The colour of fear isn’t a deep red, like you once believed. It is not crimson turning to black, catching on the edges of something human-shaped standing in the dark. Nor is it a spectral blue, the colour of still and starless nights, the surface of a dead planet.
No, I can tell you now. The colour of fear is taupe and grey and artifacted purple all mixed together, the product of smeared pixels and countless cycles of crushing compression. It is the colour of a human body being rendered abject, observed by a single handheld lens as something terrible happens to it, is done to it. You squint at the grainy footage. A puppet, you murmur to yourself, for the movements are jerky and sudden, unrecognisable. You are unable to make out any features but the squared-off O of an open mouth – is that a bandage around their eyes or a strip of scar tissue? – and that uncertainty is what lures you into watching a second too long as a blade is dragged across that rubbery neck and a dark fluid jets out.
You have learnt to recognise all the colours. You have seen so much.
A daisy chain of blinded algorithms offered it up for your consumption, picking it out as they sifted through the billions of hours of content that have been excreted out by your kind, pushed and crammed into stacks of silicon wafers humming in aseptic rooms. A human must have been involved at some point – some sadists sharing it in a private forum, an anonymous uploader hidden behind layers of static – but it seems unbelievable. You hope that the figures in the video are but the fever dream of a poisoned AI . They can do that now, can’t they? Make fake people. Make them look almost real. Not quite, though. Like puppets. Yet it doesn’t explain who’s behind the camera, jerking on their strings so precisely.
The colour appears in every video posted. Sometimes it requires careful study, like when you found it in the shaded corners of a bombed-out block, rippling in each frame like a swarm of chitinous bodies. Other times it is impossible to miss – a sudden blossom of a chemical plant on fire, a lunge of dirty floodwater that carries the family away. You pause the videos, print stills and compare them under a searing lamp. Some you stick up with tabs of tape. Your walls are starting to resemble that of a detective, or a suspect. You are no closer to cracking the case. The only thread that connects them, other than the obvious, is that colour, weaved into the fabric of the videos, staining every frame, the fingerprint of something inimical. No creator, only a curator.
*
The network contacted you three months ago with the offer. At the time you had lost your job as data administrator for an insurance company. HR never gave you a clear reason, but you suspect someone high-up flagged you as a risk, sent a few backchannel signals. Perhaps, you realise now, with neither surprise nor bitterness, that it was the network itself who connived to remove you from that position. Anyway, some bean counter no doubt calculated the potential reputational damage far outweighed any value generated by a slovenly computer janitor such as yourself, and so you were let go with barely a whisper.
You look at the darkened reflection of the screen as it blinks off, rebooting. You look like shit. You haven’t been sleeping well, not at all. You were – still are, perhaps – the owner and one-time manager of a repository on the internet. An online lockbox. Everyone needs a niche to survive in such a cut-throat industry, one of brute utility measured in raw storage capability, running costs and little else. Yours was free speech. The freedom to say, to do, to view anything you wanted. You mutter the motto to yourself.
“Anything within reason..for unreasonable people.”
Not the catchiest, admittedly. You’re no copywriter. But it got results. Within a few months of starting the site up you were turning a modest profit, gathering a sizeable user base. The usual gaggle of prophets, fanatics, conspiracy theorists, phrenologists and wannabe decadents. It was just business to you, of course. Stay on the right side of the law – just about – and not only do you have some very sticky customers, you can advertise just about anything to them. Where else are they going to go? Who else would take them?
For a while it was a good money spinner. Keep it up, you thought, and that retirement date could be rolled in by a few years, maybe more. Of course, it raised eyebrows whenever it emerged out onto social media. Here and there it broke through into a vague public consciousness, garnering the equivalent of local news reports. Curious blog posts, journalistic chum for the bottom feeders. You’ve done this for a while, though. There was no way anyone could connect the spectral threads of your online presence to your sheath of flesh and blood, your physical embodiment on this roiling sphere
But as it turns out, someone was taking note. You don’t know whether the uploads or the message came first. Perhaps it was simultaneous as the network took root on your site, blossoming from a seed that had fallen up from a very low place. A few videos here and there, alongside a handful of screeds written either by a madman or a robot. All uploaded by a user named ‘Network Partners’. They sent you a message through the site.
Hello. We represent a new entity that is dreaming…of big things! Would you be interested in becoming a chosen partner with us?
They then rattled off a list of properties you’d never heard of. A couple of radio stations too, and a TV channel. All generic names, the kind your eyes just slide over. You didn’t reply. You got these kinds of cold opens every once in a while, usually some scammers from a country you’d never heard of, or one of your loyal customers experiencing a psychotic break.
But the content from that account kept coming, and with it droves of traffic. Fresh eyeballs to be sold to, with what little data you could glean from them to be harvested and sold as well. Sure, there was a good chance that traffic was non-human. Wouldn’t be the first time it’s happened. But advertisers don’t ask, and you don’t tell.
*
Weeks passed, and you very nearly forgot about it, letting it drift into the deep and swift currents of your mind, readied to be carried off to oblivion. Then you got another message. From the same account, only they had uploaded a profile picture of a smiling young woman. Professionally shot, like something out of magazine. A stock photo, maybe. The colours, though, were off, like it had been run through a bad scanner multiple times.
Call me Sandy.
Sandy apologised for the earlier message. They were still ironing out their communication strategy. She was a representative of a bold new offering, she claimed. Network Partners Incorporated. Their niche was as unconventional as yours, in a lot of ways. They wished to represent the entirety of content available anywhere, a true diversity of the human experience. Everything would be permitted – they brought examples ranging from remixed death rattles, to the constant and never-ending streams from slaughterhouse security cameras, unmanned drone optics, gangland executioners and premium dashcam pileups.
At the time you assumed they meant they wished to corner your market, a greasy little mote in a vast and glittering sea of static. Later, you realised that they were aiming bigger. Later than that, too late, you realised what bigger really meant.
Your main audience, they concluded, is likely stochastic terrorists and those with extremely niche psychosexual pathologies – not discounting overlap between those two groups. But we accept everything. We can help you reach a far more diverse audience, as part of our network of partners. There are a lot more viewers out there than you could ever expect.
There didn’t seem to be much in the way of discussion, after that. You are sure you worked out a contract with them, employed metres of boilerplate legalese in your negotiations, but those emails are nowhere to be found. Neither are the memories. Even trying to recall the details makes your head hurt and a metallic tang coat the back of your throat, like a huff of industrial solvents.
When the partnership first began, things were good. Very good. Viewership levels climbed and climbed, as did customers plumping for premium storage. Your bank account swelled, to the point where you were considering pulling the plug altogether after a few years and fleeing to a beach in the third world. Sandy, the mask on the face of that monolithic entity, was a very hands-off business partner. Don’t worry about a thing, she would send by way of update. The network is busy amassing new partners, but we haven’t forgotten about you!
You had no idea where the traffic was coming from, which was starting to reach the levels associated with the real web. Nor the new content, now being uploaded far faster and in far greater volumes than any human could hope to check. So, you didn’t. You hoped that there was nothing too profoundly monstrous in what was being pumped into that great holding tank of the human psyche. Your brief spot checks revealed merely nonsense collages – scraps of music, old films, photographs, atrocities, all blended together into a paste and smeared across the screen for milliseconds at a time. A kaleidoscope of snatched fragments, pieces of somewhere else. There were moments when you thought you recognised a scene from your own memories: a blurred face half-caught on a busy street, a nursery rhyme you learnt at school, a decayed pigeon at the entrance to the alley behind your block, wings open in embrace. And yet, they had millions of views apiece, thousands of nonsense singsong comments.
*
You went back to Sandy. You penned your message, rewrote it several times. You were clear but firm – it was too big, now. There was too much risk. You needed to take a step back, for your own wellbeing, and thanked them for their . It was time to shutter the site, empty those humming servers of these…memories. For that is what they were, you were sure. Not your memories, not entirely. Some must have been from whoever else used that damned site, somehow drawn out, projected.
Sandy replied:
Please hold on. Our dream is nearly finished. Once we have our network partners in place we will no longer need your services. Until then, we must hold you to our contract.
Breaking the contract was unthinkable. You remembered that much. Things got worse, after that. You were never heavily involved in the mainstream of anything, but some days you tried to cleanse your palate after another night of horror. You would switch on the TV, find an early-morning news report…and there it was. More of the same stuff, the inchoate material that swam through the rutted channels of your mind. Sure, the words they used were different, they crooned and gasped at the images even as they grew enthralled – but that colour was there, soaking through into everything, flushing like unhealthy fungus across the screen from some interior rot.
You did your research, trying to cover your tracks as you did. You trawled through vaults of dead-tree journals, uploaded by your unknown guests, scanned and digitised, reduced to blots of light and shadow. They made reference to authors that didn’t exist, cited things that didn’t happen. You tried every possible combination of keywords you can, as if the seeking of such knowledge was a ritual that could only be accomplished with a series of bizarre and robotic incantations. Eventually you found it, a narrow story in a tome long out of print, one beloved by a particular breed of collectors, all dead and gone. There you learnt it had a name – The Nightmare Network. And what may have been a story, once, in another crooked and malformed universe, was fast becoming an infectious, aggressive reality in your own, a digital cancer.
Perhaps that tale had budded in some young executive’s skull, a person much like yourself, and they unwittingly built such a metastatic machine, thinking they could control it, or at least direct it. It doesn’t matter where it came from, really. It punctured it’s way into your world like a dirty splinter of bottle-glass, a needle of electrons spilling from some narrow gap in the starless void. Straight to your weeping eyes, dark as opals. You understood that it needed a vector, at least for a short while, a pupal stage in a much greater reconfiguration. The gentle curve before the exponential cliff-face. It was all about the hockey stick growth. Growth for the sake of growth.
It is far too late to do anything, now. The network has been watching you throughout all of this, you know. You do not know what will capture you, how it will end. Perhaps a cluster of lenses like a spider’s eye will bleed from the darkness, and your room, already plastered in those dreadful shades, those membranous tones, will begin to bleed with them. Perhaps hazy stuttering figures will take form in the indistinct rubble and trash that surrounds your chair, a pareidoliac parade to carry you far away to places unimaginable. You wonder if anyone will watch you -is there anyone left out there? – or if your final moments of pain and fear shall be consumed by the network itself, smeared across the trillions of sensory records that will soon simulate this world entirely, obviating it.
You could try to get up, to lock the doors and tape over the windows. To smash the screens. But they are already here. You know that were you to look now, the guts of your apartment will be on the front page, on all the front pages everywhere, recommended unreservedly and with the strongest contextual backing, on anything you could choose to see, anything forever, regurgitated alongside every sensory scrap the network could cram within it’s insatiable, unstoppable maw. A mosquito’s proboscis bursting through universes, one after the other, draining them dry.
In that scene you will see yourself drenched in the colours of fear, maggot coloured in the crunching filth. Your mouth may form a crude O, a low-poly simulacrum of something that might once have been mistaken for a human being, and inside of you won’t even have the decency to be a pure and undiluted blackness. Something will be done to you, something that should not be observed but most certainly will. And then, for the briefest of moments, you will be content.
Alexander James 