An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (An Absolutely Remarkable Thing #1)(9)
“Do I have to do my hair?”
“April May, it’s gonna be like fifty thousand dollars.”
“OK, fine, I’m in.”
* * *
—
Within the next thirty minutes, I had two network news interviews scheduled for that day, and, figuring that I should probably have something worth saying, Maya and I spent the hours I had free before I had to head downtown reading everything we could about Carl. It wasn’t much—Andy had caught me up pretty thoroughly. I was a little bit terrified about going on the news and honestly had no idea what I was supposed to say. “I saw this thing, it was cool, I don’t know what it is, my friend and I made a video”—that’s like nineteen seconds. Doesn’t seem worth precisely $10,000, but I didn’t know how TV worked. Turns out, they mostly just wanted to keep using the footage that they’d already stolen from us without getting sued.
I ended up on the Wikipedia page for “Don’t Stop Me Now,” the barely audible song that bizarrely showed up on all the static-filled security camera footage of areas where Carls had appeared.
“Don’t Stop Me Now” is a song by the British rock band Queen, featured on their 1978 album Jazz that was released as a single in 1979. Wrtten by lead singer Freddie Mercury, it was recorded in August 1978 at Super Bear Studios in Berre-les-Alpes (Alpes-Maritimes), France, and is the twelfth track on the album.
Weird, I thought, typos like “wrtten” don’t usually make it into Wikipedia. But, being the good steward of the internet that I was, I edited the page, fixing the typo, then went back and reloaded the page.
“Don’t Stop Me Now” is a song by the British rock band Queen, featured on their 1978 album Jazz that was relesed as a single in 1979. Wrtten by lead singer Freddie Mercury, it was recorded in August 1978 at Super Bear Studios in Berre-les-Alpes (Alpes-Maritimes), France, and is the twelfth track on the album.
“Hey, Maya, can you bring up the Wikipedia page for ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’?”
“Yah.”
“Do you see any typos?”
“Uhh . . . two in the first paragraph.”
“Two?”
“Yeah, ‘released’ and ‘written’ are both spelled wrong.”
“Fix them.”
“Um, yes, master?”
“Just do it, something is weird.”
She fixed them and we both reloaded the page.
“Don’t Stop Me Now” is a song by the British rock band Queen, featured on their 1978 albu Jazz that was relesed as a single in 1979. Wrtten by lead singer Freddie Mercury, it was recorded in August 1978 at Super Bear Studios in Berre-les-Alpes (Alpes-Maritimes), France, and is the twelfth track on the album.
“OK,” Maya said, “there is no conceivable way that I didn’t see that someone misspelled the world ‘album’ after you specifically asked me to look for typos. I’m fucking fastidious.”
She was.
“I’m going to fix it again,” I said.
I fixed all the typos and reloaded the page again.
“Don’t Stop Me Now” is a song by the British rock band Queen, featured on their 1978 albu Jazz that was relesed as a single in 1979. Wrtten by lead singer Freddie Mercury, it was recorded in Augst 1978 at Super Bear Studios in Berre-les-Alpes (Alpes-Maritimes), France, and is the twelfth track on the album.
“The u in ‘August’ is gone now!” I said, getting more freaked-out.
I called Andy.
“Yello!” he said, still clearly delirious.
“Can you go to the Wikipedia page for ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ right now?” I said, without any preamble.
“Yup!” I could hear him rustling around for his computer. I just waited.
“OK, loading up . . . aaannd . . .” I heard the keys clacking.
“Do you see any typos in the first paragraph?”
“Ummm . . . Yes . . . there’s no i in ‘written.’”
“And that’s all.”
“Is this a test?”
“What about ‘released’ or ‘album’ or ‘August’?”
“I have had a very weird day, April, but you are making it considerably weirder.”
“Answer the question.”
“No, all those words are spelled correctly. You do know how Wikipedia works, right, you can change the page. Somebody probably just fixed it.”
I reloaded the page again, all the same typos, no new ones.
“Fix the typo.”
“April, we’re supposed to be downtown to shoot for ABC News in like two hours. There are a lot of errors on Wikipedia and we aren’t going to fix them all today.”
“OH MY GOD ANDY DO THE THING,” I loudly monotoned.
“I already did . . . I did it while I was whining. It is not fixed. Oh, actually, this is weird, ‘released’ is now misspelled. Wait, that was one of the words you listed. How did you do that?”
Maya chimed in, “Put him on speaker.” So I did.
“Andy, this is Maya, the same thing happened to us, but it didn’t require me to make the first change before I saw the second one, probably because April and I are on the same IP address. Every time I fix a typo I see a new one, as well as the one I just fixed. According to the Wikipedia log pages, no one is making these changes. Indeed, according to the Wikipedia log, no one has made any changes, including us, to this page since three hours ago when an editor added a note about the song playing in security camera footage.