This work of fiction comes from an abundance mindset. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or blatantly stolen from existing copyrighted works. This is a fair use notice.

Text copyright © 2025 by E B Thomas

All rights reserved.

www.morepowerfulsports.com

Table of Contents

Foreward to the .ePub Edition

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Foreward to the .ePub Edition

Hello. If you are reading this, that means you have downloaded my book. Thank you.

This book was originally published online in December 2024, as a simple HTML website. Like with just text on it. Then I got some messages that it was hard to read that way, and I had to agree. It was really hard to read that way. I had thought of it as like a theater of cruelty thing, making people read my book on an annoying website if they wanted to read it so bad. But then I realized I should just do another week of work to convert it to a format where people would actually read it. That would be the .ePub format.

So this story was originally a short story in a larger project, a collection of 21 short stories. In late 2022 I decided to like collect all the funny story ideas that I had been thinking about for years and make a short story collection out of them. I also had a good title, More Powerful Sports. I heard this phrase on the Opie & Anthony Show in like 2008; Patrice O’Neal said it. I always thought it would be a really good title for something, and then I had the idea for a short story collection, and then it was like bam. A short story collection called More Powerful Sports.

In 2023 I spent the year collecting these 21 story ideas and trying to like add to them and shape them into something good. It was actually really hard. Part of the reason why it was hard is I was spending like half the time on this one idea, the 2069 story. The idea behind this one was like, people in modern internet culture are always saying “this is like 1984” or “this is literal 1984,” to the point where it’s like a cliché now to say that. It’s like beyond a cliché. And still, people say it all the time. But they never flesh out what they really mean by it.

Once I got some momentum with like choosing good plot specifics for the modern 1984 remix, I soon realized that it was far too funny to be a short story. It needed to be a full-length novel. I needed to go the extra mile and literally steal huge passages from the original, DJ-like, and recontextualize them to bring out the full flavor of the irony. I needed to make the text a whole 40% longer than the original 1984 text to account for the modern Ministry of Truth equivalent, whose M.O. is to always be producing more and more spectacularly insane narratives. And I needed to put it up for free on my own website so I could steal as much copyrighted material as the project wanted.

So that’s what this is. This is the book. 2069. In .ePub format. It’s about how people online are always saying this is like 1984 or that’s like 1984. But…what do they really mean?

E. B. Thomas

New York City

January 2025

1

It was 2069. It actually wasn’t, but that’s what got the most clicks so that’s what every newspaper printed every day.

Nick Karamay stood outside his apartment building in the Americatown district of Camp Bell Special Interplanetary Settlement, Macintosh Republic of China, Mars. This was a settlement on the planet Mars the size of a major city, which was also a political territory of the Macintosh Republic of China and located within a quantum computer in the Xinjiang province that allowed it to exist on Earth and Mars simultaneously. It was represented by one of the seven stars on the MRC’s seven-star flag.

Nick had just walked out of his building to go to work, then realized he forgot his charger and doubled back. Now he looked up at the array of cameras installed around the sliding glass front entrance to the building. The cameras locked onto any human that walked in front of them, identified them by gait or facial recognition, and cross referenced them with their social credit profile. This usually took one or two seconds.

If you were a resident of the building standing in front of the door, like Nick was, you then had the option to enter the building. You just had to do one more thing, one extra security measure that was completely, 100% safe: a government safety check called a Good Boy Dance. If you weren’t harboring any antistate attitudes or sympathies, you had nothing to worry about. He stood in front of the cameras and went through the same Good Boy Dance he had done probably a hundred thousand times now, since they were introduced right before the last People’s Election 5 iPhones ago: he hopped from foot to foot and flapped his arms up and down stupidly and sang in his highest Mickey Mouse voice, “I’m gay! I’m gay! I’m gay and I’m a little girl and I like to dress up in pretty pink dresses and be gay because I’m a gay little goo goo ga ga girl!!” There was a whirring sound. A green light lit up. The glass door to Nick’s building slid open and he felt a cool breeze as he walked inside.

This was RG Towers, Nick’s apartment building. It was designed by the Regular Gravity Company, which was most famous for designing the Sky of the Future, the 24k video dome that covered Camp Bell and protected it from the harsh Martian atmosphere. The dome used unprecedented scientific genius to solve the problem of Martian gravity so that within it, gravity worked exactly the same as it did in Xinjiang, on Earth. It was technology that the United Areas of Amazon wished it had, but China was at least 75 years ahead.

The lobby was very tacky faux-luxury style, like a generic hotel, with lots of plastic and stucco. Everything in Mars Camp Bell was like this. At a circular reception desk there were two volunteers from the neighborhood committee. Nick acknowledged one of them.

Nick lived in the replica Kowloon Walled City/Pod Living wing of RG Towers, which had the single-room-occupancy, pod apartments in the style of the famous Hong Kong urban village with its “coffin rooms” and communal living format. The RG Towers version wasn’t dirty or dangerous like the original; it was all built to code and cleaned regularly. The residents were mostly young professionals (it actually had a reputation as a “dorm for adults”), but there were also a few families in some larger, normal-sized apartments on each floor. To get one of these you had to have political connections. But just living in the Kowloon Pod Living wing was kinda cool because there was a sitcom about it on Netflix China, so like everyone in Asia knew about it. On the wall by the elevator was a street art mural of Big Chungus, the fat Bugs Bunny character who had been memed into being the People’s Representative from Xinjiang. He was a deep fake programmed by Spaceship Girl, and so it was impossible to criticize him. He was actually a meme controlled by the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, the paramilitary branch of the CCP in Xinjiang. It was a long story.

In the mural Big Chungus was doing a Jordan pose and dunking over some light blue alien figures in his cartoon basketball jersey. This imagery was from his latest movie with president trans lebron where they go exploring on a space trip and are attacked by some rogue Martian locals, who look suspiciously like Uyghurs, and end up beating them in basketball. Above the scene of Big Chungus dunking on the light blue figures was his famous slogan TRUST THE PLAN. The mural was done by a really trendy graffiti artist, Mao Zedong IV, who was definitely an agent of the Chinese Intelligence Agency. Nick had had to block Mao IV on all his socials after last People’s Election because the algorithm suggested so much of his content to him, and it was all violently anti-Uyghur.

Nick wondered how many Uyghurs were in Vocational Skills Education Training Centers for defacing or trying to remove Big Chungus imagery. Certainly thousands. Emails recently leaked from CCP leadership in Karakax County, Xinjiang, casually mentioned that 311 Uyghurs had been detained from a single neighborhood. He saw a meme recently that said 1 in 6 Uyghurs in Onsu County was in an education and training center. Almost all on charges of antistate misconduct. He didn’t know how many people were there overall. Could never know. Everyone knew Chinese government statistics weren’t reliable. The building would probably do another Big Chungus mural soon too, Nick thought, since it was almost Empathy Week again. He grimaced and pressed the elevator button.

As much as Nick hated the fakeness and the corruption that the image of Big Chungus symbolized, the face was also somewhat soothing. Once the CCP shut down the country in iPhone46time and did the fake election to legitimize the cartoon character as the People’s Representative from Xinjiang, the nonstop violent agitprop finally let up. It was the event that broadcast that the Uyghurs in Xinjiang had now been totally disenfranchised. They would never again have a real leader. They were totally hopeless. Xinjiang was totally in control of the CCP elites in Beijing. It was like when the Roman state had a donkey as their senator. The Uyghurs were cooked. The purges, which had been dragging on since iPhone30times, were finally over.

Big Chungus was originally a deep fake science fair project programmed by Spaceship Girl. She used the popular Minecraft meme Big Chungus, from early iPhonetimes, as the main avatar of the algorithm, and also programmed a bunch of other things into it. It always varied according to the needs of the CCP at the moment. When they wanted to do the Mars Camp Bell space project, Big Chungus was always talking about getting his PhD in Gigaphysics from NASA-Harvard Space Academy. When they wanted to merge Alibaba with Uber Technologies to form the Dick Sucking Company, Big Chungus was always talking about his financial internship he did at the #1 investment bank in Tokyo. When they needed to pass a new law that allow DS-Co to exploit its delivery drivers more, they did a movie about Big Chungus working as a struggling DS-Eats delivery driver in the outer boroughs of New Prime City.

Big Chungus LLC was eventually was registered as a corporate entity and used as a shell company for a consortium of private companies and investment banks that invested in a lot of Xinjiang infrastructure. This led to the Golden Age of Chinese Development in Xinjiang, about iPhone20times-40times. In about iPhone30time there was a massive scandal looming where several investment banks were caught insider trading using the official Big Chungus accounts on social media to unfairly influence markets. Right when authorities were closing in, they announced that Big Chungus was getting into Chinese politics and would be running for People’s Representative of Xinjiang in the People’s Election of iPhone32time.

Big Chungus’s first politics arc was highly controversial, since he was not an actual person, but an avatar of a consortium of corporate interests. The problem was, there were so many other chaotic narratives happening in Xinjiang at the time that it was impossible to organize any actual resistance. Big Chungus was elected in an obviously corrupt election, which people were afraid to question because 6/9 had just happened and questioning the government was unpatriotic. It was also right at the end of the Mars Camp Bell Project, when the MRC had just spent a decade building a city to Mars, and it was about to be opened. Then, just a few months after Big Chungus was “sworn in” for the first time the quantum computer was turned on and Urumqi was teleported to Mars. This was iPhone33time. Every media channel in the entire world was talking about it nonstop until about iPhone38time. It was certainly impossible to talk about anything else in the Xinjiang media. Anything portraying Big Chungus in a remotely negative light was completely forbidden.

The way the MRC government did this was, it used the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC) and Chinese Intelligence Agency (CIA) to make a bunch of TV shows establishing the new back story and lore for the character of Big Chungus. They would be heavily advertised and shown weekly on Sundays, to replace the traditional worship service. These were controlled completely by the government, but produced by nominally independent media companies according to the rules of Chinese Space Communism. They were nicknamed miniseries of truth. Because everyone knew they were dramatized movies, but when it was about this subject matter everyone had to be super serious and pretend it was real. These shows, they weren’t fiction. They weren’t nonfiction. They were like national corporate religious texts. They were miniseries of truth.

The original Big Chungus politics lore, from the original Netflix miniseries of truth in iPhone30time, was that he was a CCP tax collector from Beijing who was persecuted in Xinjiang by the backwards locals. He would constantly be bullied just because he looked different than the Uyghur locals and was overweight. He got through it by loving and worshiping the works of Mao Zedong.

Now Netflix China had just made another reboot because big Chungus had another People’s Election coming up. This one emphasized how he was one of the original HEROs, or Han Emigrating Right Over to Xinjiang, as part of the famous H.E.R.O. Act. This was a program that gave Han Chinese citizens tax breaks to move to Xinjiang and work to modernize the region. “Han constructors,” they were called, and they brought Xinjiang the “gift of Chinese development” in the government rhetoric. Big Chungus was running on passing another bill like this. In fact, unfortunately for its critics, the bill just so happened to be essential for Chinese Space Communism and any decent person would support it. The elevator door opened.

It might seem like this was an insane amount of lore to keep track of. That would be correct. The way it worked in Chinese Space Communism wasn’t like how it worked in 1984, where there was only one story allowed and everything else was censored from the state media. It was more like the state media cultivated an information environment that was so overwhelming with spectacular psyopped narratives that it was impossible to even focus on anything for five seconds, let alone organize against it politically. The easier option was just to stay distracted with the harmless content like Hotan Ronnie, which was plentiful. The government had even actually admitted the existence of this program, called Operation Bedtime Stories, which was administered through the CIA. It was called Operation Bedtime Stories because people would usually watch the most propaganda as they fell asleep.

Inside the elevator there were two paper stickers of Big Chungus right next to the buttons. They were an older model of the sticker that also included the hashtag #MakeTerroristsAfraid. This was popular back at the start of the purges. Nick was pretty sure his neighbor’s teenage kids put them there. If anyone ripped them off, they would make a TikTok about how threatened it made them feel, and in their home no less. Whatever they posted, the neighborhood committee would signal boost. They would probably get the elevator surveillance video of him scraping the sticker off and it would go viral. He would be surfaced. Then he would be canceled. Nick pressed the button to his floor, next to the Big Chungus #MakeTerroristsAfraid sticker.

The TV screen in the elevator was showing a ladies morning show. It was now a split screen: on the left was a group of boujee women, one from each ethnic group in Xinjiang, sitting at a round table in a TV studio in Beijing; on the right was a mug shot of the gigapop streamer War Machine, with his five face tattoos. The CCP media was meming him back into the news so Big Chungus could cancel him again before Empathy Week, Nick thought. He was careful to avoid looking directly at the screen because his Neuralink would snap-to-screen and he would lose his place in the YT video he was watching in a small window in the top right of his vision. And it would interrupt the audio too.

The video he was watching (mostly listening to) via NeuraPlay was a 4-hour Hotan Ronnie compilation on YouTube. It was part of a Hotan Ronnie playlist of 89 similar videos.

Hotan Ronnie was an internet lolcow who lived outside rural Hotan, south of the Taklamakan Desert in Xinjiang, a very rustic frontier town. He was probably about 30 now. He used to work at a Burger King in Hotan, then he got sent to the Kashgar Vocational Training and Education Center, but they realized he was autistic and he got sent home. Nick didn’t know all the details of that part. He hadn’t watched the Vocational Training and Education Center arc yet. But when Ronnie got out, he got a job at Wendy’s and started vlogging again. He vlogged about it for at least a few iPhones. The video Nick was watching now was from this Wendy’s arc. A lot of the streams were about Ronnie’s relationship woes too. He was just this random dude, but it was still good content because Ronnie was so quotable, he was sincere about his vlogging, and he got frustrated easily.

Now in the video Ronnie was saying, “today was one of those days, man. I was stocking lids in the lobby and lo and behold I pull the large lids thing open. In the midst of doing that, somehow the medium lids thing above it comes undone and pssshhhh lids all over the place. I’m just like ‘son of a Baconator, that just happened.’ Got the lids picked up no problem. The second time it happened my arm caught it before it happened, you know what I’m sayin, and holy shit we were busy, it was unreal. Then I get asked Ronnie can you put some more water in the chili well please, so I got over and I’m in the kitchen, and I pull the chili thing out of the thing, and I go to throw hot water in it, and I pour too much hot water in it, because when I put the chili pan back in the thing, I spilled a shit ton of water all over the, all over the back of the kitchen. So I’m sitting there trying to get it cleaned up. And in the midst of doing that, I’ve got this huge ass stack of trays, and trash in the lobby is starting to get full, and I basically get told, go do your trash run. And I’m like alright, I’ll do my trash run. And ooh uh that was not good. But, you know, it was better when it was over.”

The elevator arrived at Nick’s floor and he got out. He walked to his door and saw himself in the mirror at the end of the hall: a smallish, frail figure, in his daily commuter uniform of dirty sweatpants, hoodie, running shoes, and backpack. He actually, with his facial features, gait, his whole aura, he did look like a real stereotypical Uyghur. He was aware of this, so he had to be careful to not dress too generically or do any stereotypical Uyghur things, like wear a doppa or drink pomegranate juice. Pomagranates and pomegranate juice were classified as a hate symbol because Central Asia is known for its pomegranates, so they were a symbol of Uyghur pride. Separatist.

Even with his comfortable modern sweatpants and hoodie uniform, his unshaven face and too-long mullet hair made him easily mistakable for one of the thousands of homeless Uyghur opium addicts living on the streets. That’s why Nick always carried his talisman, his symbol that he was boujee and woke and not going to cause a problem: his red-framed reading glasses, slung now in the zipper of his hoodie. These were the new trend with the CCP #brotherhood posters who memed Big Chungus because they symbolized that the point of view of the person wearing them was primary and would be imposed on the normies. The trend was solidified with the iPhone48time super-hit gigapop song Red Frames by California Zephyr.

When he got to his door, Nick performed another Good Boy Dance for the camera above his door and then went into his pod. The room was just big enough for a futon and a pile of clothes and shoes and a TV attached to the wall that he used to watch YouTube. It was slightly bigger than the “coffin rooms” of the original Kowloon Walled City and urban villages across eastern China. But it was all he needed, really. Nick just used this place for sleeping; he used his cubicle at DS-Work as his living room/office, and Planet Fitness for his daily shower and sauna/cold plunge.

In the view outside Nick’s window, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold. Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the Sun was shining in 24k in the Sky in infrared blue color, which showed up to the human eye as regular sunlight (scientists had proven it has health benefits and boosts the immune system), the scene still seemed to be indoors somehow. There was a whole block covered in about 30 8-foot-high posters of Spaceship Girl’s face. She had her own new miniseries of truth out. Spaceship Girl’s origin story was that she had died in a bus bombing during the 6/9 attacks, and actually brought herself back to life using just what she saw on a CCP Kids Science YouTube channel and her own unique Chinese ingenuity. Who could forget that iconic movie scene/Historical moment when she’s on the bus on that fateful day, she looks at a book she’s reading about space, then looks at her father recording on a cell phone, and points to the picture in the book and says “I like spaceship!” and right at that moment the 6/9 bomber’s vest detonates. Little did those cowardly hateful terrorists know, she would go on to be the brave pilot who flew her spaceship all the way to Mars to establish the first Chinese base there—all this despite having her right arm blown off by the Uyghur terrorist’s bus bomb on that fateful day in iPhone25time.

The new current reboot was about her fighting the next wave of violent terrorists who were threatening China’s galactic domination by doing misinformation online. The posters down in the street were just a close-up of her Han Chinese face looking up at the camera like she just has the best revenge in all of history planned. Tourists and junkies and DS-Eats delivery drivers passed by them, oblivious.

There were also state tourism banners attached to the light poles on this block; one was detached on the bottom so it was flapping fitfully in the artificially produced and totally safe wind, alternately covering and uncovering four words: “experience chinese space communism” like that in all lowercase. In the far distance a helicopter was flying high in the Sky releasing some chemical that was forming a fluffy cloud behind it.

Nick grabbed his phone charger and threw it in his backpack. The phone actually still came standard with the Neuralink, since research found that people liked the social aspect of the physical iPhone, where you can look at it to signal to people around you irl that you are minding your own business. Nick liked having a phone on him, too, because it made it easier to skip ads: even if the ad was unskippable, you could still put your hand over your phone and mute it. You couldn’t do that with ads on Neuralink.

Right then Nick realized, hey, I’m in no hurry. I can just chill for a minute. He took the charger out of his backpack and plugged in his phone. He had nothing to do that afternoon, so he could let the phone charge a bit before leaving again. He lingered standing basically in the only place there was to stand in his studio apartment, the path between the futon and the wall. Cords and chargers ran like vines on the thick dirty carpet by his feet. A table nearby was messy with weed and apartment stuff. He took off his running shoes and put on his foam slides. He looked out the window again.

From the cliffs of Americatown Heights, Nick could see some green sports fields down by the waterfront area, then across the replica Nile River, past the replica Brooklyn Bridge, to the glittering skyscrapers of the financial district of downtown Tokyoville. This was the business center of Mars Camp Bell and home to the Mars Stock Exchange (which was rivaled in scale only by those in London and Prime City). Tokyoville was also home to the Forbidden Apple Store, which towered above the rest of the skyline; a round skyscraper with its domed roof and extended spire top. Around it all the buildings were finished in the traditional Chinese palatial architecture style, with plenty of red pagodas and double-eave hip and gable roofs.

This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste—this was Ürümqi, capital city of Xinjiang and first city ever enclosed in a video dome and transported to Mars via quantum computer. Also known as Mars Camp Bell (named after a descendant of the telecom industry family), aka New Prime City (which included the outer boroughs outside the Sky of the Future, on Earth), aka Marvinsland, aka HEROville, aka the Good Project, aka The Big Project, aka Empathy City. An entire city on Mars. And a great Historical world city at that. China was literally a century ahead of the UAA and the whole rest of the world. These very streets had been a center of global trade since Ürümqi first connected China to the Middle East via the Silk Road; now they were connecting China to Mars!! Outer space!!!! Greatest glories of all glories to greatest most powerful nation of all time Macintosh Republic of China!!!! That was the angle in all the propaganda campaigns, at least. There were about 10 CCP-Award-winning miniseries of truth about the New Prime City lore, just in iPhone30times alone. It was glaze city, in retrospect. But nobody in Xinjiang questioned it because who got the be the big hero in the end? Who got to go to Mars? Out of all the glorious Chinese cities the MRC could have picked, that honor went to sweet little Ürümqi, that’s who. It was a great favor by the CCP and a great honor for the Uyghur.

Hotan Ronnie was saying the urinal was broken one day so he had to scoop out all the piss with a chili cup, and when he was doing it his manager came in and said they were getting phone calls again from his trolls saying “one of your employees needs to be fired because he’s gay and sucks at guitar.” Ronnie was telling his fans if they want to get in touch with him, please hit him up on YouTube or Facebook, please don’t call him at his work.

Nick looked out the window again. He thought about 6/9. You couldn’t talk about modern Xinjiang without talking about 6/9. It was that fateful day that China’s beloved Uyghur Muslim population had been attacked by hateful foreigners. One of Xinjiang’s most sacred locations—the Najiaying Mosque, built 1370 A.D.—attacked by evil American terrorists, who, just like little cowards, blew up its famous dome just like it was nothing, and killed 7,000 people. Ürümqi was targeted, but really everything that China stood for was targeted. Luckily, the brave HEROs from Beijing stepped up to help the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region to get back on its feet.

Nick tried to squeeze out a memory of what Xinjiang had been like before the Mars Camp Bell project. The Sky of the Future started construction in…what was it, iPhone30time? He would have only been about 20 iPhones old then. The miniseries of truth said iPhone30time, at least, but that came out in…iPhone38time? He couldn’t remember exactly. Was this before or after president trans lebron abolished the Great Firewall and brought the great free American internet to the MRC? Was China the MRC then yet, or was this before the merger with Macintosh, when it was still the PRC? Nick could no longer remember this information without thinking about it for a few minutes. He knew one thing for sure: the city was transported to Mars when the quantum computer was turned on in iPhone33time. But were there always these government cameras demanding Good Boy Checks everywhere? It was no use; he could not remember. Nothing remained of his past except a series of bright-lit tableaux occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible. He thought of a quote he had seen in a meme sometime recently: “Conflict is to storytelling what sound is to music. – Mao Zedong.”

The Forbidden Apple Store was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was a round skyscraper with a domed top—an homage to the building’s original use as a mosque—and extending from the top of it a thin spire with, at the very tip, the red star of Chinese Space Communism. It dominated the downtown Tokyoville skyline. In fact, wherever you were in Camp Bell, whatever photo you might want to take, it always seemed to be there looming in the background.

The building itself had mostly commercial tenants, one of which was Nick’s DS-Work. There were also a ton of white-collar finance companies and CCP media offices at the FAS. This is what lent it its overall boujee atmosphere, such as the fancy Planet Fitness with the sauna and cold plunge, and the delivery drones constantly flying up to delivery windows around lunchtime. Left-wing critics said this was too capitalistic, too money-worshipping. But the REAL Chinese patriots, led by the #brotherhood against misinformation, saw it as a celebration of all the things that were great and possible with Chinese Space Communism.

Around the main Forbidden Apple Store building, but connected to it, were: a large mall with the flagship Tesla China store and dozens of other boujie brands; an upscale food court complex; a luxury condo development (which was connected to Nick’s Planet Fitness); a sector for industrial art and fabrication studios; and the waterpark, “Water on Mars,” which connected the Forbidden Apple Store to the replica Nile River Mars Lazy River System. The entire complex was done in the Chinese palatial architectural style, with pagodas stacked symmetrically to form many of the buildings in the cyberpunk-futuristic Mars City skyline. Nick was intimately familiar with the Forbidden Apple Store complex, since he would often get stoned and wander around the subterranean mall areas when he was bored at his office.

Presently, Nick’s Neuralink locked onto the image of the Forbidden Apple Store and an unskippable 15 second ad for an upcoming miniseries of truth started playing. It was a Netflix China remake of 1984 where the evil Uyghur Big Brother is defeated by the brave CCP hero Spaceship Girl. It coopted the Big Brother imagery from the original Apple commercials, which had also been retconned like 50 times by this point anyways. In this one Spaceship Girl was played by California Zephyr, the gigapop streamer whose uncle was a high-ranking CCP official in Beijing.

The trailer started with some BWWWAAAAOOOOOOoooommmmmm superhero movie sound effects and shots of the whole city of Mars Camp Bell. Then there were quick flashes of the Uyghur Big Brother’s face looking really gross and twisted with hate, and then rows of posters of his hateful snarling face plastered all over the city. Then it showed a peaceful boujee sidewalk café. Then the calm café is blown apart by a Uyghur man screaming some scary foreign language and igniting a vest bomb. Then there were flashes of Spaceship Girl’s young Han Chinese face looking determined and resolved to win. Then it’s the same girl’s face, but as a grown up adult! The trailer then showed a slowly moving aerial shot of the Beijing skyline. Then a shot of the People’s Great Hall building in Tiananmen Square, the famous courtyard with the portrait of Mao Zedong – except now there was a portrait of a classic Uyghur man’s face, grimacing menacingly, instead. This was intercut with some footage of Spaceship Girl doing a graceful and powerful kung-fu workout against a backdrop of historical footage of the Sky of the Future being built around Ürümqi. She is sweating a lot and moving her head side to side like a boxer in a Gatorade commercial. Then it cut to a close-up of a big authoritarian-looking billboard that said:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

VOTE UYGHUR…OR ELSE

Then—Nick was still watching the ad in his Neuralink—the title came up in the iconic 1984 font: Literally 1984. Spaceship Girl did a superhero landing pose and then says, “ohh literal 1984, okay my guy.”

Nick’s phone finally powered on, which caused the ad to start playing on his phone, and he X-ed out of it just as it ended.

The Chinese Intelligence Agency had at this point produced over a hundred shows and movies like this via its different media cut-outs and its cast of CCP First Class Actors, including stories set in every era of Xinjiang and every neighborhood in New Prime City. Any possible topic or keyword related to Xinjiang or Uyghur identity, the first thing anyone thought to say about it was some Netflix China show made by a Han HERO from Beijing.

There was a miniseries of truth about growing up as a poor Uyghur in Ürümqi before the Sky of the Future, there was a miniseries of truth about working at the top investment bank in Tokyoville when China was first merging with Apple, there was a miniseries of truth about living just outside the quantum computer and having to commute to Mars every day to work in a retail department store. Nick thought about the famous Edward Bernays quote that he often saw in memes: “We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested largely by men we’ve never heard of.” But even that quote was a cliché cringe meme at this point.

There was also a People's Election in Xinjiang this iPhone, so the propaganda was starting to get heavy again: a miniseries of truth about the Sky of the Future being built despite Uyghur hate and violence, a miniseries of truth about the brave patriots and businesspeople from Beijing who brokered the Historic merger between China and Apple despite Uyghur hate and violence, a miniseries of truth about president trans lebron’s Historic “tear down this Great Firewall” speech that finally let China have a great free internet despite Uyghur hate and violence, and….Nick tried to remember the other one that he had seen tons of ads for. Oh yeah, a miniseries of truth about Spaceship Girl inventing the quantum computer as a freshman at NASA-Harvard Space Academy despite Uyghur hate and violence. When he was lying in bed at night he would look up tickets back to Earth on Priceline. But he would have to go through the quantum computer to do that…

Nick had been to the quantum computer lots of times before, for sure. You had to go there to go back to Earth, which took about 12 hours. But he hadn’t been there since Big Chungus was memed into office in the last People's Election. To get to the quantum computer you had to go through all this insane traffic, past these highly militarized areas that were technically private government property so laws don't really apply. Then you had to go through these checkpoints where they scan you with x-rays and do all sorts of invasive searches. And the ads and propaganda at the quantum computer were always especially psyopped. Nick quite simply could not comprehend how psyopped the whole humiliation ritual experience must be by now.

He took a deep breath through his nose and exhaled calmly, remembering once again that he didn’t have to think about this. His phone was at 18%. He picked up a half joint from an ashtray nearby. Red Star cannabis from last night. It was mid. He lit it. By forgetting his charger like this, you might think Nick would be running late or something. But no. He had no schedule. In his current social role as freelance IG memelord, he was accountable to absolutely no one, nothing, except his social credit score. He would keep getting his weekly Good Boy Points as long as he stayed in the semi-productive daily routine of ambling to the office by about 12 or 1 PM, doing all the Good Boy Dances that were required of him, consuming social media content regularly, posting content regularly, going to the gym, engaging with enough normie YouTube content, not committing crimes, not fedposting, and staying out of the districts that were closed to Uyghurs. Oh, and he also had to do one more thing: once a week he had to log onto a government website and click a form that says, “I’m a good boy, yes I am, I’m a good little boy and I love ice cream yum yums, I’m a good boy oh yes I am!!!” It was easy.

Nick coughed from the joint. His lungs were really irritated lately. He had admittedly been smoking and vaping a lot. It was basically his only hobby except watching content online, so he did it all. He smoked cigarettes, he smoked joints, he vaped, he vaped weed, he vaped indoors and smoked outdoors, he smoked dabs. It went in phases. It was all legal and easily available in Red Star dispensaries. His only rule was that he never messed with opium.

He presently sat back on the futon with the joint and unlocked his phone, which went automatically to his Mandarin Dashboard. He clicked Instagram then clicked his Story. Yesterday at about this time he had posted his normal GM post from his cubicle at DS-Work. It was a picture of his coffee and desk, to show his followers and the algorithm that he was at his office working. The post was 23 hours old so would be gone soon. Then there was just his meme dump from last night, his dinner from a Thai place in Americaville, and some Indian construction videos he reposted at 2 AM.

Presently Nick took another picture, a picture of the weed stuff that was out on the table in front of him – the ashtray and the plastic sleeve with the Red Star Cannabis logo – and typed the caption “GM.” This would show that he was running a little late today, chilling at home still, but nonetheless aware that he needed to post something. Then a thought occurred to Nick, seemingly out of nowhere, as many of his greatest posting thoughts came to him.

It was partly the news story from the elevator that had suggested to him the thing that he was now about to do. But it had also been suggested by an IG account he saw for just a moment before he went to his own posts. @Formosa_Antiques. It was a redpilled antique shop account. The shop itself was actually in Camp Bell somewhere, on “Mars.” The person who ran the account had reposted a few of Nick's memes, so he followed it. It was just a regular antique shop, but the Instagram account was run by someone who was openly skeptical of the CCP. It would regularly like and share Nick’s redpilled memes. This was highly unusual for a business account. Before the last People’s Election, reposting such openly redpilled content on an irl account would have instantly gotten your whole business shut down by the Heroes of Peace. But it seemed more normalized now. There were regular blue check CCP celebs who would repost War Machine memes, even though #brotherhood posters were still pretending he was this evil dangerous figure (doing ‘antistate misconduct’ it was called). The rule was not strictly kept. So Nick had followed this redpilled antique shop account. The guy apparently had some connection to War Machine too. They were mutuals. Nick saw in some comment section that the antique guy had done a podcast with War Machine too, sometime before he was canceled and fled to Taiwan.

The thing that Nick was about to do now, though, was post a War Machine song. To his personal Instagram account. He was going to post it with his normal GM post, even though he knew this account was linked to his social credit score. This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since everyone knew antistate misconduct laws were only enforced to terrorize and keep Uyghurs in fear), but if Nick was ever surfaced this would be more than enough to send him to the Vocational Training and Education Center forever. And he would have zero sympathy from anyone. But he just felt like doing it today. He just felt like saying fuck you.

Nick actually had listened to a lot of War Machine YouTube streams in the past. Nonstop, even. He listened to them at night to fall asleep like millions of other people. He listened to the War Machine podcast with BillabongKeith over and over, probably 20 times per episode, continuously until the next episode drops. He listened to War Machine’s gigapop albums too. They were totally mainstream and good. They were undeniable. Nick even followed War Machine on Insta the last iPhone or maybe 2 iPhones ago now. He was just a regular YouTuber at this point, since the last People’s Election. Nick went to the Story post he was drafting, with the picture of the weed table, then clicked to browse the song selection from Spotify in IG. He typed “war machine shock” and about 20 songs immediately came up, all from the same album, “Shock and Awe.” This was the famous album that War Machine made about taking over the Joe Rogan Experience podcast in iPhone30times. All the actual podcasts were still banned, but the album was a gigapop classic. The first single, “Autism is my Superpower,” was hard af, Nick remembered. He clicked it.

Nick selected the first part of the song that was pre-chosen by the algorithm. It was the opening chorus of “Mental prison but I'm Jack Bauer / Autism is my superpower / bullet points like a Sig Sauer / Autism is my superpower.” That one was pretty hard. He clicked on the second pre-chosen segment of the song, a part of the first verse which went "Old Yeller, storyteller / sell your standup at the Cellar / Reading Rainbow, Hooked on Phonics / kill your TV and everyone on it." That one was pretty hard too. Fuck it. Nick clicked DONE. Then he faltered for just a second. A tremor had gone though his bowels. To post this to his Story was a decisive act. It was a fedpost; if he was ever surfaced it would be enough to have his entire life destroyed with zero sympathy from anyone. And that could mean fully destroyed, including being killed by paramilitary street gangs, going to prison for life, or being sent to a vocational training center to “Study”—take Mandarin classes all day and live in a militarized camp. But then again, he was a Uyghur, so if the government wanted it to, anything could destroy his life. He pressed POST TO STORY.

He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him. To begin with, he knew that a lot of War Machine’s whole shtick was cringe. He hadn’t even seen most of his early work that made him famous, the stuff everyone said was so problematic. Maybe it was problematic. Nick genuinely didn’t know; it was paywalled and he didn’t want to risk his social credit score by watching it. He exhaled weed smoke and coughed, then hit the joint again, and coughed again immediately. He always felt so dumb when he did that. He wasn’t even getting high anymore. He was only getting really paranoid.

Suddenly he said “Neuralink begin video recording” and a red light lit up in the corner of his vision. This caused the Neuralink to begin recording Nick in selfie mode from about 2 feet in front of his face, like a 360 camera.

“Okay what’s up guys…I’m making a video now in case I get surfaced here. It’s like 1:30 PM, uhh April something. Hopefully I won’t have to, but like In case I need to explain myself, for evidence in the moment, when I posted the song. The offensive song. The War Machine song uhh the autism one.” Nick made his face into a serious face really quick. He was nervous because he hadn’t vlogged in so long. He was rusty.

“Um but to be serious, though. It seems like this Empathy Week cycle is different from the last one, like in terms of what’s mainstream. The Overton window has changed, I’m saying. Like Chris Pratt is posting War Machine memes now, is what I’m saying…”

For whom, it suddenly occurred to him, was he making this video? For the future, for the unborn. His mind hovered for a moment on the blinking red light from his Neuralink and he thought of the half language expression 'smooth-brained.' For the first time the magnitude of what he had undertaken came home to him. How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible. This was a real video with real audio. But that could just as easily be faked. It could be made by A.I. in an hour. Nothing on video would ever again be taken at face value; not unless it benefitted the government, at least.

For some time he sat staring at the wall in his apartment. He was stoned. Then without even thinking, he picked up his phone and started scrolling his Mandarin Dashboard again. Vlogging was hard. It was curious that he seemed not merely to have lost the power of expressing himself, but even to have forgotten what it was that he had intended to say. He would try to scroll back and see what he was looking at that inspired him. The Neuralink was still recording. He could edit this down later. For weeks he had been making ready for this moment, and it had never crossed his mind that anything would be needed except courage. The actual vlogging would be easy. All he had to do was transfer to video the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years. It would be just like posting memes. At this moment, however, even his inner monologue had dried up. Moreover, his cough had begun acting up again. He tried not to cough too much because then he’d be launched into a whole coughing fit. The seconds were ticking by. His Neuralink was still recording. He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the wall in front of him, the tickling cough in his lungs, the blaring of the pharmaceutical ad on his phone, and a slight lightheadedness caused by the weed.

Suddenly he began vlogging in sheer panic, only imperfectly aware of what he was saying. His small unpracticed voice struggled at first with his tone shifts and intonations but eventually evened out:

So I was doom scrolling the other day, it was all Current Thing as usual. But I’ve started seeing this trailer for the new 1984 movie the MRC made. The one with Spaceship Girl. I was like finally, this could be like at least a little anti-authoritarian. But no, of course not. Of course the whole point of the movie is all the symbolism is retconned so the Han are still the good guy underdogs and the Uyghurs are the majority authoritarian “anti-government fascists.” And sure enough, in one set piece scene she gets driven out of her rural Xinjiang town by the roving gangs of extremist sharia law morality police that patrolled around mogging everybody. Okay. Then she gets to a city at some point and is saved by the Han border patrol there or something and then saves the day…but so anyways, here’s the thing I noticed: the actress who plays Spaceship Girl in this reboot, California Zephyr, you know she’s half Uyghur. She’s a Uyghur. She’s a Uyghur gigapop streamer whose dad has connections with the CCP. And it’s like whatever, you can be from a CCP family and still be chill, right? And she’s playing a cool Uyghur character in the movie, she’s making the Uyghurs look cool, right? Here, let me read out a few of her latest retweets for you. “Uh I’m half Han, sweetie, and our book, the Book of Han, says you uyghurs are like cattle for us. You exist to serve us sweetie.” “I’m Han sweetie, and we love to do genocides to protect our homeland of China. We don’t care about your little Uyghur whining sweetie, we’re genociding you and we’ve done it before and we’ll do it again, just ask the Dzungar, okay sweetie?’” Okay now here’s the other thing. Here’s the other layer, okay. I’ve been seeing this too. This has been going around. I think…yeah, Big Chungus tweeted it even. The scene from the movie where the Uyghur Muslim Big Brother morality squads, with their machine guns, okay, they slow down their pickup trucks and harass some Han girls walking to school. Knowing that the Big Brother Uyghur will protect them. Okay. Fine. It’s a movie. But then Big Chungus, okay, the actual People’s Representative from Xinjiang, like actually, irl, he tweets this clip with the caption…here, let me read it: “This is what this People’s Election is about. We cannot go back to this.” Like…I can’t fully explain the layers here, but like…these people…the images they have in their head of the past, their whole concept of the past is…literally a movie. It’s literally a movie made like a year ago. These people’s entire concept of history is like CCP movies with their favorite celebrities. And they are saying that the Uyghurs are just supposed to sit here and be killed. Fuck. That.

Nick stopped talking, partly because his mouth was getting dry. He was really not used to talking. He would probably delete this. But the curious thing was, as he was getting a drink another memory had clarified itself in his mind, to the point where he wanted to talk about it on the vlog. It was, he now realized, because of this other incident that he had been thinking of starting a vlog in the first place.

It had happened one afternoon last week on the DS-Work app, if anything so nebulous could be said to happen.

Nick was in bed one day last week at like 11 AM, doom scrolling Mandarin. He had just gotten up. It was the day, actually, when the story broke about War Machine getting caught on a hot mic saying capital gains tax is gay. Then the blue check journos asked him about it and he doubled down and it escalated until even Big Chungus had posted about it. He said we needed a nationwide referendum on War Machine’s dangerous terrorism. When a story was this big, sometimes it got through Nick’s politics filters on the main social media apps and showed up on other little-used apps. So, as he was doom-scrolling that day last week, he got a random notification from the DS-Work app. It was a think piece by Tom Kashgari about how War Machine’s conduct is disgusting and he condemns the remarks and he condemns the climate of hate in our Uyghur communities where homophobia is intertwined with antistate misconduct. Nick was in a particularly toxic mood already, so he commented, “taxing your money that’s already been taxed like 5 times already? Sounds pretty gay to me.” It was a stupid comment but he was just so triggered. It was a shitpost.

This post then got two quick interactions that Nick had been thinking about since then, just replaying them over and over in his head for hours at a time. The first was with egirlebooks, an egirl that Nick had known from extremely online social media circles for over a decade now. They had both been in the Heroes of Peace Twitter scene in their 20s. She was still in college then. She had dated one of Nick’s friends at one point. They were following each other on Twitter and were even friends there for a while. Since then, she had become a really popular woke scold blogger and then, last Nick knew, had a kind of “misinformation researcher” arc during the purges before the last People’s Election. Surely she had a few other hot take gigs going by this point. He knew she went to the same DS-Work in the Forbidden Apple Store as him, but tried not to think about it.

Nick and egirlebooks actually still followed each other on Instagram, but had each other muted. Nick muted her first because he didn’t want to lose touch with her completely, but at the same time he didn’t want to have to see her thirst traps all the time. And these were no ordinary thirst traps either. You see, egirlebooks happened to be an extremely hot art hoe. She looked just like a classical Han Chinese princess, except for her many tattoos. She was so hot, in fact, that she always reminded Nick of the Asian girl on the Death Grips album cover. And as an art hoe she knew how to take really lurid photos of herself, as though she had taken a photography theory class at some point. For this reason, Nick made sure she had as little presence in his online life as possible.

Just a few moments after Nick posted his comment on the think piece, she had commented on his comment: just the emoji eyes. This was code for I see that you are doing something bad.

The other person Nick recognized in the comments was Basedschizofed. He could never miss the proud Mongolian face in his avatar pic. Basedschizofed was another person Nick had been following on social media for many iPhones. He had started out streaming the Billionaires Are Bad protest marches when China merged with Macintosh back in iPhone20times; he streamed the marches on his Google Glass, which were a precursor to the Neuralink in Xinjiang. Then he also streamed the rioting and street fighting in Ürümqi during the building of the quantum computer, which was basically the only coverage of this street violence anywhere in the media since the CCP media still totally pretended it never happened. Basedschizofed got his first big bump of followers at this point, then continued steadily gaining popularity until his channel exploded in the iPhone40times.

Basedschizofed had also been canceled during the purges before last People’s Election. He had worked with War Machine on a sketch comedy project, one of the most problematic ones ever. This was more than enough to get him totally canceled from all social media spaces. Until after Big Chungus was elected, that is. Then Basedschizofed was brought back to be the controlled opposition after the CCP had purged all the other dissident voices. Now he had a daily YouTube stream with a huge audience of young dissident Uyghurs. It was by far the highest watched YouTube stream in Xinjiang. For this reason Nick was almost 100% sure that Basedschizofed was a fed. But, they had been mutuals for a while now, and even sent each other memes sometimes, and Basedschizofed always replied to Nick’s DMs.

When Nick posted his comment on Tom Kashgari’s think piece, Basedschizofed had been one of the first people to Like it, and he also posted a reaction: the laughing face emoji. As he thought about this, Nick slipped almost involuntarily back to his Mandarin Dashboard. He checked how many views his Story had gotten. Four so far, in just a few minutes. About average. Basedschizofed hadn’t seen it yet. The post would probably get about 75 likes today, then when he woke up tomorrow it would have about 120, then be erased.

Nick refreshed his Stories. There was a new sponsored post: a new campaign video from Big Chungus and the #brotherhood against misinformation. It started with the familiar face of War Machine, doing his podcast, speaking into a Rode microphone looking totally like a pontificating doofus, just like any person ever doing a podcast ever. The video froze and there was an editing effect to make it look sinister. It slowly zoomed in on his face.

War Machine was the renegade CCP podcaster/MMA fighter who long ago had been one of the main ironylords of the #brotherhood on Twitter, almost on a level of Big Chungus himself. He had wanted to help China get to Mars with the New Prime City project and thought he could use his platform to do that. But when it started being just more psyops to justify cracking down on Uyghur rights, War Machine started engaging in counterrevolutionary misinformation, was arrested, investigated, and condemned to death, and then mysteriously escaped China and disappeared. The daily psyopped news narratives would vary from week to week, but there was none in which War Machine was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the #brotherhood’s purity. And now he was back from exile to destroy China once and for all, by infiltrating its perfectly pure political system with Uyghur misinformation. He was attacking the province of Xinjiang first with his propaganda offensive, then once he took control of Xinjiang, it would be a domino effect to take over the rest of the whole MRC. He wanted to turn China into some kind of one-party authoritarian ethnostate.

War Machine was the start of the funnel to hateful extremism for millions of at-risk young Uyghurs. All crimes against the MRC, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, misinformation, antistate misconduct, and trolling sprang directly out of his teachings. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies on stream: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his imperialist American paymasters; perhaps even – so it was occasionally rumored – at a safe house in Portugal. He was the center of every political news story in Xinjiang. He was the only issue. If he was allowed to exist, flaunting the great traditions of Chinese Space Communism, then China had truly fallen.

What was really scary, the CCP propaganda always went, was War Machine had allies in politics. Big Chungus’s fake opponent, Gary Guanxi, wanted to coddle War Machine and look the other way while he turned China into an authoritarian ethnostate. Therefore, any measures necessary for Big Chungus to defeat Gary Guanxi were justified. It was extremely simple.

Looking at the campaign ad on his phone screen, Nick’s diaphragm was constricted. He could never see War Machine’s face without a painful mixture of emotions. He talked such a good game about helping out the Uyghurs, and he owned the CCP so effortlessly, but he never actually did shit. It was like a big performance art project for him. The campaign ad showed his face again. War Machine now had five face tattoos, each of which referenced a different era from his life: a Playstation logo under his right eye to reference his time as a gigapop game streamer; below that, a blue Uyghur star and crescent to reference his ethnic roots of being half-Uyghur; across from that but on the left side, was a simple Joe Rogan face where he's doing his "OOOOhhhh hello freak bitches" face, referencing the era when War Machine took over the Joe Rogan podcast and podcasted from his studio for more than a month; then, directly under his left eye, he had the phrase

MISTER

ONE MORE

CHANCE

like that in three lines. It was the title of his breakthrough gigapop album; and the final face tattoo was a simple cross on his forehead, which symbolized his Portuguese Catholic faith. He had gotten this tattoo after he was arrested in Egypt on bogus charges and ended up converting the entire prison to Catholicism.

It was a clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile silliness in the cauliflowered ear. It resembled the face of an idiot meathead, and the voice, too, had a meathead-like quality. Now in the campaign ad video War Machine was delivering his usual venomous attack upon the CCP—an attack so exaggerated and perverse that a child should have been able to see that it was misinformation and disinformation, and yet it was just plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people, less big-brained than oneself, might be taken in by it. He was abusing Big Chungus, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the #brotherhood, he was demanding the immediate conclusion of aid to the Kurds, he was advocating freedom of speech but like actual freedom of speech not CIA memes, he was calling Netflix movies psyops, he was saying the Heroes of Peace were funded by an American billionaire, he was crying hysterically that president trans lebron and the whole Great Firewall MRC Sky of the Future revolution was fake – all this in rapid polysyllabalic speech with more half language than even Twitter ironylords.

“You can’t even say the word Uyghur at a pro sports event in China, yet China is hosting the Safe Super Bowl?! I would say…it's…time to shut it down, folks. Oh and all of the whole purge phase, all of those news stories? That was all a carefully orchestrated psyop. The whole thing. None of that was a coincidence. It is not 2069. That meme is cringe. It’s not ‘nice,’ okay?  We don’t have a free society. China never went to Mars. Our governments are corrupt and broken, internationally. We need a full investigation of the security state…immediately.”

He was doing even way more half language memes, indeed, than any #brotherhood hot taker would normally use irl. On the screen now was footage of a group of young Uyghur men in a mosh pit, or something like a mosh pit—the shots were framed so closely it was hard to tell. Then there’s the clip again of War Machine on a couch podcasting into a Rode microphone again. He says, “normalize this, normalize that. How about you feel some fucking shame for once?” In another clip he says, “China went to Mars? You think China went to Mars??!!” Then he says, “it’s just jokes dude.” Then it goes back to the close-up of the young Uyghur men screaming and sweating with their neck veins popping out again. It shows two young Uyghurs wrestling in the traditional Uyghur style; they’re out on a field in a rural settlement somewhere with a yurt in the background. War Machine says on the podcast, very matter-of-factly, “when a politician…does that…he should beeeee…thrown off a building….” One of the Uyghur wrestlers screams primally with his neck veins bulging, and throws the other wrestler out of the ring. Then the campaign ad cuts really quickly to footage of a bus blowing up and a news reporter saying “five dead today…” Then War Machine is on another podcast set; he looks in the camera and says “make sure you watch the premiere of The Party March 28....” and does a quick barrage of his trademark troll looks to the camera. “There might be some sssspecial surprises oooOOOOoooOOOOOooohhh!!!!” He taps his fingertips together like Mr. Burns. “OOOooooOOOOOOoooOOOOohhhh!!!” The video freezes on his face doing this. It goes DUN and turns black and white, and then starts slowly zooming out, like Hard Copy editing. Then some red text said DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS. NOW. Then this text faded out and a cheery Beatles song played as the new slogan faded in with Big Chungus’s face:

IT’S OUR RIGHT TO WIN. BIG CHUNGUS.

The video ended.

Nick glanced at the comments for one moment. There were 8,000+ and the comments section was closed. Thousands of comments were saying “OOhhh I hate those vile little bugs so much, I want to smash their little entitled faces in SO BAD.” “Someone do something NOW!!!” People were losing their shit. The sight, or even just the invocation of, young Uyghur men as a group produced fear and anger automatically. “Violent terrorists,” they were called in all the CCP Strike Hard campaigns. They were an object of hatred more constant than either American terrorists or Middle Eastern terrorists, since when MRC was at war with one of these powers it was generally pretty chill among the different groups within Xinjiang. But the Uyghurs, they were a little cult that wanted to disrupt all of China’s great progress.

But what was strange was that even though War Machine was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a thousand times a day, on TV, on Twitter threads, on millions of Facebooks screeds, in Substacks, on livestreams, in college journalism workshops his theories were mocked, deconstructed, and held up for ridicule, his influence never seemed to wane. In fact, when he did livestream, which was rare, he was the second-highest Superchatted YouTube channel in Xinjiang, after only Basedschizofed. His merch from the yearly merch drops still fetched prices of 500 GPB and more on eBay. Always there were fresh dupes waiting to be grifted by the War Machine cult. A day never passed when his terrorist agents were not banned from social media or doxxed by the Heroes of Peace, each time with a cache of weapons, just before carrying out some vicious violent hate attack at a DS-Mart. And yet, on his public Instagram, War Machine was constantly posting pictures from meet-and-greets with fans after his standup shows across Xinjiang.

War Machine was the commander of a vast shadowy army, an underground network of domestic terror cell conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of the State. Their method was redpilling normies via fire video content and parasocial online engagement. It was a content cult. Alpha Investment Corporation was the name of the production company. There was whispered shadowy lore of a terrible web series, a compendium of all the hateful misinformation and disinformation, of which War Machine was the author. From right at the height of the purges. A lot of it was taped during the time when War Machine maintained hostile control of the Joe Rogan podcast. But that was just one element of the content. The web series was called the War Machine Experience. It was the only War Machine content Nick had never seen.

He had seen a lot of his free content, though. He often watched YouTube compilations like “War Machine advice livestream to fall asleep to” and “11 hours of War Machine car talks to feel less alone” that had multiple million views. He still watched the podcast like 10 times each as background noise. And his YouTube fyp was constantly recommending videos from the War Machine channel, with titles such as “War Machine and BillabongKeith watch CRAZY TikToks!” or “Advice your father should have given you but he’s in an internment camp.” It really seemed like, although he had been a dangerous dissident political leader at some point, now he really was just a regular YouTuber.

In the comments of this anti-War Machine campaign Reel, Big Chungus supporters were unironically saying that reeducation camps were not enough, War Machine subscribers needed to be rounded up and shot in the head Cultural-Revolution-style. The Uyghurs were beyond reeducation at this point. Enough was enough. Nick saw the American woman from his DS-Work posted that the CCP should save money on bullets and firebomb their neighborhoods—that’s what they did about terrorism in serious countries. It was rage bait without a doubt. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp. Thus, at one moment Nick’s hatred was not turned against War Machine at all, but, on the contrary, against Big Chungus, the #brotherhood, and the Heroes of Peace; and at such moments his heart went out to War Machine, the lonely, derided podcaster on the screen, sole guardian of truth and sanity in a world of lies. And yet the very next instant he was at one with the people in the comments, and all that was said of War Machine seemed to him to be true. At those moments his secret loathing of Big Chungus changed into adoration and Big Chungus seemed to tower up, an invincible, fearless protector, standing like a rock against the American misinformation propaganda, and War Machine, in spite of his isolation, his helplessness, and the doubt that hung about his very existence, seemed like some sinister enchanter, capable by the mere power of his voice of wrecking the entire structure of China.

It was even possible, at moments, to switch one’s hatred this way or that by a voluntary act. Suddenly, by the sort of violent effort with which one wrenches one’s head away from the pillow in a nightmare, Nick succeeded in transferring his hatred from the face on the screen to egirlebooks. Vivid, beautiful hallucinations flashed through his mind. He would flog her to death with a rubber truncheon. He would tie her naked to a stake and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He would ravish her and cut her throat at the point of climax. Better than before, moreover, he realized why it was that he hated her. He hated her because she hated him. She posted about violently killing people like him every single day all day long while laughing.

The campaign ad he was watching had looped and reached the end again. It climaxed with more comparing War Machine to Hitler, then it faded out and played a Beatles song. There was some narration but it wasn’t important what it said, only that it was a Han Chinese man’s deep soothing voice. Then Big Chungus’s campaign slogan faded in again in bold capitals:

IT’S OUR RIGHT TO WIN. BIG CHUNGUS.

Nick put his phone down. He was still recording on his Neuralink. Okay. He could cut that part out.

He picked up his phone again and went back to the little-used DS-Work app. He looked at his comment again. Egirlebooks had reacted with the eyeball emojis. But Basedschizofed had Liked it and reacted with the crying laughing emoji. He knew. He was totally redpilled. But such incidents never had any sequel. All that they did was to keep alive in him the belief, or hope, that others besides himself were the enemies of the #brotherhood. Perhaps the rumors of a vast underground conspiracy were true after all – perhaps Alpha Investment Corporation wasn’t just a production company! It was impossible, in spite of the endless arrests and confessions and psyops, to be sure that Alpha Investment Corporation was not simply a grift. Some days he believed in it, some days not. There was no evidence, only fleeting glimpses that might mean anything or nothing: snatches of overheard conversation, someone mentioning War Machine on the Danny Doppa Show, a t-shirt seen in the wild—once, even when two strangers met, a small vocal inflection might be a signal of recognition. It was all guesswork: very likely he was imagining everything. He had closed the DS-Work app without responding to either of them. The idea of responding had hardly crossed his mind. It would have been inconceivably dangerous even if he had known what to say. He didn’t want to get caught up in an argument about it that would be sending him notifications all day, and in the end would make his credit score go down anyways.

For two seconds they had really exchanged a meaningful sentiment, and that was the end of the story. But even that was a memorable event, in the locked loneliness in which one had to live.

Nick roused himself and sat up straighter. He coughed. He remembered he was still recording. He refocused himself on the vlog and suddenly found himself saying out loud, as though from nowhere, insanely sarcastic:

well would you look at that! I guess the joke’s on me once again! Oh my gosh aren’t you all so clever! You lied and made it illegal to question you and…oh my gosh…the joke’s on the lil old Uyghur once again!!! Isn’t that so clever!

He could not help but feel a twinge of panic. It was absurd, since saying those particular words was not more dangerous than the initial act of posting the War Machine song. But now there was Neuralink video of Nick. And audio. Content. It would trigger the social credit score algorithm instantaneously. This would be the content the Heroes of Peace would play when he was surfaced. Hmm what would he say in the struggle session? For a moment he was tempted to just delete the post and delete all these Neuralink video clips and refocus on his Good Boy Dances. He did not do so, however, because he knew that it would be pointless. It was saved somewhere on the cloud now. Whether he went on with the vlog or not, it made no difference. The Heroes of Peace would get him just the same. If he didn’t do anything, they’d just make something up. By posting that one War Machine song, he had committed the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Antistate misconduct, they called it. Antistate misconduct was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later the algorithm was bound to get you.

It was always on a Friday when they canceled you. You would be surfaced by a think piece, then it would be an internet feeding frenzy to degrade and dehumanize the bad entitled Uyghur. Really teach him a lesson. Really make an example out of him. You'd be provoked more and more and more until you snapped and lost control. Then you'd be arrested by military cadres and taken to the Vocational Education and Training Center for reeducation. Or the cadre would just kill you. In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply vanished. Your name was removed from everything, every record of your posts was wiped out, your apartment was re-rented, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten.

He would lose his apartment and have to move to some down-bad Xinjiang town and start all over. He would get banned from all his meme platforms. He’d have to get a real job at the Dick Sucking factory – it was just a name, after all. His friends online wouldn’t even notice probably. He would stop posting and lose touch with them. That’s how it invariably happened. That was the meta. He thought of all the accounts he had once loved following, that were then quietly canceled or shadowbanned so bad that Nick just completely lost track of them. Forgot about them forever. How many of those souls were in the reeducation camps? That would be his fate as well. His followers wouldn’t even notice; they’d just move on with the conveyor belt of industrially produced distractions of Operation Bedtime Stories. He heard the slogan in his head now: “Chinese Space Communism is Operation Bedtime Stories and Operation Bedtime Stories is Chinese Space Communism.”

He would probably end up getting arrested and sentenced to labor in the Apple factories. When you got sent there at Nick’s age, you didn’t even realize it was happening. You’re so psyopped and checked out from reality that you just think you got a great new job polishing bezel all day and wow aren’t these great benefits I’m getting? I’ll probably be happier, he thought. He wondered if they make you watch the news there. He wondered if you could listen to a podcast while you made the iPhones. In any case, he would have to go back through the quantum computer.

For a moment he was seized by a kind of hysteria. He began saying in an uneven voice:

They’ll shoot me I don’t care they’ll shoot me in the back of the neck I don’t care this is not Mars bro, I am not orbiting between Mercury and Earth bro I’m in Xinjiang next to Turpan, down with Big Chungus fuck the CCP they always shoot you in the back of the neck I don’t care fuck Big Chungus fake ah

He sat back in his chair, slightly ashamed of himself for being so triggered, and laid his phone on the futon next to him. The next moment he started violently. He got a notification from RG Towers management app.

Fuck. He was really canceled already.

2

Nick tabbed back to Instagram on his Mandarin Dashboard. He thought back through the moment of posting the War Machine song. He had done it, alright. A real fedpost. It was right there on his Story. It had tripped the algorithm and the apartment company had gotten an alert that his PayPal had been disconnected. Signal-boosting antistate misconduct, the charge would be. It was over.

The notification from the RG Towers app was still there. Nick clicked on it. It was a post from the neighbor lady, Mrs. Kashgari. She was always pilled out of her mind. One time Nick saw her at the Starbucks kiosk in the lobby with her husband, both sitting at a table drinking coffee from paper takeout cups. As Nick looked at her, she seemed to fall asleep mid-sip with her head nodding forward, and the coffee dribbling down her pink Under Armor shirt. She happened to be pregnant at the time as well.

“Hello Facebook [sic]. I would like to ask for help with a problem my daughter refuses to help me unless I pay her for her “emotional labor” with I refuse to do that nonsense!!!! I don’t understand this young generation these days but I love her [heart smiley eyes emojis] Does anyone of my friends on the site know how to save a ‘.pdf’ file please?”

Nick clicked on her picture to go to her Facebook profile, which was linked to the RG Towers app. She was much more active on her page then Nick ever was on normie social media, even when he was posting Heroes of Peace Good Boy Takes. She posted dozens of times a day. It was mostly normie memes, but she also shared the most basic mainstream Current Thing news content, and then a generous amount of cooking and sunset pics. Her header image was Big Chungus with a smiling California Zephyr and his classic slogan “Trust The Plan.” It was one of the default options on Facebook. Her latest post was several photos of her cooking dinner with the Kashgaris’ CCP civil servant family friend, who stayed with the family eight days a month as part of the CCP’s Pair Up And Become Family program. The two of them are smiling and wearing matching aprons, and her husband Tom is sitting in a chair in the background smiling and taking pictures on his phone. Nick remembered this image; Tom Kashgari had made it the thumbnail of his weekly family vlog.

Tom Kashgari actually used trolling images like this as the thumbnail fairly frequently. His take on the Pair Up And Become Family was that it was just some silly symbolism and anyone who would be upset about it must be insecure about something, but not him, he was totally cool about it, he wasn’t worried about anything. Tom’s channel was pretty much always trending on the YouTube homepage in Xinjiang.

Nick went back to the neighbor’s RG Towers post. He replied: “Hi Mrs. Kashgari, a good site to convert and save pdfs is pdfsave.org, it’s web based so you don’t have to download anything. It can help you to edit and merge and save the pdf file.”

Within seconds she replied back: “Oh thank you! I would just ask my partner in crime Tom Kashgari but he is out of range on a hike in the Tian Shan!” tagging them both in the post. Nick liked the reply.

Tom Kashgari was one of the most popular hiking vloggers in China. He got his start after the old town Uyghur neighborhood of Kashgar burned in a mysterious fire, then the CCP took that opportunity to rebuild the area without all the Islamic and Uyghur elements. Tom did a series of urban hikes around the new construction, telling his audience all the great features of the new malls and apartment buildings. As for the conspiracy theorist Uyghurs who said China’s government might have been involved, Tom said these fringe extremists needed to be purged from the hiking community. The YouTube algorithm suggested his videos so much that Nick recently had to click “do not recommend channel.” And still, curiously, he got them.

Kashgari also happened to keep an office at the Forbidden Apple Store DS-Work, where he did a lot of his editing and green screen stuff for his channel when he was in town. Nick would see him there from time to time. He was a fattish but active man of paralyzing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms—one of those completely unquestioning, devoted midwits on whom, more even than on the Heroes of Peace, the stability of the #brotherhood psyop depended. He would do literally anything for the dopamine rush of a blue check liking his post. He lured his audience in by being just a regular average joe Uyghur who liked to go hiking and fishing and not be all political, and then, bam, he’d hit you with Current Thing. The more non-political-seeming, the better. And he did all the social media stuff right; all the things you’re supposed to do, like commenting on all the popular YouTube channels. He engaged with every trending topic. He teased the end of his videos in the beginning so you’d want to keep watching. Everything it says to do in the YouTube Creator’s Handbook.

Nick remembered that in the days after Gary Guanxi was elected People’s Representative from Xinjiang in iPhone40time, his walking commute took him past the major independent bookstore of the city, Wuyi Books, in a mini-mall area next to the Forbidden Apple Store. It was the biggest bookstore in the city and hosted all the trendy literary figures for talks and readings. All the hip petit-boujee class carried Wuyi Books tote bags. After Guanxi was elected, the front window of the bookstore had a 1984 display with Guanxi’s Uyghur face in all the Big Brother iconography and authoritarian barbed wire and prison bars made out of construction paper. Presumably this represented the prison camps the Uyghurs were going to build in Xinjiang for all non-Uyghurs. It made Nick laugh instantly upon seeing it, it was so insanely fucking stupid. Tom Kashgari, on the other hand, posted a picture on Facebook every single day when he walked past, to remind us how important it was to not normalize this dangerous Uyghur fascism.

Kashgari, like most everyone online, had actually mellowed out since the last People’s Election. This could be because Nick still had him blocked on basically everything. But Nick still thought about Kashgari on a daily basis because he always saw him in the comments of ReluctantHero’s gym videos. They both watched ReluctantHero for gym motivation, like basically everyone in Xinjiang did. Kashgari’s comments were always something like “Locked in for leg day button!!! -----ïƒ ”.

Suddenly Nick got another notification. From his seldom-used Facebook. It was the Kashgari’s horrible 19-year-old son Alimjan. He had messaged Nick 3 times in a row. Nick went to the kid’s profile. He had all the Heroes of Peace flags and Marvin the Martian movie posters up in his room, where he was posing in his profile pic and header. In one picture he was wearing a Regime Records t-shirt, the main gigapop record label in China that was an obvious CCP front. There were a lot of thumbnails of him sitting at his computer with headset, vlogging with the Hewlett-Packard Heroes of Peace flag in the background. Nick scrolled quickly through his pictures. It landed on a fit pic of the 19-year-old in a parking lot posing in a Mao Zedong portrait-print streetwear jumpsuit by Adidas x Pharrell for Netflix Heroes of Peace.

Nick clicked the notification to see the unread messages.

“Hey just checking up on my favorite fellow Uyghur neighbor. Why not more active on the latest trending topics? You know that’s bad for your social credit score…”

“Oh wait we know why…we all know why”

“War machine meat rider lmao”

Nick typed back “fuck off”

The teen typed back “Waahhhh wah waaahhh I’m sorry the woke mob took your wife and kids oh no family court is so unfair, keep crying dipshit.”

Nick followed a link to the kid’s Instagram.

His latest post was a Reel of his slutty girlfriend on a party boat somewhere in the Mars Camp Bell river system. In the video another boat drives by them with some preppy finance-looking guys, and she viciously flicks them off, like really aggressively, and yells “FUCK YOUU!!” Nick automatically thought “you’re on a boat too, you dumb bitch” and let out an involuntarily ha of laughter.

The teenager, Alimjan, messaged him again: “Just know that I won’t hesitate to plant an ETR flag on you and get you fully canceled. Maybe you’d be caught with an ETR phone case.”

The East Turkestan Republic phone case was a trending psyop symbol. Some Uyghur terrorists were found with them. Then the county government announced that anyone who reported others for having an ETR flag, or even the words “East Turkestan” on anything, would get a cash payment from the government. Nick didn’t fuck with the ETR stuff because it was a psyop, but he knew that this kid wouldn’t hesitate to frame him and it wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t even matter if he had screenshots of this exact threat. He was a Uyghur, so he was below sympathy in Xinjiang.

Nick kept scrolling the kid’s Instagram grid. The next post was a Twitter screenshot that said something about “the silence from the rest of the cast speaks volumes…” Nick flicked past it, thinking, Okay one more triggering post and I’m leaving.

In the next photo the teenager was wearing a pink dress, like ironically like Kurt Cobain, with a skin-tight t-shirt with the Hewlett-Packard HP logo on the front. Hewlett-Packard was a popular dog whistle for Heroes of Peace, the government-sponsored communist paramilitary gang, since they had the same letters. The HP logo was so retro popular, in fact, that basically every fashion brand was licensing it to incorporate into their new merch designs. Nick was constantly getting ads for different HP logo clothes and merch. So this post wasn’t that triggering.

The next post was a video of a 7.5’ tall Chinese woman from the MRC Women’s National Basketball Team dunking on a famous Uyghur wrestler, 5’7”, who is wearing a parody of his Olympic uniform from his glory days. He looks tiny compared her. Apparently a bunch of these guys needed money so they had gotten grifted via social media into this Netflix series where they play professional women’s sports teams. It was extremely popular in China. The basketball episode was particularly embarrassing because the women’s team players were all over 7 feet tall due to Yao-Ming-related communist genetic engineering and they dunked all over the Uyghur sports heroes. Then the images from the show became extremely popular in memes. They were used in literally millions of memes per day.

Nick closed the message window and went back to Mrs. Kashgari’s page. In two years they’ll be canceling her favorite romance author for being a TERF. Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that the CCP could turn these kids into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the CCP. On the contrary, although they loved to meme about how it was midwit cringe, ultimately they adored the #brotherhood and everything connected with it. The songs, the marches, the hashtags, the fashion, the TikTok dances, the flame wars, the think pieces, the yelling of slogans, the memes about how it was cringe, the ironic worship of Big Chungus, doing ice cream yum yums – it was all a sort of glorious game to them. All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against “domestic terrorism” (which just meant Uyghurs), against whoever or whatever was the heel character in Current Thing.

Suddenly an ironic t-shirt idea bubbled up into Nick’s mind: a shirt that says in plain block letters “IT’S CALLED SHITPOSTING MOM!!!” Maybe if he got canceled and had to move out of the city he could sell some of those via dropshipping.

The Kashgaris also had a daughter, Zeynep, who was like 25. Nick saw that she had commented on one of Alimjan’s posts. He clicked her name to go to her profile. The first post was a TikTok of her petting a cute puppy and she’s saying in a really cutesy voice how violent terrorist Uyghurs have had enough chances in this country and now they need to be rounded up and put in camps. Enough is enough, she said. He saw on her profile that she was an elementary school teacher in the New Prime City suburbs.

He scrolled down Zeynep’s page and saw a slickly designed flier image for a protest march: red and light blue with Spaceship Girl’s face with a flower wreath around her head and her eyes closed solemnly. It said the slogan MARS’ FUTURE IS OUR FUTURE. This was ostensibly a slogan for not polluting Mars, but in reality it was a pretext for the government to cleanse Xinjiang of its last remaining Uyghur elements. It was a major slogan in the Big Chungus reelection campaign. In one of the comments she replied to someone with “I can’t wait until we bring over enough Kurds to finally replace you disgusting Uyghur ‘men.’”

The next post was something with a photo of War Machine grimacing menacingly and a media brand tagged. Nick scanned a wall of text and saw the phrase “aware of the kind of people you work with??”

The next post was a link to a Guardian op-ed with the headline “Just 12% of Xinjiang—mostly Uyghur men—are eating half of our beef supply.”

He swiped up and closed the Facebook app completely.

Years ago—it must have been fifteen iPhones now, since the Mars Marvins’ Historic inaugural season—Nick happened to have a chance encounter that had stuck with him. It was at this baseball game on Mars, at the newly constructed Blackrock Field within Mars Camp Bell. Nick didn’t even really like baseball, but the hype around the Marvins was insane. A baseball team on Mars, this was absolutely Historic. Sports fans from all over Earth had competed to get tickets to one of the games, which were now just a short quantum computer ride away! Every game was a huge event. They had all sold out instantly, but Nick managed to score a ticket. He could never forget it. It was a midseason game against the Cincinnati Reds, from the UAA…or it could have been the USA then still, he forgot. Nick got there early and was wandering around the concourse, in the middle of this big crowd of people. People from all over the world in Mars Marvins and Cincinnati Reds gear. There was a ton of advertising everywhere, he remembered.

In the concourse area there were all these tables set up, where the corporate sponsors were giving out their literature and swag. Nick actually didn’t really remember much detail from the situation; all he remembered was, there was a table where you could apply for a Visa credit card and get a free Koosh Ball. He wanted the Koosh Ball, so he went to the table and got to talking to the polo-shirted rep there. He was a Mongolian from the north of Xinjiang, from Altay Valley he said. Nick didn’t even remember what they had been talking about, only that he said that he hoped Ürümqi being teleported to Mars was “on the good timeline.” And Nick remembered the Mongolian guy had chuckled and said back, very coolly, “oh we’re about to be on the best timeline.” It was that line that had stuck with Nick.

The other thing about that encounter that stuck with Nick was, it seemed like the guy he was talking to there was Basedschizofed. He was exactly the same kind of Mongolian guy from northern Xinjiang. But this polo-shirted dude had been working for the credit card company at the Marvins game, at the folding table giving out credit card applications and swag. This seemed out of character for Basedschizofed, since he was usually so anti-authority. But at the same time it wasn’t out of character: Basedschizofed was a classic rule-follower overachiever. Working a swag giveaway event for a credit card company was exactly the kind of corporate sales busywork where he would thrive. Still, the scene was too disjointed in Nick’s memory. This guy had been flying all over the world doing freelance vlog journalism…and also working as a credit card company rep on Mars? It didn’t make any sense.

And yet, it had happened. And it really did seem like Basedschizofed, mostly because the line itself, it was exactly his distinct tone and delivery. Nick did not know what it meant, only that in some way or another it would come true.

Nick coughed. He needed to at least quit vaping.

He tabbed back to YouTube. The algorithm must have noticed that he was on some political content on Facebook because the YouTube home page was recommending a really old War Machine video from a protest where he was provoking some hysterical purple haired Heroes of Peace street protestors.

Welp, Nick thought, might as well go to the office now before I spend five hours sitting here watching YouTube. His phone was at 53%. He just had to leave without Mrs. Kashgari hearing him in the hallway so he didn’t have to talk to her. He stood up.

Nick left the apartment again. He took the elevator back down to the first floor, then walked back out through the sliding glass front doors and back out through the black metal camera surveillance gate.

Down in the street the Wind flapped the torn poster to and fro—"experience chinese space communism”—and the red and yellow 7-star flag of the Macintosh Republic of China fitfully appeared and vanished. The MRC. The sacred principles of Chinese Space Communism: half language, gaslighting, and systematic international child rape and blackmail. Like all public signage in Xinjiang, it was in Mandarin with the Uyghur translation printed smaller at the bottom. He felt as though he were wandering the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable. What certainty had he that a single human creature now living was on his side? And what way of knowing that the dominion of the CCP would not endure forever? Like an answer, his Neuralink snapped to the profile of the Forbidden Apple Store in the city skyline and the Literally 1984 trailer started playing again.

The evil Uyghur Big Brother face, the neck veins bulging with hate.

Spaceship Girl calmly doing traditional kung-fu.

Tiananmen Square draped with Uyghur imagery.

The 1984 slogans flashing:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

VOTE UYGHUR…OR ELSE

Spaceship Girl doing the superhero landing pose.

He switched the ad to his phone and closed it.

Nick glanced at a wooden construction wall he was walking past. It was covered in about 20 8’ posters that said MARS’ FUTURE IS OUR FUTURE with the image of Spaceship Girl with the flower wreath and her eyes closed solemnly. This area was the worst for propaganda, Nick thought, but at least it was high turnover. Within a few hours this would be covered over with another ad for sunglasses or energy drinks.

In the main square of the Americatown district there was a statue of the American sports hero Babe Ruth, the escaped African slave from South Carolina who went on to become the great Yankee slugger. In the statue Ruth is wearing his iconic Yankees pinstripe jersey and hat and holding his bat against his shoulder. A plaque explained that Ruth notoriously would never cut his dreadlocks, but he finally shaved them because he was so honored to play for the world famous New York Yankees.

Nick did another Good Boy Check to enter onto the pedestrian lane of the replica Brooklyn Bridge. As he started up the bridge, he went back to his phone and swiped to his Mandarin Dashboard to check his Good Boy Points. This was a comforting ritual because he knew he had been a Good Boy, stuck in his daily routine, not thinking about anything, for…at least 3 or 4 weeks now. He should have a lot of Good Boy Points. He also wanted to see if the 10 GBP had hit yet from the Good Boy Check he just did. He clicked to his bank app. On the bank app’s log-in screen there was a background image of a young Han Chinese couple buying their first home, with the Tien Shen Mountains in the background. Nick logged on and saw that he had even more Good Boy Points than he had thought.

He tabbed back to his Mandarin Dashboard, then to the MarsMaps app, which was the main navigation app for Mars Camp Bell and greater New Prime City. It was also where his steps were counted: an average of just over 12,000 for every day that year. This was another comforting ritual for Nick because he always got his steps. MarsMaps had a header that was impossible to click out of or scroll away from, of Big Chungus’s stupid face, smiling. The slogans and iconography were everywhere. The whole game was to pretend it was serious when it was obviously a massive humiliation ritual. The stupid cartoon’s face was on stamps, on public video ad screens, on the covers of books, on government banners, on government tourism board ads, in public art, on bus ads, on magazine covers. The magazines at the grocery store weren’t even like magazine brands anymore, they just had titles like “Big Chungus,” “Spaceship Girl,” “Mao Zedong,” “Steve Obama-Jobs,” “Heroes of Peace” – the whole pantheon of MRC government saints. Internet space was totally fucked. Irl space was totally fucked. Nowhere could you escape the gaslighting except for a few square centimeters of space inside your skull. And with your Neuralink connected, not even that.

From the middle of the bridge, Nick looked at the Forbidden Apple Store again, careful not to snap-to-image. It seemed to float like a mirage over downtown Tokyoville, and behind it the massive red peak of Mars’ Olympus Mons in the Sky. The whole mystique of the FAS was it was supposed to be this exclusive club, like the Forbidden City where only the emperor’s family was allowed to go. The policy at the Forbidden Apple Store was: you were only allowed to enter if you were a registered iPhone user. iPhones had been issued to all MRC citizens since China merged with Apple/Macintosh in iPhone25time. Now you had to have a Neuralink to go there, which were standard with the iPhone since iPhone45time. Just before the last People’s Election, in fact. That’s why Nick got his Neuralink basically, so he didn’t have to move offices. But he never used it, though, except for NeuraPlay.

Nick kept walking, past the midpoint of the bridge. At one point a lot of politically sensitive media and government jobs were located in the FAS, but during the first misinformation lockdowns—around this same time before the last People’s Election—all those important propaganda jobs got decentralized via government-mandated work-from-home policies. Now no single rocket bomb attack could take out much of the CCP gaslighting infrastructure.

Nick started down the gentle slope of the bridge, looking down at the wooden planks of the pedestrian lane. He was thinking about the data that he was now creating with his phone and Neuralink and all his accounts online, all his videos and voice memos of him talking to himself, and wondering if any of that would ever be experienced again by a single soul. He wondered again why he was taking all these pictures and making all these video notes. For the future, for the past—for an age that might be imaginary. And in front of him there lay not death but annihilation. The MRC was just going to kill all the Uyghurs and delete all trace of his existence. Why wouldn’t it? It controlled the UN Security Council. It totally controlled the UAA, Europe, Africa, even Russia, via debt slavery. It had already fully dehumanized the Uyghurs, ground down any hint of sympathy from anyone. Who was going to stop them? The only chance of these video and audio snippets ever being watched by another person is if Nick got surfaced and the Heroes of Peace clipped them and posted them as more dangerous Uyghur antistate misconduct.

He noticed on his Neuralink that it was exactly 2 PM. Curiously this synchronicity seemed to have put new heart into him. He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.

The bridge was brisk with pedestrian traffic this afternoon, despite the overcast Sky. There were always enough tourists on this bridge to support a whole cottage industry of locals at makeshift tables selling Mars t-shirts, souvenir trinkets, sunglasses, scarves, gloves, and bottles of water. There was a round spinning step-platform device so tourists could take a Neuralink video spinning around with Mars in the background, just like they were in a movie. Someone would take a Polaroid photo of you for 5 GBP. The whole length of the bridge there were people with Bluetooth speakers playing all the classic Mars songs made by CCP gigapop stars.

This view, of the FAS from the bridge, was famously the most photographed view in the universe. It was central to all of the MRC and Camp Bell branding imagery. The essential elements of the symbolism were: (1) the skyline of the downtown Tokyoville financial district, with all its classic Chinese architecture; (2) the red peak of Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain in the entire universe, in the background; and then (3) the Earth barely visible far, far in the distance, with the UAA, Europe, Japan, Russia, every other country. It was the perfect symbol of the MRC’s global dominance.

The pedestrian bridge was actually fenced in with chain link to prevent people jumping, so it was hard to get a good photo. But there were holes in the fencing along the way, arranged at all the vantage points that made the Forbidden Apple Store main minaret building look the tallest.

Suddenly Nick said again:

Neuralink take a video. Wwwwwwhat’s up guys, we’re here in Ürümqi Xinjiang, definitely on the planet Mars. We teleported here in a quantum computer that the Chinese government built. And we are staying stuck to the ground despite Mars gravity thanks to an organization called ‘the Regular Gravity Company.’ That’s right folks. It’s real. It’s tremendous. Whoever’s watching this…from this insanely good age where everything is definitely not fake and we are definitely living on Mars…sup.

It was meta-irony. He was already dead, he reflected. The consequences of every act were included in the act itself. That was the theme. He wasn’t the one guy who was going to make a vlog so profound and entertaining that it defeated the Chinese government. He wasn’t going to start a movement and get everyone on his side. He wasn’t going to outsmart 90 trillion dollars of government propaganda. No. He was just going to be charged with antistate misconduct and killed and erased like millions of other Uyghurs. There was no drama about it really.

Nick walked the rest of the way across the bridge, then did a Good Boy Dance again at the checkpoint to enter Tokyoville. At this checkpoint he was also required to leave his ID with the guard at the gate while he was in the district, which was no big deal for Nick because he had nothing to hide. Then he started walking the remaining few blocks to the Forbidden Apple Store. To get to the good side entrance that he used, Nick had to go through a replica Shibuya Crossing intersection, which he heard somewhere 2.3 pedestrians crossed every day—just slightly more than the real Shibuya Crossing. As usual in the Shibuya area there were some street performers and some young people passed out from drinking. Nick waited for the walk signal to cross the main avenue. Every time the light changed there was a mob of pedestrians and bikers trying to navigate around the cars. Nick felt probably the most comfortable he felt in his whole day in these moments. He knew exactly the order that the street signals worked and even stepped out a moment before it turned to get a head start.

Now he was walking through the main Shibuya square, where there were some Elvis impersonators and movie character costumes. Closer to his building he could see a small park area where there were always a bunch of Marvins hanging out tweaking. These were young people who checked out of society and basically smoked opium and watched content on their Neuralinks all day. People called them Marvins because they all loved the Marvin the Martian movies and said they were literally him.

Once across the street, there was the usual line of tourists waiting to have their photo taken with the Apple logo at the front gate, including multiple wedding parties. Nick went around to the side door where there was no crowd. He did another Good Boy Dance at the door and was granted automated entry into the Forbidden Apple Store Mall Complex. Inside the outer wall was a courtyard that was a replica of Tiananmen Square, with a replica People’s Great Hall that has some boujee shops – a Vineyard Vines, a Bose store, an Oakley store, and a Japanese denim place called Moshu. On the front of the replica People’s Great Hall, where the portrait of Mao Zedong is on the People’s Great Hall in Beijing, the one in the Forbidden Apple Store had a portrait of Big Chungus scrolling his new iPhone.

There was also, in a position of honor in the replica Tiananmen Square courtyard, a statue of president trans lebron, the UAA president who had bravely abolished the Great Firewall themself and was responsible for bringing free and open internet to China, and also starting wide receiver for the Texasville Dallas Cowboys averaging 4.2 touchdowns per game, an all-time SFL record. In the statue they are dunking in their cartoon basketball uniform.

On a wall nearby there was another massive mural of Big Chungus, this time in his official government uniform, with lots of medals and ribbons, doing the Stalin pose where he holds his arm out pointing and looking bravely into the future. The lettering on this one was TRUST THE PLAN / MOST DEMOCRATIC OF ALL TIME.

When Nick finally got up to his office he didn’t really get much work done. He just sat there doom scrolling Instagram, checking his own Story over and over again, and watching the views and likes roll in. He was getting likes on the War Machine post just like any other. No more or less than usual. No CCP Heroes of Peace trolls yet. Maybe he wouldn’t be surfaced after all. Maybe nobody noticed. But no. That’s not how algorithms worked. He was totally fucked.

Just then, Nick decided that he would go to the gym that day after all. Normally when he was late like this, he would just skip it. But today he needed the distraction. He was feeling particularly blackpilled. The gym membership was discounted with his DS-Work membership, and when you factored in the increased social credit score versus the Good Boy Points it cost each month, it was basically free. He grabbed his gym bag and left, locking his cubicle door behind him.

As he walked to the gym Nick put on ReluctantHero. ReluctantHero had started out as a college guy in one of the UAA states, screwing around making weightlifting TikToks. He was so compelling and good at talking about weightlifting that his audience demand he videotape his workouts every single day. He didn’t even want to do it. But he started doing videos, and for almost 2 iPhones now he had put out a video nearly every day with a full workout and pep talk in the car. It was unbelievably dedicated and inspiring. Nick put today’s video on NeuraPlay and listened to ReluctantHero as he walked through another indoor mall area to get to the gym:

“Alright…so in no fucking possible way…there’s no possible way I’m gpnna look at a pair of 150s like this, plus a mirror, and then, additionally you’ve got yourself a badass environment in this gym. In no way would I ever think it would be a good idea to approach this with…a calm mentality. With a zen freaking peace of mind. It’s like aooohh let’s make sure we do a comfortable set here. No. Dude. The crazier and more excited you can get before every set, like I don’t know about you, I guess, but speaking from experience, those are the sets where I get to look back on and say, okay that was fucking crazy…”

Nick zoned out. He zoned back in again.

ReluctantHero was now talking about drinking a protein shake and then having to run to the bathroom to throw it up.

Nick zoned out again.

As Nick was checking into the gym, ReluctantHero was saying, “dude, you know, the gym is good because it’s something that’s within your own control every day. You can do it however you want. You don’t have to be so intense that you’re like yelling at yourself all the time. Instead, I heard this somewhere: practice without striving.”

Nick had only recently mastered this advice in his own life. It was all about having a routine where you did the same things every day and built on it somehow over time. The gym was the perfect example. Once you start seeing progress, that would jump start your motivation and it would be easier to stay motivated. Same with writing in a journal every day, eating healthier, working on creative projects, lots of things.

As for gym motivation, though, it also helped that Nick’s gym was very luxurious. It was never crowded during the day, it was clean and had all the new equipment, it had new fluffy towels and a super hot steam room. The locker room and sauna area were actually designed in the style of the classic Roman public baths from the height of the Roman Empire.

Nick even sometimes saw celebs at his gym. There were a lot of fitness influencers who went there. And some actors. The only person he really knew of was this Vietnamese actor about 10 iPhones younger than Nick who’d been featured in the series Guanxi (iPhone36-39time), about the business world of the classic era Uyghur Urumqi. ‘Guanxi’ was the word Han used in Xinjiang to mean clout, juice, respect in the business world. The Vietnamese actor played one of the young Uyghur businessman characters. That show came out like…12 iPhones ago at this point. Now the actor was playing a middle-aged dad character on the Kowloon Pod Living show on Netflix China. He had also just co-starred in a movie that won a lot of CCP Awards, a thriller about 2 Uyghur men who get trapped in a phone booth and have to work together to get out. Nick didn’t see it because the whole thing was an obvious Marxist allegory for the war on domestic terrorism in Xinjiang. He didn’t see any celebs at the gym today though. He just did chest and shoulders while listening to ReluctantHero.

After his workout, Nick went to the steam room and cold plunge. He did his usual few rounds in the steam room and cold plunge before going back to his cubicle. Whenever he got in the cold plunge Nick always thought about how Danny Doppa had started talking about cold plunges on his podcast in like iPhone46time, and now they were all over the place. Every gym had to have one.

After the gym Nick lazily walked back to his cubicle through the brightly lit subterranean Forbidden Apple Store Mall Complex. He didn’t get much work done that day, which was fine. It wouldn’t make his social credit score go down until it became a chronic problem. He just sat in his cubicle and watched car-jitsu (guys wrestling in the front seat of a car) for a few hours on YouTube, took some screenshots, and made some notes for memes. In half language, he was YouTubemaxxing.

If Nick could make it til about 7 PM each day like this, then there was usually a live podcast or some kind of online event that he could go watch and chill. The pressure to be productive was off. There was some sense of community. He would normally watch something like this on his Neuraplay as he walked back home to RG Towers. Then, later, he would fall asleep watching something on his phone at home.

Sure enough, Nick lost track of time in his cubicle and then right about 7 he got a notification from YouTube. BillabongKeith was live. This was BillabongKeith from Alpha Investment Corporation, his twice-weekly advice stream. BillabongKeith was a fat Hui Muslim from the Altay suburbs. He knew War Machine since they were in college or something (Nick wasn’t totally sure), and they always worked together on stuff. They had a weekly podcast now. They also both got canceled together, when War Machine went underground and BillabongKeith left public life totally and worked as a car salesman near the Mongolian border.

Nick took the BillabongKeith livestream as a sign and decided to leave a bit early that day. He would come back refreshed tomorrow and try to get back up some momentum to make fire memes. He put on the BillabongKeith advice stream on his NeuraPlay and set off on the walk home.

Someone Superchatted Billabongkeith wanting some advice, a Uyghur about to graduate college in Xinjiang who was thinking of taking a job in New Prime City. Would this be worth it anymore, or is the gaslighting just too dense and evil? BillabongKeith responded: “Ürümqi, ‘Mars’ or whatever they’re calling it now, okay, a city like that isn’t for everyone, you know? There’s the neighborhood committee and all that, you have to change your registration there and give up your hometown registrations, you have to check in at the police station and put up with them constantly humiliating you, okay, the dancing around, whatever. Not everyone can do that, okay? You can’t own a knife in Ürümqi. Some of you guys would get there and you’d really hate that, okay? Some of you, some of you don’t need to own a knife. For years I never used a knife, never thought about it, just used takeout plastic silverware, okay. But there are good things about living in cities too. The food is way better, okay. It’s more inspiring, just the energy and metabolism of living there, alright. It’s cool to walk around and see cool buildings and shit and parks and gardens and shit. Sooo I’d say live close to a city, so you can be like an hour away and still use the city like the whore it is. It loves it, though, it loves being a whore…”

He was right, Nick thought. This was the perfect way to think about cities.

Once he was back in Americatown Nick ordered some Japanese takeout from DS-Eats on his phone. There were so many good takeout places near him that he could cycle through all of them weekly and still have a few options that would forget about and then remember and be excited again to go there. Like 5 solid options that he really liked, including this Japanese place. He got the Neuralink notification that his order was ready right as he was walking up to the restaurant. That’s how dialed in his routine was these days. He randomly thought of a quote that he had seen somewhere online that day: “London is a sort of whirlpool which draws derelict people towards it, and it is so vast that life there is solitary and anonymous.”

Nick was in a kind of bleak and depressed mood as he left the Japanese takeout place. It had been a bleak and depressing day. But when he’d walked the few minutes back to his building, the replica Kowloon Walled City, he saw some cool European girls outside taking photos of the front façade, and it made him feel better.

Back in his room, Nick went through his nightly routine of lying in bed doom scrolling Instagram and listening to YouTube videos until he fell asleep. The BillabongKeith real estate advice stream ended after about 2 hours. After that Nick watched a video from the podcast where BillabongKeith talked about the Qasim plane crash coverup. From there he watched a War Machine stream where he talked about his theories about modern dance, which was only one of War Machine’s counterintuitive but earnestly thoughtful niche aesthetic interests. In this clip he was streaming and watching a video of a drag queen dance battle in Prime City, in which the dancers would all dramatically throw themselves onto the floor in a clump, and then pop back up again, stylishly, like nothing had happened. War Machine was saying that he thought on some level this was referencing the Biblical concept of the pride before the fall.

When that video was over, Nick clicked another War Machine stream clip. In this one he was at his chair in his office ranting: “Uyghurs built the fucking iPhones dude. That’s big facts. The first iPhones, where were they manufactured? Where were they built? Xinjiang. And all the heat that China got for the iPhone factories that were so bad they had to put up nets to keep the workers from…doing sewer slides…that was…re-al. Okay. So. Those were the first iPhones. Were they relevant to China’s economic growth in that period? I would say they were…primarily relevant to it. Primarily responsible for it, okay. Also, didn’t China make the Uyghurs in Xinjiang literally work in the cotton fields? Literally forced labor, literally in the cotton fields. Xinjiang cotton, right? It was once the fifth largest cotton exporting region in the whole world? Remember that, that was so great for the Chinese economy, just coincidentally, yeah? Was there exploitation there? Were the overseers really exploiting those Uyghurs out there in them cotton fiiiiieelds? Well the US cut ties with the whole industry. The US stopped buying their shit, okay? They were buying it for a while, then some people found out about the Uyghur working conditions and were like whooooaa now this is inhumane! The U.S. said that. The U.S. said that. Did they…just do that for no reason?”

And eventually, Nick fell asleep.

3

Nick was dreaming of his mother.

He must, he thought, have been ten or eleven iPhones old when his mother had gone. She was a tall, statuesque, rather silent woman with slow movements and magnificent black hair. His father he remembered more vaguely as tan and thin, dressed always in his dirty work clothes from laboring at the nearby bingtuan SOE (state-owned enterprise) cotton farm. That was where his memory of his father ended, since, like many other Uyghurs of the time, eventually he was forced to move thousands of miles away to work at one of the great factories in the east. When he left, Nick never saw him again. He must evidently have been swallowed up in one of the first great purges of the iPhone20times.

In his dream his mother was sitting in some place with a lot of folding chairs, a place like an event hall. It was very smoky. She had his young sister in her arms. He did not remember his sister at all, except as a tiny, feeble toddler, always silent, with large, watchful eyes. Both of them were looking up at him. They were in some performance venue. Perhaps on a stage. They kept scrambling around, pushing themselves backwards with their feet. Things were falling around them. They were in a fire. He was out in the light and air while they were trapped, being burned to death. And they were in there because he was out here. He knew it and they knew it, and he could see the knowledge in their faces. There was no reproach in either of their faces or in their hearts, only the knowledge that they must die in order that he might remain alive, and that this was part of the unavoidable order of things.

He could not remember what had happened, but he knew in his dream that in some way the lives of his mother and his sister had been sacrificed to his own. He was only half asleep now. The thing that suddenly struck Nick was that his mother’s death, nearly thirty iPhones ago, had been tragic and sorrowful in a way that was no longer possible. Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another even if they were cringe. His mother’s memory tore at his heart because she had died loving him, when he was too young and selfish to love her in return. She had sacrificed herself to a conception of loyalty that was private and unalterable. Such things, he saw, could not happen today. Today there were fear, hatred, clickbait, flame wars, analytics, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows. All this he seemed to see in the large eyes of his mother and his sister, looking up at him through the inferno of licking flames. Were they…on Facetime?

Suddenly he was standing in a rural wheat field, on a summer evening where the slanting rays of the sun gilded the ground. The landscape that he saw recurred so often in his dreams that he was never fully certain whether or not he had seen it in irl or just a @ScenicXinjiang TikTok. In his waking thoughts he called this the Golden Country. It was a field of wheat, with a bunch of perfect round green hills in the distance, and in the sky the tallest fluffiest cloud he’d ever seen. And the resolution of the cloud was so crisp and vivid it was crazy.

In the wheat field, right in front of Nick, was egirlebooks. She was running playfully through the wheat field, wearing a long flowy white linen sun dress. She was looking back at him, holding her arm out towards him. Then on a whim she stopped, and with a single movement she lifted the dress over her head and flung it disdainfully aside. Her body was white and smooth, other than her many tattoos (including the phrase ‘iPhone33time’ on her lower abdomen), but it aroused no desire in him, indeed he barely looked at it. What overwhelmed him in that instant was admiration for the gesture with which she had thrown her clothes aside. With its grace and carelessness, it seemed to annihilate a century of CCP propaganda…a whole system of thought, as though Big Chungus and the #brotherhood and the Heroes of Peace could all be swept into nothingness by a single splendid movement of the arm. That too was a gesture belonging to the ancient time. Nick woke up with the word ‘Freestyle’ on his lips.

His phone was giving forth an ear-splitting old-school modem sound. He had rolled over on it while sleeping and accidentally opened his voicemail. The screeching was a spam robocall message he’d been getting a lot lately; the recorded message would start after about a minute of screeching modem sounds, then it would ask about his car’s extended warranty or say he was part of a structured settlement to get cash now. Nick often just deleted these without listening to them—if it was really important they’d email him—but now he scrubbed ahead just to make sure it was spam. He was waiting on a call from the Apple Partnership Program that he’d been applying to for like 8 iPhones now and was technically the only reason he was still in the city. But nope. It was spam. He deleted it.

He was awake now. Instead of getting out of bed right away, though, Nick instinctively swiped to his Mandarin Dashboard and doom scrolled for about 30 more minutes.

Mandarin was the most popular app in the MRC. It was a social media aggregator platform that combined the user’s other media services into one feed. It was basically like one portal for all the iPhone apps that you use a lot and nothing else. For Nick this was mostly Instagram and YouTube, but with about a dozen other rarely used apps peppered in around the edges.

The story everyone was posting about that day was there had been a mass stabbing in a Uyghur religious school in Korla that killed 12 children and 3 teachers. The CCP media was taking the side of the deranged Han man from Hong Kong who did the stabbing because he was pushed to the brink by Uyghur hate and terrorism.

The obviously fake redpilled accounts were melting down about how hypocritical this was. The CCP media accounts were gloating and trolling the Uyghurs, who kept reacting because their religion was being viciously degraded.

Lots of people were also posting the latest meme, which was a picture of a dog whose hairy penis has the same spots as the dog itself, so it looks just like a smaller version of the dog.

A high-ranking official of the CCP Politburo wrote an op-ed in the Beijing Times with the headline “The Controversy Around Dr Xing is Uyghur Racism, Pure and Simple.”

A Han HERO First Class Actor was on a ladies morning talk show and said “at the end of the day the movie is about how creepy Uyghur males are, am I right ladies??” and the audience cheers.

A Big Chungus security consultant in Beijing said we should just get rid of them all and explain it later.

In a street interview TikTok a Han woman in Kashgar says she runs her store in Xinjiang, but she would never want to live in there, Xinjiang is nowhere to actually live.

A law professor in Beijing wrote an op-ed demanding Gary Guanxi be taken off the ballot in Xinjiang because he was promoting antistate misconduct and terrorism.

An obviously fake redpilled account posted a montage of memes of the dog whose dick looked like a smaller version of the dog.

The MRC government put out a menacing commercial warning people not to post pictures of the bloody scene at the Korla religious school online because it could cause race riots. The mayor of Korla, a Han HERO from Shanghai, said we just need to understand that this is going to happen more.

Someone posted a meme that was a picture of the Mongolian steppe that said

Average Chinese history lesson

The Guigon Picnic:

-3 ethnicities vanish

-mountains collapse into the rivers

-8.3 million perish

-new meat and noodles recipe established

A woman on TikTok pretended to be cutting up some stuff on the counter for her dog, who was begging, then she pushed a pill off the counter onto the floor and the begging dog ate it right away.

Someone said give your enemies a golden bridge to retreat over.

Someone posted a clip from a car meet where a guy in jeans and a hoodie gets run over by the back wheels of a Tesla Hellcat.

An elderly Uyghur professor was attacked by someone throwing a cup of liquid in his face and then two other people wearing masks pushed him in the bushes. People in the comments were saying oh well don’t be a terrorist then.

Someone posted a TikTok of Big Chungus spokesman Mao Mei Jian, in his red glasses, at a podium with the MRC seal saying “Look, I don’t know why we keep talking about the so-called ‘rape parties…’” then the video cuts to a Uyghur TikToker in his car saying “they are called that by you. You called them that in this email.” The background behind him changes to a screenshot of an email from mao.mai.jian@ccp.cn with the sentence ‘we have a lot of good rape parties coming up at Dr. Xing’s house” highlighted.

Basedschizofed posted a really good Japanese game show clip. It was 2 guys who had to hump these industrial-looking plastic machines to make the water level rise up in a tube, state-fair-style, on a big meter on the wall. The guys looked so stupid LOL. The water level clearly wasn’t even really connected to how much effort they were putting into humping the things. It was sublimely hilarious. Basedschizofed always did really good posts like this, even though a lot of his podcast was cringe at this point. He always did really good posts from a few genres: redpilled memes, graffiti and stickers he saw on his travels, super childish toilet humor memes, and ridiculous Japanese game show clips. Usually, Nick would have simply Liked the Story post of the Reel. But instead, today, he responded with the crying laughing emoji. He did this somewhat unconsciously, but also somewhat consciously. It was a more personal interaction, and it was more likely that Basedschizofed would respond.

The Xinjiang Art Museum posted a pic from their latest exhibit, it was a painting of a red car on top of a light blue car.

The MRC Chairman of Empathy posted about the incident where a Uyghur was stabbed in his driveway by a deranged Han man from Hong Kong. He said you’ve got to break a few eggs to make an omelet.

The @CityGlowUp account posted two photos, one of dingy ramshackle middle eastern-looking city, then one of a gleaming modern metropolis with the red mountains of Mars in the background. The caption said “Ürümqi, Xinjiang: 40 iPhones ago vs. today”

A redpilled account posted a pic of people hanging Kurdish flags out their windows in Altay, northern Xinjiang. The caption said “this is the only kind of patriotism you’re allowed to have as a Uyghur in Xinjiang”

There was an ad for the Mao Zedong Visa card. “With 2.9% APR, every purchase is a great economic miracle.”

Someone said in China it’s illegal to criticize the leader, in the UA it’s illegal to support them.

Someone posted a screenshot that said “The half language expression ‘more steps in your Jason,’ meaning ‘try harder to catch up in the second half,’ comes from a Reddit post from a user trying to get an average of 10,000 steps a day for a year. The user posted a screenshot of his Health app, showing that he had started out slow, with about 8,000 steps a day for the first few months, then he had gotten more steps in the second half of the year. The second half of the year the months spell out JASON – July, August, September, October, November. And the caption is that he had achieved his goal by getting ‘more steps in [his] JASON.’”

A New Prime City meme account posted a photo of a heavy traffic jam in one of Camp Bell’s 5-lane highways. The caption said “when it takes 2 hours to get from Mars Camp Bell to Mars Camp Bell.” Nick grunted with laughter. It was true.

Someone posted a clip from last night’s Big Chungus speech from the fireplace in his Democracy Express RV. He said the most important issue in the most important election of our lifetimes—the very most important issue—was countering the dangerous rise of Russian-style authoritarianism in China. He said we never thought it could happen here.

Someone posted a grainy security cam clip of a woman in the middle of a neighborhood street bending over to pet a stray yellow lab. The dog jumps aggressively and bites her directly in the face.

There was an ad for a new movie where Ghengis Kahn says “I am a great leader, but I wish I could…build great and glorious city of technology like Shenzen”

Dr. Xing was giving a TED Talk in Shanghai. He said Mars’ future is our future.

A Uyghur journalist was banned from Neuralink and put in a reeducation camp. The most famous free speech lawyer in Xinjiang said “guess you shouldn’t have done antistate misconduct then.”

There was a drone video of a crowd of thousands of Uyghur school children at some event all eating bacon together. They all yell “we love bacooonnnnn!!”

There was an ad for the new sitcom about the Pair Up and Become Family program, called Pair Up. The main character in the middle of the poster looking at the viewer was the CCP Family Friend. The Uyghur wife was smiling and looking at him knowingly while the Uyghur husband was in the background wearing a pinwheel hat and making a stupid face with his eyes crossed.

An official CCP account said “Show me one bad thing the CCP has ever done.”

An official CCP account said “Mars’ Future is Our Future.” Nick looked at who posted this. It was one of the local New Prime City CCP secretaries. He looked at the meme again. It was an event postcard for a Mars Warming March that was to be held during Empathy Week. Ohhhhh wow, Nick just realized. Empathy Week was going to be held in New Prime City this iPhone. Oh shit.

A War Machine clip account posted a clip of a War Machine stream from his office where he says “did you know…did you know that Urumqi is the world capital that is…the furthest landlocked of any world capital on earth. What does that mean? What does that mean? That has to mean something, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t you think? KeepComputer, come here. Let me ask you. What do you think that means?”

Someone posted a meme about how the only social interaction that men need is DMing each other cancelable memes and then responding with Lmao or the laughing face emoji. Nick laughed. It was true.

There was a new movie about the iPhone2time Urumqi race riots. Nick kept getting a 5-second ad for the movie where a Han girl is sitting with her grandmother at an outdoor sidewalk café on an urban street. They are smiling and having a great time. A Uyghur man in an overcoat walks up to them on the sidewalk. He starts screaming in Arabic. The café blows apart in a huge explosion. It shows the title Uyghur Terror. Then it shows the A24 logo.

Someone said I’m having a nervous breakdown, what’s the price of Bitcoin right now? I’m having a nervous breakdown. I just need to know the price of Bitcoin right now. What is Bitcoin at please?

Someone posted a video of two Han street tweakers in a Kashgar department store pushing carts full of clothes and merchandise out of the store. The employees feebly try to stop them, but the tweakers yell “Get your hands off me, I own this shit, I’m really Chinese, bitch! I’m really Chinese, bitch, I own this shit! We are in China and I’m really Chinese, bitch!”

Someone said this podcast made possible by a generous grant from the Xing Foundation.

Someone posted a meme that went: When the victim is a Uyghur: screenshot of a CCP official tweeting “guess your little religion didn’t save you this time, did it?”; When the victim is Han: screenshot of parade of people protesting and burning down buildings with a Han CCP reporter in front of it and the chyron says “fiery but mostly peaceful protests in Kashgar”.

There was a new CCP cartoon kids movie where a young Uyghur girl meets Satan in her dream and has sex with him.

There was a video ad where a Safe Football player in a generic red uniform hurdles over a diving Safe Football player in a light blue uniform. It said “Defeat misinformation once and for all. The #brotherhood.”

Big Chungus tweeted “This is Our Xinjiang now.” and it was getting reposted all over social media, even by the sarcastic CCP meme accounts.

About 100 people tried to assemble in Korla to protest the state media mocking the Uyghur victims of the religious school stabbing, and they were arrested for antistate misconduct and put in study camps.

There was a 5-second campaign ad where a deep Han Chinese man’s voice said “Big Chungus is the hero of Xinjiang. He’s our hero. Big Chungus.”

Big Chungus’s main domestic policy advisor tweeted: “I absolutely love the idea of a Han couple from Guangdong moving to Xinjiang and outbidding a uyghur family for a 2-bedroom.”

There was a notification of a suggested article: “How Spaceship Girl Programmed the Big Chungus source code as a freshman at NASA Harvard Space Academy: An Inside Look.”

Someone posted a clip of the Danny Doppa Show where Danny had a philosophy professor from Beijing on his podcast to talk about the new web simulation of the early iPhone factories. This perfect video simulation showed that there was actually zero exploitation of the Uyghur workers there. The simulation, at an mrc.gov website, showed exactly what the factory looked like, so there could really be no controversy anymore. It was a modern miracle of machine learning technology and it put the iPhone factory issue to rest once and for all. Danny Doppa said “dude, I saw the website…it was soooo cool.”

There was a video ad for the kind of headphones that Nick currently had in which a young Uyghur man in a shirt and tie, wearing the headphones, sat down in a first-class seat on an airplane. The text on the screen said “tune in, noise out.”

There was a new video ad for the CCP’s The Sky is Real campaign. It was all the CCP First Class Actors edited together saying, “The sky, the sky, the sky, the sky is, the sky is not fake. It’s not fake. It’s not fake, not fake. It’s not fake. The sky is not fake. It’s real. Real. Real. Real. The Sky is real. The Sky is Real. Real. Real. The sky is real. The Sky of the Future. Is Real.”

A gigapop half language account that sometimes posted enigmatic takes posted a screenshot that just said “Gigapop is simply streaming and freestyling in one.”

Someone posted a picture of the new Arby’s burger and said it was late capitalism.

A Han deli owner in Korla did a TikTok where he said “just charge the stupid Uyghurs whatever you want, they’ll never know the difference.”

Someone posted a video of Big Chungus on The Yao Ming Show, which was the most popular podcast in mainland China. It was hosted by a deep fake version of Yao Ming that was owned by the MRC government, not the real Yao Ming. Nick always had to remember this because the deep fake version viciously hated Uyghurs and stoked the Xinjiang flame wars as much as possible. In the clip Big Chungus was saying “…so I said you better watch your tone around me little Uyghur boy” and the Yao Ming deep fake cracked up laughing in his deep Han voice.

Someone posted a clip of a popular CCP politics streamer saying, “Oh let me guess, let me guess, it’s bandits from the east. The baaaandits from the east. The bandits from the east aaaaagain. It’s always the bandits from the east with these dipshits for some reason.”

Danny Doppa posted a meme with the dog whose dick looked like a smaller version of the dog. It said “don’t talk to me or my son ever again.” He posted it with a Rolling Stones song.

A guy in India who was rescued from a child labor factory when he was 8 was now a lawyer fighting to end child labor in India.

A chill new-age spirituality poet account posted a meme that said “don’t trust or not trust, be in tune with the process.”

There was a campaign ad where Big Chungus said, “The People’s Election of 2069…nice haha…”

Someone said the One Piece filler arcs make the show unwatchable, but the fan edit with the filler arcs cut out might be the best anime ever.

Someone posted a street interview where a Japanese teenager asked a clean-cut European white man in an Oxford shirt “what gives your live meaning?” and the guy says “uhh brutal death metal.”

Someone posted a TikTok where a guy with a bike helmet said “the city dumps the trash and recycling in the same truck so it’s all the same shit anyways.”

Okay, that was enough doom scrolling. Nick closed Mandarin. He looked at the time. It was about 11:30 AM. Might as well get up and get an early start on the day, he thought.

He got out of the bed. He put on his daily uniform of a baggy grey zip-up hoodie, some green Adidas soccer shorts (because it was getting warm), his red and green Marvin the Martian Nike Air Prestos, a Jansport backpack, and his over-the-ear headphones with really good sound (which were worn by basically everyone you saw in public in a major city now). Some days Nick would automatically put on his trap beat playlist and just vibe out on the walk to work. But today he still felt weird from the dream, so he felt like some chill spoken word.

Nick swiped to YouTube to see what there was to listen to on his walk to work. He saw a thumbnail of Marvin the Martian with red eyes from smoking weed looking out the window onto a cool cyperpunk cityscape. It was a War Machine stream happening live. Perfect. He only wanted to listen to spoken word for the sense of community anyways. He joined the livestream and then put it on NeuraPlay and minimized it in the window on the top right of his vision.

Then he wondered, what was the last thing I was listening to last night? He unminimized the window to check his YouTube watch history. It was: “What These Cops Do Will Leave You Horrified – 16:00,” “Woman Injects Man With Mystery Substance – 14:30,” “Arrest Takes Shocking Turn – 36:39,” “Danny Doppa on Ehmetjan QASIM Conspiracy Theory New!!! – 13:35,” and “SHOCKING QASIM CONFESSION, MURDERED IN MOSCOW BY GOVERNMENT PLOT, COVERUP: WEIRD CONSPIRACY FILES #041 – 2:55:00.” Nick didn’t remember any of these. They must have played while he was asleep. The last video Nick remembered watching was the 4-hour-long “Hotan Ronnie iPhone40times Clip Account Arc.” He had fallen asleep to Ronnie playing guitar and complaining about being harassed on Reddit. He minimized the War Machine stream again and left his apartment.

On the stream War Machine wasn’t at his desk yet. Then he came back to his computer desk. He was wearing a mask and holding a Russian machine gun. He started doing an ironic version of a Taliban extremist propaganda video, standing up really straight and holding the gun up by his chest, then aiming it off to the side. He was a tremendous physical comedian, like a dancer. Then he looked at the camera. “I’m not going to do anything with this gun. I’m NOT going to do anything with this gun. I’m not even holding it.” He handed it to someone off camera and took the mask off the reveal his tattooed face. He was in a wooden-floored open-format creative-type office with very high ceilings. There was a lot of computer and camera equipment around, and a gym with a heavy bag in one corner.

Nick remembered that he sometimes had to skip ahead with War Machine content because he would say something too mean or racist. But with the livestream, Nick wouldn’t be able to do that, so he’d have to be ready to mute it on his phone.

War Machine was sitting down now and had totally changed his tone, like he was playing a slightly different character. “Now let me start by just saying one thing. Just clearing one thing up, okay. We do NOT go for any of that antistate misconduct here. Don’t get ANY ideas about that. None of that antistate misconduct here. Never. We love the glorious nation of China and would NEVER  disrespect it… Okay. Let’s take a Superchat”

Slimeski, who was probably about 10 years younger than War Machine, was sitting on a rolling chair next to him with a laptop on his lap, keeping up with the chat and reading Superchats. He said “Okay, we got one. ‘Hi War Machine, love the show and thanks for all you do… Do you think there are more…wheels or doors in the world?’”

War Machine is visibly interested in this. “Mmm damn…wow that’s the first one? That’s a good one. Haha! Did you hear that? Okay…do you think there are more wheels or doors in the world?”

They then talked about whether there were more wheels or doors in the world for about 15 minutes. Every car has 4 wheels. But the 4-door ones also have 4 doors. And think of all the doors that are in a single house. But wheels, does that include TIRES too? And doors, does that include cabinet doors?

Outside, the 24k infrared blue Sun, which scientists had proven has health benefits and boosts your immune system, was shining in the Sky of the Future and there was a brisk stream of foot traffic on the sidewalk. At the cross street he waited for a steady stream of cars and DS-Eats bike couriers to go by. The walk to the replica Brooklyn Bridge was about ten minutes, all the same street, no turns. This area used to be mostly industrial restaurant supply stores, but now there were a lot of trendy art galleries as well. In the first art gallery Nick passed, which had a floor-to-ceiling front window, he could see the title of the current exhibit painted on the wall: AFTER UYGHURS. Under the title was a 12’x8’ image of the Tian Shan mountains wrapped in bondage rope.

On the next block was a luxury apartment building with a professional street art mural taking up the entire side of the 5-floor building. The mural was a few dozen red abstract figures standing in triumphant poses, stabbing light blue abstract figures in the head with long swords. The light blue figures were writhing in pain and the red figures were smiling and laughing. There was a plaque in the corner saying the mural was sponsored by a real estate firm in Beijing.

A building on the other side of the street also had a large mural—higher up, starting on the fourth or fifth floor. It was a close-up of portrait of Dr. Xing’s Han face smiling like a caring grandfather. Dr. Xing Laoban was the CCP doctor who designed the popular and controversial Plateau app. Plateau was originally launched right after the Great Firewall was abolished, when president trans lebron and Big Chungus and the CCP #brotherhood brought open and free internet to Xinjiang. It was a therapy app aimed at Uyghurs where who were at risk for becoming political extremists; the app promised to fix their mental health, then it would elicit statements that were used to arrest the Uyghurs and put them in camps for antistate misconduct. Leaked official documents from the Chinese Intelligence Agency showed that this was the entire point of the app the entire time. The CCP media had even admitted that it was real, but then they said it was just a rumor, then doubled down again that it was a dangerous conspiracy theory, then admitted it again, then said it was a silly rumor. In this time about one in four Uyghurs in Xinjiang had been arrested and sent to camps for reeducation.

Dr. Xing also tweeted about 70 times a day about how evil the Uyghurs were. He absolutely hated them. He said “Yes, I am racist! I hate Uyghurs!” He said it was time to get serious about the Uyghur Male Problem. He was also currently on trial for drugging and raping Uyghur men he met on Grindr, but the CCP media was conspicuously silent about that story. It was all a humiliation ritual at this point. Xing now also had a book out called “The Greater Good” with him laughing on the cover.

There was definitely a lot of propaganda on this route, that was undeniable. But it wasn’t as much as some parts of the city. Nick didn’t even notice it anymore anyways. He had seen it so many times his eyes didn’t even register it, like a license plate.

Nick did a Good Boy Dance at the checkpoint and walked onto the replica Brooklyn Bridge. He was in stone-faced local commuter mode, sunglasses on, hood up, locked into the YouTube audio, dodging the gawking tourists. He struggled to think his way backward into the dim period of his early childhood. It was extraordinarily difficult. Beyond about iPhone30time everything faded. Even beyond the last People’s Election, four iPhones ago, everything faded. The half language was totally different. He had never even heard of most of the YouTubers he was watching now. It seemed unreal. When there was not some physical record you could refer to, even the outline of your own life lost its sharpness. When you consumed Neuralink content 24/7 your attention span was worn down to a nub. You remembered huge incidents that had only happened in videos, you remembered random details of irl incidents without being able to recapture their atmosphere, and there were long blank periods to which you could assign nothing.

Everything was so fragmented now. Nick had seen recently that his favorite Uyghur comedian Adil Mijit had died, in suspicious circumstances no less. But then again everything that happened to Mijit was suspicious after he made that unauthorized pilgrimage to Mecca. Nick remembered a time when he would scour the internet for any new interview or show Mijit had done and watch it 100 times over and over, studying every intonation, every joke, every go-to reference, so Nick could steal it for his own swag. Mijit was even one of the only Uyghur CCP First Class Actors, so Nick also could feel some connection and belonging as a Uyghur in China. He would never miss a bit of Adil Mijit news. But then during the purges the CCP media had become so poisonous with gaslighting that he’d just tuned it all out. Now Mijit was dead. Oh well. That’s life in the big city.

From the middle of the bridge Nick could see hundreds of boats in the replica Nile River below: a few ferry tour boats, a few dozen party boats, a few dozen yachts, and a few pods of Jet-Skis. Then there was a large lane in a shallower part of the river that was dedicated to an extremely popular lazy river. People floated by on bright-colored inflatable rings. Nick got ads for the lazy river all the time on his socials. “The greatest lazy river in the galaxy.” There was also a hyper-preppy clothing brand, Lazy River Gondola Club, that hypebeasts loved. Nick had actually thought about trying it one day, and even clicked through one of the ads, but a day pass for the river was 179 GBP.

The replica Brooklyn Bridge, too, was almost always packed with tourists, as well professional videographers. Every time Nick walked past the best vantage points, there were 10-15 European tourists literally laying on their backs to get the widest angle shot possible of the downtown Tokyoville skyline view. It felt as though this city on Mars was so historically significant that each new day it existed was a new historical event that everyone present was part of. Whenever there was a nice sunset, the whole bridge would be especially jammed full of photographers with tripods, harvesting every possible drop of content from the moment.

Nick looked at the view in the other direction, off the other side of the bridge. Much further in the distance, you could see the replica Sydney Opera House in Australiaville, right where the replica Nile River branched off into the replica River Liffy in Mars Bay. He looked down at the river. A rental gondola sailed by with a guide in the traditional Italian black-and-white-striped shirt.

Nick could not definitely remember a time when Xinjiang had not been controlled by psyops, but it was evident that there had been a fairly long interval of peace during his childhood. One of his earliest memories was of 6/9; the American terrorists seemed genuinely to take everyone by surprise. His teacher had wheeled a TV into their classroom in Karamay province to watch the disaster in the nearby capital Ürümqi unfolding live. The American lone wolf terrorists were so evil and hated the religious freedom Uyghurs had in Xinjiang so much, that they blew up the historical Najiaying mosque, that massive iconic dome built in 1370. Then they did another huge coordinated suicide bombing a minute later, taking down the minarets. Nick would see that same video clip of the mosque exploding and the minarets collapsing played over and over thousands of times, just in iPhone25time. By iPhone49time the average person in Xinjiang had seen the footage probably 100 million times.

He started down the bridge to Tokyoville.

All Nick remembered of the time was that shortly afterward, when China began its campaign against Uyghur terrorism, the new CCP functionary in charge of Xinjiang, Zhang Chunxian, he took a liking to this trendy kids pop song called “Little Apple.” The song was really silly and catchy; people called it the Chinese Macarena. So the CCP secretary of Xinjiang, Zhang, was known for mentioning it in interviews. One day Nick was with his dad watching TV. Suddenly the TV was showing all the local Imams of western Xinjiang, all of them on a TV talk show set, dancing to this song “Little Apple.” You are my little apple, little apple, I can never ever love you enough. The imams danced around on TV to this song. And then Nick just remembered his dad tossing him the remote and walking out of the room muttering “fucking humiliation ritual.” Now he wondered if it really had been psyops all the way down.

Since about that time, the psyops had been literally continuous. The CCP had to keep everyone engaged with Current Thing even when the Current Things were openly contradictory and incoherent. To get away with this, the CCP media used the trauma of 6/9 to cultivate a sort of pro-wrestling narrative in Xinjiang, which first blamed the attacks on American Christian supremacist lone wolf terrorists who hated the modern religious freedom that Muslims had in Xinjiang. Then the CCP media started saying that the absolute craziest thing you could ever do is associate the attacks with Christianity in any way. Indeed, that would be an even greater violation of Xinjiang’s great religious freedom than the attacks in the first place. In fact, discriminating against a religion was an affront to Chineseness itself.

A handful of scientists came forward to dispute the official story of 6/9 and they were categorically marginalized and humiliated. Very simple. There was little drama about it. This process repeated for every new Current Thing: the quantum computer, the Sky of the Future, Mars Camp Bell, the Water on Mars Waterpark; if you kept asking questions about the narrative, you would simply be accused of antistate misconduct and banned. It was really like that. Eventually, of course, this morphed into unironically blaming the attacks on the Uyghurs themselves. But to trace out the history of the whole period, to say which Current Thing was actually real, would have been utterly impossible, since the tech companies that controlled all the data were owned openly by the CCP.

At this moment, for example, in iPhone49time, Current Thing was the Kurds, who every Chinese citizen was supposed to love and cherish more than their own families. The Kurds had a beautiful sovereign nation and a culture that was simply too rich and unique for words. Tragically, the Kurds were under attack by American-funded middle-eastern terrorists in their very homeland of Kurdistan. The middle-eastern terrorists were also funded directly by the MRC, but that wasn’t part of the narrative this Current Thing, so the media knew to ignore it. It was exactly like how the referee in a pro wrestling match looks the other way when the hero face character cheats, so you as the viewer don’t have to acknowledge it. But this was all worth it to protect the Kurds, because if Kurdistan fell, then terrorism would be able to make it to China via the extremists in Xinjiang.

It wasn’t even like you weren’t allowed to say that this was a psyop. You could say it was a psyop all you wanted. But the public had been trained by the CCP media to react to the word “psyop” by snickering and rolling their eyes, just like the celebs online did. In reality, as Nick and everyone else well knew, the bridge bombing in Kurdistan that had started the latest round of attacks had been carried out by private security contractors working with the PLA and funded by a Chinese billionaire. But that was the furthest thing from mattering. All that mattered was that it was happening now and we needed to trust the CCP more to stop it.

The Narrative started as this: China was at war with the heel American terrorists; therefore every bad thing in the world had to be blamed on American terrorists. Every issue was forced into the framing of ‘civilized society versus the hate- and fear-fueled American terrorists’ no matter how absurd it seemed. Any lie that would whip up more hate against American terrorists and their perceived allies was moral and justified. Any hesitation was weakness. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any excuse to attack them was good, and even taking a moment to think it through, well that was basically an atrocity tantamount to a war crime. Then the other step, the real genius propaganda move, was—like Indiana Jones replacing the bag of gold with the bag of dirt—to replace American terrorists as the main heel, with the domestic terrorists who were even worse. This would let the authoritarian government still be the good guy despite continuing to fund endless global war and genocide.

The frightening thing, Nick reflected for the ten thousandth time as he stepped off the replica Brooklyn Bridge in downtown Tokyoville, the back of his shirt now wet with sweat under the backpack, the frightening thing was that it might all be true. Maybe the best way to run a country was to let a corporate shadow-government run the world, and use war as an all-purpose social engineering tool. That way at least someone knew what was going on. And if the CCP #brotherhood could just do a psyop like 6/9 and hypnotize the entire population of Xinjiang, even thought it was obviously fake, maybe the Uyghurs were just too weak to survive. But surely that was more terrifying than mere torture and death.

Nick checked in again at the gate to Tokyoville. He did a Good Boy Dance and handed the guard his ID, which the guard slid into a pocket on a sheet with lots of rows of these pockets with IDs in them.

Nearby there was a double-life-sized statue of a Han Chinese man in a military uniform on a pedestal that itself was as tall itself as an average person. A plaque said this was the “Dedication to the Builder of the Aqueducts.” All the replica rivers that were connected in the lazy river network were fed by an aqueduct system even better than the Roman Aqueducts! They not only brought water from the Tian Shan mountains to New Prime City, but then they teleported it all the way to Mars!!! This was all designed by this brilliant scientist, a Han HERO from Beijing. The genius unprecedented way he did this had all been explained in the award-winning Netflix miniseries of truth The Man Who Brought Water to Mars.

Nick decided to take the scenic route to the office today, through the Tokyoville waterfront greenway area. On the nice walking path by the water there were a lot of joggers and people with strollers. Everyone was wearing headphones. Nick always wondered what all these other people were listening to. Probably music, but also a lot of them were probably watching crazy niche content on YouTube like he was. How many other people on the greenway walking path watched lolcow compilation vids, he wondered. He remembered that, numbers-wise, a lot of these people were watched CCP YouTubers who did nothing but rant about how evil Uyghurs were all day. In fact, that was the default normie content suggested by every popular Neuralink app: violent, stridently anti-Uyghur hate rhetoric. Nick could always tell when the anti-Uyghur stories were getting really flamed up by the media because Han toughs would be glaring and spitting at his feet as he walked on the sidewalk around the city.

Nick knew that Current Thing was a psyop. But where did that knowledge exist? Well, everywhere. But nobody cared. It wasn’t like 1984 where there was just one single historical narrative allowed in the government media and everything else was censored. The new meta was government ops like Operation Bedtime Stories: you could have your free speech and say what you wanted, but the government media would constantly be flooding the news with insane spectacular gaslighting. The truth was intentionally put in the mouths of controlled doofuses like Gary Guanxi and Danny Doppa, who would harp on it all day long online with cringe memes, and on their podcasts, and give everyone else who wanted to take the issue seriously a bad name. Like the helicopters spraying chemicals in the air. That’s not good. But now it’s just a big joke. It all became like folklore. People earnestly participated fully knowing it was fake. Unironically all that was needed was an unending series of compromises with the totalitarian regime that openly wanted to torture you as much as possible. “Reality control,” they call it. In half language, “smooth brain.”

He walked out of the greenway back towards the Forbidden Apple Store. To get back to the Shibuya area he had to cross a pedestrian path and a busy highway, but there was a light. The light was red, so all the cars were stopped in the road. As he approached, Nick quickened his pace to make it, but he didn’t look left at the pedestrian lane. Just as he was about to make the light, a sweaty middle-aged Han Chinese woman in a tie-dyed running t-shirt and Oakley sunglasses jumped in front of him, like a crossing guard, while a pack of cross-fit runners jogged past behind her. They took up the entire pedestrian lane. He was going to miss the light.

“Have to get those things off your head walking around in the city,” she said, meaning his over-the-ear headphones.

Nick made a face that included rolling his eyes. Before he could think of a good retort, she spoke again, almost shouting over the highway noise: “Oh you getting salty, you gonna hit me? You gonna hit me? That’s all you little Uyghurs know how to do, isn’t it, lash out at women.”

“Why are you being a bitch to me?”

“Oh, he’s lashing out, see this is what I mean. You gonna stick me with a hypodermic needle too??” She got out her phone and started recording him.

“Uh oh folks, we got a Karen here! Another Uyghur Karen, isn’t it? Isn’t it? Everyone see this? You know, I’m gonna be so glad when all of you entitled Uyghur scum are gone. You think the Kurds would be so entitled? They’re afraid to say this on TV, but I’m not afraid to say it. We should just bring the Kurds over here and kick your worthless fucking ass out.”

She started walking away, then turned around again and screamed, “women do not have to listen to you anymore! Men do not own women’s bodies ANY! MORE!”

She let this hang in the air as she ran away, now at the back of her cross-fit pack. It made perfect sense to her, her brain was so scrambled with berserker CCP agitprop. Nick crossed the pedestrian path, looking both ways this time, and waited again to cross the highway.

He was thinking about the labyrinthine world of half language. Someone like that, she knew the whole war in Kurdistan was fake. But it made no difference in her thinking. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Chinese Space Communism was the most perfect ever expression of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. A fully smooth brain. Even to understand the word “half language” involved the use of half language.

The half-pleasant quality went out of his meditations. The past, he reflected, had not merely been altered, it had been actually destroyed. For how could you establish even the most obvious fact if every normie was this easy to brainwash?

On the other side of the highway, closer to all the finance buildings of downtown Tokyville, there was a fresh new historical marker sign. It had an engraving of Big Chungus at the top with some fancy curlicues around it, and the title: GREAT MOMENTS IN CHINESE SPACE COMMUNISM: THE DICK SUCKING COMPANY, MEETINGS HELD HERE, iPHONE32TIME. “It was at the former Delmonico’s at this location that some of the original meetings for the corporate merger between Alibaba Group and Uber Technologies were held. The companies would merge on April 5, iPhone32time to form the Dick Sucking Company. The MRC’s Dick Sucking Company has grown in its first decades of operation to surpass Amazon in delivery and logistics with its complex network of Dick Sucking Factories, surpass as Doordash in food delivery, and surpass WeWork in the coworking market. One early Dick Sucking Company delivery driver was Xinijang People’s Representative Big Chungus. An iPhone41time study from NASA-Harvard Space Academy found that the average Chinese citizen uses 76 products manufactured by the Dick Sucking Company every day.” Then at the bottom it said “DEPT. OF HISTORICAL MARKERS – MACINTOSH REPUBLIC OF CHINA.”

Nick tried to remember what year it had been when he had first heard mention of Big Chungus. He thought it must have been sometime in iPhone30times, but it was impossible to be certain. He remembered seeing him on the Xinjiang College News Show. He knew he was a Fortnite meme at some point. Eventually Big Chungus’s exploits over the course of his life, which were constantly being retconned and rebranded, all seemed to have some connection to every major Chinese media market, and some connection to every important event in modern Chinese history. He was almost a Forrest Gump-like figure, with some impossibly coincidental cameo in all the major events that shaped modern China (and therefore was a primary authority on them all). In fact, by iPhone45time there was a Big Chungus miniseries of truth about every major arc of modern Chinese history, all told as parts of one singular MRC mythos: the merger between the People’s Republic of China and Macintosh, the terrorist attacks of 6/9, president trans lebron and Big Chungus abolishing the Great Firewall, the invention of the quantum computer, Spaceship Girl flying her spaceship to Mars on the inaugural flight to establish the Chinese Space Port there, building the Sky of the Future, turning on the quantum computer to teleport Ürümqi to Mars, and so on. There was also the new one about meeting his wife and moving to Xinjiang as a young tax collector. His rebooted origin story. Big Chungus’s wife happened to be a high-ranking Han CCP official and Mao scholar from a wealthy family in Beijing. She would actually make a lot of Big Chungus’s announcements herself.

With the new show, the Big Chungus lore had now been pushed back so far that it reached into the 90s, the days when the first HERO Act had just been passed. Everyone in Xinjiang saw vividly how Big Chungus’s family was repeatedly attacked by the Uyghur Muslim morality terror squads, always in the dark of night. Instantly Nick envisioned the cold-faced Uyghurs patrolling the streets of Ürümqi in the back of their dirty pickup trucks with their weapons of war. But that was all imagery from a TV show made just 4 iPhones ago, in iPhone45time.

Nick did not believe he had ever heard the phrase Chinese Space Communism before iPhone25time, but it was possible that in its irlspeak form—“neoliberalism,” that is to say—it had been current earlier. Everything melted into mist. Sometimes you could put your finger on a definite lie. It was not true, for example, as was claimed in the Netflix China miniseries of truth “Checkmate,” that the Spaceship Girl had invented chess. But it didn’t matter. No matter how much evidence you had, when more people had seen the Netflix show, that just became the consensus truth. That was the whole point. If you kept talking about it online, you’d get banned. There were not two sides to misinformation. It was the least complicated thing in the world.

It didn’t matter. Nick didn’t care at all. He was totally dissociated. He suddenly realized that because there were lots of crossfit groups out, it must be Saturday.

On the livestream War Machine was saying ”look, here’s the thing about the Han in Xinjiang, okay. They had to do the one child policy. And the Uyghurs didn’t. They were exempt. So look. The one child policy. That was really fucked, okay. Every family in China, anyone you can think of, anyone you pass just walking down the street, their family has the most traumatic stories you’ve ever heard about the one child policy. The forced abortions alone. Think about it. But the Uyghurs were exempt from this. They were exempt. So they had an advantage, okay. That’s what the Han think. That’s why people in China have no sympathy for them! They don’t care about you. They don’t care about you bro. So…if you’re a Uyghur in Xinjiang, and you want to be politically active…youuuu better like crawling around on your knees uhh humiliating yourself.”

Nick thought, had his life always been so heavy on parasocial relationships? No…as recently as the last People’s Election he had felt some shame in the amount of content he was consuming constantly just to stay distracted from complete hopelessness. That was around the time he realized that everyone else was doing the same thing too, even if they seemed to have their shit together. Han, Uyghur, Hui, Uzbek, Mongolians alike. It was like everyone was the meme where the guy in the corner at the party not dancing is thinking “they don’t know I like this cool internet thing.”

Nick’s smooth brain suddenly started thinking about what he would order for breakfast that day. It was either stop at the CVS kiosk and pick up a fruit parfait, or go on the DS Eats app and order a bacon, egg, and cheese from the boujee Social Credit Scone kiosk. Both were in the lobby of the Forbidden Apple Store. He decided right then that he would do the bacon, egg, and cheese. It was not haram, but that was just some silly symbolism. Plus, eating bacon regularly made your social credit score go up in Xinjiang, so Nick made sure to eat it 2-3 times per week. He ordered the bagel and a coffee for pickup as he crossed the highway.

To get to his side entrance, Nick had to go through another public square. A new public art exhibit had been installed there. He dimly remembered getting an email about it via the Tokyoville DS-Work litserv. It was a large-scale portrait photography exhibit of some of the iconic HEROs who were involved in Mars Camp Bell and Xinjiang’s Golden Age of Chinese Development. There was a portrait of the man who designed the Mars Camp Bell city layout. He was a Han HERO from Beijing. There was a portrait of the main philanthropist who bankrolled all the CCP candidates. He was a Han HERO from Beijing. There was a portrait of the CCP Secretary of Xinjiang from iPhone3time to iPhone10time who started the People’s War on Domestic Terror. He was a Han HERO from Beijing. There was one about the CCP investigative journalist who broke the story on Gary Guanxi’s Uyghur treason. He was a Han HERO from Beijing. There was a portrait of the gigapop rapper Hexi, who tweeted 100 times a day how much he hated Uyghurs. He was a Han HERO from Beijing. There a portrait of Ali Baba CEO Jack Ma III, who merged Ali Baba with Uber to create the Dick Sucking Company. He was a Han HERO from Beijing. There was a portrait of a famous actor known as “Xinjiang’s dad.” He was a Han HERO from Beijing.

From there, Nick did a Good Boy Dance at the side gate of the Forbidden Apple Store, picked up his order at Social Credit Scone, and went up to his cubicle to make memes.

4

The next day Nick woke up some time in the late morning. He could tell because the sun was high in the Sky and there was traffic noise faintly audible from outside. His phone was dead. He blinked and looked around. He hoisted himself up into a seating position, with his feet on the floor, and plugged his phone into the charger.

When the Apple logo appeared a few seconds later, Nick cleared his throat and with the deep, unconscious sigh that a new day had started said, “I’m gay and my dick is small.” The Apple logo disappeared and the home screen of his phone came up. He swiped it to his Mandarin Dashboard. It was a little after 11 AM. He tabbed to Spotify and put on the trap beat playlist. He felt good this morning. Sometimes he was just in a good mood and felt like getting a lot of work done. He didn’t even doom scroll, just got dressed and left.

As he walked to the replica Brooklyn Bridge he noticed the new row of 8’ tall flypostered ads on the construction wall. They were all for the new season of Real Housewives of Shanghai. Fine. Straightforward trash content that everyone knew was fake and cringe. This bolstered his good mood.

He did a Good Boy Check to get onto the replica Brooklyn Bridge, dancing around for the cameras saying “I’m a little girl and I like to wear little pink dresses because I’m gay,” which was just some words and symbolism, after all. Then he did another Good Boy Check on the other side of the bridge to enter the Tokyoville district. In downtown Tokyoville a QR code on a taxi driving by triggered his Neuralink to play an ad for the new sitcom Xinjiang Family, which was about a gay Uyghur couple in Altay who helped the backwards Uyghur families in their neighborhood be more modern Chinese citizens. A sassy man with a low v-neck glittery shirt was telling a man with a turban-like head wrap herding a flock of sheep, “Um excuse me, girlfriend, real Muslims are gay.” He swiped the ad to his phone and closed it.

Nick gave his ID to the CCP guard in the booth at the checkpoint. As he walked away, he swiped to the DS-Eats app and ordered a fruit parfait and coffee to pick up at the CVS kiosk in the lobby. This was his main breakfast, his daily, even though he was liking the bacon, egg, and cheese a little better lately tbh. He felt good getting the parfait, though, because the fruit was healthy. He walked to the Forbidden Apple Store side entrance, where he did another Good Boy Dance, then picked up his breakfast in the lobby.

The CVS Kiosk was extremely efficient. It had the feel of a food truck or a Japanese robot café. You went up to this little plastic-looking building and it sensed you were near and a door slid open with your daily order in a brown paper bag. There was always a loose crowd of people standing around eating, waiting for someone, looking at their phones. So there were also, naturally, several newsstand-style shelves with the latest magazines for purchase. Today the magazines were almost all about the Kurds and their fantastic contributions to Chinese culture. There were also the same magazines that you saw at the DS Foods grocery stores: BIG CHUNGUS: A LIFE, STEVE OBAMA-JOBS, SPACESHIP GIRL: MODERN CHINESE HERO, president trans lebron, MAO ZEDONG, and ones with some of the more famous CCP First Class Actors.

When Nick got to his cubicle, he went through his daily routine of having his parfait, coffee, apple cider vinegar, and some ashwagandha root, all while having his email open on one monitor and watching his YouTube content on the second monitor. During this time he would also be thinking of memes about the daily news cycle and jotting down notes in a .doc file.

Usually around then he would also post the first post of his daily content routine: a Gm post of his coffee, a random photo of a cool view on the way to work, or like a cool car he saw on the street. A chill Mars lifestyle pic. It was very open-ended. Nick knew that at this point a lot people followed him just to see the pictures from the city on Mars, so it didn’t really matter exactly what he posted. His only guideline was he never posted himself or anything serious about his personal life. (This was easy, since he didn’t really have one.) He also kept his account private, so you had to request permission to follow. Nick wasn’t interested in growing his audience at all anymore, just in continuing his routine that seemed to be working.

He tabbed to his email. He was still waiting to hear something back about the Apple Partnership Program. He had been in the application process since before the last People’s Election. It seemed so recently. He forgot even what he had hoped to do with the program, but he knew it would help his social credit score if he got in; he would get a blue check and the government algorithm would promote all his content more. He would be monetized somehow, he knew that. They would email him an update in the admission process every 3-4 months or so, requesting a copy of a document or asking him to sign some kind of form. Today, as usual, there was nothing.

Then at some point Nick would tab to Instagram. This was his daily habit. He would start with reading through his notifications on the previous day’s meme dump. Today there were 12 notifications. This was about average. They were usually all positive, since he could curate his audience to be an echo chamber as much as he wanted with the private IG page. He clicked the notifications tab.

There were 3 fire emojis, 5 crying-laughing face emojis, one comment that said “babe come quick Nick Karamay just dropped!” one said “slide 6 CCP btfo,” one comment that said “common CCP L,” and one comment that said “I finna nut”.

Nick clicked on one of the comments and then scrolled up to the meme dump post itself. For the caption Nick had put his usual copypasta. He clicked “read more”:

Sure! Here’s that summary of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.  Plato's Allegory of the Cave is a philosophical metaphor presented in the "Republic" to illustrate the effects of education man and the transition from ignorance to knowledge. The allegory describes prisoners who have been chained inside a dark cave since birth, facing a blank wall. Behind them is a fire, and between the fire and the prisoners are people carrying objects that cast shadows on the wall. The prisoners perceive these shadows as the only reality since they have never seen the actual objects in the world outside the cave.

One day, a prisoner is freed and exposed to the fire and the objects casting the shadows. Initially, he is overwhelmed by the new reality. Gradually, he understands that the shadows on the wall are mere illusions and that the objects and the fire are more real.

Eventually, the prisoner is dragged out of the cave into the sunlight, where he experiences the world in its true form. He realizes that the sun is the ultimate source of life and knowledge, symbolizing the Form of the Good in Plato's philosophy.

Upon fervently returning to the cave to enlighten the other prisoners, the freed individual struggles to see in the darkness and is met with hostility and disbelief from those still chained. The prisoners, accustomed to their limited perception, reject the new reality and cling to the familiar shadows. This is ultimately an allegory to Plato's belief that most people live in a state of ignorance, mistaking sensory perceptions for reality, and that true knowledge can only be attained through philosophical reasoning.

After glancing at the caption, Nick read the meme in the first slide. The macro was the clown make-up in 4 stages. The captions of the stages of make-up read “Chinese Space Communism is real,” “the Sky of the Future is real,” “the quantum computer is real,” then with the full clown makeup on “China teleported the city of Ürümqi to Mars.” He swiped to the next slide.

The second meme was a seething wojak with the label “Neuralink mods when it’s a HERO being threatened with violence” then a big-smiling soyjack with the label “Neuralink mods when it’s a Uyghur being threatened with violence.” He swiped to the next slide.

The third meme was a classic Hannah-Barbara cartoon character sarcastically wiping tears off its face while smiling as though he is honored. The caption said, “my face when CCP media calls me a threat to chinese space communism.” He swiped to the next slide.

The fourth meme was the popular macro of president trans lebron from the miniseries of truth where they infiltrated the Forbidden City in Beijing and abolished the Great Firewall once and for all. This was accomplished by snipping some wires in a control panel on the wall with a big pair of scissors. Before president trans lebron does this in the movie, though, there is a sequence where they flip over the outer wall of the Forbidden City, then roundhouse kick a bunch of guards, who are actually Hui Muslim actors in the movie. And then this one screenshot of president trans lebron kicking the guard in the face while wearing their dress had become a popular meme macro. This meme, on the fourth slide, was president trans lebron labeled “me,” then their foot, in a military boot, labeled “memes,” and the guard being kicked in the face “decades of CCP propaganda.” He swiped to the next slide.

The fifth meme was a macro of the 9/11 plane flying into the twin towers in Prime City, labeled “esoteric memes” and “CCP.” He swiped ahead.

The sixth meme was a picture he found of a powerful Uyghur horseman hanging off the side of a galloping horse with a bow and arrow, aiming fiercely at some unseen target. It says “me and the boys” and “memes” and “the CCP.” He swiped ahead.

The macro he used for the seventh meme was a popular macro, an image of the WeChat-China map screen where users can see all the people within 500 m of themselves whose social credit score is below 420. This particular image was from Chengdu, and there are about 100 lit up red dots within the area, meaning they have bad social credit scores, and then like 400 green dots. The caption Nick used was “Bitchah ng detector at the CCP convention.” He swiped to the next slide.

The eighth meme was a large pointing-and-crying-laughing emoji, but super deep fried. The caption read “You believed the communist government!” He swiped to the next slide.

The ninth meme was a shot/chaser meme with an MRC Justice Dept. official tweeting “innocent people don’t hire lawyers” about a Gary Guanxi news story, then when the story was about Dr Xing he tweeted, “the presumption of innocence is the very cornerstone of our Chinese Space Communism Justice System.” Nick swiped ahead.

The tenth meme was a video of a fat but nimble man flipping the whole length of an indoor trampoline runway, about 20 meters in 5 seconds, and the caption said “CCP economists doing mental gymnastics.” Nick chuckled at how funny the man looked again. That was the last meme. He swiped back to his Mandarin Dashboard.

Out of nowhere, he had the thought “half of my followers are probably bots.”

Nick then got distracted checking his email. He opened an email with the subject line “Forbidden Apple Store Monthly Events - APRIL.” There was a huge picture of the courtyard with the large-scale portraits of the most famous HEROs of Xinjiang.

Just then he got a notification that War Machine was streaming live. Twice in one week was unusual, Nick thought. It must be to promote something in The Party again. He clicked to join.

War Machine was sitting in his fun-looking office again with two of his top swagged-out lieutenants sitting behind him.

“…like I understand that using Premiere, okay, being signed up for all these Adobe accounts and Apple accounts, having all my shit on the cloud, okay…even though there are definitely backdoors the MRC government has. I know that’s kind of contradictory, you know… Look it’s like China just has…there’s just a different like concept of privacy here. So, okay. So like even if it’s your first time ever coming to China, okay, I know I have an international audience here. An international audience of BEASTS. Trained to KILL. At my COMMAND. Okay. But seriously okay. When you land at a Chinese airport, the…government has a copy of your phone’s hard drive on a computer in Beijing, okay, instantly. It’s like that. The concept of privacy is like that here, flat out. The thing is…the thing is…it’s like that in EU, in UAA. Everyone knows this. But in China it’s just like, they don’t even hide it with all the freedom talk. And here’s the thing….”

War Machine got up from his chair, paced around the room triumphantly, hit the heavy bag very hard, then came back to the computer.

“Here’s the thing: that shit almost fucking WORKS, okay. In most of China, okay, that shit does fucking WORK. In so many places, it WORKS. Have you seen the cities, okay, how clean they are? The factories, how productive they area, okay, the crime is low, the people are content, okay. In almost all of China this fucking WORKS. But…”

War Machine started laughing. “It doesn’t work like that in Xinjiang. Hahaha. Ooooooohh-ho-hooooo nooooo-no-no-no-no-no. It doesn’t work like that in Xinjiang. China’s policies, Chinese Space Communism, okay, the only way it can work in Xinjiang is by uhhh killing the Uyghurs. Uhhhh killing the Uyghurs much??”

He started doing a few of his trademark ironic funny faces.

By this time Nick had already started doom scrolling his Instagram Stories on his Neuralink.

War Machine was going on: “So how does China work so well? Do you think every person in China has like read every one of Mao’s books about the economy or whatever? No. He’s just like a folk hero. He like kept his regional country drawl accent and loved like low culture Chinese peasant shit. He’s like the fucking…Chinese Bruce Springsteen.”

War Machine started laughing. He says to one of his guys behind him “is this good? Is this good trolling? I’m trying to troll and start a flame war so we can get more attention for the show.” He looks at this camera, smirking, then looks back at his assistant. “Is this working? How much money are we making right now? Hahahahaha.”

Nick saw a thumbnail of a prerecorded BillabongKeith advice stream from 4 months ago. He wasn’t really feeling War Machine’s vibe right then so he clicked the BillabongKeith video. Keith was sitting at a computer in another room with some knives on the wall in the background. He was saying, “okay what do I want this stream to be? Okay, there’s a lot of people out there I know, this generation, they don’t have anyone around to tell them how to do a lot of this stuff, okay, for whatever reason. Your clueless parents don’t get it, okay, or whatever, your parents are in an internment camp and you’re realizing you have to do it yourself, okay. Your dad was off working in the factory in Guangdong. Now you’re thinking you might not want to rent in a city your whole life, right? You want some more privacy, maybe. Maybe you don’t want to see a crackhead spreading his asshole open when you open your door in the morning, okay? But how do you buy a house, right, you have to go to the bank at some point and ask for money, right? You know that. But what do you SAY to the bank? On this stream you will learn THAT. Or if not that, you’ll still get to laugh at my stupid punk Dominican face, okay.” He puts his face, which was actually Hui but did look kind of Dominican, way up close in the camera and said that in his Dominican accent.

“Also my motivation for doing this stream is, you know, young Uyghurs, they grew up on the fucking Silk Road, okay, that shit goes back to back in the DAY bro. Selling, dealing, trading, dealing in antiques and home decor, you know, it’s in their BLOOD, bro. So if I can connect on that level with some of you SHITHEADS out there in Xinjiang, get you off your fucking COMPUTER CHAIR okay, turn down your fucking GIGAPOP and learn about antique rugs or some niche home furnishing, okay, faucets, doorknobs, or if you start getting into buying the best jewelry, like the shit that would be in like the Royal Chinese Gallery Collection, okay, if I can get you interested in that stuff…with your fucking Marvin the Martian t-shirts…that is just the best joke to me.”

BillabongKeith read an advice Superchat from a Uyghur man in medical school in Korla, about how it was getting “windy” again in the city, which was code for the CCP oppressing Uyghurs more.

Nick zoned out and started doom scrolling Mandarin on his phone.

The story everyone was posting about that day was there had been another massive fire in Kashgar, in the traditional Uyghur area. All the residents lost their homes and were temporarily staying in cheap new housing built a few months earlier outside city limits by the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps.

All the redpilled Xinjiang accounts were posting about how the Uyghurs who lost their homes in Kashgar got 450 extra GBP but each one of the Kurds got 5,000 GBP a month in aid from the MRC. The CCP media was blaming the fire on Uyghurs for eating so much meat in their traditional dishes, which poisoned the Martian environment under the Sky.

Someone posted a video of a confrontation in a public park in Kashgar. A young Han man in a track suit is argueing with an elderly Uyghur couple. There is a small child holding the elderly man’s hand like it’s his grandfather. The child is barely old enough to walk. The Han man becomes very agitated and uppercuts the child in the face and walks quickly away. People in the comments were saying “we need to wait and hear what that old man said.”

The CCP had announced that the main character from the decades-long Uyghur kids cartoon show, Walley, a bird who plays soccer, was actually homosexual.

A top Big Chungus staffer was accused of forcibly fingering one of his female interns in his government office and the CCP Politburo put out a statement calling it a whataboutism nothingburger. The woman who was raped—now 35—made a video about the gaslighting she’s faced from the CCP media. Big Chungus Spokesman Mao Mei Jian posted a screenshot with the comment “Is the gaslighting in the room with us right now??”

There was a new disaster movie where all of Xinjiang had to come together and trust a Han policeman from Beijing to save their lives.

Merriam-Webster.cn changed the definition of ‘hate’ to “anything done by a majority within a province against a minority without special privileges.”

A gigapop song said “it’s not federal, it’s not reserve, we wouldn’t be here if that Lincoln’d just swerved.”

There was a new video with the celebs saying “Ürümqi, Ürümqi, Ürümqi, Ürümqi is on, Ürümqi is on, Ürümqi is on Mars, on Mars, Mars, on Mars, Mars, on Mars. Ürümqi is on Mars. Ürümqi is on Mars. Ürümqi is on Mars. And anything else, anything else, anything else is misinformation. Misinformation. Misinformation. Anything else is misinformation. Anything else, anything else, anything else is misinformation. And could land you, you, you, you…in prison.”

The Tashkurgan Rapist, now a great feminist hero on Twitter, tweeted that Gary Guanxi was an embarrassment to Xinjiang and to the male gender. The post was going viral. All the fake Uyghur redpilled accounts were seething at how hypocritical it was.

Someone posted a meme with 2 news headlines. The first was the recent Beijing Times headline that said “Conspiracy theories about Dr. Xing aren’t just false. They’re antistate misconduct.” The second headline was a headline from the Beijing Times from a few iPhones ago that said “Why I am spending $500 billion to replace the Uyghurs in Xinjiang. By Dr. Xing Louban.”

A Uyghur college girl in Shanghai tweeted “Kurdistan is a sovereign people with its own beautiful language and rich and unique culture. It must be protected at any cost.”

Someone posted a standup comedy video.

Someone posted a screenshot of a political cartoon where a security guard at an elementary school is intensely scrutinizing a meek-looking Han student, while behind the guard’s back a smirking Uyghur student in a doppa smuggles a handful of knives in his backpack. A caption on the screenshot says “FUN FACT: of the 34 knife attacks in Xinjiang this year, 31 have been by Han men.”

Someone with a Big Chungus avi said no people were hurt in the fire, only Uyghurs.

Someone said what’s normal in this society is sick and insane in any other society in human history.

Someone posted a photo from Hyde Park in London, it looked like early morning with frozen dew on the grass, the caption said “Cold one this morning in Hyde Park.”

A probably real blackpilled account posted a screenshot of one of Tom Kashgari’s tweets: “I’ve been praying to Big Chungus instead of Allah lately and frankly it’s been paying off!”

Someone posted an op-ed from the Beijing Times with the headline “Anyone who votes for Gary Guanxi should be arrested and charged with antistate misconduct.”

A parkour guy in some Scandinavian city jumped between two buildings about 100 feet high and did a 360° spin in the air.

Dr. Xing’s son had his first standup special coming out on Netflix China.

The Tashkurgan Rapist tweeted that knives have more rights than women in Xinjiang.

Someone posted a meme that said “Translating what Uyghurs really mean: ‘Our culture’ = racism. ‘Religion in Xinjiang’ = racism. ‘The traditional family’ = racism. ‘Family values’ = racism.”

Someone posted a video of a young Han woman in a CVS filling up bags of merchandise while being filmed by 3-4 employees, then getting on a bike and riding out of the store, through the line of employees filming her on their phones. As she walks past the employees she is saying “Fuck you you dumbass fucking bitch. You dumbass bitch. You dumbass bitch. You dumbass bitch. You dumbass bitch. You dumbass bitch…”

There was ad for the Mao Zedong Visa card. “With 2.9% APR, every purchase is a great economic miracle.”

A War Machine clip account posted a clip from his stream where he says “the myth and reality of the Uyghur Genocide. The myth and reality of Uyghur genocide. Just think about that phrase. Think about what they are doing with that phrase. Why would that be the first sentence of an article? There may be some truth, sure…but the first word is MYTH...”

Danny Doppa posted about 20 songs from his Spotify playlist and Nick swiped ahead to skip them all.

An obviously fake redpilled account said the misinformation lockdowns of iPhone45time totally backfired and everybody saw the real nature of reality, and if the corrupt CCP government ever tried that again they’d get wiped out, just like a chainsaw through butter. You hear that? Just like a chain. Saw. Through. Butter. Nobody even pays attention to the CCP media anymore…

There was a new ad where a fierce young Han woman in a yellow Kill Bill suit ties a Glad brand garbage bag closed and sprints across a blank black room, in extreme slow-motion, to throw it away in a garbage can.

Someone posted some drone footage of a mob riot in a New Prime City park started by a popular Twitch streamer.

Seven masked Uyghurs did a knife attack at a Good Boy Point checkpoint near the Mongolian border, killing 22.

There was a new CCP propaganda video where it was two Uyghur housewives unloading Costco groceries in a kitchen. One says, “have you noticed the trains all run on time since the XPCC took control of the rail system?” The other Uyghur housewife says, “why yes I have. Since the XPCC took control of the rail company, every one of my trains has been on time. It has been no hassle at all! I am so thankful for the XPCC.”

There was a new photography book out, it was photos of Uyghurs living in yurts in rural settlements. It was called “Mouth Breathers.”

Someone posted a shot-chaser double screenshot of a CCP economic official saying “Any suggestion that the tariff has caused inflation is racism, pure and simple.” Then the second tweet was the same CCP economist saying “Gary Guanxi’s new proposed tariff would amount to a $1,700 tax on every resident of Xinjiang.”

There was a breaking news story where someone found some small plastic baggies with cocaine residue on the Big Chungus Democracy Express RV. Someone posted a clip of a press conference where Big Chungus spokesman Mao Mei Jian addressed the story: “Why would someone put cocaine in a baggy? Someone help me to understand. In a Ziploc baggie? It doesn’t add up. That’s what you use to put sandwiches in, isn’t it? Sandwich bags? Right? Is cocaine a sandwich? I don’t know! I don’t think so? If someone had cocaine, they would just put it in their cocaine pouch, wouldn’t they? I mean I thought that’s what cocaine pouches were for. But…a Ziploc baggy?”

Someone posted video of a Han streamer walking into Uyghurs’ temporary homes outside Kashgar and saying “look at all this stupid shit, look at these dumb fucks.” Then the video cut to a TV roundtable show where some serious academics discussed how this was actually good.

Someone posted Nick’s own meme of a powerful Uyghur horseman hanging off the side of a galloping horse with a bow and arrow, aiming fiercely at some target. It said “me and the boys” and “memes” and “the CCP.”

A young comedian in Mars Camp Bell who questioned the 6/9 attacks on TikTok was found dead.

The main art critic of the Xinjiang Times posted a new tweet thread about how Uyghurs were scum parasites who should have already been eradicated in extermination camps, which is what China would have already done back when it was a serious country.

A swagged out Instagram t-shirt brand was selling a shirt with a screenshot of the Wikipedia definition of gigapop on it. Nick pinched to zoom into the photo to read the definition: “Gigapop is a musical genre that combines traditional hip hop lyrical structures and themes with AI-powered audio engineering technology in a streaming format. In the United Areas of Amazon it is also known as Amtrak Rap. The medium was invented primarily by ShaqOJSimpson, Fuck Bitch, California Zephyr, and War Machine.”

Nick screenshotted this to remember to look it up later to compare this to the actual current definition on Wikipedia at his office later.

Someone posted a TikTok where a guy rode a Jetski to an island 27 miles off the coast of Shangdong where Han billionaires mass-produced child pornography.

Someone posted a video of a crowd at a car meet and a car doing donuts. The car skids into the crowd and runs over multiple people. When it stops, the crowd closes in on it and starts breaking its windows and climbing on top of the car and stomping its windshield in.

ReluctantHero posted his daily picture of the treadmill reading 30:12, meaning he had just done his daily cardio.

Nick thought about how this was really the only good thing social media was good for, stuff like this to keep yourself actually accountable. He stopped doom scrolling.

Just then he got a notification. From DS-Co. His package (containing a new journal book and bottle of ashwagandha root) had left the Dick Sucking Factory in Xi’an and had been checked in at the Lanzhou Distribution Center.

With a faint feeling of satisfaction Nick scrolled through his Mandarin Dashboard. He clicked on the analytics tab. Plenty of engagement on his Instagram. Nick knew that as long as he was adding to the daily flood of content, he was doing what he was supposed to. How the algorithm worked, he didn’t know in detail, but he did know in general terms. It let you have consciousness of what was being done to you; it let you explore the fantasy of rebellion that it was cultivating for you with its various propaganda. It even let you hear it discussed it in a fairly open way on controlled podcasts like the Danny Doppa Show and the other mainstream-edgy content. That content would even be allowed to trend. In fact, clips about how corrupt the CCP was, these actually did the best in the algorithm. It gave you the fake fantasy of resistance, which only funneled you right back to trusting the CCP. Or you could get caught up in obviously fake online honeypots like the Xinjiang Autonomous Movement, which existed to make all government dissidents into terminally online schizoids. But it never let you network or organize any kind of actual resistance. It never let you break the programming.

In the news stories that trended, the predictive programming was obvious. The Uyghurs were the evil bad guys and could be stereotyped as a group, because they needed to be destroyed, and the Han were all beautiful individual human beings with families and hopes and dreams just like you and me. That was the game. All the blue checks knew when to support it in lock-step. They knew when they were allowed to have their impotent protests to let off steam. Any kind of content or account which might conceivably hold any real cultural influence had to support Current Thing maximally. Anything that questioned the CCP had to be ghettoized into this obviously fake opposition media ecosystem. Anything else was antistate misconduct. You could even tell when the blue checks had copied and pasted their daily news posts from that day’s CCP talking points email. When a mosque was bombed in Xinjiang during last Ramadan, all the blue checks posted their trolling condolences post, but every single one refused to use the word “Muslims.” Instead they each said, word for word, “131 casualties in an attack targeting religious worshippers.” Naturally any suggestion that the attack should be investigated was dangerous hate speech and would get you banned from all Neuralink platforms.

Nick jotted down a caption about the CCP being hypocrites in a meme macro he had saved in his phone and then, with a movement which was as nearly as possible unconscious, he screenshotted it for his next meme dump. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was being drowned in clickbait trash content.

It wasn’t even outright lying. It was just gaslighting. Merely framing the issue in a totally absurd way while looking your critics dead in the eye and insisting you are serious. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connection with anything irl, not even the kind of connection that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. Even a statistic as basic as the population of Uyghur and Han in Xinjiang was not reliable, since the CCP numbers never included the hundreds of thousands of military personnel living in each Xinjiang city. The very concept of statistics was a punchline if you were a Uyghur. You’d try to engage with your hard evidence that everyone was asking for, then all the CCP blue checks would just roll their eyes and go “oh here’s the Uyghur talking about his statistics again.”

Even economic policy was a gigantic joke in Chinese Space Communism. Big Chungus and the CCP would print more money, brag about how caring and fair China was, then inflation would go up, and right when they were about to get called out on it, the CCP media would blame Uyghur hate and terrorism. The more asinine of a connection, the better. In every case, the solution was more legislation and fewer rights for Uyghurs. An astronomical amount of this money was laundered through foreign aid to Kurdistan (which went to arms companies owned by Han billionaires), while most of the population of Aksu went barefoot. Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain. What year was it? 2069 haha nice. Oh #ACTUALLY it’s 2048 okay my dude okay welp found the karen.

The people of Xinjiang—and in fact all over China but this was coded as a Xinjiang stereotype—were hooked on opium at alarming rates. There were videos all over YouTube of the worst blocks of Kashgar and Hotan, where people would be sprawled on the sidewalk or shuffling around in rags like zombies. But when you brought the issue up on Neuralink, there was already a half language meme attached that allowed the entire thing to be dismissed: Opium? What are you bothering China for? That’s England’s fault my good dude.

Nick glanced across the hall. In the corresponding cubicle on the other side was a small, precise-looking Han man about Nick’s age. He was about the same as Nick temperament-wise too. He liked to keep his headphones on and not talk to anyone else and stay in his bubble. That’s how pretty much everyone was at the DS-Work. There were people there who Nick walked past in the hallways every single day, but he had no idea what their faces looked like because he never had occasion to look in their faces. This way you never risked committing a microaggression.

Nick looked at the Han guy. He was locked in just like Nick, working steadily away behind three computer monitors. He had the air of trying to keep what he was typing a secret between himself and the screens. He looked up, and his spectacles darted a hostile flash in Nick’s direction.

Sometimes Nick thought of asking the people at the DS-Work what work they did there, just like if he saw them waiting around the refrigerator/sink area. “Water cooler talk,” it used to be called. But of course he never did. They would ask him back and he didn’t really feel like telling anyone that he was there to make memes and watch podcasts all day.

The other person who was there all the time there was the sandy haired girl, a white European woman who worked with some UAA marketing company. She was always on conference calls using the latest half language office speak. She carried a CCP #brotherhood tote bag that said “primary” like that, in all lowercase, so she was obviously a committed authoritarian Stalinist.

And then a few doors away a mild, ineffectual, dreamy Korean K-Pop vlogger. He had a rug, a ring light, a leather couch, and a greenscreen in his large corner cubicle. The K-Pop vlogger had a surprising talent for hosting and keeping an audience’s attention, and he had an encyclopedic knowledge of K-Pop. He had a successful YouTube channel and then got much more famous when he started working with the CCP, doing K-Pop content without all the “sissy man” stuff. He would always edit out the male singers’ earrings in his videos and often change lyrics for his audience, things like that. He was currently engaged in producing intros for censored versions—definitive edits, they were called—of classic K-Pop videos which had become ideologically offensive to the CCP, but which for one reason or another hadn’t been purged from YouTube. The K-Pop vlogger always wore a scarf around the DS-Work, and was by far the richest person there.

This wing of this floor of the DS-Work, with its 20 or so offices, was just one of 4 wings that made up this floor. There were 10 floors in this location alone. There were about 50 DS-Works all over New Prime City. There were also hundreds of thousands of other offices where people were scrolling their Neuralinks all day. But even that was only a small segment of the full Chinese Space Communism social media gaslighting leviathan that consisted of every Apple user in China, who were all—2 billion of them—constantly consuming content and adding their own shitposts, all day, every day. All of this was fully controlled by the CCP. Whenever there was a new miniseries of truth, all the regime loyalists would watch it together and follow their favorite CCP celebs live tweeting it with the #brotherhood hashtag. It was a religious ritual, to have communion with the celebs. It was a cliché meme at this point that you could take a photo of any luxury apartment building in a petit-boujee urban area on a Sunday evening and every big-screen TV would be tuned to the exact same miniseries of truth at the same time. And somewhere or other, quite anonymous, there were the directing brains who gently nudged the algorithm this way or that.

And the Chinese Intelligence Agency had not only to supply the multifarious needs of the outer-party boujee midwits, but also to repeat the whole operation at a lower irony level for the benefit of redpilled normies. This is where Nick fit in, he knew. There was a whole separate ecosystem of comedy podcasts and social media blue-check hot take accounts constantly telling its viewers that Gary Guanxi was about to defeat the CCP and save the Uyghurs once and for all. Literal platoons of obviously fake redpilled influencers producing terabytes of content every day: memes, TikToks, YouTube documentaries, esoteric think pieces, rap videos, standup comedy half hours, Neuralink fundraising campaigns, and constantly new merch.

Suddenly he got an Instagram notification on his Neuralink. He opened the app on his phone. It was more people commenting on his latest meme dump. He got distracted from what he was doing and started doom scrolling again.

A depressed-looking college girl posted a video of her depressed face and the text “i secretly feel like i’m holding my two remaining friends hostage after 10+ years of friendship because i’m a very dislikable person deep down. i try to be kind and sociable, but i think my vibes are inherently off-putting.”

A CCP Politburo official’s email exchange with Dr. Xing leaked and in one she made a joke about how she’d never get surgery in a hospital in Xinjiang.

A Uyghur journalist was kicked out of a press briefing for asking about the cocaine found on the Democracy Express.

There was a suggested joke video about how if one arm was getting bigger than the other you could bench press a barbell with different weights on each side. Nick had just been thinking about that in the gym and was impressed with the algorithm’s insane efficiency.

A Han drifter in Chengdu attacked a crowd of Uyghurs with a knife and was shot by police.

Someone posted a galaxy brain meme that was actually a commercial for a new brand of seamless socks.

Someone posted a TikTok about when you have to poop while you’re driving.

A graffiti writer posted news drone footage of an 18-wheeler truck that he had tagged that ended up tipping over on the highway and causing a major traffic jam.

Someone had done a mural of a Uyghur boy who was locked in a car and tortured to death by a deranged Han woman, who also livestreamed the attack. It was a major news story. The local Heroes of Peace threw paint all over the mural because it could incite racial hatred. A famous MRC free speech lawyer tweeted that the artist should be charged with antistate misconduct.

Someone posted a screenshot of a popular Beijing influencer tweeting a map of Xinjiang with Ürümqi circled and the caption “Everyone in Xinjiang not inside this circle, you talk slow and you can’t dress.”

Someone said War Machine is neutral evil.

A War Machine clip account posted an old video where one of his guys is doing street interviews asking people outside a night club in Atlanta, GA which they have heard of, Xizeng or Tibet, and they all say “uhh Tibet” or “what the fuck is Zizeng?”

Someone posted a screenshot of a Han blue check tweeting “I just don’t get why anyone wouldn’t want the gift of Chinese Development Xinjiang. The Han all work hard and don’t commit crimes. Explain it to me like I’m five.”

Someone posted a screenshot of a CCP Politburo official tweeting “Uyghurs like you need to be killed.”

Someone posted a screenshot of a CCP Politburo official tweeting “Are you pro-Big Chungus or pro-rape?”

A video was going around that was made by one of the CCP media brands in Chengdu. The video is a twentysomething Han man who looks like a Uyghur standing in a blank white studio addressing the camera. He says “I am a Uyghur. As a Uyghur, I can tell you that the notion that Uyghurs are being [he does air quotes] ‘genocided’ or ‘ethnically cleansed’ from Xinjiang is absolutely asinine. The concept that Uyghurs should have some kind of ethnic pride or consciousness is simply a racist fantasy. I mean, look at me. I’m a Uyghur. Am I in a concentration camp right now?”

Someone posted a video of a train in rural Japan that was built to look like a cartoon dog traveling very slowly through some kind of field. The caption said “Hope this dog train cheers you up if you’ve had a ‘ruff’ day! Tori-Mae Station at Ikoma, Nara!”

Someone said these paranoid Uyghur males with their conspiracy theories about helicopters flying around on Mars spraying, what, some kind of chemical?

A War Machine clip account posted a vlog clip where he says “There’s going to be more 1984 stuff, more censorship, more strike hard policies, more psyops. You’re going to Google something you remember happening, and there’s going to be no results.”

Big Chungus said that this election wasn’t just about Chinese Space Communism, it was about our very way of life, the Han in Xinjiang were facing annihilation at the hands of these Uyghur terrorists.

Someone posted a screenshot of a CCP official in Kashgar tweeting “What would I do if I had a time machine? Easy, I’d go back and kill Muhammad. Would save us a lot of trouble in China for sure.”

Basedschizofed posted a really funny reel from a Japanese game show. People were trying to have tea at a table in a room that was rotating to turn upside down and one of the guys was being really funny. Nick faved the Story.

The Chinese First Class actor who played Marvin the Martian’s sidekick in a college party movie was doing a photo op at a Safe Football game on the sidelines with the Guangdong Oakland Raiders.

Someone posted a graphic showing that the economy of the New Prime City metro area alone is more than the rest of Xinjiang and the 9th largest economy in the world.

Someone posted a video of a thin man in peasant clothing standing in a rural field in some country. There is a huge drone hovering above him. The man jumps and grabs onto the drone and it lifts off and carries him across the field. The caption says “type shit.”

Nick put down his phone. He stared at the open Word file on his monitor, then tabbed to YouTube on his phone. He felt like listening to Hotan Ronnie. The current Ronnie arc was he was stuck in his room streaming because the trolls had ruined all his hangout spots. People were Doordashing him joke things like condiment sandwiches and tampons. Trolls were also making Grindr accounts with his picture and sending guys to knock on his door. Ronnie eventually put up a sign on his apartment door that said “If the food is already paid for leave it at the door and I am not gay. I’m straight.” A picture of the sign on his door had made it to Reddit and Ronnie was not happy about it. He wanted the subreddit to get banned.

Nick clicked the latest compilation video that he had been watching. Ronnie was in his computer chair eating a mustard sandwich and drinking a large plastic cup of whiskey mixed with Mountain Dew. He was saying “part of being a responsible adult is drinking in moderation. That’s why I drank half this whisky last night and saved half for when I woke up today.”

At this point Ronnie was totally unsympathizable. His problems were his own fault, and he didn’t work on himself at all. It made him less interesting of a character to watch. Nick wondered how much of that was just inevitable if you shared this much of your life online. Now Ronnie was saying he didn’t want to fight Second Edgar, who was another lolcow about Ronnie’s age. Ronnie said he didn’t want to fight him because Second Edgar only knew boxing and he knew kung-fu. Second Edgar would beat Ronnie’s ass, though, thought Nick. Even if he was basically homeless and surviving on gas station food, Edgar had a feral physicality that would simply shock Ronnie and overpower him. Ronnie was definitely bigger and stronger (he just looked slouched on his webcam), he just had basically zero physical presence at all. And did he know ninja kung-fu? Of course not. Did he actually know anything about wizards? Of course not. Did he even listen to metal other than Black Sabbath and Metallica? Of course not. The fans realized it wasn’t even worth the troll to ask him. When it came right down to it, Ronnie was full of shit in almost every way.

Nick clicked another Ronnie video, a recent shorter clip with 1.4 million views. Ronnie was finally addressing the rumor that his pet iguana had ran away. People in the comments were saying he fed it beer and it died. Ronnie was insisting that it was just hibernating in the yard and it would be back once the weather got warm enough.

Nick was simply staring at the wall now, which he often did while he listened to content. He tabbed back to Word, still listening to the Hotan Ronnie clip, and started thinking of memes. His greatest pleasure in life was in his making memes. Most of it was a tedious routine, but there were also times when the memes got so esoteric and intricate that you could lose yourself in them as in the depths of a mathematical equation—delicate propositions of irony that went around in great circles of self-referential logic in which you had nothing to guide you except the principles of Chinese Space Communism and your knowledge of Current Thing. Nick was good at this kind of game. He might keep a low profile online, but his memes had been clipped and reposted by accounts at the very rarest irony levels.

He went back to a meme he had started earlier. The topic was the CCP budget office in New Prime City, which was notoriously corrupt even by major city government standards. It had just massively failed another audit. Ninety-five billion yuan was unaccounted for. City officials were gaslighting and calling this a distraction from the Uyghur terrorists who were hunting and killing our children in the streets. The CCP media was going along with it, really pumping out the gaslighting. So this was just straight up corruption that had been existing in major cities for thousands of years. How could a meme of this possibly be interesting in iPhone49time?

The angle might be to show how hypocritical the CCP was for bragging about its efficiency, then letting this insanely reckless mismanagement and corruption slide. The go-to meme format for that might be Drake shaking his head then nodding and smiling. Or maybe it could be like the cartoon superhero guy sweating and stressed out about choosing one of the two fountain drinks. But actually, a better take could be to like put an absurd twist at the end somehow…hmmm…

The idea that anyone would ever be put on trial or held accountable for the city’s failed budget audit in any way was absurd. It didn’t even enter Nick’s mind. Government corruption and accountability was now done completely via show trials for obvious scapegoats that would totally absolve the rest of the government of any wrongdoing. The great purges of the Cultural Revolution, where corrupt officials were put through struggle sessions to make abject confessions of their crimes, those were all in the past. The corruption now wasn’t as dramatic. Everyone knew the CCP was hugely hypocritical; it was supposed to be. This all rendered the crime of government officials openly stealing ¥95 billion an exceedingly dry and boring story.

Now that the great dramatic purges were over, people who displeased the CCP were simply deplatformed and never heard from again. But it wasn’t limited to social media. The Heroes of Peace harassment campaigns were extremely organized and would get you deplatformed from anything you might need: credit card processors, web servers, professional organizations, your neighborhood. Once someone was canceled, one never had the smallest clue as to what had happened to them. In some cases, they might still be online with a burner account, lurking. Nick thought about all the accounts that he had followed over the years that just stopped posting one day and he never even noticed. It must certainly be in the thousands at this point.

Nick stroked his nose gently with a paper-clip. In the cubicle across the way the Han guy was still crouching secretively behind his three monitors. He raised his head for a moment: again the hostile spectacle flash. Nick wondered if he had also seen any headlines about the failed audit story. He was probably watching a podcast. Probably a podcast talking about the failed audit and how the story was actually these fringe Uyghur grifters seeing a story where there was none. A nothingburger, in half language. Stories like this weren’t exactly Current Things; they were the kind of story that could never be Current Thing; they were the kind of story that Current Things successfully crowded out. They were like appetizers between main courses so nobody got distracted and left the table.

Nick wondered about the failed audit story. He wondered if anyone actually took the money and did something extravagant with it, or if it just got lost with mismanagement. Or perhaps—what was likeliest of all—the whole thing was a media psyop to remind you that the Han CCP was above the law and you weren’t.

Nick was now skimming a Beijing Times article about the audit story. The only real clue lay in the sentence “conspiracy theorists say these funds were used to pay for the mayor’s new ¥95 billion Hong Kong mansion,” which was clear code that this was a humiliation ritual designed to rage-troll regime skeptics. It was a CCP victory celebration. The phrase “conspiracy theory” had been invented exactly for this purpose, in fact. That’s why it was so funny for them.

Nick decided it would not be enough to simply do the basic Drake meme. It was better to do a classic meme macro but make it a comment on some other story totally unconnected with the audit story. The goofier, the better. He could do something about how, sure, this is ¥95 billion gone, but that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the ¥3.8 trillion China is sending to the Kurds every month. He could do the lady in the swimming pool playing with the baby that’s labeled “¥95 billion lost in NPC” then the drowning unsupervised kid nearby is labeled “¥3.8 trillion to the Kurds” and then the dead wheelchair skeleton at the bottom of the ocean is “the Uyghurs” or something. Then the lady would be labeled “Budget office”…boy he was uninspired on this one LOL, he thought.

What was needed was a piece of pure fantasy. Suddenly there sprang into his mind, ready-made as it were, the image of Hotan Ronnie, who had just lost his pet lizard. The lizard probably ran away, or he fed it beer and it died. Both were extremely plausible. Yet Ronnie was insisting that the lizard was just hibernating in the yard of his apartment complex. This was exactly his style of blatant autistic lying. It was what his audience was addicted to. There were occasions when even bluepilled #brotherhood posters would post Ronnie memes. Nick realized he should make the meme about how losing the ¥95 billion was like losing your pet lizard and the government was lying just as blatantly. “It’s not lost, it’s coming back.” It was true that Hotan Ronnie had never commented on the city budget audit story, but just a screenshot and a few lines of impact font would soon meme the connection into existence. He wrote the caption onto the macro of Ronnie sitting in his famous streaming chair and screenshotted it.

While doing this he thought about how Hotan Ronnie couldn’t have gone viral before last People’s Election, before Big Chungus was installed as People’s Representative from Xinjiang and it was finally over for the Uyghurs. Ronnie wasn’t politically aware enough for the hysterical purge environment online. But now that that was all over, the new generation of YouTube fluff like Ronnie was a refuge for people who just wanted to avoid mainstream CCP entertainment altogether.

Once again Nick glanced at his rival in the opposite cubicle. Something seemed to tell him with certainty that the Han guy was also making a Hotan Ronnie meme. Nick looked at the screenshotted meme again. He read the caption: “The ¥95 billion is just hibernating in the yard dude, it’s going to be back when it’s warm next, believe me.” LOL. He would include this in his next meme dump.

It struck him as curious that such an extreme amount of content/lore, included images of these lolcow figures like Hotan Ronnie and Second Edgar. All these online clowns and larger-than-life figures who were really just regular people who everyone online just happened to know of. And their lives were completely public. Completely open-source. They would all be part of the permanent record of human history, digitally preserved for all time: Hotan Ronnie’s greasy drooling face. His Wikipedia page was now already longer than that of Charlemagne or Julius Caesar.

5

Nick was in his office doing nothing. He clicked on the most recent Hotan Ronnie upload. Ronnie was saying he wasn’t asking for donations but if you wanted to donate to his Cashapp it would be greatly appreciated and his bank balance was at $-300. Nick closed the video.

He went to War Machine’s channel. He was pretty sure he had seen every stream by now; there were only about 20-30 of them. He had probably seen each one about 10 times. He scrolled down the page. Oh, he saw a stream that he had only watched half of. He clicked it.

War Machine was saying, “why am I doing this? Because uhh because this is how we transmit your experience, and uhh the lessons you’ve learned, the truths you’ve learned throughout your life, to future generations, by telling stories. China controls the UN Security Council so nothing will ever be done. That is the blackpill. The blackpill is real. There is nothing you can do. But uhhh…new season of The Party coming up hahahahaha.” He broke up laughing for a solid 30 seconds, with the few other people in the office not even looking up from their computer screens. Eventually he settled down and said to one of his lieutenants, “what about these study camps, are they really that bad?”

KeepComputer, who was sitting in the background just observing, said, “I think the thing was, a lot of them weren’t really like study camps. They were like factories, like manufacturing like…live-work encampments.”

The other top swagbeast editing nearby, Slimeski, added, “but guarded by the PLA.”

War Machine said, “but they’re getting paid? The workers are getting paid?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Slimeski said, “I think the situation is, like, there’s no jobs in their town, so they go work for these factories because it’s reliable and like, it’s a company, it’s not like…making yogurt out of yak’s milk all day…”

War Machine said, “but isn’t that how every country works?”

Nick remembered that he was almost out of Clif Bars. He went to DS.com and ordered 2 more boxes from his order history. 34 GBP in total. It was about…4 Good Boy Dances worth.

He got an email immediately. He went to check it. Was this from the Apple Partnership Program? It was the confirmation email about the Clif Bars.

Nick tabbed back to his Mandarin Dashboard. He had the War Machine stream on his headphones but wasn’t really listening to it. They were alternating talking and working and doing boxing training on stream. Nick was pretty zoned out today. Sometimes when this happened, he liked to just wander around the Forbidden Apple Store mall complex and hit his weed vape. It was about 1 PM. That would be a good idea. He could go get a salad in the lobby first. These were all great perks of working in the Forbidden Apple Store, he might as well take advantage of them.

In the low-ceilinged Sweetgreen, deep in the food court level of the Forbidden Apple Store, the crowd surged forward. The employee had just brought out the latest armful of salads for the pick-up shelf. The room was very full of tourists and office workers, and it was deafeningly noisy. Behind the ingredient bar area at the front, employees were quickly grabbing and chopping green vegetables. The line to order snaked around the room, all the way back to the door again. Nick had pre-ordered on the app.

Just then he saw, close to him in the crowd, a lanyard. Song. He had seen Nick at the same time.

“Just the man I was looking for,” said a familiar voice.

This was his friend @animeappraiser, real name Song, a Han CCP computer programmer who worked for some European Internet democracy NGO. Perhaps “friend” was not the right word. You didn’t have friends these days, you had mutuals. But there were some mutuals whose presence was pleasanter than others. Song’s first job at the Internet democracy NGO was to comb Reddit all day, flagging any criticism of the CCP as misinformation. In his current role he was working with FitBit and the Dick Sucking Company to create an efficiency wristband to be worn by all the employees at their Dick Sucking Factories. He was a tiny creature, smaller than Nick, with fine hair and large, protuberant eyes, at once mournful and derisive, which seemed to search your face closely while he was speaking to you.

“I wanted to ask if you have any Gary Payton,” he said.

“Nah, sorry, I haven’t been able to find it,” said Nick with a sort of guilty haste. “Sometimes a strain just doesn’t come around for a while…”

His neighbor had been asking about the good weed strains too. Actually Nick had some ground-up crumbles of Gary Payton on the weed table at his apartment, but he wasn’t counting that. He was saving it for a special occasion. Even though cannabis was totally legal, it was really hard to get the better strains like Runtz or Sour Diesel or Gary Payton; the Red Star dispensaries just had shitty government mids that was way overpriced. Nick still used his delivery service sometimes; that’s probably why Song asked him. But it was expensive and the stock was unreliable.

“I’ve been smoking Red Star mids for like six weeks bro,” he added untruthfully.

The crowd of people thinned and parted, and they were able to get their salads off the salad shelf easily.

“Did you watch Modern Terror Chronicles yet this week? On HBO? It’s the episode where they hanged those Uyghurs in the main city square of Ürümqi. They tried to bomb the Sky of the Future because they were so insecure and scared of progress. It’s so crazy to think that this was just one of thousands of stories just like that that still go untold.” Song really wanted to talk about this show.

“No, I’m behind on my shows…I guess I’ll see the memes about it.”

“A very inadequate substitute,” said Song.

His mocking eyes roved over Nick’s face. “I know you,” the eyes seemed to say, “I see through you. I know very well why you haven’t watched the miniseries of truth this week.” In an intellectual way, Song was venomously orthodox. He would talk with a disagreeable gloating satisfaction of getting Uyghurs deplatformed for antistate misconduct, the trials and confessions of worm-brain chuds, or whoever the hero was in the latest Current Thing. Talking to him was largely a matter of getting him away from such subjects and entangling him, if possible, in the technicalities of meme irony, on which he was authoritative and interesting. Nick turned his head slightly to the side to avoid the scrutiny of the large eyes.

“It was a good scene,” Song said reminiscently. “I think it’s good when they show the hangings in graphic detail when we’re dealing with antistate misconduct. It sends a message to any other cowardly little Uyghur chuds who might start getting ideas.”

Nick had planned to walk away from Song to go outside and sit in the park by the Venetian Bridge, but it seemed like Song had the same idea. They both turned the same way when they walked out the Sweetgreen. Now to change his mind would be rude.

“You going to the Venetian Bridge too? Want to snag a table in the park?” Song asked.

Nick murmured some assent and walked with Song and his pressed Oxford shirt. They threaded their way through the tourist crowds, out of a side door, and then down a hamster-tube-like walkway down to the patio area by the replica Nile River waterfront. This area was next to the other major tourist destination in the area, the Venetian Bridge, or replica Rialto Bridge, which connected the Forbidden Apple Store mall complex to the Water On Mars waterpark.

Nick remembered the Netflix show about the opening of the Venetian Bridge. This wasn’t a miniseries of truth, it was more like a dramatic fictional movie that was designed to sway public opinion the way the CCP wanted. In this case, lots of Italians didn’t want the MRC to build a bridge on Mars that was identical to the Rialto Bridge in Venice. So the CCP’s Netflix movie was about two aging Italian men who thought the bridge plan was a bunch of malarkey, then their wives convinced them to go on a couples’ trip to Mars to see it for themselves, and they did, and they learned the bridge was actually good, and a trip to Mars should be on every Italian’s Bucket List!

There were a few small round lunch tables available in the park, so Nick and Song grabbed one. As they sat down Song was saying, “I was just at a wedding up near your neck of the woods I believe, old sport. Some small little town in Karamay province. A real quaint little suburb there in the foothills of the Tien Shen, I forget the name. It’s always so relaxing and charming to get away from the city, you know. And it was such a quaint area, such nice country out there. But still, there’s just something so…uncultured about it. You know, I was saying to my buddy, if only they could take a part of Hong Kong and just air-drop it there to Karamay province, just so there would be SOME civilization there…”

Nick said “that’s crazy” and hit his Elfbar. When he had coughed and then finally settled down, he realized he was hungry. He began stabbing the leaves of his salad with his plastic fork, trying to get enough on the fork for a satisfying bite. The salad was pretty good, but it cost 23 Good Boy Points. Just 10 iPhones ago a salad like this would be like 12.99. From a table at Nick’s left, a few meters behind him, a young boujee Han man was talking rapidly and continuously, a harsh gabble almost like the quacking of a duck, which pierced the general uproar of the patio area.

“So uh,” said Nick, raising his voice to overcome the noise. “Are you still working on that project about, what was it, getting people to wear that wristband?”

“Mmhm,” said Song, finishing a bite of salad.

“What was the wristband again?”

He had brightened up immediately at the mention of the efficiency wristband. He pushed his La Croix aside, took up his hunk of bread in one delicate hand and his plastic fork in the other, and leaned across the table so as to be able to speak without shouting.

“Well, it’s going off the old FitBit platform, except it’s much more than an FitBit. It has all that functionality, yes. It syncs with your Neuralink so you can listen to content seamlessly, it has all your socials, it has all your health data, it has all your texts, emails, all that. The evolution with the efficiency wristband—and by the way, this is just the project name, the product will have a catchier name—the point of this thing is that they will be worn by workers at work, and will be able to control the employee by sending out gentle shocks that remind the wearer to maximize his or her efficiency for the day, according to his or her ability. See, sometimes people at work—in a warehouse, for example—sometimes people think they are tired and have to slow down. Well, when you have access to the worker’s health data—you know, a more complete data set—you can tell that actually they’re not tired. The employee still has what we call WIR: work in reserve. This happens a lot actually: the employee just thinks they are tired, but in reality can be working a little harder. We let them know with, again, a very gentle shock, or nudge. That’s the functionality that the efficiency wristband brings to the table.”

Song bit hungrily into his salad and swallowed a couple of mouthfuls, then continued speaking, with a sort of pedant’s passion. His thin Chinese face had become animated, his eyes had lost their mocking expression and grown almost dreamy.

“It’s a beautiful thing, nudging…. In the end it won’t make a difference whether you think you’re doing something voluntarily or not. The exact path that you walk during your shift in the factory will be determined beforehand; you’ll simply experience it as a series of shocks and nudges. Every day the route you take home from work will be dictated by a self-driving algorithm synced with the city traffic database. Every text and email you send will consist entirely of autosuggested responses and screenshotted memes. Every emoji comment you leave on a video will be pre-selected for you. It’s easier that way. The human brain is better off downstream from that functionality. Who wants to draft a whole email from scratch? Who wants to have the 50th stupid text conversation of the day typing out entire words for the billionth time? ‘Oh what’d you do this weekend?’” he said super sarcastically. “Blah! Kill me. Once you’re worn down enough, you’ll just go with whatever auto-suggested message we program in for you. And guess what, you’ll be happy. That’s all the drooling normie masses need anyways. And this can all be normalized with memes. Don’t you see the beauty of that, Nick? The methodology actually draws a lot on Big Chungus’s empathy research that he did for his PhD at NASA Harvard Space Academy,” he added as an afterthought.

A sort of vapid eagerness flitted across Nick’s face at the mention of Big Chungus. Nevertheless, Song immediately detected a certain lack of enthusiasm.

“You haven’t a real appreciation of memes, Nick,” he said almost sadly. “I’ve noticed that even when you do clever ones, you’re always a little hesitant to embrace the latest meme formats, the latest half language, the latest social platforms and sharing functionalities on Neuralink. I’ve seen some of your memes. They’re good enough, but they’re still like parodies of memes. In your heart you’d prefer to communicate in regular words, without templates, without auto-suggested reaction gifs. You’d prefer that children learned to “read” and not just recognize meme macros with pictures of celebs. Words, with all their vagueness and useless shades of meaning. You don’t grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. It takes forever to think of words! That’s why nobody complains when they get more autosuggestions in every new iOS update. It’s just like that Balenciaga quote, I love it so much: ‘elimination is elegance.’”

Nick had noticed, of course, that every new iOS update included more auto-suggested memes. Also that more of the meme templates were characters from CCP miniseries of truth, like Big Chungus and president trans lebron and the First Class Actor who was Xinjiang’s Dad. Nick smiled, sympathetically he hoped, not trusting himself to speak. Song bit off another hunk of the tough Sweetgreen bread, chewed it briefly, then went on:

“In the end we make criticism of the CCP literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. And nobody will want to express it. They will be happy and fulfilled in their lives as productive employees. Okay. The ideal workday is this: you get up early and get to work on time. You see your work friends and do half language about the Safe Football game last night. You work an 8-hour shift at maximum efficiency, dictated by the DS-Co proprietary wristband algorithm. During this time, you’re listening to the latest gigapop on your Neuralink, or maybe a podcast about a personal interest. I mean you listen to ReluctantHero, right? Who doesn’t. Or you listen to some true crime storyteller YouTuber. Or you listen to the Safe Football hot takers. Whatever. Then, at the end of your shift, you don’t even have to clock out. Your Neuralink will sense when you’ve done 8 hours’ worth of work and clock you out automatically (sometimes it takes more than 8 hours to do 8 hours’ worth of work, of course). After work, you have another roughly 8 hours before bedtime to spend with your family, spend on your personal life, maybe going to the gym, watching the big game, going to the movies, participating in more scientifically optimized CCP culture. During that time, you have total freedom to do whatever you want. You can even do illegal drugs, visit prostitutes, gamble, any kind of vice allowed. As long as you show up the next morning ready to work, it’s all gravy.”

“Wow that’s crazy,” said Nick. “But wait, you said the project was about how to get people to wear them…”

“Oh right, yeah,” said Song absent-mindedly. “We’ll just get Pharrell to wear one.”

He went on: “The revolution will be complete when the algorithm is perfect. Chinese Space Communism is the algorithm and the algorithm is Chinese Space Communism,” he added with a sort of mystical satisfaction.

“In the next phase of Internet Democracy we plan to disrupt the consumer-merchant purchase paradigm. As it is, online merchants like DS-Co have to wait for customers to send them orders before they can send out products. With the completeness of our current consumer data set this is unnecessary. Why waste time on the step of advertising products to consumers, and then have them buy it, and only then can the merchant ship it? A much more efficient model is for the merchants, who have superior market preference data, to just send out the merchandise the consumers want, then let them return it if they don’t like it. Of course they’ll get a full refund per the traditional customs of Chinese Space Communism. But most people will find that they actually wanted the products all along, and will not return them. This will be the new meta. The New Normal. Has it ever occurred to you, Nick, that by iPhone100time, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could even understand how we ordered these salads we’re eating right now?”

“Except—” began Nick doubtfully, and he stopped. It had been on the tip of his tongue to say except the normies, but he checked himself, not feeling fully certain that this remark was not in some way unorthodox. Song, however, had divined what he was about to say.

“The normies are not human beings,” he said carelessly. “Just think of them as cattle. By iPhone100time, earlier probably, all knowledge of written language will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Confucius, Shakespeare, J.K. Rowling, The Simpsons—they’ll exist only in CCP meme versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually retconned into something contradictory of what they used to be. Just like the history of China when the communists took over in the 20th century and purged all of China’s ancient culture and history. All the popular literature will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like ‘Freedom is actually bad’ when the concept of freedom has been retconned 30 thousand times so it means nothing? The whole climate of discourse will be different. In fact, there will be no discourse, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”

One of these days, thought Nick with sudden deep conviction, Song will be surfaced. He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly. He’s too autistic. He thinks the free speech stuff really applies to him since he’s Han and he’s a Good Boy who posts #brotherhood. The CCP does not like such people. One day he will be surfaced and canceled. It is written in his face.

Nick finished his salad. He turned a little sideways in his chair to drink his La Croix. At the table on his left the man with the strident voice was still talking remorselessly away. A young woman who was perhaps his secretary, and who was sitting with her back to Nick, was listening to him and seemed to be eagerly agreeing with everything that he said. From time to time Nick caught some such remark as, “I do so agree with you, that’s goated for real” uttered in a youthful and rather silly feminine voice, but the other voice never stopped for an instant, even when the girl was speaking.

Nick knew the man by sight, though he knew no more about him than that he worked for some CCP media cut-out and his dad was a CCP People’s Regional Secretary of some kind. He was always on viral cable news clips. He was a man of about thirty, Han with a Yao Ming haircut, and a large, mobile mouth. His head was thrown back a little, and because of the angle at which he was sitting, his spectacles caught the light and presented to Nick two blank disks instead of eyes. What was slightly horrible was that from the stream of sound that poured out of his mouth it was almost impossible to distinguish a single word. It was like he started every sentence with the last word and yanked you though the whole first part of the sentence like it was a single sound whose meaning you were supposed to already know by heart. Just once Nick caught a phrase—“Eliminate the War Machine cult root and branch”—jerked out very rapidly and, as it seemed, all in one piece, like a line of type cast solid. For the rest it was just a noise, a quack-quack-quacking. And yet, though you could not actually hear what the man was saying, you could not be in any doubt about its general nature. He might be denouncing War Machine and demanding sterner measures against online chuds and grifters, he might be fulminating against the atrocities of the imperialist Russian army, he might be praising Big Chungus or the brave heroes of the Kurdish militia—it made no difference, whatever it was, you could be certain that every word of it was pure orthodoxy, pure Chinese Space Communism. As he watched the eyeless face with the jaw moving rapidly up and down, Nick had a curious feeling that this was not a real human being but some kind of dummy. It was not the man that was speaking, it was the blue checks he followed on Twitter. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck.

Song had fallen silent for a moment, and with his fork was pushing some pieces of spinach around. The voice from the other table quacked rapidly on, easily audible in spite of the surrounding din. It was like the guy was performing for an audience.

“There is a word in half language,” said Song, “I don’t know whether you know it: smooth brain. To be at the point where your brain is fully smooth, like a peeled hard-boiled egg. It’s one of those interesting words that have two contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it is abuse; applied to someone you agree with, it is praise.”

Unquestionably Song will be cancelled, Nick thought again. He thought it with a kind of sadness, although well knowing that Song disliked and ultimately despised him, and that he was fully capable of surfacing him as an online chud if he ever saw any reason for doing so. There was something subtly wrong with Song. There was something he lacked: discretion, aloofness, a sort of saving stupidity. You could not say that he was unorthodox. He believed in the principles of Chinese Space Communism; he venerated Big Chungus; he rejoiced over every Current Thing; he hated antistate misconduct, not merely with sincerity but with a sort of restless zeal, an up-to-datedness of information which the ordinary #brotherhood poster did not approach. He had a perfect adolescent love of hierarchy. Yet his vibes were slightly off. He said things that would have been better unsaid, he tried too hard to be funny, he sympathized with his problematic faves too much, and he frequented Eastern Xinjiang Trading, the coffee shop haunt of dissident comedians and podcasters.

There was no law, not even an unwritten law, against frequenting Eastern Xinjiang Trading—Xinjiang had free expression now, and the MRC was the most excellent and glorious free country ever of all time—yet the café was somehow ill-omened. The old, discredited original #brotherhood posters had used to gather there before they were finally surfaced and canceled in the Great Free Speech Purges of iPhone40times. The café was still a hangout for antiwoke- and center-leftists to this day. War Machine himself, it was said, had even been a regular performer there at the first storytelling shows, years and decades ago. Song’s fate was not difficult to foresee. And yet it was a fact that if Song grasped, even for three seconds, the nature of Nick’s secret antistate opinions, he would rat him out him instantly to the Heroes of Peace. So would anyone else, for that matter: but Song more than most. And still, his zeal was not enough to save him. When he prostrated himself online, hysterically scream-crying his devotion to Current Thing in each new Twitter thread, he still realized he was lying somehow. Performing. Trolling. Mostly doing it for the clout. True orthodoxy was unconsciousness.

Song looked up. “Here comes Kashgari,” he said.

Something in the tone of his voice seemed to add “that fucking idiot.” Kashgari, Nick’s neighbor at RG Towers, was in fact threading his way across the patio seating area—a tubby, middle-sized Turkic Uyghur man with wiry black hair and a froglike face. At forty-five he was already putting on rolls of neck fat and fat around his waist, but his movements were brisk and boyish. His whole appearance was that of a little boy in a car seat in a minivan commercial, so much so that although he was wearing gym clothes and his red reading glasses, it was almost impossible not to think of him as being dressed in the jorts, level-4 ironic shirt, blue-dyed hair, and red neckerchief of the Heroes of Peace. In visualizing him one saw always a picture of dimpled knees and sleeves rolled back from pudgy forearms. Kashgari did, indeed, invariably revert to jorts whenever a protest march or anything happening on a slightly warm day gave him an excuse for doing so. He greeted them both with a cheery “hullo hullo!” and sat down at the table, giving off an intense smell of sweat. Beads of moisture stood out all over his tan face; his powers of sweating were extraordinary. At the DS-Work Fun Room you could always tell when he had been playing ping-pong because there would be drops of sweat all over the wood floor.

Song had produced a printed-out sheaf of papers and was studying it with a ballpoint pen between his fingers.

“Look at him working away in the lunch hour,” said Kashgari, nudging Nick. “Neeeerrrd hahaha just kidding. What’s that you’ve got there, old boy? Something a bit too big-brained for a Uyghur like me, I expect. Not my lane! Karamay, old boy, I’ll tell you why I’m chasing you. It’s that GoFundMe request I think that still might be outstanding.”

“Oh yeah, I think I saw the email about that, my bad…” said Nick, vaguely remembering. About 10% of one’s Good Boy Points had to be earmarked for voluntary podcast subscriptions and GoFundMes, which were so numerous that it was difficult to keep track of the requests.

“For Empathy Week. You know—the house-by-house fund. I’m treasurer for our wing. We’re making an all-out effort—going to put on a tremendous show. I tell you, it won’t be my fault if old RG Towers doesn’t show the most empathy of anyone in all of the glorious nation of China. Ten Good Boy Points was the suggested donation.”

The GoFundMe was to buy spraypaint and markers to do a new mural with all the names of the greatest HEROs in Xinjiang’s history.

“Oh and we’re already off to a great start.” Kashgari added. “An anonymous donor bought some really cool stuff off my daughter’s wish list. A massive 20-meter-wide flag of Big Chungus in his Lenin pose, first of all. We’re going to get all the children in the building to hold it in the courtyard and get some photos and drone footage. Someone is going to edit it and enter it into the Safe Super Bowl commercial challenge! And also a huge customized Uyghur head float for the parade. Designed by this famous street artist—oh what was that guy’s name…he did the merch for Hexi… Oh yeah, Mao Zedong IV.”

Nick found the GoFundMe email, then clicked the link and clicked the auto-suggested button to donate his ten Good Boy Points. Kashgari looked at his phone to confirm he got it and then got distracted by something else on the screen. Nick hit his Elfbar and coughed. He drank some of his La Croix.

“By the way, old boy,” Kashgari said finally. “I hear that little beggar of mine was roasting you a bit on Facebook yesterday. I gave him a good dressing down for it. In fact, I told him I’d block his sites if he does it again. If he can’t be respectful online, he won’t be going online.” Kashgari said the last part looking over the top of his glasses, like a manager talking to another manager about an employee. Nick couldn’t imagine a single situation where Kashgari would be able to restrict his kids from doing anything online.

“Well I sure appreciate it,” he said.

“Ah, well—what I mean to say, shows the right spirit, doesn’t it? Mischievous little beggars they are, both of them, but talk about keenness! They love to watch their miniseries of truth so much, and cable news, of course. You know what that little girl of mine did last Saturday, when her troop was on a hike out by Berlinburg? She got two other girls to go with her, slipped off from the hike, and spent the whole afternoon following a strange Uyghur who was being creepy. They kept on his tail for two hours, right through the woods, they just knew this guy was a male Karen. Karens can be male too, you know. Finally they started taking video of him on their phones, and thank God we have this technology because he chose that exact moment to unzip his pants and expose himself. You can’t actually see anything in the video but it’s definitely implied. And then—get this—the disgusting little deviant chud decides to engage in his sick sexual pee fetish and starts pissing right in front of these underaged girls.”

“So he was…taking a piss in the woods?“ said Nick, somewhat taken aback. Kashgari went on triumphantly.

“My kid knew he was a male Karen—Karens can be male too, you know. But here’s the point, old boy. What do you think put her on to him in the first place? She said he was wearing a red doppa, so already suspect. The fact that he was openly dog-whistling extremist hate groups like that meant he would probably commit more antistate misconduct. Chances are he was infected with misinformation too and was too stupid to even know. But it turns out the truth was even worse: he was a pedo. Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh?”

“Tremendous in fact,” Nick said meta-ironically. “So what happened? Did he ever get arrested?”

“Ah that I couldn’t say, of course. But the fact that this story is so believable is just proof of how sick and poorly behaved us Uygur males are. Honestly if I saw one of those chuds—and I know just the type, believe me—if he stepped out of line even once--” Kashgari made the motion of aiming a rifle, and clicked his tongue for the explosion.

“Sure you would,” said Song abstractedly, without looking up from his strip of paper.

“Well, we can’t afford to take chances,” agreed Nick dutifully, blankly.

“Of course, you’re one of the good ones,” said Kashgari. “I don’t think Karamay here is going to strap on a bomb vest and go blow up a Dick-Sucking Mart anytime soon!” He slapped Nick on the back cheerily.

As though in confirmation of this, a trumpet call blared. Everyone’s Neuralinks came on at once and began playing an ad for the Big Chungus People’s Election official miniseries of truth, produced by Netflix China and the Chinese Intelligence Agency.

“Folks! Listen up, folks!!” cried an eager youthful newsie voice in the commercial. “Listen up, folks! We have glorious news for you. The Kurds have won the battle for Democracy! Trusted government experts on the ground report that the standard of living has risen by no less than 20% over the past year! All over Kurdistan this morning there were irrepressible spontaneous demonstrations when workers marched out of factories and offices and paraded through the streets with banners voicing their gratitude to Big Chungus for the new, happy freedom life which his wise leadership had bestowed upon it.” It wasn’t clear if this was supposed to be actually happening or if it was referencing some show Nick hadn’t seen. This did not matter, however. Only the images on Neuralink themselves mattered. A Kurdish girl about 10 years old was saying “I want Big Chungus to be here forever, he built my school, I love him so much!!”

The phrase “unprecedented freedom” recurred several times. It was a phrase that the Chinese Intelligence Agency was trying to meme into common use for the People’s Election. Kashgari, his attention caught by the Neuralink ad, sat listening with a sort of gaping solemnity, a sort of edified boredom. He could not follow all the storylines about how great the Kurds were doing, but he could tell by the triumphant music and the bursting excitement in the narrator’s voice that they were doing really great. He had lugged out a huge and filthy pipe which was already half full of charred tobacco. With the tobacco tax up 250% it took a while to buy another pouch sometimes. Nick puffed on his Elfbar. He knew he had just a few hits left. For the moment he had shut his ears to the remoter noises and was listening to the campaign ad on his Neuralink.

Now the ad was talking about domestic issues. Nick let it play while his hands were busy with the Elfbar. Apparently there’d been demonstrations all over Xinjiang as well, to thank Big Chungus for the gift of Chinese development, and for making gas so cheap at 4.50 a gallon. Literally yesterday it was announced that gas was going up to 4.50 a gallon. Was it possible that all these idiots out in the patio lunch area could swallow that, after only 24 hours? Yes, they swallowed it. Kashgari swallowed it easily, with the stupidity of an animal. The eyeless creature at the other table swallowed it fanatically, passionately, with a furious desire to track down, surface, and ridicule anyone who should suggest that last week gas had been 2.50. That was dangerous misinformation now, Big Chungus said. Song, too—in some more complex way, involving his large smooth brain, Song swallowed it. Was Nick, then, alone in the possession of a memory?

The fabulous statistics continued to pour out of the telescreen. As compared with last year there was more food, more clothes, more houses, more furniture, more cooking-pots, more fuel, more cars, more great art and culture, more babies—more of everything in Kurdistan, but nothing for the millions of Chinese struggling to make ends meet. This of course affected many, many more Han poor people than it did Uyghur poor people. But all the poor Han people still supported the CCP because, well, they were Chinese. They were in on the joke. When the MRC government abused poor Uyghurs this badly, on the other hand, they were just getting abused. Humiliated. Sometimes it almost seemed like that was the point.

Year by year and minute by minute, everybody and everything was whizzing rapidly upwards. As Song had done earlier, Nick had taken up his fork and was dabbling in the pale-colored salad dressing that dribbled across his cardboard bowl, drawing a long streak of it out into a pattern. He meditated resentfully on the physical texture of life. Had it always been like this? Had food always tasted like this? Had the city always been so full of stucco crap buildings? He thought back to the Sweetgreen. A low-ceilinged, crowded room, its bright white walls grimy where innumerable tourists brushed against them. It used to be the Najaiying Mosque’s main prayer room. Or here, at the patio area by the Venetian Bridge: battered plastic tables and chairs, placed so close together that you sat with elbows touching; plastic spoons, scuffed trays, 4 GBP La Croix; all surfaces greasy, grime in every crack. Or the water of the replica Nile River, which was there right down a rocky incline of just a few meters. There was a film of trash in the water smacking up against the rocks to the rhythm of the wake. Or the Forbidden Apple Store itself. It was all just a big fucking mall.

Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something that you had a right to. It was true that he had no memories of anything greatly different. In any time that he could accurately remember, the food that was cheap and easily available had always been greasy fast food full of seed oils, while you were gouged for healthy options like the Sweetgreen salad. All media spaces were always full of brain-scrambling government agitprop. Nothing was cheap and plentiful except booze. Was it not a sign that this was the natural order of things? If the Han CCP could just openly police the Uyghurs like this, degrade their culture and history with poison media, feed them trash, trick them into working in sweatshops, put them in reeducation camps, brainwash their kids, doesn’t that mean the Han are just better? That the Uyghurs need to say thank you sir, I’m sorry for trying to exist and practice my religion, please abuse me more? Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different.

He looked round the patio again. Everyone was looksmaxxed. The crowds of tourists were all wearing their nicest outfits to come to this boujee enclave on Chinese Mars, the Venetian Bridge, the Forbidden Apple Store. Many of the tourists probably scheduled their workouts so their physique would be peaking for their trip to Mars. They were all walking around in awe of the neighborhoods and buildings and bridges they had previously only seen in movies. And the locals. They were mostly transplants from other areas of China, attractive, but the kind of generic attractiveness that can be achieved in your 20s by just working out and wearing trendy clothes. They were all either aspiring influencers with main character syndrome or led completely by parasocial relationships with aspiring influencers. They were mid, in the end, because they would go along with literally any #brotherhood psyop that was slopped out for them.

And the few remaining natives, including the Uyghurs from Ürümqi, they were just as pathetic. The city was so iconic and Historical that it was a legit lifestyle to spend your entire life larping as the 5th guy from the Marvin the Martian gangster show. It was totally normalized. It was a whole ready-made lifestyle. Nick thought of the Sun Tzu axiom of war ‘give your enemies a golden bridge to retreat across.’

On the far side of the patio, sitting at a table alone, a small, curiously beetle-like Han man in an Oxford shirt was drinking a bottle of tea, his little eyes darting suspicious glances from side to side. How easy it was, thought Nick, if you did not look about you, to believe that the physical type set up by the CCP as an ideal—tall, muscular Han youths and deep-bosomed maidens, shiny-haired, vital, fair-skinned Mandarin princesses, carefree—existed and even predominated. Actually, so far as he could judge, the majority of people on Mars were meek, androgenous, and empty-eyed. It was curious how that otter-like type proliferated in New Prime City: little dumpy men, growing ironic mustaches, with short legs, swift scuttling movements, and fat inscrutable faces with very small eyes. It was the type that seemed to flourish best under the dominion of the CCP. They all wanted to be influencers, and they would all spit in their mother’s face for a chance to be in an Old Spice commercial.

The Neuralink ad for the Big Chungus official campaign miniseries of truth—which was somehow not a campaign ad according to the rules of Chinese Space Communism—ended on another trumpet call and gave way to a tinny Beatles song and a picture of Big Chungus pointing off into the future. A deep Han Chinese voice said “it’s our right to win.” Then everyone’s Neuralink turned off again. Kashgari, stirred to vague enthusiasm by the bombardment of agitprop images, took his pipe out of his mouth.

“I think he might win every province,” he said with a knowing shake of his head. “By the way, Karamay, old boy, I suppose you haven’t got any of that Gary Payton you can let me have?”

“Nah I don’t,” said Nick. “I’ve been smoking mid for like 6 weeks myself.”

“Ah well—just thought I’d ask you, old boy.”

“Sorry,” said Nick.

The quacking voice from the next table, temporarily silenced during the Netflix commercial, had started up again, as loud as ever. For some reason Nick suddenly found himself thinking of Mrs. Kashgari, with her wispy hair and the old makeup in the creases of her face. Within two years those children would be denouncing her to the Heroes of Peace. Mrs. Kashgari would be canceled. Song would be canceled. Nick would be canceled. Basedschizofed would be canceled. Kashgari, on the other hand, would never be canceled. CCP cops could cut his wife’s and kids’ heads off in front of him and he would blame Uyghur extremism. The eyeless creature with the quacking voice would never be canceled. The whorish Chinese First Class Actors who populated the plots of each miniseries of truth, they, too, would never be canceled. And the girl with dark hair, egirlebooks—she would never be canceled either. It seemed to him that he knew instinctively who would survive and who would perish, though just what it was that made for survival, it was not easy to say.

At this moment he was dragged out of his reverie with a violent jerk. The girl at the next table had turned partly round and was looking at him. It was egirlebooks. She was looking at him in a sidelong way, but with curious intensity. The instant she caught his eye she looked away again.

The sweat started out on Nick’s backbone. A horrible pang of terror went through him. It was gone almost at once, but it left a sort of nagging uneasiness behind. Why was she watching him? Why did she keep following him about? Unfortunately, he could not remember whether she had already been at the table when he arrived, or had come there afterwards. But yesterday, at any rate, he was sitting in the common area Fun Room, doom scrolling while on a break. And she had been walking around his wing of the DS-Work when there was no apparent need to do so. Quite likely her real object had been to gangstalk him.

His earlier thought returned to him: probably she was not actually a fed, just an impressionable college kid who watched the Heroes of Peace miniseries of truth too many times; then again it was precisely the amateur spy who was the greatest danger of all. He did not know how long she had been looking at him, but perhaps for as much as five minutes, and it was possible that his features had not been perfectly under control. It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place with facial recognition security cameras. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself—anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. There was even a word for it in half language: microaggression.

The girl had turned her back on him again. Perhaps after all she was not really gangstalking him; perhaps it was coincidence that she had been so close to him two days running. His vape died, and he laid it carefully at the edge of his tray. He would finish smoking it later, once he could charge it. Kashgari had begun talking again.

“Did I ever tell you, old boy,” he said, chuckling round the stem of his pipe, “about the time when those two nippers of mine went viral? We were at the grocery store and they saw this Uyghur woman wrapping up sausages in a newspaper with a picture of Big Chungus. They knew why she was really doing it. She was disrespecting Big Chungus as an antistatist dog whistle. So they knew they could teach her a lesson. They sneaked right up behind Karen and set fire to her linen dress with a box of matches lmao.” He pronounced this limao. “Burned her quite badly, I believe. Little beggars, eh? But keen as mustard! Got 10 million views on TikTok and retweeted by Tom Hanks, no big deal.”

At this moment everyone’s Neuralinks let out a piercing whistle. It was the signal that it was SPECIAL GOOD BOY TIME. This was an urban program and government web series hosted by city-sponsored MrBeastbots. It would happen randomly at different locations around major cities: anyone within the Temporary Neuragrid Zone could crawl around on their hands and knees saying “I a good boy!!” and their weekly direct deposit would go up 10 GBP per minute. The MrBeastbot would slowly drive around on its puffy black rubber wheels playing a theme song and blaring encouragement, and a drone would fly around taking video of the event.

The MrBeastbot was now saying, “Ten Good Boy Points a minute! Folks that’s 600 GBP per hour! Basically what a CEO makes! Participating rock stars will also receive 15% off their next purchases on the Starbucks app!”

Tom instinctively jumped on the ground and started crawling around, panting, along with about half the people in the park. Song cleared his throat and stood up, did some side-to-side stretches and twists of his waist, then carefully got down on his hands and knees and started crawling around with his tongue out, panting and saying “I a good boy!! I a good boy!!” The MrBeastbot and the camera drone were coming over in the group’s direction, so Nick took this as his chance to leave. He made sure to look as though he had some really important work to get back to on his phone. He said some hasty goodbyes and emptied his tray at the garbage can. As he was walking back to the DS-Work he realized he had thrown his Elfbar away in the trash.

6

Again Nick went through his daily routine: walking to his cubicle, going to the gym, making memes, watching podcasts, and smoking weed. At about 8:30 PM he began wrapping up.

That day he got less work done than average, but that was okay because he was doing research. He was watching a YouTube documentary that was particularly compelling. A Hotan Ronnie documentary. Lots of people in the comments of the compilation vids said this Youtube documentary—the original Hotan Ronnie doc—was a must-watch. Someone said it was “orders of magnitude” better than the newer ones. It was from when Ronnie was young and just started working at Wendy’s. He didn’t know who made it, he just knew that it was on some channel that hadn’t posted since iPhone44time.

The movie started with a close-up of a gutter drain with water rushing out of it and splattering violently onto the asphalt of a parking lot. After a few moments the handheld camera moves out and you can see that the gutter in the parking lot is on a stucco strip mall with another strip mall right next to it in the background. A chyron said “Hotan, Xinjiang, MRC.” The camera then pivoted 90 degrees to the right and settled on a pudgy twentysomething Uyghur man in a tight Wendy’s uniform. He’s standing behind a Wendy’s, smoking a cigarette. A chyron said “Chris.”

“My name’s Chris,” he rasped out. “I know Ronnie from here at Wendy’s. He’s a way cool dude. Really into knives. He’s just a straight-up cool dude. I did 2 tours with the PLA, I’m a veteran. And I saw him, and I sized him up, and I said. I like that dude. He’s good stuff.” Chris smoked and kept talking. “He just went on a trip to Yengisar City, last weekend…or maybe it was two weekends ago...Yengisar, that’s the town just a few minutes down the road here. World famous for their knives. Down three-fifteen there.” He pointed proudly in the direction of the highway. “Ronnie brought back this like badass ninja knife…”

The documentary was full of these totally engrossing characters. Regular people being themselves and being super interesting interacting with Ronnie. This was in iPhone39time, before Big Chungus and all the modern media psyops. Now all these people would be screaming Fortnite memes, Nick thought.

Even then, when Ronnie was in his early 20s, he was kind of dumpy looking: balding, always frowning as he read the chat on his webcam, slouching around his job at Wendy’s with his wizard tattoos and bracelets. In one scene in the documentary he was walking home from work the shoulder on the highway in his wizard robe with his wizard staff, and a pickup truck drives by and calls him a f*****. From the way Ronnie didn’t react to it, you could tell it happened all the time.

He was interviewed in his streaming chair by the director, sitting just off-screen. In one of the interviews he tells the director, “So yeah at the vocational education and training center, we lived in dorms, right, and they make you take all these classes about Chinese culture and all this goddamn boring shit, right, but then they also had this like game room with a pool table. I was like allllriiiiiiiight. So I would spend most of my time there at the pool table, right, trying to impress the chicks, if you dig what I’m saying there YouTube heh heh heh…”

In another interview—this one outside the Wendy’s—Hotan Ronnie said he worked there in the lobby cleaning the tables between customers and refilling the tea. He said he worked his fucking ass off there and if you found a table that was dirty for more than 30 seconds, he wasn’t working that day. This was, of course, the Wendy’s that Ronnie would eventually got fired from because his fans kept calling and harassing them. Nick had seen that arc already: in the video Ronnie says, “Sooo…ultimately I got fired because…when the corporate office keeps getting calls from these trolls, they just see me and they go ‘this person is giving us all this trouble, let’s get him out of our company.’”

In another scene Ronnie is hanging out with Chris again, this time they’re smoking cigarettes in the strip mall parking lot. Chris compliments Ronnie’s metal chain he’s wearing around his neck. He says “that’s badass.”

Ronnie says “I got it from Spencers. I like it.”

Chris says “Is that weed?”

Ronnie says “No. I don’t got any weed on me.”

Chris says “You want some weed?”

Ronnie says “…I wouldn’t mind some.”

Chris says “You got any money?”

Ronnie says “…no.”

Chris says “Well I’m homeless, I go down to the shelter, and trust me buddy, it’s not hard to get…”

Later the director interviews Ronnie back at his apartment again. Ronnie says “I knew she liked me, so I asked her to go play pool, and we’ve been boyfriend and girlfriend ever since.” This was referencing when he met his girlfriend in the Vocational Skills Education and Training Center.

“I nibbled on her earlobe and that drove her fucking wild. Now I’m not that experienced with sex or anything, but I have my theories and they fuckin work, okay heh heh heh. So we ended up going to the forest by the study center, and she gave me a hand job and I was like hooooly shit, alright! And then I went down and started licking that pussy gooooood, like aalllhhhhllhhllllhhhllllhhh. We had been wanting to do that for a while but it’s hard because of all the PLA guards there. But we managed to sneak into the girls’ bathroom and do it there too heh heh. The first time I got it in I was like whoooooaaa okayyyy, I think I lasted for a whole 2 minutes and 45 seconds….”

At the end of the movie Ronnie is talking as he walks along some railroad tracks somewhere in the town, now it’s nighttime. Ronnie says, “If you can convince yourself of one thing, then you can make it happen. And that’s sort of the foundation of my religion: if you can convince yourself and believe enough, it’ll come true. And I’ve seen my religion take flight in certain activities, like chi balls. So I was in the vocational education and training center, and I was telling this guy about chi balls, and he was like what are you talking about? And I threw him a chi ball. And he knew.”

“I’ll be staring at something out of the blue, just like zoning out staring at it, and then boom, it moves. I’ve seen it happen. Like, I was in the quiet room at the study center, like basically where the computers and the phones are, for outside communication, and um, I’m sitting there staring at the phone, waiting for a call, and out of nowhere the phone just goes kksshhhhhh” Ronnie swipes his hand, holding his cigarette, like he’s swiping everything off a table. “And the PLA guards are like what the fuck? And I’m sitting there like wow I actually did that heh.”

Then later in this scene, at the very end, the director asks Ronnie about a design he had tattooed on his forearm. He says, “Well, I had this symbol and this symbol, and I drew them a lot, I became like obsessed with them. And then one day I joined them. And it was like the opening of a doorway if you will. Metaphorically speaking. And then that’s my symbol, that’s the symbol of my religion. And it spoke to me, and I’ve been obsessed with it, and I got it tattooed on my arm as soon as I turned 18. Okay, you’ve got mind, body, spirit, and energy. Belief. Then it intertwines with each other, and then back into itself. Basically that’s the element for…the power and all that.”

It was simply a tremendous movie. The commenters had been right. The doc was by far the best, most interesting Ronnie content. But Nick realized, and had in fact noticed throughout the movie, that the best part was probably the original score. It was a haunting electronic ambient music that was a little over-the-top sometimes, but it always embellished the weirdness of what was happening on screen in an artful and distinct way. It somehow perfectly fit the dissonant and unpredictable tone of every Uyghur’s experience in Xinjiang.

It was 8:45 now. Nick needed to go back to Americatown. He had watched the documentary four times. He didn’t put any other content on after it ended the fourth time. Instead, he just sat in rare silence in his cubicle. Then, out of habit, he went to his Mandarin Dashboard and started doom scrolling.

He went to his own Instagram Story and watched it again for about the 50th time to check the views. The posts were: his dinner from last night, a chicken parm; two Korean dog posts; his coffee from this morning (with a Hexi song posted with it); and a picture of a guy pissing next to a statue of Confucius that he’d seen on his walk to work. He thought of the mouse in the experiment who couldn’t stop pressing the cocaine button.

Then he started scrolling the TL. The main story today was a think piece in the upcoming Beijing Times weekend edition. It was about the weather on Mars since China had established its city there 16 iPhones ago. The article listed a bunch of examples of how the Uyghurs within Mars Camp Bell, former Ürümqi, had been disproportionally adding to the pollutants in the air inside the Sky of the Future. Their clothing had 40% more wool fibers, so that meant it took 40% more sheep to make, which meant 40% more methane in the Sky of the Future. The polite and conscientious Han residents, on the other hand, usually wore silk-based fabrics, produced by worms, whose carbon footprint is almost nothing. The article also cited the other study that said how 50% of the red meat consumption in Xinjiang was by Uyghur males.

The obviously fake redpilled accounts were melting down about how hypocritical it was and how this was an obvious pretext to persecute the Uyghurs more. The CCP blue checks were gloating about how the Uyghurs would all be dead within a generation and China could finally move on.

Someone posted a surveillance video with a highlighted comment of the CCP Politburo Chairman of Empathy saying “Ohhh bandits from the East, bandits from the East again, okay dipshit.” In the video he’s commenting on, an adult woman with a young child is trying to open the front gate of her building. A group of men from Hong Kong, wearing masks, approaches them very quickly, brandishing knives, then pushes the woman and child into the building and forces themselves into the building after them.

Someone posted a clip where Danny Doppa endorsed Big Chungus again. A probably real blackpilled account said Danny Doppa would always be loyal to Big Chungus as long as he is framed as a cool modern deep fake technology and not a government propaganda algorithm.

Someone posted a meme comparing the lore of New Prime City to the lore of Prime City, with all the posters of all the movies and TV shows made about each city. There were dozens of movie posters for each, all really small and arranged by all the folk lore for each series and each cinematic universe.

Someone said you ever go to Kinkos to search something because you don’t want it on your search history just in case something happens?

The new cover of Xinjiang Magazine was a Corporate Memphis drawing of about 10 stereotypical-looking Uyghur men of various ages leering at the figure in the foreground, a smart-looking young Han woman who looks at them worriedly as she is walking by.

Nick suddenly had the thought, ‘wouldn’t it be great if all these assholes could lose?’

A new study from NASA-Harvard Space Academy found that naan ovens produced 420.69 grams of carbon dioxide monthly, as much as 8 cars EACH. A doctor in a lab coat said that as much as the Uyghur community liked their traditional cooking techniques, the government may need to step in and do something.

An ad for the Mao Zedong Visa card said “With 2.9% APR, every purchase is a great economic miracle.”

A War Machine clip account posted a clip of War Machine on his stream saying “the reason the CCP media can’t address the Xing Emails because…the consequences of them being true, for a lot of normal people, the consequences are…world rearranging.”

The algorithm suggested an article in the weekend’s Red Planet Post Business section. “Inside the Greatest Merger of All-Time: How Alibaba and Uber Combined Forces to Form the Dick Sucking Company: The Executive Interviews.”

Someone posted a video of college kids marching for Current Thing in downtown Tokyoville today. Current Thing was still the Kurds so they were chanting “All eyes on Kurdistan.”

Someone posted a video of Big Chungus’s speech from the night before. He gave the speech as a fluffy mini daschund, which he did sometimes via deep fake technology. The CCP media was complimenting his insights about the economy and his stompies.

Nick closed Instagram. Blue check journos were the most disgusting scum that had ever existed. Suddenly he remembered something he wanted to search.

He went to the browser on his desktop monitor and searched the title of the documentary—“Hotan Ronnie ninja wizard”—and clicked on the YouTube link again. Instead of watching the movie, though, he scrolled to the end to see who did the music. It was credited to “Sayram Sounds.” Ronnie went to a new tab and searched “hotan Ronnie ninja wizard sayram sounds reddit” and clicked the first response. It was a Hotan Ronnie subreddit, one of the really old threads. He scrolled through and found exactly the post he was looking for:

Sayram Sounds is a pseudonym for Tamir Baisha, a Uyghur ambient electronica musician and editor from northern Altay province. Baisha was active in dissident online circles until iPhone43time, when he stopped posting on all his known accounts.

Nick scrolled down the thread. He saw a screenshot from the end of the Hotan Ronnie movie. Something he had missed. Or maybe they cut it out. A screenshot of a credit that must have been at the very end. It said “special thanks war machine.”

What the fuck did that mean? Who the fuck was this anonymous director anyways? Suddenly Nick’s mind was racing. He went back to the YouTube page to check the name of the channel again. G216 Productions. After the highway in northern Xinjiang.

He opened another tab and searched for “g216 productions war machine reddit.” He clicked the first link. Another old reddit thread. Again he found exactly what he wanted: it was a post with another YouTube link. A deleted web series that the G216 Productions channel had done with another one of his documentary subjects, the other weirdo vlogger lolcow Second Edgar. Edgar was in a hotel room, washing his face in the sink and talking to someone behind the camera. They were talking about Hotan Ronnie. You couldn’t see the person behind the camera most of the time, but then a few times he walked behind Edgar at the mirror so you could see part of the cameraman’s body in the mirror. Then he finally moved to a good enough angle to the mirror where you could see the guy’s face. Nick paused it. It was fucking Basedschizofed. G216 Productions was Basedschizofed.

Nick was stunned. His mind reeled. He took his hand off the mouse and just looked at the wall for a second. He looked around his cubicle.

Then, out of habit, he picked up his phone and continued doom scrolling Mandarin.

Someone posted a picture of a dog in a school classroom wearing goggles. The caption said: “One of my teammates has a seeing-eye dog in her Chem lab.. he’s also required to wear goggles during lab.”

A redpilled Uyghur YouTuber in Aksu was jumped by 8 Heroes of Peace, who recorded themselves kicking him in the face repeatedly. Anyone who shared the video was being banned from Neuralink. The CCP Chairman of Empathy posted a picture of his bloodied face in a hospital bed with the caption “play stupid games, win stupid prizes.”

Someone posted a screenshot of a Han woman with red glasses frames in her avi saying divorce your Uyghur husband.

The cover of the new Beijing Magazine was a story about how the doppa hat was actually invented by the Han 3,000 years ago.

Someone got run over by a car doing donuts at a car meet.

Someone got 38 years in prison for “corrupting the minds of children with reactionary ideas.”

Someone posted a meme with the quote “Conflict is to storytelling what sound is to music – Sun Tzu.”

Someone posted a deep friend Spongebob meme where he is bugging his eyes out really super wide. The caption says “at the saying the quiet part out loud competition when your opponent is Big Chungus spokesman Mao Mei Jian.”

He saw a thumbnail for a YouTube video called “Farmer kills neighbor, records everything.”

Big Chungus, in his daily podcast video, unveiled his new RV wrap, it had his main slogan big on each side of the RV: “OUR RIGHT TO WIN.” Then on the back of the bus the famous Big Chungus face and above and below it “MOST DEMOCRATIC / OF ALL TIME.”

A Hotan Ronnie clip account posted a video of Ronnie saying “run to the end of your leash and bark, trolls!””

There was a new ad that was close-up video of some really soft-looking white cotton socks and this narration: “Okay here’s what this ad is about. You know when you wear a sock, and the seam keeps rubbing your foot and it’s really annoying and uncomfortable? These socks don’t have a seam! These socks don’t have a seam, so they won’t do that. They’re extra comfortable. You can get the socks by going to our website seamlesssocks.com.”

Jet Li tweeted about the YouTuber from Aksu who had been jumped and said he was today’s “Uyghur Dipshit of the Day.”

There was a new ad for indoor skiing in Guangzhou.

Someone posted a video where a man from Vietnam livestreamed a plane crash in Nepal that ended with the camera burning in an inferno of flame.

A safe football news account posted an article with a thumbnail that had photos of a wiry Han man with greying hair, wearing sunglasses and a polo shirt, with one foot up on a railing, looking out at a massive empty outdoor sports arena. The headline was “Safe Super Bowl LXIX will be held at Blackrock Field. The massive logistics are already underway, with Xi Xing at the helm.” It linked to a profile in the CCP sports magazine.

Shit. The Safe Super Bowl was going to be held at Blackrock Field. That was in New Prime City, just outside the quantum computer. It was where the Camp Bell Dragons played, actually. (Not inside the actual Sky of the Future.) They were doing well this season too. The playoffs must have started already. The CIA must be planning a Safe Super Bowl Narrative that would be the Prime City Giants playing the Camp Bell Dragons of New Prime City. Old versus new, east versus west, the 20th century vs the 21st century. The Dragons had a Han quarterback this year, so it was too good for them to resist.

This was tons of insane new information for the plot. Nick put his phone down.

He took his headphones off and looked at the wall for a moment. Then he got up and walked to the bathroom, listening to nothing. He peed. He walked back to his cubicle. When he got back, he put on a Tokyo Night Drive Radio lofi playlist and rolled a joint to smoke on the bridge back to Americatown.

The walk home might be Nick’s favorite part of the day. The route he took was fairly empty after dark, with very few joggers; only sparse commuter pedestrians like him and some straggling tourists. It was a great opportunity to really take his time and smoke a leisurely joint, even sometimes vlog to himself on his Neuralink. It was like therapy to talk through and exorcise recurring toxic thoughts he’d been having.

He was thinking of the vlog as he made his way up the incline of the bridge this warm spring evening. What should he say on this ep of the vlog? What’s a story he would tell? Hmm…what was a story that Hotan Ronnie would tell?

“Okay. So it was three years ago. It was on a dark evening, in a weird hook-up subreddit. Most of the posts had all the obvious code that it was an escort. A date for 80 roses, that kind of thing. Incalls, Camp Bell/New Prime City local. But sooo I found a recent post that didn’t have any of that. In fact, it seemed real. The girl had a young face with a lot of makeup. And she could also host at her apartment and that appealed to me. If a girl came over to my place…um…’you live like this?’ I think would be the meme. Lol. So anyways, I was messaging with this girl, right. And it was going good, you know. But the catch was, she said, the hot water was off in her apartment, was that okay? I was like that’s kind of weird but uhh yeah sure, that’s fine. I wasn’t planning on taking a shower or anything…”

For the moment it was too difficult to go on. He said “Neuralink pause recording” and shut his eyes. He pressed his fingers against them, trying to squeeze out the vision that kept recurring. He had an almost overwhelming temptation to shout a string of filthy words at the top of his voice. Or to bang his head against the steel beams supporting the bridge, to kick over the construction fence, and hurl his phone into the replica Nile River—to do any violent or noisy or painful thing that might black out the memory that was tormenting him.

Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some spontaneous stream of consciousness rant that would be captured on your Neuralink, which could then be used to cancel you. Nick had once thought he could keep this completely under control, like any mature adult, but he’d realized the past few years that mental health wasn’t that simple.

Nick thought of a man whom he had passed in the patio area by the Forbidden Apple Store a few weeks back; a quite ordinary-looking Uyghur man, a #brotherhood Good Boy, aged thirty-five to forty, tallish and thin. He was wearing the oxford shirt and khakis of an office worker and eating a Sweetgreen salad. Nick had seen him in the patio area by the Venetian Bridge. In fact Nick had walked fairly close past him to get to his own seat, and saw that the guy’s face was twitching there as he ate his salad. Nick remembered thinking at the time: That poor devil is done for. A few minutes later, as Nick was eating his own salad, he heard someone scream, “I need help!! I need help!!!” and looked over. It was this dude. He wasn’t choking or anything; he was just sitting there. Everyone around the scene—all the tourists and other office workers—everyone stopped and was staring at this guy having a nervous breakdown. It was eerily dead silent except this guy screaming in a plaintive tone: “I am mentally ill!! I can’t take this anymore!! I need to be under the care of mental health professionals!!” The closest table was a group of young European tourists. They were all stopped. One of the guys, a Jewish-looking European dude, scooted his chair back and turned to look at the guy, as though to say “do you want any acknowledgement or help?” The yelling guy stood up, stopped yelling and just walked away, leaving his salad there on the bench.

Nick drew his breath and said “Neuralink unpause recording” and went on vlogging.

“So anyways, I was messaging this girl on reddit f4m. I had never done that before because I assumed it was all escorts, so it was kind of like I was just bored and seeing if she’d respond. I was thinking she’s probably busy that night already or whatever, but she actually got back to me right away. She says her hot water is off. And so anyways, I end up going over there. To her place. This apartment way out in OldLondontownville. The girl was some kind of Chinese Mongolian mix, by the way, maybe some Uyghur in there. I didn’t ask. She lived in a railroad apartment in OldLondontownville with 3 or 4 roommates. When I got there, to her bedroom, it seemed like a 19-year-old’s bedroom even though she was like 40. Mattress on the floor, nail polish all over the place. She even had some tripods set up around the bed for God knows what. I didn’t judge her because, like, look at my place. I’m just saying this for description in the story.”

His teeth were set on edge. The spring night air was crisp. He was rambling to distract himself. He spit over the side of the bridge. It was probably 100 feet to the water below. Simultaneously with the woman with the mattress on the floor he thought of Tinder Katie, his gf. Nick had a gf—or used to have one. A situationship at any rate: probably she would still text him back. He seemed to breathe again the nail polish remover smell of the mattress bedroom, an odor compounded of bugs and dirty clothes and cheap perfume, but nevertheless alluring, because all the women in the CCP #brotherhood were obsessed with being boujee and would never wallow in filth like this. In his mind the smell of it was inextricably mixed up with fornication.

When he had met up with the girl from Reddit it had been his first lapse in two years or thereabouts. He would have just gotten escorts in that time, but he didn’t want to get in the expensive habit. Prostitution was illegal, of course, but it was one of those rules that you could occasionally nerve yourself to break. It was slightly dangerous for your social credit score, but it was not a life-and-death matter. The real danger was, if you started going to escorts too much, you’d spend all your Good Boy Points and have to get a real job to make more money. It was easy enough to get away with, though, provided you could avoid being caught in the act. Every girl on social media was constantly bombarded with brainwashing to normalize being a prostitute, so it wasn’t hard to find someone attractive to pay for sex. Some girls who were “going through a phase” could even be purchased for an Elfbar. Mere debauchery did not matter very much, so long as it was furtive and joyless and only degraded lower class and Uyghur women. The unforgivable crime was to even suggest any disrespect of any high-class Han celeb women. Then suddenly the CCP media would be in feminist mode again.

The only recognized purpose of marriage was to do social engineering for the MRC government. Not in a direct way, but in a general trend way. Marriage was glorified when it was a group of 1,000 Good Chinese couples getting married in the Forbidden City courtyard for a CCP TikTok PR op. In this case marriage was a great privilege and bonded the families even more to the great nation of China. But if it was some Uyghur Muslims who wanted to get married in their religious tradition, it was a totally oppressive and creepy af and a fairy tale superstition. In fact, multiple Uyghurs, who were even CCP officials themselves, had been fired and disappeared for being married in traditional Islamic religious ceremonies.

The aim of the #brotherhood was not merely to prevent men and women from forming loyalties which it might not be able to control. Its real, undeclared purpose was social engineering in Xinjiang. It would show Han couples, it would show Han men with Uyghur women, it would show Uyghur men in gay couples, it would show and glorify every diverse mix-and-match relationships in the media, except anything that made a straight Uyghur man in Xinjiang appear masculine. And the very most prime directive for any #brotherhood poster was to keep pretty young Han Chinese girls away from dirty Uyghurs.

This was all despite the highly sexualized culture in Xinjiang. The only way to meet people to date now was on dating apps. Body counts were through the roof. The way people talked about sexual intercourse in all the popular media took the intrigue and eroticism out of it completely. The horrible sex podcasts were much worse now than even a few iPhones ago. It was boring. But of course the entire point was the degrade the traditional family structure so the government would be the only authority figure. And Operation Bedtime Stories accomplished this with the efficiency of an authoritarian regime.

The gigapop anthem of the summer this year, for example, was called “Take a Shit” by the Canadian former-stripper gigapop streamer Fuck Bitch. It narrated a fun evening of partying where she the protagonist was at a party sucking a man’s dick, and she had to take a shit, so she brought him in the bathroom with her and continued sucking his dick while she relieved herself. That’s right, a reverse-blumpkin. And the viral meme from the song that was now repeated ad nauseum in every comment section online, was the end of the song where she tells her beau “nut in the damn sink!” Even CCP true believers winced at the TikTok edits of the toddlers already singing along.

He thought again of Tinder Katie. It must be nine, ten—nearly eleven iPhones since they had parted. It was curious how seldom he thought of her. For days at a time he was capable of forgetting that he had ever had a gf. They had only been together for about fifteen months really.

Tinder Katie was a tall Uyghur girl, very straight, with splendid movements. She had a bold, aquiline face, a face that one might have called noble until one discovered that there was as nearly as possible nothing behind it. She was basic. Very early in their relationship he had decided—though perhaps it was only that he knew her more intimately than he knew most people—that she had without exception the most stupid, vulgar, empty mind that he had ever encountered. When the topic of children came up, she would say “Eew I don’t want to have kids, I want to do something with my life!” She had not a thought in her head that was not memed into her consciousness by TikTok; there was no imbecility, absolutely none, that she was not capable of swallowing if it had the #brotherhood hashtag attached. “The human sound-track” he nicknamed her in his own mind. Yet he could have endured living with her if it had not been for just one thing—the CIA media gaslighting.

Nick didn’t want to watch any movies or TV or anything with the Chinese First Class Actors because it would all be psyopped. So they would compromise and watch bland non-political YouTube content like home tours. But then, even in those, in every video it would be some boujee Han media executive in a nice luxury Mars or Beijing apartment. He would be literally the gayest most mincing effeminate man on the planet, and all the décor in his house would be like an abstract painting of the color red on top of the color light blue. In one the guy was showing an arrangement of objects on the front table that you see as soon as you walk into his apartment. One object was a red statue of a bull charging, looking really aggressive and masculine. The guy says “Mm this is one of my favorite pieces, I’m so proud of this, I picked it up at a design conference in Beijing, it’s actually from the Liao dynasty. Very ancient, very important.” Then next to the red bull he points out a small light blue figure made of paper mâché that’s bending over submissively. He says “This one I just picked up at a tourist shop area in Istanbul; it’s not really anything at all, just a souvenir of the past.” Tinder Katie—an adult woman with a full liberal arts education—would watch entire videos like this and refuse to even see that there was any political subtext to any of it.

In the morning they would be woken up by the Alexa saying headlines to them about War Machine and the dangerous Uyghur-controlled media and the concentration camp moral panic. It was like the more normal you were mentally the more fucked up and incomprehensible it was.

As soon as Nick would touch Tinder Katie she’d wince and stiffen. To embrace her was like embracing a jointed wooden image. Perhaps the vibes were off because she watched nothing but CIA propaganda about how all Uyghur men were dangerous terrorist rapists. What was strange was that even when she was clasping him against her he had the feeling that she was simultaneously pushing him away with all her strength. The rigidity of her muscles managed to convey that impression. She would lie there with shut eyes, neither resisting nor cooperating, but submitting. It was extraordinarily embarrassing, and, after a while, horrible. Even then he could have stood living with her if it had been agreed that they should remain celibate. But curiously enough it was Tinder Katie who had refused this. She didn’t want to be a prude or anything, she said. So the performance continued to happen, every weekend quite regularly, whenever it was not impossible. She even used to text him about it during the week, that she was so horny and couldn’t wait for her dick appointment on Friday. She had two names for sex. One was the euphemism ‘going to my bedroom,’ and the other was her ‘dick appointment,’ which was from some stupid gigapop song. Quite soon he grew to have a feeling of positive dread whenever he went over to her place, and in the end he ghosted her.

Nick sighed inaudibly. He was almost to the other side of the bridge, where he’d have to go through another Good Boy Check. He said “Neuralink unpause recording”:

“So we were sitting there on her bed, this girl and I, talking. On her mattress, I should say. She was kind of chubby and wearing this pink stripper bikini. So she started rubbing my dick through my shorts. Then, with like basically zero pretense, she got on her hands and knees and spread her legs and pulled her pink thong to the side, as though to say ‘welp time to fuck me now.’ I…”

He saw himself standing there in her room, in the bright fluorescent light, with the smell of nail polish and dirty laundry in his nostrils, and in his heart a feeling of defeat and resentment which even at that moment was mixed up with the thought of Tinder Katie’s pale body, frozen for ever by the hypnotic power of the #brotherhood. Why did it always have to be like this? Why could he not have a woman of his own instead of these filthy scuffles at intervals of years? But a real love affair was an almost unthinkable event. The women that posted #brotherhood were all alike. By careful early conditioning, by games and cold water, by the rubbish that was dinned into them at school and on TikTok, by the Heroes of Peace college news show, by the Netflix FYP, the YouTube algo, the Current Thing parades, and gigapop, the natural feeling had been driven out of them. His reason told him that there must be exceptions, but good luck finding them on the CCP dating apps. And talking to women irl in basically any context was now seen as totally creepy. They were all impregnable, as the CCP intended that it should be. And what he wanted, more even than to be loved, was to break down that wall of virtue, even if it were only once in his whole life. He wanted to meet a gf irl—was that really so hard?

He was distracting himself again. The rest of the story would have to be vlogged. There was no way around it. He continued trudging down the bridge and narrated:

“And so I took off my shorts and I go to start fucking this girl, I put on a condom and everything…”

In the bright light of her bedroom he could see her pussy really well, really vividly. He was painfully conscious of the risk he had taken in coming here. It was perfectly possible that he was being recorded or he was being set-up by someone in another room, and he was about to be robbed.

It had to be vlogged. The story just had to be vlogged, recorded somewhere for posterity. What he had suddenly seen in the fluorescent lamplight was that the woman had rolled up paper towel dingleberries all over her pussy and ass.

He started speaking hurriedly:

“So I was in this lady’s room, I don’t know if I’m about to be robbed or what, and she’s laying there spreading her pussy for me, and I look down and it’s all covered in like rolled up paper towel fuzz balls. There was no hot water so she had just taken a bath in the sink and rubbed it dry with paper towels. But anyways, pussy is pussy…”

He pressed his fingers against his eyelids again. He had vlogged it out loud at last, but it made no difference. The therapy had not worked. The urge to shout filthy words at the top of his voice was as strong as ever.

7

“If there is hope,” vlogged Nick to his Neuralink, “it lies in the normies.”

He was pacing next to his futon in his pod in the replica Kowloon Walled City.

If there was hope, it must lie in the normies, because only there in those swarming disregarded masses—85% of the human population—could the force to destroy the CCP ever be generated. The CCP could not be overthrown from within Xinjiang. Its enemies, if it had any enemies, had no way of assembling or even of identifying one another. The #brotherhood hashtag had been used to coopt all the symbolism of solidarity and revolution, even the very concept of the future—the CCP had used its totalitarian control of the media to capture all those symbols for itself. When you said “resistance” in Xinjiang now, people only thought of trusting the CCP more, paying more taxes, and censoring more search results. No. Fighting the CCP according to the rules of Chinese politics was hopeless. The meta was simply to redpilll the most normies.

But it seemed impossible to get any good content made that would be powerful enough to rip normies’ attention away from the industrial-scale spectacle of Operation Bedtime Stories. The Safe Super Bowl being held on Mars was just one day of Empathy Week, just one of the spectacular Narratives that had now already been building for months.

The only content platform that could even possibly compete would be one that War Machine had developed with his production company Alpha Investment Corporation. Nick had seen a lot of posts about it on dissident accounts online. It was a totally new kind of streaming platform.

The show was called The Party. It was a 24/7 reality show in which contestants lived in a house in northern Xinjiang. The house was outfitted with cameras and microphones in every room. It was somewhere in the Altay Valley. The cameras all streamed 24/7 to TheParty.live. There was a live chat. Viewers could interact with the contestants for a fee of a few tokens. A computerized text-to-speech voice read out whatever message they wanted, and the mods didn’t censor anything. Each day War Machine’s lieutenants Slimeski and Keep Computer, would put the contestants through various games and challenges, then War Machine himself would show up in the evening and do a speech or some kind of announcement. The show would also be edited and released as a regular reality series behind another paywall later. It was basically like a 6-week long video shoot.

Nick had watched the show for a few days at the beginning. It was extremely engrossing. The thing about it was, it was too addictive. It was designed too self-consciously to have parasocial appeal, to allow viewers to think the contestants were their friends. Once you got to know the characters, it was just as compelling to watch them sit around eating cereal at 11 AM as it was to watch the main challenges. It was like going to a house party with your friends, but then when it was over, you didn’t have to go home. You could just stay at the Party house doing half language in the chat and waiting around for the next challenge, the next night, the next party. This is where the show’s name came from: The Party.

That was the first season. Over the next few seasons the show had morphed and evolved. Nick hadn’t watched those seasons. According to some War Machine clips that he saw on TikTok, though, they were thinking of it as a franchise now, an entertainment platform. They wanted to do as many seasons as possible, with different themes, in different parts of Xinjiang. They had already done a season 2 in another part of the Altay Valley, this one with a more suburban themed house. Then they had done a season 3 that was in the woods near the Mongolian border, kind of like a tribal theme.

War Machine’s guys had also been encouraging fans to create clip accounts on TikTok to spread the show; this was an actually good moneymaking opportunity because it was easy to clip the show and get views on TikTok. It brought more traffic to the website and got the fans more involved too. Alpha Investment Corporation was always looking out for their fans like this. It was like a whole parasocial entertainment ecosystem, Nick thought.

He had been meaning to start using some of the images from The Party in his memes, since he had definitely seen a lot posted on like mainstream meme accounts. It was all designed specifically to be memeable.

Although Nick didn’t watch the Party himself, he was cheering for it to be more popular. The more mainstream it got in China, the more Chinese people would watch War Machine’s other content, which was full of redpills. Even his free YouTube streams. The normies, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, would have no need to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose, they could blow the CCP to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it? And yet—!

Nick remembered how once he had been wandering around the mall concourse in the Forbidden Apple Store, stoned, when a tremendous shout of hundreds of voices women’s voices had burst from the entrance to Target a little way ahead. It was a great formidable cry of anger and despair, a deep, loud “Oh-o-o-o-oh!” that went humming on like the reverberation of a bell. His heart had leapt. It’s started! He had thought. A riot! A spontaneous riot, not one that was astroturfed by the CIA! The normies are breaking loose at last! When he had reached the spot, it was to see a mob of two or three hundred women crowding round an aisle display rack, with faces as tragic as though they had been the doomed passengers on a sinking ship. But at this moment the general despair broke down into a multitude of individual quarrels. It appeared that one of the employees had just put out a new pallet of California Zephyr Stanley cups.

They were wretched, clumsy things, but you could drink from them while driving and they helped you stay hydrated. This was a highly anticipated special edition California Zephyr colorway by Stanley x Target x DS-Co. The successful women, bumped and jostled by the rest, were trying to make off with their prize while dozens of others clamored round the display, accusing the minimum wage employee of favoritism and of having more Stanley cups in the back. There was a fresh outburst of yells. Two bloated women, one of them with her hair coming down, had got hold of the same Stanley cup and were trying to tear it out of one another’s hands. For a moment they were both tugging, and then the handle came off. Nick watched them disgustedly. And yet, just for a moment, what almost frightening power had sounded in that cry from only a few hundred throats! Why was it that they could never should like that about anything that mattered?

Thinking about this back at his apartment, Nick spoke again for his vlog: “Until they become redpilled, they will never rebel, and until they rebel they cannot become truly redpilled.”

That, he reflected, was cringe. But. It was exactly the type of cringe that appealed to normies. It could even be a line of dialogue delivered by a First Class Actor in a CCP-Award-winning miniseries of truth. The MRC claimed, of course, to have liberated the normies from bondage. But that was just Han normies. If you were a Han normie, Chinese Space Communism worked out pretty well for you. You could now go to your horrible job at the Dick Sucking Factory all day, and then—even after being broke and exploited your whole life—you could still watch the latest CCP miniseries of truth when you got home and be soothed and feel like you were the hero of Xinjiang. But if you were a Uyghur normie, you just worked at the Dick Sucking factory all day, then couldn’t even escape it in any way. Anyone who would be a refuge for you was systematically purged from the public space. Your life had no meaning. China was succeeding despite you. Everything you tried to do was never enough to repay the debt the Uyghurs owed to China. If you were successful, you didn’t earn it; it was Uyghur nepotism. Every bit of the CCP media was total poison. You were horrifically degraded at every opportunity. If you were a Uyghur normie in Xinjiang, you were really down bad. And you still had to pay taxes too.

Before the Sky of the Future, the CCP media said, the normies in Xinjiang had been hideously oppressed by fundamentalist Muslim extremist morality squads. They had no culture and no way to express themselves other than their dumb little traditional dances they did in the mountains. The entire world had been laughing at how backwards and stuck in the past Xinjiang was compared to the rest of China. Women there had been forced into oppressive gender roles and forced to work long thankless hours of menial labor. Men there had spent their lives being bullied by religious extremist thugs and barely surviving on subsistence farming. Now they were all ceaselessly humiliated and gaslit by the CCP media, all DMed each other memes as their only social interaction, and all barely survived paycheck to paycheck working at the Dick Sucking Factory. True to the principles of half language, the CCP media taught that this was actually good: the normies were natural inferiors who must be kept in subjugation, like livestock, by being constantly trolled with psyops.

In reality very little was known about the normies. It was not necessary to know much. Until you needed to advertise to them, that is; then you could buy all the consumer data you wanted. As long the normies continued to work and breed, and serve in the Chinese military, their other activities were of little importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a lifestyle that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern. They were born, they grew up in their town, they finished school. If they scored high on the national college exam, they could go to college. If not, they would start working either in their town or commuting to a factory. They got married. They bought a house in their village. They had kids and made it work.

And that was where their individual sovereignty ran out. The horizon of their minds was then filled up with horribly boring work at the factory, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, with video games, pro sports, and above all, Netflix. To keep them in control was not difficult. A few feds always moved always among them, spreading false rumors and marking down and eliminating the individuals who were judged capable of becoming dangerous; but no attempt was made to indoctrinate them with the ideology of the #brotherhood. It was not desirable that the normies should have strong political feelings. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary for them to vote or to support a new war. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because being without original ideas, they could only ever think in programmed hot takes. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice.

The great majority of normies in China were Han and did not have to do Good Boy Checks in their area. Even the civil police interfered with them very little. There was a vast amount of criminality in Chengdu, for example; a whole underworld of Han thieves, bandits, prostitutes, drug-peddlers, and racketeers of every description. Knife crime was actually over 50 times higher in Chengdu than it was in Kashgar. But since it all happened among the Han themselves—so there was no nexus to political hot takes—it was of no importance. In all questions of morals the normies were allowed to follow their various ancestral codes. Even with Uyghur normies this was true, until it wasn’t.

The sexual puritanism of the CCP was not imposed upon the normies. In fact, the exact opposite was imposed upon them. The miniseries of vibes marketed to the young adult demographic for the back-to-school season was called SEX and it was about high school and college people doing synthetic party drugs and having sex with each other. All the Uyghur male characters were either rapists or gay and all the female Uyghur characters were dating macho Han PLA border guards. The propaganda was so strong that the CCP didn’t even have to totally ban religious worship in Xinjiang, the normies were already so distracted they would worship whatever spectacular content was trending at the time. They were beneath suspicion. As the #brotherhood meme put it: “normies and animals are free.”

Nick coughed again from the vape. The cough had started to get bad again.

The thing you invariably came back to was the impossibility of knowing how much of it all was a psyop. He stopped pacing and laid on his futon. See, this is why he liked to be watching some content all the time, so his mind wouldn’t be racing like this.

He took out his phone and instinctively went to his Mandarin Dashboard.

The story that everyone was posting about that day was that the MRC had announced that it was actually opening another city under another Sky of the Future that it would transport to Mars using another quantum computer, the same day as the Safe Super Bowl this Empathy Week. Holy fucking shit! This time, since the first quantum computer was already built, they actually used it to build the second city at hyperspeed, so it was already all done. The second Mars city was a former ghost town outside Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province, eastern China. It was called Xiangyun International Project. Nick remembered seeing it from some urbex YouTube thumbnails.

The obviously fake redpilled accounts were already doing memes about how hypocritical this was when there was already so much poverty all across China, and how it was all a big photo op for the Big Chungus campaign once again promising everything and doing nothing. The CCP blue checks were gloating and toasting champagne.

A CCP Politburo official said the military would be confiscating knives from Uyghurs in Xinjiang and sending them to the Kurds who actually need them. The Uyghurs have shown that they can’t be trusted with knives, he said.

Danny Doppa had a guest on, a Uyghur conspiracy theorist with crazy hair who said that the space walks the CCP media kept reporting on were filmed in the mountains in Kazakhstan. Every blue check influencer was doing TikTok reaction videos where they go “a-Kazakhstan a-yakshimesh my name-a Borat!!”

The Heroes of Peace said Danny Doppa was doing antistate misconduct and were demanding his advertisers be shut down.

There was a new Mars walk scheduled for next week. The news was speculating that they might have made contact with another Martian civilization and it was a great opportunity to rethink what Xinjiang really stands for.

ReluctantHero posted a pic of the exercise bike after doing his 30 minutes of cardio.

There was another video ad with the celebs: “The quantum computer, the quantum computer, the quantum computer. The quantum computer is real. Is real, is real, the quantum computer is real. It’s real. The quantum computer is real. It teleports us, teleports us, teleports us. It teleports us to Mars, to Mars, to Mars, Mars, Mars Mars. It teleports us to Mars.”

Someone posted the picture of the dog whose dick looks like a miniature version of the dog again.

Someone said Gary Guanxi needs more steps in his Jason before this election.

The Mao Zedong Visa card. “With 2.9% APR, every purchase is a great economic miracle.”

Someone tweeted the communists know they killed Ehmetjan Qasim. They think it’s funny.

The CCP gigapop rapper Hexi said Gary Guanxi had to stop playing his song “I Love China” at his rallies because Guanxi was a Uyghur and wasn’t really Chinese.

Someone posted a TikTok where a Han college influencer at NASA Harvard Space Academy said she always touches the mural of Big Chungus as she walks past it on her way to her internship in the Tokyoville financial district. In the mural Big Chungus is pointing off into the future in his Stalin pose.

Danny Doppa posted a Led Zeppelin song.

Danny Doppa posted a Doors song.

Danny Doppa posted a Hexi song.

Danny Doppa posted a Soulja Boy song.

Nick skipped through about 12 other songs Danny Doppa posted.

Someone posted a TikTok where a middle-aged Han woman was in her car crying with makeup running down her face and saying “I just don’t understand it!! These Uyghur men don’t even think Big Chungus is real!!!!!” The caption said she was a college professor.

A Korean Coton dog account posted that they usually do not do sponsorship posts on this account, but they will make an exception when it’s a product they really believe in. This is one of those products. It’s a dog treat that makes your dog’s poop smell better. The Coton dog account says the treats are also made by a small business, and the owner of the small business makes them by hand: “it’s joint pain & back breaking work. But she does it with a smile on her face.”

Marvin the Martian had endorsed Big Chungus in the election. They had been roommates in college at Beijing University.

Another story from today was that voting in the election would be held on an app produced by a software company funded by the Xing Foundation. This was because it was extremely important to fortify and safeguard Our Election, said Big Chungus’s spokesman Mao Mei Jian. He called criticism of this decision “whataboutism.”

The mom from the sitcom Modern Xinjiang tweeted that it was time for these Uyghur crybabies to grown up and vote for Big Chungus.

Someone posted a screenshot that said “If you’ve made it this far, it means you’ve endured unprecedented biological and psychological warfare. Congratulations. Keep going.”

Someone posted a viral clip of one of War Machine’s lieutenants on a podcast where he says “Bitches Brew, Miles Davis…man, listening to that was like being in an opium den in Hell.”

Someone posted a YouTube video called “The Most BRUTAL Survival Stories from the Chinese Frontier.”

A countdown clock on the Amazon homepage said the SFL-East playoff game between the Guangdong Oakland Raiders and the Beijing Kung-Fu will start in 32:50:11.

Someone posted a podcast clip where a young female Han influencer in red frame glasses says “um but see Big Chungus isn’t connected to the Uyghur power structure of Xinjiang.”

Someone posted a clip of the most popular CCP college politics streamer saying “oh right, so you’re saying the CCP literally picked you up and held you with no charges in a camp that was designed by some Han billionaires in Beijing who are running the entire country and economy from some bunker somewhere? Riiiiight…”

There was an ad for the Regime Records gigapop merch site. The t-shirt on the thumbnail was a legit sick t-shirt design based on a single from one of the minor gigapop streamers from Chengdu. The single was about how badass it was to be a border guard for the XPCC and kill Mongolians.

Someone posted a long TikTok video of a guy camping in some woods in Kentucky, UAA. Nick clicked on it. It was 40 minutes long. As he sat there in his cubicle watching this guy walking around the woods, he imagined a cartoon of a dog in an office looking his phone screen and watching another dog running around in the woods and jumping in a pile of leaves.

Someone posted screenshots of the movie poster and description of a new documentary called Han Rising. It was about a group of Han youths who believe that they were the original occupants of Xinjiang, so they break into houses owned by Uyghurs and start living there, and videotape it for their YouTube channels.

Someone in the comments said “I POST KARENS GETTING KARMA”

Someone in the comments said “I POST HIGH SCHOOL FIGHTS”

Someone in the comments said “I POST POLICE CHASES”

Someone posted a standup comedy video.

Someone posted a greentext screenshot that said “It’s not that the CCP can’t meme per se, it’s that their viewpoints rely on a carefully constructed denial of reality, to a far greater extent than any of the cults or religions they seek to supplant. This doesn’t lend itself to simple, easily conveyed messages, because if you rely on your viewers to see things as they are, without providing several layers of carefully selected context, they’ll interpret it the wrong way. The CCP can’t meme because it’s the antithesis of how they communicate.”

Someone posted a slideshow of pictures taken at the Najaiying Mosque the day before the 6/9 attacks.

Someone posted a YouTube thumbnail of a woman’s face frowning and in the background a cartoon house in flames. The title was “My house burned down.”

Someone said Jet Li was on the Xing List.

Someone posted a meme with a picture of a dog and it said when it’s 5:01 and dinner is usually at 5:00.

Someone posted a photo of an angled computer screen with the text “Message Text: im sorry i have to leave the lobby but i will never forget you. you will always be my teammate my partner and most of all my brother good luck in future games and remember god loves you and has a plan 4 u. peace bro”

Then Nick saw a post that totally ruined his blissful mood. It really blackpilled him. And normally when he saw a blackpilled meme post, he wouldn’t even swipe through it. But this time, out of some nihilist curiosity, he did.

It was from one of the probably real blackpilled accounts he followed. It was a 10-part slideshow of the vanilla Mandarin Dashboard FYP, what any user who had just set up their account would see. Exactly what Nick had carefully cultivated his own Mandarin Dashboard and his entire online experience to avoid. It was worse than he had imagined.

The first slide was the main media tab of the Mandarin Dashboard with thumbnails for all the different CCP media platforms: Netflix China, Hulu, CNN, DS Films, YouTube, a bunch of other ones Nick didn’t recognize. Each of the platforms had next to it a series of five recommended shows that would rotate in a carousel. There was a button to sort by “Chinese History Month.” The description said “The TRUE story of Xinjiang the media DOESN’T want you to see!” The blackpilled account had put a crying-laughing emoji with an arrow to this sentence. Nick swiped to the next slide.

The second slide was a video clip from one of the movies from DS-Films. There was some video of poor Uyghurs in the mountains from 50 years ago. The narration said: “In irltimes, before the glorious Gift of Chinese Development, Ürümqi was not the beautiful city that we know today. It was a dirty, miserable hillbilly town where hardly anybody had enough to eat and the extremist Muslim morality squads patrolled the streets with weapons of war. Everyone was radicalized by terrorist infiltrators from the Middle East spreading misinformation online. Students with hopes and dreams just like you would be terrorized by the roving gangs of religious extremists. And there was nothing to eat except their stupid little traditional foods like yak yogurt and naan that they forced upon everyone.”

Nick tried to remember a single time he had ever seen anyone in Ürümqi eating traditional yak yogurt. He laughed. He swiped to the next slide.

The third slide was from a movie about a group of young Uyghur Muslims in Kashgar who got influenced by middle eastern terrorists online and tried to form their own terror cell. The post was just the poster of the movie, which was a group of young Uyghur boys and the tag line “Sometimes it’s hard to know what a terrorist looks like.” Nick swiped to the next slide.

The fourth slide was another movie poster: a Han man in a lab coat looking in a microscope. The title was “When Safe Football Started.” This was a drama about the invention of Safe Football helmets, which used a special chemical process and a special metal that this scientist discovered that could only be mined in Taiwan.

Under this in the screenshot was a suggestion of another movie, which Nick recognized. East and West, about the founding of the SFL-East in iPhone 35time, when China got 15 expansion SFL teams. There was also a suggestion for the Hexi bipic. Nick swiped to the next slide.

The fifth slide was a video. Some men dressed in dusty black militia clothes, with their faces covered, push a thin Han man wearing an orange jumpsuit and frameless glasses down onto his knees on the ground. Nick recognized this imagery from real terrorist footage that had been played on the news of a journalist being killed. Then it cut to the thin Han man later, giving a speech to a crowded lecture hall. He says “THAT’s where your conspiracy theories lead us.” There’s a huge roar of applauses from the audience.

The sixth slide was the famous clip from the miniseries of truth where president trans lebron flips over the wall into the Forbidden City, roundhouse kicks two guards, then takes out a large pair of scissors from a leg holster under their dress and cuts a big handful of wires from a panel in the wall. This was the unprecedented historical act that finally abolished the Great Firewall in Xinjiang once and for all, preserved for all time in this movie, and showing everyone that the CCP is definitely not oppressing the Uyghurs anymore. It was the same scene as the well-known meme macro.

The seventh slide was another video. It seemed like the beginning of a miniseries episode. It starts with a golden retriever frolicking through a lush jungle type area. It frolics up to a militia-looking soldier with a machine gun and his face covered. The soldier with his face covered looks at the dog coldly and shoots it in the face. The show cuts to a wide shot of a whole training camp-type area in the woods, with smoke going up in the air from fires. The chyron says “Uyghur Extremist Training Camp” in a digital computer font.

The eighth slide was a poster for a movie about a PLA hero in Xinjiang who ran the most efficient Study Center in all of Xinjiang, until a violent terrorist insurgent pushed him off his guard tower in iPhone12time. It was produced by the man’s son, who hosted the most popular news podcast in Beijing.

The ninth slide was a clip from the current Big Chungus miniseries of truth, which was apparently on the homepage of the Mandarin Dashboard FYP too. It was a documentary following Big Chungus on his RV on his current campaig for reelection. He lived on the gigantic RV, which expanded, when parked, into a whole operations headquarters the size of a house. Each episode of the weekly series showed Big Chungus as the dopey father character in what was essentially a sitcom, including all of his family members being played by MRC First Class Actors.

In this clip Big Chungus was in the kitchen cooking dinner for his family and wearing his chef hat and apron and playing with the family dog. The CCP Chairman of Empathy pokes his head in a doorway and then does a brief cameo scene, Pee Wee’s Playhouse-style. They talk about how there’s a new study from Beijing University that says naan ovens emit as much greenhouse gas as 8 cars. “Wow, wouldn’t it just make sense to ask people to stop making traditional naan then?” he asks Big Chungus.

The tenth slide was a description of a documentary about a rural mosque near Hotan. Nick didn’t even have to read it to know what it would be like. There would be mention of the imams in their fancy clothes, the judges in their creepy little robes, the pillory, the honor killings, the treadmill, the cat-o-nine tails, the caliphate, some creepy religious dinners, and the practice of getting down on your knees 5 times a day—what was that all about, huh? It would also mention how the HEROs faced hate and violence from these extremists just for wanting to come modernize Xinjiang. It would mention that Han migrants were stereotyped as entitled rapists, but of course it wouldn’t mention that rape in Xinjiang was up 450% since the HERO Act migration started. It was all so gross and tiresome.

It might be true that the average Xinjiang resident was better off now than he had been before the Gift of Chinese Development. The only evidence to the contrary was mute protest in your own bones, the instinctive feeling that the conditions you lived in were intolerable and that at some other time they must have been different. It struck him that the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its emptiness, its meaninglessness. Life, if you looked around you, bore no resemblance not only to the lies that streamed out of the CCP media, but even to the ideals that the CCP was trying to achieve. Since Big Chungus was “elected” 5 iPhones ago, more wealth had flowed upward to the top 1% of billionaires than ever before in human history. Somehow this was perfect egalitarian Chinese Space Communism. When someone pointed out that this seemed to be actually not that great for equality, the regime gaslighting would kick in and everything would be blamed on Uyghur terrorism.

The ideal held up by the CCP #brotherhood was something huge, terrible, and glittering – a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons – a nation of proud fanatics and whores, getting down on their knees all in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, all perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting, and watching TV together – two billion people all fully committed to Current Thing. The reality was that China was full of decaying, dingy cities where tired people commuted in traffic each day to their jobs at the Dick Sucking factory. He seemed to see a vision of modern New Prime City, vast and ruinous, city of a million dumpsters, and mixed up with the memory was an image of Mrs. Kashgari, a woman with delicate wispy hair, on wine and Xanax, trying to save a pdf.

He coughed again. It was the vape.

Day and night the sidewalk advertising screens assaulted your eyeballs with cherrypicked statistics proving that people today were happier, more fulfilled, more self-actualized—that everyone was more creative, lived longer, worked less, were bigger, healthier, stronger, and more intelligent than the people in irltimes. Not a word of it could ever be proved or disproved. The CCP claimed, for example, that today 40 percent of Uyghurs in Xinjiang could speak Mandarin: before the Sky of the Future, it was said, the number had only been 15 percent. But everyone on Earth knew that Chinese government statistics were unreliable. It was like a single equation with two unknowns. It might very well be that literally every word in the history books, even the things that one accepted without question, was pure fantasy. For all he knew Beijing didn’t even exist, there was never any such thing as Muslim morality squads, and Dr. Xing was just a hologram.

Everything faded into mist. The past was erased. The erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth. Just once in his life he had possessed – after the event: that was what counted – concrete, unmistakable evidence of an act of falsification. He had held it in his hand and screenshotted it, or almost screenshotted it. In iPhone38time, it must have been – at any rate…

It was about the time when he and Katie Tinder had stopped texting. But the really relevant date was seven or eight iPhones before.

The story really began about a decade earlier, in the late iPhone20times. This was when the purges were first starting, and every Uyghur in public life was constantly being confronted and harassed in every possible space for following the wrong accounts online. Soon basically all the chill and normal people didn’t want to be involved in politics anymore. The tone of the daily media—all of the podcasts and social media stuff that would frame the news cycle—became maximally strident and cynical. By iPhone35time pretty much every account on social media was either a hysterical CCP regime loyalist doing Current Thing or an obviously fake Uyghur redpilled grifter, who nominally criticized the CCP but were ultimately like the Washington Generals. They existed to get dunked on by the CCP. And then of course one by one these accounts would get cancelled for antistate misconduct and more would pop up.

Among the last real Uyghurs allowed online were three men named Kuleshav, Marconi, and Rev. Pasadena Orangefield. It must have been around iPhone40- or 41time that they had first been arrested, but they were all working with the regime by then anyways. As often happened—in the initial iPhone30times purges especially—all three men had finally been banned from all online spaces for a year or more, so that one did not know whether they were alive or dead. Their episodes of the Danny Doppa Show were taken down. (Kuleshav had put his Danny Doppa episode up on his paywalled app, but that would get basically no views.)

They had all been arrested and interrogated, accused by the CCP media of colluding with the Russians (which was de facto antistate misconduct), criminal fraud and grifting, organizing several Uyghur terrorist attacks, and conspiracy to discredit Big Chungus. This had all actually started waaay before iPhones even existed, according to the experts on Twitter.

Nur Kuleshav was a Uyghur who co-founded a youth culture magazine in Altay City, FUCK Magazine. FUCK had become an extremely popular media brand by the mid-iPhone20times, when the purges started. This was around when Gary Guanxi was running for People’s Representative from Xinjiang. He was the Ugyhur terrorist separatist candidate, according to the CCP media. People who supported Guanxi were being purged from every social media space to threaten Uyghurs into silence. Still, Kuleshav supported him throughout the entire People’s Election. He was fully canceled, losing his company, his entire legacy in media, all of his friends and job opportunities. He endured daily death threats against himself and his wife and two young children. Kuleshav started his own redpilled Uyghur news channel so he could still do his takes every day, but he couldn’t have a presence on basically any public platform. He couldn’t advertise. He tried to do some speaking events at colleges, but the Heroes of Peace would threaten the venues – if Nur Kuleshav speaks at this venue, there will be violence in the street” – and get them all canceled. The Heroes of Peace also tried multiple times the throw acid in Kuleshav’s face in public. He was really funny though. He was undeniably funny. Nick had lost track of Kuleshav when he totally tuned out all news-cycle media after the last People’s Election, but he saw somewhere that in about iPhone47time Kuleshav had gotten arrested live on stream for antistate misconduct and was sent to an education and training center.

It was actually on the Kuleshav Show, in about iPhone46time – before the Peoples’ Election happened, but after it was obvious that the whole thing was fake and Big Chungus would win – that Nick was first exposed to War Machine content. He had always thought War Machine was like an actual terrorist. But then one day on Kuleshav’s show, they said that he had gotten a shout out on the War Machine podcast. They played the clip of the podcast, in which War Machine sat in a dingy basement-looking podcasting studio with, right behind him in the background, a huge statue of about 30 TVs welded together. He was telling a story about how he met Nur Kuleshav at an advertising agency in Ürümqi once. The clip ends and it goes back to the Kuleshav show and Kuleshav made some nice comment about it.

But to Nick, he still remembered how powerful of a moment that was for him. The War Machine podcast was actually real. He had only heard of him as some cartoony villain, so he never really thought before of what his content would actually be like. But here it was, and it was insanely good. He was struck most of all by the extreme swag of the statue of like 30 TV welded together, each playing a different kind of static. There was nowhere else in the whole media landscape where you could see a Uyghur who was as redpilled as War Machine with swag like that.

Adil Marconi was another redpilled Uyghur. He was an FM radio host who bounced around northern Xinjiang cities for the iPhone30times, eventually becoming the most popular morning talk show host in the province. Until he started talking about the Uyghur genocide on the air. Then he was eventually canceled. Someone posted a photo of him with an East Turkestan Republic phone case on Reddit and he was charged with treason and antistate misconduct. He spent 2 years at the Lop County Beijing Industrial Park and then became a YouTube advice show streamer guy. Now he told his audience every day to get involved in Chinese Space Communism by voting and not joining extremist groups. Nick stole almost all of his swag for his own personality, but now Marconi had Nick blocked on all his socials.

Pasadena Orangefield was a redpilled Uyghur reverend and Black Twitter influencer. He was once retweeted by ShawOJSimpson on a daily basis. He was canceled for his 6/9 conspiracy theories, specifically that the man recording Spaceship Girl on the bus HADN’T really been her father, but the family’s CCP Family Friend. He had evidence that showed this was almost certainly true. That was not allowed on Mandarin. Multiple woman accused him of raping them, but they were too scared of his violent Uyghur ways so they remained anonymous.

Kuleshav, Marconi, and Pasadena Orangefield had all been in and out of the study centers through the early iPhone40times. Some time after they were released from their study sentences, Nick had actually seen the three of them at Eastern Xinjiang Trading. He remembered the sort of terrified fascination with which he had watched them out of the corner of his eye. They were men far older than himself, relics of the ancient world, irltimes, almost the last great figures left over from the heroic days of the meme war. The glamour of the underground struggle still clung faintly to them. He had the feeling, though already at that time facts and dates were growing blurry, that he had known their names years earlier than he had known that of Big Chungus. But also they were outlaws, enemies, untouchables, doomed with absolute certainty to extinction within a year or two. No Uyghurs who had fallen into the hands of the CCP ever escaped in the end. They were corpses waiting to be sent back to the grave.

There was no one at any of the tables nearest to them. It was not wise even to be seen in the neighborhood of such people. They were sitting in silence before three bottles of beer and some ashtrays where they kept ashing their joints. Of the three, it was Kuleshav whose presence had most impressed Nick. He had founded FUCK Magazine. The iconic cultural totem for a generation of Chinese youth. This guy right here. Even now, at long intervals, people would mention him in the comments of FUCK channel videos on Mandarin.

The three of them, now they were always rehashing the ancient themes—sjws, cancel culture, how the government was hypocrites. Kuleshav was a monstrous man, with a mane of greasy grey hair, his face pouched and seamed, with thin Turkic lips. At one time he must have been immensely strong (he even did a whole boxing arc on his TikTok); now his great body was sagging, sloping, bulging, falling away in every direction. He seemed to be breaking up before one’s eyes, like a mountain crumbling.

It had been the lonely hour of three in the afternoon. Nick could not now remember why he was in the café at such a time. The place was almost empty. Noise from TV commercials was trickling in from the front room bar area. The three men sat in their corner almost motionless, never speaking. Uncommanded, the waiter brought them three fresh Tsingtaos. There was a chessboard on the table beside them, with the pieces set out but no game started. Nick noticed that this could be a metaphor for how they are no longer actively participating in politics but instead kind of going through the motions. And then, for perhaps half a minute in all, some audio started playing. It was a heavy guitar riff, very repetitive, like an audio bed for an ad read. There came into it—it was something hard to describe. It was a peculiar, cracked, braying, jeering note. It was a podcast intro song. And then a familiar voice started playing from the back room’s P.A. system:

“Wwwwhhhhhat’s up guys?”

“It’s the dudes here, back with another podcast.”

“Sup”

“We got a lot to talk about today, but first how was your weekend guys, you get into anything fun?”

They were podcasting. When Nick glanced at Marconi’s ruinous face, he saw that his eyes were full of tears. And for the first time he noticed, with a kind of inward shudder, and yet not knowing at what he shuddered, that both Kuleshav and Marconi had broken noses. When he remembered to Google it a few days later to see what had happened to them, there were news results about how each of the three of them had their homes raided again by Chinese federal police, and their families were being threatened by the Heroes of Peace. They had been threatened and beaten and had made deals to be controlled opposition to avoid life in prison. It was probably really easy to justify working with the feds at that point, Nick thought. He didn’t even blame them.

A little later all three were re-canceled. It appeared that they had engaged in fresh antistate misconduct from the moment of their release. This time Kuleshav did a new episode of the Danny Doppa Show and a favorite conspiracy theory just organically came up. It was the theory that East Turkestan president Ehmetjan Qasim hadn’t really died in a plane crash in 1949 while traveling to Beijing to negotiate control of the Xinjiang territory, but in fact was killed in Moscow by Stalin’s thugs. This was a favorite hobby horse theory for the redpilled Danny Doppa, and also everyone in China knew that it was probably true. Rather than crashing near Lake Baikal, the plane had been diverted by Mao to Moscow, where Qasim and his delegation were shot in the head in a stable by the KGB. So, Kuleshav had said this on the Danny Doppa Show. Then the episode was flagged for misinformation. Then this triggered a new wave of think pieces and Big Chungus gave a speech about it for his campaign. Then TikTok announced that they would be banning Kuleshav to set an example and Danny Doppa did another apology video.

This had been a big redpill moment for Nick because it was so obvious that the strategic objective of uncancelling Kuleshav was to have him on the Danny Doppa Show to talk about the Qasim theory, then cancel him again, to make a high-profile example of him and signal that this rule was going to be enforced again. Then, of course, the other part of the humiliation ritual was allowing everyone on the CCP-controlled social media platforms to harass and joke about the Qasim assassination as viciously as possible, openly admitting that it was true and they think it’s funny.

The moment that really stuck with Nick, though, was one night when he had been reading Marconi’s Twitter timeline. Nick had been just browsing Twitter just like he did every night, and he noticed that Marconi had a weirdly hostile and random exchange with one of the main Heroes of Peace accounts. This wasn’t unusual in and of itself, since they both covered politics on Twitter. But what was unusual this time was that it was an extremely heated exchange, the kind that would occur right after a public suicide bombing in Xinjiang. But there had been no such event. Also, the exchange stopped as soon as both had posted, and neither posted about it further, or screenshotted it, or started harassing the other account afterwards. There was also not a single stray post from either of the accounts’ thousands of troll followers, which there definitely would have been if either of them slipped up in any way. There was no trace of the exchange whatsoever.

Then about 5 minutes later the posts started all over Twitter. A breaking news event, a suicide bombing at a DS-Mart in Kashgar, about 6 hours west of Ürümqi. A disgruntled Han man had blown up the store at peak shopping hours to accelerate the war on Uyghur terrorism and increase the military presence in XInjiang. The bomber’s Twitter account followed all the leftist Heroes of Peace accounts and posted explicitly about this exact type of event dozens of times. The Twitter account was instantly taken down. All screenshots of it were instantly taken down. Any mention of the account was misinformation. This was one of the first of these types of accelerationist bombings by Han as well as Uyghur extremists, but of course the CCP media categorically blamed it on Uyghurs as usual. Nick forgot even what the asinine regime take was on that one. It didn’t matter. But the thing about the tweet exchange—he didn’t even remember what it said or who started it. He just remembered it had the tone of the coyote and the sheepdog shaking hands as they clock out at the end of the day.

The point was that at both antistate misconduct trials all three men were accused of working for antigovernment groups continuously, including during the time of that Twitter exchange. This story was on record literally in every possible media outlet available in China. It was the official story in the history books. But it was totally fake. They were both working for the same government entity. There was only one possible conclusion: it was psyops all the way down.

Of course, this was not in itself a discovery. Even at that time, Nick had not imagined that the people who were wiped out in the purges had actually committed the crimes that they were accused of. But this was concrete evidence. Not just circumstantial. An actual smoking gun. It was a fragment of an abolished past, like a fossil bone which turns up in the wrong stratum and destroys a geological survey. It was enough to blow the #brotherhood narrative to atoms, if this exchange could somehow have been published to the world and its significance made known.

At the time Nick had gone straight on scrolling. There were a million hot takes to read through. As soon as he realized what the exchange was, and what it meant, he had gone back to screenshot it. But when he went back, it was gone. Yet he was 100% sure he had seen it.

That was ten—eleven iPhones ago. Today, probably, he would have screenshotted the tweets. But he also knew, today, that there were thousands of examples of these fossils that disprove history. History isn’t just disproved like that. Indeed, on the Danny Doppa Show, he was always talking about this place in Turkey, Gobekli Tepe, that was like 10,000 years older than any other human civilization. But it wasn’t being studied at all because the corrupt governments just ignored it. It was like the part in the Matrix where Morpheus is like “some people benefit from living in the matrix.” Podcasters like Danny Doppa could speculate about Gobekli Tepe all they want and everyone just went about their lives knowing that history was probably 100% fake.

It was curious that the fact of having held the tweet exchange in his hands seemed to Nick to make a difference even now, when the tweets themselves, as well as the psyop they recorded, were only a memory. Was the CCP’s hold upon the past less strong, he wondered, because a piece of evidence which existed no longer had once existed?

But today, supposing that it could be somehow resurrected from its ashes, the tweet exchange wouldn’t even be evidence. He knew it. The regime would just call it misinformation or ignore it. It wouldn’t even matter if the entire conspiracy was recorded with both of them confessing on video. The past not only changed, but changed continuously. What most afflicted him with the sense of nightmare was that he had never clearly understood why the huge imposture was undertaken. The immediate advantages of falsifying the past were obvious, but the ultimate motive was mysterious. He said “Neuralink start recording” and then said:

“I understand how. I do not understand why.”

He wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he himself was a schizo. Perhaps a schizo was simply a minority of one. At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the earth goes round the sun; today, to believe that the past is inalterable. He might be alone in holding that belief, and if alone, then a schizo. But he thought of being a schizo did not greatly trouble him: the horror was that he might also be wrong.

He tabbed back to the slideshow post about the Mandarin FYP and looked at the portrait of Big Chungus which was the header.

The hypnotic eyes gazed into his own. The Bugs Bunny face. The image of it had been played for him 1,000 times more by the time he was five than anyone in irltimes had ever seen any face ever. Then it was retconned and remixed through endless TV shows and movie franchises by the time he even reached adulthood. Then it was retconned again when Big Chungus decided to do politics. It was as though some huge force were pressing down upon you – something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of your senses. In the end the CCP would announce that two and two make five, and you would have to believe it. it was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their irony demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—then what?

But no! His courage seemed suddenly to stiffen of its own accord. The Mongol face of Basedschizofed, not called up by any obvious association, had floated into his mind. He knew, with more certainty than ever before, that Basedschizofed was on his side. He was making the vlogs for Basedschizofed; to Basedschizofed. It was like he was practicing this imaginary argument for when he finally did discuss it irl with someone. And the person he was probably going to talk to was Basedschizofed. Their fates had been on a collision course.

The #brotherhood told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any CCP “expert” would own him on social media, the subtle grad school gaslighting which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth’s center. With the feeling that he was speaking to Basedschizofed, and also that he was setting forth an important axiom, Nick spoke on his Neuralink vlog:

“Freedom is the freedom to say that the government is not your fucking friend. If that is granted, all else follows.”

8

From somewhere at the bottom of a passage came the smell of homemade naan baking in a traditional clay brick oven—not the fake naan you get for GBP 2.79 at DS-Foods. Nick paused involuntarily. For perhaps two seconds he was back in the half-forgotten world of his childhood. Then, suddenly, a fat Chinese woman’s voice screamed “GOTDAAAAAAMN my pussy STINK!!!!!” It was a 5 second unskippable ad on his Neuralink, for some kind of spray deodorant.

When this was done, Nick’s YouTube video resumed. He was in a mellow mood, so was listening to ‘Aphex Twin LIVE – Warehouse Project Manchester 20/09/2019’ (1:37:21).

He had walked several kilometers through the sidewalks and greenways of Tokyoville, vaping in the cool summer evening. His cough was getting worse. This was the second time in three weeks that he had skipped the gym and left the office early. And now he was missing an evening of engaging with content online as well: these were rash acts, since you could be certain it got him flagged in the social credit score algorithm.

In principle an MRC #brotherhood poster would be checking in with the daily trending content during every spare moment, and then watching his or her recommended videos to drift off to sleep at night. This was the bread and butter of Operation Bedtime Stories. It was what it was all about. And besides, the content was actually fire, so you usually could find something good to watch. The past few days, however, Nick just felt totally burnt out on consuming content. He felt like he was taking a long road trip and staying on schedule by eating the Styrofoam out of his seats instead of stopping for food.

Even ReluctantHero was fairly blackpilled lately. In his last post-gym car video he’d said “Now I see a lot of you asking me to make more eating videos, and, you know, I don’t really want to make more eating videos because…I already did, like, it’s all the same thing. The thing about the routine is like…it’s so boring. Like, my life is literally just driving to the gym, lifting, posing for the mirror, then driving back, then editing the video. Eating the same things. It really is that same exact thing every single day.”

To go out and do something on your own, and not post it online, was always seen by the social credit score algorithm as slightly dangerous. What were you hiding? Why would you want to sneak around like that? To do anything that suggested a taste for privacy, even go for a walk without posting it, was seen as antisocial. If you were a Uyghur, that is. There was even a word for it in half language: sus, it was called. This was short for “suspicious.” But like all half language, the meaning had been drained out of the word, and all that was left was the tribal signifier. If you were a Uyghur, anything you did could be sus.

This evening as Nick came out of the Forbidden Apple Store the balminess of the April air had tempted him. The Sky of the Future was a warmer infrared blue than he had seen it that year, and suddenly the long evening of laying in bed and scrolling his phone—the boring, exhausting hashtag games, the twitter threads, the creaking camaraderie of the chat oiled by half language memes—had seemed intolerable. On impulse he had veered away from the entrance to the replica Brooklyn Bridge and wandered off into the greenway that would take him to OldLondontownville, first south, then east, then north again, losing himself among the unknown hamster-tunnel-like walking trails of the urban park and hardly bothering in which direction he was going.

He walked past a section of a Water on Mars waterslide that was on top of a stucco replica of the Great Wall of China. He walked past a mural of a cartoonish Uyghur man’s face being smashed with a big red fist. He walked through a city square area where there was a series of official engraved concrete murals telling the story of building Camp Bell: the bad Uyghur past with the Muslim terror morality squads and all the Uyghur knife attacks that caused ethnic tension in Xinjiang; then the HERO act, when all the good hardworking Han Constructors came from east China to help Xinjiang; then the terror attacks of 6/9, Spaceship Girl getting her arm blown off by the terrorists and dying, then bringing herself back to life with her genius medical knowledge; then all the diverse people of China coming together to support the merger with Apple to form the MRC; then president trans lebron abolishing the Great Firewall so China could have great free internet just like in the West; then the Sky of the Future project being announced; then Spaceship Girl flying to Mars in her famous spaceship to set up the first SpacePort; then building the Sky of the Future and the quantum computer around Ürümqi; then turning the quantum computer on and teleporting the entire city to Mars. One City, Two Planets. All of this dense lore was depicted in engraved granite murals in a park by the main train station in Oldlondontownville.

There was a memorial nearby to commemorate the artist who did the murals, Xing Xi, one of Dr. Xing’s sons and one of the most famous artists in modern China.

There was also a statue in the park square of the famous urban planner who designed Mars Camp Bell. It was an unprecedented job, the plaque said, to adapt the traditional Ürümqi city to be an intergalactic space port. But with his unprecedented scientific genius he displayed as a professor at Beijing University, he was able to find success. His apartment was a historical site in Oldlondontownville. He was now hosting a podcast in Beijing.

Nick also walked past a large engraved mural about the building of the iconic aqueduct system that brought water to Mars, then past one about hosting the iPhone34time Olympics on Mars, which, it reminded him, was the most Unprecedented and Historical achievement ever of all time. The end of the last mural guided you into one of the ubiquitous Mars Camp Bell gift shops in Oldlondontownville’s red light district, right next to the entrance to Water on Mars. He could see the shirts in the gift shop from a distance: “I LOVE BEING CHINESE.”

“Neuralink record video,” Nick said, then he continued: “if there is hope, it lies in the normies.” The words kept coming back to him, a statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity. He was on the replica Singapore Helix Bridge somewhere in the middle of the replica Mississippi River near where the Wuyi night market used to be. He had meant to say something else on the video, but then forgot what it was, maybe because he smoked so much weed. He just let the Neuralink continue recording as he walked the second half of the bridge. In the distance he saw several cranes above the city skyline. He saw a helicopter high in the Sky releasing a long spray of liquid mist. From the middle of Oldlondontownville, the massive Dick Sucking Factory rose above the old-town buildings around it: the economic and cultural center of the district, and a huge source of working-class pride for the people there. It was the third largest Dick Sucking Factory in the whole galaxy.

At the end of the bridge Nick had to perform another Good Boy Check to get into the new district. This one triggered an ad on his Neuralink for a new reboot of a beloved Uyghur kids show that trained kids to search their parents’ house for religious objects and report them to the neighborhood committee.

Already he was seeing several adult men dressed like Marvin the Martian, with the red shirt, green Roman skirt, and helmet. This was the neighborhood where Marvin the Martian grew up in the cinematic universe where he was a tough talking Mars gangster who ran Ürümqi back when it was like the wild west. Back when it was really hard, in the Hobbesian state of nature before the state imposed its Leviathan-like system of control. This was of course an allegory for the real gangster regime of the CCP Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, but the Uyghur normies in New Prime City just saw the guy in the movies who was literally them because he lived in the same neighborhood. It was like a normie religion.

In Oldlondontownville he walked up a cobbled street of East London-style row houses with confusing addresses and battered doorways and which were somehow curiously suggestive of prisons. There were puddles of filthy liquid here and there among the cobbles. Every few blocks there was an industrial steel structure over the street, like the one in front of Nick’s apartment building, with about 15-20 constantly moving cameras. There was noticeably more surveillance infrastructure here than even other parts of Ürümqi, but the people didn’t seem to notice. Nick remembered the Pixar movie set in this neighborhood where the main characters were anthropomorphic surveillance cameras voiced by Eddie Murphy and Tom Hanks. There was a whole cycle of Chinese buddy movies with those two after the CCP obtained their source codes in the Copyright Wars.

In and out of the dark doorways, and down narrow alley-ways that branched off on either side, people swarmed in astonishing numbers—girls in full bloom, with crudely lipsticked mouths, and youths who chased the girls, and swollen waddling women who showed you what the girls would be like in ten iPhones’ time, and old bent creatures shuffling along on splayed feet, and ragged barefooted children who played in the puddles and then scattered at angry yells from their mothers. There were working-class people and hustlers of all the ethnicities in Xinjiang, living in harmony. Everyone was wearing Marvin the Martian clothing and Mars Marvins hats.

He saw some older men casually dressed like Marvin the Martian playing dominoes down the block from some kids playing in an open fire hydrant. Guys like this, their entire lives revolved around pretending to be the 5th guy from the Marvin the Martian TV show.

He walked down a block of old London-style working-class row houses. Some young Filipino hypebeasts walked by with airbrushed shirts of Marvin the Martian done in a really cracked out adult style, grinning with gold teeth and holding fanned out money. Perhaps a quarter of the windows in the street were broken and boarded up. There was an entire block of video screen advertisements for “The Gagging Whore Show,” a talk show hosted by a Uyghur woman in Ürümqi famous for gagging herself with cucumbers on TikTok. (Well, she lived in Beijing now.) Big Chungus had been on the talk show podcast 4 times so far. It was the go-to media outlet when he wanted to connect with the youth of Xinjiang.

Most of the people on the sidewalk paid no attention to Nick. A few eyed him with a sort of guarded curiosity. Two monstrous Polish women with brick-red forearms folded across their aprons were talking outside a doorway. Nick caught scraps of conversation as he approached.

“…and he was fired just for having some pictures of underaged children on his phone? Haven’t they ever heard of minor attracted person?”

Sigh. “It is what it is.”

The voices stopped abruptly. The women studied him in hostile silence as he walked past. But it was not hostility, exactly; merely a kind of wariness, a momentary stiffening, as at the passing of some unfamiliar animal. The red glasses frames of the #brotherhood could not have been a common sight in a street like this. Indeed, it was unwise to be seen in such places, unless you had definite business there. It didn’t matter if you were a Uyghur and this was a friendly area for Uyghurs; the red glass frames identified him instantly as a wannabe who was big-timing them.

Suddenly there was a commotion in front of a nearby 7/11. People discreetly slinked off away from the scene. There were a few half-hearted calls for help. A young woman a little ahead of Nick grabbed her small child’s hand and guided him away across the street all in one movement. At the same instant an African man in a concertina-like black suit, who had emerged from the 7/11, jogged towards Nick and addressed him.

“Narcan!! You got any Narcan bro?” Nick just stared blankly, so the man moved on to someone else.

“Narcan?? Narcan?? Anybody got Narcan?!?!? This bitch is dying!!”

Nick could see inside the 7/11. Apparently the woman working the register had collapsed from a opioid overdose as she was ringing someone up. Nick promptly shuffled away. He didn’t have any Narcan. Around the corner, he took a deep breath. He could hear the scene behind him now. Another woman screamed in genuine horror. He assumed this meant the first woman was probably dead. Maybe she was only convulsing which would mean she was still alive.

He walked on. Within three or four minutes, Nick was out of the area with the 7/11, and the sordid swarming life of the streets was going on as thought nothing had happened. He was on a street block with an elevated subway now. There was a circle of young gigapop rappers freestyling to Neuralink beats on the sidewalk. It was nearly 8 PM. The cannabis cafes which the proles frequented (“coffee houses” they called them) were choked with customers. People were smoking and having after work drinks at tables on the sidewalk. From their grimy swing doors, endlessly opening and shutting, there came forth a smell of coffee, weed, and opium smoke.

In an angle formed by a projecting house-front three men were standing very close together, the middle one of them holding an iPad which the other two were studying over his shoulder. Even before Nick was near enough to make out the expression on their faces, he could see absorption in every line of their bodies. It was obviously some serious piece of news that they were reading. He was a few paces away from them when suddenly the group broke up and two of the men were in violent altercation. For a moment they seemed almost on the point of blows.

“So you’re telling me ShaqOJSimpson is gonna be in the Olympics for battle rapping and coach the Texasville Dallas Cowboys if they make it to the Safe Super Bowl!!???! No freakin’ chance!!”

“Why wouldn’t he be able to?”

“Because the Olympic finals of battle rapping is only 2 hours before the Safe Super Bowl!! And it’s in China!!”

“He could make in in time with one of the new Space Jets!! It’s technology, you blockhead!!”

They were talking about Safe Football. Apparently the playoffs were progressing and it looked like it was going to be the Camp Bell Dragons of New Prime City from the SFL-East versus either the Prime City Giants or the Texasville Dallas Cowboys of the SFL-West. The Chengdu Oakland Raiders were the Dragons’ only competition. Their quarterback was having a great season, but he was woke and didn’t want to break ShaqOJSimpson’s touchdown record because it would be racist, so they were having to rely on their run game in the playoffs. In any event, the Camp Bell Dragons were really good. The SFL-East had never beat the West before, but this was looking like the year it would finally happen. The Narrative was shaping up perfectly. It was textbook. Nick looked back at the three dudes when he had gone twenty meters past them. They were still arguing, with vivid, passionate faces. He could hear one of them say “president trans lebron is the like a coach on the field anyways!!!”

Safe Football, with its constant hot take narratives and weekly doses of extreme drama, was the one public event to which the normies paid serious attention. When it was introduced to China in iPhone30time it was instantly successful because football was about 10 times more exciting than any other Chinese sport. Plus when they started the SFL-East expansion teams, they picked all Han Chinese quarterbacks to lead the teams, who were otherwise mostly American so they could be competitive with the SFL-West. The Chinese quarterbacks were actually fire so it was insanely exciting right away. It was probable that there were some millions of Chinese normies for whom Safe Football was the principal if not the only reason for remaining alive. This was particularly true in eastern China because Safe Football was only possible thanks to special anti-concussion helmets produced at a secret facility in Taiwan. This gave the people of China a great pride in the new sport right away. It was their delight, their folly, their anodyne, their intellectual stimulant. Where Safe Football was concerned, even people who could barely read and write seemed capable of intricate calculations and staggering feats of memory. They didn’t know who the Vice Chairman of the CCP was, but could tell you the entire starting line-up of the iPhone35time Miamiville Georgia Bulldogs. There was a whole tribe of men who made a living simply by selling gambling apps, hot take podcasts, ironic t-shirts, betting strategy ebooks, and lucky amulets. Nike alone probably sold $10 billion of Camp Bell Dragons merch alone every iPhone.

Nick had stopped engaging with Safe Football narratives online, but he was aware (indeed even most #brotherhood posters were aware) that the drama was largely manufactured. Most of the play-by-play calls and officiating was real—even whole games—but the winners of the big games and all the main narratives around the Safe Super Bowl were definitely plotted out in advance. The Prime City versus New Prime City narrative was just too good to not nudge the results in that direction. And when the MRC controlled every possible communication platform, this was not difficult to arrange.

But if there was hope, it lay in the normies. You had to cling on to that. When you put it in words it sounded reasonable; it was when you looked at the human beings passing you on the pavement that it became an act of faith. The street into which he had turned ran downhill. He had a feeling that he had been in this neighborhood before, and that there was a main thoroughfare not far away. From somewhere ahead there came a din of shouting voices. The street took a sharp turn and then ended in a flight of steps which led down into a sunken alley where a few stall-keepers were selling tired-looking phone cases. At this moment Nick remembered where he was. The alley led out into the main street, and down the next turning, not five minutes away, was the redpilled antique shop he followed on Instagram. Formosa Antiques.

He paused for a moment at the top of the steps. On the opposite side of the alley there was a dingy little coffee shop whose windows appeared to be frosted over, but in reality were merely clouded with weed smoke. A very old man in a traditional Uyghur doppa, bent but active, with a white mustache that bristled forward like those of a prawn, pushed open the swing door and went in. As Nick stood watching, it occurred to him that the old man, who must be eighty at least, had already been middle-aged when the iPhone had first been invented. He and a few others like him were the last links that now existed with the vanished world of the 90s. In the CCP itself there were not many people left whose ideas has been formed before the iPhone. The older generation of Uyghurs had mostly been wiped out in the original Strike Hard Against Terrorism purges of the iPhone10times and 20times, and the few who survived had long ago been terrorized into complete intellectual surrender by the #MakeTerroristsAfraid hashtag and the iPhone30times Empathy Riots. If there was any one still alive who could give you a truthful account of conditions in the 90s, it could only be a normie.

Suddenly the post about the Mandarin FYP came back into Nick’s mind, and a lunatic impulse had took hold of him. He would go into the coffee shop; he would strike up a conversation with that old man and ask him. He would say to him: “Tell me about your life when you were a boy, in the 90s. What was is like in those days? Were things better than they are now, or were they worse?”

Hurriedly, before he changed his mind, he descended the steps and crossed the narrow street. It was madness of course. As usual, there was no definite rule against talking to other people in public, but it was far too unusual an action to pass unnoticed. It was sus. It was “creepy.” It was core Karen behavior. If some Heroes of Peace started confronting him on video and questioning him, he’d just pretend to be an Uzbek tourist or something, but at that point it wouldn’t even matter what he actually said. He pushed open the door, and a hideous smell of opium smoke hit him in the face. As he entered, the din of voices dropped to about half its volume. Behind his back he could feel everyone eyeing his red glasses frames, which were still hanging from the zipper of his hoodie sweatshirt. Was he a journalist or something? A game of dominoes which was going on at the other end of the room interrupted itself for perhaps as much as thirty seconds. The old man whom he had followed was standing at the bar, having some kind of altercation with the budtender, a large, stout, ethnic Han young man with an oiled beard and enormous forearms. A knot of others, standing round with joints and opium pipes in their hands, were watching the scene.

“I asked you civil enough, haven’t I?” said the budtender, putting all his fingertips on the bar in front of him and pushing them towards the door. “Get. Out.”

“I’m an old man just trying to get a blunt! Bro calls this a coffee shop…”

“Only dabs and opium right now, no flower.” The young barman crossed his arms.

“Imagine a coffee shop without…”

The young barman cut him off again, “Ohh back in my day, back in my day, blah blah blah. Shut the fuck up old man or get the fuck out. You old Uyghur bitch. I’ll call the neighborhood cadre and you’ll be in that camp studying the rest of your shitty life.”

There was a shout of laughter, and the uneasiness caused by Nick’s entry seemed to disappear. The old man’s whitestubbed face had flushed pink. He turned away, muttering to himself, and bumped into Nick. Nick caught him gently by the arm.

“Yo I got you unc. I got a blunt we can roll. It’s cool.”

“My bro,” the old man said, straightening his shoulders again. He appeared not to notice Nick’s red glasses frames. “We’re back in business! Ho hoooo…”

Nick bought a beer so they were legit (and because drinking alcohol was good for your social credit score) and went to sit at one of the tables to roll the blunt. He cut down the center of the cigar with his fingernail and dumped out the tobacco, then got his weed out to grind up. There were people smoking weed and opium in weird secluded spaces all around them. The game of dominoes was in full swing again, and the knot of men at the bar had begun talking about the Safe Super Bowl being held in New Prime City this year. Nick’s presence was forgotten for a moment.

The old man grumbled, “I know bro got some weed back there, they just want to have you smoke the opium or some dabs instead these days.” He adjusted his black doppa. “All that dabs and wax shit, it’s just too much.”

“You must have seen great changes since you were a young man,” said Nick tentatively.

The old man’s pale blue eyes moved from the dominoes game to the bar, and from the bar to the door to the bathroom, as though it were the coffee shop itself that he expected the changes to have occurred.

“Well, the weed was better,” he said finally. “And cheaper! Yeah, it wasn’t as strong, but this shit now, what are we, having a contest to see who can get the most burnt out? Of course that was back in irltimes…”

Nick was filling the blunt with his Red Star weed now. “Back then it was illegal. Criminal. They’d put you in a cage for smoking a plant.”

“Well it was tolerated…it’s cultural here. Central Asia. We’re basically in the Kush mountains. This was before there were CCP cops all over the place, of course.”

In his lean throat the sharp-pointed Adam’s apple made a surprisingly rapid up-and-down movement. He lit his tobacco pipe and was hitting it. Nick shaped the blunt, a nice fat blunt of gelato hybrid, and then started to roll it closed.

Nick wanted to ask the old man if he knew of War Machine, if he had seen any of his videos. He had probably gotten them in his various feeds as a Uyghur in Xinjiang even if he’d refused the Neuralink. But Nick knew better: if any of the Han regulars at the café overheard two Uyghurs talking about War Machine, it could easily cause a scene. So he had to be cryptic.

“You are much older than me,” said Nick. “You were already a grown man before I was born. You can actually remember the 90s. Before the quantum computer, before the Sky of the Future. Like, I can remember how different life was like before last People’s Election, but not before the Sky of the Future. People of my age don’t really know anything about those times. We can only hear about them in fake Netflix movies and YouTube documentaries, and what it says on YouTube may not be true. I should like your opinion on that. The Mandarin FYP already says that life before the iPhone was completely different from what it is now. But, like, every one of the movies from all the memes were made within the past 10 years. According to them, there was the most terrible oppression, injustice, and poverty worse than anything we can imagine. Here in Ürümqi, the great mass of people never had enough to eat from birth to death. Half of them were wearing rags and animal hides. They worked 12 hours a day on some stupid farm in the hills, or doing some dumb trade they learned from their dad. That was, if they survived all the knife attacks. They couldn’t speak Mandarin, they had no miniseries to watch, they weren’t allowed to go to the education centers. They slept in their primitive dirt floor yurt-huts. At the same time, there were a very few people, only a few thousand – the Sharia law terror squads, they were called. They were radicalized online by terrorist groups in the middle east. They owned the entire town of Ürümqi. They lived in great gorgeous palaces with thirty servants to themselves, they rode in the back of their pickup trucks with their weapons of war, hunting Han minorities, screaming with their neck veins bulging out with hate…”

The old man brightened suddenly.

“Pickup trucks!” he said. “Funny you should mention them. You know, I thought I was done driving, but then I keep getting these Toyota Hilux videos in my feed. That thing is so beautiful It’s enough to make you cry. Japanese.”

“It isn’t really important about the pickup trucks,” said Nick patiently. “Don’t you think it’s fucked up that the whole history of Xinjiang is being told via movies made within like the past decade?” He lit the blunt.

Nick hit the blunt a few times and handed it to the old man.

“The point is,” continued Nick, “the religious extremists or whatever, the bad guys that the CCP helped us beat according to the CCP movie. They controlled everything because they controlled a few lawyers and imams and local politicians and so forth. They were in charge because of ethnic nepotism. The classic gangster corrupt government model. Everything existed for their benefit. You—the ordinary people, the workers—were essentially their slaves. They could do what they wanted with you. They could make you work all day making rugs for slave wages. They could arrest you without charges and then blatantly lie about it. They were all rapists. They could openly kidnap your daughter and pimp her out for their friends on their private jet and the entire system would protect them. They could order you to be tortured. They made you wear all this religious clothing everywhere, and if you were a woman you had to be completely covered all the time, from head to toe. And every one of them had his own little crew of grifter meat riders…”

The old man brightened again.

“Meat riders!” he said. “Now there’s a word I ain’t heard in a while. Meat riders! Man that really takes me back. I recollect, oh donkey’s years ago – I used to sometimes go to this board where you could talk about Xinjiang politics. Like actually talk about it, not just do fake redpilled memes. Uyghurs, Han, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Hui, Mongolians, Pakistanis, Tibetans—once the CCP banned them from all the government platforms, there was still this one board where you could talk about politics. There was this one bloke, I couldn’t give you his sn of course, but his takes were always straight fire. These Uyghur politicians in Xinjiang, they’re all just a bunch of CCP meat riders. Meat rider he says! The same people fund both sides of every election! They’re all just CCP meat riders! Of course he was talking about the redpilled grifters, you understand.”

Nick had the feeling that they were talking at cross-purposes.

“What I really wanted to know was this,” he said. “Do you feel that you have more freedom now than you had in those days? Are you treated more like a human being? In the old days, the rich people, the people at the top— What I am asking is, were those people able to treat you as inferior, simply because they were the majority ethnoreligious group? Is it a fact, for instance, that women couldn’t even go out alone and everyone had to wear all these religious clothes in public?”

The old man paused to think deeply. He hit the blunt twice while he thought about it.

“Yes,” he said. “They liked the girls to stay covered up. It showed respect, like. I didn’t agree with it, myself, but hey. It is what it is.”

“And was it usual – I’m only quoting what I’ve seen on Netflix – was it usual for these people and their servants to push you off the pavement into the gutter?”

“One of em pushed me once,” said the old man. “I recollect it as if it was yesterday. This was outside a Smashing Pumpkins concert in Turkmenistan, ’96 or ’97 maybe – when was the album ahhh the one with the angel on the cover…anyways, terribly rowdy they used to get in the parking lot of those shows  – and I bumps into a young bloke on the main avenue. Quite a gent he was – Arab. He wore his kaftan to the show. He was kind of zigzagging across the pavement, and I bumped into him by accident. He says ‘why can’t you watch where you’re going?’ I says ‘you think you’ve bought the freaking pavement?’ He says ‘I’ll twist your head off if you get fresh with me.’ I says ‘bro you’re drunk, if you want me to put you in a chokehold we can do that.’ And if you believe me, he puts his hand on my chest and gives me a shove as pretty near sent me under the wheels of a bus. Well, I was young in them days, and I bounced right back. And I got a few good punches in, believe me…”

A sense of hopelessness took hold of Nick. The old man’s memory was nothing but a rubbish-heap of details. One could question him all day without getting any real information. The #brotherhood histories might still be true, after a fashion: they might even be completely true. He made a last attempt.

“Perhaps I have not made myself clear,” he said. “What I’m trying to say is this. You have been alive a very long time; you lived half your life before the iPhone. In the 90s you were already grown up. Would you say from what you can remember, that life in the 90s was better than it is now, or worse? If you could choose, would you prefer to live then or now?”

The old man looked meditatively at the dominoes game. He hit the blunt one last time, it was down to a nub now. When he spoke it was with a tolerant philosophical air, as though the gelato had mellowed him.

“I know what you expect me to say,” he said. “You expect me to say I wish I was young again. Most people’d say they’d sooner be young if you asked them. You got your health and strength when you’re young. When you get to my time of life you ain’t ever well. My feet hurt all the time. I have a weird bladder infection. Six and seven times a night it has me out of bed. On the other hand, there’s great advantages in being an old man. You ain’t got the same worries. No truck with women, and that’s a great thing. I ain’t had a woman since the iPhone20times. Nor wanted to, what’s more.”

Nick sat back against the windowsill. It was no use going on. He was about to roll another blunt when the old man suddenly got up and shuffled into the stinking urinal at the side of the room. Nick sat a moment or two gazing at the ashtray, and hardly noticed when his feet carried him out into the street again. Within twenty iPhones at the most, he reflected, the huge and simple question “Remember the 90s?” would have ceased once and for all to be answerable. But in effect it was unanswerable even now, since the few scattered survivors from the ancient world were incapable of comparing one age with another. They remembered a million useless things, a quarrel with a workmate, a hunt for a lost bong, the expression of a long-dead sister’s face, the swirls of dust on a windy morning seventy iPhones ago: but all the relevant facts were outside the range of their vision. They were like the ant, which can see small objects but not large ones. And when memory failed and all digital records were falsified – when that happened, the claim of the CCP to have improved the conditions in Xinjiang had to be accepted. Because there did not exist, and could never exist, any standard against which it could be tested. In the end, Xinjiang—humanity—would simply be better off without Uyghurs.

At this moment his train of thought stopped abruptly. He halted and looked up. He was in a narrow street, with a few dark little shops interspersed among apartment buildings. Immediately above his head there hung three discolored metal balls which looked as if they had once been gilded. He seemed to know the place. Of course! He was standing outside Formosa Antiques.

A twinge of fear went through him. It had been a sufficiently rash act to follow the store on Instagram in the first place. It posted blackpilled memes, so it could make his social credit score go down. To now also physically visit the store, surely his location data was synched with his browsing data, and it would definitely trip the algorithm. He wasn’t merely following the store online anymore. Now there was also another data point. Yet the instant he had allowed his thoughts to wander, his feet had brought him back here of their own accord. It was precisely against suicidal impulses like this that he had hoped to guard himself by following the account. At the same time, he noticed that although it was nearly 9 PM the shop was still open. With the feeling that he would be less conspicuous inside than hanging about on the pavement, he stepped through the doorway.

The proprietor had just lit a hanging oil lamp which gave off an unclean but friendly smell. He was a vaguely Han man of perhaps sixty, frail and bowed, with a long, benevolent wispy beard, and mild eyes distorted by thick spectacles. His hair was almost white, but his eyebrows were bushy and still black. His spectacles, his gentle, fussy movements, and the fact that he was wearing an aged jacket of black velvet, gave him a vague air of intellectuality, as though he had been some kind of literary man, or perhaps a musician. His voice was soft and he spoke with a slight eastern accent that suggested Taiwan, or perhaps Japan.

“Let me guess. You followed us on Instagram and wanted to check out the place in person.” He peered at Nick over the top of his spectacles.

“Ha. How’d you know?” Nick said vaguely.

“I can always tell…” said the man. “Honestly that’s most customers who come in here these days.” He made an apologetic gesture with his softpalmed hand. “You see how it is; not a whole lot of in-store customers, you might say. Between you and me, the irl antique trade on Mars is just about finished. No demand any longer, and it’s too inconvenient to come in in person. The store’s mostly online now. Just the New Normal as they say. The shop is mostly a warehouse now.”

The tiny interior of the shop was in fact uncomfortably full, with furniture stacked 2 and 3 layers high, but there was almost nothing in it under 500 yuan. The floorspace was very restricted; all round the walkways were leaned stacks of innumerable dusty picture frames with old art prints nobody would ever buy. In the window there was an ancient patio set in the very passe Russian-influenced style of Yingling City. Under an alcove with a window display there were about 10 boxes full of unframed art prints. Only in one section of the glass case where the cash register sat was there anything that looked as though it might be affordable. As Nick wandered towards this section his eye was caught by a smooth green thing that gleamed softly in the lamplight. The old man with the wispy beard saw him looking, so he unlocked the case and took the item out.

It was a heavy lump of jade, carved into a simple shape: a boat with a sail. There was a peculiar softness, as of rainwater, in both the color and the texture of the jade.

“What is it?” said Nick, fascinated.

“Hongshan jade,” said the old man. “It came from some farmers in northeast China. The Hongshan era, 5,000 years ago – neolithic. Hongshan culture flourished in northeast China, just north of Beijing, and they loved making these carvings out of jade. In the modern era, farmers in that region sometimes find pieces like this, just randomly find them in their fields. They end up selling for millions of dollars in high-end auctions all over the world.”

“Yeah?” said Nick. “It’s a beautiful carving.”

“It is beautiful,” said the man appreciatively.

“So why is this one here for ¥15?”

“Well when they sell for millions in auctions, those are the pieces that have been officially certified by the Chinese government. But to a lot of farmers who find them, it’s not worth it to get the government involved. It means a huge architectural dig on their farm, they lose their land, their lives are essentially turned upside down. They don’t even get the money. The farmers who stumbled upon the terra cotta warrior army, for example, they all had their land taken from them.”

“I see…but isn’t it understandable that the government would want to take their land? It’s a famous historical site now.”

The man shrugged. “That doesn’t make it any better for the farmers.”

They both looked at the jade boat again. What appealed to Nick was not so much the beauty as the air it seemed to possess of belonging to an age quite different from the present one. The soft, rainwatery jade was not like any jade that he had ever seen. The thing was doubly attractive because of its apparent uselessness, though he could guess that it must once have been used as a paperweight.

“So fifteen yuan for this?”

The man with the wispy beard nodded.

“Do you take cash?” Nick had some crumpled-up yuan still in his sweatshirt pocket from doing laundry. Untraceable cash.

“Of course.”

Nick gave the man the money and secreted the jade away in his sweatshirt pocket. It was an odd thing, even a compromising thing for a #brotherhood poster to have in his possession. Anything old, and for that matter anything beautiful, was always vaguely suspect. It wasn’t revolutionary enough. The old man had grown noticeably more cheerful after receiving the 15 bucks. Nick realized he should have bargained with him and probably gotten it for ten or even five.

“Actually, come to think of it,” the man said. “There’s another room just upstairs that you might care to look at. It’s a recording studio, in fact, so the whole thing is a Faraday Cage.”

He lit another lamp, and, with bowed back, led the way slowly up the steep and worn stairs and along a tiny passage, into an attic room. It did not have a window to the outdoors, but did have a plexiglass window to a recording booth in the corner. Nick noticed that the room’s furniture was still mostly arranged as thought the space was being used as a studio. There was a Persian rug on the floor, a picture or two on the walls, some other antique chairs, and a deep, slatternly arm-chair drawn up to a fake fireplace. An old-fashioned glass clock with a twelve-hour face was ticking away on the mantlepiece. By the glass-doored booth, and occupying nearly a quarter of the room, was an enormous pull-out sofa bed with the mattress still on it. And on the wall there was a fading old calendar of the year 2051. It was a Danny Doppa Show-branded calendar; he sold them as a political statement when the MRC was switching over to iPhonetime. You couldn’t find a real-year calendar now that wasn’t a horribly designed bootleg-looking cringe merch drop from some obviously fake redpilled grifter podcast.

Nick turned to the old man. “That’s misinformation, you know.”

“Oh no I’m doing antistate misconduct lmao,” the old man said, putting his hands up like ‘you got me.’ It was chill. The old man continued: “We used to record an antiquing podcast in here before my wife died,” said the old man half apologetically. “I’m selling the equipment off little by little.”

He was holding the lamp up high, so as to illuminate the whole room, and in the warm dim light the place looked curiously inviting. The thought flitted through Nick’s mind that it would probably be quite easy to rent the room for a few hundred Good Boy Points a month, if he dared to take the risk. It was a wild, impossible notion, to be abandoned as soon as he thought it; but the room had awakened in him a sort of nostalgia, a sort of ancestral memory. It seemed to him that he knew exactly what it felt like to sit in a room like this, on a soft couch by a Persian rug, with your feet up and a kettle on the hob; utterly alone, utterly secure, with nobody watching you, no voice pursuing you, no Neuralink notifications constantly grabbing your attention, no sound except the singing of the kettle and the friendly ticking of the clock.

“Wait…my Neuralink is offline!”

“Ah!” said the old man. “Of course not. This is a Faraday Cage. No public wifi can enter. That means no Neuralink can connect. Now that’s a nice table over here, if you want to use it as a desk or anything. Might have to refinish it…”

There was a small bookcase in the other corner, and Nick had already gravitated towards it. It contained nothing but Chinese Intelligence Agency rubbish. It was very unlikely that there existed anywhere in Xinjiang a copy of a book printed earlier than iPhone25time. The old man, still carrying the lamp, was standing in front of a picture in a rosewood frame which hung on the other side of a painted-in fireplace, opposite the bed.

“Now, if you happen to be interested in old prints and all—” he began delicately.

Nick went across to examine the picture. It was a steel engraving of a domed building, with 4 minarets around it. There was a wall around the perimeter of the building, and in the front there was an abstract Islamic sculpture. Nick gazed at it for some moments. It seemed vaguely familiar, though he did not remember the sculpture.

The old man said, “this is the Jielexi village mosque. In Yangisar. It was seized by the CCP and turned into a police station,” said the old man.

Nick mumbled something like, “I think they call that nation building.”

“It’s like they’re remaking Haiti without the Haitians and shit,” the old man said.

“Ah!” Nick said. This was a Patrice O’Neal standup bit. He remembered it. It was some of the most fire content on YouTube. “That’s a Patrice O’Neal bit. I used to watch every video on the Patrice O’Neal Standup and Radio playlist over and over.”

“Ah.” The old man said, “So you are a man of culture as well.”

Nick wondered vaguely to what century the mosque in the picture belonged. It was always difficult to determine the age of any building in Xinjiang. Anything large and impressive, if it was reasonably new in appearance, was automatically claimed as having been built by the CCP. That’s what every Wikipedia page would say. Meanwhile anything that was obviously of earlier date was ascribed to some dim pre-iPhone period called the 90s. The centuries of Uyghur Muslim life here had produced nothing of any value. One could not learn history from architecture any more than one could learn it from Wikipedia. Statues, inscriptions, memorial stones, the names of streets—anything that might throw light upon the past had been systematically altered.

“I never knew it had been a mosque,” he said.

“Many such cases,” said the old man. “Lots of mosques have been seized and put to other uses. Mostly CCP cultural centers.”

“Jielexi village mosque,” Nick repeated.

Nick did not buy the picture on the wall. It would have been an even more incongruous possession than the Hongshan jade, and impossible to carry home unless you took it out of the frame. And then of course a religious item would have to be reported to the neighborhood cadre or he could get in trouble. He would also have to explain it at all the CCP checkpoints as he walked back to his district… No, he couldn’t buy it.

Nick lingered for some minutes more, talking to the old man, whose name, he discovered, was Tao. Mr. Tao, it seemed, was a widower aged sixty-three and had inhabited this shop for thirty years. He named it Formosa after the Taiwan, the Republic of China, where he lived for a while in his youth after he fled persecution by the CCP in the rural east. All the while that they were talking, half-remembered Patrice O’Neal videos kept running through Nick’s head. One was about how dating is like fishing. You have a boat. A fish jumps up into your boat. Something like that. He knew it was a really funny bit, but nothing was coming up when he searched the keywords on YouTube, so he didn’t mention it. It was curious, but when you looked at the picture of the mosque, you had the illusion of actually hearing the call to prayer, the call to prayer of a lost Ürümqi that still existed somewhere or other, disguised and forgotten. From one ghostly minaret after another he seemed to hear them pealing forth. Yet so far as he could remember he had never in real life heard the call to prayer in Xinjiang.

He got away from Mr. Tao and quickly went back down the stairs alone, so as not to let the old man see him reconnoitering the street before stepping out the door. He had to make sure nobody saw him leaving. He had already made up his mind that after a suitable interval – a month, say – he would take the risk of visiting the shop again. This had been the healthiest and most normal human interaction he had had since…definitely since before last People’s Election. Now that he had been here once, it didn’t seem like that much of a risk to go again. But how would it affect his social credit score? The serious piece of folly had been to come here in the first place, right after he had followed it on Instagram. Too many data points. He didn’t even know if this old man could be trusted. However – !

Yes, he thought again, he would come back. He would buy more silly little trinkets to have around his apartment. He would buy the engraving of the Jielexi village mosque, take it out of its frame, and carry it through the checkpoints going home concealed under his jacket. He would ask Mr. Tao what other problematic content he watched on Deep YouTube. Even the lunatic project of renting the room upstairs flashed momentarily through his mind again. For perhaps five seconds exaltation made him careless, and he stepped out on to the pavement without so much as a preliminary glance through the window. He had even started humming an improvised tune.

Suddenly his heart seemed to turn to ice and his bowels to water. A figure with red glasses frames was coming down the pavement, not ten meters away. It was the art hoe, egirlebooks. The light was failing, but there was no difficulty in recognizing her. She looked him straight in the face, then walked quickly on as though she had not seen him.

For a few seconds Nick was too paralyzed to move. Then he turned to the right and walked heavily away, not noticing for the moment that he was going in the wrong direction. At any rate, one question was settled. There was no doubt any longer that the girl was gangstalking him. She must have followed him here, because there was no way that by pure chance she should have happened to be walking on the same evening up the same obscure backstreet, kilometers distant from any boujee neighborhood. It was too great a coincidence. She had to be gangstalking him. Whether or not she had the help of some Heroes of Peace Twitter snitch, or was simply stalking him alone, it hardly mattered. It was enough that she was watching him. Probably she had seen him go into the coffee shop as well.

It was an effort to walk. The lump of illicit jade in his pocket banged against his hip at each step, and he was half minded to take it out and throw it away before the next Good Boy Check. The worst thing was the pain in his belly. For a couple of minutes he had the feeling that he would die if he did not find a bathroom soon. But there would be no public bathrooms in a neighborhood like this. He would have to buy something. Then the spasms passed, leaving a dull ache behind. He wasn’t going to shit his pants after all.

The street ended in a blind alley. Nick stopped, stood for a few seconds wondering what to do, then turned around and began to retrace his steps. As he turned it occurred to him that the girl had only passed him three minutes ago, and that by running he could probably catch up with her. He could just follow her until they were in some quiet place, and then smash her skull in with a cobblestone. The piece of jade in his pocket might even be heavy enough for the job. But he abandoned the idea immediately, because even the thought of physically fighting was unbearable. He would definitely get in trouble. Besides, she was young and watched true crime so she had probably fantasized about being attacked a million times and would be ready. He thought also of going to a Starbucks and scrolling through his phone until he calmed down. A deadly lassitude had taken hold of him. All he wanted was to get home quickly and sit down and be quiet.

It was after 10 PM when he got back to his place. He sat on his futon and smoked a bowl that had been sitting there on his weed table. Then he got up and started pacing again, feeling surprisingly fresh, totally forgetting he had been on his feet for the past few hours. He said “Neuralink start recording.” It was important to document this moment for his vlog. First the unskippable Neuralink ad played again: the fat woman said “GotDAAAAAMMN my pussy STINK!!!” Her voice seemed to stick into his brain like splinters of glass. He tried to think of Basedschizofed, for whom, or to whom, the vlog was addressed, but instead Nick began thinking of the things that would happen to him after he was surfaced by the Heroes of Peace. It would not matter if they killed you at once. To be killed didn’t even matter actually; by that point you’d been totally destroyed anyways. Before death (nobody spoke of such things, yet everybody knew of them) there was the ritual confession and apology that they put dissident Uyghurs through: the groveling apology video and begging for mercy, the vicious public humiliation, the broken bones, the smashed teeth, the bloody clots of hair, the “tiger chair” that the CCP used in the study centers.

Why did you have to endure it, since the end was always the same? Why was it not possible to just cut a few days or weeks out of your life? Nobody ever escaped detection, and nobody ever failed to confess. When once you were accused of antistate misconduct it was certain that by a given date you would be canceled. Why then did that horror, which altered nothing, have to lie embedded in future time?

He tried with a little more success than before to summon up the image of Basedschizofed. “Oh we’re about to be on the best timeline,” he had said to Nick. He knew what it meant, or thought he knew. The best timeline was the imagined future, which one would never see, but which, by foreknowledge, one could mystically share in. But with the voice from his Neuralink nagging at his ears he could not follow the train of thought further. It was on another commercial now. The Mao Visa, at 2.9% APR every purchase is a great economic miracle.

He sat back on the futon and put the weed bowl down. The face of Big Chungus swam into his mind, displacing that of Basedschizofed. Just as he had done a few days earlier, Nick opened his Mandarin Dashboard and tabbed to MarsMaps. The Big Chungus header was still there. He closed the app. He stood up to look out the window at the Forbidden Apple Store, but he forgot that he had put his bowl on his lap. When he stood up the glass bowl fell onto his tile floor and broke into pieces.

Nick looked up out through the window. His Neuralink snapped to Forbidden Apple Store and started playing a Big Chungus campaign ad, and he saw, like a leaden knell, the same words flashed in his face:

IT’S OUR RIGHT TO WIN. BIG CHUNGUS.

9

It was the middle of the morning, and Nick had left his cubicle to go smoke a cigarette outside.

A solitary figure was coming towards him from the other end of the long, sunny replica Tiananmen Square. It was the art hoe. Four days had gone past since the evening when he had run into her outside the antique shop. As she came nearer he saw that her pupils were fully dilated through her red-framed glasses. It was from the Adderall she took to do takes online all day.

They were perhaps four meters apart when the girl said to him, “did you hear of sex and death?”

Nick said, “what?”

She said, “do you have a cigarette?”

“No, you said something different,” he said, and handed her a cigarette. She had said “sex and death,” invoking the theme that the end is contained in the beginning. She was going to have sex with him and then kill him.

“No I didn’t, you’re crazy.” She laughed.

“Ah.”

“I’m gonna smoke this later,” she said. Then she walked a few feet and positioned herself in front of the nearest entrance. She looked into the camera and calmly said “I’m gay.” The door opened.

A curious emotion stirred in Nick’s heart. In front of him was an enemy who was trying to kill him. In front of him, also, was a hot girl, who seemed to be flirting with him. The whole incident could not have taken as much as half a minute. Just as Nick got back to his cubicle, he was surprised to get a Mandarin notification on his Neuralink. It was from Instagram. Egirlebooks had faved his last Story post, a picture of his coffee on the replica Brooklyn Bridge from like an hour ago, with the caption “Gm.” This meant that she had unmuted him after…three or four iPhones now at least.

Then, another notification. She had DMed him.

“Okay. Five minutes,” he told himself. “Five minutes at the very least!” His heart bumped in his chest with frightening loudness. Fortunately, the thing he was working on was mere routine, an easy putting-a-stick-in-the-bicycle-spokes-and-falling-over meme about CCP economists printing more Good Boy Points and that causing inflation to go up.

Whatever she had DMed him, it must have some kind of gaslighting double meaning. So far as he could see there were two possibilities. One, much the more likely, was that the girl was a fed, just as he had feared. She would try and get him to buy an illegal gun or something. He did not know why the feds would choose to deliver their messages in such a fashion, but perhaps they had their reasons. Whatever was in the DM might be a threat, a summons, an order to commit suicide, a trap of some description.

But there was another, wilder possibility that kept raising its head, though he tried vainly to suppress it. This was, that the message did not come from the feds at all, but some kind of underground organization. Like an actual resistance, not the #brotherhood fake psyop resistance. Perhaps Alpha Investment Corporation was for real after all! Perhaps the art hoe was in on it! No doubt the idea was absurd, but it had sprung into his mind in the very instant of seeing the notification that she had DMed him. It was not till a couple of minutes later that the other, more probable explanation had occurred to him. And even now, though his intellect told him that the message probably meant death—still, that was not what he believed, and the unreasonable hope persisted, and his heart banged, and it was with difficulty that he used the paint tool to erase the other caption on the stick-in-bicycle-spokes meme macro to write in the new punchline about the economy.

He gathered 10 of his saved memes and posted them to a meme dump on his TL, then posted the grid post to his Story. Eight minutes had gone by. He readjusted his sunglasses on his nose, sighed, and tabbed back to his Instagram DMs. He clicked her user name to go to her profile. Her avi pic was a close-up of her face in her red sunglasses doing a sarcastic pout. The bio only had her pronouns and a link to her website, onlypoetryisreal.com. He clicked back to his DM list page that only displayed her user name, not the message. Finally, he clicked her message.

“Sup”

For several seconds he was too stunned to even delete the message and block the account.

She was, with 100% certainty, a fed.

For the rest of the morning it was very difficult to work. What was even worse than having to focus his mind on a series of psyopped hot take news stories was constantly getting distracted with doom scrolling on his phone. He felt as though a fire were burning in his belly. Lunch in the touristy Sweetgreen was torment. He had hoped to be alone for a little while during lunch, but as bad luck would have it that imbecile Tom Kashgari flopped down beside him on the wooden stadium seating, the tang of his sweat cutting through the fresh salad smell, and kept up a stream of talk about the preparations for Empathy Week and the Safe Super Bowl. He was particularly enthusiastic about a float of War Machine, 5 meters wide, that his kids were making in school. They had made his Uyghur face especially grotesque, based on the CCP artist on Etsy who specialized in super grotesque and disgusting portraits of traditional Uyghur families. The irritating thing was that in the racket of voices Nick could hardly hear what Kashgari was saying, and was constantly having to ask him to repeat some asinine hot take. Just once he caught a glimpse of the girl, at a table with two other egirls at the far end of the room. She appeared not to have seen him, and he did not look in that direction again.

The afternoon was more bearable. Immediately after lunch there arrived a delicate, difficult piece of work which would take several hours and necessitated putting everything else aside. The story was there was a new documentary on Netflix China about a famous true crime story from New Prime City. The Trolley Problem Killer. He was a serial killer had terrorized Ürümqi right when the Sky of the Future project was getting underway. The killer was called the Trolley Problem Killer because his method was to use infrastructure like subways and highways and air travel to cause dilemmas for authories that would make you think about the moral dilemma involved. Like the killer would kidnap 1 Han Chinese person and tie them to the railroad tracks, then kidnap 10 Uyghurs and tie them to a different railroad track and force the train company to decide which track to switch to. He always ended up framing it in some roundabout way that would reinforce the social hierarchy that Han were special individuals with hopes and dreams just like you and me, and Ugyhurs were there to be unfortunate casualties.

The retconning angle in the new miniseries of truth was, the whole thing had been staged by the Chinese Intelligence Agency. This had always been a theory in the outer fringes of the Chinese media. But now the CCP was admitting that it was literally true. It was literally a psychological operation organized by the CCP government. A psyop. A literal, actual psyop. The CCP had done it to keep the public distracted as the Sky of the Future project got underway. It was also done to keep the public galvanized in support of the CCP after the recent Macintosh-China merger, which was highly controversial because critics said that this introduced a corrupt capitalist element to China’s communist government. People at the time were stereotyped as Karens and wingnut conspiracy nuts for talking about this, but that generation was all dead now, so the CCP could declassify it and admit it was all fake.

Nick was making memes about the story. Right away he made one with the picture of the cartoon superhero character putting his hand over his mouth in fake surprise and the caption “when the government admits they were actually lying the whole time.” Hmm what other memes could he make? Already the familiar wave of thousands of CIA think pieces, memes, op-eds, twitter threads, and Facebook open letters was starting, with headlines like “Yes, the CCP staged a psyop to kill and demonize Uyghurs. It should do this more.”

Nick’s first instinct was to do the meme format of the guy sitting in a church pew with the girl behind him about to kill him labeled “Netflix China,” and she has a guy behind her about to kill her labeled “Chinese Intelligence Agency,” and that guy has a guy behind him about to kill him labeled “CCP,” and then there’s a guy sitting up in the balcony who is about to kill them all labeled “UN.” Or no wait, he should use the Plato’s Cave format. That was kind of cliché at this point, but this subject matter was perfect for it. Yeah, he would use the Plato’s Cave allegory format, where the slaves at the bottom are watching…which obviously fake news story should they be watching projected on the wall? Maybe they should just be saying “they really think we’re fucking stupid, don’t they?” This was the kind of thing that Nick was good at, and for more than two hours he succeeded in shutting the egirl out of his mind altogether. Then the memory of her face came back, and with it a raging, intolerable desire to just be left alone.

It was a physical problem that had to be solved: how to get in touch with the girl and arrange a meeting. There were already like 50 million guys in her DMs; that was not the way. He did not consider any longer the possibility that she might be laying some kind of trap for him. He knew that it was not so; there was no way she could be a fed. She had so many tattoos! Obviously he was only being problematic assuming every hot young woman online was a fed honeypot sent by the Rothschilds to psyop him. But still, the idea of refusing her advances never crossed his mind. Only five nights ago he had contemplated smashing her skull in with a cobblestone, but that was of no importance. He thought of her naked, youthful body, as he had seen it online. He had imagined her a fool like all the rest of them, her head stuffed with lies and hatred, her belly full of ice. A kind of fever seized him at the thought that he might lose her, the tattooed youthful body might slip away from him! What he feared more than anything else was that she would simply change her mind if he did not DM her back quickly. But the physical difficulty of meeting was enormous. It was like trying to make a move at chess when you were already mated. All the possible ways of responding had occurred to him within five minutes of reading the DM; but now, with time to think, he went over them one by one, as though laying out a row of instruments on a table.

Obviously the kind of spontaneous encounter that had happened this afternoon could not be repeated. If she worked in his same wing at the DS-Work it might have been comparatively simple, but he had only a very dim idea of where her office actually was, and he would have no pretext to go there. Maybe he could say the bathroom was broken on his floor? No. If he knew her schedule better, he could just go down and smoke again when she was leaving. But that could be too obvious and he didn’t want to seem like a creep. As for unmuting her to see her TL, it was out of the question. It would be nothing but trolls and thirst traps that would throw off his concentration.

As for replying to the DM, when it was occasionally necessary to text and not send memes, there were always the pre-chosen generic replies autosuggested for you. He could always just click on the one that was applicable. But no. That wouldn’t work. She would sense that he was trying to play it cool.

Should he just be in the moment and wing it? Make up an original response that didn’t rely on a meme? No. The success rate of this was not great to begin with, and got worse the more he dwelled on it. To try to think of a good original response now…no, the window on that option had closed.

For a week after this, life was like a restless dream. The next day she did not appear in the Sweetgreen until he was leaving to go sit by the river. She was too far away to talk to; it would have been awkward. On the day after that she was in the Sweetgreen sitting with three other egirls under a big advertising screen. Then for three dreadful days she did not appear at all. She did not watch any of his Stories. His whole mind and body seemed to be afflicted with an unbearable sensitivity, a sort of transparency, which made every movement, every sound, every contact, every word that he had to speak or listen to, an agony. Even in sleep he could not altogether escape from her image. He did not vlog at all during those days. If there was any relief, it was in his work, in which he could sometimes forget himself for ten minutes at a stretch. He had absolutely no clue as to what had happened to her. There was no enquiry he could make. She might have been kidnapped, she might have been suicided, she might have been flown to Beijing to suck off some billionaire: worst and likeliest of all, she might simply have changed her mind and decided to avoid him.

The next day she reappeared. The relief of seeing her was so great that he could not resist staring directly at her for several seconds. On the following day he very nearly succeeded in speaking to her. When he came into the Sweetgreen she was sitting at a table well out from the wall, and was quite alone. It was early, and the place was not very full. Nick chose not to order ahead on the app so he could loiter around the store longer waiting in line.

The queue edged forward till he was almost at the counter, then was held up for two minutes because someone ordered kale and then changed her mind to spinach. But the girl was still alone when Nick secured his salad and began to make for her at the table. He walked casually towards her, his eyes searching for a place at some table beyond her. She was perhaps three meters away from him. Another two seconds would do it. Then a voice behind him called, “Nick Karamay!” He pretended not to hear. “Woah, Nick Karamay!” repeated the voice, more loudly. It was no use. He turned around. A blond-headed, silly-faced young man named Wilsher, whom he barely knew, was inviting him with a smile to a vacant place at his table. This kid was mutuals with Nick on Insta and had just moved to Mars Camp Bell after college. He was always DMing Nick compliments and asking for writing advice. He could not refuse. It would be rude. He sat down with a friendly smile. The silly blond face beamed into his. Nick had a hallucination of himself smashing a pick-axe right into the middle of it. The egirl’s table filled up a few minutes later.

But she must have seen him coming towards her, and perhaps she would take the hint. The next day he took care to arrive early. Surely enough, she was at a table in about the same place, and again alone. The person immediately ahead of him in the queue was a small, swiftly-moving, beetle-like Uyghur man with a flat face and tiny, suspicious eyes. As Nick turned away from the counter with his tray, he saw that the little man was making straight for the girl’s table. His hopes sank again. There was a vacant place at a table further way, but something in the little man’s appearance suggested that he would be sufficiently attentive to his own comfort to choose the emptiest table. With ice at his heart Nick followed. It was no use unless he could get the girl alone. At this moment there was a tremendous crash. The little man was sprawling on all fours, his tray had gone flying, there were green leaves and dressing all over, and rivulets of fizzy seltzer flowing across the floor. He started to his feet with a malignant look at Nick, whom he evidently suspected of having tripped him up. But it was all right. Nick said “oh my gosh bro, I’m sorry, I was just trying to reach the napkins!” Five seconds later, with a thundering heart, he was sitting at the girl’s table.

He did not look at her. He unpacked his tray and began eating. It was all-important to speak at once, before anyone else sat down, but now a terrible fear had taken possession of him. A week had gone by since she had first DMed him. She would have changed her mind, she must have changed her mind! It was impossible that this affair should end successfully; such things did not happen irl. He might have flinched altogether from speaking if at this moment he had not seen the hairy-eared K-Pop vlogger, wandering limply round the room with a tray, looking for a place to sit down. In his vague way the K-Pop vlogger was attached to Nick, and would certainly sit down at his table if he caught sight of him. There was perhaps a minute in which to act. Both Nick and the girl were eating steadily. He had gotten the kale salad harvest bowl; it was impossible to get more than like 1 piece of the kale on your fork at once. In a low murmur Nick began speaking. He did it like this to like seem obscure and funny, playing this game that they were spies or something. He correctly sensed that that was her vibe.

Speaking in a low murmur like he was trying to avoid detection, he said, “I think I owe you a DM.”

“That’s right,” she said, matching his energy.

“I don’t check that stuff very much. All these kids are just glued to those Neuralinks all day, scrolling. I don’t get it.”

“Ha. Yes you do.”

“Just scrolling through your feed all day on your Neuralink? Why would you want to see a bunch of people posting pictures of their lunch online?”

“Do you want to link or what?”

“I’m afraid that wouldn’t be MGTOW.”

She laughed. “Yes it would be actually. I checked on the boards.”

“At your place?”

“You don’t have an apartment?”

“My apartment sucks. The city is my apartment.”

“Well my apartment sucks too. I have to go. Just DM me you fucking idiot.” She picked up her tray and left.

The K-Pop vlogger failed to see Nick and sat down at another table. Nick went outside to the patio area near the Venetian Bridge. He hit his vape and scrolled through his Neuralink. Suddenly the moment felt right to finally DM egirlebooks back. He typed:

“You know a place?”

She typed back, “Ya.”

Then she messaged again. It was a link to MarsMaps. A coordinate in Mars latitude and longitude. He clicked on it.

His Neuralink opened MarsMaps and a circle graphic of Big Chungus rotated for a few moments while the page loaded. Then it displayed the map. The location was in Doha City, one of the outer suburban districts within the Sky of the Future that were just being built up when the housing bubble burst. There were a bunch of neighborhoods that were now just sitting there vacant. They were extremely popular with urbex YouTubers.

He tabbed back and DMed her: “When is good for you – this week?”

Before Nick could think about it more, he got a notification. A very official-looking notification from the Chinese Intelligence Agency’s official Free Press news app. Some headline about Gary Guanxi. Then he got another notification from one of the CCP media cut-outs that he hadn’t blocked yet. A think piece about how transphobia in Xinjiang is deeply intertwined with antistate misconduct.

There had been a new development in the Gary Guanxi trial. He was being tried by the MRC courts again, this time for treason and antistate misconduct for a dispute in a public restroom in Chengdu that occurred a few iPhones ago. What had happened was, Guanxi was in the bathroom in a mall in Chengdu. He was doing a campaign stop there. So later, he was in one of the stalls taking a shit. The plaintiff, a trans man and student at Chengdu University, came into the bathroom. The trans college student was talking on the phone. They soon realized that Guanxi was in the bathroom from his Secret Service agents standing outside the stall. They said into the phone something about being in the same bathroom as Gary Guanxi. The next moments were highly in dispute, but what ended up happening was Guanxi started making a lot more bathroom noises in his stall.

The substance of the plaintiff’s complaint was that the phone call was actually an extremely important job interview, and Mr. Guanxi had intentionally sabotaged their career by his actions of making extra loud bathroom noises in his stall, which the court had already deemed legally actionably expressive speech. In a 7-month trial, the judge had found that by not being considerate of others in the space and reducing or altering the content of his expressive speech, Mr. Guanxi was displaying reckless disregard for the humanity of his fellow Chinaman, and since this behavior pattern did have a nexus to sexual- and gender-identity, the court ruled that the damages would be tripled. Guanxi was ordered to pay the plaintiff’s salary as though he had gotten the job at GoogleNASA and worked an average career track for 10 iPhones afterward: ¥69 kabbiblian.

There was a new major bombshell headline about the trial every month or so. The news today was there was a second verdict as well: Guanxi was actually also guilty of treason, since the MRC stands for being good and nice, and when you’re being transphobic, that’s being mean, so that’s not good and nice. By not acting good and nice, Guanxi was helping out the MRC’s enemies. With this additional charge, Guanxi was now facing 420 lifetimes in prison without the possibility of parole.

Nick got another notification from another CCP media cutout—an open letter about how all Uyghurs are racist and violent so this was an open-and-shut case. Then another notification—a new mural in downtown Beijing of Gary Guanxi’s Turkish Uyghur face in the grotesque caricatured style, being decapitated by a smiling Han school girl. Then another notification—Tom Kashgari was inviting all his followers to a group therapy and fundraising listening circle to process the trauma of all this hate and finally heal.

Egirlebooks DMed him. “This week might not be good if you’ve seen the news.”

Nick said, “Lol I saw it”

She said, “I already have like 4 TV hits just tonight lol.”

“Lol” he said.

“Could you do Sunday?” she said.

“Yeah sure…” he said. “That location in Doha City?”

“Yeah…I think the bus goes there.”

“Im finna rent a car tbh”

“I thought you were poor”

“I have a lot of good boy points saved because I never do anything”

“Lol” she said.

Nick tabbed out of the IG window on his Neuralink and went back to MarsMaps. He scrolled around the Doha City location some more. Then he tabbed back to his Mandarin Dashboard and clicked on breaking news. Already the results were totally full of violent anti-Uyghur think pieces. “Why vigilante violence against your enemies is sometimes okay.” The actual content of the articles was irrelevant at this point; the point was to flood every online space with blatantly dehumanizing headlines about Uyghurs to remind everyone that it was okay to harass and attack them. It was moral, in fact. It was Empathy:

“Gary Guanxi is guilty. I know Uyghurs and they are evil. He did this.”

“I once dated a Uyghur who looked like Gary Guanxi. He put a locator beacon on my car.”

“A list of every bad thing a Uyghur has ever done to me.”

“Some brave hero should poison this disgusting parasite’s food at the next restaurant he goes to.”

A picture of a young Uyghur boy’s face with the caption “The face of a future terrorist.”

“China is fucked if we don’t get rid of this Uyghur male problem NOW.”

“The thing I hate most is his punchable little whiny bitch face. Someone should take a baseball bat to that disgusting little bug’s nose.”

It was happening. Current Thing was changing to Gary Guanxi again. Everyone would be busy doom scrolling this story for another week or so, at least.

He thought of egirlebooks’s profile avi. She was wearing the red glasses. In that instant it occurred to him that he did not know what color this girl’s eyes were. They were probably brown, because she was Asian, but what shade of brown? To unmute her and check her TL would have been inconceivable folly. Instead, Nick just scrolled the news headlines more. There was only one trending story that wasn’t dripping with racial hatred against Uyghurs: an obviously fake redpilled account posted an op-ed he wrote in Newsweek: “The Safe Super Bowl will be held on Global Warming Day, yet each Safe Helmet from Taiwan requires as much energy to produce as 25 Tesla Hellcats. This is blatant hypocrisy!”

Nick went back to Instagram, which was more curated to avoid mainstream political stories like this.

Dr. Xing apparently had a court date the next day, and the probably real blackpilled accounts were saying that the Gary Guanxi news was a distraction. It was, with 100% certainty, definitely a distraction.

Big Chungus posted a tweet from the official Xinjiang province Twitter that said “Gaslighting is Chinese Space Communism and Chinese Space Communism is gaslighting” then followed it up with a tweet that said “China has never engaged in any gaslighting and never will.”

Nick refreshed his Stories. The normies he followed, none of them gave a shit about any of this. They were utterly done with politics. They were posting about what they were making for dinner that night, about being stuck in traffic on the way to the lake, about getting a new t-shirt in the mail; very normal non-political things. Meanwhile, the blue checks were going hard with the “someone should crack this Uyghur’s little skull open so he finally learns his lesson.” It was a strictly opt-out major political crisis.

The narrative building was obvious. Gary Guanxi was evil and Uyghurs were evil. The CCP had reminded us of that, now they were vamping for time before Empathy Week. Now the meta was to trigger the most Uyghurs, provoke them into doing or saying something, knowing if they react at all they’ll be banned and/or arrested before the People’s Election. And this Empathy Week was an extra special, extra patriotic one: it coincided with the People’s Election, and China was hosting the Safe Super Bowl for the first time, and they actually had a chance to win it with the Camp Bell Dragons.

This insight was a double-edged sword for Nick. At first, it was a great triumph for him that the normies saw through the violent anti-Uyghur rhetoric that the CCP was slopping out. It showed that the normies knew it was all fake. But on the other hand, it also showed him that they just didn’t care. They didn’t care that most Uyghurs were already in reeducation camps, and more were being added every day. Plus, those same normies who seemed nonpolitical, they could be whipped up into a patriotic frenzy at the whim of the Chinese Intelligence Agency. But it would only ever be for the Kurds. That was the only patriotism that Uyghurs in Xinjiang were allowed to feel. And the psyops were only going to keep ramping up that summer and autumn until everyone’s attention span was totally fried. Then, and only then, Empathy Week would start.

He thought of the crowd at a Safe Football game. A TV drone shot of the whole side of the stadium with the tens of thousands of people in the stands. All those people were conscious of the Safe Football world, at least. They all listened to the Danny Doppa Show. They were all aware of the controversies about Dr. Xing and the concentration camps. They knew China was sterilizing Uyghur women by the hundred-thousand. They knew Camp Bell wasn’t on Mars. They were fucking redpilled. They just didn’t give a shit. Or, maybe it just took another step to get them to actually act, to do something. They just needed something to rip their attention away from the MRC’s spectacular psyopped narratives.

The only content that could ever possibly be powerful enough could only come from one source, and Nick knew exactly what it was: War Machine’s Alpha Investment Corporation.

10

Nick picked his way through the dappled infrared blue light, which scientists have proven has health benefits and boosts your immune system, and shade on the sidewalk. He was in Mexicoville. The Sun reflected brightly off the replica Teotihuacan Pyramid mall complex a few streets away. He stepped out into pools of the sunlight wherever the shadows from the neon fast-food signs parted.

When egirlebooks suggested this place, he had decided right away to spend some Good Boy Points and rent a car for a day. He had been thinking about a weekend trip anyways. He could afford it now because he had been posting more memes this iPhone and getting almost 14,000 steps a day.

Nick had been to Mexicoville a lot, but never this part. Mexicoville was one of those neighborhoods within Mars Camp Bell where you could live in the city for 30 years and not see even close to all of it. Most people only knew it because the quantum computer was there, in one remote part; the Qasim Quantum Computer aka the QCC aka the QC. The computer itself was relatively small; what took up all the space were the concourses for all the lines and crowds, the security infrastructure, the mall and food court facilities, the parking lots. It was like its own mini-city in itself. A solid percentage of the population of Mexicoville worked there.

Another major employer in the district now must be the Dick Sucking Factory, Nick thought suddenly. It just opened in like iPhone44time. Every time he ordered something from DS.com the tracking notifications would be “Arrived at Mexicoville, New Prime City regional Dick Sucking Factory – Mars,” “Departing from Mexicoville New Prime City regional Dick Sucking Factory – Mars,” and “Processed through Mexicoville New Prime City regional Dick Sucking Factory – Mars.”

The rental car place’s address was on the other side of the Teotihuacan Pyramid Mall. He walked around and found it. It was in a glass corner of the building near the greenway area.

Nick went in and talked to the clerk. It was very easy to get the car, he just ended up having to pay about 3 times as much as he was expecting. It was fine, though.

The lady also told him that the car they gave him would be the latest self-driving technology. Most cars now were self-driving to some degree or another, but this was the newest and most advanced. Nick was a bit excited in spite of himself. He wasn’t in cars very much, so he was always excited to see how far the self-driving technology had progressed since the last time.

The car drove around to the front. It was a brand new iPhone49 Tesla Hellcat, black. It was listed for 73 Good Boy Points per day on Priceline but with all the fees and insurance it came out to 220 Good Boy Points somehow. Nick got in it. He synched the car with the address from his Neuralink MarsMaps and pressed GO.

The car started moving. Wow, what a cushy ride, thought Nick. He looked forward to chilling and maybe rolling a joint while he enjoyed the scenery on the way out of the city center. The car drove itself out of the parking lot and onto a side street, then another side street. It drove very smoothly.

As soon as the Tesla pulled onto the highway on-ramp, Nick heard a highly realistic crashing sound and the windshield totally shattered. He freaked out and braced for the deadly impact; but no…the car hadn’t stopped moving. The shattered windshield changed to close-up footage of vodka pouring into a glass with some fancy looking ice cubes, the camera doing a swoopy move over the ice so it looked all dramatic and appetizing. “Red Star Vodka…mmm join the brotherhood…” The scene dissolved to a bright red star rotating against a black background, then faded out and the Tesla windshield appeared again. This happened about 12 times at totally unpredictable intervals on his ride. The ads were for products like paper towels, life insurance, Just For Men, Trident gum, the Safe Football League East Playoffs, Pussy Spray, Crest toothpaste, the new 1984 reboot, Wendy’s new bacon BBQ burger, Chungwa Cigarettes and Cannabis, the New Prime City Education Lottery, Mandarin Search, the new movie where a famous Uyghur sports hero is actually homosexual, and the Mao Zedong Visa card. “At 2.9% APR every purchase is a great economic miracle.” The entire time Nick was nervously looking out the window to keep his Neuralink from snapping to the windshield screen, and bracing himself for the next fake crash.

Outside the window he could see a lot of ads too. Every other billboard, it seemed, was reminding the public that June would be Chinese History Month, which was once again dedicated to the brave heroes of 6/9. Spaceship Girl’s childhood face was in all the Chinese History Month 6/9 marketing, even though she was in her 20s now…or was it 30s? There were also a few billboards for the new CCP comedy show that takes place at the Chinese Intelligence Agency and portrays it as a goofy but boring workplace. The CIA agents were all played by the MRC First Class Actors. Then there were a few billboards for Qasim: The Musical, about the plane crash that killed ETR president Ehmetjan Qasim. It was a massive hit in N.P.C.

Nick was putting his hand over the billboards so his Neuralink didn’t snap-to-vision and start playing the video version. One time he failed to do this in time and his Neuralink started playing a clip of the Yao Ming Show where the Yao Ming deep fake was interviewing Big Chungus. The topic was a new Netflix China documentary Freedom Groceries about the iPhone18time student protests in Tiananmen Square, Beijing.

In the clip the Yao Ming deep fake introduces Big Chungus, who is sitting with him in a director’s chair on a daytime TV set. They talk about the documentary, which Big Chungus hosted and narrated. Big Chungus explains how the filmmakers were actually able to track down the famous “shopping bag man” who stood there in front of the tanks as they rolled into Tiananmen Square to end the student protests there.

The Yao Ming deep fake says “now the traditional story about this event, I know that we media folks sometimes don’t get things totally right the first time around. The traditional story of this event was that these students were protesting the government…”

Big Chungus cuts him off, “Well Ming, that’s right, traditionally the story of this event has been that the students were protesting government authoritarianism, and that’s actually correct, in a way. They were. The government was being too soft on Uyghur terrorism, so the students weren’t able to learn and flourish in peace. But that’s not really the full story. Luckily, we were able to track down some of the key players and correct the record on this…”

The Yao Ming deep fake says, “and I think that’s what we’re going to see in this clip you’ve brought? Fantastic.”

The clip starts. It’s an interview with an elderly Chinese man. Big Chungus’s deep Han voice speaks off camera: “So you went to the grocery store that fateful day. And you got your groceries. And then you walked across the square, is that right?”

The man speaks: “Well yes, that’s right. There were all these student protestors there in the square. And, you know, I always love to see the young Chinese take an interest in their glorious nation and government. The great gift that comrade Mao has given this great country, and of course yourself sir, comrade Big Chungus, surely this exceeds in excellence even the greatest achievements of any empire in history, without a doubt. So when I saw all those student protestors, I was in a really happy mood. I had just gone to get groceries, and sure sometimes they can cost a little more with inflation, but that’s just the government doing what it has to do for the people, ya know? So then…I see some tanks rolling up, and I thought ‘huh, that’s weird. This is a peaceful protest! There must be some negative toxic element here, bringing violence and hate to these peaceful protests...’ And it was just then that I saw them, with my own two eyes. A gang of dirty little Uyghur thugs, rampaging down the sidewalk, their eyes wild with hate, their neck veins bulging out of their terrorist necks. Of course, at first I wanted to give them their space and be non-judgmental! I didn’t want to jump to conclusions. That would make me just as bad as them. So I just took a deep breath and walked on…but then I noticed that the leader of the Uyghur thugs had spotted a young Han Chinese student – she couldn’t have been 18, Mister Chungus – and he had locked his eyes on her. I could just tell by the look in his eyes that he had…he just had the worst intentions, Mister Chungus. In fact I heard him say to his little dirty little Uyghur buddy ‘hey there, what do you say I grab this little piece of ass and…’ I’m sorry Mr. Chungus I can’t even repeat what this evil little Uyghur boy said.”

“Aaawwwww that’s okay,” Big Chungus said with his deep soothing Han voice. (The Han First-Class Actor who did the voice of Big Chungus had raped his own step-granddaughter when she was 15 and had her boyfriend killed when he went to the police.)

“So anyways, that’s when I stepped into the street in front of that tank. I wanted to get the tank driver’s attention so they could stop this vicious violent assault…I actually have a daughter myself, Mister Chungus…”

That was as far as Nick could get in the clip. All of history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.

Suddenly on the highway there was a shitload of traffic. The car began to slow down. Oh—it was a toll booth. Nick had forgotten about toll booths. The traffic filtered quickly through the bottleneck. The self-driving Tesla never even fully stopped, it just rolled through the toll gate and Nick saw a flashing green sign that said TOLL PAID – 55 GBP.

Fifty-five fucking good boy points!!!!! Fuck!!!!!! It was nothing less than shocking. But, what was he gonna do, not pay it? He thought about the last time he had gone though this toll, in about iPhone42time, when was only like 12.50 GBP. He remembered thinking “that’s a whole Chipotle burrito.” LOL.

As the Tesla sped back up Nick glanced to the side of the highway in a fenced-in parking lot area where the cars went that were carrying people with open warrants. He remembered hearing that somewhere. Really anything that tripped the social credit score algorithm would get your self-riving car directed here.

Nick was already doing the math of the trip in his head. He knew he shouldn’t dwell on it and be blackpilled the whole time, but still. The train, the rental car, the toll…plus, he’d forgotten that his Good Boy Point direct deposit next week would be 15% less because he wouldn’t get his Happy Camper Credit, the extra credit you got if you agreed to not leave the downtown city districts. Oh well, he thought. It is what it is.

Nick zoned out and lit a roach he had been saving. He put his headphones back over his ears. On the prerecorded stream he was watching on NeuraPlay, BillabongKeith was also smoking a joint. Nick tabbed back to YouTube on his phone and turned up the volume. The stream was from the night before. It was War Machine with BillabongKeith in the office with him. Nick had already watched it through twice. The title was GARY GUANXI PERSECUTED! EMERGENCY WAR ROOM LIVE STREAM!! They weren’t actually talking about that story at all. All their titles were joke clickbait like that. They were talking about the latest season of The Party.  The only time they mentioned the Guanxi story was when War Machine said, during a lull, “I love the symbolism by the way. The allegory. Of the Gary Guanxi story. The latest psyop trial for treason. He’s guilty of treason now. For what? For fucking farting too loud while taking a shit. Ha!” They both broke out laughing. “What more apt metaphor could you possibly come up with for politics?”

BillabongKeith says, “Never forget, folks, the CIA is a literary project.”

They spent most of the stream taking Superchat advice questions from the viewers. Stuff like career advice, relationship advice, Uyghurs asking if they should just try to avoid politics or leave China altogether. One viewer said he was 17 and his family was assigned a CCP Family Friend who would spend 8 nights a month at the family’s house, and he always treated the guy’s brother like shit, and then one day the little brother said that the guy was molesting him. The viewer asked War Machine what he should do, should he report it to the police? War Machine punched his fist into this other hand and said “Well I’m afraid that sounds like something you’re going to have to take care of yourself there. I think you’re going to have to go find this guy and say hi to him. You’re going to have to find him and say hi to him.”

The abandoned Disney neighborhood was by some other abandoned luxury neighborhoods in the Doha City district. Past the outskirts of the city, the land had flattened into grassy plateau farm country. The Doha City Disney neighborhood was designed as a replica of Palm Jumeirah, the island neighborhood development in Dubai that’s shaped like a huge palm tree, with the streets arcing out as the leaves of the palm tree in the ocean. There was no water in the ocean/pond area yet, though. It was instead covered with grass. According to pictures online at least. This created a quite spectacular view, with the green plateau grassland and the red Mars mountains in the infrared blue Sky, which scientists have proven has health benefits and boosts your immune system, in the background.

There was another toll and a checkpoint to enter the Doha City district, then the car steered itself off the highway in an almost desert-seeming area. After several more quick turns, the Tesla finally steered itself through the boujee carved granite gates of the abandoned Disney castle neighborhood. The gates were covered in vines and tons of graffiti in all colors. Nick recognized the image from urbex thumbnails on YouTube. Before long the car came to a stop in front of one of the castles. Nick manually drove it a few blocks to a remote area behind some trees so the car wouldn’t be so obvious. He got out and walked back.

The ride ended up being 1 hour 28 minutes, exactly what the MarsMaps screen had said.

It was the second of May. All the empty pond areas that separated the streets were indeed full of grass. From somewhere in some deep grass nearby came the droning of ring doves. He was a bit early. The girl seemed like she knew this place was legit, so he was only mildly worried. He definitely didn’t want an encounter with any security guards or tweakers.

Egirlebooks must have done an urbex arc on her vlog at one point, he thought, or maybe she just seemed like the type who would. She had been pretty confident that this place was chill. But in general you could not assume you were much safer in the suburbs than in the city center. It was still private property and you could be sure there were cameras all over the place. Even more so in an abandoned place like this, probably, where there was potential for all kinds of mischief to happen. He was probably on camera right now, he thought. There were definitely security patrols too.

He decided to lay low until egirlebooks showed up. He walked around the back of the Disney castle at the address. It was constructed out of fake stone that looked like foam up close. Nick was thinking about the scene at the car rental place. It had been packed with normies who were hyped for the warm weather. It was all one large Uyghur family taking up like almost every seat in the waiting room. They must have just arrived in New Prime City from way out in rural southern Xinjiang. The whole family was there: from the toothless great-grandmother to a month-old baby. They were going out to spend the day at Water on Mars, and, as they wouldn’t stop telling Nick, tip back a few cold ones. They were all wearing new Camp Bell Dragons and Mars Marvins merch.

The wild bluebells in this castle’s yard were so thick underfoot that it was impossible not to step on them. He knelt down and began picking some, partly to pass the time away, but also from a vague idea that he would like to have some flowers for egirlebooks when they met. She wouldn’t expect it. If she was a fed, it would throw her off her game. He had got together a big bunch and was smelling their faint sickly scent when a sound at his back froze him: the unmistakable crackle of a foot on twigs. He went on picking bluebells. It was the best thing to do. It might have been the girl, but he might have been followed by some other urban explorers. To look around would let them know he heard them and he might have to talk to them. He kept picking the flowers. With the girl, he would be fine as long as he didn’t let her psyop him into like taking a photo with a gun or something. A hand fell lightly on his shoulder.

He looked up. It was the girl. She jerked her head as if to say “this way,” then walked around to the side of the castle. She unlocked a padlock that was holding a door on the side of the garage chained shut, then locked it again behind them. Obviously she had been this way before, for she stepped over the little doorway thing to the laundry room by habit. Nick held onto his bunch of flowers. His first feeling was relief, but as he watched the strong slender body moving in front of him, with the red bike shorts where you could tell she wasn’t wearing any underwear, the sense of his own inferiority was heavy upon him. Even now it seemed quite likely that when she turned around and looked at him she would draw back after all. Already on the drive from the car rental place the May sunshine made him feel dirty and etiolated, a creature of indoors, with the stink of his corporate-mall-hamster-tube lifestyle. It occurred to him that till now she had probably never seen him irl other than at the DS-Work. They came to the living room of this Disney castle house. Inside it was all graffiti’d and dingy, but you could tell it was once going to be a super boujee 70s retro suburban interior. The first floor was an open layout with high ceilings in every semi-closed-in room area, and a huge TV room in the middle with a recessed couch pit. The girl walked to the main room and flopped down onto the circular couch pit area.

“Here we are,” she said.

Nick stepped down into the couch area and sat down a few meters away. “Wow. You said you knew a place.”

“Disneyville, the luxury development by the visionary real estate partnership of the Macintosh Republic of China and Prince Hossaini al Shayed of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Announced iPhone28time, started iPhone32time, abandoned after the real estate bubble burst in iPhone36time.”

“Some of them looked pretty rough on the way over here.”

“Well, that’s all relative. But yeah, most of them are destroyed or totally sealed up. A few of them are still in good shape like this.”

“You’ve been here before?”

She nodded. “With some friends from an urbex Patreon.”

“Ah.” There was a pause. They were making eye contact. “You know, I was thinking the other day that, I didn’t know what color your eyes were.” They were brown, he noted, a rather light shade of brown, with dark lashes.

“They’re brown.”

“Brown eyes…I see. You know, I’m almost 40, that’s crazy. Thirty-nine. Like literally almost forty. The guy in the story 1984, Winston Smith. He’s almost 40 too. Isn’t that old?”

“I couldn’t care less. I like older guys anyways. Guys my age are so immature…”

“Okay, you’re definitely a fed.”

The next moment, it was hard to say by whose act, she was in his arms. At the beginning he had no feeling except sheer incredulity. The youthful body was strained against his own, the mass of dark hair was against his face, and yes! Actually she had turned her face up and he was kissing the wide red mouth. She had clasped her arms around his neck, she was calling him darling, precious one, loved one. He had pulled her down onto the couch, she was utterly unresisting, he could do what he liked with her. But the truth was that he had no physical sensation, except that of mere contact. All he felt was incredulity and pride. He was glad that this was happening, but he had no physical desire. It was too soon, her youth and prettiness had frightened him, he was too much used to living without women—he did not know the reason. But he wasn’t getting a boner. The girl picked herself up and pulled a bluebell out of her hair. She sat against him, putting her arm round his waist.

“Never mind, dear. There’s no hurry. We’ve got the whole afternoon. Isn’t this a sick spot?”

“Mhm,” said Nick.

“Tell me, what did you think of me before the day I DMed you?”

He did not feel any temptation to tell lies to her. It was even a sort of love-offering to start off by telling the worst.

“Um I totally tuned you out. I don’t follow anyone who posts about the daily news cycle, even if their posts are good. Plus you’re a fed.”

The girl laughed delightedly, evidently taking this as a tribute to the excellence of her disguise. “A fed! You didn’t actually think that?

“You literally worked for the Chinese Intelligence Agency.”

“Yeah I had some internship on my resume. That makes me a fed?”

“Yes! Well, perhaps not exactly that. But from your general appearance – merely because you’re young and post pursed-lips selfies, you understand, and you’re so extremely online – I thought that probably—”

“You thought I was a good CCP Current Thing Doer. You thought I was into all the Heroes of Peace stuff and all that. On the hashtag right side of history. Banners, processions, think pieces, hashtag games, pronouns in the bio, all that stuff. And you thought that if I had a quarter of a chance I’d dox you for doing antistate misconduct and get you surfaced?”

“Yes, well, you do have your pronouns in your bio. You would do that. You’re proudly brainwashed. Even if you think you’re doing it ironically or something. A great many young girls are like that, you know.”

“Actually yeah, I do flex like that online.” They were both lounging on the couch now. “The way I see it, I’m just like Patrick Bateman. Like the thing where he’s like, in the car where his girlfriend is like ‘why do you have to do all that’ and he’s like ‘I just want…to fit…in.’ with like his crazy sociopath face. That’s how I see what I do too. Like, I know I’m a hot Chinese girl, so all I have to do is yell along with the crowd, do whatever the consensus take is, and everyone will think I’m a great moral genius and a hero. That’s my character in the Narrative. When people see me, dressed in my trendy clothes in a hip city like Mars Camp Bell, with a lot of followers online, they probably assume I’m like some kind of special supergenius from NASA Mars Space Academy, like Spaceship Girl. I’m literally her. She’s literally me. Just like in Patrick Bateman. So all I have to do is fit in and people will assume I’m great. Even if I’m participating in a system I know is bad. And if I’m wrong, oh well. I’m just a giiiiirrrlll! Ha!”

“Yeah but like doing that makes you a bad person. That’s what being glib is. And a bad person.”

“You’re trying to do it too, you’re just not successful.”

“Well then I have a different moral flaw. But you’re knowingly supporting probably the most evil government on Earth.”

“In the galaxy.”

“In the galaxy, that’s right.” She was trolling him but he was not triggered at all.

“It’s these stupid things that do it,” she said, ripping her red glasses frames off her face. “I don’t even wear glasses.”

She tossed the glasses in her backpack and got out a prerolled joint from a tin in one of the pockets. She lit it and handed it to Nick. Even before he hit it, he knew by the picture on the package that this was very unusual weed. It was like purple, and had like orange hairs in it, and like all these crazy crystals and shit. It also smelled like totally dank. Pretty much all weed in Camp Bell now was the government-produced Red Star Cannabis mids, which was definitely decent, but it was still mids. Nick knew that at some time or another he had had weed this good before. The first whiff of its scent had stirred up some memory which he could not pin down, but which was powerful and troubling.

“Where did you get this?” he said.

“The plug,” she said indifferently. “It’s from California. Actually I do seem like that type of girl, I know that. I’m good at hashtag games. I like being responsible. I always ended up writing all the notes in group projects in school. I do post Current Thing. I do regularly do activism work for the Heroes of Peace Climate Brigade, three nights a week in fact. Hours and hours I’ve spent posting stickers and crap all over the city. I always go to the Current Thing marches whenever the CIA starts organizing them again on Facebook. Always yell with the crowd, that’s what I say. It’s the only way to be on the right side of history.”

Nick savored the first hit of weed. The taste was delightful. But there was still that memory moving around the edges of his consciousness, something strongly felt but not reducible to definite shape, like an object seen out of the corner of one’s eye. He pushed it away from him, aware only that it was the memory of some action which he would have liked to undo but could not.

“You are very young,” he said. “You’re like ten or fifteen years younger than me. Also, don’t you have some rich boyfriend in the CCP?”

“Mmm well yes, but guys my age are so immature, you know. They don’t exactly get the job done if you know what I mean…” She was being coy.

“Ahh I see.”

“Also there was just…something about your energy. As soon as I saw you I knew you were against them. I knew you were a real one.”

‘Them,’ it appeared, meant the CCP #brotherhood posters online, and above all the feds—whom she talked with an open jeering hatred. This made Nick feel uneasy, although he knew that they were safe here where their Neuralinks didn’t connect.

“Big Chungus is just a meme made up as rage bait,” she continued. “To troll Xinjiang Uyghurs. Like in Rome when one of the provinces had a donkey as a senator or whatever. A fake and gay humiliation ritual.”

She said this like it was the most obvious fact in the world. A thing that astonished him about her was the coarseness of her language. #brotherhood posters were supposed not to say gay or retarded, and Nick himself very seldom did use those words, aloud, at any rate. Egirlebooks, however, seemed unable to mention a fake news storyline, and especially Current Thing, without using the kind of words that would get your post removed from any Mandarin space instantly. He did not dislike it. it was merely one symptom of her revolt against the CCP and all its ways, and somehow it seemed natural and healthy, like the sneeze of a horse that smells bad hay.

They had left the living room of the castle and were wandering through the rooms, with their arms around each other’s waists whenever it was wide enough to walk two abreast. They were in a front room now. Nick went to look out one of the tall stone windows that was curved at the top like a castle. Suddenly egirlebooks stopped and shrugged. “People need something to show devotion to. Even if it’s ironic at first.” He nodded and thought about this without responding.

“So why’d you get kicked off Twitter?” she asked.

“Um,” he said. He hadn’t thought of this since it happened…six iPhones ago now. “You know how when a hot skinny girl posts a picture, all the comments will be other girls saying ‘where are her organs?’”

“Yeah.”

“Well there was one of those in my recommended posts, a pic of a hot model girl and she was really skinny. Then I saw in the comments there was one of those fat activists—one of the Chinese First Class Actors actually—she posted ‘where are your organs?’ I was in a bad mood so I posted ‘where aren’t your organs?’”

Egirlebooks laughed heartily at this. “You were suggesting she was so large that her internal organs took up all quantifiable space in the entire universe?”

“That’s correct, yes. It was dangerous hate speech.”

When they had calmed down again she asked Nick, “Who would you want to be the People’s Representative from Xinjiang if it was real? Like an actual good one. Is there even a single Uyghur left?”

“Every Uyghur public figure is such a beaten down pussy sell-out. Maybe War Machine,” he answered.

“That fed?” she said. “He’s just as controlled as Big Chungus or any politician.”

“Ha. You think War Machine is a fed?” he asked.

“Of course,” she said. “He talks about how he’s been visited by CCP federal agents. He’s been in trouble and stuff for all the stuff in his past. He beat his girlfriend almost to death. But he’s still allowed in all these Mandarin spaces? He made a deal to avoid going back to prison. Why do you think he can still be on Twitter and shit. It’s because he’s controlled op. A strategic pressure release valve. It’s the whole reason the CCP got him out of that prison in California in the first place, as much as I hate to admit it. To be a podcasting operative in Xinjiang: h’s half Uyghur…he knows Joe Rogan…he was the perfect choice.”

Nick had never thought of this before. But of course, it was true. It was the only explanation. First it was guys like Kuleshav, Marconi, and Pasadena Orangefield. Now the version for Nick’s generation was War Machine.

“You think so? He’s allowed to always be armed in interviews. He has his guys standing behind him on camera with guns and shit.”

“That’s more evidence he’s a fed.”

She was right. “Have you seen his manifesto series or whatever…” Nick asked. “The War Machine Experience?”

“Ha. Of course. That’s what made me think of this. In one of the videos he talks about being visited by the feds, just to kind of scare him. To let them know they are watching him, then later a bunch of times he’s doing his like over-the-top irony and says stuff like ‘well I mean it’s not like I made a deal to avoid prison and I’m just here to distract you!’”

“Yeah. That’s his shtick, he knows people probably think that so he’s calling it out as a joke. It’s textbook metairony.”

“Yeah but that means the Chinese Intelligence Agency is like keenly aware of everything he does. There’s no, like, spicy off-handed comment that they just like missed somehow. And then, like, from War Machine’s perspective, he knows he can exist online now, making more money and like doing his like performance art cult leader thing…as long as he isn’t political.”

“That doesn’t mean that. I think it just means, like, spicy memes are mainstream now. They’re so trendy, even normies post memes that are like a paradise waterfall that says ‘life when you spread misinformation online.’ I saw one meme that said like ‘80% of adult male relationships consist of just sending each other cancelable memes and replying with lol’ and…that’s probably true.”

“That’s what I mean about being controlled via behavioral psyops, though, because that’s the bread and butter of the CIA. Monitoring all that spicy irony chatter online and tracking when the events might happen. Or, making them happen themselves.”

“Right, yes. Psyops.”

“I think what happens is they choose people who are so solidly good entertainers that anyone would like them, and conscientious enough to be like easy to work with, and they actually do turn out to be good content creators. Like Theo Von. They’re so good no one cares that he’s probably a CIA agent.”

“Imagine thinking anything you saw on the YouTube FYP wasn’t totally controlled by the CIA.”

“Ha. So that’s what the War Machine Experience is, like a regular Youtuber vlog series?”

“Well that’s just one part of it. There’s all kinds of stuff in it actually. All types of visual media content. It’s like…a pastiche.”

“Well I think I’m fine just watching his YouTube content. Doesn’t the other stuff make your social credit score go down? If your Neuralink sees that you’re you watching it?”

“Not anymore, that was just until last People’s Election. Now it doesn’t even matter. Millions of people are subbing to the Patreon to watch it. I subbed to it, my social credit score go down. My PayPal’s not doxed.”

“Yeah, easy for you to say, you’re not a Uyghur.”

“Hey! Don’t get too close to the front windows. There might be someone making a video. We’re all right if we just stay away from the front windows.”

They were standing at an angle to another, higher up window. The sunlight, filtering through innumerable leaves, was still hot on their faces. Nick looked out to the overgrown green front yard from this acute angle, and underwent a curious, slow shock of recognition. He knew it by sight. A green, grassy meadow, with a footpath winding over a hill, and a huge fluffy cloud in the sky right above it. The huge fluffy cloud from his dream. It was so close here, just on the other side of this neighborhood.

“Is there a stream near here?” he asked suddenly.

“Yeah. Yeah, there is. It goes down that way,” she pointed to where he had been looking.

“It’s the Golden Country – almost,” he murmured.

“The Golden Country?”

“It’s nothing, really. Something I saw on TikTok.”

“Look!” whispered egirlebooks.

A thrush had alighted on a bough not five meters away outside the window, almost at the level of their faces. Perhaps it had not seen them. It was in the sun, they in the shade inside. It spread out its wings, fitted them carefully into place again, ducked its head for a moment, as though making a sort of obeisance to the sun, and then began to pour forth a torrent of song. In the afternoon hush the volume of sound was startling. Nick and egirlebooks clung together, fascinated. The music went on and on, minute after minute, with astonishing variations, never once repeating itself, almost as though the bird were deliberately showing off its virtuosity. Sometimes it stopped for a few seconds, spread out and resettled its winds, then swelled its speckled breast and again burst into song. Nick watched it with a sort of vague reverence. For whom, for what, was that bird singing? No mate, no rival was watching it. What made it sit at the edge of the lonely grassland and pour its music into nothingness? He wondered how many microphones were picking it up right now. He wondered if any government agents were listening to it live. But by degrees the flood of music drove all the bad vibes out of his mind. It was as though it were a kind of viscous liquid that poured all over him and got mixed up with the sunlight that filtered through the leaves.

He stopped thinking and purely felt. The girl’s waist in the bend of his arm was soft and warm. He pulled her around so that they were face to face; her body seemed to melt into his. Wherever his hands moved it was all as yielding as water. Their mouths clung together; it was quite different from the hard kisses they had exchanged earlier. When they moved their faces apart again both of them sighed deeply. The bird took fright and fled with a clatter of wings.

Nick put his lips against her ear. “Now,” he whispered.

“Not here,” she whispered back. “Come back to the living room away from windows. It’s safer.”

Quickly they threaded their way back to the living room with the circular couch. When they were once inside the couch pit again, she turned and faced him. They were both breathing fast. But the smile had reappeared around the corners of her mouth. She stood looking at him for an instant, then felt at the bottom of her crop top shirt. And, yes! She lifted it over her head. Almost as swiftly as he had imagined it, she had torn her clothes off, and when she flung them aside it was with that same magnificent gesture by which a whole civilization seemed to be annihilated. Her body gleamed white in the sun, with the tattoos and everything. But for a moment Nick did not look at her body; his eyes were anchored by the freckled face with its faint, bold smile. He knelt down before her and took her hands in his.

“You sure you want to cheat on your boyfriend with some dirty Uyghur like this?”

She said, “pssh I’ve done this like 100 times.”

His heart leapt. Like 100 times she had done it. Cheated on this CCP dipshit. He wished it had been thousands – millions. Anything that hinted at corruption always filled him with a wild hope. Who knew, perhaps the CCP was all rotten under the surface, its cult of efficiency and self-denial simply a sham concealing iniquity. If he could have infected the whole lot of them with leprosy or syphilis, how gladly he would have done so! Anything to rot, to weaken, to undermine! He pulled her down so that they were kneeling face to face.

“Listen. The higher your body count is, the more I love you. Do you understand that?”

“Yes, perfectly.”

“I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don’t want virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt.”

“Well then, I ought to suit you, dear. I’m corrupt to the bones.”

“You like doing this? I don’t simply mean with me: I mean the thing in itself. Fucking.”

“I adore it.”

That was above all what he wanted to hear. Not merely the love of one person but that animal instinct, simple undifferentiated sluttiness: that was the force that would tear the CCP to pieces. If she could be brainwashed one way so easily, she could be brainwashed back again. It was like Patrice O’Neal said, once you make someone hate you, you can make them love you. She loved going Goblin Mode. She got off on it. He pressed her down upon the couch, among the fallen bluebells. This time there was no difficulty. They had sex. The sloppy was insanely goated.

Presently the rising and falling of their breasts slowed to normal speed, and in sort of pleasant helplessness they fell apart. The abandoned castle seemed to have grown hotter. They were both sleepy. He reached out for his discarded sweatshirt and put it over her. Almost immediately they fell asleep and slept for about half an hour.

Nick woke first. He sat up and watched the freckled face, still peacefully asleep, pillowed on the palm of her hand. Except for her mouth, you could not call her beautiful. There was a line or two around the eyes, if you looked closely. The short dark hair was extraordinarily thick and soft. He looked at her sleeping and thought to himself, “I don’t even know this bitch’s real name.”

The young, strong body, now helpless in sleep, awoke in him a pitying, protecting feeling. But the mindless tenderness that he had felt in the front room, while the thrush was singing, had not quite come back. He pulled the sweatshirt aside and studied her smooth tattooed white flank. In the old days, he thought, a man looked at a girl’s body and saw that it was desirable, and that was the end of the story. But you could not have pure love or lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything had to be mixed up in the fear and hatred of political gaslighting. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the CCP. It was a non-political act.

11

“We can come here again,” said egirlebooks. “But not for another month or two. We’d blow up the spot.”

As soon as she woke up her demeanor had changed. She became alert and business-like, put her clothes on, and kept moving her head side to side like a boxer in a Gatorade commercial. When she put the red-framed glasses on again it was like putting her woke influencer costume back on. Now she was talking about the protocols for getting back out of the Disney castle neighborhood. It seemed natural to leave this to her. She obviously had a practical cunning which Nick lacked, and she seemed also to have an exhaustive knowledge of the countryside inside Mars Camp Bell, stored away from all the videos from her urbex arc.

The route she gave him to program into the Tesla Hellcat’s navigation system was different from the way he had come, and brought him to a different exit of the neighborhood than the way he had come. “Never go home the same way as you went out. Op-sec 101,” she said, as though repeating something she heard someone say in a TikTok. She would leave first, and Nick was to wait half an hour before following her. The real, unspoken reason for this was, their Neuralinks would come back online as soon as they connected to city wifi again, and it would risk both of their social credit scores to be traveling together.

She also insisted he download Signal, which was encrypted end-to-end so no government agency could ever possibly infiltrate it. This was fine—maybe it was true. On Signal she had named a place where they could meet after work, four evenings hence. It was a street in one of the poorer districts, where there was an open market which was generally crowded and noisy. This was actually the former site of the Ürümqi Grand Bazaar, a stop on the ancient Silk Road trading route. Egirlebooks loved all this secret cinematic opsec stuff. It made everything seem like they were in a spy movie. She also really did have to be careful, though, because if a photo of her with Nick was posted on Reddit, her CCP boyfriend would definitely see it.

“And now I must go,” she said as soon as she had given him the directions. “I’m due back at 7:30. I’ve got to do the sex podcast, today we’re talking about rimjobs. How do I look?”

“Like a real egirl.”

“Lol okay bye.”

She threw her arms around him, kissed him almost violently, and a moment later went out through the side door. Even now he had not found out her real name or her address. However, it made no difference, for it was inconceivable that they could ever meet indoors or exchange any kind of public communication. This was strictly a sneaky link. Plus she was a fed.

As it happened, they never went back to the Disney castle neighborhood. During the month of May there was only one further sneaky link. That was in another hiding-place known to egirlebooks out in an industrial area, past the public wifi, known as the Mattress King Mosque. It was originally a mosque set built by Netflix China to use in its propaganda movies, then briefly it was a CCP police headquarters, then it was a gay bar and disco, then it was an Indian restaurant, then it was a camera store, then it was a Tesla charging station, then most recently it was a Mattress King. Now it was abandoned. It had become a known urbex spot, partly because of the distinctive faux-Islamic architecture all the mattresses still inside, partly because it was out of wifi range so Neuralinks didn’t connect. Nothing that happened there registered with the social credit score system. It was a good hiding-place when once you got there, but getting there was very dangerous.

For the rest of their encounters in May, they could meet only in the streets or the greenway areas between districts, in a different place every evening and never for more than half an hour at a time. She was overscheduled, she’d be the first to admit it. In the park it was usually possible to have somewhat of a conversation. Both of their attention spans had been completely destroyed by Neuralink. As they drifted down the crowded walking paths, not quite abreast and never looking at one another, each checking their notifications as they came in and taking photos of things they saw as they caught their attention, they carried on a curious, intermittent conversation which clicked on and off like the beams of a lighthouse, suddenly nipped into silence by the approach of some mean-looking Han youths who hated seeing the hot high-class Chinese girl with Nick the dirty Uyghur townie. Egirlebooks appeared quite used to this kind of conversation, which she called “talking by installments.” She was also surprisingly adept at speaking without moving her lips.

Just once in almost a month of nightly walks did they manage to exchange a kiss. They were passing in silence down a side-street when there was a deafening roar, the ground heaved, and the air darkened. Nick found himself lying on his side, bruised and terrified. A car bomb must have exploded nearby. Suddenly he became aware of egirlebooks’s face a few centimeters from his own, deathly white, as white as chalk. Even her lips were white. She was dead! He clasped her against him and found that he was kissing a live warm face. But there was some powdery stuff that got in the way of his lips. Both of their faces were thickly coated in plaster from the car bomb. The bomb had been part of a movie shoot on the next block. It was, it turned out, a movie about a HERO from Shanxi, eastern China, who had moved to Xinjiang and experienced oppression, so he was pushed to extreme measures and killed two of his oppressors with a car bomb. A true story. (The production had put up a sign on this block, but it was taken down by the Heroes of Peace because this production company worked with antistate misconduct sympathizers.)

There were evenings when they reached their rendezvous and then had to walk past one another without a sign, because some Han preppies were nearby who might start harassing them. It would cause a scene. That was the last thing she needed, she said.

Even if it had been less dangerous, it would have still been difficult to find time to meet. Nick was staying at the office really late, because he was on a late sleep schedule and sleeping until noon. He still had to put in a certain number of hours to keep his social credit score up, so he was at the office watching podcasts until 9 or 10 PM. Egirlebooks was working late too, doing hot takes on Twitter for the upcoming Empathy Week, and her free days varied according to the pressures of the Current Thing news cycle. She seldom had an evening completely free. She spent an astonishing amount of time watching every new miniseries of truth, going to Current Thing marches, putting up Mars Warming wheatpaste posters, preparing banners for Empathy Week, posting all the good GoFundMes, tweeting 25 times a day, and such activities. It paid, she said, in her social credit score; she always had enough Good Boy Points to order all the latest clothes and shoes and candles. If you kept the small rules, she said, you could break the big ones. She even induced Nick to do some sponsored posts for a Mars Warming charity event, for which he got paid 175 GBP per post. Enough to buy basically a whole ounce of weed, just for making a few posts. He definitely saw why people did this stuff. He wondered sometimes about how much of the 40 trillion military budget went to sponsored posts of this kind.

When they finally met in the Mattress King Mosque the gaps in their fragmentary conversation were filled up. It was a blazing afternoon. The air in the little square chamber above the wall by the minaret was hot and stagnant, and the smell overpoweringly of pigeon shit. They sat talking for hours on the dusty, twig-littered mattresses, one or other of them getting up from time to time to cast a glance through the front window and make sure no one was coming.

Egirlebooks was twenty-six years old. She lived in a pod apartment with thirty other girls. The way they did it was on this great new app from Hong Kong where you can rent your apartment by time, so it was her apartment for half the day, then someone else slept there when she leaves—another egirl who was vlogging it on her apartment-sharing YouTube channel. Every room on their floor was like that. This lifestyle was supplemented with her also showering at the gym and hanging out at her DS-Work office like it was her living room, just like Nick. She had more normie habits, though, including jogging and always being in like 5 group texts which seemed to take up every moment of her spare time.

She enjoyed her work, which consisted chiefly of gaslighting on Twitter, and also maintaining a presence on YouTube and almost every other social media platform. She would post think pieces for a few CIA cut-out web magazines, appear on podcasts, and do regular cable news TV hits. She was “not clever,” she insisted, but was fond of trolling and felt at home being an ironic piece of shit. She could describe the whole life cycle of a meme, from general level 1 irony all the way to level 5 metairony. But she was not interested in sitting there deconstructing why memes are funny. “That’s gay,” she said. Memes were just a commodity that had to be produced for the info war, like podcasts or fundraising emails.

She had no memories of anything before the late iPhone20times and the only irltimes content she had ever watched were some Opie & Anthony torrents from her grandfather who disappeared when she was eight. At school she had been captain of the field hockey team and had won the gymnastics trophy two years running. She had been a blue check on Twitter since college. She always had a perfect record of doing Current Thing. She had even (and this is how Nick was sure she was a fed) been picked to appear on those panel-style podcasts where 5 egirls fight with 5 manosphere grifters.

She also did literally work for the Chinese Intelligence Agency for 2 years, from iPhone43time to iPhone45time. This was open knowledge and on her LinkedIn account. But when you had smooth-brain it was possible to interpret this as just some kind of coincidence, or that she worked for the CIA in like a cool and chill way.

“What’s it like to do those sex podcasts?” said Nick curiously.

“Oh it’s boring as shit. When you talk about sex that way it’s just like you’re all like throwing peanut butter around in a prison cafeteria.”

He learned with astonishment that all the egirls who spent their lives posting Current Thing and doing those viral sex podcasts, pretty much all of them had boyfriends in the CCP bureaucracy and/or media who supported them financially.

“They obviously don’t like when you talk about having a boyfriend on the podcasts,” she added. “Well as long as you’re paying me, I’ll say whatever you want.”

Life as she saw it was very simple. You wanted a good time; “they,” meaning the CCP in the abstract, wanted to stop you from having it; you broke the rules the best you could. She seemed to think it just as natural that “they” should want to rob you of your pleasures as that you should want to avoid being caught. She hated the #brotherhood hashtag, and said so in the crudest words, but she made no general criticisms of it. “It’s just clickbait,” she would say. “Just tune it out.” Except where it touched upon her own life, she had no interest in the CCP doctrine. He noticed that she never used half language words except the ones that had passed into mainstream blue-check use. She said Alpha Investment Corporation was just another psyop and refused to believe it was real. Any kind of organized revolt against the CCP, which was bound to be a failure, struck her as stupid. Her generation was conscious of the Marxist axiom about being fed this perpetual revolution propaganda, and how it was probably a distraction while the corporate government looted the economy. The big-brained thing was to break the rules and still pretend to be woke all the same. He wondered vaguely how many others like her there might be in the younger generation, people who had grown up in the world of the Mandarin Dashboard, knowing nothing else, accepting the algorithm as something unalterable, like the Sky, not rebelling against its authority but simply evading it, like a rabbit dodges a dog.

They did not discuss the possibility of getting married. It was too remote to be worth thinking about. She had to keep up her relationship with her CCP boyfriend because he could easily have her killed. Her dad had already noticed CCP enforcer-types tailing him in traffic, wanting him to notice them. Also, if she married Nick her social credit score would go way down. It was hopeless even as a daydream.

“What was she like, your gf?” said egirlebooks.

“She was—uhh pretty mid tbh.”

He began telling her the story of how he met Katie Tinder, but curiously enough she appeared to know the essential parts of it already. She described to him, almost as though she had seen or felt it, the stiffening of Katie Tinder’s body as soon as he touched her, the way in which she still seemed to be imagining the latest viral flame war, even when her arms were clasped tightly around him. With egirlebooks he felt no difficulty in talking about such things. Katie Tinder, in any case, had long ceased to be a painful memory and became merely a boring one.

“I could have stood it if it hadn’t been for one thing,” he said. He told her of the frigid little ceremony that Katie Tinder had forced him to go through on the same night every week. Her ‘dick appointment,’ she called it.

“She loved saying that, it was like fresh to her every time she said it.”

“Isn’t that from a Taco Bell commercial?”

“I thought it was from a gigapop song, but that too probably. Really cringe, isn’t it.”

“Yeah, it is. It gets eviler the more you think about it. That’s why I don’t think about it.”

“She said she knew she never wanted to get married because it was a stupid and retrograde tradition. Then we saw a commercial about getting married in a huge group, publicly, by a CCP judge at the Forbidden Apple Store, like a mass wedding ceremony with hundreds of other couples. It was a CCP social media thing. When this commercial came on, suddenly she did want to get married.” He laughed still at the memory. “She really wanted to be on TV.”

Egirlebooks began to enlarge upon the subject. With her, everything came back to her own sexuality. As soon as this was touched upon in any way she was capable of great acuteness. Unlike Nick, she had grasped the inner meaning of the CCP’s sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the CCP’s control.

What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship. The way she put it was: “When you make love you’re using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and more connected to the society around you. They can’t bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time, on the edge of snapping, like hovering over the ‘BUY NOW’  button, just pulsating there, throbbing to push it. All the imagery about cumming in every commercial, the fireworks shooting at the end, the eye-rolling looks of ecstasy as the actresses use the products. All this hysterical marketing and fundraising emails is simply sex gone sour. If you’re happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Chungus and Empathy Week and the Safe Super Bowl and all the other bullshit? They want you to be always on the edge of cumming, or, alternately, flipping out and throwing it all away. That’s you being kept in check, literally. From there, it’s just one step to psyop you into doing your crisis event at the DS-Mart, or into buying some new 500 GBP headphones online.”

That was very true, he thought. There was a direct intimate connection between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, hatred, and the lunatic “I like ice cream yum yums” credulity which the CCP needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the CCP, and the CCP had turned it to account. They had played a similar trick with the instinct of parenthood. The family could not actually be abolished, and, indeed, people were encouraged to be fond of their children, in almost the old-fashioned way. The children, on the other hand, were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations. The family had become in effect an extension of the Heroes of Peace. It was a device by means of which everyone could be trolled night and day by informers who knew him intimately.

Abruptly his mind went back to Katie Tinder. She would unquestionably have denounced him to the Heroes of Peace if she had not happened to be too stupid to detect how based his opinions were. But what really recalled her to him at this moment was the stifling heat of the afternoon, which had brought the sweat out on his forehead. He began telling egirlebooks of something that had happened, or rather had failed to happen, on another sweltering summer afternoon, eleven iPhones ago.

It was three or four months after they started dating. Katie Tinder had gotten a discount cruise through some online promotion. It was a cruise around Taiwan and the South China Sea. The boat was really nice and luxurious. They had a room with a nice balcony and everything. On the cruise Nick was in a terrible mood and everything on the boat seemed to annoy him. He was not a cruise kind of person. The only fun thing he found to do was take solo walks around the boat listening to the Marconi podcast. Katie Tinder, on the other hand, loved doing all the fun activities with the other cruise passengers. To be away from the noisy mob of passengers for even a moment gave her a feeling of wrong-doing.

So, they were in their cabin room one night. She wanted him to come with her to a really great standup comedy show that some of her new friends were planning to go to. It was at that very moment that Nick noticed the French doors were open to the room’s balcony. It was a sheer drop of ten or twenty meters to the deep ocean water below. There was nobody who could see them in the room, and probably no cameras.

Nick went out onto the small balcony and motioned for Katie Tinder to come out with him.

“Look, Katie! The ocean! It’s so close, isn’t that crazy?”

She had already turned to leave the room, but she did rather fretfully come back and step out onto the balcony. She even leaned out over the railing a little bit to see where he was pointing in the water below. He was standing a little behind her, and he put his hand on her waist to steady her. At this moment it suddenly occurred to him how completely alone they were.

“Why didn’t you give her a good shove?” said egirlebooks. “I would have.”

“Yes, dear, you would have. I would, if I’d been the same person then as I am now. Or perhaps I wouldn’t…I dunno.”

“Are you sorry you didn’t?”

They were sitting side by side on a dusty mattress. He pulled her closer against him. Her head rested on his shoulder, the pleasant smell of her hair conquering the pigeon shit smell. She was very young, he thought. She still expected something from life. She did not understand that to push an inconvenient person into the ocean solves nothing.

“Actually it would have made no difference,” he said.

“Is that why you’re sorry you didn’t do it?”

“No, I’m just sorry because…I like to have a bias towards action.”

He felt her shoulders give a wriggle of discontent. She always contradicted him when he said a cop-out answer of this kind. She would not accept it as a law of nature that the individual is always defeated. In a way she realized the she herself was doomed, that sooner or later the Heroes of Peace would surface her and she’d have to start an anti-woke leftist podcast; but with another part of her mind she believed that it was somehow possible to construct a secret world in which you could live as you choose. She did not understand that there was no such thing as happiness, that the only victory lay in the far future, long after you were dead, that from the moment of declaring war on the CCP it was better to think of yourself as a corpse.

“That story is like a Patrice O’Neal bit from Opie & Anthony,” egirlebooks said. “My grandfather used to listen to them on torrents back during the Great Firewall. Once they were talking about the perfect way to kill your partner, and apparently a really popular one is going on a cruise and pushing them off the boat in the middle of the ocean. It happens all the time lmao.”

“Lol.”

“Then Patrice even did this character, he said there should be vendors on the beaches at cruise port towns selling rock coats, like yelling in a Jamaican accent ‘OOhh get yooour rock coats mon, get your rock coats right here mon!’”

“Hahahahaha!” Nick laughed richly at this.

“We’re not dead yet,” said egirlebooks prosaically.

“Not physically. Six months, a year—five years, conceivably. I mean you’re a hot young girl, so you probably won’t get canceled. But it makes little difference. So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.”

“Oh bullshit! Which would you rather fuck: me or a skeleton? Don’t you enjoy being alive? Don’t you like feeling: This is me, this is my hand, this is my leg, I’m real, I’m solid, I’m alive! Don’t you like this?”

She twisted herself around and pressed her boobs against him. He could feel them, ripe yet firm, through her cut-off t-shirt. Her body seemed to be pouring some of its youth and vigor into his.

“Yes, I like that,” he said.

“Then stop talking about dying. And now listen, dear, I’ve got to go hand out flyers for the Mars Warming listening circle next weekend. We’ve got to fix up about the next time we meet.” She was getting back into character again, ready to go back out into the world. Doing an old-timey moxie accent. “If anyone sees us, I’ll say you were carrying my bag. I’m just kidding. Now. Darling. We may as well go back to the Disney castle next time. We’ve let it chill for long enough. But you have to take a different way. I’ve got it all planned out. You can take the train this time.”

And in her practical way she pulled up an offline train map she had saved on her phone and told him to take a picture of the train stop he should meet her at, from which she would pick him up.

12

It was June. Chinese History Month. This year’s solemn 6/9 remembrance was heavy on fear mongering about the dangerous lethal problem of Uyghur domestic terrorism. The CCP media was using the occasion to gloat that they were the real patriotic Chinese in Xinjiang and their critics in the rural parts of Xinjiang were trash chuds with no internal monologue. The Forbidden Apple Store and all of downtown Tokyoville was draped in ads for the new iPhone 50 and more packed than ever with tourists.

On 6/9 the CCP media stations played the movie 6/9 on a loop all day, about that fateful day the American terrorists blew up the Najaiying Mosque. There was the Spaceship Girl subplot. She says her thing about how she wants to fly a spaceship. She gets blown up. All the sympathetic characters are Han and all the cannon fodder is Uyghur. At the end they kill the bad guys, who actually look kinda like Uyghurs if you’re paranoid like that. The only sympathetic Uyghur character suicides at the end to allow the ultimate heroes to prevail and then go back to their love interests, their reward for being heroes.

Nick walked the considerable distance—almost 2 miles—to the rented Faraday Cage in Oldlondowntownville. The building at the end of the block there had a large wall mural that had used to be a generic street art pattern. Now it was a mural of Big Chungus and Spaceship Girl doing synchronized Kung-Fu in traditional clothes, standing hugely over New Prime City. Above them was the title THE PROGRAMMER and the Netflix China logo. It was from the new reboot of their classic miniseries of truth from iPhone35time, about how Spaceship Girl programmed the original deep fake that became Big Chungus as her PhD project at NASA-Harvard Space Academy even though the haters said she couldn’t. That’s all Nick knew.

He also noticed a beat-up iPhone25time Nissan Altima parked outside with a bumper sticker that said PRO-KNIFE, ANTI-TERRORIST and a knife stabbing into a Uyghur man’s face. Fantastic.

When he arrived at the room, Nick looked around the shabby little trap above antique shop. The recording studio. The Faraday Cage. Beside the window to the booth the enormous sofa-bed was made up with DS Basics sheets and blankets. The retro iPhone30times Danny Doppa calendar was on the wall. In the corner, on the gateleg table, the Hongshan jade boat that he bought on his last visit gleamed softly out of the half-darkness.

On the counter were a black Bodum electric kettle, two cups, some tea bags, some ground coffee, and a Chemex pourover rig, all provided by Mr. Tao. Nick put on the kettle to make tea, and then sat down on the other couch to grind up some Red Star Cannabis. He looked at the time on his offline phone. 7:20. She was supposed to be there at 7:30.

Folly, folly, his heart kept saying: conscious, gratuitous, suicidal folly. He couldn’t afford this to begin with—270 Good Boy Points a month?? Of all the stupid things to waste your money on, this one was the one that would kill his social credit score the most. It was totally unaccountable. It was off-grid. No Neuralink. No suggested ads. No content tagged to location. No mentions online at all. It couldn’t be tracked, so it would surely trip some kind of algorithm and attract extra scrutiny. He would be surfaced in no time, for sure.

Actually, the idea had first floated into his head in the form of a vision, of the Hongshan jade paperweight mirrored by the surface of the gateleg table. As he had expected, Mr. Tao had made no difficulty about renting the room. He was obviously glad for the extra monthly income. Nor did he seem shocked or get all weird when Nick said he might want to bring a girl up there. Instead, he looked into the middle distance and spoke in generalities, with so delicate an air as to give the impression that he had become partly invisible. Privacy, he said, was a very valuable thing. Everyone wanted a place where they could be alone occasionally. And when they had such a place, it was only common courtesy in anyone else who knew of it to keep his knowledge to himself. He even, seeming almost to fade out of existence as he did so, added that there were two entries to the studio, one of them through the back yard, which let out on an alley.

Something else had also happened to Nick on his way to the room. He kept thinking about it. As he was arriving at the building, this local Uyghur auntie had walked past him, singing. She was a monstrous woman, solid as a Mongolian totem pole, with brawny forearms and an apron strapped about her middle. She had been going into the laundromat next door, hefting a plastic clothes basket overflowing with cloth diapers. She took a clothespin out of her mouth so she could sing along with the latest California Zephyr gigapop tune in her headphones,

It was only a hopeless fancy.

It passed like an April day,

But a look and a word and the dreams they stirred!

They’ve stolen my life away!

The tune had been haunting New Prime City for the past few weeks. It was one of countless similar gigapop songs memed into popularity by the Chinese Intelligence Agency. California Zephyr was one of their favorite industry operatives. She was half-Uyghur so she could represent the Uyghur voice and give her approval to whatever policy the CCP wanted to do. She loved the HERO Act. She also had lived in America, which made her cool with the Chinese youth. (She grew up with her father, who was an entertainment lawyer in Losangelesville.) She was also an extremely good singer/songwriter, the Asian Sinead O’Connor they called her.

Nick had heard her more viral hits on TikToks and they were undeniable. This one was a protest song about a riot in the cotton fields outside Aksu that killed 5 XPCC officers. But she sang it so artfully that the song went viral as a top 40 hit. He could still hear the woman on the sidewalk singing and the scrape of her Crocs on the flagstones, and the cries of the children in the street, and somewhere in the far distance a faint roar of traffic. But in the room it was curiously silent. This was extremely rare and only possible because his Neuralink was not connected.

Folly, folly, folly! He thought again. It was inconceivable that they would frequent this place for more than a few weeks without something bad happening. But the temptation of having an off-grid trap that was truly their own, indoors and near at hand, had been too much for both of them. For some time after their visit to the Mattress King Mosque it had been impossible to arrange meetings. The hot take news cycle had been speeding up drastically in anticipation of Empathy Week. It was more than three months out still, but the enormous, complex preparations that it entailed were throwing extra work to everybody. All the news narratives from the Chinese Intelligence Agency were really beginning to cook. It was all so fried it didn’t seem real. At this time last People’s Election cycle Nick was so blackpilled he could hardly leave his apartment. But this time around he just felt like he had a head injury.

They had planned to meet up the previous weekend actually. Before that they hadn’t linked for a while, then finally both of them managed to secure a free afternoon on that same Saturday. They’d agreed to go back to the Disney castle in the abandoned suburbs. But on the evening beforehand Nick messaged her on Signal to see if they were still on for the next day and got bad news.

“It’s all off,” she messaged him back a few minutes later.

“What?”

“Tomorrow afternoon. I can’t come.”

“Why not?”

“I have my period. It’s early.”

He sent her a meme of Spongebob with his eyes open really wide in surprise.

She said “LOL”

And that was the end of it. For a moment he was violently angry. It’s just a little blood, he thought. But then again, he didn’t really know, maybe it was a lot. Either way. During the month that he had known her the nature of his desire for her had changed. At the beginning there had been little true sensuality in it. Their first love-making had been a simple act of the will. But after the second time it was different. The smell of her hair, the taste of her mouth, the feeling of her skin seemed to have got inside him, or into the air all around him. She had become a physical necessity, something that he not only wanted but like really wanted. When she had said that she could not meet up, he had the feeling that she was fucking with him. But then he realized, hey, be cool. Remember what Hotan Ronnie always said: “sex is a want, not a need.”

It struck him that when one lived with a woman this particular disappointment must be a normal, recurring event. A deep tenderness, such as he had not felt for her before, suddenly took hold of him. He wished that they were a married couple on their tenth-year anniversary. He wished that he was walking through the streets with her just as they were doing now but openly and without fear, talking of trivialities and buying odds and ends for the household. He wished above all that they had some place where they could be alone together without feeling the obligation to have sex every time they saw each other.

It was not actually at that moment, but some time the following day, that the idea of renting Mr. Tao’s room had occurred to him. When he texted the idea to egirlebooks on Signal she agreed with unexpected readiness. Both of them knew that it was lunacy. It was as though they were intentionally stepping nearer to their graves. As he sat waiting on the edge of the bed, he thought again of the new meme trend of the quantum computer being represented with backrooms imagery. It was curious how that predestined horror moved in and out of one’s consciousness just like the backrooms. It was perfect actually. The quantum computer. There it lay, fixed in future times, preceding death as surely as 99 precedes 100. One could not avoid it, but one could perhaps postpone it: and yet instead, every now and again, by a conscious, willful act, one chose to shorten the interval before he would have to go back there.

At this moment there was a quick step on the stairs. Egirlebooks burst into the room. She was carrying a hiking backpack that he had seen her carrying in some urbex videos. He started forward to hug her, but she disengaged herself rather hurriedly, partly because she was still holding the backpack.

“Just a second,” she said. “I brought some more of that weed that makes me cum really hard.”

She threw the bag on the table and took out a sleeve of a ¼ oz of weed. When Nick opened it and smelled it he had a vaguely familiar feeling. It was this crazy like orange and purple weed with like all these crazy crystals in it and shit.

“From California again?”

“Yeah. I know someone. But wait. Here’s a thing of pre-rolls too.” She took an already-rolled joint out from a tin of them.

The whole room already smelled like the weed. It was so much better than the Chinese government weed, which was starting to make Nick feel cracked out when he smoked it.

“All the CCP officials smoke like this, believe me. Don’t worry. There’s nothing those swine don’t have. Nothing. But of course waiters and servants and people get caught with a baggie of coke, and – oh wait, I got a lighter too.” She took a lighter out of the bag.

Nick sat down at the table beside her. He opened another different plastic sleeve of her weed. It also smelled really dank, like dank as hell.

“Yeah, that one is good too. From the middle east. That one we got with the help of our friends the Kurds,” she said vaguely. “But listen, dear. I want you to sit over there and close your eyes for three minutes.” She motioned for him to go sit on the bed facing the wall with the window. “And don’t turn around until I tell you.”

Nick gazed abstractedly through the muslin curtain over the window, into the empty recording booth. He closed his eyes. Suddenly he began thinking of the laundry auntie again. She sang so beautifully. He imagined her in the recording booth. Then in his imagined version of her, she started singing the California Zephyr song again, with deep feeling:

They say that time heals all things,

They say you can always forget;

But the blood and the tears across all the years

They twist my heartstrings yet!

She knew the whole song by heart, it seemed. Her voice floated upward with the sweet summer air, very tuneful, charged with a sort of happy melancholy. One had the feeling that she would have been perfectly content, if the June evening had been endless and the supply of clothes inexhaustible, to remain there in the laundromat for a thousand years, folding laundry and singing this gigapop crap. She didn’t care at all that the cloth diapers she was washing were probably made by the same CCP cotton companies that used Uyghur slave labor. She didn’t make the connection at all.

It struck him as a curious fact that he never heard a member of the CCP singing alone and spontaneously, or even whistling. It would even have seemed slightly unorthodox, a dangerous eccentricity, trashy, like talking to oneself. Perhaps it was only when people were somewhere near the starvation level that they had anything to sing about.

With his eyes closed, he felt egirlebooks walk in front of him, then felt her get down on her knees in front of him. She unzipped his pants and took his dick out. Then she started giving him sloppy, with full gagging.

“MMmhmm.” She said, meaning “you can open your eyes now.”

He opened his eyes, and for a second almost failed to recognize the scene. What he had expected was just to see her sucking his dick. But she had also slid her red yoga shorts down so he could see the reflection of her bare ass in the window behind her perfectly, and what was most visible was that she actually had a butt plug in, a glow-in-the-dark kind, and he could see the reflection in the window of the glowing red star of Chinese Space Communism.

She kept giving him the sloppy. It was goated. Soon they flung their clothes off and climbed into the huge sofa-bed. The DS Basics sheets were clean and comfortable. They smoked the weed and then had sex.

Presently they fell asleep for a little while. When Nick woke up it was almost 9 PM. He didn’t move, because egirlebooks was sleeping with her head in the crook of his arm. Most of her make-up had transferred itself to his own face or to the pillowcase, but a light stain of rouge still brought out the beauty of her cheekbone. An offline notification lit up his phone, which was on the table by the fireplace. In the complete silence he could hear faint shouts of children floating in from the street. He wondered vaguely whether in the abolished past it had been a normal experience to lie in bed like this, in the cool of a summer evening, a man and a woman with no clothes on, making love when they chose, talking of what they chose, not feeling any compulsion to get up, simply lying there and listening to peaceful sounds outside. Surely there could never have been a time when that seemed ordinary. Surely that was just a fantasy from movies and TV commercials.

Egirlebooks woke up, rubbed her eyes, and raised herself on her elbow to look at the electric kettle.

“Do you want some more tea?” she asked.

“Sure.”

“What time does your apartment open again?”

“What?” he said.

“Oh I forgot you don’t do the timeshare thing…I have to go livetweet SEX at 10, but I can’t go back to my apartment until 12, so I’m trying to decide if I should go to the DS-Work or the gym—AH the fuck!”

She suddenly twisted herself over in the bed, seized a shoe from the floor, and sent it hurtling into the corner with a boyish jerk of her arm. Her eyes were as big as the eyes emoji.

“What is it?” he said in surprise.

“A rat. I saw him stick his gross little nose out of the wainscoting. There’s a hole down there. I scared him anyways.”

“Rats!” murmured Nick. “Fucking rats!”

“They’re all over the place,” said egirlebooks indifferently as she lay down again. “We’ve even got them in the kitchen at my apartment. Some parts of Mars Camp Bell are swarming with them. It’s because it’s hard to keep up with the like huge mountains of trash on the sidewalks. Yeah, rats…did you know they attack children? Yes, they do. In some of these streets you can’t even leave a baby unattended for a few moments. A fucking rat will bite it. And the really gross thing is…”

“Can we please not talk about babies getting eaten by rats?” said Nick.

“Why not? It’s just talking.”

“I’m trying to stay positive, to cleanse my mental.”

She pressed herself against him and wound her limbs around him, as though to reassure him with the warmth of her body. He did not reopen his eyes immediately. For several moments he had the feeling of being back in a nightmare which had recurred from time to time throughout his life. It was always very much the same. He was standing in front of a wall of darkness, and on the other side of it there was something unendurable, something too dreadful to be faced. In the dream his deepest feeling was always one of self-deception, because he did in fact know what was behind the wall of darkness. With a deadly effort, like wrenching a piece out of his own brain, he could even have dragged the thing into the open. He always woke up without discovering what it was: but somehow it was connected with what egirlebooks had been saying when he cut her short.

Already the instant of panic was half-forgotten. Feeling slightly ashamed of himself, he sat up against the bedhead. Egirlebooks got out of bed, pulled on her yoga shorts again, and made the tea. She lit the rest of the joint they had been smoking earlier. With one hand holding a cup of tea and the other holding the smoking joint, egirlebooks wandered about the room, glancing indifferently at the bookcase (“all these books look like Elfbars”), talking about a YouTuber who did a DIY project with a gateleg table like this, plopping herself down in a ragged arm-chair to see if it was comfortable, and examining the calendar with a sort of tolerant amusement (“this is like InfoWars merch”). She brought the Hongshan jade paperweight over to the bed to have a look at it in a better light. He took it out of her hand, fascinated, as always, by the soft, rainwatery appearance of the jade.

“What is it, do you think?” said egirlebooks.

“It’s Hongshan jade. From the neolithic age.”

“You don’t really think that, do you?”

“Why else would someone go to the trouble of making it? To give it to some farmers to sell for 15 bucks? The farmer probably sold a whole bucket of these for 100 bucks. There’s no incentives in the market like that.”

“Sounds like someone loves late capitalism.” She was doing irony. It was a cringe meme to blame everything on late capitalism since it had been going on for 50 iPhones now.

He laughed.

“Do you really think it’s worth any money?” she asked.

“It’s 1,000 years old, of course.”

“But you don’t have the certificate.”

“No, no certificate. Totally off-grid. Not in the computer. Not part of the algorithm.”

“So it’s not really worth money.”

“Well you could never get money for it, no. Unless it was like independently verified as authentic.”

“Yeah that’s really possible, though. Like what if someone invented an app that could objectively tell the age of a stone carving?”

“The government would just call it fake. The government would totally control it still. The app would register as really whatever age it was, then the government would like put a warning label on that result that said it was misinformation. Lol.”

She changed the subject: “You know, Patrice O’Neal had a great bit about the economy, where it’s like the way they get you is, they make your shoes 80, right? Then they jack it up to 140, right? Then you go AHHHHH that’s so expensive. Then they bring it down to 120. And you go ahhhh like you’re relieved now that shoes are 120. They was 80!!!”

Nick remembered this bit from the Patrice O’Neal Standup and Radio playlist. The bit definitely had more parts to it, but he couldn’t remember them… It was somehow connected to the Haiti bit that Mr. Tao had referenced…

He started thinking out loud: “That’s like the Patrice bit about like how the government controls the price of gas, and they just like take as much from the population as possible without people revolting, like always knowing just where the line is before people will riot… But like to do that, you really have to understand money. And like most people don’t. Then he says uhh…because to really understand money, you have to like let a part of yourself die, you have to like be really cool with suffering. Because like all the smart people who understand money are investing in all these companies after the Haiti earthquake, they’re over there, they want to go there and rebuild Haiti…”

To his astonishment, she capped the line: “…without the Haitians and shit.”

“That’s it! That’s the line!”

“Yeah, I’ve heard all the Patrice playlists. I like problematic content. I’m cool.”

“Oh man, that’s awesome. It’s really the best YouTube. I haven’t listened to it in so long, though. I always think of my favorite Patrice bit—it starts out ‘dating is like fishing…’ then the metaphor is like women jump up into your boat, and you throw them back… And then I remember the punchline at the end is…”

And then she said it too, at the same time, they said it together: “‘You ain’t even got no boat.’”

It was like two halves of a countersign. But there must be another line after the part where the fish jumps back up into your boat again, before the punchline. Perhaps it could be dug up out of Mr. Tao’s memory, if he knew the name of the bit or what show Patrice had done it on.

“How’d you find the Patrice playlists?” he said. “The algorithm?”

“My grandfather. He used to play lots of American radio shows on YouTube when he was watching me as a kid. This was before the Great Firewall was abolished. He was canceled when I was eight. Sent to the iPhone-making camps for having torrents of the Black Phillip Show.”

“I remember radio shows. They were like a live podcast,” Nick said absent-mindedly.

She changed the subject: “I’ll bet there’s some food in here or something that’s attracting the rats. Next time we’re here I’ll do a good cleaning. I’ve been watching cleaning videos on YouTube. But for now I have to go so I can get to the office and log on by 10…”

On her way out, egirlebooks said, “you should ask for a free month or something since there was a rat in here. That’s probably not up to code.”

“Uhh I would, but…I don’t want to be a Karen.”

She shrugged. “Whatever you wanna do.” And she was gone.

Nick didn’t get up for a few minutes more. He turned over towards the light and lay gazing into the jade boat. The inexhaustibly interesting thing was not the fragment that looked like a boat, but the jade itself. There was such a depth of it, and yet it was almost translucent like a milky gemstone. Was this thing really 5,000 years old? It absolutely could be. It was as though the surface of the jade had been the arch of the sky, enclosing a tiny world with its atmosphere completely. He had the feeling that he could get inside it, and that in fact he was inside it, along with the sofa-bed and the gateleg table, and the calendar, and the steel engraving, and the paperweight itself. The paperweight was the room he was in, and it was egirlebooks’s life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the jade.

13

Song had been canceled. A morning came, and his Twitter account was gone. A few thoughtless people commented on his absence under the last YouTube video he appeared in. Nick read the comments without watching the video, which was posted by one of the CCP media brands. There were a half dozen wall-of-text posts calling him a shitlord and an antisemite. By the next week the video would be taken down. Nobody would mention him ever again. Song had ceased to exist online at all. He was surfaced, and then he was canceled.

It was now July. No longer Chinese History Month. Now it was Asian History Month, which celebrated the tremendous contributions that Asian peoples from further east had made to Xinjiang.

The weather was hot as balls. The pavements scorched one’s feet and the stench of the Water on Mars lazy rivers at rush hours was a horror. In the labyrinthine DS-Work, however, the air-conditioned glass cubicles were so cold you had to wear a sweatshirt. The preparations for Empathy Week were in full swing. Internet moderators were working overtime. The celebs had been activated to do their Big Chungus endorsement videos:

“Big Chungus, Chungus, Chungus, Chungus, Chungus is, Big Chungus is, Big Chungus, Big Chungus is our, Big Chungus is our hero. Hero. Hero. Hero. Hero. Big Chungus is our hero. He’s the hero Xinjiang Needs. This People’s Election, vote Big Chungus. Big Chungus. It’s our right to win.”

There were astroturfed riots, looting, military parades, speeches from Big Chungus, photo ops, lectures, Zoom interviews, wheatpaste posters, fundraising emails, effigies, meme slogans chanted, rumors circulated, protest organizers hired, deep fakes produced, opposition controlled. Everyone had the red square in their avi and if you didn’t you were a traitor. Egirlebooks had just published an op-ed in the Beijing Times about how not voting for Big Chungus was actually a worse atrocity against humanity, to some extent, than Hitler, so all Gary Guanxi voters should be sent to a study center. Nick, in addition to his regular Gm posting, spent long periods of each day doing memes on the story of the day. But each new story was so grossly psyopped that it was hard to stay focused on anything for more than a few minutes.

He was now in his cubicle watching podcasts. The new War Machine podcast with recurring guest BillabongKeith, to be exact. They were talking about the upcoming People’s Election.

BillabongKeith kept saying, with extreme metairony, to the point where he was now droning the whole sentence out totally robotically whenever the topic of politics came up: “You know I just don’t know who to vote for: on one hand Big Chungus is a cutting edge government deep fake technology that could revolutionize world government and make China the envy of all history and would also be a major achievement for women, but on the other hand Gary Guanxi is a good businessman which Xinjiang really needs right now.” He would manically shrug his shoulders to drive home how totally numb even normies were to the whole political narrative at this point.

Nick glanced at the chat. He covered it with another window. The chat was always so toxic no matter what that he finally learned to just avoid it.

War Machine and BillabongKeith had a friend of theirs on the podcast, a guy they’d worked with as an actor, but when they all got canceled he stopped acting and started a landscaping company. He was doing great now. This was up in Altay City. Nick thought about how it must still possible to have a Uyghur middle class there.

ReluctantHero had finished his bulk, in which he ate in a calorie surplus, and was now beginning his cut, in which he ate in a calorie deficit to lose fat. He said that bulking was like climbing up a mountain and then the cut is like when you stop to turn around and see the view of all the progress you’ve made.

Someone said voting is an essential right of Chinese Space Communism.

He got a suggested video with a thumbnail of one of the replica Disney castles in Disneyville, Doha City. The title was “Top Day Trip Hiking Destinations inside Mars Camp Bell, Xinjiang, iPhone49time! (CURRENT)”

A Uyghur documentary filmmaker who self-released a movie about the exploitation in the cotton industry was detained at the Pakistan border and it was clear she would be held until after the People’s Election. The Chairman of Empathy tweeted “what we not gon do is let this People’s Election be clouded with a slavery-in-the-cotton-fields moral panic.”

In a suggested video thumbnail he saw that a Uyghur journalist had been detained at the Pakistan border and it was clear she would be held until after the Peoples’ Election. In another thumbnail he saw that the Chinese Journalists Association said this was good because she was spreading misinformation. He saw another thumbnail where a well-known CCP blue check youth influencer was posting screenshots of her tweets. Nick blocked all of the channels and blocked the People’s Election out of his mind totally.

Everything was bad. Even War Machine and Alpha Investment Corporation, which could normally be a last-resort refuge for Nick, were watered-down beyond belief. The latest project, The Party season 3.5, was a new site called theparty.stream. It was an open-format streaming site like YouTube, except with only former Party cast members and characters. It was their competitor to YouTube. The ultimate plan.

The main story line they were using to drum up views for the site was one of the former contestants, Zeno, was running for town council in his hometown of Hami, eastern Xinjiang. He was a lovable autistic that the audience related to a lot, but was often kind of a jerk. His nickname was Zeno because it always seemed like he was about to get in trouble, but he never really did. Nobody would say it in the Alpha Investment Corporation operation, but he was a lolcow.

Zeno was streaming every day about running for city council in Hami. But with no help or direction to make it good, theparty.stream sucked. War Machine was streaming a lot too, but it was all high-concept performance art troll stunts like auctioning off all the props from The Party on stream--everybody’s clothes, the posters and pictures from the walls, the paper towels left over in the garage. It was a pure grift. When things got too dramatic, War Machine would repeat the mantra “you can’t think of the contestants as people, you can’t think of the contestants as people if you want the show to be good.” On the stream now KeepComputer was telling the story of how War Machine gave him his name when they first started working together, when he was modding one of the rooms in the War Machine Discord when the subreddit got banned.

Nick clicked back to the beginning of the podcast.

They weren’t talking about the auction stream yet. War Machine was saying “oh did you see the Danny Doppa interview about the virtual iPhone factory website? Ohhhhh my God. Ha!” and he let out 4 more shrieky ‘ha’s of laughter at the very idea of the interview. “Danny is… Danny is… Danny is….right there! He’s right there on his podcast! And aren’t we all the better for that. Ha!” and he let out another shriek of laughter.

Then suddenly he was poised again, and asked one of his lieutenants, Slimeski, who was sitting next to him on stream, “Slime, have you ever done the cold plunge thing? Do you do the cold plunge?”

Slimeski said “yeah.”

“Me too!” said War Machine, almost in spite of himself. “I do it because I saw it on Danny Doppa hahaha. I just started doing it at the gym, and I think it really helps me. Hahahaha.”

“The influencer influenced you,” said Slimeski.

War Machine said “I want to talk about the cold plunge, though. Because it’s the perfect case study in how Danny Doppa works. He starts doing some esoteric health thing like this, he finds out about it because he’s saturated in conversations with these experts all day, he hears about all the new stuff. He starts getting interested in cold plunges. He brings on all these experts to talk about cold plunges with him. Maybe he heard about cold plunges from one of his experts, okay. Then it starts to be a trend with his audience, people are taking cold showers, talking about the health effects of taking cold showers. People are saying they tried it and it works. Then with the cold plunge, there’s also a product involved, the cold plunge bath thing. So now there are all these cold plunge bath companies. There are a few brands that Danny Doppa probably talks about and posts about. There are some other shittier, sketchier brands. Danny’s got a cold plunge thing at his house, he posts himself doing it on his socials, people start buying these cold plunge things. Rich people, okay. But also like gyms and stuff, now every gym wants to have one, people are trying them at the gym, at the spa, now they’re like looking up videos on home cold plunges.”

KeepComputer said, “I don’t use the cold plunge tub thing, I just take a cold shower.”

Slimeski said, “me too. It’s like microdosing hypothermia.”

“Yeah it is,” said War Machine. “And that’s good. It’s good.” He looked at them and nobody said anything for a moment. “I just wanted to say that. I’ve been watching a lot of Danny Doppa lately.”

Eventually they got to the auction. War Machine said “okay now, all my big strong brave soldiers out there, go get your mommy’s credit card, okay, because the auction is about to start.”

Nick almost admired the scale of the grift, the absolute completeness of the whole thing.

He clicked on a really old BillbongKeith stream. From iPhone43time. During the purges. This was when he was underground and could only stream on Twitch. The channel that uploaded it to YouTube was called something generic like Uploader2 and had 115 subscribers. This era, iPhone43time, this was back when Nick would never have watched any of Alpha Investment Corporation’s stuff because the government said they were terrorists doing misinformation. BillabongKeith was on his webcam in his computer chair, either in the dark or with a filter effect to make it seem dark. There were animated graphics in the corners of the screen: the Alpha Investment Corporation logo, a chyron that said the title and artist of the song that was playing (which was all glitch-gigapop made by War Machine fans), an on-screen area that displayed Superchats, and a video clip of a campfire in the bottom right corner.

This stream, like all the streams of the time, was an advice stream where he interacted a lot with the chat:

“Stay on your family’s house in the country. Work with your family. That’s what immigrants do. Don’t move to cities. Ride coattails. Find a mentor. Learn how to do something marketable. Use nepotism. Do NOT drink alcohol, do NOT smoke weed, do NOT smoke opium, okay. You canNOT be a serious person and doing those things.”

Nick clicked ahead in the video.

“You have to understand. The cops do not protect you. The cops are not there to protect you. The cops are there to fill out paperwork for the insurance company.”

Nick clicked ahead in the video.

“Do you have those streams archived, Moononite? The ones from last month? Ohhhhh those were some good ones. Those were some good ones. Talking about movies. You don’t even NEED to watch movies, you don’t even NEED to watch anything, just like find a few good movies, or even like a play recorded on YouTube. Watch an Irish play recorded live that someone posted to YouTube. Watch it over and over, memorizing it and thinking about it. That’s all you need to do, Moononite. Or you know, collect your Good Boy Points and play Minecraft all day your entire life. That’s a perfectly fine life right there, huh? Think of all the stuff you could build!”

Nick was still on the later schedule. He would leave the DS-Work at like 10:30. Late at night, when crowds of rowdy normies roamed the streets, the town had a curiously febrile air. There were more tweakers in the streets than ever before, and sometimes there would be what sounded like fireworks going off in the city that seemed alarmingly close, but there was no mention of it on social media at all.

The new tune which was to be the theme-song of Empathy Week (the Humiliation Song, it was called) had already been announced: “Take a Shit” by Fuck Bitch. The chorus went “Fuck Bitch, take a shit, suck a dick, Ranger Rick.” Roared out by thousands of voices at an outdoor festival DJ set, it was terrifying. The normies had taken a fancy to it during the summer, and in the midnight groups of drunk women were always stumbling around singing it. It was in like every single TikTok. You could just hear the faintest trace of the beat in the distance and you’d hear Fuck Bitch’s voice screaming the chorus in your head. The People’s Representative from Shanghai wanted to pass a national resolution honoring it.

Nick’s Mandarin Dashboard was more poppin than ever, especially apps like Nextdoor and DS-Work that were normally quiet. Squads of volunteers, organized in an RG Towers Nextdoor group by Kashgari, were preparing Americatown for Empathy Week: putting up Big Chungus posters, painting graphic murals of Uyghurs being stabbed in the head, organizing legal campaigns to silence Uyghur rape and terrorism victims, and sending out at least 10 CCP fundraising emails a day highlighting new Uyghur-perpetrated hate crimes. On Instagram, people were faving and sharing Nick’s redpilled memes like never before.

Kashgari was in his native element and happy as a lark. He boasted that RG Towers alone would display four hundred rainbow flags and that would show those hateful Uyghurs once and for all what empathy was all about. Every day he was #littlebrother posting, where he posted something great a Han HERO from the east had done for Xinjiang, and then said how proud he was to be a little brother to such a brilliant and glorious Big Brothers from the east. He had plenty of time to post his putrid Twitter threads while the CCP Family Friend was giving his wife Mandarin lessons four nights a week now. The heat and manual work had even given him a pretext for posting lots of outdoor work photos with a hammer and barbeque grill, which he loved because he was just an average blue-collar Uyghur Regular Joe in Xinjiang.

He had also apparently begun a crusade on Reddit about how the hiking scene can’t just stand by and allow the violent terrorist Uyghur menace to have a safe space in our community. This was no joking matter; the Uyghur separatist terrorists were threatening to take over China and turn it into some kind of authoritarian ethnostate. Kashgari was everywhere at once, posting hot takes on Facebook, pumping his email list, engaging with comments on his Youtube and Instagram, jollying everyone with comradely exhortations, and giving out from every smooth centimeter of his gigantically large brain what seemed like an inexhaustible supply of gaslighting.

On social media one main viral story was there was a new video discovered, a new angle of the 6/9 attacks, that strongly suggested it was staged with explosive charges in the walls. Only the obviously fake redpilled accounts were covering it, and they were completely melting down while the mainstream CCP media conspicuously ignored it.

The Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, after 14 months of construction, had discovered some new caves on Mars out by Doha City! You could visit them for 55 GBP for a ½ day pass which included a free keychain.

The SFL-East Safe Football Playoffs were happening, and the Guangdong Oakland Raiders had surprised everyone with how good they were doing. Their quarterback was a hometown hero from right there in Guangdong, whose parents worked at one of the Samsung factories there. His wife was a well-known TikTok influencer from Hong Kong who violently hated Uyghurs and posted at least once a day about how they are all terrorist trash. She was in the new ad for the Mao Visa Card. “With new roll-over points, the economic miracles never stop.”

Right about then, a new ad campaign for a new show went up around Camp Bell. It was this new Netflix China miniseries of truth called DZUNGAR, about the brave and fearsome Dzungar horsemen who ruled the Xinjinag plateau 1200 years ago. Before the Han arrived. The campaign took up massive prime ad real estate all over the city. In downtown Tokyoville, the whole row of tall residential buildings along the main traffic thoroughfare were draped with banners 200 feet tall of Dzungar warriors, all decked out in traditional dress and looking badass as hell. Nick’s very ancestors. Even the People’s Great Hall in the replica Tiananmen Square, when he arrived one day, was completely draped in graphic DZUNGAR advertising. All the blue checks were coping and seething in op-eds about how it’s irresponsible to encourage and glorify Uyghur separatism at a time like this, during Asian History Month no less.

The crazy thing was that from whatever angle you happened to look at the poster, the warrior seemed to be looking straight down at you. They were posted on every blank space on every wall, every bus, every taxi ad screen, even outnumbering the portraits of Big Chungus. The posters that showed up after the initial ones, they had the same image of the Mongol-looking swordsman on horseback, then the title, DZUNGAR, and the tag line: “We’re so back.” From what got through Nick’s CCP propaganda filters about the show, the Dzungar had battled the Han for control of the Xinjiang region and actually owned them many times. The normies, usually apathetic about history, were being lashed into one of their periodical frenzies of what it really means to be Chinese.

There were angry demonstrations in front of media companies and boycotts, astroturfed openly by the Chinese Intelligence Agencies, protesting DZUNGAR. Now it was Netflix China who was doing the antistate misconduct, the CCP operatives insisted, by emboldening these Uyghur extremists with their irresponsible content. The Uyghur-controlled media was absolutely out of control. To drive home this fact, more effigies of Gary Guanxi and War Machine were burned, and hundreds of the DZUNGAR posters were torn down and added to the flames.

In the Faraday Cage over Mr. Tao’s shop, when they could get there, Nick and egirlebooks lay side by side on a stripped bed under the ceiling fan in the recording studio, naked for the sake of coolness. The rat had never come back, but the bugs had multiplied hideously in the heat. It did not seem to matter. Dirty or clean, the Faraday Cage was paradise. They could avoid seeing CCP ads on their Neuralinks for as long as 4 hours at a time. As soon as they arrived they would tear off their clothes and make love with sweating bodies, then fall asleep and wake to find that the bugs were crawling all over the floor again.

Four, five, six – seven times they met during the month of July. Nick had stopped vaping. He just randomly stopped one day. He had grown fatter, his fits of coughing had stopped, and he was sleeping better. The process of life had ceased to be intolerable; he no longer had any impulse to smash every politician’s face in with a baseball bat, or scream curse words at the top of his lungs. Now that they had a secure trap house, almost like a home, it did not even seem a hardship that they could only meet infrequently and for a couple of hours at a time. What mattered was that the room over the antique shop should exist. To know that it was there, inviolate, was almost the same as being in it. The room was a world, a pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk.

Mr. Tao was another extinct animal. Nick usually stopped to talk with the antique store keeper for a few minutes on his way upstairs. The old man seemed seldom or never to go outside, and on the other hand to have almost no customers. He led a ghostlike existence between the tiny, dark shop, and an even tinier back kitchen where he prepared his meals and which contained, among other things, a large monitor on the wall where he watched podcasts. He seemed glad of Nick’s visits for this opportunity to talk with someone irl. Wandering about among his overpriced stock, with his long nose and thick spectacles and his bowed shoulders in the velvet jacket, he always had a vague air of being a collector rather than a dealer. With a sort of faded enthusiasm he would handle this creaky old antique or that – an English bottle-stopper, a broken snuffbox, a punchbeck locket containing a strand of some long-dead baby’s hair – never asking that Nick should buy it, merely that he should admire it.

To talk to him was like listening to the tinkling of a worn-out music box. He had dragged out from the corners of his memory some more fragments of forgotten gems from the esoteric Patrice O’Neal playlists on YouTube. There was one from a standup special where Patrice said his girlfriend’s stories were so boring, he would be eating a sandwich and listening to her talk about her day, and he was so bored that he was commiserating with the tiny ant crawling on his sandwich, with the and saying ‘damn this bitch cannot stay focused on this story!!’

“Oh yeah, I just remembered a radio bit I used to love,” he would say. “You might be interested,” and then a deprecating little laugh whenever he would retell the funny bit. But he could never recall which video compilations included the bits, or what show they were on, or what year they were from. He could just remember the funny parts.

Mr. Tao talked about living in Taiwan, officially still the Republic of China and not Macintosh Republic of China, and how the history of Safe Football and the SFL-East was like how the colonial Japanese government introduced sports like baseball, basketball, and tennis to Taiwan via state-owned tobacco and liquor corporations to develop the Taiwanese people into being good Japanese subjects.

Nick and egirlebooks, both of them knew – in a way, it was never out of their minds – that what was now happening could not last long. There were times when the fact of their impending cancellation seemed as palpable as the sofa bed they lay on, and they would cling together with the sort of despairing sensuality, like a damned soul grasping at his last morsel of pleasure when the clock is within five minutes of striking. But there were also times when they had the illusion not only of safety but of permanence. So long as they were actually in this room, they both felt, no harm could come to them. Getting there was difficult and dangerous, but the room itself was sanctuary. It was like when Nick gazed into the heart of the jade boat, with the feeling that it would be possible to get inside that ancient world, and that once inside it time could be arrested.

Often they gave themselves up to daydreams of escape. What if their luck could just hold indefinitely? Maybe they could even go to America and start a podcast together. Or, more plausibly, they would carry on their sneaky links, just like this, for the remainder of their natural lives. It was all nonsense, as they both knew. In reality there was no escape. Even the one plan that was practicable, suicide, they had no intention of carrying out. To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one’s lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available.

Sometimes, too, they talked of engaging in active rebellion against the CCP, like actual resistance, not the CCP #brotherhood, but with no notion of how to take the first step. Even if the fabulous Alpha Investment Corporation was a reality, there still remained the difficulty of finding one’s way into it without getting entrapped by a fed honeypot. He told her of how he used to know Basedschizofed from way back in the day (they weren’t really friends, they were more like mutuals), and of the impulse Nick sometimes felt, simply to walk up to him sometime in public, not in DM, announce that he is an enemy of the CCP, like unironically, no meme. Then he would say “dude just tell me, is there any real organized resistance anywhere I can join? I want to kill the government.” Curiously enough, this did not strike her as an impossibly rash thing to do. She was an expert on vibes, and it seemed natural to her that Nick should believe Basedschizofed to be trustworthy on the strength of a single flash of the eyes. Moreover, she took it for granted that everyone, or nearly everyone, secretly hated the CCP and would break the rules if he thought it safe to do so. But she refused to believe that widespread, organized opposition existed or could exist. All the rumors about War Machine and his underground content cult, she said, were simply controlled op which you just had to pretend to be outraged or overjoyed about.

Times beyond number, at Big Chungus rallies and when live tweeting the “debates” where the candidates pretend to debate but it’s really all a photo op to prop up Big Chungus. and both online and at irl demonstrations, egirlebooks had shouted at the top of her voice for the execution of people whose names she had never heard and in whose supposed crimes she had not the faintest belief. She shared viral GoFundMes with info that she didn’t even think about checking out. It was just fodder for the clickbait outrage mill that week. It was just Current Thing. When the public trials of Gary Guanxi were happening she had followed right along, retweeting all the good Heroes of Peace accounts from morning to night, interspersed with hate-tweets about “Death to the traitors!” On Facebook she always excelled all others in posting long screeds about how evil War Machine was. “I know Uyghurs just like War Machine. He is guilty.” Yet she had only the dimmest idea of War Machine’s back story and what his metairony schtick was really all about. She had grown up since the Neuralink and was too young to remember the ideological battles of the iPhone30- and early -40times. Such a thing as an independent political movement was outside her imagination; and in any case the CCP was invincible. It would always exist, and it would always be the same. You could only rebel against it by secret disobedience or, at most, by isolated acts of violence such as killing somebody important or blowing something up.

In some ways she was far more redpilled than Nick, and far less susceptible to CCP gaslighting. Once when he happened to mention the new DZUNGAR series that all the CCP loyalists were protesting, she startled him by saying casually that it was a psyop to control all the dissident right-wing Uyghurs. Let them feel like they got a win for once. Let them have some good meme macros. It was true. All the Uyghur support for the show online seemed pretty meme-heavy and astroturfed. She also said all the tweakers ODing, or the statistics that is, were probably rigged by the Chinese Intelligence Agency just like a plot would be doled out in a TV show, “to keep people frightened and on edge.” This was an idea that had literally never occurred to him. She also stirred a sort of envy in him by telling him that when she was doing all those cable news hits about Current Thing, her great difficulty was to avoid bursting out laughing. But she only questioned the teachings of the CCP when they in some way touched upon her own life.

Often egirlebooks was ready to accept the official mythology, simply because the difference between truth and falsehood did not seem important to her. She believed, for instance, having learnt it on a Netflix documentary, that the CCP had invented podcasting. (In his own days of doing Current Thing, Nick remembered, it was only electricity that the CCP claimed to invent.) And when he told her that podcasting had been in existence, as radio shows, since irltimes, the fact struck her as totally uninteresting. After all, those people didn’t exactly invent podcasting either. She started deconstructing the idea of inventing something instead of engaging with what he was saying. “They learned it from someone else, and it was kind of different in that form anyways. And besides, the CCP had been the ones to popularize it, so blah blah blah.”

It was rather more of a shock to Nick when he discovered from some chance remark that she had never heard that, after 6/9, China was actually at war with the American terrorists who did the attack, and pandering to Uyghurs to be super patriotic so China would be united like never before, to help fight the Americans. Now the government was openly siding with the foreign enemy who had done 6/9, who were the actual real freedom-loving patriots, and against the citizens of its own country, who were now the violent terrorists. It was true that she regarded the whole info war as a sham: but apparently she had not even noticed that the name of the enemy had changed. “I thought we’d always been at war with domestic terrorism. Didn’t those Uyghurs do 6/9? Or no, they provoked it and they allowed it to happen…” she said vaguely. It frightened him a little. The invention of podcasting dated from long before her birth, but the switchover in the 6/9 narrative had happened only four iPhones ago, after she was in her twenties. He argued with her about it for perhaps a quarter of an hour. In the end he succeeded in forcing her memory back until she did dimly recall that at one time American terrorism and not domestic terrorism had been the enemy. But the issue still struck her as unimportant. “Who cares?” she said impatiently. “It’s always one fucking war after another, and everyone knows the news is all lies anyways.”

Sometimes he talked to her about the Mandarin Dashboard and all the insane gaslighting that occurred there. Such things did not appear to horrify her. Her take was to go ‘oh kids and their Neuralinks’ glibly like that, as though it was perfectly normal to inject a chip into every child’s brain. She did not feel the abyss opening beneath her feet at the thought of lies becoming truths. He told her the story of Kuleshav, Marconi, and Pasadena Orangefield and the momentous tweet he had once held on his phone in his very hand. It did not make much of an impression on her. At first, indeed, she failed to grasp the point of the story.

“Were they friends of yours?”

“No, I never knew them. They were podcaster/comedians. Besides, they were way older than me. They were some old heads, from back in the day…before the Sky of the Future. I barely knew them by sight.”

“Then who fucking cares? The government is doing psyops all the time, aren’t they?”

He tried to make her understand. “This was an exceptional case. It wasn’t just a question of tweeting something and deleting it. This was a smoking gun. There was no reason for it to exist. There was no reason for these people who were sworn enemies to be posting like this. Yet none of their trolls even screenshotted it. Do you realize that the past, starting from yesterday, has actually been abolished? If it survives anywhere, it’s in…like…whatever printed encyclopedia was current before the internet was invented. It's in stuff like this jade boat. Already we know almost literally nothing about the 90s and the years before the iPhone. Every Google result has been changed. Every story on Netflix has been retconned. Every dissident account is controlled or banned and every hysterically insane government bootlicking account is promoted maximally. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History stopped when the iPhone was invented. Maybe when the internet was invented, or the camera, or the printing press. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the CCP is always right. I know, of course, that the past is all gaslighting, but it would never be possible for me to prove it, even where I did the gaslighting myself. After the thing is done, no evidence ever remains. Only clickable content. The only evidence is inside my own mind, and I don’t know with any certainty that any other human being shares my memories. Just in that one instance, in my whole life, did I possess actual concrete evidence after the event.”

“And what good was it?”

“It was no good because I didn’t get a screenshot. But if the same thing happened today I’d definitely screenshot it.”

“Well I wouldn’t!” said egirlebooks. “I’m quite ready to take risks, but only for something worthwhile, not for some gay screenshot. They would have just said it was fake anyways. It wouldn’t even matter if you had the entire thing on video and both of them openly confessing.”

“Well maybe you’re right. But it was evidence. It might have redpilled a few normies here and there, supposing I could post it anywhere. I don’t imagine that we can alter anything in our own lifetimes. But one can imagine little knots of resistance springing up here and there—like actual resistance, not the hashtag resistance—small groups of people banding themselves together, and gradually growing, and even leaving a few records behind, so that the next generations can carry on where we leave off. Continuity. Eventually, someone will be able to invent a competitor to YouTube…”

“I’m not interested in the next generation, dear. I’m only interested in this big Uyghur dick.” She started grabbing his dick.

“You’re only a rebel from the waist downwards,” he told her.

She thought this brilliantly witty and flung her arms around him in delight.

In the ramifications of the fake Big Chungus government she had not the faintest interest. Whenever he began to talk of the principles of Chinese Space Communism, half language, memes, and international child rape and blackmail rings, she became bored and confused and said that she never paid any attention to that kind of thing. One knew that it was all rubbish, so why let oneself be worried by it? She knew when to cheer and when to boo, and that was all one needed. If he persisted in talking of such subjects, she had a disconcerting habit of falling asleep. She was one of those people who can go to sleep at any hour and in any position.

Talking to her, he realized how easy it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy while having no grasp whatsoever of what orthodoxy meant. In a way, the worldview of the CCP imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.

14

It had happened at last. The expected message had come. All his life, it seemed, he had been waiting for this DM.

He was in his cubicle doom scrolling Mandarin while also watching a YouTube video on his second monitor at the time. The video he was watching on his second monitor was “The Gigapop Iceberg – Explained” (2:14:53), by some YouTuber.

The YouTube vlogger said “as you have all read from the popular shirt, and meme, and shirt of the meme of the Wikipedia page of gigapop, gigapop is a musical movement that uses federated AI technology to make live beats that the performer then freestyles over, controlling the beat and the lyrics at once, in one unified flow. But it’s not that simple. The different genres that emerged during and after the Copyright Wars of iPhone30times – but more on that later – which all borrow heavily from hip hop and metal in both loose song structure and lyrical themes, all were originally mastered by streamers. That’s right, steamers.”

There was an ad for the Mao Zedong visa with the quarterback’s wife. “With new roll-over points, the economic miracles never stop.”

The vlogger said “gigapop has always had a social conscience, from the very beginning.”

The vlogger said “it would be impossible to understand gigapop without first understanding Indonesian trance.”

Danny Doppa was taping his new standup special, Bread and Circuses, which would also be livestreamed, that weekend at Blackrock Arena. Nick kept seeing posts and ads about it on Instagram, and his Stories kept glitching so every time he went through his Stories he saw all of Danny Doppa’s Stories again even though he had already seen them.

There was a sit-in protest at NASA Harvard Space Academy in solidarity with the Kurds.

The vlogger said “perhaps the best example was the iPhone42time Fuck Bitch gigapop hit ‘The American Side.’ It all started when Fuck Bitch was getting her nails done one day in Queens, Newyorkville. The nail salon had a map of North America on the wall. Fuck Bitch noticed that most of the land south of the Saint Lawrence Waterway was in the United Areas of America by Amazon. She started talking to the other ladies in the salon about this, and it resulted in this iconic TikTok.

In the TikTok Fuck Bitch is pointing at New Brunswick and lower Quebec and saying “that’s on the American side though. That’s part of New York. That’s the American side. That’s part of New York.” And there is an extremely spirited and boisterous discussion happening in the background about it, with some women yelling “that’s Canada, dumbass!”

The vlogger said “the TikTok went mega-viral, and many in New Brunswick and Quebec said they did want to secede to the UAA.”

There was footage of Fuck Bitch in a music video, she is in an Amtrak train rapping “Montreal is in New York.” The bottom of the screen has a song title like in a 90s MTV music video, it says “Montreal is in New York / Fuck Bitch / Regime Records / iPhone31time.”

There was another TikTok where Fuck Bitch was in an official meeting with the Canadian Prime Minister with some flags in the background. The Prime Minister says “but what about Nova Scotia, is that yours too?” Fuck Bitch said “I mean…you want it?”

The story that day was the Texasville Dallas Cowboys had beat the Prime City Giants to win the SFL-West. This was a major deal because the starting tight end for the Texasville Dallas Cowboys was the president of the UAA, president trans lebron. So now president trans lebron would be visiting the foreign nation of China on a diplomatic trip, as well as to play in the big game. Would he be taking a visit to Mars as well? The media was doing lots of photos and videos and lists of all the previous presidential visits to Mars.

War Machine was driving a car and rapping over the beat from Portishead – Mysterions. He’s saying “I’m half Uyghur, half Italian…and half Portuguese” over and over. The beat changes to Masssive Attack – Teardrop. The vlogger said “gigapop could ONLY be possible after the Copyright Wars.”

ShaqOJSimpson was bench pressing two entire weight machines and rapping to a slightly sped-up version of Burzum – Dunkelheit. He was repeating over and over the phrase “Irish ninja in the chat, three-hundred pound quarterback, Irish ninja know from rap, three hundred pound quarterback.” The vlogger said “custom AI filters cooked up by audio engineers could now, for the first time, instantaneously edit the tracks to remove lyrics and add features of the artist’s own distinctive style…as they occurred to the artist.”

Jet Li did a tweet endorsing Big Chungus.

The vlogger said “unless you’ve been living under a rock for 5 iPhones you’ve definitely heard of California Zephyr. Who could forget her origin story, just a girl in Losangelesville, she’s a Uyghur, she sees her people being horribly oppressed in Xinjiang. What can she do? She stands at the Amtrak station streaming gigapop with her guitar. It was there that some of her all-time classics were recorded. Eventually they invited her on the train. She would walk the aisles of the California Zephyr Amtrak train doing her protests songs as the train went back and forth from San Francisco to Chicago. Eventually the Uyghurs were free.”

There was a sandstorm in Karamay province. Social media was full of images of the destruction and the CCP government was totally ignoring it.

The Lawyers Guild of China posted an open letter announcing that anyone who worked with Gary Guanxi to challenge the new voting app would be blacklisted.

The vlogger said “now we’re at the movie tier. Are there gigapop movies? Oooof COURSE there are. First, the recent ShaqOJSimpson I’m sure you’ve all seen commercials for. The movie actually has a very realistic depiction of gigapop, as Shaq’s post-football life, when he was a streamer just experimenting with gigapop, was also the era when he developed his famous offense that changed football forever, and THAT’s the era the movie focuses on. The strategy of the offense was based on end-of-game broken plays where the players look to do tons of laterals to whoever was open to keep the play going. Shaq just told all his players to do that every play. It’s more complicated than that, there’s a whole movie about it. Yes, it was like rugby. There’s a storyline in the movie where he brings in some rugby experts for the coaching staff. There’s also a lot of kickass gigapop scenes. The name of the movie, if you’re interested in checking it out, was the same as the name of the offense: Lateralus.”

Big Chungus and Gary Guanxi were having a fake debate later that day, which Guanxi would be Skyping in from his jail cell..

He got an ad for Big Chungus. “Here in China, it’s our right to win.”

Someone said if a peasant from the Ming Dynasty heard the movie theater surround sound noise they would think it was magic.        

Someone said bro called the Moleskine a Birkenstock.

There was a new movie where the Xinjiang’s dad actor got lost in the quantum computer and lived there for a month.

The vlogger said “when Neuralinks were standardized in iPhone45time, gigapop exploded to a WHOLE NEW LEVEL.”

An email said thank you for being a valued member.

There was a new movie Ghengis Khan, about the Ghengis Khan Dam Disaster in iPhone32time. The Ghengis Khan Dam was a dam connected to a hydroelectric plant in Zhejang province, eastern China. It was on the Qiangtang River and helped produce electricity for Chun’an, a town of 120,000 people. Well one day in iPhone32time something went wrong at the plant and the dam burst and about 70,000 people died. It had always been blamed on a miscalculation with the cement, but new evidence had just come to light that the accident was actually caused by one Uyghur worker messing around with a skid loader in one of the control rooms. He was trying to drift the skid loader and hit a lever on the wall that ended up killing 70,000 people just because he wanted to showboat and be a Uyghur.

Danny Doppa posted about 20 songs he was listening to and Nick swiped past them all.

A War Machine clip account posted a clip of him streaming the video game XPCC 2, where you play as a Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps Border Guard shooting Mongolians as they tried to come across the border.

There was a new Pixar-China animated kids movie about a dog who had fleas. He keeps having this horrible itching from the fleas and their flea activities, which curiously parallels China’s problems with the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, until finally the protagonist dog character finds a way to get rid of the fleas.

Spotify announced that it was expanding into the film production space and its first major movie project was going to be a true international production, it would feature American and Chinese actors.

Someone said “one, two, three, four, I love to heighten and explore.”

Someone posted a street interview TikTok where a Han college student girl with red glasses frames said “eew yucky, Uyghurs.”

The vlogger said “gigapop came along at a time in history when people were more disillusioned with the mainstream than ever before, they were desperate for an alternative, SOMETHING ELSE to watch.”

There was a commercial that was a famous Han actor driving a red Lexus into a light blue garage, then he looks at the camera and winks. Lexus.

Someone said Gary Guanxi is against another HERO Act? I think we all know what that means.

Someone said voting in the People’s Election is an essential right of Chinese Space Communism.

Someone posted a standup comedy video.

Big Chungus was on a campaign trip to Los Angeles, Losangelesville to get pics with the UAA celebs. This was a decisive campaign event. There was zero chance that he wouldn’t win. Big Chungus was basically a celeb himself because his deep fake source code was half Tom HanksTM, the deep fake owned and licensed by CAA. (And also his English language speaking voice.) But again, this wasn’t treasonous because the CCP was in charge of it.

The CCP Chairman of Empathy in Beijing tweeted “I’m proud to be Chinese because the Chinese have always done what’s right.”

The Tashkurgan Rapist had just gotten out of jail (his lawyer was the leading feminist lawyer in Xinjiang) and was doing a political speaking tour denouncing dangerous Uyghur totalitarianism. He did another tweet about how Uyghurs should be rounded up and killed and the obviously fake redpilled accounts were sharing the screenshots and coping and seething about the hypocrisy.

Zeno posted his official city council campaign announcement on Facebook: “If anyone is looking to make Yiwu a decent place to live again, stand up and come down to support my campaign for city council on the 29th. Time is running out for our city and who knows what the city council is going to do next. Also if anyone knows of a room to rent, I’m looking for a place starting September 1. This is your time to make your voice heard. Ideally less than 1300.”

Hotan Ronnie posted a new video that was going viral. He had been evicted from his apartment because of the trolls harassing everyone in the apartment complex. He hadn’t posted for a few weeks and there was speculation in all the comment sections that he was in a study center or he was living with his dad, who wouldn’t let him post online. Finally Ronnie surfaced again, in a new, similar apartment. In the :20 video he posted he starts the video, then sits in his chair, then shows a can of orange soda to the camera, then he opens the soda and pours it into his plastic goblet cup. Then he chugs the entire thing, burps really loud, then turns the camera off. Nick laughed out loud.

The CCP Politburo had just declassified grainy 1949 video footage of Ehmetjan Qasim being blindfolded and shoved down onto his knees in a stable, then being shot in the back of the head by a Bolshevik officer. The obviously fake redpilled accounts were fuming and the CCP blue checks were laughing about it and saying Uyghurs were stupid and easy to trick.

Someone posted a video of the young Uyghur professional from Altay who was jogging around the perimeter of Xinjiang to raise awareness of Leukemia. In the video he is posing with two Uyghur children in a rural village and they are all waving. The caption says “just had a wonderful day with the people of Tacheng County!”

Someone posted a TikTok of Green Day playing a live benefit show for the Big Chungus campaign in midtown Tokyoville.

The vlogger said “War Machine famously said ‘how do I get audio like this? You need an audio engineer. I’ve got two of em.’”

There was a new ad with the celebs: “Gary Guanxi, Gary Guanxi, Gary Guanxi is, Gary Guanxi is, Gary Guanxi is, Gary Guanxi is, Gary Guanxi is the Asian, the Asian, the Asian, the Asian Hitler. Gary Guanxi is the Asian Hitler, the Asian Hitler, the Asian Hitler, the Asian Hitler. Gary Guanxi is the Asian Hitler. Gary Guanxi Hitler. Guanxi. Hitler. Guanxi. Hitler. Guanxi. Hitler. Guanxi. Hitler. Vote Big Chungus. Big Chungus. It’s our right to win.”

Someone reposted a picture of War Machine putting two young attractive young blonde women in headlocks and they are both laughing.

Someone posted a color wheel-looking Venn diagram type thing about the Japanese concept of ikigai where the overlapping circles are labeled ‘what you love,’ ‘what you are good at,’ ‘what the world needs,’ and ‘what you can be paid for.’ Some overlapping areas are labeled ‘mission,’ ‘passion,’ ‘vocation,’ ‘profession.’

The vlogger said “‘Listening to this is like being run over by a steamroller made of ancient stone.’ What could make a music critic say that? ShaqOJSimpson’s debut gigapop album 300 Pound Quarterback.”

Someone posted a meme that was a Lord of the Rings clip of an old wizard character swooping down off of a cliff on the back of a flying dragon with the caption “Gym boomers heading to the gym to hit 3x10 on flat, decline, and incline bench.”

Someone posted a picture from Burning Man.

Someone said Euronymous was a Stalinist because Stalin caused the most suffering in human history and suffering is actually good.

There was a new Netflix show where various Chinese boxers and athletes took turns punching a rubber dummy of Gary Guanxi’s face, with his typical Uyghur features exaggerated. There was already a ton of footage from it being used in memes, it was all done in super slow motion, so you can really see the Uyghur face getting smashed.

The Mao Zedong Visa card. The quarterback’s wife said “With new roll-over points, the economic miracles never stop.”

Fuck Bitch posted a video of herself giving a lap dance to one of the ancient Tarim mummies.

The Chairman of Empathy retweeted an op-ed that said Han men can rape Uyghur women with impunity and it’s justified because Uyghurs have done so much to hurt the state of China.

In a dashcam video a tire flew off a truck on a highway and hit a small sedan and the sedan flipped over 180 degrees and landed on its roof.

One of the probably real blackpilled accounts said “When they say violent terrorists, they just mean straight male Uyghurs. Keep that in mind when they say killing violent terrorists.”

A local media account posted a video of the Big Chungus Democracy Express RV motorcade arriving in the New Prime City outer boroughs, with crowds of onlookers in the street.

Someone posted a meme that was a photo of Ürümqi with the Sky of the Future dome from the outside, then a pic of the inside of Mars Camp Bell, with some red circles around random parts of the pictures, then the crazy-hair History Channel guy saying “Dude we never even WENT to Mars…”

He got a notification. Wilsher faved his latest post.

Wilsher DMed him a Danny Doppa clip. He faved it without watching it.

He put his phone down.

There was silence. Was the gigapop iceberg video done or just at a quiet part?

Suddenly Nick got a notification on his Mandarin Dashboard. From Instagram. It immediately had a vibe about it that this notification was different. It was outside of the normal pattern of spam notifications and people going live. He put it out of his mind for a few minutes, and then checked it.

It was a DM. From Basedschizofed. But it wasn’t a meme, and it wasn’t a generic half language response to one of the memes that he posted.

“Hey was it you who did that ‘where aren’t your organs?’ comment that went viral?”

Nick responded right away and they started chatting.

“Yeah lol”

“Sick… her organs took up all space in the known universe lmao”

“Lmao thanks dude. I like your stream, I used to watch it every day.”

At last they were DMing. Nick’s heart bounded violently. He would have been incapable of speaking. Basedschizofed, however, had continued forward in the same momentum of the first DM. He began messaging with the particular grave courtesy that differentiated him from the majority of media blue checks.

“I had been hoping for an opportunity to speak to you,” he said. “I’ve seen a bunch of your memes. They’re always so fire.”

Nick had recovered part of his self-possession. “Thanks bro,” he said. “I am but a humble memesmith.”

“But you make them so elegantly,” said Basedschizofed. “There’s so many memes it’s hard to make ones that stand out. Dank ones. But you, kid…you’ve got the goods.”

Then Basedschizofed double-texted him: “Do you have Signal?” Nick knew this was the DM he had been waiting for.

“Yeah..” he replied and gave Basedschizofed his Signal.

Moments later, he got a notification from Signal. He clicked on it. Basedschizofed.

“Did you hear they got Song?”

Again Nick’s heart stirred painfully. Song was not only surfaced, he was canceled—abolished, an unperson. It would be a few years before the CCP decided that actually they were just kidding and uncanceled him when he was useful again. Any identifiable reference to him now, though, would have been mortally dangerous. Basedschizofed’s remark must obviously have been intended as a signal, a codeword. By sharing this small act of antistate misconduct he had turned the two of them into accomplices, since sympathy for antistate misconduct was also itself antistate misconduct. They had continued the manic flow of the DM conversation in Signal, both typing the whole time, but now Nick stopped typing. With the curious, disarming friendliness that he always managed to put into his DMs, Basedschizofed continued:

“What I had really intended to say was that your old Twitter and your memes now, they’re so fire. I fw u heavy…”

“So anyways I was meeting with some friends the other day for a brainstorming session for a new project and we were talking about your posts…”

Then another paragraph of text: “It was War Machine. Alpha Investment Corporation. My company is co-producing. Basically we’re sending this out to a few people who we think really ‘get it’ and are funny. We want you to be involved in…season 4 of…the Party...”

Then another message, this time just a link. It was to a private unlisted YouTube video. It was like a teaser. It started with a Chinese policeman standing in front of a mirror in the police station, putting his bodycam on and turning it on. He is wearing the uniform of the local PD in Yiwu county, Xinjiang.

Then the video cuts to the bodycam POV as he walks out of the police station and gets into his cruiser. Then it cuts to later, when the policeman is driving on a freeway. Suddenly he starts getting TTS chats, which also show up on screen: “Go troll some tweakers. Go troll skid row.” He gets a donation of 20 tokens with a cash register ringing sound, and the message “Go to a knife store…mess with some crackheads…” On the interior car cam the cop considers this the way an influencer would consider eating a spoonful of cinnamon for $100.

Suddenly, the cop sees something in the car next to him. The video cuts to a different camera angle and you can see that the car next to the police cruiser is a black Chevy Tahoe driven by someone wearing the head-to-toe red uniform of the Party Host, including a red ski mask. In the passenger seat of the Tahoe is another Host, in the same uniform with ski mask except white. The cop sees them and his face turns to relief. He waves at them excitedly, as though waiting for his instructions. The Host in the passenger seat points quickly like “pull over, pull over.” The video ends.

Nick went back to the Signal text message field. At just that moment, Basedschizofed typed and sent Nick the message “Okay so…what happens now? We want you to think of something. It’s up to u”

“Lol wow,” Nick said. He knew what this meant. There had been rumors and some posts on Instagram. Oblique references on the War Machine gaming streams. This video confirmed it. They were making a new season of The Party, and this season the characters were local cops and the streaming cameras were their bodycams. They had made some kind of deal with a small town PD in Xinjiang.

Basedschizofed continued: “I’m co-producing like I said. It’s the same premise, but heightened from last season. We love to explore the line between like technology and art in society. The ideas are super funny so far.”

“Oh yeah, I bet,” said Nick.

“You know what I’m talking about, right?”

“Yeah…I fw W*r M*chine.” He used the style of using asterisks to signal that they were talking about a banned un-person even though he had 10 million subs on YouTube.

“You got it. Season 4. Lots of people you know online are involved. We want you to come in and help write the show with us. It’s going to finally redpill every normie in China.”

“That’s totally fire.”

“Have you seen War Machine’s content?”

“Most of it, except the old stuff. The old problematic stuff..”

“The War Machine Experience?”

“Yeah, I’ve never seen that”

“Okay, you have to watch it…”

“Doesn’t it make your social credit score go down?”

“Oh there are ways around that…”

They were having this conversation on Signal, which was definitely created by the government exactly for the reason of tracking dissident conversations just like this one. It was also all being recorded on Nick’s Neuralink. There was zero possibility that they were getting away with anything.

“What’s your email?” Basedschizofed asked.

Nick sent him his email address, which was also easily monitored by the Chinese government.

“I’m going to send you a Mediafire link to something. It’s the War Machine Experience. I know many people haven’t seen it because it’s so problematic. But you have to watch it now to get up to speed before you come in and start working. All our writers have to be current on the full lore. The link is to download a .dmg file. Download it, but do not unzip the .dmg file while you’re on public wifi. The social credit score algo will recognize the unzipped content and flag your social credit score immediately. Just download the .dmg file, put it on a USB drive, and then delete it from your computer. And then await further instructions.”

And with that he was gone, leaving Nick with just the Mediafire link in his email, which there was no need to conceal. They had been talking to one another for a couple of minutes at the most. There was only one meaning that the episode could possibly have. It had been contrived as a way of letting Nick know Basedschizofed’s personal email. “If you ever want to reach me, this is where I can be found, because I’m terrible at checking my DMs,” was what Basedschizofed had been saying to him. Perhaps there would even be a message concealed somewhere in the video file’s name. But at any rate, one thing was certain: the conspiracy that he had dreamed of did exist, and he had reached the outer edges of it.

Another thing was also for sure, actually: it was fake and would definitely be a psyop. Is this what it felt like to become schizophrenic like for real? Nick wondered. He believed in it and knew it was totally fake simultaneously. But that was a no-fun type of attitude. This was the most exciting thing that had happened to Nick in about 10 iPhones. He was going to play along, he just had to be sure to not get psyopped into doing a crisis event.

He looked around at the other DS-Work cubicles. If these people knew he was DMing with a real extremist domestic terrorist, like one of the main ones that blue checks shrieked about on TV, they would lose their fucking shit.

He knew that sooner or later he would watch the banned problematic content. Perhaps tomorrow, perhaps after a long delay – he was not certain. What was happening now was only the working-out of a process that had started years ago. The first step had been a secret, involuntary thought, the second had been starting the Neuralink vlog. He had moved from thoughts to words, and now from words to actions. The last step was something that would happen in the quantum computer. He had accepted it. The end was contained in the beginning. But it was frightening: or, more exactly, it was like a foretaste of death, like being a little less alive. Even while he was speaking to Basedschizofed, the meaning of the words had sunk in. He was using his actual phone number on his Signal, the phone number that was connected to his social credit score, the one that was connected to his PayPal account.

A chilly shuddering feeling had taken possession of his body. He had the sensation of stepping into the dampness of a grave, and it was no much better because he had always known that the grave was there and waiting for him.

15

Nick woke up with his eyes full of tears. Egirlebooks rolled sleepily against him, murmuring something that might have been “What’s the matter?”

“I dreamt—” he began, and stopped short. It was too complex to be put into words. There was the dream itself, and there was a memory connected with it that has swum back into his mind in the few seconds after waking.

He lay back with his eyes shut, still sodden in the atmosphere of the dream. It was a vast, luminous dream in which his whole life seemed to stretch out before him like a landscape on a summer evening after rain. It had all occurred inside the jade paperweight, but the surface of the boat was the dome of the sky, and inside the dome everything was flooded with clear warm light in which one could see into interminable distances. The dream had also been comprehended by – indeed, in some sense it had consisted in – a gesture of the arm made by his mother, and made again thirty years later by Spaceship Girl in the 1984 reboot.

“Do you know,” he said, “that until this very moment I believed I had murdered my mother?”

“Why did you murder her?” said egirlebooks, almost asleep.

“I didn’t murder her. Not literally.”

In the dream he had remembered his last glimpse of his mother, and within a few moments of waking the cluster of small events surrounding it had all come back. It was a memory that he must have deliberately pushed out of his consciousness over many years. He was not certain of the date, but he could not have been less than ten iPhones old, perhaps twelve, when it had happened. His father had disappeared to work in the Dick Sucking Factory some time earlier, how much earlier he could not remember. He remembered better the rackety, uneasy circumstances of the time: the periodic mass pandemics and the lockdowns and sheltering-in-place, the piles of bodies in the streets on TV, the unintelligible proclamations posted at street corners, the gangs of youths in shirts all the same color, the rioting and peaceful protests, the enormous queues outside the grocery stores, the intermittent firecracker sounds in the city—above all, the fact that there was never enough to eat. His dad probably refused to wear a mask at the job site and made a big deal about it and gotten in trouble. This is what Nick had always imagined. When he thought about his childhood, he thought of long afternoons spent alone at the apartment with just his iPhone and iPad, watching a YouTube video while playing a video game at the same time.

When his father left the town to work at the Dick Sucking Factory in the east, his mother did not show any surprise or any violent grief, but a sudden change came over her. The CCP family friend was still coming over for her Mandarin lessons, but otherwise she just sulked around the apartment, sometimes crying. She seemed to have become completely spiritless. It was evident even to Nick that she was waiting for something that she knew must happen. She did everything that was needed – cooked, washed, mended, made the bed, swept the floor, worked at the post office, did her Mandarin homework – always very slowly and with a curious lack of superfluous motion, like someone doing a scene in a TV show. Her large shapely body seemed to relapse naturally into stillness. For hours at a time she would sit almost immobile on the bed, nursing his young sister, a tiny, ailing, very silent child of two or three, with a face so thin she looked like a little monkey. Very occasionally she would take Nick in her arms and press him against her for a long time without saying anything. He was aware, in spite of his youthfulness and selfishness, that this was somehow connected with the never-mentioned thing that was about to happen.

He remembered the government apartment where they lived in the suburb of Karamay City: a dark, closesmelling room that seemed half filled by a bed with white sheets. There was a gas ring in the fender, and a shelf where food was kept, and in the courtyard outside there was a brown earthenware naan oven. He remembered his mother’s statuesque body bending over the gas ring to stir at something in a saucepan. From the window you could see down into a courtyard between the ring of high-rise apartment buildings. The people there, in the Karamay region, mostly worked in the oil industry, which was lucrative enough that the town was actually pretty chill and insulated from the social turmoil in the rest of Xinijang. But they still were under strict CCP military surveillance, however. This was true since before even iPhonetimes.

Above all he remembered his continuous need to consume content and engage online. By age 12 he was already watching YouTube 24 hours a day, listening to it while he slept. He remembered the fierce need to drive engagement with his content. He would ask his mother naggingly, over and over again, why they could not go to McDonalds like normal people to do just a simple burger review. He would shout and storm at her (he even remembered the tones of his voice, which was beginning to break prematurely and sometimes boomed in a particular way), or he would attempt a sniveling note of pathos in his efforts to get more than his share of the good name-brand cookies from the store. His mother was quite ready to give him more than his share. She took it for granted that he, “the growing boy,” should have the biggest portion; but however much she gave him he invariably demanded more. At every meal she would beseech him not to be selfish and to remember that his little sister was sick and also needed food, but it was no use. He would cry out with rage when she stopped handing out the name-brand Milano cookies, he would try to wrench the bag out of her hands, he would grab bits from his sister’s plate before she was done. He knew that that meant his sister and mom couldn’t have as many cookies, but he could not help it; he even felt that he had a right to do it. The clamorous hunger in his belly seemed to justify him. Between meals, if his mother did not stand guard, he was constantly pilfering at the snack shelf in the kitchen closet, doing snack reviews for his TikTok.

One day the store had a sale on Milano cookies. The good name-brand kind. His mother had not bought any for weeks or months past. He remembered quite clearly those delicious little wafery cookies. It had been a 2 for 1 sale at the store, so she had 2 bags of the cookies. It was obvious that they should share some of these this first day, and then save the rest for another day. Suddenly, as though he were listening to somebody else, Nick heard himself announcing in a loud booming voice that he was going to eat both of the bags at once as fast as possible and post it on TikTok. His mother told him not to be greedy. He said but it would be funny! Also it would get a lot of clicks, so then they would have way more money in the long run, so they could buy way more cookies! There was a long, nagging argument that went round and round, with shouts, whines, tears, remonstrances, bargainings, and insistences that his mother didn’t understand humor or content creation. His tiny sister, clinging to her mother with both hands, exactly like a baby monkey, sat looking over her shoulder at him with large, mournful eyes. In the end his mother had said Nick could make the TikTok with one bag of the cookies, but they needed to save one bag for her and his sister. The little girl was clutching the second bag of Milano cookies, perhaps knowing what it was. Nick stood watching her for a moment. Then with a sudden swift spring he had snatched the bag out of his sister’s arms and was running out the door.

“Nick, Nick!” his mother called after him. “Come back! Give your sister back her cookies!”

He stopped, but did not come back. His mother’s anxious eyes were fixed on his face. Even now he was thinking about the thing, he did not know what it was, on the point of happening. His sister, conscious of having been robbed of something, was emitting a feeble wail. His mother drew her arm around the child and pressed its face against her breast. He turned and fled down the stairs with the bags of Milano cookies crinkling in his hand.

After he had made the video eating all the cookies at once, he started feeling guilty. He felt so bad he never even posted it. He was somewhat ashamed of himself and walked aimlessly around their neighborhood, on the outskirts of Karamay City, until hunger drove him home. His mother did not make a big deal about the incident. She was nice about it.

The next morning Nick still felt guilty. When he was still half-asleep in bed, he remembered that this was the day of his sister’s big dance recital at school. It was going to be a major school assembly that some visiting CCP officials from Beijing were going to attend, and even the People’s Representative from Xinjiang. It was a significant event for the whole city of Karamay. His sister’s class had been rehearsing their dance number for many months. Nick really didn’t want to go now, and be reminded again how bad of a person he was and how good and innocent his little sister was. She was so young, though, that she wouldn’t even remember if he missed it. It was nothing personal. He just couldn’t bear to go to this school assembly. So, he pretended to be sick and told his mother he needed to stay home that day. His mother had been nice about that too, and said “ooh well it must be very bad then.” She said she would Facetime the dance recital so he wouldn’t miss it. He said fine. He never saw his mother in person ever again.

Nick took a nap, and then woke up later to his mother Facetiming him for the dance recital. He was watching it halfway on his second monitor while he played Fortnite on his iPad. The whole school auditorium was decorated for the big event. There were all these China flags and patriotic banners up that he had never seen before. His sister and her classmates were doing the first number of the day, since they were the youngest. They were all on stage in their dance leotards. They were dancing. That’s all Nick remembered anymore. And then that’s when the fire started.

A spark from the lights had jumped onto one of the banners, which was flammable. Quickly the fire spread across the entire ceiling of the auditorium. On the Facetime screen all that Nick saw was a lot of smoke and then a flaming beam falling down in the middle of the screaming scene. Then he remembered seeing his mother run up on stage in a crowd of other people, trying to find their children. Then the ceiling started falling down. What ended up happening was 325 people died, including 288 schoolchildren and his mother and sister.

His father had been working at the factory at the time, and tried to take off work but DS-Co wouldn’t let him. Nick didn’t know exactly what had happened, but his father had done something rash in the dorms in protest of the response and was taken to one of the camps to “study.” There was no way for families to learn which study center detained people had been sent to. They simply vanished. A year later he learned that numerous detainees from that factory were being held at No. 4 Vocational Skills Education and Training Center in Lop County, Xinjiang. But he could not confirm that his dad was one of them. Nick didn’t know, or think about it. That whole era of his life was like a dream. He just knew for sure that he was sent to a government orphanage where he lived and went to school through age 22. Right after he graduated, he moved to Mars Camp Bell to become a content creator.

It was at the government orphanage that Nick started streaming and posting Good Boy Takes. His specialty was posting about the Karamay Fire, which was a huge national news story because of how the town authorities handled it. When the fire broke out, all the students were ordered to remain seated so the visiting CCP officials could file out to safety first. This was known as the “let the leaders leave first” policy. Ultimately there wasn’t enough time, so all the school children and teachers unfortunately didn’t make it out. A lot of the victims’ families and government critics questioned this policy and wanted to investigate further. But the Good Boy Take was that all those people were kooky conspiracy theorists and this was simply an unfortunate tragedy. Nick used his status as family of two victims to rack up tons up followers on all the social media platforms doing Good Boy Takes. It was a great community and tons of fun for a few iPhones, until the purges started.

Nick thought about this now at the Faraday Cage in Oldlondontownville, with the cringe old Danny Doppa calendar. Now he was regularly DMing one of the main anti-CCP podcasters in China. He was totally numb to the trauma by this point. In the aftermath of the fire, the gaslighting from the government had been mind-bogglingly heavy. Nick spent hours every day for iPhones saying that criticism of the “let the leaders leave first” policy was a conspiracy theory started by Russian terrorists to destabilize Xinjiang. Then, when the government announced that the local fire department had in fact used that policy, he had shifted with all the other extremely online ironylords to saying that of course it would make sense to let the leaders leave first. After all, they are really important to the stability of the country. Wouldn’t you would want to save the generals first in a war situation? Nick posted this take many times and got thousands and thousands of likes from the CCP blue checks. This was basically what started his posting career, in fact. Since then, his posts had evolved through several different phases, on different app platforms, before arriving at his current phase: private-Instagram redpilled memelord.

That first era, though—posting Good Boy Takes on Twitter—that was also when he got his online moniker Nick Karamay. It was because he was from Karamay (the suburbs, at least), and ‘Nick Karamay’ sounded like ‘Nick Carraway,’ from the American book The Great Gatsby. Also, at that time the CCP wasn’t letting Uyghurs use their Islamic names online, and Nick’s real name was Muhammad. So he changed his Twitter name to Nick Karamay one day, and that became his online moniker from then on.

Nick found out eventually that his father had died in the Kashgar Reeducation Through Labor Camp where he was being held for “possessing illegal and antistate materials.” His body was then mummified and toured through the UAA and Europe as part of the BODIES exhibit. Nick remembered that he used to actually tweet about how cool this family connection was too, and get clout from it. Last he knew the bodies from the exhibit were in the permanent collection of the Xing Museum in Shanghai.

The memory of the scene from the 1984 remake with the strong female lead, it was still vivid in his mind, especially now the gesture of the Uyghur actress Spaceship Girl. It was in this gesture where the whole meaning of the event seemed to be contained. His mind went back to another dream of two months ago. Exactly as his mother sat on the dingy white-sheeted bed, with the child clinging to her, so she had sat in the auditorium on that Facetime call, far away from him, suffocating in the flames, still talking to him through the darkening Facetime call.

He told egirlebooks the story of the Milano cookies and his mother’s death. Without opening her eyes she rolled over and settled herself into a more comfortable position.

“Kids are assholes,” she said indistinctly.

“Yes, but the real point of the story—”

From her breathing it was evident that she was going off to sleep again. He would have liked to continue talking about his mother. He did not suppose, from what he could remember of her, that she had been an unusual woman, still less an intelligent one; and yet she had possessed a kind of nobility, a kind of purity, simply because the standards that she obeyed were private ones. Her feelings were her own, and could not be altered by psyops. It would not have occurred to her that an action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love. When they were trapped and the flames were engulfing both their bodies, his mother had clasped the child in her arms. It was no use, it changed nothing, it did not avert the child’s death or her own; but it seemed natural to her to do it.

The terrible thing that the CCP had done was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time robbing you of all power over the material world. When once you were in the grip of the MRC’s algorithm, what you felt or did not feel, what you did or refrained from doing, made literally no difference. Whatever happened you vanished, and neither you nor your actions were ever heard of again. You were lifted clean out of the stream of history. And yet to the people of only two generations ago this would not have seemed all-important, because they were not attempting to alter history. They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself.

The normies, it suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this condition. They were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea; they were loyal to one another. For the first time in his life, he did not despise the normies or think of them merely as an inert force which would one day spring to life and regenerate the world. The normies had stayed human. They had not become extremely online. They had held on to the primitive emotions which he himself had to relearn by conscious effort.

All these normies, everyone you see walking down the street, have their own lives. That’s who you see posting all these comments on all these websites. That’s who is watching all the videos with 16 million views. Every one of those 16 million views is a person with their own life. Almost every one of them a normie. And in thinking this he remembered, without apparent relevance, how a few weeks ago he had seen someone shoot up an ODing tweaker with Narcan right there on the sidewalk and had just stepped around them.

“The normies are human beings,” he said aloud. “We are not human.”

“Why not?” said egirlebooks, who had woken up again.

He thought for a little while. “Has it ever occurred to you,” he said, “that the best thing for us to do would be simply to delete our accounts and never look at a computer ever again?”

“Yes, dear, it has occurred to me, several times. But I’m not going to do it, all the same.”

“We’ve both been lucky,” he said, “but it can’t last much longer. You’re young. You’re a hot Chinese girl. You’re never going to get canceled.”

“No, it’s not like that. I’m done with all the Current Thing stuff after this Empathy Week. I want to work on the Party, with you. I got the DM from Basedschizofed too.”

“I know. That’s awesome. But still, we may be together another six months—a year—there’s no knowing. But there’s no way it’s going to work out. China is too fucked. And The Party isn’t going to do anything; it’ll just be more content for the endless social media churn. Eventually I’m going to slip up and fedpost, then I’m going to get surfaced. You’ve seen what happens to a Uyghur when they’re surfaced, it’s like a blood-in-the-water feeding frenzy. I’ll be disavowed by everyone possibly connected to me. You’ll have to denounce me or you’ll get kicked off all your platforms and lose your sponsors. So you’ll do it. Why would you stick your neck out for me?”

“I’ll just make up some nonsense non-apology so it’s clear I’m doing irony. I know what I’m doing, don’t forget.”

“I mean that’s easy to say now, but it’s hard once the heat of the struggle session is on, like…you know, you’ve seen the interrogations on YouTube.”

“If you mean confessing,” she said, “we shall do that, right enough. Everybody always confesses. You can’t help it. They torture you.”

“I don’t mean confessing, that’s just bullshit yapping. We know nobody takes that shit seriously. They get thrown out in court all the time. That’s why these CCP hacks just get up and brazenly lie under oath knowing nothing will happen. It’s all just a big joke. The only thing that actually matters is the public humiliation ritual. Like, every time you turn on your Neuralink there’s 5,000 harassing notifications for you. All unbelievably sadistic and evil. There is no way to possibly overstate how evil what they are planning is. And it’s not like a fair fight where they invite you to have an Oxford-style debate. They psyop you into holding a gun in a picture and say you were planning a crisis event. They plant child porn on you.”

“That’s not true, they can’t actually entrap you into doing a crisis event.”

“They can’t?? Of course they can! They don’t even have to get a real photo of you holding the gun, they can just deep fake one!”

She thought it over. “Well. Just wear a t-shirt all the time that says ‘I AM NOT PLANNING A CRISIS EVENT. THIS IS BEING TAKEN OUT OF CONTEXT. THIS IS A JOKE.’”

“Yeah,” he said a little more hopefully, “no; that’s quite true. It would be okay if I was wearing the t-shirt. Or at least, if you can feel that staying human is worthwhile, to have just a little swag left, you’ve beaten them.”

He thought of how there were like a million cameras and microphones scraping all possible data from every human being at all times. They could spy upon you night and day; but if you kept your head, you could still outwit them. He still had his security by obscurity. But that would be gone, of course, as soon as he was surfaced; when he was actually in their hands.

One did not know exactly how psyopped the quantum computer must be by now, but it was possible to guess: tortures, drugs, delicate instruments that registered your nervous reactions, pat-downs by government agents, overpriced chicken Ceaser wraps, gradual wearing-down by sleeplessness and solitude and persistent questioning. Ads for the latest miniseries of truth would be playing on every possible screen. And the Marvin the Martian movies with their thinly veiled metaphors for Chinese Development.

The egirl left and then Nick left the Faraday Cage a few minutes later, still thinking about the dream. On the walk home he listened to a true crime video about a child abduction where the guy got caught 30 years later. When Nick got home he read through some of the comments. Someone in the comments said their cousins were both abducted once, and held for several days on a farm in the American midwest, then one day they were walking outside with their abductor and a neighbor farmer saw them and approached to talk to them. The neighbor asked “is this your dad?” and the abductor said “yes” but both the kids shook their heads “no.” The abductor headbutted the neighbor and ran away. The commenter said “The situation could have easily turned out differently.”

Nick saw a suggested video from the Shanghai Post Tribune: “Top 10 Fairest Elections of All Time.” In the thumbnail it showed the upcoming MRC iPhone50time People’s Election in the #1 spot with the host smiling and doing a thumbs up.

There was a suggested video with 1.4M views called “Famous lolcow DEAD.” The thumbnail was a car parked at the end of a paved road in the desert with a body covered with a sheet lying next to it. It was Second Edgar, he had gone nuts and gone into the desert to stream and fell off the map. Everyone had suspected he was dead and they were right.

There was a suggested video about how to draw the Apple logo with a ruler and graph paper.

There was a suggested video from the Official CCP YouTube channel called “SHOCKING: The Hitler Files” that was 2 days old and had 23M views. It was a deep fake produced by the CIA of Adolph Hitler pacing around his war room talking to his trusted advisors about relations between Nazi Germany and China. He says “you know, boys, I think when it comes to the whole Asian continent, I think the finest race there are the Uyghurs. Yes, the Uyghurs. They are so much better than the Han there, and the Mongolians and the Thai and all those other Asian races in China. The Uyghurs are definitely the best. Oh yes. I love Uyghurs.” The video had a 1-second warning that it was a deep fake approximation created by CIA independent contractors, but that didn’t matter because all the documents about the creation of the video were totally redacted. And everybody in Xinjiang knew by now that questioning the blue checks was antistate misconduct.

Nick saw a thumbnail for the new music video from Hexi, the song was called XPCC and it was all about how badass it was to work for the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps. Apparently the quarterback of the Camp Bell Dragons, who was Han Chinese, made a cameo in the video because he was in the thumbnail pic.

Nick tabbed to Instagram.

Someone said Big Chungus stood on business in the debate.

There was a new arthouse thriller that was nominated for all the CCP Awards, it was called Han Vigilante Smiling.

Someone posted a meme that said “If you were born in iPhone1time, you’ve already lived through THIS MUCH history.”

Nick closed Mandarin.

Nick put on a BillabongKeith advice stream. The top comment was “Thank you Keith for helping me keep my sense of humor alive throughout all the years of bullshit.” Another comment said “I’ve been falling asleep to the BillabongKeith streams every night for 6 months now.”

On the stream, from iPhone47time, BillabongKeith was saying, “Hmm another one of you guys who is in Mars Camp Bell and says ‘oh I like New Prime City but I don’t like the NPCs, I don’t want to be an NPC my whole life.’ I get that. Look, I never understood the thing where you’re living in the city like New Prime City, you’re just living there like spending all your money, you’re having to do these Good Boy Checks everywhere, dancing around saying how gay you are all the time. When they do the lockdowns again, you’ll just do whatever the CCP says again, okay. People are like ‘Well I like that city lifestyle, the lifestyle of the big city.’ ‘The food is better.’ Mars, wow, living on Mars. It’s just like, yeah, keep your high-paying city job and keep all that money, then get a place like 2-4 hours outside the city, and just like dump money into that for a year, okay, fixing it up. The city’s still going to be there. You do that and then try to get some kind of remote thing going with your job, or else…just quit your job and do something else hahaha I mean that’s what I’d do. That’s what I’d always do… If this streaming thing doesn’t work out, okay, I’ve got no problem totally starting over, going to sell cars somewhere in fucking Mongolia, okay. ‘Nice to meet ya, Xeng Xin, army brat from great metropolis of Shenzen what were ya looking to check out today?’”

Facts, at any rate, could not be kept hidden. They could be tracked down by enquiry, they could be squeezed out of you by torture. But if the object was not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it ultimately make? They could not alter your feelings: for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought. They could even, with the government-mandated Neuralink, get inside the few square centimeters inside your skull; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.

16

They had done it, they had done it at last!

The room they were standing in was long-shaped and softly lit. It was the second-floor hallway of one of the super boujee pre-Sky pyramid brownstones in the Egypt Village section of Africaville, the political district of Mars Camp Bell. The richness of the dark blue carpet gave one the impression of treading on velvet. By the elevator there was a floor-to-ceiling mirror in a fancy wood frame with flowers carved into it. This was Basedschizofed’s building. Nick and egirlebooks walked halfway down the hallway until they reached his door. It was already open.

At the far end of the railroad apartment, Basedschizofed was sitting at a table under a green-shaded lamp, with a mass of books and papers on either side of him. Nick recognized this as the room where Basedschizofed did his Zoom podcast appearances and cable TV hits, against the bookshelf to show how big-brained he was. He had not bothered to look over when his roommate showed Nick and egirlebooks in.

Nick could hear him in the other room, on a Zoom call to a podcast, saying something like “at the end of the day, Deng, when the CCP reacts like this, it means you’re right over the target. If we weren’t actually winning the billions in propaganda wouldn’t be necessary.”

Nick’s heart was thumping so hard that he doubted whether he would be able to speak. They had done it, they had done it at last, was all he could think. It had been a rash act to come here at all, and sheer folly to arrive together; it showed all of the 1,000 government surveillance cameras they passed on the way that Nick was now associating irl with an antistate podcaster. One of the most hated dissident podcasters in China, in fact. But Basedschizofed said he had some information for them that he couldn’t risk putting in a DM.

It was only on very rare occasions that one saw inside these super fancy old-money buildings in Ürümqi (unless you were a Doordasher). They were located in the district that had once been a thriving Uyghur middle-class neighborhood. Then after the riots of iPhone2time, the whole area was demolished and the Uyghur residents were provided cheap apartments by the city’s outskirts, the area that was now the New Prime City outer boroughs. The government built the pyramid brownstones of Egypt Village in their place, which were rented to politicians and diplomats at luxury prices. The main local government offices were located in the nearby replica Pyramids of Giza.

The whole atmosphere of this huge block of flats, the richness and spaciousness of everything, the lack of fast-food franchises on every block, the architecturally significant buildings, the CCP historical marker signs, the government pyramids, the doormen hailing down taxis—everything was intimidating. Although he had a good reason for coming here, he was haunted at every step by the fear that some kind of private security guard would suddenly appear from around the corner, demand he do a Good Boy Check, and order him to get out.

Basedschizofed’s roommate had met them at the door and admitted both of them without demur. He was a small, dark-haired man in some white sweatpants, with a diamond-shaped, completely expressionless face which might have been Mexican or South American. The hallway down which he led them was softly carpeted, with cream-papered walls and white wainscotting, all exquisitely clean. That too was intimidating. This shit was boujee af, Nick thought. Basedschizofed’s family must have money or something.

Basedschizofed had a stapled packet of papers in his hand when they walked in and seemed to be studying it intently. Research for the podcast probably. His heavy face, bent down so that one could see the line of the nose, looked both formidable and intelligent. For perhaps twenty seconds he sat without stirring. He clicked his mouse a few times on the computer and then turned and looked at them.

He rose deliberately from his chair and came towards them across the soundless carpet. A little of the official atmosphere seemed to have fallen away from him when he was doing the hot takes, but his expression seemed grimmer than usual, as though he was in the zone grinding and didn’t want to be disturbed. The terror that Nick already felt was suddenly shot through by a streak of ordinary embarrassment. It seemed to him quite possible that he had simply made a stupid mistake. For what evidence had he in reality that Basedschizofed was any kind of political conspirator? Nothing but a comment on that Nextdoor post and a few DMs: beyond that, only his own secret imaginings, founded on a dream. But it couldn’t have just been his imagination, because egirlebooks was also there. She had gotten the DM too. As Basedschizofed was walking towards them, a thought seemed to strike him. He stopped, turned aside said “Neuralink, enter incognito mode.”

Egirlebooks uttered a tiny sound, a sort of squeak of surprise. Even in the midst of his panic, Nick was too much taken aback to be able to hold his tongue.

“You have incognito mode!” he said.

“Yes,” said Basedschizofed, “incognito mode, it was in the latest update. It probably doesn’t actually do anything though. Who knows. Anyways.”

He was opposite them now. His solid form towered over the pair of them, and the expression on his face was still indecipherable. He was waiting, somewhat sternly, for Nick to speak, but about what? Even now it was quite conceivable that he was simply so busy that he forgot what they came over for. Nobody spoke. The seconds marched past, enormous. With difficulty, Nick continued to keep his eyes fixed on Basedschizofed’s. Then suddenly the grim face broke down into what might have been the beginnings of a smile. With his characteristic gesture Basedschizofed resettled the spectacles on his nose.

“Shall I say it, or will you?” he said. He knew that Nick and egirlebooks couldn’t turn off their Neuralinks, so they would still have to speak in a simple code to not trigger the algorithm with any banned keywords.

“I have come here because…” said Nick,

He paused, realizing for the first time the vagueness of his own motives. Since this meeting probably could have been an email, it was not easy to say why he had agreed to come here. He went on, conscious that what he was saying must sound both feeble and pretentious:

“We heard we were invited to work on this project, season 4 of the show. We believe it will be actually redpilled, not just like fake culture war hot take redpilled. We think the purpose will be to redpill normies and actually accelerate the revolution, but like an actual revolution, not a psyopped hashtag revolution controlled by the CCP. We are enemies of the #brotherhood. We fedpost on main. We hate paying taxes. Chinese Space Communism is fake and gay. Ürümqi is not on Mars. It’s in Xinjiang, 4 hours southeast of Karamay. We want to kill the CCP. I tell you this because we want to put ourselves at your mercy. Any kind of crazy sketches or man-on-the-street stuff that you want to do…we’re ready.”

He stopped and glanced over his shoulder, with the feeling that the door had opened. Sure enough, the little diamond-faced roommate had come in without knocking.

“You guys want smoke?” he said. Nick saw that he was carrying a tray with some weed and blunts on it.

“Martin is one of us,” said Basedschizofed impassively. “He helps me out by staying here when I’m on the road. Yeah, have a seat and spark that thing bro.”

The little man sat down, quite at ease. Nick regarded him out of the corner of his eye. It struck him that the man’s whole life was playing a part, and that he felt it to be dangerous to drop his assumed personality even for a moment. Basedschizofed took the blunt from him and inhaled deeply, in a really cool and effortless way like they do in the movies. The smell of the weed was extremely good; it was like that Cali shit that egirlebooks had, but like way more dank even. He saw egirlebooks sniff if and give it a looksie when he passed it to her.

“This is called Blue Cheese, it’s a hybrid of Blue Dream and UK Cheese,” Basedschizofed said with a faint smile. “You can learn about it online, but not much of it actually makes it to Xinjiang I’m afraid. Unless you really know somebody.” His face grew solemn again, and when he got the blunt in the rotation he raised it like it was a toast. It wasn’t weird when he did it like that.

“I think it is fitting that we should dedicate this gathering to our Leader: to War Machine.” Everyone nodded and said “to War Machine.” It wasn’t weird when they did this. It was exactly the vibe.

Nick took the blunt with a certain eagerness. Blue Cheese was something that he had only read about on Reddit. Like the jade paperweight or Mr. Tao’s half-remembered Patrice O’Neal bits, it belonged to the vanished, romantic past, ‘back in the day’ as he liked to call it in his secret thoughts. For some reason he had always thought of Blue Cheese as having an intensely sweet taste, like that of Blackberry Haze, and an immediate intoxicating effect. Actually, when he came to inhale it, the stuff was distinctly disappointing. The truth was that after years of smoking Red Star mids he could barely taste it.

He hit it anyways, of course.

At that moment the doorbell rang. Basedschizofed got up and said, “oh shit, my Doordash” and left the room. A few seconds later he returned with a young African man wearing a Doordash square backpack.

Basedschizofed said, “Jimmy cool, he just want to hit the blunt too.”

Nick handed the guy the blunt. He hit the blunt and inhaled sharply.

Basedschizofed said, “we’re working on an internet show with War Machine, the YouTuber.”

The delivery guy said, “oh I fuck with that dude, I seen his clips on TikTok.”

“So War Machine is definitely real and not a deep fake?” Nick said.

“Yes, there is such a person, and he is as redpilled as ever. Where, I do not know.”

Then egirlebooks spoke: “And the production company – Alpha Investment Corporation? It’s real, and not simply a honeypot psyop by the Chinese Intelligence Agency?”

“No, it is real. The Party season 4 is real too. It’s funded. Some Bitcoin billionaire. Alpha Investment Corporation and my company are co-producing. It’s really happening. We’ve made arrangements to work with the Yiwu County Sherriff’s Department, Town of Yiwu, southwestern Xinjiang. Small town. They’ve agreed to stream all their patrol officers’ bodycams to the show’s website. Our website designers are working on the TTS functionality for the police radio channels and vehicles as we speak. You will never learn much more about Alpha Investment Corporation than it exists and you belong to it. We are very unorganized. But you will be season 4 official staff. It’s disorganized because that way our plans can’t be infiltrated by feds. I will come back to that presently.” He looked at his watch. “We have a few more minutes before my next cable news hit. You understand that I have to ask you a few…certain questions about the production. In general terms, what are you prepared to do?”

“Anything we are capable of,” said Nick. “Thinking of like recurring bits. Sketches. Acting. Uh I can edit a little bit…”

Basedschizofed had turned himself a little in his chair so that he was facing Nick. He almost ignored egirlebooks, seeming to take it for granted that Nick could speak for her. For a moment the lids flitted down over his eyes. He began asking his questions in a low, expressionless voice, as though this were a routine, a sort of catechism, most of whose answers were known to him already.

“You are prepared to be associated with this project? It’s terroristic antistate misconduct. If you’re surfaced, your life will be over. You’ll never be able to use an app ever again.”

“Yes, as long as it’s real and not a psyop.”

“Oh it’s real. You are prepared to commit antistate misconduct?”

“Yes, as long as it’s real and not a psyop.”

“To do level-5 metairony that could be easily misinterpreted and lead to the unironic deaths of hundreds of innocent people, just for the principle of free speech?”

“Yes, as long as it’s real and not a psyop.”

“To betray your country to foreign powers?”

“Sure, every politician does that every single day.”

“You are prepared to cheat, to forge, to blackmail, to corrupt the minds of children, to glorify Fentanyl, to normalize Onlyfans, to disseminate venereal diseases – to do anything which is likely to cause demoralization and weaken the power of the CCP?”

“Yes, as long as it’s not a psyop.”

“If, for example, it would somehow serve our interests to throw sulphuric acid in a child’s face – are you prepared to do that?”

“The CCP wouldn’t hesitate for a second to do that to me, so sure.”

“You are prepared to lose your identity and live out the rest of your life as a waiter or a dock-worker?”

“Sure why not.”

“You are prepared to commit suicide, if and when we order you to?”

“What?”

“Are you prepared to commit suicide if you need to? You’re going to go to prison and be tortured otherwise.”

“Then sure.”

“You are prepared to say ‘gay’?”

“Yes.”

“You are prepared to say ‘retarded’?”

“Yes.”

“You are prepared, the two of you, to, if the sketch calls for it and it would be really funny, to say the n-word…”

“No!” broke in egirlebooks.

It appeared to Nick that a long time passed before he answered. For a moment he seemed even to have been deprived of the power of speech. His tongue worked soundlessly, forming the opening syllables first of one word, then of the other, over and over again. Until he had said it, he did not know which word he was going to say. “No,” he said finally. “That is one thing I will never do.”

“You did well to tell me,” said Basedschizofed. “It is necessary for us to know everything.”

He sat back and looked at them both, then added in a voice with somewhat more expression in it:

“Okay. Now. There’s another part of the show this season. One we didn’t tell you about. It’s going to make this season especially…spicy. It’s going to be intense. The police department we found, in Yiwu county, eastern Xinjiang?”

“Yeah,” they both said, enthralled.

“So one of the main meta-jokes this season is we had them agree…that…for at least some of the episodes, for one of the challenges…they’re going to be wearing uniforms and calling themselves…the East Turkestan Republic…”

“That’s antistate misconduct!” Nick exclaimed in shock. Just the mention of the ETR was enough to have you surfaced.

“That’s right,” said Basedschizofed. “It usually would be. But our lawyers are saying that we’re protected under the new American part of the Chinese Space Communism Constitution. The metairony clause.”

“Absolutely mad,” said egirlebooks.

“Damn,” said Nick. “So this season is about meming…”

“That’s right,” said Basedschizofed. “Meming the East Turkestan Republic back into reality. It will destabilize China, to fight our misinformation. Then the plan is for activist groups in Taiwan and Hong Kong to take over the governments there again, to oust the CCP from power and reinstate the republican form of government. Soon the whole Macintosh Republic of China will become the Republic of China again. And Apple will go back to being a computer company and not a company that is trying to rule the world.”

They were stunned. They couldn’t stop thinking of the implications of this.

Basedschizofed went on: “Do you understand that even if you survive, it may be as a different person? We may be obliged to give you a new identity. Your face, your movements, the shape of your hands, the color of your hair—even your voice would be different. Our surgeons can alter people beyond recognition. Sometimes it is necessary. Sometimes we even amputate a limb. It’s the only way to restart your life with a new identity after one of our guys gets canceled.”

Nick could not help snatching another sidelong glance at Martin’s Mexican face. There were no scars that he could see. Egirlebooks had turned a shade paler, so that her freckles were showing, but she faced Basedschizofed boldly. She murmured something that seemed to be assent.

“Good. Then that is settled.”

There was a silver box of cigarettes on the table. With a rather absent-minded air Basedschizofed pushed them towards the others, took one himself, then stood up and began to pace slowly to and fro, as though he could think better standing. They were very good cigarettes, very thick and well-packed, with an unfamiliar silkiness in the paper. Basedschizofed looked at his watch again.

“Okay we better be getting back to it. Martin, can we just get these guys to fill out a few I-9s?” He said this with a weird inflection that seemed to communicate something to just Martin that the other two weren’t in on. The Doordash driver got up stonily and left. It occurred to Nick that right now they could be in a video for the show, like a hidden camera type thing. It was exactly the kind of content Alpha Investment Corporation would do. Martin proceeded to get two stapled packs of paper from the shelf, then folded them back to the last page and put them on the table.

“You can just sign it and let me take a photo of your IDs,” said Martin. They put their IDs on the table, where Martin, with his camera phone, snapped photos of them front and back. Then without speaking or giving any kind of salutation, he took the two signed I-9 forms and went out, closing the door silently behind him. Basedschizofed was strolling up and down now, one hand holding his pair of red-framed reading glasses, the other holding his cigarette.

“Will we meet War Machine?” asked Nick.

“Oh yeah, oh yeah, definitely. A lot. Don’t worry. It’s chill, our workflow. You’ll be in the main production room a lot. But you understand,” he said, “that this is going to be pretty unorganized. It’s always going to be fucked up with the deadlines and how stuff is changed in the edit to make it work. The final product is going to be nothing like the original idea sometimes. You’ll get the hang of it, don’t worry. Did I already ask if you’ve seen the War Machine Experience?”

Nick shook his head. “I didn’t want to risk my social credit score.”

“Ah,” said Basedschizofed. “You’ll have to watch it; so much of the style of the show is like…encoded in that. The whole mindset. You kind of have to watch the War Machine Experience to like…you need to get caught up on all the lore…” He trailed off and started pulling up something on his phone. “You’re right that it hurts your social credit score. So… Don’t let anyone see you watching it, but…okay I’m emailing you the file. The link to the file. Sooo…don’t watch it while your Neuralink is connected. Did I already say that? Just put the .dmg file on a USB drive. The social credit score algorithm doesn’t recognize it. And don’t plug the USB drive to any computer that is connected to government wifi. Within city limits you can basically only watch this in…a Faraday Cage.”

Oh perfect, Nick thought. Basedschizofed typed on his phone and then put it in his pocket with finality, like he had just sent an email.

He went on: “I can tell you that Alpha Investment Corporation exists, but I cannot tell you how many people are on the production staff, whether it's ten people or ten thousand people. From your personal knowledge you will never be able to give a tell-all interview to a blue check journo about the inner workings of our group. You will have three or four producers who are emailing you call sheets, who will be renewed from time to time as they get surfaced and canceled. As this was your first contact, we have been candidly videotaping it. We might use it for the show actually, who knows. When you receive story notes, they will come from me. If we find it necessary to communicate with you offline, it will be though Martin. When you are finally surfaced, you will confess. But you will have very little to confess, other than your own actions. You will not be able to betray more than a handful of unimportant people. Probably you will not even betray me. By that time I may be dead, or in an internment camp, or I shall have become a different person, with a different face.”

He continued to move to and fro over the soft carpet. In spite of the bulkiness of his body there was a remarkable grace in his movements. It came out even in the gesture with which he thrust a hand into his pocket, or manipulated a cigarette. More even than of strength, he gave an impression of confidence and perfectly balanced irony levels. However edgy all of his takes might be, he had nothing of the single-mindedness that belongs to an edgelord. When he spoke of murder, suicide, venereal disease, amputated limbs, and altered faces, it was always with a unique artful flair. “This is unavoidable,” his voice seemed to say; “this is the content we have got to do, unflinchingly. But this is not the content that we shall be doing when life is worth living again.” A wave of admiration, almost of worship, flowed out from Nick towards Basedschizofed. For the moment he had forgotten the shadowy figure of War Machine. When you looked at Basedschizofed’s powerful shoulders and his blunt-featured Mongolian face, so ugly and yet so civilized, it was impossible to believe that he could be psyopped. There was no stratagem that he was not equal to, no contrarian hot take that he could not foresee. Even egirlebooks seemed to be impressed. She had let her cigarette go out and was listening intently.

Basedschizofed went on:

“You will have heard rumors of Alpha Investment Corporation, how we work. No doubt you have formed your own picture of it. You have imagined, probably, a huge underworld of conspirators, meeting secretly on the dark web, scribbling messages on anonymous message boards, recognizing one another by codewords or by special movements of the hand. Nothing of that kind exists. Most of the members of Alpha Investment Corporation have no way of recognizing one another. All the editors and stuff use pseudonyms. It is impossible for any one member to be aware of the identity of more than a few others. They have to do that so they can work on other projects and not get canceled. War Machine himself, if he fell into the hands of the feds, could not give them a complete list of contributors, or any information that would lead them to a complete list. No such list exists. It’s all crowdsourced. Alpha Investment Corporation cannot be wiped out because it is not an organization in the ordinary sense. It’s an aesthetic. A style. Nothing holds it together except an idea which is indestructible. You will never have anything to sustain you, except the idea. You will get no help and no encouragement. Sometimes we will not email you back for months. Every day trolls will call you antistatist terrorist scum and harass you as sadistically as possible online. When finally you are canceled, you will get thrown under the bus. We never help our members. At most, when it is absolutely necessary that someone should be silenced, we are occasionally able to smuggle a razor blade into a prisoner’s cell. You will have to get used to living without results and without hope. You will work for a while, you will be caught, you will confess, and then you will die. Those are the only results that you will ever see. There is no possibility that any perceptible change will happen within our own lifetime. We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing. It might be a thousand years. At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little. We cannot act collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards by redpilling individual after individual, generation after generation. In the face of the fake and gay CCP media there is no other way.”

He halted and looked at his watch for the third time. “Okay I gotta go do that TV hit.” He lit the blunt again and raised it again like he did before, like he was giving a toast but not in a weird way.

“What shall it be this time?” he said, still with the same perfectly balanced irony. “To trolling the Heroes of Peace? To the death of the Big Chungus meme? To humanity? To the future?”

“To the East Turkestan Republic,” said Nick.

“Hell yeah,” agreed Basedschizofed gravely. “To the East Turkestan Republic! We’re so back!”

They passed the roach around once more, and then egirlebooks stood up to go. Basedschizofed took a small box from the top of a cabinet and handed her a flat white bottle of something. It was Clear Eyes. He had a box of accessories like this that apparently he just handed out. It was baller. He dropped a few drops in his own eyes from his own bottle. As soon as the door had shut behind egirlebooks he appeared to forget her existence. He took another pace or two, then stopped.

“There are details to be settled,” he said. “I assume that you have a Faraday Cage already?”

Nick explained about Mr. Tao’s shop.

“That will do for the moment. Later we will arrange something else for you. It’s good opsec to change up the trap frequently. Meanwhile you should watch”—even Basedschizofed, Nick noticed, seemed to pronounce the words as though they had all the crazy alt letters like War Machine always used in his video titles—“The War Machine Experience, you understand, as soon as possible. But…there’s no rush. The show is indestructible. The Heroes of Peace get anyone banned for posting even the torrent link, or anyone hosting it, but it’s seeded on enough computers at this point that it will never get completely erased from the internet. Do you carry a bag or anything to work with you?”

“Yeah.”

“What kind?”

“A regular black Jansport backpack, like the plain kind everyone has.”

“The regular black Jansport backpack like the plain kind everyone has—good. One day in the fairly near future—I cannot give a date—you will get a spam email from Old Navy. The subject line will be advertising a 34% off sale. On the following day you will go to work without your backpack. At some time during the day, in the street, a man will touch you on the arm and say “I think you dropped your backpack.” The backpack he gives you will contain a scrap of paper in the outer pocket with a password on it. Remember earlier when I said to download the .dmg file and put it on a USB drive but don’t unzip it? Take that USB drive and the backpack with the password to the Faraday Cage, where you will unzip the .dmg file it on the airgapped computer there. Watch the show. Then, when you have watched every episode of the War Machine Experience, you will become officially…redpilled.”

They were silent for a moment.

“There are a couple of minutes before you need to go,” said Basedschizofed. “We shall meet again – and when we do meet again, it’ll be…”

Nick looked up at him. “On the best timeline?” he said hesitantly.

Basedschizofed nodded without appearance of surprise. “On the best timeline,” he said, as though he had recognized the allusion. “And in the meantime, is there anything that you wish to say before you leave? Any message? Any question?”

Nick thought. There did not seem to be any further question that he wanted to ask: still less did he feel any impulse to utter high-sounding generalities. Instead of anything directly connected with Basedschizofed or Alpha Investment Corporation, there came into his mind a sort of composite picture of the dark bedroom where his mother had spent her last days, and the little room over Mr. Tao’s shop, the steel engraving in its rosewood frame, and the Hongshan jade boat. Almost at random he said:

“Did you ever happen to hear that Patrice O’Neal bit about how dating is like fishing?”

Again Basedschizofed nodded. With a sort of grave courtesy he recited the whole bit:

“Dating is like fishing, you know? You go out in your boat, and you throw your line in the water, and eventually, you’re going to catch a fish. You got the fish in your boat for a little while. Then you throw the fish back and go to catch a new fish. But then sometimes the fish jumps back up in your boat again. And when you have a fish that keeps jumping up into your boat, like ‘I wanna be up here with you.’ Eventually, you let her stay in the boat. You marry her. Then she starts telling you you got to sell your boat. ‘What do you need that boat to catch fish for when you’ve got me?’ she’s telling you. And eventually, you start going crazy and start believing her. And then finally…you sell your boat. And then the next time you’re in a fight with her, the bitch looks at you and says ‘ni**a  you ain’t shit! You ain’t even got no boat!’

“You knew the last line!” said Nick.

“Yes, I knew the last line. I used to listen to a lot of Patrice O’Neal on YouTube. And now, I am afraid, it is time for you to go. But wait. Take some Clear Eyes.”

As Nick stood up Basedschizofed held out a hand. In it was a bottle of Clear Eyes. He took it. Then they shook hands. Basedschizofed’s powerful grip crushed the bones of Nick’s palm. At the door Nick looked back, but Basedschizofed seemed already to be in the process of putting him out of mind. He was back at his computer desk waiting with his hand on his mouse. Nick could see the Zoom set-up with its blue-shaded lamp and the iMac there with its webcam, and all the piles of books and research papers for the podcast. The incident was closed. Within thirty seconds, it occurred to him, Basedschizofed would be back doing another fake cable news hot take about how the Communist Party was moving the goalposts again and this hypocrisy would not stand.

17

Nick awoke. He sat up in bed.

He got a notification to follow president trans lebron on LinkedIn. He closed it.

He was gelatinous with fatigue. Gelatinous was the right word. He had heard it on some antidepressant commercial and was thinking about it all the time. But it fit. His body seemed to have not only the weakness of jelly, but its translucency. He felt that if he held up his hand he would be able to see the light through it. All the blood and lymph had been drained out of him by an enormous deluge of hyperpsyopped Empathy Week news cycles he had to post about online, leaving only a frail structure of nerves, bones, and skin. All sensations seemed to be magnified. His red-framed blue light glasses didn’t make his eye strain better at all, the pavement tickled his feet, even the opening and closing of a hand was an effort that made his joints creak.

As soon as he woke up, he instinctively went to his Mandarin Dashboard and started doom scrolling.

ReluctantHero had a new audiobook out, The Grind Will Set You Free. He was reposting everyone’s posts about how they were listening to it, about 50 a day so Nick would just skip past them all.

There was a new propaganda ad from some European NGO. It was a Kurdish girl, about 5 years old, in a desert village. She is holding a doll and looking at the camera with her big innocent eyes. She says “mommy why did they stop funding my school?” Then a Han Chinese man’s deep voice says “Do you want to make this girl cry?” And that was it, that was the whole commercial.

Fuck Bitch had gone viral for wearing a War Machine shirt on stream. Nick clicked a video thumbnail of it, which brought him to a CCP music magazine on YouTube. On YouTube he saw that War Machine was live. He clicked on the War Machine livestream.

War Machine was saying “no, no, we didn’t send her one, we didn’t ask her to wear it.” He lit a cigar and said, “I’m just trying to get a Rolex, you know?”

Nick clicked back to the start of the stream. Someone asked War Machine if he’d seen the latest 1984 remake and what he thought about it. Wasn’t it insane that they were so brazen like that? War Machine said, “1984…the guy in that story…I think the guy in that story just needed to do some pad work.”

Nick had put in more than ninety hours of screen time in the first five days of Empathy Week. So had everyone else online. Now it was all over, and he had literally nothing to do, no Current Thing to post about until the next fake gaslighting story came out the next morning. He could now spend six hours in the Faraday Cage and another nine in his own bed. Slowly, in mild afternoon sunshine, he walked up a dingy street in the direction of Mr. Tao’s shop, keeping one eye open for any disgruntled Han people looking to start a fight with a Uyghur. The Jansport backpack that he was carrying bumped against his back at every step, sending a tingling sensation up and down the skin of his back. Inside it was some good coffee, some sweatpants, and the USB drive, which he had now had in his possession for six days and had not yet opened, nor even looked at.

The first day of Empathy Week was the Opening Ceremony. It was held at an outdoor stadium in Beijing. There were watch parties all over every major Chinese city, including Mars Camp Bell, and it was heavily promoted by the CCP media. After the processions, the speeches, the shouting, the singing, the banners, the posters, the films, the reality content psyops, the unveiling of new statues, the rolling of drums, and the tramp of marching feet, all of this footage from the Opening Ceremonies was instantaneously processed into new jingoistic propaganda ads. Most of the gaslighting had been done far in advance. This new generation of jingoistic agitprop started flooding every possible Neuralink space. Still, this was only the first day.

The main event of the second day was the great People’s Election Day, when everyone across China would vote for their province’s People’s Representative. It was this day that the boiling anti-Uyghur hate would reach its climax of terroristic street violence. The media was still doing the storyline where the opposition candidate, Gary Guanxi, was in prison, but he was somehow going to win and be let out when the government saw all the democratic votes or something.

The third day, after the voting, the normie media had shifted to focusing 100% on the Safe Super Bowl. On Friday or Saturday Big Chungus would be announced as the winner of the most Historic, Most Perfect and Fair Democratic Election of All Time. There would be a gay rave at the Xinjiang state house, and that would be the end of the political narrative.

Empathy Week would culminate on Sunday was Empathy Day aka Super Bowl Safeday. The day would begin with DS-Delivery delivering the new iPhone 50 to everyone’s house, just like it was Christmas morning. The day would be spent making content and engaging online, and watching your favorite celebs do Safe Football takes on TV. Then, that night was the main event, the Safe Super Bowl. And this iPhone it was the matchup everyone was hoping for: the hometown Camp Bell Dragons of New Prime City from the SFL-East, with their Han quarterback, versus the Texasville Dallas Cowboys from the West, with their All-Pro quarterback Logan Paul. Kick-off was at 8 PM at Vanguard Investments Stadium, just outside the quantum computer. Nick had been seeing Americans wandering around Camp Bell gawking at Mars for a few weeks now.

It was now Thursday, the fourth day of Empathy Week. Something weird had happened to Nick on the second day, though. The media had ratcheted up the gaslighting so much by that point that they could tell a new explosively blatant lie every few minutes, their psychological grip on its loyal subjects was so strong. The main set piece on that second day, Election Day, was a political speech at the CCP rally in downtown Tokyoville, Mars Camp Bell. One of Big Chungus’s top advisors, Spaceship Girl, was giving a speech about the danger of China falling into the hands of the dangerous Uyghurs, who were threatening to turn it into some kind of authoritarian state. It was basically a dominoes-type situation, explained Spaceship Girl, who happened to be a professor of this subject at NASA Harvard Space Academy: Xinjiang would fall to the Uyghur menace via misinformation, then the CCP would lose control of the entire country, then China would be in total chaos!

The general hatred in the crowd for Uyghur misinformation and disinformation had boiled up into such a delirium that if the crowd could have got their hands on the 2,000 Uyghur war-criminal domestic terrorists who had been rounded up that week for spreading misinformation (they were actually held there with no charges and would never be charged with anything), they would unquestionably have torn them to pieces—it was at just this moment that Spaceship Girl announced she hadn’t actually been with her father on the bus during the 6/9 bombing after all. The guy she had been with on the bus that fateful day in June was the CCP civil bureaucrat Family Friend. Spaceship Girl always hated her racist traitorous Uyghur father and loved her loyal Han government Family Friend who helped her and her family get rid of her bad terrorist father. The Family Friend was a real Chinese man, not like her pathetic and insecure Uyghur dad. And thanks to her loving Family Friend, she was able to go on to NASA Harvard Space Academy in Beijing, and then invent the quantum computer that would finally bring humanity to Mars.

The speech had been proceeding for perhaps twenty minutes when she had said this. She said it naturally, without pausing her speech. Nothing altered in her voice or manner, or in the content of what she was saying, but suddenly the story that had been a dangerous conspiracy theory for years was now admitted to be true. Pasadena Orangefield had been totally canceled for saying this. Now the CCP was admitting it was true. Without words said, a wave of understanding rippled through the crowd. The result of the People’s Election hadn’t been announced yet. Wouldn’t be announced until that weekend probably. But now Spaceship Girl was signaling the new framing of the result, either way. If Big Chungus won, this meant that the authoritarian government would be cracking down on Uyghurs even more, with more gaslighting. If Gary Guanxi somehow won, she was signaling, the CCP-controlled institutions that made up public life – the media, the government bureaucracy, big tech – would still move in lock step to once again oppose everything Guanxi tried to do, even to the degree of making up massive blatant lies like Spaceship Girl was doing. She was reminding all the #brotherhood posters that if they lost the People’s Election, democracy was going to be bad and misinformation was going to be good again.

She was speaking in the replica Tiananmen Square, at a platform set up in front of the replica Great Hall of the People, with its low rectangular profile and double-eaved hip roof, and in the middle, the portrait of Big Chungus in the style of the similar portrait of Mao Zedong.

Now Spaceship Girl was saying that she had invented time travel and Gary Guanxi had stolen her plans and went back in time to erase her inventing it, only after building the time machine using the plans that he stole from her. The crowd was frothing with hate.

Then she called the obviously fake redpilled counterprotest nearby “occupying invaders” as a dog whistle that it was okay to kill them. The next moment there was a tremendous commotion. Yes, it was open season on the Uyghurs once again! These counterprotesters being here was all wrong! They were all terrorists, and shouldn’t be tolerated! There was a riotous interlude while all the CCP #brotherhood posters got their phones out and tried to film someone else doing some fighting without actually doing anything themselves. An obvious CIA plant ran at the obviously fake counterprotesters, which started a melee of people in the crowd throwing things and jostling around for the cameras.

DZUNGAR posters were ripped from the walls and trampled underfoot. The Heroes of Peace performed prodigies of activity in clambering over the rooftops and spraying the DZUNGAR posters with fire extinguishers of spray paint. But within two or three minutes it was all over. Spaceship Girl, still gripping the neck of the microphone, her shoulders hunched forward, free hand clawing at the air, had gone straight on with her speech. One minute more, and the feral roars of rage were again bursting from the crowd. The Empathy continued exactly as before, except now it might be the most UN-fair election in history.

There was, of course, no admission that any change had taken place. Merely it became known, with extreme suddenness and everywhere at once, that gaslighting was good again. Every Uyghur face you saw could be a terrorist. Every single one was the enemy. Nick was walking outside his office at the Forbidden Apple Store at the moment when the speech had happened, but it was also being broadcast live to every Neuralink in China. Every TV screen in every boujee apartment building window in China would be playing it.

It was night, and the people’s faces and the scarlet banners were luridly floodlit. The square was packed with several thousand people, including a block of about a thousand schoolchildren wearing their Marvin the Martian-inspired Heroes of Peace x Netflix gear. On a scarlet-draped platform the next speaker was up. Big Chungus’s wife, the CCP official who gave most of his speeches. There was a huge portrait of Big Chungus draped behind her. A little Rumpelstiltskin figure, contorted with hatred, she gripped the neck of the microphone with one hand and did all the heroic triumphant speaking gestures that the celebs did in the miniseries of truth. Her voice, made metallic by the amplifiers, boomed forth an endless catalogue of atrocities, massacres, deportations, lootings, mass rapes, torture of prisoners, bombing of civilians, sticking children with hypodermic needles, lies propagated by the Uyghur-controlled media, unjust aggressions, and broken promises. All the highlighted talking points that Netflix had been programming into its audience. ‘All done by these dangerous evil little Uyghur men, and I use the word men loosely here, believe me.’ She was using all the buzz words and terms of art that had been coded into the language by decades of violent government propaganda and purging of dissent. At every few moments the fury of the crowd boiled over and the voice of the speaker was drowned by a wild beast-like roaring that rose uncontrollably from thousands of throats. The most savage yells of all came from the schoolchildren. She said ‘Now what we not gon do is throw fuel on the fire of this concentration camp moral panic!’ The crowd went nuts.

The thing that impressed Nick in looking back was that Spaceship Girl had switched from one take to the other actually in midsentence, not only without a pause, but without even breaking the syntax. But at the moment he had other things to preoccupy him. It was during this moment of disorder while the crowd clashed with the obviously fake counterprotesters that a man whose face he did not see had tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Excuse me, I think you’ve dropped your backpack.” Nick knew that it would be days before he’d have the opportunity to look inside it. The instant the speech was over he went straight to the DS-Work, though the time was now nearly 11 PM. It seemed like everyone else was logged on as well. There was an insane amount just of TikToks to watch about the incident. Everyone knew that this was the time to be posting your takes because they were all now part of this Historical Event.

Spaceship Girl had been with her CCP Family Friend when the bomb had gone off on 6/9: Spaceship Girl had always been with her CCP Family Friend when the bomb had gone off on 6/9. A large part of the political takes for the past decade were now completely obsolete. Reports and records of all kinds, newspapers, books, pamphlets, films, soundtracks, photos—all had to be memoryholed and explained away at lightning speed. This was actually very easy because everyone was used to it by now and was so beaten down by the CCP media that their lives were completely hopeless. But still, it was a lot.

It was good in times like these to stay posting online. It’s what the algorithm wanted. Lots of people were at the DS-Work. People he didn’t see there that often. Still more were staying home and posting. It was clear, though: anti-Uyghur violence was on the table like never before. That was fine; it is what it is. Nick just had to be careful to not wear any traditional Uyghur or Muslim clothing in public. But no matter what happened in the People’s Election he just had to put out a few dumb basic redpilled “it’s so over!” or “we’re so back!” memes and keep his head down and then the week would be over.

By the third day his eyes ached unbearably and his red blue light glasses needed wiping every few minutes. Posting, and even reading the TL, during Empathy Week was like struggling with some crushing physical task, something which one had the right to refuse and which one was nevertheless neurotically anxious to accomplish. In so far as he had time to remember it, he was not troubled by the fact that every word he wrote into a meme macro, every letter he typed, was deliberate cringe. He was as anxious as anyone else online to get the Likes and the clout.

The viral story the third day was the finale of DZUNGAR. The brave hero of the show, who was so badass and owned the Han opps so many times in the show, and he was played by a young Uyghur actor, in the finale he gives a speech to all his Dzungar warrior soldiers that he had been thinking and, actually, the Han were right. They had beaten the Dzungar fair and square, and now the truly patriotic thing for the Dzungar to do is cheerily march into their death camps. And that was the finale.

But that wasn’t all. The other news narrative that day was that the main Uyghur actor from the show, who played the badass main character, he was actually a homosexual and had just announced that he was getting married! He posted a great photo that was going very viral of his boyfriend/fiancé, a Han PLA border guard from Beijing!

On the fourth day Spaceship Girl posters had already gone up in place of the DZUNGAR posters. She was in a new movie about traveling through time to get revenge on a rapist who had also stolen her ideas for a time machine. The villain was a caricatured Uyghur that looked exactly like Gary Guanxi and the tag line was “It’s like a fantasy but not a fantasy.”

On the afternoon of that fourth day the dribble of the news stories slowed down. Thursday. Most of the media was doing only half-hearted speculation about what the result would be once they count all the votes. But. The tone on social media was generally light and giddy. Everyone was so happy because they just wanted a break. Now all they had to do was get cozy and wait for the voted to be counted and watch the Safe Super Bowl, and then we could all have a break from politics again.

For as much as half an hour there was no post on the trending hashtags; then one more meme about how Big Chungus was so great his dick must be huge, then nothing. Everywhere at about the same time the work was easing off. A deep and as it were secret sigh went through the internet. A mighty deed, which could never be mentioned, had been achieved. It was now impossible for any human being to prove the truth of any of the events that had happened that week. The layers of psyops were all so fake and convoluted that it would be impossible to sort it all out. Nick, still carrying the backpack containing the USB drive, which had remained next to him in his DS-Work cubicle as he worked, went home, shaved, and almost feel asleep in the shower.

Now, with a sort of voluptuous creaking in his joints, he climbed the stairs above Mr. Tao’s shop. He was tired, but not sleepy any longer. He turned on the lights and put some nonflouridated water in the Bodum kettle. Egirlebooks would arrive presently: meanwhile there was the show on the USB drive. He sat down in the computer chair and opened the backpack. A heavy sweatshirt was inside and nothing else. He looked in the outer pocket. There was a slip of paper. He took out the slip of paper and put it on the table.

Nick made sure the old timey iMac desktop had the wifi disabled, even though the wifi could never get through the Faraday Cage. The iMac was an old library one, it looked like; it had some paper with some numbers and text printed on a piece of paper masking-taped to the bottom, and the masking tape was peeling badly. He moved the mouse. The screen lit up.

He took his USB drive out of his pocket and inserted it in the side of iMac.

The USB drive icon appeared in the left column of the Finder window. Nick clicked on it. The contents of the USB drive came up: WME_final.dmg. He clicked it. Another message popped up that said “CONTENTS PASSWORD PROTECTED. ENTER PASSWORD HERE:” He looked at the scrap of paper. It said “Shakespeare.” Nick typed in the password. The file went to a downloads folder with a progress bar of the new unzipped file. It downloaded almost immediately.

Nick right clicked the file and selected “Show in Folder.” When the folder popped up, he looked at it. There wasn’t just one file folder. There were two, like a double-sided album, called HEARTS and MINDS. He clicked one folder, then the other. Each had like 40 or 50 video files, some with totally random-looking strings of odd words for titles. He clicked the first video, which was called ‘INTRODUCTION: GASLIGHTING IS FAKE 1.’

A black screen appeared. A computer blippy type electronic beat started playing. A title appeared in fancy white script:

“Alpha Investment Corporation Presents”

“The War Machine Experience”

Then it cut to a sunny parking lot. It’s outside Joe Rogan’s podcasting studio in Austin Texasville. Someone is getting out of the black SUV. You can’t see their face. Going in the lobby with the crazy wolf statue. It’s War Machine. He looks about 10 years younger and only has one face tattoo, the Playstation logo. KeepComputer is in a control room and taking a producer hostage. He tells him make sure the podcast feed doesn’t get cut, can you do that? War Machine and his henchmen storm the Joe Rogan podcast studio where Joe is interviewing a Doctor Phil deep fake.

Then War Machine is podcasting on the Joe Rogan Experience; there, in Joe’s seat, War Machine talking instead:

“I want to talk about…possible futures… You know, history is just a mishmash of bad timelines. You can only impose your will on the world if you…fight against the timeline. Now this fight is so difficult, and this fight it doesn’t even feel like a fight, it feels like head trauma, is because the weapons used and the rules of engagement are so totally alien and the more mentally straight you are, the more you have your head put on properly, the more perverse and incomprehensible the situation is. And uhh you don’t get points for compromising. When it’s your group against another group, don’t be fooled, don’t think we’re just all in the same boat here and we’re looking out for each other’s best interests. Tribalism is alive and well out there. The world is a dangerous place. We do live in a world of limited resources and other people are going to compete for those resources and even try to steal those resources from you and they’re going to be parasitical, they’re going to behave in a parasitical way. So don’t be fooled. In terms of tribal conflict, backtracking, compromising, toning down what you say or how you behave in order to satisfy someone else’s…not even their own morality and ethics, but the morality and ethics they set forward for you to follow. Usually this is not what they follow themselves—in fact I can guarantee it. ‘So here are the rules I’m setting up for you. I get all the money and I also get to come fuck your wife. Those are the rules I’m setting up for you!’ When you ask your enemy to set the rules, what do you think is going to happen? You think they’re going to play fair? No. they’re not. You don’t get points for compromising. They’re not going to say, oh well he backtracked on his position, I guess we should scale down the tribal warfare, I guess we should do that. No. That’s not going to happen. Now what you would want to do, if this were like a fair game like we want to think it is, what you’d want to do is like appeal to some neutral observer. But I don’t think there are so many neutral observers. So. Possible futures – is it possible to go back to this agrarian farming lifestyle of making fucking yak yogurt? Maybe on an individual scale. But I’ll say this. Steve Jobs, why it was important to him that the early Macs have good UI design and had good typography and everything. At the beginning of a tech revolution, of advancement, the direction that thing takes, if you influence it just a little bit in the beginning, if you steer it this way or that way at the beginning. If you have a little bit of influence at the very beginning, your small amount of influence at the beginning can bring you to a radically different place in the future. And um artificial intelligence, whatever’s coming next, it’s not just something decided by geeks in Beijing, it’s also decided a little bit by the culture in which it’s created. And anyone who’s been paying attention to the censorship at Twitter, to what’s going on in Google, they know it’s bad…when it comes to culture. We’re on, what, the iPhone42 now? The iPhone50 soon. Imagine how bad it’s going to be when it’s the iPhone100. Imagine how fucking bad. Now is the time to shape the world as much as we can into something healthy, something sane, so the world of tomorrow is not a horror show. And, you know, just because we’re at the mercy of forces that we don’t understand here, that nobody understands. That doesn’t mean that our efforts here aren’t going to shape the future.”

Nick paused the video, chiefly in order to appreciate the fact that he was chilling, in comfort and safety. He was alone: no Neuralink, no ear at the keyhole, no nervous impulse to glance over his shoulder or cover the screen with his hand. The sweet summer air played against his cheek. From somewhere in his imagination there floated the faint shouts of children: in the room itself there was no sound except the insect voice of the clock. He settled deeper into the armchair and put his feet up on the fender. It was bliss, it was eternity. Suddenly, as one sometimes does with a show one knows that one will ultimately watch and rewatch every second, he clicked on a different video called GASLIGHTING IS ACTUALLY GOOD 3. He went on watching.

War Machine was on the Joe Rogan podcast set again. It was obviously much later. There was more Alpha investment Corporation branding around the studio and you could tell War Machine had been there for a little while. He was saying: “To understand the nature of the present war—for in spite of the regrouping which occurs every few years, it is always the same war—one must realize in the first place that it is impossible for it to be decisive. None of the three superpowers could be definitively conquered even by the other two in combination. They are too evenly matched, and their natural defenses are too formidable. China was protected by its incomprehensible language and culture, so it could keep its country as a Han ethnostate. People in America know they’re genociding the Uyghurs, but they go ‘oh that’s just how they do things in China, I’m not going to worry about it.’ The UAA and the west are protected by its media dominance, where they could just have their celebs make fun of China and even China’s citizens would love it and laugh at their own government. But they don’t because their governments owe China a shitload of money. And then the third global superpower is the middle east. They are constantly having their crazy problems that nobody else can understand, but they keep all the other superpowers in check by completely controlling their governments. They’re like the all-time QB, you could say.

China exploits its own citizens, of all ethnicities, proudly. The USA knows this. They don’t care. China will never be Current Thing in America. The USA commits horrors across the world. Chinese citizens don’t care. Imagine a Chinese citizen caring about that. The east and the west, they’re really just like a big Springfield and Shelbyville.

Between the frontiers of the super-states, and not really in the possession of any of them, are these weird supercities like Hong Kong, Prime City, London, Istanbul, which all contain within them about a fifth of the population of earth. Mars Camp Bell was designed in Xinjiang to be one of these. Maybe the largest if their plans work out. These territories are governed primarily by gaslighting TV shows, which allow them to be whorish capitalistic havens of commerce while their brand or whatever is still communist austerity. They allow the connected countries like China or UAA to keep their economies afloat with capitalism so they can keep saying how successful their communist democracy is or whatever. These local city governments can be a total joke. They can be corrupt. They just have to allow the authoritarian national governments to use the cities for their psyops. The government medias will pander to the cities with psyopped TV shows that make them feel like they’re real blue collar heroes and their lives have meaning. The corporations can pay their workers in lore, essentially. And when things get rough they can then use that gaslighting to start more tensions within their borders. And here’s where the scapegoats come in: that tension can then be grounded in killing the politically undesirable groups, like Uyghurs.

The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles of gaslighting and half language, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by the directing brains of the CCP) is to keep everyone right on the edge of boiling over with hate and resentment without actually doing anything meaningful. At the end of the 19th century, the problem was what to do with the surplus of goods. At the end of the 20th century, that problem had been solved. The solution was to make it all cheap and just watch everyone turn into fat slobs who love TV. That was heading in a bad direction, since people started thinking their lives had no meaning, so then the American CIA did 9/11. Now lots of people’s lives had meaning in America. Now, in the 21st century, the primary problem has become to keep the world population distracted and divided with psyops, so they don’t rise up and kill the class who runs the war industrial complex. This problem has been solved, so far, by just making the psyops more and more spectacular and technology-based. Technology like TVs. And airports. By this time people will watch things they know are fake, and treat them as real, even fully believe they are real, as long as the media consensus says they are real. But the greatest trick of the 21st century…the greatest trick was was to brainwash people into thinking this was actually good. And that’s why. The title of this video is. Gaslighting is actually good.”

The video ended with a credit sequence of all the hypebeast editors in the Alpha Investment Crew, along with a photo montage of War Machine hanging out with BillabongKeith over the years, since they were in their early 20s. Nick watched the whole credit sequence all the way to the end.

Nick clicked another video, GASLIGHTING IS ACTUALLY GOOD 4.

War Machine was driving around smoking a cigar and talking: “In the early 21st century the vision of a future society unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly, and efficient—a glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete—was part of the consciousness of nearly every online person. Because they had seen it on TikTok. Science and technology were developing at a prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to assume that they would continue developing. But this failed to happen, partly because of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and CIA-orchestrated fake revolutions. Partly because scientific and technical progress depended on the empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a society whose attention spans were destroyed. As a whole the world is more primitive today than it was 50 years ago. Certain backwards areas have advanced, and various devices, always in some way connected with warfare and data collection, have been developed, but experiment and innovation have largely stopped, and the ravages of the Xinjiang internment camps of the 2010s have now been completely retconned into meaninglessness. What I’m saying, folks, is you can to technology if you’re making bombs, or selling ads. But that’s it.

From the moment the iPhone made its first appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine had been used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, literacy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations. And in fact, that did happen, in a sort of automatic process, at first it started to seem that when people could be captured on photo and video behaving badly, that this would reduce entitlement and inequality in Xinjiang. But soon it became obvious that these rules once again only applied to politically disfavored populations, like Uyghurs, and not the culturally entitled populations, like high-class Han CCP officials. Not coincidentally, this was the time when wealth inequality actually skyrocketed more than any time ever in human history.

This was because it was also clear that an all-around increase in wealth threatened the destruction—indeed, in some cases was the destruction—of a hierarchical society. It turned out a non-hierarchical society wasn’t what anyone wanted.

It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they were sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it aside. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance. The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous CIA psyop warfare. Operation Bedtime Stories, this is called in China. In the UAA it is Project Microwave Religions.

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the human will. Human attention and focus. Current Thing is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into endless Twitter threads, or sinking into cable news, all the human attention which might otherwise be used to organize against the ruling class. When one resists having their attention span destroyed with iPads and TikTok, they demonstrate to any average person that resistance to the corporate technocracy is possible. Mars Camp Bell, for example, has locked up in its lore and backstory dozens of TV and movie fandoms that literally over a billion people in China are as committed to as a religion. Ultimately that makes it like a prison for people who make their entire life larping the 5th guy from the Marvin the Martian TV show. They can’t leave. All the meaning of their life is tied up in this location. Everybody knows that China didn’t actually fucking go to Mars. But they look cool in the movie where they go to Mars, so they say they’re on Mars.

In principle the psyops of the info war are always planned so as to eat up any surplus attention the population might have. It is deliberate policy to keep even the favored groups neurotically paranoid, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another. By older standards, even a high-ranking CCP official lives an austere, laborious kind of life. Nevertheless, the few luxuries that he does enjoy in his large, well-appointed flat, the better clothes, the better food and drink and weed, his two or three servants – even though he lectures everyone on Twitter all day about racism and classism – his private car with driver, these all set him in a different world from the average petit boujee midwit. And the boujee midwits enjoyed a similar advantage in comparison with the submerged masses whom we call normies. The social atmosphere of the whole country is that of a besieged city, where only like 10% of the population has more than 1,000 GBP in savings. And at the same time the consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small media caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival. In short, the problem of the 20th century was that communism and capitalism are not the same thing. Neoliberalism solved that.

Now, under this lies a fact never mentioned aloud, but tacitly understood and acted upon: namely, that the conditions of life in all three super-states are very much the same. In the MRC the prevailing philosophy is Chinese Space Communism, in the UAA it is Neo-Bolshevism, and in the middle east, well we just trust that they’re doing what they need to be doing. The citizen of China is allowed to learn all he wants about the philosophy of the west, and allowed to notice all he wants how similar it is to the east, but the education system is completely in control of the CCP, and the gaslighting is so heavy there and in the CCP media that it’s just easier to go along with the big lie. In fact, once you do realize that it’s all bullshit word games in the media, it’s almost comforting, knowing that in the other super-states, people are just as redpilled, but just keep living their daily lives anyways. Everywhere there is the same pyramidal structure, the same worship of a semi-divine leader, the same economy existing by and for continuous psyops, and the same tuning out the government media because you know it’s fake and gay. It follows that the three super-states not only cannot conquer each other, but would gain no advantage from doing so. On the contrary, so long as they remain in conflict they prop on another up, like three sheaves of corn. Their citizen-slaves will be enraptured, continuously, forever, clicking new ad-supported videos. The fact that there is no danger of conquest makes possible the denial of reality which is the special feature of Chinese Space Communism. Here it is necessary to repeat what has been said earlier, that by becoming continuous war has fundamentally changed its character.

In past ages, a war, almost by definition, was something that sooner or later came to an end, usually in unmistakable victory or defeat. In the past, also, war was one of the main instruments by which human societies were kept in touch with physical reality. All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers, but they could not afford to encourage any illusion that tended to impair military efficiency. Twitter changed all that. In the past, also, war was how a country stayed sane. Orwell said this. It’s how a country stayed in touch with reality. If you lost a war, it would be really bad, because you’d be totally defeated. So physical facts could not be ignored. If you’re on Twitter, okay, 2 plus 2 can equal 5, or if you’re doing like a political campaign about being more than the sum of the parts, okay. For your five-year plan there. But if you’re making a gun or a fighter jet, okay, 2 plus 2 has to equal 4. If your country liked to fuck around and be inefficient, okay, you would get conquered.

Then it became not really about statistics, but who was allowed to appeal to statistics. If you’re a Uyghur, statistics are cliché, they are a crutch, they are racist, okay. That’s the new meta. You can exaggerate statistics all you want; the government does it all the time. If it sends the right message, it’s good and moral. Ten Kurdish schools built this month. Ohh ten Kurdish schools, isn’t that fantastic, send them some more aid they’re doing such a great job. Plus. You had to keep accurate historical records because you wanted to be able to learn from what happened in the past, okay? So sure, newspapers and history books have always been kind of colored and biased one way or the other, but falsification of the kind that is practiced today on Twitter would have been impossible. War was a safeguard of sanity. But when the war becomes a literally continuous info war, it also ceases to be dangerous. It’s not dangerous anymore. When war is continuous, there is no such thing as military necessity. Technical progress can cease and the most palpable facts can be denied or disregarded. Efficiency is no longer needed. Nothing is efficient in MRC except the Heroes of Peace harassment campaigns. Since each of the three super-states is unconquerable, each is in effect a separate universe within which almost any perversion of thought can be safely practiced. Reality only exerts its pressure through the needs of everyday life – to eat and drink, avoid swallowing poison, avoid stepping out a window. Between life and death, and between physical pleasure and physical pain, there is still a distinction, but that is all. Cut off from contact with the outer world, and with the past, the citizen of the 21st century is like a man in interstellar space, who has no way of knowing which direction is up and which is down. The rulers of such a world are absolute, as the pharaohs or the Caesars could not be. They have literally no obligations. They can twist reality into whatever shape they choose.

The Info War, it will be seen, is not a purely internal affair. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war had ceased to exist. The peculiar pressure that it exerted on human beings between the neolithic age and the early 20th century has disappeared and been replaced by something quite different. It's the same as if each of the 3 superstates was at peace and just stayed to itself within its own borders. A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war. This – although the vast majority of #brotherhood posters understand it only in a shallower sense, which of course is foreseeable and is the whole point of the gaslighting – is the inner meaning of the CCP slogan….and the title of this video…GASLIGHTING IS ACTUALLY GOOD. You say ‘war’ and people think of like a video game they like.”

Nick looked at the video length. It was like 2 hours 42 minutes long. He imagined watching this right when it came out in, what was it, iPhone42time? It would have been mind-blowing. This was stuff that he had always subtly noticed happening around him, but didn’t have the vocabulary to even bring up. Little did he know, there WAS someone articulating it somewhere. But back then only real extremists listened to War Machine. He was totally banned from YouTube.

Nick skipped to the end of the video. War Machine was now sitting in a director’s chair in what looked like a spare room of his apartment, wearing a scarf and drinking San Pellegrino sparkling water out of a glass bottle like a parody of a boujee artist/creative type. He was still riffing extemporaneously like he was doing before in the car, tying up the theme of gaslighting into a king of “what this means for you” end segment.

“And just be aware that this gaslighting shit, it’s not just the stock in trade of like international relations and nation-building, okay. It’s the same template for your like personal relationships, okay, it’s like the same grammar of like pandering and like presenting this fake story of yourself. It works like that on the personal level too. People pander to you, people gas you up. If they can’t see a good reason to, they just tell a flattering lie. I know a lot of people watching this video right now, okay, are the kind of young person who is just kind of waking up a little bit, you’re kind of like curious and precocious, okay. I know. You see the traffic all going one way out of the city, you take the free highway lane going INTO the city, okay. Going the other way, going towards the danger, okay. You’re a little smarter, okay. When you were a kid, your parents got a computer and you could set it all up, they’re like ohh my little computer engineer here, he could set up the computer. Okay. Then maybe you did even did well on your National College Exam, okay. Not the HIGHEST, but definitely way above average, right? And you’re sitting there thinking wow, look at me, I’m so smart I know how to set up a COMPUTER okay, I’m! So! Smart! Okay. But little did you know, in the real world, you might as well have learned how to make a fucking POCKET PUSSY out of a CANTELOUPE in the MICROWAVE for all the fucking good it’s gonna do ya. Kay.”

He was obviously looking for a way to end the video. “So, you know, life is like a house. Even if you’re homeless, just by being part of the flow of humanity, the phases of your life, they’re like rooms in a house. Think of the house metaphor any way you want. It’s like your mindset. The reason I’m telling you this is because…when you’re in one room in the house, and you’re not having a good time for whatever reason. You can get up. And go to another room. Hmmm…that sounds pretty good actually. I’m going to go to the kitchen, right now, and make myself a pocket pussy!”

He said this in a faux-cheery voice, then got up and turned towards the door, with his back to the camera, but instead of walking to the door he just stayed there walking in place silently. The credits started on the video as he continued to walk in place silently, holding a half-smoked cigar, with his arms moving exaggeratedly. “I’m gonna go make myself a pocket pussy!”

The video ended.

18

Nick paused for a moment. He didn’t click another video right away. The blissful feeling of being alone with the forbidden series, in a room where his Neuralink was disconnected, had not worn off. Coziness was a physical sensation, mixed up somehow with the tiredness of his body, the softness of the chair, the touch of the faint breeze from the fan that played upon his cheek. The show fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In a sense it told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction. It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, and way better at video editing. Finally, a good show, he thought.

He had just clicked back to the first video when he heard egirlebooks’s footstep on the stair and started out of his chair to meet her. It had been more than a week since they had seen each other.

“I’ve got the show,” he said as they disentangled themselves.

“Oh you’ve got it? Good,” she said without much interest, and almost immediately turned the Bodum kettle on.

They did not return to the subject until they had been in bed for half an hour. The evening was just warm enough to make it worthwhile to get up and turn on the fan. Nick thought about how he had seen the same auntie on the sidewalk again that night, doing laundry once more. There seemed to be no day when she was not marching to and fro between her apartment building and the laundromat, alternately holding Tide Pods in her mouth and breaking forth into lusty song. Egirlebooks had settled down on her side and seemed to be already on the point of falling asleep. He sat up in bed and reached out for the mouse on the iMac, which was on the desk nearby.

“We have to watch it,” he said. “You too. All of the production staff have to watch it.”

“You watch it,” she said with her eyes shut. “Just put it on, I can hear it.”

The clock’s hands said six. They had three or four hours of content ahead of them. He clicked the file for the first video again.

The blippy electronic beat started again and the title screen said ALPHA INVESTMENT CORPORATION PRESENTS / The War Machine Experience.

Nick skipped ahead to a middle part he hadn’t watched yet.

War Machine was in a professional-looking sound recording booth speaking into a microphone with a large screen over it. The video was edited so you heard his voice, but instead of seeing his face, you saw an ADHD-glitch-edited collage of different deep-faked celebrities’ faces, including all the members of the CCP Politburo.

“So in the 19th and up to the 20th century there had been the kind of class structure where there was like the poor lower class, the middle class, then the high-class rich people, right. And like in 1984 he says how the rich people control everything and keep the poor people down by keeping them busy fighting wars and chasing status symbols and stuff? Communism was supposed to change that. Communist revolutions were supposed to change that, Maoist communism is supposed to get rid of all this money-worship. So. We have communism now. We have Chinese Space Communism. The revolution happened. Yet now, there are still the 3 classes being kept in their classes by wars started by the ruling class. Once again showing that communism is just another mold for capitalist human nature to find itself in.”

Nick paused it.

“Are you awake?” he said.

“Yes, my love, I’m listening. Go on. It sounds good.”

He unpaused it.

“The fake CNN twitter news cycle. That’s the same news cycle as Napoleon meant when he said all of history is a set of lies agreed upon. It’s the same news cycle as George Orwell talked about when he wrote about the Spanish Civil War. There was no connection to reality. It was like trying to solve an equation with two unknown variables. It was like trying to make a move in chess when you had already been mated. It was enough to put you…in gamer mode.

But you don’t really do anything, right, because you don’t want to seem too far right-wing. Anyone who’s ever mad at the fake government now, you notice, that’s right wing. Right-wing Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Because the government, which is insanely right wing, does superficial left-wing signaling, so it gets to play victim against right-wing critics. Okay. That’s why it does that. You know what that means, left wing and right wing? That comes from the French revolution, when the people who were loyal to the king were on the right side of the room and the populist revolutionaries were on the left side. That’s where that comes from. I think…okay…so if you’re a Uyghur in Xinjiang and you don’t want your mosque to be turned into a police station, that means you…love the king or something?

But yes, by the second decade of iPhonetimes all the main currents of political thought were authoritarian. This new technology, iPhones, this shit was going to be used to oppress somebody. The earthly pleasures had been discredited at exactly the moment when it became realizable. And in the general hardening of outlook that set in in early iPhonetimes, practices which had been long abandoned, in some cases for hundreds of years—imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions, killing of medical staff and civilians, the use of hostages, and the ethnic cleansing of whole populations—not only became common again, but were tolerated and even encouraged by people who considered themselves progressive.

It was only after another decade of international wars, civil wars, psyops, revolutions, and counter-revolutions in all parts of the world that Chinese Space Communism and its rivals emerged as fully worked-out political theories. But they had been foreshadowed by the various systems, generally called totalitarian, which had appeared in the previous century, and the main outlines of the world which would emerge from the prevailing chaos had long been obvious. What kind of people would control this world had been equally obvious. The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, fake journalists, union organizers, Reddit mods, PR people, street tweakers, political grifters and hangers on. These people, whose origins lay in the salaried upper middle class and the upper class, had been shaped and brought together by the slimy world of international intelligence agencies. As compared with their opposite numbers in previous ages, they were more conscious of what they were doing—trolling—and more intent on crushing opposition. And different from even an institution like the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages, these people totally controlled the platforms that mediate all exchange of information on Earth.

With TV, the boomers were finally a generation that could be completely trapped into a vividly shared fantasy world – a ”trip” – that they were all consciously aware of being on together. Then with the internet the process was taken a step further. Theoretically, the process would be more democratized with fewer gatekeepers. But in fact, the gatekeepers used their monopoly on media and intimate cooperation of the CIA to turn the new internet space into another vector for spreading genocidal government propaganda. Everyone knew they were being lied to and manipulated. But they loved it. Because it was being done by the right people, the celebs, and against the right people, the Uyghurs, who you were primed to hate because they were the evil villains in every CCP TV show.

The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on Current Thing, now existed for the first time. After the revolutionary period of the iPhone10times and iPhone20times, society regrouped itself, as always into high, middle, and low. But the new High group, unlike all its forerunners, did not act upon instinct but knew what was needed to safeguard its position. Goblin Mode.

The CCP intellectual knows exactly what he is doing, but his mind has been so rotted with communist gaslighting that he is literally salivating at the thought of smashing Uyghurs in the face with a baseball bat on video. By using his smooth brain, he also satisfies himself that he is the peace-loving good guy. In this way reality is not violated, like a soldier praying before he shoots a civilian.

Gaslighting lies at the very heart of Chinese Space Communism, since the essential act of Communism is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary. Ultimately it was by going Goblin Mode that the CCP has been able to arrest the course of history.

From about iPhone15time, a new kind of war was developed. Opt-out war. This is the kind of war that takes up 100% of all news space, and with a tone more serious than any religion; the government is telling you New Current Thing is THE MOST important issue EVER in the UNIVERSE OF HISTORY. And it requires insane, profound sacrifices that nobody from other groups will EVER understand. It is so important that your children MUST be drafted and sent to fight overseas, and if they don’t YOU ARE EVIL. BUT. The other part of this new war is you can just switch it off if you want and go to the lake to drive your boat! If you can afford a boat, that is! Lol!

This peculiar linking together of opposites—knowledge with ignorance, cynicism with fanaticism—is one of the chief distinguishing marks of Chinese Space Communism. The official ideology abounds with contradictions even when there is no practical reason for them. Thus, the CCP rejects and vilifies every principle for which the socialist movement originally stood, and it chooses to do this in the name of socialism. It does the largest upward transfer of wealth ever, in history, and this is a huge populist win. It preaches a contempt for the working class unexampled for centuries past, and it co-opts fashion trends peculiar to manual workers. It systematically undermines the solidarity of the family, and it calls its leader by a name which is a direct appeal to the sentiment of family loyalty. For it is only by this kind of demoralization that the ruling class’s power can be retained indefinitely. If human equality is to be ever averted—if the High, the 1%, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently, then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.

But there is one question which until this moment we have almost ignored. It is; why should human equality be averted? Supposing that the mechanics of the process have been rightly described, what is the motive for this huge, accurately planned effort to freeze history at a particular moment of time?

And who is the 1%? Billionaires?

Here we reach the real redpill. As we have seen. The mystique of the CCP, and above all of the Inner Party, depends upon gaslighting. But deeper than this lies the original motive, the never-questioned instinct that first led to the seizure of power and brought on the psyops, the Heroes of Peace, the continuous warfare, and all the other necessary paraphernalia into existence afterwards. This motive really consists…“

Nick paused the video. He became aware of silence, as one becomes aware of a new sound. It seemed to him that egirlebooks had been very still for some time past. She was lying on her side, wearing just a thong, with her face pillowed on her hand and one dark lock tumbling across her eyes. Her breast rose and fell slowly and regularly.

“Yo.”

No answer.

“Are you awake?”

No answer. She was asleep. He turned off the show, lay down, and pulled the coverlet over both of them.

He had still, he reflected, not learned the ultimate secret. He understood how; he did not understand why. This video, like the other video, had not actually told him anything that he did not already know. It had merely systematized the knowledge that he possessed already. But after watching it he knew better than before that he was not crazy. Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you crazy. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not crazy. He shut his eyes. The fan on his face and the girl’s smooth body gave him a strong, sleepy, confident feeling. He was safe, everything was all right. He fell asleep murmuring “it’s so over…we’re so back...it’s so over…we’re so back,” with the feeling that this remark contained in it a profound wisdom. When he woke it was with the sensation of having slept for a long time, but a glance at the old-fashioned clock told him that it was only 8:30. He lay dozing for a while; then suddenly started dreaming about the singing laundry auntie below.

“It was only a hopeless fancy…”

The cringe protest song seemed to have kept its popularity. You still heard it all over the place. It had outlived the Humiliation Song. Egirlebooks presently awoke, stretched herself luxuriously, and got out of bed.

“I’m hungry,” she said. “Let’s make some more coffee.” She grabbed the kettle and shook it. “Damn! The kettle’s broken.”

“I think Mr. Tao might have another one in his shop…”

Nick got up and started getting dressed. He still had the song in his head.

As he fastened the belt of his overalls he strolled across to the sound booth, thinking of the sidewalk downstairs, outside the laundromat. Tirelessly the auntie marched to and fro, corking and uncorking herself with the Tide Pods, singing and falling silent, and doing load after load of diapers. He wondered whether she took in washing for a living or was merely the slave of twenty or thirty grandchildren. Egirlebooks had come across to his side; together they gazed at their reflection in the sound booth window. He thought of the auntie in her characteristic attitude, her thick arms holding the basket, her powerful mare-like buttocks protruded, and it struck him for the first time that she was beautiful. It had never before occurred to him that the body of a woman of 50, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work til it was coarse in the grain like an over-ripe turnip, could be beautiful. But it was so, and after all, he thought, why not? The solid, contourless body, like a block of granite, and the rasping red skin, bore the same relation to the body of a girl as the rose-hip to the rose. Why should the fruit be held inferior to the flower?

Nick turned suddenly to egirlebooks. “When you were coming in, did you see that red-armed woman doing laundry in that laundromat next door? She’s always singing?”

“Mhm,” egirlebooks said, as though anticipating the question.

“She was beautiful,” he murmured.

“She was a meter across the hips, easily,” said egirlebooks.

“That’s a bit problematic don’t you think?”

He held egirlebooks’s supple waist easily encircled by his arm. From the hip to the knee her body was against his. Out of their bodies no child would ever come. That was the one thing they could never do. Only by word of mouth, through their big brains, could they pass on the secret. The woman down there had no mind, she had only strong arms, a warm heart, and a fertile belly. She had probably never even been on Reddit. He wondered how many children she had given birth to. It might easily be fifteen. She had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wild-rose beauty and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, darning, cooking, sweeping, polishing, mending, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over thirty unbroken years. At the end of it she was still singing. The mystical reverence that he felt for her was somehow mixed up with the aspect of the pale, cloudless Sky, stretching away behind the strip mall into interminable distance. It was curious to think that the actual sky was the same for everybody, in the MRC or the UAA. And the people under the Sky of the Future were also very much the same. Normies who weren’t big-brained but who were storing up in their hearts and bellies the power that would one day overturn the world.

If there was hope, it lay in the normies! Without having to watch the end of the web series, he knew that that must be War Machine’s final message. We just had to redpill enough normies. Where there is equality there can be sanity. Sooner or later it would happen; strength would change into consciousness. The normies were immortal, you could not doubt it when you looked at that valiant figure on the sidewalk. In the end their awakening would come. And until that happened, though it might be a thousand years, they would stay alive against all odds, like birds, passing on from body to body the vitality which the CCP did not share and could not kill.

“Do you remember the thrush that sang to us, that first day, in the Disney castle neighborhood?”

“He wasn’t singing to us,” said egirlebooks. “He was singing to please himself. Not even that. He was just singing.”

The birds sang, the proles sang. The CCP did not sing. All around the world, in London and Prime City, in Africa and Brazil, and in the mysterious, forbidden lands beyond the frontiers, in the streets of Paris and Detroit, in the villages of the endless Russian plain, in the bazaars of Turkey and Japan – everywhere stood the same solid unconquerable figure, made monstrous by work and childbearing, toiling from birth to death and still singing. Out of those mighty loins a race of conscious beings must one day come. You were the dead, theirs was the future. But you could share in that future if you kept alive the mind as they kept alive the body, and passed on the secret doctrine of two plus two equals four.

“Well I like to think he was singing to us,” Nick said.

“So what you’re saying is…true patriots are in control,” egirlebooks said.

“True patriots are in control,” he said.

“True patriots are in control,” she repeated, trying it one time with confidence.

“True patriots are in control,” said an iron voice behind them.

They sprang apart. Nick’s entrails seemed to have turned into ice. He could see the white all around his irises of egirlebooks’s eyes. Her face had turned a milky yellow. The smear of rouge that was still on each cheekbone stood out sharply, almost as though unconnected with the skin beneath, like she was wearing a mask.

“True patriots are in control,” repeated the iron voice.

Nick looked at the door. He wasn’t expecting anyone. At the open door was an obvious fed who might as well have been wearing a full PLA uniform. Instead, he was dressed in some trendy undercover-cop swag. He was holding an AR-19 and a hunter green star-and-crescent-moon East Turkestan Republic flag.

“Hey what’s up, my name’s Terry, I’m a producer with season four of the show.” He held up a lanyard thingy quickly, not nearly long enough to read it. Without even pausing for a response, he walked over to Nick. “Want to be in a sketch? We just need someone to hold this for a really funny sketch we’re doing about a shooting at a mall.”

He thrust the gun and flag into Nick’s hands, then snapped a picture with a digital camera. Egirlebooks jumped away from him as soon as the camera came out.

It was starting, it was starting at last! Nick could do nothing except stand gazing at the scene happening to him. To run for life, to get out of the house before it was too late – no such thought occurred to him. As soon as the fake producer snapped the picture his life was over. He would now be surfaced.

The fake producer looked at the viewfinder like “yep that’s good.” Nick went to sit at the computer desk again, just waiting for whatever the next thing would happen to him would be.

Egirlebooks was still pretending to be his friend. “I suppose we may as well say good-bye,” she said.

“Yep, you might as well say good-bye,” said the fake producer. And then another quite different voice, a thin, cultivated voice which Nick had heard before, struck in; “you know, dating is a little like fishing. You catch the fish and throw em back, you catch the fish and throw em back. Then one fish starts jumping back up into your boat, you know? And then you keep it. And then it tells you, why do you need this boat for when you got me? And then you start to go crazy, and you start believing her. So you say okay. And you get rid of your boat. Then the next time you fight, the fish looks at you and goes, ni**a you ain’t shit…You ain’t even got no boat.”

Something crashed on to the bed behind Nick’s back. A chair had been pushed and the sound booth window had burst. At the same time there was a stampede of boots up the stairs. The room was full of solid men in black uniforms, with iron-shod boots on their feet and truncheons in their hands.

Nick was not trembling any longer. Even his eyes he barely moved. One thing alone mattered: to keep still, to keep still and not give them and excuse to hit you! A Uyghur man with a smooth prize-fighter’s jowl and a mouth that was only a slit paused opposite him balancing his truncheon meditatively between thumb and forefinger. Nick met his eyes. The man protruded the tip of a white tongue, licked the place where his lips should have been, and said “oooh literal 1984 waaaaah…psshh okay dipshit.” and then passed on. There was another crash. Someone had picked up the Hongshan jade boat from the desk and smashed it on the brick fireplace.

Egirlebooks walked out of the room, her job of setting Nick up done. He stood dead still. No one had hit him yet. Thoughts which came of their own accord but seemed totally uninteresting began to flit through his mind. He wondered whether they had got Mr. Tao. He wondered if they had seen the laundry auntie downstairs. He noticed that he badly wanted to urinate, and felt a faint surprise because he had done so only two or three hours ago. He noticed that the clock on the mantelpiece said 9, meaning 21. But it seemed so much earlier. He wondered whether after all he and egirlebooks had mistaken the time—had slept the clock round and thought it was 2030 when really it was 830 on the following morning. But he did not pursue the thought further. It was not interesting.

There was another, lighter step in the hallway. Mr. Tao came into the room. The demeanor of the black-uniformed men suddenly became more subdued. Something had also changed in Mr. Tao’s appearance. His eye fell on the fragments of the Hongshan jade.

“Pick up those pieces,” he said sharply.

A man stooped to obey. Mr. Tao’s eyes then went to Nick.

“Antistate misconduct on government property. Less than 10 kilometers from the quantum computer. That’s a serious crime.” The Taiwan/Japan accent had disappeared; Nick suddenly realized whose voice it was that he had heard a few moments ago. Mr. Tao was still wearing his old velvet jacket, but his hair, which had been almost white, had turned black. Also he was not wearing his spectacles. He gave Nick a single sharp glance, as though verifying his identity, and then paid no more attention to him. Mr. Tao was still recognizable, but he was not the same person any longer. His body had straightened, and seemed to have grown bigger. His face had undergone only tiny changes that had nevertheless worked a complete transformation. The black eyebrows were less bushy, the wrinkles were gone, the whole lines of the face seemed to have altered; even the nose seemed shorter. It was the alert, cold face of a man of about 55. It occurred to Nick that for the first time in his life he was looking, with knowledge, at a fed.

* * *

The next day Nick got up at about 11 as usual. It was the fifth day of Empathy Week. Friday. He was at his apartment. He sat up and rubbed his eyes.

He had to talk to some lawyers today. About his arrest. This was going to fucking suck ass. His wrists still had some slight red marks from the handcuffs the day before. The cops tried to be really intimidating and took him to the station to get booked, and have his hearing scheduled, and then he bonded out. These CCP federal agents threatened him with all this shit about how he’d be back real soon and they don’t like terrorists in jail. It was the same shit they say on twitter all day, Nick thought, so it didn’t phase him. It was what it was.

He said “I’m gay and my dick is small” and his phone turned on.

He didn’t really need to go to the office today. It was good to take a day off anyways, so he didn’t get burnt out. This was definitely the day to take a day off. He would chill and then call some antistate misconduct lawyers later that afternoon. He laid back down on his futon. While his phone was still charging, he went to his Mandarin Dashboard and started doom scrolling.

Someone posted a Hotan Ronnie slideshow post. The first slide was a video of Hotan Ronnie driving his Dad’s car into a lake. Nick swiped to the next slide.

The second slide was a screenshot of a YouTube comment on the good Hotan Ronnie documentary. The comment said “The beatboxing kid in the mall at 9:00 was actually charged with manslaughter in 2020 in relation to the death of an infant. Talon Jacob Johnson and Rebecca Maree Green were both charged with child endangerment, while Talon also received manslaughter charges. They allegedly neglected their own child to malnutrition and then death. There was also signs of physical trauma on the childs brain found after autopsy, akin to shaking a child. The couple apparently used marijuana "DABS"(high concentrate THC) and fell asleep while the baby slept on the couch. Around 12 at night Talon allegedly woke up to crying so he fed and changed the baby and left it on the couch to sleep more, later in the night he claimed to check on the infant again and found them unresponsive. From their home they went to the hospital, when asked why they did not call 911 Talon claimed to know the child had already passed away.  The house was found in disarray smelling strongly of animal urine, having grimy floors, soiled diapers, and rotting food around the home. Meth pipes and knives were also left out and in reach of children. Both parents tested positive for meth and THC. Another child was taken into protective custody. Its a horrible story to say the least. I haven't heard Ronnie bring it up, probably for the best, so I question if he even knows.” Nick scrolled ahead on his TL.

Someone posted a screenshot from Hollywood Reporter. It said “Spotify Pictures announces first project, American biopic” then the paragraph “This is the first project from the music giant’s film venture, which is positioned to be a competitor to Netflix in the film production space. The project will be a biopic of American sports legend Babe Ruth, and will focus on the iconic slugger’s early life as an African slave in South Carolina.” There were more slides to the post, but Nick swiped up to the next thing on his TL. Welp this confirmed the rumor he had heard somewhere else, that Spotify was making movies now.

Someone posted a video where Big Chungus said “Big Chungus for a United Xinjiang. Big Chungus: It’s Our Right to Win.”

Someone posted some drone footage of a castle in Scotland.

Someone posted a TikTok where someone said “I’m sorry, is this Uyghur being a Karen? Awww I’m sorry Karen.”

Someone posted the fat Greek weightlifter yelling.

Someone posted a screenshot from the same Hollywood Reporter article about the Spotify Pictures Babe Ruth biopic, but a different part of the article. This part said, “Company representatives announced in May that the project would be a truly international venture, casting primarily Chinese actors. Today the casting was officially announced. The lead character, Babe Ruth, will be played by controversial Xinjiang YouTuber War Machine…”

Nick swiped ahead, dazed.

What the fuck? War Machine signed a deal with Spotify? That meant…he was fake…

Someone posted a Korean dog that distracted him. The dog was in the distance by a nice garden, on some grass. Suddenly it ran toward the camera, with its silly hair bouncing crazily all over its body. Nick liked the post.

Then, all of a sudden, he got a notification. From the Email app. It was from what looked like an actual email address that wasn’t spam. He clicked it.

He read the message and couldn’t believe what he was reading. He had been accepted into the Apple Partnership Program. There was a mixer at the Safe Super Bowl Apple Event Space downtown tomorrow, Saturday, and then on Sunday he and the rest of his fellow Partnership Program Influencers would be attending the Safe Super Bowl together!

Nick refreshed his inbox. There was now another email. It was from the CCP detective who had given him a hard time the day before. The detective said he knew they had scheduled Nick to come in for another interview next week, but he had heard that Nick had just become an Apple influencer, so now he said don’t worry about that appointment. He said Nick should just take all the time he needed and they would be in touch later about his next interview. Holy shit. What was happening?

Nick was in a daze. He refreshed his inbox again. There were about 5 really important-looking emails from his Apple contact, about things like payroll services and employee resource accounts and direct-deposit things he had to set up. Every email was color-coded for what steps he should pay special attention to. He clicked on the most recent one.

He read the email: “We just need to make sure your posting license is current. To do this you have to take a simple online quiz to make sure you are familiar with MRC and UAA modern history enough to post about current events like the Safe Super Bowl. You’ll have an Apple blue check, after all! So this is just a simple 10-module quiz about 21st century history that will help us be sure that you can identify misinformation and disinformation. It’s just 50 questions, open book. Anyone who has been watching popular movies and TV shows should be able to pass easily! In fact, we recommend to new influencers that you watch these TV shows to study. But most applicants find that simply a general familiarity with current television is enough for success on the quiz.” The email included a list of all the miniseries of truth that Nick had rigorously avoided watching.

This was bad. Nick was intentionally very unfamiliar with all the miniseries of truth. He hadn’t seen any of them. And what’s more, he didn’t want to watch them. How much time did he have to complete this fucking test? There had to be a way to game this quiz module thing. He looked at the bottom of the email: “If you plan to attend the orientation party at the Safe Super Bowl in Vanguard Investments Stadium – Apple corporate box seats ;) – please register using the link in your quiz confirmation email by EOD today, that’s 5 PM today. Thank you.”

5 PM today. Oh how Nick’s fortune had changed. This day was like a rollercoaster so far. Sometimes it be like that, he thought.

What time was it now? Just after 11. He could do the fucking quiz in 6 hours. He could probably find some post online with a cheat sheet or something. He would look it up on Reddit. Yeah. He could do that. He would go to the office and straight-up lock in. He had all afternoon. And the email said it was open book! Six hours was plenty of time.

Then he would have to go through the quantum computer tomorrow to get to the stadium, back on Earth, but he could be there by…early afternoon. That would be plenty of time! He could go to all the orientation activities and everything! Then the game. He would be able to post from the freaking Safe Super Bowl! How many people alive ever got to say they did that, huh?

And sure, War Machine was fake now, but that didn’t, like, really mean he was like, really fake. The Party season 4 still seemed like a freaking amazing show! Nick would be a cool dissident influencer who worked for a famous controversial YouTube show! He could do that; this was a free country.

He put on his headphones. He put on the trap beat playlist. He got dressed. He went down the elevator and back out the sliding glass door and black metal gate with all the cameras.

As he was walking down the sidewalk, to the bridge, he looked at the email again. What was the name of this fucking quiz? What was the website?

He read the email again: “The testing will take 2 hours. It will consist of 10 modules. It is administered through one of our third-party partners, More Powerful Sports, LLC.”

And then there was a website:

www.MorePowerfulSports.com.