The Deluge, page 76
Fred was home, staring out the window. Just one lamp on, our reflections in the glass. I could tell something was up. At first I thought he was angry I’d been out with an ex for so long, but he’d forgotten that entirely.
“I was planning to give you this in a few days but…” He handed me a stack of papers with a binder clip. “It’s a divorce agreement. So we can get married.”
“What’s wrong?” I asked him. “You look freaked. Marrying me can’t be that bad.”
“No, it’s… This awful, crazy thing happened on the street outside the restaurant.”
A few weeks later I’d watch the video online. While Peter, Nate, and Fred were eating dinner in Tribeca, a couple of kids in their twenties had walked up to the window. A boy with long black hair and a patchy, peach-fuzzy beard; a Black girl wearing, for some reason, a graduation gown. The boy held a sign that read THIS IS DONE OUT OF LOVE. And then they lit themselves on fire. The video was chaotic, the diners stumbling back from their tables as the two screaming kids banged against the glass, maybe trying to crash through it, but instead falling to the ground, writhing and shrieking in pain. A few of the patrons, including Peter, ran outside to try to beat out the flames with their jackets. The girl survived, covered in third-degree burns. The boy did not.
That night I held Fred and told him how sorry I was, how horrible that sounded.
“I think I’m in shock.” He’d never appeared younger to me. I could see what he’d looked like as an uncertain boy, maybe gazing at a tree he was afraid to climb. “It was just… awful. I can’t stop seeing it.” I thought of finding my mother. I knew that when you saw a person do violence to themselves, it never really left you.
We went to bed, Fred taking a sleeping pill to knock him into dreamlessness. I couldn’t sleep, though, and got up to try several different passwords for the section of the report called “The New Gray Edge.” After having no success, I went to Fred’s trading station and logged in to the three-monitor setup. From there I got into his password manager and began trying those combinations. Finally, one of them worked, and I sat back in his chair, reading. When I was done, I made some coffee, ate breakfast, and dug through the refrigerator for bread, meat, and fixings. I packed ten sandwiches, a few bananas, and protein bars into my biggest shoulder bag. Then I took the elevator down to the street and walked until I reached the gas station. There were still five teenagers camped out with their signs, looking hungry, tired, and cold under the first bathwater light of dawn.
SLAPDISH Presents
SLATE SENSORY NEWS
SPONSORED BY KAPLAN – YOUR EDGE IN A COMPETITIVE WORLD
Whose Worlde Are We Living In? A Dark VR Legacy Arrives in Our Reality
Content by Stephanie Hardwick
June 25, 2035
[Warning: This news xpere is intended to be consumed with 3D ASMR Fractal Visuals and a soothing binaural soundscape. Without these elements, some users may find this content disturbing.]
When virtual reality arrived as a staple in people’s homes in the years following the Covid-19 pandemic, its champions made utopian predictions of its power to connect and create while detractors warned it would rot children’s brains. Few could foresee the far stranger consequences that have actually come to pass. Virtual reality has allowed people to, once and for all, curate their own realities. Bit by bit, day by day, our old world is having to fend off intrusion by these upstart regimes.
In a recent grisly example, on April 28 thirty-seven individuals infiltrated elite spaces of politics and luxury, from a birthday party in Montecito, California, to the Parliament House in Sydney, to outside high-end New York City restaurants. The CEO of Bank of America, a meeting of Australia’s conservatives, and numerous guests of Manhattan’s Eleven Madison Park, watched as radical activists doused themselves in gasoline and set themselves ablaze. The “QMM light show,” as it’s known, began in VR. On the last day of the siege of Washington, an unemployed thirty-four-year-old college dropout named Quinton Marcus-McCall added to the carnage by taking to the floor of the House of Representatives and self-immolating. Within months his disturbing end had become a potent VR meme. Hacked into countless games and xperes by activists with a point to make and trolls simply looking to get a rise, the “QMM light show” interrupted the Oscar telecast, American Idol, and CBS’s VR reboot of The Big Bang Theory. Some of the largest audiences in the history of the medium have now been subjected to this ghastly vision.
In VR, it is always easy to wingnut cherry-pick. There is the grotesque meme of the “Ham Sammy Brigade”—xperes of right-wingers happily wolfing down ham sandwiches to taunt the planet’s starving, which has led to Far Right politicians munching on pork subs during rallies across disparate countries. Two million daily visitors to the worlde of “Dan Doodoo,” a soft-spoken, bespectacled conspiracy theorist who claims to communicate with dead celebrities, believe the “real world” is in fact Doodoo’s simulation, which we are all living in. His adherents inundate those who doubt Doodoo’s divinity with very real death threats.
Because this warp-speed revolution has so fractured audiences, advertisers have no choice but to pursue eyeballs wherever they congregate. Dan Doodoo is the quintessential Slapdish millionaire, and there are untold numbers of wannabe gurus, gamers, and small-fry gods trying to copy his success. While Marvel, Disney, DC Comics, Game of Thrones, and other iconic IP still rule the day, it does not make up the plurality of interactions with VR xperes or worldes. People don’t much care for corporate curation anymore. They don’t want to see Tom Hanks storm the beach at Normandy in the Saving Private Ryan xpere, they want Tom Hanks to hold them while they cry and call him their father. They don’t want to watch Luke Skywalker save Leia from Jabba the Hut. They want to watch Jabba penetrate Leia with a baseball bat–sized slug phallus. The age of DIY social and cultural experience, never censored, questioned, or combated with facts, has taken over.
“The QMM light show” takes this up a disturbing new notch. Most of the thirty-seven people involved in the globally coordinated action died in agony. A few survived, though recovery will be a long, difficult road.
Marcus-McCall grew up in a lower-middle-income neighborhood in Detroit, his mother a doctor and his father a professor of African American Studies at Wayne State University. The couple separated when Quinton was seven, and his mother passed away during the pandemic, while his father died from a heart attack in 2023. Marcus-McCall also had a sister, who was killed by her boyfriend in 2018.
After moving to Los Angeles to try his hand at a career in stand-up comedy, Marcus-McCall returned to Detroit, where he enrolled in Wayne State’s nursing program, only to drop out in 2026. This was also the year he joined A Fierce Blue Fire’s Detroit Outpost, where he worked in community outreach. Friends describe him as quiet and kind but with a quick wit and occasionally provocative sense of humor. A childhood friend, Tyrone Cardona, told Slate that Marcus-McCall became enamored of A Fierce Blue Fire’s mission.
[Voice of Cardona]: “He thought they had the right program. Quinton wasn’t religious but he was, you know, spiritual. He was a funny guy but also thoughtful, and he could be dark. Or brooding—I don’t know what to call it. He had been through tough stuff, but you wouldn’t know that hanging with him. He was also political but not in the normal way. He didn’t march or tweet or do nothing like that—it was more like he kept tabs. Now I feel like he was just biding his time. Waiting his whole life for his moment.”
Marcus-McCall did seem to have a plan. He left A Fierce Blue Fire in 2033 and spent months training for the occupation. When the time came, he was one of the foot soldiers who helped fortify and administrate the occupation of the capital. By August 1, he had positioned VR cameras in the House Chamber to capture and immediately download his act of self-immolation to private servers, subverting the government’s efforts to block all communication that day. By the time news outlets were reporting what had happened on the Mall, the “QMM light show” was already bouncing between worldes. Within a week, it had become a potent global meme, yet another flash point in the heated debate about the climate crisis, the occupation, and where virtual reality is leading us.
The Slapdish “paintbox” allows participants to dream almost anything, and yet the results of this are typically as crude and troubling as the rest of the internet. From CGI child pornography to antebellum slave plantations to real-life torture xperes, VR’s frightening underground is a thousand-person heavy metal concert one floor beneath your apartment. Yet those examples at least follow a kind of logical continuity with how the internet’s dark side has always functioned. In other words, censorship works against them. It is the aboveboard insurgents like Quinton Marcus-McCall who are skewing our reality. And some of these insurgents have created audiences of exceptional numbers and power.
After hip-hop artist Tricky Digz was revealed to be Jason D. Blair, a forty-year-old white accountant living in St. Paul, Minnesota, a movement emerged to force Slapdish to create a racial registry of its users. The backlash to that has exploded into a different revelation: a study in the Journal of Applied Biobehavioral Research found that 78 percent of participants admitted to identifying by another gender, race, or religion as they navigate worldes. Fans have declared Blair to be Black and will carpet-bomb anyone who says otherwise with a program of intimidation. Despite the death of Henrietta Housekip, child shock jocks Henny and Dillpickle continue to hit peaks of virality that make media empires jealous. Housekip’s targets of ire began with identity politics, government censorship, and the corporate control of information and speech, but shortly before her death at age fourteen, she discovered China—not only its internal repression but how it uses its economic power to silence movie studios, sports leagues, and technology companies alike. Wearing Henny and Dillpickle merchandise in China has become a crime punishable by a ten-year prison sentence. Then there is The Pastor.
As we round the corner to election season, one of Slapdish’s biggest stars became the first major candidate to ever launch a presidential campaign in virtual reality. His worlde, a neo-futuristic Christian citadel, has more daily visitors than any real-life theme park in the country. The current president utilized VR behavioral tracking and predictive analytics of voters to decimate his opponents in the 2032 Democratic primary. Yet Victor Love is not a native of the medium. The Pastor is. As he put it in the first Republican primary debate, “I intend to bring to the office of the president the joy, passion, and fire you see and love every day in my worlde—and I’ll bring it to the 2D, 3D, 4D, and every dimension in between and beyond.”
Say “Next Story” for: “How Zeden’s VR Album Seminole Party is a Master Class in Post-Indigeneity”
THE GHOST AND THE MASK
2036
You’re bone-tired, but you focus on the work. You try not to think of prison, of search and rescue, or of the girl in the hole. Every Tuesday, Reverend Andrade and his wife, Ginna, drive their minivan around Coshocton handing out sack dinners to anyone who needs one. This winter, that includes most everyone in the county, from the single moms in the apartments on Walnut Street to the folks in tents out by the ruins of the old power plant. The Rev and Ginna print up little cards at the local copy shop and tape one to the top of each ham and cheese sandwich. It gives the recipient directions to the church or addiction treatment at the Fierce Blue Fire center where you and Raquel got clean a decade ago. You riding with them is part of the make-work the reverend has thrown your way since you got paroled, and you understand it’s money he can’t afford to pay you. Even with the parishioners who’ve stuck with him, no one can afford much tithing. He gives you tasks like stapling forms or fixing a clogged sink, and you’re figuring out how to use a pipe snake on the fly with his AR glasses. Then on Tuesdays he takes you along as “muscle” while he and Ginna make the rounds.
“Hon, y’all wanna sack dinner?” Ginna shouts through the window in her syrupy West Virginian drawl.
“What’s the catch?” the tired old Black guy asks, stopping all the same. He carries a backpack and wears a Cleveland Browns Super Bowl LXI Champs toboggan cap.
“Ain’t no catch, sweetheart. Just some food from Church of Christ down Route 16.”
“No God stuff,” he says.
“Sorry, darling, Jesus comes in every bag. Now come take this.”
Hesitantly, he comes forward. You hand Ginna the bag from the back seat, and she hands it to the man, who pops it open and peers inside like he can’t believe there’s not a bomb or a human ear.
Says Andrade from the driver’s seat, “Ever need a helping hand or a place to sleep we got contacts at the shelter.”
“Just hungry,” the man mutters, poking past the church’s card to the sandwich and fruit beneath. Then he looks up at Andrade and Ginna. “Much obliged. For real.”
“God bless you, brother,” says the Rev.
Andrade pulls away, leaving the man to tear the sandwich out of the cellophane right there on the street and take down a quarter of it in one bite. Ginna spots a woman she knows, working the corner near Raquel’s McDonald’s. It’s a good place to trick because the crosswalks are busy, and there’s a cheap motel right across the street.
“Starling!” she calls. Ginna has chestnut hair with blond highlights and would be pretty but for several missing teeth. You’re now missing three teeth, so you’re no one to judge, but the asymmetry of her smile is distracting. “Starling, honey, you wanna sack dinner?”
Andrade pulls the van to the side, and Starling looks annoyed but takes the brown paper bag anyway. She’s wearing a T-shirt cut off at the midriff, exposing the pale flab of her belly. The shirt has a picture of an eagle filing its talons, backdropped by an American flag. Despite the flesh hanging loose over her knobby bones now, you recognize her from the blood bank way back in the day.
“How you doing out here?” Ginna asks her. “Staying warm? Got a place to sleep?”
“I’m aight. Just need a customer.” She jitters and twitches, a dance taking place in the same square foot of space. You’ve been dope-sick enough in your life to know that she needs to score. “Used to be I sucked cock for heroin and didn’t gotta worry about eating. Now it’s easier to get heroin than a sandwich.” This explanation, Ginna says as you pull away, “is as close to a thank-you as Starling is ever going to fork over.”
The reverend and Ginna hold hands while he pilots the minivan around town. A cross dangles from the rearview mirror. Beyond the windows you watch the sunset reflect off the clouds, turning the sky pink and blue. A cotton-candy light. A sky of cold winter branches and telephone wires. Billowing above a front door, there is a banner with the silhouette of The Pastor carrying the cross up a hill against a gold, yellow, and brown sky while dark outlines of his followers watch silently. You can’t turn a corner in town without seeing his name.
You drive the twilight until all but two sack dinners are gone. The reverend and his wife always give you the last two to take home.
Back at the double-wide, you set one of the brown sacks in front of Toby, who’s drawing and telling you about the ghost in the salad words you can never quite make out. He’s wearing both his hearing aids, but his language is still mush-mouthed:
“En dah it stans in feel an watches us.”
Five months home, and you’re starting to pick up the sounds: And Dad, it stands in the field and watches us.
Toby’s seven years old but looks smaller and younger. You’re not sure what he thinks of you. His hearing aids jut from the canals, clipped together around his neck so he doesn’t lose them.
“Where’s Mommy?” you ask. He points to the wall, which means out back of the double-wide in your small lot. You do not have to ask if he’s hungry because when he peers inside the sack his eyes light up, the ghost momentarily forgotten.
Out back, in the glare of the flashlight, you find Raquel covered in blood.
“He’s talking about that ghost again.”
She doesn’t look up from her work. “I know, he spooks me out. Like one of them possessed kids in the old movies.” From a low branch on the maple tree, she’s got an animal hanging by a bungee cord, its feet cut off, and she’s using a fleshing knife to take off the fur, pulling it down the body like a sock. “How was it?”
“ ’Bout what you’d expect. Rev gave me twenty bucks and two sack dinners for my time.”
Raquel pauses and scratches her nose with her forearm, the part that doesn’t have blood on it.
She examines the animal and resumes skinning. “Your mama still coming up Sunday?”
“Far as I know. Think she’ll hit church with us, but I don’t expect her to stay.”
“That’s good.”
Raquel does not indicate which part of this she thinks is good, the staying or the going. While you were away, your mom inserted herself into Raquel’s and Toby’s lives, driving up on her days off to serve as free childcare, throwing in money when she could after they made SNAP impossible. Raquel had needed the help, but you don’t blame her if she’s had enough of your mom at this point. She’s moved up to assistant general manager at Mickey D’s, but the pay bump was insignificant. Once you got out, you promised her you’d be bringing in some money, but now it’s more like you’re just another mouth for her to feed.
“What is that anyway? Coyote?” you ask.
“Stray.”
“A dog?”
“It’s protein, ain’t it? Some scientist wrote this thing that said we should all stop feeding the pets and start eating ’em.” Raquel bops her eyes. “Everyone on the news threw a fit, but I’m like, Not a bad idea. And we can take care of this stray problem to boot.” She finishes pulling the skin and fur free of the animal. It looks like a demon freshly crawled out of hell. “All Toby’s eating anymore is oatmeal and chocolate cake.”
