Everyone loved a good ghost story, and I was no exception. Behind the safety of disbelief, even the wildest tales sounded amazing. Countless people ate up the tales of the strange and otherworldly for breakfast. They spoon-fed themselves cereal and milk while the algorithm fed them what they wanted to see or hear. The cyberspace could either be heaven or hell on Earth depending on what you used it for. Fluffy kittens or doxing. Happy families or gore.

  Beside me, Ethan was scraping the infinite world of social media, where anyone could be anything or anyone. Anything was real if you wanted to believe hard enough. People were larger than life, and editing software could make the impossible real, at least digitally. The ghostly figure I thought was a trick of the light was turning out to be more than I ever imagined, and the rumor I dismissed as school grounds gossip was coming back to bite me. The creature from my dreams materialized in front of me yesterday in a bright and shiny synthetic form, beaten up, but not going down without a fight.

  A hundred years ago, social media was invented, but even now, it was still alive and kicking. If anything, it had grown stronger in the meantime. With the advent of virtual reality, it could feel even more real than actual reality. Anyone who got too sucked into that could end up like the Neo-Luminaries, who wanted to leave the physical plane and digitize entirely. There was a wide spectrum between whatever that was and the general masses.

  Everyone took to it like moths to a flame. You couldn’t live without it anymore, and if you looked hard enough, you’d map out someone’s entire life in their digital footprint. There was the persona they created for themselves, the stories they chose to tell, and the images they chose to share. Even behind carefully curated content, you could catch a reflection of someone’s inner world. Buried in a sea of broken links, inactive forums, unloadable images, and automated bots, you could find hints of humanity. Sometimes it was the reflection in a window or a poorly edited figure or the mess that wasn’t supposed to be in view. Nobody was above it all.

  Chasing clout was a favored pastime for the young and old alike. Whether it was a symptom of a disconnected age or an overly superficial one didn’t matter to us. We’d leave it to the sociologists to make sense of all the noise. We weren’t going to bite the hand that fed us. Considering all our budget cuts, we were more short-staffed than ever and more than happy enough to let the people expose their lives so we didn’t have to beat it out of them. Right now, almost every teen from Silver Reach High was online somewhere snapping selfies, recording vlogs, or posting messages on whatever the most trending platform was. If we were really lucky, they’d also be doing it with the time and date openly displayed and their locations tagged.

  “How’s it looking?” I asked.

  “Who knows,” he said. “With this much data, we should just flip a coin and click on something while my software does the rest.”

  “Hey, I’ve got one of those,” Gabe grinned, pulling out a lucky penny. “Found it on the ground as a kid. My old man told me it was fucking worthless, so I kept it just to spite him. Never know when you need that kinda thing.”

  He launched the coin into the air with a flick of his thumb.

  “Heads,” he said. “How about that one?”

  “Gabe, we didn’t even designate the sides yet,” I said.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said, leaning over to click on the post at the top of the page.

  Before we could complain, the video started playing. There was a group of teenagers ambling around somewhere. It was dark, far too dark to tell where they were exactly, but the location tag said it wasn’t far from the local high school. Whoever was manning the camera was absentminded and clumsy, and the footage showed more of the ground than anything else.

  “What are we doing?” a girl asked.

  “Something stupid probably,” another girl muttered. “Come on, let’s go home. I have a curfew.”

  To the girl’s dismay, no one joined her side. The rest of the group was entirely unfazed. Instead of hearing her out, a boy jumped and slapped a sign above him to the amusement of the others in the group.

  “Boys…” she muttered irritably before something rustled in the grass.

  “Did you hear that?” a girl asked.

  “Hear what?” a boy chimed in.

  It was faint at first. A soft sound was mingling in with the falling rain. While they were busy fighting with each other about whether or not something was there, the sound grew stronger and stronger. By now it had become more distinct, like the pitter-patter of footsteps in the rain-soaked grass. If they couldn’t hear it before, they sure could now, and as they turned toward it, they screamed.

  “Fuck! Do you see that!?” a boy cried.

  What they saw wasn’t visible; what was visible were empty footprints forming in the wet grass, and for just a moment, the faintest blur of an outlined body flashed on the screen. If you blinked, you would have missed it.

  Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

  “Are the rest like this too?” I asked.

  “Not all of them were as clear,” Ethan said, rubbing his chin. “Most of them were just text posts repeating something they heard from the grapevine. Thirdhand information. Useless, other than to prove it was on their mind.”

  The loading bar on his screen finally ticked up to one hundred percent. Hundreds, if not thousands, of snippets of content were tidied up for us into neat and orderly tables and graphics. One thing was clear — the kids were spooked by what they either did or didn’t see. The location tags were overlaid on a map of the city. Small red dots clustering in hotspots caught my attention.

  “I can approximate its movements based on the density in each area,” he said. “It’s not perfect, but it’s what we’ve got.”

  He was right. There were flaws with counting on social media to do the groundwork for you. After all, nothing worth doing was ever easy. The only thing that these posts proved was that there was someone there to witness and record it. Places the android went to when there was no one to notice it would be excluded no matter how often it was there. Conversely, places it only came to once could be over-represented if a crowd was there to snap pictures.

  “There are records of some calls, but not much else.” Ethan said.

  No one listened to kids, especially when they were dramatic, too much, or otherwise difficult. It was a cruel irony that the infinite potential of youth was often overshadowed by the inability to utilize it. The truth was only noise when it came from the mouth of a child. They knew before we did that this android was on the move. The vast majority of sightings were from our missing girl’s schoolmates. In fact, the more classes they shared with her increased the likelihood of running into our ghost. It might have been looking for people who Cassie might have known; the question now was why.

  “Just one school,” Ethan said. “And only at night too.”

  She had no eyes to see, but did she have a mouth to scream?

  “What about her voice?” I asked.

  “No, her speakers were also destroyed,” he said. “There was no way for her to speak.”

  “Think it wanted to help her?” Gabe asked.

  “Maybe. It’s not as strange as you might think,” Ethan said. “An advanced model like this could easily have its own will.”

  Was it a cry for help? Did the silent girl find the voiceless machine and see themselves in each other? Were they trying to find compassion and belonging in what they could not control? The drive to reach out and befriend her peers was not its desire, but hers. The drive to belong somewhere, anywhere at all, and the drive to be normal was enough to get anyone’s mouth watering. The lengths people would go to reach those goals were vast and varied.

  “Despite the damage, I found evidence it still held onto something like a consciousness,” he said.

  “How much data did you pull from it?” I asked.

  “Its GPS and cameras were done for, but audio and infrared footage were intact. Don’t get too excited, though. We don’t have the time to scan everything and match them to the physical locations they came from,” Ethan said.

  “So what you’re saying is what we need is a hint,” I said.

  There was only one person who could know her that well. Her classmate who approached us was concerned but even more clueless than we were. No, we needed someone who would have greater insight into who she was and what she was like. Father Lewis had seen her individually as well as with her family, and unlike Lexi Torres, he had wisdom only age could bring.

  “Maybe the priest knows something,” I said. “We only focused on what she told him last time, but we might learn more from what he said to her.”

  The last time we were there, I left Gabe behind to talk to the priest. The elderly women seemed to like him, and we didn’t always need to be in the same place at the same time.

  “Gabe, did you get his number?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he chuckled. “They gave me his schedule too. They were real friendly.”

  He patted around his pockets to find a scrap of paper. It wasn’t common to get information this way anymore, but some people were stuck with what they were familiar with, and those intent on holding onto tradition were always the last to modernize.

  “I got some expired takeout coupons from them too,” he grinned. “If we ever get a good time machine going, you can count on me for lunch.”

  “Thank God you never clean out your pockets,” I sighed.

  Of course he did; you should never underestimate the ability of older women to mother anyone young enough to be their child.

  A flustered older woman answered our call. A secretary maybe. I didn’t recognize her voice, but Gabe did.

  “Hey, Betty,” Gabe said. “It’s Detective Grant. You remember me, don’t you?”

  “Oh dear. Yes, of course,” she said. “Did you like the cookies we gave you?”

  “They were amazing,” he grinned. “Really hit the spot, but we have a few questions for Father Lewis. Mind handing over the call for us?”

  Instead of her voice, we heard shuffling footsteps and muttering. In this case, handing off the call would be literal. The church didn’t even have a call transferring system. How old-fashioned. Once we had him on the line, we skipped the introduction and got straight to the point.

  “You already told us Cassie didn’t talk much but we’re interested in what she listened to. Think back carefully. What did she love to hear the most from you?” I asked.

  We spoke for a while, bouncing back and forth. She had known him for years. We were rehashing so many stories. No one could remember it all, and even if they could, it’d be no good to them if they couldn’t separate what was meaningful from what was not.

  “Was there anything she ever requested specifically?” I asked.

  “Come to think of it,” he said. “She loved all my stories, but there was only one she asked me to tell her twice. It was about my time in the quarantine zone.”

  He gasped as our breath hitched.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll find her.”

  There was never a guarantee in this line of work, but my gut was telling me that this was it. Whether it was his guilt, grief, or a misplaced yearning for atonement, he spent seventeen years in a rotting house, tending to his late mother’s garden. Why? Because he couldn’t save his mother from herself. It was the trap so many children fell into when they watched their parents spiral in their own self-made prisons. It broke him. It shattered him. He came out stumbling in a daze, unaware of how much time had passed him by. This was when his faith found him, and it was transformative. Whether it was for better or worse, it made him the man he was now, and she was a lonely girl with a strange mind who wanted to slip out of her own skin and become someone else. It didn’t need to make sense to us; it only needed to make sense to her.