The Waste Tide

People always think of themselves as playing with the tides, but in the end, they find out that the tides play with them.

A naked man logged into an encrypted channel, where an albino alligator with skin covered in tactile sensors wrestled a mechanical octopus in a swamp; the electrical signals from the alligator’s skin were transformed into sexual stimuli injected directly into the man’s cortex. Fifteen thousand co-fetishists were logged into the same channel.

Mimi saw even more: the lonesome, the gamblers, the addicted, the innocent . . . hiding in brightly lit or dark corners of the city, worth millions or penniless, enjoying the convenient life brought about by technology, pursuing stimuli and information loads unprecedented in the history of the human race. They were not happy, however; whatever the reason, it seemed that the capacity for joy had degenerated, had been cut off like an appendix, and yet the yearning for happiness persisted stubbornly like wisdom teeth.

When I was in the army, my drill sergeant told us, Never act like a Hollywood hero. A real hero knows the difference between an order, a mission, and life itself, and will prioritize them correctly at key moments.

The attacker had used technology to present the scene in first-person POV so that anyone watching the video became a source of violence along with him and was forced to experience the perpetrator’s pleasure in the attack. The brother had to suppress the powerful, biological disgust he felt for himself, as though he had murdered his sister.

Once, I waited patiently to see if an octopus in front of a mirror would eventually settle down to a stable pattern; I ended up with a dead octopus. And this was how I came to understand that stability was the same as death

This was the problem with democracy: by the time the congressmen finally understood the seriousness of the threat and proposed their bills, by the time interest groups were finally done with their squabbling and compromised on a joint industrial policy, the United States of America would probably have fallen to the status of a third-rate country, perhaps even a mere satellite of the Greater China Economic Sphere. The dissolution of the European Union was an object lesson, and no one in the West could forget the sight of the red field and golden stars of China’s flag waving over the beaches of Ibiza after its purchase by a Chinese group in 2022.

Their furtive glances concealed hatred and loathing, but they did not pass up any opportunity to surround the white tourists and push any local crafts that could be converted into cash.

The pipes laid down by Oil Search Ltd. were like a web of exposed capillaries, crossing forests, rivers, and villages to suck the black essence of the ancient past out of the rich soil to slake the unquenchable thirst of the developed world.

The tide gently lapped the beach, giving it little bites; the water surged over her ankles, encircling them with white foam; there were no shellfish or crabs in the water, only trash, the trash that had been tossed into the sea and then brought back by the tides, giving off a heavy stench.