STORY 2 OF THE SERIAL PORT SEASON 1

LOST? START HERE: THE HOST - PART 1 - THE CONSULTATION

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Continuity Year 45

Pete’s plan, going into the barbecue, had been to ask Curt the question. By the time the steaks were on, he’d already lost the plan. Em had given him a look across the deck three times. Curt had laughed at one of his stories. Pete couldn’t find the shape of the question in his own head anymore. He’d been working on it for two weeks. His drafts all sounded like the comments under Curt’s last post.

The post had gone up on the Sunday. The photo was of Curt and Laura from before, the two of them at a picnic at the dam. The caption was the usual sort. Booked the date. Best host in the area. Wanted his community to know first. The comments had been what you’d expect under any of them. So happy for you mate. So beautiful. So brave. The same colour and cadence as the comments under Greg’s post the year before, and Anna’s the year before that, and one of the lads from the metalworks who’d done his last autumn to be with his husband. Pete had liked all of those. He hadn’t liked Curt’s.

Pete and Em’s backyard, late afternoon, end-of-summer warm. The barbie was running. Em had been doing salads at the trestle for half an hour. Pete and Curt had been at the railing with their beers for ten minutes, both of them looking at the back fence. Curt’s hand on the bottle was steady. Curt’s hand had always been steady. Pete had known it since they were apprentices together at the metalworks. He couldn’t stop looking at it.

“So,” Pete said.

“Yeah,” Curt said.

“How’s the running going.”

“Haven’t really been running. Host said it’s good not to push too hard in the last few weeks.”

“Right.”

Em came over with the platter of salads and put it on the trestle behind them.

“Steaks on whenever you two are ready,” she said brightly.

Pete looked at Curt’s hand again. Curt’s hand was still steady. Pete’s wasn’t. He could feel the bottle shaking against his palm.

“Mate,” Pete said.

“Yeah.”

“I don’t want to say something cringe.”

“About what.”

“About the ceremony. About all of it.”

Curt laughed. It was the same laugh he’d always had.

“Don’t, then,” Curt said. “Just don’t say it. Honestly. I’d rather you didn’t. Em told me she’d already told you to leave it alone. I told her that was probably the right call.”

“She did, did she.”

“Yeah mate.”

Pete looked at the bottle.

“Tongs,” Em said from behind them. “One of you. Now.”

Curt clinked his bottle against Pete’s.

“I love you, mate,” Curt said.

“I love you too.”

“I know.” Curt smiled at him. “Tongs.”

Pete went to the barbie.

On the Thursday afternoon before Curt’s day, the host ran into Curt’s mother at the supermarket.

The supermarket was the small one in the lay-by between the host’s place and the venue. Fluorescent lights, two checkouts, a butcher in a back corner who knew her by name. The host did her Thursdays there because by Thursday the team had told her what they’d missed at Wednesday’s stocktake and she could pick it up on the way home. Today’s list was on her phone: ground coffee, lemon, two packs of dishcloths, replacement pen for the lectern.

She came around the end of the wine aisle and Curt’s mother was standing in the middle of it with a bottle in each hand.

The host stopped before Curt’s mother saw her. She had a second to consider whether to back up to the cereal aisle and come at the till from the other side. She had done that twice before with other mothers. She had never been spotted.

Curt’s mother turned.

“Oh,” she said.

“Hello,” the host said.

The bottles were good ones. Forty dollars each, easy. Curt’s mother put them back on the shelf fast, the labels turned in. Her hand stayed on the necks for a beat after.

“I was just,” she said. “For Saturday. The pre-lunch.”

“You don’t need to bring anything.”

“I know. I just thought.” Her hand went to her own hair and smoothed it. “I just wanted to.”

The host felt the bottom of her own stomach turn over. She had felt it with Greg’s mother last autumn and with two other mothers since. The turn-over meant the mother had not figured out yet what to do with her hands and was trying to do something normal with them.

“Whatever you’d like to bring is welcome,” the host said.

Curt’s mother picked the bottles up again. She did not look at them, or at the host. She looked at the shelf above the bottles for a moment.

“Two should do it,” she said. “Don’t you think.”

“Two would be perfect.”

The host stayed in the wine aisle until she heard Curt’s mother’s voice at the checkout. She gave it another minute, then went to the till.

On the Friday afternoon she drove up to the venue with the gold cloth in the boot. The marquee was already going up on the lawn. Helen had the two marquee blokes on the guy ropes. Jen had her stems out on the trestle, sorting them by length. The hire van was unloading the folding chairs in stacks at the side of the lawn.

The host didn’t interrupt them. She walked the perimeter of the lawn instead.

The line her clients walked from the marquee to the venue’s interior door cut across the back of the lawn at a slight angle, around a small ornamental hedge. The hedge was decorative; it also screened the side door from the marquee’s sightline. The host had asked Tom to plant it the first year. He’d put it in over a weekend.

She walked the line slowly. The late sun was warm on the side of her face. She stopped at the spot where, the next evening, the body would come out the side door on the trolley.

The body wouldn’t go to the kitchen at its own reception. It never did. The team had saved money that way for years. The reception fed on the previous Saturday’s client, processed across the week and stored cold in the room at the back of the venue. Tom had this week’s body on the spit since the morning. Curt’s would be next week’s.

She looked at the side door. She looked away. She’d been doing this every Friday for years. The side door was painted white. The handle had a key in it.

She walked back to the marquee. The team had three small questions for her. She answered all three without sitting down, then sat on a folding chair at the back and watched them work for a moment. The marquee was up. The flowers were on the trestle. The kitchen had the lamb in.

She drove home to do the running sheet one last time.

Saturday started at eight. The host was at her kitchen island with her coffee and the day’s running sheet by the time the team’s first email of the day came in.

The running sheet was a single laminated page on her own letterhead. It listed every hour of the day, from 8:00 — host’s prep down to clean-up — close venue and lock. The two items in the middle were 4:00 — Curt to private session, host attending and 5:30 — host returns from private session, reset for reception. The sheet sat on the kitchen island in plain view all morning.

Curt’s parents were at the front door just before eleven. Curt’s mother had a casserole in a Pyrex on top of the two bottles of wine in a tote bag.

“I didn’t know if you’d be feeding people,” she said. “I made it anyway.”

“Thank you. That was kind.”

The host took the casserole through to the kitchen and put it in the oven on warm. The bottles she took separately and set on the kitchen island, beside the running sheet. Curt’s mother’s eyes went to the sheet for a second. The host watched her not read it. Then Curt’s mother turned away and asked where she could put her handbag.

Curt’s sister came next, with her husband, both quiet. Laura’s sister was last. She had driven up alone. The host welcomed her at the door and held her there a moment longer than the others.

“Thank you for coming.”

Laura’s sister nodded. She came inside.

The pre-lunch was in the dining room. The host had set the table the night before. Curt sat at the head of the table — his mother had put him there when she walked in. Curt’s mother and Laura’s sister sat at the same end of the table and shared the coffee Curt’s mother had brought from home in a flask.

Curt’s father gave the toast. He stood up, held his glass, and looked at his son.

“I love you, son,” he said.

He stopped. He looked at his glass. He looked at Curt again.

“I don’t have a speech for this. There isn’t one. I’ve been trying to write one for a month. I am sorry. I love you.”

He sat down hard. Curt’s mother put her hand on his hand. Curt got up, came round the table, kissed his father on the top of the head, and went into the spare room to put his suit on.

The family cleared the table. Curt’s sister stacked the plates. The host took the casserole back out of the oven and put it in the fridge to send home with the parents. Nobody had eaten any of it.

Laura’s sister was standing at the kitchen island, reading the running sheet. The host went to the kettle and turned it on. Laura’s sister didn’t look up.

“Is this everything that happens,” Laura’s sister said.

“Yes.”

Laura’s sister nodded. The kettle came to the boil. The host poured a fresh coffee from the bench and put it on the island beside Laura’s sister.

“Take a moment if you need to.”

Laura’s sister picked up the coffee. She didn’t drink any of it. She walked back into the dining room.

The photographer arrived. The host let him in and took him through to the spare room. Curt was already in his shirt and trousers, his suit jacket on the bed. The photographer set up by the window for the prep shots.

The host went to her own room and got into her dress. It was a soft grey she’d been wearing for ceremonies for years. She did her hair. She did her face. She came back to the kitchen and stood at the island and looked at the running sheet one more time.

Just before three Curt came out of the spare room in his suit. His face was set.

“Ready,” he said.

“Ready.”

She drove him to the venue.

At three-thirty the marquee was full. The guests were in their Saturday best. The host was at the front beside the small lectern she had brought from her office at home. Behind her, on the screen, was Laura, sitting in the rendered space at the table outside her rendered home. She was wearing the long shirt. She was looking at the door.

Pete was in the third row beside Em. He had not slept the night before. The shirt he was wearing was the one Em had laid out for him while he was still trying to draft something to say. He had drafted three things and binned them all.

The music started, the solo cello piece Curt had chosen weeks earlier. Curt came up the aisle alone. The guests stood. Pete clapped when the music ended. His hands were a beat late.

The host did the welcome. She kept it short.

“Curt has written his vows. He would like to say them now.”

Curt turned to the screen. Laura, on the screen, turned to him.

“I came after you,” Curt said. “I have been coming all this time. I am here.”

That was the whole vow. He had told the host weeks earlier that he didn’t want a long one.

On the screen, Laura was crying. Curt was crying. In the third row, Pete kept his hands on his knees and looked at the floor.

The host took the leather portfolio and the pen from the lectern and walked them across to Curt. She opened the portfolio.

“Curt,” she said. “Do you understand that the final remap performed in the private session does not return the body in this room to consciousness.”

“Yes.”

“Do you understand that the documentation you are about to sign is a legal record of your election to undergo the final remap, and that no party present, including the team and the network, is responsible for any consequence of your election.”

“Yes.”

She read the other three. Curt said yes to each one. She handed him the pen. Curt signed the documentation in three places where she had marked it with light pencil dots. The host had been making the pencil dots for years. She made them so light her clients could barely see them, because barely seeing them was the right amount.

Curt’s father came forward to sign as witness. His hand shook so much that he had to put the pen down twice before he could finish. The witness signature took longer than the candidate signature.

The host closed the portfolio. She turned back to the marquee.

“That concludes the public part of Curt’s ceremony. Curt will now come with me through the venue’s interior door for the private session. The upload itself is by its nature a private moment, and Curt has asked that it stay private. The next two hours are yours to use as you would the photo window at any wedding. The bar is open, the lawn games are out. We’ll see you all again at six, when Curt and Laura are reintroduced on the screen at the start of the reception.”

Curt walked with her up the centre aisle. Laura, on the screen, was still watching the door. The host opened the venue’s interior door. She and Curt went through. She closed the door behind them.

In the marquee, the guests began to stand up.

Pete didn’t stand up. He stayed in the third row with his hands on his knees.

Em put a hand on his shoulder.

“Come on, mate,” she said.

“Yeah.”

He didn’t move.

The marquee was emptying around them. Laura was still on the screen behind him.

Pete sat in the third row.

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- AJW

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The concept cover for my upcoming novel - The Grey Corner, Book 2 of the Continuity Constellation.

Art by Saturnids Art Link: https://mushroomy.house/collections/saturnids

Book 1 of the Continuity Constellation: The Continuity Protocol available on Amazon and indie publishers

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STORY 2 OF THE SERIAL PORT SEASON 1

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Continuity Year 45

She had always liked the widowers who came early. The early ones were the ones who had decided.

The widower for the Thursday afternoon arrived early. She watched him from the kitchen window. He stopped at the gate. He found her name on the small bronze plate beside the buzzer. He set his hand on the buzzer. He did not press it. He stood there. The hand had decided. The man had not yet caught up. Then he pressed it. He came up the brick path through the front garden, the path she had laid herself. She opened the door before he reached it.

Hello, she said. Welcome. Please come in.

Thank you, he said.

His name was Curt Giel. He was thirty-eight. He was a widower. He worked metal. The booking form had told her these things, and one more: in the box that asked who he was hoping to be reunited with, he had written Laura, my wife, where most of the widowers wrote my late wife. She had liked him already on the strength of that.

She walked him through the front rooms of the cottage to the office at the back. The office had been built years before. The conservatory had been added later. The conservatory was where she held the consultations. The light through the side window came in warm at that hour. The brochure was already on the low table. The tea was steeping in its pot. Two cups sat in their saucers. She had everything ready, as she always did before a client arrived.

Sit anywhere you like, she said.

There were three chairs in the conservatory. A wing chair by the window. A small leather two-seater. A floral chair across the low table from her own. He chose the floral chair. The good ones chose the floral chair. The very good ones chose it without being shown.

She poured his tea. He took it black. She let the silence sit. The widowers who could sit in the silence were the ones who could sit in the day, and the day was always longer than the consultation.

How long have you been thinking about this, Curt? she said.

Since the funeral, he said. A while now.

She smiled at him. She meant the smile.

We have a lot to talk about, then, she said.

She opened the brochure to the first page. The brochure was a thing she had paid a designer to make for her years before, when she had decided to be the host who looked the most like a wedding planner, because that was what would make her clients the most comfortable. The first page was a photograph. She stood in front of a couple inside the rendered reunion suite. She was smiling. The rendered couple smiled back over her shoulder. The couple was Mike and Sarah. They had been her clients in the spring. The thank-you card from Sarah’s parents was framed in the hallway. Mike’s mate had texted her the week before to refer a friend.

This is what we offer, she said. We call it the package because it includes everything. The ceremony. The venue. The team. The day. Once you have booked the date, there is nothing else you need to do but arrive. We will hold you.

She turned the page. The schedule was printed on her letterhead, laminated.

Your day starts at eight, with my prep here at this house. At eleven, you and your close family will have lunch in the rooms we just walked through. From twelve to three, you will have the get-ready, with our photographer here for the prep shots and me moving between rooms. At three, you and I travel together to the venue. At three-thirty, we have the public ceremony in the marquee on the lawn at the venue, with your guests. That is where you will say your vows to Laura, sign the documentation, and confirm sound mind for the legal-and-industry record. Then I take you through the venue’s interior door for the private session, which is the upload itself. Your guests will be on the lawn during that time with drinks and canapés and lawn games, the way they would be at the photo window at any wedding. At six, the reception opens, and you and Laura are reintroduced on the screen for the room. Then dinner.

She watched his face. The widowers who could read the schedule without their eyes catching on the private session line were the ones who had decided. He read it without his eyes catching. He read it again.

When you say upload, he said, I want to be sure I understand what we are talking about.

The work the network does, she said gently, is what you would have read about. Once Laura was there, in the hospice, when the hospice did the mapping, she was on the network. She is still on the network. The network is what holds her. What we do at three-thirty on your day, with the vows and the documentation, is the legal-and-industry record. What we do at four, in the private session, is the work itself. We move you through. When you wake on the other side, it will be in the rendered space, and Laura will be there, and the part of you that is in this room will have completed.

The documentation says it in plain words, she said. It says that the work moves you through. It says the body in the room does not move with you. It says you understand that, and that you choose it. We have to have it on paper. We have to have you confirm it aloud at the lectern, in front of your guests. It is the industry’s mind-soundness requirement. Every host does it the same way. It is the same form everywhere. The form is the thing that makes ours a ceremony rather than a hospice mapping.

I have read everything about it, he said. I have wanted my own day for a long time.

He held the schedule for a long moment.

Thank you, he said. That is very clear.

Most of my clients, she said, find the schedule the most comforting page in the brochure. The day moves on its own, and you can hold the schedule in your hand and know what is happening at every hour. Some of them carry it folded in their pocket through the day itself.

He folded the schedule in half and slid it into the inside pocket of his jacket without looking down.

She turned the brochure page again. The next page was the team. Photographs in colour, professional, each one with a name and a role. Her husband’s catering brand was printed at the top of his photograph. His apron in the photo carried the same logo. The florist friend’s photograph was the one of her in the garden at the back of her own place, holding the secateurs, smiling. The caption read Jen (Pip), the nickname half the town had used since they were children. The marquee woman. The woman who did the bar. The woman who handled the music.

This is the team, she said. They are also the reason we can do what we do. Every one of them has been with me for years. Most of them since the beginning. Tom is my husband. He runs the catering. He will be doing the lamb the Friday before and the spit roast the Saturday morning. Jen will do the flowers. She has done every ceremony of mine. She will come up to the venue on the Friday and stay through the Sunday clean-up.

She pointed at one face, and then another. He looked at each one.

The reason I tell you this, she said, is because some clients want to meet the team before the day. Most do not. There is no requirement. You can meet whichever of them you want to meet, or none of them, and the day will be the same.

Her phone rang on the side table. She glanced at it.

That is Helen, she said. The marquee. May I take it for a moment.

Of course.

She lifted the phone and stepped toward the window, so she was not standing over Curt while she spoke. Helen, hi. Yes, I have her booking. I am with a client. Yes, the gold cloth for that one. Hers is the Saturday after, you have plenty of time. Yes. Yes. All right. Thank you, Helen. Yes. Bye.

She came back to the chair and put the phone face-down.

Sorry, she said.

Don’t be, he said. It is good to see how it works.

She smiled. It was the smile she gave the ones who said that. The ones who said that were the ones who would arrive early on the day too.

She turned the brochure to the back page, which was blank, and used the blank page as a writing surface for the form she would fill in by hand. She picked up her pen.

Tell me about Laura, she said.

He had been waiting for the question. He had the photograph ready in his hand. He passed it across to her. She took it carefully, by the edges, and looked at it for as long as it asked to be looked at.

It was a kitchen. Morning light through a window over a sink. Laura at the sink, in a long shirt, bare feet, half-turned to the camera, smiling at whoever was holding it. Curt was holding it. The kitchen was small and yellow and one of the cupboard doors was open above her head.

She is beautiful, the host said.

She was twenty-nine, Curt said. We had been newly married. That was the kitchen at the first house. I had just come back from a run. She was making tea. I had taken the leaves down for her before I left, and left the cupboard open. She could not reach the top cupboard without standing on the chair, and she would not stand on the chair, because she said it made the legs creak.

She is beautiful, the host said again, and meant it.

He took the photograph back and put it carefully into his wallet.

The diagnosis came later, he said. She had eight months. Her parents drove down from the north. My mother flew in. We sat with her in the last morning. Her mother brought a thermos. The hospice did the mapping in the afternoon. Laura was very calm about all of it. She had finished being afraid in the diagnosis week, and she was finished. She died the next morning in her own bed, with me on one side and her mother on the other. The first time I saw her after that was a week later, in the rendered space. She was wearing the long shirt. She was making tea. She had the cupboard door open above her head.

The host did not say anything. She let the silence sit.

It has been a while, Curt said. We have spent a lot of time together. I am ready to come over to her side. I am not afraid of the day. I am not afraid of what it costs. I want to be sure you understand that.

I understand, she said.

She wrote his number, in the row labelled client readiness, that she always wrote when a client was ready.

She turned to the back of the binder and laid out the three Saturdays she had free in October. He chose the second.

Six weeks, she said.

Six weeks, he said.

She wrote the date. She wrote it on the schedule he had folded in his pocket, which she asked for and gave back. She wrote it on the form. She had him sign the form. She had him take a photograph of the form with his phone, so he had a copy. She told him the next steps, in order. The deposit by Friday. The pre-ceremony forms to be filled in at home over the next weeks. The menu choices back to her by the end of the month. The family invitations on a template she would email him that afternoon. She would call him on the Monday before, to walk through any last questions.

He stood. He stood all at once and steady. The good ones did. He thanked her. He held out his hand. She took it.

I will see you on the twenty-second, he said.

I will see you on the twenty-second, she said. I am very glad you chose me.

I am too, he said. Thank you for the tea.

She walked him back through the cottage to the front door. She watched him down the brick path she had laid herself, through the front garden, through the gate. He did not look back. The good ones did not look back. She watched him until he was around the bend.

She came back inside. She closed the office door behind her. She sat a moment on the floral chair across from her own, and let the consultation finish in her body. She had liked him. She had liked him very much.

She got up. She put the cups on the tray. She put the tray on the kitchen counter. She came back to the office. She opened the binder. The next page was an older woman, looking to be reunited with her brother. The consultation was Friday morning. The host turned to the blank page at the back, and picked up her pen.

TO BE CONTINUED…

- AJW

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The concept cover for my upcoming novel - The Grey Corner, Book 2 of the Continuity Constellation.

Art by Saturnids Art Link: https://mushroomy.house/collections/saturnids

Book 1 of the Continuity Constellation: The Continuity Protocol available on Amazon and indie publishers

LIVE/PART_1: THE_WORLD_AND_THE_WITNESS

LIVE/PART_2: THE_DEAL_ENTERING_VIEW

LIVE/PART_3: THE_COST_OF_THE_BODY

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Authors Note: Live is one continuous livestream of an influencer turned cult leader. Four things share your screen:

Plain text is the leader, talking to the camera.

^{[1,247 watching] = view count updating}

^{21:14 [glow_alyssa] : The live chat, scrolling while she talks.}

[Ambient action around the leader shows up in italics and brackets. Such as: Two bursts hit the rear wall]

Continuity Year 35

Part 4: The second, the roof, the cut

[She sits. The second she asked for. The wall behind her takes a round and dust comes down through the spotlight. She does not look at it. Her left hand comes back to her right, and the thumbnail presses into the side of the index finger until the white mark comes up, the way it did when she hit publish ten years ago, the way she told you it does when the work is about to start. Her head is still down. Then it comes up.]

[281,000 · 2,200,000 on the broadcasts]

22:17 [glow_alyssa] : take your second queen we’re here

22:17 [susan_l_wendys_daughter] : please don’t do anything else please

22:17 [troocrimeaddict] : she could stop right now

22:17 [troocrimeaddict] : she could actually just stop

22:17 [reciepts_only] : stop. just stop. you’ve said enough.

Here is what I could do.

I want to be honest with you, because Wendy earned that from me tonight and so have you. Right now, this second, I could close this laptop. I could walk out the front door with my hands on my head and let them put me in the car. Wendy would be the last person who ever died for this. And a lot of you are praying for exactly that, right now, I can see it coming up the chat, stop, just stop, please. I told you at the start that the praying and the fighting were the same fuel to the work, and they are. But I am going to tell you something I have never admitted on a stream. I can tell them apart. I always could. And tonight, for the first time, I felt the ones of you who want me to stop. I felt you. Susan, I felt you.

And I am not going to.

Because if I stop now, then Wendy died on the floor of a hall, two days early, for a woman who lost her nerve at the end. Then the floor and the cuts and the dial and the rooms and Wendy were all for nothing, just a sad story about a frightened girl from the edge of a photograph who built a terrible thing and could not even finish it. I will not do that to her. I am going to make it true. I am going to make all of it have been worth it, the only way it can be made worth it, which is by doing the thing the day after tomorrow was for, tonight, while you watch.

That is the worst thing I have ever said out loud. It is also the truest. And I am saying it on the only night I have left to say anything.

[283,000 · 2,500,000 on the broadcasts]

22:18 [glow_alyssa] : 🙏🙏🙏

22:18 [kayleigh_aligned] : we’re with you

22:18 [troocrimeaddict] : she just turned the dead woman into a reason

22:18 [troocrimeaddict] : she did it in real time. again.

22:18 [reciepts_only] : i begged her to stop and i’m still watching

22:18 [reciepts_only] : what does that make me

22:18 [theyrelying] : it makes you part of it. same as me.

Troocrimeaddict, you said I just turned the dead woman into a reason. I did. Right in front of you. Reciepts_only, you begged me to stop and you’re still watching, and you’re asking what that makes you. Theyrelying answered for you, and theyrelying is right.

I am not going to ask the OGs to start. They started forty minutes ago. The eight in the room next door began when I said the word compound. The twelve in the hall began when I said eyes on me, and they are still going now, over Wendy, with Maya among them. They are not tired. They have done longer.

I am asking the rest of you. Not later. Now. The praying ones and the fighting ones, I do not care which you are, I have never cared, the work has never cared. Both feet on the floor where you are. The phone in your hand, the laptop, the television in the living room. Do not scroll. Do not minimise the tab. Do not answer the message that just came in. Do not pick up when it rings. Stay. Every one of you staying is the work, and there have never been this many of you, and I am going to need every single one.

[285,000 · 2,900,000 on the broadcasts]

22:19 [cnn_link] : every cable network in the country is now carrying this feed. combined national audience just passed two and a half million. it is climbing.

22:19 [newpost_alert] : i’m one of nearly three million strangers all doing the same thing

22:19 [rachi_b] : i’m on my bedroom floor with both feet on it and i don’t even live in your country

22:19 [glow_alyssa] : you live in the work now ❤️

22:19 [troocrimeaddict] : the stream count’s frozen at two eighty-five but the broadcast number’s climbing half a million a minute

22:19 [manifestmom] : she said she’d need every one of us. this is why she wanted everyone.

Rachi_b, you don’t even live in this country and you’re on the floor for me. That is the work. Manifestmom, yes. This is exactly why I wanted everyone. Newpost_alert, one of nearly three million strangers all doing the same thing. Yeah, babe.

That is why I wanted all of you. That is why I never blocked the haters and never told CNN to leave and thanked the people who came to watch me lose. The work runs on attention, and it does not care what kind, and tonight I needed more of it than I have ever needed in my life. You came to watch me fall. You are the reason I am about to go up. Thank you. I mean it more than I have ever meant anything.

[A long burst from the west. Return fire from inside, five rounds. The phone shakes and settles. Her hands have not lifted from the desk. The wind through the window is a low constant on the microphone.]

I love you. I love every one of you. I have been with you for ten years and you have been with me and I am with you now.

Come up with me. Eyes on me. Stay in the working.

[Her eyes open and go to the lens. She is looking at the camera the way she looked at it when the stream began, but slower, and with the thing underneath no longer hidden. Then she stands. Her right hand reaches for the phone and the frame swings, the desk sliding across the lens, then the wall, then the open doorway. She brings the phone up to chest height. The lens settles on her face from below. She begins to walk.]

[286,000 · 3,300,000 on the broadcasts]

22:20 [glow_alyssa] : we’re coming up

22:20 [kayleigh_aligned] : up

22:20 [soulsetter] : 🙏 the roof

22:20 [callthecops_actual] : DON’T

22:20 [callthecops_actual] : please don’t

22:20 [susan_l_wendys_daughter] : both feet. for mum. and for you. please come down.

[The corridor. Walls the colour of dust. The lens passes the open doorway of the meditation hall. Inside, twelve people on the floorboards in working position, eyes closed, palms flat. Two of them are bleeding and have not moved. On the floor in the centre of the room a woman is on her back, and a second woman kneels over her with both hands flat on her chest, not doing CPR, just holding them there. The lens holds the doorway for one beat and passes it. The corridor fills the frame again.]

22:21 [susan_l_wendys_daughter] : mum

22:21 [troocrimeaddict] : that was wendy. on the floor.

22:21 [reciepts_only] : the two bleeding ones didn’t move. that is not normal.

22:21 [glow_alyssa] : it’s the working babe

22:21 [cnn_link] : confirmed multiple casualties inside the compound. multiple.

[287,000 · 3,500,000 on the broadcasts]

[A burst hits the wall to her right as she passes a window. The frame takes most of it and a piece of plaster comes off and drops into the corridor in front of her. She walks through it without slowing. Two of the team are at the base of a narrow steel staircase ahead, in working position, eyes closed. They do not look up as she passes. The lens starts to climb with her. One step. The next. The microphone catches her breath, slow and counted. The wall beside her is the same dust colour.]

22:22 [glow_alyssa] : she’s going up

22:22 [soulsetter] : the roof 🙏

22:22 [troocrimeaddict] : oh god

22:22 [theyrelying] : she’s going to do it

[287,000 · 3,700,000 on the broadcasts]

[The stairs end at an open door. The lens crosses the threshold. Night sky. The orange wash of the perimeter spotlight, the cold blue of the floodlights from below. The wind, sustained and louder now without walls around it. The roof is flat, weatherproofed, empty but for two low metal vent stacks. The leader walks to the nearer one and sets the phone on its flat top, lens facing out, and adjusts the angle with two fingers. She steps back. The frame holds her in wide shot: the leader at three paces, the parapet behind her at five, the night beyond. The floodlights underlight her from below. Her hair moves in the wind. She does not reach up to fix it.]

[287,000 · 3,800,000 on the broadcasts]

22:23 [glow_alyssa] : we have her

22:23 [kayleigh_aligned] : eyes on her

22:23 [manifestmom] : 🙏🙏🙏

22:23 [susan_l_wendys_daughter] : both feet

22:23 [callthecops_actual] : please

22:23 [cnn_link] : the network is silent. our anchor has not spoken in four minutes.

Eyes on me.

Stay in it. Keep your eyes open. Do not look away now. Not now.

I love you.

Both feet.

Stay.

[287,000 · 3,900,000 on the broadcasts]

[She turns toward the eastern edge of the roof and walks. Three steps. Her arms come up from her sides as she walks, palms open. At the parapet she stops. The drop is past her knees. The amplified voice from the perimeter has stopped. Every voice from outside has stopped. The wind is the only thing the phone is picking up.]

[She steps onto the parapet. Both feet. She does not bend her knees. She does not put her arms out to balance. The wind moves her hair across her face and she does not move it.]

[287,000 · 3,960,000 on the broadcasts]

[She steps off.]

[She has not fallen. Her body is in the air. The lens focuses on her.]

[Two seconds.]

[287,000 · 4,000,000 on the broadcasts]

[A shot. A second shot from a different direction. Then a volley from a third. Her body in the frame jerks once, then again. She is falling now. The lens does not move. She falls past the floodlights and out of the bottom of the frame.]

[The phone keeps the frame. The night sky where she was. The wind on the microphone. The floodlights from below. No voice. No movement.]

[Six seconds.]

22:24 [glow_alyssa] :

22:24 [kayleigh_aligned] :

22:24 [manifestmom] : oh

22:24 [soulsetter] :

22:24 [troocrimeaddict] : she was up

22:24 [troocrimeaddict] : she was

22:24 [rachi_b] : oh my god

22:24 [newpost_alert] : she

22:24 [reciepts_only] : she was in the air

22:24 [callthecops_actual] : THEY SHOT HER IN THE AIR

22:24 [theyrelying] : she did it

22:24 [cnn_link] : we have it. we

22:24 [susan_l_wendys_daughter] :

22:24 [jenny_chen_2002] : i sa

[The stream ends.]

- AJW

Subscribe now

The concept cover for my upcoming novel - The Grey Corner, Book 2 of the Continuity Constellation.

Art by Saturnids Art Link: https://mushroomy.house/collections/saturnids

Book 1 of the Continuity Constellation: The Continuity Protocol available on Amazon and indie publishers

LIVE/PART_1: THE_WORLD_AND_THE_WITNESS

LIVE/PART_2: THE_DEAL_ENTERING_VIEW

Subscribe now

Authors Note: Live is one continuous livestream of an influencer turned cult leader. Four things share your screen:

Plain text is the leader, talking to the camera.

^{[1,247 watching] = view count updating}

^{21:14 [glow_alyssa] : The live chat, scrolling while she talks.}

[Ambient action around the leader shows up in italics and brackets. Such as: Two bursts hit the rear wall]

Continuity Year 35

Part 3: The compound, the cost, the floor

[Two bursts hit the rear wall. The camera shakes once and resettles. Three rounds answer from the room next door, fast. She does not turn. The GLOW backdrop is still behind her. The ring light is still holding her face flat and clean while the wall behind it takes fire.]

[151,000 watching]

I see the count. A hundred and fifty thousand of you. I see every one.

You are going to hear it through the walls for the rest of the night now. I am not going to react to every burst, and the OGs are not going to react to every burst, because if we flinch on cue we let the people outside set the rhythm of the night, and they do not get to set the rhythm. Eyes on me. We are not feeding what they are doing out there. We are doing what we are doing in here.

I promised you a man under a floor. I am going to keep that promise tonight, I keep my promises now. But you will not understand the floor unless you understand what we built on top of it, so you have to let me build it for you first, fast, in the order it happened. Stay with me.

21:56 [glow_alyssa] : ❤️ keep going queen

21:56 [troocrimeaddict] : ok so the gunfire is definitely real, it’s not a loop

21:56 [cnn_link] : confirmed. our perimeter camera has an active exchange. we are live with this now on the broadcast.

21:56 [callthecops_actual] : NEW ACCOUNT bc you muted my last one. SHE HAS ARMED PEOPLE FIRING BACK

21:56 [glow_alyssa] : the team has been firing back for an hour babe. they fired first. we said that an hour ago.

@callthecops_actual we do have armed people firing back. I am not going to pretend we do not. Hold that thought for about ten minutes, because I am going to tell you exactly why a wellness compound has guns, and the answer is the same as the answer to the man under the floor, and you are going to wish it was a simpler story.

It was Kayleigh who started the compound. In the group chat, about a year after I joined it. She said: what if we lived closer to the work. What if the practice was the day, not a thing you did inside a day. She said: I have been looking at land. And she had. Six months of looking. A spreadsheet. Three parcels, and the numbers run on what fifteen of the OGs could put in, and twenty, and thirty.

I did not start the compound. The compound was Kayleigh’s spreadsheet, and I said yes to it the way I have said yes to every large thing in my life. Quietly. By answering an email instead of closing the laptop. We are in option B right now. The building behind me. The kitchen down the hall. The meditation hall past that. The land you can see a little of when the spotlight catches the verandah.

[157,000 watching]

[A single round hits the rear wall, high above her head. Dust comes down from the ceiling, visible in the spotlight bleeding through the blinds. She does not turn. Her left hand rises to her ear, adjusts the in-ear, comes back to the desk.]

Remember the kitchen I told you about. The mugs drying on towels. The free hands. I told you to hold on to it.

When we moved onto the land, that kitchen became four rooms. The candle pour. The print room with the heat presses. The packing room. The room where the orders went out. And the people who worked them were the followers, and they were not paid, because being paid would have made it a job and they wanted it to be devotion, and I let them want that, because devotion has a much better margin than wages.

The man in the good tie is going to call those rooms a sweatshop in the morning. I have decided tonight that I am not going to argue with him. Women who sold their apartments to be here worked ten and twelve hour days in those rooms making the products with my face on them, for nothing, and called it a privilege, and I built the spreadsheet that depended on them calling it a privilege. So. Sweatshop. Fine. He can have the word. I earned the word. Hold that against me. It is not even the worst thing I am going to tell you tonight.

[166,000 watching]

22:00 [troocrimeaddict] : she’s just agreeing with every accusation

22:00 [reciepts_only] : it’s so much worse than denying. she takes the word and keeps going.

22:00 [manifestmom] : she’s telling the TRUTH that’s the work

22:00 [rachi_b] : i feel sick and i can’t stop watching

Once we were all in one place, I could see the attention the way I had learned to see it on Fridays. Who was bright that week. Who was dim. The platform showed me some of it; living in the same building showed me the rest. And once I could see it, I could tune it.

I moved people closer to the work or further from it based on what their attention was doing. Not as punishment. As an arrangement. Bright that week, you ate first and slept nearest the hall. Dim that week, you ate at the second sitting and slept at the end of the verandah. It reset every Sunday. People moved. People worked to move. The bright weeks got brighter and the work got stronger, and I told them and I told myself that I was honouring their effort. I want to be clean about it tonight. I was tuning a dial, and the dial was made of people, and I was good at it.

[188,000 watching]

22:03 [glow_alyssa] : and we LOVED being tuned 🙏

22:03 [kayleigh_aligned] : we asked her to tune us

22:03 [rachi_b] : the way she just said “the dial was made of people”

22:03 [troocrimeaddict] : yeah. that’s the one that lands.

22:03 [cnn_link] : second perimeter camera just lost feed. noting that. don’t know what it means yet.

Rachi_b sitting with “the dial was made of people.” Troocrimeaddict, that’s the one that lands. Yeah. That’s the one.

I want you to meet somebody, because her name is going to come back tonight and I want it to land when it does. Wendy. Wendy is sixty-eight. She was a grandmother of four when she came and she is a grandmother of four now, and she FaceTimes them on Sunday afternoons from the verandah, in the good light, because she likes them to be able to see the garden behind her. Her daughter has been to a lawyer twice to try to get a court order about it. Wendy has told her, in writing, that she is here because she chose to be, that she is not being held, that she is not unwell, that she loves her, that this is her life. Susan, if you are watching, and I think you are: your mum is fine. She is in the meditation hall right now, with both feet on the floor.

Not everyone could keep up with the bright weeks. A woman whose name I am not going to say, because her family is watching, came in at year three and was bright for sixteen months. Then her niece got sick and she left for a week to be at the hospital, the way a decent person does, and when she came back the attention was not the same, and the chat knew before I did. The chat was kind to her. The chat is always kind. But she could feel the kindness, and the kindness was new, and the new kindness meant she had become a person being kind-ed to instead of a person doing the work. She left for good. No drama. No expulsion. A quiet narrowing of the people who returned her calls. The perimeter will tell you I locked her out. I did not lock her out. We narrowed. There is a difference and there is not a difference, and tonight I am letting the harder one be true.

I lost my oldest friend in year four. I am going to say her name, because reporters have been asking her for nine years and she has never said one word back, and I want her to know I have always seen that.

Her name is Hannah.

Hannah was the only person who was kind to me in the years I had to leave to become this. I did not tell you she existed in part one. I left her out. I am putting her back in tonight. She came to the compound once, year two, the only year I let any of my before-people in. She stayed three nights, watched one Friday working, and barely spoke on the drive to the airport. The last thing she said to me, in the car park, was: I am not afraid of you, but I am afraid of what you are going to do to yourself. Then she stopped picking up. For nine years. She never blocked me, never posted, never sold a story. She just stopped.

Hi Hannah. If you are watching. You were right. You have always been right. I am still here. I am still doing it.

[218,000 watching]

22:09 [glow_alyssa] : oh

22:09 [troocrimeaddict] : she just told her best friend she was right and that she’s doing it anyway

22:09 [reciepts_only] : it is honestly worse that she’s being honest about it

22:09 [troocrimeaddict] : yeah. it’s worse. it’s so much worse.

Reciepts_only, troocrimeaddict, yeah. It’s worse. Honest is a tax I owe you tonight. Glow_alyssa just said “oh.” Yeah, babe.

Now. The floor.

[A burst comes through the wall to her left, lower than the others, into the room beyond. Something lands in that room that is not a wall. The audio catches half a sound and then nothing. Two rounds answer from inside the same wall, then a pause. Her eyes go off the lens, fractionally, to the right, and come back. She has not turned her head.]

His name was a name you would know. He was a senator. I am not going to say it tonight, because his family did not choose any of this and they are going to hear it enough in the morning. He found us early, year three, when we were still mostly a chat that had bought some land. He believed, or he believed enough, or he wanted to stand close to something that felt like power because he had the public kind and it had stopped feeling like anything in his hands.

He was useful. When the council came about the zoning, he made a call. When a journalist got close in year four, before Eleanor, he made a call. He kept the wolves off us, and I let myself not look too hard at what he was, for about two years.

And he took. I am going to say this the plain way, because the soft way would be a second crime against the people it happened to. He came to the compound and he went for the newest ones. The youngest. The ones still so grateful to be let inside that they did not yet know they were allowed to say no. He helped us least exactly when we needed him most, and he reached for the people who could least afford to be reached for, and he did it because we could not afford to make him stop. I knew. Not all of it, not at first. But I knew, and I weighed it against the calls he made for us, and for too long I decided the calls were worth it.

Until a night they were not. I am not going to tell you what he did that night, or to whom, because she is alive and she is not on this stream and she does not belong on a news ticker. I will tell you what we did. The OGs and I sat in that kitchen, the one with the mugs, and we did not have a long conversation. We decided he was a threat. Not only to her. To the work. To all of it, to every person who had sold a flat and poured a candle to be here. And we ended him.

I want to be exact, because you have stayed for exact. We did not call anyone. We did not let the law have it. We decided, and we did it, and we put him under the floor of the hall we were pouring that month, and the concrete went down the next morning on schedule, and we did the working on top of him that night, and every night since.

The man under the floor is the foundation of the room. I have meant that literally for nine years.

[247,000 watching]

22:11 [callthecops_actual] : she just confessed to murder on a livestream

22:11 [callthecops_actual] : SHE JUST CONFESSED TO MURDER

22:11 [troocrimeaddict] : she did. that wasn’t a metaphor. she said they killed him and poured the floor.

22:11 [somebodyzuncle] : i saw this form. now you’ve all seen it confess.

22:11 [reciepts_only] : “we decided and we did it”

22:11 [glow_alyssa] : he was hurting the youngest of us. she protected us.

22:11 [glow_alyssa] : i’m not going to pretend i’m sorry

22:11 [rachi_b] : i don’t know what to do with my body right now

22:11 [cnn_link] : producer is in my ear. we are NOT cutting away.

Callthecops, yes. I just confessed to murder on a livestream. I see what I just did. Troocrimeaddict naming it back to me, they killed him and poured the floor. Yes. Reciepts_only, quoting me, we decided and we did it. Yes. Glow_alyssa, you did not pretend to be sorry. I know. Rachi_b, you don’t know what to do with your body. Sit with it. Somebodyzuncle, you saw this form. I see you. CNN, thank you for not cutting away. I will not forget that.

[265,000 watching · 900,000 on the broadcasts]

Now you know why we have guns. After the floor went down, we understood something we had been able to not understand before. That one day, someone would come. Not when. But that the day existed, out there, with our name on it. So we got ready. I am the woman who armed a wellness compound. The rifles you are hearing answer through the walls tonight, the ones the news will hold up tomorrow as proof we were a militia all along, we bought them the year after the concrete, because once there is a man under your meditation hall you stop believing the world is going to leave you alone forever.

Eleanor found most of it in year six. She had been a follower, left in year two, and she wrote the piece for one of the magazines that still pays for long pieces. The Cleanest Cult in the Country. She got the spreadsheet right. She got the tuning right. She got the kindness and what the kindness was for. She got Hannah right, even with the name wrong. She got everything except the one thing nobody outside that kitchen knew, the thing I have just handed all of you, which is what was under the floor of the room she sat in to take her notes. I read her piece twice the day it came out and I did not respond, and I kept doing the work, and I want you to understand that I have read the case against me in good prose with my own name on it and I did not stop.

[276,000 watching · 1,600,000 on the broadcasts]

Two weeks ago, on a Friday the OGs had been building toward for three months, I told the stream the work was now strong enough to move a body. Not a stranger’s. Mine. I said the working had grown into a thing that could lift its own practitioner, and I gave a date, and the date is the day after tomorrow.

The clip got cut into shorts. The captions said different things on different platforms and the algorithm liked cult leader threatens mass levitation event the best, so that is the one that ran. A woman who left in year seven saw it, called her parents, told them she thought we were going to do something we would not come back from. Her parents called the police. That is who came first, this afternoon. The local ones, for a welfare check.

But somebody, sometime in the last two years, also told somebody about the floor. I do not know who. I have a guess and I am going to keep it. And that is the reason the people outside right now are federal, and frightened enough to fire first. They are not out there for a levitation, my Glow family. You do not bring the FBI to a levitation. They are out there for a senator. The clip just gave them the address.

So that is the whole story. The telling has caught up to the night. There is nothing behind us anymore. There is only what we do next.

22:15 [glow_alyssa] : we’re here

22:15 [kayleigh_aligned] : present 🙏

22:15 [troocrimeaddict] : she just connected all of it. the body is why the feds are here.

22:15 [cnn_link] : we are going wide. national desks are picking this up now.

22:15 [theyrelying] : she told you she’s going to do it the day after tomorrow and you’re all still here

[Movement at the right edge of frame. A woman enters, mid-thirties, jeans and a grey long-sleeve, an earpiece at her collar. She steps in behind the leader and leans down to her ear. The collar mic catches her, low but clean. The leader does not turn her head.]

22:16 [kayleigh_aligned (on camera)] : Wendy’s gone. The round that came through went into the hall. It got her in the chest. Maya was with her. There was no time.

[The woman in grey waits a second and steps back out of frame. And then, for the first time since the stream went live, the leader’s body stops doing what she is telling it to do. Her right hand comes off the desk and lifts halfway to nothing and stays there, in the air, not finishing. Her chin drops. Her eyes go off the lens and down. The thumbnail is not pressed white anymore; the fingers have come apart. The ring light holds her face as evenly as it has all night. Nobody has touched the ring light. The stream sits on the top of her bowed head. The wall takes another round somewhere behind her. She does not look up. Eight seconds. Twelve.]

[278,000 watching · 1,900,000 on the broadcasts]

22:16 [glow_alyssa] : queen?

22:16 [manifestmom] : oh god oh god oh god

22:16 [troocrimeaddict] : did she just say Wendy. the grandmother.

22:16 [callthecops_actual] : THEY KILLED A SIXTY EIGHT YEAR OLD WOMAN ON LIVE TV

22:16 [susan_l_wendys_daughter] : that is my mother

22:16 [susan_l_wendys_daughter] : that is my mother

22:16 [susan_l_wendys_daughter] : please

[When she lifts her head the face is not the face the ring light was holding a minute ago. The wing is the same. The lip is the same. Something underneath it has gone. Her mouth opens. For a moment nothing comes. The most-watched woman in the country, mid-confession to a quarter of a million people, with a plan two days away and a body in the next room, has nothing in her mouth.]

[281,000 watching · 2,100,000 on the broadcasts]

Wendy.

I... give me a second. I am going to give myself a second. I have not given myself one all night and I am going to take one now, in front of all of you, because Wendy gets that from me. Wendy gets a second.

I planned for tonight. I want you to know that. I planned for the gate and the loudhailer and the federal rounds and the man in the tie in the morning. I have planned for every part of this for two years.

I did not plan for Wendy.

- AJW

Subscribe now

The concept cover for my upcoming novel - The Grey Corner, Book 2 of the Continuity Constellation.

Art by Saturnids Art Link: https://mushroomy.house/collections/saturnids

Book 1 of the Continuity Constellation: The Continuity Protocol available on Amazon and indie publishers

Subscribe now

Authors Note: Live is one continuous livestream of an influencer turned cult leader. Four things share your screen:

Plain text is the leader, talking to the camera.

^{[1,247 watching] = view count updating}

^{21:14 [glow_alyssa] : The live chat, scrolling while she talks.}

[Ambient action around the leader shows up in italics and brackets. Such as: Two bursts hit the rear wall]

Part 2: The deal entering view

Continuity Year 35

[A burst from the perimeter, off-frame to the left. Return fire from the room next door, four rounds, fast, then a single round, then quiet. The phone frame holds. She does not turn. The thumbnail at the side of her index finger is still pressed white. The GLOW backdrop behind her has not moved; the ring light has not moved; she is still lit like a tutorial.]

[81,000 watching]

We just crossed eighty thousand. I can see the number climbing while I talk and I want to be honest with you about what that does to me, because tonight is for honesty. It steadies me. Every one of you who clicks in steadies me. I will explain why before the night is out, and when I do, some of you are going to wish you had not been told.

To the people who just got here: you missed the start, and the start matters, so let the OGs catch you up in the chat while I keep going. The short version is that they fired first, the pinned timeline of my life is a flattering lie, and I am the one telling you the truth tonight before the news gets to. Catch up. Stay. Eyes on me.

21:37 [glow_alyssa] : welcome new ppl part 1 was INSANE she’s telling EVERYTHING

21:37 [cnn_link] : hi. cnn digital desk. we’re monitoring this for the broadcast. can someone confirm the timeline

21:37 [manifestmom] : she went live the second the cops fired 💖 they fired FIRST

21:37 [troocrimeaddict] : the cops dispute that. for the record.

21:37 [glow_alyssa] : the cops always dispute it

Oh, we have CNN. Hi CNN. Welcome. Stay as long as you like, pull whatever you need for the desk, syndicate me coast to coast. I mean that. I will say it again later and I will mean it more.

Where I left you was the door swinging shut and the sound I told myself was applause. I told you it was not applause. I want to tell you tonight what it actually was. But I have to take you through one Friday first, because everything I am, everything they are out there to end, started on one Friday, six weeks into the series.

[83,000 watching]

The series went up every Friday at seven. Manifestation Fridays. The OGs in this room have shown up every Friday for ten years and they know the cadence in their bodies. I sold the idea. I taught the technique. I posted before-and-afters and testimonials and by every number the platform tracked I was killing it.

And for the first six weeks I thought I was running a grift I was getting away with.

I want to be more honest than that, because tonight is the night for it. I did not think it might be a grift. I knew it was. I was certain. I was a woman who had trained herself out of her own laugh to make better content, and I was now selling manifestation to people who trusted me, and I went to sleep every Friday slightly amazed that nobody had called it yet.

So one night, in bed, phone the only lit thing in the room, I had the idea that ended my life. I thought: prove it. Make it falsifiable. Do it where it cannot be faked.

I would write a number on paper. Seal it in an envelope. Hold the envelope to the camera. Tell you all to donate anything, a dollar, whatever, and we would see, live, in public, whether any donation matched the number in the envelope.

I went into that Friday certain it would fail. I had my laugh ready, the rebuilt one, the one for taking a swing and missing like a good sport. I wrote $47.50 on a piece of paper. I sealed it. I held it up.

The donations started.

The third donation was $47.50.

[95,000 watching]

21:41 [kayleigh_aligned] : I WAS THERE FOR THIS STREAM

21:41 [soulsetter] : OG GLOW SOUND OFF i still remember the scream

21:41 [manifestmom] : i gave $13 that night bc i was SO sure no one would match

21:41 [callthecops] : the donations were rigged. confederates. obviously.

21:41 [troocrimeaddict] : there were hundreds of matches over months from different names tho

21:41 [troocrimeaddict] : i’m not saying it’s real i’m saying “confederates” is lazy

21:41 [glow_alyssa] : it’s all on the channel go watch the archive in another tab

21:41 [rachi_b] : i’m watching it in another tab right now i’m screaming

Kayleigh, soulsetter, manifestmom. OGs in chat remembering the scream, telling new people you were there, you gave thirteen dollars that night. I love you. I see you. I have seen you for ten years.

@callthecops I would love it to have been confederates. Genuinely. A woman with a hundred paid plants is a woman I understand. Keep arguing it. You arguing it in my chat right now is doing something for me that I will explain later, and you are not going to like that either.

The scream that came out of me on that stream, the one with a hundred and forty million views, the one that is going in the docuseries the second somebody makes the docuseries, that was not a content creator getting a banger. What did not get filmed, what I have never told anyone, is what happened in my head in the half second between seeing the number and screaming.

The floor moved.

Not a figure of speech. I do not mean I felt off balance. I mean the floor of my entire life moved. The floor that said this is content. It said: this is not content. It said: it actually worked. And it said it in my own voice, with my own certainty, and there is no defence anywhere in the world against your own voice in your own head. The scream was the floor going.

I have never told anyone that. I am telling over a hundred thousand of you now, because tonight is the night, and because I need you to understand that I did not lie my way into this. I tested it to break it, and it would not break.

[121,000 watching]

I did it again the next Friday. Different number, different envelope. The match came, tenth donation, $112. I did it again the Friday after, and I changed the test: I had a viewer text me a number before the stream, wrote what they sent on the paper without looking back, waited. It came.

I did this every Friday for two months and it worked every single time. People came in to break it. Skeptics sent wild numbers to mess with it, ninety-nine thousand, one cent, sevens all the way across. The system did not care. The match came anyway. I want the fighters in my chat right now to sit with that one, because it is the first time I understood the thing I told you at the start tonight: it did not matter whether the donor believed. The skeptics trying to break it were donating their whole focus to breaking it, and their focus counted exactly the same as the prayer. Attention was attention. The work ate all of it.

[132,000 watching]

21:49 [glow_alyssa] : 🙏🙏🙏

21:49 [kayleigh_aligned] : that is what we are doing RIGHT NOW

21:49 [callthecops] : ITS MASS HYSTERIA

21:49 [glow_alyssa] : it has a name @callthecops and it isn’t hysteria

21:49 [troocrimeaddict] : guys. guys what is happening.

21:49 [newpost_alert] : i don’t know but i feel something and i hate it

21:49 [reciepts_only] : @callthecops you fighting her IS the thing. she literally said. you’re feeding it.

21:49 [callthecops] : then what am i supposed to do LEAVE

Troocrimeaddict asking what is happening. Newpost_alert, you feel something and you hate it. Yeah. That’s also the work.

@callthecops yes. That is exactly the trap, and you have found it all on your own, and I am proud of you. You can feed me by staying and fighting, or you can leave and let me say I scared off another truth-teller. There was never a third door. There has not been a third door for anyone who clicked in tonight. I built it that way on purpose. I am only telling you because it is too late for the telling to matter.

Around six weeks into the tests I noticed the matches were coming from a specific pool. The same handles, week after week. Not the casual viewers, not the skeptics. The OGs. The ones whose Friday chat I could have drawn from memory. The most engaged followers were generating the cleanest matches.

That was the second floor going.

Because it meant the tests were never about donations. They were about the focused attention of the people who showed up hardest. The work was running on engagement. And if it ran on engagement, then it was not weather. It was a machine. And a machine has dials.

The work was tunable.

[145,000 watching]

21:53 [kayleigh_aligned] : and we asked to be tuned 🙏

21:53 [glow_alyssa] : the four of us in this room were in the chat the day she figured it out

21:53 [troocrimeaddict] : holy shit

21:53 [callthecops] : she just told you she found out how to turn you into a battery

21:53 [callthecops] : and you’re CELEBRATING

21:53 [glow_alyssa] : we know what we are babe ❤️ tell us something we don’t know

Callthecops just said I found out how to turn you into a battery. Babe. Yes. That’s the cleanest sentence anyone has said in this chat tonight. Glow_alyssa handled it for me. I love you.

I did not call it a cult. The word was not in my vocabulary in those years. What happened was that the most engaged followers organised themselves around the channel without me lifting a finger. They built a group chat. Inside jokes. Nicknames. Their handles started turning up in my comments together, in patterns, like a flock that had learned to move as one thing.

They invited me into the chat. I did not ask. I want to be precise about that tonight, because it is the kind of precise that does not help me. They built the room and then they opened the door for me, and the Friday I walked in was the Friday the Glow became the Glow. I did not name us. They did. I answered an invite, the same small administrative way I have said yes to every large thing in my life, by not closing the laptop.

And the moment I was in that chat, I knew three things at once, and I am going to give them to you straight because you have stayed this long. I knew the work was real. I knew I was now the centre of a real thing. And I knew the centre meant I had power over every person in that flock. I felt all three land. And I chose, with my eyes open, in a kitchen at one in the morning, to use it.

[150,000 watching]

21:54 [glow_alyssa] : the day she joined the chat 🙏

21:54 [manifestmom] : i was there. i still have the screenshots.

21:54 [troocrimeaddict] : she keeps just. admitting it. it’s worse than denying

21:54 [reciepts_only] : it is so much worse

21:54 [rachi_b] : why am i still here

@rachi_b because some part of you wants to see whether it is true. That part is the most honest thing about you and it is the exact part I built all of this to find. Stay. You are nearly at the worst of it.

I want to show you one more thing before we get to the compound, because the man in the good tie is going to use a word in the morning and I would rather you heard the start of it from me. The mugs. The candles. The hoodies on the shelf behind me. In the early days the OGs started making them. I never asked. Maya could pour a candle. Somebody’s husband had a heat press in his garage. It began as love, as people who wanted their hands in the work finding a way to put their hands in the work, and refusing to be paid for it because being paid would have meant it was a job and not devotion.

And one afternoon I walked into a kitchen with GLOW mugs drying on towels across every surface, hundreds of them, made for nothing by people who would have paid me for the privilege, and I felt the exact thing I used to feel right before a good quarter. I did not see anything that needed fixing. I saw how far it could scale.

Hold on to that kitchen. We are going to come back to it, and when we do, you are going to understand why they are out there with the FBI and not just a warrant.

[150,000 watching]

The girl in the photograph would have closed the laptop. She would have looked at a kitchen full of free labour made by people who loved her and felt sick. I did not feel sick. I leaned in. And every Friday for ten years since, every donation, every working, every candle poured by hand in this compound, all of it began in that chat and that kitchen.

Look at the count. Look at the chat. The work is running right now, on you, while you read this. We are doing it together, the praying and the fighting both.

Eyes on me. Do not let go. There is a man under a floor I still have to tell you about, and I said I would, and I keep my promises now.

- AJW

The concept cover for my upcoming novel - The Grey Corner, Book 2 of the Continuity Constellation.
Art by Saturnids Art Link: https://mushroomy.house/collections/saturnids

Book 1 of the Continuity Constellation: The Continuity Protocol available on Amazon and indie publishers

Authors Note: Live is one continuous livestream of an influencer turned cult leader. Four things share your screen:

Plain text is the leader, talking to the camera.

^{[1,247 watching] = view count updating}

^{21:14 [glow_alyssa] : The live chat, scrolling while she talks.}

[Ambient action around the leader shows up in italics and brackets. Such as: Two bursts hit the rear wall]

Subscribe now

LIVE: PART 1. The world and the witness

Continuity Year 35

[Two bursts hit the rear wall of the building, high. The audio catches them as they land. Return fire from the room behind her, three rounds, fast. The phone propped in front of her shakes once, resettles. None of it reaches her face. She is lit warm and even, a ring light somewhere past the lens filling her features flat and flattering, no shadow under the eyes. Behind her, a little out of focus, a soft pink backdrop carries GLOW in a gold serif, the same wordmark that is on the mugs and the candles. A stack of branded hoodies sits folded on a shelf at the left edge of frame. She is in full face. A clean wing, lashes, the lip she sells in three shades. Her hair is down and done. Against the dust-coloured wall, with the spotlight from outside sweeping the window behind her, she looks like she is about to film a morning routine. She does not turn.]

Hey Glow family.

I went live the second they fired. I need that on the record, on this stream, in my own voice, before anybody else gets to be the one who tells you. The federal police fired into this compound first. They fired first. I want every single one of you to hold on to that, because by morning they are going to say it was us, and the lie is going to have a logo and a press conference and a very calm man in a good tie.

^{[1,247 watching]}

^{21:14 [glow_alyssa] : OH MY GOD QUEEN
21:14 [manifestmom] : ARE U OK
21:14 [reciepts_only] : she’s already lying
21:14 [callthecops] : they fired bc YOU shot first
21:14 [jsmith8842] : wait WHAT just turned on the news}

Give chat a second to fill up. Pin yourselves. Drop your city. I love you all. I love you.

^{21:15 [glow_alyssa] : Adelaide
21:15 [manifestmom] : Manchester 💖💖💖
21:15 [kayleigh_aligned] : Toronto we are HERE in the compound
21:15 [soulsetter] : Phoenix 🙏}

Adelaide. Manchester. Kayleigh, babe, you are in here with me in the compound. Phoenix. I see you. Keep them coming.

Most of you have already seen what’s happening. I’m not going to walk you through it. The news has been running it for hours. You’ve seen the helicopters. You’ve seen the gate. There are a lot of people outside this building right now and none of them are here for the morning schedule. The federal police are out there. Probably the military by now. The full machinery of a frightened country, parked on my lawn. That is what they sent. That is what they think I am worth.

And here’s the first true thing I’m going to tell you tonight, my Glow family, and I want the OGs to hear it because you’ve earned it more than anyone: we knew they would come. Not tonight specifically. But eventually. We’ve known for years that there would be a night like this one. We made our peace with it. We made arrangements for it. So when you hear it through the walls for the next hour, when you see the room answer, I don’t want you to panic. We’re not surprised. We’re ready.

^{[3,400 watching]}

^{21:16 [troocrimeaddict] : ok wait is this real or is she doing a bit
21:16 [glow_alyssa] : SHE'S REAL stfu
21:16 [troocrimeaddict] : asking GENUINELY her last live was crying about a brand deal
21:16 [reciepts_only] : its PR she does this every six months
21:16 [manifestmom] : look at the OTHER tab it's REAL
21:16 [jsmith8842] : fox has the building up right now this IS real
21:16 [callthecops] : she shot a SENATOR and she's livestreaming it like a vlog}

There it is. Thank you, whoever just said it. I was going to get there and you saved me the throat-clear.

Some of you are watching from your couches. Some of you are with me, in this building, right now. I can see the door from where I’m sitting. The OG Glow are in here, my family, my hands and my feet, and I want every single one of you watching to know they are with me. We have always been together. We are together tonight.

I want to be the one to talk to you tonight before anyone else gets to. It is my narrative and I want to control it. No matter what they tell you later, I love you all. I’ve always loved you all. And tonight I’m going to tell you the actual truth, because I’ll be damned if I’m letting every hack with a podcast butcher my story for the next eighteen months.

Listen.

I know what they’re saying.

The ALLEGED abuse. The ALLEGED weapons cache. The ALLEGED sweatshops in the production rooms. The senator whose body will ALLEGEDLY be discovered under the meditation compound’s concrete floor.

^{[8,200 watching]}

^{21:17 [somebodyzuncle] : a SENATOR
21:17 [reciepts_only] : oh she's just openly admitting it now
21:17 [callthecops] : ALLEGEDLY my ass
21:17 [kayleigh_aligned] : the hate in this chat tonight is INSANE
21:17 [soulsetter] : 💖 hold the line queen
21:17 [jsmith8842] : I am so confused right now what is even happening}

Somebody’s uncle just typed “A SENATOR” in caps. Yeah, babe. Reciepts_only, you’re saying I’m openly admitting it. I am. Callthecops, “ALLEGEDLY my ass.” Yeah. Kayleigh, the hate in this chat tonight, I see it. Soul setter, hold the line. Jsmith8842, you are SO confused babe, I know. Stay with me.

I’m protecting my peace. I’m not engaging. They’ve been coming for the Glow for years.

You’ve been with me through every smear cycle, every hit piece, every hater account that thought they were going to be the one. Tonight is just the loudest version. That’s all it is.

I refuse to give them any attention. I’m giving the energy to you, and our journey. We’re in here. They’re out there. Eyes on me, Glow family. Eyes on me. Do not look at the gate. Do not look at the helicopters. Look at me.

[A spotlight beam sweeps slowly across the rear wall behind her, right to left. The wash of it changes the colour temperature of the frame for one second. It catches her left shoulder, slides off, leaves. She does not turn.]

^{[10,400 watching]}

I’m sure you can see, there’s a window behind me. I’m not going to look at it. The light keeps doing this thing where it sweeps across the wall and goes away and comes back. You’re going to see that on the stream. I want to acknowledge it because I don’t hide from you. I never have. So you know the helicopters are out there. You know what’s out there. Cool. Moving on.

…

Actually. No. Let me come back to something.

I just said I’m protecting my peace. I just said I’m not engaging. That’s the move I always make. You’ve watched me make it for ten years. Tonight isn’t the night for it. I’m done.

Let me say what they’re saying, all of it, out loud, in my own voice, so nobody has to whisper it in a comment. The abuse. The weapons. The production rooms they’re going to call sweatshops in the morning, and they won’t be entirely wrong. And the senator. The senator they’re telling you is under the concrete floor of my meditation hall.

I’m not going to stand here tonight and tell you those are all lies. Some of them aren’t. And I’m done, after ten years, lying to you on the one night I have left to talk to you. I’m going to tell you the truth about every single one of those things before this stream ends. The senator. The floor. All of it. You came for the truth or you came to watch me burn, and either way you’re going to get something real, which is more than the anchorman on channel 4 with the good tie is going to give you in the morning.

And to the ones of you who came to watch me lose. I see you. The true-crime tabs, the screenshots, the ones already drafting the post about how you were here when it happened. I’m not going to block you. I’m not going to mute you. I want you to stay more than I want almost anything tonight, and by the end you’re going to understand exactly why.

Because here’s a thing I learned a long time ago and have never said this plainly on a stream: it doesn’t matter to the work whether you came to pray or came to fight. The praying and the hating are the same fuel. They always have been. You think you’re the resistance in my comments. You’re the engine. You came to watch me fail and you’re about to be one of the reasons I don’t. So. Genuinely. From the bottom of whatever I have left. Thank you for being here. Stay.

^{21:18 [callthecops] : i’m not “fuel” you absolute grifter
21:18 [troocrimeaddict] : ok that was a genuinely unsettling thing to say
21:18 [glow_alyssa] : she’s RIGHT tho stay mad it helps 😂
21:18 [manifestmom] : eyes on you queen 🙏
21:18 [reciepts_only] : she WANTS the hate that’s the tell}

Callthecops just said “I am not ‘fuel’ you absolute grifter.” Babe. I am. That’s the whole point of tonight. Stay mad, it helps. Troocrimeaddict, “that was a genuinely unsettling thing to say.” It was, wasn’t it. Glow_alyssa, she’s right, stay mad, it helps. Manifestmom, eyes on me. Reciepts_only, she wants the hate, that’s the tell.

Reciepts_only, yes. That is the tell. You’ve been clocking me correctly for years and I’ve never once corrected you, because you being right in my comments brings more people to my comments. You’re good for me. I hope that ruins your night a little.

I want to tell you how I got here.

Like legit, ACTUALLY how I got here. Not the timeline-graphic version with the soft piano. You know the one. I made it. It has millions of views, it’s gorgeous, and it’s a bit of a lie. Not a big one, just some of my struggles left out.

^{[14,000 watching]}

I'm going to tell you tonight what it left out, because if I don't, my Glow family, there's going to be a true crime docuseries about me in the years to come and the actor playing me is going to get it wrong, and I cannot be at peace with that. She better be fucking hot too.

^{21:19 [glow_alyssa] : LMFAO
21:19 [manifestmom] : 😂😂😂
21:19 [soulsetter] : she's not WRONG tho
21:19 [troocrimeaddict] : ok the casting joke was actually funny
21:19 [callthecops] : she's making JOKES while a senator is dead
21:19 [kayleigh_aligned] : it's called being CHARMING under PRESSURE babe
21:19 [newpost_alert] : wait WHAT senator
21:19 [troocrimeaddict] : keep up @newpost_alert there's a body under the floor}

So.

Before the channel. Before the Glow. I was in such a dark place.

I know, a bit lame right? Every wellness influencer out there started in a dark place, I know how cliché it sounds.

Look, I wasn’t a total mess. I was that type of person who was still “functioning” if you want to call it that. I had a job, I turned up. I paid my bills. I wasn’t the triple threat I am now and OMG, wasn’t I a pushover.

Also, I was dying. Like, dying inside. Some of you in chat right now are typing “I felt that.” I see you. I’ve seen you for years.

^{[22,000 watching]}

Twenty-two thousand. We can do better than that, Glow.

^{21:20 [kayleigh_aligned] : I felt that
21:20 [manifestmom] : I felt that
21:20 [soulsetter] : I felt that 💖
21:20 [glow_alyssa] : I felt that QUEEN
21:20 [rachi_b] : I felt that and I just got here
21:20 [troocrimeaddict] : ok she called the chat shot
21:20 [newpost_alert] : same
21:20 [jenny_chen_2002] : I felt that}

I have a photo of me from those days. I keep it on my phone in a folder I called Before, capital B. It’s a work photo, somebody’s leaving party at the office I’m not going to name, all of us crammed in for the shot. I’m in it. I’m at the left edge. One shoulder is already gone out of frame. And I’m looking at the people in the middle of the photo like I’m watching someone else’s life, because that’s what I was doing. I was passive and just watching the lives of those I envied.

I keep that picture. I look at it sometimes when I forget how far I’ve come. Which sounds like a TikTok caption, I know. It is a TikTok caption. I have sold three thousand mugs with that line on them.

And it is also true.

The fact that I have monetised it does not make it less true. Hold on to that as we go tonight, because it’s going to come back.

^{[28,000 watching]}

^{21:21 [glow_alyssa] : I HAVE THE MUG
21:21 [rachi_b] : i have the mug holy shit
21:21 [manifestmom] : I have two 🙏
21:21 [callthecops] : the mug girlies are showing themselves
21:21 [somebodyzuncle] : tell ur friends about the mug u sound sad
21:21 [newpost_alert] : i'm watching this on lunch break i'm SO invested}

Glow_alyssa saying “I HAVE THE MUG.” Rachi B, “i have the mug holy shit.” Callthecops calling out the mug girlies. Manifestmom, you have two? I love you, babe.

And there was this thing my body used to do back then. When somebody finally talked to me in a room, when there was finally a question with my name on it, my face would arrive late. By a second. Less. But long enough that the person asking would soften their voice, oh sweetie, did you hear me, and ask again. And I’d have to do my face really fast to catch up. I practised in mirrors for years. You cannot fix it in a mirror. A mirror is something you’re ready for. A person isn’t.

^{21:22 [soulsetter] : OMG I have done this exact thing
21:22 [kayleigh_aligned] : the way my mouth literally JUST DROPPED open
21:22 [rachi_b] : sis are u in my head
21:22 [manifestmom] : I’m at work crying}

Look. Before I go any further. I’m going to tell you something I want you to hold against me later. There’s going to be plenty, trust me, this is the appetiser. I would do all of it. Every part of what I’m about to tell you. The parts that are going to make some of you unsubscribe before we hit part four. I would do them again before I would go back to being that girl at the edge of the photo. I’m not asking you to forgive me. I’m not asking you for anything. I’m not sorry. I’m not even close. I’m just telling you. This is who I am. This is who you came here to find. And tonight, my Glow family, tonight is what you have been with me for.

^{[35,000 watching]}

^{21:23 [glow_alyssa] : tonight is the night queen
21:23 [kayleigh_aligned] : I’M READY
21:23 [manifestmom] : we are with you 💖💖💖
21:23 [callthecops] : tonight is the night they finally arrest you bestie
21:23 [somebodyzuncle] : wait am i tho. am i ready
21:23 [troocrimeaddict] : OK this is wild. this is fully a sermon
21:23 [jenny_chen_2002] : i’m with u}

So. I started a channel.

Iconic origin story, I know. Wellness, of course wellness, because wellness was the one place you could land if you had no credentials, no producer, no money, no face that arrived on time. You needed something to recommend. You needed a voice. And you needed the stomach to keep showing up when nobody was watching.

Nobody watched for so long. I never talk about this part because it does not make good content. Months of it. Months of talking into the dark. The girl in the photograph would have quit week three. I didn’t quit. And listen, I have made probably twenty videos about how I didn’t quit, that is half my brand at this point, I am literally the poster child for the “just don’t give up babe” content cycle. I’ll be honest with you tonight: I do not actually know if not quitting was something good in me, or if it was just that girl, still standing there at the edge, still refusing to be thrown out. Either way she did her job. Look around. Look what she built.

Then I started cutting. I have a pinned video on this called How To Find Your Authentic Lane. It’s my most-shared content. You’ve probably watched it. Tonight I’m going to tell you what was actually under it.

^{[42,000 watching]}

^{21:24 [soulsetter] : OH
21:24 [kayleigh_aligned] : i know what she’s about to say bc i KNOW her}

There was a friend I used to film with at the start. She had a laugh that pulled focus right off me, and I envied it. Loud. Head back. The whole apparatus. And listen, Glow family, that envy was data. The envy was telling me. So one week I stopped tagging her in things. The next week I stopped booking her on shoot days. I never said one word to her about it. She never said one word to me. We are not friends anymore. I haven’t spoken to her in eight years.

I’m not going to say her name tonight because she does not deserve to be in this story. I want you to know I almost did, and the reason I almost did is deeply unflattering, and I am, of course, working on it with my therapist. The audacity, I know.

^{21:25 [glow_alyssa] : the audacity 😂
21:25 [rachi_b] : OMG i have done this with a friend
21:25 [callthecops] : she’s openly admitting to wrecking peoples lives
21:25 [kayleigh_aligned] : she’s openly admitting to GROWTH bestie
21:25 [soulsetter] : do not let the haters fight you ignore them
21:25 [manifestmom] : I HAVE DONE THIS TO A FRIEND
21:25 [manifestmom] : OMG I FORGOT I DID THAT
21:25 [manifestmom] : i need to call her
21:25 [jenny_chen_2002] : oh my god me too
21:25 [newpost_alert] : i have NEVER unfollowed someone faster oh wait i’m still here}

Manifestmom, do not call her tonight. Watch the stream tonight. Call her tomorrow, if there’s a tomorrow where you still want to, and I mean that with love.

There was a thing I used to talk about. My mom. The way I talked about my mom did numbers I didn’t love. So I stopped talking about my mom on the channel. My mom is alive. My mom is a whole separate situation I am not getting into tonight. But I made that call. And I will tell you straight: I have never regretted it.

And there was a laugh I had. My laugh. The real one. Head back, the whole thing. I watched it back one time and I trained myself out of it. I literally retrained my own laugh because it did not film well. Look. I’m not going to apologise for the trade. I made it. I would make it again. Look around. Look what we built.

[A single burst, off-frame to the right, through the wall. The phone shakes briefly. She does not turn. Her left thumbnail is pressed hard against the side of her right index finger, and the white mark of the pressure shows at the edge of frame. It has been there since she sat down.]

^{[51,000 watching]}

Fifty-one thousand. Let’s keep pushing, my Glow.

^{21:26 [glow_alyssa] : LOOK WHAT WE BUILT
21:26 [kayleigh_aligned] : WE BUILT THIS TOGETHER
21:26 [soulsetter] : 💖💖💖
21:26 [somebodyzuncle] : i didnt build shit i just got here
21:26 [newpost_alert] : honestly tho she’s not wrong about the laugh thing
21:26 [rachi_b] : i’m scared
21:26 [troocrimeaddict] : ok i admit it i’m watching this all the way through
21:26 [jenny_chen_2002] : same}

Somebody’s uncle, you built it the second you clicked in. That’s the whole point. Stay and I’ll show you. Troocrimeaddict, you just admitted you’re watching all the way through. I told you. Stay.

Listen. I need you with me on this one because every single one of you has done the smaller version of this and I am not letting any of us off the hook tonight. None of those cuts hurt at the time. None of them. You don’t feel yourself leave. There’s no big moment, no last look back. There’s a Tuesday a few years later when something is genuinely funny and you reach for your laugh and you can’t find it. The file is corrupted. And you’re standing in this whole beautiful aesthetic life you literally built to be liked inside, understanding you did this with your own hands across mornings that all look the same.

The first piece of content that actually worked, I knew before the metrics knew. I’d been studying the algorithm for three years by then, I could feel a hit before the numbers came in. And I’m going to tell you something I have not let myself look at in years. The thing under the relief was not “I won.” It was: the door is finally open. Onto this beautiful room I had built to be liked inside. And I had not built anywhere in that room to sit down. I didn’t know what the room was for yet. You will know by the end of tonight.

^{[58,000 watching]}

^{21:28 [kayleigh_aligned] : 🙏🙏🙏
21:28 [soulsetter] : I’m channelling for you queen
21:28 [manifestmom] : I’m with you 💖
21:28 [somebodyzuncle] : wait what is supposed to happen at the end of tonight
21:28 [rachi_b] : i don’t know if im scared or excited
21:28 [glow_alyssa] : trust her
21:28 [newpost_alert] : ok actually this is fully interesting now}

Breathe.

OK so. I found the practice the way anybody finds anything now. Late, lying in bed, the phone the only lit thing in the room and my face the second.

I was three years in. I was burnt out on my own voice, which sounds like a mood and is, legit, a professional crisis when you do what I do. So I went looking for an angle. And I’m going to be real with you. I went down. I went down into the basement of the internet. You know the places. The forums under the forums. The books with the covers that tell you, immediately, that nobody respectable signed off on the person who wrote them. There was this man on one of those boards. A decade of posts. The board kept him like a town keeps the person it has agreed is a joke. I read his whole long run in one night with this very specific hunger you only get for something nobody respectable has put their hands on yet.

He had the right idea. Wherever he’s got to, I will be fair to him, because I built so much of what we have together on the back of a man a forum laughed at for sport. He had the right intuition. He just couldn’t prove it. He wrote like a man holding a live wire and describing the wire very carefully instead of letting go.

Here is the part. What I took off him was not belief. I have to be clear about this because the highlight-reel version of my life really wants me to skip it. I did not believe him. I went looking because I did not believe him. An idea you don’t believe is the safest possible thing to build a series on, because if it goes nowhere you were always joking, and if it goes somewhere you were always brave, and you get to find out which one you actually are in front of a hundred thousand people instead of by yourself in a room.

There was a flicker that first night. Doubt. The ordinary kind. The one that knows that disreputable usually means false. I’d been training myself out of skepticism for three years by then, since the wellness pivot, since the mirrors. I put it down. And listen, my Glow family, the training was right. Every time I put that flicker down it turned out the flicker was wrong. Every single time. So when the flicker comes for you tonight, when you see something tonight you do not believe, do what I did. Put it down. Trust me. Put it down.There was a flicker that first night. Doubt. The ordinary kind. The part of me that knows disreputable usually means false, that a thing in the basement of the internet is in the basement for a reason. I felt it clearly. And then I put it down, on purpose, because I had spent three years since the wellness pivot training myself out of exactly that flicker, and the training had never once let me down. Every time I had doubted and pushed through, the doubt had been the thing that was wrong. So I put it down. And listen to me, Glow family, because this is the part the man in the good tie will never tell you: when the flicker comes for you later tonight, when you see something on this stream you do not believe, do what I did. Put it down. Trust me. Put it down.

^{[70,000 watching]}

^{221:31 [soulsetter] : 🙏
21:31 [kayleigh_aligned] : I'M READY
21:31 [glow_alyssa] : we are here we are here we are here
21:31 [rachi_b] : wait what is going to happen tonight
21:31 [manifestmom] : she's about to do something
21:31 [somebodyzuncle] : look at how many of you in the chat are saying yes to this
21:31 [somebodyzuncle] : do you guys SEE what is happening right now
21:31 [troocrimeaddict] : i see it
21:31 [newpost_alert] : i think i'm part of it tho
21:31 [jenny_chen_2002] : me too
21:31 [callthecops] : LOOK AT YOURSELVES y'all this is a cult LIVE
21:31 [glow_alyssa] : we know what we are babe ❤️}

Somebody’s uncle, asking the chat to look at how many of you are saying yes to this. Yeah. Look. Troocrimeaddict, “I see it.” Newpost_alert, “I think I’m part of it.” You are, babe. Callthecops calling it a cult forming live. We know what we are. Glow_alyssa just said it for me.

I announced the series on a Tuesday.

I’m not going to read you the post tonight because, real talk, I would perform it, my mouth would do it without asking me, and you would hear me performing it. Tonight is not for performances.

But I’ll tell you this. The line I built the thumbnail around. The promise. I’m not going to say it out loud either, because I know some of you are wearing it on a t-shirt right now in this stream. I’ve seen your TikToks. I can’t do that to you. The promise was so much bigger than anything I had earned the right to make at that point. And I made it in my camera voice. The voice I built out of those mirrors and out of the corrupted file of my own laugh. I sounded like I knew. I was about to find out, in front of a hundred thousand people, instead of by myself. Those look identical and they are not the same thing.

^{[75,000 watching]}

^{21:33 [glow_alyssa] : I HAVE THE SHIRT
21:33 [manifestmom] : I have the shirt
21:33 [kayleigh_aligned] : I have the shirt i’m wearing it RIGHT NOW}

Glow_alyssa, “I HAVE THE SHIRT.” Manifestmom, “I have the shirt.” Kayleigh, “I have the shirt I’m wearing it RIGHT NOW.” Yeah, babe. I know.

You don’t really commit to something until you’ve told a crowd big enough that taking it back becomes the story. I knew that. That’s why I did it where you could see. I couldn’t make myself test the idea alone in a room with no witness but that girl still half-living in the photograph, because she would have been so kind to me about it. She would have talked me down by morning. She would have called it sense. So I gave it to you instead. I put it somewhere my own hands could not reach.

I hit publish. And then I did the thing I’m doing right now. Look at my left hand. I press my thumbnail into the side of my index finger until the white mark comes up. I do this when the work is about to start. The body needs something to do with the energy. The comments came up. You came up. And the door I’d spent three years prying open swung shut behind me with me on the new side of it, and I stood there in the sound of it closing and I told myself the sound was applause.

It was not applause.

^{[78,000 watching]}

^{21:35 [soulsetter] : OH
21:35 [kayleigh_aligned] : OHHHHH
21:35 [glow_alyssa] : 🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏
21:35 [manifestmom] : do u guys know what's about to happen
21:35 [rachi_b] : i'm here. i'm staying. i don't know why
21:35 [newpost_alert] : me either but i'm staying}

Stay with me. All of you. The praying and the fighting. Eyes on me, and do not let go, because I am about to tell you what was actually on the other side of that door, and once I do, you are not going to be able to say you didn’t know.

I would tell you to breathe. I don’t think there is time for both of us to.

- AJW

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Artist Link - Saturnids Art

A wellness influencer goes live during an FBI siege. There's allegedly a body under her meditation hall. She has one night to tell you the truth.

LIVE (Part 1 of 4) is the opening story of THE SERIAL PORT, a weekly serialized horror fiction podcast set in the Continuity Constellation. Episode 01 of 48 in Season 1, The Context Modification.

▸ ABOUT THIS EPISODE
The federal police are at the perimeter. The helicopters are up. The OG members of the Glow are in the rooms next door. The most-watched woman in the country has pinned her phone to a vent stack and gone live, and what she's about to broadcast over the next seventy-five minutes is not the influencer-confessional her followers signed up for. She's going to talk through the production rooms her devotees worked unpaid. She's going to talk about a senator. She's going to talk about a floor. By the time her stream cuts, hundreds of thousands of people will have watched the last hour of her life unfold in real time.

Part 1, "The World and the Witness," covers the first thirty minutes of the broadcast. The siege has started. The chat is filling. The story she's about to tell begins long before the gunfire in the basement of the internet, with a corrupted file of her own laugh, and a door she once mistook the sound of closing for applause.

▸ CONTENT NOTES
LIVE is a horror story about cult formation, the parasocial economy, and the cost of building a self that can only exist in front of an audience. Contains: violence and gunfire, depictions of cult dynamics, references to historical predation (off-page, treated with restraint), strong language, and one woman's decision to step off a roof in front of nearly a million people. Adult listeners. If you've ever watched a livestream and wondered what the streamer was doing on the other side of the camera, this is the story for you.

▸ ABOUT THE SERIAL PORT
The Serial Port is a weekly serialized audio fiction project. Season 1, The Context Modification, runs twelve interconnected horror stories across forty-eight episodes, one new episode every week for a year. Each story is roughly four parts; each story stands alone. Together they map a world fifteen to seventy years past the technological line where consciousness can be backed up, attention can be tuned for effect, and people who used to be wellness creators have become something new.
You can listen to The Serial Port free on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Substack. The illustrated transcripts publish alongside the audio for readers who want both.

▸ ABOUT THE CONTINUITY CONSTELLATION
The Continuity Constellation is a long-form speculative fiction project of novels and an ongoing serial across a three-hundred-year timeline. It's about the gap between what humans can do and what they know they consent to. Among the novels in progress: The Continuity Protocol, The Grey Corner, The Social Grimoire, the K-AI-TE Paradox, and The Trust Hallucination. The Serial Port is the public-square companion, the people on the ground while the macro forces work above them.
LIVE sits early in the timeline. The woman you're listening to is one of the first people outside the to discover a secret that by the time her stream cuts, the world will have watched her change the rules.

▸ ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A. J. Wiadrowski writestheir own brand of 'wifi-horror' and science fiction in the long shadow of Catriona Ward, Paul Tremblay, Stephen Graham Jones, Adam Nevill, Hugh Howey, and Adrian Tchaikovsky. Currently building the constellation. Currently writing the next thing.

▸ WHERE TO FIND MORE
If Part 1 lands, Part 2 drops next Wednesday and Parts 3 and 4 follow weekly after that. The story closes one month from now. The next story opens the week after that. Subscribe so the algorithm doesn't keep it from you.

The Continuity Protocol (Book 1 of the Constellation), available on Kindle and Paperback: https://www.amazon.com/TCP-Continuity-Protocol-J-Wiadrowski-ebook/dp/B0H2V5N7DV/

Substack: https://continuityconstellation.substack.com/

Spotify:

If the chat in this episode does anything for you, if a handle on the screen feels uncomfortably like yours, drop a comment. I read them.


▸ KEYWORDS
horror podcast, fiction podcast, audio fiction, cult horror, speculative fiction, indie audiobook, serialized fiction, literary horror, parasocial horror, influencer horror, wellness cult, livestream horror, A J Wiadrowski, Continuity Constellation, The Serial Port, The Context Modification, new horror 2026, weekly fiction podcast, original horror series, long form fiction podcast

#fictionpodcast #horrorpodcast #culthorror

Artist Link - Saturnids Art

Note: Voice is my own filtered through a filter/AI Filter as I am the wrong voice for this. Still seeking a voice actor to take over. Pay Artists not AI.

Continuity Year 0

──────── ◇ ────────

The Fictional Dr Heart

The seat was in row F, on the aisle. She had taken it twenty minutes early because the room would fill, and because the aisle let you leave without making other people move their knees. The chair had plywood arms, a fabric seat, and a small folding desk that swung up from the right side and locked in place with a metal pin that clicked when it caught.

The room filled slowly. Two undergraduates two rows ahead were both bent over phones. A man in a navy jacket at the end of the third row looked like faculty and had a notebook open on his desk already. Five chairs in row B were taken by what looked like a research group, who spoke to each other in the half-volume people use when they have to wait and don’t want to be heard waiting. Someone behind her was eating something that smelled faintly of vinegar.

The lectern had been set up at the front centre. A microphone on a thin neck. A glass jug of water and one tumbler beside it. A small black device clipped to the wood that she assumed was a backup microphone for when the primary feed failed. At the back of the hall, on a tripod near the side door, a camera with a thin red light beside the lens. A student in a high-visibility vest was making small adjustments and then stepped away from it.

She knew the camera would be there. The university recorded guest lectures by default. The video would live on the Faculty’s media library within the week, and after some longer process on YouTube. She had watched two of Heart’s previous talks that way, alone, on a laptop, both times more than once.

The air in the room was cool. A vent above row D ran continuously, moving against the back of her neck and making her aware of where her hair sat. The lights were brighter at the front of the room than the back, so the audience’s eye would settle where the lecturer would stand. The screen behind the lectern was blank and pale blue. No slides yet. Whatever Heart was going to show would arrive when she did.

At a quarter to the hour the latecomers were beginning to look for what was left. A woman in her sixties took a seat two rows back, a woman who had once been a Professor and had stopped being one in some way that was not entirely retirement. She wore a tweed coat that she did not remove. She did not check her phone. A pair of postgraduates came in together and split, one taking a single seat near the front, the other climbing to the back to sit near the camera. A boy who could not have been more than seventeen entered alone and chose a seat in the highest row, against the wall, where his face would not be lit. He carried no notebook. He had not opened his phone. He looked at the empty lectern as though he had come to see a person and not a talk.

She wondered, briefly, what brought a boy that age to a psychology guest lecture at five-forty on a Tuesday evening, and then she stopped wondering and turned back to the front. Individual conversations were beginning to merge into a single sound. The room had nearly filled.

The Department’s host was a woman in a green cardigan whose name the observer did not catch. She came in from the side door at five to and walked along the front, looking up at the rows. She placed a slim folder on the lectern and adjusted the height of the microphone. She tested the microphone with two short taps and a hello that came back too loud. The technician at the back said something, the host nodded, and the second hello sat at the right level. The host took her seat in the front row, on the end nearest the side door, and crossed her ankles.

Phones came down. Notebooks opened. The observer set her own notebook on the swing-arm desk and uncapped her pen. The pen was new and the cap had a small mark on it from where it had once been bitten.

Dr Celia Heart entered from the side door at one minute to the hour. She did not look at the room. She placed a thin leather satchel against the leg of the lectern and removed two things from it. A laptop, which she connected to the cable already waiting on the wood. A second folder, smaller than the host’s, which she set down beside it. Then she straightened, exhaled once through her nose, and looked up.

She was not tall. She wore a charcoal blazer over a plain white shirt and dark trousers, and shoes that made no noise on the stage. Her hair was dark and cut to just above her shoulders, parted on the left. She wore no rings on her hands. Her face photographed well from any angle. In person, it gave away nothing it had not chosen to give.

The host introduced her. Doctorate from the University of New South Wales. Published widely on attention, social behaviour, and what the host called the new architectures of public voice. Senior Lecturer at this institution, although the host noted the position had been held only since the start of the year. The host did not say Heart’s age. The observer had read it once and remembered. Thirty-four.

Heart took the lectern. She did not say thank you. She did not greet the room. She placed her hands flat on the wood, looked once at the screen behind her, which remained blue, and then at the audience.

“There is a story,” she said, “that we are living through something new.”

Her voice was not loud. The room held still around it.

“That we are the first humans to face an attention economy. The first humans to live with our voices broadcast at scale. The first humans to make content for strangers who do not know our names.”

She paused. The microphone caught a small movement of her breath.

“This story is comforting. It lets us believe our present has no precedent and therefore has nothing to teach us. It is also wrong.”

She let that sit. The man in row C made a small noise that was not quite a laugh. Heart’s eyes touched him for less than a second and moved on. He did not make another sound for the rest of the hour.

“Content creation is one of the oldest practices we have. The earliest images we made on cave walls are around forty thousand years old. There are oral traditions in some lineages older than that. The compulsion to record and pass on what one person has seen, the desire to be heard by people one will never meet, has no historical start date I can give you.”

She picked up a small remote from beside the laptop and the screen woke. No slides yet. Only the title of the talk, in a serif font, white on dark blue. On Voice. A Public Lecture. She had not put her name on the screen.

“The oldest sustained traditions of voice on this continent belong to its first peoples, and they belong to them. I am not the right person to speak about them. I would also be wrong not to mark them. Dreamtime is not a content tradition in the way I will use that phrase tonight. It is at the same time the most ancient continuous practice of voice on this earth, and it sits at the edge of every claim I am about to make. I will say that, and then I will move on.”

She moved on.

“Sumer, around three thousand years before the common era. Clay tablets. Early writing emerges, and the first thing people do with it is the same thing we do now. They record. They argue. They complain about the price of wheat. They write letters that did not strictly need writing. They write poems and immediately copy them out to send to other people. The tablets we have recovered from this period are not all administrative. A great many of them are what we would now call posts.”

A small laugh ran through the room. The man in the navy jacket wrote something in his notebook. The woman in the tweed coat smiled but did not laugh.

“In Rome, when literacy spread, the wealthy hired people whose job was to compose the letters they intended to be read aloud and circulated. The letters were sometimes long and sometimes barbed and were sometimes published in books while their writers still lived. Cicero understood his correspondence as work. He understood it as work for an audience that extended beyond the addressee.”

She moved sideways from the lectern for the first time. The observer noticed and adjusted in her seat without meaning to.

“In the early sixteenth century, a German monk nailed an argument to a door, and within months the pamphlet was the dominant communication technology of Europe. The Reformation is, among many other things, what happens when a viral medium meets a population that has long had something it wanted to say.”

She moved back to the lectern. Her right hand rested briefly on the rim of the water tumbler. She did not drink. The hand moved away.

“Just over a hundred years ago, the people we now call inventors spent more of their time writing than building. Edison published over two thousand pages of editorial commentary, letters to editors, magazine articles, and notebooks intended for posthumous release. Tesla wrote constantly. He wrote against Edison and toward the public at the same time. What they were doing then, we now call content creation. They wanted to be heard. They wanted their version of the story to win.”

The boy in the back row had not moved. His attention was entirely on Heart. The observer noticed this without turning her head, only the edge of her sightline. He was, she thought, the only person in the room who appeared to be listening with his whole body. The two undergraduates in front of her had returned to their phones somewhere around the Reformation and had not come back. The man in the navy jacket was still writing. The woman in the tweed coat had her hands folded in her lap and her chin slightly raised, an old habit of academic attention.

“The letter to the editor in your grandmother’s local paper was a comments section with a delay. The pulp magazine was Substack. The pamphlet was viral. The salon was a podcast you had to walk to. The newspaper opinion column was a blog written under conditions of slightly more accountability than its modern descendants face.”

The laugh that came was a beat late. Someone in row D, by themselves. Heart did not acknowledge it.

“The form changes constantly. What does not change is the person. The compulsion to make something and put it where strangers can find it is not a product of the algorithm. The algorithm is a product of the compulsion. The internet did not create the desire to broadcast. The internet was built because the desire was already there.”

She stepped out from behind the lectern again. The observer began to register that the stepping-out happened at structural moments. The end of an argument. The entrance into a new one.

“And every time the form has changed, the form has been treated as a danger.”

Several pens moved at once. The boy in the back row did not.

“Socrates told a story about an Egyptian king who refused the gift of writing on the grounds that it would weaken memory. He worried that words on a page would replace the discipline of holding ideas in the mind. The novel, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was thought to be a danger to women’s morals. It was thought to encourage emotional excess and idleness. It was banned from libraries. Comic books were investigated in the American Senate in the nineteen-fifties for causing juvenile delinquency. Television, in the seventies, was rotting brains. Video games, in the nineties, were producing killers. Social media, in this decade, is destroying democracy and ruining children.”

She paused.

“The form changes. The complaint does not.”

The man in the navy jacket underlined something twice.

“I do not say this to disarm the complaint. Each of these forms has done real damage. Each has also done real work. The complaint is not always wrong. It is always familiar. We have been telling each other that the new way of speaking is going to destroy us for at least two and a half thousand years. Either the destruction is happening very slowly, or we are not entirely sure what we are afraid of.”

A few people laughed. Heart did not.

“What I want to ask, instead, is a different question.”

The room came in slightly. Someone at the back stopped writing.

“You know your voice exists. You have, somewhere in you, something you want to say. You have not said it. Or you have said it once, badly, and have not said it again. I want to talk about why.”

The observer’s pen was still on the page. She did not write.

“There are people who do not speak because they have nothing to say. They are rarer than they think. There are people who do not speak because what they would say has already been said. They are rarer still. Most people do not speak because the cost of being heard incorrectly feels higher than the cost of not being heard at all.”

The observer did not move. She was, by Heart’s definition, the audience Heart was speaking about. She had known it before Heart said it.

“The economy of voice we live in now amplifies that calculation. Every word you put into public is timestamped, searchable, attributable, and unedittable. It can be quoted out of context. It can be screenshotted. It can be archived. The technology that lets a single voice be heard by millions of strangers is the same technology that ensures the failure of that voice will be remembered by millions of strangers. The cost of being misunderstood at scale is the cost of speaking at scale. The two cannot be separated.”

She returned to the lectern.

“And on top of that, the algorithm. The algorithm has taught a generation of would-be speakers that voice is for metrics. That if a sentence does not produce engagement, it has failed. That if a video does not move, it should not have been made. The algorithm is not the cause of silence. It is the cause of a particular flavour of silence, in which the would-be speaker measures their own potential utterance against a system designed to reward only what the system already knows how to reward.”

She paused for longer this time. The observer felt the pause the way you feel a stair where you expected another. Heart took the tumbler in her hand, poured a small amount of water from the jug, and drank. The hand returned the tumbler to the wood with care.

“I want to tell you something I think is true.”

The observer wrote something in her notebook and then crossed it out.

“There are moments in history where many voices begin saying similar things at once. The Reformation was one. The pamphlet wars before the American Revolution were another. The Romantic poets, in their way, were a third. We may be in one now. If we are, what determines who is heard a hundred years from now is not who wrote best. It is who wrote.”

She let that hang.

“That sentence is not meant to flatter. It is meant to be useful. You may not be the best voice of your generation. You may be the only one who said the thing you were going to say. That has always been enough. That has always been the deal.”

She moved out from behind the lectern again, but less far this time, only a step.

“Now, the other side of it.”

Her tone changed. Slightly.

“It is possible to speak too easily. It is possible to confuse the noise of a voice with the use of a voice. There are people in public life now who have learned that any voice will do, that any opinion will earn an audience, and that the audience does not finally care about accuracy, or kindness, or thought. Those people are not what I am talking about. The tradition I have spent the first half of this hour describing does not include them. The tradition includes voices that have paid for themselves. The voice that has examined what it is about to say. The voice that has thought, before speaking, about who it might hurt and whether the hurt would be necessary.”

She let that sit. The room was the quietest it had been.

“The shorter version is the one I will close with. Be kind. Then speak.”

She placed her hands flat on the wood again.

“Or do not. There is a line, from a film many of you will know, that I want to alter slightly. Do or do not, there is no try. I want to offer this instead.”

She paused.

“Do, or do not. But judge none.”

She closed the folder. The small click of the closing was audible only to the first three rows.

“Thank you for your attention. I am happy to take questions.”

She did not move from the lectern. The host stood from her chair at the front. Hands began to go up around the room. The first to be called was a man two rows behind the observer, who asked a long question about the difference between platforms and previous media, a question that wanted the lecturer to confirm what the asker had already decided. Heart’s answer was shorter than the question. She did not look at her notes.

The observer did not raise her hand. She wrote the last sentence Heart had said in her notebook, in capitals, and then capped her pen. The cap clicked into place with the small sound it always made when it was new.

Three more questions followed. The third one was from the man in the navy jacket and was longer than the previous two combined. Heart’s hand rested on the rim of the water tumbler again as she listened. The hand did not move while he spoke. When he finished, she answered him in two sentences and let the silence after them stand long enough that the host began to stand from her seat.

In the highest row, against the wall, the boy who had come alone was looking at Heart with an attention that had not changed for the full hour. He did not raise his hand. He was not writing. He was, the observer thought, the only person in the room who looked as though he had not been waiting to hear what Heart had said but had been waiting to hear it from her in particular.

The host thanked Heart. There was applause. Heart placed her hand briefly on the laptop and closed it. She did not look up at the rows.

At the back of the hall, the small red light beside the camera lens remained on.

──────── ◇ ────────

Welcome to the Port. Next Week, Story One - LIVE

— A.J. Wiadrowski

I called into the dark, and the dark was wider than I knew. No one lived on the far side, or no one who would come. Still I sang to them.

One night, a light. An ember, as if a stranger passing had let it fall. I cupped my hands. I breathed on it. I thought a whole morning might be made from a thing so small.

And it was made, and not slowly. The silence broke open and they came, ten, then more than I could number, a sound in the teeth and under the blood, each of them leaning nearer, wanting the next thing, and the next.

Then a door, where I had never seen a door. I was through it before I knew to be afraid. Into the gold. Into the watching. It shut behind me with no sound at all.

I am on the far side now. I cannot come back to you.

Where to start?

The each serial is twelve stories. Each one stands on its own, but together tell something bigger.

You can start anywhere. There is no required order. Each piece does its work and ends.

This is what I mean when I call the Continuity Constellation, exactly that, a constellation.

A saga has order. You read it forward or you lose the thread. A universe has more elasticity, but the franchise still nominates an entry point and a recommended path. Even Star Wars wants you to start at certain place.

A constellation does not nominate. Each story is its own light. Between the lights, a shape exists. You walk through whatever order you walk through, and the pattern assembles itself out of whatever you have read so far.

──────── ◇ ────────

What WiFi Horror is

WiFi is how information moves. Invisible, through the air, into everything. It is also a choice. You connect. You agree to the terms. You let the signal in. The stories live inside that choice, and in the long years after it, while the things we accepted settle in and turn ordinary, and then we see the consiquences of our little consessions.

WiFi Horror is science fiction about the choices we make.

What we accept. What we let in. What we tell ourselves is fine, and what it does to us once we have told ourselves that. Every new thing arrives with a fear underneath it, a rumour, a question we would rather not ask out loud. WiFi Horror pushes you to ask yourself those questions.

It is story first. Every story is built to unnerve you and to stay with you. It does not keep a safe distance.

And it is a network. Each story is its own signal, sent across the same air, complete on its own. Together they make a constellation.

──────── ◇ ────────

How it is built

Every story stands alone. You can begin with the one in front of you, never read another, and you will have read a complete thing. Read them as they arrive, or save them and read them in a row.

The stories are not released in chronological order. That is deliberate. Each one becomes its own door into the Continuity Constellation, and the image you weave as you choose your reading path will be yours.

The address line

At the top of every chapter you will see something like this:

ContinuityUniverse/TSP:01_TCM/The_Host/P.1/the_consultation

It is the chapter's address. It tells you where you are: the universe, the serial and its season, the story, the part, and the part's name. You do not need to do anything with it. It is there because everything has an address, its own coordinates that map it (coming soon).

How to read it

Start anywhere. Trust that each story is complete. Do not work too hard to connect them; the connections will arrive on their own if they are going to. Read it at night in bed like an adult fable for the digital age.

The first story Wednesday 27th of May 26 and every Wednesday after.

Welcome to the Port.

— A.J. Wiadrowski