Elon Gation

The air in the Upper Tier of New Colwyn was always scrubbed to a crisp, artificial sweetness. Down below, in the choked concrete canyons of the old council estates, it tasted like diesel and damp ash.

It’s been 15 years since Covid 24 struck—they finally got it right. I say ‘they’ as it wasn’t just the governments, the big corporations were involved too. They finally found a virus that killed the poor. Covid 23 wiped out the gays, the trans, the non-binaries—The Gay Plague some called it. AIDS 2.0 said others. It wasn’t the virus that killed them of course, it was the “vaccination”—I hate using my fingers as inverted commas like some poncy twat, but that’s the only way to describe the “vaccination”. With the NHS in the hands of corporations, a “special” (there I go again!) vaccine was administered to anyone who fell under the Covid 23 remit—plus anyone else the government and big corps found undesirable. Those targeted with the “special” vaccine soon showed symptoms and were quarantined in purpose built Convalescent Homes, each with a crematorium annex.

That’s how the Transglobal Underground was formed—a safe haven for the survivors of Covid 23.

Still, life is good if you’re one of the elite, or you tow the line and fit in. Not so good if you’ve voiced an opinion that differs from theirs.

But Covid 23 was just the beta test. The real masterstroke came with Covid 24, and it wasn’t designed to kill immediately. It was designed to clean up the "demographic deficit."

The corporate-state alliance called it Project Civic Renewal, but on the ground, we just called it the Postal Code Purge. They didn’t need complex DNA sequencing to target the social underclass; they just used the NHS central database and cross-referenced it with postcodes. If your address registered in a rundown estate, a dodgy high-rise, or a regional town the Ministry of Finance had written off a decade ago, your mandatory Covid 24 vaccine batch number started with a 'G'.

The effects were subtle at first. The "chav mummies"—as the Upper Tier tabloids loved to sneer—who already had five or six kids, suddenly found they couldn't conceive another. The real horror, the quiet one, settled in when their teenage kids grew up.

A whole generation of council estate youth, raised on cheap energy drinks and survival instincts, found themselves completely hollowed out. No pregnancies. No sudden scares. The estates, usually deafening with the sounds of screaming toddlers, barking staffies, and tinny music blasting from tinier speakers, began to grow eerily quiet.

The government celebrated it behind closed doors as the ultimate cost-cutting measure. No more child benefits to pay. No more social housing to build. The underclass problem, engineered to vanish within a single generation.

I stood on the balcony of a twenty-storey block in what used to be the Peulwys Estate, watching the sunset bleed a toxic orange across the Great Orme and sea. Below me was the Last Playground—a concrete patch where the paint on the swings had peeled away to rusted iron.

There were no children playing. The youngest person on this estate was eighteen, and he spent his days staring at his hands, knowing his bloodline ended with him.

"They're flattening the houses on Highlands Road tomorrow," a voice said behind me.

It was Llion. He was a survivor of the Covid 23 sweep, smuggled out of a Convalescent Home by the Transglobal Underground before the crematorium chimneys could smoke. He wore a heavy high-vis jacket—the universal uniform of the invisible working class.

"Why?" I asked, not really needing the answer.

"Fewer people means less space needed," Llion spat, sucking on a smuggled, highly illegal vape. "They’re zoning it for luxury smart-flats. For the corporate mid-managers. People with 'approved' genetic and financial profiles."

"They're wiping us out without firing a single bullet, ethnic cleansing" I muttered.

"Then we change the ammunition," Llion said, his eyes reflecting the dying orange light. He pulled a small, silver stasis-vial from his heavy jacket pocket. It gleamed under the shattered balcony light.

The Transglobal Underground wasn't just a network of safe houses anymore; it had become a rogue laboratory. While the government thought they had successfully sterilized the "undesirables," locally, our underground medics—the struck-off doctors and rogue corporate scientists who still had a conscience—had been working in Bryn Elian, the abandoned secondary school. This was the case in major towns and cities across the world.

"Is that the counter-agent?" I whispered.

"The synthesis is complete," Llion nodded, a grim smile touching his lips. "It won’t reverse what they did to the older generation, but for the kids? The eighteen and nineteen-year-olds? It rewrites the corporate blockers in their system. It restores the future they tried to steal."

The plan was simple but incredibly dangerous. We couldn't distribute it via clinics—everything was monitored by biometric scans and corporate AI. We had to contaminate the Upper Tier's exclusive supply lines, or better yet, weaponize the delivery system, introducing the counter-agent into the very water treatment plants that supplied the outer sectors.

The elite wanted a sterile, compliant world where the poor simply ceased to exist, leaving behind just enough automated drones to clean their streets and maintain their servers. They thought they had engineered the perfect corporate utopia.

I looked down at the silent, empty streets of the estate. Tomorrow, the bulldozers would arrive at Highlands Road. But tonight, the Underground was moving.

"Let's go," I said, stepping off the balcony into the dark. "It's time to give this country its noise back."

Shop til you drop

The modern shopping addict does not wander the wilderness gathering berries. They wander the algorithm gathering parcels.

The hunter-gatherer has evolved into the click-and-collector. Same primal thrill, just with next-day delivery and a returns label.

It begins innocently enough, as all great dependencies do. A phone upgrade here. A gym membership there. Something ergonomic for the back. Something decorative for the wall. Something aspirational for the soul. You never say, “I am building a shrine to consumerism.” You say, “I’m just sorting my life out.”

Sorting your life out, it turns out, involves a suspicious amount of cardboard.

The conveyor belt starts early. School, exams, university, job. These aren’t milestones so much as staging areas—holding pens before the real marathon begins: the purchasing. Somewhere between your first payslip and your first panic about pension contributions, the system quietly hands you a script. It is printed on glossy paper and smells faintly of new plastic.

Step one: acquire identity through acquisition.

A relationship is not just companionship; it is the gateway to a shared streaming subscription. A baby is not just a baby; it is a pram ecosystem, a nappy supply chain, a tiny human-shaped portal through which money disappears at light speed. A house is not a home; it is a lifelong handshake with debt, decorated seasonally.

You don’t buy things because you need them. You buy things because your life has chapters, and every chapter requires props.

The tragedy is not that the props exist. The tragedy is how quickly they become invisible. Yesterday’s must-have becomes today’s background noise. The thrill evaporates faster than the packaging can be recycled. Satisfaction has a half-life measured in hours.

So you buy again.

Advertising understands this better than you ever will. It knows you are not purchasing objects. You are purchasing adjectives. Confident. Youthful. Successful. Desirable. Efficient. Organised. Adventurous. The products are merely the nouns required to smuggle those adjectives into your home.

Buy this and become that.

It is the oldest spell in the book, and it still works beautifully.

The slogans chant like a modern liturgy. Because you’re worth it. Just do it. Probably the best in the world. There are some things money can’t buy—so buy everything else just in case. The phrases bounce around your skull until they feel like memories rather than marketing.

You cannot recall the moment the voice in your head stopped being yours.

Social media provides the cathedral where these beliefs are practiced publicly. The ritual is simple: display, compare, upgrade. Your life becomes a shop window in which the mannequins are real people and the price tags are invisible but universally understood.

Someone always has the newer kitchen, the sharper jawline, the more photogenic holiday. You scroll not because you enjoy it, but because hope demands evidence. Proof that the next purchase might finally close the gap between who you are and who you could be if you just tried harder and financed it responsibly.

Comparison is the engine. Envy is the fuel. Free delivery seals the deal.

The irony is that the more choice you have, the less any single choice matters. Shelves stretch to infinity. Infinite cereals. Infinite trainers. Infinite self-improvement. Decision paralysis masquerades as freedom. You stand in the aisle of endless possibility and feel an itch that only a purchase can scratch.

Choice used to mean agency. Now it means obligation.

You must optimise your skincare. Your coffee. Your mattress. Your productivity tools. Your leisure time. Your mental health. Your hydration strategy. Your morning routine. Your evening wind-down routine. Your routine for managing routines.

Life becomes a full-time job with a shopping list attached.

And the punchline? None of it sticks. The gadgets age. The clothes fade. The trends mutate. The apps update. The “must-have” quietly joins the landfill of yesterday’s essentials. Your house fills with artefacts from past versions of yourself—each one purchased by a person who was certain they were about to become someone better.

Every object is a fossil of a former hope.

The system is elegant because it never promises completion. Completion would be catastrophic. Completion would end the buying. Instead, it offers perpetual almost. You are always one purchase away from the life you imagined. Always nearly there. Always improving.

Always paying.

By the end, the receipts outnumber the memories. The boxes outnumber the ambitions. The loft becomes an archive of good intentions and free trial periods that quietly became monthly subscriptions.

And one day, if you’re unlucky enough to notice, a strange question appears uninvited: What was all this for?

The system has no answer. It was never designed to.

It simply refreshes the page and suggests something you might also like.

MAIL ORDER PUNK

Denbigh was a speck on the map, a nowhere town far from the pulse of anything resembling a punk scene, so I became a mail-order rebel, hunting down records like they were contraband. When No Future Records dropped A Country Fit For Heroes 12” compilation EP in January 1982, it was like a suspect device landing in my teenage lap and going off. That record cracked open the world of street punk for me and thousands of other kids stuck in backwaters like mine. Before that, we’d been pogoing at school discos to Angelic Upstarts, UK Subs, Cockney Rejects, the untouchable Crass, and Dead Kennedys—bands that fueled our snotty defiance. But this? This was rawer, grittier, like a boot to the face.

Discharge had already set the blueprint two years earlier with their Realities Of War EP on Clay Records. I saw their ad in Sounds screaming “Pure brickwall punk,” and by fuck, they weren’t lying—those songs hit like a sledgehammer, all distortion and rage. Then there was Vice Squad, fronted by Beki Bondage, who was (and still is) a total punk goddess. Their Last Rockers single on Riot City Records was a snarling anthem that made many a heart race. A year later, GBH upped the ante with their Leather, Bristles, Studs and Acne 12” EP, a title that basically summed up the entire aesthetic of my teenage years (minus the bristles - I was a late developer!).

Those records weren’t just music; they were lifelines, proof that there was a world beyond Denbigh’s dead-end streets. Ordering them felt like joining a secret society, each vinyl slab a middle finger to the boredom and conformity of small-town life. Looking back, I can still feel the thrill of ripping open those packages, the crackle of the needle hitting the groove, and the way those songs made me feel like I could burn the whole world down—or at least spike my hair and try.

Punk was shifting, burrowing deeper underground, a feral pulse thrumming just out of sight. If you knew where to look—back pages of Sounds, dog-eared fanzines like Never Surrender—it was there, raw and ready. Thatcher’s iron grip and the gut-punch of mass unemployment lit a fire under the nation’s youth, and punk was our Molotov cocktail. Angry voices screamed back at her regime, spitting in the face of a system that left people jobless and restless. Labels like No Future, Riot City, Rot Records, and Clay were practically high street in punk’s scrappy ecosystem, but I was chasing the obscure, the stuff so niche it barely existed.

My record collection was my war chest, stacked with every release I could afford from those labels, each one arriving with a fistful of flyers, badges, and patches that I’d sew onto my jacket like battle scars. One gem was a 7” single by the Luddites on Xsentrix Noise Records and Tapes—Strength Of Your Cry, a brooding, slow-burn banger that hit harder than most. Then there was The Human Suffering EP by What Is Oil?, which showed up with a melted hole through the vinyl and a note scrawled by some guy named Dunk: “This is for art’s sake, ask for another, cheers.” That’s peak insanity—torching your own records before mailing them out. I wrote back for a replacement, but it never came. These days, those singles go for £200 a pop, a relic of a time when art was worth more than sense.

Two or three times a week, my doormat was a drop zone for new singles, each one a tiny rebellion I’d spin until the grooves wore thin. Albums? Those were rarer—too pricey for a kid scraping by on pocket money. But the singles were my lifeblood, each one a ‘fuck you’ to the grey monotony of Thatcher’s Britain. Looking back, I can still smell the ink on those fanzines, feel the weight of the vinyl in my hands, and hear the crackle of a needle dropping on a record that felt like it could change the world—or at least my little corner of it in Denbigh.

Check out - Ian Glasper's book - A Country Fit For Heroes PRIMARILY COLLECTING THE STORIES OF OVER 140 UK PUNK BANDS FROM THE EIGHTIES WHO ONLY RELEASED EPS AND DEMOS, OR ONLY APPEARED ON COMPILATION LPS, 'A COUNTRY FIT FOR HEROES: DIY PUNK IN EIGHTIES BRITAIN' IS A CELEBRATION OF THE OBSCURE, A LOVE LETTER TO THE UK'S PUNK UNDERGROUND.

The Local Festival...

Something’s not quite right. It’s the day after the Sausage & Cider Weekender and I’m sat here hydrated, functioning, and only mildly ashamed of my life choices. No hangover. No mysterious bruises. No inexplicable receipt for £47 worth of loaded fries. And yet I drank enough to pickle a village. Parenting at a festival, it turns out, is the ultimate pace car; you can sink thirteen pints but you’ll still stop short of licking a generator because someone needs a wee every eleven minutes.

Which brings us neatly to the modern “local music festival”, that once noble concept that has quietly morphed into a tribute act safari with a bouncy castle. I paid £18 to attend what was billed as a celebration of live music and community spirit, which is technically accurate if your definition of live music includes Arctic Donkeys, Fleetwood Mac & Cheese, Rage Against The Vending Machine, Ed Shear-in and a group of firefighters called Guns N’ Hoses. Seven bands on the poster, six pretending to be other bands, and the seventh a bloke called Darren doing acoustic Ibiza classics, which is the musical equivalent of finding a wasp in your cereal.

Someone asked me what I thought of the day overall and my reply was simple: lovely atmosphere, appalling originality. If you want cutting-edge music, danger, art and risk, do not attend a local festival. If you want lukewarm lager, children covered in glitter and a 43-year-old man screaming “THIS ONE’S FOR THE LADIES” before absolutely butchering Mr Brightside, welcome home.

I understand why organisers do it. Tribute acts are safe. They are musical comfort food. Nobody has ever stormed out of a field shouting “I cannot believe they played songs I recognised!” Original bands are risky; they might be loud, political, experimental, or worse, contain a trumpet. Tribute acts, on the other hand, offer reassuring predictability. You already know the chorus. You already know when to cheer. You already know when to go to the bar because they’ve started the slow one. By mid-afternoon the entire crowd has settled into a beautiful rhythm: hear opening riff of famous song, cheer like Pavlov’s drunk dogs, spill cider on toddler, repeat. At one point I watched a man punch the air with genuine emotion while watching a band called The Rolling Scones perform Satisfaction in a gazebo next to a churro van. He was moved. Deeply moved. This is where we are now.

The real miracle of these festivals is the sheer number of children present. Thousands of tiny humans in ear defenders watching their parents slowly become folklore. Nothing says wholesome family day out like dad triple-parking the buggy at the cider tent, mum shouting “I LOVE YOU” at a band dressed as ABBA, and a toddler eating chips off the grass like a gentle badger. By 4pm the field becomes a sociology experiment with three distinct tribes: the Responsible Parents who leave at six, the Optimistic Parents who said they’d leave at six, and the Parents Who Have Lost The Concept Of Time. You see dads carrying sleeping children like fallen comrades while still holding two pints and a tray of nachos. You see mums doing that squinty one-eye walk that says I am absolutely fine and also the ground is moving. The kids, of course, will remember none of this. Their core memory will simply be: at some point Daddy sang Oasis at a stranger.

Then comes the magical hour, around half seven, when the sun dips, the temperature drops and the cider hits the bloodstream like a tax rebate. It always begins with a disagreement about queue etiquette, escalates into a heated debate about football and ends with two men named Kev grappling gently beside a falafel stand while security intervene with the calm professionalism of people who have separated this exact fight four hundred times before. Meanwhile on stage, No Way Sis Oasis Experience UK launch into Wonderwall for the third time that day and the crowd sings along like nothing has happened. Civilisation continues.

But the truth is nobody is really there for the music. The music is just a pleasant soundtrack to day drinking in a field while pretending this counts as culture. These festivals aren’t about discovery; they’re about familiarity. They’re not cutting edge, they’re cutting hedge: trimmed, tidy and impossible to get lost in. You pay your money, you drink too much, you clap for songs you already know, you promise never again and you absolutely go again next year. Because deep down we all love a sunny field, a plastic pint glass and a band called Blurred Lines (Not That One) shouting HELLO FESTIVAL like they’re headlining Glastonbury instead of performing next to portable toilets. Great day, terrible music, see you next summer.

Abuse of power

Power rarely begins with a master plan. It begins with a mood.

A simmering one. A quiet irritation that lives in kitchens and pubs and comment sections. A sense that things are slipping, that someone somewhere is getting away with something, that the future looks suspiciously different from the past and nobody asked permission.

If you want power, you don’t start with policy. You start with that feeling.

Hope and fear are the oldest levers ever installed in the human brain. Hope says tomorrow could be better. Fear says tomorrow could be worse. Between the two lies a sweet spot where logic quietly packs its bags and leaves the room. That’s where power grows best.

The trick is to feed both emotions at once.

First, you give people something to applaud. Encourage public gratitude, public rituals, public unity. Get them banging pots on balconies and doorways, waving flags in windows, clapping in unison. People love to feel like participants in something noble. It costs nothing and feels priceless. Meanwhile, the systems beneath the applause quietly erode. Budgets shrink. Services creak. Contracts change hands. But the applause is loud enough to drown out the sound of dismantling.

Ceremony is the perfect camouflage for subtraction.

Then you give them something to fear. Fear must be simple. Tangible. Preferably human-shaped. Statistics don’t frighten people; strangers do. You whisper about outsiders, about threats, about change happening too fast and too unfairly. You don’t shout it outright. You imply. You hint. You ask questions you never answer.

“Is anyone else worried?”

They always are.

Soon fear becomes a habit. A daily vitamin. People begin to seek it out like caffeine. They scroll for it, share it, argue about it. It gives them energy, direction, purpose. Fear is intoxicating because it makes people feel alert and alive. It sharpens the world into heroes and villains, friends and enemies, us and them.

Binary thinking is wonderfully efficient. It saves people the trouble of nuance.

Once fear takes hold, hope becomes the product you sell as the cure. You position yourself as the solution to the danger you carefully inflated. The only steady hand. The only voice brave enough to say what others won’t. The only one willing to protect what people love from what they’ve been taught to hate.

It doesn’t matter if the solution exists. It matters that the promise does.

The crowd begins to form. At first it’s a gathering. Then a movement. Eventually it becomes a mob with Wi-Fi. They defend you before you ask. They attack your critics before you notice them. They transform disagreement into betrayal and criticism into treason.

You no longer need arguments. You have loyalty.

A loyal crowd is the most renewable resource on Earth. It generates outrage on demand. It produces enemies faster than you can name them. It thrives on the idea that the world is under siege and only you can fortify the walls.

Walls are excellent symbols. Simple. Photogenic. Reassuringly permanent.

Opposition becomes a gift. Every critic is proof of persecution. Every protest is evidence of conspiracy. Every scandal is a distraction engineered by your enemies. Truth becomes flexible. Facts become negotiable. Reality becomes a matter of team spirit.

And the most beautiful part? You never need to admit wrongdoing. You simply accuse louder.

Eventually laws become obstacles rather than guardrails. But laws, like narratives, are editable. Break them first. Rewrite them later. Explain that extraordinary times require extraordinary measures. People will nod because they’ve been trained to believe the times are always extraordinary.

Meanwhile the money flows quietly offshore, like a tide that never returns. Lives are disrupted, livelihoods rearranged, futures trimmed to fit the new shape of necessity. The cost is enormous, but it is paid in small instalments by millions of people, which makes it almost invisible.

Collective loss feels like weather. Personal loss feels like injustice.

By the time anyone notices the difference, the machinery of power is humming too loudly to interrupt. The crowds still wave their flags. The headlines still shout your slogans. The fear still pulses, steady as a heartbeat.

You stand at the centre of it all, buoyed by the hopes you sold and the fears you fed, wondering how it ever felt difficult.

Power, after all, was never about leading people.

It was about convincing them they were running toward you.

Let's Lynch The Landlord

 

And now I'm all alone. In bedsit land. My only home 

Living in a Rhyl bedsit in the mid-80s wasn’t so much housing as an endurance test. You didn’t rent a home; you rented a collection of problems and smells that happened to share four damp walls.

The toilet didn’t work, which felt less like a maintenance issue and more like a philosophical stance. The landlord insisted it was “temperamental,” as if it merely needed encouragement and positive thinking. The carpet had fleas — not the odd freeloading hitchhiker, but a thriving, organised society. If you stood still long enough, they treated you like public transport.

And then there was the scabies. A delightful skin condition that arrived uninvited and refused to leave, like a distant relative who suddenly needed “a place to stay for a few weeks” and was still there at Christmas. You’d lie in bed scratching and wonder whether the mattress had ever been new, or whether it had simply existed since the dawn of time, quietly absorbing the despair and mites of previous tenants.

Electricity came courtesy of a single plug socket for the entire flat. One socket. That was it. You had to plan your evening like a military operation: kettle or heater? Television or lamp? Luxury or survival? Owning an extension lead made you the technological elite.

The landlord would occasionally appear for inspections — not to fix anything, obviously, but to check the building was still technically vertical. Meanwhile, disco thundered from the flat below like a permanent soundtrack to mild suffering. The bassline vibrated through the floorboards, rattling the damp plaster and giving the fleas something to dance to. I would counter this with storming punk rock and they below had the nerve to complain!

Requests for hot water or heating were met with the timeless landlord refrain: “All you ever do is complain.” Which felt unfair, considering the alternative was silently dissolving into the wallpaper. Sometimes you’d return home to find the place mysteriously “checked” while you were out — nothing stolen, just a vague sense that your privacy had been borrowed without permission.

The yard outside hosted rats with the confidence of long-term tenants. They didn’t scurry; they strolled. Cockroaches joined the party too, because every ecosystem needs diversity. Turning on the oven released a smell that suggested it had previously been used for experimental chemistry. And when it rained, the ceiling joined in, contributing its own indoor water feature.

Yet, somehow, we lived like this. We laughed about it in pubs, swapped horror stories, and kept going because rent was cheap and options were thinner than the wallpaper. It wasn’t comfort — it was survival with a sense of humour. Cynical humour, perhaps, but humour all the same.

Because if you didn’t laugh, you’d probably just sit there in the dark.

Virtual Agreement

By day—by which he meant whenever he opened his laptop—Elliot was a good person.

Not just good in the vague, harmless sense. He was visibly, demonstrably, relentlessly good. The kind of good that arrived punctually in comment sections and left a tidy trail of heart emojis behind. The kind of good that knew exactly when to post, what to say, and which opinion would receive the most approving nods from strangers with anime avatars.

Elliot had built the persona carefully, like a bonsai tree trimmed into a perfect shape. It had taken years of pruning.

In real life, his flat was quiet in the way places become when no one visits. The curtains stayed half closed. The sink filled gradually with mugs that once held coffee and now held intention. His phone rarely rang, but it buzzed constantly—notifications from people he had never met congratulating him for being such a thoughtful human being.

The applause was silent but addictive.

Online, Elliot was kind. Fiercely kind. Performatively kind. He shared petitions before breakfast and posted compassionate threads before lunch. He corrected people gently but firmly. He condemned things with careful, eloquent disappointment. He supported causes he had learned about three minutes earlier with the conviction of a lifelong activist.

He never said the wrong thing. More importantly, he never said the honest thing.

Honesty was risky. Honesty could be screenshotted.

So Elliot watched the crowd instead. He waited for the temperature of the room to settle before speaking. A pause, a scroll, a quick scan of the most-liked replies. Then he would step forward, nodding vigorously, echoing the consensus in slightly different wording—just enough originality to seem sincere, just enough agreement to stay safe.

He was a human retweet.

The mob didn’t frighten him because they were cruel. They frightened him because they were efficient. One misstep, one badly phrased joke, one opinion that aged poorly, and the crowd would turn with the speed of weather. He had watched it happen to others. People evaporated overnight, leaving behind apology notes and locked accounts.

Elliot survived by never standing still long enough to be noticed.

His posts read like warm hugs. His private thoughts read like cold rain.

He muted people he publicly praised. He rolled his eyes at threads he enthusiastically shared. He despised the endless moral grandstanding even as he perfected it. Each day felt like attending a party where everyone insisted they were having a wonderful time while quietly checking the exits.

Sometimes he typed a reply that was honest. Something blunt. Something real. Something that might have started an argument instead of ending one. He would stare at the words, heart racing, imagining the fallout.

Then he would delete it and replace it with kindness.

Kindness was safer. Kindness was applauded. Kindness got likes.

Likes felt like oxygen.

The strangest part was how much he resented the people who provided it. Their avatars smiled back at him from his phone like a chorus of polite strangers applauding a speech he didn’t believe in. He knew they didn’t truly know him. Worse, he knew he didn’t want them to.

He feared ridicule more than loneliness, so he chose loneliness with Wi-Fi.

Every so often he posted about mental health. Vulnerability performed well. A carefully worded confession about burnout, a tasteful mention of therapy, a gentle reminder to “be kind to yourselves.” The responses poured in immediately. Support. Love. Solidarity. Dozens of people telling him he mattered.

He read every message and felt nothing.

Because the person they cared about didn’t exist.

One evening, after a particularly successful thread, Elliot closed the laptop and sat in the silence of his flat. The room hummed faintly with electricity and distant traffic. He realised he had spent the entire day agreeing with people he secretly disagreed with.

He tried to remember the last time he’d said something that felt dangerous and true. The memory didn’t come.

His phone buzzed again. Another notification. Another stranger thanking him for being such a good person.

He stared at the screen for a long time before turning it face down on the table.

The silence that followed felt heavier than any argument.