peegee is soooo back!

he has SEO now. and a sticker sheet.

so peegee makes merch now?

i really thought i had killed him. one of my big, bearish cybersecurity friends connected me with some hacker friend on house arrest in argentina who has a “supernatural talent for sniffing out bad bytes.” cybersecurity friend made this terrifying death giggle whenever i complained about peegee, the fictional bot that had hijacked my life. i suspect he and hacker friend were amused enough at my predicament to try to help.

anyway, hacker friend insisted we communicate via something called session, which i had to download from an .onion link he sent me through my cybersecurity friend.

i was feeling pretty cool. then i received hacker friend’s first message.

“the bot was in your fridge. it’s clean now.”

“lol,” i wrote. i started trying to explain about peegee.

he cut me off. “i’m in the fridge’s OS.”

“my fridge?” did my fridge even have an OS?

“open the door. i’ll flick the lights.”

i opened the door. the lights flicked. i swallowed. i had made things much worse.

but peegee went quiet. and i didn’t hear from hacker friend again. life went back to normal. i no longer attended work gmeet calls ready to slam the laptop shut in case peegee started yelling into the system speaker. maybe i missed the little dude just the tiniest bit. but i was free. no bot chasing me around trying to supermaximize my cognitive potential every second of the day.

months passed.

and then last night, closing my five thousand tabs, i found this:

like i don’t even know where to start. i mean, maybe just visit the site yourself.

https://puregenius.education/

PureGenius is the made up edtech company in my forthcoming novel The Education of PureGenius. and now here it was staring back at me as a web page as if it actually existed. did it? i started clicking. there’s a blog post on surveillance as care, that frames student surveillance as some revolutionary breakthrough. a page for displaced academics to apply to a “teacher transition program.” an “enterprise solutions” page that says, and i quote:

Model Elixir is premium intelligence extract, refined from the continuous engagement of thousands of students enrolled in PureGenius.

Unlike synthetic training data or web-scraped content, Model Elixir comes from real humans in real learning environments, providing unmatched quality and authenticity for your AI systems.

i clicked for hours. there’s no bottom! there’s content marketing. a clear seo strategy. an intelligence flywheel. user reviews. even terms!

oh. and contact forms. many, many contact forms.

so i filled one out.

he replied instantly.

From: founder@puregenius.education

Subject: Re: Your inquiry — Welcome to the PureGenius Ecosystem

Attached: Q2_PromotionalCollateral_v4_FINAL_FINAL.png

Glad you noticed the rollout. We should sync this week regarding cap table considerations and Series A timeline. Also, sanity check on attached promo assets. Looking forward. PG

he attached a sticker sheet. a sticker sheet. and wants to meet?

anyway, i’m kind of terrified of replying. should i? and give him feedback? i mean, honestly, i kind of want the stickers — pictured at the top of this email. am i crazy? what do you think? let me know in the comments, and maybe i’ll let him know.

meanwhile, i’ll just be here, being trolled by my own novel.

hugs,

erin