LIVE - PART 3: THE COST OF THE BODY

Intergrateo Press presents the third installment of the serial 'LIVE,' an unfolding narrative exploring contemporary themes. This segment delves into the stark realities within a compound led by an influencer turned cult leader, examining the psychological manipulation at play. It provides a nuanced perspective on the attention economy and the concept of devotion in a community shaped by social media. The piece further investigates the unexpected presence of gunfire and the complex dynamics that define this unique environment, setting a compelling stage for the unfolding drama.

LOST? SEE PARTS 1 & 2 BELOW

LIVE/PART_1: THE_WORLD_AND_THE_WITNESS

LIVE/PART_2: THE_DEAL_ENTERING_VIEW

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Authors Note: Live is one continuous livestream of an influencer turned cult leader. Four things share your screen:

Plain text is the leader, talking to the camera.

^{[1,247 watching] = view count updating}

^{21:14 [glow_alyssa] : The live chat, scrolling while she talks.}

[Ambient action around the leader shows up in italics and brackets. Such as: Two bursts hit the rear wall]

Continuity Year 35

Part 3: The compound, the cost, the floor

[Two bursts hit the rear wall. The camera shakes once and resettles. Three rounds answer from the room next door, fast. She does not turn. The GLOW backdrop is still behind her. The ring light is still holding her face flat and clean while the wall behind it takes fire.]

[151,000 watching]

I see the count. A hundred and fifty thousand of you. I see every one.

You are going to hear it through the walls for the rest of the night now. I am not going to react to every burst, and the OGs are not going to react to every burst, because if we flinch on cue we let the people outside set the rhythm of the night, and they do not get to set the rhythm. Eyes on me. We are not feeding what they are doing out there. We are doing what we are doing in here.

I promised you a man under a floor. I am going to keep that promise tonight, I keep my promises now. But you will not understand the floor unless you understand what we built on top of it, so you have to let me build it for you first, fast, in the order it happened. Stay with me.

21:56 [glow_alyssa] : ❤️ keep going queen

21:56 [troocrimeaddict] : ok so the gunfire is definitely real, it’s not a loop

21:56 [cnn_link] : confirmed. our perimeter camera has an active exchange. we are live with this now on the broadcast.

21:56 [callthecops_actual] : NEW ACCOUNT bc you muted my last one. SHE HAS ARMED PEOPLE FIRING BACK

21:56 [glow_alyssa] : the team has been firing back for an hour babe. they fired first. we said that an hour ago.

@callthecops_actual we do have armed people firing back. I am not going to pretend we do not. Hold that thought for about ten minutes, because I am going to tell you exactly why a wellness compound has guns, and the answer is the same as the answer to the man under the floor, and you are going to wish it was a simpler story.

It was Kayleigh who started the compound. In the group chat, about a year after I joined it. She said: what if we lived closer to the work. What if the practice was the day, not a thing you did inside a day. She said: I have been looking at land. And she had. Six months of looking. A spreadsheet. Three parcels, and the numbers run on what fifteen of the OGs could put in, and twenty, and thirty.

I did not start the compound. The compound was Kayleigh’s spreadsheet, and I said yes to it the way I have said yes to every large thing in my life. Quietly. By answering an email instead of closing the laptop. We are in option B right now. The building behind me. The kitchen down the hall. The meditation hall past that. The land you can see a little of when the spotlight catches the verandah.

[157,000 watching]

[A single round hits the rear wall, high above her head. Dust comes down from the ceiling, visible in the spotlight bleeding through the blinds. She does not turn. Her left hand rises to her ear, adjusts the in-ear, comes back to the desk.]

Remember the kitchen I told you about. The mugs drying on towels. The free hands. I told you to hold on to it.

When we moved onto the land, that kitchen became four rooms. The candle pour. The print room with the heat presses. The packing room. The room where the orders went out. And the people who worked them were the followers, and they were not paid, because being paid would have made it a job and they wanted it to be devotion, and I let them want that, because devotion has a much better margin than wages.

The man in the good tie is going to call those rooms a sweatshop in the morning. I have decided tonight that I am not going to argue with him. Women who sold their apartments to be here worked ten and twelve hour days in those rooms making the products with my face on them, for nothing, and called it a privilege, and I built the spreadsheet that depended on them calling it a privilege. So. Sweatshop. Fine. He can have the word. I earned the word. Hold that against me. It is not even the worst thing I am going to tell you tonight.

[166,000 watching]

22:00 [troocrimeaddict] : she’s just agreeing with every accusation

22:00 [reciepts_only] : it’s so much worse than denying. she takes the word and keeps going.

22:00 [manifestmom] : she’s telling the TRUTH that’s the work

22:00 [rachi_b] : i feel sick and i can’t stop watching

Once we were all in one place, I could see the attention the way I had learned to see it on Fridays. Who was bright that week. Who was dim. The platform showed me some of it; living in the same building showed me the rest. And once I could see it, I could tune it.

I moved people closer to the work or further from it based on what their attention was doing. Not as punishment. As an arrangement. Bright that week, you ate first and slept nearest the hall. Dim that week, you ate at the second sitting and slept at the end of the verandah. It reset every Sunday. People moved. People worked to move. The bright weeks got brighter and the work got stronger, and I told them and I told myself that I was honouring their effort. I want to be clean about it tonight. I was tuning a dial, and the dial was made of people, and I was good at it.

[188,000 watching]

22:03 [glow_alyssa] : and we LOVED being tuned 🙏

22:03 [kayleigh_aligned] : we asked her to tune us

22:03 [rachi_b] : the way she just said “the dial was made of people”

22:03 [troocrimeaddict] : yeah. that’s the one that lands.

22:03 [cnn_link] : second perimeter camera just lost feed. noting that. don’t know what it means yet.

Rachi_b sitting with “the dial was made of people.” Troocrimeaddict, that’s the one that lands. Yeah. That’s the one.

I want you to meet somebody, because her name is going to come back tonight and I want it to land when it does. Wendy. Wendy is sixty-eight. She was a grandmother of four when she came and she is a grandmother of four now, and she FaceTimes them on Sunday afternoons from the verandah, in the good light, because she likes them to be able to see the garden behind her. Her daughter has been to a lawyer twice to try to get a court order about it. Wendy has told her, in writing, that she is here because she chose to be, that she is not being held, that she is not unwell, that she loves her, that this is her life. Susan, if you are watching, and I think you are: your mum is fine. She is in the meditation hall right now, with both feet on the floor.

Not everyone could keep up with the bright weeks. A woman whose name I am not going to say, because her family is watching, came in at year three and was bright for sixteen months. Then her niece got sick and she left for a week to be at the hospital, the way a decent person does, and when she came back the attention was not the same, and the chat knew before I did. The chat was kind to her. The chat is always kind. But she could feel the kindness, and the kindness was new, and the new kindness meant she had become a person being kind-ed to instead of a person doing the work. She left for good. No drama. No expulsion. A quiet narrowing of the people who returned her calls. The perimeter will tell you I locked her out. I did not lock her out. We narrowed. There is a difference and there is not a difference, and tonight I am letting the harder one be true.

I lost my oldest friend in year four. I am going to say her name, because reporters have been asking her for nine years and she has never said one word back, and I want her to know I have always seen that.

Her name is Hannah.

Hannah was the only person who was kind to me in the years I had to leave to become this. I did not tell you she existed in part one. I left her out. I am putting her back in tonight. She came to the compound once, year two, the only year I let any of my before-people in. She stayed three nights, watched one Friday working, and barely spoke on the drive to the airport. The last thing she said to me, in the car park, was: I am not afraid of you, but I am afraid of what you are going to do to yourself. Then she stopped picking up. For nine years. She never blocked me, never posted, never sold a story. She just stopped.

Hi Hannah. If you are watching. You were right. You have always been right. I am still here. I am still doing it.

[218,000 watching]

22:09 [glow_alyssa] : oh

22:09 [troocrimeaddict] : she just told her best friend she was right and that she’s doing it anyway

22:09 [reciepts_only] : it is honestly worse that she’s being honest about it

22:09 [troocrimeaddict] : yeah. it’s worse. it’s so much worse.

Reciepts_only, troocrimeaddict, yeah. It’s worse. Honest is a tax I owe you tonight. Glow_alyssa just said “oh.” Yeah, babe.

Now. The floor.

[A burst comes through the wall to her left, lower than the others, into the room beyond. Something lands in that room that is not a wall. The audio catches half a sound and then nothing. Two rounds answer from inside the same wall, then a pause. Her eyes go off the lens, fractionally, to the right, and come back. She has not turned her head.]

His name was a name you would know. He was a senator. I am not going to say it tonight, because his family did not choose any of this and they are going to hear it enough in the morning. He found us early, year three, when we were still mostly a chat that had bought some land. He believed, or he believed enough, or he wanted to stand close to something that felt like power because he had the public kind and it had stopped feeling like anything in his hands.

He was useful. When the council came about the zoning, he made a call. When a journalist got close in year four, before Eleanor, he made a call. He kept the wolves off us, and I let myself not look too hard at what he was, for about two years.

And he took. I am going to say this the plain way, because the soft way would be a second crime against the people it happened to. He came to the compound and he went for the newest ones. The youngest. The ones still so grateful to be let inside that they did not yet know they were allowed to say no. He helped us least exactly when we needed him most, and he reached for the people who could least afford to be reached for, and he did it because we could not afford to make him stop. I knew. Not all of it, not at first. But I knew, and I weighed it against the calls he made for us, and for too long I decided the calls were worth it.

Until a night they were not. I am not going to tell you what he did that night, or to whom, because she is alive and she is not on this stream and she does not belong on a news ticker. I will tell you what we did. The OGs and I sat in that kitchen, the one with the mugs, and we did not have a long conversation. We decided he was a threat. Not only to her. To the work. To all of it, to every person who had sold a flat and poured a candle to be here. And we ended him.

I want to be exact, because you have stayed for exact. We did not call anyone. We did not let the law have it. We decided, and we did it, and we put him under the floor of the hall we were pouring that month, and the concrete went down the next morning on schedule, and we did the working on top of him that night, and every night since.

The man under the floor is the foundation of the room. I have meant that literally for nine years.

[247,000 watching]

22:11 [callthecops_actual] : she just confessed to murder on a livestream

22:11 [callthecops_actual] : SHE JUST CONFESSED TO MURDER

22:11 [troocrimeaddict] : she did. that wasn’t a metaphor. she said they killed him and poured the floor.

22:11 [somebodyzuncle] : i saw this form. now you’ve all seen it confess.

22:11 [reciepts_only] : “we decided and we did it”

22:11 [glow_alyssa] : he was hurting the youngest of us. she protected us.

22:11 [glow_alyssa] : i’m not going to pretend i’m sorry

22:11 [rachi_b] : i don’t know what to do with my body right now

22:11 [cnn_link] : producer is in my ear. we are NOT cutting away.

Callthecops, yes. I just confessed to murder on a livestream. I see what I just did. Troocrimeaddict naming it back to me, they killed him and poured the floor. Yes. Reciepts_only, quoting me, we decided and we did it. Yes. Glow_alyssa, you did not pretend to be sorry. I know. Rachi_b, you don’t know what to do with your body. Sit with it. Somebodyzuncle, you saw this form. I see you. CNN, thank you for not cutting away. I will not forget that.

[265,000 watching · 900,000 on the broadcasts]

Now you know why we have guns. After the floor went down, we understood something we had been able to not understand before. That one day, someone would come. Not when. But that the day existed, out there, with our name on it. So we got ready. I am the woman who armed a wellness compound. The rifles you are hearing answer through the walls tonight, the ones the news will hold up tomorrow as proof we were a militia all along, we bought them the year after the concrete, because once there is a man under your meditation hall you stop believing the world is going to leave you alone forever.

Eleanor found most of it in year six. She had been a follower, left in year two, and she wrote the piece for one of the magazines that still pays for long pieces. The Cleanest Cult in the Country. She got the spreadsheet right. She got the tuning right. She got the kindness and what the kindness was for. She got Hannah right, even with the name wrong. She got everything except the one thing nobody outside that kitchen knew, the thing I have just handed all of you, which is what was under the floor of the room she sat in to take her notes. I read her piece twice the day it came out and I did not respond, and I kept doing the work, and I want you to understand that I have read the case against me in good prose with my own name on it and I did not stop.

[276,000 watching · 1,600,000 on the broadcasts]

Two weeks ago, on a Friday the OGs had been building toward for three months, I told the stream the work was now strong enough to move a body. Not a stranger’s. Mine. I said the working had grown into a thing that could lift its own practitioner, and I gave a date, and the date is the day after tomorrow.

The clip got cut into shorts. The captions said different things on different platforms and the algorithm liked cult leader threatens mass levitation event the best, so that is the one that ran. A woman who left in year seven saw it, called her parents, told them she thought we were going to do something we would not come back from. Her parents called the police. That is who came first, this afternoon. The local ones, for a welfare check.

But somebody, sometime in the last two years, also told somebody about the floor. I do not know who. I have a guess and I am going to keep it. And that is the reason the people outside right now are federal, and frightened enough to fire first. They are not out there for a levitation, my Glow family. You do not bring the FBI to a levitation. They are out there for a senator. The clip just gave them the address.

So that is the whole story. The telling has caught up to the night. There is nothing behind us anymore. There is only what we do next.

22:15 [glow_alyssa] : we’re here

22:15 [kayleigh_aligned] : present 🙏

22:15 [troocrimeaddict] : she just connected all of it. the body is why the feds are here.

22:15 [cnn_link] : we are going wide. national desks are picking this up now.

22:15 [theyrelying] : she told you she’s going to do it the day after tomorrow and you’re all still here

[Movement at the right edge of frame. A woman enters, mid-thirties, jeans and a grey long-sleeve, an earpiece at her collar. She steps in behind the leader and leans down to her ear. The collar mic catches her, low but clean. The leader does not turn her head.]

22:16 [kayleigh_aligned (on camera)] : Wendy’s gone. The round that came through went into the hall. It got her in the chest. Maya was with her. There was no time.

[The woman in grey waits a second and steps back out of frame. And then, for the first time since the stream went live, the leader’s body stops doing what she is telling it to do. Her right hand comes off the desk and lifts halfway to nothing and stays there, in the air, not finishing. Her chin drops. Her eyes go off the lens and down. The thumbnail is not pressed white anymore; the fingers have come apart. The ring light holds her face as evenly as it has all night. Nobody has touched the ring light. The stream sits on the top of her bowed head. The wall takes another round somewhere behind her. She does not look up. Eight seconds. Twelve.]

[278,000 watching · 1,900,000 on the broadcasts]

22:16 [glow_alyssa] : queen?

22:16 [manifestmom] : oh god oh god oh god

22:16 [troocrimeaddict] : did she just say Wendy. the grandmother.

22:16 [callthecops_actual] : THEY KILLED A SIXTY EIGHT YEAR OLD WOMAN ON LIVE TV

22:16 [susan_l_wendys_daughter] : that is my mother

22:16 [susan_l_wendys_daughter] : that is my mother

22:16 [susan_l_wendys_daughter] : please

[When she lifts her head the face is not the face the ring light was holding a minute ago. The wing is the same. The lip is the same. Something underneath it has gone. Her mouth opens. For a moment nothing comes. The most-watched woman in the country, mid-confession to a quarter of a million people, with a plan two days away and a body in the next room, has nothing in her mouth.]

[281,000 watching · 2,100,000 on the broadcasts]

Wendy.

I... give me a second. I am going to give myself a second. I have not given myself one all night and I am going to take one now, in front of all of you, because Wendy gets that from me. Wendy gets a second.

I planned for tonight. I want you to know that. I planned for the gate and the loudhailer and the federal rounds and the man in the tie in the morning. I have planned for every part of this for two years.

I did not plan for Wendy.

- AJW

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The concept cover for my upcoming novel - The Grey Corner, Book 2 of the Continuity Constellation.

Art by Saturnids Art Link: https://mushroomy.house/collections/saturnids

Book 1 of the Continuity Constellation: The Continuity Protocol available on Amazon and indie publishers

This segment of 'LIVE' offers a critical examination of the costs associated with such a lifestyle, revealing the intersection of wellness culture and coercive control. Through its unflinching portrayal of a compound under siege, the narrative illuminates the dark underbelly of influencer culture and the pervasive power of psychological manipulation. The exploration of devotion, the attention economy, and the true crime elements leaves the reader contemplating the profound implications for both individuals and society.