Synopsis: A modern girl in the modern world deals with modern problems.
Varargin looked at her phone and pored over the vizzums with the most smaps, the tweets with the most retweets, the pictures with the most likes, the audimotes with the most dings, and the picto-memes with the most comments. All top notch stuff. The content curation was expert-level, an artist’s careful selection of materials and colors and mixtures and techniques to create the ultimate well-shaped form to be uncovered each new minute.
It was a good morning on the train into the heart of the city, for the content on social media today was particularly raw with the afterbirth of last night’s presidential debate. This made for dripping wet hot takes, sizzling soaked commentary, and the rapid-fire repetition of familiar jokes, ideas, gags, wordplay, carefully constructed controversy, and pitchfork wielding. And all of it delivered in the traditional method: a bundle of thoughts and concepts stripped of any complexity and nuance, distilled into easy-to-absorb patterns. Thought-terminating cliches. Certainly a seductive, synapse-stimulating buffet of rich, thick mindsauce.
The headlines this morning were gooey with pictures of the characters from last night’s debate, their faces contorted in disgust, anger, confusion, or shame in the articles designed to paint them as monsters, and their faces showing smiles, confidence, excitement, or victory in the articles designed to paint them as heroes. This made for easy skimming; it let the skimmer catch the gist by mere suggestion and visual stimuli instead of reading. It signaled alignment with the right set of ideas. Easy. This told the skimmer how to think about reality, as filtered through the right lens. It was not just a good morning, it was a glorious morning.
The train was quiet. Its passengers’ noses were down so their eyes could zip erratically across their screens without distraction, while buildings and signs whizzed by the windows. These screens filled the passengers with the slippery, smooth, warm throbbing accumulation of vague ideation a good citizen needs, an ideation of sensation that confirms the correct value alignment. Here is a thought fragment, here is an association with a pre-packaged value set, here is another one, there flashes a recycled play on emotion, here is an alarm being raised that there are existential threats to the proper alignment slithering almost invisibly through our world, too numerous to count, here is a qualifier hashtag to signal the values promoted by this trending media piece, confirming its right to exist in the present climate, here erupts a series of pieces charged by the latest fashions, here is the newest list of deserving targets of our pitchforks and ire, here the wind beats our flags in a uniform ripple, and here the cycle begins to repeat, looking no different at first glance. All encoded in shorthand and symbols the user has been trained to interpret with little effort or thought. And here is the warm sensation of synapses shooting into jelly, the spicy sting of outrage, the sugar-high of righteousness, the joy of proper alignment.
Those who weren’t absorbing high doses of streamlined thoughtbeef were instead shooting dopamine straight into the vein from the influencers they followed, a direct link from suave trendy woosh-haired teens and twents to their own cardiovascular system. The constant deluge of information, the unending stream of condensed ideation, content bled dry of substance, packed tightly into a feed kept everyone hooked up, perked up, stimulated by the drip-drip-spray into the mind. Attention spans shortened to contracted pocket-sizes once thought impossible, the new format of info sized just right to fit into the social-media shaped holes in the eyes. What a time to be alive, what a privilege to exist in this waterfall dream.
Varargin found today’s highest-smapped vizzums even more provocative than usual, and the headlines, carefully selected just for her, filtered by the latest agreed upon valuetags, were really hitting her moist buttons of approval, tickling her sense of satisfaction like a warm saline rinse through her sinus cavity. She was quick to share the most urgent blasts that caught her eye, with no time to read them too closely or think about them too deeply. When the warm tingling saline rinse pours through you you just know you have to share it with the community so that others will get the warm tingling rinse you just felt. That feeling tells you the alignment is there, it’s right, and it must spread across the collective consciousness. Easy. Maybe your smapcount will jump higher in the process. The more who witness the strength of your alignment, the higher your potential smaps. Easy.
A couple pieces Varargin accidentally read beyond the headlines were filled with the sort of sensitively but assertively written appeals to her exact set of pre-packaged beliefs that she always loved to find. What a remarkable discovery! That my set of cherished beliefs should find such a champion in the electronic pages! These pieces gave her that warm tingling saline rinse feeling, the good feeling that said the message must be right, because something not right cannot give that warm tingling rinse feeling. Confirmation was present. Alignment was strong. Effort not required. Progress is here. Easy.
She made sure to skim these pieces a few times until she felt she had absorbed the thought fragments cleanly enough to be able to recite them later in the day or the week, whenever the need presented itself, as long as no misaligned challenger was present to look a little more closely at her recitation. She mouthed the fragments to herself so she would be ready from muscle memory. Key words. Buzz words. Hashtags. Valuetags. Irrefutable elements of correctitude amassing into a blob of weaponized syllables that could be pasted together in any combination at a moment’s notice and vomited out to beat the misaligned into alignment. Easy.
These fragments wormed into her mind and soon felt like her own thoughts, even if she could not define them, understand them, or rationalize them. They were now hers and she would fight for them, she would mock and spit at those who did not appear to value them, she would slander her opponents with special pet names she had learned, she would dismiss contrary views with her special tags, or exclude them from her elite bubble entirely, and she would exert her presence over all who did not adopt and adapt. This is the way forward. This is how you change the world.
Speaking of changing the world, an alert popped up from her Dargitetz account notifying her of a new post from one of the zippiest alignment historiographers of the moment. This net-star was a titan at interpreting all historical figures and events and ideas from the hyper-awakened and ultrasafe vantage point of modernity and alignment values, in the tongue of technological decadence. Dargitetz is one of the most important monolithic apps in social media, bringing together cutting edge interpretive perspective, an advanced alignment-certified internet lexicon, and human history to enlighten the user in how to think about everything that is not the present. And the way to think about everything that is not the present is to look on it with disdain, shame, and a sense of superiority empowered by the masterful alignment of modern times. As Dargitetz makes very clear, this moment, this point in time, unlike all other points in time before it, is special, because this one and the ones that come after it will never be looked at with the same disdain and shame with which we presently look at all the past. This enlightenment is achievable only through Dargitetz. This godpath toward the brightness of enlightenment is supplemented by the myriad of social channels and chatrooms its users can make and participate in, allowing for real time flashing of all the right indicators, cues, words, and alignment tags. Conformity to the monolith is more rapid, more efficient, more complete through the Dargitetz usergroup channels.
The tools for accomplishing Dargitetz's incredible feats are the classic bag of memes, click-ready icons, key words, concept-inflation, idea-distillation, definition-revisionism, and zeitgeist-framing reductionism. Any person or occurrence or notion in history could now be 100% dargsplained with the perfectly fitting combo of emojis, hashtags, modern alignment concepts, user ratings, and a sexy slipstream selection of thought-free, fat-free cliches custom fit into the most up to date umbrella narrative. Dargitetz was the most reliable way for a person to check that they were going to be on the right side of history, as defined by the users and moderators and ideology developers of Dargitetz. Good alignment meant you fell into the proper binary bin. Easy.
Varargin read the new post. It was a tumtum-rumblin’ look at a philosopher she had never heard of. After reading only a handful of words and glancing at a picture of him not looking happy and digesting the three lines of unseparated emojis that served as hieroglyphs for the main narrative, she could go away guessing she knew everything she had to know about him, and it was humdrum, boring, pitiful, maybe even misaligned and offensive to the nerves. She logged this into her brain wrinkles, because sooner or later it would be imperative that she make a snide and dismissive remark about this figure to flex her alignment across all platforms.
She swiped over and logged into her Bubbler account, which kept a detailed analysis of all her social media activity, complete with statistics and scores for her ideological, informational, and social bubbles. Her bubble score was very high, 960, closing in on a perfect 1000. This meant she had a highly controlled, rigidly regulated, extremely limited bubble of acceptable ideas and information, a low emotional resilience (better known as a heightened sensitivity), and admirably high levels of narcissism, with a large group of bubble cohabitants who shared the vast majority of her regulations and self-imposed limitations. They would not soil her bubble with misaligned, impure concepts. A high score meant the walls of that bubble were lined in steel, permitting very little misaligned ideation to bleed through. Such a marvelous score represented an incredible density of people occupying an incredibly tiny volume of thoughtspace. At the top of the page sat the tag line: “Outside the bubble lies trouble.”
The train was approaching the city center. Buildings grew taller and more numerous. Sounds of the metropolis grew busier, more complex. Electronic advertisements inside the train activated to inform passengers of the services available in this zone of town. Each advertisement began and ended with the appropriate collection of hashtags and valuetags and verbal cues to notify viewers that the products advertised were from the good guys on the good team, aligned with the correct value set. All could sleep peacefully knowing their coins were going to the good team, circulating among those who keep it pure.
Varargin checked the time. Still ten minutes until she would arrive at work. There was time for watching vids or moosin’ (that’s what twents call listening to music in this hyper modern dream-age). What good fortune that she resided at this special juncture in time, a juncture in which all her interests and hobbies and elements of existence were digitized into that disposable, forgettable, replaceable version of themselves, nonphysical save for their tiny bits swarming on faraway servers, powered by maximal connection to the grid, hyper-weaved, interdependent, part of a monolithic entertainment and thought one-mind hub pumping juice into the hive, inseparable from, and controlled by, third party agreements, curated by corporations and fine print and subscriptions, accessible only through the cloud, all functions and features swimming and streaming just a finger press away.
The seduction of social media now applied to all forms of art and entertainment, stitching together every aspect of existence into the collective organism. If you could see Varargin’s tiny minimalist home you would find no books on her shelves, no music or devices for playing it, no movies in a rack, no art on tasteful display, no sign of interest, no material of substance, only walls and floors and pure lifeless functionality at every glance. A home reduced to bare shape, an existence, a reality dependent on that distant motherbrain. The entirety of her exposure to worlds beyond herself was confined to the cloud, a click opening the virtual portal that controls all. Being part of the machine never felt so good! A digital orgasmic splash.
She opened GumbuTumben, her favorite streaming service for both vid and moose. This app was best because all her friends were on it, so they could see everything she did, everything she watched or listened to or audimoted, and they could reward her for it. This was the real juice of GumbuTumben, the distillation of all entertainment and art into social currency. Her vizzums could climb through sheer force of will and the right clicks.
It was a crackling moment right now, fresh off the steaming trails of the debate last night. She thought she should listen to something fresh and topical. Hashtags blew up her screen with a dazzling assortment of phrases and words that neatly compartmentalized everything on the service by social and political value alignment. If it did not fall into alignment it would not be on the service. And if it was not on the service, there was no need to watch it or listen to it or to know about it. If her favorite song of yesterday had been removed from service overnight, it was no longer her favorite song. It belonged to the memory hole, now.
For a moment she started to think about what to watch or listen to, but realized the danger and difficulty in such a task, and surrendered to the intelligence of the machine. The machine could never give her something that had been collectively deemed unsafe and unaligned. The human algorithm was flawless. Instead of figuring out what she wanted to see, she could swipe through the latest valuetags to find something fresh, warm, sizzling, acceptable, and saucy, filtered through a slick, smart series of GumbuTumben-approved tags into her tightly regulated chamber of echoes. This would tell her what she should watch. And she would watch it. And she would come out stronger, sleeker, cleaner, better shaped, better aligned. Easy. Technological ecstasy.
No longer is this the world of independently determining the quality of individual things, and selecting things based on such a criteria, but it is the era of the cloud collective. This cloud keeps the breathers plugged in. What is in the cloud can be in you. Subscribe to the cloud. All your consumption is bounded by the cloud, curated by the cloud, decided by the cloud. To experience anything now requires a subscription, an account, a connection of your identity to the service that streams the cloud into your brain. There is no escaping its restrictions, there is no need to, because if it is restricted it must be restricted for good reason. You do not need or deserve anything outside the cloud. Have faith in the machine. Oh, pleasure! Oh, seduction! Oh, technology!
A short light melody told Varargin she’d received a friend request on Smapnest. With one swipe she was off GumbuTumben and back on Smapnest, but with the right sounds playing in her ears. The friend request was from Hombart the Cleaner.
This was a no-brainer. Not only would accepting Hombart the Cleaner’s invitation to electronic connection garner her a significant increase in social currency among her friends (largely due to his social status as Cleaner, but also because the name Hombart had recently appeared on a Top Ten Most Appropriately Used Names of the Summer list, a list that was generated by one of the most firmly aligned valuemakers on the net), but it would automatically add him as a friend on all of her other social media accounts, allowing Hombart the Cleaner to view the badges and trophies Varargin had been awarded across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, tumblr, Smapnest, audy-O, Dargitetz, GumbuTumben, Spotify, Bubbler, and Turjid. Hombart would now be able to see Varargin’s incredible accomplishments and recognition by her peers and by the official moderators of the platforms she used. This alone was reason to grant Hombart access. He would be floored by her high levels in all areas. Her connection with him may even boost her signal enough to elevate her to a higher level. Only one way to find out. Accept.
If she was connected to anyone who did not share her regulations, who was, for example, misaligned or tainted or misshaped in their value system, it could hurt her bubble score. She checked her score again. Still a solid 960. It was good to see that accepting Hombart the Cleaner’s friend request did not adversely affect her bubble score. Of course he was of the right alignment, he was a Cleaner and his name was Hombart. The artificial intelligence would have quickly picked up any red flags in his bubble, and she would have had one minute to defriend him before her bubble score was hurt. He must have a tightly regulated bubble, too, a highly controlled chamber of echoes. If Hombart makes the right choices on social media it might even help her bubble score improve. Please do the right thing, Hombart. By strengthening yourself you strengthen the bubble.
The train came to a stop at Midcity Station, and the passengers pulled their heads up and stepped off the train. Varargin walked across the street and down a sidewalk, examining society on her path.
A man came out of a shop in front of her and the first thing she noticed was that he was wearing the wrong clothing and hairstyle, something she had learned to spot quickly by identifying his skin color. The second thing she noticed was that the shop he walked out of specialized in antiquated things that had been replaced by modern technology, and he was carrying a bag of things evidently bought in this shop. Sometimes one could find things in shops like this that were not allowed on the streaming services. One could buy products often created by people now deceased whose beliefs and values could not necessarily be ascertained with enough certainty to prove they were well aligned with the modern value system. This raised suspicion. Enjoying products made by potentially misaligned people meant there was a chance that the person using the product could inadvertently be amplifying misaligned ideas. This wasn’t safe, this was a known danger. Some people acted like this danger was a pleasure, like the alignment-approved products weren’t enough, like being part of the machine was not enough. In fact, she could see at least three other things this person was doing that he shouldn’t be doing on account of his skin color or gender. Yikes. This was too controversial a thing to pass up. There were dripping wet memes about this, that was how wacky it was. Famous people said words about this, sometimes with rage in their voices, that was how wretched it was. She snapped a dozen quick photos of the man, his clothes, his bag, and his skin color, and immediately put them on her social media.
The caption she gave to the image set was a poetic regurgitation of some idea fragments she had heard and learned and faithfully recited over the years, almost identical in substance to 81% of her social media content, with a few new words thrown in that she had seen this morning while on the train. This amalgamation of misalignment she had witnessed was another part of the ongoing narrative of threats. An auto-generated smorgasbord of twenty fitting hashtags and valuetags was tacked onto the end of the caption, allowing this content to be appropriately categorized and archived under the necessary Alignment Imperatives.
She was almost at work, now. There was her building, just down the sidewalk. What else could she see? On the corner of the street she noticed three people in conversation. To the misaligned eye and ear this would appear to be an unimportant sight, but to the aligned eye and ear there was noticeable devilry afoot. One of the conversation participants was talking to the other participants incorrectly based on his physical differences from them, with the wrong inflection, cancerous mannerisms, imperialistic body language, and he was using some words and phrases that had been removed from the lexicon of the aligned quite some time ago. Trouble words. There had been a handful of juicy sweet articles about this same behavior on her feed this morning, and here she was seeing it firsthand. It’s always like that, as soon as you learn about a heretical behavior or idea, you learn to spot it everywhere, in everything, in everyone, like an ever-vigilant hero of the people. Would she have time to make a record of this? Yes. Easy.
In seconds it was on her social media, complete with commentary and tags. This is a morning rich with inspiration, a field of opportunity ready for harvest.
She entered the building and took the elevator up. During this quiet ride she flipped to Bubbler to check her score. Still 960. But wait til they see my posts. Wait til those tags grab the smaps and the likes and the retweets.
She examined her badges and awards proudly on display and shared across her accounts: awards for most dinged audimotes under six different Alignment Imperatives, awards for highest rated memes used in response to a challenger, badges for early acceptance of the latest delicious ideas, badges showing above and beyond performance in promulgating Alignment Imperatives, trophies of one kind awarded for speaking out against the bad sort of violence, trophies of another kind awarded for inciting and celebrating the good sort of violence, an Eclipse award received for exemplary show of emotion in the face of moral complexity, badges recognizing her discoveries of new topics to be angry about, badges for best taste in music, badges for most movies watched during a vacation, trophies given for her contributions to the ever-morphing lexicon of aligned words, honorary service awards granted by academic institutions for providing adequate social currency incentives to employers to adopt alignment enforcement programs, awards for excellent contributions in the categories of anecdotes and testimonials, trophies showing the progress of her bubble score over the years, from the first trophy signifying the first outlining of the tiny territory she would inhabit in thoughtspace, to the latest trophy, celebrating the steel and barbed wire walls that protected her tiny insular domain, indicated by her score surpassing 900, and a whole section of internet popularity awards. Pride swelled up. The glow within radiated outward, and when she stepped off the elevator she was positively ionizing.
Varargin went to the break room and opened the fridge to store her lunch, placing her sandwich in the available space. Two women came into the break room. She closed the fridge, turned around, and pulled her headphones out of her ears just in time to overhear Delindsay from Human Resources telling Glumin from Finance about a remark she had overheard Orty from Development make to Gregor from Engineering. Apparently, Orty had expressed disagreement with an alignment value and in doing so had used some trouble words. He had expressed an opinion on the presidential debates last night that was not in conformity with alignment ideology. He had said a lot of things, but Delindsay was able to relate her interpretation of events with simple and familiar words that Varargin had learned from her friends and her sites and pamphlets. Good words. The right words. Words that proved Orty was wrong without having to say what he said. Delindsay didn’t have to understand what Orty had said or refute his position, she simply had to say the right power words and use the right meme and the case was closed. Varargin always knew Orty was a misaligned malcontent, nothing but trouble.
Glumin asked how Gregor had responded to Orty’s insane diatribe, and Delindsay said he had laughed and nodded, like he was agreeing with him. Varargin gasped, and the girls noticed her presence for the first time. They said their hellos to one another, then Delindsay continued, explaining the sudden anger she felt at seeing Gregor not deflect Orty’s challenges with the learned words or with a meme or with a neatly packaged set of thought fragments that had been tested as effective deterrents against the misaligned. Why did he not fight? Why did he not mock with pet names and sarcastic sass? Why did he not ridicule Orty? This called for ostracism, and all he could do was laugh and nod? What was wrong with him?
Varargin no longer felt the buzz and sensation of a tingling saline rinse moving through her sinuses. She felt pain, deep pain. Pain in the guts. The sort of pain that told you something was wrong, that a sin had been committed. A pain that festered and seeped and grew, until Varargin became a victim by proxy. A cold darkness fell over her. Violence had been committed. Orty and Gregor had perpetrated violence against her, against Delindsay, against Glumin, against many still unaware. But she would make them aware. She threw herself into the conversation.
The break room was rattling with heat and vigor, now. Vocal ejaculate filled the room, bled out the door, splashed down the hallways, churned around corners and into new rooms, swished round and round, a deluge of seething fury that must be heard and felt and drunk. It would be noticed.
Like shipwrecked sailors braving the onslaught of a tropical storm, a couple coworkers pushed through the torrents and tidal waves and made their way down the hall to the break room, where they intended to store their lunches. The vocal ejaculations were almost overpowering at this proximity, and they stared in awe. Then the ejecaulators noticed their guests and became quiet. The two men standing at the threshold were none other than Orty and Gregor. Was this a showdown?
Good morning, Gregor said, as though he were a normal person putting on a normal face and capable of acting decent. What’s going on, Orty said, as though he were not a monstrous heretic. Varargin, Delindsay, and Glumin scowled. The gentlemen went to the fridge and threw their lunches on a shelf. As they were leaving, Varargin mustered the courage to deliver justice.
She questioned Orty rapidly about the things he had said to Gregor, about the things Delindsay had reported. Wrath and hate flew from her tongue. Orty cracked a smile that, knowing what she now knew, Varargin saw to be poisonous and plague-like. He responded with words that Varargin had not heard before. Some of his words were known trouble words, just like Delindsay said. Varargin stopped him and looked at her friends. They began their line of interrogation. Glumin told everyone in the room what the headlines had reported this morning, what the right takeaways from the debate were. Delindsay pointed her finger at Orty to let him know his defiance had put him in deep down brown hills of trouble. Orty nodded to what they said, then shook his head. What sort of defiance is this? wondered Varargin. This boy is a bomb.
Orty replied with a level of abstraction Varargin was not comfortable with. Predictable tactic. He then used words Varargin and her friends had used, key words, buzz words, slippery wet hot takes, hashtags... But how does he know these words? These words possess immense power and he is playing with this power right in front of us. But he used these words in an unfamiliar way, which is the wrong way. What was he doing? He was criticizing the words themselves! No, no, stop. He was looking too close. He was doing it all wrong. He was thinking wrong. These things are not to be questioned. Do not challenge, just accept. This is not OK. Quick, please, someone do something.
Glumin shouted at Orty, accused him of one of the symptoms of misalignment — one of the more piercing symptoms that all reasonable and aligned people work very hard to avoid being accused of. That would get him. But he seemed unaffected. What alien entity has crawled inside him? How is he unfazed? Maybe he didn’t hear. She repeated it. Gregor laughed. Delindsay piled on with some words she had seen in a popular meme a month ago, and Varargin and Glumin got a chuckle out of it, a soothing, alleviating chuckle of satisfaction, almost like the tingling saline rinse feeling. Charged by this sense of bravery and valor, Varargin recited another beefy meme-phrase to her friends, who were tickled into guffaws of victory.
The meme-words seemed to bounce off Orty in a mysterious way, as though they were not the silver-tipped bullets that Varargin knew them to be. Had they passed right through? Could she pick them up and try again? Was there no damage? There has to be damage! Varargin saw that he was unhurt, so she unloaded the failsafe artillery — mockery and pet names and thought-terminating cliches. Yes! This would be the fatal blow. As she dished these out, Orty turned to Gregor and shrugged, then laughed, and he shook his head. Varargin stopped to catch her breath, and Orty came back with his wickedness, his abstractions, his breakdown of the power words. Why was he doing this? He made some connections here and there that, to the misaligned mind, would have appeared to show the weakness of the hot power words that made up the bulk of their ammunition. If this ammunition was useless, victory would be uncertain. Uncertainty is not compatible with our unfaltering certainty in the campaign of alignment. This is horrible. Where is the block button? I must block, I must report, I must ignore, this cannot pollute my mind, this must not challenge my alignment, NO.
When Orty finished talking, Varargin and Delindsay and Glumin were quiet. What could be said? These things Orty said were not familiar things. This was a war with new weapons, and our weaponized syllables did not work the way they were supposed to. Orty said he had to get to work, and he and Gregor left the kitchen. The silence was dry, heavy, horrible.
A tear fell down Varargin’s cheek. A terrible, salty, hot tear. She wiped it away. Delindsay broke the silence by acknowledging that Orty and Gregor were bad people, which Glumin agreed to. They all laughed a mellow, intimately connected laugh. Glumin and Delindsay said their goodbyes and walked out of the kitchen a moment later, phones in their hands, probably reporting the incident to the bubble.
Varargin boiled with fury. Her heart hurt, her mind reeled, she saw stars and shades of red. It was too much. It was time to get to work, but before that, it was time to file a report of this incident online, on Turjid. That would make things right. Turjid acts as a self-identification watering hole, where its millions and millions of users share their highly customized self image and self perception that they demand others identify them with, and create a safe space for raising hell and demanding the heads of those who fail to address the user with all of the appropriate words and nuances and acknowledgments of small, imperceptible but absolutely vital aspects of the self, for Turjid understands that the Self is the most important Thing or Essence in the universe, and that for one living thing to fail at bowing to the floor in awe and amazement and proper usage of the endless string of self-identifiers another living thing chooses for themselves is the most unforgivable of sins. Turjid is your electronic narcissism enabler, compartmentalizing your identity based on astrological sign, Chinese animal, Enneagram type, gender identification and selected pronouns, social media activity and activism, sexual orientation(s), vocal patterns, clothing style, taste in entertainment, and alignment hashtags. Turjid empowers the lifelong adolescent who never matures or grows into a complete person, but remains in the always vulnerable and fragile state of fear and revulsion and fury. She logged into her account and with shaking fingers typed out her Hollywood version of the morning’s conflict, making clear the heroes and villains, adding hashtags to raise the right flags, to send the right message. Submit. A wave of relief came over her. The Turjid community would unite to bring peace to her, to champion her, to pat her on the back for the front-lines violence she had just encountered, and to reaffirm her existence and right to live, which the experience she just had had attempted to crush under a boot.
Still her heart raced. She could not work like this. She had been victimized and made to feel lesser. Tears blurred her vision as she swiped through her social media. Words danced in her mind: “Beyond the bubble lies trouble.” How true that is. Sometimes these encounters outside the bubble were too much. Why must we go out into the world instead of living forever in the bubble? She heard a ding. A bubble image appeared in the top right corner of her screen. Her eyes went wide and she put her finger on it. Her Bubbler account popped up and a brief animation played, in which an ambiguous gray being snapped its fingers and spun around then blinked unfrighteningly at her. The being faded and was replaced by a message: “Bubble score increased to 961.”
She closed her eyes tight and the tears came streaming down, down, down her red cheeks, and streamed slowly over her smiling, trembling lips.
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