The disembodiment of little Bobby Shaftoe

by David Benjamin

“Some eighth graders … had set up fake TikTok accounts impersonating teachers…
“… In the days that followed, some 20 educators—about one quarter of the [Great Valley Middle] School’s faculty—discovered they were victims of fake teacher accounts rife with pedophilia innuendo, racist memes, homophobia and made-up sexual hookups among teachers. Hundreds of students soon viewed, followed or commented on the fraudulent accounts”
—Natasha Singer, New York Times, 6 July

SPRINGHAVEN, Pa.—The mystery of little Bobby Shaftoe has only deepened in the months since he disappeared from his desk in Anita Gomez’s Spanish class at the Springhaven Middle School.

By now, the circumstances of the incident are known almost universally. What is not known, despite rampant speculation among experts in specialties that range from technology to theology, is where the heck Bobby went.

His teacher, Señora Gomez has testified that, at her last sighting, Bobby was ignoring the day’s lesson while immersed in a complicated TikTok transmission on his mobile phone. One moment he was there, thumbing away frenetically at a slanderous deepfake aimed at Señora Gomez and school principal Irwin LaPlante. The next time anyone noticed, Little Bobby was simply gone.

“At first, I thought he was hiding, or he’d gone to the toilet,” said his teacher. “But we looked for him. He was nowhere in school, nowhere in the neighborhood. Nowhere.”

Or everywhere, as some observers have suggested.

All that was left behind was Bobby’s unfinished counterfeit video depicting a gorilla—with principal LaPlante’s face—attempting a complicated ménage à trois with a crudely photo-faked Señora Gomez in the nude, and an uncooperative cocker spaniel.

Before his disappearance, Bobby had achieved international status as a rock star among “influencers.” His smartphone cyberbullying campaigns directed at schoolmates, teachers, adult neighbors and randomly chosen strangers have been credited with at least two teenage suicides and an explosive spike in psychotherapists treating young girls traumatized after thousands of social-media attacks by the young Shaftoe’s legion of avid fans and forwarders.

His school’s teachers and principal had tried to curtail Bobby’s torrent of sadistic texts, but were frustrated by the young man’s parents and by lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union, as well as Bobby’s online advertisers. These advocates defended his First Amendment right to “speak” at any length on his smartphone about anything that came to mind wherever he was, as long as he refrained from using the “N-word,” the “K-word” and the “C-word.”

His parents also fought to continue the flow of advertising income attracted by their son, which allowed them to acquire—among other amenities—a live-in butler, an in-ground Olympic-size swimming pool, a small “villa” on the Côte d’Azur and a forty-foot Clarence Thomas model Prevost Le Mirage XL Marathon land yacht.

“We’d give most of that stuff back,” said his mother, Eunice, “just to see Bobby’s shining face again.”

“Except for the pool,” said his father, Lance Shaftoe. “I love the smell of chlorine in the morning.”

For months, police and the FBI doggedly conducted a nationwide search for the missing boy, interrogating hundreds of adult relatives, neighbors, the entire faculty of Bobby’s middle school and a veritable rogues gallery of pederasts and perverts. Meanwhile, an army of theorists, technologists and crackpots have offered a panoply of explanations for Bobby’s seeming evaporation.

Science-fiction author Kilgore Trout elicited an unlikely but compelling hypothesis, harkening to one of the most oft-employed—if not hackneyed—Darwinian themes in speculative literature. “Little Bobby Shaftoe might well be a harbinger of human evolution, leading us from our cloddish and resource-destroying corporeal state into fleshless blots of ectoplasm composed of ‘pure thought’.”

(In response, Señora Gomez, one of Bobby’s favorite deepfake victims, was heard to comment that, “there wasn’t anything close to ‘pure’ in that little monster’s thoughts.”)

Trout went on to reprise his prediction that “Apple and Samsung have opened—and placed in the hands of clever, uninhibited children—a portal to cybernetic immortality. Having cast off his body, little Bobby Shaftoe will never die.”

Conservative observers have objected vehemently to this interpretation, insisting that Bobby has already died—and gone to Heaven. This thesis was best expressed by Cardinal Seamus Lollobrigida, Silicon Valley’s technology envoy to the Vatican. Speaking to a special convocation assembled in Rome to discuss the possibility that Bobby’s disappearance might be deemed a “miracle,” Cardinal Lollobrigida suggested that the brilliant young cyber-influencer was “assumed.”

“Technically, as you know, the Mother of God never died. Every August, the Church celebrates the feast of the Virgin Mary’s Assumption into Heaven, when a glowing cloud descended to the Earth, enveloped her and lifted her upward into the infinite mystery of the Kingdom of God,” the prelate explained.

“Today, everyone with a laptop or iPhone is invisibly bonded to a cloud just as ethereal and mysterious, where we unthinkingly send our ideas and poems, our account IDs and Social Security numbers, our dreams, fears and secrets, our thoughts and prayers. Is it preposterous to wonder whether that digital cloud, fashioned by human ingenuity, cannot ‘assume’ into itself its devoutest believers, lifting them from this earthly vale of tears and guiding them toward the loving, forgiving and analog bosom of God Almighty, along with Steve Jobs and Andy Grove?”

While these and other, more far-fetched theories made headlines, a nursery rhyme was getting millions of views on TikTok, Facebook, X, Instagram and other platforms. To the bouncy meter of “Humpty Dumpty,” it concludes:

“… All th’ nerds in the Valley, both girls and men,
“Couldn’t code Bobby together again.”

After enduring a steady parade of well-wishers and seeing her yard turned into a tacky memorial, littered with with dead flowers, Hallmark greetings and rain-soaked teddy bears, Eunice Shaftoe cracked and admitted to Rachel Maddow that she had moved on from her little boy. “It wasn’t like we ever had anything to say to each other. I hadn’t heard a word from him in three years,” she confessed. “Even when was eating, or sitting on the toilet, the little prick never looked up from his phone.”

Meanwhile, back at Springhaven Middle School, several of Bobby’s followers recovered his farewell deepfake from the cloud and posted the obscene tableau of Señora Gomez, principal LaPlante and the cocker spaniel. It went viral, leaving the School Board no alternative but to fire both Gomez and LaPlante. Since then, the Board, in honor of America’s first martyr to cyberspace travel, have voted to change the name of little Bobby’s alma mater to the Robert F. Shaftoe Middle School.

His mother had no choice but to attend the ceremony.