Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media book Club, book Club, book Club, book
Speaker 1: Club Club Club. Welcome to Coolson Media book Club, the
Speaker 1: only book club that starts with asynchronous chanting, unless your
Speaker 1: book club is as cool as ours.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the New York Reviewer of Books does that, but
Speaker 2: because they're all a bunch of fucking East Coast elites,
Speaker 2: they don't let anyone hear their asynchronous chanting. Yeah, so
Speaker 2: find the staff of the New York Review of Books
Speaker 2: on the Internet and harass them at their real homes
Speaker 2: until they send you audio of their chance.
Speaker 1: Or go on an epic journey to find the staff
Speaker 1: of the Book of Reviews or whatever it was, which
Speaker 1: is an ancient artifact and not a person's job. You
Speaker 1: have a lot of options. So, as you probably guessed,
Speaker 1: because you all are creepily aware of the sounds of
Speaker 1: our voices, I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and my guest
Speaker 1: today is Robert Evans.
Speaker 2: You'r gosh darn toutin rutin right, So.
Speaker 1: I hope you all are ready because we're starting a
Speaker 1: whole new actual book. Today is gonna be another four parter,
Speaker 1: which is how he started this whole thing.
Speaker 2: That's right, we're finally doing the Bible.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2: When the Abrahamick God reached out to you a couple
Speaker 2: of months ago saying, you know, I've got this thing
Speaker 2: that I wrote that might fit for your book club.
Speaker 2: You and I kind of hesitated a little, but I
Speaker 2: think he's put in the hours at this point he
Speaker 2: deserves a shot, you know.
Speaker 1: You know, it's like kind of inconsistent in a lot
Speaker 1: of places, and some of it's downright means spirited, other
Speaker 1: parts shine.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think this guy, I think he's got like
Speaker 2: a temper, right. I feel like, you know, when he's
Speaker 2: his best self, there's some pretty good moments. But man,
Speaker 2: he really needs to take a nap or something.
Speaker 1: You know, we shouldn't judge people based on the worst
Speaker 1: things they've ever done consistently over the course of millennia.
Speaker 1: That's right, only on the best things. But no, today
Speaker 1: we're talking about our other god, Cory Doctorow, who probably
Speaker 1: doesn't want to be considered a deity at all.
Speaker 2: No, but I think he might fuck up some money
Speaker 2: changers in a temple if he got the opportunity.
Speaker 1: He would absolutely. Corey doctor Row is one of my
Speaker 1: favorite science fiction authors and has been for a long time. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Absolutely.
Speaker 1: I have yet to read a Cory Doctor book that
Speaker 1: I didn't like, but there's a lot of them, and
Speaker 1: I haven't read them all.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I have not read his entire Ouvra. I've read
Speaker 2: at least a dozen of his books, including walk Away,
Speaker 2: which I understand this is related to. Yeah, walk Away
Speaker 2: is one of my favorite books that I've read in
Speaker 2: the last ten years, like top three or four, probably
Speaker 2: somewhere in there, along with your new book, The Sapling Cage.
Speaker 1: Oh, you mean the one that actually kickstarts tomorrow at
Speaker 1: one pm Eastern and if you look for it by Monday,
Speaker 1: June tenth, you will be able to back it on Kickstarter.
Speaker 1: Is that the one that you're talking about?
Speaker 2: Well, Margaret, to me, time is a flat circle. I
Speaker 2: have come unstuck from time like Billy Pilgrim from another
Speaker 2: one of my favorite books by Bonnagat, which was not
Speaker 2: written in the last ten years, and thus I am
Speaker 2: unable to account for when things are. But that does
Speaker 2: sound accurate to me.
Speaker 1: Okay, Well, it's not a lot I keep track of,
Speaker 1: but I keep track of the fact that I just
Speaker 1: got out of a meetum with my publisher to do
Speaker 1: the last minute getting the Kickstarter stuff together, and I'm
Speaker 1: excited about it. But what I want to get people
Speaker 1: excited about is a novella, which is clearly if you
Speaker 1: look at what I've written, my favorite form of writing,
Speaker 1: which is basically a real short novel.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's called Party Discipline and it's by Cory Doctro.
Speaker 2: Excellent.
Speaker 1: It was first published by Reactor, which was then called
Speaker 1: tour dot Com in twenty seventeen on their website. This
Speaker 1: is set in the same universe as walk Away. For
Speaker 1: everyone who's listening. If you haven't, go read walk Away.
Speaker 1: It's way longer than this this one short.
Speaker 2: Is there any background we need to give the listeners
Speaker 2: so that this will make sense?
Speaker 3: Now?
Speaker 1: This one it stands on its own.
Speaker 2: Okay, cool?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Party Discipline by Cory Doctor. I don't remember how we
Speaker 1: decided exactly to throw Communist Party. It had been a
Speaker 1: running joke all through senior year, whenever the obvious divisions
Speaker 1: between the Semizadas and the rest of us came too
Speaker 1: close to the surface of Burbank High have fun at Stanford,
Speaker 1: Come drink with us at the Communist parties when you're
Speaker 1: back on break. The semi Zadas were mostly white, with
Speaker 1: some Asians not the brown kind for spice. The non
Speaker 1: Zadas were brown and black. And we were on our
Speaker 1: way out out of Burbank Hi and out of Burbank too.
Speaker 1: Our parents had lucked into lottery tickets buying houses in
Speaker 1: Burbank back when they were only ridiculously expensive. Now they
Speaker 1: were crazy. We'd be the last generation of brown kids
Speaker 1: to go to Burbank High because the instant we graduated,
Speaker 1: our parents were going to sell and use the money
Speaker 1: to go somewhere cheaper, and the leftovers would let us.
Speaker 1: I'll take a couple of mid range MOOCs from a
Speaker 1: big ten university to round out our community college distanced degrees.
Speaker 1: It was nearly time for finals May, and it was hot,
Speaker 1: over one hundred degrees every day, and we were all
Speaker 1: a little crazy. There were the Romeos and Juliets who
Speaker 1: are feeling the impending tragedy of their inevitable breakup. The
Speaker 1: kids who knew they weren't cut out for university or
Speaker 1: couldn't afford it, had no clue what they would do next.
Speaker 1: The ones who had kept their noses to their screens
Speaker 1: for four years, busting their humps to get top marks
Speaker 1: and were just now realizing that none of it mattered
Speaker 1: for shit. And then there was me. I like to
Speaker 1: hang out with my bestie Cherell at the back of
Speaker 1: the portables, by the old basketball court, where there was
Speaker 1: a gap in the CCTV coverage that the school filled
Speaker 1: with intermittent drone flybys. It was where the vapor kids
Speaker 1: hung out, But I wasn't one of them. Even decaf
Speaker 1: crack wasn't my idea of a good time. I just
Speaker 1: like to be a little off the grid, because your
Speaker 1: business is your business.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: My cousin got laid off. Cherrell's smart fingernails were infected
Speaker 1: with ransomware, again, refusing to work on payment touch points
Speaker 1: and blinking in seizure time. She was awkwardly trying to
Speaker 1: patch them, pressing each one's hard reset while tapping her
Speaker 1: phone to it. But it was a job that really
Speaker 1: needed a third hand, and since I'd told her that
Speaker 1: this was going to happen, I refused to help. She
Speaker 1: was sitting against the portable wall with her knees drawn
Speaker 1: up and her phone balanced on them. Mikhail no Antoine,
Speaker 1: the sheet metal guy. It had been decades since Lockheed
Speaker 1: Martin left Burbank, but there were plenty of remnants of
Speaker 1: its glory days, including all the metal shops that had
Speaker 1: supplied it. Antoine had worked at three or four of these,
Speaker 1: hopping around as they got shut down. Then he'd got
Speaker 1: a job in Encino that meant a long commute but
Speaker 1: was supposed to be a steady check. And Robert Evans,
Speaker 1: do you know what you can do with your steady check?
Speaker 2: Spend it on the thing that gives us a steady check,
Speaker 2: whoever happens to be advertised for this podcast.
Speaker 1: At the moment, it's almost like a cyberpunk thing itself
Speaker 1: that this is cut through that.
Speaker 2: It's almost like we live in a cyberpunk dystopia, except
Speaker 2: for I cannot get a move by wire system installed
Speaker 2: in my central nervous system or titanium bone lacings, and
Speaker 2: I'm livid about that. Not yet, not yet, not yet.
Speaker 1: I'm sure someone will do a terrible version that play
Speaker 1: ads inside your skull.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I would much prefer the shadow run version where
Speaker 2: we randomly turn into mythical creatures. But we also have
Speaker 2: laser guns, so somebody make that happen.
Speaker 1: It really is the best of both worlds.
Speaker 2: It really is. I want to vote for a dragon
Speaker 2: for president. We had so many presidents that are more
Speaker 2: depressing than a dragon.
Speaker 1: I know, at least it's interesting.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like these ads, unless you skip them.
Speaker 1: And we're back. That job seems too good to be true.
Speaker 1: Turns out they had a five year tax holiday from
Speaker 1: Encino and it ran out this year. If Antoine had
Speaker 1: been smart enough to look it up, he'd have known
Speaker 1: that they weren't going to last pass July. She got
Speaker 1: one fingernail done, moved on to the next one. What's
Speaker 1: happened to the factory? She got another fingernail done, then
Speaker 1: dropped her phone. Fucky darn. I kicked it back to
Speaker 1: her thanks. I think she wedged the phone again and
Speaker 1: tried to reset her third nail. That they're doing it
Speaker 1: up and out. That was when a company's tax incentives
Speaker 1: ran out, and then the company ran out too, shutting
Speaker 1: down an arm's length subsidiary through fast bankruptcy and leaving
Speaker 1: its creditors. The people who worked there say to sort
Speaker 1: out the sale of its assets. Up and outs made
Speaker 1: sense because companies were hollow. They leased everything and contracted
Speaker 1: everything out. The leasing companies didn't beef because they had
Speaker 1: a sweet loophole they could take a write off on
Speaker 1: the equipment that was based on the full replacement value,
Speaker 1: despite having already taken depreciation and fees for the whole
Speaker 1: time the plant had run. We'd done a CIVIX for
Speaker 1: Business unit on it as part of the curriculum on
Speaker 1: generally accepted accounting practices. Of course, the people who worked
Speaker 1: there often found themselves shot out of luck when it
Speaker 1: came to their last paycheck, and sometimes that least equipment
Speaker 1: would walk out the door. In the days running up
Speaker 1: to the out and up and out, I was hungry
Speaker 1: like always. Mom didn't believe in SCOP and I didn't
Speaker 1: want to piss her off, so I wouldn't eat out
Speaker 1: of the vending machines at school. But that meant if
Speaker 1: I didn't remember throw an apple in my bag, my
Speaker 1: stomach would growl all the way to lunch. Got anything
Speaker 1: to eat. She finished the fifth nail in her left
Speaker 1: hand and fished in her purse and passed me some
Speaker 1: leptin gum, which was supposed to enhance satiety and help
Speaker 1: people like Charelle stick to the diets they had no
Speaker 1: need to be on in the first place. I didn't
Speaker 1: like to chew it, but my stomach was rumbling. I
Speaker 1: unwrapped a stick and chewed it. It tasted like caramelized
Speaker 1: hemi proteins, which is to say, cooked blood in a
Speaker 1: good way, like a burger. Thanks to the transgenic yea
Speaker 1: it was cultured with. My stomach stopped making noise. Maybe
Speaker 1: it worked. Maybe it was the placebo effect. You sure
Speaker 1: about that? Up and out? I tried not to sound
Speaker 1: too interested. Cherrelle had a severe case of risk aversion.
Speaker 1: Girl her side, I could have cut a thousand yards,
Speaker 1: but I had been immune to it since ninth grade.
Speaker 1: Come on, Charelle, just asking. It's a daydream. Communist parties
Speaker 1: were one of my favorite daydreams to dream me and
Speaker 1: my revolutionary comrades, and are funny Karl mark S beards,
Speaker 1: liberating a whole factory under the noses of cops in
Speaker 1: the town, running all those machines, and giving away free
Speaker 1: shit until the feedstock ran out. My dream parties didn't
Speaker 1: usually take place at a sheet metal factory. I liked
Speaker 1: the idea of taking over a scop factory where they
Speaker 1: made burgers or candy or ice cream, because then I
Speaker 1: would be the person who gave everyone free candy or burgers.
Speaker 1: Or ice cream, but I take sheet metal. This is
Speaker 1: the only thing going. I could learn my skills there.
Speaker 1: And also Mama wouldn't kill me for the scop thing
Speaker 1: if she found out. Damned health food crazies, Linney. She
Speaker 1: sounded like her own mama when she warned, but I
Speaker 1: wasn't scared of her mama. I was scared of my mama,
Speaker 1: and her mama sounded nothing like mine. Really, the whole
Speaker 1: basis of our lasting friendship was my immunity to all
Speaker 1: her secret weapons, which would otherwise burn you down in
Speaker 1: your shoes the first time she spatted with you, it's
Speaker 1: a daydream like. Saying it twice would make it more believable.
Speaker 1: You're gonna ask someone else if I don't tell you,
Speaker 1: aren't you? I didn't deign to answer. I'll hold your
Speaker 1: phone while you do your other hand. She tried the
Speaker 1: side eye again, then she put it away and patted
Speaker 1: the ground next to her. Hold my phone, then go on.
Speaker 1: Once she'd done her right thumb, she said, it'sn't up
Speaker 1: and out. Yeah, And a lot of the workers there
Speaker 1: aren't happy about it. Wages have been really delayed lately.
Speaker 1: Lots of people owed a lot of back pay, especially
Speaker 1: people who are out on sick pay. People got injured
Speaker 1: on the job, can't go down to the payroll office
Speaker 1: in person. O, there's talk talk. She shook her head.
Speaker 1: You're going to make me spell it out talk. They're
Speaker 1: going to run some shifts after the place shuts down,
Speaker 1: sell things out the back door. Whatever they can make
Speaker 1: back the money. They know they're going to be burned for.
Speaker 1: In case you don't understand, Missy, that means no communist parties.
Speaker 1: I sighed and moved her phone to the last finger.
Speaker 1: No party, then, nope, forget a girl. Concentrate on graduating.
Speaker 1: B students don't get scholarships. This was a running joke
Speaker 1: between us, because A students didn't get scholarships either. I
Speaker 1: mean they did, but at a rate you'd have to
Speaker 1: be nuts to count on, like basing your life plan
Speaker 1: on winning the lottery every ten years. Because there were
Speaker 1: way way more kids with brokeass parents and sharp minds
Speaker 1: than there were spaces left behind by the dullards who
Speaker 1: made it into the university on quote merit and by
Speaker 1: taking the quote no assistance required box on their applications.
Speaker 1: I was an a student anyway. She called me that
Speaker 1: night after mama's lights out, no phones, blackout time. My
Speaker 1: little sister Tisha stared at me from her bed when
Speaker 1: I took the call and mouthed, I'm telling I rolled
Speaker 1: my eyes at her. She wouldn't tell. Titia was still
Speaker 1: developing her low cunning, and there was plenty of stuff
Speaker 1: i'd caught her in that she didn't want me blabbing
Speaker 1: to mama. In retaliation, it's late, I whispered, your mama's crazy.
Speaker 1: Cherrell's mama was strict too, but not about bedtimes. She
Speaker 1: was an insomniac, and so were her kids, and she
Speaker 1: taught them her coping skills of doing all their homework, showering,
Speaker 1: laying out their clothes, and packing their lunches at two
Speaker 1: am so they could rise twenty minutes before first bell,
Speaker 1: pee and wash their faces and be on campus with
Speaker 1: seconds to spare. You call me up after curfew to
Speaker 1: tell me that. Send a text next time Antoine called us,
Speaker 1: all thought you'd want to know. I almost said, who's Antoine?
Speaker 1: And then I remembered her cousin, the sheet metal worker.
Speaker 1: Oh you want to know what he said? Don't play game, Cherill.
Speaker 1: I'm not trying to wake up my Mama Tisha staring
Speaker 1: at me like she caught me strangling a cat too. Hi, Tisha.
Speaker 1: It was loud enough that Tisha heard it through the earpiece.
Speaker 1: I winced high, Cherrelle, she mouthed and grinned. She says, Hi,
Speaker 1: Now what is it? Cherrell? Antoine called you said that.
Speaker 1: He said, the reason the plant is shutting down so
Speaker 1: fast isn't just about the tax credits. He said, there
Speaker 1: was a wobbley in the shop, someone trying to get
Speaker 1: everyone to sign a union card. Union organizing was a
Speaker 1: fireable offense, had been since I was a little girl,
Speaker 1: but that didn't mean it didn't happen, and if enough
Speaker 1: of the workers signed a card, the factory wouldn't be
Speaker 1: allowed to stop paying taxes until the California Labor Board
Speaker 1: had completed its investigation. Antoine says the other workers are
Speaker 1: pissed at the wobbley, not stupid at the bosses. Antoine
Speaker 1: says that before all this, most of the employees didn't
Speaker 1: really give a damn about the wobbley in her nonsense,
Speaker 1: and now it's got everyone thinking, got them thinking about
Speaker 1: making an example of the plant. They get away with
Speaker 1: this next time, they'll be even worse, hold up, get
Speaker 1: away with what? Just listen okay. I realized she was excited,
Speaker 1: really excited. The wobbly got deported born in America on
Speaker 1: everything they sent her to Guatemala. Said her parents were
Speaker 1: undocumented when she was born here, so that makes her
Speaker 1: an anchor baby. Everybody is pissed, Like I said, they
Speaker 1: know it's just bullshit, an excuse to get rid of
Speaker 1: her because she'd come sniffing around the shop. Antoine says
Speaker 1: none of them gave a damn when she was talking
Speaker 1: about helping them, but when she got deported for trying
Speaker 1: out comes all this corny talk about it being on
Speaker 1: American to shut her down. They're gonna let us have
Speaker 1: a communist party. She made a sound between a squeal
Speaker 1: and a cheer, and Tisha's eyes got wild. I cut
Speaker 1: her my sternest look so she didn't jump right out
Speaker 1: of the bed and tell Mama when she just heard.
Speaker 1: And I realized with a sinking feeling, that I was
Speaker 1: going to have to get my little sister involved. If
Speaker 1: I didn't wanted to wrap me out, Mama would kill me.
Speaker 1: The gravity of it fell down on top of me.
Speaker 1: It was one thing to daydream about this another to planet.
Speaker 1: I'd have to do a lot of googling. He's one
Speaker 1: of those darknet googles that I can't even remember how
Speaker 1: to reach, So that meant i'd have to get one
Speaker 1: of those brainiac nerds at school to explain it again,
Speaker 1: which meant they'd know I was looking up something forbidden,
Speaker 1: which meant that I'd be even more exposed. And you
Speaker 1: aren't even listening to me, are you? Line uh nu
Speaker 1: huh no, Sorry, chill just thinking it through. Damn are
Speaker 1: we really gonna we are? You don't get us caught first.
Speaker 1: Antoine met us at the Froyo place off San Fernando,
Speaker 1: the sketchy part near the dead Ikea that had been
Speaker 1: all cut up for little market stalls that were mostly empty.
Speaker 1: I hadn't seen him since we've been freshman and he'd
Speaker 1: been a senior, and in the years since, he'd got
Speaker 1: strangely grayish, his skin sagging off his face and his
Speaker 1: hair shot with white, like he was an old man.
Speaker 1: He looked like he hadn't been sleeping much either. He
Speaker 1: made a sign at us, a thing with his hands
Speaker 1: like the kids had done to pass messages around the
Speaker 1: classroom back when we'd been kids. It took me a
Speaker 1: second to remember that this one meant phones down, school
Speaker 1: cops coming. I couldn't figure out what that was supposed
Speaker 1: to mean. But Charrell got it and reached into a
Speaker 1: purse and shut her phone down. Now I got it.
Speaker 1: I did the same. We'd both been infected before, of course,
Speaker 1: drive by bad wear. That let some creepy Rando spy
Speaker 1: on us through our phones. But then we got more careful.
Speaker 1: But he wasn't worried about Rando spying through our phone.
Speaker 1: He was worried about cops. You think Burbank PD is
Speaker 1: going to bother with you? I wanted to ask, but
Speaker 1: the fact was maybe they would. Why not, once they
Speaker 1: bought that kind of thing, why wouldn't they want to
Speaker 1: use it every chance they got? I probably would. Damn.
Speaker 1: He looked us up and down, not like a perf,
Speaker 1: but like a grown up judging a little kid. You
Speaker 1: two are so young. I don't know if this was
Speaker 1: such a good idea. Schreelle gave him an up and
Speaker 1: down of her own. Antwine, we're only five years younger
Speaker 1: than you. Fool smart too. Besides, it was Linai's idea,
Speaker 1: not yours. That was news to me far as I
Speaker 1: knew he'd had the idea told Cherrell and she'd said, oh,
Speaker 1: Linaise said the same thing. But the way he shook
Speaker 1: his head, I knew it was true. He'd got the
Speaker 1: idea from me. That made me feel pretty badass. Tell
Speaker 1: the truth. Okay, okay, your mama will kill me though
Speaker 1: a twine. Okay, there's he lowered his voice. Forty five
Speaker 1: of us and one guy. He says he spoke to
Speaker 1: a wobbly and they're pissed about what happened to that girl,
Speaker 1: and they say they'll help. We got all skills in hands.
Speaker 1: We need to get it running, but we don't know
Speaker 1: how we get the word out without getting popped. Who
Speaker 1: do you want to reach? I've been wondering about this myself.
Speaker 1: I didn't really know much about sheet metal except it was,
Speaker 1: you know, metal that came in sheets. What would you
Speaker 1: do with a bunch of that stuff around the house.
Speaker 1: We don't know either. Antoine looked anxious, more anxious. He
Speaker 1: dry washed those big knuckled hands. We can make just
Speaker 1: about anything we got a file for, and there's plenty
Speaker 1: of files out there. You want a fireplace around or
Speaker 1: a new truck, bumper. We got you covered. Don't know
Speaker 1: many people who need a truck bumper, Chrell said, I know.
Speaker 1: Antoine gave her a shut up look that was brotherly,
Speaker 1: reminding me that they'd been close since they were little.
Speaker 1: There's all kinds of toys we can make, too, little
Speaker 1: cars and shit. He looked at us, like, you think
Speaker 1: that'll do it. I don't think we're going to strike
Speaker 1: terror into the hearts of the investor class by giving
Speaker 1: away little cars. Antoine, sorry, because that was the point, right,
Speaker 1: give us all part, give them sorrows. I hadn't really
Speaker 1: thought about where sheet metal fit into that framework. He
Speaker 1: shook his head. He knew it too. What were you
Speaker 1: making Uber parts? He shrugged. Mostly for the vans, you know.
Speaker 1: La Metro had been using the vans for most of
Speaker 1: my life, though I could still remember when there had
Speaker 1: been city buses before the contract went out to Uber.
Speaker 1: The vans were boxing and indestructible, covered in some kind
Speaker 1: of slippery treatment that you couldn't write on or mark,
Speaker 1: which gave off a funky musty smell, like old socks
Speaker 1: when the sun baked it. But you know what won't
Speaker 1: give off a funky musty smell Robert.
Speaker 2: While the Washington State Highway Patrol might that's true. Some
Speaker 2: complaints have been made, but yeah, nothing else, no one
Speaker 2: else who advertises for us.
Speaker 1: We apply special cool zone media covering that anti bad smell.
Speaker 2: And we've been told that the Chumba casino people have
Speaker 2: excellent hygie.
Speaker 1: So I'm always too afraid to name them by name,
Speaker 1: but that is stuck in my head.
Speaker 2: I have no reason to doubt the Chumba Casino people
Speaker 2: on this, Margaret.
Speaker 1: No, isn't it?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 1: I would never tested them.
Speaker 2: As a general rule, casinos are known for being incredibly
Speaker 2: good at not having you smell things that are unpleasant.
Speaker 2: That's why you can chain smoke indoors in Vegas.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they are known as plaices of hygiene.
Speaker 2: Palaces of hygiene, and incredibly expensive air filtration systems.
Speaker 1: And here's an ad for probably that, And Rebecca, I
Speaker 1: watched the people mill around the Hawker's stalls, smelling the
Speaker 1: Korean tacos and the papoosas cooking, and wondering whether any
Speaker 1: of it was real food instead of scop. I'd skip
Speaker 1: breakfast that morning, and I was hungry. The food was
Speaker 1: probably scop, judging from the clientele, who were mostly homeless,
Speaker 1: and Mama wouldn't approve, so I didn't eat, even though
Speaker 1: my stomach growled. According to my science teachers, single celled
Speaker 1: organic protein was safe and healthy. According to Mama, it
Speaker 1: was a large scale experiment in feeding mutated bacteria to humans.
Speaker 1: Mama liked to point out that rich people didn't need stop.
Speaker 1: They didn't drink coffee m either, but that never stopped Mama.
Speaker 1: She also had a lapel pin that read, a foolish
Speaker 1: consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Mama is one
Speaker 1: of a kind. The homeless were accompanied by their inevitable companions,
Speaker 1: be lovingly tended rusting ancient shopping carts. It had been
Speaker 1: years since it was possible to remove a shopping cart
Speaker 1: from a grocery store without being caught, but the number
Speaker 1: of people who used the carts as home locker and
Speaker 1: pack mule had only grown in the years since, creating
Speaker 1: fierce competition for the old dumb carts. These ones looked
Speaker 1: particularly raggy. Antoine and Cherrell had kept talking while I
Speaker 1: stared at the carts, but eventually they followed my stare.
Speaker 1: I looked at them, and they looked back at me.
Speaker 1: Those would be easy. Antoine sounded dismissive, so Cherrell said,
Speaker 1: you want to make something hard or something useful. I
Speaker 1: put my hand on his shoulder. Antoine, you make those,
Speaker 1: You'll be making something that everyone will see every day
Speaker 1: for years and years to come. His eyes glinted, Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: He looked at the sky for a minute. I bet
Speaker 1: there's all kinds of ways we can improve him too.
Speaker 1: Bet there's designs for better ones like crazy too, from
Speaker 1: the refugee camps.
Speaker 3: I know.
Speaker 1: I saw him in a news clip or something that's amazing.
Speaker 1: He grinned, and he was as handsome as he'd been
Speaker 1: when I was a freshman and he was the captain
Speaker 1: of the senior swim team. I told myself that the
Speaker 1: flip flops in my stomach were hunger, not crushing. It
Speaker 1: was only five minutes before final bell when the school
Speaker 1: went on lockdown. We all groaned as our homeroom teacher,
Speaker 1: mister Pizitken, sprinted to the classroom door and swung down
Speaker 1: the bar, slapping the button that pulled oar eyed the
Speaker 1: classroom windows, including the little one in the door itself,
Speaker 1: plunging the room into darkness. The groan made Pizitken glare
Speaker 1: at us with his finger on his lips. Rule one
Speaker 1: in lockdowns, no words, rule too. Silently build a shelter
Speaker 1: of bullet absorbing furniture, and then hunker down. Nearly everything
Speaker 1: in the classroom was made of waxed cardboard and wasn't
Speaker 1: about to stop any artillery, not even crossbows. Yeah, some
Speaker 1: fools actually went on school shootings armed with crossbows. But
Speaker 1: the room had once been a science lab and there
Speaker 1: was a big work bench running the length of the
Speaker 1: wall made of steel and concrete, with long plugged hookups
Speaker 1: or burners along its length. Previous lockdown drills had established
Speaker 1: that this was our designated shelter, so we shuffled behind it.
Speaker 1: It's not that we weren't worried about getting shot, but
Speaker 1: we also knew that lockdowns were nine times out of
Speaker 1: ten hoaxes. Some fool center texts said gonna be at
Speaker 1: school later, and it got auto corrected to guns be
Speaker 1: at school later, and that tripped burbank SWAT's paranoid fusion
Speaker 1: Center security AI. Then we all had to hide behind
Speaker 1: the lab bench for half an hour while the toy
Speaker 1: soldier squad did a sweep of the school, we hunkered
Speaker 1: down and texted each other. The school deactivated its network
Speaker 1: filters during lockdown so we could text status updates to
Speaker 1: the cops or our last words to our loved ones,
Speaker 1: and made dumb jokes. Our messages were interrupted every thirty
Speaker 1: seconds by reminders to stay silent and vigilant broadcast on
Speaker 1: the school's administrative emergency channel by the school Safety Office.
Speaker 1: On top of that, there were the actual status updates,
Speaker 1: officers en route, officers on site, North Wing sweep complete,
Speaker 1: South Wing sweep, complete, portables sweep complete. More of this,
Speaker 1: then all clear, All clear, All clear, followed by an
Speaker 1: announcement out of every phone speaker in the room. Only
Speaker 1: phones that ran the school Safety app would work on
Speaker 1: school property, so we all ran it, But dang, it
Speaker 1: was some creepy shit. I left the classroom thinking about
Speaker 1: my homework and whether I was supposed to pick up
Speaker 1: Tishae from band practice. And I was so lost in
Speaker 1: my thoughts that I didn't noticed the guy in the
Speaker 1: suit until he put a hand on my shoulder as
Speaker 1: I was heading for my locker. Linney Walker just the
Speaker 1: way he said it gave him away as a cop.
Speaker 1: I felt my heart rate triple yes, please come with me.
Speaker 1: He steered me to the administrative office. The secretary on
Speaker 1: the front desk pointedly didn't stare at me as he
Speaker 1: led me into one of the VP's offices. The first
Speaker 1: thing I noticed was my backpack on the desk, surrounded
Speaker 1: by its contents, and next to it Charrell's bag and
Speaker 1: its contents too. That was when I noticed Cherrelle sitting
Speaker 1: on a low sofa. The cop indicated the spot next
Speaker 1: to her with a tilt of his head, and I sat.
Speaker 1: The late afternoon sun slanting through the window caught the
Speaker 1: huge fart of dusty air that escaped from its cushions.
Speaker 1: When I settled in, Charrell coughed a little and caught
Speaker 1: my eye. She looked scared, really scared. Which seems like
Speaker 1: a good place for a cliffhanger, and therefore the place
Speaker 1: that it ends this week. Yay. I think it's interesting
Speaker 1: how this was written in twenty seventeen.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I wouldn't have guessed that just from the actual pros.
Speaker 2: But you know, it's also like a lot of the
Speaker 2: stuff about the expansion of homelessness, like the fact that
Speaker 2: the like shopping carts have turned into these ancestral items
Speaker 2: as the number of people in the streets have expanded,
Speaker 2: and you know, the kind of acceleration of mass shooting
Speaker 2: culture and the responses to it, particularly the bit about
Speaker 2: a kid accidentally tripping the local pds AI scanning thing
Speaker 2: or whatever by accidentally tweeting something that sounds like gun.
Speaker 2: I guess all of that is stuff that like, yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean in twenty seventeen, if you're looking ahead, I
Speaker 2: can see how Corey you know, kind of picked that
Speaker 2: stuff out in a way that feels kind of prophetic.
Speaker 1: But yeah, yeah. And then also the person who gets
Speaker 1: deported for labor or organizing, you know, as like an
Speaker 1: anchor baby or whatever is like, I mean, that's the
Speaker 1: kind of thing that I mean, the right wing has
Speaker 1: been on about for a long time, right, I.
Speaker 2: Mean it happened in the twenties, right, Like you had
Speaker 2: like wobbly as and anarchists who were like various kinds
Speaker 2: of you know, organizers get deported under some of the
Speaker 2: laws at that time.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And then also just like specifically that like the
Speaker 1: anchor baby thing, the you know, guaranteed US citizenship to
Speaker 1: people born here is a thing that the right wing
Speaker 1: is always howling and yelling about how they want to
Speaker 1: get rid of and I hope that one doesn't come
Speaker 1: out true. I hope none of this comes out true
Speaker 1: except people throwing communist parties where they get weird three
Speaker 1: D printers on factory level to pronount free things for people.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, I guess I would prefer kids with
Speaker 2: crossbows to kids with ar fifteens, but not because either
Speaker 2: is good. It's just one of them is going to
Speaker 2: kill fewer people.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I wonder whether that's like a you know, oh,
Speaker 1: this is what they had access to. People will do anything,
Speaker 1: or I wonder if at this implication that the way
Speaker 1: that school shooters develop as like such a meme. Now
Speaker 1: some people are just trying, like clever ways to go
Speaker 1: be the worst kind of person.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I think there's probably a point there about how like,
Speaker 2: if somehow, in some inconceivable way, we got rid of
Speaker 2: all of the guns tomorrow, mass shootings like attacks like
Speaker 2: that are still such a part of the culture that
Speaker 2: people would find ways to carry them out. You know,
Speaker 2: I think they would. Yeah, Basically, anything I can imagine
Speaker 2: is less deadly than what we currently have. But now
Speaker 2: because it's a part of the culture, people would carry
Speaker 2: out kinds of attacks with shit like crossbows that like,
Speaker 2: if this hadn't developed into a meme the way it would,
Speaker 2: they probably never would have started doing because this isn't
Speaker 2: uniquely America. You know, Serbia's had a recent spate of
Speaker 2: mass shootings, But like Serbia's mass shooting, I think every
Speaker 2: country's mass shootings really are at this point patterned on
Speaker 2: the way they work in America. So we don't need
Speaker 2: to go into too much of a aggression on that.
Speaker 1: Yo, American exceptionalism. We're number one. We're number one about this.
Speaker 1: No one else is really in the running. Well, next
Speaker 1: week we're going to find out not the conclusion, but
Speaker 1: part two of four of Party Discipline by Cory Doctor.
Speaker 1: But you know what else, Corey Doctro wrote, He wrote
Speaker 1: a really sweet blurb for my book.
Speaker 2: He did.
Speaker 1: I wrote a book called The Sapling Cage that we
Speaker 1: talked about beginning and Monday, June tenth, twenty twenty four.
Speaker 1: It is available for pre order through Kickstarter. Comes out
Speaker 1: in September, although one of the backer tiers is actually
Speaker 1: you'll get sent a copy early because there's a couple
Speaker 1: advanced reader copies left over. But what Corey Doctor wrote
Speaker 1: about my book, The Sapling Cage is a cracking, first rate,
Speaker 1: epic coming of fantasy novel where the crisis of gender
Speaker 1: identity only heightens the stakes and suspense of a propulsive,
Speaker 1: page turning tale. A nice blurb just to talk about
Speaker 1: how writing is this weird thing of networking. Like I
Speaker 1: know Corey Doctro and we met when he taught at
Speaker 1: the Clarion West Writer's Workshop in Seattle that I went
Speaker 1: to in twenty fifteen, And at that I had a
Speaker 1: long conversation with him about my writing. You know, I
Speaker 1: had a couple of books out, but I was like
Speaker 1: still kind of just finding my feet, you know, as
Speaker 1: a writer. One of the things that I really like
Speaker 1: is he talked about how with science fiction and fantasy,
Speaker 1: authors pride themselves on making sure that there's this plot,
Speaker 1: there's this like engine that drives the story forward, and
Speaker 1: you can talk about any ideas you want, and if
Speaker 1: you attach it to plot, you're able to like keep
Speaker 1: the reader engaged. In a way that has really stuck
Speaker 1: with me and made me think about how I write.
Speaker 1: And it's one of the reasons I like how Corey
Speaker 1: writes so much. Right Like this story is about some
Speaker 1: teens who want to get into some trouble, and it
Speaker 1: also is like, here's the way that factories fuck over
Speaker 1: poor communities, you know. Anyway, anyway, so y'all next week.
Speaker 2: We'll be back in seven days.
Speaker 1: It Could Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
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