SUPERHOT

Realizing you’ve been accidentally masturbating to yourself for the last five minutes would be a disturbingly Dorian Gray situation for most, but for me it was a weekday in June, alone in my apartment. It’s difficult to put into words, exactly, the feeling in your stomach when something like that happens. It’s somewhere in the neighborhood of waking up to find out you went out and murdered someone while you were sleepwalking. Who? What? When? Where? Why? I had stopped the video and zoomed in, trying desperately to find a spot in the footage where there wasn’t a dick in this woman’s mouth (my mouth?) and positioning it just right… there it was. It was me. It was undoubtedly me. Well, it was undoubtedly my face… on somebody else’s body. At least I knew I hadn’t given somebody a blowjob in a hideously lit living room, with a cat wandering around in the background like a family vlogger who forgot to stop the recording in my sleep. Murder would’ve been preferable, anyways. 

I analyzed the image for five, ten minutes, reading the video title, which didn’t inspire confidence, nor did it lend to a great deal of self-esteem in the moment regarding my personal interests, before scrolling down to the comment section.

johnnysrocket69: man this bitch is hot. culd have bigger tits tho

jizz43: hotttttttttttttttttttttttt32t452

morgansballs: i love her

pussyslayer081: insta ?

Now, naturally, they meant the Other Me. She was fit, toned, had beautiful blown-out hair… and all that other stuff, too. Nothing that I, for better or for worse, was bringing to the table on a good day. I suppose a face might add something to it, after all, hadn’t I selected the video partially based off of that? Would I have clicked “play” had the woman been sporting an eye patch or some horrific scarring? I guessed not. But the more I would come to think about that moment, sitting in bed in the dark with the sounds of laughter, drunkenness, and bad driving, and those sweet smells of weed, hot pizza, and car exhaust all dancing in through the window, the more I would come to appreciate it, luxuriate in it. Manhattan is a big place filled with thousands of people, and there I had been, in bed, alone, sharing maybe the most intimate moment of my entire life with just myself. Well, me and Other Me. Just us. Together, quiet. I had often spent my time waiting for something to happen for me, thinking that if I kept my head down long enough It would find me, whatever It is for a woman in her early thirties. I just wish that I had found It first. 

I went to sleep a while after that, selling myself some kind of story about how I might be losing my fucking mind and needed to go out more, I had spent so much time at night masturbating I had somehow been creating fantasies that it was me I was watching. The next morning I woke up, showered, and got ready for work. Walking to the subway station, I called my friend Helen.

“You’re fucking kidding.”

“No, dude, I swear to God. Like I swear. It was literally me.”

“Okay, don’t you think–”

“Yes, completely I do, it’s just that… you didn’t see it. It was fucking me. Or, like, it was me, fucking.”

I knew my conversation with Helen wasn’t going to amount to much, of course I knew that. Helen is the kind of friend who invites you out to drinks with her co-workers from her investment firm just to make you pay your own tab and have her work friends ask you “wait, what do you do, again?” like marketing is some foreign concept to them. However, she was really my closest friend, and had, on occasion, given some good, no-nonsense advice, which was exactly what I needed.

“Well, look, send it to me. I’m curious. If it really is you, you can probably sue the shit out of whoever uploaded it and make a ton of money.” That wasn’t the exact type of no-nonsense response I had been hoping for, but I supposed, despite everything else, it might be good to get some extra eyes on the video to verify that it was, in fact, my face on Other Me. I clicked through my phone and pulled up the link. The video had been sitting in my search engine all night, like it was waiting to remind me of its presence. Waiting, like a demon in a horror movie, to say “No, you aren’t crazy, this is all real, which is even worse!” 

“Okay, I just sent it,” I said. There was a prolonged pause on the other end, evidently Helen was watching the video in her office at work from the dull thrum of ringing phones and the inaudible but boisterous noise of conversation. After a couple of minutes, she spoke again.

“I mean… it definitely looks like you, but… what the fuck??”

“I know,” I replied, overjoyed with the news that I wasn’t alone in this now. “But, like, how is that even possible?” I asked, feeling a detective on the case.

“Well, you know, this whole AI thing has been going on for a long time, now.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like, I think it happened to Olivia Munn or something. If somebody gets a photo of you or your face, bam, that’s it, they can do whatever they want with it.” My heart sank. Until that moment, the whole thing had seemed, for lack of a better word, almost funny. Even if there was an Other Me out there, who cared? Some weird pervs left some comments on a porn video, that’s not my problem, that’s theirs. But something about Helen’s story made me wary. If you Google Olivia Munn, there she is. But where was somebody finding a photo of me? Or where did they take it without me noticing? 

“Yeah, no,” I said, deflated, anxious. 

“Listen, I have to go, but I really think you should look into this guy! This could be great! You should message him or something! Anyways, we’ll talk later, good luck!” Helen hung up before I could say another word. As I rode the subway to work, my eyes shifted back and forth, back and forth, watching everyone watching me. I chewed methodically at my nails throughout, and when the doors opened I was the first one off the car. 

At work, I sat there in my cubicle with my phone held underneath the desk and an erroneous spreadsheet queued up on my computer screen. I scrolled through the comments again, noticing a few new ones, and continued to search for different angles of Other Me’s face. My face. That part was pointless, I knew. There was no doubt about the facts of the situation, I just couldn’t seem to bring myself to move beyond that yet. Anything I did next would feel too real. I reloaded and reloaded the page, incessantly, waiting for I don’t know what. Each time I did, it seemed, the view count had risen. I’d leave it for five minutes, trying to complete something on my computer, and then return to it to find another fifty, sixty people had viewed it. It begged the question of whether I believed that many people had ever looked at me in my life. Other Me. What the fuck. 

I passed the day more or less exactly like this, getting up once to copy a stack of papers before returning to my desk and falling down the rabbit hole all over again. I didn’t eat, I didn’t speak, and then I took the subway home, finding a seat in the corner which allowed me to watch everyone in the car at once. Helen’s words had been spinning around and around in my head all day.

When I returned to my apartment I slammed and locked the door, tossed my coat over the stovetop, removed my shoes, and sunk into the little ratty leather couch I had. Maybe Helen was right. Perhaps I did need to reach out to this person, whoever it was who had posted the video. I opened my phone again and was met with my own face again. A perfect replica. Not quite, but me enough. I lingered a moment on the features, my green eyes, my slim nose and full cheeks, my slight eyelashes. It was all a little bit distorted, despite the AI’s obvious best attempts at molding my face to the body of Other Me but, I thought to myself briefly, it was a pretty face. It was nice. I scrolled down, then, to discover the account who had posted the video, and just below the footage I noticed the title had been changed. It was now titled “SUPERHOT1”. Just beneath that was an account name, with a link to the account’s page: “ConnorsCum”. I let the link take me to the profile, and from the profile I found the messaging button. I began to type. Then I deleted, began again, deleted, paused, began again, set the phone down, picked it back up, deleted, began again. I ended with something I felt neither proud nor ashamed of:

“Hello. I’m messaging you because this is my face in this video. I know you probably used some AI Olivia Munn thing on me and I’d really appreciate it if you would take this down. Hopefully you receive this message. Thank you.”

Despite Helen’s dreams of me suing this person, I decided to at least give them a chance to take it down without drama, and without having to pay for legal representation in the state of New York. I dropped my phone onto the couch, eager to be rid of it for a little bit finally, and made myself a box of mac and cheese, eating it with the TV on in the background, the laugh track of some show like the sound of waves on the beach, washing over me while I stared out at the floor, imagining what might happen next. 

By the time I was going to sleep, there was still no response from ConnorsCum. I left it that way, almost relieved in a way, feeling like I had been spared for the evening of anything else. 

When I woke up the next morning, there was a notification on my phone from ConnorsCum. Snapping immediately out of my grogginess I picked up my phone, ripped the charging cord out of it, and opened the message. It read, simply:

Fuck u bitch

Underneath there was a video attached, titled “SUPERHOT2”. I pressed on it, and within the first five seconds of the video I could see it was me. Again. I closed my phone. I opened it back up and stared. It was all I could do. I propelled myself out of bed and began getting dressed, then, in some kind of poor attempt at moving past whatever was waiting for me on the other side of that dark mirror. Thinking quickly, then, I wobbled over to the bed with one leg in my jeans, and picked up the phone, sliding quickly past the video and instead calling Helen once more. I proceeded to yell to her on speaker while I was getting dressed, sweating and frantic. 

“Yeah, a second one. And can you believe the response?? “Fuck you, bitch”?? What kind of person says that to another person?” I raved. 

“A lot more people than you’d think,” Helen replied flatly. 

“But so what the fuck?? I mean, shit, what does that mean?”

“It means how much do you care about this?” I had not necessarily considered that question before. 

“As in…?” I asked.

“As in,” Helen answered, “does this really matter to you? If it does, then you should get a lawyer and sue the balls off of this perv–”

“Well, yeah, I’d love to if I had any money that wasn’t going towards my rent,” I interjected, buttoning up my shirt and scouring the room for a pair of shoes I hadn’t already worn multiple times that week. 

“Then in that case, I guess you just have to live with it,” Helen replied. 

“But that’s so, like… just fucked up, right?”

“Well, yeah, but… I don’t know. Obviously he doesn’t care what you say, so he’s not one of those mama’s boy, pleaser kinds of guys. He’s probably one of those “not all men” guys, he’s a creep.” I nodded slowly while slipping my feet into my shoes. 

“Yeah,” I replied. Jesus Christ. So that was it. Just to deal with it? It didn’t seem right, but then again nothing did, nothing in the entire situation seemed right, and it couldn’t be any more wrong than me trying to pay for a lawyer to bring this guy to justice. My head started to throb, my mouth was dry from nerves, and I wanted to crawl back under the sheets and stay there for a month. “Well, okay, I gotta go. Thanks, Helen.”

“Okay, talk later,” she said, and still managed to hang up before me.

On the subway again, same thing, my eyes must have been bloodshot. 

At work again, too, and I had dropped my phone into the drawer of my desk, locking it away like it carried some kind of disease, which it did, in a way. A disease that had nestled itself into my brain and seemed intent on staying there. That image of my face. Even distorted, it was beautiful, I had come to realize. It was hard for that face to seem like my own when I thought about it like that though. Beautiful. It seemed off. 

What really and truly began the final days of this whole ordeal, brief though it may have been, was when Randy, my manager, tapped me on the shoulder and beckoned me to the break room in the middle of the day. Closing the door behind him, I caught a glimpse of his face out of my peripheral vision, and he was smiling to himself. 

“So what’s up?” I asked, trying to sound innocent enough. But I knew before he breathed another word what was about to happen.

“So I, uh… I think I might have seen you last night. I mean, I think I might have seen some of your work, if you understand what I mean?” I scrunched my eyebrows together, trying to morph my face into a look of confusion to mask the abject horror I was experiencing inside. 

“I don’t really know what you’re talking about?” I offered, like I was trying out the lie on him and waiting to get some feedback. 

“I mean, that is you, right? In those SUPERHOT videos. I swear it was you.” 

“Well… I don’t…” I trailed off, furious with myself for not saying something, anything, to turn the tide of the conversation. Randy started smirking and my cheeks flushed, not out of whatever perverted fantasy Randy thought he was inducing upon me, but out of fear, anger, and the inability to do anything to stop what was happening.

“Aw, sweetheart, don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone. It can be our secret, you know, almost like a little office romance. Who knew under all those big sweaters and stuff you’re always wearing you looked like that underneath! I mean, Jesus, I was hard for hours!” At this, Randy burst out laughing, shaking his head and leaning against the counter beside the sink. “Jesus you’re hot,” he continued, almost to himself, his eyes drifting down to the floor, his mind clearly racing with all the things he might do or say next. I clenched my fist, stepping in an arc both away from him and towards the door. At this he stood up straight again. He was taller than me, glared down at me, his eyes tearing my clothes off piece by piece. I clenched my teeth.

“Randy, I don’t know what you think you saw, but it wasn’t me. I have to go,” I said, and slipped through the door quickly, walking back to my cubicle, packing my bag, and leaving early for the day. 

On the subway, I messaged ConnorsCum again:

Fuck you too.

Then,

I’m going to get a lawyer shithead

And,

You’re just some weirdo fucking pedophile

Nothing especially groundbreaking, but driven purely by the boiling anger and scattered anxiety from my encounter with Randy, an example of ConnorsCum’s real impact on my life, it felt good nonetheless. Halfway through my ride on the subway, my phone suddenly died, and I rode the rest of the way with an uncomfortable itch running across my body. Was that person taking a photo? What about him? That kid? That old man?

When I returned home to my apartment, I plugged my phone in beside my bed. In the kitchen, I boiled a pot of tea and microwaved a styrofoam container of ramen, its slick, greasy scent escaping behind the walls of the microwave and filling the kitchen. For about ten minutes, I lived in the fantasy of being off the grid. I slurped ramen from fork to mouth in total silence, save for the life just below my window, and pretended I was a bigger person than I was, that perhaps I wasn’t in the midst of some porn crime, if that’s what it was called. I was just enjoying my dinner, an unphased woman eating an unphased meal, maybe I even wished I was involved in a porn crime! And yet. 

Leaving the ramen half-finished on the counter, I sped to the bedroom and opened my phone. A glimpse as I was unlocking the screen, and then bam, sucked down the rabbit hole again, the chat from me to ConnorsCum awaiting me. New messages. Three new videos. “SUPERHOT3”, “SUPERHOT4”, “SUPERHOT5”. Jesus fucking Christ. I opened the keypad and began typing furiously, a paragraph, an essay; I was Didion, I was Sontag, waxing poetic about the life of a woman, the injustices of what ConnorsCum was doing, my altercation with Randy, all of it, every last moment. Halfway through what might have become a new critical feminist text, the character limit was up and my fingers were sore. My face was flushed completely now, sweat collecting under my arms, droplets hanging on like bats in a cave. I bit down on my thumb and drew blood, tearing a sliver of dead skin away from my finger like a lion devouring a slab of meat. I was shaking. Piece of shit, I thought. Fucker. Pussy. All true. All intangible, just like ConnorsCum, and all the ConnorsCums out there. I squeezed my phone tight, almost willing it to shatter right there in my hands. And all of the sudden Other Me was holding it, and she was winding back and hurling it across the room, where it collided with my bedside lamp, shattering the ceramic base and leaving a dent in the wall where the phone had connected with it. 

The sun was beginning to set now, which meant the bodega signs were being lit and the bars were becoming crowded with people ready for the weekend. My office, she (Other Me) knew, would be open for another hour. She ran to the kitchen, snatched my jacket and jammed my feet into some shoes, and ran down the sidewalk in full sprint to catch the next subway train. She was at the office in twenty minutes flat. She took the elevator up to my floor where, predictably, Randy was just beginning to pack his bags for the day, making small talk with the interns in his office. At the end of every day, he would dole out lollipops to the women, and give the men a bulleted list of all the things they should work on for the next day. Smiling, chuckling to himself the whole time, brushing, oops, the shoulders of this woman and that, but who cares!

“Randy!” she yelled, throwing open the door to his office. 

“Oh, hey, you’re back! Listen, can we talk in a few minutes, you know, when it’s a little bit more private?” He winked at me. He actually winked. She glided into the office like she was on rollerblades and threw his plastic bowl of lollipops across the room before spinning around to take in the interns. 

“You know he’s been working on the same marketing strategy for a donut place for four months now? It’s a fucking donut place! ‘Donut miss these deals!’ ‘You donut have to pick just one!’ ‘Donut worry, we really are that good!’ Jesus Christ!” Turning back to Randy for a brief moment, she added:

“Write those down! And don’t ever speak to me again!” In a fog, she crossed the floor again, was back inside the elevator, and thrust back out onto the street. By then, the sun had set, and the larger-than-life nightlights of Midtown had finished warming up. She decided to walk back to the apartment, at least halfway, to clear our head. And she couldn’t stand to be on the subway again with all of those people, all of those eyes.

She careened down sidewalks, around corners, sucking down mouthfuls of vape, chicken gyros, perfume, and BO. Everyone was looking, always looking. At the billboards, at the crossing signs, at the man being arrested, at the pigeons, but at me, too. Almost everyone, it seemed like, was looking at her. She thought back to the broken phone on the floor of my bedroom, the lamp, the wall. ConnorsCum was waiting there, waiting for one more piece of me to take with him, to use. 

That was when she saw it. The man with the phone camera aimed right at her. Without a second’s hesitation, she had confirmed to herself that it was him. It was ConnorsCum. She darted forward, shouldering through a mass of several people waiting to cross the street before rounding the corner and tackling the man into the street. Before another breath could pass he was on the ground, shouting, and a line of impatient cabs were honking at them as she pounded her fists into the person’s face over and over again. The sun could have risen again and I’m not sure she would have noticed, until someone yanked her backwards onto the street and away from the body on the ground. Their face was bruised and bleeding, but she hadn’t even done that much damage. Not as much as she had wanted to. She was panting, actually gasping for air, and a migraine began to split her head in two. 

“What the fuck!” the person on the ground yelled, staggering to his feet, and before the moment could be prolonged any further she scrambled to her feet and bolted down the sidewalk in the direction of the closest subway station. She never even saw his face, but it didn’t really matter. She slowed to a quick walk after a block or so, and while she walked she caught a glimpse of herself in the reflection of a set of glass double doors outside of a hotel. Suddenly, she was back in the reflection, and I was the one standing there, gazing at her. It couldn’t be, could it, that it was that same face from the SUPERHOT videos looking back at me. Strange to think I had had it all along, hiding the real thing for myself. It was almost like Other Me wanted me to find it, to realize it had been right under my nose that whole time. 

I let a week go by without bothering to replace my phone, but when I did I had countless messages from ConnorsCum. There’s no need to repeat them, it was the usual. “Bitch”, “slut”, “whore”, “dyke”. If you can think it, he said it. But then they just stopped. And another week went by, and another, and another, and there was nothing. No more messages. No more SUPERHOT. No more me and Other Me. Just me.

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