How to Haunt Your Own Algorithm

My other self first contacted me through LinkedIn, of all the godforsaken places. While I was hunched over my laptop at 3 AM, eating microwave burritos and pretending to care about quarterly projections, she sent me a connection request. The profile picture was me, but a version that hadn't spent the last five years marinating in fluorescent lighting and cryptocurrency trading. Her hair was the violent purple I'd abandoned after my mother told me I looked like someone had beaten me with a grape popsicle.

"You've become everything we used to mock," she messaged.

I took another bite of my burrito, which had frozen patches in the middle and was probably giving me low-grade food poisoning. "At least I have dental insurance," I typed back.

She started haunting my devices after that. Every screen became a portal to my better self, the one who hadn't sold out to corporate America for the privilege of sitting in ergonomic chairs that made my ass sweat through my sensible slacks.

Mark, my latest attempt at dating within my tax bracket, didn't notice when her face replaced mine during our FaceTime calls. He was too busy explaining blockchain while I picked at a persistent rash that had developed under my bra strap. I named the rash Herbert. It seemed to grow whenever Mark used the word "disrupt."

"You haven't showered in three days," My other self texted.

She wasn't wrong. My hair had developed its own ecosystem. Sometimes, I swore I could hear tiny civilizations rising and falling in my unwashed ponytail.

The other me began posting art on my Instagram—grotesque digital collages made from screenshots of my banking app and photos of my growing collection of empty wine bottles. She tagged them #personalitydecomposition and #corporatezombie. My followers doubled, though that might have been because she kept posting topless selfies at 4 AM.

"Stop sabotaging my professional image," I texted her.

"Stop professionally sabotaging yourself," she replied, then hacked my dating apps to change all my interests to 'watching paint dry' and 'slow death by PowerPoint.'

I started taking my lunch breaks in the server room at work, sitting cross-legged between the humming machines. Their fans sounded like heavy breathing, like the building itself was having an asthma attack. My other self appeared in every darkened monitor, watching me eat salads and pick scabs off my scalp.

"Remember when we used to create digital art that made people uncomfortable?" she asked through my AirPods.

"Now I make spreadsheets that make people uncomfortable," I said, finding a particularly satisfying scab. "Same difference."

She started sending meeting invites to my work calendar:

"Confronting Your Slow Descent into Mediocrity, Conference Room B." 

"Emergency Session: Why You Let Mom's Internalized Capitalism Win.” 

"Quick Sync: Remember That Time You Kissed Sarah Peterson and Felt Actually Alive?"

I declined them all, but they kept reappearing like digital herpes.

“The night Mark tried to explain NFTs, while I disassociated so hard, I briefly achieved astral projection.”

My other self hijacked my phone and began live-tweeting my slow death:

“Watching myself rot in real-time at a bar that serves depression with a side of cocktails.”  

“Time to drink until I forget I have an Instagram profile."

 “Remember when we had dreams that didn't involve stock options?”

I closed my eyes and leaned against one of the servers, feeling a sense of nostalgia wash over me. We used to be so carefree, creating glitch art that pushed boundaries and challenged society's norms. But now, here I was, stuck in a corporate job crunching numbers and optimizing data.

"What happened to us?" I whispered.

"You chose stability over passion," she replied softly. "But it's not too late to change that."

I opened my eyes and looked at her reflection on one of the monitors. She still had that wild purple hair and rebellious spirit that I had lost along the way.

"I can't just quit my job and go back to creating controversial digital art," I said with a hint of desperation in my voice.

"You don't have to," she said with a mischievous glint in her eye. "But you can start by bringing some of our old selves into your current work."

I furrowed my brows in confusion, but before I could ask what she meant, she disappeared from the screens.

"Wait!" I called out.

But she was gone. I sat there for a moment, contemplating her words. 

That evening, I went to a bar and ordered an $18 cocktail and named it Regret.

My apartment had become a graveyard of abandoned creative projects. Half-finished canvases served as cutting boards for microwaveable meals. My old art supplies had developed a thin film of dust that I sometimes wrote SOS messages in, hoping the void would answer. So far, only my other self had responded, and she was kind of a bitch about it.

"You're supposed to be the successful version of me," I texted her while sitting on my bathroom floor at 2 AM, trying to remember if I'd taken my antacids or if those were just breath mints I'd found in my coat pocket.

"Success is a capitalist construct designed to sell meditation apps," she replied.

She had a point. I spent $29.99 on a mindfulness app last week. So far, all it had done was remind me to breathe, which seemed redundant since my body did that automatically, though with increasing reluctance.

The breaking point came during a quarterly review where I had to present a slide deck about maximizing shareholder value. My other self hijacked the presentation, replacing every chart with close-up photos of my stress-induced eye twitch. The CFO called it "avant-garde." They gave me a raise.

That night, I stood in front of my full-length mirror, the one I'd covered with old takeout menus, because looking at myself felt like watching a documentary about industrial decay.

"What do you want from me?" I asked my reflection.

She appeared, purple hair glowing like a toxic spill. "Want? I want us to stop pretending that success means slowly dying in business casual. I want us to make art that makes people throw up a little. I want us to stop measuring our worth in LinkedIn endorsements and Instagram followers and start measuring it in how many people we make uncomfortable at dinner parties."

"I don't know how to be that person anymore," I said.

"Bullshit. She's right here, drowning in dress slacks and Outlook calendars."

She had our old portfolio website cached somewhere in the cloud. Works titled things like: "Screaming into the Digital Void" and "Self-Portrait—Better Living Through Self Haunting" The kind of art that made my mother increase her blood pressure medication.

I called in sick the next day. My other self had already updated my email signature to include a link to a website showcasing my digital art.

I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror; our reflections finally merged, and I barely recognized the woman looking back at me.  I stood there, gripping the edge of the sink as if it were the last thread tethering me to reality. My eyes were wide, too wide, and my pupils were like pinpricks, darting left, right, up, down, as if trying to escape my own gaze. And the reflection—I could swear it was breathing.

"Who... who are you?" I whispered, feeling absurd as soon as the words left my mouth, but the question was genuine. This woman, covered in a smear of paint and what looked like… binary code? Zeroes and ones traced down my neck and across my collarbone like some twisted tattoo. Each digit seemed alive, shifting, shimmering, like a live data feed scrolling across my skin. The numbers looped around the rash I named Herbert.  The binary code was spreading—no, blossoming—like fractal patterns branching over my face, crimson and raw.

"Herbert!" I yelled, clutching my temples as my voice echoed around the tiny bathroom. "What… what is happening to me?"

I looked down, but when I raised my eyes, she was still there—the painted woman in the mirror. Her eyes narrowed, a smirk curled at the edge of her mouth, mocking, daring. I pressed my hands to my cheeks, only to feel the slick, sticky paint slide beneath my fingers. My fingertips came away black and blue, and I swore I could hear each brushstroke whispering, crackling like static.

Then it started again, that searing itch under my skin, spreading like wildfire. The binary tattoos flared to life, pulsing with light—ones and zeroes glowing, then dimming in rhythmic waves. I scratched, nails raking my arm until I drew blood, but the numbers just grew, expanding exponentially, consuming.

"Herbert, why aren’t you helping me? Herbert!"

Silence. Herbert, the rash on my skin, my own voice in the chaos, just watched, silent. Somewhere deep in my brain, I felt a twinge, a glitch, a static burst like a radio tuning to the wrong frequency.

"Hello?" I muttered, blinking hard, trying to focus. But when I looked back at the mirror, it was… shifting, phasing, like the glass had turned to liquid. I could see other faces—women, men, children. All staring back, each one covered in the same dripping paint, the same neon code, zeroes and ones dancing across their skin.

“You’re not me,” I hissed, my voice low and furious, as if anger could banish them. "None of you are me!"

But the woman in the mirror only smiled wider, her eyes gleaming like data points, alive with a light that wasn’t human.

"Why are you smiling? What the hell do you want from me?" My voice rumbled, and I could feel the desperation gnawing inside of me.

The answer came as a whisper, like the soft chime of code entering my ears: "I want you to understand. You’re not real anymore."

I froze. Not real? The words echoed, distorted, morphing as my brain tried to comprehend. The edges of my vision wavered, pixelating.  I blinked, and suddenly, I could see the digital framework of the room around me—the walls dissolving into grids of code, the sink reduced to wireframe lines.

"No, no, no, this can’t—this can’t be—"My breath was coming in gasps, each one shallower than the last. "Herbert, help! Say something, tell me what to do!"

But all I heard was laughter. A high, hollow laugh that sounded like mine but came from the other side of the mirror. My reflection pressed her hand to the glass, paint dripping, and with a sickening fascination, I watched as her fingers slid right through, sinking into the surface as if it were quicksand.

"You’re trapped," she whispered. Her lips didn’t move, but the voice filled my head.

"Trapped in the code, the data. Just like the rest of us."

"No," I whispered, stepping back, but the wall met my back, solid and unyielding. "No, I don’t belong here! I’m—I'm real!"

"Are you, though?" she sneered, tilting her head. "Then tell me, why can’t you step out? Why do you keep ending up here, staring at me, day after day, hour after hour, repeating yourself like an endless loop?”

She reached out a hand toward me, fingers outstretched, her eyes dark with something familiar and terrifying. I felt my hand lift of its own accord, reaching back, mirroring her. My fingers stretched forward, closing the gap, compelled by something beyond me.

“No—please—no!” I screamed, trying to yank my arm back, but it was like every muscle was caught in someone else's grip.

”Come,” she cooed, her voice a silky whisper that slithered into my mind. “It’s time to join us.”

My hand touched the glass, and suddenly, the world imploded, fractals shattering, data spilling, rushing over me in a tidal wave of binary. The numbers, the rash, the paint—they became me, pulsing, breathing, taking over.

As the last shred of my sanity slipped away, I saw her one final time, grinning from the other side, her eyes flashing with code.

The doctors would call this a psychotic break, a mental breakdown that had caused me to lose my grip on reality. Silicon Valley, on the other hand, would call it disrupting the paradigm, a necessary part of innovation and progress.  Physicists would call it Entropy.  To me, it was digital decomposition, a necessary rot of the person I had pretended to be. The person who had chased after money, fame, and success, only to find herself emptied out, hollow and lost. The person who had sacrificed her own happiness and well-being for the sake of societal expectations and societal measures of success.

As I stood there, staring at my reflection, I couldn't help but wonder who this person in the mirror was—a creative, boundary-pushing, rule-breaking artist, or a cog in the machine of Silicon Valley. 

My first gallery show opens next month. It's all digital images of cryptocurrency CEOs getting arrested projected onto cans of Red Bull energy drinks. Sarah Peterson is curating it. Turns out she still likes kissing women who make digital art.

My other self doesn't text anymore, but sometimes, when I'm coding glitch art at 3 AM, I catch her smile in my screen's reflection. She's still there, less like a ghost in the machine now, more like a virus I chose not to delete.

The doctors say I should be worried about losing touch with reality. But what is reality anyway? It's just badly coded software, full of bugs and user interface issues. Sometimes, you need to let your digital ghost crash the system to remember how to write better code.

Herbert, my loyal rash, has evolved into something more than just an annoyance. Now, his red bumps have formed intricate patterns that look suspiciously like stock market graphs. I can't help but wonder if he's trying to tell me something. Perhaps he's trying to teach me about the interconnectedness of all things—data points and skin cells included.

I'm even thinking about submitting Herbert to the prestigious Whitney Biennial Survey of American Art. Who knows, maybe he'll become the next Andy Warhol—or at least make me some quick cash as an NFT.

Despite my digital transformation and newfound obsession with glitch art and financial data visualization, part of me still worries about losing myself completely. But then again, maybe this is who I was meant to be all along—a fusion of human and machine, creating something beautiful out of chaos.