Chapter 7 - The Digital Guillotine"Ryan," I breathed, my knuckles turning white as I gripped the edge of my mahogany desk. "What did you do?"
"I didn't do anything," Ryan laughed, a cold, bitter sound that echoed with years of bruised ego and narcissistic rage. "But it seems the internet has finally caught up with what a fraud you are. You took my house. You ruined my reputation. You thought you could just build a new little empire and forget about me? I told you, I always win in the end."
The line clicked dead.
"Chloe," I snapped, my CEO instincts instantly overriding my shock. "This wasn't an automated ban. Ryan orchestrated this. Dig into the backend traffic logs. Now."
Within ten minutes, Mark arrived at the office, having heard the panic in my voice over a brief phone call. He strode into the boardroom, his jaw clenched in absolute, protective fury.
Chloe projected her screen onto the main wall. It wasn't just a Meta ban. Across Facebook, a network of themed drama and news pages specifically targeting American and international investors—pages with generic, highly optimized names like Corporate Scandals Exposed—were blasting a terrifyingly realistic video.
The video showed me sitting in a dimly lit restaurant, allegedly handing a briefcase of cash to a known corrupt city official, laughing about laundering offshore money through APT Vietnam.
"This is completely fabricated," I whispered, staring at the footage in absolute horror. "I have never met that man. How did he make this look so real?"
"It’s a deepfake," Mark explained, his eyes dark with rage as he analyzed the video's rendering patterns. "A highly advanced one, powered by a text-to-video AI engine like Seedance 2.0. Ryan must have hired a shadow agency. And the views aren't organic. Whoever he paid went to the darkest online digital marketplaces and purchased thousands of Facebook VIA clone accounts."
"They are using these automated bot profiles to aggressively share, like, and mass-report your legitimate pages," Chloe added, tears brimming in her eyes. "They tricked Meta's compliance bots into permanently locking you out, while simultaneously pushing their fake news to millions of real users."
Ryan had used the last of his hidden resources to fund a massive, coordinated smear campaign. He couldn't beat me in the divorce, so he was trying to destroy my business, my reputation, and my sanity in the court of public opinion.
"If this hits the mainstream media, our international investors will pull their funding by Friday," I realized, a cold dread pooling in my stomach.
"We can issue a press release," Chloe suggested desperately. "We can tell the truth."
"The public doesn't care about the truth; they care about the drama," I said, a fierce, calculating fire suddenly igniting in my chest. I refused to be a victim again. I had survived his emotional abuse; I was not going to let him destroy my empire with artificial intelligence.
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"Mark," I said, turning to him, my voice completely devoid of fear. "Ryan thinks he can hide behind black-market VIA clone accounts and fake drama pages. He thinks he’s a digital ghost. How do we unmask him?"
Mark’s lips curved into a dangerous, predatory smile. "We don't fight the algorithm. We hijack the network."
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