CZM Book Club: Cool Zone 2055: The Dreadnaught Funeral

Media team of twenty fifty five. We were sent audio from our very own show I'm thirty years from now and we're just gonna jump into it. You know what this is, It's the Dinah Wars. Either your triceratopsy, it's

Nazis or Nazi zombies are gonna EU. This here is part three of our EXCLUSI report from the Front from Behind the Iron Curtain with mixed bunnyface murder our top correspondent and yes top And that sentence has more than one meaning, though I suppose anyone listening to the uncensored version of this report over on under the pants and under the ground knows that it might be more accurate

to call mixed bunnyface murder our switch correspondent. But if you want to switch careers, then do you want to check out our top sponsor, our switch sponsor, Dino Cadence. That's right, Dino Cadence, the premiere Dino Writer Academy is opened applications. If you ever dreamed of decapitating fascists with a saber in one hand, a rifle in the other, and the reins to a rampaging ragisaurus held in your teeth,

and by God, Dino Cadence is for you. When you think to yourself, I want to see the blood of fascists grant life to the climate changevage soil, then you need to think Dino Cadence. Tuition is free, but spots are limited, so apply today. The sun rose the next morning, as is its relentless habit, and it lit a field littered with detritus of flesh. I don't think you can be alive in twenty fifty five without having seen a dead body or two. But this was at a scale

I'd never quite imagined. The high of combat had receded, and I looked out, and I wept. What has become of humanity? Of course, to kill the liminal, it's a mercy. The biospawn literally beg for death with their ripped vocal cords, and the zombies have already died once, but it's still brutal and raw. A stare at the horrors of war to see what teeth and bullet and pike can do. In order to stop crying, I went to work. I think most listeners are familiar with that particular trick. The

busy bee has no time for sorrow. With the first light of dawn, a pair of rangers rode in on day it ends. For those who aren't familiar, these are basically megafauna pigs. They went extinct about sixteen million years ago. The rangers rode in with a whole herd of giant half wild pigs, and those pigs set to work cleaning the field. About six herding dogs regular old canine MutS kept all the giant beasts in line, and for hours there was this omnipresent sound of munching bones. It was

faster than burial and more ecologically sound than fire. Are dead and they're dead. Both went into the gullets of giant pigs with no other task. Immediately before me, I went to the pair of rangers who were overseeing the whole thing. I was prepared to talk in Spanish, but I was in luck in. One of the rangers, a black man in his early sixties named Aiden, was born and raised in Brooklyn, and we got to talk in

English and talk about the New York giants. I kept calling him a zoomer, and he kept correcting me that he was a millennial. Thank you very much. I started off the interview a bit more properly. I asked who he was, what his role was. The herd of Diodens was one of only three such herds in the world, at least in the semi wild. The other two were in North America. Introducing extinct species was a delicate mamble. If we weren't in the middle of a climate apocalypse already,

it would be unconsciousable. But the past fifty years have seen unprecedented die off of species after species. Entire genuses go extinct more or less every day, and generally, when a newly extinct species is de extincted, it can't compete and it just disappears again. So the megafauna and other ancient animals are sort of a hail. Mary Aiden is a New York Giants fan. In his speech is peppered with sports references, some of which I understood. Some of

the reintroductions have been wildly successful. Think the giant sloths that have become almost a mascot of what's left of the Amazon charismatic megafauna. The pigs are a particularly dangerous gamble. According to Aiden, wild pigs are, of course already one of the most prolific invasive species across the world, and they're in no more danger of extinction than cockroaches are. But during lab experiments with the datin, scientists discovered something

they hadn't expected. Datin can eat plastic. Of course, so can a bunch of worms and microbes and such. But a single datin that are about the size of a largish bowl can eat around twenty pounds of plastic a day, so long as it is interspersed with plant matter and protein. So the potential risks of wild daadin may yet be

outweighed by their ecological facility. Most datin are kept in captivity, but before the outbreak of war in the Iberian Peninsula, Aidan was working with a team experimenting with allowing deadon to graze. They must be closely monitored at all times, but initial results were promising. These days, dadon mostly eat the war dead. Their ability to chew through fabric and plastic and flesh and bone is simply unmatched when it

comes to cleaning battlefields. Aidan's affinity for these animals is clear, though so is his worry if we're not careful. He told me these things could wind up turning half the biomass of the planet into more of themselves. He thought about that for a moment and then laughed, kind of like what humans have done, turning half the planet's biomass into humans and cows, Much like, if you think of it, how humans have turned a solid half of the planet's

entertainment content into advertisements. This podcast is brought to you by the Committee for the Curtailment of Sexually Transmitted Diseases among Internationalist Forces the CCSTDAIF would like to remind you that while sex is good and healthy, and there is no particular ethical imperative for or against monogamy, sexually transmitted

diseases reduce the fighting strength of our forces. The CCSTDAF works with medics and based hospitals to provide std testing, and we ask any sexually active soldier or anyone who is sexually active with soldiers to get tested on a regular basis and treated when necessary. Because remember, you can fuck, just don't fuck up. This podcast is brought to you by dogs. Are you lonely, sad, overworked, stressed about the impending death of all life on earth to climate change?

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compatible with different living situations. If you choose to adopt a dog, please do so from a responsible rescue shelter. If you choose to adopt a dog, you must accept that you are responsible for that dog for the foreseeable future and cannot abandon the dog without finding another safe home first, and we're back. Aiden and I talked for hours. Here was a man who had lived through the whole of the long twenty first century thus far and God willing. He told me he was going to live to see

it end. I told him I didn't think any human was going to live to see the century end. And he looked me dead in the eyes and said, you can't think like that. I asked him, why not, he said, and I quote here, you can't think like that because look, have I buried two of my three daughters already? Yeah? Have three of my grandkids died in the fighting? Sure have. That leaves me with a non binary kid and a daughter, and that leaves me with three grandkids who are still alive.

I know it's hip and cool to live like you're going to die, and you should live that way because you are going to die. But not everyone is. There was this old fiction writer check guy and anarch from before my time, before your time, Franz Kafka. He lived through the First World War in Europe. One day he was talking to his friend and he said something that

keeps me going. They were talking about how God has forsaken everyone, how everyone was killing themselves and killing each other and dying, and how everything was just raw and bleak. His friend brought up hope, and Franz he looks at his friend and he goes, hope. There's an infinite amount of hope in this universe, just not for us. And so, yeah,

you and me, we're probably fucked. I hate to tell you that, but like iron curtain is down, maybe you boys here, sorry, force a habit, you all will break that curtain, or maybe that curtain will break itself against you. Might happen, probably won't. But every fascist government that's ever risen has fallen. And right now we've got more than the usual amount of hope. All over the world, people

are fighting. Fascism requires people to give up, and for once in history, with our backs up against the collective wall of climate change, we're fighting. We're gonna win. You and me we're gonna die, But everyone else we're gonna win. He said all that to me. I said to him, but you said you were going to live to see the whole century come and go. He responded, sure, sure, you never held onto two opposite thoughts in your head at the same time, I'm gonna die in bed in

a Brooklyn brownstone. It's gonna be cooperatively owned, and the whole of Brooklyn, maybe the whole Turtle Island is gonna be under traditional stewardship, because we'll have fought like hell to make it that way. There's gonna be three cats, two dogs, and at least two previously extinct animals lying in my bed, and my great great grandkids are gonna ask me about the war, and I'm gonna smile and say, what war? And then I'm gonna see the light that

I don't know if I believe in. And my first husband, Gary, who died in the war in the forties, he's going to be waiting for me, smiling, and he's going to lead me up that light. That might happen. I hope that'll happen. There I go talking about hope. That's one thought in my head, and it's a pleasant one. Then there's this other thought, and the thing is this thought

is pleasant too. Me and Gary we moved to Portugal during one of those times when we thought the US was going to go fascist instead of just split up. And Gary had a good remote job and I'm good with languages, so I started driving for a ride share. Then you know, he goes and dies during that war, and I go back to school and I get a PhD in wildlife restoration, but just start working for the park Service because being outside is the only thing that

keeps me away from my thoughts. All of a sudden, MegaFon are back, and that's what I studied an undergrad a million years ago. And I wind up a ranger in Catalonia. New war breaks out, and I think about signing up, but mostly people tell me I'm too old, But animals they never tell you that you're too old, and so I stay on as a ranger. Iron curtain goes down. All my family they're on the other side of that curtain. Are they still alive? I don't know.

I might never know. So probably one night while I'm sleeping, the phalax is going to come over the hills and they're going to kill me and eat my pigs. And maybe I'll get a round off and maybe I won't, But the end result is the same. I'm walking towards the light, whether or not I believe in that light, and Gary is there, and it don't matter in the end if I die in Brooklyn sixty years from now or Catalonia today, because because I've lived my life as

well as I could. What's it matter that I die in the Pan Africanist, decolonial, anti authoritarian, socialist utopia or that I die fighting for it? Either way? So you can tell me that me and you that we're going to die because we are now. We might die today, they might try to double tap our ass, but people the earth, we're going to fight to make sure that those keep going. There is hope, bunny face, but not for us. And uh, you know what else, there's hope

for our advertisers. They're hoping that you'll drop your critical thinking skills and just do whatever they tell you to do. This podcast is brought to you by Bobby Blues Bastard Blades. Are you tired of wielding a sword that's designed for either one hand or two hands, feeling a little non binary when it comes to sword and hilt length, then Bobby Blues Bastard Blades is for you. We are the world's finest purveyor of Bastard swords, and don't worry, we

are definitely not affiliated with Robert Evans. This podcast is brought to you by Marty's Mattress Mall. It sure is hard to sleep lately, what with all the evocative hand gesture goes here. If this had is recorded in a video format, I know that it's been ages since I had a good night's rest, or it had been until Marty's Mattress Mall sent me their latest and greatest, The Matte Rest, the only mattress that makes you coffee in

the morning. This podcast is brought to you by Food and Usually Not Bombs, the ideological successor of food not bombs. All the food and occasionally some bombs. Don't know how else to make the world a better place. Feed people food and usually not bombs is a horizontal, decentralized collection of autonomous collectives to provide food to all comers and occasionally bombs to people who just you know, really need

to go blow something up back. For most of the morning I talked to Ranger Aiden as coworker I know h came over and joined us for lunch, though she asked me not to report on anything. She said I was glad to have civilian company because the soldiers in camp were rather busy. In the morning, there was an open forum, well open to all enlisted soldiers, not to civilians like me, discussing the tactical situation and brainstorming ideas. Those ideas then went with the elected officers into the

command tent. I don't know what they talked about, and I wouldn't tell you even if I did. In the afternoon, I thought we'd be packing up to move camp. The enemy, after all, knew where we were. They knew our numbers, our defenses, everything. We'd taken out an entire battalion the night before, but somewhere nearby was an entire brigade, which is, in case you're not up on such things, bigger than a battalion. If we were attacked by an entire brigade,

there is no way our defenses would hold. One of the fag hags caught up with me in the afternoon to tell me that we were staying put. Don't worry. They told me they won't attack us directly again, not tonight. Then they got contemplative, Well, they might shell us, but there's no point lingering on that thought. They spent the afternoon alongside two Katalan teenagers repairing a machine gun nest. There was blood and gore everywhere, and the scent snuck

its way past my bandana mask. Soon enough, there weren't enough respirators to go around, though, so I choked back bile and cleaned out some meat that used to have memories and friends and threw it into the field to be eaten by ancient pigs. We finished just around the time the sun started going down. The two teenagers sat down in that nest to staff the machine gun. I can only imagine what must have been going through their minds,

because they didn't want to answer my questions. They said, ed and I have run across this a lot with the youngest soldiers that they were immediatists, that they didn't believe in mediating their experiences through photos and videos. The only mark they wanted to leave on the world would be their actions, which, if they were lucky, would go unrecorded and unrecognized. That they said was the only way to truly be free was to be free from the

yoke of posterity. So I don't know how they felt to sit down into a machine gun nest that had just the night before been the death of two people they knew. As we were finishing up, a dreadnought walked up to me, it's really easy to recognize a dreadnought. No one else in camp had chainmail woven through her

plate carrier. No one else in camp had a labris, a two headed axe, a lesbian symbol now used more literally than it had been in previous generations, hanging from a loop on her belt, next to a glock seventeen and a medkit. No one else but a Dreadnought would walk up to me, salute and say hail, and well met, weary word smith in a Catalan accent so thick. I wasn't sure I heard her right. So a Dreadnought walked up to me and look, I swear to you, I

fell in love a little. I fall in love a little about once a week, so this wasn't a world changing moment for me or anything, but still I fell in love a little. Her name was Octavia, after the prophet Octavia Butler. She was born and raised in Barcelona. A third generation syndicalist and a second generation trans woman, she was in her thirties. You would assume that the Dreadnoughts would skew younger than the rest of the anti fascists,

but they don't. Fanato nihilism attracts people of all ages. We are saying farewell to the blessed ones tonight. She said, you should come, You should see before all of us are so blessed. I knew enough about the Dreadnoughts to parse out what she was saying. The dead were the blessed they or the lucky ones, and all of the Dreadnoughts would soon follow. I can't say no to a party, I can't say no to a trans woman with a labyris, and I can't say no to getting to see a

new funeral write. So I went with her. It was like nothing I'd seen before. All six hundred Dreadnoughts plus a couple hundred regular soldiers paying their respects, stood in a line at the edge of the camp, facing towards the field of battle. Thirty of the Dreadnoughts came over the hill, carrying the six fallen Knights, a torch bearer, a company in each body. For a moment, everything was silent but for the rustle of chainmail and the scraping

of metal armor. Then the horns began. I'd never seen or imagined these things before. Celtic War horns with dragonheads that rose five feet above the crowd. I don't know how to describe their music haunting. This didn't feel like a like a ren fare with happy minutess. This felt something ancient. An extinct giant boar wandered close to the edge of camp, and curiosity sat on its haunches and listened. Ten singers began keening, a wordless, toneless morning singing. The

ancient hills were around us. Dear listener, I am not a religious person, yet there is another world beneath this world, an invisible world, and I believe that now. I felt it. That night, the bodies were laid on a makeshift altar of lashed logs, and I assumed they would be burned. It just seems like what should have happened, or maybe fed to the dinosaurs, I don't know. Instead, while the horns played, while the boar watched, while the keeners sang. One by one, the friends of the dead came up

and stripped their bodies. The first people took bits of armor, the next took clothes. After that, knives came out. Tattoos were flayed from flesh to be turned into leather patches. Then people took teeth took bones as emblems. Once there was almost nothing left, a single man, heavy set and half naked, came out with a gigantic hammer. He walked up to a body. The crowd breathed in. As he breathed in, he let out his voice with a hun,

and the crowd joined him. He brought the hammer down on the skull of the dead, crushing it and the platform beneath it into the ground. He did this for each body in turn. Then the thirty pallbearers took the ruined bodies back out to the field, the whole order of operations in reverse. The strong man disappeared into the crowd. The singing stopped, the horns stopped. We stood silent as

the torches disappeared over the hill. One figure, a small, olive skinned woman wearing Middle Eastern armor, stood in front of the crowd. She held a human femur in each hand. Aloft above her head. She held something in Arabic, then caughtalum, then in English, hail the victorious dead, which is for anyone who isn't caught up on such things a lord of the rings quote. I had to have it explained to me later. The ceremony ended, and the party began.

The young and the young at heart danced and drank and sang all night, challenging each other to build fires higher and higher. But even drunk, they were cautious. A dreadnought aims to die in battle, not drunk at a party. The older Dreadnoughts formed circles to talk, to drink or to not drink, to sing songs to reflect. I joined Octavia one of these, and we talked late into the night. And I'm not going to become an immediatist anytime soon, but I'm still not going to tell you everything that

we talked about, not the details. We talked about our hopes and fears and dreams and what we liked in bed and what we liked about each other. As for how the rest of the night went, you'll have to pop on over to our sister podcast, Under the Pants and Under the Ground. Thanks so much for listening. That ends Part three of Mixed Bunny Face Murders Reports from the front line. But don't worry, that's not the end

of it. There is more of that to come. And if you liked this podcast, you, for whatever reason, might like the fact that I wrote a book thirty years ago. It came out in twenty twenty five. It was called The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice and it was published by Strangers in Tangled Wilderness, and it was kickstarted in March twenty twenty five, and early twenty twenty five was a weird time to be pitching fantasy books instead of just getting ready for the rise of fascism in the

United States. I'll tell you what, but you know I was grateful thirty years ago. In twenty twenty five, were all the people who signed up for alerts on the Kickstarter's page telling them about how the book was going to come out, which they probably did by googling Immortal Choir Marret Kiljoy. Anyway, see y'all next week. Good luck with everything. Hope you survive the Dino War. But there's hope, even if not for us.