15

Nick woke up with his eyes full of tears. Egirlebooks rolled sleepily against him, murmuring something that might have been “What’s the matter?”

“I dreamt—” he began, and stopped short. It was too complex to be put into words. There was the dream itself, and there was a memory connected with it that has swum back into his mind in the few seconds after waking.

He lay back with his eyes shut, still sodden in the atmosphere of the dream. It was a vast, luminous dream in which his whole life seemed to stretch out before him like a landscape on a summer evening after rain. It had all occurred inside the jade paperweight, but the surface of the boat was the dome of the sky, and inside the dome everything was flooded with clear warm light in which one could see into interminable distances. The dream had also been comprehended by – indeed, in some sense it had consisted in – a gesture of the arm made by his mother, and made again thirty years later by Spaceship Girl in the 1984 remake.

“Do you know,” he said, “that until this very moment I believed I had murdered my mother?”

“Why did you murder her?” said egirlebooks, almost asleep.

“I didn’t murder her. Not literally.”

In the dream he had remembered his last glimpse of his mother, and within a few moments of waking the cluster of small events surrounding it had all come back. It was a memory that he must have deliberately pushed out of his consciousness over many years. He was not certain of the date, but he could not have been less than ten iPhones old, perhaps twelve, when it had happened. His father had disappeared to work in the Dick Sucking Factory some time earlier, how much earlier he could not remember. He remembered better the rackety, uneasy circumstances of the time: the periodic mass pandemics and the lockdowns and sheltering-in-place, the piles of bodies in the streets on TV, the unintelligible proclamations posted at street corners, the gangs of youths in shirts all the same color, the rioting and peaceful protests, the enormous queues outside the grocery stores, the intermittent firecracker sounds in the city—above all, the fact that there was never enough to eat. His dad probably refused to wear a mask at the job site and made a big deal about it and gotten in trouble. This is what Nick had always imagined. When he thought about his childhood, he thought of long afternoons spent alone at the apartment with just his iPhone and iPad, watching a YouTube video while playing a video game at the same time.

When his father left the town to work at the Dick Sucking Factory in the east, his mother did not show any surprise or any violent grief, but a sudden change came over her. The CCP family friend was still coming over for her Mandarin lessons, but otherwise she just sulked around the apartment, sometimes crying. She seemed to have become completely spiritless. It was evident even to Nick that she was waiting for something that she knew must happen. She did everything that was needed – cooked, washed, mended, made the bed, swept the floor, worked at the post office, did her Mandarin homework – always very slowly and with a curious lack of superfluous motion, like someone doing a scene in a TV show. Her large shapely body seemed to relapse naturally into stillness. For hours at a time she would sit almost immobile on the bed, nursing his young sister, a tiny, ailing, very silent child of two or three, with a face so thin she looked like a little monkey. Very occasionally she would take Nick in her arms and press him against her for a long time without saying anything. He was aware, in spite of his youthfulness and selfishness, that this was somehow connected with the never-mentioned thing that was about to happen.

He remembered the government apartment where they lived in the suburb of Karamay City: a dark, closesmelling room that seemed half filled by a bed with white sheets. There was a gas ring in the fender, and a shelf where food was kept, and in the courtyard outside there was a brown earthenware naan oven. He remembered his mother’s statuesque body bending over the gas ring to stir at something in a saucepan. From the window you could see down into a courtyard between the ring of high-rise apartment buildings. The people there, in the Karamay region, mostly worked in the oil industry, which was lucrative enough that the town was actually pretty chill and insulated from the social turmoil in the rest of Xinijang. But they still were under strict CCP military surveillance, however. This was true since before even iPhonetimes.

Above all he remembered his continuous need to consume content and engage online. By age 12 he was already watching YouTube 24 hours a day, listening to it while he slept. He remembered the fierce need to drive engagement with his content. He would ask his mother naggingly, over and over again, why they could not go to McDonalds like normal people to do just a simple burger review. He would shout and storm at her (he even remembered the tones of his voice, which was beginning to break prematurely and sometimes boomed in a particular way), or he would attempt a sniveling note of pathos in his efforts to get more than his share of the good name-brand cookies from the store. His mother was quite ready to give him more than his share. She took it for granted that he, “the growing boy,” should have the biggest portion; but however much she gave him he invariably demanded more. At every meal she would beseech him not to be selfish and to remember that his little sister was sick and also needed food, but it was no use. He would cry out with rage when she stopped handing out the name-brand Milano cookies, he would try to wrench the bag out of her hands, he would grab bits from his sister’s plate before she was done. He knew that that meant his sister and mom couldn’t have as many cookies, but he could not help it; he even felt that he had a right to do it. The clamorous hunger in his belly seemed to justify him. Between meals, if his mother did not stand guard, he was constantly pilfering at the snack shelf in the kitchen closet, doing snack reviews for his TikTok.

One day the store had a sale on Milano cookies. The good name-brand kind. His mother had not bought any for weeks or months past. He remembered quite clearly those delicious little wafery cookies. It had been a 2 for 1 sale at the store, so she had 2 bags of the cookies. It was obvious that they should share some of these this first day, and then save the rest for another day. Suddenly, as though he were listening to somebody else, Nick heard himself announcing in a loud booming voice that he was going to eat both of the bags at once as fast as possible and post it on TikTok. His mother told him not to be greedy. He said but it would be funny! Also it would get a lot of clicks, so then they would have way more money in the long run, so they could buy way more cookies! There was a long, nagging argument that went round and round, with shouts, whines, tears, remonstrances, bargainings, and insistences that his mother didn’t understand humor or content creation. His tiny sister, clinging to her mother with both hands, exactly like a baby monkey, sat looking over her shoulder at him with large, mournful eyes. In the end his mother had said Nick could make the TikTok with one bag of the cookies, but they needed to save one bag for her and his sister. The little girl was clutching the second bag of Milano cookies, perhaps knowing what it was. Nick stood watching her for a moment. Then with a sudden swift spring he had snatched the bag out of his sister’s arms and was running out the door.

“Nick, Nick!” his mother called after him. “Come back! Give your sister back her cookies!”

He stopped, but did not come back. His mother’s anxious eyes were fixed on his face. Even now he was thinking about the thing, he did not know what it was, on the point of happening. His sister, conscious of having been robbed of something, was emitting a feeble wail. His mother drew her arm around the child and pressed its face against her breast. He turned and fled down the stairs with the bags of Milano cookies crinkling in his hand.

After he had made the video eating all the cookies at once, he started feeling guilty. He felt so bad he never even posted it. He was somewhat ashamed of himself and walked aimlessly around their neighborhood, on the outskirts of Karamay City, until hunger drove him home. His mother did not make a big deal about the incident. She was nice about it.

The next morning Nick still felt guilty. When he was still half-asleep in bed, he remembered that this was the day of his sister’s big dance recital at school. It was going to be a major school assembly that some visiting CCP officials from Beijing were going to attend, and even the People’s Representative from Xinjiang. It was a significant event for the whole city of Karamay. His sister’s class had been rehearsing their dance number for many months. Nick really didn’t want to go now, and be reminded again how bad of a person he was and how good and innocent his little sister was. She was so young, though, that she wouldn’t even remember if he missed it. It was nothing personal. He just couldn’t bear to go to this school assembly. So, he pretended to be sick and told his mother he needed to stay home that day. His mother had been nice about that too, and said “ooh well it must be very bad then.” She said she would Facetime the dance recital so he wouldn’t miss it. He said fine. He never saw his mother in person ever again.

Nick took a nap, and then woke up later to his mother Facetiming him for the dance recital. He was watching it halfway on his second monitor while he played Fortnite on his iPad. The whole school auditorium was decorated for the big event. There were all these China flags and patriotic banners up that he had never seen before. His sister and her classmates were doing the first number of the day, since they were the youngest. They were all on stage in their dance leotards. They were dancing. That’s all Nick remembered anymore. And then that’s when the fire started.

A spark from the lights had jumped onto one of the banners, which was flammable. Quickly the fire spread across the entire ceiling of the auditorium. On the Facetime screen all that Nick saw was a lot of smoke and then a flaming beam falling down in the middle of the screaming scene. Then he remembered seeing his mother run up on stage in a crowd of other people, trying to find their children. Then the ceiling started falling down. What ended up happening was 325 people died, including 288 schoolchildren and his mother and sister.

His father had been working at the factory at the time, and tried to take off work but DS-Co wouldn’t let him. Nick didn’t know exactly what had happened, but his father had done something rash in the dorms in protest of the response and was taken to one of the camps to “study.” There was no way for families to learn which study center detained people had been sent to. They simply vanished. A year later he learned that numerous detainees from that factory were being held at No. 4 Vocational Skills Education and Training Center in Lop County, Xinjiang. But he could not confirm that his dad was one of them. Nick didn’t know, or think about it. That whole era of his life was like a dream. He just knew for sure that he was sent to a government orphanage where he lived and went to school through age 22. Right after he graduated, he moved to Mars Camp Bell to become a content creator.

It was at the government orphanage that Nick started streaming and posting Good Boy Takes. His specialty was posting about the Karamay Fire, which was a huge national news story because of how the town authorities handled it. When the fire broke out, all the students were ordered to remain seated so the visiting CCP officials could file out to safety first. This was known as the “let the leaders leave first” policy. Ultimately there wasn’t enough time, so all the school children and teachers unfortunately didn’t make it out. A lot of the victims’ families and government critics questioned this policy and wanted to investigate further. But the Good Boy Take was that all those people were kooky conspiracy theorists and this was simply an unfortunate tragedy. Nick used his status as family of two victims to rack up tons up followers on all the social media platforms doing Good Boy Takes. It was a great community and tons of fun for a few iPhones, until the purges started.

Nick thought about this now at the Faraday Cage in Oldlondontownville, with the cringe old Danny Doppa calendar. Now he was regularly DMing one of the main anti-CCP podcasters in China. He was totally numb to the trauma by this point. In the aftermath of the fire, the gaslighting from the government had been mind-bogglingly heavy. Nick spent hours every day for iPhones saying that criticism of the “let the leaders leave first” policy was a conspiracy theory started by Russian terrorists to destabilize Xinjiang. Then, when the government announced that the local fire department had in fact used that policy, he had shifted with all the other extremely online ironylords to saying that of course it would make sense to let the leaders leave first. After all, they are really important to the stability of the country. Wouldn’t you would want to save the generals first in a war situation? Nick posted this take many times and got thousands and thousands of likes from the CCP blue checks. This was basically what started his posting career, in fact. Since then, his posts had evolved through several different phases, on different app platforms, before arriving at his current phase: private-Instagram redpilled memelord.

That first era, though—posting Good Boy Takes on Twitter—that was also when he got his online moniker Nick Karamay. It was because he was from Karamay (the suburbs, at least), and ‘Nick Karamay’ sounded like ‘Nick Carraway,’ from the American book The Great Gatsby. Also, at that time the CCP wasn’t letting Uyghurs use their Islamic names online, and Nick’s real name was Muhammad. So he changed his Twitter name to Nick Karamay one day, and that became his online moniker from then on.

Nick found out eventually that his father had died in the Kashgar Reeducation Through Labor Camp where he was being held for “possessing illegal and antistate materials.” His body was then mummified and toured through the UAA and Europe as part of the BODIES exhibit. Nick remembered that he used to actually tweet about how cool this family connection was too, and get clout from it. Last he knew the bodies from the exhibit were in the permanent collection of the Xing Museum in Shanghai.

The memory of the scene from the 1984 remake with the strong female lead, it was still vivid in his mind, especially now the gesture of the Uyghur actress Spaceship Girl. It was in this gesture where the whole meaning of the event seemed to be contained. His mind went back to another dream of two months ago. Exactly as his mother sat on the dingy white-sheeted bed, with the child clinging to her, so she had sat in the auditorium on that Facetime call, far away from him, suffocating in the flames, still talking to him through the darkening Facetime call.

He told egirlebooks the story of the Milano cookies and his mother’s death. Without opening her eyes she rolled over and settled herself into a more comfortable position.

“Kids are assholes,” she said indistinctly.

“Yes, but the real point of the story—”

From her breathing it was evident that she was going off to sleep again. He would have liked to continue talking about his mother. He did not suppose, from what he could remember of her, that she had been an unusual woman, still less an intelligent one; and yet she had possessed a kind of nobility, a kind of purity, simply because the standards that she obeyed were private ones. Her feelings were her own, and could not be altered by psyops. It would not have occurred to her that an action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love. When they were trapped and the flames were engulfing both their bodies, his mother had clasped the child in her arms. It was no use, it changed nothing, it did not avert the child’s death or her own; but it seemed natural to her to do it.

The terrible thing that the CCP had done was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time robbing you of all power over the material world. When once you were in the grip of the MRC’s algorithm, what you felt or did not feel, what you did or refrained from doing, made literally no difference. Whatever happened you vanished, and neither you nor your actions were ever heard of again. You were lifted clean out of the stream of history. And yet to the people of only two generations ago this would not have seemed all-important, because they were not attempting to alter history. They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself.

The normies, it suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this condition. They were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea; they were loyal to one another. For the first time in his life, he did not despise the normies or think of them merely as an inert force which would one day spring to life and regenerate the world. The normies had stayed human. They had not become extremely online. They had held on to the primitive emotions which he himself had to relearn by conscious effort.

All these normies, everyone you see walking down the street, have their own lives. That’s who you see posting all these comments on all these websites. That’s who is watching all the videos with 16 million views. Every one of those 16 million views is a person with their own life. Almost every one of them a normie. And in thinking this he remembered, without apparent relevance, how a few weeks ago he had seen someone shoot up an ODing tweaker with Narcan right there on the sidewalk and had just stepped around them.

“The normies are human beings,” he said aloud. “We are not human.”

“Why not?” said egirlebooks, who had woken up again.

He thought for a little while. “Has it ever occurred to you,” he said, “that the best thing for us to do would be simply to delete our accounts and never look at a computer ever again?”

“Yes, dear, it has occurred to me, several times. But I’m not going to do it, all the same.”

“We’ve both been lucky,” he said, “but it can’t last much longer. You’re young. You’re a hot Chinese girl. You’re never going to get canceled.”

“No, it’s not like that. I’m done with all the Current Thing stuff after this Empathy Week. I want to work on the Party, with you. I got the DM from Basedschizofed too.”

“I know. That’s awesome. But still, we may be together another six months—a year—there’s no knowing. But there’s no way it’s going to work out. China is too fucked. And The Party isn’t going to do anything; it’ll just be more content for the endless social media churn. Eventually I’m going to slip up and fedpost, then I’m going to get surfaced. You’ve seen what happens to a Uyghur when they’re surfaced, it’s like a blood-in-the-water feeding frenzy. I’ll be disavowed by everyone possibly connected to me. You’ll have to denounce me or you’ll get kicked off all your platforms and lose your sponsors. So you’ll do it. Why would you stick your neck out for me?”

“I’ll just make up some nonsense non-apology so it’s clear I’m doing irony. I know what I’m doing, don’t forget.”

“I mean that’s easy to say now, but it’s hard once the heat of the struggle session is on, like…you know, you’ve seen the interrogations on YouTube.”

“If you mean confessing,” she said, “we shall do that, right enough. Everybody always confesses. You can’t help it. They torture you.”

“I don’t mean confessing, that’s just bullshit yapping. We know nobody takes that shit seriously. They get thrown out in court all the time. That’s why these CCP hacks just get up and brazenly lie under oath knowing nothing will happen. It’s all just a big joke. The only thing that actually matters is the public humiliation ritual. Like, every time you turn on your Neuralink there’s 5,000 harassing notifications for you. All unbelievably sadistic and evil. There is no way to possibly overstate how evil what they are planning is. And it’s not like a fair fight where they invite you to have an Oxford-style debate. They psyop you into holding a gun in a picture and say you were planning a crisis event. They plant child porn on you.”

“That’s not true, they can’t actually entrap you into doing a crisis event.”

“They can’t?? Of course they can! They don’t even have to get a real photo of you holding the gun, they can just deep fake one!”

She thought it over. “Well. Just wear a t-shirt all the time that says ‘I AM NOT PLANNING A CRISIS EVENT. THIS IS BEING TAKEN OUT OF CONTEXT. THIS IS A JOKE.’”

“Yeah,” he said a little more hopefully, “no; that’s quite true. It would be okay if I was wearing the t-shirt. Or at least, if you can feel that staying human is worthwhile, to have just a little swag left, you’ve beaten them.”

He thought of how there were like a million cameras and microphones scraping all possible data from every human being at all times. They could spy upon you night and day; but if you kept your head, you could still outwit them. He still had his security by obscurity. But that would be gone, of course, as soon as he was surfaced; when he was actually in their hands.

One did not know exactly how psyopped the quantum computer must be by now, but it was possible to guess: tortures, drugs, delicate instruments that registered your nervous reactions, pat-downs by government agents, overpriced chicken Ceaser wraps, gradual wearing-down by sleeplessness and solitude and persistent questioning. Ads for the latest miniseries of truth would be playing on every possible screen. And the Marvin the Martian movies with their thinly veiled metaphors for Chinese Development.

The egirl left and then Nick left the Faraday Cage a few minutes later, still thinking about the dream. On the walk home he listened to a true crime video about a child abduction where the guy got caught 30 years later. When Nick got home he read through some of the comments. Someone in the comments said their cousins were both abducted once, and held for several days on a farm in the American midwest, then one day they were walking outside with their abductor and a neighbor farmer saw them and approached to talk to them. The neighbor asked “is this your dad?” and the abductor said “yes” but both the kids shook their heads “no.” The abductor headbutted the neighbor and ran away. The commenter said “The situation could have easily turned out differently.”

Nick saw a suggested video from the Shanghai Post Tribune: “Top 10 Fairest Elections of All Time.” In the thumbnail it showed the upcoming MRC iPhone50time People’s Election in the #1 spot with the host smiling and doing a thumbs up.

There was a suggested video with 1.4M views called “Famous lolcow DEAD.” The thumbnail was a car parked at the end of a paved road in the desert with a body covered with a sheet lying next to it. It was Second Edgar, he had gone nuts and gone into the desert to stream and fell off the map. Everyone had suspected he was dead and they were right.

There was a suggested video about how to draw the Apple logo with a ruler and graph paper.

There was a suggested video from the Official CCP YouTube channel called “SHOCKING: The Hitler Files” that was 2 days old and had 23M views. It was a deep fake produced by the CIA of Adolph Hitler pacing around his war room talking to his trusted advisors about relations between Nazi Germany and China. He says “you know, boys, I think when it comes to the whole Asian continent, I think the finest race there are the Uyghurs. Yes, the Uyghurs. They are so much better than the Han there, and the Mongolians and the Thai and all those other Asian races in China. The Uyghurs are definitely the best. Oh yes. I love Uyghurs.” The video had a 1-second warning that it was a deep fake approximation created by CIA independent contractors, but that didn’t matter because all the documents about the creation of the video were totally redacted. And everybody in Xinjiang knew by now that questioning the blue checks was antistate misconduct.

Nick saw a thumbnail for the new music video from Hexi, the song was called XPCC and it was all about how badass it was to work for the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps. Apparently the quarterback of the Camp Bell Dragons, who was Han Chinese, made a cameo in the video because he was in the thumbnail pic.

Nick tabbed to Instagram.

Someone said Big Chungus stood on business in the debate.

There was a new arthouse thriller that was nominated for all the CCP Awards, it was called Han Vigilante Smiling.

Someone posted a meme that said “If you were born in iPhone1time, you’ve already lived through THIS MUCH history.”

Nick closed Mandarin.

Nick put on a BillabongKeith advice stream. The top comment was “Thank you Keith for helping me keep my sense of humor alive throughout all the years of bullshit.” Another comment said “I’ve been falling asleep to the BillabongKeith streams every night for 6 months now.” On the stream, from iPhone47time, BillabongKeith was saying,

“Hmm another one of you guys who is in Mars Camp Bell and says ‘oh I like New Prime City but I don’t like the NPCs, I don’t want to be an NPC my whole life.’ I get that. Look, I never understood the thing where you’re living in the city like New Prime City, you’re just living there like spending all your money, you’re having to do these Good Boy Checks everywhere, dancing around saying how gay you are all the time. When they do the lockdowns again, you’ll just do whatever the CCP says again, okay. People are like ‘Well I like that city lifestyle, the lifestyle of the big city.’ ‘The food is better.’ Mars, wow, living on Mars. It’s just like, yeah, keep your high-paying city job and keep all that money, then get a place like 2-4 hours outside the city, and just like dump money into that for a year, okay, fixing it up. The city’s still going to be there. You do that and then try to get some kind of remote thing going with your job, or else…just quit your job and do something else hahaha I mean that’s what I’d do. That’s what I’d always do… If this streaming thing doesn’t work out, okay, I’ve got no problem totally starting over, going to sell cars somewhere in fucking Mongolia, okay. ‘Nice to meet ya, Xeng Xin, army brat from great metropolis of Shenzen what were ya looking to check out today?’”

Facts, at any rate, could not be kept hidden. They could be tracked down by enquiry, they could be squeezed out of you by torture. But if the object was not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it ultimately make? They could not alter your feelings: for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought. They could even, with the government-mandated Neuralink, get inside the few square centimeters inside your skull; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.