By Jiksun Cheung

“Siri, put Emotr on the wall,” he said.

The wall screen flickered and blue light flooded the narrow apartment.

An attractive looking woman was posing in the snow. It was his neighbor Miki, holidaying somewhere glamorous again. Whistler, probably. The post had four thousand and twenty-seven loves. Four thousand and twenty-seven!

“Play post,” he said.

Instantly, a sense of excitement enveloped him. Miki adjusted her goggles and pushed off, the camera following behind. His heart fluttered as she carved her way down the mountain—he felt like a dessert spoon skimming the surface of a scoop of rich vanilla ice cream.

“#nofilter,” read the caption.

“Bullshit,” he blurted.

Miki’s emos were all filtered. He knew they were. Multi-layered, nuanced, and always so delectably joyous. She had probably spent a lot on them—cloud-hosted emos were all the rage these days. As spectacular as they felt, he knew they weren’t real; these weren’t raw, untainted emotions. There was something artificial about them, something tart and metallic, like licking the tip of a battery. The little twinge behind his eyeballs gave it away; it wasn’t much, but he felt it just the same, right where the neuralink chip was implanted.

“Siri, what’s my follower count?”

“You have fifty-two thousand and three followers, Hiroshi.” It was nowhere near Miki’s numbers—she was about to hit half a million followers, averaging four thousand plus loves per post. People saw him as an up-and-comer, but he had been floating around the fifty-thousand follower mark for weeks.

He didn’t have the good looks and the feel-good emos plied by the likes of Miki and her kind, but that didn’t matter in his niche.

What mattered was what he felt.

And what he felt—what he specialized in—was shame. Humiliation. Self-loathing. Disgust. You don’t make a name in this NSFW niche without paying a price. But numbers meant influence, and influence meant recognition, and it all gave meaning.

He scrolled through his feed wanting more, needing more.

He needed something different.

He finished the noodles and tidied away the clutter on his bed.

“Siri, call mom.”

“Calling Mom now.” The wall screen switched to a profile photo of his mother. It was a photo of her reading a magazine at the kitchen table. He remembered the moment—she had looked up to see if he had wanted lunch. That had been three years ago.

His mother answered after the second ring.

“Hiroshi?” she said, her hair was shorter now, greyer. “Hiroshi! W-where are you?”

“I’m okay, mom,” he said. “I’m in Tokyo. I’m okay.”

“I didn’t hear from you—I didn’t know where you’d gone.” She was standing in the kitchen holding a bag of groceries. Her hand fumbled for a chair and she sat down without taking her eyes off the wall screen.

“I thought something had happened. I called the police, but they said they couldn’t do anything. They said you weren’t a kid anymore. You never called.”

“I’m sorry, mom—”

“Son, listen. I love you,” she said, and then covered her mouth with the back of her hand, blinking away tears. “Please. Please come home.”

He thought about the last three years and all the things that he had done. It would break her. It would break her so completely, the mother that he loved. But it was his road now. However dark and debased the road was, it was his to walk. To turn back after coming all this way would be unthinkable.

No, this was who he was now.

“I love you, mom.”

He saw her eyes light up. He looked away and said: “Siri, play latest session.”

Four unclothed men were kneeling in a circle on a large bed.

In the picture-in-picture inset, he saw his mother, confusion on her face.

The camera moved closer. The men were making sounds of pleasure, shuddering at whatever was happening in the center.

“Hiroshi—“

The camera moved in even closer, angling between one of the men’s bare legs.

It was Hiroshi in the center. His hands were bound, and around his neck was a dog collar with a leather leash attached to it. One of the men yanked on the leash and barked out a series of explicit, lurid orders.

At this, his mother screamed.

In her eyes, he saw disbelief turn into disgust. This was the price he had to pay. She buried her head into her hands and pleaded, begged for him to stop.

The video played for three more minutes. By the end, she was a broken person. She stumbled out of the kitchen, knocking over the groceries, never turning back to look at her son. Just as he had forced her to watch him, he had forced himself to watch her.

Shame. Humiliation. Self-loathing. Disgust. Raw and untainted. He felt them all.

“Siri,” he said, biting his lip, “insert hashtags. Post call recording and associated emos.”

He watched the wall screen as Siri processed his post. There was a stillness in his mother’s kitchen. Groceries lay strewn across the floor.

Then, on the corner of the wall screen, a pink heart flashed, and then came that sweet sound of love. A blip, and then another. And another.

Just as he had hoped: love was streaming in.