16

They had done it, they had done it at last!

The room they were standing in was long-shaped and softly lit. It was the second-floor hallway of one of the super boujee pre-Sky pyramid brownstones in the Egypt Village section of Africaville, the political district of Mars Camp Bell. The richness of the dark blue carpet gave one the impression of treading on velvet. By the elevator there was a floor-to-ceiling mirror in a fancy wood frame with flowers carved into it. This was Basedschizofed’s building. Nick and egirlebooks walked halfway down the hallway until they reached his door. It was already open.

At the far end of the railroad apartment, Basedschizofed was sitting at a table under a green-shaded lamp, with a mass of books and papers on either side of him. Nick recognized this as the room where Basedschizofed did his Zoom podcast appearances and cable TV hits, against the bookshelf to show how big-brained he was. He had not bothered to look over when his roommate showed Nick and egirlebooks in.

Nick could hear him in the other room, on a Zoom call to a podcast, saying something like “at the end of the day, Deng, when the CCP reacts like this, it means you’re right over the target. If we weren’t actually winning the billions in propaganda wouldn’t be necessary.”

Nick’s heart was thumping so hard that he doubted whether he would be able to speak. They had done it, they had done it at last, was all he could think. It had been a rash act to come here at all, and sheer folly to arrive together; it showed all of the 1,000 government surveillance cameras they passed on the way that Nick was now associating irl with an antistate podcaster. One of the most hated dissident podcasters in China, in fact. But Basedschizofed said he had some information for them that he couldn’t risk putting in a DM.

It was only on very rare occasions that one saw inside these super fancy old-money buildings in Ürümqi (unless you were a Doordasher). They were located in the district that had once been a thriving Uyghur middle-class neighborhood. Then after the riots of iPhone2time, the whole area was demolished and the Uyghur residents were provided cheap apartments by the city’s outskirts, the area that was now the New Prime City outer boroughs. The government built the pyramid brownstones of Egypt Village in their place, which were rented to politicians and diplomats at luxury prices. The main local government offices were located in the nearby replica Pyramids of Giza.

The whole atmosphere of this huge block of flats, the richness and spaciousness of everything, the lack of fast-food franchises on every block, the architecturally significant buildings, the CCP historical marker signs, the government pyramids, the doormen hailing down taxis—everything was intimidating. Although he had a good reason for coming here, he was haunted at every step by the fear that some kind of private security guard would suddenly appear from around the corner, demand he do a Good Boy Check, and order him to get out.

Basedschizofed’s roommate had met them at the door and admitted both of them without demur. He was a small, dark-haired man in some white sweatpants, with a diamond-shaped, completely expressionless face which might have been Mexican or South American. The hallway down which he led them was softly carpeted, with cream-papered walls and white wainscotting, all exquisitely clean. That too was intimidating. This shit was boujee af, Nick thought. Basedschizofed’s family must have money or something.

Basedschizofed had a stapled packet of papers in his hand when they walked in and seemed to be studying it intently. Research for the podcast probably. His heavy face, bent down so that one could see the line of the nose, looked both formidable and intelligent. For perhaps twenty seconds he sat without stirring. He clicked his mouse a few times on the computer and then turned and looked at them.

He rose deliberately from his chair and came towards them across the soundless carpet. A little of the official atmosphere seemed to have fallen away from him when he was doing the hot takes, but his expression seemed grimmer than usual, as though he was in the zone grinding and didn’t want to be disturbed. The terror that Nick already felt was suddenly shot through by a streak of ordinary embarrassment. It seemed to him quite possible that he had simply made a stupid mistake. For what evidence had he in reality that Basedschizofed was any kind of political conspirator? Nothing but a comment on that Nextdoor post and a few DMs: beyond that, only his own secret imaginings, founded on a dream. But it couldn’t have just been his imagination, because egirlebooks was also there. She had gotten the DM too. As Basedschizofed was walking towards them, a thought seemed to strike him. He stopped, turned aside said “Neuralink, enter incognito mode.”

Egirlebooks uttered a tiny sound, a sort of squeak of surprise. Even in the midst of his panic, Nick was too much taken aback to be able to hold his tongue.

“You have incognito mode!” he said.

“Yes,” said Basedschizofed, “incognito mode, it was in the latest update. It probably doesn’t actually do anything though. Who knows. Anyways.”

He was opposite them now. His solid form towered over the pair of them, and the expression on his face was still indecipherable. He was waiting, somewhat sternly, for Nick to speak, but about what? Even now it was quite conceivable that he was simply so busy that he forgot what they came over for. Nobody spoke. The seconds marched past, enormous. With difficulty, Nick continued to keep his eyes fixed on Basedschizofed’s. Then suddenly the grim face broke down into what might have been the beginnings of a smile. With his characteristic gesture Basedschizofed resettled the spectacles on his nose.

“Shall I say it, or will you?” he said. He knew that Nick and egirlebooks couldn’t turn off their Neuralinks, so they would still have to speak in a simple code to not trigger the algorithm with any banned keywords.

“I have come here because…” said Nick,

He paused, realizing for the first time the vagueness of his own motives. Since this meeting probably could have been an email, it was not easy to say why he had agreed to come here. He went on, conscious that what he was saying must sound both feeble and pretentious:

“We heard we were invited to work on this project, season 4 of the show. We believe it will be actually redpilled, not just like fake culture war hot take redpilled. We think the purpose will be to redpill normies and actually accelerate the revolution, but like an actual revolution, not a psyopped hashtag revolution controlled by the CCP. We are enemies of the #brotherhood. We fedpost on main. We hate paying taxes. Chinese Space Communism is fake and gay. Ürümqi is not on Mars. It’s in Xinjiang, 4 hours southeast of Karamay. We want to kill the CCP. I tell you this because we want to put ourselves at your mercy. Any kind of crazy sketches or man-on-the-street stuff that you want to do…we’re ready.”

He stopped and glanced over his shoulder, with the feeling that the door had opened. Sure enough, the little diamond-faced roommate had come in without knocking.

“You guys want smoke?” he said. Nick saw that he was carrying a tray with some weed and blunts on it.

“Martin is one of us,” said Basedschizofed impassively. “He helps me out by staying here when I’m on the road. Yeah, have a seat and spark that thing bro.”

The little man sat down, quite at ease. Nick regarded him out of the corner of his eye. It struck him that the man’s whole life was playing a part, and that he felt it to be dangerous to drop his assumed personality even for a moment. Basedschizofed took the blunt from him and inhaled deeply, in a really cool and effortless way like they do in the movies. The smell of the weed was extremely good; it was like that Cali shit that egirlebooks had, but like way more dank even. He saw egirlebooks sniff if and give it a looksie when he passed it to her.

“This is called Blue Cheese, it’s a hybrid of Blue Dream and UK Cheese,” Basedschizofed said with a faint smile. “You can learn about it online, but not much of it actually makes it to Xinjiang I’m afraid. Unless you really know somebody.” His face grew solemn again, and when he got the blunt in the rotation he raised it like it was a toast. It wasn’t weird when he did it like that.

“I think it is fitting that we should dedicate this gathering to our Leader: to War Machine.” Everyone nodded and said “to War Machine.” It wasn’t weird when they did this. It was exactly the vibe.

Nick took the blunt with a certain eagerness. Blue Cheese was something that he had only read about on Reddit. Like the jade paperweight or Mr. Tao’s half-remembered Patrice O’Neal bits, it belonged to the vanished, romantic past, ‘back in the day’ as he liked to call it in his secret thoughts. For some reason he had always thought of Blue Cheese as having an intensely sweet taste, like that of Blackberry Haze, and an immediate intoxicating effect. Actually, when he came to inhale it, the stuff was distinctly disappointing. The truth was that after years of smoking Red Star mids he could barely taste it.

He hit it anyways, of course.

At that moment the doorbell rang. Basedschizofed got up and said, “oh shit, my Doordash” and left the room. A few seconds later he returned with a young African man wearing a Doordash square backpack.

Basedschizofed said, “Jimmy cool, he just want to hit the blunt too.”

Nick handed the guy the blunt. He hit the blunt and inhaled sharply.

Basedschizofed said, “we’re working on an internet show with War Machine, the YouTuber.”

The delivery guy said, “oh I fuck with that dude, I seen his clips on TikTok.”

“So War Machine is definitely real and not a deep fake?” Nick said.

“Yes, there is such a person, and he is as redpilled as ever. Where, I do not know.”

Then egirlebooks spoke: “And the production company – Alpha Investment Corporation? It’s real, and not simply a honeypot psyop by the Chinese Intelligence Agency?”

“No, it is real. The Party season 4 is real too. It’s funded. Some Bitcoin billionaire. Alpha Investment Corporation and my company are co-producing. It’s really happening. We’ve made arrangements to work with the Yiwu County Sherriff’s Department, Town of Yiwu, southwestern Xinjiang. Small town. They’ve agreed to stream all their patrol officers’ bodycams to the show’s website. Our website designers are working on the TTS functionality for the police radio channels and vehicles as we speak. You will never learn much more about Alpha Investment Corporation than it exists and you belong to it. We are very unorganized. But you will be season 4 official staff. It’s disorganized because that way our plans can’t be infiltrated by feds. I will come back to that presently.” He looked at his watch. “We have a few more minutes before my next cable news hit. You understand that I have to ask you a few…certain questions about the production. In general terms, what are you prepared to do?”

“Anything we are capable of,” said Nick. “Thinking of like recurring bits. Sketches. Acting. Uh I can edit a little bit…”

Basedschizofed had turned himself a little in his chair so that he was facing Nick. He almost ignored egirlebooks, seeming to take it for granted that Nick could speak for her. For a moment the lids flitted down over his eyes. He began asking his questions in a low, expressionless voice, as though this were a routine, a sort of catechism, most of whose answers were known to him already.

“You are prepared to be associated with this project? It’s terroristic antistate misconduct. If you’re surfaced, your life will be over. You’ll never be able to use an app ever again.”

“Yes, as long as it’s real and not a psyop.”

“Oh it’s real. You are prepared to commit antistate misconduct?”

“Yes, as long as it’s real and not a psyop.”

“To do level-5 metairony that could be easily misinterpreted and lead to the unironic deaths of hundreds of innocent people, just for the principle of free speech?”

“Yes, as long as it’s real and not a psyop.”

“To betray your country to foreign powers?”

“Sure, every politician does that every single day.”

“You are prepared to cheat, to forge, to blackmail, to corrupt the minds of children, to glorify Fentanyl, to normalize Onlyfans, to disseminate venereal diseases – to do anything which is likely to cause demoralization and weaken the power of the CCP?”

“Yes, as long as it’s not a psyop.”

“If, for example, it would somehow serve our interests to throw sulphuric acid in a child’s face – are you prepared to do that?”

“The CCP wouldn’t hesitate for a second to do that to me, so sure.”

“You are prepared to lose your identity and live out the rest of your life as a waiter or a dock-worker?”

“Sure why not.”

“You are prepared to commit suicide, if and when we order you to?”

“What?”

“Are you prepared to commit suicide if you need to? You’re going to go to prison and be tortured otherwise.”

“Then sure.”

“You are prepared to say ‘gay’?”

“Yes.”

“You are prepared to say ‘retarded’?”

“Yes.”

“You are prepared, the two of you, to, if the sketch calls for it and it would be really funny, to say the n-word…”

“No!” broke in egirlebooks.

It appeared to Nick that a long time passed before he answered. For a moment he seemed even to have been deprived of the power of speech. His tongue worked soundlessly, forming the opening syllables first of one word, then of the other, over and over again. Until he had said it, he did not know which word he was going to say. “No,” he said finally. “That is one thing I will never do.”

“You did well to tell me,” said Basedschizofed. “It is necessary for us to know everything.”

He sat back and looked at them both, then added in a voice with somewhat more expression in it:

“Okay. Now. There’s another part of the show this season. One we didn’t tell you about. It’s going to make this season especially…spicy. It’s going to be intense. The police department we found, in Yiwu county, eastern Xinjiang?”

“Yeah,” they both said, enthralled.

“So one of the main meta-jokes this season is we had them agree…that…for at least some of the episodes, for one of the challenges…they’re going to be wearing uniforms and calling themselves…the East Turkestan Republic…”

“That’s antistate misconduct!” Nick exclaimed in shock. Just the mention of the ETR was enough to have you surfaced.

“That’s right,” said Basedschizofed. “It usually would be. But our lawyers are saying that we’re protected under the new American part of the Chinese Space Communism Constitution. The metairony clause.”

“Absolutely mad,” said egirlebooks.

“Damn,” said Nick. “So this season is about meming…”

“That’s right,” said Basedschizofed. “Meming the East Turkestan Republic back into reality. It will destabilize China, to fight our misinformation. Then the plan is for activist groups in Taiwan and Hong Kong to take over the governments there again, to oust the CCP from power and reinstate the republican form of government. Soon the whole Macintosh Republic of China will become the Republic of China again. And Apple will go back to being a computer company and not a company that is trying to rule the world.”

They were stunned. They couldn’t stop thinking of the implications of this.

Basedschizofed went on: “Do you understand that even if you survive, it may be as a different person? We may be obliged to give you a new identity. Your face, your movements, the shape of your hands, the color of your hair—even your voice would be different. Our surgeons can alter people beyond recognition. Sometimes it is necessary. Sometimes we even amputate a limb. It’s the only way to restart your life with a new identity after one of our guys gets canceled.”

Nick could not help snatching another sidelong glance at Martin’s Mexican face. There were no scars that he could see. Egirlebooks had turned a shade paler, so that her freckles were showing, but she faced Basedschizofed boldly. She murmured something that seemed to be assent.

“Good. Then that is settled.”

There was a silver box of cigarettes on the table. With a rather absent-minded air Basedschizofed pushed them towards the others, took one himself, then stood up and began to pace slowly to and fro, as though he could think better standing. They were very good cigarettes, very thick and well-packed, with an unfamiliar silkiness in the paper. Basedschizofed looked at his watch again.

“Okay we better be getting back to it. Martin, can we just get these guys to fill out a few I-9s?” He said this with a weird inflection that seemed to communicate something to just Martin that the other two weren’t in on. The Doordash driver got up stonily and left. It occurred to Nick that right now they could be in a video for the show, like a hidden camera type thing. It was exactly the kind of content Alpha Investment Corporation would do. Martin proceeded to get two stapled packs of paper from the shelf, then folded them back to the last page and put them on the table.

“You can just sign it and let me take a photo of your IDs,” said Martin. They put their IDs on the table, where Martin, with his camera phone, snapped photos of them front and back. Then without speaking or giving any kind of salutation, he took the two signed I-9 forms and went out, closing the door silently behind him. Basedschizofed was strolling up and down now, one hand holding his pair of red-framed reading glasses, the other holding his cigarette.

“Will we meet War Machine?” asked Nick.

“Oh yeah, oh yeah, definitely. A lot. Don’t worry. It’s chill, our workflow. You’ll be in the main production room a lot. But you understand,” he said, “that this is going to be pretty unorganized. It’s always going to be fucked up with the deadlines and how stuff is changed in the edit to make it work. The final product is going to be nothing like the original idea sometimes. You’ll get the hang of it, don’t worry. Did I already ask if you’ve seen the War Machine Experience?”

Nick shook his head. “I didn’t want to risk my social credit score.”

“Ah,” said Basedschizofed. “You’ll have to watch it; so much of the style of the show is like…encoded in that. The whole mindset. You kind of have to watch the War Machine Experience to like…you need to get caught up on all the lore…” He trailed off and started pulling up something on his phone. “You’re right that it hurts your social credit score. So… Don’t let anyone see you watching it, but…okay I’m emailing you the file. The link to the file. Sooo…don’t watch it while your Neuralink is connected. Did I already say that? Just put the .dmg file on a USB drive. The social credit score algorithm doesn’t recognize it. And don’t plug the USB drive to any computer that is connected to government wifi. Within city limits you can basically only watch this in…a Faraday Cage.”

Oh perfect, Nick thought. Basedschizofed typed on his phone and then put it in his pocket with finality, like he had just sent an email.

He went on: “I can tell you that Alpha Investment Corporation exists, but I cannot tell you how many people are on the production staff, whether it's ten people or ten thousand people. From your personal knowledge you will never be able to give a tell-all interview to a blue check journo about the inner workings of our group. You will have three or four producers who are emailing you call sheets, who will be renewed from time to time as they get surfaced and canceled. As this was your first contact, we have been candidly videotaping it. We might use it for the show actually, who knows. When you receive story notes, they will come from me. If we find it necessary to communicate with you offline, it will be though Martin. When you are finally surfaced, you will confess. But you will have very little to confess, other than your own actions. You will not be able to betray more than a handful of unimportant people. Probably you will not even betray me. By that time I may be dead, or in an internment camp, or I shall have become a different person, with a different face.”

He continued to move to and fro over the soft carpet. In spite of the bulkiness of his body there was a remarkable grace in his movements. It came out even in the gesture with which he thrust a hand into his pocket, or manipulated a cigarette. More even than of strength, he gave an impression of confidence and perfectly balanced irony levels. However edgy all of his takes might be, he had nothing of the single-mindedness that belongs to an edgelord. When he spoke of murder, suicide, venereal disease, amputated limbs, and altered faces, it was always with a unique artful flair. “This is unavoidable,” his voice seemed to say; “this is the content we have got to do, unflinchingly. But this is not the content that we shall be doing when life is worth living again.” A wave of admiration, almost of worship, flowed out from Nick towards Basedschizofed. For the moment he had forgotten the shadowy figure of War Machine. When you looked at Basedschizofed’s powerful shoulders and his blunt-featured Mongolian face, so ugly and yet so civilized, it was impossible to believe that he could be psyopped. There was no stratagem that he was not equal to, no contrarian hot take that he could not foresee. Even egirlebooks seemed to be impressed. She had let her cigarette go out and was listening intently. Basedschizofed went on:

“You will have heard rumors of Alpha Investment Corporation, how we work. No doubt you have formed your own picture of it. You have imagined, probably, a huge underworld of conspirators, meeting secretly on the dark web, scribbling messages on anonymous message boards, recognizing one another by codewords or by special movements of the hand. Nothing of that kind exists. Most of the members of Alpha Investment Corporation have no way of recognizing one another. All the editors and stuff use pseudonyms. It is impossible for any one member to be aware of the identity of more than a few others. They have to do that so they can work on other projects and not get canceled. War Machine himself, if he fell into the hands of the feds, could not give them a complete list of contributors, or any information that would lead them to a complete list. No such list exists. It’s all crowdsourced. Alpha Investment Corporation cannot be wiped out because it is not an organization in the ordinary sense. It’s an aesthetic. A style. Nothing holds it together except an idea which is indestructible. You will never have anything to sustain you, except the idea. You will get no help and no encouragement. Sometimes we will not email you back for months. Every day trolls will call you antistatist terrorist scum and harass you as sadistically as possible online. When finally you are canceled, you will get thrown under the bus. We never help our members. At most, when it is absolutely necessary that someone should be silenced, we are occasionally able to smuggle a razor blade into a prisoner’s cell. You will have to get used to living without results and without hope. You will work for a while, you will be caught, you will confess, and then you will die. Those are the only results that you will ever see. There is no possibility that any perceptible change will happen within our own lifetime. We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing. It might be a thousand years. At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little. We cannot act collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards by redpilling individual after individual, generation after generation. In the face of the fake and gay CCP media there is no other way.”

He halted and looked at his watch for the third time. “Okay I gotta go do that TV hit.” He lit the blunt again and raised it again like he did before, like he was giving a toast but not in a weird way.

“What shall it be this time?” he said, still with the same perfectly balanced irony. “To trolling the Heroes of Peace? To the death of the Big Chungus meme? To humanity? To the future?”

“To the East Turkestan Republic,” said Nick.

“Hell yeah,” agreed Basedschizofed gravely. “To the East Turkestan Republic! We’re so back!”

They passed the roach around once more, and then egirlebooks stood up to go. Basedschizofed took a small box from the top of a cabinet and handed her a flat white bottle of something. It was Clear Eyes. He had a box of accessories like this that apparently he just handed out. It was baller. He dropped a few drops in his own eyes from his own bottle. As soon as the door had shut behind egirlebooks he appeared to forget her existence. He took another pace or two, then stopped.

“There are details to be settled,” he said. “I assume that you have a Faraday Cage already?”

Nick explained about Mr. Tao’s shop.

“That will do for the moment. Later we will arrange something else for you. It’s good opsec to change up the trap frequently. Meanwhile you should watch”—even Basedschizofed, Nick noticed, seemed to pronounce the words as though they had all the crazy alt letters like War Machine always used in his video titles—“The War Machine Experience, you understand, as soon as possible. But…there’s no rush. The show is indestructible. The Heroes of Peace get anyone banned for posting even the torrent link, or anyone hosting it, but it’s seeded on enough computers at this point that it will never get completely erased from the internet. Do you carry a bag or anything to work with you?”

“Yeah.”

“What kind?”

“A regular black Jansport backpack, like the plain kind everyone has.”

“The regular black Jansport backpack like the plain kind everyone has—good. One day in the fairly near future—I cannot give a date—you will get a spam email from Old Navy. The subject line will be advertising a 34% off sale. On the following day you will go to work without your backpack. At some time during the day, in the street, a man will touch you on the arm and say “I think you dropped your backpack.” The backpack he gives you will contain a scrap of paper in the outer pocket with a password on it. Remember earlier when I said to download the .dmg file and put it on a USB drive but don’t unzip it? Take that USB drive and the backpack with the password to the Faraday Cage, where you will unzip the .dmg file it on the airgapped computer there. Watch the show. Then, when you have watched every episode of the War Machine Experience, you will become officially…redpilled.”

They were silent for a moment.

“There are a couple of minutes before you need to go,” said Basedschizofed. “We shall meet again – and when we do meet again, it’ll be…”

Nick looked up at him. “On the best timeline?” he said hesitantly.

Basedschizofed nodded without appearance of surprise. “On the best timeline,” he said, as though he had recognized the allusion. “And in the meantime, is there anything that you wish to say before you leave? Any message? Any question?”

Nick thought. There did not seem to be any further question that he wanted to ask: still less did he feel any impulse to utter high-sounding generalities. Instead of anything directly connected with Basedschizofed or Alpha Investment Corporation, there came into his mind a sort of composite picture of the dark bedroom where his mother had spent her last days, and the little room over Mr. Tao’s shop, the steel engraving in its rosewood frame, and the Hongshan jade boat. Almost at random he said:

“Did you ever happen to hear that Patrice O’Neal bit about how dating is like fishing?”

Again Basedschizofed nodded. With a sort of grave courtesy he recited the whole bit:

“Dating is like fishing, you know?

You go out in your boat, and you throw your line in the water, and eventually, you’re going to catch a fish. You got the fish in your boat for a little while. Then you throw the fish back and go to catch a new fish.

But then sometimes the fish jumps back up in your boat again.

And when you have a fish that keeps jumping up into your boat, like ‘I wanna be up here with you.’ Eventually, you let her stay in the boat. You marry her.

Then she starts telling you you got to sell your boat. ‘What do you need that boat to catch fish for when you’ve got me?’ she’s telling you. And eventually, you start going crazy and start believing her. And then finally…you sell your boat.

And then the next time you’re in a fight with her, the bitch looks at you and says ‘ni**a  you ain’t shit! You ain’t even got no boat!’

“You knew the last line!” said Nick.

“Yes, I knew the last line. I used to listen to a lot of Patrice O’Neal on YouTube. And now, I am afraid, it is time for you to go. But wait. Take some Clear Eyes.”

As Nick stood up Basedschizofed held out a hand. In it was a bottle of Clear Eyes. He took it. Then they shook hands. Basedschizofed’s powerful grip crushed the bones of Nick’s palm. At the door Nick looked back, but Basedschizofed seemed already to be in the process of putting him out of mind. He was back at his computer desk waiting with his hand on his mouse. Nick could see the Zoom set-up with its blue-shaded lamp and the iMac there with its webcam, and all the piles of books and research papers for the podcast. The incident was closed. Within thirty seconds, it occurred to him, Basedschizofed would be back doing another fake cable news hot take about how the Communist Party was moving the goalposts again and this hypocrisy would not stand.