Adrian
The sound of the gala is still in my ears. The collective gasp. The roar of the online mob. A perfectly executed character assassination, live for the whole world to see.
From my spot on the stage, just a few feet behind Serena, I had a front row seat. I watched her face crumble on cue. I watched the room turn on Lia Smith in an instant.
They all saw an assault. I saw a performance.
I saw what an online smear campaign did to my sister. The whispers that became shouts. The screen that became a prison. It broke something in her that never quite healed. I will not watch it happen again.
Back in my room, the silence is a welcome relief. My monitor glows, the only light source. As student council president, I have administrative access to the school's cloud server. It takes me less than thirty seconds to locate the master file of the gala livestream.
I download the 4K source file. Not the compressed version everyone is sharing, but the raw data.
I open my editing suite, the same one I used to make campaign videos. I drop the file onto the timeline. I find the exact moment the screen flickered.
My fingers move across the keyboard. I isolate the clip. The grainy security footage of the stairwell. I play it at full speed. Lia shoves Serena. Serena falls.
I play it again at half speed. The movements look jerky, unnatural.
I play it frame by frame.
Forward. Back. Forward. Back.
There.
The flicker I saw in the ballroom. A single frame where the timestamp in the corner of the footage jumps. It skips a millisecond. It goes from 14:32:05.12 to 14:32:05.14. It skips .13 entirely.
It’s almost perfect. An edit so clean you would never see it unless you were looking for it. Unless you knew what a lie looked like up close.
“Got you,” I whisper to the empty room.
I zoom in, pushing the magnification to its limit. The pixels warp and distort, but I see it. Right where Lia’s hand meets Serena’s arm, there’s a microscopic smear of digital artifacting. A ghost in the machine.
It’s a splice. It’s definitive proof of manipulation.
My jaw tightens. Knowing the video is fake is one thing. Understanding why is another.
Jealousy is the easy answer. The one Serena is selling. A poor scholarship kid lashing out at the golden girl. It’s a story that writes itself.
It’s too neat. Too simple.
I minimize the video file and open a new browser tab. I don’t search for Serena’s latest posts. I search for her first ones. The videos from two years ago, before the major brand deals and the talk show appearances.
Her first viral hit was a campaign for a local animal shelter. It was surprisingly sophisticated for a sixteen year old. The editing was crisp, the graphics were clean, the rollout strategy was flawless.
It was too good.
I leave her public profile and go back to the school server. I navigate to the archives for student project submissions. I type in ‘Serena Vale’ and the year of the campaign.
A single project file appears. ‘Blackwood Paws Charity Drive Proposal.’
I open the document. It’s a detailed presentation, outlining the entire campaign. The target demographics, the content schedule, the technical specs. I scroll through pages of data, all under Serena’s name.
But digital files have memories. They have metadata.
I dig into the file’s properties, looking at the revision history. Most of it is logged under Serena’s student ID.
Except for one entry. An early draft of the technical execution plan.
It was uploaded from an external account. An account that was scrubbed almost immediately after. But the name is still there, buried in a single line of code in the document’s original notes.
A credit, so small it’s almost invisible.
‘Initial creative and technical framework by L.S. Creative.’
L.S.
Lia Smith.
Everything clicks into place. It’s not a story about jealousy. It’s a story about a ghostwriter stepping out of the shadows.
Lia didn’t attack Serena. She created her.
Serena didn’t just frame a rival. She tried to bury her architect.
I lean back in my chair, the screen reflecting in my eyes. The mob can have their villain. I’ve just found the truth.
And I know exactly who I need to talk to.
