Designing Hell – Chapter One

Tom Foster was dead. His soul knew it, but it would take a moment for his body to let go. Sitting alone in a high school cafeteria, the nerdy teen took a big bite out of the roast beef sandwich his mom made last night. At five foot six, weighing a buck twenty, it was obvious that he did not care about food. His crazy metabolism kept him skinny and this giant hoagie was not going to make a dent in his scrawny physique. Finishing up his sandwich, he was resigned to being a stick for the remainder of his time on earth.

Little did Tom know, he had only twelve minutes left to live.

The lunchroom had very few windows and was lit with a grid of fluorescent lights. Blue was the school color, making it mandatory to put the hue in all the posters and banners that dressed up the drab white walls. The tables were filled with kids staring at their phones. As much as Tom hardly ever spoke to anyone, he found it ironic that most of his fellow classmates didn’t either. No matter how skilled a wordsmith they were, texting could never be a substitute for a real conversation. Especially when most direct messages were filled with trendy abbreviations: LOL, IMO, TTYL, ILY, OMW, THX. Capitalized letters could not replace a smile or a raise of brow. He guessed that was a job for an emoji.

Scanning the room, he watched detached teens clicking hearts, sending memes and staring at videos of other people living their lives. Tom would never buy into that. Everyday, he sat pen to paper writing stories. His creativity took him to fantastic worlds greater than anything possible in his small Pennsylvania town. The characters in his fables were his only friends growing up. Through his fiction, he was a hero who had buddies, fell in love and even saved a few lives. Everything the tiny teen couldn’t do in this world, he could achieve in his vivid imagination. These tall tales were his salvation from the horrors of high school.

Slumped over his journal, he was crafting a parable about a loner trapped in a Virtual Reality game. His scraggly alter ego trudged through a dark apocalyptic universe in a hunky warrior avatar. He imagined being the kind of guy that dudes wanted to hang with and women wanted to bang. Not that Tom wasn’t good-looking. Hidden behind his thick plastic frames, he had beautiful blue eyes, nature’s gift from his mom’s DNA. His distinctively narrow nose couldn’t hold up his glasses, requiring him to slide them back up every few minutes. No one ever noticed his brilliantly white teeth, as he rarely smiled. Given half a chance, he might have grown into his looks.

Nine minutes left to live.

He dug into his knapsack for his favorite gadget. Saving his minuscule allowance for months, the brainy boy purchased huge noise canceling headphones that tuned out the clusters of camaraderie around him. Best thing he ever bought. In the sea of stoners, jocks and populars, he was an army of one. His uniform was black jeans, a black tee shirt and a black hoodie. This was topped by a head of naturally jet black hair, which he styled haphazardly with a splash of cold water each morning. His choice in dark attire was not because he wanted to join the goth kids. He would never don lipstick or nail polish. The lack of color was his attempt at invisibility. With the perimeter of solitude around him, he clearly succeeded.

A song came on that triggered a memory of the first time Tom ever thought about girls.

Zap.

Sixth grade, Jan was the new kid in class. Her family recently moved into town from New York. Without friends, she hadn’t figured out that Tom was a loser, so she sat next to him at lunch and shared a box of chocolate chip cookies. He had never liked chocolate, but didn’t say no. When they got down to the last cookie, Jan suggested they split it. She took a bite and handed it to him. He took a small polite bite and returned it. They passed it back and forth a few times, until he was left holding a tiny triangle of baked sugar in his hand. The pretty girl smiled, giving him permission to pop it in his mouth. It was what he imagined kissing would be like. After a few days, she made a bunch of real friends. Following the other kids, she avoided him like the plague.

Back.

Nothing rivaled the power of a memory. For Tom, the flashback played like an iMax movie in his sharp mind. He could still taste that sweet chocolate chip in his mouth. It made him crave a candy bar. Wondering if he had enough change for the vending machine, he checked his pockets to find a quarter, a nickel and two pennies.

“No kiss for you today, kiddo,” said the voice in his head. Tom skipped to the next song.

Seven minutes left to live.

On his phone, he received a GhostChat notification. Message from Dad, “It’s hot as hell down here.” It was his app’s idea of a joke. Tom’s father passed away a few years ago. That was probably why the nerd had become interested in tech. There was a small part of him that wanted to get closer to his estranged dad.

Father and son never got along as they were polar opposites. Dad’s interests were fueled by testosterone. He was into sports, cars, and construction. In contrast, Tom pursued activities that required brains. He focused on science, art, math and of course, writing.v

After watching some YouTube videos, it was his goal to be a hacker. Step one: sign up as an Apple developer to get access to Facebook APIs. Step two: build an app, so when a user tapped ‘Okay’ without reading the Terms and Conditions, they blindly granted him permission to their personal information. That was why he coded the GhostChat App.

Tagline: What if you can text someone you’ve lost?

The app was simple. After uploading someone’s text history, Tom’s A.I. could emulate a conversation based on the data. Most folks regurgitated the same stuff over and over again, so reproducing a chat was easy. The hard part was coding an intuitive learning engine that would give the dialog some life. There were a few kinks, but since the app launched, he had over seventy thousand downloads. Folks wanted to talk to the dead, even if the conversations were merely canned responses generated from his crafty algorithm. For a boy who rarely spoke to anyone, it was ironic that he could break down communication into numbers that could mimic a personalized direct message.

Tom wondered if it felt real to text his dead dad. His answer was No. The app-generated discussion was based on his father’s public persona. The one who never cursed or belittled his estranged son. Real dad was never in the running for father of the year, especially towards the end of his life. This did not stop Tom from promptly responding to his father’s AI messages. He opened the app and texted, “Apply sunscreen.” It was free therapy for his daddy issues.

With only one real parent, Tom defaulted to being a mama’s boy, whatever that meant. He grew up in a house where no one ever said, I love you, but Mom never needed to. She was the first person he saw in the morning. It was her motherly duty to pour him a bowl of cereal, alternating between Raisin Bran and Special K. On the weekends, she made him a ham, egg and cheese sandwich. He only ate the middle, leaving a long continuous piece of crust on the plate. After packing him a decent lunch, she also made sure his dinner was waiting in the fridge. It was ready for him to microwave whenever he got hungry, which was pretty much never.

His mother said I love you three times a day. Words were never spoken. Her affection was shown in the meticulous care she took with feeding her son. With each bite, he replied, Thank you. Despite his indifference towards food, he could never waste a morsel. It would be like saying, fuck you, to the only person that ever loved him.

Mom was at work every school night, so Tom ate most of his dinners alone. He would always wait until the sun went down because no one on television ate dinner in daylight. With no around, all of Tom’s life lessons came from TV and movies.

Four minutes left to live.

Tom glanced down to see ‘Pep Rally’ written in a neat penmanship on his palm with a black marker. He often used his hands as a notepad, reminding himself of things that he should do or avoid. This note told him that there would be a football pep rally after school and he should exit the building away from the field. Varsity events were definitely not his thing.

Their football team was not a big deal. The rival school on the other side of town had the championship team. His school was not competing for anything except last place, leaving the cheer squad with very little to do. That did not deter Mary, the head cheerleader, from wearing her short-skirted uniform even on the coldest of days.

Mary was the epitome of the popular girl. People either hated her or wanted to be her friend. Most kids were a bit of both. In alignment with the archetype, she was a first-class bitch. Nonetheless, Tom’s eyes could not help wandering one table over to look at the pretty blonde girl’s long bare legs.

Mary noticed his roaming eyes and asked, “Can I help you?”

Tom removed his headphones and replied, “Sorry?” His throat was dry. He realized it was the first word he had spoken all day.

“I said, can I help you? You look like you needed something.”

He shook his head and wondered why she caught him staring. He had done this discreetly many times before.

She offered a small plastic smile. “If you need something, anything… I’ll be right here. Just ask.”

Tom sat frozen, not knowing what to do. Social interactions were not in his wheelhouse.

“Get back to work,” said the voice in his head.

Tom obediently listened and awkwardly turned away. If Mary’s offer was at all genuine, he would probably ask her to treat him like he wasn’t there. He noticed that she often glanced in his direction, just so she could roll her eyes and look away. It seemed like a lot of energy wasted on someone she cared nothing about.

Mary was having lunch with the Christian celibacy group, planning a weekend of what Tom figured to be two days of hot and heavy hand holding. He found it ironic that the pretty cheerleader paradoxically exposed a lot of skin for someone trying not to be sexual.

“She’s a cunt,” said the voice in Tom’s head.

Beautiful enough to summon an audience with a smile, Mary’s current assembly was a couple of virgin guys who wanted to deflower her and a few girls who prayed to be her. The devout teen had the unique ability to guide any conversation towards an instance where she spoke with the Lord. Why just last night, God texted her soul.

Tom aimed his ear towards Mary to hear her say, “I could feel his presence in the room, so I closed my eyes. What came to me weren’t words but more like a feeling. Bad things are going to happen and I’ll be faced with a very important decision. He told me to have faith.” She took a gulp of water like a runner after a marathon. For this girl, talking was cardio.

The girls at the table nodded as if they were hanging on her every word. The guys were a bit skeptical, but could not look away. They imagined how much of this nonsense they would have to put up with if they ever dated her.

“Go back to your writing,” said the voice in Tom’s head. It was a voice he trusted, guiding the boy through most of his day. He wondered if the voice was his own conscience or something external that was helping him along. He didn’t believe in guardian angels but could not help thinking that there might be something more to this world than what he could see. The voice kept him company when no one was around. It also kept him out of trouble, until recently.

About a month ago, the trusted voice started telling him to put an end to those who made his life miserable. People like Mary, whose full-time job was to make him feel like a loser. “Put that bitch and her goody two-shoes friends out of their God-forsaken misery,” said the voice in his head.

Tom had never hated Mary. He didn’t hate anyone. All he wanted was to be left alone, so he could finish writing his book. Yet, it was getting harder to ignore the voice that was nudging him to get a gun, write a manifesto and shoot up the school. Alas, someone was about to beat him to the punch.

Fifty-six seconds left to live.

Headphones on, Tom turned up his music to drown out the room full of strangers that meant nothing to him. The song that filled his ears was a sad deep voice crooning about the end of the world. Had Tom done this a moment later, he would have heard the commotion that was happening behind him. He would have noticed Brad Cobb, an armed teenager wearing a tactical vest, firing a semi-automatic rifle into the screaming crowd. The song’s chorus drowned out the blast of a bullet that ripped through Mary’s lung and severed her aorta. Her blood shot across the table and baptized the faces of her Christian friends, blessing them to get shot next. Bang, bang, bang. Three more popular kids fall dead to the ground.

On the other side of the room, Brad was deeply immersed in his first person shooter game. Testing his marksmanship, he aimed his crosshairs at a tiny target sitting one table over. A skinny nerd was not moving or running for his life. What an easy bullseye.

Tom was writing an epic gun battle between demons when two bullets struck him. One in his left arm, igniting the most intense pain he had ever felt. Before he knew what had happened, the second bullet ripped through the back of his skull. The slug scrambled his parietal lobe and lost momentum when it hit his frontal bone. His adolescent soul abandoned its mortal coil a moment before his thin frame hit the vinyl floor. Luckily, he landed on his back. This spared the mortician any extra work prepping Tom’s body for his poorly attended funeral.

Thank God for small favors.