Gemima was once a good student. That was decades ago now, or so it seemed, bound for Oxford or Durham armed with all the philosophy and armchair-sociology to defend nearly any colonial conquest.

She was not what anybody would consider ‘educated’ now, that was, if anyone had seen her at all. Her life, it had become apparent, was now a hazy daze of mechanical routine, instilled into her body by the aching of non-motion. Awake, shoot up, vomit, collapse, awake, drink, enter fugue state, repeat. Or something to that effect.

She had once, stayed sober long enough to charge her phone and scroll on it. She found a video, ranting in bold text about learned helplessness and something offensive, set to an egregious remix of radio pop. It wasn’t a term she had heard in years, but the drug addled hallucination that would follow almost made it make sense.