Duncan watched the slowly blinking SP51 and barely breathed. ‘what in the absolute fuck?’ he asked the world at large. This was truly astronomical. Without some for of endorsement assistance, this kind of leap was unheard of. He checked his views and saw his last two vids had scored enormous interest. The last video featured 11,000 plus comments. His mind refused to process the numbers. He sat dully, half formed thoughts cycling through his mind. Eventually, he forcefully minimised the SP reading and stared at the ten squares divided on the large screen. He didn’t know what to do with himself so he decided to work.
He booted the work station up and set to cutting together feeds. Surprisingly, he found the cat guy from the other day posting shorts of his new kitten. Young Emerald was quite precocious and had made a huge mess of a nutrient cube. He layered the short videos into a cute montage and pressed it onto the man’s feed. Then footage of a middle aged SP4 shooting himself watching his screens for three straight hours popped into his work schedule. Despite the days events, Duncan felt his heart sink. How to cut this together. The man had reacted with scorn and similar vitriol at his viewing. Calling ‘Fake’ as often as anything else has he watched the one and a half hour special of Amelia and Roy’s big reveal to family and friends at an incredible, upscale, swanky restaurant in New York. Oddly, the SP4 barely reacted to the jarringly obvious product placements and endorsements for the restaurant and heaped abuse upon the couple’s announcements and heartfelt reactions of the guests at the dinner. Seeing what the man had wanted, Duncan cut together a three minute edit of the “best of” the scorn filled monologues. Then sat back sighing expansively.
The wheels on his chair protested slightly as he thrust himself back with more force than was strictly necessary. After cutting together a female gamers video of herself playing a first person shooter in a strategically low cut shirt, he felt the growing familiar butterfly lightness feeling of inspiration in his stomach.
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
“Hi Everyone, this is your Cutman. It’s nine pm where I am and I’ve spent the past unknown hours cutting together your feeds. I’ve done cats again. I’ve done a man blind anger towards those he feels jealousy and contempt for. I’ve helped a green haired gamer chick with big breasts get some more male followers. I’ve even helped an older lady post with her grandchildren in mind, discussing the importance of family in a world that seems to more and more divide into smaller and smaller groups. She made this video in a single apartment and there was a layer of dust around the place that broke my heart for its absence of the family she wanted to talk to. It made me wonder a lot about why we are taking to our feeds to express our feelings. Why we seek the reactions we put out. It seems like we are addicted to strong emotions. I did a little research. In the past hour there have been 21 million posts about Roy and Amelia. A quick bit of graphing, which should be taken with a grain of salt, shows that 72 percent of these posts were negative by nature and 28 positives. Which of these types of reactions is worth more? Which is the faux-outpouring that meaningless? Is the deep feelings of love and adulation faker than the absurd outrage of the negatives? Are we addicted to outrage by and large? Seems we want to be offended. We want to be rage filled and feel like we are being marginalised/ignored/hated/lied to or misled. We cant wait for the cracks in the perfect couple to appear so we can drag those jumped up jerks down to our level! Is that who we are? Either the blindly let flag wavers or the obnoxiously offended? Might be worth a debate. For now, I’m your Cutman and I’ll be honest for you.” And the post went live.
****
Two hours later after a ridiculous amount of feed surfing and a district lack of tiredness, Duncan received a message flashing right over the top of his feeds.
* Duncan Winter: You will be contacted at 9am your time tomorrow by members of the StarPower team. –
The stark letters fading slowly to nothing marked a moment of rising dread in the young man.