★★★
If you’ve ever watched a good idea become completely distorted by the internet, you’re already inside.
★★★
The Test
Michael’s body hummed with contradictions – diabetic and not, ordinary, and impossibly altered. Of course it’s emotional resonance, he thought, tasting his first calm in days. Not vision boards – actual OS-level code.
He tried something small. From his desk, he tuned to the dusty teacup on the shelf. He felt the ceramic already in his palm – the slight roughness, the right warmth, and chamomile drifting up from tea that didn’t exist yet.
There it was.
His fingers closed on empty air and met a cup that arrived to fill the assumption. Steam rose, perfect temperature.
A car backfired outside. Startle shattered the frequency. The cup softened like honeyed glass; tea scalded his palm. Liquid ceramic threaded his fingers and stained his jeans.
“Shit.” Pride singed more than skin.
The Suggestion
Brayne’s presence rolled in, thick and smug.
Reality-hacking teacups, Mikey? Classy. Why not rob a bank while you’re at it?
Neurons spiked, his body tagged it as “good idea” before reason caught up. He shook it off.
Brayne laughed like distant thunder.
We discussed the efficient move: a communal reversion.
“Communal… reversion?” Michael ran cold water over his hand.
Yes. Revert your community from externalized worship to internalized.
“I don’t have a community. And I just melted a teacup.”
That’s the elegance of inversions: the coding is automatic. You still have to hold the frequency. And pay the cost.
The room held its breath.
The Inversion
He tuned inward: not bowing to idols or outsourcing worth, but honoring the divine spark within. Sacred self ≠ inflated ego. You are enough. Look inside.
He held the resonance like a tuning fork. The air thickened, a collective inward-turn, soft as shared breath.
Then his phone started vibrating like an angry wasp.
The Corruption
Notifications poured in. People quoting him wrongly.
“I am divine ✨,” captioning a ring-lit mirror selfie.
“Worship the god I am 😍🔥,” with a link to paid content.
“Internal worship means I deserve everything 💅,” over a haul video and $300 worth of crystals.
His gut twisted. He’d coded humility; the field compiled narcissism.
Brayne cracked up in his head.
Careful what you code. Words mutate in the collective unconscious. You asked for worship turned inward, now everyone’s bowing to their reflections.
“I don’t have a community,” Michael muttered. “I have a narcissism feedback loop.”
The Signal in the Noise
Still scrolling, he noticed threads that glimmered between the vanity:
A stranger in São Paulo quoted him accurately, adding a note on seeking without grasping.
A twelve-person group chat dissecting paradox with the care reserved for scripture and case law.
Usernames that kept appearing, not with selfies, but with questions. Real ones. People who’d read past the surface and wrestled the bends in the logic.
Recognition sparked. Fragments. Not yet a community, but orbiting the same frequency. Some had been there for years, nudging his thinking, sharing quietly with friends who might actually understand.
The Weight
The responsibility hit like a lead blanket. He didn’t want this, not after nearly splitting timelines to heal, not after burning his hand on liquefied ceramic. He was barely holding himself together. Now: anchor others?
“Wrong move,” he said, watching another influencer sell “divinity supplements.”
Wrong, Brayne thundered. You have fragments. Readers. Strays tuned to your signal. The question isn’t whether you have a community, it’s whether you’ll claim it. Or keep pretending you’re alone while people build altars to your ideas.
On the screen, the vanity spiral kept spinning, but beneath it pulsed a quieter signal, people listening. The seed was planted. The frequency was already out there.
Would he water it, or let it go feral?
Field Notes
[FIELD NOTES — Community Inversion Test. Timecode: 4:23 / ∞. Source: Unknown.]
Text thread found on Michael’s phone
Unknown: Is this the guy writing about reality debugging? Your paradox stuff is keeping me awake—in a good way.
Michael: Depends. Planning to start a cult?
Unknown: Tried. My cats won’t join.
Michael: Cats understand everything. They just don’t care.
Unknown: Exactly. I need humans who do.
Michael: How many of you are there?
Unknown: More than you think. Fewer than you fear. We’ve been talking. Some of us want to meet.
Michael: [typing…]
Michael: [typing…]
Michael: [typing…]
Michael: Maybe it’s time.
☆☆☆
[End of Episode 9]
Reader’s Note
If you’ve been quietly screen-shotting and sharing the parts that snag your ribs, you’re already in the circle. The only question: are you using this as spiritual décor, or are you actually wrestling with it?
