The Postmortal (11 page)

 

 

XMN doesn’t like people.

“I mostly keep to myself, because other people are annoying.” He tells me this as we sit together in a burrito shop near his home in San Jose, California. The crowd at the shop is relatively sparse this afternoon, but XMN’s mannerisms indicate that he feels anxious, even a bit claustrophobic. His eyes dart back and forth. He never once looks at our waitress while ordering. He scratches his face constantly, though he doesn’t appear to have any bites or scrapes that would need relief.

“When I found out about the cure being legalized, I was crushed. Because the idea that there would be more people walking around, sucking in air like a bunch of fucking mouth breathers . . . I couldn’t handle the idea. I always subscribed to the theory that hell is other people. Well, here come
more
other people! I get sick just thinking about it.”

I ask XMN why he dislikes people so much. “Because none of them have ever been nice to me,” he says.

At the time of legalization, XMN (pronounced “examine”) was part of a large online subculture of people known as “trolls,” cyberanarchists who enjoy wreaking as much havoc online as they possibly can—on message boards, blogs, feeds, everywhere. XMN claims to have once hacked into the e-mail account of a famous politician and deleted its entire contents. “The news was never made public, but in the days after you could see it in his eyes. He looked like he hadn’t slept for seventy-two hours,” the troll boasts. XMN also cites multiple occasions when he found the ping feeds of family members of the doctors killed in the New York and Oregon bombings and sent them hateful messages, some in the voice of their deceased loved ones. “I sent one to Sarah Otto. It said, ‘Hey, honey. I can’t talk right now. Some kids are roasting marshmallows over my burning carcass. Love, Graham.’ I laughed for days.”

But soon XMN grew to find simple online trolling unfulfilling. “You have to put out a lot of bait just to catch one fish,” he tells me. “And each day it’s harder and harder to shock and offend people, even if I send out a photo of a boy being castrated or something like that. They’ve seen it all before, or they know not to click. It’s easy to become desensitized to that kind of stuff online. But it’s nowhere near as easy to ignore it if happens to you for real.”

So on the message board he calls home, an enormous trolling site called SiPhallus, XMN exchanged private messages with a group of fellow trolls and decided it would be more fun to wreak their havoc live and in person. He refuses to go into exact details about what he has done, fearing it will lead to his arrest. He suggests that I try to guess.

Vandalism? “Yes.”

Bomb threats? “Yes.”

Blinding people? “Just once, but I’d like to do more.”

Keying cars? “Yes.”

Killing pets? “Yes. Or blinding them.”

Arson? “No, but only because it’s hard to get away with.”

Draining bank accounts? “Yes.”

I ask XMN why he doesn’t choose to cross the line into full pro-death fanaticism and kill people outright. “I’m not a nutjob. I’m not a terrorist,” he protests. “I’m not going to go around killing people. I just think that if people are going to live in this world, why do they deserve to be happier than me? They should have to go through every day feeling as lousy as I feel. And then, maybe, they’ll stop walking around like they own the place. Maybe they’ll have some respect for other people, like me.”

XMN admits to coming from a broken home. His mother died when he was young, and he says his father physically abused him and sexually abused his sister. Ridiculed at school for his gawky appearance, XMN walled off the people around him and took refuge in the online community on SiPhallus. “They’re people like me. They understand that this whole society thing is a bunch of bullshit.”

But doesn’t he ever crave real contact with people? “Not really. I’m very private. I don’t like being touched. I don’t like it when people are friendly to me. It’s like, ‘Who are you? What the hell do you have to be so sunny about?’ ”

I ask XMN how many other “terra trolls” are now out there, planning to wreak havoc. His eyes twinkle. It’s the first time all day that I’ve seen him express genuine excitement. “There are a lot more of us than people think. And more people are joining every day.” It’s hard to know if he’s telling the truth or simply playing another one of his games. Studies of terra trolling are nonexistent, and laws against it are just now coming into shape. There’s no data for terra troll crimes committed as of yet.

I ask XMN if perhaps this is not the best way to spend one’s time. I ask if it might be a symptom of a much deeper personal problem that he has failed to address. He thinks for a moment. “Yeah, I’m sure that’s part of it. Then again, I don’t know if the problems I have can ever be fixed. I don’t know how you go about being reborn into a family that loves you. I think I’m damaged permanently. And if that’s the case, everyone else deserves the same fate.”

He finishes his burrito and tells me a story of the time he broke into a woman’s house and stole her cat. He drove the cat fifty miles south and released it out into the wild. “That way,” he says, “she’ll never know what happened to it. It’s a double whammy.”

I ask XMN why he did it.

“Because it’s funny,” he says. “It’s so funny to me. It makes me laugh.” He does not laugh when he says this.

He leaves the shop early, as I pay the tab. When I walk out to my car, I see a small sticky note attached to my front right tire. I grab it.

“I could have stabbed your tire, but I didn’t,” the note says. “Just this once, I’ll be a nice person.”