Cut Out, Cashed In

I stared at my phone as the abuse piled up in real time, wave after wave of it, and felt something sink all the way to the bottom.

'Aunt Sandra, you really burned every last principle you had just to destroy me.'

Within half a day, a crowd had gathered outside my new office building. Freelance content creators, rubberneckers, and hired protesters with signs picketing outside the building.

"Lexi Harmon's got no shame! Slept her way up and drove her own aunt to her deathbed!"

"Come look, everyone! The face of a saint and the behavior of a gutter rat!"

My new boss, Owen Chase, called me into his office, his brow tight, his eyes measuring. "Lexi, what exactly is going on?

"This scene outside is doing serious damage to the company's image. The board's position is that you take a leave of absence until the dust settles. If this can't be cleared up, we'll have no choice but to terminate your contract."

I stood across from his desk, jaw locked, forcing myself to stay steady.

"Give me three days." I held his gaze. "If I can't put the people who fabricated this behind bars in three days, I'll resign voluntarily and cover every cent of the penalty fees."

He studied me for a long moment, then nodded. "Three days."

I took a cab straight home. I locked myself in my room and played back Craig's hotel clip frame by frame, over and over.

The build was similar to mine, but if it was a fake, there would be a flaw somewhere. There always was.

I enlarged the footage one frame at a time until I found it—a faint, unnatural distortion along the edge of a mirror in the background.

A classic deepfake artifact.

And the only person with both the technical skills to pull it off and a reason to do Sandra's dirty work was Wade. Wade had studied computer science. He'd always had a taste for that kind of gray-area technical work.

I immediately reached out to a former colleague from Vivid Stream Media's tech department who I'd stayed on good terms with, Derek Mills.

"I need a favor. Can you pull Wade's cloud storage IP login records?"

He hesitated. Then he thought about how Sandra used to grind him down, and his jaw set. "Give me two hours."

In those two hours, the internet reached full boil. Hundreds of comments flooded my personal account.

[Get out of streaming. Go die.]

Mum sat reading them, shaking, tears streaming down her face. "Lexi, how can they do this to you? I'll go after every single one of them myself."

I wrapped my arms around her and rubbed her back. "Mum, don't. The higher they jump right now, the harder they're going to land."

Two hours later, Derek sent me an encrypted archive.

"It's all in there: the original files, the deepfake project files, and the chat logs between Wade and Craig. Craig took $30,000 from Aunt Sandra. Wade handled the fake video. They were going all out to bury you."

I looked at the evidence in my hands.

At eight o'clock that night, I went live across every platform I had. The stream title was: "Let's Settle This Now."