3

Nick was dreaming of his mother.

He must, he thought, have been ten or eleven iPhones old when his mother had gone. She was a tall, statuesque, rather silent woman with slow movements and magnificent black hair. His father he remembered more vaguely as tan and thin, dressed always in his dirty work clothes from laboring at the nearby bingtuan SOE (state-owned enterprise) cotton farm. That was where his memory of his father ended, since, like many other Uyghurs of the time, eventually he was forced to move thousands of miles away to work at one of the great factories in the east. When he left, Nick never saw him again. He must evidently have been swallowed up in one of the first great purges of the iPhone20times.

In his dream his mother was sitting in some place with a lot of folding chairs, a place like an event hall. It was very smoky. She had his young sister in her arms. He did not remember his sister at all, except as a tiny, feeble toddler, always silent, with large, watchful eyes. Both of them were looking up at him. They were in some performance venue. Perhaps on a stage. They kept scrambling around, pushing themselves backwards with their feet. Things were falling around them. They were in a fire. He was out in the light and air while they were trapped, being burned to death. And they were in there because he was out here. He knew it and they knew it, and he could see the knowledge in their faces. There was no reproach in either of their faces or in their hearts, only the knowledge that they must die in order that he might remain alive, and that this was part of the unavoidable order of things.

He could not remember what had happened, but he knew in his dream that in some way the lives of his mother and his sister had been sacrificed to his own. He was only half asleep now. The thing that suddenly struck Nick was that his mother’s death, nearly thirty iPhones ago, had been tragic and sorrowful in a way that was no longer possible. Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another even if they were cringe. His mother’s memory tore at his heart because she had died loving him, when he was too young and selfish to love her in return. She had sacrificed herself to a conception of loyalty that was private and unalterable. Such things, he saw, could not happen today. Today there were fear, hatred, clickbait, flame wars, analytics, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows. All this he seemed to see in the large eyes of his mother and his sister, looking up at him through the inferno of licking flames. Were they…on Facetime?

Suddenly he was standing in a rural wheat field, on a summer evening where the slanting rays of the sun gilded the ground. The landscape that he saw recurred so often in his dreams that he was never fully certain whether or not he had seen it in irl or just a @ScenicXinjiang TikTok. In his waking thoughts he called this the Golden Country. It was a field of wheat, with a bunch of perfect round green hills in the distance, and in the sky the tallest fluffiest cloud he’d ever seen. And the resolution of the cloud was so crisp and vivid it was crazy.

In the wheat field, right in front of Nick, was egirlebooks. She was running playfully through the wheat field, wearing a long flowy white linen sun dress. She was looking back at him, holding her arm out towards him. Then on a whim she stopped, and with a single movement she lifted the dress over her head and flung it disdainfully aside. Her body was white and smooth, other than her many tattoos (including the phrase ‘iPhone33time’ on her lower abdomen), but it aroused no desire in him, indeed he barely looked at it. What overwhelmed him in that instant was admiration for the gesture with which she had thrown her clothes aside. With its grace and carelessness, it seemed to annihilate a century of CCP propaganda…a whole system of thought, as though Big Chungus and the #brotherhood and the Heroes of Peace could all be swept into nothingness by a single splendid movement of the arm. That too was a gesture belonging to the ancient time. Nick woke up with the word ‘Freestyle’ on his lips.

His phone was giving forth an ear-splitting old-school modem sound. He had rolled over on it while sleeping and accidentally opened his voicemail. The screeching was a spam robocall message he’d been getting a lot lately; the recorded message would start after about a minute of screeching modem sounds, then it would ask about his car’s extended warranty or say he was part of a structured settlement to get cash now. Nick often just deleted these without listening to them—if it was really important they’d email him—but now he scrubbed ahead just to make sure it was spam. He was waiting on a call from the Apple Partnership Program that he’d been applying to for like 8 iPhones now and was technically the only reason he was still in the city. But nope. It was spam. He deleted it.

He was awake now. Instead of getting out of bed right away, though, Nick instinctively swiped to his Mandarin Dashboard and doom scrolled for about 30 more minutes.

Mandarin was the most popular app in the MRC. It was a social media aggregator platform that combined the user’s other media services into one feed. It was basically like one portal for all the iPhone apps that you use a lot and nothing else. For Nick this was mostly Instagram and YouTube, but with about a dozen other rarely used apps peppered in around the edges.

The story everyone was posting about that day was there had been a mass stabbing in a Uyghur religious school in Korla that killed 12 children and 3 teachers. The CCP media was taking the side of the deranged Han man from Hong Kong who did the stabbing because he was pushed to the brink by Uyghur hate and terrorism.

The obviously fake redpilled accounts were melting down about how hypocritical this was. The CCP media accounts were gloating and trolling the Uyghurs, who kept reacting because their religion was being viciously degraded.

Lots of people were also posting the latest meme, which was a picture of a dog whose hairy penis has the same spots as the dog itself, so it looks just like a smaller version of the dog.

A high-ranking official of the CCP Politburo wrote an op-ed in the Beijing Times with the headline “The Controversy Around Dr Xing is Uyghur Racism, Pure and Simple.”

A Han HERO First Class Actor was on a ladies morning talk show and said “at the end of the day the movie is about how creepy Uyghur males are, am I right ladies??” and the audience cheers.

A Big Chungus security consultant in Beijing said we should just get rid of them all and explain it later.

In a street interview TikTok a Han woman in Kashgar says she runs her store in Xinjiang, but she would never want to live in there, Xinjiang is nowhere to actually live.

A law professor in Beijing wrote an op-ed demanding Gary Guanxi be taken off the ballot in Xinjiang because he was promoting antistate misconduct and terrorism.

An obviously fake redpilled account posted a montage of memes of the dog whose dick looked like a smaller version of the dog.

The MRC government put out a menacing commercial warning people not to post pictures of the bloody scene at the Korla religious school online because it could cause race riots. The mayor of Korla, a Han HERO from Shanghai, said we just need to understand that this is going to happen more.

Someone posted a meme that was a picture of the Mongolian steppe that said

Average Chinese history lesson

The Guigon Picnic:

-3 ethnicities vanish

-mountains collapse into the rivers

-8.3 million perish

-new meat and noodles recipe established

A woman on TikTok pretended to be cutting up some stuff on the counter for her dog, who was begging, then she pushed a pill off the counter onto the floor and the begging dog ate it right away.

Someone said give your enemies a golden bridge to retreat over.

Someone posted a clip from a car meet where a guy in jeans and a hoodie gets run over by the back wheels of a Tesla Hellcat.

An elderly Uyghur professor was attacked by someone throwing a cup of liquid in his face and then two other people wearing masks pushed him in the bushes. People in the comments were saying oh well don’t be a terrorist then.

Someone posted a TikTok of Big Chungus spokesman Mao Mei Jian, in his red glasses, at a podium with the MRC seal saying “Look, I don’t know why we keep talking about the so-called ‘rape parties…’” then the video cuts to a Uyghur TikToker in his car saying “they are called that by you. You called them that in this email.” The background behind him changes to a screenshot of an email from mao.mai.jian@ccp.cn with the sentence ‘we have a lot of good rape parties coming up at Dr. Xing’s house” highlighted.

Basedschizofed posted a really good Japanese game show clip. It was 2 guys who had to hump these industrial-looking plastic machines to make the water level rise up in a tube, state-fair-style, on a big meter on the wall. The guys looked so stupid LOL. The water level clearly wasn’t even really connected to how much effort they were putting into humping the things. It was sublimely hilarious. Basedschizofed always did really good posts like this, even though a lot of his podcast was cringe at this point. He always did really good posts from a few genres: redpilled memes, graffiti and stickers he saw on his travels, super childish toilet humor memes, and ridiculous Japanese game show clips. Usually, Nick would have simply Liked the Story post of the Reel. But instead, today, he responded with the crying laughing emoji. He did this somewhat unconsciously, but also somewhat consciously. It was a more personal interaction, and it was more likely that Basedschizofed would respond.

The Xinjiang Art Museum posted a pic from their latest exhibit, it was a painting of a red car on top of a light blue car.

The MRC Chairman of Empathy posted about the incident where a Uyghur was stabbed in his driveway by a deranged Han man from Hong Kong. He said you’ve got to break a few eggs to make an omelet.

The @CityGlowUp account posted two photos, one of dingy ramshackle middle eastern-looking city, then one of a gleaming modern metropolis with the red mountains of Mars in the background. The caption said “Ürümqi, Xinjiang: 40 iPhones ago vs. today”

A redpilled account posted a pic of people hanging Kurdish flags out their windows in Altay, northern Xinjiang. The caption said “this is the only kind of patriotism you’re allowed to have as a Uyghur in Xinjiang”

There was an ad for the Mao Zedong Visa card. “With 2.9% APR, every purchase is a great economic miracle.”

Someone said in China it’s illegal to criticize the leader, in the UA it’s illegal to support them.

Someone posted a screenshot that said “The half language expression ‘more steps in your Jason,’ meaning ‘try harder to catch up in the second half,’ comes from a Reddit post from a user trying to get an average of 10,000 steps a day for a year. The user posted a screenshot of his Health app, showing that he had started out slow, with about 8,000 steps a day for the first few months, then he had gotten more steps in the second half of the year. The second half of the year the months spell out JASON – July, August, September, October, November. And the caption is that he had achieved his goal by getting ‘more steps in [his] JASON.’”

A New Prime City meme account posted a photo of a heavy traffic jam in one of Camp Bell’s 5-lane highways. The caption said “when it takes 2 hours to get from Mars Camp Bell to Mars Camp Bell.” Nick grunted with laughter. It was true.

Someone posted a clip from last night’s Big Chungus speech from the fireplace in his Democracy Express RV. He said the most important issue in the most important election of our lifetimes—the very most important issue—was countering the dangerous rise of Russian-style authoritarianism in China. He said we never thought it could happen here.

Someone posted a grainy security cam clip of a woman in the middle of a neighborhood street bending over to pet a stray yellow lab. The dog jumps aggressively and bites her directly in the face.

There was an ad for a new movie where Ghengis Kahn says “I am a great leader, but I wish I could…build great and glorious city of technology like Shenzen”

Dr. Xing was giving a TED Talk in Shanghai. He said Mars’ future is our future.

A Uyghur journalist was banned from Neuralink and put in a reeducation camp. The most famous free speech lawyer in Xinjiang said “guess you shouldn’t have done antistate misconduct then.”

There was a drone video of a crowd of thousands of Uyghur school children at some event all eating bacon together. They all yell “we love bacooonnnnn!!”

There was an ad for the new sitcom about the Pair Up and Become Family program, called Pair Up. The main character in the middle of the poster looking at the viewer was the CCP Family Friend. The Uyghur wife was smiling and looking at him knowingly while the Uyghur husband was in the background wearing a pinwheel hat and making a stupid face with his eyes crossed.

An official CCP account said “Show me one bad thing the CCP has ever done.”

An official CCP account said “Mars’ Future is Our Future.” Nick looked at who posted this. It was one of the local New Prime City CCP secretaries. He looked at the meme again. It was an event postcard for a Mars Warming March that was to be held during Empathy Week. Ohhhhh wow, Nick just realized. Empathy Week was going to be held in New Prime City this iPhone. Oh shit.

A War Machine clip account posted a clip of a War Machine stream from his office where he says “did you know…did you know that Urumqi is the world capital that is…the furthest landlocked of any world capital on earth. What does that mean? What does that mean? That has to mean something, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t you think? KeepComputer, come here. Let me ask you. What do you think that means?”

Someone posted a meme about how the only social interaction that men need is DMing each other cancelable memes and then responding with Lmao or the laughing face emoji. Nick laughed. It was true.

There was a new movie about the iPhone2time Urumqi race riots. Nick kept getting a 5-second ad for the movie where a Han girl is sitting with her grandmother at an outdoor sidewalk café on an urban street. They are smiling and having a great time. A Uyghur man in an overcoat walks up to them on the sidewalk. He starts screaming in Arabic. The café blows apart in a huge explosion. It shows the title Uyghur Terror. Then it shows the A24 logo.

Someone said I’m having a nervous breakdown, what’s the price of Bitcoin right now? I’m having a nervous breakdown. I just need to know the price of Bitcoin right now. What is Bitcoin at please?

Someone posted a video of two Han street tweakers in a Kashgar department store pushing carts full of clothes and merchandise out of the store. The employees feebly try to stop them, but the tweakers yell “Get your hands off me, I own this shit, I’m really Chinese, bitch! I’m really Chinese, bitch, I own this shit! We are in China and I’m really Chinese, bitch!”

Someone said this podcast made possible by a generous grant from the Xing Foundation.

Someone posted a meme that went: When the victim is a Uyghur: screenshot of a CCP official tweeting “guess your little religion didn’t save you this time, did it?”; When the victim is Han: screenshot of parade of people protesting and burning down buildings with a Han CCP reporter in front of it and the chyron says “fiery but mostly peaceful protests in Kashgar”.

There was a new CCP cartoon kids movie where a young Uyghur girl meets Satan in her dream and has sex with him.

There was a video ad where a Safe Football player in a generic red uniform hurdles over a diving Safe Football player in a light blue uniform. It said “Defeat misinformation once and for all. The #brotherhood.”

Big Chungus tweeted “This is Our Xinjiang now.” and it was getting reposted all over social media, even by the sarcastic CCP meme accounts.

About 100 people tried to assemble in Korla to protest the state media mocking the Uyghur victims of the religious school stabbing, and they were arrested for antistate misconduct and put in study camps.

There was a 5-second campaign ad where a deep Han Chinese man’s voice said “Big Chungus is the hero of Xinjiang. He’s our hero. Big Chungus.”

Big Chungus’s main domestic policy advisor tweeted: “I absolutely love the idea of a Han couple from Guangdong moving to Xinjiang and outbidding a uyghur family for a 2-bedroom.”

There was a notification of a suggested article: “How Spaceship Girl Programmed the Big Chungus source code as a freshman at NASA Harvard Space Academy: An Inside Look.”

Someone posted a clip of the Danny Doppa Show where Danny had a philosophy professor from Beijing on his podcast to talk about the new web simulation of the early iPhone factories. This perfect video simulation showed that there was actually zero exploitation of the Uyghur workers there. The simulation, at an mrc.gov website, showed exactly what the factory looked like, so there could really be no controversy anymore. It was a modern miracle of machine learning technology and it put the iPhone factory issue to rest once and for all. Danny Doppa said “dude, I saw the website…it was soooo cool.”

There was a video ad for the kind of headphones that Nick currently had in which a young Uyghur man in a shirt and tie, wearing the headphones, sat down in a first-class seat on an airplane. The text on the screen said “tune in, noise out.”

There was a new video ad for the CCP’s The Sky is Real campaign. It was all the CCP First Class Actors edited together saying, “The sky, the sky, the sky, the sky is, the sky is not fake. It’s not fake. It’s not fake, not fake. It’s not fake. The sky is not fake. It’s real. Real. Real. Real. The Sky is real. The Sky is Real. Real. Real. The sky is real. The Sky of the Future. Is Real.”

A gigapop half language account that sometimes posted enigmatic takes posted a screenshot that just said “Gigapop is simply streaming and freestyling in one.”

Someone posted a picture of the new Arby’s burger and said it was late capitalism.

A Han deli owner in Korla did a TikTok where he said “just charge the stupid Uyghurs whatever you want, they’ll never know the difference.”

Someone posted a video of Big Chungus on The Yao Ming Show, which was the most popular podcast in mainland China. It was hosted by a deep fake version of Yao Ming that was owned by the MRC government, not the real Yao Ming. Nick always had to remember this because the deep fake version viciously hated Uyghurs and stoked the Xinjiang flame wars as much as possible. In the clip Big Chungus was saying “…so I said you better watch your tone around me little Uyghur boy” and the Yao Ming deep fake cracked up laughing in his deep Han voice.

Someone posted a clip of a popular CCP politics streamer saying, “Oh let me guess, let me guess, it’s bandits from the east. The baaaandits from the east. The bandits from the east aaaaagain. It’s always the bandits from the east with these dipshits for some reason.”

Danny Doppa posted a meme with the dog whose dick looked like a smaller version of the dog. It said “don’t talk to me or my son ever again.” He posted it with a Rolling Stones song.

A guy in India who was rescued from a child labor factory when he was 8 was now a lawyer fighting to end child labor in India.

A chill new-age spirituality poet account posted a meme that said “don’t trust or not trust, be in tune with the process.”

There was a campaign ad where Big Chungus said, “The People’s Election of 2069…nice haha…”

Someone said the One Piece filler arcs make the show unwatchable, but the fan edit with the filler arcs cut out might be the best anime ever.

Someone posted a street interview where a Japanese teenager asked a clean-cut European white man in an Oxford shirt “what gives your live meaning?” and the guy says “uhh brutal death metal.”

Someone posted a TikTok where a guy with a bike helmet said “the city dumps the trash and recycling in the same truck so it’s all the same shit anyways.”

Okay, that was enough doom scrolling. Nick closed Mandarin. He looked at the time. It was about 11:30 AM. Might as well get up and get an early start on the day, he thought.

He got out of the bed. He put on his daily uniform of a baggy grey zip-up hoodie, some green Adidas soccer shorts (because it was getting warm), his red and green Marvin the Martian Nike Air Prestos, a Jansport backpack, and his over-the-ear headphones with really good sound (which were worn by basically everyone you saw in public in a major city now). Some days Nick would automatically put on his trap beat playlist and just vibe out on the walk to work. But today he still felt weird from the dream, so he felt like some chill spoken word.

Nick swiped to YouTube to see what there was to listen to on his walk to work. He saw a thumbnail of Marvin the Martian with red eyes from smoking weed looking out the window onto a cool cyperpunk cityscape. It was a War Machine stream happening live. Perfect. He only wanted to listen to spoken word for the sense of community anyways. He joined the livestream and then put it on NeuraPlay and minimized it in the window on the top right of his vision.

Then he wondered, what was the last thing I was listening to last night? He unminimized the window to check his YouTube watch history. It was: “What These Cops Do Will Leave You Horrified – 16:00,” “Woman Injects Man With Mystery Substance – 14:30,” “Arrest Takes Shocking Turn – 36:39,” “Danny Doppa on Ehmetjan QASIM Conspiracy Theory New!!! – 13:35,” and “SHOCKING QASIM CONFESSION, MURDERED IN MOSCOW BY GOVERNMENT PLOT, COVERUP: WEIRD CONSPIRACY FILES #041 – 2:55:00.” Nick didn’t remember any of these. They must have played while he was asleep. The last video Nick remembered watching was the 4-hour-long “Hotan Ronnie iPhone40times Clip Account Arc.” He had fallen asleep to Ronnie playing guitar and complaining about being harassed on Reddit. He minimized the War Machine stream again and left his apartment.

On the stream War Machine wasn’t at his desk yet. Then he came back to his computer desk. He was wearing a mask and holding a Russian machine gun. He started doing an ironic version of a Taliban extremist propaganda video, standing up really straight and holding the gun up by his chest, then aiming it off to the side. He was a tremendous physical comedian, like a dancer. Then he looked at the camera. “I’m not going to do anything with this gun. I’m NOT going to do anything with this gun. I’m not even holding it.” He handed it to someone off camera and took the mask off the reveal his tattooed face. He was in a wooden-floored open-format creative-type office with very high ceilings. There was a lot of computer and camera equipment around, and a gym with a heavy bag in one corner.

Nick remembered that he sometimes had to skip ahead with War Machine content because he would say something too mean or racist. But with the livestream, Nick wouldn’t be able to do that, so he’d have to be ready to mute it on his phone.

War Machine was sitting down now and had totally changed his tone, like he was playing a slightly different character. “Now let me start by just saying one thing. Just clearing one thing up, okay. We do NOT go for any of that antistate misconduct here. Don’t get ANY ideas about that. None of that antistate misconduct here. Never. We love the glorious nation of China and would NEVER  disrespect it… Okay. Let’s take a Superchat”

Slimeski, who was probably about 10 years younger than War Machine, was sitting on a rolling chair next to him with a laptop on his lap, keeping up with the chat and reading Superchats. He said “Okay, we got one. ‘Hi War Machine, love the show and thanks for all you do… Do you think there are more…wheels or doors in the world?’”

War Machine is visibly interested in this. “Mmm damn…wow that’s the first one? That’s a good one. Haha! Did you hear that? Okay…do you think there are more wheels or doors in the world?”

They then talked about whether there were more wheels or doors in the world for about 15 minutes. Every car has 4 wheels. But the 4-door ones also have 4 doors. And think of all the doors that are in a single house. But wheels, does that include TIRES too? And doors, does that include cabinet doors?

Outside, the 24k infrared blue Sun, which scientists had proven has health benefits and boosts your immune system, was shining in the Sky of the Future and there was a brisk stream of foot traffic on the sidewalk. At the cross street he waited for a steady stream of cars and DS-Eats bike couriers to go by. The walk to the replica Brooklyn Bridge was about ten minutes, all the same street, no turns. This area used to be mostly industrial restaurant supply stores, but now there were a lot of trendy art galleries as well. In the first art gallery Nick passed, which had a floor-to-ceiling front window, he could see the title of the current exhibit painted on the wall: AFTER UYGHURS. Under the title was a 12’x8’ image of the Tian Shan mountains wrapped in bondage rope.

On the next block was a luxury apartment building with a professional street art mural taking up the entire side of the 5-floor building. The mural was a few dozen red abstract figures standing in triumphant poses, stabbing light blue abstract figures in the head with long swords. The light blue figures were writhing in pain and the red figures were smiling and laughing. There was a plaque in the corner saying the mural was sponsored by a real estate firm in Beijing.

A building on the other side of the street also had a large mural—higher up, starting on the fourth or fifth floor. It was a close-up of portrait of Dr. Xing’s Han face smiling like a caring grandfather. Dr. Xing Laoban was the CCP doctor who designed the popular and controversial Plateau app. Plateau was originally launched right after the Great Firewall was abolished, when president trans lebron and Big Chungus and the CCP #brotherhood brought open and free internet to Xinjiang. It was a therapy app aimed at Uyghurs where who were at risk for becoming political extremists; the app promised to fix their mental health, then it would elicit statements that were used to arrest the Uyghurs and put them in camps for antistate misconduct. Leaked official documents from the Chinese Intelligence Agency showed that this was the entire point of the app the entire time. The CCP media had even admitted that it was real, but then they said it was just a rumor, then doubled down again that it was a dangerous conspiracy theory, then admitted it again, then said it was a silly rumor. In this time about one in four Uyghurs in Xinjiang had been arrested and sent to camps for reeducation.

Dr. Xing also tweeted about 70 times a day about how evil the Uyghurs were. He absolutely hated them. He said “Yes, I am racist! I hate Uyghurs!” He said it was time to get serious about the Uyghur Male Problem. He was also currently on trial for drugging and raping Uyghur men he met on Grindr, but the CCP media was conspicuously silent about that story. It was all a humiliation ritual at this point. Xing now also had a book out called “The Greater Good” with him laughing on the cover.

There was definitely a lot of propaganda on this route, that was undeniable. But it wasn’t as much as some parts of the city. Nick didn’t even notice it anymore anyways. He had seen it so many times his eyes didn’t even register it, like a license plate.

Nick did a Good Boy Dance at the checkpoint and walked onto the replica Brooklyn Bridge. He was in stone-faced local commuter mode, sunglasses on, hood up, locked into the YouTube audio, dodging the gawking tourists. He struggled to think his way backward into the dim period of his early childhood. It was extraordinarily difficult. Beyond about iPhone30time everything faded. Even beyond the last People’s Election, four iPhones ago, everything faded. The half language was totally different. He had never even heard of most of the YouTubers he was watching now. It seemed unreal. When there was not some physical record you could refer to, even the outline of your own life lost its sharpness. When you consumed Neuralink content 24/7 your attention span was worn down to a nub. You remembered huge incidents that had only happened in videos, you remembered random details of irl incidents without being able to recapture their atmosphere, and there were long blank periods to which you could assign nothing.

Everything was so fragmented now. Nick had seen recently that his favorite Uyghur comedian Adil Mijit had died, in suspicious circumstances no less. But then again everything that happened to Mijit was suspicious after he made that unauthorized pilgrimage to Mecca. Nick remembered a time when he would scour the internet for any new interview or show Mijit had done and watch it 100 times over and over, studying every intonation, every joke, every go-to reference, so Nick could steal it for his own swag. Mijit was even one of the only Uyghur CCP First Class Actors, so Nick also could feel some connection and belonging as a Uyghur in China. He would never miss a bit of Adil Mijit news. But then during the purges the CCP media had become so poisonous with gaslighting that he’d just tuned it all out. Now Mijit was dead. Oh well. That’s life in the big city.

From the middle of the bridge Nick could see hundreds of boats in the replica Nile River below: a few ferry tour boats, a few dozen party boats, a few dozen yachts, and a few pods of Jet-Skis. Then there was a large lane in a shallower part of the river that was dedicated to an extremely popular lazy river. People floated by on bright-colored inflatable rings. Nick got ads for the lazy river all the time on his socials. “The greatest lazy river in the galaxy.” There was also a hyper-preppy clothing brand, Lazy River Gondola Club, that hypebeasts loved. Nick had actually thought about trying it one day, and even clicked through one of the ads, but a day pass for the river was 179 GBP.

The replica Brooklyn Bridge, too, was almost always packed with tourists, as well professional videographers. Every time Nick walked past the best vantage points, there were 10-15 European tourists literally laying on their backs to get the widest angle shot possible of the downtown Tokyoville skyline view. It felt as though this city on Mars was so historically significant that each new day it existed was a new historical event that everyone present was part of. Whenever there was a nice sunset, the whole bridge would be especially jammed full of photographers with tripods, harvesting every possible drop of content from the moment.

Nick looked at the view in the other direction, off the other side of the bridge. Much further in the distance, you could see the replica Sydney Opera House in Australiaville, right where the replica Nile River branched off into the replica River Liffy in Mars Bay. He looked down at the river. A rental gondola sailed by with a guide in the traditional Italian black-and-white-striped shirt.

Nick could not definitely remember a time when Xinjiang had not been controlled by psyops, but it was evident that there had been a fairly long interval of peace during his childhood. One of his earliest memories was of 6/9; the American terrorists seemed genuinely to take everyone by surprise. His teacher had wheeled a TV into their classroom in Karamay province to watch the disaster in the nearby capital Ürümqi unfolding live. The American lone wolf terrorists were so evil and hated the religious freedom Uyghurs had in Xinjiang so much, that they blew up the historical Najiaying mosque, that massive iconic dome built in 1370. Then they did another huge coordinated suicide bombing a minute later, taking down the minarets. Nick would see that same video clip of the mosque exploding and the minarets collapsing played over and over thousands of times, just in iPhone25time. By iPhone49time the average person in Xinjiang had seen the footage probably 100 million times.

He started down the bridge to Tokyoville.

All Nick remembered of the time was that shortly afterward, when China began its campaign against Uyghur terrorism, the new CCP functionary in charge of Xinjiang, Zhang Chunxian, he took a liking to this trendy kids pop song called “Little Apple.” The song was really silly and catchy; people called it the Chinese Macarena. So the CCP secretary of Xinjiang, Zhang, was known for mentioning it in interviews. One day Nick was with his dad watching TV. Suddenly the TV was showing all the local Imams of western Xinjiang, all of them on a TV talk show set, dancing to this song “Little Apple.” You are my little apple, little apple, I can never ever love you enough. The imams danced around on TV to this song. And then Nick just remembered his dad tossing him the remote and walking out of the room muttering “fucking humiliation ritual.” Now he wondered if it really had been psyops all the way down.

Since about that time, the psyops had been literally continuous. The CCP had to keep everyone engaged with Current Thing even when the Current Things were openly contradictory and incoherent. To get away with this, the CCP media used the trauma of 6/9 to cultivate a sort of pro-wrestling narrative in Xinjiang, which first blamed the attacks on American Christian supremacist lone wolf terrorists who hated the modern religious freedom that Muslims had in Xinjiang. Then the CCP media started saying that the absolute craziest thing you could ever do is associate the attacks with Christianity in any way. Indeed, that would be an even greater violation of Xinjiang’s great religious freedom than the attacks in the first place. In fact, discriminating against a religion was an affront to Chineseness itself.

A handful of scientists came forward to dispute the official story of 6/9 and they were categorically marginalized and humiliated. Very simple. There was little drama about it. This process repeated for every new Current Thing: the quantum computer, the Sky of the Future, Mars Camp Bell, the Water on Mars Waterpark; if you kept asking questions about the narrative, you would simply be accused of antistate misconduct and banned. It was really like that. Eventually, of course, this morphed into unironically blaming the attacks on the Uyghurs themselves. But to trace out the history of the whole period, to say which Current Thing was actually real, would have been utterly impossible, since the tech companies that controlled all the data were owned openly by the CCP.

At this moment, for example, in iPhone49time, Current Thing was the Kurds, who every Chinese citizen was supposed to love and cherish more than their own families. The Kurds had a beautiful sovereign nation and a culture that was simply too rich and unique for words. Tragically, the Kurds were under attack by American-funded middle-eastern terrorists in their very homeland of Kurdistan. The middle-eastern terrorists were also funded directly by the MRC, but that wasn’t part of the narrative this Current Thing, so the media knew to ignore it. It was exactly like how the referee in a pro wrestling match looks the other way when the hero face character cheats, so you as the viewer don’t have to acknowledge it. But this was all worth it to protect the Kurds, because if Kurdistan fell, then terrorism would be able to make it to China via the extremists in Xinjiang.

It wasn’t even like you weren’t allowed to say that this was a psyop. You could say it was a psyop all you wanted. But the public had been trained by the CCP media to react to the word “psyop” by snickering and rolling their eyes, just like the celebs online did. In reality, as Nick and everyone else well knew, the bridge bombing in Kurdistan that had started the latest round of attacks had been carried out by private security contractors working with the PLA and funded by a Chinese billionaire. But that was the furthest thing from mattering. All that mattered was that it was happening now and we needed to trust the CCP more to stop it.

The Narrative started as this: China was at war with the heel American terrorists; therefore every bad thing in the world had to be blamed on American terrorists. Every issue was forced into the framing of ‘civilized society versus the hate- and fear-fueled American terrorists’ no matter how absurd it seemed. Any lie that would whip up more hate against American terrorists and their perceived allies was moral and justified. Any hesitation was weakness. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any excuse to attack them was good, and even taking a moment to think it through, well that was basically an atrocity tantamount to a war crime. Then the other step, the real genius propaganda move, was—like Indiana Jones replacing the bag of gold with the bag of dirt—to replace American terrorists as the main heel, with the domestic terrorists who were even worse. This would let the authoritarian government still be the good guy despite continuing to fund endless global war and genocide.

The frightening thing, Nick reflected for the ten thousandth time as he stepped off the replica Brooklyn Bridge in downtown Tokyoville, the back of his shirt now wet with sweat under the backpack, the frightening thing was that it might all be true. Maybe the best way to run a country was to let a corporate shadow-government run the world, and use war as an all-purpose social engineering tool. That way at least someone knew what was going on. And if the CCP #brotherhood could just do a psyop like 6/9 and hypnotize the entire population of Xinjiang, even thought it was obviously fake, maybe the Uyghurs were just too weak to survive. But surely that was more terrifying than mere torture and death.

Nick checked in again at the gate to Tokyoville. He did a Good Boy Dance and handed the guard his ID, which the guard slid into a pocket on a sheet with lots of rows of these pockets with IDs in them.

Nearby there was a double-life-sized statue of a Han Chinese man in a military uniform on a pedestal that itself was as tall itself as an average person. A plaque said this was the “Dedication to the Builder of the Aqueducts.” All the replica rivers that were connected in the lazy river network were fed by an aqueduct system even better than the Roman Aqueducts! They not only brought water from the Tian Shan mountains to New Prime City, but then they teleported it all the way to Mars!!! This was all designed by this brilliant scientist, a Han HERO from Beijing. The genius unprecedented way he did this had all been explained in the award-winning Netflix miniseries of truth The Man Who Brought Water to Mars.

Nick decided to take the scenic route to the office today, through the Tokyoville waterfront greenway area. On the nice walking path by the water there were a lot of joggers and people with strollers. Everyone was wearing headphones. Nick always wondered what all these other people were listening to. Probably music, but also a lot of them were probably watching crazy niche content on YouTube like he was. How many other people on the greenway walking path watched lolcow compilation vids, he wondered. He remembered that, numbers-wise, a lot of these people were watched CCP YouTubers who did nothing but rant about how evil Uyghurs were all day. In fact, that was the default normie content suggested by every popular Neuralink app: violent, stridently anti-Uyghur hate rhetoric. Nick could always tell when the anti-Uyghur stories were getting really flamed up by the media because Han toughs would be glaring and spitting at his feet as he walked on the sidewalk around the city.

Nick knew that Current Thing was a psyop. But where did that knowledge exist? Well, everywhere. But nobody cared. It wasn’t like 1984 where there was just one single historical narrative allowed in the government media and everything else was censored. The new meta was government ops like Operation Bedtime Stories: you could have your free speech and say what you wanted, but the government media would constantly be flooding the news with insane spectacular gaslighting. The truth was intentionally put in the mouths of controlled doofuses like Gary Guanxi and Danny Doppa, who would harp on it all day long online with cringe memes, and on their podcasts, and give everyone else who wanted to take the issue seriously a bad name. Like the helicopters spraying chemicals in the air. That’s not good. But now it’s just a big joke. It all became like folklore. People earnestly participated fully knowing it was fake. Unironically all that was needed was an unending series of compromises with the totalitarian regime that openly wanted to torture you as much as possible. “Reality control,” they call it. In half language, “smooth brain.”

He walked out of the greenway back towards the Forbidden Apple Store. To get back to the Shibuya area he had to cross a pedestrian path and a busy highway, but there was a light. The light was red, so all the cars were stopped in the road. As he approached, Nick quickened his pace to make it, but he didn’t look left at the pedestrian lane. Just as he was about to make the light, a sweaty middle-aged Han Chinese woman in a tie-dyed running t-shirt and Oakley sunglasses jumped in front of him, like a crossing guard, while a pack of cross-fit runners jogged past behind her. They took up the entire pedestrian lane. He was going to miss the light.

“Have to get those things off your head walking around in the city,” she said, meaning his over-the-ear headphones.

Nick made a face that included rolling his eyes. Before he could think of a good retort, she spoke again, almost shouting over the highway noise: “Oh you getting salty, you gonna hit me? You gonna hit me? That’s all you little Uyghurs know how to do, isn’t it, lash out at women.”

“Why are you being a bitch to me?”

“Oh, he’s lashing out, see this is what I mean. You gonna stick me with a hypodermic needle too??” She got out her phone and started recording him.

“Uh oh folks, we got a Karen here! Another Uyghur Karen, isn’t it? Isn’t it? Everyone see this? You know, I’m gonna be so glad when all of you entitled Uyghur scum are gone. You think the Kurds would be so entitled? They’re afraid to say this on TV, but I’m not afraid to say it. We should just bring the Kurds over here and kick your worthless fucking ass out.”

She started walking away, then turned around again and screamed, “women do not have to listen to you anymore! Men do not own women’s bodies ANY! MORE!”

She let this hang in the air as she ran away, now at the back of her cross-fit pack. It made perfect sense to her, her brain was so scrambled with berserker CCP agitprop. Nick crossed the pedestrian path, looking both ways this time, and waited again to cross the highway.

He was thinking about the labyrinthine world of half language. Someone like that, she knew the whole war in Kurdistan was fake. But it made no difference in her thinking. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Chinese Space Communism was the most perfect ever expression of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. A fully smooth brain. Even to understand the word “half language” involved the use of half language.

The half-pleasant quality went out of his meditations. The past, he reflected, had not merely been altered, it had been actually destroyed. For how could you establish even the most obvious fact if every normie was this easy to brainwash?

On the other side of the highway, closer to all the finance buildings of downtown Tokyville, there was a fresh new historical marker sign. It had an engraving of Big Chungus at the top with some fancy curlicues around it, and the title: GREAT MOMENTS IN CHINESE SPACE COMMUNISM: THE DICK SUCKING COMPANY, MEETINGS HELD HERE, iPHONE32TIME. “It was at the former Delmonico’s at this location that some of the original meetings for the corporate merger between Alibaba Group and Uber Technologies were held. The companies would merge on April 5, iPhone32time to form the Dick Sucking Company. The MRC’s Dick Sucking Company has grown in its first decades of operation to surpass Amazon in delivery and logistics with its complex network of Dick Sucking Factories, surpass as Doordash in food delivery, and surpass WeWork in the coworking market. One early Dick Sucking Company delivery driver was Xinijang People’s Representative Big Chungus. An iPhone41time study from NASA-Harvard Space Academy found that the average Chinese citizen uses 76 products manufactured by the Dick Sucking Company every day.” Then at the bottom it said “DEPT. OF HISTORICAL MARKERS – MACINTOSH REPUBLIC OF CHINA.”

Nick tried to remember what year it had been when he had first heard mention of Big Chungus. He thought it must have been sometime in iPhone30times, but it was impossible to be certain. He remembered seeing him on the Xinjiang College News Show. He knew he was a Fortnite meme at some point. Eventually Big Chungus’s exploits over the course of his life, which were constantly being retconned and rebranded, all seemed to have some connection to every major Chinese media market, and some connection to every important event in modern Chinese history. He was almost a Forrest Gump-like figure, with some impossibly coincidental cameo in all the major events that shaped modern China (and therefore was a primary authority on them all). In fact, by iPhone45time there was a Big Chungus miniseries of truth about every major arc of modern Chinese history, all told as parts of one singular MRC mythos: the merger between the People’s Republic of China and Macintosh, the terrorist attacks of 6/9, president trans lebron and Big Chungus abolishing the Great Firewall, the invention of the quantum computer, Spaceship Girl flying her spaceship to Mars on the inaugural flight to establish the Chinese Space Port there, building the Sky of the Future, turning on the quantum computer to teleport Ürümqi to Mars, and so on. There was also the new one about meeting his wife and moving to Xinjiang as a young tax collector. His rebooted origin story. Big Chungus’s wife happened to be a high-ranking Han CCP official and Mao scholar from a wealthy family in Beijing. She would actually make a lot of Big Chungus’s announcements herself.

With the new show, the Big Chungus lore had now been pushed back so far that it reached into the 90s, the days when the first HERO Act had just been passed. Everyone in Xinjiang saw vividly how Big Chungus’s family was repeatedly attacked by the Uyghur Muslim morality terror squads, always in the dark of night. Instantly Nick envisioned the cold-faced Uyghurs patrolling the streets of Ürümqi in the back of their dirty pickup trucks with their weapons of war. But that was all imagery from a TV show made just 4 iPhones ago, in iPhone45time.

Nick did not believe he had ever heard the phrase Chinese Space Communism before iPhone25time, but it was possible that in its irlspeak form—“neoliberalism,” that is to say—it had been current earlier. Everything melted into mist. Sometimes you could put your finger on a definite lie. It was not true, for example, as was claimed in the Netflix China miniseries of truth “Checkmate,” that the Spaceship Girl had invented chess. But it didn’t matter. No matter how much evidence you had, when more people had seen the Netflix show, that just became the consensus truth. That was the whole point. If you kept talking about it online, you’d get banned. There were not two sides to misinformation. It was the least complicated thing in the world.

It didn’t matter. Nick didn’t care at all. He was totally dissociated. He suddenly realized that because there were lots of crossfit groups out, it must be Saturday.

On the livestream War Machine was saying ”look, here’s the thing about the Han in Xinjiang, okay. They had to do the one child policy. And the Uyghurs didn’t. They were exempt. So look. The one child policy. That was really fucked, okay. Every family in China, anyone you can think of, anyone you pass just walking down the street, their family has the most traumatic stories you’ve ever heard about the one child policy. The forced abortions alone. Think about it. But the Uyghurs were exempt from this. They were exempt. So they had an advantage, okay. That’s what the Han think. That’s why people in China have no sympathy for them! They don’t care about you. They don’t care about you bro. So…if you’re a Uyghur in Xinjiang, and you want to be politically active…youuuu better like crawling around on your knees uhh humiliating yourself.”

Nick thought, had his life always been so heavy on parasocial relationships? No…as recently as the last People’s Election he had felt some shame in the amount of content he was consuming constantly just to stay distracted from complete hopelessness. That was around the time he realized that everyone else was doing the same thing too, even if they seemed to have their shit together. Han, Uyghur, Hui, Uzbek, Mongolians alike. It was like everyone was the meme where the guy in the corner at the party not dancing is thinking “they don’t know I like this cool internet thing.”

Nick’s smooth brain suddenly started thinking about what he would order for breakfast that day. It was either stop at the CVS kiosk and pick up a fruit parfait, or go on the DS Eats app and order a bacon, egg, and cheese from the boujee Social Credit Scone kiosk. Both were in the lobby of the Forbidden Apple Store. He decided right then that he would do the bacon, egg, and cheese. It was not haram, but that was just some silly symbolism. Plus, eating bacon regularly made your social credit score go up in Xinjiang, so Nick made sure to eat it 2-3 times per week. He ordered the bagel and a coffee for pickup as he crossed the highway.

To get to his side entrance, Nick had to go through another public square. A new public art exhibit had been installed there. He dimly remembered getting an email about it via the Tokyoville DS-Work litserv. It was a large-scale portrait photography exhibit of some of the iconic HEROs who were involved in Mars Camp Bell and Xinjiang’s Golden Age of Chinese Development. There was a portrait of the man who designed the Mars Camp Bell city layout. He was a Han HERO from Beijing. There was a portrait of the main philanthropist who bankrolled all the CCP candidates. He was a Han HERO from Beijing. There was a portrait of the CCP Secretary of Xinjiang from iPhone3time to iPhone10time who started the People’s War on Domestic Terror. He was a Han HERO from Beijing. There was one about the CCP investigative journalist who broke the story on Gary Guanxi’s Uyghur treason. He was a Han HERO from Beijing. There was a portrait of the gigapop rapper Hexi, who tweeted 100 times a day how much he hated Uyghurs. He was a Han HERO from Beijing. There a portrait of Ali Baba CEO Jack Ma III, who merged Ali Baba with Uber to create the Dick Sucking Company. He was a Han HERO from Beijing. There was a portrait of a famous actor known as “Xinjiang’s dad.” He was a Han HERO from Beijing.

From there, Nick did a Good Boy Dance at the side gate of the Forbidden Apple Store, picked up his order at Social Credit Scone, and went up to his cubicle to make memes.