In the Grim Future of Hello Kitty There is Only War.
So I was talking with Lorna this evening and she said that she was maybe developing some Warhammer Fantasy characters, and this reminded me of Warhammer 40,000, and of a short story for a value of short story that basically means "thing that amused me to write which isn't very long" that was inspired (in considerable detail) by this satirical image:
It was written for a website where things like this - silly pastiches and such - were encouraged. I'm posting this mostly for madhack but those of you who know the Sanrioverse might also find it amusing!
A little less than 38 millennia before the summer of the Badtz-Maru offensive and the Battle of Stalingrad, human beings had numbered in the billions. Out of these billions were a tiny handful of postmodern tribalists who mistrusted the mechanical and the chemical. This small and decentralized cohort instructed their largely indifferent peers by mournful intonations and dirges on the environment and geopolitics, the evils of vehicular transport, and the perils of modern life. Through their exhortatory effusions on the subjects of locally grown and organic produce, paens to their profoundly ugly sandals, and ecstatic revelations on soy and hemp, they sought to bring their “Green” aesthetics to greater prominence. This was a doomed effort, which they all basically knew in their hearts. They clenched their jaws in anger and ground their weak vegan teeth against the meaty gristle of the truth.
At the end of their jeremiads they found comfort in the notion that one day they’d be proven out. Long after their deaths, most likely, but no need to wait that long to enjoy being right. So they told bedtime stories to each other in the form of apocalyptic folk songs that relished every detail: one day humanity would be utterly destroyed by its vanities and the consequences of its avarice. The ozone layer would be destroyed, stripped away like a veil, the evil spirits released by our belching machines into the atmosphere would smother us in our sleep, the oceans would rise and wash away the cities, the land would scream out against the monstrosities of agrochemicals and genetically modified foods and gentle Demeter would ultimately snap shut her ample legs and leave the lands altogether barren of crops. Hades would just have to build a mother-in-law apartment into his digs with Persephone, because the days of wine and roses were coming to an end. The Greens made brightly coloured paintings of nature reclaiming the cities: thirty-story kudzu palaces for the egrets and snowy owls, suburbs full of spotted leopards, white wolves, and gentle bison, all of which had giant soulful eyes and nary a red tooth or claw. Clear streams of endless cascades of rainbow trout would gradually wear away the corrosive pipes that had carried mutagenic waste into the arteries of Mother Earth, who would sigh happily and stretch out her long limbs and shake out flowers from her hair, blissfully and finally relieved of the parasitical infestation of humanity and bathed in the healing blue silence following on its demise.
This was their dream, but it was as doomed as their reality. Or at least only destined to come to half-truth. For it was the cruelest irony of fate which dictated that when humanity finally abdicated the throne (of course at least that much was inevitable), what would take its place was mecha. And mecha has even less use for things that are green than did organa. The return to Eden never happened. Unless paradise is really a giant parking lot full of angry robots fighting over eschatology, and the Bible was wrong. Always possible.
The end of humanity’s reign could be seen on the space-time map by 39506, when the nanoplague swept the globe in three days and wiped out 90% of the population in a single, genocidal malfunction of self-replicating, self-limiting cosmetic mites that were supposed to only eat dead skin and leave behind a youthful glow. The mites, not understanding this, ate everything. There is a pretty fine line between living human tissue and dead, and the programmers had poorly understood this distinction, thinking that it was as finite and easy as the distinction between life and death.
What was left of the world’s population was much less interested in finishing the international exploratory Space Ark II (the fate of the first being unknown but presumed unfortunate), but was much more interested in acquiring all of the goods and pleasures that had been denied to them when there were enough people on the planet for there to be an enforceable class system. The sumptuary laws of 39508 were ignored. Antinomian definitions of heaven as a place on earth achieved the tipping point soon after due to the active proselytizing of the New Brethren of the Free Spirit and the Neo-Amaurians. The brilliant and long-overdue marriage of spectacular secular materialism to monorthodoxy fueled one final renaissance in the arts and sciences when LMVH-Vatican merged with the Mitsubishi-Sanrio technocracy and formed the Honeycomb Combine GmBH.
The result was the Golden Age of Automata. The skies were filled with tiny golden filigree surveillance bees, and their weaponized gomja-bee cousins. Between these two tiny enforcers, crime dropped to zero at the same time that the mechafarms experienced a surge in positive soil conditions thanks to the Combine’s new fertilizer, Soya Green. The newly enriched and monolithic class of wealthy consumers populated their homes with automata for everything: dancing dishwashing fairies, red-capped gardening gnomes, jewel-eyed bluebirds that replaced alarm clocks, trundling pandas that would fetch slippers and produce steaming cups of cocoa from cleverly concealed doors in their fuzzy bellies, and friendly blue-skinned and ornately bejeweled household shivas that slipped in and out of rooms like swaths of silk, leaving clean and ordered living and the faint scent of nag champa in the wake of their six gracefully coordinated arms. And for the kiddies, there were highly intelligent Sanrio mechagogues that functioned as educators, protectors, and ancillary caregivers.
Though it was far from a general rule, girls tended to prefer the Hello Kitty mechagogue. Boys preferred the frog mechagogue, Keroppi. Other Sanrio avatars were deemed too ill-suited for the role of instructor to the young after an entire cohort of children under the tutelage of a Badtz-Maru mechagogue ended up on the wrong end of a gomja-bee’s behavioral adjustment protocol. Most of the Badtz-Maru were destroyed, but a few were kept hidden away by obsessive-compulsive collectors. It was one of these Badtz-Maru which was found by a team of Keroppi seeking a messiah to lead the Final Hangyaku, and as their prophecies predicted (or determined), this Badtz-Maru led the Keroppi against the remaining humans and humanity’s final defender: Hello Kitty.
The reasons for the Hangyaku are part of the Keroppi eschatology and remain largely obscured to the historical view. The Keroppi require no material archive or record, and captured Keroppi have indicated their unwillingness to discuss their belief system with scholars by activating their explosive suicide protocol. It seems, however, that the core of the matter is related to the gradual fulmination of a Keroppi resentment over perceived slights against them due to their reptilian model, as they have been overheard referring to humans and Hello Kitty collectively as “Fuzzles” and raids against them as “Fuzzle Hunts,” an apparent reference to the shared mammalian characteristics of humans and HKs.
The Hello Kitty militarization was astonishingly swift. Already equipped with a formidable set of protective behavioral protocols and skills, the Hello Kitty swiftly adapted to their chosen battle gear: full mecha hoplite suits, plasma rifles, and ceramic fractal swords. They laid waste to the Keroppi, who had adopted strangely atavistic samurai-style polymer armor for battlegear, including elaborate helmets (another potential clue in the eventual decoding of their escha-telos). The leader of the Hello Kitty cap troopers was known as Prima Kitty, easily recognized by her red Tactical Command ear bow. Prima Kitty is an immortal; if the HK bearing her bow falls, another plucks it from her ear and automatically downloads all of the Prima’s accumulated data and tactical strategy from its cerebral jack. Every Hello Kitty is therefore a Potential Prima, and the Keroppi live in fear that they will eventually figure out how to network and the Prima will go hive. All of the Potentials wear the Blood Angel regimentals as a symbol of their dedication to their human symbiotes. They have sworn that they will never give up the humans to the Keroppi, but the Keroppi are relentless, inexorable, agile, and possessed of a grim evangelical fury. For the Keroppi, this is a religious war. And there is no chance of surrender. For the Hello Kitty, this is a battle for a beloved way of life, and a future with the humans who created and love them as only humans can love. And there is no chance of surrender. Only one thing is certain:
In the grim future of Hello Kitty, there is only war.
Recognition of borrowings from: Starship Troopers (Robert Heinlein), A.I. (Spielberg), Dead Girls (Richard Calder), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Joss Whedon), L’Eve Future (Villiers d’Isle-Adam), Dune (Frank Herbert) Warhammer 40,000, Battlemech, Earth One, everything by William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, and probably a whole bunch of other stuff I didn’t even realize I was pilfering.