by Drew Magary
In return, Anna was herself a balm to Sarah, who suffered from insurmountable bouts of depression before and after their father abandoned them. Sarah knew the black curtain of depression as well as anyone: its texture, its heft, the way it would close around her. It would manifest itself as an influenza upon her psyche: deadening her muscles and numbing her senses. But Anna could occasionally liberate Sarah from its curse, dragging her out bed and demanding they go where the curtain couldn’t enshroud every last thing.
And the places they ported to together! They ported to the Boundary Waters and surveyed the mighty river bends from an A-dock, with Sarah saying to Anna, “There is a peace here I’ll always wish for you to have.” They ported to Plage de la Bocca in Cannes to gaze out at the Mediterranean while perched upon the riprap guarding the shoreline from erosion. Bronzed old French men in too tight Speedos, their skin sagging down from their spines, strutted past them with far more confidence than their fleshy bodies merited. Sarah swore to Anna that she would return to this coast one day as a director, premiering her own work at the Film Festival. They ported to the top of Table Mountain above Cape Town, standing upon the overlook atop the cliff face and running their hands along the stone wall as they marveled at the corduroy swells of the Indian Ocean and the sight of paragliders jumping off Signal Hill in the distance.
They ported to Centennial Park in Atlanta and stared at the public fountain that choreographed its sprays to Tchaikovsky. Then ported to Rehoboth Beach in Delaware, where they picked up dead horseshoe crabs by the tail and hammerthrew them back into the surf. They trampled abandoned sandcastles and played a game where they ran away from the waves, trying to not let the cold surf touch them. They ported to the Boneyard in Tucson and played hide-and-seek along rows of hundreds of grounded Boeing 737s.
They ate pizza on every continent. They scouted out new beaches for playing the wave game. They rode every roller coaster. They attended free poetry readings and lectures on second-wave feminism. They did “port-bys,” where you ported to a random place for two minutes, snapped a WorldGram, and then ported right back out. They played World Hunt, in which you were given a photo of an unknown location and then you won $1,000 if you could port to it and snap a photo of yourself there before anyone else could. They never won.
Everywhere they went, Anna wanted to pack the air into a tin and keep it, like a handful of dirt.
Now a soft breeze came through the dorm window, and now Anna was remembering back before porting, when Sarah had a car. It was a used, cherry red 1994 Civic they christened Rhonda. A truly lovable piece of shit. Anna thought it was the coolest car ever manufactured. Sarah would let Anna ride shotgun in Rhonda and take her to Rockville Town Center Cinemas to see any movie Anna wanted, even the PG-13 ones. She spoiled Anna like that, using her own allowance money to buy her little sister candy, terrible apps, plushies, and whatever else she wanted. Anna worshipped Sarah and treasured that drive to Rockville Town Center intensely: watching her big sis bounce along to the radio, rolling every window down on the brutally humid Maryland nights, and dancing in her seat amid the wind blasting through the car’s interior.
One time, after pulling into a spot a block from the theater, Sarah turned to Anna and asked her, “What do you think of boys?”
“I don’t like them,” Anna said.
“Good. I know you already know this because you’re seven, but stay away from boys. They’re disgusting.”
“Yeah! They’re squicky!”
“Ha! That’s a good word for it. Squicky. Stay away from the squicky boys.”
When Anna was alone, as she was now, she could shut her eyes and take herself to a shadow dimension where Sarah was still alive, where what happened hadn’t happened at all. She could build new, imagined memories of Sarah on top of the real ones. That shadow dimension was a better patch of spacetime than this one. When Anna put enough work into her illusions, they felt more real than reality.
She reached under her pillow, slipped on the rose pink bracelet Lara had given her, and kissed it for good luck. She finally fell asleep and the alarm pounded away an hour later. The whole suite still smelled like butter when she woke up.
From The Account Of @ErickMartin
Writer, Analyst, Assoc. Professor of Economics
Featured in @nytimes, @TNR, @washingtonpost, @NBCNews
Author of The Architect Of Heaven: The Rise Of Emilia Kirsch and PortSys
Posted from 9:30am to 10:05am, 9/28/30
Okay, so my FOIA request for PortSys’s internal emails re: personal privacy and antitrust practices was denied, which isn’t exactly a huge surprise. 1/
PortSys is technically based in the “country” of Western Sahara, the bulk of which was uninhabitable pre-porting, but now hosts shell businesses for any global company that wants to plant an empty storefront in the middle of the free zones. 2/
The U.S.-based “arm” of the company, PortSys America, lobbied successfully to be exempt from FOIA laws when their lawyers argued that their algorithm and the ways the company use it are “trade secrets.” 3/
Of course the judge that sided with PortSys was appointed by the President, whose re-election campaign received an $85,000,000 from a PAC with known ties to—who else?—Emilia and Jason Kirsch. 4/
So I came up empty on that request, BUT… 5/
Like every other corporate monolith, you can get a clear picture of what PortSys doing by gathering info on the people they do business with. And hoo boy, do they do business with a lot of other companies! 6/
Here are four of them: Blackheel, WorldGram, WallTech, and ShareSpace. Take a wild guess where those companies are based. It rhymes with Mestern O’Hara. 7/
I got tax records from all of those companies. They’re all insanely overleveraged. We’re talking about billions of dollars. Just a staggering amount of debt. 8/
You might think that’s because of labor, or overhead costs, or R&D, but it’s not. It’s because all four of these companies pay over half their operating budgets directly to PortSys. 9/
Take ShareSpace, for example. Here is how much they paid PortSys over the past three years:
2027: $42.6b
2028: $45.9b
2029: $50.4b
10/
Why the hell would an apartment-sharing app fork over that much money to PortSys? Well, the reason why is because ShareSpace is constantly borrowing money to pay PortSys for YOUR porting data, even though PortSys says they don’t sell it to anyone. 11/
But that’s crap. Ever try to adjust their privacy settings? I tried to navigate them just now on my phone. They’re a labyrinth with no exit. 12/
PortSys, which is already a monopoly, is charging these companies billions to give them a working knowledge of where consumers port to the most, and when they do it. The rumor is they do this thru a private app called Network Z. No one is allowed to talk about Network Z unless they want to find themselves “accidentally” ported to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. 13/
Once those secondary monopolies take hold, you can expect PortSys to swoop in, assume majority ownership once the stock has tanked enough for their liking, and then offload the debt onto taxpayers. 14/
So not only is this blatant collusion, but PortSys is illegally giving over your location to complete strangers, even as they deny that same information to loved ones, personal attorneys, and even law enforcement in the event of an emergency. 15/
It’s sickening, and it’s only getting worse because as the company keeps getting richer, it can easily afford to buy the kind of policy that allows it to operate unfettered. 16/
We haven’t even gotten into some of their other shady practices. I mean, Tennessee won the “sweepstakes” for a new PortPhone manufacturing facility by A) issuing an exemption to the state’s minimum wage and mandatory time off laws and B) offering PortSys 15% of all state income taxes. 17/
Not just state income taxes paid by PortSys employees. ALL state income taxes. 18/
In the end, the fa
cility PortSys built doesn’t actually make PortPhones. All it does is produce a single Bluetooth terminal for PortPhones that are then fully assembled in Poland. 19/
A grand total of 38 people work at that plant. Thirty-eight. 20/
Good luck trying to investigate any of this. Our Secretary of Transportation is a former PortSys lawyer who says she cannot exercise any oversight of her former company not because of a conflict, but because she says it’s a TELECOM company, not a transportation company. And the head of FCC is Emilia Kirsch’s grandnephew! They’ve stonewalled anyone asking about PortSys, and worse. 21/
After I submitted my FOIA request and then ported to Punta Cana, I swear to you that I was approached by a man in a suit, who ported onto the beach and then walked up to me and told me, verbatim, to “knock it off,” then ported right out. 22/
They know everything. EVERYTHING. 23/
BTW I’m tweeting all this from the Outer Banks, and when I ported into Corolla there was a timeshare sales rep right there, on the beach, asking me if I was looking for a place. He knew my goddamn name. END THREAD
GOREN HALL
Anna needed a microwave, a suction cup, a thin plastic spudger, a heat-able gel pack, a small flashlight, and a smaller-than-smaller set of pentalobe screwdrivers. These were screwdrivers designed for a forest nymph should she ever decide to become a handyman, but they were necessary for the heist all the same.
The microwave was the easy part of the plan, since Asmi had a cheap, light one from home that her mom hand-delivered directly to Druskin Gate. Asmi even brought her own spice blends to the dining hall to “remix” (her word) all of the bland cafeteria fare into passable versions of biryani and other more enticing dishes. Then she would box up the leftovers and nuke them during late-night cramming sessions. One time Asmi hacked her way into making a fish curry than stank up the stairwell for two days. The offense was noted at length in The Shit Memoirs. Asmi made up for it by stealing a few sundries from the kitchen while she was doing her work-study job and then making mug cakes for all the other girls in the stairwell.
Burton’s courier, the mysterious Alyssa, smuggled in everything else Anna and Bamert needed. Anna stayed after in Nolan’s class every Saturday morning to sign into a VPN account she had created that let her go online incognito. Then, she studied web tutorials of how to crack open tablets and PortPhones over and over, making sure she wouldn’t miss a step when the time came to execute the plan for real. She must have watched hours of footage of dudes with pasty, greasy fingers handling and mishandling PortPhones. They were bad hands; incapable hands. Anna took pride in comparing that sorry parade of hands to her own nimble extremities. One time, she granted herself a break from heist study by checking in on Lara’s WorldGram. The first post was a photo of Lara, sitting in the middle of what appeared to be an empty apartment in Manhattan, with the following caption:
Oktoberfest was fucking nuts, but sometimes I also love the day after the party, when you can just be you. I miss roomie spots like this one.
Anna was convinced that the way “roomie” was spelled was no accident. She went back to feverishly binging DIY vids.
It was, naturally, against the rules to tamper with school-issued electronic devices. After all, it wasn’t as if Anna was alone in dying to engineer a way to port off campus and back. A lot of other great minds were behind a lot of dorm room doors, scheming to work similar magic.
Finally, everything was ready. With Asmi out at volleyball practice that Saturday afternoon, Anna wasted little time. She took out the dwarf screwdriver and unscrewed the bottom of her tablet. The second the screws came loose, they skittered off her desk and fell to the floor. Anna would have had better luck seeing microbes with the naked eye.
“Shit.”
She felt around the hardwood, never realizing until now just how dirty the floor of her own dorm room was. Sticky and dusty. She felt crumbs of unidentifiable foodstuffs, hardened grains of stale rice, long hairs of unknown origin and color. Just when it seemed like the whole plan was dead before she had even taken one lousy step out of Sewell, she felt two pinpricks of cold metal and grabbed the screws, placing them in a small cup to make sure they would never go rogue again.
Next, she heated up the gel pack in the microwave. She only had to nuke it for twenty seconds to keep it warm for half an hour. That was enough time for the gel pack to absorb the oven’s entire history of smells: dinners, popcorn, old tea, instant ramen, canned pasta, etc. She laid the gel pack over the glass touch screen to loosen the glue. Then, she attached a suction cup and jabbed the little spudger between the glass and the chrome casing. This was an oddly satisfying process. Her hands were busy and productive. They were happy.
It took a little English, and Anna began to freak out that the screen would suddenly come loose and go flying out the window, winding up in the beak of a pigeon that would then air mail it directly into Vick’s office. Instead, the screen lifted off with gentle ease. Phew. Now she could see the guts of the tablet: all hard black chips and tiny circuit board terminals.
She kept the screen lifted at a 90-degree angle as she carefully unscrewed the battery cover. Druskin was a luxurious school in many ways, but cheap and shoddy in others. The dreaded lack of lack conditioning could make even fall oppressive. The food was one step up from a hospital cafeteria. And the tablets were mass-produced Monarchs with a battery that was the same shape and thickness as discount Worm PortPhones.
Anna disconnected the battery from its cable clip, pocketed it, and then reassembled the tablet. When she was finished, it looked the same as it had before she cracked it, and was still roughly as useful.
Now came the hard part.
Vick left his door open at all hours on school days, offering his availability to any student on campus. No one ever took him up on it. Even the brownnosers knew to stay away. Every day, Anna would go to her little snail mail cubby in Goren to check for school alerts and postcards that Sandy delivered by hand to the guards at Druskin Gate. On her way back to Sewell, she could glance into Vick’s office and sometimes notice his PortPhone sitting out on the conference table, there for the taking.
The horrible indelibility of Anna’s visit on Vick’s office on her first night had a peculiar utility to it. She remembered, with high-definition clarity, a closet just off to the right of his office table, large enough to fit a person and also dark enough to hide them. She also remembered that Vick’s office was manned by his assistant, Mrs. Kursten, who smoked five packs a day and had the bullfrog voice to prove it. Indeed, Anna Huff had remembered a great many details of the dean’s office and was determined to take advantage of them.
On this Saturday morning, Kursten was out and Vick was working alone in the office, the door wide open. Goren Hall stood between a row of three boys’ dorms off Water Street and the rest of North Campus, so it got a lot of foot traffic from the Walton Hall and Korenjack Hall boys passing through on their way to eating and studying elsewhere. Otherwise, no kid ever hung around Goren for any reason.
Bamert, who lived on the opposite campus, had no business being there that Saturday. But that didn’t stop him from confidently striding up the stairs in a bright orange suit festooned with white Clemson tiger paws. He was whistling, a brilliant move to get attention that wouldn’t raise suspicion because honestly, no one would ever find it unusual for Paul Bamert to make himself as conspicuous as possible.
When Bamert got to the final stair, he tripped and spilled a quart of ice cold Coke all over the floor.
“CHRIST AND EGGS!” he cried out. “THIS IS A FUCKING PECKERHEAD OF A DAY, YES IT IS!” Unsure he had laid it on thick enough, he added a few more: “SHIT! PISS! ASS!”
That did the trick. Vick stormed out of his office and over to the scene of Bamert’s misdemeanor.
“What did you just say, young man?”
“Oh shit, Dean Vick! Oh, sweet ginger brown, I just said shit, did I not? FUCK!”
Vick swelled with rage. Bamert expected spikes t
o start sprouting out of the dean’s face. Vick was so purely livid that he didn’t notice Anna slip down the opposite staircase and into his office, snatching Vick’s phone from the table and quickly ducking into the adjacent closet.
She turned on the pen flashlight. Cracking open a tablet in the comfort of her room was one thing, but now she was quivering a little. She could hear Bamert carrying on with Vick from afar.
“I am so, so sorry, sir.”
“Do you think it’s appropriate to use such foul language? If you’re this casually profane outside of my office, I can’t even begin to imagine what kind of sewer talk you use around your peers. I oughtta put you up for Un-Druskinlike Conduct right this instant.”
Anna got the screws out and jammed them into her overalls pocket. She was getting more adept with the pentalobe screwdriver, handling it with the dexterity of a safecracker. She pressed the gel case, which she had microwaved just ten minutes earlier, against the screen and counted ten Mississippis to herself. Then she attached the suction cup and worked the spudger under the glass and pulled. It wouldn’t give.
Come on.
“You’re right sir, and I beg your pardon. I beg it genuinely, as I am already down on my knees here. It’s just…”
Do it, Bamert. Sell it.
“It’s been a very difficult week for me, Dean Vick. A difficult month, really. I get terribly lonely. I have trouble making friends.”
“Perhaps your comportment is the reason for your struggles,” Vick told him.
“I have little doubt of that,” Bamert said. “The worst part is that I have no one to talk to about it.”
The screen came free. Anna lifted it ninety degrees and started in on the battery cover with a tiny Phillips-head screwdriver.
“Would you want to get a cup of coffee with me, sir?”
“I don’t drink coffee,” Vick told Bamert.