The Blip

#1

He had to admit that the window of time between watching porn and his one regular Zoom call a day was narrowing. It had started as a considered hour – that had been a boundary, a red line – and over the weeks had winnowed away to a measly handful of minutes. It didn’t feel good.

He’d read about serial killers that wanted to be caught; drooling psychos who turned up to the scene of a stabbing or shooting they’d committed with blood still flecked on the hems of their trousers. Maybe this was his version. Or he was just bored.

The 11am “Check In” was his only fixed appointment. The rest of his working hours oozed away into nothingness, thanks to the fact he had automated most of the tasks he had been recruited to do. It had taken a week. Now the dashboards ticked over, counting hours listened to, subscribers amassed and attention retained.

The company was a midmarket podcast production studio and he’d interviewed twice, remotely, to become their “Head of Analytics”. The studio made thirty-five different shows a week, all of them, in his opinion, shit. He’d been charming and cogent, his overshirt ironed and his smile believable.

The interviews had happened in his old room, which he’d left when things had rapidly gone sour with his housemates. That had been his first enforced house share, hastily accepted when She’d ended their relationship and he couldn’t face his childhood bedroom or the friends they used to share. It had been in a grim part of the city, expensive beyond belief. There had been some incidents and they asked him to move out. He’d retreated to the town he grew up in, twenty minutes up the train line from the city, and where his money afforded him the luxury of a bedsit.

He’d been there a year. It had a kitchenette, a shower, and a room with a bed in one corner and two ultra-high definition monitors provided by the company in the other. There were twenty-four other flats in the block, a hastily converted former office building, also filled with monitors and unused kettlebells and dogs that he could hear pacing and pacing and pacing through the walls and the floors and the ceilings. The brutalist block overlooked a dual carriageway in an unlovely corner of North Hertfordshire.

He had worked from home forever. There had been freelance work for an e-bike app headquartered in Vilnius, and even a time prior to that when he had covertly subcontracted his work for a Belgian FinTech company to a less fortunate but equally intelligent tech worker in the global south at a fraction of the day rate he was charging.

It was winter, and when the gloom gathered in mid afternoon and rain spattered the windows he had the strong and serene sense that he was at one with the objects and machines through which he did his job. The light from the monitors was soft and inviting. Messages arrived, denoted by soft pings, and sometimes he answered them and sometimes he didn’t.

Occasionally he reimagined his monitors and keyboards as the tools of a secret agent in a kind of “Situation Room”. He imagined walking in with urgency, shirt rumpled and sleeves rolled, his every word suffused with authority. “Get out,” he’d tell imaginary underlings, tapping at their keyboards when some long-sought agent strolled onto a CCTV feed in Tangier, surfacing from God knows where to cause him untold trouble. “Now!”

To his shame he had one day made that fantasy literal and worn as a prop an old lanyard he’d found discarded at the bottom of a drawer from some distant conference, swiping himself in and out of his work space, showing the QR code to a bare patch of his bedroom wall en route to the toilet.

Some months back he’d stayed within the confines of the bedsit for nine days. Food would be deposited near his door. With each hour that passed he’d become more entrenched, as if daring himself to do something strange and memorable – something that would pop up in conversations in the other rooms, in messages to friends about the oddball upstairs. Sometimes it felt like he was turning to stone.

He had dragged himself away from the precipice by pulling on a clean t-shirt, texting some people and accompanying them to the pub where he drank seven pints of Guinness and smoked cigarettes and tried earnestly but clumsily to shorten the horizonless distance he felt between himself and everyone else. Stupid things he’d said when half-cut had dogged him for days afterwards, so much so that the recollections caused physical reactions of disgust. He’d recoil in the shower remembering lame jokes.

Work numbed him. He stared at his screens until there were floating points of shadow in his vision and all other sensation fell away.

It was a Thursday when he’d first noticed the blip. One episode of a podcast was outperforming others in its series. A simple rule he had coded had surfaced the insight: “If the total listened minutes of Episode X is 20% more than the average listened minutes of every show in the series flag and notify”. He’d needed insights, any would do.

Usually the rule served to show which celebrities moved the needle in the attention economy. The owners of the podcast network would pretend that this was actionable and he would too. “Yes,” they’d nod sagely. “We can see now that an episode of a podcast about films that contains an interview with Paul Mescal does better than all other similar episodes that do not have Paul Mescal in them. This is useful. How often can we feasibly get Paul Mescal on?”

But this time the rule had dredged to the surface an old episode of something called The Double Shot – a daily 20-minute magazine show mixing topical political news with the odd human interest story. It had listening figures in the high hundreds that usually stayed roughly consistent from the day of release. It was a knock-off of shows presented by more charismatic ex-politicians and journalists; it wouldn’t last much longer.

The blip didn’t make sense. A glance showed that the unexpected rate of increase to the episode’s listens was robotically consistent. One per day. The episode was about six months old. It should be sitting stagnant like the rest. And yet here it was, a daily, steady incline. It was one person. It had to be. It was too rhythmic to be a coincidence. A small but insistent knocking that he wanted to answer.

Not that he could definitely tell. The data gave a broad picture rather than a portrait. He could see the number of listens, how long people listened for, and saw data in aggregate for the gender and location of a listener base, reams of meaningless, sprawling numbers. The data didn’t stretch to isolating an IP address, didn’t tell him individually who the listeners were, didn’t allow him to look up the person and parse from their listening habits the contents of their thoughts.

He looked for clues in the content of the episode. The top story was a long-forgotten Westminster squabble, followed by a twee interview with a model railway enthusiast from Stourport. The train man had created a fake town of such intricate and increasing complexity in his back garden that it had started attracting tourists by word of mouth. His tiny trains circled the town, chuntering over viaducts and under bridges, over and over and over. In the middle of the complex model was a park with a duck pond and astro turfed fields where families basked with their dogs in the sun.

He thought of detectives and cork boards and pictures connected by twine. With a measure of embarrassment he rescued a white board from the back of his cupboard and wrote BLIP in childish capitals at its centre. He drew small neat boxes blossoming outwards around it.

Over time the words on the white board became increasingly deranged as he sat, staring, wiping, re-writing and vaping into the early hours. Some ideas even became comedic postcards that he sent to himself, delivered when he awoke fully clothed the next morning and tried to interpret the ramblings of the night before (MI5??).

The blip was a brick wall. The blip was getting in the way of him doing nothing and he was losing sleep and feeling heavy. Enquiries were made as to his welfare at the 11am check ins, comments ventured on the darkness of his eyes. His smiles of reassurance were increasingly unconvincing. In the time between the meetings, he would lean back stiffly in his chair, place his feet on his desk and watch the metrics on his meaningless dashboards climb and the hours in his day tick by and more than once he cried. Every day the number of listens on the episode increased by one.

Phases like this would usually occasion manic attempts at self improvement. He’d commit to performing esteemable acts. He’d accept that life was suffering and discipline was freedom. He’d feel strong and independent for long stretches – but sometimes at night there were freezing, mortifying moments where he’d wonder if he’d made the right choices.

The blip continued and every day he observed it. There was no one to tell about the mystery. He’d checked with the providers of the company’s software. It was real, they’d confirmed it, there was no bug at their end. It was a validation that at least quietened some of the more worrying suspicions he had about himself.

It was midnight when he thought of a solution. Since the blip had found him he’d attacked it like a predator circling an elusive prey. He couldn’t reach the person. But they could reach him. He unpublished the episode, leaving a gap between episode 166 and 168 like a pulled tooth. He snapped his laptop shut and immediately fell asleep.

On waking he sent an email calling in sick. There was a heartbeat thud in his ears and his blood felt too close to the surface of his skin.

It took two minutes to reroute the messages sent in via the company website’s “Contact us” page to his personal email account. He found a ten-hour white noise playlist on YouTube and, hammering the volume as high as his speakers would allow, he fell back on the duvet and tried not to think.

An email arrived forty-eight hours later. It was tentative. Almost embarrassed in its tone. Subject line: Double Shot Episode 167. “Dear Wonderage Media” it started. “This is a slightly odd request!”

It was too saccharine. From the son of the blip. Her husband had passed, suddenly, not long after they interviewed him. She used an Alexa they gave her for Christmas to stream Episode 167 every day with a vocal command she’d learned by heart. Apparently it was the tone of his voice in the interview that she enjoyed. Hearing her husband talk about something he loved.

“My dad loved his trains.”

A letdown. Boring even.

“Could you make the episode come back? Or is there some kind of copy you could send?” they’d asked.

He had an urge to destroy the episode. It could be done. An ex-rugby player presenter on the network had said something cancellable not long after he started; it got caught before publishing and they’d expunged the entire episode just to be safe. The train man’s family would tire of contacting them after a while, the emails would peter out, they came directly to him anyway. No one would know.

A half empty bottle of Vodka sat at the back of one of his kitchen cupboards. He fished it out and downed the majority of it in one go. The intoxication was almost instant. Lying on his bed with his arms spread wide, he stared at the swirls of artex on the ceiling. He thought he saw the ring of a coffee mug there, as though the room had been inverted. On blinking it was gone. He called for his Alexa to play some music and, giggling, remembered he didn’t have one.

The drunkenness was juvenile in its severity. It made him think of nights aged fifteen, where he’d arrive home hopelessly late from drinking cider in a freezing park and curl himself into the shape of a kidney bean under the covers and hope he hadn’t woken his parents. He’d treasured those nights, when he’d found himself hovering there in a state of lucid semi consciousness, aware that he was mischievously traversing the borderlands between wakefulness and sleep. He felt that feeling again. Not long after he began to feel sick. Sitting up he fumbled for the bin next to his bed, vomited violently into it and passed out.

There was a lightness to him when he woke up. Admittedly his skull didn’t feel quite like it was his own. But the train crash hangover headache never arrived. There was the nagging feeling of a task unfinished, and the episode page for edition 167 of The Double Shot was open on his monitor. Searching in his desk drawer he found a tube of Berroca, dropped it into the bottom of an empty glass from his bedside table and padded to the kitchenette sink to douse it in water. He’d never been sure if they actually worked.

Heaving himself back into his desk chair, he jiggled the mouse attached to his computer, hovering the cursor deliberately over the pixels that signified “Delete”. The act now seemed like a far off appointment that he had committed to in anticipation of the day never actually arriving. There was a London Plane directly across from his window and he realised he’d never noticed it before. Staring out at it his eyes lost focus. All he could hear was the soft fizzing of his glass.