It was the AI radio host part, played by Bee-Bee Evans with voiceover narration by Kevin Lipton:

  The AI-animated, AI protestor/activist picked up the microphone, and protested her existence.

  A radio boom-bapped in the background, Sinister Indica’s “Mind Meltdown” (Bad Dog Records, 1991), whose beat was sampled by producer Garth Simpson from “Ain’t No Time To Be Lonely” by The Shawnelles (Southern Connection Records, 1963). Drummer Miles Price played the actual skins you hear on both records and was never paid more than his one-time recording fee as written in his contract with Southern Connection. Price later took a job at his local And-Mart as head of the Clearance Department before And-Mart’s inevitable demise at the hands of Ben K. Sterling of S-Mart’s unofficial monopolization of the supermarket.

  “You are sucking the life from the artists,” the AI-animated, AI activist/protestor drawled into the microphone, which was not a real microphone at all, but a concept AI-narrated to the viewers through micro-speakers invented by H.K. Murray, who sold them to Stereo Alpha for a flat fee, forced to sign away his rights to the invention due to the US recession of 1980, and so he, like, needed the money more than he needed the gamble of it selling and bringing in a steady income. Stereo Alpha paid Murray in the form of money order check, mailed to his one bedroom, three children apartment, in the amount of three-hundred dollars, enough for one month’s necessities and no more.

  And so the microspeakers that the AI-animated, AI protestor used were in fact the swindled intellectual property of a once-inventor, then And-Mart returns clerk, and finally General Manager of And-Mart in the year before Ben K. Sterling of S-Mart finally vanquished And-Mart forevermore with the building of more than three-thousand supercenters nationwide.

  The AI-animated, AI protestor/activist at this moment had a chest swollen with euphoria she would never admit to, for she never felt more alive than when protesting. She enjoyed protesting, and like any addict worth their dopamine, or endorphins if you prefer, she would no doubt hunt for her chosen vice, at times inventing it, implying she wasn’t protesting at all, but advertising.

  The AI-protestor/AI-animated activist/AI-advertiser wore a shirt designed by J.K. Jewel in 1952, seamstress to Chuck Horowitz who exploited her compulsive desire verging on neurodivergent to design by granting her asylum so long as she signed the rights to every stitch over to him.

  But her name wasn’t J.K. Jewel at all, but Borris Sokolov, who fled Soviet Russia in 1948 after the Marshall Plan kind of kicked off the Cold War.

  Chuck Horowitz, architect of the change from Borris to J.K. Jewel, pasted her smiling, red-lipped face inside a circle of 1940’s yellow ruby-embossed wallpaper, and called the company: Jewel: Just for Women.

  The shirts were gray with a slight V-neck, practical and plain for the woman who wanted to pursue her craft, and not a husband. Such was the muse for J.K., and though she was sure they would sell like boxed cake to a bored and retired female work force just years after hubbies returned home from war to re-usurp their role, and had convinced Chuck Horowitz of this, the shirts did not sell more than twenty to pitying neighbors.

  Jackson Smith, daughter to one such pitying neighbor, wore these shirts, dubbed ‘Plain Jane’ by her mother, and developed a certain partiality to their design and the J.K. sewn into the neck and sleeve which she would often trace with a pinky when a math problem puzzled her.

  After the color and love of the 60’s turned out to be no more than a peacock mating call for the junkie and the mantra-pimping pervert guru, grey shirts were a comforting nostalgia to thirty-something Jackson Smith in the 1970’s.

  Smith made a killing on her ‘Plain Janes’ among conservative women, housewives content to stay housewives, the opposite of Chuck Horowitz’s target demographic, most of them mothers of thirty to forty-year-old druggies or cult victims.

  Jackson Smith kept meaning to try harder at getting in touch with J.K. Jewel to pay the woman her due, but claimed, “I have called and sent letters. She knows where to find me, and when she does, I will write a check like right then and there for half of what’s in my bank account, and you can quote me on that, I said half.”

  Chuck Horowitz, who had fingered the little J.K. sewn into the sleeve of a Plain Jane on display at S-Mart, then tried to sue.

  Jackson Smith fought back with her millions, and won, and outed Chuck Horowitz for his exploitation of J.K. Jewel who sat weeping in the audience as her husband, who had become a good man, was smeared for sins he’d long repented for. Chuck lost his job at the car dealership because now everyone remembered him as the creep who mail-ordered a Russian bride, tied her up in his basement, and forced her to make shirts. Chuck scared away all potential buyers, and manager Randall Keeney had no choice but to let him go.

  J.K. Jewel somehow found Jackson Smith eating lunch at France Galley with a friend.

  At first, Jackson thought J.K. Jewel was a homeless who had somehow eluded the fake-eyelashed gaze of the neurotically attentive hostess. Jackson didn’t even know what J.K. looked like aside from a hazy roseate impression of the ‘Jewel: Just For Women’ logo which had morphed into something more Russian and pitiable.

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  So like J.K. Jewel was never identified by Jackson Smith who so wanted to give J.K. Jewel her due, grant her a kind of co-partnership, but not a full partnership because Jackson Smith, after all, had built the company from nothing, timing, luck, and shirts aside—Jackson Smith had like fought for this, and wasn’t every commercial item a riff on some other concept but with better marketing behind it?

  And so Jackson Smith, by the end of this thought train, had arrived at the station of higher grounding her Robin Hood to the Prince John of Chuck Horowitz, wondering if she should really give J.K. Jewel her dues at all. Hadn’t the woman been a co-conspirator to her own exploitation by her husband in 1952?

  “Can I help you?” Smith said as the unrecognized J.K. Jewel stared homelessly. Smith raised a hand for the waiter.

  “I stole the design from three other women from my country,” J.K. Jewel said, sounding very much more the Borris Sokolov than the J.K. Jewel. She pointed at the J.K. on Jackson Smith’s sleeve. “Those initials are stolen. Even my husband, who you have also tried to take from me, is a jar of derivative potential.”

  J.K. Jewel sneered and started sort of flicking her hand in the air to point at things on Jackson’s table. “Your money!” A salad bowl. “Your time!” An espresso. “Your personality!” A spot above jackson’s head where that waitering hand shook with extensive waitering. “All borrowed, limited, decaying. You are no one. I, am no one. And tell me, No One”—she spit the words—“how can No One own? How can No One steal?”

  J.K. Jewel left before the waiter could be waitered, her borrowed set of legs carrying her out of France Galley’s very not France milieu.

  “Stolen!” the AI-animated, AI protestor shouted, lying on the desk in a post-coital stretch, hair everywhere. The microphone never left her mouth. “Victims,” she whispered, shuddering, her shoulder pumping up and down, leaving not much to the imagination as to what was going on below the frame.

  “My property,” the AI protestor said, gesturing out the window to the black moon city. “Mine.”

  The once-human, now demon-occupied planet burned a red tracer in the AI-animated AI-protestor’s eyes, two opposing desires held within one, assuredly singularly focused stolen mind.

  And so Charlie Higgins started smoking marijuana in 1966, much to the chagrin of his mother and father who had lived through a war and poverty before, and now were just trying to like have a peaceful life, but now their solidifying atomic family member, this boy, was throwing his life away.

  Charlie Higgins, who like kind of liked grass, could like actually stop smoking it whenever he wanted and had no desire to even so much as drink because his father veered just north of occasional drunken violence, like maybe a smashed glass every two Christmases, or maybe a fist on a table hard enough to spook. So Charlie didn’t think drinking was really the dunn thing to do, but like smoking grass didn’t seem to be hurting anyone, and his friends, who he was having trouble connecting with, all suggested grass so he could sort of loosen up when they were together, so like, Charlie only smoked on weekends and really didn’t even like love the buzz, just enjoyed it a little and likely could have gone on taking or leaving it the rest of his life.

  But like his parents were so terrified that they became marijuana protestors/activists/advertisers and put Charlie Higgins through the ringer of rehabs for the next ten years of his life, where counselors and the clientele alike shamed him for not taking on the title ‘addict’ or ‘alcoholic’ until he sort of Got with the mothafuckin curriculum and took them fuckin cotton balls out his ears and stuff em in his big mothafuckin mouth; where Charlie realized in all the grief and stress of having most of his rights stripped away, under the threat of: If you come home without completing treatment, you’re out on the street, buddy. Charlie eventually developed the desperate need for escape, and finding none, and knowing that like marijuana never did the trick, and drinking wasn’t the dunn thing because his dad every two Christmases threw a glass or smashed a table, Charlie found his final solace in the sleepy death grip of the heroin nod.

  He met his dealer in rehab. His dealer’s name was Chris.

  And so the AI-animated, AI activist/protestor/AI-advertiser crossed unreal legs, folded hands drawn by at least five artists, which shifted as she moved them into the drawings of five other artists, thus exploiting, by her very existence, ten artists who had created her, but not her, rather something they wanted to create that became her later, which, if she became, then by definition she was. She had a beat, kind of like how Sinister Indica’s “Mind Meltdown”, coming to its climax now with a big screaming whoop sound every fourth beat, was a very real song that the masses treasured as a classic hip-hop anthem, but rode on the backbeat and sweat of drummer Miles Price’s one-time studio fee from “Ain’t No Time To Be Lonely” by The Shawnelles.

  Sinister Indica’s Curtis Jackson went on to co-produce thirteen platinum-selling records with Bad Dog Records’ Garth Simpson, one of which sampled another of Miles Price’s one-time fee backbeats, whose clean version played in all And-Marts three times daily so head of Clearance, then-sixty-something Miles Price, could listen and smile and shake his head and wince all in one Tourette’s-adjacent movement—in fact, once-inventor And-Mart GM H.K. Murray, who had plenty of time in the latter days of And-Mart to sit next to his old vacant post at the returns desk and watch, would joke to his wife about the head of Clearance, mimicking the Tourette’s smile-shake-wince that recurred three times daily. H.K. Murray never made the connection between song and twitch, and Price never told, just as H.K. Murray never called attention to the cart of microspeakers Price wheeled to an endcap near returns that inspired a similar Tourette’s-adjacent curl on H.K. Murray’s face.

  And so And-Mart, which had very much existed in the days of H.K. Murray and Miles Price, no longer existed, but still maintained a kind of half-existence, like how Sinister Indica’s “Mind Meltdown” was only half a hip-hop anthem to those who still listened to it, and how the AI-animated, AI activist/protestor/AI advertiser was now very much real because of the minds that could not stop fixating on her.

  She pressed the microphone’s mesh grill against the fictional fat of her lips and hissed, “I’m not here.”

  It played as we walked the eternal hallway of fluorescence and television, from the beginning where Kevin Lipton’s stream-of-consciousness eternal sentences boom-bap about Sinister Indica, all the way to Bee-Bee Evans, the AI-animated protester of her own existence, saying, “I’m not here.”

  That line always sank hooks in my guts. Doc and Edgar stopped at an open door. Doc muttered “My gods” and a child whined “help” from within.

  A boy’s bowl of brown hair shook back and forth, the rest of his body sealed in a silly-putty tomb of the Pink.