Chapter 8:
Ghost In The Machine Interlude — Lennard
Lennard stared at the screen. Unblinking. Unbreathing.
Online.
The little green dot. The name.
DarkGirl112 is online.
The word didn’t vanish.
It didn’t flicker, didn’t refresh, didn’t fade back into the grey blur of inactivity like some delayed server artifact. It stayed. That little green dot. Bright. Alive.
Impossible.
He sat up, spine rigid, heart hammering in his chest. Four days. Four goddamn days since the bomb. Since the stream. Since the world flipped upside down and DarkGirl112 became a martyr for her community.
He’d checked her status a hundred times. A thousand. Always the same.
Last seen: 4 days ago.
Until now.
But… he couldn’t believe it. He had seen her last stream and… the news afterward. So, the only possibility was: some idiot had hacked into her account. Lennard went from flabbergasted to furious. Who dared to take over her account? What the hell was this shithead thinking? Was he out of his mind?
With shaking hands, he opened the chat with DarkGirl112.
“Who are you, idiot? Why do you have her password? Can’t you respect her privacy after her death?”
He pressed enter. His message went through…
No response.
His anger flared up even more, and with a series of hectic clicks, he logged into his work tools. Some programs he had written himself, others traded in darknet channels or passed down from old hacker friends.
He opened his programs one after another, muscle memory guiding him through the motions. Familiar windows spread across his secondary monitor, data logs, connection sniffers, packet analyzers. The tools were like weapons to him now, each one designed with precision, some borrowed, others homebrewed. WhisperWorm sat quietly in the corner, its faint pulse confirming it was still active. It had been installed on Grace’s machine months ago, buried so deep no commercial antivirus could even dream of finding it. Not because he didn’t trust her. Because he couldn’t stop himself.
He had told himself it was for her safety. That if anyone ever tried to hurt her, he’d be there. Ready. Watching. But deep down, he knew the truth. He just couldn’t bear the idea of being out of her life completely. Even if she didn’t know. Especially if she didn’t know.
The dashboard blinked. A single alert. A login activity tied to her old account.
He froze.
It wasn’t from her destroyed rig. That device was gone, incinerated in the blast, along with everything else. This was different. It was live. Real-time. Someone had just logged into the chat. From her account. On her smartphone.
His stomach twisted. That phone had been in her hand during the stream. He’d seen it in the footage, propped up on the stairs next to the bomb. There was no way it had survived. And yet, here it was. Active. Online. The same ID…
He yanked open the session trace. For a second, he assumed it was a bug. A glitched log, a spoofed signal. But the IP didn’t resolve. No hostname. No country code. No ISP. Just raw digits, recursive, circular, endlessly feeding back into themselves. He refreshed the trace. Again. Again. Still the same.
A self-looping ghost.
The connection wasn’t coming from any known network. It was like the signal had bypassed the physical internet entirely, routed through a space that shouldn't exist. The longer he stared at it, the less sense it made.
Impossible.
This wasn’t some script kiddie on a VPN. Whoever did this had skills. Or something else entirely. The government?
He leaned in, heart hammering against his ribs, breath caught in his throat.
And then… the cursor in the chat window blinked.
Typing...
He still didn’t believe it. Couldn’t. This had to be some basement-dwelling script kiddie, someone who found a copy of her files on a dead drive or ripped from the archived stream footage. Maybe even someone from the forums, trying to get a rise out of him. A sick joke. A twisted fan tribute. Nothing more.
But as the message came through, his heart stopped for a moment.
"Didn't I say I won't forget you, my knight... MarleX? ♥"
He stared at the screen.
Every character burned.
The phrasing, the emoji, the cadence, exactly like her. Not just in content, but in style. That deliberately playful edge. The flirtation masked as a farewell. She’d used that line before. Almost verbatim. But never in public. Only to him.
A small icon blinked underneath.
A file.
No name. Just a .bin extension. Roughly 2.3 MB.
Every instinct screamed trap.
He launched his sandboxed virtual machine, cold booted from an isolated image with no network access. Then he ran it through three scanners: his standard antivirus, a darknet signature match tool, and his own custom malware sniffer. Nothing flagged. Clean. But that meant nothing.This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.
He loaded it anyway.
The VM window opened… then froze. Static washed across the screen, followed by a flicker of shapes, golden threads twisting through blackness, like roots in the void. The image pulsed for half a second, then resolved into a still frame.
Lennard leaned closer.
And froze.
It was a picture from a teenage girl, but… This wasn’t DarkGirl112 as he knew her, not the teenage girl with muddy brown eyes and average looks. Not the one who smirked behind a school uniform and held a homemade bomb into a livestream.
This girl was… different.
Blonde.
Slightly older, maybe around 18.
Hair curled in deliberate waves, like something from a fantasy film. Her skin glowed faintly, almost too flawless, and her eyes—god, her eyes—they burned with a crazed pink light that shimmered unnaturally in the shadows of the photo. Her lips curled into an unsettling grin, somewhere between playfulness and malice. She wore a black dress, long, elegant, and impossibly detailed. Velvet laced with silver embroidery, something medieval, theatrical… wrong.
It wasn’t cosplay. It wasn’t makeup. It was like she had stepped out of another world.
And worst of all…
She was standing outside.
Outside in front of his house.
Lennard’s blood turned to ice.
The brick wall in the background, the crack in the sidewalk, the warped iron railing, he knew them. He’d seen them every day for the last ten years. It was his front yard. The photo had been taken from the end of his street; from the exact angle he walked every morning to grab coffee.
The girl stood perfectly centered in the frame, as if the camera had been placed just for this shot. Her posture was elegant, unnervingly still. Her expression, frozen in that smug, almost amused grin, burned itself into his memory on sight.
And her hand…
It was raised in a casual, confident gesture.
Two fingers up.
A peace sign.
A fucking V.
Just like she used to do on stream.
His breath caught. His hands were cold on the mouse.
This wasn’t a replay. This wasn’t an edit.
This was now.
No timestamp. No metadata. Just her.
Staring straight into the lens.
Into him.
Lennard recoiled from the screen.
“No…” he whispered.
His chair screeched loudly against the floor as he shoved it back, stumbling to his feet. The room suddenly felt too small, too cold, too close. His heart was racing, every breath shallow and tight in his chest.
“No, that’s not her… she’s dead”
He stared at the door like it was some foreign object that didn’t belong in his apartment anymore. His voice cracked, trembling out of his throat like it didn’t want to leave him.
“It can’t be here…”
His eyes darted back to the screen. The still frame hadn't changed, but now the shadows around her looked deeper. Her hand still held that damn V-sign, but her fingers looked… longer? More strained? Or maybe he was just losing it.
“Who is this?” he growled, more at the air than the computer.
His fingers twitched at his sides, itching to grab something—anything—a weapon, a phone, even the power cord to rip from the wall.
But he didn’t finish the thought. Because the VM hadn’t frozen again.
The image was moving.
Her grin widened by a fraction.
And the faintest shimmer flickered at the edge of the screen… as if she was about to take a step forward.
He stared at the image, heart thudding against his ribs. It couldn’t be real. It shouldn’t be real. But every detail of the photo said otherwise.
He panicked.
This girl was outside. Not figuratively – literally. In front of his house. Her feet on his sidewalk. Her hand raised in that familiar V-sign he’d seen in a hundred of her old streams. It was surreal. It was wrong.
Instinct shoved him into motion. He pushed back from his desk, his chair rolling with a screech across the floor. His legs were already moving, half-lifting him toward the window, toward proof. He had to look. He had to…
Then the message came through.
The chat blinked once. New text.
“Knock knock...”
His body locked up.
The words hung on the screen, simple and childish, like a joke whispered through the dark.
That’s when it came. The sound.
Knock.
A single, sharp knock on the door. Clean. Rhythmic. No hesitation.
Not in the headset. Not from the speakers.
From inside the apartment.
He froze.
The kind of stillness that doesn’t come from fear but from instinct. Primitive. Ancient. His heart hammered so loudly in his ears it almost drowned out the second knock.
Knock knock.
Louder this time. Deliberate. Not aggressive. Just… timed. Like whoever was behind it was completely calm. As if they already knew he was listening.
He turned, slowly, toward the screen. The image hadn’t changed. The girl in the black dress still stood outside, her eyes shining pink, her hand still raised in that maddening V. But her smile… was it wider?
Had she moved?
He couldn’t tell anymore.
The message below the image remained frozen on the screen, the timestamp blinking in the chat window like a countdown.
“Knock knock...”
Lennard’s breath caught in his throat. His hands hovered uselessly at his sides. He looked toward the door.
For the first time in years, he didn’t feel in control.
Not of the situation.
Not of the tech.
Not even of himself.
And worst of all he wasn’t sure if he wanted to open that door… or if he already had.
He didn’t remember moving, not really. His body acted on something deeper than thought—something primal. Muscles locked in slow, mechanical motion. He stepped out from behind the desk, one foot at a time, the air around him thick like water. Every creak of the floor beneath his weight sounded deafening in the silence.
The door loomed ahead of him, unchanged, unremarkable… and now impossibly wrong.
He reached out.
His hand trembled as his fingers hovered over the handle. For a moment, he hesitated, barely breathing, caught in a pause that stretched forever. Maybe it was just a prank. A neighbor. A sick joke.
Maybe.
He turned the knob.
The latch clicked.
The door opened.
And there she was.
Standing on the threshold like she belonged there.
For a moment, everything moved in slow motion. Lennard’s breath caught mid-inhale, and the world narrowed to a single point: her. Every second dragged, stretched by disbelief, fear, and the surreal certainty that nothing after this would make sense again.
He was sure now. It is DarkGirl112… No, it is Grace…
She wore a long, midnight-black dress, elegant, flowing, unmistakably out of place in his world. The fabric shimmered faintly in the dim hallway light, catching motes of dust like starlight on ink. Silver embroidery curled across the hem in swirling patterns that looked almost arcane, shifting subtly as though alive. The sleeves were long, tight near the wrist, and flared slightly at the ends. Royal. Deliberate. Not a costume. Real.
She was taller, maybe eighteen, maybe older—but it was unmistakably her. Her posture was perfect, her chin lifted slightly with the same self-assured arrogance that had once bled through her livestreams. She stood like someone who had never once doubted they belonged at the center of the universe.
Her skin was flawless, porcelain-smooth, glowing faintly with an unnatural clarity that wasn’t makeup or lighting. It was something else. Too perfect. Too untouched by the world. Her cheeks were slightly flushed, but her expression was calm.
Her lips curled into a slow, confident grin. Not playful. Not sweet.
Predatory.
It was the kind of smile that said she already knew what he would do next.
And her eyes…
Lennard couldn’t look away from her eyes.
They glowed with a vivid, unnatural pink, and they were impossibly deep, layered like burning crystal. The light wasn’t reflecting. It was radiating. Twin orbs of something that looked like joy, madness, and hunger all at once. They shimmered with recognition… and something else.
Her hair had changed too.
Once black, now golden-blonde curls spilled in soft, gleaming waves over her shoulders. It looked real. Not bleached. Not synthetic. It framed her face with the practiced ease of someone who chose how she wanted the world to perceive her, and made the world obey.
Her hand hung at her side, relaxed. The other lifted slowly, forming that familiar V-sign with her fingers. Just like in the photo. Just like on the streams.
She tilted her head the slightest bit, eyes never leaving his, and smiled.
“Found you, my knight,” she said softly.
And her smile widened like a blade drawn slow across skin.