chapter 7
taz
Here’s the thing: Sutton was actually a pretty good writer. Oh, not on a sentence-by-sentence level, and the way he wrote dialog reminded me of my AP Creative Writing teacher: “Did you type this wearing boxing gloves?”
But the story was actually really good: it started with these incredible amazing, smart, competent people living on a very thinly disguised version of the Flotilla, surrounded by robots that did their bidding and AIs that anticipated their every need before they could even voice it.
The hero was obviously a Larry Stu for Sutton, an entrepreneur/engineer named Brandon Sullivan who was in a polycule with a bunch of hot women half his age, and he inspired everyone he talked to, knowing just what to say to ease the tensions as the ships sailed into a superstorm that all the AIs and other toys were completely not up to the task of getting them through.
It turned out they had to sail through the storm because they were overdue to meet with a group in Indonesia that they had promised aid to—more brilliant entrepreneur/engineers who had been threatened by small-minded, violent, bigoted bureaucrats who resented the fact that they’d come up with this incredibly awesome high-tech way to prevent coastal losses to sea-level rises and were going to arrest them all for having the audacity to build a really cool gated community right at the beach.
These Indonesians were part of a global network of secret societies that Sullivan and his pals supported. Not all of them were genius inventors: to qualify for membership, you merely had to believe that people who were good at what they did should be in charge, rather than having leadership handed out as a participation trophy so that lesser beings wouldn’t have hurt fee-fees.
Brandon-a.k.a.-Sutton and his valiant crew help the Indonesians, sneaking them aboard after dark for secret strategy meetings, and using a combination of tactics (laundered money to pay for top-notch lawyers; hackers that dig up kompromat on their political opponents; a bodyguard squad for their leader that kicks six kinds of shit out of the thugs sent after her), the Indonesian allies are triumphant.
I could not put this shit down, and I thrilled to their triumph even though the victory they’d won was the right to tear out a mangrove swamp and build condos. That was the gross and amazing thing about Sutton’s work: he got me to root for terrible things, even though I knew they were terrible. How did he do that? Was all storytelling this evil and sneaky and manipulative?
The chapter ended on a cliff-hanger, as Brandon learned that there was a spy in his midst, an infiltrator who was bent on sabotaging his group’s valiant quest to rescue the whole human race from these dumb libs and tree huggers who thought they knew everything. He’s informed of this by a deep-state informant using a secret back channel, because Brandon and all his friends are censored on online media by giant companies that have been co-opted to be an arm of the corrupt, authoritarian governments of the world, and won’t let anyone speak the truth. The whistleblower warns Brandon that his own fleet is filled with traitors, but he can’t say who—all he knows is that the world’s governments are getting scared of Brandon and his friends and they’re ready to do anything, including bombing the fleet, to stop them.
The Brandon scenes were intercut with these scenes from the “default” world where cyberwarriors for Brandon’s cause were getting red-pilled in secret forums, then going out to make a difference in the world, picking fights with mindless drones who believed in the Green New Deal and the idea that people should be in charge based on whether they believed the same things, not whether they were good at their jobs. This silent majority caught all kinds of hell from self-righteous, domineering eco-idiots who would jump down their throats at the slightest offense, like one of them who got called a racist for not wanting his grandfather’s single-family home torn down to make way for a high-rise.
And here again, I kept finding myself slipping into sympathy for these dumbasses, and filling up with loathing for these caricatures that could have been me and my friends. The weird thing was, I was totally familiar with the stereotypes Sutton was using, they were no different from the ones Gramps and his friends tossed around for my whole life, but somehow having them in this story, especially when I was so (involuntarily) invested in Brandon and his cause, made it all seem so urgent.
I think it was that the story was just really well done: there were all kinds of awesome chases, fight scenes, love stories, super-cool high-tech ninja shit (if the real Flotilla had half as many cool cyberweapons as the one in the novel, it was a wonder that they hadn’t seized power) and fantastic acts of bravery. At one point, Brandon’s protégé—a plucky, wisecracking teen from Bangladesh—gets into a wingsuit and flies into enemy territory after being lifted and released by a stratospheric drone, and Sutton worked so much cool stuff about aerodynamics and material science and astronomy into the scene that I found myself digging into Astrogoogle and running these little aerospace-engineering tutorials.
I finished the first half of the book and wanted to finally go to sleep—it was after midnight—but I made the mistake of skimming the first paragraph of the second act, and bam, I was sucked straight into it. This one was all guerrilla warfare, all around the world, as all the characters we met in Act 1 ran merry circles around the fat-fingered, slow-footed authorities of the Green New Deal: This is what happens when you promote idiots for ideological purity and ignore their incompetence!
And the more the “good guys” won, the more the masks slipped on the Red Greens of the Green New Deal—faced with unstoppable resistance, they created a police state with genetic checkpoints and mass surveillance and mandatory apps on everyone’s screen.
This was the true nature of the “first generation in a century that didn’t fear the future”: they were so afraid of that fear that at the first sign of trouble, they turned into totalitarian thugs, building concentration camps for their ideological opponents, transplanting refugees—all from poor countries where people had brown and Black skin—to fill the neighborhoods that had been emptied by the roundups.
For all their deep green rhetoric, the enemy would not confront the obvious reality that the Earth’s carrying capacity had been vastly exceeded, and that any future for the human race would have to start with getting the population under control. There in the camps, the resistance announced its willingness to put its own fertility under rational control.
People who could demonstrate their objective merit—their intelligence, physical prowess, rationality, and capacity to create things of value—would be awarded the right to reproduce. People who were born to be takers—the dull, the entitled, the foolish, the easily led—would have to join a lottery to win that right. With a finite Earth and a potentially infinite population, something had to be done.
There was even a memorable scene where Brandon agrees to have a reversible vasectomy—he’s pretty sure that he’ll qualify to reproduce when the time comes—and wins the admiration of a hyperfertile Guatemalan man who’s already fathered five kids by five different women and the guy goes and get his tubes snipped, too.
I hated reading this racist trash, but I couldn’t stop. It was after two thirty in the morning now and I was coming up to the big climax, and I was involuntarily invested in the massive war that Sutton was teeing up, and which flew past in a series of tight little scenes: dogfights and drone fights, missile strikes and beach landings, space war and cyberwar, ground fighting house-to-house, soldiers turning on their officers and joining the resistance, it’s all guns, guts, and glory, flags being hoisted over capital buildings and then …
The epilog: starships (of course), all kinds of jobs being created by job creators (not by committees voting on Jobs Guarantee jobs, of course), the climate emergency “solved” with high-tech systems that sink the carbon, protect the shores, and block the sun (no mention of what they do with all those therms sunk into the ocean, melting the poles—maybe they bribed the second law of thermodynamics to look the other way for a century), cars everywhere, and Black and brown people living in harmony with white people, with an end to racial strife and the beginning of a new dawn.
I felt dirty when I finished it, realizing how much I’d been into it, and how gross and just Nazi it was at the end, and just, ugh. Besides, it was three in the goddamned morning and I’d just blown up a perfectly good night’s sleep on this crap.
I threw the book at the wall and got half a gummy out of the bedside table and turned out the lights. I was just falling asleep when something that had been niggling at me jolted me wide awake and bolt upright. In that second act, when there was all that guerrilla warfare, there’d been a scene I’d somehow glossed over, maybe because I was tired and there was so much plot at that part, but—
I flipped through the book and couldn’t find it, so I pulled it up on my screen—naturally it was open access, because in pluteland the truth is paywalled and the lies are free—and did full-text search: “solar panel acid squirt” and yeah, there it was.
One of the guerrillas, a minor character, recounts to another how his cell had been getting up on the roofs of public buildings with hammers, smashing the solar arrays, carrying squirt bottles of acid for self-defense.
I read the short passage over and over. The truth was sinking in: this wasn’t just a piece of garbage ideology in pulp-fiction form, it was a manual for revolution. Mike Kennedy hadn’t come up with his stupid wrecking stunt on his own. He’d been LARPing Those Who Tread the Kine. The Flotilla distributed this book by the truckload, and all those Maga Clubs passed it hand-to-hand like it was Dianetics.
I switched off my screen, threw the book at the wall again, and turned out the lights. Even with the gummy, it took a long time for me to drop off.
* * *
I didn’t get up until after twelve, my housemates already gone. Phuong had left me a message telling me she’d really enjoyed our dinner—which made me feel like a clod for not sending her a message like that, instead of staying up all night reading apocalyptic late-stage capitalist pornography. I wrote her a gushy note about how much I’d enjoyed it, deleted it, wrote another two drafts, then wisely decided to pause this composition exercise until I could swill a liter of cold brew and heat up some pizza in an iron skillet (that’s how you get a crispy crust!).
After I’d fixed my blood-sugar and caffeine levels, I wrote a fourth draft of my text and fired it off and immediately got anxiety sweats, somewhere between schoolboy crush and new-relationship energy, and felt both embarrassed and elated about them. I reminded myself to cool off and not get weird about this and then I nearly broke my neck on the shower tile when she messaged me back and I lunged for my screen.
> Well, now that we’ve established that YOU enjoyed it and I enjoyed it, let’s do it again! What are you up to this afternoon?
Omg, she was so good at this. Of course, this realization set off a fresh round of panic: What reply could I make that was just as breezily positive, self-assured, and yet not thirsty and weird? I used the rest of my shower to think of something, drafted it twice, then just replied:
> YES!!!
And promptly realized it wasn’t a yes-or-no question. I was typing a sheepish reply when she messaged back.
> You are hilarious. okay, I was supposed to be on a building site today but obviously that’s canceled. Let’s have a picnic in Verdugo Park?
I didn’t think, just copy-pasted my last response:
> YES!!!
and then
> I’ll bring the food this time. One hour?
> Perfect
I’d roasted a ton of cubed sweet potatoes earlier in the week, so I threw them in a Dutch oven with egg whites and olives and cherry tomatoes and other tasty things, sprinkled feta on top, and stuck the whole thing in the oven for half an hour while I tried on and discarded ten outfits. I found something I hated less than everything else—wide-legged pants a little similar to the ones Phuong had been wearing the night I met her, a vintage Western shirt with contrast stitching and shiny buttons—and moved the frittata from the middle shelf to the top of the oven and turned on the grill, setting a five-minute timer. That was just enough time to toss a leaf/watermelon/pumpkin-seed salad and put some peaches in a tub for dessert and then I took it out and set it down to cool while I found a picnic blanket and extra cutlery.
I was out the door with fifteen minutes to spare and made it to the park just as she arrived, carrying my big picnic bag.
She gave me a hug that was more than warm and friendly and there was a moment there where I forgot what I was doing and just noticed how spicy and amazing she smelled and how smooth and shiny her hair was on my cheek. Then she gave me a kiss on the cheek and a brief one on the lips and I just …
Wow.
I set out the picnic, making awkward small talk and wishing I had something perfect to say that would disguise my essential dorkiness. But then I served my frittata and the whole world changed, because my frittata game is super badass. It’s the capers. And the caramelized onions, twice cooked (once when I roast the sweet potatoes, then again in the Dutch oven). And the oregano. Also browning it. It’s a whole thing.
“This is amazing,” she said.
“I know.”
“Good. Hate false modesty. Give me another slice.”
After wiping her lips with one of the napkins I’d brought, she looked me right in the eyes. “This is good,” she said.
“I know,” I said.
“Not the food. This.” She pointed at herself and at me, and our surroundings. “I mean, in theory, stuff’s pretty messed up, but I am seriously enjoying having you around while it’s all going to shit.”
“Um.” I took a deep breath. “Phuong, I am trying to find a way to say how happy that makes me without sounding like a scary weirdo.”
“You’re not scary.”
“But I’m a weirdo?”
“Certainly,” she said. The last three (four? five?) times, she’d made the first move. Clearly it was my turn.
“Can I hold your hand?”
“Yes, you can.”
It was warm and lively and strong and callused.
“Can I kiss you?”
“Yes, you can.”
It went on for a long, long time.
“Wow,” I said.
“You know, I was just thinking that.”
“My housemates are home today,” she said, and gave me a very serious look.
“Mine,” I said, “are not.”
“Oh, good,” she said.
* * *
It was so good. I mean, good in that new-relationship-energy way, of course, a new body and a new playmate and playing off all that tension I’d been carrying around for days.
But also, it was objectively good. She was athletic and energetic, surprising and funny—we both laughed really hard at various points, sometimes at the same time, but not always—and, best of all, she knew what she wanted and told me:
“There.”
“Lick that.”
“Bite that.”
“Harder.”
“Softer.”
“Don’t stop now.”
Wow.
I’d always struggled with that kind of explicitness. I mean, I’d been raised with all the sex-positive stuff in school—and had it countered by Gramps’s mix of squeamishness and gross, sexist jokes—but I could never quite bring myself to tell my partners what I wanted.
Maybe it was because none of them were as explicit as Phuong. Shyly at first, then with more confidence, I did as she had, and she reacted with such enthusiasm that before long I’d lost all self-consciousness. It was beyond great. It was the best I’d ever had.
“Wow.”
“You say that a lot.” I’d gotten us ice water from the kitchen, and her lips were cool as she nuzzled me under one ear.
“Not usually,” I said. “But you know—” I ran a finger up her flank and she shivered. “Wow.”
I yawned, then yawned again.
She bit me in the spot she’d just kissed. “Am I boring you?”
I yelped. “No, sorry. I just didn’t sleep last night.”
“Ooh, thinking of me?”
“Uh, honestly? No.” I told her about my visit from Kenneth and Derrick, and my hate-reading of Those Who Tread the Kine.
“I can’t believe you read it all the way through?”
“Ugh. I know. I feel so gross. But there’s something weirdly unputdownable about it. I mean, there must be some reason for its success.”
“Yeah,” she said, “it’s the same as every shitty fantasy novel: you’re part of a group of naturally superior people, held back by a bunch of mud-people and haters who don’t want to admit that everything would be better if their social betters were just allowed to get on with being in charge of everything.”
“That’s the plot of every shitty fantasy novel?”
“Duh. Fucking King Arthur. Lord of the Rings. Ender’s Game. Star Wars. Foundation—”
“Pretty sure some of those are sci-fi.”
“If it’s got faster-than-light travel, it’s fantasy,” she shot back. She got up on one elbow and I sincerely and intensely admired the new play of light and skin and muscle. She clicked her fingers under my nose. “Snap out of it, fella. Eyes up here.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay. It’s just that you’re about to have a revelation. This is the foundational belief behind ‘conservativism.’ Ever wonder how white nationalists, American imperialists, misogynists, Christian fundamentalists, and finance bros could all fit into one political category? What do all those ideas have in common?”
“Uh,” I said. I hadn’t ever thought about it, but yeah, those were pretty different ideas. How could they make up one ideology? “Shit, I don’t know. That’s really weird.”
“No, it’s totally explicable. Think about what I just said about shitty fantasy novels.”
“Oh! Uh.” I thought hard. Man I wanted to get it, just to show Phuong that I was in her league intellectually, even though I’d only just gotten out of high school and she’d spent three years hanging out with brilliant, planet-saving heroes in drowning London. “Um.”
“You’ll get it.” She stretched out like a cat, then tweaked me in a sensitive spot. “Eyes up here.”
“Uh.” It was hard to think. I thought hard. “They all believe that some people should be in charge of other people.”
“You are a smart fellow,” she said, and gave me a kiss. “That’s exactly right. Our side believes that no one was born to rule over others. Their side thinks that some were born to rule and others to be ruled over. That’s the difference. That’s the change that Uwayni represented—moving away from the idea that the answer to a world ruled over by a hundred and fifty white men was to change things up so half of them were women and people of color to the idea that the world shouldn’t be ruled over by a hundred and fifty people, full stop.”
“I never thought of it that way.”
“Now you can. It’s why so much popular fiction over the years has been right-wing garbage. Harry Potter, any of those stories about being the Chosen One, Gone with the Wind, Atlas Shrugged, so much of it has been just eugenics dressed up as wish fulfillment. No one is born to be The One, any more than you can find The One that you’re supposed to fall in love with. People have different abilities, and they can improve them to different degrees, but no one is born to rule and no one is born to be ruled.”