New Tales of the Yellow Sign, page 9
The thing was, there was a guy in the next apartment.
I broke it down. Okay, so geolocation could possibly tell them I was currently in an apartment building.
But how could the app tell it was my own apartment?
How could it know there was a man in the next one over? That’s a fifty-fifty chance, sure.
But the thing was, occasionally I did instinctively shrink from him, when we saw each other in the hallway or in the elevator. Now, as illogical as it was, I’d never be able to feel a sense of safety anywhere near him.
This was wrong. People needed to know about this. The app shouldn’t be for sale in that store, which supposedly maintained minimum content standards.
You probably think I was overreacting. Consider this: a threat of violence does physical damage to the body. It increases the levels of a hormone called cortisol, which triggers your fight or flight reflex. If you don’t do either—because, for example, there’s no one to run from and nobody to fight—it builds up in your system and messes you up. It can cause post-traumatic stress syndrome. Long-term, if it keeps happening (which, you’re right, doesn’t apply exactly to this case) it brings on all kinds of degradation to your heart, your internal organs. Some researchers say it can turn cells cancerous. I know this because I spend a lot of time looking at health sites.
So naturally the first thing I did was grab the phone in order to delete the app.
That damn message was still there so I hit the new notification button to clear it away.
A pop-up window appeared:
There is no current notification more distressing than what you have already been given.
It melted away, replaced by the previous:
That guy in the next apartment will never rape you.
But he fantasizes about it.
So I took the steps to delete it from my device. I pulled a bottle of white from the fridge and gave myself a generous pour.
My phone made its text noise. I jumped and nearly spilled my glass.
The text was from Jessica.
Deleted it already huh?
A wave of dizziness hit me. I didn’t think I’d connected to her account yet. In fact, I was sure I hadn’t. But obviously I must have done it and spaced, because what other explanation would there be? (I still don’t remember doing it.)
Damn straight, I texted back.
Her answer rang in with surprising swiftness (our group’s champion texter, Jess blazed the fastest thumbs in the west): Told u u were paranoid.
It’s not paranoia if you’re right to be freaked, I texted back.
Ding! Quickest brunch I ever won.
Yes, you win, Jess.
The next morning I left late for work because the stress of the evening had kept me up until an ungodly hour, causing me to snooze my alarm four times running. Coming into the foyer as I was going out was the next-door neighbor. The timing of our respective morning routines did not usually coincide. A dog, a smallish white terrier, trotted by his ankle.
Now you’ll say I was projecting, and that has to be it, but I distinctly caught a guilty look on his face. The dog even yipped at him as if detecting something wrong. He had his phone in the same hand as the end of its leash. And I am not saying that I for certain saw that he had Distressing Notifications up. Unquestionably, of all the parts of the story, this is the bit I most likely imagined.
That left me so shaken I almost took a short turn streetcar. Once aboard the right one, I turned on the phone, thinking there might be an email reply on the presentation from one of my team.
There was the icon for the Distressing Notifications app.
No, hold on, I told myself. There’s nothing weird about this. Sometimes if you sync via the desktop after deleting an app on the phone it will put it back on you. Normally there’s an alert window where it asks you whether you want to do this. But I could easily have missed it or confused it for something else.
I went to re-delete it but wound up simply tapping on the icon, causing the program to load.
It said:
The one you most trust is the one undermining you.
I flashed on Jessica. Was this her telling me I’d been pranked? It didn’t seem likely. First off, I’m not sure, as much as I love her in all her flakiness, she’d top my most-trusted list. Second, she was a geek and all, but putting an entire app together, going through the approval process...no, whatever this was, a practical joke it was not.
The client and the rest of the team had already assembled in the board room when I got there, shotgunning Americano dregs. I arrived in mid-sentence, to hear Yasmin kinda-sorta-but-really-actually taking credit for my breakthrough the night before. It was too subtle to prove, so there was no confronting her on it. In the moment, though, it couldn’t have been clearer: she looked like a kid caught with smashed cookie jar debris heaped around her toes.
Shit, I thought, as I connected the projector outputs to my laptop. Of the team, Yasmin was the one I most trusted. The app predicted this.
The client loved the adjusted pitch and greenlit us to proceed. Tony treated us to high-fives all around. We opened a bottle of Prosecco. Tony spilled bubbly on Yasmin’s skirt.
My phone produced a sound I hadn’t heard from it before. A low, resonant chiming. The office practiced appalling phone etiquette, so no one blinked twice when I checked it.
Distressing Notifications had activated itself and had a message for me:
She’s sleeping with him, of course.
Given the context, I jumped to the assumption that it meant Yasmin and Tony. And I accepted right away that they were sleeping together. My reaction was: so what? I was not the human resources police. Unlike Jessica, Yasmin didn’t need me looking out for her. If anything, it was Tony who had a history of leading with his heart and getting it stomped.
Then I thought: no, it’s warning me about Jess and Nic. She’s back with Nic. That’s what I find distressing.
Only by thought number three did I return to sanity and recognize that the app knew neither to be true. Users were free to project anything on that most general of statements. Jessica had told me exactly this. Around the world right this minute, hundreds or thousands of people, or more, were nodding sagely, crediting the app with telling them that a she they knew was sleeping with a he.
On an intellectual level I marveled at how powerful the urge toward superstition is, how easily it can bubble up from the evolutionary depths to put you in a mental headlock. This awareness could not prevent me from wanting to check up on Jessica nonetheless. When I got back to my office and closed the door, I went to the mobile Facebook app and searched for her profile. She was still listed as single. That meant nothing, though: if she was sneaking around to duck her friends’ disapproval, she wouldn’t exactly broadcast her latest boyfriend relapse, would she?
I switched to the Distressing Notifications app and found its friends page. As I waited for it to load a crazy fear hit me: that everyone in my life, all the people I passed on the street, my co-workers, the guy next door who imagines himself raping me, would all be there, automatically added to my network. Of course there was only the one entry, Jessica’s. I tapped the profile pic—it was the same as on Facebook—and scrolled through her most recently received distressing notifications. They appeared in bluish text bubbles against the usual black background, which I now noticed was animated to swirl very slightly.
Its programmers had calibrated the effect so that it occurred just below the level of conscious perceptibility. They were playing with your perceptions to heighten your suggestibility. It was working, even on me, whose job it was to analyze and exploit the decision-making process. Not just the subliminal animation, but the package in its entirety. With this thought, objectivity returned. My jagged breathing mostly normalized. After weaning Jessica off this destructive mindfuck, I resolved to track down the team behind it and see if we could maybe bring them on board for a more mainstream and responsible campaign. If we were lucky they’d turn out to be freelance and flexibly scheduled.
I read the messages Jessica had received. There was a lot to scroll through, mostly because there were so many of the boilerplate entries that said:
There is no current notification more distressing than what you have already been given.
Obviously she was hitting the refresh button constantly in search of more notifications. I wondered if this even helped—sometimes the notifications came without prompting. Though from an eyeballs retention point of view the designers were incentivized to keep you actively coming back to the app, if they could hook you in to do it. It likely rewarded obsessiveness by giving you more feedback than you’d get from passive use.
I scrolled rapidly through, stopping on each bubble of nonstandard text.
Many consisted of vague, fortune-cookie like bullshit. Here my anxiety spiked again. If I let myself be the paranoid Jess said I was, I’d conclude that they were written specifically to negate my influence.
The only danger? Not seeking it.
To fear is to live.
Would a real friend try to control you like that?
Others informed her, supposedly, of the thoughts of people around her. The common theme: incipient violence lurking under the surface of our placid city.
She’d smash you in the face if she thought she could get away with it.
Last night, he stole his father’s gun.
She thinks he’s a secret agent. One day she’ll push a different guy in front of a train.
Another sub-theme invoked the supernatural:
That woman doesn’t look it, but she’s three hundred years old.
When he dies, it will take three weeks for putrefaction to set in.
She cuts herself. At night, tiny demons come to lick the scabs.
Then there were the instructions:
Go down those stairs, or you’ll always regret it.
There might be something dead in that box. Look inside.
Steal her pen and put it your purse. Or else.
As I scrolled down, the other types of messages fell away until it was almost all instructions. They freaked me immediately, in part because they weren’t universally unsettling.
Your destiny awaits you.
Keep going.
No, not that way.
Not that way either.
Yes, that’s right.
You were about to stray from your destiny.
What happens if you stray? Everything dies.
Yes, everything.
You might want to call work and tell them you won’t be making it in today.
Turn here.
Wait. Stand by for more.
Sit on that park bench there.
Until further notice.
This was the last of the notifications.
I turned to ice. An uncontrollable tremor grabbed me by the hands. This had gone beyond entertainment purposes. Someone on the other end of that app was manipulating her to take real actions, in the real world. And from the context of the message stream, Jessica was obeying.
The app chimed. I yelped. The phone skittered across my desk. I grabbed it. This notification was for me:
You’ll never stop her in time.
Yasmin poked her head in without knocking: “You okay in there?”
“I’m fine,” I said, guiltily covering the phone, like it was somehow incriminating.
“Sounded like you saw a mouse.”
“No, no mouse.”
She squinched up her cute little features. “There are mice in my apartment now. Don’t you hate them?”
“Yeah, yeah, I do,” I said, nodding at her like a bobblehead.
“Okay then. If there were mice in here as well as at home, I don’t think I could handle it. I’d have to put in for psych leave.”
I turned back to my keyboard as if I’d been working on it. “Well, then, back to the salt mines...”
“Sure sure,” she said, popping back out of sight.
My device chimed.
Annoying little bitch, isn’t she?
“No she’s not.” Like a fool, talking back out loud to a smartphone application. Arguing with it.
I’m only telling you what you’re really thinking.
“Fuck off.” I flipped back from the main screen to Jessica’s page. A new message had appeared:
Now down Augusta.
Finally it had given me a location. I got my shit together quick and bombed out of the office. On the way out I nearly bowled Tony over, mumbling about a meeting. He bought it and I kept going to the elevator.
Another chime:
It would be ironic to die in an elevator accident right now.
This set off several thoughts of varying ridiculousness. One, the app programmer is, like most people, using the word irony wrong. Two, I am going to go down the stairs.
I’d already swapped heels for Nikes. With hand gripped tight to the rail, imagining myself tripping and falling, my fatal tumble all part of the application’s scheme, I made it to the main floor and out to the street in record time.
Waving with one hand, the phone in my other, I hailed a cab. Augusta is only a few blocks long, so I didn’t need a cross-street. College and Augusta was closest, so that’s what I told the driver. I checked the app.
It had disappeared from my screen. I tried to restart it from the menu icon but it wouldn’t open. None of the apps would. I tried to remember how to reset my fucking device.
Traffic crawled. I’d figured with rush hour past we’d be okay but it was construction season and the streets that were open snarled beyond reason.
I saw that the cabbie had the same kind of phone stuck in a holder on his eye shade thingy up near the top of his window.
“You don’t remember how to reset these things, do you?”
“Press and hold both buttons.”
I did. The phone went blank. I turned it back on. The start logo appeared, hanging there for a taunting long time. Finally I got back into the app and went to Jessica’s page. Her latest notifications:
Go into the coffee shop.
Order something and sit down at the front table.
Take the purple pen, the one you stole, from your bag.
Place it on the table.
Enjoy your drink.
Thank you, Jessica.
Your destiny awaits.
The cab stopped behind a streetcar with the corner in sight. I had a twenty already in hand. I popped it in the driver’s hand and jumped out. I ran down College to Augusta and then south. Problem was, there are a bunch of coffee places along there. New ones since I’d last been there. I ran into the first one. No sign of Jessica. Then the second one. There were more further down, on both sides of the street.
When I arrived at Profundity, where Jess and I had gone together multiple times, a crowd was already forming outside. The counter guy and a burly customer restrained a pale, perspiring man. A bright red stain spread across his threadbare white dress shirt. Uneven stubble spackled his face. He kept repeating the same phrase: “I’m not crazy. I’m not crazy.”
I tried to get into the cafe but other patrons blocked me. I called Jessica’s name. She slumped on the floor, curled around the front window table’s wrought-iron base. A kitchen knife lay a couple of feet away. Her blood pooled toward it.
To the sound of approaching sirens I collapsed. I never found out who caught me.
When the cops arrived they cuffed Jessica’s killer and searched his pockets. His wallet contents identified him as Douglas O’Connell, age 51, proprietor of a decreasingly successful landscaping firm. Divorced with two kids, behind in his support payments. No criminal record. His lawyers keep telling him to plead not guilty by reason of insanity, so he keeps firing them. Still he is unable to account for his actions, except to say that he did it to prevent everyone from dying. To stop the world from ending. He doesn’t expect to be treated as a hero but feels he should not be further penalized.
As you can guess, his phone had the Distressing Notifications app on it. They found it on another table at Profundity, where he’d been sitting for a little less than an hour. (He’d arrived before her.) The last few notifications he received:
Turn north here.
Keep walking.
In that coffee shop coming up on your right, destiny waits.
Order a large drink and sit down two tables away from the counter.
Now wait for instructions.
Order something else, so they don’t wonder why you’re taking up the table.
A woman will come in. She’ll put a purple pen on the table. That’s your signal.
She understands. Her sacrifice is willing.
Come on. You’ve been wanting to do this for quite some time.
What are you waiting for? You see the pen.
Take it out of your bag. Go.
The app got pulled from the store the next day. When INTERPOL in Belgium raided the Carcosa LLC offices, they found only a pile of unanswered mail and some disconnected phone lines. The electronic money trail dead-ended in dummy accounts linked to an Eastern European mafia. The rumored link to the forbidden book? A total dead end.
One detail I never mentioned to anybody till now. When the cops dropped me off at my apartment, after hours of waiting around at the station and a couple of quick interviews, I stumbled in the door and threw myself onto the couch.
