by Rich Horton
I HOPE, he writes.
He writes the most awful things. Doesn’t know why he is doing this. Perhaps she will assume that it is a wrong number. He types in details, specific things, so she will know it’s not.
Eventually she texts back.
WHO IS THIS? WILL?
The demon lover doesn’t respond to that. Just keeps texting FILTHY BITCH YOU CUNT YOU WHORE YOU SLIME etc. Etc. Etc. Until she stops asking. Surely she knows who he is. She must know who he is.
Here’s the thing about acting, about a scene, about a character; about the dialogue you are given, the things your character does. None of it matters. You can take the most awful words, all the words, all the names, the acts he types into the text block. You can say these things, and the way you say them can change the meaning. You can say, “You dirty bitch. You cunt,” and say them differently each time; you can make it a joke, an endearment, a cry for help, a seduction. You can kill, be a vampire, a soulless thing. The audience will love you no matter what you do. If you want them to love you. Some of them will always love you.
He needs air. He drops the phone on the floor again where Pilar will find it in the morning. Decides to walk down to the lake. He will have to go past Meggie’s trailer on the way, only he doesn’t. Instead he stands there watching as a shadow slips out of the door of the trailer and down the stairs and away. Going where? Almost not there at all.
Ray?
He could follow. But he doesn’t.
He wonders if Meggie is awake. The door to her trailer is off the latch, and so the demon lover steps inside.
Makes his way to her bedroom, no lights, she is not awake. He will do no harm. Only wants to see her safe and sleeping. An old friend can go to see an old friend.
Meggie’s a shape in the bed and he comes closer so he can see her face. There is someone in the bed with Meggie.
Ray looks at the demon lover and the demon lover looks back at Ray. Ray’s right hand rests on Meggie’s breast. Ray raises the other hand, beckons to the demon lover.
The next morning is what you would predict. The crew of Who’s There? packs up to leave; Pilar discovers the text messages on her phone.
Did I do that? the demon lover says. I was drunk. I may have done that. Oh God, oh hell, oh fuck. He plays his part.
This may get messy. Oh, he knows how messy it can get. Pilar can make some real money with those texts. Fawn, if she wants, can use them against him in the divorce.
He doesn’t know how he gets into these situations.
Fawn has called Meggie. So there’s that as well. Meggie waits to talk to him until almost everyone else has packed up and gone; it’s early afternoon now. Really, he should already have left. He has things he’ll need to do. Decisions to make about flights, a new phone. He needs to call his publicist, his agent. Time for them to earn their keep. He likes to keep them busy.
Ray is off somewhere. The demon lover isn’t too sorry about this.
It’s not a fun conversation.
They’re up in the parking lot now, and one of the crew, he doesn’t recognize her with her clothes on, says to Meggie, “Need a lift?”
“I’ve got the thing in Tallahassee tomorrow, the morning show,” Meggie says. “Got someone picking me up any minute now.”
“ ’Kay,” the woman says. “See you in San Jose.” She gives the demon lover a dubious look—is Pilar already talking?—and then gets in her car and drives away.
“San Jose,” the demon lover says.
“Yeah,” Meggie says. “The Winchester House.”
“Huh,” the demon lover says. He doesn’t really care. He’s tired of this whole thing, Meggie, the borrowed T-shirt and cargo shorts, Lake Apopka, no-show ghosts and bad publicity.
He knows what’s coming. Meggie rips into him. He lets her. There’s no point trying to talk to women when they get like this. He stands there and takes it all in. When she’s finally done, he doesn’t bother trying to defend himself. What’s the good of saying things? He’s so much better at saying things when there’s a script to keep him from deep water. There’s no script here.
Of course he and Meggie will patch things up eventually. Old friends forgive old friends. Nothing is unforgivable. He’s wondering if this is untrue when a car comes into the meadow.
“Well,” Meggie says. “That’s my ride.”
She waits for him to speak and when he doesn’t, she says, “Good-bye, Will.”
“I’ll call you,” the demon lover says at last. “It’ll be okay, Meggie.”
“Sure,” Meggie says. She’s not really making much of an effort. “Call me.”
She gets into the back of the car. The demon lover bends over, waves at the window where she is sitting. She’s looking straight ahead. The driver’s window is down, and okay, here’s Ray again. Of course! He looks out at the demon lover. He raises an eyebrow, smiles, waves with that hand again, need a ride?
The demon lover steps away from the car. Feels a sense of overwhelming disgust and dread. A cloud of blackness and horror comes over him, something he hasn’t felt in many, many years. He recognizes the feeling at once.
And that’s that. The car drives away with Meggie inside it. The demon lover stands in the field for some period of time, he is never sure how long. Long enough that he is sure he will never catch up with the car with Meggie in it. And he doesn’t.
There’s a storm coming in.
The thing is this: Meggie never turns up for the morning show in Tallahassee. The other girl, Juliet Adeyemi, does reappear, but nobody ever sees Meggie again. She just vanishes. Her body is never found. The demon lover is a prime suspect in her disappearance. Of course he is. But there is no proof. No evidence.
No one is ever charged.
And Ray? When the demon lover explains everything to the police, to the media, on talk shows, he tells the same story over and over again. I went to see my old friend Meggie. I met her lover, Ray. They left together. He drove the car. But no one else supports this story. There is not a single person who will admit that Ray exists. There is not a frame of video with Ray in it. Ray was never there at all, no matter how many times the demon lover explains what happened. They say, What did he look like? Can you describe him? And the demon lover says, He looked like me.
As he is waiting for the third or maybe the fourth time to be questioned by the police, the demon lover thinks about how one day they will make a movie about all of this. About Meggie. But of course he will be too old to play the demon lover.
Petard: A Tale of Just Deserts
Cory Doctorow
It’s not that I wanted to make the elf cry. I’m not proud of the fact. But he was an elf for chrissakes. What was he doing manning—elfing—the customer service desk at the Termite Mound? The Termite Mound was a tough assignment; given MIT’s legendary residency snafus, it was a sure thing that someone like me would be along every day to ruin his day.
“Come on,” I said, “Cut it out. Look, it’s nothing personal.”
He continued to weep, face buried dramatically in his long-fingered hands, pointed ears protruding from his fine, downy hair as it flopped over his ivory-pale forehead. Elves.
I could have backed down, gone back to my dorm, and just forgiven the unforgivably stupid censorwall there, used my personal node for research, or stuck to working in the lab. But I had paid for the full feed. I needed the full feed. I deserved the full feed. I was eighteen. I was a grownup, and the infantilizing, lurking censorwall offended my intellect and my emotions. I mean, seriously, fuck that noise.
“Would you stop?” I said. “Goddamnit, do your job.”
The elf looked up from his wet hands and wiped his nose on his mottled raw suede sleeve. “I don’t have to take this,” he said. He pointed to a sign: “MIT RESIDENCY LLC OPERATES A ZERO-TOLERANCE POLICY TOWARD EMPLOYEE ABUSE. YOU CAN BE FINED UP TO $2,000 AND/OR IMPRISONED FOR SIX MONTHS FOR ASSAULTING A CAMPUS RESIDENCE WORKER.”
“I’m not abusing you,” I said. “I’m
just making my point. Forcefully.”
He glared at me from behind a curtain of dandelion-fluff hair. “Abuse includes verbal abuse, raised voices, aggressive language and tone—”
I tuned him out. This was the part where I was supposed to say, “I know this isn’t your fault, but—” and launch into a monologue explaining how his employer had totally hosed me by not delivering what it promised, and had further hosed him by putting him in a situation where he was the only one I could talk to about it and he couldn’t do anything about it. This little pantomime was a fixture of life in the world, the shrugs-all-round nostrum that we were supposed to substitute for anything getting better ever.
Like I said, though, fuck that noise. What is the point of being smart, eighteen years old, and unemployed if you aren’t willing to do something about this kind of thing? Hell, the only reason I’d been let into MIT in the first place was that I was constitutionally incapable of playing out that little scene.
The elf had run down and was expecting me to do my bit. Instead, I said, “I bet you’re in the Termite Mound, too, right?”
He got a kind of confused look. “That’s PII,” he said. “This office doesn’t give out personally identifying information. It’s in the privacy policy—” He tapped another sign posted by his service counter, one with much smaller type. I ignored it.
“I don’t want someone else’s PII. I want yours. Do you live in the residence? You must, right? Get a staff discount on your housing for working here, I bet.” Elves were always cash-strapped. Surgery’s not cheap, even if you’re prepared to go to Cuba for it. I mean, you could get your elf-pals to try to do your ears for you, but only if you didn’t care about getting a superbug or ending up with gnarly stumps sticking out of the side of your head. And forget getting a Nordic treatment without adult supervision. I mean, toot, toot, all aboard the cancer express. You had to be pretty insanely desperate to go elf without the help of a pro.
He looked stubborn. I mean, elf-stubborn, which is a kind of chibi version of stubborn that’s hard to take seriously. I mean, seriously. “Look, of course you live in the Termite Mound. Whatever. The point is, we’re all screwed by this stuff. You, me, them—” I gestured at the room full of people. They had all been allocated a queue position on entry to the waiting room and were killing time until they got their chance to come up to the Window of Eternal Disappointment in order to play out I Know This Isn’t Your Fault But . . . before returning to their regularly scheduled duties as meaningless grains of sand being ground down by the unimaginably gigantic machinery of MIT Residency LLC.
“Let’s do something about it, all right? Right here, right now.”
He gave me a look of elven haughtiness that he’d almost certainly practiced in the mirror. I waited for him to say something. He waited for me to wilt. Neither of us budged.
“I’m not kidding. The censorwall has a precisely calibrated dose of fail. It works just enough that it’s worth using most of the time, and the amount of hassle and suck and fail you have to put up with when it gets in the way is still less than the pain you’d have to endure if you devoted your life to making it suck less. The economically rational course of action is to suck it up.
“What I propose is that we change the economics of this bullshit. If you’re the Termite Mound’s corporate masters, you get this much benefit out of the shitty censorwall, but we, the residents of the Termite Mound, pay a thousand times that in aggregate.” I mimed the concentrated interests of the craven fools who’d installed the censorwall, making my hands into a fist-wrapped-in-a-fist, then exploding them like a Hoberman sphere to show our mutual interests, expanding to dwarf the censorware like Jupiter next to Io.
“So here’s what I propose: let’s mound up all this interest, mobilize it, and aim it straight at the goons who put you in a job. You sit there all day and suffer through our abuse because all you’re allowed to do is point at your stupid sign.”
“How?” he said. I knew I had him.
Kickstarter? Hacker, please. Getting strangers to combine their finances so you can chase some entrepreneurial fantasy of changing the world by selling people stuff is an idea that was dead on arrival. If your little kickstarted business is successful enough to compete with the big, dumb titans, you’ll end up being bought out or forced out or sold out, turning you into something indistinguishable from the incumbent businesses you set out to destroy. The problem isn’t that the world has the wrong kind of sellers; it’s that it has the wrong kind of buyers. Powerless, diffused, atomized, puny, and insubstantial.
Turn buyers into sellers and they just end up getting sucked into the logic of fail: it’s unreasonable to squander honest profits on making people happier than they need to be in order to get them to open their wallets. But once you get all the buyers together in a mass with a unified position, the sellers don’t have any choice. Businesses will never spend a penny more than it takes to make a sale, so you have to change how many pennies it takes to complete the sale.
Back when I was fourteen, it took me ten days to hack together my first Fight the Power site. On the last day of the fall term, Ashcroft High announced that catering was being turned over to Atos Catering. Atos had won the contract to run the caf at my middle school in my last year there, and every one of us lost five kilos by graduation. The French are supposed to be good at cooking, but the slop Atos served wasn’t even food. I’m pretty sure that after the first week they just switched to filling the steamer trays with latex replicas of gray, inedible glorp. Seeing as how no one was eating it, there was no reason to cook up a fresh batch every day.
The announcement came at the end of the last Friday before Christmas break, chiming across all our personal drops with a combined bong that arrived an instant before the bell rang. The collective groan was loud enough to drown out the closing bell. It didn’t stop, either, but grew in volume as we filtered into the hall and out of the building into the icy teeth of Chicago’s first big freeze of the season.
Junior high students aren’t allowed off campus at lunchtime, but high school students—even freshmen—can go where they please so long as they’re back by the third-period bell. That’s where Fight the Power came in.
WE THE UNDERSIGNED PLEDGE
TO BOYCOTT THE ASHCROFT HIGH CAFETERIA WHILE ATOS HAS THE CONTRACT TO SUPPLY IT
TO BUY AT LEAST FOUR LUNCHES EVERY WEEK FROM THE FOLLOWING FOOD TRUCKS [CHECK AT LEAST ONE]:
This was tricky. It’s not like there were a lot of food trucks driving out of the Loop to hit Joliet for the lunch rush. But I wrote a crawler that went through the review sites, found businesses with more than one food truck, munged the menus, and set out the intersection as an eye-pleasing infographic showing the appetizing potential of getting your chow outside of the world of the corrupt no-bid, edu-corporate complex.
By New Year’s Day, ninety-eight percent of the student body had signed up. By January third, I had all four of the food trucks I’d listed lined up to show up on Monday morning.
Turns out, Ashcroft High and Atos had a funny kind of deal. Ashcroft High guaranteed a minimum level of revenue to Atos, and Atos guaranteed a maximum level to Ashcroft High. So, in theory, if one hundred percent of the student body bought a cafeteria lunch, about twenty percent of that money would be kicked back to Ashcroft High. They later claimed that this was all earmarked to subsidize the lunches of poor kids, but no one could ever point to anything in writing where they’d committed to this, as our Freedom of Information Act requests eventually proved.
In return for the kickback, the school promised to ensure that Atos could always turn a profit. If not enough of us ate in the caf, the school would have to give Atos the money it would have made if we had. In other words, our choice to eat a good lunch wasn’t just costing the school its expected share of Atos’s profits; it had to dig money out of its budget to make up for our commitment to culinary excellence.
They tried everything. Got the street in front of the school designated a no-
food-trucks zone (we petitioned the City of Joliet to permit parking on the next street over). Shortened the lunch break (we set up a Web-based pre-order service that let us pick and prepay for our food). Banned freshmen from leaving school property (we were saved by the PTA). Suspended me for violating the school’s social media policy (the ACLU wrote the school a blood-curdling nastygram and raised nearly thirty thousand dollars in donations of three dollars or less from students around the world once word got out).
Atos wouldn’t let them renegotiate the contract, either. If Ashcroft High wanted out, it would have to buy its way out. That’s when I convinced the vice principal to let me work with the AP computer science class to build out a flexible, open version of Fight the Power that anyone could install and run for their own student bodies, providing documentation and support. That was just before spring break. By May 1, there were eighty-seven schools whose students used Ftp to organize alternative food trucks for their own cafeterias.
Suddenly, this was news. Not just local news, either. Global. Atos had to post an earnings warning in its quarterly report. Suddenly, we had Bloomberg and Al Jazeera Business camera crews buttonholing Ashcroft High kids on their way to the lunch trucks. Whenever they grabbed me, I would give them this little canned speech about how Atos couldn’t supply decent food and was taking money out of our educational budgets rather than facing the fact that the children they were supposed to be feeding hated their slop so much that they staged a mass walkout. It played well with kids in other schools and very badly with Atos’s shareholders. But I’ll give this to Atos: I couldn’t have asked for a better Evil Empire to play Jedi against. They threatened to sue me—for defamation!—which made the whole thing news again. Stupidly, they sued me in Illinois, which has a great anti-SLAPP law, and was a massive technical blunder. The company’s U.S. headquarters were in Clearwater, and Florida is a train wreck in every possible sense, including its SLAPP laws. If they’d sued me on their home turf, I’d have gone bankrupt before I could win.
