He Brought His Mistress to My Ultrasound to Humiliate Me. The Doctor’s Screen Wiped the Smirk Off His Face.

The silence in the war room was suffocating.

A deepfake smear campaign of that magnitude, orchestrated by a ghost like Silas, would be catastrophic. Even if we proved it was fake years later, the immediate federal asset seizure would permanently destroy the foundation.

"What do you want?" Daniel demanded, stepping up beside me.

Silas smirked. "I want the crown. Lauren will sign over complete, irrevocable executive control of her data infrastructure and real estate holdings to my proxy company. You get to keep a small allowance to raise your children quietly in the suburbs. I get the empire."

"And if I refuse?" I asked.

"Then the dossier drops at 8:00 a.m. tomorrow," Silas threatened casually. "And your children will grow up poor, disgraced, and alone while you rot in a federal cell. Tick tock, Ms. Parker."

The screen went black.

The analysts in the room immediately started panicking, shouting over each other about containment protocols and emergency server shutdowns.

"Silence!" I barked.

The room instantly went dead quiet.

I turned to my lead cyber-analyst. "Can you pinpoint his physical location?"

"No, Ma'am," the analyst stuttered. "His signal is bouncing off a constellation of private, unregulated telecommunication satellites. He could be next door, or he could be in Switzerland. As long as he uses that satellite array, he is completely invisible."

Daniel looked at me, his fists clenched. "Lauren... we can't fight a ghost. If we can't find him, we can't stop the upload."

A slow, terrifying, and brilliant realization began to bloom in my mind.

Silas thought he had outsmarted me because he understood code. But he forgot that the digital world still relies on the physical world to exist.

"We don't need to find him," I whispered, a cold smile curving my lips. I turned to Marcus. "Marcus. Who owns the private satellite constellation he is bouncing his signal off of?"