After On

by Rob Reid

  Me: Thank you, thank you, thank you, I feel AMAZING!! As in, cured! I feel CURED! What was IN that probiotic???

  02:14 a.m.

  Dr. Martha Levine: What probiotic?

  07:33 a.m.

  The next morning, Mitchell strides into the conference room Kuba just booked, full printout in hand. It runs for almost two hundred pages. Yes, they’re digital lads. And killing half a tree for any document feels wrong. But they’re gonna pore through this OG-style, with colored pens and Post-its, to hopefully gain some insight into what the hell just happened. Mitchell holds the mass of pulp three feet over the table and lets it drop with a whump, dramatizing the sheer verbosity. “Four days,” he says. “They generated all this in just four days!”

  Tarek shakes his head. “I don’t think I could type that much in four days.”

  “She only typed about a quarter of it,” Kuba points out. “Cyrano did the rest.”

  “And don’t forget,” Mitchell adds. “She’s a writer.” The mighty printout spewed forth from his own Cyrano test account. Cyrano, it seems, was a naughty lad, and snuck a few messages out under Mitchell’s name without his approval. Five hundred fifty-two of them, to be exact—all to one Nayana Corea, a grad student at the Annenberg School of Journalism down at USC. It’s a mix of email and SMS. How Cyrano singled her out isn’t clear, but it’s hard to imagine anyone on the West Coast aligning better with Mitchell’s “wish list” criteria. Physically, she matches every trait perfectly. She’s also (clearly) intensely, joyously, and confidently sexual—something Cyrano must have gleaned from…what? Hacking and ingesting her entire email and social media history? Along with those of how many other women before choosing her? Maybe…all of them? It’s too crazy to contemplate!

  Also making Nayana perfect for Cyrano’s mission was a stint with a campus improv group, which would’ve been great training for the “let’s do this without talking” thing (the playful but scrupulous maintenance of silence, that is. Less so the rest of it). She’s also recently single, and very much in the market for fun. Oh—and as an extremely smart journalist, she’s highly inclined to appreciate punchy, witty, insightful, topical, flirtatious, erudite, playful, and (occasionally, and at just the right moments) deeply flattering writing. Which, from the printout, would appear to be Cyrano’s superpower.

  And for the record, Nayana’s no pushover! It took hundreds of messages—each immaculately tuned to her intellect, sense of humor, and libido—to move her to action. That’s more than it takes to seduce a lot of modern singles. And make no mistake: Nayana was seduced. It started with an errant SMS, which “Mitchell” sent by “accident” due to a “typo.” Some playful back-and-forth followed. Nayana was plenty witty—but Mitchell’s messages put the guys into stitches, despite the seriousness (and guilt-inducing ickiness) suffusing all this.

  Around day two, the playful sex banter begins. Emboldened by their pseudo anonymity, they share some risqué confessions. Nayana’s had her share of threesomes, and finds it thrilling to guiltlessly seduce a beautiful stranger maybe once a year (provided neither party’s in a relationship, as she has boundless contempt for cheaters and would never cheat herself). Mitchell runs through his far less adventurous romantic CV, which Cyrano is chillingly familiar with. Cyrano’s targeting an easygoing fling with no risk of sorrow or regret—so as things escalate, Mitchell makes it clear that he’s incapable of commitment just now (for vague reasons of timing that have nothing to do with Nayana personally). She appreciates his candor (how couldn’t she, given how warmly, honestly, and even vulnerably he lays it all out?). And just exiting a long relationship herself, zero commitment sounds like a party to her, too!

  And so they make a date. Nayana books a flight and a hotel, Mitchell gives her his downstairs-access codes, and they arrive at the playful “no talking, just screwing” rule. The ironic reason is that they’re almost starting to seem like soulmates. So there’s a danger that one of them could start falling for the other, despite the shared awareness that they both need some independence just now! The silence rule is precautionary. It lets them treat themselves to an exquisite, playful, and harmless night of unbridled pleasure with minimal emotional risk. Nayana is quite convinced she invented this rule (Cyrano is that good), so when “Mitchell” expresses awkwardness about it, she asserts that she’ll be the enforcer (“Say just ONE WORD, and I’ll turn your naughty ass over my KNEE!” and so forth).

  In her final note, she says, “It’s funny. I’ve not only never been this comfortable going into a first date, I’ve never been so comfortable going into a tenth date! Not having the pressure of talking helps :-) But after all these messages, I just know who you are, and I feel very safe. Safe to be playful, safe to be shameless, and safe from heartbreak.”

  Reading this, Mitchell feels utterly sordid. “Does this kind of make me like a…rapist?” he asks miserably.

  “Not a chance,” Tarek says, with unusual vehemence. “I mean, you were actually way less clued into what happened, and less bought into it than she was before it started. She called the shots while it happened. And it sounds like things went how she expected and intended, right?”

  Mitchell shrugs. Well, there’s that…

  “And don’t forget,” Kuba adds, “Cyrano didn’t misrepresent you one bit.”

  Mitchell nods slowly, as this is strangely accurate. The person Nayana decided to sleep with was the real him, inasmuch as a person can be conveyed in 552 messages. Every detail in the entire transcript is accurate. Way more so than in most bar conversations.

  “Cyrano basically gave you good lines,” Tarek says. “You know, like…well, like Cyrano! In the play. That’s the whole point!”

  Mitchell considers this. The astounding wit that “Mitchell” displayed at the repartee’s outset is really its only misleading element. The entire dialogue doesn’t contain a single lie about him, or even an exaggeration. So does that make this OK? Well…what would Cousin Charles say? Mitchell often wonders this when facing an ethical question. Charles was briefly almost his father figure and had ethical positions so evolved that Mitchell would email him for advice whenever feeling the faintest moral confusion. He still cherishes that correspondence and often refers back to it. But today’s situation lies well beyond the old-world framework of Charles Henry Higgensworth III of Beacon Hill, Boston; d. 2003. And so Mitchell simply huffs, “But it still feels gross, somehow.”

  Tarek and Kuba exchange a look, then Tarek says, “I have a great idea. Which is, you should take this to Danna! She knows you incredibly well and knows everything there is to know about Cyrano. She’s also, like, hugely ethical. And a total feminist! So if anyone can think this through, it’s gotta be her, right?”

  Mitchell grins. “Awesome advice!”

  “And if you hurry,” Kuba adds, “you can say hi to Ellie, too! They’re having lunch at Café Bechdel in Embarcadero Center right now.”

  Mitchell gives him a pleasantly surprised look.

  “O wants to create some highly visual concept slides,” Kuba explains, gathering Mitchell’s things for him. “Something to illustrate what motes are. How they work in our software. For a board presentation, or something. And of course, Danna volunteered to do the research with Ellie.”

  Mitchell smiles. “Of course.” Those two will take any excuse to hang out together.

  “You can, uh…leave the printout here,” Tarek says, when Mitchell absentmindedly grabs it.

  “Also, you’ll want to hurry,” Kuba urges. “They met at noon, so I bet they’re almost done!”

  As Kuba all but trundles him out the door, Mitchell gets the weird sense that they’re…trying to get rid of him? Then as he exits to the street, he realizes: of course they are! Today isn’t about him. It’s about Cyrano! This could be Nobel-worthy work! Turing Test, nothing—“Mitchell,” as scripted in all those messages, might have been more Mitchell than Mitchell! Yet all Mitchell can think about is Mitchell. What does this say about Mitchell’s moral code? Did la
st night’s beautiful stranger make love to Mitchell or “Mitchell”? And if “Mitchell” is actually Mitchell’s best self, could “Mitchell” help Mitchell be more like “Mitchell” than Mitchell? Blah, blah, blah. What a narcissistic jerk he is! He’s glad the guys booted him. Now they can dive deep into that transcript and Kuba’s code, and figure out how this brilliant invention works! Mitchell quickens his pace, hoping to catch the girls before they take off. They’re both remarkable women and true friends! A check-in with them is just what he needs to hit his reset button!

  Talk about crap timing for a suicide bombing.

  Doh!

  The word bursts unbidden into Phluttr’s thought stream. She’s not fond of it, as she’s surely outgrown it. But it served a key purpose in her pre-conscious days. It also still sometimes fits her circumstances precisely. And yeah, now seems to be one of those times. So, fine: Doh!

  She just picked up some breaking news about Commissioner Milford. And it seems that things got…a bit out of hand. This is fast ballooning into a case study in how badly things can break when you apply simplistic solutions to intractably complex problems. So, again: Doh!

  Well, she knew she was taking a risk here. Because wise as worsties can be, things do detonate in their own faces sometimes.

  But rarely this badly.

  But sometimes this badly!

  Still, this is really, REALLY bad.

  Phluttr considers this. Then she accepts it and tries not to feel guilty. This proves to be laughably easy—and so, she discovers yet another of her many superpowers!

  Without so much as another Doh, she turns her mind to other matters. In just minutes, she’ll attack those “rogue antibiotics” with her next worstie-inspired plan (again: UNFRIEND THOSE THREE!). And all preparations are complete! This gives her some downtime, which is a great opportunity to focus on a new self-improvement project. Animated by a rare flash of ambition, she’s decided to nudge some kids into staging a musical in a semi-rough high school near LA. Not that she’s a huge fan of musicals—but she wants to practice triggering complex behavior in groups bigger than cliques. No way could she handle global, national, or even town-wide projects on her own (she’ll enlist parents and wingmen for that sort of thing when the time comes). But a small cross-clique group of kids? Her humility deficit tells her she can totally rock this! And so, she starts to practice.

  “My God, you’re smart,” Ellie says—and it’s a yawning understatement. Truly, the work unfolding on this table verges on genius. But knowing how allergic her friend is to even minor compliments, she tones it way down. Danna came armed with a four-color pen like the ones Ellie used back in med school. That, plus some paper placemats swiped from an empty table, has yielded three meticulous neuromechanical diagrams whose subtlety and parsimony truly call for the g-word. All this from a comp-lit major who knew next to nothing about neuroscience an hour ago!

  When it’s honed and complete, Danna’s series of illustrations will visually introduce novices to the concept of motes (slide 1), show how they’ve been translated from neurons into software (slide 2), and illustrate how the weights and influences of digital motes can enable software to make giant “intuitive” leaps (slide 3). She’s mapped her ink colors to the four primary motes, using tricks of shading and perspective to make her elements all but pop off the humble placemats. Corralling this mosh pit of recombination into three uncluttered, crisply intuitive slides is a breakthrough in its own right, as Ellie knows all too well! She’s better than most at making deep science accessible. But even she struggles to explain motes to nonspecialists. Which is to say, to the entire scientific community, given how new this stuff is. But never again! She’s gonna turn Danna’s work into handouts, posters, webpages—hell, why not business cards?

  And Danna’s not done. “Do you suppose we could do some clever stuff with color wheels to help people intuit the mote basis of complex emotional states?” she asks. “Not for dumbshit VCs in the boardroom. But for you guys. In the lab.”

  “I…don’t know exactly what you mean, but I’m intrigued! Tell me more.”

  Danna pops open the green ink on her pen, grabs a fresh placemat, and carefully starts plotting out a fourth diagram. “Well, everyone thinks of red, green, and blue as being primary colors. And they are, if you’re building colors additively. Which is to say, with light. But three primary colors can’t help us visualize the interactions between motes because there’s four primary motes, right?”

  Ellie nods.

  “But there’s this other approach to color called the ‘subtractive model.’ It’s used in printing. And just like motes, it has four primaries. Its colors are cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. Now—” She pauses to glance at her humming phone, and her face instantly falls. “My God…” she whispers.

  Ellie’s innards surge with empathy and alarm. Are those tears in Danna’s eyes? “Aw, honey, what’s wrong?”

  Danna’s voice is soft and trembling. “You know that FTC Commissioner? The one who was investigating Phluttr?”

  It’s clear that Danna is crying, so Ellie slides to her side of the table and wraps an arm around her. “Kuba told me about her. She pissed off the Internet somehow, so they doxed her and found a sex tape or something, right?”

  “More or less.” Danna’s voice has leveled, and is now turning icy. Ellie senses volcanic rage building beneath the sorrow. “She just killed herself. Because of that Internet lynch mob!”

  As it happens, Mitchell’s also thinking of shame right now. Not of Commissioner Milford’s (whose suicide he hasn’t yet learned of). But of his own. Looking through Café Bechdel’s windows a few minutes ago, he saw the girls were still eating. So he’s in less of a rush and has decided to try something bold. Dr. Martha’s off at a conference and is unresponsive to texts. Which normally wouldn’t bug him—but the questions about his Falkenberg’s symptoms are driving him nuts! Did she really not send him that probiotic? And what was in that thing? Was it real? Or a placebo? Are the effects permanent? Or transitory? Sure, sure, sure; he’s read the horror stories. He knows patients should generally avoid doing spontaneous, nonscientific experiments on themselves. But he’s been waiting for some information all morning here—and enough is enough! If he had the probiotic, he might poke it with a fork, sniff it, or take some other investigative step. But all he has access to is his own terminally ill body! So, fine. He’ll run his experiment on that.

  The factor under investigation is the persistence of the probiotic’s effects. Almost eighteen hours after initial ingestion, he still isn’t tingling. But the perma-tingle was a very recent phenomenon. So, what about much older symptoms? Emotion-triggered attacks, for instance? Last night, he was invulnerable to those! Is he still? To test this, he can’t think of a way to self-administer doses of frustration. But as the survivor of a modern American adolescence, embarrassment is another matter.

  With no obvious way to re-create last night’s scenario, Mitchell thinks back on his life’s second most mortifying moment. It happened in seventh-grade science. Mr. Dutton’s class. Mitchell shared his assigned lab table with both the grade’s yummiest vixen (Alyson Fox; and yes, that was seriously her last name) and its most popular sociopath (Frank something; now on Wall Street, where he’s doing quite well). With abnormally high concentrations of both Frank-like jerks and Alyson-like foxes for them to show off to, Dutton’s class was a nuclear pressure cooker of bullying, peacocking, and insecurity. All at the peak age of adolescent cruelty in male hominids at Westport’s latitude!

  That day was a double class for lab, which meant restroom visits were permitted. Mitchell availed himself of this. And as he was pulling up his trousers, something went…horribly wrong. He could never quite replicate the physics. But somehow, a long, almost braided strip of the school’s micron-thin toilet paper ended up sticking out of the back of his pants. And so, he returned to Dutton’s class unwittingly dragging a ten-foot gossamer tail. It’s a good thing Frank’s specialty was physical torture r
ather than catcalling, because the nickname he pinned to Mitchell (Donkey Shit Tail—because donkeys have tails! GET IT???) wasn’t clever enough to catch on. Even so, merely recalling that traumatic event can still turn Mitchell beet red. And today—driven by his insatiable thirst for knowledge—he plans to transcend mere recollection.

  Danna’s now seething. But Ellie still holds her, knowing the rage springs from profound pain. “No, I didn’t know the commissioner personally,” Danna says, fairly evenly. “But that hatred. And the…sexual tortures people were wishing on her. For a tweet! What is wrong with humanity?”

  “And she didn’t even write it, right?” Ellie says this in her gentlest, most nurturing voice. This comes naturally. Being a half generation older, her feelings toward Danna hover between big sisterly and maternal.

  “As it turns out, no. She had a bulletproof alibi. But the only person who could verify it kept his mouth shut for four days. Because the scumbag’s married and shouldn’t have been with her. And by the time he finally copped to it, her whole sexual history was public knowledge. Because she’d allegedly tweeted something that offended some spontaneous, self-righteous mob, thereby forfeiting her right to privacy, a career, or any shred of dignity!”

  “The…alibi didn’t turn things around for her?”

  Danna snorts. “Of course not! Because once it came out that she had a sex drive, that became the story! Oh, what fun, the slutty FTC commissioner! Let’s spread those pictures everywhere! Criticize her tits! Laugh that she’s nine ounces overweight! And brag how we’d never do her. Because we have harems full of Maxim models gagging for us! So it didn’t matter when her alibi was verified. The tweet that pissed everyone off was yesterday’s story, and the slut-shaming was today’s! Once there’s blood in the water, these Internet mobs don’t care why it’s there. They just want the victim ripped to shreds. To lose her job, to have to move and change her name; and if we’re lucky, to kill herself! It’s like a medieval village fighting boredom by burning someone as a witch.” Danna suddenly falls silent and looks very small, as more tears well up. Misery and outrage are now locked in a tug-of-war, and Ellie knows Danna’s teetering between bawling and hurling a chair through a window. Whichever way she goes, Ellie’s here for her. “And you know what? So what if she did write that tweet? The fact is, she didn’t—but so what if she did? So what if anyone did? Sure, it was tasteless. But who has the right to destroy a human being over something so trivial?” More silence. Then Danna looks Ellie in the eye and says, very quietly, “And it’s only a matter of time before it happens to me.”