“Are you a bot?” My young cousin asked me. I was being asked what they were all thinking, by my own kid.
“What’s a bot?” I wondered.
“They just go around downvoting anything with key words. They cancel people.” A raised hand explained.
“I don’t understand.” I admitted. “Do you mean software?”
The kids laughed at me.
“No. Bots are people. They just do one thing. They cancel people when they say certain words.” One of the children told me.
As they were dismissed to the playground, I looked at their teacher. ‘Bring your parent to school day’ had taught me a lot about what the young generation was learning. Their teacher just shrugged.
I left the school, to return to later to pick up my kid. I went and got some coffee and wondered what I must have said to make the students think I could be a bot.
I’d told them that I was an editor that worked for Amazon Prime. I wrote memos, proofread documents and researched communication. Sometimes I had to replace words with better words. I used a search for key words and when I found them: I replaced them with phrases and acceptable terminology. How did that make me a bot? They weren’t sure, they had asked me if I was one - a bot.
The truth.
My fiftieth birthday came and went without anyone noticing. I preferred it that way, I didn’t need to be reminded I was getting old. I remembered hearing about the internet for the first time, during the Nineties, when I was in my twenties.
Back then it was called the World Wide Web and only rich people had cell phones. Everyone else had to plug their home computers into the phone jack and dial into the internet using an America Online disc for a few hours of service. It could take an hour to establish a connection and the whole thing could be interrupted if someone called you, so you did it at night when there were no phone calls.
I wrote short horror stories that I sent via my Electronic Mail that I had to pay for, before free email on Yahoo became popular. They circulated around as people forwarded them. Sometimes I got an email that had one of my stories because the world of the internet was still very small. It felt like there were only so many people and it was possible to know most of them and if you didn’t know somebody then somebody that you did know, knew that person.
As the years went by everything exploded and blossomed and got faster. I got my first cell phone in 2000 and it cost money to make a call or to do a text message. The plan came with a limited amount of minutes and text messages. Most phone calls were still done at home. People used public libraries to get online and had to wait in line to get online.
One day I found one of my stories published by someone else. There wasn’t much I could do about it. All of my stories I had sent had continued to circulate, sometimes in variation, often with different titles or credit. It became impossible to find my original work signed by me, but easy enough to locate some version of my stories.
My favorite was “Something Came Down The Chimney”, although it was one of the more difficult ones to locate. I wrote on Open Diary, Creep And Paste, Post Apocalyptic Media, My Space and Bethesda, each during the height of their glory. I was Virgin Poet, Drowned Wolf, Vespacide, Dark Lord Schindler and Goris The Scholar, respectively. When Google + became the big place for the best horror stories I was there, as Darwinz Petz.
I was present for the rise and fall of all of those websites and posted stories frequently, all of them my best work, at the time.
Reddit is fun, but I’ve seen such a thing come and go and it always seemed like it would last forever. Increased censorship always preceded the eventual collapse of all of the places I had journeyed through. It had never occurred to me that it was all connected, that there were people who were literally trying to destroy the stories.
“Bots.” The children call them, these days.
They had gone by many names: ‘Cheater’, ‘Hacker’, ‘Napster’, ‘Troll’, ‘Identity Thief’, ‘Spammer’, ‘Hater’ and ‘Incel’ are what they were called before, in the old days. Now they get called ‘Bot’. It was almost as though they were never really people, with such dehumanizing names.
Was I a bot? Had my job made me into one? I wasn’t sure, because there was specific criteria involved with each new evolution of the Cheater.
The original Cheater would look up game codes and use them to beat a game. The Hacker came next, using passwords to go where they weren’t allowed to go. The Napster was next, uploading and downloading music without paying for it. I had done all three of those things at one point or another.
Then came the Troll, leaving unwanted comments, challenging someone on their own post. The Identity Thief arose from that, remaining anonymous and continuing to post under an assumed alias. I never stole anyone’s identity, but I had retaliated when someone blatantly ripped me off for something I had created. I was young and hadn’t learned to just let it be.
Using email lists was all it took to be called a Spammer. It was around the time when it became unpopular to forward chain emails. Before then, it was what everyone always did.
I became reclusive, unable to keep up with all the changes. My refusal to adapt or use new lingo, complaining about the constant bombardment of useless ‘Information Pollution’ made me a genuine Hater. It was the first time I accepted the label, realizing I was indeed a Hater. Ironically, being a Hater meant everyone hated me, not that I actually hated anyone. I regard hatred as deliberate ignorance, a waste of effort for someone who loves knowledge and learning, as I do.
As a divorced-single parent raising a small family and working two jobs, I didn’t have time to date. When I did have free time, I pursued the same interests I always had, writing and reading and commenting and responding to comments. I started just being myself online, not bothering to conceal my identity, as I knew how easy it was to find out who someone was. Doxing was around at the beginning, and it had only become easier. I made it clear who I am, where I live and what I do for a living, taking all the fun out of Doxing me.
The flip side of being who you are for Halloween is that people presume you are a monster.
Since none of my interests were concealed, even my tastes in pornography, I stood among an elite crowd of boring older males called Incels. I didn’t like the term, but I couldn’t deny it. I haven’t gotten laid for about eight years, now. If anyone bothered to spy on me, amateur work, they would also find that I have pretty mundane searches and look at women my own age for a thrill. Just an Incel; I almost wish I was more perverted, at least then I would have something to hide.
I don’t need any privacy.
So, when I considered all of that, looking back: I was all of the previous incarnations of the Bot. I worried that I was one.
Upon realizing that I was a Bot, the seed of horror was planted in my heart. I had rarely felt actual terror in my life. I am a jaded and brutal person, seeking anything scary or disturbing, instead of avoiding the horror. I always was.
In Sunday school I drew pictures of Dracula and Satan. When they wouldn’t let me do that: I drew Jesus on the cross in gory detail, blood dripping and flies buzzing. In grade school all of my creativity went towards ghosts and chimeras. I read lots of books and most of them were the scariest ones I could get my hands on.
The fear.
Fear is my addiction, my darkness, the thing that is wrong with me. I chased fear my whole life and it only got further away, harder to catch. At fifty years old: the only thing I am afraid of is…well…I can’t think of anything I haven’t pursued that scared me. In chasing fear, it loses its meaning, because I was running the wrong way.
I looked in the mirror and asked: “Am I a Bot?” and I knew that I wasn’t. I was never really any of those things. I was always just myself, doing what came naturally to me. A storyteller, a horror writer and someone who has deep resolve, refusing to yield to those who sing the fool’s praises.
I realized that behind the Bot, behind the Hacker or the Troll, there was an actual monster standing behind them. Not the Napster, not the Incel, but those who were truly hidden behind the people who wore the labels, Troll or Hacker.
Jesus on the cross had INRI written on a board and nailed over his head. The original Hacker. But Jesus didn’t nail himself to the cross. He just got labelled while he was on display. “Here’s the bad guy, look no further.”
They’ll tell you that my account isn’t plausible or that it isn’t horror. They are hoping that by labelling me that they will remain concealed, that their activities will go unnoticed, that only the guy dripping blood with nails stuck in him is the villain. He’s an Incel, a Spammer, an Identity Thief.
What he isn’t - a liar.
When I realized that my fate is to be publicly crucified, I began to tremble in fear. I would not be remembered for who I truly was. The liars would win, they would write my story, label me, tell everyone that I caused all their troubles. They would steal my best stories and they would profit from my destruction.
I lost my boldness and felt unending dread. At last I had gotten a fix, a moment of sincere and utter dread. I wanted to die, to end my depression, my agonized paranoia and the fear that made my sweat stink.
There could be no escape from my own shadow. I could never be Chris Evans or Elon Musk or Stephen King or Mohammed. I would never be sacred; I would always be the villain.
My stories were great, greater than the sum of me. But they weren’t mine; as long as they had my name on them: they would be removed. My stories would be removed, or they’d be downvoted by collaborations, or simply ignored by anyone with self-respect. My best work would be plagiarized, shamelessly.
My life’s work was a complete waste of time. I felt a loathing, for myself and all that I had created. In that loathing rose something much deeper than any fear I can describe. It arose as a new creature, something tangible.
I could see them, and I knew why I had to be demonized and dehumanized. I stood in place of them, their proxy. They existed, they were real, and my experiences had given me access to the proof of them.
The Cancelers.
The name I gave them sounded like ‘cancer’ and remined me somehow of Stephen King’s The Langoliers. King was safe, to mention a fictionalized version of the monsters, because his writing was sacred and all of it, even the stuff he tried to publish anonymously, all of it safely belonged to him. Whatever he wrote turned to gold, even if most of it was mindless drek.
I had always invented monsters for my stories, I had never written about anything that was completely real. All of my characters were just inventions, too. Everything I had ever written before was purely fictional.
I was afraid to begin writing about the Cancelers. I was terrified to describe them, to reveal them, to look upon them and see the ultimate horror. I found that my skills as a writer were inadequate. I found that my courage would not help me.
Standing there, at the threshold of truth, I felt paralyzed. My fingers refused to transfer my thoughts. I just blinked at the blank white screen and sweated. Whatever I said would be my undoing.
“I must first be undone. I can leave nothing for them.” I told myself. I looked around at my collection of vintage books, horror and science fiction, seven thousand paperbacks. I knew of no book that was missing from my beloved collection.
I gulped and realized I needed to warm up. I had a lot of aspects of myself that needed to be destroyed. I could leave nothing for them, when they came for me. I started crying as I realized what I must do, but it was going to take great willpower and I had to be fully committed.
Shaking and weeping I tossed them all out my window into the backyard. As I got down to my favorites it became a little easier, as the anchor became lighter. I took a gas can and poured it over the paper, as it began to snow.
Then, with a scream of mind-shattering defiance, I struck the fatal match and stood back. They burned and I knew I would not be able to turn back. I went inside and found all of my notebooks and the boxes of copies of books I had published. I threw it all onto the flames.
I went to my computer and after what I had done it was much easier to delete everything. Every story I had ever written, all of my notes, all of it. I needed a drink but reminded myself I had stopped drinking long ago:
“It will only make things worse.” I reminded myself.
I still had too much. I drove to the bank and closed my account. When I had all of my savings, money I had earned ghost writing and from selling the occasional story, I took it and scattered it out of my car window as I drove home in the dark snowfall.
By midnight I had nothing left. I had quit my job, cancelled my lease and donated my car. I called all of my kids and told them how much I loved them, telling them that I had just gotten diagnosed with an unknown, but fatal disease.
I was not going to survive for very long after writing about the Cancelers. I was sure of it. All the time I was laying waste to my life I felt dread and even moments of panic when I wanted to stop. I could not stop, there was no going back.
“Jesus, you know what this is like, you crazy bastard. Help me out, wouldya?” I prayed for the first time since Sunday school. “Um, amen.”
I suddenly remembered that there was a box in my attic that I had stored from my early days. Paper stapled together and with illustrations. Ghost stories I had written between the age of eight and fourteen, when I started keeping notebooks instead.
I climbed slowly into my attic with a flashlight, during the witching hour. I was horrified and shaking with fear of what I would encounter. I had to do it, I couldn’t leave anything behind for the Cancelers to feed upon.
Tears cut through the dust and ashes on my face as I dropped the box from above. I went down the ladder and like a nightmare I slowly took the last of my works to the fire that was still burning in the backyard.
I emptied it out onto the smoldering pile of books, mine and all the ones I had loved and collected. There could be nothing for them to cancel. I had to cease to exist, it was the only way.
Blinking, I stared into the glowing darkness, snow falling all around me. My fears were momentarily diminished as I saw a note from a teacher, paper clipped to “The Whimper Whoppers” a collection of three of my ghost stories I had written when I was ten. I reached into the heat and took it.
I read it aloud before I added it to the flames:
“Derik,
This is your best work, so-far. Keep writing, you will be a great author. You have a lot of talent.
-Mrs. Lyeman”
I shuddered in loathing and horror. I was not ‘talented’ or ‘great’ and I never would be. I was prey for the Cancelers.
I went back inside and sat at my desk for a long time. It occurred to me that I was writing the last thing I would ever write. While the Cancelers searched for me and hunted me down, I would be homeless and leaving footprints in the snow.
“Footprints in the snow.” I mused. It was a moment of relief to realize I could still make a few words seem profound. I smiled, cracking the grimace I had worn and said it again, much slower: “Just footprints. Footprints left in the snow.”
I wanted to feel sorry for myself, I wanted to be pathetic and turn back. I could see the shadowy figure disappearing into the gathering blizzard and I wanted to be him even more. The conflict was resolved within me. I had rediscovered fear, I had learned to fear death, to fear oblivion and erasure. I knew something I had tried to learn my whole life.
Faced with the lethal cancer, I had proof of my own existence. Nothing could terrify me more, for I knew I was real. It seemed horrible that I had to be dying to finally feel alive.
I needed the Cancelers to come for me. I needed them to hunt me, follow me, catch me in the darkness, alone. I needed them to take me down and tear me to pieces.
Part of me was more afraid that they weren’t even real.
But I knew they were. It all added up. I could see them closing in on me. The shadows grew darker, taking shape, forming into hideous forms. They were indescribably horrible, even as they became tangible, all around me. They were not monsters, they were my creations, my horrors.
I understood that they had actually created me. I was shaped and formed by their pressure, their stalking and drooling. As they watched me from behind the invisible shade: I had responded with all of my efforts, always trying to find them, to describe them. Fear was a manifestation of many things: loss, suffering, waiting, rejection, the unknown and death itself.
I finally understood fear and felt something entirely more horrible and hostile. I had always loved horror. At last, in the final moments of my life as a storyteller, I had learned to fear Fear itself.
My ultimate undoing, my demise: to become as though I never was. Some of my creations were too wicked to die, but they belonged to others who had given them refuge, made them their own. I had despised the fraud, but as I sat in the early freezing hours of dawn, I was grateful to my plagiarists.
“I must write something, anything. This is it, my final story.” I told myself. I couldn’t think of anything. The Cancelers were all I could think about.
There had to be proof that the Cancelers were real. I had to find a way to tell their story. “Start at the beginning.”
The story.
I closed my eyes and spoke the story I knew was both scary and true:
“In the beginning there was a storyteller. A fire burned and the listeners sat in the darkness, shivering. The story began, a tale of the hunt. The hunters went forth from their homes to hunt their food. When they returned, they found that their families were attacked while they were gone. A hulking monster of claws and teeth and fear had come and eaten some of the children and killed the dogs. The women could not stop it, despite being equally - if not more - fierce than their men. It carried off a child to its cave, alive, and presumably ate it there. Winter was coming and the monster would soon fall asleep while it was cold. The men of the village, anger and fear mixed together, had waited long enough for revenge. They went to the cave and found the monster asleep. Then they murdered it while it snored. When they were done, they were about to leave when they heard the child that was stolen, crying from within the cave. The monster had not yet eaten the child and so it was returned to the mother.”
I said it out-loud, an ancestral memory of the first horror story. I thought of how it went:
A Canceler was there, even in those days. The storyteller was ridiculed:
“It wasn’t even scary.” Someone said from the darkness. “It can’t even be true.”
It was always the same. But the story was told again and again, improved each time. It was always true and it was always scary. The Canceler had an agenda, the Canceler was the lie, the true monster. The storyteller did not know that the story had saved lives and eased suffering, told again and again long after. The story had become another story and another, all of them true, all of them scary. The storyteller was alone in shame, unable to cope with the fact that the creation was responded to by the Canceler.
The storyteller, without knowing that the story would live on for all time, went alone into the falling snow and disappeared.
“And here I am. I am still walking away in shame, letting the Canceler tell me my story isn’t horror, isn’t plausible. I know it is both of those things, but I cannot remove the label.” I told myself.
Then I beheld the Canceler. It was more awful than I could have ever imagined and there are no words to describe the chimera, the ghost, the devil-serpent. It reared up and struck me, biting me and clawing me as I panicked. I was filled with screaming-nightmares that my mouth and mind joined together within. I fell backwards as the monster Canceler was upon me, tearing into me, attacking me. When the mauling was over, I could feel its venom in my veins. I knew it was inside me. I was going to die from the injuries left by the Canceler.
The cancer.
Time was short. The Canceler had left fatal wounds in my flesh, poisoning me. I was certainly going to die within a matter of hours. The Canceler had certainly hunted me down and finished the job.
I was grateful, glad that it had come at last. It had made me whole again. It had proven its existence to me and made me realize how I would tell my story. It would be a true story, no matter how implausible. It would be a scary story, even if it wasn’t mere horror.
While I was afraid of the ticking clock, the rising sun, the falling snow and the silent ruins of my life, I had found my courage. The ashes of millions of carefully crafted words were heaped and cooling behind me. There was nothing left for the Cancelers to take from me. I was all that was left of me.
It was time for me to get to work. I had one last story to tell, and it had to be my absolute best work. Nothing less would do, for it was the only story that I had left.
Walking out into the snow to leave footprints would have to wait.