The Internet Play
Marie Mayweather had been doxxed. Or rather, the bot formerly known as Marie Mayweather had been doxxed. She had passed successfully for many years, thirty-six of them, in fact, at last check. Marie had a social security number and a birth certificate, several bank accounts, electronic college transcripts, and various social media profiles bursting with photos of relatives and friends. It had been determined, though, that she was a deep fake.
A man on the internet found her out. Botty McBotface had been suspicious of new technology for years, but when it finally proved inescapable, he joined an online chat room. Botty knew about the cyberspace trolls and looked out for the signs. He could tell Marie Mayweather was a fake because her identity seemed too real. She was trying too hard. When something is trying so hard to signal itself as real, that’s when you know for sure that it’s fake. Her complete history was discoverable online. Her whole identity was just a bit too provable. Not like his!
Botty posted on a popular, semi-anonymous online forum. Of course, he did not reveal his real name, and neither did Marie – in fact, she had not even been on the site. He simply typed, “Marie Mayweather is a bot,” and the information cascaded from there. Marie heard that she had been discovered while browsing news on a major social network, which did little to verify her identity except force her to choose a name-sounding name. The more she defended herself, pointing to the documentation of her verifiable existence, the more her detractors doubted her. Her social position now was, for all intents and purposes, that of what she was accused of being, a Bot.
This was all rather tough on the bot formerly known as Marie, who had declined to dance with the Botty once in middle school, citing his fingertip warts and acne-studded facial pores in her defense. She slowly wasted away, becoming a shell of her former self. Botty is doing well. His YouTube channel is going totally viral.
Anna Genevieve Winham writes at the crossroads of science and the sublime, cyborgs and the surreal. Anna serves as the Prose Editor for Passengers Journal and the Poetry Editorial Co-Lead for Oxford Public Philosophy. She is Ninth Letter's 2020 literary award winner in Literary Nonfiction, Mikrokosmos 2020 Poetry Contest's 3rd place winner, Writer Advice Flash Fiction Contest's 2020 3rd place winner, and was long-listed for the 2020 Penrose Poetry Prize. Anna writes and performs with the Poetry Society of New York, moonlighting as Velvet Envy in The Poetry Brothel.