The Kalwejt Foundation for the Promotion of Atlas Hilarity

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Imagine if this was about Russia.

*drops the mic*

Excellent. Now if you could just never pick it up again, we'll be all good.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Ironically she wrote a book called "Useful Idiots" in 2003.

That was actually her autobiography

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

He wasn't reaching major donors and was highly unlikely to make the debates even before it became clear that he had perpetrated a hoax.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

I was bored at work yesterday afternoon and wrote this, inspired by this thread. I considered not posting it, but what the heck, I spent like half an hour of dead time on it. BRTD's Gen Z nightmare. [Note: I do actually like BRTD, but sometimes his takes can be absurd]

This is entirely original work btw, no copying involved here.

Twenty Thirty-Four

It was a bright warm day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. BRTD, his face nuzzled into his mask despite the heat, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Latinx Estates, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.

The hallway smelt of flavored vapes and old rag mats. At one end of it a colored poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a yard wide: the face of a man of about thirty-five, with a small black mustache and ruggedly handsome features. BRTD made for the stairs. It was no use trying the elevator. At present electricity was cut off during daylight hours. It was being conserved in preparation for Enby Week. The apartment was seven flights up, and BRTD, who was forty-nine, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the elevator shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. LIL NAS IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.

Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had something to do with the production of PPE. The voice came from a thin television screen which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. BRTD turned a dial and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The television could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely. He moved over to the window: an aged figure, the meagerness of his body only partly hidden by the unisex romper and surgical mask which was the uniform of The Party. His hair was broccoli-cut and dark, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.

Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold. Down in the street there seemed to be no color in anything, except the posters which were plastered everywhere. The black face gazed down from every commanding corner. There was one on the house-front immediately opposite. LIL NAS IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston's own. Down at street level another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the phrase SAT-RAP. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the police patrol, snooping into people's windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Rap Police mattered.

Behind his back the voice from the television was still babbling away about PPE and the validation of the Second Four-Year Plan. The television received and it's camera transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that BRTD made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Rap Police watched any individual home was guesswork. But at any rate they could whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every song you played was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

BRTD kept his back turned to the television. It was safer, though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. A mile away the Department of Lived Experience, his place of work, towered vast and colorful above the grimy landscape. This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste -- this was Minneapolis, chief city of Wokesota, itself one of the more populous states of the ZSA. He tried to squeeze out some adolescent memory to remind him that Wokesota hadn't always been like this. But It was no use to delude himself: nothing good remained from those times, from those better days when the mosh-pits were full and you could get wasted at keg parties without rattling off your pronouns.

The Department of Lived Experience -- LiveDep, in Wokespeak -- was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering rainbow concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 616 feet into the air. From where BRTD stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its face in elegant brown lettering, the three slogans of The Party:

RAP IS MUSIC

MASKING IS STRENGTH

PRONOUNS ARE MANDATORY

Scattered about Minneapolis there were three other buildings of similar appearance and size. So completely did they dwarf the surrounding architecture that from the roof of Latinx Estates you could see all four of them simultaneously. They were the homes of the four Departments between which the entire apparatus of the state's government was divided. The Department of Lived Experience, which concerned itself with Wokespeak, news, and indoctrination. The Department of Music, which alone concerned itself with suppressing all forms of emo-adjacent music to the benefit of rap. The Department of Love, which maintained law and order. And the Department of Inclusion, which was responsible for overseeing economic affairs. Their names, in Wokespeak: LiveDep, MusDep, LoveDep, and IncDep.

The Department of Love was the really frightening one. It was where the dissenters ended up. The people who had relationships with age gaps greater than a year, or who moshed illegally. BRTD had never been inside it, nor within half a mile of it. It was a place impossible to enter except on official business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests. Even the streets leading up to its outer barriers were roamed by androgynously-faced guards in rainbow uniforms, armed with jointed truncheons.

BRTD turned round abruptly. He sat down at a small table that stood to the left of the television. From the table drawer he took out an old unlabelled tape, a pair of dingy wired earbuds, and a small cassette player with a cracked plastic exterior. For some reason the television in the living-room was in an unusual position. Instead of being placed, as was normal, in the end wall, where it could command the whole room, it was in the longer wall, opposite the window. To one side of it there was a shallow alcove in which BRTD was now sitting, and which, when the room was built, had probably been intended to hold bookshelves. By sitting in the alcove, and keeping well back, he was able to remain outside the view of the camera, so far as sight went. He could be heard, of course, but so long as he stayed in his present position he could not be seen. It was partly the unusual geography of the room that had suggested to him the thing that he was now about to do.

But it had also been suggested by the equipment he had just taken out of the drawer. It was an old device. Its formerly-black battered plastic exterior, a little lightened by age, was of a kind that had not been manufactured for at least forty years past. He could guess, however, that the tape was somewhat newer than that. He had seen them in the window of a frowsy little pawn-shop in a slummy quarter of the town and had been stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire to possess them. He had given a quick glance up and down the street and then had slipped inside and bought the tape and player for only twenty dollars. At the time he was seized by the desire to hear anything other than the rap he was constantly subjected to. He had carried it guiltily home in his briefcase. Even unplayed and unlabelled, the tape was a compromising possession.

The thing that he was about to do was listen to unauthorized music. This was probably illegal, and if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least by internment in a forced-transition camp. BRTD fitted the cord into the audio jack after rubbing it to get the dust off. The earbuds were an archaic instrument, seldom used, and he had procured them with some difficulty, so that he could listen to his potentially-illegal music undetected. He was not used to owning physical media. It was typical to listen to approved rap videos on Tik-Tok, which was of course contrary to his present purpose. He set the unlabelled cassette into the device and then faltered for just a second. A tremor had gone through his bowels. To press play was the decisive act. He trembled, then drifted away as he heard:

"Here, you can be anything. And I think that scares you. I think that scares you."

He sat back, with a sense of complete helplessness, tears upon his face. This is what they had taken from him.