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Magical Girl Antifa War Machine

By Esther Alter

XYLIA

We were at the bottom of a hole, a new construction site that went deep into the bedrock. I was the first to touch the artifact, a thing that didn’t quite have shape or color. I grabbed it. My new consciousness slammed into my mind so fast that there was just enough time for only one last wholly-human thought: You’re a girl, you fucking idiot.

My new form was sleek. Mathematically perfectly curved. Hyperfeminine in the truest sense. Breasts extending into six dimensions. A tall, lithe, highly reflective body. A smooth face with eyes burning with seductive rage. And strength, immense strength. I flexed and felt a distant star flicker a warning.

I turned to look at the three friends I was with: Sapphire, Ella, and Raven. They were looking at me. To them, this had all happened instantly.

I tried speaking but it can out as a high-pitched sine wave. I tried again, this time delicately forming air into coherent acoustics. “Hey,” I said. “I think I’m trans.”

“Are you still alive?” Sapphire, ever the caretaker of our little group, asked.

“Yes,” I said. I felt extremely alive.

I could feel the rock under me down to the mantle down to the core, yes, I could feel cosmic rays as if they were sleet, yes, but I could also feel exploitation like a bad odor, I could feel the carceral state like a skin rash, I could feel climate change like a life-threatening fever.

And I felt the need to destroy anything that would doom this planet or its people. It was just an itch at first, but the need was growing. By daylight, it had superseded all other needs, permanently. And it frightened me, badly. That was disappointing. I had spent my whole human life frightened.

So, I turned to my friends, and said: “Well? What’re you waiting for?”

If I hadn’t felt so scared, I think I would’ve at least tried to explain the choice they were about to make. None of us regret what we did—I don’t think we can—but I should’ve given them a real choice. I didn’t, because I didn’t want to do this alone.

I’m sorry.

They all touched the artifact and transformed. We studied each other and noted that yes, we were powerful, and yes, we were extremely hot, but also: there was a military base not far from us. There was a Nazi dive bar less than a mile away. There was a cop beating up a homeless man just around the corner. We could murder the cop-we should murder the cop; we must murder the cop—and demolish the Nazi dive bar and lay waste to the military base. We must, we must.

I did what I’d always done, which was avoid my needs with whatever was available. Booze, video games, breaking into construction sites at night, and or sex.

I radiated the want and the question out to my friends and they replied, yes.

I had never wanted to fuck them before. Never. Except Sapphire. But right now it felt like it was the only thing I could do to stave off this other thing. And my friends must’ve felt likewise.

The construction site flashed brilliant colors as we slid into each other along axes that until that night we could never have dreamed of.

---

SAPPHIRE

We all knew Xylia was trans long before they did. For years, they’d insisted that it was totally normal for a cis guy to have three transfemme best friends. Probably nothing. They were such a pro at avoiding themselves that they had to literally turn us all into weapons to crack their egg, God bless.

I used to imagine every possible timeline of what it would be like when Xylia came out and was finally able to requite the crush I knew I had on them. The timelines where we made out, and the ones where we didn’t, and the ones we made out and then over breakfast quietly asked if we could do this again.

When we finally did fuck, it was beautiful and I could see those timelines crisscrossing and ending and resolving into just this one. I could see the filaments of moment-by-moment decisions: where Xylia might touch me, where I might touch them, what might make me sigh with pleasure in this new body, what might make them sigh and ask me to do it again.

My thoughts drifted, as they always do after sex, but so so much farther now. I don’t know if I can see farther than the others because I spent so much of my previous life trying to plan for every contingency. Human aptitudes and anxieties are incomparable to our strengths and desires. But also, like, I’m still me, right?

Farther down the sprawling infinite temporal tree of the future, all branches intertwined into a single moment: When the Enemy arrived.

The Enemy would stop at nothing to tear these things out of us and decouple their very ontologies. They had been our foes for an immense length of time, billions of years, long before the universe knew mercy. They knew we were here. They were already on their way. They had converged time itself on the moment of their arrival to ensure their inevitability. They would arrive in three years.

But even without the Enemy, this planet was, on many timelines, doomed to kill itself. I could see history’s terrible beauty and the fragility and worth of everyone living. I could see all of that at once and I could also see the exact probability of the extinction of humanity due to like five oil companies.

I was shaking. The ground was shaking. I felt something. In my hand. Xylia’s hand. They squeezed my hand.

“I’ve got you,” they whispered.

I manifested lungs with which to exhale.

I focused my awareness. Maybe witnessing the totality of human suffering on a dying planet was too many feelings to process. How about just this city instead. Or, better, this neighborhood, and this under-construction office building for some fucking pharmaceutical company that was going to charge a gazillion dollars for a new ADHD medication that there would soon be an artificial shortage of. The whole neighborhood, mostly Black, would become congested with commuter traffic and too expensive to live in. The owners of the company would die a few years later due to super-Covid, brought about by systemic ineptitude. Thirty years later, the building would be condemned and demolished after being flooded too many times due to the city not investing enough money into climate change infrastructure, for all the good that would do them in the long run.

I’ve been saying that I can see alternate timelines but it’s not at all like seeing. It’s more similar to what I did before, when I was imagining worst-case scenarios and how to protect my people. But my imagination was now exactly the same thing as factual prognostication. Planning was the same as prophesizing was the same as being an anxious catastrophizing mess. I saw all the ways this neighborhood would die.

I wondered what I could do about it.

Instantly, the hunger in me was back. Sex was good, but this other thing, this new foreign thing, needed something more. It needed to save this neighborhood, right now, this very instant. It wanted to destroy and kill anything that threatened these vulnerable people.

Wanting was the same as doing.

I lifted us all out of the pit. We were still folded into each other. I sealed the pit with rock and earth. I planted trees. I fussed with their space-time coordinates until they had grown tall and beautiful. I decided that was enough. I could’ve carved out paths through the lot and made it more of a park but I didn’t because, well, I flunked out of urban planning school and I didn’t want to revisit that era.

I thought it would be enough. But the thing in me was still famished.

Then it was morning. The commuters were the first to see it. They gawked. That drew more people’s attention. They took pictures. Some of the more daring decided to take a stroll. There was a lady with a tiny puppy who’d been planning to get coffee around the block and now just wanted to play with that stupid lovely animal under the shade of the trees. Ella collapsed herself back into her original trans woman shape, only slightly shorter, so that she could take a stroll. She walked up to the woman and asked if she could pet her dog. The woman said yes. Ella received puppy kisses.

The cops came. One of them shoved Ella away from the puppy and shouted in her face that she was trespassing on private property. Ella didn’t move. The cop drew a gun. Ella converted the cop into fire.

There are fascisms throughout this galaxy and beyond that are far stronger, far more depraved than mere human fascism. There are kinds of oppression that humans physiologically can’t do to each other. We don’t know who made the artifact but we know we were intended to challenge and devour these distant fascisms and when we struck this trifling Earth-bound fascism we struck with excessive fury.

More cops arrived until the city ran out of cops. The trees were all on fire because we were built not to grow, but to destroy, and we sang to each other when the tanks started to roll in. We crashed fighter jets into the ground and we looked at the wreckage of machines and human meat that littered the city and we wept because we hated what we’d done. But we needed this carnage. We needed more of it. We were never going to be able to get enough of it.

---

ELLA

One night, I went to some hedge fund manager’s mansion and walked through the exterior wall, bursting it into splinters and dust, into the bedroom, and listened to him plead for his life before taking it. Another night, I traveled to a city and found each and every person presently raping someone and then made my arm a knife and stabbed them through the chest. One day, I went far down into the ocean to play with a submarine. I let it launch a torpedo at me because I wanted it to go first. The torpedo hit me in the chest and threw me backwards. I sank to the bottom of the ocean, then pushed myself upward and sliced through the submarine’s hull. I heard the screams of the crew.

Whatever that artifact was, it had a certain amount of, well, something, whatever it was storing. Charge, hit points, whatever. I was the last to touch it, which meant I got less, which let me cling to more of my humanity.

I was not a very nice human. I was a huge bitch to everyone around me and the others had clung to me out of misplaced affection. Raven was my ex who didn’t love herself enough to walk away from me. Sapphire had watched me burn too many bridges in too many communities and wanted to be the one last lifeline for me. Xylia probably just wanted to be me and didn’t know it.

I used to be angry all the time at everything and I used to take it out on my own people. And now I didn’t have to do that anymore. I had a vulgar human need for revenge which meant that I could sometimes ignore the implacable alien need to save this world.

I murdered both of my ex-abusers.

I knew where the remaining American senators were and how to best destroy them. But I didn’t best-destroy them. I waited until they thought they were safe and then I strangled them.

Then there was a defense contractor that wanted to surrender all their weapons and industrial capacity.

“You should let them do it,” Sapphire said while we were busy freeing Palestine.

“I want to hurt them,” I said.

“No, you don’t,” Sapphire said.

“Are you saying they deserve to live?” I said.

“It’s not about that, and you know it,” Sapphire said.

She was right. All of me wanted to destroy this defense contractor but half of me wanted to rid this sick world of all evil before the Enemy arrived and wanted to neutralize the company quickly. One half of me wanted to commit to a plan that was so strategically unsound that I was coming undone. It felt like I was going to break.

“Promise me you’re going to take care of yourself,” Sapphire said.

“I promise,” I said.

Instead, I went to one of the defense contractor’s manufacturing plants, massacred everyone there, and stole some cluster bombs. I tunneled under one of their offices, then burst up into the ground-level floor and detonated the bomb. I did this three times. It was deliciously satisfying to hear maimed and dying war criminals cry out for immediate aid or swift death, depending. It felt really good right up until, very abruptly, it didn’t. I tried to blow up a fourth facility, and then I had to stop because I was crying and shaking too much to tunnel in a straight line. I dismantled the remaining cluster bombs and went deep underground. I closed the tunnel around me and let the weight of the Earth squeeze me until I felt like I was back in my body.

When I resurfaced, Sapphire, Raven, and Xylia were waiting for me in a sports car they had commandeered from some rich dead asshole. I walked over.

“We’re worried about you,” Sapphire said.

“I’m ok,” I lied. “I’m just taking care of myself in my own way.”

“We feel like you should spend more time trying to enjoy your new self,” Sapphire said.

“I don’t like my new self!” I shouted. “I hate it! I don’t want to fight this fucking war! I just want to be, like, a normal mean trans girl!”

“You’re still a mean trans girl,” Sapphire said gently.

I was going to say something harsh but stopped myself and instead whispered, “Really?”

“Really,” Sapphire said. “You’re my mean trans girl, Ella.”

“That’s all I ever wanted to be,” I cried.

“Can I hold you?” Sapphire said. “Please?”

“If you don’t hold me I think I’m going to fly apart,” I said.

Sapphire opened the car door and extended a long arm outward. I grasped it and she pulled me in.

---

RAVEN

I was getting flashbacks. Not just of the destruction we’d wrought, but of the destruction we could’ve wrought, in other timelines. I remembered every time I murdered someone and the time I made the same person homeless and the time I caused the same person to starve to death, and on and on, for a lot of people.

My whole body felt terrible. I would’ve laid on the couch for days and done nothing but smoke weed but lying on the couch made me angry and weed didn’t do anything.

The war was not yet over and the human in us was disgusted by the magical girl antifa war machine in us and we couldn’t stop crying and we couldn’t stop fighting. We argued. We said spiteful things that we shouldn’t have. But there was no release, no end to the pain, no end to the hunger for righteous battle. We threw things at each other—glasses, trees, boulders. We called each other monsters. We disguised ourselves as humans and cheated on each other. Nothing worked.

I don’t know if we lost the part of us that can recover from trauma or if what we’d done was too severe to heal. Maybe both.

“Let’s go to the beach,” I said. “Let’s do something normal.”

“Why are you like this?” Ella sighed. “We’ll just feel worse.”

“Please,” I insisted, “please, I need this. Just for a couple of hours and then we can go back to killing capitalism.”

“Fine,” Ella said. “Let’s do it.”

“I’m sorry, are you squad leader now?” Sapphire said to Ella.

“Fuck you Sapphire,” Ella said, “No one said you had to go.”

“I’m going, I’m just wondering why no one asked me,” Sapphire said.

It went on like that for a while. We eventually got our shit together, got some bathing suits from a bombed-out Target, and got to the beach a little before sunset. To our right, a group of homeless people were picking through the wreckage of a barge. To our left, a family was having a quiet, sad wedding for two men who were dying of tuberculosis.

“You know,” I said, watching the family, “it’s possible we’re not fixing anything.”

“Well,” Ella said, “that’s what happens when your praxis is Blanquist superhero bullshit.”

“Don’t lecture me on bad praxis,” I snapped. “I’m not even a vanguardist! I’m an anarcha-syndicalist!”

“Christ, it was just a comment,” Ella said.

We bickered until we had nothing more to say.

The sun was low now. The sky looked like a beautiful, miraculous, all-consuming firestorm.

“I wish we lost sometimes,” Ella said. “I wish we could pretend that sometimes we had to defend ourselves at all costs. I wish someone was sometimes threatening us so it wouldn’t be totally our fault. I wish we could get fucked up and try harder next time.”

I turned that over in my head. A desire found its way into me that I hadn’t had in a long time.

“Do you want to lose, Ella?” I asked.

She looked confused and then her eyes widened and she shimmered, and she said, “Please.”

I grabbed her hair and pulled her to my face. She swung forward like a hinge. I stumbled backward; none of us had ever gone limp like that before and the momentum of her dense body surprised me. I recovered, kissed her lips, and threw her into the sand. She tumbled as if she was human.

I kicked her. She flew backwards, tumbling through the sand before impacting a dune. She moaned. I walked over to the dune. I pulled her partway out and held her down and kneed her cunt. She screamed.

“You’re weak,” I said. “You’re weak and you deserve this.”

“I’m weak and I deserve this!” Ella shouted.

And the alien hunger in me went from its persistent growl to a confused murmur. Because, here was a true monster in my hands and I was sliding around dimensions four and five into the three dimensions of her cunt. Half of me was incredibly turned on. The other half, the one concerned with target acquisition, was incredibly confused, which turned me on more.

I kept my hand in Ella, wrapped my other hand extra dimensionally around her ass and tits, and pulled her out of the sand. I released her from both hands and slapped her face. I spat on her, with just normal spit, and she gasped. “Do it again, please do it again,” she said.

And I would’ve, but someone grabbed my ankle from behind and twisted me into the ground. Someone was kicking me in the stomach and it felt so fucking good. “You can tell us to stop at any time, babe,” Sapphire said, “but we both know you’re not going to do that.”

I could only nod.

Sapphire made her other hand’s fingers into atom-fine blades and raked my back. It was excruciating. “Take it,” she whispered. “Be a good girl and take it.”

“I’ll be your good girl,” I said. I wanted to, but this was, actually, very hard. This was difficult for all of me to endure. For the first time since I was this me, I didn’t feel torn, ragged, fighting myself. I was merely… in pain.

Sapphire let go of me with the non-blade-hand to touch herself. “Be good and come for me,” she said.

I smoothed my left hand into the shape of the head of a vibrator and pushed it between my legs.

The orgasm was a simultaneous detonation. We cratered that fucking beach.

We spent the night giggling and reassuring each other. We scorched another financial downtown in the morning.

---

XYLIA

We destroyed every last vestige of tyranny on Earth and left society with no real means of recovery. There was near-total infrastructure collapse. Global crop failure was nigh-inevitable. There were floods and droughts and superstorms—we were too late to prevent any of that—and multiple lethal pandemics. Billions of sick and starving people beseeched us to repair what we had broken, but we didn’t, because we didn’t know how to. We wished that we could grieve alongside them.

 

 

We had been aware the Enemy was approaching ever since Sapphire told us where to look. But we could sense them now. The perturbations in space-time were impossible to ignore. The Enemy mainly wanted us, but they’re the sort of entities who would blow up Earth with the kind of enthusiasm a human might reserve for fireworks. So we lingered on this planet to defend it.

And: We were so eager. There was something very, very enticing about this imminent invasion. After all we’d been through, it was still hard to admit that we wanted combat. But I was too tired to loathe myself anymore, so I was merely coy about it. I smiled to myself and the others would wink at me knowingly.

On the day of their arrival, we went to the Moon. We sat on some rocks and watched the stars.

“This is beautiful,” Raven sighed. “We should’ve done this a long time ago.”

“We never went here because there’s no fascists to kill here,” Ella said.

“Is one of you experiencing phenomena beyond our collective perception?” Sapphire asked. No one answered. She frowned. “Shit. That’s not what you’re supposed to say… I mean, uh, what’s on people’s minds?”

“I wonder what we’ll do afterwards?” I said.

“What do you mean?” Ella asked.

What did I mean?

I had never really thought about the future before. All my life, I’ve focused on getting through the day. Dealing with mundane depression. Dealing with a hangover. Dealing with a shitty boss. Dealing with being unable to separate a warcrime from a waking nightmare. Dealing with an age-old existential threat to freedom throughout the universe.

“Maybe we can go somewhere where they can fix us,” I said. “We could try exploring.”

“That sounds nice,” Raven said. “I’d like to do that too.”

“What’re you thinking about, Raven?” I asked.

“Tactics,” Raven said. “I’m so excited.”

“Same,” I admitted.

“We’re going to fucking take them apart,” Ella said.

“Is it weird that I feel turned on?” Raven said.

“Yeah,” Sapphire said, and we laughed.

“I love you all so much,” I said.

“I love you too,” Raven said.

“I love you,” Ella said.

“I love all of you and you’re all beautiful,” Sapphire said.

“All together, then,” I said. “And then we’ll see what happens next.”

The sense of restless happiness was growing stronger and stronger as they drew nearer. We quaked in anticipation of, at last, tearing into something formidable enough to satisfy us. We kissed one last time. Then there was a burst of light, and we all but exploded with joy.

---

Host Commentary

By Valerie Valdes

Once again, that was Magical Girl Antifa War Machine by Esther Alter.

The author had this to say about their story:
This is, in part, a love letter to Animorphs, which taught me at an early age that war is hell and bodies are mutable.

The magical girl genre is awash with bright colors and vibrant personalities, with cheerful expressions of femininity alongside fantasies of power and martial prowess. A magical girl is one transformed from normal to extraordinary, often by friendship and love as well as a wand or mystical powder puff. But what happens when the evil you’re fighting by moonlight isn’t so easily defeated? When the love is denied because it doesn’t fit the prescribed gender mold? When the mere act of using the bathroom becomes a battle? While the experience of a trans woman is also one of transformation, it is typically far more difficult than a glittering animated sequence of poses; the trappings of femininity are hard-won, the fight to retain them bruising and bloody as enemies engage in direct and indirect forms of violence and genocide. Stories like this one compel us to examine, brutally and without compromise, the inequities of a world where power fantasies take on an aspect of vengeance–which itself has long been feminized in many cultures. Nemesis and the Furies, Durga and Kali, even Justice with her blindfold wields a sword to punish those who deserve it. And yet this story also asks us: who, exactly, deserves punishment and why? Whose actions warrant retribution, and what form should that retribution take? If you had nearly infinite power to mete out justice, to avenge the wronged, how would you use it? There may not be easy answers, but in a revenge story such as this one, it is the act of questioning that hopefully transforms us for the better.

Escape Pod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. Don’t change it. Don’t sell it. Please do share it.

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And our closing quotation this week is from Martha P. Johnson, who said: “History isn’t something you look back at and say it was inevitable. It happens because people make decisions that are sometimes very impulsive and of the moment, but those moments are cumulative realities.”