SEEN

That’s enough. I’m finished. This is officially the final livestream I’m ever recording.

It’s 2:00 AM, and I’ve been stuck in this cycle for longer than I’d like to admit. If this broadcast fails like all the others, I’m heading out to find a real job, because a couple of bot comments on my last upload aren’t exactly paying the bills.

My name is Ray. I’m twenty-five, and I’ve spent a lifetime watching my favorite YouTubers amass fame and fortune while I sat at my desk, half-heartedly pretending to study. That lack of academic focus earned me the unofficial title of the least intelligent student in Bend, Oregon. It’s a place famous for its mountains, craft breweries, and outdoor living, essentially the perfect, quiet retirement destination for a sixty-five-year-old couple, provided they enjoy living in the most monotonous city imaginable.

My dad was the only person who truly got me. He used to joke, “Ray, if YouTube were a school subject, you’d be at the top of the class.”

“No,” I’d tell him. “I’d be the teacher.”

He even bought me my first real camera, a massive upgrade from the built-in laptop webcam that always made me look like a coma patient in the middle of a zombie apocalypse.

He used to be my first viewer—my only viewer. He’d watch every video, comment on them, even share them with his coworkers. One time, one of my videos got two views, and I was genuinely happy, thinking maybe—finally—someone besides my dad actually cared enough to watch. Turns out, it was just him. He’d learned how to make a second account so he could leave fake comments pretending to be someone else.

I was mad at him for that. Or at least that’s what I told myself. Truth is, I was mad at myself for being such a failure online.

So when he bought me that camera which, by the way, cost him his entire monthly salary I thought, this is it. A real setup. A decent camera. A mic I may or may not have “borrowed” from my school’s technology department.

That night, I stayed awake waiting to do my first livestream. A horror movie reaction stream. The funny part? I’d already seen the movie. I just planned to act like it was my first time because, I should probably mention, I’m absolutely chicken-hearted. That’s exactly why I picked a movie where I already knew every jumpscare timestamp. Midnight felt like the perfect time too dark enough to make the fear look real.

I waited for my dad to sleep before starting the stream. Despite having zero viewers, I performed for an imaginary audience of five hundred. Even knowing every jump-scare, I felt a mix of genuine fear and crushing disappointment. The realization hit me: new gear couldn’t fix the fact that I was the problem. I concluded that no matter how expensive my camera was, people simply didn’t want to see my face and I couldn’t blame them, considering how much I hated my own reflection.

Lost in thought, I finally noticed a viewer after two hours. Desperate to keep them, I forced reactions and cringey jokes, forgetting I was watching a horror movie. A jump-scare made me scream so loudly it woke my dad. Isolated by my headset, I didn’t hear his knocking until he burst in like a SWAT team. Startled, I turned toward him and tripped over the cable attached to the new camera he had bought me.

The camera was damaged and my dad knew it would be impossible to repair it, he didn’t scream or yell at me, he was just disappointed…and somehow, that hit me harder. He returned to his room without saying a single word, Staring down at my camera, I saw it lying there shattered and ruined, a perfect reflection of my own life.

What made that silence worse was that it wasn’t the first time I had watched disappointment replace anger in my father’s eyes. He had seen that look before years earlier, back when I was still in school and trying very hard to stay invisible. I was never the problem child, never the kid teachers warned others about. I stayed quiet, kept my head down, and let life happen around me. Most people barely noticed I existed. But silence has limits, and sometimes all it takes is one sentence, said by the wrong person, on the wrong day, to turn someone forgettable into someone everyone remembers.

During a PE handball game, I was mocked after missing a shot as goalkeeper. One classmate crossed the line by insulting me and bringing up my mother abandoning me, saying even she had left because I was such a loser. Instead of arguing or crying, I picked up a large rock near the stadium and threw it straight at his head.

He turned around bleeding, shocked but silent, and the teacher saw everything immediately. I was sent out of class and told to bring my father because I would face a disciplinary council. What hurt most wasn’t the punishment, but hearing my classmates whisper that I was crazy and abnormal.

When I told my father the truth, he first laughed, but everything changed when we learned the boy had been hospitalized with a suspected concussion. At the hospital, watching my father humble himself and beg the other family not to press charges broke me. They eventually agreed not to sue, and after that, no one ever dared to bully me again mostly because they believed I was insane.

After a decade of failed attempts at gaming, news, and even a disastrous stint in cooking, I’ve spent the last three years carving out a niche in horror movie reactions. It isn’t my looks or humor that attracts my 128 subscribers; it’s the spectacle of my genuine vulnerability and fear as I hide behind my chair. The irony is that the single viewer who joined my livestream the night my father nearly shot me with his rifle turned out to be an automated bot. A lifeless line of code has been my only consistent audience for ten years.

But a lot can disappear in ten years.

My mother was already a ghost, someone I never met, and a topic I still refuse to touch. But three years ago, my dad joined her. He took his own life.

If you’re asking why he did it, don’t. I have absolutely no idea. I never got a reason.

So here I am. I am twenty-five years old. No parents, no family, and an academic future that belongs in a shredder. My entire existence has shrunk down to a dark room, a social void, and a YouTube channel that barely earns enough to cover the rent.

Bzzzt.

The harsh vibration of my phone on the desk cuts through the silence. I don’t even have to look at the screen to know who it is. There is exactly one person left on earth who still texts me at 2:00 AM.

I drag my eyes over to the Discord window on my second monitor.

Maya [02:01 AM]: Are you going live, or are you just sitting there staring at your dropping analytics again? The raw file for yesterday’s video is corrupted. Did you mess with the render settings?

Maya is my remote editor. She lives somewhere in Seattle, exists entirely as text bubbles on my screen, and has absolutely zero tolerance for my self-pity. She’s also the only reason this channel still functions.

Ray [02:02 AM]: I didn’t touch the settings. Just clean it up. I’m going live right now. This is the last one, Maya. I swear.

Maya [02:02 AM]: You say that every week. Fix your hair, you look like a corpse on the webcam preview.

I sigh, closing the chat window before I can reply. I boot up StreamYard, listening to my PC fans instantly spin up like a jet engine preparing for takeoff. I take a deep breath, slap on the fake, highly-caffeinated smile that I reserve exclusively for the internet, and hit the ‘Go Live’ button.

The red light on my camera blinks to life.

“What’s up, Graveyard Gang! Welcome back to another midnight descent into cinematic garbage. Tonight, we’re reviewing The Blood Mirror—a slasher movie so terrible I’m pretty sure the director financed it by selling his own sperme."

I dive into the review, operating on pure muscle memory. I roast the practical effects. I make fun of the agonizingly slow plot. For ten solid minutes, I am talking to an empty void. The viewer count sits at a depressing 0.

Then, the chat window twitches.

The fast-scrolling text of my own automated bot messages suddenly stops. A massive, glowing banner takes over the top of the chat box.

[@VIP_User_Null has gifted a Tier 3 ‘Observer’ Membership.]

I pause my rant, blinking at the screen. The user has no profile picture—just a blank, black circle. No one has ever bought a Tier 3 sub on this channel.

"Uh... huge thanks to VIP_User_Null for the Tier 3 sub," I say, my fake smile faltering a little. ”Welcome to the stream, man. Hope you’re ready for a terrible movie."

I wait for a response. A “hello,” an emote, anything.

A single message pops up in the chat from them. No words. No greetings. Just a timestamp.

@VIP_User_Null: [02:14 AM]

I frown, leaning closer to the monitor. I glance down at the bottom right corner of my taskbar.

The digital clock reads exactly 02:13 AM.

Behind me, something moved.