All the different subcultures and opinions made a crude body politic. The parts did not quite reject each other; the livid stitches had healed over into just skin.  We could lurch around, drink water from the stream, appreciate the flowers, grunting and cooing at them.

We had lactating breasts for the growing population, and the genitals of both sexes; we used birth control and we didn’t.

And we watched the news.

Then suddenly a man appeared at my bedside in the dark.  Restrained me in iron cuffs.  And all night, he ran his fingers over me, searching out the lines between parties, between races.

I had always been hesitant, of course, but I could function.  I heard voices, but they were whispers; the overriding voice was me.  And I could control my limbs, my movements, with decent precision, passing laws intended to help.

But his fingers—it was uncanny the way he knew where to press.  As if I had scurvy, my old scars opened… 

The cognitive dissonance I’d always lived with began to shriek.  Two voices shrieking incessantly, clawing at each other.  Right there on the bed, I started to hemorrhage.  And separate.  There is my hand, bleeding from the wrist into the blanket.  To move it now would take telekinesis.

I can’t unite the voices anymore.  The man is kneeling at my bed again, his fingertips searching.  Mercifully I’m going away.  I hate him, my enemy, my destroyer.  With my last bit of consciousness, last bit of will, I vote for him.