The writing contest is now over, and three people submitted. Honestly not bad, it's pretty crazy that three people took some time out of their week to write a story for an incel forum, of all things, with no hope for a prize or compensation. I decided to add the names earlier because I don't think it will affect anything, and the authors should be credited earlier. So thanks to @NEETcel2023 @WorthlessSlavicShit and @earming for submitting their stories. I enjoyed reading them and there was obvious effort put into them. I am also hoping for myself or others to organize similar things like a poetry or song cover contest in the future.
Here are the stories, I encourage people reading them to comment their thoughts on each story so that the ones who wrote them can get feedback and praise.
"A Ship of Me"
WorthlessSlavicShit
Well, here I was. Today, it was officially 139 years ever since I've embarked on my journey of self-discovery... in an empty void where finding anything else was a cause for a multi-week celebration. Well, to be fair to myself, that rock I passed by looked pretty nice. Add in the act that it could've signalled that I'd soon pass by some asteroid belt a least, and it was definitely worthy of concentrating my attention on burning through some of my media and entertainment caches. Well, I haven't found any asteroids or anything else I could make a landing so far, but the just-mentioned activity did indeed bring about some interesting discoveries. I never knew that Void Voyage had so many interesting alternate endings!
Well, at least that one did. My Void Voyage for sure didn't seem like it was leading to one of those.
Ahem. Where are my manners. I'm pretty sure I've seen them running around here a few minutes ago, hah! Anyway, I believe it's time for me to introduce myself. That way, at least I won't be a stranger to you anymore. Not much we can do about the reverse, unfortunately. So, to keep my real name safe... I've talked about Void Voyage, right? Well, then you can simply call me "Void Voyager". How about that? Sounds pretty good, doesn't it, and it nicely sums up why I'm here, sending signals everywhere and nowhere, and why you are here, receiving, deciphering and watching those signals years later, delivered straight from the utterly godforsaken patch of void I'm flying through.
Yes, I'm one of those mindless schmucks who fell for that comical trend of "self-development among the stars,", why do you ask? Is it that obvious that I've already thrown away over a century of my life, and it's very likely to be a couple more before I return back home? Damn, I guess I should work on how I present myself to others, you don't need to know everything about me, heh!
But then, can anyone blame me? When you don't have a lot of friends, you listen to what the ones you have are saying all that more attentively and deeply.
"Have any of you heard about this?" Rengzer said as he showed all of us videos of people talking about this, before turning all of his attention to me, "I can imagine this would be right up your alley, you've been looking for adventure for some time, haven't you?"
"Oh yeah, he was!" Jezika reacted with a laugh. "Also, not wanting to be human anymore, cause of how boring it is. I mean, I understand that," she said, ruffling the weathers of her wings and winking her multicolored eyes theatrically, "but just imagine him becoming a robot or something else designed for long living, something with an extremely long lifespan so he could do this even without any medicine."
"Or he could just be the ship itself," Asanlem joked, deadpan as always, prompting laughter from the others, and determining my future for the next few centuries.
The others also had their own ideas, jokes, offers and suggestions they've shared in our conversation, but those didn't matter to me. Everything I needed to hear from that conversation were just those few sentences.
And so, I did it. Bought a modern starship with most of the savings I've accumulated over the decades, downloaded my consciousness into the ship's control systems, and set off to "explore myself", by going into a place where there was nothing else to explore.
There was a lot of that right off the bat. For those of you who haven't yet done it, unless you choose to have your mind edited to better handle the transition's results, which I didn't choose, since you are used to having a normal body, your mind will just perceive the ship the same as it would your old body, just converted to new "body" parts. It was surprisingly easy to get used to the ship's sensors being my eyes and ears. It was surprisingly hard to get used to the boosters being my legs, and what the airlock is to me and how I've felt about it over time is something I'll keep for myself.
For the first couple of years, while I could still clearly see inhabited systems all around me, while I was still pasing places filled with other living and thinking being and while I was still receiving regular broadcasts nd messages both meant for me and not, this was the only meaningful "self-discovery" I've done. Because why would I go completely crazy and needlessly self-introspective, I still had regular contact with some other people, after all.
Then, I got used to it, even started forgetting what it was like to have a human body and be the good-old four-limbed, two-eyed-and-eared, squishy person that would quickly die in a vaccuum, and I stopped communicating with the outside world. Regularly, I mean. Got too far away from any civilization.
I don't even remember which of those two happened first. Could've been that they happened at the same time.
And then... came the boredom.
The unimaginable boredom. Remember what I've said about the mind editing? A reasonably common procedure for people transitioning from one form of life to another, to help them better handle the switch to a different mind substrate, different sensorium, different bodyplan, yadda yadda yadda.
Well, like a good number of the people who scoff at such procedures, I soon found out why they are routinely performed. As it turns out, the mind of a social primate whose brain during its entire existence is fine-tuned to help them handle and navigate the social environment created by the people around them and of which they are an inseparable part just like everyone else, something so deeply ingrained in it that even most cyborgization and gene editing procedures leave it intact... it isn't going to suit you after you've decided to download your consciousness into a multiple-hundred-thousand-tons steel vehicle and living your life as a starship happily gallavanting through the endless void, directed only by your heart's choices.
Yeah. It gets boring and lonely pretty quickly.
Ah. Annoying, aren't they? Can you hear their voices in the recording, their howling, screaming and chanting? The cheering? It's coming from everywhere, the food dispenser, the dock, the cleaning drones, even from the datafiles. It'd have to be a miracle for you not to hear their annoying screeches, hell, I'd bet the recording apparatus itself is joining in right now, just as I'm using it to record this message. I'd be surprised if it wasn't, frankly. All of them are the same.
Yes, "them." Well, me, actually. It's a bit complicated, but a funny story once you get through the boring exposition at the beginning, trust me.
So, you know what I said about the boredom and loneliness, with absolutely nobody anywhere for me to meaningfully interact with? Remember me talking about how I've gotten used to my new body and the new outside feelings, perceptions, qualia, however you want to call those things, which I've been experiencing? Well, with nobody there to interact with and nothing coming in from outside for me to think about and marvel over, my attention soon turned inward, to my own mind.
And what a ride that was.
I began to think about absolutely everything. I started creating scenarios, then more scenarios, and then more and more scenarios. So many scenarios. Some fantastic, some realistic, some batshit crazy, some romantic, some depressing... you get the idea. I build scenarios on top of scenarios, reused characters, imagined crossovers, thought of how some characters would react when put in the place of others, the general overthinking stuff.
Then, I started doing this with real people I knew. I thought back to that party where Rengzer, Jezika and Asanlem's words changed my life. I started imagining what they were doing before that, knowing what I knew about them. What they were doing after that. What they were doing now and what adventures they were getting up to when I wasn't around, whether together or individually. Then, slowly but surely, I started adding in other people I knew, imagining what they were doing that I didn't know about, what were their relationships and interactions that I wasn't privy to, all that and so much more.
And in the end, it always just circled back to me. What I knew and didn't know about them, what was hidden and revealed to me about the people I knew, or thought I knew.
Well, I guess it was inevitable what happened after. Where my mind then turned its attention.
Itself.
I started thinking about me. Every aspect of my being. I looked back at all the scenarios I've been imagining earlier, and pontificating why I've thought of the plotlines, events and themes I thought about. I started deeply analyzing my thinking, which inputs wired my brain, which was currently inactive in my frozen old body by the way, to react with the mental outputs it did, which my new substrate for my mind continued allowing and letting happen.
I started exploring my memory, from the freshest memories worth remembering, so nothing after I had to start using my mind to overdrive, to the deepest ones whose context had long since disappeared into oblivion. I started analyzing how each of them made me who I am, just like a few semi-random sentences from my friends at what should've been an ordinary gathering did. I started thinking about what I did in each of them, my choices which have all had irreversible consequences, and pondered what their effects actually were, both on myself and others. I traced the path of my life as deeply and in as much detail as I could've, and lost myself in it utterly.
I lost myself in myself. Sounds egotistic, doesn't it? Well, we are just starting, because guess what I did after that.
Do you have an idea? Are the hints I've given so far enough? Are the enthusiastic screeches in the background as I speak to you what made it all fall in place for you?
Yes, I've cloned myself. My mind, specifically. Now that it was running on silicon instead of biomass, it was pretty easy, not to mention quick. Everyone should try it at least once, if you'd ask me.
Simply put, the more I've thought about my thinking, the more I've analyzed my mind, again and again I've arrived at two undeniable truths.
First, I was painfully lonely out here, and absolutely craved connection and interactions with others, more than I've ever craved anything in my life.
Second... I had a lot to talk to myself about.
It wasn't like there wasn't enough space, either. So far, what now functioned as my subconscious mind was taking care of all the systems, tools, appliances and so on that I had, but which didn't need to be used at all since I wasn't transporting any crew. Just so we are clear, by taking care of them, I mean that it just did quick checks to see whether they were still there, connected, and potentially usable if needed sometime in the future.
So, I cloned my mind, just like I was at that moment, and put the new me to take care of one of the two food dispensers. We got off to a pretty good start, though he was a bit miffed that he wasn't the one controlling the entire craft, since in his view he had been doing so for years before being ripped away from that and put into one of the most basic appliances in the world.
Still, we were the same, so we were on the same wavelength ultimately. That's why I wasn't too surprised when he chose to be the next one to duplicate his mind, though I'll admit, to this day I can't exactly describe the emotion I felt when he put the new him into the other food dispenser. Painful foreboding, maybe? Because the new "us" was indeed not a new "me", but a new "him" through and through. Not even a few minutes have passed before the two started jokingly arguing who of them was the better dispenser.
We've all ultimately started at the same point, from and with the same baseline, but the moment I created a clone of my mind and put him into a tiny appliance, a tiny part of me, I've created a different individual with wildly different range of possible actions, which were sure to quickly mold this individual into someone quite unlike myself. And now, he had a partner, someone who from the start of his existence was in the same situation as him, with the two of them having much more in common together than with me, something that was bound to only accelerate exponentially now that there were enough of them to interact together and strengthen those differences.
At that point I already knew where this was going and would ultimately end up at. And I had no problem with it them. Company was exactly what I wanted, and everything was just a justification for it or an actual action done to reach that goal.
After that, we just started to experiment. For the next cloning, I put the brand-new me into a single cleaning drone, and after letting him get used to his new existence for a few days, he then cloned himself and I, surprise, put the new "him" into an entire group of interconnected drones, so the two of them could compare their experiences and points of view.
The dispenser-mes, meanwhile, put their copies into the rest of their systems, from the appliances which actually created the food, to the ones keeping them connected together and with the rest of the ship, the real Me. Just like that, those two had, in addition to each other, entire groups of us to spend the time with and be literally connected together more than any of them were with me. Soon, they were fated to become so different from me that they would just become, effectively, my crew, and be a bunch of strangers with ideas and worldviews quite different from mine.
Good.
This was what we continued doing. Anything that could store my mind, another iteration of it, got one. Some came from me, some were "next generation." Some could move, some couldn't. Some got to experience the real world, some had to do with the virtual one. Speaking of that, as we started running out of physical appliances our copies could inhabit, the new ones simply got to exist in the databases. Considering how many of them are basically me, but without control of the ship or anything else, you can imagine how they feel about it. But hey, they at least get to enjoy the entertainment we have nonstop, while I still have to focus at least a bit on the outside world.
We also started experimenting, a lot. It became clear very soon that just copying my, our, baseline minds wouldn't be enough for what we wanted, and it was starting to get a bit repetitive anyway. So, why not duplicate just a part of it? I've mentioned my good manners before, haven't I? Turns out he was looking for his brother. Still is. He would never hide somewhere to get up to who knows what type of mischief, unlike him. And don't even get me started on what the "toilet manager", who was birthed after my first copy isolated the part of his mind that included his experiences after he found out how much he liked seeing how far he could spray the various liquids at his disposal is getting up to when he thinks nobody's looking or close by...
What happened next I believe you can guess by now. Right now, the ship, I, have a very unusual crew of about 500 living beings, inhabiting everything from companionbots to toilet systems. And we are only now starting to slow down. I've gotten the others to agree to stop at about 1,000 of us. It was a pretty quick agreement as well. The benefits of talking to yourself and having only yourself to talk with.
By now, you're probably asking why I'm even sending this message out there, aren't you? Well, I think it's time for me to make a small confession. Throughout this entire recording, especially so at the beginning, I had been a bit of an unreliable narrator. I believe that's the correct term, at least it is according to my databases.
Well, while I indeed hadn't yet found anything to make a landing on at a whim, I have in fact detected someplace I could take a stop at for some time. A nice, cozy-looking system, consisting of a dwarf star, a planet or two, a couple of planetoids and what seems to be an asteroid field, about three years of journeying away from me. If you've guessed that that's where I'm currently heading, no points for you, because that was completely obvious. If you've guessed that this message is meant for you, the couple million people according to my estimate who inhabit that system in a couple dozen habitats, then you also get no points, because I've basically told you that multiple times.
I'm a stern teacher, aren't I? Well, you would be too if you were in my place and had to deal with my circumstances. Which you might very soon. I have no idea what any of those guys will be make once we make a landing in your system and enjoy our stay there. I don't even know what I will be like when that happens, dealing with my. I hope you will welcome us warmly, and I hope you won't interpret that as me hoping to be blasted out of the sky with laser cannons. Though it would definitely save all of us a whole host of potential problems...
But hey! If any of you guys are looking for an adventure in any of the weirdest starships you've ever encountered, I'm yours. I'm the former guy, now ship you were asking for. So let's meet! Maybe the self-discovery journey was always meant to bring me here, to meet whatever bunch of schmucks will be willing to board me, to meet me and me and me and me, to get to know all of me, and finally bring some non-me presence into the ship of me.
We don't know yet for sure. But I'll be happy to try.
"The Feast of Tantalus"
earming
Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination - Voltaire
A booming crescendo rose, before giving way to a metallic clanking and a ping as the doors of a lift opened onto the fifth floor of a brutalist flat on the west end of Cardington St, near its intersection with Wentworth Avenue. A fair-skinned young man stepped out, arrayed in leather boots, a pair of denim jeans and a tank top, all the garments being quite deeply soiled. A stench of sweat and grease clung to his outfit as though he had in his livelihood absorbed the grimy sordidness of the city itself. The man, whose name was John Weldan -though no one knew it-, made his way to room 507, the soles of his boots sticking to the floor’s film of dust and spilt liquor. John Weldan dug his hand into his pocket, probing for his wallet, from which he took out his key, and opened the door. John stepped through the threshold onto linoleum flooring, closing the door behind him quietly so as to not alert his roommate of his entrance. Howbeit, as John passed Ivor’s absent room, with its door flung open, it became evident he was out socialising, like he typically was. John never spoke to his roommate, and in the few awkward circumstances which made silence unacceptable for Ivor, such as when they were both watching the television, was unable to return the interjection with anything but a curt reply. In fact, it seemed all people were unwilling to talk to John unless it was necessary, and John, enlightened by the transactional nature of social interactions, and with his own ends in mind, was equally wary to enter into conversation with anyone. With that having been said, John had always felt asocial, even as a child; his inclinations toward solitude were not chiefly a symptom of his experience but rather the quiet, immutable workings of his blood. Yet here, in his sanctuary, he would be molested by nobody but his roommate. Regardless, perhaps it should rather be described more fittingly as his prison, for within the five bleak cubicles which comprised this flat, he was subjected to the same dreary, monotonous conditions as he was in the drudgery of his vocational business. Nevertheless, as of late John had been relieved of his mediocrity by a virtual repose; in his solitude, John found solace in the dim glow of his computer screen. He opened the door to his featureless, claustrophobic room, illuminated only by a narrow chink in his curtain. As he went over to tie together the tassels at the bottom of the curtains, a makeshift solution for his hatred of light, he glimpsed the bustling street below, with its groups of nobodies, who were yet infinitely less obscure and dull than himself. It may well be that one of the reasons John so despised light was that he believed himself to be an abhorrent being to which nothing pure should be afforded. For as much as one likes to be pretentious and portray himself as greater than he really is, continued posturing invariably results in a cognitive dissonance that can lead a man to ruin, and the same goes for ill-acquired and undeserved presents. Few men deserve half the things granted to them by our aberrant society, John thought, for society had raped that conviction into him.
He turned around in the darkness, letting his body go slack and allowing it to fall onto his unmade bed, the springs groaning under his weight. John reached out under the bed, where he placed his laptop, bringing it onto his lap. It was an old Dell laptop that he had salvaged from a boot sale some years ago, and since then it had been his only steady companion, patient and ever-present, biding its time until John got home from work, when its faint blue glow would light up like a close friend thrusting out his arms for an embrace. John opened the laptop, the fan whirring to life with a tired hum, the screen flickering into its familiar glow. He typed in his password, an obscure reference to a comic book he had read in his youth, and opened his web browser, navigating to the forum on which he whiled away his time- a site for alienated people. He scrolled the threads, scouring the website for something that would stimulate the ineffable vat of primordial soup in his mind, the murky waters of old memories and half-developed abstract notions, which had been locked tight against further mixing since his childhood, and from which all his interests and curiosities sprung.
John, at length, found an arousing thread title: ‘How Do You Keep Going When Life Forsakes You?’. Although John had seen variations on this title countless times before, the panacea which this post beckoned forth to such an unanswerable question proved irresistible to John’s weak temperament, and he clicked onto it. The thread unfolded the way they do- with a blend of sarcastic replies and serious advice- but it wasn’t the replies which caught John’s attention, it was the original post. The author of the thread wrote with such an alluring and earnest vulnerability that it struck John. Her handle was ‘effffie291’, and she had a profile picture of a girl from some Japanese cartoon, whose wide, innocent eyes only added to the delicateness of her aura. He reread her words, feeling something stir inside of him, and after a moment of deliberation, sent her a private message: ‘yngwrth: i know how you feel. it’s like everyone else has this secret to living that you just don’t. if you ever need someone to talk to, i’m here.’
John went over the words. Maybe this was a mistake, he thought to himself. He doubted she would even respond. He’d gone this long without having to confide in someone else. John made out to delete the message, but an instant before he were to, a notification came up; effffie291 had responded.
‘thanks, john. it’s good to know someone’s out there. how ru holding up?’
Henceforth their conversations became part of John’s routine, and something that he began to look forward to. Every night after work, after scrubbing the grime off his body in the shower, he would return to his laptop, waiting for a notification from effffie291. He felt a sense of comfort in their talks. They’d send each other whimsical pictures. They’d ask about each other’s days; he would recount the dull, mechanical tasks he laboured away at each day, and she’d share stories about her life, though her stories would be noticeably less divulging. Effie lived in a different city, and John was too poor to travel, though his mind wandered to the possibility many times. Their conversations were light at first, though over the course of time grew more personal, and as they did, so did John’s infatuation.
John found himself quite compelled to interact with her by an acute force inside of him, like that a ravenous, moribund man who has been lost in the woods might feel at the sight of an unsuspecting rabbit. His hunger for her was undeniable, yet he rationalised this urge in a way that cloaked his primal lechery. He told himself that it was something much more profound.
The aforesaid justification lay in John’s certainty that he had always found something celestial about Effie’s presence, even if it was only conveyed through words on a screen. Her curt responses, her distant nature, the aura of fragility she projected—it all began to coalesce into something grander in his mind. He persuaded himself that Effie wasn’t like other people. No, she was something pure, something beyond the mundane existence of those he encountered daily. She was different from the people at work who ignored him, or even from his flatmate Ivor, who flitted through life with shallow, meaningless social engagements. Effie was above all that; she was a beacon of light, untouchable, removed from the filth of the world around him. Effie, John told himself, wasn’t just a person, she was a symbol, a manifestation of the purity that had been denied to him his entire life. She was a vessel into which he could pour the little of his constitution that was not wholly wretched. John had been waiting his whole life for a calling, as all men in their youthful naïveté do, and he believed this was it. Engendered by concupiscence, John abandoned his austere worldview.
John began to feel hope for the first time since his childhood, and his emotional well-being now rested upon Effie’s presence. But even as John became closer to her, he couldn’t help but feel that her responses often seemed brusque, and that she took a long time to reply. This had the unfortunate effect of making John very desperate and determined to ensure her fidelity. His anxiety mounted with each delay in her responses, sending his mind spiralling into frantic scenarios. John was sure
that Effie was holding something back, but he lacked the insight and courage to ask, and any feeble attempts at a discreet question were quickly dismissed by the superior shrewdness and prudence of the supposed fairer gender.
Four months after the uneventful circumstance by which John had met effffie291, he sat by his desk in the bleak, confined cube that was his apartment’s bedroom, staring at the screen of the old Dell laptop. He did nothing but stare into the one light source of his room, the glow of the hundreds of thousands of pixels that constituted his computer screen. His mind was quite distant, fantasising about the girl buried deep beneath those pixels. John’s dark eyes had not seen a good sleep for a week, and they gradually began to shut, as they resolved to match the sleepful reverie of his mind. While they did, they themselves began to see the moving pictures of John’s psyche as the two projector screens were pulled down; moving forms transmuted into an increasingly crisp portrait of an ethereal figure that stood by John’s bed.
‘I’m sorry I couldn’t get back to you today John.. how was your day at work?’ the effigy began, with a mellow inflexion.
‘How could a day moving boxes be anything other than mundane, Effie’ he replied, with a smile that effused the radiant warmth Effies’s presence developed in him. ‘The days crash into each other like waves, and I can’t make out from the surf the individual undulations’ John continued.
‘I don’t think that they’re quite so large that they *crash* into each other John..’ Effie rebutted. John’s grin grew wider; his still quite shut eyes fluttered, unaware that the conjuration was backing up towards his window, ’you’re what keeps me going through the.. diminutive waves, Effie and.. I don’t gift you enough for that.. and for caring about me.’ ‘Effie?’ he murmured after a moment had passed.
‘It only took place out of liminality.. you know that well.. I can’t be here..’ a voice returned lightly. John’s eyes shot open, tracking the silhouette as it clambered over the window sill, the curtains wide agape, flares of oppressive light discharging in from street lamps, head lights and windows, utterly paralysing him.
He woke up some minute of the witching hour with a profuse sweat, to the view of his unlit room with the curtains together as they had been since he had fastened them shut months ago. Unaware of his awakening, his mind was monomanic with one thought- that he was losing Effie, and that he must do something about this actuality. His eyes were focussed on the ceiling, wearing off the paint with their steady gaze, as his mind settled on solving this business by purchasing a gift for Effie, as his dream had suggested he should.
John did indeed prove to buy her a present, saving a little money to purchase a eau de toilette befitting of her perceived aura, and the sensuality of his desires for her very essence. In spite of this, Effie put the ornate vial into a cupboard with her little supple hands, with other gifts she had received from men, friends and family, never to touch it again, and indifferent to the passion that had accrued its value. Effie continued to remain distant after this, her words sometimes sharp, sometimes elusive, but always enough to keep him tethered. He started to wonder if there was something wrong with him, if maybe he wasn’t good enough for her. He had never asked, but it gnawed at him—did she feel the same way about him? One night, a week after John’s dream, and after a long silence from Effie, he couldn’t resist the urge anymore. Without an expression on his face, he typed:
‘yngwrth: do you ever think about me? i’ve been thinking about you day and night since we met ’ He shuddered, as the snare he had set in his own path constricted around him with every second that passed without a response.
‘effffie291: idk what you mean.. im not sure if i could say anything esp considering its virtual nature…’
She of course knew very well what he meant. John’s heart sank; tasting sour puke in his mouth, his stomach churned with the realisation that he had overstepped. To a regular man, this terse statement would quite lucidly signify the fact that a virtual relationship with Effie would simply not be possible, but this threw John into a desperate bid for self-improvement.
He worked arduously and conscientiously, he worked overtime, he forced himself into new routines, he even tried to start working out, but it was all futile and he fell short of his goals regardless of his earnestness. John also applied for more sophisticated jobs, to no avail. Pitiful John, despite his ardour, was of degenerate working class stock, and the threads of Clotho had already spun John into his ideal niche, becoming of his inferior extraction. John’s ambition, however, was far from quelled. He had heard stories of men like him—men who crawled out of the gutters of mediocrity through sheer willpower. He had seen those redpill posts plastered all over the internet, stories of men who had become somebody- Andrew Tate, Jeremy Meeks, Hamza, Bill Gates, so on. He told himself that if they could do it, so could he. Yet no matter how many hours he put into his job, no matter how much he lifted weights or how many self-help articles he read, the results were always the same: the mirror reflected the same gaunt, grimy face. Weeks turned into months, and the weight of his failure began to bear down on him. Every interaction with Effie became a struggle. Her replies were growing shorter; their relationship was fraying, just as the hems of his jeans had, and John no longer had any confidence in Effie. It came to a head one particularly brutal day. John had been turned down for a job promotion yet again, his manager citing his ‘lack of initiative’ and ‘poor social skills’. He had been publicly stamped with the black triangle for all in his workplace to see. John walked home miserably through a downpour, his clean clothes drenched by the time he had reached his dingy flat. He staggered into the sitting room, unable to make to his bedroom, collapsing onto the settee. John lay there, languishing, his mind too humbled and anxious to wander over thoughts of *her*. He sat on the couch in his fluorescent jacket, in the stuffy hot room, until he began to sweat profusely. The odour reminded him of how he used to reek before he started taking care of himself, before he had met Effie, in return reminding him of the early days of their relationship. He took a large inhale of his armpits, which nauseated him not from the stench, but from the hope the predestinate John thought he harboured before it had been quashed by the apathetic unravelling of fate, and the other emetic effects nostalgia and vague evocations invoke. It was not simply the olfactory sensation, but the abyss in himself that had been breaking open since he had met Effie, previously being occupied by the malleable clay of connexion; the soil that remained in his bosom had stiffened. John did not notice when his roommate crept past him to his quarters, scowling at the sorry sight of the mess sprawled on the couch. Whilst John Weldan sat alone undertaking his masochistic rite, wallowing in the unpleasant surrealness the mnemonic fetor induced, Euphemia sat next to the effects of her toilette, gossiping with her friends.
It was only at half past nine, two hours after the start of his shift at his warehouse, that John woke up. In view of this and his embarrassment the day prior, which had conflated with the queasiness he had felt in the evening, John decided not to turn up at work that day. He had gone to sleep on the settee, so he made his way to his room, to check if his inbox had any messages from Effie. He opened his laptop with a trepidation, and his heart sunk lower as he saw the lack of any new notifications in his inbox, there were no new messages from effffie291. John ran his hand over his uneven stubble. This warranted radical action, he thought to himself. He had to stave off the dissolution of their relationship at any cost, and he had to find out more about Effie. John clicked onto Effie’s profile, the stylised animated girl facing him, mesmerising him. He searched through her posts, looking for a clue. And he found it, nestled in a thread about favourite songs- she had posted her email so that someone might be able to further correspond with her. John entered her email, ‘eufemb@gmail,com’, into an open source intelligence framework, and it returned a list of
matches of usernames across social media websites. The first was eufemb, a Twitter account. He clicked onto this, but it didn’t seem to be Euphemia’s, as the account had been created in 2009, and he doubted that she would have made a twitter account at the age of seven. The second match was an Instagram account. He moved his cursor to the rectangle displaying the results, but Instagram prompted him to login, which he thereupon did. Before the page had fully loaded, John’s breath grew short. It was indubitably her, the same eyes which she had once sent cropped, claiming were hers (this being the only snapshot of her face she had been comfortable sending), now glanced back as part of a finished portrait. As the rest of the page loaded, John’s anxiety turned to dread. There it was, the proof of her ‘infidelity’. Last Friday, Euphemia Billingsbey had uploaded a picture of her and a man kissing.
John’s stomach lurched, the air knocked from his chest as he went over the image in his dimly lit abode, fixating on every painful detail—the way her head tilted slightly to meet the man’s lips, the softness in her expression. That warmth, that radiance he had so obsessively attributed to her purity, now revealed itself to be nothing more than the mundane affection between lovers, wholly outside his grasp. The man, faceless to John but every bit the spectre of his deepest fears, was well-groomed, his chiselled jaw and confident posture a stark contrast to John’s own slumped figure, haunted by inadequacy. It wasn’t so much the disloyalty that shattered the residual spirit John had left in him, but rather the reality that Euphemia had a life beyond his own, and that Euphemia was not in any way pure; she was simply another partaker in the banal and ephemeral nature of this world (John was precisely the same, only on a lower functioning level, although telling him that would certainly not have consoled him here). She was not virginal, despite her feigning; indeed an analysis of these events by any right-minded man would would tell you that John was the more naïve person. John felt his vorago growing deeper, the mephitis it emitted suffocating him. He was still certain he must take action, and despite his bodily affliction, stood up, and started pacing back and forth, outlining in his mind the draft of the message he should write to Euphemia. These thoughts culminated in this harsh exposition:
‘yngwrth: I write to you out of concern for those you speak to, and to put and end to your deluded notions; you have previously made evident to me, through indiscreet insinuations, that you think of me as wholly inferior to yourself, and that you only speak to me not even out of common civility, but due to your desire for attention. I have become aware of the fact you are not single, having become aware of your posts on sites outside this one. I doubt you are aware of the energy that I have poured into you, the lengths I’ve gone to to ensure your happiness and the survival of our relationship. Do you not enjoy your perfume? I had believed you were, we were, something profound. Yet I have come to realise that you are a twopenny slag as could be found in any nook and cranny, albeit with your own foibles that render you utterly detestable to any man. It is only out of man’s insatiable lechery and the female propensity to conformity and superficial kindness that you maintain your pitiably meagre company. The way you shroud who you are, and pose yourself as vulnerable to get by is akin to the strategy of a writing beast as it moans forgiveness after fitting a child down its maw and being shot by a hunter. Therefore, your solicitory livelihood can be considered tantamount to a harlot’s. It is clear to me that you know this truth of your being; it is not solely buried deep in your inmost temperament, in your conscious actions your miserableness is readily conspicuous. Do you not understand how you have condemned yourself to a life of transitory pleasure? This man shall not be your last, Euphemia. You will soon come to realise that man does not love you, that he desires only the validation of his own self worth with you as a face to trample on. After you break up with your second man, you yourself will be broken, broken I say! And when you are broken on the outside, just as you already are on the inside, you will rapidly age, lose your soul, personal aspirations, and most importantly to your practical worth, your body will deteriorate and you shall have lost your only utility to others. You will give up everything that you are and wish you were just to get by. And when you are an old dame, as you are set out to be currently only at the tender age of thirty, you will be bitter of your lost hopes like all the rest of them. This is not a path you can wrestle yourself free from, Euphemia, yet there is another way! You can come to me, and we can cleave in half the route fate has cast us, for our own dreams. I beg you to consider this Euphemia, I have loved you always.’
John’s faculties had been wholly drained composing the message, and he sent it without a thought in his mind. He did not ruminate over the contradictory nature of his message, or the impossibility of it even if Euphemia did desire to be with him. effffie291, as would be expected, did not reply.
His newly activated indignation and the points he had outlined in his epistle proved to act as a catalyst for a developing malevolence John had never felt before. The very same symbol which had been a symbol of purity had matured into a symbol of the sordidness he had tried to escape from. Effie was just like the others, a self serving, superficial cog in the machinery du monde. In his darkened flat, as the night deepened, John’s rationale began to form into a coherent ideology.
She, in his mind, was emblematic of a larger societal disease, one that rewarded the shallow and punished the truly deserving. The strong, those with real virtues- intellectual, emotional, spiritual-had been systematically beaten down, while the weak, those who existed merely to consume and gratify their basest urges, were uplifted. Effie was part of this inverted moral order, and John was certain that her mere existence, the ease with which she manipulated others- himself included- was proof that she, like society itself, was irredeemable. He believed now, fully and without reservation, that her betrayal was not personal; it was part of the larger betrayal of mankind.
Revenge, to John, was not merely an act of personal vengeance, it was a moral imperative, although unbeknownst to John, or perhaps he wished not to admit it, this was merely the justification for the same unconscious impetus which driven him into his unnatural relationship in the first place.
His heart raced as he sat down at his desk, opening his laptop with a steady hand. His old Dell laptop flickered to life once again. His fingers hovered over the keyboard. John no longer felt the need to speak to Effie directly; that was over. Words had no power here anymore. Instead, he would find her, trace her steps online, gather what he needed. He had seen enough clues in her posts, enough breadcrumbs to locate her in the real world. John began constructing a map, triangulating locations around her haunts as though he were the operator of a sonar vessel. In the days that followed, John did not show up to work at all. He did not care for his hygiene, he barely ate, and the little contact he engaged in with Ivor and his colleagues at his workplace vanished as he focussed every inch of his being on his new calling. He trailed her comments and her photos from the shadows like a vulture, before circling in on the carrion; the same coffee shop appeared almost weekly in her posts on instagram. He quickly geolocated it, remarking on the fact it was nearly in the dead centre of the triangulation. In preparation for his operation, John purchased a large bowie knife from a camping store down the road from him, and a length of rope.
At eight o’clock the next morning, John put on a dark hoodie, packed his backpack with his essential effects and the knife and rope he had bought, and then made his way eastbound down Wentworth Avenue, heading for the train station on North Bank. The train ride to her city felt both interminable and too brief. The undulating country hills outside the window flickered past him unnoticed, a blur of meaningless shapes. John’s mind was elsewhere, replaying their conversations in his head, dissecting each of Effie’s words, each pause, each ellipsis in her messages. When he arrived at the city, after the eleven hour hour long train ride, John moved through the evening streets with a quiet determination, his backpack slung over his shoulders. His mind was still, his focus razor-sharp. The café was just a few blocks away, a small, nondescript place nestled among larger buildings. The evening light was filtering through the windows with a soft, golden glow. He stood outside for a moment, watching through the glass, scanning the faces inside. By coincidence, she was at the coffee shop at the very moment of his arrival, sitting on a stool, her skirt draped over it. Euphemia, her brunette hair being highlighted by the rays of the sun, was chattering away with two of her girlfriends about various scandals. His gaze reached her face, and instantly his bosom became light and a wave of nervous and sickening energy emanated out of his breast into his limbs. This person who had occupied his every thought for months was suddenly tangible, and only a few metres away from him. He pulled the cords of his hoodie and turned away, breathing laboriously. Scarcely had he sat down on a bench facing the café when the door opened and Euphemia and her retinue set off to repair to some other haunt of theirs. John vigilantly trailed at a distance behind them, for he was imprudent enough to have sent his face to Euphemia, and was at risk of her identifying him were he too reckless. The doe and their hunter arrived at a public garden, the sun, although obscured by trees and buildings, steadily plummeting and engulfing the park in an incipient darkness. John, from behind a plane tree, observed them settling down in a depression behind some bushes and next to an ornamental pond, quite hidden from view. One of Euphemia’s friend pulled a bottle of alcohol out of her bag, and the other girl got up, said something to the duo, before walking away in the antipode direction from whence the crowd had come. After a few minutes, Euphemia herself said something to her friend, and got up; John reasoned she was going to the toilet by the twilight, as she had left her belongings on the little dip in the greensward. John deftly took off his backpack, unzipped it, drew out his dagger, and thrust it into the pockets of his jacket. He strode swiftly after Effie under the cover of dusk. They walked through a grove, and John increased his pace, his good hand in his left pocket. Euphemia turned her head as he neared, her eyes catching his. Her expression broke into dread, as did his. John froze, and his backpack slid and fell from his shoulders.
‘John?’
John stumbled backwards, tripping over his own backpack, and he let out a whimper as the knife in his pocket fell out onto the grass, slashing his hand on the way, sanguine exuding from a slit on his pale palm.
"Day of Retribution"
NEETcel2023
Day of Retribution. That’s what today was.But it wasn’t during the day—no, this was the time for shadows, for the silent, cold hunger of the night. I had prepared for this moment meticulously, every detail rehearsed in my head for weeks, months, perhaps even years. It all led here. I stood alone in the heart of Brussels, Belgium, under the cloak of nightfall. This city, this very place, would be the graveyard of the so-called Western Elites.
The hotel loomed before me, a five-star palace where those who crushed men like me beneath their heels gathered in opulence. Inside, Ursula von der Leyen, Mark Rutte, Kier Starmer, Emmanuel Macron, Olaf Scholz, and Kamala Harris, among others, were meeting. The faces of the West’s hypocrisy. Traitors to men like me. They were the architects of this oppressive system—Zionists, feminists, and the defenders of slut culture that had forsaken the incel like me.
My AK-47 was hidden in a cello case, the kind that would fool anyone. It was purchased on the black market, its cold, deadly power the answer to my years of silent suffering. It would be the weapon of my justice, the tool that would etch my name into history, forever.
I checked into the hotel, like any guest, walking calmly to my room. The suitcase weighed heavy with purpose. Inside, I unzipped it, taking the rifle in hand, feeling its weight, its raw potential. Wrapping it in a towel, I tucked my knife at my side. The time had come. I could feel my pulse slow, focus honing with each step toward the elevator. My mind was clear, steady.
The elevator dinged. I arrived on the floor of the conference room. Security guards flanked the entrance, oblivious to their fate. I walked past them—closer, closer—until I was almost brushing shoulders. In one swift motion, I slid the knife from my side and drove it deep into the throat of the first guard. His eyes widened in shock, gurgling as blood poured from his mouth. Before the second could react, I plunged the blade into his neck, twisting it with precision. They crumpled to the floor, gasping, struggling, but unable to scream. They bled out in silence. I watched them die, a smirk curling at the edge of my lips.
Retribution had begun.
I approached the grand double doors of the conference room, my heart pounding not with fear, but with anticipation. The moment I had dreamt of was finally here. I swung the doors open and stormed inside, AK-47 raised high. The room, filled with the world’s most powerful, froze in shock. Their eyes met mine, wide with disbelief, fear contorting their polished faces.
Without hesitation, I opened fire.
Bullets tore through the air, shredding the bodies of security personnel who had barely lifted a finger to react. Blood sprayed across the walls, across the velvet curtains and polished tables. It was chaos, pure and beautiful chaos. Screams filled the air as the leaders of the world, the so-called saviors of society, scrambled in their expensive suits and designer dresses, trying to hide, trying to flee.
Ursula von der Leyen fell first, her body convulsing as bullets ripped through her chest. Macron was next, his once-arrogant demeanor shattered as he screamed, crawling under a table, only for my bullets to find him there. Kamala Harris, eyes wide in disbelief, tried to make a run for it, but I shot her down, watching her body crumple against the wall.
I could hear their pleas, their pathetic cries for mercy.
“Please, no!” Mark Rutte begged, his hands raised in surrender, eyes filled with terror.
There would be no mercy. Not today. Not for them. Not for the elites who had created this world of suffering for men like me. I shot him in the stomach, watching him double over in agony.
The live broadcast cameras were still rolling. I had made sure of it. I walked over to the journalists who were cowering in the corner, guns trembling in their hands. “Keep filming,” I snarled, “or you die next.” They obeyed, their faces pale, cameras still pointed at me, capturing every second of this historic moment.
I turned to the cameras, speaking directly to the millions watching.
“This is the Day of Retribution,” I declared, my voice steady, powerful. “The day when an Incel rejected by society strikes back. You have all created this world—this world of oppression, corruption, Zionism, feminism, slut culture. And now, I destroy it. I am a Saint, a Supreme Gentleman, and today, history will remember my name.”
The leaders were still writhing in agony, begging for their lives, but their time was up. I raised the rifle once more and sprayed bullets across the room. Their bodies jerked violently as they were torn apart by the gunfire. The blood pooled at their feet, staining the lavish carpet beneath them. They were no longer untouchable elites; they were just bodies, like any other, falling beneath my wrath.
The room fell silent, the chaos subsiding, replaced with an eerie quiet. The broadcast still streamed live, my image burned into the eyes of millions around the globe. I walked over to the camera, looking straight into the lens, my face unflinching.
“The Incel Revolution has begun,” I whispered, with a cold smile. “Fear us, for we will be the terror that shakes this world.”
The footsteps of soldiers echoed in the hallway. The military had arrived, but I had planned for this. I wasn’t going to let them take me alive, to rot in a cell for the rest of my days. I took a small vial of cyanide from my pocket, unscrewing the cap, knowing what was coming. Like Hitler in his final moments, I would choose my own death.
I swallowed the poison, feeling its bitter taste flood my mouth. My heart pounded erratically as the cyanide spread through my bloodstream. Within moments, my muscles seized, my vision blurred. I collapsed to the floor, convulsing, gasping for breath as my body fought against the inevitable.
But it was okay. This was the plan all along. I was roping, and that was fine. Because now, I would be remembered. Now, my name would go down in history as the one who struck terror into the heart of the West.
The last thing I saw before darkness claimed me was the camera still rolling, still filming, as the revolution I had started began to unfurl across the world.
