[Voice of Cardona]: “He thought they had the right program. Quinton wasn’t religious but he was, you know, spiritual. He was a funny guy but also thoughtful, and he could be dark. Or brooding—I don’t know what to call it. He had been through tough stuff, but you wouldn’t know that hanging with him. He was also political but not in the normal way. He didn’t march or tweet or do nothing like that—it was more like he kept tabs. Now I feel like he was just biding his time. Waiting his whole life for his moment.”
Marcus-McCall did seem to have a plan. He left A Fierce Blue Fire in 2033 and spent months training for the occupation. When the time came, he was one of the foot soldiers who helped fortify and administrate the occupation of the capital. By August 1, he had positioned VR cameras in the House Chamber to capture and immediately download his act of self-immolation to private servers, subverting the government’s efforts to block all communication that day. By the time news outlets were reporting what had happened on the Mall, the “QMM light show” was already bouncing between worldes. Within a week, it had become a potent global meme, yet another flash point in the heated debate about the climate crisis, the occupation, and where virtual reality is leading us.
The Slapdish “paintbox” allows participants to dream almost anything, and yet the results of this are typically as crude and troubling as the rest of the internet. From CGI child pornography to antebellum slave plantations to real-life torture xperes, VR’s frightening underground is a thousand-person heavy metal concert one floor beneath your apartment. Yet those examples at least follow a kind of logical continuity with how the internet’s dark side has always functioned. In other words, censorship works against them. It is the aboveboard insurgents like Quinton Marcus-McCall who are skewing our reality. And some of these insurgents have created audiences of exceptional numbers and power.
After hip-hop artist Tricky Digz was revealed to be Jason D. Blair, a forty-year-old white accountant living in St. Paul, Minnesota, a movement emerged to force Slapdish to create a racial registry of its users. The backlash to that has exploded into a different revelation: a study in the Journal of Applied Biobehavioral Research found that 78 percent of participants admitted to identifying by another gender, race, or religion as they navigate worldes. Fans have declared Blair to be Black and will carpet-bomb anyone who says otherwise with a program of intimidation. Despite the death of Henrietta Housekip, child shock jocks Henny and Dillpickle continue to hit peaks of virality that make media empires jealous. Housekip’s targets of ire began with identity politics, government censorship, and the corporate control of information and speech, but shortly before her death at age fourteen, she discovered China—not only its internal repression but how it uses its economic power to silence movie studios, sports leagues, and technology companies alike. Wearing Henny and Dillpickle merchandise in China has become a crime punishable by a ten-year prison sentence. Then there is The Pastor.
As we round the corner to election season, one of Slapdish’s biggest stars became the first major candidate to ever launch a presidential campaign in virtual reality. His worlde, a neo-futuristic Christian citadel, has more daily visitors than any real-life theme park in the country. The current president utilized VR behavioral tracking and predictive analytics of voters to decimate his opponents in the 2032 Democratic primary. Yet Victor Love is not a native of the medium. The Pastor is. As he put it in the first Republican primary debate, “I intend to bring to the office of the president the joy, passion, and fire you see and love every day in my worlde—and I’ll bring it to the 2D, 3D, 4D, and every dimension in between and beyond.”
Say “Next Story” for: “How Zeden’s VR Album Seminole Party is a Master Class in Post-Indigeneity”
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2036
You’re bone-tired, but you focus on the work. You try not to think of prison, of search and rescue, or of the girl in the hole. Every Tuesday, Reverend Andrade and his wife, Ginna, drive their minivan around Coshocton handing out sack dinners to anyone who needs one. This winter, that includes most everyone in the county, from the single moms in the apartments on Walnut Street to the folks in tents out by the ruins of the old power plant. The Rev and Ginna print up little cards at the local copy shop and tape one to the top of each ham and cheese sandwich. It gives the recipient directions to the church or addiction treatment at the Fierce Blue Fire center where you and Raquel got clean a decade ago. You riding with them is part of the make-work the reverend has thrown your way since you got paroled, and you understand it’s money he can’t afford to pay you. Even with the parishioners who’ve stuck with him, no one can afford much tithing. He gives you tasks like stapling forms or fixing a clogged sink, and you’re figuring out how to use a pipe snake on the fly with his AR glasses. Then on Tuesdays he takes you along as “muscle” while he and Ginna make the rounds.
“Hon, y’all wanna sack dinner?” Ginna shouts through the window in her syrupy West Virginian drawl.
“What’s the catch?” the tired old Black guy asks, stopping all the same. He carries a backpack and wears a Cleveland Browns Super Bowl LXI Champs toboggan cap.
“Ain’t no catch, sweetheart. Just some food from Church of Christ down Route 16.”
“No God stuff,” he says.
“Sorry, darling, Jesus comes in every bag. Now come take this.”
Hesitantly, he comes forward. You hand Ginna the bag from the back seat, and she hands it to the man, who pops it open and peers inside like he can’t believe there’s not a bomb or a human ear.
Says Andrade from the driver’s seat, “Ever need a helping hand or a place to sleep we got contacts at the shelter.”
“Just hungry,” the man mutters, poking past the church’s card to the sandwich and fruit beneath. Then he looks up at Andrade and Ginna. “Much obliged. For real.”
“God bless you, brother,” says the Rev.
Andrade pulls away, leaving the man to tear the sandwich out of the cellophane right there on the street and take down a quarter of it in one bite. Ginna spots a woman she knows, working the corner near Raquel’s McDonald’s. It’s a good place to trick because the crosswalks are busy, and there’s a cheap motel right across the street.
“Starling!” she calls. Ginna has chestnut hair with blond highlights and would be pretty but for several missing teeth. You’re now missing three teeth, so you’re no one to judge, but the asymmetry of her smile is distracting. “Starling, honey, you wanna sack dinner?”
Andrade pulls the van to the side, and Starling looks annoyed but takes the brown paper bag anyway. She’s wearing a T-shirt cut off at the midriff, exposing the pale flab of her belly. The shirt has a picture of an eagle filing its talons, backdropped by an American flag. Despite the flesh hanging loose over her knobby bones now, you recognize her from the blood bank way back in the day.
“How you doing out here?” Ginna asks her. “Staying warm? Got a place to sleep?”
“I’m aight. Just need a customer.” She jitters and twitches, a dance taking place in the same square foot of space. You’ve been dope-sick enough in your life to know that she needs to score. “Used to be I sucked cock for heroin and didn’t gotta worry about eating. Now it’s easier to get heroin than a sandwich.” This explanation, Ginna says as you pull away, “is as close to a thank-you as Starling is ever going to fork over.”