Grensfeld Industries took a long hiatus from demanding I make any public appearances after the Battle of Port Elizabeth. But that didn’t mean my life got any easier.

In the brief time I had been away from home my father had cooked up a calamity. Cutting a deal with a friend of his who owned a movie studio, he had managed to purchase all of the furniture used on the set of the HBO show Entourage. He had filled my home with it.

Worse, my father had hired a bunch of actors to hang out at my house during the daytime, to make it look like I had friends. I felt really bad for one of them. He had a smoker’s cough and looked way too old to be hanging out with twenty-somethings. It turned out the guy had been an actual extra on Entourage, in two episodes of season four.

It was all very sad.

The two things most abundant in the house were cameras and whiskey advertisements. No corner or wall was without one or the other.

All the various camera feeds streamed off to God-knows-where over the Internet. Apparently, somebody somewhere sat around all day in a control room and produced my livestream, by switching the main feed to any camera in the house picking up something interesting. It hurt my heart to think of that person’s life.

I was thus under almost constant surveillance.

I knew that everyone wanted me to ‘go off’ and give them something viral they could use to push their whiskey on people, so I made an almost superhuman effort to act normal in front of the cameras. Passive resistance was all I had left.

I protested everything to Emily, many times, but she would only tell me to be happy I was making money off of my property. My house had become a valuable income stream. The judge overseeing my conservatorship was happy.

Emily had worked out another deal with my father. He was paying my estate a big chunk of cash for the exclusive rights to livestream from inside my home.

“And, besides,” she would always say, “the actors only work from 8:00 to 5:00. You can be alone the rest of the time.”

“Aren’t you forgetting about Jim?” I would point out.

That’s when Emily usually sighed.

My bodyguard Jim seemed to appreciate having the extra company around. He spent a lot of time with the actors while I slept. In fact, they were slowly becoming Jim’s posse instead of mine.

It was thus, one afternoon, while sitting on a crowded sofa, watching a movie with a group of hired friends and my bodyguard Jim, that I heard an unexpected clatter outside.

I got up to look out the window.

The source of the noise was a car pulling into my next-door neighbor Dave’s driveway. And what a car. It looked like it had been in an around-the-world race, without being properly prepared for an around-the-world race.

The vehicle came to a wobbly halt and out jumped a woman my age, wearing a baggy sweatshirt and jeans. She stormed up to the front door and rang the doorbell. Someone apparently answered her summons — I couldn’t see from my angle — for she soon disappeared inside the house.

The following day, when I was attending a meeting of the neighborhood book club, I learned the young woman was likely Pamela Elmer, Dave’s daughter.

I had joined the neighborhood book club in a fit of pique, trying to get away from the actors infesting my house. I remained a book club member because the hostesses always catered the meetings with delicious pastries. I was really only in it for the sugar.

Anyway, the ladies in the club gave me the full scoop. It seemed that Pamela had gone off to get a film degree against her parents’ wishes. She was currently trying to fundraise for her first movie, and her parents had refused to invest.

Perhaps that explained what I had witnessed in Dave’s driveway.

Later that week, when I was in my backyard tossing a football around with the actors, I saw Pamela’s car pull into her parents’ driveway.

To my surprise, she emerged and began walking in my direction.

“Hi,” she greeted me cheerily, holding out a hand as she drew close. “I’m Pamela.”

As we shook hands, I confessed, “I’m Terrence.”

“I’m well aware. I’ve been watching your career skyrocket since you went supernova at my father’s press conference. That was brilliant work, by the way. I’m an admirer.”

“My career?” I replied, puzzled.

“As an influencer,” Pamela nudged gently.

“Oh, I’m not an influencer,” I protested.

“Right,” she challenged. “Call yourself whatever you like, but your channel’s subscriber growth rate has been impressive.”

I cringed.

Once I had basked in ignorance, but sadly no longer, for now I definitively knew that my public humiliation’s growth rate had been impressive.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

Pamela continued to speak, seemingly unaware of how rapidly the world had begun to spin.

“I looked up your channel’s analytics. I’m amazed by how popular your livestream is getting in Japan.”

“What?” I cried, quietly stricken.

“You definitely have a cult following over there. People make fan videos about you. I watched a few. They call you ‘Weird Terrence.’”

“Nice job,” she concluded, with an approving smile.

“No. You don’t understand. Do you think I’m putting my life on the Internet by choice?”

“Well, when I’ve been over at my parents’ house, I’ve seen your friends putting makeup on before they walk inside, so I’m pretty sure they were choosing to be on camera.”

“That’s because those aren’t my friends. They’re actors.”

Pamela burst out laughing.

“You hired actors as friends for your livestream? That’s an incredible idea. You get to control the entire narrative, without the drama of real-life friendship. Bro, that’s brilliant.”

“You still don’t understand. It’s true that the actors want to be on camera, it’s only me who doesn’t want to be. I didn’t hire the actors, my father did. The whole livestream thing was forced on me by my father so he could make money off of me.”

She studied me carefully. I could tell I had danced dangerously close to triggering her BS detector.

“You’re telling me that you’re a rising Internet celebrity, but you have nothing to do with any of it, and want no part of it. Do I have that right?”

I nodded.

“Then why did you decorate your place like a fraternity house if you’re trying so hard not to be an Internet celebrity?“

She was peering inside my house through the open back doors.

“I didn’t decorate this place. Who would hang whiskey ads in their own home? Do you think I want to live in a saloon? My father was responsible for the decoration. My father hired the actors. My father put up the livestream. Every bit of this has been forced on me.”

“Seriously?” Pamela marveled.

“Seriously,” I affirmed, in a grave tone.

“And I thought my parents were controlling,” she wondered aloud.

She paused for a moment as if struggling over whether to say something or not. She came to a decision and proceeded.

“Terrence, I’m a filmmaker,” she began.

Based on what the neighborhood moms told me, that was a bit of a stretch.

“I’m trying to find investors for my next film, ‘The Blue Papaya.’ I would love to sit down with you to pitch the idea properly.”

“Why?” I responded, puzzled. “Do you want my feedback on your pitch?”

“No,” she explained in a measured tone, slightly offended. “I’m hoping you will be motivated to invest in the film.”

I understood. She wasn’t aware of my situation. How humiliating.

“I’m sorry,” I professed. “You see, the thing is, I got placed in a conservatorship. I don’t have permission to spend any of my own money. If I did, I certainly wouldn’t be living here. So I’m afraid I can’t invest in your movie.”

“That’s awful,” she observed. “Who did that to you?”

“My parents,” I replied.

She looked at me pityingly.

“Wow. I know what it is like to have overbearing parents, but I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of someone who has it as badly as you.”

We bonded for a quiet moment, both pondering my tragic existence.

“In that case,” Pamela piped up, breaking the silence, “you wouldn’t mind if I use your father a little bit to promote my film on your livestream, would you? Since your father’s only using you, it only seems fair to use him back, doesn’t it?”

She gave me a big friendly grin to help sell the idea.

I tried to reason this new relationship out. Wouldn’t that make her my second user, once removed?

“Hey boys,” she suddenly called out to the actors, who were still tossing the football around. “Which of you are up for whiskey shots?”

Four twenty-something actors came galloping past, following Pamela into my home. One forty-something actor came huffing and puffing along moments later.

I followed the huffer and puffer inside.

Pamela proceeded to pour drinks for all of the actors. I declined her offer. Jim, thank god, also declined her offer. A drunken Jim was something I never wanted to see.

Once Pamela had the crew in her clutches — using flirtation and free whiskey — she pitched her movie idea, all of which was going out over my livestream, probably being watched by an English-speaking teenager in Tokyo in the middle of the night, if the analytics didn’t lie.

And that was how it all began.

Soon it became a daily occurrence for Pamela to show up unannounced and bluster her way into my home by gaslighting me that I “surely didn’t mind” having her over. She spent hours vamping for the cameras and talking about the plans for her movie.

To my even greater irritation, she began to bring guests with her. Many were friends from film school, happy to take their turn getting free publicity on my father’s dime. Others were influencers, trend-surfing off my misery, hoping to be associated with me.

I really needed to stand up for myself, but I mainly just isolated myself in my bedroom.

The strange goings-on only seemed to add to my livestream’s popularity. Soon, I was garnering significant viewership numbers in Poland and Kenya. I found out when I received a text message from Emily.

“Someone contacted me about licensing your image for some merchandise to be marketed in Eastern Europe. Are you good with that? The deal is worth $50K over 6 months.”

“What merchandise?” I replied.

She texted me a photo of a sweatshirt. On it was a silkscreened image captured from my livestream, zoomed in upon an extremely unflattering picture of me.

My name appeared above the image, and there was Polish text below. I pasted the text into a translation engine and got the result.

“Web Goblin.”

Ouch. I mean, that hurt. I’m only human.

Web goblin?

“I’m not sure I’m comfortable with that,” I related to Emily, considerably understating my feelings.

“K. What about $30K to license your image for making educational signage in Kenya?”

Educational signs sounded a lot better than the web goblin deal. I was willing to consider such an offer. I was in favor of promoting education worldwide.

“What sort of educational signs?” I asked, seeking clarification.

“They would be part of a government initiative educating the Kenyan public on the importance of seeking proper mental health treatment.”

“And am I to be the cautionary tale in this educational material?” I asked, having already surmised the answer.

Emily’s silence told me everything I needed to know.

“Then, no,” I texted.

Emily never replied.

And so it came as a surprise the following week when one of the actors showed me a social media video shot by a young man in Kenya, thanking me for inspiring him to seek help turning his life around.

I know who I am. I know my strengths and I frequently relearn my weaknesses. Never would I suggest to anyone that I should be a source of inspiration. That is not me.

I felt extremely uncomfortable.

What Emily had done was completely unethical. But she, unfortunately, had every right to do so. And I knew it was a losing strategy to fight my conservatorship by claiming I was against the idea of helping people around the world. That would not make me appear as a particularly sympathetic character before a judge.

But I vowed to make sure Emily hadn’t accepted the web goblin deal, too. If she had done that, I was pretty sure I could have taken the matter before a judge.

(Sadly, it turned out Emily hadn’t taken any goblin money. I remained trapped.)