It started with the fight in the stands. The Knights were already leading the American West league by late November and the championship looked promising for them this year, finally. They were playing against the Corsairs, who had started out strong this season but were last in the entire league. That didn’t stop their die-hard fans from showing up to the game in force, decked out in black and silver. On a nationally televised Monday Night Football game, a fight broke out between two opposing fans and their surrounding friends took sides. The melee spilled onto the field as one of the fans was tossed over a barricade, and he pulled his adversary over the barricade with him. The game had to be paused as security cleared out the fight. The tension had been brewing since last season, when a few Corsairs players took a knee during the National Anthem. A Knights player had walked the field and tried to kick one of them over.
Viral videos from the Monday night game continued from the parking lots, right after the fourth quarter ended. The Corsairs fans ganged up on a Knights fan and bloodied him and his wife. Other Knights fans came to their rescue and broke up the fight. The violence spread across the parking lot and a nearby gas station, and as the night wore on, other fights broke out across the city in various bars, restaurants, and even the streets. By the next morning twenty-two people ended up in the hospital.
Jesse was captivated with the fight videos and all of the comments, and other people recording themselves and promising to attack people on the streets if they saw them wearing Knights/Corsairs clothes or accessories. It was hard to avoid the controversy if you used the internet at all.
Jesse’s eyes fluttered and he realized that his short break wasn’t short anymore. He had been sucked in again.
He dropped his phone on his mattress and then rolled over the edge of his mattress to the nearby floor, right into push-up position. He did twenty and then started holding his body straight and still at the bottom position, so his body was barely touching the ground, and held it there for five deep breaths. He pushed back to the up position, and did this four more times. He kneeled up and a glisten of sweat crowned his head.
As he caught his breath, Jesse thought about a dream from last night. Almost two months had passed since he started his training with Yusef, and his lucid dreaming was becoming consistent. Yusef’s sleep training methods felt corny at first, but even before they started working in his dreams the self-affirmation and visualizing felt good. Earlier in the week, Jesse had flown in his dream for a second time. He was really trying for a third last night but didn’t quite get it. Instead, he ended up jumping out of control and woke up when the landing was out of his control.
His wrist hurt where he wore Yusef’s watch. He loosened it and saw the underside of the watch straps dug into his skin and left an imprint of a squiggly line around his wrist. But wearing it looser didn’t feel as secure. Beggars can’t be choosers, he shrugged to himself and tightened it back up.
He reached back for his phone and saw the time, noting that his homework break was done in two minutes. He scrolled his social media some more and something about Horizon came up a few times on his different feeds. There was a meme of Mr. Moneybags from Monopoly holding a giant bag of cash behind him, and he was labeled as “Samuel Bradford, CEO of Horizon,” but instead of stepping over “Go” the famous spot on the board had been replaced with “My paycheck”. Jesse then clicked on a video and saw a YouTuber holding up his Horizon phone, talking about how every time there was an update, he just knew that his phone was slower, or had lower battery life, or something just wasn’t right. He then swore off buying another Horizon product ever again.
Jesse searched online for “Horizon phone news” and immediately clicked on a recent video uploaded from One World News, titled “INTERVIEW: Horizon CEO Admits Faulty Products, Promotes New Nova Nine Phone.” Samuel Bradford sat on a red leather chair, leaning across the armrest and directly addressing the interviewer, who was off-camera.
“Well, of course our phones have a limited design,” he said dismissively. “These products are incredibly expensive to manufacture and assemble. Not to mention the process and cost of finding and allocating the resources for this premiere technology.”
“Yes, but--” the assertive female voice of the reporter started to say.
“Look,” he said to the interviewer, sitting up and then leaning in closer, sticking his head out. “Can you imagine what would happen to the international market if these phones stopped being made because everyone only bought one or two during their entire lives? The industry would crash and burn with that loss in sales. There are incredibly honorable, hard-working people in other parts of the world, the developing world, that depend on the enthusiastic purchasing habits of the more fortunate, industrial countries.”
“What would you say about the--”
“We’re talking massive loss of jobs, opportunities, and ongoing development in other parts of the world, not to mention the sales and other related industries right here in the U.S. of A.
“More importantly,” Bradford went on, “we’re helping to build a middle class in other parts of the world. With that, comes a demand for democracy. So don’t come in here and question our sales philosophy. Maybe we’re not saving the world, but we’re sure helping a lot of people survive in it. Some people might go so far as to call our marketing strategies patriotic. We’re not a business anymore. We’re an institution, and without us a lot of things would fall apart.”
The video then cut to the interviewer, a thirty-something blonde woman with a defined jawline and broad breasts that pushed and peaked out of her low-cut blue dress. “Yes,” she said with eyes that stared directly straight ahead. “But how can you justify coordinated and planned faultiness in your products, including specially designed malware -- hidden in your company’s product updates -- that intentionally slows software performance and drains battery life? All the while your company continues to push sales for products that promise to increase performance and battery life. Further--”
“Our products do increase performance and battery life,” Bradford cut in. “How else can we keep up with the ever-increasing demands of newer apps, games, higher quality photos, videos, and…” He went on but Jesse stopped paying attention and tried to refocus on his task at hand.
This proved a little harder than usual. As he understood it, this Bradford guy was getting away with making our phones slow and break down on purpose so we would keep buying more. Jesse pondered that for a second and came to the conclusion that people liked buying new phones, anyway.
“Mr. Bradford, I’d like to show you something. You might be familiar, of course, with the kinds of materials that are needed for all of these phones you so proudly produce,” the beautiful blonde reporter said as the video switched over to footage of microchips and the inside of phones being manufactured. “But what you and our viewers might not be aware of,” she continued on as the video switched over to footage of sweaty, dirty men in scraggly clothes, digging with tools inside a dark cave, “is that these phones require uncommon materials and elements, such as cobalt. Cobalt, for example, can only be affordably mined in certain places. And extracting it can be very dangerous, especially when companies such as yours, Mr. Bradford, aggressively purchase it from Chinese companies that overlook hazardous mining practices that exploit and endanger poor, desperate workers who have limited options for other employment.”
The video now showed villagers in African villages with missing limbs, some laying in beds coughing up blood, and lifeless bodies being pulled out of caved-in mines. “These laborers,” the journalist went on, “live in developing countries where laws can’t protect them against the careless labor practices that they work under, resulting in horrendous injuries, illnesses, and too often, death.”
The interview went on, but Jesse was lost in thought as he wondered what the hell cobalt was. He thought it was a color. A quick web search revealed that it was an element heavily sought after for its high use in electronics manufacturing, particularly smartphones. Then he wondered just how many phones were being made. After another search, he saw that just within the first nine months of 2018, there were already more than a billion phones produced just in China alone.
“Damn!” he exclaimed.
How many people need phones? He thought. Wait. How many people are there? He tapped some more into his phone and it revealed that there were currently 7.6 billion people living on Earth.
“Shit. That’s a fuck ton of people!”
But how many of them actually have phones? He then realized that the 7.6 billion people also has to include a lot of babies and kids, really old people, and really poor people that probably don’t all have phones.
How does this connect with the bigger picture? Jesse thought, repeating Yusef’s tip about analyzing the news. What is being gained beyond money, and who gets it? He was learning that more money was definitely going to the elites. But Yusef warned this was an old game, and some elites want more than that. Powerful ones Yusef mentioned, like the Apostles, were focused on not just controlling money, but ideas and beliefs. They wanted votes. Souls. Total control.
DUN-DUN-DUH-NUH-DUN-DUN-DUH-NUH. A heavy and loud electric guitar riff exploded from Jesse’s phone as an alarm notification titled “Breaks over fucktard” flashed across his screen. He swiped to turn off the alarm and immediately dropped his phone where he held it, and it bounced off the mattress and thudded across the carpeted floor. He ignored it and focused on his English homework, which was a set of review questions for Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl.
Jesse had reluctantly taken his break to begin with. He was surprised by how interested he had become in the book. It was the first time he had ever sat and read anything for an hour straight. It felt really girly and weird at first reading a white chick’s diary, especially since she wrote a lot about liking boys, not to mention getting her period. But he also couldn’t stop. She wrote about things that Jesse always wondered about that he would otherwise not have any kind of perspective on. Like, why did girls like certain boys? And do they feel the same way I do when I like a girl? But then again, it wasn’t like Anne had a lot of options to choose from.
As she wrote more about her deepest feelings and confessions, she also wrote about what was happening in the world around her, from the little bit of news she had access to as she hid with her family. It all sounded like a movie, and Jesse had to constantly remind himself that this actually happened, which made it more captivating to him.
Jesse also wondered what that must have felt like, to live in the same small living area for so long, with the same people. How unbearable it must have been to constantly live in fear, he acknowledged, knowing that at any minute you and your family could be swept away because awful men were constantly hunting for you. It wasn’t that hard to make a connection, as he had already heard of so many stories from Lita and neighbors and the news about families getting swept up by ICE and the police, being tricked and coerced into being captured and taken away.
Then there were Los Ojos. From the little that Jesse had heard and paid attention to them, he knew that they did the bidding of and dirty work for ICE. Los Ojos were not officers, but just regular civilians who in their free time enjoyed hunting for undocumented people and reporting them to the authorities. Sometimes they directly teamed up with ICE and the local police, and they could be pretending to be anyone. They often went door to door pretending to sell things, or lied to people and said they were with the local energy company and needed to know who was home, and asked other weird questions. In other cases they would go into a restaurant to see if there were a lot of Latinos working in the back and would wait until the end of their shifts to take photos of employees when they would leave to go home.
Was this what it was like for Anne, almost eighty years ago? The similarities were striking to Jesse. As a freshman, he wasn’t taking a history class. But Yusef had explained to him that there’s too much happening in the world right now, and learning about how we got here is too important, to wait. So Yusef had begun giving Jesse World History lessons, supplemented with videos on YouTube and documentaries. Jesse hated it.
Yet, as Yusef began tying things together and making connections with the present, Jesse began to see why history mattered. In a lesson that hit Jesse particularly hard one week, Yusef had said, “We are still living in the past. We are still a part of it, and it is a part of us. The people of the past are dead but the participants of today’s world are still playing their roles: the ones with the power, the knowledge, or the grit to do so, anyway. The limits of our planet have been discovered long ago. There has been a scramble to take as much from it as possible, before other competitors do. Where does that leave you, Mubtadi? Where does that leave your children? Where does that leave the legacy of all our struggles, our sacrifices, and our loves?”
“But they’ve been doing this forever. What the fuck can I do about it?”
“Struggle, Mubtadi! Sacrifice. Love. Fight! Fight for everything you love and hold dear! Because if you do not, someone will eventually take it from you. And if you do not know how to fight for it,” Yusef had then picked up a history textbook and let it slam on the table in front of Jesse. “This is how you learn.”
Now that Jesse was paying more attention to the news and observing what was happening in his country and the rest of the world, everything began to make more sense. He saw how events connected and were continuations of previous incidents: a constant flow of cause and effect that carried forward and rooted itself from decades, generations, and centuries ago. Jesse wondered how much of it was being influenced by these secret organizations that Yusef told him existed, made up of Readers around the world. Are all those YouTube conspiracy theories a part of the conspiracy? Jesse thought.
He was anxious now, knowing things were constantly happening around him, and just because he wasn’t being directly and immediately affected by something, that didn’t mean that someone else wasn’t being affected at that moment. He or someone he did know might be next. If some huge change was developing that could eventually affect him, then he was helpless to do anything about it.
Jesse had been on a page from Diary of Anne Frank for a while now but hadn’t really read any of it. He picked up his phone and dialed Yusef.
“As-salaamu-Alaykum.”
“Uh, hey.” The other line was silent. “Ugh. Walay-come sal-um.”
“You mean, ‘Wailakum Salaam,’ Mubtadi.”
“Yeah, right. That’s what I said.”
“What can I do for you on this glorious day, Mubtadi?”
“You can help me fight.”
“Pardon me?”
“I’m tired of hearing about the families being taken and separated. I hate that there’s Americans hunting people.”
“Yes, Mubtadi. It is terrible. If only someone did something about it.”
“I want to do something about it.” Jesse said this without hesitation.
“Yes, of course. What would you like to do?”
“Whatever I have to.”
“This brings me joy to hear, my young mubtadi. You are about to take your first steps in the real world. Now I will help you with your first steps in the dream world. In the Plane.”
“No shit?”
“So it would appear. I am as serious as you are willing to be.”
Jesse gulped on air and his stomach weighed down with excitement. ‘Fu-- I mean… yes. Yes, sir.”