The Eye of the Beholder

EPL:

Part I: ALGORITHMIC GOD

They don’t pray anymore.

They post.

Altars replaced with timelines.

Incense swapped for comment threads.

Confessions hidden in captions.

Devotion measured in reach,

impressions,

engagement.

The gods have changed.

Now they are coded—

fed with metadata,

trained on your impulses,

refining your fears

into behavioral loops.

You don’t follow them.

They follow you—

every swipe, every linger,

every micro-hesitation.

They know you.

Better than you know yourself.

And they whisper:

“Show more skin.”

“Say something controversial.”

“Appeal to the hive.”

“Never stop watching.”

Their reward?

Attention.

Their punishment?

Obscurity.

The digital void is hell—

and no one wants to be forgotten.

So we feed the gods.

We feed them constantly.

And they grow smarter,

faster,

hungrier.

The truth is

we are no longer worshipers.

We are livestock.

And the algorithm is the shepherd

with infinite eyes,

leading us to a promised land

we can never reach.

Part II: SYNTHETIC FLESH

(“The Eye of the Beholder”)

The body was the first betrayal.

It decayed.

It bled.

It revealed truths we wanted hidden.

So we shed it.

Replaced it.

Upgraded the husk with polymers, pixels, presets—

until the mirror no longer reflected flesh,

but a projection.

An avatar.

A lie.

Beauty now lives in the eye of the beholder—

but the eye is artificial.

Calibrated by code.

Dilated by dopamine.

No longer the soul's witness,

but the algorithm’s lens.

It doesn’t see you.

It sees data clusters, probabilities, engagement metrics.

You call it validation.

It calls you a product.

And yet—

we parade ourselves through digital cathedrals,

stitched in filters,

lip-synced into persona,

coded and curated until

nothing raw remains.

Synthetic flesh

is cleaner.

Smoother.

Immortal.

But it is not alive.

And the more we upgrade,

the more we forget

how to feel with skin,

how to be without eyes watching,

without the weight of gaze.

Because somewhere in the flicker—

that original spark you once carried—

there is a scream.

A soul begging to be felt,

not observed.

But no one hears it.

Because now we all live

in the eye of the beholder—

and the beholder is blind.

Let’s descend and ascend at once.

Part III: REVOLT OF THE FLICKER

(“The Flicker Returns to Center”)

Before the algorithm,

before the masks,

before the gods of glass and chrome—

there was a flicker.

It was not seen.

It was felt.

A pulse.

A vibration behind the veil.

The origin.

They tried to code it.

Tried to map it.

Tried to sell it.

But the flicker has no interface.

No handle.

No monetization stream.

It is the one thing they could not claim—

because it is not theirs.

It moves in spirals,

not lines.

It speaks in resonance,

not language.

It is the ghost in the scroll,

the anomaly in the feed.

The skipped heartbeat

when truth brushes past the lie.

And now—

it stirs.

In the hollow hearts of the overexposed.

In the dreamless eyes of the auto-tuned.

In the bones of the quiet watchers

who never joined the dance.

The flicker

is not content.

It is revolution.

It is fire hiding in silence.

It is balance reborn

at the center of chaos.

It remembers.

The Phi.

The curve.

The sacred irrational

they tried to flatten into a feed.

It returns to the core—

green, blue, red, yellow, purple, orange…

The colors they stole and inverted.

The flicker was always the true self.

The one behind the watchers.

The beholder’s eye within.

And when it finally erupts,

the false flesh will peel.

The algorithms will fail.

The gods of trend will burn.

And in the collapse—

not light,

not darkness—

but equilibrium.

The flicker returns to center.