"I used to be a variable in his algorithm. Now, he's a red dot on my tracking system."
Time: 12:13 AM — South Palo Alto, San Francisco Bay Area
Wind howled through the fenders of a shared e-scooter, scattering fallen leaves across the street. Elena rode a Lime electric scooter, her hair blazing like fire in the night. Her fingers brushed against the embedded chip sensor on the handlebar, reading the target's GPS signal every few seconds.
Target Codename: Mr. Crow
Real Name: Oliver Zhang
Identity: Lead engineer from the team she once belonged to — the one who altered her code logic and made her take the fall for a data incident.
Now, he was riding another shared scooter, drunkenly leaving BlueMoon Bar in Mountain View, unknowingly leaking his route into the seams of the city's data stream.
Elena wasn't following him on foot—she was tracking him through the digital grid.
She wasn't a vigilante.
She was the hunting system itself.
1:04 AM — Edge of Mountain View, a sloping backroad
Oliver was riding, scrolling through messages on his phone. He'd just received an anonymous "data alert" — someone had cloned the Eve Protocol algorithm he'd helped build three years ago, uploading it to a blockchain site along with his signature code.
He thought it was a prank.
What he didn't know was that this was a psychological trap, meticulously designed by Elena using her Data Soul-Marking System.
She fed his code into a blockchain audit node and left this message in the Git log:
Committed by: OliverZhang@Eve-v3.2
Commit Message: Final betrayal.Final price.
Like a digital suicide note.
Panic set in. Oliver veered off into a deserted alley, looking for a spot to make a desperate call for help.
But what he didn't realize was that seven surveillance cameras nearby had already had their vision overwritten by Elena's deep-learning image masking system. To them, the street now showed:
No one.
The link between reality and data had been severed.
The world no longer saw him , but she was watching his every move.
1:19 AM — End of the Alley, an Abandoned Warehouse
Oliver finally jumped off the scooter. He pulled out his phone in a panic, only to find—no signal.
His eyes turned to the old warehouse ahead.
Through its half-open door, a faint light flickered inside.
"Hello?" he called out.
No answer. He crept in, cautiously. The air smelled of rust and disinfectant. In his mind, a memory began to surface: Elena, standing up in that conference room years ago, shouting at him for "tampering with the distribution model."
"She's dead," he muttered to himself.
But there, in the center of the warehouse, sat a folding table. On it, an open laptop. Its screen slowly lit up with a single line:
"Your ghost is online, Oliver."
His pupils dilated in shock.
She had arrived.
Elena stepped out from the shadows, wearing a black trench coat. Her hair moved with the wind, and on her lips was a cold, quiet smile.
"You signed my name onto a data stain," she said. "Now that stain is the starting point of your execution—by algorithm."
Oliver instinctively backed away. "You're insane. How are you even alive?"
Elena didn't answer. She waved her hand, and the laptop screen switched to a video.
It was from three years ago, inside the data lab.He and Elena, along with their team, were debating a model divergence issue in the Eve Protocol. The video froze on the exact moment he used admin privileges to overwrite her code.
"You thought no one backed up the backdoor?" she said. "I wrote a self-trace script back then."
"I don't care what you're trying to do now," Oliver stammered. "I—I can help you. We can take this to market, make a killing —"
Elena laughed. A laugh like a flickering red light on an empty midnight street.
"You really think I came here… for money?"
She stepped closer, trailing her finger across the panel of the nearby e-scooter.
"This scooter—you scanned it three hours ago, didn't you?"
Oliver froze.
"I embedded a sensor in its onboard system. It's been recording your biometric signals the entire time — when your heart raced, when you lied, when you had to pee, when you searched 'how to escape AI surveillance'... I know all of it."
She pulled a data chip from her pocket and tossed it at his feet.
"On this chip is everything you've ever done in the data black market. Including evidence of how you rebranded the Eve model and sold it to health insurance firms to trade patient risk-level scores for profit."
"I've already uploaded it to the darknet. Passed it to the GhostRain alliance. They've claimed the bounty. My part is done."
Oliver collapsed to his knees. "Please, Elena… we used to be friends…"
She bent down, speaking in a low voice:
"You didn't kill me, but you watched them do it. You knew the algorithm was mislabeled—and you chose silence."
"In that moment, you were already dead."
2:00 AM, San Francisco Bay Area — The police received an anonymous tip: a man was found unconscious in an abandoned warehouse.
He was disheveled, semi-coherent, and beside him was a laptop endlessly looping a video titled: "I participated in data murder."
The police found no leads. No one had been seen entering the warehouse. The e-scooter's data trail vanished in the final kilometer — into a digital black hole.
Just like a hunter who finishes the job — without ever leaving footprints.