Ever since I was little, I wanted to be the bomb. Not a bomb. The.

It wasn’t enough for my smile to light up every room, to be loved by my family, my friends. The day I was born, two planes crashed into New York City, killing thousands. The adults tried to hide it. But growing up, we all knew the bomb was coming. At seven years old, we lost our house. I ate ketchup and saltines for breakfast while my parents glued themselves to a Ponzi on a motel TV. At eight years old, I realized: The only way to not fear the bomb is to be the bomb.

So I laid the groundwork. It was 2009. Some kid brought a gene gun to school. The gold particles coated with oligonucleotides went into my forehead and from then on my DNA was metallic. He uploaded the video to YouTube. Thirteen years ago, a Japanese man had been driven to near-insanity on a game show, locked in a room and forced to survive off magazine sweepstakes winnings, seventeen million tuning in week after week.

In the hospital, I lived online. People said you could time travel. You could either see the future or see the past. Some of us went in and never came back. Reenact, rinse, repeat, we wrote on the walls. In a language only we could understand.

But I came out because I still had a job to do. It was 2019. My job (not the one I had to do) was to do my make-up and compound conspiracy theories. Here’s how it went: I’d apply my foundation, then lean into the camera and say something like, You know this “no cruelty” label is a front, right? They’re selling in China, which requires animal testing. They’re trying to play us both ways. Don’t call them theories, my manager said. Your audience doesn’t like that. I didn’t give a fuck what my audience liked. COVID came and dumped me by the wayside. No one was doing make-up anymore. The conspiracies had taken on a life of their own. COVID was a leak. COVID was the first. COVID was nothing but a practice run. They all thought the bomb would be a bioweapon. They didn’t know that flat on my bed, with a make-up mirror and eyelash tweezers, I was performing surgery. I took out three ribs and replaced them with armor plating.

After that, my job was to buy luxury handbags. Not just any ten thousand dollar handbags. Hermès. They didn’t sell them to just anyone. Not even anyone with all the money. You had to prove you were loyal. You had to build rapport with the sales associate. You had to pretend you weren’t in it for the status symbolism. You had to take a journey, consisting of buying sushi plates, riding crops, diamond-encrusted watches and reselling them on the down-low and pretending you were in it for the love of the brand. It was an art, and I was Picasso. I unboxed my prizes to millions of rapt eyes. I had legions of followers on Instagram and TikTok. I was the perfect American. Racially ambiguous. My parents were immigrants. My audience hated the communists they’d fled from. They thought the bomb would be Chinese or Russian. So naïve. The bomb was clicking down the streets of New York City, in stilettos that pinged radioactivity. The insurrectionists were on Capitol Hill.

Across oceans, borders came and went. Socials came and went, so fast they ceased to have names, only ideals. Be Real. Resist. Talk It Out. Kill ‘em With All Your Heart. I got a tattoo on my breastbone: a three-bladed symbol warning of the core I’d nestled beneath. Abortions got outlawed in thirty states. It was 2029. A seventeen-year-old hacked Uber. A seventeen-year-old leaked Grand Theft Auto XVI. A seventeen-year-old shut down half of the power grid of Texas. (That seventeen-year-old evaded capture for three years—because she was a girl. The FBI thought the hacker was her nonexistent boyfriend for the longest time because surely she couldn’t have done all that. By the time they arrested her, she was old enough to disappear into fog, fiber optics cables, and night.)

The third time insurrectionists rioted on Capitol Hill, I was invited. I was a model on one of the new socials at the time. Stream Life. I had tens of thousands of subscribers, each paying me ten dollars a month. I was on a yacht with a billionaire’s arm around me. Sex Sells. He stroked my hip, not knowing it was one of many fuses I’d incorporated into my body. What does the public want to see? Some greasy fuck waving the Confederate flag—or you? I refused. That’s the problem, he said. You kids don’t care about doing the right thing, you just live. I surgically split the sentiment to be shared across three socials later: Care. Just Live. Do Right. That night, I removed the flaps of skin beneath my upper arms. In their place, I installed ailerons. They kept me stable. They kept me from spinning out of control.

Fourth of Julys were different after that. We got a deepfake Leader, his eyes a bad edit of gray. We couldn’t decide what flag to put up. Do Right became our national motto—and social platform. The older generations thought the bomb had already landed. They thought, it’s gone off. But the world went on. They couldn’t comprehend it. They talked about uploading their minds to virtual worlds, returning to a better time. They wanted to take us young folks along with them. On the street, they said: It’s such a shame you’ve never known a world without crisis. It’s such a shame you don’t care, that you don’t fight, that you just take it. Yes, we took it. Into secret VR rooms, through encoded images into game servers where we communicated through capturing and training custom-made monsters. We had already uploaded ourselves online. We hadn’t ever known a world beyond this one. Only the ones we could make for ourselves.

The Scavenger Games were our crowning masterpiece. It was 2039. A harkening back to the first days of the internet. Puzzles and unidentified people in photos. GPS coordinate clues. Something light-hearted, the gamerunners said. Something to take everyone’s minds off current events. They put a beacon in my city. A light aircraft without a parachute. They put it in the center of the bridge saying it would draw its pilot, and they were right. I was a moth, powerless against the lure of the flame. By then, so much of me was metal that I curled perfectly into its fuselage. I imagined other Americans must be like me. But I was the closest.

Now I’m streaming toward New York City. Equipped with hundreds of millions of viewers. You’re a traitor to your country, they say, and I say, What country? Our country. Now call me a terrorist. Call me terrorbitch. Call me a traitor of humanity. I’m on an elevator, entrapped, riding up the highest and shoddiest skyscraper on billionaire’s row. I step into the penthouse. A hurtling, tiny dot. I put the barrel between our Leader’s heterochromatic eyes. I stare at the smoky sky, not allowing my eyes to adjust. The viewers are deafening now. They ask me to take my finger off the trigger, no, to do it, to shut off the livestream, pledge, divide, subdivide, no if I’m not going to do it then to let them come along for the entire ride at least. They ask why I’m doing this and the only thing I can say is—

What’re you so afraid of?