Chapter 15: The Deepfake — Edmund's First Strike at Daniel

The notification arrived at 6:47 AM on a Tuesday, delivered not by any official channel but by a Georgetown classmate named Priya who texted simply: *have you seen this* followed by a link and then, thirty seconds later, a second message: *don't read the comments.*

Daniel was already awake. He had been awake since four, working through Eleanor's financial records at the kitchen table with the focused persistence of a man who had learned to treat sleep as optional. He picked up the phone, clicked the link, and watched.

The clip was forty-three seconds long. It had been posted to three platforms simultaneously at 6:30 AM — he clocked the timestamp later, when he was thinking more clearly. In the video, a man who looked like Daniel Vance stood in what appeared to be a dim hotel room or furnished apartment, his collar open, his eyes wrong in a way that was immediately legible as pharmaceutical. The man was speaking with a kind of urgent, jagged conviction, his hands moving in arcs that tracked slightly behind his speech, the way a person's hands sometimes lagged when his brain was running faster than his body could follow. The audio was clear. The lighting was ambient, unforgiving. The man said, among other things, that certain people in Washington had decided the country was theirs to distribute like an inheritance, that he knew what they had done and what they were still doing, that they would understand what consequence felt like when he was finished.