Trigger Happy
Shoot first, ask questions later
Steven Poole sketches out our postBrexit, migrant-hunting AR future
In the new sovereign utopia that is post-EU Britain, adults and children alike are going nuts for the latest craze, Pokémon Go Home. We took back control of our borders; now
Pokémon Go Home lets everyone help in the democratic task of sending migrants back where they came from.
Using robust profiling algorithms and your smartphone’s camera, the game has you search for migrants in streets, parks and cafés. With its deep-learning tech, Pokémon
Go Home simplifies the task of the vigilante, who may not be able to tell at first glance who is a migrant and who isn’t. After all, a Pole might well speak better English than many of the natives, and will also be indistinguishable in skin colour. In this way have literally billions of East Europeans come over here to perform skilled work while blending imperceptibly into the population. But there is no fooling the AI behind
Pokémon Go Home. On the AR display, an Albanian orthopaedic surgeon is successfully represented as ‘Albasaurus’, a disgusting green monster that frauduently lives on disability benefits, while a Lithuanian microbiologist is unerringly unmasked as ‘Oncosaurus’, part of the immigrant cancer that is eating away at our country.
Once you’ve tracked down and identified your unsuspecting migrant, you ‘collect’ them by throwing a brick to knock them out. The player must use an actual brick, rather than a virtual one, but helpful targeting information and physical hints are provided by the phone; as we all know, the government has thoughtfully provided stacks of actual bricks for just this purpose at ‘Pokéstops’ all over the country. When you have successfully knocked out your target, the app automatically contacts the Home Office with a precise GPS location for the foreigner, who is then picked up in an unmarked black SUV.
At this point the player is given two choices: send the migrant straight to a deportation-processing centre, or build him or her into a powerful fighter. Excitingly, migrants may be ‘trained’ using techniques shared by our friends in CIA black-ops rendition research, involving torture, brainwashing, and forced steroid injections. When the player considers them ready for battle, migrants are paired off in a gladiatorial fight to the death, conducted at one of many public ‘gyms’ in popular locations. There are hundreds of such brutal fights taking place every day all over the country, though of course the migrants with the best training stats do battle at the most popular sites, such as the Olympic Stadium, the fatal encounters streamed live via Internet paysites.
The loser of each fight, of course, is bloodily killed; the winner is transported on a punishment ship to an inhospitable rocky island where it is planned that, once they are all let out of their cages, the last remaining migrants found with Pokémon Go Home will be forced to kill one another in a grand Hunger Games-style finale until only one remains. At this point the last-ever migrant will be ‘plastinated’ while still alive according to the preservation techniques developed by Gunther Von Hagens, and the body, as a commemoration and a warning, will replace Nelson atop the column in Trafalgar Square. Our country will finally be free of the scourge of the foreign-born.
The success of Pokémon Go Home, analysts suggest, arose from an innovative combination of two ideas: first, that the referendum result made it necessary to address the “very real concerns” about immigration held by much of the population; and second, that the best way to attack any social problem is through gamification.
Pokémon Go Home’s addictive way of gamifying xenophobia has shown that there is no social ill that cannot be profitably addressed in the same way. After all, before she became prime minister, Theresa May had presided over the rollout of billboard vans that literally advised illegal immigrants to “GO HOME OR FACE ARREST”. The new videogame realisation of such sentiments might appear sick to a few elite metropolitan liberals still whining about racism, but its overwhelming popularity should surely be proof enough that, in post-Brexit Britain, the mood has changed. Future sequels to
Pokémon Go Home will enable people to cathartically enact their dangerously repressed fantasies of abduction and abuse of any preferred minority group, because as we know, simple arithmetical majority now means justice. As another strong leader once said, more or less: Gotta catch ’em all!
Once you have tracked down and identified your migrant, you ‘collect’ them by throwing a brick to knock them out