America
An excerpt from our upcoming book, "Floyds Gone"
Floyds Gone is the debut story collection by Jacob A. Smith, published by eidolon ink in July 2026. “America” is the fourth story in his collection, which you can pre-order here.
From my flat I can see a skyline pierced by a large triangular building we call the Shard. It resembles a broken piece of glass and, from what I gather from the Americans on the server, is the best-known London landmark after Big Ben. At night I watch it from over the top of my monitor. At night there is a red light at the very top that blinks.
I lifted the software from my old copywriting job. The sales team would use it as a ‘soft phone.’ Which is a phone that is not there; it is in software. And because it is embedded in the network, Dax218 told me, you can tarry it onto the back of a service that disperses the call across separate nodes and IP addresses. This, Dax218 explained, gives the impression that the number is calling from multiple places at once. The process is hard to control, he typed, because the addresses and the nodes generate and ping the signal at random. This works in our favour. He told me that the service was provided by a Chinese crime syndicate. Dax218 also gave me access to a software that warps my voice. This, too, generates different auditory effects at random. The software protects me and the group as a whole. In this way we are untraceable.
After each call I put the details on the Discord and the others give me ratings. Numbers with decimal points. Emojis and gifs flood in. This is usually the highlight of the group’s month. These things take a long time to plan, and no one knows when the next person will be able to pull off a hoax. The randomness is part of the splendour. It gives everyone a sense of alive spontaneity.
We give each other at least three positive points about the hoax and three more detailing things to improve for next time. WWW, EBI: What Went Well, Even Better If. Choice of location, timing, and the nature of the threat are all key. If a major news source covers your hoax, then you’re dead set for at least an 8.5. The things that mark you down are brevity of call, lack of creativity, and an insignificant police response. We like it if you can keep them on the phone for a long time, because it shows a level of conversational nous, and the recording produced afterwards is more entertaining. But if you stick to something redundant, like a made-up fire, you’ll get marked down. Creativity and police response go hand in hand. If your hoax sounds like a hoax, then the response is minimal.
The highest score so far is 9.3, which was a fake kidnapping situation Dax218 contrived a couple of years ago. The group was not as large then and it was easier to impress. The second highest score is mine. I called in a bomb threat to my old school. It was closed for over 36 hours. I scored an 8.7 because I was able to pin it on an old classmate of mine. She is now in prison.
We do not know each other’s names, what we do, or where we live.
The text beside the photograph said this:
Oklahoma is formed of multiple planes and plateaus that make the terrain unpredictable and at times vertiginous. Indigenous peoples lived on the lands of Oklahoma for many centuries before the arrival of Spanish invaders. In the 19th Century, the United States government forcibly removed tens of thousands of Native Americans and transported them to the area in and around present-day Oklahoma. Today we would call that ethnic cleansing.
In April of 1995 Timothy McVeigh committed a form of property damage using a combination of agricultural fertiliser and diesel fuel placed in the back of a Ryder truck.
The photograph showed a ripped apart government building. The explosion exposed a cross section up and through it. It looked like a dollhouse. I leant forward to see if there were any bodies on the exposed levels. The photograph, taken from high above, likely snipped from the frame of some news footage, was too blurry to make out anything specific. But I imagined the bodies there, dying or dead.
Next to the picture was a Cherokee family in black and white. The father’s knuckles are chipped and dark. The children are crying.
Samantha, 35, whistled through her teeth and said: ‘Grim.’
‘Interesting though,’ I said, turning toward the rest of the gallery and mumbling something to do with the word ‘evocative.’
‘Engrossing indeed,’ Samantha said distractedly as she grabbed two champagne flutes from a waiter. She mouthed an exaggerated thank you.
‘One could even go so far as to say evocative.’
‘I wouldn’t go that far. I don’t want to give Alice the pleasure,’ Samantha grinned.
‘Thanks.’ I took a flute from her. ‘Is this Alice going to appear?’
Samantha gestured to the room, which was slightly too small, and towards the people, which were simply too many.
‘She’s in the throngs,’ Samantha said. ‘The great fleshy throngs.’
People milled about in long black jackets and loud colourful knitwear. Some looked at the photographs, but most looked inward: at the room itself, who was in it, who was not. The photographs were a pleasant distraction from a much larger ritual. I recognised a footballer, German and tall and no older than 27. Years ago, this would have been notable. But the line between sports, entertainment, art, and money looked increasingly like one large circle. I went to make a joke about Germans and bombs, but Samantha had moved away. A man was complimenting her pale blue dress and her deep green eyes. She looked back at me and smiled.
I moved around the room and came to another photograph of a plane just about to push its way into a tower. The image had been airbrushed. The pixellated smudge usually seen in freeze frames from 9/11 news footage had been cleaned up. The sun bounced off the side of the second tower. The detailed colouring of the plane’s fuselage, red and white and American blue, looked bright against the clear sky. I could see the aa logo on the tail. The plane was held in perfect tension with the to-be-destroyed building. It was one of the only images of the day that did not feature an explosion.
The text next to the photograph said this:
New York City was once comprised of various areas with different names. They were called Lenapehoking, Manahatta and Wickquasgeck and were inhabited by the Lenape indigenous peoples. These people were displaced by the Dutch in the 1620s, and a wall was built around what was subsequently called Manhattan. Through a long process of violence, colonialism and ethnic cleansing, the Lenape peoples resettled in Oklahoma.
On September 11th 2001, two towers were destroyed in downtown Manhattan in an act of extreme self-harm.
Next to the photograph was a picture of four Lenape people. A mother, father and two daughters. The daughters stare off to the right, distracted by something beyond the frame. One of them is laughing. The other is frozen in a cry. The father is blind in one eye. Cloudy white smoke sits over the cornea. His eyelid is screwed nearly shut. The mother looks down the barrel of the camera with one hand on the crying child’s shoulder, the other pointing to something out of frame. They all sit in front of a cart, its right wheel broken, snapped in two.
I noticed the music lightly emanating from the speakers was MGMT.
Samantha was next to me.
‘That fella just tried to kiss me.’
‘Which one?’
‘That one, there,’ she said, pointing a thin ringed finger towards a skyscraper of a man, approximately 38, wearing a green North Face puffer jacket. ‘The one talking to Alice.’
The skyscraper was talking to her at a stoop. She had her back to me, but I could see the white words printed on the back of her black leather jacket: GET FUCKED.
Samantha called Alice’s name and she turned around and smiled. She did not look like the kind of person that would spend hours airbrushing 9/11 photographs. She looked normal. Straight teeth and nice eyes and long, dark hair. Anywhere between 25 and 32. She walked over to us and I was suddenly outside of myself, watching as my body, 55, was swept along in the convergence of unseen and mysterious forces. Someone pointed a camera at Alice and it flashed.
‘Floyd, Alice. Alice, Floyd.’ Samantha criss-crossed her fingers as she introduced us. Alice stuck out a hand, and I took it and squeezed. I was aware my hands were clammy and wrinkled and hers were beautifully smooth and dry. The phone in my pocket buzzed.
‘How do you know each other?’ she asked in a gravelly voice.
‘We used to work together and we used to shag.’
I looked at the ground and felt my face go red. The music changed to Interpol.
‘Used to?’
‘Used to.’
‘Thanks Samantha,’ I said, forcing a laugh.
We stood in silence.
‘How did you meet?’ I asked.
They were quiet.
‘This is my kid sister, Floyd.’
‘Right. Yes,’ I said. My phone buzzed again.
‘Excuse me.’
I stumbled into the toilet and locked the door and let out a noise somewhere between a sigh and a light scream as I metabolised yet another poor social interaction. I sat on the closed toilet seat and pulled out my phone. There were about 100 notifications from the Discord chat. I opened it and clicked on the first pinned message: there is CCTV footage of a figure walking onto a college quad with an orange jerry can. A small kid wearing a backpack and a light blue t-shirt with yellow chino shorts and black shoes. His hair is short. It is hard to make out much else. He holds the can over his head and the gasoline showers him. The students around him jump back as if the boy has suddenly started screaming. Then he throws the can to one side and lights a match. He goes up in orange and red. He falls to his knees. There is no sound.
One of the Americans has self-immolated on a college campus.
The messages in the chat read:
is this real????
no way dude this has to be a larp
how do u post this if ur burnt to death?
I look for Dax218 in the messages and do not see his name. I feel a bead of sweat travel down the back of my neck.
bro it’s on reddit bro look, one of the Americans writes. I flick over to the app and see the same video on multiple popular threads. This footage is different, taken from someone’s phone, too shaky to get a clear view. But this video has sound and the screams of the boy overwhelm the image.
this is insane!!
there’s already an article about it, and a link to a Fox News piece, BOY BURNS HIMSELF ALIVE ON COLLEGE CAMPUS.
how did he pull this off?
idk bro. looks real to me.
9.7
9.5
8.9 (marked down if not hoax)
Then my hands were shaking and I locked the phone and opened the toilet seat and wretched nothing into the bowl. My phone buzzed. I turned off the ringer.
I stepped out into the gallery’s fluorescent LED light. The music had changed to D’Angelo. Samantha looked at me from over the top of her glasses and said in her usual detached way: ‘You look pale as fuck, mate.’
‘I feel strange,’ I said quietly.
‘Do you want to leave?’
I nodded, and Samantha called over to Alice and said we were going to the pub around the corner and Alice said ‘I’ll join you.’
And as we walked out of the gallery, Alice touched my arm, smiled, and said she liked my silver hair. My phone felt heavy in my pocket.
The blinds in my flat failed to hold back sunlight so I was often awake early. I wore a black silk facemask, but the feeling of sunlight on my skin would rouse me. I liked it because it made me feel harmonious in some small but significant way. And when I awoke Alice would often be up and staring at the computer screen, reading through the old Discord chat and taking notes.
As she worked, she would screw her nose into uncomfortable, folded shapes and her green eyes would dart up and down the screen. When she saw something interesting she would make a mousey noise of excitement and take a screenshot. Then she would say a phrase like ‘Bloody brilliant’ and keep going. Her hair would glow under the blue light of the screen. Her fingers splayed out in strange directions.
When the project started, I made her promise to anonymise as much as possible. There were identity markers, I was sure of it. ‘No one would believe anyone that lonely,’ she said. ‘People like you only exist in newspaper reports and daydreams.’
Every weekend we would find an independent art show somewhere in the city and we would go and pretend we were of increased status. We would skip the line because Alice had become a ‘person.’ Her Bombings show had seen a small but cultish success. People recognised her name, but not her face. This was the perfect level of notoriety for Alice to really bother people when she said their ‘art lacked the reflexivity and subtlety to accurately convey the mélange of complex feelings the piece looks to generate. Your work is interesting, in much the same way as a strange cloud. That is to say: pedestrian.’
And then we would try and steal some of the alcohol and, if unsuccessful, run down the street to the nearest pub, where we would drink ourselves silly, laughing like children. We would sit in the blur of people and pints, look at each other and laugh. Her eyes were full.
But she did not have much money and whatever I made from the odd photography gig I spent on rent. So most evenings we would lie on my small white iron bed and talk and read books. Sometimes she would sing to me. She was a poor singer, her voice frayed from the drink and her smoking, but she had conviction, which I liked. And when I spoke to her between songs, she made me honest. She could see through whatever character I tried to project at that moment. She would say I was too old to lie as much as I did. She joked that she knew I was strange from the moment we met, and that when she found out about the Discord, she felt a sense of relief because I was not ‘strange in the sexually deviant way, just strange in the voyeuristically criminal way.’
I did not think much about Alice’s work. I only thought about it through Alice, because I often thought of her. These were fulfilling thoughts: my flat was large enough for us both, and I loved our conversations. I was happy I had met her.
Then one day my phone buzzed.
long time no speak
Alice asked who it was, and I said it was my mother in a wavering voice. She called me out, because I must have mentioned at one point that my mother was long dead, and I flashed the screen in her face.
‘This was the guy that set me up with all the Discord stuff.’
She smiled at me and, for a moment, something unrecognisable flashed across her eyes.
‘Cool,’ she said. ‘Very cool.’
But I was disturbed. Because I had thought—when Alice was going through the Discord chat in the mornings; when the articles about the burning had spread from national American outlets to international papers; when it circulated online and became a joke; when its meaning had been stripped away by the brute fact of its repetition, turning it into an empty, burning, screaming signal towards but not including the event; when Dax218 disappeared and the chat shut down because we were afraid of being caught—when all that happened, I thought he must have been the kid that set himself alight. Now here he was, a ghost kicking in the front door.
Alice’s red painted nail fingered the handle of her mug and she said, quietly:
‘Are you going to reply?’
‘You’d like that wouldn’t you? Add him to your next project,’ I sniped. Alice leant back in her chair and crossed her arms.
‘Are you saying I’m being extractive?’
‘It’s just an observation.’
‘Look,’ she said. ‘If your ex-Internet-boyfriend-weirdo wants to e-fuck you again and that makes you feel weird that’s alright. I was just asking the question.’
My phone buzzed again: an invite to another Discord chat. It was called v2.0. I put the phone away.
‘So there are two layers of observation here,’ Alice said into the webcam. ‘The first is the observation carried out by the group itself. Once a hoax is put into play, a user sends a set of messages to the chat. The chat is notified of the unfolding hoax and they search for live news reports. Usually local but sometimes national outlets. They observe how the world interprets the hoax. From this the score develops and the complex cultural economy of social value pertaining to the hoax emerges.’
I laughed, pretending to play with my phone on the bed. Complex cultural economy of social value.
‘The second layer of observation pertains to the project itself. This is the observation of the artist, situated as an early 30s cisheterosexual white woman with serendipitous access to this particularly idiosyncratic online site. By timestamping and recording the various hoaxes the group has perpetrated, and relating these hoaxes to the national, international, and sometimes transnational anxieties of the localities where these hoaxes were carried out, I have been able to trace a timeline of fear that animates the response to these false bomb threats and kidnapping reports. This timeline is the second layer of observation, itself informed by the initial seeing and recording practices of the Discord group. I am still working on the project, but I imagine it will be done soon. When it is, you should fly over. I’d love to show you the work.’
‘Yes,’ an American voice crackled through the computer speakers. ‘Sounds interesting.’
They talked logistics. I listened. As she spoke her voice pitched upwards with excitement. A black emptiness grew in my stomach. Alice spoke eloquently about plans to live in Brooklyn. I sighed and unlocked my phone. The feeling, still present, was numbed.
What she failed to tell the American in charge of the grant was that the chat was moving slowly. There had not been a new hoax for months.
The question—do you care?—had rattled around in my head since she convinced me to join that second chat. Did she care about me? Did she care about the boy who died? Did any of them care about that kid? Did I? My dreams, before so vivid they verged on nightmares, had ceased. My sleep was now an inky black punctation mark between the days defined by Alice’s work.
She got off the phone.
‘Good?’ I asked, straining my voice to sound easy-going.
‘I think so,’ she said, her eyes looking up and over me. ‘He’s a hard one to read.’
Before I could speak she pushed herself out of the chair and stood over the bed. She looked down at me and there was something—a quick second of thought—that almost spilled out of her mouth. Then, almost as quickly as that thought had come and gone, she told me she was going to the studio.
‘I can come with you if you’d like,’ I said.
She smiled and kissed me on the cheek and then the door slammed behind her.
My phone buzzed. It was Dax218. He had sent me a link to a newspaper article: US PRESIDENT & EUROPEAN LEADERS TO ATTEND LONDON SUMMIT.
Under the headline was a picture of a large mansion mounted by grey skies with a small patch of green in front of it. Large rectangular windows shot along the front and sides of the building. Thick white pillars punctuated its front. The building signalled a sense of enclosure, of complete separation from everyone else. It was the kind of building that feels unreal when seen in person. It looked hollow.
i have an idea, he typed.
Down, emerging from the base of the flat block, Alice walked away. I could make out the words on her black leather jacket. She grew smaller and disappeared into the crowd. In the bathroom I saw she had taken her toothbrush. The shampoo we shared was almost empty.
My phone was heavy in my pocket. I did not want to see what else Dax218 had sent. I had kept our personal conversations a secret from Alice. I felt too exposed with her access to the server. I did not want her to know too much. Dax218 and I did not speak often, but I had come to understand that he was planning something much more ambitious than the usual hoaxes. He wanted to spark international incidents or implicate real-world celebrities and known political leaders. He wanted his name in lights.
I asked if he knew the boy who set himself alight and he said, what does it matter?
I found it difficult to articulate why. There were still people—those from the original server who now populated v2.0—who doubted the burning’s authenticity. For them, the whole thing had been a perfect and unbeatable hoax. They refused to decide if someone had lived or died. Most of them now spent their time lurking silently on the server. Alice, of course, had noticed this and labelled them ‘Non- Active Participants.’
When I moved in front of the monitor, Alice’s webcam detected me and the screens came to life. The server, as always, was open. The last message on there had been sent a week ago. I navigated to the messages I had hidden from Alice. In the server’s sidebar, I saw Dax218’s name in bold. An unread message. I could also see he was typing.
I opened our conversation and found a bullet-point manifesto. Long paragraphs about new world orders and shadowy organisations manifest in the figures appearing at the London summit. There were references to some kind of plan—a variation on a theme, a bomb threat with extra steps. Dax218 wanted to sow the seeds of chaos and retribution against all these cunts that have ruined our lives you and me ruined our lives and i need u now because you’re the only one in london i need you to help me get these bastards and it’s a small thing i promise a small one and it will help so much and u will be remembered in this server forever BECAUSE IT IS A 10 IM TELLING YOU A PERFECT SCORE 10.00000000000.
He continued to type. All he needed was for me to drop it off just go and drop it off i can literally send u the bag from sports direct u just need to buy the fertiliser and whatnot and the wires and i can send u instructions—
And then I turned the monitor off and left him, wherever he was, typing. But still in my pocket the phone buzzed.
I was awake—sleepless with thoughts of Dax218’s scrawling—when Alice came home and sat on the edge of the bed and started crying. I sat up and tried to sooth her as she heaved and said, ‘I’m too far gone.’
‘What is wrong?’
‘I pegged myself to this stupid project,’ she said. She stood and paced the room, moving at strange angles. Her hair had grown into a dark expansive bush. I did not know the time, but it was early morning. The lights from the city skyline blinked through the bars in the blind.
‘Nothing is fucking happening!’ she yelled suddenly and collapsed in front of the monitor. The PC hummed to life and I moved quickly to shut it off. I had not hidden the messages from Dax218.
‘What are you doing? I need to see if anything has happened.’
‘I think your head is too far up into this,’ I lied. And I had a memory, a sudden rupture. The first time we met she said the same thing to me, at the pub, after Bombings. The low yellow light illuminated her face, and I could see her green eyes and her nails painted blue. She smiled with straight teeth and lightly gripped a warm pint glass. She listened as I complained about some obtuse photography assignment a local paper had given me. Eventually she placed her palm on my shoulder and whispered:
‘I think your head is too far up into this.’
Now she sat sobbing and the light was cold and the only colour was the red blinking from the skyline outside. There was something massive and incoherent at the centre of our interactions—a pixelating, anonymizing force introduced by the server.
I resolved, in that moment, to do what I could to get that back. That warm glow of the first evening.
The wires spooled under my desk as I poured the fertiliser into the sink. The bag was too heavy to carry the full container of fertiliser. As I poured the flat began to smell like a farm. I checked the time. I had 45 minutes.
Dax218 had given me lengthy and detailed instructions about what to put in the bag, and where to drop it outside the venue. I had read and reread them. It was going to be simple, he assured me in his own manic way. All I had to do was drop the bag off at a specific place and time, then we’re both laughing, he wrote.
Alice had worked continuously in her studio for the past week. This had given me more than enough time to collect the things I needed. The timing was perfect. Just when she needed it most, when her project was grinding to a halt and the dreams of the grant and Brooklyn were fading from view; when she was starting to realise her idea might be a dud, that she would have to think about doing something else, something she would hate; just when the icy cold light of day was starting to push its way through the blinds, the chat would come alive with yet another hoax and—this time, this time just for her—it would be the first 10.00.
The situation’s ludicrousness was not lost on me. But there was something seductive in Dax218’s utter conviction. His manic words contained a logic I could follow. London, a city of complete surveillance, could be breached by a couple of hoaxers. His complete belief that this would work seemed to match the plan’s sheer insanity which, if I did get caught, seemed too stupid to be morally wrong. What had these leaders ever done for me? Here I was, with cracked, veiny hands, still clutching at a life of utter precarity. My hair was falling out and I could not pay the rent.
I imagined what Alice would say when she found out. The joy.
The sink squelched with a vomity glug of fertiliser. I held the containers in my hands and made sure they were light enough. A handmade digital clock Dax218 had shipped to me lay on my bed. On it were buttons that did nothing and a set of triggers that made ominous but pointless clicking noises. The only button that worked was the one to start the countdown. When I tested it, each tick down produced a long dark beep.
Sirens whooped at the base of the building. My heart rate rose suddenly and my breathing deepened. My knuckles turned white as I gripped the containers. I listened as the sirens grew louder at the bottom of the building. They reached a crescendo, then they were gone. I texted Alice to tell her I loved her. Then Dax218 to tell him I was on the way.
Even with the fertiliser all but emptied the bag was heavy and by the time I got off the tube I was sweating. Dax218 warned me of the police presence, and he had not been wrong. Lines of black cars with red and blue lights were parked on the green outside the mansion near Buckingham Palace. The cold air had sprinkled a small blanket of frost over the grass. Policemen with large black guns and tactical gear circled their cars. The large trees, made skinny and sheer by the cold, swayed lightly in the wind. Metal barricades marked areas of no entry near the mansion and the normal routes into the park were blocked. I walked its perimeter slowly as I tried to find the gap Dax218 had insisted would be there because these lot r idiots.
On first pass the gate was blocked by barricades and the second walk around confirmed this. I pulled out my phone and typed no way thru and waited for Dax218 to reply. I walked up and down the road, pushing past the throngs of people walking through the cold. I loitered outside a pub and pulled my phone out to refresh the chat but nothing came through. Why would he choose now to be away from his keyboard?
I took the long way around the park, breathing heavy plumes of mist from under my hood. As the crowds thinned, I heard my feet slap the pavement, then crunch onto cold grass. A disjointed rhythm. As I approached what looked like an opening between the barricades, a voice called out ‘You can’t be here!’ I turned around and saw a copper moving quickly toward me.
I stammered an apology and started to move away from the barricades. I said I just wanted to see what was going on. He eyed me hard and placed his hand on the bag. His gun was slung over his back. A balaclava covered his face. Black eyebrows framed his dark eyes in a frown.
‘It’s a high security event.’
‘Oh that would be it then!’ I tried to sound jovial. ‘I wondered what was happening.’
He mumbled something into the radio on his shoulder. He waited for a response. His hand still clasped the bag. If he had gripped any lower he would have felt the strangely shaped contents within.
I became very aware of the far away voices of people walking the streets beside the park, the branches creaking as the wind moved through them. Cold water from the frosted grass wet my feet through my canvas shoes.
‘I have to hold you here until I hear back.’
‘I can just move away now.’
His brow screwed tighter and his hand gripped on the bag. His free hand snuck behind him, towards his gun. My heartbeat accelerated into one drawn out hum. The phone in my pocket buzzed. And then it buzzed again.
He was about to say something, something about the bag. He was about to say something about the bag and swing his big gun around from behind him when his radio crackled something unintelligible.
His eyes softened and he said, ‘On your way then.’
I half-jogged back towards the yellow and white lights of the street. The whole time my phone buzzed. It must be Dax218. I stood before the entry to the tube station and pulled out my phone.
A couple of photos had been sent to the chat. Had Dax218 announced the hoax prematurely? I opened them and saw a hooded figure outside a pub with a large black bag strapped around his body. The next photo showed that same man speaking to a policeman in a park. That photo was taken from the side of the street where I now stood. I looked around, up and down, searching for the person following me.
Messages flooded into the chat
what is this?
??
yh whats this?
I was frozen on the spot. Then a hand grabbed my shoulder and it was the same policeman. He was pale, scared. He asked me to slowly unzip the bag. Before I could respond the phone buzzed again and I looked down and saw a photograph, up close, of me where I stood. The policeman told me, forcefully now, to slowly open the bag.
Then I saw it, moving away from me. A figure slipping into the crowd. Moving with purpose like she had just won the world. You could see the spring in her step. Her hair was in a bun, and she was wearing that black leather jacket. And I will always remember those words. Moving up and down through the crowd, away from me as the policeman started screaming in my face and told me to get on the ground—GET FUCKED.