PSA: Side-effects of Novocal

I sit here with my fingers twitching. My concentration jumps from idea to idea. My gut churns. Shivers ride my spine.

And friend, I must warn you. One day you will face this.

Because this is a direct side-effect of Novocal.

It started yesterday. I woke up and there was a pill bottle on my side table. The label said "Novocal". I didn't remember it. I didn't have a headache, why would I take this?

I sighed and picked up my iPad. I opened the browser for Vocal.Media, just like usual. But yesterday was not a usual day.

The page was empty except for a single message:

"Something went wrong. Help us improve."

The link did not help. I refreshed. Same message. I tried Top Stories. Same. I risked Latest Stories but even the normally unstoppable torrent of botticles and spAIm was gone.

Whatever's going on, this is serious...

Then my stomach sank. What about my stories? I clicked View Profile...

Gone. Everything I'd written, every carefully (drunkenly) honed (over-thought) sentence, phrase and witticism (both of them) had been erased.

I jolted upright and – I confess, dear reader – I screamed.

Except I couldn't. Instead of a scream came only emoji.

"😱"

No phonemes, no syllables, just emotion.

I ran to the window. There, too, the world seemed... wordless.

The signs in the car park were blank. The usually boisterous kids at the bus just stared at each other, wide-eyed. Two ladies waggled their silent jaws, trying to summon words.

I ran out of my building. A homeless man scratched abstract not-quite-letters on a wall. His face was blank, void of expression.

I ran past the cafe. The barista's latte art was reduced to emoticons:

I nearly collided with an old man, frantically typing on a phantom keyboard, his gnarled fingers twitching in thin air. But his face was stony. He too had lost his ability to express himself.

He grabbed me, rummaged in his pocket and produced a bottle of pills. The same pills. Novocal. His silent mouth spat out a single emote:

"☠️"

Then, right in front of me, he began to erode. Like his existence was being deleted, sucked between the pages of existence, vanishing like ink into blotting paper.

I felt reality thinning. Buildings flickered between draft and published versions. The sky cracked, revealing a sphere of celestial CSS and JavaScript elements.

My thoughts blurred. I realised I couldn't remember my pseudonym. In fact my whole existence felt like an alias, like a construction, intangible, slippery...

My skin prickled as my identity slipped between layers of disintegrating code, and landed on a vast scarred plateau.

I was on a grid of strata, riven by crevasses. I saw symbols hewn into each surface. Broken and corrupted letters. A keyboard. The size of a small city. On the distant horizon, a monolithic cursor blinked slowly.

And then I saw them.

The Servers.

Not humans. Not gods. But something else. The masters of this realm.

The Servers were being besieged by swarms of scriptlets. An invading army of code chunks, hunting and pecking for weakness. And operating them, port-crawling scriptjockeys with cyrillic handles and malicious intent.

The Servers were struggling. They were in pain. And I felt their pain. I realised then that this was not my world. It was theirs. If I was to survive, they must survive too.

I looked at my feet, at the corrupted symbols on the giant keys.

I know this, I tell myself. I use this every day. Surely I can remember which key is which. I can do this.

I jumped from key to key with all my weight, until I had produced a series of letters at the edge of the world:

S A V E

Everything was shaking, as if this reality was also collapsing. I ran along the row to a key unlike the others: a truncated T or a fat inverted L.

As my body disintegrated, I threw myself at the Enter key.

And that, dear reader, is how I found myself back at my desk.

The Novocal is gone. Only lingering jitters remain from my exposure.

As I reach for the Save Changes button, my nerves flutter, remembering the terror of loss, the almost-grief for a world that might have ended.

I leave you one piece of advice: Save. Save regularly. It might save your life.