Version Zero

by David Yoon

  He stared at the fence, seeing something no one else could see.

  “You really loved her,” said Max.

  Pilot sniffed and blinked his eyes. “Do you want to see?”

  Pilot pulled out his phone: a customized, no-brand device wrapped with tape and foil. The rest of the team caught up, and they all leaned in.

  “What are we looking at?” said Shane.

  “Noelle,” said Max.

  “Oh,” said Akiko. Max saw her instinctively draw closer to Shane.

  Pilot swiped through a surreal collection of photos.

  A grainy security camera screenshot of Max leaving Wren.

  “Whoa,” said Max.

  A webcam view of Akiko. Shane unloading his van, from a distance. Brayden dancing in his underwear in front of a massive television.

  “Uh,” said Brayden.

  “Not these,” said Pilot, swiping.

  The man in the Black Halo mask.

  A man in a demon mask in a vast server room, giving two thumbs-up.

  A futuristic ski lodge sitting atop a pristine snowy mountain range.

  “Not these, not these,” he said, swiping.

  He finally reached a video of a young girl—ten or eleven—standing on the rickety llama fence. The girl performed clumsy split leaps from the top beam. Max watched Pilot’s face closely as the video played. He saw Pilot’s eyes soften and grow full of wonder and regret and, just once, flash with nausea.

  Noelle missed a leap. She fell. She began crying, which struck Max as odd for a girl her age. Anna Chiang rushed into the frame to help.

  “Honey, come help me,” said Anna.

  Pilot turned the phone off. “That is the last video I have of her.”

  “She was beautiful,” said Akiko.

  “She really was,” said Shane, and he squeezed Akiko’s hand. Max guessed he was fast-forwarding his mind to the day when they would have children of their own.

  Max was suddenly struck with the real possibility of remaining alone for his whole life, unless he changed certain things. So he decided to change things, starting from this moment forward.

  In a valley turning purple with dusk, Max saw a bird cloud moving in tight formation, creating a living blob that shifted and stretched as a single unit. In his mind he took a photo—chakee—and sent it to Akiko sitting just a few feet away.

  Do you see the things I see? thought Max. Do you see them how I do?

  I know you do.

  The bird cloud dissipated.

  “Noelle was twenty-one when she died,” said Pilot. “She died hating me.”

  “That can’t be true,” said Akiko, and pressed closer into Shane.

  “No, she was right to hate me. I hate me.”

  Pilot said it perfectly plain. Perhaps his tear ducts had dried up long ago.

  “It was only afterward when I learned how brave she had been,” said Pilot. “Writing and writing and writing, about only the good things. Was she ever mine?”

  “Of course she was,” said Akiko. She seemed affected by this news. Akiko loved her own father very much, so Max imagined it was impossible for her to grasp the concept of a daughter hating her father.

  “She wrote against Gorillagate,” said Pilot. His voice hitched, and he cleared it with a growl. “She stood up for the actress, someone she did not even know, without fear. And for that, she was attacked online, forced to escape from her home in a cab in the middle of the night to a rental in a new city, with new furniture, a new life, a new haircut. One day she went for a morning run—that must have been a new thing, too—and they ran her over. The police always say if you want to kill someone with total impunity, a hit-and-run is a terrific option.”

  Now Pilot was laughing and crying, those dry tear ducts springing to life, and he said, “It was impossible for her to hide, for she left a trail. All they had to do was follow it. She was doomed from the moment she spoke her mind.”

  Max opened his mouth to speak, but stopped. He shot a glance at Akiko, who was already looking at him, thinking the same thing: Noelle had been that SJW, or the social justice warrior, murdered at the height of Gorillagate.

  “I was asleep when they killed her,” said Pilot. “I was asleep my whole life. I will never sleep again until I am dead.”

  Brayden picked at a big splinter in the fence. Shane watched him. No one really knew where to look or what to say.

  “I am so sorry,” said Akiko finally.

  Max threw an arm around Pilot, and he could tell he loved the gesture. It struck Max that Pilot probably had had almost no physical contact for years.

  Max read about a study once. Monkeys were split into two groups: one with physical contact, one without. Those without slowly grew insane. They stopped eating. They destroyed everything in their habitats. They sat in their own feces.

  “My little Noellephant,” said Pilot. He laughed through his tears.

  “But how—” said Akiko. “How did her name stay hidden from the press? I never knew that poor girl was your daughter. No one did.”

  Pilot stared at nothing. “I could have deleted those troll cowards out of existence before they learned her location. I could have built a castle to protect her in a single day. But I was too busy working. I was too late. So all there was left to do was to try to protect her memory. She would not turn into some meme joke. So I scraped all of it into the trash. Every mention of her name, every photo, every news article.”

  Pilot took a drink while everyone watched.

  “How’d you pull that off?” said Brayden.

  Pilot suddenly gave his chest a dry, fierce thump.

  “How?” said Pilot Markham. “I am Pilot fucking Markham. That is how.”

  Ahead, a triangle sounded.

  “Boys and girl,” hollered a woman from a pair of weathered saloon doors at one end of the porch. “Food.”

  Max could see a table with a neat stack of burgers.

  Max and Pilot and Shane and Akiko rose and ambled over.

  “Hope you guys like a lotta llama,” said the old woman. She gave Pilot a hug. “Sweetheart, how are you holding up?”

  “He’s a fighter,” said Max.

  1.25

  Hello world! Noelle Chiang here. But you may call me Noellephant, for I trumpet thru the jungle and stomp all the baddies doing wrong in the world. Mom likes the name. She says Dad likes it too. (She’s like his assistant.) You may know Mom from those NEXT institute videos. Is it nerdy that I still think my own mom is cool?

  Dad makes apps, but you already knew that. Dad is cool too. Wherever he is.

  . . .

  Here’s a funny thing I realized . . . people never stop being babies. Babies cry when they need attention, right? Adults are the same. Everyone needs attention. Everyone needs to hear: you are real! You matter! Without that stuff, we cry and cry.

  Except adults don’t cry. Their pain builds and builds until it pops out in strange ways. They do drugs. They do graffiti. They shoot up a school. Me, I used to cut.

  I still wear shorts to the beach. And that’s all I’m going to say about that.

  . . .

  Mom and Dad separated. Fat separates from cold soup. Pulp separates from orange juice. She said: think of it as Dad being on another long business trip . . . that he never comes back from lol. Still I’ll probably get emails or karps or “shapters” (wtf are those) from him. Or whatever they come up with next. They keep making new stuff. Everybody ditches the old stuff and runs to the new stuff.

  . . .

  The feeds scare me. But I can’t stop reading them. It’s awful. It’s hilarious. It’s everything and nothing. One big nonstop cry for attention and validation, like I said before with the babies, but everywhere all over the world.

  The feeds are an addiction masquerading as therapy.
<
br />   They are the worst therapy I can imagine. I understand the addiction. I pity us all. Because socially—politically—you cannot afford to not be on the feeds.

  I think about the trolls. How they think what they do is one big joke in search of a big reaction. How is that different from a baby’s cry?

  Here’s how it’s different: babies never bully.

  The trolls try to punish me for everything I say. I realize I am becoming a kind of activist. And I won’t stop saying what needs to be said. So I troll the trolls back.

  In a way, the trolls are making a troll out of me. But what can I do? Be silenced?

  Hell no.

  . . .

  Sorry to get all absent-dad on you . . . BIG NEWS! Got articles published on The Hunt (3), Kraken (2), Poliwonka (4!). Top articles so far: Rape Culture in VR Gaming and How to Be a Woman Online and The Internet Needs a Mother.

  Top compliments: Heroine, Nut-twister, Wonderwoman.

  Top epithets: c*nt, b*tch, slut, whore, fat, feminazi, lesbian (?), c*mdump, f*ckhole, f*ckskull, gash, blood wound, c*ckchoker, and too many others to list here.

  Anyway. Broke 10k followers (don’t know how many are trolls). Traffic to Strugglettes off the charts. Making decent ad money. Onward!

  . . .

  This last month has been hell. Someone phished my personal emails. There is an insane narrative forming now, that, apparently, I was an underage prostitute coached by Dad in secret. Started on Knowned, got upvoted by the boy brigade on NewsWar, now it’s on National News Edition. Now it’s like fact.

  Hope NNE got a lot of clicks out of me. Not linking to them here.

  There’s a meme photo too. I never asked for that kind of famous.

  Spending more time policing/cleaning up/defending myself against bullsh*t coming from all sides than actually writing.

  Pain makes you stronger? I hope?

  Even wrote to you-know-who for advice, is how desperate I am, but no response. Asked journalist buddies but they have no clue where he is. Ghost dad, lol.

  . . .

  The good news: gave a talk with my kickass mom in Switzerland last week. Audience of thousands, got to wear the fancy headset and get livecast globally. Our title was How to Include Women in Tech in One Easy Step. Uber-empowering. I told them to invite you-know-who to come, but he’s still being the “J. D. Salinger of Tech.”

  The bad news: got doxxed on Knowned. I tried writing to Linda Belinda, no response. My personal info is now everywhere: my haunts, my habits, all my desire lines. If I move, they win. If I quit my favorite café, they win. Paralyzed . . .

  . . .

  I have to shut down Noellephant. From now on please directly email me or, even better, mail an old-skool letter. Something safer. I’m taking a break from writing publicly, but please please please do not lose touch. I need you more than ever.

  Reason why: yesterday a man showed up at my favorite café with a shotgun and screamed my name before firing four times into the ceiling. Was arrested. No one hurt. I was not there at the time.

  I begin looking for a new place tomorrow. Not sure how I will sleep tonight.

  I will miss this place. It made me, it loved me, it betrayed me, it broke me.

  Farewell, internet.

  1.26

  Max turned off the tablet. It was a strange home-brew device, with a removable battery held with gaffer tape and no options for any sort of connectivity whatsoever. On it Pilot had written in white ink:

  noelle

  “Jesus,” said Akiko. She held the tablet with care for the sacred object it was.

  They had walked down a short hill to this spot, marveling at the way the dry sand responded to each step with a little squeaky bark, until they reached the shore where the little waves wiped the wet sand perfectly flat and perfectly clean over and over again into an infinite slab of the most luscious, most flawlessly poured concrete in the world.

  Max, wrote Max into this perfect sand, and the waves wiped it clean.

  Aki, wrote Akiko, and the waves wiped it clean, too.

  Now the two of them huddled beneath a heavy poncho around the screen, reading and reading as the temperature around them fell. The blog entries and articles and letters all ended as abruptly as they had begun, which, Max figured, was pretty much how life worked.

  1. Life began out of nowhere.

  2. Things happened.

  3. Life ended without warning.

  Out of the three, only step two was of any importance. It was also the most mysterious.

  “She’d been bullied publicly for months,” said Max. “I mean, where was Pilot?”

  “So fucked up,” said Akiko.

  It had been the four of them reading the tablet, Max and Akiko and Shane and Brayden, but Shane had grown tired of reading and Brayden got distracted by the discovery of a ball court nearby. Some country club game Max had never heard of called pétanque, French for bocce ball. Shane and Brayden sauntered over a small ridge to play, perhaps to make the best use of the falling daylight.

  While those two whooped and cantered, Max found himself alone with Akiko in a hidden pocket of tall grass. Grandma had given them the heavy poncho.

  Akiko’s hair smelled musky and sleepy, like it hadn’t been washed in a while. Like her pillowcase, probably, back in the Delgado Beach apartment.

  Before them the sun had already set. The ocean surrounding this bluff atop Glass Island had grown still and steely and cold. The sky the color of tea.

  “In the real world,” said Max, “if you see someone bullying someone, you stop it. You don’t let it get all the way to murder. Right?”

  “Yeah, but you know Online,” said Akiko. “Online is all, We are not responsible for our users’ content. It’s bullshit.”

  “Isn’t that what the CEO of Knowned said? Linda Belinda?”

  “She just wants users at any cost.”

  “Wait, wasn’t Pilot a cofounder of Knowned?” said Max.

  Akiko frowned, thinking. “What do you think Pilot really wants out of all this?”

  “Something big,” said Max. “Something only a guy like him could imagine.”

  She laughed. “I’m not getting arrested for anything, I’ll tell you that right now.”

  “I won’t tell if you won’t,” said Max. The words felt clever to say, but they didn’t make a whole lot of sense.

  Indigo began to seep into the tea sky from the cosmos above. Max thought about Dad. Dad made coil springs. He got paid. The coil springs were sold for money. They were used in useful machines. They were the thing-thing. Simple. There was no data-tracked freemium crowdsourced business model in coil springs.

  Maybe Dad was right.

  Maybe Dad was right about everything, and Max and Pilot and everyone of this generation were fools. The world—correction: Max’s world—felt like an absurd wonderland with plenty of seats at the Mad Hatter’s tea party, but still no room for anyone.

  Max began to feel stupider and stupider by the second.

  “There was life before the internet, you know,” said Max. “I think I remember some stuff from when I was real little.”

  “Yay, and there was life before cars and the telephone and running water.”

  “Dang, bite my head off.”

  “Nom nom nom.”

  Akiko folded in close under the poncho. This was the Akiko Max grew up with—more a sister than a friend, with all the easy dumb jokes that came with.

  Max did not want a sister.

  “I just remember the internet was supposed to be this awesome place that would bring the world together,” said Akiko.

  “It did, but not always in a good way.” Max frowned, realizing something. “You ever read the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace?”

  “Never read it,” said
Akiko.

  “Well, it exists. And come to think of it, the whole thing amounts to a huge dick move.”

  “Well, now I’m never going to read it.”

  “Mostly the declaration is about hey, government, fuck you, we don’t need you,” said Max. “Also, physical bodies are outdated and stupid. And Cyberspace is this whole new parallel world that doesn’t need to play by any rules of humanity. Shit: the internet was fully antisocial to begin with.”

  “That’s such a nerd thing to declare. That’s such a boy thing to declare. If you guys had to menstruate you wouldn’t say stupid shit like bodies are outdated.”

  “I would menstruate if I could,” said Max.

  “That literally makes no sense, what you just said.”

  They laughed. Max could smell her hair again.

  “If you could fix the internet,” said Max, “how would you—”

  “Two-way links,” said Akiko.

  “Two-way links.”

  “Hyperlinks are one-way. You know how we’re all supposedly interconnected in this big global conversation? Conversations are two-way. Links are not. So I call bullshit.”

  “Because I could link to you without you even knowing about it.”

  “Mhm. You could troll me, too, and I could never find you. Email me without letting me email you back. Dox me and never show your face. That’s not a conversation. There’s no purpose to this kind of setup. It’s fundamentally anonymous, it’s fundamentally antipurpose. Just potshots in the dark.”

  “You mean antisocial,” said Max.

  “I do?”

  “You said antipurpose. I think you mean antisocial.”

  “Isn’t that the same thing?”

  “Six of one.”

  Akiko shifted and threw the poncho higher to stay warm.

  “Anyway,” said Akiko. “Two-way links. Not that anyone would approve that kind of core-level change. Entire business models depend on potshots in the dark.”

  “So then what?”

  She shrugged and grinned. “So we’re fucked.”

  It was a dark joke, and Max laughed, because laughter was the best medicine and blablabla. He was having fun. He was having the most fun he had had in a while, and he was having it with his favorite person in the world.