THE GEEK

His eyes are large, inquisitive—and nearly hidden behind sleek, black hair.

"My parents never liked me keeping my hair this long," he says. "Papa Patel always wanted me to avoid doing anything that might make me stick out. Anything that made me different from the white kids and the lightskinned Asians."

He shrugs.

"I never could get him to understand. In this country, standing out is the whole fucking point."

RepDrop.com came outta nowhere. Legit, it was online within 12 hours of the Kobek demonstration.

Explain the site for our readers, if you don't mind.

Sure. It was a social networking site with one purpose only: sharing rep files online. You could sort all the files on the site by "most downloaded," and there was a rudimentary rating system on each upload so people could review the quality of items.

And, most importantly, each uploader had their own ranking, called your "RepScore," which doubled neatly to mean "reputation" in this use-case.

The more high-quality uploads you managed, the better your RepScore.

Pretty quickly I got obsessed with improving my RepScore. I'd managed to get my hands on my own rep the day after the Kobek demonstration. I discovered RepDrop pretty much that same day, and I was one of the first really active uploaders during that first 24 hour period.

I was just scanning all the shit in my apartment, which didn't take long, because I didn't own that much shit. I was just a high school student at the time.

As soon as I ran out of shit to scan in my apartment, I started looking for stuff in the streets to scan. A lot of storefronts were getting broken into right during that first day. People no longer saw it as stealing to take physical objects, right? Especially anything that could fit into a rep.

I wasn't really sure how I felt about it. Because I still felt like taking something without permission was somehow a taboo, or a crossing of some line.

Besides, retail merchandise was quickly filling up the archives on RepDrop anyway. I couldn't bump my RepScore by uploading stuff that was readily available to most people. I needed to figure out how to find more unique objects.

So instead of stealing, I came up with an idea. I had an electric moped with a cart I could attach to the back. I put my rep in that and drove it around to different peoples' houses around Seattle. Then I'd just knock on doors and ask very nicely if I could rep their stuff.

Normally, this would be a pretty awful strategy. Seattle being a major city, most people aren't neighborly. To knock on someone's door is already a violation of personal space, but to then ask to come inside their house and touch their shit—it's unheard of.

But in the first few weeks after the reps appeared in Seattle, the city was in a much different mood. Many people had gotten their own reps from kind strangers who delivered them to their door. So a neighborly spirit had kind of taken over. There was this really jubilant, electric feeling in the city.

For a lot of people—the restaurant owners, chefs, retailers, capitalists, etc.—the reps were a huge disaster, of course. But for the people who'd had regular salaried jobs, or who were doing contract work through an app just to scrape by, the reps felt like a gift from God. Manna from heaven.

So, when I started knocking on peoples' doors, a lot of folks were more than happy to help. They felt they'd gotten something for free themselves, so when I'd show them RepDrop.com on my phone, they got excited about the possibility of sharing their own stuff with the world.

I found all kinds of stuff that way, including really rare collectibles. This one guy in particular sticks out in my memory. His name was Aleksandr. Polish, I think. He lived in a small house, very unassuming. When I asked if he had "any really cool shit that he wanted to share the world," this look came over him like he was in total pain. After I explained to him how RepDrop worked, he looked like he wanted to say something, but just said, "I'm sorry," and started to close his door.

I was about halfway down the street when he came running out after me and asked me to come back. He told me he'd just have to show me what he had for me, and told me to follow him into his basement.

I was kinda scared at first. I kind of thought this guy might be about to try to kill me. (Laughs).

But then we got down into his basement and it was– it was just incredible. First of all, the basement was enormous. It seemed much bigger than his house. It was well-lit, like a shopping mall. And the room was totally full with row after row of these pristine glass display cases. Inside those cases were Beanie Babies.

Aleksandr was older. Probably late sixties.

But he looked about twenty years younger while bouncing around that room showing me his collection.

He had Patti the Platypus. "A very early release," he said. "Used to go for thousands." He had Tabasco the Red Bull. "They later changed the name to 'Snort' to avoid copyright infringement," he said.

I saw this one crab-looking toy and asked him what was special about it. "Nothing," he said. "Except they forgot to put the star logo on his tag." Apparently this made the crab worth like $10,000.

The most rare and valuable Beanie Babies tended to be bears, it seemed. Aleksandr had a purple Princess Diana bear, which was released as part of a fund-raising drive for Diana's memorial fund after her untimely death in '97. He had a Valentino bear "with all the manufacturing errors," he said. "Brown nose instead of black. Wrong colored star. The works!" He had no fewer than a dozen "Peace" bears, which he explained were the first bears with any sort of emblem emblazoned on them, and which were also all slightly different from each other because of their tie-dyed fur.

There were thousands and thousands of these things. I asked him how much he'd paid for all of it. And he said he had no idea, but that if he were to guess, it was probably over a quarter million dollars. He said it was a "near-complete" collection.

So, when I uploaded all those toys to RepDrop, that's how I labeled it: "Near-Complete Beanie Baby Collection, All Mint Condition, Many Rare Bears!" (Laughs.)

How long did it take you to scan all of the bears?

Not as long as you'd think. Probably like 12 hours total.

Normally, I wasn't just scanning shit. I was also printing out replacements for the stuff I scanned. But after I explained that all the Beanie Babies would be safely stored in the cloud, Aleksandr seemed to relax. He insisted that he didn't want me to print him out any replacements for the bears I scanned. He offered to help. We set up half a dozen reps in his basement and coordinated to keep each of them running all day long.

The only thing that slowed us down was him naming the files to highlight important details about the toy, like the year it was produced, and any manufacturing mistakes that might make it more valuable. And I had to regularly unload the memory banks on the reps to a portable hard drive I had with me, so I could get the files ready for upload to RepDrop.

By the time we were done, his basement was totally empty. No Beanie Babies left. Aleksandr had this strange look on his face. I was like, "Hey man, are you sure you don't want me to print out replacements?" And he just said, "No. I've given enough of my life to those bears." That was it.

I thanked him, headed out, and haven't seen him since.

That upload changed the game for me. There were so many files, and a lot of people were downloading every single one of them. My RepScore shot through the roof. Employees from RepDrop were reaching out to me, asking if I'd like to come visit their headquarters. Local reporters came out and did a story on Aleksandr. It was sick.

People, especially older people, who saw the story on the news started reaching out to me directly and asking if I might come look at their weird collected shit. Of course I agreed.

One guy's house was just filled to the brim with all of these teapots from all over the world. Mint condition. They had belonged to his late wife, a big collector.

He wouldn't let me touch them myself, but he let me set up a bunch of reps and scan them all, after he carefully placed each of them inside.

He was different from the Beanie Babies guy—he wanted me to print out replacements as soon as I finished scanning each one. I dutifully did so, for hundreds of these teapots. I asked him, at some point, if he'd ever used the pots to make tea. And he looked at me like I was totally insane. (Laughs.)

He calmly explained that they were "collector's items." He said it had been his job to keep the pots clean, especially after his wife started getting too weak to go through the motions of dusting them out.

I think, actually, he hadn't even looked inside the teapots since his wife passed away. Because after I uploaded all the files, I started getting all these weird comments on a few of them. People were asking what the "story" was behind the pots.

Apparently several of them had little scraps of paper inside. They were notes. Little love letters that the man's wife had left for him to find, while he dusted out the teapots.

Pretty quickly, the teapots went viral. Tens of thousands of people were printing them out so they could get a closer look at the notes. People were posting online, asking if the woman was still alive, if the couple was okay. One of the notes made a passing reference to the woman's illness, and this added greatly to the allure of the teapots.

I felt terrible that I'd posted this man's private letters onto the internet for everybody to see. I printed out copies of the pots with letters inside and drove back over to the man's house to show him. He couldn't stop crying. I showed him the things people were saying online, and asked him if he wanted me to take the teapots down off of RepDrop. He said no. That this way, she'd be remembered.

By this point, I realized that the most popular uploads on RepDrop all had a story behind them—a value that went deeper than just the quality of the object, or of the price that it might have commanded before the collapse. The Beanie Babies uploads were huge in part because it all came from one source. A big-time collector. The teapots went viral because of the little hints of a love story that were contained within the pots.

So I started thinking about ways to find stuff with a backstory. I also began bringing a camera along with me on my trips, so I could record my exploits around the city and upload the videos so anyone who downloaded my files could see the backstory. I linked my YouTube profile from my RepDrop account, and that was enough to pull in tens of thousands of views for my first uploads.

People were delighted to see me going house to house and having friendly interactions with people. They also got to see the faces behind the objects. So the whole thing had a similar vibe to one of those reality TV shows about pawn shops. My viewership skyrocketed.

Mind you, this was all happening very fast. It was during the same week after most people in Seattle had gotten their first reps. Major industries were shutting down. Basically all trade. Big container ships kept arriving at port all week, and there was simply nobody there to unload them. So foreign dock workers kept bailing off of the ships and just wandering off into the city, leaving their hauls unattended. I decided to get a little dangerous by going onto one of the ships with my rep. I figured I might find some cool shit to scan, and it'd make for a cool video.

When I got to the ship, I printed out some supplies. Rope, crowbars, that sort of thing. Then set to work on the containers. The results were pretty disappointing, at first. Mostly a bunch of cheap shit made in Thailand. Microwaves, coffee bean grinders, carbonated water makers, computer monitors, plastic spatulas, and tons of garbage toys based on cartoons that I suppose some kids must be watching. It was all useless shit, but it was pretty interesting to see how much they packed into each box.

I was actually starting to have fun when I heard a weird noise. Like a tapping.

I started walking around trying to get closer to the source. Didn't take too long to find it. It was a container exactly like all of the others. Unmarked. No real way to separate it out from all the others, unless you already knew what you were looking for.

I banged the container's door with my crowbar, and the tapping changed pace. It turned into banging.

I thought I could hear a voice inside.

I started hauling away at the door, hacking it open.

After a few swings, it opened up and…

THE GEEK sighs, shuddering.

I don't know man. What do you want me to say about it?

I saw the video you uploaded, but I'd like to hear your impressions of what you saw.

It was bodies, man. Girls. Dead girls.

They were dressed like they were all heading out to a cocktail party. And only one left alive, crouching at the very back of the container. She was just covered in…

Man, I'm sorry. I just don't want to talk about this anymore, if that's alright.

That's okay. You don't have to say anything you're uncomfortable with.

Alright.

Just one last thing—after the feds shut down RepDrop.com, what did you do?

What did I do? Nothing, mostly. I stopped uploading videos after that day. And without the website, there was no point in continuing my trips around town.

Besides, all this happened before Bastille Day II. After that shit went down… well… I was kinda grateful to no longer have the attention on me.