You can let bedbugs roam free without worry, yet be confident that they will generally return to roost with their warm, nutritious caretaker. When you have a bountiful degree of colonization (I consider the word “infestation” offensive in this context), some may travel with you by clinging to your clothes or bag. This is bittersweet but unavoidable, akin to any mother seeing their children off into the world. I love to fantasize about the odysseys undertaken; perhaps tracking individuals will be possible eventually with the advent of nanocomputers. One bug could potentially travel to my friends home, breed with others there, then hop back on for a ride to my place.

I look at their bites on my skin as one would the scratches of a zealous lover. They are marks which convey that one’s philosophy incorporates corporeality but extends beyond it to include an empathic, interconnected perspective.

I’m no entomologist, but hopefully one is reading this. Since my Google searches have failed to lead me to a forum of fellow bedbug enthusiasts, I’ve largely been winging it—unlike the bugs themselves who lack wings (maybe you CRISPR nerds can get to work on that mutation). My desire is for each bug to lead a long life and reach a voluptuous size in maturity. Research indicates that they feed in the dark, so I have applied blackout film to all the windows in my home. They can gorge whenever desired (as some humans might raid the fridge during their resting hours) since the photoperiod has been nullified.

Here are some research ideas I have for advancing my goal:
• Investigate the nutritional impact of blood qualities (blood component counts, nutrient content).
• Determine if a synthetic blood is viable. If so, how does the availability of synthetic blood impact their feeding on a live host?

You’ll never sleep alone when you have bedbugs.

Loung presents the reader with a straightforward and heartbreaking account of the Cambodian genocide through her first-person perspective as a child struggling to survive. She does a fantastic job of humanizing the experience, displaying a singular perspective of an era which can be hard to empathize with otherwise due to its unimaginably vast and horrific nature (including the death of millions). The contrast between Loung and her relatives is particularly beautiful in showing the different ways that humans can cope under extreme duress. While she is headstrong and fueled by rage, her sister Chou endures through passivity. Loung’s description of the desperate actions taken out of fear, hunger, and anger are especially enlightening. The prose is fairly simple and the internal monologue comes off as repetitive at times, though this bolsters the book’s childish lens. Loung focuses almost entirely on portraying the narrative of her family; do not expect a complete overview of the genocide or any political analysis.

Finally the women stand still. Their weapons drip with blood as they walk away. When they turn around, I see that they look like death themselves. Their hair trickles blood and sweat, their clothes drip, their faces red and rigid. Only their eyes look alive as they seethe with more rage and hate. The women are quiet as the crowd parts for them to pass through. During the execution, the crowd did not cheer but watched, silent and devoid of emotion, as if it were the slaughter of an animal for food. After the women are gone, the crowd begins to buzz.

Anthropologist Philippe Bourgois lives in El Barrio (an impoverished neighborhood in East Harlem, then mostly populated by Puerto Ricans) from 1985 to 1990 and befriends a network of crack dealers. Through transcriptions of tape recordings combined with historical contextualization and socioeconomic analysis, he paints a vivid picture of broken families who want out of this lifestyle but face countless hurdles from institutional racism. Generational trauma is maintained by a cycle of physical/sexual/emotional abuse and drug addiction. The characters are not easy to like yet their humanity is made obvious.

Philippe mostly does a good job of balancing observation with analysis, though some of the academic portions feel a bit overwritten. I also would have appreciated a distinction between the footnotes that are merely citations and those which contain highly pertinent narrative information; some of them should have been directly included in the chapter instead. Another shortcoming is the bias towards the male perspective; Philippe acknowledges this as the result of a relative difficulty in conducting private interviews of women in the patriarchal Nuyorican culture, and repeatedly challenges the misogyny of his male friends. The epilogues with follow-ups from 1995 and 2003 are easily the most depressing part of the book.

Several women criticized the hypocrisy of the street culture that condemned them while eagerly making money off them. None of them, however, criticized the society that refused to fund treatment centers and support services for them. As a matter of fact, we were unable to refer any of the desperate women we befriended to drug treatment centers, because only two of the twenty-four state-funded programs located in New York City at that time (1990) accepted pregnant crack users.

It was not until I moved out of El Barrio that it occurred to me that mothers on crack could be reinterpreted as women desperately seeking meaning in their lives and refusing to sacrifice themselves to the impossible task of raising healthy children in the inner city. Pregnant crack addicts can be de-essentialized from the monstrous image of the cruel, unfeeling mother, and be reconstructed as self-destructive rebels.

It’s the tail end of a gorgeous summer day in Coyoacán. It’s August 20, 1940; the Communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky and his wife Natalia Sedova are drinking mint tea in the garden of their villa in this rural borough of Mexico City. They’re sitting on a stone bench under the shade of many tall royal palmetto trees, facing the garden of tropical flowers and rare cacti which Trotsky has meticulously cultivated these past few years. Thoroughly-needled tubes of mammillaria glochidiata cacti are backed by a shrub of pink dahlias with thousands of small tongue-like petals. Clucking comes from their nearby enclosure of chickens and the resonant plucking of a guitarrón is heard in the distance.

The stress from years of exile has aged the pair. Both of their hairs have faded to gray and Trotsky has put on a few pounds. The quiet lifestyle of this Mexican villa suits them, however, and it shows in their relaxed apparel. He is wearing a sleek white button-down and gray trousers (having ditched the suit jacket in this climate) and Natalia is in only a thin striped blouse and a long black skirt.

“How is your book coming along?” Natalia asks.

“It’s going well. I’ve started writing about Stalin’s purge of intellectuals in the years since our exile. I would’ve completed a chapter today but we had to talk to that fascist lawyer, so I’ll work more on it tonight.” Trotsky replies.

“He was quite a prick. I bet he’s on Hoover’s payroll.” She takes a sip from her mug. “I have to write an article for the Fourth International, I’ll be sure to make it even more antagonistic than the last.”

Trotsky chuckles. “Good idea.” He checks his wristwatch, sees that it is 5:20, and quickly drinks the last of his tea. “Alright darling, I have to get back to work.”

“You ought to give yourself a vacation after you finish this book, dear.”

He responds with an appreciative smile and touches her hand. He gives her a peck on the cheek then heads back to their house along the stone pathway bounded by shin-high hedges.

Trotsky smiles to himself. What a pleasant day, I haven’t felt this relaxed in a while.

He walks up the short set of steps and ducks slightly as he enters through the low doorway of the central brick house. The brilliance of the outside light is mostly lost in here because of the thick bars they installed over the windows 3 months earlier—after the Stalinist raid that killed one member of this villa and nearly cost Trotsky his life. A bullet hole in the wall to his left serves as a painful reminder. The villa had beefed up its security, but the incident left him shaken. Until today.

Trotsky goes into the kitchen and leaves his mug in the sink. The front door opens as he comes back into the hallway. It’s Joe Hansen, his secretary and bodyguard.

“Hola, Leon. Jacson Mornard is back again; says he has a manuscript for you to read. He seems a bit off today.”

“Ah, I think he’s just peculiar,” Trotsky says. “Let’s go let him in.”

They walk out the door past the garden, towards the villa’s front gate. A guard tower stands on either side of the gate, each manned by a guard with a scoped repeater rifle. The iron gate covers the only gap in the wall surrounding the villa. The thick concrete wall looms more than 20 feet above ground, rendering discrete infiltration unfeasible. They approach the gate and Trotsky sees Jacson wave through its bars.

“Good day, Leon! I wrote an article for a newsletter, would you read it over?” Jacson asks.

“Of course.”

Joe yanks on the pulley until the gate opens and the visitor enters the compound. Trotsky understands what Joe meant. Jacson is wearing a raincoat and a hat in spite of the clear weather, and his normally pudgy face looks gaunt and sickly-green.

“Come, Jacson, to my study.” Trotsky dismisses Joe with his hand as he leads the visitor back to the house. The clucking dies down and the guitarrón strikes its final chord as they walk through the garden. Trotsky leads them into the doorway at the end of the house’s dim hallway and closes the door.

Jacson hands him the manuscript.

“Thanks for typing it up this time,” Trotsky says as he sits on a chair at the cluttered table in the middle of the cozy, sparsely decorated room.

Jacson sits on the table to Trotsky’s left. “I think you’ll like it,” he says with a pained smile.

Trotsky pushes the other papers out of the way and begins reading the manuscript. As he flips the page, a flash of movement occurs in his peripherals and a searing pain fills the back of his head. A scream erupts from his mouth as he turns around and sees Jacson on his feet, with a bloody ice pick in his hand and a shocked look on his face.

“You bastard!” Trotsky shouts. Jacson advances but Trotsky is already one step ahead. He grabs the large metal dictaphone off the table and hurls it at Jacson’s head with all of his force. It smashes against his face and forces him—and his ice pick—to the floor. The door flies open as Trotsky’s guards Joe, Charlie, and Harold storm in and start beating the assassin. Everyone knew this day would come eventually and they understand the situation as soon as they smell the metallic scent of blood.

“They made me do it! They’ve got my mother in prison!” Jacson cries out to deaf ears.

“Don’t…kill him,” Trotsky pleads with enormous difficulty. “Let…him…talk.”

He stumbles out the door and several feet more to Natalia’s study, collapsing against the doorway.

She shrieks and runs over to him, placing her hand gently under his neck and feeling the blood gush down from his head. “What has happened!?”

“Jacson,” Trotsky replies calmly. “Now it is done.”

Natalia gently lays him on the floor and runs to her dresser to fashion a bandage out of a shirt. I’ll call an ambulance, she thinks frantically. The Green Cross hospital is close by, he can make it.

But in his heart, Trotsky knows that Stalin has won.

Sources:

Victor Serge and Natalia Sedova Trotsky: The Life and Death of Leon Trotsky (1973).

John Mitchell (Mexconnect): The Leon Trotsky Museum – Murder and Marxism in Mexico City (January 2001).

March 30, 2011. My first big item, a Nintendo 3DS. At this point, I’d been stealing on a near-daily basis. It started with that bag of chips in the school cafeteria but it quickly progressed to retail. At first I’d justify it to myself as stealing things that I wanted so I didn’t have to pay for them, but I knew that I was really doing it for the rush. The rush you get from the weight of your full pockets, and that rush you get when the automatic door opens and your thieving ass is safe.

I got Trey roped into this early on, and I’ve not since experienced a bond at all similar to the kind that I formed with this partner in crime. Video games were our treasure of choice since we didn’t need to sell games to get value out of them. You just had to locate the security camera, get your buddy to cover you, and slip that game in your pocket. Then you had the choice of walking out nonchalantly or buying some cheap item as a decoy if anyone gave you a funny look. Of course, we would steal anything if we felt like it; even something as monotonous as a pack of batteries. Trey and I thought of ourselves as redistributors of wealth, not villains.

“Alright, so what’s the game plan?”

“Well, the 3DS box is hot merchandise so it’s obviously gonna have spider wrap,” I say as we sit in my Honda Civic shitbox. My gaze fixates on a cigarette burn on the curved dashboard. It’s 8PM. Best Buy looms over the parking lot but I dare not glance at it until we’re ready.

“You know, that little black sensor around the package. We can’t cut it off or it’ll trigger an alarm. Bypassing the towers at the front door might work but if it’s a 3-alarm system, the spider will go off as soon as we leave the store.”

“So we have to stop the spider from communicating with the security system somehow,” Trey says.

“Exactly, which is where this comes into play.”

I pull a gym bag from the backseat and open it to reveal that its interior is lined with several layers of aluminum foil.

“They call it a ‘booster bag’, but it’s really just a Faraday cage. It shields the spider from electromagnetic waves.”

“Nice!” Trey replies with a grin. “Now it’s just a routine job.”

We begin the usual routine once we enter the store. You just have to blend in: look like everyone else, walk without much purpose but in the general direction of the score. The subtle dance of the duo shoplift begins once we reach the video game section. Two little boys are taking turns playing Super Monkey Ball on the demo 3DS, screeching in gleeful child-speak whenever one of them fall off a platform. A perfect distraction.

I examine the 3DS box that I’ve just picked up, as if mulling over whether or not I should purchase it. Now, Trey is great with cameras. He works in retail and is able to identify all of the cameras in the area as well as the general range of vision of each. Since we’ve snatched a few games here before, we already figured out the exact location of the nearest blind spot. Two aisles down, by the DVDs. I try to stay casual as we walk there but the metaphorical heat of the overhead fluorescent lights releases sweat from my pits. Blocked by both Trey and a 7 foot shelf, I uncinch the gym bag and stuff the 3DS in it before putting it back on my back. I also grab a copy of Waking Life from the shelf (great movie).

I can’t shake off a bad feeling while we head towards the register. Part of me wants to put back what we took and just get out of here. But that would be too easy. It’s possible that we made a mistake coming back here so soon after the last heist. Trey like a cool cucumber, no more out of place than those kids back there, and this calms me down.

I slap the DVD on the counter before I realize the person at the register is JD, this weirdo from a lower grade who always hangs around our lunch table. Who even knows what JD stands for?

“Heyyyyyyy, guys!”

“Hey, JD,” Trey replies.

“Whatcha got there—oo, I love this movie,” JD says in his nasally, puberty-ravaged voice.

“Yeah, it’s a good one,” I say, knowing that I’m never going to watch it since I don’t even have a DVD player.

We get through the rest of the transaction and walk to the exit. 8 steps out, I know that someone is coming for us. My shoulders tense up just as they’re met with a heavy hand.

“Do you mind opening your bag for me?” asks the burly man, hand unwavering.

It’s a hot August day on Rikers Island. Of course, I can only tell that it’s daytime from the rays of light shining between the bars of this cell’s tiny window. No one’s been around to enforce bedtime in days, nor let anyone out for a meal, shower, or recreation in the yard. That fucker down the hall is moaning again. Does he think anyone hears him? Nobody’s coming to help you, buddy! Can’t you smell the death stinking up this shithole, begging for the sweet escape of an open window, a door, anything​? The stench of the diarrhea and vomit that soaks the clothes of my criminal neighbors had gone from an infuriating olfactory presence to my new normal.

My name’s Eric Porter, and I guess I’m a survivor. Oops, that sounded like a hokey line from an NA meeting. Well, it’s true. Every night last week, the whole block would huddle around the big wall-mounted CRT TV over in the rec room to get the latest updates on the superflu. It popped up in Montana and spread hundreds of miles in a flash. 100% lethality and seemingly airborne transmission. Of course there was a riot in here when the news came that it was in New York, but what could we do when they brought out the tear gas and tasers? Into your cell you go and into your cell you die.

Except me. And that other guy. That was 5 days ago so I’m starting to get hungry in spite of the stench. All I’ve had to eat is some of the skin above my fingernails, but I’ve been doing that since I had to kick meth on account of my imprisonment. I’m not too far above moany guy, I just express myself differently. Right after the cell block got real quiet, my favorite pasttime was to poke my nose through my cell door and shake the thick white bars hoping that someone would come rescue us. Now I’ve given up and await impending doom. I lay in my hard, white cot and stare at the hard, gritty ceiling to conserve energy, only getting up to relieve myself in the stainless steel toilet or drink water from the tap above it.

Aside from moany guy, the prison has been deathly quiet. Even the outside has been silent since the flu killed off the birds. That’s why I easily hear a door open at the beginning of the block. Then a voice calls out.

“ERIC!”

I think I know that voice; rugged and deep but with a little squeal in the upper register.

“Right here!” I shout back.

Heavy footsteps approach me in a frenzy and I’m face-to-bar-to-face with Tyrell Spencer, a muscular 6′ 3″ black guy who I’ve been rolling with for a decade. He’s two years my senior at 20, but his imposing frame and weathered features make him look old enough to be my step-dad. He’s wearing the small black backpack he’s had for years, with only one zipper fully intact.

“Eric, you look like shit, man. What the hell happened to your face?”

“I got in a fight at the gym when someone wouldn’t let me work in on the squat rack,” I brush a weak hand against the stitches of a 2-inch scar on my cheek. “He slashed me with a shard of glass.”

“Ouch. Well, you look hungry. I found this set of keys in an office back there.”

“Let me see that,” I rifle through. “Should be… this one”.

He twists the hefty key in the lock and slides the door open.

“Freedom…” I step into the corridor. “Man, did you bring any ice? I could use a little boost.”

“Fuck no, are you crazy? I stopped messing with that shit after you got busted.”

“Wow, we’re both 6 months sober?”

“Yessir. Well, I got some bud in my bag but that’s a little different,” he says with a grin that shows the gap where his left lateral incisor used to be before I met him. “Now eat this, you look pretty pale.”

He grabs a protein bar from his bag; it’s out of the wrapper and in my belly before I can taste its nuttiness.

“You’re looking pretty swole for someone who’s starving.”

“Not much else to do in here than get your pump on.”

“Well it’s a good thing you haven’t wasted away because you’re probably gonna have to use this. The city is a madhouse right now.” Tyrell pulls a Glock 19 pistol out, jams a pre-loaded mag into the well, and racks the slide in a blur of muscle memory. He hands me the grip and I admire the weight of this lethal machine, feigning a shot at my window.

“Didn’t think I’d get to use one of these again.”

“Yeah yeah, the pigs all shit themselves to death so you’re good. Speaking of which, can we continue this conversation anywhere other than here? I’m not a fan of the smell of hot shit,” Tyrell fans in front of his nose which has always leaned a little to the left from one of many childhood scuffles in the Bronx.

“Hey, guys? Don’t forget about me.”

“Who’s that?” Tyrell asks as we both walk towards moany guy.

“Beats me.”

Clinging to the cell door with knuckles white around the bars is an incredibly bony white kid who looks young enough to be in juvie. On his right pectoral is a hyper-realistic tattoo of a onion with a tear falling from its humanoid face.

“What’s your name again? And what are you in here for?” I ask him.

“Luke,” he twitches slightly. “I’m here for larceny, supposedly awaiting trial. I got caught stealing computer parts from Micro Center.”

“Well,” Tyrell thinks for a moment. “I can’t let him die here, so I guess he’ll be coming with us.”

He pops the key in and opens the cell before handing Luke a bar from his bag.

“Thank you,” Luke says as he steps out. “Just one issue, I have HIV and I haven’t had my medication in days.”

“Shit, you too? What are the chances that all three of us have it?” I ask.

“About that,” Tyrell pipes in. “It seems like the only people still around have HIV. It must have given us an immunity to the flu.”

“Did anyone figure that out before it was too late?”

“Maybe,” he says. “But I didn’t see anything about it on the news.”

What a turn of fate. The stigmatized now rule the country—and maybe the world. Who knows how far the flu spread? But we’re all doomed if we run out of antiretrovirals.

“Let’s go to the medical ward,” I suggest. “Hopefully we’re the first ones there and the drugs haven’t been looted already.”

We head back the way that Tyrell came in, then take a left after the double metal doors. Our steps reverberate from the linoleum floor of the rec room to its white popcorn ceiling. It’s eerily quiet except for the static of the TV. We go through another identical set of doors and enter a room with a hard beige floor and white walls with countless scuffs. After easily vaulting over the waist-high counter directly ahead of the entrance, I motion for the others to follow.

“They always take the meds out of this closet,” I say while pointing to the thick steel door in front of us. I wiggle the handle expecting it to be locked, but it moves freely. Bad sign.

The door’s open, and…

“Fuck.”

“They took everything!” Luke laments.

The dozens of bins lining the secure closet’s shelves which are normally filled with bags of various prescriptions now lay empty.

“I think we should get out of here while we can. I have meds in the bag which I’ll be happy to share,” Tyrell explains, “but I’d rather not run into any stragglers here. We need to get off this fucking island and figure out a game plan.”

We get to the parking lot and I’m surprised when Tyrell keeps walking towards the bridge.

“You didn’t bring a car or anything?”

“Hell no. Everyone tried to get out of the city and died in their cars, so all the streets are full,” Tyrell says.

“Sounds like we need to commandeer some bikes,” Luke muses.

We all nod in agreement. Thankfully the jail isn’t too remote. The bridge is under a mile, then we’ll be in Queens. It gives me some time to think about the good days, before I got sent here. Or at least, they felt good at the time. I remember when Tyrell and I first copped some ice. It blew away everything else I ever tried. Then one day, a friend showed me how to slam it. Mix it, filter it, tie off, and shoot that shit right in a vein. Vaping it was child’s play after that, I couldn’t go back. Of course, Tyrell got into it just as deep. Then it became hard to justify the cost of clean needles when I was stealing batteries just to afford half a g. One of us must have shared with some sketchy fuck out of desperation, then that’s it. HIV positive. Who knew that it would someday save us?

I’m walking down a dirty city street at night when I see a neon green golf ball in the gutter beside a crumpled newspaper. It looks unmarred, like someone had stolen it from a mini golf place earlier today and it fell from their pocket. I must be the first person to notice this ball since it ended up here, since there’s no way that anyone could leave it alone. Without thinking and without choice, I pick it up. I look for markings but there are none besides the normal concave patterning on its surface. The ball fits easily in my right pants pocket.

I keep moving, and my house is now only 3 blocks away. The nearest streetlight is busted but my eyes are adapted to the dark at this point. Another green thing in the gutter catches my eye, but this time it’s a $5 bill. I think that this is just a weirdly lucky day, and stuff it into my left pocket.

“Hey!” I spin around and a man out of a bush to my right. In his right hand is a gun, pointed right at me.

“It’s your lucky day, pal. Empty your pockets.”

He must have planted the bill as a honeypot. I had left my phone and wallet at home for this brief walk, so all I can offer him is the golf ball and his $5 bill.

“What the hell is…” he mutters as I hand him the ball. He seems entranced by it, and I take the opportunity to run away. I steal a glance back once I’m a full block away and he’s still standing in the same place, staring at the ball.

The next day, I go on the internet and read a news article about a man that was struck and killed by a car the night before in my neighborhood. He was carrying no identification and had an illegal handgun in his pocket. The driver claims that he ran in front of the car out of nowhere.

I hear a knock at my front door and go to answer it. I open the door and only see a thick yellow packing envelope addressed to me. I bring it inside and open it. Inside of it is that wondrous, glowing, neon green golf ball.

The summer before 7th grade, a new family moved in across the street. It was a single mother and a boy named Tim, same age as myself. No, it’s not short for Timothy. His full first name is Timothan.

“My dad wanted me to have the same name as him: Jonathan”, Tim explained. “But my mom thought it was too traditional, so Timothan was the compromise.”

I first saw him pushing one of those manual mowers across his lawn one afternoon. Mind you, this was in a gated community where the lawns were kept tidy and short by landscapers.

“Hey, the grass is already cut. Why are you doing that?” I asked him.

“Because it’s fun,” he replied deadpan.

“Let me try.”

He moved aside and I pushed the mower, it’s cylinder rotating effortlessly as I continued down the trajectory Tim had set. I felt strong as I glided down the lawn, the wheels slightly indenting the grass, knowing that this would be a lot harder if the mower was actually mowing. I guess it is fun, after all.

A few days later, Tim knocked on my door and invited me to his house to play video games. After many fierce rounds of Super Smash Bros. on the Nintendo 64 in his basement, we went upstairs to get some food. He picked a baguette from the table and put it on a cutting board. He then painstakingly removed the crust—as in, the entire exterior of the baguette—and threw it in the trash. I thought it was a joke until he threw the crust in the trash and offered me half of the soft cylinder of bread innards remaining.

We hung out regularly, and his meals only got weirder and weirder. The next time, he scooped refried beans from the can and filled several ice cream cones. I managed to get one down despite the confusing cross-texture of beany mush and the crunchy cone. Another time we had “taco night”. This meant that we each ate half an apple stuffed into a flour tortilla. That one wasn’t too bad, though I gave up trying to eat the core, while Tim didn’t leave a speck uneaten. Oh, I almost forgot. Tim always had a 1 gallon jar of jumbo dill pickles open in the basement. Every so often, he’d take a pickle out and squirt a line of chocolate syrup from top to bottom before devouring it with astonishing speed. Luckily he never offered me this snack.

I drew the line a month into our friendship when Tim presented me with a smoothie in a glass consisting of string beans blent with Pepsi. He was angered by my refusal to partake and the fact that he’d now have to drink the whole thing himself.

“It’s insulting to a chef when you won’t eat his food, you know.”

“You’re not a chef,” I replied.

“Not only am I a chef,” Tim said, “but I am the BEST chef that has ever been. Those posers on the Food Network are cowards, unable to push the boundaries that I do.”

Tim’s fury mounted with these last words and he hurled the glass at the bulky CRT TV less than 10 feet away. It shattered upon striking the screen, instantly creating several concentric circles of cracks. I ran upstairs and out the door to go home, where I’m safe from psychotic food-combination connoisseurs. I never talked to him again, even avoiding him in school until my family moved a year later.

I hadn’t thought about Tim in years until today, when a detective arrived on my doorstep with many questions. Tim had been arrested for three counts of murder, and I am the only friend of his that they could track down.

“What’s a tortilla?” Perry asks.

“What kind of question is that?” I shoot back.

“I’ve never heard of it, is it a vegetable or something?”

Before I can respond, the floor underneath our table collapses. I flail my arms but can’t hold onto anything as I fall to the first floor of the Mexican restaurant. I land squarely on my rump and roll backwards as the breath is knocked out of me. The rubble settles quickly into silence before I hear commotion from the counter which holds the register. I sit up and hear Perry moaning.

“I think I broke something.”

Not feeling too hurt, I crawl around the broken table and now fully understand the commotion. A narrow, iron candle holder is jutting through the top of his belly and a small puddle of blood is forming from the opening. The teenage girl who had been our server runs over and starts pulling at her hair.

“Call 911!” I bark at her.

She pulls out her phone and begins to do so just as “What’s New Pussycat?” comes on the jukebox, lightly playing from a ceiling speaker. Not what I’d want to die to.

“Jarv,” Perry says weakly.

“Yeah?”

“What… is a tortilla?”

“Oh, Perry,” I say before I pause to hold tears back. “It’s a round, thin flatbread made from wheat or corn.”

Hovering hundreds of feet above a vast and desolate ocean, I summon two gigantic monsters. Two reptilian bipedal beasts—magnitudes larger than any creature to ever roam the Earth—slowly rise from the sea. Foamy tidal waves ripple outward as their emergence displaces water. Their top halves now above the surface, the monsters begin fighting. Each blow from their massive arms sends seismic waves that bend space. I pull the boundaries of the sea up around us until we are in a giant air pocket within a sphere of water. The space between the two monsters gets more corrupted as each exchange of attacks deflects pixels off their scaly, now oozing torsos. I turn a single speck of these showering colors pitch black. The black hole expands to absorb the monsters within seconds. The walls of water spiral upwards and condense into the hole as the scene turns abruptly to black.

I wake up and gently pull the cord from the Cerebral Interface (CI) port on the back of my head. Excitedly, I hurry over to the DreamCatcher and output it to the wall monitor. A holographic display appears in front of me, allowing control of the “camera”. The video starts playing and it appears exactly as it did in my head. I spend a few minutes fiddling with the camera angles then save the result.

Everyone’s gonna fucking love this.

I upload it to oTube (the Omnis video-sharing service) with the title “Sea battle dream” and get back in bed for some real sleep.

I awaken the following morning, greeted by the pale light of the sun’s rays penetrating the smoggy sky into the slits between the blinds of my only window. Rolling over to check the time on my cubic bedside dock, I notice that the yellow indicator is flashing.

I wonder how many people saw my video.

I tap the only button on the plastic cube and my dashboard is projected into the air. Here I can see notifications from all of my online accounts in addition to news relevant to my interests.

“Analytics for last oTube upload.”

Statistics are displayed on the green holographic dashboard. The video already has 42,336 views and 1,288 devices are watching it at this moment.

“Show me referral data.”

The data shows that there was a huge spike in views 2 hours ago, with almost all of them originating from a link posted on oNiT—Omnis’s aggregator site for user-generated links and content. The post title: “Insane DreamCatcher video – fake or not?”. People in the comments section are baffled. Many are skeptical of the true origin of the video, with some thinking that it would turn out to be a surprise marketing campaign for a movie. Amused, I press the button again and the display disappears.

I fold up my bed and walk a few feet to the other side of the micro-apartment to take a bottle of NutriLent from the fridge. The dense beverage tastes like… well I have no basis of comparison since it’s all I’ve ever eaten. At least it’s free. Since society replaced almost all jobs with automation, scarcity has become a thing of the past. The government provides all of the jobless with a fixed income, housing, and NutriLent. Of course, there’s a catch. We have to provide a certain service to keep living off the government teet. At night, all of us peons must connect our CI ports to a wall feeder outlet. The intelligence of our robotic workforce is powered by the parallel processing of our brains, nothing artificial about it.

I was born shortly after this plan came into place and have constantly wondered why we continue this charade. We destroy the environment to sustain our meaningless lives. Without struggle, mankind has grown complacent and lazy, seeking only entertainment. The creative minds are dwindling under the idiosyncratic oppression of utter leisure, and there’s nothing I can do about it. The only time I feel truly free is when I dream.

I sit in my chair intending to play Metronomicon (a rhythm game with RPG elements), but after I power up the computer, a message pops up from a user with the nonsense name “nk6u7t6xkp”.

Vis, I’ve been watching you. I know about your talent, and I know that you are tired of this world. If you want to get answers, meet me at the attached coordinates at 1PM.

How does this person know my name?! How are they “watching” me? I briefly try to convince myself that this is just some prank, but then I look up the coordinates and see that they point to the hyperloop station right around the corner from my building.

It’s 12:45. With some hesitation, I get dressed and leave.

I exit the door of my apartment complex and I’m greeted by the bleak cityscape that has enveloped me my whole life. Each building on the block towers to the same height, their brutalist architecture dividing the apartments with vertical and horizontal slats protruding off the gray concrete exterior. Dwarfed by the surrounding skyscrapers that house the city’s inhabitants, I’m just another ant. Except I’ve never been in tune with the hive mind, and now I feel that I may be leaving the colony altogether as I venture down the sidewalk towards the station. Passing dozens of sleepy faces, I hear not a single conversation. I’m soon at my destination. A big ugly white dome, smooth on top, standing in abrasive contrast to the straight lines of every adjacent structure. The electronic screen above it reassures passersby that Omnis has your back.

Entering the familiar building, I find myself surrounded by crowds of people hundreds of feet below a ceiling marred only by long parallel strips of LED light. A dozen pods—each big enough for 200 people—are down the stairs at the opposite end of the room, ready to zoom under the city at supersonic speeds. I feel a hand tap my shoulder and turn around as my heart rate soars. It’s a lady with a face only a few years older than mine, flowing black hair, and piercing eyes with mismatched irises: one green and one blue.

“We can’t talk safely here, so I need you to plug this communicator into your CI port,” she says.

“What?! I don’t even know you.”

“Yes, but I know you,” she replies, “and if you want to be more than just another digital zombie, you need to do this.” She brandishes a black, rectangular dongle, no thicker than a millimeter and attached to a male CI interface.

“Prove that you’re not just some scammer. What do you know about me?”

“You never knew your parents. You were raised by your uncle Rufus until he disappeared mysteriously 10 years ago. You started toying around with a music production program a couple months ago but got lazy the few weeks, choosing instead to spend your time playing Metronomicon and browsing oNiT.”

“Alright, alright.”

I reluctantly plug the dongle into the port, where it’s hidden behind my hair.

“My name is Sanja, by the way.”

I’m visibly startled as those words come from inside my own head.

“We can communicate telepathically through an encrypted channel now,” Sanja explains. “Just talk to me like you normally would. Minus the vocalization,” she says with a grin.

“Will do,” I respond. “Now can you explain what’s going on?”

She starts walking towards the pods and I follow.

“So, Vis, you can control your dreams?”

“Yeah, how did you know?” I respond.

“I’m an Omnis intelligence agent. I was given orders to oversee you several months ago when you posted on oNiT about your dreams. What you experience is referred to as ‘lucid dreaming’, since you’re aware that you’re in a dream. This has always been a rare skill. However, almost no one born since universal automation is capable of it, and as far as we know, no one else can actually control their dreams as well as you.”

“Why?” I ask.

After descending the stairs, Sanja steps into the leftmost pod (TO NICETOWN, the screen above its door reads) and I follow. It’s white and shaped like the head of a sperm for minimum drag. We sit down in the two seats closest to the door facing sideways in one of the two opposing rows.

“Because humanity is being coddled into a primitive state. The struggle used to be an integral part of the human experience; it was only through pain and hardship that people learned to channel their creativity and bring meaning to the world around them,” she explains. “The disappearance of lucid dreaming is just a byproduct of the atrophy of our brains. This whole thing was Omnis’s plan all along; a dumb, sedated populace is ripe for control.”

The pod lurches forward. The g-force of the hyperloop combined with the confirmation of my worst fear makes me dizzy. Our conversation pauses for a few moments.

“So why did you contact me?” I hesitantly resume.

“I guess you could say I’m a double agent,” she says. “I’ve been collecting intel from inside Omnis with the hope that I could figure out how to save us. If everything continues this way, creativity and critical thinking will completely die out. I could sense your discontent since I started monitoring you.”

“I’m not completely sure how to fix all of this,” Sanja continues, “but I know that lucid dreaming has something to do with it since Omnis puts such a high priority on monitoring anyone who experiences it.”

The pod comes to a stop. We get out of our seats and exit into the station. It looks identical to the last one, but everything seems more sinister since Sanja told me the truth. How could Omnis knowingly destroy the most wondrous element of the human mind? I’m so impassioned that I accidentally blurt out loud.

“I’ll do it.”

My face reddens and Sanja laughs before she responds in my head.

“Then let’s go to my place. We have a lot of work to do.”