Rebirth14 min read
I Died Twice and Became a Star (With a System and a Lot of Mess)
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I am dead. Then I was assigned a system. Then I almost broke my wrist on a wire and had to learn how to lie beautifully to a camera.
"It isn't fair," I said to the empty room, and the room only smelled of antiseptic and cheap coffee. "It is never fair."
The woman on the hospital bed looked like a porcelain doll someone had dropped. Her lashes trembled. I—Lacey Rivera—opened my eyes inside someone else's ruined body.
"You're awake," a nurse said. "You were lucky. You fainted from shock. Your wrist is sprained, but you'll recover."
"Good," I murmured. "Very good."
A voice that wasn't in the room answered me from inside my head.
"Host, welcome," it said. "Task one will begin shortly."
"Who are you?" I asked the voice, because politeness matters even when you're thinking you might be dying a second time.
"I am your system," it replied, and its tone was flat, like a machine that had read a thousand motivational posters and hated them all. "You were selected from a set of trained literary antagonists across timelines. You died in your prior narrative. We offer you assignments: ascend, rewrite, profit. Complete tasks; receive privileges."
"You think I'm a villain because I was a villain?" I asked, half amused.
"You performed the role well," the system said. "You did not ask to be typecast. We provide opportunity."
I pulled at the bandage on my wrist, testing the pain with a tiny, theatrical frown. "Opportunity to stop being a villain—fine. Where do you send me?"
"A modern world," the system said. "Entertainment sector. Target file: 'Star-Chasing Guide.' You will inhabit the body of a wealthy actress who almost died twice: once by public opinion, once by a physical accident. Her name is the same as yours. Mission: survive the storyline, reach the role of the victor, become indispensable."
"Meaning?" I asked.
"Change the original trajectory. Make different choices. Use data. Accept sweet twists. Complete the romance arc for maximum public charm." The system blinked unreadable light into my mind. "Also: you are excellent at being an antagonist. That is a strength."
I let out a short laugh. "Of course I am."
*
"They want you to drop the role," my agent—Francesca Cash—said from the edge of the bed, voice fast as a city train. "A stunt went wrong on the set of the fantasy drama. Insurance is fussing. We are negotiating—"
"I won't cry," I told her, and I didn't. Instead I folded my hands over the bandage and smiled like the kind of woman who kept a secret garden inside her palm and a poker face over it.
"You're not just an actress," Francesca said. "You're an asset. Your family—your company's standing—"
"Yes, yes, the company," I said. "Let them talk. If the show delays, I can delay them right back for a penalty."
"You sure?" Francesca's eyes widened. "They will levy damages."
"I am sure. And if they try to play me for a villain, I will write the invoice myself."
She stared at me a moment like she'd seen a ghost wearing Chanel. "You are impossible."
"I prefer 'decisive'."
Francesca left with an odd look on her face. The system hummed.
"Host," it said. "You caused a small scene in your prior life. The entertainment plot is volatile. You must be strategic: gain fans, leverage authenticity, offend only in ways that make the cameras love you."
"Translation: be reckless, but in a profitable way," I said.
"Correct. Saddle up."
*
"You look like trouble in a flowy dress," a man said the first time I met him properly.
"Trouble has good PR," I answered, because my instincts remembered the old scripts—sharp retorts, sharper smiles.
He was Fraser Santos, a design prodigy turned director-designer, the kind of man who sketched lines with the same ease that other men breathed. He had thin hands and the nervous, thoughtful smile of someone who loved geometry more than gossip. He'd been my accidental co-star in a charity event a week earlier; now he offered me coffee and a page of real kindness.
"You're being followed," Fraser said softly. "By people who want you to be a story, not a person."
"They always prefer narratives," I said. "I'll be stubbornly human."
"You are stubborn," he smiled. "You intrigue me."
"Thank you," I said and closed the conversation with a small, private plan: keep Fraser friendly. Trust the artisan who makes fabrics that swallow the light.
He gave me a box of small pastries one evening and disappeared like a breeze. We flirted with little, dumb jokes that the cameras loved. I let the cameras catch the jokes, because the system liked raw material: adoration.
"It's an empire of fans," the system told me. "Collect them like currency."
"Fine." I did—slowly, like planting a garden. I made a small, deliberate gift to a fan at an airport: a tin of plain biscuits, because once someone remembered the taste of a real thing they remembered the giver. The fan squealed and uploaded a dozen photos. Someone called me "genuine" and that single word was fire. My followers climbed.
"Keep doing the gestures," the system said. "They reward repetition."
So I repeated: cups of coffee on cold nights for the crew, a neat note left in a makeup kit for a costar, a laugh aimed at a man who could angle a camera like a sword. Do it enough and the internet will start telling itself new stories.
Fraser watched me do this and leaned in. "Have you ever been an actual fan?" he asked once, like testing water.
"Of art, yes," I answered. "Not of people. Too messy."
"And yet—" He smiled like a person with time for little confessions. "You give the appearance of being beloved."
"That's my job." I let the words be soft, and they landed in his chest like a small, careful bird.
He looked at me like he could read the stitches on the bird's wing. "Good."
*
"Who is sending these hits?" I asked one morning when the smear on the gossip sites had materialized like fog.
"Vera Schmid," Francesca said, flat as a courtroom order. "She has a minor role in a competitor drama. She's trending as virtuous. Her people are adept."
"Vera," I repeated—Vera Schmid: soft-lipped, lily-voiced, the kind of actress who made virtue look like a brand. "She thinks attacking me will boost her girl's credibility."
"More than that," Francesca said. "Her camp paid certain tabloids. They planted stories: you took favors, you caused on-set trouble, you—"
"You mean 'they invented a life for me'?" I said.
"That's exactly what I mean," she said. "They want you to melt so they can have unresentful light."
I watched the headlines and felt the system nudge with statistics. It offered tactics like a chef offers knives: legal threats, controlled confessions, staged philanthropy. I let it show me how to fight back without seeming to fight back. We are monsters of optics; Mr. Fraser likes the word "aesthetics." I like "results."
"Public confession," the system suggested. "Be honest on your terms."
"Do I admit everything?" I asked.
"Admit only what strengthens. Deny with vivid proof. Reveal the truth you want the world to hold."
So I did a small live stream. "I played badly in another story," I said into the camera where a thousand phones watched. "I once believed power came from wearing armor. I'm trying differently now. I'm messy and human and—"
"Sweet," Fraser said off-camera. He had come to stand behind the light. "You're sincere."
"There," I told the camera. "That was my truth." It trended. People made art out of my honesty.
Vera fumed. Her team doubled down. The pile-on shifted—toward a panic about "performative admissions." The system purred: "They will scatter. Your chart shows high conversion to sympathy."
Good. Let them scatter.
*
Weeks folded into the small, domestic chaos of shoots and rehearsals. I did a live dating show—one of those 24/7 reality series—and my life was suddenly both private and a public performance. I learned to feed strangers' imaginations with small facts: favorite film, preferred bread, an invented childhood memory that sounded like a poem. I watched my following climb like ivy.
"Do you know why people like you?" Fraser asked once, leaning on the doorway of my trailer as I changed a hairpin.
"No," I said.
"Because you show up," he said simply. "Because you don't pretend to be unreachable."
"Appearing in public is one thing," I murmured. "Remaining is another."
"You remain," he said and then kissed me properly for the first time, slow and tender as if he wanted a model for the way to take someone's breath politely. The cameras had left the room. The system had watched and blinked.
"You're trouble," I told him later, when my head was full of ropes and cheap masks and the taste of his lips painted like a postcard.
"You're my trouble," he answered.
We grew into a private weather: light, a storm; then warmth. The public loved us. The internet made fan art with our eyes turned toward each other. The show producers loved us, because we loaded their metrics.
"It feels easy," I admitted to the system. "Am I allowed to be happy?"
"Your mission increments on emotional indices," the system replied. "Happiness increases your defense against sabotage."
"I like two things then," I said. "Numbers and pastries. Also you owe me choreography for public apologies if Vera escalates."
"Prepared," it said.
Vera escalated. She leaked a faked message accusing me of buying favors and—worse—of being behind workarounds that hurt another actress. The tabloids picked it up like a scent.
"Public humiliation," Francesca hissed. "They want to drown you in character assassination. We need a move."
"Let's bring the evidence," I said. "We will do it their way."
We scheduled a press conference. The room was a small rectangle of fluorescent lights and pretzel buffet trays. A hundred phones and lenses sat like curious birds on a wire.
Vera arrived with a chaperone and a cloud of pre-scripted outrage. She wore white like a sheet of winter snow and stepped onto the stage with a sash of righteous anger. Her team smirked. They thought they had pinned us.
"She tried to set me up," Vera said into a mic. "I found proof on my own. The industry must be honest. She has—"
"Cut the feed," I said simply. I walked to the front of the stage and took the microphone. Cameras turned like sunflowers.
"You will hear things tonight," I said, calm as an ocean. "But if you are here to see me collapse, you will be disappointed. I did not come to this stage to beg. I came to invite you to look harder."
Vera's jaw tightened like a trap springing.
"Show proof," she demanded. "Prove you didn't—"
"Okay," I said. "Let's prove it."
I had already sent files to a handful of independent journalists and one celebrity lawyer. I had a folder titled "For the Press." It contained recorded messages, signed emails, payment ledgers showing legitimate fees for photography, makeup, transport. It contained a voicemail from a manager admitting to a smear that had been paid for by a name I had traced to Vera's producer. It contained a video from backstage where I had been rehearsing lines and the "accused" actress had asked for a lighter and a bottle of water—nothing more.
I pulled a USB from my pocket like a magician producing a dove.
"Ms. Schmid," I said, and the room leaned in. "Do you accept that not all stories are yours to write?"
"You're—" Vera began, eyes blazing, but the playback started.
The video was raw. It showed Vera's supposed "source" speaking to a gossip writer, describing a plot that did not exist. It showed the "source" arranging payments, speaking of a 'few thousand to bury the matter.' The journalist admitted on record: "We accepted a tip. We didn't verify. We should have." The proof unspooled like a ribbon.
There was a small howl of delight in the press—hunger for scandal satisfied with new meat. Vera's smile frayed.
"Those payments," I continued, "were traced to a shell company whose account was funded by a consultancy that lists Vera Schmid's producer as a principal." I clicked another file. Bank transfers bloomed on the screen like ugly flowers.
Vera made a noise somewhere between a gasp and a curse. "This is—"
"What it is," I said, "is not the whole truth."
I watched the journalist faces for reaction. Cameras recorded the way Vera's supporters scrambled to the edges like crabs escaping a tide pool.
"Do you hear them?" I asked. "They're listening for a confession from me that they already scripted in their heads. But confession is not a broadcast of lies. Confession is contrition for harm. I have caused harm—yes. I have harmed people by being cowardly in old scenes or gone silent when I should have spoken. But I will not be used as a vessel for someone else's fabrication."
Vera's mouth opened into small, sharp syllables: "You—"
"Sit down," I said.
The laughter in the room was small at first, then louder. That laugh is a thing to behold when it turns on a complainer. Vera shrank under that sound. Her publicist lifted a phone to speak, then put it down.
"You think this will ruin you?" Vera whispered, but the microphone carried the whisper like a small confession. "You think proof will save you?"
"I think honesty helps," I answered. "And I think you will have to answer for a campaign you authorized. People will ask why your name paid for stories. People will ask who in your team decided to abuse the press. If your claim against me is true—then produce your evidence. If it is false—then be brave enough to apologize."
"You're threatening me," Vera said.
"I'm threatening nothing," I replied. "I'm asking the public to decide."
There was a moment of silence, like a city stalled at midnight. Then a real reporter who had been off-camera but had followed the document trail stood up.
"Ms. Schmid," she said, "we have a lawyer's notice. The money trail leads to your producer. Will you explain?"
Vera's face turned pale as a sheet. She stammered, denied, then pointed fingers, then tried to turn the room into a theater of victimhood herself. The cameras were ruthless. They filmed her reaching for a statement then crumpling it like a napkin. I watched the public watch her, and saw their expressions tilt from outrage to suspicion to the slow, sweet satisfaction of discovery.
Then Vera's reaction changed. It was a progression I had catalogued in a hundred different revenge scenes in different lives: arrogance; incredulity; panic; denial; bargaining; collapse. She did all of them, in order, on a stage the world could stream.
"You're a liar," she cried finally, voice thin and sharp. "You set me up to fall!"
"Vera," I said softly, and for the first time my voice softened into a human sound. "If only. If only we had not turned each other into characters."
She left the podium with a wail like fabric tearing. Outside, lenses followed her down the stairs.
The room hummed. Reporters shouted questions. My feeds screamed with comments—some supportive, some skeptical. My fans sent hearts; my haters sent sharper things, but the tide had turned.
And Vera? She would go on to plead private stress and issue a forced apology; behind the apology she'd have hard conversations with executives; publicists would be fired. The details eventually surfaced in the weeks after: the producer's resignation, a string of phone records, a snarl of payments. When lawyers got involved, the public saw the inner scaffolding.
Her reaction evolved in front of everyone: first denial, then angry rebuttal, then weeping denials, then a broken public apology on the steps of a production building while cameras recorded every soft, miserable syllable. People who had cheered her watched her shrink. Fans took photos and deleted them in the same hour. The world is cruel that way; the world is honest in the end.
It was ugly to watch, but necessary. The system logged the public momentum: sympathies up, smear down. Points awarded.
"That was public," the system said later, tone approving. "You satisfied the public's appetite for drama with proof. You've recorded a net gain."
"You're not allowed to be pleased," I said, and the system hummed.
"Pleasure recorded," it replied.
*
There were other battles. Tabloid editors were sued, small-time smear merchants were traced to PayPal ledgers and confronted with subpoenas, a handful of influencers who'd retweeted the lies found their accounts demoted. I wrote a public piece about truth and industry cruelty and let my lawyers handle the rest. Public punishments followed: bans from certain fringe networks, loss of contract, a forced apology in a live stream where a former gossip editor read the truth and then trembled while taking viewer questions.
The one punishment the rules demanded—the kind that made a villain's face change through a series of emotional missteps in public—came when the producer who had greenlit the dossier and paid the smear merchants was called to testify at a media ethics hearing I had requested. He thought he would be a minor witness. Instead he sat under hot lights and an unforgiving moderator.
"Mr. Tarlowe," the moderator said, "can you explain why your company disbursed ninety thousand dollars to accounts associated with rumor placement on the same week Ms. Rivera announced her charity events?"
The man swallowed. "Those were vendor payments."
"For what?"
"For monitoring."
"For monitoring what?" the moderator asked. The man's hand trembled. The cameras took that picture and sent it to a thousand phones.
"For… public perception," he mumbled.
"Who authorized those payments?"
He hesitated. "Ms. Schmid's producer did."
"Did you ever verify the source?"
"No."
"You paid without verifying?"
The audience gasped into a thousand small microphones. The producer clutched the edge of the table like a man holding a thin rope. He made seven attempts to explain, each one smaller than the last.
The viewing public watched him shrink. He first tried to seem indignant, then evasive, then angry, then pleading. His attorney told him to stop answering some questions; he answered anyway. When shown chat logs, he tried to laugh; the laugh split. He ran out of words.
When he finally muttered, "I didn't think it would hurt anyone," the cameras captured the precise moment his self-image shattered. He realized too late what cruelty he'd bankrolled. The room shivered with a kind of ethical satisfaction. People whispered "karma" as a prayer.
The moderator asked him a final question: "Do you accept responsibility?"
He looked at the lights and then at the camera. His eyes filled. "Yes," he said.
He left the studio white-faced and defeated. Reporters trailed him. Fans made memes chronicling his fall. The tide of public opinion that had once threatened to drown me now carried away its architects. That was the root of my satisfaction: not the fall itself, but the exposure, the public's right to know.
Vera apologized in a stilted livestream and said she had been betrayed. The producer resigned. The gossip outlet ran a mea culpa. The legal suits rolled forward and produced fines, retractions, and a shift in how certain agencies did business.
If you needed a cruel spectacle to feel properly victorious, I gave you one. I watched them fall like someone watching a ridiculous film and then realizing it had been scripted with human hands.
But—I couldn't pretend the satisfaction was clean. For every villain punished there were people who had been hungrier, poorer, more desperate. I didn't want to be the queen of anyone's shame. I wanted to be better.
"Do better," I told the system. "And teach me how."
"Agreed," it said. "Mission continues."
*
The show went on. I left the reality house before filming ended to take a lead in a period drama called "First Meeting"—a role I threw myself into with surprising ferocity. I worked with the director, a man named Carson Evans, whose actorly presence made courtrooms look like playgrounds. Carson was distant, rigorous, and exacting. He watched me train with a measuring eye and never once flattered me.
"You're prepared," Carson said calmly on the first day of rehearsals. "Don't expect me to make you pretty for things that require blood. I want truth."
"Truth is less flattering," I answered.
"Exactly," he said.
On set, the crew called me "Initial" as if we were launching something. I learned a stoic patience, the way an actress frames pain so it speaks. The cameras loved the first whips of my performance. The critics later used words like "astonishing" and "startingly great," and the reviews fed into the system's data like oxygen.
Fraser watched from the wings as I flourished. "You are constructing a different self," he said, and sometimes he would sketch the silhouettes of costumes while we took coffee.
"I am," I said. "I am learning to be steady."
"Good," he said, and slid a scarf around my shoulders. He touched my hair like a painter placing a final brushstroke.
The world kept moving like water. Fans kept making art. My enemies kept regrouping, but with less venom. The system rewarded me with small gifts: a "no forced narratives" badge, the ability to skip a task, a tiny window of free agency. I used it to be generous: I arranged a fundraiser for an independent makeup artist's studio and publicly shared the names of people who had helped me. The internet rewarded authenticity; a wealthy woman giving money shows she can spend it—cheap drama loves it more when a victim spends.
I learned to navigate the machines. I learned to be loved for what I was becoming instead of what I had been.
And on a quiet Sunday when the city smelled like bread, I told Fraser, "We will be fine."
"We already are," he said. "You changed the plot."
"No," I said. "We changed it together."
He kissed me like he had been waiting to do what the plot finally allowed: slow and decisive and very human.
The system hummed in the background, but for once I did not listen for its pings. For once, I listened for the sound of my own breath and the small, fierce beating of my heart.
The End
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