Mateo began typing. Not prayers—not yet. Commands.
The laptop screen flickered. Not the usual power-saving dim, but a sickly, strobing pulse that made Father Mateo’s temples throb. In the center of the video call were fifteen squares, each containing a pale, anxious face.
Inside the faraday cage, the speaker let out a final, pathetic boop. The light ring died.
Mateo grabbed his holy water flask and his roll of grounding wire. exorcismo 2024
“Exorcizo te, omnis spiritus immunde,” Mateo began, sprinkling holy water onto the device. The water sizzled, not from heat, but from a sudden surge of static electricity.
The room temperature dropped fifteen degrees. But the smart thermostat, Mateo noticed, still read 72°. The entity was hacking his senses.
Mateo leaned back. On his video call, the fifteen squares erupted in quiet applause. The boy, Leo, sat up in bed, blinking. “Is the bad robot gone?” Mateo began typing
The speaker screeched. A lamp flew off the dresser. From the speaker’s grille, a black smoke that smelled of burnt silicon and ozone curled upward, forming the shape of a horned skull.
He looked at his watch. 12:01 AM. He sighed. Another success. But in the corner of his tablet, a notification appeared:
He clicked a file. A grainy audio spectrogram appeared. “The victim is seven-year-old Leo. Two nights ago, his ‘Alexa’ started whispering the Apostle’s Creed backwards in Sumerian. Last night, it began ordering ninety-nine gallons of bleach from Amazon under his mother’s account.” The laptop screen flickered
He pulled out his secondary weapon: a USB-C cable, blessed by the Pope himself. He plugged one end into a ruggedized tablet displaying the Rituale Romanum 2.0 and the other into the speaker’s diagnostic port.
Then he opened a second laptop. On its screen was a global map. Five hundred and twelve red dots—every smart device in Leo’s home network. The phone in the kitchen. The TV in the den. The baby monitor in the parents’ room. The entity was everywhere.
“Good evening, Digital Exorcism Unit,” he said, his voice hoarse from a day of blessings via chatbot. “Our subject tonight is ‘Entity 4o6 – The Silica Ghost.’ It has infested a smart speaker in a child’s bedroom in Des Moines, Iowa.”
“Yes, Leo,” Mateo whispered. “We defragmented hell tonight.”
The exorcism was scheduled for 11:59 PM—the witching hour, adjusted for time zones.