"Bounty"

Short Story #1

At the start of this year I decided to take up the Ray Bradbury Short Story Challenge to improve my craft. He advised writing one short story a week and publishing them. Despite being busy as a husband, father, and moving into a new home, I am finally sharing my first of fifty-two stories (or as close as I get).

Here is… “Bounty.”

Tommy was on the app for hours at a time. Social media was his addiction. He hit up all the apps. TikTok, Twitch, Twitter (Tommy refused to call it “X’), YouTube, Insta, and yeah, he even messed around on Facebook reels now and again. But, of them all, Snookr was his favorite. Basically, it’s a glorified Twitter, same features, better functionality. And you can use 365 characters. The way Tommy figured it, 365 is better than 280. So, his days revolved around Snookr.

When he wasn’t locked in a marathon session rapid firing off comments until his fingers flying across the keyboard ran red hot like the barrel of an overheated machine gun. he was firing off short bursts, stealing a few minutes here and there to wage war on the digital battlefield that is social media. 

Tommy was an online assassin. Calling one poster a clown, dismissing another’s political views as worthless. Writing to one that he should off himself. Telling another that she was a waste of life. @SydneyPTA96 wrote that she would pray for his soul. He wrote her back while taking a dump: there is no god. Bite me. Tommy battling anyone who offended him, dispatching multiple digital adversaries.

Tommy wiped, flushed, and stood up, pulling up his boxer shorts and jeans bunched around his ankle, and shoved his cell phone into his pocket as he exited the stall. 

Looking at himself in the bathroom mirror as he washed his hands, he smiled, pleased with himself.  Fighting the good fight, he thought, wiping his hands on his jeans as he left the restroom.

The small vestibule was filled with the sound of a high-pitched yelp as a fiery-haired woman nearly collided with Tommy, who had just emerged from the restroom. Both were caught off guard by the unexpected encounter, frozen in an awkward face-to-face position.

The woman's round, moon-shaped face was flushed with surprise and embarrassment. “Excuse me,” she said with an apologetic smile, her twinkling eyes revealing a hint of recognition. 

Tommy struggled to recall her name, but all he could remember was that she worked in accounting.  Redhead…Accounting…Nothing. He stood about a head taller than her, his gaze looking down onto the top of her head into the rolling waves of fiery red hair that gave way to darker roots. A low-grade panic crept over him as he worried she might know his name and ask him something that would reveal that he did not remember hers. 

Tommy forced a smile, mumbled, “It’s okay,” then quickly stepped to the left just as she moved to the right, narrowly avoiding another collision. The air in the cramped space grew even more tense as they both apologized again, the nameless redhead nervously giggling.

Finally, she signaled to Tommy that she was going right and would Tommy be kind enough to go to his left. He did. Then he was past her, pushing open the outer vestibule door that led to the rest of the office. 

Turning right, he made his way down the hallway, still flustered from his encounter with the redhead whose name eluded him as he entered his office, shut the door, and moved quickly behind his desk. He sank into the four hundred dollar ergonomically designed mesh chair that he had put in a special request from human resources to get and let out a deep breath.

Tommy spun around in his mesh chair and gazed out the large glass window of his office. His office was on the fourteenth floor and the bustling city of Los Angeles spread out before him. Below, he could see the streets of Century City clogged with cars honking and people trying to get where they were going. Above him, the sky was a bright blue, and the clouds looked like fluffy cotton balls. In front of him, however, his eyes met a familiar sight - another high-rise office building almost identical to his own. 

He couldn't help but feel a sense of irony as he gazed out the window. He lived in Los Angeles, a sprawling metropolis surrounded by natural beauty with a mountain range at one end and the Pacific Ocean at the other. Yet, his view was of another generic office building identical to the one he was in. It was almost like looking into a mirror, reflecting back the monotony and sameness of his everyday life, his own reflection in the window distorted by the patterns of the light and glass. Tommy pictured a sports jacket-wearing office drone just like himself, looking out his window at Tommy’s building with the same disdain and resentment he felt towards theirs.

Tommy spun back around in his chair to his desk and opened his laptop. The logo of the aluminum corporation he worked for bounced around on the screen. His company sold aluminum. You know, the kind that comes in rolls that you lay at the bottom of your toaster oven to catch the drippings or wrap a sandwich with, or which is also commonly used to make air ducts, like the ones snaking through his office building to provide hot and cold air. Tommy's job didn't involve mining, manufacturing, or transporting the aluminum. Instead, he worked for a company that acted as a middleman, connecting different businesses involved in those processes. For a fee, of course. Tommy was a manager at the company. A middle manager at a middleman corporation selling foil.

He tapped his finger repeatedly on the keyboard of his laptop until the corporate logo bouncing across the screen vanished and was replaced by the Snookr home page. Tommy’s username and password were already saved. He logged in. New posts loaded. He scanned them quickly, firing off a few scathing rebukes, one to a user who called Tommy a Nazi, followed by a dozen yellow middle finger icons. Tommy banged out a response suggesting the User perform a lewd sex act on his own mother. 

After sending off the response, he reclined in his ergonomic chair. He stewed, thinking of other more insulting digs he could have used when a new post popped up on the screen from a user with the handle IAmTheTeacher86, who wrote that certain politicians were a threat to democracy if elected. Tommy had no patience for overblown blowhards and made sure to let @IAmTheTeacher8686 know. Not two minutes later, @IAmTheTeacher8686 replied using all 365 characters, but the only two Tommy paid attention to the last two: FU.

Tommy fired back. FU2, and just like that, it was on. For 15 minutes, Tommy and @IAmTheTeacher8686 exchanged digital barbs. In between exchanges, Tommy checked out @IAmTheTeacher86’s Snookr profile. He discovered that @IAmTheTeacher86 was a middle-aged college professor at Stanford. Tommy used this info to aim his next attack at @IAmTheTeacher8686 and make it equally personal. With a few quick web searches, he discovered the man’s real name was Couper Hanley. Tommy used this info to aim his next attack at @IAmTheTeacher8686 and make it personal.

He went on Stanford’s website and took several minutes to file a complaint form against Professor Hanley. He knew that nothing would come of it, yet he filled out the forms with the intensity of a man who had been assaulted, filling out the police report. Once he finished that, he returned to find @IAmTheTeacher86 had fired off two more posts at Tommy, the first calling him a fascist, the second calling him another F-word. Tommy, feeling his anger rising, returned the sentiment with his own profanity tweet. This went on for nearly forty minutes. In between trading barbs on Snookr, Tommy sent a few work emails, though the entire time, his mind was flooded with potential responses for @IAmTheTeacher86.

He was midway through writing one when he noticed the glowing envelope icon in the upper right-hand corner of his screen, indicating he had a direct message. He traced his finger on the trackpad, bringing the cursor to the envelope icon, letting it hover for a moment, then clicked it. The screen changed over to his inbox. At the top of the inbox, that stood out. The message was from the Snookr Business Center. The subject line read simply: “Would you like to place a bounty on user @IAmTheTeacher86?”

A bounty? 

He had never heard that term before, had never come across it when using Snookr in the past, nor on any other social media platforms. Come to think of it, he had never received a message from the Snookr Business Center and didn’t even know what that was. He assumed it was administrative but was still unclear about what the message itself meant.

Would he like to put a bounty on @IAmTheTeacher86?

His two options were to “Continue” or “Cancel”.

He clicked “Continue”. A small window appeared next to the word “bounty .” It was blank except for a single symbol. A dollar sign.  Was he supposed to enter an amount, he wondered, staring at the tiny blank box in the center of his screen, his cursor flashing at him like a beacon beckoning a response.

Below the entry box was a message from the Snookr Business Center. “As we continue to develop Snnokr, we want to make it a place where our users can have a meaningful interaction with fellow users. As we continue to design Snookr with our User’s satisfaction in mind we are developing tools to empower users to counter these types of negative interactions.”

At first Tommy thought he was in trouble, that his account had been flagged by the administrators of Snookr. He read the rest of the message. “If you have experienced hurtful content, microaggressions, or at any time felt threatened by another user, we offer our users a chance to place a bounty on users who have violated our codes of conduct, at which point our Community Standards Team can address the problem directly with the users posting hateful or hurtful content.”

Tommy wasn’t sure what that meant exactly but continued to stare at the blinking cursor in the blank box next to the dollar sign. After a moment, he entered an amount. He typed “$1.”

The automated reply came back immediately. “Minimum bounty is $10.”

Ten bucks to enforce community standards, Tommy thought with a cynical snort. Boy, these tech co’s were really wringing every dollar out of their user base. Who would pay ten dollars to a company in order for them to enforce their own community standards?  

Still, he was curious.

He loved Snookr and, having never come across this particular option in any of his other thousands of interactions with users on the app, thought that perhaps this was something special for high-frequency posters on the Snookr app, a designation for which he surely qualified.

So he re-entered an amount into the flashing box — ten dollars — then clicked “Continue.” There was a whoosh sound like a message being sent, followed by a ding and another automated message reply, this one stating, “Your bounty is in the process of being fulfilled. Your account will be billed upon fulfillment of the bounty against @IAmTheTeacher86.”

Tommy didn’t know what to think. He wasn’t sure what exactly he had just paid ten bucks for when suddenly the thought popped into his head that he was the victim of a scam. A quiet rage began to simmer but settled sightly when he checked his bank account and saw there was no money debited from any of his accounts. He pulled up the web page with the Snookr User Agreement and scanned it quickly, but found no mention of bounties anywhere in the pages of boilerplate legalese. A quick Google search turned up nothing either.  

Perhaps this was some new service that was being beta-tested with verified high-frequency Snookr posters such as himself. Tommy liked the idea that he might fit into a select group and figured ten bucks was worth it to find out what this “bounty” feature was all about. If he was unhappy with the results, he could always contest the charge, claiming his account was hacked or some other excuse why he never agreed to such a thing in the first place. 

He closed his inbox, returning to his Snookr feed, immediately becoming lost in the seemingly unending scroll of posts that popped up on his screen. Twenty minutes later, he had forgotten all about the bounty he had put on @IAmTheTeacher86. Until three days later when he noticed the glowing envelope icon in the corner of his screen, clicked it, and saw in his inbox that he had received another direct message from the Snookr Business Center. The subject read: “Bounty on @IAmTheTeacher86 fulfilled.”

Tommy leaned closer to his computer screen, his curiosity piqued. He clicked on the link, and a photo popped up. It showed a man with brown hair and a scruffy beard, wearing wrinkled corduroy pants and a buttoned-up maroon shirt. The photo was blurry and seemed to have been taken from a distance, possibly with a cell phone. Underneath the photo was the name "Couper Hanley." Tommy remembered seeing this name on the Snookr profile of @IAmTheTeacher86 - the man whose message he had just received. According to the profile, Couper Hanley was a Humanities Professor at Stanford. This information seemed to be confirmed by the subsequent photos that appeared in the message. One showed Professor Hanley standing in front of a messy whiteboard in what looked like a university classroom. In another, he was sitting in the stands at a basketball game, cheering on his team. But it was the next photo that caught Tommy's attention. It showed Professor Hanley getting out of a silver Honda Accord parked in front of a quaint split-level house, carrying a leather shoulder bag.

Tommy scrolled through the photos more quickly. There were videos as well that featured Professor Hanley in the course of his everyday life, coming and going from his house, running errands at a local pharmacy, and teaching his humanities classes.

Tommy recalled the private DM he had received from the Snookr Business Center, which claimed it was designed to protect its users against harmful or offensive content and to make Snookr a more user-friendly environment. A sense of unease crept into his gut as he considered the possibility that his payment for the bounty may have triggered some kind of surveillance on @IAmTheTeacher86 for violating the social media app’s Community Standards.  

How was that even possible? 

Then his mind flashed on the idea of an AI-drive algorithm that used the hyperlinked, high-speed, hi-def video camera and microphone in every cell phone of every single person who spent time online in our fiber-optically laden, technologically driven modern world. Which included just about everyone and anyone. 

Tommy wasn’t sure how he felt about a tech company stepping beyond the boundaries of the digital world and snooping into the private lives of its users, supposedly in an effort to combat hateful or offensive speech. That seemed like an overreach to him. He was about to reply to the direct message inquiring as to its purpose when he realized there were additional photos and videos that had finished uploading. He clicked on the next photo. He gasped when it opened on his screen.

Panic played an octave on his spine. His skin felt prickly. It was the kind of photo that made Tommy afraid to have on his phone. Almost reflexively, Tommy laid his phone down on his desk, the screen facing down. After a moment, he picked it up again and looked at the screen. The photo was of disheveled and frightened Professor Hanley kneeling on the floor next to his bed, his hand up in an effort to hide his face from the harsh white light that shone on him. He was dressed in white boxer shorts and a white undershirt that had ridden up, presumably when he was dragged out of bed and made to get on his knees. With a sickly wariness that reminded Tommy of the times he pilfered his mother’s painkillers from her stash in her bedroom closet, Tommy’s finger touched the photo on his phone, and it became a video. The clip, about five seconds long, began to play. It showed the ten seconds in the moment before the photo. A gloved hand holding a gun entered the frame. A smoother cylindrical black suppressor was screwed onto the barrel of the gun, which was aimed directly at Professor Couper Hanley’s head. Tommy now realized that the man’s hands were not held in his face in an attempt to shield his eyes, but rather in an act of submission, one meant not to shield him from harsh light but from a bullet. The video clip was silent except for the low hum of the ambient noise in Professor Hanley’s bedroom. And the two words the terrified professor managed to utter in the seconds before the video ended. “Please. Don’t.”

His last word, as it turned out.

There was a flash from the barrel of the gun followed by a thwip sound and then the video stopped, and the still image thumbnail of Professor Hanley kneeling by his bedside returned. Tommy saw there was one more photo, swiped left, and again gasped at what he saw.

Professor Hanley sprawled on the floor in a pool of his own blood. The way Professor Hanley had fallen, at first, Tommy thought the head was obscured by the edge of the bedspread, which hung half on the floor. But then he realized Professor Hanley’s head wasn’t hidden from view; it was gone. Blown off. What remained of it was splattered across the maple wood nightstand behind it. 

Frantically, Tommy pressed his finger to his phone screen, and Professor Hanley came back to life for the ten-second playback of the live photo. Just long enough to see the mystery man with the silenced pistol pull the trigger and kill Professor Hanley again. Tommy watched the video three more times, each time swiping to see the photo of the blood-splattered, headless Stanford Professor splayed out on the floor of his bedroom, his head — what was left of it — half obscured by the beige duvet cover he had on his bed.

Suddenly, Tommy looked up with a start, an ice-cold fear seizing him, his shoulders tensing, his arms and legs going rigid as he suddenly got the feeling he was being watched. However, he was all alone in his office, the door closed, and the only prying eyes being those of his doppelgängers in the glass tower opposite his own, any of which were too far to see what he was looking at. Still, he felt uneasy, and for what felt like a long time, he sat there frozen, the only sound that of his own ragged, short inhalations. When his sense of reality, which had momentarily been on pause, returned, he immediately deleted the direct message on his phone.

He was returned to his inbox, and once again, his ragged breath hitched in his throat, and he stopped breathing as he saw that there was another message from the Snookr Business Center. It read simply: “Are you satisfied with this service?” Below that was a series of five face emojis, each one with a different expression ranging from sad to neutral to happy.

Tommy ignored that and immediately hit the “reply” button and typed the words: “Is this a joke?” He hit send and instantly received a reply saying, “The message was from an automated service and was not receiving incoming messages at this time.” Tommy was nervous and confused. What was going on? His hand was shaking. Hell, his whole body was rippling with a stuttering tremor that rolled from his head to his groin and back again. He deleted the second message. He sat alone in his ergonomic mesh office chair for a few moments, sweat beads forming on his brow, a tingle in his groin and a tightness in his chest before he realized he had forgotten to breathe. When he finally did, it was a deep exhalation followed by several heaving breaths.

What had he just seen? Was that man dead? Shot?  Then, another thought: Was this even real?  How did he know that what he’d seen in the videos and photos was even real?  Again, his mind flashed on the new autonomous AI-powered algorithms being employed by nearly every social media platform and tech company in the world, and it occurred to him that what he’d just seen was a deep fake. Despite this, his hands were still shaking. That was when he looked down and realized that the tingling sensation in his crotch had given him a slight stiffy. Only then did Tommy realize the tremors that gripped his body were not the shakes from nerves but from exhilaration. Real or not, what he had just seen had gotten him more than a little excited, which ironically only made him believe even more that this was all a hoax.  

The internet is wild, the voice in his head whispered. He tried to laugh it off. 

But he wasn’t so sure. 

Something about the message and the photos didn’t seem like a joke. It felt real.

Then, another thought: I’ve been hacked.  But by who? Why? And if so, what was the point of sending a series of fake photos and videos?

He stood up, wiped his sweaty palms on his gray slacks and began to pace his office. He stopped at the window to his office and, for a moment, just stared at the glass tower twin looming across the street, the transparent reflection of half his face staring back at him with one eye.

He shuddered, then sat back down. On his phone, he pulled up his Snookr app. He quickly thought better of it, put his phone down and opened his laptop instead. He opened a web browser to incognito mode and navigated to his Snookr account, where he saw a debit in the amount of $10 had been deducted from his account. The transaction was in cryptocurrency, so it was anonymous. Again, he thought perhaps he was being scammed, so next, he searched for the profile of @IAmTheTeacher86, also known as Professor Hanley. The account was still active, though there were no posts from yesterday or today. Not that that meant anything, Tommy told himself. It had been a weekend, and people didn’t post as much on Saturdays and Sundays. However, this failed to reassure him and he decided to do a deeper dive into Professor Hanley’s profile. The Stanford professor’s profile revealed that Hanley was a regular poster to Snookr, including on weekends. Some quick calculations and Tommy figured the man was good for about three posts per day, on average, including on the weekend. He came across their exchange from a few days ago, the one that had begun with politics and devolved into a variation of hurled “F-bombs” to one another. Yet, for the past two days, the man’s feed was empty. Tommy felt a hollow pit in his stomach. A wave of nausea rolled over him, and he swallowed hard. A sour taste tinged his throat as he choked back the hot bile that had been rising in his throat.

Breathe, he told himself. And he did. And it helped. He began to calm down. Tommy continued his search of Professor Hanley’s Snookr feed, going back days and weeks prior to their encounter. He saw now that the man posted a good deal more than just politics. There were a number of personal pictures on his feed. Photos of him speaking with his students. Of him on campus, speaking with his students or other faculty. There were videos of him in San Francisco. It did not appear from the photos or videos that Hanley was married or had kids. But one thing Tommy knew for sure was that the man behind the handle, @IAmTheTeacher86, Professor Couper Hanley, was the same man in the photos and videos sent to Tommy of the kneeling bearded man who’d been shot dead in his bedroom.

Next, Tommy opened another incognito browser window and did a Google search for “Professor Couper Hanley Stanford.” He clicked return, and almost instantaneously, the results returned. The first was a link to Professor Hanley’s employee page at Stanford. Beneath the smiling photo was a list of the humanities courses he was teaching this semester, along with his office address on campus and his office hours for meeting with students.

Tommy closed that and scrolled down further. The fourth link he saw made Tommy say, “fuck me,” the words escaping his lips like a confession. His vision began to cloud, his world darkening as he clicked on the link and read the article to which it linked. It was an excerpt from a brief article that ran yesterday in the Stanford school newspaper:

“Professor killed in home invasion.”

The article was really a snippet with just a few sentences and no photos, but the few details it offered appeared to confirm that the photos and videos Tommy had been sent were indeed real and not some AI-produced hoax.

Tommy closed the article, clicked out of the browser and shut down his computer. He thought for a second, trying to figure out what to do. Then he stood, walked to the door of his office, opened it, and told his secretary that he wasn’t feeling well and was leaving early for the day.

He got home to his house in the Hollywood hills, locked all the doors, drew the shades on all the windows, and sat alone in the dark. His phone rang a few times, but each time, he was too afraid to answer it. Finally, he removed the SIM card and battery, dropped the phone on the tile floor of his bathroom and stepped on it with his heel. There was a crunch as the glass screen cracked. He tossed the broken device in his trash and went back inside, where he stayed for the next couple of days.

When he finally emerged from his house two days later and went to work, he stopped at the mall in Century City, purchased a new iPhone at the Apple store, and restored his wireless account. However, he did not install the Snookr app. In fact, he did not log onto Snookr for the next two weeks.  

During that time, he didn’t hear anything about a murdered Stanford Professor. There were no strange emails or unfamiliar messages in his inbox, not from the Snookr Business Center or anyone else. When he checked his other social media apps, there was nothing that seemed to hark back to the Snookr bounty. When he did go online he played nice, mostly liking and commenting on other people’s content, but posting nothing himself. He kept his interactions low-key and friendly.  

After two weeks, he went onto Snookr on his laptop, again using an anonymous browser, and searched his own profile. It was up, and seemingly working fine, albeit it with no new posts the past two weeks that he had taken his hiatus from the app. He checked his inbox and saw that there were no direct messages from the Snookr Business Center. At the end of the second week, Tommy began to feel at ease again and slowly but surely settled back into his normal online routine. However, he kept it simple and polite. No Snookr battles with other users, not even so much as a snarky comment.

After a month, Tommy stumbled upon an article that set his blood boiling. The article quoted a Snookr post and included a link to the post, which Tommy clicked, taking him to the User’s feed. Within one minute of reading this User’s post, Tommy was hacking out a reply. The reply was not nice, polite or friendly. It was scathing, and he quickly found himself in a war of words with the User whom Tommy had dubbed “an internet troll” before blocking the woman altogether. 

At the end of that week, he downloaded the Snookr app onto his new phone. By then, he was back at it full-time, waging digital warfare against Users who posted things that ticked him off. There was no rhyme or reason to his digital rage. It could be a comment, a post, or a meme that set him off and sent his fingers flying across keyboards.

With one User who listed her pronouns in her Snookr bio, he got into a particularly vitriolic back-and-forth about gun control. The conversation took a dark turn. The User he was fighting with, @Yoga_Girl, suggested that maybe someone ought to pay Tommy a visit at Aluminum Corp. and exercise their Second Amendment rights in Tommy’s face. She had clearly checked his Snookr profile, figured out where he worked, and was now threatening violence.  Who the fuck did she think she was dealing with?  Tommy was in the middle of angrily composing an equally violent response when he noticed the glowing envelope icon appear in the upper right part of his screen. He had a message. It was from the Snookr Business Center. It read: “Would you like to take out a bounty on @Yoga_Girl?” He thought about it for about two seconds, then typed “$10” into the blank box and hit return. This time, however, the reply came back stating that the minimum bounty was “$25”. Tommy looked at the screen, confused.  

Why the increase?  

However, he did not dwell on that very long, nor did he question question the increase. What he was focused on instead was the rush, a feeling of pins and needles at the top of his head and a tingling in his groin as he typed in the amount of $25 dollars into the box. His hands shook as he hit "return."

The next few days, Tommy religiously checked the Snookr account of @Yoga_Girl. He was still posting. Then, on the fourth day, there was nothing. @Yoga_Girl had stopped posting.

That night, Tommy got the DM from the same anonymous Snookr Business Center account. His heart raced as he opened it, knowing that this meant another bounty had been fulfilled. The message read "Bounty fulfilled," followed by a series of photos and videos of a woman named Sloane Alper that the Snookr bounty hunter had sent him (for that is how Tommy had come to think of the anonymous Snookr Business Center — as a bounty hunter). The photos showed a blond woman in her late twenties, possibly thirty, dressed in purple spandex, a rolled-up pink yoga mat slung over her shoulder. He recognized the profile photo immediately. @YogaGirl. The name below her photo was Sloane Alper. There were photos of @YogaGirl, aka Sloane, in line at Starbucks, driving in her black Range Rover, and walking into a yoga class with her two girlfriends. The final attachment was a video file showing Sloane Alper being shot in the back while getting into her car. She lay face down in a pool of her own blood, her pink yoga mat next to her on the concrete floor of the parking garage. A sense of satisfaction washed over Tommy as he held his finger on the live photo and watched the ten-second video of @Yoga_Girl being shot in the back. He replayed the short video several times. 

Later that night, alone in his bedroom, the lights off and the shades drawn close, Tommy did a private search for “Sloane Alper” and quickly found several articles linking to her death, each of which he clicked on and read. When he finished, he deleted the message from the Snookr Business Center but couldn't bring himself to delete the photos and videos. He kept them. He stored them in a separate folder in his phone’s photo album. Trophies from the vanquishing of a digital foe in flesh and blood.

Tommy found in the days that followed he got into Snookr scrums (the term for online fights with another user) with more frequency. He squared off against nine other users. The arguments involved gun control, abortion, and the president’s allegations of corruption. But of the nine, he was offered a bounty on only one — a User with the handle @CK1999. When Tommy saw the direct message from the Snookr Business Center, there was no hesitation this time. He paid fifty bucks for the bounty on a man named Charlie Kessler, a thirty-five-year-old digital marketing executive from Boston. Three days later, he received a direct message with the subject: bounty fulfilled.

The bounties came quicker after that. Six more followed over the next two weeks. The list of the departed he contracted to have taken out included:

-A kindergarten teacher.

-A Hollywood writer.

-A union organizer in Arizona.

-A pharmaceutical company vice president.

 That’s a hell of a killing spree, he occasionally thought to himself. He’s practically a serial killer (no “practically” about it, he thinks). 

This evening, he was at a work event held by his company at a downtown hotel, swilling gin martinis with his coworkers. He was affable, all smiles. But whenever he looked at one of them, he saw a dollar sign and a number in front of their face. The amount he would pay for a bounty on that person. While making small talk, he tallied up the total in his head of what it would cost to kill all of his coworkers.  

This got him thinking.  Who was messaging him at the Snookr Business Center? Tech companies are constantly rolling out new updates, new features, and new terms of service that just as quickly disappear. But Tommy thinks this is a flaw in Snookr’s programming algorithm, not a feature. More importantly, who was fulfilling the bounties and killing these people? One or two lone operators using the data from users’ profiles and feeds to carry out these killings for cash. But why are the bounties so low? Ten bucks? Fifty? The price had been going up on some of his bounties but not all of them. And who else besides Tommy is putting bounties on people? Every attempt he made to find the answers to these questions ended in a dead end.

No pun intended.

He stayed at the hotel bar until just after eleven when he got an alert on his phone from a dating app signaling him about someone nearby interested in meeting him.

 He checked the profile of the person who was inviting him to connect. A Taiwanese girl named Mindy Chen who lived in West Hollywood. He accepted and messaged her back. After a little back and forth, he suggested they could go out to a place in her neighborhood. She agreed and sent him her address.  I slay ‘em with my phone, Tommy thought with a twisted grin.

The garage, where he parked his car was around the corner from the hotel. Tommy entered the garage, bathed in white fluorescent overhead lights. He was parked on the second floor, so rather than wait for the elevator, he walked up the ramp. 

It was as he was coming up the ramp, rounding his way up to the second floor, that he spotted him. The man standing there between a blue Tesla and a black Honda Accord.

Tommy stopped short. Something felt wrong.

The man’s back was to Tommy, but he could see where the man was looking — straight at the elevators and stairwell. Like he was waiting for someone. Tommy’s mind flashed on the body of Sloane Alper, shot in the back in a parking lot coming back from yoga. 

Tommy realized he was totally exposed under the harsh fluorescent lights of the garage and instinctively ducked out of sight before the man turned around and saw him. From his concealed spot behind a black Ford Explorer, Tommy watched the man watching the elevators. He gets a sudden certain feeling the man is waiting for him.

But why?

Because Tommy instinctively knows who the man is. A bounty hunter.

Did he really think he was the only one taking out bounties on people on Snookr?

The truth is Tommy hadn’t really considered it. Not any more than he considered any of his Snookr posts before he fired them off. His mind flashed all the Snookr users he had fought with. 

Oh yeah, baby, he was considering it now.

As he was his options.

He could run. 

How far would he get before the bounty hunter spotted him? Also, what about his car? 

He could Uber home. Or walk. 

Don’t be ridiculous. Nobody walks in Los Angeles. Besides, he needed his car to get to Mindy, his West Hollywood hook-up. And what about the man standing between the black Honda and the blue Corvette? The bounty hunter. Who is to say that man won’t show up at his apartment later if he doesn’t catch up with Tommy here? Stop it! He chided himself.  You’re being paranoid. Who would want to put a bounty out on you?

Well, if that bounty hunter was here to kill him, then Tommy had only one choice: he had to kill him first.

But how?

As he considered this, the bounty hunter turned around. Tommy instinctively ducked down out of sight, crouching behind the black Ford Explorer’s front tire. He held his breath, waited, and listened. Then he heard the sound of footsteps. The bounty hunter was moving.

Which way was he walking? Tommy wondered.

Slowly, so as not to reveal himself, he got on his hands and knees so he could see underneath the truck. He scanned the floor of the parking garage, looking underneath the bottoms of rows of parked cars for a single pair of —

He saw him. Tommy caught sight of a pair of patent leather loafers, walking slowly. The clip-clop they made on the concrete echoed off the walls of the garage, disorienting Tommy and making it hard to tell how close he was. He tried counting cars to gauge the distance, but being able only to see the bottoms of cars made that difficult. One thing for sure was the bounty hunter was heading straight for Tommy.

Had he seen him?

Should he run?

Tommy thought so but then couldn’t move. He was frozen with fear.

In panic, Tommy patted himself down, searching for something he could use as a weapon, even though he knew he had nothing. The footsteps of the bounty hunter drew closer.

“Think! Think!” Tommy urged himself.

Adrenaline spiked in his bloodstream, and time seemed to slow down.

Then, the bounty hunter’s footsteps halted. They sounded as if they were right next to him. Taking a chance, Tommy slowly stood, sliding up the driver’s side of the black Explorer. He was careful not to jostle the car, which might give away his location. He held his breath, making his body as narrow as possible. Once fully upright, he slowly turned his head to the right, peering through the Ford’s tinted window.

Tommy quickly ducked his head down. The man was in the next row over. He hadn’t seen Tommy. He was too distracted looking at his own phone. Tommy tried to focus. An idea flickered in his mind. Reaching into his pants pocket, his fingers closed around his house keys. He considered the jagged edge of the largest key, the one for his apartment’s deadbolt. 

Could he use it as a weapon? Stab the bounty hunter in the eye or slash his face?  This approach would require Tommy to get dangerously close to the bounty hunter. He doubted whether the key would do enough damage to stop the man from pulling out a gun and shooting Tommy. He also did not think he could win in a fight against a cold-blooded killer, and either way had no desire to test those odds.  

He searched the area around him. His eyes caught sight of a beer bottle. The green glass long neck, with a swallow of beer still lingering at its base, sat on the curb in front of where the Ford Explorer was parked, about four feet from his crouch. The risk was evident: the bounty hunter might hear him move.

But he had no choice. He had to take that risk.

Tommy crouched lower, sliding along the Ford’s side door until he was near the front of the car. The low slope of the hood made him feel more exposed. He worried the bounty hunter might see him reach for the beer bottle.

But the bounty hunter did not see Tommy grab the bottle and pull it close to his chest. Holding the bottle upside down by its neck, like a makeshift glass bat, Tommy froze, waiting for the right moment.

Then he sprang up. With a primal scream that echoed off the garage walls, he charged around the Explorer’s front, wielding the bottle like a sword. Swinging it in a high arc, Tommy struck the bounty hunter on the side of his face.

The man toppled over.

Tommy stared in disbelief. Contrary to what movies had led him to expect, the bottle didn’t shatter upon impact.

However, the same couldn’t be said for the man’s face, which now sported a gruesome, red, wet gash extending from his left eye to the corner of his mouth.

The air filled with the coppery scent of blood. Tommy struck again. He smashed the man in the head again, and this time, the bottle did break. So did the bounty hunter's skull. The man crumpled to the ground. Tommy didn’t relent. Clutching the bottle, which was slick with a mix of beer and blood, he plunged the jagged end into the bounty hunter’s neck. The man groaned. Tommy stabbed him over and over until the only noise was a gurgle that escaped the man’s lips, which frothed with a reddish-pink foam. It smeared across his lips and chin, his eyes wide with shock and disbelief as his life ebbed away onto the cold, dark pavement.

The man gasped his last few breaths, staring up at Tommy, his eyes wide and uncomprehending. Tommy kneeled over the man, watching his chest rising and falling until it stopped and the light faded from his eyes. He braced himself, expecting to feel fear or panic at the reality that he had just killed a man with his own hands. 

Instead, however, he felt something else. A sensation he had felt eight times before—a rush. The same exhilaration he felt each time he took a bounty out on a Snookr user who had wronged him or annoyed him with some comment or another. Only this time, it was even stronger, more potent. He had killed the bounty hunter, a man who had been sent to kill him, his would-be assassin, and he felt…alive.

The rush faded to prickly pins and needles coursing through his body as he casually walked away from the bounty hunter's corpse. He felt certain he was in no danger of being caught. After all, this was just another dead body left to rot in the City of Angels.

The sense of satisfaction he felt after vanquishing his digital foes returned.  Fighting the good fight, Tommy Boy, he thought as he strolled to where he had parked his car.

Then he remembered Mindy. His social media hook-up. As he slid behind the wheel of his car, he pulled up to her address. West Hollywood.  On my way.

He found a spot on the street a block away from her apartment, and as he walked to her place, he thought maybe he might try and convince Mindy to skip the drinks and get right to the good stuff. He felt a familiar twinge in his groin as he walked up to her building and rang the buzzer.

A minute later he was knocking on the door to apartment 5B.

A pretty young Taiwanese girl in a tight black dress answered the door. “Tommy?” She asked it in a manner suggesting she wanted to confirm his identity. After all, in the world of online dating, you can never be too sure who anyone is.

Tommy nodded and smiled. “Mindy?” he replied. 

Now, it was she who smiled.

“Should we head out?” he asked.

“Come in for a second. I need to finish getting ready.”

She looked ready to Tommy. In fact, she looked good enough to eat. But Tommy smiled and went inside her apartment. It was sparsely furnished, a futon couch, a single wood chair, which looked like it had been borrowed from the kitchen table, itself a plain wood oval with only three chairs surrounding it.  Maybe she was a minimalist, Tommy thought.  Some actress starring in her current role as a waitress while trying to make it big in the movies. She was certainly pretty enough.  Her straight black hair framed a beautiful, symmetrical face anchored by two emerald green eyes. So, Tommy didn’t give much thought to her decorating skills, or lack thereof, and found his way to the gray futon couch and sat.

“Where should we go?” he asked.

“There’s a local spot a few blocks from here I know of. Let me just finish putting on my face, and then we can head out.”

“Sounds good,” Tommy said. Mindy disappeared into the bathroom, and Tommy felt a sense of satisfaction with himself. He was the man. 

No, he was more than that.  He was the fucking man. 

He had survived an attempt on his life that night, killed the man who had meant to kill him, and now he was about to go on a date with a pretty young thing that was most likely to end with Tommy getting laid.

Oh yeah, he was the fucking man, alright.

Suddenly, he felt strange. A wave of unease washed over him. It was a familiar feeling. He had last felt it—

Before he could complete the thought, he heard the bathroom door open. He turned to see Mindy standing behind him. The flashlight from her cell phone was on and pointed directly into his eyes. He had to lift his hand to his face to shield his eyes from the light. “Hey, Mindy,” he said, trying not to sound annoyed, “your phone’s flashlight is on, and it’s right in my eyes.”

Mindy did not switch off the light. She did not say anything, at least not to him. Instead, she spoke in a manner that sounded more like she was leaving an outgoing message on her voicemail. She was matter-of-fact. Emotionless.

Tommy froze. He breathed in sharply as all the spit in his mouth dried up.

What she was saying was his name.

“Tommy Burger. Online handle Tommyboy1987.”

Tommy still couldn’t see her, blinded by the light from her phone. He finally managed to get his eyes up and block the beam. It was then he saw what she held in her other hand.

Her gloved hand...

A silenced pistol.

As he stood up from the couch, she fired it. Tommy barely had time to register the familiar thwip, the sound of the suppressed shot as a white-hot fire bloomed in his belly, where the first bullet hit him. He fell to his knees, his hands clutching at his gut, which burned with a searing, white-hot pain. He looked down at the hole in his gut, his lifeblood seeping out between his fingers. 

With a mix of shock and pain, he looked up at Mindy. In her right hand, she held the gun she had shot him with. But Tommy was looking at what she held in her left. A cell phone. She was pointing it at him. Tommy flinched at the bright white light when she switched on the flashlight app and held his hands up in front of his face, half shielding himself, half pleading with her not to shoot. The last thing he heard was the click of the camera app taking his picture.