This month’s theme:
Frozen Frames, Part 1

I had some nice response to the two-part tribute to Meat Loaf’s album Bat Out of Hell that I wrote in 2012, and last year I did a three-part tribute to Zager & Evans’ song “In the Year 2525.” This morning I was enjoying the sounds of the album Freeze Frame by The J. Geils Band, which was the first album I ever owned, way back in 1981. When it comes to inspiration in the realm of science fiction and fantasy, every song title on this album immediately stoked an idea in me. If you’re a J. Geils Band fan, you’ll appreciate this. (And if you’ve never heard this album, run, don’t walk, to give it a listen. Sweet rock and roll!) Like the BOOH tribute, this will run over two months (May and June). The theme: social oppression. Regular readers know I often write dystopian sci-fi, mostly because we must always be vigilant to prevent such social devolution.

“Freeze Frame”
Snapshot image froze without a sound...
By David M. Fitzpatrick

Officer Robert Daniels was lucky enough to see the crime happening, and he drew his freezer and hit the button immediately.

He’d been a cop for three years, and the freezers had been in use for twenty, but every time he activated his freezer he was impressed. The entire world stopped dead, and he was protected by the temporal field surrounding him.

The downtown market was busy as it always was. It was a beautiful summer day with a brilliant blue sky and a shining sun, and the market was full of people, but it was as silent as an oil painting. Some were standing, others had been in motion; some were in mid-stride, frozen in time, and many seemed to violate gravity and physics. A little girl, holding her mother’s hand, had been skipping along and was suspended several inches above the ground; her flailing ponytail and flying necklace were frozen in mid-bounce. A pizza vendor was tossing dough, and it hovered three feet above his head in mid-twirl.

Daniels made his way carefully through the still crowd. It always felt to him like he was able to walk into a photograph, which was, in effect, a moment frozen in time. But this was three-dimensional. It was like participating in a three-dee game, except that here it was the real thing. Time had been all but stopped, and he was the god of the world.

Of course, he knew time hadn’t stopped. Rather, his personal timestream had been sped up. The temporal shell that encased his body increased his time up by a factor of over a thousand. If he watched long enough, he could see the pizza slowly twirling and falling.

In fact, he realized, the crime had offered an unseen bonus. As he was almost to the crime scene, he looked at the street beyond and could see what was happening: A car was about to hit a child running in the street.

“Talk about good timing,” he muttered to himself.

He changed his trajectory and hurried to the street, dodging the many statue-like people in the market. Even as fast as his time stream was, he could see the car’s motion, creeping almost imperceptibly forward. The driver’s frozen eyes were wide in last-second realization. Daniels picked up the kid and moved him out of the car’s path—which would probably cause a lot of pain, but it was better than being killed.

Good deed done, it was back to the crime. He rushed back to the market and found the picnic table on a patch of grass beneath a tree. He wasn’t too late for his criminal, but it was close.

The mother and father were with three young children, preparing sandwiches. The youngest child, a girl of about six, had done something to warrant punishment—Daniels had seen the kid acting like a brat from across the market—and he’d seen the crime in progress in time to hit the freezer. And now, he stood before the scene, ready to catch the mother in the act.

The mother had grabbed the girl’s arm, and her other hand was coming down. Daniels got into position and hit the button on the freezer.

He jumped back to normal time just as the market noises returned, and just as the mother’s hand slapped the girl’s fingers. “That’s dangerous!” she cried out. “You don’t touch the knife—“

And just then she realized the policeman was standing there, freezer in one hand and badge on his jacket. She immediately turned white.

“She kept grabbing for the sharp knife, officer!” she cried. “I didn’t want her to hurt herself!”

“Ma’am, you’ve been found guilty of child abuse,” Officer Daniels said as he set his freezer.

“No, please!” she cried, leaping up.

“Officer, she’s their mother!” the father cried.

“You’re sentenced to one year in slow time,” Daniels said, aimed the freezer at the mother, and pressed the button.

It took a while for the crowd to disperse and for the family to calm down. Daniels explained to the husband that his wife could not move, would need no food, and that a year would pass for everyone else while a hundred hours would pass for her. The woman would miss a year out of her family’s life, watching them speeding around her.

“Take her home and leave her in a room alone,” Daniels advised. “In a year, when she’s back to normal, make sure she understands that no abuse of children will ever be tolerated.”

He left the family and resumed his patrols, feeling proud. The freezer made stopping such crimes much easier than ever before, and made punishments much less of a burden on the state. That, of course, was what mattered: that individuals never infringed on what society deemed acceptable. It had been that way long ago—people in prison facilities, taxpayers shouldering the burden, and many crimes not even being prosecuted because they were expensive or considered a waste of time.

Thankfully, Officer Daniels thought, life was more civilized now.

“Rage in the Cage”
They don’t want me paralyzed; they just want me neutralized...
By David M. Fitzpatrick

“We have a female abomination for you, sir.”

The general turned to the aide in his doorway. “Oh?” he said with a raised brow. “From the town in the valley?”

“Yes, sir. We identified her as an abomination and arrested her for social subversion.”

“A nice surprise,” the general said, smiling as he rose. “I always enjoy the chance to reeducate an abomination. Bring her in.”

The aide and several soldiers returned minutes later with the girl. She was older than he’d expected, far older than most could hide their abominations from the mind scanners. She was very attractive for her age, though: long, blond hair framed a pretty, heart-shaped face, and she had ample breasts and hips in perfect proportion to her narrow waist. The soldiers shoved her into the room and closed the door, leaving her alone with the general.

He walked around her slowly, inspecting her. “Very nice,” he said. “How long have you been an abomination?”

“I have been a lesbian all my life,” she said.

He smiled at her strong will. “Your homosexuality is an abomination. How old are you?”

“Thirty-one.”

He whistled. “I’m not sure how you escaped detection all these years, and it’s too bad we caught you so late. But we’ll give it a try. Under the law, I must reeducate you. If you cannot be reeducated, you will be executed. Since the law recognizes that abominations lie under duress, my reeducation of you will last for the remainder of your life. I will oversee your sexual reeducation until you die—whether of natural causes or of your unwillingness to admit being reeducated. If I ever doubt your sincerity, I will execute you. Is that clear?”

“You can’t keep doing this to us,” she said.

“The law says I can. And if you continue with this belligerent attitude, I’ll have you killed right now.”

She grew silent, staring at her feet.

“Remove your clothes,” he ordered.

She snapped her head up, and he could tell she wanted to oppose him, but his threat was clearly foremost on her mind. She swallowed hard.

“I will not order it a second time,” he said, stern and glaring.

She disrobed quickly. When she was nude before him, he inspected her again. She was a beauty. He knew she’d never be reeducated, but he knew he wouldn’t put her to death for a long time. She was too fine a piece of abomination flesh—wasted with other women for her adult life. He’d work hard to reeducate her, along with the harem of women he kept. She’d be a fun abomination until she grew too old to be appealing. She’d learn the evils of her ways while she was alive.

“Bend over the table,” he ordered, and she complied, and she cried while he began her education.

When it was over, she said, “I’ll do whatever you ask. But only with you. You can never give me to your men.”

He laughed. “You have no choice, abomination. I have three hundred men here, and I will give my abominations to anyone I choose.”

“I refuse to have sex with any of them!” she cried. “Not one of them, not ten of them, not any number of them!”

“You’re not the first to say that,” he said. “So I guess you’ll have to learn otherwise.”

*   *   *

He had her tied down in the middle of the camp for a month, and issued orders that every one of his men was to participate in her reeducation. By the time the month was over, every man had reeducated multiple times. There were days when she’d had a hundred reeducation encounters. The general was a merciful man, though, and he allowed the harem to tend to her for a week of recovery.

It was during that week that the pain began. It was all over his body, aches and stabbing sensations. It was worse the next day, when his men began complaining of the same. By the time his symptoms were a week old, nearly the whole camp was in agony. The general had the girl brought to him.

“You did this!” he cried out, doubled over in pain. “I don’t know what, abomination, but you’ve infected all my men.”

“You’ve been so cruel to us,” she said. “You’ve ‘reeducated’ us and executed us. You’ve taken our freedom and our lives. But no more. I’ve done what I can, but rest assured there are many more like me doing the same thing to soldiers everywhere.”

He collapsed to the floor, reaching for her. “I’ll kill you...!”

She stepped back. “You drove us to this. You’ve imprisoned us, but even when we aren’t locked away, we’ve lived in a prison of the society you’ve created to destroy us. But you can’t cage us forever! Our misery and our fury can only be stopped for so long.”

“You fucking abomination!”

“No,” she said. “My name is Jennifer. I’m not an abomination. Know, as you die, that YOU are the abomination.”

“Centerfold”
My blood runs cold; my memory has just been sold...
By David M. Fitzpatrick

Theo hurried through the woods, clutching the tiny device. His heart pounded madly at the thought of being caught. But he’d been assured that it was untraceable. He just needed to get to his hideout.

He found the familiar stand of birches amidst endless evergreens and forced his way through the thicket of brush behind it until he found the rusty steel door in the ground. It led to a very old concrete bunker, long forgotten in the middle of a wild, tangled forest—a hiding place only he knew. Theo pulled up the door, climbed in, and pulled it shut.

His concrete hideout was outfitted with a cot, shelves of banned books, comic books that had been illegal for decades, and even a few bottles of alcoholic beverages. Any of his treasures could get him jailed for years—but none of them compared to the illegal device in his hand.

He’d left his portable computer at home, so he couldn’t be tracked. But in his hideout, he had a backup—an untraceable black-market computer. It lit up as he held it, and he eagerly plugged his new device into it. Almost immediately, holographic images filled the room. Scantily clad women stood before him, looking as real as he was, but they were just projections. The images changed: blondes, brunettes, redheads; girls in microkinis, topless women, complete nudes. A girl with a green Mohawk used a giant sex toy inside herself, and her moans and cries filled the tiny bunker. Still the images changed: a grunting man having sex with a wailing woman, two moaning women sixty-nining, a noisy threesome.

He was impatient. These were great, but they weren’t what he was after.

“Skip this!” he cried out. “I want the centerfold.”

It was an archaic term from the days of printed pornography, but the device knew what he wanted. The holograms vanished, and the computer announced, “Printing centerfold.”

The air shimmered, and slowly a new woman materialized. She formed as if by a zillion tiny white points of light, all coalescing into an hourglass shape. Colors settled in, and there she was: the centerfold, standing before him. She was tall, with long legs and big breasts, a tiny waist and broad hips, and she was wearing a skintight bodysuit. That would change soon, Theo knew.

“Hey there, hot stuff,” she said in a voice that caused instant physical responses in Theo’s pants. “Ready for some fun?”

He stepped forward, reached out, touched her shoulder. She was solid—or she would be while the device projected her. “You’re real,” he said.

“Real enough,” she purred with a smile. Her lips were ruby red, glistening with saliva as she licked them. “You wanna have sex with me, baby?”

“I’m going to do ever

ything with you,” he said.

And then he heard the thundering of footsteps—outside, above the bunker. Men coming through the woods. He heard shouting.

“Shit!” he cried, and moved to power the computer down.

“That won’t help, honey,” the woman said.

As he watched, the image changed. A halo of light encircled her neck and swirled about as it dropped to her toes, and as it moved her clothing changed. She wore a military uniform and a glowing badge.

“You’re under arrest, sugar,” the centerfold said, “for sexual objectification.”

The steel door above him opened, and angry soldiers hollered at him. Theo could only watch his centerfold smiling at him as the first soldier came down the ladder.

“Do You Remember When”
Time moves slowly since you’ve gone away...
By David M. Fitzpatrick

“I need you to take my memories.”

“Yes, sir. That’s why people come here. We’re Unrecall Enterprises. What would you like removed?”

“I need to forget my wife. I need everything wiped back eleven years.”

“Very good, sir. I have to ask, because the government requires it: Why do you want to forget your wife?”

“She died. I can’t deal with it. They say you get over it, and remember the good times, but... I never will. I... I just need to forget. Fo

rever.”

“All right. There’s no turning back once we do this, you know. When the memories are gone, they’re gone. So you’d better be sure, because once we administer the drug you’ll be unconscious and unable to change your mind.”

“I’m absolutely sure.”

*   *   *

“I... what happened?”

“Good morning, citizen.”

“Who... who are you?”

“I’m with the government. Per the law, Unrecall Enterprises notified us once they performed the initial memory scan. You really thought you could get away with this?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about... get me out of this harness!”

“You’re not going anywhere, citizen. You wanted to erase memories of your wife, but the memory scan showed that you’ve never had a wife. Your girlfriend, however, was executed for treason last year. What are you trying to hide, citizen?”

“It’s not your business! I... I just didn’t want to tell the Unrecall people that. I just wanted to get wiped back eleven years so I could forget!”

“Forget what, citizen?”

“I have nothing to say.”

“You are aware that wiping memory to evade prosecution is illegal, right?”

“I said I have nothing to say.”

“Here’s what I think: I think you knew more about your girlfriend’s treason than anyone realizes. I think you’re trying to erase your memories so we can’t find out what you knew. I think there’s plenty to learn from you.”

“I have NOTHING to say!”

“Oh, you don’t have to, citizen. We’ve already gotten a court order, and you’re already strapped in at Unrecall Enterprises. We’re going to do a complete mind scour, citizen, and find out what you’re hiding. And we’ve been approved for a complete scour, which means we’re going to find out far more than you want us to know.”

“No... please... you can’t...!”

“Sure we can. Your girlfriend was executed when we discovered her treasonous thoughts during a routine medical exam, but how far did her thoughts go? Maybe you were planning something. We’ll find out. But we’ll find out what other laws you’ve broken in your life—foul language, uncontrolled speech, masturbation, premarital sex... we’ll know it all.”

“No!”

“Oh, YES. Now, relax, citizen, and let’s see what’s in that head of yours...”

“Insane, Insane Again”
I have seen with madhouse vision...
By David M. Fitzpatrick

Dr. Bradshaw furrowed his brow as he leaned back in his chair. “This is a most unusual request, Mr. Fellman.”

“I know, doctor,” said the balding man sitting on the other side of Bradshaw’s desk. “But I really want it.”

“Mr. Fellman, you were cured,” Bradshaw said. “There was something broken in your brain, and the procedure corrected it. You were legally insane before, and you are legally sane now. You hold a good job. You pay your bills. You have a family.”

“I can still do those things. I... I just need my insanity back.”

He was an unimposing man—not small, really, but not big. The bald head did it, Bradshaw knew; it made him seem a bit mousier than he was. But he also slouched in the chair, and he was nervous, sweating a bit and looking furtively about.

“Mr. Fellman, the government paid for the procedure. If we undo it, you will have to pay for the reversal up front, and you will be liable for repaying the government for the original procedure, with interest.”

“I’m prepared for that.”

“And what of the life you’ve forged since the procedure?”

“I can still do my job and take care of my family,” Fellman said. “Those skills won’t be gone. I just want my insanity back. I need it. I’m not the same man without it. I can’t exist without it, but the procedure took those skills, those abilities, from me.”

“It should have taken your desire for those skills as well.”

“It did. But I keep looking back over things I did while I was insane, and they... they call to me, I guess.”

“Mr. Fellman! You were supposed to dispose of all of that.”

“I know, but I was scared of losing who I was. I... I stashed them away, and after a few years I found them and began looking them over, and... and I enjoyed them. They made me feel alive, but like I was missing something important in my life.”

Bradshaw sighed, rubbing his right temple with his fingertips. “That’s very distressing news.”

“I’m within my rights,” Fellman said. “It isn’t illegal. I just need you to do it. Please, doctor.”

“All right,” Bradshaw said. “But don’t come back to me looking to be cured again.”

*   *   *

“I’m going for a walk,” Fellman told his wife.

“You seem to be doing that a lot lately,” she said. “Why?”

“Oh, just exercising, and enjoying a beautiful day,” he said.

He left the house and walked through the suburban streets, frantic to get to his secret spot but trying not to look like it. It was a good fifteen minutes before he was on the woodland walking trails, and another thirty before he was atop the hill overlooking the valley. He felt as if he were on top of the world. It was time to let his insanity out.

He rummaged through the bushes until he found the waterproof bag he’d concealed there. He hauled it out, heart racing with excitement. If anyone knew, society would again shun him and his life would be ruined. But his insanity made him feel so alive!

He pulled it out, sat cross-legged, and opened it. He grabbed a pencil from his bag and surveyed the page. He’d been sketching from the hill for the past month, and the pictures were so good. He’d sketched the whole valley, but now he was sketching people from the neighborhood, from memory. Pages and pages were filled with the faces of people he knew. He was working on one of a child playing with a ball in the street.

It would be another masterpiece that nobody could ever see. Doing anything artistic got you declared legally insane, of course. Not a dangerous insanity, mind you, but one that didn’t benefit society. And people were expected to contribute to society. He wondered how it was that people couldn’t feel something about art the way he did.

It was okay. Nobody had to see his work. He only needed to do it.

Then again... if only he could show his drawings to his wife, to share them with her—with anyone!—and to get confirmation that his insanity just wasn’t that crazy.

Maybe someday he’d entrust her with his secret. But for now, he’d draw in solitude, even if it was a waste to society.

Frozen Frames, Part 2 will appear next month in Cud Flashes in the Pan.

David M. Fitzpatrick is a fiction writer in Maine, USA. His many short stories have appeared in print magazines and anthologies around the world. He writes for a newspaper, writes fiction, edits anthologies, and teaches creative writing. Visit him at www.fitz42.net/writer to learn more.