Page 83 of Someone Just Followed You

My skin crawls. He either treats me like his girlfriend or his child, and both disgust me. Every cell in my body is screaming, begging for me to find a way out of here. But how? This sick, fucked-up human has chained me to a bed and locked me in a blacked-out room.

He sits next to me on the bed. I shuffle away, toward the wall, but he leans over me. My body starts to shake. ‘Oh, Maple,’ he murmurs. ‘I don’t know why you’re fighting it. You and I could be best friends if you just let it happen.’

‘I hate you,’ I murmur. ‘You’re twisted.’

‘I could be like Coco,’ he goes on, as though I haven’t spoken. ‘Telling each other our secrets. Sharing photos all day long.’

‘You’re nothing like Coco,’ I whisper, wanting to defend my friend, even though I can barely breathe.

‘Needing each other so desperately that we get a one-hundred-day snap streak. That would be fun, wouldn’t it?’

I stare at him.

‘Ha! You look so confused,’ he continues, grinning. ‘I love it.’

‘You’re insane,’ I manage.

‘Me?’ he asks in mock outrage. ‘But I thought I always gave the best advice?’ His eyes glint like he’s said something funny. ‘And that I’m brave and righteous and compassionate for investigating a girl’s murder.’

‘That’s …’ I’m almost panting now; short, rapid breaths. What the hell is he saying? ‘That’s Coco,’ I stutter, even as invisible sirens blare in my brain. ‘Not you.’

‘Oh, your face!’ Brandon giggles like a kid. ‘Who knew AI could be so much fun.’

‘I don’t know what you’re saying, but you’re not Coco.’

He sighs, but the grin stays. ‘So here’s the thing, Maple. That’s exactly who I am.’

Chapter 98

Nikki

@RealRyanB14, TikTok

Hey, what’s happened to the Coco’s Cold Case YouTube channel? There’s just a message saying, ‘this account has been terminated’. I loved her content

Nikki has her phone on the kitchen counter, on speaker mode so her hands are free to check her laptop. Her head is throbbing and she feels sick, but she doesn’t know if that’s down to the booze she drank yesterday, or what she saw on YouTube last night.

She’s also struggling not to throw her phone across the room because Tom – one of her oldest friends, and more relevantly, the only person she knows who works in cyber security – is not freaking out as much as she is. Last night, drunk, she managed to label what she saw as fucking weird and go to bed. But when she woke up at dawn – hungover but sober – she realized that a serious crime had taken place. So she called Tom every ten minutes until eventually he picked up.

‘Yeah, it’s fucked up,’ he says now. ‘But it happens a lot. Identity theft.’

‘But I don’t get it!’ Nikki cries out, sounding more like a dramatic teenager than she intended. ‘It’s me, all of me, but from when I was a kid, and in clothes I never wore. Modern stuff that teenagers wear now, not twelve, thirteen years ago when I was that age. I mean, how did this Coco even get hold of my image?’

‘Were your parents into Facebook when you were growing up?’

‘Sure,’ she says. ‘We used to do big road trips to Florida in summer break. Mom would take a gazillion photos of us and then do a kind of travel log on Facebook.’

‘That’s probably it then. Back in the day, a lot of people didn’t get the importance of keeping their page private, which meant photos became fair game for everyone on the internet. And now, with AI, you can scrape an existing photo off a random page – or a bundle of photos to make it more accurate – and make infinite new ones in the same image.’

‘God, I guess I knew that, but why would she choose me?’

‘I don’t know. I guess you’re kinda photogenic.’

A flash of a memory from junior prom, Tom’s hand on her back as they danced like wooden soldiers to Justin Bieber’s ‘Love Yourself’. But Nikki swallows down the awkwardness. She’s got something way more disturbing to deal with right now.

‘And, sorry to freak you out even more,’ Tom goes on, ‘but I doubt it is a “she”.’

Nikki straightens her spine. ‘What?’