Ask

  Ask

  by Aelius Blythe

  First Smashwords Edition

  October 2012

  #FuckCopyright

  ~~~~~

  "All individuals shall have the right to an identity.

  Therefore, in defense of this right, every person shall have the right to safeguard that identity through positive identification.

  And therefore, in further defense of this right, every person shall have the right to face those who infringe on the freedom of that identity.

  Thereby, no one's right to identity shall be subject to undue stress or harm."

  28th Amendment, United States Constitution

  ratified unanimously,

  July 4, 2015

  ~~~~~

  ONE

  Just ask.

  She grit her teeth and looked down at the desk. Her eyes followed the swoop in the wood's grain as it made it's way around a dark knot, the one blemish in the honey-colored wood. Looked like an eye.

  She flicked her gaze away from it, over to the desk corner by her left elbow.

  Her fingers still rested on the keys, uselessly poised over the letters. She couldn't look up, couldn't meet his eyes, even though his eyes weren't really there at all. She knew they were somewhere. Somewhere. That's what mattered. So she kept her gaze on the corner of the desk, a gaze reflexively lowered as if the eyes on the other end of the connection were actually burning into her.

  Can't you just ask already? she pleaded silently, still not meeting the eyes that weren't there.

  They were somewhere. They were. They had to be. She knew that much. His eyes were... she had no idea. They could have been on the other corner of the state. Or they could be across the street.

  This kind of place wasn't so specific.

  People hid their faces, hid their names, hid their places. They were only vague stats, broad descriptions, common personal qualities. Height, weight, hair color. Office worker, technician, food service expert. Long walks on the beach, vodka martinis, dogs. That kind of thing.

  And people lied.

  The stats, the descriptions, the personalities, the meager amount of information glowing on each person's profile... it all meant squat if the one writing it had lied. And there was a high chance they had.

  And she knew it.

  His eyes could have been in Guam, for all she knew.

  She shook her head and finally snuck a peak back at the screen in front of her. Her fingers moved, finally having something to say.

  "I have to go," they said.

  "Don't."

  "Have work," her fingers explained. "I'll be on tomorrow."

  "Wait–"

  But she had already quit.

  Just do it. Just ask already! Fucking commitophobe.

  But her fingers had already slammed the metaphorical door shut and the epithet did not make it out of her head. She leaned back and sighed, looking down at the desk again because there was now nothing more interesting in the room.

  How could she trust a guy who didn't have the balls to ask one simple question?

  She would ask him, of course. If she could. But she couldn't. It wasn't ladylike. It wasn't okay. Even in this dark corner of the internet she sat at a neat desk with one new, blood-red suede heel tapping the desk leg, impatient fingers tapping the keys with glossed nails that glinted in the screen's glow. She was a lady, even here. And she'd keep it that way, thank you very much.

  So she wouldn't ask.

  They'd cross that bridge when he came to it. Not her. Of course, she could throw caution to the winds and just do it...

  But no.

  Then she'd be a slut.

  Or a spy.

  **********

  "Wait," he wrote. But she was already gone.

  Evade. The name continued to glow beside its avatar.

  But she was gone, and he just stared at the bland white face in the little box beside the name – a bland white face under a brown mop of choppy locks pointing like arrows down towards a bland white chin, resting feathery on either side of a slender but bland white neck, and under the rough fringe brown eyes blinked, delicate, careful. Even on the little phone screen he could see the spidery spokes in the irises.

  It was a good picture, a good avatar anyway, but it still had that plastic doll sheen. Unlike the name, the face was generic, nondescript.

  It was okay.

  They all were.

  They were all just masks.

  ...tomorrow.

  The word glowed in its speech bubble beside the name beside the nondescript face for another minute before disappearing as he tapped it off.

  With the screen now dark, his hand hurried to his pocket to put the phone away. He dropped the device into his pocket and smiled reflexively at the little clink of metal that broke the quiet. It was a satisfying, reassuring sound. He let his hands rest in his pockets, it was a cold night and he liked the feeling of metal under his fingers.

  Oh, Evade.

  When he said her name to himself, he pretended it was her real one. It wasn't, of course, but he did like to pretend. It was a fitting one, after all.

  Evade...

  He looked up and realized it was dark – or at least, the sky was. Some time on the walk home from work, the sun had gone down.

  He didn't care.

  Not about the dark.

  But the emptiness of the streets was unpleasant now. Where a second before it had been a comfort, a safety blanket he wrapped around himself, a quiet companion that didn't look over his shoulder and that he didn't have to look over his shoulder for, now it was a lonely gaping thing. Night.

  Paranoid fuck, he berated himself.

  Still, shivers wiggled through his gut at the night's emptiness, more frightening than its dark sky. The streetlights lit up the night, and he walked under the black dome of a city-sized light bubble with the dark sky pressing in from the outside. The white pools of light from the lampposts overlapped so that there was barely a spot of dark anywhere on the sidewalk, and blue light rape-phones dotted each corner. Like those were still necessary. At least the blue cubes added some color to the grey night.

  He was safe and he knew it.

  At least, he was safe from the people that the blue light phones had been set up to protect him from.

  The emptiness still bothered him, though.

  It was impossible to blend into emptiness. No matter how much he tried, he'd always be just so... extant. Couldn't really do anything about that. Couldn't just disappear into emptiness. Couldn't quit. Couldn't swipe out of sight in the blink of an eye. Couldn't delete himself. No, he had to settle for being... there. Nothing to be done about that.

  Well, at least not anything he wanted to do.

  But it didn't matter anyway. It was Friday and he wouldn't have to be... there – not fully present, anyway – outside his own front door for a full two days. And his own front door was close. His conversation with Evade had taken him almost all the way home.

  A minutes later, he was there.

  He emptied his pockets. Wallet, keys, ID plopped onto the bed. The phone clinked onto the metal desk beside it. The clink of the gun beside the phone was louder.

  The .22 gleamed silver in the pool of light under the desk lamp. The weapon sat on the night stand staring up at him, mostly useless. Hadn't even been to the firing range in over a year. He plugged in his phone, then opened a drawer in the desk and put the gun away inside it, closed the drawer, concealed the weapon.

  Then, without taking off his shoes, he flopped down on the bed.

  The gun wasn't his most valuable possession. And it was far from his most illegal.

  They still had the Second Amendment, after all.

  TWO

  The blood red suede shoes thunked on to the closet floor.

&nbs
p; They skittered in different directions. One bounced off the back wall and lay on its side next to a brown knee-high boot. The other landed next to a pair of fluffy pink slippers in the shape of bunnies - the type of slippers saved for emergencies like breakups or PMS or douchy guys on the internet who were friendly and warm one minute and then–

  Fucking pull yourself together!

  She stood a moment staring at the shoes, not wanting – or maybe not able – to gather up the energy to set them right. She sighed, a frustrated sigh that hissed out through her teeth.

  Still a lady. Still a lady.

  She bent down, righted the blood red suede shoes and set them neatly in between the brown boots and a pair of sneakers. She resisted the urge to pick up the fluffy slippers.

  She turned away from the closet and sat down at the desk again. The chat window had disappeared from her screen since she quit the conversation – there hadn't been anyone else to talk to. And other things had taken her attention.

  Now, the screen showed a dark site with white letters and plastic-faced avatars in boxes.

  No. Stop. Still a lady...

  She closed her laptop so the incriminating site disappeared.

  She hadn't really been looking at it. No, not really. No she wasn't.

  Just glancing out of habit.

  Whenever things with Nomad didn't go well, she couldn't help but go back and page through the other profiles, scrolling through perfect, plasticky faces, vague attributes, likes and dislikes, favorites, habits, deal breakers. Sometimes, she even entered a few search terms. New York, NY. Post-modern literature. Dancing.

  There had to be some in these dark corners that weren't liars or commitophobes.

  But it was just a habit to look.

  She pushed her computer out of the way and flipped open a little mirror on a stand, turned on a lamp on a long neck that arced over her head, making her desk into a halfway-decent vanity table. She looked herself in the eye and saw the guilt there.

  Sorry, Nomad.

  **********

  Spinach.

  He turned the limp leaves over with his fork. A piece of garlic rolled onto the bedspread. He speared the garlic, blew on it once, twice, then ate it. He leaned over, yanked a tissue out of a box on the desk and scrubbed at the spot of oil on the quilt for a moment before giving up and tossing the crumpled tissue on the desk.

  Spinach... Spinach...

  One unenthusiastic fork tine picked at another leaf of the stuff.

  He typed awkwardly with one hand – the hand that wasn't busy with spinach. The keyboard wobbled, balanced on his knee as he sat legs crossed on the bed. He paused for one moment and considered his dinner. Then he put his fingers to the keys again, and typed the new name into the registration form.

  Username: Spinach

  First name: Spin

  Last name: Nach

  SSN: ...

  He clicked over to a document full of 9 digit numbers. Scrolling through them he picked one, then and copied and pasted it over to the registration form.

  It was some dead guy's. He wouldn't miss it.

  No one would check it unless someone complained – there were just too many names to check all of them. It wouldn't matter anyway. By the time anyone complained, he'd be long gone.

  He hit Enter, breezed past the welcome screen – he really didn't need to see it for the hundredth time – and two seconds later he was at a new inbox. Stark and empty, it was just like all the others he'd created. He clicked over to another window and entered the new address.

  And then, over a dinner of cold spinach, he read the evening news.

  Behind that, another screen was open. He kept his eye intently on the news, trying not to look for the bubble that he hoped would pop up, as it so often did:

  "Nomad, are you there?"

  But it didn't come, and the news continued.

  ~~~~~

  "The threat to individual identity is unprecedented in this medium. A person's beliefs, opinions, knowledge, and esteem – the very foundations of our identity – are subject to assault on a daily basis. The aggressive and persistent disagreement that we see on almost every page on the internet is a challenge, a social, intellectual, and emotional challenge that is immensely hurtful to these pillars of personal identity.

  This body has the obligation to uphold those rights articulated in the 28th Amendment to the United States Constitution: that everyone has the right to an identity, to safe guard that identity, and to face any threat to that identity.

  Congress must facilitate the defense of these rights."

  from the testimony of Everett Smith,

  National Digital Identity Initiative coordinator

  SOAPI Hearing

  November 15, 2016

  ~~~~~

  THREE

  Morning light woke her.

  She pushed herself up from the blankets, threw a pillow out of her way and stumbled the two steps to the desk. One hand rubbed her half-open eyes, the other opened her computer.

  The site still glowed from last night. Nameless strangers with plasticky faces stared out at her. Guilt twinged her gut and she shut the site away quick. Night had slept away her anger.

  She swallowed.

  Even with no one looking, she felt her cheeks burn, feeling embarrassed about her own impatience. She couldn't be angry. Not really.

  Not here.

  She went to the bathroom and got her toothbrush ready, then went back to the desk. With one hand she brushed her teeth. With the other she flipped open her laptop again and hopped on her email. She typed in her name and password and social security number only to be greeted by an empty inbox.

  She sighed.

  What did you expect?

  She shook her head and her mind laughed silently at itself. No one ever had anything to say. Not there. Checking that inbox was just old habit. Only the occasional work reminder ever popped up – a redundant note to remember the spreadsheets for the meeting or that Monday was Presidents day. No real communication.

  Not in the safe places. Safe places were boring places.

  She closed her email.

  She took a breath.

  Sorry, Nomad.

  She apologized silently in her head again.

  They had to be careful, and she knew it.

  Carrying around an alias was like carrying around a gun. But you wouldn't get arrested for the gun.

  Of the sites that'd given the finger to the 28th amendment, most didn't survive. They all had to be careful. There were creeps out there – out there beyond the safe places. That's why they always got shut down. Pedophiles. Terrorists. Thieves. They didn't like the safe places.

  She sighed, closed her computer again, went to the bathroom, spat, and put away her toothbrush.

  Then she sat back down at her desk and opened up chat window.

  She was damned if she'd be caught at a real meeting site – the above-board networks that registered and kept the proper records. There were some fucking creeps out there. The cops might catch some pedonazis or whatever the fuck they were chasing these days (it was hard to keep track) but they caused as much mayhem as they stopped.

  And she was damned if she was going to give her real name before she was ready.

  Or as it turned out, before he was ready.

  But she would be there when he was. She took a breath and typed:

  "Nomad, are you there?"

  **********

  The chat sound woke him. He jerked awake, reflexively swiping the trackpad of the still-open laptop next to him, waking it up, too. He rubbed the heels of his hands into his eyes, blinked a few times and–

  Ow.

  Nomad flinched away from the spears of light stabbing into his vision. He rubbed a hand over his eyes again and glared at the offending sunbeams peeking through the chink between the wall and the curtains. The tupperware still sat beside the open laptop next to his arms crossed under his head where he had slept for. . . he rolled over to look at the time.
/>
  7:03

  He groaned at the numbers on the clock. Eyes still gummed together from two hours of sleep, he blinked dumbly at the clock on the screen for a moment before a smile broke onto his face and his eyes stretched open, now wide awake.

  He pushed himself up and arched his back, stretching. It hurt.

  But the smile on his face stuck stubbornly anyway.

  Carefully, he took a moment to cover the tupperware with the last few leaves of yesterday's breakfast, and pushed it out of the way. He took the fork and set it on the plastic top. He grabbed a tissue and wiped futily at the dot of oil on the bedspread again.

  Then he abandoned the tissue and looked back to the laptop.

  News still floated on the screen, but in a little bubble in the corner, over the headline of another New York Times source jailed, was the bubble he'd been looking for. He smiled.

  "Nomad, are you there?"

  Someone in Dubai was reporting on corruption. Someone in New York was getting arrested. Someone in Britain was voting. Someone was disagreeing - in all caps – with Mr. Spin Nach. Somewhere, someone else laughed.

  He didn't care.

  He closed the news and clicked over to the floating bubble in the corner.

  "Nomad, are you there?"

  His fingers answered automatically.

  "Yes, Evade. I'm here," they said. Then without permission from his brain, they kept typing, typing something new: "I want to talk to you."

  This time, the chat window answered:

  User: Evade has ended chat.

  He stared at the screen. He pulled his hands away from the keyboard and closed his fingers into fists, as if they would betray him again if left to their own devices, and write more stupid stuff.

  Dumbass, he berated himself.

  He reached out and closed the chat window. Then he got up, went to the curtains and tugged them over the sunbeams that had invaded the room. Returning to the bed, he turned the sound up high again, and lay down again, this time crawling under the covers.