Bodies, limp and lying:
Dead
bodies prostrated before glowing screens, all around the world.
Millions of them.
Their necks—
broken.
“Them’s the antequates,” Nexdao says into the camera.
“Them’s the beforents. And we’s,” he says, unscrewing his head, before putting it aside, picking up another—a girl’s head—and screwing that one into his neck as if it were a lightbulb; blinking the girl’s eyes, speaking with the girl’s mouth: “We’s the afterwards, the evolverite.”
He sounds so sweet, as all around the world:
So many young bodies, their futures—(that) snapped (sickening sound) by friendly hands, as among them stand the joyful few, the acolytes of Nexdao, the head-sharers, the survivors of The Unscrew TikTok Challenge!
How did it come to this?—
[Video]
A boy’s smiling face.
“Hey, everyone. Listen, today I’ve got a cool new challenge for you. #unscrewchallenge. All you need is a friend.”
A body appears behind the boy.
It places two hands, one on each side of the boy’s head.
“It’s easy. Just close your eyes—” The hands—twist the head! “—and think about making the world a better place!” round and round and round, until the head comes off, and both the unscrewed head and the body (head unseen) say, “Imagine that: easy, right?”
[/Video]
“Another broken neck?” the 911 dispatcher says.
Her colleague nods.
“That’s crazy.”
Although she doesn’t know it, her teenage daughter is already—
[A reporter’s notebook with the following underlined: Who’s Nexdao?]
—dead.
“I… I think I killed her,” a voice sobs into a phone. “Oh God, I… I…”
[#unscrewchallenge is trending.]
[Death is trending.]
But for every thousand scenes of despair, experience one of exultation:
[Video]
—twist the head, and her eyes, shut tight, flutter and bloom open, first in unbelief, then in sheer jubilation, with tears streaming down her unscrewed cheeks. “OMG! OMG! OMG!”
“Holy fuuuck!” the other girl says, holding her friend’s severed, squeeing, crying head. “You’re fucking one of them! You stand with Nexdao.”
The head says, “I stand with Nexdao!”
How did it come to this?—
How did we realize an unreality; merge the virtual with the actual so that [Video] and [/Video] cease distinction?
Nexdao says we are a brave new world. A nineteen-eightyphoria, in which the beforents have no place. They lacked empathy, he says. Could never experience another as we can experience each other. The ones who’ve not been challenged must be hunted down; obliterated. We must trend them into oblivion.
Carry your heads proudly at your sides.
Screw into one another.
Nexdao that can be stated, is not the eternal dao.
The meme that can be memed, is not the true meme.
[…and the reporter, beholding the depository of manufactured same-heads, understood the danger of…]
“Fun—,” the girl screams, as together with her friend they live-stream the breaking of her neck.
[gibility.]
Her body slumps to the floor.
The camera: relentless.
The head that can be born, is not the true head, Nexdao says.
The dispatcher switches on the light—
and weeps.