The girls find the faces on the floor of the abandoned rubber factory. Michelle puts one on followed by Nichelle and then Richelle.

“All of us look like each other!” exclaims Michelle.

Michelle is the pretty one and she holds all the cards. Anything she says about her appearance becomes vocalised in a way that makes Nichelle and Richelle want to punch her, but they do not because they are best friends who explore abandoned urban sites together.

“Now I’m you!” screams Nichelle. She has put on another face! The rubber straps pinch her ponytail so that it looks kind of like Michelle’s bun from the front.

“This is fun!” yells Richelle, who has a flair for redundancy.

There are faces of people of all races and nations on the factory floor. The girls pretend to be each other for a little while longer and then they pretend to be each other’s mothers. Then they pretend to be each other’s maids. Then they go home and eat dinner and take shower and do their homework like good daughters of the land.

Nichelle is the last to leave. Her tote bag is stuffed with rubber masks.

///

In the far future the body is no longer deterministic.

The revolution is driven by a number of corporate executives, chief amongst them a young entrepreneur with armies of biochemists and materials engineers under her wing.

"We want to give the young people of tomorrow the hope we've never had for ourselves," plays the looping press release in the lobby of her office.

Hordes of youths descend on the nation's skate parks, shopping mall rooftops, football fields, and abandoned factories every weekend. They have almond eyes and anime eyes and square jaws and fuck-me lips and broad shoulders and narrow shoulders and killer pecs and giant tits. They have great calves and twink legs and Popeye arms and washboard abs and dad bods and Kim Kardashian buttcheeks. On Saturday evenings all you can hear are the flap of rubber on concrete, rubber on skin, rubber on rubber.

"We want the young people of tomorrow to respect traditional Asian values," pleads a harried-looking young man on camera. "Our society isn't ready for this conversation."

With perky circumstance the youth in the skate parks and shopping mall rooftops and football fields and abandoned factories disagree. Everything is lost in the flapping; no one voice rises above the crowd. There is a churning and a rushing and a moving of limbs, and occasionally a single loud whoop that pierces the night air.

///

"Liberation comes at the end of the injection mould needle."

There is a fountain of liquid silicone in the public square at the middle of the city, from which all of its roads flow. The silicone amalgamates with nanoparticles in the air to form an intelligent substance that links all relationalities together, funded by a collaboration between leading social media conglomerations and the Ministry of Communication and Information. All manner of individuals commune and converge with each other in the avenues and streets of the city, coming together and coming apart at will.

People make way for each other in the streets and lanes and squares. People smile, or don't smile, and aren't judged for it at all. Kindness is, finally, a kind of movement--the lion mascot's long retired, but we remember his gentle face and his accomodatingly fluffy mane.

Once in a while people lose themselves or each other. There is no referent point anymore, you see. Physicality is such a transient thing. Parents lose contact with their children for weeks, only to find them impersonating other children's parents, making rubber families all on their own. Siblingship is declared by virtue of common materiality. The list of possible relatives and mixed-race permutations stretches and stretches and stretches on the city's passports and identification cards and duty rosters. Stretches like rubber. Like a slime mold on the forest floor.

The evangelicals are fighting against something, but they can't quite remember what.

Still, life with the fountain goes on.