It is 8:12 a.m. and Elvis is not in the building.
The video feed is black and she has never been this late before. She's always ready to push that button to flip the screen over to the familiar TV test pattern promptly at 7:59, and sixty seconds later, she's there on the screen with another exciting episode of Dystopia Today.
She has never not shown up, and the people in the comments section are beginning to get antsy, like children whose parents are late picking them up from daycare, or addicts waiting for their next fix.
Do you think she got caught by a Watcher?
She would have to leave her apartment for that.
Probably passed out in a cloud of Cheeto dust and McDonald's wrappers.
What if she had a heart attack or something? What should we do?
She's anonymous and she likes it that way - there's nothing we *could* do.
She's not dead or detained. She'll be here.
By nine a.m., the frenzy in the comments section has worn itself thin and people are beginning to log off, choosing to switch over to one of a few hundred other streaming channels to avoid the uncertainty here. None of the other channels are as good as Dystopia Today, and they don't have the kind of footage that Elvis is able to find, but at least there's a person on the other side of the screen.
At least they can feel comforted by the fact that the world continues to turn and everything marches forward as usual.
Those who stick with Elvis's channel have no choice but to stare into the abyss of the black screen and wonder what went wrong in the world today.
Maybe she's sick.
She's done shows when she was practically green beneath that mask - it never stopped her before.
Maybe she just doesn't need us anymore. She got so popular so fast with all that Elimination Game footage, maybe she just took the money and left.
Hardly. She needs us.
No one who sits in a chair and streams for eight hours a day has anywhere else to go.
Maybe she cracked under the pressure of her newfound stardom.
Maybe she was silenced.
MAYBE SHE'LL BE BACK SOON. GUYS, STOP SPECULATING!
Found the optimist. Dream on, buddy, something's up.
* * *
There are only a few dozen hardcore viewers left by the end of the day, and the conversation has long since switched over to mundanities. They're talking about the criminal price of a Big Mac when the clock ticks over to 5:00 p.m., the time when Elvis always ends her show.
The conversation in the comments section pauses as everyone takes notice, then even the most hopeful of them - and the ones with nothing else to do - finally call it quits.
I guess that's it then. She's not coming.
You don't say.
Try again tomorrow, I guess, eh?
Nothing else to do.
One by one, they all log off. They have jobs to do, sleep to catch before the morning, and a thousand other little tasks to fill up the space from one moment to the next. And they'll have to do it without the security blanket that is Elvis Splat, at least for one day.
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