"We were never here for survival," he said. "We were here for transformation. They want us to break so completely that we become something new. A new genre of celebrity. The post-human star. The one who died on stream and kept performing."

And somewhere in a control room in California, a producer sipped a latte and whispered to her neural interface: "Up his cortisol by 12%. The audience wants tears before midnight."

"They're testing us," said Marco, the exiled pop prince, picking at a blister. "For the edit. The 'darkest season yet' angle. Our panic is their premiere."