Fictional journal entries from a freedom fighter in a possible future. This is something I was toying with when I wrote Things might be different tomorrow for Paul Elam. The working title of what I submitted to Paul was, "Tomorrow Might Be Different," which I stole from Mack Reynold's 1976 book by that name. In the piece for Paul's site, I took a peek into the lives of 3 prominent anti-feminist/MRAs set about 70 years into the future of an almost utopian society based on liberty and free enterprise.

But while I'm optimistic that something like I describe in the piece for Paul is possible (The Venus Belt and other books in L. Neil Smith's Probability Broach series are among my favorites), I also wanted to explore a dystopian struggle to create such a world. As a fiction writer I'm a little lost without my writing partner, who committed suicide several years ago, and rarely do the elements come together in my mind to put together even a short piece. So I chose the journal format for this series.

In future entries I'll have more to say about "Byron," but the author of the journal assumes that most readers already know about Byron because he's one of the most wanted men in the femen empire.

I'm not sure where this will go or how often I'll have time to make entries. But then, isn't that the way it is in real life? But I will be very interested to read your comments, whether you post them to the link I'm going to put on the Men's Rights sub-reddit, email them to me, or post them on my semi-moderated Backlash! Yahoo Forum.

The femen seemed harmless, at first. Amusing annoyances, like the antics of cute dogs yapping for attention. Young women marching in various stages of undress to protest men who, more often than not, enjoyed the show, though for the sake of their wives and girlfriends they pretended otherwise.

But then the femen began blowing up things, then people, then entire buildings. That got the world’s attention. Some were arrested and prosecuted. But they weren’t like bin Laden’s terrorists. They didn’t live in deserts or caves, but in cities and suburbs.

The few who were known were rounded up. But the femen had been working for years to infiltrate government bureaucracies, schools, legislative bodies and they destroyed documents and records to hide the identities of most of their members, and the arrests only served to recruit more of the disaffected and disenfranchised to their cause.

They infiltrated Homeland Security, too, and the highest ranks were femen leaders who quietly used the power of the agency to round up thousands of people throughout the west who opposed them. As bloggers began disappearing word spread that something was going on. AJ, AVfM, C4L, GWW, JB, RTK, Spearhead, TLG, TB!, one after another they were shut down without warning or fanfare. Vlog channels on YouTube disappeared. Facebook profiles were deleted.

As if from an EMP, the light of liberty on the web was winking out. Soon thereafter, they renamed the agency, Motherland Security. Go figure.

Some of us, a few, were prepared to bug out. Because of the economic collapse we believed to be inevitable. It never occurred to anybody that a few addled young attention whores prancing around naked was a distraction drawing attention away from the real action. Nevertheless, a few of us did manage to flee just ahead of the raids.

We were warmed by powerful allies, men and women whose wealth allowed them to spirit a few of us out of harm’s way and hide as the femen had, anonymous in the crowds. But we were never safe, always on the run, and sometimes they did catch up with us.

Byron was sitting in an internet café when they almost got him. He managed to escape, but not before taking two bullets just as he and John Page jumped into their car. During the chase that followed Page ditched them long enough to drop Byron in an alley out of sight of any surveillance cameras and then roared off with the femen in pursuit. He didn’t get far before they cornered him. He died trying to escape on foot.

Weak from loss of blood, Byron was picked up by members of the local underground, scientists whose work had been banned for being patriarchal and oppressive. At one of their hideaways as they worked to save his life, they injected Byron with nanobots that first sealed off his wounds, and then began rebuilding his tissues with living graphene, and rewiring his nervous system and brain to use spintronics. Thus did Byron become one of the first fully human cybernetic beings. Not a synthetic human, android or robot, but the next generation in human.

In the early days nobody knew these enhanced humans, or augments, would be able to fly, among other things. Using electron spin to ride the magnetic fields hadn’t been discovered, yet. All of the early augments were just trying to survive the femen’s rapid march toward global domination and totalitarian rule. The first was an AI scientist named David Ault. When Ault received word that his lab was to be shut down and he was to be arrested, desperately he injected himself with the experimental nanobots.

The injection ultimately proved lethal, but it boosted his intelligence enough for him to perfect the nanobots before he died and recruited others. Others who continued to improve on that and more technologies while continuing to recruit liberty-loving women and men to our cause. Including Byron.

Byron had been a leader in the MRM, as well as a libertarian businessman, and his skills as a leader proved invaluable to the augments.

Though we were faster, smarter and stronger than ordinary humans, the augments were neither mutants nor super beings. We could still bleed and die, and we still loved and laughed, mourned and cried. And although our numbers were growing, with the world’s billions under femen control, our cause often seemed lost.

The femen portrayed us as being something akin to the “Borg” in Star Trek. It became a joke among us: “Resistance is futile!” The femen were more like the borg in that respect. Each augment was far too intelligent and powerful in his or her own right to submit to a hive mind or be a member of a collective. With enhanced intelligence came enhanced abilities, interests, and curiosity. We were constantly working to learn new things, improve ourselves, and delight in one another’s company.

But we still had yet to glimpse our full potential until one night when we were ambushed while gathering supplies at a warehouse. While rushing to escape, one of our band slipped and fell from the roof. Sheer panic overloaded his circuits snapping the electron spin in some of the circuits in his limbs into momentary alignment with the local magnetic field and he was able to slow his descent enough to escape serious injury. Through experimentation we learned how to control it and thus learned how to fly.

This led to developing more spintronic capabilities. We learned to use our nervous systems like radio transceivers operating with 1,024 bit encryption. After that, using plain old speech to communicate with everybody else seemed clumsy and slow. We learned how to emit microwaves, and to use subsonic frequencies. Our senses were also similarly enhanced, hearing, seeing and touch operating far beyond the range of ordinary humans.

We began to think we would be able to win the war against femen domination when the unthinkable happened: one of our members joined them and betrayed us. Thinking to set herself up as a goddess, Cassy promised to turn the rest of us in for a high position in the femen network. They took none of us alive, but a few died to give the rest of us time to escape.

That was the day I learned how to draw lightning. It’s not a very useful skill, really, but it puts on quite a show that can be terrifying. Backed into a corner by femen commandos armed to Cassy’s specifications, the few defensive and offensive skills we had developed at that point were effectively neutralized. That’s when I snapped.

For some, when they reach the breaking point they break down and cry. Others fly into a rage. But when I snap it’s like my mind breaking through the sound barrier: everything else drops away and I see everything with perfect clarity. In this moment, my left hand stretched toward the earth until I found and took hold of an electromagnetic field. With my right hand I reached toward the sky and grasped a field, there. Lightning bolts arced around us, burning some of the commandos but sending most of them running. In the confusion we were able to make our escape.

It’s not something you can teach, really. Some people can feel energy flows, most can’t. Once they understood the idea, the augments who could feel the flows were able to draw lightning, too. It seemed all very mystical and science fictiony, but no more so than any other talent. Some people have perfect pitch, some can do complex math in their heads, some have photographic memories, and some of us can feel the flows, but until the augments there was little practical application for it. And until we figure out how to do more than arc electrical bolts in dancing displays of pseudo-lightning, we still haven’t, but at least we had discovered that there was something to it.

Time to close this entry, now. I need to REM out for maintenance--we don't really sleep, but we still do a version of REM sleep that is far more efficient and effective than ordinary sleep. Following the sleep cycle, we have to move to our next base camp. We're constantly on the move, looking for new recruits and seeding the resistance against the femen oligarchs. Sometimes I wonder if the fight will be worth it, or if any of us will ever survive to see the day when freedom and liberty are restored.

Rod Van Mechelen is the author of What Everyone Should Know about Feminist Issues: The Male-Positive Perspective (the page now includes several articles by other authors), and the publisher of The Backlash! @ Backlash.com and Cowlitz Country News. He is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and served for 9-1/2 years on the Cowlitz Indian Tribal Council.