Nick paused for a moment. He didn’t click another video right away. The blissful feeling of being alone with the forbidden series, in a room where his Neuralink was disconnected, had not worn off. Coziness was a physical sensation, mixed up somehow with the tiredness of his body, the softness of the chair, the touch of the faint breeze from the fan that played upon his cheek. The show fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In a sense it told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction. It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, and way better at video editing. Finally, a good show, he thought.

He had just clicked back to the first video when he heard egirlebooks’s footstep on the stair and started out of his chair to meet her. It had been more than a week since they had seen each other.

“I’ve got the show,” he said as they disentangled themselves.

“Oh you’ve got it? Good,” she said without much interest, and almost immediately turned the Bodum kettle on.

They did not return to the subject until they had been in bed for half an hour. The evening was just warm enough to make it worthwhile to get up and turn on the fan. Nick thought about how he had seen the same auntie on the sidewalk again that night, doing laundry once more. There seemed to be no day when she was not marching to and fro between her apartment building and the laundromat, alternately holding Tide Pods in her mouth and breaking forth into lusty song. Egirlebooks had settled down on her side and seemed to be already on the point of falling asleep. He sat up in bed and reached out for the mouse on the iMac, which was on the desk nearby.

“We have to watch it,” he said. “You too. All of the production staff have to watch it.”

“You watch it,” she said with her eyes shut. “Just put it on, I can hear it.”

The clock’s hands said six. They had three or four hours of content ahead of them. He clicked the file for the first video again.

The blippy electronic beat started again and the title screen said ALPHA INVESTMENT CORPORATION PRESENTS / The War Machine Experience.

Nick skipped ahead to a middle part he hadn’t watched yet.

War Machine was in a professional-looking sound recording booth speaking into a microphone with a large screen over it. The video was edited so you heard his voice, but instead of seeing his face, you saw an ADHD-glitch-edited collage of different deep-faked celebrities’ faces, including all the members of the CCP Politburo.

“So in the 19^th and up to the 20^th century there had been the kind of class structure where there was like the poor lower class, the middle class, then the high-class rich people, right. And like in 1984 he says how the rich people control everything and keep the poor people down by keeping them busy fighting wars and chasing status symbols and stuff? Communism was supposed to change that. Communist revolutions were supposed to change that, Maoist communism is supposed to get rid of all this money-worship. So. We have communism now. We have Chinese Space Communism. The revolution happened. Yet now, there are still the 3 classes being kept in their classes by wars started by the ruling class. Once again showing that communism is just another mold for capitalist human nature to find itself in.”

Nick paused it.

“Are you awake?” he said.

“Yes, my love, I’m listening. Go on. It sounds good.”

He unpaused it.

“The fake CNN twitter news cycle. That’s the same news cycle as Napoleon meant when he said all of history is a set of lies agreed upon. It’s the same news cycle as George Orwell talked about when he wrote about the Spanish Civil War. There was no connection to reality. It was like trying to solve an equation with two unknown variables. It was like trying to make a move in chess when you had already been mated. It was enough to put you…in gamer mode.

But you don’t really do anything, right, because you don’t want to seem too far right-wing. Anyone who’s ever mad at the fake government now, you notice, that’s right wing. Right-wing Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Because the government, which is insanely right wing, does superficial left-wing signaling, so it gets to play victim against right-wing critics. Okay. That’s why it does that. You know what that means, left wing and right wing? That comes from the French revolution, when the people who were loyal to the king were on the right side of the room and the populist revolutionaries were on the left side. That’s where that comes from. I think…okay…so if you’re a Uyghur in Xinjiang and you don’t want your mosque to be turned into a police station, that means you…love the king or something?

But yes, by the second decade of iPhonetimes all the main currents of political thought were authoritarian. This new technology, iPhones, this shit was going to be used to oppress somebody. The earthly pleasures had been discredited at exactly the moment when it became realizable. And in the general hardening of outlook that set in in early iPhonetimes, practices which had been long abandoned, in some cases for hundreds of years—imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions, killing of medical staff and civilians, the use of hostages, and the ethnic cleansing of whole populations—not only became common again, but were tolerated and even encouraged by people who considered themselves progressive.

It was only after another decade of international wars, civil wars, psyops, revolutions, and counter-revolutions in all parts of the world that Chinese Space Communism and its rivals emerged as fully worked-out political theories. But they had been foreshadowed by the various systems, generally called totalitarian, which had appeared in the previous century, and the main outlines of the world which would emerge from the prevailing chaos had long been obvious. What kind of people would control this world had been equally obvious. The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, fake journalists, union organizers, Reddit mods, PR people, street tweakers, political grifters and hangers on. These people, whose origins lay in the salaried upper middle class and the upper class, had been shaped and brought together by the slimy world of international intelligence agencies. As compared with their opposite numbers in previous ages, they were more conscious of what they were doing—trolling—and more intent on crushing opposition. And different from even an institution like the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages, these people totally controlled the platforms that mediate all exchange of information on Earth.

With TV, the boomers were finally a generation that could be completely trapped into a vividly shared fantasy world – a ”trip” – that they were all consciously aware of being on together. Then with the internet the process was taken a step further. Theoretically, the process would be more democratized with fewer gatekeepers. But in fact, the gatekeepers used their monopoly on media and intimate cooperation of the CIA to turn the new internet space into another vector for spreading genocidal government propaganda. Everyone knew they were being lied to and manipulated. But they loved it. Because it was being done by the right people, the celebs, and against the right people, the Uyghurs, who you were primed to hate because they were the evil villains in every CCP TV show.

The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on Current Thing, now existed for the first time. After the revolutionary period of the iPhone10times and iPhone20times, society regrouped itself, as always into high, middle, and low. But the new High group, unlike all its forerunners, did not act upon instinct but knew what was needed to safeguard its position. Goblin Mode.

The CCP intellectual knows exactly what he is doing, but his mind has been so rotted with communist gaslighting that he is literally salivating at the thought of smashing Uyghurs in the face with a baseball bat on video. By using his smooth brain, he also satisfies himself that he is the peace-loving good guy. In this way reality is not violated, like a soldier praying before he shoots a civilian.

Gaslighting lies at the very heart of Chinese Space Communism, since the essential act of Communism is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary. Ultimately it was by going Goblin Mode that the CCP has been able to arrest the course of history.

From about iPhone15time, a new kind of war was developed. Opt-out war. This is the kind of war that takes up 100% of all news space, and with a tone more serious than any religion; the government is telling you New Current Thing is THE MOST important issue EVER in the UNIVERSE OF HISTORY. And it requires insane, profound sacrifices that nobody from other groups will EVER understand. It is so important that your children MUST be drafted and sent to fight overseas, and if they don’t YOU ARE EVIL. BUT. The other part of this new war is you can just switch it off if you want and go to the lake to drive your boat! If you can afford a boat, that is! Lol!

This peculiar linking together of opposites—knowledge with ignorance, cynicism with fanaticism—is one of the chief distinguishing marks of Chinese Space Communism. The official ideology abounds with contradictions even when there is no practical reason for them. Thus, the CCP rejects and vilifies every principle for which the socialist movement originally stood, and it chooses to do this in the name of socialism. It does the largest upward transfer of wealth ever, in history, and this is a huge populist win. It preaches a contempt for the working class unexampled for centuries past, and it co-opts fashion trends peculiar to manual workers. It systematically undermines the solidarity of the family, and it calls its leader by a name which is a direct appeal to the sentiment of family loyalty. For it is only by this kind of demoralization that the ruling class’s power can be retained indefinitely. If human equality is to be ever averted—if the High, the 1%, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently, then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.

But there is one question which until this moment we have almost ignored. It is; why should human equality be averted? Supposing that the mechanics of the process have been rightly described, what is the motive for this huge, accurately planned effort to freeze history at a particular moment of time?

And who is the 1%? Billionaires?

Here we reach the real redpill. As we have seen. The mystique of the CCP, and above all of the Inner Party, depends upon gaslighting. But deeper than this lies the original motive, the never-questioned instinct that first led to the seizure of power and brought on the psyops, the Heroes of Peace, the continuous warfare, and all the other necessary paraphernalia into existence afterwards. This motive really consists…“

Nick paused the video. He became aware of silence, as one becomes aware of a new sound. It seemed to him that egirlebooks had been very still for some time past. She was lying on her side, wearing just a thong, with her face pillowed on her hand and one dark lock tumbling across her eyes. Her breast rose and fell slowly and regularly.

“Yo.”

No answer.

“Are you awake?”

No answer. She was asleep. He turned off the show, lay down, and pulled the coverlet over both of them.

He had still, he reflected, not learned the ultimate secret. He understood how; he did not understand why. This video, like the other video, had not actually told him anything that he did not already know. It had merely systematized the knowledge that he possessed already. But after watching it he knew better than before that he was not crazy. Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you crazy. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not crazy. He shut his eyes. The fan on his face and the girl’s smooth body gave him a strong, sleepy, confident feeling. He was safe, everything was all right. He fell asleep murmuring “it’s so over…we’re so back...it’s so over…we’re so back,” with the feeling that this remark contained in it a profound wisdom. When he woke it was with the sensation of having slept for a long time, but a glance at the old-fashioned clock told him that it was only 8:30. He lay dozing for a while; then suddenly started dreaming about the singing laundry auntie below.

“It was only a hopeless fancy…”

The cringe protest song seemed to have kept its popularity. You still heard it all over the place. It had outlived the Humiliation Song. Egirlebooks presently awoke, stretched herself luxuriously, and got out of bed.

“I’m hungry,” she said. “Let’s make some more coffee.” She grabbed the kettle and shook it. “Damn! The kettle’s broken.”

“I think Mr. Tao might have another one in his shop…”

Nick got up and started getting dressed. He still had the song in his head.

As he fastened the belt of his overalls he strolled across to the sound booth, thinking of the sidewalk downstairs, outside the laundromat. Tirelessly the auntie marched to and fro, corking and uncorking herself with the Tide Pods, singing and falling silent, and doing load after load of diapers. He wondered whether she took in washing for a living or was merely the slave of twenty or thirty grandchildren. Egirlebooks had come across to his side; together they gazed at their reflection in the sound booth window. He thought of the auntie in her characteristic attitude, her thick arms holding the basket, her powerful mare-like buttocks protruded, and it struck him for the first time that she was beautiful. It had never before occurred to him that the body of a woman of 50, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work til it was coarse in the grain like an over-ripe turnip, could be beautiful. But it was so, and after all, he thought, why not? The solid, contourless body, like a block of granite, and the rasping red skin, bore the same relation to the body of a girl as the rose-hip to the rose. Why should the fruit be held inferior to the flower?

Nick turned suddenly to egirlebooks. “When you were coming in, did you see that red-armed woman doing laundry in that laundromat next door? She’s always singing?”

“Mhm,” egirlebooks said, as though anticipating the question.

“She was beautiful,” he murmured.

“She was a meter across the hips, easily,” said egirlebooks.

“That’s a bit problematic don’t you think?”

He held egirlebooks’s supple waist easily encircled by his arm. From the hip to the knee her body was against his. Out of their bodies no child would ever come. That was the one thing they could never do. Only by word of mouth, through their big brains, could they pass on the secret. The woman down there had no mind, she had only strong arms, a warm heart, and a fertile belly. She had probably never even been on Reddit. He wondered how many children she had given birth to. It might easily be fifteen. She had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wild-rose beauty and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, darning, cooking, sweeping, polishing, mending, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over thirty unbroken years. At the end of it she was still singing. The mystical reverence that he felt for her was somehow mixed up with the aspect of the pale, cloudless Sky, stretching away behind the strip mall into interminable distance. It was curious to think that the actual sky was the same for everybody, in the MRC or the UAA. And the people under the Sky of the Future were also very much the same. Normies who weren’t big-brained but who were storing up in their hearts and bellies the power that would one day overturn the world.

If there was hope, it lay in the normies! Without having to watch the end of the web series, he knew that that must be War Machine’s final message. We just had to redpill enough normies. Where there is equality there can be sanity. Sooner or later it would happen; strength would change into consciousness. The normies were immortal, you could not doubt it when you looked at that valiant figure on the sidewalk. In the end their awakening would come. And until that happened, though it might be a thousand years, they would stay alive against all odds, like birds, passing on from body to body the vitality which the CCP did not share and could not kill.

“Do you remember the thrush that sang to us, that first day, in the Disney castle neighborhood?”

“He wasn’t singing to us,” said egirlebooks. “He was singing to please himself. Not even that. He was just singing.”

The birds sang, the proles sang. The CCP did not sing. All around the world, in London and Prime City, in Africa and Brazil, and in the mysterious, forbidden lands beyond the frontiers, in the streets of Paris and Detroit, in the villages of the endless Russian plain, in the bazaars of Turkey and Japan – everywhere stood the same solid unconquerable figure, made monstrous by work and childbearing, toiling from birth to death and still singing. Out of those mighty loins a race of conscious beings must one day come. You were the dead, theirs was the future. But you could share in that future if you kept alive the mind as they kept alive the body, and passed on the secret doctrine of two plus two equals four.

“Well I like to think he was singing to us,” Nick said.

“So what you’re saying is…true patriots are in control,” egirlebooks said.

“True patriots are in control,” he said.

“True patriots are in control,” she repeated, trying it one time with confidence.

“True patriots are in control,” said an iron voice behind them.

They sprang apart. Nick’s entrails seemed to have turned into ice. He could see the white all around his irises of egirlebooks’s eyes. Her face had turned a milky yellow. The smear of rouge that was still on each cheekbone stood out sharply, almost as though unconnected with the skin beneath, like she was wearing a mask.

“True patriots are in control,” repeated the iron voice.

Nick looked at the door. He wasn’t expecting anyone. At the open door was an obvious fed who might as well have been wearing a full PLA uniform. Instead, he was dressed in some trendy undercover-cop swag. He was holding an AR-19 and a hunter green star-and-crescent-moon East Turkestan Republic flag.

“Hey what’s up, my name’s Terry, I’m a producer with season four of the show.” He held up a lanyard thingy quickly, not nearly long enough to read it. Without even pausing for a response, he walked over to Nick. “Want to be in a sketch? We just need someone to hold this for a really funny sketch we’re doing about a shooting at a mall.”

He thrust the gun and flag into Nick’s hands, then snapped a picture with a digital camera. Egirlebooks jumped away from him as soon as the camera came out.

It was starting, it was starting at last! Nick could do nothing except stand gazing at the scene happening to him. To run for life, to get out of the house before it was too late – no such thought occurred to him. As soon as the fake producer snapped the picture his life was over. He would now be surfaced.

The fake producer looked at the viewfinder like “yep that’s good.” Nick went to sit at the computer desk again, just waiting for whatever the next thing would happen to him would be.

Egirlebooks was still pretending to be his friend. “I suppose we may as well say good-bye,” she said.

“Yep, you might as well say good-bye,” said the fake producer. And then another quite different voice, a thin, cultivated voice which Nick had heard before, struck in; “you know, dating is a little like fishing. You catch the fish and throw em back, you catch the fish and throw em back. Then one fish starts jumping back up into your boat, you know? And then you keep it. And then it tells you, why do you need this boat for when you got me? And then you start to go crazy, and you start believing her. So you say okay. And you get rid of your boat. Then the next time you fight, the fish looks at you and goes, ni**a you ain’t shit…You ain’t even got no boat.”

Something crashed on to the bed behind Nick’s back. A chair had been pushed and the sound booth window had burst. At the same time there was a stampede of boots up the stairs. The room was full of solid men in black uniforms, with iron-shod boots on their feet and truncheons in their hands.

Nick was not trembling any longer. Even his eyes he barely moved. One thing alone mattered: to keep still, to keep still and not give them and excuse to hit you! A Uyghur man with a smooth prize-fighter’s jowl and a mouth that was only a slit paused opposite him balancing his truncheon meditatively between thumb and forefinger. Nick met his eyes. The man protruded the tip of a white tongue, licked the place where his lips should have been, and said “oooh literal 1984 waaaaah…psshh dipsht.” and then passed on. There was another crash. Someone had picked up the Hongshan jade boat from the desk and smashed it on the brick fireplace.

Egirlebooks walked out of the room, her job of setting Nick up done. He stood dead still. No one had hit him yet. Thoughts which came of their own accord but seemed totally uninteresting began to flit through his mind. He wondered whether they had got Mr. Tao. He wondered if they had seen the laundry auntie downstairs. He noticed that he badly wanted to urinate, and felt a faint surprise because he had done so only two or three hours ago. He noticed that the clock on the mantelpiece said 9, meaning 21. But it seemed so much earlier. He wondered whether after all he and egirlebooks had mistaken the time—had slept the clock round and thought it was 2030 when really it was 830 on the following morning. But he did not pursue the thought further. It was not interesting.

There was another, lighter step in the hallway. Mr. Tao came into the room. The demeanor of the black-uniformed men suddenly became more subdued. Something had also changed in Mr. Tao’s appearance. His eye fell on the fragments of the Hongshan jade.

“Pick up those pieces,” he said sharply.

A man stooped to obey. Mr. Tao’s eyes then went to Nick.

“Antistate misconduct on government property. Less than 10 kilometers from the quantum computer. That’s a serious crime.” The Taiwan/Japan accent had disappeared; Nick suddenly realized whose voice it was that he had heard a few moments ago. Mr. Tao was still wearing his old velvet jacket, but his hair, which had been almost white, had turned black. Also he was not wearing his spectacles. He gave Nick a single sharp glance, as though verifying his identity, and then paid no more attention to him. Mr. Tao was still recognizable, but he was not the same person any longer. His body had straightened, and seemed to have grown bigger. His face had undergone only tiny changes that had nevertheless worked a complete transformation. The black eyebrows were less bushy, the wrinkles were gone, the whole lines of the face seemed to have altered; even the nose seemed shorter. It was the alert, cold face of a man of about 55. It occurred to Nick that for the first time in his life he was looking, with knowledge, at a fed.

The next day Nick got up at about 11 as usual. It was the fifth day of Empathy Week. Friday. He was at his apartment. He sat up and rubbed his eyes.

He had to talk to some lawyers today. About his arrest. This was going to fucking suck ass. His wrists still had some slight red marks from the handcuffs the day before. The cops tried to be really intimidating and took him to the station to get booked, and have his hearing scheduled, and then he bonded out. These CCP federal agents threatened him with all this shit about how he’d be back real soon and they don’t like terrorists in jail. It was the same shit they say on twitter all day, Nick thought, so it didn’t phase him. It was what it was.

He said “I’m gay and my dick is small” and his phone turned on.

He didn’t really need to go to the office today. It was good to take a day off anyways, so he didn’t get burnt out. This was definitely the day to take a day off. He would chill and then call some antistate misconduct lawyers later that afternoon. He laid back down on his futon. While his phone was still charging, he went to his Mandarin Dashboard and started doom scrolling.

Someone posted a Hotan Ronnie slideshow post. The first slide was a video of Hotan Ronnie driving his Dad’s car into a lake. Nick swiped to the next slide.

The second slide was a screenshot of a YouTube comment on the good Hotan Ronnie documentary. The comment said “The beatboxing kid in the mall at 9:00 was actually charged with manslaughter in 2020 in relation to the death of an infant. Talon Jacob Johnson and Rebecca Maree Green were both charged with child endangerment, while Talon also received manslaughter charges. They allegedly neglected their own child to malnutrition and then death. There was also signs of physical trauma on the childs brain found after autopsy, akin to shaking a child. The couple apparently used marijuana "DABS"(high concentrate THC) and fell asleep while the baby slept on the couch. Around 12 at night Talon allegedly woke up to crying so he fed and changed the baby and left it on the couch to sleep more, later in the night he claimed to check on the infant again and found them unresponsive. From their home they went to the hospital, when asked why they did not call 911 Talon claimed to know the child had already passed away. The house was found in disarray smelling strongly of animal urine, having grimy floors, soiled diapers, and rotting food around the home. Meth pipes and knives were also left out and in reach of children. Both parents tested positive for meth and THC. Another child was taken into protective custody. Its a horrible story to say the least. I haven't heard Ronnie bring it up, probably for the best, so I question if he even knows.” Nick scrolled ahead on his TL.

Someone posted a screenshot from Hollywood Reporter. It said “Spotify Pictures announces first project, American biopic” then the paragraph “This is the first project from the music giant’s film venture, which is positioned to be a competitor to Netflix in the film production space. The project will be a biopic of American sports legend Babe Ruth, and will focus on the iconic slugger’s early life as an African slave in South Carolina.” There were more slides to the post, but Nick swiped up to the next thing on his TL. Welp this confirmed the rumor he had heard somewhere else, that Spotify was making movies now.

Someone posted a video where Big Chungus said “Big Chungus for a United Xinjiang. Big Chungus: It’s Our Right to Win.”

Someone posted some drone footage of a castle in Scotland.

Someone posted a TikTok where someone said “I’m sorry, is this Uyghur being a Karen? Awww I’m sorry Karen.”

Someone posted the fat Greek weightlifter yelling.

Someone posted a screenshot from the same Hollywood Reporter article about the Spotify Pictures Babe Ruth biopic, but a different part of the article. This part said, “Company representatives announced in May that the project would be a truly international venture, casting primarily Chinese actors. Today the casting was officially announced. The lead character, Babe Ruth, will be played by controversial Xinjiang YouTuber War Machine…”

Nick swiped ahead, dazed.

What the fuck? War Machine signed a deal with Spotify? That meant…he was fake…

Someone posted a Korean dog that distracted him. The dog was in the distance by a nice garden, on some grass. Suddenly it ran toward the camera, with its silly hair bouncing crazily all over its body. Nick liked the post.

Then, all of a sudden, he got a notification. From the Email app. It was from what looked like an actual email address that wasn’t spam. He clicked it.

He read the message and couldn’t believe what he was reading. He had been accepted into the Apple Partnership Program. There was a mixer at the Safe Super Bowl Apple Event Space downtown tomorrow, Saturday, and then on Sunday he and the rest of his fellow Partnership Program Influencers would be attending the Safe Super Bowl together!

Nick refreshed his inbox. There was now another email. It was from the CCP detective who had given him a hard time the day before. The detective said he knew they had scheduled Nick to come in for another interview next week, but he had heard that Nick had just become an Apple influencer, so now he said don’t worry about that appointment. He said Nick should just take all the time he needed and they would be in touch later about his next interview. Holy shit. What was happening?

Nick was in a daze. He refreshed his inbox again. There were about 5 really important-looking emails from his Apple contact, about things like payroll services and employee resource accounts and direct-deposit things he had to set up. Every email was color-coded for what steps he should pay special attention to. He clicked on the most recent one.

He read the email: “We just need to make sure your posting license is current. To do this you have to take a simple online quiz to make sure you are familiar with MRC and UAA modern history enough to post about current events like the Safe Super Bowl. You’ll have an Apple blue check, after all! So this is just a simple 10-module quiz about 21^st century history that will help us be sure that you can identify misinformation and disinformation. It’s just 50 questions, open book. Anyone who has been watching popular movies and TV shows should be able to pass easily! In fact, we recommend to new influencers that you watch these TV shows to study. But most applicants find that simply a general familiarity with current television is enough for success on the quiz.” The email included a list of all the miniseries of truth that Nick had rigorously avoided watching.

This was bad. Nick was intentionally very unfamiliar with all the miniseries of truth. He hadn’t seen any of them. And what’s more, he didn’t want to watch them. How much time did he have to complete this fucking test? There had to be a way to game this quiz module thing. He looked at the bottom of the email: “If you plan to attend the orientation party at the Safe Super Bowl in Vanguard Investments Stadium – Apple corporate box seats ;) – please register using the link in your quiz confirmation email by EOD today, that’s 5 PM today. Thank you.”

5 PM today. Oh how Nick’s fortune had changed. This day was like a rollercoaster so far. Sometimes it be like that, he thought.

What time was it now? Just after 11. He could do the fucking quiz in 6 hours. He could probably find some post online with a cheat sheet or something. He would look it up on Reddit. Yeah. He could do that. He would go to the office and straight-up lock in. He had all afternoon. And the email said it was open book! Six hours was plenty of time.

Then he would have to go through the quantum computer tomorrow to get to the stadium, back on Earth, but he could be there by…early afternoon. That would be plenty of time! He could go to all the orientation activities and everything! Then the game. He would be able to post from the freaking Safe Super Bowl! How many people alive ever got to say they did that, huh?

And sure, War Machine was fake now, but that didn’t, like, really mean he was like, really fake. The Party season 4 still seemed like a freaking amazing show! Nick would be a cool dissident influencer who worked for a famous controversial YouTube show! He could do that; this was a free country.

He put on his headphones. He put on the trap beat playlist. He got dressed. He went down the elevator and back out the sliding glass door and black metal gate with all the cameras.

As he was walking down the sidewalk, to the bridge, he looked at the email again. What was the name of this fucking quiz? What was the website?

He read the email again: “The testing will take 2 hours. It will consist of 10 modules. It is administered through one of our third-party partners, More Powerful Sports, LLC.”

And then there was a website: