The End Specialist

I ask XMN why he dislikes people so much. “Because none of them have ever been nice to me,” he says.

At the time of legalization, XMN (pronounced “examine”) was part of a large subculture of people online known as “trolls,” cyberanarchists who enjoy wreaking as much havoc online as they possibly can: on message boards, on blogs, feeds, everywhere. XMN claims to have once hacked into the email account of a famous politician and deleted its entire contents. “The news was never made public, but in the days after, you could see it in his eyes. He looked like he hadn’t slept for seventy-two hours,” he boasts. XMN also cited multiple occasions when he found the ping feeds of family members of the doctors killed in the New York and Oregon bombings and sent them hateful messages, some in the voice of their deceased loved ones. “I sent one to Sarah Otto. It said, ‘Hey honey. I can’t talk right now. Some kids are roasting marshmallows over my burning carcass. Love, Graham.’ I laughed for days.”

But soon XMN grew to find simple online trolling unfulfilling. “You have to put out a lot of bait just to catch one fish,” he tells me. “And each day it’s harder and harder each day to shock and offend people, even if I send out a photo of a boy being castrated or something like that. They’ve seen it all before, or they know not to click. It’s easy to become desensitized to that kind of stuff online. But it’s nowhere near as easy to ignore if it happens to you for real.”

So on the message board he calls home, an enormous trolling site called SiPhallus, XMN exchanged private messages with a group of fellow trolls and decided it would be more fun to wreak their havoc live and in person. He refuses to go into exact details about what he has done, fearing it will lead to his arrest. He suggests that I try to guess.

Vandalism? “Yes.”

Bomb threats? “Yes.”

Blindings? “Just one, but I’d like to do more.”

Keying cars? “Yes.”

Killing pets? “Yes. Or blinding them.”

Arson? “No, but only because it’s hard to get away with.”

Draining bank accounts? “Yes.”

I ask XMN why he doesn’t choose to cross the line into full pro-death fanaticism and kill people outright. “I’m not a nutjob. I’m not a terrorist,” he protests. “I’m not going to go around killing people. I just think that if people are going to live in this world, why do they deserve to be happier than me? They should have to go through every day feeling as lousy as I feel. And then, maybe, they’ll stop walking around like they own the place. Maybe they’ll have some respect for other people, like me.”

XMN admits to coming from a broken home. His mother died when he was young, and he says his father physically abused him and sexually abused his sister. Ridiculed at school for his gawky appearance, XMN walled off the people around him and took refuge in the online community at SiPhallus. “They’re people like me. They understand that this whole society thing is just a bunch of bullshit.”

But doesn’t he ever crave real contact with people? “Not really. I’m very private. I don’t like being touched. I don’t like it when people are friendly to me. It’s like, ‘Who are you? What the hell do you have to be so sunny about?’”

I ask XMN how many other “terra trolls” are now out there, planning to wreak havoc. His eyes twinkle. It’s the first time all day that I’ve seen him express genuine excitement. “There’s a lot more of us than people think. And more people are joining every day.” It’s hard to know if he’s telling the truth, or simply playing another one of his games. Studies of terra trolling are nonexistent, and laws against it are just now coming into shape. There’s no data for committed terra troll crimes as of yet.

I ask XMN if perhaps this is not the best way to spend one’s time. I ask if it’s perhaps a symptom of a much deeper personal problem that he has failed to address. He thinks for a moment. “Yeah, I’m sure that’s part of it. Then again, I don’t know if the problems I have can ever be fixed. I don’t know how you go about being reborn into a family that loves you. I think I’m damaged permanently. And if that’s the case, everyone else deserves the same fate.”

He finishes his burrito and tells me the story of a time he broke into a woman’s house and stole her cat. He drove the cat fifty miles south and released it out into the wild. “That way,” he says, “she’ll never know what happened to it. It’s a double whammy.”

I ask XMN why he did it.

“Because it’s funny,” he says. “It’s so funny to me. It makes me laugh.” He does not laugh when he says this.

He leaves the shop early as I pay the tab. When I walk out to my car, I see a small sticky note attached to my front right tire. I grab it.

“I could have stabbed your tire, but I didn’t,” the note says. “Just this once, I’ll be a nice person.”

Date Modified: 11/16/2029, 10:19AM

Afternoon Link Roundup

• South African freighter had to be rescued by an American destroyer after it became immobilized in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. [Mail + Guardian]

• Russia’s population climbs above two hundred million for the first time ever as its government makes getting the cure mandatory for all military personnel under the age of thirty. [The Times]

• Casey Jarrett’s mother speaks out for the first time about watching her son being executed. I think it’s possible to feel sympathy for her while having absolutely no sympathy for her son. [ABC]

• The date of the consumer gas ban has been pushed back to March 1, 2037. [FNN]

• Leighton Astor was convicted of killing her billionaire father in an attempt to prematurely claim his estate. Her father had a cure age of sixty-two. The night of the murder, one witness heard her screaming, “I WANT WHAT IS RIGHTFULLY MINE.” [The New York Times]

• New studies show postmortals are 59 percent more likely to develop cirrhosis of the liver within the next ten years than their true organic counterparts. [DanBlog]

• The West Antarctica Ice Sheet may be gone by the end of the decade. [BBC]

• The staunchly anti-cure town of Soda Springs, Idaho (home to the Mormon sect known as the Deliverance Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, or DLDS), has built a wall around itself and quietly seceded from the United States. Town mayor Thomas Maskin explains why: “The concept of America has outlived its usefulness. Why should we pay 30 percent of our salaries to help keep some crack addict in Detroit on welfare for the next thousand years? Why should we care about people in California? Or Florida? Or New York? Why should we share anything with them? They’re not our people. They’re not our family. They’re as foreign to me as Arabs. They all want to live forever and don’t have the faintest clue how they’re gonna eat a hundred years from now. Well, they’re going to find out soon that their country ain’t gonna help them. They’re gonna find out every man is his own country now.” [The New Yorker]

• Annual sales of cigarettes have reached an all-time low. My friend Walsh now accounts for the majority of all Parliaments sold in the US. [NYist]

• The producers of the Saved By The Bell reboot have petitioned the governor of California to allow them to administer the cure to the show’s teenage stars, so that they don’t have to graduate in the show. The governor denied the request. [Variety]

Date Modified: 11/17/2029, 4:44PM

“I’ve Made A Terrible Mistake”

That’s my dad talking. He was grumpy all Thanksgiving Day long, even during the football game.

“I never should have gotten this cure,” he said.

“Why not?”

“You know I got laughed at the other day? I was walking to the supermarket and there was a group of kids outside the store. They couldn’t have been more than twelve. And they just sat there and laughed at me, calling me ‘old man’ and all that garbage.”

“So what?” I said. “They’re just kids.”

“Yeah, and they didn’t let me forget it. They were more than happy to let me know that I don’t belong in this world anymore. I feel like I’m stuck outside a ballroom window, watching a great party everyone but me got invited to.”

“I thought you were happy. I thought all your buddies got it.”

“They did. Ted Maxwell got it and then had his face done. They pulled his cheeks damn near behind his ears. He looks like a moron. I knew I shouldn’t have gotten this done. I knew it!” The tightly upholstered armrest of his dining chair had become worn and frayed. He angrily picked at the loose threads.

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