Chapter 4The Parasite in My Daughter’s Veins

When I next awoke, I found myself in a hospital bed. A nurse walked in.

“Severe mental disorientation. You’ll be staying here for a while.”

I grabbed her hand. “Where is this? Where’s David?”

“Your family admitted you to a psychiatric facility. Your mental condition is quite serious. You can only leave once you’re fully recovered.”

Just as I was about to speak again, someone pulled open the curtain of the adjacent bed. “Keep it down, will ya?”

It was a boy, no older than ten, hunched over a laptop, eyes fixed on lines of strange code. Trapped there, I found him to be a quiet companion. He often advised me to give up struggling, saying I’d only leave when family came to collect me.

Out of sheer desperation, I began drawing. I drew Daisy, over and over, trying to capture the girl I remembered. I still believed my daughter was out there, vanished. The more I drew, the more sketches piled up. The boy, observing my frenzy, eventually used his computer to generate a picture from my drawings.

I stared at the AI-generated photo. This was my daughter. My Daisy.

Tears streamed down my face. “Please, kid,” I pleaded, my voice hoarse. “Can you find this girl for me? She’s my daughter.”

I poured out everything that had happened, telling him about the fake Daisy, the pig farm video, my family’s disbelief. He listened, then used his laptop to log into my old social media accounts. There, among my posts, were old sketches of Daisy. I saw a private message, an account tagged.

I found the account. It was empty, yet the profile page boasted hundreds of thousands of likes on old posts. An unsettling feeling seized me. I urgently begged the boy to do something.

His fingers danced across the keyboard. Soon, that account was open on his screen. In the private section, there were several videos, each with tens of thousands of likes. In them, a small girl, mimicking a hog, was eating from a trough. Her clothes were filthy, her body emaciated.

I watched video after video, tears streaming down my face, uncontrolled. This girl… this was my daughter. The one who’d been missing for three years. I scrutinized her face, confirming it again and again. It was Daisy.

Seeing my desperate state, the boy quickly pinpointed the IP address.