“Twenty tongues / Moving at once…”

What the hell? He pressed repeat and listened again. Daniel had heard the new Deftones song enough times by now that he could sing along. He tapped his computer awake and opened a Word document titled “Gore Portal (working).” A short story he’d been writing, inspired by the band. He wasn’t 100 percent on the title yet, so had made note of other possibilities. Alternatives included: “Twenty Tongues.” He’d written that months ago. There were other lyrics in this new song that seemed to reference his story, too. And other words he couldn’t quite make out, not yet anyway. Sure, some were sort of abstract, could be interpreted differently, maybe. But “twenty tongues”? That was pretty damn specific.

“High marks… / ‘Cos you made it, Count…”

“Of a membrane, peeling… / Straightforwardly…”

Daniel’s story was about an obsessed Deftones fan getting drawn into a… cult? The cult was called ‘Gore Portal,’ though he hadn’t actually decided yet whether he was going to use the word ‘cult’ in the finished thing. He also wasn’t sure whether ‘Gore Portal’ should be the name of the cult, the name of one of the cult’s rituals, a sacred place, some divine entity, or any/all of the above. Anyway, in the story this fan-protagonist starts to think he’s hearing coded messages in Deftones’ lyrics. The lyrics, as he interprets them, allude to Gore Portal, their beliefs, their practices and promises, and the means they use to recruit. The fan comes to understand through the music that new initiates, before they even know they are initiates, are visited by a sequence of arcane seductions. A figure called ‘The Count’ acts as a kind of messenger. The name of the first ritual? Twenty tongues.

Daniel closed the Word document and opened MSN Messenger. He needed to talk to someone. He saw Jack had changed his username to… ‘The Count.’ What the hell? The Count was busy, apparently. Daniel sent Jack a text message, ordering him to get his ass online. About ten seconds later the little dot icon by Jack’s username went from red to green.

“Weird stuff’s happening today. Why are you called Count??”

“That’s the name of my cat dude. She’s Countess.”

Daniel remembered now, Countess the cat. Maybe that’s where he got the name for the story in the first place. Jack typed out a string of punctuation that meant ‘pussy.’ Daniel typed an eye-roll back. 

“What?? Cats are very sensual creatures. And so am I…” Wink.

“Jack, did you hear the new Deftones?”

Jack’s dot turned red: The Count is Away. Fuck’s sake. Jack was so… distractible. Daniel leant back on his tatty office chair and sighed. His bedroom was covered in picture cuttings, collaged together and stuck directly to the wall with glue. He’d fixate on a specific image, scouring magazines, old books, newspapers or whatever, and cut them out over and over. He’d started arranging them by type, so that each image-form proliferated over time, growing like mold across the walls. A hundred crescent moons, for example, created a dark and glittering firmament over the bedroom door. Elsewhere, he’d gotten preoccupied with reptile anatomy and built a mound of rheumy eyes and plasma-slicked eggs in the corner of the room opposite his computer (on top of the mound he’d erected a scaffold out of snake bones, stacking ribcages upright on top of one another in a charnel tower).

“Your bones broke / Then we made a tower…”

Daniel looked at MSN again: Jack’s dot had turned back to green.

“Still working on your deftones shrine?” asked Jack/The Count. It was always so humid in the summer. The heat made the glues seep, like the room was breathing.

“I haven’t got band pictures up, give me a break… It’s like an artwork. Or mood board or something…” That was true. No pictures of the band. Pictures for the band. Jack hadn’t been in Daniel’s room for a while, and it was different now, but you could call it a shrine, he guessed. The area around the bed looked sort of shrine-like. Above the headboard he’d stuck red, pink, and green flowers, aglaonemas and chrysanthemums mainly, mixed with plastic gore from back issues of Movieworld.

In Daniel’s story, the final ritual has the fan-initiate make a bizarre shrine out of papier-mâché and floristry foam. The construction incorporates spidery stilt legs, a seating platform, a backboard panel just above the seat, and a little Perspex window embedded in the pulp. The window is decorated with fan-made cum, produced each morning by the seated initiate. Pink and green chrysanthemum stems are stuck into the shrine’s surface; these are also replenished daily. Special care is taken around the Perspex window to create a subtle pink/green illumination. This routine eventually culminates in the initiate shooting themselves, adding to the composition.

“You’ll find your true reflection in the splatter…”

“Have you ever had a prostate exam?” asked Jack/The Count. Wink.

“No,” lied Daniel. He remembered the nurse spoke so softly. She told him to get on the bed, pulled on a glove and rubbed lube over her fingers, using her other hand to spread his cheeks apart slightly. She kept talking to him the whole time, softly softly, pushing her fingers inside him mid-sentence. He made a sound of involuntary excitement the nurse either didn’t hear, or just ignored.

The main riff drops out and a filter turns everything to metallic clatter and ice. The drums were recorded in a morgue, apparently. In Daniel’s story, Gore Portal have a whole procession of nurses finger-fucking the initiate, and he describes the ceremonial aspects of their costumes, including capes, cuffs, pleated face masks made out of latex and straw, and rubber gloves going up to their biceps. Before each round of administrations, the nurse puts their hand into the initiate’s pocket and pulls out a surgical tool.

“Because you brought your own… instruments”

He pressed repeat. Listen again.

“So you know I’m writing this Deftones story?”

“Yeah, I read some of this… Gore Portal?”

Jack/The Count’s dot turned green to red. The Count was Busy. Now The Count was… Away. Busy, Away, Busy, Away.

“Fuck’s sake!” typed Daniel, to no one. The Count’s status icon alternated red and yellow, red and yellow like traffic lights, and then: green. The Count’s dot turned green. The Count was — available.

“I’m available, Daniel,” said The Count. Daniel was starting to understand what The Count really was, and wasn’t: “I know.” The Count asks Daniel if he’s ready.

“Ready for what?”

“A sticky bloom, above your head,” said The Count.

Daniel looked at the chrysanthemum and aglaonema blooms above his headboard. He unwrapped the gun he’d hidden under the bed, and started squeezing his cock through his jeans. The Count’s status flicked faster and faster: Busy, Away, Busy, Away, Busy… Away. 

“Ready?” asked The Count.

In Daniel’s story, fan-Daniel imagines a gradual papier-mâché encasement, seated astride spider legs, oasis residue sprinkled on his face. The Perspex window illuminated just so by fresh flowers. The chrysanthemums had been replaced daily, up until now.

Daniel was ready. Daniel was… Ready. Daniel was Busy… Daniel was Away.

This story is taken from the fall 2025 issue of VICE magazine, THE BE QUIET AND DRIVE ISSUE, a Deftones special. We’ve sold out our copies, the only ones left are in stores—perhaps there’s one near you? Secure yourself the next 4 issues by subscribing.

The post Gore Portal appeared first on VICE.

You may not have heard this term before, but mark my words, you’ve seen some of it. Last October, there was the story about a TMZ reporter who, after seeing ASAP Rocky on a jog, decided to run after him. She chased him in her flip-flops, and then resorted to running barefoot, while asking questions about his forthcoming new album. At the end of the video, Rocky conveniently recommended that she cop some kicks from his Puma x F1 collection.

Then there was Charli XCX’s viral Instagram post about a supposed list of “marketing ideas” she’d sent by her record label, which included “Charli leaks a sex tape” and “Charli gets caught shoplifting”. Just days later, the popstar appeared to have been filmed by a fan – one with over 28k followers on X – driving in a convertible with the roof down, blasting her new single.

Can we 100% confirm that these seemingly spontaneous incidents were actually carefully considered marketing ploys? No. But does everything smell intensely fishy at the moment? Yes.

Read Next

Why Are Puppets Everywhere Right Now?

Other examples of UGC soon reveal themselves to be fake. In January, Michael Cera was in the news headlines after he was pictured carrying plastic bags chock-full of CeraVe skincare lotion through the streets of New York. “Why is Michael Cera carrying that much lotion,” asked one Twitter user, posting the paparazzi-style photo to around 18,000 followers. The next day, influencer Haley Kalil posted a video on TikTok of a casual visit to her local pharmacy, where she witnessed Cera signing bottles of lotion – apparently unexpectedly. “Guys run to this pharmacy in BK, I just saw MICHAEL CERA signing bottles!!” she captioned her post. “I’m a #ceravepartner, and I’m asking @CeraVe what is going ON.”

Of course, what was going on was marketing, and the whole thing culminated in a halftime ad at the Super Bowl. The viral marketing partnership was heralded by some fans as “the best Super Bowl commercial in years.”

To some degree, all marketing is a game of smoke and mirrors. The entire point is to make people pay attention to what the advertisers want them to. And the CeraVe commercial did a great job of making a splash, while distracting consumers from the calls for boycott that its parent company, L’Oréal, is currently facing because of its ongoing investments in Israel.

The question is, why are marketers turning to fake UGC as their new trick? Is everyone sick of traditional marketing methods? And does it actually work, or does it run the risk of leaving people with a bitter taste in their mouths once they realise their favourite influencer or celebrity has played them for a fool?

”It feels more prominent at the moment, but ‘fake’ content has always been a part of advertising,” Chris Kubbernus, founder and CEO of social media agency Kubbco, tells VICE. “PR stunts, flash mobs, hidden camera stunts, candid cameras – all are faking content to create a reaction and to do something subversive.” But, he admits, things have stepped up a notch recently. “We’re seeing more ‘fake advertising’ now because people are allergic to traditional advertising, unless it’s during the Super Bowl or Christmas,” he says.

Read Next

The People Who Watch Movies on 2x Speed

Charlie Howes, CEO of digital marketing agency Klatch, seems to agree. “Social media platforms have become saturated with content, and users are bombarded with advertisements,” he says. “To cut through the noise, brands are resorting to more unconventional methods.” Enter, fake UGC. In Kubbernus’ opinion: “‘Faking it’ seems to be working better because it feeds into our desire for controversy, mystery and internet drama.” Basically, we might be more sceptical of traditional advertising than ever, but in our hearts we’re all messy bitches who can’t resist a good bit of stagecraft.

UGC, of the genuine variety, has always been a boon for advertisers in the 21st century. Take the 2009 Ford Fiesta campaign where the company gave away 100 cars and asked consumers to provide ongoing feedback about the vehicle on social media. It spurred a 37% increase in brand awareness. “Another remarkable example is Cancer Research UK’s no make-up selfie campaign, which raised over £2 million in a span of a few weeks,” says Jaya Kypuram, a senior lecturer in marketing at the University of East London. “The biggest contribution of UGC is that of authenticity,” she says. “It makes information being provided more credible as it is coming from customers, users and other publics.”

The problem now is all this authentic influencer marketing and UGC simply isn’t hitting the same anymore. As Georgia Branch, co-founder of marketing agency We Create Popular, puts it, “Authenticity has become the much-loathed catch-all for how brands, influencers and consumers should be showing up online and in real life. But in a world where everyone is trying to be authentic for profit, the commodification of the idea is diluted to almost nothing.”

So, what does go viral in this authenticity-saturated world? “Great stories,” Branch says. Indeed, she seems to welcome the rise of fake UGC, of the kind created by CeraVe. “Surrealism in marketing is kind of refreshing after years of very earnest, po-faced purpose ads,” she says.

TikTok seems to be the main influence behind the surrealist turn. Wackiness is the platform’s lifeblood, and sequential storylines – like the one played out by Cera – perform well. “The major change that’s happened since TikTok was introduced is that ‘social media’ is no longer social,” says Branch. “It’s primarily entertainment, so everything is ‘programmed’.” Just look at all those videos of influencers getting out of bed in the morning, with their hair done and the camera magically arranged at the perfect angle. “As a consumer it’s important to go in with an expectation that nothing is ‘off the cuff’,” Branch says.

Read Next

The Tyranny of the Work Lunch

“The recent Charlie XCX video feels fake to me,” says Richard Michie, CEO of The Marketing Optimist. “The ‘leaked list’ of marketing ideas seems phoney as well,” he adds. “But the crucial point is that it got people talking, resharing and creating opinion posts in response, which is the key to marketing… Under the posts, there are haters, and there are people who love it. Everyone has a strong opinion, and this is probably the point of it all.”

Emotion is a key driver of consumer behaviour, according to Adam Brannon, senior content strategist at marketing agency Herd. “Content that can elicit strong feelings [is] more likely to be shared and remembered,” he says. Campaigns that blend reality and fiction often evoke these emotional reactions, he adds, “whether it’s amusement, surprise, or even outrage, leading to higher levels of engagement.”

But, Brannon also warns that fake UGC can be a double-edged sword. “This approach can create scepticism among consumers,” he says, “making it increasingly difficult to differentiate between what is real and what is fabricated.” He believes marketing professionals must navigate this delicate balance carefully, “prioritising transparency and ethical practices to maintain consumer trust”.

“Brands need to be careful how they engage with their audience if they want them to trust them and remain loyal fans,” says PR and media expert Natalie Trice. “Fake user generated content is not going away because everyone out there is fighting for golden virality,” she says. “But we must remember that people don’t want to be fed lies, they do not want to be exploited.”

At the end of the day, marketers and advertisers will use whatever’s in their toolbox to get their brand noticed. And, in this booming era of fakes, lies have never been so lucrative. “The feeling that evil marketers are trying to trick you is, in some respects, justified,” Michie admits. “It’s always been seen as an industry full of spin.” Ultimately, he says, a good rule of thumb for spotting fake content is to “trust your gut and use common sense… If something seems too good to be true or looks fake, it probably is.” That’s marketing, baby!

@EloiseHendy

The post We’ve Reached Peak Fakery in Celebrity Marketing Stunts appeared first on VICE.

“Submissions are currently closed. It shouldn’t be hard to guess why,” the magazine’s Twitter account announced.

Clarkesworld has been publishing online since 2006, and has featured works by numerous notable authors. The announcement followed a blog post that Clarkesworld editor Neil Clarke wrote last Wednesday called “A Concerning Trend.” Clarke wrote that since the pandemic, the magazine had been receiving an increase in spam submissions, with resulting bans now being at an all-time high as a result of the uptake of AI chatbots like ChatGPT, the machine-learning-powered chatbot released by OpenAI that quickly became a viral hit.

While Clarke didn’t disclose how he could tell many of the submissions were AI-generated, he was confident in writing on the blog post that he was able to see “very obvious patterns” that gave it away. Clarke created a chart that showed the number of submitters that the magazine has had to ban by month, with February 2023 being disproportionately high, at over 500 people. A year ago, there were around 20 bans in February.

“Prior to late 2022, that was mostly plagiarism. Now it’s machine-generated submissions,” the magazine’s Twitter account stated.

Clarke wrote in his blog that he reached out to editors of other magazines who confirmed that this is a pattern across the board, and not just a unique situation to Clarkesworld. Indeed, due to ChatGPT’s free and open access, an entire cottage industry has popped up online of people using the chatbot to make money, and instructional videos and blogs giving tips on how to do so. There are hundreds of e-books on Amazon listing ChatGPT as an author or co-author, Reuters reported, including many books about how to use ChatGPT, written by ChatGPT.

“It does appear to be hitting higher-profile ‘always open’ markets much harder than those with limited submission windows or lower pay rates,” Clarke said on his blog. “This isn’t terribly surprising since the websites and channels that promote ‘write for money’ schemes tend to focus more attention on ‘always open’ markets with higher per-word rates.”

The flood of spam is “largely driven in by ‘side hustle’ experts making claims of easy money with ChatGPT. They are driving this and deserve some of the disdain shown to the AI developers,” the account Tweeted.

“We would like to reopen sometime in the next month and are working under the assumption that we will have to close submissions again. It’s going to be a period of trial and error until we come up with something workable that doesn’t eliminate groups of legitimate writers from participating,” Clarke told Motherboard.

As chatbots become more advanced, it has become more difficult to identify with certainty whether something is AI-generated or human-written. Teachers, for example, are very worried about students using the chatbot to cheat on assignments and have begun to explicitly ban the chatbot from being used. There are some ChatGPT detectors that have cropped up, such as GPTZero and parent company OpenAI’s own AI classifier. However, even OpenAI said that its classifier is not fully reliable.

“We don’t have a solution for the problem. We have some ideas for minimizing it, but the problem isn’t going away. Detectors are unreliable. Pay-to-submit sacrifices too many legit authors. Print submissions are not viable for us,” the magazine stated on Twitter.

To Clarke, there is no hard and fast solution for this problem, and many proposed solutions hurt potential writers, especially emerging writers in low-income countries and those who rely on free, open submissions to get their work read. Solutions like providing fewer editor contacts and creating geo-blocking regions with high ChatGPT submissions would further limit accessibility for the sake of privacy and security.

“It’s clear that business as usual won’t be sustainable and I worry that this path will lead to an increased number of barriers for new and international authors. Short fiction needs these people,” Clarke wrote. “If the field can’t find a way to address this situation, things will begin to break. Response times will get worse and I don’t even want to think about what will happen to my colleagues that offer feedback on submissions. No, it’s not the death of short fiction (please just stop that nonsense), but it is going to complicate things.”

Update: This article was updated with comment from Neil Clarke.

The post Legendary Sci-Fi Magazine Halts Submissions Amid Deluge of AI-Written Stories appeared first on VICE.

I always fix a half cup of rice until the bag is half full. Then I switch to a quarter cup. That’s how I was raised; it feels like starving time. So the number looked unreal when I wrote a check for the first and last month’s rent and deposit. It was there in my savings account for a while, but I thought of the sum like a stray cat I sometimes fed. It was never really mine. The money was its own boss that rubbed against my hands just to tease, set to run into the night. I wrote those zeros with the last of the ink in a Bic with no cap and my dentist’s name on the side. It startled me, that this was what I had agreed to pay, but it was decided, and besides, the bag of rice to this is: I’ll never have to write a check that size again.

My apartment was the first thing I had that was actually mine. I guess that doesn’t make sense since I rent, but the solitude it provided me was all mine. The kitchen supplies and furniture came from my grandmother’s basement. Abby gave me an air mattress to use while I saved up for a real bed. Even my bike had been my brother’s. The night after I moved in, it snowed. The plows wouldn’t come for another hour and all traffic outside stopped. I stood at my window and listened to the silence of the city and clutched my hot chocolate in a big mug. It was the most peaceful I’d felt in my whole life.

I carried this sense of fulfillment with me to work and it lasted me three months. I knew that when my shift would end, I could go home, and that I had a home to go home to. The other girls at the store had roommates. They thought it was odd how much I paid for no company at all. It was warm in March, and after work, we rode our bikes to Regatta Point and fed the ducks with leftover oats from the store. Our days began at six. I knew the commuter rail schedule without looking at it by the packs of hurried customers that arrived in intervals on the hour. I liked this early crowd the best. They wore the nicest clothes and they had somewhere to be.

Tash studied nursing online. Destiny and Leia went to Quinsig. Abby wasn’t in school and neither was I. The application process always overwhelmed me. But when I got my apartment I knew it was time to try again. It seemed like something I would have to do to keep living in a place like I had.

My laptop did not agree with this plan. Just as I needed it, the screen filled with static. It had something to do with the wiring. I put a clothespin on the bezel like a Reddit thread suggested but it loosened after a week. I pinched the bezel with my middle finger and thumb where the clothespin had been but this made typing impossible. I could have lived without a laptop in other circumstances, but when I looked at the Quinsig website on my phone, I could see that applications were due the following month. I clicked on Craigslist and scrolled through the computers for sale.

The seller lived in an ordinary three-decker, blue and white, in a neighborhood I still don’t know too well. I locked my bike at the gate and looked up at the cloudy sky for a minute before I rang the doorbell. Sometimes I’m nervous before I meet people for the first time. He met me outside and handed me the laptop to test. It felt light and rubbery like a school-kit eraser. I sat on the porch and typed the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs on its clean keys. I typed Gmail in the browser. It connected fine. I noticed the Wi-Fi router had the name “LicketyspLit.” He led me to the side of the house and plugged the charger in a box outlet to show me that it worked.

“Is there a serial number? Or anything else I should know?”

“It’s a seventeen-year-old machine,” the seller said. “No one cares anymore.”

And it didn’t need a clothespin. I handed him three fives.

This exchange was over in minutes, but I remember, when I was typing, that I had the sense that someone else was there with us; that if I looked up, there would be someone on the porch like his father or his wife. I can’t remember the seller’s face now—I don’t think I noticed it—but I do remember that no one else was outside.

Dinner that night was snacks from the Mix: hummus and dried apricots, banana chips and lentil crackers that had smashed in the packaging that the manager said I could take. I set up my laptop to watch TV but when I got to the Netflix page, it looked unusual. There was an image of a white family eating popcorn on a sofa against a blood-red background. It looked, I don’t know, glinty—like the image was too dull and too sharp at the same time. The shadows on their faces were pixelated and crispy like cheap advertisements, while the screen image seemed to beam from underneath an opalescent filmy layer. I tapped the screen gently with my fingertips, half expecting a texture like wet cellophane, but it was dry and normal. Then I clicked on “Member Sign In” and entered my brother’s email. No dice. Each time I tried, I got the message: Not a registered member. Would you like to sign up for an account?

I thought about texting him to see if he canceled or changed his email, but I could log into his account on my phone. I watched my shows on the little screen propped up against the microwave and I forgot all about it.

Most of the morning customers came from the LOFTS down the street. It’s an old mill building, brick with industrial windows. The name is written in copper letters above a steel awning. I’ve never been inside. Abby knew them all because she worked behind the coffee bar and they’d chat with her while waiting for their drinks. I didn’t have regulars like that, with me, their interactions were thirty seconds at a time, if that, but sometimes I’d remember a face when I would ring up someone’s prepackaged salad and bottled water. Some people were hard to miss, like the blonde woman in the leopard-print jacket who stopped in almost every day. There was one guy I used to see about three times a week. He dressed casual and carried a nice laptop bag. I remembered him for his striking face and the name on his debit card that said “Zenobios.” It is a name that sounds like a place I’d like to visit.

“Zenobios,” Google told me on my new old laptop, is a “Greek masculine given name. Feminine form: Zenobia.” The Google logo had the same glinty effect of the Netflix page: sharp and dull, with a pixelated shadow muted by the sheen from the laptop screen. Maybe alarm bells should have gone off then. Maybe I should have worried about things like identity theft. But my computer worked fine, it connected to the internet. I noticed the page for Quinsigamond was completely different than what I had seen on my old, old laptop and my phone. There were photos of people who looked like they were from the 1980s and the typeface was very small. I couldn’t find the application portal. The website had instructions to download the application as a PDF and put the completed package in the mail. I figured there had to be a sensible explanation for the difference, that the underlying problem was something I’d never understand, like a data center malfunction or a server farm delay. I had to be witnessing a rendering error, a loading error, a batch error—something like that. I checked the Wi-Fi and instead of the random capital letters and numbers of the router for my building, I was connected to “LicketyspLit.” Yes, it was mysterious, but computers always are to me. What I knew was that my laptop worked, and what I assumed was if the network and connections were acting funny, well, that was a structural issue and not mine to fix.

Through this confusion, I still felt sometimes like I was being watched. I’d type on my computer for a little while and feel a chill and a sensation of eyes on me. Just eyes. When I’d look up, I’d see my apartment, as empty and perfect as it had always been, but in the microsecond before, I’d truly believed that someone was with me. Not an unkind person. Could have been Abby or Destiny, or my brother—anyone who dropped by without announcing themselves. Who was I to complain about feeling like I was not alone when I was?

I thought this might have been a normal part of adjusting to living alone; like, I had to make up company in my head to get used to occupying a room with no one else there, but when I mentioned this to other people, no one knew what I was talking about.

The laptop seemed to be melting a little. It left tracks on my grandmother’s table like candle wax and if I typed with it on my lap, the residue would stick to my jeans. I was rubbing some of the wax away when I googled “qcc admissions help” and I found a thread on a website with the name Worcester Post Online. Someone with the username “checkplease” said his wife went there nine years ago and it was a good deal. A few people commented that the transfer program was the best in the region. The guy with the wife posted again that if you go, you should make a point to meet with your “career advisor.” The users referred to each other as “woopers,” and while the name sounded like a newspaper, there wasn’t anything on the website but the forum. I read some of the other threads on things like taco places and good ponds for ice-skating. It makes no sense to say this, but I wondered if I’d run into Zenobios there. I wanted a context for him, besides some guy who bought things at the store where I worked. While I was reading the other threads, someone started a new one with the subject “Why don’t people leave.” I clicked on it.

emsnick: It is weird that people from Worcester never leave. Why don’t people move to other places? I count myself as one of them by the way

greatskates: I grew up in Worcester, went to school in Boston, and moved back here and so did all my friends. So maybe there are people who leave but you have decided to discount their experience for some reason.

People stay because it is nice, most of the commenters seemed to agree. No one expressly called the other a loser, but as the thread expanded, the discussion grew heated.

I set up an account under “nebula”—the word just came to me—and posted a question to the QCC thread. I asked if anyone had experience filling out the FAFSA independent of their parents. It was then that I looked at the timestamps on the comments. No one had posted since 2007.

I brushed more of the waxy residue from my laptop off my jeans and reread my own post.

The timestamp for it was “16-Mar-07 08.13.37.000000 PM.” The clock time was right but the year was way off. I didn’t think much of it. It’s a mistake that a computer would make.

I pressed refresh and there were even more replies to the thread “Why don’t people leave.” All were timestamped 2007, but had only posted to the forum just then. The first guy argued with the premise and said it was no different here than anywhere else in the East Coast and parts of the Midwest. And if anything, Worcester is a highly transient city because of its student population. Everyone ignored him. Most people said it was a statewide thing.

emsnick: True. But how come they never move from the town where they grew up? Massachusetts is such a small state.

Salukidad: nowhere has felt more like home to me (i moved around a bit). I dont plan to leave again because all my friends live here.

Aht78: I grew up in the city (born on Pleasant St in the Blizzard of 78) and have family that trace back to the 17th century. I guess I don’t understand the question. Anywhere you live is what you make of it.

Under nebula, I wrote a comment that people who move here don’t accept the culture of the city and then they leave, so it seems like they never lived here at all. I didn’t know why I typed these things, but after I pressed post, I realized I was thinking of the morning customers.

The WPO website didn’t work on my phone. I wasn’t supposed to look at it behind the register anyway. But I’d think about the people and the conversations on it throughout my shifts. They seemed more real to me than the dozens of customers I’d have flashes of interactions with throughout my day. Tash got engaged and that’s all the girls wanted to talk about. I stopped joining them after work. “What’s come over you?” Abby hissed, as she walked to the door for a cigarette break. “If you keep slacking and ringing up shit wrong, they’re going to let you go.”

Salukidad posted that night that Bella, his saluki, had passed. We all wrote notes of condolences. Some people talked about dogs they had that they still miss. I didn’t write that much about my own life but I always read about everyone else. I came to love these people, without really knowing them, and I loved that I could get to know them from my safe new home.

When a new thread appeared: “Wooper Meet-up,” I knew I had to join Salukidad, emsnick, checkplease, greatskates, and all the rest. They scheduled it at a pizza parlor that Thursday. Someone said the restaurant had been around since 1926 but I’d never heard of it. I was there at six on the dot, but by the time I made it, even the pizza was gone. The restaurant is a dispensary now. I entered the WPO website on my phone and for the thousandth time I saw a page of spam advertisements and Japanese characters where the forum should have been.

I spent the evening on my bike riding past the Canal District and over the hills in a ring around the city. Some of the laptop residue had made its way to my handlebars and I tried to rub it off while I was riding. When I got home I read all the WPO posts about what a good time everyone had. All those places I saw on my ride don’t exist on their timeline. The LOFTS don’t exist, the Mix doesn’t exist. If I said “Canal District” on WPO, no one would have known what I was talking about.

This could have been where I lost it, but I never doubted that the problem was my own lack of technical skills. It also didn’t strike me as much of a problem. The content I was reading was entertaining to me. I couldn’t afford another laptop, but I could fill out the QCC application at the library. I could feed the stray cat in my savings account for a while and finally sleep on a real bed soon enough. And I’d go to college, finally. That’s what I was thinking about when I noticed the name “Zenobios” on the debit card in front of me.

I looked up at the person, whose face was as strange and familiar as it ever was; it had been a couple weeks since he had stopped in the Mix. I had wondered if he got a new job or moved away. It was later than I’d normally see him, but enough time to catch the 10:50 a.m. commuter rail.

“Zenobios,” I blurted out, as I handed him the receipt. He looked up at me and I relaxed with this tacit sign of affirmation that yes, it was his name; yes, I pronounced it correctly. “Are you in IT? Like, informations?”

He nodded. I told him what I suspected, that I had bought some kind of mock-up demo laptop that was stuck chronologically. I did not tell him that I was communicating with people who lived in 2007, but I did say the word “broken” again and again. If he didn’t believe me, he didn’t show it.

“I do not understand,” he said, with a hint of an accent I couldn’t place. “Tell you what,” he said, writing his phone number on the back of the receipt I’d just handed him. “We’ll find a time. You’ll show me this laptop.”

It snowed that night in the last storm of the season. For dinner, I had a quarter cup of rice and curry from the store. The pot was soaking in the sink. I left my new old laptop on the kitchen table. There was a buildup of wax, by this point, in layers of drips. I would have had to scrape the table clean. Instead I prepared to go to bed.

Out the window was a blinking beam in the night sky that looked like an unstable aircraft. The light grew nearer and it enveloped my whole apartment. It shot out like dark purple light, the color of night, still I felt blinded by its brightness. I looked at the snow outside my window. Instead of white puffs, the streets were violet underneath the powerful rays. It felt like I had been visited by a star. I felt small and physical compared to this majestic atmosphere.

The purple light turned to a sparkling cloud, all was glinty, and then it evaporated. The pot was still in my sink, but the kitchen table was bare—no wax, perfectly clean. The laptop was gone; back in the night and out of my hands. It had been theirs all along.

The post WPO appeared first on VICE.

One day the human inhabitants of earth woke up to find that their headphones no longer worked. No one knows exactly when it started because some people worked nights and slept in the afternoons, some woke up early and some late. But as the world revolved longitude by longitude, the global nature of the problem revealed itself. 

The first to go used Bluetooth. The initial response was a joke: It’s a sign from above that persons who walk around wearing white plastic earrings deserve punishment. Soon, though, people in the dwindling supply of rationalists tied the failures to an update to the Apple iOS, which had been downloaded overnight in the various time zones. 

Raged postings, tweets, texts, emails burned across the digital landscape. When users tried to contact Apple support, they received a recorded message that said, in essence, that due to heavy call volume, it was unlikely that anyone would answer within the caller’s lifetime. Those who had called at once, when representatives were still available, reported that the support staff also used Bluetooth headphones, now useless, and what they heard was a cacophony of people yelling into speaker phones, so that no one understood what anyone else was saying.

The most rational of all pointed out that Bluetooth headphones failed everywhere: on iPhones, Androids, and outliers like the senior-citizen devices on Consumer Cellular, not to mention those paired with TVs. So it was no use blaming Apple. But then, who? or what? Had someone globally hacked the Bluetooth algorithms? Not possible because Bluetooth speakers still worked. Geeks everywhere tore out their green-tinted hair and long gray ponytails trying to come to terms with this absurdity. 

Those who had resisted the onslaught of Bluetooth felt smug: their headphones that plugged into jacks still worked. Others raced to join them. This produced a run on those older style devices, which were sold out everywhere, as were the Apple dongles that allowed simultaneous power and headphone connections. Those who could not buy a fallback solution were out of luck. But no matter. Within two days those jacked-in headphones also fell silent.

The populace was stunned. Suddenly they were aware of sounds their earbuds, earrings, and ear-surrounds had protected them from: car engines, emergency sirens, truck airbrakes, the rustles and shuffles that indicated the existence of other people. The awareness became torture. Cell-yell was omnipresent. Speaker phones squawked at every turn. Music blared as in the days of the boom boxes. It was as if the very concept of private listening had been snatched from the world. 

Yet humans are adaptable, and soon, over the course of a month, callers on the streets retreated into doorways to speak softly. People who lived together came to some agreement on the contents of the soundscape. A general acceptance arose: One can survive decently well without a headphone.

Just when everyone had calmed down, there came the next wave of failures: Laptop screens went dark. All of them, on Macs and PCs of every brand. It made no sense, it was absurd, it could not be happening, yet happening it was. We made entries: beeps, chimes, longer beeps, but, without seeing the screen, we had no idea what was going on. 

But, ah, perhaps we could see through the eyes of the sightless: software for the blind. It spoke aloud, describing the screen. Yes, that would work, but the average sighted user had no experience with ease-of-access tools and could not visualize where they were on a web site. Blind people were suddenly in hot demand. Organizations bid up their bounty offers, six-figures, seven, eight  if the experienced users would contract with them. The blind, still happily emailing and browsing and texting on their own, gloated, laughed among themselves, joined forces, and refused. 

As with the headphone failures, sighted people, the majority of users, turned back in computing time seeking the only screens that still worked, CRTs, desktop behemoths, few of which were still extant, and not for sale anywhere. But again, no matter. Those stopped working too. This cascading disaster happened even more quickly than the death of headphones. It took but three days.

We were dumbfounded, afraid. Was it gremlins? aliens? Hate groups got out their Crayola sets and blamed it on swarthy tan Jews, yellow Asians, red Native Americans, Black people, Brown people, anyone who did not look like themselves, which is to say, Pink people. (They cursed Crayola for discontinuing what they considered their perfect tint, “Flesh.”)

We trembled to think of pending disasters. Please God, we whispered, if you exist, we beseech you to protect the Internet. Then, to the world’s amazement, it stayed up.  

Those who understood the system explained that it was not the work of supernatural beings but the genius of the design, which let the Internet operate semi-independently. Bits travelled from node to node under the direction of software and protocols, not human beings. Yes the mesh of machines needed adjusting, tuning, bug-fixing from time to time; yes it would be nice if we could see what was happening internally; but, overall, short of a dire emergency, it was best if humans stayed out of it entirely. Intervention by people left the door open for subversive control. The fact that the system still ran proved a basic tenet:  When the Internet sees trouble, it routes around it.

And, halleluiah, phones still worked! In the whole inexplicable roiling world of crashing machines, we still had the most essential elements of our digital being. Phone. Internet. Months of calm followed. We emailed and texted and minded our Facebook pages. We shopped shopped shopped. We felt almost normal. 

Then, to the wails, sorrows, cries of despair from earth’s humans (add depression, anxiety, rage, fury, and so forth), the Internet fell to its knees. No messages, no emails. Web sites disappeared without so much as a 404 Not Found.  

Among the last tweets that reached us was a message from the experts who had reassured us that the Internet did not need us, begging our forgiveness. Some systems had a degree of independence, it was true, but that state could not last for long, they admitted.  All of computing technology — from manufacturing to logistics to power generation to sales to agriculture to the rolling computers still called cars — wears down as anomalies arise. Machine-learning algorithms learn the wrong lessons. “If” clauses in all code move to ever more remote “then”s and “else”s, walking paths never before trodden, routes that lead to formerly hidden, paralyzing bugs. For our systems to survive, humans and machines had to communicate. Without those conversations, the digital universe seemed to die of loneliness.

Farming and ranching faced particular stresses as the machinery broke down over time. Fishing declined as boat motors failed. Reduced to home gardens, hand cow-milking, and herding on horseback, we stared down a future of looming famines, starvation, not only for people but also for the domesticated creatures we relied on for food, and those who helped us find it. Only gun owners felt secure as they scoured the woods and fields for game, but soon the land was denuded of edible creatures. Then, while out on more and more desperate, competitive hunts, they turned their long guns on one another.

The very last tweet released on earth revealed what any half-conscious person should have known from the outset. The common denominator among the various dysfunctions was this: The device worked when you went to bed; it did not work when you woke up. Which meant the failure infected your digital life while you slept. 

Alarm! Awake! Without the Internet, all we had left of our phones was the content we had downloaded. Movies, books, videos — those thousands of precious photos — save them!

So began another mass attack of panic buying. Coffee, No-Doze, black tea, pseudoephedrine, Adderall, Concerta, Ritalin, cocaine, amphetamines,  methamphetamines, reds, speedballs — any upper to stay awake — all scraped from the stocks of pharmacies, groceries, doctors’ offices, hospital store rooms. Accomplished sellers of illegal drugs made a fortune. Yet no one can function without sleep indefinitely. En masse, we went insane. We became like our machines, cut off from external inputs, now trapped in the horrors of delusions. 

Small groups scattered across the globe decided to sleep, let their phones die, and regain sanity. Independently, they came to a theory: What if we broke the bonds of private ownership and socialized the machines? Imagine if the Internet had become a public utility and not a tool of corporate monopolies. Yes, some new digital order could arise if we understood that it was the humans, not the machines, that had to change. The groups hand-cranked flyers to spread the word. Alas, announcing the thought was exactly their mistake. Deranged militias declared them to be lefty commie pinko traitors. They hunted down the pamphleteers, raided their homes, smashed the presses, made sure that humans could never again promote the great evil of socialism.

The most venal of the earth’s richest human beings hired what were essentially slaves, who were forced to stay awake for a pittance so they could baby-sit the sclerotic phones while their owners slept. Ah, but the enslavers failed to save their phones with this maneuver. The devices were part of us.  We were entwined with our digital companions like lovers. No one else could watch over your beloved. No enslaved person could save it. For once, those who had enslaved others lost all. 

Failures continued apace. Electric grids blinked on and off. We survived the cold by burning the plenteous supply of discarded plastic and steadily poisoned ourselves. Paper money, what little was left of it, tattered and dirty, was useless. There was nothing to buy. 

Strangely, it was the loss of our adored phones that most tortured us. Migrants could not tell one another the safest path to their desired lands. Day workers on street corners could not warn others about the pick-up drivers who took them off for hard labor and never paid. We missed multiplayer Candy Crush.

Yet the universal human loss, no matter what our lives had been, was about memory. What was so “precious” about all that content? Yes, we longed to see images of our loved ones, those who had died, those still alive in some place now unreachable. And pictures of the rare sparkling days when we had been deeply happy. But those were like eddies drowned in a raging river of birthday cakes, designer sneakers, beloved tchotchkes, drunken young people downing shots, great deals from Etsy, sofas found on sidewalks, preferred toasters, electronic toilets, naked women with hair-denuded privates that made them look like children, weddings of now divorced and feuding friends, babies babies babies, cats cats cats, dogs dogs dogs, YouTube and TikTok videos on how to dance, dress, vamp, apply make-up, clean your gutters. Why did we save those episodes of crime dramas when we already knew the ending? Those movies that could not survive a second watching, books that were mostly trash? A few had saved masterpieces of literature and cinema, but, after continually revisiting them, boredom set in. What had possessed us? We’d hardly had time to look at what we were accumulating while we frantically added more, a world-wide collection of human digital detritus growing into a landfill of rotting infinity. We tried to recall what in all that pile had been of value, but the memories dissolved into the acid reality of the present. 

What fails next? we wondered. What devolution awaits us? Do we lose even paper and ink in the great demise of manufacture? Lose the gift of language? Slide ever backwards into whatever primordial soup from which we emerged? Soon we were all too exhausted to be afraid. We asked ourselves, What was the point of all that technology? What good are humans anyway? Did the cosmos really need us?  

In the end we came to believe that the experiment of life on earth, like our machines, would fail. And then we thought, So what.

The post Devolution appeared first on VICE.

*

The first thing I noticed was the smell. It was not one particular smell, but a barrage of smells, each carrying its own associations. For a moment, I thought I picked up a scent I recognized, but then it was quickly replaced by another in the air before my mind could decide what the last one meant. That crosscurrent drew me across the threshold and into the exhibition room, at which point my eyes tracked upward to take in the moths overhead.

Their glorious wings were different shades of an intense, saturated green. Like sunlight filtering through leaves. Their antennae swooped downward from their bodies in feathered arcs, curling delicately at the tips. Their undersides looked soft, an alien texture I had the strong desire to try to graze with my fingertips. I kept my hands by my sides and sidled along the wall of the room, trying to take all ten of them in.

I’d had a few days of training in a different building before I saw the moths in person, so technically speaking, I knew what to expect. I knew about their strange smells and massive wingspan – nearly as wide as my own with arms outstretched. But who ever really knows what to expect?

I trailed one moth around the room, noticing that its wings were lightly textured with a webbed pattern that reminded me of algae. It spun in circles, then tensed, flexed, and darted toward an imaginary target, like it was testing the air, or rehearsing for something. I caught a whiff of earth or mud, then was suddenly distracted by what seemed like the smell of cardamom –

My supervisor clapped her hands to get my attention. She waved from the entrance. I hadn’t realized she was still there. I gave her a thumbs up, and she nodded and left. It was seven in the morning. I had one hour to get acquainted before my first shift at the Archive began.

*

Many days passed – weeks, really – until I felt like I had a command of the room, until I knew my place in it. At first I was shy around the moths, uncertain how to approach and touch them; they seemed so delicate and foreign. I thought of something a friend of mine, a physical therapist, had told me: that the most important part of treatment is the first moment you lay your hands on a patient. That first touch has to convey both gentleness and authority.

Once I got the hang of grasping and manipulating their parts and began to feel confident repairing them throughout the day, I went through a period of frustration. The moths were finicky, prone to malfunctioning, always demanding my attention. I wasn’t used to being needed like that. Nobody else depended on me. All the other bots in my life were perfectly self-sufficient. On my way to work in the morning I’d pass hundreds of them busying themselves –surveillance sparrows watching me, nano-bots taking my temperature, swiffers dusting my shoes – and hardly notice them at all. If one broke, another bot would come fetch or repair it.

I thought of the giant green moths as the primordial ancestors of those autonomous bots in the wild, which were made to blend into the background. Watching the moths circle ostentatiously in their room, I found it hard to believe they had once roamed free as well. Now they were here, contained, archived, protected from the outside world. And we from them.

It didn’t take long for me to start thinking of them as my moths, although they belonged to the Archive. I was just their custodian. Still, I was in charge of them during visiting hours. I tended to them by myself while the exhibit was open, from eight to five. I knew them best. And the more I got to know them, the more I liked them. The more I liked being needed by them.

The wall label described them as first-generation dirigible biobots invented for epidemiological purposes. They were, it said, grown from an assortment of cells originating in a species of silkworm moth, who could smell the pheromones of a mate nearly 11,000 meters away.

They did resemble insects, but as if refracted through a strange prism — they were headless, limbless, and their antennae curved downward from the body rather than upward. They were engineered to sense the world in one specific way.

The wall label also explained that my moths had been designed to run on an evolutionary algorithm. That meant that they had been given the capacity to learn as they moved through the world. Their original job had been to fly above cities and smell people, and to learn more about the way people smelled as they moved. I read that they could pick up a hint of illness up to 3,000 meters from a source, not as far a distance as their progenitors, but far enough. When they found a sick person, they sent a GPS coordinate to a server somewhere. They had been the darlings of aspiring biotech engineers and the health ministry, who had been trying for decades to invent a bot that could identify points of contagion in cities. I read that word in a news report: darling.

*

Until I started working at the Archive, I’d never really seen inside a bot. The new brands were opaque, their workings a mystery. Back in the days of the biobots, a lot of people knew how they worked, how they changed over time. But now you aren’t supposed to tinker with bots, and they aren’t supposed to change beyond downloading a software update. Too many accidents.

My moths’ soft underbellies were kept in place by a bioplastic film that could be easily opened so that someone – me – could inspect their insides and make necessary adjustments. My job was to keep an eye on them and make sure they were running smoothly throughout the day, and when one wasn’t, to carefully capture it and inspect its innards: a jumble of warm, pulsing organic material and cold electrical wires. At night I took them down, one by one, and put them to sleep.

The tips of the antennae contained stem cells from the soft palates of a now-extinct species of Asian elephant. Those elephants were the only other animal able to pick up scents at such great distances. I liked to carefully run my fingers over the antennae and breathe in each of the moths’ unique scents, imagining other creatures, other continents.

There were dozens of exhibitions at the Archive, but mine was one of the most popular. It was always full. Especially with kids. Kids loved the moths. They reached their little hands into the air to try to tickle a belly or grasp an antenna. Tossed gum or pencils at a low-hanging target; crouched and leapt and giggled. I was constantly surveying the 30-meter breadth of the white-walled room to make sure no heads or hands were bobbing above my own height.

I was surprised by the children’s fascination, given how familiar the new generation is with bots of all kinds. But these old biobot models mesmerized them. Perhaps it was their unusual animality, their grace. Or perhaps it was that their behavior had a transparency to it, a curiosity. They too were exploring, childlike.

I quickly got to know my moths’ individual personalities. The vivid lime-green one with dappled wings who loved to soar high, skimming the ceiling. The smallest one, pale chartreuse, always spinning in circles. The one with brown spots on the undersides of its wings that appeared disconcertingly like eyes. Some were more social, predisposed to move together and travel in flocks; others were independent, preferring to dart or dance alone. But they were all clearly part of a group body. How quickly their seemingly random movements could switch to synced-up military precision. One moment natural, casual, improvisational — then suddenly locked into an ancient choreography.

The only exhibition more popular than mine was the tiger den. A holographic animation of an extinct species of cat stalked the edges of the dark space, roaring convincingly and leaping at people who stumbled over their feet trying to dodge its imaginary claws. I never understood the allure of the tiger room. The tiger was long gone. My moths were still very much alive.

*

At the Archive, I operated on moth time. Slower than human time in some ways, faster in others. Sometimes I thought of myself in machine terms. When my stomach and brain signaled to each other that it was lunchtime, I imagined an electrical current crystalizing into the command line sustenance, and took myself for a refill.

Some days I ate at the canteen with a friend who worked at the security desk. I joked with him that spending so much time at the Archive was causing me to revert to my lizard brain, act on instinct, become a simpler machine. Obviously, he said, with a grin. Zookeepers always start to act like their animals. Dog owners always start to look like their pets.

This was my first custodial gig, but I knew I was good at this kind of work. First requisite experience: some years on a server farm, braiding wires together and resetting electrical panels. Second requisite experience: a year on an agriculture lot. Washing down the pens and spreading feed. What I remember most from my time on the lot were the smells, repulsive when I started and pleasant by the time I left.

I needed a job to live. My moths did not. They only had to exist. They didn’t have to fill in the gaps of daily life—clean up messes, cuddle lonely people—like normal bots did. They didn’t even have to perform the function that they were invented for, to detect smells in the air; their primary sensory apparatus had been disabled long ago. If they were worth money – and my supervisor had emphasized that they were – it was for their historic value as a bygone species, and their beauty.

This is another reason I enjoyed their company. They lived for themselves alone. They made me feel that to be an organism is enough. To be a body surrounded by other bodies – more than enough.

*

When I was hired, my supervisor told me sternly to resist anthropomorphizing the moths, that is, imagining that they had feelings. But I will say that they seemed the most dynamic in a room full of people. They couldn’t smell people anymore, but I was sure they liked having people around. When the space was packed, I saw a clear correspondence between the movements of biobots and humans. I marveled at that mysterious morphing and congealing and scattering of beings, the patterns that emerge from an interspecies crowd. But maybe my supervisor was right, maybe I was just seeing what I wanted to see.  

At certain times of day, when the space was full and everyone was shifting and bobbing in rhythm, I sank into a peculiar state of mind. I came to think of that feeling as the Fog. It was like being shrouded in a mist that clouded all the senses; I’d have the distinct experience of shrinking, and then of becoming part of something I’d thought I was external to. It was a feeling of being mixed up, then dissolved. I forgot myself.

But then a moth would glitch or stammer or start to drop in altitude, and I’d have to run out, dodging elbows and shoulders and catch it, with my hands or a long net I always kept within reach, and bring it to the little alcove at the back of the room and handle it. I would flip the moth over to release the catch of its undercarriage — tricky if the wings were still flapping, but as soon as it was open, it would immediately stop in motion, briefly arrested so I could perform my work.

Those were intimate moments. First, I always checked to make sure the electrodes made proper contact with the spongy cells nestled within their organic-artificial exoskeletons. Next, I prodded gently at the soft helium pouch nestled at their center that made sure they could stay afloat should their wings completely fail them. If I felt the slightest laxity in the membrane, I refilled the pouch from a little helium tank.

The moth with spots like eyes on its wings had the most problems. Something was always going on with its antennae; dust got lodged in the feathers or they drooped too far down. It struggled to maintain buoyancy. I learned to keep it in my line of sight, and eventually I started to feel like it was staring back at me with those big brown irises. We regarded each other often.

The moth with eyes happened to have the most enticing scent of all. It was a warm smell, maybe something like a log fire, with a hint of spice, like cloves. I sought signs of emotion in this one especially, despite knowing rationally that it was not an animal, that it computed and sensed but did not strictly think or feel. There wasn’t even a real uncanny valley in effect – it didn’t look like a kitten or speak my language. But still. People see faces in clouds and hear words in transmission static. People find people in everything.

*

In my neutral clothes, I receded into the Fog most of the time, but sometimes visitors asked me questions. The most common question was the obvious one: why had these creatures been retired? They were so lovely, and they must have been so useful! Didn’t we need them now more than ever?

“Just sniff,” I’d explain in response. “Smell that?”

Nobody knows how or why it happened, why the moths began to emit their own powerful and otherworldly smells. They were built in order to sense us, but somewhere along the line they evolved to manufacture their own smells, too. This was a truly unexpected emergence, a cellular miracle. In my mind it was a feature, not a bug, but the scientists of the time saw it differently. The health ministry quickly took them out of commission. My moths had been the first generation of their kind, and they were also the last. Bots today do as they’re told. 

“But I like that smell,” one teenager insisted, frowning. “Or I don’t mind it, I guess.” I nodded. I understood his ambivalence. That was the problem.

“A lot of people didn’t like the smells,” I told him. In fact, some people couldn’t stand them. Some people went crazy.

The scent of one moth did make me anxious. It was a mottled, grayish green and its smell had a metallic tang that left a bloody taste at the back of my mouth. I never felt the urge to attack or to harm it, but my visceral reaction helped me understand why people might have been driven to extremes. And of course there’s the fact that people don’t like being watched by creatures they can sense — they like their surveillance invisible, forgettable.

More than once I brought that anxiety-provoking moth down for repair to try to find out where its infuriating odor was emanating from, but of course I had no more luck than any of the disappointed researchers who couldn’t identify the specific region that had emerged of its own accord. That is: the part of the moth that wanted its purpose to extend beyond recognizing and analyzing us, the part that desired us to recognize it too.

By my third or fourth month on the job, I was sure my sense of smell had heightened. After a busy hour I might catch a whiff of sweat drying on my chest, and only then register my exhaustion. Or I might sniff a hint of perfume or hairspray and quickly pinpoint the person who had imported the chemicals. I smelled with a new articulateness. I smelled faster.

*

Kids can sense vulnerability. They bear down on a weak link.

One morning I caught a little girl yanking down the moth with eyes by its weaker antenna. She was maybe seven or nine, and short – I don’t know how she reached it. She must have been there on a school trip, since there were no parents around, just a swarm of other kids egging her on. The moth lifted and drooped as she pulled it all the way down. It looked to be gasping.

I walked briskly toward the scene and wrapped one hand firmly around the girl’s arm, startled by the strength of her grip. She was hugging the moth by then, her arms around its body and her face against a fluttering wing, as if she were clinging to a parent’s leg.

I grasped one wing with my other hand and noticed that its surface felt more familiar to my touch than the girl’s soft flesh. She refused to let go — instead she turned her lips to the moth and nuzzled its belly with startling tenderness.

I pried her away as carefully as possible and scanned the room. That’s when I saw him, a man with graying hair and a blue backpack, watching me like a hawk. I recognized a certain sour smell about him and pegged him as a repeat visitor. He shook his head slowly at me, but I realized his eyes were fixated on the moth in my arms, not on me. He was glowering at it with something like bitterness, or fear.

He approached me slowly and I realized that his pungent sourness was the smell of infection. I thought he was going to say something about what the little girl had done, or what I had done to her. But instead he asked me, eyes cast down at the moth in my arms, whether these things could still identify people. “That one’s been following me,” he whispered, pointing toward me, toward the moth with eyes.

I assured him that the biobots were no longer active. “They don’t track people anymore,” I explained, “and they don’t send GPS coordinates. The part of them that could make decisions has been disabled.” I repeated, firmly, that he had no reason to worry. What I didn’t tell him was that my own sense of smell was active enough to know why he was nervous. 

I didn’t mention the incident to anyone and hoped no one would check the security cameras. I tended to the damaged antenna myself. As I repaired it, I regretted that my moth was no longer evolving, no longer learning how to exist in the world or sense human behavior. It really did need me.

*

Smell does things to you. It bypasses the logic centers, yanks up deep memories. As I walked around the Archive room, one moment I’d be a teenager kissing in a pine forest; another moment I’d be on a dock, hands covered in the foul but enticing smear of fish guts. Another moment I wouldn’t know where I was, but my heart would clench in feverish joy.

The moths rubbed off on my hands and clothes. Each evening I came home smelling like my whole life. Smelling like whole centuries. I came home having time traveled. Although I couldn’t be sure that other people picked up on it, I became self-conscious about the way I smelled. I worried about bothering people, and also, I admit, some part of me wanted to keep the smells to myself. I started to avoid crowds. I saw my friends less. When my family came for a visit I planned our dinners outside, hoping the wind would scatter the molecules clinging to my body.

The moths acted no differently during our days together, but my time with them became more thrilling as I became more attuned to them. I could easily identify each one by smell. There was the floral tint of the small, pale moth, the grassy freshness of the ostentatious bright green one. I could sometimes sense a disturbance in the swarm before it happened.

One day a talcum-scented woman in her seventies approached me, and excitedly announced that she had seen these bots before. I figured she meant she’d been to the Archive, but no, she cut me off – “When I was a kid,” she said. “I couldn’t forget them,” she said, “the way they bob around! And that sweet smell….”

Another day a man whose clothes were washed with supposedly unscented detergent asked me why the bots needed a human custodian. “Can’t other bots take care of them?”

In a way, he was right. New bots could do the mechanical work; new bots could speak to visitors; new bots could sense smell. In my interview, my supervisor had simply told me that I was needed in order for the exhibition to be “authentic.” Because that’s how life was, back when the talcum woman was young: people and biobots, all part of the same world, in reciprocal communication. I was as much a part of the display as the moths were.

*

In my kitchen, after work, I started to experiment. I cooked. I made extravagant dishes laced with thin threads of brilliant red saffron, tiny cumin seeds, fresh marjoram leaves, budding thyme flowers still attached to the stem. White peppercorns, tingly Szechuan peppercorns, bright emerald peppercorns, spicy pink peppercorns. A kind of cardamom-laced ginger called Grains of Paradise that I found in the back of a shop. I followed recipes for a time, but then I started to follow my nose. I grazed the aisles of stores far from my neighborhood, bent at the waist, taking in the notes and letting inspiration wash over me.

Chemicals bothered me, gave me migraines – the train became unbearable, with the awful Fog of ammoniac perfumes – but the world of plants! Fruit was ecstatic: I filled first the kitchen and eventually the whole flat with bowls and colanders and cups of citrus. Even at the fruit’s first stages of decomposition I loved the tinge of rot, the beginning stages of matter returning to its source materials.

In this way I came to understand how sterile the city was, and how much the moths had given me. I came to view the appliances that lifted my blinds and maintained the temperature in my flat with melancholy, even pity. They did not feel or smell or taste the world, and I couldn’t feel or smell or taste them. They were as silent and innocuous as they had been designed to be, and there was no transit between us.

*

I blame the rain for my lapse. It was a torrential, monsoon-like day. The crowds were thinner than a typical afternoon, and everyone who made it inside was bedraggled and dripping. Humidity saturated the air, and the smell of warm rain rising off jackets and skin overpowered me. I was standing in the alcove facing away from the entrance, trying to block out the extra information.

Still. I should have caught it. The same blue backpack. The same sour stench of infection. Nauseating! But by the time his scent had spiraled toward me through the Fog and I turned around, it was too late. His head was cocked back and mouth slack; he was staring up at a school of moths flapping in heavenly synchrony, but he was fixated on the one with eyes, which was bobbing lower than it should have. Suddenly: he clawed the air and snatched it — grabbing one antenna and then the other, then heaving the whole body down with him to the ground.

Adrenaline, air whipping toward me. I was on him in a flash, flattening him, my knee on his chest. My heart was thudding in my ears. I felt the warmth of his body, his chest heaving. I was inundated by the smell of danger, his awful contagion surrounding us. Then I saw it: the moth was completely crushed beneath him.

A custodian is a guardian and a janitor. A custodian has responsibility without much authority. Regarding the incident, my supervisor explained that I had overreached, taken charge of a situation I was not equipped to handle. On the other hand, she said with sympathy, I had always taken good care of the biobots, and she knew I had the best intentions when it came to safeguarding the Archive’s precious artifacts. When I protested that the man was certainly a vector of disease, she only shook her head and quietly reminded me that now we have other bots for that. They’d certainly find him if he were really a threat.

*

A few months later, after finding a new job, I returned to the Archive as a visitor. In the moth room I found a thick pane of plexiglass stretching from floor to ceiling, bisecting the space in two and sealing the creatures off from the people. The moth with eyes was nowhere to be seen. I smelled nothing. I let my eyes follow the familiar, still glorious shapes of the other nine, but I was sure they moved differently now. Occasionally a wing batted the glass, or two moths bumped into each other. They traced the same paths again and again. They were being played on repeat, like the tiger. Perhaps the moths didn’t care, but I did.

Afterward, feeling adrift, I decided to visit the city aquarium. I hadn’t been there since I was very young. Aquariums have always made me slightly nervous. As a kid, I remember feeling unable to trust the glass to keep all those tons of water from bursting out and taking over. I also remember the frustration of separation – I wished I could jump in the water and see the fish from the other side of the glass. An aquarium gives you a window but in doing so reminds you how separate you are.

I looked at the map and found the stingray tank. I peered at the winged animals for a long time. But they were entirely unfamiliar, with their bulbous eyes and smiling mouths, their smooth movements, their easy sociability. After so much time spent with my half-animal moths, these natural animals seemed like aliens.

I happened to pass by a freshwater tank while a custodian bot was feeding the fish inside. They were zebrafish: small, unassuming, striped minnows darting around in perfect concert. The custodian extended a jointed metal arm and dropped a piece of meat into the water. I watched as the fish gathered and bolted toward it en masse. The whole swarm began delicately nibbling at the meat.

I asked the custodian what had attracted the fish to their food. In a woman’s voice, it replied: “Zebrafish are irresistibly attracted to a chemical compound called cadaverine. This compound is repulsive to humans but it smells delicious to the fish.”

“Fish can smell?” I asked.

“Why, yes,” the custodian told me. “Zebrafish have an especially heightened sensory apparatus. They can pick up a trace of their favorite food from hundreds of meters away.”

I don’t mind the loss of my moths so much anymore. I have a new job at a quiet, rather sterile server farm, but even there I find novel, unexpected smells, all the more rewarding for their subtlety. And I spend many mornings and evenings entranced by the small aquarium I now keep between my bed and the window. I press my nose to the glass and watch my bright green fish, imagining what they are learning and what the water smells like to them. I sprinkle the odorous brown pellets of food onto the surface of the water and watch them sift slowly down, as the fish race toward them. I sink into the water alongside the fish. I sink into a Fog that has condensed so fully it is now liquid. 

*

This story was also published offline in the catalog for Anicka Yi’s exhibition In Love with the World at the Tate Modern in 2020.

The post The Fog appeared first on VICE.

The first time I read this scene I gasped out loud, then read it again, and laughed out loud. It’s typical Waters: grotesque, shocking, disturbed. He takes you to an uncomfortable place and then pushes you even further in that direction. It’s the same filthy, chaotic sense of humour that oozes from all of his films: The sideshow freaks that rob audience members in Multiple Maniacs (1970), Divine eating real dog shit in Pink Flamingos (1972), Beverly Sutphin going on a murderous rampage in Serial Mom (1994) and then cooking dinner for her kids at home. 

Waters, now 76, hasn’t released a film since A Dirty Shame in 2004, although he’s come out with multiple books. Liarmouth is his first piece of written fiction. It follows Marsha Sprinkle, an evil sociopath who lives to scam, lie and steal. Despite her abhorrence, you find yourself siding with her. When she thieves from unsuspecting victims, you pray she doesn’t get caught. When she lies for the fun of it, you enjoy the havoc that follows. Marsha’s bad, but it feels good to be bad with her. 

Read Next

What Does Being ‘Too Much’ Really Mean?

Waters’ characters might be unsavoury, but the writer himself possesses an easy charm. Over the phone, he speaks in a quick and melodic drawl, frequently answering questions before you’ve had a chance to finish them and scattering the conversation with anecdotes. Unlike plenty of other cult directors and writers, Waters seems to enjoy speaking with the press. He enjoys speaking, in general. He’s been on countless book tours and, on the 10th of June, will be performing not one but two spoken word monologues at The Barbican.

Here’s everything we spoke about over the phone.

VICE: Hey, John. How’s your afternoon?
John Waters: Well, I just came back from eight cities in ten days. I’m looking forward to coming to London. I was there not so long ago, on vacation, with some friends. 

I’m looking forward to your London leg. Do you think the British sense of humour differs from the American?
I think the British can laugh at themselves, and then they laugh at each other. I think the British sense of humour is similar to my sense of humour. But the regular sense of American humour is becoming more like mine. 

Humour has got darker because the times have had so much tragedy. If you can laugh, that’s the first possible way to fix things and get other people to listen. You have to laugh at yourself first. That’s what some of the “trigger warning” crowd doesn’t do. If you lecture people, sometimes that backfires and makes them go in the other direction. 

I just finished your book, it was very funny. Marsha is quite a sociopathic character…
Certainly she is. And she joins many women that I have written about before and who could hang out with her and not feel uncomfortable around her. I think the people who have followed my work forever know that I enjoy writing about characters that would be the villain in anybody else’s book, but I’m asking you to root for her. Even though I think she is appalling and does terrible things. But she has reasons, you find out. Although she may have overreacted…

She reminds me a bit of Beverly Sutphin in Serial Mom.
I think she and Beverly Sutphin could hang out. But Serial Mom very much wanted to be a normal mother except for [the murders]. Marsha doesn’t want to be a normal anything, but she thinks she is normal, basically, and every other person in the world is insane and does not have the right to make eye contact. 

Why do you think people are so drawn to psychopathic, sociopathic and narcissistic characters? “The dark triad”, so to speak?
Hopefully, in my book, it’s because I’m using a character like that for humour. She’s so terrible, but she thinks she’s so right, so you start to root for her because you know that this is a cockeyed world that I’ve created, that you’re in. 

Whenever you read a novel by me, or a movie I did, you know that I’m going to take you to a world that you might not feel comfortable in in real life – but it’s fiction. So you can get inside peoples’ heads and see how crazy people react and that’s something I’m always wanting to do. When I see somebody and I think, ‘Oh god, suppose I had been born in that body. Suppose I was that person. What would it be like every day?’

I sometimes wish I was even just a little bit more evil. 
I don’t because… well, I don’t think I have been evil. I don’t think I regret anything in life apart from smoking cigarettes, that’s the one thing I regret. I think I’ve been kind to people, pretty much. None of my work is that mean-spirited – I just want to understand people. 

Yeah, I don’t think your work has ever been mean-spirited. 
I’m supportive of unsupportive people. 

Read Next

From Heart Medicine to Party Drug: A Brief History of Poppers

I love that Marsha’s a scammer. Have you ever been on the receiving end of a terrible scam?
One I was at LaGuardia Airport – and I did use this in the book, fictitiously. So I was waiting outside looking for a car and my bag was right behind me. And I turned around and someone was picking up my bag and they were half caught stealing it. I was shocked like, “What are you doing?” It took me a second to realise what had happened. They didn’t get away with it. 

If you were going to be a criminal, what type of criminal would you be?
I’d be a hacker, probably. A really crazy hacker. I think some of them are probably cute. 

Right? But maybe because I imagine them looking like the hackers in that film Hackers.
I’d be like, “Let’s go and get Putin’s pornography searches.”

Ha! So this book is called Liarmouth. Have you ever told a lie, just for the fun of it?
Oh sure, I’ll tell a lie – if I’m backstage after a play and I didn’t like it and you know the people. It’s called “green room perjury.” Mostly not to hurt peoples’ feelings. I have never done it like Marsha does it; as an exercise in evilness. Marsha believes it’s a beauty treatment and it gives her power to lie.

I sometimes think that if I wanted to lie, I could do that all the time. And nobody would question it. But it would be exhausting, right? 
Well, I always think that now [I couldn’t lie] because people recognise me. Could I shoplift now and get away with it? It would be really embarrassing to get caught. I doubt I’m going to do that. But when I was a kid I did shoplift and never got caught. These days, they have the little tags in them. You have to learn how to cut them out. That’s a little more complicated. 

True. So in the book you manage to make sex sound quite disgusting and extremely unerotic, for the most part. 
I’ve never had an “eargasm”, so I don’t know about that particular sex act. But Marsha hates sex. I think at the end when she has sex though… I don’t know. I mean, I don’t think people are masturbating reading my book… Or maybe they are. [laughs]

Hopefully not to the cat scene [in which someone makes a cat orgasm using the end of a Q-tip]. 
You know, that scene… It is true. When I lived with David Lochary [the actor] in New York, he had this boyfriend in the early 70s who had this cat. I hated this cat. It was on heat all of the time. And he did that with a Q-tip and it does work. 

That is horrible!
I was happy because I could go to sleep. I looked over and saw it and thought, ‘Oh my god, what are you doing?’ He didn’t have to explain. 

So much of your work dives into the grotesque and the surreal that simmers behind ordinary suburban characters. What is it about those themes that has always interested you?
It’s always amazing when someone who really wants to be normal, or thinks they’re normal, suddenly has some kind of power or some kind of obsession that makes them stand out and makes them different. I exaggerate that. I think to myself, ‘Suppose they could do all these supernatural things. What are the side effects?’

Read Next

The Radical Art of Lip Sync

You always have to pay the piper for any kind of instance of success that you have that challenges and defies nature. It might bring you power, but what are the side effects? Is it sometimes just easier to go back to being normal?

Did you grow up around those kinds of characters? 
I grew up in an upper middle class family – my mother thought she was Queen Elizabeth. She was really a fan of England and they went there for their vacations, to the little villages, and watched birds. So I learned all of that “good taste” from my mum, and spent a career defying it. But I’m glad she taught me all of those rules. 

I feel like the idea of “bad taste” is a contentious subject these days – maybe more so than when you first started making films. I don’t know if you agree with that.
For me, Trump ruined it. After him, there was no good or bad taste, it was just over. But is Liarmouth bad taste? I don’t know if it’s good or bad taste – it’s a novel. But certainly it has questionable descriptions and subject matters. But is that bad taste anymore? 

For me, bad taste is peoples’ boring moral philosophies where they’re lecturing you about your political correctness. To me that is deadening. That’s the new bad taste, maybe. It’s not exciting. And I think everything’s right that they say, they just say it in a way that makes other people go the other way. It doesn’t get supporters or helpers. Why is the gay world fighting with each other? We all used to be one big perverted family. Now we’re fighting with each other; it’s a waste of energy. 

So it’s the earnestness…
Earnestness is the perfect word. It makes even me reactionary sometimes. Me – a bleeding heart liberal. 

I have to say I gasped and laughed out loud during that scene in the book, in the airport, when the kid punches the guy…
Haha, well good. Every time I’m on an aeroplane and I see someone reading a book and they start laughing and then close it and then open it back up again, I think, “That’s so great that you can see someone visibly react like that.”

With a book it’s hard to do.
I used to read that Jane Bowles’s book Two Serious Ladies (1943) and laugh out loud. I was crying in parts. 

Have there been any pieces of art like that recently – that make you laugh in that way?
I think Saturday Night Live makes me laugh, especially when they’ve one day to write a skit. I admire the writing on it. 

Did you find more freedom in writing fiction? Because it could spill straight out of your head and onto the page?
There was more freedom because I didn’t have to worry about the ratings or budget. Yes, in some ways there is more freedom. 

What are you doing for the rest of the day?
I have six interviews after you. I want people to come to my show, I want people to read the book. It’s fine, I get to talk to smart journalists all over the world – it’s a high class problem. 

So you don’t mind doing back-to-back interviews?
I read newspapers every day and participate in the press. I don’t understand why people get so mad about the press, or when celebrities get so mad when someone takes their picture. That’s the point. 

I also think that celebrities who genuinely don’t want to be bothered find a way not to be bothered. 
I think you can have a life. You have to learn how to negotiate that life, but everyone can have a life. I think Brad Pitt drives around in a beat-up old car and people don’t think it’s him.

Yeah, true. I guess there’s also a difference between the tabloids and the media more generally. 
Well the tabloids don’t come after me because there’s nothing I’m hiding. I asked the editor of The Enquirer once, “Why do you always write about celebrities when they’re failing?” and he said, “Because our readers are failing.” 

I like to read the tabloids in America because I like to read the journalist’s spin on words and the headlines and also… Who is famous enough that people care enough to say bad things about?

You’re not wrong. Thank you so much for chatting.
Thank you very much, Daisy. 

John Waters will be performing his all new, stand-up comedy
monologue False Negative at the Barbican on Friday, June 10th. Due to popular demand, a second show on the same night has now been added.

@daisythejones / @lilylk__

The post John Waters: ‘Why Is the Gay World Fighting With Each Other?’ appeared first on VICE.

Set in a fictionalised time in which the UK has criminalised the advertising of sexual services, sex workers in London suddenly find themselves without a means to an income. Writing from the perspectives of three women – two sex workers (Lori and Freya), and a journalist campaigning against prostitution (Paula) – author Frankie Miren draws on years of experience and activism to tell a story about the sex industry that is groundbreaking for its complexity, warmth and humour.

With an abusive former partner and the fear of criminal charges looming over her, long-term sex worker Lori fights to provide for her young daughter. Freya, a student, finds herself wading through a new world of independence and employment, in tandem with her own mental health problems. Meanwhile, journalist Paula struggles to untangle her trauma from her moral stance on sex work. As the characters’ lives become increasingly tangled up, things reach a climactic end in a church in central London – a scene inspired by real-life events, where sex workers occupied churches in King’s Cross in 1982, and Lyon, France in 1975, to protest police brutality and harassment.

While it touches on everything from police raids and online censorship to issues around domestic abuse and childcare, the vast majority of The Service is about the act of living. The characters are friends and parents; they go on dates and get drunk at dinner parties; they take ketamine and argue with each other; they are hurt and they are resilient. Carefully balancing the harsh realities faced by sex workers with a sprinkling of fictional magic that offers hope in the dark, The Service is an intimate portrait of ordinary lives and struggles that resonate within the sex industry and beyond.

I caught up with Frankie over Zoom to talk about her debut novel, the ongoing fight for full decriminalisation and the need for more complex accounts of what it feels like to be a sex worker.

VICE: Hey, Frankie! So my first big question is: why did you want to write a book about sex work?
Frankie Miren: A part of that was just the ego-driven feeling of wanting to know that I can create something. I’ll be 45 this summer, so I’ve felt like, ‘God, life is going so fast!’ It was partly that, but also because I wanted to say something. I feel really strongly that, outside activist circles or very small circles on the left, the discourse around sex work is so basic still. I don’t know if the SWERFs [sex worker exclusionary radical feminists] are being deliberately or wilfully basic, or if they genuinely still don’t get that it’s so much more complex than whether it’s empowering or whether we’re all happy, and the bearing that has on whether we deserve rights.

I’ve done sex work since I was 18, and how I saw it back then is really different to how I see it now. I sometimes think my 18-year-old self would be like, “Hey, that’s not how it was,” but now that I’m older I feel that actually I was really traumatised, and I was taking so many drugs, and I feel pretty horrified at the memory of old men paying to fuck me. At this stage, I’m doing sex work in such different circumstances and feel very in control of it. It’s another world. And I’ve met so many different sex workers over the years, so I know there’s all these different viewpoints that I wanted to get across, without trying too much to tell stories that aren’t mine.

Another reason to write the book was that there are so many non-sex workers telling our stories and cashing in big time – I obviously haven’t cashed in big time with this [laughs], but I’ve got it published – and I wanted to take a bit of that space back.

**I feel like the book gets across the realities of sex work – the difficulties and the violence faced from the state and society in general – but it’s also incredibly tender. I think we’re so starved of warmth and humour in depictions of working class life in general at the minute, but especially when it comes to sex workers.
**I had to really battle not to make the book too much of a lecture. I wanted it to be entertaining, and I wanted it to feel warm without coming across as twee or sentimental – and I really didn’t want to leave everyone feeling horrible at the end. I feel like, unless you’re the most exquisite writer in the world, you’re not allowed to leave people feeling sad at the end of a book!

**The book follows three different intersecting narratives from the perspectives of three different women. Could you talk a bit about the decision behind structuring it this way, and what it enabled you to do?
**I feel like I’ve seen such different worlds of sex work, and a part of that is obviously the amount of time I’ve been a sex worker. I did have a break from the industry, and in that time the internet appeared, and when I came back it was to a supportive community rather than the isolation of before. But even within this supportive community, there are big disagreements about how to do things – how to fight for decriminalisation, how to think about sex work itself. So it was mainly to talk about the divisions among sex workers. I wanted to show that it’s not a monolith. There’s definitely space for more complex, conflicting accounts of what it feels like to be a sex worker.

I also wanted to have a non-sex worker character [Paula] in there to talk about how some of the things that apply to sex workers also apply to the things she’s dealing with. I wanted to talk about some of the issues that people think of as being very sex work-specific, which are really not.

**There are so many conversations in Paula’s storyline – with her family, her peers, herself – that show how issues affecting sex workers often apply to women and work more broadly. There’s a conversation about one of her mates having a nanny, for example, which feels very intentionally paralleled to sex work. Why was it important for you to include a character like Paula, and how did you find the experience of writing from her perspective?
**I’ve got a grizzly fascination with SWERFs. There’s a few of them that loom so large for activists, they’re like these kind of monsters! But beyond those very hardline characters, I feel like there’s a lot of women who have those views who I actually have a lot of sympathy for. I feel like their analysis is often not that wrong, I just disagree with what they’re suggesting as a solution, i.e. more criminalisation.

So with the conversation about the nanny – one of the things I really wanted in this book was to think about authenticity and what that means. I think part of that was me going back into sex work, and finding that, this time around, it was much more about selling this fantasy of authenticity – these intensive girlfriend experiences where you might spend a lot of time, over years, with someone – and the amount of work that’s required to make clients believe that you’re also having a nice time and that this is real and you’ve got a real connection.

Then I was thinking about how this expectation for things to be “real” is true of a lot of feminised jobs, and nannying felt like there was some real similarities [with sex work], because I honestly think most parents would not be OK with the thought that their nanny hated or didn’t care about their kids. Even if the nanny was doing a great job, and the kids were having a lovely time. We want to believe it’s real because it’s in this sphere of work that we think of as women’s work, and we’re uncomfortable with that being commodified.

I wanted all the characters to be haunted by themselves in different ways. Paula definitely is, and she was really hard to write because her life is so different to mine. I’d initially written her like a boomer, because in my head people with lives like that are, but then I was like, ‘No, she’s kind of my age!’ So I went back and rewrote her. With my first draft, my agent was like ‘You’ve made her like this walking mouthpiece for bad opinions,’ so it took loads of work, because I hated [Paula] so much. But then I started to understand her more, and I do have affection for her by the end of the book.

**Paula is quite a sympathetic character in some ways, because the sort of domestic loneliness and lack of compassion in her life is so stark. There’s one bit where it seems like she’s looking for solidarity, almost, from Carmen [a sex doll she has while researching sex doll brothels], and there’s a pretty violent scene where she physically assaults the doll. Could you talk a bit more about the doll and what you feel she symbolises to Paula?
**Often it feels like women like Paula see prostitutes, in this quite symbolic way, as the ultimate degradation of women. And as separate from themselves, or very “other” to themselves. The way they talk about sex work feels very ideological, and not at all grounded in this very mundane thing that’s going on. There’s also a particular group of them that I think are obsessed with sex robots, so [Carmen] is a physical manifestation of these ideas that they have about sex workers. For Paula, she’s taken all of her personal pain, and pain in general – which is all really legitimate stuff – and focused it in on prostitution as the ultimate evil. It’s like if she can sort that out, she can rescue her mum. It’s kind of misguided, but the doll is the symbol of all that.

**It’s interesting that you say she projects all of her pain onto the doll, because for most of the book she locks her away in a box where no one can see or engage with it.
**I read this book called Purity and Danger by Mary Douglas – literally 20 years ago, when I was at uni, so I’m probably completely misquoting it – but it’s about this idea of how, in every culture, the idea of dirt or what’s dirty is just matter out of place. Like, something in the wrong place becomes dirty, and you can use that for ideas about pollution and taboo. Sex outside marriage is dirty, sex in the world of commerce is dirty. So I really liked the idea of weaving that all the way through.

Lori’s really obsessed with physical dirt and keeping clothes and things separate, which is something I relate to a lot. I have completely different clothes that I wear for work, and I like to keep everything physically and mentally separate. Paula brings the sex doll into into her family home, and when the hookers occupy the church, that too is a transgression of a boundary.

The church occupation in The Service **is inspired by real life events – an occupation in France in 1975, and another in London in 1982. I was wondering if you could talk a bit about them?
**The whole idea of hookers in a church is just so brilliant. That transgression of boundaries – the sacred and the profane! With the occupation in Lyon, sex workers were protesting violence from the police and dangerous laws. And the way they got treated felt so familiar – they were called “pimps”, and the spectre of “the pimp lobby” was conjured up, which I’m sure would happen now. It was an iconic moment, even though France has the Nordic Model [where the purchase of sex work is criminalised and the sale of sex work is partially decriminalised] now.

The occupation in King’s Cross got a lot of non-sex workers involved and seeing the issues for the first time. People came down to the church who had just heard about what was happening. And it got a lot of new sex workers politicised, because so many sex workers don’t work in a politicised way. I didn’t for years. I worked all over the world and I had never thought about legal models. A lot of sex workers are too busy working to read up on legal models, but I think [the occupation in King’s Cross] really politicised people, and that was something I wanted to get across in the book. For these brief moments, you get a sense of how much power you really have.

The ECP have told me that public perceptions of sex work did change a bit after that, and the way the media talked about sex work changed after the occupation. Before, the raids had been quite gleefully celebrated, but afterwards they couldn’t get away with talking about it in quite the same way, because this little bit of humanisation had crept into the public imagination. So it was really powerful. But I just love the image of it, and I often wonder about what it would be like if we did it now.

**There’s one bit where the newspapers are interviewing the priest, who is like, “Yeah, I support these sex workers, they can use the church.” Is that how it went down in reality?
**Yeah! For a bit, he was. There’s some amazing footage of the London occupation of this disgruntled parishioner and a priest with glasses – it was like a Monty Python sketch – and he did say something along the lines of, “In my mind, it wouldn’t be a very Christian thing to do,” to evict them from the church. Apparently there was a lot of pressure on him, and he did push to get them out in the end. But there were still services going on throughout the occupation. The sex workers would sit in the church quietly while these services would happen, and the parishioners would leave and they’d carry on with the occupation.

The Service is set in a fictional time where the UK has criminalised the advertising of sexual services, alluding to legislation like FOSTA-SESTA in the US. Why did you want to set it in this slightly “alternate” reality?Because it’s so close to becoming a real reality. There’s been repeated attempts to introduce the Nordic Model in various ways, and that’s not going to stop. There’s all these high-profile women in the Labour Party who are really pro-Nordic Model, and it’s just so frustrating and frightening. We’re surrounded by Nordic Model countries now. I’ve got friends in France and in Ireland, and in France so many [sex workers] – almost all of them trans migrant women – have been killed since they introduced the Nordic Model. The book took me so long to write that I kept thinking, ‘Are we going to actually have the Nordic Model by the time it comes out? Will advertising platforms be banned?’

When we talk about laws changing, it sometimes seems a bit hypothetical and up in the air, but I wanted to show the really mundane things that would happen if advertising platforms got banned. Like, how do you get in touch with your clients – even your clients for the next day? It’s really ordinary but really terrifying at the same time.

**One of the first things that happens in the book is a threat particular to our current reality, which is raids. Without giving too much away, a raid is the backdrop to Lori’s storyline, and we see the devastating effects of it throughout book, but to bring the discussion into reality – in your experience, what do raids mean for sex workers in the UK?
**The raids that stand out in my mind, and as I was writing the book, are the Soho raids of 2013. That was so violent and frightening. Two-hundred-and-fifty police officers in riot gear stormed into these flats and dragged women in their underwear onto the street. And they brought along the Evening Standard, so the next day the Evening Standard and the Daily Mail published pictures of girls in their underwear that were barely blurred. That was done under the guise of anti-trafficking, and they didn’t find any trafficking victims. Then, in 2016, there was another round of raids.

In general a lot of the stuff that happens to Lori in the book can happen [to sex workers in reality]. You can be done for brothel keeping if you share a flat with another sex worker, which is ludicrous. There’s been cases of women going to the police because they’ve been attacked and then getting done for brothel keeping. I feel that surely the tide has to be turning on this idea that the police are safe and benevolent, and that it’s fair to bring them into contact with this group of people who often have other marginalisations – for example, a lot of sex workers are migrants or undocumented. None of it makes sense.

**There’s a line towards the end, when the dust is settling a bit, that really punched me in the gut, about “how people keep making lives for themselves”. It kind of felt to me like the overarching theme of the book. That everyone is just trying to live, and shouldn’t they be treated with equal compassion regardless of their ways of living. The way it’s written feels very accessible, very human. Ultimately, what do you hope that people reading this book, regardless of how much they knew about sex work beforehand, will come away feeling?
**I hope that for people who’ve not had much contact with sex workers, or done sex work, have a bit more understanding of how complex it is, how many different viewpoints there are, and how you can feel one way about sex work one day and completely differently the next day. Hate it, love it, none of that stuff should stand in the way of being allowed to work safely, or have respect, or get on with your life. So that would be the most important thing I hope people come away with – a bit more nuance.

@emmaggarland

‘The Service’ is Frankie Miren’s debut novel, and will be released on the 8th of July via Influx Press.

The post ‘The Service’ Captures the Messy and Mundane Realities of Sex Work in the UK appeared first on VICE.

OCTOBER 2022

The boat had been at sea for less than a week, drifting west with the currents, weathering squalls, never once floating close enough to other boats that their crews might notice something was wrong. Were it not for an early-autumn storm the previous evening, the ship might have traveled several more days, perhaps weeks, avoiding the island altogether, even colliding with debris in the open sea and sinking. In which case, everything that happened next would be quite different.

By the time the boat came aground, it was the end of October, well after prime tourist season was over. The nearest village had shut down nearly all its hotels and ferries had been cut to twice a week. There were still a few travelers on the island, loners and romantics hoping to experience a distant, lesser-known part of the archipelago, which explains why it was a young man from Canada, an aspiring photographer fresh out of college, who first spotted the boat and reported it to local authorities.

A ship had washed up on an isolated beach, the Canadian told them. Down on the south side of the island, where rock cliffs and sand faced the open waters of the Mediterranean. The boat was rolling back and forth in the waves, grinding up against the shore. It seemed pinned there, the Canadian said. Abandoned.

A shipwreck? The island’s police were instantly on edge. Competent seafaring went back generations here, where the outer edge of Europe hit the sea, and, for them, a wrecked boat was a wrecked conscience; it upset the order of things. Yet migrant boats had been washing ashore for years, they knew; perhaps this was another. Or could it be local? This worried them, admittedly more concerned for their own than they were for others. One man ran outside for a quick scan of the marina. Phone calls were made. There were no missing boats or crews.

The boat, the Canadian’s photos showed, was a small fishing vessel, modern but mastless, partially destroyed by fire. Dark, mounded shapes could be seen on deck, and though the Canadian’s images were excellent, taken with an expensive camera given to him just months before as a graduation gift, it was not at all clear what those forms really were. Large and hulking, they resembled dead livestock.

There’s something else, the Canadian said. He zoomed in, his finger pointing at the camera screen. Look.

Long reddish stains ran down the outer hull of the ship. They were everywhere, smeared and dripping. They looked like blood.

A small group of police and island fisherman—followed, to their frustration, by the Canadian, who maintained his distance but snapped photos the whole way—drove south, parked their vehicles, and climbed down over the rocks to the sand below.

The boat was exactly as it had been positioned in the Canadian’s photographs, half on sand, half on water, but the late-afternoon tide was rising. Within an hour, they knew, the ship would likely lift off and float back to sea; if the Canadian hadn’t come by when he did, perhaps no one would have found it at all.

The boat, they finally saw from the information on its hull, was from a town on Greek-controlled Cyprus. It had been fishing well outside its legal range, they realized, or it had been stolen; either way, the ship had wandered fully 300 miles from its city of origin.

Several men climbed aboard.

None of the early news reports were consistent with one another and none of them remained current for long. Details were both mixed and misreported, leading to rumor on top of rumor for at least the first forty-eight hours. What broke on local news, after one of the men phoned his wife in horror, describing what they had found on board amidst a chaos of tangled fishing nets and what appeared to be signs of an engine fire, was that a boat filled with corpses had washed ashore. The bodies were so deformed by fire, the man told his wife, that they seemed more animal than human. It must have been an inferno—which was strange, of course, because the ship itself was only partially damaged by flames.

The bodies aboard were all migrants, the first reports claimed, without evidence. Economic migrants desperate to reach Europe, killed in a tragic boat fire. It was an accident at sea. But arguments began immediately. No, others said, they weren’t migrants. They were war refugees. They had drifted over from Syria.

No, no, others disagreed. They were victims of human-trafficking—and this was no accident: everyone on board had been murdered. It was obvious, they said: the engine fire was deliberate. Some sort of cover-up. It must have been political.

It was Mossad. No, it was the Turks…

It was only when the men tried to move one of the bodies, the boat now rolling beneath their feet in the rising tide, that things took a turn for the worse.

No one had noticed this when they first climbed on deck because the bodies were so grotesquely disfigured—fused together, it seemed, in a blackened mass—but one man shouted. My God, he said, they’re doubles. Conjoined twins. The entire crew.

Five pairs of conjoined twins, connected not at the sternum, spine, or waist but everywhere, as if at random, merged at the arms, sharing legs, most of them horribly mis-sized as if joined with smaller versions of themselves, lying atop one another in charred knots.

Not five corpses, but ten; not ten corpses, but five.

In his photos, which eventually ran in newspapers and TV broadcasts all over the world, the Canadian managed to capture the scene in startling detail: the townsmen, their arms and clothes smudged with a charcoal of human flesh, looked pale, nauseated, some staring blank-eyed at the sea. One man, visibly shaken, his shirt covered in soot, leapt from the boat, stumbled up the beach, and vomited onto the rocks.

Word had traveled fast, the men saw, as they towed the boat into town. The sun had long since set. Dozens of villagers were out on the docks, watching, waiting. Several carried powerful marine flashlights, though most quietly tucked them away as the ship—sinister, unlit, dead against the night sky—floated into view, their desire to see replaced by unease.

The authorities’ original plan—to tie the boat up in the harbor and cover it with tarps—was clearly not an option. The smell of the fire, and of the bodies inside, was growing worse by the minute and a steady nighttime breeze meant it would have been anchored upwind from the village.

Then one of the men remembered something. Half a mile north of the town’s marina, his older brother owned a fishing warehouse. Modern, newly built, equipped with room-size refrigerators, it had been a recipient of European Union funding. The building had its own dock behind a repaired seawall that would shield the burned ship—and its scent—from the village. It seemed perfect.

Acting on orders from authorities, a small group of men worked into the night, gloved up, clad in aprons from their fishing boats, clearing the boat of corpses. It was horrific work. The bodies, where they weren’t blackened, had become gelatinous, the skin bursting and slipping until the only thing left to hold onto was bone.

They placed the bodies—five, ten; ten, five—down atop tarps inside refrigerated rooms that still smelled faintly of mackerel, swordfish, and squid.

Exhausted but sensing a market for his photos, the Canadian continued to shoot outside, well past midnight, capturing anything he could. Denied entry to the warehouse itself, he focused instead on a small group of men squatted aboard the burned ship, peering down at several canisters caught in the fishing net, one of which had burst, like a ruptured oxygen tank.

Within a day, before the Canadian’s photos of the boat became a global news sensation, while the islanders still had a modicum of privacy, the townsmen who boarded the ship that night began complaining of chills. Fevers and body aches. Their stomachs were cramping, some said, a terrible pressure rising beneath the breastbone.

One man said it was like he needed to cough something up, something painful growing inside him.

MAY 1995

The statue was large, but, because of its location, easy to miss. It had been mounted near an underlit wall in the furthest wing of the museum, in a side-gallery that most visitors chose to walk past without even noticing. That was a mistake: it was a wonderfully detailed piece, an utterly strange bit of architectural stonework taken from the nave of a German church, dating back to the 1400s. It rewarded sustained attention.

Exquisitely carved from a single piece of limestone, the statue depicted two human bodies wrapped around one another tightly, as if embracing. At first glance, the statue appeared identical to other ornamental pieces found inside a typical church of that era—but, upon further inspection, odd details began to emerge.

The two figures did not just share their legs, for example, but most of their chests and torsos. And they didn’t have four arms, oddly, but three—one of which appeared to be erupting from their mutual belly like an errant branch on an unkempt tree.

The second man’s face was also leaned back as if trying to sing; the face beside his, so close that they were cheek to cheek, appeared already lost in song. This gave the sculpture its unofficial German name, Die Gesangbrüder, the “Singing Brothers.”

Looking closer, however, in certain angles of light, an observant visitor would notice that the two brothers did not have entirely separate heads. Indeed, when the museum turned on its harsher lights—emergency lights it never used when visitors were still in the gallery—it became clear that the brothers’ mouths were not open because they are singing a carol. In fact, the brothers were not singing at all. Their mouths were open because they were in agony.

Sarah put her glass down, carefully. She was already on her second red wine of the evening and this sort of thing, she knew, would be noticed. Her department head, to Sarah’s right, was drinking nothing but water; her grant coordinator, also seated at the table, seemed nervously attuned to every detail of the evening.

Nevertheless, dinner had been going well, Sarah thought. She had been making small-talk, discussing her research, giving away minor but amusing details here and there about her personal life, and laughing whenever it felt appropriate. More importantly, she knew, it was nearly over. She had not embarrassed herself—yet—though the potential was always there. Lord knows she had done that before.

What really mattered was keeping her host, Dr. Christoph Kohl, happy, not making him regret having chosen her for this year’s Kohl Grant. The grant was given to just one student every academic year and was one of the most prestigious awards at the entire university—certainly one of the largest.

These dinners, held at Dr. Kohl’s house, a sprawling mansion in the suburbs west of the city, facing a lake, were required for every Kohl Grant recipient, but everyone knew they were just a formality, a favor of sorts for this retired surgeon, already in his 80s, too rich to know what to do with his money. But, Sarah suspected, the dinners were also a test. One mistake tonight, she thought, could risk it all.

Dr. Kohl’s fortune—as everyone knew, he was one of the most widely-profiled men in Minneapolis—came not just from his medical practice, where he had pioneered new surgical techniques that revolutionized how deformities of the spine could be treated; he was also heir to a vast family medical fortune.

The Kohl line of prosthetics, developed by Dr. Kohl’s grandfather in Germany after World War I, had become the global standard for prosthetic design and manufacturing; the licensing fees, contracts, and assorted dividends from family investments were rumored to bring Dr. Kohl, even today, as much as $30 million a year in passive income. That he would now be funding one of the most generous art history travel scholarships in the country—the Kohl Grant—would be surprising, were it not for his unusual upbringing.

The men of the Kohl family had always been interested in antiquity, he explained to his three guests, addressing Sarah in particular. His father had built a collection around pieces that worked as a kind of ironic—or, some critics might say, tasteless—commentary on the family business. Statues missing arms, legs, and heads, their limbs lost somewhere to the mists of history, had been exhibited around the Kohls’ house like advertisements for the prosthetics industry. They lurked on the edges of every room, marble figures tragically wounded, as if awaiting a state of completion. Many of those same statues, he said, now stood here in his lakeside home.

Sarah looked over Dr. Kohl’s shoulder as he spoke, at the stone form of a Greek warrior missing both its arms, its face hidden in shadow but turned directly toward her at the dinner. Slowly, so as not to seem distracted, Sarah glanced around the room and realized all the statues there, dozens of them, were turned this way, staring, broken and incomplete, keeping the surgeon’s guests under close watch. Unable to turn around, for fear of seeming paranoid or rude, she had the uncomfortable feeling that something was watching her from behind.

Dr. Kohl’s own art collection, he continued, had pursued similar themes. He had donated millions of dollars’ worth of artifacts to the university’s small but exceptional museum, and it was this same collection that now stood at the heart of the Kohl Grant application process. Egyptian artifacts and Buddhist statuary stood side-by-side there with Christian manuscripts, painted panels from Italian monasteries, and architectural fragments rescued from ruined churches all over Europe.

Although there was no explicit connection, astute visitors would begin to notice similarities, a number of shared motifs and symbols. Broken bodies, strange bodies, disfigured bodies. Monsters, the crippled, the dying.

Every year, Kohl Grant applicants were required to choose one piece from the museum for further study. Sarah’s essay, Dr. Kohl revealed, had focused on a piece that no other applicant had ever chosen before—but it was, he said, his favorite piece in the whole collection.

Sarah had not known this. No one had known this. She rewarded herself with a sip of wine.

Die Gesangbrüder, the surgeon continued, the “Singing Brothers,” had come from the ruins of an unusual church, destroyed by an errant British bomb in World War II, in a geographically stranded part of the German state of Hessen. The church should, by rights, have been in the neighboring state of Baden-Württemberg, but the meandering course of the river Neckar, a tributary of the Rhine, meant the church was in one state, the village it was meant to serve in another. It had been cut off, he said. Amputated.

Dr. Kohl had rescued the “Singing Brothers”—the only piece of the church his European dealers could locate for him—just before the rest of the building’s masonry had been ground to dust for new concrete or unrecognizably reused in other construction projects around town. For all he knew, the surgeon said, other pieces were still out there; perhaps Sarah’s research could help uncover them.

I would love that, Dr. Kohl emphasized. This was a request, she realized, a research direction she was being asked to pursue.

Relaxed now as much by wine as by her realization that her grant would not, in fact, be rescinded, Sarah asked the doctor a question. Her application essay had focused entirely on the craft of the “Singing Brothers”: the statue’s material fabrication, the tools it had most likely required, and the question of who had carved it. She realized now that she knew almost nothing about its original architectural context. Why hadn’t the church itself been rebuilt? she asked. That seemed unusual. Why had the townspeople not chosen to revive it?

That, Dr. Kohl replied, he also wanted to know. The church had lost its congregation long before the bombing, he said: it was a medieval relic, ruined by inattention before it was ruined by war. The townspeople had apparently avoided it for generations, he explained, telling dark stories about the place to their children as if to warn them away. Some people even said it wasn’t really Christian—that perhaps it hadn’t been a church at all.

Everything within, Dr. Kohl said, from the faces and forms carved into its arches, to its woodwork, murals, and paintings, had depicted twins. Conjoined twins, he added, although their bodies had been so heavily stylized that they could not have been medically accurate. Twins sometimes bursting forth from one another, entangled with each other, growing smaller versions of themselves, even consuming one another entirely.

The town, he said, had almost seemed happy to be rid of it.

OCTOBER 2022

The island’s police reached out to regional marine authorities with information about the boat, including its name and Cypriot origins, but the identity of the ship’s captain and crew, let alone its legal owner, had yet to be discovered. Whatever paperwork was on board had burned, and there were so few personal items stashed away, on so badly maintained a vessel, that it seemed clear the crew had gone to sea expecting little more than a few hours’ work.

Yet news of the ship had spread.

The doctor from a neighboring island came over the next morning, offering help, meeting the island’s own physician and its veterinarian on the docks. Mid-career, married, and doing well for herself, a mother of three, the doctor arrived expecting to perform a quick confirmation of some medical specifics: the crew’s deaths by fire or asphyxiation and, if she could determine it, their approximate date of death. Her job, she thought, was to supply the most basic timeline, to be an official signature on required forms, then head home.

But either the doctor had not yet been told the full story or she had severely downplayed what she’d heard, perhaps concluding that the description she’d been given was medically impossible, just panicked exaggerations from an island less sophisticated than her own.

When the doctor stepped into the warehouse, across the threshold of the first refrigerated room, it was a moment marked by silence and horror. Before her, laid out across tarps on the floor, were scenes of anatomical incoherence. Blackened bodies with exposed bones seemed attached to one another at strange angles; single torsos carried three, even four, stunted legs; and faces on conjoined heads that should have been identical were, in fact, wrongly sized, more like shrunken versions of themselves frozen in expressions of pain they must have taken as flames consumed them at sea. It was a nest of bodies, stuttered by blurs and distortions.

The doctor stood there for so long, just staring, that a fisherman had to prod her.

Doctor? the man said. What is this?

The Canadian managed to catch a few hours of sleep, but nothing more. Before bed, he’d emailed several photos of the burned ship back to friends in Toronto, including a college acquaintance whose sister, he knew, now worked at the city paper. There was something strange going on, he wrote, though he didn’t have the full story yet. Nobody did. A shipwreck, a fire, dead bodies. He would get better pictures, he wrote, if he could.

Despite the early morning hour, he saw, the fishing warehouse was crowded. So many people were milling about outside, talking to each other in the street, that they seemed to have forgotten the presence of any outsiders on the island. The Canadian saw an opportunity. After a few minutes of waiting, he simply walked inside.

He need not have worried. Several islanders saw the tourist, glanced down at his camera, and just looked away, their eyes betraying a worry far larger than some foreigner taking photographs. The Canadian, testing this out, snapped a few shots of the warehouse interior, its stainless-steel work surfaces, its industrial fishing gear stored against the walls next to poles, hooks, and knives, its doors wide open out back, the burned ship perfectly framed in the harbor. He took a picture of that, too.

Near the doors, atop one of the tables usually reserved for prepping the day’s catch, stood a mess of objects offloaded from the boat. Tangled fragments of net, deck tools, someone’s half-burned duffel bag, and some fuel cans sat beside a collection of metal canisters—one of them broken open, as if it had burst—that the Canadian had seen the men looking at the night before. The canisters had been placed further away from the other objects, near the edge of the table; even as the Canadian was watching, two of the fishermen walked over and began inspecting them, looking for clues.

Voices from one of the walk-in refrigerators ahead caught his attention. Its door was pinned open by a folding chair and a small crowd had gathered outside, peering in. Above it all was a woman’s voice, speaking Greek with evident force and authority.

Flanked by fishermen in work aprons and gloves, the doctor, he saw, was squatting over the tarp, barking instructions. The men seemed to be holding onto several of the bodies, pulling them aside—pulling them apart—as if spreading their limbs to help her get a better look. Then the flash of a camera, again and again, and occasional groans from the villagers watching. Was this some sort of autopsy? The Canadian couldn’t get a good view. Through small gaps between people’s shoulders blocking the door, he could see the men grimacing, faces slack with revulsion, their aprons and clothes blood-flecked.

Then the shout.

It came from the dock outside. A young fisherman, no more than 18, was standing there beside the ruined boat. He was agitated, one hand wrapped in the other, turning away from everyone around him. He kept sneaking looks down at his hand and shouting, louder now, squeezing his arm ever closer to his body.

The doctor pushed her way out of the walk-in refrigerator, through the gathered townspeople, frustrated. What now? But perhaps she saw an opportunity. She could calm things down, demonstrate her expertise, focus everyone for just one moment on something medically straightforward—a simple work injury, she hoped, perhaps a cut, a puncture, a broken hand—anything that might distract from the horrible bodies entwined in the warehouse room behind her.

The young man was making a strange mewling sound now, like a scared animal, pushing his hand deeper against his belly as if to hide it. The doctor approached, calmly stopping him with a hand on his shoulder, an almost maternal gesture. Perhaps she was thinking of her own children, children she would soon see once this cursed day was over. She should never have come.

The doctor insisted now, reaching out, touching the young man’s forearm. Calm down. It’s okay. Be quiet.

But when the man finally revealed his hand, there was an uproar. Everyone backed away, some stumbling.

New fingers had emerged from the back of his hand, breaking away from the man’s knuckles. And they were moving.

Other men who had helped unload the blackened ship woke up complaining of stomachaches and chest pain the next morning and stayed home. For each of them, their fevers and chills were only getting worse.

In one house, a man began shouting for his wife: a painful ridge that had formed overnight on his breastbone, where he had been helping carry fishing nets off the damaged boat, holding them against his chest, had begun to swell. It was cracking outward, millimeter by millimeter, pushing his ribcage with it as if forcing open a jammed umbrella. When his wife came into the room and saw her shirtless husband writhing in agony, retching, trying to cough something up, she froze. The stubs of new ribs appeared to be growing from his chest like antlers.

In another house, a widower, living alone, never woke up at all. He would be found a day later, still in bed, the entire left side of his head stretched sideways, nearly double in size, one eye socket pulled open into a six-inch hole. His scalp had torn in places, revealing a fissure between the man’s skull and this malformed, bony sphere struggling to emerge from it.

All over town, for workers who had boarded the ship, such agonies were just beginning. Nearly a dozen men, their limbs cramping—somewhere on all of them, anywhere they had been exposed—their skin pushed from within by new growths of bone.

The doctor herself stepped backward, away from the young man, telling herself she just wanted to give him space. But this was a mistake: her reaction was interpreted as fear and the crowd responded accordingly. People began leaving—not fleeing, but turning away, quickly, instinctually, some gathering on the opposite side of the warehouse, but others heading straight home.

Let the doctor take care of this, they thought; let someone take care of this.

The Canadian was still by the back door, facing the docks, taking pictures, zooming in on what he could make of the man’s doubling hand. The confrontation he had once expected finally came. A woman, angry at the sight of this outsider with his expensive camera photographing the pain and embarrassment of a fellow villager, shouted something in Greek and pushed her hand against the camera lens.

Caught off-guard, the Canadian thrust his hand out to protect the camera, but—far more forcefully than he ever would have intended—knocked the woman’s arm away. From almost any angle, it looked as if he’d struck her.

Other townspeople rushed over in her defense. One man grabbed the Canadian’s camera strap and began to pull, the woman encouraging him, eager to get this pompous foreigner out of the way. The young dockworker with his terrible doubling hand was yelling ever louder in the background, the visiting doctor pleading with him in Greek. It was confusion and disarray on every side—when a tremendous back-to-back boom burst inside the warehouse. The man pulling on the camera strap fell over in surprise, hauling the Canadian down with him, the camera’s lens shattering onto the concrete.

Two of the pressurized canisters had blown, sending a cloud of mist over everyone nearby. Oily droplets rained down into people’s eyes, coating clothing and skin, forming a vaporous fog that sent anyone still on their feet rushing for open air.

The men who had been tinkering with the canisters now lay dead on the warehouse floor, their hands and faces mangled. The Canadian, sprawled beside his broken camera, mouth open in shock, realized he could taste something, that the oily substance had landed in his mouth and on his tongue.

JULY 1995

The man pulled up in his silver BMW and waved, carrying himself with a friendliness that gave away the many years he’d spent working in the United States. Married, with two young boys, the man had moved to Los Angeles as a West German and, by the time he’d returned, in 1991, it was to a reunited nation, a single country once again.

Sarah had been in southern Germany for nearly two months now, long by the standards of backpacking but no time at all in terms of serious research—and a mere blink of an eye for someone determined to learn everything she could about a region. Sarah had come as an art historian, of course, but, for her, art history had expanded into a different kind of investigation, something much larger than the statue she was supposed to be focused on.

The descriptions she had read of the church, written long before it was destroyed, taken from old journals, travelers’ pamphlets, and even a 19th-century novella, had given her an idea. Sarah had been developing a completely new approach to the “Singing Brothers.” She had not yet told Dr. Kohl or her grant coordinator about any of this, but she was increasingly convinced she was on the right track. While her colleagues back at home were doing internships for art museums or writing summer papers about Rembrandt and Van Gogh, Sarah was tracking down the truth behind a lost 15th-century church and its statues, where the truth appeared to be an undiagnosed medieval disease.

Before leaving Minneapolis, Sarah had put together a formidable list of research leads and contacts throughout southern Germany, mostly art historians, scholars, and dealers, people deep in the European humanities. She had done so with the assistance of Dr. Kohl and his artifact-procurement team, including a curator at the university’s archaeology museum and a private lawyer about whom she knew very little.

Her Kohl Grant, Sarah had quickly come to see, was not really an academic award at all—no wonder it paid so well, she laughed to herself—but more of a project fee for pursuing research of interest to Dr. Kohl. Whether this was genuinely intellectual or simply financial, Sarah did not yet know—after all, with every grad student Dr. Kohl sent abroad, he was adding to the breadth of knowledge associated with his own art collection, thus, in theory, contributing to its future value on the market.

The man picking her up that day was Florian Büchner—and, to Sarah’s thrill, she had discovered Florian’s research on her own. He was a geneticist by profession and an amateur historian by choice. His particular niche was tracking down apparently extinct medieval diseases. Florian was convinced that many of the descriptions of horrible deformities and monstrous creatures found in German folklore could, in fact, be explained by science: the bogeymen of yore might simply have been people afflicted with unusual diseases or genetic conditions that doctors, for whatever reason, no longer saw today.

It was one of Florian’s papers in particular that inspired Sarah to reach out: it described three cases, all from southern Germany, of what he believed to be a virtually unknown genetic abnormality. What caught Sarah’s eye was that the disorder was eerily similar to conjoined twins—with a terrible twist. Florian called it “post-natal twinning,” or bifurcation, by which he meant that the doubling process only began afterbirth. From what Florian could tell, based on medieval texts and engravings, the condition was inevitably, agonizingly fatal—yet, if those same descriptions were to be believed, it could begin as late as puberty. Imagine the horror of that, he would later say to Sarah. No one wants to become two.

When Sarah first spoke with Florian in his university office in the middle of June, he had never heard of the church. Nevertheless, he had responded to the premise of her research right. away. Sarah explained that she had been trying to build a larger historical context for Die Gesangbrüder and that she had gone down every rabbit hole she could find. The iconography of twins in European mythology. German folktales of twins, doubles, and siblings. Christian attitudes toward the deformed. Even, she said, clearing her throat, the twin-experiments of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele—who had been born, she added, here in southern Germany.

Yet none of her research had gone anywhere—mythology and iconography alone were not enough to make the art from her lost church make sense. Until, of course, she discovered Florian’s work on twinning.

The two of them had been sharing notes and research leads together for a month when Florian pulled up in his BMW. Sarah threw her bag in the backseat, hopped in, and they began the short but, they hoped, consequential drive up the river.

Florian had already lived up to his side of the collaboration; now it was Sarah’s turn. He had found, deep in the university’s medical archives, a manuscript from the 1400s. It described a generations-long outbreak of post-natal twinning in three small towns along the river Neckar. It must have been, he said, forty years of pure Hell: children from the age of six months to as old as fifteen would come down with fevers and cramps. Then a period of anguished waiting would begin. Within days, the children would begin to twin, helpless, terrified, other versions of themselves bulging outward through their spines and torsos, their skulls and ribs.

The timing of the outbreaks, Florian found, suggested that Sarah’s church had been built three or four generations after the disorder finally burned itself out, a memorial to the region’s trauma.

On their drive upriver that day, Sarah hoped that she could now fulfill her side of the collaboration. Only a few days earlier, she had come across new information that Dr. Kohl and his staff in Minneapolis had missed. Fragments of important historical sites, destroyed by war, had been preserved without ever being reconstructed. In local town records, she discovered several examples of architectural fragments being saved in storage facilities.

Most of the descriptions—all hand-written, some virtually indecipherable—were irrelevant to her research. One, however, grabbed her attention. It described the remains of a Klosterkirche, or monastery church, whose ruins Sarah had, in fact, already visited. Famously, this same monastery church had been partially reconstructed after the war, but was really just a stabilized ruin on the edge of the same town as the twin church, its vaults and arches deemed too complex, and too expensive, to rebuild. But, Sarah saw, its label had continued: the warehouse storing bits of the Klosterkirche had mistakenly included fragments of an “unknown chapel, 15th century,” alongside them—a church described as being on the river Neckar, just over the state line in Hessen.

Archives, Sarah thought, were like bodies. You never know what’s inside until it comes to light.

The two of them stood side by side, looking at the shelves in front of them, in a mix of revulsion and pride, horror and fascination. The warehouse they stood within, on the banks of the river, was alarmingly water-logged and very badly lit. A small house sparrow had flown in with them when the archivist first opened the front door; when the sparrow landed on a light fixture dangling from the ceiling above, it was as if everything in the room began to sway, shadows moving through shadows.

Stored amidst dust, mice, and roof leaks for the past half-century were at least a dozen carvings—mislabeled and thus unknown to the outside world—taken from Sarah’s ruined church.

The “Singing Brothers,” Florian joked, had many siblings.

Sarah tried to explain to the archivist who let them in, a woman in her mid-50s with her hair cut in a bob, why they were so interested in these stone figures, but her words came out jumbled, incoherent. She was still overwhelmed by what they’d found—by the fact that they had found it at all.

The archivist, however, seemed baffled. The three of them were, after all, looking at shelf after shelf of hideous human deformity, of faces melting into other faces, of bodies merged with other bodies, hideous and screaming, visibly in pain.

No matter, Sarah thought. She had become distracted, envisioning herself returning here, coming back to the warehouse with Florian the next day and the next, taking photographs and notes, even returning to Germany next year, perhaps turning this into her doctoral thesis, telling Dr. Kohl the good news, getting ahead of herself.

The archivist gave the sculptures one final, wary look before wandering off to a small front office, leaving Sarah and Florian alone with their talk of monstrosity. The sparrow eventually flew from its perch and the shadows on the sculptures grew still.

OCTOBER 2022

The Canadian was almost there. He could see the lights of the other village up ahead, just a few more hills and ridges to cross, maybe a mile away, but this headache—pain streaking down one side of his jaw in sharp bursts—was becoming intolerable. He should stop walking, he told himself; let the pain wash over, the agony fade. It would pass: of course, it would pass.

But he did not stop. He needed to get to the village—it was already dark, the stars out above him, the lights of ships visible in the maritime distance—and he needed their help. He needed painkillers. He needed a way off this island, now that the town he had been staying in had descended into chaos. A dozen fishermen grotesquely deformed, the visiting doctor complaining of chills, looking overwhelmed and terrified, anyone affected by the burst canisters complaining of pain.

The canisters, he thought. The oily liquid inside them—but he stopped himself. It had gotten all over him, in his mouth, on his face. Luckily, he told himself, pushing forward in the dark, it didn’t seem to be affecting him. Was it affecting him? No, he thought. No—he didn’t think so. But this headache, this pain he felt in his very bones. It was getting worse.

After the canisters had burst, his camera shattered, the Canadian had panicked. He fled back to his room at the inn. He had leapt into the shower, piled his soiled clothes on the floor, and sat alone on his bed, thinking about what to do next.

Shouts of agony and fear had been erupting all over the village. People coughing, hacking, calling out to each other in Greek. One man had fallen down in the middle of the street, screaming, the beginning of another torso now growing from his own; several other men in the warehouse had begun showing symptoms, bony protrusions appearing on their backs and shoulders, across their throats and chests.

The Canadian didn’t have access to a boat, he knew. Even if he did, he wouldn’t know how to use it. He didn’t have access to a car or even a motorbike.

Then he remembered the other village.

At the extreme northwestern edge of the island was another town. He knew there were paths that could take him there, long hiking trails that led up over the island’s central hills and gorges. He could just walk.

It would take hours, he knew, but if he left now—if he left right now—he could get there before dark. He could get away from this place. He could join a private boat to the mainland, he thought. He could find safety.

The village was right there, he saw, straight ahead, its lights a welcome glow in the darkness, beckoning him downhill. It had taken him longer than he thought, the sun now down for more than an hour. But he had done it. His eyes were blurring, this awful headache—it must be dehydration, he thought, he could barely see straight—this pain in his jaw really flaring, a stabbing sensation that seemed to radiate deep into his very teeth.

His teeth—the Canadian ran his tongue along the molars in back, over and over again. He didn’t want to think about what he felt there, that there were more teeth somehow breaking through his gums, the stumps of growing molars forcing his jaw to one side, his mouth swelling open.

Closer, he saw, closer: the village was just downhill. He would keep walking. He would find help.

The Canadian tried to calm himself by counting his teeth, using his tongue, one by one, tooth after tooth, but he kept losing count, getting confused, or—no. He stopped. There was something new. He could feel two tongues—one splitting from the other and expanding, forcing his jaw further to one side, pushing it wider, making it impossible to close.

He was jogging now, his jaw stretched painfully wide, swollen with the pressure of new teeth and a growing tongue, until, finally, he felt it break, his jaw dislocated.

Yelling in pain, the Canadian tried to cry for help. Please. He was all alone here, beneath the stars, becoming something he did not want to be. But the best he could do was emit a warbling sound, a wet animal howl as he stumbled downhill toward the village lights below—forty feet, he thought, thirty feet, he was so close—his nose now cleaving in half down the center line—twenty feet, ten feet—his face slathered with blood, but there it was, finally, he was walking toward the light, stumbling toward a village square, a small plaza.

He had made it.

The young girl, not quite 10 years old, bored of her family’s endless dinner, wandered away from the table outside. She hopped along the pavement cracks, from one stone to the next, but she was tired. She stopped in the middle of the village plaza and looked back at her family, hoping they’d be done, hoping the last bottle of wine would be empty, when a noise echoed down from the darkness of the hill behind her.

It was a gurgling of sorts, like an exotic bird, echoing down to the street. She looked at her family again but they were oblivious, roaring with laughter and drink.

The girl heard it again, more of a choking sound, like a growl. For the first time, she felt fear. It was crying now, whatever it was, a quiet whine—a creature in pain—getting closer, coming downhill in the dark.

Then footsteps, shuffling in the dirt just outside the plaza. Something coughed—or perhaps barked, she couldn’t tell—as it reached the edge of the concrete, a dark spot framed by buildings where no streetlights could reach.

Then it appeared: this tentacle-tongued thing, this man-like monster, its huge, doubled jaws dangling from a broken face, nose split asunder, its whole head bulbous, belly and chest covered in blood and drool.

The thing staggered toward her out of the darkness, eyes locked directly onto hers. To the girl’s horror, it didn’t look threatening. This was worse. It looked terrified, as if appealing to her for help.

Responding to her screams, the girl’s father and sister were first to arrive, running, followed closely by their neighbors. Her father leapt in front of her, protecting her, as the monster from the hill collapsed onto its knees. Its collar bones were beginning to duplicate now, breaking open like wings, revealing new and growing bones within.

The whole time, the creature’s eyes were moving back and forth, person to person, pleading, looking again at the little girl, desperate, tears running down its face.

The Canadian sat there like that, his throat blocked by another throat, gasping, choking on new parts of himself for minutes, endless minutes, before he could no longer breathe at all.

AUGUST 2001

Sarah stepped away from the plinth at the back of the gallery with a polite wave and a note of thanks—genuine thanks. It was a small crowd, no more than fifty, almost everyone there a close friend or fellow academic. But a crowd was a crowd, she knew, especially for a book about medieval German sculpture.

A small show of carvings from the German church—the Zwillingskapelle, as she called it in her book, the chapel of twins—was opening here at the university museum, where all of her research had begun, under Sarah’s curatorial guidance. Dr. Kohl had funded the shipment, installation, and insurance of the entire endeavor, with the understanding that two of the pieces would stay in Minneapolis permanently, joining the “Singing Brothers” in a renovated display.

The event that evening was part exhibition debut, part book signing. Sarah had finished her Ph.D.—it was Dr. Sarah, if you please, although she always found non-medical doctors using such titles to be pretentious—and turned it into a book less than two years later. No matter how many copies her book might sell, and she didn’t expect that would be many, Sarah was proud, justifiably so: she had done it. A weight off her chest, an entire phase of her intellectual life now enclosed by two covers. And, here in the last days of August, a quiet September looming ahead, it seemed like the beginning of a calm autumn to come.

The formal book-signing took another twenty minutes, after which the head curator congratulated her, offered her a glass of wine, and handed her a short note from Dr. Kohl. He could not make it in person, Sarah already knew, due to health issues, but he sent his congratulations—and pointed out in his note, to Sarah’s surprise, that the wine they were all now drinking was the same he had served at their initial dinner so many years before. Sarah took a nostalgic sip and looked around at the gallery, at the “Singing Brothers” and the statue’s newfound siblings. So many loops, Sarah thought, were finally closing.

Small talk, follow-up questions, photographs for the university magazine, and positive feedback all ensued. Soft music playing in the background. A clear summer night outside. Sarah loved it. Her fifteen minutes of fame.

In a moment of pause, a man approached. Sarah recognized his face from the book-signing earlier. He was intense and focused, almost clinical, but he did not have the air of an art historian, Sarah thought, even a person in the humanities.

The man introduced himself as a medical researcher, a geneticist from Nicosia. He had been living in the Twin Cities for the past year on a research fellowship—but nothing, the man quickly added, as interesting as her Kohl Grant.

He was astounded by her presentation, he said. He had never heard of any of this. He wanted to know if there was any chance this disease was still out there—if there might be signs of it, hidden reservoirs, maybe the occasional odd case flaring up, perhaps even in wild animals. He would love to study it, he said, to learn more about its long-term effects. The sculptures might have stopped in the 1400s, he suggested, but that didn’t mean the disease itself had gone away. It would be fascinating to see if it was still a threat.

Fascinating. Sarah laughed at this. How could anyone be excited to see such a horrible affliction in the world? But she caught herself. She had been asked similar things of her own research: why would such a nice midwestern girl like Sarah want to look at gruesome statues all day?

No, she started, there are no known reservoirs. But—and here, Sarah thought, why not? why not play with this, see where the idea goes?—if it is a genetic disorder, as Sarah wrote in her book, not a virus or a germ, then some local families might still carry the gene. You could do blood tests, she suggested, take samples. Look for the genes. Isolate the genes.

Sarah stopped herself—this was the wine talking, she knew. She was an art historian, not a medical expert.

But the man looked thrilled, nodding as she spoke. Yes, he said. Yes—that might work. Perhaps I’ll try that. Thank you.

Sarah later saw the man leaving, a signed copy of her book in his hand. Academia, she thought, finishing her wine, was full of such strange little people. Everyone pursuing their own isolated interests, never sure of what effects it will have on others along the way.

MARCH 2017

The two brothers saw no problem with their work. The Mediterranean was a huge sea. Anything their company might dump in all that water would eventually be dispersed, they told themselves; that was just common sense. Over the past year, the brothers had disposed of barrels, bags, and boxes, canisters, crates, and, once, a whole cargo container they had to saw holes into with an angle-grinder to make sure it would sink. And they did not lose sleep over any of it.

The company they worked for—part of a conglomerate owned by a hedge fund of some sort, they didn’t know and, frankly, didn’t care—had become masters of the global loophole, and the firm’s standards for disposal fell off more every year. Chemical waste, medical waste, toxic waste: they were licensed to accept all of it, expected to use the appropriate treatment facilities, places inspected by the full power of the European Union. But there was not enough profit being legal.

If anyone bothered to look at their paperwork that day, they would see that this particular load, allegedly destined for sanitary disposal, contained human tissue samples, vials of blood, chemical reagents, the bodies of horribly deformed laboratory mice, and a collection of roughly two dozen pressurized canisters. A professor at the university up in Nicosia had died—a geneticist who, at one point, worked in Minneapolis for a year and had spent half a decade studying recessive genes in southern Germany—and this was the result of a cull. The school had saved what they thought they needed from his lab and made a decision to eliminate the rest.

University administrators had done it the right way, they thought, consulting with a fellow professor—who, they did not know, wanted nothing more than to see her colleague’s controversial work come to an end. He had been doing terrible things—breeding conjoined mice, doubled limb by limb, all dying in pain—and pursuing gain-of-function research on the human genome without any appropriate safeguards. Several times, she would come into the shared lab space the morning after another of his late-night sessions and find strange websites still in the browser history. Political sites. Conspiracy sites.

The man’s heart attack had been a blessing, she thought. This was not research anyone should be doing, and, if regulators ever found out, she worried, it would tarnish the entire university. She thus ordered a purge: the dead professor’s experiments were discontinued, his biological and genetic samples marked for autoclave sterilization.

The school, once again, did everything right, or so they thought: they contracted with a licensed disposal firm—but, truth be told, it never occurred to them that the waste might not be going where the invoice said it was.

Someone just came and picked it up, and then it was gone.

The two brothers aboard the waste ship that day went through their usual routine; it had worked before and it would work again. They spoofed their GPS transponder, scanning both the radio and the horizon for nearby inspectors. Satisfied, they began dumping their cargo.

Somewhere amidst this great plug of rubbish and waste destined for the Mediterranean seabed were two dozen canisters from the researcher’s lab. The canisters drifted down through the currents, jostling against each other like bells ringing in the deep. They. might stay there, buried by silts and muds, for thousands of years, or they might be punctured by curious sea life—or, who knew, they might get pulled up someday by some unlucky crew’s fishing net.

It wasn’t the brothers’ business to care. They checked their hold, saw it was empty, and began the long journey back to shore.

The post Twinning appeared first on VICE.

THE BOY ON THE MOUNTAINTOP

By Katy Wagner, GizPo

9/21/2030

(COOS BAY, OR) — Melanie Greenberg has a plan for what to do if she ever meets the Kirsch family. She’s rehearsed her speech in the mirror for over a year now. Late at night, when she’s mired in the private hell of insomnia, she’ll jot down tweaks to her working script, each word chosen carefully for maximum impact. She’s learned to write legibly in darkness; rarely does she misspell a word or write one word over another despite writing blind. She can feel the pages for indentations from where she’s put pen to paper, so she can locate free white space beneath. And she has sharpened the words down to a blade, so that when she sticks them into a Kirsch, they’ll leave a mark.

Can you tell me what you plan on saying?

“The words ‘you killed my son’ will be in there somewhere.”

You think they killed him.

“I know they did. Emilia Kirsch runs the company. Jason Kirsch invented the technology. Tell me who else would be responsible.”

Do you want to physically harm Emilia and Jason?

“Yes, but I know I can’t. I’ve convinced myself it’s the wrong idea anyway. I want them to live with the hell of being themselves. Emilia and Jason can stay rich. They can stay free. But they’ll always have to live inside their hateful bodies, and I want that to hurt them.”

It wasn’t always easy to get to Coos Bay. You used to have to drive here from Portland, taking the 5 South down to Route 38 and then across to 101, a tattered ribbon of a country highway that would test even a cast-iron stomach. That slim passageway through the wild, coupled with eternally damp weather, was enough to keep Coos Bay relatively isolated in the beginning of the century, especially as shipping jobs began to dry up and drugs took hold over this otherwise anonymous bit of Oregon shoreline.

“We’d have campers and tweakers,” says Greenberg. “But now you get these clusters of surfers and fishermen, all zapping in together at exact times and making a goddamn mess before zapping right back out again. And, of course, we have a few port refugees from here and there.”

But the greater impact that porting has had on Coos Bay hasn’t come from people bypassing the endless roads to come here, but rather its original residents leaving. When the world opened up, the youth of Coos Bay fled in droves. So many kids have dropped out of nearby Marchfield High that the school has been forced to shutter entirely.

One of the kids who dropped out was Melanie’s son, Jeffrey. If you’re conjuring the stereotype in your head of what a high school dropout might look like these days—lazy, disaffected, porting at random, addicted to black market opioids, etc.—Jeffrey’s story will alter that image drastically. He was a straight-A student. He was lead trumpet in the school marching band. He never drank or smoked. A sophomore at Marchfield during the advent of porting, he was already receiving letters from prominent Pac-12 schools with hints of scholarship money in the offing.

“I think, in some ways, porting has been worse for the smart kids,” Melanie tells me. I’m in her house right now. It’s a split-level abode nestled deep in the woods. This is an area that gets little port traffic, although that hasn’t stopped Melanie from keeping dozens of guns handy to fend off aggressive trespassers and would-be squatters. She makes me a fresh pot of coffee but, in a moment of absent-mindedness, forgets to put a filter in the coffeemaker. Hot water and loose grounds spurt all over the kitchen counter.

“Jeffrey wanted to leave Coos Bay, and I don’t blame him. I mean, this place was a meth hole. He was excited to get out and see the world, and I was excited for it, too. I just think you have to be ready, you know? No one was ready for it.”

She held off buying Jeffrey a PortPhone for as long as she could, but after he saved up hundreds from his own personal landscaping business, she couldn’t fend him off any longer.

“I remember where he ported to first,” Melanie says to me as she rinses the soaked coffee grounds out of her pot and puts in a fresh filter. “It was Cancun, which is predictable for a 16-year-old. I made him promise only to go for a couple of minutes. So he zaps out, and I’m waiting, and waiting, and I’ve got half a mind to go to his pin and thrash him in front of all of Mexico. Then he finally came back.”

And what was that like?

“He wouldn’t stop laughing. That ever happen to you? You’re so happy you start laughing, and you don’t know why? It was that. And I saw that look of joy from him and…” she begins to cry, “I’m a mom, you know? When you see your kid happy, you want them to stay that way forever. It’s like when you give a small child candy, and they go crazy for it. It makes you want to give them more. To spoil them. Because it’s so easy. Spoiling them makes them happy. But you know you can’t spoil them always because if you keep giving candy to them, it’ll…” She can’t finish the thought. She presses her hands against the counter and lets out a long exhale.

Jeffrey began porting every weekend, and then every night. Once PortSys began offering unlimited plans, Melanie felt powerless to stop him. He always managed to talk his way out of having the phone confiscated. Sometimes they would port together places, but more often it would be Jeffrey out in the world on his own, Melanie dying a little inside every time he vanished.

“Everything was different overnight, and I needed more time to adjust to that. We all did. We all still do! But PortSys? They never gave a shit. They weren’t careful. They didn’t bother preparing anyone for this kind of world. They charged ahead because they knew no one would ever have the courage to stop them.”

One Sunday in May, Jeffrey told his mom he was going to Los Angeles with fellow bandmate Paul Gallagher. They had an agreement that he would share his pin with her anytime he went somewhere. This day, the destination was the Santa Monica Pier. Melanie watched Jeffrey port out, then ported to Atlanta herself to visit a friend before coming home to wait for him.

But Jeffrey never showed. Melanie called her son. She texted. Still no answer. When she checked her own PortSys account, she realized that Jeffrey had unfriended her that morning, leaving her unable to see his port history. By the time Monday morning arrived, she had turned frantic, porting to Jeffrey’s chosen pin on the beach and wading through hordes of unimaginative tourists to look for her son, a human needle in the haystack. When she called PortSys to try to verify his current location, they refused to disclose it.

“Sometimes,” Melanie says, “You trust your children too much, you know? Jeffrey was such a good kid, I’d have trusted him with any decision he made. But then I would forget he’s still just a kid.”

What Melanie didn’t know was that Jeffrey’s trip to Santa Monica was actually a premeditated ruse. He and Gallagher weren’t going to California at all. Rather, they had spent the better part of a month sketching out a plan to port to the summit of Mount Everest. They studied storm patterns. They borrowed mountaineering gear from a friend (lightweight, to adhere to PortSys’ YOU PLUS TWO guidelines, which allow for teleporting an extra two kilograms on your person in addition to the mass of your naked body) plus bottles of supplemental from a more experienced summiter. They went on long runs in high altitude cities: cities that Jeffrey had truthfully told his mother he was going to visit, while keeping hidden his ulterior motive for the jaunts.

The plan was port to increasingly high altitudes, get acclimated, and then hit the summit. Once on the roof of the world, Jeffrey and Paul would take in the view of the surrounding hemisphere, get a selfie, and then leave in an instant.

It is, of course, not legal to port to the summit of Everest. Since the advent of porting, only the South Slope of the mountain is open to climbing, with the North Slope formally closed by a Chinese government that outlawed porting from the start and has no plans to reverse that policy. Thus, oversight of Everest’s unlicensed port tourism has fallen mostly to overwhelmed Nepalese officials.

The path to the summit was awash in litter and human excrement long before the advent of PortPhones, and porting has only exacerbated the problems at the top of the mountain. As with other national landmarks all over the world, port tourists have overwhelmed and desecrated what were once carefully preserved lands. In a bit of morbid irony, the deadly environs of Everest have help protect it from being completely overrun. Other parks and attractions lack such natural deterrents.

And standard tourist attractions are even more vulnerable, particularly spots highlighted by popular WorldGram travel accounts like @GoHere, which can create nightmare crowding situations the instant it recommends a porting destination. The Eiffel Tower in Paris is patrolled by armed forces at all times because port tourists stampede in at all hours, but the Tower is fortunate enough to be able to afford that security. Prominent amusement parks like Cedar Point in Ohio now must charge by the ride instead of charging gate admission because they can’t build a portwall large enough to secure the grounds. Pebble Beach golf course in California now has PINE agents on carts patrolling the holes 24/7. Other hotspots, such as Monte Alban in Oaxaca and parts north of the aurora oval in Alaska, lack the funding to afford a portwall or beefed-up security, and have thus suffered environmental and ecological decay due to massive increases in foot traffic.

The summit of Everest, despite its hostile climate, has also suffered likewise. Perhaps it hasn’t suffered the same amount of damage as Uluru in Australia, but any damage done to the roof of the world is substantial and permanent. New mountaineering laws have not helped. Anyone caught porting to the summit of Everest is subject to arrest and fines in excess of $500,000. But catching violators and enforcing fines is nearly impossible. While Nepalese officials were glad that porting eased some of traffic to the summit, they have had little control over the inevitable overcrowding that now routinely happens on it, especially when weather conditions prove favorable. How can you control the top of a mountain when anyone can get there by pushing a button and stepping into a wormhole? You can’t keep a police force 33,000 feet up in the sky. You can’t patrol it from the air. Proposals to create a portwall around the summit have proved unworkable.

To prevent being identified at the summit, Jeffrey Greenberg and Paul Gallagher left their passport lanyards behind in a still-unknown location. Jeffrey’s callowness meant that he had vastly overestimated his ability to execute the Everest plan. As they ported from one acclimation point to the next, Jeffrey complained to Gallagher that he felt nauseous and dizzy: unmistakable signs of altitude sickness. An encroaching storm system—not exactly a surprise development around Everest—forced Jeffrey and Gallagher to accelerate their plans and shorten their acclimation intervals so that they could port to the summit and get out before the squall bore down.

That would prove to be a fatal error, because Jeffrey’s lungs were already starved for oxygen. At the peak of Everest, the air only has roughly a third of the oxygen contained in the air at sea level. That thin air, combined with the drop in air pressure, can tax the lungs of even a seasoned climber. And Jeffrey was far from that.

The instant the two boys ported to the South Summit, with an altitude of 28,704 feet, Jeffrey collapsed and began to convulse, the result of a cerebral edema. Gallagher, now terrified, tried to program Jeffrey’s PortPhone to port his friend back to safer ground, but couldn’t get his bandmate’s finger to hold steady on the phone’s scanner prompt. Even if Gallagher had succeeded in this, Jeffrey never would have been able to take the crucial step to complete the porting. He was stuck seizing at the summit, his body desperate to hyperventilate but too weak to do so. His diaphragm cramped into a hard knot. The oxygen supply to his brain got cut off entirely. When Gallagher called American medical startup 1RSPND and begged them to have first responders port to the summit, the company told him that they were over their monthly porting data limit, and that PortSys had throttled their service. Mountaineers that had secured official permits to summit the mountain began to openly grouse at the two boys clogging up the summit, which has a surface area roughly the size of an apartment closet. No one was going to help Jeffrey Greenberg.

It was all over in less than a minute. A nearby team of experienced climbers, who had made the summit the old-fashioned way, rushed to administer CPR to Jeffrey, but by then he had no pulse. With the storm closing in quickly, Paul Gallagher, who would only agree to speak on background for this story, had little choice but to abandon his friend right there, 100 meters below the highest point on Earth.

Jeffrey Greenberg’s body remains on Everest to this day, scattered among the hundreds of other corpses resting on the mountain that cannot be removed, neither by porting nor by law. He is far from alone in being the only young person to meet a gruesome fate by porting somewhere he didn’t belong. There was the case of Taylor Garrison, a college student who accidentally ported into the middle of the Pacific Ocean and drowned. There was the case of Megan Abay, who got stuck in a faulty wormhole that teleported her back and forth from her apartment in Chicago to her parents’ home in Addis Ababa every microsecond, splitting her into two places simultaneously and destroying her mind. There was Leann Egan, who was ported 200 feet above her intended pin in Maui thanks to what PortSys described as a “glitch” in its famously guarded algorithm. She fell to her death.

And then there was the strange case of Anthony Drazic, a seven-year-old who, through yet another system “bug,” ported directly into the body of a full-grown man named Joshua Klim, killing both instantly. Drazic’s body had to be surgically removed from Klim’s abdomen in a gruesome Caesarian section that would take a Serbian coroner thirteen hours to complete. To this day, it remains the only violation of PortSys’s supposedly ironclad law that solid matter cannot port into other solid matter. And then there are, of course, the tens of thousands of runaways and refugees shot and killed by interior patrols lurking in the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, Russia, and every other country looking to crack down on port migration.

These deaths, be they the result of direct failures in PortSys’s algorithm, or the result of PortSys failing to curtail its users’ more reckless impulses, have invariably resulted in solemn statements issued by the company, along with any number of discreetly agreed-upon cash settlements. Melanie Greenberg was offered $28,000 to settle her case against PortSys. When she refused and filed a formal lawsuit, the case was thrown out in Federal court after Congress passed a law that made it illegal to sue “any porting carrier” (curious wording, given that PortSys is the only porting carrier in existence) for accidents resulting from the use of their products.

Calls for PortSys to restrict how users port—into private homes, into war zones, and to dangerous terrain—have been rebuffed by the company in the name of port neutrality. The closest PortSys has come to fixing the problem is establishing two-factor confirmation for any user wishing to port into “conflict zones,” areas marked as dangerous by the company (of course, those designations have often been met with vehement protest by residents of said zones). They promise that the bugs that killed Josh Klim and Leann Egan have been fixed in later software updates. The company’s parental controls, ostensibly introduced to help parents monitor where kids port, remain cumbersome and lightly used.

When Jason Kirsch was confronted with these facts in an email exchange with me, he remained defiant.

“Our terms of service are clear,” he told me. “Our port moderators do not advise people porting to certain areas they have declared as unsafe, but we are not going to close off those areas and restrict the God-given freedoms of those who are experienced and hardy enough to tackle that kind of terrain. I myself have ported to such locations. Have you been to the top of Devil’s Tower? I have. It’s breathtaking. It is incumbent upon users to follow both their better instincts and the laws of anywhere they choose to port.”

“So you’re absolved of all responsibility in these deaths?” I asked him.

“Let me make it clear, Katy: This company saved the world. You know that. I know I speak for my mother when I say it’s a terrible thing any time someone experiences a porting malfunction.”

You mean a porting death.

“No, these are unfortunate malfunctions. In the event of someone harming himself during the porting process, we mourn just as his family mourns.”

I don’t believe that.

“Believe what you want to believe,” Jason Kirsch wrote back. “I have the facts on my side, and what the facts say is that porting solved this planet’s energy crisis, along with its housing crisis and its traffic crisis. People can now evacuate from natural disasters in a snap, and rescue workers can port into those same areas with equal speed. Once we get China on board with porting, we’ll have improved modern civilization by orders of magnitude. To me, it’s insane that some people don’t appreciate this. WE INVENTED TELEPORTATION. How can you not be astounded by that? I’m astounded by it every day! Do you understand how many lives this company has saved? 40,000 automobile related deaths in the United States alone. Every year. All saved. Why is that not the focus of your story?”

(Jason Kirsch is not entirely correct here: While passenger automobile deaths are now nearly extinct, trucking fatalities have increased over 500% since the advent of porting, thanks to decaying highway infrastructure plus huge increases in demand for construction and shipped goods in formerly remote areas.)

Melanie Greenberg has never seen her son’s body. To visit Jeffrey, she would either have to pay an outrageous amount to have it removed from Everest, or she herself would have to port to the summit, something she is terrified to do both from a physical and legal standpoint. For now, Jeffrey’s body remains on display in a permanent, open wake she’ll never be able to attend. She long ago forgave Paul Gallagher for his role in Jeffrey’s death. Instead, she saves the bulk of her ire for PortSys and the Kirsch family. Sometimes, when she wakes up in the morning, she discovers that she’s written hundreds of words in frantic night scribbling. She shows me the notes, which take up an entire filing box.

Are all those notes for the Kirsches?

“Not all of them. I spare more than a few for myself.”

I don’t think you’re alone in having a hard time reckoning with how much freedom to give your children.

“Yeah but my son is dead, so I have hard proof I did a lousy job, don’t I? I caved when I should’ve been stronger. And I let him have this power, because I wanted to have it too.”

This is when I notice a rectangular bulge in Melanie’s pocket. She takes out her old PortPhone6, the screen slightly cracked and the chrome edges nicked and scarred. She knows what I’m about to ask, so she goes ahead and answers in advance.

“It’s for the Kirsches. It’s my only way to get to Emilia and Jason. When they do one of their bullshit listening tours, or when Jason stages one of his insufferable new product launches, that’s when I’m gonna port in and tell them about my son.”

And then?

“And then, I swear to you, I will throw this thing in the fucking ocean.”

The post The Boy on the Mountaintop appeared first on VICE.