The Troll (28 page)

You
know, I really enjoyed killing your Pilot. Partly because he was such
an asshole and partly because he was your friend. I look forward to
meeting the rest of your friends and killing them too. I really hope
they find us fast because I think I can be good at ruining them. When
I do, I’ll get a nice close-up shot for everyone to see.”

Everyone
watched closely from living rooms around the world, from in their
yards or their local pubs. The Gambler and The Weatherman halted
their journey to watch, The Poet stirred inside as The Troll’s
face filled the sky. The Mentalist studied his face from his suite in
Vegas, hoping he would make the journey so he could put an end to his
boasting. Behind him, Wigeon’s face was glued to the screen.
The Chameleon and The Magician watched expressionless, plotting their
attack, and The Moderator tightened his fists off camera, speechless,
but stewing.

Ten
feet from The Troll’s side, Iris looked up and watched
wide-eyed, and The Guide wiped away tears and watched silently,
pushing all emotion aside and admiring the face of the revolution as
he trolled with his anger finally in the right place.

“
We’ll
find them and kill them, and why stop there? We don’t need to
go to Vegas to shut you down. We don’t carry Psi. We’ll
just come straight back to Chicago to ruin everything you’ve
built. I’ll burn your city to the ground and when you come
running out, we’ll take you down too.

You
made a mistake when you took Psi out of me Mod. You made a mistake
when you left your family to die along with millions of people when
you turned Psi on the population. I’m sure the ghost of your
wife and daughter are sitting with you now, ashamed of what an
ass-hat of a person you turned out to be and hawking spirit-spit on
your ugly twitchy face. You once justified your actions by saying:
when gods fight, they step on ants, but you’re flattering
yourself way too much, you narcissistic piece of shit. You’re
nothing more than a four year old with a magnifying glass, burning
ants because you’re emotionally immature and in need of
attention. Oh, you got fired from your job. Boohoo. How horrible. Try
being one of the many people you murdered or their family left behind
that have to mourn them and then whine about your dumb problems. You
brag about bringing peace, as if anyone could ever believe that a
mass murderer has a conscience.”

“
Are
you done yet?” The Moderator started to say. “Because…”

“
You’ll
know I’m done when I stop talking and when I stop
talking,
I’m shutting down the broadcast because I can’t think of
anything in this world that I care less about than whatever bullshit
you’re going to fire off when I finish.

You
lost today Mod and you lost big, and the world saw it, and to the
world: Soon, you will no longer be enslaved by Psi. This moron has
been in charge way longer than he should have been. Just hang tight.
You’ll know you’re free when you see The Moderator
paraded around town with his head on a stick.”

The
Moderator opened his mouth, but The Troll shut down the broadcast.
Moments later, the screens turned on and The Moderator broadcast more
of the same: “Follow the rules…the rebels are
terrorists…I created peace,” but it didn’t sound
the same. It sounded phony and transparent, and even The Moderator
had lost his showmanship.

The
Troll grabbed the life boat and brought it to the edge of the bridge
and turned to The Guide, who hadn’t recovered, but looked
hopeful after The Troll’s trolling. “We ready to do
this?” he asked.

“
I
thought you said we were going back to Chicago,” Iris said.

“
Strategic
thinking,” The Troll said, tapping his temple. “Give them
another direction to watch. We can get this thing to Vegas. I learned
a little about the layout of the land from The Acrobat. There are
ways to get there. We just have to find them.” He reached out
and extended his hand to The Guide, who slowly reached up and let The
Troll hoist him to his feet. “The Surfer was a good man,”
The Troll said. “Let’s finish what he started.”

The
Guide said nothing. He walked ahead and The Troll and Iris followed
as they descended the hill and climbed into the life boat. As the
current took them down the river far from the bridge, Iris and The
Guide fell asleep in each others arms. The Troll watched them,
wishing it was him instead. He watched as the scenery passed,
wondering if he had what it took to fulfill this mission, but knowing
he would at least make life as hard as possible and do as much damage
as he could along the way.

I’m
a Troll
, he thought.
And I’m the face of a revolution
.
He laughed to himself as he shook his head in disbelief. It wasn’t
the best combination of things to be, but maybe it was exactly what
the world needed.

A note about trolling from the
Author

A
little over fifteen years ago, I decided I would try my hand at
screenwriting. I wrote what I believed to be the best script ever
written at the time, though to this day, I have a hard copy in a
binder that I refuse to open because I know I’ll cringe at how
bad it really is. The script led to the next which led to nine
scripts, all of which will never see the light of day, but through
screenwriting, I became a troll, and eventually, a writer.

Let’s
go back in time a bit. Fifteen years ago, I had what I believed to be
a great script. I knew nothing about what I was supposed to do with
it, so when a friend told me about a reality series called Project
Greenlight, the brain-child of Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, which was
essentially a scriptwriting contest, I submitted immediately. Those
who entered a script were to read at least three other scripts
entered, judge them, and the thousands of scripts entered would
filter down to 250. They would be filtered two more times until only
one winner remained and that script would be made into a movie.

For
those of you wondering, I didn’t make the first cut. I entered
all three years that Project Greenlight existed and never made the
first cut. Each time, I thought I had gold. Each time, my ego took a
hit. I don’t write screenplays anymore and I have no desire to,
but Project Greenlight was a gigantic spark in my life that set me on
a path that ultimately led me here. Without it, I would have moved in
another direction and I have no idea what I would be doing today.

Project
Greenlight had a message board. I can still remember the green font
and black background of the boards. I remember going there because I
was navigating the site to expand my knowledge of all things
screenwriting.

When
I found a board where hundreds of users were discussing writing,
arguing with each other, critiquing each others work, I knew it was
something I needed to pay attention to. I lived in a small-town in
Iowa and never interacted with people who shared my passion and here
I’d fallen into a crowd of witty, intelligent people who knew
something about writing. I latched on to some and others I ignored,
but for awhile, I read what they had to say and learned what I could.
To my surprise, there were relationships, rivalries, and group
discussions. It resembled, believe it or not, a community.

Then
one day, under the user-name mcbrainder, I jumped into a thread and
posted.

I
don’t remember what the fight was about. It was two users,
arguing back and forth. I thought I had something witty to say and
attacked one of them with what I believed was a clever comeback. A
moment later, two other users attacked me back and told me that the
user I attacked was a “good egg.” Apparently I went after
a popular user and picked the wrong side.

I
don’t remember the progression from there. I remember posting a
lot, starting to fit in, making a name others knew, and somehow
becoming part of an on-line community. I was still very young and
playful. I didn’t have contributions that would help an amateur
learn the craft. Instead, I played the role of a goofball, and when I
was tired of that, I started creating multiple user-names and posting
as many people at once. At one point in time, I had as many as thirty
user-names.

I’m
aware of the fact that anyone reading this will have discovered that
I had way too much time on my hands, and they’d be right. I got
sucked into the message board vortex. If I’d spent that energy
writing scripts, I probably would have produced ten times what I
actually wrote. Instead, I interacted, and sometimes, I played the
bad guy. Sometimes, I antagonized newbies just for sport.

Somewhere
along the way, playful became mean and sport became
Internet-vigilantism. As I became more intelligent, I would approach
a conflicting viewpoint with a rant that I would use one of my fake
names to voice. Mcbrainder remained a nice goofball, but I started to
feel like I had something to say. I would see what I considered to be
ridiculous behavior, attention seeking people in need of ego-boosts,
and other users enabling them, telling them they were right (though
often they were clearly self-destructive) and that it wasn’t
their fault. I wasn't a fan of victim mentality.

Enter
me, trolling with my fake names, trying to hold a mirror up to
people. Sometimes it was mean-spirited. Sometimes it was just brutal
honesty, but brutal honesty that I knew would provoke attacks. I
preferred to keep the attacks aimed at the names who weren’t
linked to my core name. As life progressed, I realized people had a
lot to say to my fake names. Mcbrainder was just a goof who would get
an “lol” here and there, but there was no substance
behind that. People wanted to talk to the trolls, even if it’s
a negative experience. The common anti-troll stance is to say “Don’t
feed the trolls” because if you don’t react to what they
say, they go away, but the funny thing is, people feed trolls far
more than they do serious posters.

I
no longer troll, but if you visit any message board anywhere with
high traffic, you will see that there are going to be a lot of
threads clearly designed to antagonize, and many where someone has
something they just want to say.

The
threads where someone just wants to hold a discussion die. The trolls
are fed constantly, and in saying “don’t feed the
trolls,” they continually feed the trolls, because trolls only
do what they do because everyone wants attention, and when a person
can’t find a positive way to create interest, they search for a
negative way. Responses fuel trolling, and unless a thread sinks,
every person in it has “fed the troll”.

Contrast
this with everything in life: The actress who thought her career
would never take off and committed suicide by leaping from the
Hollywood sign, kids who aren’t acknowledged in positive ways
and act out in negative ways because they know it’s the way
they’ll be noticed, the man whose spouse cheats on him and he
realizes his real self isn’t good enough and offs himself and
her. Everyone wants to be noticed, and when they’re not noticed
positively, they don’t give up there. They find another way,
often in ways that hurt other people or themselves.

It
took me a long time to realize that trolling was just a waste of
time, but so was being mcbrainder. Though Project Greenlight and
those message-boards set me on a great path in life, I can look back
now and I know that everything I did, good or bad, was to be noticed
and I put too much energy into that—time I could have used
creating other good things. Talking about what I was going to do took
away so much time just doing what I needed to do. I have no regrets,
but I could never troll again. It’s simply something I did and
snapped out of after awhile.

I’ve
angered people in chat rooms. I once went to a role-play sex room and
made someone cyber with me as The Hamburgler and him as The Pillsbury
Dough Boy. I’ve been kicked off and banned from a Scientology
board forever after multiple warnings from their moderators to stop
pretending to be Xenu (I claimed I was the dictator of the Galactic
Confederacy and my profile pics were of Alf). I once had a Kevin
Federline Myspace page and interacted with his fans and even Brittany
Spears, going out of my way to make him seem like a fool. I’ve
had people threaten my life through Craigslist, and I’ve had
people try to send me viruses.

Everywhere
you go on-line, from the user comments on CNN to the IMDB
message-boards, the majority of what you will see is vile,
politically or religiously motivated, hatred. From fights between
whether or not a movie was any good, to Facebook disagreements where
friends become enemies because of their polar opposite viewpoints.
People have become detached from one another because we see words—not
faces. We can easily hide behind a keyboard, angry that life hasn’t
given us everything we want and channel that anger into spreading our
poison to others.

Behind
every user who is doing this, is a person who very likely is polite
to their peers, loved by their friends, who spends holidays with
their families and is maybe highly reputed at their job. No troll
carries that troll persona throughout their daily life when they’re
off-line.