by Megan Angelo
The only reason all the files had not been released at once, Dana Marshall concluded, was presumably to keep the country down as long as possible.
“It turns out we’re all so boring,” she sighed. “So alike in our tells and desires. So limited in our insults and strategies. You know how many times I googled ‘physical appearance, stage four breast cancer’ when I was lying to my husband? That’s how they got me.” This was why everyone liked Dana Marshall. She always editorialized, and she was just as fucked up as the rest of them.
In April, Orla started leaving the house—only on errands Jerry invented to coax her out, and only late at night. She was on such an errand when she heard about Andriy. At least, she figured it was him, though she knew neither his last name nor his hometown. But there was a forty-eight-year-old Andriy in Delaware who had stabbed his daughter’s pediatrician, after a file told him that the man kept photos of her on his laptop. When Orla heard this story, buzzing soberly through the radio speaker of the Taurus, she was leaning over the dashboard outside the twenty-four-hour Rite Aid. She was looking across the parking lot at the entrance to the TGI Fridays. Outside it, Danny and Catherine were pressed against the wall, making out like they had just met. Catherine wore a stiff satin cocktail dress and brassy chandelier earrings that brushed her bare shoulders. She looked strange. But then, Orla thought, people could be strange when they wanted someone. And where else was Catherine going to wear a dress like that, anyway?
It was the same weekend that, the year before, it had snowed and Danny got her pregnant. This year, April was the month of her driving her parents everywhere, trying to decode the symptoms they had begun to complain of. Sometime toward the end of the month, a hobbled version of the internet flickered back on. People began posting rumors about whose files said what. Dark secrets piled up, easily searched, easily browsed. Orla found the deepest shames of everyone she knew in the time it used to take her to locate the closest burrito.
Mason, the producer, must have caught hell at home. For decades, he told his husband that they were mentoring a poor boy from Camden, New Jersey, chipping away at his needs, college and books and security deposits. It turned out that the boy was actually a prostitute Mason had frequented for a short time and been blackmailed by for a long time. The checks and the Venmo exchanges, email chains that were several kinds of heated—the bots sent it off to Mason’s husband with their standard note: Apologies.
Craig had an affair with a seventeen-year-old, ten years before, when he was twenty-nine. The texts released in his file, Orla thought, colored him improbably likable. He had wanted the girl to marry him. Orla wouldn’t have said as much, but she couldn’t help thinking it: take away the ages, and this was a story of ordinary meanness—a lonely, besotted guy and the girl less in love, taunting him.
Danny, before he ever came to find Orla, had bought a bunch of domains with beauty-related takes on Floss’s name: styledbyfloss.com, flossgloss.com, looklikefloss.com. He wanted flossy.com, too—badly—and tracked down the person who owned it. His file contained the emails he had sent the woman, which moved from middle-school formal (To Whom It May Concern) to desperate (Can you AT LEAST let me know you are getting these?) to threatening (Seriously bitch you need to get back to me...please don’t make me come after you other ways). It bothered Orla, but not as much as the file’s final email exchange, the dates of which fell within his stay in her room. After she told him about Floss’s skin care line, he had hurried to try to get facebyfloss.com for himself.
Catherine had stolen a science test’s answers for her whole soccer team in college. Orla noted how old this information was, how far back the hackers had to go to find Catherine being her harmless worst.
Ingrid, decades before, had misunderstood eBay and bid extravagantly on vintage fashion items, then panicked when she learned what she was expected to pay and backed out of all of the deals. She must have been, Orla thought, the kindest person she knew.
Melissa had undercut her best friend back when they were both assistants at a publicity firm, writing a long (and drunk, Orla guessed as she pored over the file) email to her boss about why she should get a promotion, not her friend. The week after her file dropped, Melissa died. A short story on her death conceded that she might have slipped—she had been dressed for hiking, after all, in a forest filled with slippery ledges. But Orla was sure she did it on purpose. The people she knew who were dying then—besides Melissa, they were all friends of friends, or cousins of cousins—they all had one thing in common, and it wasn’t that they’d done something terrible. It was that they had shouldered shining reputations, from kindergarten into adulthood. The people who had been known as good—they were the ones who, frequently, could not survive their own bad.
Aston’s file said he stiffed people who worked for him, over and over again. But the revelation was dull compared to what Aston—who Instagrammed his own stools as a teen and who was once seen making the eating-pussy sign at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial—had always done in the open.
That, to an extent, was the same reason Floss’s and Orla’s files flopped. Oh, their devices turned on, blaring terrible shit—it just wasn’t anything new. Orla saw that the bots had gleefully salvaged Floss’s naked pics and thrown them back into the world. But who hadn’t seen that already? As for Orla: one morning, months after she came home to Pennsylvania, her iPad lit up and showed her an endless compilation. It was all there: early tweets of Floss’s the bots could tell had come from Orla’s IP address. The Lady-ish posts Orla had written, declaring Floss famous. The emails they had signed from Pat White. Photos of them, clips from the show, all of it culminating in the Instagram comment from Orla’s account, the one Floss left on Anna Salgado’s picture: this is floss and i agree. you should! The effect the bots intended was clear: whatever Orla had been going for, she had done more harm than good. She owed the world a life. Orla’s file, a snide addendum from the bots said, had been forwarded to Anna’s family. Apologies.
Orla reviewed it all calmly, then tossed the tablet into a drawer without turning it off. This was the glitch in the bots’ lethal system: they couldn’t tell when the worst in someone had already come to light.
* * *
Three years later, the files were finished, but people were still losing jobs, leaving spouses, killing themselves. Life grew in around death. Graveyards were hopelessly backlogged. High schools had more memorial scholarships than seniors to receive them. Jumpy parents sneaked baby monitors into their teenagers’ rooms. Orla had four dresses just for funerals; and even as they got sicker, Gayle and Jerry insisted that they go to so many. “We want a good turnout at ours,” Gayle sniffed. They were always spooning room-temperature macaroni salad onto plastic plates. They were always making small talk with devastated people. Orla was tired of hearing bad news, tired of passing it on. Tired of listening to last wishes and of ginning up nice things to say. Tired of pitching in to help clean out the apartments of the dead. Tired of the cards with that day’s deceased pictured over Bible verses or silly Irish platitudes. Tired of not knowing when it was all right to throw the cards away. Sometimes she wanted to shout, I lost someone, too. My daughter. Where’s my fucking luncheon?
She got it—she got two—the next year. Gayle and Jerry died within eight months of each other—first him, then her—from bone cancer that swept through the house like a cough. Soon afterward, when Orla was visited by a lawyer—a girl younger than her, trembling, whose pearl studs did not distract from her night-before eyeliner—she learned what was likely to blame. While Orla was away, in college, the CoreStates Bank had changed names several times and finally been torn down to make way for a flame-resistant fabric factory. “Good American jobs,” Orla could remember Gayle saying proudly. Something in the product’s chemical coating had been seeping into her parents’ groundwater for years. Now they and two more Hidden Ponds residents were dead, and young lawyers were asking around. In any other time, Orla imag
ined, this would have set Mifflin ablaze with uproar, but the people who came to Gayle’s and Jerry’s funerals were bored. Cancer, these days, seemed vanilla, regardless of how it was caught. The people were accustomed to dramatic ends, and they had all become wake connoisseurs. “Oh, the TGI Fridays?” Orla’s Aunt Marge said, dismayed, when Orla told her about Jerry’s funeral. “The back room at Applebee’s is so much more intimate.”
Without knowing where she was going, Orla got ready to leave her home. She peeled the photos off her bedroom door and put her trophies out for the recycling. She paid men, from her parents’ checkbook, to replace the bathroom sinks and strip the kitchen’s ivy-patterned wallpaper. She did some things herself. She caulked trim that had pulled away. She fixed a door her late beagle had scratched the finish off in the nineties.
She ate Pizza Hut and Apple Jacks and watched the news alone. She listened to a congressman on a morning show, pitching a new and better version of the web, one the government would facilitate, one that would protect Americans instead of leaving them vulnerable. “The private sector had their chance,” the congressman said. “People don’t like the idea of the government running the internet? They don’t like the government watching them? Let me tell you something: nobody ever had privacy. Privacy was an illusion. Believing that we had it is what left us open to attack. On this version of the web, we will be watching you—so that we can watch out for you. Now we need Americans to come together, to say that you’ll support this. That you’ll use it the way you used to—for banking, for getting directions, for talking to each other. We need everyone to unite and pledge to share data in order to keep this country safe. If you don’t share, how can we protect you? I urge all Americans: come into the light.”
Shortly after that, Orla watched a report about Atlantic City. People who didn’t like the sound of coming into the light were gathering there by the thousands. They said they were building a protest movement. They crushed their phones while people filmed it on other phones. They said they were starting their own new world, off the government’s internet, outside the government’s eye.
Orla sold her parents’ house just before Christmas. She didn’t clean it out. Her parents would have been so angry at that, her leaving their snacks and underwear for strangers to have to sort through, but she found that she couldn’t face her mother’s closet, or her father’s garage. The last thing she did before she left home for the last time was pull up all the blinds that Gayle had put down.
“Join us!” a wild-eyed girl on the TV report about Atlantic City had shouted as she swung from a streetlight. “But know that you must come with nothing! You must leave your world behind!” That works for me, Orla had thought. And how often did that happen—her résumé lining up with revolution?
As Orla prepared to walk out the door, leaving her keys for the new owner, she realized that she had left the TV on. As she grabbed for the remote, she heard it: Marlow’s name. Orla looked up and saw Floss’s face. The trashy entertainment show that ran before the news was doing a preview package on Marlow’s fifth birthday party. A camera followed Floss through a dusky new Hollywood hotel.
When Orla had finished watching, she pulled the front door shut behind her. She drove into town. She cleaned out her measly bank account, stuffing the white envelope in her bag, then walked across the street, to the shop where Gayle bought cards. She waited while a man went into the back and cranked metal down on the paper. She sprang for the navy-lined envelopes. Then she drove to the Philadelphia Airport, bid the Taurus farewell in lot E, and repeated her itinerary several times for the man behind the desk. Philly to LA, LA to Atlantic City.
Two days later, she stood in the trendy hotel, holding her box of notes, hearing kids scream the way sugar makes them, knowing that one was hers.
Twin security giants blocked her view of the party. “The balls on her, omigod,” Orla could hear Floss saying from somewhere just out of sight.
“It’s not gonna happen,” one of the guards said to Orla, his baritone blending with the music. “You gotta go.”
Orla stood there a little longer anyway, hoping to see a flash of Marlow. But she could tell from the sound of the children’s shrieks that they were across the room. Finally, she left, thinking of Floss at the pet party, years ago, passing her a drink through the bars. All these years later, Orla thought, she still couldn’t get in.
* * *
The early days, when Atlantis was still Atlantic City, were routinely borderline terrifying. The protesters spit at the local police, and the police gassed them back. Boardwalk merchants got out of town quickly when they saw what was happening. Their shops were raided immediately—people tore plywood off the windows and shattered the glass to get in. Orla subsisted on stolen saltwater taffy and bottled water shipped in by antiestablishment billionaires. The electricity had been turned off in all of the buildings they huddled in; the only light they had at night came from weak solar lanterns. For reasons Orla could not understand, there was always a fire somewhere.
The news cameras came to watch them. The panel of faux-hippie students who had anointed themselves the leadership—most of them not a decade removed from their elite prep school days—sent a messenger with a letter to the closest federal government outpost: a US representative’s office on Brighton Avenue. The note was written on Tropicana hotel stationery. It demanded that the government give up control of the internet, or prepare to watch a revolution by the sea. They chanted for the cameras: “Stay out of our information, or we’ll start a brand-new nation!” The news painted the effort as rebellious and high-minded, something to be taken seriously. But Orla saw chaos everywhere, and secretly, she thought the whole thing would soon burn itself out. And then what? She’d have to start over, at least online. She felt breathless and anxious when she thought of what had happened the day she arrived. The boy who checked her in, in the lobby of the old Caesars Palace, had taken her phone and laptop and said they would not be returned. “But I didn’t back up to the cloud,” she told him automatically.
“The cloud,” he said, “isn’t welcome here.”
Orla had moved, feeling naked, to the girl at the second card table. The girl asked for her name, had her confirm which social-media profiles had been hers before the Spill, then showed her what she was doing: deleting every search result for Orla on the internet. Orla watched as the girl pulled up an old Lady-ish post of hers, then somehow made her byline evaporate. “From now on,” the girl said proudly, “when someone searches for you, they won’t find a thing. In fact, they’ll know you’re one of us because we’re using a code. As soon as they search for your name, they’ll get that error—404, not found.”
“Like a dead link?” Orla said.
“Exactly.” The girl’s eyes were shining. “Except now you’re truly alive.”
It was the first time Orla felt, in Atlantis, like maybe she was at the wrong party. A party full of people who made her feel ancient at thirty-three, who insisted on natural deodorant even when it didn’t work, who were handy at Big Brother poster board puns, but frighteningly bad at focusing.
She was assigned to Housing, the committee tasked with turning the old gambling hangars into livable neighborhoods. At the first meeting Orla attended, seven of the eight other members got bored of discussing how to achieve running water and began fighting over what to set up in the common rooms—foosball tables, or pool?
The eighth other person in the meeting was Kyle. He met Orla’s worried gaze across the table and nodded in sympathy. She noticed, with great relief, that his beard was partially gray.
She was in his room a few days later when the boy who had taken her laptop that first day stopped and poked his head in. Then, they were keeping the doors to the hotel rooms propped open, college-dorm-style, since the only real way to communicate was to go and find each other. The boy looked hyper. He grabbed both sides of Kyle’s door frame and swung his chest into the room. �
�Did you hear?” he said. “We’re not gonna be Americans anymore.”
Kyle handed Orla her shirt. They got up and followed the boy down the hall, to where a crowd was gathering around the floor’s one rabbit-eared television.
The president was reading from a teleprompter, squinting his pin-dot eyes like he found his own words suspicious. “And so,” he was saying, “as Atlantic City has become a hotbed of violent crime and, really, an enormous burden on the state of New Jersey and its taxpayers—and it used to be a great town, Atlantic City, it was a fantastic town when I was there—I am asking Congress to grant the big wish of the disloyal protesters there.”