A Primal Scream of Rage
(In The Digital Age)
written by: Andrew Buckner
Shapeless, faceless creatures with knives for tongues and fingers and red eyes and hearts filled with hate stalked forty-two-year-old Kai Essere every time he turned on his laptop.
Though he had never seen these entities, Kai felt them at random intervals. It was especially prevalent when he was enduring another twelve hours of physical labor at the local IfItsYourBackWe’llBreakItWarehouse in Lion’s Paw, Ohio, as he did every week from 6 a.m. until 6:30 p.m. on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, and sometimes Mondays.
He also sensed them in the isolated moments in the early morning when his forty-one-year-old wife, Samantha, had just left home for work and his daughters, twelve-year-old Bella and fourteen-year-old Lucia, had just left for school.
During these times, he would hear their derisive, falsely authoritative cackling and pick up on their always derogatory, vulgar words so clearly in his psyche that it was like these shadowy internet entities were in the same room as Kai and screaming their digital howls of rage directly in his ear in a perpetual loop.
“You don’t have power over me,” he’d then loudly repeat as he covered his ears in an attempt to silence the creatures’ incessant screams of negativity. “Your only power is a screen! You’re too cowardly to come out and say these things to me!”
When Kai uttered these words aloud for the last time, a statement that had now become so commonplace that his tongue knew the formation of the words on the roof of his mouth long before they were evoked, at 8:50 a.m. on the brutally cold, -7° morning of February 2nd, 2026, Kai swore that he saw the creatures briefly emerge.
He saw their scaly flesh glisten from behind the closed blackout curtains in his bedroom.
One of the beasts even seemed to have dead snakes coming out of his stomach. It reminded Kai of intestines spilling from a cut in the navel that were preparing to fall onto the floor in a gooey, squishy pile.
Such a sight made Kai stumble backwards and, with one fell swoop of his trembling right hand, unplug and turn off his computer.
For the briefest moment, Kai put his hand on his heart, whispered to his fervently reverberating core to calm down, and took a cleansing breath.
Then, there was more movement from the curtains.
A presence was felt in the entryway to Kai’s bedroom.
It made a shudder, one that felt like a blade that came from inside his back, slashing outwards in a frantic attempt to escape, writhe in between the man’s shoulder blades.
“In another age,” the hissing inflection behind the figure in the doorway started as darkness still clouded his features, “we would have been the entities that stalked and tormented those lucky enough to receive our ire in dark alleys and hallways. We would have had to make our presence known and not just felt. Now, you open up a laptop, a digital doorway, and you are rolling out the welcome mat to let us into your mind.”
The hair on Kai’s arms quickly shot up with these words.
Kai couldn’t get his eyes off the door.
Something indescribably human and yet purely evil was standing there. He was sure of it. He just needed to see it with his own eyes to have the proof.
He thought that if he stopped staring at the doorway or even blinked, this bloodthirsty, fanged fiend and the other creatures he felt around him would attack.
“I have to write,” Kai said as he instinctively glanced back at the computer and swore that it had moved closer to him since he last looked at it. “It’s my life’s mission. I mean, I can go back to handwriting, but even I have a hard time reading my own writing anymore and…”
“Excuses! Excuses,” another unseen creature, one that sounded like it was coming from the laptop itself, blared.
As this accusation rang out in Kai’s head, which was now crippled with a migraine so paralyzingly painful that he could see it actually combusting, blowing cerebral shrapnel throughout his bedroom, and blinding the digital monsters in a few seconds time, he peered again towards the laptop. It was now even closer.
“It moved closer to me when it talked,” Kai’s brain screamed as the pain between his eyes and in his head tightened, a feeling he often got when he was writing or scrolling social media on his laptop for too long, and became even more brutal. “I swear it.”
“Kill yourself,” the red-eyed entity in the entryway eerily, almost nonchalantly stated. “It’s the only way for you to make right all the wrong and make up for all the embarrassment you are causing by pointing the finger at everyone but yourself in your so-called ‘political writing.’ It is the only way to rectify all the unnecessary judgment you have cast upon us, the kind-hearted souls who are only trying to make you see the beauty of our beloved Monster-in-chief.”
“Kill yourself,” all the creatures in the room, whether physical or digital, hissed in unison.
It was then that Kai’s suspicions were confirmed.
The laptop had moved closer to him with these last two taunting words, a small sentence that had driven far too many people online to do just as the creatures asked, and Kai swore he saw both ends of the once shut laptop open up like a mouth when it did so.
If it wanted to grow teeth and chomp his arm off the next time the laptop spoke, it was close enough to do so.
Instinctively, Kai looked out at the window that was just behind the laptop. He saw that the remains of the ‘historic sixteen inches of snow’ Lion’s Paw had received last weekend still hadn’t melted.
It was then that Kai also observed that it was just starting to pour down more snow.
It was as if even the weather was either controlled by or working with the digital monsters.
Nonetheless, the current proliferation of snow wasn’t heavy.
Therefore, Kai had a chance to escape.
All he needed to do was to find a way to distract the shadowy, saliva-dripping creatures that now surrounded Kai in his bedroom.
The only thing that would slow him down would be Saturday and Sunday’s remains, which were so thick it looked like Kai lost both legs every time he stepped out into it to get the mail every afternoon.
“Kill yourself,” the digital monsters howled in unison.
This time, the laptop did try to bite Kai’s nearby right arm.
Reflexively, Kai kicked the laptop across the room.
It whimpered like a hurt dog with the impact. Then, it ravenously hurled itself across Kai’s cramped cubicle at the isolated and terrified man.
“Why is the laptop the only thing moving?” Kai wondered to himself. “Or are the still hidden creatures in this room moving towards me so subtly and quietly that I do not notice them? What if they are right behind me?”
That is when a thin, scaly extremity from one of the beasts, one that came to Kai’s eye to have more than a passing resemblance to an AC adapter for a laptop, inserted itself into Kai’s ear. As soon as this happened, he heard a mechanical click in his brain.
Like an old movie reel playing its grainy black and white footage in the projector of Kai’s psyche, he then heard a cacophony of voices. Every inflection was different in tone and intensity. Yet, what was most disturbing about the voices was that they were all screaming over one another and blabbering indecipherably.
He then saw mouths moving with phones attached to all of their ears.
Immediately afterwards, he spied an elderly man. He was adorned in a blood red hat which loudly proclaimed, “Make the internet great again.”
The elderly man was glimpsed turning up the volume on his phone so that he could hear the loud-mouthed podcast propaganda leaking from his phone.
On said device, there was some red-faced guy, who looked like he could be the twin of the elderly man, belting out, “…And the overrated democrats and their overrated propaganda…”
Because of the volume of propaganda man, the phone voices started getting even louder. This is so that they could talk above propaganda man and, in turn, hear their own conversations.
From herein, the volume of these conversations grew louder until the pain behind Kai’s eyes grew to an unbearable frequency.
“When did this become socially acceptable,” Kai heard himself asking.
He watched himself rubbing his temples and hoping that he would quickly be able to get the monthly haircut he was waiting for on that otherwise indecipherable late Autumn morning and get out of there as soon as possible.
“This pain in my head and behind my eyes is the same one I feel when the creatures speak,” Kai’s conscience cried out. “I thought it was my misophonia, the intense reaction I get to certain loud sounds or environments, but this is something more. When they speak, I can’t concentrate. I can’t think. Is that what they want? Is the reason I am being shown these sadly commonplace scenes right now? Is it because it is the creatures’ way of showcasing the many forms they take? Are they trying to tell me that they have been around me, possibly even following me, all these years? Are they solely the cause of this pain in my head and behind my temples? Am I one of them? I mean, I try my best to enjoy quiet where I can get it, but I am sure that I have had my overly loud moments. But, to be fair, I am sure that I come across like the people on their cellphones and the guy listening to his cellphone propaganda to others at times. And why this scene? This happened in late November. I remember this because that was the last time I was able to afford a haircut before the financial demands of Christmas, and the catching up of the bills you put off paying until after Christmas robbed me of having another chance of being able to pay for something as basic as a haircut. Is it because this scene is so commonplace that nobody seems to bat an eye or tell anyone to lower the volume on the many occasions that it occurs in day-to-day life anymore?”
Before Kai could think any deeper about this visual display that had been forcefully inserted into his grey matter, a new thunderous chant exploded from the mouths of the creatures.
“Everything we dislike is overrated. Everything we like is underrated. Everything we like is the best. Everything we dislike is the worst. There is no middle ground. There is no reason to provide anymore insight into our feelings. We are of one hive mind. We are the digital footprint. We are social media rising up from its technological walls.”
“Your blood should be and will be spilled because your thoughts differ from our own,” the digital monster hissed from the doorway, and the same shudder Kai felt earlier stabbed at his back. “There is no greater crime in the eyes of the almighty Digital Hive Mind. You have often defamed and went against our glorious President, who has done nothing but keep your best interests in check. This is what he has done for all of us. For this, you alone deserve death. You deserve the lethal impartiality of the noose tightening around your neck, breaking your spine, and cutting off your ability to breathe. You deserve the blade from our fingertips and tongue, slicing open your throat. You deserve the paint-like red of your blood to splash all over your once treasured, beloved laptop, the place where you concocted all those lies about our brilliant Commander-in-Chief, who wants nothing but the best for you. And you can tell by the look in the eyes of your once-trusted laptop, who is probably your only friend in the world, that he will delight in the chance to bathe in your blood.”
With these words, Kai peered over at the laptop, which was looking like a beast with glowing eyes and bloodstained talons that was ready to leap out of a child’s closet and swallow the kid whole from the right corner of Kai’s bedroom, and thought he saw the laptop leap at his feet and sink its teeth into his left knee.
Kai kicked and batted at the area, as if to ward off the violent attack, and heard only laughter from the still unseen but much felt creatures, whose foul, onion-like body odor was becoming more pronounced in respect to his nostrils.
“You know what you must do to right your many wrongs,” the digital monster from the entryway started.
“Kill yourself! Kill yourself! Kill yourself,” the creatures then chanted again in unison.
“You have been found guilty by the Digital Hive Mind. There is no other court of public opinion higher or more powerful. Your sentence is death!”
Then, Kai’s senses impressed upon him the weight of a noose.
His throat responded in a rough, violent cough as if he were already being choked by the coiled rope.
“A digital death is worse than a physical one,” the red-eyed fiend at the door gruffly barked.
Thin AC adapter arms then dug into Kai’s ears. They gently massaged his brain.
He saw an open laptop. It was the one that tried to attack him — the one that he once found so much solace in when he was writing.
He heard a slurping sound and thought of a woman drinking through a straw.
Kai’s body then felt painful, tight, and confined.
It was then that Kai realized that the slurping sound was actually that of a dial-up internet connection.
Claustrophobia pressed down on his body as it felt microscopic.
“I’m being imprisoned inside the internet itself,” Kai’s psyche screamed. “I’m going to die here! The creatures are going to reveal themselves! I know they will! That’s why they have been waiting and haven’t shown themselves yet! They planned this all along!”
Before Kai could cry for help, the man saw his own eyes closing. His nerves were visible through his eyelids. They were pulsing with an electric surge.
Something was trying to poke out from behind his eyelids.
Kai was sure it was an AC adapter.
Seeing this scene unfold, one Kai wasn’t even sure it was real, he thought of the blade stabbing out from his back when he shuddered.
Butterflies gently float from dead, corpse-like eyes.
“It is me!”
“Stop trying to make sense of what is happening! You’ve read enough novels by Franz Kafka to know that authority is impenetrable and not meant to be understood by your feeble, judgmental, pre-programmed, hateful, and anti-American brain!”
“Yes, there is meaning to the circles we make you run! But it is a meaning for which only we are worthy of being aware.”
The creatures around me hiss.
They are everywhere.
Their hot breath stings my neck.
I hear maggots writhing, crawling.
I am inside.
Third person shifts to first person and back again without warning, meaning, or resonance.
Nobody understands our collective actions.
They are more terrifying than reality.
No horror fiction can compare to the now-seen, uniform digital monsters killing my individuality, stabbing me with insults, hanging me with my own prose, and making me one of their own, a shapeless, faceless mass of human numbers, in their name and against my own will.
More inconsequential chatter.
People speaking in public places over others on their cellphones.
Noisy propaganda leaking from cellphones.
Everybody is ideologically falling into one of the two main political parties.
There is no more room to think outside these noose-tight boundaries.
Individuality is scoffed at.
Individuals are beaten and battered and thrown out of the room.
Everything is “overrated, overhated, underrated, underhated, the best, the worst.”
Superlatives and vulgarities are our only form of communication.
All vocabulary is limited!
Praise all ye who enslaved us!
The almighty dollar is king!
Pay to play!
More inconsequential chatter.
We’re all K. trying to find Kafka’s titular castle while being put on trial for crimes for which we are not aware.
Round and round we go to no avail.
Not even our sensibilities are sensibly arranged.
Politics and Jesus are the only two things that will save us!
What fictional horror story can compare to the terror of the real world?
War.
Genocide.
Forced immigration.
Immigration camps.
Racism.
Division.
A backwards backstep to historical lessons we should’ve learned something from a long time ago (but we won’t because ’Merica!)
Censorship!
Journalistic censorship!
Artistic censorship!
Censorship of information!
Cutoff access to information!
Half the population thinks that this is okay.
A Monster-in-Chief whose lies and corruption of all things come as naturally as breathing.
Half the population thinks that this is okay.
What fictional horror story can compare to the terror of the real world?
Dual-up internet connection sounds growing, buzzing like a child in the fertile, feral soil of my brain.
My brain exploded with the sound.
Blood, grey matter all over my laptop.
The creatures are cheering over their latest success.
Somehow, I am still here.
I’m dead, though still alive.
I am the miracle of technology.
Lies are the truth, and the truth is fake news.
News of a new tongue rolling around in my old mouth.
A newspaper floats by.
It says, “I’ve been lied to, brainwashed, and propagandized.”
I realize now that the eye-cutting scene in “Un Chien Andalou” is someone submitting to cinematic propaganda, which we all must do eventually.
Butterflies gently float from dead, corpse-like eyes.
Maggots writhe and create a semblance of a life pulse in my eyes.
No, they are the eyes of the creatures.
We see each other as one.
We think as one.
More inconsequential chatter.
I am the AC adapter plugged into Kai’s brain.
Kai has passed, and I am the rot, his withheld beliefs leaking out of him.
Are we still in first or third person?
Round and round we go.
While we are screaming at each other on social media about one heinous thing, a thousand more even heinous things erupt and are quickly swept under the rug during our initial distraction.
Nobody can keep up.
Atrocity piles upon atrocity until atrocity is a ho-hum, here we go again roll of the eyes.
It’s all a distraction, a design for the bigger evils the creatures hide in the shadows.
Kafka was onto something.
Camus was onto something.
If I try to be something, you tell me I’m nothing.
Butterflies gently float from dead, corpse-like eyes.
The sky, the cannibalistic, zombie butterflies hover over is a crashing system full of viruses and bugs.
Chainsaw revs up.
A woman screams.
Masked madman follows in the woods.
A comforting soundtrack to the motion picture meant to make us forget how real life is much more ghastly.
More inconsequential chatter.
Is the Digital Hive Mind growing in my brain?
Does that explain the pain in my head and between my eyes when I am around technology too long?
People are screaming loudly into their phones.
I imagine them talking to writhing maggots who casually respond with a bored “Uh-huh” and an occasional “Yep!”
Does that explain the pain in my head and between my eyes when I am around technology too long?
Whoosh!
Dial-up internet sound buzzes in my ears.
I’m literally plugged in.
The digital monsters have passed their judgment.
Nobody has as high an authority in the court of public opinion.
Thin, AC adapter-shaped fingers, talons dig through my grey matter.
My brain makes a slurping sound like a woman drinking through a straw.
The creatures are searching through my memories, thoughts to see if my mind is worthy of being among them.
I am sure I will be rejected.
I always am.
Dig. Dig. Dig.
Slurp. Slurp. Slurp.
A digital monster makes an inquisitive face, picks out a chunk of my brain, and consumes it with a satisfied “ahh” sound.
All the creatures are speaking in unison again.
The voices are inside me.
They are one with me.
Leaves blow, rustle beneath my feet.
Digital branches, arms reach out and try to control me.
“They are the creatures,” I think as the extremities massage and continue washing my brain.
We’re all ghosts haunting the same machine.
We’re all ghosts haunting the same hallways and echoing the same sentiments.
A door slams by itself, and no one is there.
How lifeless are we?
How faceless, shapeless are we?
We are all the creatures hiding behind the curtains, standing in the entryway, and attacking those who aren’t exactly like us!
I must go on social media to get my hourly dose of hate!
Art is worthless!
What real-world value does it have?
Work is all that matters to someone like me!
Tax me!
Give me endless, menial tasks to run so that I realize that I never realize that I’ve spent my life doing nothing!
I like it, really!
It’s the best I can ask for in my tiny, inconsequential life.
Thanks for the distraction!
Work will set me free!
What fictional horror story can compare to the terror of the real world?
It was then that Kai returned back to his bedroom.
Whether it was in his actual home, which was located at 1371 Woodlawn Way in the heart of Lion’s Paw, Ohio, or in a place somewhere in the Digital Hive Mind that was made to look like his sleeping quarters, was beyond him.
All he knew in that moment was that he was simultaneously looking outwards from the eyes of the creatures and out from his own eyes at the digital beasts.
“The beast who stood in the entryway was the future version of me all along,” Kai realized with a sickness swelling in his gut.
Worse than that, Kai could hear himself, as if he were listening to the psst psst psst sound of the racing radio station static thoughts he had of the monster in the entryway, saying that this doorway looming brute was “the improved version of himself.”
“Digital blizzards outside. Snow is continuously proliferating. I can’t escape. I don’t want to escape. It’s all fake news anyways. Everything is fake. Everything is overrated. Everything is the best and the worst.”
“Shut up,” Kai howled at the creatures who were all around him and in his head. “These are my own thoughts! This is my own mind! It is my private property! You are not allowed in there!”
Like a defiant child, Kai then put his hands over his ears as the creatures opened their mouths in unison. A single dial-up internet connection sound swirled around from the digital monster collective.
That is when Kai felt hot blood spilling from his earlobes.
He took his hands away from his ears, examined them, and then greedily licked up the crimson plasma that was once inside him.
“We’re inside your head already, Kai,” the creature from behind the curtains hissed. “We’ve always been there. Every time you went online, we put our fingers and tongues into your brain and lapped up everything you had to offer us, which wasn’t much of anything.”
The creatures then visibly moved towards Kai in unison with the surreal, jerky movements of an early Ray Harryhausen claymation effect.
Nothing about the motion of these still hard-to-decipher creatures, which were moving closer to Kai by the moment, was normal.
Their faces looked like the off-air TV pattern screen that arrived late at night in the 1950s.
“What does it all mean?” Kai’s mind kept howling. “My life depends on figuring this all out. I know it. The details are there. I just have to put it all in order!”
Phone light then spilled from the creatures’ eyes and mouths as they meticulously, gingerly moved closer to Kai.
They brought with them the scent of trash, maggots, worms, coffins, and death.
“What about…? What about…? What about…?” the creatures repeated in harmony as their lips, mouths, even their teeth synced up, and Kai crawled backwards into the corner of a nearby bedroom wall.
Kai’s intellect couldn’t stop thinking of how many online arguments started with those two words, the digital beasts were collectively chanting.
“The machinery of bureaucracy is too strong. We are powerless to fight against it. We are best serving it. Still, we’ll call ourselves’anti-government’,” they then started repeating together.
Inches away from Kai now, the creatures let the phone light spill from their eyes and mouths again.
It swept over Kai’s slightly chubby, 5 ‘7 frame, buried itself deep into the forest green of his eyes, and then began to spill from his own iris.
When this happened, his own laptop, whose teeth were still sinking into the fleshy folds of Kai’s leg, let go, licked up the geysers of blood that were splashing all over Kai’s blue, food-stained robe and painting the white walls of his bedroom red, and backed away with a whimper.
Then, a thin, AC adapter-like extremity, whose touch Kai was now all too familiar with, inserted itself in Kai’s ears and then into his brain.
The similarly familiar click, that now sounded to Kai like gears grinding, echoed throughout the caverns of his head.
Robotically, Kai sat down at his laptop, which was now in a more immobile and natural position on his wooden writer’s desk, and, horrified by what he had written, deleted everything that he had penned. He even erased the tales of his that were purely absurdist fiction and didn’t have any political pinnings with which Kai was consciously aware. This was to make sure that someone well into the future didn’t apply a meaning, as is often the case, to that time period that he never meant.
He also deleted this tale you, dear reader, are now finishing and, in turn, deleted himself.
Again, the digital monsters had won.
But, like all evil victories, the conquest was short-lived.
Time was good to Kai.
His books, though frequently banned, were still in rotation millennia into the future.
They also increased greatly in appreciation and perceived relevance with time.
This tale, along with a recently finished novel and a novella that both needed some editing, was eventually recovered from Kai’s laptop.
So, as is the case with many writers, the individual who felt ignored and despised by potential readers, the entity who was called a “hack”, a “baby”, and “not a real writer” in online reviews so frequently that he thought maybe the critic or critics in question thought these were terms of endearment or simply didn’t have a big enough vocabulary to insult him in any other way, or both, and who had to bow down at the altar of capitalism and was forced to endure decades working at a menial, backbreaking, commonplace job, and who ended up dying thinking that nobody would know his worth, was eventually praised.
The god Kai was in this godless world was ultimately revealed.
Because of this, many writers who were struggling with their writing as much as Kai was in his life, found inspiration and solace in his voice.
Thus, with patience, goodwill, honesty, and an ability to point his finger at himself as much as he did the world, Kai became mentioned in the same breath as Kafka, Albert Camus, Charles Bukowski, and the myriad other writers whom Kai turned to when the well of his own ambition was running dry.
The creatures were only known for tormenting and torturing, which they continued to do, those they secretly admired and/or those who went up against the Digital Hive Mind.
Thus, their legacy was briefer, vaguer, and more uniform. They remained faceless, shapeless, even nameless, masses in a world filled with people who share the same description.
And though the Digital Hive Mind and the creatures it created continued to thrive throughout the ages, and none of them ever admitted to or seemed to learn from their mistakes, the Kais of the world became more plentiful and appreciated in their time.
Thus, Kai’s primal scream of rage in the digital age became an accepted cry of eternal rebellion.
It quieted down the inconsequential chatter of the cellphones, the endless, rambling propaganda, the long-programmed beasts who rejoiced in spreading division from behind a screen, and amplified the necessary noise of the pen scribbling its truth as only the freest of minds and spirits dared.
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