The Antisocial Network

Six weeks earlier and four hundred miles away, Jeremy Poe, twenty-two years old and built like a wire hanger that had been untangled and extended to break in through the crease in the window of a locked car, stood by himself at an institutional-style metal table at the front of the vast Presidential Ballroom of the Washington Duke Inn and Golf Club, wondering how in the hell it had all come to this.

The only thing he knew for sure was that this wasn't what his senior year of college was supposed to be like. He'd seen all the movies, read all the brochures. Senior year was supposed to be barhopping and keg parties, class dances, maybe a romance or two, afternoons hanging out on the Quad, and bull sessions in his dorm room that went on all night, until the morning light streamed in through his window and his alarm went off, telling him he was late for class—but who cared, really, because it was senior year, the last gasp before college ended and the real world came roaring in.

Instead, he was standing in a gigantic ballroom along with a dozen of his classmates, lined up in staggered, socially distanced lines beneath elegant chandeliers dripping teardrops of crystal. Each kid, like him, waiting for a turn at that frighteningly sterile steel table cluttered with vials, specimen bottles, and sanitizing lotion.

There was a nurse a few feet away, watching Jeremy with eyes that might have been blue, but just as easily could have been green. At least Jeremy thought she was a nurse; she was wearing a mask and a face shield and rubber gloves, but then again, so were a lot of people inside the ballroom, and also out on campus and in the streets of Durham and, for that matter, on TV and in the newspapers and just about everywhere else. High fashion in the age of Covid. But this woman also had on scrubs, which meant she probably knew what she was doing. And despite the way the light from the chandeliers splashed obscuring patterns across her face shield, Jeremy could see the impatience in her blue or green or blue-green eyes.

Jeremy offered an apologetic smile as he readied himself for the task ahead. He wasn't wearing a face shield, and his own mask was down under his chin—but only because of the thing he held in his right hand. Six inches long and topped with an evil-looking wisp of cotton. A cruel twist on the party skewer, and to Jeremy's thinking, this was about as far from a party as a college senior could get.

At least the ballroom itself was mildly festive; the carpet beneath his feet was lush and ornately patterned in reds and blues, and there were thick velvet drapes surrounding the many windows that looked out onto one of North Carolina's premier golf courses. And of course, there were those chandeliers, sprouting from the ridiculously high ceiling like frozen, sparkly jellyfish, glistening tendrils waving in the breeze from the specially designed air circulators that had been set around the perimeter of the room.

"Nothing to it," the nurse said, her voice muffled by her mask. "Just stick it in your nostril, give it a few turns, and leave it in the specimen container on the table."

Jeremy tried to think of something witty to say back, but then decided that the moment wasn't right. It was hard to be suave when you were about to stick something up your nose. Sure, this was better than the test they used to use, back in the spring before the campus had shut down when Covid first hit. That damn swab had been twice as long and had seemed to go right up into your brain.

Truth be told, Jeremy was usually pretty good at small talk and making people laugh; he probably would have had a chance of at least getting a positive reaction out of the nurse if he had been holding a cocktail skewer instead of a nostril-bound swab. Then again, though he wasn't shy, he was quirky, with an idiosyncratic personality; although he'd made a few good friends over his first three years at Duke, he had really been looking forward to senior year to build on that social framework, bust out in a bigger way.

When he thought about it, he knew the quirkiness wasn't entirely his fault. His upbringing had been, in a word, unique. Not a lot of kids could say they'd grown up on a boat, bouncing along the coast of Florida when he wasn't zigzagging between various Caribbean islands. For much of his childhood, his morning commute had involved tide charts and docking fees, and his only real companions had been his family—his dad and mom and his younger brother, Casper. You didn't gain many normal social skills on a 44-foot catamaran, and by the time he'd hit junior high and entered a regular school, he'd already developed some eccentric habits. But he'd put in a lot of work on his personality since then and gotten much of his anxieties and social awkwardness under control.

Still, under the most ideal of circumstances, it was always hard breaking the ice with strangers, and this particular circumstance was far from ideal. At the moment, the best he could manage was an amiable smile.

He couldn't tell if the nurse smiled back, because of the mask, but he took it for a win. Then he turned his attention back to the swab, stuck it in his nose, and gave it a confident twist.

Twenty minutes later, Jeremy's nostril was still stinging as he shook the remnants of a hard drizzle from his hooded sweatshirt, kicking his sneakers off in the foyer of his economical one-bedroom, off-campus apartment. The Dunworthy Pines, a sprawling complex of multistory residences on the south side of Durham, wasn't anywhere near as flashy as its name, which made Jeremy think of a daytime soap opera—pretty people playing out dramatic storylines while congregating in bikinis and Speedos around a lavish communal swimming pool. But it wasn't entirely awful. There was indeed a swimming pool, and even a man-made lake, both of which Jeremy could have seen through the sliding glass doors on the far end of his living room if the shades hadn't been currently drawn. And the grounds around the lake were fairly manicured, a maze of low bushes and pruned trees crisscrossed by cobbled and stone paths designed for walking. Though the Pines was teeming with college kids who, like Jeremy, had opted to avoid the cramped accommodations of the college's main campus, there wasn't any congregating going on, at least that he was aware of. It was mostly strangers sharing hallways, everyone hiding behind masks and invisible six-foot repulsion fields, doing their damned best to keep to themselves.

When Jeremy had first arrived on campus, he'd been pretty lonely—which was saying a lot for a kid who'd grown up on a boat. But then at his father's urging, he'd taken the initiative to create a bubble with a few of his classmates who happened to live in the same complex. Karl, two floors above Jeremy, was one of his best friends at Duke, a biology major and martial arts hobbyist who taught Jeremy both how to wrestle and how to better maintain a healthy lifestyle, helping him keep himself physically fit despite how focused he was on academics. Karl's girlfriend, Josie, who was a better wrestler than either Jeremy or Karl, studied applied math and political science. And a third classmate, Michael, whom Jeremy had met in his advanced linear algebra class, happened to share Jeremy's double major—math and psychology—which meant they had a joint penchant for making themselves miserable, coupled with a drive to figure out why they were chasing said misery. Between Jeremy's bubble, which got together twice a week, and his course load, which included such mouthfuls as Bayesian statistics, probabilistic machine learning, and the cinema of psychopathology, it was almost possible to forget that the outside world had come to a grinding halt.

Jeremy yanked his hood back as he moved deeper into his apartment, freeing his tangled mop of reddish hair, which sprang up above his high forehead like some sort of demented, rust-colored halo. He hadn't been to a barber since before Covid, though he had tried to take clippers to himself a handful of times over the past few months, to his own detriment. Then again, one of the benefits of a pandemic was that it didn't really matter how you looked, when most of your social life took place through a little square floating around the screen of your laptop. Zoom was the great equalizer, and a good, high-definition webcam beat a proper haircut every time.

Jeremy moved deeper into his apartment, pulling his cell phone out of his pocket as he went. A little green light on a speaker planted halfway up a set of bookshelves that separated the foyer from the living area told him the magic of Bluetooth was already two steps ahead of him, and with a flick of a finger, he coaxed the music app on his phone to life.

As usual, his playlist was cued up to his favorite song, and the first hyperkinetic chords of some seriously frenetic Japanese pop spiraled out at him from the speaker, like explosive ringlets of invisible, electronic confetti. Kanako Itō, of course, because for the past year or so it was almost always Kanako Itō. Her real name was Itō Kanako—in Japanese they put the last name first—one of the many things Jeremy had learned as his love for anime and, specifically, for a series called Neon Genesis Evangelion, had ballooned into a near obsession. Jeremy had consumed Evangelion in one marathon sitting after he'd been introduced to the mid-nineties Japanese TV production by a well-traveled cousin. The plot of the anime series—which had included manga, movies, and video games, on top of the twenty-six original episodes—was incredibly complex, involving a global apocalypse, enormous bio-robots battling even bigger monsters, mysticism, Judeo-Christian imagery, and lots of teenage angst. The series was made even more impenetrable by the fact that Jeremy had watched it all the first time through in the original Japanese, which he didn't speak; but even so, he had concluded that it was an absolute masterpiece, and he'd often posited that it was, in fact, a miracle that something that good had ever been made. He'd spent many hours trying to decode the story and its themes using every Internet source at his disposal—a journey that had led him even deeper into anime, where he'd discovered countless more series such as Kaguya-sama: Love Is War, Kiki's Delivery Service, and the Science Adventure series of visual novels, including Steins;Gate and Robotics;Notes, the latter of which he had binged—the whole forty hours' worth—in three or four days.

From the anime, it had been a short hop to the music; Kanako Itō, Kikuo, pop, and metal. At the end of his junior year, while writing a paper on algebraic number theory, he'd listened to a single Japanese metal album fifteen times in a row over the course of a week, during which he'd taken repeated breaks to dance, letting the music move him like a puppet to get his creative juices flowing.

At the moment, as he crossed his apartment toward the desk in the corner by the glass back doors, where his laptop computer waited, he wasn't dancing; but he did have his Neon Genesis Evangelion T-shirt on under his hoodie, and there was at least one book of manga on the desk's glass-and-chrome top by the laptop's keyboard.

The desk itself—shiny, sheer, glossy, with retractable legs and way too many wheeled feet—could have doubled for a mechanized battle robot in a pinch; Jeremy's brother, Casper, had put the damn thing together when Jeremy had first moved into the apartment. It was something that would have taken Jeremy a few days to accomplish, but Casper had finished the job in a short afternoon. Casper had always been the more practical minded of the pair, which was probably why he had chosen to major in civil engineering, while Jeremy had taken the more theoretical route. Which meant that although they were both focused on mathematics at the same university, separated only by two years, they'd barely crossed paths even before the pandemic.

Unlike Jeremy and despite Covid, Casper had chosen to experience his sophomore year from a dorm room on campus because he'd wanted to be closer to his friends. From what Jeremy had gleaned from the first few weeks of the fall semester—a barrage of quarantines, weekly testings, social distancing requirements—it didn't seem like Casper would have it much better than Jeremy, as isolated as he was. It hadn't taken long for Jeremy to realize—whether it was in a dorm surrounded by classmates, or in an apartment surrounded by strangers—a pandemic was something you went through alone.

As he lowered himself into the chair in front of his desk, he yanked his mask from his chin and tossed it toward a nearby garbage can. He missed by a good yard, the flicker of crumpled medical-grade paper landing next to a pile of dirty clothes. Sooner or later he'd cart the pile down to the shared laundry room in the basement of his complex; who knows, maybe he'd get lucky and someone would be at one of the other machines. Maybe he would have a conversation in person—an activity he vaguely remembered, involving a real interchange of thoughts turned into words, thoughts that might even have nothing to do with coronaviruses or the proper use of PPE or testing rituals, thoughts communicated without the use of computer software or a wireless router.

He smiled at the idea, then began to hit keys on his laptop, powering up the sleeping screen. To his right, beyond the collection of manga, stood an imposing stack of math textbooks, most with titles that would have terrified anyone he'd meet in a laundry room, even at a university like Duke. Next to the books, a pad of yellow-lined paper—the first few pages of which were already filled with the beginnings of a problem set that had been assigned even before school had returned to session. But at the moment, as his fingers danced across the keyboard, his thoughts were not on his homework, or the anime, or even friendly, imaginary strangers in equally imaginary, Covid-free conversations in less-than-imaginary laundry rooms.

Instead, his focus was on the laptop, which, since the start of his senior year, had pretty much become the center of his universe. Not just because it was where he would soon be attending his classes, and conducting much of his socializing. Apart from school and his existing network of friends and family, he'd recently discovered a new endeavor, which was taking up more and more of his time. An interest that had started as a curiosity had progressed to something of a hobby, and was rapidly becoming another of his obsessions, right alongside his passions for anime, Japanese pop, and anxiety-inducing introspection.