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.