Rebirth14 min read
I Live-Streamed My Old Life — And the Empire Watched
ButterPicks14 views
I woke up to someone shouting, “Get up, class is starting!” and for a second I thought I was still the farm girl who answered to no name. Then I blinked and realized I was in my dorm bed, in a university that smelled like instant noodles and detergent, and my phone buzzed with an alert: “Live feed active — viewer count rising.”
“I don’t remember setting a live,” I muttered.
“My bad, you fell asleep in the lab again,” Kiara said from the bunk across. “You okay? You look pale.”
“I’m fine.” I swung my legs over the bed. “Maybe the system finally—” I stopped. No system. No glowing box in my head. Just a hole, like someone unplugged a neon sign.
“System?” Aviana asked, plucking a chip from her sleeve like she’d misunderstood. “Is that a new app?”
“Never mind.” I shoved my hand into my jeans pocket, found my phone, and opened the app I’d never installed. My fingers hovered over a thumbnail that pulsed: LIVE. The screen showed a bright rectangle far away, and inside the rectangle—me.
“Is that—” Kiara’s voice went flat.
“Is that you?” Aviana whispered, leaning over my shoulder.
“Upper-left: Emerald Bryan. On-screen: classroom. Below: 234,000 viewers,” my phone recited like an oracle.
I laughed, then I didn’t. “That’s—my voice. That’s my room. How?”
“Who is watching?” Kiara asked. “Is this some prank?”
I tapped the feed and then saw messages scroll faster than I could read.
“Is that—Marcus Barber’s wife?”
“Holy—she’s in a schoolhouse. How does the queen study like that?”
“Protect the palace! The emperor watches!”
Someone typed, “This is the prince’s wife. She’s back.”
“No,” I said, and the word stuck. In my head the other life roared back like a tide. I remembered a low-roomed courtyard, a cold lacquered bed, a man who had once knelt in mud to ask me to be his. I remembered the servants’ footsteps, the smell of wood smoke and incense. I remembered loving and losing. I remembered the countdown in my skull and the sudden flash: an elevator of light that spat me into fluorescent bulbs, dormitory bunk beds, and morning announcements.
I swore, loud and obvious. “I left. I left that life.”
Kiara blinked. “Left where?”
“Long story, I guess. Listen—” I swallowed. My mouth was dry. “If that thing is broadcasting, people in the palace might be watching. People in the city. People who used to know me.”
“People watching live my morning cereal?” Aviana asked, amused.
“Not just that.” I looked at my reflection in the dark screen. “They’re watching everything I do. And—” I whispered, “I think when I do, they learn.”
“Learn?” Kiara repeated.
I scrolled the feed. The room in the rectangle moved with me. The on-screen comments flickered like stars. The census of the viewers climbed by the thousands.
“Emerald,” a voice called in my head. It was nothing like a system. It was a small, childlike echo: “Return?”
I shut the laptop and forced a laugh. “Return? To what? To history?”
“Stop being dramatic,” Kiara said. “If you’ve made a show, monetize it.”
“I didn’t make a show.”
Kiara shrugged. “Then watch the numbers, Emer. People will pay to watch someone like you. Someone who lived two lives.”
I swallowed. “I’m not a performer.”
“You’re already on stage.” Aviana grinned. “So—what’s your content? Farm therapy? Palace gossip? Campus vibes?”
“I used to be a palace wife,” I said. “I saved a wounded man once. He later wore embroideries I’d never seen before. He asked me to marry him.”
Kiara made a face. “Rom-com pitch.”
“It’s not that funny,” I said. “He cared once. He left. I left. I came back and—” My chest tightened. “Now the ‘palace’ is watching me study algebra.”
“Algebra?” Aviana asked, delight in her voice. “Oh my god, that’s a content goldmine. Tutoring streams for thousands.”
“You don’t get it,” I said. “They think my life in that world is news. They think whatever I do tells them something about their own world.”
“You said ‘they,’” Kiara said. “Who’s ‘they’?”
I opened the comments again.
“Healed the palace! Long live Emerald!”
“Emperor Bennett Long should be honored.”
“Why is she eating a rice ball? What is a rice ball?”
“Is that a train outside?” someone typed, then another replied, “It’s a carriage, maybe one day.”
I exhaled. “They watch like churches.”
“Then preach,” Kiara said. “Write. Stream. Show them a better life.”
“I can’t fool them,” I said. “I can’t pretend nothing happened. Marcus—” My throat went dry. “Marcus Barber was the man who once promised me the moon. He… did not keep the promise.”
“Marcus Barber?” Aviana asked. “That name’s so—British.”
“Names don’t matter.” But the memory of the prince was sharp: his stubborn jaw, the way his hand had found mine in winter, the public show of a man who had at first been clumsy and honest and then polished and absent. The palace had turned him into glass.
“Try this: stream your campus day like it’s a magic machine. Show them trains and cafeterias.” Kiara beamed. “Also, you should post the novels you said you’d write. With those palace stories? People will devour them.”
“I write gossip now,” I said. “I didn’t expect them to explode.”
“Good,” said Aviana. “Then explode more.”
The next day a ripple crossed two worlds.
“I heard the emperor called an emergency council because of her livestream,” someone in my hall whispered.
“Called what now?” I asked.
“Bennett Long,” Kiara repeated the name like a spell. “The emperor? The light-screen in his throne room showed you. They all watched you eating breakfast.”
I laughed, but the laugh had edges. “I’m eating leftover dumplings, not breakfast with the emperor.”
“And yet,” Kiara said, “they want more.”
*
“We must keep a daily schedule,” the morning announcements insisted. “And keep conversations civil. Proper conduct at all times.”
“I won’t be proper,” I muttered. “I will be honest.”
That night I posted my first story on the site I’d chosen—anonymously at first, under the name “Gossip Hand.” I told the truth about a household called the Wang family: dynastic secrets, the jealousy of a woman who had locked her husband’s affections to one child, the cruelty that had been so carefully disguised. I wrote in plain words and cheap metaphors: hunger like rain, a wall that leaned wrong. I published ten short chapters. I hit upload and held my breath.
“The Wang family?” Kiara read the title and snorted. “You’re going to give emperors ulcers.”
The comments arrived within minutes. In the other world, the palace screens flared. People crowded like a tide before a spring.
“You wrote about my neighbor!” a woman cried aloud in a market and clutched her basket.
“Read it aloud!” a crowd demanded.
I lay awake and watched the viewer count climb. It felt less like a crowd and more like a weather pattern—inevitable, unstoppable. I typed answers into the chat; my hands moved like someone else's. The feed moved with me.
“Why do they care?” I asked Kiara.
“Because you turned their private scandals into stories they can read,” she said. “And because you did it with facts.”
“Not facts.” I frowned. “I used truths I heard while I sat in a palace void. I used rumors that stank like old fish. I gave names a soft brush.”
“I don’t care,” Aviana said. “Write more.”
So I did.
*
Week by week the palace and the townsfolk learned to watch the rectangle of my life. They learned the shape of an espresso machine, the speed of a bus, what a university dining hall looked like. They also learned to look at themselves.
“You will not let a palace wife humiliate our family,” someone in the emperor’s council said when the discussion turned to what a woman in another world had written about a distinguished house.
“Why wouldn’t we?” Bennett Long—Emperor Bennett Long—said quietly. “If the story’s true, that family has done wrong to its own. They deserve the truth.”
“Truth,” an older minister muttered. “And spectacle is not our way.”
“Spectacle reforms,” Bennett Long said. “We must not let private cruelty hide in shadow.”
He ordered a public review.
“Bring the Wang family to the square,” he said. “Bring the neighbors. Let them speak. Let us show the evidence that the Wang house hid.”
Word spread like an ink stain. The market emptied the next morning as people walked toward the square. They carried woven mats and children and curiosity like offerings.
I woke up to a hundred messages: “Light-screen live at the square. The emperor is showing the story.” My phone trembled in my hand.
I clicked, because I could not not click. The feed showed the square. There were wood platforms and a great silken banner with the emperor’s crest. Then the Wang family arrived—dressed like they had never expected shame. They stood like carved things.
On the screen someone narrated. “The accused: Florence Mathieu—wife of the Wang household. The charges: replacing a sister at birth, concealing death, cruelty to a daughter-in-law.”
Florence Mathieu’s face, on the screen and then in the square, was the face of someone who had never feared the sun. She had been kind to those who knelt before her and remade her hair to look softer after every disaster.
“Ha!” she said at first, a laugh like a brittle coin. “You accuse me of what?”
“Show them the documents,” Bennett Long—the emperor—said.
The light-screen flickered. I watched my own fingers scroll the story while the crowd watched the screen. There it was: lineage records, a slender hand of paper, a midwife’s later letter, the evidence I’d found in my memory’s attic. They spread like a map across the screen, and then they brought forward relatives who told of a midnight replacement.
Florence Mathieu’s smugness cooled. Her lips tightened and the laugh left her like breath.
“You slander me,” she said. “You make up lies.”
A murmur grew.
“Look!” someone shouted. “The record—there is the signature.”
“She forged the record!” a voice cried.
“She changed the baby,” another shouted. “She took one life and bought another for the family.”
Florence’s eyes flicked to the emperor and found him impassive. “This is false,” she said, louder now, and anger heated her voice. “This is all a cunning tale. Who proves it is true? Who benefits from dragging our household in filth?”
At her words, a ripple traveled through the crowd. Some faces hardened. Others tilted toward disbelief.
“Does anyone here doubt?” the emperor asked.
“Do you deny your deeds?” the young magistrate at the platform asked Florence.
She shook her head, slow and proud. Her necklace chimed. “I am the head of this house. I raised children. I kept this family from ruin when the river came. Who would harm their blood?”
Someone in the crowd called, “Bring the witnesses who were paid. Bring the midwife who took the money.”
The midwife was brought, a thin bird of a woman who had spent her life with her hands in other people’s linen. She creaked forward and looked like she would break at any truth. “I—” she began. Her voice shook like a reed. “I was ashamed. They promised me a roof. I had a sick mother. I thought—” She fixed Florence with a steady gaze that the woman had not expected. “I was paid in coins and promises.”
At that, Florence’s face peeled. Heat drained out of it. Her expression moved from anger to a stunned look I knew: the sound of a person being caught out.
“You paid her,” said a farmer in the crowd. “You turned coins into a child’s silence.”
Florence’s mouth worked. “It is not shown I did—”
They brought forward servants who remembered small gestures: gifts wrapped in midnight, a carriage that came for a child one night, a bottle of medicine that cost too much. Each memory was a grain added to a heap.
The crowd swelled, and their reaction changed from curiosity to noise. They shouted accusations. They cried. Mothers rested their hands on children and looked at Florence with a fury that seemed to drop from the ceiling.
“Shame!” someone screamed. “Shame to those who transgress!”
Florence swiveled. She looked out at the faces—faces she had once marched past without a thought—and she realized what lay before her: not only the emperor’s justice but everyone’s eyes. Smugness slid away like wax.
“This is slander!” she said. “I—” Her voice broke.
Then she laughed—sharp and small. “You cannot show me! You cannot show I—” She swallowed. The laugh stuttered into denial. “I never—”
Someone near me typed, “She’s losing it.”
“She’s frightened,” Kiara said. She was watching my phone in my lap, but her voice sounded like a distant bell.
Florence’s face flushed. Her hands trembled. She took a step back.
Denial gave way to something sterner. “You lie!” She pointed at the midwife. “You lie for coin! You’re paid to ruin me.”
“I took the coins,” the midwife said. “But you gave them.”
A hush fell. Then, like a thunderclap, the crowd reacted. “She lied! She lied!” a hundred fists beat air.
Someone had thought to bring a wooden board and—this was the new world—a light-tablet to record the scene. Hands rose. The screens showed them, hands unsteady but recording. People in the crowd took out devices—scraps of glowing paper they’d made from the same strange light that had first shown me—and pressed them to the platform edges.
“My lady!” a weeping woman cried. “You punished my daughter for nothing!”
Florence’s composure failed. Her shoulders slumped. She tried to tuck the hair behind her ear; it fell loose like surrender.
“Begone!” someone shouted. “Bend! Kneel!”
A magistrate called forward. “Florence Mathieu, do you admit your crimes?”
For a moment her face was empty. Then she sank, slow and formal, to her knees. The crowd gasped—not because she had kneaded before, but because now she had been made smaller in front of them all.
“Please!” She lifted her hands, voice thin. “Please, remember what I did for this house! I served—”
“No one listens,” a voice near the front said, and the crowd trembled between anger and pity.
She scrambled, clawing for footing, then collapsed into a low heap. Her sheen of silk was crumpled. She clasped her hands together, palms up, and began to beg.
“Please—my lord, I did it for family. For protection. I did not mean—”
The emperor looked away. His expression was not rage. It was a small, exhausted sadness. “The law will decide,” he said. “For now, you must answer.”
Around her, people shifted like a sea. Some spat; others recorded, their little lights chittering. Some clapped—not in joy but in the release of seeing hidden things dragged into sunshine.
A boy pushed his way forward. “She took my uncle’s child. My uncle drank to death when they took his home.”
Florence’s eyes darted. “No—no—” She made a sound that might once have been a laugh and then turned to a plea. “I was afraid. I was afraid of losing my place. I was afraid of hunger. My actions were wrong, but I deserve forgiveness!”
The crowd did not forgive on command. The light-tablets continued to hum. People wrote comments: “Kneeling now, deny later,” someone wrote. “Her face changed,” another observed. Someone else pressed a small glowing shard and captured the moment.
At last Florence collapsed, not with dignity but like a person who had been wrung dry. She laid her forehead against the wooden platform and begged aloud.
“Please,” she said. “Please, spare me. Spare me the scandal. I will resign. I will go. I will—”
Her voice dwindled into a long, low sound that was close to crying. The magistrate ordered guards to take her to the magistracy. The crowd’s voice rose in a blur of approval and horror.
“They recorded her,” a farmer said. “They will take this to the towns and to the next market. This cannot be hidden again.”
Someone in the crowd tossed a scrap of old bread at the platform. Laughter. A woman cried out, “No—don’t feed her pity bread! She fed others with lies!”
People traded news in whispers. “Why did it take a foreign woman?” someone asked. “Why did her light reveal what our own could not?”
The emperor did not smile. “We learned what we could not from ourselves,” he said softly. “We must be better. This will take more than punishment.”
The magistrate took Florence away, still kneeling and still pleading. The mayor announced that a commission would sit for an inquiry. The crowd dispersed slowly, leaving a ring of straw and footprints on the wooden platform.
On my phone, a flurry of messages arrived.
“She begged.”
“She’s broken.”
“She’s being taken.”
“She’s gone mad.”
My fingers trembled.
“Did I do that?” I whispered.
Kiara reached over and squeezed my hand. “You showed the truth,” she said. “You didn’t make it. You told it.”
“But they punished her publicly,” I said. “I didn’t intend that.”
“No one wanted the cruelty,” Kiara said. “But if the truth frees people, maybe the punishment is how the old things fall.”
I closed my eyes. Florence’s kneeling face stayed in my head like a smudge. The crowd’s clapping and jeers echoed like a bell. Someone recorded, someone shouted, someone begged. The documentary of a private crime had become a public act, and Florence’s transformation—smugness, shock, denial, collapse, begging—had been complete and horrible and visible.
I had to live with that.
*
The weeks that followed my streams and posts were like seasons.
In one, I was a teacher—my small videos of algebra drills had turned into evening lessons for people who had never seen numbers written down like that.
In another, I explained supermarkets and trains, and whole villages copied the way lighted numbers were arranged, inventing crude calendars and timetables from my lunch receipts.
In another, the emperor convened ministers and asked for armies of new schools, public libraries, roads. “If we can learn from them,” he said, “we must.”
“You can build a road,” a minister said. “But where do you get the money?”
“From better governance,” he replied. “From fewer abuses. From stealing less and building more.”
Quietly, some ministers began to plan.
“Will the people forgive you for exposing secrets?” a court noble asked Bennett Long.
“We will show them a way forward,” the emperor said. “We will teach. We will not only punish. We will build and change.”
Meanwhile, Marcus Barber—my Marcus, the man who had once called me a simple thing and promised more—watched me like a ship watches a lighthouse. Sometimes bitterness filled his face; sometimes confusion. He kept his distance from the palace warmth that smoothed his shoulders, and yet I sensed that my return in light scratched at something old in him.
“You left,” he said once, in private, when fate folded us together at an audience. “You left and you came back. Why?”
“Because I needed to live my life,” I said. “And because—” I looked at the way the emperor’s court watched us. “Because no one told your court that better ways existed.”
Marcus’s jaw tightened. “You tell stories and they turn people against a household.”
“I told truth,” I said.
He laughed, a small sound that meant nothing. “Truth hurts.”
“Then let it heal.”
He closed his eyes. He was still handsome. He was still Marcus Barber. But he was thinner at the edges now, as if the palace had carved him into a shape he didn’t recognize.
We were not lovers anymore. We were two people who had once fit by accident and now were separated by a screen that neither of us fully controlled.
*
Night after night I read comments. Some were tender: a mother teaching her daughter the alphabet I had taught on stream. Some were vicious: a nobleman swearing I had ruined his house. Some were weirdly modern: suggestions that the palace import certain crops, or that prisons be reformed.
“You’re changing history,” Kiara said once, half-horrified, half-amused.
“I don’t know if I changed history,” I said. “But I pulled back a curtain.”
“And now they see the stove behind the curtain and they want to overhaul the kitchen,” Aviana said.
“You will be famous,” Kiara added. “You will be hated. You will be loved. And you will have to answer for all of it.”
“I am not ready,” I said. “But apparently history is.”
*
Months blurred. I finished my second story, about the doomed brothers in the Conrad household—Samuel Conrad and his sons, Baxter Bennett and Kyle Hamilton. I wrote with a cold hand, outlining how favoring a child who was not the blood-born seed could rupture everything. The people were merciless in their judgments, and in the telling, I did not spare myself.
“Why do you show only the broken parts?” Aviana asked.
“Because people need to see the fracture before they learn how to set bone,” I answered.
“You set bones by being kind,” Kiara said.
“I will try,” I promised.
Sometimes, late at night, I would type until my hands cramped with the wrongness of making other people’s grief into story. Sometimes I would sleep and dream of wooden platforms and raised voices, of kneeling people and the sound of a crowd bearing witness. I learned to accept that I could not unsee what I had seen. I could not unshow what I had shown.
But I could keep teaching algebra.
And one night, when I was tired and my fingers hovered over the keyboard, a new notification pulsed: “An invitation: Emperor Bennett Long requests a private audience.”
I sat very still. I thought of Florence one last time—the crouching woman who had begged under a public sky. I wondered what it meant to be the one who revealed truths.
I tapped ACCEPT.
“Be careful,” Kiara said. “And dress warmly.”
“I will,” I said.
Outside, the corridor lights hummed. On my phone the live feed continued, a small rectangle pulsing like a heart. Somewhere, a crowd gathered around a platform expecting justice. Somewhere, a mother taught her child to count by the numbers I’d drawn on a whiteboard.
I closed the laptop and walked out into a world that was no longer only mine, and not only theirs. It belonged to both, and to the space between, where stories can make people kneel and beg—and sometimes—if we are brave—make them build.
The End
— Thank you for reading —