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By Root 494 0

there’s one thing she’s learned from Ivy, it’s that contradictions stop only the people who stop and think about them, who stop to question the consistency of their various desires instead of simply forging ahead and fulfilling them all. Indeed, the only real gains Ursula herself has made in the last few years have come over the last few weeks of not stopping to think, of letting go and letting the tide of events carry her mysteriously toward both shores at once: a successful career and an admirable mission in life. They may seem to be in opposite directions, but that’s just faulty thinking, a symptom of her pedestrian skepticism, puritanical conscience, overweening pride, just an antiquated flat-earth logic that has failed to take into account some additional dimension, some heretofore unapprehended curvature that makes east merely a different degree of west, that makes the apparent contradiction consistent after all.

She has picked a direction and set sail, and the horizon shimmers with possibilities. The savage trend may not have become everything that Ursula wanted, but it has undeniably become something real, and in so doing has given her confidence in her own ability to carry on and maybe even escalate her secret guerrilla campaign against consumerism. The tween report that she and James T. Couch have just completed may turn out to be the perfect way of doing precisely this. Together the two of them have confirmed the existence of a burgeoning substratum of tween paranoia: they’ve talked to child psychologists about the increasingly violent impulses of the very young; researched the growing popularity of cartoons with complex, convoluted, and dystopian story lines; correlated rising sales figures with advertising that pits individualistic children against robotically antagonistic adults. And based on these findings, she and Couch have created the blueprints for superstition-wear, conspiracy-wear, persecution-wear: miniature trenchcoats with tall collars and protective lining against evil rays, talismanic accessories, arcane labels, badges with meaningless but ominous-looking insignias. They’ve advised the Old Navy people to be intentionally obscure, to pepper their campaigns with unexplained inconsistencies and seemingly unintentional patterns; to play on their young customers’ fears of being watched, scrutinized, laughed at; to play to their solipsism, facilitating fantasies of heretofore unimagined control, of being at the center of all things, all consciousness, all existence.

For the last two weeks they’ve been consumed by the job. Ursula has spent her days scanning the streets and her nights sketching, making notes, and brainstorming over the phone with Couch, who has continuously surfed the Net on his dedicated line while chatting with her into the early hours. Somehow they managed to meet the deadline, just this morning handing in their report to Chas, who is now editing and synthesizing it into something slick enough to justify the sizable price tag. And what’s more, they managed to do it without the help of Javier’s manic motivational enthusiasm. In the last three weeks he hasn’t checked in once at the office or returned a single one of Couch’s or Chas’s calls.

Nevertheless, they weren’t entirely lacking in Javier’s help. In fact, he was the inspiration behind the report’s unifying theme, recurring catchphrase, and eye-catching title: “Conspiracy against the Children.” At first Ursula thought Couch and Chas were even crazier than Javier for wanting to run with his idea, but after a while she began to see how it really could work. And the more they developed it, the more enamored of the concept she herself became. The conspiracy trend, she realized, could provide children with a means of expressing their mistrust of the adult world, enabling them to carry out a subversion of the brand imaging that surrounds them by wearing meaningless insignias instead of product slogans and corporate logos. Of course, she’s not unaware that the kids who’d buy this stuff would be supporting precisely the consumerism they