"I refuse to make myself useful," Mei declares. We are sitting at the edge of the rooftop, dangling our bare feet over the side. From just behind us, the summer smell of the rooftop garden washes over us -- tomatoes and arugula and basil and weed.
        "We know," Amanda calls up from the street three floors below us. I go to get the can of cyan paint Amanda had asked for, since Mei refused, and toss it down. Amanda catches it before it hits the asphalt. She adds a few touches to the graffiti mural she has been spraying on the house across from us, then stands back to contemplate her handiwork. Flowering vines are tearing apart the bars of a cage, releasing a figure with a raised fist and a shock of bright blue hair.
        Mei didn't refuse to get the paint out of laziness. Nobody who saw her racing around with fliers and petitions and signboards and spray paint during the last series of student protests could doubt her capacity for tireless work. Her idleness now is part of her latest artistic project, a principled rejection of the capitalist value of diligence.
        The rest of us -- myself, Amanda, and anyone else who decides to share this building for a night or three -- we all have a role in Mei's project too. We are to introspect constantly about the feelings Mei's deliberate non-utility provokes in us, report on them, and sublimate them through action, art, or however else feels right, until we are capable of supporting Mei without any trace of resentment. We will exorcise the covetousness that's been trained into us, train ourselves out of the idea that not working equals not deserving.
        "I feel a sense of irrational pique," I tell Mei as I sit down on the edge of the roof again. I'm putting on my social science voice, aiming to impress her. "It would have been no more efficient for you to get the paint. It's the very fact that you refuse that triggers an entrained hostility."
        Mei nods pensively. She seems pleased with my analysis. "That's an interesting point. It's often not really about the loss of productivity. It's about the refusal to submit." Amanda decides that "irrational pique" is a good phrase and adds it to the upper left of her mural in big, bubbly block letters.
        Mei is staring off toward the horizon, and I follow her gaze. From our vantage point in the Berkeley hills, we can see out across the bay to San Francisco. Out by Mission Bay, the prismatic glass corpmind towers loom -- shards of pure, crystallized capital. As I stare at them, I know the liquid-helium-bathed quantum computer minds inside are staring back at me through ten million eyes -- surveillance cameras, microdrones, satellites, DNA samplers, and god knows what else. Still, it's hard to feel afraid with Mei lounging in the sun next to me, sipping a home-brewed beer and smiling her ferocious rebel smile.
        From here, we can also see the barricades that surround what used to be the UC Berkeley campus, constantly regenerating barriers of discarded furniture, sandbags intended for flooding control, live ivy and kudzu, impromptu art pieces, and ex-student demonstrators. They keep the police and the private security forces out but welcome in the formerly homeless, the formerly "illegal" -- the defectors of the surplus labor army that the corpminds ground into poverty to keep the price of humans low. Beyond the barricades, the corpslaves (as Mei calls them) streaming down the highway toward their daily travails must already be referring to us using nomenclature pumped directly into their brains -- communists, maybe even terrorists. Mei, who likes Rousseau, calls us the Natural State.
        Even at this distance, I can faintly hear what the police speakers are blaring out. "You are occupying privately owned property."
        Mei spits off the roof. "Only private because you fucking stole it out from under us," she says.
        The corpminds had coordinated their investment strategy to collapse the value of the university's endowment, then seized the entire campus as collateral for debts owed. I wrote a packet-sniffing program to listen in on the corpminds' secure networks and watched them auction the property off among themselves, selling it and buying it and selling it again in milliseconds as the value of the ground under our feet fluctuated. It was grotesque. Why the corpminds had done it was anyone's guess. Maybe they had wanted to poach the engineering faculty. Maybe it was because the university had refused to stop teaching critical theory that challenged their hegemony. Or maybe they just couldn't stand the idea of a public institution still having influence and power.
        You know it was bad if even a computer science major like me joined the protests, throwing away a lifetime of the most pampered jobs in service to the corpminds. I had offers -- wealth and security in exchange for my privacy, my ownership of my body, a piece of my volition. Just a few implants. That was all they asked. Just a few adjustments to optimize my productivity, suppress certain attributes that might get in the way of profit-making. I rejected every contract that hadn't already been voided when I showed up to join the demonstrations.
        The police loudspeaker continues. "This is trespassing. If you do not vacate the several properties on which you are illegally squatting, it will be our duty to effectuate our claims."
        The corpminds never mention violence directly, but we're not in any doubt about what they're threatening to "effectuate" upon the bodies standing before them in protest. I took a turn out there with the demonstrators early this morning, after I finished weeding some of the communal gardens. It was exhilarating and terrifying, staring down the bulldozers, the rifles, the gas grenade launchers, the phalanxes of armored private police with minimalist logos on their shields. Some are metal robots, some human robots. They move with disturbing synchrony, a cold, lifeless mind marionetting them. I wonder idly if they feel its blind sight staring through them, monitoring, judging.
        "Sooner or later," Mei says. "Sooner or later, they're going to charge the barricades. They're going to demonstrate the coercive, violent nature of their power on innocent flesh, and it will all fall apart. People will wake up." This is Mei's theory, our hope for the Natural State's eventual victory. We will break the myth of the corpminds' benevolence, amplify the dissonance between the corpslaves' programming and the evidence in front of their eyes until something breaks.
        But I'm starting to worry. It's been weeks now, and the corpminds have been content to threaten and surveil and wait. "Are we so sure they will? What if they have some other way to break us?"
        Mei shakes her head. "No, there isn't another way. Paris 1871, Colombia 1928, Prague 1968, Kent State 1970, Cairo 2011, Kiev 2014… I could go on. When people rise up, centralized power can only win through force, revealing its illegitimacy."
        I'm not so sure. "But what about Beijing in 2023? What about Occupy? Nobody had to get killed for those movements to fall apart."
        We debate back and forth. Mei leans her head on my shoulder and says, "Ade, you're wrong. I love you, but you're wrong," and I laugh.
        Amanda joins us on the roof to doodle in chalk, diagramming our thoughts and arguments. She brings one of the collectively owned laptops, and we co-author a short essay on the Natural State's forum, disseminating Mei's conclusion: the decisive confrontation is still ahead.

        Later in the evening, Mei, Amanda, and I are inside, washing and drying out dinner dishes and waiting for the polyamorous love-bond among the three of us to resolve into one of its several possible configurations. There are days when we all end up sleeping in a sweaty, cuddled pile in a single bed, but today Amanda and I eventually slip into an available bedroom, arm in arm, while Mei wanders off to find her own space.
        Amanda undresses me slowly. I trace her collarbone, her arms, the intricate tattoos around her waist. Her mouth is on my neck, her tongue tracing warm, tingling lines of pleasure. My legs are around her waist as she lays me back on the bed.
        "Oh," she says, and at first I think it's a sound of pleasure. But then she stops, sits up suddenly. The smile is gone from her beautiful face, and her dark, graceful eyebrows converge. She flicks on an additional light, then maneuvers me close to the lamp, examining my neck. She probes with a finger, and now I can feel it too -- a thin, filamentous something running alongside my throat, so barely there that only a sensitive tongue could detect it, if you weren't looking for it.
        Amanda and I race to find Mei. When we get to the room where she's planning to sleep, she must see the panic on our faces, because she throws down the book she's reading and gets to her feet. "What's wrong? Did the corpslaves attack the barricades?"
        Amanda shakes her head. "Ade has--The corpminds have--" She swallows, or maybe gags, takes a breath, and manages to continue. "They've gotten inside her. Their implants."
        But Mei seems to relax for a moment. "No, no, don't worry, it can't be that. That's not possible. They can't just--I mean, there's a procedure, isn't there? We would know if--" She falters when her reassurance doesn't seem to calm either of us. I take a step closer to her reading light, still half-naked, making her look closer. She examines the side of my neck, traces it with her fingers, and her breath catches. Mei may not understand the mechanics of nerves and wires, but she understands the precariousness of bodily autonomy and understands that mine is being taken from me, an alien nervous system running parallel to my own.
        "Oh." She just stares at the unnatural lines superimposed on my muscles and tendons, as if trying to process what's happening. Then, abruptly, she starts pulling her clothes off, prying and pinching at her skin.
        The three of us find other disturbing signs, poring over each other's bodies -- trace evidence of strange new structures appearing within us, or maybe just now rising to the surface from their hiding places. Amanda can't stop staring at the tiny machines working their way through my flesh, as if they might do something even worse if she looks away for even a moment. As if she can somehow protect me from them. Mei turns inward, rifling through her notes and muttering to herself. I just shut down, curled up on the bed, cold with dread and too stunned to do anything. We don't sleep until dawn.
       
        Over the next few days, more signs of infestation appear, circuits and networks becoming visible under our skin. Some former medical students go around taking blood and confirm that we are all full of nanites -- the whole Natural State. The microscopic machines can replicate, assemble into self-templating structures, change the chemistry of our synapses, our blood, our cerebrospinal fluid.
        The corpminds didn't have to charge the barricades, because they were already deeper inside the Natural State than we could have imagined.
        I cross the chaos of workshops, art studios, and rooftop gardens that used to be a campus, to the computing cluster that once belonged to the UC Berkeley EECS department. The cluster is powerful enough to crack sophisticated cryptography, letting me bust my way into the corpminds' networks, to watch their traffic. In the representation of the network that appears in my VR goggles, each corpmind looks like a luminescent mushroom looming over the bay -- an enormous fruiting body of hoarded data, a narrow stalk where access is controlled and restricted, and then a dense, sprawling network of billions of teeming, filamentous hyphae reaching throughout the city and beyond it, pulsating with information absorbed through sensors and cameras. Data is flowing into and out of the Natural State, into and out of us. Measurements of our blood counts, our microbiomes, our neural action potentials streaming out to the corpminds. Instructions come back: build, measure, buy, sell. Trillions of digital contracts are being signed and transactions conducted. Shares of our future productivity are being bought and sold and speculated on. Our debts and grants and fellowships make us purchasable. Our health is being involuntarily insured, wagered on, and manipulated from the inside to collect a profit. The Natural State is being financialized, every cell of our bodies, every base pair of DNA turned into micro-capital.
        How did this happen? When were the seeds of the corpminds' control planted in our flesh? Did drones fly over, showering us with nanites like spores? Or were we inoculated long ago, during medical treatments or through the food we ate? Or were we born already steeped in silicon, infected in the womb? We thought we had chosen to be free of them, but we'd never had a choice at all.
        The network traffic coming from me is awful. It makes my skin itch and my stomach churn with the instinctive desire to evict the parasite by any means -- vomit or shit or sweat or bleed or cry, it doesn't matter, just get it out. Individual neurons in my brain are being priced, and access to them is being bought, sold, leased, and sub-leased hundreds of times a microsecond. Contracts and subcontracts are being arranged among half a dozen corpminds for the construction and use of fiber-optic cables traversing my legs, my chest, my neck, my face. If I pull my skin taut, I can faintly see them being built and then disassembled when they're no longer useful, growing and shrinking and winding like thin worms. Nanites owned by different corpminds are fighting over the nerve endings in my tongue and my finger pads and my nipples, dismantling and buying and breaking one another to control my desires and their fulfillment.
        Amanda and I gather some other former computer science and electrical engineering students in the computing center. For days, we hardly sleep. Amanda's hand always stays clasped around mine, even as we're both completely immersed in virtual space, every so often giving a gentle squeeze to remind me to eat, to drink water. She's as gorgeous in virtual space as in real space -- an intellect as clear and glittering as stained glass, full of beautiful, manifold symmetry. We're perfectly coordinated, every program we create representing an intricate intertwining of our minds -- intimate and powerful. We swamp the corpminds' networks with DDoS attacks, try to issue spurious commands to the nanites, try to buy our own cells and thoughts and skin back from them with counterfeit cryptocurrency. But even when it works, even when we kill a handful of nanites or disrupt a subcutaneous network, the corpminds just collect on the micro-insurance contracts they've sold each other and continue on. After two weeks, we've had enough. We're not going to win this way.
        I come back to my contaminated body, collapse in dizzy exhaustion against Amanda, my face tucked against her collarbone. She runs her hands over my hair and absently traces the impressions my VR goggles have left on my face. Finally, she pulls her headset off, too, and lets it clatter onto the table.
        When she eventually speaks, the defeat in her voice is heartbreaking. "Let's go home."
        The Natural State is losing its atmosphere of cookouts and weed smoke and music drifting over the rooftops. Before, we were on the path to prison or death or revolution, and there was nothing to do but sing and scream joy, defiance, and fear to the stars and the city. Now, there's suddenly a different kind of future to prepare for. People are rushing anxiously from one place to another like they have work to do -- not work that brings joy to themselves and others, but terribly necessary work. Graffiti and other artwork is disappearing. In places, the barricades are slowly eroding.
        The signs of the corpminds' intrusion are becoming more visible, unnaturally regular patterns surfacing on our skin, arrays of circuit components and dense meshes of wires. In the evenings, Amanda, Mei, and I can hardly bring ourselves to touch one another. Some atavistic, ancestral memory of plague-time makes me shudder when I imagine the unwanted foreign processes happening inside us, spreading through us like strands of growing bacteria.
        One morning, I wake up with an unquenchable thirst burning the back of my throat. I try water, tea, beer -- nothing quenches it. Then, as if innocently, Mei mentions that there's a coffee shop on San Pablo Avenue that makes incredible cold brew, and I know that's exactly the thing. I'm walking down the hill and am about to cross over the barricades and into enemy territory when Amanda catches up with me and shakes me by the shoulder and asks what the fuck I think I'm doing.
        Later, I trace the network packets that carried the contracts to manufacture my need, trace my relationship to Mei, send action potentials to influence Mei's speech center, suppress my fear of crossing the barricades, and make me leave the Natural State. Mei doesn't remember saying anything. She's never had a cold brew coffee in her life.
        Later that evening, while we're planting new tomato seedlings in the garden, Amanda suddenly breaks. She sits down hard, her face in her hands, sobbing. I sit next to her and wrap my arms around her.
        "I could have had a good life," she says. "I could have graduated with an electrical engineering degree, had a good job at any company I wanted." Her shoulders are hunched and tense with anxiety and fear. I massage them gently, but she doesn't relax into it like she usually does. "I could have had a career. I could have had a house, a husband. I could have had kids. I've been so stupid, so lazy, to throw it all away. I didn't-- I just--"
        "Amanda, you never wanted any of those things."
        What happened to all those conversations about the bourgeois strictures of marriage? What happened to resisting pressure to perform reproductive labor? What happened to all the beautiful, gay, poly sex we had?
        "I wasn't thinking," Amanda groans. "I wasn't thinking."
        "Listen." I try to turn her head, get her to look at me, but she keeps her face buried in her hands. "It sounds like you're not thinking now. They've gotten inside you, Amanda. This isn't coming from you."
        Finally, she looks up. Her eyes are bloodshot from crying. No, wait. Those aren't blood vessels. The lines are too straight, blue instead of red. Wires. I flinch back, and in that moment Amanda pulls away from me and stands up, eyes wide and wild, muttering, "I have to pull myself together, get my life back on track…" She rushes downstairs and out the front door, and I sprint after her, calling her name.
        She moves fast -- almost inhumanly fast. By the time I catch up to her, she's already climbed over the barricade. A corporate security officer is standing next to her, one hand on her shoulder, nodding understandingly as she explains that she needs help, she's made a mistake.
        A mistake? Is that all it was?
        The communal gardens are being uprooted, the free clinics shuttered. The medical students are being whisked away to privatized training programs. The formerly homeless are being turned back out onto the streets, people reclaiming what they considered their private property. When I get back to the apartment, I sit on a sofa and cry. The building is emptying out. My chosen family is being taken away from me.
        But Mei comes back. Thank god she comes back. I wrap myself around her and won't let go until I notice the canvas bag slung over her shoulder. She sets it down on our kitchen table. (Our? When did I start thinking of this freely shared space as our apartment? When did ownership creep back in?) She pulls out items one by one and sets them firmly, grimly, on the table. Gauze. Rubbing alcohol. Hydrogen peroxide. Medical tape. Tweezers.
        Razor blades.
        Mei looks at me, and her eyes blaze with love and sorrow for the coming pain and hunger for real freedom. I look back at her, shaking with fear, yet brimming with admiration and awe at her courage.
        The first cut makes me scream, even though the pain is blunted by alcohol and topical anaesthetic. It's on my back, over my shoulder blade. Mei digs quickly with the tweezers, then presses down with the gauze. When I dare to look, Mei has a tiny circuit chip clasped in the tweezers. Optical fibers dangled from it, no thicker than spider silk. Dark red drops collect at the end of each self-assembled strand. I feel sick, lightheaded, but I say, "Okay, do the next one."
        The most disturbing incision is in my scalp, to remove a transceiver chip that is wired directly into my brain. Mei slowly starts drawing a length of fiber-optic filament out of my head, and the room dissolves around me. Smooth touch is bright white is river pebble, water flowing, rounded corners, brushed metal. Happiness is in a smell of coffee, a big gulp of rich, dark, black oil, refreshing in the burning, bombed desert, sweet like syrup, like sun on fields of graves, on fields of corn, growing stalks blooming into rose-scented deep red gunshot blood splatter, iron taste in a mouth of gears and pipes, and heat rising into smoke that swirls in hurricane clouds crashing on the vacation shores on billboard screens flashing city lights glittering on tower glass shattering and crashing and booming and busting and rising, falling like breath and heartbeat in my chest, and all this is corpmind, and all this is of me, and I am of it until suddenly I'm not. Mei has pulled the sickeningly long filaments all the way out and is dabbing with gauze at the blood and tears leaking down my cheeks.
        She carefully disinfects and bandages the profusely bleeding wound, and she kisses my ear and my neck. "It's okay. You're okay. Breathe."
        Then it's Mei's turn. I take off her shirt and run my fingers over the place just below her collarbone, where I can feel that a dense network of circuits has grown close to the skin. I sterilize the razor with rubbing alcohol and then hesitate.
        Mei meets my eyes, jaw clenched. She takes my hand and squeezes it. "Do it. I want to be free."

        For a week, we do this every night. We've returned to the primal love ritual -- chimps picking parasites off of one another. The self-assembled structures run deep, extending their tiny sensors and wires into muscle and connective tissue, spiderwebbing our thighs and hips and faces and fingers with electronics. They're embedded so far into us that I feel sure they infiltrated us much longer ago than we knew. Maybe they've been manipulating us our whole lives. Sometimes, the wires and sensors squirm under the skin and worm their way deeper into the tissue to avoid the tweezers. Once, I make an incision on Mei's calf and find a tiny camera staring out of the bloody wound at me. I crush it with the tweezers after I pluck it out.
        They were part of us, deeply integrated, and we do real violence to ourselves as we tear ourselves free from the networks of meaning and value and contracts and desires that tie us to the corpminds. Pulling a bundle of sensors out of the cartilage of Mei's ear canal makes her deaf on her right side. Severing a fiber-optic conduit in my wrist makes my left hand go numb, and it never recovers. I've lost every memory from the time I was seven until I was twelve. Mei can't read English anymore, only Chinese. I can no longer use a computer. I don't see green anymore. She doesn't taste salt. We're leaving pieces behind as we cut ourselves free from the network.
        But we are cutting free. We can walk outside without being overcome with the overwhelming, unquenchable desire for a perfume, a new sweater, a hibiscus tea, this year's smartphone. Without the obscuring haze of the corpminds' ideology, we can mourn the resisters who have been crushed all over the world to make these things for us. We open our apartment to the homeless again, share the food we stored away during the Natural State's collapse.
        And the corpminds know. They've seen our resistance, and they are ready to evict, convict, medicalize, institutionalize -- all the violent verbs of power. Day after day, their private police idle their cars and armored vehicles in the street outside. From the rooftop garden, we can see drones circling overhead, surveilling and waiting. Waiting to see if we can really disentangle ourselves from all their puppet strings.
        Riot shields and handcuffs and rifles and missiles are arrayed against us. I wonder if, when we finally pull the last bits of wire out of our bodies, the corpminds' overwhelming force will finally come -- finally leave us two shattered, bloody corpses, or two cowering creatures in a cage. Maybe. But until then, we hold one another's scarred, lacerated bodies. We take care of one another and dozens of others. We tend our garden together, we paint defiant, joyful murals on walls that aren't ours, we ask instead of buying, we give instead of selling, and we swear, we swear -- they will never use us again.