Fishbowl by Matthew Glass Read Free Book Online Page A

Stanford was an elite institution and regarded itself very much as such. It seemed pretty certain that a Stanford disciplinary board would react worse to an apparently pliant and manipulable dupe who was unable to distinguish right from wrong when instructed by someone else than to a smart, self-motivated and curious junior who had gone a little too far in an innocent prank. If they were going to throw someone off campus, it was more likely to be a dupe than a prankster.
    Kevin and Ben thus agreed that while Kevin took the blame for originating and executing the exercise, Ben would present as someone who knew from an early stage what was going on and, if guilty of anything, was guilty of not intervening to stop it. The board wouldn’t take kindly to his moral failure, but the fact was that by the time the experiment came to an end most of Robinson House and quite a few people outside it had been guilty of the same lapse. Since the board, therefore, couldn’t very well expel Ben without expelling a good percentage of the junior class with him, they thought this would protect him from the worst of the vice-provost’s wrath. Kevin’s fate would depend on the way he presented himself. Contrition was key.
    A friend of Charles’s had been up before a disciplinary board for a minor misdemeanour and they lured him to Robinson with promises of women and drink – only one of which eventuated – and got him to help out with a trial run. The night before the board, the common room resembled a lawyer’s office the night before a trial, with Charles, his friend, Ben, and even Andrei breaking off from his Fishbowll coding to fire questions at Kevin.
    It worked. Or perhaps some members of the board, guilty of a student prank or two in their own student days, secretly admired Kevin for his skill and originality in mischief-making. They put him on probation, asked him to sign a pledge to refrain from accessing any social networking sites for the next twelve months, and required that he see a counsellor. Ben, who felt chastened by the experience and wondered how he could have lost his moral compass to such an extent as to have allowed himself to get involved, received a stern rebuke but was let off without formal punishment.
    Both of them were also required to apologise to Dan Cooley in front of one of the university officers and to hear his account of how the experience had affected him. Ben had already sought Cooley out to offer an apology.
    It was about the best they could have hoped for. That night, Kevin organized a party in the suite. The whiff of alcohol soon attracted a crowd and the party spilled out of the door. Through it all, Andrei sat at his computer, headphones on his ears, in the last stages of coding. The building could have gone down around his head and he would have carried on tapping.
    With a flurry of final touches, Fishbowll 2.0 was ready.
    At around 2 a.m. that night, in early November, as the party was winding down around him, Andrei pressed the button to go live. He sent a message to his friends and acquaintances telling them about the new Fishbowll and asking them to try it again.
    Then he opened the site once more, just to see what it would look like to someone who had never visited it before. A simple, uncluttered login page appeared in front of him.
    WELCOME TO FISHBOWLL
    A dating site for the mind

6
    TWELVE HOURS AFTER Fishbowll went live for the second time, seventy-five people had registered and Andrei was getting positive messages in his inbox. By the end of the second day after launch, there were 200 users on the site, three times the number that the first Fishbowll had ever achieved.
    By now, Andrei knew, the circle of users must have spread beyond his friends and acquaintances. Fishbowll had floated out into the open ocean of cyberspace, where the fact that Andrei Koss had developed the site was no reason to look at it. By the weekend, the 1000-user mark had been breached. A