Void stretched her shoulders, muttering, "Time to check in on the old ghosts while those two keep themselves busy..." She padded over to her netrunning rig, pulling the cyberdeck closer. The thing looked like it had been scavenged from half a dozen corpses: matte-black patch plates, screws gone rainbow from too much heat, wires soldered in strange angles. Frankenstein tech, just like her.
She itched for a proper neural link, but the idea of flying out to some back-alley clinic overseas only to wake up with a soon-to-be-obsolete neuroprocessor didn't exactly scream worth it. A week of downtime for something the market would make ancient in six months? No thanks. The deck was ugly, but it worked - and it never let her down.
Keys clacked sharp and rhythmic under her fingers as she powered it up, the bootloader, then the OS painting her face in pretty purple. She cracked her knuckles. "Let's see what's still twitching in the ruins today."
The login prompt flickered to life for her haunt of choice - aptly named Necropolis, it was one of the last true BBS graveyards where runners, code necromancers, and hardware freaks gathered, not just to trade software, but to carve art into the digital bones of the world.
░█▀█░█▀▀░█▀▀░█▀▄░█▀█░█▀█░█▀█░█░░░▀█▀░█▀▀░ ░█░█░█▀▀░█░░░█▀▄░█░█░█▀▀░█░█░█░░░░█░░▀▀█░ ░▀░▀░▀▀▀░▀▀▀░▀░▀░▀▀▀░▀░░░▀▀▀░▀▀▀░▀▀▀░▀▀▀░ ---------------[NODE v7.4]--------------- // sculpting chaos into art //
// USER: void // PASS: ****************
Void smirked. "Home, sweet home."
Inside, the text channels were their usual chaos: arguments about ICE revisions, links to pirated soft, someone ranting about corpo contract runners snooping around, more demos for retro hardware. Nothing new, nothing of concern. Void flicked through the boards, and when she couldn't find anything of interest, she decided to ping a chat relay.
void :: status? been a minute.
N1GHTF4LL :: holy shit, void. thought you ghosted
MEATGHOST :: wb girl. whats cookin?
C4THEDERAL :: wow corpo sellout makes her return. gold
Same vibe as always. Cryptic paranoia and half-jokes layered on top of real warnings.
But then a separate chat popped up, flagged private, bouncing directly to her.
Luxy :: yo void. seen the feed yet?
void :: which one.
Luxy :: echosphere. you're trending. not in the good way.......
Her hands froze above the deck. A cold weight settled in her stomach. She hadn't expected to hear that.
void :: the fuck you mean trending. i don't *trend*.
Luxy :: nah, you do. check net://echosphere.pub/feed/5442
Luxy :: god help whoever decided to fuck with you
void :: ...
void :: thanks lux. i'll have a look.
Her jaw tightened. Luxy wasn't the type to troll. If they were flagging something, it meant it was real.
With a flick, she loaded the link.
The EchoSphere bloomed across her overlay: not a board, not a BBS, but the ugly, beating heart of modern gossip. It had grown out of the ashes of the post-2022 collapse - anonymous posting, encrypted feeds, endless whisper-channels feeding on algorithmic amplification. Think rumor factory on steroids. Where the corpo PR bots danced with human spite and no one bothered to check what was true.
She hated the place. But she couldn't look away now.
The stream loaded. Her breath caught.
It was Amy's face.
Her heart stuttered. A low-res image, slightly warped from compression, but unmistakably her: Amy on some rooftop café, mid-laugh, eyes soft with the kind of joy you only captured when no one thought they were being watched.
And right next to it: text screaming in caps.
"MY DAUGHTER, MY BABY, STOLEN BY THIS 'VOID' CREATURE."
Void's skin prickled cold. She scrolled, eyes locking onto the video embedded below.
It was a woman. Black hair, too-perfect makeup that didn't quite mask the fatigue beneath. A studio setup, ring light gleaming in her eyes, background blurred to look homey but sterile. And her voice - calm and measured, dripping with that well-rehearsed tremble of someone who had practiced sounding broken.
"I don't... I don't know how to say this. But my daughter - my sweet Amy - she's been taken advantage of. By someone calling themselves 'Void.'"
The way she said the name made Void's stomach twist, like bile rising.
"This person is older. Dangerous. My daughter was vulnerable, and they preyed on her. And now... I don't know if I'll ever get her back."
Void's nails dug crescents into her palms.
"Fucking crocodile tears," she muttered under her breath. "Goddamn actress."
She scrolled further. Comments stacked like corpses. Half the crowd clucking in sympathy, half sharpening knives, all of them treating Amy like a prop.
Disgusting predator. Someone find this Void.
Classic groomer energy. Protect the kids.
Your daughter deserves better. Stay strong, mama.
Void's vision pulsed red. Mama. As if Marzena - who'd left scars so deep Amy still flinched at her own reflection - was some wounded saint.
Her breath grew shallow, quick. She slammed a hand on her desk to ground herself.
Void leaned closer to the screen, words coming out low and deliberate.
"Proper piece of shit."
Her fingers drummed against the deck. The image of Marzena's faked distress - perfect lighting, voice cracking at all the right places - burned into her eyes.
"You're the reason she jumps when someone raises their voice," she hissed, every syllable clipped like a blade. "The reason she doesn't even trust a goddamn hug."
Void's lip curled, but her voice didn't rise. It stayed measured, like she was forcing every ounce of fury through a filter, compressing it down until it felt heavy enough to crush ribs.
"And now you want to paint me as the monster? Because you can't stand losing control?"
She leaned back, exhaling through her nose, eyes locked on the hollow performance. Her tone dropped to a cold, almost surgical whisper.
"Broadcast all you want, lady. Build your little fantasy version of yourself. Spin your story while the whole Net plays jury."
A pause - her knuckles whitening on the edge of the desk. Then, sharper, the words cutting like a hot knife through butter.
"But you're not putting that on me. Not now. Not ever. Over my dead fucking body."
Her heart thumped loud in her ears. But beneath the anger, a darker feeling simmered: guilt.
Because Luxy hadn't been wrong. She was trending. Not for her cyberspace antics involving the work she'd put in to fuck with the corpos, but for this. For being painted a predator by a woman who couldn't stand reality checks.
"What. A. Bitch." she whispered.
Void felt her throat tighten, anger pressing against her skull. It wasn't just the lies. It was the fucking ease of it. One manipulative woman, crying into a webcam, and suddenly half the Surface Net wanted Void's head.
She killed the feed before she smashed something. For a long moment, she sat in the flickering glow of her cyberdeck's screen, breathing through her teeth.
"Alright, you absolute cunt," she muttered. "You want to play games with me? Fine. Let's have some fun."
Void started digging. Threads unraveled under her touch - connections between accounts, repost pipelines, the sudden suspicious boost in view counts. Classic astroturfing. Someone had juiced this story with botnets, ensuring it clawed its way to the front page of every algorithmic feed.
And it wasn't random. She knew exactly whose fingerprints were on it. Marzena had resources. Not corp-level, but petty enough, bitter enough, to scrape together a smear campaign with the right hired vultures. And a familiar name appeared in metadata: n3on.
"Knew I'd see you rearing your ugly fucking head eventually."
Then, a realization hit her...
The logs.
Amy's computer. She connected the dots. If she left her phone at home, she probably also didn't scrub her machine clean.
Marzena had probably found them - the messages, the late-night chats, all the little confessions Amy had stored without realizing what they'd look like to someone eager to twist the narrative. And of course, the log identifying Void.
Void's chest tightened. "She never even told me her mother's name. And now here she is, burning me alive with it."
She traced the signal back, sniffing out the route Marzena's video stream had taken. Household address. Protected by a weak ICE, so not beyond her reach. A few nudges, a bunch of old exploits dusted off like crowbars in a toolkit, and the cracks began to show.
Amy's machine was still on the same network. And like Void predicted - the thing hadn't even been barely scrubbed.
Void stared at the directory structure unfolding before her. Logs. Photos. Cached conversations. Everything Amy had ever poured into that keyboard, sitting there like ammunition waiting to be fired.
"This machine is a coffin. A mausoleum she never asked for. And her mother's rifling through it like a grave robber, parading the bones in front of the neighbors. No. Not while I'm breathing.
She pulled up her wiper. Sector-by-sector, zero overwrite. Permanent. A wipe you can't undo even with forensic-grade recovery. She hovered over the execute command.
But then her gaze flicked back to the network map. Another device showed up on the branch - MK_Phone.
Void's heartbeat steadied. "Why settle for a scorched earth cleanup when I can salt the fields while I'm at it?"
Not having a specialized tool ready, she jumped back to the chat with Luxy.
void :: lux? you there?
Luxy :: yea wsp
void :: i don't usually ask for help but. i'm in a pinch.
Luxy :: lmao am i dreaming? void? asking the lowly me for a hand?
Luxy :: alr done with the clowning. what do you need, friend
void :: need me a datasiphon daemon. i know you dabbled.
Luxy :: oooh. the "whale piper." i gotchu. but...
void :: yeye iou. see you in the tavern soon. usual time.
Luxy :: damn, you remember?
void :: i *never* forget.
Luxy :: [attachment received]
She opened another tunnel, slipped in through the weak link - an outdated messaging app with laughably poor protection. Within seconds, she had a foothold. A clean dropper nestled into the device, invisible to anyone but her. A bug. Not a flashy one - nothing that would make Marzena scream and post about "hackers targeting her." No, this was Luxy's creation, after all. Delicate, clandestine: logging, copying, siphoning her messages, camera access in timed bursts, microphone recordings. Evidence. All pushed directly to Void's datastack back home.
Only then did she trigger the wipe. Amy's machine blinked out piece by piece, directories collapsing like buildings in slow-motion demolition. Logs - gone. Photos - eviscerated. The whole rotten archive reduced to digital ash. The monitor in Void's workshop flickered as the connection dropped dead.
Void jacked out of the system and sat back, staring at the blank screen.
The silence was deafening.
For a moment she thought about Amy, the way she flushed under sharp words, the way she looked at Keira like she was both anchor and a lifeboat. Void wondered how she'd break this news - or if she even should. Tell Amy her mother had been parading her trauma online for strangers' validation? Or keep the wound stitched shut, let her breathe without knowing how deep the rot had gone?
She closed her eyes, pinched the bridge of her nose, and whispered to herself:
"Later. Deal with it later. Right now, she's safe. That's enough."
She exhaled. Her hands were still trembling, but she told herself it was adrenaline, not doubt. Never doubt.
As she walked out of her den back into the living room, she knew one thing: she wasn't done yet.
Not by a long shot.