My grandmother doesn’t get it, but then she’s from a time when social media was in its infancy. I think she had an Insta, maybe a TikTok? Whenever we’ve watched The Challenge together she’ll say things like “How difficult can it be to just not touch your screen?” I try to tell her that for my generation it’s as involuntary as yawning, but I don’t think she gets it.

She’ll still watch though, as soon as this month’s episode drops. Could be any minute now. As soon as a winner is declared, the highlights will be uploaded everywhere. I wonder what she’ll think when she sees I’ve been summoned to participate. Shock, definitely. Grief, almost certainly. Maybe, when she sees I’ve gotten to the final two, pride?

It’s half human, half pixie these days. 10,000 each, every month. And it’s a pixie I’m up against now. They love when that happens, shows it’s not biased towards either race. It was this show which led them to discover that they were actually a separate sub-species. The early Challenges were pixie-dominated. Their brains are wired differently, they don’t seem to find peer pressure hard to resist. Trends mean nothing to them. So the format was adjusted. We still have to be constantly watching our socials, but the topics we’re shown have changed. Specific subjects the pixies tend to have an intense interest in feature more, lots of stuff involving social justice and niche hobbies. Humans are generally eliminated in large numbers; a thousand burnt to a crisp for liking a photo of a sunset, 500 or so cooked in their own juices for downvoting a picture of a well-done steak, a hundred buried alive for sharing their grief after the death of a celebrity. The pixies, though, generally go out in smaller numbers; a few beaten to death for reposting news of police brutality, a couple of dozen sliced up genitals-first for sharing a trans rights post, a handful thrown in front of trains for correcting statistics about public transport. So the algorithm shows more of their kind of stuff to balance things out.

Now that we’re down to the final two, they start to really mess with us. Reels complaining about The Challenge itself, “The ultra-rich are using you as the ultimate distraction technique!” It has no effect on me, the pull of the ten million dollar prize is too strong. The next reel seems to read my mind. “Ten million dollars is nothing, you still won’t be one of them, don’t fall for it.” My finger nearly taps Reply, but I resist. Looking up briefly – three seconds every 20 minutes is allowed – I spot my final competitor across what used to be a football stadium. She’s surrounded, as I am, by guards ready to drag us off to our death somewhere in the remains of what used to be Manchester, before these kinds of shows decimated the population. I look back down again. Aww, cute kitty. Like.

Shit.