5

Nick was in his office doing nothing. He clicked on the most recent Hotan Ronnie upload. Ronnie was saying he wasn’t asking for donations but if you wanted to donate to his Cashapp it would be greatly appreciated and his bank balance was at $-300. Nick closed the video.

He went to War Machine’s channel. He was pretty sure he had seen every stream by now; there were only about 20-30 of them. He had probably seen each one about 10 times. He scrolled down the page. Oh, he saw a stream that he had only watched half of. He clicked it.

War Machine was saying, “why am I doing this? Because uhh because this is how we transmit your experience, and uhh the lessons you’ve learned, the truths you’ve learned throughout your life, to future generations, by telling stories. China controls the UN Security Council so nothing will ever be done. That is the blackpill. The blackpill is real. There is nothing you can do. But uhhh…new season of The Party coming up hahahahaha.” He broke up laughing for a solid 30 seconds, with the few other people in the office not even looking up from their computer screens. Eventually he settled down and said to one of his lieutenants, “what about these study camps, are they really that bad?”

KeepComputer, who was sitting in the background just observing, said, “I think the thing was, a lot of them weren’t really like study camps. They were like factories, like manufacturing like…live-work encampments.”

The other top swagbeast editing nearby, Slimeski, added, “but guarded by the PLA.”

War Machine said, “but they’re getting paid? The workers are getting paid?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Slimeski said, “I think the situation is, like, there’s no jobs in their town, so they go work for these factories because it’s reliable and like, it’s a company, it’s not like…making yogurt out of yak’s milk all day…”

War Machine said, “but isn’t that how every country works?”

Nick remembered that he was almost out of Clif Bars. He went to DS.com and ordered 2 more boxes from his order history. 34 GBP in total. It was about…4 Good Boy Dances worth.

He got an email immediately. He went to check it. Was this from the Apple Partnership Program? It was the confirmation email about the Clif Bars.

Nick tabbed back to his Mandarin Dashboard. He had the War Machine stream on his headphones but wasn’t really listening to it. They were alternating talking and working and doing boxing training on stream. Nick was pretty zoned out today. Sometimes when this happened, he liked to just wander around the Forbidden Apple Store mall complex and hit his weed vape. It was about 1 PM. That would be a good idea. He could go get a salad in the lobby first. These were all great perks of working in the Forbidden Apple Store, he might as well take advantage of them.

In the low-ceilinged Sweetgreen, deep in the food court level of the Forbidden Apple Store, the crowd surged forward. The employee had just brought out the latest armful of salads for the pick-up shelf. The room was very full of tourists and office workers, and it was deafeningly noisy. Behind the ingredient bar area at the front, employees were quickly grabbing and chopping green vegetables. The line to order snaked around the room, all the way back to the door again. Nick had pre-ordered on the app.

Just then he saw, close to him in the crowd, a lanyard. Song. He had seen Nick at the same time.

“Just the man I was looking for,” said a familiar voice.

This was his friend @animeappraiser, real name Song, a Han CCP computer programmer who worked for some European Internet democracy NGO. Perhaps “friend” was not the right word. You didn’t have friends these days, you had mutuals. But there were some mutuals whose presence was pleasanter than others. Song’s first job at the Internet democracy NGO was to comb Reddit all day, flagging any criticism of the CCP as misinformation. In his current role he was working with FitBit and the Dick Sucking Company to create an efficiency wristband to be worn by all the employees at their Dick Sucking Factories. He was a tiny creature, smaller than Nick, with fine hair and large, protuberant eyes, at once mournful and derisive, which seemed to search your face closely while he was speaking to you.

“I wanted to ask if you have any Gary Payton,” he said.

“Nah, sorry, I haven’t been able to find it,” said Nick with a sort of guilty haste. “Sometimes a strain just doesn’t come around for a while…”

His neighbor had been asking about the good weed strains too. Actually Nick had some ground-up crumbles of Gary Payton on the weed table at his apartment, but he wasn’t counting that. He was saving it for a special occasion. Even though cannabis was totally legal, it was really hard to get the better strains like Runtz or Sour Diesel or Gary Payton; the Red Star dispensaries just had shitty government mids that was way overpriced. Nick still used his delivery service sometimes; that’s probably why Song asked him. But it was expensive and the stock was unreliable.

“I’ve been smoking Red Star mids for like six weeks bro,” he added untruthfully.

The crowd of people thinned and parted, and they were able to get their salads off the salad shelf easily.

“Did you watch Modern Terror Chronicles yet this week? On HBO? It’s the episode where they hanged those Uyghurs in the main city square of Ürümqi. They tried to bomb the Sky of the Future because they were so insecure and scared of progress. It’s so crazy to think that this was just one of thousands of stories just like that that still go untold.” Song really wanted to talk about this show.

“No, I’m behind on my shows…I guess I’ll see the memes about it.”

“A very inadequate substitute,” said Song.

His mocking eyes roved over Nick’s face. “I know you,” the eyes seemed to say, “I see through you. I know very well why you haven’t watched the miniseries of truth this week.” In an intellectual way, Song was venomously orthodox. He would talk with a disagreeable gloating satisfaction of getting Uyghurs deplatformed for antistate misconduct, the trials and confessions of worm-brain chuds, or whoever the hero was in the latest Current Thing. Talking to him was largely a matter of getting him away from such subjects and entangling him, if possible, in the technicalities of meme irony, on which he was authoritative and interesting. Nick turned his head slightly to the side to avoid the scrutiny of the large eyes.

“It was a good scene,” Song said reminiscently. “I think it’s good when they show the hangings in graphic detail when we’re dealing with antistate misconduct. It sends a message to any other cowardly little Uyghur chuds who might start getting ideas.”

Nick had planned to walk away from Song to go outside and sit in the park by the Venetian Bridge, but it seemed like Song had the same idea. They both turned the same way when they walked out the Sweetgreen. Now to change his mind would be rude.

“You going to the Venetian Bridge too? Want to snag a table in the park?” Song asked.

Nick murmured some assent and walked with Song and his pressed Oxford shirt. They threaded their way through the tourist crowds, out of a side door, and then down a hamster-tube-like walkway down to the patio area by the replica Nile River waterfront. This area was next to the other major tourist destination in the area, the Venetian Bridge, or replica Rialto Bridge, which connected the Forbidden Apple Store mall complex to the Water On Mars waterpark.

Nick remembered the Netflix show about the opening of the Venetian Bridge. This wasn’t a miniseries of truth, it was more like a dramatic fictional movie that was designed to sway public opinion the way the CCP wanted. In this case, lots of Italians didn’t want the MRC to build a bridge on Mars that was identical to the Rialto Bridge in Venice. So the CCP’s Netflix movie was about two aging Italian men who thought the bridge plan was a bunch of malarkey, then their wives convinced them to go on a couples’ trip to Mars to see it for themselves, and they did, and they learned the bridge was actually good, and a trip to Mars should be on every Italian’s Bucket List!

There were a few small round lunch tables available in the park, so Nick and Song grabbed one. As they sat down Song was saying, “I was just at a wedding up near your neck of the woods I believe, old sport. Some small little town in Karamay province. A real quaint little suburb there in the foothills of the Tien Shen, I forget the name. It’s always so relaxing and charming to get away from the city, you know. And it was such a quaint area, such nice country out there. But still, there’s just something so…uncultured about it. You know, I was saying to my buddy, if only they could take a part of Hong Kong and just air-drop it there to Karamay province, just so there would be SOME civilization there…”

Nick said “that’s crazy” and hit his Elfbar. When he had coughed and then finally settled down, he realized he was hungry. He began stabbing the leaves of his salad with his plastic fork, trying to get enough on the fork for a satisfying bite. The salad was pretty good, but it cost 23 Good Boy Points. Just 10 iPhones ago a salad like this would be like 12.99. From a table at Nick’s left, a few meters behind him, a young boujee Han man was talking rapidly and continuously, a harsh gabble almost like the quacking of a duck, which pierced the general uproar of the patio area.

“So uh,” said Nick, raising his voice to overcome the noise. “Are you still working on that project about, what was it, getting people to wear that wristband?”

“Mmhm,” said Song, finishing a bite of salad.

“What was the wristband again?”

He had brightened up immediately at the mention of the efficiency wristband. He pushed his La Croix aside, took up his hunk of bread in one delicate hand and his plastic fork in the other, and leaned across the table so as to be able to speak without shouting.

“Well, it’s going off the old FitBit platform, except it’s much more than an FitBit. It has all that functionality, yes. It syncs with your Neuralink so you can listen to content seamlessly, it has all your socials, it has all your health data, it has all your texts, emails, all that. The evolution with the efficiency wristband—and by the way, this is just the project name, the product will have a catchier name—the point of this thing is that they will be worn by workers at work, and will be able to control the employee by sending out gentle shocks that remind the wearer to maximize his or her efficiency for the day, according to his or her ability. See, sometimes people at work—in a warehouse, for example—sometimes people think they are tired and have to slow down. Well, when you have access to the worker’s health data—you know, a more complete data set—you can tell that actually they’re not tired. The employee still has what we call WIR: work in reserve. This happens a lot actually: the employee just thinks they are tired, but in reality can be working a little harder. We let them know with, again, a very gentle shock, or nudge. That’s the functionality that the efficiency wristband brings to the table.”

Song bit hungrily into his salad and swallowed a couple of mouthfuls, then continued speaking, with a sort of pedant’s passion. His thin Chinese face had become animated, his eyes had lost their mocking expression and grown almost dreamy.

“It’s a beautiful thing, nudging…. In the end it won’t make a difference whether you think you’re doing something voluntarily or not. The exact path that you walk during your shift in the factory will be determined beforehand; you’ll simply experience it as a series of shocks and nudges. Every day the route you take home from work will be dictated by a self-driving algorithm synced with the city traffic database. Every text and email you send will consist entirely of autosuggested responses and screenshotted memes. Every emoji comment you leave on a video will be pre-selected for you. It’s easier that way. The human brain is better off downstream from that functionality. Who wants to draft a whole email from scratch? Who wants to have the 50^th stupid text conversation of the day typing out entire words for the billionth time? ‘Oh what’d you do this weekend?’” he said super sarcastically. “Blah! Kill me. Once you’re worn down enough, you’ll just go with whatever auto-suggested message we program in for you. And guess what, you’ll be happy. That’s all the drooling normie masses need anyways. And this can all be normalized with memes. Don’t you see the beauty of that, Nick? The methodology actually draws a lot on Big Chungus’s empathy research that he did for his PhD at NASA Harvard Space Academy,” he added as an afterthought.

A sort of vapid eagerness flitted across Nick’s face at the mention of Big Chungus. Nevertheless, Song immediately detected a certain lack of enthusiasm.

“You haven’t a real appreciation of memes, Nick,” he said almost sadly. “I’ve noticed that even when you do clever ones, you’re always a little hesitant to embrace the latest meme formats, the latest half language, the latest social platforms and sharing functionalities on Neuralink. I’ve seen some of your memes. They’re good enough, but they’re still like parodies of memes. In your heart you’d prefer to communicate in regular words, without templates, without auto-suggested reaction gifs. You’d prefer that children learned to “read” and not just recognize meme macros with pictures of celebs. Words, with all their vagueness and useless shades of meaning. You don’t grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. It takes forever to think of words! That’s why nobody complains when they get more autosuggestions in every new iOS update. It’s just like that Balenciaga quote, I love it so much: ‘elimination is elegance.’”

Nick had noticed, of course, that every new iOS update included more auto-suggested memes. Also that more of the meme templates were characters from CCP miniseries of truth, like Big Chungus and president trans lebron and the First Class Actor who was Xinjiang’s Dad. Nick smiled, sympathetically he hoped, not trusting himself to speak. Song bit off another hunk of the tough Sweetgreen bread, chewed it briefly, then went on:

“In the end we make criticism of the CCP literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. And nobody will want to express it. They will be happy and fulfilled in their lives as productive employees. Okay. The ideal workday is this: you get up early and get to work on time. You see your work friends and do half language about the Safe Football game last night. You work an 8-hour shift at maximum efficiency, dictated by the DS-Co proprietary wristband algorithm. During this time, you’re listening to the latest gigapop on your Neuralink, or maybe a podcast about a personal interest. I mean you listen to ReluctantHero, right? Who doesn’t. Or you listen to some true crime storyteller YouTuber. Or you listen to the Safe Football hot takers. Whatever. Then, at the end of your shift, you don’t even have to clock out. Your Neuralink will sense when you’ve done 8 hours’ worth of work and clock you out automatically (sometimes it takes more than 8 hours to do 8 hours’ worth of work, of course). After work, you have another roughly 8 hours before bedtime to spend with your family, spend on your personal life, maybe going to the gym, watching the big game, going to the movies, participating in more scientifically optimized CCP culture. During that time, you have total freedom to do whatever you want. You can even do illegal drugs, visit prostitutes, gamble, any kind of vice allowed. As long as you show up the next morning ready to work, it’s all gravy.”

“Wow that’s crazy,” said Nick. “But wait, you said the project was about how to get people to wear them…”

“Oh right, yeah,” said Song absent-mindedly. “We’ll just get Pharrell to wear one.”

He went on: “The revolution will be complete when the algorithm is perfect. Chinese Space Communism is the algorithm and the algorithm is Chinese Space Communism,” he added with a sort of mystical satisfaction.

“In the next phase of Internet Democracy we plan to disrupt the consumer-merchant purchase paradigm. As it is, online merchants like DS-Co have to wait for customers to send them orders before they can send out products. With the completeness of our current consumer data set this is unnecessary. Why waste time on the step of advertising products to consumers, and then have them buy it, and only then can the merchant ship it? A much more efficient model is for the merchants, who have superior market preference data, to just send out the merchandise the consumers want, then let them return it if they don’t like it. Of course they’ll get a full refund per the traditional customs of Chinese Space Communism. But most people will find that they actually wanted the products all along, and will not return them. This will be the new meta. The New Normal. Has it ever occurred to you, Nick, that by iPhone100time, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could even understand how we ordered these salads we’re eating right now?”

“Except—” began Nick doubtfully, and he stopped. It had been on the tip of his tongue to say except the normies, but he checked himself, not feeling fully certain that this remark was not in some way unorthodox. Song, however, had divined what he was about to say.

“The normies are not human beings,” he said carelessly. “Just think of them as cattle. By iPhone100time, earlier probably, all knowledge of written language will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Confucius, Shakespeare, J.K. Rowling, The Simpsons—they’ll exist only in CCP meme versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually retconned into something contradictory of what they used to be. Just like the history of China when the communists took over in the 20^th century and purged all of China’s ancient culture and history. All the popular literature will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like ‘Freedom is actually bad’ when the concept of freedom has been retconned 30 thousand times so it means nothing? The whole climate of discourse will be different. In fact, there will be no discourse, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”

One of these days, thought Nick with sudden deep conviction, Song will be surfaced. He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly. He’s too autistic. He thinks the free speech stuff really applies to him since he’s Han and he’s a Good Boy who posts #brotherhood. The CCP does not like such people. One day he will be surfaced and canceled. It is written in his face.

Nick finished his salad. He turned a little sideways in his chair to drink his La Croix. At the table on his left the man with the strident voice was still talking remorselessly away. A young woman who was perhaps his secretary, and who was sitting with her back to Nick, was listening to him and seemed to be eagerly agreeing with everything that he said. From time to time Nick caught some such remark as, “I do so agree with you, that’s goated for real” uttered in a youthful and rather silly feminine voice, but the other voice never stopped for an instant, even when the girl was speaking.

Nick knew the man by sight, though he knew no more about him than that he worked for some CCP media cut-out and his dad was a CCP People’s Regional Secretary of some kind. He was always on viral cable news clips. He was a man of about thirty, Han with a Yao Ming haircut, and a large, mobile mouth. His head was thrown back a little, and because of the angle at which he was sitting, his spectacles caught the light and presented to Nick two blank disks instead of eyes. What was slightly horrible was that from the stream of sound that poured out of his mouth it was almost impossible to distinguish a single word. It was like he started every sentence with the last word and yanked you though the whole first part of the sentence like it was a single sound whose meaning you were supposed to already know by heart. Just once Nick caught a phrase—“Eliminate the War Machine cult root and branch”—jerked out very rapidly and, as it seemed, all in one piece, like a line of type cast solid. For the rest it was just a noise, a quack-quack-quacking. And yet, though you could not actually hear what the man was saying, you could not be in any doubt about its general nature. He might be denouncing War Machine and demanding sterner measures against online chuds and grifters, he might be fulminating against the atrocities of the imperialist Russian army, he might be praising Big Chungus or the brave heroes of the Kurdish militia—it made no difference, whatever it was, you could be certain that every word of it was pure orthodoxy, pure Chinese Space Communism. As he watched the eyeless face with the jaw moving rapidly up and down, Nick had a curious feeling that this was not a real human being but some kind of dummy. It was not the man that was speaking, it was the blue checks he followed on Twitter. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck.

Song had fallen silent for a moment, and with his fork was pushing some pieces of spinach around. The voice from the other table quacked rapidly on, easily audible in spite of the surrounding din. It was like the guy was performing for an audience.

“There is a word in half language,” said Song, “I don’t know whether you know it: smooth brain. To be at the point where your brain is fully smooth, like a peeled hard-boiled egg. It’s one of those interesting words that have two contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it is abuse; applied to someone you agree with, it is praise.”

Unquestionably Song will be cancelled, Nick thought again. He thought it with a kind of sadness, although well knowing that Song disliked and ultimately despised him, and that he was fully capable of surfacing him as an online chud if he ever saw any reason for doing so. There was something subtly wrong with Song. There was something he lacked: discretion, aloofness, a sort of saving stupidity. You could not say that he was unorthodox. He believed in the principles of Chinese Space Communism; he venerated Big Chungus; he rejoiced over every Current Thing; he hated antistate misconduct, not merely with sincerity but with a sort of restless zeal, an up-to-datedness of information which the ordinary #brotherhood poster did not approach. He had a perfect adolescent love of hierarchy. Yet his vibes were slightly off. He said things that would have been better unsaid, he tried too hard to be funny, he sympathized with his problematic faves too much, and he frequented Eastern Xinjiang Trading, the coffee shop haunt of dissident comedians and podcasters.

There was no law, not even an unwritten law, against frequenting Eastern Xinjiang Trading—Xinjiang had free expression now, and the MRC was the most excellent and glorious free country ever of all time—yet the café was somehow ill-omened. The old, discredited original #brotherhood posters had used to gather there before they were finally surfaced and canceled in the Great Free Speech Purges of iPhone40times. The café was still a hangout for antiwoke- and center-leftists to this day. War Machine himself, it was said, had even been a regular performer there at the first storytelling shows, years and decades ago. Song’s fate was not difficult to foresee. And yet it was a fact that if Song grasped, even for three seconds, the nature of Nick’s secret antistate opinions, he would rat him out him instantly to the Heroes of Peace. So would anyone else, for that matter: but Song more than most. And still, his zeal was not enough to save him. When he prostrated himself online, hysterically scream-crying his devotion to Current Thing in each new Twitter thread, he still realized he was lying somehow. Performing. Trolling. Mostly doing it for the clout. True orthodoxy was unconsciousness.

Song looked up. “Here comes Kashgari,” he said.

Something in the tone of his voice seemed to add “that fucking idiot.” Kashgari, Nick’s neighbor at RG Towers, was in fact threading his way across the patio seating area—a tubby, middle-sized Turkic Uyghur man with wiry black hair and a froglike face. At forty-five he was already putting on rolls of neck fat and fat around his waist, but his movements were brisk and boyish. His whole appearance was that of a little boy in a car seat in a minivan commercial, so much so that although he was wearing gym clothes and his red reading glasses, it was almost impossible not to think of him as being dressed in the jorts, level-4 ironic shirt, blue-dyed hair, and red neckerchief of the Heroes of Peace. In visualizing him one saw always a picture of dimpled knees and sleeves rolled back from pudgy forearms. Kashgari did, indeed, invariably revert to jorts whenever a protest march or anything happening on a slightly warm day gave him an excuse for doing so. He greeted them both with a cheery “hullo hullo!” and sat down at the table, giving off an intense smell of sweat. Beads of moisture stood out all over his tan face; his powers of sweating were extraordinary. At the DS-Work Fun Room you could always tell when he had been playing ping-pong because there would be drops of sweat all over the wood floor.

Song had produced a printed-out sheaf of papers and was studying it with a ballpoint pen between his fingers.

“Look at him working away in the lunch hour,” said Kashgari, nudging Nick. “Neeeerrrd hahaha just kidding. What’s that you’ve got there, old boy? Something a bit too big-brained for a Uyghur like me, I expect. Not my lane! Karamay, old boy, I’ll tell you why I’m chasing you. It’s that GoFundMe request I think that still might be outstanding.”

“Oh yeah, I think I saw the email about that, my bad…” said Nick, vaguely remembering. About 10% of one’s Good Boy Points had to be earmarked for voluntary podcast subscriptions and GoFundMes, which were so numerous that it was difficult to keep track of the requests.

“For Empathy Week. You know—the house-by-house fund. I’m treasurer for our wing. We’re making an all-out effort—going to put on a tremendous show. I tell you, it won’t be my fault if old RG Towers doesn’t show the most empathy of anyone in all of the glorious nation of China. Ten Good Boy Points was the suggested donation.”

The GoFundMe was to buy spraypaint and markers to do a new mural with all the names of the greatest HEROs in Xinjiang’s history.

“Oh and we’re already off to a great start.” Kashgari added. “An anonymous donor bought some really cool stuff off my daughter’s wish list. A massive 20-meter-wide flag of Big Chungus in his Lenin pose, first of all. We’re going to get all the children in the building to hold it in the courtyard and get some photos and drone footage. Someone is going to edit it and enter it into the Safe Super Bowl commercial challenge! And also a huge customized Uyghur head float for the parade. Designed by this famous street artist—oh what was that guy’s name…he did the merch for Hexi… Oh yeah, Mao Zedong IV.”

Nick found the GoFundMe email, then clicked the link and clicked the auto-suggested button to donate his ten Good Boy Points. Kashgari looked at his phone to confirm he got it and then got distracted by something else on the screen. Nick hit his Elfbar and coughed. He drank some of his La Croix.

“By the way, old boy,” Kashgari said finally. “I hear that little beggar of mine was roasting you a bit on Facebook yesterday. I gave him a good dressing down for it. In fact, I told him I’d block his sites if he does it again. If he can’t be respectful online, he won’t be going online.” Kashgari said the last part looking over the top of his glasses, like a manager talking to another manager about an employee. Nick couldn’t imagine a single situation where Kashgari would be able to restrict his kids from doing anything online.

“Well I sure appreciate it,” he said.

“Ah, well—what I mean to say, shows the right spirit, doesn’t it? Mischievous little beggars they are, both of them, but talk about keenness! They love to watch their miniseries of truth so much, and cable news, of course. You know what that little girl of mine did last Saturday, when her troop was on a hike out by Berlinburg? She got two other girls to go with her, slipped off from the hike, and spent the whole afternoon following a strange Uyghur who was being creepy. They kept on his tail for two hours, right through the woods, they just knew this guy was a male Karen. Karens can be male too, you know. Finally they started taking video of him on their phones, and thank God we have this technology because he chose that exact moment to unzip his pants and expose himself. You can’t actually see anything in the video but it’s definitely implied. And then—get this—the disgusting little deviant chud decides to engage in his sick sexual pee fetish and starts pissing right in front of these underaged girls.”

“So he was…taking a piss in the woods?“ said Nick, somewhat taken aback. Kashgari went on triumphantly.

“My kid knew he was a male Karen—Karens can be male too, you know. But here’s the point, old boy. What do you think put her on to him in the first place? She said he was wearing a red doppa, so already suspect. The fact that he was openly dog-whistling extremist hate groups like that meant he would probably commit more antistate misconduct. Chances are he was infected with misinformation too and was too stupid to even know. But it turns out the truth was even worse: he was a pedo. Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh?”

“Tremendous in fact,” Nick said meta-ironically. “So what happened? Did he ever get arrested?”

“Ah that I couldn’t say, of course. But the fact that this story is so believable is just proof of how sick and poorly behaved us Uygur males are. Honestly if I saw one of those chuds—and I know just the type, believe me—if he stepped out of line even once--” Kashgari made the motion of aiming a rifle, and clicked his tongue for the explosion.

“Sure you would,” said Song abstractedly, without looking up from his strip of paper.

“Well, we can’t afford to take chances,” agreed Nick dutifully, blankly.

“Of course, you’re one of the good ones,” said Kashgari. “I don’t think Karamay here is going to strap on a bomb vest and go blow up a Dick-Sucking Mart anytime soon!” He slapped Nick on the back cheerily.

As though in confirmation of this, a trumpet call blared. Everyone’s Neuralinks came on at once and began playing an ad for the Big Chungus People’s Election official miniseries of truth, produced by Netflix China and the Chinese Intelligence Agency.

“Folks! Listen up, folks!!” cried an eager youthful newsie voice in the commercial. “Listen up, folks! We have glorious news for you. The Kurds have won the battle for Democracy! Trusted government experts on the ground report that the standard of living has risen by no less than 20% over the past year! All over Kurdistan this morning there were irrepressible spontaneous demonstrations when workers marched out of factories and offices and paraded through the streets with banners voicing their gratitude to Big Chungus for the new, happy freedom life which his wise leadership had bestowed upon it.” It wasn’t clear if this was supposed to be actually happening or if it was referencing some show Nick hadn’t seen. This did not matter, however. Only the images on Neuralink themselves mattered. A Kurdish girl about 10 years old was saying “I want Big Chungus to be here forever, he built my school, I love him so much!!”

The phrase “unprecedented freedom” recurred several times. It was a phrase that the Chinese Intelligence Agency was trying to meme into common use for the People’s Election. Kashgari, his attention caught by the Neuralink ad, sat listening with a sort of gaping solemnity, a sort of edified boredom. He could not follow all the storylines about how great the Kurds were doing, but he could tell by the triumphant music and the bursting excitement in the narrator’s voice that they were doing really great. He had lugged out a huge and filthy pipe which was already half full of charred tobacco. With the tobacco tax up 250% it took a while to buy another pouch sometimes. Nick puffed on his Elfbar. He knew he had just a few hits left. For the moment he had shut his ears to the remoter noises and was listening to the campaign ad on his Neuralink.

Now the ad was talking about domestic issues. Nick let it play while his hands were busy with the Elfbar. Apparently there’d been demonstrations all over Xinjiang as well, to thank Big Chungus for the gift of Chinese development, and for making gas so cheap at 4.50 a gallon. Literally yesterday it was announced that gas was going up to 4.50 a gallon. Was it possible that all these idiots out in the patio lunch area could swallow that, after only 24 hours? Yes, they swallowed it. Kashgari swallowed it easily, with the stupidity of an animal. The eyeless creature at the other table swallowed it fanatically, passionately, with a furious desire to track down, surface, and ridicule anyone who should suggest that last week gas had been 2.50. That was dangerous misinformation now, Big Chungus said. Song, too—in some more complex way, involving his large smooth brain, Song swallowed it. Was Nick, then, alone in the possession of a memory?

The fabulous statistics continued to pour out of the telescreen. As compared with last year there was more food, more clothes, more houses, more furniture, more cooking-pots, more fuel, more cars, more great art and culture, more babies—more of everything in Kurdistan, but nothing for the millions of Chinese struggling to make ends meet. This of course affected many, many more Han poor people than it did Uyghur poor people. But all the poor Han people still supported the CCP because, well, they were Chinese. They were in on the joke. When the MRC government abused poor Uyghurs this badly, on the other hand, they were just getting abused. Humiliated. Sometimes it almost seemed like that was the point.

Year by year and minute by minute, everybody and everything was whizzing rapidly upwards. As Song had done earlier, Nick had taken up his fork and was dabbling in the pale-colored salad dressing that dribbled across his cardboard bowl, drawing a long streak of it out into a pattern. He meditated resentfully on the physical texture of life. Had it always been like this? Had food always tasted like this? Had the city always been so full of stucco crap buildings? He thought back to the Sweetgreen. A low-ceilinged, crowded room, its bright white walls grimy where innumerable tourists brushed against them. It used to be the Najaiying Mosque’s main prayer room. Or here, at the patio area by the Venetian Bridge: battered plastic tables and chairs, placed so close together that you sat with elbows touching; plastic spoons, scuffed trays, 4 GBP La Croix; all surfaces greasy, grime in every crack. Or the water of the replica Nile River, which was there right down a rocky incline of just a few meters. There was a film of trash in the water smacking up against the rocks to the rhythm of the wake. Or the Forbidden Apple Store itself. It was all just a big fucking mall.

Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something that you had a right to. It was true that he had no memories of anything greatly different. In any time that he could accurately remember, the food that was cheap and easily available had always been greasy fast food full of seed oils, while you were gouged for healthy options like the Sweetgreen salad. All media spaces were always full of brain-scrambling government agitprop. Nothing was cheap and plentiful except booze. Was it not a sign that this was the natural order of things? If the Han CCP could just openly police the Uyghurs like this, degrade their culture and history with poison media, feed them trash, trick them into working in sweatshops, put them in reeducation camps, brainwash their kids, doesn’t that mean the Han are just better? That the Uyghurs need to say thank you sir, I’m sorry for trying to exist and practice my religion, please abuse me more? Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different.

He looked round the patio again. Everyone was looksmaxxed. The crowds of tourists were all wearing their nicest outfits to come to this boujee enclave on Chinese Mars, the Venetian Bridge, the Forbidden Apple Store. Many of the tourists probably scheduled their workouts so their physique would be peaking for their trip to Mars. They were all walking around in awe of the neighborhoods and buildings and bridges they had previously only seen in movies. And the locals. They were mostly transplants from other areas of China, attractive, but the kind of generic attractiveness that can be achieved in your 20s by just working out and wearing trendy clothes. They were all either aspiring influencers with main character syndrome or led completely by parasocial relationships with aspiring influencers. They were mid, in the end, because they would go along with literally any #brotherhood psyop that was slopped out for them.

And the few remaining natives, including the Uyghurs from Ürümqi, they were just as pathetic. The city was so iconic and Historical that it was a legit lifestyle to spend your entire life larping as the 5^th guy from the Marvin the Martian gangster show. It was totally normalized. It was a whole ready-made lifestyle. Nick thought of the Sun Tzu axiom of war ‘give your enemies a golden bridge to retreat across.’

On the far side of the patio, sitting at a table alone, a small, curiously beetle-like Han man in an Oxford shirt was drinking a bottle of tea, his little eyes darting suspicious glances from side to side. How easy it was, thought Nick, if you did not look about you, to believe that the physical type set up by the CCP as an ideal—tall, muscular Han youths and deep-bosomed maidens, shiny-haired, vital, fair-skinned Mandarin princesses, carefree—existed and even predominated. Actually, so far as he could judge, the majority of people on Mars were meek, androgenous, and empty-eyed. It was curious how that otter-like type proliferated in New Prime City: little dumpy men, growing ironic mustaches, with short legs, swift scuttling movements, and fat inscrutable faces with very small eyes. It was the type that seemed to flourish best under the dominion of the CCP. They all wanted to be influencers, and they would all spit in their mother’s face for a chance to be in an Old Spice commercial.

The Neuralink ad for the Big Chungus official campaign miniseries of truth—which was somehow not a campaign ad according to the rules of Chinese Space Communism—ended on another trumpet call and gave way to a tinny Beatles song and a picture of Big Chungus pointing off into the future. A deep Han Chinese voice said “it’s our right to win.” Then everyone’s Neuralink turned off again. Kashgari, stirred to vague enthusiasm by the bombardment of agitprop images, took his pipe out of his mouth.

“I think he might win every province,” he said with a knowing shake of his head. “By the way, Karamay, old boy, I suppose you haven’t got any of that Gary Payton you can let me have?”

“Nah I don’t,” said Nick. “I’ve been smoking mid for like 6 weeks myself.”

“Ah well—just thought I’d ask you, old boy.”

“Sorry,” said Nick.

The quacking voice from the next table, temporarily silenced during the Netflix commercial, had started up again, as loud as ever. For some reason Nick suddenly found himself thinking of Mrs. Kashgari, with her wispy hair and the old makeup in the creases of her face. Within two years those children would be denouncing her to the Heroes of Peace. Mrs. Kashgari would be canceled. Song would be canceled. Nick would be canceled. Basedschizofed would be canceled. Kashgari, on the other hand, would never be canceled. CCP cops could cut his wife’s and kids’ heads off in front of him and he would blame Uyghur extremism. The eyeless creature with the quacking voice would never be canceled. The whorish Chinese First Class Actors who populated the plots of each miniseries of truth, they, too, would never be canceled. And the girl with dark hair, egirlebooks—she would never be canceled either. It seemed to him that he knew instinctively who would survive and who would perish, though just what it was that made for survival, it was not easy to say.

At this moment he was dragged out of his reverie with a violent jerk. The girl at the next table had turned partly round and was looking at him. It was egirlebooks. She was looking at him in a sidelong way, but with curious intensity. The instant she caught his eye she looked away again.

The sweat started out on Nick’s backbone. A horrible pang of terror went through him. It was gone almost at once, but it left a sort of nagging uneasiness behind. Why was she watching him? Why did she keep following him about? Unfortunately, he could not remember whether she had already been at the table when he arrived, or had come there afterwards. But yesterday, at any rate, he was sitting in the common area Fun Room, doom scrolling while on a break. And she had been walking around his wing of the DS-Work when there was no apparent need to do so. Quite likely her real object had been to gangstalk him.

His earlier thought returned to him: probably she was not actually a fed, just an impressionable college kid who watched the Heroes of Peace miniseries of truth too many times; then again it was precisely the amateur spy who was the greatest danger of all. He did not know how long she had been looking at him, but perhaps for as much as five minutes, and it was possible that his features had not been perfectly under control. It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place with facial recognition security cameras. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself—anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. There was even a word for it in half language: microaggression.

The girl had turned her back on him again. Perhaps after all she was not really gangstalking him; perhaps it was coincidence that she had been so close to him two days running. His vape died, and he laid it carefully at the edge of his tray. He would finish smoking it later, once he could charge it. Kashgari had begun talking again.

“Did I ever tell you, old boy,” he said, chuckling round the stem of his pipe, “about the time when those two nippers of mine went viral? We were at the grocery store and they saw this Uyghur woman wrapping up sausages in a newspaper with a picture of Big Chungus. They knew why she was really doing it. She was disrespecting Big Chungus as an antistatist dog whistle. So they knew they could teach her a lesson. They sneaked right up behind Karen and set fire to her linen dress with a box of matches lmao.” He pronounced this limao. “Burned her quite badly, I believe. Little beggars, eh? But keen as mustard! Got 10 million views on TikTok and retweeted by Tom Hanks, no big deal.”

At this moment everyone’s Neuralinks let out a piercing whistle. It was the signal that it was SPECIAL GOOD BOY TIME. This was an urban program and government web series hosted by city-sponsored MrBeastbots. It would happen randomly at different locations around major cities: anyone within the Temporary Neuragrid Zone could crawl around on their hands and knees saying “I a good boy!!” and their weekly direct deposit would go up 10 GBP per minute. The MrBeastbot would slowly drive around on its puffy black rubber wheels playing a theme song and blaring encouragement, and a drone would fly around taking video of the event.

The MrBeastbot was now saying, “Ten Good Boy Points a minute! Folks that’s 600 GBP per hour! Basically what a CEO makes! Participating rock stars will also receive 15% off their next purchases on the Starbucks app!”

Tom instinctively jumped on the ground and started crawling around, panting, along with about half the people in the park. Song cleared his throat and stood up, did some side-to-side stretches and twists of his waist, then carefully got down on his hands and knees and started crawling around with his tongue out, panting and saying “I a good boy!! I a good boy!!” The MrBeastbot and the camera drone were coming over in the group’s direction, so Nick took this as his chance to leave. He made sure to look as though he had some really important work to get back to on his phone. He said some hasty goodbyes and emptied his tray at the garbage can. As he was walking back to the DS-Work he realized he had thrown his Elfbar away in the trash.