Season Finale

3:17 AM. My audience count had dwindled to a mere six-hundred-and-twelve souls, each of them linked to my consciousness through the tenuous digital thread of the CastNet.

“Alright, NeuroFam, that’s another round of ‘Apocalypse Dawn’ in the books,” I said, stretching my arms overhead, feeling the satisfying pop of vertebrae realigning. “Let’s check the tip jar before we call it a night.”

The donation counter in the bottom right corner of the screen is showing a paltry sum: 22.75 credits. Not even enough for a synthetic coffee and vat-grown breakfast at the corner bodega. The algorithmic gods had not smiled upon us tonight.

While my fingertips danced across the haptic keyboard, preparing to shut down the stream something caught my eye. It was a news alert from the Emergency Broadcast System. It was not the usual celebrity scandal or corporate merger announcement. It was something with a crimson border. Priority One.

“Hold up, gang. Something’s coming across the wire.” my fingers twitched, broadcasting my genuine confusion to the viewers. The FeelingSync™ implant at the base of my skull transmitted the first shiver of unease down the spines of my dwindling audience.

The alert expanded across my field of vision:

EMERGENCY ALERT: UNIDENTIFIED AERIAL PHENOMENA DETECTED OVER MAJOR METROPOLITAN AREAS. CITIZENS ADVISED TO REMAIN INDOORS. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.

My pulse quickened. The FeelingSync™ transmitted my elevated heart rate, the subtle adrenaline rush. I noticed that the viewership jumped by twenty-seven in three seconds.

“Well, well, well,” I drawled, affecting nonchalance while my mind raced. “Looks like we might have some actual content tonight after all.”

I flicked my wrist, activating the external camera feed from my apartment’s window. The night sky over NeoPortland was filled with chemical fog. It had the usual midnight gradient of industrial waste and light pollution. But there, hovering above the TransAmericorp Tower, I could see a shape. Not quite solid, not quite vapor. It shifted like mercury under pressure, reflecting the city’s glow in ways that hurt to look at directly.

“Are you seeing this?” I whispered, forgetting for a moment the artificial persona I maintained for the audience. The viewership counter ticked upward: 1,047… 1,352… 1,890… The algorithm had noticed something unusual and was pushing my feed up the recommendation stacks.

My donation alert chimed, then chimed again. The tip jar swelled as viewers poured in.

“Looks like we’ve got company, folks,” I said, attempting to regain my performative edge. “Either the government’s testing some new holographic tech, or—”

The shape above the tower pulsed once, twice. A beam of light—no, not light exactly, something more solid than light but less tangible than matter—shot downward from the craft. The TransAmericorp Tower’s upper floors vanished. Not exploded, not crumbled. Simply ceased to exist where the beam touched.

My jaw dropped. The FeelingSync™ broadcasted my genuine shock as the comment crawler at the edge of my vision exploded with activity:

SynthChick99: omg is this real?????
VoidWalker_2: nice VFX bro
TruthHunter447: IT’S HAPPENING THEY’RE FINALLY HERE

“This isn’t—” I stuttered, noticing my practiced persona crumbling. “I’m not doing this. This is real-time. This is—”

The shape above the tower multiplied, splitting into three identical forms that began to drift in different directions across the city skyline. More beams. More buildings with suddenly missing floors, sections, entire wings. No explosion. No debris. Just absence where presence had been moments before.

2,743… 3,568… 5,129… The viewership counter climbed exponentially.

I stumbled to the kitchen, keeping the window feed running. I yanked open the refrigerator door, grabbed a bottle of synthetic whiskey, and took a long pull.

“I should be heading to a shelter,” I muttered, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. “I should be calling my mother.”

But the numbers kept climbing. 9,446… 12,827… The donation alerts had become a constant chime, a church bell tolling the apocalypse.

“What am I seeing?” I whispered as I returned to my chair, now seeing dozens of the shapes scattered across the skyline, beams of anti-matter—for what else could erase rather than destroy?—carving geometric patterns into the city’s architecture.

GodOfAbraham: judgment day is here repent
CorporateX_Employee: this is classified tech testing SHUT DOWN YOUR STREAM
EyesWideOpen: they’re writing something look at the pattern!

I enlarged the window feed. The viewer was right. The missing sections of buildings, when viewed from his vantage point, formed a pattern. Not random destruction. Deliberate excision. A message being written in negative space.

My doorbell chimed.

“Not now,” I muttered, engrossed in the patterns emerging across the skyline. The beams continued their work, erasing matter with surgical precision.

The doorbell chimed again, followed by heavy pounding. “Department of Information Security! Open up!”

I froze. The viewer count hit 387,451. I had never had more than twenty thousand before. The tip jar showed more credits than I had earned in the previous six months combined.

“Mr. Vedder, you are broadcasting restricted imagery! Open this door immediately or we will be forced to enter!”

The shapes in the sky began to converge again, forming a single massive entity that hovered directly over the center of the city. The pattern they had carved into the cityscape was almost complete—a series of concentric circles with lines radiating outward. A language. A declaration. A verdict.

“One second!” I shouted toward the door. My hands shook as I manipulated the control panel. Should I end the stream? Should I grab my emergency bag and try to run? The algorithm had made me a star in real-time as the world changed forever.

“Mr. Vedder! Final warning!”

I looked at the viewer count—now over a million—and the still-climbing donation counter. I looked at the shapes in the sky, at the message they had carved into his city. I looked at the comments flowing past faster than I could read, thousands of people watching through my eyes as history unfolded.

“I’m sorry, NeuroFam,” I said softly, my voice breaking. “I think this is the end of the stream.”

I reached for the disconnect button just as the door crashed inward. Three figures stood in the doorway, backlit by the hallway’s sickly fluorescents. Not government agents. Their proportions were wrong—too tall, too thin, limbs not quite bending where joints should be.

“Oh,” I whispered, as his viewer count hit two million. “Oh, I see.”

The figures moved toward me with inhuman grace. One reached out with a hand that had too many fingers, each one impossibly long and jointed in ways that made my eyes hurt.

“They’re here,” I said, my voice steady now. “They’re in my apartment. They look… they look like us, but wrong. Like someone described humans to a blind sculptor who had never touched a human body.”

The tip jar overflowed with credits. The comment crawler became a blur of text.

The lead figure stepped directly into the camera’s field of view. It stared into the lens with eyes that contained too many pupils, all dilating independently.

It spoke. A sound like metal tearing, like glass breaking, like a million voices screaming in perfect harmony. The Feeling Sync™ overloaded, broadcasting not just my terror but something else, something ancient and vast and utterly alien.

Two million viewers felt it simultaneously: the sensation of something vast and uncaring turning its attention toward humanity. The collective consciousness of an intelligence so foreign that merely sensing it scraped against the mind like sandpaper.

“They want me to tell you,” I said, my voice distant even to my own ears. “They’ve been watching our broadcasts. Our streams. Our signals. They’ve been… studying us. Learning our languages. Our cities. Our ways.”

The figure nodded, a motion too fluid, too perfect in its execution.

“They say… they say they’re here to help us. To save us.” I laughed, a hollow sound devoid of humor. “They say we’re entertaining. They say we’re… their favorite show.”

The creature extended its too-long hand toward my face. Its fingers brushed against my cheek with the gentleness of a lover’s caress.

“Remember to like and subscribe,” I whispered, as the hand covered my eyes. “And hit that notification bell.”

The feed cut to black.

But not before the viewer count hit ten million. Not before the pattern carved into the city was complete. Not before the message—now clear in its negative space—could be read by those with eyes to see: SEASON FINALE.