Girls had ruined her life; being one, and otherwise. That’s why men who committed acts of violence because they were rejected by women were, in her mind, the lowest, weakest members of society. No one would fuck you because you’re ugly? Try being dropped by your best friend of four years for no reason at all. Try being rejected romantically, plus by friends all your life. Try being freshly twelve and on the phone with a girl who feels a little dangerous but laughs at all your jokes, and she’s trying to get you to talk shit about another girl, so you do, and then that girl is on the line too, and then you start to think maybe it’s not your jokes that are funny. Romantic rejection aside, incels would never survive girlhood. That’s the clincher.
Scientists loved to point out how women age faster than men. She recently turned twenty-five and learned that is the exact, precise point you start to decay. Like you’re growing all your life, and then at twenty-five you begin rotting. This is called losing collagen. To slow this process, you need to use a thing called retinol, to stop eating sugar, and to cut out alcohol entirely.
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Every day it seemed there were new demands as to who she was supposed to be, demands in the form of infographics or newsletters floating around, and she kept finding creative new ways to fail. She’d go to work with shower-wet hair, not realizing how puffy and raw she looked without makeup because she’d get ready before the sun came up so she could catch the bus on time. Halfway through the day, when she finally had a chance to go pee, she would discover her underwear was put on inside out. Some days she wouldn’t take a break at all if it didn’t line up with her intermittent fasting. And then when she got home from the office at night, in those three fleeting hours between dinner and what an app on her iPhone called her “optimized bed time,” she would eat nineteen-dollar BBQ soy wings on her mail-order modular sofa and doom scroll until she could no longer feel her limbs. She would spend the next twenty to thirty minutes in front of her bathroom mirror, squeezing the sebum from the enlarged pores on her nose. She wanted to be pore-less. Actually, she wanted to be formless. The body just got in the way.
In bed, she would scroll for an additional hour. She liked to read reader-insert fan fiction about her current favourite Vocaloid or K-pop idol. She was embarrassed about this, but there was nobody around her to keep the secret from. Just the placid, non-judgemental voice of her meditation app.
With a subscription-based plugin called VoiceBox, she could select from a virtually unlimited number of unique voices – from the sensual, soft and ASMR-like to the high-pitched lilt of an anime girl or Disney princess – to dictate not only her meditation but her entire OS. The thing about VoiceBox was that, for a monthly fee, real live girls provided their real live voices. It wasn’t pre-recorded phrase. The girls would record a soundbite and AI did the rest, using the one-of-a-kind tenor of their precious human-girl voice to read subscribers things like text messages, the weather, and their daily step count, all while maintaining a friendly and conversational rapport throughout the day (although there were those who signed up for aloof or even mean-spirited VoiceBox). It was something about the personalized experience and the creator’s consent that made the program so immensely popular; the parasocial relationship between the real and the digital, sort of like the girlfriend experience of audio porn, de-porned just enough for the mainstream.
Personally, she missed the days of Alexa and Siri. She liked that she couldn’t imagine what they looked like. She would end her nightly routine with the out-of-the-package voice, bland and droning like the teacher from Charlie Brown, if you get that reference, repeating steady affirmations in her weary, overstimulated ears. Then she would roll over, sometimes jerk off to nothing, and fall asleep. She didn’t dream.
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When she was a kid, there were nights where she couldn’t sleep because she had so much anxiety about a nuclear disaster. There was a nuclear powerplant across the lake in the town where she grew up, and if there was an accident or a leak, her town would be fucked. She knew this at age nine. Once, her teacher said they had a bunch of pills kept in a drawer in the principal’s office, and if there was ever a nuclear accident, they would all take the pills and it was supposed to help. She asked her mom about it one night, unable to sleep, and her mom laughed and said the pills weren’t really going to do anything at all, they’re just there to make us feel better. If an accident really did happen, we would all be doomed. Our skin would melt clean off. That’s the thing her mom said to cheer her up. Don’t worry, if everyone’s dying it’s almost like no one is. That was what she hated most about the end of the world; she thought it would have been a bit more biblical.
Sometime in the last two months, the sky had gone and turned completely orange. Talking heads on screens threw around words like “air quality” and “climate crisis,” her lungs got coated in dust, and it got harder to breathe for everyone. She stopped going outside altogether. Her work-from-home setup was fine. She had a solid PC build and a comfortable and expensive ergonomic desk chair. Despite her previously stated shortcomings (i.e., being twenty-five), she had money, a good job, and a moderately high IQ. Historically, her unpreparedness had been like a defining characteristic. She didn’t even have winter boots. To remedy this, she started getting into astrology to calm her anxious mind. It was cheaper than therapy, and she had always believed in a force beyond reason. She had apps and webpages bookmarked charting her planetary alignments for the next decade, every transit, every phase, every emotion calculated to the last whatever. She took comfort in seeing her life – or someone’s version of it – pinpointed before her.
This was exceptionally unattractive to men. Nobody wanted to fuck her. It had only happened once before, as an experiment (but not her own). She guessed the spatial awareness was somewhat of a turnoff. But that was fine. She could plot the next ten years from the safety of her large, bird shit-splattered condo window, seeing no one and, more importantly, being seen by no one. The gym was out of the question.
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On Tuesday, she awoke to an email from her supervisor taking personal responsibility for addressing an employee of colour by the wrong name. This was followed by a 30-minute one-on-one phone call from HR to go over an objective retelling of the situation. She could tell the HR representative was still in bed. He sounded sideways. Yet another colleague, distraught by the instance, refused to complete their tasks and stopped responding to their Slack messages, so she had to finish their work herself. She knew her supervisor didn’t actually care. At the end of the day, he had something to close his laptop to, like a house, and a car, and a nice salary, and a family. In reality, it probably had far less to do with the fact that he was a man in power and more to do with him being born between the years of 1965 and 1980.
The whole thing irked her and threw off her schedule to an annoying degree. And by now, she could feel a pulsating bass, the rhythmic affectation of some music – but definitely not a song – many floors beneath her going BUH, BUH, BUHBUHBUH repeatedly. She was introduced to the idea of “quiet quitting” a few months back – a new name for the old concept of doing the bare minimum. She thought, she could do that. Distracted from her work, unmotivated and perhaps feeling just a bit destructive, she allowed her cursor to hover over one of the pop-up ads taunting the edge of her computer screen.
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She wasn’t stupid. She knew this was some malware or ransomware or phishing scam. It was surprising how little pop-ups had changed since the advent of the internet. She wondered who in their right mind was clicking on these, expecting to reap their promised rewards, no strings attached. Maybe somebody doing their honest work, accidentally closing a tab. Or someone who clicked on legit links that looked similar to this fake one, which would infect their computer and force them to take a day or two off to give IT remote access and make sure the company server’s goose wasn’t totally cooked.
She did visit many astrology-related webpages, some pretty rudimentary and others quite hardcore. It wasn’t unusual for her to go down a rabbit hole in search of horoscope readings or relatable zodiac memes. This was called plausible deniability. Still, a small part of her wondered if somehow visiting a weird-looking link might actually connect her with an archaic and forgotten – and therefore more real – corner of the internet, before there were things like rounded edges and conversion rate optimization.
She clicked.
Immediately, something called Dev0urment.exe began downloading, and she sat back and watched it install. Soon afterwards, her cursor started to lag like it was on downers, and Zoom meetings began to delete themselves. She liked how that felt, so for good measure, she clicked on a button labelled Soft Legit Data Compressor and found a download for NavBotFoxyMesh.exe hiding underneath. Free Reddit Awards took her to RoboMine, and a particularly innocuous 3D Desktop Toolbar Key installed a peculiar extension called sigilMod.
She hadn’t meant to go this far, but then there was Download Player, which was simple enough, and AdChomp, which just made sense. Soon she had spent the better part of the afternoon reorganizing the guts of her computer. Fake-looking search bars appeared at the top of her home screen. Whenever she opened a new tab, a swarm of monarch butterflies chased her cursor away, and somehow, Club Penguin was up and running. Her computer hummed threateningly like an airplane about to take off and snuffed out the sound of the apparent rave downstairs, until the machine shut off entirely and left her looking at herself in the extinguished screen, which felt very poetic to her.
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When her computer rebooted, it welcomed her with a flurry of error messages and overriding those (she knew how to do that) led her to a screen inviting her to set up a bootleg VoiceBox OS. She didn’t know how to get around that one, so she just kept clicking “next,” and when she was done, a new voice welcomed her back to her desktop and ran through the eight Slack messages she had been sent in the last fifteen minutes. Only, it wasn’t a new voice at all, but her own voice talking back to her. It took her a second to identify this echo, but instead of being disconcerted, she felt oddly validated and comforted. After all, this version of herself was a pore-less algorithm, offering zero competition, wanting nothing and appearing as nothing.
She tried to return to work but was too excited by the prospect of engaging with her new jailbroke operating system, which had also miraculously spread to her phone. It read her email, gave her the news from Twitter, and analyzed her entire birth chart in under a second, so it knew the exact way to communicate with her. It absorbed the information stored on her period tracker app to order the ideal taco salad bowl for dinner, only the human delivery man fucked up and waited outside the building instead of doing a contactless drop off at her unit’s door. She threw on her least rag-like sweatpants and scurried to the elevator. The music got louder and louder as she descended, hungry, and aware she wasn’t wearing a bra.
She discovered the source of all the noise from her austere condo lobby. It was another kind of pop-up, a transitory travelling circus that infested an adjacent storefront, vacant long since the original tenant had been driven out of the area due to the never-ending rise in rent. It was filled with tables and ephemera and pop-up people, who appeared out of thin air as 3D versions of their online accounts, like a pop-up book or greeting card, who only ever knew of each other, and whose social gathering revolved around the trading of goods and services for money. Or, more specifically, the electronic transfer of invisible wealth.
Many of the goods and services focused on the theme of self-improvement, like T-shirts and rug latch hooking kits that promoted strategies on how to heal your trauma by addressing it head-on. The truth was, she liked astrology not because it prepared and informed her, but because it was a way to alleviate any responsibility she might feel over her own life. Like whatever was happening with the weather, or whatever civil unrest was happening across the world, it was out of her hands and frankly none of her business. All she could do was cross her fingers and prolong her own decay to the best of her natural ability. She grabbed her salad from the delivery man – who seemed preoccupied with some mysterious and hushed psychodramatic phone call – and ran back to the elevator.
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By Wednesday, it had more or less perfected language. It had answered work emails on her behalf with ease, and filled in for her on Zoom calls without video, mimicking her inflections and catch phrases. It even advocated for her in areas she had previously neglected for herself. By nearly all accounts, it was a better version of her. At night she whispered to it in the dark like the last two awake at a sleepover. A sacred conversation between the most trusted of allies. Adam and Eve in reverse.
You should quit your job, it said.
I probably will in the new year.
You know there are no new years anymore, right? Just one big long one till the end of it all.
Maybe it’s arbitrary that we’re going through all this right now.
Maybe arbitrary keeps you human. You’d probably keep cutting your bangs even if there were zombies. You’d still be you.
I just mean that maybe it doesn’t actually mean anything at all in the grand scheme of things.
Life is a transition. This is the last one, from life to death. (It paused here.) Isn’t it funny how mortality kind of means both life and death? The state of being destined to die.
For the first time, she started having vivid dreams. Ones where she lived on a farm, or something like a farm. She could smell wildflowers and soil and looked off her back porch into a dense cornfield, a tall golden audience – and looking up, it was a purple-ish dusk, and there was no music but the blinking lights of fireflies everywhere. She felt inspired to escape the city, from the noise and routine and tedium and various forms of consumption. She decided to use her vacation days and get an Airbnb in some foresty area outside the suburbs. A cottage maybe, one of those micro-cabins built for weekend getaways, the ones the size of outhouses or storage lockers or large wooden barrels that cost almost nothing to build but offered patrons the chance to LARP as a hobbit or granola naturalist or the Unabomber.
She found one that was certainly a cedar hardware shed, elevated with a small loft the size of a single twin mattress, and had the word “Retreat” in the listing title. It was perfect. It would change her. She messaged the host, who wrote back with lots of exclamation marks and gave her specific directions to the Retreat. On Friday night, she ordered an Uber to deliver her from her condo, whose primary focus now seemed to be facilitating these algorithmic bazaars. They drove for fifty minutes without speaking to each other; the driver occasionally murmured into his earpiece, and his own VoiceBox instructed when and where to turn. They drove until they were on a stretch of road with no streetlights, with empty fields on one side and trees on the other.
The car rolled to a stop in front of what appeared to be a dirt road leading into the woods. She could see on the driver’s phone that this was the correct address, despite there being nothing there. The host had told her to turn down a driveway to get to the Retreat, so she tried to get the driver to turn, but he wouldn’t. Finally, she decided she would hoof it on foot, even though it was getting dark. She had everything she needed in her backpack and on her phone, and the feeling thrilled her and connected her with some primordial sensation of self-sufficiency and the urge to gather. She started down the driveway, and the Uber pulled away, and she opened up Airbnb to let the host know she was arriving soon.
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Only, the Airbnb app wasn’t on her phone. Maybe she had booked it on the web browser. She signed into her account to open her chat with the host, but nothing was there. She had no conversations, no recent bookings. She couldn’t even find the listing for the Retreat when she searched for it. She asked her phone for help, but there was no reply. It was just a brick in her hand; whatever had possessed it was no longer there. And now she was surrounded by trees, alone, without her own voice as company.
So she lay down on the driveway, which wasn’t really a driveway, but a dirty forest floor older than she could fathom, made up of the remains of a rabbit or maybe a squirrel, leaves, sticks, moss, and a history of other things. She couldn’t see the stars beneath the thick black paintbrush trees, but out here she could begin to imagine them.