Fantasy Phantom

​

The Penguin​

Before he became the Penguin, he was plain old Otis Cleaver.

Well, maybe he wasn't exactly plain. No one ever called Otis plain.

For you see, Otis was born with a certain deformity.

The left half of his body was white.

The right half of his body was black.

The coloration went down the exact middle of his body. The left side of his nose was white; the right side was black. His left arm and left leg were white; his right arm and right leg were black. The left side of his chest was white, the right side black. It even extended to his genitals. The left half of his penis and testicles was white, while the remainder was black.

Otis's mother, who was white, blamed Otis's father, who was black. He in turned blamed her for Otis's unusual complexion.

Elridge Cleaver was a unionized longshoreman for the Port of Los Angeles. He was paid 400,000 credits a year to watch robots load and unload cargo ships. It was a very lucrative and much sought after job, one Elridge inherited from his late Uncle, who had a lot of influence in the Union and even more with organized crime and the Democratic Party, which was not quite as organized.

Murna Goldbaum, on the other hand, was an Unsocial Worker for the World Government. Her job was to go to assisted living facilities and to see to the emotional needs of the elderly population. Specifically, she was tasked with giving senior citizens awards for having solid bowel movements. The awards came in three varieties--gold, silver, and bronze, depending on the quantity and quality produced, but in the "everyone's a winner" philosophy of the World Government, all were entitled to an award, even if the best they could produce was tiny droplets no bigger than a pea.

Murna was active in social causes, in the White Lives Don't Matter Alliance; the Penis to Ass Coalition, the Loving Friends of Laquinta Smallgroup, as well as the Lady Cat Friends who Smoke Weed Justice League. When Murna met Elridge at one of the weekly World Government sponsored White People Are So Racist marches, it was love at first sight. He was tall and handsome and full of virtue, and she had a brilliant smile and heavy breasts which looked like overcooked apple dumplings which sagged a bit but were still a joy to the touch. They performed the ritual of reproduction, bonding emotionally and biologically, and then got married. Elridge impregnated Murna on their wedding night, and nine months later Otis slid out of Murna's outrageously untrimmed bush.

Murna had hoped the baby would be born black. To her, being black was so virtuous! She cursed her whiteness and all the white privilege that came with it. To be born white was to wear the skin of an oppressor, an unconscious racist. But neither she nor Elridge were prepared for what she actually gave birth to, a baby who was precisely half white, and half black.

Of course, they had no choice but to love Otis; at least Murna did, Elridge preferred not to be seen in public with his son, who he once referred to as a "freak of nature."

Otis developed a lot of emotional memories at a young age, none of them good. He remembered crying on Murna's lap at a very young age. He remembered overhearing his parents blaming each other's genes for Otis's predicament; he remembered being picked on and ostracized by kids in school, he remembered using makeup to try to make his right side look as white as his left side, he remembered being kicked out of the Black Student's Union in college, but above all he remembered one word, a word which stuck with him his entire life ever since Joey Madelva pointed a crooked finger at him in First Grade and uttered it.

"Penguin".

The kids tagged him with it relentlessly, even through high school. In college they became tactful enough to say it behind his back. And after that, they simply thought it.

Otis had no friends, and certainly never had a chance with girls. White girls were normally attracted to men who were black, or half black. But Otis was the wrong kind of half black; Otis wasn't virtuous, in their eyes. He was a freak.

After college, Otis got a job with the World Government as a Junior Diversity Analyst in the Encouraged Resettlement Division. The World Government was very disturbed by the racial, ethnic and religious segregation in the world. 95% of the world's black people were in Africa, and 84% of the followers of Laquinta not on Ramada were concentrated in the Middle East. This was de facto evidence of discrimination, and the World Government had allocated funds to relocate populations en masse to Europe and the Americas to encourage desegregation on a continental scale.

It was there that he met Shoshanna Gronstein. Shoshanna had gotten a B.S. in Social Justice from Yale University, and worked in the World Government's prestigious Department of Social Re-Engineering. Shoshanna had a well rounded bosom and an even more well rounded face, perfectly framed by her bushy Jewfro which practically hummed with energy and positivity.

When she saw Otis, Shoshanna didn't see a freak, or an object of scorn or pity; she saw a man, full of virtue. For her entire life, she had been attracted to oppressed people: especially to followers of Laquinta, who suffered from persecution and Laquintaphobia, the highly irrational fear white people had that they would be beaten to death or beheaded by followers of Laquinta, and so on. Shoshanna had fantasized about championing their causes, and confronting her fellow white racists and reeducating them, and receiving fantastic awards for bringing about dramatic social change.

But when she saw poor Otis, she got a Virtuegasm just by looking at him. Otis was an entirely new class of oppressed people, a class of one! Shoshanna's clitoris throbbed with joy and her nipples tingled with excitement as she realized that she could be ten times more virtuous than those who helped minorities, a hundred times more than those who helped Laquintans!.

Otis was puzzled at first by the effort lavished on him by the friendly woman with the wide smile and sexy Jewfro, but he was so lonely that he accepted attention from any quarter, regardless of the intent. And soon enough they were engaged in the ritual of reproduction. As Otis thrusted into Shoshanna and stared into her face, the image of those heavy chipmunk cheeks, the meandering nose, and those thick black eyebrows framed by her Jewfro became imprinted on him as a source of pleasure, just as his half white and half black face did for her.

Soon they were a couple, and marriage was inevitable. Shoshanna brought Otis home to meet her mother Idah and her father Ross. Both had been warned about Otis's special needs, but being told was one thing and seeing was another. Idah looked startled, but gave a kindly smile and invited Otis into her home; but Ross had another reaction entirely.

Over dinner Ross asked Otis a series of probing questions about his complexion which made him uncomfortable. Had he been born like that? Yes. Had he seen a doctor for it? Many. Was it a treatable condition?

At that point Shoshanna burst out and said, "Dad, you're treating Otis like he has a sickness! This is just the way he is! We're all perfectly wonderful, just the way we are!"

Otis was looking down at the table, not eating his food. He had lost his appetite.

Shoshanna glared at her father.

"Of course," Ross said woodenly.

Somehow the topic of marriage, which was supposed to come up that night, didn't.

Instead, Shoshanna raised the subject with her parents two days later. Her father exploded.

"You're going to marry that freak!" he said.

"Dad! The World Government has forbidden that word! You could be reported!" Shoshanna cried.

Idah grabbed Shoshanna's hand. "Your father didn't mean it, dear."

"Yes I did!" said Ross.

"We're just... concerned," said Idah. "Shoshanna, dear, what if you have children?"

"I hope we do!" said Shoshanna defiantly. "What of it?"

"What if... if they take after Otis?" Idah asked.

"Mother, I'm shocked! Are you the same woman who took me to the Real Men Have Vaginas march?" Shoshanna asked. "Are you the same woman who helped me sew the Ass to Mouth Quilt? Are you the same Mom who signed the one child pledge to fight Temperature Change?"

"Of course I am," said Idah.

"However my baby looks will be wonderful. I hope my baby is half black and half white! It would double the class of oppressed people in Otis's category!"

Ross reeled as if he had been struck by a blow. Idah licked her lips and looked down.
​

********​

The day of the wedding, Shoshanna paced back and forth in a waiting room in the Sacred Temple of the She-Goddess in her black wedding gown. White was a symbol of the racist patriarchy. All the guest were there except her parents. "Where are they?" she muttered.

"They'll be here," said her best friend, Eliza Glickstein.

And then Shoshanna's comm chimed.

It was Mother.

She was crying.

Father was dead.

He had simply failed to wake up in the morning. She had rushed him to the hospital, but the Doctors said it was probably a heart attack.

A heart attack. On her wedding day.

Shoshanna cried out as she hugged Eliza, feeling her friend's much larger Jewish breasts pressed against her own. Eliza was large and rotund, sort of like a potato knish.

And then she put out a brave face and got married to Otis.
​

*********​

The first few months of marriage were bliss for Otis. He had a job where he commanded respect. He had a wife who loved him. Everything was fine.

But Shoshanna could not say the same. She kept getting an uneasy feeling in her mind, a feeling she was being watched. Sometimes when she would look in the mirror she would see a glowing, shadowy shape behind her, but when she turned to look, it was gone.

She spent long hours thinking about her father, often staring into space, losing track of time.

And then she started hear voices in her head, voices whispering too low for her to hear, but they were definitely having some kind of effect on her.

Otis wasn't blind to what was happening to his wife. He realized she needed something more in her life. And so he tried to give it to her.

With his penis.

He banged her almost every night, even when his penis was sore and red. He told himself he was trying to do a good deed, to give Shoshanna something new to think about. And then, two months later, it happened.

Shoshanna became engorged with Otis's fetus. She was overjoyed when she found out, hugging and kissing him excitedly. For a time, she was happy again.

For a time.

But then those whispering voices came back into her head. Shoshanna's pattern of thinking started to change. Gradually, instead of believing that she was going to give birth to a virtuous minority, she came to think that she was growing a freak inside of her, a freak who would be tormented by the rest of the world, just like Otis was.

It was a gradual process, hearing the voices wear her down; Shoshanna herself didn't know exactly when her change in attitude happened. But one morning she got up and she knew, she knew, that she could not have this baby.

She got up and had breakfast with Otis, chatting amiably with him before going to work. But when she got to work she immediately left, and drove to East Los Angeles.

Planned Unparenthood had sprinkled HappyHappy booths throughout the minority community, to make sure minorities had more than equal access to HappyHappys. Shoshanna drove her grav car to the first seedy neighborhood she could find, and sure enough, she saw a HappyHappy booth on a street corner, between a World Government Rehabilitation Therapy Center and an Anal Dissolve boutique. Even as she got out of her grav car and marched straight for the HappyHappy booth, she could hear the excited sounds of local youths who were stripping her grav car of all its removable components as partial reparations for generations of discrimination. That didn't matter now. The only thing now that mattered was getting the HappyHappy, the voice in her head assured her.

When Shoshanna stepped up to the booth it automatically opened. It was basically little larger than a padded examination table. An image of a smiling black woman appeared inside. "Welcome! Are you here for a HappyHappy?"

"Yes," said Shoshanna blankly.

The image of the black woman frowned. "My holoscanners say that you're white. Are you sure you want this?"

"Yes," said Shoshanna again.

"Then please lie down on the couch on your back."

Shoshanna, taking a deep breath, lay down on the black examination table. The lid of the booth closed around her, and she found herself trapped inside.

"Welcome! My name is Velma," said the black lady, who Shoshanna was increasingly sure was an AI. "What is your name?"

"Shoshanna Gronstein."

"What a beautiful name! Please remove your pants and panties, Shoshanna Gronstein," Velma said.

It was a tight squeeze, removing her clothes while lying on her back, but Shoshanna complied. She felt very alone, very vulnerable as she lay there on the couch.

"Before we get started, I need your holothumbprint on this contract." A glowing contract appeared in front of her.

"What does it say?" Shoshanna asked.

"It's all routine, just stuff to satisfy the lawyers," Velma assured her.

Shoshanna hesitated, but the voice in her head, You must get rid of this thing inside of you, daughter, and so she pressed her thumb to it.

"Good," said Velma. "And now, as required by law, I must inform you that anything removed from your body may be put to a variety of uses, including but not limited to the following: attempts by Kamino to create a clone army for the New Republic, a nutritional supplement for cat food, organ transplants, efforts to reanimate the dead, as an exhibit in the Smithsonian Museum of Spent Fetuses -"

Shoshanna stopped listening. She was entirely numb.

And then a robotic arm came out of the wall, an arm holding a tube.

"Spread your legs, dear," said Velma. "Wider. A bit wider. Good, good dear."

Shoshanna flinched when the tube entered her. She cried out when she felt suction. Her eyes turned to the wall of the booth, where she saw electronic devices behind a glass partition. Velma, programmed to distract her during the procedure, said, "You've noticed the prize wall?"

"Prize wall?"

"Every time you get a HappyHappy, you get a ticket. When you accumulate enough tickets, you can redeem them for a prize. See that electric blender? If you get five HappyHappys, you can take that home with you. See that music dispenser? That cost only ten HappyHappy's. And over there we have-"

Shoshanna was still deciding whether she wanted to start earning points towards getting the blender or the music dispenser when she felt something being sucked out of her womb. She cried out, but in her head she heard a voice, the voice of her father, saying Gooooooood.
​

*********​

When Otis found out she had lost the baby, he was naturally upset. He hugged and consoled his weeping wife and promised they would try again.

"No!" said Shoshanna, recoiling from his touch. "Never again!"

Otis looked incredibly hurt. "You're upset now. Maybe you'll change your mind in time."
​

*********​

Shoshanna's mind did change with time, but not in the way Otis expected.

They lived in a wonderfully diverse apartment building in downtown Santa Monica. Shoshanna was friendly with some of the people in the building, but she barely noticed Robert Wilkinson, her next door neighbor, a tall, strong young white man in his mid 20's. And she certainly wasn't attracted to him.

But then that mysterious voice in her head started telling her that she was attracted to white people; specifically, that she was attracted to him.

At first, Shoshanna thought it ridiculous. Robert, after all was white, and white people were either racists, or unconscious racists. After all Shoshanna was white, and she clearly knew she was an unconscious racist herself. It was all in her genes. And yet, day by day, she found herself increasingly attracted to Robert. He was single, he was young, he was handsome, and he always smiled and talked flirtatiously to her in those mysterious white ways when they encountered each other in the hallways. Robert knew she was married, and who she was married to, but by the way he smiled, the way he looked at her, she knew he was more than just casually interested.

And then Shoshanna, to her great surprise, found herself kindling that interest. She would have longer and longer talks when she saw him, find herself smiling flirtatiously and touching his arm when they talked and looking deeply into his eyes.

And then the day came when Otis had to leave for a three day Diversity of Skin Color Conference in Stockholm, leaving Shoshanna all alone. She immediately cornered Robert and invited him over for dinner.

"Dinner?" said Robert, raising his eyebrows.

"I'm all alone tonight," said Shoshanna, wiggling her hips. "It's just a friend thing."

A friend thing.

But Robert knew otherwise. He knew otherwise, even before he entered Shoshanna's apartment that night, even before he saw the romantic candle lit dinner, even before he heard the soft music playing in the background, even before he saw Shoshanna dressed in her best fuck-me dress, the one she had worn on her honeymoon with Otis.

Shoshanna had stood in front of her bedroom mirror, staring at her breasts sticking out of her fuck-me dress. What am I doing? She thought. I love Otis. I can't be doing this.

Otis is a freak. You can't love him. You need a white man, a voice inside her head said.

"No," Shoshanna said, trembling as she traced the outlines of her breasts.

The white man. You must have sex with the white man, the voice insisted.

The voice had been working on her for weeks, filling her with dreams of making love to Robert. As she stood before the mirror, she felt a burning in her clitoris, and saw her nipples were erect. And then the doorbell chimed.

And so when she opened the door she was all smiles to Robert, speaking in a sexy musical voice. "So nice to see you...." She said flirtatiously.

Robert's eyes grew wide when he saw what Shoshanna was wearing, and even wider when he saw her erect nipples sticking out through the flimsy material of her bra and the even more flimsy material of her fuck-me dress.

The tension over dinner was thicker than the T-Bone steak Shoshanna had prepared for him. Robert stared at her, and she stared at him, and neither of them could wait for dinner to be over. Each chew, each bite, each swallow was an exertion, like a step in climbing a mountain, a step closer to reaching the top, an anticipation building in each of them.

Finally, it was done, and Shoshanna found herself inviting Robert to sit with her on the couch.

As he sat down by her side, Shoshanna noticed the giant erection in Robert's pants. How to begin? Should she initiate? She was a married woman! There was no way she should-

And then her ruminations were rudely interrupted by the feelings of Robert's lips against hers. Shoshanna responded in kind, even as she thought, I shouldn't be sleeping with a white man! They are so wicked! And yet she couldn't resist the fires that had been stoked so tenderly, so skillfully in her body.

They made love, right there on the couch. Shoshanna looked down and felt surprised to see a single colored penis sliding into her. She was so used to seeing Otis's half white, half black penis making love to her. She had loved to see his nutsack, half white, half black, bobbing all around as he-

"Aaaaaah!" Shoshanna cried out, as the hard bar of Robert's manhood brought her to a rapid conclusion. Robert cried out as well, and as he squirted her with his reproductive juices, Shoshanna wondered what the voice in her head planned for her next debasement.


Shoshanna and white Robert had sex again the following night, and the night after that, and then the night after that, though Robert finally proved reluctant. "Isn't your husband coming back tonight?" he had asked.

"No, baby," said Shoshanna, kissing him furiously. "He's staying an extra day. The Diversity Conference wasn't diverse enough, and they had to delay things while they flew in a planeful of Cambodians." She said it without even knowing if it was true.

"Oh, all right," said Robert.

And then they made love that night....

Even as Robert was plowing into her in the master bedroom, they heard the front door opening.

"What was that?" Robert whispered.

Shoshanna reached up and kissed him. She was terrified by what was about to happen, but she no longer had any control over herself. Whatever was inside her was controlling her now. "Fuck me harder, Robert!" she commanded.

Robert complied. And so it was on a downward thrust that Otis entered the bedroom, his arms filled with gifts for his wife, and his eyes grew wide as he took in the scene.

"What the fuck is going on here!" he cried.

Robert pulled out of Shoshanna and jumped off the bed like he had been burned. "What's happening, Shoshanna?" he cried.

"That's my line," said Otis, stepping forward with fire in his eyes.

"Otis... I didn't expect you," Shoshanna cried.

"Apparently not," said Otis, picking up the antique baseball bat he always kept by the bed. There were frequently burglaries in the neighborhood, as a community of illiterate Guatemalans relocated to Santa Monica by the World Government were trapped in a perpetual cycle of poverty and helplessness caused by racism and injustice.

"Hey man, take it easy," said Robert.

Otis did not take it easy. He swung his bat at Robert, connecting with his head. Robert went down like a plucked pineapple. But Otis didn't stop there, he kept swinging and swinging until Robert's head was crushed like a... like a crushed pineapple.

"What have you done! You've killed him!" Shoshanna cried.

Otis raised the bloody bat. "Why, Shoshanna? Was it about the baby?"

"There was no baby," Shoshanna snapped.

"No baby?"

"I got a HappyHappy!" Shoshanna cried.

"No!" The bloody bat slipped through Otis's fingers. "Why, Shoshanna?"

"Isn't it obvious? I could never have a baby with a freak like you!" she cried. No! she cried, in her head. But the tiny voice was not in control now. The other voice was.

Otis's mouth opened so wide that a nuclear golf ball could have flown into it. He screamed and grabbed Shoshanna by the throat. She cried out as he choked her, his grip tightening with every grasp... and then Shoshanna stopped crying.

Otis stood up and looked at their lifeless bodies. Despite his handicap, he had thought he could be a part of this society. The world scorned him and hated him, but he had been shielded by Shoshanna's love. But now he realized that the entire world hated him for what he was, and in return he hated them. From this day forward he vowed to bring misery and death to the rest of humanity.

And on that day he took the name that had been given to him, 20 years earlier.

He called himself... Penguin.


The Penguin embarked on a killing spree across the Southwestern United States. It didn't matter who he killed. Life was his enemy. All must die. He had just snuffed out the life of his 29th victim in a shooting rampage in a supermarket, when the man who probably would have been his 30th victim, a quaint believer in gun rights who had his own hidden compression pistol, used it to end the Penguin.


Except, it wasn't the end. The Penguin was so filled with rage, that even as he died, he watched as his own body as his kalak floated out of it. He would continue his reign of terror, he vowed, simply by other means.


[The Present Day]

"What have you brought me, Galina?" the Penguin asked impatiently.

Galina was a Lemure. She looked like an ordinary kalak, except her eyes were red instead of white. The Penguin himself had taken human form, his half black, half white face staring down at her impatiently.

"Another prospect for you, Master," said Galina.

The Penguin looked at the glowing shadowy shape with red eyes standing by Galina's side. "A Fiend?"

"A Shade, Master," said Galina.

The Penguin made a face.

"He is strong enough," Galina insisted.

The Penguin had put Galina in charge of finding another kalak to help him launch the Nova Missiles. As he had learned, it took two officers to launch the Nova Missiles. He needed a kalak strong enough to take over a missile control officer to make it happen. But so far Galina hadn't brought him many suitable prospects. It was hard enough finding a Shade or a Fiend, but to find a willing one was rare. Each one had their own agendas, their own reasons for being, and theirs was not his.

This one probably would not work out either.

"All right," the Penguin sighed. "You," he said, speaking to the Shade. "Take control of me."

"What?" said the Shade, in a deep voice.

"Go inside of me and take control of my body." As a Poltergeist, the Penguin had taken human form. His body was not quite the same as a regular human body, but it was close enough.

The Shade shimmered in front of him.

"Do it!"

Galina visibly cringed at the harshness of his voice.

The Shade glided forward, and flew into the Penguin's body. For a moment, the Penguin stood perfectly still. Then his body started to buckle; it started to tremble; then his body went through violent contortions, as if there was a battle, raging inside of it. Galina heard faint screams, and then wisps of white light, like steam, came out of the Penguin, as the last cry rang silent.

And then the Penguin turned to look at Galina.

"Not strong enough?" Galina asked fearfully.

"No. Not strong enough," said the Penguin. And as he spoke, a ball of energy appeared in his hand, and in moments it was Galina's turn to cry out.​