Children are not people. If they can’t work, you can scald them, lock them in the cellar, chain them to radiators or abandon them. Or kill them before killing oneself. Women can be raped, splattered with acid, burned; you can shove broomsticks into them, you can buy them and fuck them and piss on them, you can lock them up, you can dictate what they should wear, when and how they bear children, you can stone them to death. Other people, whose skin is different from your own, are not people, they are objects that you may despise, they’re dumb (see: animals). And if they resemble each other, people, as far as status and gender and skin color and income, then they hate each other because they are neighbors, because they think everyone else is stupider, deem them less dignified. So, do something, do something with these people whose expiration date is set from birth.

Who would want to walk around in the company of such beings?

The others, real people with employment contracts, who don’t sit stuck to a sofa somewhere waiting to die, go crazy while taking a so-called stroll. The body, accustomed to speed, produces stress hormones. Nobody can take it with their overtaxed muscles, with worn-out synapses trained only to digest short info captions in seconds.

Thinks

Hannah.

The things your brain will speculate about when your fingertips are burning with desire for the touch of a keyboard. My goodness—just look at this place. Hannah has been walking for fifteen minutes, and the area looks. The way she pictures the surface of the moon.

The user interface is defective: you see here the detritus of long-ago progress. That’s the absurdity of the earth, that because of gravity, everything you put on it just stays: the skeletons of old factories, rusted fences, plastic waste, unidentifiable metal junk, liquids that turn ponds green. An old pharma plant or a brewery? Or a trout farm? Hannah had never walked so far. Behind the former trout farm was another factory. And inside glowed

A light.

THE FRIENDS (BEN, KEMAL, PAVEL, MAGGY, RACHEL)

MENTAL LIMITATIONS: various obsessive-compulsive disorders

CLINICAL PICTURE: psoriasis, actinic dermatitis

HOBBIES: bad food, gaming, uh—nothing else

TECHNICAL ABILITIES: satisfactory

AVERSIONS: Marvel movies, fascists, the ruling class

Had gotten lucky. When their old clubhouse sank into the ground, they were asleep. All of them. At home at their various parents’ places.