Chapter 10: Don't Share This

Chapter 10: Don't Share This

The plan was a suicide note written in code. N0_FACE’s instructions were cold, precise, and utterly devoid of hope. They were not the words of a guide, but of a pallbearer giving directions to a grave. Leo sat before his monitor, the malevolent hum of the machine a constant presence in the room. The ghost was no longer just watching from the corner; it was waiting. It could feel his intent, its curiosity a palpable pressure against his skull. The memory of Maya’s scream was the fuel that burned away his fear, leaving behind only the cold, hard ash of resolve.

His desire was absolute: to build a better prison. To forge a cage so irresistible that the entity would willingly abandon its hunt in the real world to possess it. He had to construct a perfect, digital effigy of Leo Vance, a ghost of his own making, and then trick the real ghost into it. It was the ultimate act of digital archeology—excavating his own soul.

The obstacle was time, and his own crumbling sanity. Every moment he spent building the trap, the entity was still out there, its tendrils wrapped around Maya’s life. He had no idea if she was safe, if she had escaped her apartment, or if she was trapped in the same nightmare he had just endured. The guilt was a physical torment, a tightening in his chest that made each breath a conscious effort. He had to work faster than his own mind could break.

With a grim finality, he took action. His fingers, once hesitant and trembling, flew across the keyboard with a surgeon's precision. He was no longer a victim; he was a creator. He wrote batch scripts to crawl his own hard drives, pulling every scrap of data that constituted his life. Browser histories stretching back a decade, every password he’d ever saved, every late-night forum post, every private message. He pulled his chat logs with Maya, every inside joke and shared anxiety a fresh stab of pain. He found photos he’d forgotten he had, of a younger, happier version of himself, a ghost from a life before the haunting.

He compiled his financial records, his failed college applications, his work emails from the soul-crushing IT job. He even recorded his own voice, reading passages from old journals until his throat was raw, feeding the audio files into the growing digital pyre. He was meticulously cataloging every failure, every hope, every mundane detail of his lonely existence.

The centerpiece of the trap, as N0_FACE had instructed, was the memory data. He had to give the entity his most personal, defining moments. He closed his eyes and focused, typing out descriptions of his life’s most vivid anchor points. The smell of his grandmother’s house. The specific, jagged scratch on the hallway wall, a memory of moving into this very apartment, a symbol of a fresh start that had curdled into a dead end. He poured every drop of his digital and emotional self into a single root directory on his desktop, a folder he named HOST.

The whispers from the speakers grew louder, more intense. The entity was excited. It could smell the feast being prepared. The feed on his monitor flickered wildly, showing flashes of his bedroom, then Maya's studio, then back again. It was impatient.

Finally, it was ready. The folder was a complete blueprint of his life, a dense, complex data-construct of a human soul. Beside it on his desktop was a single, terrifying script: contain.bat. The final lock for the cage.

He took a deep, shuddering breath and double-clicked the HOST folder, opening the gate. He initiated the transfer.

The result was not a progress bar. It was an avalanche.

His monitor exploded in a chaotic storm of light and data. The entity, sensing the offering, flooded his system with its presence. It didn't just access the files; it consumed them, and him along with them. His entire life flashed before his eyes, not as a gentle stream, but as a violent, high-speed collision.

He felt the cold, alien curiosity of the entity inside his own mind, sifting through his memories with a clinical detachment. He relived the feeling of the plaster scraping under his father’s clumsy bookshelf—the scratch on the wall. The entity cataloged the memory, absorbed the feeling. He tasted the cheap coffee from his first day at the helpdesk. He felt the sting of a forgotten rejection. He heard Maya’s laugh from a day in the park, a sound so pure it felt like a violation for the entity to touch it.

The whispers were no longer coming from the speakers. They were inside his head, a roaring symphony of static and stolen words, his own thoughts being overwritten by the parasite's cold, analytical code. He could feel his identity fraying, his sense of self being deconstructed, file by file. He was Leo Vance, a 24-year-old man who… who liked… what did he like? His hobbies were… His primary drive was…

He was losing himself. The memories were becoming data points, the emotions reduced to variables. He was becoming a ghost in his own body, his consciousness a flickering flame about to be extinguished. The entity was almost finished. It had what it wanted. It was ready to make the full transition, to cast aside its old, decaying vessel and take root in the new, perfect HOST.

This was the moment N0_FACE had warned him about. The point of no return.

With the last shred of his will, a single, desperate spark of self-preservation, he forced his hand to the mouse. His fingers felt like foreign objects, clumsy and disobedient. The cursor trembled on the screen, a tiny beacon of defiance in the raging storm of his dissolving mind. He had one thought left, one command that was still his own.

He double-clicked contain.bat.

For one, agonizing second, nothing happened. The psychic roar in his head intensified, a final, furious push to consume him completely.

Then, the compression algorithm engaged.

The storm on his screen folded in on itself, collapsing with the force of a dying star. Every open window, every flashing memory, every hissing whisper was pulled into a single, ravenous point in the center of the screen. A new icon was being forged in the digital chaos, a familiar, blocky square with a zipper down the middle.

The roar in his head was cut off, replaced by a single, piercing digital shriek of fury and surprise. The entity was being ripped from his mind, torn from his system, and shoved, along with its perfect bait, into the cryptographic prison he had built for it.

The screens went black. The hum of the PC died. The whispers stopped.

The silence was total. A profound, deafening emptiness that was more shocking than the noise had ever been. Leo slumped forward, his forehead hitting the cool, dusty surface of his desk. He was trembling violently, his body slick with a cold sweat. He was exhausted, scoured, but he was alive. And he was alone.

---

Days later, the world had tentatively resumed its shape. He’d spoken to Maya. She was safe, staying with her parents, her voice still shaky but whole. She didn’t understand what had happened, only that her apartment had been filled with a terrifying, poltergeist-like energy that had vanished as suddenly as it had appeared. He didn't try to explain. He just listened, his own voice feeling foreign and distant.

He felt free, but it was a strange, hollow freedom. The constant, low-level anxiety that had been the background radiation of his entire life was gone, but so was everything else. He felt like a house that had been cleared of a ghost, but also of all its furniture. An empty vessel.

He found himself sitting at his computer, the machine now scrubbed clean and silent. He wasn’t sure why he was there. An impulse, a flicker of a forgotten habit, had guided his hands to the keyboard. He opened his browser and navigated to the old Discord server. The forums were filled with the usual chatter about lost media and obscure games. It all seemed impossibly trivial.

He clicked on the channel where it all began. The channel where N0_FACE had first posted the file. His fingers moved on their own, a faint, disquieting twitch of muscle memory that was not his own. They opened a file explorer, navigating to a new, heavily encrypted file on his desktop. A file he didn't remember creating.

archive.zip

With a smooth, fluid motion that felt both practiced and alien, his hands uploaded the file to the server. The progress bar filled in an instant. Then, his fingers moved to the message box, typing with a cold, simple finality. The words appeared on the screen, a perfect echo, a curse renewed.

Don't share this.