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Fading Signal
An unreleased short story from the book:
Disconnected: The Dark Effects of a Screen-Fueled Brain Rot Generation
Jenna’s life had always revolved around connection. She had grown up with the internet, her first real taste of it in her early teens—an endless stream of social media, messaging apps, and online communities where she could be whoever she wanted to be. The world felt boundless in a way she couldn’t quite explain. She could post a picture, update her status, and suddenly she was in touch with hundreds of people, from her closest friends to strangers across the globe. Every interaction felt like a thread, weaving her into a digital tapestry, a network that pulsed with endless activity.
But the threads began to unravel.
It started small, as most things do. A few notifications that were quieter than usual. A couple of comments that seemed… distant. Jenna would check her phone incessantly, scrolling through her feeds, refreshing the pages, hoping for a new like, a new message, a new post to give her that satisfying, fleeting rush. She became obsessed with every update—every single one felt like a heartbeat, her pulse syncing with the rhythm of the digital world. If she didn’t check her phone within a minute of a new notification, her stomach would drop, and her mind would race. She needed to stay plugged in, to stay visible. She couldn’t bear the thought of being unseen.
Days began to blur into nights. She’d wake up with her phone in her hand, the screen still glowing faintly in the darkness. The time—what time was it? The outside world was irrelevant. Jenna’s world was contained within the cold, artificial glow of her screen, and the validation it gave her was all she needed to function. At first, she could feel the rush when her posts went viral, when a video of her dancing or ranting about the latest trend received hundreds of thousands of views. But then it became a game, a race she couldn’t win.
No matter how much she scrolled, no matter how much she posted, it was never enough.
At first, Jenna thought it was just a phase. That she was going through a rough patch. But the more she buried herself in the virtual world, the less she understood the real one. Her parents stopped trying to talk to her. They used to beg her to put her phone down for just a few minutes, to come to the dinner table without distractions. But Jenna couldn’t do it. It felt like she was missing out on something huge—if she wasn’t online, she wasn’t existing. The world was moving, and she was terrified of being left behind.
Then came the silence.
It wasn’t immediate. It crept up on her slowly, the way a storm gathers on the horizon, building its dark clouds before it unleashes. One by one, Jenna’s friends began to stop responding. Texts were left on read. Social media posts went unliked, ignored. At first, she assumed it was just a fluke—people were busy, or the algorithm was glitching. But the silence persisted.
Jenna’s mind raced, and the isolation began to twist into something darker. It was as if the world itself was slipping away from her grasp. She would stare at her phone for hours, but the posts she once cherished seemed hollow. The validation didn’t come anymore. The likes were sparse. Her followers, once a loyal army, were now invisible, faceless. She felt like she was screaming into an empty void, and no one was there to hear her.
Her thoughts began to splinter. She couldn’t focus anymore. Conversations with people became jumbled. Faces became blurry, their voices muted. She didn’t know if she had forgotten how to talk or if the world had simply forgotten how to listen. Every moment in the real world felt like a distant dream, one she couldn’t quite grasp. The digital world was all she had left, and even it was crumbling.
Jenna’s body began to change too. She stopped eating meals, unable to focus long enough to prepare food, existing only on the artificial satisfaction of likes and notifications. Her skin became pale, her eyes sunken from staring at screens for hours on end. The isolation became suffocating, the silence in her room unbearable. She could still hear the buzzing of her phone in the background, but it was always quiet, always distant. She had long lost the joy of a good message. It was just noise, a blur of words that meant nothing anymore.
The longer she stayed in this self-imposed prison, the more distorted her perception of time became. Days melted into one another, and she could no longer remember the last time she had spoken to someone face-to-face. The phone had replaced all of that. The digital world was now her entire reality, and the outside world? It was fading. There were moments when she couldn’t remember if she had walked outside in weeks, or if she had even stepped out of her room at all.
One evening, after a long stretch of silence from her social media, Jenna logged on again, her hands trembling. Her feed was empty. There were no new posts. No updates. Just a blank canvas where her life once was. She felt her heart race, her breathing shallow. A pit formed in her stomach. Had they all left her?
She refreshed her feed again. And again. The same emptiness stared back at her.
In a sudden panic, Jenna scrolled back through old posts, searching for something, anything, that would remind her of who she was before everything had gone dark. She found her older photos—bright, smiling, full of life. But now they seemed alien. Who was that girl? She couldn’t remember. The girl in the photos felt like a ghost. It was as though someone had stolen her identity, replaced her with someone hollow. There was nothing left but the empty hum of the screen.
The realization hit her like a tidal wave: she had given everything to the screen. Her identity, her self-worth, her entire sense of reality—all of it had been reduced to a series of digital likes, comments, and virtual affirmations. And now, there was nothing left. The very thing that had kept her tethered to the world had taken everything from her.
In her final moments, Jenna held her phone in her trembling hands, the screen now dark and lifeless. There was no more validation. No more posts to make. No more messages to read. Just an empty abyss where her thoughts once were. Her finger hovered over the power button, ready to turn it off. But then, the emptiness in her chest grew unbearable. She couldn’t leave, not yet. She needed more. Just one more post, one more like…
But the phone screen remained black. The digital world had gone quiet. Jenna’s thoughts were lost to the static of her own mind, drifting further into the void. And as the silence suffocated her, the last trace of her connection to the world faded, leaving only the hollow echo of a life once lived.
Her final breath came in a soft, quiet exhale, the phone still clutched in her hand, the world outside slipping away into the darkness.
If you enjoyed this short story you will probably like our latest release available now:
Disconnected: The Dark Effects of a Screen-Fueled Brain Rot Generation
$3.99
In a world dominated by digital screens, a generation of teenagers has become trapped in a cycle of mindless scrolling, binge-watching, and endless notifications.
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