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 wealth that ensued. 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. 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 simply so mysterious that we went to the Moon and back, but 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, pulled the painting off the wall and she 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?
She put down her customised hot-pink smartphone and ended the livestream, which had been muted for hours but running for days. Then 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 sitting, morose and depressed, in her parents’ basement. To be fair, she had bought them this new six-bedroom luxury house with her first brand deal, and there was some comfort with 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 wore her usual basement outfit: a furry pink Balenciaga onesie, a vintage Incesticide T-shirt and a 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 bubblegum 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 even had 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 - the symbol. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - the Movie. She ran her fingers across Raphael’s reptilian 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 greatest day I’ve ever know. Eat a bowl Billy Corgan.
She had spent hours watching the endless YouTube videos and ASMR shorts so appreciated that restoring old movie posters was an art form; soaking and cleaning the paper with gentle soap-free detergents, pressing out the creases, remounting it 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 there 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 Olive’s favourite of the four turtles on the poster. As a child, she had found a VHS copy of the film in a thrift store near her parents’ flat in the social-housing block where they lived. Obviously none of this appeared in her official biography.
‘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 at dawn in the city - a strange memory of a time when nature interrupted you, not the other way around. Quaintness.
The phone kept ringing, louder and louder, the popular dance song from 1995 in chirping polyphonic tones, as she glanced down and just about recognised the eleven-digit number that appeared. It was Anita. She was her friend. Her friend who started this whole thing two years ago.
She answered. ‘Hi, Olive here. I’m kinda busy being a queen. Please leave a message after the tone.’ Olive loved doing the strange robotic voice, pretending to be a voice machine of the 80s.
‘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 anymore and promptly hung up. Anita was the one who made her famous; she and Olive created that Olive two years ago, kinda by accident. One evening, one video, one post, all on captured 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 and went back to her laptop and opened her email. It was 3:43am. 505 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(vans). Chris P(ine). Chris H(emsworth). She scanned the subject lines and noticed her agent had already replied to them all. Her agent wasn’t real, though 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. Bored, she scrolled her mouse wheel down, 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.
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 claims 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 really, in your heart, a big green angry turtle.
Call us. Or you can open that avocado in your fridge.
Dave
---- 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 at the lazy creak of the fridge door opening. An avocado sat on the shelf, shrouded in orange light.
‘What the actual fucks,’ Olive said out loud.
She had seen enough videos to know how to open an avocado efficiently. Taking it carefully out of the fridge, she held it in her palm and and cut around the longest circumference. You just pushed the stone out from behind - no knife-strike and hospital visit required - and then cut the halves into quarters and then peeled each 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, she opened the avocado and checked whether its insides were disappointing murky brown, as was tradition.
Olive gazed at God in the avocado.
It gazed back.