Slug stood over the table, hands planted on the edges. He looked around the room at the East Sixth Collective. Old faces. New ones. Enough bodies to start feeling like a room again.
"If it wasn't a war, then how did they take it?"
Merit asked from the doorframe, more taunt than question, a cracked drone rotor turning between his fingers. He probably didn't mean anything by it, but a question like that gets in you.
"You kids," Slug said, shaking his head. "You always want it to be a war. You want to believe we went down fighting. That there was a last stand at the Alamo where we held off the corporate tanks with Molotovs and patriotism."
A cigarette was burning dangerously close to his knuckles. He blew smoke at the ceiling fan, watching the gray plume get chopped into nothing.
"There were no tanks, Merit. There wasn't even a fight."
Merit frowned. "Bullshit. Nobody sells their freedom."
"Everyone sells their freedom," Slug corrected. "The price just has to be right. And the price wasn't money. It was convenience."
Slug leaned forward, elbows on his knees.
"You have to understand what it was like. The 'Old World' wasn't some paradise. It was exhausting. Every day was a crisis. Politics was just two old men screaming at each other on screens while the water got toxic and the rent tripled. We were tired, Merit. Bone tired. We were sick of voting for people who hated us. We were sick of the noise."
He took a drag.
"Then the Corporations came out with the 'Premium Citizenship' bundle."
Slug traced a square in the air with his glowing cherry.
"It wasn't a coup. It was a marketing campaign. They promised: 'Sign over your municipal voting rights, and we guarantee gigabit fiber, filtered water, and private security response in under three minutes.' They called it the 'Stability Tier.'"
"And people signed that?"
"People lined up for it," Slug explained. "I remember the day the Terms of Service updated. It popped up on everyone's phone at the same time. A little box: 'I agree to transfer administrative governance to the Silicon Prairie Network in exchange for guaranteed infrastructure stability.'"
Slug looked Merit in the eye.
"You know what we did? We didn't read it. We wanted the wifi to stay on. We wanted the riots to stop. We wanted to watch our shows and order our food and not think about the feds anymore."
"We clicked 'Accept' and went back to sleep."
Merit looked horrified. "You just gave up."
"Sure," Slug said, standing up and grinding the cigarette into the sink. "That's one word for it."
He walked to the window, pushing aside a yellowed blackout curtain. "See, that's the thing. Fascism never comes wrapped in a uniform anymore. It comes as an app update. It comes with a better user interface. It comes with 24/7 customer support and a loyalty rewards program."
"Slug, honey, you get one more line of apocalypse poetry, then we need to talk about what's happening here and right now."
She wasn't much for speeches, but when Mom spoke, the room listened. Mara June Hollow wasn't anyone's real mother, but she held this scrappy group together by sheer continued existence. She sat solidly in the corner, one of her big hands folded over her knee, the other receiving a perfectly formed manicure.
"Thanks, Mom," Slug said. "My point was, don't look for battlefields. There aren't any. The world ended because we were bored, and they made slavery a subscription service."
The room sat with that for a moment. Nina's Microform Nail Forge hummed softly as she slipped Mom's pinky into it. Rook had claimed the windowsill behind the copper mesh curtain, one knee up, the metal in their combat boots catching the artificial light in thin, strange flashes. They worked the long blue braid that ran down the center of their scalp through their fingers.
Then Slug shifted his gaze to Melissa. He always read her too easily, like the tension in her shoulders had been printed there for him.
"You wanna get out of here?"
She nodded.
"Yeah," she said quietly. "Yeah, I do."
"C'mon." He jerked his head toward the door and started for it.