Leo walked to the stage. He didn’t have a bottle, so he took a long sip from someone’s abandoned blue drink. It tasted like regret and cherry syrup.

Maya Singh stood up from her like-button seat. “I’ll livestream it on my phone,” she said. “The old way. No Vortex. No Curator. Just us ghosts.”

“We always were, Leo. You just used to get paid better.” The main event was held in an amphitheater shaped like a giant smartphone. Every seat was a “like” button. When you sat down, it vibrated. Leo took a seat in the back, where the vibrations were weakest.

“They’re trying to break us,” Leo said.

The Curator smiled. “Tonight, the wild things aren’t monsters. They’re metrics .” The first exhibit was a room called “The Cancellation.” It was a VR simulation where you relived your worst public downfall, but with a twist: every hate comment appeared as a physical object—rotten fruit, shards of glass, wet socks—that you had to dodge. Leo lasted four minutes before ripping off the headset and vomiting into a potted plant.