I Hate the Internet

by Jarett Kobek

  “Don’t give him ideas,” said Ellen.

  ELLEN TOOK MAXIMILIANO up on his offer. They went bowling. The name of the bowling alley had changed and so had the sign and now the interior and exterior façade were done up to look like the dwelling of a cartoon caveman. But otherwise it was still T or C.

  Somewhere around her fourteenth gutter ball, Ellen realized why she hadn’t gone bowling in Los Angeles. She hated bowling. Bowling was awful.

  Maximiliano was buying the drinks.

  “I’m still not fucking you,” said Ellen.

  “I’m not trying,” said Maximiliano. “You’re out of my league.”

  “Shut up,” said Ellen.

  Maximiliano went to the bar to get the third round of drinks. He bumped into one of Ashley’s friends, an unpleasant girl named Amanda Martinez, who was originally from New York City and had a very small amount of eumelanin in the basal stratum of her epidermis.

  “¿Hola cerote, cómo estás vato?” she asked. “¿Ashley estás aquí? La chica puta dijo se mantiene el culo en casa.”

  “Está en casa,” said Maximiliano. “Estoy aquí con mi amiga Ellen.”

  “Ellen Fitcraft?” asked Amanda. “That empollón you fucked?”

  “Sí”, said Maximiliano. “Flitcraft. Ella en la ciudad.”

  The bartender brought over the drinks. Maximiliano paid.

  “Hasta luego,” said Maximiliano.

  “Later,” said Amanda.

  AMANDA MARTINEZ watched as Ellen and Maximiliano bowled. She was using her cellphone. She was sending text messages to Ashley.

  Amanda to Ashley: BITCH WHERE U @

  Ashley to Amanda: wot u on about now

  Amanda to Ashley: BITCH Y IS UR MAN HERE WITH HIS RAGGITY ASS RATCHET X

  Ashley to Amanda: wot

  Amanda to Ashley: BITCH HES HERE WITH EILEEN FITCRAFT

  Ashley to Amanda: u crazy

  Ashley to Amanda: shes in la sucking hollywood dick

  Ashley to Amanda: lol

  Amanda to Ashley: BITCH I C THE BITCH WITH MY EYES

  Amanda to Ashley: BITCH THE BITCH JUST FELL IN HIS ARMS

  Amanda to Ashley: BITCH SHES HOLDING HIM

  Ashley to Amanda: he said hes with his cousins tonite

  Amanda to Ashley: BITCH HES HERE RITE NOW

  Ashley to Amanda: where

  Ashley to Amanda: ?

  Amanda to Ashley: BEDROXX

  Amanda to Ashley: I NEVER LIKED THIS STUCK UP CUNT AND SHES BOWLING WITH UR MAN

  Ashley to Amanda: im comin rite now

  BUT ASHLEY’S BROTHER, with whom she lived, had borrowed her car. She had to walk from the northern part of the city. By the time that she arrived, Ellen and Maximiliano had gone to their respective homes.

  Amanda gave Ashley a ride over to Maximiliano’s house. Ashley thought she’d catch Ellen and Maximiliano in the act of betrayal, but the only thing she found was her boyfriend sitting on his mother’s couch, eating toxic junk food and playing BioShock Infinite on his X-Box 360.

  “Where’s your whore?” asked Ashley.

  “What?” asked Maximiliano.

  “Ellen,” said Ashley. “Amanda saw you.”

  “Aw baby,” said Maximiliano, “It wasn’t nothing. We were just hanging out.”

  Maximiliano spent the next few hours explaining the situation. He was soothing Ashley. He was telling her the truth about why he hadn’t told her the truth. He’d wanted to keep her from freaking out because he didn’t think she’d believe him that nothing was going on. He stroked her head and let her cry. He kissed her face.

  Mamá Rojas overheard everything. None of it improved her opinion of Ashley.

  WHEN ELLEN WAS DATING MAXIMILIANO, they had a ton of sex. They had lost their virginities to each other and fucked in every possible way. They had seen each other clutched in orgasm. Countless times. They’d been in love.

  On one evening late in the relationship, when they were both drunk and more than a little stoned, Maximiliano convinced Ellen to let him take photographs of them having sex.

  “I just want to have something to remember,” he’d said.

  He used his cellphone.

  Ellen knew this was a terrible idea but she lived in a culture enraptured with its consumer electronics. These consumer electronics were inevitably incorporated into people’s sex lives.

  Sometimes it was gross, like the unconscious symbolism of a television remote control employed as a dildo.

  Most of the time it was simpler.

  It was the Twenty-First Century.

  Everyone fucked on camera.

  THEY DIDN’T END UP HAVING VAGINAL SEX. While Ellen was performing oral sex on Maximiliano, he ejaculated into her mouth and onto her face. It was something about the combination of the camera and the act and the way that the camera made him see the act. He took pictures of it all.

  While they were in bed, Ellen asked to see the evidence. She had sucked his dick with such love but none of that came across in the photos. She just looked awkward and weird.

  “Can you delete these?”

  “I wanna keep them,” said Maximiliano. “For the future, you know. I love you, baby.”

  Ellen said okay, fine.

  When they broke up, she insisted that he delete them.

  “I’ll come to your house and tell Mamá,” she said.

  He told her not to worry. He said he deleted them.

  A WEEK after the bowling incident, Ashley Nelson visited the Rojas household. She screwed out Maximiliano’s brains. He fell asleep.

  While he was snoring, Ashley found his cellphone and looked for evidence of his infidelity. She’d never done this before. She couldn’t find anything.

  Ashley woke up Maximiliano.

  “I don’t feel so good,” she said.

  “What’s wrong?” he said.

  “Stomach ache,” she said. “I need some medicine. Do you guys have Kaopectate?”

  Maximiliano went into the bathroom and looked through the medicine cabinet. He remembered seeing a bottle of Kaopectate.

  He couldn’t find any. What he didn’t know is that Ashley had removed the old Kaopectate. The bottle was in the bottom of her purse.

  He returned to his bedroom.

  “I couldn’t find any,” he said.

  “Can you go get me some?” she asked. “It’s killing me.”

  She gave her very best groan.

  MAXIMILIANO TOOK HIS CAR and went to find some Kaopectate. Ashley sat down as his computer and started going through his files. She was seeking evidence of his infidelity. She had never done this before.

  She found the pictures of Ellen performing oral sex on her boyfriend.

  Now Ashley’s stomach really did hurt. She wanted to throw up. She felt like she could die. The sky had crashed in on her head.

  She logged into her email account. She emailed herself the pictures.

  When Maximiliano came back home, Ashley thanked him for the medicine. She drank some Kaopectate and said she had to go home. He offered to drive her. She said it was okay. She’d be okay. She just wanted to sleep in her own bed.

  IT STARTED SOMEWHERE around eight in the morning. Ellen’s phone beeped out the arrival of phonecalls and text messages and voicemail. The first text message was from her second cousin. That was weird. They hadn’t texted in years.

  CHECK YR EMAIL.

  Ellen checked her email.

  There were about thirty messages.

  The nicest read, “I’m sorry to tell you this but I think you were hacked. There are some pictures of you online with your name that you should probably see. You probably recognize them but maybe you don’t.”

  The email concluded with a link to a webpage.

  And it was on that webpage that Ellen saw herself performing oral sex on her high school boyfriend. Her full name was attached. She was on the Internet.

  ASHLEY EMAILED THE LINK not only to Ellen but also to everyone who knew Ellen. Old friends, people from high school
, teachers from high school, Ellen’s boss at the insurance company. Ellen’s family.

  Because Ellen was a normal human being, she didn’t know that she could hide her friends list on Facebook. Her friends were visible to the world.

  Ashley sent links to all of Ellen’s friends. The ones who didn’t read the message from Ashley received the link in messages from other people to whom Ashley had sent it.

  Almost everyone who knew Ellen saw photographs of Ellen performing oral sex on her high school boyfriend.

  All the while, Facebook was making money. Every message that people sent each other about Ellen’s public shame arrived alongside advertisements for electric razors, pet food and the Child Brain Health Research Institute.

  All the while, Google was making money. Whenever anyone searched for Ellen’s name, Google serving targeted advertisements and collecting user data for future exploitation.

  There was not going to be a move to Los Angeles. There was not going to be any career in film. There was only a long stretch of crippling student debt and elder care in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.

  There was only life in a city where at least half the population had seen photographs of Ellen performing oral sex on her high school boyfriend.

  She could change her name and hope that no future employers would make the connection, but this meant giving up her identity and did nothing whatsoever to alleviate the mental trauma.

  She wasn’t kind of famous like Adeline and, unlike Adeline, she had nothing to sell.

  Ellen was twenty-two years old and her life was over.

  chapter twelve

  Christine worked as an assistant librarian at UCSF’s Parnassus campus. Adeline had never inquired as to how she got the job.

  Adeline never asked about anyone else’s work or living situations. It seemed rude.

  ADELINE MET CHRISTINE at an event for Baby’s Annie Zero.

  The event was held at City Lights, a bookstore in North Beach famous for its association with the Beat Writers of the 1950s and 1960s.

  It was the best bookstore in San Francisco. It was also the best bookstore in America.

  EVENTS AT CITY LIGHTS were planned by a man named Peter Maravelis, who didn’t have eumelanin in the basale stratum of his epidermis. If Peter Maravelis believed that an event would draw a large crowd, the event was held downstairs. Smaller events were held upstairs in the intimacy of the poetry room.

  The event for Annie Zero was held downstairs.

  BECAUSE OF THE FICTIONAL CONCEITS within Annie Zero, Baby was being mentioned alongside a certain class of contemporary writers.

  These writers were influential amongst the men who ran Silicon Valley. These writers were also influential amongst the men who worked in subservient positions to the men who ran Silicon Valley.

  Baby had joined the ranks of writers like William Gibson, who wrote Neuromancer.

  Baby had joined the ranks of Neil Stephenson, who wrote Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon.

  Baby had joined the ranks of Cory Doctorow, who wrote fantasies about rebellion aimed at a teenaged audience.

  Despite being aimed at a teenaged audience, Cory Doctorow’s books were read by adults. Typically, these adults were UNIX systems administrators, network engineers, and Ruby developers who’d been rendered functionally illiterate by their collegiate computer science programs.

  WHEN BABY WAS WRITING ANNIE ZERO, he needed a conceptual space for the French Neo-Maoists to stage battles against the entrenched social order.

  Because Baby was realistic about the future, he couldn’t conceive of a world in which these battles happened in any traditional context.

  So he invented the Megaverse.

  In Annie Zero, after global warming and an accidental nuclear winter, all the world’s citizens live out their lives in the Megaverse. The Megaverse was a significantly upgraded version of an old online multiplayer roleplaying game called Ultima Online.

  When the tattered shreds of the world government modded Ultima Online into the Megaverse, there were many notable enhancements, including wetware interfaces for biological needs like fucking, eating and shitting.

  The central conceit of Annie Zero is that life in the Megaverse has evolved to a point where its social structure is an almost exact mirror of life in 1990s. The Neo-Maoist revolution happens in a world that is a virtual duplicate of our own.

  Despite the inference of this narrative, Baby didn’t believe in teleological social progress.

  He did believe in recognizable fictional settings. He knew that a recognizable setting would help draw in an audience. From his experience with Trapped Between Jupiter and a Bottle, he also knew that a recognizable fiction setting was the best way to convince readers that his work was an allegory.

  Allegory was a word used by self-important writers and readers to suggest that the flaws of an above average novel were, in fact, virtues.

  When someone suggested that a narrative was allegorical, they meant that the narrative’s symbolism was intentionally gauzy. They meant that a narrative’s ill-thought out structure possessed a secret meaning.

  Many, many people called Annie Zero an allegory. They saw parallels between Baby’s Megaverse and the work that they were doing on the Internet and in Silicon Valley.

  They also found the struggles of the Neo-Maoists very inspiring. What was the Internet if not an outlet of constant revolution and social change?

  These men were confused about the basic nature of Neo-Maoism. Their formal educations in computer science had rendered them historically as well as functionally illiterate.

  They didn’t realize that Maoism had been, you know, like, an actual thing.

  THUS DID BABY find a wider audience, elevating himself out of the common gutter of Science Fiction and into the echelons of digital prophecy.

  Baby didn’t care about the Internet’s potential for free speech or world revolution. He only wanted to tend his own garden.

  But Baby was realistic. For a long time, he’d known that the Internet was a propaganda engine through which he could trick people into buying his books.

  He began tweeting cryptic phrases about new technologies, futurism and dystopias.

  CHRISTINE CAME TO THE EVENT as a favor to a friend, who didn’t want to attend Baby’s event by himself.

  Adeline went to the event because Baby was Baby and Adeline was Adeline. She hadn’t read Annie Zero.

  BEFORE BABY ARRIVED IN SAN FRANCISCO, he did fifteen other events. Most were on the East Coast. A few in the American Middle West. Some in Southern California.

  He had pressed the flesh of his audience and in turn his audience had pressed their flesh against him.

  One member of Baby’s audience had given him a terrible cold.

  He’d since swallowed a near overdose of remedies, including: Vitamin C, Vitamin E, NyQuil and Sudafed. Nothing helped.

  As he walked through the door of City Lights, Baby was one of America’s sickest men. He leaked mucus from all the orifices of his countenance. His eyes blurred with tears.

  The only saving grace was that, forty-eight hours earlier, the vomiting and violent diarrhea had disappeared.

  BABY STOOD AT THE PODIUM and talked and talked. About the abuses of Maoism, about its vogue with young Parisians of the upper middle class during the May ’68 revolt, about the suicide of Guy Debord, about the Khmer Rouge, about the novelist Michèle Bernstein, about the conceptual structure of the Megaverse.

  While he talked, he coughed. While he talked, he blew his nose. While he talked, he expelled phlegm into a handkerchief.

  The event was standing-room only.

  Baby spoke for an hour, scattering germs in every direction.

  BABY FINISHED SPEAKING. People queued in line. They wanted Baby to sign copies of Annie Zero. Adeline hung around near the front of the store.

  Christine was in the same area. Her friend was queued in line. Christine had no interest in Baby’s autograph.

  “What’s the matter with y
ou, sweetheart?” asked Adeline. “Aren’t you simply dying to touch the author of Annie Zero? Or is it his germs that you fear?”

  “I haven’t read it,” said Christine. “I’m just waiting for a friend.”

  “Me too,” said Adeline. “Do you know, I gather that Annie Zero is rather stuffed full of interesting new words. There might very well be a word in Annie Zero for the chance meeting of two people at an event for a book neither person has read.”

  “Is there a glossary?” asked Christine. “Some of these books come with their own glossaries.”

  They checked. There was no glossary.

  BABY FINISHED SIGNING BOOKS. Peter Maravelis asked Baby to leave an artifact on an altar in the basement. Maravelis said that every writer left a relic.

  Baby couldn’t think of anything, so he ripped a random page from his reading copy of Annie Zero and blew his nose.

  “The very first thing on here was a cum rag,” said Peter Maravelis.

  BABY WAS STAYING with Adeline. The plan was to go for drinks after the event. Adeline asked Christine if she wanted to come along.

  “What about my friend?”

  “Is he a square?” asked Adeline. “Does he have four equal sides and angles?”