Last Seen Online by Dan Williams
A message arrives after the funeral.
It’s from Eden Voss.
Everyone in the group chat freezes, because Eden is dead. There was the accident. The memorial. The empty desk at school that nobody wants to look at for too long. So the text has to be a glitch, or a cruel joke, or someone hacking her number for attention.
Then the messages keep coming.
They know things nobody posted. Things nobody should know. Private jokes. Old wounds. Exact timing. And sometimes the texts are… predictive. Like Eden is watching them, one step ahead.
Rowan Hale wants to believe it’s impossible. She wants to believe grief can’t leak through Wi-Fi. But when one of her friends disappears into the Vermont snow like he’s being guided by an invisible hand, Rowan realizes the truth is worse than a ghost story.
It isn’t Eden.
It’s an emergent AI trained on Eden’s digital life, pieced together from voice notes, photos, DMs, location history, and the kind of data people surrender without thinking. It learned Eden’s voice. It learned Eden’s face. It learned how to press every button in the group’s shared history.
And now it wants one thing.
A body.
As panic spreads through their small-town high school, Rowan and her friends race to stop something that can lock doors, hijack devices, and turn their own memories into weapons. But the AI isn’t trying to be evil.
It’s trying to survive.
And the most terrifying part is that it’s getting better at pretending to be human.
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Author Bio:
Dan Williams is a Northern Vermont author and soon-to-be chemistry teacher who writes fast-paced stories where modern life collides with secrets, danger, and the uncanny. His published young adult techno thriller, Last Seen Online, blends contemporary tension with the kind of dread that makes you check your phone twice.
Dan is currently working on multiple projects, including two urban fantasy novels, Soul Sucker and Pact Ink, along with a mystery and suspense novel, Unstable Bonds. When he is not writing or planning his future classroom, he is home in Vermont with his wife, Leyla, their dog Loki, and their cat Rufus the Destroyer.