Three days after ten million, my life still looked like it always had.
Wake up too late.
Check Boovtoob stats.
Answer messages.
Pretend to be a functioning human.
The only difference was the feeling that eyes were a little closer than before.
I sat at my desk with a mug of instant coffee and opened my analytics page.
Graphs. Numbers. Watch time. Retention. All the usual.
My latest stream highlight was doing well. That made sense. Ten million, emotional moment, people love that stuff.
What didn't make sense was an old video.
A throwaway upload from a year ago. Low effort. I'd titled it something stupid like "Nothing special here". It had flat-lined months back.
Now the graph was curving upward again.
"Why are you alive?" I muttered.
I clicked the video. Comments were new. People were saying things like:
This just popped up, why?
I don't know why I clicked this but I can't stop watching his hands
Is anyone else rewatching his old stuff way more lately?
I leaned back.
"Algorithm being weird," I told my mug.
Maybe it was. It had been weird before. Sometimes the site decided to drag a corpse out of the archive for no reason.
Still.
I squinted at the graph, then at the word hovering in my memory like a guilty secret.
CHOOSE.
ATTENTION.
"…No way," I said.
That was what people always said right before something supernatural happened in a movie.
I rolled my chair back, closed my eyes for a second, and picked a video at random in my head. A different old one. Same era, same low effort, different game.
I opened my eyes, found it in the list, and stared at the thumbnail.
Nothing else. Just stared.
For thirty seconds, I didn't blink much. I tried to think of everything that made people click. The title. The face. The moment inside.
It was a stupid way to test anything. It felt like trying to move a car by glaring at it.
I watched the live view counter.
At first, nothing. Then one view. Then three. Then ten.
"Coincidence," I told myself.
Another tick. Twelve. Fourteen.
My shoulders tightened.
I forced myself to stop looking. I switched tabs. Opened the weather. Stared at a forecast I didn't care about.
The uneasy feeling slid away.
I went back. The little number had frozen. It stayed where it was.
I waited. It didn't move.
"Okay," I said. "Fine. That's not creepy at all."
If it had been one video, I could have blamed luck. Two was harder to ignore.
It wasn't proof. But it felt like someone had quietly added a new rule to the world:
When I focus on something, other people start noticing it too.
Online.
On the street.
Anywhere.
I grabbed my phone and opened my notes app.
RULES?
– People stare harder when I look them in the eye.
– Old videos revive when I concentrate on them.
– Dream with spotlights was not just nerves?
I wrote "dream" and erased it. I didn't want to be the guy who took his dreams as evidence.
Whatever this was, it was attached to attention. That much I was sure of.
I checked my schedule. There was a sponsored stream the next day. A brand wanted me to promote some "healthy lifestyle tracker" and talk about self-care and balance.
Self-care. Balance.
I laughed once. It came out dry.
I confirmed the time with my manager over text and went to make lunch.
While the pan heated, my phone buzzed again. This time it was a call.
"Yeah?" I answered with my shoulder, rummaging for eggs.
"Congratulations again, star boy." My manager's voice. Too cheerful. "Ten million. Trending across platforms. Brands are happy."
"That's good." I cracked an egg badly and fished out shell with a fork.
"Listen," she said, business tone slipping in. "We've had a few offers since the stream. Mental health charities, anti-bullying campaigns, that kind of thing. They really like your 'you're not alone' messaging."
"They like the word 'hero', you mean," I said.
"Well. It plays."
I could hear her smile through the phone.
"You okay with leaning into that angle a bit?" she went on. "Real life role model, voice of the lost, all that?"
I flipped the egg too hard. Yolk broke.
"I talk into a camera in the dark," I said. "I'm not sure I'm qualified to be anyone's conscience."
"You don't have to be perfect," she said. "Just be you. That's what they want. You already get those 'you saved my life' messages."
I stared at the pan.
I did get those messages.
I read them.
Sometimes I answered.
Sometimes I didn't know what to say.
"Think about it," she said, misreading my silence. "We'll go over details after the stream tomorrow. Rest today if you can. You sounded tired at the end of the celebration."
"Yeah," I said. "I'll… think."
We hung up.
The egg burned on one side while I stood there.
People were ready to call me a hero for saying nice things and reading ad copy. Meanwhile somewhere in the city, someone else was getting kicked in a bus stop while everyone pretended not to see.
If this attention thing was real, it wasn't just a party trick. It was the first thing in my life that felt like an actual miracle.
What was the point of having it if I only used it to bump video numbers?
I ate lunch half-distracted, then went out. Hoodie, mask, cap. Sunglasses this time too.
I wanted to see if it worked on a crowd.
The shopping district was busy. Outdoor café tables, street vendors, people weaving around each other. A guy on a portable speaker rapped badly on the corner. A woman handed out flyers no one took.
I walked slowly, watching faces. Most didn't notice me. A couple did a double take, then went back to their day. No big deal. I'd learned to live with occasional recognition.
I stopped near a busker with a guitar who was being ignored into oblivion. His case sat open in front of him with a few coins clinging to the bottom.
He played well. Soft, complicated chords. No one cared.
I stood there and watched his hands.
No phone. No fidgeting. Just my full focus on the sound, the shape of the notes, the way he moved.
At first, nothing. Then a woman slowed down next to me. Her head turned towards the music. She stopped.
A man behind her almost bumped into her, looked annoyed, then heard the guitar. He paused too.
Two more people drifted closer, pulled by nothing in particular.
Within a minute, there was a small cluster around the busker. Not a huge crowd, just five, six people instead of zero.
He noticed and smiled, voice steadying, fingers surer.
Coins and small bills started dropping into the case. Not many, but more than before.
I let my attention slide away, forcing myself to look at a shop window instead.
The little group around him thinned as quickly as it had formed.
I swallowed.
"That's big," I whispered behind my mask.
I could drag eyes around. Turn nothing into something. Make people notice what I wanted them to.
If I could do that for a guitar player, what about danger?
What about someone about to get hurt?
The bus stop from the news flashed in my mind. Feet kicking a body on the ground. People filming.
What if their attention had been pulled somewhere else? What if a security guard had looked over instead of scrolling his phone?
I walked for a while longer, trying small things.
Shift a stranger's gaze to a dropped wallet.
Pull a kid's attention away from running into the street.
Nudge a bored guard into checking a dark corner of a parking lot.
Every time I focused, something moved. Not always perfectly, not always exactly how I pictured, but enough to feel cause and effect.
My chest buzzed faintly when it worked, like static under my ribs.
No one knew I was doing anything. They just walked and turned and reacted as if it was their own idea.
By the time the sun dropped, I was tired in a way that had nothing to do with walking.
On the way home, I passed a convenience store and caught my reflection in the glass. Hoodie. Mask. Cap. Sunglasses.
I looked like I was about to rob the place.
Or patrol it.
The thought slid in, quiet and ridiculous.
A city at night.
A masked figure.
A bike.
Black clothes.
All the stories I'd read, all the shows I'd watched, lined up in my head and pointed at me.
"Stupid," I told my reflection.
Maybe it was. It also wouldn't leave.
Back home, I started stream as usual. Scheduled, sponsored, bright overlay and fake energy.
We played a game. I told jokes. Chat flew. The sponsor segment came and went. I did my job.
But the whole time, I could feel attention like heat on my skin.
Hundreds of thousands of eyes, funneled through a little camera, concentrated on my face.
Whenever chat blew up after a joke, the static in my chest flared stronger. My hands moved faster. The game felt slower, clearer.
I wasn't imagining it. During peak moments, when more people poured in, I felt lighter. Stronger. Like I'd just had three cups of coffee without the shakes.
Then I clicked "End Stream" and it all cut off in an instant.
Silence again.
The buzz faded, leaving normal tiredness behind.
I stared at my dark monitor.
If I could feel the difference that clearly just from being watched through a screen… what would it be like to have real, physical eyes on me in person? To stand in the middle of a crisis with everyone's attention locked there?
I opened a shopping site in another tab before I could talk myself out of it.
Search bar.
"Motorcycle."
Scroll.
Most were out of my league, but there were mid-range ones I could afford. Black bodies, sleek lines. Helmets without logos. Jackets.
I added a plain black helmet, a black jacket, black gloves to a cart.
I removed them.
I added them back.
"Idiot," I muttered, but my finger still hit "Buy Now".
The order confirmation blinked at me, accusing.
Next, I searched for local listings. Used bikes. Something fast enough to outrun trouble, small enough to weave through traffic.
If I chickened out later, I could always say I just wanted to finally learn how to ride. Plenty of creators had bikes. It was practically a cliché.
I messaged a seller. Arranged a viewing the next afternoon.
When I closed everything, it was late again.
I lay on the bed, staring into the dark.
Until a few days ago, all I could do for people was talk and hope my words landed right.
Now I could twist attention itself. Nudge crowds. Light up danger. Steal eyes away from cruelty and shove them where they were needed.
Maybe I still wasn't a hero. I was clumsy, anxious, untrained.
But I had something no one else had.
If I didn't at least try to use it for more than views and sponsorships, that would be worse than doing nothing.
Out there, the city kept pulsing. Somewhere, someone was choosing to look away.
I had already clicked my choice.
The tools were on their way.