Fuck you, Suzanne. This is not their problem. It’s yours. We intend for it to be yours, because wouldn’t it be better? Wouldn’t it be better if the Elizas and Suzannes of the world simply didn’t work in games? They wouldn’t be harassed; neither would we.
“And you know who hasn’t opted out of it even when she could’ve? Suzanne.”
“Thank you, Eliza.”
and We can hear them too because We have Converged and Crashed and Collided and We are watching Eliza Bright in this moment—all of Us are—and We need to pause for a word on Friendship because the others wouldn’t know what this is if it Bit Them In The Literal Ass—most people say friends when they mean acquaintances and any people they don’t hate but when We say Friends We mean what is true—Family—the people We have and hold forever, even when We look at them and see only rage—where We can go from screaming at Each Other to screaming with Each Other in that binary way like a switch flipping—No to Yes and False to True—even after everything happens that’s about to happen and even after Eliza and Suzanne don’t live in the same state they will go on being Friends and that’s Our meaning of Friends—Heartfriends—Chosen Family and We Embrace Eliza by proxy because Our Suzanne is Ours and they are Each Other’s for years and years to come and this is the sort of Kinship that We need to survive in this unfeeling world and it is Sad—Sad in the same way Preston is Sad—that the others don’t get to know it and they don’t understand it and they scramble for it in their mythmaking and their obsession and their constant pinging into the internet void as they pray in desperation that the others are listening—but they do not have the “and” in them—not really
“Well what do you propose I do?” Preston says. He tries to continue, to say that they don’t know what it’s like, running a company. They don’t know what it’s like realizing he’s been taking hours upon hours doing nothing and no one at work has missed him an ounce. Everything’s kept going. Without him. But he doesn’t say that, because those aren’t feelings he’s been aware of until this moment. He stoppers his mouth, looks at the ground.
“I propose that you leave,” says Eliza. “This is really uncomfortable.”
“Well. Okay then. I will.” He turns around and walks down the steps.
Eliza remembers something. “Preston?”
He turns around, something hopeful in his eyes, as though he were Dog. Begging, pleading. Eliza is extremely happy because she feels no more conflicted feelings at all. Only one. The very clear desire to haul off and punch him in the mouth. She is proud of herself for resisting. “I forgot to tell you,” she says. “Jean-Pascale didn’t doxx me. Lewis did. You can fix that. That’s what you can do.” She watches him walk away.
Then she turns to Suzanne. “I’m sorry I made this really hard for you.”
Suzanne snorts. “Please. It just sucks, you didn’t have any control over it. It just—sucks. But thank you. Apology accepted, though certainly not required. I’m not sorry I did—whatever it was—with Preston. I don’t think it was sex. I don’t think it was inherently wrong. It’s just a fucking game. But I am sorry it hurt your feelings. And that I did it, like, now when I knew very well you were going through a rough time. And I’m sorry I kept it from you.”
Eliza really wants to accept the apology because some part of her believes Our Suzanne’s correct that it’s just a game but she’s not one hundred percent sure she believes it in her gut because one part of her isn’t all parts of her and We all know it is not a Real Apology—sorry to have hurt your feelings never feels good and We know because We have all done it before and Our Suzanne knew Eliza would hate this cyberfucking—she knew and she rationalized and she did it anyway without telling her simply because she wanted to—there’s a Kind Way and an Unkind Way—Eliza said it and We agree—Unkind all the way to the middle—but sometimes people are Unkind and sometimes it’s even the ones We love the most and who love Us the most do a shitty behavior and they set a Boundary and they take care of their own Need and it’s the antithesis of Our own and We can’t control that nor would We want to—We can only revel in the Closeness of it—that’s just the way the world is
The door is still open. We can still see them as well, stare upon this gateway to hell. During all the shouting, Eliza’s eyes have gotten used to the sun. It’s beautiful out. Winter, sure, but warm for the season. A few other people walk by on the street, walking dogs. She feels sad she didn’t once reach down and pet Dog while he was right there; she thinks maybe she won’t get another chance. Come out and play, Eliza.
“You know what?” she changes the subject. “I think I will go out. Like, out out. For real.” She puts her foot across the doorjamb and feels no fear.
“Wait,” Suzanne says. “Coat.” She ducks into the closet and retrieves it, hands it over. Eliza slings her arms into it and climbs down the steps. “Wait,” Suzanne says again. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah,” Eliza replies. “I won’t go far. I won’t be long. You said so yourself. It’s unlikely, at this point, that he can find us. Maybe”—and she brightens, here, at this thought—“maybe he’s given up. Maybe he’s gone back home. He scared me pretty good. He probably got what he came for.” And she half convinces herself this is true. “I’ll be back in, like, thirty. I just—need a walk. A walk, and then I’ll make more pancakes to make up for the ones we ruined with our fight.”
“Okay,” Suzanne says. “But more than half an hour and I’ll send a search party.”
Suzanne trudges up the stairs, a little bit mad at herself. “Sorry to have hurt your feelings?” she is thinking. She knows it sucks and yet—Suzanne absolutely cannot apologize if she thinks she’s done nothing wrong; she can’t even bring her mouth to make the words. About halfway up to the kitchen, she looks down at her phone, looks at Twitter. She flies back down the stairs, breathless, gesturing toward the screen as she wrenches the door open and squints down the street. The time for breathing is short-lived, we think. It is breath-catching, heart-stopping, something out of a horror movie. Yes, yes, yes. A horror movie for us to consume. “Eliza!” she yells, and no one answers. People stare and Suzanne stares back, seeing if any of them look suspicious. But there’s no Eliza on the street.
We, of course, can see it too. The tweet.
It is a retweet: Preston’s Instagram, automatically pushed to Twitter with If This Then That. It is a photo of his “Peter” coffee cup and Dog. In the background, where the uninitiated wouldn’t see her, where no one would notice her if they weren’t expressly scouring social media, is Eliza yelling in the window, tearing fabric to pieces. Her face is distorted by her wide-open mouth, ugly, like fangs on a rodent, but it is unmistakably her. Her glasses. Her distinct overbite. The retweet is quoted; The Inspectre has something to add:
“I’m coming to take you away, ha ha.”
Chapter One Hundred Six
Okay,” Suzanne says to the air. “New plan.” She grabs her phone and starts texting Eliza. She’s telling her to stay the hell away. To get on the subway and go to a stop she’s never been to before.
Suzanne hits the send button a few times and her stomach drops as she hears the buzz. She looks to the floor near the windows, where sits a pile of balled-up fabric, and sees Eliza’s burner phone, dropped and forgotten.
“Shit,” Suzanne hisses. “Shit fuck piss.”
While her eyes are still on the phone, it begins to ring. She walks over and picks it up. It says Buffalo, New York.
Luckily, she is prepared. She grabs the phone and takes the steps two at a time, running straight for the laptop, wherever it is in that abomination place that we can’t entirely conceptualize. Finally, when she will lose him if she doesn’t pick up, she answers. “Hello,” she says, trying to mimic Eliza’s higher voice. Suzanne concentrates very hard on how Eliza sounded on television, not how she sounds in real life. She steadies her breath as best she can, even though she is scaling stairs at a clip.
“Eliza?” he says, the name sandwiched between
heavy breaths, his mouth too close to the receiver.
“This is she,” Suzanne says and winces. Eliza would have never said that.
“I’ve found you, I think.” Suzanne is surprised. The voice is mellifluous, childlike and tenor at the same time. She can picture him, younger, singing in a children’s church choir. She isn’t sure what she expected, but it isn’t this: the voice of an angel.
“I ran here,” he continues, “took an Uber, before you could move. Before you could go anywhere.” Suzanne slides into the guest bedroom, looking frantically for the laptop, and she can hear the laughing and glass-clinking of the Sixsterhood’s breakfast. It’s best they not know, so she doesn’t alert them. She finds Eliza’s laptop, pops it open and launches a program. It’s janky, lines of code and a window with a Google map ported into it. And taped right onto the computer, just under the keyboard in the space where a wrist might usually rest, is a piece of paper with some Verizon log-in credentials scrawled on it.
Wait.
What?
Chapter One Hundred Seven
We can’t believe it.
We can’t believe it.
All that time she’d been hiding away, she’d been hacking the phone company. Putting together all the pieces she needed to catch him. We look for our evidence, we scour her chats and our imaginations. While she’d been slowly losing her mind, her response hadn’t been to simply lie there, like we thought. Her response had been to do something. To, in the absence of any sort of savior, save herself.
Chapter One Hundred Eight
Eliza: this is Eliza
JP: copy
JP: I’m glad you used my phone number, I didn’t think you’d talk to me again
JP: Is everything okay.
Eliza: I need some help
Eliza: Switch to Signal? Will be texting from Suzanne’s number.
Chapter One Hundred Nine
Suzanne: this is Eliza
JP: this is confusing
JP: how can I help?
Suzanne: I feel like I missed the very thing I need right now because I learned to do this shit as an adult
JP: this shit?
Suzanne: programming
Suzanne: some people like you and Devonte learned because you were out there lawbreaking and I learned from fucking YouTube
Suzanne: I’ve never hacked anything
Suzanne: there are too many consequences when you aren’t a kid
JP: and you need to now?
Suzanne: yes
Suzanne: I’ve made the software
Suzanne: to track down the inspectre, next time he calls
Suzanne: I’m gonna pick up and make him keep talking
Suzanne: but I need a verizon employee’s log in and pasword
Suzanne: *password
Suzanne: to make it work. To use their data
JP: that is very, very illegal
JP: phone companies are super litigious, too
Suzanne: I know
JP: you have to be one hundred percent certain you won’t get caught
JP: and you know, it’s never one hundred percent certain
Suzanne: I know
Suzanne: but I can’t live in an elevator forever
JP: I have follow up questions regarding this turn of phrase
Suzanne: never mind
Suzanne: the point is, the police aren’t helping me, the inspectre hasn’t stopped and I’ve had enough
Suzanne: I have to do something
JP: and what are you going to do when you have that information?
Suzanne: well if it’s nowhere near here, probably I’m safe, and so that’s something
Suzanne: but if it is, I’m not sure yet
Suzanne: I have to figure out how to tell the police where he is without letting them know we broke the law
Suzanne: but as far as I’m concerned, that’s a problem for another day
Suzanne: the point is, is getting a phone company employees username and pw something you have experienced in your checkered past as a cyberpunk youth?
JP: oh yeah, absolutely
Suzanne: great.
Suzanne: can you help me break into whatever to get it?
Suzanne: I don’t even really know where the data and shit is stored
JP: oh that’s not how you do it
JP: that’s script kiddie shit
JP: computers are fast and stupid and bad at a lot of things
JP: but they’re good at being secure, most of the time.
JP: people are terribly insecure, though
JP: people can be tricked faster and easier than backdoors can be found and exploited
Suzanne: I’m not a social engineer
JP: I’d offer to do it for you, but there’s one problem
Suzanne: your accent, yes, that’s why i wanted you to help me get it some other way
JP: yeah.
JP: when I was young and French in France, that of course was not a problem
JP: but now, I don’t know how much of a red flag it’ll be
JP: i also always have socially engineered at least one thing out of people in order to compromise data, so honestly i don’t think i could do it any other way
Suzanne: welp
Suzanne: im fucked
JP: I don’t think you are
JP: you’re gonna do it
Suzanne: me?
JP: yeah
JP: you’re going to make a phone call
JP: and you’re going to get sensitive information from a Verizon employee
Suzanne: I am?
JP: yes
JP: you’re going to pick someone in sales or in customer service, they’re the easiest
JP: if you come up with a reason that there’s money involved, that someone’s going to buy something or stop buying something, salespeople lose all their common sense
JP: customer service are conditioned to help
JP: I’d call “from a store”
JP: if you look online, they probably put their store numbers in their “locate a store” urls
Suzanne: thats crazy
JP: thats common
Suzanne: but my caller ID
JP: here, here’s a way to get around that
Chapter One Hundred Ten
We have seen the evidence with our eyes and we still can’t believe it. Maybe she has never really been afraid to leave. Perhaps staying in the elevator night and day had been a product of finishing something as the sole maker of it. Of figuring out how to trick a hapless, corn-fed Verizon employee into giving her sensitive information. Of reading everything she could about Defcon hacks and Kevin Mitnick, catching up on the lessons a childhood of rule-following can’t teach. Rule-breaking is usually about curiosity and a sense of immortality, two things people lose as they grow older; we suppose fearing for her life has been good motivation.
We are reeling. Angry. We mistrust ourselves, our leaps into logic, our guesses to fill in the blanks. Had she and Suzanne even fought? What if they’d spent days together, side by side in the elevator, plotting? What if Eliza was totally okay with Suzanne sleeping with Preston in-game? What if, instead, they fought over something else? The ethics of the plan? How best to break the law without being caught? Whether or not to involve JP? Or perhaps it went smoothly the entire time, something most of us can’t picture. If we were locked in a room with even our best friend, we would drive each other insane. We know she pulled down the fabric. We have a photo.
Or what if Eliza never knew that Preston and Suzanne had fucked in the game? What if she never put on the Vive, never saw the uncanny, reality-adjacent behavior. What if? What if Suzanne and Preston never slept together? What if they spent hours in the game with each other talking about something else? What if both of them made impeccable, professional decisions? What if they put that stuff in the G-chat as a diversion? Or bait! What if they were plotting too? What if they used Preston’s high visibility as a provocation, what if they asked him to post that picture t
o lure The Inspectre into calling Eliza, into showing himself in this neighborhood into which most people would otherwise never venture? Perhaps Preston was supposed to show up on this day, at this time, and take a photo in which Eliza was plainly visible. Perhaps our strange anti-protagonists had enough of waiting for The Inspectre to stop or make a move. Perhaps it wasn’t an accident that Eliza’s phone was still at the Sixsterhood, ready for Suzanne to use while Eliza made herself a plain, irresistible target.
We find this unlikely, given what happens next.
It’s too dangerous. If they’d really planned it that carefully, they could’ve done all of this and waited for The Inspectre to show up, staying safely inside. They could’ve called the police on a physical human stalking his way around the warehouse and the police would’ve had to do something.
Or maybe it’s some combination of all of this, where they’re all flying by the seat of their pants because they are only people, imperfect people. Planning strange, imperfect plans and responding to failure the best ways they can see. We are more optimal players than that; that is probably why we’ve gotten stuff wrong, why we didn’t know she’d written the program. We can see the whole thing, respond to all of it at once. They can only see from their limited perspective. We’ve been analyzing the moments we know for sure as though they have made the best, most logical decisions at every turn. The ones we would expect them to make. We’ve already realized an inconsistency; how did The Inspectre get the burner phone number? Did someone leak it, put it in their Google contacts? Suzanne? Preston? Devonte? Or did she forward her old number to it? Was it an accident, or did they trap our comrade?
What else have we gotten wrong?
Chapter One Hundred Eleven
You have to understand,” The Inspectre says. “You broke my favorite game. You destroyed a world.”
“The world is still there,” Suzanne offers. This is harder than it looks on television—selecting the right locker-combination of words that would click into place and open up a new conversation. She will say she sweat through the entire conversation, and that she could smell herself by the time she was done. “I just knew he couldn’t hurt anyone while he was on the phone with me,” she will say. “Or at least that I would know about it. If he did.” She will never admit that she did anything except field this call; she will never admit that she was party to hacking Verizon to find out where he was. She will only say that she knew where Eliza was going, and so when the phone call came in, she immediately followed. We won’t be allowed in the courtroom, of course, but rumors will circulate that as she tells the story, her eyes flick to the left. As if she is back in the elevator bedroom, concentrated, collected, all action and fury—as if she’s transported back to now, where we are.
We Are Watching Eliza Bright Page 27