by Theo Thimo
#aggregator
Carl Stanley will touchdown in beautiful, wonderful Dubai for the 2024 Save Earth Convention. Every year, the world’s most ambitious programmers travel to Dubai for a chance to be a part of Save Earth Inc., the largest nonprofit in the world. “Good luck, baby. I love you so much!” Carl’s girlfriend messages him on Kik.
It is 2024, and Stanley Marty is walking down the terminal with his headphones on when he hears a handicapped man call out to him from behind, and although he recognizes he is addressing him, he can not understand or view him so he simply continues walking towards his plane.
Stanley is famous on Twitter. On Twitter, nobody calls him Stanley Marty. And he’s attending TwitterCon, the largest twitter convention in the world, to be one of their top speakers at the event. He has more twitter followers than all world leaders combined, and English professors teach classes about themes deeply embedded in his tweets. Last year, Coca-Cola paid him 23,000,000 bitcoins to endorse them in one of his tweets. He used the money to build an outernet, giving free high speed internet globally. It was the only way he could gain more followers.
“You look fabulous,” he tells the flight attendant.
“Thank you, @theoooeooo. Would you like a 7up?”
“No thanks,” he says. “I just want to smoke some weed.”
The paparazzi follow him to his limousine.
“Tell us about #aggregator!” They shout at him.
“Later on in the story!” he says very charismatically.
In the hotel lobby, Marty Stillgood, who Carl Stanley has read about online, approaches him. Carl feels like he is being approached by a celebrity, but not really. It actually sort of feels like he is seeing an old friend who he doesn’t like or know anything about.
“Carl Stanley,” Marty says, “Do you know the workers here make less than a dollar a week?”
“They deserve more,” Carl says.
“What was your app for again? Parking meters? Do you really think you are capable of achieving anything in your small, miniscule life?”
Carl talks to his girlfriend on Skype, and he wonders what it takes to get close to another human being. Carl believes that there is a system to it. If you do certain things in a certain order, there will be results. How often can you tell someone something before they feel similarly to you. When Carl Stanley is sad, his girlfriend will be sad. It doesn’t matter if they’re in different countries. Carl thinks that there are powerful frequencies that leave the body and alter the lives of others. These frequencies can cause ripples throughout the universe.
At the hotel lobby in Dubai, Stanley meets [@nathanmasserang] as he has a servant attend to his luggage.
“[@theoooeooo], do you know these workers only make ten bitcoins a day?”
“They deserve more,” he says.
“How are things, I’ve been working mainly in the deep web. Some people are saying you’re following in the footsteps of [@paulrizza], may he rest in peace.”
“He was following in mine before he ran off to somewhere.”
“[@theoooeooo], they never found the body.”
“Yeah, well, good riddance.”
There was a pause.
“Well, I know some cats in town,” [nathan] says. “They real cool cats. And they’re down.”
“Oh,” he moans very inquisitively. “They’re down, you say?”
“Are you down?” he asks.
That night, Stanley went with [@nathan], his long contended enemy, although Stanley stole his tweets more often than he would Stanley’s, to do a long held tradition at TwitterCon.
Did you know the fine for stealing people’s tweets can go as high now as 5,000,000 bitcoin in Dubai? You may be asking how can the price be so high? That is because of the man who Stanley will soon be doing illegal drugs and [this other thing ; keep reading to find out] with.
When they get to the suite at the top of the Burj Khalifa, Stanley enters to find, that’s right, [oscarbrunoartios], a self-proclaimed twitter tycoon. He is not a real twitter user. He has twenty bots in the top hundred followed twitter list. I want to remind you that Stanley is number one, but the spot gaining on him is one of his called LouieCKbot. The twitter account has a transcript of every recorded word the recently deceased comedian, Louie C.K. had said, and it uses plug-ins to create new jokes that coincide with certain data provided by his themes and speech habits. He is richer than anyone in this room combined.
“There is simply, how you say, no art in what you do,” Stanley said, walking through the door very charismatically.
“We go through this every time,” [oscar] says.
After crying in the bathroom for 15 minutes, Stanley attends the beginning of their cuckolding ceremony where they all take shrooms and pray to Satan. Moments after the ceremony, a fellow bull, touches his shoulder.
“[@theoooeooo], I understand your work,” he says very seriously.
“Do you?” Stanley asks. “I’m hallucinating a lot right now.”
“I didn’t understand it before but when we were tripping back there one of your tweets got caught in my head, I totally get it now.”
“I think I’m dead right now.”
On the rooftop, the bull shows Stanley his twitter profile. It has a modest 500,000,000 followers.
“You’re almost a big deal, huh?” Stanley says, very coolly.
“I’m trying really hard,” he says.
“I’ll tell you what, give me your twitter handle and I’ll follow you.”
“Oh my god, you are a saint.”
“Just wait till we get to the end of this story,” Stanley says.
After following [@sarah], Stanley goes through his recent tweets.
“Whoa,” Stanley says, taking off his sunglasses very seriously. “This tweet. It’s amazing.”
Stanley shows him the tweet he’s referring to on his Android Smartphone. The tweet would look like random letters and squiggles to someone from ~2014.
“You came up with this?” Stanley asks.
“Yes, sir.”
“How old are you?”
“I’m twelve,” he says. “How old are you?”
“I’m fourteen.”
“I hope when I’m your age, I can be as good as you,” he says.
Stanley stares off into the sky. He has no idea where he is, right now. And this kid is blowing his mind.
“Can I ask you something, [@theoooeooo]?”
“Yes.”
“Why does it seem like there is huge, [@oscar] and you beef? I saw in there that you seem to be the one provoking it. Personally, I don’t even think you guys are in the same league. He reuses original ideas to give the illusion of new work being produced. Humans enjoy the concept of creating because it releases enjoyment chemicals on our brain when we believe to be viewing original content. He’s just abusing this dopamine activation. You’re the real artist.”
“[@sarah], I wouldn’t blink an eye towards [@oscar] if all he did was make billions of bitcoins destroying the legacy of dead comedians. Here is something not everyone knows. [@oscar] uses wealth to lobby congress.”
“What’s lobbying congress?”
“It’s bad. It is bad because it distorts the democratic system. It apportions influence by money, instead of democratically. So politicians who are supposed to do what is best for the people are instead influenced to do what is best for those groups powerful enough to hire lobbyists.”
“What is he lobbying them for?”
“I want you to come close and listen to me because I will not repeat myself. [@oscar] is lobbying congress for stricter laws on copyright infringement. He has given enough money to congress to change the way ideas are sorted. Now, it is possible to copyright tones, and ideas, and concepts, and like, I don’t know, character dialogue as short as a word, and like colors. Then he spent millions of bitcoins patenting all ideas. He has already patented half the tones that exist, and is patenting the tones quicker than we can produce them. What will happen when they’re all bought?”
“Why do copyright laws exist, @theoooeooo?”
“Because rich people like us want more money, [@sarah]. That’s all there is to it. And they’ll do anything to stop the creation of work. They put value on ideas and try and take ownership of them, so others can’t produce. There are two kinds of people in this world, @sarah and that’s producers and consumers, and have you ever read Ayn Rand? She used to write books?”
“Books?” @sarah asked, very puzzledly.
“Oh, I’m sorry. Books were these apps that users wrote on before twitter.”
“Was there a character limit?”
“No, and some were hundreds of pages long.”
“How long is a page?”
“A page is like five tweets long, I think.”
“Wow, it seems too long.”
“Back in the days when they wrote books, they had a much larger alphabet. Sentences could take up to 500 characters. Now, we can contain all of David Foster Wallace’s work in a single, 140 character tweet.”
“The beautiful stories in your tweets leave me breathless, @theoooeooo. How are you able to come up with them quicker than any other twitterers?”
Stanley Marty is floating in the pool when Carl sneaks behind him and splashes water in his face.
“Yo! Cut it out!” says Stanley.
Carl originally helped Stanley develop an app that was able to determine if your coffee was decaf or not. Stanley is otherkin. He believes that he is, in some way, not entirely human. He prefers to be identified as a fox. Carl Stanley finds this kind of thinking to be exciting and uplifting.
“It’s nice to see you here,” Carl says.
Back at Stanley’s apartment, Carl watches him play Secondlife, an online game where you can lead a virtual life, unrestricted to reality. Carl and Stanley first met through this game.
“This is how my house looks like right now,” says Stanley.
“Not too shabby.”
“I bought these sneakers.”
“Very nice.”
The house next to Stanley’s was much bigger, and had a lot of objects in the backyard.
“Who are those guys?” Carl asks.
“Those are some furries that moved in a week ago. They’re all Russian and gay, I think.”
“What do they do?”
“They talk Russian with each other, and keep asking me to do things to my house because they think it looks ugly. I hate them. They’re really annoying. And they line the walls of their house with gay furry porn.”
Carl wanted to play Secondlife and make a Secondlife version of Dubai, and put himself and Stanley in a hotel room together. It would feel really good. Program a big city from nothing. He wondered, what if he were to just let himself be nothing, like a fox but instead of a fox it’s nothing. Carl thought about using that Facebook app, What Would I say?, that creates statuses using previous statuses you’ve made. Carl has written over 400,000 words on Facebook, and each status generated is a thought that Carl never knew he had. What if he just used that app to update his social media. Would people notice? Would the statuses get likes? They would probably notice but would they really mind?
Carl feels less grounded in reality, and this has helped him deal with his emotions. Before, Carl would only care about doing the right thing, and making sure everyone liked him. Now, very suddenly, Carl only wanted to explore ideas that he doesn’t understand, or ideas that don’t make sense.
“Stanley,” Carl says, “I’ve been thinking about something, do you want to know what the thing I’ve been thinking about is?”
“Alright.”
“What if, your idea of a color, let’s say green, what if your green is different from my green? What if my green was your red. And I would be going through my whole life thinking that my green is the right green, but in reality, it’s not the right green, it’s actually your red.”
“I don’t think I follow you, Carl.”
“Like, you see this desk? And that the desk is gold, kind of, right?”
“Sure.”
“What if you’re really seeing the desk as blue, but for you, you’ve spent your whole life thinking that blue is gold, so you think it’s gold, but it’s really blue.”
“Oh, I get what you’re trying to say. Yeah, that’s pretty crazy.”
“Here’s a wild idea, Stanley. What if we make an app, that uses the smartphone’s camera, and detects the colors in the crosshair, and tells you what color it is.”
It was like something clicked between their two heads. Carl knew this had something to do with their frequencies. They were completely in sync. Carl believes that it is in this frequency level, the same frequency level people experience when moving to a new city, when starting a relationship, when finishing college, when quitting (or getting fired) in their jobs, that humans are most capable to create great change in the universe. They worked all night on the app. The name came to Stanley like he had dreamt about it thousands of years ago.
“How does this sound,” he said, “ColorApp.”
Carl and Stanley revealed ColorApp to the world on the next day at the 2024 Save Earth Convention. The app confirmed Carl’s suspicions that the universe chooses colors at random. Light travels at varying speeds faster than the human brain is capable of processing, and creates an illusion that we perceive as color. It was a bright day in Dubai, and Carl and Stanley made history.
Carl thought about Stanley and a fox rubbing shoulders like an animated GIF, 128 colors repeating over and over like the Benny Hill theme song. It’s relatable in this specific way, you are here but you feel like you are there (~2m to the left) instead. Embarrassing isn’t it? Thank you for reading. I’m not just talking about my feelings here. There are definite things occurring out there, maybe too complex for Carl and Stanley to understand but that doesn’t mean they’re not out there. The proof is anywhere you want to look for it. You can’t not convince me that there is something more to my existence.
***
gooogle.com
Hi, My name is Theo and I’m a 19 year old writer living in Brooklyn! 🙂 I came up with this story about having friends while I was on my rooftop and it’s good, and I think you’ll love it, but anyway let me say this, I’m not just talking about relationships here. Try to disassociate things from one another, think about how differences can connect things, and please just don’t be ashamed of existing anymore. No matter how wrong people say your existence is, it just isn’t, OK? I hate watching you cry in front of your webcam. You don’t believe you deserve to be happy, but you do. Everyone makes mistakes, that doesn’t make them a bad person.
Nathan Masserang is lying outside on the morning grass like a bright pair of pants, feeling expensive and comfortable, messaging Paul Rizza on Facebook Messenger.
“Theo is so cool,” Nathan says.
“I think he’s very, very cool,” Paul replies. “Strange and carefree, like a big mystery.”
“I think he is just good, like objectively a good person, and I’m very lucky to be his friend and I really consider him a friend.”
“I do too, I want to spend more time with him online.”
Nathan agrees with Paul, noticing the new shining colors in his phone.
Paul sends nathan a Pusheen sticker. Facebook stickers are illustrations or animations of characters that you can send to friends. They’re a great way to share how you’re feeling and add personality to your chats. It’s an internet postcard that is sent from one online user to another, something to enjoy yourself with, a small moment of instant gratification, sometimes relief, or to feel comfortable with.
Paul mentions to Nathan how the world can seem glimmering at times, bright and expensive like pants.
Scott Krave sends Bob Schofield a Snapchat of a small rainbow that formed over the mist of his garden hose. It’s a small piece of everything, floating in colors somewhere in the air, and maybe it isn’t really there, but it is because we can see it but, I don’t know, I don’t really know how rainbows work but I still like writing about them because they make people happy.
“What makes Theo a Theo?” The snapchat says, disappearing in seconds like, well a rainbow I guess, or like, I don’t know, an unimportant memory, maybe?
A girl who secretly has a crush on Theo searches his name on Youtube and watches videos of him reading poetry. She thinks he acts cute, and has a goofy voice but also, he still seems very intelligent too, and good looking, and with a great sense of humor too. Maybe she will message Theo later to flirt with him in a nonconfrontational way.
What does make Theo a Theo? Is it a thing like rainbows, or like pants? Paul wonders if he is a little Theo, and Anthony Peregrine text messages Amy Saul-Zerby late at night, vaguely mentioning Theo in a comforting way, and Stephen Michael Mcdowell messages Stephen Tully Dierks, “I can’t stop reading Theo’s stuff.” John Mortara Kiks James Ganas, “Did you catch Theo’s new story on Electric Cereal?”
“Of course I did.”
Nathan messages Paul like how you would slide letters under a door, and he feels like a Theo, at least I think he feels like a Theo. I’m not sure, and Paul seems confused too. He googles Theo’s name and suddenly, it’s all there.
***
HABBO HOTEL
It was a messy and foggy morning when Steven Sillyman logged onto 4chan.org and saw the picture of a dog photoshopped inside the foreskin of a human penis. Steven, who prefers gender neutral pronouns, saved the picture in their Dropbox folder titled reaction pics, and after spending twenty minutes reading a post about Elliot Rodgers, they started a Tinychat room and linked to it in their thread on /b/.
The sky felt gender neutral to Cher Littlebit while she browsed an area code hookup thread on /soc/. She ctrl+F’d “415” but didn’t receive any results. Simba, the orange ragamuffin, knocked over a vase before running out of her bedroom and hiding under a couch. Cher followed him out the room and laid down at eye level with him where they stared at one another. “What’s the matter with you?” she said but Simba had trouble understanding her because he mainly communicates through body language.
Steven smoked salvia alone in their room to an audience of twenty peers, and when they began to feel constrictions tense through their body, they came to the same, reoccurring thought, “I can not imagine anyone consenting to this.” In the middle of the terribly physical and violent yanking of Steven’s identity, they felt something familiar.
But does it really matter if things feel familiar to Steven,and I mean does this feel similar to you, this familiar feeling thing I mean?Just FYI, I don’t see any correlation to how Steven perceives himself to how someone like, for example, me can perceive himself. It’s hard for me to find the connections between the things happening around me, but we make connections with the people in our communities all the time anyway, and they affect the way we think about the things and people around us, just in case you weren’t paying attention this is what is currently happening.
Paul Nickleback, who had recently published Cher in his serialized magazine focused on culture and gender after their initial meeting at a book launch last month in San Mateo, who had just sent Cher one of many increasingly concerning text messages requesting nude photos, hadn’t left his home in a week following his termination from his job, and watched Steven on tinychat but lost interest halfway through, in the same familiar way he had lost interest in himself whenever long ago, it doesn’t really matter.
Eli recently began his job at NewHive.com and is otherkin. His Facebook news feed displays an article that matches his interests. Millions of dollars go towards an algorithm that ensures you only see the articles that are most relevant towards you. Humans are increasingly finding new ways to control and change the environment around them. Eli, on the other hand, identifies as a cat.
***
KitKat
Embarrassingly enough, I am struck by a car while sending a text message. My face is flat against the pavement, like a tadpole, and I am sad because I have been just struck by a vehicle, and the pain from the impact made me sad. My pocket vibrates with a FB message from my talking cat, Paul Rizza.
“It’s OK. You’re fine,” he says. “I will see you soon.”
I stumble to my feet and it feels like I’m sleeping, and also my body feels light, like more than a dozen feathers, I mean like feathers falling on me, like falling feathers. And I feel like a smiley face emoji. I recieve a text message, “Just relax,” it says, “You’re alright. How do you feel?”
I feel like a notification, and very present in the moment. And I am very presently placing my head on the curb of the street. “You’re good,” a facebook messenger dialogue says.
My manager approaches my body. He takes my HTC One Mini 2 smartphone, whose operating system, Android 4.4.2 (codenamed Kitkat), I helped design, out of my pocket.
He recognizes me from my phone’s distinct aluminum casing. He goes for my wallet while on the phone with the operator. I start to think about just how many twitter favorites I’ve been getting. I’ve gained a lot of followers this past month.
“Are you dead?” My manager asks me.
“I’m OK,” I say.
“Keep breathing.”
“I’m trying.”
“You’re a good person. You will make it through this.”
“Thank you, Carl.”
“KitKat wouldn’t have been such a success if it wasn’t for you, I haven’t thanked you for that yet. You have been such a valuable member to us during the 4.4.3 update.” Carl starts to cry. “The update will be so simple, so clean. It will be everything we worked so hard for it to be. Camera improvements, a new gallery app, Extreme Power Saving Mode, a gorgeous new user interface, and many bug fixes that improve battery life and system ability.”
I think about how nice it is to be alive, and that it’s good to be alive too. This summer I went to the park a lot, I ate food at the park, I had a lot of fun this summer. I notice Carl’s phone.
“We have the same OS,” I say observantly. The sky is glowing with billions of kilobytes flying over my head, like jellyfish, or like poodles. “I’m glad we share such similar experiences every day.”
In the hospital, everything is fine. I have broken bones, and massive trauma. Carl installed happyapp into my phone. Designed specifically with me in mind, happyapp scans through your all your friend’s private messages and extracts messages from when they are talking about you.
“It then determines from the vocabulary used in the messages whether it’s a positive or negative comment. Then the app broadcasts the positive comments translated to be directed towards you in an OS integrated feed.” Carl explains.
The app is overlayed on top my phone’s screen, and it is beautiful, and defining, and the text floats down like tadpoles. “God bless you, get well soon,” one happy says, alongside my close friend’s name. “I’m worrying about you so much. I need to be there for you,” my mother writes. It feels like love, a lot of love, and no shame, just love. It feels good to me and good to be me. I feel like a frog. I feel like I’m a good person, and can be trusted with things financially.
***
I played CS 1.6 All Night and Then Things Got Interesting
If you ever forget what it’s like to feel alive, just wake up one morning after getting no sleep and then drink a lot of coffee. That uncomfortable feeling, the one that feels like you have to pee and poop and also something else you’re not sure exactly yet, and it feels like everyone else is also feeling that same feeling, that is what it’s like to feel alive.
Hi, my name is krapz. It’s 4AM, and I live in the year 2004. I just found out, only a couple of hours ago, that George Washington was reelected.
“do u mean george bush,” says ReIgnitioN on CS 1.6. Then he says, “i am recording a frag vid right now,” and if it’s anything like his other videos, it’ll probably be edited together with that Sandstorm song. ReIgnitioN has a lot of respect in the community for having the most headshots in his frag vids.
“yes i mean george w bush fuck him,” i say and get killed by ReIgnitioN.
“thats going in the frag vid,” he says.
“im so mad,” I say, “where r u john kerry when the country really needs u”
“im owning,” says ReIgnitioN. Next round, I spawn terrorist side, De_Dust.
“this noob is hacking,” says 666.butane, whose k/d ratio is the top of the server.
“u talking to me?” ReIgnitioN says.
“ya”
“roflcopter i see u using wallhacks,” ReIgnitioN says.
“fucking noobs always in this server,” 666.butane says.
“ur the top player in a 24/7 de_dust server go kill yourself.” ReIgnitioN kills 666.butane. “say hello to all my fans noob hahaha”
“john kerry lost because he is a waffle eating rich boy from massachusetts,” 666.butane says before leaving the server.
The next week, after so much interesting stuff had happened, I notice a homeless person in the subway and think about how ReIgnitioN told me on IRC just later that night that most homeless people you see on the streets begging for change are just holograms he uses to afford all of his of his expensive computer equipment. “its been an old trick used since ronald reagan,” I remember him telling me, “i have nearly half a million homeless on the streets of america working constantly and once a month they dispense the money into envelopes sent through the usps and straight into my mailbox”
“are you trying to tell me you get nearly half a million envelopes sent to your address once a month?” I thought he must have been playing me for an idiot, imagining him as that one kid you always saw with a toy gun like it’s some kind of over the top foreshadowing (e.g., like how I dreamt every night for the past month, before ReIgnitioN told me about this on IRC, that he would tell me about this on IRC, but I’ve heard that everyone has precognitive dreams, right?).
“do u ever get precognitive dreams?” I asked ReIgnitioN.
“like the queen song that if u reverse tells you to smoke marijuana?”
“no but have u seen that one for stairway to heaven?”
“yeah that scared the crap out of me,” he said.
Then, 666.butane joined the IRC channel and used a script to spam so much ascii art in the chat that it managed to crash my client.
I searched his name on Google and found his team’s forum page, which was private, but google had a cached page of his profile where I could see his profile pic. It was a real picture of his face against a pale background with fluorescent lighting, like it was his college ID or something, and a couple of excerpts of his posts.
“… dudes called kraps and ReIgnitioN were on again,” one excerpt contained.
“Whoa,” I thought, “he’s been talking about us? This is so weird.”
I made a new email address and signed up for an account on the forum, reusing the name of another forum user on their team.
I told ReIgnitioN about all of this but he didn’t seem very interested.
“he looks so much like william hung lol,” he kept noting.
I didn’t hold out much hope for being accepted into the forum, but the next day I was sent my confirmation email and logged in. Except now everything on the forum was removed. No posts or users were left, except for me and the administrator.
“what why,” ReIgnitioN said, “wtf”
“idk i’m sure it was a coincidence,” I said.
We both agreed that the world was most likely not a giant conspiracy theory.
In the subway, I start to feel upset about things like, for example, people in general, this nation in general, our political system in general, myself in general. I see an advertisement for divorce. “When a diamond isn’t forever,” it says.
“No,” I think, “I cannot.”
Now, you may ask what exactly upset me about this advertisement. That is a good question. I am not exactly sure. I’m not a supporter of monogamy or anything. But that doesn’t mean I’m into polygamy either. I mean, just do you, is what I believe, you know. I totally think we should legalize gay marriage and everything too. But something, I don’t know what, really set me off about this advertisement.
I use a key to try to pry off the plastic covering over the advertisement. I start to feel drowsy and my keys fall from my hands. They jingle on the floor like two dancers. Someone touches my shoulder like a cheating spouse would. I look around and to not my surprise, it’s a cop. Typical. Of course. As you would expect, I guess. He says, “What do you think you’re doing?” but before I can respond I’m in the backseat of his car. At least, I think it’s his car, and I’m saying, “I know you’re a cop, (but do I? Keep reading.) and you must hear the same thing over and over again, and maybe I need to start taking medication, but I still feel I’m in the right at least to some degree. Maybe I shouldn’t have done what I did but I still believe in what I said earlier.”
“What did you say earlier?” he asks me.
“Uhm.” I don’t remember. Uhm. Uhm. Uhm. I remember the cop saying “What do you think you’re doing?” Then, uhm. Uhm.
“Uhm, I said, “Well, I guess you’re going to arrest me now,” and then I said, “Don’t touch me. I am a minor. You’re molesting me. Stop,” but, uhm.” I look at him through the rearview mirror. This isn’t a cop car. “Is this not a cop car?”
“No, It’s not.”
“Are you a car?… I feel funny. Where am I?”
“You seem disoriented,” he says.
“You’re disoriented,” I say.
This is a cute car, and it’s going down a highway, like bugs on a stick. My hands are tied together. They feel funny touching each other like this. I remember the bank. The bank teller told me that they pay all of my ATM fees.
“Wow, really?”
“Yes, sir,” she said.
“Wow, that’s just great. That just made my day,” I said.
“Get out,” the cop tells me.
Then, all of a sudden, I am in a prison cell. I am surrounded by what appears to be an infinite number of homeless people, but maybe only five.
“Holograms,” I think.
I hold onto one of them. “ReIgnitioN,” I whisper, “I need your help. I think I’m being kidnapped.”
“Get off of me,” the hologram says.
“I’m doomed,” I think out loud, “I’m so doomed. This shit is really fucked up now. I don’t even know what’s going on anymore.”
There’s a small room and there is a table in front of me and in front of the table is a person. He asks me questions.
He says, “We know you have ties with this person. Where did you meet?”
“Uhm.”
“Look at this picture,” he tells me.
It’s the same picture from 666.butane’s profile.
“I saw this,” I say.
“Do you know who the person in this picture is?”
“666.butane.”
“His real name is Jun-young Ho. You talked to him online, correct?”
“Jun young hoe,” I say.
“He is your friend?”
“Yes,” I say, smiling, “Like friends.”
“What can you tell me about him?”
I look around the room. Things aren’t real.
“Are you real?” I ask the man.
“Yes,” he says, “I’m very real.”
“Wow,” I say.
How long has it been? A week? A month? Maybe a year? When is this catastrophe going to end? Maybe ReIgnitioN is out there looking for me.
Am I alone now? No, there is someone here. Say hello. No. Don’t.
I want to be alone. There are too many people. They all want a piece of me.
Things are dawning. I have a hold of myself.
I can hear them out there.
I can hear them doing it.
I can hear their dogs barking at the mailmen.
I can hear their fathers mowing the lawns.
I can hear their feet scuffling in the subways.
Just silent scuffling.