The Turd: An American Journey, Chapter 12 – Xperience Fiction

The Turd: An American Journey, Chapter 12 – Xperience Fiction – by Liam Sweeny.

Standing in a line of cars waiting for the overworked, myopic guard to grant them passage, Ernest had all the feeling of the flight into an apocalypse. Cars bumper to bumper on the way out and only six or seven, his included, on the way in.

Then again, it was nearing five o’clock.

Jasen drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, keeping pace to the industrial techno grinding through his speakers. Ernest would’ve preferred a little outlaw country, but he was most decidedly in Rome.

“I gotta warn you about these guys,” Jasen said at a pause in his concert. “These guys aren’t old guys in suits. They’re young guys, younger than you, Ernest. I mean, I think they are. How old are you?”

“Old enough to see over the bar.”

“Okay, yeah, I’m sure you’re older than them. They’re like thirties, and they dress street or prep, but they’re piranhas. They have more than once made us sleep in the office to cut down on the commute. They had the nerve to applaud us on our dedication.” Jasen let out a laugh. “Like these assholes are the type that’ll layoff a thousand people with a text message, and oh yeah, you have to get their texts telling you to stay late, come in on weekends, and you gotta.”

Ernest hawked spit out the window as the car crept up a length. “Ain’t nothing wrong with hard work and dedication,” he said. “I know I slept in the garage when I had a rebuild going on. What’s the alternative, get fat on a couch?”

“Your garage?” Ernest nodded.

“Right. Your garage. Not just putting money in a yacht or a harem of Botox hags.” Ernest felt his stomach rumble as the car neared the second place at the gate.

“So what do they have you sleeping on the couch for here?” he said. “What’s your skill. Programmer, I bet. You look the type.”

Jasen eased back. “My official title job duties were looking at nipples and making sure I was the last one that would see those nipples.”

“Oh, so a high skill set.”

“C’mon, man,” Jasen said. “I’m a hacker, but no one really calls themselves hackers unless they’re posers or someone with cash is looking for a hacker. Let’s just say

I’m a reformed computer trespasser.”

The car got up to the gate, and after halfheartedly checking Jasen’s fake badge, let them pass. The road in winded about the campus, ending in a massive parking structure behind VidYou Alpha, their destination.

“Are you sure she’s going to be here?” Ophelia asked. “Can we maybe stay away from the board, get in, get out?”

“She’s doing a thing there, poops of the new media,” Jasen said. “She said it traces the poop to the video of the poop through the whole VidYou complex.”

“That sounds stupid,” Ernest said.

“No,” Lysette said. “I like those, like the medical shows that show you how something travels through the body. It’s cute.”

“Yeah, well it’s the only thing on VidYou that is getting any views other than shit art.”

They followed the road and found a place, luckily, on the first floor of the parking structure. Ernest wasn’t a fan of stairs over the past month.

VidYou Alpha had the lobby of an extraterrestrial craft as portrayed by a school of Bauhaus artists. The geometry was awe-inducing, and the smell of linen and light lemon must have been piped in through the vents. Lysette’s eyes were everywhere. Ernest was laser-eye straight ahead, lest he feel encompassed by architecture meant to encompass. Employees in polo shirts and white laminate tags navigated the lobby without guides, just on habit and intuition.

Jasen asked for Tristan Miller at the information desk, and after a few minutes of phone tag, they were directed, not to her, but to the same conference room in which they had been reporting, with the promise that she would meet them there.

“The big guys want to see you both,” the man at the kiosk said. “Seems like you all have an appointment there. Weird you didn’t know about it.”

“They must’ve forgotten to text us.”

The man smiled. “Good thing you showed up then.” He snapped his fingers and aimed his index at the group.

They arrived at the conference room to find it empty. Jasen sat down at the head of the table. Ernest, Lysette and Ophelia found seats on the side by the wall.

“What the hell, man?” Jasen said. “Do we even have a meeting with these guys?”

“I know we didn’t make one,” Ophelia said. “Do you think the influencer set it up

when we got back to her?”

“Are y’all sure this is gonna work?” Ernest said. “What’s she gonna do with my story? I mean, yeah, I’m getting attention, but even if she makes me famous, for how long? Since this shit thing started, nothing stays on the radar past the next cool shit thing.”

Jasen felt his pockets and pulled out a vape, then thought better of it.

“Look, I don’t know if this is going to work,” he said. “In my line of work – in my ideal, non-nipple line of work, there’s a problem and a solution, and concrete steps you can take to solve it. But this is all people, man.”

Jasen hunched over but spoke just as loudly. “If this doesn’t do something to tip the needle, the government really is going to pull the plug on the internet. We heard it from the people here that can actually do it.”

They heard the door hit up against the back wall and looked to see the influencer, her expression beset by shock.

“Oh my God…” She said.

***

Tristan took a step or two forward, her hands out like she was stopping a semi with hand signs.

“I didn’t hear anything, I swear,” she said. “Hear what? Did you guys say something?” she chuckled nervously through a bit lip. “So did you hear about the Mets game last night?”

She started to back out the door, but Jasen cleared the distance to stand in her

way.

“Please don’t kill me, guys. I’m so close to 70 million followers. Look! I can help you!”

Jasen grabbed her shoulders. “We’re not gonna hurt you. But you can’t say a word about this, not a goddamn word. We’re going to stop this thing and we need your help. But if you tell those seventy million people that their Profiles account is going to get wiped out and they’ll lose the two-thousand friends they spent a decade collecting, it will be urban warfare.”

“Okay, okay, okay,” Tristan said. “So we’re here, we’re dressed up, and where are these VidYou people that treated me to a cheesecake in the cafeteria?”

Her query was followed by a rap on the door frame. Jasen backed away and a line of executives in tracksuits filed in, boisterous and jocular. They took every empty seat and the last one in slid a bunch of brochures around to all assembled.

“I’d like to apologize for what you’re about to read, especially you two, Jasen and

Ophelia. It’s not fair, but it has to be this way. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

Ernest thumbed through it. His mouth went agape and he tapped Jasen’s shoulder, sharing it with him before he had a second to look at his own copy.

“34 year-old Jasen Nancy, 27 year-old Ophelia Mathers and 20 year-old Tristan Miller are wanted in connection with the social media outage, and all evidence indicates that the outage was an attempt by the three to push a local couple into internet stardom. It is unknown whether or not they sought to permanently damage the internet. If you find them, please contact your local authorities. At this time, they are not considered armed or dangerous.”

“What the hell is this?” Jasen said. “You’re framing us?”

“No, we’re giving you a chance to make a play here,” the head of the table said. “You found someone-,” he pointed to Ernest, then to Lysette, “someones, that might just pull people off poo for a minute, slowly – Ernest, Lysette; you two are like stool softeners here. Ease the people off the poo. But they need to go on to something else after that, cause if they don’t, the FCC is shutting the whole thing down. And they need someone to pin it on, cause otherwise it’ll be blood in the streets.”

“You sons of bitches, this was your plan all along. Fire us so we look like disgruntled employees. That way all your bases are covered. We pull the net off poo, you pay us and no one’s the wiser. We fail and they shut the whole fucking country down and we’re the criminals that did it. You’re protected either way.”

The executives in the room glanced at each other and nodded.

“Of course,” the head of the table said. “How do you think we get to come in and run a multi-billion-dollar company in track suits? Hell, I have a maid wipe my ass every morning, you think I’m going to commit an act of national disruption with these hands?”

“Oh and Jasen, if you get up and try to use your fists right now, we’ll just light up the plan B early.”

“Wait,” Ernest said. “I don’t know what’s been going on with you and Jasen and this young lady, but I know a fella that’s made up his mind, and he sounds a lot like you.”

The head of the table got up and collected the brochures, yanking Jasen’s out of his hands.

“This is set dressing,” he said. “We honestly thought we could turn this thing around, if only we had a shiny enough ball. Or that people would just get bored. Boredom is how we make money here. Big viral hits with a million views? Great. But what else ya got? If peoples’ minds don’t wander, we lose square miles of advertising space.”

He put one hand on Ernest’s shoulder and one hand on Lysette’s and hunched down between them. “Let’s face it. There’s only so much you can do with shit. Joke about it, walk around with it, smear it on the walls, your face, start a shit religion that has no point. Hell, Ernest, you really are the best thing to happen to shit that I’ve seen since that video hit the platform.”

“So you’re just betting on us to fail,” Jasen said. “You’re not even going to give us that chance you say we have.”

“Of course we are. We just have less than no hope that you’ll actually succeed.”

“Can I at least have the brochure back? Let me read about my criminal exploits, what do you say?”

The executive flung Jasen a brochure and he picked it up. It was meticulous, with a map showing where, when, and how the internet was taken down, with infographics showing stats of the damage, the data lost. A ready-for release article about Jaen and

Ophelia written like a news story, then a feature that made them out to be Bonnie and Clyde. He read enough to know that they had gathered enough evidence, gathered or fabricated.

“This isn’t fair,” Tristan said. “We’re not going to do anything, you can’t just frame us. I won’t let you.”

The executive chuckled. “Look, you’re not a hacker. You can make a deal. And when the book comes out, you can push it to your followers. Maybe we’ll give you a seat in our office when we crash it, make it like you got caught up in it all. Maybe we can get you real fame.”

“Can you do that?” Tristan said. “Will you?”

“Sure, why not.” The executive said. “We’ll make it a party. Invite your followers.”

Tristan pulled her phone out of her shirt pocket. “Thing is, I already did.”

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