The clock hit forty and blinked into a game. My screen reloaded on its own and the numbers dissolved into honeycomb tiles arranged like a hive diagram—cells labeled SHARE, CLIP, DUET, TAG FIVE FRIENDS. Each tile fed glistening progress bars that inched forward whenever the chat burped out new posts. The bars filled with a slow syrupy animation that tickled the brain the way peeling plastic off a new screen does. Above the hive, a header purred: Community Challenge · Unlock Lyla’s Story Together.
“He turned the timer into a treadmill,” I said. The ring light on my borrowed desk hummed with the faint ozone I now associate with panic, and the ghost-click of phantom notifications throbbed against my palm even when my phone lay still. Outside, harbor fog pressed against the window; downtown’s neon smeared its mouth on the glass.
Nessa appeared on the call, hair in a messy spiral that made her look like she’d slept in a lecture hall and liked it. “I’m seeing it,” she said, eyes tracking fast. “Tier One: five thousand new posts equals ‘audio hint.’ Tier Two: fifty thousand comments equals ‘location silhouette.’ Tier Three: one hundred thousand duets equals ‘behind-the-scenes still.’ Classic engagement ladder, but dressed like a rescue.”
“Read the microprint,” I said. “It’s where he stashes the teeth.”
She zoomed. “There—participation may appear in future storytelling. He’s work-for-hire’ing the hive without contracts.”
“He’s hiring with hunger,” I said. The kettle on my shelf wheezed itself off; I ignored it. I tasted old tea anyway, stale bergamot and stress.
In the main feed, progress bars bloomed. Fans posted voice notes confessing why Lyla mattered to them; each clip pinged the counter like coins into a jar. Duets split the screen into ant farms of faces. Comments stacked like fallen dominos—bring her back i’ll do anything refreshing until reveal—and every stack slid the “LOCATION SILHOUETTE” tile toward 100%. The interface threw little bursts of confetti when a new milestone crested, confetti that remembered the first night and didn’t apologize for it.
“We need mod scripts live,” I said. “Don’t scold; redirect.”
“Already drafting,” Nessa said. Her fingers clattered, brisk as shells on tide rock. “Remind them not to threaten, not to trespass, not to crowdsource harm. Offer reporting links. Offer the victims’ fund mirror for any spend impulse.”
“And pin one thing,” I said, “the only thing. You’re not the product. Short, declarative, concrete.”
“On brand for the un-brand,” she said, smiling without letting it take her too far. She breathed in through her nose like a swimmer finding rhythm and started pinging volunteer mods. “Jules on Insta, Dev on Discord, Mina on TikTok. I’ll take YouTube. We’ll rotate every hour to beat fatigue.”
The site chimed with a new tone—clear, high, engineered to be unskippable without being loud. A top banner unfurled: Work together to unlock clues. The word work didn’t blush.
I opened the “Rules” page and found what I needed: Content we highlight may be edited for clarity and safety. He’d written a license for crowd labor disguised as care. I dragged the browser window to the second monitor and started a note.
“He’s using them like crew,” I said. “Transcribers, editors, street teams, set scouts. He’ll sort the duets for locations in the backgrounds. He’ll ask for where you would feel safe meeting Lyla and harvest the list.”
“Then we jam the harvest,” Nessa said. “We seed generic backdrops. We blur. We teach people how to shoot their kitchens without metadata. We hand them copy-and-paste captions: No locations, no faces, no kids.”
“And we make care boring,” I said. “No spectacle to metabolize.”
“Boring saves lives,” she said, and the words steadied me the way a handrail does when stairs surprise you.
Micro-hook: The bars jumped again, like someone had slipped a hose into the tank. “Did you see that?” I asked. “Twenty percent in one breath.”
“Brigade,” Nessa said. “I’m watching a Discord fan-lift channel rename to housewarmers. Same avatars from the reactor raid, plus three new accounts with six-digit suffixes. Cass’s interns are in there, spoon-feeding prompts.”
“Screenshot, log, don’t engage,” I said. “We bank it for the payment processor thread.”
“Copy,” she said, and I heard the soft fthip of her taking receipts. “Scripted comments incoming: If you care, post twice. We’ll reply with If you care, rest twice.”
I opened a new doc and wrote the line that had been waiting under my tongue since midnight: You’re not the product. I let it sit alone on the page for a breath. Then I built a body around it—short sentences, plain verbs, specific asks.
- If posting helps you feel less scared, post without hashtags.
- Don’t show your street, your school, your employer’s logo, your kids.
- Don’t buy anything to prove you care. Care doesn’t need a receipt.
- If anyone asks you to DM them privately for “the real plan,” block and report.
- If you have tips: send to Sloane’s tipline, not my DMs.
- If you have money: victims’ fund mirror only.
- If you need rest: log off. We will still be here.
I added one sentence that tasted like metal when I typed it: A reveal that depends on your engagement is a product, not a rescue.
The kettle had cooled to a rubber taste; I drank it anyway. My hands steadied over the keyboard the way they do when icing a cake—spine tall, wrist loose, grief sharpened into technique. The fog bunched outside like folded linen. Neon from the cliff-backed harbor turned the window into a slow-moving billboard.
“Tier One unlocked,” Nessa said. “He dropped an audio clip. It’s Lyla’s laugh, over-processed and looped, with a high-end filter that makes you want to lean in.”
“He’s using her voice like a metronome,” I said. “Warmth as a click track.”
“Comments are crying,” she said. “Mods are answering with boundaries, not buckets. Jules is a machine.”
I clicked play on the clip and killed it after a half-second. The sonic honey stuck, the way glitter does even when you wash your hands twice. I wiped my palm on my jeans and pushed the counter-message to the top of my doc.
“I want to say don’t post at all,” I said. “But that’s not honest to how fear works. It wants movement. It will take any movement you give it.”
“Then we give it a slow dance,” Nessa said. “Not a mosh.”
I laughed, brittle and useful. “Okay. Copy variant for each platform. Keep the voice the same—no corporate. Put the legal bit at the end: This is not legal advice; this is safety advice.”
“I’ll make a text-only image for the folks who need to screenshot,” she said. “Plain background, no brand. Do we mention the barn?”
“Not yet,” I said. “Chain-of-custody first. We don’t gift him our map.”
Tier Two’s bar swelled like a bruise. A silhouette tile quivered. The site’s CSS rendered a shape in grayscale blocks: a rectangle with a pitched top and a cutout in the center. It could have been any barn in any county; it was also his barn dressed as nobody’s.
“He’s templating the hayloft,” I said. “So he can deny it later. ‘Not ours, just barn-shaped.’”
“Mods are pushing location safety 101,” Nessa said. “No caravans, no meetups, no candlelight vigils. Someone suggested a pop-up memorial at Tide Market; we shut that down.”
“Good,” I said. “The city’s compact loves profitable scenes. We won’t feed it a free one.”
I took a breath and let the smells of my block float in: neighbor’s garlic and ginger up the hall, the faint sugar from the pier when the wind felt charitable, the dry cardboard scent of mail stacked by the door because I hadn’t had the energy to open anything with glossy ink. All of it anchored me in a body not built for the internet’s speed.
“How are your parents?” I asked.
“Sleeping after a K-drama and two bowls of juk,” she said. “I turned off the landline. The students are babysitting the spam.”
“Tell them I’ll bring buns tomorrow,” I said. “No cameras.”
“They’ll feed you first,” she said, and I smiled where she couldn’t see.
I posted the counter-message on a burner first to watch for immediate brigades, then mirrored it to the main with comments locked to followers-only for an hour. I added alt text so screen readers would carry the same weight: Protect yourself. You’re not the product. Then I pinned the victims’ fund mirror link one line below and the tipline two lines above—care, report, resource.
The replies came like rain at first, gentle and scattered. thank you for saying this i needed permission to log off how do i talk to my kid about this is it ok if i just pray. I answered three, then stopped. My pulse wanted to answer everyone and be good all at once. That’s not how this works.
“He’s boosting duets with faces,” Nessa said. “He’s training the algorithm to prefer tears.”
“We starve it,” I said. “We reward text. We toss hearts on the posts that show nothing but words. We teach the audience to love a blank wall with clear sentences.”
“Not sexy,” she said.
“Life-saving,” I said. “Sexy later, in therapy.”
Micro-hook: The silhouette tile snapped into a sharper image: a barn door with a modern padlock and three floodlights, one burned out. Not proof, not nothing. The comments howled. I counted to eight and felt each number rub the inside of my ribs.
“He’s pulling stills from earlier rehearsal,” I said, the words low and clipped so they wouldn’t bruise the air. “He wants them to build the set with him—Pick the light. Pick the angle. Pick me.”
“Then we pick refusal,” Nessa said. “I’m adding a short how-to: How to care without being cast.”
The chat brigades swung back with sugar knives. mara is gatekeeping care mods are jealous of lyla if you loved her you’d share more. I felt my jaw set so hard a molar complained. I placed my hands flat on the desk, palms down, and pressed until the tremor left. The skin of my hands smelled like warm plastic where the ring light had breathed on them all day.
“I want to rage,” I said.
“You can rage in the doc,” Nessa said. “Not on the timeline.”
“You’re right,” I said, and I typed the rage out where only I could taste it, then deleted it line by satisfying line until what remained was simple: You’re not the product.
Tier Three grew teeth. Duets multiplied, many from teenagers filming on school stairwells or bus stops, all that unintended metadata offering him a live map of where the hive slept. I flagged three for takedown. I asked two kids to DM me from a teacher’s account. I posted a template letter any parent could send to a principal explaining why their school might see a spike in unauthorized filming and how to handle it without humiliation.
“Location silhouettes are the cheapest clue,” I said. “He’ll save the expensive one for the penultimate hour.”
“Expensive?” Nessa asked.
“Live bodies,” I said. “Someone on camera, even if it’s just a hand.”
She was quiet for a second. “Then we get ahead. We tell people that a hand on camera is not proof of safety. We teach them to ask for I am safe to speak.”
“Yes,” I said. “We seed that phrase like breadcrumbs.”
I checked our mirror links. Donations were steady, not spiky. A good sign. Panic wanted spikes. Care preferred a durable slope.
“We’re holding,” Nessa said. “Numbers are up, but our ratio is decent. We’re converting performative energy into practical tasks.”
“Into boredom with boundaries,” I said. The thought warmed the space between my ribs, a small furnace that never makes headlines.
The site threw another confetti burst. A new tile unlocked: COMMUNITY CHOICE: WHERE SHOULD LYLA TELL HER STORY? The options matched the sets I’d clocked before—Tide Market container row at dusk, downtown mural wall with QR panel, “cozy kitchen” with hex shelves, and an empty warehouse with taped floor marks. He’d given them his scouting deck and asked them to vote.
“Production by plebiscite,” I said. “He’s pre-sold the reveal to the highest-engaged set.”
“We say no to all of it,” Nessa said. “We tell them a story told under duress isn’t a story. It’s a script.”
“Write it,” I said. “And put my name on it.”
She did. I signed it by breathing into my shoulders and letting them drop. Then I opened my main account, looked at the camera I hadn’t turned on, and recorded a ten-second clip for captions only. No face, no music, just text over a blank wall:
You’re not the product.
Don’t be cast as crew.
Rest, report, resource.
We’ll meet Lyla where she’s safe to speak, not where a poll sends her.
I pinned it and put my phone face down so the neon couldn’t flirt with the glass anymore. The apartment held the quiet with gratitude. The harbor sent up its salted breath, caramel-sweet from the pier. A scooter chirped two streets over and stopped, embarrassed to be noisy in this particular night.
“Check the bars,” Nessa said softly.
I did. Tier Three shivered near full. The silhouettes glittered at their edges, eager. I could feel Cass somewhere in his farmhouse or a rented office stroking a checkbox on a whiteboard, care turning to content with a flick of his wrist.
“We’ll never outrun his machine,” I said.
“We don’t outrun,” she said. “We slow it until it tips over.”
I let her optimism touch my elbow and not climb higher. The site chimed with that clear, high tone again. Ninety-seven percent. Ninety-eight. Ninety-nine.
“Stay boring,” I told myself, soft enough to fog the screen. I held the words the way you hold a hot cup, careful not to spill. I thought of hex shelves and honey trapped in jars. Of sweetness saved and sweetness sold.
Then my phone lit not with confetti but with a single notification that cut the room cleaner than any ringtone. A dormant handle Lyla had followed once—quiet for years—pulsed in my inbox with one character.
A honey drop sat in the request folder, gold and small and impossible to ignore.
I didn’t tap. I watched the progress bar complete and asked the only question that belonged to me in that breath: if the crowd was building his set, who had just sent me the first line of mine?