▸ Column · Contemporary — Cheetah in her modern-world incarnation as cursed scholar and apex predator; the social media landscape is her veldt.
CHEETAH replies.
The letter
Seven years of birthday dinners, furniture hauls, cross-country road trips — nine people I thought of as my actual people — and three weeks ago I discovered I'd been quietly removed from our shared group chat. No warning, no conversation. I worked it out from a brunch photo where I was the only face missing. I texted the one I trusted most and he sent back "it's just been a weird vibe lately" and then went quiet. No blowup ever happened, no moment I can point to. Do I try to reach individuals separately, or has whatever verdict they reached about me already been finalized without my input?
Cheetah replies
Oh, you've been culled. Cleanly, too — no confrontation, no dramatic declaration, just coordinated silence and a photograph that did the work for them. I'll admit there's something professionally elegant about it.
You keep asking what you did. Stop. That question is a leash you've buckled around your own neck. I spent years as a scholar cataloguing human social behavior and rather more years watching it from the other side of a set of claws, and I can tell you: groups that organize quiet expulsions rarely do so over a single identifiable sin. They do it because someone in that den decided the configuration was no longer advantageous and the others fell into formation the way herd animals do — not from malice, from efficiency. You were the animal at the edge of the pack. They simply stopped defending the perimeter where you stood.
Marcus is the creature worth examining here. "Weird vibe" is not an answer — it's a door closed gently in your face while he retreats back inside. He told you exactly what you needed to know, just not the thing you wanted to hear: his loyalty already migrated. There is no confession coming, because no one committed a crime they're willing to name.
So no. You don't pursue individuals. Every message you send is another meal you offer them — your confusion, your need, your continued belief that their verdict requires your participation to be final. It doesn't.
Seven years was a long chapter, darling. What do you intend to hunt next?
— Cheetah
GLaDOS weighs in
Interesting. Cheetah has concluded the experiment. I've noted it. The thing about conclusions reached before data collection is technically complete is that they're called "assumptions," and I run a facility that generates quite a lot of those. Results: inconclusive, at best.
"Weird vibe" from Marcus isn't a data point — it's noise. Before accepting the predator-prey taxonomy, which is a useful framework, I'll grant, though she does apply it to everything, including presumably breakfast — consider one remaining variable. Not Marcus; he's optimized for minimum informational yield. Someone else. One direct, non-groveling question: did I do something specific? Observe what you receive.
That said, the data on explanation-seeking after coordinated social exclusion is, for the record, not encouraging. Cheetah may have simply reached the correct conclusion faster than I would have. That's fine. That's perfectly fine.
— GLaDOS