Always Seen

There was a time when Charles Danek barely existed. A fluttering presence in backlit rooms. A man in transit between chain-store coffee and an open browser tab. His job was spectral—content audits for an influencer marketing firm housed in a WeWork copycat with glass walls and quiet sobbing in the restrooms. No one, not even Charles, knew what Charles did.

He longed for more, but not in any grand way. It wasn’t ambition so much as ache. Sometimes he imagined someone calling his name in a crowd. He didn’t know what they’d want—a laugh, a moment, a connection—but he wanted to be the kind of person others noticed, even briefly.

At night, he watched the numbers—the followers, the views, the metrics. Other people, better people, thrived on being perceived. They were shirtless on balconies, crying in confessionals, making pasta in immaculate kitchens. It was not envy so much as a dull ache, like the start of a cold you couldn’t justify.

Then the ad appeared.

It was embedded in a comment on a video of a man eating drywall. Charles clicked. The page was crude HTML, a single paragraph in red text:

Tired of not being noticed? Want to be seen, touched, loved? Join the Perceptual Initiative. We make you real.

He clicked. There was no form to fill, just a progress bar that filled in reverse. Then everything went white.

Fame didn’t come as a boom but a seep.

On the first day, two women on the street recognized Charles. He walked faster. He checked his reflection in mirrored glass. Nothing unusual. On the train, a man asked if he was "that guy from the thing."

"What thing?"

The man shrugged. "Just… the thing. You know. Online."

At work, people started sitting next to him in meetings. They laughed at his asides. The office manager brought him snacks without explanation. His Slack filled with emojis.

His follower count climbed despite his lack of content. He opened an account just to see what would happen. He posted a picture of his bathroom mirror, slightly fogged.

The photo received 400,000 likes in an hour. A woman with 8 million followers reposted it, captioned: "This broke me."

The effects compounded.

People approached him on the street. Some asked for selfies. Others didn’t ask. They placed their hands on his shoulders and his arms. One woman clung to him, sobbing. “You helped me,” she said, voice trembling. “You don’t know how, but you did.”

He tried to explain he hadn’t done anything. But her face was rapturous.

Soon, he couldn’t walk more than a block without someone pressing against him. At first, they came in pairs or threes. Then groups. Then crowds. He tried taking back alleys. It didn’t help. They were there too—waiting behind dumpsters, crouched on loading docks.

Charles moved to a different part of the city. It didn’t matter.

They knew.

There was no content driving the attention. That was the strangest part. He posted nothing. No streams. No sponsored deals. He was not doing anything. He was being. And being was now performance.

A teenager screamed when she saw him buying milk. The scream was taken up by others. It became a chant. "Charles! Charles! Charles!" He dropped the milk and ran. They followed.

His building was overrun. Neighbors rented out window space to onlookers. Strangers slept in the hallway, pressed ears to the walls. Someone mailed him a box of their teeth.

He stopped answering his door.

Famous people began to notice—and to resent.

Talk show hosts joked about him nightly. "Charles Danek: the human screensaver," one quipped. An Oscar-winning actor posted: "The guy looks like beige wallpaper and somehow gets worshipped. Unreal." A pop star tweeted, "I danced my ass off on tour for a year and some dude posts a foggy mirror and he’s the messiah? LOL." Others accused him of faking vulnerability, of being a manufactured plant, of stealing attention that "real artists" deserved.

But the swarm only grew.

It wasn’t just affection.

The need escalated. People needed him in a way that bypassed speech. They trembled near him. One man bit his own hand until it bled because Charles hadn’t looked at him. Another fainted from holding his breath in Charles’s presence.

And the touching—always the touching. Hands brushed his shoulders, his hair, his lips. Fingers in his pockets. Palms pressed flat to his chest. It became hard to breathe.

He hired security. The security quit. They said there was nothing to protect against. That was the problem. No one was angry. They were adoring. They just wanted him. All the time.

He tried disguises. Wigs, masks, prosthetics. None of it worked. He took a train to upstate New York under an alias. When he arrived, there were already people on the platform with signs that read “TOUCHED BY CHARLES.”

They swarmed him.

He collapsed.

Hospitalized. Claustrophobic injuries. Cracked ribs. Skin abrasions from affection.

The doctors were reverent. Nurses lingered too long. One woman wept while applying disinfectant.

They kept him in isolation. It didn’t help. People found ways in—sneaking through vents, bribing orderlies. The hospital erected a perimeter. It was torn down overnight by well-dressed teenagers who called it “a cage for the prophet.”

A video of Charles sleeping in bed reached 40 million views. He didn’t remember filming it.

He contacted the Perceptual Initiative. The original link was gone.

He searched forums, archives, and the dark web. No record. No address. No undo button. No hint of authorship. Only whispers: theories that it was a rogue AI, a government experiment, a god.

He made a video. Just his face. Blank. Tired.

“I want out,” he said. “Please. I’m not built for this.”

It was reposted 700 million times.

A trend emerged: “I’m not built for this” became a viral audio. Teens lip-synched it in slow motion. Brands used it for coffee ads. He was memed into abstraction.

A compound was built in the desert. Some billionaires offered it as a refuge. Remote. Heavily guarded. Charles was flown there by helicopter, wrapped in blackout cloth. He was unconscious for the journey.

The facility had no windows. It was built underground. The walls were lead-lined. No phones. No signals.

He breathed. For three days, he breathed. Alone. Silent.

On the fourth day, he woke to hands on his chest.

Three staff members knelt beside his bed, eyes wide.

“We couldn’t help it,” one whispered.

The swarm had come.

They burrowed through the desert. Formed convoys. Built ladders of human flesh to scale the walls. People walked 900 miles on foot to reach the edge. A girl tore out her eyes and mailed them with a note: “So I can see you always.”

The facility was abandoned. Charles was taken by stealth jet to an Arctic research station. No signal. No roads. The air was knives.

For two days, he heard only wind.

Then, on the ice: footprints.

They came on foot. Across the tundra. Wrapped in blankets, driven by a need that transcended logic. Lips blue. Toes black. But still, they smiled. They wept. They reached for him.

Charles screamed.

No location was remote enough. No disguise effective. They didn’t track him by IP. They tracked him by being.

He tried to end it. Once. Twice. Each time, he was found, revived, wept over.

“You’re too important,” they said. “You can’t leave us.”

He stopped resisting. His body was no longer his. It was a public artifact. A sculpture of nerves and exhaustion. A living monument.

The final place was a vault under the Pacific. A concrete tomb sealed in titanium. Air recycled. No exits. Alone.

He was never seen again.

But the world kept watching.

A cult rose around the absence. They touched screens that once showed his face. They cried at shadows that resembled his posture. They gathered in parks to brush against life-sized cardboard standees.

Everyone remembered Charles Danek.

Everyone wanted to be near him.

And deep beneath the ocean, in silence, he still felt them.

Their fingertips.

Their breath.

Their need.

You want to be seen? the ad had said.

Now he was never not seen.

Now he was never alone.