Chapter One: Blue World
Felicia Hook had always prided herself on seeing through the world's illusions. She'd grown up with a knack for spotting the cracks in a story, the subtle tells in a liar's eyes. But nothing prepared her for the day she learned she was "Blue World." The phrase didn't mean anything at first—just two words, floating across a government file she wasn't meant to see. But the more she dug, the more she realized: it was a code, a label, a warning. She was marked.
It started with a routine traffic stop. She was on her way to pick up Lillian and Gary from school, humming along to a song she barely remembered, when the flashing lights appeared in her rearview mirror. She pulled over, heart thumping, and rolled down her window. The officer's eyes flickered when he scanned her license. His jaw tightened, his posture changed. "Step out of the car, ma'am." His voice was flat, rehearsed—like he was reading from a script.
Felicia complied, forcing herself to stay calm. She knew she'd done nothing wrong. She'd never even had a speeding ticket. Yet the officer's hand hovered near his weapon, and his partner circled behind her, radio crackling with codes she didn't understand. She could feel the tension in the air, thick and electric, as if the world itself was holding its breath.
At the station, they called her a "violent offender." She laughed at first—until she saw the screen. Her name, her face, her social security number. But the charges were fiction: assault, resisting arrest, even a note about "armed and dangerous." She demanded to know where this came from, but the officers just shrugged. "It's in the system," they said. "You're flagged."
They held her for hours, questioning her about things she'd never done, places she'd never been. The room was cold, the fluorescent lights buzzing overhead. She watched the officers exchange glances, saw the doubt in their eyes. "I'm not who you think I am," she insisted. "There's been a mistake." But her words seemed to bounce off the walls, unheard and unheeded.
When they finally let her go, no charges filed, the damage was done. Everywhere she went, people stared. Neighbors whispered. Her landlord left a notice on her door: "We don't want trouble here." At her children's school, teachers avoided her. She caught a glimpse of her own file on a secretary's desk—her photo, but with a red "X" stamped across it.
Felicia's world shrank overnight. Friends stopped calling. Her mother's voice on the phone was tight with worry. "Are you sure you're okay, Felicia? Maybe you should see someone. You've been so stressed lately." She tried to explain, but the words came out wrong, tangled and desperate. She could feel the distance growing, a chasm opening beneath her feet.
That night, Felicia stayed up searching for answers. She hacked into her own records, military and civilian, and found the same thing: "Blue World." A secret designation, buried deep. She was being watched, tracked, and—somehow—her entire reputation had been rewritten.
It was more than a smear job. It was perception itself, manipulated at the source. She remembered stories of government hacking, of agencies turning surveillance tools inward, using data to control and coerce. She realized that whoever was behind this had access to the deepest systems—able to rewrite her digital existence, to make her a criminal in the eyes of the world, even though she'd never broken a law.
Felicia's mind raced. She thought back to the strange encounters, the odd looks, the way people seemed to see someone else when they looked at her. She remembered the military hospital, the cold hands, the pain and the silence. The way the doctors looked through her, as if she were invisible. The way her complaints were dismissed, her records altered, her body violated and branded. She remembered waking up with stitches where there shouldn't have been any, bruises she couldn't explain, a sense of dread she couldn't shake. She remembered being told to forget, to move on, to be grateful she was alive.
Now, it all made sense. Someone was orchestrating this—someone with power, with resources, with a personal vendetta. She pictured the man in the shadows, the one who'd haunted her since childhood. She didn't know his name, but she knew his methods. He could make her words sound like gibberish, make her face shift and blur, make her own family doubt her sanity. He poisoned the air, the water, the very fabric of reality.
Then came the news alert: "Local Woman Killed in Car Accident." Her name. Her face. Her death, faked and broadcast to the world. She stared at the headline, numb, as her phone buzzed with messages. "Is this you?" "Are you okay?" "I saw the news…" Some people sounded relieved. Others sounded disappointed. Her ex-husband, Gary Jr.—if he even noticed—would probably just laugh and make some off-color joke, like a cartoon character who'd wandered into the wrong show.
Felicia felt a strange thrill. If she was officially dead, that meant she was invisible—at least for a moment. She could move without being tracked, could dig deeper, could fight back. And somewhere, deep inside, she felt a flicker of excitement. If she survived this—if she could prove what had been done—she'd have the evidence, the leverage, the lawsuit of the century. "I'm going to get paid," she whispered, almost giddy. "When this is over, I'm going to make them pay."
But first, she had to survive. She had to find her children. She had to reclaim her name.
She was Blue World now. But she would decide what that meant.
Felicia sat in the darkness, her laptop screen glowing, her fingers flying across the keys. She started documenting everything—every odd look, every fake charge, every glitch in the system. She made copies, backups, sent files to anonymous dropboxes. She wasn't just fighting for herself anymore. She was fighting for Lillian and Gary, for the truth, for the right to exist in a world that wanted to erase her.
She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and smiled. For the first time in weeks, she felt something like hope. They thought they could bury her, but they'd only made her stronger. Blue World wasn't a sentence—it was a challenge.
And Felicia Hook never backed down from a challenge.