The Turd: An American Journey, Chptr. 9 – Xperience Fiction

The Turd: An American Journey, Chptr. 9 – Xperience Fiction – by Liam Sweeny.

People had a remarkable convention of seeing a thing and asking a question, even when the question has been asked a hundred times, and the answers are well established in the flow of comments. Ernest read off the questions and answered best he could, and he had to actually be thankful for the same questions a hundred times, because in answering those, it occurred to him how very little he knew about his own condition. In fact, he had to look some things up as he spoke. And one of the questions he didn’t have an answer to was: how was he still alive?

Thing was, he ate. Roast beef and turnips, cherry cobbler, vanilla yogurt; he had no razing of his appetite, which reduced his dilemma to a physics problem – where was the food going? His digestive tract was one tube, long as it was, it was still one tube. He should be so full he was choking, yet aside from the heartburn and the occasional white hot stabbing pain, he was fine. One person asked him if he was in the Guinness Book of World Records and he knew he wasn’t, but wondered if he should be. He looked up the ‘no shit’ record about three weeks into the bowel strike, and found that, unlike lack of sleep, lack of stool wasn’t a thing to keep track of. Of course, biggest stool was well documented.

One particular question got a lot of traction, one that Ernest had scarcely thought about.

“What are you going to do with it once you get it out?”

“I’m going to flush it,” Ernest replied. “Or try like hell.” His decision, hastily made, brought the crowd to pleas of him keeping it, or at least selling it to a good home. Then came offers, some so ridiculous Ernest knew they couldn’t be true. A million dollars, sight unseen. But then came a crowd and Ernest and Lysette were up all night.

The morning next, Lysette counted her haul.

“Twenty thousand,” she said. “Can you believe it? That’s just one night.” She kissed him on the cheek. “You are my lucky charm. My constipated lucky charm.”

“Yeah, just wait until I flush this thing. A lot of those people are going to be heartbroken.”

“Well, I mean,” Lysette started a shrug. “Do you have to flush it? I mean, that million dollars probably is bullshit, but there were other offers.”

“Hell no,” Ernest said. “I am not going to be famous for letting my giant turd be adopted and put into somebody’s jar.”

“Probably a 55-gallon drum at this point,” Lysette said.

“Either way, no.”

“Okay, okay.” Lysette started to get dressed. “We’re going leaf peeping. I’ve got something to tell you.”

They were in California north enough to get fall color, and about ten minutes out beyond the City, pigment was setting fire to the leaves, pulsating reds, streaks of orange plastered on splashes of bright yellow. Halloween was the week before, and the early November peak was at apex. Tires crunched beneath their tires as they drove, sounding like the stiff spring breeze that lay at the opposite end of the year.

“I wanted to surprise you,” Lysette said. “I’ve been working on an invention.”

“Aren’t you always doing that?”

“Yeah, but this one is big. It might catch. Especially after the other night.”

“Okay,” Ernest said. “Shoot.”

Lysette found a lookout and pulled over. “So all this talk to poo got me thinking, you know, people love it so much, they should just stuff their faces with it.”

“Gross,” Ernest said.

“Is it? Thirty percent of shit is dead bacteria, thirty percent is cellulose, which we can’t digest, ten- to twenty percent is cholesterol, and one to two percent is protein.”

“Yummy.”

“The thing is, there’s a microbe called Mestophus baccae which can break all that down. It eats waste and its byproduct is largely carbohydrates and methane. So if you engineer a machine that accept poo, and can sustain a colony of that microbe, under the right heat and pressure, you could turn poo int a sort of flour.”

Ernest smirked, then started laughing. “So eat shit won’t be an insult anymore; it’ll be an advertisement.”

“Ooo, yeah, we could use that,” Lysette said.

“So why not tell me about this?”

Lysette let out an anxious breath. “I was hoping we could test it on your-, you know, when it comes out.”

“Wait, so you’re telling me I should let it go for some weirdo’s collection, but also chop it up so we can bake cakes with it. I can’t do both.”

“I had no clue what was going to happen the other night,” Lysette said.

“Well, my answer’s no different to you, sorry honey. It is a burden to me, it gets flushed.”

They drove home, Lysette starting to say things and stopping herself before they came out. She pulled a pack of cigarettes out her pack and pressed in the car cigarette lighter, an indication of how old the car was.

“You don’t smoke,” Ernest said.

“I do sometimes.”

They kept quiet on the road down the hill and passed block after block on nondescript, cookie-cutter craftsman-style houses until they reached their own non-descript, cookie-cutter house, which was a bit less cookie-cutter with the sign-bearing crowd on the front lawn.

“What the hell?”

Lysette flicked her cigarette out the window as they pulled into the driveway.

They got out to signs in their faces, phones in their faces.

Keep it! One sign read. Flushing is Murder, read another. Adopt, Adopt, ADOPT said another. One just had a toilet in a circle with a line through it.

“What the hell is this?” Ernest said. “Y’all need to get off our yard, swear to God.”

A short woman in a blueberry-colored dress with a black beret got up front and pushed a microphone in Ernest’s face.

“Do you think the thing inside you is a miracle?”

***

Working in VidYou was working in a highly stratified sea of people sporting, being made to sport, egalitarian masks. The owners, the ones with three-hundred-foot yachts and the power to get bridges removed to allow them birth, wore couture shirts with graffiti on them and called each other ‘bro.’ And they didn’t give one clumpy shit about the two people sitting just outside the conference room.

Jasen pinched the skin of his forearm covered by a smiley face tattoo, giving it comically weird expression. Ophelia was on her phone watching self-help videos. They were there to report on their progress, though their meeting was fifteen minutes ago and the board, if one could call it that; rather, the bosses, seemed to be carrying on as if only their time was valuable. Because it was.

“So do we just… go?” Ophelia said, not looking up.

“Not if we want to keep our jobs.”

“We don’t have jobs. We have a fistful of cash. Did you run through yours already?”

“No, but close,” Jasen said.

“Dude, that was thousands of dollars. I got ten myself.”

“I got twelve.”

Ophelia scoffed. “See, women getting paid less than men.”

“Take it to the ballot box,” Jasen said. “I don’t make the rules.”

Ophelia returned to her self-help, murmuring, “You could give me a grand and do your part.”

“I’ll let you drive for the rest of the job. How’s that?”

“You’re a true feminist.”

Jasen shut up and Ophelia put her focus back on positivity. Jasen strained to hear what was going on in the boardroom, and once he’d focused a little bit, he could make some of it out.

“…We do that, everybody loses everything…”

“…Is that any better than now…?”

“…that’s not even legal…”

“…that’s not even possible. Who could do that…?”

Jasen was getting himself in a deep trance, the kind he’d get himself in coding. If he focused just a little more, he could get the whole conversation. Plus, it was giving him something to do.

He was interrupted by a throat clearing that didn’t come from the conference room. He looked up to see a man in his thirties dressed in urban sportswear with sticker shock, pants pre-ripped, whose rips would outlast most peoples’ whole jeans.

“You guys want to come in?” He said.

Jasen and Ophelia got up and followed Urbanwear to the conference room. Sitting at the table were the definition of white guys. Pastel polo shirts, nice watches, yards of khaki and ballcaps that seemed to complement each other, like an interior decorator came in there and measured heads.

Urbanwear led Jasen and Ophelia to two open seats at the far end of the table. A glass pitcher of water promised refreshment, or the cure for any dry mouth, and it reminded Jasen of the pitchers in Congressional investigations for those testifying. The only cheap thing in the room were the cups.

“Alright, guys,” Urbanwear said. “What do you got for us?”

Jasen nudged Ophelia, and she went first.

“So the one thing we’ve figured out was that this wasn’t a hack. I know that seems obvious based on how people are taking to it, but this, this ‘shit fetish’ is a product of the system working the way it was designed to. Find something people want and feed them more of it. Only in this case, it’s shit.”

“So what have you been able to do?” said a man with a Dodgers hat on backwards.

“Not a whole lot,” Ophelia said. “The problem is, we’re not countering a hack; we are the hackers here. We’re going up against VidYou cybersecurity, and it’s some of the toughest in the world. Whole countries are trying to hack VidYou with no luck. And we’re not having any more luck.”

“So should we stop paying you?”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Jasen interrupted. “You still need us.”

“Okay, for what?” Dodgers hat said.

“I’m assuming you all know about the ‘piss algorithm?”

A few nodded, a few shrugged.

“It’s the most powerful, engaging algorithm out there, and it’s on the loose. Now it sounds like hacking, but I’m not going there. We need to find something, anything, that will break people’s fascination with poo. We find it and load it into the piss algorithm. That’s our plan right now.”

“So then where are you with that?”

“Just trying to find something that’s more interesting than poo. It hasn’t been easy. Did you know it’s a religion now?”

“It doesn’t sound like you two have done a whole lot. I could’ve done this.”

“I don’t think you’re paying us per keystroke,” Jasen said. “You’re paying us so that if we screw up and fry the internet, none of your fingerprints will be on it.”

They chuckled around the table, which unnerved Jasen.

“I’m going to give you something, some information to motivate you,” Urbanwear said. “The FCC is forcing us to purge the social media infrastructure in a week if this shit culture doesn’t move on. It is bad for business. People need to buy things other than food, and right now, they’re not buying chachkies; they’re making them in the bathroom. The only household product to see a bump in sales is mason jars.”

“Guys, if we have to purge the system, it’s all gone,” Dodgers Cap said. “Videos, pictures, friends, all of it.”

Urbanwear got up and paced the room. “I don’t think we come back from that,” he said. “Not as a society. You guys might think we’re rich, and we are, make no mistake. But most of us are paper rich. Not liquid. Stock options. This purge happens, we might not come to the surface.”

Jasen and Ophelia had coffee in the cafeteria after the meeting.

Jasen manhandled his vending machine cappuccino. “I feel great, how about you?”

“I got so much of my life on social media,” Ophelia said. “Can they really do that?”

“Technically yeah. It’d be corporate suicide, but doable.”

Ophelia’s cup birthed wisps of steam and raised them to dance. “So what do we do?”

“We find the next most interesting thing,” Jasen said. “We find the anti-poo.”

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