Olive had 50 million followers. They flocked like birds to her. They came to listen to every syllable, every chirp she considered uttering. Women with money issues, boys with body issues, men with prostate issues — prostrate thyself. They lavished her with love, gifts, encouragement and the grotesque ensuing wealth. Her image was iconic. Her words totemic. Who needed Metatron when you had Instagram Reels?
Olive had 50 million, 4 hundred and 50 thousand, 6 hundred and 31 followers to be exact.
Actually since you read that sentence, she now has 50 million, 4 hundred and 50 thousand, 6 hundred and 32 followers to be really exact. The flocks be flocking.
Olive looked up from her phone and stared at the painting in front of her above her desk. In beautiful gold script, the words danced across a tapestry, her most famous and beautiful saying. The one that sold the most personalised Stanley cups.
Have you ever found it mysterious that we went to the Moon and back, but yet we fail to start a simple conversation with a person across the road?
Olive snorted and then muttered, 'That's because all those fucking astronauts wanted to get away from ever having an actual conversation with me', curling a finger through her recently blown-out ombre-dyed hair. Chestnut brown to light pink. Her signature colours. Very on trend.
Chewing her hair, she leant forward out of her chair, pulled the painting off the wall and flipped it over to read the other side. Written in harsh block text in black sharpie:
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
— 'Breaking Bad S5 E14?'
— 'I think I read it in those Watchmen comics?'
Putting down her customised hot pink smartphone, cutting the live-stream that had been muted for hours but streaming for days — she grimaced and practised her sneer into her Olive-branded neon-yellow pocket mirror.
'Wait till they get a load of me', she thought, and threw the mirror on the floor, hearing it shatter like raindrops on a sheet steel roof, and then stood up stretching her arms to touch the ceiling of the basement.
For a world famous influencer it still didn't make much sense that she was sat, morose and depressed, in her parents' basement. To be fair she had bought her parents a new luxury six-bedroom house with her first brand deal, but there was some comfort in descending into the bowels of the earth like she used to do two years ago when this was all just starting. It was quite a large luxurious basement now. Olive was in her usual basement outfit of a furry pink Balenciaga onesie, vintage Incesticide t-shirt and pack of Marlboro Reds. Smoking is cool again — just ask all those dead boomers, she told her parents.
Olive's rise to goddess-like status was unexpected to say the least. Obsessed with the 90s like everyone else in 2026, she was incredibly average in every way. Grades — average. Athletic ability — basic. Looks — norm. The mean girl. The median girl. À la mode. She revelled in this fact. No one at school batted an eyelid or even noticed her chewing gum behind her Kurt Cobain-dedicated bleached blonde hair and oversized grey cardigan. He was the only one who actually could understand her, even though technically he had died nearly 25 years before she had even picked up her first Nirvana T-shirt from the Forever 21 store. $14.99. Made in China.
'Kurt died for us,' she would reply when asked by her Geography teacher about what the capital of Madagascar was.
'Antananarivo,' was the response.
Olive walked around the room solemnly, looking at the movie and album posters on the walls, one by one. Bleach — the first album. Batman 1989 — the symbol. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles — the Movie. She ran her fingers across Raphael's amphibious visage, etched with fury and rage, peeking out from the manhole cover on the streets of Manhattan.
Manhattan. Synecdoche. New York. Olive was both the part and the whole. She was the brand and the person. She was part of the brand, the brand was part of her. Yet as she pressed her face against the vintage movie poster — an original restoration from 1990 that cost her $14,000 — she knew she was not built for this today. Today isn't the greatest day she'd ever known. Fuck you Billy.
She had spent hours watching the endless YouTube videos and ASMR shorts about restoring old movie posters as an art form: soaking and cleaning the paper with gentle soap-free detergents, pressing out the creases, remounting on new archival backing paper, and finally restoring the colours and painting back in the damaged folds and tears. The tears in her eyes were because this all felt like she was living as a restoration. Carefully repaired and restored. Moved from 1991 to today in 2027. No scars. No marks.
Raphael was her favourite turtle since she was a child and she found a VHS tape of the film in a thrift store a few streets from her parents' flat, in the social housing block she lived. None of this was in her official biography, however.
'I am you, Raphael. I am the unwilling hero. I am vengeance. I am the outcast one. I am...' she paused and stepped back. 'I am Olive the biggest lifestyle influencer in the world with my own range of Korean skincare products and mushroom teas.' She bit her lip and laughed.
Her other phone rang. Her real phone. This was unusual for a 21-year-old. Phones never rang anymore. This one did. It was like hearing songbirds in the dawn in the city — they felt like strange memories, of a time when nature interrupted you and not the other way around. Quaintness.
The phone kept ringing, louder and louder, a popular dance song from 1995 in chirping polyphonic tones, as she glanced down and just about recognised the 11-digit number that appeared. It was Anita. She was her friend. Her friend who started this whole thing two years ago.
'Hi Olive here, I'm kinda busy being a queen, please leave a message after the tone.' Olive loved doing this strange robot voice.
'Jesus fucking Christ O. Quit it.'
'BEEEEP.'
'I'm sorry O. Please just say something to me. You know me. I know I just disappeared. I'm back online. I want to talk to you and explain everything. I'm in India. It's really humid. There's no matcha. My mum is unbearable. K. Bye.'
Olive stared at the phone, hearing her friend's voice, familiar but also not quite, and promptly hung up. Anita was the one who made her famous — she and Olive had created that Olive two years ago, kinda by accident. That evening out, one video, one post, all captured on Anita's phone on her account with poor grungy Olive tagged as an afterthought — and Olive ended up here, millionaire goddess, and Anita there, probably rotting in a slum in Delhi with no AC and no matcha. Fuck matcha. Matcha is for insects. Even her own Olive-green matcha collab tasted like dirt. Good.
Olive stretched up touching the ceiling, went back to her laptop and opened her email. It was 3.43am. Five hundred and five new unread emails since she last checked 30 minutes ago. Gucci. Ford. Haygreens Toilet Paper. UK Government Affairs. Nike. Dave. Steve, Donald, Sarah, Anita. Antifa. Fifa. Apple Computers. Apple Growers of America. Chris E. Chris P. Chris H.
She scanned the subject lines and noticed her agent had already replied to them all for her. Her agent wasn't real. This agent wasn't a parasite like the rest of them. It was a bot or something that her human agent had set up for her. But it was called Olive and pretended to be her, making the motions, sounds and words to fulfil those daily machinations that were below her standing — like interacting with people. Olive pretended to be Olive as well. She scrolled her mouse wheel down bored, closed her eyes and clicked on the first one.
'Hello Mr Dave. I wonder what I said to you.'
Which Olive was the automaton and which was real? The influencer, the brand, the person, the daughter or the computer program that replied to brand partnerships and fans — it turned out nobody knew.
From: Dave
'Hello Olive. I don't know you. Well I know who you are — your face was on a billboard opposite my office and your reels are in my algorithm. You don't know me.
But I'm with someone who knows you apparently. He says he knows what really happened with you and Anita that night. He knows what's going on with her now. He knows you hate your range of wellness routines, guided meditation and green juice. He says you need to help us.
Also he's now trying to tell me that you aren't a big green angry mutant turtle.'
Call us. Or you can open that avocado in your fridge.
Dave
From: Olive (Auto-Reply)
'Hi Dave. One sponsored post will cost $40,000. I won't endorse a product that doesn't meet my brand and emotional values (see list here). If you want a link to your website or branded content that will be negotiated. My lawyer will be in touch.
Stay fruity!
Olive xoxo'
Olive closed her eyes. This was definitely not a boring turn of events.
Her eyes opened as she heard the lazy creak of the fridge door opening and she could not avoid seeing the avocado sitting on the shelf, shrouded in glowing orange light.
'What the actual fuck,' Olive said out loud.
She had seen enough videos to know how to open an avocado efficiently, taking it carefully out of the fridge and holding it in her palm: take the knife and cut around the longer hemisphere, push the stone out from the back side of the avocado half — no need to cut your hand trying to get the stone out dramatically with a knife-strike — then cut the halves into quarters and peel the segments by hand. No spoon. There is no spoon. She was a pro. Ten million views told her this.
Often when she was filming these 'perfect guac with zesty lime and CBD energy spread' reels she imagined she was cutting open an alien egg. The alien egg. Ridley's egg. Other times she was Galactus, the devourer of planets, using her power to carve open this feeble planet cradled in her hand — with its leathery and green crust, soft green mantle and a hard brown core. Then imagining just crushing it to pieces, the insides squelching between her fingers, destroying this planet like a God. A God of tree fruit.
She chuckled to herself and with a swift twist opened the avocado in two and looked inside to see if it was brown, as was the tradition.
Olive saw God in the avocado.
It looked back.