2

Nick tabbed back to Instagram on his Mandarin Dashboard. He thought back through the moment of posting the War Machine song. He had done it, alright. A real fedpost. It was right there on his Story. It had tripped the algorithm and the apartment company had gotten an alert that his PayPal had been disconnected. Signal-boosting antistate misconduct, the charge would be. It was over.

The notification from the RG Towers app was still there. Nick clicked on it. It was a post from the neighbor lady, Mrs. Kashgari. She was always pilled out of her mind. One time Nick saw her at the Starbucks kiosk in the lobby with her husband, both sitting at a table drinking coffee from paper takeout cups. As Nick looked at her, she seemed to fall asleep mid-sip with her head nodding forward, and the coffee dribbling down her pink Under Armor shirt. She happened to be pregnant at the time as well.

“Hello Facebook [sic]. I would like to ask for help with a problem my daughter refuses to help me unless I pay her for her “emotional labor” with I refuse to do that nonsense!!!! I don’t understand this young generation these days but I love her [heart smiley eyes emojis] Does anyone of my friends on the site know how to save a ‘.pdf’ file please?”

Nick clicked on her picture to go to her Facebook profile, which was linked to the RG Towers app. She was much more active on her page then Nick ever was on normie social media, even when he was posting Heroes of Peace Good Boy Takes. She posted dozens of times a day. It was mostly normie memes, but she also shared the most basic mainstream Current Thing news content, and then a generous amount of cooking and sunset pics. Her header image was Big Chungus with a smiling California Zephyr and his classic slogan “Trust The Plan.” It was one of the default options on Facebook. Her latest post was several photos of her cooking dinner with the Kashgaris’ CCP civil servant family friend, who stayed with the family eight days a month as part of the CCP’s Pair Up And Become Family program. The two of them are smiling and wearing matching aprons, and her husband Tom is sitting in a chair in the background smiling and taking pictures on his phone. Nick remembered this image; Tom Kashgari had made it the thumbnail of his weekly family vlog.

Tom Kashgari actually used trolling images like this as the thumbnail fairly frequently. His take on the Pair Up And Become Family was that it was just some silly symbolism and anyone who would be upset about it must be insecure about something, but not him, he was totally cool about it, he wasn’t worried about anything. Tom’s channel was pretty much always trending on the YouTube homepage in Xinjiang.

Nick went back to the neighbor’s RG Towers post. He replied: “Hi Mrs. Kashgari, a good site to convert and save pdfs is pdfsave.org, it’s web based so you don’t have to download anything. It can help you to edit and merge and save the pdf file.”

Within seconds she replied back: “Oh thank you! I would just ask my partner in crime Tom Kashgari but he is out of range on a hike in the Tian Shan!” tagging them both in the post. Nick liked the reply.

Tom Kashgari was one of the most popular hiking vloggers in China. He got his start after the old town Uyghur neighborhood of Kashgar burned in a mysterious fire, then the CCP took that opportunity to rebuild the area without all the Islamic and Uyghur elements. Tom did a series of urban hikes around the new construction, telling his audience all the great features of the new malls and apartment buildings. As for the conspiracy theorist Uyghurs who said China’s government might have been involved, Tom said these fringe extremists needed to be purged from the hiking community. The YouTube algorithm suggested his videos so much that Nick recently had to click “do not recommend channel.” And still, curiously, he got them.

Kashgari also happened to keep an office at the Forbidden Apple Store DS-Work, where he did a lot of his editing and green screen stuff for his channel when he was in town. Nick would see him there from time to time. He was a fattish but active man of paralyzing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms—one of those completely unquestioning, devoted midwits on whom, more even than on the Heroes of Peace, the stability of the #brotherhood psyop depended. He would do literally anything for the dopamine rush of a blue check liking his post. He lured his audience in by being just a regular average joe Uyghur who liked to go hiking and fishing and not be all political, and then, bam, he’d hit you with Current Thing. The more non-political-seeming, the better. And he did all the social media stuff right; all the things you’re supposed to do, like commenting on all the popular YouTube channels. He engaged with every trending topic. He teased the end of his videos in the beginning so you’d want to keep watching. Everything it says to do in the YouTube Creator’s Handbook.

Nick remembered that in the days after Gary Guanxi was elected People’s Representative from Xinjiang in iPhone40time, his walking commute took him past the major independent bookstore of the city, Wuyi Books, in a mini-mall area next to the Forbidden Apple Store. It was the biggest bookstore in the city and hosted all the trendy literary figures for talks and readings. All the hip petit-boujee class carried Wuyi Books tote bags. After Guanxi was elected, the front window of the bookstore had a 1984 display with Guanxi’s Uyghur face in all the Big Brother iconography and authoritarian barbed wire and prison bars made out of construction paper. Presumably this represented the prison camps the Uyghurs were going to build in Xinjiang for all non-Uyghurs. It made Nick laugh instantly upon seeing it, it was so insanely fucking stupid. Tom Kashgari, on the other hand, posted a picture on Facebook every single day when he walked past, to remind us how important it was to not normalize this dangerous Uyghur fascism.

Kashgari, like most everyone online, had actually mellowed out since the last People’s Election. This could be because Nick still had him blocked on basically everything. But Nick still thought about Kashgari on a daily basis because he always saw him in the comments of ReluctantHero’s gym videos. They both watched ReluctantHero for gym motivation, like basically everyone in Xinjiang did. Kashgari’s comments were always something like “Locked in for leg day button!!! -----”.

Suddenly Nick got another notification. From his seldom-used Facebook. It was the Kashgari’s horrible 19-year-old son Alimjan. He had messaged Nick 3 times in a row. Nick went to the kid’s profile. He had all the Heroes of Peace flags and Marvin the Martian movie posters up in his room, where he was posing in his profile pic and header. In one picture he was wearing a Regime Records t-shirt, the main gigapop record label in China that was an obvious CCP front. There were a lot of thumbnails of him sitting at his computer with headset, vlogging with the Hewlett-Packard Heroes of Peace flag in the background. Nick scrolled quickly through his pictures. It landed on a fit pic of the 19-year-old in a parking lot posing in a Mao Zedong portrait-print streetwear jumpsuit by Adidas x Pharrell for Netflix Heroes of Peace.

Nick clicked the notification to see the unread messages.

“Hey just checking up on my favorite fellow Uyghur neighbor. Why not more active on the latest trending topics? You know that’s bad for your social credit score…”

“Oh wait we know why…we all know why”

“War machine meat rider lmao”

Nick typed back “fuck off”

The teen typed back “Waahhhh wah waaahhh I’m sorry the woke mob took your wife and kids oh no family court is so unfair, keep crying dipshit.”

Nick followed a link to the kid’s Instagram.

His latest post was a Reel of his slutty girlfriend on a party boat somewhere in the Mars Camp Bell river system. In the video another boat drives by them with some preppy finance-looking guys, and she viciously flicks them off, like really aggressively, and yells “FUCK YOUU!!” Nick automatically thought “you’re on a boat too, you dumb bitch” and let out an involuntarily ha of laughter.

he teenager, Alimjan, messaged him again: “Just know that I won’t hesitate to plant an ETR flag on you and get you fully canceled. Maybe you’d be caught with an ETR phone case.”

The East Turkestan Republic phone case was a trending psyop symbol. Some Uyghur terrorists were found with them. Then the county government announced that anyone who reported others for having an ETR flag, or even the words “East Turkestan” on anything, would get a cash payment from the government. Nick didn’t fuck with the ETR stuff because it was a psyop, but he knew that this kid wouldn’t hesitate to frame him and it wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t even matter if he had screenshots of this exact threat. He was a Uyghur, so he was below sympathy in Xinjiang.

Nick kept scrolling the kid’s Instagram grid. The next post was a Twitter screenshot that said something about “the silence from the rest of the cast speaks volumes…” Nick flicked past it, thinking, Okay one more triggering post and I’m leaving.

In the next photo the teenager was wearing a pink dress, like ironically like Kurt Cobain, with a skin-tight t-shirt with the Hewlett-Packard HP logo on the front. Hewlett-Packard was a popular dog whistle for Heroes of Peace, the government-sponsored communist paramilitary gang, since they had the same letters. The HP logo was so retro popular, in fact, that basically every fashion brand was licensing it to incorporate into their new merch designs. Nick was constantly getting ads for different HP logo clothes and merch. So this post wasn’t that triggering.

The next post was a video of a 7.5’ tall Chinese woman from the MRC Women’s National Basketball Team dunking on a famous Uyghur wrestler, 5’7”, who is wearing a parody of his Olympic uniform from his glory days. He looks tiny compared her. Apparently a bunch of these guys needed money so they had gotten grifted via social media into this Netflix series where they play professional women’s sports teams. It was extremely popular in China. The basketball episode was particularly embarrassing because the women’s team players were all over 7 feet tall due to Yao-Ming-related communist genetic engineering and they dunked all over the Uyghur sports heroes. Then the images from the show became extremely popular in memes. They were used in literally millions of memes per day.

Nick closed the message window and went back to Mrs. Kashgari’s page. In two years they’ll be canceling her favorite romance author for being a TERF. Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that the CCP could turn these kids into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the CCP. On the contrary, although they loved to meme about how it was midwit cringe, ultimately they adored the #brotherhood and everything connected with it. The songs, the marches, the hashtags, the fashion, the TikTok dances, the flame wars, the think pieces, the yelling of slogans, the memes about how it was cringe, the ironic worship of Big Chungus, doing ice cream yum yums – it was all a sort of glorious game to them. All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against “domestic terrorism” (which just meant Uyghurs), against whoever or whatever was the heel character in Current Thing.

Suddenly an ironic t-shirt idea bubbled up into Nick’s mind: a shirt that says in plain block letters “IT’S CALLED SHITPOSTING MOM!!!” Maybe if he got canceled and had to move out of the city he could sell some of those via dropshipping.

The Kashgaris also had a daughter, Zeynep, who was like 25. Nick saw that she had commented on one of Alimjan’s posts. He clicked her name to go to her profile. The first post was a TikTok of her petting a cute puppy and she’s saying in a really cutesy voice how violent terrorist Uyghurs have had enough chances in this country and now they need to be rounded up and put in camps. Enough is enough, she said. He saw on her profile that she was an elementary school teacher in the New Prime City suburbs.

He scrolled down Zeynep’s page and saw a slickly designed flier image for a protest march: red and light blue with Spaceship Girl’s face with a flower wreath around her head and her eyes closed solemnly. It said the slogan MARS’ FUTURE IS OUR FUTURE. This was ostensibly a slogan for not polluting Mars, but in reality it was a pretext for the government to cleanse Xinjiang of its last remaining Uyghur elements. It was a major slogan in the Big Chungus reelection campaign. In one of the comments she replied to someone with “I can’t wait until we bring over enough Kurds to finally replace you disgusting Uyghur ‘men.’”

The next post was something with a photo of War Machine grimacing menacingly and a media brand tagged. Nick scanned a wall of text and saw the phrase “aware of the kind of people you work with??”

The next post was a link to a Guardian op-ed with the headline “Just 12% of Xinjiang—mostly Uyghur men—are eating half of our beef supply.”

He swiped up and closed the Facebook app completely.

Years ago—it must have been fifteen iPhones now, since the Mars Marvins’ Historic inaugural season—Nick happened to have a chance encounter that had stuck with him. It was at this baseball game on Mars, at the newly constructed Blackrock Field within Mars Camp Bell. Nick didn’t even really like baseball, but the hype around the Marvins was insane. A baseball team on Mars, this was absolutely Historic. Sports fans from all over Earth had competed to get tickets to one of the games, which were now just a short quantum computer ride away! Every game was a huge event. They had all sold out instantly, but Nick managed to score a ticket. He could never forget it. It was a midseason game against the Cincinnati Reds, from the UAA…or it could have been the USA then still, he forgot. Nick got there early and was wandering around the concourse, in the middle of this big crowd of people. People from all over the world in Mars Marvins and Cincinnati Reds gear. There was a ton of advertising everywhere, he remembered.

In the concourse area there were all these tables set up, where the corporate sponsors were giving out their literature and swag. Nick actually didn’t really remember much detail from the situation; all he remembered was, there was a table where you could apply for a Visa credit card and get a free Koosh Ball. He wanted the Koosh Ball, so he went to the table and got to talking to the polo-shirted rep there. He was a Mongolian from the north of Xinjiang, from Altay Valley he said. Nick didn’t even remember what they had been talking about, only that he said that he hoped Ürümqi being teleported to Mars was “on the good timeline.” And Nick remembered the Mongolian guy had chuckled and said back, very coolly, “oh we’re about to be on the best timeline.” It was that line that had stuck with Nick.

The other thing about that encounter that stuck with Nick was, it seemed like the guy he was talking to there was Basedschizofed. He was exactly the same kind of Mongolian guy from northern Xinjiang. But this polo-shirted dude had been working for the credit card company at the Marvins game, at the folding table giving out credit card applications and swag. This seemed out of character for Basedschizofed, since he was usually so anti-authority. But at the same time it wasn’t out of character: Basedschizofed was a classic rule-follower overachiever. Working a swag giveaway event for a credit card company was exactly the kind of corporate sales busywork where he would thrive. Still, the scene was too disjointed in Nick’s memory. This guy had been flying all over the world doing freelance vlog journalism…and also working as a credit card company rep on Mars? It didn’t make any sense.

And yet, it had happened. And it really did seem like Basedschizofed, mostly because the line itself, it was exactly his distinct tone and delivery. Nick did not know what it meant, only that in some way or another it would come true.

Nick coughed. He needed to at least quit vaping.

He tabbed back to YouTube. The algorithm must have noticed that he was on some political content on Facebook because the YouTube home page was recommending a really old War Machine video from a protest where he was provoking some hysterical purple haired Heroes of Peace street protestors.

Welp, Nick thought, might as well go to the office now before I spend five hours sitting here watching YouTube. His phone was at 53%. He just had to leave without Mrs. Kashgari hearing him in the hallway so he didn’t have to talk to her. He stood up.

Nick left the apartment again. He took the elevator back down to the first floor, then walked back out through the sliding glass front doors and back out through the black metal camera surveillance gate.

Down in the street the Wind flapped the torn poster to and fro—"experience chinese space communism”—and the red and yellow 7-star flag of the Macintosh Republic of China fitfully appeared and vanished. The MRC. The sacred principles of Chinese Space Communism: half language, gaslighting, and systematic international child rape and blackmail. Like all public signage in Xinjiang, it was in Mandarin with the Uyghur translation printed smaller at the bottom. He felt as though he were wandering the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable. What certainty had he that a single human creature now living was on his side? And what way of knowing that the dominion of the CCP would not endure forever? Like an answer, his Neuralink snapped to the profile of the Forbidden Apple Store in the city skyline and the Literally 1984 trailer started playing again.

The evil Uyghur Big Brother face, the neck veins bulging with hate.

Spaceship Girl calmly doing traditional kung-fu.

Tiananmen Square draped with Uyghur imagery.

The 1984 slogans flashing:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

VOTE UYGHUR…OR ELSE

Spaceship Girl doing the superhero landing pose.

He switched the ad to his phone and closed it.

Nick glanced at a wooden construction wall he was walking past. It was covered in about 20 8’ posters that said MARS’ FUTURE IS OUR FUTURE with the image of Spaceship Girl with the flower wreath and her eyes closed solemnly. This area was the worst for propaganda, Nick thought, but at least it was high turnover. Within a few hours this would be covered over with another ad for sunglasses or energy drinks.

In the main square of the Americatown district there was a statue of the American sports hero Babe Ruth, the escaped African slave from South Carolina who went on to become the great slugger in irltimes. In the statue Ruth is wearing his famous New York Yankees jersey and hat and holding his bat against his shoulder. A plaque explained that Ruth famously would never cut his dreadlocks, but he finally shaved them because he was so honored to play for the world famous New York Yankees.

Nick did another Good Boy Check to enter onto the pedestrian lane of the replica Brooklyn Bridge. As he started up the bridge, he went back to his phone and swiped to his Mandarin Dashboard to check his Good Boy Points. This was a comforting ritual because he knew he had been a Good Boy, stuck in his daily routine, not thinking about anything, for…at least 3 or 4 weeks now. He should have a lot of Good Boy Points. He also wanted to see if the 10 GBP had hit yet from the Good Boy Check he just did. He clicked to his bank app. On the bank app’s log-in screen there was a background image of a young Han Chinese couple buying their first home, with the Tien Shen Mountains in the background. Nick logged on and saw that he had even more Good Boy Points than he had thought.

He tabbed back to his Mandarin Dashboard, then to the MarsMaps app, which was the main navigation app for Mars Camp Bell and greater New Prime City. It was also where his steps were counted: an average of just over 12,000 for every day that year. This was another comforting ritual for Nick because he always got his steps. MarsMaps had a header that was impossible to click out of or scroll away from, of Big Chungus’s stupid face, smiling. The slogans and iconography were everywhere. The whole game was to pretend it was serious when it was obviously a massive humiliation ritual. The stupid cartoon’s face was on stamps, on public video ad screens, on the covers of books, on government banners, on government tourism board ads, in public art, on bus ads, on magazine covers. The magazines at the grocery store weren’t even like magazine brands anymore, they just had titles like “Big Chungus,” “Spaceship Girl,” “Mao Zedong,” “Steve Obama-Jobs,” “Heroes of Peace” – the whole pantheon of MRC government saints. Internet space was totally fucked. Irl space was totally fucked. Nowhere could you escape the gaslighting except for a few square centimeters of space inside your skull. And with your Neuralink connected, not even that.

From the middle of the bridge, Nick looked at the Forbidden Apple Store again, careful not to snap-to-image. It seemed to float like a mirage over downtown Tokyoville, and behind it the massive red peak of Mars’ Olympus Mons in the Sky. The whole mystique of the FAS was it was supposed to be this exclusive club, like the Forbidden City where only the emperor’s family was allowed to go. The policy at the Forbidden Apple Store was: you were only allowed to enter if you were a registered iPhone user. iPhones had been issued to all MRC citizens since China merged with Apple/Macintosh in iPhone25time. Now you had to have a Neuralink to go there, which were standard with the iPhone since iPhone45time. Just before the last People’s Election, in fact. That’s why Nick got his Neuralink basically, so he didn’t have to move offices. But he never used it, though, except for NeuraPlay.

Nick kept walking, past the midpoint of the bridge. At one point a lot of politically sensitive media and government jobs were located in the FAS, but during the first misinformation lockdowns—around this same time before the last People’s Election—all those important propaganda jobs got decentralized via government-mandated work-from-home policies. Now no single rocket bomb attack could take out much of the CCP gaslighting infrastructure.

Nick started down the gentle slope of the bridge, looking down at the wooden planks of the pedestrian lane. He was thinking about the data that he was now creating with his phone and Neuralink and all his accounts online, all his videos and voice memos of him talking to himself, and wondering if any of that would ever be experienced again by a single soul. He wondered again why he was taking all these pictures and making all these video notes. For the future, for the past—for an age that might be imaginary. And in front of him there lay not death but annihilation. The MRC was just going to kill all the Uyghurs and delete all trace of his existence. Why wouldn’t it? It controlled the UN Security Council. It totally controlled the UAA, Europe, Africa, even Russia, via debt slavery. It had already fully dehumanized the Uyghurs, ground down any hint of sympathy from anyone. Who was going to stop them? The only chance of these video and audio snippets ever being watched by another person is if Nick got surfaced and the Heroes of Peace clipped them and posted them as more dangerous Uyghur antistate misconduct.

He noticed on his Neuralink that it was exactly 2 PM. Curiously this synchronicity seemed to have put new heart into him. He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.

The bridge was brisk with pedestrian traffic this afternoon, despite the overcast Sky. There were always enough tourists on this bridge to support a whole cottage industry of locals at makeshift tables selling Mars t-shirts, souvenir trinkets, sunglasses, scarves, gloves, and bottles of water. There was a round spinning step-platform device so tourists could take a Neuralink video spinning around with Mars in the background, just like they were in a movie. Someone would take a Polaroid photo of you for 5 GBP. The whole length of the bridge there were people with Bluetooth speakers playing all the classic Mars songs made by CCP gigapop stars.

This view, of the FAS from the bridge, was famously the most photographed view in the universe. It was central to all of the MRC and Camp Bell branding imagery. The essential elements of the symbolism were: (1) the skyline of the downtown Tokyoville financial district, with all its classic Chinese architecture; (2) the red peak of Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain in the entire universe, in the background; and then (3) the Earth barely visible far, far in the distance, with the UAA, Europe, Japan, Russia, every other country. It was the perfect symbol of the MRC’s global dominance.

The pedestrian bridge was actually fenced in with chain link to prevent people jumping, so it was hard to get a good photo. But there were holes in the fencing along the way, arranged at all the vantage points that made the Forbidden Apple Store main minaret building look the tallest.

Suddenly Nick said again:

Neuralink take a video. Wwwwwwhat’s up guys, we’re here in Ürümqi Xinjiang, definitely on the planet Mars. We teleported here in a quantum computer that the Chinese government built. And we are staying stuck to the ground despite Mars gravity thanks to an organization called ‘the Regular Gravity Company.’ That’s right folks. It’s real. It’s tremendous. Whoever’s watching this…from this insanely good age where everything is definitely not fake and we are definitely living on Mars…sup.

It was meta-irony. He was already dead, he reflected. The consequences of every act were included in the act itself. That was the theme. He wasn’t the one guy who was going to make a vlog so profound and entertaining that it defeated the Chinese government. He wasn’t going to start a movement and get everyone on his side. He wasn’t going to outsmart 90 trillion dollars of government propaganda. No. He was just going to be charged with antistate misconduct and killed and erased like millions of other Uyghurs. There was no drama about it really.

Nick walked the rest of the way across the bridge, then did a Good Boy Dance again at the checkpoint to enter Tokyoville. At this checkpoint he was also required to leave his ID with the guard at the gate while he was in the district, which was no big deal for Nick because he had nothing to hide. Then he started walking the remaining few blocks to the Forbidden Apple Store.

To get to the good side entrance that he used, Nick had to go through a replica Shibuya Crossing intersection, which he heard somewhere 2.3 pedestrians crossed every day—just slightly more than the real Shibuya Crossing. As usual in the Shibuya area there were some street performers and some young people passed out from drinking. Nick waited for the walk signal to cross the main avenue. Every time the light changed there was a mob of pedestrians and bikers trying to navigate around the cars. Nick felt probably the most comfortable he felt in his whole day in these moments. He knew exactly the order that the street signals worked and even stepped out a moment before it turned to get a head start.

Now he was walking through the main Shibuya square, where there were some Elvis impersonators and movie character costumes. Closer to his building he could see a small park area where there were always a bunch of Marvins hanging out tweaking. These were young people who checked out of society and basically smoked opium and watched content on their Neuralinks all day. People called them Marvins because they all loved the Marvin the Martian movies and said they were literally him.

Once across the street, there was the usual line of tourists waiting to have their photo taken with the Apple logo at the front gate, including multiple wedding parties. Nick went around to the side door where there was no crowd. He did another Good Boy Dance at the door and was granted automated entry into the Forbidden Apple Store Mall Complex. Inside the outer wall was a courtyard that was a replica of Tiananmen Square, with a replica People’s Great Hall that has some boujee shops – a Vineyard Vines, a Bose store, an Oakley store, and a Japanese denim place called Moshu. On the front of the replica People’s Great Hall, where the portrait of Mao Zedong is on the People’s Great Hall in Beijing, the one in the Forbidden Apple Store had a portrait of Big Chungus scrolling his new iPhone.

There was also, in a position of honor in the replica Tiananmen Square courtyard, a statue of president trans lebron, the UAA president who had bravely abolished the Great Firewall themself and was responsible for bringing free and open internet to China, and also starting wide receiver for the Texasville Dallas Cowboys averaging 4.2 touchdowns per game, an all-time SFL record. In the statue they are dunking in their cartoon basketball uniform.

On a wall nearby there was another massive mural of Big Chungus, this time in his official government uniform, with lots of medals and ribbons, doing the Stalin pose where he holds his arm out pointing and looking bravely into the future. The lettering on this one was TRUST THE PLAN / MOST DEMOCRATIC OF ALL TIME.

When Nick finally got up to his office he didn’t really get much work done. He just sat there doom scrolling Instagram, checking his own Story over and over again, and watching the views and likes roll in. He was getting likes on the War Machine post just like any other. No more or less than usual. No CCP Heroes of Peace trolls yet. Maybe he wouldn’t be surfaced after all. Maybe nobody noticed. But no. That’s not how algorithms worked. He was totally fucked.

Just then, Nick decided that he would go to the gym that day after all. Normally when he was late like this, he would just skip it. But today he needed the distraction. He was feeling particularly blackpilled. The gym membership was discounted with his DS-Work membership, and when you factored in the increased social credit score versus the Good Boy Points it cost each month, it was basically free. He grabbed his gym bag and left, locking his cubicle door behind him.

As he walked to the gym Nick put on ReluctantHero. ReluctantHero had started out as a college guy in one of the UAA states, screwing around making weightlifting TikToks. He was so compelling and good at talking about weightlifting that his audience demand he videotape his workouts every single day. He didn’t even want to do it. But he started doing videos, and for almost 2 iPhones now he had put out a video nearly every day with a full workout and pep talk in the car. It was unbelievably dedicated and inspiring. Nick put today’s video on NeuraPlay and listened to ReluctantHero as he walked through another indoor mall area to get to the gym.

“Alright…so in no fucking possible way…there’s no possible way I’m gpnna look at a pair of 150s like this, plus a mirror, and then, additionally you’ve got yourself a badass environment in this gym. In no way would I ever think it would be a good idea to approach this with…a calm mentality. With a zen freaking peace of mind. It’s like aooohh let’s make sure we do a comfortable set here. No. Dude. The crazier and more excited you can get before every set, like I don’t know about you, I guess, but speaking from experience, those are the sets where I get to look back on and say, okay that was fucking crazy…” Nick zoned out. He zoned back in again. ReluctantHero was talking about drinking a protein shake and then having to run to the bathroom to throw it up. Nick zoned out again.

As Nick was checking into the gym, ReluctantHero was saying, “dude, you know, the gym is good because it’s something that’s within your own control every day. You can do it however you want. You don’t have to be so intense that you’re like yelling at yourself all the time. Instead, I heard this somewhere: practice without striving.”

Nick had only recently mastered this advice in his own life. It was all about having a routine where you did the same things every day and built on it somehow over time. The gym was the perfect example. Once you start seeing progress, that would jump start your motivation and it would be easier to stay motivated. Same with writing in a journal every day, eating healthier, working on creative projects, lots of things.

As for gym motivation, though, it also helped that Nick’s gym was very luxurious. It was never crowded during the day, it was clean and had all the new equipment, it had new fluffy towels and a super hot steam room. The locker room and sauna area were actually designed in the style of the classic Roman public baths from the height of the Roman Empire.

Nick even sometimes saw celebs at his gym. There were a lot of fitness influencers who went there. And some actors. The only person he really knew of was this Vietnamese actor about 10 iPhones younger than Nick who’d been featured in the series Guanxi (iPhone36-39time), about the business world of the classic era Uyghur Urumqi. ‘Guanxi’ was the word Han used in Xinjiang to mean clout, juice, respect in the business world. The Vietnamese actor played one of the young Uyghur businessman characters. That show came out like…12 iPhones ago at this point. Now the actor was playing a middle-aged dad character on the Kowloon Pod Living show on Netflix China. He had also just co-starred in a movie that won a lot of CCP Awards, a thriller about 2 Uyghur men who get trapped in a phone booth and have to work together to get out. Nick didn’t see it because the whole thing was an obvious Marxist allegory for the war on domestic terrorism in Xinjiang. He didn’t see any celebs at the gym today though. He just did chest and shoulders while listening to ReluctantHero.

After his workout, Nick went to the steam room and cold plunge. He did his usual few rounds in the steam room and cold plunge before going back to his cubicle. Whenever he got in the cold plunge Nick always thought about how Danny Doppa had started talking about cold plunges on his podcast in like iPhone46time, and now they were all over the place. Every gym had to have one.

After the gym Nick lazily walked back to his cubicle through the brightly lit subterranean Forbidden Apple Store Mall Complex. He didn’t get much work done that day, which was fine. It wouldn’t make his social credit score go down until it became a chronic problem. He just sat in his cubicle and watched car-jitsu (guys wrestling in the front seat of a car) for a few hours on YouTube, took some screenshots, and made some notes for memes. In half language, he was YouTubemaxxing.

If Nick could make it til about 7 PM each day like this, then there was usually a live podcast or some kind of online event that he could go watch and chill. The pressure to be productive was off. There was some sense of community. He would normally watch something like this on his Neuraplay as he walked back home to RG Towers. Then, later, he would fall asleep watching something on his phone at home.

            Sure enough, Nick lost track of time in his cubicle and then right about 7 he got a notification from YouTube. BillabongKeith was live. This was BillabongKeith from Alpha Investment Corporation, his twice-weekly advice stream. BillabongKeith was a fat Hui Muslim from the Altay suburbs. He knew War Machine since they were in college or something (Nick wasn’t totally sure), and they always worked together on stuff. They had a weekly podcast now. They also both got canceled together, when War Machine went underground and BillabongKeith left public life totally and worked as a car salesman near the Mongolian border.

Nick took the BillabongKeith livestream as a sign and decided to leave a bit early that day. He would come back refreshed tomorrow and try to get back up some momentum to make fire memes. He put on the BillabongKeith advice stream on his NeuraPlay and set off on the walk home.

Someone Superchatted Billabongkeith wanting some advice, a Uyghur about to graduate college in Xinjiang who was thinking of taking a job in New Prime City. Would this be worth it anymore, or is the gaslighting just too dense and evil? BillabongKeith responded: “Ürümqi, ‘Mars’ or whatever they’re calling it now, okay, a city like that isn’t for everyone, you know? There’s the neighborhood committee and all that, you have to change your registration there and give up your hometown registrations, you have to check in at the police station and put up with them constantly humiliating you, okay, the dancing around, whatever. Not everyone can do that, okay? You can’t own a knife in Ürümqi. Some of you guys would get there and you’d really hate that, okay? Some of you, some of you don’t need to own a knife. For years I never used a knife, never thought about it, just used takeout plastic silverware, okay. But there are good things about living in cities too. The food is way better, okay. It’s more inspiring, just the energy and metabolism of living there, alright. It’s cool to walk around and see cool buildings and shit and parks and gardens and shit. Sooo I’d say live close to a city, so you can be like an hour away and still use the city like the whore it is. It loves it, though, it loves being a whore…”

He was right, Nick thought. This was the perfect way to think about cities.

Once he was back in Americatown Nick ordered some Japanese takeout from DS-Eats on his phone. There were so many good takeout places near him that he could cycle through all of them weekly and still have a few options that would forget about and then remember and be excited again to go there. Like 5 solid options that he really liked, including this Japanese place. He got the Neuralink notification that his order was ready right as he was walking up to the restaurant. That’s how dialed in his routine was these days. He randomly thought of a quote that he had seen somewhere online that day: “London is a sort of whirlpool which draws derelict people towards it, and it is so vast that life there is solitary and anonymous.”

Nick was in a kind of bleak and depressed mood as he left the Japanese takeout place. It had been a bleak and depressing day. But when he’d walked the few minutes back to his building, the replica Kowloon Walled City, he saw some cool European girls outside taking photos of the front façade, and it made him feel better.

Back in his room, Nick went through his nightly routine of lying in bed doom scrolling Instagram and listening to YouTube videos until he fell asleep. The BillabongKeith real estate advice stream ended after about 2 hours. After that Nick watched a video from the podcast where BillabongKeith talked about the Qasim plane crash coverup. From there he watched a War Machine stream where he talked about his theories about modern dance, which was only one of War Machine’s counterintuitive but earnestly thoughtful niche aesthetic interests. In this clip he was streaming and watching a video of a drag queen dance battle in Prime City, in which the dancers would all dramatically throw themselves onto the floor in a clump, and then pop back up again, stylishly, like nothing had happened. War Machine was saying that he thought on some level this was referencing the Biblical concept of the pride before the fall.

When that video was over, Nick clicked another War Machine stream clip. In this one he was at his chair in his office ranting: “Uyghurs built the fucking iPhones dude. That’s big facts. The first iPhones, where were they manufactured? Where were they built? Xinjiang. And all the heat that China got for the iPhone factories that were so bad they had to put up nets to keep the workers from…doing sewer slides…that was…re-al. Okay. So. Those were the first iPhones. Were they relevant to China’s economic growth in that period? I would say they were…primarily relevant to it. Primarily responsible for it, okay. Also, didn’t China make the Uyghurs in Xinjiang literally work in the cotton fields? Literally forced labor, literally in the cotton fields. Xinjiang cotton, right? It was once the fifth largest cotton exporting region in the whole world? Remember that, that was so great for the Chinese economy, just coincidentally, yeah? Was there exploitation there? Were the overseers really exploiting those Uyghurs out there in them cotton fiiiiieelds? Well the US cut ties with the whole industry. The US stopped buying their shit, okay? They were buying it for a while, then some people found out about the Uyghur working conditions and were like whooooaa now this is inhumane! The U.S. said that. The U.S. said that. Did they…just do that for no reason?”

And eventually, Nick fell asleep.