The Vault

Cryogenia

Written in a very emotional state, Cryogenia flooded from my head in the space of an hour one dark November night. The previous evening I’d watched a documentary on racism and it had filled me with such frustration with the world that I guess Cryogenia was the distorted result. Originally set at the end of the millennium, only dates, spelling and minor wording have been changed since the night I wrote it.

One day to go.

James Mason sat in the same cafe he had sat in what seemed like a hundred times before. It probably had been a hundred. This was nothing to do with the quality of the cafe. The place, imaginatively named “White with sugar” was, to understate it, a bit of a hole. But it was the only hole where he could meet his friends and talk about their chosen subject without having to worry about offending anyone.

To say they were friends was probably an overstatement too. Acquaintances was a much better word to use when you have something in common with people, but don?t really like them. And the only thing James had in common with his acquaintances was that they weren?t scumsucking blacks.

Actually, that made it two things, because they, just like James, hated black scumsuckers. Not that all black people were actually black scumsuckers. Only to James they were. All of them. Every last scumsucking one of them.

His acquaintances felt that way too. Every last scumsucking white one of them. It was just as easy to replace the word black with white. But James could say things about a white person without the same feeling, the same anger or the same intent.

When James met his acquaintances in the cafe they would plan their next attack on some unfortunate group of blacks at some unfortunate venue. It didn?t matter to James that most of the rest of the world had dropped their racist views and meant no harm to anyone, regardless if they were red, yellow, black or white. To James and the rest of the “Syndicate”, black people were the disease and they were the cure.

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