Line Go Up

Tim Maughan is a writer of fiction and nonfiction. His debut novel "Infinite Detail" (FSG, 2019) was The Guardian's science fiction and fantasy book of the year and was shortlisted for the Locus Award for best first novel. "Where'd you find this guy?" Dave Clutch asks me, pushing bangs out of anime-girl eyes with a flick of a cell-shaded hand. "Yeah, nice try lol," I reply. "Like I'm gonna tell you my trade secrets." I brace for a stylized sweat drop that never comes, thankfully. The aesthetic is so played out that my reaction to it borders on allergic, but at least it is an aesthetic. When I first found Dave he was just another youtuber, all skinny white boy grey skin and sagging eye bags lit by nothing but the slowly cycling RGB LEDs of his gaming rig, staring awkwardly into the camera as he read his scripts and flicked real bangs of hobbit hair out of his eyes. It was a look that screamed a desperate need for authenticity, and it was the first thing I had to beat out of him. Back then he was posting weekly videos about his patent dives into smart contact lens technology -- long, rambling monologues detailing what he'd unearthed about some obscure Chinese manufacturer and how they were going to "reinvent personal immersion" by making VR headsets and spex obsolete. What he didn't know was that the company was already in acquisition talks with Meta, and they'd been feeding him bullshit patents for fantasy tech in order to drive their market value up. Meta didn't give a fuck, the whole deal was pocket change for them, but the day traders whose algos had already decided his info was whack and the company was a good shorting opportunity were pissed and braying for blood. It didn't help that Dave had been stupid enough to blow his student loans on buying shares in them himself. It was not, as we used to say, a good look.