Chapter 3: The Glitch in the Feed
Riya spent the next forty-eight hours in a daze. Ever since that cold, robotic voice echoed inside her head—[Task 1 Completed: Empathy Drained to 0%]—she hadn't been able to sleep. She kept staring at her phone, waiting for it to happen again. But nothing did. Instead, her follower count just kept exploding. Every single graph on her screen was pointing up.
By Tuesday evening, the excitement of the "Accident Stream" started to fade, leaving behind a strange, empty feeling.
She sat alone in her dark apartment. The only light came from her three computer screens. She was editing the final video of the crash. She was even changing the colors of the video to make the delivery boy's blood look brighter and more dramatic on screen.
Suddenly, her main monitor flickered. A new notification popped up with a sharp, static hiss.
[New Message: User_404] "You missed the best part, Riya. Look closer at the 04:12 mark."
Riya frowned. She pulled the video timeline back to the exact moment she had stepped closer to the injured boy. She zoomed in.
In the background of her high-definition video, standing behind the crowd of people holding phones, was a man. He wasn't recording. He wasn't even looking at the accident. He was staring straight into Riya's camera lens. He looked exhausted, with deep, tired eyes, and he was holding a small, old notebook.
As she watched, the man in the video wrote something down, tore out the page, and dropped it on the ground.
A cold shiver ran down Riya's spine. A second later, another notification pinged. It was an image file from the same anonymous user.
When she opened it, she stopped breathing. It was a photo of her from the day of the accident. But it wasn't a selfie. The photo was taken from the ground—from the exact perspective of the bleeding boy. In the picture, Riya looked scary. Her face was twisted by the camera lens, and her eyes were glowing with the reflected blue light of her phone.
The caption below the photo read: "Who is filming the filmmaker?"
Riya's heart pounded. She immediately tried to block the user, but the button was greyed out. She couldn't click it. Suddenly, her phone started vibrating uncontrollably.
Thousands of comments on her latest post began changing right before her eyes. The nice messages like "Stay safe, queen!" were vanishing. They were all being replaced by a single, repeating sentence:
CHECK THE FRUIT STALL. CHECK THE FRUIT STALL. Panicking and desperate for answers, Riya grabbed her jacket and ran out of her apartment, heading back to the city center.
By the time she reached the spot, the street was completely clean. The midnight rain had washed away the blood and the crushed fruits. But as she looked closer, tucked into a small crack in the pavement where the biker had fallen, she saw a crumpled piece of paper.
Her hands shook as she picked it up and opened it. It wasn't a digital comment. It was a real note, written by hand in messy, shaky handwriting:
"The audience is hungry, Riya. But they don't want to watch the accident anymore. They want to watch the vulture fall."
Riya looked up, her breath hitching. The streetlights above her felt unusually bright, like spotlights on a stage. She slowly turned around and saw them.
Three teenagers were standing on the street corner. Their faces were hidden under the shadows of their hoodies. They weren't talking. They weren't moving.
They just stood there with their phones raised, pointing straight at her. The small green recording lights on their cameras glowed like eyes of wild animals in the dark.
Terrified, Riya felt a sudden, desperate urge to check her phone. She pulled it out, and a brand-new notification popped up on her screen, making her blood run completely cold:
[LIVE: Riya_RealLife is being followed! Watch now!] Someone else was streaming her fear to the world. The hunter had officially become the content.