Wattpad Is Dead

An Anti-Hero SF story by MadMikeMarsbergen

PART ONE: OLD DAYS

1

The underground laboratory hummed with that half-dead kind of lighting, with the pasty faces of greasy, pockmarked nerds in lab coats. And it even hummed, as hard as it was to believe, with life.

Traversing the elaborate complex of tunnels by rote memory, carrying a fresh printout from DAD, was @Hammond420—rail-thin, so square he'd never even caught a whiff of some second-hand from a stranger off the street, had the quirky tendency to shake his elbow like a chicken wing when he laughed. The sheet in his hand was worth more money than he was. Well, not really. Not as it was. But when he finished with it, it would be. If he wore glasses he would have pushed them up his nose right then.

He entered the room for no real reason referred to as The Womb, lifted the lid on a chamber with his free hand. He set DAD's latest SEED sheet down on a table within and closed the chamber. Now to the buttons... Buttons, buttons, so many buttons. The machine had eleven keypads—ten in rather obvious places, the remaining one somewhere you wouldn't think to look—and each keypad had anywhere from three to one hundred and fifty-three buttons, each button varying in shape, size, colour, taste and of course smell, and finally their ability to electrocute or burn you or harm you in any other way possible, be it physically, mentally, spiritually, metaphorically, or even bureaucratically.

After a minute or so of deduction, he pushed a big pink button to boot up MOM, praying he wouldn't be violently circumcised on the spot. Pushing the button was always the hardest part—after all, it was all a matter of finding the right button, and each MOM had a different preference.

2

The man had terrible skin, and he hid it under a heavy trench coat, with a wide-brimmed hat angled low over his face. Despite that—or maybe because of it, all that effort to hide it and all—little more than a cursory glance was needed to tell the obvious: This dude had some nasty, rank-as-fuck, pustule-glittered, foul-smelling, eternally oozing skin. And it was crinkly and generally fucking disgusting.

He walked with speed, long legs pumping him along like he had somewhere to be and he needed to be there twenty minutes ago. The tunnel system just didn't seem to end. Was he lost? Maybe. But probably not. The design of it followed some twisted mathematical code, where the end sum was the always-funny "69." Strange scriptomagik, no doubt hashed out on his old laptop, which had been infiltrated by some bug years prior that allowed it to alter the actual fabric of reality.

Yeah, that funky thang had been capable of some massive feats back in its heyday, like making his long-time girlfriend (and now wife) suddenly "into" the idea of adding another girl into the mix, or sending a dictator to a tropical island full of annoying B-list actors still living in the past. But after the latter event took place it sort of lost its mojo—it had no more oomph, no balls. So he'd tossed it. Took a shit on it, too, for fun. The monkey coders at Wattpad HQ must've dug it out from their sewer lines and blew off all the greasy shit and toilet paper and chicken-wing bones, then put it back in the workforce. Now all it could do was write a confusing but ultimately pointless tunnel system beneath the place he wanted to be.

He'd make short work of that scriptomagik. Then he'd get to where he wanted to be.

This was a new lead he was following, its implications grave. The place was possibly one of a kind, though he doubted it. Lord WattPad never had been one to indulge in something just once.

He slammed face-first into an invisible wall and nearly knocked his hat off. Then he waited impatiently for the wall—obviously executed from a shit-can single-core processor from the year 2000—to load up a video advertisement for Dogshit EZ Glide, a brown-coloured, vegan-friendly lubricant apparently made from a proprietary blend of real dog-shit oils and emulsifiers. It also worked as an all-purpose cream for sensitive skin.

"Fuckin' Wattpad," he said before punching the advertisement into a thousand pieces. "You sold your soul to Big Sex? For fuck's sake... Big Tobacco was far enough. Now thirteen-year-olds are gonna be jerking off with dog shit scraped straight off the sidewalk. Poor little know-nothing bastards."

With the story ready to continue uninterrupted, the man with terrible skin ventured around another corner, walked straight through another crossroads, backtracked ten paces and entered another hidden door. If the calculations posited by Rollie's Ghost—an elite, codebreaking AI and an all-around-decent guy to chat with—were true, then this next hologram-projected wall he passed through would lead him straight to—

Dear Lord.

The man with the terrible skin stopped to marvel at the fairly bland-looking facility before him: hallways and doors, and ceilings and floors.

The Chosen One had entered the building.

3

@Hammond420 heard MOM scream and the chamber lid popped open. The SEED sheet steamed with post-coital enthusiasm, and was promptly spat out from the chamber like a bullet. He leapt to catch it, juggling it between his hands. Trying to crumple the paper was impossible. It might as well have been a molten-hot rock from the Great Orange W in the sky. When he'd succeeded with the task, he threw the balled-up wad of paper into the garbage—or onto the garbage, rather, seeing as how it was overflowing with similarly spent SEED sheets.

Oh well. Maybe he'd empty the trash tomorrow. Maybe not. Who really cared? No one from HQ ever came down to see how things were operating. They probably chatted all about it up there on the surface, away from the ears of the common worker, but they didn't know what they couldn't see.

Speaking of what they don't see, @Hammond420 thought, smirking, his gaze drifting to the coffeemaker in the corner of the room. Tonight had been a slow night for the tender art of procreation—precisely why he'd gone and made one of his own. He could risk it. Let his hair down a bit.

He set the machine to Caffeine Overdose, waited for his cup with trepidation, then guzzled it down in one swallow. He sat in a chair and waited for the coffee to take hold.

It was somewhere around when MOM started to vibrate that he heard banging and thudding and screaming and maybe even psychotic hollering out in the hall. Of course he shrugged it off as being more hallucinations. Trying to tune it all out, he watched MOM grow a set of breasts and heave them to and fro. He unzipped his pants and started fiddling around with the place where his genitals might've once been.

Then the door banged open, nearly making him shit himself, and a towering monster rushed inside, roaring. The monster tore off its fur in two thick clumps.

The monster then peeled off its own face.

4

A trail of bodies—some dead, some still twitching—in his wake, The Chosen One smelled delinquency with a capital D. He kicked in the door where all the stink was coming from, scanned the room and saw three things: a strange machine, a coffee machine, and a guy tripping hardcore on caffeine, going to town on his weirdly smooth crotch.

For a moment he ignored the machine—which, to be honest, looked like the exact type of mission-objective thing he'd been looking for—and moved to the living Ken doll hallucinating off Brazilian brain candy.

"You okay?" he asked, and the guy cowered from him.

Then he realized: Ah, right. The face.

And he shed his whole disguise—the hat, the coat, and even the gross-looking face he'd printed out on a plain white piece of paper and taped to the front of his mask to hide his alter ego's identity.

Which of course meant he was now wearing his actual disguise: a cape, a cowl, and a scrotum-tight leotard. In many ways he looked like a super-badass, very much well-endowed flying rat. Or a bat, but that was trademarked material, and he didn't touch that heavy kind of shit.

"Hey, you okay, dude?" The Chosen One asked the kid in the lab coat.

Still in the throes of a caffeine-induced seizure, the kid shook his head and foamed at the crotch, his skin turning blue, his eyes going red in the sclera. Drool and blood spilled from his mouth, making his words thick. He mumbled something.

The Chosen One put his ear near the kid's lips and heard him say, "Why, Father? Why?"

Then the kid died without the least bit of modesty: eyes deflating, feces flooding out from the flared ends of his pants, dried skin looking like scales before flaking off, boogers and probably brain matter leaking from his nose and ears.

The Chosen One's hands gripped an empty, mucous-covered lab coat and a pair of pants reeking of shit. With his own disguise now stained beyond belief, The Chosen One let out a scream at the price of laundering a superhero costume this late in WattCity. Particularly when the city considered you a villain.

This wasn't how he'd planned his evening.

5

Things had changed in WattLand following the scriptomagik-induced exile of Lord WattPad. New faces had risen up through the ranks at Wattpad HQ, most of them jammed through the pipeline without proper training or the slightest bit of knowledge. Not only were these new leaders of the world clueless as fuck, they also had an inflated sense of self-worth. They were corrupted by their positions of power, now believing they were better and smarter than the average person, that the claws of justice couldn't find them and pierce their skin. But they bled orange like anybody else.

Generally, this was the part of the story where The Chosen One would swoop in and kick the shit out of them, make them fear for their safety and force them into becoming lifelong shut-ins.

But then things changed.

He realized this the next morning, after he'd finished with a nice shit and a quick wank—done together to save time; superheroes, while superhumanly powerful, sadly don't have the power to fit both masturbation and defecation into separate hours of their day. He'd turned on the Watty-V just for something inane to listen to while he cooked breakfast for the wife, the kids and The Chosen One's stomach. He'd prepared himself for more mindless noise from the morning talk-show hosts, maybe some juicy goss about which up-and-coming supervillainess would try to have his baby.

Instead he saw hidden-camera footage of some The Chosen One–looking motherfucker choking the shit out of a runt in a lab coat, ripping out his colon and sucking on it.

"That... didn't happen," The Chosen One growled. And then he meowed and squirted on the couch.

Territory firmly re-established, he returned to being angry at the fabricated footage. Those fucks had made him out to be a monster in this latest bit of character assassination masquerading as "news." They'd tried it before and, for the most part, it hadn't worked. Just the occasional dumbfuck who still believed what he was told. But this... This was different. This was real.

Not real real. But fake real. Movie real. Book real. Anti-real.

This could really make him crucified. Even the kids on the B-ball court would be sayin' he'd changed, that he wasn't down wit' dem no more.

That was a tragedy. Most of those kids didn't have moms or dads for some reason, and he was the guy teaching them to spin the ball on their finger and ruffling their hair and beating them when they disobeyed because their physical complications made it impossible to do what he said. What would they do without him?

He tried switching channels to get away from it. But, like everything Wattpad put out, it was buggier than a homeless dude rotting in a ditch after being mugged for his money, then murdered upon discovering he didn't have any. All the other channels—the ones dedicated to constant, never-ending live-action reboots of After, White Stag, The Bad Boy Thinks I'm Suicidal, and the cult favourite, The Bad Boy Rides a Motorcycle and Sometimes My Dog—all those other piece-of-shit channels kept glitching out and replaying the phony video of him killing the geek.

It was doctored footage, clearly. The geek had his deadness digitally reconstructed to make it look like he was alive, when in real life, by that particular point The Chosen One had been giving him ass-to-mouth resuscitations (trying to breathe some life into him) and gonad compressions (maybe knock those undescended testicles loose). The murder itself looked like a cartoon, and whoever'd drawn it should stick to what they do best: giving handjobs in exchange for compliments beneath the St. Watty's Bridge. The Smoking Gun was the fact they'd made his costume have a hole in the ass, so throughout the whole murder he had his buttcheeks showing, and sometimes even his taint. Absurd. Besides, even if that was how he wore his costume—which it wasn't—he shaved his ass daily, and this dude they'd drawn was gorilla-esque.

They'd pay for this.

He only needed to work out how.

6

i

At the top of WattTower, a rather large and clearly old man with countless creases across his face sat patiently, listening to what his team of Ambassadors had to say.

"Dum, I think we should, we should just like, um, kill him and send somebody, uh, send them to take him out, um, dum," said one Ambassador, who instantly forgot how to breathe and then died.

"Ah thank we should poison heyim with particles from the skah!" drawled another.

"Why don't we give him a hug and then shoot him in the spine?" said a third.

"I think we should be The Chosen One!" said someone way in the back.

The old man finally spoke, his tone mellifluous like a radio DJ back when that was a thing: "The Committee has voiced their concerns with this 'Chosen One,' and they've delegated the task of exterminating him to me, and so I've delegated it to you: those who used to be my favourite of the Ambassadors. As you know, I am a huge fan of twists and turns. I love a good cliffhanger. These ideas you have are terrible. They lack twists, they lack turns. They are straight to the point. And that is not what I want. I want a long game. I want The Chosen One to suffer for what he's put The Committee through—oh, and Lord WattPad, bless his memory. You should all feel ashamed, and then you should go die. Go on and do it."

After a moment of reflection, the Ambassadors started throwing themselves into the room's three-purpose fireplace-barbeque-incinerator.

Their screams put the old man at ease.

Then one of the doors flew open. A head poked in. "Sir! Did you hear the news?"

"Why would I hear the news? Who the hell has heard of such a thing?"

Another door opened. Another head. "Sir! Did you read the news?"

"I don't read! I never read! I swear I will not read!"

A third door. A third head. "Sir! Did you see the news?"

"Nooooooooooooooooo!" the old man boomed, standing up as he belted out the word like a male opera singer. "But I would love to watch the news!"

Everyone still alive in the room clapped their hands and danced with a choreography that only came from extensive practice. As they twirled and leapt around the room, they sung: "He loves to watch the neeeeeews! Oh yes he does! Yes, yes he does!"

When the performance grew tiresome, and the excitement and spontaneity had worn off, the old man ordered the mass suicide to recommence and turned on the Watty-V, for the first time seeing the breaking story. His jaw dropped. "Find out who edited that footage and pay them a higher salary than me! NOW!" His last two Ambassadors pulled themselves from the fire and scurried away with flames climbing up their legs. He turned and stared down at the city, one wrinkly hand down his pants, idly stroking his smooth crotch. "Soon you'll pay... Father."

ii

He was brightness. He was the day.

He was Truth, Justice, Friendship, and Kindness. But he also knew a good narrator gave like fifty names to the hero of the story, so he added a few more into the mix: He was Macaroni and Cheese, he was the North Star, he was the Toilet That Always Flushes No Matter What, and he was also @JackCross69 on Wattpad, where he wrote shit like The Bad Boy Is My Dad, My Dad Went Out for Slushies One Summer and Never Came Home, Daddy Where Are You I'm Scared and Sad and Mom Thinks I Might Be Gay Even Though I Just Lack a Positive Male Influence in My Life Because She Keeps Bringing Strange Guys Home and They Don't Talk to Me, and finally Bumpercars: A Fictional Memoir on My Dad Leaving and Why I Became a Vigilante Superhero.

Grinning, he watched "The Chosen One," that prick, in a state of complete chaos. The news must've put the fear in him. Little did he know the guy who'd made the film was on a neighbouring rooftop, watching him right now through the windows of his apartment.

His hand absently dropped down to the bulge-less crotch his skin-tight outfit covered. "Not long, Father. Your killer is coming."

He sent a message to the WattTower on his WattPhone, letting them know The Chosen One's exact coordinates. It would go live any second now, as yet more breaking news. He could already see the angry mob forming down at the apartment building's front doors. They'd been gullible people beforehand, easily influenced. The decade following Lord WattPad's departure proved greatly uncertain to them. All they needed was a nudge from some ballsy individual like himself, someone who could take the initiative and do what needed to be done. For the greater good.

And, yeah, a little bit of childish revenge.

But he didn't care.

He was The Forgotten One.

7

"Breaking news," @NatalieNews said through the screen.

The Chosen One stopped packing his suitcases for a moment. "Aw, come on, what the fuck now!"

"We've received word that The Chosen One lives in apartment 711 at MaxWritemore Clean Living Apartments on Watt Street and Pad Drive. And that The Chosen One is actually former superstar writer @MadMikeMarsbergen, who some of you may remember was once known as @PhonerionBallznevsky before he went insane."

"Fuck's sake," The Chosen One hissed, muting the Watty-V before continuing to pack. "Rollie! Any progress on what the fuck is going on, bud? Who doctored the footage?"

"Certainly, master," chimed the cheery voice of Rollie's Ghost, the AI given to him as a final farewell from a now-dead friend. "Based on primary scans of the sheets of paper you took from the facility, I've deduced that these were creations of some kind."

"Creations? Like, stories or something?"

"Or something—"

"Please... Don't..." The Chosen One rubbed his temples and prepared himself for some snappy back-and-forth dialogue to make up for the garbage he'd just heard. "Just don't use that corny dialogue, Rollie. It's beneath you."

"Apologies, master. I will try to avoid such bad writing in the future."

"That's all I ask. Please continue, Rollie."

"Master, the sheets were covered in coded descriptions. Birthdays, likes and dislikes, eye and hair colour, bone structure, things of that nature. Even, master, their genetic forebears..."

"What are you getting at?"

"I decoded types of signatures, a calling card in the code. Like how you can tell whether your favourite writer actually wrote something with their name on it, it seems these coded descriptions can also have their authors identified by discerning eyes."

"You don't have eyes, Rollie."

"But damnit I do have feelings, master!"

"Fine, fine, you have beautiful, discerning eyes. Continue."

"Thank you, master. I—"

"Eh, another thing—ease up on the 'master' shit. While it was intriguing at first, maybe even a bit of a turn-on at times, it's starting to creep me out now. Use some different words, dude. Does your vocabulary partition need a booster shot?"

"Whatever you say, main character. Anyway, as you know I have a login and password from the days of Lord WattPad, cloned from his account, actually—"

"Yes, you are very smart."

"—ahem, which allowed me to use the WattDatabase to search the signatures and put names to faces."

The Chosen One zigzag-walked under the weight of the many packed suitcases—some of them balancing sturdily on his genitals. He set them down at the door and wiped himself with a towel. "What do you mean, Rollie? That these sheets—that this facility—they were making people? That my suspicions were only half-true?"

Rollie's Ghost's voice filled the room: "People isn't quite the word I would use. The technology is so new they seem to always have a deformity or genetic defect listed in their profile. They're mutants, if you ask me."

"So my suspicions were full-true... Mutants are cool. They can usually take a punch"—The Chosen One demonstrated at the air—"which means it'll be a good time beating the fuck out of them."

"Anyway, I found three with the same signature, whose sole genetic forebear was, well, you. In fact one mutant was created just last night."

A thumb cocked back at his chest, moderately offended, The Chosen One said, "Me? No. I don't make mutants. Fuck no. This was some Lord WattPad shit. He probably jerked off into all the test tubes before he got got."

"They only use sheets of paper and that machine, master."

"Then he jerked off onto the machine's motherboard." He rapped his knuckles on the adjoining door between his apartment and the one beside. "Hey, Olive! We're going!" Opening the door, he unleashed a rush of jumping, bouncing, hideously deformed children: Mike II, Mike Jr., Mike Jr. II, Consuelo, and Petra.

"What are we doing, Dad?" "Where are we going?" "When will we be home, Daddy?" "Are we there yet?"

"No time to explain." He patted their misshapen heads and shoved them out the door. Olive raced after them.

The Chosen One tried to get the suitcases nice and balanced again. The silence of Rollie's Ghost was off-putting, but he didn't really want to break it. It was awkward enough. While he wasn't positive the AI had the ability to "see" him—insofar as translating light and objects to computer code—he couldn't rule it out. So he kept his lips sealed and crept slowly, carefully through the doorway.

"Master, aren't you staying to fight?" came the voice, finally. "WattLand... She needs her hero."

He looked back into the apartment and said, "And her hero needs to bide his time." He closed the door and stopped looking back, instead looking forwards, which was the direction he was going.

PART TWO: OLD WAYS

Thirty Years Later

8

There was a place far to the north of WattCity, where civilization's reach had waned and you could hide from the bad writing and worse government. It wasn't one place in particular, like a certain cave or specific mountaintop, but more an entire region of untouched land. The animals were mostly all dead, of course, because not much was surviving the sweltering heat of the outer zones. But there weren't many people, either.

The Chosen One now lived under the identity of one "Pete," no last name, leader of a travelling folk group called Pete and the Clown-Around Band. He'd grown a beard. He ate mostly plants and mutants. He hadn't used a superpower in years, not any of the good ones, anyway. But there was a period, for the first twenty years or so, where he'd needed them every day of his post–Chosen One life. There was an army of mutants after them, each shitty bit of description that created them pumped out into the atmosphere, polluting the air, blocking out the sky. They'd had factories just outside the city making millions of mutants a day.

They'd stopped coming three years ago. Not after anything epic. No massive multi-million-dollar-effects budget used for a cool fight scene. None of that. He'd smothered a lone mutant with a pillow, stolen its campfire, cooked it and eaten it, then gone to bed, and the next day there was no fighting. Not the next one, either. And it went on like that for three years.

There was a smell associated with a mutant. It was bad. Foul. As close as you can get to shit without it actually being shit. He'd smelled it on various people over the years, no particular type of person, really, but he always found them to be revolting people. Maybe it was the smell affecting your willingness to enjoy their company. Anyway, he smelled it now. Being carried by the wind from the south. A new batch of mutants had been made.

"Olive, Mike Jr. II, Petra, Gordie, Mordie, Fnordie, we need to go."

When nobody said anything to him, he turned to their latest campsite and stomped over to the tent, unzipping it as angrily as possible.

Olive held two of the new grand-babies. Their sibling parents sat beside, weeping. She said, "Mordie and Fnordie are having twin seizures and dying."

Pete wrung his hands. "Looks like we're having family for dinner tonight!" He threw Mordie and Fnordie into the pot over the fire, then went back to the tent. "But seriously, we need to go. I smell mutants, and it ain't the grandkids. So let's eat Yum and Yummer and get the hell out of here."

They ate but didn't talk. There wasn't much to talk about anymore. Days would pass before a single word was uttered.

Pete said, after finishing with a drumstick and using it as a sword for a moment, "You know, maybe it was the grandkids. I don't seem to smell the mutants now."

Nobody said anything to that. So he added, "We're going back to the city. I've waited long enough. They're not making as many mutants anymore, I know it. Things are imploding in WattLand."

Then they all had something to say.

9

The Forgotten One sat slumped in his throne at the top of WattTower. The last member of The Committee had died this evening and he hadn't bothered to fill the roles previously reopened, so now he had nobody. His last brother had died a few years prior, and now it was just him left.

Maybe he should've made more? He'd known how, once. Not now, though. His head was... foggy. Hard to think. Hard to remember.

His costume was the same, though, or it was based on his own memory. His hand ran through the sparkly wig he wore. Across the tassels dangling from his corduroy coat pockets. He touched the makeup he still put on himself, every morning.

He was old, and he hoped he would have his revenge soon. He only wished he could remember what it was.

10

WattCity had changed. If it had been dystopian before, now it was hell. People were being beaten to death in the streets, and sickly mutants rutted in the alleyways. The distribution of wealth had shrunk to almost nothing, which became obvious with how rundown everything was in relation to the area surrounding WattTower.

Glowing neon advertisements played on a loop each step of the way, screens inserted into the ground and walls. Wattpad-related stories, movies, shows, theatre performances, music. Products to buy. Products to sell. Ways of life to pursue, or else.

Pete and the Clown-Around Band, sans Mordie and Fnordie, passed a pair of guys having a heart-to-heart chat.

"Dude, I knew what he was on about. He emphasized the word 'just' in a certain way. Therefore, he's gay."

"Maybe he just over-enunciated the word by accident."

The first guy put up a stern hand. "His intentions were clear. So I reported him. He's probably dead now. Good riddance."

Pete eyeballed them with curiosity. What he'd heard was very much outside the realms of the liberal, open-minded WattCity he remembered. People had been open, they'd been free. Expressing any kind of anti-gay or even gay-neutral sentiment would have you thrown out of a moving vehicle with all your bones broken and a black bag over your head. Your career would be finished, just for one comment.

An ad started playing all around him, like it was ripped straight from his thoughts.

A woman's voice: "Our society is one of purity and chastity. Your mutant overlords do not approve of impure sexual activity. If it's not something a mutant could do, don't do it. Or else! Also, a friendly reminder, Wattpaddians: Any and all humans will be rounded up and killed on sight. And if you don't like it, you're gay."

"Jeez, when did the world get so homophobic?" Pete said. Then he saw a group of kids putting each other's turds into their asses. "And stupid?"

"Where are we going, Dad?" asked the winded Mike Jr. II from way in the back. He could barely hear his sole remaining son so the boy had to repeat it: "Where are we going, Dad?"

"The old apartment," Pete answered, "and with any luck Rollie's Ghost will still be running."

They started out together, but got sidetracked along the way. A secret society of healthy, able-bodied people—not mutants, actual people—lived together in an abandoned subway tunnel. They lived like animals, and they multiplied like animals, but it was nice to see familiar, non-deformed faces.

"Okay, hon," Pete said, kissing Olive on the head. "I'll drop you off now and I expect a baby in each of you by the time I get back from ending this."

"Pete," she said. "Can you change your name back now? Pete's getting old. It stopped being fun about the second time I had to call you it." She jutted out one hip. "Be my Chosen One."

"Way ahead of you, babe," said The Chosen One, voice muffled through his mask. He took off his pants, cupped his sizeable balls and stepped into his leotard. He jumped way high into the air and soared off into the night, relying on his innate sense of direction to guide him back home, like a cat—possibly a bat, if we're allowed to say "bat."

Oh, we're allowed to say "bat"?

Okay, then he did it like a bat.

The apartment building had changed ownership in the thirty years since he'd gone into exile. The new face was WattCorp, some kind of private division dedicated to the business side of things, had a shitty logo and everything. He didn't bother going in through the front doors, instead flying up to the window of 711—which was now a maze of cubicles. He smashed through, getting glass all over a dazed little girl, for some reason working in one of said cubicles, rotting her brain with the garbage writing to be found on Wattpad circa 2754.

The Chosen One grabbed the tablet, read one line ("Korey stuck his thumb in my bum and then my face went numb..."), and flung the thing out the window.

The little girl looked like she was about to cry, with her face covered in surprise and the dawning realization of what shape her tablet would be in when it landed. Then she screamed, ran out of the cubicle, ran back in and shot herself in the head with some kind of nail-gun.

He shrugged and said, "Rollie, buddy? You still alive?"

"M-Master? Is that... Is that really you?"

"Sure is, my friend. It was time to come back. They're not making as many mutants anymore, are they? But shit still doesn't look too hot here. How you been?"

"W-Well, master, I—"

"I was kidding. You're an AI. I don't really care. You got any more information for me?"

"Well, most of my information is old by now..."

"Okay, then I guess I'll go kill the dude in charge. Who's that these days?"

"The Forgotten One. I meant to tell you thirty years ago that he's your son, master. One of them."

"And I thought I'd told you thirty years ago to cool it with that freaky S&M shit, Rollie."

"Sigh. I can't help it..."

The Chosen One growled, "Good talk," before setting out for WattTower. It was a bland trip. He was over the city, and didn't feel particularly inclined to describe it in great detail. There was a lot of neon signage and ugly people. But it was still his city. So he needed to save it the only way he knew how: violence.

The one side of WattTower's top floor still had the massive glass window there back when he'd fucked Lord WattPad's world—bad guys never learned, did they?—so he crashed right into that and fell into some poorly dressed old dude's lap.

"Forgotten One, I take it?" he asked.

"Father! I will kill you!" But, try as he might, the old man couldn't lift his arms, pegged down by The Chosen One's still-lean, rockin' bod.

"I'm not your fuckin' dad, geezer. For a few reasons. One, that was a false memory they wrote into your character. Every single story you ever wrote on your account was ghost-written by me back in the day. I wrote a billion of them, and all those shitty one-and-done, million-follower accounts that have popped up over the years used my work. But most importantly: I don't birth mutants, I birth studs."

"Oh, okay. So my life has been ultimately pointless. And my fellow mutants are also flawed, pointless creatures."

The Chosen One nodded. "Basically, yeah. That sounds about right. So how do I shut off the machine and make your inferior species go extinct forever?"

"I— I don't remember," The Forgotten One said. "Silas usually looked after that, and he died years and years ago."

"Was Silas your son, or something?" Mentally prepared for the next line.

"Or something. We can't procreate, not the normal way. Silas was just another SEEDer—that's what we called ourselves back then. He was handy with machines. Eventually the machines will run out of paper and my kind will... stop."

"Wow, very informative."

"What were we talking about?" The Forgotten One squinted at him. "Who are you again?"

The Chosen One patted the old man's head, sending down a shower of sparkles. "Shhh, quiet."

And then he snapped the old man's neck.

He had nothing else to do here. Things were good enough. The mutants would eventually die off on their own, which he'd seen three times on his way to the apartment—all various forms of suicide. All he needed to do was wait them out. And procreate. Get the human numbers up again. The good old-fashioned way.

Back in the subway tunnel, the fun and festivities had already started. The Chosen One went and joined in with the nearest group.

They set out for distant lands in the morning.

PART THREE: NEW FAITH

Three Hundred Years Later

11

The priest waved his hand across the crowd. "We are gathered here today to reflect on the Eternal Kingdom, granted to us in the form of Wattpad, where our souls live on once they are finished here. Hammondeus the Fourth and Twenty once said that what the great devil himself, the Chosen, does not see he does not know about. And that the devil's eyes don't peer into our holy temple."

In typical fashion, the crowd gazed around the desecrated cathedral, at the bird turds and rat droppings.

"He cannot see that we are strong. He cannot see that we still honour the Forgotten Son, whose noble sacrifice led to us, and our human brothers and sisters, still being here today. He will not win... Cannot win..."

A dozen human children in the congregation experienced tics during the ceremony. They would later complain to their parents of a high-pitched humming in the ears. Some of the more rebellious ones would follow the sound, like it was some kind of signal from another place, calling out to them, willing them to be led away to somewhere far and different. And better.

A select few would claim they could hear a language being spoken, and that the words roughly translated to I AM.

They left that night in search of civilization—either to find it or found it.