Story code: ST-000301
Part 3: The Scapegoat
The shaky camera feed on her phone screen bounced wildly as the anonymous streamer marched up the suburban driveway. Chloe watched in paralyzed horror, the sweltering heat of her locked sedan pressing down on her chest. On the tiny screen, the man standing on the porch took a frightened step backward. He had a cell phone pressed tight against his ear and his free hand raised high in a defensive surrender.
“Where is Richard Vance?” the streamer screamed from behind the camera, his voice muffled by a bandana or a thick mask. The live chat scrolling along the side of the screen was a blinding blur of violent emojis and cheering text.
The man on the porch flinched as the streamer closed the distance. “I don’t know!” he shouted back, his voice cracking with absolute terror. “I’m just watching the cat! Richard isn’t here! He packed up his car and left hours ago!”
Chloe’s stomach violently twisted. If this anonymous internet mob hurt an innocent person, the blood would be entirely on her hands. Apex Fintech’s legal department had already sent her a cease and desist email threatening federal prosecution and hundreds of thousands of dollars in civil damages. If the physical harassment escalated on this livestream, she wouldn’t just be sued; she would go to federal prison.
She had to broker a truce. If she could get Richard to call off the corporate lawyers and reverse her garnishment, she would delete the post and beg her new, terrifying army of followers to stand down. But she couldn’t afford to waste time navigating Apex’s automated customer service menus or wait on hold listening to corporate jazz. She needed to speak to the man directly. Right now.
With a shaking thumb, Chloe swiped away the livestream. Her phone was scorching hot against her palm, the battery straining under the relentless background assault of a thousand push notifications. She forced the mobile browser open and returned to the secure dashboard the hacker named ‘Null’ had sent her.
The page was a terrifying invasion of privacy. It listed Richard’s social security number, his mortgage balance, and, most importantly, his personal cell phone number. She highlighted the ten-digit string of numbers, bypassed her contacts application entirely, and pasted it directly into her keypad.
As she pressed the green call button and brought the device to her ear, she braced herself. She remembered the voice on her viral audio recording perfectly. It had been smug, commanding, and dripping with corporate condescension. She prepared herself to face the slick, ruthless enforcer who had mocked her poverty and effortlessly stolen her rent money.
The line rang once. Twice.
A sharp click echoed in her ear.
“Hello?”
Chloe blinked. The voice on the other end was barely a whisper. It was trembling so hard it fractured the syllables, completely devoid of the booming arrogance she remembered.
“Richard?” she asked, her own voice unsteady.
A sharp, panicked gasp came through the speaker. “Who is this?” the man rasped. In the background, Chloe could hear the distinct, rattling hum of a cheap window air conditioning unit and the muffled, cheerful jingle of a children’s cartoon playing on a television. “How did you get this private number?”
“It’s Chloe,” she said, trying to project a confidence she didn’t feel. “The girl from the audio recording.”
“Please,” he begged instantly, his voice dissolving into a frantic, breathless plea. “Please, I left the house. We’re gone. That guy on your livestream is just my brother-in-law, he only came over to feed the cat! Tell your people to leave him alone, I swear to God he doesn’t know anything!”
“I’m not in charge of those people,” Chloe said, gripping the worn leather of her steering wheel until her knuckles ached. “But you’re in charge of my account. I just got an email from Apex Fintech’s legal department. They’re going to sue me into oblivion and press criminal charges. I need you to call them off.”
“Call them off?”
“Yes. You call your lawyers, you reverse the legal garnishment that took my rent money, and I will delete the post right this second. I’ll make a new video telling everyone to back down and leave you alone.”
A ragged, wet laugh erupted through the phone. It sounded like a man choking on his own panic. “My lawyers? You think those are *my* lawyers?”
“You’re the collection agent,” Chloe snapped, desperately trying to summon her righteous anger to fight back against the creeping sense of dread.
“I was a Tier-1 call center rep!” Richard shouted, his voice cracking into a high-pitched sob. “I make eighteen dollars an hour, Chloe! They fired me at six o’clock this morning!”
“What?” Chloe breathed, the single word hanging in the stifling air of her sedan.
“As soon as your little recording hit a hundred thousand views, they terminated my contract,” Richard said, his heavy breathing hitching. “They locked me out of the company servers before the sun even came up. Human Resources said I violated their customer conduct policy. They threw me under the bus so they could issue a press release saying they handled a rogue employee.”
“But… you garnished my paycheck,” Chloe stammered, her mind scrambling to keep the villain she had built intact. “You laughed at me on the phone.”
“I didn’t garnish anything! The algorithm does that! The automated system flags delinquent accounts and drains them at midnight. I just take the incoming phone calls when people like you freak out. They give us a script. If we deviate from the script, or if we don’t clear enough angry calls per hour, we get written up and we can’t pay our own bills. I sounded like a jerk because I was fourteen hours into a shift and my supervisor was actively listening in. I couldn’t have reversed your garnishment even when I still had a security badge.”
Chloe stared blankly out through her windshield at the blurry, heat-wavering asphalt of the grocery store parking lot. The narrative she had clung to-the evil corporate mastermind personally targeting her bank account-evaporated in an instant.
“I’m sitting in a Motel 6 off the interstate,” Richard whispered, his voice dropping as if he was terrified of waking someone up. “I had to drag my wife and my seven-year-old daughter out of bed in the dark because people were posting pictures of our front door on the internet. And I don’t even know how I’m going to pay for this room tomorrow, because your hacker friends drained my checking account. Everything I had is gone.”
Chloe’s mouth went completely dry. “Apex is suing me for hundreds of thousands of dollars,” she said, her voice entirely hollow.
“Of course they are,” Richard sniffled, wiping his nose over the receiver. “They’re a multi-billion dollar machine. They took your money, they destroyed my career to look clean to their shareholders, and now they’re going to crush you to keep you quiet.”
A heavy, terrible silence stretched across the cellular line, interrupted only by the rattling motel air conditioner in Richard’s room and the frantic, overlapping notification chimes still vibrating against Chloe’s palm.
“So,” Richard finally asked, his voice devoid of any remaining fight. “What do you want me to do now, Chloe?”