She was.
Sia Morozova had been a ghost for twelve years. Once the reigning queen of Russian reality television—known for her brutal honesty on The Glass House and her scandalous win on Dance of the Ice Wolves —she had vanished after a live broadcast went catastrophically wrong. The official story was a studio fire. The internet remembered it differently.
Diablo Face, of course, was not destroyed. You can’t delete a glitch. You can only compress it, wait, and hope it doesn’t decompress at the worst possible moment. Freeze 23 12 15 Sia Siberia Diablo Face Off XXX...
The comments exploded: “Nice deepfake.” “He’s in on it.” “SIA SIBERIA IS WATCHING.”
For six months, she had been scraping metadata from every video that featured Diablo Face. Not the content itself—the laugh tracks, the reaction compilations, the ironic edits set to phonk music—but the gaps . The milliseconds of corrupted frames. The identical geo-tags buried in the code. All of them traced back to one place: the abandoned Sibfilm-17 studio outside Novosibirsk. The same studio where her own career had ended in flames. She was
The image was a grainy screenshot from a forgotten 2000s sitcom. In it, a minor actor—a no-name extra playing a possessed laptop repairman—had pulled a fleeting expression. His eyes were too wide, his smile slightly ajar, as if something else were wearing his skin. The internet, in its infinite hunger, had named him “Diablo Face.” Memes, deepfakes, and conspiracy theories bloomed. Some said the face appeared spontaneously in livestreams. Others claimed that if you saw Diablo Face in your peripheral vision while doomscrolling at 3 a.m., your data would be erased.
One night, a new video went viral on MainFrame (a fictional TikTok successor). A popular streamer known as GlitchPrince was doing a “Siberian Sleepover” stunt—24 hours alone in Sibfilm-17. The chat was manic. Donations poured in. Then, at hour 22, GlitchPrince’s face froze. His eyes did that thing. The Diablo thing. The official story was a studio fire
Sia hacked into the studio’s old security mainframe—laughably easy, as no one had updated the firmware since 2009. What she saw made her blood run colder than the permafrost. GlitchPrince wasn’t acting. He was standing in front of a cracked mirror in the prop room, repeating a loop of dialogue from the original sitcom, frame by frame, his voice a perfect mimicry of the dead extra. And behind him, on a dusty CRT monitor, was a live feed of her weather station.
But that’s a story for another trending topic.