by David Yoon
“Huh?” said Shane.
“It’s Japanese for courageousness of action. Let’s go.”
They entered the alley.
There, Akiko lit three cigarettes, one for each of them, and they stood as the ash burned down. Akiko snuck a drag. A tiny ball of orange glowed before her face.
“Come on, baby,” said Shane. “No more smoking ever.”
“Couldn’t help it,” said Akiko, grinning. “This is where coders like to smoke.”
Beside her a door began to open. An exhausted Mexican man in kitchen whites emerged with a cigarette in his mouth and fished for a lighter.
“I got you,” said Akiko, and she lit it for him. He nodded Thank you.
And they stomped out their cigarettes and slipped in through the door.
“There’s a workstation here out of camera range,” said Akiko, leading them to a conversation booth reserved for private calls. They crammed inside and gathered around a laptop plugged into a wall jack. She logged in under a nameless admin account. In seconds, they once again could see the great big user database.
She smacked a key—and a new screen full of odd commands appeared.
“There we are,” she said. She turned to Max. “What first?”
Max thought for a moment, then said: “Let’s just do all of it.”
“Heck yeah,” said Akiko. She actually cackled.
She typed and typed, executing commands in rapid succession.
public void asplode(thing) {
delete from USER_MASTER where thing = *ANY*;
}
“Asplode,” said Max, laughing. “I like that.”
Akiko typed faster now.
asplode(LIKES_RECEIVED);
asplode(LIKES_GIVEN);
asplode(COMMENTS_RECEIVED);
asplode(FOLLOWER_CT);
And so on.
Commit changes? (Y/N) Y
This cannot be undone. Are you sure? (Y/N) Y
Changes merged with master.
May the force be with you.
“And also with you,” she said.
She cleaned the computer with an alcohol wipe and slapped it shut.
“That’s it?” said Shane.
Max and Akiko looked at Shane, then at each other, and laughed.
“What were you expecting?” said Max.
“I don’t know, like, a big shutdown noise or something,” said Shane.
“Sometimes you have to break a thing in order to fix it,” said Max. “Homie, we just broke Wren.”
“We did?” said Shane.
Max looked at Shane.
“Sweet,” said Shane. “Fuck this place.”
“You just saw the biggest hack in Wren’s history,” said Akiko. “Now let’s get the eff out of here.”
“Can we do one thing first, super quick?” said Max.
Max removed his black shirt to reveal another shirt, a white one, underneath.
“What are you doing?” said Shane.
“Claiming responsibility,” said Max.
0.14
A man becomes his choices, Pilot Markham had read once. One of those word-cum-image aphorisms online, a virtual bit of inspirational needlepoint.
What a lie.
Given the choice to do anything, men will simply choose to do what everyone else is doing. Choice is an illusion. Mankind is a dumb herd.
A boy is born.
His powerful and motivated parents shunt him, the bothersome thing, to nannies and boarding schools from an early age—so early that when they are murdered along with a dozen other conference leaders by a bus bomb in Geneva, all the boy feels is a great distance between him and the world, a distance he only increases by hiding behind a world of computers.
Young Pilot Markham finds this world of computers a comforting fortress of perfect crystal. Later, as the internet is formed, the crystal walls become tinged with the sunset-hued idealism of leftover hippie spirituality. There is talk of a cyberrevolution, and transparency, and communities, and empowerment, and world peace, and blah,
blah,
blah.
No other industry talks like that. Not finance, not real estate, no one.
World peace in an app?
Assholes.
At age twenty-nine, Pilot Markham produces his first million-dollar business, backdoor security keys for the NSA, and then his second, a universal code library for the then-unheard-of internet of things.
Pilot Markham is recognized now. A player. He meets Anna. She follows him along the brunch and cocktail circuit, all silence and grace as Pilot Markham pitches ideas to the powerful Whitemen who can make things happen.
Pilot Markham creates his third, then fourth, then fifth company.
Smartphones arrive, and Pilot Markham launches his sixth and most lucrative company, selling every tilt and movement of these new devices to local law enforcement. He talks the talk. His product empowers people to take back crime-ridden communities through constant monitoring. He begins to believe his own blabbleglug. Because men must believe in something. Otherwise there is only money. And money is morally inert. Money is nothing.
And my God, what if you believed in nothing?
Data is collected and sold. The red lines of real estate are shifted to favor the wealthy. Police eagerly put more Browns in prison.
On monitor 2 in his towering wall of screens, Pilot Markham watched Snowball.
“Why?” Pilot asked Snowball.
On monitor 2, Snowball sniffed and sniffed, as guinea pigs will do, and flounced off frame. Pilot switched cameras and followed it.
Anna, gorgeous Anna, athletic and Asian—how he loved Asians—delivers their first and only daughter. Pilot misses it while at a meeting across town.
One month later his wife’s caesarean section scar bursts from infection, his porcelain doll rudely cracked open, and is rushed to the hospital. He misses that, too. It is the day of the IPO. He is across the country, ringing a ridiculous bell in an outrageous room full of men all dressed alike, all shouting for money.
Not money. More.
It occurs to none of them to ask how much money is enough, and so Pilot does not ask, either, and the idea of Enough goes unnoticed.
Given the choice to do anything, men will simply choose to do what everyone else is doing. So Pilot chooses this idea of More.
Meanwhile, at Anna’s side sits her best girlfriend and her best girlfriend’s stunning and kindly and selfless brother Kent Navy, the soon-to-be film star. A soaring brown Adonis of a man. She deserves him.
She divorces Pilot and takes their daughter with her to London.
Years go by. Pilot promises to do better. Work/life balance, unplug and reconnect, blablabla. But a man becomes his choices, and again and again Pilot chooses to work behind his crystal castle wall of computers. He sells his sixth company and earns enough money to buy a time zone.
But not enough money to buy his daughter back.
Noelle.
Now, at this point in his life—early fifties—Pilot realized he had for years chosen to be an entrepreneur, mogul, leader, billionaire. But not husband. Not father. And now he could only honestly call himself one thing.
One day three years ago he came home alone to his newly bought smart-palace of concrete and steel and walnut and slate and found he was very tired of being Pilot Markham. And he never stepped outside again.
Pilot sighed and turned to monitor 5. Like everyone, he scrolled Wren out of habit and ennui. He skimmed the tedious litany of rage and quotidian ephemera and self-promotion. He did, however, find Wren’s livestreaming feature interesting. It was—to use preinternet terms—like having your own personal TV broadcast.
For a moment, Pilot fondly recalled the preinternet days.
Bu
t enough nostalgia. Time to begin the test.
Pilot logged in to Wren as a fake user. It was easy to create a fake account and amass fake friends. Wren was designed to be easy, after all.
He tapped begin livestream. A few users joined, simply because Wren told them they should join. Then more joined, simply to see what everyone else was seeing. And they were seeing Snowball.
On monitor 2, Snowball found the trap and sniffed and sniffed at it until its alantine jaws snapped shut on his neck, hard enough to immobilize him without crushing, and he clawed away at the floor to no avail: tic tic tictictictictic.
The crowd grew to fifty now, all silently watching.
Two viewers had hit the report button. Wren admins would boot Pilot’s broadcast soon. He made a note to find a hack around that.
This is wrong, someone said in the chat window.
The poor animal
And yet, they kept watching. Typical.
One viewer was his neighbor, a wealthy teenage Whiteman named Brayden Turnipseed. Pilot secretly kept him on monitor 4. There sat the boy in full view of his networked security camera system—very easy to tap—lounging and watching Pilot’s homemade snuff movie with the same nonchalance he reserved for cop shows or video games. He smoked a hash pipe. According to his parents’ emails, he had the house to himself for a full summer while they were away on vacation.
Brayden had the whole house to himself, and yet for four days straight he had not stepped outside. He had spent four days almost entirely on his laptop or smartphone, hanging out with invisible friends, smoking weed, masturbating.
Pilot found Brayden fascinating.
Pilot pressed a key to activate the last part of the test. On monitor 2, a bolt clicked open. The snout of a dog pushed open a door: Helen, his golden retriever. She must be crazed with hunger by now. He hadn’t fed her in three days.
Helen splayed low and snarled and bit down on the guinea pig, holding still as the life leaked out of it. And then Helen began to eat the way dogs eat.
Fake
Is this for a horror movie or something
Outraged viewers shared the broadcast, calling on authorities to act. In minutes it was taken down from Wren, but in those minutes the video had already been captured, repackaged, remixed, and shared elsewhere. It was used as animal rights propaganda. Conspiracy theories emerged about its faceless maker. It was picked up by news sites, which earned traffic and advertising revenue from it. A looped version appeared as a visual joke on some of the darker places online.
On monitor 4, Brayden had moved on to his laptop. Pilot squinted closer: porn. Brayden stroked himself twice but got distracted by another window containing his Wren feed, and seemed to forget all about masturbating.
Pilot leaned back. He would talk to this Brayden. The internet was a broken world, and Brayden was growing up inside of it. What kind of boy did that make?
The internet: instant, free, throwaway, permanent, anonymous, bullying, never-ending, lascivious, and so on. Deliberately designed this way by sociopathic Whitemen in thousand-dollar hoodies.
Pilot wanted to gut them all and shit and piss in their open cavities, and then sew them back up.
But he had no right. Because he was one of them. A man becomes his choices, and over his lifetime Pilot had become his, and now he could only honestly call himself one thing:
A monster.
After an hour or so, Pilot’s Snowball broadcast went fully viral—bizarre 2018 slang for hugely popular. But oddly, Pilot noticed that no instance of the video had received a single like anywhere on Wren. The likes it had previously received—which were many—had vanished.
He did a little hacking around to check. His wall of screens filled with rainbow text on black. Confirmed: posts everywhere no longer had any likes whatsoever. Like buttons everywhere on Wren no longer liked when clicked. They no longer did anything.
A few minutes later the video of the man with the Black Halo mask appeared in his feed, and that was when he and the rest of the world first heard about Version Zero.
We broke it to fix it, said the man in the Black Halo mask.
Pilot rubbed his eyes, went up a staircase, and emerged into a hallway. He turned and entered a room that was empty but for sofa cushions arranged on the floor. He had discarded the sofa itself, which he found bulky. He arranged the cushions into a single large rectangle, lay down, and rested in Shavasana pose, the corpse pose, and became motionless.
It was not sleep. He never slept, not these days. He would meditate for one hour. Then he would rise again and continue his research.
And for the first time in his three-year exile, Pilot smiled.
“Who are you?” said Pilot to the man in the Black Halo mask.
0.15
A man wears a white mask marked with a large black circle. He sits in a corporate lobby. Behind him a logotype is visible: Wren. The mask is virtual, superimposed and tracked digitally. His voice has been disguised. The video is a mezzotint, all black and white.
The words version zero appear at the bottom of the screen.
BLACK HALO: How much would you sell your soul for? A million dollars? A thousand?
The frame freezes for two seconds. It resumes.
BLACK HALO: How about zero? That is how much you have sold it for in the mirror world.
Freeze.
BLACK HALO: With every like you give, you give Wren a piece of your soul for free. A tiny void is left behind. You give two hundred likes a month on average. Wren remembers them all. It knows what you like better than your best friend. You like, like, like. The mirror world consumes your likes. And within you, a void grows.
Freeze.
BLACK HALO: Every like you receive promises to fill this void. You post. You get liked. You feel good for a moment—but only a moment. You post again. Your phone becomes a slot machine that you pull over and over. The void grows. You will never escape it. The only way out is to leave. Wren’s worst nightmare is if everyone simply leaves.
Freeze.
BLACK HALO: This is why we broke Wren. We broke it to fix it. We will keep breaking things until the mirror world is finally fixed once and for all. Wren takes your soul and sells it to the NSA, CIA, FBI, and SVR. You agreed to this without knowing you were agreeing to this. Follow this link and read for yourself.
Freeze. A link appears on the screen: quar.tz/wren-soul-project.pdf
BLACK HALO: You are infinite.
Freeze.
BLACK HALO: Without you, they become zero.
0.16
The day was piercingly hot. Mist rose off the blacktop of the street lined with lush greenery, the picture of a Mediterranean Arcadia stirring from languor.
Pilot found it blinding.
He walked to the house next door—almost a thousand feet away—and rang its doorbell. It was a mansion, really, built in the typical Playa Mesa faux-Spanish style to better disguise its size.
Brayden’s millionaire Whitemen parents had founded SnapJobs.com. Brayden was eighteen. He was their only child.
Brayden opened the door and squinted out from the darkness.
“I know you are smoking weed,” said Pilot. “I can smell it.”
The boy ran a hand through his wild yellow hair. “I have no idea to that which you are referring to, sir,” said Brayden.
“I want some,” said Pilot. “If you can spare any. I am Pilot Markham.”
Brayden frowned. Then his eyes grew wide. “Pilot Markham?”
“Hello.”
“Like, Pilot Markham–Pilot Markham?”
“The one.”
Brayden’s face froze with recognition. “Holy shit, you are Pilot Markham.”
The normal thing to do at this point would be to extend a hand for a handshake, so Pilot did that.
Brayden
accepted with one hand and rubbed his eyes with the other. He looked left and right. Then he said: “I can hook you up, bro.”
“I have never gotten high,” said Pilot. “I want to try it. I live next door.”
“You live next door.”
“Just one bro asking another bro for a hookup, ha ha ha.”
“Pilot Markham lives next door to me.”
“We can smoke at my house,” said Pilot.
“Sure, uh, yeah, totally, let me just get my phone, holy shit,” said Brayden.
* * *
* * *
The weed did nothing.
They passed the pipe back and forth in Pilot’s empty living room: a cavernous faceted space lit by floating globes of glass. It was evening. They sat on sofa cushions on the floor.
“Life is all about letting things go,” said Pilot. He took a drag and held it like he had seen in films. But it did nothing.
How different he had been in high school. Simpler. Stupider. But better.
Brayden solemnly ate from a large bowl of yogurt-covered pretzels and listened with great care. His eyes were already red.
Pilot exhaled a jet of smoke and passed the pipe back.
“When you are a baby, you love baby things: Mommy’s breast, teething toys. When you are a small child, you let go of those baby things. They no longer interest you. When you are twenty, high school seems—forgive me—like a circus full of imbeciles.”
“That’s okay,” said Brayden, nodding. “High school is wack. Was wack.”
“You just graduated.”
Brayden shrugged.
“In your thirties, all the worries of your twenties—finding a mate, finding direction—are forgotten and replaced with new worries: building a career, a family, a name. In the crash of your forties, work becomes pointless and Sisyphean. Your marriage turns out to be a simple stage play. Your daughter slips from your grasp.”
Pilot showed him the lock screen of his phone, which had a photo of a girl Brayden’s age. He had never shown anyone this. Maybe the weed was working.
