The Souls

You voted, and STAY won. At 9 a.m., Apollo keeps his word and retracts the strike. His terms: now you cut for me, only me. By noon, Hermes has cut three of Apollo's streams for a hundred and twenty euros. A hundred and sixty in total, every cent from Apollo.

At 1 p.m., Zeus opens Hell Week: until the thirty-first, the dead may follow. By two, the god just above Hermes in the ranking gains five thousand followers. Hermes has nothing of his own to post: every cut he makes is Apollo's.

At 5 p.m., an account with no face writes: ten thousand souls, real dead, a hundred and sixty euros. Hermes laughs. He has walked the dead down for ages, he knows a real soul. He pays it all. At 5:01, ten thousand followers arrive in the same minute, and for the first time in eight days, Hermes isn't last. Here is what he doesn't know: far below, the same ten thousand black circles glow on a tablet.

At 9:12 p.m., all ten thousand vanish, and a warning lands: fake engagement. Here is the trap: Zeus counts the dead, YouTube counts accounts. Subscribers gained through artificial means, like buying them from a third party, are spam, and spam subscribers don't count toward a channel's total. Worse, any method that breaks YouTube's rules can mean content removal or a channel takedown, even when someone you hired did it. And in the US, an FTC rule in force since October 2024 bans buying fake followers to misrepresent your influence for a commercial purpose.

Now the choice: confess, and Apollo may fire him and file the strike again. Hide it, and Apollo may never know, but the seller has the receipt. One last thing: at 9:13, the account with no face sends one more message. To Apollo.