CSA

About this page This page houses a short story anthology I wrote. Click the buttons to expand.

What does CSA stand for? Whatever you want. Cyberpunk Shortstory Anthology. Cracked States of America. Contemporary Social Anatomy. Chaotic State of Anarchy. Completely Scientifically Accurate. Cool Sick Awesome. Crap Shit Ass. Confederate States of America. Cynical Stupid Action. Whatever you read into CSA is on you. Here's a breakdown of the work as a whole. 1,2,3 - America before it dissolved, vague time periods for this and for everything else, this section is set in the 2010s-2020s 4,5,6 - Former America, now referred to as Freeland, during Dissolution and the immediate aftermath, set in the 2020s 7,8,9 - Life in megacorp microstates within Freeland, set in 2030s-2050s 10,11,12 - Powerful individuals of Freeland, set in 2070s-2090s You can assume the stories are in vaguely chronological order, but there's so much overlap and ambiguity only those 4 sections are concrete enough to worry about. You shouldn't necessarily have to read them in order to understand what's going on so read whichever has a synopsis you like. I tried to use this as an exercise in writing stuff in different ways. Also a big TRIGGER WARNING for anyone who has been a victim of murder, rape, or society at large. It's full of spelling errors and probably more than one plot hole, but hey, you get what you pay for. Feel free to email me comments, reviews, edits, or suggestions using the mail icon in the share bar at the bottom of the page or click this.

Episode 1

It's All a Game to Me A NEET goes on a night mission in modern day.

I squeezed out the remainder of my shit long ago, but I was sort of stranded there. My phone needed charge and my backup solar charger wasn't cutting it in the torrential downpour that exploded into the sky out of nowhere. The older generation tried to act like these mini-hurricanes were normal. I didn't get why though. We all knew it was global-warming-induced future-weather caused by the unprecedented levels of industrial pollution over the past century. The supermarket bathroom was simply the only place I knew other than my house where I could jack some power. Not that I couldn't afford to pay my bills. For all intents and purposes, I was rich. I really was just after some data. Time isn't happening if information isn't being exchanged. It'd been hours since I last checked reddit. Reddit, while not my favorite infodrug, was definitely the one I used the most. It didn't require a very strong data link, and I never built a tolerance. It was the weed of infodrugs. After I lost feeling in my legs I decided I had enough info in my brain to get me home. I stepped outside the filthy public bathroom with the lone hidden AC outlet in the handicapped stall. The sky was bright and barren as soon as the rain stopped, like a cartoon on fast-forward. My journey home continued. I still lived amidst the cheap college housing I inhabited before I decided college might be a waste of time. I didn't have a job. When I was still in high school I mined hundreds of bitcoins. I got lucky. It was just a hobby for the most part although I'd be lying if I claimed I wasn't interested in the idea of getting drugs mailed to me. I wasn't the most social person and I always had problems finding dealers. This Silk Road thing solved that problem for me nicely. It seemed like bullshit. Money was not supposed to work like that. Weed was not supposed to be mailed to my apartment with no repercussions. Regrettably the revelation of the rampant spying going on via American alphabet-soup agencies (and my fear of getting caught) outweighed the potential benefits of shitloads of basically free drugs. So I basically forgot about my 679.8378 bitcoin stash. Then, a couple months ago, I happened to come across one of the many articles discussing the recent explosion in bitcoin value. Roughly one thousand USD per bitcoin, just some numbers my computer crunched a couple years ago. I was no millionaire, but I had enough to live on for the rest of my life, easily. How could I live this frugally? Simple. During my sophomore year of college I became a hikkikomori. And I had never been happier. I grew up in an orphanage so I was sick of face-to-face human interaction by the time I entered college anyway. What people failed to realize is that there are billions of other humans on the internet. I posted my opinions and arguments on the chans, met up in online worlds to play with my steam friends regularly, and played therapist to complete strangers on omegle. The backpages were where I bought all my sex too. At first I only left my room to go to class. Soon though me and most of the people I went to college with realized that it was a waste. Worse than that, it was a scam. I wasn't the first person to stop going to class. I actually held out until about half of my classes were empty. Then I quit right before the end of my sophomore year. Shortly after that I learned of bitcoin's value, cashed out with half a million US dollars, and soon cut off contact with all the people I was forced to interact with to merely exist. I was almost at my apartment. I passed by swaths of datajunkies swarming like lethargic flies around any free wi-fi point, their faces buried in better worlds at the other end of a screen. Much to my dismay, eye-contact was made and the fluid statue of a man called out to me: "Wizard! Make this spot hot! Allllll I need is a place to code!" A corruption of a 4chan meme run amuck, 'wizard' had become datajunkie slang for someone with a fat dataport. It was derived from "wi-fi" in addition to the mere love of fantasy, it didn't really make sense as time went on with the advent of 5G, the successor to 4G. At 3 gigbits a second nearly anywhere in a 50 mile radius of a tower, it was still considered something of a rich man's luxury. However it was so efficient many ISPs started using a meshnet of 5G access points instead of traditional fiber optic cables, effectively restructuring modern internet. The DJ trying to get my attention could smell the 5G on me and he wasn't satisfied sucking at the distraught teat of the college library's access point. I pretended not to see the guy who carried himself like he was from the West Coast. The dropping out of college thing wasn't merely localized to my school. This had become a nationwide epidemic. Some became hikkikomoris like myself. Some started working on organic farming communes. Some started working for the government. The hippest among us became cyberpunks. Cyberpunks were traveling, highly educated, homeless, bands of anarchists. Digital nomads on steroids or at least LSD. They were mostly in their twenties and late teens. They carried ample solar chargers, cables, keyboards, camping gear, musical instruments, ramen, and each one's most prized possession, their mobile device, be it smartphone, tablet, or laptop. They traveled in packs of two or three to a couple dozen and never alone. They slept outside in the margins of civilization. They drank the free water that flooded American public facilities. They ate dumpstered food or food acquired via begging or busking or just plain stolen. As much as they rejected society and authority, some even still participated. Not a small amount of cyberpunk troupes had one or two programmers traveling with them. You'd hear the occasional story of a cyberpunk "family" that hit it big after their resident programmer created a viral app. This always shot the code-monkey to maximum alpha status. Even when they had plenty of money, the cyberpunks didn't stop traveling. They were known to merely upgrade their equipment or even buy plane tickets for the whole tribe to continue their travels in a novel environment. They were the drop-out counterpart of the hikkikomori, equally dismissive of society but extroverted by default. They were our generations' counterculture, our hippies, our punks. Revolutionaries at their best and mere junkies at their worst. I trudged up the stairs and opened the door to my crappy 400 dollar a month studio apartment. A tiny one-room deal with thin walls and no parking. I didn't have a car and I did have considerate neighbors so neither of these things were an issue. I threw down my groceries. I lived off food that didn't require refrigeration. This provided more variety than one would expect. Tortillas, fruit, sausage, parmesan cheese, nuts, dried meat, berries, and that's not even counting canned food. I saved electricity by unplugging my fridge and my temperature was regulated by the layers of clothes I wore and two fans. The only light in the room was the warm, comforting glow of my top-of-the-line custom-built $3,000 computer. I splurged a bit on the black jade desk and blacker leather office chair. I carefully stepped around all the trash and clothes and wires and sat down to plug in my noise-canceling headphones. I rarely listened to music. I rarely even played vidya these days. My ear buds gave me an additional sense with which I could interact with my comp. For some reason, data transfer to the net produced a quiet clicking. The frequency and pitch of this revealed how much data was being uploaded or downloaded. More than a few times I intuitively realized I had some hidden malware from this sense alone. At the same time I could hear how many and how fast my processors were running by the number and pitch of a simultaneous whirring noise. The percent RAM and GPU use were determined by these two quiet, constant pinging sound sort of like tinnitus. Like everyone else, the little blinking light was still how I determined when the hard disk was being written to. Maybe to someone else this would be annoying, but to me it was soothing as well as mildly practical. I put on my aviator shades. These didn't really connect me to my comp like my stethoscope/headphones. They served the purpose of mitigating eye strain produced by hours and hours of staring at a monitor. Reducing the brightness ironically increased eye strain as it made text more difficult to read. I set my fingers on the glowing wireless brushed steel mechanical keyboard and lightly fingered the clit-mouse in the center. I started the night with more reddit. I found that the user interface, the mechanism of infodrug ingestion, mattered almost was much as it did for regular chemical drugs. Doing reddit on my desktop was to doing it on my phone as eating pot brownies was to smoking. You had to get a good app to do it on your phone properly too. A poorly formatted interface is fatiguing, the equivalent of body load. Fortunately reddit is a social infodrug making the body load less relevant. If you use, it's only a matter of time before you start participating in the community. This was the opposite of the next infodrug on my itinerary, Netflix. Like heroin, binge watching TV is a pleasant alternative to thinking. On my phone it was like snorting bumps. On my desktop it was like full-on injection. The whole time I was Netflixing my brain was focused on nothing but what I was consuming. I barely moved for 6 hours. When I came out of my tv-binge coma I grabbed my perfectly weighted wireless mouse, in order to mix up the route of administration. I tried some chans after that. 4chan. 420chan. 8chan. Similar to reddit in a lot of ways I always considered these to be the psychedelics of infodrugs. They opened my mind, although I occasionally saw things I didn't really want to see. I went back to reddit. Boredom was no longer a feeling I experienced, similar to how true pain and hunger were nearly eradicated with the invention of anesthesia and cheap food in the 1900s. So long as I had a data connection I could always be indefinitely entertained. Some groups began- My internal monologue was cut short by a poorly dressed, hairy caveman, clenching a pen and moleskine notebook in his teeth, kicking open my unlocked door. Tan and short and muscular and lean. He had these massive, wireless headphones on and was listening to some music with more bass than they could handle. I got the impression he hailed from a cyberpunk clan. I felt no fear though. I had lived a good life. And I wasn't afraid of death. I watched tons of anime, surfed the net compulsively, and been around quite a few people on drugs so nothing struck me as particularly unusual anymore. I took a pic of him with my phone and used this app that auto-sent it to the chans, reddit, diaspora, instagram, facebook, tumblr, and more as others shared it. Caption: 'this guy just broke into my house' He took the notebook out of his mouth and quickly scribbled a note with its attached pen: 'i need help' and underneath it 'DEAF-MUTE sorry' I snapped another pic updating my threads. I took off my headphones expecting him to do the same but he didn't. Oh well. I tried to grab his pad to write a note but it was back in his mouth before I could attempt the maneuver. I motioned for him to come over to watch me as I typed in a new text document: 'I can't help you. I'm sorry. Please leave.' He scribbled on his notepad again: 'Im on a quest and I need a wizard.' His brown eyes seemed sort of dilated and he was clearly on drugs. The chemical kind, not the info kind. The kind I used to do. I was bored enough to think at the time: Why not humor him? What’s the worst that could happen? I typed: 'you have chosen well. Here is your armor faithful warrior' I scavenged a heavy leather jacket and some beaten-up steel-toed boots from my laundry/carpet. They didn't quite fit but he seemed ecstatic. I gathered my phone, keys, and wallet. I actually had a hiking stick in my closet, clearly making me a wizard, so I duct-taped it to a tazer. In case this drugged up stranger tried something. I scanned the room one last time for "spells" to take. The best I could come up with was my large-pocket-sized computer air duster. A cold spell? A wind spell? Whatever this is a joke anyway, I thought. I typed: Are you ready to embark? He pressed a single key on my keyboard: 'y' He started running out of my room down the stairs. Taking them two at a time. I barely kept his pace as we raced down the street, the deaf-mute caveman still holding the notebook in his mouth (I noticed his clothes had no pockets). He ran like a robot or a Cold War portrayal of a Russian, looking straight ahead at all times. We ran through campus and traversed the miniature hills and valleys of a golf course. Under nothing but street lights and a cloudy night sky. We reached the edge of the woods. The music in his headphones got slower. He took the notepad out of his mouth and wrote: 'wiz use light spell' I flicked on the tazer's flashlight switch at the end of my wizard staff. Nice touch on calling it a light spell. This guy was really high. We entered the forest. I let him lead and I tried my best to illuminate the ground around both of us. My phone beeped. As I cast 'silent' I noticed I had 19 total notifications (comments, upvotes, likes, etc) from my recent multi-post on various social media apps. Not bad for 10 minutes. It's hard to remember exactly why I continued at this point. Sure it was partly because I was on the best endorphin high I'd had in years. And yeah I probably needed some excitement in my life or at least some exercise. Also maybe I possessed more than a twinge of nihilism. But oddly enough I think I really was just nostalgic for going on these adventures with my friends as a kid. Plus I had the advantage of the tazer at the end of a stick. I was already tired from the jog and the walk through these pitch dark woods was boring. Right before I was about to give up on our quest we had our first random encounter. The loud barking startled me and I hung back but our fearless hero seemed unfazed. I managed to follow his path with my light and turn on my video-GIF recorder as he charged straight at the sickly beast giving it a devastating kick to the ribs. No shoes either. He punched another dog out of the air that jumped at him. He growled at them both through his notebook and another two that were too cowardly to make a move. His efforts proved successful, and the dogs ran away. He was bleeding. "Holy crap dude! You okay?" He calmly wrote with a big grin: ‘99/100’ Now I was in this thing for the long haul. That was just too freaking cool. I uploaded the GIF. "Jesus. How much XP you get?" He pointed to his headphones and I quickly typed out my question. He wrote: '12 but we have to share lol' I tapped on my phone: 'As long as you're okay... What is the goal of this quest anyway?' With my flashlight shining at his chin, he looked me dead in the eye as he wrote (poorly) and showed to me: 'kill the net' I shrugged implying that he needed to be more specific. He moved away from the flashlight a little dejected and spent a few moments writing out something. He showed me his writing impatiently: 'tonight were gonna shut down the 5G cell tower. weve already lost too many of our tribe to the hivemind' It was initially confusing to see a cyberpunk write about shutting down the net although I immediately understood what he was talking about. I couldn't deny that the net had turned me into a datajunkie. The scourge that morphed me into a zombie was spreading faster throughout society than any chemical drug ever could, thanks to the low cost and high accessibility. The internet was evil. There was just one problem. It took an awkward several seconds of typing but I finally presented my strange companion with: 'I lack the skill necessary. Do you even have a plan?' He looked at me, flashed a smile, and scrawled: 'we are the chosen ones! and as a wizard you have a 5G connection. just download this when were at the place. copy it, dont link to it yet' From his notebook he quickly produced a disgusting, crumpled paper QR code, the highest resolution I'd ever seen. I stared at it for a second before mechanically getting it prepped for taking it into my phone. Ignoring his wishes in my personal quest for points I sent it to the net with the caption: '#shutdownthenet' Right after the upload completed I was a bit stunned to find that since I checked a couple minutes prior I had already reached 112 collective notifications. This guy was karma gold. I had my doubts that he wasn't just crazy though. I made a lead the way gesture and we continued until we got to a partially collapsed abandoned building in the middle of the woods. The full moon's light came in through the giant hole in the structure and glinted off something inside. Soon after we carefully entered, a vagrant lunged at me with a machete but my friend took the brunt of the poorly executed blow...receiving only about 5 damage. I used lightning bolt until our attacker stopped moving. The warrior took the sword and handed me the hat. I let him have the flask of health potion we found. Being the only one with pockets I took the bag of nickels and dimes. I didn't take a pic of this scene but checked my score again: 319 notifications. Like a samurai, I switched off my tazer in one elegant motion. The moonlight was good enough that I could switch off the light too as we pressed on all the way into some rich guy's backyard. The blonde barbarian dropped into a crouch and began making every step deliberate, so that the initial contact with the ground was with a force of zero gradually increasing over time. I followed suit. We were almost at the exit gate when a police car pulled up dousing us in light. The man who got out didn't seem to be a cop. He had a gun though. He shouted at us, "What the hell are you doing on my property? Take off your damn headphones!" I pushed my teammate back and made my move before he could do anything stupid. I held up my staff apologetically and said in my most sycophantic voice, "We're LARPing sir. We got too drunk and somehow we ended up here. We don't want any trouble. You can search us. We're not thieves, just drunk college kids. Swear to god sir. Please." I ribbed my oddly dressed friend and he thankfully seemed to get the picture without hearing a word. He looked down, intentionally started swaying a bit, took his writing implements out of his mouth, and proceeded to dry heave until he puked. The man with the gun (who I quickly ascertained from his car was a currently off-duty sheriff) lowered his firearm and eyed us suspiciously. "Why you got that sword then boy?" "We're LARPing, live action role playing. We're pretending that we're wizards and warriors. Feel it, it's not even sharp." It wasn't. The sheriff seemed to be buying it. "What in god's name is wrong with you boys? My son does this crap too. You needa be hanging out with girls. You're in college for chrissakes." "Sir, do with us what you wish. Just know that we really, really mean no harm and we're just trying to get home at this point. I'm tired. He's trashed. You can take our stuff. Just please don't arrest us. We really, really were just trying to cut through your yard. We're lost." He grabbed my lightning rod and the machete, then stared us down. "Yer damn right yer lost. You all boys know that's trespassing, right? I could send you down to the station right now and lock you in the drunk tank for the weekend...but I don't think you'd last 10 minutes in there." "No sir. Please. We wouldn't last 5 minutes." He glared at the warrior for a solid 3 seconds before finally saying, "Okay. I'm still gonna write you a ticket, but it's justa warning. This is ONLY cause I wanna go to sleep." "Thank you so much sir!" "I'm keeping these..." he held up our weapons, "...toys. If you want 'em back you'll hafta come down to the station." "Ok no problem. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Have a good night!" We stood there for several beats in silence. "Well? What are you waiting for? Fuck off!" "What about our tickets?" "Don't worry about it! Call a cab and fuck off!" "Thank you so much!" I tugged the arm of the fake-drunk real-tripping warrior and we headed off down the dirt driveway as I pulled out my phone to call a cab. Turned out I'd already hit 7,590 notifications! This had to be a new record for me. After the sheriff seemed to go inside the warrior was back to his normal weird self. He quickly jotted down: 'glad thats over. Were not done yet tho' This had gone on long enough plus my only defense against this insane human being was gone forever. The internet points were nice but I'm never trying to die. I typed in my phone: 'dude I'm sorry, I'm out. I'm calling a cab if you want to go somewhere else' Squinting in the moonlight he wrote down: 'No! We need you wizard. It has to be you.' I ignored him and tried calling myself a black-cab via Uber. The man on the other end said it would take him 20 minutes to get to me. I plopped down cross-legged and admired my 9,721 notifications for a while afraid that. The warrior (still standing) handed me a note: 'I dont know why it has to be you but they are always right. They. The voices.' He tapped his still-erupting-music headphones when I looked up at him, then he handed me another note: 'They found me in a hospital. I don't remember anything before that. I think I was in an accident. I know where we can go tho' I texted him angrily: 'Dude. I can't actually help you. Find someone else.' He stared at my phone's screen for a second before letting out the most agonizing shrieks. Then as quickly as he started screaming, he stopped, although he didn't stop shaking. His trembling hands scrawled another note in broken handwriting: 'I need you' My empathy kicked in. What could I do? I couldn't let this guy suffer and he no longer seemed completely crazy. Someone was doing this weird shit to him. Equally important, they seemed to want something with me. I looked at my phone again to find I broke 10,000 notifications. I stood up and typed: 'ok man, lead the way' He grinned weakly and fought his pain prior to sprinting off in that artificial manner yet again. We must have jogged about three miles away from civilization. Right before I collapsed we reached a drainage tunnel. He climbed in. I cast light with my phone and reluctantly followed, even though it was big enough for us to walk comfortably side by side. There was tons of graffiti and the whole passageway was littered with spraycans. We soon came upon a decorated canvas barricade that the warrior pushed aside to reveal a large open room lit by the cool glow of LED-in-gallon-water-jug lanterns. Pipes neatly poured out water from multiple levels. My eyes were drawn to the crowd surrounding an industrial-size Biolite woodfire grill/generator. The warrior's cyberpunk tribe. "Hey guys!" I shouted to a confused response. The warrior ignored me and went to hug and hand-slap his friends. I stood back letting my eyes adjust. It was actually quite cozy. Chains of carefully arranged garbage. A waterwheel generator powering a couple low-spec laptops. And every single one of the warrior's friends had different over-ear headphones. I stood there staring at not just how fantastical my environment was, but how much these people loved each other. How happy they were living in this little tribe in the sewer. I wasn't envious. It was more about observing cyberpunks in their natural habitat than me wishing I was one of them. It was odd how fit and healthy the seemed despite their condition. Like a good nature documentarian, I made sure to snap some pics and upload them, caption: '#cyberpunklyfe'. At this time I had reached 21,314 notifications. They all wrote and exchanged some notes. They all seemed equally mute, yet it seemed like none of them knew sign language. After a couple minutes of this I was beckoned over and they embraced me. Some women came out from one of the tunnels dripping water holding apparently dumpstered food and a couple cases of beer. We sat at a stolen picnic table and dug in. They passed notes full of small talk to me and I passed responses back. We roasted marshmallows over the Biolite. It was a strange experience to say the least. After a while a guy who had an air of authority pointed to a watch and the warrior got up. It was time to go. I got to participate in the hug-fest this time. The warrior was given a lockpick kit and I was given a zippo lighter along with a note that read: 'it's dangerous to go alone. take this' I found it odd they didn't give us anything else because they clearly had a small stockpile of guns, swords, and even a morning star. I pointed and the warrior just shook his head in response. I noticed he no longer was carrying his notebook and pen. We were getting close to the final boss. Without missing a beat, we were off down the exit tunnel and the dull glow of the cyberpunk camp was soon extinguished by distance. Some cockroaches scurried past but they thankfully weren't trying to attack. Turned out the rats were. The warrior started wielding a piece of rubble to little effect. At first I tried to run (leaving my friend without light) but the warrior's screams returned, freezing me in my tracks. Time seemed to slow down when I shined the light back on him. I patted my pockets. My wallet, my computer duster, my keys, the lighter... In a flash of insight I grabbed a nearly empty spraycan and cast flame. It rewarded me with the crunches and screams of dead cockroaches. I picked up another and headed towards my shrieking friend. While no rats were killed, it was more than enough to scare almost all of them off my fellow LARPer. All except one. A real life unintimidated rat-king. I sent a pic of it to the net, caption: #the1trueking. It sort of resisted my next fire attack but it couldn't avoid a crushing blow from the warrior's stone. He didn't stick around to finish it off. We continued running down the tunnel. I checked my phone: 82,327 notifications. It got narrower and narrower until we finally squeezed out one after the other into a dangerously wealthy neighborhood. A gated community. Cameras everywhere and the whole couple of drunk college kids thing wouldn't get us out of trouble here. I typed on my phone: 'dude we need to find another path to the place. we could seriously get arrested' He looked at me, looked down, then turned around to continue on. I should have just let him go on his way. Instead I grabbed him and tried to take off his headphones. They were stuck to his head. He allowed me to investigate. Turned out that under his mop of hair this poor, crazy fucker had superglued his headphones to his skull. Easily undone but still, what the fuck? What did they do to him? Before I could even process this, lights silently pulled up. Police. We both started running. The car sped up but I managed to find a nook to hide in, yet the warrior was gone. Perfect. Gunshots. I carefully scanned the surrounding area to make sure there weren't any cameras, peeked my head out, and sure enough, the technophobic cyberpunk was charging the car. He ripped open the door, threw the apparently stunned cop on the ground, yanked out a knife in the cop's boot, and severely severed his throat. I wasn't close enough to get the full brunt of the image, but the gurgling of his screams through the bloody gash that was the cop's trachea was enough to momentarily paralyze me in disgust or fear or something. I watched as the silhouette of the murderer rummaged through the still flashing cop car. He ran over to me wielding a shotgun and carrying a first aid kit. Without thinking I put my hands up. He handed me a note he must have scrawled with the cop's blood-spattered notepad: 'were ok we just need to get to the 5G base station. I need to cast heal on these bite wounds. You cast teleport' I reached for the first aid kit but he pulled away and got in the car. I wanted to give up. I turned to my phone reflexively seeking infodrugs; to enter that better world. 167,215 notifications. I shouldn't have been this nice. I should have bailed at the homeless guy. But it was past the time for regrets. No going back once you're an accomplice to a cop-killer. I got in the drivers seat and figured out how to turn off the lights. The warrior guided me with pointing and deaf-style yelling in between treating his wounds. The local 5G tower base station ended up being only a five minute drive outside of the gated community, thankfully not passing any traffic cameras. Still night. I distracted the lone guard with a fireblast and the warrior cast shotgun. We worked our way through the dark, silent facility until we got to what the cursed warrior seemed to think was the central control room. After a few minutes of failed attempts at lockpicking, my video game instincts caused me to take out the ice spell to freeze the lock and the warrior blasted the door open. We were in. Cops were surely on their way already so I got straight to work. I downloaded the file off the QR code and it installed on my phone automatically before prompting a restart. When it booted back up my phone was something else. Green Matrix-like text was constantly scrolling on the background and there were two buttons on the screen, 'SCAN' and 'KILL' underneath it. I instinctively hit the green SCAN button first, which presumably took in all information necessary to manipulate the system via a probe into the base station's intranet. This process took 5 agonizing minutes. No cops though. The warrior was content to happily do push-ups as we waited. My eyes were darting from the nearby computer terminal to my occupied phone longing for some juicy data to take in. I hadn't had 5 minutes to be left with my thoughts in a long time. It sucked. As soon as the bar was filled, the KILL button turned from red to green and I hit it. At first I wasn't sure it worked, then all screens shut off leaving my phone the remaining source of light. It stayed alive just long enough for me to see the notification total from the most recent update: 553,140. Finally there were just the quietly blinking red, blue, and green LEDs on my compatriot's headphones. It was almost peaceful for about 3 seconds. Then there were police lights and sirens. Then a loud crash. Then explosions. The warrior led the way outside, shotgun first. Before I could get a good visual of the battle, the shotgun warrior launched a metal pellet hurricane in their general direction. He bolted off to the van the headphoned-cyberpunks shooting and morning-starring the cops must have arrived in, deliberately ripping his headphones off his head in the process. There was blood and bone but it didn't look as horrific as what I braced myself for. Before I could even close my door we peeled out spraying gravel everywhere. I initially kept my head down to avoid the bullets and stayed there at the warrior's behest. We rode in silence for a while until I heard, "I didn't lose my memory." The warrior spoke. I was silent. He took a deep breath and continued speaking in his surprisingly normal voice. "That stuff about the voices was bullshit too. We really were deaf-mute though! Me, my friends in the sewer, we were all in the marines. I can't speak for them, but I was not a good soldier. I was really only there cause I had nowhere else to go." He gripped the wheel a little tighter. "The day before I was to ship out to Iran the brass pulled me aside and told me I wasn't going to war. At first I assumed it was just cause I couldn't shoot for shit." He briefly turned to me with a sad grin. "My dexterity stat was low." I let out a polite snort. "Anyway, it was really all about brain implant experiments. Top secret stuff. Project HIVEMIND is what I heard a few times. I don't know what the ultimate goal was, I just know that they controlled me like a drone." Before he could continue I interrupted him. "What the motherfuckin- Holy shit- Dude. I think I've heard of something like that. Like those Chinese robo-roaches?" He grimaced a bit and I felt a twinge of guilt. "Yeah, like those cockroaches," he answered. "Being a marine sucked but the shit they did to me lab..." A nearly imperceptible shudder punctuated his thousand yard stare. "I could only obey the commands they gave. Beamed through 5G one of the guys from the sewer learned. There were side-effects, or maybe it was intentional. They deactivated the hearing and talking parts of my brain. Then one day, there was some sort of outage and the tower musta shut down. I could hear again. I was free. Then I escaped. Others apparently had the same idea. And the rest you know." "What was with the headphones? I thought you couldn't hear? And how'd you get that QR code?" I had a few more questions but I could piece the answers together. They needed me cause I was the only societal drop-out with a 5G connection in a 50 mile radius. We took that convoluted route to avoid traffic cameras. They located me via my extensive online presence, and that possibly contributed to all the video game analogies too. They knew my weakness. He parked the car. I didn't notice but he had driven me back to my complex. He killed the lights and looked at me. "After we escaped and the power came back on, we still were under their control. We couldn't rip that shit outta our heads when we tried. Luckily one of the girls tried putting on a pair of headphones she found. It seemed to block the signal entirely so long as music was playing giving us our free will back, although talking and hearing were still out of commission. We only started gluing them on for safety last month. Another one of us stole the QR code for the 5G killswitch during our escape." His face exuded bittersweet as he looked towards my apartment door. "And now, it's finally over." With the same expression, he turned back to me. "Now I got a question for you. Why'd you help me?" I finally could admit the real answer to myself. Loneliness. I hadn't talked to anyone in person in months, not even a cashier. I too had become a deaf-mute controlled by cell towers...albeit in a less extreme manner. Maybe I knew that subconsciously when he busted in earlier that night. Maybe I- My overwrought introspection was broken as I realized my phone's GPS was tracking my location the whole time before I induced the 5G outage. There weren't any cameras at my apartment. I could tell police this crazy guy kicked down my door and stole my phone. Why would any sane, wealthy person go on an adventure with a total stranger like that? I had plausible deniabilty so long as I stuck to my story. I could actually get away with this, if I gave up half a million internet points. A hard choice to say the least. Reason prevailed in the end though. Without another word I dropped my phone in the car, got out, and went straight to my computer to scroll my mouse wheel on a blank monitor.

Episode 2

Revolutionaries Smoke Weed A young man graduates college on the day martial law is declared.

I stared at my diploma. They got my name wrong. University was all a big scam anyway. I took great solace in the fact that no one else seemed to know what the hell they were doing after college either. Like everyone else I knew, I was in massive debt with no real job prospects on the horizon. I wanted to do research in a neuroscience lab, but I knew I wouldn’t be able handle grad school financially. And an undergraduate science degree was apparently useless without a doctorate. It wasn’t fair. To anyone who graduated before 2007, a college degree was a guaranteed one-way ticket to job heaven, where employers threw themselves at you, you paid off your $40,000 student loans in a couple years, then you bought a house and had a family. Well, that’s the story we were told our entire lives at least. It seemed generally accepted that the present was a transition period, known as the Great Recession. It’s called a “recession” instead of a “depression” because on one hand, the world economy was going down the tubes by virtually every measure. Yet there were less people going hungry, healthier populations overall, and an apparent increase in creature comforts. A more accurate term might have been a “Post-Scarcity Depression.” Most people seemed to live fairly comfortably, yet anti-depressant use, suicide and unemployment rates had reached record highs. Ever since the 2008 financial crisis it didn’t matter how many or what kind of college degrees you held, employers simply didn’t have the resources to train new employees. There were more educated workers than jobs to fill them. Half of under-25 college graduates were underemployed minimum wage-slaves. A quarter of them were unemployed. The remaining quarter either continued pursuing education or immediately got a job at daddy’s business. These weren’t the statistics I heard on TV, but they seemed to match reality better with respect to the data I gathered from other sources. The panicked pretense of confidence portrayed in the news was indistinguishable from satire these days. Everyone was talking about the end of days, from those who couldn’t afford basic cable to those on it. At least there were big parties usually hosted by the folks talking about the apocalypse. And for good reason. The man behind the curtain had been revealed. We were on the edge of the fiscal cliff. Global warming had never been more real, gun violence was at an all-time high, and most religious people quit their jobs to volunteer full-time at a church. Most thought it really was the apocalypse. It was probably just the drugs. One had to admit the past couple of years were a great time to be a psychonaut. The worldwide economic collapse suspiciously coincided almost perfectly with the advent of an easily accessible, anonymous, global drug cybermarket known as Silk Road. I could obtain anything I wanted through Silk Road or online RC vendors. Legal drug analogs with unknown side effects began to be sold in gas stations and new ones were being synthesized faster than they could be made illegal. The DMT flowed like Spice. Of course, my DOC was DXM, better known as cough syrup. It certainly was one of the less cool drugs. Luckily I’ve never been the kind of person who makes decisions based on how cool they make me look. Not only was it easy to obtain for five bucks at the local pharmacy, I could do it in public or even drive on it with no one being the wiser. For some reason it made me feel good to have this little secret. The low dose I was on at the moment was preventing me from leaving this lame event. DXM was good for getting lost in thought and this oftentimes prevented me from taking rash actions. A sober person wouldn’t have been able to stand reality, and no one had to thanks to the incredible variety and abundance of affordable, quality drugs. In my mom’s case, it was wine and reality TV. My dad was more a beer and news kind of guy. Every person who didn’t completely go off the deep end was kept complacent by something. Depression had been manifesting itself rapidly over these past several years when it was leaked to the public that the Great Recession only occurred due to a handful of corrupt men in the US government and Wall Street. Literally the entire world was suffering for the greed of a few, commonly referred to as the 1%. There was a small uprising in 2011 called Occupy Wall Street and it was soon proven impotent. When media and software megacorps teamed up to provide us with even cheaper endless channels of quality entertainment, it was all over. Our current reality would have been the delusions of a drug addicted conspiracy theorist decades ago. In fact, many people simply lived in denial of this reality, having it confirmed by not only their colleagues but almost all of the mainstream media megacorporations. Again, that’s not to say my life was bad. While the rest of the world seemed to be on the downslope, this conflict of reality merely created disharmony in upper-middle class America when the unemployed youth of 2013 wound up stuck at their parents’ house after college. This was a signal of failure in our American parents’ time, but was more and more the norm when I graduated college. They called us “entitled” yet refused to realize the world no longer works the way it once did. Our degrees now meant nothing, but they still cost several dozen grand. How was this making even some of these people holding degrees happy? These sheets of paper effectively made us indentured servants to the highest echelons of society. We couldn’t travel the world, start a family, or really enjoy life until these debts were paid off. The folks who didn’t go to college at least escaped getting thrown into a massive debt hole if they were smart enough to avoid credit cards. Serfdom was back. It’s not like this stuff had never happened before; powerful people forcing others to do what they want is something that consistently happens throughout human history. All my relatives kept telling me that this would pass in a few years, but world-renowned economic analysts who weren’t related to me seemed to think differently. It was the tipping point on the exponential curve of human corruption. Geez. I had to start being more positive. I had to get out of that fucking ceremony. Being a Broderick I was going to have to sit through a shitload of other people having their name’s called before I could leave. Students didn’t even walk across a stage anymore at graduation; everyone just stood up when their name is called at an assembly. My parents couldn’t make it but most of my friends were here, so I decided to text my pal who was also at the top of the alphabet. Aaron Courtier quickly agreed. Aaron apparently grew up in my hometown, yet I never really knew him until I got to college. Regardless, we found we had a lot in common and remained best friends since freshmen year. I sashayed past my more obedient classmates to meet up with Aaron and a few others by the back exit. The stares we received on our way out seemed to emit hatred. I couldn’t imagine why. They wanted to be there, right? “Well, what should we do?” Alicia asked after our initial meaningless banter. Alicia was Aaron’s sister and someone I unfortunately developed a crush on. I just tried to ignore it though. Aaron would be pissed. “There’s a graduation festival thing going on in the woods past the Factory,” responded Brandon. Brandon’s the only cool ginger I’d ever met. He was kind of a surfer bro. He always knew where the party was at, yet he never felt too cool to hang out with us, his friends since freshman year. “The only problem is nothing’s gonna be happening this early,” he continued. “Fuck it, let’s go to the factory,” Mel offered. Mel viewed himself as the badass leader of our group and no one really minded. The rest of us weren’t that decisive. Case in point, everyone seemed okay with his idea of drinking at the factory, so we went to College St to pick up some beer and headed straight there. Alicia split off with us to change clothes because she opted to buy the full graduation gown for an extra 200 USD instead of just the mortar board hats like the rest of us. We decided to chill in the courtyard behind the factory, away from the road. Someone long ago had set up tables and chairs and owner of this abandoned factory apparently didn’t give a shit. *Ssss pop sip* Daniel: “Man, I don’t know what I’m gonna do now that college is over.” Brandon: “Look bro, relax. Just take a load off and enjoy the accomplishment you have crumpled up in your pocket.” Daniel: “Yeah, you’re right.” *Glug* Mel: “So guys, guess who invited some incoming freshmen tonight?” *Thumb point* Daniel: “Hahaha guys, guess who’s gonna get some illegal pussy tonight?” Aaron: “Bullshit Daniel.” Daniel: “Give me a break man. Are you saying that it would actually be hard for any of us?” *Glug glug glug* Mel: “No, but I brought them, so I get first dibs.” Daniel: “Dude, there’s enough to go around, right?” Mel: “Well, there’s only two, and I was kinda hoping to–” Daniel: “Threeway? Come on man, that’s a pipe dream and you know it.” Mel: “Fuck you man. The night is long. Give me a chance and then we’ll just go from there, alright?” *Glug glug glug* Brandon: “Hahaha yeah whatever man. I just want to drink, smoke and have a good time tonight.” *Glug* Aaron: “Oh by the way Brandon, did you get that ounce?” Brandon: “Of course bro, and I got a little on me right now. You guys game?” *Glug glug glug* Daniel: “Can we wait like half an hour?” *Ssssss pop sip* Brandon: “Why?” Daniel: “Check the time.” *Check phone* Brandon: “Hahahaha duh. Of course man, 420, good call.” *Glug glug* *Glug glug* *Glug glug glug* Aaron: “Okay holy shit. Did you guys hear about what happened in Toronto a few nights ago?” Mel: “Uh no.” *Glug* Aaron: “So did you hear about all those resignations of bank CEOs and arrests of financial terrorists a few months ago?” *Glug* Daniel: “Yeah. But I haven’t heard anything about it since.” *Glug glug glug* Aaron: “A few nights ago someone from Toronto posted a video on the internet that no one has been able to debunk that clearly depicts an alien.” Mel: “Give it a rest Aaron. Did you show up to graduation high?” Daniel: “I did.” Brandon: “Me too.” Aaron: “I’m serious guys.” Daniel: “What do aliens have to do with bank CEO resignations again?” *Glug* Aaron: “No, they’re related. Listen. In the video, this man with cat-like features except for a dolphin-like head is talking about the end times being near and that interdimensional alien beings will save us.” Daniel: “It spoke English?” Aaron: “Yup.” *Ssss pop sip* *Glug glug glug* Daniel: “Okay dude.” Aaron: “Fuck. Just give me your phone. I’ll show you the video right now.” Daniel: “Uh I’m not getting any bars here.” Mel: “Me neither.” Brandon: “I don’t carry a phone sorry bro.” *Glug* Aaron: “Well, just look it up when you get home then.” Daniel: “Sure.” *Sssss pop sip* Aaron: “I’m not crazy.” Brandon: “I don’t know guys. I wouldn’t be that surprised if all that was real. It is 2013 after all. The Mayans were pretty smart about outer space and stuff last year.” Mel: “Come on. If this shit were real, it would be all over the media. We all would have heard about it already.” *Glug glug* Aaron: “A-ha! I knew you were going to use that argument. First of all, you’re well aware of the vice grip the US government has on corporate media, correct? CNN fired their entire investigative journalism department.” Mel: “Well yeah, but–” Aaron: “Anything you see on television hear on the radio or read in the paper is just an extension of the propaganda machine of our government. Nazi Germany was the same exact way. In fact, most countries today are run like this. It’s the most effective method to control a populace, control their information.” Mel: “–But what about the internet? Shit spreads virally. Can’t explain that.” *Glug* Aaron: “Yes I can. Why do you think governments the world over have only recently been trying to extend that vice-grip control to the internet with legislation like ACTA, SOPA, CISPA and PCIPA? Freedom fighters like Kim Dotcom and Alex Jones have been getting too loud and too well-known. They need to further control the flow of information.” *Sss pop sip* Mel: “Also piracy. Don’t forget piracy. Isn’t that the main reason governments are cracking down on the internet?” *Glug* Aaron: “Nigga please. Profits from visual media have actually increased since torrenting went mainstream. Have you noticed that every big movie that’s come out lately has been breaking a financial record somehow? Spiderman, Batman, Avengers, The Hobbit, et cetera. And the only people losing money in the music sector are the middlemen, not the artists.” Daniel: “He’s right. I read that the piracy argument is bullshit too. I heard it has more to do with Arab Spring. Governments are afraid of that shit happening again.” Aaron: “Good point. And that only bolsters my own point: that governments are trying to lock down the internet to keep the lower classes in their place.” *Glug glug* Mel: “But again, what does that have to do with aliens? Why would the government care about aliens being real?” Aaron: “Good question. It’s simple. The power elite know these aliens are friendly. They know that the technology and knowledge the aliens bring are only going to make older forms of governance obsolete. They’re suppressing information about aliens because they know it is the only thing that will keep them in existence. The answer to your question is self-preservation.” *Glug glug glug* *Ssss pop sip* Daniel: “Who’s they again?” Aaron: “Governments the world over, but more specifically, the power elite pulling the strings behind them.” *Glug* Daniel: “But didn’t most of this power elite get arrested recently?” Aaron: “Most but not all. And it’s only been a few days since this video was posted. You can’t fight the flow of information. Information, like people, wants to be free. Just give it time.” *Glug glug glug* Some more people showed up so we decided to end our esoteric discussion and begin smoking weed with them. We continued relaxing behind the factory amassing a crowd until it grew dark and then headed to the forest to join the people who were already drinking there. It was disappointing in the way that “grand finale” parties usually are. Years of media indoctrination had led me to always have high hopes for some amazing shit happening but barring some drunk guy doing stupid shit, most people just acted normally. I wanted to see a brawl or an orgy or something. Mel had just told me that he struck out with both his freshmen. I sipped my second bottle of robotussin as I considered making some moves of my own. But then a little after midnight the sky began flashing as if there was lightning, although there was no thunder. The only thing that could be heard was a loud high-frequency rotation sound. A UFO? No… A police siren? A booming authoritative voice: “PLEASE LAY DOWN AND PLACE YOUR HANDS ON YOUR HEAD.” Out of the sky dozens of soldiers with masks and guns came down holding ropes and throwing what I assumed was tear gas. Somehow Aaron had the good sense to shout “RUN!” Immediately half the other partiers submitted. The other half must have been too wasted. I was. I sprinted to the factory even though about a dozen people were heading there with me. I was faster than most people and they were only sending out 8 soldiers in our direction. I knew the big factory door was locked and felt a wave of relief as I saw half of the fleeing partiers head that way, each followed by their own soldier. DXM typically gave me the perception that I was viewing myself in the third person as some sort of video game character and this phenomenon was exacerbated thanks to the soldiers rapidly closing in. I don’t know what happened to the lone girl who headed my direction but I certainly wasn’t going to waste time helping her get through the loose window. Suddenly a large quadricopter drone swooped down right in front of me shooting at me until it hit my hand with what I assumed was a rubber bullet. I dropped the beer with a depressingly feminine scream and made a beeline for the window. In two completely disconnected moments, I jumped in more fluidly than I was expecting and teleported inside, hitting the pavement near-silently. Then I crawled under the adrenaline-charged moonlight until I found a collection of rotten cardboard boxes in a room and promptly hid myself underneath. I heard gunshots and screaming in the distance, but the military-police never even got close to me. After a surprisingly comfortable sleep I was awakened by birds chirping. The sun was shining brightly the next morning. It made it seem as if last night’s events were a particularly interesting DXM mind-movie. The only evidence to the contrary was the bloodstained dirt outside near the chairs we chilled at last night. I realized I wasn’t doing anything illegal, but I still did not want to be caught by the soldiers. They might even be shooting people on sight now. The only person who took this stuff seriously was Aaron’s Dad. He had a bunker within walking distance. I decided I had to make it there. Aaron might not be there, but at least there’d be some food. I headed back through the woods until I reached main street. Plastic cubes stacked like legos presumably full of sand, barbed wire roadblocks, military vehicles, dozens of soldiers wearing FEMA logos, and, surprisingly, a normal amount of civilians. Occasionally I heard a gunshot or scream, but I mostly listened to the sound of distant loudspeakers calmly shouting that we were now in a state of martial law. I knew I couldn’t just walk out there, so I slunk back into the cover of the forest and tried to check the news on my phone. Absolutely zero signal. I gave up and tried to find a break in the roadblock. I had to cross main street to get to Aaron’s neighborhood but by the time I reached the edge of the woods, there were still plenty of military men. I decided to use a distraction gambit. I turned my phone’s music player on and threw it as a diversion. It worked, giving me a tiny attention gap underneath an 18 wheeler which I ran under. It’s not like my phone was going to do anything other than track my location in this situation. The rest of the trek through people’s backyards was a piece of cake. Nothing except the occasional helicopter or drone. When I finally reached Aaron’s house it seemed as though no one was home. Thankfully, I was greeted with a familiar voice and an open door when I buzzed the hidden terminal to let me in. Aaron: “DANIEL! You’re safe!” Daniel: “Where are the others Aaron?” Aaron: “I don’t know, I can’t get in touch with anyone, all phones and internet are down. Television still works though.” Daniel: “Really? What the fuck? What’s going on?” Aaron: “It happened!” Daniel: “What happened?” Aaron: “They just declared world war three and martial law.” Daniel: “Why did they declare martial law?” Aaron: “Well, NBC reports that there have been terrorist strikes happening all over America, but I’m positive that’s not right. It’s American’s fighting back.” Daniel: “Yeah…so, uh, how did this war start?” Aaron: “A combination of events. North Korea pulled the trigger by firing a nuke at a Japan.” Daniel: “That’s hilariously ironic.” Aaron: “Then Israel immediately fired a nuke at Iran. And once Israel was making moves, Obama went on TV and declared war on enemies of America’s allies.” Daniel: “I guess it makes sense they only call it WWIII when nukes are involved. Have we been nuked yet?” Aaron: “Not according the news I’m getting from this broadcast television, but it’s impossible to tell.” Daniel: “Did we nuke anyone yet?” Aaron: “Only India and North Korea.” Daniel: “Who else is involved so far?” Aaron: “It’s China, Iraq, North Korea and Russia versus us, Israel, South Korea, and Britain.” Daniel: “Wait, why’d we nuke India?” Aaron: “Dunno. That’s just what the TV said.” Daniel: “Sounds like we’re fucked.” Aaron: “Not if we stay in this bunker.” Daniel: “So we’re just going to stay in here forever?” Aaron: “I got a bowl.” Daniel: “I need that pretty hard right now.” *Toke* Daniel: “So like, what happened to everyone else?” Aaron: “I saw Mel and Brandon run off with two girls.” Daniel: “Nice.” Aaron: “Fuckin wish I could get in touch with them.” Daniel: “I’m sure they’ll just show up here. Who else do you know who has a bunker?” Aaron: “Yeah you’re probably right. So, what do you think is really happening right now?” Daniel: “Huh?” Aaron: “Like do you really believe anything the news is telling us? This is straight up New World Order bullshit. WWIII is how the Illuminati will consolidate power internationally. You’ll see.” Daniel: “Yeah probably.” *Toke* Aaron: “So what are you gonna do about it?” Daniel: “I mean, what can we do? Just stay in this bunker I guess.” Aaron: “No. We can’t do that forever. We need to fight back.” Daniel: “How dude? What the fuck are you going to do against the Illuminati as you claim? What the fuck are you gonna do against the US military? All those terrorists you claim are Americans, they’re all just gonna die. Fuck that. I don’t care about this shit. All wars are followed by peacetime. I’m just gonna chill here til that happens.” Aaron: “You just want to sit back and let life happen to you your whole life? You never want to take control?” Daniel: “Of course not, but mindlessly following suicidal folks like yourself certainly could not be considered taking control of my life. No offense.” *Toke* Aaron: “None taken.” Daniel: “Anyway, how long do you reckon we can stay down here before we need to get supplies?” Aaron: “I have a year’s worth of rations and entertainment. Two years if we really stretch it out.” Daniel: “Where do we shit though?” Aaron: “That bucket.” Daniel: “…where’s the toilet paper?” Aaron: “….” Daniel: “…shit.” Aaron: “You can say that again.” Daniel: “Okay, let’s go outside, get all we can buy, and come straight back here.” Aaron: “Damnit, we really don’t have a choice. Okay.” The bunker door swung open revealing two haggard figures. It was Mel and Brandon. They told us that everything had kind of calmed down now. There were FEMA and DHS police everywhere, but as long as you weren’t actively trying to fight them, you could still pretty much live your life regularly. They went on to inform us that, working and paying taxes were now probably more important. Our friends apparently forgot how to enter the bunker, which is why they were just standing there. They were also high. More than a little disappointed that life was going to continue pretty much as usual, we went to get some pizza before going back to our respective homes. Over the next 6 months, the country quietly went to shit. Actually, maybe quietly wasn’t the right word. The constant roar of drones, rumble of tanks, and occasional shrieking of klaxons had an unforeseen effect on the local wildlife. Birds and bugs either evolved or learned in a matter of months to produce mating calls three times as loud as what I had grown up with. Biologists claimed this was because these creatures needed to be louder than military technology in order to locate mates. This phenomenon made it next to impossible to fall asleep without the freely available, invaluable infodrug known as white noise. Most of the plastic barricades stayed up and were cemented in place. In a similar manner, small police bases were being retrofitted to the roofs of existing buildings. The amount of wall in my town seemed to have doubled. They got rid of most of the barbed-wire though. The remaining streetlights without cameras were soon converted to TRAPWIRE-connected automatic camera-lights, “smartlights.” None of this was a problem for me or my family. We had nothing to hide. As far as I knew the rest of the world was in a bad way although I couldn’t be sure once connections to all servers outside the US were blocked. WWIII quickly transformed Occupy Wall Street from an impotent protest organization to a violent paramilitary group, OWS 3.0. Many of the major US cities had become veritable warzones, with the opposing armies comprised of either the highly militarized riot police and their tear gas drones, or the somewhat uneasy alliance between east coast socialists and west coast isolationists. I lived in a small town in Nebraska, so me and my family were entirely insulated from all this. In fact, I only knew about what was going on from a few sites I found on deep web. When I brought this up to my parent’s at the dinner table one night, they had no idea what I was talking about and chastised me for knowing these things. Apparently syndicated media sources had been almost entirely ignoring the reality of the situation, choosing instead to report that protestors are getting arrested for unnecessarily breaking reasonable laws. I showed my dad a video of OWS 3.0 rioters getting blown up in the veritable battlefield formerly known as Zucotti Park and he simply refused to believe it was real. For proof, he showed me a government-verified live-video feed of Wall Street in which everything looked fine. Most people only consumed the media facebook showed them or media from mainstream sources. It was even harder to get people off facebook when they started receiving FB bucks for using it. Virtual economies were what did us in. There was nothing I could do. Even if I did have the ability to gain a large audience, I would quickly be removed by the government. It was a futile endeavor. So I just stopped learning about what was really going on as well. It just made me feel shitty. The last I heard, riots were breaking out all over the globe: India, Turkey, Iran, Sweden, even normally non-violent Japan. As the year drew to a close, more and more riots began springing up in large cities all over the United States. These were referred to as the Doomsday Riots. On the evening of December 21st Aaron showed up at my bedroom window to solicit my assistance. I hadn’t seen him in months by this point. When the Great Recession hit, the expense necessary to move trapped most young people in the place they were living at the time. This caused a sort of pervading malaise during social interactions with fellow college graduates. Some made new friends. Apparently Aaron had. He had broken off from a crowd of armed civilians to run to my window. This was the first time the Riots had ever made it to my podunk town. Daniel: “Dude what the hell.” Aaron: “Hey man. Did you hear about execution of order 13987?” Daniel: “No…what’s going on?” Aaron: “You haven’t even heard about that?” Daniel: “…I try to not know what’s really going on anymore…” Aaron: “I can’t really blame you. The Obama administration has just released an ultimatum to every US citizen: sign a pledge to aid us in this war, or be permanently labeled an enemy combatant state.” Daniel: “So I guess those aliens aren’t gonna help us, huh.” Aaron: “I don’t know where they are, but I do know the critical mass is about to be reached. So now, me and every other child of light are showing our dissent with the NWO in order to gather enough human consent for the Galactic Federation of Light to help us. Tonight’s the night!” Daniel: “Uhhh are riots the most effective way to do that?… I’m sorry man… I think I’ll pass…” Aaron: “What?! Daniel we need everyone we can get!” Daniel: “Look man, I’m just trying to keep my head down and live my life.” Aaron: “When is the breaking point? When does the frog realize that it’s being boiled alive? This is the night we strike! This is the night Second American Revolution begins!” Daniel: “What? Dude I don’t want to be in a war.” Aaron: “So you want to be a slave?” Daniel: “Yes!” Aaron: “No! You don’t!” Daniel: “A soldier is a slave Aaron.” Aaron: “You’re either with us or against us. If you don’t come out of there, I’ll–” Despite the shame it brought me I shut the window, dulling the sound of broken glass and fire. The truth is I wanted to go outside and smash stuff, I just didn’t want to deal with the repercussions. No, it was plain as day that Aaron and whoever else he could get to come with him would lose against the might of the American military. I needed something to take my mind off my own personal failures and TV filled that role better than weed or alcohol or violence. Not having anything better to do the night he came by my window, I went downstairs to go watch TV with my parents.

Episode 3

Sociopathy is a Feminine Trait A graduate student starts a nationwide revolution.

It honestly started out as an innocent unbridled lust for destruction. People mistakenly believed there was some sort of political motivation. I never even watched the news. Things were going great for my family at the time. My dad was a lawyer and my mom had enough money to not cheat on him. I was an only child in the middle of my grad school years. I had a couple friends but they were too far below me to make any real connection. I didn't have a boyfriend. Not that I really wanted one. I just wanted to change the world. For the worse. Before my rein of terror began I really was a good girl. I volunteered. I studied hard. I only had socially appropriate sexual relationships. My whole life I was told I could change the world if I did all those things. Like everyone else, I soon learned that didn't work. I tried the other side of the coin for a while right before I graduated college. I smoked pot. I got too drunk. I fucked bad boys. And it was all somehow less satisfying than what I'd been doing. I didn't want to merely ignore the rules. I wanted to make new ones. Break the mold. Then one day I saw the light. Being from a wealthy family it didn't matter that I was a comp sci grad student, I was still rich. I had the most expensive clothes, make-up, technology, car, everything. So when the 5G crash struck my city I was hit pretty hard. For 2 hours my life was thrown into disarray. I couldn't work. I couldn't contact my friends. I was completely powerless. And I knew for a fact that a single person was the cause of this. A single person temporarily crippled an entire nation. I wasn't smart enough to engineer a viral cell-network quick-response code retro-virus. I wanted to do something like this though. I wanted to taste that kind of power. I wanted hard evidence that I did something real, that I mattered. Right from the start my mission was to be first and foremost, to spread destructive memes. Other than that, I always needed to get away with it. I never wanted to end up in prison. I didn't want to be directly responsible for hurting anyone either. Even though I chose to pursue destruction I had never been nihilistic. In a way I just wanted to be a prankster. I became possessed. School, TV, boys, it kind of all zoomed away as I thought up ways to severely inconvenience the world. My first official project took months of scouting out, although the time it took could be attributed to my own timidity. I chose the target of a newly installed security camera on a wooden telephone pole. I was savvy enough to know that there was a big anti-surveillance movement at my school. Plenty of suitable candidates for patsies. The Monday before my planned date of execution I flirted with one of the dumb buzzcut anarchist leader boys at school. I immediately forgot his name, but he made sure to give me his number. I talked to him at length in person about how cool it would be if someone burned down a security camera pole. I made sure to elicit a reply via text that indicated he was interested in that kind of stuff. My alibi wouldn’t require nearly as much work. I made my move on a Friday, the night most crime statistically occurs. I crawled through the woods with the stolen gasoline and kindling in some crude straps fashioned from stolen rope. It took me 30 minutes of dirty army crawling to get to the telephone pole that was a 5 minute walk from my house. I approached from an angle impossible for the camera to see. Still crouched I dumped the gasoline on the kindling, putting some sticks and leaves next to it for good measure. I lit a box of matches with my gloved hand and crawled the 30 minutes back. The firefighters might have seen me if they weren't so distracted by fighting fire. My cell phone was left home and I got my roommate to Facebook a boy for me at the exact time I left under the guise of shyness. My alibi was firmly in place. Not that anyone came looking for me. Buzzcut wasn’t so lucky. Well he was pretty lucky in that he didn't get charged with anything, but he did end up quitting his anarchy schtick apparently. My actions had two other salient effects. One, other cameras started coming down. Every time someone didn't get caught it was attributed to the "pyro" as she came to be known. The other effect was a surge in activist graffiti and wheat-pasting, at least around my university, showing the pyro as a modified figure of the TF2 character. I resented that they actually choose a female icon. That was one layer of obfuscation removed. Ironically one thing that didn't change was infrastructure security. It made sense if you thought about it. The whole phenomenon revolved around eliminating security cameras. It created more jobs to put up new cameras, jobs were a political priority, and no one was actually getting hurt. The amount of money and effort it cost to replace the cameras was negligible. It was seen as an excuse to revitalize the area. At first. The social media buzz was that this made the pyro an impuissant joke. More pathetic than revolutionary. Idiots. It was never about making a specific thing happen. I was simply horny for change. Any change. And things were changing, albeit in small ways. I achieved what I wanted and once I had a taste of a plan coming together I naturally craved more. I knew if I got caught I’d cease to be a legend in the moronic public’s eyes. That aspect of it I'll admit, I was totally into. I retreated back into the light. Into normal life. Into class. Into parties. Into the mundane. Into hell. Two months passed. Something bigger happened. A coordinated telephone pole take-down. My entire school had to shut down due to these concerted attacks. Only for a day. But still. I did that. Kind of. The power, the rush I felt that first night was back. And this time I didn't have to lift a finger. It became clear to me. Destroying a network in an unstable system causes a ripple effect. I had thrown the aging university telecommunications infrastructure into disarray with little more than gasoline and matches. Next up was the local transportation infrastructure. Like all addictions my next hit had to be bigger. This is when I realized I had to get help. Much to my dismay. I created a couple of dating profiles. Standard stuff, although no actual profile picture. Not even any lies except a fake name. I said I was into mischievous construction workers with trucks. Whoever I met up with would need to have pretty low standards in the first place to go on a completely blind date like that. I knew my looks would blow them away. It took me 2 hours to through the hundreds of messages til I found a boy who suited my purposes. Online dating really was like shooting fish in a barrel. The first date was at a pizza place. The expectedly desperate guy showed. He looked like he just hit the jackpot. Gross. He was a bit too chipper for my tastes. It didn't matter though. He had nice arms. He wasn't lying about working in construction. It was easy to gauge his interest in my actual plan without revealing too much. The exploits of the pyro functioned as small talk for any generic couple these days. I segued into narrowing my plan specifics by asking him if he wanted to help me screw over my ex-boyfriend. He barely asked for details. This guy was putty in my hands. It took me another few “dates” with this guy before I figured out exactly what I needed to do. The goal was to inconvenience the most people. Neither me nor the construction boy had access to explosives so we had to be a bit more creative. The location would be a popular commuter exit ramp. It took a few weeks of intermittent searching for me to find one that couldn't be avoided with a trivial detour. We loaded his truck up with orange and white barrel barricades preloaded with quick-dry cement, both stolen from construction sites. I got him to cut the bottom out in addition to rigging the inside with a circulatory system of plastic tubes that allowed for even hydration when we poured water in the top. He also fashioned me some traffic spikes out of nails and tubing filled with cement. He designed it so after throwing these down the rain cemented them to the asphalt. We arrived on site at twilight, right before it was to start raining. I threw down the traffic spikes before the blind curve while he rolled the barrels off his truck and stuck funnels in the top. We made our escape right after the downpour started. Needless to say, he got lucky that morning. It ended up being less effective than I had hoped. Fortunately one of the many advantages of being a beautiful woman is that no one can criticize you for impotence. All reports of the event said the commotion caused a jam that barely lasted an hour. The sole victim's Volvo wasn't even damaged. I knew that the only way it'd work is if I erected two barricades at once; more if I could organize it. I needed more than one man's help. I needed an army. I went back online. I set up more dates. I coquetted. I bought new outfits. I stared at my made-up face in the mirror wondering how anyone could do this for fun. I could only use one boy per dating site. I presented them each a different story, a different name, a different profile picture of a girl who looked okay but was without a doubt less sexy than me. A new alibi for my roommate every time too. I only contacted them through online and through different VPNs. I never let them know where I lived. I was a new person each night. For all that trouble I only ended up with 4 boys after 2 weeks. I had enough time in the hours between 2AM and 4AM to erect 4 barricades in precise locations. I got one of them to load his truck up before the first boy dropped me off at the his house. Two of them were wrapped around my pinky so tight they carried out my plan without me even being there to help. Fortunately only one was dumb enough to send me a picture documenting his work. When I was later questioned by the police, I was a hot girl who denied any involvement. The last I heard of him he went to federal prison. Police never came for the rest of my boys. I was smart enough to manage the two I carried out the mission with and the fourth actually seemed to be more into the plan, the pyro, than me. He was smart enough to know how to avoid getting caught. This escapade was far more successful. The news was seized with reports of a 32 car pile-up that occurred during rush hour. I got lucky. Two cars careened into the on-ramp and off-ramp barricades within seconds of each other. The simultaneous crash in both lanes confused drivers. The confused drivers all acted in discord creating a dissonance that would have been music to my ears if I heard it. Even better, the city mayor went on the news that evening vowing to locate the scumbags who pulled this domestic terrorism, which in turn when viral on YouTube. I deleted my accounts without even looking at their messages. Telephone pole burning became intro level stuff, but it didn't stop. The cement barricade technique started popping up on highways across the country. Police came for those who weren't as careful but they were few and far between. Someone wrote a guide to making the quick-dry cement-barricades and anonymously posted it to the net. Over the next few weeks things escalated even further. Now, instead of being attributed to the pyro all these acts of vandalism were attributed to terrorists. Two months in and economic effects began to show. Whenever this occurred, truck drivers couldn't reach their delivery destinations and most other people couldn't get to their jobs on time. Major corporations were hurting from the time stolen from their truck drivers. None if this affected college students. The chaos was growing without added effort so I lied low while others copied my ideas. My Facebook feed quickly woke me up to the national perception of these cement blockades. Most people were opposed to this scourge upon the country and the buzz was that this chaos had a purpose. It was thought these were the coordinated efforts of some neo-revolutionary group. Technically the people claiming this were right. I wasn't doing anything anymore, they were, and they did care about that kind of stuff. But they pretty much all incorrectly thought that whoever was the first to do this gave a fuck about fixing society. Made it even funnier in my opinion. Watching these people talk about me like I had some grand plan to help them gave me exactly as much satisfaction as I predicted it would. I needed more. I needed to come up with more ideas, more step-by-step instructions detailing how to carry out them out, and distribute them anonymously. Guides to terrorism was a market with high demand and low supply in this day and age. I was good at making them. Being in a computer science graduate program, I was good at network security too. I could steal all the information I needed and distribute it without being traced. It only made sense to combine my two greatest talents. Three if you count looking cute and innocent. Cops always believed me when I repeatedly denied claims from my former potential suitors that I had even once given them the time of day. Night after night I laid in bed awake, dwelling on these thoughts until one night what I had to do slammed into me. 'Rats in supermarkets. Termites in office buildings. Wasps in courthouses. Untraceable economic bioterrorism. This is the next step. Buy a mating pair of these creatures or find them in the wild to keep your supply purchases as off the grid as possible. Breed an army. Insert them into a hole on the target with an ample supply of food. Let them do the dirty work. They'll all naturally diffuse to where people are because that's where the food is.' I stared smugly at my text for a few minutes before submitting it anonymously on Cryptograffiti. I couldn't just sit around and wait. I had work to do. I needed to get these idiots even more information. They weren't capable of doing it themselves. I started dating a city planner. No need to get into the messy details. No one got laid. He is how I secured unfettered access to all architectural plans in the city. I researched layouts of every building thoroughly. I was mainly looking for vents or other access points and how the maintenance tunnels twisted throughout the building. Letting rats out in supermarkets was trivial, just pick the lock and slip them in the back door. Termites in office buildings would be harder to figure out, but I was going to leave that to the office-workers. A wasps nest would be hard to sneak in anywhere. Rats and termites can tear through barriers with their teeth. Wasps can only sting. Before I could complete this aspect of my research people were already following my orders, poorly. They were using explosives to penetrate buildings and then letting their animal helpers run amuck. It was too disorganized, too brash. And every single one of them got caught. Even worse the direct violence seemed to scare others off. The attacks dwindled before I could even get my info out there. I was devastated. It was too late. I had already obtained the intel I needed to pull this off, but anonymously posting my plans online turned out to be a bad idea. Soliciting people on the net or in person had both become too dangerous and 99% of the population were completely incompetent anyway. I had to find a way to be more selective, at least somewhat. The only thing I could think of was distributing info by hand directly to certain individual's addresses. I couldn't even use printers anymore. I knew there were people who were willing to use this intel, I just didn't have a way to get it to them. It turned out my last ditch effort worked. I stayed up all night hand-copying instructions for penetrating key buildings' defenses 100 times over and putting each sheet of paper into a ziplock baggie. At sun-up I drove my car all over the town putting a baggie at every frat house, at every slummy crackhouse, at every mosque, at every radical professor's house that I knew of. Surely one of these would hit their mark: an angry boy who wants to lead a team to do something extremist. A week later I received hard evidence this occurred. The governor's house was evacuated for 2 days as exterminators killed whatever was let into it. The nearby heat re-ignited my fire. I was starting to fall behind in my school work but I didn't really care at this point. I took a 1 week leave of absence to carry out my next move. I went on a tour of the white house as well as the revolutionary underbelly of the District of Columbia and seduced parties in both those groups. Then I dropped off info at every underground base location I found. Not a month later the white house was evacuated just as the governor's was. This was a big deal. The seat of power, penetrated. It made people think they could exact change upon the universe as I had. The proof was in the pudding. There were abundant reports of people anonymously receiving dossiers in their mailboxes. They were starting to disseminate information themselves. They were calling “me” the “info-fairy” now. I was miffed they still implied this anonymous terrorist/folk-hero was a woman. Society started crumbling all around me. People, important people, were getting shot on live television. Highways were now riddled with checkpoints making travel an Orwellian nightmare. Food was getting scarce. It even got more difficult to escape reality as caps were put on data. For most people it was bad. Not for me. I was finally becoming the person I wanted to be. I finally understood my destiny. Wasps and cockroaches shut down expensive businesses. Termites and carpenter ants demolished buildings. Rats and mold devastated the food supply. It was round one of the apocalypse and I was Pestilence, Death, and Famine. It only made sense I became War too. I dropped out of grad school. This time I needed focus all my energy in building a real army. It probably seemed suspicious to other people, but I couldn't plan something of this size alone and getting “caught” didn't matter anymore at any rate. I still couldn't go completely public though. I stalked the most decorated war heroes I could find through publicly available military records. Then I cross-referenced their information with what I could find in the recently leaked massive government black project documents as well as the already public terrorist threat database. A single one of these guys could compromise my mission. I never formally dropped out of grad school but I never returned. For all intents and purposes I cut off contact with my past. I still had access to my trust fund, which immediately I converted to cash to fund my travels. Before placing my PGP key in each soldier's mailbox, I made it a policy to secure some confirmation from 3 friends or family members of each of my candidates that the soldiers I selected were who their data said they was. It didn't take long to receive replies. In rest stops and fast food restaurants, we organized our plan alone and together via darknet. The societal tension reached an apex. It was my time. This was to be my magnum opus. When we finally all met up on the freshly christened battlefield of NYC, the hundreds that came were visibly shocked to learn I was a diminutive babe. As soon as I opened my mouth their jaws snapped shut. They knew I was the person contacting them. Shouting at these men (and a few women) gave me tingles. Their screamed replies converted it into full-blown arousal. Without much fanfare the penetration specialists began their work as the rest of us lurked in the underground concourse. The penetration specialists were mostly disgruntled employees and personnel who were too critical to the production of counter-revolutionary propaganda to evacuate the city with the rest. Once inside the 30 individuals would re-congeal into 5 groups of 6. Each squad had the sole mission of getting the doors unlocked long enough for the rest of us to break through. I was with the team at the least guarded entrance. I was carried by my stampeding brigade like a surfer riding a sentient tsunami. The wave broke in a crash of glass, bullets, and grenades. I didn't even have a gun. It didn't matter. I controlled those who did. Due to the nature of our surgical strike taking the elevator wasn't an option. I hiked up hundreds of stairs and over as many corpses until someone more knowledgeable about the environment we were in yelled that we were at the public broadcast room. Someone else gave the order to charge seconds after I mentally decided to do it. Again the tsunami hurtled through everything in it's path until we were in the broadcast room. Confirmation crackled through our communication appendage that the other organs of our team had secured all the necessary technology to prevent anyone from stopping us from publicly broadcasting. They barricaded the entrances as best we could. We were going to start a civil war. I was heavily made up, like a sexy commando, so much so that no one would be able to recognize me. We collectively prepared the scripts months ago. All I really did was read, like a newscaster. Our production assistants put relevant info and pictures on the screen as I did my thing. Reports started flooding in. The United States government never officially declared war on it's own people but in a matter of hours world news sites made it abundantly clear. I was the main event but my soldiers continued providing programming for the masses. My work here was done. I partook in the drug-fueled orgy that seemed to have blossomed. This went on for a little over a day as we all traded off keeping special ops forces at bay and keeping fresh inflammatory memes churned out. No one slept. These people knew they were going to die. And they were right. Sunday night something killed the celebratory atmosphere. More and more heads turned toward the big window overlooking the city and framing the immaculate sky. In the distance I saw a twinkle. I knew what it was, but one of the guys monitoring the web confirmed my thoughts. The United State's government was going to bomb their biggest city. A civil war would start. This whole thing spiraled completely out of my control. I liked that. Some guys just don't understand. Most women don't really like leading. We want to be the spark, not the explosion. I flicked off the heavens before my descent to hell.

Episode 4

A People's History of Dissolution A historical documentation of the events leading up to, during, and immediately after the Dissolution of the United States of America.

The young politician walked on stage, his neutral demeanor betraying nothing of his next move. "I'm here today to address claims that I did cocaine 3 years ago. I did. Not only that but 4 years ago I smoked methamphetamine, dropped acid, did a medley of designer drugs, and smoked illegally obtained pot. When I was a teenager I got in trouble for flicking off a teacher. I broke a girls heart. I didn't rat out some guys I knew who stole a car. Even younger than that I got into a fight, I stole a bag of candy, and shit my pants when I was caught. I still torrent movies. That's all true. But here's the bottom line, these anonymous accusations launched at me are a social assassination attempt by a CIA organization known as COINTELPRO. This is a good thing. It means we're getting powerful. The powers that be are getting scared. Don't fall for their desperately executed tricks. Look, nobody's perfect, least of all me. That is precisely why we must reject the status quo and utilize the ORACLE system I developed to organize our communities at the neighborhood, city, county, state, and national levels. Power is best utilized when it's decentralized. If there are any further allegations towards me, check them against what I just told you. If it's true so be it. I've dug up all the dirt on me. Everything else is a lie. My personal life is irrelevant anyway. I don't want the power and the stress of being the leader of the free world. This isn't about me. Government is not about people. The whole point of government is to create the legal system we want to live in. Now that we have blockchain voting technology and automated government project data miners we only need a human intermediary as a conduit for migrating the broken old republic to this more practical way system of governance. I hope social assassination is no longer an option. Really all the CIA can do now is assassinate me the old fashioned way, MLK style." He laughed. "Am I enough of a martyr for you yet?" This is the part where the stunned public would have stayed silent for a second before erupting into thunderous applause. Instead, the young politician's head exploded, resulting in instantaneous passionate screams. The assassin had botched the job. Whether or not it was intentional was anyone's guess. The CIA assassin was shot by the TSA hours later. This was the first self-aware cultural epiphany. Mere seconds before this rapidly political leader was shot he called out his detractors, making denial of harsh reality all the more difficult. This was nowhere near as obfuscated was the JFK or the MLK thing. The net almost immediately reached a consensus as to what happened. Everyone ignored the TV news and everyone knew the ORACLE candidate was killed by the US shadow government. And everyone knew why. He was too close to dismantling the matrix very rich people had spent centuries assembling. Even though the people knew what happened there was no reason to care. So most went on with their lives. At first this was misinterpreted by the powers that were as submission, although soon top level government sociologists predicted that an armed uprising was brewing using data mined from social media sites and the deep web. They deliberately misinterpreted the data to justify their primal fear of course, but that didn't stop them from declaring nationwide martial law. Ironically, it was the highway barricades and constricting of bandwidth themselves which caused a domino effect that skyrocketed the cost of food and entertainment. Shelves gradually withered away. It was the almost accidental removal of bread and circuses, not the assassination of a revolutionary leader, that was cause for revolution. Similarly, the backlash to these events was gradual yet steady. It was rather difficult to tell at first what was actually going on because the mainstream media stage play continued uninterrupted. There was an old evil tyrannical democrat and the lesser of two evils, a very young entrepreneurial libertarian. This candidate had "revolutionized" the campaign process by spending less than a million USD on advertising, claiming to rely on viral videos but in reality relying on ISP endorsement and manipulation of search results straight from Google's servers. Net neutrality was a thing of the past so this was easy to accomplish at this point in time. But the people would not be fooled again. For the six months leading up to the assassination a never-identified group had been conducting terrorist acts uniformly throughout the United States of America. It was easy for anyone to tell these weren't CIA black-ops because instead of calmly providing the cowering citizenry with answers in the form of oppression the government was forced to try to cover up the growing problem. The news media was scrambling, not that anyone watched TV for actual information about the real world anymore. That is, until the weekend Anonymous (or whatever you want to call them) took control of 30 Rockefeller plaza and started broadcasting it's own news on what was formerly known as NBC. Yes, just like V for Vendetta. Unsurprisingly the key to the ignition of the American Fall (as it came to be known) was televising the revolution. Only two days of non stop insurgency-inciting broadcasting was all it took for shit to hit the fan. It should be noted that the television tower was so strongly fortified the terrorists held it against special forces for two whole days before being surgically converted to dust via a 5 kiloton tactical nuke. If you have to pinpoint the exact moment the United States of America ceased to be, this is it. Needless to say, elections were postponed until a to-be-determined date. The remainder of New York City promptly did what large cities do best and devolved into an unsalvageable dystopia. Over the next 6 months, smaller companies based in the troubled country one by one shut down all operations and relocated their headquarters, no big deal. The larger corporations realized they could now exploit the nationless people by charging more for their products and paying smaller wages to the suckers hired to do grunt work. Globalism wasn't so kind to the individual though. The second America dropped the nuke Canada and Mexico took a firm stance on closed borders. Most people with families to take care of stocked up on food and stayed in. Some organized militias siding with the government...or against it. The people with less to lose finally put those years of virtual reality training to the test. Of this last group, about half tried to occupy government buildings while the rest tried their hand at crime. All but the top-tier raiders got themselves killed in a matter of weeks, typically at the hand of the people they attempted to rob. All government forces had their hands full eradicating the anti-government militias in addition to the problematic insurrection. Soon that same Anonymous group had taken control of a myriad of communication systems which they used to manipulate the police and military into protecting their families instead. This technique wasn't 100% effective but it evened the odds a bit. The leader (if there was a leader) of this Anonymous coup was a mastermind, not giving orders, but instead merely distributing information in the manner that most benefited the organization. This decentralized leadership style was a hit with all the splinter cells of the revolution. Allegedly, the information was dropped off hand written in a tube at random people's houses. Untraceable by the NSA so long as the guy making the drop didn't have his phone on him. So many places were info bombed that even if half the data was lost there were enough duplicates that the right person always eventually found the info. What info? It started with blueprints, guard shift schedules, and admin network access to state government buildings. As the movement grew the "info fairies" started leaking data concerning the location of weapon caches, nuclear launch codes, and blackmail no politicians. Much to everyone's delight, someone had even been able to prove that the sitting president wore a chastity belt. By the time the bomb dropped there was no real information advantage the government had over it's people. With most of the public military withdrawing from the war against the people, the US government had no choice but to unleash it's black ops mercenary forces. It wasn't pretty. On average for every borderline super soldier killed, 50 domestic terrorists were executed...which isn't terrible considering how much training they had. All hope was lost. The army formed by the combination of CIA, DIA, DEA, TSA, AAA, COBRA, and the seven-foot blue-eyed super-soldiers known as the Four Horsemen (the aptly named result of a secret bio-engineering project courtesy of the PMC Xe) were just too good. Then the American people unleashed their secret weapon: crowdfunding. They simply bought the highly skilled sector of the US shadow military using untraceable funds not tied to the US dollar. Extremely skilled murderers never fight for silly things like patriotism. That's only in stories. Thank Satoshi for inventing cryptocurrency otherwise the transactions could never have occurred. Like the sun imploding, the US government seemed to only feel the effects of its own demise much later after it happened. Government employees still got their checks. The mail still went through. Police officers still issued speeding tickets (unless they found a gun on you, in which case it was straight to a FEMA camp). Even though all the while the Senate, House, and Pentagon were literally occupied by violent protesters. For some reason the White House remained the vestigial stronghold of the dying organization. If the people occupied that building it seemed like the whole ordeal would be over. For about a week the battle seemed to reach a stalemate. Pretty much everything important was occupied by the insurrectionaries except the White House. The powers that be managed this via the antlike underground base beneath the white house property. People had found tunnels going all the way into Canada. The drone strikes had ceased. Netflix broke new records. The whole country was peaceful and quiet at the one time of year you'd expect the opposite, the 4th of July. No one really knew what to do at this point. Even if the rebels surrendered things would never go back to how they were. All the powerful people government was invented to protect evacuated long ago. Thanks to globalism, patriotism is considered quaint at best and evil at worst. All parties realized how ridiculous it had all become. However, you should never underestimate how difficult it is to concede defeat nor the lengths people will go to avoid it. Eventually, something that started out as a joke became the de facto solution via social media: get Keanu Reeves to walk up to the front door of the white house alone with a megaphone and declare independence. He was 'the one' after all. Not to mention the fact that he was an instrumental player in taking the capitol building. "We the people hereby dissolve the constitution and all government organizations as they exist today. The money and assets of all organizations funded with tax dollars have will be confiscated and held until redistribution. Outside of that, any property someone owns is theirs. Taking from then is theft. Do so at your own peril. There is no longer a united states of America. This landmass is now under no centralized authority." This declaration didn't need to be convoluted. And neither did the cherry on top. Keanu ad-libbed: "Oh, and give me your chastity belt. I'm alone. Come out. Give up." He stood there as long as it took for them to process the situation and deliberate. When the president finally came out, accompanied by a dozen super-soldiers, it was easy 