Any woman who has ever spurned a man’s advances already knows my story. Rejecting someone you have known and loved is, I think, even more perilous than rejecting a stranger.

Edward and I dated for six months. He was an exceptional man in so many ways, but he soon revealed his contemptible side, and that soured the relationship. Signalled by numerous red flags, I broke up with him.

He couldn’t accept that. His relentless pursuit began. The monstrous man had veiled his true evil for so many months. I think he’d been aching to free it. His vengeance was savage and unyielding. Threatening social media posts. Candid photos he’d taken of me. An emailed schedule of my family’s movements. A restraining order did nothing to stop him.

Nevertheless, after months of fear, the horrendous stalking came to a bitter end. In December, Edward tragically froze to death in his snow-covered, beaten-up, unheated Ford Mustang. He had been waiting outside my house for hours at the blistering height of winter. A neighbour found him in the morning.

Cards on the table. ‘Edward’ wasn’t even his real name, and I’m not exactly sure why I’m protecting his identity, given that he’s dead. I guess I’m still scared of him. Understandable, given that even deathhasn’t halted his heinous hunt.

Edward was a technological wizard. That was his true love. He called himself an innovator. Not a programmer — an artist. During the final month of our relationship, as I started to doubt the man’s ethical compass, he became obsessed with the idea of the human soul. Artificial intelligence bored him. The future, he said, was a mesh of man and machine. Immortality. He believed he could upload the human consciousness to a computer.

He didn’t invent the concept, of course. Mind uploading is a well-documented hypothetical among scientists and philosophers alike. He’s watched too many sci-fi films, I thought. But I suppose science fiction often becomes reality, doesn’t it? Many people think it’s impossible to upload the human consciousness to a computer, but I suppose they only think in terms of computing. Edward’s research went beyond ordinary programming. He was ranting and raving about greycode. An underground programming language of the occult.

His eerie obsession didn’t phase me, in all honesty. I would have endured the plight of the suffering artist, had he not struck me across the face on one particular evening. Abuse was the line. Edward apologised profusely, of course. But the longer I ignored him, the more violent his messages grew.

After his death last month, I thought the torture would cease. It did, for a couple of weeks, but then awful things started happening.

Edward: Nice sunset, Natasha.

That was his comment on a recent Instagram picture of me. My friends flooded my DMs, asking whether I thought Edward’s account had been hacked. Obviously. What an asinine question. The man was dead. It had to be somebody’s perverse prank.

But I’d blocked Edward’s account, which made the whole ordeal quite traumatising for me. I thought somebody had bypassed Instagram’s security. That made me feel vulnerable. I contacted Instagram about it. They apologised, suspended his account, and I thought that was the end of it.

The comments persisted, however. And it wasn’t just happening on Instagram. It was happening on every one of my social accounts. I believed that somebody was tormenting me — maybe one of Edward’s fucked-up relatives who blamed me for his untimely death. I told the police, and they promised to conduct a thorough investigation. Yeah, right.

I was a little shaken, but I wouldn’t say I was scared. The cyber-harassment had stirred some of the old trauma and fear, but I felt resilient. Nobody could scare me as much as Edward, and Edward was dead. I was convinced that it was some idiot with a vile vendetta.

It was what happened a week ago that defied all rational explanation and filled me with fear unlike any I’ve ever experienced.

One night, I was lying in bed, and a ping from my laptop startled me. It was open on my desk, less than a foot from the end of my bed. I certainly hadn’t left it open — I hadn’t left it switched on, for that matter.

And I hadn’t left it on Facebook. Who even uses Facebook anymore? The screen was scrolling by itself. Somebody’s hacked my computer. That was my first thought. The mystery hacker was looking at Edward’s profile. The scrolling stopped, and I found myself staring at an old photo of Edward and me at a party. It was from the early days of our relationship. We looked happy.

“I get it, Ryan,” I murmured, assuming Edward’s brother to be behind the torture. “It’s my fault that he’s dead.”

And then something horrifying happened. The photo moved. To be more specific, Edward moved. I, like everything and everyone else in that picture, remained static. But Edward, suddenly untethered, strolled over to the photographer. He was engulfing every square inch of the full-screen photo. My dead ex-boyfriend was staring through the laptop screen. Staring at me.

“What the fuck is this?” I cried breathlessly.

I wasn’t even sure how it was possible to override Facebook in that way, but I still felt that everything was within the realm of possibility. It’s Ryan. It has to be Ryan. That didn’t explain how he’d doctored an old photograph to include a moving video of Edward. Deepfake technology?

“Hello, Natasha,” Edward said.

His voice was garbled, as if he were swirling in a blender. My chest tightened. Did Edward record himself to torture me from beyond the grave? I wondered.

“You look so beautiful,” His inhuman voice gushed. “I like your new hair. And the dog pyjamas are adorable.”

I yelped quietly. It couldn’t be a pre-recording. How would he have known that I’d change my hairstyle? How could he have known about the new pyjamas? Ryan. It has to be Ryan. He’s watching me through my webcam.

And then something happened which couldn’t be attributed to Ryan.

Edward’s demeanour shifted. As had been the case in our six-month relationship, he swiftly transitioned from a genial gentleman to a vehement villain. His pixellated head tilted to one side, as if he were simply ogling me from a fresh angle. His smile had only changed ever-so-slightly, but it was now brimming with malignancy.

The dead man’s charm was vanishing. So were his pupils, for that matter. Seconds later, all that remained were two white, soulless eyes. It felt as if I were seeing the real Edward at long last. The sub-human thing that lay dormant beneath his scintillating shell.

A thunderous thudding sound sent a shockwave through my body. Horrified, I watched Edward’s hands pressing against the screen of my laptop. As if he were trapped underwater, he continued to push against the surface of the pixellated pool. The screen continued to flex. I screamed in unbridled terror. I finally accepted that it wasn’t Ryan. It wasn’t anything that could be explained by earthly rhyme or reason.

I wasn’t going to wait for my undead abuser. Never again. I scarpered from my bed, beelining for the door of my room. Before I could flee, there was a blinding flash of light from my laptop screen. The door swung shut, and a piercing sound emitted from the speakers of my laptop. It sounded like a ghastly cry of agony.

“You’re not leaving me again,“ Edward commanded.

I rotated to face the digital entity that was slithering free from my laptop screen, which was stretching around him like elasticated rubber. When he finally escaped his digital prison, Edward’s long limbs glitched ghoulishly before me. He adjusted his posture, standing upright and gazing upon me with white, empty eyes. My stalking spectre widened his fiendish Cheshire Cat grin.

“I found a way to live forever,” He whispered. “If you join me, I promise we won’t ever fight again.”

I tirelessly battled to open my bedroom door, which was being held shut by an invisible force. Twisting my head to look at the monstrous creature behind me, I whimpered in horror. Edward slowly stumbled towards me on unsteady, glitching legs, toppling his head to one side. I screeched at the top of my lungs and turned back to face the door, desperately yanking the handle.

That was when I had a dreadful idea.

I darted towards my bedside table, swerving past Edward’s outstretched arms. Picking up a half-full glass of water in one hand, I turned to face my ex-boyfriend. His lips parted, and a pit of blackness was revealed. That same high-pitched wail erupted from the caverns of his demonic body. He knew what I was about to do.

Without a moment’s thought, I launched the glass of water at the digital ghoul that was lumbering towards me. Edward screamed in a robotic cry so deafeningly loud that my ears popped. As the water soaked through his shimmering, translucent skin, he began to spasm manically. His unbound digital form retreated, and I watched the laptop screen reclaim him.

My bedroom door swung open, so I assumed my undead stalker must simply have been too distracted to keep me trapped. I seized my opportunity and fled my flat.

I have been living in my car for the past few days. This is the first time I’ve used technology since the incident. I’m currently in a computer café. There are plenty of people around, and I don’t think Edward would come for me in a public place, but who knows?

I just wanted to post here because I need help. I don’t know where to go or what to do. I have nightmares of being imprisoned in Edward’s eternal digital prison.

I keep seeing flickering screens out of the corner of my eye. Should I get off the grid and avoid technology for the rest of my life? I can’t run. He’s everywhere.

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