Chapter 8 - THE CHATROOM VERDICT
The chatroom thumbnail exploded with a frantic waterfall of scrolling text, thousands of anonymous usernames spamming emojis, bets, and demands faster than the human eye could track.
“Name him Glitch!”
“What’s the mother’s health score?”
“Give the kid a discount code for sneakers!”
“Look at the cop, he looks nervous lol.”
Julian stepped back from the holographic projection as if it were a physical wall of fire, his chest heaving with a mix of fury and sheer helplessness. “They’re treating him like a reality show character before he’s even born! This is sick!”
“It’s the economy, kid,” Vance said, leaning against the cold marble wall with his arms folded across his chest. “Ever since the municipal budget collapsed into private hands, every public service runs on engagement revenue. You want a hospital bed, someone has to pay for the kilowatt-hours. And right now, two hundred thousand people are willing to foot the bill—provided they get a front-row seat to the delivery.”
Clara groaned, her body slumping sideways in the wheelchair as another contraction tore through her, longer and sharper than the last. Her lips were cracked and bleeding, her skin taking on an alarming greyish tint under the harsh fluorescent lights. “Julian… my phone… check the… the secondary channel… your uncle left a message before he…”
Her voice trailed off into a ragged gasp, her head falling forward against her chest as the wrist monitor flashed a warning amber light: CRITICAL HEART RATE VARIABILITY.
“Mom! Mom, stay with me!” Julian cried, dropping to his knees beside the wheelchair and pressing his small hands against her cold fingers. He grabbed her battered phone off her lap, frantically scrolling past the corporate contract to find the encrypted folder his uncle—a rogue data runner who had vanished three years ago—had hidden in the device’s root directory.
“What are you doing, boy?” Miller asked, stepping closer as he noticed the sudden drop in the broadcast chatroom’s activity.
“My uncle left an override key,” Julian muttered, his fingers flying across the screen despite his shaking hands. “He said the corporate sponsorship kiosks have a legacy vulnerability left over from the old municipal grid transition. If I can inject his signature code before the timer runs out…”
“If you inject an unauthorized legacy code into a corporate sponsor grid, the system will flag it as a cyber attack,” Vance warned, his hand dropping automatically to his belt. “The internal security nodes will lock down every door in the building and flood the lobby with acoustic suppression gas.”
“Better than selling my brother to a bunch of ghouls on the internet!” Julian shouted back, his hazel eyes flashing with a fierce, desperate defiance that silenced both officers instantly.
May you like
He tapped the final execution button on the screen just as the overhead countdown timer hit three seconds, and a sudden, deafening shriek echoed through the entire hospital ventilation system as every light in the lobby instantly went pitch black.
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