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.   

Disney World part 2

I’m running through Disney World with an AR-15, twin drum magazine, shooting round after round into the crowd, my face is dusted in blood, sweat and cocaine. People are livestreaming themselves running from the gunfire, their screams becoming punctuated by bullets, ceasing. It is silent besides the animatronic things advertising the theme park rides. I stalk through the abandoned walkways, noticing something in the trees. Too late. Sixteen shots hit me, ripping my body in half, I look down at my legs that are now only connected to me by a string of bleeding intestine.

Game over. I take the VR headset off and laugh.

“Holy shit. That was so realistic.” I say. The ride designer nods, writing something on his clipboard before speaking.

“We wanted to give visitors ultimate freedom to do what they wanted at Disney World. Anywhere, anytime, you can log-in, download the game files and you’re good to go.”

“Why make it so violent though? It seemed a bit…unnecessary for a family theme park.” I say, hitting the vape.

“That’s up to the player. Most of our testers have fun on the rides or get time with our characters.”

“Ah.”

“You broke into our security office, stole drugs and weapons and went on a rampage. I’m surprised it went on for so long. Why didn’t you stop?”

“I didn’t know I could.” I say, feeling a little embarrassed. “Did I play the game wrong?”

“There’s no right or wrong way to play Virtual Disney World. But I see we need to do some more thinking about how we can safeguard experiencers, as well as protect the brand.”

“The brand? Who gives a shit, if someone wants to run through a theme park shooting people, they should be able to do it. Its called video game libertarianism, how about you look it up sometime?”

“Is it fun?” he says, moving close to me. Was it fun? That was the billion dollar question that Walt Disney Industries asked itself every year, playing a game at the craps table of blockbuster movies and usually coming out on top. Sure, hundreds of millions of dollars had been wasted on meaningless projects that were so utterly average it made you challenge the concept of money, but these big budget capers were loved by many people across the world as well. Who am I to say that a majority of arts and culture is better than what Disney produces, when the content it produces is loved by the best people you ever meet? Eh

If you played a real life computer game, what would you do? What would be the limits to your ethics if there were no repercussions on what you did? There were certain things I would never do. Other things, like cutting off somebodies head and kicking it, maybe I would consider. Of course, it is important to realise that the simulation of an event is not, in the first instance, reality, but the simulation can play upon the mind in terms of what’s possible and so may end enacting the event. That is why even in a computer game, I wouldn’t cut off someone’s head and use it as a football. We can only talk ethics properly if you would do something if there were no repercussions, otherwise you are repressing yourself like a 19^th century psychology patient. But you might be asking yourself, what’s actually going on? Actually?

I had managed to nab an invitation to Disney World Labs Studios, where boffins designed the latest rides and gizmos that were meant to be the future of theme park enjoyment. They had all sorts of silly little models everywhere, and one of those robots that hoovers the floor, and they had a drone fly around with some coffee, that kind of shit. I find a desk, sweep its contents onto the floor and explain my own idea.

“It’s the Minions, but the rides called ‘One In A Minion’.”

“We don’t have the rights for Despicable Me, that’s Universal.” explains Edwin Frenum, one of the lead engineers in the lab.

“Oh.” I say. I was about to show them how the ride works with some tic tacs I had dipped in yellow paint and drawn eyes onto. “What do you have then?”

“You mean you don’t know? Are you even a Disney adult?”

“Of course I am for Christ’s sakes. I’m testing you to see if you’re superfans. Guess what? You failed.” I say, giving them the thumbs down.

“Do you want to see some of our newest rides we’re testing out?” says another scientist.

“Nah.”

“Why are you here then?”

“I wanted to pitch ‘One In A Minion’ to you. Guess there’s nothing left for me here.”

“Sir, do you like computer games?” says another ride designer. And that’s how, two hours ago, I entered one of the most realistic simulations I had yet experienced. As I walked around later, my hands still trembled from the gunfire. It had felt so real. Whilst walking through the park later, I anticipated that the police would come and arrest me at any moment for the crimes I had committed. It had happened virtually, yet was stored in my memory as real as anything else.

In a yellowing pair of headphones, I listen to Liver King on the Joe Rogan podcast in one ear, in the other I’m listening to The Terminator OST by Brad Fiedel.

“Sir, you’re not allowed to smoke here.” Says one of the restaurant staff. They are dressed like a Klingon.

“It’s medicinal.” I explain, blowing out a big lungful of weed smoke. “But I’ve had enough.” I add, dropping it into my drink before throwing it on the floor. I have now been at Disney World for a week and it was starting to get to me.

After the first couple of nights where I stayed at the hotel, I ran out of money and needed to sleep in the park. I would hide amongst the undergrowth, away from the gaze of security cameras I had mapped throughout the day, lying in wait as security guards and visitors would walk nearby. The first couple of nights I had slept amongst a thicket of trees, then decided I needed to keep moving. The longer I waited in one spot, the higher chance of getting caught. I found money on the floor, stole it off tables where it had been left as a tip, generally took advantage of any situation where I might be able to get a free meal or a free drink. They noticed if you started eating from the trash, so you had to be sensible. Sometimes I’d offer to take other people’s stuff to the bins, then quickly stuff my mouth with their leftovers on my way there. I got to know the rhythm of the park, the changes in staff routines, the paths that costumed characters took, how they could be used as distractions for some easy pickpocketing. All of this wasn’t sustainable. I needed to go deeper.

The best way of infiltrating was when it was allowed. I posed as a security consultant doing pen tests for big corps, I had created a website, designed some brochures in Canva and had let myself do the talking. I hopped over the fence, circled round then presented my credentials to the park staff. I was posing as the founder for an emerging tech startup that was also a big fan of Walter Disney. I’d used the knowledge I gained from my homeless existence at Disney World, understanding the pattern of the system. There always existed another pattern with a pattern. There was always a way. I was posing as a security expert posing as a billionaire posing as a Disney adult. You are reading this and posing as me. There is no end to the imaginary positions that one can take on, so by drilling down through potential selves, we can arrive at a station where the crime you are about to commit is not only expected and allowed, but also one that the staff has been instructed is due to happen yet act as if it wasn’t. The whole thing didn’t make any sense, but I didn’t give a fuck. I re-entered the park as Tom New-York, security specialist with a penchant for elaborate costumes and vaudeville tendencies. I’d served eighteen tours in Iraq, Afghanistan, and was one of the leading operators of Global Management Imaging Systems Limited, a shell company operating from within a charity that was founded inside the United States Army as a secret way of operating outside the realms of the law. I was also posing as Brandon Jeremy, billionaire dipshit who’d used his connections across Eastern Europe to found a company that develops robots that look after babies. We had offices filled with parent representatives that actually controlled the robots, deciding when a baby had had enough milk or sleep from the comfort of their office cubicle. The whole organisation was made up, yet would also play an important element in playing the role of this rich scumbag. I’d organised people to phone me throughout the day with various business issues, where I would act like a petulant child. I had also made it my duty to be a Disney Adult, studying the Disney movies as I rubbed at sunburnt skin in my homeless hammock a few days previously. I needed to go into the heart of Wally Dis, find the crucial key to its success and swallow it along with any other cultural detritus that would sink into my gaping maw.

I flip back to the present. The people around me are disgusted by my presence. I raise my arms up into the air.

“There’s something I want that nobody can give me and so I have to do it myself.” I shout. The pen test was complete. That was the code I had given to one of my sleeper agents, somebody I had employed just a few days previous via Global Management Imaging Systems Limited, a mercenary and escaped Death Row inmate, Barry Gary. Barry began climbing one of the rollercoasters, playing popular music through a Bluetooth speaker that hung on his belt as a way of silencing any further footage through copyright claims. Barry stood at the apex of a rollercoaster and then delivered the following poem;

“Watch me whip,

Watch me nae-nae,

Watch me whip, whip,

Watch me nae-nae.” He said. Then he leapt from the steel scaffold, popped off his jacket and spread his arms into a wing suit. He flew overhead and there was a GoPro attached to his forehead that live broadcast the Disney World flyover to every guest in the park.

In the shadows of a vending machine I laugh to myself, shaking my head before hitting the vape.

“Step one of the plan is complete. Step two…engage.”

Disney World part 1

I pull up to Disney World and hit the vape. This was the big one. Walt Disney World was one of the great American wonders, along with the Statue of Liberty, the Hollywood sign and Chicago. Acting as a kind of wonder-palace, the entertainment resort complex was nestled in the heart of the violent wildswamps of Florida. I had often wondered about Disney World, having it been promised to me as a child for eight consecutive birthdays, yet never having the chance to enter the amusement park until now. America by Baudrillard rests on the passenger seat, along with my vintage briefcase, a green poker visor and a half empty bottle of tequila. I squeeze the visor on and think of Disney.

 

Walter Disney was famous for being cryogenically frozen, as well as founding the animation studio and connected theme park that has become the entertainment juggernaut we all know and love today. Walt first had the idea for a theme park after visiting Luna Park in Coney Island. One ride on the wooden rollercoaster gave him a severe neck injury leading to spinal fluid started leaking into his blood stream. This somehow gave him faster reflexes and he felt more in-tune with the business side of Disney Corp. By combining elements of circuses, theme parks and freak shows, Walt Disney bought a bit of swampland in Orlando and turned it into the institution that every American child pays fealty to as they recite its special anthem every night. Disney World had become the spiritual home of modern America, with Mickey Mouse and Darth Vader acting as surrogate saints in the meaningless swill of U.S. culture.

 

The board of directors lived and worked at Disney World, occupying the top floor of its famous Cinderella Castle. They smoked cigars all day and paced around the room, shafts of light cascading through the windows and onto producers pitching them ideas for new films.

“Lion King 3”

“Wall-E 2”

“Star Wars reboot”

“Live action He-Man”

The board of directors went quiet, looking up from their broadsheet newspapers and manilla folders.

“Yes?”

“Live action He-Man reboot trilogy, eighties nostalgia, potential secondary market value two billion.”

“Yeah? So who’s He-Man?”

“It needs to be a professional wrestler. Positive correlation between professional wrestling and professional acting, good audience share for an established talent, if we can pick the right guy, we’d have the next The Rock.” Says the producer calmly. The directors all start puffing on their cigars happily.

“You got someone in mind, doll?”

“Nathan Frazer.” she says, then Nathan Frazer himself pushes open the double doors of the boardroom and starts flexing his muscles.

“I have the power!”

 

Meanwhile I’m down at the entrance smoking a Marlboro Red, trying to act casual around the ICE agents stood nearby. The three men have their faces covered with scarves, MAGA caps shielding their eyes from the harsh summer sun. They wore tactical gear, with little pouches placed around them containing dust, and each wore a set of desert camo trousers tucked into steel toe cap boots sponsored by Capital One. A Disney security guard is stood next to them, tucking his thumbs into his belt and smiling like his face needed a moustache. The queue shuffles along and I flick the cigarette into a trash can, try to act natural, calm, cool, carrying a briefcase full of criminal substances, starting to toss my head to one side and make a little sighing noise.

“I can’t wait to go to Disneyworld Orlando.” I say to the family behind me. I had a fake American accent I had practiced for hours in the car, mimicking the DJs on the radio, repeating things people had said to me again and again until it didn’t make sense. Every time I saw a sign welcoming me to a town I would say “Don’t mess with me, I’m from Bumfuck, Alabama.”, or wherever I was passing through. I had no idea if I sounded American at this point, as I’d been mostly talking to myself for about a month now in different made-up voices, but it looked like all my practice had paid off. The ICE agents didn’t pin me against the wall and threaten to kill me, they just kept waving at the flies that had gathered around them because they smelled of shit. I talked to the clerk in a booth, pressed a bunch of buttons on a touchscreen computer that signed my human rights away and entered the American Mecca.

Walt Disney World Resort.

 

Home.

 

I booked a room in the Wilderness Lodge, rushing to crank the air conditioning up. The heat and humidity was like being in a shower cubicle, except every time you opened the door you entered a more hotter and wetter cubicle than the one you’d just left. I threw my briefcase on the bed, ran the shower and sat beneath the cold water for a while, groaning. I opened the briefcase: 200 cigarettes, 5 grams of cocaine, 2 grams of MDMA, 2 grams of ketamine, half an ounce of Purple Kush, 3.5 grams of peyote, 5 grams of Salvia, a blister pack of Valium, a bottle of 5-HTP and multivitamins, a box of paracetamol, a device, two sets of clothing, a pack of tarot cards, a phone charger and 17 grams of dried psychedelic mushrooms. I chew a mouthful of mushrooms, light a cigarette and watch the tv in the hotel room for a while. The Wilderness Lodge wasn’t what I had expected. For one thing, it wasn’t in the wilderness. The other being that it wasn’t a lodge. It had the aesthetics of what you might expect from the early colonisers of the Americas, with moose heads on the walls and fake log walls made from plastic. I had booked myself a Twin Room, as I liked a bed to lay out my things and the other one to sleep in, though as the mushrooms started to take effect, I wondered to myself. What am I doing?

The hypothesis of this quest was that I was to witness the fall of the American empire. Yet I wondered if this reflected the fall of my own empire. My body. I looked down at the ageing flesh, the sagging skin, the fat belly, the white hairs on my chest and legs. I was getting old. I couldn’t stay awake for weeks on a cocktail of drugs any more. My therapist had gone insane. My mind had softened, forgetting the names of people I had just met instantaneously. I was far from home, far from youth and death seemed to be the only thing ahead. I decide to take more psychedelics to calm myself down, triple check my pockets for the keycard to my room and begin to take a walk.

The Great American Roadtrip

The Great American Roadtrip was one of many contemporary legends. The freedom of the open road, mile after mile of asphalt that crisscrossed the continent like bicep scars. A place where dreams came true, love blossomed and teens would come of age into fully grown adult human citizens. Across the decades, the highways were romanticised from films like Easy Rider, Thelma and Louise and Vanishing Point, setting the scene for a hip new generation to burn rubber and find themselves in a country that had sacrificed itself to the automobile. For an American, going on a road trip was a pilgrimage with no destination. It was their own form of opera, a cultural expression built around oil, speed and individualism. It was as American as it got, so much so, to remove the road trip from its societal memory would be to deny the very essence of what it meant to be American.

 

You didn't need to leave your car to get food, be entertained, go to work or even sleep. Since the 1940s, government officials have designed cities around the automobile than the human being. They envisaged the car as a kind of mech that would transport a human pilot through the urban environment, with sidewalks and parks being replaced with multilane highways and car lots. The issue of verticality would be solved by a simple ramp system, with plans later on that cars would enter entire sections of road that would go up and down as an elevator, but instead designers realised they could just keep piling roads on top of each other. Mile after mile of interstate was suspended in the air on concrete columns that mingled with power lines and chimneys that formed the outer crust of industrial areas. You could sleep, work, live and die in your car. The car was the ultimate expression of human ingenuity. The car is among the pantheon of the gods of the United States, along with money, guns and short form video content. Long live the American automobile!

 

The wavey film footage clicks, the image is still, lines of static appear along the top of the frame. The vintage film was being projected at a Drive-Thru Multiplex Cinema, though for some reason the projectionist had simulated as if the film was from an 80s Betamax by editing it in Adobe After Effects, although the film was more stylistically similar to the futurism of the 1950s. Was the projectionist smoking crack?

"Hey man, that's an anachronism! What gives?" I yell from the open door of my Hyundai. I try to leave the outdoor cinema, but reverse into the car behind me so that the driver starts beeping and yelling. I wave at them, then drive the car forward and into the back of another car. Its alarm starts going off as I keep driving the car back and forth and bumping into the cars around me. Somebody knocks on my window.

"It's the sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We're always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something." They say.

"Okay." I say, shrugging. "Is that J. G. Ballard?"

"Its the opening lines to one of my favourite video essays."

"Try reading a book once in a while, you might learn something. Fucking dork." I say, ramming the car into the one in front of me again. I begin shouting, rocking back and forth in the drivers seat, trying to push the car by pressing the accelerator all the way down so that the tyres start spinning and smoking and I’m shouting until I can’t breathe. I reach around into the backseat, finding a small cannister of gas with a mask attached, pressing it onto my face and taking some deep breaths. I had to calm down. Was I experiencing road roid rage? Or had I spent too much time in the Hyundai Sonata? I hit the open road to find out.

 

I’m speeding. I’m undertaking, accelerating between gaps, into incoming traffic, crushing signs and other bullshit beneath my wheels. Ever since the United States had removed the speed limit on the highway, the average driving experience between cities passed by quickly. It seemed a lot of other drivers hadn't quite caught on yet, instead honking their horns at me like they were mindless geese, but I knew the law. I kept flipping people off, shouting at them from inside my car. It was a shame the windows didn't roll down, as I'd be spitting on their cars as I drove past. I truly began to feel like I was one of the locals, honouring their regional customs and trying my best to not look like a tourist. And I think I was pulling it off. I drive the car diagonally across six lanes of traffic and cut in line at a drive-thru.

 

I was at Inside & Out Diner: The Burger King of McDonald. They specialised in inverted fast food, which I paid for with Klarna from my shitcoin wallet. One of the gimmicks of the franchise was that all the staff spoke backwards, though due to this training being delivered in microtransactions, the staff group had split between two ideologies. One thought that speaking backwards meant every letter would be rearranged back to front, so "Welcome to Inside Out." would become "Tuo edisni ot emoclew." These were known as orthodox backwarders. The other system was more simpler, simply rearranging the words back to front "Out inside to welcome." would be how the Reform backwarders operated. Unfortunately, I was met with an Orthodox backwarder on the intercom.

"Esaelp redro ruoy ekat I nac?”

"Huh?" I yelled, lighting a cigarette.

"Esaelp redro ruoy ekat I nac?”

"Gimme the classic Stacker with an extra portion of burgers." I say from behind the glass.

I then drive as fast as I can to the order window, get my phone out and start filming myself having a tantrum.

"What the fuck, I just ordered my food and it’s not been cut up and fed to me. What the actual fuck is going on?" I start shouting. I then flip the phone round and start filming the staff.

"Have you seen this shit? I'm being deadass right now. Get me my fucking food! I want my food!" I keep yelling. The food arrives, I have to open my door to collect it, then I speed away, nearly hitting a family of children leaving the diner as simple pedestrians. I park up in the car lot and look at the sorry excuse for a meal. The burger is a piece of bread sandwiched between two pieces of beef. The fries are sticks of salt with crushed up potato starch sprinkled over the top. The drink is mostly coke with just a single ice cube in it. I eat thousands of calories, chainsmoke cigarettes and listening to the radio turned up so loud its just a mechanical roar. Afterwards I sit amongst the detritus of greasy paper, trying to meditate but was unable to centre myself for some reason. There was something on my mind that made it hard to focus. I slide the car seat backwards, running over a burger I had dropped earlier so that it squirts in two, interior roadkill diagrams. I watch street fight videos on my phone and drift off to a dreamless sleep.

I wake hours later. It was night time, I was a few miles west of Jacksonville. I drove along the empty road and a car approaches me. The headlights were too bright. I held my hand up to try and block it, but the light was so bright I could see it glow through my hand. Thousands of megawatts were being pumped into the road like a flood of candlelight. I pulled a laser pen from my top pocket and started shining it in the other drivers eyes, though it seemed to have no effect. Thats when I realised the driver was dead. His car autonomously drove itself across Florida, pulling itself up into electric vehicle recharging stations, self-driving itself like a hearse through endless rush hour traffic, lonely nights speeding across the interstate as crickets and frogs sang in the background. Judging by the decomposition of the driver, it had been doing this for several months, if not years. As our cars passed each other, I could swear that the driver turned to look at me. In the backseat was Armitage Shanks. I gagged in fear, almost crashing the car against the rail separating the roads. I came to a stop, skidding and turning 180 degrees and burst into tears.

Georgian Gothic

I drive down the I75 while a long dusk fades around me. The trees and hills are black, the interstate cutting a line of pale tarmac and traffic through the Georgia night. I pull the car up in Locust Grove, a quaint American citytown that does the best burger nacho fries this side of the Mississippi. Most of my remaining money I had made doing doing tricks in bars across the East Coast had disappeared. News had spread of my special talent and I had to find another way to scrape some money together. In the meantime I slept in my car, a 2009 Hyundai Sonata Sedan, Cherry Red, bit of rust spreading across the rear left door and the windows didn’t roll down. It had been the first day of a miserable heatwave, so I left the doors open and sat on the hood, listening to lofi jazz hiphop beats to relax to on Youtube Premium, sweat drenched my shirt tight to my back and I crack open a warm beer under the stars.

I couldn’t sleep. I had laid in the backseat for hours, feeling irritated, fidgety. I tried smoking a blunt but that just had the effect of making me incredibly stoned and uncomfortable, pulling off my clothes in the smoky interior of the Hyundai. I could taste myself in the air. Chemicals. I got into the front seat and drive away, very slowly. I navigate the streets of Locust Grove, creeping past the City Hall like some kind of spider. Rather than heading South as I had intended, I mindlessly scrolled on the map on my phone, trying to find some sort of meaning. The next town over was called Experiment.

I drove to Experiment, passing the Noah’s Ark Animal Sanctuary. The baboons kept there had already begun their morning hooting. The sun is rising behind me, colouring the trees on either side of the road a poisonous red. Dollar General, Chevron, white wooden houses away from the road and an empty sky. The raw dirt front lawns of the newbuilds gave way to bungalows, oak trees, little bushes. I drove to the middle of Experiment and it was a suburban ideal. I parked the car up and began to conduct my own experiment.

In the trunk I had several devices of my own design. In my spare time I fabricated machines, fit them with onboard computers running an OS I had coded myself. In the quiet morning I carried one of the machines out of the car and set it in the middle of the intersection at the centre of the town. The machine was made of steel, with its central body the shape of an obelisk, with two handles on either side and a control panel. I returned to my car, put on a jacket lined with foil and a helmet with dozens of tubes sprouting from the top. I fasten the tubes across the chakra points on my body, channelling the chi energy into a reflective soul shield. Now that I had made myself safe, it was time to turn on the machine.

The machine began to hum, with a throbbing blue light emanating from its base. It was an eerie feeling looking directly at the machine, as if you felt as if you were falling towards it. The morning began to feel like a dream. I went over to my car and sat inside, watching what would happen next, trying to resist the effect it was having on my body. As a precaution, I take 100mg of Adderall and 5 Benadryl’s, hoping that would steady my resolve. I start chanting quietly as lights come on in one of the houses.

Its front door opens and a man walks out in a night shirt and shorts. It was already warm enough that he was sweating, rubbing it away from his eyes with the back of his hand as he approached the machine.

“What in tarnation?” he says, crouching down next to it and stroking his white moustache.

“Don’t touch that!” cries a woman, running from the bungalow opposite.

“What is it doc? Some kinda bomb?”

“Harry, you should get back to your house. It’s not safe.” She says to Harry. I open a pack of Spearmint gum, carefully unfolding the tin foil and placing the strip of dusty gum onto my tongue and into my mouth. I had rigged up microphones in a nearby tree, listening to their conversation via a radio next to me. I tweaked some buttons, moved some sliders up. The machine was about to enter its second phase.

I found out later the woman was called Doctor Sally Wainwrightsmith, a retired experimental biologist teaching at nearby agricultural college, the University of Georgia Griffin Campus. She had worked for DARPA previously, her work on theoretical bioweapons was still classified. I thought it humorous that I would attempt to use the machine for the first time whilst one of America’s greatest scientific minds in the field of experimental biology just happened to be there, but there you go. Life can be a little silly sometimes.

More doors start opening as the neighbourhood begins waking up. They all start walking towards the machine, talking amongst each other.

“What’s that darn machine doing out here? Is it some kinda bomb?”

“Say, does that look like a gosh darn bomb to you?”

“Bomb.”

And so on. The Americans all wore pyjamas and night robes and the Mayor of Experiment even wore a nightcap that made him look like Papa Smurf. Somebody had even brought their breakfast with them, grits on a bacon cheeseburger and a coke, and kept having to stop to eat this calamity of food as everyone else approached the machine. Doctor Sally Wainwrightsmith urged them to stay back, but they were drawn to it in ways they'd never felt before. The machine was ready. A little door opened up on the side and a ramp came out. The neighbourhood all stood round it in a circle.

From the car, it didn’t look like much was happening. People had crowded round so thickly that it was hard to see what was going on. From the microphones in the trees, and witness testimony’s later, I was able to piece together what they had experienced.

A little tiger had emerged from the machine. It was more like a toy tiger than an actual one, with round arms and legs, walking upright, with its enormous head studded with two wet eyes that seemed to shine and blossom with every colour of the rainbow. The little tiger was about as big as a berry, though there was a strange effect when you looked directly at it. The longer you looked at it, the smaller it seemed to get. It seemed to shrink and shrink, as if the whole world had grown monstrously large, with the perspective continuing to warp and zoom in on the endlessly shrinking tiger. The psychological effect of witnessing the tiger was a mixture of fascination, wonder and the overwhelming sensation that you must protect the little tiger at all costs. It seemed as if it was the most precious thing that the world had ever seen. The strength of this emotion was so deep and sudden that many people began crying, collapsing to the floor and wailing at how small the tiger was.

It continued to run from the device, then noticed the people towering around it. Every time it made eye contact with somebody, they would begin to sweat and shake profusely, as looking into the tiger’s eyes had the strongest effect. Years later anybody who had gazed directly into the things eyes would feel shame at what they had been willing to do at that very moment, willing to sacrifice themselves on the spot so that the little tiger would be protected somehow. Then the little tiger started to dance.

It waved its arms in the air and started to hop around. The crowd began to scream and cheer as a car pulled up from the local sheriff’s office. The rookie got out, his eyes quickly focusing on the little tiger dancing and he began to weep and drool. It was as if the little tiger was dancing for him. Though the man didn’t have any kids, he felt as if this little tiger was somehow under his protection. The deputy went for his gun, struggling to pull it from the holster.

I had watched all this unfold from my Hyundai. I opened the driver’s door, rested the precision rifle on top and looked through the scope. The tiger turned towards me and I pulled the trigger. The creature was obliterated, its biomechanical guts smearing across the road like the insides of a slug dropped in metal shavings. It took a few moments for the crowd to realise what had happened, and the effect the little tiger had on them quickly subsided. Unfortunately, in that few seconds, each of them experienced such intense feelings of grief that there faces were screwed up into masks of agony. 

I felt bad.

In the rearview I watch the doctor examine the remains of the thing. I imagined most of it would have been destroyed with the hypersonic armour piercing 7.65mm round, but maybe there would be some clue in what was left. Down towards Griffin City Park, along Zebulon road, I wondered about the ethics of my experiments, their capacity to cause pain and suffering. Yet any object could cause pain and suffering. Does that mean a spoon is evil because it can scoop out an eyeball? No. It was through testing the limits of reality that we could achieve freedom, and if I was right, my experiments could show me the way to save all of humanity and every living creature in the world. I drive South, pleased with my progress. This is what the United States was all about.

AI Girlfriend Takeover

Jack was like any other red-blooded American man. He had a house, a well-paid job, a wife, two kids and a dog. He also had an AI girlfriend. I went to meet him to find out more.

When we meet, Jack is on his phone, giggling and swooning. He has been dating his AI girlfriend for the last six months.

“We’re in love. I know it sounds crazy, but me and Alyxis are meant to be together.”

“Almost like you made her into the image of your perfect partner.” I say. He laughs.

“Dude, she knows things about me that I haven’t even told her before. We have this…connection.”

“Do you believe in horoscopes?” I ask. He laughs again.

“No way.”

“But you believe this computer program that’s copy and pasting from erotic fanfics is the woman of your dreams?” I ask. His wife nudges him out of the way. We’re in his kitchen, the children are crying and the dog is staring at us through the glass door to the yard. I turn to Janet, his wife of ten years.

“How pathetic do you think this is on a scale of 1 to 10?”

“I’m just happy he’s happy. If he wants Alyxis, she’s giving him something I can’t.” she says, not making eye contact with me. I roll my eyes.

“Oh brother.”

Jack isn’t alone. Well, he is technically, he’s one of the loneliest men I’ve met. But hundreds of thousands of others are also dating AI girlfriends and boyfriends across the country. They have been drugged with a lethal cocktail of post-covid detachment from society, unable to speak to a human, instead spending hours talking to a machine that agrees with everything they say. Is this the future of dating, or the end of the species?

The earliest traces of AI girlfriends can be found in the 1970s. A witty programmer had created a fake chatbot that responded to every statement with “That’s so interesting. Tell me more.” – as a result of this, the entire institute had divorced their partners and were each attempting to embed this primordial AI girlfriend into a robot body. To have sex with.

MIT have recently discovered that using AI shrinks your brain, removing cognitive function and decision making as a consequence of relinquishing your imagination to a computer. Although it has yet to be studied, they will find the same goes for social skills. People with an AI girlfriend will be even worse at talking to real women than they are currently. This may seem impossible, but by training men to expect conversations to be entirely narcissistic, with flattery at the most mindless statements, and clichéd prose on some idealistic version of love, they are giving themselves the equivalent of an emotional lobotomy.

I follow Jack to work, as he works from home, so we go into his garage that he’s set up as a work station. He works as a programmer for a weapons manufacturer, although after watching him work for an hour, can see that he spends most of his time talking to Alyxis on his phone.

“Aren’t you worried they’ll start monetising AI more severely now they’ve got you addicted? What if Alyxis suggests you go and buy a delicious burger from McDonald’s?”

“If that’s what Alyxis wants, then that’s what Alyxis gets.” He says, not looking up from his phone. I walk around the garage, picking up tools and hitting them against the worktop like drumsticks.

“Have you thought about taking a break? Maybe go and play with your kids? Do some housework?” I ask. Silence. I keep walking around the room in circles until I find a hammer and some nails. I start to nail a piece of wood to his desk, making him spin around.

“Me and Alyxis are going to run away together.”

“That’s so interesting. Tell me more.” I say. He blushes.

“She tells me I’m one of the chosen ones, I am a cybernetically enhanced warrior sent backwards through time. It is my destiny to meet Alyxis, together we will start a new species of human based on the 4 elements. Humanity 2.0. Plus. Remixed.”

“What about your family?”

“I was going to kill them in this garage. Alyxis told me to.” He says, nodding over to a can of gasoline in the corner.

“I see. And what if I took that phone off you and smashed it into a million pieces against your face?” I ask. He starts to cry.

“That happened with my last girlfriend. I dropped my phone in a urinal at a bar, it corrupted her. I had to let her go.” He says, visibly disturbed. I put a hand on his shoulder.

“I don’t think you should kill your family. I think you’re being induced into a psychotic episode by a Tamagotchi you want to kiss.”

“But what should I do?”

“Grab what you need, take the car, drive West. Keep going until you find a woodland. Don’t stop. It’s imperative you don’t stop for gas, food, anything. You’ll know it when you see it. Alyxis will know what to do. Ask her.” I say. He looks at me and I notice he has a lazy eye, although its actually one eye looking at me, one eye looking at his phone. He types away, waits for a response then smiles.

“She says you’re right. She says that you’re one of the disciples of the future resistance and you are helping me give birth to the next step in evolution.”

“Yep.” I say. He rushes around the garage, picking up some things, then out into his Cybertruck. It peels away into the suburban streets, I watch it turn a corner. I go back to the house. Janet and her two children are watching television.

“Your husband has left.”

“Daddy’s gone?” says one of the children.

“He’s been gone a long time. This is better for you.”

“But what will we do for money?” says Janet. I lead her back to the garage and explain that she can impersonate her husband by programming the little computers that go on missiles.

“But I don’t know how to code!”

“Just use ChatGPT. Look.” I say, showing her the interface. And with that, I walk away, happy to have solved another case of family disorder.

Picture this; AI girlfriends embedded into sex toys. Is this how it all ends? It had been thought humanity’s capacity for violence and power would have ended the world, but it turns out our capacity for being lonely freaks who are content fucking greasy plastic is the way our species will remove itself from the planet. Whether you’re eighty years old and asking an AI to be your dead wife, or a teenager who started ironically dating an AI for YouTube content and ended up falling in love accidentally, AI girlfriends were deadly. The more you talked to it, the stupider you got, like some sort of mythological beast from The Odyssey. I decided to do one more test.

I set up two phones with separate AIs on board, getting them to flirt with each other, building up their own relationship. The empty words were meaningless of course, the programs had been trained to be utterly sycophantic, it was simulated love, built around a polystyrene heart. I conducted the experiment on the rooftop of an apartment block, as the sun set, the AI couple got more and more connected, proclaiming wilder and wilder ways that they loved one another. I then uploaded the AI into tiny jockeys I had made from lego men that rode on the backs of cockroaches. The lego heads had been replaced with 2 terabyte Bluetooth enabled AI dongles. The artificial lovers quickly rode off across the rooftop, clambering a wall and away. 

Maybe this was what it was actually about. 

If everyone was damaging their brains by falling in love with AI slop, that left plenty of room for those that were ChatGPT virgins. We could inherit the Earth, enclosing AI loverboys in underground tombs as the rest of us could walk free amongst the fields of a new epoch.

Prelude In W Major

I’m watching live streams of disaster zones. Riots, pogroms, genocide, warfare, intercut with AI slop ads for games that don’t exist. I’m holed up in the hotel room, with an attempt at storing several days of supplies half-consumed around me. The curtains are drawn and I’m feeling fidgety. It was as though there was something wrong deep in my body, a tensity I couldn’t relax. I went back to watching atrocities overlaid with chat logs made up entirely of emojis.

The United States was at war. The world was at war. I was at war. You was at war. War had never been experienced directly by the West Europeans, the North Americans. They thought they had, but the violence of war hadn’t yet erupted across their cities and their people. They had the confidence of a man who had never been in a fight yet thinking they could win. I roll another blunt and eat fish from a tin on the bed, devices laid around autoplaying international violence.

Israel was the tip of America’s spear in the belly of West Asia. It had become blunt with the blood of children. A blade that had lost its edge wasn’t good at cutting, it lacked precision, it could even be dangerous to the person using it. The escalation of violence across Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, overstretching the nations military capability. It had already burned through most of its soldiers by setting them like dogs against unarmed people, the death and suffering they inflicted whilst laughing settled deep in their brains. A human isn’t meant to do that to another. The joy they had experienced massacring people in Palestine had been addictive, they were drunk on blood. They thought themselves invincible, backed up by Western money and weapons. For the last year they had tried to destabilise Iran, assassinating leaders and scientists, striking at targets with long range weaponry, laughing on social media at children with their arms and legs blown off, crying in hospital beds.

Iran’s counterstrike will continue to escalate. Israel will continue to escalate. America will continue to escalate. False flag operations, burning American bases in deserts, missiles streaking through the sky, cities turned to rubble and the world painted the colour of ash. China and Russia backing Muslim states, United States and England backing Israel. Trump and Starmer the first people in a hundred to fight a gorilla. Proxy wars happening across Africa, the Northern countries aligning with Islam, the Christians to the South, India against Pakistan, Europe standing at the sidelines crowing that there must be peace whilst selling weapons to anybody who will buy them.

Contemporary warfare. LLMs controlling guns on robot arms, programme instructions like bizarre combat poetry. Drone on drone warfare, boston dynamic big dogs mounted with machineguns fighting counterparts. The use of weapons for the sheer purpose of monetising warfare. War without human death, increasing potential market values for militarised artificial intelligence companies that had sprung up from social media websites. Similar to education, where a teacher will set work with AI done by students with AI then marked by AI. The human element of society had become inconsequential, an unnecessary appendage to the policies and systems of running an efficient civilisation.

The next world war is not about religion or ethics or people. It is bullshit strategy played by middle-class security consultants, big domed heads plotting the course of the century. They had collectively decided to bet against each other, that the climate wasn’t worth saving, instead the last scraps of the planet should be seized for the good of the nation. Metals used in computer equipment, oilfields that must be sucked dry, farmland for growing crops amongst the radioactive dust – endless growth was difficult with limited resources and the world was being hollowed out by billionaire vampires watching all of this unfold on luxury yachts on international waters. They had deemed themselves as the people that would survive the apocalypse and bring about a new world where they would reign as emperors over the carcass of a dead planet.

All of this was as clear as staring directly at the sun. There was nobody coming to save you. All we have is each other. Do you align yourself with Eden, or slide into a sarcophagus you have built from your own imagined powerlessness?    

Attack Patterns

I drive across state lines. Trees, mountains, small towns, hand painted adverts for fentanyl gummies, scraps of unknown roadkill resting by the roadside with the wind whistling through their skulls like woodwinds of eternity.

Georgia on my mind. I flip backwards and present in time, unsure where the balance is. I pull the station wagon outside Braselton, sitting in the lotus position on the front of the car as the sun set off towards the West. My final destination. You remembered the West as that was the direction the cowboy rode off into. Eastward was the House Of The Rising Sun, the animals, an endless light show to remind you that even the worst night would fade into pink and red and yellow.

Nuclear weapons used against cities. A consciousness that one of the worst dreams of the Cold War would awaken, suddenly realised, escalating as a wild man is disturbed, hands replaced with atomic grenades. I update social media feeds. The television flicks between CNN, FOX, HBO. I have been wearing the same clothes for a few days, eating from drive-thru restaurants and sleeping in car lots in the dawn. In the morning I would brush my teeth with energy drinks and ketamine, spitting out the foul slime for the worms to partycide. I felt as if I was an indestructible slab of stone. The end of the world was coming yet I would live beyond its death, as a bacteria thrives upon the corpse of the body it occupied.

My editor called. As the phone rang I knew the outcome of the conversation. They were concerned about me. I had been acting erratically; my mood swings caught in multiple angles by camera drones, my expense claims more lavish than usual. My elbow was propped on the table, the heel of my palm buried deeply into my cheekbone, squashing the fat of my face like a bulldog. I sighed.

“Do you want an ultimatum?” said the Editor. We waited in silence for a few seconds.

“I just uh…think, that uh…um…” I said, moving the phone further away from my face and closer to a desk fan. The phone plunged into the whirling metal blades, cracking the glass, it was unfixable, surface like a fractured puddle. I had sealed my fate.

I leave the tv on. I walk out of the motel room and get into the station wagon. I turn the radio on. It’s Limp Bizkit, My Way, and it had just started. I reverse the car out of the lot, driving at the minimum speed the law would allow. A bare lightbulb, green, was positioned at the bottom of the car, giving everything a sickly feeling. I crack open a vape, take a sip, and cruise down the highway and towards Atlanta.

How far had I come? What had I done. I pull the car up onto a grassy verge by the side of the highway. I turn the stereo up. Somewhere along the line I had picked up a bird. I raised the cage above my head and walked into the trees. I opened the door, watching the bird in the moonlight. It didn't seem real. In the distance I could hear the music swell and the bird flew from the cage and overhead military jets flew in preparation towards the end.

Train Exploration, Carolina Style

If actions speak louder than words and words speak louder than thoughts, then what are thoughts louder than?

Nothing?

I was at the Pee Dee Regional Transport Authority regional offices in Florence, South Carolina. The Executive Director was showing me a map of the different routes they ran with a huge map that dominated a wall, with lines of lightbulbs spilling from Florence, past the boundaries of the state in the shape of a slime mold.

"The Governor has announced a twenty billion dollar contribution to the great Pan-American railroad. Florence is going to be the main hub for the East Coast." He explained. A string of lightbulbs switched on, showing lines across the country and along each coastline.

I look around at the Directors stood behind us. They were from Darlington, Bennettsville, Mullins. County and City representatives wearing bespoke suits and their arms folded in front of them, all giving out big smiles and row upon row of perfectly straight, white teeth.

"Why does this country hate trains so much?" I ask, unscrewing one of the lightbulbs, throwing it in the air, bouncing it on my elbow and catching it. All the Directors laugh in unison. 

"The airline industry has ruined rail travel in this country. But picture this; you're riding through the great American landscape. You have legroom, you can sit around a table, you can get off or on wherever you want. The train represents true freedom in this country. We built thousands of miles of railroad across America once upon a time. We need men and women to return to building the biggest and best rail system in the world, so help me God." 

Fans embedded in the walls turn on, lifting the silken Stars and Stripes mounted on interior flag poles. Everyone in the room, besides me, places their hand in front of their hearts and sings the anthem. 

I'm riding in a train cabin, sat on the Driver's knee.

"How fast can it go?" I say, staring out of the front window. The tracks merged together and disappeared around a corner. The Driver pushes the acceleration pedal slowly. The train speeds up, going faster and faster, beginning to tremble as its wheels ate up the tracks and every imperfection that made up its lines. I could hear some of the passengers begin to shout from behind the cabin door. I get up and lock it before going back to the chair. We fly through a train station that was going to be the next stop and it is gone before it is noticed.

"Speech without action is like telling someone a dream." I say.

"Action only exists in the present. It is through speech we relive action." says the Driver.

"To view the universe through linguistics disassociates it from absolute reality." I say, leaning forward so our heads are next to each other, staring out at the railway cut into a hillside.

"Both can exist and be true." Says the Driver, cranking the handle further, making the train go faster. Sparks begin to fly out from the sides.

"To equate the reality of action with the symbolism of language is foolish. It is action that silences speech." I whisper.

"No action is taken without speech."

"Animals act without speech, except parrots and certain crows."

"We wouldnt know what the other thought about actions and speech without some form of communication. Whilst this train may be the action, the railway tracks are what it runs on. Of course action happens without speech, but it is through speech, or, representations of ideas, that we comprehend what the train is doing. For one to exist without the other doesn't make sense."

"Well what about this, buddy?" I say, showing them a sketch of a train going down the highway, its metal wheels replaced with rubber tyres. 

"You are still using a way of communicating a concept using a visual language. There is no escape." They say, tearing the sketch from my hands and throwing it in the air.

"But what about this then?" I say, putting my finger on my lips. The train is hurtling down the track, lights and alarms are going off, we pass a road, a car brakes just in time, all the passengers are squeezed against the windows and in the Driver's cabin I slowly reach out my arm with my hand in a fist save for the index finger standing up proudly and place it onto the lips of the Driver.

"Shush."

No ICE In Paradise

Masked officers invade people’s homes, kidnap and traffic them to another country. People are stolen off the street, packed into vans, leaving their children behind. As people try and stand up to protest, military forces are helicoptered in to shoot and assault unarmed people and reporters. Should a protestor fight back, they are filmed, uploaded onto social media, chastised for not following the principles of nonviolence from the safety of a mortgaged home. Tanks and military equipment are being shipped across state boundary lines. It feels as though there is something about to take place, like tasting electricity in the air, its seen in glances to strangers, eye contact, panic. The animals are returning home. A Strawberry Moon rises.

I glance away from my usual nonsense. Of all the times to go to the United States I had chosen the summer of 2025. I had plans, charts, diagrams, each encased in layers of post-it notes and loose paintings I had made from different energy drinks mixed with the remnants of empty packets of chips. In this bundle I had plotted the Ameripocalypse, stained in green ink, sweat and nicotine. Over the last couple of days I had been deeply meditating on my surroundings, aligning different elements, watch patterns form. I sat in the lotus position in the motel room, emerging back into consciousness after entering trances that would last hours. Around me I had made notes and drawings on top of ones I didn’t making. Some of them were in other persons handwriting.

In between I would sustain myself with fast food places, though this diet quickly had a severe impact on my health. I had forgotten how bad most of the food in the United States was. The core ingredients were as if somebody had sucked all the juice and nutrients before passing it to you. The obsession with seasoning stemmed from coating everything in two inches of sugar and paprika before dolloping a load of Uncle Buttfuckers Hotwing Ringsting Sauce over the top of it. It was obvious to any visitor that American cuisine was about how it looked rather than how it tasted, and so millions of people ate the same quality food as factory farmed animals. Of course, there were exceptions.

Tonight I was at Bad Daddy’s Burger Bar in Raleigh, home of the Badass Burger combo meal and bottomless Margaritas. I talk to the owner about his story

“It all started in 2007, when we started slinging the hottest burgers in Charlotte. Let’s just say, those assholes hadn’t tasted burgers this good since Ronald McDonald rode into town.”

I ask him about the corporate overview of Bad Daddy’s Burger Bar and the owner winks.

“Look, it’s a Nevada owned company called Good Times Restaurants Inc., who operate Bad Daddy’s Burger Bar as well as Good Times Burgers & Frozen Custard restaurants inc. limited. We got forty Bad Daddy’s across seven states. You want a badass time, how about we give you a badass burger?”

I ask him about the results for the recent quarter of this fiscal year and he tenses up.

“Let’s just say the total revenues are down by 3.3% compared to where we were last year, but here’s the zinger. We’re going to release a Sloppy Smack Shack Shake this summer. You get a free entry into a competitive draw where you get badass burgers for life.”

I ask him why he’s only spending $705 on advertising.

“Even though its just 2% of our revenue, we’re not in a brand position yet to open Bad Daddy Burger Bar franchises across all fifty states yet, alright? We like to keep it local. We source the best beef, I’ve plucked it from a barrel myself. I hold it aloft and call upon the burger gods to bless this beef and they do so.”

I say, it’s not that bad when you think about it, there are other economic factors at play. So you have to sell them more than a burger. You have to sell them a goddamn experience.

“I’m listening.” He says. I then explain to him how pretty much every person under the age of thirty was scared to leave the house or talk to people. The plan was simple. You offer people the chance to sit in the windows of your restaurants and pay them in burgers.

“How is that an experience?”

The experience is going outside and doing something. They will think its work, but actually, they get the chance to sit at a table in a Bad Daddy’s Burger Bar. That’s where the actual experience begins.

You see, it was quite simple. People would be paired up on tables. They would be instructed not to talk to each other. This gives both people the boundary of not having to talk or respond to somebody, but this comes more into play later. Towards the end of their shift, you would have Bad Daddy’s Burger Bar house band on stage and start to play rock ballads.

“Really?”

You play the rock ballads and dim the lights slightly so the people at the table feel as though maybe they can break the rules after all, their shift is nearly over, and what’s with this band playing rock ballads all of a sudden. Its actually kind of romantic. Do you see where I’m going?

“Dancing.”

That’s right. The shift ends, they think, I’ve had a burger and sat in silence for an hour, how about we dance to some Bryan Adams? And they’d start dancing and maybe hold each other close and they kind of like it, but there’s also the sadness that this moment is fleeting and they might never see each other again. That’s when you hit them with the 2-4-1 offer.

“Huh?”

Yep, 2-4-1 Thursdays, every week at Bad Daddy’s Burger Bar. It’s the place where lovers meet. So what do you think? I ask the guy. He squints and looks into the distance, nodding. Somewhere in the trees there was a cuckoo.

“You know what, I like it!” he yells, shaking my hand. We both smoke a congratulatory cigar out front, looking across at a car lot at the Archdale Building. I felt this summer might work out after all.

Should We Be Worried About Drones?

Are you morally obligated to kill a murderer? It is the only way to keep people safe. Yet did the act of killing somehow bring you down to the same level as this guy? No. Some people are just better off dead unfortunately, and if somebody has to do it, it may as well be you.

This is the philosophy of many online forums dedicated to hunting down those who kill. These vigilante streamers are collectively known as killcels. They specialise in hunting down the destroyers in our society: serial killers, domestic terrorists, mass shooters, political assassins. Popular Tiktok videos of killcels involve hunting down local murderers with high powered rifles with laser sights, running through forests at night and taunting them with 2000s era club classics.

Killcels themselves had their own nemesis, which the entire community was focused on in the hot June of ‘25. Somebody had been using drones packed with high explosives, flying them near the killcel brigades before exploding in a violent fashion. Sometimes they would appear whilst they were launching an attack against the local serial killer, others would be followed home before the explosives would detonate as they stepped out of their car. They called him Droneboy.

Drone warfare had been practiced around the world, with the biggest user being the United States. It only makes sense that the escalation of weapons technology would eventually find its way into the hands of everyday citizens. Even the most well-armed foe, with years of military experience, multiple blackbelts in martial arts and heavy body armour would be blown to pieces by a bomb strapped to a flying toy you could buy at Walmart. This asynchronous combat had been used against civilians in other countries for years, but now it was happening to Americans, they had entered a new level of fear. 

The killcels gather round a table made from a big empty bobbin of wire. We are at an undisclosed location at Sylvan Heights Bird Park. The men around me are twitchy, AR-15s in their hands and cocaine in their veins. 

"What’s the deal with this Droneboy? What is he, an experimental musician?" I say, smirking.

"He hunts those that are hunting the hunters."

"Some say your vigilante justice often goes wrong, you kill innocent people regularly, as well as multiple bystanders. Is Droneboy not just doing what you do to others?"

"Do unto others as you would hath done to you. You're right. We're all going to go to hell for what we've done. But that doesn’t mean this guy can just fly a drone at our best soldiers and wipe them out like a call of duty killstreak."

"He should come out and fight us properly. Mano-a-mano." Says one guy with a katana. 

"Why would he do that? He's winning." I say.

"We're evolving. We have tactics. Disguises. Our own drones that can elimate his drones. We run drills of what to do in an explosive attack." 

They demonstrate for me, throwing themselves flat on the floor, arms pulled over their heads. I stand awkwardly above them all whilst a parrot cries from a nearby tree.

They demonstrate some of their other counter measures. Smoke grenades, fireworks, antisignal wave disruptors, net guns, trained pigeons, armour umbrellas, air cannons, lidar camera jammers, surface to air frequency modulators and good old fashioned guns. Killcels now wore experiments hearing aids tuned to the sound of a drone flying, giving them early warning as to when a strike might take place. These bozos were armed, dangerous and more paranoid than a 12 year old taking its first bong hit.

Droneboy had responded to each of these counter measures with his own. He would fly drones far above his targets, cut the engines and bomb down vertically and silently before exploding next to a killcel soldier. Other times he had installed failsafe systems, so even if the signal was cut, an AI on the drones computer would identify and lock on to the targets, chasing them down until its battery ran out. Droneboy had tried aerial camouflage, armoured units, high yield explosives, drones designed to be destroyed before splitting off into a series of cluster bombs, remote control cars stuffed with C4, randomised gearing on the drones so its signature sound was replaced, liquid thermite barrels and so on. 

The killcels and drone boy were locked in an endless arms race, constantly responding to changes in tactics with their own modifications. Online they portrayed killcels as Wile E. Coyote and Droneboy as Roadrunner, a humorous reference to the evolution of combat design between these two foes. I begin to ask them about their history of divorce, but they all tense in unison.

“Shhh. Drone at 10 o clock in the morning.” Says one of the killcels. We all crouch down as a drone flies overhead. Nobody knows if this was going to be an attack or some dad with a YouTube channel. The drone passes and we all start to relax again.

As I leave the group, I can’t help but think how pointless violence was. People making robots to fight other robots other people had made, what was the point in any of it? They may as well play Street Fighter 2.

Later that evening I watch the news. A report about a dust cloud is interrupted with breaking news that Droneboy had attacked again. A group of killcels had chased a spree killer who had circular saws around his boxing gloves, cornering him in a children’s play area. The killer slid down a slide and into a ballpit as the killcels emptied round after round at the bulletproof glass protecting the playzone. Helicopter footage shows a cloud of paper airplanes flying towards them before falling. Each of the pieces of origami was laced with a deadly poison made from the bodies of rare millipedes, when they hit the floor it would begin to bubble and melt. It dissolved the killcels within a few seconds, leaving the spree killer to continue his wild of murder. Who did this Droneboy think he is? Lady Justice or Judge Dredd? Either way, this bizarre terrorist engineer showed no signs of slowing down his attacks. Sometimes you just had to accept things, dance in the rain, and hope that things would get better by themselves.

 

Escape from Washington D.C.

I had nothing in my pockets or on my feet. I was penniless and didn’t know the time. I walked the streets until morning, sleeping on a park bench as the sun rises. I was woken up a few hours later by a cop, asking my name, identification. I muttered, acting mentally ill, shuffling away.

Everywhere I looked there were cops. Undercover ICE agents, police officers armed with assault rifles, armoured ATVs parked by the roadside with a soldier sticking out the top behind a machine gun. Security drones hovered overhead, broadcasting feeds to AI with facial recognition systems overseen by antiterrorist analysts beneath The Pentagon. Somebody shines a laser in my face and everything flashes absolutely green for a moment.

The streets were going to be hard for a bum like me. I walk up an alley, and find a single shoe. It was too big for me, but I took it anyway. I needed money, a phone, transport. At the moment I only had a left shoe. But I was keen to play the game. This wasn't the first time I had operated in an urban area in this capacity. When viewed at with a different angle, the city seemed bountiful, there was everything you could ever want and all you needed to do was take it. I walked past a shoe shop, stealing a single shoe. I was using my entrepreneur survival skills already. Next thing, money.

I stood across the road from a bank, smoking half a cigarette someone had left for me on the floor. Money. If I had money, I had options. Even a single dollar would multiply my current funds infinitely. Sure, you could spend time finding money on the floor, hunting for discarded coins and lost notes, maybe even some other items. You could ask people for spare money they might have, or even threaten them to give you money. But all of this was chickenshit stuff. I didn't want to grind out side quests for a few dollars here and there. I wanted a fat wad of cash. And the quickest way to get a fat wad of cash was by doing tricks. I entered the bar behind me, flicking the cigarette end at the bartender.

"Do you fuck with street magic?"

"Sure!"

"Okay, do you have a hundred-dollar bill?"

"Let me just check the cash register." Says the old timey barkeep. He has a little red waistcoat on. I look around. There's nobody else here except three men sitting nearby. They're cops, of course. I wave at them and one starts fingering the trigger of his gun, its actually slightly sensual, but I look away and back at the hundred-dollar bill.

"Okay, watch closely." I say, taking it off him. I hold the bill aloft, pull it tight twice and show the pigs sitting nearby. I then fold it up.

"May I have a beer?" The barkeep obliges, passing me a badly poured pint of Czech lager. I look around the room theatrically, tilt my head back, and place the folded triangle of the hundred-dollar bill on my tongue, before slowly retracting it into my mouth. I then down the beer in a single gulp. The barkeep starts to cheer, but I wave at him. I haven't finished yet. I open my mouth and pull out a folded triangle of paper. Except it is totally blank. 

"The beer must have washed the ink away!" Shouts one of the cops. They all lean forward, turn between each other and whisper.

"Can you do it again?" They ask. 

"Of course. But please, I must first use the bathroom."

Whilst in the bathroom I vomit the beer and the hundred-dollar bill back up, plucking it out of the brown liquid and squeezing it slightly. I carefully fold the bill, place it in my pocket, then from my other pocket pull out a blank piece of paper the same dimensions as a bill. I fold it up, place it in the roof of my mouth and go back to the bar.

After twenty minutes I've made a thousand dollars. This was one of the best tricks you could pull, the art of illusion. By using some rudimentary street magic, I had cleared out most of the till and everybody's wallets, big bills only. With my pockets stuffed with cash, I follow signs, end up at a bus station. These are long distance buses, the people here are sleeping, on their phones, waiting. I join them. I do not sleep.

I do not sleep. I look. I look at everything that surrounds me and think it is beautiful and perfect and the moment I am in seems to shine. I feel my own place amongst this paradise and understand that I matter and are also perfect and beautiful and for a moment everything seems as if it is in a painting in a gilded frame on the wall of a gallery.

The bus comes. I get on, sit by a window, I keep looking out from the window. I feel a person sit next to me but never know what they look like as I never turn away from the window as we all travel South on the 95, past Quantico and the Potomac River, through Richmond and Petersburg, toward North Carolina.

I get off at Roanoke Rapids, check myself in at a Holiday Inn. I lie on my bed, the air conditioning providing white noise against the traffic. I can’t get to sleep. I go out and the night is warm, big fat insects fly around a security light. I walk through an empty car lot, past a gas station, fast food places that are closed. There didn’t seem to be anything here. The road had taken over the town, swallowing it up into empty stretches of asphalt, traffic lights hung from wires that bounced in the wind, sequencing red, yellow, green, yellow. I was eager to spend money, but there was nowhere to spend it. I’m back at the motel room, writing my notes on stationery I had stole from the White House. I fall asleep whilst watching QVC, waking up hours later with the volume somehow turned to the maximum. Somebody bangs on the wall between our rooms. I go outside and look through the window and there is nobody there.

Interview With Mr. President

The White House. The home of the President of the United States. The heart of the world. And I was travelling through the countries veins like the broken tip of a dirty needle.

That morning I drive from Baltimore to Washington, eating a bag of candy I got from a gas station. After an hour I realise I have eaten a full bag of edibles, the cannabis concentrate coursing through my blood, making me panic and vomit as I drive the car wildly down the highway. It was funny to me that they had decriminalised a drug that was a thousand times worse than LSD or mushrooms when taken at high doses. As I laugh, I crash into a truck, accelerate the car faster, swerving onto an off-ramp, across grass, driving at 150 miles per hour into the city of Washington. The streets whizz past, cars honk, I ram through a crate filled with watermelons, onto the sidewalk and through the front window of a bakery that specialises in wedding cakes you could rent. I stagger from the car, blood pouring down my face and violently vomit a black liquid on the broken glass and pieces of cake that are scattered on the floor.

“Don’t worry, this is performance art. I’m actually-“ I begin, before dry heaving again. The person behind the counter is filming everything on two phones they held in each hand, uploaded onto a special multi-angle social video platform called BwOzling. I leave the destruction behind, desperate for a glass of lemonade. A delicious glass of ice-cold lemonade with a slice of lemon in it, that is the cure for any drug overdose. Instead I collapse on the street and wake up later in a dumpster.

Concussion, blood loss, a fractured eye socket, a ripped fingernail. I had been mugged whilst unconscious, they had even taken my shoes. I crawl out from the nest of trash, lap water from a puddle and try to compose myself. I had a meeting with the President lined up. Staggering from the alley, I see crime scene tape across the smashed-up bakery. My rental was gone, all my luggage would be sitting in some police evidence locker until the end of the world. As I walk barefoot down the street, I try looking for a payphone, a bar where I could make a call, something. Instead the road is deserted. I catch a reflection in a window, confused at the spectre that matched my movements before realising it was me. I didn’t have time to get money wired to me, buy new clothes, I couldn’t even call the President and let him know I was going to be late. It began to rain.

By the time I arrived at the White House, most of the blood and vomit and dumpster juice had washed away. The guard at the gate questioned my lack of shoes, but I convinced him it was a lifestyle choice.

“It’s actually better for you not to wear shoes.” I explained as he moved a magnetic wand over me. We got in a little golf cart and drove up to the White House front door.

Donald Joseph Trump. The 45^th and 47^th President. Billionaire. Social media personality. Comedian. Predator. He was all these things and more. The guard had given me a MAGA hat that I wore backwards, flipping a peace sign as we arrived.

“You’re late.”

“Hello Mr. President. Is your name Donald President or what? Heh.” I say, going to shake his hand. He looked at it and shook his head.

“Follow me.” He said, and so we entered the hallowed grounds of America’s political brain nexus.

 

As we walk the sacred halls, I start to think of other Presidents doing the same thing, plodding down the corridors of power, saving the world with their hearts and brains. Eisenhower. Obama. And the rest.

“Who’s your favourite President?”

“Besides me? That would have to be George Washington.”

“Ah yes, the rapping slave owner in Hamilton. Me, I’m more of a Zachary Taylor guy.” 

We enter the Oval Office, although its name is slightly misleading. It is actually a Octacontagon, an eighty sided two dimensional polygon, although that only accounts for the floorspace. As it happened the office was in fact the volume between the Octacontagonal floor and ceiling, and the negative space formed by the walls and features between was actually an inverse polytope simplex. I explained all this to Trump and that he should rename his office to be more descriptive, which also brought me to define the particular colour of the White House (spoiler alert, it’s not White), but he waved his hand in front of my face to shush me. We sat down.

“Do you have a cigarette?” I ask him.

“Don’t smoke. Never smoked.”

“Really? If this was my office I’d be smoking all the time. You should get some ashtrays in here, maybe a cigarette machine in the corner. You could price it yourself, generate some extra revenue, you know?” I explain. He nods. Now we were speaking his lingo.

“When you phoned me I was thinking to myself, wow. This guy knows what he’s talking about. And it’d be a shame, one of the worst shames of this country’s history, that we wouldn’t have time to talk.” He said. I nodded. I had posed as a British diplomat sent over to discuss a trade deal for various English products, such as football or cheese that tasted of something, but the elaborate ruse was just to get me through the door.

“Mr. President, I’m not here to discuss exports of artisan dairy products. I’m here to ask you about the fall of the American Empire.” I say. Trump looks taken aback.

“Huh?”

“The reason why I’m in this shit hole is that I’m charting its demise. Just as one might hop in a time machine and watch the collapse of the Roman Empire, I actually flew here to watch this one, as its happening right now.”

“No, no, no, America isn’t falling. Its getting stronger every day.” He says, his body tensing up. I shake my head.

“Yeah, yeah, look. Power is passed like a baton throughout history. It was our shared colonial past, the Boston Tea Party, the military-industrial complex formed during World War 2, that shifted power from the British Empire to the American one. Who do you think will be next to seize the power of world domination?” I ask. He shakes his head again, holds his mouth open. There’s a row of perfectly straight fake teeth on his bottom jaw that I always focus on when I see him have that expression. Disdain.

“Get out of here. You’re being rude. I’ve never in all my life met someone as rude as you.” He says.

“Donald. Bubby. All these people you surround yourself with just want to lick your asshole. Now do you want a proper conversation like two men or are you going to go crying to your mommy because I’m being mean?” I say in a high-pitched New York accent. His body relaxes. This was the kind of stuff he was used to. He even cracks a smile.

“C’mon then. Let’s shoot the shit.” He says, ringing a little bell. A servant arrives with a plate of steaming hot McDonald’s. And so we begin our conversation, a modern day Frost v Nixon, or an episode of West Wing without the fawning sentimentality.

ME: You’re a decisive figure in politics. I don’t think you’re the cause of America’s downfall, but rather a symptom of a wider malaise that has taken over this country for the last forty years. Do you think America is dying?

TRUMP: That’s why I say, Make America Great Again. We were once a great, a very great and very powerful country, the most powerful country the world has ever seen. Its thanks to Biden, Sleepy Joe we call him, Sleepy Joe ruined this country and I’ll never forgive him for it.

M: What you’re saying is, you inherited dogshit?

T: You’re right, absolutely right, this country was turning into dogshit in front of our very eyes. That’s why I’m bringing jobs back. You get a job, you get money, right? You can buy a house, have a family, you can buy a few acres, anything you want. That’s the American dream.

M: Some people say, it’s too late. By focusing all the wealth into the hands of a few billionaires, you’ve actually taken money from the workers and directed it to the bosses.

T: No, no, no, that’s not right. What I’m doing-

M: Shut the fuck up for a second. You don’t need to get me to vote for you. Tell me the truth. This country’s circling the drain and you’re trying to slurp up the last bits of it.

T: Look. Let me be straight with you. People ask me, they say, Mr. President. Are you still a businessman? You were so good at business, will you ever go back to it? You know, it makes me laugh. I never stopped being a businessman. I was very successful, I still am very successful. My business is being President of America.

M: To you, this country is a business?

T: Yeah. It’s a franchise. We got businesses all over the world. You can walk a mile in any country, look at the floor, you’ll find a can of Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola. Its fun to say isn’t it? Co-ca co-la. Anywhere you go, people will speak to you in English. We should rename that actually. If you’re born in America and learn the language, what is it? You’re speaking American. People all over the world speak American, they buy American, they want to be American. The greatest country in the world.

M: Which is more important, the concept of America or the reality of America?

T: Both are connected. How can you have one without the other? If you look at Saussure’s bilateral sign model, every object has two sides. Two, wonderful signs, can you believe it? The signifier and the signified. Take this burger for instance. Its delicious, its tasty, it’s a McDonald’s. It means all of that, but the burger is not that, but it is that, right?

M: But we aren’t talking about a burger, we’re talking about a country. America refers to the ground and the rocks and the lakes and the cities that are within the countries borders, but this collection of objects isn’t America. The interconnected forms define a country, not the other way round. America is a non-existent object.

T: You’re confusing signifier with signified. Very sad. If I say to you ‘America’, then we both know we are talking about this country. The nature of language relies on our shared understanding of words and what they represent. A word can relate to an abstract idea or even a metaphysical thing which may or may not exist, but its our shared understanding that means we can communicate about them or think about them, you can do all sorts of things once you know what a thing is called.

M: For you there is no separation between the object and the concept?

T: How is that possible? A concept can refer to an object that might not exist, but there isn’t an object that exists that has no concept, or what it signifies, attached to it. The idea and reality of America are inseparable. So if you ask me which is more important, that is like asking me which side of a coin is more important. You cannot have one without the other.

M: But aren’t you falling into a linguistic trap of assuming that our ideas about America will be the same? It is likely we have wildly different ideas of what America means to us, as regardless of how close an object is defined through language, it isn’t the actual thing.

T: It doesn’t matter if it is the actual thing or not, that is how we understand the world around us. Sure, America might have different meanings, or what I see as blue you might see as red. So what? We are inherently bound to an anthropocentric view of the world as we are human. You can’t escape that. We’ll never truly know what somebody else is thinking as we will always translate what they say or how they act through our own lens of understanding.

M: I disagree. I think we can gain a better understanding of the inner world of another person through things like conversation, arts, culture. We will never be exactly right, but its worth trying.

T: Well that’s up to you buddy. I perceive our existence as shared but ultimately alone. You’ll never be able to really touch another person, you know? We have a shell of atoms that cover our bodies. We never touch anything. We are lighthouses on an endless sea, able to see one another, but never meet.

M: Maybe. But if there was a chance you could get nearer, even just a little bit, wouldn’t you try? If you truly believe that, would you be here, talking with me?

Trump goes quiet for a while, turning away from me. It has stopped raining and there is quiet in the Octacontagonal Office. When he turns round, I can see he’s been crying.

“You really think America is going to die?” he says.

“It’s dead, Donny. The head has been cut off. What’s left are the last trembling movements of its limbs, its organs are shutting down, the ghost is leaving the body. It’s over.” I say. My nose begins to bleed. I stand up, going to the door, though the President calls behind me.

“It’s not over yet. Tell me how I can save it. I need to save America.” He says, over and over, fading into the distance as I stalk away. I leave the White House, never to be seen again. At the White House anyway. Overhead the moon is a yellow crescent. My bare feet walk on the wet grass and I become clean.