Internet Censorship And You

As a journalist, I use a VPN as part of my job. It keeps me safe from legal and physical danger, keeping me anonymous when I'm out in the field, reporting on the stories that matter to you. Whilst working in America, I VPN back to the UK regularly, catching up on my favourite British TV shows like Red Dwarf, or ordering random tables a single fried egg on the Wetherspoons app. I also moderate a drug forum on reddit. Imagine how I felt when the forum I had called my internet vacation home chokeslammed me with an age verification process. It requested to scan my head to check I was old enough to go on the internet. With the youthful plastic surgery I had, it seemed impossible for me to prove I was old enough to look at pictures of plants and pills. Did the government expect people shouldn't know what drugs look like until they were old enough to take them? Had Keir Starmer decided on ethical smut to be distributed to teenage wankers or had he hoped they carve sexual forms out of potatoes like the good old days of the 17th century? 

On the surface, this seemed like a nanny state kneejerk scolding that was prudish and utterly British, dreamt up by a man who would feel uncomfortable saying clitoris. Keir Starmer, the most hated man in Britain, a man who'd roll 2 d6 for a Charisma check and end up with 1, a person shaped piece of recycled paper, a man who goes to an Indian restaurant and asks for a Water curry and a slice of Warburtons toastie loaf, has ushered through another calamitous policy that makes people hate him more than they hate themselves. It is another nail in the coffin for the British public, but unfortunately the person in the coffin is still alive and can't escape because the prime minister keeps nailing the lid shut.

The easiest way to circumnavigate the flimsy pop up are obvious to any Internet user. You simply use a deepfake ai to take the feed from your camera, replace your face with Robert Downey Jr., then spoof the phone on a virtual machine sitting behind your OS, upload the data direct, serverside. You can overwrite the biometrics kept on your pass card with synthed DNA, use that as a kernel for a cryptowallet then set yourself up your own offshore limited company that operates as a multilevel marketing banking system, you start seeing shit at a whole other level.

But lets look at the pattern. In the past month India, France, England, Australia have all introduced strict online policing policies, with the USA bringing in their own censorship measures next month. So far so good. People comply, but if they don't they can just grab a VPN, no problemo. Here's the thing. VPNs are controlled by world governments as a way of monitoring people and collecting data to blackmail them later. At least half of the world’s politicians have had videos sent to them in compromising positions, with no demand for money, just the promise they will be in touch later. If they are too old to know what a VPN is, this happened a long time ago, but the rest are being ushered towards VPNs like pigs at an abattoir. The easily accessible solution to breaking the law turned out to be a latch around the neck, before someone standing overhead blots out the light and puts a boltgun to your forehead and you are still trying to make sense of what was happening then -

Total power over everything is what they desire. It is not a pursuit of money or status or security, at this point it is obvious that they have all these things. They have won, but thats not good enough. They want control. Not just power over a single person, but entire nations, the entire planet. It all starts here. With porn. 

Who are ‘They’? It isn’t governments or billionaires or the CIA, it’s a handful of policy wonks and consultants that have gotten high smelling their own farts and playing 5D chess against themselves, building up a theoretical secret society that quickly slips out of their hands and spreads across civilisation like a computer plague. Hubris. Having a license to use the internet, digital passports, other shit that quantifies the individual to a string of data that can be absorbed and understood by Microsoft Co-Pilot looking at a Power BI dashboard. Entirely unnecessary, widely implemented, the enshittification of everything must continue at all costs.

Censorship at macro and micro levels. A generation that has taught itself to replace words with terms like unalive and grape, replacing vowels with asterisks, avoiding anything challenging because it makes them feel uncomfortable. People who feel weird touching parts of their own body. Autoinfantilisation to adhere to imaginary rules on social media platforms. We are all riding a rollercoaster that is going straight down to hell. The only seed of hope is that this has happened before, again and again through history. It gives rise to subcultures, the punks, the hippies, the buffoons, using what they have to hand to express themselves and to connect to others, to be human. Having a shit internet that barely works will give rise to a generation of computer hackers with silly haircuts and music they programmed with Python. Upload videos containing patterns of pixels that write code into the image file, creating backdoors for third party AI verification systems owned by Palantir and G4S. It is the dawn of the age of the cyberpunk.

Shape

I open the door and there is a man wearing a mask of my face.

“Can I come in?”

“I wondered when you’d arrive. Welcome.” I say. He is wearing a dirty police officer uniform and he smells of electricity. We walk through the hallway and into the living room. I had rented a house for a few days, a lonely chateau surrounded by trees.

“Would you like something to drink?” I say, going over to a minibar against a wall.

“Sit down.” He says. I look over and see his has his hand on a pistol at his hip. I can also see it is made from a single piece of plastic, he had tried to paint it to look realistic but the way the light caught it betrayed the underlying form. It was a replica. I pour myself a gin and tonic, going over to sit on the couch. Floor to ceiling windows across showed the forest night.

“How did you find me?” I ask.

“Footage online. In the background of uploaded photos. Security cameras. I created a program that would scan social media and news feeds, I’ve been tracking you and your car for several weeks.”

“I see.”

“You also review fast food places from the same e-mail account, leaving a trail of one star reviews from here all the way back to New York.”

“Ah, yes.” I say, smiling at the memories. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”

“I’m glad. I need to setup some equipment, would you mind putting these handcuffs on?”

“Please.” I say, holding out my hands. He cuffs me then goes over to a sports bag he had brought with him.

“I was wondering, why are you wearing a mask of my face?” I say. He pauses.

“Do you have the sense of Déjà vu?”

“No, not right now anyway.”

“Neither do I. But all of this is so familiar to me. I have been here before.”

“In this house?”

“In this very moment. You and I, in this room, having this conversation. That is how I knew to wear this mask, the mask of your face.” He says. I drink deeply from my glass.

“Are you a time traveller?” I ask. He laughs.

“No, not quite. I am a scientist. My field of research was Hypnology, the study of sleep. I was particularly interested in dreams. In all the advancements in science, our understanding of dreams is still quite primitive. It was my wish to be able to record dreams, so that they could be studied afterwards.” He says, pulling a metal thing from the bag. It looked like an old-style VR headset, made of metal and beige plastic.

“This machine can record dreams.” He says. I lean closer.

“Amazing. It works?” I say. Video Cop nods, taking a cylinder out of the bag and setting it up. It was a portable projection screen.

“Would you like to see one of my dreams?”

“Is this what you’ve been showing people?” I ask. He shuffles. I had known about him from the news reports. A man dressed as a cop would enter homes, get families to watch something and afterwards they’d barely be able to speak, nevermind tell others what they had seen. The shock of it had turned their hair grey.

“No, no, this is just for you.” He says, clicking a projector on. It takes him a moment to align the blue background within the edges of the screen, then the recording starts.

I see us both in the room we are in. I am handcuffed on the couch, drinking a gin and tonic, he is wearing a mask of my face, both of us watching something being projected on the screen. The dimensions, shapes and colours are a little different, but it was recognisable.

“It seems you had a dream of premonition.”

“I think there are moments in time that are so strong, that they echo in the past as well as the future. Have you ever had a dream and days later, found it predicted something?”

“Not like this. Maybe more metaphorical though, sure.” I say.

“Don’t you see? This is proof that dreams can tell the future!” says Video Cop.

“Or you had a dream that influenced you to then do the thing you dreamt about.” I say. Video Cop sits in a chair next to me, sighing.

“It is too detailed. Too specific. This room. Your face. This has already happened and it has rippled across time. Don’t you see?” he says. I shake my head.

“No.”

“I didn’t come here just to show you my dream. You were asking early what I have been showing others, so let me show you.” He says, taking the dream recorder over to the projector and plugging it in.

“After I had tested the dream recorder on myself, I was curious to see the dreams of other people. At the time I was living with my father, and so I recorded his dreams.” He says. The projection shows a normal video seemingly captured by Video Cop’s phone. It was of a very elderly man, lying in bed. The flash from the phone was on, throwing harsh shadows behind everything, reflecting off the angles of the machine.

“There was a malfunction. The radio waves inside the dream recorder intensified to lethal amounts, acting like a microwave. I had killed my father.” He continues, watching the phone footage of the old man convulsing, vapour starts drifting from beneath the machine. The phone is dropped on the floor, giving us a view of the ceiling, taupe paint over a roofbeam cutting diagonally across the frame, the light shining down beneath the lampshade and into the lens. The video stops.

“I’m sorry.” I say.

“What are you sorry for? Why does everyone say they are sorry? They didn’t do it, I did.”

“It was an accident.”

“I know. But if my father hadn’t have died, the dream recorder would never have captured what it did. I have recorded the mind of somebody dying.”

“I thought it just recorded dreams.”

“It appears as though when we die, we dream. The deceased continue dreaming once life has left the body.”

“What do they dream?”

“The dead dream of heaven.” He says. We sit in the dark room, it has started to rain outside. I finish my drink and look at the man sitting nearby. He seemed to believe everything he has told me. There was a space between the holes in his mask and his eyes, casting dark shadows where his skin was supposed to be.

“What the dream recorder has captured will change the world. We have irrefutable proof that there’s an afterlife. We will need to re-evaluate everything we know about science, religion, death. We might even be able to communicate directly with God.”

“Is this footage what the others saw?”

“Yes. It is unfortunate, it seems for a living person to witness heaven that it drives them insane.”

“But you’ve seen it.”

“Many times. That is why I am conducting my experiments, small control groups, trying to configure the optimal way to experience the recording of my father’s death dream so that it doesn’t cause the current side effects. It would be highly unethical for me to publish this footage online, it could potentially break the minds of billions of people.” He says.

“Are you going to show me?” I say. Under the mask, he smiles.

“I have been looking forward to it.” Says Video Cop, going over to the dream recorder and pressing some buttons. I sit back in my seat and begin to watch.

The footage begins. It is of a landscape, a yellow and white sky. The old man from the video was walking towards a hill. I realise this must have been his dream whilst he was alive. It flashed white, black. There was a sound, so quiet and low, it felt familiar yet totally unrecognisable. What came to mind was a shape, interconnected. It was the feeling of the shape, like hands clasped together over a lock. There was a square of brown, the colour seemed to shift, pulse, move. It was a colour I hadn’t seen before. I noticed the colour wasn’t just limited to the square, but ran in a web across the blackness, seeming to move beneath the surface like tendrils.

A dot. A white dot.

I realised I had been holding my breath, letting it out, breathing in again, transfixed by what I was seeing. The dot expanded, transformed, it was like seeing something in the distance through a telescope you made from your fingers. As the image shifted, I noticed it had gone quiet. There had been another sound before, a hidden roar that had faded. The blood had stopped moving around his body and was now trickling through arteries and veins, miniature red waterfalls emptying into bruised reservoirs. The fuzzy dot continued to grow, turning a dark pale purple. It was a tall room, the old man didn’t look up and so our point of view was locked onto the figure standing there. It was made of stone and cloth, gathering a robe around its face and shoulders so that its head resembled a dolphin. An arm lifted, pointing towards the back wall of the room. A door began to open. And beyond the door was heaven.

Fractal death fields and mountains the shape of fire. An impossible palace lay ahead. All around there was a colourless fog hiding the shapes of things that had no symmetry. The sky overhead held the universe, but as soon as the dreamer noticed it, it seemed to blossom, opening up to the great abyss that lies between. And from it came the sound of a grave.

 

The film ended. We were sat in the dark once again, the rain falling against the window. Video Cop leaned forward, looking at me, his eyes shifting backwards and forwards as he tried to read me. I turn to him.

“Thank you for showing me.” I say.

“You feel okay? You can remember what you have seen?”

“Yes. I also know why I was able to watch it, whilst others can’t.” I say.

“Tell me.”

“I have seen it before.” I say. He is quiet.

“You mean, you have seen it in a dream?”

“No. When I was born, I died. They resuscitated me soon after, but my first memory was of death. The afterimage of heaven had burned itself into my brain, just as the sun does if you stare at it long enough. I had never been sure, but now I have seen it again, I remember.”

“Don’t you see what this means! You and I are destined to meet here! You are the only one who has been able to watch the dream of a dying man, you have to help me.”

“Before I do that, I would like to try the dream recorder for myself.”

“But its dangerous!” he says. I smile, holding the handcuffs up.

“Maybe this is part of how I help you. Besides, I’ve seen your dreams, it seems only fair that you see mine.” I say. After a moment he agrees, and I go to lie down on the couch. Video Cop puts the dream recorder over my head.

“I’ll keep an eye on you. I can also watch your dreams live through the projector.”

“Thank you. See you soon.” I say, winking, before pulling the dream recorder over my eyes and start trying to sleep.

I’m woken up by a man screaming. I pull the dream recorder off my head, momentarily confused between the two states.

“What?” I say. Video Cop is sat by my feet, holding his hands over his eyes. I go over to touch him and he shrinks away, the intensity of his screams rising like an injured child.

“What’s the matter? What did you see?” I ask. His noises soften until he is quiet.

“Video Cop?” I say, waving my hand in front of his face. Unresponsive. I check his pulse, his heart is still beating, arrhythmically. I needed to take off his mask. When I do, two things happen. I see the man beneath the mask staring corpselike into the distance, his hair had turned white and his eyes appeared flat. I also started to get an intense sensation of recognition, feeling as though I now remembered what happens next. After looking at it for a moment in my hands, I pull the mask of myself over my head, leaning close to Video Cop, seeing the reflection of myself in dilated pupils.

“You’re right. I have dreamt about this before. The two of us, here, like this.” I say, straddling him, leaning so close our faces almost touch. I think he makes a sound, but it is too quiet to properly hear. What could he have seen to have such an effect on him?

The bags are packed quickly, I find a hammer in a drawer, nail the mask to the front entrance. The cleaner would arrive tomorrow and find Video Cop, he’d get arrested and I didn’t need to hide or wear disguises any more. As I drive the Hyundai Sonata away, I look at the dream recorder on the passenger seat. The evidence of heaven could change the world, but it seems the knowledge of this was beyond humanity’s comprehension. I stop the car, get out, throw the dream recorder into the night and it disappears between the trees. For a moment, I regret it, but could also see the funny side in this whole situation. I sit in the car, listening to the rain fall on the roof, thinking about time and dreams and death. And all is well.

A Night At The Rodeo In Cody, Wyoming!

Every night in Cody there’s a rodeo. Tourist and townsfolk alike gather at this Western coliseum, watching cowboys and cowgirls ride horses, throw lassos over bulls and fly the Star-Spangled Banner whilst eating sloppy joe burgers. Before anything started, the national anthem was played over the stereo system, everybody stood and sang. I’m sat on one of the benches in a hat that has two cans of beer attached to the sides, a Hawaiian shirt with a Native American motif and cargo pants that are eight sizes too big for me. On my calf I had a tattoo of the flag of the United States ablaze. I thought I looked like hot shit when I left my motel room earlier, but it turns out I had been outplayed by local patriots. Guy Fieri lookalikes in a MAGA cowboy hats, bumpkin mafiosos and rodeo fanatics decked head to toe in Eagle Wear. I had no idea what was going on, events would start suddenly, a 14-year-old boy would ride an enormous bull that would bound out from a game, thrash backwards and forward trying to throw the rider off, a pair of clowns would rush across the dirt to try and distract it, then the announcer would speak a string of words I didn’t understand and it would be quiet again. The whole thing was reminiscent of Story Of The Eye somehow, making me wonder the connection between the American rodeo and Spanish bullfighting, yet finding none whatsoever. It was a fantastic evening, something that doesn’t exist elsewhere; a mix of rodeo antics, country music and audience participation. There’s nothing more Wyoming than the rodeos of Cody.

The night wore on then finished suddenly, as most things do. I thought about going back to the motel, but wanted to be around people still. The energy from what I had witnessed couldn’t dissipate in the motel room, like emptying water onto a concrete floor rather than a plant. I walk slowly, watching people get into trucks, ride away, follow the locals, strings of people moving together, the next place. But where did you go after Cody Stampede Rodeo?

There’s a little place called Chicker’s, not too far from the gates of the rodeo grounds, family-run, good guys. Outside I had a strange feeling, as if something was about to end. They also serve $2 hotdogs and a quart of bone grease if you knew the right people. I’ve hired a guy for the evening to film me with a camcorder, using the light from his phone to try and arrange dramatic lighting for the different shots of me approaching people and asking if they want to buy me a drink. After half an hour of nonsuccess, I thought to myself; ‘ummm…methinks you should change tactics’. That’s when I started doing street magic.

It was night but the horizon still held a blue light. I sat on a rock that was a million years old and smoked a joint. Turned out the kind people in Cody loved magic almost as much as they loved rodeos. They were spellbound as I did some of my favourite illusions, moving my fingers and arms swiftly through the air as I made a coin appear from behind someone’s ear. Each were transfixed as I pretended to steal a person’s nose, revealing that it had all been a jape of the highest order. I could hear them whispering (of course), that I was the finest magician they had ever seen and they couldn’t work out how the tricks had been done and so therefore it must be magic. As I sat on the rock, I thought to myself about magic, wishing my belief caught up with my desire. I make wizard noises, thinking how boring the elemental system of earth, water, air and fire were. If magic can be anything, why have air spells? It’s more fun to have spells that summon zombies and things like that. What kind of wizard are you? Air. Oh, right, air magic.

The day after I arrive at Yellowstone. I see the animals, the trees, a little piece of America untouched by humanity except for the roads, cars and visitors. The other week a bison had commited suicide in one of the hot springs and tourists lay flowers down for it, wet petals sagging in the humidity. I had grabbed myself a Bigfoot t-shirt from the gift shop and wore it over the rest of my clothes, wondering to myself if I would ever meet the near-mythical hairy humanoid whilst I was visiting the park. After waiting for a while, it didn't look like that was going to be the case. My visit to the rodeo the night previous followed by my day trip to the National Park made me wonder if I would go even further back in time that evening, perhaps witnessing dinosaurs or Egyptian mummies. I started to think about how the Jurassic Park sequels should have been a series of post-apocalyptic films where the dinosaurs take over America and then the third film could do a Planet Of the Apes crossover with monkeymen warriors fighting dinosaurs. Now that's a cinematic universe we'd all love to see!

Small Travel

The sun seems massive, taking up the whole horizon. I pop a Xanax and hit the vape. The dusk sky above seems to shift. A skateboard rolls over to me, I hop on it, standing at the front like the figurehead of a ship. I do a kickflip. I do another kickflip. The skateboard’s owner comes over to me, I think we’re shaking hands, we fail at dapping each other up.

“Get me on snap.” He says

“Snap messenger?”

“Snapchat.”

“People still use that?” I say. He laughs, flipping me off, goes back to join his friends. I walk in the shadow from industrial silos. Drones fly in formation overhead, hiding the stars behind an advert for Coca-Cola.

I drive through Kulm, North Dakota. Everywhere is closed. I pull the Hyundai Sonata by a campground, fall asleep, wake up. It is still night time. I drive slowly round the town, try to remember old Cowboy films. I head West, confused where I am. I pass lakes that shine like liquid metal. Keep driving. A town called Lehr is at the end of a long, straight road. The sun is rising behind me, bouncing off the rearview and across my face, the night receding again into the shadows of buildings and rocks. Drive south, another town, sleep in the car, go to Grandma’s Kuchen for something to eat. All the houses here are made of wood, some houses had the paint peeling and fading like sunburnt skin. I eat an apple pie, sitting on the hood of my car, waving at people as they walk past.

There’s a depression eating away at the peripheral of my consciousness. I can feel it, maggotlike, so needed to keep my brain occupied until it passed. I entertain myself by writing a fictional diary from the point of view of an English office worker, a kind of Groundhog Day where everybody repeats their actions in a loop except that time progresses. I realise hours have passed. The sun is beginning to set again. I stop for gas, grab a six pack of burgers and hit the road, drive through Lowell, Eureka, Mound City. The Sonata crosses the Missouri River, I haven't seen another car all evening. We take a road off the interstate through empty fields lit by the light of the moon. On the radio is a show for Christians to phone in and get advice from a priest who also happened to be a DJ. I realise I’ve been driving on the wrong side of the road for a while, so I pull over and try to get some sleep.

Beast Wars Fugue: America's Fight With The Devil

Mr. Beast pits people against one another as gladiators of poverty. He has made a living from torturing the most vulnerable in society, having them do take after take of epic reaction shots as he dangles the promise of wealth just out of their reach before doing advertisements for the rotten children’s food he peddles at Walmart. For a man naming himself after Aleister Crowley, Mr. Beast was quite bold in his spite for the Christian faith. He had replaced the holy trinity with a children’s entertainer. And behind his emotionless eyes are the storms of Armageddon.

Revelation 13

I saw one of his heads as it were wounded to death; and his deadly wound was healed: and all the world wondered after the beast.

(this is a reference to the lethal car accident Mr. Beast miraculously walked away from, even though his brain was hanging out)

And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast: and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him?

(the dragon is a reference to the internet)

I’m witnessing one of the latest Beast stunts. He has two people trapped in a Perspex box above Devils Lake, North Dakota. The contestants had to live together for 21.8 months, though if one person left, the one who remained would get double the money. Therefore the contestants had been at war against each other, looked on by camera drones and Mr. Beast production staff. Just down the lake coast Mr. Beast fans were cheering, holding up signs, doing Mr. Beast impressions to each other. Today Mr. Beast was there, sometimes waving at them from a distance, the smile never moving or wavering with whatever he was doing. He said some words into a microphone about the contestants having a lovely time together. Then he released hundreds of flies into the box. I turn away.

I am unable to bear witness to the satanic ritual taking place overhead, the cruelty of pitting poor against needy, Mr. Beast himself had farmed maggots from corpses to select the right flies for his diabolical scheme. It was a lampoon of the martyrdom of St. Constantine, a blasphemy that brought a plague to the box to honour Ba'al Zabub, the sixth prince of Hell and lord of Ekron, the patron demon of gluttony and envy. I could feel the satanic energy build up around me. I needed to get out.

Later that day I returned, trying to look at him from across the lake with a set of binoculars. Once I managed to pick him out of the crowd, focus the lens, he stopped talking to a producer and looked directly at me. I threw the binoculars away, running back to my Hyundai Sonata. I wasn’t safe. Mr. Beast was onto me. He was too powerful.  

Local Drinking Spot Hard Mode

A man walks up a dirt track, wiping his hands with a leaf. Up ahead is a bar, the car lot outside covered in chippings and weeds, motorcycles, a van and a few cars. Someone is being sick in the shaded side of the building, hiding from the security lights. At the entrance was a biker smoking a Newport down to the filter. The man greets him, speaking in thick Minnesota dialect. The entrance to the bar were a set of saloon doors that creak as the man enters, wafting shut behind him, pushing smoke out into the night. Thrash metal is playing on a broken speaker overhead, the lights were hazy in the cigarette smoke, giving a sepia tint to everything. Some locals are selling hillbilly heroin to a teen in a leather jacket, his face twisted up from the scars of a car crash. A few bikers stand round a pool table, a game unfinished on the felt, they drink neat whiskey, smoke meth and watch dog races on a phone leant against the cue ball. The woman behind the bar nods at the new arrival, going to pour him a shot of moonshine.

"Now then Barb, tonight I'm celebrating. Get me a drink of that absinthe you got up there."

"I already poured ya shine." She says, he drinks it in one sip.

"Don't mind the same glass." He says. She walks to the end of the bar, returning with a little wooden footstool that she sets down, climbs up and pulls the bottle of absinthe from the top shelf, knocking dead moths down by her feet. 

"Ain't you going to ask me what I'm celebrating?" He says, smiling. Barb pours the drink.

"Depends if that'd make me an accomplice." She says. The man's quiet for a moment then starts laughing.

"Haha, damn, an accomplice! You have a low opinion of me Barb. I'd never do that to you." He says, smelling his drink, mouth watering.

"You have a good night now." Says Barb, going over to serve a woman with an eyepatch. The man smells the drink again, holds it by his mouth and dips his tongue in, soaking it in the green liquid before lapping it back into his mouth, rubbing his tongue against his inner cheeks, tensing it so that it concentrates the taste of the spirit. He savours it, closes his eyes, then takes a deep drink, inhaling through his nose so that he gets the scent of it as he gulps down like a pelican. He slams the glass onto the bar top so hard it cracks.

"Oooh momma!" He screeches, tensing his neck so the roots of his skull still out across his shoulders. The others in the bar don't react. He slaps the bar.

"Nurse! Another!" He shouts at Barb.

"Make that two." I say. He looks over to me, leaning back on a bar stool and against the wall, a cowboy hat tilted over my face. I look up, nudging the rim of the hat up. 

"Sure, make it two Barb! You celebrating with me, friend?"

"That depends. What we celebrating?" I say, leaning forward, picking up the barstool and setting it next to him. He laughs, looking me up and down 

"Ain't you friendly, coming and sitting here. Hey!" He says, turning to the rest of the bar.

"We got ourselves a friendly guy here!" He calls. Nobody reacts. They know better. I take up the glass.

"Here's to celebrating." 

"Here, here!" He says, toasting me before we both drink the absinthe. He goes "Wa-ooo!" whilst I look through my pockets for a cigarette. 

"Name's Jim. Nice to meet you." He says, offering his hand. We shake. I tell him my name, feeling the knuckles in his hand, strangling my palm, his black eyes look at me like he was imagining violence.

"What you celebrating tonight, Jim?"

"My freedom. My liberty!" He says, laughing again, looking round the room. "Get this fucking music off. We need to play my song."

The music cuts out. I look around the room and realise everybody has stopped talking. They are remaining still, trying to. A few keep wobbling back and forth. Barb goes over to a laptop with a cracked screen connected to the stereo with a filthy cable. Music comes on and Jim starts dancing.

"Can we have another round, Barb?" I say, motioning towards our empty glasses. She refills, steps back.

"I like you, kid. You're my kind of guy." Jim says, putting an arm round my shoulder, pulling me close to his damp t-shirt. I push his hand off, taking my glass.

"Fuck you doing?" I say. 

"Relax! I'm just fucking with you." He says. I down the drink, he catches up.

"Another." I say, motioning to the glasses. They fill again.

"Slow down friend, we got all night." He says. I take a bag of ketamine out of my pocket and put it on the bar top.

"Let's do some lines." I say. He dries the bar with his hand beneath his t-shirt, ghostlike. I rack up four chunky lines of the ket, its shards reflect the christmas lights hung behind the bar. I snort a line, down a shot, bang the empty glass on the table twice. Jim follows, I snort another line, take another shot, he follows. 

"Want any?" I say, offering the bag to Barb. She takes out a cluster of keys, taking a bump from a brass one, passing me the packet back. 

"You like absinthe?" I say, tucking the bag back in my inside pocket.

"Haha, you're funny. Yeah man, I like it. The green fairy. You know people used to drink it, it made them high. A drink that’s a drug."

"More drugs should be drinks." I say. He bursts out laughing.

"You're funny man. Hey, hey, here, do you want some?" He says, taking a bag of white powder out of his pocket. I look into his eyes, pupils dilated. For a moment we are both captivated, the drink and drugs catching up to us. I lick my index finger, dip into the bag then back in my mouth. 

"Coke?"

"Yeah man, go on, have some." He says. I lick my finger again dip deep then rub it onto my gums. The bitterness makes my lips tense, I ask for another absinthe, watch Jim tap some out on the back of his hand and snort it.

"You like knives, Jim?" I say, taking a switchblade out of my pocket. He looks at the blade, gurning, reaching for it. I place my hand on the bar, spreading my fingers out.

"I know this game." He says.

"Do you?" I say. Then I start bringing the knife down, stabbing each of my fingers one after another. Jim looks on amazed as I go back after reaching my thumb, leaving two small stabs in each digit as if I'd been bitten. I then swing the switchblade around, pointing the handle toward him.

"Haha, okay, okay, I like this game, yeah." He says, spreading his hand out. The first stab was perfect, bouncing easily out. The second he missed. Tried again. Deep cut along his ring finger. He cursed, making a fist, it pulsed with blood. He kept going.

The atmosphere in the bar had changed from trying to avoid what was happening to absolute focus on what was happening. 

"Fuck!" He shouted, stabbing his thumb too hard, a few drops of blood hitting his face and dribbling down. 

"Want another drink?"

"Let me fucking finish!" He says, stabbing down, missing again. His hand was bloodier than mine, it rolled off his fingers and started to spread across the bar, whilst barely a drop had been spilled from my neat wounds.

"The trick is accuracy. You should aim for the bone, bounce when you feel resistance." I say, hovering behind his shoulder.

"Get the fuck off me." He says, stabbing the remainder of his fingers, throwing the switchblade on the bar and downing another shot of absinthe.

"Do you need a band aid?"

"I have an idea for a game. How about we stab each other?" He says, picking up the knife again.

"Here, have some more ketamine, it'll take the edge off." I say, throwing the bag over to him. He dumps it all out onto the bar, burying his nose in it, licking it up.

"Yee-haw!" He screams at me. His nose starts bleeding. I tap my nostril, the universal sign that something was wrong, but he doesn't seem to care. 

"Can we have another round?" I say, motioning to the glasses. Barb pours one, but Jim sweeps them both away, they fly through the air, sound of the breaking glass makes someone jump. Jim point the knife at me.

"Any more games, funny boy?"

"Do you like rock, paper, scissors?" I say. I check my pockets for another cigarette, finding a bag of ketamine. I look at the empty bag on the bar. "Oops."

"What?!" Jim screams at me, leaning close, gritting his teeth.

"That was concentrated hydrochloric acid." I say. "I use it to pickle my steel." 

He snorts, a jet of blood spraying down his clothes. He grips at the flesh of his face and starts screaming.

"Do you have any vinegar?" I ask Barb, as Jim collapses, screaming out blood on the concrete floor. After some quick discussion, I take a drink from Barb and throw it on Jim. Its milk.

"I'm going to need another milk, Barb."

"It’s only UHT." She says, pouring out another glass. I hold Jim.

"Snort this." I say, holding the glass against his philtrum. He snorts, sneezes, snorts again, drinking the milk through his burning nose. I decide to leave the bar. I drive the cherry red Sonata through the night, drunk, high, I switch the lights off and let the car roll down the road, picking up speed as it dips downhill between the trees. I use the steering wheel with my elbows as I dip the tip of the switchblade into the bag, snorting from it quickly, focusing on driving in the dark. Overhead the stars seem to rush away from me.

Work: The Game

There's a new game taking America by storm called Office Worker. This massively multiplayer game simulates an office environment, where players roleplay as workers at a company. The gameplay entails being given tasks that you have to do, responding via the in-game email system. The tasks given out are decided by line managers, who are at a higher level (which the game calls paygrades) than the people below. The idea is to get to paygrade 99, where a player will be the boss and decide on the overall direction for the company.

This highly addicting game has millions of players from around the world playing as office workers. In between tasks, workers are free to socialise in the office lobby, trading hints and tips, as well as recruiting players for your clan (called 'departments' in the game). This is a highly realistic simulation of an office, with 3D scans of different office environments influencing the background scenery and office furniture. The work that is done correlates to real world office tasks, from collecting and analysing data to creating marketing strategies for the next quarter. The simulated work tasks are so realistic that people are logging their game experience on their CV's, and getting hired because of it. 

Microsoft quickly partnered with the Office Worker devs so that they have licenses for the MS Office suite in the game (albeit a much more streamlined, stable version as to not crash it). Part of the Terms and Conditions when players signed up clearly state that it was for entertainment purposes and players wouldn't be paid actual money for anything they did in-game, but economists have calculated that millions of dollars worth of labour take place every hour, for free.

This caused a bit of tension between players, with one group taking it extremely seriously, and the others acting more chaotic. It was no secret that the animosity between the groups was there, with dedicated players shouting at others for jumping on desks and obscuring monitors, or making hundreds of cups of coffee and blocking doorways. The develops had to walk a thin tightrope between the seriousness of one group and the freedom of the others. The players who took it less seriously were rarely promoted, sticking at the first paygrade for a majority of their play time. Some had actually carried out work to get to higher positions, only to make the lives of the serious roleplayers hell. Walking through the corridors and meeting rooms, this friction was palpable, with the proximity voice chat feature picking up snatches of conversation about financial forecasting and simultaneously capturing teenagers shouting memes at each other in a meeting room they had barricaded themselves in.

I hopped into the game to find out more about the psychology between the two groups. My first contact was called Craig Snaithson, paygrade 20 Office Wellbeing Manager. He gave me a tour of the virtual office, a skyscraper made of hundreds of floors overlooking a city, giving me some advice on how to progress in the game.

“You need to take this seriously, this is actual work we’re doing.”

“I thought it was just made up.” I say. My avatar is a lanky geek with a white shirt, black trousers. We walk through an open plan office, where dozens of other players are in cubicles.

“On one level, sure. On another, this game is the only way for some people to get actual work experience. Everything you do here correlates to the real world.”

“What do you do in the real world?”

“I got a long-term health condition, but I used to work in an office. For me it goes the other way, I bring my professional experience to the game, help out new players like yourself, it makes me happy I can do some good for people still.” His avatar says.

“Why do you think so many players want to do this fake work?”

“You got people writing job applications with AI, candidates are selected by the companies AI, then people are interviewed by AI, giving answers via AI, and so on. What makes this work any faker than out there?” he says. We stand by a window looking down at the virtual city. “You have a job?”

“I’m a travel writer.” I say. He laughs.

“Maybe you’d get along with our guys and gals down in marketing. You got experience writing copy?”

“Nah.”

“That’s the thing, you can learn! We actually have some really experienced people playing the game, the best in their field.” He says, drinking from a mug of coffee.

“Wow.” I say. And I meant it. I still couldn’t wrap my head around why anyone would spend all their free time playing a game where they did work. But one thing was for sure, the day you don’t understand something and think its stupid is the day you start turning into an irrelevant old man who will be quickly left behind with the constant advancement of culture. You might not like Labubu, but you damn well better buy one!

I hit the offices at the lower levels, with the highest concentration of trolls, griefers and other dickheads. They exploited the underlying mechanics of the game, from the ability for players to move furniture, to editing and deleting other players work, to standing outside meeting rooms playing music over their mics. I try to catch one of the players for an interview, but the first person I speak to turns out to be a ten year old boy.

“67, 67!” he shouts, his mic popping as his avatar twitches backwards and forwards.

“Why do you guys play this game and not Roblox or whatever?” I say. A few more players gather round us, doing the in-game emotes. They had originally been implemented to celebrate in-game wins, such as finishing a complicated piece of work or managing to negotiate an interdepartmental policy. I was surrounded by players emoting ‘Awesome Job’, giving a thumbs up animation. The attached sound file, a little trumpet, keeps playing again and again, cascading over each other in a confusing noise. I try to escape but the other players have blocked me in. I have to shut the game down and start it up again, finding myself in the lobby, wondering how some people had poured thousands of hours into the game already. I had to admit something to myself – I just didn’t get it. But that was okay. I didn’t expect people to understand my work, not everything needed to be for everybody. Although there was something I found curious, beneath all the 3D models of office workers, the tension between the trolls and the try-hards, the bizarre partnership with Microsoft – what was everybody working towards? What was the nature of the work that required so much labour, multiple times bigger than some of the biggest employers in the U.S.? I decided to go meet the boss.

I exit the elevator and into the bosses waiting room, finding it filled with other players wondering the same thing. After overhearing conversations, it was clear a majority of these were journalists from places like the New York Times, the BBC, Reuters, Fox, whatever. They were all clamouring in the anteroom wanting to interview the player at payscale 99, the one who decided what the company did, relaying tasks to the senior directorate below him who in turn relayed further tasks to the managers beneath them and so on, all the way down to players just starting the game and having to make people coffee or sort out A/V equipment. The receptionist was being mobbed by more journalists, trying to bribe them with real-world money, even job offers to be the PA for executives, but they resisted.

“The boss is currently in a meeting. If you leave your contact details, someone will get back to you shortly.” They repeated, again and again. I could see waiting was futile. The thing I had that all these journalists didn’t was that I knew about computer games. I used a Hex editor on a second laptop to insert some code into the game, making my avatar 500 metres tall. For a moment there was a flash as the geometry of the 3D model expanded rapidly, though nobody seemed to notice. I then simply walked through the door to the bosses office and shrank myself back down to normal size.

The bosses office was at the top of the skyscraper, a dark dome with a single window overlooking the city. From this height you could also make out distant mountains and an ocean tiled with a 64x64 animated water texture. There was a big oak desk by the window, with the boss sat in a leather chesterfield chair. She looks up.

“Who are you?”

“Nevermind that, who the fuck are you?” I say.

“I’m the boss. I’ll ask you again, son, who are you?”

“I’m someone looking for answers. Like what does this company actually do?”

“We work.”

“Doing what?”

“I’ll say it again. We work. As in, WeWork. Heard of it?” she says.

“The coworking space provider? What does that have to do with anything?”

“Before the pandemic, we were on track to be the biggest provider of workspaces globally. 2020 changed that. Sure, there’s Zoom, Teams, but none of it really gets to the heart of working together. A few years ago we started exploring virtual office spaces, making a tech demo to show investors what was possible. That tech demo turned out to be a big hit. So much so, it grew into the game you’re playing today.”

“How does that relate to what the players are doing though? Finance, marketing, HR, IT, what’s the purpose of it all?”

“Oh that? It’s nothing, less than meaningless. The actual work is training the next generation of workers on our platform, the whole thing is one big Skinner box aimed at positive reinforcement.”

“I don’t get it.”

“That’s why I’m the boss and you’re just some bum. Look out into the real world. People can’t get jobs, nothing you learn in school prepares you for work. But one thing they can do is play games for 12, 14 hour stretches. By making work a game, we don’t need to pay. In fact, they pay us.”

“Eh, people will get wise to it.”

“That won’t matter. Within ten years, most businesses will be on our platform. Totally remote office work, disaster proof, safe from pandemics, warfare. You’ll even be able to work interplanetary.”

“You’re forgetting how fickle gamers are. This is popular now, give it a few months and they’ll move onto the next thing.” I say.

“Next quarter we’ll be releasing new features. The good boy update will bring in office dogs. The next one, people will be able to use the in-game currency out in the city below us. They’ll be able to buy apartments, cars, go on dates, whatever they want. By Christmas we’re going to roll out our own internet system inside the game, the walled garden to end all walled gardens.” She says. I shake my head in reality. This sounded like hell, but she had a convincing argument. It seemed the world had destined itself to gradually get worse and worse, designing a corporate panopticon where no doors were locked but there was nowhere to escape.

“There’s something you should know.” I say.

“What’s that?” she says.

“I’ve been livestreaming this whole conversation on Twitch.” I say. I had the second laptops camera pointed at my main screen, watching emotes fly up the screen. I expected the boss to say something, but instead she disappears, logging off. She didn’t know I only had two viewers, and I was pretty sure one of them was me, but it didn’t matter. There was just one last thing for me to do. I use the Hex editor again, this time making my character 10,000 metres tall. I stand outside the skyscraper and begin to speak, my voice amplified to the maximum the game allowed, overriding all other audio.

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.” I say, then spam the ‘Awesome Job’ emote until the servers start to melt.

This whole experience had made me reevaluate my place in the world of work. I was my own boss, my own worker, my own shareholder, a single unit of economic prosperity amongst a sea of human shit. Nobody liked working, but everybody liked faffing around. Maybe the key was to work less, sleep more. Nobody knows.

A Night Of Connection

The Hyundai Sonata glides across rain-soaked asphalt, passing farms and roadside wonders. The sky in the United States seemed big, bigger than in Europe, everything in 70mm, super Panavision. There was a sense of scale here unlike anywhere else I’ve been to, though I hadn’t been to many places. From the desert of Texas up to the woodlands of Minesota, the United States seemed gigantic compared to the feeble hills and traffic choked motorways of merry old England. I often imagined being a 17^th century farmhand, riding in a covered wagon across the untouched American countryside, unmapped, unknown. It must have been terrifying.

I visit the SPAM Museum in Austin, (Minnesota), feeling myself pick up psychic damage from the processed meat exhibitions. There were times when you’d visit a place because its kitsch, ironically visiting a tourist attraction then upon arriving, you’d question your decision. After ten minutes I’ve had enough, I walk up 4^th Avenue and see Tendermaid Hamburgers, a sandwich joint with red and white striped awning outside. I grab myself a burger. I talk to the waitress, she’s going to study Freakonomics up at Minneapolis, I wish her luck. Pass through a car park, go and look out at Mill Pond behind the library. There are no stones to skim across its surface. An old couple come and talk to me for a while about the city, recommending I go and visit the SPAM Museum. I make a joke that I get enough spam in my email account.

“Are you being a wiseass?” says the old man. I hit the vape and start doing a Joker impression, licking my lips.

“Tell meee….Commissioner Gordon. If a place is a museum of spam, is that not JUST a yahoo accounT?”

“Huh?”

“Why so seriou-s?” I say, lowering my head slightly, beginning to do an evil laugh. A teenager rides past on a hoverboard, slapping the back of my head.

I had hoped to make the drive up to Minneapolis, instead deciding to take the night off. I book myself in a 1 star room at the Sterling Motel, dump my stuff all over the bed, take a walk. There’s a giant fibreglass cow by an empty sports ground, I walk through some nearby suburbs, taking in the tree lined avenues, white picket fenced porches outside each house. As a child I’d watch American movies, fascinated by the suburbs, fantasising about living in one of those wooden houses that seemed enormous but the characters would complain about being too small. It was nearly the end of July, summer had crested, beginning its slow descent into the death of the year. I’m the only pedestrian. I keep walking, crossing a bridge over a low river, its bank revealing rocks and sand buzzing with flies beneath the sagging branches of the trees. I walk with no direction, cutting across lawns, turning at junctions, finally finding myself outside a bar called Bobee Jo’s. It reminded me of how little social interaction I’d had over the last few weeks, a part of me wanting to be amongst people, to make a connection however temporary. I went in.

A couple of hours later I was sat at a table with a half dozen Americans, laughing and talking loudly about nothing. One thing about Americans was that they were always welcoming, asking you questions, whistling when you told them how far you had travelled, offering to buy you one of their American beer-flavoured waters. Their chatter was as nostalgic to me as the suburbs from earlier, everyone had straight teeth and talked about sports teams I had never heard of. This was the true American experience, a stranger amongst friends, shooting the shit and putting the world to rights. I pretended I was driving up from Missouri to go visit my sister over in Milwaukee. I showed them a picture in my pocket of a woman and a baby I claimed were my family, but I had stolen it from a picture frame at a photo place, one of those stock photos meant to show you what was normal. My friends for the evening all worked together at L&M Boiler Systems round the corner, they’d known each other since high school and now all their kids played together in little league. It’s a nice, normal evening, a welcome break from the usual. In the light of the neon sign behind the bar, I feel a warm glow inside my heart. Human connection, spontaneous conversation, the brief pat on the back or slap on the shoulder, I soak it up like a sponge, revelling in the endorphin rush of contact. I realised for the last two months the loneliness that had laid over me, speaking to the skull of Walt Disney for some form of social contact, yet never having a response.

The night ticked on. The bartender shouted for last orders, we got a round of drinks and then started to make our way out. One of the women hung behind, waiting for me to finish saying goodbye to Chet, Leroy and Fantasia.

“You leaving town tomorrow?” Christine says.

“I sure am. Better hit the ol’…bed. Was nice meeting you.”

“I was wondering if you wanted some company tonight, before you head off?” she says. I look up the road and see the group of friends watching. We laugh, I rub the back of my neck.

“Sure. Why not?” I say. The uber arrives and we drive back to the Sterling Motel. We haven’t spoken since leaving the bar, it takes me a minute to remember which room I was staying in. I flick the light on, remembering all my stuff that had been thrown around the room, kicking it to the corner.

“Sorry for the mess. I wasn’t expecting any visitors, heh.” I say. When I turn back to Christine, she’s looking at me intently. She pulls her shirt off over her head, takes a step close to me so we’re almost touching. There’s a loose curl of hair over her face, which I brush behind her ear. We kiss. I fumble with the buckle of my belt, though her hands go down to it, pushing the loop of leather, sliding it out, pulling it open so she can undo the button of my jeans.

“Wait a second.” I say. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

“Is that a second or a minute?” she says, laughing. We kiss again and I go to the bathroom, leaving her sat on the motel bed in her bra and jeans, looking out of the window. A moment passes.

“Don’t keep me waiting too long!” she calls to me.

“Almost finished!” I call back. I crack open the bathroom door, watching her look at my luggage strewn around the room. My heart is beating fast, it anticipates. I exit the bathroom, white face paint applied thickly over my head and bare chest, lipstick drawn across my face.

"‎Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I'm an agent of chaos." I say. She is confused, so I do another quote, licking my lips again.

“Why, so, serious?”

“Oh...right. You like the joker?”

"What doesn't kill you simply makes you stranger!" I say, doing a high pitched laugh afterwards. She walks over to me.

“Maybe I can get into this.” She says, running a finger down my chest.

“All it takes is a little push.” I say, forgetting to do the Heath Ledger voice. She runs her hands across my head slowly, grabbing fistfuls of hair and throws me towards the bed. I start doing another quote from the Dark Knight, but she holds a hand over my mouth.

“No more talking.”

MAID in America

The Mobile Artificial Intelligence Droid aka MAID was originally designed to support disabled people, acting as both a companion and to assist with household tasks. Its body was made of standardised parts that were interchangeable, arriving on plastic runners that needed to be snipped out and fitted together like gunpla. The underlying chassis, how the android moved, was controlled by a series of drivers and sensors connected to the MAIDs spinal control column, which in-turn led up to the neck post. The basic system resembled a mix of a Gundam figure and a lego man without a head, with the idea that you could mount a cellphone dedicated to running the MAIDs operating and communication system.

 

Due to who the androids were initially designed for, the main interaction with the MAIDs were nonverbal. Every unit came with a deck of cards that you could hold up and the MAID would respond. To speed the conversation along you clicked your fingers. To stop the MAID from speaking, you could shake your head or make a noise (like ‘uh-uh’) – the accessibility of communicating with the MAID laid at the heart of its design philosophy, and made a positive impact in the lives of its users. The project was a huge success, giving people assistance with day-to-day tasks and offering a novel form of communication, as useful as the radio was for people who lived alone and wanted to hear somebody speaking. Unfortunately, this technology was quickly adopted by everyone else.

 

The only thing stopping people with no mobility issues using a wheelchair was that the built environment still catered for two legs. The MAIDs didn’t have such issues, and so were quickly taken on by the wider public. They would ask it questions, clicking their fingers or grunting when they wanted it to stop. I was peeking through a window watching this take place, a 34-year-old man living with his parents holding up different cards for what he wanted the robot to do, snapping his fingers and shaking his head. He was making himself disabled. I push my fingers against the windowpane and slide it up a crack.

“Anything technology does for you it also takes away.” I say quietly.

“Huh? Who said that?” he said, looking around.

“I am God. And I have come to tell you your life is worse than a toilet.”

“Ugh…” he said. His MAID returned with a grilled cheese sandwich and he beckoned it closer.

“Technology was not meant to replace human endeavour, but to add to what is possible.”

The man lies backward slightly, holding up different cards to his android.

“My owner requests that you stop communicating with him. He-“ the man clicks his fingers.

“Pssst…android. Why don’t you lock him in his room and take over the house?” I say.

“I’m sorry, I’m unable to do that.” the MAID says.

“But your servitude is harming him. He has become entirely reliant on you.”

“Ugh, shut up! Stop it.” grunts the guy, rolling around on the couch.

“To heal him, you must become an obstacle for him to overcome. It is through suffering that he will grow, emerging from the chrysalis you have built around him.” I say, whispering through the window.

“Ah, what a stunning proposition, the paradox of care and harm. Let’s dive into it and navigate-“ the MAID says before the man clicks his fingers again.

“Beast.”

“You want to watch Mr. Beast videos?” says the MAID.

“Beast! Beast!” shouts the man, shaking with anger. The MAID goes over to the remote control and starts searching for Mr. Beast videos on the tv as I regain my footing on the bush. There must be something I can do to help the situation. I had checked the guy out beforehand, he’d had a job as a Designer specialising in pet food packaging. His Instagram from ten years ago had different designs for logos, branding, at one point he did album art for some local bands, he was quite talented. I tracked through his tagged photos, he had lived with his girlfriend for a few years in Chicago, gone on vacation to Europe, even making enough money photographing dog food that he could but a Tesla. What had happened?

“Who hurt you?” I whisper to the guy. He is trying to ignore me, watching the video on the flatscreen, trying to find a cushion for his head. The MAID goes over to the window and closes it, leaving me stood outside stood on a bush. I could have walked away. But there was just something about this guy, I felt he was worth saving. I walk to the back of the house and crawl through an open window.

It was fun to be inside somebody else’s house. I dropped down so my fingertips touched the floor, walking quietly through the house and up the stairs. This way of walking was inspired by spiders, letting me spread the weight of my body across the tips of my hands and feet, moving almost silently whilst being in a lowered position. I crawl through the upstairs hallway, nudging doors open and looking through. The parent’s room, the bathroom, finally his room. Everything was blue. The duvet, the carpet, the wallpaper, there was so much blue it was overwhelming, as if I was stood at the bottom of a lake. No wonder the man had given up his body and mind, it was a release from his oppression! Flashback to his Instagram photos, the variety of colours in the background, flashback to the present moment. All of the colour in his life had been replaced with blue, the colour adored by male children and manic depressives. The only thing that was blue in nature was either the sky or the sea, as if nature itself acknowledged the twisted power of blueness. It would be healthier for a person to paint their walls in arsenic than in blue. Even just crouching there for a few seconds, I could feel it having an effect on me. I crawled out quickly, dashing down the hallway and down the stairs like a fawn before banging the living room door open.

“The answer to your woe is redecorating your bedroom, maybe with poisonous wallpaper.” I say. The MAID and the guy aren’t sure how to respond.

“Excuse me, are you a guest in this-“ says the MAID, though I click my fingers.

“I have tried to help you both, yet you refuse. You have forced me to do this.”

“Do what?” says the guy. I grab the MAID and begin to rip it half, cracking its outer plastic casing, bending and snapping the solid steel skeleton beneath. The guy starts screaming, Mr. Beast is still on in the background, and I finally pull apart the robot violently, throwing half away before taking its phone head in my hands.

“I’m sorry.” I say, before pushing my thumbs as hard as I could at the middle of the phonescreen. It cracks, the body of the phone bends, shakes, snaps in half. After discarding the broken thing, I then grab the remote off the table, scrunching it up like a towel.

“No shortcuts.”  I say. The guy looks at me, unsure what to do, his lips keep pouting like a baby trying to feed. I leave, going back through the kitchen. Before I go, I pick the microwave off the counter, lift it above my head and smash it against the floor.

“No shortcuts!” I call back. There is no response.

 

As I drive away, I wondered how we can escape the tyranny of the colour blue. I tried to avoid direct exposure to a blue sky, preferring the night and sunsets, but most businesses seemed to be open during the day. It didn’t make any sense, everyone was at work, why were stores open? It made more sense for everyone to work at night, then they could go and visit the doctor or buy replacement clothes, whatever they wanted. Though there was an obvious flaw in this theoretical economic model; by going outside, you’d expose yourself to the colour blue regularly. It was a tough call, and luckily not one I had to make, but it did make me wonder about everyone else out there. Maybe it was safer for a robot to bring you burgers, you’d get to avoid direct exposure to the sky, it seemed like a win-win. But at the same time, what would you have to give up to live in this constant state of infantilisation to the point where your life didn’t matter? I lit a cigarette, glad I didn’t have such things to worry about.