A Taste of Fame

    Fame.

    It was the background noise of the twentieth century. You saw it on every screen, in every house, in every store of any type. Fame was the backbone of the media machine most millennials have at least some small remembrance of. Everyone my age has at least one name that stuck out at them. Britney Spears. Lindsay Lohan. Miley Cyrus. You couldn't escape it, and it bred two types of insanity: the kind where you followed fame wherever it went, and the kind where you hated fame so much you couldn't stand to be in a place where it would follow you. Fame did not infect our world; fame was our world. 

    My identity was built around fame. Being a Dreamer in the '00s longing for a public career meant that you had two options; conform to the expectations of the world or be your own person. I chose the latter. I would achieve whatever small amount of fame I could under whatever terms I set. After all, I had plenty of role models. Going into the '10s, the internet was dominated by people convinced they could be their own person whilst upholding society. Everyone had an opinion which everyone else was supposed to share like crazy. I know the criticisms, but I still miss it dearly, I dreamed of the day I'd be confident enough to be able to sell myself on sheer vibes the way that everyone else was doing. Did the person on the other end know what they were talking about? Who cared?! All that mattered was that we were having fun. 

     Until the day we stared doing it with a straight face. 

     This realization has been slow in coming. For a while now, I've kept seeing people with huge subscriber counts online, who you would think would be famous yet never seem to leave their niche of the internet. Call me old school, but some one with hundreds of millions of followers shouldn't be obscure. I didn't notice the tabloids disappearing from the cash registers, or if I did I attributed it to the rise of eBooks and online articles. It wasn't until John Green pointed out that he'd noticed the same thing that I realized that I wasn't going crazy. Something about our world has changed in the decade that I've been online. Fame, as I understood it, is gone. 

     You would think this would be a victory, and perhaps I should be screaming with joy, but all I actually feel is a deep sense of emptiness. When I was a kid, fame was something real that you could push against to know that you were still you. Now it's just an illusion, a holdover from a time that no one misses. I don't think many young people know what fame even is, or at least what it used to be. I have nothing to rebel against any more, so I've gone from being a nobody with principles to just a nobody. I'm left as someone seeking fame for reasons that don't even make sense anymore. 

      It's no secret that our world destroyed the nine-to-five job. It's also no secret that the gig economy has ruined hobbies. What I didn't reckon with is how both of those factors, plus the saturation of social media, would make me long for a day where not being famous was a legitimate path to take. We weren't avatars, were were just people writing our own story and carving our own path. A path that, in hindsight, was built on a context we didn't see until it wasn't there any more. People sacrifice everything for a taste of fame even now, bound by the belief that someday they'll make it. But how can you be famous when nobody can see you? 

    AI has completely destroyed reality.

    At least, that's what I think happened. I'm not sure. Like everyone who isn't a reporter themselves, I have no clue what is or isn't real anymore. I could be getting AI slop pushed at me all day, and I'm not sure I'd even notice the difference so long as it aligned cleanly with what I knew back when our world was real. 

    Like everyone else in my position, I've spent the past few years looking for something to believe in. That something is Infinitelism, the viewpoint that reality is only real so long as we collectively believe that it exists and that our world is only as strong as its weakest believer. Like everyone else who believes they've found the answer to all of life's big questions, I'm amazed that no one sees what I see. It's gotten to the point that I'm shocked more people on the left don't talk about the fact that we need something to believe in. Surely the high sales of books on spirituality would be something of a clue. 

      I've decided to spread the world on Infinitelism. It's time for people to learn about why they're so vulnerable to this new thing that keeps popping up. It's nobody's fault that no one knows what's real and what isn't, and until we accept that we won't be able to move forward. I've been holding off out of fear that I'd attract a rabid cult, but with how quickly things are falling apart I'm not sure that I've got any other choice. 

The Dreamer

      I don't remember my mother. 

     It's been a long time since I left Estellia for good, even longer since I gained enough power to manipulate all of its key components individually. I live in my temple now, dedicated to the Dreamworld and the stars in the night sky, connected to every part of the world that I'm now in charge of, a world on the fringes of what other Dreamers have built. Most of my life happens in my head. Fragments of Memories that happened, or did not, depending on whether or not  I believe them to be real. I believe that my mother and father hated me for my weakness, trapping me in an endless slumber, a nightmare I could not wake up from. I believe that I encountered all four of our Gods, fought them off, won endless power over an endless world, then ascended so they could never have control over me. I believe that somewhere, somehow, Estellia is going on as it always did, without me in it, as my predecessor would have wanted it. I also believe in a mother who looked after me and loved me as a child, a father who taught me about the stars and their meanings, a village who loved the lost child in their midst. I truly do not remember the truth. Too much of my life has been spent wandering the stars in my Dreams. 

    The only thing that I do remember is Estellia's Gods, though I don't remember how I first learned about them. Maybe, as a little girl, my mother told me in a story that, "There are four races of Nightmare: Shadow, Fairy, Monster, and Sorcerer. Each representing a fear of the Dreamer. Shadows represent those who live in the darkness and operate in the unseen and unknown. They hold all of the positions that grant one power automatically. Fairies represent unrestrained fun, the kind that pulls you in and will not let you go. It is said that they harm no one, but time after time humans have gone into their carnival and found they could not leave no matter how badly they wanted to. Monsters represent the things we must keep hidden, such as weakness and cruelty. Despite their name, they are not truly evil, merely incredibly dangerous. Sorcerers represent unchangeable truths, a world that cannot be believed in because it is always there, so it must instead be dealt with, though I'm told that they decide what can and can't be changed themselves. Do not hope to become one and escape the pain they inflict on us. Hope instead that you will one day be strong enough to fight back. But you cannot fight all of them, and there are four Nightmare's that you could never hope to defeat. They are our gods. They are worshiped, but also feared, and their power flows through their avatars into each of their domains. Do not take them lightly. Or else they will kill you where you stand."

      Perhaps that was what happened. I don't know. I do remember defeating them, as all Dreamers must in order to ascend. I do remember the names of their avatars; James, Emily, Alex, Nina. I fought all of them. Alex was the strongest, James the weakest, and I don't remember much other than them coming together to try and force me back into an endless slumber, but whether that was because they saw me as a human or a Dreamer is beyond my recollection.