Today, Freya Akselsen was on track to break a new record. Three hundred and fifty thousand people were watching her stream right now, and the number kept climbing as she headed into the Q&A.
If the viewership hit four hundred thousand, it would be a world record for the coaching industry as a whole.
No one had ever done it before. Even the famous and obscenely wealthy Tony Bobbins, in his best years, had topped out at three hundred and ninety—after decades in the market with a globally recognized face! And now Freya had a chance to shatter that benchmark with room to spare and secure her fame for years to come. While some might chalk it up to pure luck, Freya knew better: luck favors the prepared.
It had all started well enough. The first hour was a lecture on achieving your goals—her favorite part—but it only pulled in a hundred thousand viewers. Expected, but hardly impressive for someone with her four million Instagram followers and another twelve million on TikTok. Freya didn't like the latter for its lack of a serious audience, but the algorithms had their own plans for her.
Another hour went to questions like "What's the best age to start a startup?" and "How do you get up and start doing things?" which had been submitted through the form before the stream. The questions landed well and pulled the viewership up to two hundred thousand.
But that still wasn't it. That was a plateau. Two hundred thousand—a plateau that was getting harder to surpass each time.
And that's when Freya went all in, as the New York dealmakers liked to say. In twenty minutes, right in the middle of the stream, her assistants hooked up a payment form and blasted out posts to her social media. And so began the surprise segment of the stream: a donation-based Q&A. Unmoderated, but entirely at Freya's discretion.
The plateau shattered. The posts spread like wildfire across social media feeds—it was primetime, just before the end of the workday—and the viewer count instantly jumped from two hundred thousand to two hundred and fifty. News bots latched onto the event and started churning out articles about the provocative stream from “the most groundbreaking business coach of our generation.” A woman!
Now, three hundred and fifty thousand people from all over the world were watching her, upvoting, sharing, and asking questions for cold, hard cash. Three hundred sixty. Three hundred seventy. Freya's breath hitched with every new thousand. And then it was time for answers.
The main thing was to avoid letting the Q&A turn into some kind of group Tinder date.
"Do you have kids?" asked a stranger. "How do you achieve success if you have four?"
Freya wanted to say: “You don’t.”
But first, moms on maternity leave made up forty-eight percent of Freya's audience, and the question was a hot-button issue. And second, you couldn't answer like that to a subscriber who had probably scraped together fifty bucks from her kids' pocket money. So Freya deployed the polite, pre-packaged answer.
"Everyone defines success for themselves," she said. “If you’ve always wanted to be a mother or father, then your children are your capital. The key is to follow a sound investment strategy and not entrust that capital to unvetted funds.”
And the joke landed. The chat went wild and the viewer count climbed: a clip of her answer was already making the rounds on Twitter. But fame came with a price: the questions veered sharply back into group-Tinder-date territory.
"Are you married?" asked someone, donating the minimum of five dollars.
Freya left questions like that unanswered. Thankfully, the flood of more interesting—and more expensive!—questions flushed the cheap provocations away.
“Don’t you ever miss having a strong man’s shoulder to lean on?” Rebecca223 asked, for a hundred dollars. “Would you give up your business if you met the love of your life?”
Freya decided to answer.
“Business isn’t a substitute for a man, and a man isn’t a substitute for your life’s work. A business doesn’t need to be placated like a lover. And the right business,” Freya added with a smile, “will always work for you—which, you have to admit, gives it a distinct advantage over a man.”
The chat erupted. On her side monitors, her Twitter and Instagram feeds were scrolling at warp speed. The fem-community activated at full throttle, and the feed bloomed with avatars sporting colorful hair like an exotic greenhouse. And now it wasn't the assistants, but Freya's own fans reporting and piling on insults at the right-wingers who'd been drawn to her broadcast from anonymous loser forums. Things were always tricky with the right-wingers.
But three hundred and eighty... no, three hundred and ninety thousand viewers were three hundred and ninety thousand viewers. No matter what they reeked of.
Trolls tried to spam the stream with questions like "Do you swallow?" and "Try shaving your legs"—unimaginative—but they came in waves. Silly green sad frogs appeared in the chat. Freya smiled and continued answering selectively, glancing at the assistants' chat. Comments set the tone, after all. But moderator help wasn't needed.
The trolls' moms gave them no more than five dollars for school. So they were utterly crushed by a counterattack from the very heart of Freya’s audience, summoned by the fan groups on Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram. Rushing to their idol’s defense were the stay-at-home moms, the nail techs, and the college girls from the middle of nowhere. The housewives who'd swapped their ladles for smartphones at the rallying cry of the digital age. And men who craved attention from all the aforementioned women, so they started posing as "one of the good ones" and didn't notice how they were spending twenty bucks a month on Freya.
Not the best audience if you're a serious woman sharing secrets of real success, but loyal. And loyalty means a lot in real business.
Before Freya's eyes, the haters’ messages were washed away by a tide of twenty and fifty-dollar donations: “Go, Freya!”, “Freya, we love you!”, “#Akselsexuals!”. The stakes were rising fast; donations under ten dollars no longer even appeared on screen. And for the first time, the woman’s smile was genuine.
But the viewer count had barely scraped three hundred and ninety thousand—and was starting to slip. The trolls, defeated, were fleeing the battlefield. Suddenly, Katie, the PR assistant, wrote.
“Flash them your legs. Now! It’ll be a sensation!”
It's not like Freya did that usually, but today was a special day. There was no time for hesitation, not even in a business suit. No time for hesitation when you were born to change the world.
Freya took the mic off the stand for effect and held it in her hands.
"Well, if unshaven legs are the last argument in the battle between weak men and strong women, all the better for us," she said. "It means we've already won."
With those words, she reclined in her designer chair, bringing into the frame her sleek, graceful legs, glistening with body shimmer. They emerged from under a strict business skirt but ended in comfortable sneakers. Freya coquettishly waved her legs in the air, spun in the chair, and returned. It came out ambiguously, but powerfully. Freya was satisfied.
She returned to a completely different broadcast. The chat was exploding. Media outlets from both the left and the right, who had been monitoring the stream, unleashed a barrage of articles, blasting them across the news feeds. “Business Coach Brings Toxic Masculinity to Its Knees at Her Exquisite Feet,” the left-wing headlines screamed. “Freya Akselsen, 29, Proves Female Power Has Nothing to Do with Hairy Legs,” the right-wing outlets reluctantly conceded.
And though the radical feminists began to leave the chat, they were in the minority. Viewership foamed up, swirled with new people. The number ticked past three hundred and ninety thousand and was closing in on four hundred. Her assistants were celebrating: the streaming platform had just sent Freya a partnership contract. The all-time record was just a couple of thousand viewers away.
Freya’s head was spinning.
Then, with the sound of a firework, a message worth ten thousand dollars flashed across a third of the screen.
“SECRET'S OUT! SCAM ARTIST FREYA AKSELSEN GIVES HEAD AND ASS FOR MONEY.” it screamed in bright orange text. Below it was an unclickable, partially cut-off link to PornTub.
What an idiot. Freya laughed out loud.
"Very generous, dear hater," she said. “A shame I can’t send it back so you can see a shrink. Psychiatrists are expensive.”
By design, a ten-thousand-dollar message stayed up for twenty seconds. It popped up in the middle, covering Freya's face, and she had to shift in her chair to the side.
"That's the flip side of success. All I can wish is for everyone to have such generous haters," the woman said with a chuckle. "And remember, don't click suspicious links; it could be a virus."
It was hard to keep track of what was happening in the chat—some were outraged at how far the haters would go. Freya sent a request to her assistants, but they could only throw up their hands; there was no way to remove the message. The girls and women of the #Akselsexuals mobilized, urging everyone not to click on unknown links. That’s how a lot of people got their credit card info stolen and ended up ordering ten bags of rice to Kenya.
But then a war of emojis and exclamations erupted.
“The video is real!” someone wrote. “OMG, it’s Freya.”
“300 dollars, my god,” wrote RobertTheDestroyer2.
“Guys, are you sure it’s not a virus?” asked Tanisha1999.
“Freya, how do you comment on this?” The message was washed away by a wave of eggplant emojis. Someone had captioned each eggplant with the word “cucumber.”
The moment the twenty-second message vanished, the screen exploded with notifications. Ten, twenty, thirty-dollar donations screamed that the video was real. Hundred-dollar donations started pouring in with messages like “3 0 0 d o l l a r s,” “C u c u m b e r,” and just crying-laughing emojis. The messages were surrounded by a mix of eggplants and pink feminist fists.
Freya shifted her gaze to the second monitor. Twitter's feed was flying there. Instagram had already locked her feed, but Twitter was more democratic. And now replies were pouring in with screenshots.
Many were blurred, but readable without effort. Somewhere Freya was holding something pink in her mouth with pleasure, and it definitely wasn't strawberry sorbet. Somewhere Twitter tactfully blurred her nipples. But people weren't interested in that: the feed was bursting with a thick green cucumber gripped by a male hand in the frame.
“SAY IT’S A DEEPFAKE!” the assistants screamed in the chat. “FREYA, SAY IT’S A DEEPFAKE, YOU'RE FROZEN ON CAMERA AND YOU’RE BEET RED!!”
Freya silently reached for the mouse and ended the stream.
She saw her own lifeless face just before the screen went dark, and then, the final numbers. Half a million people had tuned in to her stream today. Half a million witnesses.
She needed to snap out of the stupor. Inhale and exhale in Lotus pose.
Freya exhaled—and then grabbed her MacBook and hurled it at the wall.
It didn't help. Freya felt her pulse hammer. A ringing started in her ears. She felt like she was about to pass out. More than anything in the world, she suddenly wanted to. But fate had other plans.
And so Freya sprang into action to save herself. She couldn't turn back time, but she could cover her tracks. She had to find a notebook. Any of them.
The number for her CIA handler—Mr. K—couldn’t be saved on any electronic device. Her iPhone would forget the number immediately after a call, and her MacBook would freeze if it ever appeared on screen. So, like in the old days, the number was written down several times on different paper carriers—in case one got lost.
It wasn't that Freya made a habit of calling in favors from the CIA—she didn’t make a habit of losing her notebooks either. It was just that when you had to call on the Deep State, the circumstances were bound to be unbelievable. Like now.
So now, Freya's foresight was paying off. She couldn't find the notebook in the kitchen cabinet. The one from her underwear drawer was gone, even after she'd dumped the whole thing onto the floor. But the number written on a separate sheet of paper inside an old tea tin hadn't disappeared.
She snatched the paper, wrestled with her trembling fingers, and dialed her handler’s number.
She didn't have to wait long—Mister K. picked up right away.
“It's a disaster,” Freya said, the second her handler said “hello.” “I need you to delete everything.”
"It's all under control, Freya," Mr. K replied softly. “Give me five minutes, and it’ll all be taken care of. Be ready for a call.”
And he hung up.
Freya exhaled. In that moment, she felt like a real superagent, and to make the satisfaction complete, she grabbed her iPad to watch in real time as any evidence of her shame vanished.
After all, things like this didn't happen every day. It was much more common for her own Instagram posts to disappear.
Freya almost smiled. Jason, her ex-fiancé and all-around sick bastard, would be in for a shock when he saw her come out of this smelling like a rose.
She only shot a regretful glance at the shattered MacBook—losing her temper never helped anything—and immediately punched her name into the search bar on the iPad. Google obligingly served up her Wikipedia article as the first result, her photo from the “New Faces of Business” conference displayed on the right. In it, Freya was smiling impressively in her trademark combination of a suit and sneakers. That block took up half the screen.
At first glance, everything looked the same—pristine and polished, thanks to the efforts of link builders and a PR assistant who bought links to the right pages and buried any criticism in the search results.
Then Freya noticed something new. In second position wasn't her TikTok or Instagram, but a block of news cards. Freya scrolled down—and the cards jumped out, expanding to full screen.
Meanwhile, three minutes of five had passed. The censorship machine was acting very slowly.
"Deepfake Video Leaked Live: Who Targeted Akselsen?" wrote SNN.
"Deepfake—A National Security Threat: FBI Announces Foreign Interference in Successful Businesswoman's Stream. Original Video Found on Anonymous Forums," declared Jackal News.
“‘Russian Hackers Trace Digital Footprint of Viral Fake: Trail Leads to Video Card Farms in Wuhan,’” wrote The Tired. Google featured a snippet of the text: “First Wuhan took our nation’s health. Will fakes now take its conscience?”
And the democratic Puffington Host, whose women’s section always had a finger on the pulse, concluded: “The Chinese vs. Feminism: Mysterious Freya Akselsen Leak Traced to Misogynistic Country. Yale University believes this is an attempt to undermine the post-pandemic U.S. economic recovery by attacking female independence.”
And on every, every card was a screenshot from the video—the one where naked Freya looks straight at the camera, on her knees. The frame was chastely cropped at her collarbones, and in here and there, a Chinese flag was photoshopped behind her.
Freya slammed the tablet on the table and grabbed her phone. And this time she spoke before Mister K. could say "hello."
"You lied to me!"
“No, I did not. Neither the original nor the uncensored screenshots will ever see the light of the mainstream,” her handler countered. “Now take a deep breath and calm down, Freya. You need to make a statement to manage this news event, and the message has to be clear…”
Freya couldn’t stand to listen to him and cut him off.
“What the hell do you mean, ‘news event’? We had a deal!”
That came out a little harsh—you don’t piss off the man holding a gun to your career—so Freya immediately switched to bargaining.
“Mr. K, I’ve worked so hard on our project!” she exclaimed. “What’s the point of throwing me under the bus? Just push the button and delete everything!”
On the other end of the line, her handler let out a grim sigh.
“A million people saw that video. Not even the Deep State can turn back time. And I am deploying a narratively costly alliance between the FBI and Russian hackers to pull you out of this, Freya. I'm playing the China card in the Narrative. Solely out of personal sympathy for you."
Freya, who had been listening to Mr. K and nodding along, boiled over again like an overheated kettle.
“Sympathy? What fucking sympathy!” she screamed into the phone. “You absolutely can turn back time! When that alien showed up downtown, that fucking fish-man with gills, thousands of people saw it too! But you shamelessly scrubbed the whole thing, right in front of their eyes, and it worked!”
Shit. Freya pinched her arm hard and gripped the phone tighter.
“I demand that this leak goes away. Fuck the China and fuck feminism. This is my life, and it will not be your Narrative.”
And taking a deep breath, Freya added:
“It’s that, or you lose me and my sixteen million.”
The iPhone seemed to creak under the pressure of her fingers. Mr. K didn’t answer right away.
But when he did speak, his voice had lost all its paternal softness. It was hard and dry.
“Your failures, Freya, are not on the Deep State's agenda. And you shouldn’t talk about classified incidents on the phone if you want to have been a part of the agenda,” he hissed. “ ‘Your’ sixteen million don't exist. There’s only you and me…”
Freya didn't wait to hear the rest. She hit end call.
She knew perfectly well that Mr. Kunt was bluffing, and she’d just let him know it. If her contributions were so worthless, and her sixteen million followers so fake, they wouldn’t need confidants. Freya could see the desperation in his attempts to belittle her achievements.
She wasn’t going to give in. There would be no statement, and no lawsuits from advertisers. They wouldn’t dare.
But Mr. K wasn’t done with her.
Suddenly, her own television flickered on. On the screen was a man in horn-rimmed glasses and an office suit, sitting in a dark study. He had black hair with a few streaks of gray, styled neatly, with dark eyebrows and a prominent nose. The room on the screen was lit to show only the man, his oak desk, and his chair. And behind him, on a flag, a blindfolded American eagle perched atop a pyramid.
It was Mr. K. And he was staring sternly at Freya, who felt tiny in front of his enormous face on the wide screen.
Freya was familiar with tricks like this. He was flexing his muscles: his access, the CIA backdoors into phones and electronics. Forcing her to feel a shiver of awe.
Mr. K’s voice boomed from Freya’s stereo system.
“We weren’t finished. If you don’t issue a statement within half an hour, I will release the truth into the Narrative. The home video with Jason will be confirmed as real. They will confirm that you were on drugs, Freya, too.”
He was trying to intimidate her! But he had no weapon against her but fear itself. So Freya laughed, right in the face of the gigantic curator on her TV.
“The whole Narrative is built on lies! But you know what the truth is? You made the wrong bet. You don’t have to delete a thing. I’ll sue Jason, and I’ll win. Ban me from Instagram—I’ll lose access to my audience, but you won’t get them either.”
Looking her handler right in the eye, Freya gave a deliberately casual shrug and continued.
“Sixteen million Akselsexuals will slip right through your fingers like sand… And someone in those millions is bound to figure out what really happened.”
Mr. K leaned his elbows on the desk with a bitter smile. Through the stereo system, Freya could hear the ebony creak under the weight of the CIA handler.
“If the Deep State hadn’t created the Narrative, you wouldn’t have even ten followers, Freya,” Mr. K said, that same bitter smile on his face. “You’re not naive enough to think we’d let someone get the attention of millions just like that, are you?”
JUST LIKE THAT?!
The iPhone in Freya’s hand cracked loudly again. The crack jolted Freya awake—with a furious scream, she hurled her iPhone at the TV. It hit Mr. K square in the nose and ricocheted back into the room as the massive screen dissolved into a shattered rainbow and went dark.
But Freya knew the CIA hydra wasn't so easily slain. She scrambled behind the TV, fumbled for the power cord, and yanked the plug from the wall—just to be sure her handler couldn't reach her.
For a moment, she straightened up, exhaled, and brushed a strand of hair from her forehead, surveying the wreckage of her apartment. The broken iPad lay on the coffee table; MacBook keys were scattered across the living room floor. The TV screen was covered in a fine web of cracks, like the first November ice on a puddle.
I'll earn enough for new ones, Freya decided. And with that thought, she went to find the phone that had bounced off the screen.
Mr. K was right—she needed to stop being so naive. But not so she could kiss the Deep State's boot. First thing, she would call her lawyer and tell him to file a lawsuit immediately. She knew her ex-fiancé had leaked the video, and she could prove it. Jason would be arrested and wouldn't be allowed to leave the state.
And Mr. K would have to explain how his FBI, hackers, and the Communist Party all got it wrong. Freya had already seen the Narrative crack back in 2020, when they got rid of Ronald Shramp. Ronnie, that old rich freak, had managed to become president of the United States and had caused so much trouble that the Deep State had to sink him in plain sight. So openly, in fact, that the very idea of the Deep State had managed to leak out to the masses before Shramp’s chicken-yellow comb-over finally disappeared beneath the dark waters of the Narrative.
Well, some four-eyed creep from Washington who liked to invade people’s TVs was about to have a very bad day. Because she, Freya, was not going to give up as easily as Ronnie had. And Ronnie had fought all the way to a prison cell.
Suddenly, a bright light flared in the kitchen. It was the screen on Freya’s large refrigerator, the one that took up half the door. The list of expiring groceries—Freya's contribution to the environment—flickered with static and vanished.
Her handler's face replaced it—stretched and pixelated. Mr. K looked half as polished as before, but his glare was just as menacing.
Freya decided to ignore him. After all, the fridge didn't have speakers. Let him beep Morse code at me with the fridge’s ‘close the door’ alarm.Let him beep at me in Morse code with the “close the door” alarm, the CIA bastard.
She had to find that damn phone, call her lawyer—where the hell did it roll off to?
But Mr. K spoke anyway. His voice, tinny and crackling, came from somewhere inside the smart kettle.
“You have no regard for your own life, Freya, and that’s your choice. McAfee had no regard for himself either,” Mr. K’s voice boomed. “But if you continue to resist orders, Freya, your parents will suffer.”
Her world went dark.
Of course. Her parents.
Freya had carefully hidden them from the public eye—never gave interviews about them, never posted photos from visits home, never added them on Facebook. Not because she was ashamed, even though a farm family from Texas wasn't the typical breeding ground for a business mogul. She was protecting them from the burden of fame. It was a cross she was willing to bear, but not one she would ask them to carry.
It was naive to think she'd hidden them from the Deep State. And Mr. K had been planning to use this argument all along.
The thought crossed her mind that her parents, being religious people, would have seen Providence in all this. She, Freya, had sinned too much, and today was the day of reckoning.
Freya opened her mouth to speak and felt her lips were dry and cracked, like a desert floor. She forced them apart and looked the man in the refrigerator straight in his inhuman eyes. And just like that, with barely a fight, she had lost.
“I want you to know something. I’m only doing this for my parents, Mr. K,” Freya said quietly. “However, after this is over, I’ll be requesting a new handler from the CIA…”
But Mr. K didn’t get to hear the end. He suddenly froze on the screen, and then a ripple went across his face. The refrigerator screen flashed white and went dark.
And then all the lights in the apartment went out. She was plunged into darkness.
A chill ran down her spine. Freya turned around.
The huge panoramic windows, which by day turned the living room into a sanctuary of sunlight, now stood silent, like dark mirrors. A cold, white light seeped through them, like headlights. Or a bright moon.
But headlights don’t reach the sixtieth floor. And the watch on Freya’s wrist said it was only three in the afternoon. Even for a gray and windy November in New York, it never got dark this early.
Her mind blank, Freya moved away from the refrigerator, rounded the bar, and walked right up to the window. Beyond the glass, there really was a moon.
A moon, huge and blue, like something from a movie. It was rising over the city from behind cottony clouds. The wind was tearing the clouds to shreds, clearing a space for the celestial body and the stars—dense and bright. Freya had never seen a sky like this over the city.
But it wasn't the moon or the sky that held Freya's gaze. To the north, beyond the park, a thick, fiery beam of light shot vertically skyward. It erupted from behind the buildings, reaching for the stars, and disappeared where the window met the ceiling. And closer to the horizon, the beam fanned out, forming a fiery corona around a large black dot—the pupil of a vast, celestial eye.
For a moment, Freya had the feeling the eye was looking right at her. Then, in a brilliant flash of light, it was gone.
All around Freya, Manhattan was fighting the sudden darkness. Windows in the surrounding buildings lit up frantically, but the power grid couldn't handle the strain; buildings flickered like broken Christmas lights and then went dark. Below, waves of headlights rippled across the streets. Cars, jammed tight in traffic, glowed like the golden scales of a single great serpent slithering between the dead skyscrapers…
Suddenly, the screen of her phone lit up with a new message.. Without taking her eyes off the window, Freya backed away until she felt the kitchen island behind her, her hand finding the iPhone she’d cracked in her grip.
It was an Emergency Alert. It popped up over everything else, impossible to miss. The alert screamed in all caps:
“EMERGENCY ALERT. BALLISTIC MISSILES ARE NOT HEADED FOR NEW YORK. THIS IS NOT A NUCLEAR THREAT. LEAVE YOUR HOMES IMMEDIATELY AND FOLLOW EVACUATION ORDERS!!!”
What…?
Freya grabbed the phone again and tried to refresh her Instagram feed. Nothing. Just the sad little loading spinner revolving in place. Facebook wouldn't even launch. She backed out to her contacts and dialed the first name she saw, her assistant, Katie, but the call dropped instantly.
Silence. No internet. No signal.
And despite everything that was happening, Freya felt a wave of immense relief wash over her.
“Oh, Lord,” she said out loud, leaning against the bar. “What am I supposed to do now?”
Lord, as usual, didn't answer. Freya sat in silence for a minute, and then rushed to pack her things.