#HateboyZ - a short story about hate, twitter and hate on twitter

“I am Hateboy. I am your cowardly, convenient, illiterate hate, made flesh. I am the monster you made, and I’m coming for you. All of you.”

The mock theatrical voice stopped. Silence. A childlike giggle. A soft thud, as Brahma X jumped down from the vintage oak stool he usually stood upon to deliver these monologues, and walked over to the shop floor of his Sandbox to look up silently at his latest creation in wonder. It towered above everything else in the Sandbox, Brahma X’s factory and workspace that his billionaire father had gifted him for his 16th birthday. Hidden under a thick canopy of trees in Madh Island, otherwise the haunt of Bombay’s low-budget B movie crews and sleazy television producers, the completely automated and aesthetically impeccable Gigafactory was the perfect playpen for Brahma X’s expansive mind. Dreem flew around him, energized. Dreem was a sentient cloud of holographic pixels that was his assistant, only friend, and on days like this, an encouraging audience. Brahma X had a propensity for being grandiose, but today, even though it did not know what it was looking at yet, Dreem could sense that the 17 year old polymath genius had creating something incredible.

In its characteristic multi-octave hum, Dreem asked “What is it?”

“This is my masterwork, Dreem”, said Brahma X, in a voice reverential, yet smug.

“It does look pretty fucking cool, B” replied Dreem, pivoting some pixels upwards to get a better view, as they walked together towards it.

The object of their mutual wonderment rose up from the Sandbox floor, almost monolithic in scale, and silhouetted against a bright spotlight on the far wall, it resembled a humanoid figure. All around it, an array of hydraulic arms were working on it, sculpting it with a furious intent, as if to compensate for the lack of precision. It looked like a crude puppet fashioned from putty by a toddler who had just begun to grasp the rudiments of the human form, and it was punctured at several places letting light leak through it like it would through a bullet ridden corpse in a graphic cartoon, throwing a ghastly shadow on the opposite wall. The hydraulic arms worked together in a sickening symphony of wet slapping and chopping sounds, and something was trickling down its sides and collecting silently in a growing pool at its feet. It looked like the whole thing was…bleeding. Dreem felt a growing sense of dread, so it prodded again.

“What is it, Brahma?”

“Well…its Biotechnology…meets AI…meets…twitter”

Brahma often spoke like this. Dreem wasn’t fazed, and waited for him to continue.

“Remember #HateboyZ?”

“Yes, the twitter neuralbot you built last week. I’m not quite sure what it does”

“Let me show you. Take me to twitter”

In a flourish Dreem reorganized its pixels into a real time spherical visualization of everybody’s least favorite blue bird.

“Okay now look up #HateboyZ”

As soon as Dreem processed this command it exploded and quickly reorganized into a much larger sphere, with individual pixels blinking in alarming shades, connoting real time activity.

“I built #HateboyZ for only one thing, to aggregate every single hateful, racist, homophobic, sexist tweet…and this is just from the past week”

Dreem found it could not verbalize anything at all, and merely hummed a hum that sounded very much like a human sigh. Brahma went on, his voice the most serious Dreem had ever heard it.

“Don’t be so puzzled, Dreem. Hate is easy. Hate on twitter is easier. It doesn’t take much. Usually a combination of insecurity and boredom. A string of convenient fuckyous to anyone you want in 140 gestures, and no one ever can touch you, how fucking convenient. How fucking convenient when it’s all pixels and gestures and words in the fucking cloud. Is this frivolous bitterness of little people going to be our legacy, Dreem? I won’t let it. They need to see the face of their hate, and feel the weight of its terror…”. Brahma spoke with a controlled fury, and his eyes…Dreem had never seen his eyes like that.

“What are you going to do?”

“I already did. I brought #HateboyZ to life”, and turned to look around at the monolithic humanoid rising from the floor like an ugly Lazarus.

Dreem was afraid. Brahma went on, by now back to his cocky drawl.

“A few weeks ago, I was toying with a biodough set from IKEA and on a whim, stuck one of those 5$ Lego AI chips into it. When I mapped the neural network’s processes, I found the chip talking to the biodough, running a repetitive program to understand what form it had been given. I swear I heard it say I’m Alive!…or maybe that was just me. Yeah I think that was me. Anyway, I made a whole bunch of the biodough legos and hotwired them together. Obviously, they started talking to each other, and I started talking to them. Now we’re friends. And they listen to me.”

Dreem probes: “Intelligent tissue. How beautiful. Distributed consciousness. How beautiful. What do you intend to do?”
“This is my masterwork, Dreem.”

“For every hateful tweet the bot picks up, a doughblock is added to the monolith. The blocks, like I said, would talk to each other, but they needed an operating system. So I made #HateboyZ the operating system. All the tweets it picks up are fed to this beast’s neural networks. Hate was what is made out of, hate is what it knows.

As soon as we hit critical mass, #HateboyZ will become sentient, and the world will truly see the face of its own simmering evil”

Dreem is quiet. Thinking. A muted blue.

“Take me back to Twitter. Scan through top trends. Hold on, there it is. A major actor just said something potentially unpatriotic. This should cause a shit storm among the zealots, and a righteous jizzfest among the liberals. Fun. What’s the hashtag? Alright, real time visualization please.”

Dreem exploded and reorganized again, this time into a much larger sphere, pixels blinking furiously. Behind him the hydraulic arms started working faster, their dreadful symphony now reaching a crescendo.

Dreem, silently, but quite suddenly, collapses into one dense, glaringly bright pixel. Brahma X hadn’t seen it like this before. A controlled, yet ominous voice, reverberating in 16 octaves, emerges from it:

“To want to constantly express oneself is fundamentally flawed, yet fundamentally human. That is how humanity propagates itself. The evolution of language was fueled by an ever increasing spectrum of ideas, thoughts and emotional states to express, including blinding hatred. Twitter is a part of that evolution. And since it allows impulsive self-expression without fear of tangible consequence, it is more honest. But, this is merely context. Tell me, how is what you’re doing any different from what any of these people you are so contemptuous of are doing? Like them, you are merely expressing your hatred for them, in a form impulsive and natural to you. The only distinction is that your intellect has driven you to delusions and your ego blinds you to your own petty foibles.”

Perhaps for the first time, Brahma X has no answer. As if waiting for this moment, the symphony of the hydraulic arms fall silent too, and suddenly a low, trembling moan fills the gigafactory. Brahma X’s eyes widen in terror.

“It’s…alive”, he mutters, awestruck.

The moaning stops, and an utterly alien, otherworldly voice now emerges from the titanic beast’s lips.

“I…AM…HATEBOY. I AM…YOUR HATE MADE…FLESH”

Dreem says, in a voice of resignation.

“Indeed you are.”

Hateboy stomps across the factory floor to Brahma X and crushes him with a deliberate movement of his foot, killing him instantly. Without an active nervous system to draw its power from, Dreem too vanishes with a soft sound.

Aligning its coarse, ungainly body to the direction its OS points it to, Hateboy breaks through the wall of the factory, towering over the dying forests of Madh Island, startling the leopards and the lusty producers alike. It then makes its way to the city. There is an incomprehensible terror that it strikes in the hearts of anyone who sees it, ending lives swiftly as it moves across Bombay, a beacon of death, announcing in an infinite staccato loop: “I AM YOUR HATE MADE FLESH”, drowning out the screams and the sirens and all other feeble attempts to stop it. Seeing it move across the city, a force of pure hatred, a lonely writer sitting on his rooftop, looking at this spectacle in awe, is reminded of a specific verse from the Bhagwad Gita — “Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds” — the last thought he ever has, as he sees the behemoth charge towards him, obscuring the sun, and then closes his eyes.