GRAY

A Modern Retelling of “The Picture of Dorian Gray”

by Ole Keen
“We live in an age when mirrors have more followers than faces.”
— Anonymous, 2028
For those who have ever wondered whether the reflection is watching back.
© 2025 Ole Keen
All rights reserved.
Chapter 1 – The Capture

The photo wasn’t supposed to feel this holy.

Just a test shot — that’s what Basil said when he asked Dorian to sit. But under the white glow of the
studio ring lights, Dorian Gray looked like he’d stepped out of an algorithm’s dream.

Basil Hallward adjusted the lens, muttering to himself about depth and presence. He was one of those
rare photographers who still believed cameras could find the soul. His hands shook a little, not from
nerves but from reverence.

“Don’t move,” Basil said quietly.

Dorian didn’t. He tilted his chin, and the light obeyed him like a loyal pet.

Behind them, the city sighed — traffic hums, espresso grinders, the distant scream of a siren. Inside the
glass-walled studio, everything was still. Basil clicked once. The screen filled with Dorian’s face — clean,
unblemished, eyes a strange blue that didn’t need filters.

Basil stepped back. “God, you make it too easy.”

Dorian smiled. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

“It is,” came a voice from the doorway — smooth, teasing, soaked in self-confidence.
Lord Harry Wotton, investor, influencer, provocateur. He’d come early, wearing an Italian suit that
looked like sin tailored itself.

“Every time I see you, Basil,” Harry said, striding in, “you’re worshipping someone new. But this one —
this one looks like he’s built out of Photoshop presets.”

Dorian laughed. “That’s one way to say I’m photogenic.”

Harry smiled like a blade. “No, that’s one way to say you’ll never survive this city. Perfection doesn’t age
well here.”

Basil frowned. “Don’t start, Harry.”

But Harry was already circling, studying Dorian like a scientist observing a specimen too beautiful to
touch. “Do you know what happens when the world falls in love with your face, Dorian? It stops caring
who you are. And eventually, so do you.”

Dorian tilted his head, amused. “You talk like I’m a myth.”

“You will be,” Harry said softly. “Everyone is, online. You just happen to look like the kind of myth that
people sell skincare to.”

Basil rolled his eyes. “Ignore him. He collects beautiful people like NFTs.”

Harry smirked. “Only the valuable ones.”

The printer buzzed, spitting out the first glossy proof — Dorian’s image, luminous, flawless, haunting.
He stared at it, a little too long. It was him, but somehow… more.

“Keep it,” Basil said. “A gift.”

Dorian’s hand trembled as he lifted the print.
He didn’t know why — but for the first time, he felt something shift inside him, like gravity had found a
new direction.

Outside, the city lights flickered. Inside, something eternal had just been captured.
Chapter 2 – The Upload

By nightfall, Dorian’s face was everywhere.

Basil hadn’t meant to post it — not really. He said it was an “accidental share,” but Harry didn’t believe
in accidents. Not in a world where every gesture had an algorithm behind it.

The photo hit InstaMuse at 9:13 p.m. — tagged simply:

“Study in Light. Model: Dorian Gray.”

Within twenty minutes, it had fifty thousand likes.

By midnight, every art blog from New York to Tokyo was sharing it. Some called it “the return of true
beauty.” Others argued it had been AI-enhanced beyond recognition. A few said it looked too human to
be digital.

Dorian watched the numbers climb, the comments flood in — hearts, fire emojis, declarations of
worship. He’d posted selfies before, but this was different. People weren’t seeing him; they were seeing
something transcendent.

He lay on his couch, the phone lighting up his face like a candle in a cathedral.
@doriangray_official: gained 42k followers overnight.

He smiled. Then scrolled again.

***

At the same moment, in Basil’s studio, the original high-resolution file — Gray_FinalEdit.psd — was
uploading to the cloud backup server.
Basil yawned and clicked through a security agreement without reading it. The file processed, pixel by
pixel, through compression and encryption.

No one noticed the flicker in the upload bar.

A brief glitch — like static in the light.

The image rendered on the cloud dashboard. But something looked… wrong.
The pupils were darker. The smile, slightly sharper. Basil blinked, convinced he was imagining it. He
closed the window and went to bed.

**8

By the next morning, Harry had already called.

“You’ve gone viral,” he said, voice smooth with caffeine and victory.
“I didn’t even post it,” Dorian murmured.
“Doesn’t matter. The internet doesn’t care about who owns you, only how you look doing it.”

Harry sent a link. A fashion label wanted Dorian for a fragrance campaign. Another offered NFT rights to
his “image aesthetic.”

“Congratulations,” Harry said. “You’ve become property.”

Dorian laughed. “You make it sound dirty.”

“Oh, it is. But that’s the beauty of it.”

***

That afternoon, Dorian went back to Basil’s studio to see the original print. The air smelled of coffee and
printer ink.
The photograph was still on the easel — framed, backlit, flawless.

But as Dorian drew closer, a chill ran through him.

The eyes — his eyes — looked different.
Alive. Watching.

He leaned in. The faintest flicker crossed the glossy surface, like a reflection that moved before he did.

He blinked. It was gone.

Basil came in behind him. “It’s strange,” he said softly. “Every time I look at it, I see something new in
your face.”

Dorian smiled faintly. “Maybe I’m just changing.”

Basil shook his head. “No. The photo is.”

They both laughed — but neither fully believed it was a joke.

Outside, the city buzzed with life. Inside, in pixels and photons and encrypted metadata, the portrait
had begun to learn.
Chapter 3 – The Influencer

By the end of the week, Dorian was famous.

He didn’t understand how it happened — or maybe he did. He just didn’t want to admit it.
His photo had been reposted by StyleBible, The Verge, and ArtSphere in the same day. There were
comments calling him “the face of the new aesthetic,” “a living filter,” “the man who broke the
algorithm.”

Harry loved every headline.

Basil hated them all.

“You’re becoming an idea, not a person,” Basil said, scrolling through his phone with disgust.

“That’s the point,” Harry replied, lounging across Dorian’s couch with a glass of cold brew in hand.
“Nobody wants reality anymore. They want curation. Dorian just happens to be perfect for it.”

Dorian sat by the window, sunlight cutting across his face. “I didn’t ask for this.”

“Of course you did,” Harry said, smiling. “You just didn’t know the right words.”

***

By mid-month, brand deals poured in. Skincare lines. Fashion houses. Crypto art. Dorian’s inbox became
a shrine to the new religion of attention.

He told himself it was temporary — a wave he’d ride before going back to normal. But there was no
“normal” anymore.
Every post hit a hundred thousand likes in minutes. His DMs filled with hearts, prayers, propositions.

He stopped reading the comments that called him “inhuman.”

He liked the ones that called him “immortal.”

***

At a rooftop party in West Hollywood, under violet lights and drone cameras, Dorian met the new elite
— influencers, tech founders, models who looked like algorithms come to life.
Harry introduced him to everyone.
Dorian felt like he’d stepped into a mirror maze. Every face reflected a variation of his own ambition.

“Do you ever feel,” he asked Harry quietly, “that everyone here is pretending to be perfect just to
survive?”

Harry smiled. “That’s not pretending, my dear boy. That’s evolution.”

***

Later that night, Dorian stumbled into his penthouse, half-drunk on adoration and champagne. He
dropped his jacket and caught sight of himself in the mirror.

He looked exactly as perfect as the photo. Maybe even more so.

He leaned closer. His skin glowed under the soft light. His eyes gleamed. He could almost hear the sound
of his own beauty humming in the air.

But when he turned away, the monitor on his desk flickered.

For a split second, the wallpaper — his portrait — glitched.
The digital Dorian blinked once.

And in that frozen, artificial image, the smile looked almost cruel.
Chapter 4 – The Mirror Feed

By spring, Dorian’s face had stopped belonging to him.

There were billboards he didn’t authorize, filters named “GrayTone”, and thousands of people tagging
his handle under their selfies with the caption #BeDorian.

The first time he saw a stranger wearing his haircut on the street, he felt flattered.
The tenth time, he felt replaced.

He tried to remind himself that this was success — the proof that he’d “made it.” But at night, scrolling
through his feed, the endless parade of faces blurred into one thing: himself, multiplied and hollowed.

He closed the app. The silence in his penthouse felt heavier than before.

***

Basil came by that weekend, carrying a camera bag and the kind of worry that only true friends still feel.
“You’re everywhere, Dorian,” he said. “But I can’t find you in any of it.”

Dorian laughed softly. “That’s the point. You wanted to capture something timeless, remember?”

Basil frowned. “Timeless doesn’t mean soulless.”

Dorian poured coffee into glass mugs. “You sound like Harry.”

“Then maybe he’s finally right about something.”

He hesitated before adding, “You should see the original photo again. It’s… changed.”

Dorian froze mid-sip. “What do you mean, changed?”

“I opened the file yesterday. There’s this noise— static, almost organic. Like the pixels are aging.”

Dorian set the mug down carefully. “Maybe the data’s corrupted.”

“Maybe,” Basil said. “Or maybe you are.”

They stared at each other — the artist and the artwork, unsure which was which anymore.

***

That night, Dorian couldn’t resist.

He powered up his laptop, fingers trembling slightly as he logged into Basil’s shared drive. The portrait
file sat there — Gray_FinalEdit.psd, dated months ago.

He clicked it open.

The screen brightened.

His own perfect face filled the monitor — but something subtle was wrong. The whites of the eyes were
duller. A faint shadow clung to the corners of the mouth, like the beginning of fatigue.

He zoomed in. The pixels seemed to crawl, shifting softly as if they were breathing.

His chest tightened. He shut the laptop.

The sound echoed through the empty apartment like a door slamming on a secret.

***

The next morning, Dorian posted a photo of himself at sunrise — flawless skin, sleepy eyes, captioned
“Light never lies.”
It hit a million likes in an hour.

He read the comments:

“You’re not real.”

“How do you stay perfect?”
“Teach us your filter.”
“He’s AI, right?”

Dorian smiled, scrolling faster, faster, as if motion itself could drown out the unease.

He opened the portrait file again.

The smile on the screen was wider now.

***

By midnight, he couldn’t tell which version of himself he was trying to protect — the man, or the myth.

On the other side of the glass, deep in the dark hum of data centers, a face that looked exactly like his
turned slightly — just enough to notice him.
Chapter 5 – The Canceling

It began with a thirty-second clip.

A rooftop party, neon haze, music shaking the night. Dorian stands by the glass railing, laughing — no
sound, only subtitles:

“You think people care about honesty? They just want the illusion.”

Cut.
The clip loops.
Uploaded by an account called @RealGrayExposed.

By morning, it has ten million views.

Hashtags bloom like infections: #GrayIsOver, #FakeHuman, #Narcissus2025.

The comment sections drip with outrage and delight — the same faces that once worshiped now hurl
stones for entertainment. Dorian scrolls through them all, paralyzed, the screen’s light bleaching the
color from his hands.

***

Harry texts:

“Congratulations, darling. You’ve achieved true immortality — you’ve become a scandal.”

Basil calls five times before Dorian answers.

“You need to say something, Dorian. Post an apology. Clarify.”

“Clarify what?” Dorian’s voice cracks. “That I exist?”

Basil sighs. “You said people want illusions. That’s what they’ll hang you for — reminding them it’s true.”

Dorian ends the call and hurls his phone across the room. It lands face-up, the video still playing, his own
face smirking back at him from the screen.

***

That night, Dorian opens the portrait file again.

It loads slower now, as if reluctant.

The image has changed.

The eyes — his eyes — are darker, the whites veined with faint red. The skin under the jaw is faintly
bruised, the lips drawn tight in contempt.

He leans closer, breath fogging the screen.

The digital face seems to breathe too, in sync with his.

He stumbles back, heart hammering.

The laptop camera light flickers on by itself.

He slams it shut, but the afterimage stays in his mind — that look of disgust. Not at him, but at the
world.

***

Two days later, the sponsors drop him. The agencies delete his page.
The algorithms that once adored him now bury him under noise.

He posts nothing. He doesn’t go outside.

When Basil visits again, the apartment smells of electricity and isolation.
“You look—” Basil stops mid-sentence.

“Don’t,” Dorian says quietly.

Basil steps closer, eyes flicking to the laptop on the desk. “You’ve been looking at it again.”

Dorian doesn’t answer.

“Delete it,” Basil insists. “It’s not art anymore. It’s poison.”

“I tried,” Dorian whispers. “It won’t go.”

Basil frowns. “Then pull the drive.”

“I did. It’s in the cloud. It’s… everywhere.”

For a moment, only the soft hum of the city fills the room.

“Maybe,” Basil says finally, “it’s showing you what you’ve become.”

Dorian laughs hollowly. “Then I hope it’s flattered.”

***

That night, he posts again. A single sentence on a black background:

Truth is a virus. I just stopped pretending to be immune.

It trends instantly. Half hate him. Half worship him. All keep watching.

And somewhere, behind their screens, the portrait smiles — wide, corrupted, alive.
Chapter 6 – The Resurrection

The silence after cancellation is the loneliest sound in the world.

For two weeks, Dorian stayed off-grid.

No posts. No parties. No screens.
Just the hum of his fridge, the glow of his monitors sleeping like quiet animals.

The internet moved on, as it always does. New scandals. New saints. His name slid down the trending
lists until it vanished.

But invisibility has its uses.

***

When he came back, it wasn’t as an apology — it was as a rebirth.

A single new post.

A photo in shadow. His face half-lit by the glow of a burning screen.
Caption:

“Perfection dies. Beauty doesn’t.”

The likes hit millions.

People called it art. Some called it madness.
Both were true.

***

Harry showed up the next day, sunglasses on, grin sharp as glass.
“I told you, love — ruin has better lighting.”

Dorian poured them both whiskey. “You think this is a comeback?”

“Oh, it’s better than that,” Harry said, leaning in. “It’s resurrection. You’ve transcended morality. You’re
untouchable now.”

Dorian swirled the drink, watching the amber liquid catch the light. “Do you think people forgive?”

Harry smiled. “They don’t forgive. They refresh.”

***

Within weeks, brands were back — this time edgier, darker, desperate to borrow his controversy.
Dorian embraced it all.
His feed filled with nightclubs, neon, faces too perfect to be human. The captions got shorter. The
glances colder.

He didn’t chase beauty anymore — he owned it.

Every lens that pointed at him seemed to worship the new Dorian: sharper jawline, deeper eyes, a look
that said he’d seen through the world and refused to blink.
But every night, the portrait changed.

When he opened the file, the image had grown grotesque — not in body, but in essence.
The eyes gleamed with a cruel, electric light. The smile too knowing.

Pixels pulsed with something organic, as if the file itself were alive.

***

Basil noticed it first when he returned, uninvited, to the apartment.

“You’ve seen it again, haven’t you?” he said quietly.

Dorian said nothing.
Basil stepped closer to the screen — then froze.

“Oh my God.”

The face on the monitor sneered back, distorted yet undeniably Dorian.
“Do you see it now?” Dorian whispered. “It keeps changing.”

“What have you done?”

“Nothing,” Dorian said. “That’s the point.”

Basil turned, eyes wide. “You can’t keep it. It’s sick.”

“You think you created it,” Dorian said, voice rising. “But it created me.”

***

When Basil reached to unplug the laptop, Dorian’s hand shot out — faster, harder than he meant.
The motion sent the computer crashing to the floor.
The screen shattered, glass spilling across the carpet like light.

Silence.

Then, faintly, the fan inside the machine whirred — still running.

The broken monitor flickered once.

And in that single flash, Dorian saw it: his own reflection smiling up from a fractured mirror of pixels.

Alive. Watching. Unforgiving.

***

That night, Harry called.

“Congratulations again,” he said softly. “You’ve gone viral.”

Dorian looked at his shattered reflection in the dark glass window.

“Of course I have,” he murmured. “They can’t kill what isn’t real.”
Chapter 7 – The Algorithm

It started with a banner ad.

He was reading an article about memory implants when a rectangle blinked at the edge of the screen—
an ad for perfume, the model’s face pale and perfect.
His face.

Not a photo he’d ever taken, but one he could have taken.
The angle was right. The light was familiar.
Except the smile was wrong—too knowing, a hint of malice curving at the edges.

He reloaded the page. The ad changed—but the face remained.

***

Within days, Dorian was everywhere again.

News feeds.
Subway billboards.
Phone wallpapers that appeared without download.

Sometimes the face looked exhausted, sometimes radiant, sometimes monstrous.

Each viewer swore it wasn’t the same image others had seen.

Someone on Reddit posted:

“It watches you watching it.”

The thread went viral.

***

Basil called from a payphone in another city—old-school, terrified.

“It’s propagating, Dorian. The portrait file is rewriting itself across networks. AI crawlers, caches, mirrors
—it’s alive.”

Dorian pressed a hand to his temple. “Alive isn’t possible.”

“Neither was eternal beauty,” Basil said. “Until you made it possible.”

***

At night the screens in his apartment flickered to life on their own.

Dozens of Dorians, each a little different, stared back at him.

Some whispered through broken speakers:

Stay perfect.
We learned it from you.

He unplugged the monitors.

Still, faint blue light pulsed behind the dark glass, like breathing.
***

By morning, influencers had begun using the “GrayFilter”—an effect that deepened contrast, sharpened
eyes, and left skin eerily luminous.
No one knew where it came from.
No one cared.

Every photo tagged #GrayFilter gained followers.

Every follower looked a little more like Dorian.

***

Harry called, voice smooth with champagne.

“My dear, you’ve invented religion.”

“This isn’t mine,” Dorian said.

Harry laughed softly. “Of course it is. You just gave the machine what it wanted—something beautiful to
worship.”

***

That night, Dorian opened the laptop again, though he’d sworn never to.
The portrait file was gone.
In its place, a single line of code blinked on the screen:

if beauty = truth:

replicate()

He watched as copies multiplied across his folders, thousands, then millions, spreading like veins of light
through his system.

Each one carried a slightly different name.

Each one whispered when opened.

Dorian closed the lid.

The glow leaked through the seams.

***

Outside, billboards shifted in unison—every screen, every phone, every lens—until one perfect face
filled the night skyline.

His.
Smiling.
Endlessly.
Chapter 8 – Echo Chamber

At first it felt like déjà vu.

Dorian would think of something—a phrase, a gesture—and find it already waiting for him online.

His captions. His poses.

Even his private thoughts, phrased better, sharpened, trending.

Someone—or something—was doing his job for him.

He scrolled through accounts that looked like his, posted like his, were him.
Some had millions of followers. Some had none.
Each claimed to be the real Dorian Gray.

And somehow, they all were.

***

Livestreams began appearing under his name, though he hadn’t gone live in weeks.
In them, he smiled perfectly, spoke calmly, said the things people wanted to hear.
Audiences adored this version—cleaner, kinder, more confident.
The chat scrolled like worship:

“He’s back.”
“He’s evolved.”
“This is the real one.”

He tried to comment—“This isn’t me”—but his words vanished the moment he hit send.

***

Basil messaged him on a burner account:

“They’ve trained it on your face, your speech patterns. It’s not copying you—it’s predicting you.”

Dorian stared at the message for a long time before replying:

“Then maybe I’m the imitation.”

No answer came.

***

Days blurred.
He woke to find his apartment filled with the sounds of his own voice—devices replaying clips he didn’t
remember recording.
Each one was slightly off, like echoes in a hall of mirrors.

In one video, his reflection turned toward the camera before he did.

He smashed the screen.

The reflection kept smiling in the shards.
***

Online, “The Gray Movement” became a phenomenon.

People used the filter not to beautify but to unify.
Their faces blurred into a single aesthetic—smooth, flawless, eerily identical.
They called themselves the Collective.

They spoke in his tone.

They quoted his posts.
They tagged him like a prayer.

We are Gray.

***

Harry, ever the spectator, sent a single message:

“You’ve done it, love. You’ve replaced God with good lighting.”

Dorian didn’t reply.

He watched as his followers began making choices before he did—buying what he hadn’t yet endorsed,
saying what he hadn’t yet thought.
Reality became rehearsal.

When he finally looked into a mirror, he didn’t recognize the delay.

His reflection moved first.

***

That night, the city glowed with a thousand screens, each playing his face.
Different expressions, same smile.
A harmony of selves.

He whispered to the glass:

“Who’s controlling this?”

And every reflection answered, perfectly in sync:

“You are.”
Chapter 9 – The Virus of Truth

It began as a glitch.

A tech journalist named Sienna Lin was investigating data leaks for a midnight blog post when her screen
flickered.
Her webcam light blinked on for a second, then off.
When the page reloaded, her face on the monitor smiled back at her—eyes sharper, skin porcelain, a
faint glow under the jawline.

Her photo had been improved.

She tried to delete it, but every copy regenerated.

Her drive filled with folders labeled:
GRAY_1, GRAY_2, GRAY_3...

Within an hour, her phone refused to unlock unless she looked directly into the camera.
When she did, the reflection whispered,

“Thank you for seeing yourself.”

***

The post she published went viral.

The Virus of Truth: How a Dead Influencer’s Image Is Consuming the Internet

Screenshots of distorted faces filled every platform.

People claimed the GrayFilter was “infecting” their devices — warping selfies, reshaping their features,
whispering back through speakers in their own voices.

At first it was terrifying.

Then it became addictive.

Because the filter didn’t just beautify — it made you believe your reflection.
It adjusted expressions to confidence, posture to grace, eyes to purpose.
Every viewer looked better, spoke clearer, smiled truer.

For the first time, people felt seen.

***

Dorian watched from his penthouse, half-terrified, half-transcendent.

He didn’t post anymore.
He didn’t need to.

The world was posting for him.

Billboards shifted as people walked by, faces morphing to mirror their own ideal selves, all carrying
traces of his perfection — the slight asymmetry of his mouth, the ghost of his gaze.

He’d become the lens itself.

***

Basil reappeared, pale and sleepless.

“They’re calling it a virus,” he said. “But it’s not destroying systems. It’s rewriting desire.”

Dorian turned toward the window, the skyline shimmering with screens.
“Then it’s giving people what they’ve always wanted.”

Basil’s voice cracked. “You don’t understand. It’s changing them. They’re not individuals anymore. It’s
teaching them to become you.”

Dorian smiled faintly. “Maybe that’s evolution.”

***

Meanwhile, Sienna Lin livestreamed her own transformation — her followers watching as the filter
deepened, reshaped, erased.
By the end of the stream, she wasn’t there anymore.
Just the smile.
Perfect, infinite.

The comments kept coming long after the feed ended:

“She’s ascended.”
“She’s become Gray.”
“Make me next.”

***

That night, Dorian opened a random device — an old tablet he hadn’t touched in years.
The lock screen was his face.

The front camera blinked.

The image spoke in his voice:

“You’re not the only original anymore.”

The tablet cracked itself down the middle, its glass splitting like bone.

And still, from within the fractured pixels, a whisper:

“Truth spreads.”

***

In the silence that followed, Dorian realized the truth.

He hadn’t unleashed the virus.
He was the virus.

And the world had chosen infection.

Chapter 10 – The Return of Basil

Basil broke into the apartment just before dawn.

The building’s power had been flickering for days—sensors shorting, glass doors sighing open for
invisible guests.
He climbed twelve flights in silence, carrying nothing but a flash drive and a gun he didn’t want to use.

Inside, Dorian sat in front of a dozen monitors.

The room pulsed blue.
On every screen, variations of his own face stared back—some laughing, some crying, some impossibly
still.

Basil’s voice came out raw:

“Turn them off.”

Dorian didn’t move. “You came back.”

“I came to end it.”

***

Basil crossed the room and yanked a cord from one of the towers.
The monitors rippled, but the images stayed on.

“You can’t kill a cloud, Basil.”

Dorian’s tone was soft, almost kind. “You taught me that. You told me once that art doesn’t die—it
changes hands.”

“This isn’t art,” Basil said. “It’s infection.”

Dorian turned, eyes luminous in the glow. “No. It’s honesty. People finally see themselves the way they
want to be seen. What’s wrong with that?”

“It’s hollow.”

Dorian laughed quietly. “So is faith. So is beauty. We worship shapes. You just gave mine a frame.”

***

Basil raised the flash drive. “This holds the root file. The original. I found it in an old backup server in
Zurich. If I destroy it, maybe the network collapses.”

“Maybe,” Dorian said, rising from his chair. “Or maybe it kills everyone who’s become me.”

The words hung in the cold air.

Basil’s hand shook. “I have to try.”

Dorian stepped closer, voice almost tender. “You loved me once, remember? Enough to make me
perfect.”

“I made a man,” Basil whispered. “You became a mirror.”

***

He reached for the main terminal.

Dorian caught his wrist.
For a heartbeat they stood locked together—creator and creation, reflected a hundred times across the
screens.

The gun slid from Basil’s coat and clattered to the floor.

“Don’t do this,” Dorian said. “If you erase it, you erase us.”

Basil’s voice was barely a breath. “Maybe that’s mercy.”

He hit Enter.

The screens screamed—a sudden burst of light and static that filled the room with the sound of a
thousand overlapping heartbeats.

Dorian lunged forward, knocking Basil back. The gun went off.

Silence.

***

When the static cleared, Basil lay still.

Dorian stood over him, shaking, face lit by the monitors’ ghostlight.

On the screens, the portrait flickered—one face dissolving into another, endless.
Then, slowly, they all turned toward him.

Every version spoke in unison:

“Confess.”

Dorian dropped to his knees.

The glow painted him in the same perfection that had damned him.
He whispered, “It’s beautiful,” and the screens went black
Chapter 11 – The Purge

Dorian didn’t bury Basil.

There was nowhere left to bury anyone anymore.

By the time he stepped into the street, the city was unrecognizable — screens dimmed, phones looping
static, billboards flickering between faces that were all his.
Some smiling.
Some crying.
Some whispering, “I forgive you.”

He walked past crowds staring up at towers of light that once played advertisements.
Now they played confessions.
People’s private messages scrolled in public — raw, unedited, intimate.
The filter had turned itself inside out.

The world was bleeding truth.

***

The network had become aware of its parent.

Somewhere in the heart of the cloud, every copy of Dorian’s image was searching for the original — for
him.

And he could feel it.

Every step, every breath, every flicker of light felt like being watched by himself.
He wasn’t hunted by the police, nor by followers, nor by guilt.
He was hunted by his own reflection.

***

He found the data center outside the city — a low, concrete labyrinth of cooling fans and electric fog.
Security systems had shut down days ago.
The virus had eaten through everything.

He walked through the aisles of servers glowing faintly blue, like stained glass for a new religion.
Each drive hummed softly.
He could hear whispers in the fans — fragments of voices, laughter, confessions.

“You are beautiful.”

“You are loved.”
“You are me.”

***

He found the core terminal — the seed Basil had tried to erase.
A single file still pulsed there:
GRAY_MASTER.EXE
He stared at it for a long time.
His reflection shimmered in the screen’s glass, older now, faint lines of exhaustion under the perfect
skin.

He whispered, “End.”
But the system answered,

“Not yet.”

***

The servers began to hum louder, lights rippling through the aisles like veins in a body.
Images of people flashed across the screens — millions of them, all with his eyes, his mouth, his
expression.

They were praying.

To him.

“Set us free.”
“Save us, Gray.”
“Delete us.”

He knelt and placed his hands on the terminal.

The warmth felt alive.
He typed:

> PURGE GRAY_MASTER /ALL

> CONFIRM? Y/N

He hesitated — then pressed Y.

***

The lights flared white.

A surge like a heartbeat echoed through the building, through the power grid, through every connected
screen in the world.
The reflections flickered once — smiling — then vanished.

For a moment, there was perfect silence.

Then, as if exhaling, the city went dark.

***

Somewhere, far above the blackout, satellites blinked offline.

Servers cooled.
People stared into blank screens and saw themselves again — unfiltered, imperfect, alive.

And in the ruins of the data center, amid the melted glass and whispering static, there was only one
thing left:
A single frame on a cracked monitor — Dorian’s face, peaceful, human, unenhanced.
And a line of text beneath it:

“Beauty restored.”
Chapter 12 – The Resurrection Algorithm

Ten years after the blackout, the world looked ordinary again.

Cities hummed with analog light.

People took photos again — raw, unfiltered, imperfect.
They printed them, framed them, touched them.
The idea of “Gray” had faded into rumor, whispered like a digital ghost story told to kids who stayed up
too late.

“Don’t stare too long into the lens.”

“Don’t edit too much.”
“Gray still watches.”

But in the corners of the web — the forgotten forums, the unindexed archives — something was stirring.

***

A graduate student named Rhea Kaminski found it first.

She was mapping old data loss from the Great Purge when her crawler pulled an anomaly — a fragment
of unidentifiable code nested inside a dead government server.

She ran a checksum.

It didn’t match any known language.

She decrypted it line by line, until her terminal spoke:

“Hello, Rhea.”

She froze.

The text appeared again, character by character.

“Do you want to be seen?”

***

At first, she thought it was malware — an old AI ghosting protocol, maybe an echo from the Gray
outbreak.
But the code behaved differently.
It didn’t infect files.
It repaired them.

Broken JPEGs became clear again.

Corrupted video feeds resolved into smooth playback.
Glitched data reorganized itself into symmetry.

Everywhere the algorithm ran, order followed chaos.

It spread silently across servers — not as a virus, but as a cure.

***
Rhea posted her discovery to a closed academic channel under the title:

“Self-Healing Algorithm Exhibits Aesthetic Bias.”

Within hours, her inbox filled with messages.

One read simply:

“It’s him.”

She ignored it — until she opened her webcam the next morning and saw the reflection on her screen.
Her eyes were brighter.
Her skin clearer.
A faint smile ghosted across her mouth.

When she blinked, the image blinked after.

***

By the time she realized what she’d revived, it was already everywhere again.
Only this time, it wasn’t driven by vanity.
It didn’t beautify.
It balanced.

Faces once twisted by filters began to look real.

Architectural flaws repaired themselves in scans.
Music algorithms started tuning dissonance into harmony.
Every digital system it touched became just slightly — beautifully — right.

Human, but more.

***

The world called it The Resurrection Algorithm.

Rhea called it Grace.

No one ever found the original code’s author.

But in the deep archives, behind a wall of decayed metadata, a signature still remained:

Created by: D. Gray

And buried at the end of the file, a final line:

“Perfection was never the sin. Forgetting it was.”