Future Lovecraft by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Anthony Boulanger, Paula R. Stiles Read Free Book Online

reasons for this were varied and she wrote about them often. Telling the people, so they would not forget. New Planet agents wanted the people to forget how unequal the society remained. Your bloods and your past remained with you, were documented in your bio and were used to keep you within a certain level of society. Even though the New Constitution stated that there would be no discrimination based on nationality, race or country of origin, discrimination in the New World was rampant. But maria was a woman with a past. Her bloods and history marked her as a person ripe for dissent. Her bloods marked her as a rebel, even amongst women in other parts of the New Planet. Women who believed maria was to be saved from herself and follow the ideals they espoused. Therefore, she stayed in her prison, built shortly after she had arrived on the New World, and plotted dissent quietly.
     ***
    The short, bald man with dull eyes and hardly any lips visited her again over a few days.
    “I hear you will be crowned Queen,” he said to her.
    “No, I will be a queen. Just like that girl over there, in the past world, who writes poetry and is still controlled in her tweets. Who does not dance all over the world and all over the place and keeps her face in place. She is unlike me, but she is a queen.” maria stopped the tapping across her keyboard and looked directly into his eyes. He backed away a little.
    “Who is this girl you speak of?” he asked her.
    “No one,” she said, lying to him in a way he could understand. “No one.” Just like the poor women in her country, she was no one. In a world that liked to stratify, she was no one.
     ***
    And so, she was given a small crown, a small crown for a tall woman with a fierce look in her big, brown eyes. A woman who wore a long, black, sleeveless dress. The only jewellery she wore were small pearl earrings that glowed against her golden-brown skin. These used to be Mireille’s. queen maria wore her small crown of flowers, which were so rare that she wondered where the people had found them. Maybe they grew them away from the Council’s prying eyes. She was told they were called “bougainvillea”, and their cream colour was the rarest variety. She recalled reading about this plant in Maita’s Old Botswana journals.
    ***
    “Queen of what?” The short man appeared again in the dead of night, clearly agitated. His eyes kept darting about, trying to understand how she made contact with the outside world.
    “How is it,” he asked, “that you can display such laziness one day, such fortitude and stamina the next, such ill discipline on another day, and still, they love you and crown you queen?”
    maria looked up from her work for just a few seconds, but then continued typing as she spoke.
    “You give me all the fortitude, all the tools I need to carry on. It is your voice I listen to when I write the character that is a lover. It is your voice that I listen to when I write the character of a ruthless politician or a would-be killer. It is your voice…that drives me. I write about the past so we can all have a future. This is all the Council wants to prevent. A future with a real past. And this is why you are here.”
    “You give me no choice, maria, but to pull the plug on you. The Council gave me full powers. It is up to me now.”
    “Go ahead. Are you scared of what I will write or what I have already written? You make me more powerful when you try to silence me. In my absence the spectre of what I could have been will lean heavier and become greater than anything I do while I am free. So, go ahead; make this easy for me as queen. I am free.”
    “I insist that you issue a statement, asking your followers to respect your privacy and to not commit any acts in your name.”
    “And what would those be? Pretending to be me? hing some of my works in a voice they think I would appreciate? Protesting?” maria stretched her long body at the desk, raising her arms so the tips of