Jan 3, 2025 — 02:30 CST, Shanghai, China
Xiuyue's fingers hovered over the EndBroadcast button on Bilibili Live. The chaos of dual chats—AurNet on her phone mirrored to her monitor, and Bilibili viewers spamming demands for updates—pulled her in every direction.
She exhaled and clicked. "Alright, that's it," she muttered. The colorful overlay vanished, leaving the blank feed of her webcam. The sudden silence felt disorienting.
"Good. One chaos at a time." She leaned back, glancing at Mr. Fluff sprawled atop plushies, the cat's indifference soothing in its own way.
But her AurNet trial stream persisted, glowing in her hand, mirrored on the monitor for easier scrolling. No main audience, no CPU strain—just her, her phone, and Aurora's ledger humming in real time.
Soy milk lukewarm, legs curled beneath her, Xiuyue scrolled. CargoMoses and HarborJack's testimonies still echoed in the chat like a mantra: humans as proof-of-liability, humans as collateral, humans as the living chain.
She clicked the Aurora Interface and typed: Theodore Alaric.
The system notice chimed. Exchange parity engaged. Every byte she pulled mirrored back with slivers of her own data—location, behavior logs, recent messages. Her pulse quickened as the first block appeared: Theodore Alaric's early infrastructure logs.
AurNet chat lit up instantly:
NeoTyphoon (Pawn):"Wait… she's pulling Theo's server logs??"
DataMoth (Pawn):"Bruh… hardware uptime receipts??"
Y.Kuro (Pawn):"This transparency is insane."
She leaned forward, soy milk untouched now. Every timestamp, every schematic, precise and traceable.
The next layer opened—Theo's encrypted memos and decisions, archived in Aurora's cold perfection. Scribbles of doubt, flashes of foresight. Human fingerprints under algorithmic steel.
Adeola (Knight):"Imagine building an AI by your own mistakes… on purpose."
HarborJack (Pawn):"And Aurora learned in real time. Mad lad."
Lina.Cherif (Pawn):"She's literally unrolling the founder's playbook."
Her pulse steadied. Each scroll revealed more: trade experiments, scalping maneuvers, risk mitigation. Minute-by-minute choreography of inevitability.
Then—Equilibrium Notes, 2019. Cold resource flows, systemic parity, humans logged as variables against planetary constants.
CargoMoses (Pawn):"BRUH… Aurora is basically a planetary accountant."
S.Varma (Pawn):"Humans = vectors. Earth Equilibrium = invariant. Law and morality = incidental noise."
NewsCrawler77 (Pawn):"National spies watching this rn should be tipping her 💀"
Xiuyue's breath caught. She whispered, "Show me everything," thumb hovering.
The progress bar jumped—then froze at 76%. Her phone buzzed twice, sharp vibrations. Words stamped across the PC's monitor:
[EXCHANGE TERMINATED. COLLATERAL EXHAUSTED.]
Her stomach dropped.
[No further counterbalance available.]
Chat exploded instantly—first mocking, then mutating into a feeding frenzy.
OverclockedToaster (Pawn):"Aurora just repo'd her clout 💀"
BitDepthZero (Pawn):"Imagine getting overdrafted by AI lmaooo"
HexShred (Pawn):"pay your digital taxes, ma'am 🤣"
CactusDad (Pawn):"delete selfies >> delete child support 💀"
GPUFanLoud (Pawn):"phone hotter than Chernobyl rn 🔥🔥🔥"
She winced—but the scroll didn't stop. The tone shifted, sharper, personal.
HollowPike (Pawn):"Classic single mom move: try to leech secrets, end up broke anyway 😂"
ByteScum (Pawn):"Hot mom thinks she can just shake her ass for Aurora Coin 💸💸"
AnonWhale (Pawn):"Where's the baby daddy? Probably ran from this circus 💀"
CivicRot (Pawn):"You're not Theo, sweetheart. You're Theo's neighborhood babysitter at best."
Xiuyue's throat tightened. Her finger hovered over the button—yet the barrage kept snowballing.
ChainLag (Pawn):"This is AurNet, not Tinder. Go fish for your sugar daddy somewhere else 🤣"
MeltedKey (Pawn):"Aurora cut you off 'cause even AI knows you're washed 💀"
ColdSink (Pawn):"Shanghai MILF arc crashing faster than Luna 2022."
PaperSkin (Pawn):"All this for viewers. Sis, sell bathwater next."
ScornHub (Pawn):"Single mother apocalypse stream. I'm dying."
VoidGrain (Pawn):"She's literally milking Aurora like it's OnlyFans."
CrackSpiral (Pawn):"Hot mom? More like burnt mom toast."
The screen became unreadable—messages tripping over each other, insults layering into static noise.
Xiuyue felt her ears burn. Her lungs fought for air she already had.
Her thumb slammed End Broadcast before the next jab landed.
Black screen. Silence.
Only her reflection stared back in the dead glass of her phone.
The insults clung to her skull, heavier than Aurora's cold termination notice.
She pressed the phone face-down onto the desk, nails digging into the wood.
Mr. Fluff stirred, stretched, and curled onto her lap with a soft prrrr.
The ordinary weight of him felt like an anchor in the storm.
Her voice cracked in the silence. The words hung there, sour and brittle, like the aftertaste of cheap liquor.
"Shanghai's hottest mom, huh? …Yeah. Sure."
She almost laughed again, but her chest wouldn't let her. The sound got stuck halfway up her throat, curdled into something tight and ugly. Her jaw ached from holding it in.
They weren't wrong. Not entirely.
The trolls had twisted her into a cartoon, but the bones of it were there.
Single mother.
Streamer.
A woman juggling bills and soy milk cartons while pretending she wasn't fraying at the edges.
She glanced at the phone lying face-down on the desk, its warmth still seeping into the wood. That little slab of glass and circuitry had been her lifeline and her mask.
Now it felt like a spotlight that had suddenly swung around to expose her instead of what she was showing.
Her reflection in the dead black screen earlier—that was the real stream. The unedited one.
Not Xiuyue the commentator, the streamer, the "hot mom."
Just Xiuyue.
With too many tabs open in her head, a child asleep in the next room, and a digital deity weighing her soul in bytes and finding it lacking.
She pressed the heel of her palm into her eye until stars burst behind the lid. It was supposed to push the tears back, but all it did was sharpen the burn.
Was she greedy? Maybe.
Curious? Definitely.
But mostly—she was tired. Tired of clawing for relevance, tired of clawing for stability, tired of clawing for something more than thrift-store plushies and rabbit-lamp glows and a cat who didn't care if she was collapsing, as long as his food bowl stayed full.
And yet she'd dared. She'd wanted a piece of Theodore Alaric. She'd wanted to see. And for a moment, she had. She'd stared into the architecture of someone else's brilliance, someone else's balance sheet—and Aurora had stared back, measured her, and cut her off with surgical indifference.
Not enough.
Never enough.
Her shoulders sagged. The soy milk carton sat half-empty on the desk, its sweetness turned sour in her mouth.
"Shanghai's hottest mom." The chat's words still pulsed in her skull, sticky as tar.
What did that even mean? That she was supposed to smile, to flirt, to turn her life into spectacle so the crowd could decide whether to worship or mock her?
She hated them.
She hated herself for needing them.
Xiuyue pulled her knees up into the chair and wrapped her arms around them, forehead resting against denim. The room was too quiet now, the kind of quiet that made her hear her own heartbeat, too loud, too fragile.
Little Yiran shifted her sleeping position, a small sound like the rustle of paper.
Xiuyue's chest tightened again, but this time it wasn't from the trolls.
She could lose her viewers. She could lose the stream. She could lose the damn phone.
But she couldn't lose that.
Still, a small voice nagged at her—an ugly whisper: "What happens when even Yiran grows up and sees this? Sees you, flailing in front of strangers, begging a machine for scraps like it's your sugar daddy?"
Her stomach twisted.
She rubbed her arms, but no warmth came. The glow of the rabbit lamp seemed colder now, mocking in its softness.
Maybe tomorrow she'd laugh it off. Play the hot mom joke herself. Pretend she didn't care.
But tonight, in this moment, the mask was cracked clean through.
And for the first time, Xiuyue wondered if the real ledger wasn't in AurNet at all.
Maybe it was in her reflection, weighing her worth in ways no algorithm ever could.