M22
In the glass city every tree you see is dead, but all posed lifelike, like taxidermy. No forests but forests of people on sidewalks, escalators, pedestrian crossings. All like taxidermy too. No mountains except pagoda office complexes. No valleys except apartment-block chasms.
CCPNot that I get out much to see. Start job in university part-time, then continue semi-full after I drop out of Literature. Shift is eight-eleven hours, traffic-dependent. Twelve fen a post, plus bonus jiao per processed thread. Make just enough yuan to rent glass pane, wifi and coffin capsule, eat ramen and vitamin twice a day, smoke cigarettes and watch AV. Wire remainder to ba and little sis back home in forest.
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Nightshift start 00:00. Unsleep glass pane, login M22. I am not a robot.
CCPInstructor already aphorising in sidebar to S81, K38, U04, plus dozen other posters on shift. Most of the time instructor just comment in sidebar text. Sometimes interrupt with black screen and digital voice. But even when not in sidebar or main window, instructor always lurking, watching, monitor all traffic. Instructor always quote and paraphrase Master Sun: type mottos like An army depends on its spies or These are ambush sites, nests for spies. Tonight instructor quick drill us again in Three Ds ― Disrupt, Distract, Derail ― and drum hard distinctions between mis-, dis-, and malinformation. Then send us off to work with All war is total and endless. Your enemy knows this, and so must you.
CCPStart scan for threads. Highlight possibles and wait for instructor to signoff or overrule. Turn music on while wait, start podcast on Jin Yong. First few highlighted threads dismissed by instructor: too min users to note. Or instructor deem subject benign and/or uncontroversial. Instructor's text scroll on right periphery throughout. Always coaching us in sidebar. Your enemy is everywhere and watches everything you do. Run mute kung-fu AV in other window, open side chat on dumbphone with K38 and U04. Find new thread about north capital strikes so highlight and report.
CCPInstructor type, Go.
CCPTwo red traffic lights in mosaic, select. Capture is character for "brother". Post comment on user response. Ask dumb question, then another. Switch account and VPN, then attack same user later in thread. Accuse someone else of misinform everyone. Then switch account and VPN again. Switch mask. Switch voice and writing style: sometimes eloquent, sometime clumsy. Masks and veils may obscure your movements and intentions, but these new identities will also be monitored, tracked and attacked. Keep switching targets until the whole thread dissolve in argument. Then report another one and start new post. Three bicycles in next mosaic, select. Capture is "silence". Reply to user responses from new burners and sock puppets. Request assist from mirrors on side thread about factorylands famine and soon all dissent quash.
CCPYou can become ten thousand spies, but remember that all are ghosts of you.
CCPOn microbreaks we dumbphone text or talk on side. Jab U04 about his fave basketball team lose to mine. Congratulate K38 whose daughter say first word today. Then back to it when new whisper appear or notify bubble pop.
CCPAll your ghosts will lead your enemies to you.
CCPNew OP says civil-war rebels should bear brunt of blame. Job now to challenge strength of conviction. Instructor type, Correct mistaken ideas. This a kind of running joke: that any idea can be wrong or right, or that any idea can be rectified. Or a thought. Or a person. In truth our job only to mime the motions. No real difference.
CCPSo from three new voices agree, mock as kowtower, and accuse of disinfo. Then watch results proliferate: msgs support, dispute, criticise, dissect. With four new voices run it again, and again with ten new. Five trucks, no horses. Capture. Relink hundreds, thousands of times. Watch my bank credit chime up.
CCPYour ten thousand spies must affect shades of your enemy to camouflage.
CCPMove on to new threads but always keep small windows open on olds. Monitor same cycles of all: info-embryo birth, growth, evolution, mutation and dissolution. All live the usual one-four hour lifespan as calculated. Then auto-mods and site harmonisers sanction and preserve thread, or sanction and delete.
CCPCamouflage yourself within the landscape, but do not become a part of it.
CCPThings go on and on, back and forth like this ― highlight, request, post, capture, heed instructor, archive, delete ― for first few hours, just like any Thursday shift.
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Then around 03:45 priority thread shunt to front of stack. Special attention, instructor type. Pause put on all else. Last time a VIP barge and bulldoze all inferiors was during elections last winter.
CCPOpen attach, follow browser launch to new chat. Unfamiliar site, heard of but never scroll: old host board and whisper space, popular only with ancients and teen ironists. But OP images familiar: like elbow breaking my jaw.
CCPYaya, from back home forest.
CCPIn arrest-process pix she's thinner than last see in high school. Hair longer, dye emergency-red on one side. But same bust tooth in smile, same dead challenge stare. Yaya 100%. OP title read Traitor! Venomous whore! Death to blasphemer! with multilink to arrest report, riot drone pics, protest blog, minifesto.
CCPInstructor type, Research/familiarise. Besmirch/defend. Divide/conquer.
CCPThread only forty seconds old and already explode with hundreds of replies. Already teem with bots and posters for and against. Strobe the OP text ripped from memetics essay Yaya alleged to write for a semiotics paper:
CCP. . . and why the ghost country is often misconstrued in concept, its dual reality overlooked. That the ghost town image ― a once-populous, now deserted place, plagued by wind and dust and banging shutters, abandoned to stray dogs ― could simply be magnified to encompass the larger version is a two-fold mistake: the ghost country was never truly inhabited, nor was it ever designed to be. The ghost country does exist: from a distance, without close inspection, it appears to be exactly what it pretends to be. But equally the ghost country does not exist at all: it appears on maps but remains unseen; it has a government but no tangible industry or culture; its name can be said aloud but its population is silent . . .
CCPThen strobe all linked items on 4x speed catch background gist, then again at 2x better absorb. A fave entry run 79 screens long, and take me almost twenty secs to blink my way through Yaya's parable on how a hive is not its structure or longevity or texture of hexagons but the will of each insect and all their combined force.
CCPBut whole time strobing info I'm thinking of her, not as some terrorist or blasphemer. Part of my brain and flashing eye see her as I remember.
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Yaya around village, in school corridors, at forest parties, but never with same gang, often alone. All teenagers lonely, but she always seem most like outsider look in. Double so in Language and Literature classroom twice weekly, where Yaya, only sixteen, gets pushed up with us just for module on C.20 writers. Senior girls sneer while their bfs snicker at this smart upstart who win school writing award and jump two tiers, but Yaya just dead stare them. Softly nickname them all, confirm their worst fears true, and no one in L+L bully her after that.
CCPFirst unit on wuxia, compare Jin Yong's martial arts novellas. In one class Yaya ask about connection to later punk poets, citing clear influence beyond surface dissonance, and teacher just dismiss and deny all connection to future dissidents, warn Yaya not to interrupt, silence her. Then in later unit Yaya write on Zhang Ailing as her elective, but not Lust, Caution as assigned. Yaya write on Zhang's works during counter-rev years, and teacher call her out in full before everyone: "Xi Yayun, this cannot go unpunished." Whole mosaic of distance students on screen plus everyone else in classroom: all faces blank and pale. See Yaya's face fall like being deleted. So just to deflect I say something about "double purge" and sing "Yeah, let's witch hunt again, like we did last century", and teacher yell at me and it works: ten hours detention. Yaya still pariah for rest of module, but not expelled from class or school. Sometimes later catch her eye and smile, and for a split moment I know her and her me.
CCPSoon C.20 L+L module end and Yaya go back down two tiers, but I still see her in corridors sometimes and wave. Sometimes see her down arcades and smoke cigarettes together and talk about Yang Xie or the Guangzhou Salon. One afternoon, drunk after school, we even kiss in the woods behind the communal hall. But feel all wrong; more like kiss little sis. And Yaya agree: both say never again, shake on it. So stick to talk about Xu Zhiyuan and Lu Min whenever we hang out, Bai Helin and Da Tui and all the other punk poets. In the last few months before school end and I move here, Yaya and me talk about write our own rebel verses, but never do. "Picture a sledgehammer exploding a head full of plum blossoms," she was fond of saying. "That is what our message should be."
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All that five, six years ago now. In time since Yaya follow through on what we always dream about. Write something important. Something taunt, provoke.
CCPInstructor type, Post replies please M22.
CCPSomething impossible ignore.
CCPInstructor type, Reply M22. M22 reply and post.
CCPAnd what Yaya say is this:
CCPShe write about control and censorship and freedom of speech and unipartisanship and token concessions and condescension. She write about citizen right to fair trial and representation and agency and right to response. Her message run gamut from microbe to planet, from macro to universal, and criticise every avenue she encounter: all politics, realpolitik, philosophy, psychology, sociology; all history, anthropology, education, entertainment. From the most sacred sutra to the newest videogame DLC, she attack everything as distraction, existential agitprop. Above all, in all her comments and manifesto frags and blog posts, in every character tapped in her neverending online war, her writing keep hammering home the point that any future impossible without unity, and unity impossible without paradox of individual. Without paradox of collective individuals, Yaya say, we all stay stuck at this intersection, lights red or green or amber no matter, and nothing change and no one move. She never bomb state institution or kill committee member or kidnap editor; never incite violence or rouse rabble from their AV slumber. She only dream of a republic where no city is an empty theatre set, no building is cardboard, no house is corrugated tin. Where nothing is faked or juked for show. Where people are untraffickable, undisappearable. Yaya dream of a world where thoughts float unpolluted, where ideas flit like flowers on winds across a smogless sky. She imagine a different juncture, where multiple paths branch in different directions, toward different possibilities, and just imagining this is enough for the rest of the hive to denounce her, expel her, haunt her dead.
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Instructor gone full screen now. Blinding white. Electric voice drown out music and background AV.
CCPInstructor on vc saying, "Reply." "Respond." "M22, respond."
CCPMirrors in side chat appear on right, then left, all echoing instructor in text.
CCPPost Write Reply Go Now Respond.
CCPS81 join chat, dumbphone light up, ask UOK??
CCPU04 msg too with Brother court chaos no reply.
CCPThen electric voices choir start screaming.
CCPViolent garble, unintelligible threat.
CCPSo loud my glass pane's tiny speakers tear.
CCPStill don't type reply or talk or respond to anyone. Over all distorted noise and msgs feel everything recede. Think distant hypothetical: maybe my pix come up next thread, Venomous coward! run underneath. And think about Jin Yong and my Literature course, and Lu Min and Feng Tang and punk poetry, and the Guangzhou writers, and Yaya.
CCPAnd instructor. Over three years at same gig, hours and hours of derail, confuse, malinform and censor, and instructor never once quote my fave Master Sun-tzu motto. So now instead of reply to U04 or S81 or respond to instructor by speech or text or get to work like electric voices scream and pile in on witch hunt Yaya, I type it out. Type it out now and hit send:
CCPThere are roads not to take.
CCPThere are armies not to attack.
CCPThere are towns not to besiege.
CCPThere are terrains not to contest.
CCPThere are ruler's orders not to obey.
CCPThen everything switch off. All windows close in quick wave, like office tower lights going out, and glass pane screen go blank. Dumbphone wipe black and S81 and U04 cutoff, disconnected. Everyone deleted. No wifi, no link.
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In the sudden silence and dawn dark I can feel how tight my capsule is. I think about me in here, and about all the people I can't see around me. Everyone lying in coffin rooms like this one, or wandering the glass chasms outside. All like ghosts. Like messengers.
CCPI think about Yaya in a prison cell, in our classroom, in the forest. I remember someone once telling me that if you go to the midcity junction and take the elevator all the way down, you exit just under the smog line. Maybe Yaya's down there now. If you peer through the right crack in the seawall, someone said, you can maybe see the sea. You can watch the great grey waves still smashing the concrete shore.