Written by Adrian Silva, read on 11/12/23
The Twitter, now x DOT com bio reads:
“highest weight : 117, current weight :105 , goal weight : 87.5”
I imagine her an honor student, not an alt girl gunning for social media clout but instead a young woman with a dark secret. This is more than an alt account by a precautious child, this is her personal confessional. The opposite of a rape whistle, it’s a bird call to draw in hungry raptors.
The AI generated profile picture image showed a lithe, strawberry blonde teenager in a white cashmere crew neck sweater with a pink dress shirt collar with floral embroidery, curved, not pointed, just seated over her neck line. Her eyes are obscured by a pair of dark mauve YSL sunglasses. She does not teeth smile in her photographs, but sometimes the sides of her mouth would be upturned portraying satisfaction—never quite happiness, but satisfaction. She can’t look too sad, but she can’t look too happy.
I was careful to generate enough images to exclude any visual artifacts. When you prompt text to image models enough you gradually get the hang of it. I’m not a tech bro. I don’t know how to program, but I know enough about music production software that intuition turns every UI into another instrument. Ask the monkey’s paw in the machine for what you want, and always be specific. Ambiguity can lead to unforeseen consequences.
The marks are careful, even more careful than I am. They may be horny and obsessive, but they are also tactful. Once they catch a whiff of law enforcement, or worse someone like me, lawless, more predatory than they are, they’ll vanish, accounts wiped, most traces gone before I can pin down an identity like a child stabbing an insect on to padded cork, its limbs flailing, wings flapping against the frame.
It’s not enough to generate a lot of false images of the teenage girl. you have to validate them. Nowadays everyone has an identity, but at the same time none at all. A simple consumer grade facial recognition search is usually good enough. I soon learned you can Run the photos of any person you know through facial recognition and watch all of their dirtiest secrets pop up before you. Maybe your best friend is hiding a secret life as a rent boy, maybe your girlfriend did porn. Lots of it. Hiding is hopeless. Everything you post online lasts forever waiting to be dug up and used against you.
You upload the AI generated photos and verify that your e-girl, your shark bait, doesn’t look suspiciously too much like a real person. People online are not real people, so if they seem real, it will be obvious that they are fake. Always assume the mark is going to do the same. They’re running the search too. They have to. You want your bait to fall into a category of ambiguity. Of course she doesn’t match anyone else online who’s real. Fire up a fake TikTok for a few months. Make it look authentic so when your marks cross reference, if they get that deep. They might see the ‘real’ girl.
This method can work for different kinds of marks. You don’t only need to create teenage girls. In this business, we’re equal opportunity predators. Faggots and boy lovers are just as much on the table as straight pederasts. Often times they might even have more to blackmail, way more to lose.
You’d be surprised how many marks are family men, people with kids, wives, the coach the little league games, they go to poker night with the boys, they’re Rotary Club Members, your local chamber of commerce.
But why now, why this line of hunt?
I have friends that had mobs come after them. It started happening in 2015. I don’t think anyone thought it was going to get as bad as it did.
You roll your eyes when you think of the phrase “ #meetoo “ with an apostrophe and a “d” at the end. It implies it’s something that’s *afflicted* onto someone and not a phrase describing a form of revolutionary dissent. The ascendency of victims against an unjust conspiratorial series of liminal backrooms full of well, predators. Predators that have sex with adult women, or adult men if that’s your flavor.
“Predator, Predator, Predator” I keep thinking about that word.
I think about my friend Jonah who tried twice unsuccessfully to overdose on oxycontin after a group of his ex-girlfriends got together and started a Facebook group about him. They didn’t even say he raped them. No, he was an ‘emotional abuser’ to a stick and poke tattoo harem of victims that were so certain that they experienced the worst that humanity can dish out. Jonah was a “predator” because he didn’t text back fast enough. He was a “predator” because he had a band. He was a “predator” because he dared to play the field. He was a predator because he lied about how many women he was seeing. He spent fifteen years of his life mastering an instrument. He created things. He was a “predator” because he was handsome.
Jonah’s third attempt at overdose was successful. I spoke at his funeral. I hugged his mom at his wake. Two of the ex-girlfriends showed up. One of them was crying. I didn’t speak to either of them but I nodded.
In the end I didn’t blame them. What happens in our culture isn’t our doing. It’s ventriloquism all the way down. Why do doctors promote ADHD methamphetamines for five-year-olds, opiate painkillers for suburban moms, and hormonal injections for teenagers? You have a customer for life, the money keeps flowing. Can you blame them? Why do people lie, cheat, steal? Because those are the real American Beatitudes.
You always feel a sigh of relief when something really terrible happens to someone else and not you. If you say you don’t, you’re lying. You rubberneck the suffering menagerie playing out in daily life,
“My poor aunt has pancreatic brain esophageal bone cancer. I feel so terrible.”
“My poor friend got metoo’d and killed himself in despair, I feel so terrible”
“Those poor children in Sri-Lanka drowned in another wave, I feel so terrible”
“That poor family in the immolated overturned minivan on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, made me feel so terrible”
But it never happens to you. You dodge suffering until, inevitably the continuity of “what is possible” collapses like quantum waveform. Atropos, “The Unturnable”, the Roman Morta, third of the primordial fates will find you. She always does. You rubberneck forever until forever isn’t.
What happened to Jonah never happened to me. No I’m not going to tell you my name. But you’ve probably met me. I’m the DJ who’s name you say at the door to get inside the hardest to get into club of the season. I’m the guy that gives you two drink tickets, but *maybe* if you give me your bag of cocaine behind the DJ booth, I’ll give you two more. I’ll do more of your coke than I should, and you’ll notice your bag shrinking but you won’t say anything because you want to get into this club again, and you don’t have anyone else’s name. I’m the most important person in your life for four hours. The other hours of my life, are a void. You don’t know or care, and truth is, you never thought about it. I might as well slip out of existence when I leave the club with a backpack full of synth equipment and digital turntables.
I’d tell you I got the idea to start hunting real predators from some burst of insight. Maybe I saw a girl get roofied at one of the clubs I work, or heard a story about a rapist moving through the scene.
I’m not some vigilante. I’m not an anti-hero.
It was about money.
DJ gigs pay but they don’t pay well enough.
I never acquired marks in the real world. Too risky.
The first ones were twitter guys quick to give out their personal information to a pretty face and the promise of an underage girl or boy. I’d set a meeting point, ambush them and let them know what I know. I didn’t even have a weapon yet. It isn’t hard to get a scared wagecuck to give you money when they think their entire life is about to be ruined. These men have families. The most surprising thing I learned about the taxonomy of online sex predators is they’re not who you imagine. They’re less basement dwelling freaks portrayed in thriller films and Peter Sotos books and more the smiling dads you see in central park playing fetch with the new puppy. Their toddler and smiling wife sitting on a picnic blanket yards away.
I’d prefer if they were basement dwelling freaks. No one is honest anymore.
But I’m not confessing to extorting money from perverts.
The first mark I killed was a guy that fit the usual model at first.
My decoy was a 13 year old boy, a Dennis Cooper protagonist.
Within the first 10 messages he started describing everything from auto-cannibalism to child gang rape. Do you know what “nullification” is? Don’t look it up unless you want to have more nightmares. The Prospect Park father and local art director described raping and torturing other boys in the past. I don’t know if he actually castrated any of them, but when you’re deep enough in the story, does it really matter?
I set a meeting place for the Brooklyn Navy Yard on a Sunday evening. This was the first time I brought a weapon, a butterfly knife left stashed in a backpack from college.
I emphasize, I never planned on killing the mark. His DMs were the most repulsive content I ever read, but I was still operating on greed.
The docks and warehouses were still lit by orange sodium lamps with a calming background white noise a backdrop for distant traffic and the wind off the NYC harbor.
The mark told my child bait to wait in an area with no security cameras, discrete, dark. It’s not just what I wanted, it’s what he insisted. He had enough sense to plan out a walking path to his car also with no surveillance. The mark was planning on leaving with my decoy child. I followed him from his car as he moved to the meeting site. He was careful, always looking back, checking his peripherals, he was carrying a messenger bag. I stuck to the shadows.
I moved up behind him to the final meet spot, the knife tucked up my jacket sleeve. He heard and turned around.
The mark said nothing, his bag slumped in his arms, his eyes were wide, the whites thick and bright under the humming lamps.
“You’re good at messaging with me. This isn’t role-play for you is it?”,
The mark moved closer, slowly he opened his hands wide, putting his arms out in front of him. The knife was cold, and covered in sweat in my hand.
“My laptop is in this bag. Do you want to see what I have in there? I know you’re into what I’m into. If you can pretend to be a boy, let me show you the real ones I walked right back to that car down the same path you followed me on. You know you want it.”
I’m not some vigilante. I’m not an anti-hero.
It was about money.
I let the blade loose into my hand and charged the man forcing him up against the side of the warehouse.
Something most people don’t know about knives is how quick and messy they are. You’re better off having a gun pulled on you than a knife. Your best option is always to run away. A knife wielding attacker can close a ten foot gap in seconds. Once the blade is in the soft tissues, a puncture with a twist not a mere laceration, internal hemorrhaging occurs rapidly. Pull the blade out and plunge it back in repeatedly and the effect is exponential. I’ve never seen a jail yard shanking, but I could imagine what it could be like as I held the mark’s neck forward, pulling the end of the blade out and inserting it into his gut so many times I lost count. I kept stabbing him even after he was dead, so many times it felt like stabbing an empty cardboard box as my arm strained and cramped.
I had to trash a $1000 dollar jacket covered in blood after fleeing back down the corridor. I rode between train cars the whole way back to my apartment.
I’ve killed three more rapists since that night.
“Predator, Predator, Predator” I keep thinking about that word.
A beautiful woman that hosts tables at one of my usual DJ nights invited me to an event at a downtown art space for a Confessionals party. I dig the idea. I step into the confession booth and write down on a slip of paper,
“I hunt predators (humans), recently ended the lives of four rapists. That is all.”
by Adrian Silva, 11/12/23
