The Trade

You voted, and CONFESS won. Hermes spends the night at his mother's, in Maia's cave on Mount Cyllene. At 9 a.m., on her doorstep, he calls Apollo and tells him everything: the dead followers, the hundred and sixty euros. Apollo already knew. He read the seller's receipt the night before. His answer: honesty suits you.

At 10 a.m., at Maia's kitchen table, Hermes completes YouTube's policy training for his fake engagement warning: on YouTube, a first violation usually brings only a warning, and the training lets it expire ninety days later. At noon, Apollo goes live with an offer to his fans: follow my editor, he follows every one of you back. In the agora of Olympus, fans stop Hermes for selfies, and across the square Aphrodite films the scene. Real faces, Hermes thinks, nothing bought this time. By six, four thousand strangers follow him, and he has followed every one of them back. He is 1,001 followers behind the god above him.

Here is what Hermes doesn't know: one of the four thousand has no face, and he followed it back. At 9 p.m., back in his mother's cave, the warning becomes a strike, and his channel is frozen for a week: no uploads, no lives, no posts. Here is the trap: YouTube's fake engagement policy bans offering to subscribe to another creator's channel only if they subscribe to yours, sub for sub. Break the same policy within the ninety days, and the warning may not expire: the channel may get a strike.

At 11:58 p.m., the account with no face writes: I'll speak for you on the thirty-first. Now the choice: wait, and Hermes stays silent through Halloween while the god above him in the ranking climbs. Sneak onto his second channel, and he risks every channel he has: YouTube says using another channel to get around a strike's restrictions can end all of them.

Then Apollo calls: a week without your channel, you'll cut for me, only me.