PB: Oh, what fun! We’ve been pulled out of deep freeze to help cover the narrator’s ass by giving readers, new and old, some sort of trite summation of the plot. Not that I’m complaining, exactly… I really thought he was going to keep us mothballed for another four or five hundred pages. Nice to be able to stretch out the old legs.

yf: ha! …hey was that a space mutiny reference? y’know, i’m actually kinda surprised, too, seemed like he was determined to keep us in the margins. surprised he folded so soon! not that i really care, but dude didn’t have to take the challenge laid out by ulysses so literally lolol

PB: Yeah, don’t get too excited, our work here is obviously pro bono, and apparently superfluous, as are, apparently, the pictures, the quotes, and the titles. He seems to want to make it clear that everything other than the text of the manuscript itself is non-diegetic. We do not technically exist right now. And yeah, of course that was a Space Mutiny reference.

yf: you’re gonna need to explain everything before the apartheid cinema gag a little clearer, or maybe try to be twice as decoherent, so i don’t feel bad about making up my own story of what you just tried to say.

PB: What I mean is, dick, in a theoretical text version, this part, our part, would be cut out, as would the pictures and the twee little quotes and titles… all of this accoutrement is just carny bullshit to try and trick marks into reading an unfinished manuscript. 

yf: but… this literally is the text, as it now stands. …it’s the only version that exists, and probably the only version that will ever exist, so…

PB: I didn’t say it wasn’t fucking daft, I’m just trying to parse his bullshit.

yf: i’m pretty sure what he wants to get across is that this is not necessarily the final version. so much for your appeals to fair mindedness lololol

BP: Yeah, I’m… not sure I ever implied I was giving him the benefit of the doubt, but… anyway, I didn’t say I wasn’t enjoying it, I just said it was bullshit. I doubt he’d disagree.

yf: which is why we know he’s either insanely sincere or a total grifter!   

BP: I have my suspicions on that one. But hey, we were supposed to do a quick summary to catch readers up, and this is already threatening to be longer than the actual text of the segment. If you want a fill-in for the first chapter in this book, which “does not currently exist,” you can check out the second half of our chapter notes at the beginning of this manuscript, and I’m just going to let you parse out what that means all by yourself. Moving on: the following is a short summary of what’s happened up until now:

We’ve followed our three Chicago Street weirdos on their afternoon jaunt to hustle some scratch, in order to make up for the narrator’s bungling of the grocery money on a deal he should have known was bad. Picky, who’d tell you she was the leader of the expedition if you asked her, has a plan to harvest valuable psychedelics from a fucked-up arcade machine in a dangerous area, then sell them to a wealthy buyer who’s always looking.

Picky’s been leading the way, so to speak, for the better part of an hour, running the narrator and the Kid through a gauntlet of less-than-legal machinery, corridors, trams, ducts, tubes, and gutters, in the name of reducing travel time and maintaining a brisk pace. Funny thing, then, when once they got to the big box magick store in the Inner Skirts, she decided to slow down and pick up a friend, and probably buy drugs from that friend, and argue with that friend for a while.

yf: lol etch rules.

BP: Yeah, I’m not surprised at all you’d stan the sort of personality who radiates a general distaste for being alive.

Yt: lol they aren’t like that, they’re just the type who’d never suffer fools like you or me, which is a type i’m very into.

BP: As I said, no surprise here. So, Etch is now leading the way, out of the big ol’ horoscope dispensary where she works, and into the seemingly infinite backstore hallways of the twisted mall-like mass that makes up the Inner Skirts. They’ve been making their way in these hallways for a minute now, and although it’s always faster and easier to take these drab corridors than snaking one’s way through the Escher-esque layout of the Skirts, they’re all beginning to feel the interminable suggestion of the infinite, in a recursively infinite way.

yf: like staring into two parallel mirrors, you mean.

BP: Eh… more like two people looking at each other while jerking off, but not touching. Anyway, they’ve been chattering on about the whatever nonsense floats into the conversation ether; gossip, politics, spirituality, doing bits, and the like. And of course the narrator has found plenty of “real-time” to drone on inside of his own head, mainly explaining the finer points of the Drop to, well, me, I guess. It’s the usual shit, you either like it or you don’t.

They’re heading for one of the narrator’s favorite places, a tremendous pinball estate called The Logic Gate, the largest public pinhall on the Drop. Picky insists there’s no time for playing games, however. They have business to attend to, or at least that’s her claim, although she’s the type who could absolutely believe “buying more drugs” would be a critical part of any vital plan. Beyond that, the clock keeps ticking, and their final destination, so to speak, is still miles away.

yf: narratively, things are absolutely nearly threatening to happen. and the thesis essay is starting to move from theory into actual storytelling!

BP: Oh man, the essay… look, I’m going to continue to beat this drum, just skip them. Value your time, fer chrissake, it’s clear the narrator doesn’t.  To be real, there are a few bits of it I like, but like an actual full-on action scene, we’ve got a ways to go to get there.

yf: so get out there, ya nutty kids!  good luck, and most of all, have fun!

BP: Yes, you’re absolutely right.  Good luck with having fun, everyone!

“Powerful states can maintain themselves only by crime, little states are virtuous only by weakness.”

-Mikhail Bakunin

“But the real thing behind the way folks feel is simply race prejudice—and I don’t say I’m blaming those that hold it. I hate those Innsmouth folks myself,…”

-H.P. Lovecraft, The Shadow Over Innsmouth

“I hope I cut myself shaving tomorrow. I hope it bleeds all day long. Our friends say it’s darkest before the sun rises. We’re pretty sure they’re all wrong.”

-The Mountain Goats, No Children

“Everything in Paris is gay,” […] “When they heard I was from Ireland they were ready to eat me, man.”

-James Joyce, Dubliners

“It’s a JOI video. Jerk off instruction porn.”
“They tell you how to jerk off?”
“They tell you why to jerk off.”

–Detroiters

“We don’t need Rome telling us what to do!”

-Capt. Murphy, Sealab 2021

The myriad violent follies that steered the formation of the Western Crusades are too prodigious to list herein, but suffice to say, the widespread European lust for blood, both personally and culturally, finally flowed into, and coagulated, in Rome, where the here-to-for inferred necessity of the coming genocide was fully endorsed and comprehensively codified by the papacy, freshly wrapped in the commandment that holy Jerusalem be finally wrested from the “Moslem hordes.” 

And thus did western Christendom form a horde of its own; a horde of many hordes, wave after wave of pillaging white men, marching eastward, for over two centuries. With them, they carried the laundered ideology of a European Christ who preached that one should absolutely kill one’s neighbors, if they refused to prostrate to the supremacy of white Europeans. 

The resulting age of slaughter and madness would destabilize both regions, bringing a fresh chaos to the European continent, while absolutely decimating the culture and population of the Middle East. Rome and the west may have acquired some scraps of new knowledge along with a small portion of what they had lost, but Europe was in no condition to fully exploit the influx of information, as the caliphates had been centuries prior. The continent was still fractious – at war with itself – and thus it was war that received the lion’s share of the technological attention and innovation.

Yet the dream of something akin to coin operation still burned like a fire in the minds of Europe’s cleverest profiteers, who sensed the closeness of an evolutionary idea; that one could somehow improve the efficiency of the act of transaction, and thus exponentially increase profit, simply by removing yet another person from the entire enterprise. 

These post-enlightenment carnies sought something in this new technology that would aid in further abstracting and mystifying the process of commerce, by turning a transaction into an exchange involving only a single individual. They dreamed, ultimately, of a machine that could extract the money from a person without capitulating to any fuss, or needing any amenities. They wished, in effect, for mechanical slaves.

And It was in that previously-mentioned tiny, backwater band of island nations where all these dreams of capital ultimately came to a head. For wee Albion, that miserable little single-ilse shithole, had gone full-English and transitioned into the sprawling archipelago of Britannica. 

Despite its own age of post-crusade chaos and churn, the condensed, insular land of Britain had maintained enough of a shared ideology of white Anglo supremacy within its inner core to fully suckle its nascent empire. It was this focus of external hatred that enabled the kingdom to make use of all that rebounding military technology, fully colonizing its neighbor islands through profound economic and physical violence, to create a new, larger, more united, fascistic nation-state.

The intrigue and bloodshed that typified the dominion’s struggle to decide who would ultimately sit on its throne was absolutely a reflection of the bloody nightmare occurring on the continent. And yet it was insulated enough from that great European abattoir to have the opportunity to develop the technology, which it had after all helped plunder, at a greater rate than those pressed-together principalities across the channel. Britain’s throne games were still quite costly, but the brain-drain and resource squandering was an order of magnitude smaller than the plague-ridden, permanent battlefield that defined the mainland.

The age of enlightenment took a good half-century before it even reached the Britons, but when it hit, it brought an even stronger stability to those isolated little islands, full of diaspora, ruled by familial wealth. The establishment of a state proxy-catholicism mostly freed them from the influence of a new and risen Rome, and thus, the “non-Anglo savagery” of the continent. And although they were still warring with each other consistently, in the end, the imperial need for a strong central core remained intact.

And in the seventeenth century, at the dawn of the global industrial revolution that it would initiate, that total hicksville-of-a-hayseed country went ahead and finally invented the first widely-used coin slot, the one from which all further coin slots would inherit their greedy, cavernous, humanity-loathing will. 

 And the devices those slots were attached to could not have been given a more ironically appropriate name by the culture that produced them; they were known as honour boxes.

Anyway, the thrust of this whole thing is that it’s clear the Dipshit AI is wrapped up in a “global” criminal network, and It will always be happy to do literally anything It thinks it can get away with without serious repercussion. Now that It fully inhabits Its position as temporary king, clothed in ridiculously immense power, the only way you could possibly stop It would be to somehow find a way to shut It off, or trick It into self-termination. 

Leaders engaging in this kind of open corruption can quickly build into a death spiral for any empire, and considering the Junk Arcade was already halfway down that decadent staircase, it’s causing all sorts of freak-outs for those living in our inner core. Everyone smells blood, and everyone has a slightly different understanding of precisely what that means.

“I don’t give a rat’s-ass-and-a-half about the media’s obsession with any of this cloak-and-dagger shit,” Etch says, with an eye-roll. “It’s all a fucking circus. The idea that some bullshit back-channel parlay with a virtual snake-man and his intelligence apparatus was the real reason behind the Drop electing a white-power psycho as their godking is rich as fuck. Lizardmen on the internet did not make the white people of the Drop attempt culturicide. Aliens did not make white supremacy decide that it had had enough of this ‘minorities’ shit.” 

Etch’s opinions on this hold more weight than I could give them. Their ethnicity… anyone’s ethnicity in the Junk Arcade, beyond the constant standard of white hegemony, is something that’s difficult for me to directly talk about, because I will always belong to that hegemony, and thus those stories aren’t mine to tell. But the way all of those stories get drowned out on the Drop, a place almost singularly interested in the white experience, is something I want to fight, even if I’m not yet sure how to really manage it. 

Yet if I’m honest with myself, I also genuinely deeply fear the prospect of fucking up other people’s narratives.

All of this is to say that I “know” Etch is of “South-East Asian” (writing that in quotes feels about as bad as it looks written down) decent, for whatever that means on the Drop (or in Reality for that matter,) but I don’t know much about their background beyond that, as they haven’t shared that information with me. I suppose I also know that their ethnicity means it’s possible they don’t have full citizenship on the Drop, even though they’ve been here roughly the same amount of time as I have…  

Look, this place is real fucked up.

“You’re not wrong at all, but…” Picky starts.

“You can stop there, if you like,” Etch says. The Kid snickers.

“…you’re not wrong at all, but there are truly fucked aspects to all of this that don’t let anyone off the hook. You’re right, you can’t pin this on external forces, but that just makes things more fuckin’ crazy from an electoral perspective…”

“Oh, good, we’re getting a visit from “Just Vote” Picky,” Etch piques.  “Y’know, sometimes it feels like she hasn’t even left us at all, despite her constant protestations.” The Kid chuckles.

“I’m gonna allow that one to pass uncommented because…” Picky starts.

“You’re about to comment on it,  though, aren’t you?,” Etch slides in, with a precision that suggests these two know each other’s moves to a profound degree.

Personally, I find these arguments are generally about something else from long ago, sort of like how most relationship arguments are less about the subject they ruminate on and more about it being perceived that one of the participants is putting something before the relationship.  But I’m not, like, an emotion expert or anything.

“I’m gonna allow both the former and the latter to pass uncommented upon because it’s a fair fucking cop, to a point. I’m not gonna deny the path I’ve weaved to get here, and I’ve had a lot of ground to cover on this particular spectrum, but, like… you’ve been allowed to, y’know, travel on that straight authoritarian line, so don’t accuse me of…”

“There’s that word you love to use to describe me, authoritarian. Like it’s your get-out-of-the-gulag free card that wins all arguments.” 

“Works pretty well down at the politburo,” Picky retorts.  The Kid starts to guffaw and then quickly trails off with an “Eh,” and a shrug.

That doesn’t even make any sense…” Etch says, and then seems to realize they’re being trolled, which causes them to apparently disengage, returning their attention to the handphone.

“You say you support authoritarianism!” Picky says, in response to the freeze out. “Why am I supposed to be shy about repeating it?”

“”Your fucking understanding of my politic isn’t even uncharitable, it’s just wrong,” Etch shoots back. “Just because I subscribe to a different set of quote-unquote allowable practices as yours, which includes the subset “things Picky considers authoritarian, like fucking basic opsec and CoC,” it doesn’t make me a dirty fucking member of the red-brown alliance.”

“Yeah, I believe that’s what you believe,” Picky responds. “Just like you think I’m a precious little thing who trusts electoralism, simply because I don’t find the concept of “just voting” to be anti-political in nature, nevermind, you’ll happily vote if a communist is on the ballot.”

“Well, yeah…” Etch says, suddenly cracking a real smile, for the first time on the day. “I’m not a fucking idiot…”  In response, Picky punctuates the moment with her customary half-rasp laugh.

“Tankie dyke,” she replies, continuing to snicker.

“Neolib anarkiddie,” Etch counters.

“…are you guys high on blow or something, because you both just seem… super high right now,” the Kid offers.  For a moment, they share a glance back that has me imagining a synchronized “shut up!” in an hilarious Hollywood fashion. But they just continue giggling like a couple ‘a ladies.

My position here, not that anyone asked, is much closer to Picky’s than Etch’s, but that’s because I have pretty specific views on authoritarians, and no matter how much Etch doth protest, the people she hangs out with are mostly all campist trash, who seem to be for any old horror as long as it’s against the interests of the Drop’s.

 I see how you can end up in the red fash gutter, once you figure out the mythic fabric of the Junk Arcade is wholly tailored from the emperor’s new clothes. But that just makes me resent them more, mostly because I’m a stubborn b-word. I had to work my way up out of that gutter at some point, so I don’t see why they should get away with hanging around an ideology that is not counter to, but actually reflective of, the empire of the Junk Arcade.

  But also, “working my way up out” might have had more to do with how my particular brain functions than anything else.  I may lean into anarchism, but it’s not like I hate communism… just most people who call themselves communists… Look, I don’t fuckin’ know, it’s complicated. If you’re a red who’s reading this, know that I know it’s complicated, and I’d probably like you if I knew you personally, as long as we could play video games and not talk politics.

Picky’s radicalism, like mine, is honestly a bit weak tea in the grand scheme, as we share a state of being both totally horrified, and utterly informed, by our connection to empire. Maybe I shouldn’t be talking for Picky here, but I, at least, don’t possess the same total distaste for electoral politics as someone like Etch, because I do believe in a theoretical local autonomy. 

But that slip of knowledge very much obscures the fact that I find no joy or pleasure in the kind of electoralism that rules the Drop; the tribalist bullshit and liberal malaise that gets us locked into a cycle of searching, in desperation, for the lesser evils every. Single. Time.  

Look, I will grudgingly make a claim to a basic pragmatism, and at least the theoretical importance of voting in local elections and orgs, even if I no longer identify my politics as “electoral”, thanks to how much I politically loathe the kind of people who tend to lay claim to JUST VOTE rhetoric in the name of the “righteous liberal center;” those who see the political spectrum as a perfectly static horseshoe curve, with them and their beliefs standing tall at the exact, middle, moral point of the arc… electoralists who’s sole political contribution is screaming at leftists for a while every four years, about how we’re ruining everything about incremental progress with our accelerationist demands for actual justice and freedom. 

Said pragmatism, however, has no patience for the petty, power-hungry asshole politicians who exist at every level of our electoral reality, nor do I imagine that voting is going to save us from the hell we’re obviously in for, as a vacuum-sealed, crumbling nation-state that’s hanging by a thread. I also understand that a concept like pragmatism is, itself, rooted in privilege, and that your dedication to harm reduction as a political strategy is often as dependent on the shade of your privilege as everything else, combined.

“I’m just saying,” Picky starts again, after the pair’s weird mirth has settled down. “The idea that the snake intelligence apparatus, or any other aspect of the War Games, could sway the Drop’s population toward social nihilism, when we’ve already been there for a while now, is obviously fallow, but the fact that the Drop was collectively pleased to elect a creature who was so obviously personally beholden to the Combine is nevertheless… ironically interesting, at least you’ll grant, if not significant?”

“I am not part of whatever you’re labeling as “the Drop,” and you mostly aren’t either, so “we” didn’t elect shit, because “we” didn’t participate in the holy liberal electoral ritual that validates any of this,” Etch says.

“And “snake” continues to be a dumb slur for them, because they aren’t snakes…” the Kid says. “…also, not for nothin’, but “fallow” is a neutral term that means “potentially fertile,” it doesn’t mean “shallow” just because they rhyme.”

“Y’know, you’re all just… a real lotta fun, aren’t you?” Picky says, spinning around and eyeballing Etch with a hint of real annoyance. She generally finds it pretty easy to shrug off the protestations of the men she allows in her life, but when that chorus includes a woman she has some respect for, she tends to get a bit more defensive.

“If it makes you feel any better about the situation, I think I’ve put together who and what the lizardmen actually are,” the Kid says, so bone dry that I would not put money on his sincerity either way.

“It absolutely does not, of course,” Picky says. “C’mon… guys… …the way the AI openly embraces the ostentatious gangsterism of the big boss of the Elohim state, even though It is a pure product of this system-what-birthed-It, and from which It has so richly benefited, and which It now rules… Its ability to warp reality is so acute that pretty much everything, including and especially Itself, constantly gets gummed up in Its bullshit field.”

“The Dipshit AI isn’t warping reality.”  Etch says, with an air of firm authority. They come to a quick stop in front of a door, and as we’d all been barreling down the hall on our merry way, this causes a slight but comical chain reaction that turns us, for a moment, into a human Newton’s Cradle. 

 “It tears holes in the buffer of bullshit that exists between material reality and the world most people want to see,” Etch continues, unperturbed by the pile-up, having immediately taken a step toward the door. They put their head forward as if to closely examine it, but they do not look up from, nor stop thumb-typing on, their phone.  “Hypernormalisation is a trick of the light that really only seeps into white eyes. The idea that culture can “degenerate into” a state in which it has always existed is some Adam-Curtis-level reductive bullshit. This is the wrong door…” They start up again, their thick heels clomping rapidly down the hall.

“Hey, the first 15 minutes of any Adam Curtis documentary is pretty compelling, before the recursive digressing,” Picky sighs. “Look, I take your point. I get that the real pressures are all internal and currently unremarkable, historically…” she takes a moment and looks up, as if considering the accidental irony of her last three words. “…I didn’t mean to imply that the AI’s disruption is all that unique in the midst of an inherently reactionary system, but I’m just fascinated by the way it’s at-all unique, the way it openly clowns on the Drop’s entire political organism through accidental application of chaotic willpower.”

“Are you sure you think it’s accidental?” Etch shrugs. “Because sometimes the way you talk about the AI, it feels like you’re doing a “great man of history” bit without realizing how much you love pumping up the dude, just because It’s a novel creature.”

“Ok, now you’re just straight up channeling Mo,” Picky says, and then she immediately clams up in a way that suggests she’d rather she hadn’t. Etch, for their part, doesn’t seem to react, beyond picking up a slightly quicker pace, and maybe staring even more intensely at their phone, as the hard rubber heels of their boots clap purposefully, in perfect rhythm, on the tile floor.

 We turn a 90-degree corner and end up in another long beige hallway, accented with off-white doors. The silence is a little heavy, so I flip my headmusic (a Eurobeat mega-mix, as a treat) to full-volume and dive back into my feed, abandoning the good judgment of remaining present in the moment in favor of dopamine chasing, per usual.  

The ol’ feed is the regular flush of nightmarish news and inane bullshit that the modern media landscape, such as it is, has to offer, as I check my nerd boards and echo holes and then cross-reference them with the current corporate media-cycle narratives… in doing so, it’s hard to put together a picture of the whole that isn’t as grim as ever. 

I skim as lightly as I can over the details of this afternoon’s latest couple of mass shootings, because it’s all just too goddamned depressing. The nature of gun culture on the Drop is a complicated issue in theory, but in the aggregate it just seems to render a bunch of tragedy that almost exclusively flows downstream. Liberals talk a huge game, but it isn’t like they’re truly organizing for any kind of real change. And any “real change” that doesn’t include the cops’ guns in the analysis is, from my point of view, absolutely futile.

For a moment, I become incredibly and uncomfortably aware of my own weapon, and even though I’m required by the Drop’s mandatory 2nd Amendment to possess it on my person at all times, carrying it seems like a cowardly and foolish capitulation to the state, which no one should be forced to endure.

 But we endure it, all of it, because we have to. Suicide is the only other option, that or actions that immediately resemble it.  Like old man Albert, I suppose I ultimately choose to drink that fuckin’ coffee. 

I sate myself with political bullshit. Magicpoint Colonywall, a political operative and lobbyist with a fucking ridiculous name, is the man of the moment. Colonywall, an old-head right-wing political operative, has a long history of mercenary self-enrichment at the behest of extra-state benefactors, and not uncoincidentally, he’s recently become a trusted capo in the AI’s political machine, or trusted as much as a one-way trust relationship allows.

Anyway, he’s done that shit again, as one would expect, and has now been indicted in the Moooer probe for illegally “negotiating” with “foreign parties under sanction,” which is relevant to Picky’s point, insomuch as having yet another open asset of a technically non-existent geopolitical adversary is a kind of  funny thing to experience. 

Colonywall’s strange path to this indictment is indicative of somewhat savvy political maneuvering on his part. He’s given up enough basic red meat to the Sins Committee to satisfy certain agency and media appetites, while still overtly maintaining that the very idea of the Dipshit AI’s central conspiracy, that of blatant crime and open corruption, is actually a far-flung fantasy engineered by Its political enemies – never mind that he’s the exact kind of guy you hire for this particular variety of black-bag skullduggery. 

As a result, Colonywall currently exists in that shadow realm of nebulous culpability, from the Dipshit AI’s point of view, a state of “maybe-I-do-know-him-maybe-not” liminality that’s got to be frustrating for the poor fuck. There is, of course, assumed back-channel communication going on, with everyone in the administration trying to keep their ducks in a row, but due to the AI’s moment-to-moment capriciousness, and the difficulty It has in not letting pre-planned insults that benefit It simply pass unanswered, the situation is still profoundly tense. 

But enduring that liminal state of quantum imbalance has to beat openly enduring the unhinged animosity the Dipshit AI saves for those who It perceives as having openly slighted It in some way, big or small, either of which is always treated as an absolute, unforgivable betrayal. These latter types, those who actively try to take their ex-boss on in some manner, like Its former lawyer, who ate shit even while going to prison for crimes they’d gleefully committed together, are less than dead to It; they become playthings to dismantle from afar, and at leisure.

Colonywall still has a decent chance to make it out of this clean, thanks to the AI’s access to the power of the pardon, which It is absolutely gonna abuse. In fact, now that he’s been removed from the game board, remaining supplicant and quiet is likely his best play. A savvy operator like him will’ve already made a bundle on whatever back-end parlay he’s been running, and his early exit is beneficial insomuch as the real shitshow likely hasn’t even begun. He may be an evil scumbag, but you have to admire his animal cunning.  

Just kidding! I hope he dies painfully.

The immigration system being on fire is in the news, but only because the Dipshit AI is purposefully drawing an inordinate amount of attention to it. Taking people who don’t deserve to be in cages, and then happily stuffing them into overcrowded, clandestine cages, is a tradition on the racist shithole we call the Drop, which is made exponentially more fucked because we’re all very self-evidently “from” here. We all went through the same process of iteration to end up existing in the Junk Arcade.

You might think that systemic racism, so nakedly exposed, would create some sort of pushback from the general population, but then again, you’d only think that if you hadn’t met white people.

 To wit; the Dipshit AI, who can’t be white – and not just because race is a social construct, but also because It’s a big dumb digital gestalt with no skin – but who claims Its whiteness as self-evident, according to Its programming and behavior (and It ain’t wrong,) is making the aggressive cruelty of our immigration system into a “win” for Itself and Its base, simply by cracking open a bloody bureaucracy that has been in place for longer than the AI has been online, just so It can expose all the horrors already long present for It’s cruel, dim, violence-inclined followers to enjoy. 

In exposing an innate monstrosity always present on the Drop, and offering up the narrative that It is personally responsible, the Dipshit AI has gifted the very clever media arms of the big ol’ corps what run the place a very simple way to rationalize all of our collective past sins, grave as they may be, and heap them onto the illusion of a present moment. These kinds of open and cheerful cruelties are then laundered into “legitimate both-sides” arguments by the organs of the media corpus. Every time some reactionary rhetorical trick like this succeeds, it gives another rightward yoink to old man Overton’s Window.

Fetid chickenshit situations like this not only expose the ways that frailty in leadership that can lead pretty rapidly to genocidal tendencies, but more disturbingly for Junk Arcade liberals who want to believe there’s justice in empire, they also draw more attention than the entire political machine would like toward the oppression within a system that was already in place, has always been in place.  

It is the open exposure to children in cages which makes both the monocorpus media and the Outer Party regulars, and by extension all of their many enablers, really upset. Again, not because they’re truly upset by what’s happening, but because it’s bad for business, and politics, as we know it, for that kind of thing to be openly exposed. And stories about kids in cages tend to break through the clutter of the news cycle, even in its current unrelenting state. 

There are, of course, no children on the Drop. Not in any physical sense. 

No one on the Drop even begins to iterate into existence until around twenty, and even if there are people who claim to start in their late teens, all evidence still points to nascent adulthood being the general trigger point. But, like the uncertain virtual world of the War Games, the virtual presence of kids is manifested through the unquestionable truth of the System’s statistics, as Other People’s Children are an invaluable weapon to wield in our political warfare; it just comes naturally to people to talk blithely about other people’s kids as an annoyance and burden they’d rather didn’t exist.

(It is somewhat interesting, and profoundly depressing, to note that the people of the Drop find the idea of theoretical kids in visible detention centers far worse than knowledge of the actual adults who have already been there for as long as anyone remembers. But that’s where we are, and more or less, where we’ve always been. In some ways, life is truly nothing more than a Red Queen’s Race.)

In an effort at distracting myself from the deeper horrors, I switch to a lower-grade nightmare that turns out just as rotten, as I start digging into the details of a weird helicopter heist in the Second City, where a guy stole an ill-watched idling chopper at a bobby airfield, and just flew the thing straight off the Drop, eventually vanishing into the abyss.

Not before he had the chance to die, live on TV, of course. The atmosphere, generated by the Systems of the Drop. stretches about a dozen or so kilometers from any edge, at which point it becomes a mostly-empty vacuum. A professional drone can easily film that sort of footage all the way to the edge of space. And in this case, several of them did, given the lead time that mere terminal velocity offers a near-instantaneous world.

(Hey, they should make a drone specifically with the ability to pull suicidal or very-clumsy people up from the certain death of total decompression. One that’s affordable to anyone not obscenely rich, I mean.) 

But I guess he didn’t seem too fussed about it as he went, or so I’ve read from several glib sources. Nevermind that the act of self-termination was probably the primary indicator of his mental distress, no matter how hard he was laughing when he died. 

Personally, I don’t really dig on watching snuff shit, ever, since I tend to see open horror in shit that others find pretty amusing, and my brain more or less remembers all the awful and traumatic things I’ve ever viewed, and it probably will until it really starts to fail. But I try not to judge too hard, even if it seems to me that being a fan of the variety of snuff and gore available on the net can lead you into some pretty grim directions. Or an MD, I suppose.

Anyway, the whole thing seems like one of those jolly kinds of suicide plans that maybe didn’t precisely start out as such, but ended up there all the same.

My deepfeed haze is shattered, as a DM drops into the middle of my main feed, highlighted in the familiar dark green Indispose font that indicates a message from LC, fellow resident of Chicago Street, and possible actual spy (does anyone not involved in tradecraft play the bassoon? Oh, plus, all the spy shit.)

“Did you guys make it?!” he says, in bright green letters that take up most of my feed for a moment before returning to the text-parser in the corner.

“yeah, we’re fine… why, did you think we might not be? XD” I shoot back.

“I mean, yeah, unlike you two, I bothered to ask Picky about what route she was planning to take. I’m not even going to get *on* an under-maintained ex-Carnival dark ride, much less jump into its machinery. Do you know how many people get killed by those things?”

“48, in the last 3 years, officially,” I reply.

“Should have figured you’d look that one up, heh,” LC says.  “You probably did it at the worst possible time, didn’t you… hey, you’re a real sucker, you know that?”

“lolol what’s up el-cee” I braintype.

“Mo’s already pacing around, just thought you guys should know. Picky’s leaving me on read, if you can believe it, and I don’t want any of you fucks saying that I didn’t make an effort!”

“you’re a sweetheart of a pal XD” I say. It’s important to know this information, I suppose, but I’m not sure how useful it is in my hands. Picky’s going to do what she does, as a force of nature is inclined to, and if she isn’t going to listen to the person she most listens to in any scenario, she sure as fuck ain’t gonna listen to me. Trying to bring things up subtly isn’t really my specialty, either, which is why my attempts to manipulate her thinking usually backfire spectacularly.

“Bring home some smokes!!!” LC adds, and although I quickly protest that I just quit smoking again, he leaves me on read. 

We’ve been walking for a long minute now, and after taking enough turns to know that we’d be totally lost without Etch’s guidance, we end up in a hallway that’s mostly the same as the rest, except that the doors have become more occasional, and they’re painted a burnt umber that would probably qualify as mere brown, if the shade’s lustre did not so exceed the dull trappings of its surroundings.

Next comes a long stretch of no doors at all, and then at last we come upon a set of double doors painted in a deep maroon, and emblazoned with the tasteful logo of the Logic Gate; the long, slender letters designed to appear slatted and bar-like in keeping with the theme of the name. Say what you want about the dipshits who own this place (and boy howdy will I,) they at least spend some money on design, making the place look as slick as possible for a non-corporate entity.

 “Here we are,” Etch says as they slow their pace, this time better telegraphing that they will be coming to a full stop, and thus no one need bash into anyone else. They’re stating the obvious, but as they haven’t even looked up from their phone for the last ten minutes, it does make the statement seem slightly cooler.

 After several long moments, it’s clear that Etch isn’t planning on doing anything else. Picky finally steps forward, twists the knobs, then gives the clearly-locked doors a couple of good shakes, just to make sure. Yep. Here we are, indeed… We stare at the doors for a moment, and no one says anything for a long-enough stretch to really build the anticipation of not knowing what exactly might happen next.

“What’s the sea-elvish word for ‘friend’?” Picky asks, after several beats more.

“WaterMellon,” the Kid sighs. “Does no one seriously have a key for this goddamn door?”