9

It was the middle of the morning, and Nick had left his cubicle to go smoke a cigarette outside.

A solitary figure was coming towards him from the other end of the long, sunny replica Tiananmen Square. It was the art hoe. Four days had gone past since the evening when he had run into her outside the antique shop. As she came nearer he saw that her pupils were fully dilated through her red-framed glasses. It was from the Adderall she took to do takes online all day.

They were perhaps four meters apart when the girl said to him, “did you hear of sex and death?”

Nick said, “what?”

She said, “do you have a cigarette?”

“No, you said something different,” he said, and handed her a cigarette. She had said “sex and death,” invoking the theme that the end is contained in the beginning. She was going to have sex with him and then kill him.

“No I didn’t, you’re crazy.” She laughed.

“Ah.”

“I’m gonna smoke this later,” she said. Then she walked a few feet and positioned herself in front of the nearest entrance. She looked into the camera and calmly said “I’m gay.” The door opened.

A curious emotion stirred in Nick’s heart. In front of him was an enemy who was trying to kill him. In front of him, also, was a hot girl, who seemed to be flirting with him. The whole incident could not have taken as much as half a minute. Just as Nick got back to his cubicle, he was surprised to get a Mandarin notification on his Neuralink. It was from Instagram. Egirlebooks had faved his last Story post, a picture of his coffee on the replica Brooklyn Bridge from like an hour ago, with the caption “Gm.” This meant that she had unmuted him after…three or four iPhones now at least.

Then, another notification. She had DMed him.

“Okay. Five minutes,” he told himself. “Five minutes at the very least!” His heart bumped in his chest with frightening loudness. Fortunately, the thing he was working on was mere routine, an easy putting-a-stick-in-the-bicycle-spokes-and-falling-over meme about CCP economists printing more Good Boy Points and that causing inflation to go up.

Whatever she had DMed him, it must have some kind of gaslighting double meaning. So far as he could see there were two possibilities. One, much the more likely, was that the girl was a fed, just as he had feared. She would try and get him to buy an illegal gun or something. He did not know why the feds would choose to deliver their messages in such a fashion, but perhaps they had their reasons. Whatever was in the DM might be a threat, a summons, an order to commit suicide, a trap of some description.

But there was another, wilder possibility that kept raising its head, though he tried vainly to suppress it. This was, that the message did not come from the feds at all, but some kind of underground organization. Like an actual resistance, not the #brotherhood fake psyop resistance. Perhaps Alpha Investment Corporation was for real after all! Perhaps the art hoe was in on it! No doubt the idea was absurd, but it had sprung into his mind in the very instant of seeing the notification that she had DMed him. It was not till a couple of minutes later that the other, more probable explanation had occurred to him. And even now, though his intellect told him that the message probably meant death—still, that was not what he believed, and the unreasonable hope persisted, and his heart banged, and it was with difficulty that he used the paint tool to erase the other caption on the stick-in-bicycle-spokes meme macro to write in the new punchline about the economy.

He gathered 10 of his saved memes and posted them to a meme dump on his TL, then posted the grid post to his Story. Eight minutes had gone by. He readjusted his sunglasses on his nose, sighed, and tabbed back to his Instagram DMs. He clicked her user name to go to her profile. Her avi pic was a close-up of her face in her red sunglasses doing a sarcastic pout. The bio only had her pronouns and a link to her website, onlypoetryisreal.com. He clicked back to his DM list page that only displayed her user name, not the message. Finally, he clicked her message.

“Sup”

For several seconds he was too stunned to even delete the message and block the account. She was, with 100% certainty, a fed.

For the rest of the morning it was very difficult to work. What was even worse than having to focus his mind on a series of psyopped hot take news stories was constantly getting distracted with doom scrolling on his phone. He felt as though a fire were burning in his belly. Lunch in the touristy Sweetgreen was torment. He had hoped to be alone for a little while during lunch, but as bad luck would have it that imbecile Tom Kashgari flopped down beside him on the wooden stadium seating, the tang of his sweat cutting through the fresh salad smell, and kept up a stream of talk about the preparations for Empathy Week and the Safe Super Bowl. He was particularly enthusiastic about a float of War Machine, 5 meters wide, that his kids were making in school. They had made his Uyghur face especially grotesque, based on the CCP artist on Etsy who specialized in super grotesque and disgusting portraits of traditional Uyghur families. The irritating thing was that in the racket of voices Nick could hardly hear what Kashgari was saying, and was constantly having to ask him to repeat some asinine hot take. Just once he caught a glimpse of the girl, at a table with two other egirls at the far end of the room. She appeared not to have seen him, and he did not look in that direction again.

The afternoon was more bearable. Immediately after lunch there arrived a delicate, difficult piece of work which would take several hours and necessitated putting everything else aside. The story was there was a new documentary on Netflix China about a famous true crime story from New Prime City. The Trolley Problem Killer. He was a serial killer had terrorized Ürümqi right when the Sky of the Future project was getting underway. The killer was called the Trolley Problem Killer because his method was to use infrastructure like subways and highways and air travel to cause dilemmas for authories that would make you think about the moral dilemma involved. Like the killer would kidnap 1 Han Chinese person and tie them to the railroad tracks, then kidnap 10 Uyghurs and tie them to a different railroad track and force the train company to decide which track to switch to. He always ended up framing it in some roundabout way that would reinforce the social hierarchy that Han were special individuals with hopes and dreams just like you and me, and Ugyhurs were there to be unfortunate casualties.

The retconning angle in the new miniseries of truth was, the whole thing had been staged by the Chinese Intelligence Agency. This had always been a theory in the outer fringes of the Chinese media. But now the CCP was admitting that it was literally true. It was literally a psychological operation organized by the CCP government. A psyop. A literal, actual psyop. The CCP had done it to keep the public distracted as the Sky of the Future project got underway. It was also done to keep the public galvanized in support of the CCP after the recent Macintosh-China merger, which was highly controversial because critics said that this introduced a corrupt capitalist element to China’s communist government. People at the time were stereotyped as Karens and wingnut conspiracy nuts for talking about this, but that generation was all dead now, so the CCP could declassify it and admit it was all fake.

Nick was making memes about the story. Right away he made one with the picture of the cartoon superhero character putting his hand over his mouth in fake surprise and the caption “when the government admits they were actually lying the whole time.” Hmm what other memes could he make? Already the familiar wave of thousands of CIA think pieces, memes, op-eds, twitter threads, and Facebook open letters was starting, with headlines like “Yes, the CCP staged a psyop to kill and demonize Uyghurs. It should do this more.”

Nick’s first instinct was to do the meme format of the guy sitting in a church pew with the girl behind him about to kill him labeled “Netflix China,” and she has a guy behind her about to kill her labeled “Chinese Intelligence Agency,” and that guy has a guy behind him about to kill him labeled “CCP,” and then there’s a guy sitting up in the balcony who is about to kill them all labeled “UN.” Or no wait, he should use the Plato’s Cave format. That was kind of cliché at this point, but this subject matter was perfect for it. Yeah, he would use the Plato’s Cave allegory format, where the slaves at the bottom are watching…which obviously fake news story should they be watching projected on the wall? Maybe they should just be saying “they really think we’re fucking stupid, don’t they?” This was the kind of thing that Nick was good at, and for more than two hours he succeeded in shutting the egirl out of his mind altogether. Then the memory of her face came back, and with it a raging, intolerable desire to just be left alone.

It was a physical problem that had to be solved: how to get in touch with the girl and arrange a meeting. There were already like 50 million guys in her DMs; that was not the way. He did not consider any longer the possibility that she might be laying some kind of trap for him. He knew that it was not so; there was no way she could be a fed. She had so many tattoos! Obviously he was only being problematic assuming every hot young woman online was a fed honeypot sent by the Rothschilds to psyop him. But still, the idea of refusing her advances never crossed his mind. Only five nights ago he had contemplated smashing her skull in with a cobblestone, but that was of no importance. He thought of her naked, youthful body, as he had seen it online. He had imagined her a fool like all the rest of them, her head stuffed with lies and hatred, her belly full of ice. A kind of fever seized him at the thought that he might lose her, the tattooed youthful body might slip away from him! What he feared more than anything else was that she would simply change her mind if he did not DM her back quickly. But the physical difficulty of meeting was enormous. It was like trying to make a move at chess when you were already mated. All the possible ways of responding had occurred to him within five minutes of reading the DM; but now, with time to think, he went over them one by one, as though laying out a row of instruments on a table.

Obviously the kind of spontaneous encounter that had happened this afternoon could not be repeated. If she worked in his same wing at the DS-Work it might have been comparatively simple, but he had only a very dim idea of where her office actually was, and he would have no pretext to go there. Maybe he could say the bathroom was broken on his floor? No. If he knew her schedule better, he could just go down and smoke again when she was leaving. But that could be too obvious and he didn’t want to seem like a creep. As for unmuting her to see her TL, it was out of the question. It would be nothing but trolls and thirst traps that would throw off his concentration.

As for replying to the DM, when it was occasionally necessary to text and not send memes, there were always the pre-chosen generic replies autosuggested for you. He could always just click on the one that was applicable. But no. That wouldn’t work. She would sense that he was trying to play it cool.

Should he just be in the moment and wing it? Make up an original response that didn’t rely on a meme? No. The success rate of this was not great to begin with, and got worse the more he dwelled on it. To try to think of a good original response now…no, the window on that option had closed.

For a week after this, life was like a restless dream. The next day she did not appear in the Sweetgreen until he was leaving to go sit by the river. She was too far away to talk to; it would have been awkward. On the day after that she was in the Sweetgreen sitting with three other egirls under a big advertising screen. Then for three dreadful days she did not appear at all. She did not watch any of his Stories. His whole mind and body seemed to be afflicted with an unbearable sensitivity, a sort of transparency, which made every movement, every sound, every contact, every word that he had to speak or listen to, an agony. Even in sleep he could not altogether escape from her image. He did not vlog at all during those days. If there was any relief, it was in his work, in which he could sometimes forget himself for ten minutes at a stretch. He had absolutely no clue as to what had happened to her. There was no enquiry he could make. She might have been kidnapped, she might have been suicided, she might have been flown to Beijing to suck off some billionaire: worst and likeliest of all, she might simply have changed her mind and decided to avoid him.

The next day she reappeared. The relief of seeing her was so great that he could not resist staring directly at her for several seconds. On the following day he very nearly succeeded in speaking to her. When he came into the Sweetgreen she was sitting at a table well out from the wall, and was quite alone. It was early, and the place was not very full. Nick chose not to order ahead on the app so he could loiter around the store longer waiting in line.

The queue edged forward till he was almost at the counter, then was held up for two minutes because someone ordered kale and then changed her mind to spinach. But the girl was still alone when Nick secured his salad and began to make for her at the table. He walked casually towards her, his eyes searching for a place at some table beyond her. She was perhaps three meters away from him. Another two seconds would do it. Then a voice behind him called, “Nick Karamay!” He pretended not to hear. “Woah, Nick Karamay!” repeated the voice, more loudly. It was no use. He turned around. A blond-headed, silly-faced young man named Wilsher, whom he barely knew, was inviting him with a smile to a vacant place at his table. This kid was mutuals with Nick on Insta and had just moved to Mars Camp Bell after college. He was always DMing Nick compliments and asking for writing advice. He could not refuse. It would be rude. He sat down with a friendly smile. The silly blond face beamed into his. Nick had a hallucination of himself smashing a pick-axe right into the middle of it. The egirl’s table filled up a few minutes later.

But she must have seen him coming towards her, and perhaps she would take the hint. The next day he took care to arrive early. Surely enough, she was at a table in about the same place, and again alone. The person immediately ahead of him in the queue was a small, swiftly-moving, beetle-like Uyghur man with a flat face and tiny, suspicious eyes. As Nick turned away from the counter with his tray, he saw that the little man was making straight for the girl’s table. His hopes sank again. There was a vacant place at a table further way, but something in the little man’s appearance suggested that he would be sufficiently attentive to his own comfort to choose the emptiest table. With ice at his heart Nick followed. It was no use unless he could get the girl alone. At this moment there was a tremendous crash. The little man was sprawling on all fours, his tray had gone flying, there were green leaves and dressing all over, and rivulets of fizzy seltzer flowing across the floor. He started to his feet with a malignant look at Nick, whom he evidently suspected of having tripped him up. But it was all right. Nick said “oh my gosh bro, I’m sorry, I was just trying to reach the napkins!” Five seconds later, with a thundering heart, he was sitting at the girl’s table.

He did not look at her. He unpacked his tray and began eating. It was all-important to speak at once, before anyone else sat down, but now a terrible fear had taken possession of him. A week had gone by since she had first DMed him. She would have changed her mind, she must have changed her mind! It was impossible that this affair should end successfully; such things did not happen irl. He might have flinched altogether from speaking if at this moment he had not seen the hairy-eared K-Pop vlogger, wandering limply round the room with a tray, looking for a place to sit down. In his vague way the K-Pop vlogger was attached to Nick, and would certainly sit down at his table if he caught sight of him. There was perhaps a minute in which to act. Both Nick and the girl were eating steadily. He had gotten the kale salad harvest bowl; it was impossible to get more than like 1 piece of the kale on your fork at once. In a low murmur Nick began speaking. He did it like this to like seem obscure and funny, playing this game that they were spies or something. He correctly sensed that that was her vibe.

Speaking in a low murmur like he was trying to avoid detection, he said, “I think I owe you a DM.”

“That’s right,” she said, matching his energy.

“I don’t check that stuff very much. All these kids are just glued to those Neuralinks all day, scrolling. I don’t get it.”

“Ha. Yes you do.”

“Just scrolling through your feed all day on your Neuralink? Why would you want to see a bunch of people posting pictures of their lunch online?”

“Do you want to link or what?”

“I’m afraid that wouldn’t be MGTOW.”

She laughed. “Yes it would be actually. I checked on the boards.”

“At your place?”

“You don’t have an apartment?”

“My apartment sucks. The city is my apartment.”

“Well my apartment sucks too. I have to go. Just DM me you fucking idiot.” She picked up her tray and left.

The K-Pop vlogger failed to see Nick and sat down at another table. Nick went outside to the patio area near the Venetian Bridge. He hit his vape and scrolled through his Neuralink. Suddenly the moment felt right to finally DM egirlebooks back. He typed:

“You know a place?”

She typed back, “Ya.”

Then she messaged again. It was a link to MarsMaps. A coordinate in Mars latitude and longitude. He clicked on it.

His Neuralink opened MarsMaps and a circle graphic of Big Chungus rotated for a few moments while the page loaded. Then it displayed the map. The location was in Doha City, one of the outer suburban districts within the Sky of the Future that were just being built up when the housing bubble burst. There were a bunch of neighborhoods that were now just sitting there vacant. They were extremely popular with urbex YouTubers.

He tabbed back and DMed her: “When is good for you – this week?”

Before Nick could think about it more, he got a notification. A very official-looking notification from the Chinese Intelligence Agency’s official Free Press news app. Some headline about Gary Guanxi. Then he got another notification from one of the CCP media cut-outs that he hadn’t blocked yet. A think piece about how transphobia in Xinjiang is deeply intertwined with antistate misconduct.

There had been a new development in the Gary Guanxi trial. He was being tried by the MRC courts again, this time for treason and antistate misconduct for a dispute in a public restroom in Chengdu that occurred a few iPhones ago. What had happened was, Guanxi was in the bathroom in a mall in Chengdu. He was doing a campaign stop there. So later, he was in one of the stalls taking a shit. The plaintiff, a trans man and student at Chengdu University, came into the bathroom. The trans college student was talking on the phone. They soon realized that Guanxi was in the bathroom from his Secret Service agents standing outside the stall. They said into the phone something about being in the same bathroom as Gary Guanxi. The next moments were highly in dispute, but what ended up happening was Guanxi started making a lot more bathroom noises in his stall.

The substance of the plaintiff’s complaint was that the phone call was actually an extremely important job interview, and Mr. Guanxi had intentionally sabotaged their career by his actions of making extra loud bathroom noises in his stall, which the court had already deemed legally actionably expressive speech. In a 7-month trial, the judge had found that by not being considerate of others in the space and reducing or altering the content of his expressive speech, Mr. Guanxi was displaying reckless disregard for the humanity of his fellow Chinaman, and since this behavior pattern did have a nexus to sexual- and gender-identity, the court ruled that the damages would be tripled. Guanxi was ordered to pay the plaintiff’s salary as though he had gotten the job at GoogleNASA and worked an average career track for 10 iPhones afterward: ¥69 kabbiblian.

There was a new major bombshell headline about the trial every month or so. The news today was there was a second verdict as well: Guanxi was actually also guilty of treason, since the MRC stands for being good and nice, and when you’re being transphobic, that’s being mean, so that’s not good and nice. By not acting good and nice, Guanxi was helping out the MRC’s enemies. With this additional charge, Guanxi was now facing 420 lifetimes in prison without the possibility of parole.

Nick got another notification from another CCP media cutout—an open letter about how all Uyghurs are racist and violent so this was an open-and-shut case. Then another notification—a new mural in downtown Beijing of Gary Guanxi’s Turkish Uyghur face in the grotesque caricatured style, being decapitated by a smiling Han school girl. Then another notification—Tom Kashgari was inviting all his followers to a group therapy and fundraising listening circle to process the trauma of all this hate and finally heal.

Egirlebooks DMed him. “This week might not be good if you’ve seen the news.”

Nick said, “Lol I saw it”

She said, “I already have like 4 TV hits just tonight lol.”

“Lol” he said.

“Could you do Sunday?” she said.

“Yeah sure…” he said. “That location in Doha City?”

“Yeah…I think the bus goes there.”

“Im finna rent a car tbh”

“I thought you were poor”

“I have a lot of good boy points saved because I never do anything”

“Lol” she said.

Nick tabbed out of the IG window on his Neuralink and went back to MarsMaps. He scrolled around the Doha City location some more. Then he tabbed back to his Mandarin Dashboard and clicked on breaking news. Already the results were totally full of violent anti-Uyghur think pieces. “Why vigilante violence against your enemies is sometimes okay.” The actual content of the articles was irrelevant at this point; the point was to flood every online space with blatantly dehumanizing headlines about Uyghurs to remind everyone that it was okay to harass and attack them. It was moral, in fact. It was Empathy:

“Gary Guanxi is guilty. I know Uyghurs and they are evil. He did this.”

“I once dated a Uyghur who looked like Gary Guanxi. He put a locator beacon on my car.”

“A list of every bad thing a Uyghur has ever done to me.”

“Some brave hero should poison this disgusting parasite’s food at the next restaurant he goes to.”

A picture of a young Uyghur boy’s face with the caption “The face of a future terrorist.”

“China is fucked if we don’t get rid of this Uyghur male problem NOW.”

“The thing I hate most is his punchable little whiny bitch face. Someone should take a baseball bat to that disgusting little bug’s nose.”

It was happening. Current Thing was changing to Gary Guanxi again. Everyone would be busy doom scrolling this story for another week or so, at least.

He thought of egirlebooks’s profile avi. She was wearing the red glasses. In that instant it occurred to him that he did not know what color this girl’s eyes were. They were probably brown, because she was Asian, but what shade of brown? To unmute her and check her TL would have been inconceivable folly. Instead, Nick just scrolled the news headlines more. There was only one trending story that wasn’t dripping with racial hatred against Uyghurs: an obviously fake redpilled account posted an op-ed he wrote in Newsweek: “The Safe Super Bowl will be held on Global Warming Day, yet each Safe Helmet from Taiwan requires as much energy to produce as 25 Tesla Hellcats. This is blatant hypocrisy!”

Nick went back to Instagram, which was more curated to avoid mainstream political stories like this.

Dr. Xing apparently had a court date the next day, and the probably real blackpilled accounts were saying that the Gary Guanxi news was a distraction. It was, with 100% certainty, definitely a distraction.

Big Chungus posted a tweet from the official Xinjiang province Twitter that said “Gaslighting is Chinese Space Communism and Chinese Space Communism is gaslighting” then followed it up with a tweet that said “China has never engaged in any gaslighting and never will.”

Nick refreshed his Stories. The normies he followed, none of them gave a shit about any of this. They were utterly done with politics. They were posting about what they were making for dinner that night, about being stuck in traffic on the way to the lake, about getting a new t-shirt in the mail; very normal non-political things. Meanwhile, the blue checks were going hard with the “someone should crack this Uyghur’s little skull open so he finally learns his lesson.” It was a strictly opt-out major political crisis.

The narrative building was obvious. Gary Guanxi was evil and Uyghurs were evil. The CCP had reminded us of that, now they were vamping for time before Empathy Week. Now the meta was to trigger the most Uyghurs, provoke them into doing or saying something, knowing if they react at all they’ll be banned and/or arrested before the People’s Election. And this Empathy Week was an extra special, extra patriotic one: it coincided with the People’s Election, and China was hosting the Safe Super Bowl for the first time, and they actually had a chance to win it with the Camp Bell Dragons.

This insight was a double-edged sword for Nick. At first, it was a great triumph for him that the normies saw through the violent anti-Uyghur rhetoric that the CCP was slopping out. It showed that the normies knew it was all fake. But on the other hand, it also showed him that they just didn’t care. They didn’t care that most Uyghurs were already in reeducation camps, and more were being added every day. Plus, those same normies who seemed nonpolitical, they could be whipped up into a patriotic frenzy at the whim of the Chinese Intelligence Agency. But it would only ever be for the Kurds. That was the only patriotism that Uyghurs in Xinjiang were allowed to feel. And the psyops were only going to keep ramping up that summer and autumn until everyone’s attention span was totally fried. Then, and only then, Empathy Week would start.

He thought of the crowd at a Safe Football game. A TV drone shot of the whole side of the stadium with the tens of thousands of people in the stands. All those people were conscious of the Safe Football world, at least. They all listened to the Danny Doppa Show. They were all aware of the controversies about Dr. Xing and the concentration camps. They knew China was sterilizing Uyghur women by the hundred-thousand. They knew Camp Bell wasn’t on Mars. They were fucking redpilled. They just didn’t give a shit. Or, maybe it just took another step to get them to actually act, to do something. They just needed something to rip their attention away from the MRC’s spectacular psyopped narratives.

The only content that could ever possibly be powerful enough could only come from one source, and Nick knew exactly what it was: War Machine’s Alpha Investment Corporation.