War was coming. People were scared of their next-door neighbours. They thought their next-door neighbours were the tribe over the hill, coming to take their land. They thought this because politicians had lied to them about it, for money.
Or maybe the world had just grown too complex. Instagram accounts, with IT technicians, and server farms, and cables under the ocean, and electronic component sweatshops in Malaysia, and social media influencers, and lipsticks, and jewellery, and cheap garment sweatshops in the Philippines, all so someone could post a picture of a new bag, and thousands of people could lie in their bedrooms caressing that picture of a bag on their phones in order to avoid thinking about their approaching deaths. And everything we ate was wrapped in processed petroleum. And then we had to figure out what to do with the processed petroleum.
And each vertex in the vast spanning web had mass, and slowly the overall mass was becoming too great, and soon the web would collapse.
War was coming. The dissolution of complexity into profound simplicity: us and them. It was a lie but it was one you could understand, and for many this was preferable to an unfathomable truth. And the bodies fell one on top of the other, and they looked like they were hugging but they were not hugging, and the bullets thudded into flesh like sandbags, and all were one, and still he fired, and still he fired.
War was coming. You could smell it in the air. You could taste it on your tongue. And in a hundred years the children would ask what people were doing to prepare for its arrival, and teachers would reply: watching makeup tutorials and masturbating to daughter-in-law videos on Pornhub.
… Or were you somewhere else?
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