During work I started hard dosing safeUp to avoid the comedown, but then I kept bouncing around, not getting any work done, so I ordered more Jaz to relax, but now, after work, I’m in serious need of more safeUp, so I buy another dose, realizing too late that I’ve spent the last of my stablecoin. I check the price of doseMoon. The price has somehow dropped a fraction of a percent. How can that be? The value of doseMoon was supposed to skyrocket exponentially without a single dip in performance. I message Taco. Yo, simul, have you seen the price of doseMoon?
He messages back immediately. Must be some kind of glitch. Just a sec.
Yide messages. You coming over?
Yes, I write back. I just need to sell some coin real quick.
And I swipe into a crypto exchange, link my wallet, and try to move a fraction of my doseMoon for a stablecoin, but when I click on the arrows going both ways, a message comes up: funds illiquid. Funds illiquid? That can’t be right.
Taco messages. Cadman is posting on social. He’s blaming the price drop on some kind of pump and dump scheme. Says it’s not his fault. Says if everyone holds, the price should stabilize.
Are you able to sell yours? I ask. Mine isn’t moving. I try several exchanges, but all of them refuse to accept doseMoon.
Why would you sell? Taco asks. Now is the time to buy the dip. I just got a bag.
I desperately click the sell button, but nothing is happening. I search the feed for anything related to doseMoon. Half of the influencers are saying it’s a rug pull; the other half are saying it’s a pump and dump. Either way, the price has become so volatile that exchanges have temporarily suspended trading. You can buy the coin, but you can’t sell it.
I take the safeUp.
I message Yide. Long story, but I don’t have enough coin to buy a ticket to your place. You wanna interface instead?
Bubbles appear. Then stop. Then appear again. After what feels like an eternity, Yide sends the message. Sure. BTW, do you know where X is? He isn’t responding to my messages.
I’ll message him, I say, and then I send an interface link sponsored by Daft Designs. After clicking the link, I arrive in a posh room with ergonomic furniture and abstract paintings.
Yide appears moments later. She’s lost so much weight that the shape of her body isn’t aligning with her avatar, so there’s a sense of glitch and mal, but I don’t say anything about the misalignment, because doing so would derail her attention and she’d spend the entire interface session trying to debug her avatar, which would be lame, obviously.
“What did X say?” she asks.
Something buzzes in my head like an insect, and I’m having a hard time paying attention, probably because of my rare form of inefficiency, the name of which I can’t remember.
“Vonn,” Yide says. “Did you hear me?”
“Oh yeah,” I say. “I’m messaging him now.”
But I don’t, because I’m so burned out that, emotionally speaking, I’m a house of cards, as if one more gust of pressure will topple me over, one more burden will collapse me, so I just stand there, in the Daft Designs storeroom, unable to move, unable to feel any sense of joy, all gutted like a dead fish and strung out like a guitar, just empty.
“Does it bother you?” I ask. “You know, like, how meaningless your job is?”
“What?” Yide is swiping. “By the way, I just messaged X. He says he’s going to join.”
“I just feel crushed by how meaningless my life is,” I say, and it’s almost like I’m watching myself say this from across the room, like I’m rewatching a movie from my childhood. “It’s just…exhausting,” I say.
Yide finally stops swiping and looks my way. “Are you talking to me as your friend or as the head of HR?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Is there a difference?”
“I would hope so,” Yide says.
“A friend,” I say, with a tinge of doubt.
Yide takes a step closer. Her eyes lock on mine. “You’re not alone,” she says.
“I feel like I’m alone,” I say. “I feel like I’m a fake, living someone else’s life. All day, at work, I have to act like I care about what I do, like what I do matters, but in reality, my job has no purpose but to convince people to buy worthless shit that they don’t need and that won’t make them happy.”
“Samesy,” Yide says. “I mean, I got into HR because I thought I could help people, but in reality I spend most of time either convincing people not to quit or disciplining them for breaking some dumb corporate policy. At the end of the day, I just feel like a shell of a person.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“What?”
I swallow hard. “Are you and X, like…a thing?”
Yide snorts. “X and I? As if. You know, Vonn…”
But before she can finish the thought, we’re both pinged. I glance at the notification. It’s X. He’s opened a group chat with me and Yide and sent a strange link that sends my mainframe shuttering.
“Is that what I think it is?” Yide asks.
“I think so,” I say.
“Oh hell no,” Yide says. “Fuck that. You can get in big trouble for going into The Vacuum.”
How did you get this? Yide asks in the group chat.
If you want to talk, he types, I’ll be in The Vacuum.
“I’m going,” I say.
“Vonn, no.” Yide looks genuinely terrified.
“Have you never been in The Vacuum?” I ask.
“Of course not,” she says. “Why? Have you?”
I shrug. “A few times, yeah. At prep.”
“Are you serious?” Her eyes grow big, like she’s just mainlined some indie upper she bought from a dealer on the outskirts.
“Yeah,” I say. “It’s no big deal, really.”
“No big deal? You can get fired,” Yide says.
“Technically, that’s true,” I say, “but nobody actually gets fired, unless you’re, like, the one creating the vacuum links or you’re doing something super shady. Anyway, I need something to shake up my night, so I’m going. See you on the other side.”
I click on the vacuum link, sending my mainframe into total glitch and mal, my vision going total static, the adStream remixing its contents, distorted voices talking over fragmented images – “don’t forget to…active shooter on Line 9…buy now or…suicide is a common side effect…” – and there’s a baby nursing on a bottle of safeUp, a sexSimul flashing her pixelated ass, a livestream of a mass shooting in a movie theater – and then all the static and noise and image chaos dissipates, and I find myself in a dark space that seems to stretch on forever in every direction, the space overlayed with a neon grid, and I feel like I’m sinking, and I wish I could order some agoraPhilia, but it’s too late now, I’m in The Vacuum, and then a few seconds later, Yide arrives, and we both stand in the grid, looking at each other, our faces stunned of all color. Immediately I start scrolling through the database of code.
“Fuck,” Yide says. “Fuck, fuck, fuck. What are we doing here, Vonn?”
But before I can answer, X appears, and he's all, like, “this vacuum is a total vibekill.”
So then Yide is, like, “if it’s vibekill, then let’s leave. I mean, like, it’s so illegal to vacuum.”
“Is it?” X’s voice is pure mockery. “I didn’t realize. You must be a Compliance Officer, Yide. Where did you get your license? simulU?"
Yide waves her hands. “It’s not a joke, X. We could get in big trouble. Like, fined hellaCoin or put on performance review or, even worse, get a content ban or a skin restriction. Ugh, I cannot have a skin restriction, X. ”
“Who said anything about a skin restriction?” X starts shimmying, doing The Halter Top, and I remember that he got a bad case of viral dance a week ago, the symptoms clearly still lingering. “I mean, look, the fact is, people vacuum all the time, and only a fraction get caught. That’s the point of a vacuum. The bureau can’t track it. Not without some serious microDataMining.”
“Well…” Yide looks around the grid. “I need some Elysium. To calm down.”
“You can’t take any pharmas in The Vacuum. They don’t work. That’s the point of The Vacuum, it’s not plugged into the same network, it doesn’t traffic in the same frequencies as dNET.”
“Jesus,” Yide says. “What’s the point then?”
“This is the point,” I say, flashing some code I just found, a book called Burn It Down. I start flipping through the pages, keeping us on the same feed. It’s strange, seeing text all laid out bare, with no flashing colors or sounds, no ads in the margins, just like the olden times, before dNet, just words on a screen.
“What is this?” X asks. “It’s fucking…boring.”
“It’s banned code. That’s what’s cool about The Vacuum. You get access to a bunch of books from the olden times.”
“Lame,” X says. “I thought The Vacuum would have something a lot cooler than…books.”
I see Yide’s cursor scrolling the text. “In an advanced industrial society,” she reads aloud, “pleasure becomes a means of control, of placation, a way to numb and distract the masses. We must therefore reject pleasure, reject coin, reject accolades. In order to liberate our minds and bodies, we must run, open armed, into boredom, into quiet, into discomfort.”
“What the fuck,” X says. “This book is a downer. There aren’t even pictures. I’m going back to dNet.”
Yide, her voice taking on a hypnotic quality, continues reading. “Silence is natural. Silence is good. In a world of noise, silence, which is a form of doing nothing, is an act of resistance.”
But I’m barely listening now because I’ve flipped to the back of the book and been stunned by the photo of the author.
Since my gaze is linked with Yide’s, she starts reading the synopsis of the book – “Burn It Down is both a self-help treatise and a radical manifesto that argues that positivity is killing us, entertainment is harming us, and the pleasure economy is mortgaging our future for an empty present. Written with gusto, intensity, and anger, Burn It Down is Elijah Mitchell’s first self-published masterpiece.”
“Masterpiece is one word,” X says. “Mental masturbation is yet another.”
“Mental masturbation is actually two words,” Yide quips. “One of which you happen to know a lot about.”
“I guess I am pretty mental,” X says.
Yide snorts.
“The picture,” I say.
“What picture?” X asks.
I point to the picture of the author. “Elijah Mitchell. The guy who wrote this book. I saw him a couple days ago, with a Withouter named Claudette.”
And then the verbal floodgates open, and I stand there, in The Vacuum, telling Yide and X all about what happened after the shooting in The Underworld – the dark underground surround, the device I swallowed, the spa interrogation, etc.. – and they’re all, like, standing there listening to me, their jaws hinged open, and when I’m done, it’s the longest silence I’ve heard either of them hold separately, much less together, and amazingly, I’m the one who breaks the silence when I say: “I think we should leave.”