After On

by Rob Reid

  BTW no email etc K? if someone finds this convo ill die so text only. email me and i kill you

  A moment later she added,

  After screwing you senseless obvs

  And then,

  WITH A STRAPON if u email me are we clear :-)

  That last transmission was the new Ellie in a nutshell. A sex act he could barely contemplate, an object he knew only from porn, capped off with a smiley squiggle she’d last used in a note about kittens. Ellie’s desk was just a few feet from his in Creative Writing, and throughout class he’d struggled to catch her eye, in hopes of copping some desperately needed context (Are we being playful here? Sarcastic? Or truly, genuinely horny?). But she was doing a masterful impersonation of someone wholly unaware of their correspondence. Then right at the bell, she was mobbed by three girlfriends who shared the next class with her. They left en masse because while they’d talked of little else since Christmas, it was mandatory that they re-re-re-discuss their plans for the imminent long weekend. Ellie’s folks would be tacking two extra days onto hers, so as to stage a lightning-brief visit to some relatives in Austria (a typically glamorous and spendy Jansen family production). For his part, Mitchell was hoping for snow, which could allow him to make a few bucks shoveling driveways.

  The one thing that could (barely) distract him from Ellie’s missives that night was those demented Amazon reviews! Mitchell lacked a dad, and some of his coaching and mentoring needs were a stretch for Mom. But one of them landed smack in her wheelhouse tonight. She was a writer—one who crafted elegant short stories with a sculptor’s patience and a surgeon’s precision. These appeared in literary journals and the occasional slim anthology. As that paid no bills whatsoever, she also wrote HR manuals, exhibits in annual reports, and other wordy ballast that Fortune 2000 companies generate to satisfy regulators and markets. She loved that Mitchell was studying creative writing and was delighted by the Turing project. And when he relayed Ms. Tharp’s suggestion that he find a “voice-y” writer to parrot, she knew exactly where to direct him. Cousin Charles!

  Charles was their somethingth cousin twice or thrice removed. Mitchell had met him at a handful of gatherings of their far-flung and ancient New England clan but hadn’t seen him in years. He was from the side of the family that “got the money”—an event that dated too far back for any related awkwardness to infect the current generations. The money-getters had also chosen to coast rather than work throughout the past century, leaving their heirs almost as poor as Mitchell and Mom. Charles, for one, lived in a vast but crumbling ancestral home on Boston’s Beacon Hill, with no money for maintenance, and a dangerously low heating-oil budget. He was a brilliant if obscure ethicist (Yes, that’s a profession. One of the few that pays even less than sculpting elegant short stories). And now, it seemed, an obsessive writer of Amazon reviews.

  Most of what was known about Cousin Charles came from Christmas cards, which ceased when his hellion of a first wife took off with their daughter. Years of yuletide silence had followed. Then, suddenly, a new card arrived in December. And was it ever a head-scratcher! There he was: more dowdy, bald, and paunchy than ever—standing beside a gorgeous woman half his age, as well as two cherubic kiddies. Intrigued, Mom had googled him. This led to his trove of Amazon reviews, which she introduced Mitchell to earlier tonight. “I’ve never known a person’s writing style to parallel his speaking manner so closely,” she said, as he chuckled through a catty write-up of a guide for prospective jailbirds. “Reading them, I can almost hear that Brahmin baritone, murmuring drolly about a scandal involving a great-aunt. Or the latest outrage perpetrated by President Clinton, who he always called ‘Diet Roosevelt.’ ”

  Mitchell was on the Charles train within minutes. Turing Test aside, getting a chatbot to talk even faintly like this lunatic would be high comedy! More pragmatically, writing a batch of his own reviews in Charles’s style would surely delight Ms. Tharp and be way more fun than most homework. And so as the night deepened, whatever attention he could wrest from the Ellie situation was directed at this sort of thing:

  This seminal and eye-opening reference makes the perfect gift for any prison-bound colleague or rival. Street-dumb executives en route to the slammer for book cookery will find the sections on surviving jailhouse riots and debasing prison initiations to be especially illuminating. I came across this handy volume shortly after our family was notified of its expulsion from a certain social & athletic club. Uncontrollable circumstances had sadly caused us to fall a full decade behind on dues. And though our ancestors were among the club’s founding notables, this record-shattering delinquency admittedly left the Membership Committee with few options.

  Despite that, I was overwhelmed by an urge to take some sort of childish & petty revenge, for which this book proved an ideal mechanism. Our club—one of New England’s oldest & grandest—boasts a truly national membership, including many eminent indictees in the recent corporate crime wave from Philadelphia, New York, and (especially) Houston. Several of these white-collar ruffians happen to sit on the Membership Committee, so I made an anonymous gift of this book to each of them, with appropriate sections highlighted and flagged with Post-it notes. Readers with similar aims will find Chapters Six (“Don’t Drop the Soap—Sex in the Slammer”) and Nine (“Blood In and Blood Out—Prison Gangs and Violence”) are dense with passages ripe for anonymous annotation (e.g., “saw this bit about ‘running trains’ upon recent matriculants and thought of you, my homie!”).

  But distracting as Charles’s oeuvre was, it held no candle to the digital pheromones of a teen nymph in heat. And so Mitchell gorged mainly on Ellie’s texted smut. He had to struggle against his innate gentlemanliness to write anything rising faintly to her level of filth. He finally managed something rather sick around 10:00, to which she replied:

  OMFG, Champ, that was hot. Can’t stop thinking bout it. It’s running down my leg. Seriously running down my leg.

  It’s WHAT? he marveled. WHAT is what?? Was it even legal to text something that filthy? Shocked, disgusted, and quite possibly in love, Mitchell took it up another notch himself…

  Now, this would be a jarring exchange with anyone. But it was Ellie on the other end! Writing words so utterly divorced from the flesh-and-blood girl he’d known for years! They’d spent innumerable hours together—in classrooms, on playgrounds, hanging out after school, you name it. And nothing ever hinted at the sexual riptides raging beneath her surface! Apparently, the scant dribble of characters allowed by first-generation texting had embrazened her to open this aperture into her id. And he was keeping up (barely). But how would it go when they were back to exchanging full sentences, gestures, and meaningful glances tomorrow? Could he even handle that? And what about when it escalated light-years beyond that? Ellie would be off on that zippy family trip to Austria tomorrow. But she’d made it perfectly clear that the instant she was home, it was on. Yessir—she wanted to do that. And THAT. And THAT with him!

  The texts finally stopped around eleven. But Mitchell couldn’t sleep. He first needed to focus on something other than him and Ellie doing that, THAT, and (above all) THAT!

  Emailing Kuba about this was out of the question, due to the nagging suspicion that he had the hots for Ellie himself. Mitchell had never confirmed this, as Kuba was notoriously tight-lipped about his emotional landscape. But he tended to be doubly bumbling in Ellie’s presence. She also cropped up often in his famous non sequiturs, and he showed zero interest in any other girl. So it was either Ellie or homosexuality with him! And in their deeply closeted high school, the latter seemed more the realm of myth and epithet than a real condition affecting actual peers. Any thought of Kuba triggered towering guilt surges, which Mitchell’s mind recoiled from as instinctively as a hand from the hot stove of legend. Which hurled it right back into a burbling cesspool of thoughts about that, THAT, and THAT! So how could he possibly calm himself for sleep? The trig homework he’d been ignoring just wouldn’t do it. No, he needed something
more consuming, more…creative?

  Yes—yes, of course! He’d take his first crack at mimicking his cousin’s reviews. Why not? He’d attempt to echo Higgensworth English, though that would take some practice. What he definitely could write here and now was puns. And didn’t Cousin Charles pun a bit himself? The prison book review made some obvious jailhouse sex references. Indeed, the review’s opening sentence called the book “seminal.” Very subtle, Mr. Higgensworth. But also, very punny! Mitchell smiled. This felt like what they called “close reading” in Honors English last year. Which was a grinding bore when applied to Moby Dick.

  Moby DICK! Mitchell’s inner Beavis latched onto this. For double entendres, you couldn’t ask for more fertile ground (Uh-huh huh huh huh. He said “fertile”). But surely, generations of sophomores had long since exhausted every conceivable Moby Dick joke. So he clicked around Amazon, seeking another promising title, or maybe an author’s name to riff on. There was no way this first review would be worthy of Ms. Tharp’s class. It would just be a lark, a joke. But it was the distraction he needed. It would also be good practice for Kuba’s project. Plus, it would make Ellie laugh! And wasn’t humor supposed to be a great aphrodisiac? Not that she seemed to need one, just now. But still, it would be fun to honor the playfully horny mood she had thrust him into (Uh-huh huh huh huh. He said “thrust”).

  After some diligent clicking, he eventually found the perfect outlet for his odd mix of inspirations in the surname of a science fiction author profiled in an obscure book.

  * * *

  * A trend of totalitarian proportions in tech, these afford zero peace or privacy, but boundless opportunities for spontaneous collaboration—which breaks out about as often as you’d expect in an industry that hires heavily from the awkward and the introverted.

  As even a casual grope through this bulging hardback will show, Michael Moorcock is one of the best-endowed members of the literary set. Science fiction was not considered to be the cream of the cultural crop when he started his work, but he erected a towering literary edifice despite that, thrusting deeply into what was then a virgin field. The writing life was initially hard on him, as his first two books stiffed after getting shafted by critics. Then his editor got sacked, which really sucked, even though the guy was a swollen-headed jerk. Moorcock soon wondered if he was a ding-a-ling for even trying. All of this was a terrible blow, but things finally came to a head in the early 1950s when he authored two hit novels. After that, the books just kept coming and coming and coming—at first just in spurts, but then in great streams of golden prose. This masterful bibliography chronicles each of these creative climaxes, while sucking the reader in with a geyser of biographical notes, including some intriguing asides about the author’s relationship with his brothers Harold and Richard, who were a real pair of nuts. His fascination with the works of Melville is also chronicled extensively. My sole bone of contention is that a bibliography, by definition, can only prick the surface of its subject, so the reader is encouraged to probe into the primary sources on his own. Those heeding this advice will have a ball.

  “Jesus,” Danna says. “I cannot believe Ellie wrote that shit. I mean, I don’t believe it! Seriously. Ellie? Ellie? ‘It’s running down my leg?’ It practically defies the laws of physics!”

  Kuba just chuckles. He’s rarely in a position to shock Danna. Indeed, this is a first (and surely, a last). A more playful, smooth, or taunting man might milk the situation. But Kuba—being Kuba—immediately starts tipping his hand. “Well, maybe there’s a bit more than meets the eye,” he hints.

  Danna’s buffeted by dueling gusts of relief and disappointment. On the one hand, she treasures the staid image she has of Ellie—her mentor, her rock! On the other, how much more awesome would the girl be with a deep, carnal undertow lurking under those still waters? The answer—if you’re Danna—is extremely awesome. Or, come to think of it…a bit too awesome. Because Danna couldn’t help but find a hidden seam of depravity awfully sexy in Ellie. And as this is her big sisterly, auntish, and/or maternal-like figure, that’s the last thing she needs!

  For his part, Tarek’s afraid he’ll let slip that he read every exchange of this ancient SMS exchange in Phluttr’s shady archive, so all he wants is to change the subject. And so he practically squeals, “Whoa, venison chimichangas!” He grabs their hands, dragging them toward the Deep Fry Bar. “I sure hope you guys aren’t veeeee-gan!”

  ICK! MEET FLOWDOUGH

  In a while-ago post titled Phluttr and Sarttr which went weirdly viral (thanks, Reddit!), I predicted that Phluttr’s user base would gradually become its by-far biggest advertiser, as people start paying up to position themselves just-so in their social microverses. I argued this with more conviction than hard proof. But a growing wave of evidence shows that this process is in fact under way.

  This fascinating post on Jezebel, for instance, reveals how the company is now mining the attention and casually batted eyelashes of local hotties everywhere. As an example, let’s imagine Courtney: a teen scholar on a teeny budget, and the sexy obsession of every red-blooded lad and adventurous lass in her Econ 101 class. Could those smitten legions be cajoled into throwing down a few dimes to place their latest humblebrag posts in front of those bottomless eyes? Without a doubt! Simply because…who knows? It might just impress her enough to faintly bump the odds of wooing the gal. “Wooing” being a bashful little word for “fucking,” which is all that half her classmates can think about during those thrice-weekly lectures.

  Those so inclined can now buy a “Psst!” This is basically a bribe to get Phluttr to subvert its normal algorithms and prominently feature a post that might not otherwise enter that special someone’s InFlow (InFlow being Phluttrese for Newsfeed). Among its selling points is that your targets don’t know you paid to get in front of them because that might feel creepy (being creepy, and all). The base price is pegged to that of a first-class stamp—which I couldn’t quote to save my life because like you, modern reader, I haven’t used one since lobbing Granny that thank-you note back in 3rd grade. Still, it’s clever pricing because it sounds cheap, and who wouldn’t snap up a cheap lottery ticket when first prize is banging Courtney for a semester or three?

  Note, however, that I said base price. Because just as ambulance chasers have bid AdWords pricing for asbestos-related search terms into the stratosphere, it’ll cost more to reach Courtney as she gets more popular. And so, as she enters more romantic crosshairs, Phluttr raises prices to match demand to supply. Soon the company’s making a small fortune whenever she glances at her screen! But what if she tires of all the boasty posts from near strangers that’re starting to clog her InFlow? God forbid she start squandering the precious asset of her attention on study, exercise, or in-person socializing! Why? Because Phluttr keeps the dollars flowing on the basis of certain solemn commitments—among them, that the company never charges for promoted posts that aren’t actually seen by their targets.

  This means Courtney needs to park that heart-shaped ass back in front of her InFlow, pronto! And so, Phluttr cuts her in on the deal. The program is called “FlowDough,” and it quite literally pays people to read more Flow, with de facto bonuses for Liking, Cooling, and Hotting a high percentage of posts (to the great delight of her drooling patrons, no doubt). They won’t pay just anyone, of course—only that tiny sliver of people who lots of other folks are paying to reach. Phluttr positions FlowDough to these exalted few in benign terms (something about testing ads), and also keeps it far from the public eye, revealing it only to the Courtneys of the world (so if this is all news to you, I’m afraid you’re not in the top 0.1% of sought-after sex partners in your local gene pool).

  Team Phluttr may sincerely view FlowDough as a win-win-win. The company keeps most of the proceeds, Courtney picks up some easy cash, and her infatuatees get harmless little thrills when she Hots photos of them. And FlowDough’s market is by no means limited to peacocking suitors, as people will pay to reach anyone they want to infl
uence. Bosses with many underlings, bank loan officers, rush chairmen in popular fraternities, and countless others will no doubt become the targets of many Psst!s as Phluttr continues to encircle and infiltrate human society.

  But all signs are that the earliest adopters here are those in the mood for love. And it’s a short jaunt from this to something quite creepy. As for what that is, I’m not yet entirely sure. But something’s not quite G-rated here, and I’m digging into it. Stay tuned.

  Years ago, Jepson dated a girl who had an odd taste for the salty husks of peanut shells, which she’d wad up and savor like chewing tobacco in a remarkably subtle, almost dainty way. This let him delight them both with just one goodie at Giants games—a small bonanza in a stadium that peddled beer for almost a buck an ounce, and price-gouged snacks even worse! As this fell during his decade-plus as a post-Bubble zillionaire, the savings were irrelevant. However, it taught him that a purchase’s apparent waste products can sometimes have value. And this is why Mitchell still has a job: because Jepson believes in giving the nontechnical deadweight from acquihires a chance to show it’s made of peanut husks rather than plastic refuse (an analogy HR recently coached him to avoid in discussions with the deadweight in question). He’s been having surprisingly good luck with nontechnical co-founders lately. He didn’t expect this, because acquihire founders are—by a harsh, but clear-eyed definition—failures. After all, they not only failed as entrepreneurs, but (unlike Jepson himself back in ’02) they couldn’t figure out how to come out with a few million bucks for themselves despite that. Both of these things point to a disappointing lack of vision.