Face-Slapping12 min read
Red Light, System Beeping, and a Million Little Lies
ButterPicks15 views
I remember thirty-two seconds on a red light like a heartbeat.
"Thirty-one," I muttered, one eyelid heavy.
"Thirty," my fingers tapped the steering wheel, looking for a DJ mix to scare away an afternoon nap.
Then metal screamed.
"Brake! Brake!" someone shouted outside my closed world of radio and sweat.
There was a flash of chrome, a throw of bodies, a grinding thud — like a drumstick on a coffin lid.
The last thing I tasted was rubber and the metallic pop of an airbag.
When I opened my eyes again, I wasn't in a hospital, not really.
"I am Jaina Gerard," I told the dark, because you name yourself to prove you exist.
"Where am I?" I thought next, because the dark is a liar.
"You're Genevieve Morris," a smooth screen said, lighting the black — and it was the exact kind of wrongness that makes a person laugh.
"System 666 online," it added in a voice that smelled like cheap electronics and fate.
"You're kidding," I said out loud, because at that point I was prepared to take any stereotype.
"Not a joke," the voice replied. "Three minutes, thirteen seconds before host soul dispersal. Complete missions. Earn soul energy. Use soul energy to reclaim your timeline."
"Reclaim my — what timeline?" I asked, because apparently I'd bought the lottery of cosmic ridiculousness.
"Question out of bounds. Select task," the system said, and a list fell into my head like a deck of cards. "Recommended: Low difficulty. Task: Prevent family loss. Title: 'Defend Against the Friend Who Steals.'"
A rhythm began to knock sideways in my ribs — the beat of being told you are not real in your own life.
Genevieve Morris: a name now on my tongue. Genevieve: a round, ordinary woman with a father who sauntered through business and a mother who polished a smile like silver. She had friends. She had a secret that would make her die in three chapters of the novel the system had harvested.
"Who is the villain?" I asked.
"Paul Marques," the system answered.
I laughed. That sounded like a soap opera villain who drinks bad scotch.
"Give me one mission," I said. "Fast."
"First: 'Defend Against the Friend Who Steals.' Protect Genevieve's parents from ruin. Prevent corporate takeover by 'Greyson Krueger.' Recommended: Begin slowly."
"Safe," I told the system. "Low stakes."
The world that came awake around Genevieve Morris smelled like lacquer and old money. The Morris house was a box of light and comfortable silences — until you lifted a corner of the drape.
"You're back?" my mother — Charlize Lang — asked the second I opened the front door. Her voice folded into the house and warmed it like a lamp.
"Yeah." I hugged a life that wasn't mine. "School sent me home early."
Her hand on my waist felt like an insurance policy. "Have you eaten?" she asked, acting like a mother and a small bank.
"I ate," I lied.
"Good. Your father will be so relieved," she said, and what she didn't say filled the corners of the room — "if he knew what to be relieved about."
He was in his study when I found him: Paul Marques, Genevieve's father, a man who had hands like administration and eyes like accounting ledgers. He looked up like someone who was always doing a favor by existing.
"Genevieve," he said, and his smile was the kind that had been practiced in boardrooms. "Back from school?"
"Just in time for the birthday season," I said, keeping my voice small. "Dad, I've been thinking about the company."
"Oh?" He folded himself neatly into the chair opposite mine, as if our house were a stage and his posture the only script. "And?"
"And maybe—" I started, because Genevieve had been a bookworm and that remained true in me. "—we should think about stewardship. About who will look after things when you're old."
He laughed, a laugh that had millimeters of warmth. "You're very wise for a girl who still owes me dinner etiquette lessons."
The novel vision that had been dumped into my head sat like a third person at the table. I had read every moment that mattered: Greyson Krueger would flirt with my friend Giulia Campbell, he would charm a room, he would be both a lover and a lever. The author had been tidy: his charm would be the wind the plot used to take a sailboat away from the rocks.
"Do you like him?" I had asked Genevieve in her memory. She had been gentle. She had been loyal. She had not been venomous, and that had been her ruin.
"He's a good man," Genevieve's memory said. "If he loved me, that would be something."
But this wasn't Genevieve's life anymore.
"I don't want you to burn for them," the system reminded me. "Extract souls. Complete task."
"Then tell me about the man who wrecked her." I asked the screen. "Tell me everything about Paul Marques."
A screen told me, but the real knowledge came as I watched him speak to the board. Paul had decided the price of his daughter's life, and he was comfortable with the calculation. He'd muttered, in a memory I had not expected to hear, "Let her go. Let the child with the other mother get in. More leverage."
A clock in my chest broke.
"You're accusing me of murder," I said, to a man who made small cross-stitches with his fingers like a tailor of excuses.
He blinked. "Genevieve, such language," he said. "You worry me."
The first time I heard him say it plainly — weeks later, half wine, half bravado — he said, "If losing one life makes the corporation safer, it is business." He laughed at his own brutality.
He had meant it, and he had meant to get away with it.
So began the slow, delicious work of unpicking a life.
"First," I told myself in the mirror that night, "we stabilize the parents. We keep them whole. We stop him from selling the house. We stop Greyson from getting the foothold he needs."
"How?" the system asked. "Strategy?"
"Why do you think I'm talking with you?" I answered. "We lie softly. We persuade loudly. We play better."
I learned lobbying at breakfast and blackmail at lunch, and charm at dinner. I took Genevieve's notes and made them sharp. I took advantage of being a person who could move — the system had given me borrowed time, and I spent it cunningly.
"Greyson Krueger is here to court my friend," I told Giulia one afternoon in the lecture hall. "I can handle courtship. I can't handle graft."
"You think he's dangerous?" she asked.
"I think he likes people who are useful," I said. "And people who are useful have their own uses."
We arranged small things. I told my mother Charlize the truth about Greyson's family's obsession with alliances, softly. I let the seed of worry sprout. I let Charlize feed it with gossip and concerned phone calls. I let the atmosphere of caution thicken. We didn't burn bridges; we built parapets.
"You're changing the melody," Giulia told me one evening as we walked through campus. "You used to be quiet."
"I used to be a spectator," I said. "Now I'm the one driving the plot. Do you remember when we read the book and all of this seemed inevitable?"
"Yeah," she smiled faintly. "But you, Genevieve—or whoever you are—you're fighting it."
"I am Jaina," I said, and the words tasted like iron. "But call me Genevieve for this part. Keep the house safe."
"Okay," Giulia said. "Then keep it safe."
Greyson kept trying. He kept being the handsome pivot around which everyone argued. He came to our building and knocked on the door like a man who believed doors opened for people who had charm.
"Genevieve," he said the first time he came when I answered. "You look... good."
"You look well, too," I said. "Are you here to talk business or to talk flowers?"
He smiled as if he'd expected the question. "Flowers," he said.
"Then buy yourself some flowers for being forward." I closed the door.
He left, but not empty-handed. He sent things: small gifts, cosmetic boxes, an "MX" set with an expensive label. He sent messages that were all charm and none of accountability.
"You have to be careful," I said to my mother weeks later when she found the box. "People give gifts because they expect to be owed."
Charlize fluffed a napkin at the kitchen. "But he is polite. Greyson has manners."
"Manners are a currency," I said. "Don't spend ours."
Years in a life can be packed into a handful of scenes. I started to rearrange those scenes in my favor. I planted doubts with shareholders. I made Paul's old friends uncomfortable. I learned from Genevieve's notes where the company kept its quiet agreements, and I nudged a few of them into daylight.
At a shareholders' banquet that felt as if every chandelier in the city had been suspended from silk, I set a small, surgical trap.
"Paul," I said quietly, standing beside him as photographers circled like planets. "Would you mind stepping into the hall for a minute?"
"Why?" he asked, suspicious only because the air changed before the temperature did.
"There's a small matter I'd like to discuss." I smiled at the cameras.
He followed, as arrogant as a man who thinks his name is enough armor.
We stepped outside the ornate room. The crowd, the cameras — perfect. The board members, the rich neighbors, the donors, the city notables — all within earshot through a glass lobby.
"You wanted privacy," I told him, turning and walking so that I was always a step away from retreat. "I'll give you something you can remember."
I had recorded him, months ago, when he thought no one listened. Sometimes tyrants like to rehearse plans aloud when they think their authority shields them. A nurse had whispered of his words. A driver had left a phone on the seat. I stitched their memories together into a single file.
"Paul," I said, and turned my phone like a lit candle. "Listen to yourself."
The recording played and his voice was as cold as frost in a freezer. "Let her go," it said. "The other line can take the asset. It's business."
In the lobby where the fall banquet conversation was thick as cream, the music halted like someone had cut a string. My mother's breath hitched. Board members tilted their heads like birds listening for a predator.
"Is this true?" someone called from inside.
Paul looked, then his expression fractured.
"It's a lie!" he snapped, the first pleas of the narrative like a thin voice trying to back away from a cliff. "This is false. Who put this on? Who is spreading gossip?"
"It was in your own voice," I said softly. "You told someone to let me disappear."
"That's insane!" He laughed then, but the laugh was small and brittle. "You are trying to ruin me."
People had begun to gather, drawn by curiosity and the spilling of something that was not meant to spill. Phones appeared like a thousand migrating beetles. Some people murmured. Some pulled out devices, the modern version of gasps.
"Paul! What—" Charlize's voice cut through the hubbub. She moved to him, hands shaking.
He turned to her, and for the first time that night I saw a man show shock instead of control. "Darling—" he began, a plea more like a child's attempt.
"Shut up," she said. Her hands had always smoothed the house's edges, but now they found his collar like a rope. "Shut up and answer."
"Genevieve, this is—" Paul started. He tried denial first, rapid and practiced.
"Is it true?" I asked.
"No!" he barked. "I didn't— it's out of context! You can edit anything! Your system tricks you—"
"You told the nurse to step away," I hissed. "You told the driver to dispose of a life you thought inconvenient. You planned it."
"That's not what I—" He faltered when someone in the lobby clicked 'record' with a device. "You're lying. This is a frame."
The arc from triumphant to terrified was a tiny, humiliating spiral. He had the look of a man whose feet were made of clay.
"Paul," I said, my voice cold like pouring water. "The board should know. The city should know. The shareholders should decide."
"Do you hear yourself?" he begged suddenly, a different tenor. "Please. Please, don't—"
It was the first step down he had to take.
"Paul Marques," I said, because names in public rings like a bell. "You plotted to let your daughter die for assets. Did you think anyone would bless that? Did you think this could be hidden?"
Someone in the lobby who'd been whispering suddenly stepped forward. "We should call the press," he said, lax but sure. "The conference room — it's prime."
"Do it," I told him.
They did.
Voices rose like tides. Cameras focused. Phones made tiny lights. The presentation screen in the hall flickered to life as someone pushed the wrong button and everything turned toward scandal. An assistant, shaking, opened a laptop and the lobby became a courtroom.
"Do you recant?" I asked, and the world watched. A hundred tiny digital vultures were already snapping.
Paul looked like a man in a suit that had suddenly been filled with air and the air was leaving. He tried to put on his stern businessman face and it slid off like wax.
"Please," he whispered at last, the arrogance gone and the appeal made of brittle things. "Don't do this to my family."
The noise around him changed. "Are you serious?" hissed a young executive. "He wanted his daughter out because of a spin to move shares? He—?"
"Stand down," someone said, but the cameras didn't stand down. They didn't have the manners of the old world.
Paul actually took a step forward and then — as if down a script he hadn't known he would ever have to act — he fell to his knees on that marble floor.
"Kneel?" someone murmured off-camera. "He's kneeling."
"Kneel and confess?" I said, and the hostess' pearls clicked as she reached for her phone.
"I didn't mean—" he started, but the audience had already shifted. Some were shocked, covering mouths. Some were smiling small and cruel smiles, the same hunger that eats people in a play when the villain falls.
"Please," he begged at my feet. "Please, I can fix it. I'll step down. I'll sign anything. I will give you shares. I'll—"
"Beg," a woman in a diamond collar whispered into the phone as she recorded. "Get him to beg."
He did not need more urging. He clawed his sleeves, a man undone, voice breaking. "Please, please, please—Genevieve—please—"
The crowd did not soothe him. They sharpened their phones. "Is he begging?" a reporter asked, delight threaded through the professionalism. "Is he tearful?"
"Yes," someone replied. "Live. Bring the press."
He crawled, in a humiliating slow motion, toward Charlize. "Forgive me. Forgive me. I was afraid. I never wanted—"
People started to clap — not always to honor him, but to punctuate his downfall. A few braved to take videos. Someone laughed; another wept. A woman near the banner started to chant, half in sympathy, half in triumph.
"Beg for mercy," someone in the crowd urged. "Beg."
"Please—" Paul choked, "Please don't ruin us."
"No one touched him for a long while," I remembered later. The footage showed the arc of his reaction: smugness to shock; denial to bargaining; bargaining to collapse. He had moved through all the steps so publically that they became a lesson.
"He will have to answer to the board and the law," a voice from the outside recorded. "This is criminal negligence. This is attempted manslaughter."
"No!" he screamed suddenly, as if struck by a new understanding. He lurched, palms scraped against marble, and tried to stand.
"Don't touch him," Charlize commanded, though I could see the softness in her eyes, the messy place where tenderness and betrayal meet. "He will answer to the law."
The people around us cheered; some whispered admiring things. Phones clicked like insects. Someone in the corner clapped, slow and theatrical. The security people looked nervous, because the city shows up when blood is in the water.
"Stay here," I told Charlize. "We will get lawyers. We will call whatever's left to call."
"You're a monster," Paul sobbed. "You will not have my life."
"You chose a life," I said. "You chose to make your family an investment. You ate the wrong course."
He cried. He pleaded. He begged. People recorded. Someone uploaded.
Somebody shouted, "Kneel and apologize!" and he did until his knees left an imprint on the marble and the lobby smelled of desperation and lemon polish.
The file spread. Video went long. It sat on social like a coal waiting for wind. The board convened the next morning. Paul was publicly suspended. Shares were frozen. He faced inquiry committees and reporters and a level of shame that does not exist in everyday barbs. The humiliation was slow, meticulous, and public — exactly the cleanse the house needed.
He was punished badly, publicly, with his fingers on the marble and press lights in his eyes. He moved from confident to pleading to crumpled, and his fall was a lesson with a soundtrack: cameras, murmurs, the ironic clinking of silver on a banquet tray. People recorded the final collapse and posted it. The comments were a chorus of vengeance.
After that day, people avoided Paul's eyes. The board managed damage control; Charlize sat on panels of interviewers and spoke of betrayal and duty and how nothing was worth a life. She was composed — the armor of the wronged — and the visitors to our house became fewer.
"Did you need him to be destroyed?" she asked me once, in the small quiet after the storm. She sounded smaller.
"You chose to make a monster of your own making," I said. "I only made sure he could no longer use the house as currency."
She took my hand and squeezed like someone worried she might lose it. "You did good."
The system chirped faintly those nights, like a mosquito trying to be a metronome. "Mission one: complete," it said. "Soul energy transmitted."
The world hummed like a machine that had been adjusted. I had earned something I didn't know how to hold — the possibility of staying. I had rearranged the story.
But stories are stubborn.
"There's more," the system told me. "Greyson's power not fully cut. Task two: prevent the love that ruins you. Task three: watch the woman you call friend. Task four: revenge can be vicious."
"Then let's do it," I said. "Carefully."
"Carefully," the system echoed. "With the red sports car in the memory, and the MX cream on the dressing table — the world recognizes your acts."
"I remember the red light," I said. "And the system — you told me something about time."
"When you accrue enough soul energy, you may rewind a timeline," 666 said. "When the timeline is rewound, you may choose a single change."
"Then I will rewind a single choice," I said. "Not to forget. Not to escape. But to force someone who planned death to face it."
"That choice will cost," the system warned.
"Everything costs," I answered. "I've already been robbed of everything I thought I deserved."
"Prepare. Next mission begins tomorrow. And Jaina — be careful with feelings that belong to others."
"I will be," I promised. The vow was both a plan and a promise to the stranger I had been and to the woman I had become.
The story would continue, with Giulia and Greyson and the corporate chessboard. People would choose, and sometimes I would nudge. Sometimes I would love. But the day Paul Marques knelt on marble and begged — that was public, that was ugly, and that was necessary. People clapped. People filmed. Paul's fall became a little star on social news, and the world tacked a lesson to its noticeboard.
At night, when the system slept and the city dimmed, I would turn the small analog watch I found in Genevieve's drawer. Its second hand did not run, but I would wind it anyway.
"Tick," I would tell myself. "One beat for the moment that burned, one beat for the bargain."
The system beeped again, faint but steady: 666.
"Tick," I said, loud enough for the empty room and the memory of a red light to answer back.
And in the quiet, I learned how to plan.
The End
— Thank you for reading —