Complete Burger Theory

I hit the University of Texas to meet America’s best philosopher, Professor H. Burglar. As I walk through the campus, I’m excited to meet one of the celebrity philosopher heroes of our generation. Famous for his YouTube lectures on the field of philosophy, psychology and sociology, the professor was thought to be one of the leading thought leaders of, not just the decade, but the millennium. I enter his office. He is wearing his signature black and white striped suit, Panama hat and medical eye mask, Burglar leans against a window looking down at the university forecourt, reading from a book of poetry by Walt Whitman.

“Tell me about your theory.” I say. He looks over at me, flashes his trademark smile and snaps the book shut. He beckons me to take a seat, I oblige, and then the eminent professor begins to explain to me the greatest idea that American philosophy had ever seen. Burger theory.

“Where do the concepts of things come from? If we are to believe Saussure, the concept is generated by the object. It is the ideas that an object, for example a burger, could be defined by different strata’s of reality. There is the absolute reality that exists beyond human perception. There is what we call reality, made of colours, shapes, sounds, smells, taste and so on, things we can perceive. There is then the other strata of reality, that arguably, is not reality at all. It is the idea behind each of those sensory inputs, as well as extra ideas that are more difficult to perceive directly, but are useful in terms of understanding the other strata’s of reality that exist beyond the realm of the reality of ideas. On each plane of reality, objects exist on each dimension simultaneously. There is the absolute reality of the burger, a collection of separate things that have come together. We must not confuse absolute reality with the reality we experience. Absolute reality should not be considered through human senses, culture or conceptualisation. Take for instance, colour. At this level of reality, everything is simultaneously every other colour besides what we can see. The same is true of time, everything happens simultaneously and it is only the time we perceive in the current moment to be the present. At this level of reality, everything exists at all points of time simultaneously besides what we can experience. It is through reducing absolute reality that we comprehend it.

Things that exist at the level of absolute reality exist in ours, like a shadow thrown from a burger. It leaves a trace in our reality that we can see or eat or talk about. In every second of every hour of every day, a human asks another if they want a burger. This constant stream of questioning ripples through the entire population of humanity, if you were to connect each person asking the question with a line and looked at from above it would seem like a pulsating web that covers the planet. With this way of talking about burgers, we have entered the reality of thought, envisioning something that doesn't exist yet both relates to our reality as well as developing our understanding of it. The secret twist is that there is no such thing as our reality. There is only absolute reality and the reality of thought. The two realities interact, and as people we mostly seem to exist in our reality, unaware of the extreme conceptual construction we have built around ourselves and how we perceive absolute reality. By taking strong enough doses of psychedelics, this is obvious, and the psychedelics often act to slow down or close off interactions between neurons. We lack the faculties to experience absolute reality through social constructs, linguistics, semiotics and the limits of human biology. Just as an insect wouldn't be able to conceive a burger, a human is unable to conceive of the absolute reality of a burger. We are chained to the walls of a cave, completely naked and sweating, unable to escape the biocultural destiny that prevents us from understanding the absolute truth of the universe and beyond. 

This doesn't matter though. It's actually okay to exist within our reality and the boundaries of the mind. Both the insect and myself might never know the absolute reality of the burger, but both of us can still eat it. Would knowing the absolute truth of the burger enable us to enter a dimension of knowledge that we are unable to conceive of, despite how hard we tried? Maybe. But we must ask ourselves, if an ant was given the ability of human intellect, then what happens? We don't even know what to do with it, after tens of thousands of years of humanity's greatest thinkers, artists, scientists and philosophers, the best we can come up with is "nobody knows". And this is good. Absolute reality is whatever, where we really shine is the reality of our own invention, the reality of thought. There is no burger without us. The collective minds of humanity are connected to each other, billions of people around the world, at different points in time, eating burgers, creating an entire dimension of reality between themselves as the best way of navigating the infinity of time and space. It is remarkable that the invention of agriculture, the domestication of livestock, the development of skills, the unbroken chain of parent and child that reaches backward through time, through species, a single dynasty that led to the first hominid, the explosion of human civilization, the milling of wheat, the baking of bread, the butchery of cattle, the mining of metal, the construction of kitchens, all of this coming together, all at once and there in your hands is a burger and you bite into it. Each bite is but one amongst a choir of millions around Earth singing the triumph of life out to the universe.

There is one flaw in this celebration of our dominion over the reality of thought. As we have made it up, it is easily manipulated. The lens in which we experience absolute reality can vary wildly from culture to culture, person to person. It is the shape it is based on what people think, and people are wrong all the time. They'll hear a single comment somebody made once and base their whole reality around it. A person can read a sentence that can drive them to murder. By relying entirely on the reality of thought, humanity is subject to its own imagination. It would be willing to destroy its own environment out of spite. People can listen to words combined in a certain way that it can make them criminally insane. There is always the potential for the creator to be destroyed by their creation, and as the ultimate creator for a plane of existence, we easily become lost and suffer amongst the architecture of our minds.

This is the importance of burger theory. There's another twist. The reality we thought didn't exist earlier actually does exist, and is actually integral that all mentioned realities are connected. Our reality is real. It is the meat in the middle of the bread of absolute and thought reality. A burger without the patty isn't a burger, it's just two pieces of bread, or a kind of sandwich. The burger can be defined - a disc of edible matter - yet it is flexible, it can change, yet remains itself. The burger cannot be a steak or a chicken leg or a salmon, it has to be a burger patty in order for the combination of burger, bread, and possibly garnish, for it to be considered a burger. Even a patty with a single slice of bread is not a burger. It would be an open sandwich or perhaps a kind of British pie. This is how we can unify both structuralism and post-structuralism. Each element is required for the holistic realisation that each of these dimensions rely on each other to exist. The same can be said for the separate models of reality discussed earlier in burger theory, they can exist separately, but ultimately are combined in such a way that they can't be separated. 

This is true of many things.” He says. I nod.

“Yep.”

Hat Futures

I hit the vape. I’m in the reception of Dallas Venture Capital Inc., about to pitch a new product. An assistant waves at me to stop vaping before beckoning me through into a meeting room. Around a table sit twelve investors, some of the richest people in Texas. The CEO had hired Matthew McConaughey to play him, receiving decisions via ear piece but then acting as a flamboyant alpha male business mogul otherwise. For these appearances, Matt only charged seventy five bucks an hour, as well as unlimited usage of every golf course in Texas, and the corporation got there moneys worth. As I quietly set up my apparatus, he sat with angled legs at the head of the table, his middle and index finger on his lips as he looked out of the window. I clap for attention.

I had stayed up the night before constructing the device. Every time the program crashed, I did a line of coke, managing to extinguish all bugs in the software in just a few hours. The fitting of cables, the soldering, I did everything by the hotel window, watching the sun rise in Dallas. 

"This is one hell of a city." I say to myself, leaning the chair back on two legs and lighting a cigarette. It was ready.

Five hours later it now rested on the board room table. It was basically an aluminium box stood on four half-ping-pong balls I had secured from a vending machine.

I was wearing a disguise. The cop that wore a mask of my face had struck again just the day before, this time caught on multiple security cameras, plastered over news networks in 4K. To avoid any confusion, I bleached my hair white and had used some temporary piercings in my cheeks to change the shape of my face slightly. On my neck an insect had bit me and had swollen to the size of a grape. I also wore a fake moustache made from actual human hair, it kept tickling my top lip when I spoke. 

“Gentlemen. I don’t wanna waste any time pullin’ on your dicks. I invented the greatest thing the world has ever seen.” I say, pressing a button. The side of the aluminium box opened up, revealing a cowboy hat. All the investors leaned forward.

“I don’t give a shit about the climate crisis, okay. What I do give a shit about is getting sunburnt. And I think we can all agree, its been pretty hot in Texas the last few summers.”

“Let me see that.” Says McConaughey. I take the hat from the box and throw it to him, frisbee style. He catches it.

“Welcome to the future of hats. Particularly the cowboy hat. I’ve modified the rim with AI. It tracks the movement of the sun and makes sure your head is protected.” I say, demonstrating by shining a daylight bulb towards the hat. As if by magic (but entirely by technology), the rim of the hat begins to shift around. McConaughey laughs, putting it on. I give further demonstrations of how the hat adapts to the light around it.

“Alright, I kinda like it.” Says McConaughey.

“Its not just limited to cowboy hats either. We can do baseball, we can do bucket, whatever you want. We’re talking about the future of hats, gentlemen. You remember pictures from the good ol’ days? Everyone wore a hat. If you have a head, you need a hat.”

“If you have a head, you need a hat…” says McConaughey, trying it on. I give a long technical description how it works as McConaughey approaches the door to the meeting room balcony.

“I look good in it, right?” he says to the investors. They all nod in unison. McConaughey looks at his reflection in the glass of the door before stepping outside.

Unfortunately, I hadn’t yet tested the hat in the daylight, having built it the night before and only using artificial UVs from lamps. As soon as McConaughey stepped outside, the hat malfunctions and brings the brim down around his face. It had clamped down hard, making him stumble backwards into the boardroom. The investors all ran to him, trying to yank the hat off his head.

“It’s just a prototype. It’s just an idea. A proof of concept.” I say.

“Will you get this goddamn contraption off our boss?” says one of the investors. I go over and start pulling at the hat along with the other millionaires. After much heaving, sweating and some temper tantrums, we finally get the hat off the head of McConaughey. Somehow, it has turned his head into a perfect cylinder. It has stretched his head out like a 3D model from the 90s. He staggers around the room, trying to speak. I hit the vape and my fake moustache peels off my face in one go, landing glue-side down on the carpet.

I apologise for the fiasco, as well as my Interstellar review, and bid the board goodbye. It wasn’t everyday that I made a mistake, but when I did, turns out it was kind of a big deal. I supposed that this in itself was actually a good thing. What I did mattered. The higher you might try to attain success, the more opportunity there was for you to fail. The worst repercussions hinted at the potential for the best successes. Though it didn’t turn out in my favour this time around, I knew that if I just kept trying, the world would be a better place.

Project Texas Chainsaw

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is one of the key pieces of American cultural history. The 1974 film started a new wave of cinema, combining elements of documentary, the fear of rural and the quintessential American invention, the serial killer. Each of these elements combined into an eerie work of art that set off a chain reaction of imitators, low budget slasher movies are still being made to this day, yet most of them fall shy of what makes Chainsaw great. The surprisingly bloodless film creates its own gothic language, one entirely separated from the European lexicon and submerges the viewer into a cinematic landscape of death and madness. Prior to Chainsaw, horror films still dwelt on Dracula, Frankenstein and aesthetics heavily influenced by Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Chainsaw acted as a new way of formulating the language of contemporary horror, the first book in a New Testament that would continue to influence society fifty years later. I rewatch the film, projected through the windshield of my car and onto a stained sheet I had hung beneath the boughs of a dead tree. I had decided to also listen to the audio commentary from the 1996 laser disc release, with Tobe Hooper, Kim Henkel and Daniel Pearl talking about the making of the great work. This is playing through a Bluetooth speaker I had on the roof of the car, the audio sometimes getting drowned out by the sounds from the film, particularly the dinner table scene. The film still holds up of course. Its a classic, remade multiple times, yet each iteration falling short of the original vision. As the film nears the end, with the Leatherface tantrum, I start the film again. What better way to pay tribute than rewatching it multiple times out in the Texas wilderness?

As the sun began to rise, I turn the projector off and lie back in the driver's seat of the Hyundai Sonata. Horror films were a cultural archive of the fears of the society in which they were made. This was well known of course, taught in cultural studies classes from kindergarten, yet as I lay inside the car with a red dawn emerging behind distant mountains the shape and colour of putrid teeth, I reflected on recent horror films, trying to align them to what I had witnessed so far in my voyage across the States. Folk horror. I hissed. What had once referred to films like The Wicker Man or certain Hammer Horror films had been hijacked by A24 horror fans who saw somebody outside and said 'that's folk horror, that's folk horror!'. The mere act of leaving the house was deemed as a potentially horrific experience, dripping in occult geometry and the anxiety of human interaction. Horror films still reflected the nightmares of the American public, it just happened to be that the American public was scared of everything. They couldn't even say words like death or homeless any more. They would fly into apoplectic rages if their Doordash deliveries weren't delivered within five minutes, proudly posting the evidence on social media that they were basically babies with poor impulse control and an utterly narcissistic worldview, screaming at teenagers and migrant workers that their chicken tenders were late. The contemporary horror fan would watch either 'folk horror' or overly long creepypasta iceberg videos. Like all other forms of culture, horror had been defanged, mass produced and made cosy. As the sun cracked the sky I began to laugh to myself. Maybe the issue wasn't production companies revisiting old ideas or making forgettable, flaccid films, the cinematic form of an adult colouring book. Maybe America needed something new to be scared of. 

 

I'm sitting in a warehouse. Around me are twenty young people from across Houston. They have been told this is a piece of online content where they would take it in turns to argue with me about fear. At first they would run through a series of things they were scared of: climate change, politicians, white people, having a job, meeting up with friends, being sextorted by cyber criminals and so on. I calmly explain to each of them that we needed to find the root of all of these fears. In fact, there was something that didn't just connect these fears, but connected everyone in this room. At this revelation they all started looking to one another, whispering that this was kinda weird. One guy stood up.

"Okay, I'm about to crash out right now. I need to leave." He says, walking away. I chuckle to myself.

"If you leave now, you'll never find out how your fears are linked." I say, staying still in my plastic chair. The kid laughs performatively, walking across the dusty warehouse floor and towards the door. He tries it. It doesn't open.

"Bro, what the fuck?" He yells. The other participants begin to shuffle in their seats, a few get up and start squabbling, go over to the big metal door and pull on it, shouting at me to let them go. I hold up my hand to silence them. 

"Tell me, do any of you believe in goblins?" I say. There is a pause then people burst out laughing.

"Goblins? What is bro cooking?"

"There's no such thing as goblins." Says a woman. I raise an eyebrow. 

"Are you sure about that?" I say, raising my other eyebrow. The participants laugh nervously.

"Sure, go ahead, if you have a goblin here, bring it out." 

"Bro thinks he's Saruman." Laughs a jock. I nod, get up and walk to the back of the warehouse. An audience gathers at the edge of the shadows, their confidence that goblins didn't exist waning. 

"This has gotta be a prank, on god." One whispers to another. In the shadows they hear my footsteps, some quiet words. My footsteps start again, approaching them, though they aren't alone. They are accompanied by the rhythmic patter of bare feet on the concrete floor. We seem to coagulate from the darkness, finding form into the light. I am walking towards them and holding my hand is a goblin.

At first, they don't know how to react. Some people laughed, some people gasped. A woman screamed. I crouch down and whisper something to the goblin, it let's go of my hand and walks towards the small crowd of people gathered around.

"No way is that real."

"It must be a kid with makeup on. Or a hologram."

"I can assure you that it's real. Go on. Take a closer look." I say quietly. The jock shakes his head.

"Ten bucks says this is Peter Dinklage with some green facepaint on. Hey Pete, I loved you in Game of Thrones." He says, laughing as he turns round to the other participants. They were silent. Apprehensive. The jock approached the goblin, kneeling down and looking into its small, pig-like eyes.

“Hey there buddy.” He said. The goblin looked closely into his eyes, a growl percolating deep in its throat. The jock laughed, turning to the other participants again.

“See, it’s not that bad.” He said. That’s when the goblin leapt onto him.

The goblin began riding the man as if he were a jockey, the pair of them ran around screaming, scattering the people that also began to run, forgetting there was no escape. Meanwhile I pulled on my Leatherface mask, go over to a switch on the wall and flip it. All the lights went out. As a fresh wave of panic swept the people, I knelt down and pulled the ripcord of the chainsaw I had hidden behind a pillar. I rev the engine a few times and turn on a red flashlight I had taped just behind the saw blades. I start mocking the screams of the people around me, with the goblin laughing somewhere in the darkness with a mouth filled with blood.

An hour later I pull up outside Houston zoo. In the backseat is a baby orangutang, the green paint still visible around its eyes and ears as I take its paw and walk with it back to the entrance. I thank the zookeepers and make my way back to the Hyundai Sonata. The participants were safe of course. They had participated in my experiment in fear, each of them contributing to the thesis of terror I had concocted in the warehouse. As the Sonata drove in the moonlight, I turn to the rotting head of Walt Disney on the passenger seat.

“Turns out that people are more scared of goblins than existential terror. Heh. You knew that already though, didn’t you Walt?” I say. I drive the car onto the highway, heading North.

“You know, there’s one thing that still puzzles me. If a person can experience almost limitless horror, what is the evolutionary purpose of it? Does it make sense that a human can be overcome with fear to the point of not being able to do anything? That events can haunt them for there entire lives?” I say. There is no response. I flick on the radio, listening to news reports charting ongoing disasters intercut with songs by Benson Boone, Morgan Wallen, I drive past the carcasses of roadkill, the car heads along the highway in the night and I whistle a lonely tune to myself, hypnotised by road markings that flash past quicker than the lives of insects.

I ride. I think of The Evil Within, wondering if it serves as a blueprint for the potential horror films of the future. It was obvious Hollywood was running on dust, it had less ideas than an AI and didn’t dare publish a horror film that a twelve year old kid couldn’t go and see. Yet horror was the truest form of cinema, the well-known films of its genesis were horror, it sang to the nightmares and fears of the movie-going public at a much deeper psychological level than the Adam Sandler movie, Click. Although the genre was jerked around, underfunded, never recognised at award ceremonies, it remained the ultimate expression of the artform. The 2025 film Sinners, written and directed by Ryan Coogler, as well as the works of Jordan Peele, gave a glimpse into the near future of cinema. Blaxploitation was back. Amateur obsessives would create their own horror films filmed on camera phones. People would take large doses of psychedelics and tell each other scary stories. We were entering a new era of horror, influenced by punk ideology, a lack of money and buckets and buckets of blood. As the car begins to gather speed, I begin to scream with joy. The potential horror films of the future were being birthed in the minds and conversations of everyday Americans right now. Life imitated the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. And I had the special edition 4k restoration.

 

Fifth Industrial Revolution: Post-work Living In America

Social media has been implemented in every aspect of business that is has become the essential tool of communication. Entire departments are pledged to marketing and communications, the output of which is on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and TikTok. The way that all businesses communicated with customers, as well as workers (through job advertisements, news and even private groups) relied on a handful of websites owned by Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk or the CIA. The government had no need to monitor communications when almost everybody would publish their lives, from multiple images they had taken of themselves, friends and family, as well as their thoughts and feelings on a range of topics, including politics. The data from social media was being analysed at a micro-level, identifying and tracking individual activity, able to chart the emotions of populations, and manipulate them through advertising.

Marketing was more important than the object. The object itself was meaningless. The advertising around it, from billboards to product placement in films to paying influencers and content creators to promote goods on the stuff they would provide the platform (with no upfront cost, for free). Although each platform would pay their creators at a certain level, this created billions of hours spent by humanity trying to achieve recognition on their platform of choice so that they could live off the ad revenue. A majority are unsuccessful. 

The strange beast of advertising had grown from capitalism like a new prophet. Whatever was being sold was unimportant. It was the feeling that a person had towards what was being sold that decided its true value. A pair of fine hand-made Italian shoes may appear in a jungle, and an ape would see them as perhaps a toy or even a set of hats. But if you were to explain to the ape that these shoes cost two and a half thousand dollars and would require working for two weeks (at minimum wage) just so you could have these shoes, the ape would think I was speaking nonsense. Marketing created value of thin air. The value of any object on the market depended primarily on its materials, labour and transport. There was little difference between a can of Dr. Pepper or a can of delicious Cherry Coca-Cola – yet whilst Dr. Pepper is seen as a premium brand and something that celebrities enjoy on their yachts, and therefore commands a higher price, Cherry Coca-Cola is drunk by crack heads and professional gamers. An unpleasant association is reflected in the lower price. Or is the lower price influential on the unpleasantness? This is unimportant. The marketing of either beverage has already decided who consumes it. It is the concept that the packaging evokes towards how you relate to the brand and the kind of concepts it represents. Concepts are an element of what makes us human, so the brand itself is presenting a collection of concepts that align to a perfect human/consumer hybrid and the idealised version of whomever wishes to consume their goods. That almost every aspect of this theoretical model of the economy was translated through six websites is bullshit.

Therefore, I was intrigued to visit Dequincy in Calcasieu Parish, Texas. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and military citizen surveillance AI (Meta AI), had bought an entire township in order to conduct an experiment of a future model of society. A society in which all of its people no longer needed to work, receiving an income from the corporation that owned the AI who now undertook labour instead. It was only fair that this multibillion-dollar company pay the workers it had displaced after all. They could afford it. Plus, if nobody had money then nobody would buy anything and then marketing was meaningless, throwing the whole model of economics up into the air before shattering it into a million pieces on a cold concrete floor. No. The serfs would be paid by their digital overlords, paying them to consume whilst the AI sent emails or wrote marketing copy, as well as other work.

All of this was well received by the citizens of Dequincy, Texas. Everyone in the town had been paid ten thousand dollars just for agreeing to the program. It seemed like a great deal. People no longer needed to go to work, would be paid a basic income, and were free to do as they pleased (including working for additional income from those that earned basic). From food production to road management to construction to administration to medicine to banking, almost every aspect of work was now done by Meta AI, either virtually or via the control of its humanoid robots. These robots, lovingly called ‘Zucks’ by the local community, stood at seven feet tall, weighed five hundred pounds and were each connected to the Meta AI via a live feed. The Zucks carried out various jobs, from cashier to teacher, and were seen all over town. It had taken a bit to get used to them, with teenagers targeting the devices in a particularly Luddite form of violence that was a TikTok trend for Generation Omega. However, after life-changing fines and a public dance performance, the Zucks were well-liked by the people around. Some had even decorated certain Zuck androids with particular outfits depending on their job, sometimes decorating them with stickers or unique paint jobs (with the robot’s consent).

As these Zucks ended up being quite personable, they grew popular with the workless locals. The people spent most of their time at home, having food delivered to their bedrooms as they spent most of the day looking at their phones. Meta had provided each individual with an advanced phone, in that it was responsive and had a big screen. People would watch movies or little documentaries or pornography or play games. Now and then they would crawl from their beds to relieve themselves in a litter tray they had in the corner (that a Zuck would come and empty every twelve hours). For those that went outside, they found their desire for interaction wasn’t satisfied by other people, but instead focused on the Zucks as each grew their own personality. A select few people had also taken to streaming themselves walking around the town, broadcast to people sitting inside who wanted the feeling of being outside without going to the effort of getting dressed and leaving the house. They had a steady supply of burgers, weed and sex toys that made most people quite content in their lives. For some, it was the first time for a long time that they had any time away from work without worrying about money. The company subsidised most of the basics, which also happened to be the products advertised to people in their bed chambers. It offered great market synergy. People were happy, the organisation were happy, the share holders were happy, and most importantly, the United States government were happy.

The town didn’t live in a bubble. The events that unfolded were watched by millions of people across America, jealous of the lazy lifestyle the participants had, enjoying seeing all the Zucks undertake old fashioned job and interact with the unemployed. Some of these Zucks became international celebrities, going on to star in films or be in bands, but fundamental to all of this was the envy at people getting paid to do nothing and live in a nest with a screen that did anything it wanted. The whole experiment is an advertisement for the vision of the future that Meta would one day offer. It encouraged citizens across the United States to write to politicians requesting that Meta try running the trial where they lived. People started visiting Dequincy from across the country, it became a tourist attraction for a philosophy. A world where nobody needed to work. The end of labour, a way to finally break free from the endless drudgery of working for a majority of your life, only to be constantly underpaid, tired out, away from the people you love. The town offered hope. We could break free from the 9-5, the commute, the irritating co-workers, the foolish bosses, the pay that barely covered the things you’d need to recover from working hard at a bullshit job. Was this the end suffering? Was this the end of capitalism?

Unfortunately, no. This was the ultimate expression of capitalism. Capitalism had evolved, it had gone Super Saiyan, it had taken total control of an entire solar system for centuries yet to happen. Capital no longer was interested in the shallow potential of money. It had total control over the lives of everyone. The only thing that had been holding it back had been the limits of economy, finance, government. By replacing almost every aspect of provision, capital now held every individual citizen in its palm like a newborn baby puppy. The ideology of capital had absolute control. It was over. All known sentient life in the universe had lost against a concept. It was quite sad actually.

Meanwhile, I walk through the town and notice some teenagers skateboarding. They were doing some sick tricks on the stairs outside the Dequincy town hall, doing ollies as easy as breathing. One of them, a punk, did a nosegrind down the railing of the steps, doing a kickflip before landing, totally relaxed, smoking a crucifix joint. One of the Zuck’s ran over.

“Hey, Security Officer here. I’m afraid I’m gonna have to give you a red flag for that, that prevents people from using the handrail. Hope that helps!” said the Zuck. The punk flipped it off, doing circles round the android as it struggled to keep up.

“Okay, I don’t want to have to reduce your Meta-Dequincy partnership rating, are you going to apologise?” said the Zuck. One of the other skaters threw an empty can at the back of its head. “Who did that?” it said, turning around. A crowd started gathering.

“You wanna reduce my social score, go ahead.”

“You know that will impact your basic income? Everyone actually gets an improved income when they sign up to the program. Meta doesn’t want to reduce you to the lower rate, so if we could-" says the robot. The punk does a kickflip ollie into the chest of the android, knocking it over.

“Lol.” Says the punk, skating off as more Zuck security bots arrive. Although people had been filming the interaction, all of the subsequent posts were edited, as well as the copies on people's phone and cloud backups. It was edited by an LLM so that the punk said slurs before pushing the shoulder of the Zuck, threatening it and anybody else collecting basic income from Meta, before hitting the robot with a skateboard and running away. The punk was quickly vilified as an enemy of the town, somebody who was no longer welcome in the experiment and should leave Dequincy and not come back. When they were found and exiled, they had the Mayor Zuck come and give a speech how Meta really cared for everyone in the town and wanted to carry on doing the experiment, so long as people wanted to. The townsfolk all started clapping and starting shouting their allegiance to Meta, as well as their appreciation for the Zucks that now lived among them. The Mayor Zuck thanked everybody, and agreed that the experiment could be extended so long as people signed up to the new terms and conditions of the social contract. They had made some additions to the agreement in order to keep people safe, it was nothing to worry about and was essentially what they were already doing. The Mayor Zuck also admitted it had made some mistakes, so in order to ensure that everyone’s wellbeing was represented, one of the townsfolk would be picked to sit on the board of decision makers at Meta. This was a big honour, and even included a small financial bonus for the valuable work they did representing their community. Meta hadn’t yet decided who would be a good candidate, so if anybody felt particularly strongly about it, they should try and live in a way that represented the core values of Meta. This person would also get their own private Zuck android to assist them with anything they wanted – although the implication was that this relationship would be sexual – and a large house between the town and Meta headquarters. The town agreed, leaving excited at the prospect of being the model citizen.

Over the next few days, there was a flurry of activity as people tried to be the best version of themselves that they thought Meta wanted them to be. This included a range of activity that was communally minded, from undertaking chores for people to decorating their local environment. The Zucks work was being replaced by people once again, albeit voluntarily, and these human workers interacting with each android was always extremely pleasant and polite. It was deemed that acting like a Zuck was acting in the spirit of the company’s values, and so more and more people imitated the mannerisms, language and style of the Zucks.

Beneath an underpass outside the town, I approach a barrel with a fire burning inside. The punk is waiting for me. We sit on a wooden palette, sharing a bottle of hot sauce.

“I’m the first exile. But I won’t be the last. There’ll be more. We gotta live off grid, live like nomads. I can put a cycle together out of anything. No more of that Meta bullshit, AI cars, androids, phones, none of it. I’m living clean. Real human biker gangs.”

“What will you do to survive?” I ask, lighting a cigarette and offering the punk one.

“We can hit the farms, the water supply, the autotrucks transporting goods between the factories. We keep moving, stay out of the way of the droids. They’ll start arming them, so we need to start arming ourselves. EMP weapons, cloth armour. If the cloth has enough potential rotation it can stop a bullet, same principle as an arrow. It’s the rotational force, you absorb it, the cloth spins with it, slows it down.”

“Sure, I heard of it. Then what?”

“We’ll ride across the wastes of America, taking what we need, trying to avoid the satellites. We’ll need overhead camo, that’s for sure. Maybe have underground grottos where we can raise babies before they can ride on the open road.”

“The empty cities will provide cover, but you’ll have goddamn corpo droids crawling all over them.” I say, looking at the flames.

“They’ll strip everything of resources, even the garbage dumps. They still need rare metals, computer components. That’s why we have to attack the manufacturing plants.”

“You’re thinking too small. You need to attack the brain.” I say, pointing at my forehead.

“Bring down the AI? Heh. You’re shitting me.”

“You can only kill a hydra by severing its brain.”

“The motherlode. Maybe you’re right. Maybe we could go back in time before this happened and plant the seed of resistance whilst the nets are still active.”

“It’ll never work.” I say, shaking my head. The punk laughs.

“Whatever it is, I’m not doing nothing about it, no way. The futures not set.”

“There’s no fate but what we make for ourselves.”

Together we sit in the darkness, watching the flame grow brighter.

 

 

New Orleans Fourth Of July Celebration

I’ve been trying to calculate the average size of an insect but have one major problem. Am I classifying the average as being the total of all total insects, or the average across different species? The latter is easy, laughably so in fact, yet the question of the total number of insects and the size of each individual insect is intensely difficult work that all the supercomputers in the world would be unable to calculate.

But let’s just say I might have an answer.

I pull up the Hyundai Sonata in New Orleans. The name of the city conjures up the disaster of Hurricane Katrina and how the government had failed its people, both during and in the subsequent years rebuilding the city. The ruins of homes became prime real estate for billion dollar investors, they could buy up land cheaply, build dogshit on top and charge higher property prices, displacing families that had lived there before slavery was abolished. New Orleans has the worst gentrification statistics in all of the United States. The entire city could be used as evidence, should the United States ever go on trial for racism, but the people living there were working hard to make sure they kept the soul of Orleans alive. 

I walk through the city streets. Fourth of July celebrations are happening everywhere, there’s red, white and blue bunting rippling overhead as bars play Independence Day 2 from monitors mounted next to the ceiling. The Saints are playing football against the New Orleans Jesters, a soccer team switching it up to celebrate the successful war of the United States against the British. Although the war of Independence played a significant role in the nations history, arguably the very spirit of America, it was a terrorist insurgence that implemented one of the most violent regimes the world has ever seen. Yet as I walked the streets of New Orleans, I thought to myself: “This is one hell of a city.”

I walk past Hooters, down Veterans Boulevard, surrounded by a surge of patriotism. Tonight there would be fireworks and cheeseburgers. The air smelled of barbecue and weed smoke. I head to the French Quarter, walking past a graveyard and thinking of all the bodies that were lying in the ground, facing up to the stars. Maybe tonight they might have little smile on their lips, thinking to themselves ‘Happy fourth of July! Even though it doesn’t follow the MM/DD/YYYY format us Americans use’. I gave the skeletons a wave and headed to one of New Orleans most famous jazz bars. Unfortunately it had been closed and taken over by a business called Uncle Suck N’ Fuck’s Sloppy Ribs Shack.

I enter the sports bar and greeted with a huge pot of crawfish. They are alive and keep wriggling their legs.

“Welcome to Uncle Suck N’ Fuck’s Sloppy Ribs Shack, do you have a table with us?” asks the maître d’. I shake my head. I hadn’t included crawfish in my calculations. As I stared at the thousands of crawfish in the pot, my mind began to race, I was unable to keep up with my own thoughts. I mumbled something, following the maître d’ as they led me to a table. I accepted the menu with a soft grip, barely conscious of my body. In my calculation of the average size of insect, I had only considered insects that lived on the land. But the insects of the sea had been missed. I felt so foolish. What had been the point in attempting to make such a calculation when making such a fundamental flaw? This wasn’t an error in some complex equation, or even basic arithmetic, I didn’t even have my numbers right! Even an ape could understand that one and one equals two. I had thought I was trying to add one and one together but somehow had replaced one with zero point seven eight six six seven three or some other random number, it didn’t matter. I laughed at my ineptitude. A waiter came over to take my order.

“Sir, may I grab you a- are you okay?” he said. I look up at him and realise I am crying.

“No, no, I’m fine, just feeling really emotional. I love this country so much.” I say, standing up. I look around, people stop their conversation, stop eating, they all look at me.

“Oh say can you see…” I begin singing. The waiter joins me.

“By the dawns early light.” He says, turning and smiling, nodding at me. The bar slowly begins to join in with an amateurish, yet realistic and therefore better, version of the national anthem. When we finally stop I sit back down and order a big bowl of crawfish.

“So we have the Crawfish salad, the gumbo, we can-“

“Just a big bowl of crawfish, boiled, with a little salt.” I say.

“Sir, may I suggest-“

“No. The price doesn’t matter. I want a kilo of crawfish and a Bloody Mary, extra spicy.”

“I’ll go and check with the kitchen.” He says. I nod, take a quarter from my wallet and flip it at him.

“There’s more where that came from.” I say. The waiter leaves, and I drum my fingers on the table, sighing loudly.

Half an hour later my so-called meal is brought to me. They had garnished the bowl with some corn on the cob, but I threw it on the floor, not desiring such frivolity. I begin to eat, cracking and splitting the bodies of the crawfish, drinking the Bloody Mary, snorting keys of ketamine now and then. The atmosphere began to take on an unusual quality. I realised there would be a constant variable of insects that are born and die and so the average number would fluctuate but if I was to add additional numbers to the whole number beyond the decimal place, calculate beyond my requirements and then reduce the reported figure to just two decimal places that would see me right. Any variation could then be accounted as a rounding error, beyond the scope of finding out the average size of an insect. By that stage I had already included the sea insects, then calculated both the average size of all insects, as well as the average size between all species of insect. The margin for error, as exemplified with the big bowl of crawfish I was currently eating, was inconsequential. You may be asking yourself, isn’t the very notion of the average size of an insect inconsequential?

You’re wrong. Let me explain why;

The actual figure representing the size of the average insect population is only useful when trying to work out which is a bigger than average insect, that also happens to be common enough that you might meet it in your day to day life. The answer, after much calculation, referring to leading mathematicians in the field, submitting it to quantum computers, speaking with insect specialists and academics, studying hundreds of books on the subject, is actually quite simple. It’s a moth. So now you may be asking yourself, what does a moth have to do with anything?

Are you saying that you don’t care about one of the great night pollinators? That the value this insect has, not just within the food chain is occupies, but on the black market amongst moth and butterfly collectors is in fact, negligible? Are you trying to sit there and say to me, I don’t understand this, can you leave me alone?

The answer to all those things is to smash enormous clash cymbals right in front of your face and then scream: “You need to start fucking paying attention, alright?”

I finish off the crawfish, leave a pretty generous tip and head out into the night time. Overhead the fireworks were exploding.

Southern Comfort

Ride to Louisiana. Air coming off the ocean tastes of salt, something chemical. I walk round a gas station, unable to understand the products, the writing makes no sense to me. Leaning against the glass door of a fridge, humming to match the pitch of electricity. When I leave, someone has left a flier beneath a windscreen wiper of my Hyundai Sonata. It’s a drawing in blue biro of a monster eating someone. I look around, screw it up into a ball and throw it. There’s a burned out car by the corner, windowless, like the skull of a Jurassic fish. It watches me as I pull away, joining the road again, feeling itchy beneath my skin.

Night time in Baton Rouge. I could have kept going to New Orleans, but stay at a Holiday Inn. There was an old man sat on a lawn chair outside a motel room. The door was open and a great, fleshy back of a person was curled up, lying on the floor, facing away from me.

“Hot night.” Says the old man. I nod.

“You got a cigarette?”

“Nope.” He says. I sit in my motel room and turn on the tv. Law & Order, CSI, ads for cell phones showing that they get coverage almost anywhere. I snort. The US was meant to be a superpower and still didn’t have phones that worked everywhere. They were forty years behind the rest of the world. I flip to the news and see myself. I lean forward.

There is footage from a doorbell. It’s a cop, wearing a mask of my face. For a moment I didn’t make the connection, the extensive plastic surgery I’d had back in New York seeming to be a lifetime ago. I watch the news report. Somebody was posing as a cop, or was a cop, and gaining entry into suburban homes. Once inside he would gather the family into the living room, place handcuffs on them, then make them watch some sort of film. It wasn’t clear what the film was about from the news reports, but they interviewed a witness who didn’t blink and their hair had turned grey and they seemed to speak as if they were very small. Police sketches of the mask. It looked like me. My reflection was on the tv and aligned perfectly with the mask. I turn the tv off, go to the window, look out, draw the curtains. What was happening?

I thought back to the last couple of weeks in Florida. I had dressed as a cop myself just the other day. I wondered for a moment if this man had been me, but dismissed it. The report was from further north, though it had been the sixth time it had happened in the last few weeks. Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska. They were heading south. I looked in the bathroom mirror, squeezing my cheeks, pulling the skin down so my eyelids revealed the pink, wet flesh beneath eyeballs marbled with veins. I was myself. Knock at the door. I look through the key hole and it’s the old man.

“I got you a cigarette.” He says. I open the door, keeping the brass chain on the latch.

“Pass it here.” I say, searching in the dark. He passes me a Marlboro, we wink at each other and I close the door. I pace round the motel room, trying to make the cigarette last as long as I can, smoking it down so the writing burns away and the filter fizzes and burns yellow.

Why was the person posing as a cop have a mask of my face? And what was on the video he made these families watch? I kept walking, trying to work it out, trying to imagine what it could all mean, yet my thoughts were like a kite on a still day, never taking off, just dragging across the ground. I sat and drummed my fingers on the bedside table. What if people mistook me for this fake cop? I wasn’t totally innocent. The real cops could already be on there way. They might be in the parking lot right now, a SWAT team creeping by the motel rooms neighbouring mine, ready to bust through the door at any moment. I needed another cigarette. It didn’t matter. I still had a job to do. I was in Baton Rouge in July 2025 and I was safe. It would all be fine. I lie back on the bed and study a stain on the ceiling. Tomorrow I would get to New Orleans, drive across the Mississippi, maybe try some soul food, maybe go to a jazz club. Just as I was drifting off the sleep, there was a knock at the door. I sit up slowly.

“Old man? You got another cigarette for me?” I say. My voice cracks, going high for a moment, betraying the dread I felt, utterly alone in a motel room in a strange country. There was no reply, but there was another knock. Shave and a haircut, two bits. I go over to the door and open it, looking out into the night between the gap in the door and with just a slender chain protecting me from the outside world. There is nobody there. I’m about to close the door when I look down. Someone had taped a piece of paper to the floor. There’s a QR code on it. I take a picture with my phone, close the door as it loads. It’s a link to a file on wetransfer. I download it. It’s a video outside the motel room. It was earlier, the old man coming to give me a cigarette. I watch myself close the door, then the camera starts to zoom in, closer and closer. I glance up at the window. Are they still out there? I look back to the phone, my heart beating twice as fast. What the fuck was going on? The camera holds, digital noise making the motel door seem to dance and shift like kaleidoscopic snow. Then it went black. I sit on the bed, feeling frozen in place, as a wild animal encountering car headlights for the first and final time.

That night I don’t sleep.

Alligator Alcatraz Tour

I get a call from my agent. They want me to cover Alligator Alcatraz.

“Alligator Alcatraz? Is that like a prison for evil animals?” I say, eating an apple. It sounded like the plot of a hit film, a kind of zoo for animals that had committed crimes. And then they escape.

“Its more of a detention centre for immigrants.”

“It’s a concentration camp?”

“Well no, it’s a compound used to hold immigrants located in the Everglades. The idea is that even if you escaped, you’d have to contend with the alligators and pythons that live in the swamps around it.”

“Sounds like a concentration camp to me. Why not Alligator Auschwitz or Snake Sobibor?”

“Will you just go and report on it?” they say. I nod, although as it’s a phone call, they can’t see it. I take a U-turn on the highway just as I’m about to hit the Louisiana border, driving down towards Miami, towards the Big Cypress National Preserve, towards America’s future.

I park my car on a dirt track, the air conditioning in the car working double time. It was so hot and humid in Florida that you could taste yourself, your sweat barely evaporating and creating a human flavoured fog around every individual. I play GTA6 on my Steam Deck, sighing at the NPC dialogue, thinking how when they first started making the game they were aiming for parody, yet now it seemed like a cosier version of the reality of Florida in 2025. I get bored of the game, delete it, then play Balatro 2 for a few minutes. Somebody taps on the car window.

“Can you roll your window down sir?”

“No.”

“Are you refusing to comply with-“

“Its broken, okay.” I say to the cop. Both of his hands are on the grip of the pistol hanging on his belt with a piece of string.

“Sir, step out of the vehicle.” He says. I roll my eyes, open the car door and look at myself in the cop’s mirrored sunglasses.

“What you doing out here?”

“I’m just chilling out. What are you doing out here, were you going to have a wank in the bushes or something?” I say.

“Show me your United States birth certificate.”

“Why would I carry that around? You want to see my swimming certificates too? You going to add me on LinkedIn?” I say, smiling.

“Sir, I’m arresting you on suspicion of being an illegal alien.”

“Haha, okay. Is this a prank? Are you promoting a Men In Black sequel?” I say, looking up and down the dirt track for some teenager with a phone. Instead, there’s just scraggly bushes, with crickets chirping all around us. The cop grabs me and pushes me against the Hyundai.

“What you got in your pockets?”

“Why don’t you find out?” I say. The cop obliges, plunging his hand into my pocket and screams in pain. He pulls his hand out, with the needle of a syringe running beneath a fingernail. As he goes for his radio, I move my hand up, push the plunger on the syringe and inject him with 30mg of heroin. His eyes roll up into his head and he collapses to the floor, I kneel next to him and pat him on the face.

“First time? Try and enjoy it, you fucking pig.” I say, oinking a few times. I look over his limp body and get an idea.

 

Twenty minutes later I am dressed as a cop. I found his motorbike up the track and was now riding it towards Alligator Alcatraz, hitting the vape as I rode towards the old airport. The cop was naked back in the trunk of the Hyundai, with an IV of heroin to keep him docile until I got back. I hadn’t needed to take his underwear, but I wanted to get into character. I was a piece of shit American cop. All I cared about was eating fast food, shooting people in the back and being illiterate. My kids would grow up to hate me, if I didn’t kill them, then myself, first. As I pulled into the parking lot I was playing ‘Damn It Feels Good To Be A Gangsta [Explicit]’ by the Geto Boys on my bike stereo. One of the prison guards is already running towards me, flailing his arms in the air.

“What the hell are you listening to? Don’t you know law enforcement are only allowed to listen to Coldplay and Taylor Swift?”

“I forgot man, sorry. Is this Alligator Prison?”

“Yup, welcome my brother. You here for a tour or you bringing someone in?”

I look behind me. There is nobody there.

“I’m just here for a tour, brother.” I say. And with that, he leads me towards Alligator Alcatraz.

We pass a McDonald’s and a Denny’s, freshly built amongst the remnants of the air traffic control tower that used to be here. The floor is littered with dead Miami Blue Butterfly’s, the whole area had been flooded with toxic gas a few weeks previously. My tour guide, Private Hank Hanks, explains to me how building the immigration facility had been dangerous.

“Turns out building a prison with a moat is dangerous if the moat already contains hundreds of alligators.”

“Moat? What’s that?” I say, picking my nose.

“Ah, its European. They used to build castles with a ditch around it, then fill it with alligators.” He explains helpfully. We pass the gift shop, where Governor Ron DeSantis sells t-shirts with ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ on them, as well as severed taxidermy alligator heads, Key Lime cookies and saltwater taffy. The cashier behind the counter has a pet flamingo she keeps in a cage, where visitors are encouraged to feed it with a bag of peanuts you could buy for a dollar.

Past the gift shop are dozens of RVs, where the immigrant workers who had built the facility had lived before being deported to Mexico. Private Hank Hanks laughs as he tells me this, before giving a long monologue about him seeing the President when he visited the facility earlier in the week. I keep laughing and slapping my thigh to encourage him to continue with his witless story as we pass chain-link fences.

“Here it is. Ain’t it beautiful?” says the prison officer. I look round.

“Its just tents?” I say, looking around. It was just tents and chain-link fences. I remember my cover just in time. “Ain’t that genius. Hoo-boy!” I yell. A man barely five feet tall comes running over to us.

“Private, who in the hellin’ heck is that?” he says, pointing his gun at me.

“Easy there, he’s one of us.”

“Yeah. I didn’t graduate high school.” I say. The man is wearing camouflage trousers and a t-shirt with the Punisher logo on it printed on top of a blue and black U.S. flag that says ‘Blue Lives Matter’ along the bottom. He wears a baseball cap that says ‘Fish Fear Me. Women Fear Me.’, and he scrutinises me beneath the shadow of the brim.

“What you doing here?”

“I just thought I’d come take a look before the liberal media come with their helicopters and try and make the tents blow away.” I say, leaning against an RV. I root round in my pockets and find a half-eaten burger, so start to chew on it.

“Don’t worry about that brother, you should be worried about the protestors who are going to try and dig a hole underneath the ‘traz. They gonna try and flood this place with gators.” He says.

“Ah yeah. I hate it when people try and get in the way of what we’re doing here.” I say, winking. The little man nods.

“Exactly. This goddamn country needs martial law. We need to go from town to town, cleanse it of any criminal activity, and rebuild America as it should be. The strongest country this Earth has ever seen, so help me God.”

“Hallelujah. As I was saying at a KKK meeting the other day, we should nuke Los Angeles and those goddamn progressives trying to summon satan.” I say, nodding at the guys. All the guys stand around nodding with their thumbs tucked into their belts.

“Lookie here son, I’m the warden here, Warden Gordon, you lookin’ to transfer over? We could use men like you.” He says.

“Ah, I don’t know about that. I’m already under investigation for bombing a retirement community. The amount of goddamn forms you gotta fill in, I’m like, why can’t ChatGPT do this shit so I can get back on the streets to hunt down commies?” I say. The warden laughs, with Hank Hanks joining in. We start walking towards a cluster of tents.

When we enter one of the tents, there’s more chain-link fences, with as much room as possible filled with bunkbeds. Had they designed this in Prison Architect? There was barely any room to stand. Bare lightbulbs hang around the fabric ceiling, with mosquitos flying around lazily.

“I’m surprised you’ve given these guys beds. If I was in charge they would sleep on a bit of wire that electrocuted them randomly.” I say, spitting.

“Its about optics, son. You remember Guantanamo Bay?”

“Yep.”

“Exactly. We don’t want anyone to remember what we’re doing here cus of the cruelty. Matter of fact, Trump himself stayed the night here, he wanted to prove that this was a humane facility.”

“Wow, Daddy stayed here? I thought it was more like a concentration camp.” I say. The warden laughs.

“We don’t use that word round here. Concentrate. Its because the goddamn liberals at city hall say that concentrating is ableist against prisoners with ADHD. This is more like a containment facility.”

“Like in Ghostbusters?”

“I ain’t seen that.” Hank Hanks says. I shake my head. Its so hot and humid in here I start to feel faint.

"What about JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean?" I ask. He blinks.

"Wha-"

“I notice there’s no real walls or bars here. What’s stopping all the inmates from piling against one of these fences, breaking it down, then going from tent to tent, murdering the prison guards with their bare hands.”

“Don’t you worry about that, these fences are made from American steel.”

“And what happens if it floods or there’s a tornado?” I say. The warden spins round with an evil grin on his face.

“What do you think would happen? All the alligators would get caught up in the wind and fly around. We got a storm shelter for our guards, as for the prisoners, well. Let’s just say…they’d be dead.” He says. I give my own evil grin back. This guy didn’t deserve to live, but I couldn’t just wait outside Alligator Alcatraz, follow him home and run him over as he made his way to his front door. No, karma had a funny way of working things out, except for all the times that it didn’t. I could imagine a shiv, covered in shit, made from a broken bit of glass, would find its way into his belly soon, but who knows? Maybe he would actually read the Bible and find out his entire worldview was in opposition to the religion he said he followed.

As I left Alligator Alcatraz, all the prison guards lined up to wave goodbye. They had given me a free t-shirt and a pack of collectible stickers featuring inmates they had illegally rounded up beforehand. I was touched. Even the most hateful person, who had dedicated their lives to cause violence and death against unarmed people, seemed to do it out of genuine care and affection for who they saw as their own kind. It was almost touching, seeing this group of fascists hand over gifts and pat me on the back as I passed by them.

“I guess I better go back to Miami. Thanks for the tour of your detention centre, my brothers in blue. My beloved guardians of justice. My saintly holocaust enablers.” I say, waving at them. I opened the pack of stickers and started slapping them on my bike, then drive back towards the Hyundai.

As I dumped the drugged-out cop naked on the dirt track, I wondered to myself about justice, the law and incarceration. It seemed absolutely cruel and meaningless, that the country had long ago lost its perspective and seemed intent on either killing or locking up the working classes that it had forced into addiction and squalor. The United States had the biggest prison population in the world, where people would be locked up in maximum security penitentiaries to undertake slave labour for decades. The next step was to criminalise all citizens so that they lived in a constant state of fear and paranoia, either ratting each other out for the smallest infraction, or throw themselves into the thresher of ultraviolence should they try and fight back. The ageing elders hoarded all the resources, voted for a clueless child emperor and rotted away in neighbourhoods monitored by privatised security forces, dying in a prison they had built around themselves as they watch Netflix movies and eat microplastics.

None of this needed to happen. None of this would stop happening. And as I drove away there was a whisper on the wind, like God was speaking to me.

“aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.” It seemed to say.

Disney World part 3: Bloodlines

Phase two was engaged. I was conducting a heist at Disney World, with all of my operatives on comms as they went through the corridors behind the scenes. They had infiltrated Disney World a few weeks prior, back when I conducted the plan in a warehouse with a little model of Disney World to describe the steps. Each of the agents were represented with a chess piece, with each of them commenting on the piece that they had been designated in a humorous manner.

“Checkmate.” I say, knocking the final piece over. They all look to one another in appreciation. Fast forward to the present.

Donald Duck is walking between rides, grabbing selfies with the kids and embarrassing the fathers. So was the way of Donald Duck. The man inside the suit looked at the sun, reflecting on his own history, why he felt drawn towards Donald Duck rather than Buzz Lightyear. His earpiece went off. Instructions decoded by an implant in his jaw that reverberated the instruction inside his ear, circumnavigating the parks surveillance system for everything that passed through the ear canal. Donald Duck span on a heel and immediately started running to Cinderella Castle.

Downstairs in the lobby were twin sisters, who happened to be jerks. They kept making wisecracks about each other as they hacked the control panel. In the ballroom the lights went off momentarily, startling the guests as they swooned around like a prequel to The Shining. The twins squabbled, then managed to turn the elevator off but so that the door was stuck on their level. They entered, pushing the ceiling of the elevator, removing a panel and began to scale the wires connecting the elevator to the machinery above.

Back in the park, an 80 year old ex-Spetsnaz super soldier pretended to have a heart attack. He clutched at his chest, then dashed towards a street food vendor, tipping over a canister of gas that flew off into the distance before shattering the head of a plastic dinosaur. On the other side of the park, somehow an eighteen wheeler was driving down the central promenade, with a Ludacris look-a-like behind the wheel shouting at people to get out of the way.

Meanwhile, the actual sub-heist was happening two hundred miles away in a cabin in a pine forest. A scrawny man wearing dungarees launched a backdoor malware hack on Disney World’s subsystems, the entire I.T. architecture built upon legacy systems from the 1980s. Fortran hacks combined with LLM codes. Lethal to any system that still had CD drives in its computers. With the hack launched, the security system of Disney World was stuck on a seven minute loop. That was the time for action.

Barry Gary was being escorted from the park when he noticed some security staff panicking over watching Barry Gary being captured seven minutes earlier whilst simultaneously being walked past the security van in handcuffs. If these guards reported that the security system was on a loop, the whole heist would be compromised. Without thinking, Barry Gary lurched over to a family sat around a picnic table, stole the Dad’s beer and threw it as hard as he could at the security staff. Panic broke out as Barry started rioting in the food court.

“Barry you son of a gun.” I say, watching from behind a pillar. I wipe away a tear and head through a security door I had wedged open with toilet roll.

I walk through the underbelly of Disney World. This was where they kept their worst secrets. I passed cell doors containing celebrities that were widely known as being dead, yet had remained beneath Disney World for decades. The connections between the CIA and Walt Disney Corp. were well documented to the point of being common knowledge. Yet as I passed a cell containing Tupac, Prince and David Bowie, I wondered if Disney had gone too far. But I had one objective. The reason why I planned this whole heist in the first place. I opened a metal sliding door and gazed upon it. The frozen head of Walt Disney.

The head was guarded by blue lasers, moving slowly in pentagram shapes around the head of the famous entertainer. I pulled some crushed glass from my pocket and blew it outwards, confusing the laser beams and diffusing them enough that I could pluck the head of Walt from its cryogenic stasis and into my bag. As I started to walk out, the doors shut in front of me. An alarm went off. I had been so close. I sank to my knees and waited to be arrested by the Disney World private military corporation.

I sat in an interview room. Two guys in suits were shouting at me, asking me questions about the head of Walt Disney.

“Where is it, you piece of shit?”

“We got you on camera stealing the head. We’ve looked everywhere for it. Where is it, big man?” said the other guy. I look between them both calmly.

“I ate it.”

“Jesus Christ.” Says the first detective, mopping his brow with his tie.

“Are you saying you just ate the head of one of the greatest minds of the 20^th century?”

“His skull was soft. Like the skin of an apple.” I say, leaning back. The two private investigators look to each other.

“Well if there’s no evidence, then there’s no crime. You’re free to go.” Says the other one.

“But if we ever catch you around Disney World, Disney Land or any other Disney related outlet or venture, you can be sure you’ll be leaving in a bodybag.” Says the first, turning away from me and at the enormous mirror they had fitted against one of the walls. I tried to shake their hands as I left, but was refused. I walk out into the car park, find my Hyundai Sonata and sat down heavily in the drivers seat. Then I turned to the passenger seat and smile. There’s the head of Walt Disney.

Rewind an hour earlier. I bump into Barry Gary and pass him an ampoule of fentanyl. He pours it in a security guards coffee. The altercation later raises his blood pressure and so he metabolises the fentanyl quickly, just in time for the twins to catch him as he makes his way between buildings. They don his costume and I nod at them before entering the laser vault, before exiting and throwing the head over to them via an air vent they had unscrewed. They walk with the head to a balcony overlooking the theme park, throwing the head onto the top of the truck the Ludacris look-a-like is driving. He does a quick manoeuvre, catches the head in one hand before throwing it again so that it sails through the open window of my car.

As I drive away, I think back to my experience of Walt Disney World. I had been taking large amounts of drugs over the course of the week, hiding at the back of rollercoasters, circling park staff, clutching at the back of the rides as they went round and round the rails for hours on end. As I took the free rides, oiled pieces of leather beneath my feet as I skated for free behind the park visitors, I wondered how Disneyland would be remembered in centuries ahead. Would it take on an almost mythic presence in the days of future ahead, or rot as a forgotten circus, a monument to the infantilisation of humanity that led to the downfall of the first civilisation? It is hard to say. I drive away, leaving the mouse eared streetlights, across swampland and up to the coast. I follow it, heading to the Mississippi.