The Future Is in the Past
by K. Ralph Bray
Part 1 appears in this issue.
conclusion
For weeks I thought about that client. Every time I made love with my girlfriend, I imagined her flesh sizzling on briquets. I asked another client if different meats had different odours, if a steak smelled like a hamburger, or if grilled chicken reminded him of any vegetable I might braise. He said that he’d heard that ancient humans considered pork and people to be similar in taste. I made him spend four weeks on a remote coffee plantation as part of his Remediation plan.
“If you were given a chance to eat a hamburger or have sex with someone else, both without consequences, what would you choose?” I asked my girlfriend.
“I’m not interested in any new meat, regardless,” she said.
“Harsh words,” I said.
“Did you get the Meat file because of your parents?” she asked. She knew about my parents, about how they had hung onto their butcher shop even after the violence shattered the windows of other shops, and mobs dragged meat from freezers and transported it to mass graves. More than a few butchers involuntarily accompanied their beef and pork carcasses to those wide, unmarked pits cratered far from the cities. She knew that my parents fought back, hacked a protester to death and received a life sentence for crimes against all living things.
“Thals eat meat. What would you choose?” she asked.
“What if the person I chose to sleep with was a Thal woman?”
“Wrong answer,” she said. “If I ever find out that you slept with a Thal, I’d make sure you were immediately subjected to Retaliation and sent abroad.”
“To the Valley, I guess?”
She was donating money to a group called Save Our Sapiens (S.O.S) that supported relocating Thals to the homeland of their original discovery, the Neanderthal Valley in Germany.
“One-way ticket,” she said. “And I’ll include a pound of bacon as a parting gift.”
* * *
I took the test.
Even though I was an Anatomically Modern Human (AMH), some parts of my genome were eighty percent Neanderthal. I was partly an archaic species.
“You’ve got nine percent Neanderthal,” the lab tech confirmed. “You have a Neanderthal variant of an ion channel, so you experience pain to a greater degree than most AMHs. And an introgressed allele of BNC, a Neanderthal gene that influences skin pigmentation.”
The lab tech explained all of this to me in a monotonous recitation. “You qualify to be a Thal,” she said.
“I don’t look like one,” I said. “And I don’t get angry when someone cuts me off in traffic.”
“You qualify. If you want to join them,” she said.
I left the lab. As I walked along the street to the subway station, I felt larger, maybe in a physical sense, like a guy who has just left a gym after lifting weights, but more so in a spiritual way, as if I were now privy to a secret, as if I’d discovered how to live forever.
“No, you’re not,” my girlfriend yelled when I told her the result. “They’re not even a separate species. They’re human!”
“You don’t have red hair,” she said.
“It turns red in the sun.”
“You like fruit. Remember the pomegranates. In Crete? You don’t eat meat.”
“My parents were butchers. Literally.”
“Wittgenstein said, ‘The best image of the human soul is the human body.’ You have a human soul,” she told me. “Look in a mirror.”
I turned and saw myself reflected in the restaurant window, a thin human body with a broad Thal soul.
“No, I have the numbers. I am what I am.”
“Get another test.” She said that the lab was spewing out false results to bolster the Thals’ claims.
“I want a second opinion about this,” she demanded. “Go to another lab, one accredited by the Committee. Then we’ll decide what to do about this nonsense.”
* * *
I pulled the file of the yacht owner who had flipped a coin. His status was “admitted to Thal status no longer receiving Sapien privileges.” His new name was Grok, which immediately reminded me of my favourite Heinlein book and I wondered if the Thal’s were harvesting monikers from classic sci-fi novels.
He lived in an old barn-like building now called The Shed. Long abandoned and barely avoiding its angle of repose, the town had planned to tear it down. Grok bought the building and announced that he was turning it into a centre for Thals. Residents protested his plan, mainly in peaceful depositions at town council meetings and poster campaigns. A few disgruntled young women encircled the shed for two days, chanting, “One race, one face, Homo sapiens, end this disgrace.”
I parked my car beside the side entrance and knocked on the door.
Grok opened it.
“What’s your score?” he asked. He held up his hands and fluttered his fingers, raising and lowering each one to correspond with a number.
“One, two, five? What percent?”
I raised both hands, palms forward, and extended all fingers and both thumbs.
“Ten?” he asked. “ I doubt that.”
I folded my thumbs.
Grok grabbed my elbow and tugged me inside the room. “Sit on the chair in the middle of the room,” he said.
The barn wasn’t like the places I’d seen in vintage home magazines. Wealthy Sapiens used to buy decommissioned farm properties and build oblong homes with basketball courts and swimming pools. Grok’s barn could be where the last stand took place between the living and the dead.
For two hours Grok and three other male Thals asked me questions about my test results, my motivation, my job with the Committee.
“I guess I’ll never get that boat back, right?” Grok said.
“Scrapped and used for other purposes,” I said. “I think they made it into park benches.”
Grok then explained the last part of my interview was to observe a killing.
Grok assured me that the victim would not be Sapien, or even mammalian.
“It’ll change everything for you,” he said.
One of the Thals came out of the back shadows of the barn, holding a chicken.
“Let’s take off your shoelaces and tie them around the bastard’s neck. To that pipe above us.”
Grok bent down on one knee, like a parent helping a child, and removed the laces from my runners.
“Thread the laces through the holes in this piece of wood and tie a fisherman’s knot to close the loop.” Grok demonstrated using one shoelace.
“I can’t do it,” I said. “Look at my hands. They don’t work.”
My fingers were white and stiff from stress and cold.
Grok took the lace from me and tied a knot to finish the loop through the piece of wood and slipped the loop around the chicken’s feet and hung it upside down from the metal pipe. He held the bird’s head while I pulled its body downwards, stretching its legs until they were perpendicular to the pipe and I steadied the animal while Grok cut across its throat, deftly passing the knife blade into the bird’s flesh, delicately close to the esophagus and windpipe. The bird’s eyes glowered at me as its blood flowed into a plastic bowl below its head.
“If you wring its neck or cut the head off, you don’t drain the blood as well,” he said. “The latter method befits our public image as raging, brutish Thals, but you want to enjoy the meat more than the performance.”
Grok rendered the bird into forbidden and delicious chunks of flesh that we cooked over a charcoal barbecue.
“Consider this a first ritual to becoming a Thal,” Grok said. “And next is learning karate.”
“Masculinity without toxicity,” I replied.
“Bring a bird, any kind, to your full initiation. We’ll be in touch.”
* * *
“We’re going to instigate a little genetic decay,” my colleague said.
“How’s that?” I asked.
“Did you read Konrad Lorenz in university? He suggested the human race had experienced a decline in genetic quality.”
“Sure, I read it. So?”
“We’ll breed the Thals with Sapiens. If we convince enough Sapiens to do this, over time we’ll dilute the Thals and their claims. No more Thals, no more ‘two species’ nonsense.”
She smoothed the front of her black pants, and her palms traversed upwards to tug her black blouse down over her flat stomach. She was my Neanderthal fantasy.
“We want male Thals to breed with Sapien women,” she continued. “They’ll have infertile offspring; the fathers cannot pass on their DNA. The Y chromosome is dead.”
“And how do you convince Sapien women to do this?”
The Committee had already recruited a thousand women into the program. They’d developed protocols and scripts and appropriated funds hidden in the budget under a line labelled “Cross Cultural Initiatives: Bringing Species Together.”
Select hospitals were ready to act as designated birthing centres and three online dating services agreed to expedite matchmaking. Marketing teams had prepared online campaigns encouraging male Thals to impregnate Sapien women as a way to reinforce the historical record. Apple and Google were each offering a million dollars to the first baby born to a mixed couple.
“This won’t work,” I said. “Even if the science is right, the Thals won’t fall for this transparent effort to diminish them.”
“Maybe,” she said, “but at least it’ll start the effort to end this.”
* * *
A month before I was scheduled to kill, my girlfriend surprised me with her contrition. She accepted my claim to Thal status and argued that we could overcome any differences, even if they were buried in genes. For the next three weeks, we played in the bedroom, and I played guitar, and she cooked all the meals.
A week before the killing, she told me she was pregnant.
“How did that happen?” I asked her. “What the hell, didn’t you take precautions?”
“You didn’t,” she said. “Grok will love this. It feeds into the Cultural campaign. You’ll be a poster boy for the successful breeding program.”
“How far?” I asked her.
“Far enough to know the sex. I hid it well, right?”
Turns out she was one of the women recruited by the Committee.
“And?” I already knew the answer. Her enthusiasm and assertiveness telegraphed the gender.
* * *
We each got a million dollars.
I killed a pigeon.
And Grok ultimately rejected me for what he said was “traitorous defiance to the cause.”
The Committee expanded the three Rs to add a fourth one, Relocation, and conscripted me to litigate it. I’ve already sent a thousand Thals away to Germany.
Copyright © 2025 by K. Ralph Bray
