Young Man, There's a place for you in the machine
By 2040, America is safe, sane, and heavily surveilled. The air smells faintly of disinfectant and ancestral duty. No one says “woke” anymore.
Woke has been classified as hate speech against the American Nap. Welcome to the orderly dystopia Marcus Chen was born to inherit. You may remember it. It used to be a country.
The Graduate (Class of God-Knows-What)
Marcus Chen graduated summa cum silentio.
His degree, printed on recycled parchment and sealed with the Department of Virtue’s watermark, certified him in “Heritage Compliance and Familial Logistics.” He adjusted his ceremonial sash - embroidered with a bald eagle, a fetus, and a QR code linking to his ideological purity score - and tried to smile for the mandatory drone photograph.
Liberty Christian University’s quad was pristine, landscaped by the National Order of Horticultural Harmony (formerly the EPA). In the distance, the chapel bells chimed in 7/4 time - rhythmically unconventional, but spiritually approved by the Heritage-Worship Council after Bach was deemed too Lutheran.
The commencement speaker, an AI-generated simulacrum of Jordan Peterson reading the Book of Deuteronomy, delivered an inspiring address entitled “Clean Your Room, Rebuild Your Civilization, Destroy Your Enemies.”
Marcus clapped as programmed.
He returned home to find the family Alexa - now named “Megyn Kelly” - offering a congratulatory poem composed entirely from Ronald Reagan speeches. His mother baked an approved dessert (apple pie, gluten-optional, narrative mandatory), while his father raised a glass of ethanol-free bourbon and toasted “Another successful generation of ideological continuity!”
“I remember when you were a baby,” his father said wistfully. “Back when public schools still taught about Harriet Tubman.”
“Who's that?” asked Emma, Marcus’s younger sister and rising star at the Daughters of Liberty Academy. She giggled. “Sounds like one of those fake names from before the Curriculum Correction.”
The evening passed in the usual way: a family discussion of daily gratitude, the national pledge (abridged and adapted from Leviticus), and a quick group repentance for microdoubts.
Yet Marcus couldn’t sleep.
He dreamt of strange things - TikToks, falafel stands, drag brunches, weird old words like "nuance." Sometimes, he heard music not written in the pentatonic scale of American Exceptionalism. Sometimes, he saw Rebecca.
Rebecca had once argued that virtue without empathy was just a costume. She had left, defected, they called it - for a graduate programme in New Zealand, where rumours said people still debated. Marcus had loved her, or something dangerously like it. But when the Loyalty Oath App began cross-referencing his heart rate during unauthorised thoughts, he filed the breakup himself - for national stability.
Now, on the eve of his interview at the Department of Cultural Renewal, Marcus reviewed the protocol binder:
Smile: But not “smirk.”
Handshake: Assertive, Christian, unlitigious.
Philosophy: Aristotle good, Foucault bad, Aquinas meh.
Personal anecdote: Something about a flag, a field trip, or a formative haircut.
The interview went splendidly. Mr. Harrison commended Marcus on his "ideological clarity and healthy testosterone levels." He was assigned to the “Pre-Marital Synchronization Bureau,” tasked with organising patriotic dating events and discouraging irony.
On the way out, he passed a sanctioned protest pod. Ten people inside a transparent bubble, gesturing wildly at a sign that read: History Wasn't Always This Linear.
One woman mouthed the word “why?”
Marcus didn’t stop. But his retina scan later flagged a 0.6-second hesitation. An official Warning of Emotional Drift was uploaded to his profile. No fine, just a nudge.
That night, he received an anonymous message on his secure device.
“Dream weird. Some of us are still doing it. - R”
Marcus stared at it for a long time. He looked out the window where a flag waved under floodlights that never turned off. Everything around him worked. The trains. The families. The algorithms. Even the birds migrated in formation again.
And yet, a question slithered through his brain like a banned jazz solo:
What if the system that gave him everything had quietly taken something he never learned to name?
In post-reform America, Marcus Chen became a bureaucrat in a state so perfectly ordered that memory itself had been relocated to the archives. But sometimes, in the cracks between pledges and performance, a sliver of something old leaks through - a story, a question, a face unscanned.
Let that leak grow.
Because nations don’t die from too much freedom. They die from forgetting how strange and wonderful it ever was to be free.
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