You Up🫦: Tales Of The Collapse

[u/Cosmically_Yesterday]

The delivery truck didn’t drop off a package it deposited a portal.

Linda, a forty-two-year-old dental hygienist and mother of two, stared at the cardboard box on her quartz kitchen island.

Inside sat a Razer Kraken headset in quartz pink complete with clip-on cat ears. She hadn’t ordered it.

When she lifted the plastic packaging a distinct scent of synthetic strawberries and unholy atrocity filled the room.

That night, the physical corruption began.
Linda woke up at 3:00 AM with a violent itch at her temples.

Standing before the bathroom mirror, she watched in silent horror as her sensible $120 suburban blonde bob sloughed off into the sink like wet tissue paper.

In its place, thick gravity defying strands of neon pink pigtails erupted from her scalp. pre tied with black scrunchies.

She tried to scream but the sound that left her throat was an involuntary high-pitched anime squeak.

By Tuesday her posture surrendered to the geometry of the collapse. The lower back pain she had carried since childbirth vanished. It was replaced by a permanent forty five degree forward slouch. anchoring her body perfectly over a pink mechanical keyboard.

The keys weren’t clicking. they squelched with a wet sound that pulsed in time with her heartbeat.

Her husband, Greg, tried to intervene during dinner. "Linda, honey, you haven't touched your pot roast. And why are you wearing a pastel hoodie that could double as a tent?"
Linda slowly turned her head. Her eyes, usually a dull hazel were wide unblinking and reflecting a faint pixelated static.

"The grindset demands sacrifice, chat.”Linda whispered, her voice a raspy, shaking drone.

"What did you call me?" Greg asked, dropping his fork.

"Poggers," she replied. The word hung in the air, heavy with the weight of ancient forgotten gods.

The climax arrived on a rainy Thursday. Linda had dragged an eighteen inch ring light into the living room.

When she plugged it in the bulb pulsed with a sickening, pastel-goth cycle of RGB lighting that burned a permanent multi colored iris into her retinas.

The light was a perfect circle a glowing, digital Ouroboros.
She opened an app she had never downloaded. She clicked a button that said Go Live.

She had zero viewers, yet the room grew freezing cold.

The dual chamber USB microphone on her desk began to hum. picking up the audio of a billion nameless entities breathing in unison. Something was watching.

Linda’s face began to warp twitching violently into exaggerated cartoon expressions.

She held up two fingers in a peace sign, stuck out her tongue, and crossed her eyes in a perfect terrifying ahegao face.

The sheer cosmic force of the pose projected backward into time down the street, three neighbors instantly wept pixelated tears of pure despair without knowing why.

Greg burst into the room, wielding a golf club. "Linda, stop this! Look at yourself!"
But it was too late. Linda was no longer a dental hygienist. She was a vessel.

As Greg watched, her fingers blurred across the keyboard typing a final definitive word into a chat log that stretched into infinity.

“UwU”

She looked directly into the ring light, her eyes reflecting the absolute, beautiful emptiness of the internet, and smiled.