I collected my bitcoins? It doesn't matter anymore so you might as well tell me, right?"
