On screen, you see your CFO, Miranda Kessler, leaning over the table with two men you’ve never met.
Their faces are half-shadowed, but their voices are clear, recorded by a forgotten security cam angle that nobody bothered to disable.
Miranda says your name the way someone says “target.”
Then she slides a folder across the table and whispers, “The market will believe it if we leak it in the right order.”
Your heart starts pounding so hard you feel it in your fingertips.
Luis pauses the video and looks at you, calm as a man who’s already made peace with storms.
“I recorded that screen from the security office,” he says. “They thought only the day team mattered.”
He clicks another file. “This is the part where they decide to burn you.”
The next clip shows a private hallway outside Legal.
Miranda hands your general counsel a flash drive.
You can’t hear the words, but you can read the body language: the stiff shoulders, the quick glance both ways, the urgency of people doing something they’ll deny forever.
Then the audio file plays, taken from a maintenance microphone Luis installed years ago to catch leaks in the ventilation system.
“Make it look like Ethan signed off,” Miranda says.
“Create the audit trail, then freeze the accounts and let him walk into the blast radius.”
A male voice answers, smooth and amused. “And the board?”
Miranda laughs quietly. “The board wants the stock to dip so they can buy the pieces back cheap. They’ll thank me later.”
You sit back as if you’ve been shoved.
Your entire day replays in your mind like a sick magic trick.
The lawyers in the lobby, the investors demanding answers, the sudden “fraud allegations” that arrived with perfect timing.
It wasn’t chaos. It was choreography.
You grip the edge of the old desk in the closet and force air into your lungs.
“Why didn’t you go to the police?” you ask.
Luis’s mouth tightens. “Because cops don’t arrest people who buy their kids scholarships.”
He points at the screen. “But federal agencies love paper trails. And this is a whole library.”
You scroll through the folders with shaking hands.
Emails. Contracts. Internal chat logs. A spreadsheet labeled “CONTROLLED LEAK CALENDAR.”
There’s a file called DEEPFAKE_AUDIO_TEST, and your skin goes cold again.
You open it and hear your own voice, clear as day, saying: “I approve the numbers. Push it through.”
Your stomach drops.
It sounds like you. It breathes like you. It even carries that slight pause you make before big decisions.
You feel your mouth go dry because you suddenly understand the weapon: they didn’t just steal your company, they stole your identity.
Luis watches you carefully.
“They used a voice model,” he says. “I heard them brag about it.”
He leans closer. “But the file metadata gives them away. And I recorded the meeting where they tested it.”
He clicks, and you hear Miranda say, “If it fools Ethan’s wife, it’ll fool Wall Street.”
You flinch at the casual cruelty.
You don’t even remember the last time someone spoke your name without wanting something from it.
And now you’re hearing people discuss your destruction like a Tuesday task list.
You stare at Luis. “How long have you been sitting on this?”
