Ch.59: The Livestream

Thorne slumped back against the centrifuge, his body smoking, his limbs twitching in the rhythmic, involuntary pulses of a shattered nervous system. I didn't wait for him to recover. I scrambled across the slick epoxy floor toward the master control tablet docked near the harvesting gantry.

My fingers, trembling and stained with a cocktail of antiseptic and Julian’s black discharge, danced over the glass. I bypassed the internal security logs and navigated to the Gala’s promotional broadcast suite. I found the 'Go Live' icon—the one intended to show Julian's "miraculous" speech to the donors downstairs—and slammed my thumb onto the digital button.

"Look at him," I rasped, pointing the tablet’s wide-angle lens at the ruin of the man in the chair. "Look at the price of your immortality."

The screen flickered. A spinning white circle appeared in the center of the display—the universal sign of a lagging connection. I hissed through my teeth, my heart a frantic drum against the cage of my ribs. The Estate’s heavy shielding was fighting me, the bandwidth choked by the emergency lockdown protocols.

"Connect, you piece of trash," I whispered, glancing back at Julian.

His good eye was beginning to focus again. The milky white film was retracting, and a low, guttural growl began to vibrate in his chest. He reached for the scalpel he’d dropped, his blackened fingers scraping against the floorboards.

The spinning circle on the tablet continued to mock me. Five seconds. Ten. The red emergency strobe lights made the screen look like it was bleeding. I could hear the hum of the internal routers struggling against the encryption wall.

Suddenly, the bar at the top of the screen turned vibrant green.

The lag snapped. The upload speed surged as I bypassed the final firewall. The camera's feed didn't just go live to the cloud; it hijacked the master AV system of the entire Thorne Estate.

On the tablet’s monitor, I saw the secondary feed from the grand ballroom downstairs. The massive, sixty-foot LED screens—which had been playing a looping montage of Julian Thorne’s humanitarian work—suddenly flickered and died.

Then, they exploded with the reality of the sub-basement.

The guests didn't see a pediatric savior. They saw a blood-spattered laboratory. They saw the slumped, lifeless body of Isabella Thorne in her ruined silk gown. They saw the "miracle baby" strapped to a web of tubes.

And they saw Julian.

The camera caught him in a high-definition close-up just as he lunged toward the lens, his mask melting off his jaw, revealing the blackened, necrotic bone beneath. The Savior of Pediatrics looked like a demon caught in a flashbulb.

I didn't need to say another word. The truth was a physical assault, broadcasted in 4K to the very people who had funded the nightmare.

The scream from the ballroom floor shook the house.