The Social Fiction Experiment: _9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES

It started as a series of comments in response to seemly-random Reddit posts, talking about flesh portals to alternate dimensions, CIA covert projects, heavy drinking, Nazis and other peculiar things. All by a user peculiarly named _9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9.

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In the MKULTRA experiments, the CIA dosed unwitting subjects with LSD to see how they would react. What has not yet come to light is that MKULTRA was an intra-agency project. The CIA created new departments within the CIA and fed them steady doses of LSD and other psychoactives to see how the departments would diverge and mutate away from normal departments. Whole projects and hierarchies were created with everybody involve being more or less unwittingly under the influence of LSD. This is how the "restraint bed portals" and "flesh interfaces" were first created i.e. from a heavily psycho-mutated hierarchy. The entire thing had to be eliminated, but the technology it created has been revolutionary.
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Those comments, somewhat reminiscent of an alternate reality game, somewhat reminiscent of a potential viral marketing campaign, always mixed some reality with fantasy. The comments seemed to be from different narrators, in different places and time, telling stories unrelated at first sight.

One of those narrators, in particular, had a very personal feel to it. As it shared very realistic experiences about alcohol and substance abuse, it had an interesting effect of confusing who was the author and who was the narrator, and casting doubt of what was in-universe or not. Furthermore, this particular narrator, popularly known as "the drunk", had seen some strange things and had been telling some of those stories, and the narratives started converging.

A crowd gathered around to watch the story unfold, virtually reunited in a subreddit that indexed the posts, discussing each new installment, that was coming almost daily. Fan art was shared along with music, videos, theories, and discussion. It began to be referred as "The Interface Series", due to the flesh interfaces serving as interdimensional portals heavily featuring in the plot.

Speaking of the plot, I won't spoil much of it here, and just say that new plotlines appeared and existing ones progressed to link to the main story. The delivery mechanism of each part of the story was through comments in posts whose subject was very thinly related to the chapter in question. Other parts were delivered as self-posts in subreddits related thematically to the subject in question. Some subreddits played along, other more serious removed the off-topic posts but never before it was archived by the readers.

Each of these comments served to bring in new readers to the saga. People confused by the surreal comments were unequivocally greeted by a link to the subreddit, inviting them to go down the rabbit hole and start reading the story from the beginning.

The story was picked by Motherboard, The Guardian, Gizmodo and even BBC, bringing in even more readers to follow the tale.

It is unclear to me how much of the persona shared by the author in interviews to those publications was real, or just more fuel thrown to confuse the narrative. Alternatively, I'm still not sure how much of the main narrator was just a personification of the author and not just a captivating, realistic character.

Eventually, the fourth wall was broken, and in one of the chapters the narrator goes on about the recent post he made on Reddit while drunk. In fact, gaps in the publication schedule have been explained in-universe by drunken blackouts.

After a couple almost endings where the community thought the experiment might be over, the series came to a sudden halt one day with a post in the Interface subreddit bringing a conclusion to the story. The intriguing thing about the timing of this ending was that it almost coincided with the premiere of Netflix's Stranger Things. Readers were quick to realize the thematic similarities between them, as they shared a large number of concepts, some down to the execution. Moderators on Reddit were also quick to dismiss on behalf of the author any claims of the relationship between them or viral marketing, but this topic was quickly forbidden and moderated away.

Feedback for a rewrite was asked since, but it's unclear on how it progressed.

Personally, I really liked the many layers to the story: the writing was good, with weird bits and multiple, interconnected stories with interesting twists and turns; but what hooked me in was the unique method of delivery and the surreal but just barely plausible settings that kept the suspension of disbelief going strong. The mystique of the unknown author and narrator also added much value to the story. While I felt the writing and pacing went down a bit in quality as it went, maybe due to pressure to deliver and having to make it up as it went along, I still feel this was a very good piece of work overall. I'm definitely glad I was able to watch it unfold.

Pieces like this that explore the edge of interactivity technology provides fascinates me. Is the future of writing e-books or works more like this one, that takes advantage of the delivery medium, adapts its pace, tone and target in almost realtime according to public feedback? Where the readers are involved and almost part of the story?

Finally, I can't help to think that Steemit could be the perfect platform for this kind of exploration, where the author wouldn't need to look for a publisher deal to take the work from an innovative medium back to a traditional one, being able to monetize each piece and be rewarded for this work as he goes.

Did you follow the Interface Series on Reddit as it went? If you haven't, you can see it chronologically in the narrative section of the wiki or go directly to his user profile and see exactly how it went. I recommend reading the comments in the context of the posts they were made in, as it adds a lot to the experience.

Are you going to read it now? Get confortable and dive in, because it's a wild ride!