Icebreaker – Gabriel Hart

October 2, 2026

Hey… where do I know you from? No? Well, who do you know at this party? Well, now you can know me—can I get you a drink? Okay, you don’t like small talk… that makes two of us. And look—here we are, just the two of us.
        So… Do you dare confess your “innocent” role in this era of post-conspiracy, beyond all default cognitive dissonance and treasonous morality, maybe claiming that the human mind wasn’t designed to process this deceptive complexity? Orphaned by critical thinking, we essentially volunteer to be enslaved by our own imaginations, fantastically world-building in response to reality behind us being mimicked just so it can be sold back to us altered or altogether obliterated… Where the only ones you can fully trust are the ones no longer participating, so the only logical instinct is to interrogate the dead.
Like, do you remember when strict air quality regulations were suddenly lifted, when massive spikes in fatalities overwhelmed our morgues—then our crematoriums—to clear the severely “backlogged” inventory of human remains? When the continuous, high-capacity incineration upsurged the release of carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, fine particulate soot, and vaporized mercury from our dental fillings? The way the environmentalists were still screaming for limits on cremations to reduce “air toxics impact” through the muffled gag of their masks, choking theatrically between every syllable, some of us hoping their mobs would grow only to distract the authorities and the crematorium security, so we could get acquainted with every corpse just to see who these kamikaze crisis actors really were, then audit them for how much they were being paid to die.
        Oh, I’m sorry…You don’t feel “comfortable” with this conversation? I’m only asking you all these questions because I’m… just so curious about you. I’m not one of those guys who just talk about themselves the whole time, you know.
        For example, do you still remember your own loved ones betraying you when they suddenly “succumbed” to the virus, despite pre-existing conditions their insurance conveniently wiped their hands of? Something felt off, right? So if you’re anything like me, you planned to do your own investigation over their death-bed with your prodding twenty questions, but their final cue came quicker than expected and they “died” before you could scream into their ear your final question: “If you were trapped at home since that second week of March, where were you when I needed you tomorrow?”
        Since you seem like a smart girl… Did you feel your intelligence insulted the way they made actual funerals die, too? To silence our suspicions, they allowed us to “attend” those final farewells remotely, and the way our own family’s faces were boxed in an onscreen grid, in my opinion, was borderline Brady Bunch campy. Forming cloying hearts with their hands, they kissed the screens: their lips smacking electrostatic dust-moted glass as they all waved goodbye, like we were all incarcerated while our dearly departed had just finished their life sentence. Do you think they saw me as I just sat, nodded, and stared, hoping I could psychically stoke some sort of inner uprising through the secret language of our shared blood?
        Okay, so you’re a liberal. That’s so cool. But you do know that doesn’t matter anymore, right? Of course, you’ll recall when “the right” was convinced it was a complex counterplot designed by the globalists even though their donors were the ones profiting, but what about the way “the left” was so chill and self-righteously rational the way they simply blamed both the inevitability of science and the slightly culturally “unsanitary” Chinese?
        Or what about Mark Mothersbaugh, the bespeckled syncopated synth-prince and pop-art architect who warned us against de-evolution, when he disclosed in a major interview that when he got infected, it activated an intricately plotted psychosis starting with a bludgeoning from a brick? Look it up. “I felt blood from being hit,” he said. “I was handcuffed to a parking deck downtown. I had this whole elaborate story of how these kids sold me to an ambulance company that then got some sort of a payment for delivering (redacted) patients to their ICUs. I totally believed it.” Would you question the sanity of celebrated liberal artist who helmed an innovative, influential, and attractive blueprint of subliminal subversion when he’s adored by millions (he’s now dabbling in A.I., so maybe don’t answer that)?
        Can you imagine: when I contracted it, the day after the night I came home convulsing with demonic chills, when I couldn’t stop shaking and nothing (or no one) would (or was allowed to) keep me warm? I was trapped not only in my own body, but against the looping scenery that suddenly looked all the same. The thought I wasn’t supposed to think finally dropped the veil: That nothing was real, that the world had been playing an elaborate trick on me. Every person I saw against the vast projected greenscreen who opened their arms claiming they knew me were being paid by our government to keep me satiated with the lucrative ruse of romance, the ever-nourishing yet hollow dream I was finally learning could only be fueled by delusion—and eventually, full psychosis—and is also contagious? It took me three days to “snap out of it,” but nothing in my psyche had actually changed: I was just allowed to go to work again.
        We don’t have to talk about the vaccine, I know it’s a sensitive subject… especially when my brother-in-law went into instant cardiac arrest and my dear friend got a rare immunodeficiency syndrome that nearly killed him. But the amount of people who almost died from something that was supposed to save them can’t compare to the rest of us who have still, to this day, forgotten how to live.
        Do you recall attending any remote weddings, where no one could catch the bouquet or the garter, where everyone had to get wasted at home alone in honor of the happy couple? Where instead of making eyes, eventually dancing, then going home with another single, you drunkenly slid into someone’s DMs and now you’re not allowed in public, anywhere? Is that happy couple still together? Did another wedding ever actually occur again, or did the tradition of courtship, commitment, —and for that matter, the one-night stand—fade altogether?
        So don’t worry, I’m not trying to pick up on you… though you look so familiar. Are you getting the feeling we’ve known each other forever?
        I think it was sometime in between wars… Was that you I was maybe with when I saw that acclaimed holocaust drama in a darkened desert theater? Because I think it was the night I stopped holding your hand, realizing no matter how much warmth I’d offer, they would remain cold, limp, and uncommitted. Between your dead hands and what was happening on screen, I couldn’t stop squirming in my seat, glazed at the eerily familiar sights of overwhelmed incinerators smoking, ever steady with train after train delivering human livestock to their slaughter? The way it all seemed like a vast machine, where the only product was erasure. Was it something I could not place or could not face, the déjà vu of something in the more recent past when our generation’s own genocide had yet to begin that fall, right around the corner?
        Is it “too soon” to remember if they’ve proven a direct connection between our televised state-sponsored genocide funded by U.S. tax dollars and our ever-increasing unlearning of intimacy? How can I have a cherished body count of over fifty beautiful women who still haunt me daily, yet today, when another one like you is clearly giving me the green light, I suddenly have no idea what I’m doing? Is it because you’re beginning to roll your eyes, and I fear they are going to keep rolling into the back of your head, like end credits to this bad trip sex/death education movie? Is this the night I might finally kiss someone after two years (on their actual lips and not a screen), but every time I’ll close my eyes and resign, I’ll see, in my impassioned mind: maimed children on gurneys, prisoners being brutally raped, and crowds of starving, emaciated people being herded into dead ends where they are uber-ironically bombed to death?
        To ease your worries, I already know exactly what would happen if we got together tonight, and I just want you to know, you’re safe with me. Determined to push through my personal Pavlovian blurring of sex and violence, I would bravely proceed. Because listen: you’re totally worth it, and it’s worth it for me to prove it. I’d start frantically removing your clothing like you’re on fire, you know, like I am rescuing you… from me. And I can already feel the pressure of shifting weight, your pelvis grinding… then I’d take you and pin you down beneath me, entering you finally, and with every thrust I can hear you moaning rhythmically, mounting into near-screaming… perhaps it will be the repetition in the movement of our bodies, syncing itself with the our algorithm of our respective Two Minute Hate-like atrocities, where no matter what we do, one side is dominating, the other submitting. But don’t worry, because I’ll suddenly stop when I imagine you as a child trapped under all my weight, and myself as a crumbling, bombed out building.
        Can you actually know what death feels like, the way they have nowhere to hide, the way it escalates daily, your sincere yet disconnected concern programming the customized measure of repetitive strobed violence until you slam your phone down, thinking you must somehow just get through your day, that you’ve had enough?
        If you can even remember what sex feels like, the way it anchors you to the burning planet of crematoriums, potters graves, and annihilated cities, while dissolving you into the ether through the desperate warmth of another spiral-eyed orphan like me, where the only way to escape your own body is through the possessed hammering pulse of that primal instinct, through a divine gift of mutual ecstasy that our species can’t survive without… does that mean you’ve had enough?
        Are you averting eye contact out of fear that it’s just a matter of time before we’ll lose it completely? Opting for the screen, can you even believe what you’re seeing? Do you still trust your own judgment—your opinion, your taste, your comfort, what or who you’re actually attracted to now—among the negating hypnosis of this repellant footage?
        Do you subscribe to the theory that with the advent of the plague, time as we know it stopped, then restarted with unprecedented acceleration to the degree that we can no longer grieve? Don’t you want to interrogate the dead? Didn’t it used to seem like the dead were trying to tell us something? I can’t forget the pre-plague procession of countless quaint and antiquated overdoses, accidents, misadventures, and suicides, back when the world seemed to mercifully pause so we could take a deep breath and cry, to capture some catharsis in the void each one left behind. Now, we feel nostalgic for pre-genocide, for a time we aren’t sure ever existed.
        Do you have that sinking feeling that everyone but you and I have left the party? We’ve been sitting in this dark room all alone, and so far, you haven’t said anything. Is there anything you want to ask me? Maybe somebody unliving? I think I saw a Ouija board out there with our names on it, probably… like once we get the guts to play, it might spell them out. Wait, what was your name again? Did you move the planchette, or was that me?
        Either way, the dead doesn’t seem to be saying anything, and I can’t find any conspiracy in what I am physically feeling: the skin of my skull being pulled back by some kind of phantom squeezing, a panic we may not be as alone as we thought when our cemeteries are this past capacity, my heart skipping every time I acknowledge how hard it’s pounding, proving I’m alive—yet prompting me: do I want to be? —every little distraction prohibiting me to grieve, that no matter who is dying—the people we are told are terrorists, or our own family—there remains an ever-evasive deadline, the shadows of the goalposts shifting like sundials taunting, and I since I have lost the God-given contentment of (for Christ’s sake) merely existing… What am I doing after this, you say? Wow, that’s so sweet, but unfortunately, I must be leaving. I have to wake up early for work.