#transfixion

No one was sure how this strange public fixture came to be. The figure in the loop, that is. Some say they’re the result of a catastrophic “glitch in the matrix”, or an experiment gone wrong.

If you asked them, they certainly wouldn’t give you anything useful. Back when they still had the cognitive capacity to speak coherently, they’d get cut off in the middle of their sentences, become too disoriented to convey anything that wasn’t vague. Over the span of a few days, frantic attempts at explanation turned into muttering, turned into babbling, turned into mindless moaning, and plateaued firmly there. 

It’s been about seven years since they first appeared. They’ve been dressed up, dressed down, tagged with spray paint, featured in thousands  of social media posts, been the center of several controversies about the ethics of making what used to be a full human person a social media trend, and cost several thousand dollars in taxpayer money due to the fruitless attempts to remove them. But they’ve never aged, never slept, never needed sustenance, never been identified, and have never stopped jogging in circles.

The pattern is that they jog for 15 seconds, jump, become visibly disoriented for a second, then jog for 15 more before “glitching” back to the start of the loop. It’s most visible when you notice that the radius of the circle they run in usually changes after they jump. Even now, when they no longer become disoriented after jumping. 

They just moan when their feet hit the ground. Maybe drool a bit. Then continue on their endless run. 

The common consensus is that the jump in the middle of the loop is a “trigger” of sorts. One that floods their senses, and diminishes the ability to think. One that’s cumulative. One that’s been triggered roughly every 30 seconds for 7 years now, and has likely totally foreclosed on their ability to ever understand much more than the warm, blissful heat that fills their body and the sensation of pristine running shoes hitting the pavement.  

Run, 

Jump, 

Pleasure.

Run, 

Jump,

Pleasure.

Run, 

Jump, 

Pleasure.