by Jarett Kobek
A small plastic device sent out a radio transmission that instructed a motor to open the garage door.
The 2016 AD Aston Martin Vanquish pulled into the garage.
HRH removed the crystal key from the ignition.
HRH and the sex worker walked up the stairs and into HRH’s hallway.
“Is this you?” asked the sex worker, pointing to a photograph of a young HRH and Ronald Wilson Reagan, taken during the last year of the former actor’s Presidency, when Alzheimer’s disease had begun transforming the former actor’s brain into useless mush.
“I am indeed the prepubescent so pictured,” said HRH.
The sex worker walked past the photograph of HRH and Richard Milhous Nixon, taken in the early 1990s AD, just before the former President’s death. In the photograph, an unfortunate wisp of a moustache was present on HRH’s upper lip.
HRH walked past the photograph of himself and William Jefferson Clinton, taken in the late 1990s AD. In the photograph, HRH had become a young man.
The sex worker walked past the photograph of HRH and George Walker Bush.
HRH walked past the photograph of himself and George Herbert Walker Bush, taken only moments after HRH was photographed with George Walker Bush.
“The noblest soul ever to vomit upon the Prime Minister of Japan,” said HRH.
The sex worker walked past the photograph of HRH and Donald J. Trump, taken around 2005 AD. The two men were in Bangkok. They were surrounded by pleasure girls.
“Fuck,” said the sex worker. “You know him?”
“He is a friend of my father,” said HRH.
“Who the fuck is your father?” asked the sex worker.
“He is called The Conqueror,” said HRH.
HRH walked past the photograph of himself and James Earl Carter Jr., taken around 2006 AD, in the halcyon days when HRH laundered medical marijuana money through environmental NGOs.
The sex worker walked past the photograph of HRH and Barack Hussein Obama, taken in late 2009 AD.
First Lady Michelle Obama had invited HRH to a White House dinner after HRH funded an initiative to help celebrate Women’s History Month.
HRH and the sex worker were 420-friendly.
The sex worker smoked from a waterpipe that she found in HRH’s living room.
HRH vaped indica.
“Now is the time, O you budding sapling of May,” said HRH. “Your clothes must take their absence from your flesh.”
When the sex worker took off her clothes, HRH was surprised to see that her chest, torso, and left outer thigh were inked with a multicolored tattoo.
The tattoo depicted a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of tentacles, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind.
In a textbook example of the caricature endemic to the modern tattoo artist, a few of the monster’s tentacles wrapped around the sex worker’s nipples, and another stretched down to her mons pubis, while a final tentacle went around the left buttock and appeared to terminate at the sex worker’s rectum.
“Rare is the treasure who adorns her essential skin with the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft.”
“Thanks,” said the sex worker.
“Tell me, which of Lovecraft’s works do you rank as the finest?”
“I like ‘The Thing on the Doorstep’,” said the sex worker.
“O my darling, with each step you reveal new depths,” said HRH. “Your perversity knows no bounds.”
HRH vaped indica.
“The Thing on the Doorstep” was about a man who marries a woman only to discover that her mind has been replaced with the malevolent consciousness of the woman’s father. Everything revolves around open concerns of homosexuality, incest, trans people, and flat-out bestiality with a fishwoman.
On several occasions in his dewy youth, HRH had masturbated while reading the story.
“My plan had been to roger you senseless,” said HRH to the sex worker. “I was to leave you drooling and dazed like a donkey attacked by the silent killer of encephalomyelitis. Yet damn your eyes, you have revealed yourself as a beast who should not suffer the usual rounds of amorous pursuits. For you, I shall unleash the highest form of depredation. I will permit entry to my inner sanctum, to the chamber where the grandest perversity flourishes. Fear not. I possess no red room of pain. This is neither Fifty Shades of Grey nor The Amityville Horror.”
The sex worker followed HRH upstairs.
HRH led the sex worker into a bedroom.
There were two DXRacer chairs, a desk, and a giant LCD display attached to an Alienware Area-51 desktop computer.
HRH sat in one of the chairs.
“Position your meat in the other receptacle,” said HRH. “Join me at this terminal to infinity.”
“Are you trying to make me watch porn?” asked the sex worker. “I’ve seen porn. But it’s your money.”
HRH powered on the Alienware Area-51 desktop computer.
HRH opened the Google Chrome web browser.
HRH directed the Google Chrome web browser to https://www.twitch.tv.
https://www.twitch.tv was the URL of Twitch, a subsidiary of Amazon.com, which was a website dedicated to the destruction of the publishing industry.
Amazon.com was owned by Jeff Bezos, who also owned Goodreads.com, the Internet Movie Database, Blue Origin, and the Washington Post, which was a newspaper with a slogan that said: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
This motto implied that without a free press casting illumination upon the powerful, American democracy would devolve into a hollow shell.
This motto had been handpicked by Jeff Bezos.
Depending on fluctuations in the stock market, on some days Jeff Bezos was the richest man in the world.
Which meant that the motto was slightly disingenuous.
You don’t get as rich as Jeff Bezos without knowing exactly how people beyond the Cash Horizon wreaked havoc upon democracy: they said what they were going to do, in public, and then they did it.
In 2003 AD, about twenty people in the United States government told the world that it was going to kill a metric fuckton of Iraqis.
The whole world cried out, in unison, and demanded that the United States government not kill a metric fuckton of Iraqis.
But the Iraqis still died by the metric fuckton.
Remind me: who gave a shit about darkness?
The second problem with the motto was that it was based on an ahistorical assumption, which was that Americans lived in a democracy.
America was never a democracy.
It was a Republic.
It had been designed as a Republic.
The country’s founders were horrified by democracy.
American democracy couldn’t die because American democracy had never existed.
out of .
The front page of Twitch’s website displayed a live video stream from the Overwatch League.
Two regional teams battled each other in the game Overwatch while a live audience watched.
The stream was narrated by two men who’d patterned their vocal style after sports commentators.
“Dallas is going to swap things up a bit. Getting aggressive here and you have to worry a bit,” said one of the commentators.
“I mean that’s huge for Dallas,” said the other commentator. “Because now they’re going to have a player advantage. It’s a six versus five. That’s a big hit on the way out.”
“What the hell is this?” asked the sex worker.
“Are you not a millennial, madame?” asked HRH. “Is this not your natural domain?”
The vast majority of streams on Twitch were very different than Overwatch League.
A random person played video games in their home and broadcast this over the Internet. Twitch hosted the action, providing a central place for the meeting of broadcasters, who were called streamers, and their viewers.
The video
game action occupied most of any individual stream. A small box, containing live video of the user, appeared in one of the stream’s corners. On the right side of the screen, the stream’s viewers commented in a scrolling livechat.
Depending on which streaming software was used, and depending on which plug-ins the streamer had configured, various graphics were displayed when viewers interfaced with the platform’s monetization.
In other words, the people watching videos on Twitch could give money to the people broadcasting on Twitch and these donations would show up in the stream itself.
“Over many arduous months, I have cultivated a personal fandom of several Twitch channels,” said HRH. “Permit a demonstration.”
HRH navigated to the Twitch channel of an unremarkable young man.
The young man was playing Fortnite: Battle Royale.
The sex worker watched as the young man navigated his video game avatar across an island landscape, destroying objects and simulating genocide against the other players connected to the same Fortnite server.
HRH navigated to the Twitch channel of a pretty young woman who lived in Tokyo.
The woman was not playing a video game. She was interacting with the livechat. She was receiving donations whenever she impersonated a character from Final Fantasy XV.
HRH navigated to the Twitch channel of a young woman who was dressed as Diana from Wonder Woman. The woman was drinking AriZona Iced Tea and playing South Park: The Fractured but Whole.
HRH navigated to the Twitch channel of a man in his twenties, who was cursing wildly as he attempted to play a game called Cuphead.
“Cuphead is a crowd-funded odyssey into an ersatz replica of animation from the Great Depression,” said HRH. “I have never indulged, but I am informed that it is a work of manifold difficulty.”
HRH navigated to the Twitch channel of a young woman who lived in Sidcup.
The Sidcup woman was playing The Sims 4, a piece of software that simulated the appearance of a Twentieth-Century AD suburban life that been murdered by the international capitalist class.
The sex worker watched the Sidcup woman demonstrate the décor of a simulated house in The Sims 4.
The house in The Sims 4 was very moderne Danske.
It stood in contrast to the visible décor of the woman’s Sidcup home.
“This is live?” asked the sex worker.
“Twitch is where the Western world’s underclasses go to demonstrate their lack of utility in the face of increasing mechanization and globalized manufacturing,” said HRH. “Education has failed them. These children produce nothing but hours of live video. Each day hosts an onslaught of countless banal gigabytes. Millions of other children hang upon these performers, watching their every gesture and nuance.”
“It’s people playing video games?” asked the sex worker.
“What you are witnessing is the death of traditional media. Do you think these children have the capacity to thrill to the slight characterization that you discovered in Lovecraft? Do you believe that after hours of this plotless false intimacy they will return to television? Here we encounter the terminal point for millennia of narrative. Goodbye the Ferrari, Tony Kushner.”
“I feel fucking old,” said the sex worker. “And I’m only twenty-seven.”
“Worry not. All of the Shropshire lads who salivate over MILF pornography will seek to unlock your wisdom of the ages. Forget you not, madame, that blood is a rover.”
“Is this what we’re doing tonight?” asked the sex worker. “Are we going to fuck or what?”
“Such crassness!” cried HRH. “Delightful! Delightful! Did I not inform you that I would demonstrate the greatest perversity? Do not think that Twitch itself constitutes the horror. There remains another dimension.”
HRH scrolled down on the webpage hosting the Sidcup woman’s Twitch channel.
HRH clicked the donate button.
The donate button opened another browser tab in Google Chrome.
HRH switched to this tab.
HRH filled out the form on the donate page.
HRH clicked donate.
A notification appeared on the Sidcup woman’s stream.
It informed the woman and her viewers that HRH had donated £2,000.
The woman pulled off her headphones and began to cry.
“One cannot donate to any Twitch channel which experiences true popularity,” said HRH. “Fellows with an audience in the hundreds of thousands will not evidence the appropriate response when presented with a mere £2,000.”
The Sidcup woman screamed into her computer: “No. Oh my God. Oh my fucking God. What? No. No. No. Oh my God. No. Oh my God. No. No. No. Fuck. Fucking Hell. Oh my God, no. No. No. Fuck. No. What? What? WHAT?”
“How much money do you have?” asked the sex worker.
“The zeroes pile up like the bloated corpses of dissident intellectuals at Dachau,” said HRH. “Imagine the earnings from a weapons-for-hostages scheme with the Islamic Republic of Iran and multiply that figure by a billion.”
HRH leaned back in his DXRacer chair.
HRH vaped indica.
“It strikes my mind that perhaps there is a way to raise the pleasure,” said HRH. “Would you care to indulge?”
HRH taught the sex worker to navigate channels on Twitch.
The sex worker navigated channels on Twitch.
The sex worker found channels belonging to sadder members of the Twitch community. People with four viewers, people who were streaming games that no one liked, people who were talking to an audience of no one.
The sex worker donated $1,000 to a bald man with a goatee who was playing the VGA remake of Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire.
The sex worker donated $3,000 to a man who was playing World of Warcraft.
The sex worker donated $5,000 to a woman in Seoul. The woman was not playing a video game. She was watering her plants and singing along to “Lip & Hip” by 현아.
All three streamers pulled off their headphones. One started crying. All started cursing. One talked about dreams coming true.
“You see?” asked HRH. “One can change a life with nothing more than a donation of $3,000. Streaming video is the intellectual sweatshop of the future.”
HRH told the sex worker to take it up a notch.
She donated $20,000 to a young woman dressed in Sailor Moon cosplay.
Her shriek was so piercing that both HRH and the sex worker had to cover their ears.
“Shall we go for the big score?” asked HRH. “Do you wish to inhale the sweet smell of success?”
“What?” asked the sex worker.
“$100,000,” said HRH.
“You actually have this much?”
“The bodies of Dachau. Arms sales to the Islamic Republic of Iran,” said HRH. “For one night only, my cherub, with the contours of your Cthulhoid membrane illuminated by a liquid crystal display, money is of no concern.”
“Let’s do it,” said the sex worker.
“My one request is that I pick your victim,” said HRH.
HRH navigated to the Twitch channel of a young woman who was dressed like a sexy unicorn.
The sexy unicorn wasn’t playing a game. She was speaking to the people in her channel’s livechat.
“Okay, SweetA, thanks for the sub,” said the sexy unicorn.
“No, DuskDot, I don’t own a gun,” said the sexy unicorn.
“Here she is,” said HRH. “I have watched this one for a great long while. Her popularity is minimal. Her desperation is great. With one click, you will change her life forever. Imagine the surprise!”
The sex worker clicked on the donate button.
The sex worker filled out the form.
The sex worker donated the money.
A notification rose up on the sexy unicorn’s Twitch stream.
The sexy unicorn sat in stunned silence.
The sexy unicorn could not believe what she was seeing.
The sexy unicorn checked to see
if the donation was real.
The sexy unicorn threw off her headphones.
The sexy unicorn screamed.
The sexy unicorn started dancing in her lower-middle-class bedroom.
HRH leaned back in his DXRacer chair.
HRH vaped indica.
HRH smiled.
HRH experienced the shudder of a tantric orgasm.
“Do you realize that we’ve just changed that girl’s life?” asked the sex worker. “We totally fucking changed everything.”
“I am aware,” said HRH.
“I can’t believe it,” said the sex worker.
The sexy unicorn was still dancing.
The sexy unicorn started jumping on her bed.
“She’s probably never seen that kind of money in her life,” said the sex worker.
“I guarantee that it is a new experience,” said HRH. “Here, madame, is the true perversity. This is from where the greatest pleasure derives. You sit there and you believe yourself enmeshed in generosity, in the glow of altruism, in the spirit of human giving, but tonight you have done nothing but practice a refined form of cruelty.”
“What?” asked the sex worker.
“You have taken that child and thrust her into a higher tax bracket,” said HRH. “Do you believe that a peasant can handle a sudden influx of filthy lucre? Like yourself, she too is ignorant of the difference between money and wealth. She will spend this sum on clothes, on a new car, on trinkets and baubles, and when she has drained the swamp, there awaits the taxman. She will have no hope of paying. She will travel on, haunted by ever increasing debt. Her best chance will be bankruptcy after seven years. She will murder her credit and she will have learned nothing and she will own nothing. All of this because of a random act of violence perpetuated by a stranger while she was dressed in a unicorn costume that emphasized her heaving bosom. It will be your fault. You did this to that child. You have destroyed her.”
HRH vaped indica.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Literary Fiction
While Fern’s body burned with gasoline, and shrieks of human agony assaulted her ears, she had a thought.
Here was her thought: This is not how I imagined things would turn out.
To fathom Fern’s disappointment, you’ll have to cast your mind back to the Year of the Salted Earth, which roughly corresponded with 1997 AD, 1417 AH, and 5757 AM.