We Had to Remove This Post by Hanna Bervoets

Author:Hanna Bervoets
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

Are you familiar with the flat Earth theory, Mr. Stitic? We’re not living on a ball but on a floating disk beneath a giant translucent dome. The sun, the moon, and the stars are all projections, and the CIA is jerking us around like we’re extras on a Hollywood set: Flat Earthers, as the proponents of this theory call themselves, make up a sizable group of people—it’s a movement of millions. They spread their ideas through message boards and chat groups—by now they have more than fifty-five million videos to their name: “So many it would take more than one lifetime to watch them all,” I once heard a believer claim proudly.

I saw a lot of flat Earth material during my time at Hexa, you know. Users on the platform would often flag that stuff as offensive, but claiming that the Earth is flat (or that terrorist attacks were actually false-flag operations perpetrated by the government and lethal viruses were manufactured in labs) isn’t against the rules. We still had to sit through the whole video every time, though, because for all we knew some weirdo had tried to debunk the basic principles of gravity by throwing a newborn baby out of a sixth-story window. If those videos went on for more than a few minutes, they’d start to get on my nerves, but the flat Earther memes made me laugh: pictures of NASA leaders as the Wizard of Oz or the Pied Piper, detailed diagrams about “Photoshop errors” in official photos of our planet—compared to other conspiracy communities, those flat Earth types seemed . . . kind of harmless, and well organized at that, with their own international conferences, T-shirts, and gadgets: “What is that?” I asked Kyo one afternoon, pointing at his wrist.

The four of us were standing at our bus stop; Louis smirked and started shaking his head. “It’s a watch,” Kyo said, holding it up for me and Sigrid to see. It took me a moment to understand what I was looking at. The dial was a map surrounded by a white ring—the fantasy world from some book, I thought, that seemed like the sort of thing Kyo might be into. Except the glass pane over the dial wasn’t flat; it was slightly convex, like a tiny cloche. Or a dome.

“Flat Earth,” Louis coughed unsubtly, and Kyo yanked his wrist back. “Hey,” he mumbled, “don’t look at me like that, Kayleigh,” and Louis smirked again.

Apparently the others already knew about Kyo’s new faith community, but somehow this development had passed me by, and I was genuinely taken aback.

“You think it’s bullshit, don’t you,” Kyo said, and he sounded petulant, like an angry teenager falsely accused of knocking over a vase when actually it was the cat’s fault.

“Sorry,” I said, “but the Earth is round.”

Kyo shook his head. “It’s flat,” he insisted, and Louis quipped that I was better off not asking any follow-up questions, but it was too late: “Why would the Earth be flat?”

“There’s no proof that it’s round.

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