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"Thoughts and Prayers" is a speculative fiction short story written by Ken Liu in 2019. It was published as part of Slate Magazine's Future Tense Fiction series for their January-March 2019 section.

Plot
Set in a near futuristic world, Hayley Fort is a current college student in California enjoying her newfound freedom from her parents. She messages her sister, Emily, that she is driving to a music festival with her secret boyfriend "Q", and tells Emily not to tell their parents, to which Emily agrees. The girls' mom, Abigail Fort, texts Emily while she is at field hockey practice asking if she knows where Hayley is, and Emily, not wanting to snitch on her sister, tells her mother that she does not know, assuming that her mom was having her usual helicopter-parent tendencies. When Emily arrives home from practice, her mom frantically tells her that Hayley's RA called from the university saying that Hayley went to a music festival where a shooting has occurred. On the television, the shooting was being reported and footage from the festival was shown. Death tolls continued to rise rapidly, and using her virtual reality glasses, Emily was even able to see the scene from a first person point of view. The Fort family anxiously tried to contact Hayley to no avail, but assumed her battery was dead or networks were jammed and left it alone. Later that night, Abigail receives the call that Hayley's dead body was found, and the Fort family was to fly to California to officially identify the body as hers. On the airplane to California, Abigail goes through the many photo memories she has of Hayley, while Gregg Fort, Hayley and Emily's father, does not wish to see the body of his daughter and questions the meaning of photographic memories while napping. When the Fort's arrive in California, they find out that the body is, in fact, Hayley. Abigail makes it a point to take a picture of Hayley's corpse. Grief-stricken, Abigail is approached by a company that once specialized in the entertainment industry that used their devices to analyze films to predict their box-office success. The company wants to use Abigail's photos of Haley and her life to have people essentially "live Hayley's life" to raise awareness about gun-control. Abigail accepts while Gregg is hesitant, and the project is started. At first, it is extremely successful with a lot of shares, donations to the Fort family, and even resulted in Abigail getting invited to the State of the Union. It inspires protests for gun change all over the United States. However, as time goes on, things start to sour. Internet trolls have begun attacking the Fort family by using the images provided in the simulation to Paint Haley in a horrible light. They edit her into forms of pornography, edit her to say things said by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, and the Fort family themselves were called "clickwhores". Gregg Fort's sister, Sara Fort, is someone who works at an armor company, with the armor being glasses that are built to screen out messages from trolls based on the criteria of the wearer. She sends Abigail, Gregg, and Emily this armor in hopes that it helps them. However, the trolls become aware of this armor, and find ways to get past Abigail's in particular. They start posting rumors that Hayley did not actually die, but ran off to live with her still alive boyfriend in China, since Q was ethnically Chinese. To combat these rumors, Abigail shares the pictures of Hayley's corpse to prove she is dead, but this only makes the situation worse. The trolls use these pictures to edit the corpse into more pornography, into dancing videos, and even into scary videos by making the corpse say that it is all Abigail's fault. All of this trauma causes her armor to block out Hayley completely, as Hayley is the biggest source of her distress. She panics, and cries to Emily screaming that she cannot see Hayley anymore; that every picture of her is blank. Emily takes off Abigail's armor and shows her a picture of Hayley, to which Abigail hugs Emily and thanks her. Shortly after this, Gregg tells Abigail he blames her, which in turn, leads to their separation. A self-proclaimed internet troll named "Heartless" explains that Abigail did this all to herself and that she deserved it because she made Hayley's death public. Heartless claims that Abigail turned her daughter into a political symbol and weapon, and admonishes her followers by saying that it took the turning of Hayley into his political symbol to get them to care about gun violence. He ends his statement by saying that because of all she has done, Abigail is the biggest, yet weakest troll of all hiding behind her armor. The story ends with Abigail sharing that politics have turned back to normal and some change was made for training to respond to mass-shooters. She also shares that Gregg and Emily both moved out as soon as they could, leaving her alone. Haunted by all of the trolling, Abigail deleted and destroyed anything and everything that had to do with Hayley, and cannot recall her face.

Reception
"Thoughts and Prayers" was included in the collection, "The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020", which is part of the The Best American Series. Series editor John Joseph Adams spoke fondly of the short story saying, "This is art. This is 100 percent art, because of how deeply it makes you think about what’s happening in the story, and how closely you get into the heads of these characters."

Awards and Nominations
2020 Locus Award for Best Short Story, finalist, "Thoughts and Prayers"