A kaiju ate me alive. I felt my ribs go one at a time. 

Then something in the dark of its gut decided I was not finished.

It started my heart with a hand that was not mine, and I walked out of the corpse on my own two feet, the only person who ever has. That was the night she bought the rights to whatever I had become.

One screen. One subscriber. The screen is my life, live and uncut. 

The subscriber is her, and she pays whatever it costs to keep the feed running: every fight, every wound, every hour I lose to the thing growing up the inside of my spine. 

When I run, the money finds me. When I bleed, the bid climbs.

The Defense Force has me filed as a contaminant. 

The corporations want me as their next headliner. 

She understood the part both of them missed: the stronger the parasite makes me, the less of me is left.

Every night, behind one glowing screen, the woman who calls herself my sponsor watches me turn into the thing that killed me. She has never once looked away.

The hospital had been dark for ninety seconds when the Hacker's voice came back on the comm.


[Hacker: Caleb. They forced the feed. I lost the firewall. You are going live in sixty seconds and there is nothing I can do about it.]


His helmet was on the floor beside the bed his brother had been on. He picked it up. The visor came online when he clamped the chinstrap. The HUD inside the visor lit pale green and showed him the problem.


PUBLIC FEED: RESTORING. ESTIMATED LIVE: 00:00:54.


PRIVATE OUTPUT CHANNEL: MASKED BY PRIMARY RIGHTS HOLDER.


[Hacker: VeilWard Premier-Tier. Three secondary investors filed an emergency stake-protection motion. They claimed the blackout deprived them of contracted visibility during a confirmed incident. The Guild Lawbook arbiter sided with them in forty seconds. They won access, not control, and I have never seen the arbiter move that fast. Someone paid for it.]


Chapter 98 - Live Session