The video had four million views and a single comment: don’t watch this alone. I was alone when I clicked it at half past eleven on a Tuesday, which is the kind of decision that feels meaningless until it isn’t.
The video was forty-three seconds long. I will not describe what it showed, because I am not sure description is the point. What I will say is that by the end of those forty-three seconds I understood why the comment was there, and I understood it in a way that was physical — a cold that settled in the back of my neck and did not leave for the rest of the night.
My name is Eli Brand. I was twenty-six, I worked in data processing for a financial firm, and I spent my evenings in the way that people who live alone spend their evenings: watching things. Films, series, clips, the broad river of content that kept the flat from feeling too quiet. I had been sent the link by a colleague named Tom, forwarded in a group chat with no context beyond don’t ask just watch. I had watched it at 11:31 p.m. on a Tuesday and I had not slept well afterward.
On Wednesday morning Tom was not at work. He had not called in sick. He had simply not come in, which was unusual for Tom, who was reliably present and had not missed a day in the year and a half I had known him.
I sent him a message: You okay? You’re not in.
The reply came at 11:17 a.m.: don’t watch it again.
I had not said anything about watching it a second time. I had not thought about watching it a second time. The message arrived as though Tom had access to a thought I had not yet had.
I did not watch it again that day. I went home and made dinner and watched something else entirely and told myself the video was the kind of thing the internet produced occasionally — images or sequences that bypassed rational assessment and went directly to the body’s threat response. Nothing paranormal. A technique, possibly deliberate, possibly accidental, that certain combinations of imagery could trigger. The comment and Tom’s message were social contagion — people performing a response to match the expectation set by other people performing a response.
I believed all of that by about nine in the evening. By eleven I was less certain.
Because the link in the group chat — which I had not reopened — was sending me notifications. Not from Tom, not from anyone. From the link itself, which should not have been able to do that. A third-party link in a chat did not have notification permissions. My phone had not granted them. And yet every eleven minutes, consistently, a notification appeared on my screen that was not from any app I could identify, showing nothing but the link and the number of views, which had increased by exactly four each time I checked.
Four new views every eleven minutes. No variation. No acceleration. Exactly four.
I screenshotted the notifications and sent them to Tom. His reply was immediate: I know. It did that to me too. Don’t click it again and don’t share the link.
I asked him what had happened. He took seventeen minutes to reply, which I noted because the eleven-minute notification interval was making me aware of time in an uncomfortable way.
His reply: I shared it to six people. I don’t know why I shared it. I watched it once and then I shared it and then I watched it again and I think that was a mistake.
I asked what he meant by mistake.
He didn’t reply for a long time.
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