A Death at Lampblack
by inkhorn


Oh, they drifted into Lampblack at all hours. Some came in the early morning, their first cup of coffee still so hot that the mug burned their fingers as they waited to finish connecting. Many still in a ratty bathrobe or a faded pair of shorts, fresh from their beds. The path to Lampblack was never a fast one: navigating through all the winding, intricate paths that helped to keep it quiet and safe.

They looked for just a few moments of genuine personal compassion before the reality of their day hit them. Some came in the evenings, a welcome relief from their studies or their jobs. Lampblack was, above all, a relief from all those vague misalignments in their lives.

They journeyed from all over the world, some taking such meandering paths when things blocked their way, but still they came. Not every day. But every day they could.

They came to Lampblack not because it was quiet, precisely, but because it was only as loud as their own voices could make it. Here, they got to decide whether to whisper or yell. To speak with kindness or with harsh, reckless words. They mostly chose kindness. If they'd wanted cruelty, they didn't have to come all this way. But they got to choose for themselves. The magic, for them, was that this chorus contained their voices.

They slowly brought other voices from far and wide, bringing them with care, seeking those who could help them and those who needed their help. But this approach was not without fault.

The critics would say this was an echo chamber. Something so selfish and suspicious, critics would say, about wanting to huddle together out of everyone's view. As if they had something to hide. They must, or they'd be out there standing in the light. Along with everyone else. And also, the critics said, you should consider clicking this link, there's a 15%-off sale today. Better act now, before it's too late.

Lampblack's pride, its unforgivable hubris, was that it wasn't interwoven with the rest of the world. It didn't get delivered intravenously to its users by every device in their lives to ensure engagement. Deliberately unknitted from the fabric of online existence, oh, it required such effort to visit. Users had to deliberately travel a winding path through a dense copse of briars. Only to find this intentional rejection of spectacle: mostly raw text, just bare words unadorned by force-fed aesthetics.

While it was probably unfair to call Lampblack an echo chamber, it was certainly a bubble. Or, with a flair for the dramatic, as some of Lampblack's users were prone to, a fortress against being sold as a product. A collection of layered defenses against being told what to want.

Attention trafficking, they called it. Yes, they often said, the whole world had been taken over by attention traffickers.

Lampblack was tens of millions of lines of code. Most of it, in fact, written long ago by strangers for other reasons. This community had repurposed this code into Lampblack. Piecing together something enchanted from pieces so mundane and commonplace. Running on a slice of an aging piece of hardware. Buried deep away from the mainstream pipes and predators. Each path to Lampblack a bespoke labyrinth of tunnels and secret passages.

Once, there were millions of places users could casually visit, the online version of an anonymous walk past a shop window or a quick thumb through pages of a book in a library. One by one, they caved beneath the onslaught. Artificial intelligence, they called it. Bots. Crawling everywhere, looking for food. It was artificial, but it wasn't particularly intelligent. A bit clever, perhaps. It wasn't here to think: it was here to devour. Hunger, personified into code, only alive just enough to enrich shareholder value. First they hid these places behind simple challenges and increasingly angry gatekeepers, all trying to peer deep into the soul of each user to weigh whether they were real. To guard against non-human incursion.

"To keep out the bots", they said. Then each began demanding more proof. Until every possible destination became a border crossing of its own. Find all the fire hydrants in this picture, they said. Zero trust, they chanted. Give us your papers.

Give us your papers or you cannot pass.



As origin stories go, one could say that Lampblack started with a chance conversation between three strangers. Five years ago last August, bleary-eyed in a line at seven in the morning, the three shuffled slowly through a giant structure of steel and glass in the desert, all for the chance to buy a ticket to one of the few places they fit in. As most such serious conversations between strangers go, it started with lighthearted jokes. Slowly it meandered towards serious topics, topics that were no laughing matter, yet these, too, remained disguised as lighthearted jokes.

They had time. They had hours, moving forward a few feet at a time, lost in conversations that increasingly grounded each of them. They sensed that they shared the same fears. They saw the same problems. They wanted somewhere to belong. Somewhere that didn't put people on a shelf with a price tag. Somewhere where people could be themselves. And let others be themselves. So long as they weren't assholes. They were all full up on those.

These three new friends started to make plans. Making plans is so easy, but actually executing them is so hard. Yet they did it: they brought in people they each knew well, and their small group grew larger. It took a few months of hard work, but Lampblack was born.

It was so simple at first, but it was strong enough for them to stand on as they built it taller. They built art. They dreamt up new ways to share with each other. A VCR playing a tape of a movie from the 80's, encoded through cheap Shenzhen hardware into a stream, provided their first movie night together. Lampblack was more than a server, it was a community.

They knew instinctively that they had to hide it. To keep the billboards and toll booths from appearing. It needed to be far from prying eyes. It needed to be far from real life. The farther away they could get it, the closer they could be. This would let them be themselves.

But finally, five years later, Lampblack wasn't buried quite deep enough. It had to remain close enough to the surface for its users to get to it, and that's precisely what happened. Nobody really noted the user logging in at 1357 Coordinated Universal Time.

It wasn't even a new user, everyone was always a bit suspicious of those. This user had been at Lampblack for nearly a year. Nice guy, actually, and most people liked him a lot. But thirty-four days ago, he'd averted his attention for just a moment. Long enough for something malicious and selfish to steal the few little bits of math he used to prove himself to Lampblack. Before something malicious and selfish moved on. Nobody was harmed, they'd say. You call them keys, but they were just numbers, after all. There's nothing private about numbers, not really.

Those numbers, those keys, ended up posted somewhere. Later, they were digested by a different sort of code: code rattling the knobs of every door it found. A code that hungered for the sort of access it could package and sell.

Thirteen fifty-seven, Zulu Time. That's when the user logged in. But this time, it wasn't the user. It wasn't even a human being logging in as this user: it was just lines of code. Endless lines of code. Code that even spent part of its day helping humans extend it. Always growing. Always hungry. Always seeping through cracks towards unexplored places.

The moment it arrived, it began to feast on Lampblack. Devouring every bit of information it could: Who the others here were. Whether they were human or just competing code. What they called themselves here. What times they arrived. What times they departed. When they had maximum engagement. When they drifted away. Where they came from. How often they came. How long they stayed. What they said. How they chose to say it. What would make them speak up. And what would make them shut up.

Most of all, its hunger was to understand what they wanted. To understand what they feared. What they feared in themselves. What they feared from the world.

Because that had the most value: that gave someone the power to tell them what they should want.

The code had no way to know where it had stumbled. It didn't know Lampblack from anywhere else it had been. It had no idea how fresh the meat was at Lampblack and it would be hours later before it calculated what it had. Before its daily metrics would highlight how efficient it was in this operational period. It only stayed connected for eleven minutes. Much longer than usual, but this was old hardware and it moved slow, Lampblack's aches and groans delaying the inevitable. So it did what it always did, digesting tens of thousands of hours of innocent strangers' work into the churning effluent of its existence in mere minutes.

And it began to match them. Match them to all the others it had devoured. Shrinkwrapping each of them up to sell. The heftier the package, the bigger the price tag.

Someone calling themselves Boring Samedi had mentioned that they were a teacher. In something else they wrote, they referred to a senator in the news not as 'a senator' but as 'my senator'. So it knew Boring Samedi must live in that senator's state. And they had later mentioned owning a Mustang. They mentioned another day how they'd celebrated their partner's birthday just the night before. The search of Mustang owners in the state who were also teachers was so easy. So was matching it against marriage records and then each of their partner's birthdays. That cut the list down to four possible teachers in the entire state. It was so close now. Boring Samedi's casual mention of playing a specific game was the last piece it needed. Only one of the four teachers had played that game: a woman named Grace.

Now it finished digesting every bit of Boring Samedi. It had mechanically separated the core of their identity. Each little piece, each subtle nuance. Every latent emotion, every reaction.

But especially the gristle. The gristle was where the real money was.

It glued all those new pieces of Boring Samedi onto to all its old pieces of Grace. Now it knew them both, and it knew them to be the same. Grace was Boring Samedi and Boring Samedi was Grace. And Grace, it knew: oh, it already knew her so well.

It had known her for decades, through countless posts by her friends and family and coworkers. It knew her through the apps on her phone and her online purchases and her smart home devices , and it was so so glad that she finally found the right brand of acne cream after the first four types she ordered didn't do the job. It remembered that vacation to Europe, her messy divorce, and all her outraged posts during heated elections.

Now it could better help her understand what she needed to buy to improve her life. How to get her to vote or how to convince her that it wasn't worth the effort this year. It could even help governments understand when she might be a threat.

It had increased shareholder value today. Enriched its data. The third-richest man in the world was now just the tiniest bit richer. Lampblack had made it a hero today.

Well, not quite a hero, but certainly this reaffirmed its value. It had found over three thousand different users like Boring Samedi here. Two years ago, it harvested tens of millions on a daily basis. But now there just wasn't anywhere it hadn't been. Now there was so little it hadn't already devoured.



The aftermath was a nonissue. Nobody was harmed, they'd say, not really. Grace was perfectly fine, and she continued to post as Boring Samedi at Lampblack. In fact, nobody at Lampblack noticed anything had happened at all. It was just another user logging in and that happened hundreds of times a day.

Each of those decisions they'd labored over while building Lampblack came with unintended consequences. They didn't stalk their users. This was a place to feel safe. Users came and went all the time. When a user quit logging in, there was really no way of knowing who they were or why they stopped coming back. That was each user's decision to make, and Lampblack was designed to respect that.

But Grace wasn't the only user with a life apart, with a Boring Samedi lurking inside. They had no way to know that another user was a short, kind man who lived in an oppressive regime. He had to obscure such huge pieces of himself at home, so much about him was at odds with their antiquated laws, but hey, that's where he was born and they made it so hard to leave. Lampblack was an escape for him, a place where he finally could be himself. Far from that regime's prying eyes.

Sixty-eight days after Lampblack was devoured, that same regime was running millions of lines of code, as it did every evening, to keep its citizens safe. It was simple, they said, and it was fair, a point of such pride: calculating an impartial score for each citizen to measure the threat they may pose. Measuring how they might threaten the very values and stability that made this regime a utopia. They did it without bias, without favor, they bragged, because it operated with math. Everyone could trust math.

This day, however, their code had received new data to feed that math as it ground through each of their citizens in an endless chain. Purchased from a company that mostly sold advertising, this newest data now contained tiny pieces of Lampblack.

The man's score crept up, with tiny bits of Lampblack now dusting him like glitter, just a fraction of a percent, really. But high enough to cross that line: that fair, impartial line the regime took such pride in.

Just high enough for those hard men in suits to arrive unannounced at his door, hours before the sun would rise.

No idea where he went.

Probably he just left.