Free Vs Reality by Blake Northcott

curtains pull apart, the billboard-sized screen behind it bursting with color.
    Cole blinks twice, adjusting his eyes. It’s a picture. A low resolution photograph of tourists running from a fire in the middle of a busy street. Inside the fire is the pale outline of a man, writhing and flailing. “Is t-that what I think it is,” he stammers, unable to avert his eyes. This is some sick joke, he thinks…they’re going to show me pictures of people being tortured to death, douse me in gasoline, toss a match and laugh about it.
    “Some dude roasting like a marshmallow at a campfire?” Brodie says, popping the tab on a beer with a soft hiss. “Yup, pretty much.” He drops into a front row seat and throws one leg over the arm rest, taking a long swig.
    Cole glances over to see Paige and Dia are seated as well. Paige flicks here eyes up towards him, and then down at the empty seat next to her, and then back to him. He takes the cue and sits down.
    “Around seven years ago there were reports all over the world of some really strange stuff happening,” Paige explains flatly, as if under duress. She swipes the face of her phone and images shift by on the screen, like a bizarre (and somewhat gruesome) PowerPoint presentation. “Spontaneous human combustions in Copenhagen, cars floating ten feet above the street in Mexico City, an iceberg forming in the Mojave desert. And it just got weirder as time went on.”
    The images are mostly unconvincing, Cole thinks. Pixelated cell phone shots taken in poor lighting, badly out of focus. Then Paige pauses momentarily on one particularly persuasive shot: a clear photograph showing the now-infamous melting incident at the Great Wall of China; an alleged paranormal phenomenon that took place just inside the southern border of Mongolia back in 2007. A pair of European backpackers snapped several shots of the iconic wall sagging like a melted candle; an enormous swath of the twenty-five foot high structure appear to be partially liquefied, dripping down to the earth in Volvo-sized globs. This stunning image had been an internet sensation for several years, being discussed on forums and debated by conspiracy theorists ad nauseum. And of course, like everyone else with a functional internet connection, Cole had seen it before.
    “Check this out, bro,” Brodie says, a bolt of excitement sparking his voice.
“This was totally a watershed moment.”
    Cole gestures to the screen. “I thought those events were all exposed as hoaxes, like crop circles and UFOs? My sixteen-year-old cousin can make it look like that shit is happening with an app on her iPhone.”
    Dia pivots in her seat. “Yeah, but none of this shit was Photoshopped or digitally altered. It all really happened.”
    Paige swipes to the next slide, which shows a squat, heavy-set man standing at the base of the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur. A small group of people surround him, jaws hanging slack. “And what about this one: a suicide attempt in 2009 where some crazy dude jumped from the sky bridge: right out the glass window, and more than five-hundred and fifty feet straight down to the sidewalk below.”
    Brodie leaps from his chair and blocks the projector, casting a pitch black shadow across the screen. “The guy hits the ground, bounces back to his feet and walks off in front of two dozen tourists. There were like twenty photos and videos of it. The next day the dude disappears, and no one knows where he went. It didn’t even make the nightly news. Boom – totally watershed.”
    Paige shoos him out of the way with a brush of her hand and lets out a frustrated groan. “Brodie, sit your dumb ass down. And why do you always use the word ‘watershed’? I don’t think it means what you think it means.”
    “Okay, Paige,” he scoffs. “Like you know what every word in the English language means. You’ve literally used the word ‘literally’ wrong, like, a billion times. If you ever got it right, that would