The Turd: An American Journey, Chptr 5 – Xperience Fiction – by Liam Sweeny.
The spirit and whole intent of Doctor Frankenstein, in the opinion of Ernest Kreb, did escape the pitchforked masses and the confines of a stormy mountain castle to grab hold of the first mechanics, who would, over a hundred years, give life to a myriad assemblage of parts. Ernest had half a mind to believe that with enough oil and a little bit of trick wrench work, he could’ve given Frankenstein’s monster a satisfying checkup.
Ernest’s father taught him many things, few on purpose. Among Ernest’s lawful education, he learned that if you wanted to be truly cheap, you better know how to fix junk. Hundred-dollar cars paraded through the Krebs’ backyard like ten-dollar hookers with pocketfuls of change. Ernest’s father wasn’t trying to teach him life skills. He needed a wrench servant and sounding board for his many minor under-the-hood triumphs.
Eventually, the esteemed Ernest Kreb the Senoir spent more time asleep in a lawn chair by the car, and Ernest the Junior knew that if they wanted groceries, he’d better take over the fixing. In tenth grade, he went to VoTech to learn auto mechanics formally, picking up a job at the garage which ten years before had fired his dad, they seeing clearly that the apple had fallen a mile from the tree.
Ernest’s gut rumbled. It wasn’t unusual. It was hard for him to describe, even to himself, just what it felt like for his body to hold in a shit for what was then thirty-seven days. A lead weight would have been an easy descriptor, but a wrong one. He felt, quite simply, that he had to go. But every toilet stop was Lucy and the football. A broken promise from his bowels. Toilet paper roll upon toilet paper roll unmolested. Gallons of flushed water sent asunder for the pure comfort it gave Ernest hearing it.
Ernest spent two hours chasing down a wiring issue that kept his neighbor Karl’s passenger side window stuck in mid-lower, which put his controls directly under the aim of the birds in the tree above. White spatter slid down the window’s edge.
He pulled his phone out of his pocket as he broke for lunch, a tuna sandwich, plain, no garlic salt. The phone was useless. He used to spend hours a day on Profiles, ostensibly to look for opportunities for he and Lysette, but truth be told, he was a purveyor of some pretty dank memes, car memes were his favorite. Now shit was every post. Shit selfies, shit memes, shit jokes, life hack articles about shit. Even the ads were shit-related. He stopped going on after seeing an ad that promised scent free shit if you mixed their powder with prune juice.
He chewed and wondered, as he did upon every chew, just exactly where the food he was eating went, if not on the bullet train that normal people called a digestive system. Clearly he would start vomiting. Why wasn’t he vomiting? Why wasn’t his gut white hot excruciating pain at its continual expansion?
He had to go. But he didn’t. He had to admit that it made him productive as hell, a never-ending job to do to get his mind off the binding of the mud serpent.
It took another hour for him to find the faulty wiring and fix it before he made his
way to the front door to give Karl a progress report, and a bill. He knocked on the screen door.
“Come on in, Ernie,” he heard Karl say. “I’m on the porch.”
Karl was a cool guy, the kind of cool guy that came from rich parents and never had a reason not to be cool. He had nice things, top of the line television with a computer built into it, tasteful decorations that were put there by a decorator; probably the African mask didn’t mean anything to Karl, as he’d never mentioned Africa but couldn’t shut up about Paris.
Ernest went to the back porch, all glass, all houseplants, likely none that Karl watered. Probably all fake, but good fake, fake to fool a horticulturist. Karl was sitting in a high-backed office chair staring into a computer screen. Something about it was familiar.
“I’d say she’s looking pretty good,” Karl said. “You’re a pretty generous sort, letting us get a peek like this.”
Ernest got a better look, at his wife, Lysette, barely covered by the lingerie he bought her for Christmas. Red satin, black lace, garter belts and sheer stockings. There she was, exposed, the ionizer in her hand. She was describing the tweak just as she described it to him, excited, holding the device as provocatively as one could hold such a device.
“I have got to say,” Karl said. “She has got great tits. I bet she could feed twins with those. I don’t know how you handle all that, Ernie, my friend. God bless ya’.”
“That’s my wife, Karl.” Ernest was hot. But he was in Karl’s house, so he’d have the cops against him if he strangled Karl. His hand clenched. Then his gut ached.
“No worries, my friend,” Karl said, then he pointed to the screen. “See? She’s got
those kind of hips, Jesus, she could’ve had anyone. You must be king cock over here.” “It’s five-hundred, Karl,” Ernest said. “For the car.”
“Oh yeah.” Karl pulled out his wallet and pulled from it five hundred dollars like he was paying the pizza man.
“I gonna buy the blueprints here,” he pointed to the screen. “An extra five hundred, she’ll call me and help me build it. That’s worth it in my book.”
“You realize if you hit on my wife, I’ll make sure that window goes halfway down and stays down.”
“No need for threats, my friend. I’m here. My hands are here. I’m just trying to help you out.”
“My dad used to get that kind of help,” Ernest said. “They never found some of those guys. No threat, just a little history.”
Karl clicked on the ‘buy’ button. “Always good to know history.” #
#
VidYou was a tale of two cities. If you toured the three-hundred square foot campus, you would be encased in pastoral bliss. The grass was meticulously cut by a grounds crew that dressed in khaki without blemish, carefully trained to not let an errant blade of cut grass grace their fabrics. Rocks carefully placed for professionals to sit on, except the rough rocks placed for aesthetics, also to discourage groups gathering. The hibiscus
trees and the cherry blossoms and the spindly gingkoes provided shade to none; the rocky bed surrounding them didn’t allow for sitting.
That was the first city. The high city that treated the public and prospective professionals to a little spot of heaven in Northern California. Even the wildfire of the year before avoided the campus, likely because the state redirected the fire into a handful of small towns that didn’t have hibiscus, cherry blossoms, and gingko trees. The second city was the city that the “professionals” saw once the cameras and recruiters went away.
VidYou Alpha was in the center of all the other buildings, and twice as tall. Jasen and Ophelia had a good five-minute walk to get there. The hope beyond hope was that the guy they were going to see would be in his office, and not in the cafeteria or the john.
“Do you always leap before you look?” Ophelia said.
Jasen shrugged. “Depends on the situation. Crossing the street? I look. Dicey condom? I check the date. But sometimes you gotta just go with it.”
“You know, technically-,”
“I hate that word,” Jasen said. “I use it, but I hate it. Want to wash my mouth out with soap.”
“Wow, you need a therapist,” Ophelia said. “So technically, you were the one that broke the law. You lied to him; that’s fraud. He could’ve called security and they would’ve arrested you. Hell of a leap.”
“Guy like that, working in the guts – you get there by fucking up elsewhere. I figured he fucked up somewhere else and couldn’t afford another fuck up on his record.”
“Yeah, but, you know, fuck telling me what you had planned. Not like I’m supposed to be on your team here.”
“Okay, well you can do something impulsive, and I’ll go with it.”
Ophelia let out a soft laugh. “Be careful what you wish for.”
The gravel shifted beneath their feet as they gained ground on VidYou Alpha. Every professional, including them, had a distinct shuffle, a product of being constantly surveilled and not wanting some stuffed suit to decide they were beset by laziness. It was a shuffle, not a run, not unless a server was on fire. A shuffle that was synonymous with an army march, the march of tech commerce.
As they got within rock-throwing distance of their destination’s courtyard,
Ophelia tugged at Jasen’s sleeve.
“You plan on telling me what we’re going to do assuming we find him?”
“I was just going to wing it, see what we can pull up.”
“So more on the impulsive,” Ophelia said. “I’m not doing it. I’ll come up with my own plan, and we’re going to have two plans. Or we come up with one plan.”
Jasen stared at her, eyes squinted. “Fine.”
Colby Snoot worked out of an office on the seventeenth floor. They had a pass that, despite Jim’s word, could only get them up to the eighth. Jasen stood by the elevator on the eighth-floor landing, cursing his lanyard. Within a minute, a coder came up, and Jasen convinced the coder that he was showing a new hire, played by Ophelia, her new office on the seventeenth floor, only to be stymied by the idiot who assigns the passes. Ophelia played her part well, freaking out as if she thought she’d screwed something up on her first day.
Upon that, they got a hand in getting to the seventeenth floor.
They got off the elevator to deathly quiet. Soundproofed walls kept trade secrets secret. They followed the signs for 1708, Colby’s office. Jasen rapped on the door, with no answer. He knocked to the same result. He then opened the door.
Colby’s office was magnificent. Glass and marble tables, Angular seats upholstered in black leather. Bauhaus and Art Deco walls.
“Hello?”
A door in the back opened and a scruffy man in briefs came out, a towel over his shoulder, a toothbrush hanging out of his mouth, wild hair that would make Einstein get a paternity test.
“Dudes, what are you doing here?”
“Um, we needed to talk to you,” Ophelia said. “You didn’t answer the door.”
“So you just walk in? Tell me why I don’t call security. Aside from me having to get dressed.”
“We’re trying to track down an algorithm for accounting purposes. They call it the
“Piss Algorithm.”
“No,” Colby said “They call it Algorithm GZ. That’s what accounting would call it.
So what are you really doing here?” Colby picked up his phone.
“Okay, look,” Jasen said. “We got fired, and somehow we’re still working for VidYou, but off the books. We’re supposed to deal with the turd video, like get it off the system. But easier said than done.”
“Yeah, that thing is gold. You aren’t getting that off the air without having something better to replace it.”
“That’s why we’re asking about the piss algorithm.”
“Who’d you hear it from?”
“Jim Banter. He gives out badges.”
“Yeah, he’s a scrub for telling you,” Colby said. “Look, I’ll help you to get you out of my office.” He pulled out a note card and jotted down a name, which he handed to Jasen.
“Tristan Miller,” he said. “She’s an influencer. Allegedly, she used that algorithm to get big. You probably heard of her. I don’t know how she got her hands on it; really, she got her hands on a tech, cause it’s not like she could run it herself.”
“I didn’t give this to you,” he added. “And don’t come back. I had to pinch off a shit when I heard you come in. I’m going to have to wipe for an hour.”
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