Episode transcript:

It was so late it was early, a time Linda hadn’t been out for a long time. She and Song An were wandering somewhere in a wooded area off a highway in Bei Bei, and Linda was starting to reassess the night’s choices.

But, there it was. A clearing up ahead with a derelict old factory. Industrial, but not industrial, noises wafted out from inside. “Ugh, come on,” said Song An. “We’re late.”

Linda followed Song An inside. A small stage was made out of discarded junk in the corner of a cavernous nothing. It held two guys with a keyboard and what in an academic setting might be called assorted percussion, but in an empty factory in the middle of the night was realistically a box of random shit. There was an overloaded plug strip to the side of the stage, and its electricity end snaked off out of the room.

The percussionist-singer screamed into a mic and … noises happened. It was amazing.

There were six other audience members, all guys, keeping their distance from one another. No one was dancing, except Song An, who didn’t need a beat to get her groove on.

No one was filming this, either, Linda noticed. At the concert’s end, without ever having addressed the audience, the two guys simply started packing up their gear.

“Who was that?” Linda asked.

“Greg and the Dinosnaxx,” said Song An, a little too loudly, in the aftermath of all that noise. “They’re from around. The one guy is a teacher at the music college.”

“Cool,” said Linda.

“Yeah, I thought you’d be impressed by that shit,” said Song An.

Everyone, including Greg and the Dinosnaxx, trundled out into the daylight Gary or Dinosnaxx had a van, and they said it was cool if everyone crammed in. “We’re headed back to the city.”

Linda crammed in, next to an old, broken looking amp. Three of the six other guys started smoking, without rolling down the windows.

Linda looked at Song An. “Thank you for bringing me. I’m having a wonderful time,” she said.

Song An sneered. “Of course you are. Be cool.”

Episode transcript:

“It’s not an art project,” said Song An, referencing the scene she had been making at Echo Bay. “It’s just what I felt like doing.”

She and Linda had both been forcibly escorted from the club. Now they were at an outdoor barbecue joint, with the rest of the rambunctious drunks.

“That can be art,” said Linda. “Art can be whatever you feel.”

Song An was shoveling morsels of beef into her mouth. When they were ordering, Song An insisted she was a vegetarian, but when the dishes started coming in, she tucked right into Linda’s carefully curated selection. Classic Song An. Linda’s reaction was to say nothing and eat all of Song An’s vegetables. Classic Linda.

The number of the bottles on the table was how they kept track of how many beers they had had, and it was a lot.

Song An did at least have a satisfying reaction to all the Weather Aboveground business.

“That’s bullshit and they’re all bullshit!” she held up a bottle to the next table, “It’s bullshit, right?!”

The guys next door lifted their beers in a return salute, “Bullshit!”

Linda had to forcibly restrain Song An from travelling straight to Moldova to kick some ass. The guys probably would have went with her.

“I don’t think that’s where they are, for real. That’s just where their IP address is.”

“Well then, I’ll kick the shit out of their IP address,” offered Song An.

Linda didn’t need Song An to do anything. It was just nice to have someone actually angry on her behalf.

“You don’t use it, do you?” asked Linda.

“Fuck the weather. You wanna go see a band? They’re playing a derelict factory up in Bei Bei. I’m trying to poach their drummer,” said Song An.

“You have a band? That’s awesome,” said Linda.

“I am the band,” said Song An.

A Didi dropped them off in the middle of a dark stretch of highway. Linda was now carrying gobs of cash these days, and paid the man an exorbitant fare, both for going off app and way out of the city. Who knows how they were going to get home.

Linda and Song An clambered over the safety rail and walked concrete pathway that narrowed as it went further into the trees. Linda tried not to think about wild dogs. Song An was unbothered, but also not too sure of the way. She chattered on about assholes and plans and bands she’d seen as they walked this way and doubled back. Neither of them had a map app, and Linda was actually starting to feel scared, especially after she pissed out most of the drunk by the side of the path.

“There’s no one out here. Are you sure this is a thing?” she asked.

“Got somewhere to be?” asked Song An.

“Yes!” said Linda. “Home sleeping.”

TRANSCRIPT

Linda hadn’t always been a respectable business owner. In her misspent youth she’d been a dissatisfied hellion, railing against the squares.

Nuts Club, 12 years ago, Punk Fest. Subs was playing. SUBS, from Beijing. Beijing sucked too, but Subs was awesome. They were Linda’s favorite band. She wanted to be Kang Mao when she grew up. And she didn’t want to grow up.

As two broke kids, Linda and Song An couldn’t afford the tickets. And they were already known at the club. Once Song An stole a bottle of gin from behind the bar. She got kicked out, but somehow managed to hold onto the gin. She and Linda split it over barbecue and got into a spectacular fight. Linda flipped the table and Song An started throwing beer bottles until the boss threatened to call the police. And then they were a team again, running from the assholes.

“We could wear disguises,” said Linda, brainstorming ways to get into the show.

“No way,” said Song An. “Never hide who you are. Or why bother being anyone at all.”

In the end, Linda didn’t remember how they got in — snuck in through the backdoor, or something — but it was the loudest, grimiest, most intense show she’d ever seen. She got Kong Mao to sign her arm after the show and she didn’t wash it off for weeks.

Song An tried to tattoo it on with a pen and a needle, “Like they do in prison, or on TV.” Linda withstood the pain for about five pinpricks. That surviving greenish dot looked like a gross birthmark, but Linda knew what it meant.

They tried to start a band themselves one summer. Practice involved screaming lyrics at each other while banging on instruments they inherited from friends who had moved on to university or whatever. It was incredible, but they kept getting chased out of their practice space for being too awful.

So instead they stole a rusty dumpster from a construction site and made it into a swimming pool for some relief from the hot, hot heat of the summer in Chongqing. It was a wet mess and, frankly, a tetanus risk, but damn if it wasn’t a good party until it fell apart.

Linda eventually succumbed to pressure to be respectable. Brian came along and believed in her pizza dreams and Song An faded into the background. At least from Linda’s perspective. Song An could never fade, and don’t let her hear you implying that she could.

Transcript: “Why don’t you go out with the boys,” Brian suggested. “You’re always happier after a little Squatty time.”

“Eww. Don’t call it that,” said Linda.

“Take a Squat. Work the glutes. Get that ass to grass!” said Brian, demonstrating perfect deep squat form.

Linda smiled.

“There we go,” said Brian. “I know you’re mad, but ‘mad all the time is a distraction perpetuated by the attention sucker.’”

“You’ve been watching Western Toilet!” said Linda.

Brian shrugged. “He’s funny.”

So Linda got it together and messaged Squatty. He immediately messaged back a location pin and said to meet them there in one hour.

It was a quiet street that looked nearly deserted, but down a small alleyway, there was a door that opened into a crowded dance club.

In the corner of the room, a tiny young woman wearing giant earphones and homemade jewelry was staring intently into a couple of computer screens, and the people on the dancefloor pulsed along to the beat.

How come Linda didn’t know about these places? She’d lived in this city all of her life. She used to be cool. But the boys were living in a whole different world.

Linda drinks. “Your honorarium!” they would say.

The DJ played weird stuff and Linda started having fun.

She danced with the boys and associated friends and some straight-up strangers.

Wendy showed up in an outfit she had designed and sewed herself from vintage fabrics.

The music was loud and conversation was impossible.

You could just yell things into the party and everyone cheered back.

It was that kind of night.

“I’m obsessed with a conspiracy that I made up in my own head!” Linda shouted.

“Right on!” Wendy shouted back.

And for a moment, Linda felt free. Maybe everyone else was right. Instead of getting all worked up about things outside of her control, she should have just gone dancing. She used to love to dance.

At 2:30 am, the DJ put on a remix of the Weather Aboveground jingle, “It’s the conversation we’re all having,” chopped and screwed into sonic scrambled eggs.

“Throw your vote up on the wall!” the DJ intoned.

Everyone projected their watches at the club walls. Cloudy icons filled the room.

“This is you!” said Adrian. “The protest vote! You made this happen!”

Linda felt sick, “This isn’t me. I’m not protesting; I don’t vote. They’re … stealing your data.”

“Oh, yeah. Your thing with your aunt,” Adrian said. “But I mean … who doesn’t have your data.

And if I get up to 40,000 Weather Points, I get this sick customizable avatar.”

“Well, I wouldn’t want to deprive you of your avatar,” said Linda, with a sarcasm that Adrian missed.

A sudden commotion drew the attention of everyone in the room.

“Oww, you fucking bitch. You did that on purpose,” A guy was yelling at a woman about Linda’s age.

“She shocked me. She has some kind of thing and she shocked me!”

“Too right, I shocked you,” said the woman.

She had artfully messy hair and impish, wild eyes, and she was wearing rubber slippers.

“Your complacency is killing you.” She shuffled her feet on the floor and thrust her finger at the guy again, menacingly. He jumped back.

“Song An?” called Linda.

The troublemaker looked over. “Oh, hey Fuck-face! Long time, no see.”

Transcript: “You went to Dan-druff?” asked Brian. “That guy! You know he interviewed with us three times.”

After sitting on it for a few days, Linda told Brian about her brush with potential cybercrime. He was of the impression that setting her money on fire would have been as effective as paying Stinky Dan for retribution against the “Moldovan hackers.”

“Whoever is running these accounts is probably not even in Moldova. You want me to bring it to work? I could do some digging,” offered Brian. “Though I agree with Dan-druff that making a blocklist and getting on with your life is probably the best course of action.”

“But, like, they made a macabre puppet of my Aunt Rose,” said Linda. She’d had a few days to think of exactly what bothered her about this.

“I know. And that’s shitty,” said Brian. “But it’s happening all over the internet. Maybe you should sue Bleater. Be some kind of landmark case.”

Linda knew he was kidding, but this new direction felt like something to do. The world was changed by people taking action, after all. So armed with the list of IP addresses Stinky Dan had compiled, Linda went to see her old college pal Nessa, who had helped her with some of the paperwork for setting up the pizza place.

“Linda, it’s family law,” said Nessa when Linda showed up at her office. Nessa was sat at her desk piled high in files and papers, an untouched takeaway container from a lunch that should have been eaten hours ago sitting precariously close to the edge. “I practice family law.”

She was dressed in a rumpled nice-ish suit, and her long hair was hastily pulled back with … was that a pencil? Did anyone do that outside of movies about busy lawyers.

“You’re the only lawyer I know,” said Linda.

“I know,” said Nessa, with a sigh. “I’m the only lawyer everyone knows. Let me poke around, see what I can find that might point you in the right direction. Is there internet law? Get out of here; I’ll let you know if I find anything.”

“Just one more question. Would you be able to represent me if I was associated with a cybercrime?”

“Jesus Christ, Linda!”

“OK. I’m going. Do you want these?” Linda asked, waving the printout of numbers she had brought.

“No,” said Nessa. “Put them on … this pile.”

Things moved slowly in real life. In an action movie, Linda felt they’d be in some kind of chase scene, shaking down bad guys and getting some answers. In this world, Nessa got back to Linda to say she wasn’t really sure there was anything actionable to prosecute.

“I can write you a stern email,” she told her. “But there’s really not much to do here that would be worth the cost of the court filing fees. Unless you want to pioneer a class action suit.”

“How would we do that?” asked Linda.

“Oh, God! I was kidding!” said Nessa. “I don’t have the resources for that?”

Linda was disappointed. She accepted her sternly worded email as a consolation prize, but she didn’t actually have any place to send it. Squatty offered to print it in the next issue of the zine, and that was kind of that. It was very unsatisfying.

The weather, meanwhile, continued to be cloudy and cold. After having perfect conditions every day, people were starting to notice and grumble. But to Linda, it felt like a return to normalcy. People should experience some discomfort, she thought. It was good for resilliancy and moral fiber, or something.

Anyway, Linda poured all of that dissatisfied energy into working with Squatty and the boys on the zines. She wasn’t sure that her writing was any good, but it was words.

Squatty was very encouraging. “Self-expression is the thing!” he said. “It’s what life is made of.”

Episode transcript: Stinky Dan was a “hacker” that Squatty knew. He was massive, like a figure drawn by someone who recently learned that the human shape is just a series of different circles, and he hulked behind his mutil-screened desktop. And, he did have a kind of chemical odor that Linda couldn’t quite place.

“Is that why he doesn’t live at the squat?” Linda asked Squatty.

Squatty smiled tightly, “Everyone is on their own path, and no judgement, but you also have to have your own boundaries, you know? But I think he can help you.”

It was the first time Linda had seen Squatty slightly uncomfortable. They had come to Dan’s with Joe, another member of the Squatty crew who seemed to be the actual connection here. Joe and Dan exchanged cryptic hellos that Linda tuned out as peacocking blather. She also thought she saw something change hands during their elaborate high five, but she also, also didn’t care.

Squatty and Linda sat on Dan’s fairly nice couch in his fairly dark living room while Dan and Joe hunched over the computer screen. Linda asked if there were any new Western Toilets but Squatty said he didn’t like to watch them when he couldn’t give them his full attention. Joe kept hurling questions over to Linda as they worked.

It didn’t take too long for results. Once Dan got down to digging, he found that all of the bleats urging Linda to rejoin “The conversation we’re all having” — they all came from a similar cluster of IP addresses. Which suggested that one person had taken control of the various accounts.

“If you look at, say, Sarah’s posting history,” he said of an old neighbor’s daughter’s account, “she stopped posting regularly about 2 years ago. This post here, ‘This place is getting stale. I’ll see you on the Green Mountain!!’”

“That’s that platform for all the weenuses,” Joe interjected.

“That was May 2030,” continued Dan, without acknowledging Joe. “And then she doesn’t post again until a few weeks ago. ‘Have you dabbed, yet?! Don’t miss Beany Beanz,’ with a ‘z.’”

“Beany Beanz is so based,” said Joe.

“Don’t click that link,” warned Dan. “Beany Beanz is malware dressed up as cryptocurrency.”

“That’s what I meant,” said Joe.

“I mean, that sounds bad, but what does this have to do with someone impersonating my dead aunt Rose?” asked Linda.

Dan summed up his findings: “It’s bots. Someone has taken control of these dead … sorry, abandoned accounts to hawk shit to idiots, and someone else hired out these accounts that have a connection to you to target you.”

Dan said that he could set up a blocklist of the IP addresses, so that Linda didn’t have to see them anymore. “Or you could join your friend Sarah on Green Mountain, where most people are now anyway.”

“But, like, can you get them?” Linda asked, feeling both bored and enraged by what was happening to her.

“What do you mean ‘get’ and who do you mean by ‘them’” Dan asked.

“Is it Button? I know it’s Button,” said Linda.

“This IP address is in Moldova,” said Dan, like that meant anything.

“So do your little clicky clacks and find out who it is in Moldova!” she said. They had spoofed her aunt’s account, or whatever, and Aunt Rose had been Linda’s favorite. Desecrating her memory should come with some consequences. “What if I really did think it was her ghost?”

Linda was on the verge of tears, which had made Joe retreat to the kitchen. Dan just shrugged his shoulders. “If you wanted to monetize this solution, we could talk next steps.”

Squatty put his hand gently on Linda’s shoulder. “Maybe let’s get some fresh air before we put any money down on … something we might regret.”

“You came to me, these are the tools I have, man,” said Dan.

Linda was shaken out of her rage by the quickly escalating tension and let Squatty bundle her out of Dan’s apartment. But she filed away “next steps,” just in case.

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Episode transcript:

After hanging out long enough, the kids started inviting Linda along for what they liked to call their “small acts of pointless rebellion.”

“Purposlessness is a great joy of life,” said a young woman with short, purple hair called Wendy, who seemed to be the ringleader for this faction of the crew.

“Is that a Western Toilet?” asked Linda.

Wendy rolled her eyes, “No. It’s a me.”

Squatty just laughed and said, “You know she’s cool, because she’s kind of mean.”

The acts were stuff like, one afternoon, they went around the neighborhood and taped little paper mustaches to the face scanning screens at all the apartment complexes. Mostly, if the security guards noticed them, they yelled them off. One even gave half-assed chase.

But more than one amused themself by examining their own mustachioed face in the screen.

“Is this what changing minds feels like?” Linda asked Wendy.

“God. Have you never taken an art history course,” Wendy responded. She snapped her fingers at an, well, underling, who rummaged through her backpack.

Wendy peered in over her shoulder. “Give her ‘Grapefruit,”’ said Wendy.

The underling hefted a large hardcover into Linda’s hands. Linda examined the spine. “By Yoko Ono. … I notice this ones not from the library.”

“No,” said Wendy. “I stole it. From Garden Book in Shanghai.”

“What if I steal it from you?” asked Linda.

“You should,” said Wendy. “And then give it to someone else who needs art in their life.”

Another evening, the gang snuck up to the roof of a nearby abandoned building to add to the graffiti that was already there. Some brought chalk, some brought spray paint. Linda brought a permanent marker.

She didn’t know what to draw, so she pulled up to a section of wall and just started making small squares. Wendy came over with a beer for Linda.

“Nice geometry,” she said.

“I can’t draw,” said Linda.

“Everyone can draw,” said Wendy.

“Everyone keeps saying that, but I don’t know if that’s true,” said Linda.

“Suit yourself,” said Wendy.

A small circle of drinkers coalesced in the middle of the roof. Adrian called Linda over to sit by him. There were no stars, but it was a peaceful night. Noise of the city drifted up from below, sounding a thousand miles away.

“Do you guys do stuff life this every night?” asked Linda.

“More recently,” said the underling who had given Linda the book. She was called Danny.

“I think we’ve been energized by the new blood,” added Adrian.

“Oh, who’s that?” asked Linda.

“It’s you!” said Adrian.

The small circle toasted Linda, “To new blood!” Linda felt warm and happy.

Recounting this to Brian later in bed, he remarked that she seemed happier lately.

“And, like, your sleep numbers are better, too. Wanna check the graphs?” He offered his watch to Linda.

“Nah. I feel like you’ve got a good handle on our bio-metric optimization,” Linda teased.

“Hey. When we’re sixty, but we feel thirty, you’re gonna thank me,” he said.

Linda hauled her laptop on to the bed.

“Babe, the blue light,” Brian said.

“I’m just checking my bleats real quick. I’ve got the polarizer on,” said Linda.

Brian tugged down his eye shade and slipped on his sleep-vibrations ring. “Good sleep makes good brains,” he said.

Linda didn’t answer. She refreshed the tab that would bring up new messages, barely even registering the slowness of the browser-based social experience. Among the posts of vacation photos and video news — both of which were too depressing to engage with for long — there was a new bleat urging Linda to “Come back! It’s the conversation we’re all having!”

She had been getting these lately, from old acquaintances. A college classmate she had fallen out of touch with. A friend of a friend she had met once at a party. An overzealous grocery store clerk who got Linda’s contact info before Brian had enlightened her on proper information hygiene. This one, though, was her aunt Rose.

Her aunt Rose had died 8 months ago.

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Episode transcript:

There was a man. There was a myth. There was a series of videos.

Western Toilet, by all accounts, was just some guy living in a place he wasn’t from, making videos about … current events? Politics? Technology? Kind of all of that and none of that, as far as Linda could see.

To Squatty, they were sacred texts to live by. They revealed things about the world that he had never seen before, and pointed out a path that was hiding in plain sight.

“Don’t be the man they are insisting you be. Be the person you are.”

This wasn’t something Western Toilet ever said. He didn’t have to. Squatty got his message loud and clear, and was dedicated to living it out in the world.

Squatty wasn’t some freak, though, obsessed with an internet man. He had a job, and hobbies, and friends. But to truly know the man, you had to watch the Toilet.

It was rumored that Western Toilet lived here in town. Squatty and the boys always kept half an eye out for him, primed with questions. Sometimes they’d take special expeditions to see if they could track the locations from his videos. And if there was good barbecue nearby, well, that was all in the course of a day’s work.

To Linda, the fervor was a part of youth she had left behind. She was a serious-minded 30-something, after all. Seeking answers from an online guru felt a little … misguided.

But then again, that was something that Western Toilet himself said. And, Linda had to admit that life was a little more exciting with something of a quest to pursue. Hanging out with Squatty and his boys, Linda had to wonder if maybe the thing she was missing in her life was just … friends.

She liked spending time with the boys, and working on the zine made her feel like a part of something. If anything, it gave her a chance to brush off her traditional paper cutting skills that she left behind in middle school.

“He talks about that, in ‘Work is for Jerks,’” explained Squatty. “Don’t be reduced to a paycheck. Do things that are useless to find your true purpose.”

Linda argued back that arts and aesthetic crafts weren’t useless, and they were off to the races: a spirited discussion about society’s values and what made life worth living.

She could have found similar advice in the self-help section at the library — a place Western Toilet argued they should all be frequenting more often. In fact, the gang arranged a trip to their local library where Linda got her first library card. Her family had reasoned that if they needed books, they’d just go to the bookstore.

And then, they never really needed books.