A Modern Morality Tale

Jonathan Dodd

 

 

It’s not necessarily true that children are innocent. But then again sometimes they can do the most profoundly uninnocent things without applying the adult and therefore more corrupt behaviour and motivation to their actions. Thus innocence and evil can become entwined and confused.

Take young Elliot Rosen, for instance. He was a twelve-year-old kid growing up in an affluent area of Santa Barbara. To all intents and purposes a perfectly normal kid whose parents - Sam and Louisa - had high aspirations for him. He went to a good school, attained high grades, was reasonably popular among his peers but tended as some boys do towards solitary pursuits. Since both parents worked in technological industries they naturally gave him lots of advanced hardware, and were pleased when he showed great interest and aptitude for computers, so naturally they encouraged him. By the age of twelve he had his own website and was trading in various small-scale commodities on the Internet. Nothing sinister here – he had come up with a toy exchange scheme and a recycling scheme, both of which were supervised by his parents quite properly and were showing a modest profit. Elliot was a promising kid.

It so happened that one afternoon Elliot was playing around with his digital camcorder on the balcony of his home when his attention strayed to the balcony of a bedroom some distance away but perfectly clear in his zoom lens. It’s not necessary to elucidate what these neighbours were doing on their balcony, but the important facts are that Elliot caught all of the action on his camcorder and apparently there was a family pet that took an important part in the proceedings. 

This left Elliot with a major problem. He was a normal twelve-year-old kid. Of course he knew he had a bombshell on his hands but he didn’t know what to do with it. He knew he should probably destroy it, but that’s not really an option for most people. He could hide it away, but what twelve-year-old kid could keep something like that secret? He could show it to his friends and hope they didn’t talk to anyone about it, but he knew they would. He didn’t want to get caught with the evidence because he knew that would mean big trouble. What he really wanted to do was talk about it with his parents, but something told him this wouldn’t be the best idea. More than anything Elliot didn’t want to get into any trouble.

So Elliot sat on the tape for a couple of days worrying about it, and then, being a smart kid, he realized the thing to do would be to look at it like his parents. Elliot knew the value of business and he was aware of the kind of thing that was available on the Internet. Of course, being twelve, he had stolen a look or two at some of the sites, but he was too young to be interested beyond an illicit snigger or two. He knew all about sex, from his school and his friends and his parents. The other thing he knew about sex was that adults talked and thought about it all the time.

So the next step becomes quite logical. Elliot applied his business knowledge, made a series of very short excerpts from his tape and emailed them to various sites. He was amazed by the response and the amounts of money that were offered to him. He considered them all and decided on one of the highest. He insisted on the money being paid into a bank account he opened specially – a large deposit in the account his parents knew about would be too difficult to explain. He decided to give away half of the money to charity because he felt guilty about the neighbours. But he didn’t think their faces were distinct enough to be recognized. He was very ethical. An adult might have thought to sell the tape to lots of different sites. How would they know? And they would have expected it. And it was all on the net so couldn’t be traced.

All in all, Elliot felt very pleased with himself. What he didn’t account for was the enormous popularity of the film. It spread like wildfire, being bought and sold, exchanged, copied, downloaded and generally plagiarized right across the planet. He was blissfully unaware of this.

Eventually two things happened. The newspapers got wind of it and sent packs of reporters roaming the net and the cities of the world looking for the mystery couple and the mystery pet. And the neighbour himself logged in one day to a site in which he was the star, as well as his pet dog. His other costar, it turned out, wasn’t his wife. In the end the whole story came out. Elliot’s balcony was identified as being the only one from which the film could have been taken, and Elliot himself landed in all the trouble he’d tried so hard to avoid.

You might think that this story would have a sad or bad ending, but such are the enlightened times we live in that almost everybody did rather well out of it, apart from the initial discomfort. Elliot explained very patiently how the whole thing happened, and overnight he became a phenomenon. His parents had to give up their jobs and move, but they were able to do that because of a very lucrative deal they brokered with a large software firm who were interested in Elliot’s money-making acumen and his ‘vision’. They set up a trust fund for him and all of them lived rather well. They had to fend off all sorts of unsavoury offers for Elliot to repeat the performance. At the age of eighteen Elliot himself became very disillusioned and joined a weird Christian sect, donating his entire trust fund to them. The neighbour and his girlfriend and dog found themselves quite happy to repeat their performance regularly and earned pots of money. The wronged wife grabbed a lot of that in her divorce settlement and they enjoyed spending most of the rest before achieving immortality by being killed in a spectacular car crash. The dog was adopted by a nice family but showed occasional embarrassing signs of wanting to return to the old life despite all efforts to retrain him. He died in his sleep with a something like a rather sad smile on his face.