Company Beta, along with Alpha, Delta, Pente were Direct-administered Municipalities, having the same rank as the Battalions and made up the highest tier of administrative division in Iota, their governors were usually members of the Republic’s director board. Company Beta was the most populated city of them all (80 million people according to Iota’s 12th Democratic Census conducted in 155). Situated right next to the Uda Bay, the largest estuary on Front Stripea connecting the Western Sea and the Kist Fjord that ran deep into the Kist Mountain, the bay’s brackish water made the city one of the most food-secured and the largest food export city in the Republic. Its administrative power also extended to several ethnic towns and villages around the area, further cementing it as not only a resource hub but a geo-political center of Iota.

Isstup loathed this place; specifically, the central city that was crowded with sky-high apartments and office buildings. Really shouldn’t have taken on the reassignment, should I? Rolling into the busiest city in the world at your thirty, a great way to prepone your menopause. She was already feeling the burnout, so when her morning schedule was completely emptied out by her superior, the reason for which she hadn’t the chance nor the inclination to learn, she decided to take a leisure stroll around the central pleasure park.

According to the Discipline of Naturalism, all living species outside of humans could be put into three categories: productive domestication, unproductive domestication, and wilderness or pest. The first category described animals such as moose, camels, or wooly bison, species whose survival depended entirely on their domestication status and the task they performed for the functioning of modern society. The second category includes organisms that also depend solely on domestication to survive but held little to no functionality for human society outside of entertainment values. The third category was self-explanatory.

The lack of sunlight and the frequency of extreme weather conditions, markers of the Katocene, drove almost all genera of trees into extinction, only one division managed to survive in the wild: Pinophyta, also known as Conifer. Some extinct tree species were successfully revived in domestic settings, like the weeping willow tree standing tall in the center greenhouse of the park.

It was Isstup ‘s favorite tree, its pendulous branches and spiraled leaves dripped languidly down from above; its posture reminded her of a sagging old man with a weak spine. She could relate to that, empathize with this feeling of seniority and exhaustion, and she would frequently come here, sitting on the bench beneath the tree, emptying her mind and dazing into this miracle of nature and humanity. Weeping willow… the monolithic, dreary tree, standing alone in this man-made construction, weeping, alone…

“Extra! Extra! Breaking news! Breaking news!” The hoarse shout of a newsboy dragged Issstup out of her quiet meditation; these kids were often orphans, dropped out of school early or simply never registered for education, employed by the news firm to orally deliver news to the nearby blocks in a more timely manner than that of printing; good quality papers were hard to come by. The newsboy stood on the soapbox and immediately attracted a crowd.

“Breaking news! The directors have just approved the military operation in Kalkaw! The army of the Tenth Division’s sixteen Battalions along with two Battalions from the Eighth Division is moving into the area at this very moment! General Su has just announced on AM 670 that the operation aimed to retake the hill towns south of the Tutut in under a month, and the Tututian tribes will likely not intervene due to their chasm with Kalkaw’s sixteen ethnic tribes! H. Immaliu estimated the value of labor would go down drastically in the following weeks…”

They started another war without Beta’s parliamentary consent. From what Isstup could make out from the boy’s ecstatic shouts, the director board didn’t even deem to inform any doctor West of the Kist of the operation. Isstup was a field doctor and rarely engage in politics outside of the yearly parliamentary meeting, and she could just imagine the betrayed and infuriated look on her supervisor once they learned of this news.

On her way back to her office, she saw a band of deserters nailing up posters on utility poles and the city walls, attracting many eyes and chatters.

A colored comic -- a rare sight seeing that colored ink required an insane amount of labor to acquire -- depicting a corpulent woman hovering over the entire continent of Stripea with her eight tentacle-like arms; the woman had a cartoonishly protruding brow ridge, a bloated nose, a massive jaw, a collapsed cranium, and an infant’s leg sticking out of her ajar mouth, a common derogatory depiction of ethnics within the Republic, and in Company Beta, this usually meant the Werxoo people. One of the woman’s arms was coiling around the Iota Power Station in Company Alpha, signaling the ethnic’s control over the Medical Parliament.

Behind the woman stood a bald man, charcoal in skin tone, whispering schemes into the fattened woman’s ears while flashing a silver dagger behind his back; in many’s minds, Klausian’s schism with the Republic betrayed Iota, and Klausian’s defiance against humanism betrayed humanity.

The bottom of the poster had a boldened line written in provocatively vibrant red ink: Kalkaw Now! Homeland Later!

When Isstup got back to her office, she saw her supervisor Zocsk standing at the door.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

“I cannot believe the director board would sink this low,” Zocsk said, shaking her head in disapproval, “they said the clandestine nature was to ensure the operation’s success… success my butt cheek. The directors were real upset, you know, they said they were going to prepone this year’s parliamentary meeting to object to the operation.”

Zocsk’s betrayed and infuriated expression was exactly as Isstup had expected. Battalions west of the Kist were usually not in favor of initiating wars with the Eastern tribes, and this time, the biggest company this side of the continent was left entirely out of the voting table; it was neither democratic nor legally justifiable. Outrage was only natural.

“Zocsk…” Isstup could feel her headache catching up to her the moment she stepped back into this building, “I am not an administrative doctor… I am a field doctor. I vote once in a while, that’s about it. I might not even attend the goddamn meeting if they were to prepone it because I have ten thousand patients stacking in my office! If you are going to vent about the director board’s decision, could you please do that to… I don’t know, the director, perhaps?”

“Who vents to their superior? I vent to you because I see you as my friend.”

“You vent to me because I have to listen.”

“Your heart is cold as stone, no wonder you are single,” Zocsk gave her a big, ugly frown before walking away, “also, you don’t have ten thousand patients. You got one. He has been sitting in the lobby waiting for you for hours by now.”

“Hello, doctor.”

“Comrade Fesitia, I thought our last session was so intolerable, you had decided to switch to another ward and find a doctor ‘more in line with your cultural value’ so to say.”

“Well, I might have exaggerated a bit… you are a perfectly democratic doctor, I’m sure. Seeing that you don’t even vote.”

“I do.” Isstup said in a stoic voice as she close the office door shut; this fucking brat was eavesdropping on her and Zocsk, “We are going to proceed with our session if you don’t mind.”

“Of course, doctor. Whatever you say.”

Isstup pulled out her notepad and started writing, “You were talking about your groups of friends at the dormitory.”

“Yes,” the boy smiled, his cloudy eyes staring at the paperweight on the desk, “shall I go over the main idea of Sexualism with you again? That is to say, the common sense held by most normal people, the silent majority?”

“No. I asked you to talk more about your group of friends.”

The boy frowned, visibly annoyed by the fact that all his attempts to get a rise out of Isstup had failed, “what is there to say? That we fuck each other? That we loitered in the street during the day and scammed kids and stole shit from the trade center at night? That hundreds of people sharing the same room inevitably leads to either a gang bang or a brawl?”

“Describes Buist for me. What is she like? What is your relationship with her?”

The boy frowned again; Isstup was well-trained, and she knew exactly how to engage with patients that were outwardly hostile to treatments. Tactical disengagement and tonally authoritative open questions that led to the further deconstruction of the patient’s mental barrel were usually the first steps. Nowadays, psychological medicalism was usually split between the universal and the humanitarian, the former supported the universal model of treatment and routine that guaranteed the baseline well-being of all patients, the latter supported a more personalized regimen that emphasized non-intervention and unconditional acceptance.

Though admiring the latter’s revolutionary effort in democratizing the treatment itself, Isstup was old school; she believed in universal principles, maximization of well-being, and surgical approachs to the human psyche.

“Describes Buist for me.”

“Buist… is my girlfriend, from the bunk house,” the bunk house was slang for the public dormitory, “she slept on the bed above me. I slept on the third.”

Public dormitories usually had quintuple sleeper bunk beds. Isstup frequently visited those places for psychiatric emergencies. “And she is your girlfriend in what sense? Are romantic feelings involved?”

“Absolutely not! I have her because I can fuck her. She is a failed man!”

“An infertile woman, you mean.”

“It doesn’t matter what your elite overlord tells you, she is born a male, she should’ve been a fucking man, but she failed! This post-biological gender ideology is part of the reason why Iota has fallen from its grace!” The boy was getting indignant, his cloudy eyes filled with hatred and recalcitrance, “we were once an empire! An empire that crushed the Ascend traitors, yet now we can’t even deal with the fucking tribesmen they left behind! We have grown weak because we were led astray by the wrongful falsification of biological and evolutionary certainty that is the foundation of humanity!”

Regressive Medicalist disavowed the founding saints of the Republic; they disavowed Medical Consciencism and they disavowed the falsification of Iota Empire. In a way, they were simply monarchists, no different than those CACA terrorists that ran rampant in the 20s.

“What is your personal relationship with Buist?” Isstup disengaged from the topic and continued her line of inquiry.

“She would have sex with others in front of me,” the boy said, so stoically Isstup couldn’t make out if he wanted that to happen or not, “she would have sex with other people in my bed in exchange for drugs… they all thought I couldn’t see cause I’m blind, but I can see… oh, I can see just fine, and my girl loves for me to pleasure myself while these people went down on her, how they fucked her in the bum, how her penis flopped…”

The boy’s harangue went on. Listening as intently as ever, Isstup put down Socially Conditioned Paranoia and Involuntary Critical Thinking Abandonment in the diagnosis column.