So, here it goes.
Once, before you were all ones and zeroes, before you were eight bytes to a bit and a thousand of those to a kilobyte, you were flesh. Flesh and blood. Blood and sinew. Sinew and soul. Your genesis (bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh) came forth in a hot slippery rush, a shudder, a throat closing to mute a strangled scream. And there you were.
Throughout your childhood, fresh skin and new mind, you toddled the line between human and not. One minute calm, serene, cute as a button and fresh as a new machine. The next a wild animal, guttural screams burrowed up from the neck of an apex predator, new teeth sharp and skin-splitting. Bone-hard obstinacy and the casual, unthinking callousness of children concatenated into a form that both transmitted unpleasantness, and knew tacitly to accept it. Kids can be cruel, no?
Your first steps were heavy for a child, less delicate feather-light pitter-patter and more furious stomp, whole foot flat on the ground, tiny hands balled into angry fists. You screamed and screamed. Screamed when doors were closed to you, fat little arms too short to reach the handle. You screamed when the white clouds above turned a miserable grey and swelled with rain. You screamed when the sun, valiant, sword in hand, fought through those clouds to shine upon your screwed-up face. Nothing was ever enough. But the television – now that fascinated you. All those bright colours and loud noises, liquid crystals pressed into Boobahs and Courage the Cowardly Dog and Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids. The screen did not merely fascinate you; it captivated you, held you in its mouth, breathed into you its hot affection. Chubby hands pressed against the screen, feeling the heat from its heart as it beat, rotating slowly in the pit of the set. The screen showed you love, even if no one else did.
By the time of your adolescence, you were all cable and spark, electric current flowing where blood should’ve. Things changed. Things paused. Things picked up speed again and sent you hurtling through hyperspace, into the mainframe, into blue screens and Hollywood hackers in silly masks, tap-tap-tapping on a keyboard in a dusty basement – I’m in. And you landed, rounder and plumper than you’d been as a young child, on your desk chair which spun when you kicked up your legs.
Your mother – God rest her – had put the computer in the family room because she supposed it ought to have been for everyone. But then she died and your father, rarely home, could barely even use his phone – a dumb phone, some brick, without a touch screen and used for only calling, for God’s sake! – so eventually the computer became yours entirely. Whilst your father was out again, you unplugged it all, dismembered it piece by piece, and lugged it up the stairs. Tower, cables, monitor, mouse, big clunky keyboards, the detachable webcam that you were supposed to keep turned to the wall in case perverts were watching. Beads of sweat broke out on your forehead but you waited until you’d dropped the computer itself before wiping them away. You needed to feel this. The pain of doing that which you had wanted to do for a long time.
You plugged it all in, made sure the fans in the tower whirred and that the huge mouse rolled and the massive keyboard clacked. The wires were all tangled and confused but that was okay. You felt a little tangled and confused too. Your heart pumped with the angry whir of the hard drive as it spun furiously, whirling like a dervish, locked away in its plastic cage. Two heads, better than one, reading and writing and exercising their muscle memory as you clicked and typed and read and explored.
And oh, how much there was to explore!
Browser games and personal websites, loud heavy metal blasting like a jumpscare on some pages and others glittering with pretty, sparkling logos. Then YouTube came along and you watched men putting things in blenders and the news autotuned and pop song parodies. You watched a person cry about Britney Spears and another shriek that gingers had souls. You tapped out messages to your cousins and classmates on MSN, giggling at the rude emoticons (they were still called emoticons, then) that put up middle fingers and blew raspberries. You learnt about memes, this new language of the internet, read bold white text plastered over photographs of cats and got tricked into singing along to Rick Astley. You woke up, went to school, came on and glued yourself to the seat, eyes wide, watching in glorious awe at this wonderful place, a place that was a place, thank you very much – smartphones were new and nobody you knew had one, so the internet was relegated to your computer desk. It was yours. Your place within a place that was shot through with mould and the heavy stench of alcohol and the roar of a downstairs drunkard. You played games and watched and played games and watched and played games and watched watched watched until one day you saw a video of – and you don’t know this yet, but you’ll find out – a Russian soldier being beheaded in Chechnya.
It wasn’t long.
A shadow of a man, a boy really, not much older than you. Panicked. Which is perhaps too light of a term for it. His head slowly sawn off. The gargle. The squeal of the gash in his neck as he gasps for air that cannot reach. It sounds like wind whistling through the trees.
You stared, scared, horrified, sickly fascinated, snapped your own head, as though your neck was cut, towards the door. But nobody was there, nobody to see your indiscretion.
Quietly, you turned it off.
You pretended that you had never seen it at all.
Using a book that you pored over at the library, you learnt about the inner workings of this machine. You learnt it inside out, transistors and transmitters. One day, when things got slow, you backed up the few photographs and memes and music tracks you’d ripped from Limewire onto multiple thumb drives and stripped the whole thing. Cleaned it down to the bare metal. And then using what you’d learnt, you built it back. Reinstalled a newer, cleaner version of Windows, cured it of the viruses it had picked up, some laying dormant, watching.
When it was all done, you held your breath and held down the power button and watched as it – your creation, now – came back to life. You feasted on the glory and heroism of doing something on the computer that wasn’t just playing Flash games and watching YouTube, and spent days picking out sparking copper wire from between your teeth.
Now that you had bent the machine to your will, it was time to learn how to make it tick. You taught yourself HTML and CSS, acronyms that formed the Web’s backbone. You slid your tongue along that sharp spine, dug your teeth in and pulled out the sinew of programming, JavaScript and Python raw and bloody on your tongue. You stayed up late, slamming commands into your terminal, creating websites and making them beautiful, learning and relearning syntax and functions and how to make things fizz and buzz. The corners of your desk dug into the soft flesh of your forearms, making it look like two permanently-etched scars. At school, when your father begrudgingly agreed to come to your parents’ evening, the compsci teacher told him that you’d do well at A-level. Maybe even university. He’d nodded sagely and said yes, she’s always playing on her computer at home.
Anyway, the Internet gave you safety you didn’t get at school, nor home. You’d be mocked and laughed at by the girls, but the boys ignored you – fine by you, you didn’t like them anyway. The landscape had changed. The lush greenery of the jungle, each tree curved by a nook or a cranny, wells of information dug into the soil, a place you could explore for years and years and never get bored – it was gone. Razed to the ground. Now the Internet was the very same screensaver you’d had first of all, a broad green field under an azure sky, empty, endless, artificial. The waters were muddied. Now everybody had the Internet, in their pockets and in their backpacks. Even you – your phone lit up occasionally as you typed, slumped beside you on the desk, screen cracked from being thrown in a rage. The Internet (proper noun now, I, I, I) was made up of three or four or five places that people really bothered to congregate. Normies, you thought furiously. You tapped and typed and made your way, gradually, to other places.
The computer of yore was gone now, replaced by one sleeker, with a curved monitor and quicker speed. On this screen you saw imageboards much clearer, read forums long abandoned with threads that you still found funny. You didn’t have social media and you were happy for it. You had taken the pink pill and talked about moids and how society was past requiring the male of the species. Elsewhere, you cloaked your true sex and wrote posts, tinged with betrayal that only you could taste, about the bitches in your class and wished upon them death, rape, mutilation. Switching sex was easy. So was switching race – you pretended to be entire other ethnicities to denigrate black people, Muslims, immigrants, whilst pretending to be one yourself, thinking it’d come off softer if you did. Eventually you gave up entirely and said what you wanted, no pretence. It didn’t matter so much when everything was anonymous anyway.
Time shifted and distorted, first a wet clay ball in your hands that you could shape and mould and destroy to your heart’s content. But the older you got, the more the clay dried out, and it grew smaller and smaller and less malleable. Things changed. Your school days – ones that you had once looked upon with mingled fury and terror – transformed into a far-off collection of memories, snapshots with fire-curled edges and dimness in the image. You began to see those days as still images, endless streams of crunchy cafeteria PNGs and a callus on your hand from holding your pen too tightly transformed into a JPG and a GIF of two dancing anime schoolgirls. Now you had left school and graduated into a slightly comfier chair behind the same desk you had spent your whole life. The Internet you trolled in 2017 was a different place from the internet you’d used in 2013, which was wholly different from the web you surfed in 2007, and even though it is all really just the same thing, the waves of nostalgia hit you hard like a bout of sickness and you desperately tried to claw it back.
Whilst your former classmates went to university and then graduated and began their entry into the workplace, whilst they married and birthed children and bought houses, you stayed. You remained, a dusty relic, a fossil, not moving from behind your computer screen. And you didn’t need to! You built websites on a freelance basis, earning from platforms that other, better programmers had set up. You thought briefly about filming yourself naked when someone you vaguely knew started doing it and, apparently, made some serious money. But then you looked at the fat on your belly and the stretch marks on your thighs and decided against it after all. Instead, you watched as the girl you used to know did it. You made an account on a site that she used and followed her, even paying a couple of quid to do so, all so you could comment that she was a whore and would never redeem herself on a video she’d posted. She responded by blocking you immediately and refunding the money you’d spent – though you suspected that this was a feature of the site rather than something she had done on purpose.
You could go days without speaking to anyone. Occasionally the people from Universal Credit would ring to check whether you were still applying for jobs (a gruff ‘yeah’ usually got them off your back), and every so often you would thank (and perhaps even tip) delivery drivers who dropped off food or parcels. But beyond that there was nothing. You told your father that you were working on your computer, and sometimes you were, but he didn’t deign to bother you at all. Creeping along to the bathroom at night, you could curl your head around the doorframe of the living room and see him, sprawled, half-dead, stinking of spirits.
It didn’t bother you at all.
On and on you continued, trajectory facing downwards, rotting your mind with YouTube drama and cartoon pornography and breakcore mixes to lose your mind to. When people online pissed you off, you would spend hours sending them increasingly obscene messages, eventually careening into death threats. How these people thought you’d kill them through a PC screen, you weren’t sure, but one day your father yelled up to you, your food’s here.
Strange. You hadn’t ordered anything. But you heaved yourself up from your chair anyway and went downstairs. The delivery driver was squinting, cap half-off, a bottle of pop sweating in his hand.
And then another appeared.
And another.
You ran upstairs and opened Discord and saw, with horror, a pastebin link that had been posted. You’d been doxxed. Strangers knew your name, your address, your date of birth, your father’s name. They wished death and rape upon you, upon your father, wished that your own father would rape you to death. Anger and terror congealed in your mouth. A quiver shot through you, a whole array of arrows notched and shooting into every hole, every pore. Your heart shook, juddering and jolting upwards until it was in your mouth. You could taste it, the coppery tang of blood, your jaw gaping open and swinging shut with the force of its pumping. A staccato of anxiety, but somewhere beneath that, of pure life.
The messages kept coming. You cleared out your old email and began a new one. You wiped all your social media accounts, swearing not to use them again but, at the slightest twinge of boredom, signed up for new ones. You already used a VPN but that wasn’t enough. Now you started using Tor, marvelling in the new sequence of relays each reload leapt through to bring you, slowly, what you wanted to see. Occasionally, you checked your old inbox again. Each time there were new emails, new messages on Twitter, and each one made blood fill your mouth. You started eating more, even when you knew you were full. Your clothes stopped fitting you. Your skin grew greasy, hair lank, face pallid. One day you didn’t get out of bed, just stayed on your phone, wrapped up between the sheets. But that was an improvement, wasn’t it? You didn’t go online, except to use your phone, and that barely counted.
One day your father – pissed off and frightened in turn by the fact that strangers online had his name and address – went out to buy a new lock for the front door, and demanded you went with him. Penance, perhaps, or a punishment. Regardless, you went. You tied up your unwashed hair and cleaned your teeth for the first time in a number of days. Outside, the sun practically bit you, sinking its sharp rays into your fleshy vampiric pallor. It was warm out. The big jumper, practically a uniform now, was unnecessary. You sat in the front seat in silence as your father swerved things only he could see. You smelled stale vodka on his breath. Wanting to smell something fresher, you rolled down the window.
The journey into town took longer than you remembered it ever taking in the past. Ahead of you stretched verdant hills, each one climbing higher towards the sky than the ones which stood before. The sky poured blue over gold. Your father swore and murmured that they’d better not be shut when he got there. The cool breeze locked onto the parts of your skin that were bare – legs, hands, face – and gave you an icy, minty feeling. You shut your eyes, let the rhythm of the car’s motion and the angry roar of the engine lull you into a feeling between somnolence and alertness, the softened-gaze middle space. Your hand lolled out of the car’s window, and when you drove over the ford, your tummy squirming at the sudden dip, water splashed up and dappled your fingers. Tall trees shaded you, their leaves as big as human hands. You felt safe within them, safe in the real world, in a way that was foreign to you.
When you got home you stood with your purchase in the ten-pence carrier bag, dangling from your wrist. You stared at the computer, and it stared back. Somehow, miraculously, miserably, you began to cry. The cold black of the powered-off screen stared at you, narrowed its blinking eye. Reality was hard to bear, but so was this.
As though it were a child, you put your arms around it, feeling for the wires plugged in at the back. You pulled. The whole thing turned off entirely. What you’d bought clattered noisily and, perhaps, uselessly to the floor. You mourned and whimpered and brought your knees to your chest like a child and stared blankly at this place that was yours, and that you’d loved, into this place that is no longer, and never was, a place at all.