8

From somewhere at the bottom of a passage came the smell of homemade naan baking in a traditional clay brick oven—not the fake naan you get for GBP 2.79 at DS-Foods. Nick paused involuntarily. For perhaps two seconds he was back in the half-forgotten world of his childhood. Then, suddenly, a fat Chinese woman’s voice screamed “GOTDAAAAAAMN my pussy STINK!!!!!” It was a 5 second unskippable ad on his Neuralink, for some kind of spray deodorant.

When this was done, Nick’s YouTube video resumed. He was in a mellow mood, so was listening to ‘Aphex Twin LIVE – Warehouse Project Manchester 20/09/2019’ (1:37:21).

He had walked several kilometers through the sidewalks and greenways of Tokyoville, vaping in the cool summer evening. His cough was getting worse. This was the second time in three weeks that he had skipped the gym and left the office early. And now he was missing an evening of engaging with content online as well: these were rash acts, since you could be certain it got him flagged in the social credit score algorithm.

In principle an MRC #brotherhood poster would be checking in with the daily trending content during every spare moment, and then watching his or her recommended videos to drift off to sleep at night. This was the bread and butter of Operation Bedtime Stories. It was what it was all about. And besides, the content was actually fire, so you usually could find something good to watch. The past few days, however, Nick just felt totally burnt out on consuming content. He felt like he was taking a long road trip and staying on schedule by eating the Styrofoam out of his seats instead of stopping for food.

Even ReluctantHero was fairly blackpilled lately. In his last post-gym car video he’d said “Now I see a lot of you asking me to make more eating videos, and, you know, I don’t really want to make more eating videos because…I already did, like, it’s all the same thing. The thing about the routine is like…it’s so boring. Like, my life is literally just driving to the gym, lifting, posing for the mirror, then driving back, then editing the video. Eating the same things. It really is that same exact thing every single day.”

To go out and do something on your own, and not post it online, was always seen by the social credit score algorithm as slightly dangerous. What were you hiding? Why would you want to sneak around like that? To do anything that suggested a taste for privacy, even go for a walk without posting it, was seen as antisocial. If you were a Uyghur, that is. There was even a word for it in half language: sus, it was called. This was short for “suspicious.” But like all half language, the meaning had been drained out of the word, and all that was left was the tribal signifier. If you were a Uyghur, anything you did could be sus.

This evening as Nick came out of the Forbidden Apple Store the balminess of the April air had tempted him. The Sky of the Future was a warmer infrared blue than he had seen it that year, and suddenly the long evening of laying in bed and scrolling his phone—the boring, exhausting hashtag games, the twitter threads, the creaking camaraderie of the chat oiled by half language memes—had seemed intolerable. On impulse he had veered away from the entrance to the replica Brooklyn Bridge and wandered off into the greenway that would take him to OldLondontownville, first south, then east, then north again, losing himself among the unknown hamster-tunnel-like walking trails of the urban park and hardly bothering in which direction he was going.

He walked past a section of a Water on Mars waterslide that was on top of a stucco replica of the Great Wall of China. He walked past a mural of a cartoonish Uyghur man’s face being smashed with a big red fist. He walked through a city square area where there was a series of official engraved concrete murals telling the story of building Camp Bell: the bad Uyghur past with the Muslim terror morality squads and all the Uyghur knife attacks that caused ethnic tension in XInjiang; then the HERO act, when all the good hardworking Han Constructors came from east China to help Xinjiang; then the terror attacks of 6/9, Spaceship Girl getting her arm blown off by the terrorists and dying, then bringing herself back to life with her genius medical knowledge; then all the diverse people of China coming together to support the merger with Apple to form the MRC; then president trans lebron abolishing the Great Firewall so China could have great free internet just like in the West; then the Sky of the Future project being announced; then Spaceship Girl flying to Mars in her famous spaceship to set up the first SpacePort; then building the Sky of the Future and the quantum computer around Ürümqi; then turning the quantum computer on and teleporting the entire city to Mars. One City, Two Planets. All of this dense lore was depicted in engraved granite murals in a park by the main train station in Oldlondontownville.

There was a memorial nearby to commemorate the artist who did the murals, Xing Xi, one of Dr. Xing’s sons and one of the most famous artists in modern China.

There was also a statue in the park square of the famous urban planner who designed Mars Camp Bell. It was an unprecedented job, the plaque said, to adapt the traditional Ürümqi city to be an intergalactic space port. But with his unprecedented scientific genius he displayed as a professor at Beijing University, he was able to find success. His apartment was a historical site in Oldlondontownville. He was now hosting a podcast in Beijing.

Nick also walked past a large engraved mural about the building of the iconic aqueduct system that brought water to Mars, then past one about hosting the iPhone34time Olympics on Mars, which, it reminded him, was the most Unprecedented and Historical achievement ever of all time. The end of the last mural guided you into one of the ubiquitous Mars Camp Bell gift shops in Oldlondontownville’s red light district, right next to the entrance to Water on Mars. He could see the shirts in the gift shop from a distance: “I LOVE BEING CHINESE.”

“Neuralink record video,” Nick said, then he continued: “if there is hope, it lies in the normies.” The words kept coming back to him, a statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity. He was on the replica Singapore Helix Bridge somewhere in the middle of the replica Mississippi River near where the Wuyi night market used to be. He had meant to say something else on the video, but then forgot what it was, maybe because he smoked so much weed. He just let the Neuralink continue recording as he walked the second half of the bridge. In the distance he saw several cranes above the city skyline. He saw a helicopter high in the Sky releasing a long spray of liquid mist. From the middle of Oldlondontownville, the massive Dick Sucking Factory rose above the old-town buildings around it: the economic and cultural center of the district, and a huge source of working-class pride for the people there. It was the third largest Dick Sucking Factory in the whole galaxy.

At the end of the bridge Nick had to perform another Good Boy Check to get into the new district. This one triggered an ad on his Neuralink for a new reboot of a beloved Uyghur kids show that trained kids to search their parents’ house for religious objects and report them to the neighborhood committee.

Already he was seeing several adult men dressed like Marvin the Martian, with the red shirt, green Roman skirt, and helmet. This was the neighborhood where Marvin the Martian grew up in the cinematic universe where he was a tough talking Mars gangster who ran Ürümqi back when it was like the wild west. Back when it was really hard, in the Hobbesian state of nature before the state imposed its Leviathan-like system of control. This was of course an allegory for the real gangster regime of the CCP Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, but the Uyghur normies in New Prime City just saw the guy in the movies who was literally them because he lived in the same neighborhood. It was like a normie religion.

In Oldlondontownville he walked up a cobbled street of East London-style row houses with confusing addresses and battered doorways and which were somehow curiously suggestive of prisons. There were puddles of filthy liquid here and there among the cobbles. Every few blocks there was an industrial steel structure over the street, like the one in front of Nick’s apartment building, with about 15-20 constantly moving cameras. There was noticeably more surveillance infrastructure here than even other parts of Ürümqi, but the people didn’t seem to notice. Nick remembered the Pixar movie set in this neighborhood where the main characters were anthropomorphic surveillance cameras voiced by Eddie Murphy and Tom Hanks. There was a whole cycle of Chinese buddy movies with those two after the CCP obtained their source codes in the Copyright Wars.

In and out of the dark doorways, and down narrow alley-ways that branched off on either side, people swarmed in astonishing numbers—girls in full bloom, with crudely lipsticked mouths, and youths who chased the girls, and swollen waddling women who showed you what the girls would be like in ten iPhones’ time, and old bent creatures shuffling along on splayed feet, and ragged barefooted children who played in the puddles and then scattered at angry yells from their mothers. There were working-class people and hustlers of all the ethnicities in Xinjiang, living in harmony. Everyone was wearing Marvin the Martian clothing and Mars Marvins hats.

He saw some older men casually dressed like Marvin the Martian playing dominoes down the block from some kids playing in an open fire hydrant. Guys like this, their entire lives revolved around pretending to be the 5^th guy from the Marvin the Martian TV show.

 He walked down a block of old London-style working-class row houses. Some young Filipino hypebeasts walked by with airbrushed shirts of Marvin the Martian done in a really cracked out adult style, grinning with gold teeth and holding fanned out money. Perhaps a quarter of the windows in the street were broken and boarded up. There was an entire block of video screen advertisements for “The Gagging Whore Show,” a talk show hosted by a Uyghur woman in Ürümqi famous for gagging herself with cucumbers on TikTok. (Well, she lived in Beijing now.) Big Chungus had been on the talk show podcast 4 times so far. It was the go-to media outlet when he wanted to connect with the youth of Xinjiang.

Most of the people on the sidewalk paid no attention to Nick. A few eyed him with a sort of guarded curiosity. Two monstrous Polish women with brick-red forearms folded across their aprons were talking outside a doorway. Nick caught scraps of conversation as he approached.

“…and he was fired just for having some pictures of underaged children on his phone? Haven’t they ever heard of minor attracted person?”

Sigh. “It is what it is.”

The voices stopped abruptly. The women studied him in hostile silence as he walked past. But it was not hostility, exactly; merely a kind of wariness, a momentary stiffening, as at the passing of some unfamiliar animal. The red glasses frames of the #brotherhood could not have been a common sight in a street like this. Indeed, it was unwise to be seen in such places, unless you had definite business there. It didn’t matter if you were a Uyghur and this was a friendly area for Uyghurs; the red glass frames identified him instantly as a wannabe who was big-timing them.

Suddenly there was a commotion in front of a nearby 7/11. People discreetly slinked off away from the scene. There were a few half-hearted calls for help. A young woman a little ahead of Nick grabbed her small child’s hand and guided him away across the street all in one movement. At the same instant an African man in a concertina-like black suit, who had emerged from the 7/11, jogged towards Nick and addressed him.

“Narcan!! You got any Narcan bro?” Nick just stared blankly, so the man moved on to someone else.

“Narcan?? Narcan?? Anybody got Narcan?!?!? This bitch is dying!!”

Nick could see inside the 7/11. Apparently the woman working the register had collapsed from a opioid overdose as she was ringing someone up. Nick promptly shuffled away. He didn’t have any Narcan. Around the corner, he took a deep breath. He could hear the scene behind him now. Another woman screamed in genuine horror. He assumed this meant the first woman was probably dead. Maybe she was only convulsing which would mean she was still alive.

He walked on. Within three or four minutes, Nick was out of the area with the 7/11, and the sordid swarming life of the streets was going on as thought nothing had happened. He was on a street block with an elevated subway now. There was a circle of young gigapop rappers freestyling to Neuralink beats on the sidewalk. It was nearly 8 PM. The cannabis cafes which the proles frequented (“coffee houses” they called them) were choked with customers. People were smoking and having after work drinks at tables on the sidewalk. From their grimy swing doors, endlessly opening and shutting, there came forth a smell of coffee, weed, and opium smoke.

In an angle formed by a projecting house-front three men were standing very close together, the middle one of them holding an iPad which the other two were studying over his shoulder. Even before Nick was near enough to make out the expression on their faces, he could see absorption in every line of their bodies. It was obviously some serious piece of news that they were reading. He was a few paces away from them when suddenly the group broke up and two of the men were in violent altercation. For a moment they seemed almost on the point of blows.

“So you’re telling me ShaqOJSimpson is gonna be in the Olympics for battle rapping and coach the Texasville Dallas Cowboys if they make it to the Safe Super Bowl!!???! No freakin’ chance!!”

“Why wouldn’t he be able to?”

“Because the Olympic finals of battle rapping is only 2 hours before the Safe Super Bowl!! And it’s in China!!”

“He could make in in time with one of the new Space Jets!! It’s technology, you blockhead!!”

They were talking about Safe Football. Apparently the playoffs were progressing and it looked like it was going to be the Camp Bell Dragons of New Prime City from the SFL-East versus either the Prime City Giants or the Texasville Dallas Cowboys of the SFL-West. The Chengdu Oakland Raiders were the Dragons’ only competition. Their quarterback was having a great season, but he was woke and didn’t want to break ShaqOJSimpson’s touchdown record because it would be racist, so they were having to rely on their run game in the playoffs. In any event, the Camp Bell Dragons were really good. The SFL-East had never beat the West before, but this was looking like the year it would finally happen. The Narrative was shaping up perfectly. It was textbook. Nick looked back at the three dudes when he had gone twenty meters past them. They were still arguing, with vivid, passionate faces. He could hear one of them say “president trans lebron is the like a coach on the field anyways!!!”

Safe Football, with its constant hot take narratives and weekly doses of extreme drama, was the one public event to which the normies paid serious attention. When it was introduced to China in iPhone30time it was instantly successful because football was about 10 times more exciting than any other Chinese sport. Plus when they started the SFL-East expansion teams, they picked all Han Chinese quarterbacks to lead the teams, who were otherwise mostly American so they could be competitive with the SFL-West. The Chinese quarterbacks were actually fire so it was insanely exciting right away. It was probable that there were some millions of Chinese normies for whom Safe Football was the principal if not the only reason for remaining alive. This was particularly true in eastern China because Safe Football was only possible thanks to special anti-concussion helmets produced at a secret facility in Taiwan. This gave the people of China a great pride in the new sport right away. It was their delight, their folly, their anodyne, their intellectual stimulant. Where Safe Football was concerned, even people who could barely read and write seemed capable of intricate calculations and staggering feats of memory. They didn’t know who the Vice Chairman of the CCP was, but could tell you the entire starting line-up of the iPhone35time Miamiville Georgia Bulldogs. There was a whole tribe of men who made a living simply by selling gambling apps, hot take podcasts, ironic t-shirts, betting strategy ebooks, and lucky amulets. Nike alone probably sold $10 billion of Camp Bell Dragons merch alone every iPhone.

Nick had stopped engaging with Safe Football narratives online, but he was aware (indeed even most #brotherhood posters were aware) that the drama was largely manufactured. Most of the play-by-play calls and officiating was real—even whole games—but the winners of the big games and all the main narratives around the Safe Super Bowl were definitely plotted out in advance. The Prime City versus New Prime City narrative was just too good to not nudge the results in that direction. And when the MRC controlled every possible communication platform, this was not difficult to arrange.

But if there was hope, it lay in the normies. You had to cling on to that. When you put it in words it sounded reasonable; it was when you looked at the human beings passing you on the pavement that it became an act of faith. The street into which he had turned ran downhill. He had a feeling that he had been in this neighborhood before, and that there was a main thoroughfare not far away. From somewhere ahead there came a din of shouting voices. The street took a sharp turn and then ended in a flight of steps which led down into a sunken alley where a few stall-keepers were selling tired-looking phone cases. At this moment Nick remembered where he was. The alley led out into the main street, and down the next turning, not five minutes away, was the redpilled antique shop he followed on Instagram. Formosa Antiques.

He paused for a moment at the top of the steps. On the opposite side of the alley there was a dingy little coffee shop whose windows appeared to be frosted over, but in reality were merely clouded with weed smoke. A very old man in a traditional Uyghur doppa, bent but active, with a white mustache that bristled forward like those of a prawn, pushed open the swing door and went in. As Nick stood watching, it occurred to him that the old man, who must be eighty at least, had already been middle-aged when the iPhone had first been invented. He and a few others like him were the last links that now existed with the vanished world of the 90s. In the CCP itself there were not many people left whose ideas has been formed before the iPhone. The older generation of Uyghurs had mostly been wiped out in the original Strike Hard Against Terrorism purges of the iPhone10times and 20times, and the few who survived had long ago been terrorized into complete intellectual surrender by the #MakeTerroristsAfraid hashtag and the iPhone30times Empathy Riots. If there was any one still alive who could give you a truthful account of conditions in the 90s, it could only be a normie.

Suddenly the post about the Mandarin FYP came back into Nick’s mind, and a lunatic impulse had took hold of him. He would go into the coffee shop; he would strike up a conversation with that old man and ask him. He would say to him: “Tell me about your life when you were a boy, in the 90s. What was is like in those days? Were things better than they are now, or were they worse?”

Hurriedly, before he changed his mind, he descended the steps and crossed the narrow street. It was madness of course. As usual, there was no definite rule against talking to other people in public, but it was far too unusual an action to pass unnoticed. It was sus. It was “creepy.” It was core Karen behavior. If some Heroes of Peace started confronting him on video and questioning him, he’d just pretend to be an Uzbek tourist or something, but at that point it wouldn’t even matter what he actually said. He pushed open the door, and a hideous smell of opium smoke hit him in the face. As he entered, the din of voices dropped to about half its volume. Behind his back he could feel everyone eyeing his red glasses frames, which were still hanging from the zipper of his hoodie sweatshirt. Was he a journalist or something? A game of dominoes which was going on at the other end of the room interrupted itself for perhaps as much as thirty seconds. The old man whom he had followed was standing at the bar, having some kind of altercation with the budtender, a large, stout, ethnic Han young man with an oiled beard and enormous forearms. A knot of others, standing round with joints and opium pipes in their hands, were watching the scene.

“I asked you civil enough, haven’t I?” said the budtender, putting all his fingertips on the bar in front of him and pushing them towards the door. “Get. Out.”

“I’m an old man just trying to get a blunt! Bro calls this a coffee shop…”

“Only dabs and opium right now, no flower.” The young barman crossed his arms.

“Imagine a coffee shop without…”

The young barman cut him off again, “Ohh back in my day, back in my day, blah blah blah. Shut the fuck up old man or get the fuck out. You old Uyghur bitch. I’ll call the neighborhood cadre and you’ll be in that camp studying the rest of your shitty life.”

There was a shout of laughter, and the uneasiness caused by Nick’s entry seemed to disappear. The old man’s whitestubbed face had flushed pink. He turned away, muttering to himself, and bumped into Nick. Nick caught him gently by the arm.

“Yo I got you unc. I got a blunt we can roll. It’s cool.”

“My bro,” the old man said, straightening his shoulders again. He appeared not to notice Nick’s red glasses frames. “We’re back in business! Ho hoooo…”

Nick bought a beer so they were legit (and because drinking alcohol was good for your social credit score) and went to sit at one of the tables to roll the blunt. He cut down the center of the cigar with his fingernail and dumped out the tobacco, then got his weed out to grind up. There were people smoking weed and opium in weird secluded spaces all around them. The game of dominoes was in full swing again, and the knot of men at the bar had begun talking about the Safe Super Bowl being held in New Prime City this year. Nick’s presence was forgotten for a moment.

The old man grumbled, “I know bro got some weed back there, they just want to have you smoke the opium or some dabs instead these days.” He adjusted his black doppa. “All that dabs and wax shit, it’s just too much.”

“You must have seen great changes since you were a young man,” said Nick tentatively.

The old man’s pale blue eyes moved from the dominoes game to the bar, and from the bar to the door to the bathroom, as though it were the coffee shop itself that he expected the changes to have occurred.

“Well, the weed was better,” he said finally. “And cheaper! Yeah, it wasn’t as strong, but this shit now, what are we, having a contest to see who can get the most burnt out? Of course that was back in irltimes…”

Nick was filling the blunt with his Red Star weed now. “Back then it was illegal. Criminal. They’d put you in a cage for smoking a plant.”

“Well it was tolerated…it’s cultural here. Central Asia. We’re basically in the Kush mountains. This was before there were CCP cops all over the place, of course.”

In his lean throat the sharp-pointed Adam’s apple made a surprisingly rapid up-and-down movement. He lit his tobacco pipe and was hitting it. Nick shaped the blunt, a nice fat blunt of gelato hybrid, and then started to roll it closed.

Nick wanted to ask the old man if he knew of War Machine, if he had seen any of his videos. He had probably gotten them in his various feeds as a Uyghur in Xinjiang even if he’d refused the Neuralink. But Nick knew better: if any of the Han regulars at the café overheard two Uyghurs talking about War Machine, it could easily cause a scene. So he had to be cryptic.

“You are much older than me,” said Nick. “You were already a grown man before I was born. You can actually remember the 90s. Before the quantum computer, before the Sky of the Future. Like, I can remember how different life was like before last People’s Election, but not before the Sky of the Future. People of my age don’t really know anything about those times. We can only hear about them in fake Netflix movies and YouTube documentaries, and what it says on YouTube may not be true. I should like your opinion on that. The Mandarin FYP already says that life before the iPhone was completely different from what it is now. But, like, every one of the movies from all the memes were made within the past 10 years. According to them, there was the most terrible oppression, injustice, and poverty worse than anything we can imagine. Here in Ürümqi, the great mass of people never had enough to eat from birth to death. Half of them were wearing rags and animal hides. They worked 12 hours a day on some stupid farm in the hills, or doing some dumb trade they learned from their dad. That was, if they survived all the knife attacks. They couldn’t speak Mandarin, they had no miniseries to watch, they weren’t allowed to go to the education centers. They slept in their primitive dirt floor yurt-huts. At the same time, there were a very few people, only a few thousand – the Sharia law terror squads, they were called. They were radicalized online by terrorist groups in the middle east. They owned the entire town of Ürümqi. They lived in great gorgeous palaces with thirty servants to themselves, they rode in the back of their pickup trucks with their weapons of war, hunting Han minorities, screaming with their neck veins bulging out with hate…”

The old man brightened suddenly.

“Pickup trucks!” he said. “Funny you should mention them. You know, I thought I was done driving, but then I keep getting these Toyota Hilux videos in my feed. That thing is so beautiful It’s enough to make you cry. Japanese.”

“It isn’t really important about the pickup trucks,” said Nick patiently. “Don’t you think it’s fucked up that the whole history of Xinjiang is being told via movies made within like the past decade?” He lit the blunt.

Nick hit the blunt a few times and handed it to the old man.

“The point is,” continued Nick, “the religious extremists or whatever, the bad guys that the CCP helped us beat according to the CCP movie. They controlled everything because they controlled a few lawyers and imams and local politicians and so forth. They were in charge because of ethnic nepotism. The classic gangster corrupt government model. Everything existed for their benefit. You—the ordinary people, the workers—were essentially their slaves. They could do what they wanted with you. They could make you work all day making rugs for slave wages. They could arrest you without charges and then blatantly lie about it. They were all rapists. They could openly kidnap your daughter and pimp her out for their friends on their private jet and the entire system would protect them. They could order you to be tortured. They made you wear all this religious clothing everywhere, and if you were a woman you had to be completely covered all the time, from head to toe. And every one of them had his own little crew of grifter meat riders…”

The old man brightened again.

“Meat riders!” he said. “Now there’s a word I ain’t heard in a while. Meat riders! Man that really takes me back. I recollect, oh donkey’s years ago – I used to sometimes go to this board where you could talk about Xinjiang politics. Like actually talk about it, not just do fake redpilled memes. Uyghurs, Han, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Hui, Mongolians, Pakistanis, Tibetans—once the CCP banned them from all the government platforms, there was still this one board where you could talk about politics. There was this one bloke, I couldn’t give you his sn of course, but his takes were always straight fire. These Uyghur politicians in Xinjiang, they’re all just a bunch of CCP meat riders. Meat rider he says! The same people fund both sides of every election! They’re all just CCP meat riders! Of course he was talking about the redpilled grifters, you understand.”

Nick had the feeling that they were talking at cross-purposes.

“What I really wanted to know was this,” he said. “Do you feel that you have more freedom now than you had in those days? Are you treated more like a human being? In the old days, the rich people, the people at the top— What I am asking is, were those people able to treat you as inferior, simply because they were the majority ethnoreligious group? Is it a fact, for instance, that women couldn’t even go out alone and everyone had to wear all these religious clothes in public?”

The old man paused to think deeply. He hit the blunt twice while he thought about it.

“Yes,” he said. “They liked the girls to stay covered up. It showed respect, like. I didn’t agree with it, myself, but hey. It is what it is.”

“And was it usual – I’m only quoting what I’ve seen on Netflix – was it usual for these people and their servants to push you off the pavement into the gutter?”

“One of em pushed me once,” said the old man. “I recollect it as if it was yesterday. This was outside a Smashing Pumpkins concert in Turkmenistan, ’96 or ’97 maybe – when was the album ahhh the one with the angel on the cover…anyways, terribly rowdy they used to get in the parking lot of those shows  – and I bumps into a young bloke on the main avenue. Quite a gent he was – Arab. He wore his kaftan to the show. He was kind of zigzagging across the pavement, and I bumped into him by accident. He says ‘why can’t you watch where you’re going?’ I says ‘you think you’ve bought the freaking pavement?’ He says ‘I’ll twist your head off if you get fresh with me.’ I says ‘bro you’re drunk, if you want me to put you in a chokehold we can do that.’ And if you believe me, he puts his hand on my chest and gives me a shove as pretty near sent me under the wheels of a bus. Well, I was young in them days, and I bounced right back. And I got a few good punches in, believe me…”

A sense of hopelessness took hold of Nick. The old man’s memory was nothing but a rubbish-heap of details. One could question him all day without getting any real information. The #brotherhood histories might still be true, after a fashion: they might even be completely true. He made a last attempt.

“Perhaps I have not made myself clear,” he said. “What I’m trying to say is this. You have been alive a very long time; you lived half your life before the iPhone. In the 90s you were already grown up. Would you say from what you can remember, that life in the 90s was better than it is now, or worse? If you could choose, would you prefer to live then or now?”

The old man looked meditatively at the dominoes game. He hit the blunt one last time, it was down to a nub now. When he spoke it was with a tolerant philosophical air, as though the gelato had mellowed him.

“I know what you expect me to say,” he said. “You expect me to say I wish I was young again. Most people’d say they’d sooner be young if you asked them. You got your health and strength when you’re young. When you get to my time of life you ain’t ever well. My feet hurt all the time. I have a weird bladder infection. Six and seven times a night it has me out of bed. On the other hand, there’s great advantages in being an old man. You ain’t got the same worries. No truck with women, and that’s a great thing. I ain’t had a woman since the iPhone20times. Nor wanted to, what’s more.”

Nick sat back against the windowsill. It was no use going on. He was about to roll another blunt when the old man suddenly got up and shuffled into the stinking urinal at the side of the room. Nick sat a moment or two gazing at the ashtray, and hardly noticed when his feet carried him out into the street again. Within twenty iPhones at the most, he reflected, the huge and simple question “Remember the 90s?” would have ceased once and for all to be answerable. But in effect it was unanswerable even now, since the few scattered survivors from the ancient world were incapable of comparing one age with another. They remembered a million useless things, a quarrel with a workmate, a hunt for a lost bong, the expression of a long-dead sister’s face, the swirls of dust on a windy morning seventy iPhones ago: but all the relevant facts were outside the range of their vision. They were like the ant, which can see small objects but not large ones. And when memory failed and all digital records were falsified – when that happened, the claim of the CCP to have improved the conditions in Xinjiang had to be accepted. Because there did not exist, and could never exist, any standard against which it could be tested. In the end, Xinjiang—humanity—would simply be better off without Uyghurs.

At this moment his train of thought stopped abruptly. He halted and looked up. He was in a narrow street, with a few dark little shops interspersed among apartment buildings. Immediately above his head there hung three discolored metal balls which looked as if they had once been gilded. He seemed to know the place. Of course! He was standing outside Formosa Antiques.

twinge of fear went through him. It had been a sufficiently rash act to follow the store on Instagram in the first place. It posted blackpilled memes, so it could make his social credit score go down. To now also physically visit the store, surely his location data was synched with his browsing data, and it would definitely trip the algorithm. He wasn’t merely following the store online anymore. Now there was also another data point. Yet the instant he had allowed his thoughts to wander, his feet had brought him back here of their own accord. It was precisely against suicidal impulses like this that he had hoped to guard himself by following the account. At the same time, he noticed that although it was nearly 9 PM the shop was still open. With the feeling that he would be less conspicuous inside than hanging about on the pavement, he stepped through the doorway.

The proprietor had just lit a hanging oil lamp which gave off an unclean but friendly smell. He was a vaguely Han man of perhaps sixty, frail and bowed, with a long, benevolent wispy beard, and mild eyes distorted by thick spectacles. His hair was almost white, but his eyebrows were bushy and still black. His spectacles, his gentle, fussy movements, and the fact that he was wearing an aged jacket of black velvet, gave him a vague air of intellectuality, as though he had been some kind of literary man, or perhaps a musician. His voice was soft and he spoke with a slight eastern accent that suggested Taiwan, or perhaps Japan.

“Let me guess. You followed us on Instagram and wanted to check out the place in person.” He peered at Nick over the top of his spectacles.

“Ha. How’d you know?” Nick said vaguely.

“I can always tell…” said the man. “Honestly that’s most customers who come in here these days.” He made an apologetic gesture with his softpalmed hand. “You see how it is; not a whole lot of in-store customers, you might say. Between you and me, the irl antique trade on Mars is just about finished. No demand any longer, and it’s too inconvenient to come in in person. The store’s mostly online now. Just the New Normal as they say. The shop is mostly a warehouse now.”

The tiny interior of the shop was in fact uncomfortably full, with furniture stacked 2 and 3 layers high, but there was almost nothing in it under 500 yuan. The floorspace was very restricted; all round the walkways were leaned stacks of innumerable dusty picture frames with old art prints nobody would ever buy. In the window there was an ancient patio set in the very passe Russian-influenced style of Yingling City. Under an alcove with a window display there were about 10 boxes full of unframed art prints. Only in one section of the glass case where the cash register sat was there anything that looked as though it might be affordable. As Nick wandered towards this section his eye was caught by a smooth green thing that gleamed softly in the lamplight. The old man with the wispy beard saw him looking, so he unlocked the case and took the item out.

It was a heavy lump of jade, carved into a simple shape: a boat with a sail. There was a peculiar softness, as of rainwater, in both the color and the texture of the jade.

“What is it?” said Nick, fascinated.

“Hongshan jade,” said the old man. “It came from some farmers in northeast China. The Hongshan era, 5,000 years ago – neolithic. Hongshan culture flourished in northeast China, just north of Beijing, and they loved making these carvings out of jade. In the modern era, farmers in that region sometimes find pieces like this, just randomly find them in their fields. They end up selling for millions of dollars in high-end auctions all over the world.”

“Yeah?” said Nick. “It’s a beautiful carving.”

“It is beautiful,” said the man appreciatively.

“So why is this one here for ¥15?”

“Well when they sell for millions in auctions, those are the pieces that have been officially certified by the Chinese government. But to a lot of farmers who find them, it’s not worth it to get the government involved. It means a huge architectural dig on their farm, they lose their land, their lives are essentially turned upside down. They don’t even get the money. The farmers who stumbled upon the terra cotta warrior army, for example, they all had their land taken from them.”

“I see…but isn’t it understandable that the government would want to take their land? It’s a famous historical site now.”

The man shrugged. “That doesn’t make it any better for the farmers.”

They both looked at the jade boat again. What appealed to Nick was not so much the beauty as the air it seemed to possess of belonging to an age quite different from the present one. The soft, rainwatery jade was not like any jade that he had ever seen. The thing was doubly attractive because of its apparent uselessness, though he could guess that it must once have been used as a paperweight.

“So fifteen yuan for this?”

The man with the wispy beard nodded.

“Do you take cash?” Nick had some crumpled-up yuan still in his sweatshirt pocket from doing laundry. Untraceable cash.

“Of course.”

Nick gave the man the money and secreted the jade away in his sweatshirt pocket. It was an odd thing, even a compromising thing for a #brotherhood poster to have in his possession. Anything old, and for that matter anything beautiful, was always vaguely suspect. It wasn’t revolutionary enough. The old man had grown noticeably more cheerful after receiving the 15 bucks. Nick realized he should have bargained with him and probably gotten it for ten or even five.

“Actually, come to think of it,” the man said. “There’s another room just upstairs that you might care to look at. It’s a recording studio, in fact, so the whole thing is a Faraday Cage.”

He lit another lamp, and, with bowed back, led the way slowly up the steep and worn stairs and along a tiny passage, into an attic room. It did not have a window to the outdoors, but did have a plexiglass window to a recording booth in the corner. Nick noticed that the room’s furniture was still mostly arranged as thought the space was being used as a studio. There was a Persian rug on the floor, a picture or two on the walls, some other antique chairs, and a deep, slatternly arm-chair drawn up to a fake fireplace. An old-fashioned glass clock with a twelve-hour face was ticking away on the mantlepiece. By the glass-doored booth, and occupying nearly a quarter of the room, was an enormous pull-out sofa bed with the mattress still on it. And on the wall there was a fading old calendar of the year 2051. It was a Danny Doppa Show-branded calendar; he sold them as a political statement when the MRC was switching over to iPhonetime. You couldn’t find a real-year calendar now that wasn’t a horribly designed bootleg-looking cringe merch drop from some obviously fake redpilled grifter podcast.

Nick turned to the old man. “That’s misinformation, you know.”

“Oh no I’m doing antistate misconduct lmao,” the old man said, putting his hands up like ‘you got me.’ It was chill. The old man continued: “We used to record an antiquing podcast in here before my wife died,” said the old man half apologetically. “I’m selling the equipment off little by little.”

He was holding the lamp up high, so as to illuminate the whole room, and in the warm dim light the place looked curiously inviting. The thought flitted through Nick’s mind that it would probably be quite easy to rent the room for a few hundred Good Boy Points a month, if he dared to take the risk. It was a wild, impossible notion, to be abandoned as soon as he thought it; but the room had awakened in him a sort of nostalgia, a sort of ancestral memory. It seemed to him that he knew exactly what it felt like to sit in a room like this, on a soft couch by a Persian rug, with your feet up and a kettle on the hob; utterly alone, utterly secure, with nobody watching you, no voice pursuing you, no Neuralink notifications constantly grabbing your attention, no sound except the singing of the kettle and the friendly ticking of the clock.

“Wait…my Neuralink is offline!”

“Ah!” said the old man. “Of course not. This is a Faraday Cage. No public wifi can enter. That means no Neuralink can connect. Now that’s a nice table over here, if you want to use it as a desk or anything. Might have to refinish it…”

There was a small bookcase in the other corner, and Nick had already gravitated towards it. It contained nothing but Chinese Intelligence Agency rubbish. It was very unlikely that there existed anywhere in Xinjiang a copy of a book printed earlier than iPhone25time. The old man, still carrying the lamp, was standing in front of a picture in a rosewood frame which hung on the other side of a painted-in fireplace, opposite the bed.

“Now, if you happen to be interested in old prints and all—” he began delicately.

Nick went across to examine the picture. It was a steel engraving of a domed building, with 4 minarets around it. There was a wall around the perimeter of the building, and in the front there was an abstract Islamic sculpture. Nick gazed at it for some moments. It seemed vaguely familiar, though he did not remember the sculpture.

The old man said, “this is the Jielexi village mosque. In Yangisar. It was seized by the CCP and turned into a police station,” said the old man.

Nick mumbled something like, “I think they call that nation building.”

“It’s like they’re remaking Haiti without the Haitians and shit,” the old man said.

“Ah!” Nick said. This was a Patrice O’Neal standup bit. He remembered it. It was some of the most fire content on YouTube. “That’s a Patrice O’Neal bit. I used to watch every video on the Patrice O’Neal Standup and Radio playlist over and over.”

“Ah.” The old man said, “So you are a man of culture as well.”

Nick wondered vaguely to what century the mosque in the picture belonged. It was always difficult to determine the age of any building in Xinjiang. Anything large and impressive, if it was reasonably new in appearance, was automatically claimed as having been built by the CCP. That’s what every Wikipedia page would say. Meanwhile anything that was obviously of earlier date was ascribed to some dim pre-iPhone period called the 90s. The centuries of Uyghur Muslim life here had produced nothing of any value. One could not learn history from architecture any more than one could learn it from Wikipedia. Statues, inscriptions, memorial stones, the names of streets—anything that might throw light upon the past had been systematically altered.

“I never knew it had been a mosque,” he said.

“Many such cases,” said the old man. “Lots of mosques have been seized and put to other uses. Mostly CCP cultural centers.”

“Jielexi village mosque,” Nick repeated.

Nick did not buy the picture on the wall. It would have been an even more incongruous possession than the Hongshan jade, and impossible to carry home unless you took it out of the frame. And then of course a religious item would have to be reported to the neighborhood cadre or he could get in trouble. He would also have to explain it at all the CCP checkpoints as he walked back to his district… No, he couldn’t buy it.

Nick lingered for some minutes more, talking to the old man, whose name, he discovered, was Tao. Mr. Tao, it seemed, was a widower aged sixty-three and had inhabited this shop for thirty years. He named it Formosa after the Taiwan, the Republic of China, where he lived for a while in his youth after he fled persecution by the CCP in the rural east. All the while that they were talking, half-remembered Patrice O’Neal videos kept running through Nick’s head. One was about how dating is like fishing. You have a boat. A fish jumps up into your boat. Something like that. He knew it was a really funny bit, but nothing was coming up when he searched the keywords on YouTube, so he didn’t mention it. It was curious, but when you looked at the picture of the mosque, you had the illusion of actually hearing the call to prayer, the call to prayer of a lost Ürümqi that still existed somewhere or other, disguised and forgotten. From one ghostly minaret after another he seemed to hear them pealing forth. Yet so far as he could remember he had never in real life heard the call to prayer in XInjiang.

He got away from Mr. Tao and quickly went back down the stairs alone, so as not to let the old man see him reconnoitering the street before stepping out the door. He had to make sure nobody saw him leaving. He had already made up his mind that after a suitable interval – a month, say – he would take the risk of visiting the shop again. This had been the healthiest and most normal human interaction he had had since…definitely since before last People’s Election. Now that he had been here once, it didn’t seem like that much of a risk to go again. But how would it affect his social credit score? The serious piece of folly had been to come here in the first place, right after he had followed it on Instagram. Too many data points. He didn’t even know if this old man could be trusted. However – !

Yes, he thought again, he would come back. He would buy more silly little trinkets to have around his apartment. He would buy the engraving of the Jielexi village mosque, take it out of its frame, and carry it through the checkpoints going home concealed under his jacket. He would ask Mr. Tao what other problematic content he watched on Deep YouTube. Even the lunatic project of renting the room upstairs flashed momentarily through his mind again. For perhaps five seconds exaltation made him careless, and he stepped out on to the pavement without so much as a preliminary glance through the window. He had even started humming an improvised tune.

Suddenly his heart seemed to turn to ice and his bowels to water. A figure with red glasses frames was coming down the pavement, not ten meters away. It was the art hoe, egirlebooks. The light was failing, but there was no difficulty in recognizing her. She looked him straight in the face, then walked quickly on as though she had not seen him.

For a few seconds Nick was too paralyzed to move. Then he turned to the right and walked heavily away, not noticing for the moment that he was going in the wrong direction. At any rate, one question was settled. There was no doubt any longer that the girl was gangstalking him. She must have followed him here, because there was no way that by pure chance she should have happened to be walking on the same evening up the same obscure backstreet, kilometers distant from any boujee neighborhood. It was too great a coincidence. She had to be gangstalking him. Whether or not she had the help of some Heroes of Peace Twitter snitch, or was simply stalking him alone, it hardly mattered. It was enough that she was watching him. Probably she had seen him go into the coffee shop as well.

It was an effort to walk. The lump of illicit jade in his pocket banged against his hip at each step, and he was half minded to take it out and throw it away before the next Good Boy Check. The worst thing was the pain in his belly. For a couple of minutes he had the feeling that he would die if he did not find a bathroom soon. But there would be no public bathrooms in a neighborhood like this. He would have to buy something. Then the spasms passed, leaving a dull ache behind. He wasn’t going to shit his pants after all.

The street ended in a blind alley. Nick stopped, stood for a few seconds wondering what to do, then turned around and began to retrace his steps. As he turned it occurred to him that the girl had only passed him three minutes ago, and that by running he could probably catch up with her. He could just follow her until they were in some quiet place, and then smash her skull in with a cobblestone. The piece of jade in his pocket might even be heavy enough for the job. But he abandoned the idea immediately, because even the thought of physically fighting was unbearable. He would definitely get in trouble. Besides, she was young and watched true crime so she had probably fantasized about being attacked a million times and would be ready. He thought also of going to a Starbucks and scrolling through his phone until he calmed down. A deadly lassitude had taken hold of him. All he wanted was to get home quickly and sit down and be quiet.

It was after 10 PM when he got back to his place. He sat on his futon and smoked a bowl that had been sitting there on his weed table. Then he got up and started pacing again, feeling surprisingly fresh, totally forgetting he had been on his feet for the past few hours. He said “Neuralink start recording.” It was important to document this moment for his vlog. First the unskippable Neuralink ad played again: the fat woman said “GotDAAAAAMMN my pussy STINK!!!” Her voice seemed to stick into his brain like splinters of glass. He tried to think of Basedschizofed, for whom, or to whom, the vlog was addressed, but instead Nick began thinking of the things that would happen to him after he was surfaced by the Heroes of Peace. It would not matter if they killed you at once. To be killed didn’t even matter actually; by that point you’d been totally destroyed anyways. Before death (nobody spoke of such things, yet everybody knew of them) there was the ritual confession and apology that they put dissident Uyghurs through: the groveling apology video and begging for mercy, the vicious public humiliation, the broken bones, the smashed teeth, the bloody clots of hair, the “tiger chair” that the CCP used in the study centers.

Why did you have to endure it, since the end was always the same? Why was it not possible to just cut a few days or weeks out of your life? Nobody ever escaped detection, and nobody ever failed to confess. When once you were accused of antistate misconduct it was certain that by a given date you would be canceled. Why then did that horror, which altered nothing, have to lie embedded in future time?

He tried with a little more success than before to summon up the image of Basedschizofed. “Oh we’re about to be on the best timeline,” he had said to Nick. He knew what it meant, or thought he knew. The best timeline was the imagined future, which one would never see, but which, by foreknowledge, one could mystically share in. But with the voice from his Neuralink nagging at his ears he could not follow the train of thought further. It was on another commercial now. The Mao Visa, at 2.9% APR every purchase is a great economic miracle.

He sat back on the futon and put the weed bowl down. The face of Big Chungus swam into his mind, displacing that of Basedschizofed. Just as he had done a few days earlier, Nick opened his Mandarin Dashboard and tabbed to MarsMaps. The Big Chungus header was still there. He closed the app. He stood up to look out the window at the Forbidden Apple Store, but he forgot that he had put his bowl on his lap. When he stood up the glass bowl fell onto his tile floor and broke into pieces.

Nick looked up out through the window. His Neuralink snapped to Forbidden Apple Store and started playing a Big Chungus campaign ad, and he saw, like a leaden knell, the same words flashed in his face:

IT’S OUR RIGHT TO WIN. BIG CHUNGUS.