This Story Is About a Startup That Isn’t Evil Which Can’t be Bought Over by A VC Firm
By SH Foo
fiction | 13 min read
Be me. 2020 sad gay poor and internet-poisoned, stay in an apartment with three other boys and we all hate our lives, worked for three weeks as a cashier at a sundry shop in Bukit Baharu owned by a pair of mom-and-pop resisting the upcoming gentrification projects by attending resident protests until, surprise! The Malaysian government swoops in with the Covid-19 Movement Control Order and two months later no more shop no more job, and if your motorbike can’t even be repaired at the workshops that aren’t open, you can’t deliver food to condos lived in by people who receive their McDs in their yoga sweats and a phone to instastory you and hashtag #socialdistancing. Be me, zero skill set because I came from a kampung 270 miles away from Kuala Lumpur and the only thing I have is some trainee bomoh knowledge I inherited from my grandpa, which is great for blessing paddy fields for bountiful harvests, but virtually useless in a metropolitan city. The only time people consult you is when they want their dick hard for more than 3 minutes.
Be me, so desperate I actually add to my grindr profile “I read a twitter thread that us bomohs are supposed to be called shamans not witchdoctors hit me up if u need freelance bomoh therapy p.s. yes i also do massages” and then block every dickpic or whoever asks “dick massage can?” Until one day at 2am this guy, kinda hunky kinda straight-acting and also actually has a face pic, texts:
>> can you summon ghosts
<< like white ppl?
>> lol no
>> real ghosts like djinn la
>> gathering a team to capture
<< ghostbusters?
>> gen x ref much?
>> $1000 first job
>> now
>> in?
In.
>> cool. plus txt me massage prices. dick?
<< 😡
>> lol nw
I “borrow” one of the motorbikes of my housemates and drive out to the GPS coordinates he sent, and it turns out to be in one of those in-city suburb tamans where the playground sets have already rusted and the house walls are off-yellow but not in a hipster way. I stop in front of a two-storey house, Number 16. Nothing exceptional to it other than it’s obviously empty but there are no banners advertising a realtor’s services with their phone number. “Huh,” I say and then I find myself illuminated by headlights from a Beemer parked across the street.
Out he comes and, of course he turns out to be a catfish. The photo on his profile is obviously a decade and paunch ago. Still cute though. Sigh. “Mohd Hugs?” he asks, because calling someone’s profile name is a real thing people do, and I just say, yeah that’s me.
“So whose house is this?” I ask Big Love Wong💦💦💦.
“Who knows? It’s just a place where about a few families died horrible deaths and shit-tier tabloids like worldofbuzz.com claim there are ghosts.”
“Is this in any way legal?” I say as I reach into my bag, taking out my dusty old kompang hand drum and tiger skin rugs.
“As legal as having a penal code punishable crime profile on a gay app. We’re outlawing in the most outlaw way possible, Hugs.” He knocks the back-passenger door of his car. “Junny?”
And then there’s Junny, who I never knew is my type but, apparently it is now? Junny slumps out of the car rather than walk and has that whole I’m-too-lazy-for-this-shit-but-whatever-I’m-good-and-I’ll-complain-and-moan-but-get-it-done-anyway swagger with hips swaying despite doing only one step, dressed in a hoodie one size too large and with a mop of blue hair over bifocal glasses. Looks at me and go, “sup, pronouns he slash him k,” then takes a long drag of his cigarette, flicking it at Big Love’s direction.
In his hands is a laptop with decals all over which he sets on the floor, and then one, two, three brandless android phones beside. “Stealing some wi-fi”, he says when I stare. “You don’t have a Quran to read from?”
“Uh,” I say, and Big Love must be giving a look because I feel my cheeks redden and then I say, “the Quran is performative because the clients need to tie everything to the religion even though being a Bomoh or a Pawang is an animistic practice that has existed for centuries, way before Islam was introduced to Malaya, and it’s really just to make clients feel safer about their insecurities because then they aren’t doing something unIslamic and –” and then Big Love is now really giving a look and I stop, and then say, “what are you doing?”
Junny is turning on a portable floodlight and plugging it to his laptop then tells me, “Magic as you Bomoh and Pawang call it is in fact just a kind of rewriting of information in reality to suit it as you need, but in modern non-animistic circumstances we call that Science and Technology, where we use machines whilst you use rituals and sacrifices; in some sense both magicians and scientists are just using appliances or methods to write a ‘cheat code’ to alter reality; so when it comes to ghosts, imagine a human being which has a body and a soul, and that both body and soul are different types of information and data presented in varying ways, so what a ghost is: is that they are humans whose data got corrupted by their deaths or whatever, and when you have data, you can process it to a form of your liking, like a ‘rewriting’ - so once you retrieve the ghost i.e. corrupted information from the house, I will use the floodlight which I have programmed to capture the data then store it into this computer, which I anticipate will take about 2 - 5GB although I am now talking to the demo code-cruncher scene who’re going to help me figure out how we can use more computer processing power to procedurally-generate the storing mechanism with less need to apply raw data storage, so I can keep a ghost at 256kb or less, allowing for more capacity efficiency and also storage between cloud services, and –”
“Holy shit, nerds,” Big Love says. “You summon ghost, he catches ghost, I pay you. Can we get on with it?”
We get on with it. I put the tiger rugs on myself and Junny and Big Love as wards against ghosts and syaitans which Big Love protested because “leceh and also tacky af” but kinda works on Junny for some reason and he looks even cuter and more my type when he’s fumbling with trying to put the rug into his hoodie, which is both very good but also very terrible, and then he looks at me looking at him and then I swear he winks and it’s both even very better and very worse? So I have to quickly do the whole setting up of the Pagar Ghaib where according to some super spiritual user on the Something Mystical forums (which somehow still runs on vBulletin 2.29) claims is “the levying of a metaphysical quantum by channeling the magnetic 5G energy of the astral planes” but honestly as far as I am concerned just means reading out a bunch of pre-written words of protection and circling the house beating a kompang drum while pouring a flask of mineral water. Also I’m fairly sure that user is now into QAnon, so fuck that noise.
Then the ghost gets summoned and turns out it’s not really that interesting, really, because we were expecting some lady murdered by some shitty adulterous husband to become a Ju-On and be like, “uwu indiscriminate cursing begins now until eternity owo,” but no, it’s just some djinn who floats out of the house wailing and shaking a lot of leaves off trees, acting like they are the top 0.01% on OnlyFans and with the number of followers on their username. Which is cool but they look like some dudebro’s vape mist, and no lie reminds of the last time I went on Grindr in the before times and the dude is like no kissing masc only pure top no-pic-no-chat on the profile and you sigh ‘cause you’re desperate but when you meet oh you just want me to lick your toes for two hours at a rest stop public bathroom, well I guess I suddenly received an emergency text to evacuate and see you never, bye bitch. So basically weird flex but ok, djinn.
Then they wail again and try to do a jumpscare like they are in James Wan’s Conjuring Cinematic Universe (Malaysia represents). Kinda worrying for a moment but we have reached the 1 hour 03 minute mark of a Marvel movie where as a protagonist I realise I needed to key into the thing I try to run away from the most as foreshadowed in the earlier portion of the narrative, and damn, surprise it’s my dissatisfaction with my rural past and my grandpa’s bomoh teachings, so I all but Mufasa-in-the-Clouds channel my kompang drum-beating and verse-reading at them pushing them until they get caught in Junny’s floodlights. Then Junny presses a few buttons on his laptop and before the CIA can run a coup to replace the government of another country the djinn is gone.
Junny types a few things on his laptop and looks at me and says, “Hey I know you like nerdchat like I do although I should ask you if it turns you on as it does me but anyway let’s get into the main question which is: do ghosts usually have digital signatures, because check this out.” I have a nice long healthy 2 seconds of blushing before I go to his screen and he starts trying to explain what metadata is but Big Love is giving his now very trademark look again, so he shuts up and part of the data of the djinn does show someone’s name, address, cell phone and even their last-used time. As it turns out, some bomoh must have de-possessed someone, then dumped the djinn in the house randomly like nbd just being an asshole pretending not to understand paranatural pollution is a thing which kills random people, ok. I go on Something Mystical and write a meltdown.txt attaching pics and vids which hopefully gets sent to the National Board of Bomohs, and maybe they’ll do a little denouncing and title-stripping or whatever.
Then we pack up and we drive out to a South Indian Muslim mamak place that’s secretly 24/7 against the mandatory pre-midnight only operating hours during the lockdown. The mamak place also serves charcoal-grilled pork on briyani rice which I didn’t even know was a thing but, that’s a thing all right.
The red packet Big Love gives me has an extra $1000. “Eh,” I say in between chomping down extremely haram tandoori, but he pushes the money back to me.
“Thought it would be one whole hour but 5 minutes, extra for efficiency,” he says.
“So why are you storing ghosts?” I ask.
“The rampant and rapid gentrification of Kuala Lumpur -” Junny starts and Big Love kisses him on the cheek and shuts him up.
“We’re releasing this in Bukit Baharu.”
Where I had my old job. The old, undeveloped area in the city where a ton of cultural heritage of old Kuala Lumpur reside, hidden away with all its many generations of residents and undocumented migrants, fighting against the government against flattening their houses to build yet another condo suburbia for shithole foreign investors to pretend we are Singapore. Recent power shifts and political coups in the government meant an abandoned project was resurfacing, and an acre of Kampung Bharu has already been razed since. “You’re going to curse a construction site.”
“Multiple sites,” Big Love says.
I think about it. “This isn’t a gig economy thing, right?”
“You wanna join our startup?”
“We decided on Ghoster because it sounds like Friendster where we met and that social media platform is dead also one of the few which were not created and administered by white supremacists, plus-” Junny starts then stops. “We are looking for a third.”
I think about it more.
Be me. 2020 sad gay poor and internet-poisoned, no boyfriend no income and faced with paying prospects of dealing shitload of damage to an asshole government who hates you because you dare to like boys and be Muslim and also be pagan and also the guys asking you to join are cute. Also you are guessing that Junny owns the tiger rug/scarf he’s really comfortable with now.
“I do do dick massages btw.”
