Bewilderment

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CURRIER CALLED a week after Ova Nova posted the video. His voice skidded around the emotional color wheel. “Your boy’s viral.”

“What are you talking about? What happened?” I thought some brain infection had shown up on one of Robbie’s scans.

“We’ve gotten inquiries from half a dozen companies on three different continents. That’s not counting all the individuals who want to sign up for the training.”

I considered and rejected all kinds of replies. At last I landed on, “I truly hate you.”

There was a silence, more thoughtful than awkward. Then Currier must have decided I was just being rhetorical. He set to work as if I’d said nothing, filling me in on all that had happened in the last few days.

Ova Nova had dropped the video as part of a bundle called “The World Is Ending Again. What Now?” They launched the suite with a sweeping social media campaign. Other outfits picked up the news, if only to meet their own daily quota of announcements. Robbie’s video caught the rapidly strobing attention of an influencer. This woman had her own lucrative video channel where she went around the world helping people get rid of things they never really wanted. Countless people around the globe were addicted to her tough love, and two and a half million of those people counted themselves as her friends. The influencer posted a link with an image of Robbie holding his hands together around a jewelweed pod. Her caption read:

The influencer followed up the invitation with several enigmatic emojis. All kinds of other influencers and non-influencers started to repost her post, and the resulting streaming jam caused the Ova Nova servers to choke for an hour. Nothing built more interest in free content than the supply briefly running out.

According to Currier, the hip flooded in on Tuesday and Wednesday. Thursday and Friday, the mainstream arrived, and the late-to-the-party showed up over the weekend. Apparently, someone ripped the video and uploaded it to a pair of archive sites. Somebody else trimmed out a clip of Robin and ran it through a filter, making his eerie words sound even eerier. People were using it on message boards, in chats and text, at the bottom of their mail signatures…

I held the phone with one hand and poked a search into my tablet with the other. Three common words, in quotes, and there Robbie was, looking and sounding like a visitor from a galaxy far, far away.

“Shit.”

Laughter trickled from Robbie’s room. I heard that!

“What do you suggest I do about this? What am I supposed to tell him?”

“Theo. The thing is, we’re also hearing from journalists.”

Which meant they’d be on my front stoop in another few heartbeats. “No,” I said, almost spitting. “No more. I’m done with this. We’re not talking to anyone else.”

“That’s fine. I’d advise you not to, in fact.”

Currier sounded almost composed. But then, he stood to profit massively from the flash fad. Robin did not.

I couldn’t tell how much trouble we were in. Maybe the whole viral thing would blow over as quickly as it had blown up. Most of the people who were thumbing the clip and passing it along probably didn’t even bother watching it all the way through. It was just a bit of weather, and there would be several more clips to thumb and pass along before the day was out.

But while Currier told me not to worry, mass cascades of error-correcting bits surged in waves of electromagnetic radiation around the planet’s surface. They blasted in vertical geysers 35,786 kilometers upward into space and rained back down at 300 million meters per second. They coursed in bundles of parallel light through fiber conduits only to fan out in bursts of radio across the open air at the whim of tens of millions of grazing fingers coaxing electrons from hundreds of millions of spots on capacitive touch screens a few inches high. Robin’s streams were the slightest blip in the race’s desperate search for mass diversion. As a fraction of the feed produced and consumed that day, a few hundred billion bits of information were like a single pip on the surface of a strawberry at the end of an eight-course dinner. But these bits were my son, and, reassembled, they held the record of his face on a late afternoon by the side of a lake telling a perfect stranger, Everybody’s inside everyone.

Currier said, “Let’s stay calm and see how this plays out.”

Hanging up on him got easier with practice.