Method Madness

By late afternoon, Olivia had migrated from the analytics dashboard to TikTok, not because it was her job—at this point, nothing could be described as work in any sane sense—but because she needed to know how bad the contagion had gotten.

TikTok was ground zero now; X was for the memes, YouTube was for the thinkpieces, but TikTok was where the Joker lived.

The app opened to an endless scroll of content, every other post now Joker-coded: split-screen reactions, makeup transformations, sound remixes, and a new subgenre Olivia hadn't seen before—videos of people filming themselves watching the original video, then posting their own breakdowns, which others then stitched and stitched again, a recursive viral knot.

She scrolled. The first video in her feed was a split-screen. On the left, the original black screen and the hiss of the match. On the right, a teenage girl, face scrubbed of makeup, hair in a brutal ponytail, nothing staged or lit.

As the laugh started, her face changed: her pupils seemed to dilate in real time, the jaw went slack, then tensed, the shoulders drew up around her neck like a body expecting an impact. At the "secret" line, she let out an involuntary gasp—"oh my god"—then clapped a hand to her mouth, eyes filling with tears she would later insist were allergies.

Olivia watched the loop again. The girl's reaction wasn't a performance, it was too raw; if anything, she looked embarrassed, even after she realized the post had already racked up 1.7 million views.

The caption was simple: "Why am I literally shaking."

The top comment was a reply: "It's like he's looking through the screen."

The next video was an art piece in the way only TikTok could produce: a makeup artist, handle @hauntologybeauty, narrating a time-lapse as she painted her own face white, then layered on the red. The audio was the Joker's laugh, but slowed down to half-speed, pitched and reversed in places so that it felt almost animal.

Each brush stroke was deliberate, but the woman's hands shook with a visible tremor. By the end, her smile was a perfect copy—every imperfection, every split at the corner of the mouth, even the smudge where blood had, in the original, trickled down past the chin.

She stared at herself in the mirror, then leaned in, tongue out, mimicking the exact motion from the video. It was uncanny, even to Olivia, who had seen the original footage a hundred times and should have been inoculated by now. Instead, she felt it: the jolt, the unease, the sense that the makeup was not a mask but a species of contagion, something that wanted to spread.

She scrolled down. More videos, now fusing the original audio with new visuals: teens in Joker makeup doing dances, college students cutting and looping the "secret" line into a kind of ASMR meme, a mother and daughter duo deadpanning into the camera as the laugh played on a loop in the background.

Olivia noticed that the trend had already mutated; it was no longer about the Joker himself, but about the way people responded to him. Reactions were king.

Then, at the bottom of the hour, she found the psychology student.

The account was called @PsychinPublic, and the girl running it—twenty-one, dark hair chopped to her chin, glasses so thick they warped her eyes—spoke to the camera as if she had no time for pleasantries.

"So," she started, voice clinical, "let's talk about why this Joker freaks you out."

A beat, then:

"First, the laugh. It's not performative. It's not for you. It's as if the Joker is laughing at a joke you're not allowed to hear. That creates what we call a parasocial deficit—your brain is wired to want to know what the joke is, but it never gets the punchline, so it loops and loops, looking for closure."

The video cut to a slowed playback of Marcus Vale's face, then zoomed on the eyes.

"Second, the stare. He doesn't blink. At all. That's not normal. Human brains are trained to track micro-blinks to judge trustworthiness. No blinks equals predator, equals fear."

She paused, then flashed a diagram:

"Here's a breakdown of the 'predatory body language' at play—chin lowered, eyes up, mouth too wide, lip-lick at the end. Every one of these is a signal: I see you, I want you, I might hurt you."

The video ended with her summing up:

"It's not just acting. It's weaponized charisma. Whoever Marcus Vale is, he's either a genius or a sociopath. Or both."

Olivia thumbed through the comments:

—"Why did this explain why I'm scared and horny at the same time"

—"I want to see what would happen if you put him in the same room as my mom"

—"Is this like, safe to watch?"

—"You nailed it. The lip-lick is everything."

The hashtags said it all: #JokerBreakdown, #WhoIsMarcusVale, #PredatorSmile.

She scrolled back up, then hit the search bar.

The "Who is Marcus Vale" tag now had nearly a hundred million hits. The trend was accelerating, not slowing, as if every attempt to explain or dissect the phenomenon just made it worse. There was a thirst to know, a need to see behind the curtain, even though the face that peered out offered nothing but secrets.

Olivia switched to the trending tab. At the top, above every political scandal, war update, and celebrity meltdown, was the Joker. Not as a meme, not as a punchline, but as the question itself: Who is Marcus Vale?

She watched the numbers tick up, watched the view count spin like a slot machine that never paid out. She read the comments, the desperate, hungry need to know more, and felt, for the first time, a kind of helpless admiration.

The engine wasn't the video. It wasn't even the laugh.

It was the question, echoing through every algorithm and every feed, looping in the skulls of millions:

Who is Marcus Vale?

Olivia closed the app, but the answer was already writing itself.

Tomorrow, the world would wake up, and the Joker would be waiting.

No more secrets, just the smile.

....

By nightfall, the metrics had become meaningless. Olivia watched as the numbers outgrew the units her dashboard was programmed for—first millions, then tens of millions, the final zeroes reduced to tiny exponents in the upper corner of her screen. She'd abandoned the PR dashboard entirely, sliding into YouTube like the rest of the world, riding the algorithm's undertow.

On the trending page, there was no longer any distinction between official content and fan production. The Joker's face—Marcus Vale's face, though no one outside the building seemed to know that name—was everywhere, screen-captured, refiltered, and edited to the point of madness.

The number one video was a fan remix, less a trailer than an exorcism. The creator, a minor vlogger named b4dcomedown, had taken the original audio and layered it over a track of amplified, distorted heartbeats, each laugh now underpinned by a pulse that grew louder and more arrhythmic as the video progressed.

Every so often, the voice would drop out and be replaced by a whisper: "Smile." The word repeated, sometimes stretched to a groan, sometimes sped up to the point of squeal, never quite the same and never once explained.

At the two-minute mark, the video cut to a strobe of user reactions: dozens of faces, filmed on phone cameras, all locked in the same horrified trance. Some smiled, some laughed, but most simply stared, as if hypnotized. The edit ended with a single, unbroken close-up of the Joker's lips, the smile never wavering as the laughter decayed into silence.

The video had gone from zero to eight million views in twelve hours. The comment section was a graveyard of insomnia and dread:

—"I played it on loop and now my cat won't come out from under the bed."

—"There's something wrong with his mouth. Is that CGI?"

—"I think the laugh is giving me headaches. I keep hearing it even when my phone's off."

—"He's not acting. He's not even human. I can't explain it but it's true."

—"I dare you to watch it at 3AM with all the lights off."

Olivia let the video loop. She turned the sound up, then down, then off, but it didn't matter—the memory of the voice was enough. She felt the heartbeat in her own chest, faster and more erratic than she wanted to admit.

She scrolled down to the recommended tab. It was a wall of reaction videos: faces caught in freeze-frame, eyes bugged or half-lidded, jaws slack, hands over mouths.

Some videos went viral purely for the extremity of the reaction; one teenage boy in a tie-dye shirt collapsed off his gaming chair, landing with a thud so loud it set off his mom's smoke alarm.

Another video, just titled "wtf," showed a grown man watching the trailer in total silence, then, at the end, reaching up to touch his own lips as if checking they were still there.

The top reaction video had 4.6 million views. Olivia clicked it, and was immediately greeted by a young woman, hair in messy curls, sitting in a kitchen surrounded by the remnants of a birthday party—streamers, half-inflated balloons, a cake with the words "GOOD LUCK IN COLLEGE" barely legible on the side.

The girl looked tired, maybe a little drunk. She hit play, and as the laugh began, her entire face changed: the smile faltered, then returned, but this time it wasn't hers. She laughed, but the sound was wrong. She covered her mouth, then let her hand fall away, and just watched, unblinking, as the Joker whispered,

"You want to hear a secret?"

At the end, she looked straight into her own webcam, eyes glassy and too wide.

"Yeah," she said, voice barely above a whisper.

"I do."

She reset the video, watched it again.

Olivia let it play out, then closed the tab. It was impossible to watch for long—the echo of the laugh, the hunger of the smile. She felt it crawling around inside her own head, rearranging things.

She toggled to the live feed of YouTube's trending page. For the first time in her memory, all ten of the top spots were variations on a single theme: Joker reactions, Joker breakdowns, Joker memes, Joker edits. There was no news, no music, nothing outside the orbit of this one face, this one voice.

The real moment, the pivot, happened at 8:42 PM Pacific. She watched it in real time: the drop of a new video from a channel called filmtheory.exe, famous for deep-dive dissections and high-speed mythbusting. The title was pure clickbait—"POSSESSED: The Truth About Marcus Vale's Joker"—but the video itself was a clinical, almost forensic breakdown.

The host, a boyish guy in a "TOO MANY MOVIES" tee, stood against a green screen, pacing like a trial lawyer.

"Okay, so let's get into it. This Joker isn't just a character—it's a phenomenon. But what's really going on? Is this just good acting? Or is there something more?"

He launched into a side-by-side comparison of every previous Joker: Nicholson, Ledger, Phoenix, even the animated series. He called out each tic, each mannerism, then compared them frame by frame to Marcus Vale's performance.

"Notice how the smile never drops, not even in the microframes between laughs. Notice the lack of blinking—again, not a single one in the entire teaser. That's not normal. That's not even safe. Your average person blinks 15-20 times a minute. This guy? Zero. For thirty seconds straight."

He zoomed in on the mouth, the corners of the lips.

"The tearing here, that's not makeup. That's real. Which means either the actor's hurting himself for the shot, or—" a dramatic pause, "—he's not acting."

The next segment was all about the voice: the changes in register, the way it seemed to vibrate at a frequency just below what most speakers could handle. The host theorized about digital manipulation, but then showed a raw take from a behind-the-scenes leak.

"It's the same. There's no filter. It's just… him."

The video's conclusion was simple:

"Either Marcus Vale is the best actor of his generation, or we are all being hypnotized by something we don't understand."

The video hit a million views in under an hour. The comments were pure chaos:

—"I can't look away. I don't want to, either."

—"He's going to break the internet. Maybe he already did."

—"This feels like a test and we're all failing."

—"He's already inside my head. What now?"

Olivia leaned back, her chair creaking in the empty office. For a moment, she let herself imagine the world outside: millions of people, all watching the same face, all hearing the same laugh. A planet's worth of attention, drawn like gravity toward a single, burning point.

She opened one last video, a compilation of global reactions. The footage was amateur, stitched together from webcams, phone cameras, security footage from bars and dorms. It was the same everywhere: faces stunned, afraid, transfixed. Some people laughed, some cried, but most just stared, as if waiting for the next line.

At the end of the video, the editor spliced together a montage of the Joker's face, cut from hundreds of fan art attempts. The last shot was not from the teaser, not from any studio release, but a frame Olivia had never seen before: the Joker, head tilted just so, eyes half-lidded and sad, the mouth smiling but the expression unreadable. It lingered, silent, for three full seconds before the video ended.

In the afterglow, Olivia sat with her own reflection in the laptop screen, the shadow of the Joker's smile floating somewhere above her own.

She knew what was coming next. The viral phase was over. This was mythology now.

She reached for her phone, not to text or call, but just to feel it in her hand, a talisman against the dark. The Joker was everywhere. He would not leave.

She closed her eyes, and in the hush behind her eyelids, the laugh played again, gentle and close and forever.

She smiled, just a little.

And let it in.

......

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