by David Yoon
The first trolls, while infuriating, were harmless: users on Knowned, led by popular video Whiteman blogger Jklol the Swede, showcased effigies of the actress made using a gorilla character from an obscure cartoon. Hence, Gorillagate.
Then one day, a delivery of a hundred watermelons—which Whitemen often deemed endemic to Browns, even though the rest of the planet enjoyed them just as well—appeared at the front door of the actress’s home. This was significant. For the Knowners had moved on to doxxing. To dox a victim was to expose their personal documents, or docs for short, or dox (since docs was still too much of a chore to type out). No one admitted to the prank, of course, and Jklol himself would only shrug.
A few days later, a noose hung from a tree in her front yard. Next, a burning cross on her lawn. “Can’t take a joke?” said Jklol the Swede (his catchphrase).
The actress soon feared for her life. She deleted all her online accounts. She moved; she changed her phone number, email address, and so on. Her acting career stalled—studios wanted to wait until the dust settled to hire her. And the trolls on Knowned rejoiced, for they had silenced their enemy.
Protests arose against Knowned for harboring trolls. This is not to say people marched in the street and laid siege to Knowned headquarters to demand action. Mostly they shared posts written by others by tapping the share button, changing their profile photos to black, and so on. As strange as it is to say, these sorts of actions were once considered real and significant.
A few brave souls wrote articles condemning the trolls in support of the teen actress. These people were called social justice warriors (internet slang for concerned citizens, often reduced to SJWs). But one by one, these SJWs—all women—were also trolled into silence. One, an epilepsy sufferer, was sent a flashing image file that triggered an episode. Another highly vocal SJW was struck and killed in a mysterious hit-and-run, prompting conspiracy theories.
Under such public pressure, Knowned published a Things You Can Do online safety guide, but performed no other actions beyond that. Jklol the Swede remained one of their most popular users. Public protest died, and profile photos reverted to normal (as they were automatically programmed to do). Knowned even experienced a slight uptick in new user registrations thanks to the media attention.
The world, for the most part, kept scrolling their feeds until Gorillagate fell far below and out of sight. Since then there have been other Gorillagate-type attacks, and they, too, floated by in the swift scroll of the feed until they were no longer in view.
And they all lived happily ever after.
1.4
It’s been a minute since that Knowned Gorillagate shit went down,” said Brayden.
“Three years is a minute?” said Max.
“Jesus, it’s like if it falls off the first page of search, it doesn’t exist,” said Akiko.
Akiko aimed a critical eye at Brayden. The boy shrank a bit.
Akiko released her gaze. She looked at Max: Can you believe this kid?
“That is Brayden’s generation,” said Pilot. “So very different from mine.”
Pilot had emerged through a disguised wall panel. He had vanished once Max launched into his retelling of the Gorillagate saga, and stayed vanished for its entirety.
“Everything okay?” said Max.
“I ran upstairs to pee,” said Pilot. “Everyone pees, Max.”
A pause.
“Let me tell you about my generation,” said Pilot. “We were raised by hippie parents. Immersed in the sixties ideologies of free love and anarchism and anticorporate blablabla.”
“You became the thing you used to fight against,” said Max. “You failed.”
“Max,” said Akiko.
Pilot held up a hand. “Mister Max is right. We built a new world online, only to realize we had built it all broken. I had built it all broken. Me. And now we are living in it. All our idealism gone IPO.”
“It reminds me of this old science fiction book,” said Max, “where aliens present earth with a perfect terrarium, this huge orbiting cylinder that has everything we could ever want or need. It’s like a clean slate for humankind.”
“I know that book,” said Pilot.
“And the humans move in, and we just end up making the same mistakes we did on earth. We fuck up the whole thing.”
“I hated that book,” said Pilot.
Max looked at Pilot, but Pilot was not angry. He was sad.
“If it makes you feel any better, my generation’s a bunch of hypocrites, too,” said Max. “I worked at Wren. I was a rock star, too. Akiko still works there.”
“I never worked at Wren,” said Shane in his own defense.
“I never worked at Wren,” sang Max, and he threw a bottle cap at Shane. The cap flew miraculously right into Shane’s open mouth, and Shane spit it out.
“Holy shit,” said Max.
“Fuck,” said Shane.
“Does it count,” said Akiko, “that I want to take this Version Zero thing as far as it will go?” She looked at Max and took a swig.
“Wait, you guys are Version Zero?” said Brayden, whipping his head. “Oh shit.”
Max had never been fangirled before, and he found it exhilarating. He gazed at the boy: Yes. We are Version Zero.
“Does it count,” said Pilot, “that I want to help Version Zero, too? With all my heart? I started life with all that hippie revolution talk. It is now time for that revolution to finally happen.”
“Oh shit,” said Brayden.
“I built the broken world,” said Pilot. “It is the regret of my whole life. You, Max, you want to fix it. You are the man I should have been all along.”
Max blinked at such a compliment. He generally did not know what to do with compliments, aside from pretending they didn’t happen.
“I just want to fix the internet,” said Max.
“So what say you?” said Pilot. “Am I hired?”
Pilot gazed at him. Max had that feeling of being seen again. All at once he began to sweat. But he did not mind it.
“It would be an honor, duncie,” said Max.
“The honor is all mine,” said Pilot.
And Max gave Pilot a handshake he would remember always.
1.5
They went back into the music studio. Brayden lit a bowl, and Pilot and Shane passed it back and forth like old friends. Akiko vaped and perched atop an amp. Max finished a second beer, then a third, and held a fourth solely for appearance’s sake.
Max stumbled behind the drum kit, whacked out a count, and began a crashing beat. Pilot found a guitar and hacked out a chunky riff. Shane crooned out lyrics on top of it all. Akiko sang an odd, wailing sort of accompaniment that somehow worked. Brayden just sat and swung his legs back and forth.
And the thing was: they sounded pretty good.
“You guys know that ‘World in a Girl’ song?” said Max.
“That’s by that one band,” said Pilot. “Panda Seven?”
“Pagan Seven?” said Max.
“Look it up, look it up,” said Pilot. He handed Max his phone.
Max thumbed the home button, but the phone did not turn on.
“Oh, wait,” said Pilot. “That phone is mine!”
They stomped their feet and laughed.
“Three whiskeys and I am officially drunk,” said Pilot. He wheeled around, found Max’s phone, and handed it to him. Max unlocked it and began searching.
“This guy does not get drunk,” said Brayden.
“It’s Pachinko,” mumbled Akiko.
“Pachinko Seven,” they shouted in unison, like men charging a hill.
“One sec,” said Pilot.
Max handed him the still-on phone. And while Akiko and Shane tried to remember how the song went, Max noticed how serious Pilot became all of a sudden. He noticed how he began ty
ping on the screen with a dexterity he had never before seen. Pilot tapped, waited, checked his own phone, and then went back to check something on Max’s screen. At one point, he had both phones balanced on the tops of his thighs.
“It takes two phones to learn a song?” laughed Max.
Pilot pocketed his device and set Max’s back on top of the amp. He threw Shane the mic.
“I just looked it up—it goes G, D, A minor, C!” yelled Pilot. His eyes glinted with drunken charm as he gazed openly at Akiko. Pilot turned to Max, who had noticed him staring, and now there was something hard about them, those eyes of his, something that made Max want to look elsewhere in the room.
“I gotta pee,” shouted Max. “Everyone pees, Pilot.”
Max tossed the drumsticks to Pilot, who missed and sent them flying. Everyone laughed as he scrambled to retrieve them.
“You guys keep jamming,” said Max.
“Yes sir, boss man,” said Pilot.
And Max loped up the stairs.
“Sky in your eyes,” sang Akiko. “Plan in your hand.”
* * *
* * *
Max fell through the brass panel.
“Pee, gotta pee,” he said.
He looked down the hall and saw the heavy iron front door, with its glowing keypad. Not that way. Maybe through the kitchen?
He walked through the white gridded space, feeling like a video game character in a wireframe world, and passed the atrium garden with its glowing stone. He took a right, went down a short mirrored hall, and found a wood wall panel with brass letters:
loo
There was no handle. He traced the edges of the panel until he found a fingerhold. He pulled, activating tubes of amber glass that lit the dark space within. Another gridded space awaited, wireframe, video game, and Max entered. The only indication of a urinal was a smooth portion of one wall punctuated by a brass disk, which dispensed a flowing scarf of water that vanished into a dark hyphen cut into the travertine floor.
Max peed.
He emerged back into the mirrored hall and was disoriented again. Was it left? Right? He found himself standing at the foot of the staircase marked private. The staircase that curved up and away and out of sight.
What was up there?
Max imagined a giant dead crystal eye with an out of order sign sitting in a great transparent pyramid of an attic. That would be crazy.
There was that poem, about the ruins. A shattered visage.
Ozymandias.
Max exhaled a big beery exhale and climbed the stairs.
The staircase curved back toward itself a full 180 degrees over the course of an entire story and a half, leading to a hallway that sat open to the sky but for a glass ceiling, through which poured in white moonlight from all angles everywhere.
It reminded Max of the Helix.
Max walked under the night sky until he reached an ordinary door hung with a letter N. Above the N flew a carved unicorn with hollow, terrified eyes.
Max opened the door.
Before him sat a room bathed blue-white under the naked moonlit sky. There was a soft pillowy bed garnished with two stuffed-animal bears, a bride and groom; a nightstand with a frilly lamp; a bulging French bombé dresser in cream and gold, laden with more plush toy bears.
Old plastic theater marquee letters danced on a wall to spell noelle.
Max clicked on the nightstand lamp—click—and it must have sent a beam of warm amber light up through the glass ceiling and into the night heavens. There was an old rotary princess phone in vanilla pink. Max picked it up and was surprised to hear a real dial tone.
The bedspread moved. Not the bedspread. A dog, blinking.
He sat on the bed and petted the golden retriever. The dog chuffed and went back to sleep. Max let his eyes roam about the room as a strange mix of feelings welled up inside him. A bit of sorrow, a bit of nausea. Two halves of the same coin.
But what coin was it?
On the floor was yet another plush bear toy—the baby to the bride and groom—lying broken, its neck billowing with white, never mended.
“Hey,” said Pilot.
“Jesus,” said Max.
Pilot stood in the doorway.
“I was just . . .” said Max.
“It is all good. Mi casa es su casa, verdaderamente.” He pronounced it beautifully, without a hint of gringo irony.
“I will tell you about this room sometime,” said Pilot. “But not now. We will have plenty of time to learn about one another.” Pilot laughed a small blue laugh.
“Your daughter lives here?”
“She does not,” said Pilot, and stood waiting.
“Did, um,” began Max, but stopped himself. He’d just met Pilot Markham a few hours earlier, and although those few hours felt like days, something about this strange room told him he had not yet earned the privilege to ask its meaning or history.
“This must look weird, I suppose,” said Pilot, looking around the room. “I guess it is weird.”
“I didn’t mean to pry.”
“You have not done anything wrong. I guess all I can say about this room is, well.”
Max watched as Pilot’s face melted.
“I have sleepwalked through most of my life, and when you sleepwalk you make mistakes,” said Pilot. “Irredeemable mistakes.”
Pilot froze, and the room seemed to freeze as well. Even the dog stopped moving.
Then Pilot inhaled deeply and closed his eyes. His face unmelted and became firm and bright again.
“But you may be my redemption,” said Pilot. “No, I am sure of it. You are my redemption, Max.”
Max blinked and blinked. Why did this man believe in him so? It felt overwhelming to have someone believe in you so quickly. Max was used to being thought of as talented, valuable as an employee. But inspiring?
This was a totally new sensation for Max: being looked up to by a man he himself had always looked up to.
“I’ll do my best, ha ha,” said Max, which felt like a really dumb response to such a serious pledge of faith. Max could only fumble onward. “Anyone deserves redemption, it’s a guy like you.”
“Oh, I do not know about that,” said Pilot, laughing. “I do not deserve anything at all, not ever.”
Max laughed, too. But after about the third ha he realized he didn’t know what he was laughing about. So he petted the stuffed animals on the bed, just for something to do.
“She likes bears,” said Max.
“She did,” said Pilot. “Not anymore.”
Pilot moved to leave. Max did the same. Pilot put his hand on the light switch.
“She is dead,” said Pilot.
Click.
1.6
There was a place Max had read about once, called the Stonehenge of America. It was a colossal structure, five sixteen-foot-tall slabs of granite arranged with astronomical precision in a star formation atop a grassy Georgia hilltop farm in the 1980s. Eyeholes drilled here and there let people find Polaris or glean the day of the year as the sun cast a mark upon a calibrated central column.
Carved into each slab were instructions in eight languages. Be fair. Be just. Seek beauty and love.
Basically: Don’t be evil.
They were called the Georgia Guidestones, and their polished faces glinted in the sunlight. They were revered, feared, derided, vandalized, and worshipped. Wind and rain lashed them. Through it all the slabs stood fast, all 130 tons of them.
The man who created them never explained their purpose. People filled this void with whatever they wanted. Home-brew pagan philosophies. Antichrist conspiracies. Neo-Nazi prophecies. Hope for a post-Armageddon paradise.
When pressed, the man simply said this:
Mysteries work this way. If you want to keep people interested, you can let them know only
so much.
And then he did the coolest thing Max could think of.
He vanished.
1.7
Max looked up and saw clouds. A vee of pelicans sailed by. Only once he put on his Buddy Hollys could he then see the glass ceiling and its truss supports.
He sat up—too quickly—and held his throbbing temples. He was halfway on a bed in nothing but his briefs. One testicle hung out for all the world to see. Max tucked it back in.
There was a nightstand made of glass hexaprisms, and upon it stood a glass dodecahedron of water beside two headache pills the color of baloney. Max took the pills, drank the water, and began the herculean task of pulling on his pants.
He looked around. It was not the Noelle room, and for that he was grateful. Because few things were creepier than passing out in a ghost girl’s room.
He checked his phone—something he did first thing in the morning, a bad habit—and saw an entire text message conversation between himself and Dad.
Dad I’m staying at my mentor’s house tonight, remember? From B school?
I dont remember him.
He’s a great friend . . . Shane and Akiko are here too
Ok have fun very b careful mijo
He had no memory of texting that. Jesus.
He rose—slowly—and ventured into the silent skywalk. The morning sun threw tessellated shadows across the walls. He passed a room in which a body lay.
Shane.
Max froze. Shane gave a single sharp fart and turned in his sleep. Akiko lay there, too, and Max stared at them for a moment with wonder.
I think that Shane guy likes you, Max had said that night at the pool party.
I’ve seen Mr. Muscles, said Akiko. He’s, like, a senior.
Would you go out with a senior? said Max. They were juniors.
I don’t know, Akiko said. Maybe for fun.
Not me, Max said. I would date someone in my same grade.
Someone in our class? Who is it? Who? Tell me, duncie.
That night, in the dark, when their pinkies had snuggled up to one another.
Max walked down the skywalk and descended the curved staircase. He felt memories of last night trickling back into his braincase.
