Follome

By Grant Jahn

The entertainer. The consumer. The savior. A dystopic future saturated by social media.

 

Pass the tests, and you receive your very own Follower, a mysterious robot that catalogues and broadcasts your every move for the growing viewership to devour. What lengths would you go to in the name of fame? What limits would you put on your own depravity? How would you save the world once it inevitably crumbled, leaving you the sole survivor surrounded by nothing but cameras?

 

In the age of FOLLOME, are there any survivors?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Grant Jahn
• Release date: Jul 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201473303

Grant Jahn

Grant Jahn is a writer of speculative and dystopian science fiction. He is also an accomplished clarinetist, pianist, and music composer.

Book preview

PART ONE

The Entertainer

1

Submersion: the first interview. A kind of series of questions, although unspoken in its own way. The air feels as though it’s being sucked from the room, floods her lungs with fire.

As Alina gasps for oxygen, the cartoon on the wall speaks to her. The logo of FOLLOME: a skinny stick figure sprawled before her with a crudely shaped top hat on its head, black circles for glasses, a black square for a mouth. Its limbs are separated by empty space, contorted in the shape of a murder victim’s chalk outline; its right elbow protruding outward with the forearm bent, the left an upside down mirror image. The figure stands in a freeze frame of a cheap dance beside a depiction of an old time-y camera with simple black lines fanning out from the end of it – reminding you that the camera is always rolling, watching, recording, broadcasting.

Be proud of getting this interview. A gargled, distorted voice leaking out of the black square. Many wish they were in the place you find yourself presently.

The fire in Alina’s lungs climbs down her insides like ivy. She has to push through it. She must prove herself to be physically agile and interesting enough to be followed, at least in some kind of category.

She knows, has read about, submersion: an abusive first task to determine viability, to separate the strong from the weak, the attractive from the undesirable. After all, if you don’t have the ‘look’, any ‘look’, there’s a much lower chance of anyone following you. Why would they?

Don’t try to breathe. You just can’t, you know you can’t. Let the fire spread. Every second that passes, pretend it’s the previous second, that the next second simply does not exist; forever be in the present moment.

In this room, in a way guarded by the FOLLOME figure, Alina stands straight up inside the half-moon contraption partially wrapping itself around her neck. It levitates, floats up and down, scanning her body for important qualities as she struggles to breathe. Rather than focus on breathing, because she knows how futile the endeavor is, how easy it is for the uninteresting Subjects to jump ship at this early stage in the interview, Alina tries to focus on the light glowing from the drifting half-moon; how soft it appears, how the small radiation of heat to her body is soothing rather than intimidating as it spreads around her skin and sinks into it to gather information, her quality. She notices the red button by her side atop a skinny platform; how it taunts her. It tells her she’s not strong enough, not worth it. Just abort it, get out. But Alina thinks of the light and the present moment and ignores it.

Just breathe. You’re doing great. The figure tells her rhetorically. It doesn’t care.

Submersion gathers information on Alina’s physical appearance, measurements, and probes for uniqueness at her surface. Alina knows she’s rather average when it comes to body-type. She’s twenty-seven, one hundred sixty-five pounds, five-five, blue eyes, blonde hair of average length. Nothing on her body to warrant a fetishized ‘deformity’ like they often look for in the ‘confidence’ category. But nothing on her body to warrant the sexualized ‘bombshell’ category either. She knows that to pass this part of the test, she has to resist breathing, resist the struggle. She has to let the data of this initial stage in the process yield results: that if anything, she’s ‘strong’. A lonely categorization of ‘normal’ without any other qualities decreases your chance of getting a Follower by half or even two thirds, so she’s read.

No, Alina is going to have to rely on the second and third stages of the process – interviews that test your mind, determine your dominant qualities, assess the ways in which you take in information, process it, and would regurgitate it if you had a Follower.

So why is she putting herself through this? This arduous testing of her body and personality when she doesn’t have a real concrete characteristic that would stand out in a crowd, a hook to get ratings and viewership? Well, it’s true that Alina can’t pin-point the reason; she just knows she’s worth receiving a Follower, knows it in her gut, her soul. She just knows it.

She can feel the fire receding – a tide back to the sea. The fire becomes replaced with cool oxygen. Alina breathes, but knows to breathe calmly; not gasping, not giving away how difficult it was to ignore the starvation of her lungs.

And the crooked man says, Congratulations. You’ve passed the first interview.

2

The street feels like rubber under Alina’s feet as she walks home from the testing facility: a gargantuan structure the shape of that old time-y camera pointing downward, seemingly floating above dozens of smaller structures, pillar-like. These represent the people, the masses; audience and entertainer. On the rubber street, Alina takes in the fresh air. She feels emptiness on her skin, though the street bustles with activity and populations. Being this close to the testing facility, it makes sense that there would be a large amount of Subjects with Followers walking around; certainly more than what she’s used to. But that being said, it appears to Alina that every person she sees is a Subject being followed.

The Followers walk behind their Subjects in black body suits, thick white plastic bars adhered to their limbs; negatives of the FOLLOME logo: skeletal stick people with top hats and glasses. No need for the old time-y camera; their suits are adorned with rotating lenses, gathering information on their specific Subject and everything around them.

Oh, how Alina yearns for this. Every Subject she sees is being broadcast to tens, hundreds of thousands of people; some millions, glued to their every move, forgetting to eat, forgetting to sleep, forgetting to love, to fuck, to be. All that matters to them is their monitor and the images being projected starring their favorite Subject being followed day in and day out.

She got over the fact that this desire is completely egotistical and self-absorbed ages ago. That stupid fact doesn’t take the desire away. She knows she’s a star, unique and worth something. But what can she do? What can she bring to those millions of viewers just waiting, begging for the next best Subject to become addicted to?

Alina arrives at the bus stop by the facility, sits on the dirty bench. She pulls out her phone and begins scrolling through the FOLLOME app. She is user023426815 – assigned by default; she hasn’t really needed to change it. Because for now, she is just a viewer. Every swipe of the finger yields a different day in the life of different Subjects. Alina definitely has favorites:

denado17 – the dark haired wannabe lover boy who prattles on endlessly about topics that would appear at first to be completely over his pretty head when he’s not doing such interestingly mundane things: going to coffee shops, calling his mother, making new friends. It would be ignorant to say Alina hasn’t had a few fantasies, dreams about the boy. Such sincerity, humility; he hasn’t even removed his last name from the FOLLOME username. What a genuine soul.

h8rsh8fkthm – a young girl with permanent burns on one side of her face, which is basically frozen in a melted state. She tells anyone who wants to listen that you’re beautiful and worth it no matter what anyone says. In her free time, she plans presentations, yells at her parents for not understanding her, eats. She often says exactly what Alina needs to hear when she’s laying on the ground, often from self-commiseration brought on by low energy, parental discord, ironically her desire to be desirable in the eyes of FOLLOME itself.

luvu:) – a gorgeous woman, maybe thirty, thirty-five, long flowing hair that she makes you think took her hours to do up, but you know for a fact she was just born that way, had to have been with that impossibly, perfectly cascading mane. Because how could anybody look that way if they didn’t ‘have it’ already? This woman, in contrast with the other two Subjects, doesn’t speak a word throughout the day. Part of her allure: looks to the camera and smiles, makes your heart melt with passion, desire, jealousy all simultaneously; has everything done for her at the command of a facial expression. When Alina first found this Subject, she tested this woman’s supposed speechless language, tried to find the one time, just one, that she spoke. Couldn’t find it. This woman, this voiceless powerhouse, makes any kind of spirit lift or confidence boost h8rsh8fkthm offers completely obsolete.

zzzzsLeEprzzzz – the man Alina watches every night when she’s about to go to sleep. A comforting habit because all he seemingly does is sleep. There’s a great universality, a sense of community produced by him. Obviously, he does more than sleep, but Alina only checks in on this Subject at the end of the day. It has to be the way his Follower films it, an optical miracle; the man looks to be in the most tranquil of states, the kind of image that convinces Alina she can get a good night’s sleep too, maybe even achieve his level of enlightenment. But only if she tunes in.

WorkIT100 – the woman and her husband who are all about working out and staying fit. Their free time, when they’re not hosting exercise classes of various kinds, is comprised of eating well, planning the workouts they present, pointing out the qualities of each other’s body that could be worked on next, and planning more workouts. Alina watches the couple when she’s down, tries to give herself some sort of motivation. Doesn’t usually work. The irony of sitting on her sofa while watching people work out often makes her chuckle to herself. Not enough to do anything about it, though.

heyitsbrenda – the comedy queen. Because every fucking thing she does is hysterical. Inexplicably. Sometimes (who is she kidding, it’s more than sometimes), Alina tells herself that she could easily come up with jokes just as good if not better than Brenda. Just give her a Follower and watch!

There are so many more. To Alina, they’re legends, all facets of the same human, of her. She wants to join them and be a part of it all. But what really makes her special? What will she do in the second and third interviews to prove herself? She knows she ‘has it’. But what is ‘it’ exactly?

3

Knocks on the door.

Mom? Alina says through the chipping wood. Mom, I forgot my key.

Shuffling in the front room. Glass bottles and cans dropping to the ground, clanging about.

I’m coming, I’m coming.

Alina’s mom: the walking disaster. The first lock clicks, located about a quarter of the way down from the top of the frame, followed subsequently by the next five locks. Her mom lives under the delusion that she, along with all of her belongings, are among the most coveted of all things.

The door swings open. Belinda stands slantedly, unbalanced with a tit most of the way out. She’s the kind of woman that looks twenty years older than she actually is, having self-medicated for so long her appearance is like it was copied from a grim future and poorly pasted onto her body in the present moment.

You should remember your goddamn keys. She berates as she holds the door open for her daughter, who walks into the living room and plops onto her single-cushion couch: a piece of furniture that stands in complete contrast, having actually been maintained and cleaned by Alina, one of the few things she can control, with the rest of the dirty, crumbling pieces that exist morosely in the room around it.

Belinda would be the first to tell you about her shitty life, all of her trials that led her to this state.