It was her flatmate who got her into it – Harry, not Ed, for a change. Harry was a Social Anthropology student who was writing her dissertation on digital identities, and the thing about Harry was she actually cared about her degree. Tirzah hated her chosen subject so much she always just called it ‘shite-ology’, while Ed read Philosophy only in the sense of that being the word which appeared written next to his name whenever he logged in to the university network. Which had happened maybe twice since first year. 

One afternoon Tirzah was standing at the kitchen sink and trying to remove an aged piece of scrambled egg from the flat’s only frying pan with as minimal effort as possible while Harry sat working at the table behind her. Fairly stoned already, Tirzah had become so engrossed listening to the click-clack rhythm of Harry’s typing that she jumped when her flatmate suddenly spoke.
“You’re pretty online, aren’t you?”

Harry had never been one for the social niceties. Tirzah’s first thought was I’m pretty everywhere, but she opted to respond with a simple affirmative grunt. 

“Y’know how I’m doing my deep dive on all this incel stuff?” Harry continued. “Well – don’t judge me – but last night I signed up for one of their forums.”

Tirzah half-turned, raising her eyebrows. 

“It’s not procrastination if it’s fun!” said Harry.

“Which forum?” 

“It’s called incels.onion. It’s on the dark web.”

“Fucking hell. I didn’t know they let girls in.”

“They don’t. I’m pretending I’m a boy.” 

“Really!” Now Tirzah turned around all the way. “Do you have a whole fake backstory?” She felt sad that Harry hadn’t consulted her; becoming an author was Tirzah’s latest pipe dream. 

Harry shook her head. “I haven’t figured out the details yet. Dean’s gonna help me.”

Tirzah pouted. As if it wasn’t enough that Harry already spent far too much time at her boyfriend’s flat these days, on top of that he was stealing their fun activities. 

“I thought I needed a male perspective,” Harry added. 

Your funeral, Tirzah thought. Suddenly she gasped.“What if they track your IP address?!” 

“I’m using a VPN.”

Reeling at her sudden vision of a horde of incels laying siege to the flat, Tirzah made a mental note to add it to her list of unrealised short story ideas. With the frying pan now forgotten entirely, she smeared her wet hands on her dungarees and went to sit next to Harry. 

“Let’s have a look.”

Her eyes widened as she watched Harry scroll the forum, the many different headlines seeming to leap out from the screen: 

QUEENING WORKS – new evidence 2/9 – gooning with the queen today – joi/goon megathread – OFFICIAL SKEPTIC THREAD – all sofs go2 heaven pt 5 – new evidence 12/28 – HELP ME FIND MY BROTHER!!! – physics of queening? – sofragette starter pack (noob edition) – Debunked FORREAL – new evidence 11/13

The subforum they were looking in was titled ‘sofism 101’. Tirzah thought herself quite well-versed in the subculture of incels, but she’d never come across that term before.  

“What’s ‘sofism’?” she asked.

“That’s what I wanted to ask you,” said Harry. “You’ve never heard of it before?” Tirzah shook her head. “Oh. Well, they talk about it constantly. Some kind of game, maybe? I think? I dunno, everything’s in their secret virgin code. Dean’ll probably know.” 

Takes one to know one, Tirzah thought. 

Later, when Harry had gone to Dean’s, Tirzah and Ed sat in the living room, the flat theirs for the evening. They were making out on the sofa as the joint by the window slowly lost its flame. Ed had already begun rubbing himself over the crotch of his pyjama bottoms, a habit which Tirzah found irritatingly presumptuous – and when the memory of her talk with Harry popped back into her head, she took the opportunity to pull away. 

“Do you know what ‘sofism’ means?” she asked.

Ed returned a look like a baby robbed of candy. Though his full name was Edmund Wright, his friends exclusively referred to him from a long litany of nicknames: ‘dead Ed’, ‘deadhead’, ‘weedhead’, ‘the weedman’, ‘the weed’, ‘the wean’, ‘the wain’, ‘the wee man’, ‘wee Ed’, and so on. In fact he was a rather large man who physically often reminded Tirzah of a big, immovable panda bear. 

“What?” said Ed.

“‘Sofism’. It’s some incel thing. Hazz asked me earlier.” 

“I don’t know,” he replied, licking his lips as his eyes darted back expectantly to Tirzah’s mouth. But she moved away and reached over him to retrieve the joint. 

“It’s weird,” she said. “I thought I knew all their slang. You’ve never heard of it either?” 

Ed shrugged. He didn’t spend half as much time on internet forums as Tirzah did. Sometimes he worried she would one day discover how routinely he exaggerated his knowledge of this subject and others. He stared at Tirzah, who frowned as she lit the joint. Then realising he still had a hand on his crotch, he quickly moved it away. 

“Sophism,” Tirzah continued, puffing smoke like a steam train. “That’s a Philosophy thing, isn’t it?” Ed agreed it could well be, but she was already getting her phone out to look it up. “I knew it,” she said, ‘Sophism: a clever but false argument, especially one used deliberately to deceive’. Sophism– like philosophy – sophia means wisdom.” 

This rang no bells for Ed, but he listened with admiration. Curiosity engulfed Tirzah’s whole attention as she navigated to her preferred incel forum, hoping to quickly cross-reference. Unlike the private message board Harry had signed up to, Tirzah only ever perused the public one. 

A search for ‘sofism’ yielded only a few scattered comments, the most recent one less than a week old. A user by the name of xXglyph_strXx had asked another named TheCrimsonChong about the meaning of the animated gif which formed a personalised signature in all the latter’s comments. It depicted a crudely pixelated waving banner adorned with the words ‘Proud Sofragette’ in sparkly, childlike lettering. Another user had replied “bruh imagine STILL not knowin bout sofism??”, to which xXglyph_strXx had simply said “not here bro” before linking to the private forum. Various surrounding comments had been deleted by the moderators. 

When Tirzah searched again for ‘sofragette’ there were many more results, all from similar interactions involving other users who possessed the exact same animated signatures. Their replies were just as evasive, often linking again to the private forum, and many too had also been deleted. 

Now Tirzah licked her own lips, in a reflex which was entirely misconstrued by Ed. At once the high from the joint swelled over her like a warm bath which she permitted herself to sink deep inside. A conspiracy, she pondered, later that night, gazing up at the bedroom ceiling while below her, Ed made passionate attempts at cunnilingus. A real mystery. Why the fuck didn’t I do Social Anthropology? 

Ed asked something then, one of his jagged stubble hairs pricking Tirzah hard in the clitoris, and she loudly cursed. 

Within two minutes of his orgasm, Ed was fast asleep and Tirzah was sitting upright against the headboard with his t-shirt stuffed between her legs, her face lit blue by the glow of the phone screen. She was trying to look up the definition of ‘sofragette’ and feeling unduly offended by her phone’s insistence that she had surely meant to type ‘suffragette’. When it finally complied, the search yielded not one relevant hit. Tirzah’s heart sank at the very same moment that a hefty glob of semen dislodged itself from somewhere inside her, carrying with it an awkward oozing feeling, and she exhaled in frustration.

She looked down at Ed’s face squished against the pillow. His bulk consumed a disproportionate amount of the bed, and Tirzah felt neither comfortable nor sleepy. Beneath the powerful top layer of joint smoke, to her his room still had its usual rotten smell. And as was the case roughly fifty percent of the time, she had found tonight that being really high had seriously impaired her capacity to orgasm. At least, to orgasm from anything Ed had done.

Adjusting her position, Tirzah looked back to her phone and searched for her favourite porn website. The top result was a news article reporting the conclusions of a psychological study into the long term negative effects of said website on the mental health of its users. Tirzah was about to hurl her phone into the wall when she realised the safe search function was on; the WiFi must have died again. She smiled as inspiration quickly struck, quite happy this time to clarify once more that she did not mean to type in ‘suffragette’. With the safe search off, a search for ‘sofragette’ now yielded many hits. The top ones were mostly just the same comments from the public forum as earlier – but about halfway down the page was a link to another porn website, a video entitled Proud Sofragettes PMV (ZERO MERCY). 

This particular website was decidedly not one of Tirzah’s favourites. It styled itself as a purveyor of content skewing a good deal more extreme than she was typically interested in. Of course, over the years even she had found occasional use for its services, most memorably after a bad breakup at the end of first year which had seen her bed-bound for nearly two straight weeks. By day four, overcome by self-loathing and unbelievably bored with conventional masturbation, Tirzah had set herself the task of attempting to reach orgasm via the most depraved stimuli she could possibly locate without breaking any major laws. To this day, remembering such sights never failed to evoke a bewildering cocktail of shame, disgust, and intrigue deep within her. 

The thumbnail for Proud Sofragettes PMV (ZERO MERCY) was just the text of the title over a plain black background in a font resembling splattered jizz. There were over fifty comments, and Tirzah skimmed these first, doing her best to overlook the many explicit sidebar ads depicting beloved childhood cartoon characters fucking each other, which here were popping up and strobing even more aggressively than she was used to.

From the comments alone Tirzah drew several new conclusions:

• ‘sof’ referred to a porn star named Sofia Ruinz, also known as Sofia Moon or Queen Sofia.
• Ruinz was notorious for her extreme videos, particularly a series called Queen Sofia Reignz which aimed to break many industry records. 
• ‘the sofragettes’ were fans of Ruinz who enjoyed an activity known as ‘queening’. 
• ‘queening’ was something like an extreme form of ‘gooning’ – that is, lengthy marathon rounds of masturbation and porn consumption with the goal of reaching a state of near-hypnotic focus and thus, in their words, somehow ‘ascending’.
• There was one particularly notorious video of Ruinz known to make ideal queening material, referred to variously as ‘the MBV’, ‘the mp4’, ‘the MO’ (magnum opus, Tirzah guessed), or most often simply ‘the video’. Sitting through this video seemed to be considered a kind of challenge or initiation rite among the sofragettes. 
• Proud Sofragettes PMV (ZERO MERCY) was not the video in question, just a highlight compilation from Queen Sofia Reignz set to intense club music with built-in ‘jerk-off instructions’. Tirzah turned it off after less than two minutes. She wasn’t remotely able to masturbate to what she saw, but it did make her put her phone away. 

The next afternoon, Tirzah successfully dragged herself to the university library for the first time in several weeks. She was midway through her fifth attempt to parse the second paragraph of a reading from which she hoped she might eventually be able to derive some as yet unknown value theoretically serving a potential contribution to the ultimate completion of her as-yet unwritten dissertation when Harry arrived and sat down next to her.   

“How was it with the Wee Man?” Harry asked, unpacking her things. “What’d you get up to?”

“Nothing,” Tirzah replied. “Got waved. Watched a film.” 

“Sounds romantic.”

Tirzah regarded her flatmate with subtle horror. Nobody knew about her and Ed – or if they did, they certainly hadn’t heard it from her. 

Harry was smirking. “Let me guess: you forgot? Honestly, you two. Sometimes I can’t believe you’re not a thing – you’re like, the exact same person.”

Now Tirzah was more confused than anything, a state which persisted until she watched Harry get out her daily planner, full of delicately printed notes, and open it to today’s date. It was February 15th.

“Fuck.” Tirzah scowled and pinched her brow. “I thought Valentine’s was next week!”

“Poor Tizz,” said Harry. “What happened to ‘all men are trash’?” 

“Nothing. They are.”

“Except for the Wee – Mister Wright. I keep saying you should just get with him, he’s obviously in love with you.”

“Fuck off. You get with him.”

Harry laughed her good-natured laugh and thought no further of it. 

Later that day, Tirzah was almost ready to make a start on the third paragraph when Harry declared she needed to use the toilet, her tone implying that she may be gone for some time. In the silence of the library Tirzah stared at the laptop waiting half-open on the desk beside her. She had long since made peace with the belief that between the two of them, Harry was surely the more intelligent, and probably a significantly better person in general. Sometimes she thought she might be better-looking too – at least, Tirzah thought it was pretty close. But for the whole time they’d been friends, there were two things Harry had always been undeniably terrible at: keeping secrets while intoxicated, and remembering to change her password. 

A moment later Tirzah was cringing at the photo of Dean posing with his rugby team which served as Harry’s desktop background. Quickly she got to work. Harry already had several tabs left open in incels.onion; it seemed that in her fiendish disguise, she had set up a poll about enforced monogamy that was evidently causing some commotion. 

Navigating back to the sofism 101 subforum, Tirzah felt excited as she scanned the page for any further information on ‘the video’. 

First she clicked on a post named ‘sofragette starter pack (noob edition)’ which turned out to just be a meme image of a large bottle of lube and two forks sitting before a desktop computer. Next she tried the latest entry in what looked to be a series about ‘new evidence’. This seemed more promising. Scrolling frantically, she was able to gather that the discussion here revolved around comparisons between social media photographs of many different men and various screenshots taken from what looked like the same porn video. The screenshots were all cropped and zoomed-in to varying degrees; none showed their nude subjects’ faces, and all were low-grain and unclear. In each case the camera was focusing on a particular segment of the body, most often the penis. 

Tirzah took a quick look around the library floor to make sure nobody was watching, then leaned closer to the screen, squinting and unconsciously biting her lip. 

The footage in question was of quite poor quality, and very dimly lit. Most of the penises were erect, and certain of the images appeared to show glimpses of another person in the shot’s foreground, their head level with the men’s crotches – a lock of dark hair here, a section of shoulder there.

In the comments, the incels were arguing over the identities of the men in the screenshots compared with the smiling faces in the social media photos. There was a particularly lengthy discussion surrounding one man’s neck tattoo, which appeared ambiguously visible in one heavily analysed video frame. All over the screen, the ‘proud sofragette’ banner punctuated almost every single comment, the cartoon banners all rolling together, playing out their looping animation in perfect, happy unison.

Tirzah had no doubt this was her first glimpse of the infamous magnum opus. Exhilarated by the thought she might be caught at any moment, she made one last dash back to the subforum homepage hoping to locate any links to the full video. She could have slapped herself when, at length, she finally noticed the pinned post sitting right below the forum header:

Click here to begin your ascent.

The post displayed a huge leaderboard ranking the high scores of dozens of forum users. Some of the names had cartoon skulls next to them. All the scores were timestamps – the topmost was just over four hours. Below the leaderboard there was a moving graphic of a digital clock set to Eastern Standard Time, underscored by the words Countdown To World Sofination. And beneath this was a large and tantalising URL link. 

THE-MOST-BEAUTIFUL-WOMAN-IN-THE-WORLD.mp4 

It took considerable mental effort for Tirzah not to click the thing right there and then. Instead she hastily copied the link text, sent it to herself, and deleted the chat from Harry’s messaging app. Then she closed the tabs which she had opened and locked the laptop again, careful to leave it half-closed at the same rough angle as its owner had, before hurrying to get back in position at her own desk. 

Harry returned less than thirty seconds later. 

“Tizz? What is it? What you giggling at?” 

To celebrate the thoroughly negligible progress she had made on her dissertation, later that evening Tirzah accepted Ed’s invitation for a pint at their usual bar. Here she regaled him with all that she had learned about Sofia Ruinz and her sofragettes, as well as the mysteries still remaining; namely, what exactly was ‘ascending’, and what could possibly be meant by ‘world sofination’? 

Ed was pleased to sort of know what his flatmate was talking about for once, his knowledge of pornography exceeding his knowledge of most other things. He thought the name Sofia Ruinz sounded familiar, and confirmed this with an image search on Tirzah’s phone. “But it’s all like, gangbangs and double anal and stuff,” he said, shaking his head. “Not my thing. Plus she’s too skinny.”

Tirzah ignored that last part in favour of watching the bubbles dance a crazy vortex at the centre of what was now her second pint. She looked back at Ed; he was staring at her breasts. “Ed. You’re a bloke,” she told him. “What do you think of all this shit? Like, honestly?” 

“All what shit?”

“The whole incel thing. I mean these guys – and they are all guys, exclusively – these guys are wasting their entire youth on all-male message boards competing to see who can come up with the most insane explanation for the simple fact that socially retarded misogynists are not most women’s idea of a good fuck. They are literally the beginning and end of their own problems. If they just put their phones away and went outside – if they just acted like a normal fucking people for one fucking second – literally all the shit they complain about all day complaining about about would disappear, like that.” Here Tirzah snapped her fingers. “And they’re killing themselves, man. They’re killing themselves. That’s if they’re not fucking killing anyone else at the same time. I mean what kind of a statement is that on the fucking human condition? Doesn’t it make you embarrassed to be alive?” 

Ed’s desire for Tirzah was almost unbearable when she spoke like this, but still he tried to think about what she was asking. He didn’t really feel embarrassed by what other people did, especially other people who presumably lived many miles away from him and only really seemed to exist at all in the form of the virtual online personas they’d made up for themselves. He didn’t understand why any man would hate women, but he had seen friends of his lose their minds over breakups, rejections, unrequited crushes. Yet even these bad spells never seemed to last very long. 

“It’s like you said,” he answered after a while, “it’s just the internet. It makes people act different. Like, anyone can be a big man on the internet, when in real life they’re probably just some nerdy kid who got bullied all the time at school.” 

Tirzah swallowed a burp before responding. “The weird thing is these lot are worshipping a porn star. Not just any porn star, but like, the ultimate queen of fucked-up shit. Meanwhile, they see girls who sleep around as fucking less-than-worthless sluts. Do they fucking rate slutty women or don’t they?” 

“They rate them,” Ed offered, “yet they hate them. Oi, that rhymed.” 

This made Tirzah smirk. Feeling bolstered, he continued “Remember you said once about that Maradona complex?” 

“Madonna-whore complex.”

“Yeah, yeah – like, a woman can either be a slut or a mum, but not both at once.” 

Tirzah could not resist. “Except for your mum.”

Ed bellowed a laugh so loud that others in the bar began to stare, and after a moment, Tirzah had to join him. 

When it came to the subject of his own dissertation, which still existed purely in the abstract, Ed only ever made jokes. He said that Tirzah didn’t realise that the beauty of Philosophy was in the fact that anyone could make it up on the spot. He said his own musings were so sophisticated they could only be expressed using a system of logical signs so complex it hadn’t been invented yet. And whenever Tirzah despaired about how stressed she was, he would happily repeat his longstanding assertion that everybody knew the university gave a free pass to anyone whose flatmate killed themselves – it happened to one of his cousin’s mates. Then he would waggle his eyebrows at Tirzah until she cut up laughing. 

Their sex that night was passionate and heavy, the alcohol a fiery fuel within them both. As Ed heaved and panted hard above her, his great face staring into hers seemed to hold a kind of desperate terror. “I – I – I -” he stammered. “I – I – I -” 

Tirzah grabbed the back of his head and wrenched it down to smother his mouth in her neck. “Ssh,” she whispered. “Ssh, just cum. Just cum.” 

Once Ed was asleep Tirzah went for a shit, where she sat on the toilet scrolling through her phone long after she had finished. Again he hadn’t made her cum – he’d been too drunk to even try – but nevertheless she was feeling pretty good and thought it wouldn’t take too long to do the job herself. Of course there was no question which video she’d be using. 

It wasn’t as if there had been anything particularly arousing about the screenshots she had seen; on the contrary, they looked more like pictures from a snuff film than anything designed to be erotic. It was everything else surrounding the video – the whole mysterious story. The sordid, shameless persona of Sofia Ruinz. The elaborate mythology, all those many lonely men obsessing, thinking, writing, writing, writing. That strange leaderboard, with its cartoon skulls and three-hour timestamps. And whatever on Earth the promise of ‘ascension’ was supposed to represent. Tirzah could not quite pinpoint the reason for her fascination any more than she cared to try to. She only knew she wanted more. She was touching herself before she’d even brought the link up. 

Whatever Tirzah was expecting, it was nothing like what she found.  

The video opens on a plain black screen. Fifty-eight seconds pass before the shot fades in on a darkened room, where the image of a woman comes dimly into view. She is centred in the frame, facing the camera and sitting naked on her knees with her hands on her knees. Her long dark hair hangs behind her shoulders, her eyes are closed, and her face has no expression. She is Queen Sofia. 

The only source of light is coming from behind the camera, perhaps from a torch mounted to the camera itself, spotlighting its subject and revealing nothing of the features of the room. 

The camera moves in slowly until the frame stops just above her breasts, and the shot holds here on her static, placid face for another sixty-seven seconds. If the Queen is so much as breathing, her face gives no sign whatsoever. 

It is now that from out the pitch darkness behind her there begins a wide, uncanny jostling movement. At first the low-grain camera makes the pale and blobby wiggling shapes impossible to discern. But as they near the foreground they emerge to take the form of naked, writhing male bodies. A whole host of men differing greatly in height, build, age, and colour begin crowding around behind Sofia in a horizontal line, jogging and bouncing on the spot in a silent jig of anticipation. The all-consuming dark obscures their numbers, but the frontline is some dozen bodies strong. 

Then there is a sound like a popping balloon – the only hint of audio – and at this the rightmost member of the line waddles over to Sofia’s left and immediately ejaculates onto her shoulder. Her eyes remain closed, her face deathly still; indeed she does not react at all. 

No sooner after the first man has exited the frame does the second one approach for the same purpose, only his semen lands haphazardly on her hair and drips back in a clump behind her shoulder. The third man is right behind him; he orgasms right on her cheek. The fourth one, her other shoulder. The fifth, her forehead. The sixth, her chest. And so on. And so on. And so on. 

The men keep coming at a rate of roughly one every ten seconds. The second one man leaves the line, he is replaced by another behind him. In the darkness it’s impossible to see where they’re coming from. They don’t look cold, they don’t look hot. A few are surprisingly elderly. Many appear distressingly young. Occasionally there are scars, tattoos, rashes, infections, diseases. More than one hobbles over on crutches; two or three have prosthetic limbs; one has a colostomy bag. They all keep jigging on the spot, their fleshy bodies bouncing, their strange impatient movement never wavering or ending. 

Throughout it all, Queen Sofia never moves. She never flinches. Her eyes are closed and her face has no expression at every moment of every minute. 

The video goes on this way for five hours, twenty minutes, fifty-nine seconds. Even by the time her nose and mouth have all but disappeared there are no signs of breath or movement underneath. By the end, she is so utterly encased by what is now many pints of semen that scarcely any skin or hair is visible beneath the thick and gluey sheet of yellow grey encasing every inch of the once humanoid form below. A crudely female candle melting slowly on the floor. A greasy heap of animal fat congealed into a person. A sad collapsing snowman leaking wet and dirty sludge. 

When the video is finished the footage simply cuts straight off. There is no way to skip ahead, pause, or rewind. One can only open the file or close it. It fills the screen automatically with no option to minimise, right-click, or download. 

Tirzah makes it less than half an hour – hardly a score for the leaderboard. 

Within mere minutes of beginning her experience, all pretensions of masturbation were utterly gone. Tirzah was simply transfixed, absorbing the hypnotic and lifeless procession which seemed to have no hope of ever finishing. When she finally did turn it off, she felt no responsibility for the action; it just happened. She looked at her hand, saw her thumb move to close the window, and watched as it pressed down. 

She went to sleep in her own bed in a kind of daze, and feeling vaguely ill, with all her newly gathered screenshots burning on her retinas like last-seen images. Restless, she dreamed of dark, low spaces, cramped and wet and suffocating, which no light could penetrate.

The next day saw an unusually early start by Tirzah’s standards, accompanied by a disproportionately bad hangover. She estimated she’d managed five hours sleep at most, and hated herself for it. Breakfast was a single fried egg with ketchup on a piece of dry white toast – they were out of lactose-free butter. As she sadly pushed her fork around the slimy egg white she thought she’d maybe taken her investigation too far. She felt she could live without knowing exactly what was motivating a bunch of demented virgins to obsess over the most revolting fetish porn ever filmed. Simultaneously it occurred to her that if she were to invest half as much effort into writing her dissertation as she had put into online sleuthing, the upcoming submission date might stop resembling a cancerous tumour rapidly metastasising in her mental calendar. 

Submission in just ten weeks. Graduation just two weeks after that. And then what, exactly? What did she have to show for the past three years and however many thousand pounds? What was she expected to do with the rest of her life? Where would she even live? And what the hell was she supposed to do about Ed? 

It was all almost enough to make her cry. And then it was enough to make her cry. Tirzah shoved her plate away and held her face in her hands, shuddering and sobbing. She wanted badly for someone to hug her, but Ed would not be up for hours. He’d probably be all hurt that she hadn’t stayed in his room, too, probably pull that stupid puppy dog face. She felt a pang of resentment for him which only made her angrier with herself. 

The cry was exhausting yet invigorating. When the awful weight had left her, Tirzah went back to her room to forage around her cluttered and dusty desk for a post-it note, on which she scribbled three commandments in bright red permanent marker:

– FINISH DISS!!!
– STOP FCKING ED!!!
– SORT LIFE OUT!!!

This she stuck to the forehead of her own reflection in the full-length wardrobe mirror. 

Reading back the post-it note gave Tirzah a new sense of calm. She stood before it for some time, wiping her eyes and nose, sporadically nodding and breaking out into involuntary grins. Then her brain remembered that coffee existed, and marijuana too, and she knew exactly how to spend the rest of her day. She couldn’t quite bring herself to leave her pyjamas and go all the way back to the library, but with Harry still at Dean’s (again) and Ed being Ed, there was no competition for the kitchen table. 

Over the next four hours, Tirzah made more progress on her dissertation than she had for the entire semester. There began to emerge in her mind a vague picture of herself as a successful person who did the things she was supposed to do in a timely and responsible manner. The kind of person a parent might be proud of, a high-ranking employer might want to hire, or an equally successful and brilliant man might be attracted to. Most amazing of all, she even started to recall some of the reasons she’d first wanted to pursue her chosen degree subject, as a precocious and ambitious girl fresh out of sixth form college, and how much optimism she felt the past three years had robbed her. At no point did she feel the urge to go and masturbate or look at porn just to try and clear the stress fog from her head.

It was very unfortunate that two things happened next. As the clock struck four fifteen, Ed entered the kitchen buzzing with an uncharacteristic energy. In her relative bliss Tirzah felt pleased to see him, though his strange excitement jarred her. He was grinning, shoving his phone in her face and saying “Tizz, she’s dead! She’s fucking dead!”

The article was dated just over a year ago. Tirzah took it in with growing horror.

ADULT STAR FOUND DEAD AT HOUSE PARTY 

An adult film star who starred in more than 200 movies has died at the age of 23. 

Catherine Poderosa, better known as Sofia Ruinz, reportedly died in Los Angeles, California on Sunday morning. The Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s Office confirmed Poderosa had passed away but did not disclose a cause. Although the exact cause of death currently remains unknown, police have said there is no indication of foul play. 

According to the Los Angeles Daily News, Poderosa was last seen attending a party on Saturday night at a Long Beach property belonging to film producer Wayne Waxon. It was here that her body was discovered by friends in a room on the property’s upper floor. One guest described the scene as “devastating”. 

Poderosa had long been a controversial figure in the adult film industry, first making an impact with her record-breaking series Queen Sofia Reignz. Her death marks the end of a nearly five-year career which saw the California native amass more than 200 film credits. 

Her family has asked for privacy at this time. 

Ed was babbling about how he’d woken up with an inexplicable urge to ‘carry on the research’ when he made his shocking discovery. On top of this he showed Tirzah a thread he’d found on a porn-centric message board after searching for ‘Sofia Ruinz dead’ wherein a user claiming to have known Catherine Poderosa alleged more details to the story. They said an incident had taken place during the filming of one of Catherine’s last movies which left her traumatised and close to quitting the whole industry. In the weeks leading up to her death she was badly abusing drugs and not acting herself at all. They believed the producer named in the news article was the one responsible for her death, that he may have fed Catherine a lethal dose of drugs in order to cover up his involvement in whatever the incident had been – they didn’t know specifically. They said the suspiciousness of her death was an open secret in the community and that seedy rumours surrounded that producer like stink lines on a dead fish. 

The most recent reply to this had come from a user named 44magsteve, and was written just one month ago. It said ‘BURN IN HELL WHORE SLUT THIS WITCH KILLED MY BROTHER!’.  

Evidently sensing Tirzah’s lack of enthusiasm, Ed felt the need to explain that this revelation cast a whole new light on the sofragettes and their idolising of Ruinz. In his words it rendered her a “porn Jesus”, presumably meaning she was like a martyr for their extreme sexual cosmology. He suggested it could be that this notion of ‘ascension’ related to death – perhaps suicide or even murder. In fact, what if ‘world sofination’ was actually a codename for some kind of grand terrorist act the incels were plotting? It was common for Ed’s imagination to express itself largely in terms of the violent video games he devoted so many hours to. As such he proceeded to outline what was essentially the plot of the latest Call of Duty game only with incels in place of the villains. 

Ed didn’t seem to have seen 44magsteve’s comment, but Tirzah could not stop thinking about it. Because she was almost completely certain her eyes had flashed over that username somewhere before. Recently. And as her memory strained to solidify this connection, the front door clattered open and Harry came in with an armful of shopping. 

Past Ed and Harry’s cheerful small talk, Tirzah stared fast into nothingness, her mind’s eye back in that fuzzy, lightless space where Sofia Ruinz sat poised like a marble statue. Things seemed to be adding up to make a dreadful kind of sense. She recalled how still that face had looked, and yet, how focused, how deliberate. That face hadn’t looked dead; motionless, yes, but alive with purpose – not that Tirzah had ever seen a person dead before. Then again, she had never seen a ghost before either, at least as far as she knew. She couldn’t figure out which scenario was less unlikely: that Sofia Ruinz’s magnum opus actually starred a corpse in early rigor mortis, or that any living human being could achieve such a persistent calm in such uncomfortable circumstances. There was a version of the story Tirzah could imagine in which Ruinz was an expert-level meditator, or had been put under a deep hypnosis, or had taken any manner of drugs to get into that state – or some combination of all three. But even then there were questions. 

Trying to remember it felt like dragging her limbs through heavy sand, as if her mind was reluctant to acknowledge the thing existed at all. But it was true, wasn’t it? None of it made any sense. There must have been two hundred separate men in the first thirty minutes alone, all completely different-looking, almost none of them even remotely the physical type that you’d expect in porn – amateurs, in other words. That many strange men, a seemingly endless parade, all ready to orgasm like clockwork from seemingly no stimulation, in an enormous queue, in a mysterious room of apparently boundless size. Where had they all come from?

On second thought, Tirzah could believe that it was at least theoretically possible to assemble a willing cast of men for such an enterprise. But how would you even begin to start looking? And why? All that effort for a video which surely no one in their right mind could find remotely arousing. The whole experience was so far removed from anything resembling actual human sexuality as to appear downright ludicrous in the cold light of day. And more than a little terrifying. Clearly the incels had no answers, hence their efforts to identify the male cast members. That was when it snapped back – where Tirzah thought she’d seen the name 44magsteve before. And with it, another phrase returned to mind: 

HELP ME FIND MY BROTHER!!! 

She eyed Harry’s rucksack, sitting by the kitchen door. She felt no more willing to wait for another opportunity to get into the laptop than she was prepared to simply ask its owner. Nor did she fancy trying to remotely guess her way into Harry’s incels.onion account without a VPN. Tirzah had no idea how a VPN actually worked, but she hadn’t forgotten her earlier idea of the incels tracking down and storming the flat – in fact Ed’s apocalyptic fantasising had only made it worse. 

So instead she used her own phone. She found the post about Sofia Ruinz’s death on the public forum and went to 44magsteve’s user profile. His comment history showed the vast majority of his recent activity had all been on the incel subforum. Nearly all of his comments had been deleted – the only exceptions were just variations on his earlier assertion that Ruinz was a bitch and a slut who’d somehow killed his brother. 

Then Harry clasped a hand on Tirzah’s shoulder. She was beaming and squealing words of affirmation about the fact her flatmate had actually got some work done. Ed announced that he too had accomplished some important research today, and winked at Tirzah, who once again felt like hurling her phone into a wall, and this time, her own head along with it. She decided she had done enough work for one day, and spontaneously asked Harry if she wanted to spend the evening watching reality TV together, which they always used to do, but hadn’t for ages. She was unbelievably relieved when Harry said she’d love to.

The reality show was about a group of cheating husbands who had been duped into vacationing with their former mistresses while their wives secretly watched them via hidden cameras and devised ways to tempt them into having sex, and if the husbands could resist, they’d split a cash prize, only there was no rule that they couldn’t have sex with another husband’s mistress, which many did. Ed stayed in his room. 

Tirzah smoked so much by herself that evening that she more or less passed out by midnight, and woke the next day bleary-eyed and hopeless. As her hand reached reflexively for her phone she caught its movement in the mirror, and noticed the post-it note, its red words seeming to sting her. She had a vision of herself in a judge’s wig, madly banging a gavel, raging and pointing in condemnation at her own reflection. A voice in her head begged her not to lose yesterday’s momentum, and as she commenced to argue with it she was amazed to see her body already rising easily from the bed and begin to get dressed for the library. 

Over the next two weeks, Tirzah established a fairly solid timetable. Most of the daylight hours saw her working at the library, her phone stashed securely in one of the ground floor rented lockers, with white noise in her headphones and piles of books surrounding her. No matter what, she would stop promptly at 6pm, having limited all marijuana use to strictly only ever after this – often she had a joint rolled in advance for the short walk home. She figured out that based on her average grade so far, with the way these things were calculated, she’d need a minimum 50% grade in her dissertation to graduate successfully. This relieved the pressure some – she was nevertheless bored by her research subject, and every day was mostly spent trying to catch up on all the statistical testing methods she had never paid attention to till now. But still Tirzah felt inspired to chisel the thing into the best possible version of itself. She began to see it as a game, and grew sincerely interested to see how she could perform within its parameters, wanting to push herself as far as she could. 

The starkest change of all was in her relationship with Ed. Since authoring the sacred post-it note Tirzah had managed to avoid all sexual temptation. They still spent many deeply stoned nights a week together, but she was generally able to escape the inevitable suggestive looks by saying she had to get up for work early, which actually was true. Not that this solved the problem of Ed’s puppy dog eyes. 

When she worked at home, he would bring her cups of tea. When she came home from the library, he would roll her joints for her. He would text her funny memes which she wouldn’t reply to. At times he would even compliment her. Tirzah believed Ed was so relaxed and obliging as a person that he’d probably just be interpreting it all as a temporary dry spell necessitated by her newfound devotion to passing her final year. That he’d be waiting for her. She just hoped he’d get the message sooner than later. 

He kissed her once, somewhat forcefully, catching her off-guard outside her bedroom door as they stood awkwardly saying goodnight. She’d been unable to stop herself kissing him back. But luckily she could just run into her room straight afterwards. 

When Tirzah’s libido got too much and she began to fear a relapse, she would just get herself into bed as soon as possible and masturbate to her heart’s content. She’d found her tolerance for fetish porn had grown substantially, particularly anything involving one woman and many men. Sometimes, right after finishing, with her phone still in her hand, she would go back to the open tab detailing Sofia Ruinz’s death just to see the photo the report had used. How normal and happy her face looked. Sometimes Tirzah would glimpse her own reflection overlaid on that smiling face and stare until she fell asleep.

By mid-March, she was nearly two-thirds to the maximum word limit. One afternoon she was getting a coffee from the machine in the library café when Max tapped her on the shoulder. Tirzah hadn’t seen Max for a very long time – in fact she had made sure of it. As an Engineering student he was always halfway across town in the Science building, which had its own library, and he had no possible reason to be here now. 

“I’m with my girlfriend,” Max explained, gesturing to an out-of-focus woman who was staring at them from a nearby table. “You look good,” he continued. “How’s it going? You must be nearly finished now?” Max’s degree lasted two years more than Tirzah’s. He would be here long after she was gone. “We have to get lunch sometime. Are you seeing anyone?” 

The silence and stale smell of the coffee was nauseating. Max was grinning at her exactly like he always used to. 

“You and Wee Ed, huh?” 

Tirzah wasn’t sure exactly what she said to get away, but soon she was in the bathroom with her phone screen a few inches from her sniffling nose. She was trying to ignore the memories of the last time she’d seen Max, along with the phantom burning pains she still sometimes felt from the chlamydia he’d never admitted to spreading. A piece of graffiti on the stall door yelled that ‘MISTER RIGHT WILL EAT YOUR HEART ASS WHOLE’. Tirzah was gazing through blurred vision at the smiling photo of Catherine Poderosa. And then she was back on the public forum to look again at 44magsteve’s comment history. She reviewed what he had said about Sofia Ruinz and then she went back further.

 Prior to his posting on the incel forums, 44magsteve had made several posts on message boards for Toronto locals; these took the form of appeals relating to his missing brother, a 21-year-old Kiyoshi ‘Yoshi’ Miike. Apparently nobody had seen or heard from Yoshi since he left the family home some weeks prior, planning to meet up with some friends he had made via the message board. Supposedly the friends were in Ottawa, a few hours away from the Miike home in East York, Toronto. Yoshi’s public profile showed he had last logged in just four days after leaving. His younger brother, an amateur coder, was confident he would soon be sufficiently skilled to figure out a way to hack the account and view his private messages. 

There was just one other comment 44magsteve had written between then and now, this one on another user’s post made in the Toronto message board. It was a link to a local news story about an apparent suicide pact between three 14-year-old high school students in East York. These boys were known friends who had all been found dead the week after attending a party which had reportedly involved the screening of extreme pornographic content. Parents of other attendees had recently complained of such content being spread via the school email system, prompting a full investigation by the local governors’ board. All three bodies shared similar patterns of ‘severe self-mutilation’. 44magsteve’s comment read simply ‘DEMON SLUT STRIKES AGAIN!!!’

Then Harry messaged her. The rugby boys and the anthropology girls were all going out tonight to celebrate handing in their dissertations. They were picking up some pills – did Tirzah want any?

The reply was an emphatic yes. 

That evening, Tirzah and Ed were in the flat having a preliminary joint. Soon they would be leaving for Dean’s flat, where Harry and her other friends were gathered for pre-drinks. Neither Ed nor Tirzah much cared for any of the other people attending this party, but still Tirzah felt the extreme nerves she always did prior to taking pills. She was wearing a very form-fitting dress, and could not stop jigging her leg. Ed was pontificating about how one of his mate’s ex-girlfriends was there and was known to be a massive slut, but that she also had the biggest breasts he thought he’d ever seen in real life, and that he thought with breasts like that it would be impossible not to be a slut. 

“Yeah? Thinkin’ you might get lucky?” Tirzah said, her voice croaky, her words seeming to drift in from another part of the room. 

Ed looked at her. “Why? You jealous?” 

“The day I’m jealous of you,” she rasped, exhaling a huge cloud of smoke, “is the day I finally throw myself out this fucking window.” This made her laugh, and she laughed for a while before noticing she laughed alone. Ed’s big face, usually so open, was curiously closed. 

“You look like a slut in that dress,” he said flatly. 

For a long time they stared at each other while the joint between Tirzah’s fingers quietly sizzled, burning away in neglect. Then she scoffed, shivering and looking off at the wall. “That’s the point, stupid,” she replied at length. “Anyway. You should be so lucky. Only way you’d pass the fucking year.” 

After a while, Ed huffed a kind of half-laugh and beckoned for the joint, which Tirzah gave him. “Talking of sluts,” he said, “You ever watch that video?” 

She didn’t need to ask which one. She shook her head. 

“I did,” he said. “Earlier on.”

Tirzah’s eyes bulged. “How’d you find it?” 

“Fucking freaky, man.”

“No, I mean how – how did you get the link?”

He explained how he’d simply made an account on the public forum under the name ‘WeeVirgin69’ and directly messaged a large number of incels, asking if they could give him the link. Eventually one did. Ed said he had made it all the way to the end earlier that day by keeping it on in the background while he played video games, checking periodically to see if anything interesting was happening. He looked repulsed when Tirzah asked if he’d jerked off to it. 

“Six hours of bukkake ain’t really my thing.”

“Six hours? I – I heard it was only five hours-something. Did you get a longer one?” 

“Hold on.” Ed brought out his phone to get the video back up. He showed it to Tirzah. The duration now showed as five hours, fifty-nine minutes, thirteen seconds. Looking at the opening shot of Sofia Ruinz on her knees again made Tirzah’s stomach lurch and she sprang up in her seat declaring that they needed to get a move on. 

No sooner after arriving at Dean’s flat, Ed and Tirzah split up to cut two separate paths through the crowded sea of bodies. The pre-drinks lasted about two hours. At intervals they clocked each other from different corners of rooms, each speaking to people the other didn’t recognise. Everyone was talking about how they’d finished their dissertations, what they were going to do next, and Tirzah felt each forced congratulation like a punch in the gut. She drank and drank and drank. 

When it was finally time to go to the club, Harry found Tirzah and gave her the first half of her pill. She ran to interrupt Ed talking to some girl, threw her arms around his shoulders and said they needed to take them at the same time, that they needed to be in sync. 

The club was a kaleidoscope of strobing lights and piercing bass, half-glimpsed flesh and leering shaded faces. The rugby boys all had different funny sunglasses and Tirzah felt they all had phones for eyes. It frightened her, yet she was cackling as Ed spun her around like a marionette in his big arms, swooping her in gusting clouds through the electrifying music storm that seemed to penetrate her nerves. His hands rolled with her swaying waist, his fingers gripped the muscles in her back, each touch a tickling firework, each squeeze a jolting, charging bolt. She leapt at him to scream into his ear “DO YOU STILL THINK I LOOK LIKE A SLUT?!” 

He mumbled something back but the feel of his breath on her neck alone was a whole new shot of adrenaline. She felt him tense against her stomach and she laughed, pushing him away only to pull him back again and hold him ever closer, closer, smelling him, squeezing his arms, wrapping herself around him and holding on for dear eternal life. 

At home their hungry mouths attacked like crashing waves, his tongue writhing furiously with hers, his teeth catching and biting her lips. Their bodies bounced and rolled around the empty flat as one grunting, moaning animal. In his room Ed threw her on the bed and tore her dress in two. With one hand he pushed her facedown and held her rear up with the other, shoving his fingers inside her in violent thrusting stabs as she gasped. She couldn’t understand what he was saying, and when he slapped her the sounds seemed to break the air. He grabbed her neck as he took her from behind, pulling her head up painfully, contorting her spine with ease, slapping her over and over, and as he wrenched her head back close to his mouth she could make out he was panting “slut, slut, slut”. 

He spun her over and pushed her legs apart and up, choking her again and watching her face grow purple. He slapped her breasts. He spat on her. He pounded himself into her so hard and fast she felt their bones colliding. She herself was making sounds and saying words she couldn’t comprehend. He spat on her and smeared her face with his hands, he stuck his fingers in her mouth and pushed them to the back of her throat and pushed them deeper. Her mind was only flashing brutal images and unclear signs. The sounds of the bed squeaking madly like a mouse seemed to take up all her thoughts. She looked up at the ceiling swirling grey-blue in the darkness. He choked her so hard she thought she could not see properly and then he was moving her again, his hands threatening to crush her skull as he held her in place and told her she was a slut and to tell him she wanted it – tell him she wanted it – tell him, tell him, tell him – tell him she was a slut – tell him she wanted his cum – and then her face was hot and wet and she was doubled over, retching involuntary. 

Ed had fallen on top of Tirzah. His whole body was shuddering and he was making sounds like she had never heard before. “Get off me,” she said gently, then again, “GET OFF ME!” and he rolled off as she kicked at him and grabbed the bedsheet, wiping fervently at her face and trying not to gag, feeling the tears come up like vomit and hearing her frantic breaths break into sobs. 

She ran out, shut herself in her room and locked the door. She threw her phone at the wall. She slapped herself in the head and screamed and cried and tried to drown out the knocking and the moaning from the other side.

“I love you, Tizz… I fucking love you… Tizz… please open the door… Tizz… TIZZ!”

In the wired half-consciousness of what approximated sleep that night, Tirzah heard vague movements outside her bedroom door. She thought she saw feet pacing, shadows flickering in the hallway light, she thought she heard wet footsteps squelching on the floorboards, someone coming in and out of the kitchen. Hands rummaging in the cutlery drawer. She dreamed of a man who was not Max or Ed, a man whose soul was only his own reflection in a dead, black computer screen. She dreamed of a liminal space in the dark web, where the great leaderboard updated itself once again. 

When Tirzah rose later that morning, the memory of the night seemed like a terrible fantasy. The post-it note fell down unnoticed as she dragged herself past it. She found Ed’s bedroom door slightly ajar, and when he did not reply, she pushed it open. 

The room smelled worse than usual. Ed lay slumped in bed with his laptop open by his side. Blood coated his sheets and sat in deep red stains all over his shirt. He was naked from the waist down with his penis in his hand and he had shoved two forks in his eye sockets. 

They didn’t let her pass.