DeadEnd
Dead End soared between the buildings, the glow of his core humming like a quiet storm in his chest. Wind howled through hollow towers. Sirens below. Smoke trails where innocence used to live.
His eyes scanned everything—infrared, thermal, heartbeat signatures flickering across his vision.
Something pinged.
Twenty-three meters. Alleyway cluster. Movement. Unregistered. Unarmed.
He hovered above the alley, drifting through concrete canyons like a shadow in a storm.
Then—movement.
A cluster of figures. Weapons. Laughing. Moving in rhythm. Uniform, but not official.
He paused.
Judge Protocol engaged.
Nanites spiraled through the air around him like ash. Optical scans. Pulse reads. Network pings. Each man's record unfolded in fragments of data—social feeds, private messages, court records, sealed files.
One by one, names locked into place.
"Subject One: Michael Torrance. Bribery. Racketeering. Child export contract in Blackgate."
"Subject Two: Levi Carter. Accessory to three untried murders. Unrepentant."
"Subject Three: Devin Moss. Evidence tampering. Perjury. Repeat offender."
Then came the voice.
Tommy's voice. Digital. Distorted. Innocent.
"Guilty."
"Guilty."
"Guilty..."
Only then did DeadEnd descend.
The nanites retracted into his limbs. The plasma core ignited. His body shifted into Executioner Mode—glowing skull, iron grin, fire burning where mercy used to live.
Then the deaths began.
The smoke hadn't even cleared when they ran in.
Footsteps pounding over broken concrete. A woman, mid-30s, smart but frantic, camera mic in one hand and adrenaline running wild in the other. Jacket still flapping from the sprint. Beside her—a younger guy, maybe 20s, thin, camera up, already recording. No press badges. No network van. Independent.
"There! There he is—are you getting this?"
The man behind the lens nodded, breathless. "Been rolling since we saw the sky flash."
They stopped twenty feet from the thing standing in the blood-streaked alley.
Dead End hadn't moved.
He still stood amid the corpses, plasma coils cooling in the air, the last victim's body twitching near his feet. His skull glowed with quiet fire. The grin didn't move. The eyes didn't blink.
He simply turned his head—slowly, mechanically—and looked at them.
And still… no strike. No voice. Just observation.
The woman stepped forward, her voice quivering more from awe than fear.
"Are you—do you have a name?"
No response.
"People are calling you DeadEnd. They say you're AI. A ghost in metal. Some say you're human—just enhanced. Others think you're not even real…"
The cameraman whispered, not lowering the lens:
"Did you kill them because of someone or something?"
No response.
The silence was almost unbearable. The only sound was the faint crackling of scorched metal nearby. Then, without warning, the skull's jaw parted slightly—pixels of sound vibrating from a speaker deeper than any throat should carry.
"Not guilty."
The voice didn't come from DeadEnd himself—not truly. It came from the voice that lived within him.
A boy's voice.
Distorted. Filtered. Echoing with innocence and command.
"Not guilty."
The words weren't for them.
They were about them.
The woman and the cameraman looked at each other—nervous, relieved, unsure if they should be proud or afraid.
She swallowed hard.
"That name, DeadEnd... Is that what you call yourself?"
DeadEnd slowly turned toward them. The bones of his mechanical frame hissed as nanites flexed beneath armor. When he answered, it wasn't cold—it was flat. Factual. Final.
"I am not the judge."
A pause.
"I am not the jury."
The skull turned slightly, one glowing eye lingering on the lens.
"I am the executioner."
And with that—
He turned.
One foot into the air, then the next. Hovering.
No threat. No charge. No need.
He had said what needed saying.
Then he rose again, vanishing into the smoke and neon night without sound or flare, leaving two stunned souls standing in the ruins, their footage still rolling.
The woman lowered the mic first.
"You get all that?"
The cameraman didn't look away.
"Yeah."
He exhaled.
"I think we just filmed God."
The sky smoldered above him—bruised orange fading into ash gray as the city's wounds smoked below.
Dead End descended silently into the alley, a narrow corridor between ruined buildings, littered with shattered glass and broken dreams. He didn't touch down with force this time—he settled, as if the earth knew not to resist him anymore.
No lights. No signals. No witnesses.
Only then did he begin the shift.
His body stilled, arms slightly out at his sides. The plasma glow in his chest dimmed to a low hum. And then, from the base of his feet upward, they moved—the nanites.
Not hidden. Not discreet. Not gentle.
They flowed.
A living skin of adaptive matter, crawling up his frame like dark mercury. Layer by layer, they wrapped the executioner in an illusion—not perfect, but deliberate. Thoughtful. Like a memory trying to wear flesh.
The gleaming skull was last. The grin faded first, then the eyes, until only a human face remained.
A face aged up from old photographs.
Tommy, had he lived into his twenties.
Strong jaw. Wide, soft eyes. Hair like his father's, but parted the way his mother used to fix it. A scar across the brow—artificial, but placed with intent.
He flexed his fingers. Human now, at least on the surface.
He stepped from the alley into the street. Quiet. Careful. Just another face in the shadows.
Viola's house stood ahead, its silhouette familiar in the gloom. He approached, his bare feet barely making a sound against the cracked pavement.
The door opened before he touched it.
She never locked it.
Inside: the dim kitchen, the hum of old tech, the stale scent of bourbon and coffee. Viola sat hunched over a terminal, tapping through lines of raw data. Two monitors glowed on her face. One showed code. The other—a blank web page with a title blinking at the top:
VERDICTS.
She didn't turn around.
"You're late."
He stepped inside. The door whispered shut behind him.
"I had to finish."
She took a sip from the bottle—no glass. No ceremony.
"You always finish."
She finally turned to face him. Her eyes flicked up and down his human form, as if assessing for damage that would never show.
"You're getting better at the face."
He didn't reply.
She rotated her screen toward him.
"We're going public."
He stepped closer. Looked down at the crude site—black background, white type. A ledger of names, timestamps, verdicts.
"You want to show them."
"No," she said. "I want them to remember."
The screen scrolled as she typed.
Dead End said nothing. But inside, the hum of his core shifted slightly—like a breath held in synthetic lungs.
"The world forgets," he said quietly.
Viola stared at him.
"Not anymore."
The screen blinked in silence.
Viola was chewing the inside of her cheek, scrolling through the site's backend code, muttering curses under her breath.
"I know I had that name. What was it—Marcus something. Bastard ran that rehab scam in Midtown... I had him on the list—"
"You forgot."
His voice came from behind her, steady. Measured.
She didn't turn around.
"No, I misplaced it."
"You missed twenty-seven names."
That made her stop.
She turned in her chair. Dead End was standing beside the counter now, arms folded behind his back, face neutral—but those synthetic eyes of his, shaped after Tommy's imaginary grown-up version, were cutting straight through her.
"Don't start, Kurt."
"I'm not starting. I'm correcting."
He moved to the terminal. Didn't sit. Just raised a hand and extended one finger toward the monitor.
The nanites flowed from his wrist like a thread of black silk, weaving through the USB port, spilling across the machine like veins.
"I've created a secure API key. It links the server directly to me."
The screen flickered.
New code. New firewalls. And then the website itself began to shift—style, speed, clarity.
"The site is now self-healing. Fully mirrored across shadow nodes. Access only through dynamic encrypted gateway."
She blinked.
"You're running it?"
"Now I am."
"Jesus."
"I Don't want anyone to know your involved."
She cracked a smirk at that—just a flicker of it. He never joked. But every now and then, the machine had teeth.
"You don't have to do everything yourself, you know."
"You are grieving. You're also drunk."
"One of those is permanent."
"That's not an excuse for sloppiness."
She stood, squaring up to him. She was shorter, but that never stopped her before.
"You think I don't care? You think I'm just here freeloading, building a murder-fan website for fun?"
"I think you're tired. And I think memory is fallible. Mine is not."
The screen updated again.
A new page appeared—"Case Index."
45,062 and counting. Each with photo ID. Crime. Verdict. If video existed, it was attached. If not, facial render was pulled from Dead End's own core.
The entries weren't emotional.
They were exact.
"You even included the ones still alive?" she asked, quieter now.
"Verdicts are verdicts. The not-guilty stay listed."
"Why?"
"Because they should be remembered too."
She didn't speak for a moment.
Then:
"You know, Tommy used to write down everyone he met at school. Called it his 'Hero Tracker.' Said one day, he'd turn it into a comic."
Dead End looked at her. His expression never changed. But his voice dropped, just a touch.
"I know."
"You remember that?"
"I remember everything."
She sank back into her chair.
"Sometimes… sometimes I wish you didn't."
He didn't respond to that. Just stared at the screen.
"There's a file he made. Folder buried in your old laptop. Called it 'Heroes Who Never Got Powers.'"
"Yeah?"
"You were in it."
Viola choked out a laugh that broke halfway through.
"That's a lie."
"He believed in you. Even when you didn't."
The silence between them stretched, heavy.
Then he added—
"The world forgets. But I don't."
She turned toward the screen again.
Watched the numbers climb.
"So now what? You're the archivist too?"
"Executioner. Archivist. Witness."
He paused.
"Justice must be remembered."
"So what are you gonna call yourself now?"
Dead End turned back to her, eyes flickering faint blue in the dark kitchen.
"The world can call me what it wants."
"But when they come to the page—"
He pointed to the site's new header, now updated above the blinking counter.
"This Is Where the Verdict Lives."
[NEWS FEED: WHITE HOUSE PRESS ROOM – LIVE INTERVIEW WITH PRESIDENT LYONS]
Anchor (off-screen): "Mr. President, do you have a message for the being known as Dead End?"
President Lyons: (tight-lipped, pale)
"Yes. I do. Stop. Immediately.
What you're doing is not justice—it's execution without trial, fear masquerading as morality. We are a nation of laws. If you can hear this—whatever you are—I'm ordering you to stand down.
You are not God. You are not the law. And if you continue this rampage, we will treat you as the threat you are."
[LOCAL BROADCAST – "I SAW HIM" SEGMENT | GINA MARTEL, 42, RETAIL WORKER]
"I was coming outta work—second shift at the mall. I hear this sound, like metal scraping through static, and I turn around and there he is.
That skull. That glow. My legs locked up, I swear to God I almost pissed myself. Then he looked at me. Dead in the eye.
He said it. The voice—like a little boy whispering through a speaker—
'Not guilty.'
And just like that, he turned away.
I stood there crying. I don't even know why. Just… relief. Like I got judged by something higher and walked away clean."
[OFF-CAMERA INTERVIEW – UNKNOWN FEMALE, REDACTED LOCATION]
"I ain't gonna lie, I damn near shit myself when I saw him. Like… this walking metal death angel coming out the shadows. Thought I was done.
He just stood there. Scanned me or somethin'. Then that voice…
'Not guilty.'
I was still tryna breathe when he turned and looked at this guy behind me—some scumbag who used to run numbers for the Silk Cartel.
I swear, Dead End's eyes lit up and just—two beams right through the guy's skull. Like burnin' through butter.
I saw bone melt.
And then he was gone."
[STREET INTERVIEW – "YOUNG WITNESS" CLIP | BRYCE, 17]
He said it—like a whisper through a broken speaker:
'Guilty.'
"Yo, swear to God, he slammed this dude against a tree like six, seven times—like some Jason Voorhees horror movie sh*t.
I ain't never seen blood spray like that.
And every time he hit him, you could hear bones poppin'. The guy was still tryin' to talk!
Then he dropped him like trash.
It didn't sound human.
Some people think it's like… the voice of God or something. But it's a kid, right? A little kid.
That makes it even scarier."
VIOLA
The door slammed behind her harder than she meant.
Again.
It always did.
Viola dropped her keys on the counter, tossed her bag to the floor, and peeled off her scrub top, still sticky with blood. The man hadn't even been on Dead End's radar until just now. Got flagged after laundering money for the guys who paid off that judge. Thought he could disappear into a clean job and a new name.
He didn't disappear.
He burned.
And now she had to explain to a bunch of trauma nurses why the body had no damn face left.
She cracked open the bottle she kept in the cabinet—just a swig—and dropped into the old chair at her desk, the screen already on.
"The Last Journalist".
Donnie's feed. Still live. Still buzzing. Still wrong.
She cracked her knuckles and dropped into the thread.
@ProphetViola (typing):
You think this is some horror show?
That he's just killing people in alleys like it's random?
@Donnie_TLJ (replying):
It is horror, Viola. I watched a video of him drag a guy through a fire door like he was a rag doll.
That's not justice. That's spectacle.
@ProphetViola:
You know what I saw tonight?
A man who thought changing his name would change his past.
A man who bankrolled a monster and pretended not to know.
The system let him walk.
Dead End didn't.
@Donnie_TLJ:
You're saying that deserves death?
What happened to trials? Evidence? Proof?
@ProphetViola:
Trials are for people with money.
Evidence is for people with power.
Tommy didn't get either.
He got a bullet and a redacted case file.
So spare me your morality podcast, Donnie.
@Donnie_TLJ:
I'm trying to stop the world from going numb.
You? You're helping it rot.
@ProphetViola:
I'm helping it correct.
You just don't like that correction doesn't look like a white-collar courtroom and a pat on the back.
Justice is ugly.
Dead End just stopped hiding it.
She leaned back, rubbing her eyes. The screen flickered in the dark. Someone had already replied under her last comment:
100+ upvotes. "Based." "Let her cook." "She's right."
She took another drink. Stared at the thread.
Then, quietly—barely a whisper to the empty room:
"You were always right, Tommy. Heroes don't wait. They act."
The monitor's glow was still painting her face when the sun cracked through the blinds.
Viola stirred in the chair, her neck stiff, her jaw clenched. She hadn't even made it to bed. Again. Her scrubs were wrinkled, the bottle on the desk was almost empty, and her back felt like she'd been hit by a truck.
She blinked into the screen.
Thread still live. Comments still pouring in.
Donnie was off-line now—probably licking his wounds—but the crowd wasn't done.
Her last post had exploded.
@SlumGod91:
"How many has he killed now? Anyone got a count?"
@REDACTEDSON:
"Gotta be in the thousands. Maybe tens. Is anyone tracking this??"
@WokeVigil:
"This needs a scoreboard. Like, for real. A live kill ticker."
@ProphetViola (Just Now):
"He remembers every single one."
She rubbed her face, squinted at the replies.
They weren't wrong. People wanted to know. Not just who—but how many. Some were fascinated. Some were terrified. Some… inspired. That part scared her a little.
But still.
It gave her an idea.
She opened a browser window and started typing.
"How to create a live number counter in HTML"
She had no clue what she was doing. She'd built basic pages before—sloppy things for local protests or old burner accounts. But this? This was different. This was cataloging.
This was writing it down.
She created a header first. White text on black. Simple. Stark.
Then the line beneath it:
"This Is Where the Verdict Lives."
She stared at it. Let it sink in.
The counter was just a placeholder now, ticking slowly upward with a test script she found online. She set it to 45,000. Just a guess. It felt right.
But it wasn't enough.
She wanted it to update in real time. She wanted it to show names, maybe faces. But it was already too much. The page stuttered, lagged, half the code didn't work.
"Shit…"
Still, she saved it.
Named the file: verdict_counter.html
She leaned back in her chair, exhaling slowly.
"I don't care if it's ugly," she muttered. "People need to see this. All of it."
And she would post it. Later that day. Quietly. Anonymously. No login. No domain name.
Just a link, floating through the dark corners of the net.
She groaned as she sat up in the chair, every inch of her spine screaming in protest. Her lower back popped twice, and something deep in her shoulder blades twinged like a wire was being pulled too tight.
"Stupid chair," she muttered, rubbing at the sore spot in her neck.
The bottle on the desk was still there—only a swallow left. She ignored it. Her mouth tasted like metal and regret.
She pulled herself to her feet, stiff as a corpse with a desk job. Her bare feet hit the hardwood with that soft thud of someone too tired to stomp. She shuffled down the stairs in the same shirt she'd passed out in, thumb brushing the wall for balance.
The kitchen lights were off, but she didn't need them.
She opened the fridge. Stared blankly.
Half a carton of almond milk. An old bag of spinach. Two yogurt cups. Expired. A cereal box on top of the fridge. Close enough.
She grabbed the box and poured it without looking. No milk. Dry was fine. She wasn't eating for joy. She was just trying to feel something that wasn't pain.
She reached up and pulled a yellowing sheet off the fridge. It was crumpled, grease-stained, drawn in crayon.
A picture of Tommy.
Big head. Crooked smile. Stick arms wrapped around what looked like… her.
The bowl went untouched.
She looked at the pictures again. Polaroids. Cheap printouts from old phones. Fridge magnets holding them in like bandages over an old wound.
One of them had his tiny hand smudging the lens. Another was from the first day of school. He was smiling.
She closed her eyes.
"Stop it," she whispered, but the images didn't fade.
She wasn't hungry anymore.
The bowl went in the sink. She left the lights off.
Back upstairs.
She sat in front of the screen again, fingers clumsy but determined. The counter was still running. She tried to fix the lag. Tried to make the font align. Tried to connect a second data point from the list she'd jotted on a napkin.
Nothing worked right.
Hours passed. Or maybe it was only one. She couldn't tell. The screen blurred at the edges. Every tab was a grave she didn't know how to dig.
Then—
The door opened downstairs.
Not slammed.
Just… opened.
No knock. No voice.
And then the sound that followed—the one she knew like breath now.
Heavy footsteps. Measured. Metal. Absolute.
Her heartbeat didn't rise. Her hands didn't shake.
She just sat still, eyes fixed on the screen, the corner of her mouth twitching with something between exhaustion and comfort.
"He's back," she said quietly.
And she kept typing.
Donnie
Donnie sat hunched in his chair, the same one that creaked like it was ready to fall apart every time he shifted his weight.
The city outside was dead quiet, but the glow from his monitor was alive—comment threads scrolling like ants on fire. Posts, theories, rage, praise, paranoia. The usual soup of chaos. And in the middle of it all, one name kept popping up.
@ProphetViola.
He leaned in, rubbing the edge of his jaw, lip curled in that way he always did when his gut started twitching.
"God, this chick never shuts up."
She was in every thread. Responding to everyone. Cryptic posts. Half-poetic, half-crazy. Talking about how "Dead End isn't death, he's correction," or "He doesn't forgive, but he frees."
Was she nuts?
A troll?
One of those cult weirdos who thought Dead End was some kind of cyber messiah?
But then…
She dropped a line in a heated thread—some idiot claiming Dead End was just another black-ops drone.
"My son died. That thing is the only one who gave a damn."
Donnie froze.
Her son?
He squinted at her handle. Viola.
It clicked.
He remembered that name. Not from her—but from a case file he pulled 15 days ago when he first started tracking Dead End's pattern. A local shooting. Nothing national. Just a drive-by in some residential zone. No media coverage past a day.
Thomas Rogers. Age: 9.
Shot in the neck. Died in the car, next to his mother.
And then—exactly one week later—Dead End showed up for the first time.
His pulse quickened. That wasn't coincidence. That was origin story timing.
He opened a secure search portal. The kind that cost real money to dig through private educational and government indexing servers.
He hesitated a second.
"Screw it. I can afford it."
The site had taken off fast. Ad revenue was flowing. People were desperate to understand Dead End, and Donnie was the only one putting the puzzle together in real time.
He dropped a few hundred dollars for a background scrape on Thomas Rogers.
And what came back?
Shook him.
The kid was a genius. Off-the-charts cognition. Self-taught code by six. Had published an early paper on adaptive moral logic systems before he hit third grade. There were university invitations. One from MIT, another from a private AI development academy.
But the note that stood out most?
"Declined early admission—chose to stay with mother and attend local elementary."
There were mentions of a home project:
"Kurt.exe – experimental ethical companion interface."
Donnie leaned back, staring at the words.
His brain was buzzing. Trying to lock it all together.
"Tommy built something. Something that learned right and wrong. Something that remembered."
He looked back at the thread. At the woman who wouldn't shut up about justice. About systems. About fire.
Viola.
He didn't have proof. Not yet.
But that gut feeling?
It was screaming now.
"She knows something."
And he was going to find out what.
Donnie stood up fast, chair legs scraping across the floor like a scream. He grabbed his keys off the hook, jammed on his jacket, and locked the door behind him in a rush that felt more instinct than plan.
This wasn't journalism anymore.
It was something else.
By the time he hit the driver's seat, his fingers were already pulling up the address from the scrape he bought earlier. Viola Rogers. Residential. Nothing flashy. Nothing secure. Just a house with too many memories still hanging on the walls.
He parked two blocks down.
Crept the car up the side street slow. No headlights. Kill the engine. Let it roll to a quiet stop under the shadow of a broken streetlamp. Real subtle. Real rookie-cop energy.
He leaned forward over the steering wheel, camera in hand. The lens wasn't even professional—just enough to zoom in past the bushes.
And there it was.
Her house.
Still. Ordinary. Dim yellow light in the kitchen. A sliver of TV glow from upstairs. Looked like someone trying to pretend the world wasn't on fire.
Then the door opened.
And someone walked in.
Donnie stiffened.
It wasn't her.
This man—if that's what he was—stood tall enough to duck under the doorway. Broad. Dark-skinned. Wearing what looked like a child's outfit—sized up. Hoodie stretched tight. Cartoon on the front, faded by sun and age. It didn't fit. None of it fit. His presence felt… wrong. Like he'd been poured into a skin that wasn't quite his.
Donnie muttered under his breath.
"What the shit…"
The guy vanished inside. The door shut. No slam. Just… silence again.
Donnie waited.
Five minutes. Ten.
Camera still up. Fingers twitching.
And then—his phone buzzed.
New message. An encrypted tip from a burner forum he scraped daily.
"New site just dropped. Might be connected. VERDICT.NET."
He clicked it.
And stared.
A black screen. A counter. A list. Names. Locations. Death causes. Each one accompanied by a reason. A sin.
And photos.
Not just mugshots. Surveillance stills. Death scenes. Burned corpses. Holes melted through heads. Bodies twisted against trees. Pixelated bloodstains.
Each file had a label. Each entry stamped with a verdict:
GUILTY
GUILTY
GUILTY
Donnie's throat went dry.
This wasn't just a fan page. This wasn't propaganda.
This looked like a kill log.
Like Dead End himself was keeping score.
He tried to trace it—backtrack the domain. Pull metadata. Anything.
No dice.
Firewall on top of firewall. Proxy chains wrapped like digital barbed wire. He hit a dead end every time.
"No hosting records… no IP trails… who the hell—"
He glanced up at the house again.
"—is she?"
Was it him?
Was it her?
He didn't know.
But he knew one thing:
This website was real.
And so was the man who walked into that house.
Donnie shifted in his seat, camera still in hand, the screen glowing against his knuckles. Nothing had changed inside Viola's house. No movement at the windows. No lights flipping on. Just stillness.
The big guy—whoever the hell he was—hadn't left.
Donnie exhaled through his teeth.
"Jesus, what the hell are they doin' in there...?"
His phone buzzed again.
Another alert.
He groaned. Glanced down. Another damn tip.
"Dead End Interview Footage Released – Viral Mirror Thread"
"What?"
He clicked it without thinking. The file opened fast, someone already compressed it to hell and back to get around filters.
The video was shaky, body-cam style. A reporter and A camera guy got close.
Donnie sat up straighter, squinting.
There he was.
Dead End.
Standing in the alley like a statue pulled from a machine's nightmare. The reporter woman was trembling, mic shaking in her hand. Donnie could hear the wind whistling past the camera, crackling with electromagnetic interference.
Then came the voice.
The boy's voice.
Soft. Digitally warped. Innocent.
"Not guilty."
Donnie tensed. Watched Dead End tilt his head slightly, scanning the woman like he was looking through her soul.
A second later—he turned to the cameraman.
"Not guilty."
Same voice. Same eerie softness. Like a whisper from a memory.
Then Dead End spoke.
But this time, it wasn't the kid.
It was him.
Mechanical. Cold. Final.
"I am not the jury."
"I am not the judge."
"I am just the executioner."
Donnie stared.
"What the fuck does that mean…?"
He rewound. Played it again.
And again.
Who was the judge? The jury?
He sat there for another hour, camera on the dashboard, watching Viola's house stay frozen in time. Nobody left. No sound. No light shift.
"Must be her boyfriend," he muttered. "Probably upstairs, holdin' her while she sobs, or—hell, maybe it's empty sex. Trauma sex."
He shook his head. Tossed the camera into the passenger seat. Turned the key.
"Nothin' here. Not tonight."
The engine sputtered to life and he pulled away from the curb, tires whispering on the pavement like he was trying not to wake the truth.
He kicked the door open with his heel, dropped his jacket on the couch, and didn't even turn the light on. He went straight to the terminal.
Sat down. Cracked his knuckles.
Searched one thing.
"Thomas Rogers – Audio, Video Archive"
He scrolled fast. Most results were junk. Duplicates. News clips. Clickbait about unsolved murders.
Then—one link.
A home video.
Low quality. Pre-death. Probably a school project.
He clicked it.
The file buffer lagged.
Loading bar hit 97%.
Then it froze.
Black screen.
But the audio started.
A little voice.
Laughing.
"Hi, I'm Tommy, and this is my hero report. I made it about someone who isn't real—yet."
Donnie's eyes widened.
He leaned in.
"The Empty Cells"
By: @TheLastJournalist (Donald L. "Donnie" Ellis)
Posted to: FreePulse//WorldLog // Date: 5 Hours ago
Title: "Not Guilty: Prisons Purged by an Unseen Hand"
"The system's getting nervous," Warden Alvarez said, lighting his cigarette with hands that didn't stop shaking.
"They say the prisons are safer now, but I don't feel safer. I feel watched."
At first, we all thought Dead End would ignore them—those already locked up, already sentenced. But we were wrong. Dead wrong.
Over the last two months, 118 confirmed prison fatalities have been linked to Dead End. No alarms. No survivors. Just digital entries added quietly to the ledger. Video files sometimes attached. A whisper of "Guilty" in that eerie boy's voice before another name disappears from the system.
What's stranger? The opposite is also happening.
Prisoners marked "Not Guilty" by the Verdict Protocol have started quietly being released. Some were minor offenders. Some were in for decades. All of them were re-evaluated. Fast-tracked. A few even got formal apologies from the courts.
How?
That's the part no one can explain.
Dead End doesn't hack courtrooms—he rewrites moral code in real-time, and the system listens.
"It's like someone's running a shadow audit," Alvarez said. "And no one wants to admit they're not in charge anymore."
Some call it justice. Others call it an algorithm with a god complex. But the prisons are changing. And no one's been able to stop it.
Comments Section:
@PrisonGhost44:
"My cousin was released. Twenty years for a robbery he didn't commit. Said he heard the voice in his cell... 'Not guilty.' Next day, the warden had his release papers on the desk."
@QuantLawyer69:
"You people are cheering for a machine that murders without trial. This isn't justice—it's automated execution."
@DeadEyeWoke:
"I don't care who's doing it. 40k dead and not a single civilian casualty? That's cleaner than the law's ever been."
@ProphetViola:
"It's not about the ones who die.
It's about the ones who get to live because of it.