They're here for the porn and the sirloin.

[Kermit]

((Michael Froese was still nominally alive.))

He leaned against a wall, head absently slumping to one side. Sunglasses on. Staring into the camera. Face blank.

He knew he wasn't real to them. He knew they were looking at him. He knew they weren't looking for him.

Really, all he wanted was to feel human again. He knew nobody would let him. To the rest of the world, this was all just spectacle.


He scowled slightly. Kept staring, the camera lens looking at its own reflection in his sunglasses.

There were people out there, on the internet, saying he didn't exist. Saying none of them did. Saying Morgan and Beryl and everyone were just a goddamn fiction.

Crisis actors, they said.

They'd email the families of the deceased videos of their deaths. They'd taunt them.

The fact they even existed was being politicized.

The sole survivor — they'd never get to move on. All they'd ever get to be was a sole survivor. The world would define them as an event, and not as a person. They'd be targeted by the alt-right like the Parkland kids were.

Someone would probably try to kill them. It had already happened to one survivor; though he was apparently kind of an asshole.


Every high school class in America had sighed in relief at the news of the abductions. Like they were proud it hadn't been them.

There was a common cognitive bias, the 'Just-World hypothesis', which caused people to rationalize injustices as being deserved by the victims. Like karma was real. Like good things happened to good people, and bad things happened to bad people.

There was another cognitive bias, called 'Compassion fade'. The thing that caused one death to be a tragedy, and a million deaths to be a statistic instead a million separate tragedies.

Another one, 'Naïve realism'. When people believed that their perception of the universe was the objectively correct, unbiased way to see things; that they were rational, and that anyone who disagreed with their view was inherently irrational.

Michael's problem was the opposite of Naïve realism, he was pretty sure. Of course, he couldn't be completely sure, because he knew he wasn't an objective observer. What his problem was wasn't his call to make. Nothing was, really.

The other two biases were the rest of the world's problems, and that was another one of Michael's problems:

When they'd been abducted for SOTF v7, GHH's senior class had become less-than-people to the world.


Slowly, he slid the sunglasses off, letting the camera gaze into his enlarged pupils.

To the people watching on the internet, Michael Froese was an unstable, obsessive, narcissistic, mass-murdering drug addict, with a body count higher than Ed Gein's. Like Camila'd said, they just saw a crazy boy dancing around and dipping his fingers in a corpse's blood. Maybe, just maybe, the reason why Catherine had made him so fucking angry was because she reminded him of them.

To the people watching on the news, Michael Froese was a name in a list of names carved into a rock. He was an ideal; a facade. He was an obituary that said something like "Michael Froese wanted to be a marine biologist. He was pretty good at remembering useless information. He was a kind, caring person. He knew what ctenophores were." He wasn't a human. He was what Morgan had turned him into. He was what he knew he'd turned Beryl into.

The only person who was really qualified to have an opinion on who Michael Froese actually was was Michael Froese, which was unfortunate, since he wasn't qualified to have an opinion on anything, and also because he was probably already dead.


He tilted his head back, jutting his jaw out. Stared at the people watching.

He'd have killed them with his bare hands if he'd been free.

He chewed on the inside of his mouth.

He thought in concepts. Words were just an approximation.

He found a decent enough approximation.


He slid the sunglasses back on.

"Consider this a formal request. Don't you fucking dare put my name on the memorial. I don't fucking want it there," he spat.

((He walked away.))