Юлия Авилкина – Survivors Bias (страница 1)

Юлия Авилкина

Survivors Bias

Prologue

Clara Vance has perfect pores. They’re so perfect they look like they were generated by a next-gen AI rather than grown on an organic diet of kale and mindfulness.

I’m sitting in the "dead zone" of her massive living room—a corner tucked away from the reach of the livestream camera lenses. The air here smells of ozone from the purifiers and a faint trace of amber, a fragrance Clara calls "the scent of serenity." In reality, serenity smells like fear—if you know where to look.

“Elena, is the ‘natural glow’ filter on?” Clara’s voice is soft, motherly.

She’s standing by the floor-to-ceiling window, where the Hampton sunset is bleeding into the ocean, turning it the color of expensive rosé. She doesn't look at me. To her, I’m just an extension of her tablet, an anthropomorphic interface.

“It’s on,” I reply, eyes fixed on the screen. “Your address on ‘digital hygiene’ is already loaded into the teleprompter embedded in your contacts. The breathing cues are highlighted in blue.”

“Good. Starting in three, two…”

Clara freezes. Her face instantly settles into an expression of noble fragility. The camera’s red tally light flickers on. At that moment, three million followers see a woman who has "found her balance."

I see the metadata. I watch her heart rate spike to 110 on my monitor a split second before the broadcast—not from nerves, but from the raw thrill of power. While she tells the world how her new app helps combat anxiety, I’m typing her next post about the "power of honesty."

My fingers dance across the glass. I am her voice. I am her brain. I’m the one who turns this predator into a saint.

Clara Vance thinks she owns this house, this empire, and me. She’s forgotten the cardinal rule of the digital age: whoever controls the code, controls reality.

And I know her passwords better than she knows herself.

Chapter 1

Maya’s name pulses on the screen like an open wound.

“Digital euthanasia complete.” A cold, clinical line of code that stands for a shattered life.

I feel a chill spreading through my chest—not the artificial bite of the AC, but the heavy, metallic tang of rage. Clara didn't just steal ideas. She filtered people like spam, scrubbing the "inconvenient" from her sterile, algorithmic democracy.

Upstairs, in the master suite, Clara is out. The monitoring system shows a perfect rhythm: 55 beats per minute, deep REM cycle. The house guards her peace. The smart glass has auto-tinted; the humidity is dialed to “Rejuvenate.”

I look down at my hands. They’re shaking, but the moment I touch the haptic panel, my fingers take over. Old reflexes. The ones I tried to bury five years ago when I traded my name for a new face.

“Well, Clara,” I whisper into the hollow silence of the living room. “You wanted a flawless reality? You’re going to get it.”

I’m not copying files. That’s too easy, too loud. Her personal AI sentry would flag the data leak in a heartbeat. I need something more surgical.

I open the Balance core console. My access is technically restricted to editor functions, but Clara made one fatal mistake: she gave me her Voice. She let me train her neural clone on my writing style, my metaphors, my cadence.

I slide into the core of her personal profile.

“Create new stream,” I command, my lips barely moving.

[SYSTEM]: Stream created. Enter parameters.

I input Maya Lin’s personal ID. The one flagged as “purged.” I restore it—not to the public network, but anchored deep within Clara’s “shadow.”

Now, every time Clara looks into her Smart Home mirrors or checks her success metrics, the algorithm will bleed in micro-fragments of Maya’s life. An old photo flickering in the corner of a screen. A forgotten melody Maya used to hum. The word “Why?” flashing on her teleprompter instead of “Success.”

It won’t destroy her tomorrow. But it will begin to erode her perfect world from the inside out. Gaslighting elevated to a fine art.

“Elena?” Clara’s voice drifts softly through the speakers.

Is she awake? No, the sleep sensors are still in the green. It’s the intercom. “Why haven’t you left yet? The system is logging elevated cortisol levels in the living room. Should I have the kitchen prep some lemon balm tea for you?”

The house is worried about me. How touching.

“I’m on my way out, Balance,” I reply, snapping my laptop shut. “Just finishing up that post on ‘Sincerity.’”

I step out onto the night terrace. The ocean below roars like white noise on a dead frequency. I know there’s no turning back. I’ve just injected a virus into her digital soul.

And that virus carries the name of my only friend.

I hail an autonomous ride. The vehicle glides up to the estate gates—a sleek, matte-black pod stripped of any human warmth. I slide into the backseat, press my burning forehead against the cool glass, and shut my eyes.

“Take me home,” I mutter to the system.

“Rerouting, Elena,” a smooth baritone replies.

I flinch. That’s not the default female voice of the Auto-Pilot. And the system shouldn’t know my name—my profile is registered under an alias, “Julia Smith.”

“Who is this?” I bolt upright, hand diving into my bag for my stun spray.

“Someone who misses Maya Lin, too,” the voice says through the speakers, but it sounds different now. It has a raw, casual inflection that algorithms can’t replicate. “And someone who just watched you crack Clara Vance’s black box. Clean job, by the way. A bit old-school on the syntax, but elegant.”

The dashboard screen flickers to life. Instead of the city map, an 8-bit pixel icon appears—a cat holding a coffee cup.

“Stop the car,” I command, my voice like ice.

“The doors are locked, Elena. We’re just taking a scenic drive down the coast. We need to talk about ‘Protocol Sunset’ before Clara realizes her ‘Ghost’ has taken on a life of its own.”

On the front passenger seat, which was empty a moment ago, a hologram slowly begins to materialize. It’s a young guy, mid-twenties at most, wearing an oversized hoodie. His image jitters slightly—he’s broadcasting through a heavily encrypted channel.

“The name’s Leo,” he says, his holographic eyes locking onto mine. “I’m Maya’s brother. Or rather, I was her brother, before Clara turned her into a rounding error.”

I swallow hard. Maya’s family… she’d mentioned a brother, a programmer, a "troubled kid" she hadn't spoken to in years.

“You were stalking her?” I ask.

“I was stalking Clara. And you. I was waiting for you to crack, Elena. Or for that girl to wake up—the one who breached the DOJ servers five years ago and then vanished, ghosting the world with a new face.”

My heart skips a beat. My past—the one I buried under layers of makeup and fake resumes—was just dragged into the light of this sterile taxi.

“What do you want?” I ask, my voice hollow.

“That gaslighting stunt was a good opening move,” Leo smirks, his image momentarily dissolving into digital noise. “But Clara isn’t just a woman. She’s the face of a massive machine. If you want to do more than just rattle her cage—if you want to burn it all down—you’re gonna need someone who isn’t afraid to get their hands dirty with some real code.”

He reaches out, and a data transfer prompt pops up on my smartphone.

[PROMPT]: Accept file "Basement_Key.exe"?

“What is this?” I whisper.

“Access to her Smart Home’s life-support systems,” Leo says. “You started with her mind. I’m suggesting we go for her security. Let’s turn her paradise into a digital hell together, shall we?”

I stare at the blinking request on my screen. Basement Key. In the digital world, this sounds like an invitation to an execution—either hers or mine.

“Clara Vance doesn't have weak spots, Leo,” I say, intentionally drawing out my words to mask the tremor in my voice. “And she’s way too smart not to plant an ‘ally’ the moment her algorithm senses something’s off.”

“You think I’m one of her projects?” Leo’s hologram lets out a bitter smirk. His digital face dissolves into a mess of pixels for a split second. “Elena, she erased my sister from reality. She turned Maya into a ‘denied ticket’ in a support queue. If I were working for Clara, you’d already be in a holding cell for a ‘corporate ethics violation’ or ‘unauthorized access.’”

I don’t answer. Instead, I rapidly punch a sequence of commands into my tablet that I haven't used in five years. This is my old “digital scalpel.”

“What are you doing?” Leo’s voice tenses up.

“Pinging your return address. If you’re really who you say you are, your signal should be routing through an old comm-node in Brooklyn—the one Maya mentioned in her journals. But if you’re sitting in Clara’s server room…”

My fingers fly across the glass. I’m tunneling through layers of VPNs and TOR nodes. Seconds stretch into hours.

[SYSTEM]: Data packet traced. Source: Mobile Hotspot. Geolocation: Laundry Basement, Queens.

“A laundry basement?” I raise an eyebrow.

“Best Wi-Fi that isn't crawled by municipal drones,” Leo snaps back. “Plus, it smells like cheap detergent down here instead of that ozone crap in your glass coffin. So, did I pass the test?”