Go Live

One day, the streamer woke and found himself too unclean to be a sacrifice. That is what Lucas had thought. When he had thought it, he couldn’t remember. Things had started to blur together. But it didn’t matter. Lucas just supposed it must have happened. There had to be some moment, right? There had to be a dividing line that separated the old from the new, what had been from what is and would be.

Lucas sat in the dark. In the dark, the dorm room might have seemed cavernous if not for the flickering screen.

The screen flickered again as the chat updated. “WTF?” White letters hung at the bottom of the window, then disappeared. No moderator had deleted it. Lucas was sure of that. Where we’re going, there are no mods, he thought. Correction—where we are. But some variant on the theme WTF wasn’t atypical. And this wasn’t the first such comment to be deleted by its sender. It was as if they sensed something, as if they sensed that just having that out there exposed them to something, connected them to something that they…. So it was better to delete their history and try to forget. Once or twice, weeks ago, maybe, Lucas had, out of curiosity, tried to track those few accounts that had found their way to the stream. He wanted to ask them how they had found it. But the accounts had been deleted.

How had Lucas discovered it? It had started so abstractly. Just a technical problem.

Of course, he had always been a viewer. It had started all the way back when he was ten. That was where many of his earliest memories came from. Perhaps there were snatches, fragments of years before, but what he remembered best started about then. In fact, the earliest and most definitive memory he had was of EpicG. Now, that was a name that hadn’t come up in a long time. He had crashed out…. Lucas could still remember it. Clips had been on livestreamfails for weeks. But now he was forgotten. That was just the churn. Streaming was like the ocean—there were always more fish in the sea. And things deeper.

Being a viewer had always been the low hum that had kept his life on a steady rhythm, and no matter what had happened, that steady rhythm had soothed everything.

He remembered being in his room, lying in bed, eyes closed, earbuds in as he listened to VVishnu play Fall Guys. The catchy music and cute sounds of the creatures running into each other, tumbling, and getting stuck on obstacles obscured the sounds of his parents that still penetrated the closed door.

In high school, it had been been what had boosted his grades out of remedial status. Co-study streams. So long as someone else was working beside him, he was fine.

But even if his grades had been passable, the lack of extracurriculars had been the big thing. Or at least everyone assumed it would be a big thing. His mother had pitched several fits about how he hadn’t been applying himself. And it had gotten worse when the letters came back from the handful of colleges he had applied to. His problem was, according to his mother, that he was turning out as lazy as his father. After Lucas had applied to attend the local community college instead, his father had claimed his lack of ambition had been because of too much feminine influence, but that that was just the way it was in this world, women always had the advantage in the courts.

He had started streaming himself around then. Just light stuff. Video games a couple of hours a night. Longer on weekends. He didn’t worry about going out.

Community college hadn’t been terrible. He had completed his associates and used that to transfer to a state university. His mother hadn’t been particularly happy about this either, but it had been what it had been. And it meant that Lucas could move out. It had required loans, but he could move out.

He applied to study computer science. His particular interest had been in video compression. At career days, he kept an eye out for booths representing any of the big streaming companies. Streaming had been booming then, more than ever. In his anthropology class, he had learned about Marshall McLuhan and the global electronic village. This is what Lucas became convinced the world was moving toward. It would be a world in which oral tradition returned as the primary mode of society, but rather than being stuck listening to whoever was around the fire, the ubiquity of smartphones would allow virtual tribes to form, and space would cease to be the organizing principle of human social affairs. Liberal democracy, the institution of the state, both were being outmoded by the network.

And Lucas had been networking. He had been refining his LinkedIn over the last half year and eventually hooked up with one of the recruiters who would be coming to the university in Fall.

That had been where it started.

They had gone to one of the bars off campus. The place had been swamped. As soon as the noise hit him in the doorway, Lucas felt he couldn’t breath. But he had to push through.

They found a booth. It was Lucas and the recruiter and another senior Lucas didn’t know. The recruiter sat there leaning over and spinning his finger to get someone’s attention.

The drinks were coming soon enough. Lucas hit a buzz almost immediately, and it only got deeper from there.

The other guy left to make his way to the bathrooms.

The recruiter laughed. When Lucas turned to look, a new bottle had been on the table, and the waitress was walking away. The recruiter lifted the bottle, watching her go. Lucas didn’t turn to look, but she must have disappeared into the crowd, because the recruiter cut his eyes toward him again. Bottle in hand, he leaned across the table, pausing there a moment with his head slightly tilted. The blacks of his eyes reflected the bar lights. “You really wanna know something that’s hush hush?”

Head buzzing, Lucas leaned forward.

The recruiter’s eyes floated there in front of him. They cut toward the end of the table, then back to Lucas. “You know they changed the algorithm….”

“Yeah…” Lucas said. He shook his head, regretted it. He watched the recruiter’s lips move, tried to make himself focus.

“…anything negative.”

Lucas almost shook his head again. “What?”

The recruiter’s eyes cut toward the end of the table again. “Any stream….” He cut his eyes toward Lucas again, and Lucas couldn’t determine if the eyes were shaking or he was. “They de-rank any stream that goes negative.”

Lucas thought he had missed something again. Again, he had to stop himself from shaking his head. “That don’t make…sense.”

The recruiter leaned back. He shrugged. Then he looked off. The recruiter shook his head. “Gotta take a trip,” he said. He gave a thumbs-up as he turned to move into the crowd. “Catch you later,” he called, but Lucas could barely hear him over the noise. “Check your DMs,” the recruiter said as his eyes wandered to a girl in a halter top. Lucas watched him follow her deeper into the crowd.

Lucas sat there with his hand gently wrapped around the lukewarm bottle in front of him.

“You want a refill?”

“Hm?” He looked over.

He shook his head, felt instantly sick again. “No….” He raised the bottle and tipped it. A trickle ran across his tongue, not enough to swallow. He looked at the bottle. But when he looked toward the end of the table, the girl had gone.

The noise was too much. His fingers twitched as if he wanted to reach for a volume control. He stood. He looked for the recruiter. Some sophomore girls were moving in a herd through the crowd. Something shoved against Lucas’s shoulder. But by the time he looked around, they had already pushed past.

Too many people. He needed to get out of there.

Out on the sidewalk, heat still permeated that Fall night. A sticky heat. Lucas felt like he was swimming in his own head. The heat made him want to vomit.

He looked in the direction of campus, stumbled off the sidewalk and across the road. A small gaggle passed him on their way to the bar. But he didn’t pay attention to them. Usually he would be cognizant of how he looked. He had always been that way, thinking about what he looked like from the other person’s point of view. Wasn’t that something everybody did? It should go without mention, right? But he had once. The guy had looked at him like wtf, dude? And Lucas had changed the subject. Just a joke, ha ha.

Maybe you only thought about that kind of stuff when you watched yourself in the preview window long enough.

He stared blankly down at the concrete, almost walked into a lamppost. Almost. But that wasn’t because of the alcohol. At least not totally. No, he was mulling, thinking, considering, pulling at the threads of what of his consciousness he could wrangle. Or had something wrangled him?

How? How would a stream go negative?

Someone was shouting. Lucas paused and looked up. Some people were running on the green space, dodging around trees in the glow of distant lampposts. Lucas turned and started toward the east dorms.

Had to be bullshit. Some joke. A hazing. Get the recruit hooked on bullshit. Maybe it was a test. A test?

He stuffed his hands in his pockets as he walked. He couldn’t stand his arms swinging. It felt like they were going to fall off.

A test made some kind of stupid sense. How would you prove it?

He could still feel the buzz. His head was swimming. But he didn’t pitch over when he started up the steps. So there was that.

De-ranked but not terminated, that’s what the recruiter had said.

Lucas’s heart rate started to rise. Was that the alcohol? API info tumbled through his brain. Momentarily, he realized he might have hit the Ballmer point. He found his keys and opened the door. Pausing in the hallway, he listened but heard nothing. If they were having sex, they were doing it somewhere else. Keys still in hand, he turned toward his dorm.

He left the light off, relaxing in the darkness after he closed the door. A sliver of light emerged beneath it. This would become more noticeable the further he sunk into dark adjustment. Sometimes he put a towel over it. But not tonight.

He moved through the dark with practiced ease. His finger came to rest on the shift key. The Japanese rubber membrane buckled under the pressure, produced a pleasant thock. The dual screens lit. His optic nerve erupted. It was like the big bang and the beginning of the universe every time. He pulled out the chair and dropped into it.

He had amassed tools over the years, most of them modified open source code. But he had also written a few scrapers and bots of his own. He opened a terminal and began typing. Screen glow bathed him, the keyboard pleasantly thocking at his touch. Instinctively, he looked at the other monitor, but the broadcast software wasn’t loaded. No preview window to see himself in. The pounding at the keyboard grew heavier, the thocking thockier until it began to sound like something else, something he couldn’t quite place…. Output scrolled by. He opened a second terminal. He tabbed between them, typing, just typing. He really must have hit the Ballmer Point.

But what was he even doing? Sitting there watching gigabytes of data download? What was this even for? Negative views? No, it was all just a joke. A nothing burger. Get the newbie looking for a room that didn’t exist.

Screw that.

It felt like he had tipped off the point. All down hill from here. Ready for the crash. He opened a shortcut to a boobie streamer he usually watched this time of night. He sat there staring at the screen. But after a while, he realized he wasn’t even staring at what he should be staring at. No, it was as if he were trying to zoom in and pick out individual pixels on the 4k display. Or not even the pixels, but the space between the pixels, the screen-door effect.

He sat forward and rubbed his eyes. If they were hiding it, how else would they be hiding it? Maybe it wasn’t accessible to the API at all. After all, the API wasn’t truth. It was just what the gods behind the screens let you have. It was more prayer schema than anything. So if they didn’t want you to know about it, it just didn’t exist.

He opened his eyes again, blurrily watched the streamer bend over as she wrote a donator’s name on a white board.

He was crashing….

But…there had been a change about…eight months ago. A very small API change. It had played hell with a lot of libraries. Some speculated that they had done it just to break third-party tools. They had changed the view count from an unsigned to a signed integer. So stupid—why would you ever need a signed integer for a view count? All a signed integer got you was…negative values.

Had…had anyone ever looked? Why would they? By definition they shouldn’t. It made no sense. By definition a viewer count went from zero to infinity. Lucas’s tools didn’t account for anything below zero, except as an error. He sat there stroking the tops of the keys with one hand, feeling the subtle texture. No, it was stupid. But he tabbed over to a terminal and opened the editor anyway. It only took changing a few lines. He saved the updated file and re-ran the previous query, sorted by views and reversed it so the lowest numbers would come out at bottom.

What time was it? He sat there staring at the screen, blinking, vision blurred. The terminal hovered in the center of the screen, obscuring the streamer’s swaying assets. The terminal cursor spastically blinked as the prompt returned, program finished. He stared at the ascending number columns. The lowest was negative five. What the hell did that mean? He looked at the name in the last column. Then he tabbed into the browser and typed that into the search. Nothing. But that wasn’t necessarily unusual. Anyone who knew anything knew that certain controversial streamers got de-ranked from search.

As if on automatic, Lucas struck the shortcut to open a new tab. He typed the first letter of the website, hit tab to autocomplete, pasted the username, and hit enter.

It was live. Immediately he looked toward the view count in the lower corner. Zero. Was the API completely busted? Was it just a fluke? But he couldn’t concentrate on that. Something was off. The screen wasn’t flashing enough. He cut his eyes toward the chat window. Empty. That made sense. No viewers, no chats. Not even bots. Lucas had streamed almost eight months before his first chatter had showed up.

His vision blurred, doubled.

Everything felt…bogged down. He really was crashing. Again, what time was it? He tried to look at the clock in the corner of the taskbar, but couldn’t focus. His eyes drifted toward the center of the screen. Black. The stream was live, but it was just…black. Technical error? Encoding problem? If the connection had failed, the icon would have popped up. He cut his eyes toward the chat window. Nothing. His eyes drifted toward the center of the screen again.

Anything negative de-ranked. Not terminated. Just hidden. It just didn’t make sense. He opened another tab, went to the home page. What time was it? He squinted at the clock. 4:17 AM.

He switched to the previous tab. Nothing had changed. Black screen, no chatters. Nothing. No viewers. No—one viewer. The count had updated to include him. He tabbed to the terminal, retyped the command, but narrowed it to that one username. Still negative five. Which was it? Plus one or negative five? The only way it worked was if you…started at zero…some views counted up, some counted down…. But why? Why would they count down on one side and up the other? It had to be busted. His eyes flickered toward the chat window, then toward the black video. It all had to be busted. It was some joke. It was all some joke. The recruiters knew your username—you interacted on the site. They get you to find something stupid, and they logged it on the backend. Somebody was probably sitting around laughing right then. Look at this stupid idiot.

“Fuck all of you,” Lucas breathed. He felt as if he were deflating. His back hurt. He stretched forward in the seat. He…. Did something move? He tried to focus on the screen. But from all he could tell, the video was as black as ever. Completely busted. Maybe their camera had gone out. Audio too? He glanced toward his headphones. The keyboard sounds had been too pleasant to want to put them on. He was about to reach for them when movement caught his eye. Yes…movement. He blinked and rubbed his eyes. He squinted. Was it only a dark room? Was somebody doing a sleep stream? He crunched forward, nose almost against the screen. Was that movement? Or was that just his eyes? It….

Then he was rolling out of the chair, struck his elbow, but tried to climb up. He pawed at the door. The hallway lights blinded him. He stumbled toward the bathroom, couldn’t make it to the toilet, vomited in the sink. He stood leaning over it, gripping the edges, retching, the scent of acid and beer rising into his face. He turned the faucet, stood there panting as water mixed with vomit and swirled down the drain. It dripped from his chin. After it had all run out of the basin—how long had that taken?—he turned toward the paper-towel dispenser, tore a chunk, wiped his mouth. He spat into the swirling water.

No, he hadn’t seen anything. It was just…it was just a joke. But something…night terrors when he was a kid. There had been a man standing there…watching. No…. He turned off the faucet and turned away from the sink. But he just stood there looking at the bathroom door.

When he went into the hall, he waited and listened. Everybody still must be out. He looked down toward his own door. It was still open. Dark inside.

It was all just a joke, wasn’t it? Yank their chain. Have a good laugh.

He moved toward the open doorway. Automatically, he closed it after he stepped inside. He stood there in the dark and stared at the computer screen across the room. He was too far away to see it, but it was there.

At first…he thought he had been watching a corpse. There was always that urban legend of a streamer dying on camera. But it wasn’t a corpse…no, it was more like….

Just a joke. Just one big joke.

He moved toward the screen, his eyes once again adjusted to the dark. He touched the back of the chair.

The eyes just stared at him. There had to be eyes in there, deep in sunken and shadowed facets. There had to be—he felt it. Long, wispy strands looked as if they might be shedding…or floating…as if underwater? He thought about wet paper mâché. Some of it had matted onto the slumped shoulders. No, not shoulders. But the mouth…the plastered maw…. There was something there. Something moved. A tongue? No, it couldn’t be. He watched something crawl through the opening.

Just a joke. A hell house for stream engineers. That’s all it was. Had to be. Had to be.

He forced himself to look at the stream timer. Almost forty-eight hours. A stream couldn’t go longer than that. What would happen? His stomach surged again. If there was anything left, it was going to blow all over the floor. His hand clamped on the back of the chair so hard his joints hurt. He fixed on the timer in the corner, glanced toward the taskbar. Had time stopped? The minute changed. How many years to a minute?

His stomach surged again. But if he turned away…he was going to miss something. Something important. Something….

The screen flashed. The video went purple. The broken icon flashed. Stream terminated.

He sighed. His stomach…it hadn’t settled. He just didn’t feel it at all. He turned away. But light flashed across the walls. Instinctively, he spun. The purple background had disappeared, the icon gone. The stream timer had reset.

Lucas slumped into the chair. He sat staring at the screen. He kept staring. He didn’t even know if he was seeing anymore. But he…heard something. Someone coming? No, no one was coming. It was the weekend. It was a holiday weekend, wasn’t it? He never kept track. No, nobody was coming back until next week. No one was coming back.

But the sound…. He looked down at the desk, at the headphones. Slowly, he reached for them. He slipped them on. When he had them on, it had always been like the rest of the world didn’t exist. And there was that sound, that pleasant, rhythmic thock. And it just kept…sounding. Lucas’s hands reached toward his own keyboard, then one hand moved toward the mouse. The webcam indicator light activated. He opened the broadcast software in the other monitor, loaded the default scene, saw himself in the darkened room in the preview window. The stream key was already loaded. All he had to do was go live. He tabbed to the browser and opened his profile and changed the title. LIVE REACT. He tabbed back to the broadcast software, opened the scene editor, added the browser window as a source, and overlaid the webcam feed in the corner. He sat there watching himself move the mouse. He clicked. Even through his headphones, the click punctuated the thocking rhythm.

He watched himself watch.

On the other stream, the view count dropped by one. How many on the negative side? How would you count it? One more or one less?

He could check later. Right now, he just watched himself watch…watched himself watch it watch him watch himself.