Liza says Pacific Cascadia keeps itself comfortable with what she calls “bad truth” — the kind of smug committee‑approved nonsense that pretends women aren’t leaned on harder, that mothers don’t carry more weight, and that generations of labor didn’t run on women’s backs while the People’s Congress debated feelings. In her view, every time someone insists women already have agency, they’re just dodging a bill she knows is unpaid. What Pacific Cascadia needs is a queen with a bad attitude.
Liza has agency and privilege. She was the personal assistant to Vexton Ulyth. Her skill managing the affairs of a zealous radical kept the lights on and the pantry stocked. Ulyth’s suite of robots did the bulk of it. But they needed a caretaker for the work that was better performed by humans. This world, in 2125, is both frustrating and as privileged as it has ever been. rooTech does a lot. And rooTech, if it doesn’t agree that fair trade chocolate mint half-whites are a civil right, is existentially annoying. With a little agency and effort, the things Liza says are rights can be achieved. That’s not this woman’s way.
Her way is to choose the high-friction, high-risk path and then bitch about how hard and risky the path is. Next step: locate an agency or a man willing to indulge her. Because her needs are rights, and the agencies — especially the men — owe her. The spa-day cost becomes someone’s reparations obligation. Reparations to a bougie white lady? Really!? Yes. Kombucha is a civil right.
An Unpayable Debt
Liza’s churn rate with men is rapid. She’s a great time at the bar until she gets too drunk. Then the feral comes out and it’s rinse repeat the drunk tank. Some men are into it until she gets expensive and the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. Then the list of rights becomes a litany of reasons to ghost her.
This bad truth hurts the brand for Liza. She’s never worth the squeeze. She woke up in a run down travel van on Sunday morning only to realize the guy next to her was blue collar. He had no juice. Flat white? Pfah! Taster’s Choice instant. A rock bottom moment? No. One of her rescuers called a car for her.
She holds a master’s from UC Berkeley in Generational and Systemic Disparities in Governance. Her thesis explored the generational inequities perpetrated by fascist bureaucrats. The language is perfect: dense, accusatory, and endlessly expandable. It never has to account for the fact that she herself is the product of the same credentialing machinery, that she once kept a zealot’s household running with competence, or that the Mesh, AMEN, and a modest amount of agency still produce actual results for anyone willing to use them.
Pattern Attitude
Liza is the pattern. The university-educated, privileged critic who treats every practical solution as moral evasion and every unmet preference as proof of structural theft. The unpaid invoice is permanent because the invoice is the identity.
Until she met travel van man a week later when she was panhandling on Telegraph Avenue. Van man cleaned up well. And smelled nice. Liza didn’t remember much of that weekend. There were echoes of a deep convo discussing intransigent racism in white people. Van man and Liza are both white to the bone. He greeted her, launched into his land acknowledgement, pronouns, and ism liturgy then loudly farted. Oh.
Yeah. Slipping out of that van while he recovered was the better move.
Grad School SHYT
Back in the day she was a catch — sharp‑featured, restless, carrying that feral spark that made men lean in even when she wasn’t trying. Her mouth always looked ready to argue, her wiry frame could go shot‑for‑shot long after the guys switched to light beer, and she’d show up the next morning bright‑eyed, smug, and ready to do it again. She had that dangerous charisma that made bad decisions feel like good stories.
A couple of decades later she carries less wire and more wear, and she works harder to get anyone to ask. When they do ask, she can’t take things very far. Hangovers now claim her. Recovery claims her too. The feral spark only flickers; it no longer burns. She occupies the friend zone—a place she once mocked, then denied, then finally admitted she had walked into on her own.
There was that time, a time ago, when Ulyth was in his prime, and he asked, she said yes, and they did that. Then too many boundaries crossed streams and she ran. The personal‑assistant era came later, after a marriage, a divorce, and Sine. Liza always believed Ulyth’s mental torment manifested in his health, that the Hive Mind’s monitoring could only do so much, and that someone had to manage the human parts of his decline. So she stuck around out of a mix of guilt, loyalty, and Bad Truth.
Reality Blows
The problem is that the world refuses to come correct. Outside it’s all heresy. Just walking down the street is an exercise in forbearance. Every footstep another offense to the truth. Only in her hotel room on Haste Street can she light candles, speak incantations, and restore the purity she needs. Walking Telegraph Avenue with a protest sign announcing the end of the world this Friday is her way to fight back the evil she sees everywhere.
It’s never going to be solved. This world is not ours. We are not in charge. God made this world, in six days he made it. Then he rested on the seventh day.
And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day. Genesis 1:3-5 ESV
Liza calls the Bible bullshit. Fairytales. Myths. The fever dreams of fools. You can’t prove what the myths in the bible claim. Too, it was written by white men, who are on their face evil. Evil words written by evil men spreading toxic heresy. She believes the science. Religion is bad truth.
Agentic
My feed is full of shouts. Apocalyptic doom is nigh. The Socialists are on the march again. Political Islamists seduced them, and the two, in an unholy marriage, are going to conquer the Great Satan and make him eat his spinach. This couple promises that perfect laws and systems will finally achieve the utopia never before instantiated.
Everyone will have an income. Organic avocado toast will be delivered daily by drones. Feelings will be protected—most of the time. Feelings that violate the orthodoxy will be punished. Therapy will be a civil right, though some are more equal and will receive a human therapist; everyone else gets a robot. Mesh connectivity is a civil right, obviously. One last thing: heretics who do not answer the call to prayer will be incarcerated.
So sayeth Liza, on the authority of the Primaris Solenne.
Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer. —Voltaire, “Épître à l’Auteur du Livre des Trois Imposteurs,” 1768.
Since God is dead and we have killed him, it became necessary to replace his corpse. The through-line is thin, but now that AI is here we have chosen it to succeed the creator of the universe. We made it ourselves, so this time we can design away every annoyance that previous attempts at a better god refused to eliminate. We killed the earlier gods because they were imperfect. This one, we tell ourselves, will finally come correct.
Perfectly Imperfect
I’m Christian. Baptized Presbyterian as a baby. My faith life follows a familiar path: Sunday school, catechism, confession of faith when I was of age, then drifting far and later returning to Presbyterianism. We make an absurd claim not made by any other major faith—that Christ defeated sin and death on the cross when he was crucified. Our second claim is that the faith-life is a continual, Spirit-enabled walk of sanctification and discipleship toward the new creation.
Add that to the adjectives that impugn me.
Liza is a reason to pray. I’ve seen enough criminal, crazy and/or addicted people to know how this ends. The downward spiral escalates until one of two outcomes, recovery or death. People either pull out of the death dive or they don’t. Liza will either be mourned as a “coulda, woulda, shoulda” or not. I pray the answer is not. My wish for her is a rock-bottom surrender where she begins the rest of her new life as a recovering person. But not everyone makes it. Some close the story with words uttered by those they leave behind, “well . . . shit.”
What about the headlines in my feed? Those crazies who vandalize Walmart because they sell pork or worse, gmo foods!? The list of things I cannot change far outpaces the list of things I can. I had a cat that used a box spring as a litter box. She left behind cat shit I still haven’t cleaned. Any day now I can do the needful — clean it or throw it away. Politicians and kings come and go. Cat boxes are eternal. And unlike utopias, cat boxes can actually be cleaned.