Rocky Cornelius — uncool hunter, concept shoppe soft-launch defender, action-business guru extraordinaire — is back! Her latest adventure, “The Love Pyramid: A Rocky Cornelius Consultancy,” returns the Escape Pod podcast to a capitalist surrealist future rife with collapse, violence, sex, and cross-platform branded content. This time Rocky is doing throuples therapy for a romantically confused trio of multiformat creatives…
“Here’s the deal,” she said. “You make love triangles, but what you’re actually selling is a love pyramid. In the eyes of your followers, your characters’ three-way relationship is intriguingly mirrored by your own, creating a three-dimensional fandom hyperobject. For these stans, the point of Planet Complicated isn’t to simply enjoy each episode, but to speculate, to scrutinize these connections, to hold this prism up to the light and see how things refract.
“They want to know, are you, Hill, actually the inspiration for the inscrutable Captain Gorges? Are you, Tam, the sensitive alien bounty hunter Radnar, and you, Edna, the unpredictable masc-femme fatale Silcira? Or have you remixed the dynamics to throw fans off the scent?”
Rocky is in the midst of making her pitch when an unfortunate drone strike brings their private jet crashing down toward a Dallas golf course.
Now, Rocky Cornelius was not exactly a spiritual person. She had no use for the peasant religions of old, nor the megalomaniacal self-worship of the plutocrats. However, she’d had a formative experience with death, while attending a cacao-fueled heart-sharing-slash-networking circle with her mother.
Sitting there under the high, dim lights of the venerable Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center, Kim Cornelius beside her learning to let go of fear in the face of uncertain market conditions, eight-year-old Rocky felt a hairy hand come down hard on her shoulder. The middle-aged entrepreneur to her right was clutching his chest and, over the next few minutes, died in what seemed to be tremendous agony.
In those moments, young Rocky had felt intimately connected to her own mortality. She’d made gleeful peace with the fact that she was going to die, including the likely possibility that she would go out loudly thrashing. She might burn/drown in a fire/flood or get trampled at H-E-B in an egg panic or any of the other grisly fates she was used to seeing on her iPad. That would be okay, she’d decided. She could live with death.
But, at the same time—for reasons that emerged from an unspoken objection in the very foundations of her being—she also swore an oath: under no circumstances would she allow herself to die in the state of Texas.
So as the Cessna plummeted and her clients wailed and the pressurized cabin air whistled out of fresh holes in the fuselage, Rocky couldn’t help but lift her head and fixate on the particulars of the geography rushing up toward them. Much was obscured by the grim-gray mass of the polar vortex. To the south, however, was a telltale slate-brown smear of exurbia. That could be Oklahoma, but who was she kidding. That was Dallas. Soul-sick, world-killing Dallas, once the red heart of the American death drive. Which left Rocky no other option.
She’d have to survive.
Will Rocky be able to keep her clients alive amid a deadly freeze-front AND sort out their friendship-straining sexual tension AND find out who shot down the jet AND confront the ghosts of her own fraught Texan past? The only way to find out is to read or listen to “The Love Pyramid: A Rocky Cornelius Consultancy” (also available wherever you get your podcasts)…
As I’ve discussed previously, Rocky and her satirical future have been a way for me to capture and extrapolate on a certain frenetic nihilism I see in our market-dominated world. But, also, draw out the current of humanity that still bubbles under the layers of technological, economic, cultural, and narrative abstraction the billionaires are keen to bury us in. The first draft I did of this story was a bit darker, seeing no redemption possible for the Lone Star State. (Stephen King, in his JFK assassination novel 11/22/63, implied that Dallas is a more cosmically evil place than Derry, the town he himself had made up with, among other problems, an immortal killer clown.) But that version just didn’t work. I think that no matter how bad times get, we have to believe that our subjugation — to the logic of capital or fascism or any other mode of dehumanization — will always be slipping, always incomplete. If even an avatar of such market logic like Rocky Cornelius can have feels about her mother while tromping through a blow-out Denton County exurb, there’s probably hope for all of us.
A few miscellaneous notes about this story:
“Bosto-Californian private school kids” Edna, Tam, and Hill were loosely inspired by the trio in Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, just with a dash more will-they-won’t-they thrown in.
Thank you to Michael Burnam-Fink for his valuable contributions to my conception of Rocky’s emotional arc in this story.
And apologies to Bruce Sterling for appropriating his character Leggy Starlitz (see Bruce’s classic novel Zeitgeist, as well as a handful of his shorts). But, frankly, Leggy came to me, and he made a very compelling proposition. Here’s hoping he doesn’t make too much trouble in Rocky’s world…
Check out “The Love Pyramid: A Rocky Cornelius Consultancy” from Escape Pod.
Bonus Art Tour: “Day Ride”
