HRH vaped indica.
“It strikes my mind that perhaps there is a way to raise the pleasure,” said HRH. “Would you care to indulge?”
HRH taught the sex worker to navigate channels on Twitch.
The sex worker navigated channels on Twitch.
The sex worker found channels belonging to sadder members of the Twitch community. People with four viewers, people who were streaming games that no one liked, people who were talking to an audience of no one.
The sex worker donated $1,000 to a bald man with a goatee who was playing the VGA remake of Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire.
The sex worker donated $3,000 to a man who was playing World of Warcraft.
The sex worker donated $5,000 to a woman in Seoul. The woman was not playing a video game. She was watering her plants and singing along to “Lip & Hip” by 현아.
All three streamers pulled off their headphones. One started crying. All started cursing. One talked about dreams coming true.
“You see?” asked HRH. “One can change a life with nothing more than a donation of $3,000. Streaming video is the intellectual sweatshop of the future.”
HRH told the sex worker to take it up a notch.
She donated $20,000 to a young woman dressed in Sailor Moon cosplay.
Her shriek was so piercing that both HRH and the sex worker had to cover their ears.
“Shall we go for the big score?” asked HRH. “Do you wish to inhale the sweet smell of success?”
“What?” asked the sex worker.
“$100,000,” said HRH.
“You actually have this much?”
“The bodies of Dachau. Arms sales to the Islamic Republic of Iran,” said HRH. “For one night only, my cherub, with the contours of your Cthulhoid membrane illuminated by a liquid crystal display, money is of no concern.”
“Let’s do it,” said the sex worker.
“My one request is that I pick your victim,” said HRH.
HRH navigated to the Twitch channel of a young woman who was dressed like a sexy unicorn.
The sexy unicorn wasn’t playing a game. She was speaking to the people in her channel’s livechat.
“Okay, SweetA, thanks for the sub,” said the sexy unicorn.
“No, DuskDot, I don’t own a gun,” said the sexy unicorn.
“Here she is,” said HRH. “I have watched this one for a great long while. Her popularity is minimal. Her desperation is great. With one click, you will change her life forever. Imagine the surprise!”
The sex worker clicked on the donate button.
The sex worker filled out the form.
The sex worker donated the money.
A notification rose up on the sexy unicorn’s Twitch stream.
The sexy unicorn sat in stunned silence.
The sexy unicorn could not believe what she was seeing.
The sexy unicorn checked to see if the donation was real.
The sexy unicorn threw off her headphones.
The sexy unicorn screamed.
The sexy unicorn started dancing in her lower-middle-class bedroom.
HRH leaned back in his DXRacer chair.
HRH vaped indica.
HRH smiled.
HRH experienced the shudder of a tantric orgasm.
“Do you realize that we’ve just changed that girl’s life?” asked the sex worker. “We totally fucking changed everything.”
“I am aware,” said HRH.
“I can’t believe it,” said the sex worker.
The sexy unicorn was still dancing.
The sexy unicorn started jumping on her bed.
“She’s probably never seen that kind of money in her life,” said the sex worker.
“I guarantee that it is a new experience,” said HRH. “Here, madame, is the true perversity. This is from where the greatest pleasure derives. You sit there and you believe yourself enmeshed in generosity, in the glow of altruism, in the spirit of human giving, but tonight you have done nothing but practice a refined form of cruelty.”
“What?” asked the sex worker.
“You have taken that child and thrust her into a higher tax bracket,” said HRH. “Do you believe that a peasant can handle a sudden influx of filthy lucre? Like yourself, she too is ignorant of the difference between money and wealth. She will spend this sum on clothes, on a new car, on trinkets and baubles, and when she has drained the swamp, there awaits the taxman. She will have no hope of paying. She will travel on, haunted by ever increasing debt. Her best chance will be bankruptcy after seven years. She will murder her credit and she will have learned nothing and she will own nothing. All of this because of a random act of violence perpetuated by a stranger while she was dressed in a unicorn costume that emphasized her heaving bosom. It will be your fault. You did this to that child. You have destroyed her.”
HRH vaped indica.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Literary Fiction
While Fern’s body burned with gasoline, and shrieks of human agony assaulted her ears, she had a thought.
Here was her thought: This is not how I imagined things would turn out.
To fathom Fern’s disappointment, you’ll have to cast your mind back to the Year of the Salted Earth, which roughly corresponded with 1997 AD, 1417 AH, and 5757 AM.
Fern spent that year out of Fairy Land.
Her existence was a minor cultural stereotype.
She was living as a pretend artist in a St. Mark’s Place apartment between Avenue A & First Avenue on the island of Manhattan, which was a borough of New York City.
Fern had been in and out of New York City for almost a decade, starting in the Year of the Unquenched Longing, which roughly corresponded to 1989 AD, 1407 AH, and 5747 AM.
It that year, Fern met a young woman named Denise. They dated for a short time, but it was fleeting. Denise had to move to Boston.
Before she left New York, Denise introduced Fern to the demimondes of Manhattan’s East Village and the Lower East Side, two overlapping ethnic ghettos that had transformed into cesspools of petty crime and cheap drugs and were gentrifying into cesspools of international money laundering and the expensive drugs required to fuel international money laundering.
It was in the East Village, where people were wearing terrible leather jackets and even worse denim jeans, that Fern met a boy named Anthony.
Anthony was from Long Island, which was an island next to Manhattan.
The western part of Long Island encompassed Queens and Brooklyn, two of New York City’s boroughs.
At its eastern end, farthest from New York City, Long Island was full of property soon to be the exclusive domain of the ultra-wealthy, where the ruling class would throw parties that commingled the Celebrity branch of American politics with the people who really ruled the world, namely its international merchant bankers.
In the space between the boroughs and the money, there was a heaping mass of vast suburbs.
Anthony was from the middle. He’d grown up in the heaping mass.
Fern met Anthony in a bar on Second Avenue.
The bar was full of ersatz punk rockers and old drunks from the Ukraine.
Their attraction was so obvious, and so apparent, that it made an audible noise.
All of the bar’s drunks heard the noise.
The ersatz punk rockers heard the noise.
Because the bar was full of brains pickled in alcohol, and because its patrons were sitting in a relative darkness designed to hide the shame of their existences, neither the drunks nor the punk rockers could identify the sound’s origin.
The noise sounded like this:
