Amity

By Jeremy Brooks

Reclusive neckbeard Timothy Berbee has exiled himself from the world, and spends his time huddled with the reckless, sinister population of a website called Amity. When they turn their collective poison on him, his life turns into a battle to reconnect with his lost humanity, and a race against his own apathy to save the life of a stranger.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jeremy Brooks
• Release date: Sep 7, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452378671

Jeremy Brooks

Author of edgy, dark fiction with satirical undernotes.

Book preview

AMITY

by

Jeremy D Brooks

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2010 by Jeremy D Brooks

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

Notes on Usage for Amity (Smashwords Edition)

In order to make reading Amity as enjoyable as possible, this ebook is free of Digital Rights Management restrictions. If you have received this book and did not pay for it, please be considerate of the author's time and financial investment in this work and purchase a copy directly from his Smashwords page.

Chapter 0

Hunter was not happy, but he was finally at peace.

He carried the solemn fullness that follows having made a difficult decision, the type of problem that keeps a person up at night and kills the appetite.

His decision was final, absolute, and irreversible. All other doors were closed to him. All pathways out of the brambled maze he was stuck in were blocked or beyond his ability to find them. All doors were closed, save one, the last one: he was going to tie a nylon rope around his neck and jump from the Lakkey Creek train bridge. He was going to do it that morning.

In a plastic filing cabinet by his pressboard desk in his bedroom were letters from organizations in New York and Ohio and Washington DC informing him that, once he was formally accepted into a qualifying Title IV university, he would be given money to help pay his way. It was a free ride through undergraduate school and possibly more, but by no means was it free money--he had paid for those scholarships in advance through years of community service (including cleaning highway shoulders alongside DUIs and shoplifters), writing letters and essays, and keeping his nose sparkling clean. And he was certain to get into a good school, not just a qualifying school; he was pretty sure his odds of getting into a top university like MIT or Stanford were certain. He had the scores and marks, and he had made the right decisions since sixth grade.

But all of that had been washed away in a matter of days and, as fate would have it, a good deal of Hunter's lifelong efforts in studying Newtonian physics in honors classes and learning research best-practices in invite-only study clubs would prove useful in helping prepare for an early death instead of a fulfilling life.

At 6'1", he knew how many foot-pounds of force were required to snap his neck. There was not much contemporary research on the subject, but several medical journals had, over the years, documented death-by-hanging, and the papers were not hard to find, nor were they difficult to follow for a non-medical person.

He knew the thickness and material of rope to use, one that would be least likely to slowly choke him to death with no fatal fracture, and would be least likely to decapitate him when the rope snapped taut. The ordeal would be hard enough on his parents without the added trauma of having to identify their son's remains by his severed head. He didn't want them to suffer any more than they had already.

There were two major factors in his decision, and his parents were neither of them. He liked his parents, and was pretty sure that they still liked him, too. They had been unfailingly supportive during his recent problems, and he appreciated that more than he could express.

The first factor was a girl named Yvonne. It was not her fault, though, and his five page suicide note detailed that very clearly. Her actions started it, but Hunter set the wheels toward oblivion into motion all on his own. Still, Hunter did not blame himself, either.

It was the other factor--the faceless demons that tormented him. They caused it all; it was all their fault, and there were no two ways around that. His blood would be on their hands, but he suspected that would be just fine with them.

When Yvonne broke his heart, he was angry. Angry enough to want some kind of vague, petty revenge, something to hurt her back--a virtual backhand to get her attention. Enough to let her know that he could bite back when dumped like some kind of middle school jerk. Hacking into her Facebook account and announcing that she had aborted a mixed race baby would be cruel enough--her Mormon parents would die in their chairs, he thought, and they would not allow Yvonne to be alone with a boy until she left home for college.

It was his Smart Voice that intervened and suggested that recruiting someone else for the task would be a good idea. With school acceptance letters so close to going out, it seemed wise to distance himself from any sort of trouble.

Hunter posted a short request on a website he secretly frequented, a place full of smart, vile creatures who loved to stir up trouble and lived to hack into Facebook accounts. In his post he asked for their help, and included Yvonne's name and a link to her Facebook account. The people who responded did not help him; instead, they drew him in like smoke and laid waste to his life. He thought that he was anonymous on the internet, but her name was all that they needed to find out who he was. The rest happened so fast that it was in motion before he realized that everything had gone south.

On the train bridge, Hunter tied the yellow rope around a blocky wooden tie and rotated the loop around so that the connecting knot faced downward--the direction of the impending tension. On the other end he tied a solid thirteen loop noose.

Even after making his peace with his decision, writing the letter, and saying a silent, lengthy prayer, the frustration was still close to the surface, and he sat on the edge of the bridge and cried again. He thought about the inhuman coldness with which the people he had once considered his online buddies had turned on him, the ease with which they had moved as one single destructive force. Within minutes of him posting the request, the hive-mind had decided that they would not help him torment Yvonne, and that they would, instead, torment him. They fabricated a story detailing how Hunter had spent a year of his young life in Juvenile Detention for molesting a five year old girl. Convincing pictorial evidence, official arrest, incarceration, and parole records on Williamsburg letterhead, and untraceable eyewitness testimonies of the non-existent crime appeared on the internet and in his email inbox within hours. He tried to shrug it off until he realized that they weren't just doing it to irk him; they wanted to smear him publicly. He was horrified, and asked them to stop; they redoubled their efforts when one of them found a list that Hunter had posted on Facebook of schools to which Hunter had applied. Of course, his family and friends would know it was not real; to everyone else, the evidence looked convincing and every bit of fact.

He fought the allegations for weeks. The story hit the local newspapers, and the phone rang endlessly with angry, concerned parents. When rejection letters arrived from all of his candidate schools, he knew that the game was up and he had lost. The scholarships, MIT, all of his long-tended plans had turned to ash, all because of one little post on a little-known website.

Hunter stood and brushed the seat of his pants, and wiped his cheeks dry with his sleeve. The noose felt heavy and smooth around his neck.

Stepping to the edge, he took one last breath of creosote-thick air.

The note in his backpack would be the last word on the subject, he knew, and his vindication would follow his death. It was the only way to have it.

Yvonne was blameless, he explained in the five page apology. It was not his parents' fault, and it was not the failings of an uncaring world.

It was Amity. Go there and you all will see the truth, he wrote.

Hunter stepped off of the edge into the chilly Virginia morning.

Chapter 1

Tim, buddy, I need your help.

Timothy swung his chair around, licked the nacho cheese corn chip dust from his chubby fingers and pointed at a spot behind the man, back through the doorway he had just walked through.

Get the fuck out.

It was not the expected response, so the man with the white shirt and blue-striped tie repeated himself. I need your help, Tim. Really. You know that report-

I'm serious, Timothy said, cutting him off. Out. You need to fucking knock before you come in here, man.

The intruder considered himself of some importance at Valley Recovery Services, LLC, and was struggling with the idea of being told what to do by a chubby troll in a stained t-shirt, a sloppy creature who liked to pretend that a supply closet was a real office and that playing with computers was real work. Oh, right. Yeah, sorry. Next time. You should maybe have a sign or a lock or something. Anyway, you know the report that you-

Uh uh, said Timothy, get out and try again.

Look, sorry Tim. I only have a few minutes before my next meeting. Can I just tell you about a problem I'm having with this report?

Timothy issued a deep sigh that drew out over every bit of seven seconds. It was not a sound of resignation or reluctant acceptance. Without reservation, it said: now look what you've made me do. He jammed his hand wrist-deep into a pile of papers stacked on top of what presumably was his desk (there was no visible evidence of what actually lay beneath the piles, but desk was as good a guess as any) and, like an aborigine in the Kuranda rainforest catching fish by hand, he extruded a yellow sticky note pad and a red felt tip pen, held tightly between his fingers.

The yellow and red flashed in the invader's eyes. The Red Pen was a thing of legend and fear in the company: it was the tool used to create the dreaded Red Note. It was whispered in the lunch room and behind locked doors that once your name was listed on a Red Note--a tool used exclusively by Timothy the Tech Guy against those who crossed him--that your computer, your files, your phone, the essence of your workday would all begin to unravel, very slowly, very deliberately, but in a way that could never be identified, never be fixed. Like a lame gazelle, the unfortunate notated would be rendered completely unproductive and, eventually, organizationally moot. It was technological voodoo at its worst. It happened rarely, but when it did it was career-fatal and untraceable back to Timothy.

Timothy, however, denied the whole thing as myth and insisted that the Red Notes were merely watch lists for him to keep track of special needs employees.

In reality, it was a gob of horseshit that Timothy had devised years ago to keep stupid people from getting on his nerves. Computers and phones fail all of the time, particularly if left to neglect or if coaxed gently in a southward trajectory; and if he could use that to his advantage, it was, in his eyes, like getting one last burst of productivity out of failing hardware and/or a few more minutes of free entertainment from a rube on his way to the unemployment office.

The man in the blue tie backed through the doorway, easing it closed, one hand pulling the knob, the other pushing against the surface so as to not accidentally slam it or even give the impression of slamming. It latched with the gentleness of a kiss on a baby's cheek.

Knock knock.

Who is it?

Sigh. It's me, said the man through the door. It's Lawrence.

Come in.

Lawrence opened the door, looked at his watch, and opened his mouth to again make his request.

Oh, hey Larry, Timothy said, smiling. What's up, man?

Small but visible beads of sweat formed on Lawrence's brow. Lumps on his jawbone pulsated.

OK, Lawrence said before he could be interrupted again, that report you did for the Over-180 Work Queue in FlowTrakker? The one where you can pull up all of the outstanding accounts in order of either debt amount or record submission date?

Of course I do, Timothy said. He was elbow deep in his Ched-R-Cheez SnackyChip bag, digging through crumbs to find tangible chunks of SnackyChip matter.

Well, we need to be able to filter it by the street name of the debtor. But we need to show all of them on one report still. And we need to be able to show it and un-show it on one screen. Do you know what I mean?

Jesus, thought Timothy. Here we go.

I was thinking maybe some way to make a particular street name on the report show up in another color on demand, without leaving the report... Lawrence continued.

Say it. Just fucking say it.

We need a button.

Timothy slammed his hand down on a pile of papers, which caused a tectonic shifting of everything within a few feet.

So, said Lawrence, can you do it?

Yeah, of course I can do it. But I won't.

What? We need this.

Just like you needed the button to make the letter 's' boldface on summary reports, or the button to toggle the user interface font between Times New Roman and Comic Sans?

Those were mission-critical functions.

They never got used. Ever.

Sure they did. I used them myself.

No you didn't. You know what happens when you click on the font-toggle button? You get a popup that says I (HEART) PANCAKES. Did anyone complain? Did anyone notice? Nope.

Lawrence looked at his watch again. We need this, Tim. We need it by Thursday.

Before Timothy could say another word, Lawrence added: Gary wants it.

Invoking the name of the company CEO, Gary Versant, to a low-ranking technical person like Timothy was like pulling a wreath of garlic on a vampire: vampires shriek like worn brake pads and fly away into the night; sysadmins sigh and agree to do work.

Fine. Fill out a PR-207 form and I'll work on it when I can.

You rock, Tim. Thanks, buddy. Lawrence left smiling, and slapped the wall on his way out like he was high-fiving the building.

Lawrence left the door open. Timothy stood and closed it, and flicked off the lights. His day had gotten gloomy, and he was in no mood for flickering, humming fluorescence.

He worked better in the dark, anyway.

~~~~

The very moment Timothy heard Lawrence turning the doorknob, preparing to intrude on his space, Timothy's hand darted underneath his keyboard tray and felt for a toggle switch. With a flick, seven of nine the monitors in the room turned blank. The two that remained switched on flickered with activity: one displayed a terminal window--a black screen with green text where Timothy could enter system commands--and another screen that looked similar to the terminal window, but had a scrolling list of all of the programs running on a computer--presumably a computer buried somewhere in the room. This second screen had two uses: looking important and drawing attention from the other seven monitors in the room that were blank but still apparently useful enough to dedicate several feet of desk space to.

Taking a closer look at the list of processes on the latter display--something nobody ever did--would have revealed that there were over a dozen instances of the Firefox web browser open, an MP3 audio player, a video player paused five minutes and eleven seconds into a movie called she_loves_to_gag_on_it.mpg, several BitTorrent file-sharing streams, and a very sizable amount of system resources allocated to an online game called Swords and Spells.

With Lawrence gone and the door locked, he flicked the toggle switch in the other direction, which sent a signal to a homemade switching box on the floor. The switching box sent a signal to the primary server, telling it that it was OK to resume normal operations. With a hum and a flash, the blank monitors came to life with dozens and layers and tabs of running programs.

He was back in his happy place: alone, surrounded by virtual friends.

The chromatic, multi-monitor glow made his face look inhuman; he could have been a bearded devil standing by a Christmas tree, or an alien sunbathing in the constantly shifting radiance of four competing suns, each burning at different points of the red shift.

He turned his attention to a monitor running Swords and Spells; his character, a ferocious-looking Death Elf named tagrage, was bobbing up and down, awaiting Timothy's return. His party was gone.

He typed:

>>sry guys, wrk stuff

Above that, somebody named destinack had earlier typed:

>>where u at? fckn dooshbag.

He found his party--twelve colorful members of different fantastic species--and spent the next two hours questing across the lands of Goreblight. They spilled green blood from the bellies of goblins, slew demonic beasts with torrents of magical light thrown from the heavens, traded found coins for thicker armor and more effective weapons, and, in celebration of a successful campaign, rutted against shapely humanoid critters under Goreblight's triple moons.

At the two hour mark, tagrage logged out and once again became Timothy. The day was ticking away; it was time for Timothy to journey to the break room where vending machines dispensed PennyPop soda by the can or bottle, Salt 'n' Lime 'n' Chicken Flavor SnackyChips, and ice cream sandwiches (with or without nuts). It wasn't gold or magic armor, but it was pretty damn good stuff.

Timothy looked as natural slouching and scratching his bearded cheeks in front of a vending machine as he did slumped back in a chair with a keyboard on his lap. He crossed his arms across his lumpy chest; layers of fatty tissue caked across smallish arm bones bunched and folded under haggard flannel. Beneath the unbuttoned flannel shirt was t-shirt with a stretched collar and long-imprinted stains, and he wore cargo pants that sported as many pockets as could reasonably be sewn on. After six or seven minutes of contemplation, he chose the optimal lunch for the day: three bags of chips, two twenty ounce bottles of PennyPop, and a drumstick ice cream (sans nuts). He had no shame in eating the ice cream first--consuming the most environmentally vulnerable member of the meal was the logical thing to do. It was gone before he got back to his office. He walked down the hallway licking the remnants from his palm and fingers.

VRS's office was full of off-white office equipment and off-white cubicles and motel-quality artwork displayed on off-white walls. Close to one hundred and ten mostly off-white people