Elijah pulled away from the monitor and pushed the heels of his hands against his eyes. His glasses fell to the desk with a clatter. Pinwheels of colour spiralled against the watery black, and he focused on those, attempting to remove the video from his mind. He couldn’t. Of course he couldn’t. That was the whole point.
He breathed deeply, found his glasses and hit the replay button.
His monitor filled with dashcam footage. The video was the highest quality he’d ever seen and a part of him made a note to find the manufacturer and buy one for himself. The thought was crass and dangerous. Somewhere in the shadows lurked gallows humour that threatened to overwhelm him. Then again, survival tactics were all part of the job, right? He was on the front line, ‘protecting the world from darkness’. He watched this so that others wouldn’t need to.
Perhaps they should, though. Perhaps, he thought, the world should get a glimpse of the insanity that lay just on the other end of the post button. The flip side of adorable animals was those same pets being pulled apart by juiced-up kids, just for the yucks.
He shook his head. God, he was getting dark. Elijah shook himself mentally. All right, time to get professional. He took a breath, counted to thirty and emerged into a place in his mind that was observant, yet distant. Disinterested but curious. A Post-It note pinned to the corner of his screen contained a list of today’s alterations to the content policy, but he didn’t need to check. The clip was something that should never find its way into the social lives of the almost two billion users of Seedling.
He clicked Play.
A car pulled out of a side street and merged into traffic. The sky sunny, the roads dry. A perfectly ordinary day. The dashcam captured everything in high fidelity digital perfection, one hundred and twenty frames per inevitable second. For a short time nothing happened, then a dog raced out of nowhere and crossed the road missing the car by a comfortable length. “Holy crap,” said the driver, “did you see…”
Then, with the inevitability of a falling axe, came the child. Elijah couldn’t begin to figure out what the kid was doing near such a major road. Following her missing dog, obviously. In his mind’s eye the scene played in slow motion but in reality was finished in less than a second. The child was gone, flipped and dumped, leaving nothing but a cracked windscreen and the sound of traffic.
Some time later the driver screamed.
He clicked Reject. Chances were that by now the video was so embedded in into the web work of social links, the likelihood of actually removing it were close to zero. At least for now this version was on its way to digital oblivion.
Next.
Elijah met Juliet in the car park during their break. Heavy, tumorous clouds sat in the sky, turning it ugly and organic like the insides of some vast gutted god. The day was muggy and the air languid and hard to breathe. Steam rose from the asphalt as he leaned against the door of his car. Juliet handed him a bottle and he drank.
“Classy,” he said.
“Only the best for node 34BF.”
He raised the bottle in salute.” Damn straight. So how are you going?”
She made a face as she took it back. “Same shit different monkey.”
“Okay, so they’ve got you on the animal stream.”
“Wise ass.”
Juliet took a breath and lit up a cigarette. Elijah noticed the tremble in her fingers. “That bad?”
She shook her head, inhaling the nicotine. She breathed it in with small desperate gasps. “Not really,” she said. “It’s just that… well you know how it is.”
“Any luck with the gig at the call centre?”
She made a face. “I’ve got it if I want it, but the money’s a joke.” She ran her tongue over her teeth. “I’ll stick it out here a little longer, I think.”
He bummed a drag of her cigarette.
“Wow, you’re such a mooch today.”
“No, I’m being economical and my friends care about me.”
She titled her head in a half joke. “Friends?”
“Co-” and he fished in his mind for a way to complete the word. “Workers… victims… inmates?”
She smiled and refocused for a moment, processing whatever horrors she’d been witness to over the last three hours. You learned a lot about people in this game, Elijah realised. Not just the crap those psychopaths posted but what it did to people on the other end of the stream. He wondered whether that anonymous horde ever thought about what it meant when they hit the send button. It was crazy of course. After doing what they did, sharing with the world be the least of their worries.
Seedling had strict policies about what could or couldn’t get posted. The only problem was those policies changed daily, blown on winds of political will. Despite that, the company pitched one hundred percent compliance with those policies, all monitored by cutting-edge AI that never missed a thing. But for whatever reason, sometimes the AI choked and that meant the work needed to be farmed out to ‘other’ nodes to fill the gaps.
The company got around the whole problem by outsourcing. Seedling didn’t ask and the company he worked for, Vanguard, didn’t tell. On paper at least, Vanguard AI was just another point on the network. From Seedling’s perspective, how they paid for the computing power was up to them. Hence, Juliette, himself and seven hundred and ninety-eight others were just meat-versions of silicon algorithms running simple tasks. People were cheaper than processors.
Juliet pinched off the end of the cigarette and carefully put it back into its box, saving the stub for later. “It’s so weird,” she said.
“Life is weird.”
“Shut up.”
He half nodded. “What’s weird?”
She took another hit of the beer. A couple of cars over, a couple were making out. What was strange, was it wasn’t strange. You dealt with your shit in your own way, or you quit. They were all survivors here, one way or another.
Elijah leaned in to her and took another drink. The beer was good. He never thought of himself as a drinker. He never had been a drinker before working for Vanguard AI. As Lennon said — whatever gets you through the night. Even if the night happens to be the morning.
“What is it?” He said.
She smiled but her face was distant, still lost somewhere not quite here. “What would be your perfect hell?”
“Excuse me?”
“You know, your old-school Punishement-From-On-High deal?”
He wiped sweat from his forehead. The heat was atrocious. “Fire and brimstone, I guess. Demons?”
“Yeah,” she said, “you’d think so.”
“What are you getting at?”
Juliette made a little moue. It could have been cute on someone else’s face, but from her it meant you were being dense. She shrugged.
Elijah shrugged, mirroring her own. Who knew? It wasn’t their job to question. They were just nodes in the all encompassing sprawl of global entertainment. She reclaimed the bottle from him and pitched it into a clump of bushes where it shattered amongst all the others, then glancing at her phone checked the time. Straightening up, she moved away back toward the building, then paused.
“How do you do it? How do you get through it all?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yeah. Me neither.”
“Do you think the world would care if we told them?”
“Told them what?”
“That we’re real people.”
He smiled. “We’re not people.”
“We can leave,” she said. Her voice was intense, cutting. “If we want to.”
He smiled at that too.
The cat, whose name was Train Wreck screamed at Elijah the moment he entered his apartment.
“I know, I know,” he said, “I’m late.” He kicked the door closed behind him and navigated the dark room before dropping the grocery bags on a kitchen counter. He flicked on the lights and took a second to appreciate the view. Manhattan sprawled across the East River, close enough to touch. It was a dream world on the other side of a bridge he could cross but never really cross. He reached out, his fingers coming to a stop on the cold glass, and for a moment he was back in the car watching the dog race across the street. He snapped back to his own reflection in the window.
“So how was your day?” The cat glared at him with all the accusation it could muster. “Yeah,” he sighed. “Me too.”
Elijah crashed into his couch and peered at the room, his eyes seeking soft shadows. The TV was on out of habit, but he only saw the videos in his mind. The kid wasn’t the worst, not by far. At least, despite whatever reason the user who called themselves NTM3 had for posting it, the whole thing had been an accident. Perhaps that was the point. He could imagine from some twisted perspective pushing that video online was attempt to vindicate themselves, to prove their innocence. See? It was an accident. I have the proof right here. NTM3–Not me.
But the other clips? He forced himself to watch the television. Those were intentional.
Train Wreck curled next to him on the couch and swatted the remote. He picked it up and scanned through the shows, his mind somewhere else.
What was his version of hell?
He thought about giving Juliette a call, but left the phone where it was. They’d swapped numbers after their induction into Vanguard, in a heady rush of camaraderie that looking back on it now seemed a little too desperate. Almost as if they both knew what was about to come. She was a single mum and lived somewhere around Long Island City, not too far away. Other than that, and the fact they spent eight hours a day next to each other in what was apparently her version of hell, he didn’t know her at all. Or she, him. He wanted to call. He didn’t want to call.
Train Wreck purred.
Elijah pulled his phone from on top of a pillow and swiped through pages. His fingers paused over the contacts app, then kept moving, kept searching. They stopped by their own volition on Seedling.
He tapped.
The welcome screen flowered into life; a small seed germinating in 3D that projected away from the phone screen, filling the apartment with an impossibly complex tree whose trunk bifurcated into hundreds, then thousands of branches. Finally, all that was left was a glowing, transcendent root system filling the air like a forest. And at the end of every root, a glowing orb–itself another seed.
We’re all connected, it said in its unsubtle way. The sequence was done in a second, but seemed airless, timeless. Like the girl and the car.
“Welcome to Seedling,” said a voice.
The avatar was meant to be soothing and gender-matched to your preference, but Elijah had overridden it. Instead of the sultry Hollywood vixen the algorithm would have normally presented, the voice was a gruff, old and whiskey-wrecked. He smiled at this. The patient, nurturing and slightly suggestive tones of Seedling were now rendered sarcastic.
“What can I help you with?”
Elijah closed his eyes, trying to see the darkness behind the lids, but failing. Repeats of the day strobed like frames from an ancient film-projector. Murder…flicker…assault…flicker…blood….flicker…screams…flicker…laughter…flicker…flicker…flicker…
“Show me something nice,” he said to the room. “Anything. I don’t care.”
“Nice,” repeated the voice. “Himari is trending. She’s nice.”
“Okay, put her on.”
Elijah sat up as the phone took control of the TV and threw the audio to the smart speakers in the room. A crowd roared and screamed as drone-cams zoomed through a stadium to find a close up of a young Korean singer waving to her fans.
“Original or translated?” asked the voice.
“Huh? Translated.”
“I’m so grateful to be here with you,” said Himari. “I want to share this new song with all my friends, all over the world.”
“You can’t be serious,” said Elijah.
“You wanted Nice,” said the voice. “This is nice.”
Virtual icons floated around the performer and for a moment Elijah saw his own face. Himari washed her hands through the confetti-stream of images, pushing through them as if through a flurry of snow. Her fingers snatched one icon at random.
“Hello Elijah from Roosevelt Island.” She waved and bounced on her feet.
Elijah leaned forward, despite himself. “Hello Himari.” His voice was a whisper.
She blew an air kiss and his icon scattered into the confetti, joining hundreds of others.
The next day, someone else was in Juliette’s chair.
Elijah sat at his desk, nodding at the newcomer who’d replaced her. His face was pale as his hands trembled over the screen.
“First day?”
“Yeah,” said the guy.
“You doing okay?”
The kid nodded. “Yeah, I’m alright.”
“Try not to use the bathrooms. Someone’s… well just try not to.”
The young man blinked a few times then nodded. “Okay.”
The kid hit play on the next clip and jerked back from the screen. Elijah took a breath, then let it out.
Juliette’s words came back to him as he steeled himself against blurry images of someone running for their life, their pursuers howling animal glee. He would call her after the shift, he promised himself. He’d check in with her to see if she was okay. She’d probably taken the call centre job. Good on her. Good on her kid, too.
Another clip came and someone else died.
He saw it.
He didn’t see it.
Elijah processed the queue like the algorithm he was, wondering if any of this was real. Perhaps Seedling was truthful, and an AI did process the content as promised. Would it be that hard to simulate a person, thinking they were real? After all, how else would it replicate the nuances needed to make a call on what got through the gate and found its way into the eyeballs of billions of users?
No. He sucked in a breath.
No.
He stared at the screen, which grew watery and blurred, forcing him to blink away forming tears.
Juliette was right. He didn’t have to do this. He didn’t have to add his own small lie to the hidden mountain. The truth was ugly. But it was still the truth. There was a world that was different to this. There was a world where people made brightness instead of darkness. A world where people mattered.
Where he was seen.
A gang of kids threw knives at a dog.
He hit Accept.
Someone jumped from a building.
Accept.
A dog raced across a street, followed by the girl.
He thought of Himari.
Accept.
Thanks so much for reading. If you enjoyed this you could make my day by buying me a coffee!
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