I’m glad I read that after I finished my stay, or else I’d have fled from the hotel like a terrified schoolboy. Then there’s this profile of a troll that P. J. Matson wrote last month for
New York
. I needed to take a shower after reading it.
Under the Terra Troll Bridge
By P. J. Matson
XMN doesn’t like people.
“I mostly keep to myself, because other people are annoying.” He tells me this as we sit together in a burrito shop near his home in San Jose, California. The crowd at the shop is relatively sparse this afternoon, but XMN’s mannerisms indicate that he feels anxious, even a bit claustrophobic. His eyes dart back and forth. He never once looks at our waitress while ordering. He scratches his face constantly, though he doesn’t appear to have any bites or scrapes that would need relief.
“When I found out about the cure being legalized, I was crushed. Because the idea that there would be more people walking around, sucking in air like a bunch of fucking mouth breathers . . . I couldn’t handle the idea. I always subscribed to the theory that hell is other people. Well, here come
more
other people! I get sick just thinking about it.”
I ask XMN why he dislikes people so much. “Because none of them have ever been nice to me,” he says.
At the time of legalization, XMN (pronounced “examine”) was part of a large online subculture of people known as “trolls,” cyberanarchists who enjoy wreaking as much havoc online as they possibly can—on message boards, blogs, feeds, everywhere. XMN claims to have once hacked into the e-mail account of a famous politician and deleted its entire contents. “The news was never made public, but in the days after you could see it in his eyes. He looked like he hadn’t slept for seventy-two hours,” the troll boasts. XMN also cites multiple occasions when he found the ping feeds of family members of the doctors killed in the New York and Oregon bombings and sent them hateful messages, some in the voice of their deceased loved ones. “I sent one to Sarah Otto. It said, ‘Hey, honey. I can’t talk right now. Some kids are roasting marshmallows over my burning carcass. Love, Graham.’ I laughed for days.”
But soon XMN grew to find simple online trolling unfulfilling. “You have to put out a lot of bait just to catch one fish,” he tells me. “And each day it’s harder and harder to shock and offend people, even if I send out a photo of a boy being castrated or something like that. They’ve seen it all before, or they know not to click. It’s easy to become desensitized to that kind of stuff online. But it’s nowhere near as easy to ignore it if happens to you for real.”
So on the message board he calls home, an enormous trolling site called SiPhallus, XMN exchanged private messages with a group of fellow trolls and decided it would be more fun to wreak their havoc live and in person. He refuses to go into exact details about what he has done, fearing it will lead to his arrest. He suggests that I try to guess.
Vandalism? “Yes.”
Bomb threats? “Yes.”
Blinding people? “Just once, but I’d like to do more.”
Keying cars? “Yes.”
Killing pets? “Yes. Or blinding them.”
Arson? “No, but only because it’s hard to get away with.”
Draining bank accounts? “Yes.”
I ask XMN why he doesn’t choose to cross the line into full pro-death fanaticism and kill people outright. “I’m not a nutjob. I’m not a terrorist,” he protests. “I’m not going to go around killing people. I just think that if people are going to live in this world, why do they deserve to be happier than me? They should have to go through every day feeling as lousy as I feel. And then, maybe, they’ll stop walking around like they own the place. Maybe they’ll have some respect for other people, like me.”
XMN admits to coming from a broken home. His mother died when he was young, and he says his father physically abused him and sexually abused his sister. Ridiculed at school for his gawky appearance, XMN walled off the people around him and took refuge in the online community on SiPhallus. “They’re people like me. They understand that this whole society thing is a bunch of bullshit.”
But doesn’t he ever crave real contact with people? “Not really. I’m very private. I don’t like being touched. I don’t like it when people are friendly to me. It’s like, ‘Who are you? What the hell do you have to be so sunny about?’ ”
I ask XMN how many other “terra trolls” are now out there, planning to wreak havoc. His eyes twinkle. It’s the first time all day that I’ve seen him express genuine excitement. “There are a lot more of us than people think. And more people are joining every day.” It’s hard to know if he’s telling the truth or simply playing another one of his games. Studies of terra trolling are nonexistent, and laws against it are just now coming into shape. There’s no data for terra troll crimes committed as of yet.
I ask XMN if perhaps this is not the best way to spend one’s time. I ask if it might be a symptom of a much deeper personal problem that he has failed to address. He thinks for a moment. “Yeah, I’m sure that’s part of it. Then again, I don’t know if the problems I have can ever be fixed. I don’t know how you go about being reborn into a family that loves you. I think I’m damaged permanently. And if that’s the case, everyone else deserves the same fate.”
He finishes his burrito and tells me a story of the time he broke into a woman’s house and stole her cat. He drove the cat fifty miles south and released it out into the wild. “That way,” he says, “she’ll never know what happened to it. It’s a double whammy.”
I ask XMN why he did it.
“Because it’s funny,” he says. “It’s so funny to me. It makes me laugh.” He does not laugh when he says this.
He leaves the shop early, as I pay the tab. When I walk out to my car, I see a small sticky note attached to my front right tire. I grab it.
“I could have stabbed your tire, but I didn’t,” the note says. “Just this once, I’ll be a nice person.”
DATE MODIFIED:
11/16/2029, 10:19 A.M.
Afternoon Link Roundup
◗ A South African freighter had to be rescued by an American destroyer after it became immobilized in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. (
Mail & Gaurdian
)
◗ Russia’s population climbs above two hundred million for the first time as its government makes getting the cure mandatory for all military personnel under the age of thirty. (
The Times
)
◗ Casey Jarrett’s mother speaks out for the first time about watching her son be executed. I think it’s possible to feel sympathy for her while having absolutely no sympathy for her son. (ABC)
◗ The date of the consumer gas ban has been pushed back to March 1, 2037. (FNN)
◗ Leighton Astor was convicted of killing her billionaire father in an attempt to prematurely claim his estate. Her father had a cure age of sixty-two. The night of the murder, one witness heard her screaming, “I WANT WHAT IS RIGHTFULLY MINE.” (
The New York Times
)
◗ New studies show that postmortals are 59 percent more likely to develop cirrhosis of the liver within the next ten years than their true organic counterparts. (DanBlog)
◗ The West Antarctic Ice Sheet may be gone by the end of the decade. (BBC)
◗ The staunchly anti-cure town of Soda Springs, Idaho (home to the Mormon sect known as the Deliverance Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, or DLDS), has built a wall around itself and quietly seceded from the United States. Town mayor Thomas Maskin explains why: “The concept of America has outlived its usefulness. Why should we pay 30 percent of our salaries to help keep some crack addict in Detroit on welfare for the next thousand years? Why should we care about people in California? Or Florida? Or New York? Why should we share anything with them? They’re not our people. They’re not our family. They’re as foreign to me as Arabs. They all want to live forever and don’t have the faintest clue how they’re gonna eat a hundred years from now. Well, they’re going to find out soon that their country ain’t gonna help them. They’re gonna find out every man is his own country now.” (
The New Yorker
)
◗ Annual sales of cigarettes have reached an all-time low. My friend Walsh now accounts for the majority of all Parliaments sold in the United States. (NYist)
◗ The producers of the
Saved by the Bell
reboot petitioned the governor of California to allow them to administer the cure to the show’s teenage stars, so that their characters wouldn’t have to graduate in the show. The governor denied the request. (
Variety
)
DATE MODIFIED:
11/17/2029, 4:44 P.M.
“I’ve made a terrible mistake”
That’s my dad talking. He was grumpy all day long on Thanksgiving, even during the football game.
“I never should have gotten the cure,” he said.
“Why not?”
“You know I got laughed at the other day? I was walking to the supermarket and there was a group of kids outside the store. They couldn’t have been more than twelve. And they just sat there and laughed at me, calling me ‘old man’ and all that garbage.”
“So what?” I said. “They’re just kids.”
“Yeah, and they didn’t let me forget it. They were more than happy to let me know that I don’t belong in this world anymore. I feel like I’m stuck outside a ballroom window, watching a great party everyone but me got invited to.”
“I thought you were happy. I thought all your buddies got it.”
“They did. Ted Maxwell got it and then had his face done. They pulled his cheeks damn near behind his ears. He looks like a moron. I knew I shouldn’t have gotten this done. I knew it!” The tightly upholstered armrests of his dining chair had become worn and frayed. He angrily picked at the loose threads.
“Why are you suddenly so upset about this?” I asked.
“Because I did what everyone else was doing instead of doing what I truly wanted to do. It was such a dumb thing, and now I can’t undo it. I’m old, and I’m tired, and I hate waking up to that reality every day.”
“But that’s just life, Dad. That doesn’t change if you don’t get the cure. It gets worse because you keep getting older.”
“And that much closer to your mother. I could have joined her in a better place.”
I rolled my eyes. “Oh, come on. That whole thing about being in a better place is a crock. It’s just something to comfort people in the face of dying or in the face of losing someone they love. You don’t need that. You don’t have to worry about trying to cover up your fears anymore.”
He slammed his beer down on the table and grabbed my arm. “Oh, so it’s supposed to comfort me to know there isn’t a better place after this? Is it really supposed to make me feel better to know that your mom has evaporated completely? That she never had a soul? That her love for me died with her? Is that supposed to make me feel all happy inside, John?”
I retreated as fast as I could. Sometimes I’m far too casual in how I speak to my father. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“I don’t like the idea of sitting here forever.”
“Then don’t,” I said. “Get up. Get out there.”
“I’ve done that already. Don’t you get it? I spent my entire life trying to find the place I liked best.
This
is that place. I don’t want to leave here and go touring India or anything like that. This is where I’m most comfortable. This is where my life is. But I don’t know what to do with myself anymore. Before all this, I was content. I knew exactly what the plan was. And now . . . now I haven’t got a clue. I’m an old person, John. You know old people hate change. This is a
big
change. Your mother bought us a new toaster oven twenty years ago, and I still miss the one we had before that. And that was just a goddamn toaster oven! Everything is upside down. I don’t have a job. I don’t have enough money to live here for as long as I please, to buy food and pay property tax. It’ll run out.”
“I’ll support you.”
“Forever? You have a kid on the way. You have no clue how much those things cost. You’ll use every goddamn penny life gives you, mark my words. I don’t want you subsidizing my life.”
“We’ll work something out. I promise you.”
“Yeah, yeah. Either way, it was the wrong decision. I’ve made a terrible mistake. And I’m not happy about it.” He held up the gravy boat. “And we’re out of gravy. That’s what the next two hundred years of my life are going to be like. Just one Thanksgiving after another, without enough goddamn gravy.”
DATE MODIFIED:
11/30/2029, 2:03 P.M.
The Truth about China
Chan is a Chinese foreign national who spent a year at our firm as part of an exchange program they set up about nine years ago. The firm was looking into a major expansion in Beijing, setting up a merger over there with another firm. Obviously, after China went back into its shell, that merger never took place. I kept in touch with Chan from time to time via e-mail—that is, before the government blocked his access. After that, I assumed I’d never hear from him again.
But I did. He e-mailed me this week through the account of some American in Beijing. Apparently, he spotted the American typing away on her tablet at an ice cream store. Since the American had an unregulated e-mail work account, he begged her to let him use her account to contact me. This is what he wrote:
To: John Farrell
Re: Chan in China (URGENT)
My wife and I had a child three days ago. It is our first child, a boy. Everything appeared to be fine during the labor and delivery. My wife had to push for two hours, which was quite harrowing. But our son emerged healthy and with all his fingers and toes. They even let me cut the cord, which is much harder than one might think.
My wife had some tearing during the delivery, so the doctors had to give her stitches. I had been by her side the whole time, but now she was knocked out by the anesthetic and had let go of my hand. Rather than stay with her, I followed the nurses as they wheeled our son to the nursery so I could give him a bath. They handed me a warm washcloth, and I swabbed the blood and waxy white vernix off his body while he lay in the clear plastic bassinet, which they had placed under a heat lamp. It was a wonderful moment because I could still feel the heat on his skin from being inside my wife’s body. I can’t describe it in a way that would justify it, but it was something I won’t soon forget.
I was still washing behind his ears, when a doctor came in and began wheeling my son’s bassinet away, which startled me.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“We have to take him,” he told me.
“But I’m not finished bathing him,” I explained. I held up the bloody washcloth in my hand to show him that I was still using it.
“You can finish bathing him later. We have to take him now.” He was very brusque, and I didn’t understand why. I know that doctors can be arrogant, but he struck me as particularly pushy.
“What are you going to do to him?”
“Routine shots and blood tests.”
“Can I come?”
“No, you can’t. We’ll bring him back to you in an hour or so.”
I wanted to insist on joining my son. But this man was a doctor, so I presumed that he knew best. I didn’t wish to ruin the moment with an argument. So I let them take him away and rejoined my wife, who was now in the recovery room, asleep.
After about an hour, they transferred us to the maternity ward on the floor above us. As we exited the elevator, we noticed armed policemen standing in the center of each hallway, which is unusual inside a hospital, let alone a maternity ward. All around the floor, from nearly every room, we heard screaming and crying, as if we were still in the labor ward. I asked the nurse if they also delivered babies on this floor. (This is China, after all. It wouldn’t have surprised me in the least if they needed more room.) The nurse turned away from me and said no.
They wheeled my wife into an empty room, with one bed. Again, this was unusual. You don’t get a recovery room to yourself normally. At this point I became very anxious to see my son again. I asked the nurse where he was, so that I could be with him and bring him to my wife. She assured me that he would be coming shortly.
But he didn’t arrive shortly. My wife and I were forced to stay in the empty room for nearly four hours. She had lost a great deal of blood during the delivery, and now her blood pressure began to drop. I became irritable, constantly yelling at the nurses that they had assured me our son would be back by now. After one nurse worked to bring my wife’s pressure back up and she regained her strength, I ventured out into the hallway and asked anyone I could find where the blood tests were being conducted. No official would answer me. I heard more screams from inside the other rooms. I went to a receptionist and demanded to know what was going on. One of the policemen saw me getting angry and approached me.
“You have to calm down here, sir,” he said. “It’s not wise for you to yell.”
“But no one will tell me what is going on or where my son is.”
“Your son will be returned to you.”
And he was correct. The main doors opened behind me, and I saw a nurse wheeling in my son. I went to him immediately and grabbed him, kissing him all over. I was so relieved—I can’t even begin to tell you. Pure joy.
They had him swaddled in a hospital blanket. I didn’t want to unwrap him, lest he become cold. So I held him tight to my chest as the nurse and policeman both inspected my hospital wristband to make sure I was the baby’s parent.
As I held my son close to me, I noticed something through the opening of the blanket. His left hand was sticking out a bit, so I went to tuck it back in. That’s when I saw it.
Just below his hand, about five centimeters up his wrist, was writing. I pulled his arm out to look. It was his birth date, written on the inside of his arm.
“Why would you write on his arm?” I asked, annoyed. “His birth date is already on his ankle bracelet.” I used the blanket to try and rub off the numbers, but they wouldn’t smudge. I quickly realized that they hadn’t written his birth date on his arm. They had tattooed it. While my wife and I were waiting for our son to get “routine shots and blood tests,” they had branded him. I looked at the nurses and the policeman, who looked back at me with deep sympathy.
“We’re sorry,” the policeman said. “This policy was just instituted by the Department of Containment.”
“The Department of Containment?” I asked. “What is that?”
“We don’t know.”
“Why are they doing this?”
“We don’t know.”
I heard more screams coming from inside the other rooms and immediately became aware that I was just the latest parent to receive this news about their child.
I stared down the hall, in the direction of my wife’s room. She was still unaware of what had happened. I felt so awful. There she was, so desperate to see her son. Yet there wasn’t going to be any relief once I brought him through the door. She was going to see what they had done to him, and she would begin screaming, as all the other new mothers were doing. I began to cry. I clutched my son tightly to my chest and told him that he would be all right. It was just his birthday they had etched onto him, and nothing more unfortunate than that.
I brought him to my wife’s room and walked through the door. She could tell by my eyes that something was terribly wrong, and she began crying. I think she assumed our son had a birth defect, or that he had been injured during the delivery. I handed him to her and unveiled the spot where they had branded them.
I’ll never forget the look on her face. She was so shocked, so horrified, so baffled. She didn’t understand. She began sobbing and screaming. I held her tight.
“Why?
Why
did they do this?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
As she cried, two more doctors and two more nurses entered the room. I was again aggravated, because all I wanted after this was to have some privacy with my wife. I asked for more time.
“We have to move her to a group room,” one of the nurses said. “This room is only for people to absorb the news. Another patient is scheduled to be in here.”
One of the doctors took my arm. “We need to see you for a moment, sir.” I resisted. The policeman showed up at our door, giving me a look that said I needed to go with him. What choice did I have? I went with the doctor and the policeman as they led me to another empty room. I thought they were going to arrest me for yelling, for being upset in the lobby.
“Do you have any identification?” the doctor asked. I produced some. Then he said, “I need you to roll up your sleeve.”
I panicked. I jumped to leave the room, but the policeman blocked the way and threw me to the floor. The doctor joined him in holding me down.
“You must not resist!” the doctor screamed.
“Why are you doing this?”
“It is the law now! We all must have it!” The doctor rolled up his sleeve and showed me his tattoo. The policeman did likewise. I stared at their arms for a few moments. I couldn’t believe it. They both nodded at me. I had no choice but to relent. The doctor sat me on the table and asked me to confirm the birth date on my identification. I did so. “You look pretty young for a forty-year-old,” he said to me.
I never told you this, John, but when I worked at your firm I got the cure. My wife too. We knew China had outlawed both giving it and getting it. And we had heard stories of doctors being killed—far worse stories than even what happened to Dr. Otto back in your country. We thought we were going to live in the States permanently, so we had it done. Then China isolated itself soon after we returned, and our dream of living in America was dashed. But we cannot undo the cure now. Our youth has damned us.
I lied to the doctor as best I could. They didn’t know I had lived in America. If they had, they almost certainly would have detained me. I think my receding hairline was enough to convince them that I probably hadn’t taken it. Can you believe that? All these years I have cursed my hairline. Now it’s the only thing keeping me out of prison. They strapped my arm down, and the doctor branded me with my birth date. I could see the ink spreading under my raw skin, seeping into the dermis and staying there forever.
When I was brought to my wife’s group room, I found that they had inscribed her arm as well. To my horror, she was no longer sobbing and crying like the other mothers around her. She simply lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling with her eyes bulging, not saying a word. Our son was crying next to her. I touched her shoulder to see if she was okay. She gave me a look of helplessness and turned back to the ceiling, dead silent—like a torture victim who falls into catatonic shock.
When they discharged us the following day, I saw the hordes of police rounding people up. By this time word had spilled out across the city. Some of them were going quietly, with the attitude that they had nothing to hide. Others were fleeing in terror. My neighbor emptied his apartment and said he was going to drive north until he couldn’t drive anymore.
I have no idea what to do, John. We must leave the country now, or else they’ll almost certainly figure out that my wife and I had our ages frozen. I do not expect you to be able to help me personally. In fact, I ask that you do not. Any attempt to try to help us leave the country will be seen as an attempt to defect. All I ask is that you send this to others, to let people know what is going on here right now. We have been branded. And I fear greatly that we will be killed.
Your friend, Chan