Something Far Larger
by J. J. Carswell
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
part 1
Olivia paces the small apartment, clipboard in hand, running her pen down the worn and heavily annotated checklist. No furniture. No tools. No utensils. No chemicals, except the treatment on the window. No rope, no cords. No blinds or curtains. City water turned off. Concrete in the electrical sockets. Nothing electronic, except the timers on the locks that will keep her in the apartment and keep her out of the oven.
And, of course, the computer on the floor. It’s undeniably from the early ‘90s; you couldn’t build it today if you tried and, in different circumstances, she might almost caress the boxy horizontal CPU with that floppy-disk drive and its spring-loaded eject button. But today, the top is off, and she’s soldered in connections to more modern accessories: a battery to power it, a screen borrowed from a cheap tablet, and a touchpad from three laptops ago. She can’t use the original mouse, for obvious reasons.
She stops mid-stride and, pen in hand, checks her earrings. Nothing. She left them at home — which is good — but they weren’t on her checklist, which is bad. What else could there be? She’s racking her mind, in combat with the infinite creativity of her future self.
Finally, she sighs and opens the first-floor window. Cold air gusts in from the back alley she inspected only an hour ago. It’s disgusting out there, but it’s safe, and it’s untraveled. She throws her pen as far as she can, and then the clipboard.
It’ll be very difficult to kill myself, she thinks as she secures the window. She presses her thumb to the lock, starting the thirty-minute timer.
She has prepared herself for anything, except the possibility of nothing. It must happen, whatever it is. Years of searching the world. Ostracized from the family she hoped to save. Posting the same plea for explanation across the far and strangest reaches of the nascent Internet until, for better or worse, she had become a minor cyber-celebrity. She can recite her post word for word, at least the version in English:
No date on the calendar is more important to me than August 3, the day my brother inexplicably tried to kill himself. Every year, as my investigation continues, I mark the anniversary. I was a rising sophomore in high school, and he was a rising senior. He was well-adjusted, more optimistic than any life could justify, and had never attempted anything like this before or after.
It had to do with a floppy disk he’d been given by a friend at Space Camp. A summer friendship, and I’m not sure he ever talked to the kid again. But he came home in mid-July with instructions to run the program on the disk on August 3. He described it as a puzzle of some sort, a test of his hacking chops.
We were both into computers... we’d built a desktop in the basement, far from our parents’ prying eyes, though in reality our parents’ eyes rarely pried. They’d order us parts if we begged (before returning to their 24/7 jobs) and, in the meantime, we’d scavenge at the computer repair store where we both worked after school.
It was Sunnyvale in the 1990s. My brother was a product of his surroundings, and I was a product of idolizing my brother.
But I was also proving my independence, and I was jealous of the summer he’d had and the new friends he’d made, and I thought that, whatever this floppy disk was, it was dumb. He told me about it incessantly, and I did my best to ignore him. He changed the system clock to August 3, ran the program, and received an immediate error. He pored over the source code and tempted me with it. Once or twice I took a look. It was ludicrously complex but pointlessly so: dense and layered subroutines working with variables that had no content, many of which had never been properly defined.
I mocked his friend endlessly. “How did it even choose which error to display?” I asked him. “He must need till August third to learn how to code,” I said. And even if the program had been functional, which is to say even if the programmer had demonstrated the most basic of skills, it had no evident purpose. It took no input and produced no output.
When August 3 arrived, I made a point of my superiority. “The day has come,” I said. “The rules of programming no longer apply.” My brother asked if I wanted to boot it up with him. I laughed. I stayed on the floor, where I was flipping through the summer issue of Data Components Quarterly — a thrill my unborn children may never understand — and hitting a joint. I had succeeded in being zero-percent curious.
My brother ran the program.
A second before, he’d been fidgeting with a pencil and rotating mindlessly in the old office chair we’d begged off our parents. But now he was perfectly still, immersed in what he was seeing. What got my attention was the noise, noises that no computer at the time could have produced.
“Andrew?” I looked up to find his face bathed in color, colors that our monitor could never have produced. Probably no monitor could.
It’s hard to disentangle my actual memories of what followed from my constant revisitation, reconstruction, my years of investigation, the dozens of similar stories I’ve now heard. He was rigid, then he was limp and moaning, then rigid again. The computer was so loud that I covered my ears. Bombarded by sound and color, he screamed. At least, I saw him scream. His scream was nothing against the noise of the computer. My brother slammed his face into the monitor, hard enough that I could hear the crunch of glass.
I was on my feet, screaming, scrambling over to him, when he raised his bloody face, shards of our prized monitor embedded in his skin. I got close, but he hit me, right in the gut, enough to put me on the floor again. He was standing. He had pliers in his hand, needle-nose pliers we used to work on the computer. He was screaming and driving them into his body over and over, his wrists, his stomach, his shoulders. They went in as easily as a dagger.
Hard as it is to reconstruct, I’ll never forget the sensation of bottomless horror. My brother wasn’t human. A frenzy, an animalistic savagery, that’s how I’d describe it. All the hatred in the world directed at himself.
I was screaming, but I was back on my feet. I went at him with everything I had and put my shoulder into him, and we went down in a heap of siblings and torn clothes and pliers and blood.
My parents were at work. I needed to call 911. He was fighting me, forcing me off, and there was nothing I could do to him that was worse than what he was struggling to continue doing to himself.
But then... it ended. The frenzy subsided. He was my brother again, horrifically wounded, whimpering and moaning on the floor of the basement. It happened fast. The entire episode, from the start of the noise and colors, to his surrender beneath me, lasted maybe thirty seconds, maybe closer to sixty.
I ran for the telephone and, in the eternity until the paramedics arrived, urged my brother to keep living. And he did. Scary days at the hospital, months of recovery, delayed graduation, a year away from electronics, but he survived.
Meanwhile, I was questioned by detectives. Clearly, I hadn’t done anything to him, but they couldn’t make sense of it. My parents’ confusion, I think, was the deepest of all. No one seemed comfortable enough with the facts to state the obvious, that I had saved my brother’s life.
Everyone had their reasons for moving on. I never did. And in my investigation, I’ve now identified thirty-seven similar events. In the many earlier versions of my post, I see that this number ranges from five in 1998 to thirty-five in 2016. Most were successful suicides. More than a quarter of them occurred in that same year, 1994. Only one occurred earlier, in 1992.
Inexplicable suicides with no warning signs, completed in thirty to sixty seconds of extreme violence, all connected to mysterious computer programs received on a floppy disk or a CD or a thumb drive or downloaded from the Internet... and always on August 3.
I’ve never found an explanation, which is why you’re reading this post. If you know of any theory or data that could shed light on these incidents, however outlandish, I beg of you to contact me.
Bizarrely, the incident did more long-term damage to Olivia’s life than to her brother’s. He went to college, albeit a year late; she never did. He grew quieter, passive, non-confrontational, somehow uninterested in what had happened to him; she grew obsessive, fixated, fanatical, interested in nothing else.
He got in on the ground floor of one of today’s tech giants; she hung around the edges of white-hat security, and then less white-hat. And after her parents cut her off, these cash jobs barely covered the modest expenses of her peripheral Californian existence, let alone the occasionally immodest expenses of investigating those colors, those noises, those subroutines with variables that hadn’t been defined.
Andrew was one of nine hundred students who attended the mid-summer session of Space Camp in 1995, two hundred and fifty of whom were in high school. Obtaining the list was the easy part. It takes years to track down two hundred and fifty people — even with a deft command of all the world’s networked information — and two were dead by the time she had personally confronted the other two hundred and forty-eight. Then she started on the middle-schoolers. But she learned there’s no algorithm that can make people answer your questions.
She posted her narrative everywhere she could think of, tacking it up to every light post and electric pole across the worldwide web — dark and light, deep and shallow — and the venues she tried read like a history of two decades of the Internet: bulletin boards, Usenet, Open Diary, Xanga, MySpace, Blogger, forums, Facebook, Google Groups, Twitter, Reddit, 4chan, Dread, FreeHacks, 8chan, and on and on and on.
Before modern software provided her a workable approximation, she paid for translation into Mandarin, Russian, Arabic, and a dozen other languages. It’s hard to say that her post went viral when it had so little virality of its own, when it was entirely her own work but, by pure dint of effort and determined replication, it traveled farther than almost anyone’s ideas ever will.
Mostly she was met with skepticism, one more conspiracy theorist using the freedom of the Internet to tell stories and call them true. Otherwise, she received what she had wished for: a deluge of potential explanations, ranging from the farcical to the far-fetched.
Is any explanation implausible, when the event she hoped to explain was itself impossible? Aliens, that was a favorite. Gray, white, blue, or green, their intelligence and physical dimensions varied in each account, but the working theory was consistent. They had escaped from government captivity and attempted to murder an eighteen-year old through his computer screen.
And if not aliens, it was the Clintons. The New World Order had more power than even the pessimists feared. Or it was technology itself, the natural endpoint of humanity’s electronic acceleration, an accident borne of forces we have unleashed without understanding them. Her story gave rise again and again to Luddite manifestos, whose authors expressed their abhorrence of civilization in the utter refusal of punctuation.
Copyright © 2021 by J. J. Carswell
