The Battle for Knockoff York and the Last Man

The Symmetry Breakers

The citizens of Knockoff York gathered around dismayed to see a great flying saucer hovering over their city like something from a totally outmoded pulp science fiction novel or worse, a Hollywood blockbuster made by those people from California. The citizens of Knockoff York were eternally dismayed that their city seemed to be doomed to be nothing but a knockoff of the original York, and that with every passing event it only became clearer that it would never be York. The appearance of a giant tasteless alien spaceship that had no business showing up in their refined, academic Knockoff York literary fiction magazines was only the last straw in a string of escalating catastrophes for the aspirational Knockoff Yorkers.

The Knockoff Yorkers were actually relieved to learn that there was not only a flying saucer hovering tastelessly over their up-and-coming yet endlessly thwarted city, but over many other cities, such as San Francisco, Beijing, Tokyo, Moscow, Jerusalem, Tehran, Berlin, São Paulo, and others, but most importantly, York and London.

“Yes, but there’s no way it’s a Hollywood saucer over York and London. It must be a Childhood’s End alien craft, you know? Like from the work of British science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke? Or maybe even something you’d see from John Wyndham, H. G. Wells, but certainly not whatever we have here, which has to be some kind of Alfred Bester or Robert Heinlein invading force at best, you know? And at worst, it’s just what it looks like, something from a Marvel movie or a B-list flick!” Brittany said to Citizen Knayme, who was talking from the top of their shared flat in Knockoff York City. They reluctantly turned on their television, which, unlike the book, was generally a product of the Knockoff World and thus contaminated by a certain impurity, and saw the reporters and the recordings of the craft. They seemed to be the exact same craft hovering over every city. “Fake news!” responded Brittany, “there’s no way they can have such an utterly campy craft invading London itself, you know? There’s nothing very British about that!” She turned the volume off and then changed the channel out of exasperation.

“Well, there is finally a spaceship invading Knockoff York just like all the films, so you know what I must do. I’m Batman!” his voice went gravelly and breathy for a few seconds. “Well, no, I could never say I’m Batman since that’s copyrighted. I must become the Knockoff Knight, and defend Knockoff York City now that it’s really happened.”

“Now, aren’t you the Prime Minister of the Kingdom? Why would you want to defend Knockoff York when you can defend the real thing? What would Knockoff Knight be doing showing up to plebian Knockoff York in the Crown of Creation and the Left Hand of Darkness anyway?”

“You’re right. I’ll send one of my original self-operating Knockoff Armor Suits so the public won’t be wondering where Knockoff Knight is even if someone figures out it’s an autonomous drone. Even if Knockoff Knight himself isn’t there, the suit can say he has reasons to be gone.”

“Reasons to be gone at the end of the world? Hah! No one knows you’re Knockoff Knight. Maybe it’s too dangerous for a mere mortal like him, maybe he got captured, you don’t have to worry about embarrassing Knockoff Knight…”

“Embarrassing? Mere mortal? Dear Brittany, we are the lords of creation…”

“I prefer lord and lady of creation!”

“No, that’s sweet, but I mean humanity. We are the greatest thing which has ever been born, we are the image of God himself. We have dominion over the Earth and abilities beyond the rest of creation…”

“What, really? You can think that with all of those mutants, erm, anomalous individuals as they call them, you can think that with gigantic camp flying saucers tastelessly hovering over our cities, destroying civilization with their affront to everything civilized people have strived to maintain such as subtlety and class?”

“Why, yes. What makes humanity the epitome of all creation is not any type of abilities, the beasts often have abilities far exceeding ours. No, what makes humanity the epitome of all creation is our souls. How do you think Solomon commanded demons anyhow?”

“Demons? I never read that in the Bible.” She decided against saying that that sounds like something demons would add to the Bible.

“No, it’s not in standard ones,” Knayme paused, “When I grew up my father, even though he was the most evil man in the world…”

“Are you sure about that? Well, go on.”

“When I grew up, my father would always tell us these stories, about the grand spiritual evolution, the purity of the race, the Atlantean and Lemurian and Aryan and Austro-Californian races…”

“Haha, your Doctor Strange talk is stupid camp enough, don’t become Aquaman now with all the Atlantis nonsense!”

“I hate Aquaman with the fury of a thousand suns. Anyway, one thing that has always been with me is the story of Atlantis. Once, humanity walked with the gods…”

“Gods? Don’t you believe in God, like, the Jesus God?”

“Well, erm, yes, but there were little-g gods too. Once, humanity walked with the gods, and we had a great and advanced civilization, but then war broke out, and in a single day and night Atlantis sank into the sea…”

“A single day and the world was so destroyed they had to live underwater? So like a nuclear war?”

“No, it can’t have been anything so vulgar, they had magic back then, things from above which we no longer understand in our fallen state. I think Plato said there was an earthquake. So, Atlantis went into the ocean, since they were the sole survivors of human civilization, and they needed to protect themselves, so now they lived underwater, and they kept alive all the knowledge of civilization and especially of spiritual things, because the forgetting of spiritual things led to the great war that destroyed the rest of civilization. It was said that when the gods came back down from the heavens Atlantis would rise again…”

“That doesn’t seem to have happened.”

“So, you’re really into the ancient aliens stuff aren’t you? Who said they were supposed to be aliens in spaceships? But even if they were, maybe it’s all myth anyway. Maybe I’m the king of Atlantis. I was well-bred from way back, planned, from thousands of years, maybe I’m the new lord of all creation. I always prefer it when my partners like Dune, anyhow. Maybe I am the first of the new race…”

“Aren’t the mutants, anomalous individuals supposed to be the new race?”

“Mutants? They’re monsters. They’re not human, they are beasts. Having an ability doesn’t make you more than human. Having an ability from the body alone is grotesque and degrading, like a carnal fixation. We who are human have abilities from the gods who serve our commands, not from our flesh. They’re not the Austro-Californians or whatever the Huxleys are saying they are since their profit margins corrupt them, they’re not even Aryans like our race is supposed to be. They are simply odd animals, devils even, and grotesque, disgusting. I doubt anyone with such a carnal fixation as what the Huxleys are calling gifts or talents in their stupid GATE whatever programs even has a soul.”

“Aww, someone’s just jealous because Claude Huxley never welcomed him into the Institute when he was a kid.”

“What? I mean, I wasn’t, but if you’re some kind of mind-reader I’m going to have to terminate our pregnancy. My allegiance is to humanity, I mean, nonhuman animals have the right to their lives as long as they don’t pose some kind of existential threat, but my progeny are dedicated to the purity of the race.”

Knayme looked around sheepishly.

“Sorry, I’m paranoid, it’s been a long night what with flying saucers descending from the sky and all that. I’m sure you’re fine. You seem human to me, I can almost see your soul. When we fly back to London I’ll go put on the Crown of Creation and we can both look at your soul together on a spectrograph, I’m sure it’ll glow gorgeously, my dear.”

Brittany bit her lip since he didn’t seem like he wanted to kiss, and you didn’t have to be a mind-reader to know that much.

“Look what I got,” she pulled a box that said ouija board out of her bag. “Sylvia Plath had one. I don’t want you to be Doctor Strange, I want you to be Ted Hughes, and we go to London and forget all this comic book stuff and be good urban sophisticates, even if the liars on the fake news are showing CGI UFOs hovering over it too. If we don’t go to London where do we go? Yes, let’s go to London.”

Knayme was paying no attention. He was tinkering with some metal tube with a glass screen. Some man was ranting angrily on the TV screen. She turned up the volume.

“Where is Knockoff Knight when our city is in danger? I am Doctor Manhatta, here for all of us residents of Manhatta! Why does Knockoff Knight not show up? Because deep down Knockoff Knight is a colonialist just like the hovering imperialist UFOs that no one wants to do anything about! We must return this land to its original inhabitants! Soon you will be besieged by legions of not-deer from the Blue Ridge Mountains, which are older than bones, the North Star, and your whole world! In the words of Woodie Guthrie, sing it with me: This land is your land! This land is my land! From California! To Manhatta Island! From the Redwood Forest! To the Gulf Stream Waters! This land was made for you and me!” He paused. “And it was not made for alien space colonialists!”

The reporter holding the microphone stammered, “But the aliens say they have come for one goal only. They say they have come to bring peace and advancement to humanity. They say they want to take away all nuclear weapons, end war, advance technology, teach profound truths, and begin a new spiritual era.”

“If the world got nuked tomorrow why would I care? It wasn’t called the Manhattan Project rather than the Knockoff York City project for a reason! We would survive.”

“Excuse me, who is this ‘we?’ I’ve heard 80% of everyone ever would die and civilization would end.”

“And what would that matter? They are occupying this land illegitimately and illegally, and they have renamed everything to absolutely stupid and awful names. If everyone were wrong that wouldn’t make them right. I don’t believe in peace and truth for the sake of peace and truth. I believe in justice and I believe in a new future. I believe in peace and truth but I don’t believe the imperialists from beyond the stars have any goal to give us that, so if we can’t be perfect, at least we’re not perfectly bad.”

“Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me,” she interjected as a stammer, “what kind of new future would there possibly be when humanity gets nuked back to the Stone Age?”

“Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me” he quipped, “what kind of new future would there possibly be when everyone gets sterilized and the planet is totally converted into resources?”

“Everyone gets sterilized and the planet is totally converted into resources? What kind of nonsense is this? This is nothing that has been stated as part of the visitors’ agenda. Where are you even getting this from?”

An older male reporter chimed in. “Wasn’t the first contact with some wokes doing the haka or something too? And now what, ‘space imperialism?’ I think we are not giving the visitors a good impression at all. It is a wonder they have not nuked us themselves, since at this rate they’ll think we’re just going to murder them all like a bunch of primitive savages. Well, we are, aren’t we? Like, where are our spaceships? But let’s not act like it. Let us behave ourselves here and see what the Visitors have to give us.”

At that moment a suit of tarnished gunmetal armor floated on clanking jets pouring from its feet, its pointed mammalian ears scratching the fragile sky. A voice like a metal grate emanated from its helmet to a muffled yet loud droning roar of applause:

“This is Knockoff Knight, here to say: knock it off, Doctor Manhatta! All enemies of humanity must surrender or be defeated!”

The self-identified Knockoff Knight shot metal cables out of its hands toward Doctor Manhatta, but some sort of spark repelled them. Up in the sky was something that looked like a murky cloud which moved in a strange fluttering way, which as it more closely approached the cameras seemed to have wings, a beak, and talons, and which brimmed full of pale bluish lightning.

“This land is our land,” cried Doctor Manhatta, “not the land of parasitic billionaires like Knockoff Knight! Even that stupid name, why do we have Knockoff Knights and Knockoff Yorks here in our new world?”

The younger female reporter interrupted, “no one has the identity of Knockoff Knight. You’re assuming because you don’t like him, but you also have no reason not to like him. And anyway, the names are perfectly good. Why do you seriously want us to call it ‘Manhatta?’ That’s a district. And it sounds like nukes, Doctor Manhatta. I’m sure you want that.”

“How would Knockoff Knight afford to make all these useless Knockoff Armors if he weren’t a billionaire?”

“Knockoff Armors?”

“Yes!” he turned for a split instant, “Thunderbird!” Bolts of lightning shrieked through the suit and pulled it apart. “See? It is empty. It is not alive. We are alive! Are you alive?” The sound of dozens more Knockoff Armors could be heard.

Knayme clicked the metal tube relentlessly. “Wernher! Send all guns and drop an insulator between that jerk and the bird-cloud-thing!”

“Ah,” Brittany replied, “I see you prefer your imaginary friend over me. I’m right here.”

“Not now. We do have to get to London.”

A white plastic-looking robotic man similar to those Japanese dancing robots walked in. His movements were incredibly human-looking. “Hello, my assistant. We need you to pilot us to London.”

“Got it, Knayme,” he said in an incredibly human-sounding voice.

“Wow, it’s a person in a robot suit,” said Brittany.

“You don’t know that. That’s my robot who will fly us to London in my robot jet.” They took the elevator down together and had the robotic man drive them in a private stainless steel limousine that looked more like an armored car than anything that would be found outside of a depiction of a fictional vehicle used by the police state in a Cyberpunk dystopia or a failed military project that unnecessarily drained the US government budget before having to be cancelled. “Don’t you enjoy the convenience of cars that you don’t have to drive?”

“Wow, it’s a chauffeur, what a brilliant invention, Tony Stark,” she breathed and looked at the tape and gaudy chrome attaching the rusting ceiling, “don’t you think Manhatta is anomalous? I mean, what are the original inhabitants and do you think the whole not-deer thing is literal?”

“Please stop, I mean, where on Earth did you get that idea? I mean, it’s OK, it’s been a long night.” He opened the glove box and pulled out a tube of some sort of powder and inhaled it quickly. “It’s OK. When we get to London we’ll look at your soul glowing so brightly on my monitor next to mine, and the soul of your little baby too. When we get to London we’ll make a speech together and the whole world will accept Ka-Ren and the great age of peace and advancement that shall come.”

“So, that’s its name then? Heh.”

“It’s OK, it’s OK, when we get to London we’ll all be in our new Golden Age, and Atlantis will rise again.”

They got out of their Panzer-limo and entered a totally ordinary and vaguely ramshackle-looking jet. “Hey Asimov, please fly us to London, UK.”

“Can do! Look at me!”

“That’s Mr. Meeseeks, and a guy in a robot suit,” she turned to face him, “Nice humor.” I don’t think I can stand Knayme either, she thought.

The plane had a large in-flight television. The program was a discussion of whether or not Manhatta was anomalous, what the Visitors could possibly be since they have so far only interacted via their designated intermediaries and the ships have been hovering in an ominously silent fashion over numerous cities, and an attempt to make a comprehensive list of which cities they were hovering over and what the possible motives for selecting them could be. This last point simply turned into a tour of London and how magnificent everyone thought it was even with a giant tacky pulp UFO floating threateningly over it, which turned to the conspicuous absence of the Prime Minister of the UK.

“Have you heard that Dietrich Fischer has left the UK and the US? I mean, of course you haven’t.”

“He’s left? Back to his native Schland?”

“Isn’t he from South Africa?”

“Yeah, Namibia. I always think of him as German.”

“I always think of you as English and magnificent, my Ted Hughes. When we get to London let’s stop all your Doctor Strange comic nonsense and talk to some proper macrobes on my board, don’t you think? I wonder if it’d work on a plane or it’s like wi-fi.” Knayme was inhaling more powder from the tubes he had stashed seemingly everywhere, and one began to wonder if he had an infinite amount of it and somehow breathed it like oxygen for ordinary men. “I think wi-fi works on a plane,” he grumbled quickly, “but you just shouldn’t. With whatever that kid who’s probably just some creature summoned flying around, don’t. Asimov, stop her. Wernher, stop her,” he commanded, though neither seemed to listen. At the least, even the AI in a box ignored him, thus not confirming that the plastic robot-man was simply a butler in a suit with an extremely dweebish nickname bestowed upon him by an egomaniac.

“Well, anyway, I heard Dietrich Fischer is going to Sealand! But he doesn’t want anyone to know!”

“Like, some themepark? Oh, Knockoff Sealand, that place. I’m the king of the only real Sealand, the United Kingdom of Sealand and the Aryans or whatever I want to call it because people must call it what I do. Well, I’m the Prime Minister, there’s actually a king, but I don’t think people care so much about him, since he’s just ceremonial, you know. My crown and iron fist actually do something unlike that loser. I don’t think it’d matter if the whole world knew, weren’t they just the people who embarrassed the human race by somehow managing to Zoom-call hakas directly to the Visitors before anyone could even say anything? Stupid woke mind virus. I bet that’s what being anomalous is, I bet it’s a woke mind virus, which is why you’re definitely not anomalous, my partner in saving humanity.”

“You seem quite obsessed. I didn’t even do anything. Are you OK? Never mind, forget that.” Knayme inhaled yet more powder from a tube and started to roll a joint while inhaling the powder at the same time. The apparent android called Asimov seemed to be lulling off and letting the plane fly directly overhead.

“I mean like, why is he doing that? Aren’t all his companies like Mordor in London? Isn’t London the capital of the world? I’m so glad to be a Londoner, just like you, and well, since you all like those names, like Tolkien!”

“He’s from South Africa.”

“I wouldn’t know. He’s totally British to me, doesn’t seem the slightest bit African. If you’re, I mean he’s, African, then why is he white, you know? Yeah. Also not a very Dutch name don’t you think?”

“I don’t know or care. That’s not my kind of thing. Would you like to see Earthbase Xanadu? I’m so tired of living in the flat. Speaking of South Africa I’ve got more emeralds than you could count, and diamonds, all the adamantium and vibranium you could ever want…”

“Those two aren’t real! Please shut up with the comic book stuff, we’re British and we need to act it! Now would you like tea?” she did her best British accent, which was not a very good British accent by any account, but everyone still knew what it was supposed to be, and thus couldn’t even pretend to be ignorant of it or tolerate it.

“Tea is supper. This is the morning. It’s not called tea when you drink tea. You are a terrible Brit. I’m sorry. Just stay here for a while and don’t talk until you learn not to sound like a clueless American, OK?”

After many hours they landed in London, the center of all civilization again, and they saw the same campy spaceship that absolutely did not belong defiling the posh and sophisticated British landscape with its Hollywood-blockbuster-ness. It absolutely was not some sort of Arthur C. Clarke craft in person either, and it seemed not to notice them at all, though Knayme knew Ka-Ren was watching them silently through endless camera lenses like a thousand eyes.