Chapter 8: GOING VIRAL
The hospital ceiling was different from the ambulance ceiling.
Mount Sinai. The name was on the whiteboard next to my bed, along with my vitals and the nurse's name and the date: July 29th, 2020. Three days since I'd woken up in the wrong body. Three days since the world stopped making sense.
My ribs were taped. My left wrist was in a cast—clean break, six weeks minimum. Six stitches above my right eye, which I could feel pulling every time I blinked.
The phone was on the bedside table. Someone had plugged it in, which was thoughtful. Someone else had turned it to silent, which was less thoughtful, because when I picked it up with my good hand, the notification count was in triple digits.
217 missed calls. 89 voicemails. 1,847 text messages.
The first text was from Jenna Park: omg harley are you okay?? saw the news
The second was from Drew Keener: Call me when you're awake. Vought HR wants to talk.
The third was from a number I didn't recognize: Mr. Vaughn, this is Marcus Webb from The Watchdog. We'd like to interview you about—
I stopped reading the texts and opened Twitter instead.
The footage had a name now.
#ShieldGuy was trending. Not at the top—the congressional hearings were dominating that space—but climbing steadily. The clip that was spreading fastest was from a fourth-floor window, shot at an angle that made the impact look survivable. From that perspective, it looked like I'd taken the hit. Like I'd planted my feet and absorbed a superhuman blow and stayed standing.
The reality—that the hit had shattered my shield, broken my wrist, cracked my ribs, and launched me into a parked car—was visible in other clips. But those weren't the ones going viral.
"The frame matters," I thought, echoing my morphine-dream. "Not the reality. The frame."
The view count on the main clip was 487,000. I watched it tick to 488,000 while I scrolled through comments.
new supe spotted in midtown?? that's not a supe that's just a guy with balls of steel def compound v nobody survives a hit like that vought plant trying to make supes look good why isn't this on any news sites? who's suppressing this?
The suppression theory was gaining traction. I checked the timestamps on the uploads—the original had been posted at 4:12 PM, right after the ambulance left the scene. But two of the most-viewed copies had already been taken down. DMCA strikes from a legal firm I didn't recognize.
I searched the firm's name. Third result: Vought International, Legal Partners.
"Oh," I thought. "That's going to backfire."
Midnight. The view count was at 1.2 million.
The Vought DMCA strikes had hit Reddit and three different conspiracy forums in the last two hours. Each takedown spawned a dozen mirrors. Each mirror spawned a hundred discussions about why Vought would suppress footage of a random civilian fighting a V-enhanced individual.
Because the shield had a Vought logo. Because Vought doesn't want heroes they don't control. Because this proves Compound V incidents are more common than they're admitting.
The theories were wrong—or at least, incomplete—but they were generating attention. Attention generated views. Views generated belief.
And the shimmer at the edge of my vision was changing.
It had been flickering since the incident, faster than I'd ever seen it. Now it was steadying. Resolving. The random noise was organizing itself into something I could almost read.
[BELIEF THRESHOLD: 98%]
[ESTIMATED TIME TO ACTIVATION: 2-4 HOURS]
I set the phone down and stared at the ceiling. The hospital was quiet at this hour—distant footsteps, the hum of machines, the occasional murmur of night-shift staff. No one was watching me. No cameras in the room.
"Two to four hours," I thought. "And then everything changes."
3:17 AM. The view count crossed 2.3 million.
The shimmer stopped flickering.
For a long moment, nothing happened. The hospital room stayed exactly as it was—sterile, quiet, lit only by the glow of medical equipment and the distant lights of Manhattan through the window.
Then the interface appeared.
Not imagined. Not a hallucination. A translucent overlay on my vision, sharp and precise and unmistakably there. Six horizontal bars in a column on the left—stats, I knew instinctively, though I couldn't read the labels yet. Numbers in the corner that updated in real time. A dashboard at the bottom edge that pulsed with categories I was starting to recognize.
[MYTHMAKER'S ASCENSION — PHASE 1: IGNITION]
[SYSTEM ACTIVATION COMPLETE]
[BELIEF POINTS: 47]
[LEGEND SATURATION: 12]
[ALL STATS: RANK 0 — MUNDANE]
Forty-seven. The number sat in my vision like an accusation. Forty-seven belief points, generated by 2.3 million views and however many people had decided that what they saw meant something.
I did the math. Forty-seven divided by 2.3 million meant... most people didn't believe. Most people watched and scrolled and forgot. Only a fraction—a tiny, precious fraction—had invested enough mental energy to generate actual BP.
But that fraction was growing. As I watched, the counter ticked from 47 to 48. Then 49.
"It's working," I thought. "Slowly. Pathetically slowly. But it's working."
The system hummed in my skull, and for the first time, I understood what I was dealing with.
The Reputation Dashboard was the key.
I found it at the bottom of the interface—a breakdown of belief by emotional category. Admiration, fear, curiosity, hatred, skepticism. Five columns with five different numbers, all of them small, all of them climbing at different rates.
Curiosity was winning. Nearly sixty percent of my total belief came from people who wanted to know more—who the guy with the shield was, why Vought was suppressing the footage, what the incident actually meant. Curiosity-belief converted at 0.6x efficiency, which was bad for raw BP generation but good for something else.
"They want to know more," I realized. "Which means they'll pay attention to what comes next."
The other categories were smaller. Admiration at maybe twenty percent—people who'd decided I was brave, or heroic, or at least interesting enough to root for. Fear at single digits—people who thought I might be a new Supe, which generated better BP but also Vought attention. Hatred and skepticism were negligible for now.
Forty-seven. Forty-eight. Forty-nine.
The number climbed while I watched, and I felt something between terror and elation. The system was awake. I was no longer baseline—or rather, I was still baseline, but I had a path forward now. A mechanism for change.
"Phase 1," the system had said. "Ignition."
The fire was lit. Now I needed to feed it.
Get Early Access to New Chapters
Thank you for reading. For those who want to skip the wait, my Patreon is currently 21 chapters ahead of the public sites.
Schedule: 7 new chapters released every 10 days.
Benefit: Gain a significant lead of 7 to 21 chapters depending on your tier.
Support the project and start reading the next arc now: Patreon.com/IsekaiStories