Like Subscribe Follow — a short story for English reading and speaking

Haze — or Heather to the tax forms she increasingly dreaded — stared at the analytics.

Almost two million followers.

It sounded impressive, a digital kingdom she’d built pixel by painstaking pixel. But the graph lines, once soaring eagles, were now wounded birds, trending downwards with a sickening consistency.

Two million.

It used to be a shield; now it felt like a target painted on her back, each lost follower a tiny, stinging dart.

She wasn’t huge, not a titan of the streaming world, but she was, or had been, comfortably established.

Daily content, a relentless churn of curated personality, had bought her a nice flat, a decent car, and the flattering attention of brands.

It was a blur, the ascent.

One sponsorship, then two, then a deluge.

The snowball effect.

She’d been too busy riding the avalanche to question where it was taking her, too focused on maintaining the flow, on being relevant — a word that tasted like ash in her mouth these days.

What did it even mean?

She was just… Haze. And Haze was losing her grip.

The emails from potential advertisers had thinned from a flood to a trickle, then to a drought punctuated by offers from companies selling things she wouldn’t wish on her worst enemy.

The red notification bubble on her social media app, once a dopamine hit, now pulsed with a malevolent glee: -231, -412, -157.

Each number was a tiny hammer blow against her sanity.

Then the DM slid in, anonymous and unsettling.

‘RealHazeFan77’.

No avatar, just the stark grey default. The message was oddly formal, almost archaic.

“Esteemed Ms. Haze, I have been an ardent admirer of your digital oeuvre for precisely 1,876 days. I possess certain insights regarding your current algorithmic challenges and a proposition of significant mutual benefit. My associates represent a considerable advertising interest. A private consultation is requested to elaborate. Utmost discretion is, naturally, paramount.”

Every instinct screamed ‘delete and block.’

‘Algorithmic challenges’?

‘Digital oeuvre’?

It was the kind of language a serial killer might use before explaining his manifesto.

But the phrase “considerable advertising interest” snagged on the frayed edges of her desperation.

Discretion, too, had a perverse appeal. She was tired of the public post-mortems of her dying channel in comment sections.

She suggested a bright, busy coffee shop.

RealHazeFan77’s reply was swift and unyielding.

“The sensitive nature of our potential venture necessitates a more… controlled environment. I have procured a suitable, neutral venue. Your safety and privacy are, of course, guaranteed.”

He provided an address. A commercial unit in a forgotten industrial park on the city’s periphery, a place where ambition went to die.

Against the frantic alarm bells clanging in her skull, Haze typed, “Okay. When?”

She told her friend Maya the address, a flimsy nod to self-preservation, but brushed off Maya’s worried questions.

“Just a weird potential sponsor. Probably nothing. Gotta chase those deals, you know?”

The building was a concrete carbuncle, windows like vacant eyes staring out at a landscape of weeds and rust.

Suite 21B.

The corridor inside was a long, dim throat, lit by flickering fluorescent tubes that hummed like trapped insects. The door itself was unmarked, just a slab of cheap wood painted a bilious yellow.

She pushed it open.

The room was vast, echoing, and unnervingly empty. No reception, no chatter, no hum of computers.

Just a single, battered office chair placed with unnerving precision in the dead centre of the stained linoleum floor. A bare bulb hanging from a frayed cord cast harsh, interrogative light.

And standing beside the chair, a man.

He was a study in blandness. Medium height, medium build, clothes so nondescript they seemed to absorb the light — a faded blue polo shirt, ill-fitting beige trousers. His hair was mousy and thinning.

But his eyes… his eyes were a different story.

They were pale, almost colourless, yet they fixed on her with an intensity that felt like a physical touch, cold and invasive.

This was RealHazeFan77.

“Ms. Haze,” he said. His voice was flat, devoid of inflection, like a text-to-speech programme. “Welcome. Please, be seated.” He gestured to the solitary chair.

Haze’s hand tightened on her phone, her thumb hovering over Maya’s contact.

“Where… where are your associates? The advertisers?”

A faint, almost imperceptible twitch at the corner of his mouth might have been a smile.

“They have entrusted me with the preliminary discussion. For now, it is merely you and I. The architects of the new.”

“The new?” Haze forced a laugh that sounded brittle even to her own ears. “Look, I appreciate you taking the time, but this isn’t quite what I was expecting. I thought we were here to talk about sponsorship?”

“Indeed,” he said, his gaze unwavering, making her skin crawl. “We are discussing the ultimate sponsorship. The ultimate content. The content that will reverse your decline. The content that will make you… immortal.”

He began to pace, a slow, deliberate circle around her, his soft-soled shoes making no sound on the floor. Haze felt like a tethered animal.

“I have observed your work, Haze,” he continued, his voice dropping into a conspiratorial hush. “Every video. Every post. Every fleeting story. I see the patterns. The algorithms see them too. And they are… dissatisfied.”

“Dissatisfied?” she echoed, her voice a dry croak.

This wasn’t just a weird fan. This was something else. Something broken.

“You’ve lost the authenticity, Haze. The raw connection. You’re curating, polishing, filtering. The audience senses the artifice. The machine senses it.” He tapped his temple with a pale finger. “But I understand its hunger. I know what it truly craves.”

“And what is that?” Haze managed, her eyes darting towards the door.

It seemed impossibly far away.

He stopped his pacing directly in front of her, so close she could smell the faint, musty scent of his clothes.

“It craves the genuine. The unfiltered. The visceral. It wants to see you tested, Haze. It wants to see you… unravel.”

A sliver of ice traced its way down her spine.

“I… I don’t understand.”

“Your numbers are falling,” he stated, as if discussing the weather. “Because your content has become predictable. Safe. Stale.”

He leaned in, his colourless eyes dilating slightly.

“Imagine, Haze: content that transcends the screen. Content that makes them question what is real and what is performance. The sheer, unadulterated engagement.”

His eyes flicked around the barren room.

“This location… this is merely the first stage. ‘Haze Confronts the Void.’ Think of the intrigue. The speculation. The views.”

Her breath hitched. “You’re… you’re insane.”

“Am I?” The faint smile returned, more pronounced this time, and infinitely more chilling. “Or am I the one who truly grasps the economy of the digital soul? Attention, Haze. Undiluted, unblinking, obsessive attention. And fear… fear is the most potent catalyst for attention.”

He took another step. She stumbled back.

“You are here because you are desperate, Haze. You need the numbers. I am the numbers. My associates… they are patrons of the profound. They will remunerate handsomely for the experiences I intend to curate.”

“Experiences?” she whispered, the word catching in her throat. “What… what experiences?”

He reached into his pocket, and for a terrifying moment, she thought he was pulling out a weapon. Instead, he produced a small, tarnished silver locket, dangling it from its chain.

“This building,” he said, his voice now a low, almost reverent murmur, “it is a labyrinth of potential narratives. Each room, a new scenario. Each challenge, a new layer of your persona stripped away. Think of it as a reality show, Haze, but with consequences that resonate beyond the screen. Your audience will witness your struggle, your terror, your resilience. They will see you pushed to the brink. They will see you break. And then, perhaps…”

He paused, letting the unspoken horror fill the silence.

“…they will see you reborn. Or not.”

Haze’s world tilted. This wasn’t about sponsorship.

This was about a grotesque, twisted form of worship, a desire to dissect her, to broadcast her suffering for an audience he believed was baying for it.

“You actually think people want to watch that?” Her voice was trembling.

“I know they do,” he hissed, his composure finally fracturing, a manic gleam igniting in his pale eyes. “They hunger for it. They are starved for something real in a world of artifice. I will provide it. Through you.”

He gestured expansively at the empty room.

“The algorithm is already aware of your presence here. With me. The numbers… I imagine they’re already recalibrating, aren’t they?”

She didn’t dare look at her phone. She didn’t want to know.

“This is your ascension, Haze,” he breathed, his face alight with a terrifying, fervent conviction. “Your chance to become a legend. To be truly… unforgettable. All you need to do… is participate.”

He took another step, and this time, Haze didn’t back away.

She was frozen, a rabbit in the glare of oncoming headlights.

The silence of the room was a living thing, pressing in on her, punctuated only by the frantic, bird-like flutter of her own heart.

The door, her only escape, seemed to recede further into the gloom, and the only thing that felt real was the madman in front of her, his eyes promising a new kind of content, a terrifying new definition of:

‘Like, Subscribe, Follow.’