I held the first page up like a lantern and let Nessa’s overlay lock it into split view. On the left, a contract screenshot; on the right, captions clean enough for a courtroom. The ring lights buzzed soft ozone; the fog pressing at the roll-up door salted the air with the harbor’s breath. The honeycomb shelves behind us threw hex-shadows across the concrete, neat little cells that promised order and hinted at traps.
“Exhibit A,” I said, keeping my voice low and unconcerned, the way I read recipes when Lyla used to double-check the sugar. “Talent Services Agreement, amendment three. Clause 14: ‘temporary persona transfer for narrative continuity.’”
Sloane lifted the slate and clicked. “Timecode 20:01:12. Chain A, B, C recording. Contract image hash matched to evidentiary copy.”
“Caption it,” I murmured, and Nessa pushed the line on-screen in big sans serif: CLAUSE 14: TEMPORARY PERSONA TRANSFER. Underneath, smaller: This practice is being challenged as coercion.
The chat pulsed: read it, what does that mean, is that legal, then a flood of refund emojis, followed by the better stuff—link to resources? Nessa pinned refund portal and safety hotline again, the text aligning with the beat of my pulse.
I licked my finger and turned the page. “Exhibit B,” I said. “Performance bonus schedule. See the column labeled ‘Risk Multiplier’?” A tiny tremor in my wrist invited the camera to come closer. “Note the tiers: ‘stressor,’ ‘jeopardy,’ ‘rescue.’ Next to each: a percentage increase in payout, capped by daily ceiling.”
“Statute reference,” Sloane said, stepping into half-light. “We allege this contributes to coercive conditions under § 530.14©. The precise interpretation will be litigated; tonight we are preserving.”
I breathed in caramel sugar from a box someone opened near the back—bakery buns cooling the air while a million strangers watched us read. “Now Exhibit C,” I said, and the mirrored screens snapped to the page with my favorite kind of violence: a neat signature.
“You’re going to say that’s digital,” someone in chat typed.
“It is,” I said. “And also wet ink.” I enlarged the corner. “C. Rainer. Signed day-of, counter-signed by the shell that pays the invoices.” I tapped the footer. “Rainer Narrative Studio, via Honey Harbor Holdings.”
“Money trail,” Sloane said, and Nessa flipped us to the flow diagram: accounts stacking like shipping containers along the Tide Market row. “Initial receipt from eco-cleaning sponsor,” Sloane narrated, “to Honey Harbor Holdings; disbursement to Rainer Narrative Studio; fractional payouts to talent via an escrow interface with conditional release triggers labeled ‘community challenge met.’”
“Community labor measured in panic,” I said. “Engagement turns the crank.”
Micro-hook:
A fresh block in the chat shouted, I WORKED FOR THEM before vanishing in slow-mode. Another wrote, we bought the jar, we bought the apron, we bought the countdown. I kept my face still, because the point wasn’t to gloat; the point was to keep the record boring enough to outlive us.
“Exhibit D,” I said, and the screenshot blinked up with a thin red underline Nessa had placed precisely where I’d asked. “Addendum: ‘NO BLOOD.’”
Lyla’s breath hitched beside the hive jar; her finger hovered and then touched the glass. I angled the page to catch the ring light. “Initials L.C. by the line,” I said. “Her hard boundary.”
“I told him,” Lyla said, voice steady now that the code had been honored and the mirrors held. “No props that read as harm, no staged injury, no fake ambulances. I wrote ‘NO BLOOD’ three times.”
Nessa underlined it again in red, slow and deliberate, then pinned a caption beneath our faces: NO BLOOD = NONNEGOTIABLE.
The chat shifted in texture—less froth, more gravel. she set a boundary, he monetized near it, refund requested, report submitted. A teen handle I recognized from mod nights wrote, I loved her aprons. I don’t love this; then, I can hold both. I let that one sit until it became a small echo the algorithm could not swat away.
I moved to the next screenshot. “Exhibit E: Script notes.” The camera zoomed. A tidy bullet read, Cue: confession at T-24. Another read, Tea break sob. Next to stair stumble, a neat X with Lyla’s initials and, beside it, in her own handwriting: no harm for views.
“I refused,” Lyla said. “He said tears test well.”
“We’ll let the testing rest,” I said. “Exhibit F: Payment processor flags.” Nessa compiled the page beside the caption: Accounts frozen pending review. “You can see these time-stamps align with the first thread I posted,” I continued. “The freeze happened, Cass pivoted to crypto, and the countdown accelerated.”
“Chain note,” Sloane said, almost to herself but into the mic, careful and dry. “Logs corroborate.”
Micro-hook:
A chorus of dings from the side monitor announced refund receipts flooding the mirror chat; the sound was thin, a tinplate rain under neon. The city beyond the door hummed in agreement, QR murals switching masks like stagehands in the fog. I smelled damp metal and stale coffee, then the yeast of buns again, and thought of Mom humming at dawn while I counted what was owed.
I raised a palm and the room fell into the stillness we’d earned. “Now the tie that binds,” I said. “Exhibit G: device log.”
The split-screen switched to a clean pane of text: Device ID: RNS-Bay-Switch-04; MAC; last admin login: crainer@; remote access enabled. The caption underneath translated to human: Cass controlled the switches.
“He designed erasure,” I said, “and priced rescue.” I didn’t need to say more because we’d already shown it, but I gave the viewers one beat to inhale and organize their outrage into action that wasn’t mobbing a door.
Sloane stepped in, her presence a cool edge on the heat. “For audiences documenting,” she said evenly, “note the continuity: device logs, contracts, payments. Chain-of-custody retains original metadata. Screenshots here are illustrative; originals are preserved.”
“So,” I said, “if you’re watching with your finger hovering over a donation button, we have an ask.” I let the sentence walk, not run. “Do not tip this stream. Do not buy crisis merch. If you have money to give, route it to people who will never appear in a finale.”
Nessa replaced the donate buttons Cass had seeded in prior scripts with a soft panel of survivor orgs we’d vetted with counsel: housing aid, legal clinics, creator-union safety funds. The panel gently overrode the old links; the color shifted from Cass’s golden brand to a calm teal.
“Pinned,” Nessa said in my ear. On-screen, the text read: Redirected: tonight’s links support survivors. Underneath: No one here receives a cent.
Cass was a shadow at the edge of our light, a flicker of suit fabric and the faint squeak of his sole against epoxy. I kept him peripheral. The story didn’t need his face anymore; it had his fingerprints.
“Back to the clause,” I said, tapping the persona transfer line. “This phrase looks academic. It is not.” I pointed to a second paragraph. “When a contract authorizes someone else to pilot your public self, and your pay depends on how convincingly you surrender, that’s not representation; that’s a rental.”
“Legally,” Sloane added, “intent and effect will be examined. Tonight we document effect.” She turned slightly to camera three. “We actively discourage harassment. Redirect to process.”
Chat echoed her: report don’t harass, no doxxing, hold the line. Nessa pinned how to report with a step-by-step for payment processors, then quietly added how to request chargebacks with the clearest language I’d ever seen her write.
Micro-hook:
I lifted Exhibit H—the emails from the silent sponsor—cropping out junior names to protect the ones we could. “Read the line, please,” I said, and Nessa zoomed to the joke that had made me grind my teeth to powder the first time: “panic-to-purchase efficiency.” I didn’t editorialize. I let the caption do it: This is not a joke.
The sound in the room changed. Not louder—truer. The ring lights stopped whining like they had decided to behave in the presence of paperwork. The honeycomb shadows sharpened. I felt the hive jar’s cool rim under my knuckles and slid it a millimeter nearer to Lyla, a small colonial of light settling in glass.
“Last set for now,” I said. “Exhibit I: the money.” Nessa bloomed the ledger view we’d built: dates, amounts, merchant IDs. The lines marched down the screen like a parade that had lost taste for confetti. I traced a finger along the route. “Sponsor payout, shell transfer, studio disbursement, drip to talent, kickback labeled ‘retention bonus’ for the handler.”
“That’s me,” Cass said, finally unable to resist the mirror of his own reflection. His voice tried for smooth; the microphone captured the burr. “Industry standard.”
“Your words,” I said, nodding toward the earlier monologue, “already told them what your standard buys.” I kept my gaze on the ledger. “We’re showing the receipt.”
Sloane clicked the slate again. “Timecode 20:13:02. Money trail corroboration entered.”
A new banner slid across the mirrors: Donations redirected—$42,118 raised for survivor orgs in nine minutes. I swallowed. The number was a balm and a bruise—proof that care can be taught where to go, proof of what he had been siphoning. I looked at Lyla. She didn’t cry. She breathed four in, four out, mouth soft. The camera caught her hand on the jar and, behind it, the hex of light stacked in a clean lattice on the concrete. Haven and hive, both true.
“I can read one more clause,” I said. I turned to Termination & Silence. “This gag’s penalty is bigger than any bonus,” I said. “Break the arc, pay the fee. Miss the rescue beat, lose your escrow.”
“Which she consented to—” Cass began.
I raised two fingers and the room didn’t cheer; the chat didn’t roar; the city outside didn’t rev its engines. We held still. “She consented to work,” I said. “You priced her refusal.”
Nessa underlined Lyla’s scrawl—no harm for views—again, and then she did a small thing I didn’t ask for that made the whole evening click into the shape I’d hoped for: she superimposed that handwriting across the corner of the stream like a watermark, faint and steady.
“That’s enough for the first block,” Sloane said quietly. “We preserve, we don’t perform discovery.”
I nodded. My throat tasted of iron and sugar. I let three seconds pass—one for my mother’s ledger, one for the girls who DM’d into the night, one for the junior employee who wrote a concern and got ignored in the Slack—and then I rested my wrist on the table beside the jar.
“We’ve shown you clauses, logs, and money trails,” I said. “If you came for rescue, this is what it looks like: boring, documented, and directed away from the spectacle.”
The chat settled into a low, strong hum: we see it, we’re done buying fear, how do we help others, resources please, what about refunds across borders. Nessa pinned international guidance and translated captions began to thread into the side mirror like a festival of careful fonts.
Micro-hook:
A reactor channel raided us then, shoving ten thousand fresh eyes into the room. The temperature rose a degree. New chat strings bloomed: FAKE, PLANT, FREE LYLA FROM HER SISTER, THIS IS CENSORSHIP. I watched the tide hit the seawall we built. Slow-mode ate the spikes; captions absorbed the bile into calmly worded questions. My heart did its old stutter—the one that remembers a funder pulling out on a Friday night and friends shrinking to notification dots.
I lifted the final page in my prepared stack: a wire diagram I hadn’t shown yet, the one that draws a clean line from the countdown tablet in the Honeycomb Loft to a device leased by Honey Harbor Holdings, administered by Cass, pinging from this very warehouse the night the confetti burst.
“Last for now,” I said. The room leaned without moving. The harbor fog pooled at the threshold like breath caught in a throat. “This diagram shows where the first timer lived and who fed it.”
Nessa brought it up in quiet glory: rectangles, arrows, timecodes. The caption kept its voice modest: Source: device logs, subpoena returns, physical serials. Sloane lifted her slate, eyes flat and bright.
I placed my fingertip—steadier than I deserved—on the arrow labeled admin login: crainer@ and I didn’t look away from the lens. “This ties the first clock to this room,” I said, “and it ties the room to the person who priced the rescue.”
The chat went noiseless for half a second—an earthquake pause. Then it split in two: a roar of there it is and a crackle of lawyer up from the raid’s remnants. The QR mural outside cycled to a new mask, honeycomb lines slipping into a darker shade that made the fog look like wet graphite.
I lowered the page but didn’t put it down.
“We can move to statements,” Sloane said softly, ready for witnesses, ready for oath.
I let my palm rest on the jar and felt the cool through my skin. “I will,” I said. “But first—”
I cut my breath into four and left it hanging, the question loaded into the air where everyone could taste it: with the receipts in view, would the crowd decide to be a community—or a consumer hungry for the next stunt?