Chapter Text
Abby stumbled into her duplex, coated in a fine layer of dirt and debris and let out a yawn so large it made her jaw click. She fumbled for the light switch, squinted in the shift from the dim light of the St. Louis suburbs to the brightness of her home, and carelessly dropped her keys into the basket by the door. One donkey kick and a series of locks later, the world was shut out and she was free to start peeling off a trail of filthy layers on her way to her bathroom. Tomorrow!Abby would be pissed, but that was why she had sprung for the place with all hardwood floors.
Backpack, shoes, jacket, gloves, kneepads all fell away leaving her in just her jeans, her sweat-stained tank-top and her ballcap by the time she made it to the hall. She paused in front of one of her many whimsical harlequin portraits scattered across her house, pulled out her phone, and began recording.
“Hey guys, new video tomorrow or maybe Thursday? You have to take that up with Beth. We were in an abandoned theater today and let me just say to all my fellow short girls?” She leaned closer to the camera as if she was imparting a great secret. “Don’t let your tall friends convince you to go into crawlspaces. It’s not worth it.”
She uploaded the video and finished stripping the whole way to the shower, her hat the only thing that ended up in the hamper where she’d no doubt forget about it when she needed to go out again. Right now the only thing that mattered was hot water and steam and a promise of a soft bed and no tight crevices.
When she finally emerged in a cloud of steam, wrapped up in a Harley Quinn bathrobe, she felt like something that had just emerged from a chrysalis, the wreck of the day having washed down the drain. She perched on the edge of her bed and opened up TikTok to check the responses to her video, scrolling mindlessly through. A lot of excitement and hype, a few people commenting on what was up with ‘the clown thing’ with several people dogpiling on them about how it was a harlequin thing (Abby winced at their veracity in correcting people, wishing she hadn’t addressed the collection of brightly colored jesters in the room because now it led to people believing they needed to defend her collection from people who might dismiss her as the ‘weird clown girl’ if left unchecked), some people being a bit thirsty about her being grimy in a tanktop— all in all a very normal assortment. She wasn’t really in a niche that generated a lot of controversy. Most of her subscribers had come from Marduk Industries’ special Halloween event last year where Twitch streamers were paired with urban explorers to live react to their explorations of abandoned buildings as if they were playing horror games with actors stepping in to provide the jump scares. Abby had gotten Markiplier and a shut-down Chuck-e-Cheese that had garnered her a slew of eyes on her. Beth had sent her memes that had popped up afterwards and told her not to forget them now that she was an icon.
Speaking of Beth, her phone jingled as a text notification from ‘Tweedledum’ popped up. why must you slander me, tabby??? followed by a line of crying emojis.
‘Tweedledee’ followed it up with: we only ask because we know you can do it. Ur like a cat.
Hence the nickname ‘Tabby.’ Abby rolled her eyes and opened up the groupchat. She imagined Beth and Becca sprawled in sweats, freshly showered, and watching trash TV in their apartment across town as she typed the people deserve to be warned about so-called friends taking advantage of them for being teensy. phish and mindy would never do this to me :(
She got a line of middle finger emojis and some booing before Beth said you love us. If you hadnt gone in we wouldve gotten shit footage and wed be behind on our schedule.
Ugh. Gotta appease the algorithm gods. The last time they got behind they’d had to rely on Phish to carry an entire video in an abandoned Big Lots, which, while it got good views, was not exactly brand cohesion. There was a reason why Phish didn’t solo. I appreciate your diligence. Beth responded with another middle finger and a tongue-out emoji. She scooted further up onto her bed and switched tabs back to TikTok. More excitement, more thirsty comments, some people wondering if she was dating anyone…
Immediately after seeing that she noticed her DMs had a single message and she rolled her eyes, figuring it was some mutual shooting their shot. What she found instead was a perplexing message from a username made out of a garbled series of numbers with the letters P-O-M-N-I in all caps at the end. It had the stuttering quality of something that was dictated.
You don’t know me. I mean technically you do. But you don’t really. This is so weird. I’m not sure if this is going to work. I need you to find the following people. If you don’t, something terrible will happen to me and everyone I know. I know you wouldn’t want that because I wouldn’t want that.
Attached was a list of names, none of them familiar.
She should have just dismissed it as a scam and reported the user, but something stopped her finger as it hovered over the block button, a cold feeling, like something had just walked over her grave.
She shook it off and put her phone facedown on the nightstand. Whatever it was, she was too tired to deal with it right now.
_________________
Try as she might to put it out of her head, the message haunted Abby in her sleep and lingered like a shade over her the whole next day as she worked on her intro for the new video and answered emails and queried potential sponsors and made plans with Phish and Mindy for the weekend. Between each task, she thumbed back to TikTok and found the private message still waiting and each time she went to block the user and be done with it, she talked herself out of it.
It was still haunting her when she met Beth and Becca at Triangle. Beth had gotten the video edited and up in record time and rather than sit and wait for the views to roll in, their tradition was to head to the bar and get absolutely trashed and check the damage in the morning. The glee over a new video and fresh engagement and possibly more eager sponsors was tempered by the message and, eventually, Becca prodded it out of her just to get her out of her funk.
Beth wrinkled her nose after she finished explaining it. “That just sounds like an AI scambot.”
“You can’t really DM people on TikTok unless you follow each other,” Abby pointed out.
“Yeah, but AI can do tons of stuff now. You’ve seen what Marduk has been up to lately.”
“Have you checked to see if you’re in a data breach?” Becca abruptly asked. That was the sort of thing she worried about. She and Beth were girlfriends who looked enough alike that they were able to make a killing on OnlyFans appealing to people into incest kinks. They never actually advertised themselves as having that kind of a brand, but when you both have the same red hair and hazel eyes and you keep your identities anonymous, people online make assumptions. And when their OnlyFans got leaked, no amount of proving they weren’t actually related could fix their image. Their faces were out there and their only salvation was getting behind the camera. Both girls used OnlyFans to support their love of urban exploring and free running and they decided to try to monetize the hobby to replace their lost revenue. They just needed a face that face had been 4’11 ex-gymnast with a Bachelor’s Degree in Finance Abigail Brooks and her two extremely diverse and marketable best friends who all had amazing chemistry together. That Abby was an accountant had been the cherry on the sundae.
“No… But it doesn’t feel like that.” She worried the garnish in her chocolate martini- a series of artisanal chocolates shaped like LEGO bricks speared by one of Triangle’s garish yellow cocktail stirrers. “I can’t explain it. It’s like they know me.”
Beth exhaled. “Yeah, Tabby, that’s what AIs do and you don’t exactly have an on-camera and off-camera personality.”
“I like being authentic,” she pouted, biting one of the chocolates off her stirrer. “And it’s too hard to keep up a persona.”
Becca ran a hand over her face. “We really should have media trained you.”
Abby’s eyes darted to the television over the bar which was broadcasting a news story about AI, which would have felt like a sign if this weren't the middle of the AI boom. Everything on the news was AI related these days, even this far away from Silicon Valley. A heavyset man with curling dark hair and a beard leaned over the bar and gestured to the bartender.
“Hey turn it up.”
They obliged and suddenly a pretty newscaster’s clipped voice could be heard over the crowd. “— hacker known only as The Second Plague has targeted yet another AI datacenter. Their dissolution results in yet another competitor of Marduk Industries falling out just weeks before the launch of Enki, their new premiere AI platform, which CEO Howell Dobby claims will revolutionize the Internet.”
“Boo,” the guy at the bar groused and flipped off the TV. The bartender turned it down and the bar chatter resumed to fill the space. Beth, who had turned around in her seat to watch it, rolled her eyes, and finished off her Cadillac margarita.
“See? It’s everywhere. Just don’t engage with it. If you start talking to it, it’ll just collect more data from you.”
“And the names?” Abby slumped in her chair. “What if they’re real people?”
“If they are, they’re probably people whose identities are getting stolen. Or you’ll look them up and it’ll lead you into the Dark Web or some shit.”
Becca swatted her girlfriend. “Beth, don’t scare her.”
“What? I’m just saying!”
Their arguing faded into a dull drone, while Abby stared into her martini for so long that she swore that the espresso foam and the chocolate syrup made a shape almost like a circus tent.
_________________
The minute Abby got home, she ignored her friends’ good advice, opened her laptop and began searching.
The first name yielded immediate results. Suzie J. Ackerman. Barely any social media presence, but a lot of articles in business and housekeeping magazines about her real estate prowess and love of house-flipping. Every one boasted a picture of a smiling woman a few years older than Abby with a doll-like face and strawberry blonde hair. According to some of the articles, she almost made it big as an equestrian as a teenager before an accident caused her to lose sight in her right eye. After that she’d abandoned her life as Nashville royalty, went to school in Bellevue, got her real estate license, and never looked back.
The second name was Grant Best. On top of frequently being featured in his daughter Anne’s extremely active Instagram account, he shared a less active account with his wife Destiny that was half family photos and half pictures of butterflies— Destiny was apparently an entomologist— with the occasional programming dad joke graphic thrown in. Beyond that, there was article after article that mentioned Grant by name as one of the pioneers of the tech industry in Seattle. He’d been a young tech savant and co-headed a software company called C&A with his mentor Mike Dobby before it went under in 1992. He was rumored to have built the first creative AI, though he refused to comment or even give interviews about it and he’d all but retired from doing anything but teaching high school computer science classes. Half the articles expressed shock at how Mike Dobby and Grant Best could have gone down in history alongside names like Zuckerberg and Gates, but they’d simply burnt their company and whatever they might have made to the ground.
But the Dobby name was receiving a redemption arc in the form of Mike’s younger brother Howell, CEO of Marduk. You couldn’t trip on an article about either man without seeing that asshole’s smug face staring back at you. It was always that fucking company.
She assessed what she had from two names so far— a guy connected to AI who was partners with this asshole’s brother? Beth’s theory was looking more and more likely, especially since she’d worked with Marduk in the past and had stopped when she realized how intensely they were going in on AI and wanted to cut ties before she got accused of using it and was subject to witch hunts. Publicly cutting ties from a company that had extended a hand that helped you get a leg up in the community was a pretty firm snap to the hand that fed you.
She drummed her fingers on the desk, exhaled, and began a new search. Riley Verselis.
Another Instagram account and an article about the opening of Triangle. The picture of them leaning on the bar with their muscular arms and their short hair and ‘don’t-fuck-with-me’ glower became transposed over a dozen images of Abby leaning over that very bar to point out which of the vodkas she preferred and hearing their smooth voice say, ”You got ID, Tiny?”
Her heart thudded in her chest. The bartender at the bar she went to every day and a guy connected to a software company that she had once been sponsored by. That was weird, sure. But she didn’t know anything about Suzie. Maybe if she dug deeper, she’d find out she’d bought this house from one of her realtors but that wasn’t a rabbit hole she was interested in pursuing just yet when Alice was already slipping down, down, down and wasn’t coming up for air anytime soon.
She pulled up another name- Zoey Raghavar— and got a wall of different accounts. DeviantArt, VGen, Twitter, Blusky, Tumblr, Instagram, TikTok, plus a professional Instagram for her work at a design firm. The difference between the business and the personal was stark- the Indian woman showing off new logos being unveiled at businesses across Seattle was poised and serious, while the artist gave an impression of an anxious mess with a soft-spoken, tremulous voice, represented by an anime avatar with curly hair framed by red ribbons.
The closest connection Abby had to her was being familiar with her webcomic (Becca loved that kind of stuff), that she was from St. Louis, too, and that she remembered hearing about the horrible hit-and-run twelve years ago that one article described. It had put her into a three-week coma and her miraculous recovery had been the talk of the news cycle for awhile because it was labeled ‘a medical miracle’ due to advanced neuroscience technology.
And that was when she found out that Marduk had started out as a neuroscience research lab.
“Well, shit,” she murmured. She checked the message again. One last name. Leeroy Mateo.
An Instagram account popped up for a man in his early 30’s who through dress and presentation came off as a bit younger, and like the others, he was also located in St Louis. Most of his Instagram were pictures of him flipping off the camera or posing in performatively early 2000’s emo ways like he was displaced out of time. One in particular stuck out to her- a picture of him with smeared black lipstick that looked as though he had applied it and then hastily wiped it off. The caption read my face after your girl’s done with me.
She scrolled through more pictures, fighting a pang of familiarity, only to realize that the reason for it was due to a viral series of ring cam videos that had turned him into a local celebrity. On his page he’d shared a video of a compilation of TikToks cribbed together from various ring cameras along with comments that read things like best delivery driver ever and I order shit I don’t need from Amazon on the off-chance that I get to see this cutie. His caption for this post was well guys I’ve peaked. Pack it in.
Abby leaned back in her chair, staring at the paused ring camera footage of Leeroy doing a little salute as he passed off a package to an elderly woman. A real estate agent, a retired software engineer, a bartender, an artist, a deliveryman, and an urban explorer You-Tuber-slash-accountant. Aside from being from St. Louis, what did they have in common?
She flipped the tab back some article on Howell Dobby that mentioned Grant she had abandoned only to immediately get stuck on C&A. It produced an itch in her brain but she couldn’t quite scratch. Frustrated, she pulled up another tab and searched it only for the air to immediately get punched out of her.
Next to an AI-generated blurb about C&A being a tech company that began in the mid-80’s, but was disbanded in the 90’s due to the death of its founder and his partner’s subsequent disinterest in continuing the projects was a photo of a long single-story building out in the middle of nowhere with an overgrown parking lot full of scrub grass growing up through the cracks. Abby knew that building by rote. It was in the thumbnail of the first video she ever made with Beth and Becca a little over a year ago.
She pulled it up on her phone to compare and found the two buildings to be unmistakably the same— the only difference was the petite girl in a ballcap and sunglasses standing in front of the building running through her intro.
Something compelled her to move through the chapters towards the end of the video where all the footage came from her Go-Pro. She’d wandered into a darkened room with several darkened computers and graffiti on the walls with Phish and Mindy. Becca and Beth were behind them somewhere, shooting B-roll that never made it into the final video.
”Looks like we’re not the first ones here,” Abby heard herself saying.
”There’s some dirty blankets over there and some old cans” said Mindy, wandering into frame, her dark brows creasing as she glanced at Phish in their oversized t-shirt snickering at something on the wall. ”I guess they had a squatter problem?”
Abby’s flashlight fell across the wall of graffiti in front of Phish. Most of it was profanity, but there were a few names. At the time she hadn’t paid attention to them, but now she could see them clearly.
In cursive font: Suzie J. Ackerman.
In huge lettering like they wanted someone to know they were here: RILEY V.
While real life Abby sucked in a breath, video Abby just moved on, like none of this was revelatory. ”Do you have a pen? I wanna sign my name, too.”
Phish dug in their pockets and handed Abby a pen and she signed her name next to a scribbled out cursive name just above where a cramped, shaking hand wrote LEEROY WAS HERE.
The video kept playing when it slipped from Abby’s hands and hit the floor. She heard Mindy squealing excitedly, ”IS THAT A HEADSET? Holy SHIT. Abby, put it on!” while Phish groaned about her getting pink eye. It was little more than background noise.
Four of them had been in that building, one up until it shuttered in the 90’s and the rest long after it had closed down. She couldn’t be sure about Zoey, but that was too many people to be a coincidence. AI, maybe. Surveillance state bullshit? Could be. But Abby’s insatiable curiosity was how she ended up answering Beth and Becca’s open call audition to be the face of their channel and she couldn’t let this go.
With trembling hands, she lifted her phone off the floor and finally addressed the DM.
WHO ARE YOU?!
There was an almost immediate response. I don’t know how to answer that in a way that won’t freak you out.
She typed two words. Try me.
So… over a year ago, you put on a headset, right?
The video had been turned off, but she could see what would have happened if she let it play so clearly- Beth instructing her to take off the Go-Pro, Beth and Becca filming her putting the headset on while Phish and Mindy looked on, the computer terminal behind them turning on suddenly…
Everyone thought they staged it, but the fear was real. Abby had thrown the headset off and the five of them had booked it. She had no idea what had happened. She put it out of her mind, beyond thanking it for giving them a glut of followers when the clip of her shrieking as the computer kicked on went viral.
Until today.
She swallowed and typed back. Yes.
It made a digital copy of your brain and long story short it ended up getting uploaded to this sort of circus game along with a bunch of other people. I’m that copy.
This wasn’t real. This was something out of a movie. She was not talking to her digital clone right now. Her fingers typed of their own volition. So you’re me?
Sort of? It gets complicated. You’re Abby and I’m Pomni. The important thing is my friends and I are in a lot of trouble. We need people on the outside and the only people we can trust right now are, well, ourselves.
This was crazy. Why was she entertaining this? Chat GPT or Grok or whatever just got extra fucking weird, that was all. Beth was right. She started to close out of the DM window and block them, but her finger, once more, refused to press down. She couldn’t do it.
Because you know it’s real, she told herself. And then, with a painful swallow, she typed out: Did your friends reach out to their real world versions too?
No, Pomni typed back. We all decided it was better if you did this. I’m pretty good at getting through to people. Hopefully you are too, too?
Abby laughed, a tiny paft of a sound. Yeah, that was her all right. There was a reason she handled the sponsors despite Beth and Becca being ostensibly the brains behind the whole thing.
There was still a chance to back out. Just block the account, close the window, and put all of this out of her head. She looked at her laptop and saw the line of tabs, the C&A building staring at her, and she knew she couldn’t do it. Curiosity, sure. She had it in spades. She also just cared too damn much.
She took a breath, nodded, and stepped off into the unknown. I need you to tell me everything.