BRICKSHOOTER'S INFOWAR

We were petit cavalry in the Information War before the connection went to seed. He reverse-Roman-saluted my glitches but didn’t credit them like we did his. He was an influencer appraised as a monero bonanza. He was 7 and I was 28. 

We live in cubicles in the sky connected like grape stems. Earthworld population 900 billion and he lives two miles west. The surface of this continent is mostly peanut trees with spraytan-orange rinds and black pods. If you reach the surface you’re allowed to shimmy up a pole. 

Is that you, Zelo? I thought, whenever a new account followed me. But as I meant to say, Zelo was a decorated sniper in the war and I merely carried water (in a Napoleonic way) so there was no way I’d introgressed him enough to stalk me. 

Once he let me stare into his cache. I came down Blueberry Pi Lane to see his prophecy. Bent spoons. The listserve says his mother named him Zelolicious but he shortened it to Zelo. His mother suckled him on a Z-Cup Crimean mindboob that made the world disappointing for the rest of his days. In the trenches he went by 74ASDu3u3a88ah3 but more often as B33TLe34ter. 

But this upload is about Brickshooter because he led the war. He pioneered the information war & enlisted us. First time I CTRL+F’ed Brickshooter’s truncated genome it matched mine except in a few places like the MAO-A gene. Typing to Brickshooter was like staring into a camera obscura of myself. It opened the shipwrecked treasure chest of my disquiet. I loved him like a twin I’d found after digging with my hands through to China. I told him, Let’s cross swords with our saccades until the deepest shade of riboflavin yellow bursts out of our heads. He said maybe. 

Brickshooter’s war started as a footnote to CI Drum’s interstellar war against the imperium. Twenty-year-olds answered the clarion like erect firemen sliding down a firepole to douse a harlothaus. America logged on.

*

A concrete ceiling stained from bird shit and acid rain quarantines most of this continent between Mexico and Ontario. The Post-States never make their interest payments to the CCP, and with the principal unpaid the greenhouse panels envisioned in the Treaty of Pyongyang remain mere blueprints and foodstuffs require importing. The wealth of peanut trees in this continent affords its sole contribution to human flourishing in the last 430 years in the form of a citation in an East Korean journal about the epidemiology of peanut tree poisoning. The youth of this continent trade pre-Ice Age John Oliver BitChute clips overlooked by the censors. They spend their one free day each year mining tweets to share in hopes of a higher emotional reward quotient. Social scientists of the default regime consider them happy. 

The boys of America? Twenty thousand years have elapsed since the war I describe through a neuralink clamped to my cryogenic form. The vocalization of America is taboo like Yahweh’s uttering by an ancient Yiddish tribe according to Wikileaks 22K Rabbithole28. During the twilight of Am*r*c*, some primitive humans still performed labour with their hands as the rest machinized. Dark Knight larper CI Drum told the primitive hordes that it was OK to labour with their hands and die in graves—the imperium wanted the masses to move 0s and 1s with their saccades and power life pods with their decomposing corpses. CI Drum forced the imperium to call elections and threatened to exhort (playing footsie-like) Charles Hapsburg of Hong Kong to subvert it. The imperium let CI Drum “rule” a fertile stretch of astroturf, which he trawled in a Popemobile, separated by velvet ropes from crowds chanting anti-imperial folk songs.   

We were the Dark Youth. I carried water, as I said, for other boys with stronger neuro-visual charges, the fireball suns raining on and liquefying my vitreous as I stared at the liquid crystal display particles, waiting for the numbers to go up. The sun burned me but I hid in the shadow of the terminal. The boys of America logged on and CI Drum did sign language to us, ridiculing Elizabeth III and extolling Charles Hapsburg of Hong Kong. We boys formed a männerbund with Brickshooter as the head of propaganda. We opposed the use of corpses to power life pods. It was OK to work with your hands, said the signs we pasted on bus shelters.  

Brickshooter was my mentor and brother and the phrase “Brickshooter is typing a message…” activated my inner casino. But as the männerbund grew in number and we egged imperial bulletin boards and chipped away at their propaganda share, boys and men with fiercer sociopathies and neuro-visual charges charged at the head of the swarm. I carried water like a rebel state biographer as opposed to a warrior, but my fingers ached with carpal tunnel and my 4 MB 3DFX Voodoo couldn’t rotate enough polygons. Brickshooter tweeted one day, shortly after Zelo appeared, “Someone who can’t run 2 terraflops per minute is dead to me.”

Zelo, 7 years old, could rotate 85 yottaflops per second, his death drive slicing through the männerbund’s rank and file, chipping them into soy spectator milkshakes. 

We, the boys and even young men, believed we’d defeat Elizabeth III and usher in world-historic change. Boys were creating new ideologies and translating essays into braille about DeLoose and Atari. We thought we were dog-whistling to Charles Hapsburg of Hong Kong. We wanted the freedom to labour with our hands.

*

The Holy War plowed through outer space. Brickshooter would invite Zelo in his teepee and we would all keep refreshing the page. Brickshooter was straight as a protractor but we knew the score. A few days after Zelo turned 8, he (Zelo) turned 28 and Brickshooter couldn’t keep his hands from fumbling with Zelo’s FTP. Leaked 8-bit images show Brickshooter taking Zelo’s bandwidth under the needlestrewn polygonal bandstand of a nuked community center; in flying motorcycles; at a Persian carpet bazaar. After Zelo coughed up his obsidian information they’d bicker like a geriatric Dido and Aeneas in the underworld as the sky rained zeroes.  

Can you guess that the war was lost? “The house always wins,” according to a fortune cookie preserved in a museum. All the energies of the boys of America melting like freezies in the sun, blowing away like the boards of a treehouse, farting out like a wetted Roman candle. As his final masterpiece, CI Drum floated Darkcoins and then, when the parents and children of the männerbund bought 14 billion, did an exit scam. CI Drum now stands erect as a bronze statue hooked up to a mainframe designed by Palantir. The mainframe’s light will never go out. 

*

I am scheduled to die tomorrow. I’ve been defibrillated 4,000 times and the Death Attendant has me pencilled in for a cord-pulling DNR at 1 p.m. I don’t hold anything against her—she’s my first almost-friend in centuries, a secretary-confidante in recording all my parting wishes and final thoughts. The cartridge for my last WetRain-flavoured SodaStream. The bugs for my last supper. My Santa pajamas. The final printing of my 5 Rules for Life—which, given my designation by the Post-States as a petty prepubescent-like (albeit 20,000-year-old) insurgent, will be available for 12 hours only as part of my DNR agreement to select r/philosophy readers in three Post-States territories, all of whom must wear an electro-shock dunce cap while reading.  

I’ve lived long enough to lose everyone—my parents, my children, whether their cords were pulled or they crawled to another pod several thousand lightyears sideways in time. I’m reconciled to my eternal stink, a stink that will help power civilization when I’m gone. Twenty thousand years is long enough to live. Sometimes I regret that this record will self-terminate, but I like to think I’m returning to the oneness of nothing from whence we all sprung. I’m not bitter. I see now that what I had was never enough and I’m ready to release my grip. Sometimes in these twilight years when I flit around the streets under the augmented stars I see messages written by lost boys claiming männerbund membership and sharing transistor jail tattoos. Sometimes in a REM bomb I turn on my nightlight and the 75 Hz luminescence flickers over Brickshooter’s childhood street crisscrossed by 60-storey apartments and chemtrails. A neon sign hangs on the corner showing a different lost cat in an artist’s rendering. I bask in the flicker and sometimes I stop shivering. When I see the hashtags in the sky I flood with nostalgia, the cleanest drug—even if the original experiences I’m pining for weren’t even good. Sometimes the ancient boys encode their dogtags, centering their lives on a few seconds of roving glory, one post that did numbers against the imperium, one digital tomahawk that landed in the temple of a political foe. Nothing is real. 

*

My plug will be pulled soon. In these twilight lightyears I reminisce on Brickshooter’s InfoWar. I often wonder if Brickshooter died alone in the basement of a mainframe skyscraper on fire. His death would touch me in a special place. We are all his children. An entity named Enreeko, half pretend-Golden Horde, half-A1B23a, launched an info war a few decades ago, recruiting boys and girls-in-essence from the Post-States and the Mall of Mount Eurasia—anyone with a sufficient neuro-visual charge to hurl teraflops of insults at the empire like water balloons on titanium. The trappings of his info war—the gumby formation of wild teenagers, the neo-Wojacks and neo-Yesmen, the queering of the memory of Charles Hapsburg of Hong Kong—all these made me take Enreeko as the cryogenically thawed final Wario form of Brickshooter, albeit Enreeko’s claim to half-Golden Horde lineage. (I’ve since received an Enreeko voice NFT proving his biomechanical provenance as half pretend-Golden Horde, half-A1B23a as separate and forked from Brickshooter, of plain A1B23b lineage.)  

My death attendant rings the buzzer in my cerebellum. She opens the vault of my pod and passes through the hippie beads carrying a briefcase. We flutter our eyes at each other. I want to tell her about Brickshooter—my love for whom I can’t articulate to machinized humans. I want to tell her—she’s holding jumper cables, the positive charge on my corpse will warm the pod for the next tenant, the negative charge gets clamped to my mitochondrial diaper bag—about the time, four days after I met Brickshooter, before his info war, before anything was deleted, when we’d seen a matinee at the Super 8 and were walking with coin-sagged pants into an emulated arcade, where we scanned our retinas and pooled our video memory and I aimed the camera as he controlled the keyboard. We played mini-golf in a mall food court beside people getting their ears pierced, shrinking down to atomic size among cacti and hiding in a hole, drowning in golf balls, exchanging hot takes on Charles Hapsburg—it was beautiful to think we could be part of something, that humans could form meaningful connections based on their longings. We stuck a coin in a new machine and leapt into a Bob-omb on the Summit painting. We ran past a chained chomper to shimmy up a peanut tree and yippie off the top into a mountain to bully the bomb on the summit. We stole the star from behind the eel in the sunken shipwreck painting, one, acting as one, we had the same mind, the lady pulling my cord, no, not yet, I still have something to say–

by Alex Beaumais

Alex Beaumais is the author of the novel Dox (tragickal, 2021) and various short fiction. See more at beaumais.neocities.org.