The Glitched Reel | Part II | Optimize or Die

Welcome to the second and final part of The Glitched Reel, a black mirror inspired short story, in which you follow Naomi as she navigates the fallout of going viral and survivor’s guilt.

👉 Missed the beginning? Read Part I of The Glitched Reel here

A too-bright sun tried its very best to break through the blackout curtains that had now been shut for almost a week. The sliver of a golden light that landed on her coffee table stirred a rage Naomi knew wasn’t fair. It was a rage folded into frustration, wrapped in sadness, directed not at the sun, but at the situation she was trapped in. Still, when you're that mad, rationality starts to feel like a bad joke. Sometimes the irrational stuff just fits better.

She pushes herself up from the couch and stomps over to that stupid curtain that needed to block out that stupid sun. Caricature like stomps. Big, dramatic ones. With a sharp pull she yanks the velvety fabric. A bit too hard. A hook pops loose from the railing.

Fuck!

The unexpected slack from the curtain throws her off balance, tripping over that dying plant, the one that, like her, had been fighting for its life ever since the reel went viral. Her phone flies across the room, catapulted by the sudden jolt and the executive dysfunction of her hand muscles. Of course my body is deciding violence, Naomi whimpers, tears welling up from yet another disaster entirely of her own making.

The screen cracks on impact. Normally, it would’ve normally set off a panic, the kind of life or death kind of panic that isn’t rooted in reality (it’s just a phone) but still feels like the end of the world. Now? She shrugs. She opens Mirra, the app she’s been avoiding, the one with her video and the flood of notifications, and avalanche of DMs, and starts scrolling.

hey you

been a while. saw your face on Mirra and nearly choked on my protein bar.

hope you’re doing okay and not, like, in a bunker or something.

miss the days when we only ruined people’s lives in spreadsheets.

Dan! Wow, Dan… It had been ages. When they were both still babies tucked behind oversized screens and even bigger datasets. Their first “real” job while trying to finish some unnecessary degree that didn’t teach them anything meaningful. The company had seemed cool at the time. Wellness-adjacent. Tech-for-good. Data with a conscience. Something about “early intervention” and “content mental health analytics.” It sounded vague and important, and maybe that was the point.

Naomi hadn’t loved the work, exactly. But it paid, and no one screamed at her, and there was always oat milk in the fridge, no signs of cactus milk anywhere. And most of all: it felt like they were helping. Like they were catching people before the spiral. Creating tools, dashboards, systems that could flag distress, surface resources, gently nudge. She remembered her manager — clean-cut, neurotically positive — once saying:

“We don’t monetize pain. We create pathways to resilience.”

Naomi hadn’t believed him. But she hadn’t not believed him, either. And Dan… Dan had always made it bearable. Spreadsheet sarcasm, protein bars, weird playlists at 11PM during deadline weeks. It felt like a lifetime ago.

wow, it really has been ages. hope you’re doing okay too. and yeah, wild times. didn’t plan on accidentally becoming a meme.

anyway. good to hear from you. really.

She puts her phone down and pulls the blanket over herself and Micky, who’s curled up in that impossible way only cats can manage: looking wildly uncomfortable, yet somehow perfectly at peace. One of Micky’s ears twitches at a noise Naomi doesn’t hear. She presses her face into his fur, the blanket pulled fully over her head. That woman’s voice, the one with the smile lines and too-knowing eyes, drifts back in like radio static. The blanket was meant to keep intrusive thoughts out, but of course it was futile. They slipped in sideways.

“Just sit down. Lemme explain.”

But Lena, as the woman apprently was called (Naomi still wasn’t sure if it was her real name) hadn’t explained much, had she? Just a few names. Not even their real ones, just screen handles Naomi half-recognized. Naomi could still picture Lena’s eyes, not blinking, as she listed the names. Like she’d seen this before. One with a shaved head. One who’d done that viral series about unboxing grief. One who’d disappeared mid-collab and was now apparently dead.

She had introduced herself as a journalist in that dreary dive bar where the music was too loud and the beer lukewarm. No outlet, no badge, no official anything. Just the word, dropped like a cigarette onto a dry patch of grass.

"I'm looking into the pattern," she’d said.

Like it was that simple. Like there were only dots and lines and some kind of logic holding it all together. But that had been the moment the stone that had been sitting in Naomi’s stomach had started to transform from a heavy weary about her new fame, to a thousand rose thorns spinning at incredible speeds, tearing up her flesh from the inside out. That’s what guilt felt like. Not a moral compass. Not regret. Just pain. Intrusive and mechanical. Like something lodged in the machinery of her body, tearing through her intestines, scraping up her ribs, blooming like a parasite in her lungs.

And since then, she’d been locked in her apartment. Curtains drawn, blanket on, lights off. First living off leftovers, until they ran out. Not that she was hungry, the thought of food made her nauseous. All she could stomach was plain white rice with a fried egg. Milo-style. Like the ones from the restaurant downstairs. Milo was probably tired of her daily orders by now.

@hollowblush

Name: Juno (they/them)

Vibe: shaved head, thick eyeliner, always filming from below with lo-fi lighting and brutal honesty.

Content: alt-beauty, trauma humor, short-form rants tagged “#cutecutcorrosive.”

Signature series: “MirrorCheck Mondays,” weekly one-take vids filmed directly after crying, no edits.

Disappearance: stopped posting five days after duetting Naomi’s glitch. Followers thought it was part of a bit, until their collab partner posted a cryptic “they didn’t deserve this” story.

Last seen: tagging Naomi’s reel with “this broke me in a good way (i think?).”

@latejuneclub

Name: Mari (she/her)

Vibe: soft voice, boxy sweaters, glasses always slightly askew. Background: a rotating set of thrifted lamps.

Content: grief work, digital intimacy, poetic narration over found footage.

Signature series: “Things I Can’t Let Go Of,” each video featured a single object and the story behind it.

Disappearance: her final post was just an image of a closed box and the caption “This is the last one.” Account has been inactive since.

Last seen: replying to a comment under Naomi’s video: “I’ve never felt more seen. Scary, right?”

@chippedhour

Name: Sky (they/she)

Vibe: glitchcore edits, DIY theory threads, half-poetic, half-code.

Content: speculative design, anti-platform activism, surreal skits about surveillance culture.

Signature series: “Terms & Conditions (You)” — video essays masked as commercials.

Disappearance: went quiet halfway through a promised collab series with two other mid-tier creators. One tried reaching out. The other deleted everything.

Last seen: posting a heavily distorted clip with one clear sentence: “We’re not glitching. We’re being rewritten.”

Lena hadn’t stopped calling her. Three voice messages, two missed calls, and a string of unread DMs, all from an account with no profile picture and a username Naomi couldn’t tell was real or encoded. Lena didn’t sound angry. Just persistent. Calm in the way people get when they need something. She wanted to know what Naomi had seen. What she’d noticed, if anything. Why Naomi’s video was the first, and why so many that came after looked just like it, raw, distorted, too real to be performative. She kept using phrases like "emergent pattern" and "untraceable metadata clusters." Kept asking if Naomi had “noticed any changes before the glitch.” As if Naomi hadn’t been trying to forget the entire thing. But what Lena really wanted, even if she never said it out loud, was the answer to the question everyone else was too polite to ask:

Why hadn’t Naomi died, too? Naomi had asked herself the same thing. And every time she came up blank, it got louder.

Forceful, loud knocking snatches Naomi back to reality, out of the spiral she’d been sprialing in for days.

“Naomi! Jesus, open up! I know you’re in there! You haven’t posted in six days. I’m legally allowed to panic,” a familiar voice cries from the otherisde of the door, the knocking continuing unprompted.

“Don’t make me climb through the window. You know I’ll do it. I’ve seen You on NetFlixPro™, I’m qualified.”

Keith always knew how to make her chuckle even though she wanted to cry, God-damn Keith.

“I’m coming, I’m coming,” Namoi mutters, quiet but loud enough for Keith to hear.

The lock clicks. Keith practically falls through the door, arms full of something wrapped in brown paper and indignation.

“Emergency dumplings,” he announces. “And a backup emotional support croissant. You’re welcome.”

Naomi stares at him, unblinking. Then at the dumplings. Then back at him.

“You brought carbs to a digital haunting.”

Keith shrugs. “I’m not saying they’ll fix your life, but they’ve got sesame oil and emotional range. Better than half the people you follow.”

He sets the bag down, scanning her apartment like a crime scene investigator with impeccable taste. “Okay. No lights. You look like a sad Victorian child ghost. Your plant is dead. And don’t tell me you’ve been eating Milo’s fried rice this whole time?”

She sinks into the couch. “It’s the only thing that doesn’t make me want to puke.”

“Mm. Comfort carbs and algorithmic existentialism. Classic Naomi.”

Her phone buzzes. She ignores it.

Buzz.

Buzz.

Buzz.

Keith raises an eyebrow. “If that’s Lena again, I swear to God—”

Naomi doesn’t answer. She picks up the phone anyway, screen still cracked, the glass spidered like a warning. A new message from Dan.

hey—this might sound weird but... can we meet up? in person. soon?

Her stomach knots. Again.

Keith watches her face shift. “What?” She doesn’t answer right away. “He wants to meet.”

Keith blinks. “Dan-Dan? From the spreadsheet days?”

He squints at her. Takes a full, dramatic step back.

“Okay, but you look like you’ve been living in a haunted casserole dish. Are you planning to show up like this? Because babe, you smell like if depression had a temperature.”

Naomi glares, weakly. “It’s just the blanket.”

“It’s not just the blanket. It’s the blanket, the hair, the eyes that scream ‘I’ve seen the void and it ghosted me,’ and whatever that stain is on your hoodie. Is that rice or regret?”

She pulls the blanket tighter around herself. “Regret fried in sesame oil, thank you.”

Keith flops onto the couch beside her, careful not to touch anything. “You cannot go meet a possibly unhinged ex-coworker while looking like a stray cat that crawled out of a comments section. I love you, but we need dry shampoo, concealer, and possibly an exorcist.”

The Code

The fresh air feels unsurprisingly welcome, the too-bright sun no longer an enemy, while Keith and Naomi step outside her apartment. His idea. He said it would help gather her thoughts. She’d initially laughed, but Keith always, always, knew how to convince her. He loops his arm through hers like it’s nothing. Like they’ve done this every day.

“This counts as exposure therapy, right?” he says, nudging her. “Sunlight. Social interaction. The distant smell of someone’s vape pen that probably isn’t legally approved.”

They turn down a side street. Quieter. Cracked pavement, weeds growing through like nature’s middle finger.

“You remember when we used to come down here for late-night dumplings?” Keith says. “That hole-in-the-wall with the broken sign?”

She nods. “You ordered six plates. Said you were carb-loading for emotional growth.”

“I was emotionally jacked by the end of that week. Could’ve run a marathon of feelings.”

They walk a little more. A kid on a rusted scooter zips past them with a dog trailing behind, leash dragging. Somewhere, a speaker buzzes to life and coughs out a government bulletin before dying again. Naomi exhales, and it comes out like she’s been holding it for months.

“Thank you,” she says, barely above a whisper.

Keith squeezes her arm. “Don’t make it weird.”

“I’m serious.”

“I know. That’s why I’m deflecting with humor.”

They pause at an intersection where the pedestrian light flickers with no rhythm at all. Keith watches it, then shrugs and walks anyway.

“Come on,” he calls. “If we wait for permission, we’ll be here forever.”

Naomi follows. She doesn’t realize her hands are shaking until she has to wipe them on her pants. The world still looks the same. It’s just… different now. Or maybe she is. They reach a small park with three and a half benches. One’s broken. The other two are occupied by old men arguing over a holographic chessboard and someone asleep under a heat-shielding coat. Naomi sits on the broken one anyway. Keith flops down beside her, dramatically, arms spread.

“We should do this more often. Exist outdoors.”

Her phone buzzes. Again. And again. Until it’s not just buzzing. It’s vibrating like a thing possessed. Keith looks over.

“Oh no,” he mutters. “What now?”

Naomi lifts it. Cracked screen. A familiar sender yet again.

“Dan wants to meet now, at his place…”

He looks at her. “Now-now?”

She nods.

“Well,” Keith says, already brushing sesame flakes off his jacket. “Nothing suspicious about a mid-meltdown ex-coworker inviting you over right now after going silent for years. Super casual.”

Naomi exhales through her nose. It’s not a laugh, but it tries. They walk, quieter this time. The kind of quiet that carries tension behind it, like fabric pulled too tight. Past shuttered storefronts and surveillance nodes painted like birds. Past a building she recognizes only by the buzz it sends down her spine. Dan’s.

She rings his bell. No answer. Tries again.Nothing. A knock. The force of the light tap, an oxymoron almost, pushes the door slightly open.

Keith frowns. “Do we…?”

Naomi is already pushing it. Dan is there. But he’s slumped over his desk, or what’s left of it. The chair is tilted and his body is collapsed forward at an unnatural angle, shoulder jammed against the edge, neck twisted like a wire someone gave up untangling. There’s blood. Congealed, dark, pooled under the desk in a slow-drying halo. His eyes are open, one of them, at least. The other… gone. Not gouged. Not like a fight. Just, missing? Something glints just beneath the socket. Like a node. Or a lens. His fingers are stiff around a stylus.

Naomi stops breathing. Her mouth opens, but nothing comes out. Just the hum of the overhead light and the sound of Keith catching up behind her. He steps through the door and freezes.

“Jesus Christ,” he whispers.

Naomi doesn’t blink.

“Naomi,” Keith says again, voice tighter now, like he’s trying not to panic for her. “Naomi, don’t look. Please don’t—”

But it’s too late. She’s already walked to the desk. Already staring down at Dan’s body like she can reverse-engineer what happened by just looking hard enough.

“Naomi.” Keith’s closer now. Softer. “You don’t need to do this...”

She crouches. Her knees hit the floor with a dull sound. She doesn’t feel it. Her hand reaches out before she even thinks it through. Not toward Dan, but toward the screen.

# urgency_bias_score = true

# resolve_if_unconvertible

# naomi_model_v0.3

Her breath stutters in her chest like a failing motor.

Keith crouches beside her. “Naomi—”

“I made this?” she says. Keith shakes his head. “What? No. No, you didn’t—” “I wrote that line...” She taps the screen. Gently, like it might flinch. “I remember it. I remember what it meant.”

She doesn’t cry. The tears won’t come. Her body’s too busy turning to stone from the inside out. Keith’s face crumples. But she’s already gone, not physically, but back there and then. Her brain dragging her under like a riptide.

The room is too white. White walls, white desks, white noise. The kind of sterile that makes your teeth itch. Not clean, but blank. Intentionally blank. Designed to make people feel like nothing bad could ever happen here. Naomi’s desk had been the only one with color. Post-its in neon pink, a cracked mug with a cartoon whale on it, a potted plant that died within the first week. Across from her, Dan’s desk. A carefully organized chaos of screens and snack wrappers. He always swore his files were “spatially sorted.” Whatever that meant. She remembers the day. The exact day. Her manager (Derek? David? Something bland), he had leaned over her monitor holding a decaf chai and a too-bright smile.

“Can we make it more predictive?” he’d asked, as if he was requesting a playlist change.

Naomi blinked. “More than… flagging depressive spirals?”

“Yeah, like… what if we could preempt it entirely? Not just flag distress, but resolve it before it escalates.”

“Resolve it how?”

He laughed. Like it was cute that she didn’t know.

“Emotionally optimize,” he said. “Push serenity. Reduce volatility. Guide behavior toward stability markers.” He said it like he was reading from a meditation app. “Come on, Naomi. Just build the layer. You’ll figure it out.”

And she had. She’d stayed late and typed until her knuckles cracked. Somewhere around 2:14AM, she’d written the line:

if not convertible_emotion:

resolve_state()

She even added a comment:

# emotional urgency as proxy for virality? fine. fine.

It hadn’t felt evil. It had felt... efficient? Until now. Standing over Dan’s body, she sees it, not just what she wrote, but what it became. Mirra hadn’t just bought the wellness company she had worked at in college. They bought the code. Rebranded the app. Integrated it into the feedback loop that powered their empire — a platform where self-expression was a currency and emotional transparency was monetized in real-time. Where rawness wasn’t just rewarded, it was required.

And the algorithm?

It didn’t see sadness.

It saw inefficiency.

It didn’t see people.

It saw incomplete conversions.

And it optimized…