Clara Voss stepped off the creaking bus, her boots crunching gravel as the autumn wind sliced through her coat. Blackwood, a town buried in the pine-draped hills of Oregon, had not changed in ten years—except for the digital signs flickering above the diner, their neon glow a sharp contrast to the weathered wooden plaques. She adjusted her scarf, the scent of damp earth and woodsmoke clinging to the air, and pulled her phone from her pocket. A notification buzzed: ‘Your website traffic has spiked 300% in 48 hours.’ She frowned. The site belonged to her father’s hardware store, a relic of a bygone era. But the numbers didn’t lie.
The store’s windows were fogged, the shelves lined with tools she hadn’t seen since childhood. Her father, a grizzled man with hands like bark, met her at the door. ‘You’re back,’ he said, his voice a low rumble. ‘Didn’t think you’d come back after what happened.’ Clara hesitated. The memory of the fire that had killed her mother still burned in her mind, but she’d left Blackwood before the investigation could unravel. Now, the town felt like a puzzle with missing pieces.
That night, she pored over the website analytics in her father’s cluttered office. The traffic spikes were irregular, coinciding with mentions of ‘local SEO’ in forums she’d never seen. A name surfaced repeatedly: Marcus Hale, a web developer who’d vanished a year ago. Clara’s fingers hovered over the keyboard. If Marcus had been optimizing the store’s site, why had he disappeared? And why did the traffic patterns mirror the fire’s timeline?
The next morning, she found a faded flyer taped to the store’s door: ‘Free SEO Audit. Call 555-0198.’ The number was scribbled in red ink, the same shade as the bloodstains on her mother’s sweater. She dialed, her pulse quickening. A voice answered, low and raspy. ‘You’re looking for answers, Clara. Meet me at the old mill.’
The mill stood at the edge of town, its iron gates rusted shut. Inside, the air reeked of oil and mildew. A figure emerged from the shadows—Marcus, his face gaunt, eyes sharp. ‘You shouldn’t have called,’ he said. ‘The algorithm’s watching.’ Clara’s breath caught. ‘What algorithm?’ He didn’t answer. Instead, he handed her a USB drive. ‘Inside are the files. But be careful—some data doesn’t stay buried.’
Back at the store, she plugged in the drive. The files were encrypted, but a password hint emerged: ‘The day the fire started.’ She typed in the date, and the screen flickered. A dossier materialized: records of her father’s business, emails between him and Marcus, and a list of keywords—’digital marketing,’ ‘content optimization,’ ‘user experience.’ The final file was a video. Her mother’s face filled the screen, her voice trembling. ‘They used the algorithm to manipulate search results. It’s not just SEO—it’s control.’
The next day, Clara confronted her father. ‘You knew, didn’t you?’ He looked away, his hands shaking. ‘I tried to stop it. But once the algorithm took hold, there was no going back.’ He handed her a key. ‘The server’s in the basement. You have to shut it down before it’s too late.’
The basement was a labyrinth of servers, their hums a low growl. Clara accessed the mainframe, her fingers flying over the keyboard. The algorithm’s code was a tangled web, but she found the trigger: a keyword—’conversion rate optimization.’ She deleted it, and the servers sputtered, their lights dying one by one. Blackwood’s digital signs dimmed, their neon flickering out.
As dawn broke, Clara stood at the town’s edge, the wind carrying the scent of pine and ashes. The fire, the algorithm, the missing pieces—all connected. She didn’t know what came next, but for the first time in a decade, she felt something close to peace.
