Story code: ST-000717
Part 2: The Broadcast
“Mom?” I gripped the steering wheel, my knuckles turning white. “Mom, what’s wrong? Are you hurt?”
She didn’t answer with words at first, just a long, shuddering inhalation that sounded like a drowning victim breaking the surface.
“Elias,” she finally choked out. Her voice was unrecognizable, stripped of all its usual warmth and replaced by a hollow, raw terror. “The police just left my house.”
My heart hammered against my ribs. “The police? Why? What happened?”
“They… they asked if I knew where you were.” A fresh wave of sobs overtook her. “They showed me the files, Elias. The video. They said it’s being broadcasted everywhere. Your sister’s boss saw it and fired her on the spot. We are getting death threats.”
“What video? Mom, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m sitting outside the lumber yard. My card just declined.”
“Don’t lie to me!” she screamed. The sheer volume and hostility in her tone made me flinch. “I saw your face! I heard your voice! How could you do those things? How could you hide this from us?”
“Mom, please, I swear to God I haven’t done anything. What is on the video?”
“I can’t,” she whispered, her voice trembling with absolute disgust. “I can’t even look at your name right now.”
The line went dead.
I pulled the phone away from my ear, my hands shaking so violently I nearly dropped it. I hit redial. It rang once before switching to her voicemail. I tried my sister. Sent straight to voicemail.
I needed to see the hashtag. I needed to see what was destroying my life. I opened the social app again. The loading circle spun for three seconds before a gray dialogue box violently interrupted the screen: *Your account has been permanently suspended for severe violations of our terms of service regarding the distribution of violent and illegal material.*
I exited the app and opened my mobile browser, typing in the web address manually to bypass the login screen. I searched my own name. The search results flashed a wall of blurred thumbnails before refreshing to a stark white error page.
My cellular provider had killed my data connection. The signal bars at the top of my screen vanished, replaced by the letters *SOS*.
“No, no, no,” I muttered, frantically toggling airplane mode on and off. Nothing. I was completely severed from the network.
I threw the car into drive, my tires screeching against the hot asphalt of the hardware store parking lot. I had to get home. My laptop was on my desk, connected to the building’s secured Wi-Fi. I merged onto the highway, driving with a reckless, frantic energy, my eyes darting between my dead phone and the rearview mirror. Every driver that glanced in my direction felt like a threat. Did they know? Had they seen it?
The fifteen-minute drive to my apartment complex felt like a suffocating eternity. I pulled onto my street, ready to sprint up the three flights of stairs to my unit, but slammed on the brakes halfway down the block.
Three black SUVs and two marked police cruisers were parked haphazardly on the curb in front of my building. Yellow crime scene tape was already being unspooled across the front stone steps. I could see two detectives standing in the courtyard, talking to my landlord. My landlord was pointing frantically up toward the third floor-my floor.
I killed the engine and slouched down in my seat, my heart slamming against my sternum like a trapped bird. I couldn’t go in there. If I walked up to those officers without knowing what I was accused of, I was walking blindly into a trap. I needed to know what was in that video first.
I checked my wallet. Four crumpled one-dollar bills. My credit cards were dead, my phone was a brick, and my apartment was a crime scene.
I put the car back in gear and slowly reversed down the street, keeping my head below the headrest. Three blocks away, there was an old internet cafe-a relic from the early two-thousands that mostly serviced international students and competitive gamers. It was dim, cash-only, and completely anonymous.
I parked in the alley behind the cafe, the smell of stale urine and hot garbage wafting through the Civic’s vents. I walked through the backdoor, paid the bored teenager at the counter my last four dollars for an hour of access, and took a seat at a sticky terminal in the darkest corner of the room.
My hands hovered over the greasy keyboard. I opened a private browsing window and typed my name into an uncensored, offshore video hosting site I remembered from my film school research days. I knew whatever had been scrubbed from the mainstream platforms would have instantly propagated there.
I hit enter.
A video titled *Elias Thorne – The Basement Confession* sat at the top of the search results. It already had three million views. The upload timestamp was exactly 9:00 AM this morning-the exact time I had been standing in line at the lumber yard.
I clicked the thumbnail and held my breath.
The video started playing. The camera quality was pristine, cinematic. It showed a dimly lit, concrete basement. In the center of the frame, tied to a wooden chair, was Clara-my lead actress. She was bruised, weeping, and begging for her life.
Then, a man stepped into the frame. He was holding a heavy, blood-stained steel pipe.
The man was me.
It wasn’t a deepfake. It wasn’t someone who looked like me. It was me. The man on the screen had the exact same jagged scar running through his left eyebrow from a childhood bicycle accident. He was wearing the same faded blue production t-shirt I was currently wearing. He even had the same tiny white paint stain on the right sleeve.
I watched in paralyzed horror as the version of me on the screen raised the steel pipe and began to speak directly to the camera, confessing to a list of atrocities so vile they made my stomach heave.
I slammed the spacebar to pause the video, gasping for air in the stuffy cafe. This was impossible. I hadn’t seen Clara since our rehearsal last night. I didn’t own a basement. I had never held that pipe.
Before my brain could process the impossibility of the footage, a heavy, calloused hand slammed down onto my shoulder, pinning me violently against the back of the chair.
“Don’t move a single muscle, Elias,” a low, unfamiliar voice growled directly into my ear. “Keep your hands on the desk where I can see them.”