Wednesday's Three Word Wednesday

The words over at Three Word Wednesday are incubate, nightmare and vanity.

Lurid
Buddy of mine has a nice little cottage industry going.
He’s a nightmare miner.
And in these troubling times, he’s got more work than one man can handle.
So I go to work for him, part time.
He’s pretty anal about the boost. He wants the fear to incubate, bubble on the stove, so to speak. He likes to mine the feed at the crescendo of dread, as people wrestle with their personal demons, thrashing as they do in the gloom with a light sheen of sweat in twisted sheets.
I don’t mind jumping the feed, watching along as people’s shit gets weirder by the second.
Used to be, when my dad was a kid, a buzz meant beer and some weed. We’re way past that these days.
We sell the nightmares to kids looking for an adrenal thrill. They’ll take a hit of neurotrin and boost our ill-gotten feeds from their handhelds.
A good, terror-filled feed is worth a shitload of credits.
He discovered this early, like right when we all switched to state-run wireless, that the wall units were amplifying people’s emotions as they went about their pointless lives in concrete-boxed housing. All those units, all those feeds, it was just a matter of time before someone wrote a program to jump the feedback.
And you’d think that joyous, happy feelings would be a good seller. Pure bullshit. No spikes from the pineal gland, which is just too small and under-developed in us humans.
No, there’s nothing like when some dumbass takes a load of neuro-exciters and watches someone else’s nightmare while their adrenal gland pumps dose after dose of adrenaline into their bloodstream.
Or so I’ve heard. I’m not that stupid.
I’m in it for just one thing.
Jump a feed early, create a new stream and you can dump a double whammy back on the person. You’ll create what I can only describe as cascading terror, a waterfall of darkness that’s just pure hell on the recipient.
So far, I’ve gotten three people to swallow their tongues. Cops can’t figure it out.
And it’s not like I’m fucking up a good thing, either. Some people’s nightmares are so pedestrian. Yeah, I’ll say it. Some people are as fucking boring in their made up worlds as they are in real life.
And I’d been waiting for weeks on this one. A woman in my buddy’s office, you know the type. Flush with vanity, she never finds it necessary to talk to mere mortals like us. Bitch.
I’ve watched her feed for a couple of nights now. Her terrors?
Wrinkles, liver spots. Gray hair. Sheesh, people.
Oh, you bet I’ll be giving her a double shot of geriatric inputs.
Should be a hoot.