At 12:03 PM, every screen in Aldarrah flickered.
Phones. TVs. Airport monitors. Highway billboards. Government websites.
The President's face vanished.
In its place: a single line in white text against a black screen:
"PROJECT SAFA EXISTS. THEY ARE REWRITING WHO YOU ARE."
Then the videos began.
Clips of Ministry meetings. Glitched surveillance footage. Audio recordings of censors laughing about deleting protest deaths. A side-by-side deepfake demo — showing a journalist's original article next to the fabricated state-approved version.
Layla's voice came next, raw and real:
"They erased my brother. They will erase you too.
Truth is not a crime. Silence is not consent.
We are not algorithms."
She was sitting in a dusty room, face bare, scar from an old injury on full display. No filters. No veil of confidence. Just fury, human and pure.
It lasted eight minutes.
It was shared 4.2 million times in the first hour.
The government moved fast.
Websites went down. The internet slowed to a crawl. VPNs failed. Internet cafés were raided. In downtown Aldarrah, teenagers were dragged out of coffee shops for watching the leak.
The President's voice returned to the airwaves by evening — recorded, weak, desperate.
"Traitors will not break the unity of Aldarrah.
The Republic is pure.
And those who defile it will be deleted."
Layla didn't run.
She stayed in her safehouse, watching the chaos unfold. Watching citizens post side-by-side screenshots of their altered birth records, bank histories, entire lives. For the first time, people weren't just afraid — they were aware.
But awareness came at a cost.
Fadi called from a burner.
"They've started pulling suspected sympathizers. Everyone connected to Adam. Even journalists who liked the leak. You need to go dark."
"I can't," she said. "Not yet."
"They'll be rewriting you as we speak."
Layla sat down at the edge of the bed, heart pounding.
"Then I'd better tell the world who I really am — before they decide for me."
She recorded another video that night.
Unfiltered.
Exhausted.
Alive.
"My name is Layla Rami," she said. "Daughter of a man they erased. Sister of a man they buried behind algorithms. And I'm not afraid of vanishing anymore. Because we've all been vanishing for years."
She paused.
"They only win if we forget who we are."
She clicked upload.
An hour later, her face disappeared from the Ministry database.
Her name was removed from Aldarrah's official birth registry.
Her university degree? Deleted.
Her passport? Flagged as "Invalid Record."
And then, quietly, her apartment lease was reassigned.
In real time, Layla Rami — rebel, truth-teller, daughter — stopped existing