Would You Stop Following Me if I Was a Worm?

Issue #77: Foulmaxing in Zoothesia

In this issue: With appearances perpetually sanitized by overlays, our protagonist must resort to foulmaxing to escape the unwanted attention of a former lover. The second installment in a new anthology series from Spencer Nitkey. Missed part one? Read it here.

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Sylvo always wanted to play this game when we were dating. He called it “If I was,” and I absolutely loathed it. “Ki,”, he’d ask, “would you love me if I was [insert inane suggestion here]?” I think the genesis of the game was some old meme about asking your partner “Would you still love me if I was a worm?” Which, OK, I could see the cloying charm, but Sylvo would ask these breathless, exhausting versions: “Would you still love me if I lost all power of speech and movement and had to communicate by blinking in Morse code?” “Would you still love me if the overlays declared me verboten and you only saw a blurry, muffled shape in my place?” etcetera.

He liked asking the questions, took some kind of sick pleasure in forcing me to affirm my love for him in increasingly unhinged scenarios. But he liked it even better when he would cajole me into asking one myself. The moment I finished, he’d smile all big and stupid and shout “Of course!” before launching himself at me with puckered lips.

In truth, I don’t know if I ever did love him. Like, at all. Let alone enough to love him through some heinous transformation or whatever. We started dating because he was handsome, and his attention was intoxicating at first. Big, liquid brown eyes that transformed into headlights when our gazes first met across the bar. Whatever his overlay settings were, I got the sense that he would blur the whole world out just to focus on me if they would let him, which of course they wouldn’t.

This was nice for a while, but it became kind of like eating poprocks for every meal. The big problem was that he was one of those dudes who really liked being in love. It was all he ever talked about: how compatible we were, how beautiful I was, how many adventures we’d have (mind you, he never actually planned any adventures, just kind of hazily dreamed about them having happened). He had the protocols of courting down pat. But the actual relationship? The part where you have to negotiate and attenuate and learn another person’s messy intricacies and develop a personal language only the two of you share? Totally useless there.

We broke up. Well, fine, I broke up with him. We were sitting on dewy lawn grass watching a drone light show in Chitram Row. The rowhomes turned the large screens affixed to their sides, and usually saved for advertisements, into mirror-mode reflections of the lights bursting and swirling above. He tried to hold my hand, a face in the sky turned into a school of fish that dove toward the river, and I couldn’t take it anymore.

It took him a few minutes to accept that I wasn’t joking. Like the concept that I would want our sad, saccharine attempt at a partnership to end was truly worldshifting for him. I thought he was going to cry when it finally sank in, but I watched this curious, steelly look pass across, then settle on his face like metal cooling.

“This is a chance to win you back,” he said. “A test.”

Fuck.

And look, I gotta hand it to the guy, if it had have been a test, he’d definitely be passing. My dining room table displayed a gradient of roses, from dark brown wilt to vibrant fresh reds. He once sent 100 in a single day.

(OK, fine. The other reason we lasted as long as we did is that he’s loaded – I’m talking real roses here, not bundles of metal sticks programmed to bloom in the overlays only.)

He stopped sending them to my work after the fifth bouquet that week got me called into HR, but they were still showing up at my apartment door every day. That’s not all, either. I was getting six “bespoke” AI songs about our love and relationship sent to my overlay audio request queue a day, dozens of these gauche renderings of me from videos he took with his implant while we were dating. He stopped me in the grocery store with a new overlay avatar projected over his body, like the problem was aesthetic and not emotional suffocation. I started looking over my shoulders on the city sidewalks in case he came barreling towards me with doughy love in his eyes and some cockamamy gift in his arms.

He was everywhere: popping up behind me in shop lines, swinging in on subway rail handles with an envelope between his teeth, and singing auto-tuned ballads as I ran from him through the streets. The overlays didn’t let you erase someone from your vision, but I wished they would let you erase yourself from others.

I know. We’d entered, decidedly, stalking territory. Trust me, I knew the statistics about where that leads, but evidently he was still seeing me, which meant the Zoothesia Protocols weren’t predicting he’d harm me. Presence must preserve, as the slogan goes.

After he surprised me in my apartment stairwell with a bottle of champagne. I visited a friend, Cressida, who worked on the hardware side of the overlays. She explained that if he was seeing me, the risk of physical injury of any kind was infinitesimal.

“The models are super high fidelity,” she explained. “The latest update brought incident rates down to less than 0.0001 per hundred thousand.”

“Ok, but is there no consideration for, like, psychic injury?” I asked.

“Only if it links to real, probable harm,” she said, I think, quoting the employee manual at that point.

“Protocols for the People, my ass,” I said.

“Have you tried making him hate you so much that you do disappear?” she asked, chuckling as I was halfway out the door.

She was joking, but the spread of charcuterie and sweating, chocolate-covered fruit that was waiting for me at my apartment door made the prospect of foulmaxing my way out of his life too tempting a possibility to ignore.

I read up on it some. The technical term was phobisculpting, and it was mostly hippies and criminals who engaged. I liked the mouthfeel of foulmaxing better. I was ready to be foul. Truthfully, jumping into bodymodding felt exciting in a way I hadn’t expected. I spent a weekend trying to find someone seedy but approachable. Some forums said there was a dealer in Kaylan Grove, and I knew half the recent-grad hires I worked with lived there, so if they were selling to yuppies, they were probably pretty approachable.

I wandered around until I saw a guy sliding baggies to nervous suits and made my approach. His name was Oren, and he was nice, like almost too nice, for a dealer. That was fine with me. He gave me the name and coordinates of a sculptor and told me to meet her at 11 the next morning. The coordinates seemed like they were in a populous enough place, so I made my way there, only a regular amount of nervous, after literally sprinting through the city streets so Sylvo couldn’t give me a present he was waiting across the street from my apartment to deliver. His begging eyes were starting to upset me, like viscerally, and I couldn’t wait to disappear from his life.

We met in a parking lot outfront of a VR studio. A woman named Agra, with gemstones embedded in the skin of her left arm, rendering it useless, was waiting for me. They shimmered in the noonday overlay sun and seemed, at times, to glitch in and out of view.

“You trying to disappear?” she said, pulling a tablet out and taking a picture of my face without asking.

“Just lose one guy,” I said.

“Bespoke. Let me guess. Love gone wrong?”

“Just his.”

As if on cue, an AI-generated song that started with ‘You’re the Ki to my heart, and I’m falling apart without you,” started blaring in my overlay until I blinked it mute.

“So what’re you thinking?” she asked.

“I thought that was your job,” I said.

“I mean, I can give you some basics, but if you’re trying to put off one person, you’d know what upsets them more than me.”

She had a good point. I thought about it a bit and realized that part of the problem with his whole romancing shtick was that I hadn’t ever really gotten to know him. He was always asking about me, obsessing over me, which, again, felt great at first, but there was a hollowness to the whole thing. It was always going to sink back in on itself like a poorly constructed skyscraper.

“It’s not just that he has to be repulsed by you. That’s what people get wrong about foulmaxing. It’s about a particular sub-type of disgust that triggers a fight response. Flight, freeze, faun, none of that’s gonna work for you.”

“Faun’s the whole problem… He’s scared of spiders,” I hazarded. “Like he’d see one and a second later he’d be throwing an improvised projectile at it.”

She paused, shot me a that’s what you got? look, and nodded.

---

I couldn’t stop looking at my new face in the bathroom mirror.

It was captivating, in a weird way. Eight black eyes blinking back at me. Sure, only two were functional, but the spectacle was startling. I’d grown all kinds of thick setae hairs across my arms that rose and fell with the goosebumps across my skin.

If Sylvo was scared of spiders, this ought to do it. Right?

I didn’t waste time. I had a few days off work and, in an ideal world, I’d sear this image of myself into him, trigger a “squish now” response that would turn the love in his heart over like spoiled milk, and then be free to undo all this.

I wanted to surprise him, figuring that would trigger the maximal fear response. It was a bit of a challenge, knowing he was also looking for me at, apparently, all hours of the day. I pulled up his socials, had my overlays project a little “frequently visited” flow over the city, like one of those spaghetti maps that show shipping routes, and started my own hunt.

I began with his food places, figuring he’d have to stop to stay sated even while hunting me. I tried all his most-frequented restaurants. I had to give the guy credit: he had exquisite taste. Every one was a reasonably-priced gem, great spots that never made the aggregator lists. Good taste is, unfortunately, hot. It occurred to me that if he’d been better able to share himself with me none of this would have been necessary.

I followed the thickest streams until I found him eating dinner at the Gaesous Giant, a high-end place where each table is cocooned in a glass sphere. Simple meats are served, and flavor pairings come via scented gas, piped in. He was sitting across from a gray-haired man and they were both picking around the last fatty dregs of their respective sirloins. It was perfect. He was contained, head down, in a prime position for a scare.

I thought about opening the door and just walking into their dome, but I wanted a single, shocking moment. I flung myself at the glass, smashing my body against it, pressing my many-eyed visage onto it, and roared. I spread my arms so their hairs would catch the light. Inside, he screamed.

I smiled. The chelicerae and fangs of my mouth moved with my cheeks. His eyes looked over me, and there was, I’m not afraid to admit, a rush of pleasure, hot and static, that overcame me when I saw his skin pale, nausea crest in his eyes, the horror dawn. I smeared myself toward him, sweat smudging the sphere.

I waited for him to run, to swing, to respond. He rose, excused himself, and left the sphere.

“I do,” he said.

I paused.

“Still love you. Have I finally passed?” He wiped sweat from his forehead. His eyes darted from the ground to me, then down again. He was scared and hiding it poorly, but it apparently didn’t matter. I wasn’t hideous enough, I thought.

I grabbed his face and made him look at my disfigured form.

That same, steely expression settled across him, and he didn’t look away.

Fuck.

---

Back in Agra’s gem-studded studio, I was ignoring the recently-added jewels which now fully obscured her shoulder, explaining to her that the first round hadn’t gone well and I needed to be re-remade. This time, though, I was better prepared. I had ideas.

I’d spent the intervening week calling in sick to work, being asked if I needed to consider a leave of absence, demuring, and – most importantly – stalking my stalker. The spider had been too obvious. I needed something deeper, something primal. This mostly involved me tracking down every minute detail of his life that had been recorded on the web. Cressida hooked me up with someone who worked in the algo department of Zoothesia, and he made me a little data-scraping bot for me that trawled everywhere for him.

I was, despite myself, often charmed by the man who fuzzily began to appear through this data. He wrote a lot.Insisted on writing reviews for public spaces so that people’s overlays would, occasionally, show him rating the grass in Nayanaport Gardens 3 out of 5 “under watered, over nitrogonated;” or a climbing gym 5 out of 5 “according to toddler-monkey-bar-expert Jonathan.” When he wasn’t too invested in squeezing the life out of something, his attention was kind, curious, and, in the physical sense, enlightening. If the man who wrote these reviews was ever capable of loving me in the same, gentle way that he loved the 5 out of 5 airtram waiting bench outside the abandoned factory in Shraville, “best place to eat a sandwich in the city,” we might have stood a chance.

This moment of sympathy was ended by a knock on my apartment door. I’d been distracted, so I opened it without really thinking, and there he was, with a terrarium between his outstretched arms, crawling with spiders.

“I’ve been training,” he said. “Look!” He reached his entire arm into the tank and let one skitter across his hand. He winced but didn’t panic. I slammed the door and locked it.

“I won’t give up!” he shouted through the drywall, while I turned my overlay volume up as high as I could to try to drown out his voice.

I think he left around the time I stumbled across a trove of information. An old poetry blog of his – the usage of the word “poetry” here being generous, to say the least – where his efforts oscillated between verses addressed to “a lover he hadn’t met yet” (guess that proclivity manifested early) and a series of insults directed at his father. The first few I read were bog-standard, “I hate you, Dad” teenage angst-type stuff, but the more I read, the clearer the picture of his father grew. Fidelity did the man no favors. Even with several grains of silicate, Sylvo’s capacity for love, overbearing as it was, felt like a miracle. He’d broken a cycle of violence few could.

A picture of him, shirtless, with a tarantula legging across his hairy chest appeared in my messaging channel, and the sympathy vanished. I needed to get away from him, forever.

So here I was, with Agra again, her triple-checking whether this was really what I wanted.

I gave her the money and she didn’t ask any more questions.

“Hope it works,” she said.

I was no longer arachnid. I was patriarchal. His father’s face stared back at me from the mirror. My oceli replaced with a perpetual five o’clock shadow. My hairy arms replaced with, well, a different kind of hair. I looked just like him.

I didn’t go searching for him this time. I let him come to me. Looking like this awful man, I felt a kind of despondency building inside me. I didn’t like being someone awful. For the first time, I was really hoping he’d stop by, to get this all over with.

After four days, he managed to talk his way into my apartment complex again. Knocking came next. I waited. I’d been overeager last time, hadn’t taken the time necessary to build the scene up to maximize a response. This time, I wouldn’t make that mistake.

“Open,” I croaked, as close to my old voice as I could muster. The dimmed lights in the apartment welcomed him, but I was in the bedroom, which beckoned with a cracked door. I heard his footsteps and heavy breathing as he made his way towards me. I lay waiting, more like a predator than I had been as a spider.

When he walked through the door, I shrugged a silk robe off my shoulders and turned to face him.

I thought his heart might have stopped right then. He paled as if exsanguinated and stumbled toward me. I stepped backward, instinctively, as he reached. Then he vomited all over the hardwood.

I raised my deepened voice. My fingers ran across his cheek.

“Do you still want me, Sylvo?”

He steadied himself by grabbing the edge of my bed and rose to meet my eyes.

“There is nothing that could make me hate you, love, surely you know that by now. Not when you love me enough to force me to move past my trauma.”

“No, I –”

“I can’t promise today, or even tomorrow, but I will love you like this, Ki. I will make myself whole and we can be together and –”

I sprinted out of my own apartment. Despair raged like an oil fire through me, and I didn’t stop running until my legs gave out. I just wanted him gone. I’d do anything to free myself from him.

---

“What in the ever-loving algo, Ki? You look like a kitbashed bio textbook. What happened?” Clarissa wasn’t horrified, but she was disgusted, and, more importantly, she was right.

After his father failed, I went hard down the foulmaxing pipeline. One of my arms was riddled with pods, like a lotus, bent on triggering his trypophobia. My midsection, made translucent with a graymarket edidermal polymer integration, showed, in real time, the excrement accumulating in my stomach. Eight legs, only two functional, spread beneath me. His father’s face peered out from mine. I was a collage of his fears, and he still saw me. Relentlessly, he saw me.

I was invisible to half the city now, maybe more, and found the freedom of translucence both isolating and enchanting. Watching someone look straight through me, the way they would a delivery drone or traffic cone, I found myself understanding, a little, the voyeuristic pleasure Sylvo might be feeling while he stalked me. I’d taken my boss up on the LOA suggestion and was, for three months, free to wander the city, a collage of my stalker’s worst fears, absent from almost everyone’s vision except his.

And Clarissa. You never know who your real friends are until you foulmax, I guess.

“I have a question,” she hazarded. It wasn’t like her to be hesitant.

“Shoot,” I said.

“Why not make him disappear from you? I mean, you clearly loathe the guy. How hard would it be to spin your wheels a little until the Zoo thinks you’re a threat to him?”

“Isn’t it pretty hard, like by design, to do that? The whole genesis was like every life is worth seeing.”

She just looked me up and down a few times with her lips curled.

Fair point.

“Where would I start?”

She sighed, shut her office door, and sat back down.

“I’m going to make this simple. The Zoo’s algo is like, half-sentient at this point, it’s so complicated, but it really boils down to two vectors: power and desire. People only think about the second one. Well, they usually call it disgust, but the Zoo isn’t modelling for disgust as such, it’s using disgust as a proxy for desire to harm. Point being, people think it’s all about that first half. Desire, disgust, whatever you want to call it. When it’s deciding whether or not you’re a threat, though, the other thing it’s assessing is power, or your ability to harm the thing you hate. I’m not supposed to say this, but that’s why there’s a slight gender imbalance when you analyze men disappearing from women vs. women disappearing from men. Power. You get it?”

“Not really.”

“I was trying to be nice. I think you would break your hand if you punched 80% of the population. Have you ever even slapped someone before? The Zoo knows you. It knows you’re harmless. I mean, just look at you now. You’re willing to Frankenstein yourself into this, this thing, before the thought of just beating the shit out of him ever even crossed your mind.”

Oh. Oh.

I left Clarissa’s office still stinging from the truth of it. The thought of actually hurting Sylvo hadn’t ever crossed my mind. On the street outside, I caught myself in the reflection of a skyscraper’s towering glass window. I jolted. I thought, for a second, I might disappear from my own vision. I hated what I saw that much. Then I laughed, and even then I hated myself more than I hated the person who’d driven me to this. My laughter crested and my insides shook, in full view, as I did. Tears followed after. I sat on the street corner sobbing as people silently stepped around me. I wept until I felt it – that same steel I’d watched harden over Sylvo during our breakup and after each successive attempt to terrify him into hating me. I wouldn’t become unlovable. I’d become dangerous.

---

Six months of twice-daily combat training. Before and after work; a dozen sessions with Agra undoing most of what I’d done as best she could; more than 300 hours throwing knives, axes, and punches; just as much time spent in gyms lifting and running; all the while dodging the ever-present advances of Sylvo.

It wasn’t enough to become dangerous; it turned out. The hardest part for me was the desire. Every day I forced myself to imagine driving my fist into Sylvo’s face. The first month, I’d feel guilty every time. I’d oscillate between my imagination and memories of his intrusions in my once peaceful life. Eventually, I could unflinchingly imagine hurting Sylvo. Still that wasn’t enough.

As a kid, I was one of the people who avoided the screaming bugs, rather than crush more of them before the update rolled out. So I took it step by step, scaffold by scaffold. I held a knife tight in my hands and slid it into raw meat while I kept my eyes shut imagining it was Sylvo’s stomach. Over and over again, I rehearsed hurting, then killing him. It was hard, horrible work, but slowly I habituated myself to violence.

Still, I saw him.

It was my defensive posture, I decided. Despite my growing capacity for violence, I hadn’t demonstrated a willingness to use it. For whatI hoped was the last time, I turned Sylvo’s stalking back on him. I would hunt him.

I used the same overlay maps to trace his known routes. None of my earlier admiration returned to distract me. I was hardened, now. I let him see me across the street from his favorite bespoke weather overlay designer. He came out smiling, and I let him follow me across the street before dipping into an alley.

---

I don’t see Sylvo anymore. I woke up in the alley a while later and, if he was still there, he was hidden from me. I wondered if, in order to protect him from me, the Zoothesia Protocols also, finally, removed me from his vision. I wonder, now, whether an awkwardly parked car or portapotty is Sylvo in disguise.

My life has returned to a kind of normal, though, I will confess, that the world seems slightly emptier than it was before my attempted murder. I could be imagining it, but I feel like I see fewer people on the street than I used to. My friends, family, co-workers are all still there, but the noise and bustle of the city itself seems to have diminished. I wonder if my violence, the act I took changed more than just my relationship with Sylvo. Does the Zoo hide others from me now? I don’t know. The flower deliveries have ceased. My peaceful Sunday coffees outside on a street corner are back. I just can’t help but feel like discovering my capacity for violence was a more extreme change than any of the foulmaxing ever was, and that the Zoo, through its rigid rules and opaque algorithm, changed me more than I ever changed myself.

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