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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. It was 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. 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, then rows of posters of his hateful snarling face plastered all over the city. Then it showed a peaceful boujee sidewalk café being blown apart by a Uyghur man screaming some scary foreign language, then igniting a vest bomb. Then there were flashes of Spaceship Girl’s young Han Chinese face looking determined and resolved to win. Now it’s the same girl’s face, but grown up! The trailer cut to a slowly moving aerial shot of the Beijing skyline. Then a shot of the the People’s Great Hall building in Tiananmen Square, the famous courtyard with the portrait of Mao Zedong – instead there was a portrait of a classic Uyghur man’s face, grimacing menacingly. Then this was intercut with some footage of Spaceship Girl doing a graceful and powerful kung-fu workout against a backdrop 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 cuts to a close-up of a big authoritarian-looking billboard that says:

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 does 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. This was a feature of the Neuralink.

“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.

What had happened was, 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

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.