Lena had never seen the app before. A black icon with a blinking red eye sat on her home screen, though she didn’t remember installing it. This was strange to her considering the fact that she proclaimed herself the tech nerd of her circle of friends. She was very cautious about what she installed on her phone, taking pride in making sure not one megabyte of data was wasted on clutter. But curiosity swept aside caution. She tapped it. The screen lit up with a teen girl's face, then went into a self imposed doom scroll, glitched, then went dark with a strange hum.
Her reflection flickered across the glass—distorted, stretching, like a funhouse mirror melting into static. Then, a whisper: "You are seen." a voice that sounded eerily like her own yet distorted. Her body tensed, fingers frozen. She wanted to put her phone down, but her mind and body weren’t functioning in unison.
Her face felt hot and a sense of warmth exploded across her body with a wave that left her feeling ill suddenly. Lena eyes felt dry and painful then they rolled back into her uncontrollably. The phone vibrated violently in her grip as the screen pulsed with a deep, glitchy void causing a sensation of convulsions.
Lena forced her eyes back down and steadied herself but her gaze was magnetically drawn back to her phone. She tried to look away, but something—someone—inside the app was looking back. A sharp jolt shot through her skull as colored lights blinded her. Feeling light headed, she gasped, then stumbled.
Consciousness was wavering as the phone emitted a bright vibrantly blinking light and a sound that violently assaulted all five senses. She tried to scream but all she could do was scream into the void of her mind. Paralyzed and fading into an abyss of terrifying awareness, unlike any state of being she had ever witnessed in her young life, the lights shot through her soul, danced around her mind and engulfed her with a flash of white.
She felt a pull, physically, mentally that was euphoric yet painful all at once, as her breath, her voice, her very being was siphoned through the screen like ink bleeding into water. Lena felt cold, a painful chill that made her wonder if this was what death felt like. Was existence no more than a glitch in the matrix she thought as her body and mind broke their tether with each other. The world went dark.
Moments later, she opened her eyes and was blinded by colorful lights. Her eyes adjusted and she realized she was not dead. Her existence was absolute. Her thoughts returned as she grasped at reality. Lena looked ahead and saw herself from the outside now—her empty body, still standing, phone clutched in lifeless hands. The app blinked shut. Her body blinked open.
A smile stretched across her face. But it wasn’t hers. She—it—glanced at the phone, now displaying a new icon: a pale face, screaming silently. The name beneath it read Lena.
Art and story by Hal Hefner.
Produced by Catmonkey Studio