I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom

by Jason Pargin

He went to his own bedroom and packed ten days’ worth of T-shirts and cargo shorts, adhering to his habit of including far more pairs of underwear than he’d need as if he were going to just be continually soiling himself amid a nationwide shortage of pairs for purchase.

Ah, okay, thought Abbott. So this wasn’t happening after all. He felt a weight roll off him, the exquisite relief of canceled plans that extroverts will never know.

The man in the tank top possessed dog-snatching reflexes that strongly implied he’d had a great deal of practice snatching this and other similar animals. He’d vaulted to the spot and in one smooth motion got the pit bull’s collar in his fist, yanking the beast sideways, not backward, denying it the kind of tug-of-war that its physiology was designed to both win and enjoy.

Malort leaned around his bumper and yelled, “Who are you here to shoot, kid? Is it somebody specific, or is this a mass-shooting scenario?”

She shook her head. “You’re not going to like what I have to say, so I’d prefer to just not say it. You do what you want.” “No, say it. We’re telling each other everything, right?” “If I say it, you have to agree to hear it and not just sift through the words for ammo to use in a counterattack.”

After a few silent miles, Ether said, “And I’m sick of hearing about your dad. You’re an adult. He has every right to be upset about the vehicle getting damaged, but it wasn’t your fault, and it’s frankly not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things.” “This is probably thirty thousand in damage. And the insurance won’t cover it, as there’s no police report.” “You know what an adult would say about that? They’d say, ‘Ether, I’m demanding another thirty K because of the damage to my vehicle.’ It’s just money and repairs, a transaction. Stop piling grand emotional significance onto it.

And think about Wikipedia; the guy who invented that deserves a Nobel Prize—it’s one of the great inventions in history, and the fact that it’s free to use is insane. They didn’t even have that in Star Trek!”

who Hunter was now pretty sure had started drinking even before she’d left for the airport. “He believed he’d been screwed over in a local zoning dispute. It had to do with a concrete plant that was going to block the entrance to his muffler shop. In response to all this, he spent a year and a half welding nine tons of armor to a bulldozer.” “Oh, the Killdozer guy! Yeah, I heard about that. I kind of like his style.” “Yes, the Killdozer guy. He dedicated his whole life to turning the vehicle into a tank, including gun ports to fire in every direction. He created a list of targets and welded himself into the cockpit—there was literally no exit; it was a suicide mission from the start. Then, well, he went on a rampage. For two hours, he tore ass around town, flattening the businesses and homes of everyone who’d ever wronged him, destroying thirteen buildings in the process. SWAT teams riddled the vehicle with bullets, Heemeyer just laughed it off—at one point, they supposedly considered calling in the National Guard to take out the Killdozer with an attack helicopter. He eventually got stuck in the basement of one of his targets and had no means to extract himself. There was a gunshot from inside, and that was that—Heemeyer had shot himself in the head after having, in his mind, resolved his zoning dispute. Well, I have this theory that we have been quietly building a society full of Heemeyers, seemingly normal people with middle-class lives and brains full of retribution fa...

“Well, if you’re going, I’m going,” said his father. He paused to study the painting on the side of the van and asked, “Do you have another vehicle, by chance?” “Nope!” said Zeke. “Get in!” Key said, “To be clear, you’re just getting us somewhere safe where we can regroup and I can find a car. You’re not pursuing the bomb convoy.” “I can explain why you’re wrong about that later! Let’s go!”

Someone shouted a rebuttal, but Ether cut it off, saying, “Guys, this is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. Can’t you see that nobody involved with this actually disagrees? Abbott, how would you feel if tomorrow your dad brought home a seventeen-year-old girlfriend?” “Bad! It would be one of the worst things to have ever happened!” “And yet, you found yourself sucked into an internet debate where you were on the side of Hitler, knowing that the only possible winner was the platform profiting from the engagement. You are all having arguments that are specifically designed to go in circles, forever! Don’t you see the system doesn’t care what you believe, that it only cares that you keep yelling into your screens, getting enraged at strangers you barely disagree with?”

Feel free to drop by one of them and ask any questions you might have. I likely won’t answer them, but asking will be good for my engagement metrics.