Before The Coffee

I used to think the worst day of my life would involve a phone call in the night. A hospital. A highway patrolman on the other end. Not... a group text from coworkers I barely remember.

“John, are you okay?”

It’s 5:14 a.m. and my kid’s cereal is going limp in almond milk while I scroll through my name trending. A man I haven’t heard from since the Darkspeed Systems winter gala in ‘21 thinks I’m dead, or worse. The next message hits harder:

“Someone’s impersonating you. It’s bad.”

Bad doesn’t cover it.

It started with Pixel Prowley. A hacker? A whistleblower? I only vaguely remember the name from a list of white-hats who reported a backend exploit months ago. She found a bug in PhantomKey—our experimental filter bypass detection engine. That was internal-only. No press. No public repo. And now someone’s using her as a character in what looks like hate-fueled fan fiction... starring me.

The tweet's viral. Obscene. AI-written or not, it reads like a dare from hell. They wrote things—things I won’t repeat—that turned my name and face into fuel for a cruel fantasy. Pornographic fanart, explicit captions, and suddenly I was trending next to hashtags calling for our company to be dismantled.

“Darkspeed went full woke.”
“This is why boys can't trust edtech.”
“Filter’s a psyop.”

And then the wall of noise came crashing down.

Before I even make it out the door, we’d been doxxed.

My wife’s crying on the phone, tells me there’s a drone hovering outside the house. The Reddit threads have my address next to stills from old school shootings. Memes pop up of me, edited into crime scenes, with captions about gender delusions and tech grooming conspiracies.

Then the forgeries start.

A Google Doc with my name on it—“confessing” that I sabotaged PhantomKey to impress Pixel Prowley. A resignation letter written in my cadence, full of deviant detail. Another fake where I allegedly describe inappropriate behavior in the Darkspeed office, complete with a link that installs malware on school computers.

By 7:00 a.m., our official Darkspeed Twitter is gone. Suspended. Not just for impersonation—because someone hacked into it and started posting from it.

"Pixel, you’re my little vulnerability."
"Filter Update 11.9 includes a gift for all our users."

That “gift” was a forced wallpaper update across thousands of school computers—an AI-generated explicit image involving me and Pixel. They used PhantomKey itself to deliver it.

I never made it to the office.

Police were already there. So was the FBI.

Legal pulled logs. PR scrambled. Pixel had already filed a takedown. So had a woman named Noelle—dragged into the smear campaign and falsely accused of horrific things. None of it real. But all of it believed, even just for an hour, was enough.

Every minute brought a new lie. A new post. A new photo. And Texas? Texas swallowed it whole.

You try to be quiet, to let it blow over. But once they turn you into a character—a symbol—there’s no controlling the script.

I didn’t ask for this.

Neither did Pixel.

We were names. Credentials. Faces on ID cards. And now we’re memes and slurs in a cyber-nightmare run by faceless trolls with cartoon avatars and a thirst for chaos.

My name was John Benter.

I was VP of Security at Darkspeed Systems.

Now I’m a punchline in a disinformation war, branded something obscene, my kid pulled from school, my front door under surveillance.

God help me, I don’t know if we’ll ever come back from this.

But I’ll never forget how it started—

before the coffee even hit.