Method Madness

The PR dashboard was a live animal, pulsing with numbers and graphs that updated faster than the human eye could track. Olivia kept her stare glued to the main screen, pupils wide and unblinking in the blue light, left hand perched on the edge of her coffee, right hand throttling the mouse as if choking answers from the fiber optic veins of the internet. The numbers were supposed to climb, yes—but not like this, never like this.

At the top of the screen, the video thumbnail sat like a loaded gun: a single black rectangle, no branding, no title, nothing to suggest the studio or even the genre. But every thirty seconds, the view counter spun up another hundred thousand, then two, then five, as if the clip was duplicating itself in the bloodstream of the web.

She clicked for the latest version, just to be sure. The thirty-second Joker teaser played out in silence first, a black void that seemed to suck the air from the room.

At second three, the laugh began. It didn't hit with a hammer—it crept, a slow, sticky exhale, the sound of something rotting but not quite dead. Even through laptop speakers, it drilled the skull; through the office's surround system, it made every fine hair on Olivia's arms rise in salute.

Then the match: a hiss, a flare, the split-second flash that seared the green into the Joker's eyes. The face—white as chalk, mouth slashed in permanent carmine, the hair dark and slicked back but tinged at the roots with acid—hovered in the afterburn, pupils huge, rimmed with a jaundiced yellow, unblinking. There was no overture, no punchline, just the stare.

"You want to hear a secret?"

The voice, impossibly soft, seemed to transmit not through the speakers but through the inner ear, like a fragment of memory or a threat.

The camera closed in, and the Joker smiled—not wide, not manic, but tight and hungry. The tongue flicked out, slow and deliberate, tracing the top lip as if savoring the taste of the words.

The video cut there.

No fade, no logo, just instant darkness and the echo of the laugh, now burrowed like a parasite into whatever part of Olivia's brain still responded to fear.

She ran the sequence again, this time slower, analyzing the frame-by-frame readout of user reactions spooling down the side of the analytics dashboard. Each line was a confession, timestamped and mapped in real time:

—"I felt it in my spine."

—"Who IS this guy???"

—"That's not acting. That's not even human."

—"He's looking at me, right? Someone else sees that?"

Olivia sipped her coffee, the taste gone sour, and dragged the world map overlay into the center of the screen. The entire eastern seaboard was a hive of activity: red dots clustering in every major metro, radiating out along highways and commuter lines.

Europe was coming online, the UK and Germany lighting up like someone had thrown a switch in Parliament and every pub at once. She ran the clock forward—thirty minutes, then an hour.

Fourteen million unique views, the kind of number that, if sent to a CMO in a normal campaign, would be cause for champagne and contract negotiations.

This was not normal.

She thumbed her phone for the team Slack.

Every channel was on fire:

#wb-social-monitor: "Guys, what the actual fuck? #NewJoker trending #1 in 11 countries"

#crisis-room: "Did someone schedule this drop? Who greenlit? WHERE IS THE PRESS RELEASE"

#talent-outreach: "Are we prepped for talent media? Press about to riot. Need talking points. Need…anything."

Olivia closed Slack and opened her inbox. The messages were coming in at a rate she'd never seen: news alerts, influencer tags, even the senior VP of communications, who at this hour was usually dead to the world or, at best, chemically sedated.

—"Can you get ahead of this?"

—"We have reporters camped in the parking garage."

—"Is he even an actor? Or did we get fucking deepfaked?"

—"Find me an angle. Fast."

She set her phone down, exhaled, then checked the video again. At first, she had thought it was a prank—a rogue intern or a guerrilla campaign some West Coast marketing bro had launched as a joke. But the closer she watched, the more she felt it: the authenticity.

The way the voice rasped and softened, switching from threat to seduction in the space of a syllable. The way the eyes found the camera, then looked past it, searching for a person on the other side.

She could see it happening in real time: in bedrooms, phones vibrated on nightstands, waking teenagers who should have been dreaming about anything but this; in office cubes, a hundred million bored employees reached for their dopamine fix and found, instead, a shot of adrenaline; in subway cars, commuters watched in silence, then looked up, half-expecting to see the Joker's reflection in the rain-streaked windows.

On the second monitor, the meme engine had already spun up. Olivia scrolled through the top tags: #JokerSmile, #JokerStare, #MarcusValeIsReal, #WhoNeedsBatman.

The memes were ruthless, viral, and brilliantly stupid: the Joker's face pasted onto the Mona Lisa, his eyes Photoshopped onto cats, babies, every member of the Supreme Court. But underneath the memes, in the comments and the QRTs, the mood was different.

It was not delight.

It was fear.

She pinged a junior analyst in the Tokyo office.

"Are you seeing the same uptick? What's the flavor?"

The reply came instantly:

"They're obsessed. But they're scared. Like, actually scared. Never seen anything like it."

Olivia leaned back in her chair. She was in the war room alone, the only one on the floor except for the night janitor, who moved with the funereal grace of a man paid to ignore the unexplainable. The windows to the outside were black mirrors, the only light the sickly glow of the dashboard, which now registered 17.4 million.

She tapped into X (Twitter, but no one on her team called it that), and scrolled the #NewJoker thread. It was a river of dread and awe:

@crimson_catlady: "Did we all just get MK ULTRA'd? I haven't blinked since it ended."

@mentalnotecase: "The voice. The smile. I'm not joking, I had to shut my laptop."

@filmjunkie17: "Forget Oscars, give this man an exorcism."

@jaspersghost: "Woke up my boyfriend to make him watch. He's now refusing to sleep. Thanks, Warner Bros."

Even the influencers were shaken. The top film reaction channel had already posted a split-screen: on the left, the video, on the right, the host's face as the smile widened. She watched the man's bravado crumble, watched him try to laugh it off, then watched as, for a single frame, he just stared back, silent.

Olivia ran the clip a third time. This time she muted the sound and just watched the body language: the tilt of the Joker's head, the way he held the match just a breath too long before lighting it. There was something about it that was less like acting and more like remembering, as if every muscle had once been trained for this exact performance and now was simply letting the memory play out.

The Slack beeped again:

#exec-corridor: "CMO wants a briefing. Five minutes. Can you summarize the threat?"

#urgent: "Press wants a quote. We need to calm people down."

She almost laughed at that. Calm people down? They'd given the world a nightmare and now wanted it branded as a dream.

She alt-tabbed to the real-time user engagement: the spike at the three-second mark, the plateau during the laugh, the explosion at the "secret" line. But the dropoff, usually a hard cliff after the payoff, wasn't there. Instead, the retention graph was almost a straight line.

Nobody was bailing. They were watching to the last second—and then, often, looping back to start again.

Olivia closed her eyes, just for a second, and let the silence stretch.

In the darkness behind her lids, the Joker's face waited. The words whispered themselves, even without audio:

"You want to hear a secret?"

She opened her eyes, reset her posture, and typed her summary for the CMO:

—Unprecedented viral spread. No sign of user fatigue.

—Sentiment: fear excitement. Some reports of emotional distress.

—Identity of talent is fueling obsession. Recommend maintain ambiguity.

—Users believe the Joker is real, or at least, that he could be.

She sent the message, then sat with the aftermath. Fourteen million, then sixteen, then nineteen. She tried to remember the last time anything went this viral.

She could not.

In the corner of the screen, an anonymous comment caught her eye:

"I think he's still watching us."

She looked up, and for a moment, the reflection in her own monitor made it true. There, in the glass, the Joker's face waited, eyes locked on hers, smile perfectly, eternally fixed.

Olivia closed the lid of her laptop. The silence was immediate, a vacuum after the sound.

The numbers would keep climbing, with or without her.

She poured herself a new coffee, hands shaking just a little.

Outside, the dawn had barely started, but already the world was awake, and the Joker was everywhere.

..........

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