You can buy Scenebux from New Ritual Press, out now. This is the first chapter of the novel by Futurist Letters editor-in-chief Cairo Smith. It contains immature themes, and reader discretion is advised.
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End of the World
This is all true. I write to clear my conscience. I write to vomit my guts all over the page. I write so someone someday will know how it happened, or didn’t happen, or almost happened. What are scenebux, you ask? Scenebux. Say it ‘scene bucks.’ They are a secret treasure promised to he who posts edgily and dangerously enough to earn the favor of the ones above and below. They are Yamashita’s gold. They are Satoshi’s bitcoins. They are made up and very, very real. Call this story a picaresque, a fable, a menagerie of narcissists, a circlejerk, I don’t care. I’m way beyond holding back, no matter the consequences.
It’s Monday night and I’m at a big tiki bar beneath San Francisco called Coconut Woman. When I say beneath, I mean literally. It used to be an underground military barracks gym and pool. Then, long ago, they filled it up with fake palms and sand and colored lights and put a big log raft in the pool for white girls in grass skirts to wink and shake their tits on. You could even buy a boozed-up quart of juice in a fake shrunken head. Somewhere along the way, they decided white girls with butterfaces shouldn’t get paid to shake their tits and dress up like hula bobbleheads. So, here I am, watching fat Samoan dudes cover Weezer on the raft while it fights for dear life to stay buoyant. You can still buy the shrunken head drink, though. It costs fifty bucks and you take the head home as a souvenir. I might need a shrunken head’s worth of liquor just to get through tonight with some scrap of my dignity intact.
“The world’s going to end in the next two hundred years.” That’s the opening line I use on the Vietnamese-ish girl standing at the bar, waiting for a drink. She doesn’t hear me. My words get lost in the clamor of balding Patagonia dickwads lamenting recent headlines and Zestimates. Apparently the pope just died. Someone says the vice president killed him. Who knows if that’s true? Not me. I’m two years fully ‘network sober,’ for reasons you’ll soon understand. I’m a cusper, twenty-five years old in 2025, stuck between Lehman-traumatized Millennial dorks and algo-fried pornbrain Zoomer illiterates. In a way, I got the worst of both, an early childhood on a lawless web rawer and sicker than anything we’ve got today. I like to joke I was molested by the internet. I really think I was. That’s why I quit.
The Samoans spin up “Africa,” blessing the rains coming out of the PVC pipes above the pool. Our second-gen girlboss still hasn’t noticed me. Just fuck my shit up. It’s over. I toss back the rest of my sugared-up cocktail. Not a single one of the H&M mannequins in a fifty-foot radius shows any spark of waking human life, aside from Miss Vietnam. It’s this chick or bust.
A passing disco beam spotlights her face. She’s my age, in a red dress, maybe some Han admixture. I’m pretty good at guessing these things. I’ve always had a way with faces, what they mean, how they tell a story of the life you’ve lived and where you’re from ten thousand years back. She’s got the right moisturizer, the right kind of sunscreen, the right kind of conditioner for her hair texture. Type triple-A. My type, my antithesis. I’ve got fifteen minutes on the clock to play pretend before The Leviathan comes by to drag me back to the cohabitation underworld.
There’s tension in Miss Vietnam’s face, boredom and distance. She has that frank sobriety that comes from surviving med school or a tiger mom or both. I lean in and nudge her arm and she smells like pomegranates and I’m rock hard. This isn’t going to be one of those masturbatory sex diaries, I’m just telling you, two years offline and I don’t need BlueChew or anything. You should try it. I’m like a Pacific GI. Just a little bit of leg is enough.
“The world’s going to end in the next two hundred years.” I say it once, then louder, and she turns to me like we’re in Oblivion. I knew a guy who took that to the extreme, by the way. He decided to become an adventurer and start questing in East LA, going to bars and asking for rumors and picking up odd jobs off Craigslist. Last time I heard from him he was learning Spanish and medieval mace technique and had a kid nearly due. Maybe he figured life out.
“Why do you say that?” She asks. My funnel worked. She clicked ‘expand.’ God, get the internet out of my head! It’s always harder when I’m drunk. It comes back whether I want it or not. What I really want is to be sun-kissed and horny and unaware and pure like the kids in Carmina Burana, which is basically Grease. Instead I’m overthinking everything.
She’s staring at me like I’m wasting her time. Amid it all I’m aware of myself. It’s so cloyingly femme to be aware of yourself, but here I am, obsessing over how other people think I look. Some girl once called my Matsuda glasses frames Miyazaki twinkcore, and I resolved to wear them forever. Bitches love Miyazaki twinks. She also called me Ansel Elgort, and I’m pretty sure he got canceled for some bad shit, but I can’t remember. I’m not into bad shit myself. I’m a softboy at heart, destined to be consumed by sirens on the banks of the Embarcadero. I don’t even wear wife beaters. I wear wife respecters. It’s just my nature.
I take off the wiry Matsudas to use them for emphasis, leaning in close. “Think about it. How many times has the launch of a nuclear ICBM been ordered in the last eighty years?” I ask. “An actual military strike, not a test.”
“Ordered?”
“Yes, ordered. It’s not zero. Really. Hear me out. October of 1962.”
“Cuban Missile Crisis,” she butts in, putting that five in APUSH to work. I can tell I’ve got her now.
“Correct. Now, get this. During the standoff, a Soviet sub running deep lost contact with Moscow. Went straight under US lines. The Navy starts dropping dummy depth charges to try and get it to surface. Of course, the Soviet crew doesn’t know if the charges are dummies or not. No contact, no radar. The captain starts to think it’s World War III. Freaking out. And he tells his XO to launch their full nuclear payload at the American carrier group.”
“And the XO says to fuck off?”
“That’s right. At risk of court martial and death the XO refuses the order. Now, based on Pentagon SIOP—”
“SIOP?”
“Single Integrated… uh, Operations Plan. I think. Anyway, Pentagon policy meant that any nuclear attack on a carrier group would have triggered a full-blown apocalyptic launch against the Eastern Bloc. Thermonuclear hell. Game over.”
“Sure, yeah,” she says, not yet impressed. “We all know ‘62 was a brush with death. We learned our lesson on great power conflict—”
“Did we though?” I prod as she stirs her mix-made piña colada. This is fun. I’m having fun. I’m making the most of my precious minutes of Persephonic freedom. “Tell me your name, I’ll tell you the rest.”
“Lin Jiao,” she says, and it reads like the truth.
Lin. A LIN. Local Interconnect Network. The connection between our machines when I plug in, access her hard drive, rummage through her history, give her my package. A moment that will never come. “Ben Etxina,” I say, taking the chance to shake as I admit my gay Basque surname. It’s less gay to say than to write out, admittedly. It almost sounds normal.
Our touch is my first contact with a new person’s skin in months, except possibly for the wrinkled hand of the man at the Manchu market on Clay. I try not to let this gap in my résumé show. “April of ‘69. President Nixon, drunk, orders a nuclear strike on North Korea. It takes Henry Kissinger himself to call the Joint Chiefs and tell them to hold off till the president sobers up.”
“Oh, Nixon,” she sighs like she knows him personally.
“Right?” I laugh. Here comes the rest of the hammer. “September of ‘83. An early warning system tells a Soviet colonel that US missiles are inbound. His standing orders, straight from his operations book, say to fire all nukes if you see that signal. It’s only his gut, some fluke in one man’s character, that makes him throw out the book and call up command to tell them he’s got a malfunctioning unit.”
“So, three launch orders,” says Lin Jiao, “in eighty years. All ignored.”
“Yeah, but, they had to be,” I say. “Survivorship bias.”
“If the orders weren’t ignored, we wouldn’t be here to talk about it.”
“Yep.”
“But, that doesn’t affect the odds going forward.”
Now she’s getting it. “Of course.” A round of cheers surges from my right. I pause as a throng of Panama hat-adorned Boomers take the floor for “Brown Eyed Girl,” oblivious to all the tight-jeaned FAANG clique small talk they’re displacing. Truly, the whole world is their retirement home, and we are but lowly players in it.
“So what are the odds?” Lin asks me. She’s more wrapped up in this now than I am. That’s the magic of thermonuclear war. “I mean, that an officer ignores a direct order to launch nukes. From your list, that’s three-for-three. Too small a sample size to really model it out—”
“Then just go with your gut.”
“Alright,” she says, brushing off some IPA-nursing interloper. “Well, let’s be optimistic. Say, maybe eighty, ninety percent odds that they don’t follow through.”
“But not a hundred.”
“Yeah. It can’t be a hundred.”
“So, there you go.” I throw up my hands with a shrug, grazing her shoulder in the process. “See? We just keep rolling that apocalypse die maybe two, three, four times a century. How many rolls do we get before we hit that one-in-five chance of an officer following through? Even if you say it’s one-in-ten, one-in-twenty, that’s only a couple hundred years tops before we all blink out.”
“Interesting,” she says, and takes a step closer to me. In the warm bar light, I can make out more of her face. It’s masculine and smooth, a beautiful form. The kind of face my granddad could have seen in a VC tunnel. The kind of face my Stanford peers could see in a VC Zoom. No longer bored but processing quickly now. “We should probably derisk this,” she says, leaning in, “from an EA perspective.”
“Probably,” I say, and I’m surprised to hear she’s still an effective altruist in the year of our Lord, 2025. The Icarian fall of that crypto schlubster Sam Bankman-Fried was sufficiently humiliating to shove the movement from the vogue for most of the overpaid tech community.
I savor the moment as much as I can. This is as close as we can go, the edge of the event horizon, the place where time and space threaten to abandon all normality. In the shadows of the far lounge, nestled in a throng of her fellow lawyers, The Leviathan radiates her inky sphere of influence, clawing me back from the brink. I do my best to keep my eyes on Lin Jiao.
“What do you do?” she asks, rote. A taboo question if you’re a boring person. A polite invitation to monologue for those with the sauce.
“I’m a writer,” I answer, and demur on explaining the rest.
“Listicles?” she asks. I think it’s a joke.
“Sure,” I say. It’s less embarrassing than the truth. “What do you do?”
I catch her eyes catching my eyes catching the eyes of The Leviathan. “Why do you keep looking at that couple?” she asks. Couple. I gag at her word choice. The other half of this imagined ‘couple,’ I realize, must be musclebound junior associate Bick Preppen guffawing on The Leviathan’s statuesque arm.
“They’re not a couple,” I snap back, losing my balance on the wave of our conversation. “That’s my girlfriend and her coworker.”
You might as well just put me in the cuck shed now. It’s obvious The Leviathan, my six-year live-in girlfriend, is fucking Bick Preppen. Even if she’s not fucking Bick, she acts exactly like she would if she were fucking Bick, which means the social damage is the same. Even Miss Vietnam can see it. “Oh, are you like poly?” she asks with a visible sneer.
“Jesus. No. Cringe.” I don’t want to tell her that the truth is even worse. The Leviathan pays the rent, sets the rules, and falls all over her cockwalking lawyer friends with only the thinnest veneer of an excuse to spare my pride.
“Then what the fuck are you doing dude?” the girlboss snaps at me. “That’s your girlfriend right there. Big yikes.”
“Fuck me for wanting to talk about Soviet nuclear policy, I guess,” I say with a shrug. The appeal to autism is a flawless conversational gambit. Women have no defense.
“Oh.”
“Yeah. I guess I’m just dealing with this thing I call my big ennui.” Big ennui sounds better than severe early-onset underemployed cuck retarded depression, which is the clinical term.
“Purpose,” she says, falling back into the light of the disco beams in thought. “You need purpose. You should talk to a homeless guy.”
“What?”
“Not like a bad-luck bum. I mean a real, strung out, never left hippiedom, cruising the astral planes kinda voluntary homeless guy. They’re the closest thing to the Dionysian. I bet he’d help you find a purpose.”
An impending sense of doom and a pang in my chest overtake me. Those are heart attack symptoms, by the way, in case they ever happen to you. For me, it just means I’ve passed back into The Leviathan’s orbit. “Let’s go,” She says, still wafting Bick Preppen’s cologne as she snags my arm like a jet on a carrier deck.
“Nice to meet you,” I manage to mumble to Lin Jiao as we whisk down the hall. The girlboss and the fat Samoans and their Papa Roach cover all blur into black as I’m forcibly dragged up the stairs.
“Chloe!” Bick shouts after us in his stupid tone, using The Leviathan’s mortal name. “Don’t forget, cello guy, eight tomorrow!”
“I’ve got it!” she calls back. Chloe’s almost as tall as me in heels. Her black hair swishes in a ponytail across her tailored jacket as we brush past the bouncer onto Nugent Street. I’m an accessory, a confidante, an ambulatory possession in her presence.
“Cello?” I ask as she calls a Lyft. I turn away from the blinding rectangle in her palm. There’s no answer, only stillness. My ears ring from the sudden absence of saccharine keytar covers. In the night, a form moves a few yards down, near the front entrance of the Grand Candaul Hotel. It’s a man, mid-sixties, scruffy and bearded and high on who-knows-what. He beams in the glow of his personal nirvana as he lies back on a musty surplus duffel. My thoughts go to Lin’s advice as I watch the eastbound fog roll in.
“Cello?” I ask Chloe again, draping my jacket across her shoulders as a chill takes hold. She shushes me, and I realize she’s holding her phone to her ear. It’s a million times more preferable than texting, at the least.
“Hey Roland,” she says, heels clicking on city concrete as she paces. “Yeah, another O-1 visa interview tomorrow. I told immigration our client’s a genius cellist. Yeah. Yeah. Well, he better be able to play.”
I lose interest. It’s always some perfidious game between US immigration and the advocacy lawyers representing their patron émigrés, like Spy vs. Spy but even less productive.
The second drink insulates my jacketless, pathetic twink body from the cold. To my surprise, as Chloe’s call rolls on, I also find it guiding my feet toward the man on the duffel. He stirs, grinning with intravenous bliss, and takes a moment to realize I’m in front of him.
“Excuse me, sir,” I say, and his grunt interrupts. “Excuse me, sir. I’m trying to find a great purpose in life. A goal. I’m hoping you can help.”
His sharp blue eyes meet mine, surrounded by furrowed pale wrinkles. A wisdom. He examines me, returning briefly to Earth, and a tremendous lightness builds in me as I watch him think. It’s the opposite of The Leviathan’s dark presence. Then, revealing yellowed teeth, he opens his mouth to straighten up and speak.
“Get out of here, you faggot.”
He’s right! San Francisco is a ghost town. It’s a leftover city for strivers on the take. It’s like Coconut Woman, a shell of itself with the prices jacked up and all the raw sex drained out. “Get out of here,” I repeat back, only slightly hearing Chloe’s yell about the idling Lyft. “I think you nailed it, and I will.”