Troll

Would reading minds make you hate people more, or empathize with them?

Photo by ROBIN WORRALL on Unsplash

Harvey trolled through the net. In his VR goggles the threads of chatter moved past him as if he was flying among jungle vines. Two web-riots he’d started were still raging. He spread some love among the popular efforts for encouragement but didn’t spend much time on them. They weren’t producing cash any more. He needed something new, something profitable.

His scanning software flagged an image being rapidly shared on the Class of 2037 circles. Harvey pulled it up. Three young men stood on a fourth-floor balcony, pants and underwear pulled down to their knees. The caption read, “My stupid ex found a new way to annoy me.”

It was perfect. The picture hadn’t spread outside Decatur College’s sorority girls. Harvey could break it nationwide if he moved fast. The college’s database yielded the original poster’s address and records. No complaints on record. He had to go through comment threads to find the names of the ex and his two friends.

One friend lived in a building next door to the victim. That told Harvey which security cameras to check. One had a clear view of the beer-can covered balcony. The three frat boys were drinking there when the victim stepped onto her balcony. The ex yanked down his pants, his friends followed, then they all pulled them back up again. Five seconds of triple nudity. Not much, but enough to work with.

The securitycam clip went into VideoShop. Extra arm waves and hip shakes stretched it into fifteen seconds. Some work with the shaping tool reduced the ex’s member by twenty percent. More fiddling made the end of the clip match the beginning for a smooth loop.

Harvey paced around his tiny apartment as he watched the video of dancing, flashing frat boys for three minutes. A pizza box almost tripped him, he kicked it out of the way. His work on the video was smooth. He attached a slanted summary of the break-up, headlined it “Stalker Goes To the Next Level,” and uploaded it. A script automatically linked it on every social media service Harvey had followers on.

Graphs popped up on his display wall. The first tracked viewings of the video, adding a zero every few minutes as the weenie-waggling ex became the internet’s latest star. The other graph showed donations to Harvey’s virtual tip jar. That curve had been flat the past day. Now it turned up as eager fans rewarded him for providing their daily dose of outrage.

Scanning the feeds showed the frat boy was being hammered. On top of direct abuse people were going after his relatives and classmates. An on-campus fan of Harvey posted video of one of the guy’s professors seeing the loop for the first time.

“No college degree for him now,” Harvey gloated.

He looked through the messages accumulated while he’d edited the video. His lawyer’s came first.

“I just finished my meeting with the plaintiff’s lawyers. I showed them enough precedents to guarantee the appeals court will throw out the jury verdict on First Amendment grounds, but they won’t budge.”

The jury had found Harvey liable for the wrongful death of Joey Danvers, a teenager who liked telling racist jokes. Harvey thought that was totally unfair. He hadn’t made the kid jump off a skyscraper. And if the brat didn’t want the whole internet hearing him tell the jokes he should’ve kept his mouth shut.

The lawyer continued, “Since they won’t settle we need to file the appeal as soon as possible to put a hold on them collecting the award from you. I’ll put the papers in as soon as you pay me the next installment of my fee.”

Harvey buried his face in his hands. He needed something much juicier than a drunk frat boy to get enough money for the lawyer. He peeked at the tip jar graph. The spike was already descending from its peak.

Maybe someone had sent him a suggestion. Those expired fast. He scanned through the message queue.

It was the usual mix. Generic fan mail (delete). Nasty notes from previous targets (move to “Tear-Drinking” folder). Suggestions for targets already at their peak media saturation (delete).

One didn’t fit the pattern. “Dear Harvey, I am greatly impressed by your work. I have something you may be interested in. May I treat you to lunch tomorrow? Aaron Tovar, Adjunct Professor, Corbeau College.”

That was promising. Harvey’s best targets came from marketers or political operatives wanting to anonymously take out a rival. A search showed Tovar’s identity was real, with a clean record. He sent back his acceptance.

---

The steakhouse was pricier than any place Harvey would pick. Tovar waited in a leather upholstered booth. Tall partitions muffled conversations from the neighboring tables.

As they shook hands Harvey asked, “So you’re a professor of adjunct?”

Tovar smiled slightly. “I’m a professor of software engineering. Adjunct means I’ve given up three-quarters of my earning potential to have the title. But they let me borrow space in the labs which makes it worthwhile.”

The waiter took their orders. Tovar asked Harvey about a few of his most famous take-downs. He was happy to boast of the details.

When the steaks arrived Harvey paused to take a bite.

“The way you pick out someone’s weaknesses amazes me,” said Tovar.

“Is’a gift,” mumbled Harvey around some half-chewed meat.

“Yes. But I have something that might help you be better at it.”

Harvey made an encouraging hmmm as he chewed.

“Do you have medical nanobots?”

He nodded. He didn’t like the thought of tiny robots swimming through his blood and reporting his measurements to the hospital each day, but it beat paying triple health insurance premiums for being unmonitored.

“Yes, most everybody does these days. I was a subcontractor on the development team for them. On the noise team. You see, it’s easy for the bots to be confused. Is a thump a bad heartbeat or a truck passing by? We taught the bots to filter out the noise.”

Tovar stroked his scalp. “My specialty was the brain. It produces noise with thoughts and memories. I developed an algorithm to let the bots ignore all that.”

Tovar leaned forward, elbows on the table. His intensity made Harvey stop chewing. “What I didn’t share with the government is that I found how to copy the thoughts people had.”

Harvey swallowed wrong and had to cough up some beef. “What?”

“I couldn’t translate them, but I could take the pattern of someone’s thoughts and have my own medical bots—we were using prototypes to test our work—project that pattern into my brain. They were actually producing neurotransmitters congruent—” and the professor went into a spate of technobabble. Harvey took the chance to eat more of his steak.

Tovar cut short the details. “I can hear their thoughts. As they were having them. Sometimes even see images and conversations they were remembering.”

“That’s—wow. I don’t even.”

“Yes, it is amazing. Peeking into a stranger’s thoughts. Feeling what they feel.”

“I can’t even start to think of what I could with that.”

Tovar took a memory rod from his suit pocket. He carefully wiped it with a napkin then dropped it on Harvey’s side of the table. “This has the tools to do it. Some code to mod someone else’s bots over the net. An app to let your bots receive the transmission and give you controls to manage it.”

Harvey dropped his knife and fork on the plate and picked it up, twiddling the memory rod in his fingers as he stared at it.

“Now . . .” Tovar’s voice dropped, “you understand you need to get permission before modding anyone’s bots?”

“Yeah, I know hacking bots breaks a lot of rules.”

“Well. I’m sure you’ll find a way to put this to good use.” At the professor’s wave a waiter appeared and boxed up his meal. Tovar signed the receipt and left.

---

Back at home Harvey transferred the software to his computer. Configuring his own system was easy, the prof had made a simple interface that displayed buttons as balls floating in the air. Squeezing the virtual objects triggered the hack in his bots.

Hacking a stranger took more work. He needed to provide the professor’s tool with the target’s exact location and identity. This was easy for the frat boy he’d exposed to the net yesterday. He still stood at the top of the trending charts and his college had promised a full investigation. Another visit to the college database found his health monitoring identification code.

None of the thousands of people tracking the guy through surveillance cameras had seen him since he returned to his apartment building the previous day. Harvey aimed the software at the guy’s apartment and waited.

His legs were stiff. He paced a little in his room, kicking dirty clothes out of the way. Walking away from the desk he stared at a poster a fan had given him. It was a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge inscribed “A Bridge This Big Needs a Troll To Match.”

A green sphere popped up in the center of his vision. He reached out to squeeze it with his right hand. The connection began transferring thoughts over.

It wasn’t a big deal. She dared me to do it. She laughed about it. The frat boy was obsessing on his torrent of net abuse. The thoughts looped through the same excuses. Then he pulled up his memory of the actual incident. Harvey reached for his keypad to take notes.

The guy had seen his ex-girlfriend step out on her own balcony. “Drowning your sorrows?” she called across the alley.

“Celebrating freedom!” he answered.

A few more insults escalated to her yelling, “I bet your dick is withering away from loneliness.”

“He’s growing with pride!”

“Yeah? Prove it!”

The alcohol-blurred memory kept the feeling that pulling down his pants was the perfect answer to that. One friend said, “Bro solidarity,” and then all three had shorts to knees.

She snapped a picture and turned to go back in. All three pulled their pants up. “Crap, I hope she doesn’t share that,” muttered Harvey’s target.

A buddy punched on the shoulder. “You’ll know she did when strange girls call you up for dates.”

The memory faded back into the spiral of excuse-thoughts.

Harvey reached out for the red ball and squeezed it to break the connection. That was useless. Nothing to fuel the scandal here, just another drunken idiot.

Still, the professor’s toy had worked perfectly. He just needed to find the right mind to read.

A politician came to mind, one who’d barely survived public outrage after saying some stupid things Harvey had publicized. He’d been reelected after the fuss died down and not made the news since. But reading his thoughts might make it possible to bait him into saying something controversial.

Tracking down a state legislator’s info would be tough. Fortunately his political opponents had already found it and made it publicly available to enable anyone who felt like attacking him. Harvey probably wasn’t one of the people they’d intended to help but he cheerfully took advantage of their work.

Once the connection was made Harvey was able to hear the politician’s thoughts during hours of constituent meetings. This provided a new reference level for boredom. After the second hour he broke the connection.

“Dammit!” Harvey cursed to his ceiling. “That was a complete waste of time. Okay, fine, he sincerely believes all that shit he spews. That’s not anything I can use.”

A blinking icon on the computer informed him he’d ignored a priority message. It was a news alert. The mother waging the wrongful death lawsuit against him was holding a press conference. He clicked on the video link.

“Mrs. Danvers, the defendant’s legal team says they’ve offered a settlement out of respect for your grief, but they expect the jury verdict to be thrown out on First Amendment grounds. Will you accept the settlement?” asked a reporter.

“We don’t care about the money. We want to establish that setting the mob on someone, hounding him to his death, is wrong and should be punished. This troll has hurt people and keeps—”

Harvey closed the video. “Shut up, bitch. You totally want the money.” He looked at the icon for Tovar’s hacking tool, realizing he could prove it . . . and maybe find something useful for winning the case on appeal.

By the time he established the connection Danvers was walking away from the podium. A reporter shouted, “How much money would it take for you to accept a settlement?”

She said nothing. The thought came through clearly: I don’t want money. I want my boy back.

It hurt. Harvey clutched his chest as the pain struck him.

Never hearing her boy laugh again.

Failing to protect him from the savages in the world.

Harvey fell out of his chair. He reached for the red ball but couldn’t get a grip on it.

Failing as a mother, not training him to behave better.

Wondering if keeping his father close would have saved him.

Finding something to say to everyone who clumsily tried to comfort her.

He stood and staggered to the bathroom. The red ball kept moving out from under his hand.

Going out to battle in the court when she wanted to stay under the covers and cry.

Facing vultures like these reporters to try for some justice.

Speaking for her boy when he should be there to defend himself.

Harvey splashed water on his face. It didn’t help. He looked up and saw his face in the medicine cabinet mirror. He slammed open the panel so he wouldn’t have to look at it. Using both hands he caught the red ball but squeezing it did nothing.

Danvers was remembering older pains now.

The empty, numb shock when the police told her the news.

Seeing his body forcing her to accept the truth.

Harvey gave up on the red ball. He banged his head against the tiled wall. Again. Harder. The pain wouldn’t stop.

Providing a strong front for his sisters to lean on for their grief.

Finding something to say at the funeral when she was barely strong enough to stand.

The cabinet had his nail scissors. If he had a cut the medical bots would have to treat it. That would shut down the other functions, he hoped. Or make enough pain to drown out the mother’s. He opened the scissors and drove a point into his forearm. It went through muscle, hurting him but not doing any major damage.

Standing over the grave, watching the box be lowered down.

He twisted the scissors. The edge slid through artery and vein. Blood sprayed over the sink. Harvey collapsed on the floor.

---

In the lab Professor Tovar monitored the reports of Harvey’s medical nanobots. The bots assessed the damage and began a vote on whether to call for assistance. Tovar used a hacked bot to spread a message that emergency services had been called and were on the way. The bots tried to seal the wound but Tovar jammed the navigation signals, sending them to the chest. The bleeding continued.

When Harvey’s pulse reached zero Tovar waited five minutes to be sure. Then he overwrote his hacked code with a common nanobot virus. That broke the connection.

He opened a worn paper notebook. On today’s page he wrote, “Experiment 7D: Successful.”

More stories by Karl K. Gallagher are on Amazon and Audible.