Entering the hackathon was exciting in itself. Andrew Cook sat toggling between two browser tabs. One his email where he re-read the welcome email . The other the event website . An hour passed with him toggling these two tabs. He was seated at a table in his favorite cafe...

He began visiting the Vietnamese restaurant regularly. They had good pho ,  spring rolls , and skewered meats. The owner, when he'd given the kid his first meal for free had known what he was doing. Knew the kid would be return. Spend all his discretionary money on the satisfying,...

His views dropped fast. He went from being the #1 watched TikTok influencer to being homeless in two weeks. The man in the nice suit who had been with him through his stardom abandoned him the moment any association with The Blue Man became inconvenient. The man with the nice...

He went to pay for his discounted meal but was surprised. On the house, the owner said, his eyes closed, head down in a slight bow. He had even had a Vietnamese coffee after his meal. Why were they not making him pay.

"Please, let me pay."

"No it is okay. You...

The best part about being a newspaper delivery man was that Andrew got to people watch . You saw all kinds of people on this job. Not that all kinds of people read the newspaper. Only a fringe of the population now touched, let alone read the newspaper. But the...

"God Dammit!" Sardinsky yelled, while letting go of the collar of the kid in front of him who was a foot shorter. 80 pounds lighter. Or at least that kid had been those things. Now he... or it, was just a corpse. Sardinsky looked down at his white polo. It...

The next day everybody was a little bit less glued to their phone. They were discussing what The Blue Man had recently done. It was the first time a social media influencer was able to murder somebody on camera and not go to prison for it. Well not yet. Who...

"Why aren't you doing the moves?"

It was a ethnically ambiguous slightly overweight girl with smooth skin in the seat behind him.

"Why aren't you doing the moves? Like everybody else." she asked again.

"I didn't know I wasn't doing them," he said."

"You aren't." she pointed at his hands. "See."

He looked down. He...

One of the young kids with long hair at the table full of young kids with long hair loudly asked, "have you seen the blue man in real life?"

"Nobody's seen him in real life," another kid groaned. Then the kid who had asked the original question groaned. He realized the...

He knew that staring at his phone looking for more interesting content wasn't a good use of time. But he had nothing better to do. He had decided that life was not worth living. Not that he was  suicidal or anything. But just that there was no point in living....