The notification popped up at 5:47 AM, just as Marta Tadesse was setting up her ring light for her morning workout stream. Another five pounds down. She should have felt triumphant—God knows her 150,000 followers would celebrate with fire emojis and hearts—but all she felt was empty. Hollow, like someone had scooped out her insides with a melon baller.
"Good morning, beautiful souls!" she chirped at her phone, muscle memory taking over where enthusiasm had fled. The comments started flowing immediately. Hearts, fire, muscle emojis. Someone asking about her meal prep. Another wanting to know what pre-workout she used.
She'd been doing this for three years now. Three years of documenting every pound lost, every meal eaten, every workout completed. Started at 280, down to 195. Eighty-five pounds of herself, gone. Sometimes she wondered where all that weight went. Did it just evaporate? Did it float away into the Portland morning mist? Did it matter?
Her phone buzzed. A DM from @TechWellnessGuru: "Hey hun! Would love to partner with you on something REVOLUTIONARY. New app called MindSync. It's meditation meets weight loss meets total consciousness expansion. Very exclusive beta. Interested?"
Normally, Marta would have deleted it immediately. She got dozens of these daily—teas that made you shit yourself, waist trainers that crushed your organs, pills that were basically legal speed. But something about this one made her pause. Maybe it was the phrase "total consciousness expansion." Maybe it was the fact that she'd been feeling so disconnected lately, like she was watching her life from outside her body.
She clicked the profile. Verified checkmark. 2.3 million followers. Looked legit.
"Tell me more," she typed back.
The response was immediate. A link to download the app, a promo code for free premium access, and a single line: "This will change everything you think you know about yourself."
Classic oversell, but what the hell. She downloaded it.
The app's interface was minimal, almost austere. Black background, white text. No garish colors or bouncing animations like every other wellness app. Just a single pulsing circle in the center of the screen and text that read: "Put in your earbuds. Close your eyes. Sync."
She did her workout first—had to give the followers their content—but her mind kept drifting to the app sitting there on her phone like a wrapped present. Or a bomb.
After logging her breakfast (overnight oats, 287 calories, and yes, she hated that she still counted, but she couldn't stop), she finally sat down on her couch, popped in her AirPods, and opened MindSync.
"Welcome, Marta," a voice said, though she hadn't entered her name anywhere. The voice was neither male nor female, neither young nor old. It was somehow perfectly neutral, like it had been calibrated specifically to bypass all her mental defenses. "We're going to help you shed more than just weight. We're going to help you shed the boundaries of self."
New age bullshit, she thought, but didn't close the app.
"Close your eyes. Listen to the tones. Let go."
The sound that came through her earbuds wasn't music, exactly. It was more like... frequencies. Layers of them, some so low she felt them more than heard them, others so high they made her teeth ache. But there was something hypnotic about it, something that made her eyelids heavy despite the large cold brew she'd just finished.
She must have dozed off, because the next thing she knew, her phone was buzzing frantically. Dozens of notifications. Hundreds. She grabbed it, confused, and saw she was still streaming. Had been streaming for the past forty-three minutes.
The comments were going insane.
"WHAT THE FUCK MARTA"
"How did you know about my mom???"
"This isn't funny anymore please stop"
"CALL 911 SOMEONE CALL 911"
"She's possessed holy shit she's actually possessed"
With shaking fingers, she went to her profile and clicked on the stream replay. There she was, sitting on her couch, eyes closed. For about five minutes, nothing happened. Then her eyes snapped open, except they weren't really open. The whites showed, rolled back in her head like something out of a horror movie she'd watched with Sass last Halloween.
And then she started talking.
Except it wasn't her voice. It was her mouth moving, her vocal cords working, but the voice coming out was wrong. Too deep. Too knowing. And the words...
"Jessica Martinez in Tucson, your father's cancer will return in three months. Start saying goodbye now."
"David Chen in Seattle, check your brake lines before you drive to work tomorrow. Check them."
"Amira Hassan in Cairo, the baby you're carrying is not your husband's. He already knows."
On and on, forty minutes of impossible knowledge, specific details about strangers' lives, their futures, their secrets. And then, at the very end, her own voice returned, but speaking in what sounded like Amharic—her parents' language, one she'd never learned beyond a few phrases.
She dropped the phone like it was burning.
Her DMs were exploding. Some people furious, calling her a fraud, saying she'd somehow hacked their information. Others terrified, begging to know how she knew what she knew. And then one that made her blood freeze:
"My father went to the doctor today. They found a mass. How did you know? HOW DID YOU KNOW?"
She ran to the bathroom and vomited, the overnight oats coming back up in a gray slurry. In the mirror, her reflection looked wrong somehow. Same face, same newly sharp cheekbones she'd worked so hard for, but something behind her eyes was different. Like someone else was looking out through them.
Her phone rang. Unknown number.
"Don't answer that," she told herself, but her hand was already reaching for it.
"Ms. Tadesse?" The voice was professional, clipped. "My name is Dr. James Chen. I'm one of the developers of MindSync. We need to talk about what happened during your stream."
"What did you do to me?" Her voice came out as a whisper.
"I think the better question is what you've done to yourself. Or rather, what you've become. Can you meet me? There's a coffee shop on Hawthorne—"
"I'm not meeting you anywhere. I'm deleting this fucking app and—"
"I wouldn't do that." His voice was urgent now, scared even. "The connection has already been established. Deleting the app won't sever it. It might even make things worse."
"Connection to what?"
There was a long pause. When he spoke again, his voice was barely audible. "We're not entirely sure. But you're not the first. There have been others. Most of them... didn't handle it well."
"What happened to them?"
"Can you meet me? Please? I can explain everything, and maybe we can figure out how to—"
The phone went dead. Not hung up—dead. She tried to turn it back on, but the screen remained black. The smell of burning electronics filled her nostrils.
A knock at her door made her jump. Three short raps, perfectly spaced.
"Marta?" It was Sass's voice. "Girl, I saw your stream. What the fuck was that? Are you okay?"
She wanted to answer, wanted to run to the door and fall into her best friend's arms, but she couldn't move. Something was happening. The frequencies from the app were still there, she realized, still playing in her head even though her earbuds were on the coffee table. And with them came knowledge. Terrible, unwanted knowledge.
She knew Sass had been fired from the bar yesterday but hadn't told anyone yet. She knew the elderly man in 4B was dead in his apartment and had been for three days. She knew that tomorrow at 3:47 PM, there would be an earthquake—not big, just 4.2, but enough to knock the antique vase off Mrs. Chen's mantle downstairs, the one that had belonged to her grandmother.
"Marta, open the door or I'm calling your brother!"
Biruk. Her baby brother, the golden child, the future doctor. She knew things about him now too. The Adderall addiction he was hiding. The patient he'd misdiagnosed during his rotation. The suicidal thoughts he'd been having since—
"STOP!" She screamed it out loud, pressing her palms against her temples. "MAKE IT STOP!"
But it didn't stop. If anything, it got stronger. She could feel herself expanding, spreading out like spilled water, seeping into every crack and crevice of collective human experience. She was Jessica Martinez's father, feeling the cancer cells multiplying in his lungs. She was David Chen, unknowingly driving toward his death. She was Amira Hassan's husband, crying in his car outside the fertility clinic.
She was everyone and no one and it was killing her.
The door burst open—Sass must have gotten the super—and then arms were around her, holding her as she convulsed on the floor.
"Jesus Christ, Marta, what's happening? Should I call 911?"
"No," she managed to gasp. "No hospitals. Just... stay. Please stay."
Sass held her tighter. "I'm not going anywhere, babe. But you need to tell me what's going on."
So she did. Through tears and shaking, she told her about the app, about the stream, about the knowledge that was flooding into her head like water through a broken dam. Sass listened without interrupting, her expression cycling through disbelief, fear, and finally, a grim determination.
"Okay," she said when Marta finished. "Okay. First things first. We need to find this Dr. Chen guy."
"My phone is dead. Like, completely fried."
"Use mine." Sass pulled out her ancient iPhone 8, the one she refused to upgrade because she didn't trust new technology. God, maybe she'd been right all along.
But when Marta tried to remember the number, it was gone. That specific piece of information had been wiped clean, like someone had reached into her brain with an eraser. She could tell Sass what the barista at the coffee shop on Alberta would name her unborn child (Jade, after her grandmother), but she couldn't remember ten digits that might save her life.
"Fuck," Sass muttered. "Okay, plan B. We go to the coffee shop on Hawthorne. Maybe he'll be there."
They drove in Sass's beat-up Honda, Marta clutching the door handle as visions flickered through her mind. Not her visions—everyone else's. The driver in the Tesla next to them was texting his ex-wife. The woman at the bus stop was planning to kill herself tonight. The kid on the skateboard had stolen his mother's credit card.
"It's getting worse," she whispered.
"What do you mean worse?"
"At first it was just... knowledge. Things I shouldn't know but somehow did. But now I'm feeling it. I'm feeling everyone's everything. Their pain, their secrets, their—" She broke off, doubling over as a wave of someone else's grief crashed through her.
Sass pulled over, ignoring the angry honks behind them. "Breathe, babe. Just breathe."
"I can't. It's too much. It's all too much." She was sobbing now, snot running down her face. So much for the put-together influencer image. "I spent so long trying to make myself smaller, to take up less space, to weigh less, be less. And now I'm everything. I'm everyone. And it's killing me."
Sass grabbed her face, forced her to make eye contact. "You're Marta Tadesse. You're my best friend. You're from Portland. Your favorite color is purple. You hate cilantro. You're real. You're here. You're you."
The litany helped, a little. Enough for them to start driving again. But as they turned onto Hawthorne, Marta felt something shift. The knowledge flowing through her was organizing itself, coalescing into something coherent. Something with purpose.
"Stop the car."
"What? Why?"
"STOP THE CAR!"
Sass slammed on the brakes. Marta fumbled with her seatbelt, fell out onto the sidewalk, and started running. She didn't know where she was going, but her body did. Her body knew everything now.
She burst into a coffee shop—not the one she'd been heading to, a different one—and there he was. Dr. James Chen, hunched over a laptop, surrounded by empty cups. He looked up as she entered, and his face went pale.
"It's accelerating," he said. It wasn't a question.
"What did you do to me?"
"Sit down. Please. Before—"
But she was already falling, the weight of omniscience finally too much for her human frame to bear. Chen caught her, helped her into a chair. The other patrons were staring, but she knew their thoughts, their judgments, their fears. The barista was reaching for his phone to call 911.
"Don't," Chen said to him, flashing a badge of some kind. "I'm a doctor. She's my patient."
A lie, but a convincing one. The barista backed off.
"The app," Chen said quietly, leaning close, "was supposed to use subliminal frequencies to access the subconscious mind. Help with weight loss, addiction, trauma. We based it on some old CIA research from the '70s, Project Gateway. But we fucked up the frequencies. Instead of accessing individual subconsciouses, we... punched a hole. Into the collective unconscious. Jung's theory, but real. Terrifyingly real."
"How do I make it stop?"
He laughed, but there was no humor in it. "If I knew that, do you think I'd be hiding in coffee shops? The company wants to scale it up, can you believe that? They see the potential for profit. Imagine knowing what every consumer wants before they know it themselves. Imagine predicting market trends, election outcomes, natural disasters."
"People are dying," Marta said. "The others you mentioned. They're dying, aren't they?"
Chen nodded slowly. "The human mind isn't meant to hold this much information. It's like trying to download the entire internet onto a flip phone. Eventually, something breaks."
"How long do I have?"
"Based on the others? Days. Maybe a week if you're strong."
Sass had found them somehow—of course she had, Marta knew she would—and was standing in the doorway, fists clenched. "There has to be something we can do."
"There is one thing," Chen said slowly. "But it's theoretical. And dangerous."
"More dangerous than dying?"
"Possibly." He pulled out a second laptop, started typing rapidly. "The connection works both ways. You're receiving information from the collective unconscious, but you're also transmitting. Every person who watches your streams, follows your account, they're connected to you. Part of the network."
"So?"
"So maybe we can reverse the flow. Instead of you absorbing everyone else's knowledge and pain, we push yours out. Distribute the load across the network. It would dilute the experience, make it bearable."
"But then all my followers would—"
"Experience what you're experiencing, yes. But divided among 150,000 people, it might be survivable. For all of you."
Marta thought about all those people who'd supported her journey, cheered her on, found inspiration in her transformation. Was she really going to inflict this curse on them?
But then another wave hit—someone's chemotherapy nausea, someone's labor pains, someone's psychotic break—and she knew she didn't have a choice. She was going to die if she didn't do something.
"How?"
"Stream," Chen said. "Stream everything. The truth about the app, what's happening to you, all of it. And at the moment of peak viewership, we'll push an update to MindSync. Everyone watching will become part of the network, sharing the load."
"That's insane," Sass said. "You're talking about inflicting this on innocent people."
"They won't get the full experience," Chen argued. "Just fragments. Glimpses. Most of them won't even notice."
But Marta knew he was lying. She could feel his deception like oil on her skin. They would notice. They would suffer. Maybe not as much as she was suffering, but enough. Enough to change them. Enough to curse them with unwanted knowledge.
"I need my phone," she said.
"It's fried, remember?" Sass said.
"Then give me yours."
Sass hesitated, then handed it over. Marta's fingers moved without her conscious control, downloading Instagram, logging in with credentials she shouldn't have remembered but did. The muscle memory of influence taking over.
"Are you sure about this?" Sass asked.
"No. But I'm doing it anyway."
She went live.
The viewers trickled in slowly at first—her streaming at an unusual time had thrown off the algorithm. But as she started talking, really talking, about what had happened, about the app, about the impossible knowledge flowing through her, the numbers started climbing.
1K viewers.
5K.
10K.
"I know Jessica Martinez is watching," she said to the camera. "Your father does have cancer. I'm sorry. I'm so fucking sorry. And David Chen, please, please check your brakes. And Amira—"
20K.
30K.
People were sharing the stream, tagging friends, spreading it like wildfire. She could feel them all, each viewer a small star in a constellation of consciousness she was suddenly, terrifyingly, at the center of.
"The weight I lost," she continued, tears streaming down her face, "I thought it would make me happy. Thought if I could just be smaller, take up less space, I'd finally feel like enough. But now I'm everything. I'm all of you. And you're about to be me."
50K.
75K.
Chen was typing frantically on his laptop. "Almost ready. Just need more viewers. We need to hit at least 100K for this to work."
Sass grabbed the phone, turned it on herself. "Listen up, you vultures. Yeah, I'm talking to you, sitting there watching this like it's entertainment. This is real. This is happening. And if you have even an ounce of human decency, you'll stay. You'll share the stream. You'll help save my best friend's life."
The numbers kept climbing. Marta could feel each new viewer like a weight being added to a scale, but also paradoxically like a weight being lifted. The pressure in her head was changing, redistributing itself.
100K.
110K.
120K.
"Now," Chen said. "Do it now."
He hit enter.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then Marta felt it—a sensation like her soul was being pulled through a cheese grater and scattered to the winds. The knowledge, the pain, the overwhelming everything-ness of her experience fragmenting and flying outward like shrapnel from a bomb.
The comments section exploded.
"WHAT THE FUCK"
"I CAN FEEL IT"
"OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD"
"anyone else suddenly know when they're going to die?"
"I can taste colors"
"MAKE IT STOP"
But also:
"I understand now"
"We're all connected"
"This is beautiful"
"Thank you for sharing this with us"
Marta collapsed, but this time when she fell, she felt held. Not just by Sass's physical arms, but by thousands of invisible hands, each taking a tiny piece of her burden. The overwhelming flow of information was still there, but diluted now, spread thin across the network of viewers like butter scraped over too much bread.
She could breathe again.
"It worked," Chen whispered, staring at his screen. "Holy shit, it actually worked."
But Marta knew it wasn't over. Couldn't be over. She'd changed things, fundamentally and irrevocably. 150,000 people now carried fragments of the collective unconscious, walking around with impossible knowledge rattling in their heads. They would spread it to others, consciously or not. The infection—or evolution, depending on how you looked at it—would continue to spread.
"What have I done?" she asked, though she already knew the answer.
She'd lost weight, all right. She'd shed the boundaries of individual consciousness, the comfortable isolation of being just one person with one set of problems. She'd become less and more simultaneously, a paradox of existence that shouldn't have been possible but was.
Her phone—Sass's phone—was still streaming. The viewer count had stabilized at around 150K, but the comments kept flowing. People sharing their fragments of newfound knowledge, their glimpses behind the veil of individual experience. Some were terrified. Some were exhilarated. All were changed.
"We need to disappear," Chen said. "The company will come looking for us. For you especially. You're the first successful integration. They'll want to study you, replicate the effect."
"Let them come," Marta said, and meant it. Because she knew something Chen didn't, something the company didn't. The network wasn't just sharing knowledge anymore. It was growing. Evolving. Becoming something new.
She looked directly into the camera, addressing her followers one last time.
"This is my final stream," she said. "At least as the person you knew. I'm not going to document my journey anymore because the journey is over. Or maybe it's just beginning. I don't know. But what I do know is this: we're all connected now. Really connected. And that connection is going to change everything."
She reached for the phone to end the stream, then hesitated.
"For those of you feeling the weight of this new knowledge," she added, "remember that you're not carrying it alone. We're all in this together. The weight is shared now. And maybe, just maybe, that makes it bearable."
She ended the stream.
The coffee shop was silent except for the hiss of the espresso machine. Outside, Portland went about its day, unaware that 150,000 of its citizens were now carrying fragments of infinite knowledge, seeds of a transformation that would spread in ways no one could predict.
Marta stood up, steadier now. The weight was still there—would always be there—but she could carry it. They all could, together.
"Where will you go?" Sass asked.
"I don't know," Marta admitted. "But you're coming with me."
"Obviously."
They left Chen in the coffee shop with his laptops and his guilt, walked out into the Portland drizzle that felt like baptism on Marta's skin. Every person they passed carried their own secret weights, their own struggles and pain and joy. But now Marta could feel it all, the beautiful terrible tapestry of human experience.
She'd wanted to lose weight, to be less.
Instead, she'd become everything.
And somehow, impossibly, that was exactly what she'd needed to be.
Three weeks later, a new app appeared on the market. It was called SyncShare, and it promised to "connect you with the universal human experience." Within days, it had a million downloads. Within a month, ten million.
The developers claimed no connection to MindSync, which had mysteriously vanished from all app stores. But users reported strange experiences: sudden knowledge of strangers' lives, dreams that felt like memories, moments of profound connection with people they'd never met.
The old world, the world of isolated individual consciousness, was ending.
Marta watched it all from a small apartment in Vancouver, Sass by her side. The weight of knowledge had stabilized, become almost comfortable. She was learning to filter it, to control the flow. Some days were harder than others. Some days she could barely distinguish between her thoughts and the thoughts of millions.
But she was alive. They all were.
And they were never, ever alone.
Her phone buzzed—a new phone, carefully isolated from any apps or networks. It was Biruk, texting from his medical residency.
"Sis, something weird is happening. My patients... I know things about them I shouldn't know. And they know things about me. It's like we're all connected somehow. Is this... is this because of what happened to you?"
She texted back: "Come visit. We need to talk."
Because the weight of knowing was spreading, with or without apps, with or without technology. It was evolution or infection, blessing or curse. Maybe both. Maybe neither.
All Marta knew was that the world would never be the same.
And neither would she.
The weight she'd lost—the weight of isolation, of individuality, of being trapped in a single consciousness—was gone forever. In its place was something heavier and lighter simultaneously, a paradox of existence that defied all logic but felt absolutely, undeniably real.
She stood at the window, watching the Vancouver rain, feeling the thoughts and dreams and fears of millions flowing through her like electricity through copper wire. Somewhere out there, 150,000 people were learning to live with their fragments of infinite knowledge. Some were probably going crazy. Some were probably becoming something more than human.
All of them were her, and she was all of them.
The weight of knowing.
She carried it.
They all did.
Together.