An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (An Absolutely Remarkable Thing #1)(12)
Your Cruelty
Our interaction on Twitter today has left me so disillusioned. Judging by your TV interviews and YouTube videos, you seemed like a genuine person. Maybe even a kind person. I now see how wrong I was. I should have known better. I just wanted to let you know that you suck.
Mary
So I wrote back, because not only had I not been mean to Mary on Twitter that day, I also did not have a Twitter account. If this seems completely bizarre, I agree. It can be easy to stay inside your bubble in New York City. It is a world of its own. Instagram was the only platform that meshed well with my strengths (art, design, and being photogenic). I also liked to share photos of whatever I was reading, which was probably Louisa May Alcott but might also have been a biography of a famous artist or something. How else is a girl gonna show the world that she can be irreverent and sophisticated at the same time?!
Anyway, Mary linked me to the Twitter conversation and, indeed, a person pretending to be me had been pretty fucking terrible to Mary.
“How do you get a tweet taken off Twitter?” I asked Maya, who was slightly more social media savvy than me.
“I think you can report it? What’s going on?”
“Someone is pretending to be me, I can’t figure out how to report them.”
She took my phone.
“Oh, hon, it’s because you’re not logged in. You have to log in.”
“I don’t have a Twitter, though.”
“Well, I guess it’s not too much of a surprise that people are impersonating you then.”
“Huh?”
“People are going to be looking for you, to follow you or to argue with you or just to see what you’re up to. And when they find that you aren’t there, some small percentage of them are going to just make a fake account. And since there’s no real one, you can’t report impersonation.”
“So why hasn’t anyone else reported them?”
“Because no one . . . cares? I can report them. I don’t know if it’ll do anything. I think they take it more seriously if the person actually being impersonated does the reporting.”
“What?!” I was a little taken aback. “And I can’t do that unless I sign up?”
“Yeah.”
“So in order to not have people pretend to be me, I have to be on Twitter?”
“That’s pretty much the size of it!”
“This is not fair,” I replied, matter-of-factly.
“I keep wondering when you will notice that that’s how everything is,” she said with a smile.
So I signed up for Twitter, and we linked to it from the YouTube channel, and I tweeted some things, and by the end of the day I had five hundred real, human people waiting to hear my every word . . . as long as they only came a few dozen words at a time. My Instagram, on the other hand, had been blowing up all week. I had ten times more followers than I had before. It was a weird mix of exciting and stressful. I freaked out a little bit and went through and deleted a bunch of stuff I was less than proud off. Everything that had a border had to go. I thought way more about every post, and I felt like I couldn’t put anything up if it wasn’t really high quality. Suddenly my posts had gotten much better (and required much more work).
Seven days in, I had stopped calling in to tell work I wasn’t going to make it, and instead, I just didn’t go. Don’t do this, it makes it way harder to get another job in the future if you quit by just not showing up, but that’s what I did. It helped that, by that time, I had made tens of thousands of dollars. But that income stream was drying up. We weren’t being paid for our appearances; we were being paid for the use of our video, which they had already paid for. They were happy to have us keep coming on shows, but they weren’t going to pay us. And if they weren’t going to pay us, then I had more important things to do.
What eventually became known as the Freddie Mercury Sequence remained a total mystery. I ran through the sequence on Wikipedia dozens of times. Each time, the edits produced the same three additional typos before it reset. A single note had appeared on the Wikipedia page commenting that a persistent typo wasn’t allowing itself to be fixed, so at least one other person had noticed.
As the days passed, the search for the artist marketing firm shadowy government agency responsible for the Carls got more intense. But knowing that there was more to it was leading me in different directions than the rest of the world.
Googling “IAMU” certainly wasn’t helping. It seemed unlikely that this had anything to do with the International Association of Maritime Universities or the Iowa Association of Municipal Utilities. It seemed most likely that it was a hint, just far too vague a hint for us to figure out.
“What if we ask the internet?” This was us, again, on my living room bed. The sun had gone down while Maya and I had been engrossed in our various laptop-based activities, and we hadn’t stopped long enough to turn any lights on. Life with no job was wonderful. I could see her mostly by the light of her screen.
“Huh?” Maya replied, hammering away at her computer on some work email. Maya didn’t seem to see Carl as a life-disrupting force so much as an event that would someday be a great anecdote to tell at a fancy cocktail party with a bunch of executives while wearing a cute outfit. She had always been as much into the business as the craft, which was extremely valuable and probably why she had the coolest job of any of us.