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CHAPTER THREE — “The Feed Starts Moving”
From “Social Networks: A Scream Into the Void”
When Émilie went back to France, the lab felt suddenly hollow.
She hugged me goodbye at the train station. Not long. Not dramatic. Just long enough to leave a phantom warmth on my chest.
“Write to me,” she said.
“I will,” I answered.
And for once, I meant it with my whole body.
But email felt slow. Cold. Too formal.
So I did what made sense to me at the time:
I built something.
A Chat Inside a Chat
I created a basic HTML chat.
Ugly. Fragile. Barely functional.
A text box.
A submit button.
A crude backend stitched together with hope and caffeine.
It wasn’t fast. It wasn’t secure.
But it was ours.
We talked through it late at night, her messages arriving with a slight delay, as if crossing the ocean left them breathless.
Sometimes the server crashed.
Sometimes the messages duplicated.
Sometimes nothing arrived for minutes, and my heart filled the silence with panic.
At the same time, I never left the public chatrooms.
Inside one chat, I was a boyfriend.
Inside another, I was anonymous again.
And something strange happened.
An older woman in one of those rooms—someone who typed slowly, deliberately—started talking to me more often. She wasn’t flirtatious. She was… attentive. She asked questions no one else asked. About what I was building. About what I feared. About whether I slept.
Her presence felt like gravity.
Between the private HTML chat, the public chatroom, and the constant hum of notifications, my mind started splitting itself into tabs.
And I liked it.
The First Dopamine Rush
That’s when things changed.
New platforms appeared. Profiles. Status updates. Friend lists.
Suddenly, people weren’t just talking—they were performing.
I posted something clever.
People responded.
I shared a thought.
Someone liked it.
My brain learned the pattern fast.
Post. Refresh. Wait.
Reward.
Chaos disguised as connection.
I started checking screens before checking my own thoughts.
Silence began to feel like failure.
The Other French Girl
I met her at a small gathering—someone knew someone who knew someone.
She was pale. Not just white, but almost transparent.
You could see faint blue veins beneath her skin, like delicate circuitry.
She spoke softly, as if volume itself might damage her.
An Angel named Lucille.
She lived in a rooftop room of a guest house, the kind of place that felt temporary even while standing still.
One afternoon, she invited me up.
Her room was flooded with light.
She offered me something she called “candy.”
I didn’t ask questions.
Curiosity had already overridden caution.
I remember sitting on the edge of the bed.
I remember the window.
I remember thinking about how strange it was that my life felt more real online than in that moment.
I remember her white translucid blouse…
After that… things blur.
Not darkness.
Just missing frames.
When I came back to myself, the sun was lower, my head heavy, my thoughts scattered like browser windows left open too long. I didn’t know what had happened that afternoon—and worse, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
That scared me.
Fragmented Selves
That night, I logged in everywhere.
I chatted with Émilie.
I talked to the older woman.
I answered strangers.
I refreshed feeds.
I felt full and empty at the same time.
The internet was no longer a place I visited.
It was a place I inhabited.
And without realizing it, I had crossed a line.
Connection had turned into consumption.
Identity into fragments.
Presence into performance.
The feed had started moving.
And it wasn’t waiting for me to catch up.
The next day, I was waiting for the elevator on the first floor of the university building.
The hallway smelled like cleaning products and old paper. Everything felt aggressively normal, as if nothing in the world had shifted the day before. I stared at the elevator numbers, watching them descend, trying to convince my body that I was fully awake.
The doors opened.
Lucielle was inside.
She looked the same—and completely different.
Her skin was still pale, almost transparent, but her eyes refused to meet mine. They moved away instantly, like something fragile trying to escape light. Then I saw it: a sudden red blooming across her face, spreading too fast, too deep, as if one of the delicate veins beneath her skin had collapsed under invisible pressure.
She said nothing.
I said nothing.
My throat closed, my thoughts froze, and the only thing that managed to escape my mouth was a small, useless:
“Hi.”
The word sounded wrong. Out of place. Like it belonged to someone else.
She didn’t answer. The elevator doors began to close, slowly, mercifully. For a brief second, I wondered if I should step inside, if I should ask something, anything—if I should try to recover whatever had been lost the afternoon before.
But I stayed where I was.
The doors shut.
The elevator ascended.
And just like that, Lucielle vanished from my life.
I never saw her again.
Not in the building.
Not in the city.
Not online.
But I still remember her.
I remember her translucent skin, the quiet way she moved, the room filled with light, the missing hours, and the look in her big eyes—something between shame, fear, and distance.
Sometimes I wonder if she remembers me too.
Or if I was just another blurred frame in her own fragmented feed.
That was the first time I understood something I wouldn’t have words for until much later:
Not every connection leaves a trace.
Not every interaction becomes a story.
Some simply dissolve—
like data lost in transmission.
And I carried that silence with me
into the next version of the internet.
