Prologue

“I want you to access the Ripe program. I do not have ConSec computer clearance.”
“Neither do I.”
“But you do have a nervous system. And so does a computer. And you can scan a computer, as you would another human being.”

• Scanners, 1981. 

Parados

I created an algorithm that calculates what group of video game users were most likely to provide private financial data to random smart phone applications based on their propensity towards risk taking. Stick with me, it’ll get good. 

Over and over again the data would shoot back the same profile: video game users who preferred body horror in their entertainment media were most likely to use various applications on their mobile devices to plug in their bank account numbers, credit cards, hell, even send nude selfies and videos of themselves masturbating. Financial risk, according to my algorithm, fell right in line with a heightened sexual appetite and interest in the inside of the human body. Gender has nothing to do with it. The highest risk takers are genderless animals who only exist for the sheer thrill of adrenaline infusion. 

I thought this was a bug at first, and maybe my own bias was causing women to come up as equally risqué as the men in my data set. But when I tried to plug in the data three more times to see if men were more likely to be the risk takers sharing sensitive information, it shot back the same equal opportunity adventure seekers I had in the beginning of my calculations. I could only conclude what was repeatedly coming up in front of me: when it comes to sharing bank account pin codes or sending a naked picture on an unkept bed full of sticky, glossy legs and fingers, there is no difference between the genders. 

At the highest risk levels, everyone is guilty of producing content that, if they were to die, would embarrass the hell out of family members looking through their iPhone camera roll. Naturally, I was happy to see plenty of women fall into the algorithm’s code vomit. It was rewarding that stealing bank accounts could give me access to a larger demographic, not just a bunch of male perverts and neckbeard basement dwellers. It also meant that if she or he or they or us or them is sending nude pictures to their friends, then they’re more likely to allow me to access their bank accounts and drain them until the only thing left is the sudden realization that I just made several hundred thousand dollars in a matter of minutes. 

“Larisa Martinez?”

“Yes?”

“The nurse wants you to go down to her office.”

She handed me a piece of paper and rolled her eyes back into her lesson plan. 

Where was I? Yes, that’s right, there’s a lot of private shit that can be pulled out of a cellphone, but if you really want to maximize this, you have to narrow down the social group most likely to slip up, whether that be a picture of someone playing with themselves or what I’m really looking for: social securities, driver licenses, atm pins, bank account numbers accompanied with respective routing numbers, international wire transfer swift codes, credit card data, you know, all the shit you can use to hide money, make money out of thin air, or purchase things you’d want to own without a chem trail leading back to you or whatever organized crime syndicate has purchased your data. 

But people aren’t going to be sending nudes out at the same rate needed to turn a constant, non-mercurial profit. And people only send nudes out when they’re in the privacy of their home, or, at the very least, not holding their phone up in public where everyone can see the color of the inside of their butthole. Well, not everyone, there are some people really into being caught looking at nude photos of themselves. I suppose those would fall higher on the spectrum of the risk groups I tend to pull out of my software, but I haven’t begun to stratify these poor bastards, not yet at least. 

So, I can’t use sexting addicts as my source of income, and I need something slightly more wholesome as a sort of trojan horse to run the extraction code into people’s smartphones. But since phone freaks don’t work at a larger scale, I needed something much more accessible. And video games, not surprisingly, have proven to be the fastest way to gather as much financial data as possible from unwilling downloaders seeking to kill time on their phone. And video games based on David Cronenberg films? Well, ding, ding, ding, we’ve got a winner folks. Body horror video games = porn and digital sex addicts= equal a whole lot of financial data ready to be sold off to the highest bidder.  And there are plenty of people in the New Jersey criminal underworld willing to buy this data and take it off my hands. Wait, what? You didn’t think I was doing anything with this shit, did you? I’m eighteen, bro. I’m just the mine, not the commercial entity. 

“Larisa, you going home today?” a teenage bi-pedal form asked in the hallway. 

“You know it.”

“How do you do it?”

“Buck the system, buck the system, and don’t look back.”

“Fuck, I want to be you,” he said. 

“Few have tried. None have been successful.” 

It’s not that I think school is a waste of time for most people. I think it’s a waste of time for me. For those that don’t want to spend the rest of their lives married to some 5’7 Tufts Business School graduate who wants me to make my own jam and clean some smelly kid’s green diarrhea. For those not interested in being wives whose husbands are off trying to make partner at a law firm named after four white guys who hate women in pant suits. For you, maybe. For the type of person whose only aspirations are reaching peak aesthetic on TikTok or whatever becomes the future signifier for the dry, empty husk of upper-middle class Western ideals. I’m not judging you, but please, don’t judge me. We’re just starting off here. I haven’t even turned twenty yet anyway, and I may still sell out at any moment in the next two decades. There’s still time to force feed me capitalistico-fetish STEAM career articles and fortune magazine success stories about me balancing my life as a CEO all whilst still perfectly coifing my hair. 

I opened the door to the stairwell and then took a flight of stairs to the first floor. On the right, in the corner of the high school corridor, was the nurse’s office. 

“What is it this time?”

“I feel hot, like my head is flushed, and I feel real weak and shit.” 

“Right.” She sat down and looked through her desk for a small plastic bag with a paper covering. 

“Come ‘ere. Let’s see what your temperature is.”

She put the thermometer under my tongue and waited a couple of seconds. She took it out, which made me gag and I coughed several times into my arm, and then leaned back into the old ripped up green chair in her office. 

“Well, whaddaya know, 99 degrees. Call your mom or will she come pick you up this time?”

“If you call her, she’ll authorize me to walk back to the house.” 

“You’ve got this procedure down fairly well.”

“99 degrees. You know what New Jersey law says.”

“Oh, I’m sure you know it better than I do.” 

The nurse called my mother and nodded her head several times. She gave her my temperature and I could hear the frustration on the other end. The nurse put the phone down on her desk and then gave me a piece of paper that she asked me to sign. 

“You know the drill. Your mom said it was ok for you to walk home.” 

And then I took my bookbag, filled with two large hard drives and shit like Korean skincare from Ulta and a black leather book filled with the names and phone numbers of enough Russians, Lithuanians, and Polish businessman to fill a Pulaski meat market, and made my way out of this awful place the government forced me to attend. God, I hate just being here. High school lately seems like a marathon of watching underpaid, overworked teachers on the edge of opening an Only Fans account try to put up with kids who could care less about math and the rise of beer hall drunks in 1931 Berlin. So, I walked straight to Wood Avenue, about a mile from the High School and met up with Janusz, my contact to the братва́ in Linden, Brooklyn, and Western Europe. 

I walked into the small electronics store. The door jingled and I made my way into the backroom where Janusz and two other guys from Gdańsk were watching a match between Porto and Bayern Munich. It smelled like Calvin Klein “One” and hotdogs. 

“Larisa, do not come in here! Wait for me outside in Dunkin Donuts,” Janusz yelled. 

He pushed me out and slammed the door in my face. 

And that’s when the Russian mob became the least of my worries. 

Episode

The whole thing had been so easy. I had mapped everything out, every little detail of what would happen and where I would go after the Linden Public School system gave me my high school diploma and it was time to leave and say goodbye to America, say goodbye to New Jersey, say goodbye to this town and its oil refinery, its petty election politics, and its obsession with football and hatred for anything resembling academics. Perhaps if my teachers had treated me with a little more respect and not seen me as just a problem child with a hard on for codeine and trap music, I wouldn’t have mapped out a plan to leave this fucked up country with a quarter million in dirty money and a one-way ticket to Valencia, Spain. I really wanted to spend the rest of my young adulthood in Spain. 

It had all been so simple. 

Then someone downloaded “Shivers&Ghouls” and my programming uploaded their financials, their dick pics, their reddit rants, and three videos of them murdering several women in foreign countries while under the guise of a diplomat who was really there as an intelligence operative seeking information on North Korean dissidents. Got that? I didn’t get it all the first time either, so feel free to reread the sentence until it makes some sense. I not only unmasked a spook who made the mistake of downloading my nonsense game on his government cellphone (rookie mistake, I’ve been told), but I also uncovered his NSFW moonlighting as a fucking serial killer. And, worst, I unknowingly shared that shit with the Russians in Brighton Beach. Can you hear the proverbial shit splatter on the ceiling fan of my teenage life? 

It had all been so simple, right?

“So, you’ve got to get lost. Like get out of here. Leave, now,” Janusz said. 

“What the fuck Janusz? You want me to just leave? I’m not even done with classes yet. It’s still March. I have fucking exams and shit.”

“You really thinking about exams right now? Do you have any idea how many people got caught up in this shit? You’re lucky they haven’t come down here looking for you.”

“How was I supposed to know that some sicko creep fed was going to be downloading it? Shouldn’t this guy be like, you know, I don’t know, killed off or something? Can’t your guys just like dump him off in the Arthur Kill or something?”

“Jesus.” Janusz looked around the Dunkin, “You think these men care about what this guy did?  Or that you would be that important to them that they would put themselves out there like that? To kill a fucking fed? They don’t care about you. You’re like five foot two and watch Netflix teen dramas. No one gives a fuck about you!”

“Gee, thanks. That’s always a wonderful reminder of my place in this society of rats.”

“Larisa, what they don’t want is this guy breathing down their neck, looking into their operation. You didn’t just put this guy on notice, you put these fucking vatnyks on the government’s radar. You need to get the fuck out of there. Like take a flight down to Puerto Rico or wherever the fuck you’re from.”

“Okay first, I’m from Jersey, and second, weren’t you liked smuggled here after the wall came down? Fuck you.”

“Nie jesteś tu bezpieczny. Kocham cię, ale musisz odejść.” 

“The fuck, bro?” 

He looked at me with his handsome green eyes and just kind of leaned back in his seat and rubbed on the tattoos on the flesh above his knuckles, rolling his fingers over his skulls and crosses and roses and numbers. 

“Yo, I have to go. I’m sorry this is the last time we see each other.”

“Big help you are.” 

“Przepraszam.” 

I looked down at my phone to check the time and saw that my mother had texted me from her office phone. 

She wrote: Some man called about an investigation and an appointment at the house. Do you know about this?

The wraith had infiltrated my home, and now had arranged some sort of question-and-answer session with my parents. I was eighteen, high half of my life, and had a closet stuffed with enough cash to buy a mansion in Panama. He was the U.S. government personified, about as powerful as the cumulative threat of history and death and packed into six feet of freshly shaven sadistic federal property. But if he was stupid enough to film himself killing those women, then I had one advantage over this bastard that he must have been aware of: I was a fucking prodigy, and he wasn’t. 

It could all be so simple, right?  

Exodus

The only option was to accelerate my trip out of New Jersey and hide the money I had accumulated without setting off any strange alarms. Oh yea and run from a murderer psychopath with a top secret clearance and enough training to overthrow a medium sized Central Asian economy. Let’s face it fuckers. Getting lost at eighteen isn’t as easy as it looks, particularly not when you must smuggle cash out of an airport, and you don’t even have a job to explain where it came from. And while it’s legal to move ten grand across the European Union, how do you explain that to a customs agent in Madrid, especially when you’re traveling by yourself with nothing but a bag of dreams and fears and ASOS jeans.  

I stopped by my house, picked up a passport, stuffed a duffle bag with huge wads of cash and rode my bicycle out to Janusz’s parents’ house on West Elm Street. The weight of all that money on my back. The pressure of having to leave this fucking place as fast as possible and not get myself killed in the process felt like being squeezed to death by one of those torture devices found in San Gimignano or somewhere in the private collection of a Paraguayan basement inside of a home bought by a mystery shopper in 1946. 

“Who is it?” he asked. 

“Who do you think?”

“I told you to leave the fucking country. Why are you here?”

“Because I need you to come with me. I can’t leave alone. I can’t even smuggle a legal amount of money without setting shit off. At least if we look like a couple, it’ll be less suspicious. Are you down?”

“I don’t know, Larisa. I’m twenty-one. This is bigger than me.”

“Are you serious? You played a part in this just as much as me. Just a year, just a year in Valencia.”

He waved me in and sat down on an old, brown couch. I closed the door and stood next to a fireplace.

“You want me to pack everything up and just leave? With you?”

“Grow a pair of pierogis and get on this fucking plane with me. A flight leaves this evening to Barcelona. You down?”

He looked down at the floor.

“What’s in the duffel bag? Eight heads?”

“What?”

“Never mind. It’s an old movie.”

“There’s a bunch of money in here. I need to hide most of it. Have no fucking idea where to begin, and we’ve got seven hours.”

“I got a place we can stash it. We could move it to an account in Poland. Small deposits.”

“That’s great,” I thought for a second and turned to him, “were you talking about that really bad Joe Pesci movie?”

“Wasn’t that bad. Same guy who wrote Dead Poet’s Society wrote it.”

“Ugh. Eww. You think that makes it any better? Do The Right Thing came out that year.”

“Okay, well, it’s a good fucking movie. It’s like inspirational and shit.” 

“It’s a gowno movie, bro. He doesn’t really inspire anyone. And they still sell him out at the end to save their asses. They pick the easy route out and still make some dramatic gesture to try to save their conscience from eating them alive. It’s an empty, half-hard erection.”

“I get the feeling we’re not talking about Robin Williams and Ethan Hawke anymore.”

“Are you still down, or what?” 

“Sit down, let’s look at the flights.”

Leaving. This is not an easy thing to achieve when you have two loving, GenX parents who have gotten it into their heads that we must be best friends no matter what happens in our lives and how horrible my musical taste is or will remain to be until I grow out of whatever phase white journalists have classified as a new generational identifier. 

But hey, I owe nothing to you, to my family, or to those who sit around and follow the law. No one asked me to play by the rules. No one ever got my consent on what is ethical and what is not. Did I sign a fucking dotted line? No motherfucker, I did not. I owe nothing to society, to the government, to some fucking flag that won’t represent anything when the sun swallows this whole bitch up in two billion years. Let’s go Nietzsche on this bitch. 

Can I just pack up and get the fuck out? 

Somewhere else, somewhere halfway across the world where things like college campus tours, job applications at Facebook, or the unconscionable weight of virtual validation are not your most pressing thoughts? Am I really the bad guy here? Any half-functioning empty suit running for the presidency can tell you this when the cameras are turned off: this is a country that thinks its people are stupid. It celebrates cocaine users. It carpet-bombs the Middle East. It sexualizes little girls and hates older women. It relishes in orgiastic inequity and holds no one accountable.

Had I been born a middle-class white woman just ten miles from my hometown, I would be on my way to a top school, but no way Deandre, here I am, running from the fucking boogeyman and bunch of Russian convicts turned black market businessmen. If you have no moral compass to change this, why shouldn’t I steal all your financial data? Fuck you and your moral incongruity. Your favorite movies are Goodfellas and The Wolf of Wall Street. 

My mother texted: please come home now. A man from the police is here. We need to talk. 

Janusz took a handgun from inside his glove compartment and loaded the clip with some bullets. He looked over at me and smiled. He was beautiful like that, like one of those rocks you find at the shore, knee deep in cold water, that look smooth despite being hurled around the ocean for thousands of years. A product of some volcano from underneath the darkest of depths, shot out from the center of a molten core, just to end up in your hand by some lineal probability that defies most mathematical calculations. 

“He won’t give up,” I said. 

“You have to make it go away.” 

“I can’t leave the country without putting this dog to sleep.”

“Are you capable of doing that?” 

“Isn’t that what David Cronenberg would do?” 

Janusz sat in the front seat of the car and looked out into the street.

“You think life is one big video game. You’ll figure it out, I guess, that the real horror is in the, what’s the word, drobne szczegóły, you know, the minutiae. That’s the fucking terrifying bullshit of it all,” he said. 

He took off in his Dodge Charger and I felt the world wrap around me, its endless galaxies, its stars and gas giants with iron surfaces and liquid skies, perfectly calculated holes in the center of the street that grew so deep and strong that nothing could escape their gravitational pull, not even time or space or light or God. And we drove right into them. 

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Diego Alejandro Arias is a Colombian-American writer who has lived in New Jersey for over three decades. He is also a diplomat and civil rights activist. His work has been featured in Another Chicago Magazine, Somos En Escrito, The Arlington Literary Journal, Acentos Review, Action Spectacle, and others. He is a native of Medellin, Colombia. He can be found at realdiegoarias.com.