Marcus's POV:
He waited, alone, in the frozen hallway outside the casting room. The world had gone utterly silent—no voices, no distant phones, just the throb of his pulse in his ears.
Even the air seemed dead. Fluorescent panels hummed overhead, scraping at the edges of his skull, as if the lights themselves were waiting to see if he'd crack first.
He caught a glimpse of himself in the glass of a framed poster—eyes, lips, jaw, all stretched thin, green irises lit up like LED.
The longer he stared, the less human the face became. This was the moment: one foot from the end of his own leash. Nothing left to do but wait for the signal.
It came, but not from the light above the door.
The pain arrived in a burst, no warning. Like a fist made of needles plunged behind his left eye. He gasped, grabbing the wall for support, but the surface offered no comfort, just cold and the taste of latex paint on his fingertips.
He tried to breathe through it, but the agony doubled and redoubled, stabbing up through his sinuses and into his brain stem, reducing his thoughts to static.
He clung to the Joker folder like a drowning man, then dropped it. Pages slid out in a soft, spattering arc, pattering to the tile.
The script bled open on the floor, his own name—Marcus Vale—staring up at him in a font so harsh it made his eyes water. The lights above flickered, synchronized perfectly to the rhythm of his pain.
His vision twisted. A black stripe sliced across it, then another. The world digitized, momentarily, as if reality were buffering. Superimposed in his right eye, a dark rectangle bloomed—glossy, translucent, indifferent. Lines of text scrolled up, clinical and impersonal:
'SYSTEM ONLINE.'
'CHARACTER: THE JOKER.'
'SYNCHRONIZATION: 20%... 38%... 59%...'
He tried to tear his gaze away but the numbers hypnotized him, each tick of the bar accompanied by a blast of migraine that made his knees buckle. By 80%, he was a puppet.
"Initializing performance," said a voice—not from the hallway, not from inside his ears, but from the unreachable, unlit place just behind his forehead.
His chest hitched. Then the memories detonated.
A flash—gunmetal and the tang of cordite, the air thick with clown-white powder and someone else's blood. His hands, clutching a straight razor, fingers sticky and trembling as he carved a smile wider and wider into a screaming man's cheek.
A room full of bodies propped up like marionettes, grins painted over the fear. Laughter—manic, then lascivious, then hollow as a scream in a coffin. He could feel it in his throat: raw, bleeding, triumphant.
He staggered sideways, back thudding against the wall. The corridor swam, then the floor tilted up and met him with a shock so real it momentarily knocked out the system overlay.
In the distance, he heard the clipped steps of a production assistant. She approached, in all black and with a badge that read "S. REYES," then slowed to a near-stop as she caught him slumped there, crumpled in the debris of his own audition packet.
For a moment she stared—eyes measuring whether this was drama, an overdose, or simply stage fright. Her verdict was obvious: classic actor nerves, not her problem. She quickened her pace and vanished down the corridor, high ponytail whipping with the acceleration.
The HUD shimmered, pixelated, then returned—sharper this time, letters haloed in seizure blue:
'YOU ARE NOW BECOMING THE JOKER.'
His heart pounded like it wanted out. The agony peaked, then, just as suddenly, dissolved. The absence of pain felt so unfamiliar it made him lightheaded. He drew a shuddering breath. The world resolved into unbearable clarity.
He stood. Not stood—rose, fluid, one continuous arc of motion, no slack in his limbs, no hesitance in his joints. The hallway had changed. Every sound now registered with impossible detail.
The hiss of the ventilation ducts sounded like a whisper of secrets. Even the lights, which had mocked him before, now seemed to pulse in time with his own heartbeat. He felt tall, weightless, perfectly balanced.
He let his head loll slightly to the left, then the right, testing the flexibility of his neck. It felt as if it had been rebuilt, vertebrae by vertebrae. He flexed his fingers, and the motion was slow, almost sensual—the hands not quite his own, but so much more precise, more expressive.
A smile unspooled across his lips—totally involuntary. He recognized it instantly, even though it felt nothing like a smile he'd ever worn before: wide, predatory, so flat it cut his face into two hostile halves. The smile stopped at the eyes, which stayed cold and unblinking, reading the world as if it were nothing but raw material for a better joke.
He bent down and gathered the scattered script pages. His hands did the work, but it was like watching a stranger demonstrate how to be human. He snapped the folder closed with a flourish. For a moment, he caught his reflection in the silver handle of the casting room door: The hair was a mess, but perfect.
The cheeks: more hollow, even sharper than before, like someone had sandblasted the softness out of his face. The eyes: not green now, but almost radioactive, ringed in the red of burst capillaries.
The HUD remained, a permanent ghost in his vision:
'JOKER SYNC: 80%. DO NOT EXCEED WITHOUT DIRECTIVE.'
He straightened his clothes—a tight, immaculate motion, every wrinkle vanished with the swipe of his palm. He rolled his shoulders, one by one, then cocked his head and inhaled the scent of the hallway: plastic, lemon cleaner, burnt ozone from the fluorescent tubes.
The red light above the door flicked, then glowed steady. He watched it for a moment, feeling nothing, then turned his attention to the door, which suddenly seemed less an obstacle than an invitation.
He approached, gliding, not a wasted motion in the entire body. Even his shadow seemed to slip along behind him, catching up only when he stopped dead in front of the threshold.
A voice, softer now, but unmistakable in its inhuman precision, whispered: Show them what a real joke looks like.
He didn't bother to answer. He reached for the handle, opened the door, and stepped through with the confidence of a man who knew, absolutely, that he would never be forgotten.
...
From Viewpoint Character: Marcus's point of view:
He hovered at the edge of the casting room, a living glitch in the corridor's clinical geometry. His heartbeat, which moments before had jackhammered, now ran slow and measured—every pulse a metronome click beneath his ribs.
If he focused, he could almost see the wave of each contraction, see it as a bright red number in the upper left corner of his vision: 42 BPM. Too slow for terror, too exact for chance.
He watched his own eyes reflected in the poster glass. They were monstrous. The pupils gone wide, nearly eclipsing the iris, the whites shot through with a gridwork of broken capillaries. His skin seemed to have thinned, the cheekbones bladed, the lines of his jaw etched with charcoal.
A single drop of sweat formed, perfectly round, at the edge of his hairline. It hovered there for an eternity before tracing a cold path down to the hinge of his jaw.
The system overlay remained, unwavering. JOKER IMMERSION: 80%. The text persisted in a ghostly grey, no matter how he blinked. There was no dismissing it.
He tested his hands again, splaying the fingers and watching them with clinical detachment. They moved like something newly evolved: precise, but alien, each digit separating and closing as if measuring invisible objects.
He rotated one wrist, then the other, and felt the bones crackle with approval. The nerves ran clean and sharp, no delay between thought and act. There was a restless, caged energy under his skin.
He let his tongue flick out, slow and deliberate, dragging along the top of his teeth. The movement felt both unfamiliar and utterly right, like a tick finally rediscovering its old host.
A memory pinged the inside of his mouth: greasepaint, thick and oily, smeared onto raw skin. He almost gagged on the imagined taste. Another flash—a puff of burnt gunpowder and the echoing ping of spent brass. He shook his head, the images slow to fade.
The red LED above the casting door blinked. Once, then again. The sign flipped from "OCCUPIED" to "NEXT." It was less an instruction than a dare.
He straightened the lapels of his jacket, felt the slip of fabric over his skin. He inhaled, searching for a trace of his former self, but all he found was the sterile chill of recycled air. There was no fear in it. Just the anticipation of the joke.
On the other side of the door, the world paused. For a heartbeat, Marcus hung in a perfect equilibrium, the man he had been balanced with the one now curled tight and waiting in his chest. The system watched from behind his eyes, unblinking.
A memory fragment surfaced: a girl's scream, the sound bubbling through laughter, then abruptly silenced. He blinked, and the vision cleared. There was a sweetness on his tongue, faint but unmistakable: the taste of sugar-glass and cheap lipstick.
The handle was cool in his palm. The pressure of his grip was perfectly calibrated—enough to open, not enough to leave a mark. The door swung out and he stepped across the threshold, every muscle coordinated as if someone else was operating the strings.
Inside, a wedge of fluorescent light cut across a floor of scuffed tile. There were three people behind a narrow table—one in a navy suit with a legal pad, one in black with a headset, one older man in a sweater with elbows worn thin.
None of them looked up at first. He took a single step, then paused, knowing exactly how long it would take for all three to realize they were being watched.
The pause lasted exactly two and a half seconds.
The assistant—the same one who'd ignored him in the hallway—sat just left of the door, tablet balanced on her knee.
She didn't raise her head, but called out with forced neutrality: "Number Seventeen? Marcus Vale?"
He stared at her for a moment, considering the name. Marcus Vale. It sounded both alien and impossibly intimate, like a password only he could decrypt. The room's attention sharpened.
The assistant tried again, this time louder, as if she needed to shout him back into existence:
"Marcus Vale?"
He rotated toward her with slow, predatory grace. He allowed the smile to take over his face—thin, unnatural, expertly measured. The world felt instantly colder.
"Yes," he said, and was startled at the sound: it came out lower, rougher, but also musical, with a hidden edge behind the consonants. "I'm ready."
The air in the room shifted. Someone at the table uncapped a pen and dropped it, the click echoing like a gunshot.
He advanced three steps, stopping perfectly at the taped X on the floor. The system overlay pulsed brighter, a faint stutter of satisfaction behind his left eye.
A voice, flat and benevolent as a scalpel, sliced through his thoughts: Show them what a real joke looks like.
He did not blink. He did not hesitate. The world had narrowed to this room, this moment, this first punchline.
He smiled, and the system smiled with him.
......
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