Maddy
12:30PM
Every day at twelve-thirty, some twenty million devoted fans of Maddy’s channel tuned in for her daily antics. What started as a way get out of school became a hundred-million-dollar empire for the eighteen-year-old Madeline Axel. Her videos became a literal overnight sensation. People around the world resonated with her bubbly energy and contents from day one. Within weeks, she built up subscribers and viewers in the millions. Along with the audience came endorsements from various massive companies worth millions of dollars. This was all whilst she was contemplating dropping out of high school. Naturally, she left home and moved to the big city, La La Land, into a massive mansion that she purchased outright. The world was her oyster.
Over the next four years, she travelled the world, founded two companies and became the biggest influencer of all time in the history of the internet. But Maddy’s content remained the same and she stayed authentic which gave millions of young girls like herself comfort and hope. Maddy’s sense of humour and editing style was something that couldn’t be taught or imitated. Major media companies offered her multimillion-dollar deals as their head of creative team amongst other deal. Maddy turned them all down. She genuinely enjoyed vlogging about her life and documenting her days. Most of all, she enjoyed the freedom to do whatever she wanted.
But for the past six months, her videos and content became increasingly intermittent and scarce. And for the last month or so, she hasn’t been uploading any content. The internet went crazy. Various theories rose, all of them spurred on by the media companies that Maddy rejected. They were all nasty rumours. There were thoughts of her suffering from mental breakdown, drug use, pregnancy and even suicide. Her most devoted fans gathered around her mansion praying that she was ok and that she would surface at any time. Another two months went by. No show. She was officially presumed missing.
On the seventieth floor of the MV Building at Downtown New Geneva, around a hundred corporate types all dressed in power suits gathered around a fifteen-metre mahogany table for an emergency meeting. The MV Group just closed a two hundred-million-dollar deal with Maddy just before she went incognito. In this world, no one gets paid that sort of money and calls it quits. Something had to be done. The MV Group had the full knowledge of what happened to Maddy. But only few of the top of the company was privy to that information. For the CEO of the MV Group the most important thing was to recoup that money, or some of it. The investors were pulling out in droves and the stocks were falling fast.
The head of technology for the MV Group has been tinkering with a new idea for couple of years for situations like this. The CEO gave him the table. It was a crazy plan. It involved a new level of deepfake, body doubles and a professional film production company. They had no choice. MV was about to close business. The CEO had no choice but to go ahead with this crazy five-year plan to recoup their large investment.
Two weeks later, at twelve thirty, her daily vlog along with content on various social media platforms uploaded. The world went crazy. MV stocks increased by ten percent in an hour.