-Who got made?

-Nobody. I mean, May did, but not as May. That’s her bit.
-So then why did they come busting in on you like that?
-It’s not that we were recognized, I’m pretty sure. They had the address, and that was enough.
-You mean they were just waiting for you to show up?
-I think so.
-Rat fucks.
-You don’t say.
-But of course they’re gonna crack down harder now.
-I know.
-I mean it’s only two weeks away, our big opening number, and so of course…
-Yeah, I know.
-And did they get anything?
-A few papers, small potatoes. Nothing that’ll amount to anything in court. The piece that Josie
was writing, and a couple of Will’s scrubs.
-So then we’re lovely.
-As long as we don’t show our faces around there again for a while, yeah, looks like we are.
-Scary though.
-You weren’t there, man. It was scary. And if they’d done a DNA test instead of finger scans...
-But they didn’t.
-As far as we know.
-What’s that supposed to mean? We know. If they’d ID’d you you wouldn’t be sitting here.
-Maybe.
-God dammit Marshie you’re killing me with this paranoid shit.
-Sorry, I’ll shut up.
-I mean it’s not like you have any reason to suspect a single one of our people.
-Except they had the address.
-There’s a million ways they could’ve gotten the address. All it takes is one bug in one bar. They
plant those things everywhere. You kids get a couple drinks in you, you forget all about protocol.
It could’ve been anyone. They mine those feeds like a motherfucker.
-I don’t break protocol. Gracie doesn’t either.
-Look I don’t even want to hear about who you trust, because the shrinking flip-side of that coin
is a fucking blacklist and I expect better from you.
-Fine.
-So we don’t go back to Brown’s and May keeps her head down for a while, at least as Sam.
-Sam has a concert at Middletown Fish Company this weekend.
-That’s the name of a venue? Seriously?
-I didn’t come up with it.
-Well tell May she can cancel if she wants, since we can’t run interference for her. Recommend
that she cancel.
-She won’t like that.
-I know. But what can we do? After what happened, the Fish Fry or whatever it’s called is gonna
be crawling with bugs and fuzz.
-She’ll want to do it, even so.
-Fine, whatever. If I say no she’ll probably go anyway. Tell her to be safe and to take a chill pill
beforehand in case they try to dose her.
-Sam Palliver is important for us, Chance.
-I know.
-If we didn’t have Sam we all would’ve been rounded up and shot on St. Patrick’s day. And May
is good at him. She’s not some art school amateur. She can handle herself at Middletown.
-Fine, fine. Where are we on talking to Gary and his people?
-Gary’s a tool and dialogue is progressing smoothly.
-What’s he done this time?
-Nothing. I just hate the guy.
-But I notice you haven’t accused him of being an op.
-An op wouldn’t be that obviously horrible.
-But they’re on board for the grand opening, right?
-They are. I get the feeling that there’s a woman over there, Bailey, who’s handling logistics,
making sure it goes off without a hitch.
-While Gary hogs the credit. I see.
-Yeah, and makes all the speeches.
-Well it takes all kinds. Do you think we should do something to try and cut him down to size,
or...
-No I think they like what they’ve got going on. Everybody but Gary gets that he’s not really at
the helm. I think if we meddled it wouldn’t do any good, we’d just be shaming him.
-Okay. What’s Bailey like? I assumed we were dealing with Gary, who’s at the very least a
known quantity.
-Bailey’s solid. She comes from Slurry loading folk, you know what that scene’s like. Pretty
much everyone in Slurry for her. If anything she might piss off other Foxes. The loading strikes
turned our way towards the end. I wouldn’t be surprised if Bailey was a Friend of Sam.
-So what’s she doing waving the black flag?
-That’s the vernacular they used over there. Our people fucked up in Slurry, and the Foxes took
up the slack. By the end, though, people were getting fed up with their pazzy asses. Jeez, don’t
take it so personally. We don’t all have to read the same books to get where we’re going, right?
-We’ll see what happens on opening day.
-And you call me paranoid. You trusted Gary, of all people.
-He’s predictable. Now it turns out CCVO thinks he’s a joke, which betrays a much more
sophisticated grasp of politics than I’d attributed to them. Add that little kink to us being just two
weeks away from Mr. Opening and I think you’ll understand my apprehension.
-Sophisticated is good. We like sophisticated. A sophisticated Fox is no Fox at all.
-I sure hope so.
-Hey, are you gonna finish that?
-No, go for it. Oh, and when’s that concert at the Fish House?
-Middletown Fish Company? It’s Saturday at, um... eleven I think. Why? You can’t go.
-If May absolutely insists on going, there might be something extra we could put together for her
to show off. Let’s see... Dan. Do you know what Daniel’s up to tomorrow?
-I can ask him when I get home.
-Yeah, get him to call me. I think May would be pretty pleased, in fact.
-What are you thinking?
-Just a bit of provocation. You know I always try to put fuzz to good use. What if there was a
way to get them to shut down the show, look bad in front of the cameras, without anybody
getting arrested?
-Sounds like a last-minute plan. You know what somebody smart once told me about last-minute
plans?
-Oh come on, live a little!
-I think at this point we have very little to gain from provocations.
-But this one is different, I promise. Look, how about I go over it with Dan and then we’ll talk it
over Friday and put it to a vote.
-Okay, but I want veto power before May ever hears about it. Friday morning, early. I can’t
imagine the kind of trouble you and the queen of recklessness could get into if your powers
combined. You two are like vinegar and baking soda.

-I dunno, it’s a little vertical, don’t you think?

-Of course. It has to be a vertical conspiracy. So there are names, identifiable characters. So the
audience can identify with the protagonists. When it comes to the real thing, the protagonists’ll
be the masses, everyone. But we’re conditioned by decades of Hollywood thinking. You don’t
just imagine that away. You have to follow certain rules in order to break others.
-But if this bears no resemblance to the real thing, why even do it?
-It’s a fantasy. Wish-fulfillment. It’s the same thing anybody who writes fiction is doing.
-I think it’s good.
-Thank you.
-But the characters are a little too Tom Clancy for me. My point’s kind of a softer version of what
Jeff said. They’re acting like super-serious humorless secret agents. That’s not realistic. That’s
just a macho aesthetic that’s not appealing to anyone who isn’t a fascist.
-Also what’s with the code words? Why are we being so coy about our politics? Foxes are
anarchists, I take it.
-Yeah.
-That’s dumb. Everybody knows anarchists identify with rats.
-Yeah but I used the word “rat” before to refer to…
-Right, yeah, I saw it. Maybe it’s not dumb but it definitely is coy. What’s the title of this thing
gonna be? When do we break out the C-word? Is the idea that we take people completely
unawares and then by the end of it we’ve got them singing the Internationale? Because that’s
not going to happen.
-Not with super-sexy ultra-spies anyway.
-I dunno, super-sexy kinda works for me. I guess I’m a bit Tom Clancy myself.
-I knew it. You brownshirt.
-Ugh, guys!
-No PDA during meetings.
-Yes, some of us are trying to enjoy a nice buzz here. We don’t need your compulsory
heterosexuality rubbed in our faces.
-Sorry Janet.
-Eat me, Janet.
-Okay and can we talk about what’s going on with this May character? She can magically pose
as a famous musician or something?
-Yup. That’s about it.
-Why? What’s the point?
-Well I was hoping to get something in there about beauty-undermining technology, freedom
from appearance and stuff like that.
-That’s pretty out-there stuff, maybe you should take it easy. We don’t wanna dilute the
message.
-No, I disagree. It’s futuristic! What we want is an Old Left meets cyberpunk via Futurama vibe.
Recognizable issues and weirdo ones jumbled up together. Goofy but heroic.
-That sounds impossible.
-It’s not! Or it shouldn’t be. Give it a go, this whole project is doomed anyway.
-Thank you Ray of Sunshine.
-You’re welcome Jeff of Stupid Face.
-Wait why do you say it’s doomed?
-Because the Gods are watching, Alice.
-No such thing, ask Wikipedia.
-It’s hubristic. It’s a tragic enterprise, in the Greek mode. What is it you’re trying to do?
-Save the world, duh.
-See? Hubris.
-But we are good Prometheans all. We had business cards printed, remember? We sneer at the
Gods.
-And how’d that turn out for old Promie?
-Eh, he didn’t have what we’ve got.
-What’ve we got?
-The science of Marxism-Leninism, of course!
-Smartphones.
-Reese’s minis.
-Mao Tse-Tung Thought.
-Dogsbody IPA.
-Several small bundles of torn-up bits of paper, some of which have writing on them.
-Indomitable will and ambition.
-Holistic medicine.
-Fuck holistic medicine.
-Fuck you, Jeff!
-Fucking. Prometheus never had a honey, did he?
-He was gay. He was so gay.
-Can we, um, get back to the topic at hand?
-Yeah I want to talk about this Slurry loading strike.
-Pass me a beer?
-The loaders are loading a space elevator.
-A what?
-It’s where you tether a satellite to the earth with some heavy-duty nanotechnology-type cable
and then you can run things up and down it really easily.
-Cool.
-Lame.
-And scrubs?
-I dunno yet. I haven’t decided. Something augmented reality maybe. Futuristic media.
-What about Johnny Mnemonic? Like transferrable memories?
-Yeah, that sounds neat.
-Wait, aren’t space elevators supposed to go up from the equator?
-Yeah.
-So where’s Slurry?
-I dunno, fuckin’ Ecuador, give me a break.
-No, that’s a good point though. You gotta be consistent with the geography.
-Why?
-Because nerds are gonna give you shit for it.
-I plan to publish anonymously.
-Of course you do.
-Shut up.
-Catch!
-What is this?
-Goodies.
-There must be... a thousand mosquitoes in here. I thought you couldn’t get this stuff without a
permit.
-You can’t. And it’s twelve hundred.
-So how did you...?
-Got a buddy makes permits.
-Jesus. What are you going to do with all of them?
-It’s Chance’s idea. See what they’ll do, hopefully, is mix with the legit mosquitoes at the concert
tomorrow, borrow the channel they’re transmitting on, and spam it with a million feeds of illegal
activity. Which will automatically draw the full attention of the cops. They’ll come hauling ass
guns a-blazin’. I mean Metro, State, Social Cohesion, even DS-9, since on the wire it’ll look like
all hell’s broken loose at the Middletown Fish Company.
-But when they get there and find out they’ve been duped won’t they be pissed off and start
busting heads?
-They’re all civilians, except for May, and they wouldn’t dare touch her while she’s performing.
That’d start the party early.
-They beat civilians.
-So a couple civilians get beat on and learn the cops are irrational assholes acting on idiotic,
inhuman orders. Good. They won’t kill anybody, and as soon as they review the footage with a
human eye they’ll realize it was just a cartoon. No facial recognition, no arrest.
-You think May will like the plan?
-It’s totally her, don’t you think?
-Yeah. So how long did it take Chance to convince you this was a good idea?
-A few minutes. My main objection was technical. I didn’t think I could get the encryption for
transmitting on police channels from the drones themselves. But that’s what they did in
Burlington last April. I just talked to some of those Foxes and they clued me in. Otherwise I
would’ve had to go in from the DemSec side, which is way better protected from jackasses like
me.
-Right. Computer computer computer, computer computer.
-Haha! I think it’s gonna be pretty fun to watch.
-A little juvenile though, isn’t it?
-Hey, we’ve been busting our humps putting this big opening together, and I think everybody
deserves to enjoy a few hilarious hijinks from our boys in blue.
-Yeah, shit, we deserve something. I’ve just been saving up my karma for the big day.
-Hey, don’t be so religious. Maybe watching these dirtbags fall all over each other trying to save
face this weekend will cheer you up. Seems like you could use it.
-We’re all religious, Danny.
-I sure hope not.

-Wait okay so let me get this straight. The super-ultra-subversive thing they’ve got planned is
this anti-surveillance op where they confuse the cops and make them show up at a totally
peaceful boring event?
-I mean it kinda works because Sam Palliver is publicly connected with the cause.
-But the cops would just scatter some PCP on him, right?
-I dunno, Jeff, it’s a fantasy.
-How about a flying pirate ship?
-Give it a rest, Ray, we’re not doing steampunk.
-Why not? Steampunk never really got a fair hearing, I feel.
-Steampunk is reactionary as shit.
-That’s exactly what I mean! Didn’t an aesthetic as cool as steampunk deserve better politics? I
feel like socialists really dropped the ball with that one. We could have been advertising our
steam-powered dino-mech collective farms, but instead we just boo-hooed and waggled our
fingers like bloody librarians.
-I am a librarian.
-You know what I mean.
-It’s not supposed to be super-subversive, it’s just teasing events to come. It’s a childish way of
blowing off steam. That ideally will blow up in their faces. There’s gotta be some blowback for
deviating from spartan party discipline. Then later when they buckle down and organize
seriously, they’ll see some results.
-God, you’re less fun than Kautsky.
-I don’t know if it’ll blow up in their faces, but I like the idea that it’s a teaser. Johnny Q.
Mainstream hates drones, even if he’s not sure exactly why they’re bad. So we get him on
board with "lol, fuck tha police" and then when the main event comes, and here I stress that it
had better be fucking sweet, he’ll be swept along in the excitement.
-I don’t think Johnny Q. Mainstream is our target audience.
-We have a target audience of zero.
-But that’s cool!
-Okay, how about this: gene-spliced furries.
-Ray you are not putting catgirls in our revolutionary propaganda.
-Your propaganda will fail to be revolutionary until it acknowledges the inevitability of furry
transhumanism.
-I kind of think he’s right. About it being inevitable anyway. Technology is always catering to
pervert shut-ins.
-Whoa whoa, slow down there Janet. Those are some very potentially damaging words you’re
throwing around.
-I gave you the inevitable bit, didn’t I?
-Truce then. Team up against Alice?
-Jerks.
-Listen Alice, Ray the Pervert has a point, and that’s that we should be thinking more
fantastically.
-How so?
-I dunno, floating cities. Miyazaki shit. Glaciers and rainforests and rainbows. Hoverboards.
Flying cars.
-But all of those deserve to be taken really seriously. A glacier insurrection is very different from
a hoverboard insurrection. You can’t just mix and match your Miyazaki tropes to make the thing
sexier.
-Of course you can! That’s what Miyazaki does. Every single one of his movies has the same
stupid message, yay innocent nature boo exploitative alienating industry. He just mixes in a few
cool visuals and the accolades come pouring in. We have no obligation to be serious.
-But that’s what makes things communicable. Stripping them of aesthetics.
-You don’t strip something of aesthetics, stripped-down austerity is an aesthetic. It’s a choice,
and it appeals to a certain narrow range of people just like any other choice.
-I dig flying cars.
-We all dig flying cars, but can any of us even imagine the social upheaval they would imply?
How they would change our tactics, strategy, even our goals? Besides, they’re a little Star Wars-
y.
-Society is Star Wars-y.
-That’s a fair point, Jeff.
-I can imagine. It would be the same way it is now with private planes, only more bureaucratic.
You think flying cars would end the nation-state? No way. That’s techno-determinist utopianism.
Upheaval nothin’.
-Whatever. Maybe we can squeeze in some of your extremely pessimistic thoughts on the
subject of totally bureaucratized flying cars if we’re at a loss for something more soul-deadening
to write about.
-I’m a prophet, yo.

-So are you excited?

-Yes.
-Really? You don’t seem excited.
-You always do that, it’s like I have to be jumping all over the place and laughing like an idiot or
else you think I’m in a deep depression. I’m just quiet. I’m excited but quiet. I’ve never seen
Sam Palliver live before, of course I’m excited.
-That’s crazy, that you’ve never been to a show. You’re like so the type.
-Yeah? Why do you say that?
-What you said to Oliver this morning, to pick an example completely at random.
-He was being an asshole.
-Of course he was, he’s Oliver! But you’re the only person I know who talks to her boss like that.
-People are sheep.
-People aren’t sheep, they’re legitimately scared. That contempt you feel is misplaced. People
act docile because they’ve been beaten on more than you have.
-I’ve taken my fair share of beatings.
-Then call it genetic. But it’s still dumb and insensitive to look down on people whose nervous
systems or brain chemistry or whatever make them less combative than you are. Those same
people make great doctors, cooks, therapists and teachers.
-So what was the show like last summer?
-It was insane. There were like ten thousand people all singing along to "Anchorman’s Blues". It
was electric. I never felt anything like it.
-You think it’s true about him being close with the PRV?
-No way. That’s just how the corporate media tries to smear him, make him seem crazy.
-Yeah. Assholes. But I mean what else could I have done about Oliver?
-Nothing! You were perfect! He’s always giving me shit about that back door, when he’s the one
leaving it open more than anybody. And to just go off on you like that, I mean... it’s bullshit.
-And nobody will stand up to him!
-You’re right! You did a good thing. A really good thing.
-I’m probably gonna get fired on Monday.
-Maybe.
-Why are you making that face?
-What face?
-That smirk, like you know something I don’t. Fuckin’ tell me!
-It’s nothing!
-Nothing, right. Nothing’s why you look like you’ve got a giraffe’s tongue up your ass.
-Let’s call it a surprise then. Will you leave me alone with the graphic imagery please?
-Porcupine quills in your urethra. Bison testicles sliding down your back. Porpoise penis going
down your...
-Jesus, fine, I give up! You’re not getting fired.
-How do you know that?
-We talked after work. Jenny, Steve, Al, Kare... all of us. That weird dude Bob. If Oliver fires you
we’re gonna trash the machines and walk out.
-Seriously? That’s like... thank you. That’s really nice.
-And if that happened, the higher-ups would eat Oliver for breakfast. He’d have to kiss that
cushy corporate job he’s been dreaming of g’bye.
-You guys would really do that for me?
-Well to be honest I can’t vouch for Bob, but everyone else seems pretty pumped about it. What
you don’t understand is that people have been getting pissed off for a really long time. Oliver
won’t approve any raises, which is just like shooting himself in the foot, since he can’t stop being
a total dick either. Plus we love you, you big fat idiot.
-Awww. That’s cute. But so what’s the deal, do you think he’s gonna fire me or not?
-He might, but he’ll change his tune once he realizes what’s at stake.
-Are you sure? He is Oliver, after all…
-Even better. If they try to fire all of us, we’ll make the store unmanageable. Glue the locks, rig
the printers to spray toner everywhere, whatever it takes. Not to mention an old-fashioned picket
line. They don’t want to lose that location, so they’ll most likely fire Oliver and renegotiate our
contracts.
-You sure?
-I’m not sure sure, but I’m confident. They have to. It’s either that or buy us out, which would be
great—who wants to work goddamn retail anyway?

-It’s not looking very magical realist at this point.

-Is that what you want it to be?
-I dunno, I guess so.
-No, fuck magical realism! It’s always just magical enough to be toothless, and just realist
enough to be boring. It doesn’t work as critique because it’s too fantastic, and it doesn’t work as
fantasy because it’s pretty much just this same shit world we know and hate. We want the
opposite of magical realism.
-Which is?
-Mundane fantasy.
-I think that’s just another term for crap.
-Materialist speculation.
-Speculative materialism.
-It doesn’t matter what you call it. The important thing is that it conveys a sense of political
possibility.
-Which I think Alice is doing a great job of.
-Yeah guys, like, feel free to step in and write a few chapters.
-No, we’re happy in a consulting role.
-But your names go on the finished product, right?
-I will permit an anagram of my name to appear in the bottom corner of the seventy-first page.
-You get zero credit, all you’ve done is make jokes.
-And brought snacks! Jeez, no appreciation.
-Okay so how do we move the story forward?
-An explosion.
-That’s so dull. You know I’m not even sure it should move. Isn’t there something beautiful about
an impasse, paralysis, like being trapped in amber?
-No.
-No.
-No.
-Explosion.
-Maybe two explosions.
-We’ve got this “big opening” coming up but I still don’t know what that’s about.
-It’s basically a coup attempt. It’ll either succeed or fail. You’ve boxed yourself into a corner by
setting a date, making it all conspiratorial. The interesting thing going on is outside, in the street,
but all your conversations happen in small dimly-lit rooms.
-We had those two rubes at the concert. That reflects… something. A zeitgeist or whatever.
-No, that’s not enough. Your conspirators, the super-sexy spies I think Janet called them, they
haven’t got shit to do with the revolution. You’re afraid to look at it in the face.
-Okay, so what should a chapter look like?
-A confrontation between good and evil. If you’re gonna simplify it, right, make it about
archetypes and representatives, follow that to its Manichean conclusion. You gave up on realism
around page zero. So give us drama. And drama’s not plot, it’s personalities.
-Isn’t that sort of capitulating to a backwards metaphysics?
-Everything’s capitulating to backwardness. Communicating means resorting to media that
some horrible mass-murderer invented to pacify his slaves. The whole idea is that you can
repurpose things, that even though you’re complicit you redeem yourself by fighting back.
-Okay wait, so since language was invented by people in the past who were no saints, therefore
we should ‘give the people what they want’ even if it means perpetuating this disgusting fucking
mythology of good and evil? I don’t buy it.
-Look, good and evil is a noble lie. You gotta mobilize hatred in your revolutionary movement or
it won’t amount to beans. You are out to Other the capitalists. You have to portray them as
ethically, morally, personally, even physically repugnant.
-They’re just victims of circumstance like everybody else, though. They were yelled at and
emotionally deprived as kids and forced to grow up to be capitalists.
-I know that, but nobody’s gonna send a victim of circumstance to the guillotine. They have to be
villains.
-I think the whole ‘noble lie’ thing is elitist bullshit. You underestimate people. Capitalists need to
be hated and stopped, not portrayed as demonic a priori evil. What’s hard to get about that?
-Because the capitalists will latch on to your ringing endorsement as ‘not demons’ and shout it
from the rooftops. It’s a lifeboat, an escape pod.
-That argument seems like it could justify pretty much any distortion of the truth.
-Harry doesn’t believe in the truth.
-I do! I just think politics trumps it.
-Nice.
-We don’t care about capitalists repeating what we say about them. When capitalists tell the
truth, they’re not acting as capitalists, they’re actually on our side. For example, when they
announce that they shouldn’t be held responsible for their actions because their parents robbed
them of genuine emotional responses to things, the possibility of a non-sociopathic life etcetera,
we should applaud their self-awareness.
-And then send them to the guillotine.
-Right, then send them to the guillotine.
-No, see, there’s a gap between those two things. They parrot our rhetoric when they’re still in
power, arrogant and untouchable. As soon as things get dicey for them, as soon as the guillotine
enters the world stage, you don’t get anything like truth from them. They fall back on the good
old lies, racism and nationalism.
-What you’re saying is that fascist capitalism won’t tell anything like the truth, while liberal
capitalism will, occasionally.
-Right.
-I agree.
-Yeah, sure, whatever.
-What’s your beef?
-I don’t have beef, I just want to get back to what’s really important.
-What’s that?
-The explosions.

-I’m ready to die for my cause. Are you?

-Oh come on. Your cause is what? Some imaginary lines on the earth? The right of slaveowners
to hold property?
-What do you mean, slaveowners? Slavery’s illegal.
-And what do you call it when you take everything away from someone and force them to work
or starve, huh?
-You’re oversimplifying things.
-Okay genius, give me the complicated version.
-When there’s a free agreement between the employer and the employee, the employee is
voluntarily submitting to…
-Let me stop you right there. For one thing, this little fairy tale of yours dates back to like the
seventeenth century. So right off the bat you’re not looking too sophisticated or contemporary.
Plus, no matter how much you insist on how ‘free’ this ‘voluntary’ ‘agreement’ is, you can’t
actually make it free. Why would a person work unless they had to? The only way to create a
labor market is to steal shit, creating people with nothing but their labor to sell.
-But we all, as a society, need them to.
-If that were true, if we were collectively at the edge of starvation, then half the world’s food
wouldn’t be thrown away. If things were so dire we really needed to buckle down and work
more, the capitalists wouldn’t be recording record profits year after year. Those profits don’t turn
into social welfare. They go towards caviar-fueled yacht orgies and more capital.
-But more capital just means more productive infrastructure.
-Really? As far as I can tell, it means more advertising, a better defense team to answer class-
action law suits, more lobbyists, better security, and swankier headquarters.
-And more houses. More furniture, more consumer goods, more stuff for people to use.
-But that stuff doesn’t get to those people unless they’re willing to prostitute themselves to
capital. Unless they’re willing and able, I should say. Because there’s plenty of kids in Sub-
Saharan Africa that would kill for a chance to prostitute themselves to capital. Only capital won’t
let them.
-More oversimplifications.
-It sounds like the only thing you’re willing to die for is nuance. It’s the classic liberal dodge—
slow down, don’t be so angry, don’t take things so seriously, it’s a lot more complicated than
that.
-What I mean is that no matter who you are, you have to understand that those ‘imaginary lines’
are important.
-I know they’re important. They’re important because people like you, people with guns, think
they are, and will impose their delusions on everybody else, come hell or high water. And trust
me, high water’s coming.
-You’ve got some friends with guns, as I understand it.
-That’s right.
-But you don’t believe in imaginary lines, huh? Not even the line between rich and poor? The
line between racist and non-racist? The line between right-thinking and wrong-thinking?
-Rich and poor aren’t imaginary, individual racism ain’t shit compared to structural racism, and I
don’t even know what you mean with that last one.
-I mean that you’ll send your opponents to the gulag first chance you get.
-What have you done, you and your noble cause-supporting friends? You’ve imprisoned more
people than any government in history. What for? For being brown, or being poor, or both.
You’ve defended the master’s justice, that’s all you ever stood for. And the master’s justice is the
whip for everybody else. It makes me sick that you get all moralizing when we point out that
capitalists, politicians and other predators who don’t know how to contribute to society will have
to be taught new skills and prevented from reestablishing their old mafia cliques under
socialism. Of course they have to! Maybe it’s dumb to put them all in one place, but that’s a
technical issue, not a political one. You throw the word ‘gulag’ around like it’s so devastating. It’s
really not. Ordinary people, people who aren’t fanatically attached to this particular configuration
of imaginary lines, they get that making a better world means fighting tyrants. That’s what I
intend to do here, today.
-Not if I can help it.
-Thanks, but you really can’t.

-I never trust anyone that pretty.

-He’s not that good-looking.
-He is. Your subjectivist claims notwithstanding, he is obectively better-looking than ninety-nine
percent of the male population.
-But he’s dumb, it’s not like he’s a threat.
-That’s a common mistake. Dumb pretty people are often taken quite seriously. The threat they
pose isn’t limited by, say, their shallow grasp of strategy. It’s limited by the devotion they inspire,
which is a lot more than normal-looking people.
-I think you’re talking about charisma, not looks.
-Maybe I am. So you wouldn’t argue the point if I said "I never trust anyone that charismatic"
instead?
-It would be less problematic.
-Why is it problematic to say pretty?
-Because only girls are pretty. Because physical attractiveness is predominantly women’s asset.
What you’re doing while you think you’re exalting the mind, inner qualities, character, whatever,
is that you’re actually demeaning the feminine. Which is trite and hackneyed and hollow.
-That’s not my intention.
-Of course it isn’t, who cares about intention? I thought we were talking about politics.
-Okay, who’s more oppressed, pretty girls or ugly ones?
-Ugh I can’t believe you want to have this conversation. Do you want me to say there are perks
to being good-looking? Absolutely. Does that mean that beauty versus ugliness is its own axis of
oppression we need to organize against? No. Because that shallowness, that devaluing of inner
qualities, is merely a consequence of women’s oppression. Because women are the sex class,
they are identified with beauty, thereby creating the category of beautiful and, inexorably, the
category of ugly. If women were to be treated as human beings and not lovely decorative flesh
dolls, then differential treatment of all people based on their resemblance to the ideal flesh doll
would also cease.
-That sounds plausible.
-The only reason you think a beauty hierarchy is part of human nature is...
-Hey, I never said that! I think it can be abolished!
-Yeah, but treating it as something separate from patriarchy is the same as ascribing it to an
outside cause, some heretofore undiscovered originary hierarchy that has nothing to do with
gender.
-It’s got everything to do with gender.
-Let me finish. The only reason you think it doesn’t belong to gender oppression is because
patriarchy has salted your imagination.
-Assaulted?
-No, salted. Like "Salt the earth!"
-Oh.
-And made you look at all of human history with the eye of a beauty pageant judge. Or, you
know, like a pornographer.
-That’s a pretty compelling story and everything, but doesn’t it say something that I can imagine
a classless society much more easily than I can one in which beauty doesn’t confer
advantages?
-But what’s an advantage in a classless society?
-I dunno, attention? Quicker service? More lovers?
-Those are only considered advantages now because they can be bought.
-You’re saying more sex will not be considered preferable in our communist utopia?
-The sex life you want will be considered preferable. That doesn’t automatically mean more
except to pornsick dudes.
-Still, being hot will always facilitate getting the sex life you want, won’t it?
-I think we’ll find that when class is abolished, hotness becomes a lot less obvious slash
objective slash universal. The only "objective" measure of hotness is money. Otherwise it’s
infinitely qualitative. By trying to quantify it you’re committing the same error as the
transformation of use value into exchange value. Once you do that you’re not even interested in
beauty any more, just numbers. Beauty is a weird thing, like poetry, distraction, deja vu. Beauty
is like a grain of sand in an oyster. You can’t rank it, and to do so is a violation of the concept.
-That’s very romantic and everything but you could easily quantify it just with a poll or
something,
-Which is why we need to abolish polling, along with all such phallic empiricism.
-Empiricism is phallic?
-Yeah, it just butts in to whatever’s going on, gets some simplistic quantitative data a.k.a.
ejaculates, then leaves. It doesn’t give a fuck about different contexts, meanings, causes,
consequences, interpretations, anything. Just as long as it gets its numbers, by which I mean
orgasm.
-Polling is science.
-The science of “I’m gonna cum”, not how to make someone cum. They’re two very different
things. The pollster wants to find out how to make actual people fit into his charts. Whatever
correlation he finds in the data will confirm or refute his theory. Except all his theory could
possibly describe is how people responded to pollsters’ questions that day. Marginalized
desires, repressed urges, they don’t show up on polls. Polling is capitalist realism, only less
imaginative.
-So voting’s the same thing.
-No, it’s worse. If polling is bad sex, voting is rape.

-Whoa whoa whoa. Where did that come from?

-I gave it a shot.
-Don’t. Please. Just… don’t.
-Fine.
-I get what you’re trying to say Jeff, but Janet’s right.
-Okay, I get it. No rape.
-Not in some glib anti-voting screed, no! Jesus.
-Hey but voting is bad for realz.
-We understand, Jeff. That’s not what this is about.
-Why not? Let’s pretend it is. I don’t think it’s obvious that voting is bad.
-I knew it! It wasn’t just the rape thing, you’re a voting apologist!
-It was the rape thing, Jeff.
-Yeah.
-Sorry bro.
-Anyway can we all gang up on Janet now, I really think she deserves it for stepping out of
groupthink.
-Ha! That’s more like asking Janet to gang up on us.
-Aww shucks, you’re sweet. No but seriously, am I off-base? It seems like voting is just one of
many tactics. Nothing should be out-of-bounds for us.
-Well I think that…
-Maybe you should sit this one out, Jeff.
-Yeah, don’t worry, I got this.
-Fine. Take it away, Dave.
-The problem for me is the idea that by voting, you’re legitimizing the bourgeois State. Elections
are ad campaigns for the political process as it was established in the slaveowners’ Constitution.
Voting validates that process.
-I dunno, that seems a little idealist to me. What is this “legitimacy”? Can’t you undermine a
state’s legitimacy while at the same time voting for politicians who share your contempt for it?
-Well no politician can openly share your contempt for it, because nationalism is a practically
universal affliction. So they’ve all gotta be flag-wavers.
-No, wait a minute, you’re changing the argument. You have to agree that some politicians are
better than others. Wasn’t Lenin better than Hoover? We agree that the realm of political
possibility is determined by collective action, class struggle, the masses. But once the possibility
of electing a socialist has opened up, don’t we have a responsibility to vote for them?
-No. We can get a better socialist.
-What? That’s insane.
-Yeah, I’m not sure I follow you, Alice.
-You’re doing it all wrong. The problem with voting is that it is completely idealist. It is the
practice of idealism and it teaches idealism.
-Go on.
-It is the practice of idealism because it sees politics as a question of individuals and their moral
character. You mentioned Lenin, Janet, but to ascribe superhuman leadership qualities to Lenin
is idealist. He was just some dude. The actions that matter, that make history, are the actions of
the masses. Period. It’s not some complicated space-opening maneuver where the masses
create the possibility for a good politician to get in and really make a difference with her special
lawmaking prowess. No. All that matters is the strength of the real movement that abolishes the
present state of things. Politicians are epiphenomena. The stronger and smarter and scarier
your movement gets, the better the reformist politicians they’ll offer up will be. They’ll let
socialists get elected, right up until they start shooting socialists. At which point it doesn’t matter
how good you are at getting out the vote, it matters how good you are at fighting together.
Which is all that ever mattered.
-That was a nice speech and everything, but I feel like you’re contradicting yourself. Isn’t
organizing to get out the vote like a really good way to practice working together? Running a
campaign is hard. If your fledgling CP-whatever can manage to get a candidate into office, isn’t
that like a major coup?
-You’re arguing two things. One is that voting is important because it’s good practice for a group
to get involved in a campaign. Is it accessible? Yes. So are training wheels. I don’t say nobody
should ever work on an electoral campaign, only that it’s not the kind of politics grown-ups do.
It’s for people who still believe in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. Which is why I called it
idealist. Your second point is that getting an avowed communist into whatever elected position
would be good and important. Not really—look at Eurocommunism. They had decades holding
spots in parliaments in Europe, but because the movement as a whole was reformist they didn’t
accomplish squat. It’s the masses, that’s where politics is happening, every single time. Voting
distracts us from that.
-I think you could find people who’d disagree.
-Are you one of those people?
-I haven’t decided.
-Well let me know when you do!
-Hey, whatever happened to those scrubs?
-Dude I completely forgot about those things! I move that we revisit those.
-Seconded.
-All in favor?
-Aye.
-Aye.
-Aye.
-Aye.
-Nay, you bastards! A thousand times nay!
-The nays have it.
-And justice carries the day. I’d like to thank you all for participating and wish you the best of
luck in all your future endeavors.

-They’re building bridges.

-Are they?
-You mean you don’t know? They’re doing it because of your drawings.
-My drawings.
-Jesus, Gary, snap out of it, we need you.
-Why would they build my drawings?
-They’re not, not exactly, they’re just taking inspiration from them. You inspired people, Gary.
That’s what you wanted.
-What I wanted.
-And now there are bridges criss-crossing the city, connecting all the apartments, swooping up
and down across the streets. It’s incredible, like something out of Swiss Family Robinson.
-Or Dinotopia.
-What?
-Nothing. Tell them to stop.
-Why? It’s awesome.
-Awe, yes, I am in awe. That’s the word I was looking for.
-You should get out there, man. This is what you’ve been working for. The PCU explosion was
what set all this off. That’s when the barricades went up in the Hackles, that’s when the Councils
called their Moot. You did this, Gary. You should be proud. Aren’t you?
-Proud, yes. I am proud.
-You don’t seem proud. To be perfectly honest, you seem shell-shocked. What’s been going on?
-Have you seen Bailey?
-No, I haven’t. Why, does it have something to do with her?
-I miss her. I should like to see her.
-"Should like"? What the fuck, man? Are you feeling okay?
-I’m very well. I just need to find Bailey. She can help.
-Help with what?
-Let’s go for a drive, James.
-You didn’t get your head scrambled in that last mosquito fly-by, did you?
-No.
-You’re sure?
-How could I be sure?
-Fair enough. Where are we going?
-We’ll follow the humming.
-Humming?
-Humming.
-I don’t hear any humming.
-You have to start to listen, James.
-Dude whatever is wrong with you please snap the fuck out of it. Like now.
-Let’s find Bailey, then we’ll talk.
-God damn it, Gary. Shit. I mean... shit.

-Entertainment should be a felony.

-Yeah, yeah. Do you have the bottle opener?
-I’m serious. Plato was right.
-It was Socrates.
-No, it was Plato doing Socrates.
-Whatever. Music is just the most sophisticated drug they had at the time. Splay-dough was
against drugging the masses.
-I think he’d be all for drugging the lower classes.
-Okay, let’s get away from the references to antiquity, because they’re definitely not my forte. Do
you or do you not agree that art is basically a drug?
-Sure. So what?
-What do you mean, so what?
-I mean that has no immediate consequences. You’re inveighing against drugs, how fucking
antique can you get?
-I’m not inveighing, I’m just making a comparison. You’re the one inveighing. God. Inveigher.
-You are, you totally are. You said entertainment should be a felony, then you said art, of which
entertainment is a subset or maybe vice versa, was basically a drug. Meaning you think art, like
drugs, should be outlawed, even in an ideal communist society, which we know you were
referring to because you brought up Plato’s Republic, a famous polemic on the "ideal" structure
of society.
-I’m not saying anything should be a felony under communism, that doesn’t make any sense.
No state means no felonies. What I’m saying is by the state’s own logic, fascism’s own logic,
Splay-dough’s own logic, entertainment of any kind is just as dangerously subversive as drugs
and ought to be treated just as harshly.
-Bullshit. That is not at all what you were saying. You really don’t like music.
-I hate it. I wish people would stop listening to it.
-What’s wrong with you? Were you dropped or something?
-If I was it would be pretty embarrassing for you, wouldn’t it.
-My dad dropped me once. He was playing basketball carrying me in like one of those baby-
backpacks.
-I see so many cool kids throw their lives away listening to music, making music, sharing
music... I just think of all the energy that gets wasted on what is basically getting high.
-You might need to see somebody...
-Prove me wrong.
-By your expansive definition of drugs, pretty much every part of the human experience would
count as a drug. All the things that make life worth living. Music is just one of those things. You
would have a Spartan society geared only toward war. That kind of thing isn’t sustainable or
desirable post-scarcity.
-I didn’t say it had to be strictly about war. Just about truth, justice, liberty, equality, fraternity...
that kind of stuff.
-You are afraid of the sensuous. You prefer abstractions. That’s cool. Maybe there’s some
atonal music you might get off to. But concretely, if you really are going to uphold those
cherished Enlightenment values you just recited so piously, you’re going to have to make your
peace with art. Music. Sex. Poetry. Drugs. Experience. Cold mathematical abstraction is a
partial, insufficient approach to the world.
-Why do I have to make peace? Doesn’t the ecology of revolutionary politics need someone in
every niche? For every humanist, a Bolshevik? For every peacenik, a warrior?
-In other words I should tolerate your difference of opinion for now even though if you ever got
your way you would impose that same opinion on everyone.
-Exactly.
-Not a chance. I need to educate you now, because I plan to work my butt off helping get you,
me and our little gang into a position of influence. And when you go around making totalitarian
pronouncements like those, it makes me nervous we won't make it, and also a little nervous that
we might.
-Come on. We’re all totalitarians.
-Maybe so but there’s totalitarians and totalitarians, if you know what I mean.
-I don't.
-I mean yes, the original charge is baseless, a rhetorical device for lumping together fascism
and the system that defeated it, what we like to call Really Existing Socialism. In the sense that
we will be slandered as totalitarians by reactionaries, yes, we ought to embrace the charge
since it proves we’ve got them on the defensive. However. There is such a thing as hatred of
the People, and it can infect even those who ought to be immune. When this hatred becomes
policy, governments become totalitarian. I think you’re not reasoning from a place of cool
reflection, but from a place of fear and resentment. Which is why you’re in danger of pushing a
program that is fundamentally anti-human.
-Thanks, Yoda. Let the record show that I am resentful and anti-human. However, and I think
this is important, communists should not shun resentment. The only people who can afford not
to be resentful are the rich.
-And scientists. If you understand a phenomenon, what is there to resent?
-Oh please. Their enjoyment!
-Which is practically null, I don’t see what the fuss is about.
-Null or nil?
-Nil. Whatever.
-It’s not nil being able to buy concert tickets whenever you want.
-Ah. So you don’t hate music.
-Of course I don’t, what kind of freak hates music?
-Look can I get you to admit that basing a political view off of such a childish grievance is
probably not the smartest idea? That many other people have had different experiences with
music, many of them positive, and that on the whole it’s not a good idea to try to outlaw
something that every single culture has spontaneously come up with and people can practice
anywhere, at any time, with no equipment or training, just to make their lives a little happier?
Can we agree that music gets a pass?
-I’d defer to an anthropologist on the "every single culture" question, but yeah, fine.
-Thank you. That’s very big of you.
-I’m still not sure about video games.
-God dammit.

-The city looks beautiful.

-I know.
-Peaceful.
-Yeah.
-Dan’s over at Whitehill, doing Callistos.
-You talked to him?
-Yeah, right before he left.
-It’s good that he’s doing that.
-I know.
-Not good for him maybe, but good for the rest of us. He works too hard.
-Yeah.
-You want a cigarette?
-I quit.
-Good for you. Marshie?
-She’s resting downstairs.
-Willa, how did these get to be our people?
-What do you mean?
-A month ago we were strangers.
-A lot’s happened.
-I don’t like them.
-What??
-No, that’s not what I mean. It’s just these people aren’t Foxes. No, I know what you’ll say,
neither are we, but they never were, most of them. They think differently. It’s unsettling.
-Not that differently.
-You’re right, I know, it’s just I’m having... trouble. Feeling like I belong.
-These people love you, Bay.
-Why? They shouldn’t.
-What do you mean?
-Two months ago I was in Fingham and I told them not to trust the PRV, that they were all a
bunch of authoritarians and opportunists.
-Ha, who cares about that?
-You know what happened after that?
-No, I was in Puerto Rico.
-And it wasn’t on the news. The rioters turned away PRV irregulars at the city limits. They liked
me in Fingham. I was respected. After I spoke my piece they consensed that they would turn
down PRV guerrilla aid.
-So? So they hurt some squid feelings.
-Don’t call them squid.
-They call themselves squid!
-It’s different. What happened was, after the cops heard that the PRV wasn’t on the guest list,
they dropped an EMP in the projects everybody was holed up in.
-Why?
-To brick our phones.
-Because...
-Because right after that they came in with live ammunition. And they didn’t want people to see it
happening.
-Live ammunition? I thought in Fingham y'all just got arrested.
-The ones who surrendered got arrested.
-You surrendered?
-No shit I surrendered, and you would’ve done the same thing, girlie.
-I’m sorry, Bailey.
-If you had any sense in you, anyway. Maybe you don’t. I saw you on the wall Thursday, that
was somethin'. All lit up. Like an angel.
-Nobody here blames you for that, Bay.
-Nobody here knows the story like I do.
-They don’t need to. And even if they did, they’d forgive you.
-I know they would. That’s the worst part. Seventeen people were killed, Willa. Because I
couldn’t trust a squid. But they sure trust me.

-I have some issues.

-Okay.
-With the book so far. I have some issues with the book.
-Shoot.
-For one thing, what the hell is it? Is it a manifesto? Is it a novel? It seems like just scattered
conversations with no thread linking them.
-That’s what it is.
-Which is fine.
-No it’s not!
-Why not?
-This brings me to my next question: Shouldn’t the book be arguing something coherently? Isn’t
that the urgent task of communist fiction, or non-fiction, or whatever it is we’re supposed to be
doing here?
-Yes it should. Absolutely. Be coherent.
-Why? I don’t think I agree.
-No, Harry, it does. Dave has a good point.
-Thank you.
-Oh honey, you’re completely innocent of it.
-You jerks.
-It has to advance a coherent ethic of struggle.
-Which is what?
-Exactly. We don’t have a clue.
-Yes we do, this is what I’ve been saying. Responsible revolutionaries have been writing the
right kind of stuff for decades! Communist writing should make you angry, it should make you
get up out of your chair and want to punch your boss! This nonsense we’re all complicit in here,
this so-called “book”, it just gives me a really strong feeling of Huh? That’s not radical! It’s
bourgeois narcissism and paralysis!
-Dave, do we live in a communist world?
-I mean, according to Graeber, everyday communism is all around us…
-Fuck that guy. Answer the question. Do we live in a communist world?
-No, I suppose not.
-Which means that all hitherto existing socialism…
-Has been flawed.
-Yes, noble, but flawed. ‘Defeated’ would be the more sympathetic expression, but defeat’s just
a consequence of flaws. It has lacked something. Scientifically speaking, there’s no way to be
sure that any prescription for communism, any theory or aesthetic or Weltanschauung, is
adequate to the task of bringing it into being. The only thing that would prove any ethic right
would be its victory over capitalism.
-The victory of the people holding it over capitalism. Ethics don’t win revolutions, people do.
-Just so.
-Wait a second Alice, I think I know where you’re going with this, and I think it’s bunk.
-It is not bunk! Your mom’s bunk!
-You’re gonna say that since we can’t know all the consequences of our actions, and since our
world is an extremely complex system, it’s possible that any little thing might be the butterfly that
leads by some chain of events to total human emancipation.
-More or less.
-Which is indisputably true. But you would then conclude that Dave is in no position to call out
our collective literary production on the question of its ‘revolutionary responsibility’, I think he
called it.
-Right.
-That’s the step too far. Yes, any little thing might be the butterfly—in fact, for any given
historical event, you will always be able to find a butterfly. Or you would, if you had perfect
God’s-eye knowledge of all history.
-Tralfamadorian.
-Whatever. But it doesn’t follow that your thing, whatever it is, is likely to be that butterfly. In our
case, Dave has every right to point out what he sees as flaws in our presentation.
-Thank you, Mel.
-And we have every right to ignore him.
-A double agent!
-I knew it! I knew you would never defend coherence!
-Um, I’m still defending coherence.
-What? Why?
-Um, because it’s coherent? And therefore communicable? And therefore democratic?
-Fuck democracy!
-Fuck communication!
-I like democracy and communication, I’ll be on your team.
-Fuck teams!
-Wait a minute, what happened to that bottle of tequila? Jesus Christ you guys, are you kidding
me?
-Well undermined, you old moles!
-Huzzah! Cheers! Salud! Prost!
-What he said!
-This is hopeless. I call a recess.
-It’s totally coherent to make a jumbled mess of things. Things are a mess.
-Wow, that’s so meta and wise.
-We have another bottle.
-Are. There. Limes.
-Yes.
-You are literally and not at all sarcastically smart and handsome; please ignore my earlier
snark.
-All is forgiven, my child.
-Eww. What are you guys talking about?
-Religion.
-God save the queen!

-This is a nice, uh, lair you got here.

-Haha, thanks. Oh, meet Chance, he’s been with us since he was about this big.
-Hi, you’re the journalist, right?
-He called it a “lair”.
-No shit? I guess it is. Well welcome to our lair. You giving him the tour then?
-That’s right.
-He’ll come to the moot?
-If that’s okay with everybody.
-Yeah, no, it’s cool. Make sure you get him up to Scarns, they’ve got something big in the works
over there.
-What?
-It’s a surprise, but I’ll give you a hint: it’s closer than it appears.
-Yeah, Chance is like that. He’s rock-solid when it comes to putting in the hours, holding down
the fort and whatever other cliché floats your boat, but when he’s off-duty he does like to play
games. What do you suppose it is?
-T. rex.
-What?
-I play a lot of ClueDin. He was making a reference to Jurassic Park. I guess they’re making a
sculpture of a Tyrannosaurus Rex or something.
-Damn. Chance’ll be pissed when he finds out you guessed so easily. If you’re right, that is.
-Tell him not to to, it’s just something I do.
-Guess I better keep an eye on you.
-I’m harmless, I swear. Just writing a story.
-We’ve been getting lots of that these last few days.
-I’m not surprised.
-You a communist?
-Not exactly. I supported the councils in Wading, though. I locked down with one of them in
August. Good people.
-Yeah, a bit queer though, aren’t they?
-…How do you mean?
-No, ha, I mean strange. Those councilists, there was always something a little spooky about
the way they did politics. Like occult.
-I never noticed anything like that.
-Maybe just my imagination. Or prejudice, more like. Now that I think about it, my ma never did
truck with Waders.
-I got the feeling that I was welcome, but with the very clear unspoken caveat that I wouldn’t be
brought into the circle of trust. So it might be that’s what you’re talking about.
-Lack of transparency culture, why don’t we call it?
-They’d probably say you all had made a fetish of it over here.
-Absolutely. That’s what the People’s Cams are about. We’ve enlisted the whole population in
spying on the rest! Haha, if my old pa could see me now, damned if he wouldn’t have himself
another heart attack!
-Yes, tell me about that.
-Well he was a big anti-surveillance activist. Used to go around spray-painting security cameras.
-Interesting.
-Here’s our canteen, by the way, three square a day. Rotating shifts, everybody’s got one, of
course.
-Of course. You were saying about your dad…?
-Right well he was pro-transparency, up to a point. Transparency of government, narrowly
defined. He never figured that government extends to our workplaces, our schools, our homes.
A man beats on his wife and kids, that’s fascism, there’s no need for parades or uniforms to call
it what it is. So my pa, he thought he was protecting us from fascism by fighting this abstract
power, surveillance, never really considering Lenin’s old saying “Who? Whom?” You know what
I mean?
-I think so.
-Tell the truth, now.
-I have a vague grasp of the argument.
-Maybe I can clear it up. Nothing’s in a vacuum, right? Nothing is ever neutral. You say a knife’s
neutral, I say a knife is the sum of all knife-related activity. You say, well, that doesn’t imply a
moral content, I say no, but it does add up to a historical content, which is what’s got us most
preoccupied these days. So all knife-related activity adds up to certain patterns, patterns of
action and patterns of thought, praxis and theory. Ideology, I should say. But those patterns are
in flux, right? They’re never fixed. A knife is not an ahistorical knife, it is not trapped in the
present, it’s constantly up for grabs, being renegotiated. Thus even if its historical meaning is
one thing now, that doesn’t mean it will necessarily be the same tomorrow. Even if its
accumulated social existence, which is identical to its essence, is one thing, the class forces it’s
serving and so on are not inherent to that essence, but only the contingent outcome of a
historical struggle. Contradiction, and therefore possibility, are in everything. That’s what Lenin
was talking about.
-I’ve never heard it talked about that way, I’ll give you that.
-Well you just haven’t been listening to the right people. Most folks around here could do a
better job of explaining, it just so happens you put me on the spot.
-Did I?
-Sure felt that way. Or maybe I was showing off, for the camera as it were. Hahaha, oh well, I’m
only mortal.
-So you’ve renegotiated security cameras, then?
-Right. Pretty much that’s exactly what we’ve done.
-And people don’t feel that as an invasion of privacy?
-I suppose some of them do, yeah. Mostly the older folks. The kids grew up that way; they’ve
always been on camera. What they’re happy about is that now they get to watch—and make a
difference. That’s the whole point, that people take policing into their own hands. Professional
cops are gone. We don’t have any.
-Some would say it’s better to have trained experts dealing with law-breakers.
-I think if anybody’s gonna carry around a gun, they better be a trained expert. But the only
places where police have guns are places where the laws are so awful that nobody will obey
them unless you hold a gun to their head! It’s really insane. Here we don’t have too many laws.
Maybe that’ll change in the future, I know there’s some ex-lawyers out there thinking about
writing a proper Constitution. It could work, I guess.
-Don’t they say that’s the death knell of the revolution?
-People say a lot of things. You don’t always have to take ‘em so seriously.
-True enough.
-Here, look at this! We’re proud of this baby.
-You’re brewing beer?
-Knock Bock, we call it, hahaha. Ain’t that a hoot?
-For the Knockers, I get it.
-You ever meet one of those guys?
-Yes, a woman. She gave me the creeps, to be honest.
-They have a way about them, don’t they? God damn saints though, each and every one of
them.
-I’ll take your word for it.
-Careful, friend. I’m a friendly giant, so you can feel free to share whatever’s on your mind with
me, but you won’t get far around here badmouthing the Knockers.
-Gotcha.
-You want a taste?
-Sure, why not?
-Here. Goes down smooth, dunnit?
-Jesus, you fuckers know how to drink.
-Now we’re talking! I knew there had to be somebody inside that suit!

-It seems like the story always cuts off right as the bacchanalia begins.
-Of course it does. Haven’t you realized what’s going on?
-What do you mean?
-I’ve noticed, but I want you to say it first.
-Right. The story’s prudish. It would call itself Spartan or stoic or whatever but it’s basically
afraid of sex.
-Are you saying I’m afraid of sex?
-Most likely. But not necessarily. You could just be writing a prudish story because you’ve
decided whatever impulses x, y and z don’t belong in it.
-Hey, hey, I got one! That’s the reason it’s all dialogue, too.
-I knew you all would call me out on that at some point.
-Since you hate your body, you don’t want to have to deal with messy description. It’s too moist
and grimy and throbbing for you.
-Of course I hate my body, who doesn’t?
-It’s the same reason you like Firestone and Kim Stanley Robinson.
-Oooh.
-Look, I don’t hate my body. I mean I’m fine with it. Whatever. How can you not like Firestone?
-Besides the racism? Because she’s a vulgar materialist.
-That’s what idealists call all matter. Vulgar.
-I mean she thinks there is a one-to-one correspondence between childbearing and oppression.
There’s no room for culture in her system. But culture is everywhere! Politics, dialectics,
complexity! Just because women can get pregnant doesn’t mean that they’ll be oppressed until
they stop getting pregnant.
-But that’s not what she’s saying. She’s saying patriarchy is about reproduction, that’s it. And it’s
inarguably true. That it dialectically develops according to women’s struggles and, obviously, the
mode of production. What is this body-hating?
-She wants us all to become cyborgs, or beings of pure light. And only then can we be free from
patriarchy. I’m not willing to wait that long.
-I heard there was a Russian billionaire or something who was funding research into making
immortal hologram bodies.
-Transhumanist frivolity. It’ll never happen, and if it did, it wouldn’t matter.
-What? How can you say that?
-What, our enemies get stronger? Smarter? Longer-lived? That’s been the trend for the rich
since time immemorial.
-So the poor keep getting stupider?
-No, everybody’s getting smarter, the rich just have more free time and quiet spaces to do it in.
They’ve always gotten the best medicine, the best physical trainers, the best private tutors.
What’s a hologram body? Just a difference in degree, not in kind. Quantitative, not qualitative.
-Wait a minute.
-Yes, um, wait a minute, I know this one, the answer is “What is dialectics?”
-Exactly. Quantitative changes transform into qualitative ones, and fucking hologram bodies
would count as a pretty big qualitative rupture, I would say.
-But what changes? Technology is like global warming, or continental drift. Our goals don’t
change. We’re going after the same stuff peasants were after a thousand years ago—food
enough for everybody and an end to bondage.
-What about immortality? When do we start fighting over that?
-If it shows up on the menu, fine. Look, I’m not gonna kick it out of the bed, you know what I
mean? But it doesn’t do us any good to ‘prepare’ for it or what have you.
-If you see it coming you can take advantage though, right?
-Yeah, I mean with continental drift let’s say you could take advantage of two cultures literally
crashing into each other to, I dunno, come up with a hybrid ideology that attracts the most
advanced sectors of each side’s working class to the struggle. Or something.
-Hybrid ideology? Advanced sectors? All that sounds pretty elitist, like people need to be taught
what to believe. As if two continents crashing into each other, which wouldn’t come as a surprise
to anybody, wouldn’t inspire a hell of a lot more creative thinking than you could ever do in your
lifetime.
-You’re right, they don’t need to be taught what to believe.
-They don’t?
-Of course they don’t! ‘They’ are us, do we need to be taught what to believe?
-I mean, sort of.
-No!
-They aren’t us, though. Everybody’s different.
-So?
-Which means we should not be as respectful toward their opinions as we are towards our own.
We know what went into forging our opinions, what got us to the point we’re at now. The
research, the despair, the thousands of conversations. It’s wrong to project that experience onto
people who haven’t shared it.
-You’re saying it’s condescending to treat people as though their beliefs were valid? That’s ass-
fucking-backwards, Alice.
-It’s liberalism to treat wrong ideas as right ones. I love people, even if I supposedly hate bodies,
which means I also love justice. A person’s ideas are contingent, circumstantial. Justice is our
collective power to recognize each other as human beings. There are many reasons a person
might have bad ideas; bad justice is an oxymoron. You might be right about immortality, that it
doesn’t really affect the meaning of justice, but you’re wrong about everybody’s ideas deserving
respect.
-But who defines what a bad idea is? You? Our little circle here?
-Everybody in existence. And they do it through class struggle. And it never ends.
-Fuck.
-I know, right?
-Wasn’t there some mention of bacchanalia earlier? I could have sworn.
-Oh, that is such a guy move, looking away when it gets heavy.
-Things are heavy. You’re right.
-Yeah.
-No they’re not, come on you assholes. Class struggle is fun as shit.
-Especially if you’re fighting holograms.
-Especially if you’re fighting holograms, thank you Alice.
-Because you have to use lasers, which are cool.
-Now you’re getting the hang of it!
-Send us drones or send us lights, no tech beats our will to fight.
-Heidegger was dumb as shite, so everything’ll be all right.
-Comrades come and hold me tight, um…
-It’s getting fucking cold at night!
-I’m terrified of Vegemite!
-Preferably a sodomite!
-Wait, you guys, I’d like to talk about the definition of justice that Alice had, I thought it was really
interesting but…
-Much too highbrow, am I right?
-Way too many megabytes.
-God, you’re children.
-Yup, look at us, we’re quite a sight.
-If only we’d been brung up right.

-What is this? It’s… amazing.

-First Wading Elementary.
-Who’s Wading?
-It’s where we’re from. All of us.
-You mean…
-It’s the town we’re from, haha. I’m not some nut that worships a god called Wading.
-I’m sorry, my bad. It’s just that…
-I know, I give off some vibes. Don’t sweat it. All these kids, and the older folks too, there’s a few
of them over by the fountain, we’re all from the town of Wading. This is First Wading Elementary.
-And where is that?
-Haha, It’s a few states over.
-Why do you laugh?
-We like to think our town has a bit of a reputation.
-What for? Oh, I’m sorry, I mean… why?
-Wading’s where the first synods started.
-Really? That’s a big deal, I’m embarrassed. Whose idea was it?
-The kids’.
-Not these kids?
-No, a little older. Some of their brothers and sisters, I believe. Anyway, it kicked off the whole
ball rolling.
-That’s unbelievable, that it was kids.
-Pretty crazy, right?
-Our synod, the first thing we did was unseat the sheriff, since nobody liked him.
-That’s pretty much the way it’s been all over. We made public kitchens open twenty-four seven.
-But don’t the kids miss home?
-Does it look like they miss home?
-Not a bit.
-I think you’re right. A couple of them have come up to me in the last few months, but…
-Months?
-Yeah. We’ve been traveling since January.
-Holy…
-We just wander, and give class when it occurs to us. But the best teacher is experience. You
wouldn’t believe some of the stuff we’ve run into. These kids are warriors. And smart, damn
they’re smart sometimes.
-So why do they need you?
-Well at the beginning I told myself it was to drive the truck, first aid, that kind of thing. I’m also a
physicist. They ate up everything I had to teach them in the first two months, though, so… I
dunno. They’re not smart all the time. And we’ve gotten close. I wouldn’t know what to do back
in Wading without them.
-Doesn’t have to be Wading. A lot of people are moving around these days.
-You’re right, we’ve bumped into the same migrants five or six times. Call them our adjunct
professors. Those folks have got ridiculous amounts of knowledge—animals, plants, art history,
human behavior, you name it. There’s one of them by the name of Jill Hemming, she’s a beast. I
wish I’d studied under someone like her at school.
-Why don’t you do it now? You could find her.
-Physics lost some of its charm for me. I’d be insufferable as a student. All I care about now is
practical applications, and in my old field there were hardly any of those.
-Practical applications like what?
-Right now the kids are into genetics, splicing and stuff.
-You have the equipment for that?
-Our lab is in that truck. It’s got pieces from all over, you’d be surprised.
-Isn’t that pretty advanced stuff?
-Well these kids aren’t like we were at their age. I mean, that’s always been true, at least since
everything started speeding up so much. And with our pedagogy, we’re Rancièreans, we don’t
slow them down.
-Rancièreans?
-Means we believe in the equality of all intelligence.
-How do you mean?
-For one thing, that no student is smarter than any other. There’s different abilities, different
experiences, different personalities, different habits, but there’s nothing that can or should be
quantified to compare two minds. You might have heard the news a few years back when they
“disproved” IQ, but they didn’t go far enough. They just replaced it with a more complicated
three-axis method of comparison. We say: yeah, and that three-axis system is an
oversimplification too. Et cetera. By induction, no quantitative measure of intelligence is
possible. Anything that can be communicated can be communicated to anyone. There’s no age
requirement or natural prerequisites to do, for example, multivariable calculus.
-That’s interesting.
-The other major difference from traditional pedagogy is that we don’t think teachers are any
smarter than students. We don’t stand between the students and their object of study. We don’t
interpret books for them, we don’t tell them how things are supposed to be, or how a machine
works, or anything. The kids do all the learning on their own. I mean, that’s the way it always is,
no matter what system they’re studying under. It’s just that in traditional pedagogies, teachers
delude themselves into thinking they can pour knowledge into brains. That’s not how it works. If
there’s no will to learn, learning won’t happen. And how do you encourage the will to learn? By
being hands-off. Not stunting their development with arbitrary hoops to jump through. Which
means no grades, no tests, very little in the way of ‘right answers’ except in Math.
-Yeah, seems like that approach would work well with subjects like English literature, but with
other subjects not so much.
-But everything is English literature, unless it’s Spanish or Arabic or Chinese. Science is just a
matter of interpreting experience. Same thing goes for History—you look at data and try to make
sense of it. Nothing’s “wrong” unless it can be shown to be wrong in the data, and since data
are always uncooperative, and since very few ideas are really falsifiable, a lot of different
interpretations aren’t wrong.
-But there is, I mean, like one reality, right? There was an actual date when the Second Civil
War started. That’s not a question of interpretation.
-Maybe it is. If you read the first-hand accounts, there are contradictions. Maybe not the date of
the Garland Massacre, that’s pretty much undisputed, but events preceding it? There’s a school
of thought that says the old regime was working behind the scenes to bring the conflict to a
head faster, since they thought that the revolutionaries were underprepared.
-Yeah, well, stuff like that, sure. How much can we really know about the old opaque regime?
Before Transparency, I mean. But stuff like force equals mass times acceleration, those are
absolutes.
-Unless you’re dealing with near-relativistic speeds. And who’s to say we aren’t all traveling at
near the speed of light? From a photon’s perspective, we are. Or perhaps not—relativity can be
tricky like that. And what is force, anyway? Just because we can quantify it doesn’t mean it’s a
real thing. It’s a useful accounting device that happens to work in many everyday situations. But
where does it break down? Why does it work in the first place? These are unanswered
questions. To pretend they’re not worth considering is anti-thought. Stultifying.
-Interesting.
-You don’t buy it, do you?
-I’m trying to understand.
-That’s just it, “understanding” isn’t a thing either! There is no way to verify that a truth has been
transmitted unadulterated. There’s no such thing as an unadulterated truth, the essence of a
truth, none of that! The only thing we have are interpretations, dialogue, clarification. When we
think we understand each other perfectly we’re still in separate universes. Two different minds
cannot share the exact same idea, since they’re different minds! Each one has a version of the
idea, a kind of transcription, and that idea is linked to however many others. But those links
won’t be the same for anyone else. What happens is that we’re always translating,
reformulating, struggling to “get our point across”, which in practice means when we get
emotional validation from the person we’re talking to, either in the form of praise or submission.
-Right. I gotcha.
-This “understanding” model is toxic, anti-democratic, and wrong. Which is part of why we’re so
happy to be traveling around with our little nomadic school. We show people what else is
possible. And isn’t that what the revolution is all about?
-Okay, let’s do it this way: Now that you’ve given me the theory, tell me about the practice. You
said your kids were getting into genetics. What are they studying now?
-Chlorophyll.
-Oh, so like putting leaves under the microscope.
-Not exactly.
-What then?
-They’re working on modifying chlorophyll so that it can thrive in the epidermis.
-Like to turn people’s skin green?
-To make people photosynthetic. Solar. Food-free.]
-That’s impossible.
-Is it? Just imagine a life where you didn’t have to rely on anything but the sun for survival.
Imagine how different a life like that would be. Humans would be enslavement-proof. Wage
labor would be absolutely banished from our species forever. With politics we can do a little, but
with bio-engineering we can make emancipation irreversible.
-That’s quite a dream.
-Dream? Ha. Just you wait and see. The dreams these kids have? They tend to come true.

-I’m not sure we should endorse crappy Rancière’s crappy epistemology in our epic
revolutionary propaganda win manifesto.
-Crappy epistemology?
-Yeah, I mean, I thought we roundly condemned that “everybody has equally good ideas” shit as
abominable liberalism the other night.
-This isn’t the same.
-It’s not?
-It’s anti-teachers! You’re anti-teachers! You’re like the president of the anti-teachers
association!
-Yes, which reminds me, we voted and you’re supposed to bring churros Wednesday. But the
thing is, I’m against teachers because they’re training you to be good wage slaves, not because
there is no such thing as truth.
-What’s truth? I’ve never seen a truth.
-The only truth is power.
-You mean politics.
-There is no truth because history is written by assassins.
-Whatever, I’m truth-agnostic. Is it not true that an idea changes shape when it passes from on
person’s head to another?
-The answer is easy: in one sense, yes, and in another sense, no. Wait, no, it’s a trap! It’s just a
metaphor! Ideas don’t have shapes!
-That’s not an answer.
-She’s right, that’s not an answer.
-It is totally an answer. No? Okay, try this. We should treat people like they’re equally intelligent
because it is objectively the best way to educate given our subjective, axiomatic core values.
-A, that’s a gross pragmatic argument that seems to endorse a kind of doublethink, and B, what
are our core values?
-Yeah, I wanna hear this.
-You know! What Alice was saying the other night. Justice and stuff. Loving… things.
-Yeah, I wanted to talk more about that but you two were misbehaving.
-Sorry, Harry.
-Yeah Harry, sorry.
-Just as long as it never. Happens. Again.
-What I said was that justice is our power to recognize each other as people, or better yet, the
exercise of that power.
-What does that mean?
-Take an easy example like murder. When you turn someone from a person into a thing, you’re
violently denying their personhood, even up to the point of revoking it. So murder is unjust.
-Always?
-No. It only works that way when there’s no context, and in the real world there’s always context.
So to take a slightly more complicated example, consider a wife killing her abusive husband.
This asshole had been failing to recognize his wife’s personhood, dehumanizing her through
trauma. She had the expectation that nothing would stop him short of death. It’s pretty common
in these cases that the guy’ll keep stalking her, harassing her, until she does something that he
thinks might actually put her out of reach for good, at which point he’ll kill her. So this human
scab, this monster, he is attacking her freedom, her power to express herself and be
recognized. And so she takes matters into her own hands and kills him, thereby enacting her
humanity, her power to participate in effecting justice, her equality.
-It’s a nice story, and obviously I agree that some murders are just, but I think you have to do too
many contortions to make your definition work. There was a fair bit of hand-waving there
towards the end.
-No there wasn’t, no hands were waved!
-There was a little.
-Yeah, sorry Alice. I liked it better when it was short and sweet.
-Okay, well, then somebody else can do a better elaboration. Or give us a better definition of
justice.
-Wait, isn’t this what Plato was on about?
-God dammit Dave you weren’t supposed to bring that up.
-Why not?
-He’s listening.
-Who’s listening?
-Plato.
-Creepy perv.
-I know, right?
-We are good materialists and we ought not to engage in such idle and spurious idealist
speculation.
-But why should we be materialists in the first place? If we can’t decide what justice is, then how
can we say we love it? And if we don’t love justice, then what’s the point of having a good solid
materialist Weltanschauung? If justice ain’t shit, then it doesn’t matter what we think about
anything.
-It doesn’t matter what we think about anything.
-Whoa!
-Whoa!
-Finally, a breakthrough.
-Right? I mean, by the same logic that says voting is idealism, little conspiracies like ours must
be too.
-But that extension is wrong. If you take it all the way, it leads to total nihilism—nobody’s actions
mattering at all.
-That’s why I never bought the voting is rape argument.
-That’s why you never bought it? The trivializing rape part, that was fine?
-Oh yeah.
-This guy…
-Wait so now being critical of voting is tantamount to total nihilism? No thank you. I am certain
we can find a reasonable place to stop that train.
-Let’s hear it.
-Actions do matter on large scales. On all scales, really, but by ‘matter’ I mean ‘define the
course of history’.
-Individual actions don’t define the course of history?
-Nope.
-Not even a little?
-Nope.
-Not even by way of chaos, the butterfly effect and all that?
-Whether the butterfly has an effect is a consequence of how the masses are acting. The
butterfly caused a hurricane? No it didn’t, the massive fucking system that we call the
atmosphere caused a hurricane. Hurricanes happen all the goddamn time. Why? Because of
the atmosphere. Oh, but this one time it was a butterfly’s fault. Yeah, and another time it was a
sneeze, or a fart, or whatever. All the things that exist in this gloriously complex system can
affect it in strange ways. That doesn’t mean it’s fair to pick an arbitrary point in time and say “Oh
here, this is the single event that caused the whole thing.” Everything caused the whole thing.
All the little interlocking parts. The seventeen zillion clouds and zephyrs and whatever in
between the butterfly’s fart and the hurricane. Plus whatever made the butterfly fart.
-Dude, heavy.
-I think I like what you’re saying.
-Oh. Cool.
-And here’s why—because justice can’t be found at any step along the chain.
-Wait, what?
-You’re right, we are complex systems, our minds are complex machines, everything around us
is in constant deterministic but chaotic flux. So where’s justice in all that mess? Nowhere.
-So you don’t believe in justice.
-I do. It’s just not nearby. Justice is the godhood of all people.
-Come again?
-More transhumanist chicanery.
-Maybe. But try this: the only way to be really free is to be in control of all of one’s conditioning.
That is, complete power over one’s own consciousness. Also, to be able to move anywhere, do
anything, experience anything, make anything, feel anything, decide anything… sorry, you get
the gist. Has any human ever had this freedom? No. You would have to be omnipotent and
omniscient. So. That’s the goal. For everyone. How do we reach that goal? Cooperating.
Thinking. Murder is unjust because it reduces the amount of freedom that can be exercised in
the world, the diversity of experience that an intelligence can take part in. The slave-master
would deny freedom to a portion of humanity, making cooperation impossible and making
thought stupid. Thus his offense against humanity’s future godhood is even more egregious,
and he disqualifies himself from being counted as a member of our species. The total freedom
of humanity’s future can only be accomplished by the practice of what passes for freedom here
and now. Which is why what we have today isn’t justice, not exactly, but shadows of it cast by
the future on the present.
-A lovely turn of phrase but your definition strikes me as astoundingly macho and Abrahamic.
Not to mention freedom-fixated. You know that’s just a fad, right?
-Freedom?
-Justice too... I mean, I think I agree with Dave, that all this is just so much idle speculation.
These words mean nothing. The only useful philosophy is the philosophy of target practice.
-We know that Janet, it’s just...
-It’s just what? You may claim to "know" it but it doesn’t seem to be informing your praxis. What
happened to riling up the masses? Isn’t that what we assembled here to do, this little posse?
Let’s tell them how to hide weapons.
-I don’t know how to hide weapons.
-Me neither. Do you, Al?
-Nope.
-This is the exact fucking problem I’m talking about.
-But also, who cares about how to hide weapons? Isn’t it dumb to centralize that kind of
information-sharing? Inspire revolutionary initiative and folks will figure it out.
-And it’s not like initiative is even a thing that can be inspired. It pretty much comes and goes
depending on the objective circumstances, the economy and whatnot.
-That is medium true. But we’re consequences of those objective circumstances too, and we’re
pretty riled up.
-I dunno about revolutionary initiative.
-Yeah, it seems like it’s in pretty short fucking supply to me.
-Yes, and chastising us for that is going to go a long way towards helping.
-What should I do? All I ever learned how to do was chastise.
-Model some behavior.
-Martyr myself? Fuck that.
-It’s a collective action problem. Even if all of us here were resolved to start doing propaganda
of the deed, that would just be naive terrorism, which is the same as thinking the revolution will
work itself out. It won’t. Our job is to help work it out. Which means organizing people, changing
people’s minds, helping them get results from the practical application of communism. Without a
tidal shift in public opinion, we are in no position to be waging a bloody class war. Which is why
we ended up in this room together working on this particular project. Didn’t we cover this on like
day one?
-Sounds like opportunism to me.
-Yeah, I dunno, very Gramscian.
-What’s wrong with Gramsci? Gramsci was a mensch!
-Yeah, but nowadays he’s like the patron saint of bourgeois academics. They love wars of
position because it means they never have to put their asses on the line. Meanwhile people are
starving.
-Which should be our major concern, rather than this post-trans-ultra-humanism shit. What do I
care about chlorophyll?
-If it could be done, that would be awesome. Is all I’m saying.
-It’ll never be done as long as capital’s running the show.
-I think we’re all agreed on that.
-Good, I’m glad we’re agreed. Now who do I have to kick in the balls to get a cigarette around
here? I’m dying.
-I got you.
-I knew men were good for something, I just forgot what it was for a second.
-Run!
-Fuck!
-What the hell?
-It’s Jill, they got Jill.
-What?
-No way.
-I saw her too.
-Wait, hold up.
-They got Jill?
-Three cops pulled her into that van, the big one.
-Assholes.
-Then we get her back.
-What?
-She’s right, we have to do something.
-Okay.
-Okay?
-Okay.
-You two, over there, come at them from behind. We workshopped this, you know what to do.
-I’ll go with. They need a spotter.
-Yeah, and we’ll get their attention.
-How?
-We’ll figure something out.
-Sounds good. Give us about forty seconds to get over there.
-In forty.
-What’s that?
-An attention-grabber.
-No, no no no. I don’t think that’s a good idea, Case.
-Why not?
-Somebody could get hurt.
-One of us? Not likely. One of them? Who cares?
-You sure you know how to use it?
-I practiced out at Bailey’s old farm.
-Where did Bailey get the money to practice with hand grenades?
-Look, they’re ready. Good thing you’re a looker, kid, or else the cops would’ve turned around by
now. It’s time. Don’t paz out on me, okay?
-Okay. You’re right.
-Ready?
-Ready.
-Now run.

-We’re off the see the wizard, the wonderful wizard of gauze!
-He is, he is, a whiz of a whiz, if ever a whiz there was!
-Shh, this is the tricky part. I need to concentrate.
-Mr. Pilot, we’re back here missing limbs and trying to keep our spirits up, do you think maybe
you could stop being such a killjoy?
-You are not missing limbs.
-If my comrades were a little more lucid, I’m sure they’d voice their agreement.
-If ever oh ever a whiz there was, the wizard of gauze is one because...
-Because because because because because...
-Oh for Christ’s sake. This is why everybody hates Foxes. Even dying you’re annoying.
-Shit, did you see that?
-Yeah. Vultures. Pretty awful stuff.
-And we’d appreciate if you could muster a little optimism. It’s the least one expects from an
emergency evac pilot.
-I said dying, not dead. Hard to imagine how you could be annoying dead, but if there’s a way...
-I resent the implication. Ooh, watch the crag.
-Crag?
-I dunno, what do you call them? Spires?
-Rocks.
-Very utilitarian. Remind me, what people are you?
-I’m Urbing PRV, shipping.
-That explains it. How'd you learn to fly this thing? I thought only tourists used them.
-They’d have big conferences in Urbing and corporate wanted somebody to take them out and
show them around the mountains. I flew a helicopter in Yuangshen, so it wasn’t too hard to
learn.
-Weird-ass machine. Like a big mosquito, innit?
-More or less.
-Futuristic. Yeah, definitely futuristic.
-Your friends okay?
-Yeah, they’re breathing. Keep your eye on the crags, man!
-Owens is good. She’ll take care of your friends.
-She can reattach Mark’s leg?
-Most likely. And if she can’t, I’ve seen people walk out of there with upgrades. Maybe that’s not
your style.
-I don’t think it’s Mark’s.
-You be sure and let Dr. Owens know that, then.
-Shit, shit shit shit! What the hell?
-Peregrine class. Probably been on standby in the upper atmosphere. Sons of... bitches,
motherffff... aaaaaaggghh!
-Left! Left! No, not that left, fuck!
-Calm down.
-Calm down they’re about to smash us to shit what do you mean calm down!
-Shut up.
-How do you expect me to shut up at a time like this those drones are the size of elephants are
you kidding me?