I Am Become Death

Ian Peterkin

Gbolahan sat in his office, waiting for the Zoom moderator, presumably his soon-to-be ex-wife’s lawyer to open the room. Open. How could he just leave the tabs out? Of course, they were incognito, but that didn’t matter. And the things he had to admit to in counseling. His index finger circled the touchpad as he waited. The files. The ToR browser. The VPN. The subscriptions. He breathed in deeply, looking down at his coffee. He looked up at one of the cleaners making his way down the hall. It was strange being back. A half an hour earlier, he had gone to the university’s Starbucks. He looked around at the students. No real hum. No real [indistinct chatter]. Everyone seemed to be looking at their smartphones. It was engineers and scientists like him who made all of this possible. Like many of his undergrad friends in CS, he had gone into NetSec, only getting a small glimpse of what was coming. The things that AI could do. There was already a company that produced holographic models of deceased loved ones, but when it was acquired by another company, one that specialized in upscaling images and audio, some people stopped going to work. Others had found other 52

uses for the tech, not using old recordings of family members but that of performers.

Gbolahan thought that things were going to be okay, that he and his wife would stay together, if for no other reason, for their two children, a five-year-old and an infant. He had vaguely remembered a news segment about another university and its STEAM project. They thought it would be great to pair mathematicians, computer scientists, and engineers with their colleagues in the fine arts. There was a simple prompt, a simple query, although its answer is complex: What Does It Mean to Be Human?

He had altogether forgotten that clip until it made frontpage news. A computer scientist, who had been working on AI, had been coupled with a digital artist. The digital artist had discussed her work, taking photographs of people and then taking those photographs to create a mosaic, one that when viewed from a distance created a single image of someone else. Their collaboration had seemed unfruitful—at first.

The program was supposed to do the same thing, but it did nothing for two weeks. The computer scientist had thought there was some kind of error in the code, but then, in the third week, it started to generate a changing image, a protean face that morphed into new faces at regular intervals. The program had scoured the Internet, cobbling together a petabyte of images: pornography, corpses, and people in extremis. Upon closer inspection, they discovered that some of the tiny images were of regular people, men whose computer cameras had been hacked and accessed while they were watching porn, men whose images were recorded in a dark corner of the Web, not knowing that their orgasmic faces would be used for this art instillation.

Men’s Rights activists had threatened to sue the university, 53

saying that men’s privacy had been violated and that men should not be publicly shamed for how they use their bodies. They said that the art instillation was tantamount to revenge porn. There were sad-eyed males behind them, shying away from the cameras.

The university refused to take it down, claiming that it was not in the practice of destroying or censoring art and that anything found on the Web was a human artifact. The result was hard to imagine. Lines zig-zagging around the university. The small gallery, that heretofore had never had more than 50 people, suddenly had a waitlist. The big image could be of a corpse, mouth agape, or it could be of a man, a rictus of what seemed like pain, his mouth open in a primal scream, or it could be of a face full of terror, pleading, or questioning. People observed the screen for hours, some of whom left with a certain twitch at the crow’s feet of one eye. Others got up close, taking pictures of the smaller images, which contained the same kinds of images. It had become a game for some, trying to unmask all of the men. Someone figured out a way to capture the big image and then zoom in on all of the smaller images and then post pages and pages of the individuals in those images to the Internet. It became a game: Whose husband, grandfather, father, stepfather, uncle, cousin, brother, or son can you find?

It did not take long for Gbolahan’s wife to find him.

The Zoom screen showed that the host was about to let him in. As it loaded, he thought about a video that he had seen in grad school, some class about ethics, and in the video, a man who looked more than haunted, a man who looked absolutely ghoulish, talked about his thoughts after the first nuclear blast, “I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita…”