6
Again Nick went through his daily routine: walking to his cubicle, going to the gym, making memes, watching podcasts, and smoking weed. At about 8:30 PM he began wrapping up.
That day he got less work done than average, but that was okay because he was doing research. He was watching a YouTube documentary that was particularly compelling. A Hotan Ronnie documentary. Lots of people in the comments of the compilation vids said this Youtube documentary—the original Hotan Ronnie doc—was a must-watch. Someone said it was “orders of magnitude” better than the newer ones. It was from when Ronnie was young and just started working at Wendy’s. He didn’t know who made it, he just knew that it was on some channel that hadn’t posted since iPhone44time.
The movie started with a close-up of a gutter drain with water rushing out of it and splattering violently onto the asphalt of a parking lot. After a few moments the handheld camera moves out and you can see that the gutter in the parking lot is on a stucco strip mall with another strip mall right next to it in the background. A chyron said “Hotan, Xinjiang, MRC.” The camera then pivoted 90 degrees to the right and settled on a pudgy twentysomething Uyghur man in a tight Wendy’s uniform. He’s standing behind a Wendy’s, smoking a cigarette. A chyron said “Chris.”
“My name’s Chris,” he rasped out. “I know Ronnie from here at Wendy’s. He’s a way cool dude. Really into knives. He’s just a straight-up cool dude. I did 2 tours with the PLA, I’m a veteran. And I saw him, and I sized him up, and I said. I like that dude. He’s good stuff.” Chris smoked and kept talking. “He just went on a trip to Yengisar City, last weekend…or maybe it was two weekends ago...Yengisar, that’s the town just a few minutes down the road here. World famous for their knives. Down three-fifteen there.” He pointed proudly in the direction of the highway. “Ronnie brought back this like badass ninja knife…”
The documentary was full of these totally engrossing characters. Regular people being themselves and being super interesting interacting with Ronnie. This was in iPhone39time, before Big Chungus and all the modern media psyops. Now all these people would be screaming Fortnite memes, Nick thought.
Even then, when Ronnie was in his early 20s, he was kind of dumpy looking: balding, always frowning as he read the chat on his webcam, slouching around his job at Wendy’s with his wizard tattoos and bracelets. In one scene in the documentary he was walking home from work the shoulder on the highway in his wizard robe with his wizard staff, and a pickup truck drives by and calls him a f*****. From the way Ronnie didn’t react to it, you could tell it happened all the time.
He was interviewed in his streaming chair by the director, sitting just off-screen. In one of the interviews he tells the director, “So yeah at the vocational education and training center, we lived in dorms, right, and they make you take all these classes about Chinese culture and all this goddamn boring shit, right, but then they also had this like game room with a pool table. I was like allllriiiiiiiight. So I would spend most of my time there at the pool table, right, trying to impress the chicks, if you dig what I’m saying there YouTube heh heh heh…”
In another interview—this one outside the Wendy’s—Hotan Ronnie said he worked there in the lobby cleaning the tables between customers and refilling the tea. He said he worked his fucking ass off there and if you found a table that was dirty for more than 30 seconds, he wasn’t working that day. This was, of course, the Wendy’s that Ronnie would eventually got fired from because his fans kept calling and harassing them. Nick had seen that arc already: in the video Ronnie says, “Sooo…ultimately I got fired because…when the corporate office keeps getting calls from these trolls, they just see me and they go ‘this person is giving us all this trouble, let’s get him out of our company.’”
In another scene Ronnie is hanging out with Chris again, this time they’re smoking cigarettes in the strip mall parking lot. Chris compliments Ronnie’s metal chain he’s wearing around his neck. He says “that’s badass.”
Ronnie says “I got it from Spencers. I like it.”
Chris says “Is that weed?”
Ronnie says “No. I don’t got any weed on me.”
Chris says “You want some weed?”
Ronnie says “…I wouldn’t mind some.”
Chris says “You got any money?”
Ronnie says “…no.”
Chris says “Well I’m homeless, I go down to the shelter, and trust me buddy, it’s not hard to get…”
Later the director interviews Ronnie back at his apartment again. Ronnie says “I knew she liked me, so I asked her to go play pool, and we’ve been boyfriend and girlfriend ever since.” This was referencing when he met his girlfriend in the Vocational Skills Education and Training Center.
“I nibbled on her earlobe and that drove her fucking wild. Now I’m not that experienced with sex or anything, but I have my theories and they fuckin work, okay heh heh heh. So we ended up going to the forest by the study center, and she gave me a hand job and I was like hooooly shit, alright! And then I went down and started licking that pussy gooooood, like aalllhhhhllhhllllhhhllllhhh. We had been wanting to do that for a while but it’s hard because of all the PLA guards there. But we managed to sneak into the girls’ bathroom and do it there too heh heh. The first time I got it in I was like whoooooaaa okayyyy, I think I lasted for a whole 2 minutes and 45 seconds….”
At the end of the movie Ronnie is talking as he walks along some railroad tracks somewhere in the town, now it’s nighttime. Ronnie says, “If you can convince yourself of one thing, then you can make it happen. And that’s sort of the foundation of my religion: if you can convince yourself and believe enough, it’ll come true. And I’ve seen my religion take flight in certain activities, like chi balls. So I was in the vocational education and training center, and I was telling this guy about chi balls, and he was like what are you talking about? And I threw him a chi ball. And he knew.”
“I’ll be staring at something out of the blue, just like zoning out staring at it, and then boom, it moves. I’ve seen it happen. Like, I was in the quiet room at the study center, like basically where the computers and the phones are, for outside communication, and um, I’m sitting there staring at the phone, waiting for a call, and out of nowhere the phone just goes kksshhhhhh” Ronnie swipes his hand, holding his cigarette, like he’s swiping everything off a table. “And the PLA guards are like what the fuck? And I’m sitting there like wow I actually did that heh.”
Then later in this scene, at the very end, the director asks Ronnie about a design he had tattooed on his forearm. He says, “Well, I had this symbol and this symbol, and I drew them a lot, I became like obsessed with them. And then one day I joined them. And it was like the opening of a doorway if you will. Metaphorically speaking. And then that’s my symbol, that’s the symbol of my religion. And it spoke to me, and I’ve been obsessed with it, and I got it tattooed on my arm as soon as I turned 18. Okay, you’ve got mind, body, spirit, and energy. Belief. Then it intertwines with each other, and then back into itself. Basically that’s the element for…the power and all that.”
It was simply a tremendous movie. The commenters had been right. The doc was by far the best, most interesting Ronnie content. But Nick realized, and had in fact noticed throughout the movie, that the best part was probably the original score. It was a haunting electronic ambient music that was a little over-the-top sometimes, but it always embellished the weirdness of what was happening on screen in an artful and distinct way. It somehow perfectly fit the dissonant and unpredictable tone of every Uyghur’s experience in Xinjiang.
It was 8:45 now. Nick needed to go back to Americatown. He had watched the documentary four times. He didn’t put any other content on after it ended the fourth time. Instead, he just sat in rare silence in his cubicle. Then, out of habit, he went to his Mandarin Dashboard and started doom scrolling.
He went to his own Instagram Story and watched it again for about the 50th time to check the views. The posts were: his dinner from last night, a chicken parm; two Korean dog posts; his coffee from this morning (with a Hexi song posted with it); and a picture of a guy pissing next to a statue of Confucius that he’d seen on his walk to work. He thought of the mouse in the experiment who couldn’t stop pressing the cocaine button.
Then he started scrolling the TL. The main story today was a think piece in the upcoming Beijing Times weekend edition. It was about the weather on Mars since China had established its city there 16 iPhones ago. The article listed a bunch of examples of how the Uyghurs within Mars Camp Bell, former Ürümqi, had been disproportionally adding to the pollutants in the air inside the Sky of the Future. Their clothing had 40% more wool fibers, so that meant it took 40% more sheep to make, which meant 40% more methane in the Sky of the Future. The polite and conscientious Han residents, on the other hand, usually wore silk-based fabrics, produced by worms, whose carbon footprint is almost nothing. The article also cited the other study that said how 50% of the red meat consumption in Xinjiang was by Uyghur males.
The obviously fake redpilled accounts were melting down about how hypocritical it was and how this was an obvious pretext to persecute the Uyghurs more. The CCP blue checks were gloating about how the Uyghurs would all be dead within a generation and China could finally move on.
Someone posted a surveillance video with a highlighted comment of the CCP Politburo Chairman of Empathy saying “Ohhh bandits from the East, bandits from the East again, okay dipshit.” In the video he’s commenting on, an adult woman with a young child is trying to open the front gate of her building. A group of men from Hong Kong, wearing masks, approaches them very quickly, brandishing knives, then pushes the woman and child into the building and forces themselves into the building after them.
Someone posted a clip where Danny Doppa endorsed Big Chungus again. A probably real blackpilled account said Danny Doppa would always be loyal to Big Chungus as long as he is framed as a cool modern deep fake technology and not a government propaganda algorithm.
Someone posted a meme comparing the lore of New Prime City to the lore of Prime City, with all the posters of all the movies and TV shows made about each city. There were dozens of movie posters for each, all really small and arranged by all the folk lore for each series and each cinematic universe.
Someone said you ever go to Kinkos to search something because you don’t want it on your search history just in case something happens?
The new cover of Xinjiang Magazine was a Corporate Memphis drawing of about 10 stereotypical-looking Uyghur men of various ages leering at the figure in the foreground, a smart-looking young Han woman who looks at them worriedly as she is walking by.
Nick suddenly had the thought, ‘wouldn’t it be great if all these assholes could lose?’
A new study from NASA-Harvard Space Academy found that naan ovens produced 420.69 grams of carbon dioxide monthly, as much as 8 cars EACH. A doctor in a lab coat said that as much as the Uyghur community liked their traditional cooking techniques, the government may need to step in and do something.
An ad for the Mao Zedong Visa card said “With 2.9% APR, every purchase is a great economic miracle.”
A War Machine clip account posted a clip of War Machine on his stream saying “the reason the CCP media can’t address the Xing Emails because…the consequences of them being true, for a lot of normal people, the consequences are…world rearranging.”
The algorithm suggested an article in the weekend’s Red Planet Post Business section. “Inside the Greatest Merger of All-Time: How Alibaba and Uber Combined Forces to Form the Dick Sucking Company: The Executive Interviews.”
Someone posted a video of college kids marching for Current Thing in downtown Tokyoville today. Current Thing was still the Kurds so they were chanting “All eyes on Kurdistan.”
Someone posted a video of Big Chungus’s speech from the night before. He gave the speech as a fluffy mini daschund, which he did sometimes via deep fake technology. The CCP media was complimenting his insights about the economy and his stompies.
Nick closed Instagram. Blue check journos were the most disgusting scum that had ever existed. Suddenly he remembered something he wanted to search.
He went to the browser on his desktop monitor and searched the title of the documentary—“Hotan Ronnie ninja wizard”—and clicked on the YouTube link again. Instead of watching the movie, though, he scrolled to the end to see who did the music. It was credited to “Sayram Sounds.” Ronnie went to a new tab and searched “hotan Ronnie ninja wizard sayram sounds reddit” and clicked the first response. It was a Hotan Ronnie subreddit, one of the really old threads. He scrolled through and found exactly what he was looking for:
Sayram Sounds is a pseudonym for Tamir Baisha, a Uyghur ambient electronica musician and editor from northern Altay province. Baisha was active in dissident online circles until iPhone43time, when he stopped posting on all his known accounts.
Nick scrolled down the thread. He saw a screenshot from the end of the movie. Something he had missed. Or maybe they cut it out. A screenshot of a credit that must have been at the very end. It said “special thanks war machine.”
What the fuck did that mean? Who the fuck was this anonymous director anyways? Suddenly Nick’s mind was racing. He went back to the YouTube page to check the name of the channel again. G216 Productions. After the highway in northern Xinjiang.
He opened another tab and searched for “g216 productions war machine reddit.” He clicked the first link. Another old reddit thread. Again he found exactly what he wanted: it was a post with another YouTube link. A deleted web series that the G216 Productions channel had done with another one of his documentary subjects, the other weirdo vlogger lolcow Second Edgar. Edgar was in a hotel room, washing his face in the sink and talking to someone behind the camera. They were talking about Hotan Ronnie. You couldn’t see the person behind the camera most of the time, but then a few times he walked behind Edgar at the mirror so you could see part of the cameraman’s body in the mirror. Then he finally moved to a good enough angle to the mirror where you could see the guy’s face. Nick paused it. It was fucking Basedschizofed. G216 Productions was Basedschizofed.
Nick was stunned. His mind reeled. He took his hand off the mouse and just looked at the wall for a second. He looked around his cubicle.
Then, out of habit, he picked up his phone and continued doom scrolling Mandarin.
Someone posted a picture of a dog in a school classroom wearing goggles. The caption said: “One of my teammates has a seeing-eye dog in her Chem lab.. he’s also required to wear goggles during lab.”
A redpilled Uyghur YouTuber in Aksu was jumped by 8 Heroes of Peace, who recorded themselves kicking him in the face repeatedly. Anyone who shared the video was being banned from Neuralink. The CCP Chairman of Empathy posted a picture of his bloodied face in a hospital bed with the caption “play stupid games, win stupid prizes.”
Someone posted a screenshot of a Han woman with red glasses frames in her avi saying divorce your Uyghur husband.
The cover of the new Beijing Magazine was a story about how the doppa hat was actually invented by the Han 3,000 years ago.
Someone got run over by a car doing donuts at a car meet.
Someone got 38 years in prison for “corrupting the minds of children with reactionary ideas.”
Someone posted a meme with the quote “Conflict is to storytelling what sound is to music – Sun Tzu.”
Someone posted a deep friend Spongebob meme where he is bugging his eyes out really super wide. The caption says “at the saying the quiet part out loud competition when your opponent is Big Chungus spokesman Mao Mei Jian.”
He saw a thumbnail for a YouTube video called “Farmer kills neighbor, records everything.”
Big Chungus, in his daily podcast video, unveiled his new RV wrap, it had his main slogan big on each side of the RV: “OUR RIGHT TO WIN.” Then on the back of the bus the famous Big Chungus face and above and below it “MOST DEMOCRATIC / OF ALL TIME.”
A Hotan Ronnie clip account posted a video of Ronnie saying “run to the end of your leash and bark, trolls!””
There was a new ad that was close-up video of some really soft-looking white cotton socks and this narration: “Okay here’s what this ad is about. You know when you wear a sock, and the seam keeps rubbing your foot and it’s really annoying and uncomfortable? These socks don’t have a seam! These socks don’t have a seam, so they won’t do that. They’re extra comfortable. You can get the socks by going to our website seamlesssocks.com.”
Jet Li tweeted about the YouTuber from Aksu who had been jumped and said he was today’s “Uyghur Dipshit of the Day.”
There was a new ad for indoor skiing in Guangzhou.
Someone posted a video where a man from Vietnam livestreamed a plane crash in Nepal that ended with the camera burning in an inferno of flame.
A safe football news account posted an article with a thumbnail that had photos of a wiry Han man with greying hair, wearing sunglasses and a polo shirt, with one foot up on a railing, looking out at a massive empty outdoor sports arena. The headline was “Safe Super Bowl LXIX will be held at Blackrock Field. The massive logistics are already underway, with Xi Xing at the helm.” It linked to a profile in the CCP sports magazine.
Shit. The Safe Super Bowl was going to be held at Blackrock Field. That was in New Prime City, just outside the quantum computer. It was where the Camp Bell Dragons played, actually. (Not inside the actual Sky of the Future.) They were doing well this season too. The playoffs must have started already. The CIA must be planning a Safe Super Bowl Narrative that would be the Prime City Giants playing the Camp Bell Dragons of New Prime City. Old versus new, east versus west, the 20th century vs the 21st century. The Dragons had a Han quarterback this year, so it was too good for them to resist.
This was tons of insane new information for the plot. Nick put his phone down.
He took his headphones off and looked at the wall for a moment. Then he got up and walked to the bathroom, listening to nothing. He peed. He walked back to his cubicle. When he got back, he put on a Tokyo Night Drive Radio lofi playlist and rolled a joint to smoke on the bridge back to Americatown.
The walk home might be Nick’s favorite part of the day. The route he took was fairly empty after dark, with very few joggers; only sparse commuter pedestrians like him and some straggling tourists. It was a great opportunity to really take his time and smoke a leisurely joint, even sometimes vlog to himself on his Neuralink. It was like therapy to talk through and exorcise recurring toxic thoughts he’d been having.
He was thinking of the vlog as he made his way up the incline of the bridge this warm spring evening. What should he say on this ep of the vlog? What’s a story he would tell? Hmm…what was a story that Hotan Ronnie would tell?
“Okay. So it was three years ago. It was on a dark evening, in a weird hook-up subreddit. Most of the posts had all the obvious code that it was an escort. A date for 80 roses, that kind of thing. Incalls, Camp Bell/New Prime City local. But sooo I found a recent post that didn’t have any of that. In fact, it seemed real. The girl had a young face with a lot of makeup. And she could also host at her apartment and that appealed to me. If a girl came over to my place…um…’you live like this?’ I think would be the meme. Lol. So anyways, I was messaging with this girl, right. And it was going good, you know. But the catch was, she said, the hot water was off in her apartment, was that okay? I was like that’s kind of weird but uhh yeah sure, that’s fine. I wasn’t planning on taking a shower or anything…”
For the moment it was too difficult to go on. He said “Neuralink pause recording” and shut his eyes. He pressed his fingers against them, trying to squeeze out the vision that kept recurring. He had an almost overwhelming temptation to shout a string of filthy words at the top of his voice. Or to bang his head against the steel beams supporting the bridge, to kick over the construction fence, and hurl his phone into the replica Nile River—to do any violent or noisy or painful thing that might black out the memory that was tormenting him.
Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some spontaneous stream of consciousness rant that would be captured on your Neuralink, which could then be used to cancel you. Nick had once thought he could keep this completely under control, like any mature adult, but he’d realized the past few years that mental health wasn’t that simple.
Nick thought of a man whom he had passed in the patio area by the Forbidden Apple Store a few weeks back; a quite ordinary-looking Uyghur man, a #brotherhood Good Boy, aged thirty-five to forty, tallish and thin. He was wearing the oxford shirt and khakis of an office worker and eating a Sweetgreen salad. Nick had seen him in the patio area by the Venetian Bridge. In fact Nick had walked fairly close past him to get to his own seat, and saw that the guy’s face was twitching there as he ate his salad. Nick remembered thinking at the time: That poor devil is done for. A few minutes later, as Nick was eating his own salad, he heard someone scream, “I need help!! I need help!!!” and looked over. It was this dude. He wasn’t choking or anything; he was just sitting there. Everyone around the scene—all the tourists and other office workers—everyone stopped and was staring at this guy having a nervous breakdown. It was eerily dead silent except this guy screaming in a plaintive tone: “I am mentally ill!! I can’t take this anymore!! I need to be under the care of mental health professionals!!” The closest table was a group of young European tourists. They were all stopped. One of the guys, a Jewish-looking European dude, scooted his chair back and turned to look at the guy, as though to say “do you want any acknowledgement or help?” The yelling guy stood up, stopped yelling and just walked away, leaving his salad there on the bench.
Nick drew his breath and said “Neuralink unpause recording” and went on vlogging.
“So anyways, I was messaging this girl on reddit f4m. I had never done that before because I assumed it was all escorts, so it was kind of like I was just bored and seeing if she’d respond. I was thinking she’s probably busy that night already or whatever, but she actually got back to me right away. She says her hot water is off. And so anyways, I end up going over there. To her place. This apartment way out in OldLondontownville. The girl was some kind of Chinese Mongolian mix, by the way, maybe some Uyghur in there. I didn’t ask. She lived in a railroad apartment in OldLondontownville with 3 or 4 roommates. When I got there, to her bedroom, it seemed like a 19-year-old’s bedroom even though she was like 40. Mattress on the floor, nail polish all over the place. She even had some tripods set up around the bed for God knows what. I didn’t judge her because, like, look at my place. I’m just saying this for description in the story.”
His teeth were set on edge. The spring night air was crisp. He was rambling to distract himself. He spit over the side of the bridge. It was probably 100 feet to the water below. Simultaneously with the woman with the mattress on the floor he thought of Tinder Katie, his gf. Nick had a gf—or used to have one. A situationship at any rate: probably she would still text him back. He seemed to breathe again the nail polish remover smell of the mattress bedroom, an odor compounded of bugs and dirty clothes and cheap perfume, but nevertheless alluring, because all the women in the CCP #brotherhood were obsessed with being boujee and would never wallow in filth like this. In his mind the smell of it was inextricably mixed up with fornication.
When he had met up with the girl from Reddit it had been his first lapse in two years or thereabouts. He would have just gotten escorts in that time, but he didn’t want to get in the expensive habit. Prostitution was illegal, of course, but it was one of those rules that you could occasionally nerve yourself to break. It was slightly dangerous for your social credit score, but it was not a life-and-death matter. The real danger was, if you started going to escorts too much, you’d spend all your Good Boy Points and have to get a real job to make more money. It was easy enough to get away with, though, provided you could avoid being caught in the act. Every girl on social media was constantly bombarded with brainwashing to normalize being a prostitute, so it wasn’t hard to find someone attractive to pay for sex. Some girls who were “going through a phase” could even be purchased for an Elfbar. Mere debauchery did not matter very much, so long as it was furtive and joyless and only degraded lower class and Uyghur women. The unforgivable crime was to even suggest any disrespect of any high-class Han celeb women. Then suddenly the CCP media would be in feminist mode again.
The only recognized purpose of marriage was to do social engineering for the MRC government. Not in a direct way, but in a general trend way. Marriage was glorified when it was a group of 1,000 Good Chinese couples getting married in the Forbidden City courtyard for a CCP TikTok PR op. In this case marriage was a great privilege and bonded the families even more to the great nation of China. But if it was some Uyghur Muslims who wanted to get married in their religious tradition, it was a totally oppressive and creepy af and a fairy tale superstition. In fact, multiple Uyghurs, who were even CCP officials themselves, had been fired and disappeared for being married in traditional Islamic religious ceremonies.
The aim of the #brotherhood was not merely to prevent men and women from forming loyalties which it might not be able to control. Its real, undeclared purpose was social engineering in Xinjiang. It would show Han couples, it would show Han men with Uyghur women, it would show Uyghur men in gay couples, it would show and glorify every diverse mix-and-match relationships in the media, except anything that made a straight Uyghur man in Xinjiang appear masculine. And the very most prime directive for any #brotherhood poster was to keep pretty young Han Chinese girls away from dirty Uyghurs.
This was all despite the highly sexualized culture in Xinjiang. The only way to meet people to date now was on dating apps. Body counts were through the roof. The way people talked about sexual intercourse in all the popular media took the intrigue and eroticism out of it completely. The horrible sex podcasts were much worse now than even a few iPhones ago. It was boring. But of course the entire point was the degrade the traditional family structure so the government would be the only authority figure. And Operation Bedtime Stories accomplished this with the efficiency of an authoritarian regime.
The gigapop anthem of the summer this year, for example, was called “Take a Shit” by the Canadian former-stripper gigapop streamer Fuck Bitch. It narrated a fun evening of partying where she the protagonist was at a party sucking a man’s dick, and she had to take a shit, so she brought him in the bathroom with her and continued sucking his dick while she relieved herself. That’s right, a reverse-blumpkin. And the viral meme from the song that was now repeated ad nauseum in every comment section online, was the end of the song where she tells her beau “nut in the damn sink!” Even CCP true believers winced at the TikTok edits of the toddlers already singing along.
He thought again of Tinder Katie. It must be nine, ten—nearly eleven iPhones since they had parted. It was curious how seldom he thought of her. For days at a time he was capable of forgetting that he had ever had a gf. They had only been together for about fifteen months really.
Tinder Katie was a tall Uyghur girl, very straight, with splendid movements. She had a bold, aquiline face, a face that one might have called noble until one discovered that there was as nearly as possible nothing behind it. She was basic. Very early in their relationship he had decided—though perhaps it was only that he knew her more intimately than he knew most people—that she had without exception the most stupid, vulgar, empty mind that he had ever encountered. When the topic of children came up, she would say “Eew I don’t want to have kids, I want to do something with my life!” She had not a thought in her head that was not memed into her consciousness by TikTok; there was no imbecility, absolutely none, that she was not capable of swallowing if it had the #brotherhood hashtag attached. “The human sound-track” he nicknamed her in his own mind. Yet he could have endured living with her if it had not been for just one thing—the CIA media gaslighting.
Nick didn’t want to watch any movies or TV or anything with the Chinese First Class Actors because it would all be psyopped. So they would compromise and watch bland non-political YouTube content like home tours. But then, even in those, in every video it would be some boujee Han media executive in a nice luxury Mars or Beijing apartment. He would be literally the gayest most mincing effeminate man on the planet, and all the décor in his house would be like an abstract painting of the color red on top of the color light blue. In one the guy was showing an arrangement of objects on the front table that you see as soon as you walk into his apartment. One object was a red statue of a bull charging, looking really aggressive and masculine. The guy says “Mm this is one of my favorite pieces, I’m so proud of this, I picked it up at a design conference in Beijing, it’s actually from the Liao dynasty. Very ancient, very important.” Then next to the red bull he points out a small light blue figure made of paper mâché that’s bending over submissively. He says “This one I just picked up at a tourist shop area in Istanbul; it’s not really anything at all, just a souvenir of the past.” Tinder Katie—an adult woman with a full liberal arts education—would watch entire videos like this and refuse to even see that there was any political subtext to any of it.
In the morning they would be woken up by the Alexa saying headlines to them about War Machine and the dangerous Uyghur-controlled media and the concentration camp moral panic. It was like the more normal you were mentally the more fucked up and incomprehensible it was.
As soon as Nick would touch Tinder Katie she’d wince and stiffen. To embrace her was like embracing a jointed wooden image. Perhaps the vibes were off because she watched nothing but CIA propaganda about how all Uyghur men were dangerous terrorist rapists. What was strange was that even when she was clasping him against her he had the feeling that she was simultaneously pushing him away with all her strength. The rigidity of her muscles managed to convey that impression. She would lie there with shut eyes, neither resisting nor cooperating, but submitting. It was extraordinarily embarrassing, and, after a while, horrible. Even then he could have stood living with her if it had been agreed that they should remain celibate. But curiously enough it was Tinder Katie who had refused this. She didn’t want to be a prude or anything, she said. So the performance continued to happen, every weekend quite regularly, whenever it was not impossible. She even used to text him about it during the week, that she was so horny and couldn’t wait for her dick appointment on Friday. She had two names for sex. One was the euphemism ‘going to my bedroom,’ and the other was her ‘dick appointment,’ which was from some stupid gigapop song. Quite soon he grew to have a feeling of positive dread whenever he went over to her place, and in the end he ghosted her.
Nick sighed inaudibly. He was almost to the other side of the bridge, where he’d have to go through another Good Boy Check. He said “Neuralink unpause recording”:
“So we were sitting there on her bed, this girl and I, talking. On her mattress, I should say. She was kind of chubby and wearing this pink stripper bikini. So she started rubbing my dick through my shorts. Then, with like basically zero pretense, she got on her hands and knees and spread her legs and pulled her pink thong to the side, as though to say ‘welp time to fuck me now.’ I…”
He saw himself standing there in her room, in the bright fluorescent light, with the smell of nail polish and dirty laundry in his nostrils, and in his heart a feeling of defeat and resentment which even at that moment was mixed up with the thought of Tinder Katie’s pale body, frozen for ever by the hypnotic power of the #brotherhood. Why did it always have to be like this? Why could he not have a woman of his own instead of these filthy scuffles at intervals of years? But a real love affair was an almost unthinkable event. The women that posted #brotherhood were all alike. By careful early conditioning, by games and cold water, by the rubbish that was dinned into them at school and on TikTok, by the Heroes of Peace college news show, by the Netflix FYP, the YouTube algo, the Current Thing parades, and gigapop, the natural feeling had been driven out of them. His reason told him that there must be exceptions, but good luck finding them on the CCP dating apps. And talking to women irl in basically any context was now seen as totally creepy. They were all impregnable, as the CCP intended that it should be. And what he wanted, more even than to be loved, was to break down that wall of virtue, even if it were only once in his whole life. He wanted to meet a gf irl—was that really so hard?
He was distracting himself again. The rest of the story would have to be vlogged. There was no way around it. He continued trudging down the bridge and narrated:
“And so I took off my shorts and I go to start fucking this girl, I put on a condom and everything…”
In the bright light of her bedroom he could see her pussy really well, really vividly. He was painfully conscious of the risk he had taken in coming here. It was perfectly possible that he was being recorded or he was being set-up by someone in another room, and he was about to be robbed.
It had to be vlogged. The story just had to be vlogged, recorded somewhere for posterity. What he had suddenly seen in the fluorescent lamplight was that the woman had rolled up paper towel dingleberries all over her pussy and ass.
He started speaking hurriedly:
“So I was in this lady’s room, I don’t know if I’m about to be robbed or what, and she’s laying there spreading her pussy for me, and I look down and it’s all covered in like rolled up paper towel fuzz balls. There was no hot water so she had just taken a bath in the sink and rubbed it dry with paper towels. But anyways, pussy is pussy…”
He pressed his fingers against his eyelids again. He had vlogged it out loud at last, but it made no difference. The therapy had not worked. The urge to shout filthy words at the top of his voice was as strong as ever.