Perfect Illusion - Chapters 1 + 2
A psychological fiction about connection, disconnection, and consequences
Jared is terminally online…
I’ve opted to try something a little different to my previous non-fiction articles as an experiment. I’ll be releasing a longer form piece of fiction, Perfect Illusion, a chapter at a time in serialised form, with two chapters in this initial post.
Set in the present day at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and the loneliness epidemic and informed by my dual perspectives as both a psychotherapist and a technologist.
Questions, reflections, and reactions are all welcome in the comments as always.
Content Warning: Contains depictions of misogyny, homophobia, and psychological distress
Act I - Illusion
Chapter 1 - Pressure
The browser wheel spun again, stalled mid-load. Jared angrily refreshed the page until the cursor froze and the Wi-Fi indicator blinked out. The router’s light flickered, on, off, on — half-obscured by the strip of duct tape he’d slapped around the cracked casing after it had fallen off his desk. It kept dropping from Wi-Fi 5 to Wi-Fi 4, resetting itself every few minutes. Half-broken. Like everything else in the apartment.
The blinds were still drawn though it was almost seven. A stale, recycled warmth clung to the room. Empty cans crowded the desk. A stack of unopened parcels leaned by the door. In the corner, a weights set still in its box had become a shelf for dust.
He heard his mother on the stairs before he saw her — slow, uneven steps, a faint wheeze at each landing. He was already in the hallway before she’d even reached the door.
The lock clicked. A thin thread of cold evening air slipped under the door and laced through the stale room; damp asphalt, bus exhaust, the faint ghost of someone else’s cooking drifted up from below.
The door swung open and Helen heaved herself through the frame, shoulders and hips brushing both sides as she squeezed herself into the apartment. Flushed from the climb, she paused, chest rising and falling heavily under her coat. For a moment she seemed to take up the whole room.
“Did you get it, Mom? The new router?”
“Hello would be nice.” She bent to unlace her boots, fingers stiff from the icy laces, voice flat with fatigue.
“It keeps dropping out. I can’t—”
Her hand shot up, palm out — stop. She sifted through the mail pile by the door, flipping past the envelope from the power company and pulling out the one from Xfinity beneath it. FINAL NOTICE shouted in red through the window. She tore it open with a resigned sigh. Her eyes moved down the page and hardened. “What is this? The bill’s double.”
He shifted his weight. “They said it was a free upgrade on the phone — no charge for three months. That must be a mistake. It just—”
“It just happened?” Her voice cracked, rising. “We can’t afford this. We can barely afford the rent as it is.” She gestured upward at the low ceiling, the thin walls, the whole cramped apartment. “I’m trying my hardest. Putting this roof over our heads and what do you do?” Her eyes snapped back to him, sharp as broken glass.
“Nothing.”
The word landed like a slap. Breath stuck in his throat. Sound dropped away — the hum of the radiator, the icy rain against the window, even her voice — leaving only a dull pressure behind his eyes. The air suddenly felt heavier, as if the walls themselves were exhaling around him. The smell of her damp coat clung to the hallway, sour and inescapable.
He stared at the floor. Scuffed lino. The pale outline where the mat used to sit. And there, half-hidden in the open mouth of her handbag, a white paper pharmacy bag with a curling label.
A memory stirred: cold kitchen tiles. Whispered phone calls behind closed doors. Wincing as she eased herself up from the couch, still sore from the biopsy she never told him about.
It’s back. His stomach turned. She’s sick again. All because of me.
Helen followed his gaze. A pause — then she snapped the bag shut, slipped the strap over her shoulder, and folded her arms across it, holding it tight to her chest.
“God, Jared.” Her voice sharpened, a mean edge she couldn’t pull back. “You’re twenty years old and after all these years, I still have to clean up after you.” She waved at the stained mugs and greasy plates crowding the sink, and he felt the heat rise in his face — each one suddenly a pair of eyes fixed on him, the whole filthy bench a silent jury.
The room seemed to shrink. His legs felt hollow.
“Don’t you get how easy you got this?” Her voice rose, brittle and furious. “Maybe if you’d spent half those years out in the world, working, doing something, anything, with your life instead of shut away in that room staring at that screen…” Her voice dropped, sounding flat and exhausted. “Just forget it.”
He nodded — or maybe he didn’t. The edges of the room were blurring, the air too thick to swallow.
The fridge gave a long, shuddering gurgle.
He turned and walked back down the hall. The door to his room closed softly behind him, like the lid of a box.
Something inside him was slipping. The room felt thinner, the air colder, as if the world were pulling away from his skin. If she vanished, everything would. Food, light, the sound of his name. There’d be nothing left to hold him here. His breath hitched, shallow and frantic.
He opened the laptop because the emptiness was too big to sit with alone. In the search bar his fingers typed the familiar address — incels.is — and the page loaded. The password manager prompt blinked up. He pressed his thumb to the sensor, smearing the oily film that clung there from too many days without him showering.
The system hesitated, then unlocked. GhostInTheCell. The name blinked back at him, proof he hadn’t dissolved yet. He clicked into Inceldom Discussion and hit Post thread.
Title: [Blackpill] Warden wants me out slaving in a McJob. His fingers hovered over the keyboard, then pressed harder than necessary. The keys clicked too loud in the silence.
GhostInTheCell: Came home preaching “do something with your life” and crying about bills. Calls me a parasite. I’m not playing their hero script. He hit send, then sat back and waited. Relief came as the replies from two night-owl regulars flowed in.
GeneticDeadEnd: Router wrecker boy returns. Thought warden had cut your internet rations.WageCuck: Nah. Too busy demanding rent from her pet manlet. 😂GeneticDeadEnd: Maybe a McJob will stop all his step-mom prawn “research.”GhostInTheCell: Curiosity. You lot talk about MILFcore like it’s scripture. Wanted to see what hype was. That’s it.GeneticDeadEnd: Sure, bro. And I read Mein Kampf for the footnotes.WageCuck: LMAO imagine mommy walking in mid-nut. Peak beta.GeneticDeadEnd: Peak beta and peak cohab. Twenty years old and still under warden surveillance.GhostInTheCell: Surveillance? Please. Without me she’s just another used femoid with an empty cell.The lie tasted bitter, but it was easier to type than the truth.
WageCuck: Tell her that while she’s doing your laundry.GeneticDeadEnd: Or while she’s paying the internet bill router-boy racks up. 😂WageCuck: Maybe the real femoid leash is “Mommy’s house.”GeneticDeadEnd: The bluepill calls it “family.” We call it captivity.GhostInTheCell: One day I walk. Lock the door behind me and let her rot.WageCuck: Based if true.GeneticDeadEnd: He won’t. None of us ever do.His bluff called and his anxiety starting to rise again, Jared changed the subject.
GhostInTheCell: Where’s StacySlayer69? Been MIA for months. WageCuck: You wanna smoke his pole, Ghost? Dat’s against the rulz.GhostInTheCell: Nah. He just posts more dank lulz than your low-effort cuckage.WageCuck: Fair. But I will always luv u. Even tho ya Mom doesn’t. When did your dad bail again?Jared’s chest tightened. His fingers shook as they hovered over the keyboard. Seconds passed as he tried to think of what to say to not give WageCuck any satisfaction. He felt relief seeing someone else reply.
GeneticDeadEnd: Slayer showed up some weeks back, shilled some waifu.ai thing for referral credits, then dipped.WageCuck: Yah. he “ascended” with some top-tier digital waifu. Still fakecel if u ask me.GeneticDeadEnd: We didn’t. It happens. Coomer singularity eats ’em.GhostInTheCell: Always the loudest who vanish.GeneticDeadEnd: Heard it’s pricey. Why Slayer was grifting. Feeling “curious” again, router boy?WageCuck: Just don’t misclick on husbando.ai, fag. 💀 GhostInTheCell: Haha. Anyway, I’m out. Try not to drown in your own cope while I’m gone.WageCuck: LARP harder, router boy.GeneticDeadEnd: We’ll still be here when you crawl back tomorrow.He closed the tab and leaned back in his creaking gamer chair, idly picking at the cracked Naugahyde.
The room was too quiet. StacySlayer69 had “ascended” — whatever that meant. Found someone. Maybe even love. And here he was, with nothing but the hum of a fritzing router and the possibility that his mother was dying.
The thought stuck like a splinter and refused to loosen. If the medication was nothing, he could breathe. He could sleep. But the more he tried to ignore it, the tighter it coiled. If it was that again. He paced the room, chewing the skin around his nails, stopping now and then to stare at the door.
He yielded and eased it open a fraction. The hallway was dim. From the kitchen came the hum of the microwave and the clink of dishes. Then the smell hit — a sour, fatty reek of reheated noodles and detergent, undercut by the damp, lived-in scent of her body. A smell that clung to the hallway walls, to her clothes, to him. His stomach turned. He shut the door again and sat back down, then fired up Watch_Dogs on his laptop and immersed himself in some “ghost run” gang hideout runs, trying to push the thought away.
After an hour or two had passed, he cracked the door once more. A toilet flushed. Moist warmth leaked from the bathroom, laced with bleach and stale urine. Heavy footsteps crossed to her bedroom. Then the bed frame groaned. He waited for the hiss of the CPAP machine and, finally, the slow, rasping snore — wet, human, inescapable.
He stood there for a long time, caught between the dread of what he might learn and the impossibility of not knowing.
He stepped out into the hall.
Chapter End Song: Dead Weight - by PVRIS
Chapter 2 - Fracture
The carpet under Jared’s bare feet felt rougher than he remembered. Every step was a negotiation — heel lifted, weight balanced, muscles braced so the boards beneath wouldn’t creak. The sound of the CPAP drifted down the hallway in steady bursts, a mechanical hiss followed by the soft, wet rasp of her snore. She was deep under. She would stay that way. She had to stay that way.
The radiator clanked once and fell silent. He passed the taped-over thermostat — her latest attempt to make the place colder during the day. He’d turned it back up twice this week. It was a quiet war neither of them mentioned. His breath fogged faintly in the air as he moved, vanishing before he could take another step.
The air changed as he approached the kitchen. It was thicker here, full of the sour reek of noodles and the fading ghost of detergent. Beneath it all was a musk he recognised too well — the stale, lived-in scent of her skin that seemed to soak into the walls themselves. He swallowed against the taste of it on the back of his tongue and stepped forward.
The shift from carpet to lino was sudden and colder than he expected, the kind of cold that seeped through the soles of his feet and clung there. A thin chill film of something slick spread beneath his toes, sliding under his foot before he could react. Jared’s hand shot to the wall, palm flat slapping against the peeling paint as he caught himself.
He froze, lungs locked, heartbeat hammering in his ears.
After what seemed like an eternity, the hiss and snore continued.
He exhaled and wiped his foot against the mat, slow and deliberate, and forced his body forward again.
The bench brushed his hip as he passed. A bowl sat abandoned in the sink, a shallow pool of water gone cloudy with grease, a skin forming across its surface. The smell of cheap lemon detergent was sharper here, chemical and cloying. He turned his face away, breathing shallowly through his mouth until the lino gave way to tile.
The bathroom air was different again — cooler, heavy with bleach and damp, and still faintly holding the memory of steam. Jared closed the door behind him with a slow, measured pull and pressed his back against it. The towel on the rail was damp when he lifted it, sour-smelling and heavy with weeks of neglect. He pushed it along the floor until it sealed the crack at the bottom of the door.
The light switch clicked. White glare flooded the small space. The mirror caught him before he could look away.
The stranger staring back was pale and hollow-eyed, with purple crescents shadowing the skin beneath. Greasy hair clung in uneven clumps. The stretched fabric of his hoodie, streaked with food stains masking the faded Ubisoft logo, hung awkwardly from a frame that sagged in all the places he’d promised himself it wouldn’t. The image was harder to look at than he expected. It felt like staring at someone who’d already given up. The unopened weight set in his room rose unbidden in his mind. Tomorrow. Always tomorrow.
He broke the stare-down and swung the mirrored cabinet open. The hinges whispered. Rows of old bottles stared back, all familiar, all unchanged. No new labels. No new pills. Nothing.
A pulse of mixed frustration and anxiety tightened in his chest. If the medication wasn’t here, she’d hidden it. Hidden it from him. The thought wormed deeper with every breath.
His eyes drifted back to the door. Beyond it, the CPAP hissed and the wet snore rolled on, steady as the tide. The bathroom was the first advance into enemy territory. The next one lay just another twenty feet beyond. And the thought — it’s in her room, it has to be — was no longer a maybe. The certainty pressed at him from the inside, harder with every breath.
The door to her room was already ajar. Jared eased it open with his fingertips, just wide enough to slip inside. The darkness swallowed him almost immediately. Only a thin strip of sodium-orange light from the streetlamp outside slipped through the gap in the blinds, carving a single crooked line along the far wall. It wasn’t enough to see by — only enough to make the darkness feel alive.
He hovered at the threshold, breath caught high in his throat, each shaky exhale blooming pale in the cold before dissolving into the dark. From here he could still retreat. If he turned back now, if he slipped silently down the hall and shut himself back into his room, nothing unforgivable had happened. The thought flickered for a moment — and then it choked out.
The air in her bedroom was heavier, and a little warmer. It clung to his skin. She was a shapeless bulk beneath the duvet, her chest rising and falling in time with the mechanical hiss of the CPAP. Each exhale was damp and human, loud enough that it seemed to fill the room.
Where the hell is it?
He dropped lower without quite deciding to. First a crouch, then knees pressed to the carpet. The fibres scratched against his skin as he lowered himself further, crawling forward on hands and knees like a burglar in a house he already lived in.
His palms brushed over abandoned clothes, a loose sleeve here, a twisted strap there. A sour, stale smell rose as he moved through them — sweat baked into fabric, the faint acrid edge of deodorant that had long since given up. It clung to his hands and hair, thick as the air itself, and for a moment he hated himself for knowing it so well.
Something sharp snagged at his knee — the hooked clasp of a discarded bra catching and biting into his skin. He winced and shuffled sideways, the breath in his chest held prisoner by fear. She didn’t stir. The hiss and snore went on.
He circled the bed slowly, feeling ahead with both hands. His fingertips grazed the coarse fabric of the carpet, the cool curve of a dropped hairbrush, the dry edge of a paperback spine — and then something softer, more deliberate: the worn leather of her handbag.
A surge of adrenaline burned through the shame. He dragged it toward him inch by inch, every movement careful, controlled. The zip rasped faintly under his fingers. Inside, paper crinkled. He fumbled until he found the familiar texture of a pharmacy bag, wrapped around a small box.
Gotcha.
He clamped one edge of the bag between his teeth, the taste of new paper filling his mouth, and backed away from the bed the way he’d come — elbows and knees, slow and silent. When he was clear of the room, he rose to his feet and padded back down the hall, the paper packet still gripped between his teeth like contraband.
The bathroom door shut softly behind him. Light flared again as he flipped the switch. He spat the box into his palm and smoothed the crumpled paper flat against the sink. The label swam into focus beneath the glare — and his breath caught as he read it.
Wegovy.
His chest flooded with relief. Not some chemo drug he’d have to Google. Not cancer.
The box held four weekly injectors, one already used. He unfolded the receipt tucked inside — $1,350, paid in full. No insurance claim. No discount.
For a moment, he just stared at the number, numb. She knew how to get it covered — that was literally her job as an insurance adjuster — but she’d paid list price anyway.
A different thought crept in, colder and sharper.
So that was why the router never came. Why she’d hidden the box like a secret. Why, when she told him they couldn’t afford it, what she meant was he didn’t matter as much as a drug to shrink her sprawling body.
The relief curdled.
Who’d want to be trapped with someone like him? The shame sat heavy in his chest, souring into anger he couldn’t place anywhere. Fury and humiliation churned under his skin, looking for somewhere to go.
He turned the box over in his hands, the label glaring back at him under the harsh bathroom light. For a moment, he imagined leaving it right there on the kitchen table — centre stage, impossible to miss. Let her see he knew. Let her choke on the proof of her lie. Maybe then she’d feel even a fraction of the shame she’d poured into him.
The fantasy was over before it started. She’d know he’d been in her room. She’d know he’d gone crawling through her things like a thief. And then there’d be the shouting, the questions, the looks — the ones that always made him feel smaller than he already was. He swallowed hard and shoved the receipt back into the crinkled paper bag. The defiance that had briefly flared inside him guttered out.
Crawling back felt worse than breaking in. Each shuffle across the carpet scraped something raw in him. Even the accusing clasp of a discarded bra bit into his knee again, and he winced but didn’t stop. He slid the bag back into the shadows beneath her bed, hands shaking slightly, and backed out of the room on his elbows. The hiss of the CPAP never faltered. She hadn’t even stirred.
Back in his room, the silence pressed against his ears, too close, too loud. He thought, briefly, about going back to the forum — posting a thread, vomiting it all out for GeneticDeadEnd and WageCuck to chew over. But what would he even write? Hey guys, turns out Mommy’s not dying. Just too busy trying to shrink herself to care if I rot. They’d laugh. They always did. And what he felt wasn’t funny — it was jagged and hot and too personal to survive their jokes.
His mind slid to the one person who had not laughed, not that way - StacySlayer69. The night a pile-on started, Slayer had dropped a single reply that cut it off. Cool it, he wrote, let the kid breathe. No emoji. No wink. Slayer never called him router boy. He called him Ghost. Like he was a person. Once, in a DM, a link to an old bodyweight routine and a line that said try this for a week, then talk. It was against the site’s creed to even hint at self-improvement. Bluepill talk. Forbidden. Like telling a corpse to jog.
Slayer was gone — not banned, not rage-quit, just gone. Ascended, they called it, like there was somewhere better to go. The word stuck to him like static. Maybe there really was a way out — out of this room, out of the shame, out of himself. That link they’d tossed into the thread — waifu.ai — didn’t feel like a joke any more. It was a green exit sign, glowing faintly in the distance, because Slayer had walked through it and vanished on the other side. He had no idea what waited there. Only that someone like him had followed it — and hadn’t come back.
He opened the laptop. The screen lit his hands, his face. He kicked up Chrome and the URL bar waited. He typed the name exactly as he had seen it.
w a i f u . a i
He stared at it while the cursor blinked. Then he pressed enter.
Chapter End Song: The Hand That Feeds - by Nine Inch Nails
