My Online Obsession

"Thirty days, Sonya."

Thirty days, or she loses her freedom in a ward.

The words followed her all the way down the block.

She hit the laundromat door too hard. A cart rattled near the dryers. Somebody glanced up, then looked away. Good. The fewer eyes on her, the better.

Sonya crossed the detergent-bright floor, took the narrow stairs two at a time, and jammed her key into the lock above the twenty-four-hour wash. Inside, she shoved the door shut, dropped her bag by the futon, and went straight to the desk.

Power button. Screens awake. Fans humming.

Her rig answered in clean blue light, the triple monitors throwing the alley-window glow back into the room. Down below, machines churned through another load. Steady. Mechanical. Predictable. She planted both hands on the desk until the scrape inside her chest eased enough for her to sit.

Dr. Mira Bennett wanted one real-life friend in thirty days or she'd push harder, push officially, push until Sonya lost the right to disappear on her own terms.

So Sonya did what she always did when the walls started inching inward.

She logged in.

Menus loaded fast. Rankings. Match history. Tournament clips. The name that mattered appeared where it always did.

Sam_Striker.

Safe, separate, built line by line until it mattered more than the one on her student ID.

The top-five board refreshed. Her tag held position.

One slot above it: Moon.

Of course.

She almost queued on reflex. Beat the timer, beat the map, beat him for once, and maybe the rest of the day would shut up. Instead she opened her usual server, looking for noise she could control.

A clip sat pinned at the top.

Posted by Rex Halden.

The room seemed to tilt a fraction. Sonya clicked.

Rex filled the center screen, bleached hair bright under streamer lights, smile thin enough to cut.

"Alright, everybody's been asking, so here it is. Sam_Striker is next."

The stream counter raced upward. Reactions flooded the side panel so fast they turned into a blur.

"Yeah, you heard me. Sam keeps dodging every cam invite, every voice check, every meetup. That profile screams fake. So let's see what's under it."

He leaned closer.

"Give me two weeks. Maybe less. We'll know exactly who Sam is, where they live, and why they've been playing pretend this whole time."

The clip cut off.

Sonya stayed very still for one beat, then refreshed the page.

Worse.

Comment piles. Old screenshots. Guesswork dressed up as detective work. Someone had dragged up forum posts where Sam skipped voice. Another account had started narrowing cities by server timing.

Her mouse slipped once under her hand. She swore, opened her security settings, and started checking locks she already knew were there.

Nothing obvious. No sign-in alerts. No strange device list.

It didn't help.

Rex had gone after three women in six months. Every one of them had tried to bury themselves behind privacy settings and careful habits. He'd still found pieces to wave around on stream until strangers did the rest.

The hum under the floor pressed harder now. The room had grown too small around the desk. Blue light washed her hands pale as she moved through menus, opening, checking, closing, opening again.

A bottle cap rolled off the desk and hit the floor.

She stared at it for a second too long.

Then a soft chime sounded in her headset.

New user joined the call.

She froze. She had not opened a public room. The name on the screen was one she knew too well.

Moon.

Her cursor hovered over decline.

If this was a joke, she would break something. If it wasn't, she needed somebody who understood exactly what Rex was capable of.

She accepted.

"Sam."

Low voice. Even pace. No performance in it except for the usual voice-changer that most of the anonymous gamers used.

"Lock it down now. Start with the account tied to everything else. Then the game. Then anything that shares old credentials. Change them all. Separate them."

Sonya swallowed once and made herself answer.

"How did you get in here?"

"You left a private room active last week after scrims. Doesn't matter right now. Move."

The order should have irritated her. It did irritate her. It also cut clean through the static in her head.

She pulled up her manager and started replacing every reused password she could remember. Random strings. Save. Confirm. Next. Her chair wheels bumped the desk each time she shifted forward. Moon said nothing for a while, and the silence worked better than reassurance would have.

Outside her window, the alley sign from the laundromat flashed red, then blue, then red again across the corner of her monitor. A dryer buzzer sounded below, followed by muffled footsteps on the stairs that kept going past her door. Sonya kept moving.

"Done with the main ones," she said.

"Check recent activity. Anything off, you sign out everywhere."

She scanned the logs again. Same locations. Same devices. Same ugly little calm before impact.

"Nothing I don't recognize."

"Good. Keep watching it tonight. Don't shut the account down."

Her head came up. "What?"

"If you vanish, he gets to spin the story for you. Stay normal enough to be annoying."

That almost sounded familiar, the kind of line a top-ranked player tossed out before finals when everybody else started choking. Sonya pushed the thought aside.

"Easy for you to say. He didn't put your name in the title."

"No," Moon said. "He picked yours because people notice when Sam moves."

She let out a short laugh with no humor in it. "Great. Love that for me."

"You should. You earned it."

The answer landed harder than it should have.

Sonya looked at the ranking board in the side monitor. Her tag sat in the top five, carved there by years of late nights, throwaway comments, blocked invites, and matches played cleaner than everybody around her because one slip had always cost more. People saw Sam and argued. They still queued. They still watched.

Moon spoke again before she could tell him to stop making sense.

"Rex doesn't go after nobodies."

"That's supposed to help?"

"It's supposed to keep you from handing him the win yourself."

She leaned back and scrubbed a hand over her mouth. The room still felt tight, but it had edges again. Desk. headset. screens. door. A world she could name.

"Why do you care?"

A pause.

Not long. Just long enough to sharpen her attention.

When Moon answered, his voice stayed level, but something in it pulled back a step, careful now.

"Because he's sloppy when he gets an audience, and you're the one in range." He let that sit. "And because I don't like watching good players get run off."

It was a better answer than heroics. More distant. More believable.

Still, he had joined too fast. He had known exactly what to say. Sonya marked that and kept it to herself.

She opened Rex's channel page on the second monitor, meaning only to check whether the clip was still climbing.

The live badge was already on.

A fresh title stretched across the top.

Countdown to Sam—Let's Hunt.

"Moon," she said, staring at the screen, "he's live. He’s after me."

The stream counter ticked down on her screen. One thousand, eight hundred viewers. The comments tore past too fast to track.

"Sam."

Moon's voice cut through the noise, low and steady in her headset.

"Still with me?"

She dragged her eyes away from Rex's feed. Her cursor hovered over the logout button. "Yeah."

"Good. Don't touch that router. Open your account settings."

She did. The pointer skidded once before she got the right tab. "Done."

"Third-party apps. List them."

The list loaded. Seventeen names, most of them sponsor platforms and tournament organizers. She started reading. Moon stopped her at number twelve.

"Payment app?"

"Yeah. I linked it when I needed to pull prize money fast."

"What account is it tied to?"

A cold wave moved through her. "The gamer one..."

He went quiet for half a beat. "That's the exposure path. Kill it. Now."

She clicked revoke, then stared at the confirmation screen. "Ho