Social Media Is People

A short story about following your dreams to their logical conclusion

Thomas hadn’t left his apartment in two weeks. This was a bad relapse. He wasn’t completely off the rails — He could just return to normal tomorrow if he chose to. He could return to normal today. It wasn’t that bad. But it was bad. It was the closest he’d been to full relapse. Worst until now had been a couple of days at most, then a quick jog around town would set his mind straight. Getting his blood pumping.

Thomas’ blood was already pumping, that was the issue. He was nauseous all the time from the coffee and nicotine. But he needed it to do the Math. He needed to be at the peak of uppers to be able to “see” it. A connection. A shape. A logic. To recreate it. To map it, to draw it, to represent it.

It had started innocently enough. He saw an article on the internet. He didn’t click it, but just, something about it grabbed his attention. It was like any other clickbait, he’d seen a million times. Probably computer generated, he thought as a little joke to himself. How would you be able to tell the difference? There’s a lot of junk data, he assumed. Then he began to wonder — a little game. “I wonder if I could somehow find out how many people were online, at any given time”. Just, a rough estimate. He wasn’t crazy. It was just a fun thing to think about. A fun thought experiment.

Once he started thinking about it, though, he realised that he’d been noticing it for a while now…