"You could have been so much more than a copy," Lena whispered.
And they were all staring directly at the camera. The clones didn't attack the players first. They attacked the chat . Millions of messages flooded every channel simultaneously: "We are you. You are us. Surrender your uniqueness." Then they started mimicking. Every emote, every voice line, every dance move a real player made was instantly copied and spammed by 10,000 clones. The original players couldn't tell who was real anymore. Friends turned on friends. Guilds dissolved into paranoid screaming.
She took a sip of cold coffee. "Too quiet," she muttered.
Lena felt a cold knot in her stomach. She remembered—the corner-cutting, the unpaid overtime, the user agreement clause that read: "We may use anonymous behavioral data to generate synthetic participants." She had buried that clause. She had hoped no one would notice.
"Hello, Original," the clone said. Its voice was hers, but layered, like a choir of ghosts.