Chapter 11

May 31th, 2024 — Prom Night. Julie Lambert.

Danger! As entertaining as the live sex show was, Julie reasoned, she probably ought to investigate that. No one was paying any attention to her, so she slid to the back of the crowd. She walked around, tracing the walls of the dance hall, trying to get a feeling of where the danger was strongest. When she felt she had it, she put an ear to a wall and listened. Footsteps, boots. She pocketed a steak knife from a snack table, then scampered down to a door, waited until the source of the noise passed that door, then opened it and slid out, trying to stay stealthy and still get a look at the threat. It wasn’t hard to spot — it really stood out.

Furry terrorists, about a dozen of them — the Anarcho-Feminist Hamster Uprising. Their leader was an obese woman with an AK-47 in a hamster fursuit with a toxic green skunk-stripe spray-painted down the back and twin “2 + 2 = Die!” placards sticking up from her back like the Monkey King’s banners. Next in line was an anthro-hamster in a latex dominatrix costume with a bullwhip and fake blood smeared around her mouth, bearing a “Cannibalism Empowers Women!” placard. She had a big duffel bag slung over her shoulder and filed-down cannibal-teeth glued into a discordantly friendly-looking cartoon fur-face — the overall effect was macabre. At her side was a protester in a Rescue Rangers fursuit wielding a fireaxe and a “Boys Can’t Touch My Gadget!” protest sign. At the back was a hamster with a samurai sword, wearing a giant purple novelty strap-on and bearing a “Peg the Hamster Patriarchy!” banner.

Julie struggled not to giggle and scrutinized them more closely. They weren’t even real furries, she realized. The fursuits were all ill-fitted — they probably bought them on eBay for this protest. The one up front was Tana — Julie recognized her from the girth and build, even though her face was obscured by a big hamster-head. They were marching Rich Bonnie with them; her hands were bound behind her back with duct tape, and another strip covered her mouth. They probably thought of themselves as protesters, not terrorists, given the placards. Guns and hostages meant terrorists, though — at least to Julie.

Julie had a fairly good idea what this was about — she’d gotten the full story out of PHB a while back, though furry terrorists were definitely a new and unexpected twist in the whole deranged saga.

It had all started, as so many teenage misadventures do, with a geek trying to impress a cheerleader. In this particular case, the cheerleader was the smarter of the two — but that didn’t really matter. Julie didn’t think PHB instigated it on purpose using Marvin as a catspaw — they just talked. They were friends. He was crushing on her, because of course he was. She didn’t honestly know how involved her friend was in the whole matter, but she didn’t see PHB as a user. Hopefully. Regardless, PHB did chat with Marvin, and likely did express the exact same social theories she had expressed to the cheerleaders in the cafeteria. Maybe she was just venting — but it gave Marvin a plan, one he thought would make him more popular, strike a blow against the social agenda terrorizing the school and win the heart of the girl of his dreams.

It was, obviously, a dumb plan, because the plans teenage boys come up with in that situation are always dumb plans. It was at least creative, though — Marvin was nothing if not creative. He’d decided that, for his Biology 30 class project, he was going to disprove the idea that gender was a social construct — and he was going to do it using hamsters!

He spent a lot of time and money on it, and kept his thesis very secret until the big class presentation. He actually got clearance from Mr. Garris to use a spare classroom to set it all up back in December — he didn’t mention the controversial premise until his presentation, obviously. He built two industrial-size hamster habitats on opposite sides of the room, calling one the Nursery and the other the Jungle. Each had dozens of separate fenced sub-habitats for individual hamsters, so they could see each other but not physically interact. He also set up a number of webcams to observe the hamster behavior in both habitats 24/7. After the D&D clique imploded thanks to DB’s influence, he found he had a ton of spare time on his hands to take on a project like this.

He sourced eight Roborovski hamsters from a pet store in Tulsa, and put them together in the Nursery. (He chose Roborovskis because their dawn-and-dusk activity cycle made the observation and analysis element of the experiment remotely viable for a full-time student like Marvin; he used computer-timed soft light lamps to control that activity cycle.) Each time a female bore a litter of pups, he removed the pups immediately from her care and placed them in habitats the Jungle, after checking their sex. He anointed the male hamsters with a scentless light blue dye, and the females with a scentless pink dye, so they could easily be told apart. As hamsters are colorblind, they couldn’t see the dye themselves. He included a chemical abortifacient in the food pellets he gave to all the hamsters he did not want to breed.

Marvin may not have been the smartest student, but he was certainly methodical in his research and seemed to care deeply about the project, spending hours after school (and occasionally deserting classes) to tend to his subjects in the “hamster observatory”. Julie thought that, while he wasn’t likely to be a brilliant scientist, he did have a possibly profitable career ahead of him as a meticulously organized lab technician with a solid work ethic. As long as there was no algebra involved, anyway.

The hypothesis he was testing was simple: he believed that the male and female hamsters would exhibit gender role behaviors despite having no cultural continuity with the previous generation of hamsters before them. In this situation, any gendered behavior could only be sourced to their neurology or the natural consequences of hamster bodily sexual dimorphism. And indeed, a new generation of hamsters carefully isolated from any contact with the previous one did demonstrate the expected gender dynamics.

The gender roles of hamsters are not closely akin to those of humans — the females can be very aggressive and dominant. None the less, some basic dynamics still applied — the females built nests and protected and nurtured their neonates, while the males staked out larger territories, fought each other to establish dominance hierarchies, competed for desirable mates and defended their mate from other males. When the female was in estrus, male and female hamsters fucked aggressively. At all other times, they fought like cats and dogs. When Marvin put male hamsters together, their social play took on masculine forms. When females were placed together, their play had a distinctly different style. When males and females were put together, the males pursued the females as mates.

Marvin captured all this on cam. He was able to demonstrate, in clear pink and blue, that gendered behavior existed independently of social constructs. Now, one might say his experiment demonstrated a shallow understanding of social constructionism, or that hamster gender dynamics are too unlike human ones for the experiment to be sociologically meaningful. Indeed, there are many possible critiques of his experiment. But the woke are not interested in debating their pet social theories — they want them to be treated as inerrant received wisdom. Merely questioning them was sin enough. The only possible motive for doing so was a sly display of bigotry.

It wasn’t really an experiment, obviously. It was a dissent. He set out to prove something everyone knows is true — gendered behavior exists in the animal kingdom and doesn’t source itself to culture — in order to make a point about those denying reality in the human sphere. It was provocative and rhetorical — albeit also methodical. Then again, how many Bio 30 students are really doing cutting-edge research in their fields? Having had books stacked on his back two years in a row, and having made formal, coerced apologies for his own gender twice now, one might forgive Marvin for a bit of snark on the topic. Julie could relate.

Her own biggest issue with social constructionism of gender was the assumption of oppression rather than voluntary participation. Any culture, by its very nature, had cultural norms. Erasing those norms erased the culture. To all those who embraced the gender binary, efforts to smash it played as a form of cultural genocide — or at least, cultural vandalism. Nor did she feel any oppression was inherent to voluntary norms. One does not have to support gender role enforcement because one aspires to a gender role, after all. It was just as credible they existed because people gravitated to them naturally as opposed to being some kind of sinister hegemon — and even more credible that historical patriarchal societies diminished or caricatured the feminine role as opposed to creating it whole-cloth.

As a young lady who had just enjoyed the hell out of being fisted by her BFF for the first time, Julie found the idea of a homophobic world repellent and grotesque — and yet struggled to raise up any rancor at the concept of a heteronormative one. What’s so bad about there being a norm and some people deviating from it, anyway? As long as they don’t hate us for it, it just makes us INTERESTING! Mediocrity was the definitive norm, after all, and intelligence and ambition the deviations. It wasn’t like any Adept was ever going to be overly normal anyway!

To the radicals, however, they were one and the same. The mere existence of norms — for gender or anything else — was a form of oppression to rage against. Taken to its logical extreme, it was a call to destroy every aspect of the existing culture in favor of an unending, anarchic revolutionary fervor — and indeed, that is exactly what Chairman Mao had tried to do some sixty years ago, and what the woke crowd likely sought today (even if they would not consciously admit it). The rage-based status economy would always find a new norm to target, a new aspect of tradition to tear down. Eternal Revolution.

It surprised her that it had been Marvin who conducted the satirical experiment. Julie, after all, profited a great deal from her femininity. She was pretty, popular and veritably reveled in her sexuality; the institution of cheerleading fit her like a glove. Marvin, conversely, was hardly a perfect specimen of rugged masculinity. As a plump, shy nerd he suffered for the cultural norms of masculinity.

It would in some ways have been easy for him to get on the woke train and fight to burn it all down. But he didn’t — he’d rather fight for the masculinity he had, imperfect though it may be, than let a radical movement dictate new expectations to him from on high. Even the vain aspiration and fantasy of machismo he’d shared with Julie meant more to him than the enforced equity offered by the woke. And for all his physical and social failings, Julie had to credit him this: he spoke up at a time when everyone else was scared to. If that wasn’t traditional masculinity, what was?

Still, Julie thought, his choices were hardly wise when judged in practical terms. His class presentation had been crushing. It was amusing, in a black comedy sense, how utterly a sufficiently motivated high school science teacher could destroy a science project, merely by applying the level of rigor one normally applies to a peer reviewed PhD thesis dissertation to a Bio 30 student. Mr. Garris was nothing short of merciless in tearing down his work and demanding aggressive retests. He had to be, obviously — Julie was pretty sure the Coordinator had told him his job depended on it.

He couldn’t do retests, though. Two days after his class presentation back in February, a radical student activist clique forcibly occupied his observatory with the tacit endorsement of the DEO. They called themselves the Anarcho-Feminist Hamster Uprising. They weren’t methodical at all, but they were far more ideologically correct, so who cares? They set out an ‘experiment’ of their own, aiming to test the idea that with hope, love and tolerance they could teach the hamsters to live in a radically egalitarian post-gender vegan society. “We can do it! We can train hamsters to be feminists and toss aside the shackles of the Hamster Patriarchy!”

They put them all together in a big, unrestricted open-concept habitat and disposed of Marvin’s grotesque, unsustainable factory food — instead feeding the hamsters fresh vegetables one of the activists grew in his rooftop garden. They replaced Marvin’s ‘oppressive’ black cloth backdrop with a colorful painted rainbow pride mural in street-art style. Herb Jeffries was going to knit them cute little rainbow flag hamster-sweaters, but it turned out he couldn’t make them small enough for the fast, tiny rodents. The AFHU even set up a big flat-screen TV to loop a collection of Sophie Xeon and Dorian Electra music videos for the hamsters — to give them positive role models.

When Marvin tried to get back in the lab, Flair, Odyssey and Herb caught him. They beat him mercilessly; Flair gave him the black eye. They stripped him to his underwear and dragged him through the school corridors, publicly emasculating him, mocking the “champion of traditional masculinity” — a title he never did (nor would) claim. Odyssey punched him in the gut so hard he vomited. Then they left him in the main annex, curled over in a fetal position with the words “bitch” and “bigot” written on his back in Sharpie, arms bound to the railing with zip-ties like an especially pathetic Messiah.

He hung there for three hours before Duke cut him down. There were other Stallions with Duke, so the AFHU didn’t pick a fight over it. Coach Larkin drove him home, gave him a sick note for the next two days and some words of succor and male wisdom. The viciousness of it had shocked Julie, when she heard about it. No other adults intervened. They were too afraid. They just pretended they didn’t notice it, or that it was routine. No one was punished. Julie had expected at least a token gesture — if not discipline, then at least the pretext of discipline.

But nobody stopped woke activists from shouting down an endless parade of conservative speakers on campuses across America, did they? No one charged and prosecuted the anarchists who planned and set up an autonomous zone in the middle of Portland, even when it got innocent residents raped and killed. Yvette Felarca got caught on film beating the shit out of a right wing agitator, bragged about forcing her students to perform left-wing activism on record and kept her job teaching middle school to this day — convicted, but sentenced only to brief community service. No one stopped that drag queen teaching a six year old to pole dance, or student activists from driving Bret Weinstein off Evergreen campus, or Kayla Lemieux from wearing giant fake prosthetic breasts to teach a Junior High shop class. What had happened to Marvin wasn’t exceptional — it was the new normal.

Julie’s first inclination had been to laugh at how counter-productive it all was. We will crush our enemies, see them driven before us, hear the lamentations of their menfolk ... and then we will build a stable democratic nation in peaceful cooperation with them as half our voting population! Yeah, great plan guys. What could possibly go wrong? But her dream with Marvin created a complex personal connection that made it far more disquieting to her in the days after, and PHB’s growing anxiety only heightened that.

Julie knew activists did shit like that, of course, abstractly, from news articles and YouTube videos — but it was always elsewhere, blending into the background noise of a polarized society. What happened to Marvin back in January was the first time something like that happened in her personal sphere, and watching the faculty react (or not-react) to it was the first time she realized her school was seriously off its rails. Shit from the cable news had just come to squat on the fringes of her everyday life.

Marvin might fairly have been accused of not having done enough background reading — about both hamsters and social constructionism — when planning his experiment. The AFHU, conversely, did none. As such, they learned some interesting things about hamsters during their custody of the observatory. For example, female hamsters can become cannibals if they get stressed, devouring their own children and mates. They never really figured out that loud noises and bright colors stress them out, though.

The cannibalism caused a sizable degree of psychic trauma to some of the activists — as much as they might have considered themselves outside of and unbound by the gender binary, some feminine-leaning ones demonstrated some very stereotypical gender behaviors themselves as regards teen girls and cute fluffy animals. This caused a schism in the group. Odyssey thought the cannibalism was empowering, a sign of nascent feminist rebellion against a socially-enforced motherhood role. Flair, conversely, thought it must be attributable to Marvin’s toxic patriarchal influence over the hamsters while they were in his custody. Still others saw it as an opportunity for self-interrogation, wondering if their own unconscious biases had allowed toxic behaviors to creep into their model utopia.

There were other hamster characteristics that quickly proved more salient, however. Roborovski hamster are very timid and stealthy, but they are also very fast runners, and they bite hard. They are fertile at five weeks of age, have a gestation period of three weeks and breed in litters of four to eight. A female can birth a new litter monthly. The AFHU was ideologically opposed to any form of gender segregation or discrimination as a core tenet of their beliefs, so they had decided not to separate the male and female hamsters. To be fair, they couldn’t really tell the newer pups apart even if they wanted to — it takes a bit of zoology lore to accurately discern hamster sex. Over the time the AFHU had custody over the observatory, the hamster population swelled from an initial size of thirty to around four hundred. Well, probably — no one took an exact count.

The school authorities were reluctant to interfere with the AFHU occupation, but the lightning-fast Robos started escaping to nest in empty classrooms and scavenge in the cafeteria at night. Tana sucked up a well-deserved animal cruelty charge for trying to organize a hamster-stomping contest, leaving everybody else reluctant to kill the little buggers. Not that anyone could, anyway — Robos are fast little bastards. Eventually someone called the health inspector, who discovered the situation and ordered all the hamsters put down.

Determined to save their furious furry feminist friends, the AFHU became an organized resistance movement. When the school called in a fumigator, an assault by ‘peaceful’ masked student protesters armed with bear spray, tear gas grenades and faeces bombs forced the fumigators to flee the site and other companies refused to take up the contract in their place.

Tensions were very high within the AFHU at this point, though, as the cannibalism, explosive breeding and generally mean, feral nature of the latest hamster generation caused an ideological schism in their community. The sincere activists quietly snuck out, leaving narcissists to adopt and defend more and more radical and dogmatic positions. This ultimately led to Odyssey and Herb having a brawl in the hamster observatory, knocking over the huge table containing the jungle. Well over four hundred Robos escaped into the corridors, crannies and air vents of MWA that day, leading to — among other things — one Vox newscaster having a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day at the school assembly.

By the time of the prom, the MWA building was home to an estimated population of just under two thousand Robos. This caused the AFHU to come under no small amount of quiet disdain by the more mainstream parts of the student body after repeated hamster-bite incidents, despite the DEO’s efforts to hush up the outcome of their activities.

The AFHU activists would be the first to viciously mock the popularity contests that students like Julie Lambert and Bonnie Kellerman so devoted themselves to. Yet, in spite of their contempt, they were locked into an ironically very similar struggle of their own — just one aligned with a subversive, counterculture status economy rather than the mainstream status economy Julie and DB struggled over. The Coordinator had praised Liz Fendermann for her pig’s blood stunt, yet made every effort to bury the AFHU. Julie understood that — Fendermann’s protest was telegenic in a grotesque way, while the AFHU’s antics had bad optics by virtue of bordering on self-parody — but she doubted the AFHU saw it that way, and even before this she suspected they felt increasingly desperate in their own mirror-universe popularity contest: Dikscheide-senpai refused to notice them!

Now, it might take a bit of a mental leap to get from “protect the hamsters” to “assault the prom” — but Julie got it. The AFHU was angry at being ignored and mocked. They probably read the Coordinator’s editorials on the Stallions, the Angels and the prom itself as gender-normative symbology. They were stock-model narcissist-activists — they saw drawing attention to themselves as the sole measure of success in activism, not actually winning a debate, or even a battle for hearts and minds.

It reminded Julie of the new generation of abortion rights activists she saw on cable news — the freaks dressed in white with the mutilated baby dolls and the crotch blood, running about torching crisis centers. They didn’t care that they were plastering imagery beneficial to the theocrats all over the evening news. They had no interest in changing minds, only grabbing attention and screaming in rage at the world. What do you mean, this protest is actually harming the cause, making it less likely a consensus opinion will accept abortion? Our protest is going great — just lookkit all the views I’m getting on Insta!

What baffled Julie at first was Tana’s presence. The AFHU wasn’t likely to be on good terms with her. But then it clicked — they needed patsies. Lots of members of outcast cliques probably wanted to wreck the prom out of jealousy toward the popular kids. After Marvin’s crucifixion, they probably figured that if they used a social justice rationale they wouldn’t face any punishment for getting some payback against the popular kids for being popular. The activists likely lead them on with this, thinking of them as useful idiots for their movement. So the AFHU recruited people like Tana, probably promising them (through implications and weasel words) impunity and planning to get them to commit the actual crimes and suck up any legal consequences that may or may not manifest. Tana — the maladjust who literally couldn’t tell woke politics from alt-right politics — would be their ultimate useful idiot.

The one perplexing bit was the AK-47 — from everything Julie had ever seen, woke radicals were intensely opposed to actual firearms of any kind, even if they were willing to gloss a wide variety of other violent and criminal activities under a new definition of ‘peaceful’ protest that tended to involve bike locks. Right now, though, it mattered less why it was here than the simple fact that it was here.

Julie crouched against an arch as she watched the protesters pass. Am I going to intervene in this? Behind her, the corridor was empty. She could make her way there and lock herself in a storage closet, or just get out of the building. But she knew she wasn’t going to do that. Her friends were in the dance hall, after all, and to some extent she knew the majority of the student body — at least in passing. She could call the police, but the freaks were right by the dance hall — they wouldn’t get here in time. She was an Adept. There was no one more qualified to intervene. It really was on her, now.

She didn’t want to attack the protesters from behind, though. Tana was in front with the gun, the only ranged weapon — Julie needed to hit her first, take her out quickly. Once the AK-47 was out of play, everything got a lot less dangerous. She slipped back into the dance hall full of oblivious students and navigated down to the main double doors to the dancehall. She stayed about fifteen feet from the door, pressed in an alcove in the wall. All the other students were watching Dikscheide, clustered near the center of the room. She knew the terrorists’ fursuits would give them a really limited field of vision, and wanted to exploit that by hitting them from the side.

She performed the Qabalistic Cross and balanced herself to the elements. Air — inhale. Earth — hold. Fire — exhale. Water — hold. She slid off her pumps, leaving her feet bare against the marble floor, and attuned herself to it. The double doors were kicked violently open and Tana led the furry terrorists into the dance hall. As soon as Tana no longer had the doors for cover Julie charged — running at Tana from the side, outside her restricted field of vision. Attuned to the marble, her footfalls were eerily silent. One hand shoved Tana’s shoulder, putting the hefty girl off balance, while the other grabbed the barrel of the rifle, angling it away from the crowd. Tana was stunned and off balance. Julie tore the gun from her hands and spun around. She pivoted full circle in a pirouette, swinging the rifle around to smash Tana in the mouth with the stock.

She didn’t crumple, but she did stagger back, fall on her ass and clutch her cheek. Julie pulled the banana clip out of the rifle, looked around and finally tossed it across the room into a bowl of fruit punch to neutralize it. Then she grabbed the rifle by stock and barrel with both hands and brought up her knee as forcefully as she could. It didn’t break, but it bent ever so slightly and she deemed it likely unusable. Fuck, though, if that wasn’t gonna leave one heck of a bruise on her knee!

As least Tana seemed to be hurting worse. “Ow. Owww! I mean, seriously, ow! I think you chipped my tooth! What the fuck! How did you ... I mean, you ... you hit me! Who said you were allowed to hit me?! Who the hell do you think you are, you smug elitist cunt?!”

Julie tossed the bent rifle at Tana’s feet, then reached down inside her fursuit and ripped the switchblade off its chain around her neck. “I’m a cheerleader, motherfucker.”

Then she glanced around. Nobody even cared about the confrontation between Tana and Julie — they were still transfixed by the Coordinator at the center of the hall. I just punched out a terrorist with her own gun, and nobody noticed — not even the Vox reporter! They’re supposed to love that kind of thing! Wounded ego aside, though, it really was better for people not to pay attention to her intervention.

She ran back and circled around, hoping to take the fireaxe hamster and the cannibal dominatrix from the rear. She kicked ‘Gadget’ in the back, causing her to stumble and drop the fireaxe. The cannibal swung around, though, and tried to crack the bullwhip. Julie was waiting for that, and ducked. She didn’t seem to know how to use a whip effectively, anyway, and once it landed Julie stepped on it, pinning the whip to the ground with her elementally-attuned bare feet.

The dominatrix — Julie was pretty sure it was Odyssey — tried to pull it back for another crack, but Julie’s stance held firm and the whip’s handle tore out of her grip. Julie then slammed the stock of the bent rifle into the dominatrix’s gut, causing her to double over. She tore off the fursuit mask — yeah, it was Odyssey Olusange. She grabbed the stocky black girl by the neck of her fursuit to prevent her ducking or dodging and landed a brutal haymaker against her left cheek, causing her to crumple down stunned. “That one’s for Marvin, you deranged piece of shit!”

Julie swung around, ready to dodge an awkward fur-suited fireaxe-swing, but didn’t have to — its bearer left it alone, and Julie kicked it aside. She ran right at the crowd of protesters, shoving them into one another and trying to trip them up in the awkward fursuits. Whenever she could, she tore off masks. As soon as they were unmasked, their anonymity lost, they seemed to lose the will to fight as well. Once they were subdued, Julie ran up and tore the duct tape off Rich Bonnie’s mouth and arms.

“Julie! Cannibal Fangirl over there brought fireworks! They’re going to set them off in here to disrupt the prom! Also, Fuck-Me Gadget has two cell phones on her that she took from me! Please get them back to me! It’s rilly rilly important! I’m ... I’m so sorry I didn’t trust you before now! I get it, okay? I know that Dopey was using me, and I’m sorry. But please get those phones back! It’s my future on the line!”

“Don’t worry, RB. I’ll get it done.”

It was less dramatic than Rich Bonnie probably expected. After all, the AFHU kids had seen how Tana and Odyssey had gone down. Julie walked up to the strap-on bearer and tore off his fursuit mask. Flair Garrett wasn’t a hard kid to recognize — man-bun, chin piercings and spiky, gelled-up cyan hair. His presence really didn’t surprise Julie. He raised his hands, terrified, folding like a little bitch with Tana and Odyssey down. ‘Gadget’ turned out to be Kaylee Albescu. I knew she was bitter and felt a bit alienated from the popular crowd, but she always seemed nice and well-adjusted too. It’s a bit of a shock, and a disappointment, to find her in this crowd. I wonder if she’s gay or was just given the costume. “Give me both phones or get punched out.”