🌃 SIM-GENETICS

Danny Pereira had forty thousand viewers and not a single face he could've named. Crime Danny went where you weren't supposed to go and came back with the exclusive. Tonight he was going into the most closed-off organization in the city. "I'll be back," he promised in the first minute.
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Inside, it was unsettlingly calm. No basements and chains — just clean light and quiet people. Nobody grabbed him. "We were expecting you. You can leave the camera on — we welcome guests."
He came to expose them, and there was nothing to hide. The chat was typing run. Danny was still cracking jokes, but they were landing worse and worse. He was shown to a door with a nameplate: Pyotr Dovlatov. Invited in, of his own free will.
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The professor stood with his back to the city. He didn't preach, didn't try to convince. He spoke quietly, like he'd known for a long time that Danny would come. Not "the world isn't real." He said Danny had been living in numbers for years now — in viewers he didn't know, in likes that filled the silences. That a man who's spent ten years living for a counter no longer tells reality apart from what films well.
"Look at this city. Remember it the way it is — you're about to stop seeing it that way."
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What happened next, the camera didn't show. The signal warped, the image broke apart into bands. Forty-one thousand people watched a streamer dissolve into static — and couldn't tell whether it was scripted or not. Then the stream ended, like the connection had simply dropped.
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A week later, he went live one last time. The camera didn't shake. Danny looked healthy and calm.
"I'm fine. Happy. I see now. Come to Sim-Genetics — I'll help you see too. To everyone else — goodbye."
The man who'd spent ten years living to film turned the camera off himself. His subscribers decided he'd lost his mind. He would have put it differently — that for the first time in ten years, he was off the air.