Fred was home, staring out the window. Just one lamp on, our reflections in the glass. I could tell something was up. At first I thought he was angry I’d been out with an ex for so long, but he’d forgotten that entirely.
“I was planning to give you this in a few days but…” He handed me a stack of papers with a binder clip. “It’s a divorce agreement. So we can get married.”
“What’s wrong?” I asked him. “You look freaked. Marrying me can’t be that bad.”
“No, it’s… This awful, crazy thing happened on the street outside the restaurant.”
A few weeks later I’d watch the video online. While Peter, Nate, and Fred were eating dinner in Tribeca, a couple of kids in their twenties had walked up to the window. A boy with long black hair and a patchy, peach-fuzzy beard; a Black girl wearing, for some reason, a graduation gown. The boy held a sign that read THIS IS DONE OUT OF LOVE. And then they lit themselves on fire. The video was chaotic, the diners stumbling back from their tables as the two screaming kids banged against the glass, maybe trying to crash through it, but instead falling to the ground, writhing and shrieking in pain. A few of the patrons, including Peter, ran outside to try to beat out the flames with their jackets. The girl survived, covered in third-degree burns. The boy did not.
That night I held Fred and told him how sorry I was, how horrible that sounded.
“I think I’m in shock.” He’d never appeared younger to me. I could see what he’d looked like as an uncertain boy, maybe gazing at a tree he was afraid to climb. “It was just… awful. I can’t stop seeing it.” I thought of finding my mother. I knew that when you saw a person do violence to themselves, it never really left you.
We went to bed, Fred taking a sleeping pill to knock him into dreamlessness. I couldn’t sleep, though, and got up to try several different passwords for the section of the report called “The New Gray Edge.” After having no success, I went to Fred’s trading station and logged in to the three-monitor setup. From there I got into his password manager and began trying those combinations. Finally, one of them worked, and I sat back in his chair, reading. When I was done, I made some coffee, ate breakfast, and dug through the refrigerator for bread, meat, and fixings. I packed ten sandwiches, a few bananas, and protein bars into my biggest shoulder bag. Then I took the elevator down to the street and walked until I reached the gas station. There were still five teenagers camped out with their signs, looking hungry, tired, and cold under the first bathwater light of dawn.
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Whose Worlde Are We Living In? A Dark VR Legacy Arrives in Our Reality
Content by Stephanie Hardwick
June 25, 2035
[Warning: This news xpere is intended to be consumed with 3D ASMR Fractal Visuals and a soothing binaural soundscape. Without these elements, some users may find this content disturbing.]
When virtual reality arrived as a staple in people’s homes in the years following the Covid-19 pandemic, its champions made utopian predictions of its power to connect and create while detractors warned it would rot children’s brains. Few could foresee the far stranger consequences that have actually come to pass. Virtual reality has allowed people to, once and for all, curate their own realities. Bit by bit, day by day, our old world is having to fend off intrusion by these upstart regimes.
In a recent grisly example, on April 28 thirty-seven individuals infiltrated elite spaces of politics and luxury, from a birthday party in Montecito, California, to the Parliament House in Sydney, to outside high-end New York City restaurants. The CEO of Bank of America, a meeting of Australia’s conservatives, and numerous guests of Manhattan’s Eleven Madison Park, watched as radical activists doused themselves in gasoline and set themselves ablaze. The “QMM light show,” as it’s known, began in VR. On the last day of the siege of Washington, an unemployed thirty-four-year-old college dropout named Quinton Marcus-McCall added to the carnage by taking to the floor of the House of Representatives and self-immolating. Within months his disturbing end had become a potent VR meme. Hacked into countless games and xperes by activists with a point to make and trolls simply looking to get a rise, the “QMM light show” interrupted the Oscar telecast, American Idol, and CBS’s VR reboot of The Big Bang Theory. Some of the largest audiences in the history of the medium have now been subjected to this ghastly vision.
In VR, it is always easy to wingnut cherry-pick. There is the grotesque meme of the “Ham Sammy Brigade”—xperes of right-wingers happily wolfing down ham sandwiches to taunt the planet’s starving, which has led to Far Right politicians munching on pork subs during rallies across disparate countries. Two million daily visitors to the worlde of “Dan Doodoo,” a soft-spoken, bespectacled conspiracy theorist who claims to communicate with dead celebrities, believe the “real world” is in fact Doodoo’s simulation, which we are all living in. His adherents inundate those who doubt Doodoo’s divinity with very real death threats.
Because this warp-speed revolution has so fractured audiences, advertisers have no choice but to pursue eyeballs wherever they congregate. Dan Doodoo is the quintessential Slapdish millionaire, and there are untold numbers of wannabe gurus, gamers, and small-fry gods trying to copy his success. While Marvel, Disney, DC Comics, Game of Thrones, and other iconic IP still rule the day, it does not make up the plurality of interactions with VR xperes or worldes. People don’t much care for corporate curation anymore. They don’t want to see Tom Hanks storm the beach at Normandy in the Saving Private Ryan xpere, they want Tom Hanks to hold them while they cry and call him their father. They don’t want to watch Luke Skywalker save Leia from Jabba the Hut. They want to watch Jabba penetrate Leia with a baseball bat–sized slug phallus. The age of DIY social and cultural experience, never censored, questioned, or combated with facts, has taken over.
“The QMM light show” takes this up a disturbing new notch. Most of the thirty-seven people involved in the globally coordinated action died in agony. A few survived, though recovery will be a long, difficult road.
Marcus-McCall grew up in a lower-middle-income neighborhood in Detroit, his mother a doctor and his father a professor of African American Studies at Wayne State University. The couple separated when Quinton was seven, and his mother passed away during the pandemic, while his father died from a heart attack in 2023. Marcus-McCall also had a sister, who was killed by her boyfriend in 2018.
After moving to Los Angeles to try his hand at a career in stand-up comedy, Marcus-McCall returned to Detroit, where he enrolled in Wayne State’s nursing program, only to drop out in 2026. This was also the year he joined A Fierce Blue Fire’s Detroit Outpost, where he worked in community outreach. Friends describe him as quiet and kind but with a quick wit and occasionally provocative sense of humor. A childhood friend, Tyrone Cardona, told Slate that Marcus-McCall became enamored of A Fierce Blue Fire’s mission.