Richard Gibney is an award-winning short fiction writer, editor, and author, based in Dublin, Ireland. He has most recently featured in Wensum Lit and Zoetic Press.
Feeding the Algorithm
by Richard Gibney
He noticed one morning that every second article on his social media stream was about a traffic accident in which there had been at least one fatality. Appalled at first, he nevertheless found that he couldn’t look away. Before noon, he faced a raw truth: He was a virtual, housebound, working-from-home rubbernecker, sitting at his desk as he stared at photos of twisted metal on country roads and motorways and suburban streets.
He had been served with an eviction notice a week earlier. With less than a month to find somewhere new to live, he had asked for more hours at work, but they were demanding that he come back into the office if he wanted more hours, and he didn’t want to do that.
He was instead drawn to the misery of the car, bus, and train accidents that filled up his newsfeed, inadvertently desensitizing himself to the carnage that met his eyes daily through his computer and phone screens, the only social contact he had being the man who delivered his groceries once a week.
“Ufff,” he uttered at one particularly graphic piece of footage which had been livestreamed and had remained online, unseen as yet by the moderators on the censorious platform. It showed the body of a decapitated man on the roadside, blood splashed across the asphalt from his torso to where his head now lay next to a hedgerow.
There was a comfort in knowing, though, that it was never personal. Then it was. His cousin, a popular YouTuber with the handle Pete the Two Bit Punk, was killed in a multiple vehicle pileup on the motorway after he had got out of his car to record the aftermath of an initial fender bender from his phone. The online community was in a state of shock over Pete’s death, and the shock only served to feed the algorithm with further vehicular havoc.
A few weeks later, his best friend Anthony crashed into a tree while riding his motorcycle. Anthony’s helmet had offered little protection.
Finally, his parents, flying back from more exotic climes where they had been on vacation, fell from the sky and plummeted into the Indian Ocean, with little by way of explanation in the subsequent inquiry. Pilot error? Technical failure? It was never determined. The plane had been carrying 112 souls, all of them gone.
Evicted from his apartment, he moved into his late parents’ now vacant house, establishing a nest in their master bedroom, the bedroom closest to the kitchen and the TV den.
“God doesn’t close a door but he opens a window,” someone told him after his parents’ joint funeral when he explained where he was residing, and why, to a small group at the church doors. Word went around that he was “short a few bob” and donations inundated his online bank account from mysterious benefactors, all of them former business colleagues of his long-retired father.
These financial gifts eventually petered away, not because anyone lost interest in his plight, but because these people too were dying, many in road collisions, train wrecks, and plane crashes. His news feed continued to populate with what appeared to be some kind of depopulation process, inexorable and ineluctable.
Thirteen people dead in bus crash
Four teenagers killed by drunk driver who mounted footpath
Road safety a top priority, insists Transport Minister, hours before her death in horrible collision
His salary stopped coming into his account. He called various numbers at work to find out why. No one answered. An internet search revealed that the company had folded due to staff shortages as a result of a series of car accidents. The information related to his own workplace was buried in the fifth paragraph of a piece about a dozen organizations forced to wind up or to file for bankruptcy due to their lack of employees, most of them killed on the roads.
As the amount of traffic dwindled on the streets and motorways, the various fatal incidents became more bizarre. With fewer drivers on the road, odd, single-vehicle events were commonplace. Lightning strikes, large birds of prey plummeting into windshields, a piece of space debris falling from the sky to impale a driver through the canvas canopy of his convertible. The accidents became rarer and more difficult to seek out online. But he found the relevant news reports and social media posts nonetheless.
One dark winter evening, a man came out to see him, parking a green hatchback car with a small dent in the passenger side door outside his driveway, blocking his own car in, from what he could see on the Ring doorbell footage. The man had a moustache and wore a tweed overcoat and a trilby hat with a red feather in the brim.
He answered the door via the intercom.
“Can I help you?” he asked.
“What are you doing?” the man responded with an angry tone, although the man stood in the blustery rain and held his hat to his chest in a beseeching, plaintive manner.
“What do you mean?”
“What are you doing, on social media?”
“Nothing!” The answer came all too quickly.
“Can’t you see that your interactions, and your likes, and your viewing history, are causing all these road traffic deaths?”
“What are you talking about? How do you know?”
“The algorithm can’t cope! It constantly creates more content for you to consume! You selfish clown! Get off the internet!”
“But I’m a passive consumer! I’m just a lurker! I don’t ‘like’ anything! It’s all appalling… the carnage… the devastation…”
“You don’t have to tell me. Get off the internet, will you? I barely survived the trip over here.”
“Who are you?”
The man glanced back at his car, and into the camera at the door.
“I’m the only one left.” He shook his rain-spattered head back and forth, and it wasn’t clear if he was crying or if his face was wet from the downpour. “I’m the only one left.”
The man planted his hat back on his head and turned and sprinted to the green car.
He put his phone, from where he had been observing the man, down on the table. He got off the sofa and ran out to the hall door, but the man had driven away. He could hear the engine revving in the distance.
It was like a switch in his brain that came all-too-late; he realized that he would have to reduce his online consumption of car wrecks and road fatalities. Maybe he would step away from it all for a few days. Maybe, when it stopped raining, he would go out for a walk and get a little fresh air.
As he stood in the hallway, his front door open, the wind carried the sound to his ears; the bleating of a traffic signal indicating to pedestrians that it’s safe to cross the street; the screech of brakes; the crunch of metal with a shattering of glass; the bleating of a traffic signal indicating that it’s safe to cross the street; silence; the bleating of a traffic signal indicating that it’s safe to cross the street; silence.
Copyright 2026 by Richard Gibney