Mila lunged for the laptop. Her knee slammed into the underside of the desk. Her chair shot backward on its wheels and crashed into the opposite wall. She slapped the laptop shut with both hands so hard the screen cracked down the middle, but it didn't matter because the damage was already done, the stream had been running for…
She checked the dashboard timer seared into her eyes.
Six minutes.
The entire time.
"No," she whispered, her voice cracking. "No, no, no, no, no—"
Her phone was still buzzing. It hadn't stopped. It would never stop.
She grabbed it with shaking hands.
Her mother was calling.
Her mother was calling at midnight on a Tuesday, which meant her mother had either seen it or someone had already told her, and both options made Mila want to crawl into the earth and decompose.
She declined the call. Another one came in immediately. Her boss.
She declined that one too.
The texts were coming too fast to read. Friends, coworkers, numbers she didn't even recognize. Her social media notifications had become a single unbroken vibration. Somewhere in the flood of notifications, she caught a screenshot someone had sent her.
It was her own face, in the middle of herself masturbating, plastered across a Bwitter thread that already had twelve thousand retweets.
Mila's hands went numb.
The phone slipped from her fingers.
Her chest seized and a sharp, crushing pressure stole the air from her lungs. Her panic had turned into something else and Mila immediately knew that there was a problem.
It was as if a fist had closed around her heart and squeezed.
She tried to breathe. Her vision blurred at the edges, darkening inward like a vignette. The room tilted.
'This isn't happening. This isn't—'
Her knees buckled and she collapsed to the floor next to Gerald, which was a detail she would have found deeply offensive if she had been conscious enough to process it.
But she wasn't.
The last thing Mila Reyes registered before everything went black was the sound of her phone, still buzzing, and still flooding with messages from a world that had just watched her most private moment on live television.
And then there was nothing.
°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°
The first thing Mila became aware of was softness.
Softness that shouldn't exist after dying on your bedroom floor next to a vibrator named Gerald while 1.4 million people watched.
Her fingers twitched, dragging across fabric so smooth it felt like liquid. Her lungs pulled in a breath that tasted wrong and smelt too strong. Confusion flooded in before her eyes even opened.
'Hospital?'
No. Hospitals didn't smell like garden roses and expensive candles. Hospitals smelled like antiseptic and regret.
'Priya's room?'
Priya owned exactly one set of sheets from a discount store and they pilled after two washes. This was not Priya's room.
Mila's eyes cracked open, and she immediately regretted it.
Morning light streamed through windows she did not own, and in a room she had never seen before. The bed was so absurdly massive that she could have rolled three full rotations and still not reached the edge. Above her, a chandelier dripped crystal that caught the sunlight and shattered it into tiny rainbows across cream-colored walls.
This was not her apartment.
This was the kind of room that existed in period dramas about people who had servants and opinions about silverware.
Her memories suddenly came flooding back.
The broadcast.
The text from Daniel, her composing herself on air before the cosmic betrayal that had kept her camera running while she—
'Oh God.'
She slapped her cheeks and screamed.
Mila remembered how she had reached into her drawer and masturbated while 1.4 million people watched her lived!
The memories crashed in like waves, each one worse than the last. Priya's texts in all caps. The live chat scrolling. The viewer count climbing. Her mother calling. The screenshot on Bwitter.
Everything!
She grabbed fistfuls of the silk sheets and pressed them against her face.
By now it would be everywhere. Every platform. Every group chat. Every newsroom in the country, because nothing made journalists happier than one of their own imploding on camera.
Her coworkers at Channel 4 were probably already drafting their "thoughts and prayers" posts while privately screenshotting the best frames to send to each other.
She could see the headlines spinning out in her mind like a slot machine of horrors.
BREAKING: Local News Presenter Dies of Cardiac Arrest After Accidental Livestream Goes Viral
And the comments. God, the comments. They'd dissect everything. Her face. Her sounds. The angle. Someone would identify Gerald by brand and model number within the hour, and the company would either issue a horrified statement or lean into it with a marketing campaign, and she genuinely didn't know which was worse.
Her mother had found out already, and her father, who still didn't fully understand how livestreaming worked, would have it explained to him by one of her cousins, probably in devastating detail.
Her grandmother, who was eighty-three and had a Spacebook account she used exclusively to share Bible verses and photos of her cat, would see a notification or a tag or a message from one of her church friends who would phrase it as "concern" while absolutely vibrating with gossip.
"Maria, I'm not sure how to tell you this, but I think your granddaughter was on the news in a way that... well... you should sit down, dear."
Mila whimpered into the sheets.
What would they even write on her obituary?
Mila Reyes, 26, beloved daughter and weekend anchor for Channel 4 City News, passed away on Tuesday evening due to cardiac arrest. She is survived by her parents, her roommate Priya, and a silicone device named Gerald that she purchased during an emotional low point.
In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations to literally any cause that might make people forget how she died.
A strangled laugh-sob ripped out of her chest. She thrashed against the silk, fists pounding the mattress, because the alternative was screaming and she wasn't sure she'd be able to stop.
She was only twenty-six.
How could she collapse from the shock just like that and die from it!