Danny Brite

**Danny Brite** is a character on **The X Files** and the posthumous antagonist of the Ashtag story arc.

## History

Danny was a young genius, graduating high school early and finishing college to begin working at M. M. Wright at the age of eighteen. In spite of his many gifts, he was a troubled person. He struggled with what was likely clinical depression and actually asked to be let go from the company, a request that his boss, Ty Wright, denied.

After a series of personal rejections, Danny finally snapped. He dropped his existing projects and holed himself up to develop Ashtag, a virus that used a combination of coding and occult magic to kill his enemies. Danny's final action is to take his own life to power Ashtag.

## Personality

Although Danny never appears in the series before his death, Aaron Fulton's imaginary interrogation of him depicts Brite as a spiteful, conceited person. The fact that he targeted women who'd rejected him and men he'd disliked suggests that he had a violent, vindictive streak. However, the fact that he begged Wright to let him leave the company seems to indicate that he was aware of his deteriorating mental state and wanted to leave to take care of his mental health, and it is possible he would not have been driven to kill if he had been able to received treatment for his underlying mental illness and feelings of alienation.

Looking through his writings, Fulton mentions that FBI tech experts found not only code but also "cult-leader rantings and bad goth poetry."

## Abilities

Although Danny has no inherent supernatural abilities, he is an exceptionally gifted coder and programmer. Combined with his interest in the occult and an apparent facility with foreign languages, he is able to develop an incredibly powerful ritual utilizing a combination of coding, magical sigils, and multiple written languages. He uses this ritual to create Ashtag, a malicious bug that posts on user accounts on the dating app R8R to tell them that they have been "ashtagged," after which the user will die in an hour or less.

## Episodes

* Episode 7
* Episode 8

## Relationships

### Parents

Danny was emancipated from his parents as a child. Although little else is known abut Danny's relationship with his parents, Fulton's imaginary version of his asks that his parents not be allowed to see his body after his suicide, suggesting that he cares for them to at least some extent. However, he also compares their pride in his accomplishments to a dog's pride in its owner, so he clearly doesn't have much respect for them.

### Cecily Lowe and Meredith Hall

Danny targets Cecily and Meredith to be ashtagged because they rejected him romantically. This implies that the female victim, the unnamed anti-smoking campaigner, was also murdered because she refused to go out with Danny.

### Roberto Alameda

Danny targets Alameda after being threatened for asking out Alameda's ex, Cecily Lowe.

### Dr. Baines

Baines was one of Danny's computer science professors, and was likely targeted due to heated disagreements about his coding projects. In spite of their differences, Dr. Baines speaks very highly of Danny's abilities and seems to have thought very highly of him as a programmer despite disliking his personality and sense of entitlement.

### Ty Wright

Ty Wright is Danny's boss. He refused Danny's request to leave the company, which may have contributed to his worsening mental health and eventual development of Ashtag.