Resist

by Hugh Howey

  Well, shit. Maybe the Nothing Men really are real. Maybe they truly are invading us.

  While all this is happening in the world, from the wilderness come reports of a decline in food production, thanks to so many workers going missing. No doubt they’ve gone the same way Book Girl did, except with no one around to film them and hack-load the vid into the world. Never thought I’d ever care too much about the wilderness people, but we do kinda need them. This food thing is alarming. Without that produce mushed up and siphoned into our gut-pipes, we’ll die.

  Why has technology yet to find a route around our tedious bodily needs? I hate anything that threatens to swipe my focus away from all the exploration and fun and porn of the world, and make me worry about practical bullshit. Our food supply should just be automatic, without us having to worry about it for one goddamn second. Bad!

  Once the majority of us pure-bloods agree that aliens are invading from another planet, and we start to come to terms with this, it’s time for us all to fight back. Yeah, it’s time to mobilize these social oceans and give the Nothing Men everything we’ve got. The kickback starts here.

  Our jokes are pretty damn good, and the bombardment lasts for a solid twenty-four hours. We hit the Nothing Men with every gag we’ve got, plus hilarious memes like photos of liquid soap bubbles with speech bubbles coming out of them. If making this much fun of the fuckers doesn’t bring them to their non-existent knees, I’ll be very surprised.

  DAY FIVE

  I’M VERY SURPRISED. As much as the jokes have amused us greatly, they weirdly don’t seem to halt the decline of food production. Wilderness idiots are still going missing, so we have to step things up a notch. Time to administer a fatal dose of savage criticism.

  Every time one of the Nothing Men posts one of its nonsense-screeds on our social oceans, we each strike back with a good old-fashioned manual-repost, complete with devastating commentary. Gramps really shines here, because manual-repost disses started in his day. All his disses start with That feeling when or Tell me again how or Siri, show me. Vintage retro putdowns!

  Weirdly, all this criticism doesn’t halt the multiplication of new Nothing Men profiles. So tomorrow we’ll be forced to wheel out the biggest guns in our arsenal. Oh yeah, baby.

  DAY SIX

  I EVEN WRITE one of these open letters to the Nothing Men myself. “If you really think you can just waltz onto our planet and absorb our people, no matter how worthless most of them may be,” I write, “then your bubble is very much about to burst. You know Nothing, Man.”

  As usual, it’s quite the rush, watching other people repost my piece and tell me I’ve totally nailed this, before inviting me to read and repost their own open letter. Of course, there’s always some jack-off who mouths off about echo chambers and points out that the Nothing Men don’t seem to read our language, but someone soon gets real mad at those people and hacks into their WACs to melt their cerebral cortex.

  DAY SEVEN

  MY GOD, I’VE never felt this sensation before. I’m hardly ever aware of my actual physical self, but now my guts are all liquid and my heart’s going nuts, but not in a cool, fun way. Is this that fear thing I once read about?

  The President fills the entire world. As much as we’d prefer to be watching porn and catz and torture vidz, our mind’s eyes have no option but to behold our leader’s flawless, tanned face as he declares a state of emergency. Last time a President made this kind of announcement, apparently, it was half an hour after the Libtards Versus Mighty Republicans War broke out on American streets in 2021. Thirty-seven years later, such an emergency should be unthinkable. Dad and Gramps both yell and blame the wilderness people for this whole alien mess. How dare those assholes allow themselves to get murdered by gelatinous blobs?

  “I have reason to believe,” the President informs us, “that reports of an alien invasion may in fact be true. We need to take urgent defensive action. While this invasion is taking place in the wilderness, it may be about to reach white male compounds. In the last few minutes, I have seen images of extra-terrestrial life forms breaking into such compounds across America.” As he says this, my guts loop the loop. How can this happen, when our security is so super-tight?

  You can feel everyone in the world hold their breath before the President comes right out with it. “Tough times call for tough measures, so I’m going to stop the world. The situation has become so dire that we all need to be vigilant in the actual physical spaces around us.”

  The actual physical spaces around us? This boggles the mind.

  “The world will end in ten minutes,” the President adds, “so please remain calm and prepare yourselves. This will also be a strange transition for your President, since I reside here in the world with you. But I must stress that this will hopefully only be a temporary measure until order is restored.”

  The social oceans go insane. Absolutely insane. People evidently have the same roiling ice-guts as me, wanting to know what the hell this is gonna be like, being off-world, or offline, or whatever you want to call this oncoming insanity. For how long can we even survive, unplugged? A billion cry-babies launch live-casts in which they beg the President to reconsider. Others want the President dead for sabotaging the fake reality to which every straight white rich Christian man is entitled.

  Millions of pure-blood avatars and words and voices, they all come together in one hugely uncertain tsunami. And then, nine minutes later, the world ends. Yeah, the world vanishes clean away and all that remains is the wilderness.

  Twenty years ago, Dad’s generation, and all the previous pure-blood generations, they housed their physical selves in compounds like this. They were so sure this was the right way to go, that they signed up all newborn boys to have World Access Chips implanted in their heads. From the moment I was born, all I ever saw, heard, smelled and touched was the world.

  When the curtain drops to reveal the wilderness, I finally see the room in which I’ve physically spent my whole life. For the first time, I see myself.

  I see all of me.

  This isn’t a big room, I don’t think. Hard to gain any perspective on this actual bricks and mortar environment, but anyway I fill about fucking half of it. My body is like one of the mountain ranges I’ve flown over so often, only a mountain range made from fat instead of pixels. A stinking mountain range, coated in saliva and clumps of rotten food. Anyone would swear our wilderness employees haven’t washed me in weeks. I’m not even sure if the effluent tube is still wedged up my ass, where it should be. What in tarnation is going on here?

  In the tall mirror propped up against the wall beside my bed, I see what passes for my face, which resembles an overflowing churn of dough covered in weeping sores. All this time, I saw myself as my own world avatar: a lithe, bronzed God with killer abz, but now I cannot believe the evidence of my grim little eye slits.

  Throughout this compound rings the aggrieved chorus of ten thousand pure-bloods, the wails of supermen who’ve realized they are whales. Dad and Gramps, they’ve seen themselves before, but the last time they looked in a mirror they were probably 200 pounds lighter. I’ve only ever seen them as their handsome, square-jawed avatars.

  On the plain cinderblock walls hang two monitor screens. One’s dormant, while the other burns bright enough to make me squint. Takes me a good few moments to work out that this second so-called monitor is actually a window made from wood and glass. Through this thing, I can see a rolling green landscape that looks so … wow. It looks so damn fresh, doesn’t it? I swear I can actually smell the cut grass from here. Maybe one of the benefits of unplugging will be getting to walk across that landscape, or at least be wheeled across it by some wilderness underling.

  Speaking of underlings, where the hell are they? The corridors outside should bustle with our wilderness workers and guards, ready to crush the incoming alien attack. But oh my God, all I can see out there is a man who I believe to be Dad. I only recognize him by the primary features of his dough-face as he
employs crutches to haul his massive self toward my room.

  “Is that you, son?” he pants, as his bulbous gut scrapes the ground. “I don’t know where everyone is, so we’ve gotta protect ourselves here. Man, I’d forgotten all about this stuff, outside the world. It’s so, like, real, you know?”

  I try to get up, but I have no muscles to speak of. I am jell-o. The wall-monitor bursts into life, and I’m surprised to see the face of the black woman who died in that first alien attack vid. Right now, though, she’s not dead at all and something horribly like triumph dances in her eyes.

  “My name is Nia Diallo,” she says. “I’m the leader of the Real World Resistance. I don’t know if you can see or hear me, but I thought it only fair to explain what is about to happen to all of you in the compounds around the world.”

  Mad tingles race across the vast open plains of my rancid flesh.

  “Please know that we did not take this decision lightly,” Diallo says. “But we could no longer tolerate your armed militia men killing us, seemingly on random whims. Neither could we tolerate your mandatory regime of inseminating our Caucasian women. So. As you have probably surmised, the alien attack video in which I starred was fake. We may not have official access to your so-called world, but we have developed machines capable of rendering highly convincing video imagery.”

  “We underestimated these fuckin’ whores,” Dad groans from the doorway, where he stares at the monitor. “They tricked us. How is that possible?”

  Just as I notice how Dad carries a rainbow gleam, all of his skin disappears. He might be screaming, but it’s hard to tell because my laughter is so high pitched. It’s not as if I’m glad Dad’s being absorbed by a Nothing Man, but I’m naturally primed to find the misfortune of others hilarious. He might feel hurt by this, but it’s hard to tell when he no longer has a face. Ha ha! I hope he understands. You can’t help your hardwired reactions, any more than you can help a sneeze.

  While all this is happening, Diallo explains how the Nothing Men landed in our compounds three months ago. They killed all our pure-blood guards, most of the wilderness workers, and then enveloped every single pure-blood in their beds.

  Oh shit.

  “Some of our bravest people,” Diallo says, “captured several of these invaders, which we have been able to study intensively.”

  Funny though it is to watch Dad getting eaten, layer by layer, I’m increasingly worried about myself. It sure looks like I’m screwed, because when I look in the mirror again, I notice how my many acres of flesh have the rainbow gleam too. Looks like the alien is shifting position. Perhaps its own equivalent of sitting upright at the dinner table to prepare for a meal.

  Goddamn! This can’t happen, though, can it? Not to me. Because I am a special case. I am everything. The world and the wilderness and wherever the hell these Nothing Men fuckers come from, I am the one they all revolve around. If this alien even thinks about trying to make my skin disappear, then God, Jesus Christ and all their angels will intervene with fire and brimstone aplenty.

  “Through these captured specimens,” says the bitch onscreen, “we discerned these creatures’ behavior and their needs, including why they seemed so keen to home in on you people. In case you’re wondering, this is because of the supernormal levels of dopa-”

  Everything goes black and silent, because my top skin layer includes my eyes and ears. The pain is incredible. I’d never considered how the process of getting absorbed might hurt this bad, or even hurt at all. Feels as though my flesh is being sucked away into a vacuum. My scream rattles around inside my head.

  The Nothing Man and me, we become one strange and slithering mind. A whole avalanche of alien emotions and memories pour into my tortured skull.

  I feel the Nothing Men’s pride, as a species, for the speed and stealth with which they infiltrated our defenses. Once the Nothing Men attached themselves to bedbound pure-blood bodies, they had no intention of killing us. Instead, they were able to leech off a percentage of the delicious neurotransmitter our brains produced while skimming around the world and taking in one thousand different items of interest per hour. Just enough to keep the Nothing Men ecstatic, but not so much that we’d notice we weren’t scoring such an intense hit as before. The parasites were so happy with this situation that couldn’t care less about the wilderness people sealing off these compounds and entombing us all. These wilderness scum still piped in our food, like the bleeding hearts they are, but that was it. Terrible!

  I feel the stark simplicity of the Nothing Men as an organism: such singularity of purpose during a short lifespan. All they want, all they crave, is dopamine. There’s no way these dumb sons of bitches created those profiles in our social oceans. If I could hear Diallo right now, no doubt she’d be fessing up to that dirty hacking trick too, not to mention that final convincer, the fake images the President saw of our compounds being invaded.

  More than anything else, I feel the panic that the Nothing Men feel, now that the world has ended. Because these filthy, rainbow soap bubble immigrants don’t speak American, they don’t understand that the President pulling us off-world is a temporary measure. So they’ve gone for broke and have decided to absorb all of us, even though the dopamine overdose will kill them. So right now, even as my very own personal Nothing Man absorbs my bones and my screaming skull, it’s killing itself too, figuring that this will be a great way to perish. I can actually feel the dumb beast’s excitement at the prospect of going out on a high.

  Those wilderness fuckers, they knew damn well this would happen. Oh yeah, they knew that all they had to do was trick the President into pulling the plug. And across this entire planet right now, all the God-fearing, wealthy straight white men are dying. This is a tragedy beyond my comprehension. Imagine a world that’s only full of non-men and non-straights and non-whites and non-Christians and the non-rich. Thank God I’m engulfed in too much agony to even try and picture such a messed-up dystopia. How will they even survive without us?

  I can feel this vile creature absorbing all of my blood. Oh dear God, my precious pure blood.

  Until the alien devours my gray matter to get at the dopamine dregs, all I have left is my brain. Twenty-two years of existence flash before my eyes: all the biggest reposts I scored, all the gamez I mastered, all the digital girlz I banged with my mighty digital cock, even though all those sensations were brought to me by a latex tube attached to my peanut-sized shame.

  In these surely final seconds, all I can think about is the last thing I saw in the mirror beside my bed. Before blindness took me, I saw my face change. From one heartbeat to the next, I saw myself fall from grace.

  I saw myself switch from supreme, eternal overlord to victimized martyr, so deeply shocked to realize that these were the final seconds of his divine life.

  It’s so funny how that’s not so funny anymore.

  CATCALL

  DELILAH S. DAWSON

  THE FIRST TIME it happened, I was thirteen. I was in a bar, but not because I wanted to be in a bar. Because my Uncle Louis took us to a fancy restaurant in a fancy hotel that had a fancy bar stuck down in the middle of it like a freaking gauntlet you had to run for the privilege of peeing. I didn’t see it as a gauntlet then, not yet. But now, looking back, remembering those trembling fawn footsteps in my cheap, barely-high heels, I can’t believe my mom just flapped a hand at me and told me I’d be fine.

  I so wasn’t fine.

  On the way there, I hurried. Because I’d had three Shirley Temples and my grandfather’s funeral wasn’t the sort of event where you excused yourself. So, yeah, I hurried. Head down, thighs squeezed together, I had zero problems getting to the glass-doored room with the little lady in her triangle dress on it. I remember checking myself in the mirror and feeling so grown-up, so mature. I hadn’t hit puberty yet, but I almost had boobs, and my black dress almost made them look good, and my skin was pretty clear and my hair didn’t suck, and it seemed like that was all you could really ask for at thirteen
.

  So on the way out, maybe I sashayed a little. Maybe I tried swinging my hips. Maybe I didn’t. It’s not a crime to feel pretty, after all.

  The first thing that happened was I heard was a long, low whistle, one that surely was not for me. My head jerked back, and I saw a guy my dad’s age at the bar in a business suit with a beer. He smiled at me and lifted his brown bottle, and I kept walking.

  The second thing that happened was a guy grabbed my wrist. Just straight up grabbed me and jerked me to a halt, and I wobbled a little in my almost-heels and didn’t even know what to say.

  This guy was older, like a young grandpa, with slicked-back gray hair and a jacket over a turtleneck, and he smelled like nail polish remover as he pulled me close, his hand flat on my back and my wrist still caught in his.

  “Let’s dance, pretty baby,” he said, and if what he did was dancing, there is no God.

  “No. I’m sorry, I—stop.”

  He didn’t stop. He pulled me close, put his face to my neck, and inhaled through his open mouth, and inside my body was a riot that wouldn’t let my arms and legs move, and I looked over his shoulder for help and only saw my mom and Uncle Lou and Aunt Lisa laughing and drinking their wine, and finally my brain started working and I shoved him away, hard, wishing that he would bust his face open on the bar and get glass slivers in his eyes and never look at a girl again.

  The man tripped and caught himself on a chair. He seemed stunned for a minute, then furious. “Who do you think you are, you little slut?” he said.

  I shook my head and ran away, back to the table where I hadn’t been missed.

  “I got you another drink,” my mom said.

  My Uncle Lou pushed the Shirley Temple toward me with a grin under his mustache. “You look very pretty tonight, Maria.”