LOS ANGELES— The Online LGBT community and its advocates continued to express outrage this week after 80-year-old actor John Lithgow declined to abandon his role as Dumbledore, prompting many to question why a man born in 1945 continues to behave like someone born in 1945.

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Critics say Lithgow’s failure to meet the moment by tearing up a high-profile paycheck—at the exact age when most Americans are trying to figure out whether they can safely stand up from the couch—has been especially painful, given that he is currently alive and famous.

“We just expected more from him,” said one disappointed activist, referring to an octogenarian who recently complained that Campbell’s split pea soup was too spicy. “Nobody is asking him to be perfect. We just need him to immediately understand the intersectionality of sex and gender, walk away from what may be his final major role, and do it all while vocally supporting the trans community using the exact correct phrasing.”

The problem for the 80-year-old man first arose when he announced he would be playing the transphobic hate figure Albus Dumbledore, then appeared visibly confused, mistakenly believing the role was for a major character from a beloved children’s book.

Accusations continued to mount when it became apparent Lithgow was not up to date on what J.K. Rowling was saying on X, or that X was once Twitter, or that Twitter was not Facebook.

Family members close to the actor have suggested he may be too old to fully grasp the controversy. “We try to explain it to him, and he just abruptly pivots to how nice it is outside, and how it’s not as hot as it was last year.”

When Them magazine asked Lithgow to respond to the widely circulated open letter addressed specifically to him, Lithgow assured the journalist that he checked his mailbox every day and would write back as soon as it arrived.

Sources close to the production say Warner Bros. has already instituted extensive sensitivity training to ease Lithgow into modern terminology, beginning with broad concepts like “identity” and “spectrum” before slowly working up to “trans person,” at which point something reportedly clicked in the actor and he responded, “Oh, you mean a transvestite? I’ve played one of those in the World According to Garp!” causing three consultants to leave the room and one intern to vomit into a tote bag.

“He didn’t understand why that was wrong,” said one shaken member of WB’s Crisis response team, recounting how John Lithgow refused to believe his Oscar-Nominated role of Roberta, once lauded as a caring portrayal of a Trans Woman, could be a bad thing, “He actually misappropriated the role of a Transgender woman right in front of us and said a few lines. And God help me… There was a voice. He did a voice.”

That same day, the entire PR team resigned en masse to avoid any potential blowback.

“He then said he wanted to see what ‘that J.K. woman was all about,’” Said one overwhelmed family member, “Because apparently that’s what you did back then. You got the full picture or something. We all started screaming ‘No!’ but he wouldn’t listen.”

Friends say Lithgow then made the mistake of taking the matter seriously. Rather than simply posting the PR-approved statement denouncing JK Rowling as a transphobic trash-monster and moving on, the actor reportedly printed out J.K. Rowling’s 4,000-word essay on sex and gender in 72-point font.

“It ate up three ink cartridges,” one family member complained. “And he just sat there reading. Taking notes. For hours. Didn’t once look at his phone.”

After finishing, Lithgow reportedly emerged with the sort of measured, partially sympathetic, context-laden opinion only seen in generations unexposed to TikTok.

Analysts are still struggling to parse the nuance.

“He does not agree with J.K. Rowling… but also does not wish she dies in a fiery car crash. He supports the trans community, but also believes that personally enjoying Harry Potter will not contribute to their death. Honestly, none of it makes sense. He might have dementia.”

As of press time, Lithgow still planned to portray Dumbledore and is now reportedly more concerned with taking naps and watching Antiques Roadshow.

I’ve come to fear the words “Netflix Adaptation.”

It so often results in an end product dumped unceremoniously onto the platform. Their shows often feel cheap and uneven, with front-loaded VFX designed to trick you into thinking the budget won’t fall off a cliff by episode two. Even if the series manages to be worth your time, don’t ever get too attached. Cancellation always hangs over it like the sword of Damocles on a hair trigger. And if it does get renewed? Enjoy your 2–3 year wait while the cast visibly ages between episodes.

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Of the many reasons Netflix has left me bitter (and there are many), none stings more than Cowboy Bebop. Seeing the Bebop in live-action has always been a long-time dream of mine, but the end result actually left me begging the streamer to take that dream behind the woodshed and put it out of its misery.

The adaptation attempt carried the usual Netflix work ethos of “We know half the audience will be on their phones, just aim for par,” but fell far short of even that. There was no distinct vision behind its creation, leaving it feeling like a fan-made short film stretched into 10 episodes, too timid to carry a vision beyond “do the anime, but live action.” Overall, so much of the series felt like Cosplay, not Cowboy Bebop. It's no surprise that the director of the original anime, Shinichiro Watanabe, said he turned the show off after the first ten minutes. I wish I had that kind of self-respect.

All of which is to say: watching One Piece stroll into its second season with confidence, ease, and style… stings. A lot.

When the two adaptations are compared, a lot of people have come to the conclusion that the live-action One Piece series is what you get when you have people who respect the source material, unlike the heathens who slopped out Cowboy Bebop, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Somehow, the same team that face-planted Cowboy Bebop came back and knocked One Piece out of the park using basically the same pipeline.

There’s also some extra irony to the Executive Producer of Cowboy Bebop and One Piece, Marty Adelstein, admitting,

“What we learned is the fans are expecting you to be true to the source material. As we read the comments [in response to Cowboy Bebop], it was always, ‘Well, they didn’t do this character the same as this and that’—It really taught us a lot of what we needed to do with this one.”

They clearly walked away learning the exact wrong message from making Bebop, but it was the exact right lesson they needed to make One Piece. Both adaptations take liberties with the source material. They both try to imitate the anime's look. Yet, One Piece works where Cowboy Bebop fails.

So what exactly happened?

After some deep, existential soul-searching and a bottle of whiskey, I landed on an answer:

There’s a paradox at the heart of adapting anime into live-action.

Anime isn’t just a medium. It’s also a genre. And those two things are tangled together in ways that make adaptation uniquely painful.

As a medium, anime isn’t constrained by reality. They don’t have to worry about the feasibility of a shoot location or the price tag of special effects. An anime set on an alien planet could cost just as much as an anime set in high school, where the live-action equivalents would effectively have you comparing Degrassi to James Cameron’s Avatar 3.

But anime is also a genre with its own tropes and style. It can be cartoony, deadly serious, emotionally devastating, surreal, violent, and pornographic and has no issue flipping between modes on a dime. Not being constrained by reality allows its stories to be as outlandish and over-the-top as they want. Chainsaw Man is about a kid who can turn into a chainsaw demon. Hellsing features a holy war between Protestants, Catholics, and Nazi Vampires. Neon Genesis Evangelion starts with high schoolers piloting giant robots, then quickly turns into watching Hideaki Anno animate his own mental breakdown.

While you can perform surgery to swap out the animated heart of How to Train Your Dragon and get a perfectly functional shot-for-shot remake, many attempts at transplanting anime often turn into heart surgery with a complete overhaul of the vascular system as well. You often end up with something compromised, Frankensteined and held together by stitches. American remakes are whitewashed and wildly diverging from the source material. Japanese remakes try to honor the source material, but can only meet the anime’s scope with terrible CGI and rushed storytelling.

Apparently, the answer Tomorrow Studios and Netflix had to this problem was simple: Don’t make it a movie. Leave the genre alone and just make it a live-action anime series instead. Duh.

That actually makes sense for something like One Piece, since the source material is an anime through and through. Its story is ridiculous. Its characters are doubly ridiculous. There is no way in hell you could ever ground it in realism and have it feel like a One Piece adaptation, so they didn’t even try. The end result looks like the bastard child of Pirates of the Caribbean and Lazytown.

And somehow it works. It works extremely well. For season 2, they just doubled down on the absurdity and guess what? It’s even better than season 1.

Fuck me, I guess.

So why did Cowboy Bebop fail?

Cowboy Bebop might be an anime, but it’s a major outlier more influenced by noir and spaghetti westerns than other anime. Its characters and its story are surprisingly grounded. There’s a subtlety to its world-building that leaves much to be inferred. When you strip away the animation of the original, you’re not going to find much anime inside its guts. Bebop is actually science fiction—good science fiction—that just so happened to be animated in Japan.

It’s why Netflix and Tomorrow Studios’ attempt to turn Cowboy Bebop into a live-action anime failed so spectacularly. They confused the original’s medium with its genre.

As counterintuitive as it sounds, straying further from the source material would have honored Cowboy Bebop more than creating a crude imitation. A real adaptation should’ve leaned into the sci-fi, hard. Spike, silently watching the smoke of a lit cigarette set to a crooning trumpet, feels more Spike than any space station kung-fu fight scene. A lazy smirk does more character building than any forced quip by John Cho. The end result should have been something closer to Firefly with the vibes of Blade Runner. A space western with jazz and room to breathe.

The muted colors and grit of The Expanse are a better fit than the oversaturated palette Netflix went with, which tried to ape the anime look.

A rotating set of clothing would have made the Bebop feel lived in. Instead, they stuck with their iconic looks, as if Spike wouldn’t be Spike if he didn’t cosplay like Spike. Jett’s angular facial hair only makes sense with the justification, “Well, it was that way in the anime.”

At the same time, One Piece Season 2 has a surprisingly emotional arc with Dr. Hiriluk, a character who rocks an insane anime-accurate tri-directional mohawk, and you don’t question it because it just fits the world they’re in.

Cowboy Bebop’s set design tried to match the anime’s junkyard retro-futuristic look, but offered no Sci-Fi worthy explanation for why you could find Cuban Resolver on Mars or have Jett standing on a Nixon-era suburban street in the very next scene. It often confused “this was an anime in the 90’s” with design choice, leaving you with a future full of CRT screens and analogue tapes. Worse, most of the retro was in the props and set design, while the set extensions carried all the futuristic sci-fi elements. You could clearly see where the physical set ended and the green screen began in almost every shot.

And then there’s Edward Wong Hau Pepelu Tivrusky IV.

When the live-action Radical Edward made a post-credit appearance in Cowboy Bebop to ham it up on-screen like some theater kid who forgot to take their Adderall, I reached such a low that I actually began to believe in God just so I could have someone to blame.

Ed is by far the most “anime” thing you will find in the original Cowboy Bebop. She’s over-the-top, silly, and the only character that uses those anime chibi expressions. When she isn’t contorted in a yoga pose so she can type with her feet, she’s usually delivering her lines by invading someone’s personal space or doing a handstand.

I always pictured Ed in live action form as a drastically toned-down version of that. She would still be an androgenous teen co-oping the Bebop’s main living area, but her anime quirks would be sanded off. Still on the spectrum with no concept of ‘awkward,’ but she certainly wouldn’t be bouncing off the walls.

When I saw her in the adaptation, I was convinced she was a panicked last-minute addition. That Netflix yoinked some girl from a local AnimeCon cosplaying as Ed and didn’t ask to see her resume. They just dragged her directly from the convention to the set.

Now? Seeing Cowboy Bebop’s cringy final death spasm is almost educational, because everything about that scene, from the over-the-top performance to the hyper-faithful character design, is exactly what works in One Piece. That Ed would fit right into Monky D. Loofy’s crew, but not the Bebop’s.

Faithfulness isn’t about creating a 1:1 copy. It’s about understanding what needs to be preserved and what needs to change. It’s about providing added value to what was in the original, and sometimes that means going in a new direction. Stories like One Piece need translation. Others need transformation, and Cowboy Bebop was clearly in the latter category.

Sigh… maybe in ten years we can try again.

With HBO.

Please God, just make it HBO.

I’m exhausted from this era of nostalgia-sploitation where we refuse to let “The End” be the end. Maybe I’m just bitter from being done dirty too many times, but every reboot seems to run on the same formula now: shuffle the deck and reposition the original lead as the wise mentor for their functional clone who still has two good hips. So when I found out that they killed the Buffy reboot, I’m not mourning the loss. I’m honestly relieved.

These revivals always begin the same way. First comes the triumphant announcement that your favorite franchise is returning. Then comes the quiet clarification that not all the original elements that made you love it in the first place will be involved. With Buffy: New Sunnydale, it increasingly looked like, out of the entire Scooby Gang, the only one definitely returning was Scooby. Or Daphne, I guess, since it’s Sarah Michelle Gellar. Whatever. Somewhere in a conference room, someone clearly decided: “The show is called Buffy. We got Buffy. Good enough.”

Except it isn’t.

To be fair, the people behind the show insisted this wasn’t technically a reboot, but a continuation. A bold new take. The idea was to introduce a new Slayer while positioning Buffy as a mentor figure — you know, like Luke Skywalker guiding Rey. Or Rocky training Adonis Creed. Or Daniel LaRusso becoming the new Mr. Miyagi in Cobra Kai.

The focus was going to be on the next generation of the Scooby Gang. Kind of like how the teens from That ’70s Show eventually became the confused parents in That ’90s Show. Or how Zach Braff was promoted from lovable idiot doctor to lovable idiot teacher in the Scrubs: Med School reboot, or how Zach Braff was promoted from lovable idiot doctor to lovable idiot Chief of Medicine in the recent re-reboot.

They were passing the wooden stake. Like Bill Murray passing the proton pack to Finn Wolfhard. Like Indiana Jones reluctantly handing over the whip to Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

It was a winning, completely original formula that couldn’t possibly fail. The roles were cast. A full pilot was shot. Real effort was clearly made.

And then Hulu watched it.

…and passed.

From the outside, the project looked like a perfect storm of structural problems a fresh coat of paint couldn’t fix. Some characters simply couldn’t come back. Dead actors can’t reprise their roles, and the best we can usually hope for is a tasteful dedication card and a line of dialogue assuring us they’re canonically “living their best life on a farm upstate.” Buffy’s younger sister, Dawn, played by Michelle Trachtenberg, tragically wouldn’t appear in New Sunnydale, which effectively scratches Scrappy Do off the list.

Then there are characters whose actors have become liabilities. In modern revivals, those figures tend to vanish into thin air, leaving behind a strangely shaped hole and real-world discomfort to fill in the gap. On That ’90s Show, Danny Masterson’s crimes were so severe the writers couldn’t even joke about his absence. Personally, I think a recurring gag where everyone just mutters “We don’t talk about Uncle Hyde” would’ve been cathartic, but I also accept that my poor taste is not always a reliable compass.

For Buffy, that dynamic would obviously apply to Xander. Nicholas Brendon’s personal struggles have been well documented, and it’s hard to imagine a major streamer building a revival plan that includes a character tied to multiple arrests and convictions.

(Update: -sigh- And the day after I wrote this, Nicholas Brendon passed away. I don’t want to speculate, and hate to think that Hulu’s cancellation may have been a factor. Honestly, Buffy isn’t Buffy without Xander.)

The creator issue loomed even larger. Joss Whedon’s alleged behavior on the original set was a guarantee he wouldn’t have been allowed within 500 feet of the property. Unfortunately, for as shitty a human being as he is, Whedon is still the mind that made Buffy, and I’m done pretending that the original authors of a story can be replaced and it’ll still be the same thing. It’s not.

For all their flaws, the Star Wars prequels at least feel like the product of a single, coherent vision because George Lucas was at the helm, steering the ship with an ego that only an original creator can have. Without that “Fuck you. This is my story. I can do what I want,” you end up with studio execs handling a franchise and directors being kept on a short leash, worried about meeting fan expectations.

And then there’s the simple reality of time. Buffy is a show about immortal vampires played by very mortal actors. Bringing back characters like Spike or Angel would mean either ignoring the fact that Angel, the eternal 20-something, was now pushing 60, or digitally sanding down the decades like De Niro in The Irishman. Neither option inspires confidence.

So what were we realistically left with? Maybe Willow in a limited cameo. (Alyson Hannigan was never signed on as a recurring role.) Possibly Giles, though positioning Buffy herself as the wise guide would make him narratively redundant.

Most likely, it would have been Buffy and a group of carefully engineered functional equivalents trying very hard to recreate the chemistry of the original Scooby Gang. That’s a hard position to put Buffy’s character in without bringing along a sad, subtle undertone of an aging sorority mom still hanging onto the triumphs of her youth while all her Chi Delt sisters go off to make careers of their own.

And seeing that the new Buffy pilot reportedly underwent rewrites to give Sarah Michelle Gellar a larger presence, it’s safe to say the show was still trying to figure out what it actually was right up to the end. Was it a reboot or a continuation?

My guess is they ended up with a reboot nobody liked.

To their credit, the creatives clearly tried. Hulu ordered a pilot helmed by Oscar-winning director Chloé Zhao. That’s not the kind of swing you take if you’re planning to phone it in. It’s easy to imagine heartless executives in suits axing a beloved property without a second thought. In reality, pilots like this are usually tested, tweaked, and sometimes reshot before a final decision is made. If they still walked away, it suggests something more fundamental wasn’t working.

And given Disney’s well-established enthusiasm for making fresh money off old nostalgia, the bar probably wasn’t sky-high. The show didn’t need to reinvent television. It just needed to somewhat feel like watching an episode of Buffy. If it couldn’t clear that hurdle, do you really want to untie the neat little bow the series finale tied all those years ago?

Personally, I would have leaned into the continuation angle and taken the story somewhere new. It starts with Buffy Summers living out of a van, traveling across the country slaying vampires because it’s the only thing she knows how to do. She’s lost her posh, fashionable-but-sensibly-priced style, and you can tell the off-camera years haven’t been kind to her. Then you introduce a young Slayer who lost her parents to vampires and—boom—now you have Buffy in a maternal role she’s not emotionally prepared for, dealing with a troubled tween who needs protection and guidance.

Keep them on the road. Have them pursued by an army of vampire bikers to keep the tension running. Throw in a scene where Buffy is calling Giles back in London looking for advice, asking if she was ever this bad. The story practically writes itself.

And yes, I basically just described the Buffy version of a story you’ve seen several times before (Logan, The Witcher, The Last of Us, Terminator: Dark Fate, just to name a few). But goddamn it, that kind of story works. What matters is that it’s not trying to give you New Sunnydale. It’s trying to give you something different.

As it stands, they were trying to recreate magic with far too many missing ingredients. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was never just about Buffy. It was a genre-blending ensemble machine powered by fast banter, rich lore, and long emotional arcs, all packaged in a monster-of-the-week structure that barely exists in the modern streaming era.

The original series thrived on the interplay of a beloved group. Yes, the show was called Buffy, but it often felt more like Friends. If you can’t recreate that, don’t even try. With only Sarah Michelle Gellar in the mix, they were essentially promising more of the same, only to risk delivering a full season of Joey.

That’s a loss I’m perfectly willing to accept.

Silicon Valley built these fantastic machines that can seemingly pull any image, song, or film out of thin air, and corporate media has been eyeing that golden goose ever since. At this point, it isn’t a question of if they’ll try to sell those eggs. It’s when. They’ve already started easing them into the diet, with a Marvel Secret Invasion title sequence here, a Fallout recap there, and after-the-fact disclosures about AI accent tweaks and set extensions in The Brutalist. The public reaction has generally been... not great. Every move gets met with scrutiny, shrieking, and a fresh wave of think pieces.

Right now, monetizing AI content mostly happens at the individual level, and it often relies on a quiet kind of deception, convincing people that the work was created by hand with care, not generated via prompt. Take The Velvet Sundown, a Southern rock band that reached one million Spotify listeners before it was revealed they don’t actually exist. People were so focused on the scale of the bamboozle that they missed the real story: Spotify’s response.

They could’ve stood by artists and banned AI-generated music because it’s sucking up potential revenue from real, starving musicians. Instead, they added a checkbox for uploaders who would like to voluntarily identify their songs as machine-generated. That’s it. A voluntary checkbox seems to be the default concession for most platforms. As long as the slop doesn’t desecrate some sacred IP, they’re dead set on keeping AI content on the same playing field as regular content. They’ve sunk too much money into this venture not to try to normalize it.

The major platforms and studios are not investing billions into generative AI because they want to foster creativity. They’re investing because AI promises an infinitely cheap content supply. Skilled labor is expensive. Actors have unions. Writers strike. Artists act like, well, artists.

AI does none of that.

For Disney’s billion-dollar investment in OpenAI to make sense, they eventually have to get something back from the deal that they can actually sell, and from a media corporation’s perspective, the dream scenario is obvious: generate the next Black Keys instead of paying the real Black Keys. Generate prestige drama for pennies on the dollar and skip the expensive, unpredictable chaos of human production.

Then sell it to audiences at the same price.

There’s only one problem: it’s unclear whether consumers will agree to that proposition. I’ve yet to see AI-generated content openly advertised as such come with a price tag.

Look, I’m not one of those “AI is the great Satan” types. I love AI. I’m fascinated by how fast it’s evolving. I firmly believe the problem has always been how people use technology, not the technology itself.

But when it comes to AI-generated creative work, that stuff is worthless.

And I know that’s easy to say right now because we’re drowning in the toxic runoff of the Uncanny Valley. Today’s AI content is weird and hollow, but the improvement curve is insane. Just look at what people now call the “Will Smith Eating Spaghetti Test.” In only three years, we went from surreal nightmare fuel to merely off-putting. It won’t be long before it’s indistinguishable from commercial filmmaking.

But even if tomorrow’s models could generate Oscar-worthy cinematography that gives Emmanuel Lubezki a run for his money, audiences still won’t value that output the same way they value human work.

But What is “Real” Anyway?

It’s a morning ritual of mine to use ElevenLabs text-to-speech to listen to my manuscripts. It helps me step out of a writer’s mindset and just hear the story. Also, having Robo Michael Caine read Bobo the Garden Gnome is objectively hilarious:

The other day, my brother overheard me listening to the sequel to Welcome to the Deep Estate. He said, “It’s going to sound so much funnier with the real narrator.” He was right. Christopher Harbour is genuinely talented. But the phrasing stuck with me.

People instinctively frame the opposite of AI as real, and I don’t think that’s just because “Artificial” is in the name. Something deeper is happening. AI will always feel not real, no matter how real it gets.

If a machine can generate something in seconds that would take a human weeks, using skills that normally take a decade to master, our instinct isn’t to marvel at the machine’s superiority. We immediately discount what it made. It’s not real. It’s AI. It’s slop.

On some level, AI content sounds like a Zen riddle. How do you take a photo without ever touching a camera? What is the sound of a song recorded without a band? AI art has no existence before its generation. The model has no intention beyond following a prompt. It feels like everything is being conjured out of thin air.

Human creative work comes with a life outside of a digital file. You will never see Velvet Sundown in concert. You can’t point to a scene and say, “Tilly Noorwood actually broke her foot when she kicked that orc helmet.” Even if the AI actress could somehow give an Oscar-winning performance, who would accept her award?

The video model? The billionaire who funded it? Or the guy who hit generate?

Certainly not Tilly Noorwood. She’s just a JPEG with a PR team.

AI Will Never Have Its R. Mutt Moment

AI may be incredibly skilled, but skill and creativity are not the same thing. Generative models are trained to follow prompts, optimize outputs, and converge toward what pleases the user. They’re phenomenal at generating variations of things that already exist.

Humans tend to create by doing the opposite. They deviate and often follow the least optimal path. They take risks that might ruin their careers. So much of their end product is flawed, confusing, or unnecessary, until eventually something clicks. Suddenly, Duchamp’s poorly placed urinal with “R. Mutt” on the side becomes the mic-drop moment of the Dada movement.

People crave that kind of novelty. AI, fairly or unfairly, arrives with the stigma of offering only more of the same. That works in small, disposable bites on social media, and maybe for genre readers whose search histories already read like a prompt: “High quality, best-selling, steamy enemies-to-lovers romance between an elf and a centaur.”

The Slot Machine Problem

Suno, the AI music platform, is extraordinary. I love writing lyrics, prompting the style, hitting generate, and getting two fully produced songs thirty seconds later. If I don’t like them, I tweak the prompt and hit generate again. Two more songs appear. Do that twenty-five times, and suddenly you have fifty songs with fifty different melodies, performed by fifty different imaginary bands.

And I end up deleting forty-nine of them.

That disposable, whole-cloth generation undercuts the value of the finished product. Generative AI doesn’t really sketch out ideas. It’s more like a printer powered by a slot machine, and the human labor mostly comes down to pulling the lever and waiting for a jackpot.

At best, anyone trying to take credit for the output starts to look like a stage mom saying, “They wouldn’t even be famous if it weren’t for my guidance.”

It doesn’t matter how much cleanup or editing happens afterward. The default assumption is always that the machine did the heavy lifting. So when someone tries to sell generative media, the first reaction is simple: Why are we paying you for something the machine made?

The second reaction is worse. Why pay at all? I could make this at home.

The Generative Genie Is Out of the Bottle

Imagine having access to today’s MidJourney a decade ago. You could have built an enormously profitable career as an artist with minimal effort. You could have amassed huge followings, sold prints, landed commissions, and had studios lining up for concept work.

Now? Nobody cares. There is no meaningful skill barrier to high-quality work from AI, and that carries an inherent “I could make that” quality.

Things could’ve been very different if Silicon Valley had kept the genie in the bottle and only doled out wishes to the highest corporate bidders. Instead, they handed it out to anyone with a subscription. Even if they hadn’t, open-source models are only about six months behind in capability. And when everyone has a golden goose, that doesn’t mean everyone profits. It just means the gold market is about to collapse.

Studios like Disney and Netflix are clearly salivating over the idea that a ten-cent generation can replace a ten-million-dollar VFX shot. On paper, the math looks irresistible. Spend pennies, save millions. Somewhere on Buena Vista Blvd, an executive is absolutely convincing themselves that this translates directly into $9,999,999.90 more in profit, but it won’t math out that way in reality. Their logic assumes the two shots exist in the same marketplace. They don’t.

A ten-million-dollar spectacle shot is finite precisely because it costs ten million dollars to produce. That limitation creates scarcity. Scarcity creates anticipation. No one went to see Avatar 3 for the story. They went to watch James Cameron burn through half a billion dollars in the most visually stunning way possible.

The ten-cent imitation exists in a separate AI-saturated marketplace of its own making, where jaw-dropping visuals are no longer rare achievements but disposable spectacle that anyone with a subscription can generate. Its content that never quite transcends the suspension of disbelief because AI is still hard-coded in our minds as not real.

And when talent and skill are industrialized, value doesn’t disappear. It migrates. When nothing feels real, people begin to value authenticity. I wouldn’t even be surprised if Lars von Trier’s stripped-down Dogme 95 ethos came back around.1

If anything, the limitations of traditional filmmaking may only add to its appeal. People were drawn to Mad Max: Fury Road because it featured real cars, real stunts, and real explosions. I’m sure that same yearning for authentic spectacle will only intensify over time.

The real power of generative tools, at least right now, lies in personalization rather than monetization. I don’t listen to other people’s AI-generated music on Suno unless I’m hunting for prompt ideas, and they don’t listen to mine. The value lies in creating something for yourself, not in consuming strangers’ machine output.

The moment the technology allows it, I’ll absolutely try to generate long-form video just to see my own stories come to life. I’ve already experimented with a version of that through my AI radio play Some Stick Around, a feature-length ghost story designed to feel cinematic without turning on a screen.

And I give it away for free.

Not because I think it’s worthless, but because I don’t want to profit from the displacement of real voice actors like Christopher Harbour, or my father, Tom Kane, who spent decades building a career in that industry. I grew up watching countless faces light up with the realization that my dad voiced some of their favorite cartoons. You don’t get that when ElevenLabs is the norm.

Which brings me to the real cost of AI content. The one that actually matters.

The Human Cost

A viral tweet recently told a horror story about Amazon forcing thousands of engineers to document their jobs before replacing them with AI.

Is the post true? No. Corporations rarely gut departments in one dramatic event. They do it quietly. Positions go unfilled. Contracts aren’t renewed. Vendors lose clients. Layoffs happen at the edges.

But the story feels true. And that’s enough to fuel outrage.

We’re already seeing a justified social backlash against AI as everyone who isn’t a plumber begins to see the outline of an AI-fueled jobpocalypse. We can’t help but feel on edge every time yet another company rolls out an AI-forward PR release.

Sit through the credits of a Marvel film, and you’re confronted with thousands of names. Infinity War alone listed more than five thousand. Buying a ticket feels, however abstractly, like supporting that vast creative ecosystem. For that same reason, paying for AI media starts to feel like a tacit endorsement of all the people they didn’t hire, and audiences are becoming increasingly conscious of where that money is going.

And this is where reality begins to matter less than the vibes. Behind the Mickey Mouse mask is a faceless multinational corporation, and it’s naive to believe they won’t choose the most sociopathic option. Corporate efficiency and the almighty bottom line dictate that the Disney of the future will keep inching toward a Marvel movie where the credits are shorter than the post-credit scene.

Based on characters by
Stan Lee and Jack Kirby

Executive Producer
Kevin Feige

Prompted by
Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick

Written by
ChatGPT

Filmed, performed, directed, and rendered by
SeedDance 5.0

Post-FX cleanup by
The one guy still working at ILM

No animals were harmed in the making of this motion picture.

Whether or not that ends up being their actual intention is almost beside the point. It’s galling to imagine someone at Disney looking at the credits of Infinity War and wondering whether all those names could eventually be copy-pasted into a war memorial for the fallen VFX industry. As things stand now, every time a corporation releases AI-generated content, it feels like another step toward that future, and you can practically hear a barking laugh coming from some boardroom on a top floor.

That idea alone is enough to push people toward boycotting anything tainted by AI, and that rancor will quickly extend to anyone working on it. Imagine becoming the symbolic face of why so many people lost their livelihoods. Social media’s maximalist rhetoric will turn you into a scab crossing the picket line and betraying all of humanity. A quick paycheck won’t cover the cost of permanently damaging your career.

The pushback is going to come from a very big tent encompassing everyone who currently feels a bit of AI-based job insecurity, which is basically anyone using a computer. It will make your usual toxic fanbase look quaint by comparison.

My hope.

Unlike the Industrial Revolution, where factories turned artisans into factory workers, AI is both the factory and the factory worker. It doesn’t just mechanize labor. It mechanizes the labor force as well. That risks leaving the metaphorical artisans out in the cold, not because they stopped mattering, but because the system suddenly stopped needing them.

On the plus side, that also means the artisans will still exist, shivering and disgruntled as all hell.

Creators are stubborn. They don’t create because it’s efficient. They create because that’s what they do. Literature was arguably hit first by the AI blitzkrieg, and most writers didn’t pivot into prompt engineering or quietly pack it in. They did what writers have always done. They kept writing, neurotically rubbing at the fresh chip on their already chipped shoulders.

If anything, generative AI may end up doing something deeply ironic. By flooding the world with frictionless media, it could restore our appreciation for messy human things. Work with smeared eraser marks and fingerprints dried into the paint. Work that feels like someone risked embarrassment, failure, or obscurity just to make it exist.

Perhaps human-made art becomes the next luxury label. Fresh. Organic. Handcrafted. Human. Something people are willing to pay for, not necessarily because it is better, and not even because it is rarer, but because it feels real in a world increasingly filled with simulacra.

That may be the quiet future of creativity. Not total replacement. Not a clean victory for machines or humans. Just a bifurcation: infinite content on one side, finite intention on the other.

Maybe audiences will still consume AI media. Maybe they’ll enjoy it, and maybe they’ll even learn to pay for it. But when it comes time to spend real money, to signal real taste, to support something they believe actually came from another mind, they will reach for the human work.

If only to escape the slop.

In a stunning geopolitical development, the Islamic Republic of Iran announced it had fully embraced Western demands by surrendering its missiles, dismantling its nuclear program, dissolving its theocracy, holding free multiparty elections, and—perhaps most stunning of all—electing the country’s first female president.

President Narges Mohammadi, the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize recipient famous for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and for promoting human rights and freedom for all, took office and immediately issued a statement declaring that Iran harbored “absolutely zero ill will toward the United States or Israel.”

“We get it,” Mohammadi said. “If we were in your shoes, we’d bomb us too.”

Approximately 14 minutes later, Israeli aircraft were seen bombing the presidential palace.

“I’m honestly confused,” said one exhausted Iranian voter, still holding an I Voted For Democracy sticker while smoke rose behind him. “We did the elections, the human rights stuff, the missile surrender, the whole thing. Mohammadi literally ended her speech by saying Israel had ‘every right to exist. You do you.’ Then—boom. They martyred her. I only pray to Allah she’s up there now teaching a women’s self-defense class to 72 virgins.”

Regional analysts said the events have raised troubling questions about the strategic logic behind decades of pressure on Iran.

“For years the argument was that Iran had to do X, Y, and Z to get with the program,” said one Middle East policy expert. “Iran just got with the program—plus some—in a single afternoon. And the response was… immediate decapitation strikes.”

Witnesses said the brief Iranian president was about to put pen to paper to sign the “Totally Chill About Israel Forever Act” when the explosion occurred. Had the act gone into effect, Iran would have:

• surrendered its remaining uranium stockpile

• deleted the phone numbers of the Houthis and other proxy forces

• agreed to international inspections “basically forever”

• converted the Revolutionary Guard into a co-ed volunteer force

• replaced the national slogan “Death to Israel and America” with “Honestly, We’re Super Chill Now.”

None of it appeared to matter.

Israeli defense officials defended the strike, explaining that a pacifist Iran with a popular female leader vouching undying love for the Jewish homeland could still “develop nuclear weapons within two weeks. Probably.”

“You have to think long term,” said one IDF spokesman. “The problem with functioning democracies is that they still function. If 93 million Iranians have running water, electricity, and a reliable rule of law, that’s 93 million potential avenues to developing a nuclear weapon within two weeks.”

Inside Washington, officials were sending mixed signals, with Trump posting on Truth Social praising the new Iranian leader and saying he expected “great things coming.”

Only minutes later, after Israel announced her death, Trump posted again, taking a victory lap for putting down the president “LIKE A DOG.”

The White House then released a statement reaffirming its backing of Israel, adding—without being prompted- “This has absolutely nothing to do with who is in the Epstein files or what evidence Mossad might have on them. Don’t be stupid.”

At press time, Israeli officials further clarified that the operation was necessary to “prevent Iran from becoming the next Syria by turning it into Syria immediately.”

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Here’s a little secret: Reality is insane.

A death cult led by a box of Kraft mac and cheese. The Bermuda Triangle. Lizard people walking among us. When every conspiracy theory, urban legend, and fever-dream headline is true, someone has to keep it all cataloged, contained, and out of sight. That someone is the Bureau of the Bizarre.

John Doe always thought his paranoid father was crazy, then the crazy showed up on his doorstep with a job offer. Now, he’s a Collector for the Bureau, partnered with Edith Sinner, a metanatural vampire with a murder glare and a past that refuses to stay buried. Their office is The Deep Estate, a liminal space carved out of The Backrooms, where nightmares take shape and reality bends to the collective unconscious. Their coworkers are anything but normal. Carrie is a stab-happy flying pencil. Marybeth is a Victorian doll with serious Devil Daddy issues. And then there is the Murder Clown...

But when John and Edie bump into a conspiracy the Bureau was never meant to see, reality itself is rewritten to frame them for murder. Hunted by their own and pursued through impossible corridors, they have to expose the truth before the Deep Estate’s secrets swallow them whole.

Equal parts cosmic horror and comic absurdity, Welcome to the Deep Estate is what happens when Men in Black stumbles into the Backrooms carrying a copy of Hitchhiker’s Guide.

Welcome to your new nine-to-five. Welcome to the Deep Estate.

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Welcome to the new YOUtopia.

The planet is dying, a mega-corporation controls everything, but at least you don’t have to work another day in your life, not when an Organic AI controls your body every night.

Eric Noble is beginning to realize that nothing makes a Day feel more like a complete waste of space than having all the time in the world. Detective Noble is starting to see the truth that he and the other Nights are nothing more than programmable slaves living inside someone else.

After eight uneasy years of sharing the same body, a chance encounter with an old friend changes everything. Now, Eric’s memory is missing, a woman has been murdered, and if things weren’t bad enough, he’s the prime suspect in his own Night’s homicide investigation.

Two minds, one body, and a society on the knife’s edge, what they do next will determine the fate of both worlds.

Partition: Critical Era is the first installment in Kevin Kane’s sweeping sci-fi mystery series. Prepare to enter a world where humanity and identity are traded in for the worst excesses of techno-capitalism, and the difference between a Brave New World utopia and a 1984 dystopia depends entirely on the time of day.

A while back, I had a full-blown existential crisis inside a Shell station. Under the hum of fluorescents, a tiny TV behind the counter cut to a 4Patriots commercial, and it was the first time I’ve ever seen an AI-made ad in the wild.

Let me repeat that, because the absurdity of it is insane: A company selling doomsday prepper chow ran a spot built by one of the robots currently taking over the world.

In it, Noah gives a TikTok-style tour of his uncanny-valley ark. Everything’s a little too saturated. Noah’s forehead looks airbrushed, and his face drifts between shots like the model can’t decide whether he’s Boromir or The Dude.

And the final shot is a veritable eye-spy of AI hallucination. Noah only has four fingers. The 4Patriots boxes contain “Mærgęr0nie & CheiDRS.” One bird is floating in thin air, and the creature on the right looks like an evolutionary ancestor you’d see at the Smithsonian that would inevitably become donkeys, pigs, and raccoons.

I did the reflexive “wow,” then it hit me: That all-too-common panic of being the ox meeting the farmer’s brand-new tractor.

AI commercials might be hawking buckets of survival beans at 1 a.m. now, but it’ll become the industry standard in a few years.

AI video may never win at long-form filmmaking. Every time I see some flashy action-packed slop showing that Hollywood is “Cooked”, my first question is: Okay, now can you make the AI show those same characters having a simple back-and-forth conversation? Don’t worry, it’s the first thing they teach you how to shoot in film school. It should be easy, right?

Almost immediately, Hollywood becomes less “cooked” and more “cooked Al Dente.”

The Ad industry, though? Oh, they’re cooked.

Let’s start by stating a painfully obvious truth for anyone outside of the Ad Industry, but is complete heresy even to hear if you’re on the inside: No one likes ads. I know you have to believe you’re Andy Warhol, not some guy shilling Campbell’s soup to avoid a full-blown existential crisis, but I’m sorry, it’s true. No one likes ads.

No one is paying to watch your commercial. In fact, many are willing to pay extra just to skip your ad entirely. Watching a commercial is traditionally the price you pay to watch something else.

When it comes to our eyeballs, ads carry all the consent of a park flasher. Marketers know the best kind of audience for a commercial is a captive audience. I’m pretty sure the only thing stopping Charmin from grabbing people off the street and keeping them in a dark basement pit where the Charmin Bears tell them, “It watches the Ad, or it gets the hose again,” is that an agency has yet to it pitch to them as ‘viral guerrilla marketing.’

All this is to say that the bar for commercials is already abysmally low. Nobody likes being sold something, and for those within the Industry, the only palatable quality of an ad campaign is that it at least tries to be memorable.

It also doesn’t hurt that working in the Ad Industry pays well. It’s a solid place to find a middle to upper-middle-class job.

Or at least, it was. The moment that an AI’s pennies-on-the-dollar and speed become a viable and noncontroversial option, the entire independent Ad industry will fall, taking with it all those middle to upper-middle-class jobs.

In terms of a medium, you cannot find a better opportunity for AI video to take over than a commercial. A commercial, at its core, is just a few seconds of screen time that hopefully lingers in your consciousness long enough that you decide to buy something when the opportunity arises, and AI is already capable of creating videos that run only for a few seconds. They only have to be “good enough” to erase an entire production crew’s call sheet.

And that’s what people mean when they say AI is about to “Cook” some industry.

A perfectly normal 30-second spot is expensive to shoot, and that cost climbs fast the second you ask for anything beyond “people talking in a kitchen.” If you shot a Noah’s ark commercial the old way—even the scrappy version—you’re wrangling wardrobe pulls and prop builds, day players and animal elements, a director, DP, AD, a small grip-and-electric crew, script sup, sound, makeup, then off to editorial, color, mix, and FX. Run it on duct tape and favors, and it’ll still coast past five figures.

Now the AI version? It’s one person at a laptop with a stack of prompts, rolling the dice, hitting ‘generate’ until they get the shots they need. That’s it. Maybe you keep some post-production people to edit it together and clean it up, but the prompt monkey could probably handle that, too. With CapCut. On their phone.

Put those two productions side by side and tell me which one is left standing. And how long do you think the old Ad Industry is going to last with all their former clients leaving them on read?

The scariest part is how indirect it all is. Maybe you could argue that basic human decency will stop your local Mom & Pop multinational from axing entire departments outright. But what about the third-party vendors? People get canned every time an ad agency loses a client. The corporation doesn’t have to fire anyone for hundreds of jobs to disappear. They just “go in another direction,” and the bodies pile up somewhere else. Not to mention that many of those same agencies are scrambling to stay relevant by rolling out their own job-cutting AI tools.

Is that depressing? Yes. Is it stoppable? No.

It’s not just doomsday-prepper-chow making AI commercials. We’re already seeing Coca-Cola and Super Bowl commercials bite the AI-generated bullet.

The brutal truth is that the spreadsheet is a wrathful God and it’s already made up its mind. Noah’s ark has already set sail, and the Great Flood of AI Slop is upon us. So what can you do about it?

Maybe you can join the growing social backlash to anything related to AI. That might work at first, at least while you can still single out companies that give in to temptation, not so much when those offending are the majority of the S&P.

You also have to keep in mind that the greatest enemy of any protest movement isn’t the entity being protested; it’s normality, inevitability, and time.

I think back to all the backlash EA received for its early attempts at DLC and loot boxes for Star Wars Battlefront 2. Did the protests work? Yeah, we “won” that fight. And now we all pay for season passes to play the game we already bought. Hell, most modern games make Battlefront 2’s ambitions to print money look quaint.

Maybe you can stand by your principles. Ask “What Would Don Draper Do?” Then argue about taste, craft, and the soul of advertising. I give it about 30 seconds before people start snickering because you’re unironically defending the integrity of a commercial. And that’s just for a room full of people who work in the ad industry.

When consumers draw the line, it won’t be for the sanctity of ads they already don’t like to watch. As long as AI doesn’t taint their viewing experience, it’ll be fine. Which is to say, it won’t be fine. AI is almost certainly coming for their TV time as well, but that only means they’ll have to choose their battles.

Ultimately, the studios are putting all their money on AI reaching a point of normality where the term becomes as interchangeable as CGI (with the unspoken added benefit of completely replacing the thousands who create CGI for a living)

As a copywriter, I was hit by that initial wave of AI innovation. After all, why go through the effort of emailing a copywriter, setting up a call to walk them through the brief, then waiting several days to receive a packet, when you can just copy-paste that brief into ChatGPT and hit Generate? The human is single-use, takes forever, and costs lots of money. The AI only requires a monthly subscription.

Well, I would argue that the LLM lacks quality and originality, but I can already hear the snickering. Again, we’re talking about commercials. Instead, I’ll just focus on the one thought that kept me from having a complete doom spiral:

I eventually pulled myself together, realizing that I could’ve made that dumb Noah’s Ark video myself.

I’m a creative copywriter. My job isn’t just to write words gud, but craft entire concepts. I already have a decade’s worth of experience writing prompts to describe action, tone, blocking, framing, wardrobe, props, and performance, only I called them scripts.

That kind of job doesn’t have to disappear if it learns to mutate. The “Copywriter” just needs to swallow their pride, grow a new organ capable of digesting toxic AI slop, and start answering to “Promptwriter.”

Then, all I have to do is fight off the refugees of an entire fallen industry to be that one prompt monkey sitting at a computer, hitting generate.

At the very least, it’ll give me a few more years before AI comes for that job as well.

WASHINGTON, D.C.— Lawmakers were reportedly left speechless after Hillary Clinton delivered shockingly candid testimony in a closed-door Epstein hearing, allegedly beginning with the words, “Look, I was going to kill him, but the funniest thing happened.”

According to sources present in the room, Clinton calmly described sneaking into the federal detention center the night of Epstein’s death, dressed in a tactical pantsuit, “Something low-profile and feminine, but still powerful.”

“I get to the hallway outside his cell,” Clinton reportedly said, “and who do I bump into, but President Trump.”

The two allegedly froze.

“We sort of did that awkward side-step dance, about why we were there,” Clinton explained. “You know, ‘I’m just visiting a friend in a federal detention center in the dead of night. Please, you go first. No, you. Oh, I insist.’”

Clinton then reportedly shrugged, “Then Donald just came out and said, ‘I take it you’re cleaning up Bill’s mess again?’ And I took a stab and was like, ‘And you’re here to see a man about...”

“The girls.” Trump reportedly answered, “They were all my age, of course.”

The two then allegedly said in unison, “If you add them all up!” and broke into the knowing laugh of a shared inside joke. President Trump then wiped a tear from his eye and said, nodding, “Oh man, there were so many girls—too many girls, really.”

“And you can’t make this stuff up,” Hillary alleges, “We both went in to kill Jeffrey, only to find Bill Gates and Prince Charles already standing over the body! They immediately put their hands up and swore it wasn’t them. But then they saw who we were, and we realized why they were there. And honestly? We all started cracking up.”

Within minutes, additional prominent figures allegedly began trickling into the corridor, all intent on murdering Epstein. “Let’s see, there was Musk, Wexner, Thiel, Sergey, Bannon, Leon Black, Richard Branson, Ehud Barak, Ghislaine—Even Woody made an appearance. It was a full Lolita Island Boys reunion. The whole affair turned into a networking event for mutually assured destruction. People were hugging. Someone popped a bottle of champagne. Bubba was so jealous that he missed out on the ordeal.”

According to the testimony, the group briefly debated attempting to identify who had actually gotten there first. “But after a while,” Hillary reportedly concluded, “we all agreed: Screw it! The problem was solved.”

No member of Congress has yet to comment on the testimony. One congressional aide, speaking off the record, admitted, “I wouldn’t hold your breath on getting anything official. Outside of Woody Allen, every single person Clinton named is a major donor bankrolling both parties.”

Update (10 AM EST): Congress has just released the official transcript of the testimony. It consists of 312 pages of solid black rectangles and a single unredacted line from Clinton, “All I can say is that I didn’t kill him.”

Bobo insisted on posting his own essay, and, well, here it is. Dictated by the gnome himself, recorded and edited by Carrie, with clarification and comments in brackets by me, John Doe. For readers and listeners to Welcome to the Deep Estate, hopefully, you get a chuckle and “that’s SO Bobo” out of this. For everyone else? I’m sorry in advance.

And dear baby “Bob” barging into a bounce house, please take note: The following are the uneducated views and opinions of Bobo, and Bobo alone. Carrie is firmly of the opinion that this article is beneath our editorial standards. I was surprised we even had editorial standards in the first place, then she thwacked me on the head, and I was right there with her on sticking to those editorial standards. But then Bobo got really whiny, and the guy can be insanely emotionally manipulative when he wants something. We inevitably broke, and well, here is the end result..

Look, I’m a severely immobilized guy [Clarification: He’s a garden gnome.]

I’m disabled as fuck. [No, he’s just a lawn ornament.]

A real quatropeligic. [A ceramic lawn ornament.]

And I’ve come to rely on the World Wide Spiderwebs to connect with real people, but bitchin’ on Reddit is only part of havin’ a connection, you know? I don’t like admitting it, but I ain’t ever had a sexy-time partner I could get sick and sweaty with for real, but that don’t make me an Incel, okay? I got exterminating circumstances, understand? And those circumstances ain’t that I’m fugly and no lady is willing to touch my junk. It’s that I got no junk.

Am I a little pissy about that? Sure. But not at the girlies. I love the girlies.

I am a proud gooner, and gooners love OnlyFans thotts cuz they let you be really pervy with them if you give them your money. [Clarification: My money. Bobo keeps stealing my credit cards.]

It’s all done respectfully, of course. Cuz the thott can always block you if you’re being too much of a sleeze or ain’t got no Slack. I think it’s a real societal service they’re doing because all us men are real perverts. [Not all men.] No, really. I mean all men. Even your Grandpa. You don’t know what he’s doing when you ain’t looking, but I’m sure it’d be traumatizing as fuck to find out. I’m talking real Lemon Party shit. And if you don’t know what I’m talking about when I say ‘Lemon Party,’ Google it.

[DON’T GOOGLE IT.]

Them pervin’ it out online is way, way better than them pervin’ it out offline in person, getting all #MeToo with it, okay? Just ask Louis C.K., he knows he shoulda kept it online. That’s why I’m all worried about all this artsy-official robot bullshit tainting my gooning experience. [“Artificial.” He means artificial.]

Now, a lotta the time, you ain’t actually creeping on real girlies in the chats. They’re using an AI chatbot, and it’s stupid obvious. No self-respecting woman is gonna see some faceless dude all up in their DMs waxing poetic and like it. Even if they’re real polite in their waxing,

“Your butthole is a pink rosebud unfurling in the white morning mist.
Your areolas are two bashful blushing ghosts perched on adjacent hills.
And every time you use that clear dildo with the rainbow beads inside,
The look of surprise is like a lover just stabbed you in the heart.
It belongs in a Shakespearean tragedy.
I beg you, let me slip upon your bathwater hemlock.
Love me and let every night be our murder-suicide.

Hell, even the women who got no self-respect are still skeezed out about it.

But the AI Thott bott? They immediately respond with “OMG Thanks, Babe 💓💓💓You really know how to make a girl feel special. 🥰”

Never mind that it’s a false representation on the girlie’s part. It’s dead-tree-mental to the gooner. We gotta feel the shame that comes with waiting a whole-ass day just to get back, “Thanks for the tip!” like we tipped a driver good on DoorDash. Believe me when I say that all that time the gooner is waiting for a reply, he’s just sitting around hittin refresh, guts gettin’ all twisty and a whole lotta ants getting into his pants. Eventually that gooner is gonna feel real stupid for spending hours perfectly crafting that pervert poem.

High-prophetically, of course, I’d never do that. [He’s totally done that and asked me to spell check.]

But for some other gooner with zero Slack? Maybe that shame will make them think before saying to their hot barber, “Hey, I bet your ass would look good under a ring light.”

‘Cuz you can’t spell empathetic, without also kinda feel-in’ pathetic.

(And you can quote me on that, John. No, really, John. You gotta put that in quotes next to my face, John. Use a fancy sheriff font and shit so I look like a real intellectual.)

And now we’re seein’ stage-two of the Artsy-official’s evil master plan.

There’s all these thotts poppin’ up, actin’ like they’re a normie OnlyFans, but really they ain’t real. They’re these Thott Botts and I dunno… How am I supposed to goon on that? I’m shellin’ out clams to see some genuine clam. A.I. got no soul or for-real hole.

And what’s the point of some rando askin’ a girlie to stick her feetsies in a pot of noodles and being real specific that it’d be linguine cooked Al Dante, if there really ain’t no lady gettin’ creeped out on the other side.1 Instead, it’s some other gooner typing into an AI prompt, “Stick her feetsies in some noodles,” and basically sending you Will Smith eatin’ noodles, except it’s a mangled foot with six toes.

The great feel-officer Hobbes once said that without society, the life of a man is “Nasty, Goonish, and short,” and I gotta say, that cat was real smart. [I think he literally means a cat, as in the cat in Calvin & Hobbes] And in Levi's thong, [Leviathan] he came up with this idea of a social media contract. You see, gooners gave up some gooning freedoms and agreed to stop being public pervs if it’d still be cool to goon to thotts at home.

It was a good system. I like that system, but what happens if they ain’t gooning to thotts no more, but Artsy-official thott bots? They’re gonna lose trust in the whole Thott economy, which means they stop tippin’. And seeing that OnlyFans is the only thing proppin’ up the stock market? You better bet your ass there’s gonna be a crash. Things will just keep cum-poundin’ after that. No payin’ 9-to-5s means no money, and no money means no OnlyFans subscribers, and soon the for-real Thotts are out on the street, starvin’. All that’ll be left is the thott botts because robots don’t need to pay rent or eat food.

After that, it’s only a matter of time before the horny hordes descend on the public like Goony Ghengis Khan, wearing trenchcoats and flashing people, askin’ to smell their armpits. They’re gonna install gloryholes everywhere, even in the load-bearin’ walls, and society is literally gonna collapse for reals.

And don’t think I’m just being yellow-dramatic. This is gonna be a bigger threat than global warmin’. Every Gooner should stock up on KY and Kleenex like it was TP during COVID and pray to the great JR “Bob” Dobbs above they’ll be able to ride it out.

In the meantime, I know I for one won’t be gooning to the AI revolution.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Here’s another poorly thought-out thinky-piece from John Doe of Welcome to the Deep Estate. Check it out if you want a giggle.

I joke a lot. Probably more than I should.

Maybe it’s an ADHD thing. I’ll catch myself half-listening to someone talk while another part of my brain is scanning for an opportunity for me to make people think I’m witty.

It’s also probably a coping mechanism. Humor is a strange form of rationalization that lets you walk around the edges of something awful without staring directly into it. The problem is, like most coping mechanisms, it doesn’t come with an off switch. And that can get… complicated when the world starts to feel like a grab bag of death, despair, and headlines you wish were satire.

A few days ago, I cracked a joke on Threads that, admittedly, may have been a bit crass. I’d like to think I have good taste in poor taste, and before posting it, I personally rated it as a solid “Oof.”

Apparently, the joke landed closer to: “You’re a piece of shit for downplaying CHILD RAPE.” The reaction was intense enough that I deleted the post and quietly exited stage left.

The joke itself is not important. It was lazy. Forgettable. The kind of thing you would hear halfway through a Bill Maher monologue while checking your phone.

Basically, I found out Stephen Hawking went to Epstein Island, and you could charitably say I was using humor to rationalize one of the century’s greatest minds having such a base perversion. The revelation hurt because it said just as much about humanity as a whole as it does about Hawking. The man was the pinnacle of intellectual achievement. Now, his legacy lives in horny jail, and I’m half convinced Earth’s entry in the Hitchhiker’s Guide is going to focus entirely on how much we masturbate.

Look, this isn’t a mea culpa.

Show me a hill, and I will die on it, defending my belief that cracking a joke isn’t the same as giving Epstein and friends a molest-one-get-one-free pass on sex trafficking. That’s Pam Bondi. You’re thinking of Pam Bondi.

Instead, this is about a single comment I got:

It stuck with me. Not because the guy is the human equivalent of stepping on a wet mystery towel and feeling it squelch between your toes. But because it perfectly encapsulates why the Internet now feels about as fun as doing deep lunges with a thorny buttplug.

What I said wasn’t a joke. It was a statement. The same way Lenny Bruce’s routine, read aloud in the Supreme Court, was a statement. The same way Biggie Small’s lyrics make him a confessed mass murderer. You can no longer shit post. You can only shit statements.

I don’t know when everything I said online started being logged as a permanent declaration of belief, but goddamnit, I want to opt out. What button do I click to opt out?

And then someone else replied with this little Chipotle-Orwellian nugget:

The idea that you should self-censor before something happens is disturbing. And the worst part is… eventually it worked. After enough screeching, I broke. I deleted the post.

And that didn’t feel great.

Y SO SRS?

From the moment I got my hands on a keyboard, I naturally gravitated towards the global circle-jerk that was unfiltered pre-algorithm internet. It was a place where everyone was venting, nothing was taken seriously, and anything could be chalked up to “for the Lulz.” It was a ridiculous place, full of shit posters, obscure pop culture, edgelords, racists, pedos, ‘can I have cheeseburger memes’, truly viral videos, mystery links that either led to a rickroll, 2 Girls 1 Cup, or traumatizing gore, and trolls.

So many goddamn trolls.

And Trolls were a vital part of the ecosystem. You know how the current deluge of AI has eroded our sense of what is true and what is real to the point that we’re all trapped in a low-grade delirium that threatens to consume us all? Yeah, old school trolls were like that, except for taking the piss out of anything or anyone trying to be taken seriously. They made sure nobody felt too safe pretending they were the main character.

Then something changed

A major part of it was our changing relationship with the web itself.

When the Internet lived on a chonky desktop PC, it was a destination. You had to go online. You sat down, opened a browser, and entered the digital world. When you closed the browser and stood up, you were offline again.

Now, with the World Wide Web in your pocket, you are always online. You are never not online. Even if you go outside and ‘touch grass,’ there’s always going to be a push notification waiting to goose you into another dopamine spiral.

This separation mattered in more ways than one.

Pseudo-anonymity was the norm back then. Who you were online and who you were offline were two completely different things. You weren’t actually interacting with real people online. You were interacting with usernames and pop culture avatars.

For many people, that made the Internet a pressure valve. A place to vent. A place to purge the worst parts of yourself so you could go back into the real world and function like a civilized human. Our screens could act as a rod-iron fence, allowing the chihuahua to snarl like the pit bull they wanted to be, and for the jokester to joke without fear of getting hit with rotten produce.

Then Mark Zuckerberg came around and turned the Internet’s mask into a face tattoo.

When social media evolved into something bigger than an emo kid’s Xanga page blasting Dashboard Confessional, it offered what would become the internet equivalent of the American Dream: with enough likes, even you could become somebody.

Offline, you might be answering emails from a middle manager who forgot why your job exists. Online, you have followers. You could be worth following. Online, we could all be knights slaying dragons. Offline, we’re not even Don Quixote attacking windmills. We’re the Senior Operator of Windmill Data Acquisition.

But to become somebody online, you had to give up anonymity. The great Algorithm demanded to be fed information, and Facebook couldn’t data-mine the anonymous nobody.

And once we became somebody, corporations and advertisers got involved. Advertisers wanted civility because electric toothbrushes don’t sell well next to slurs. Jokes stopped landing when your mom showed up in the comments. And the moment people heard that HR might be snooping on their social media, everyone started cleaning up their act, fast.

But that online vitriol people had never went away. It just stopped being cathartic once platforms figured out how to monetize it.

In their perpetual quest for engagement, social media platforms quietly installed a stadium FanCam in the public town square of the Internet and hired an algorithm to start spotlighting the zaniest characters.

This Algorithm doesn’t care if something is true, fair, or proportional. It cares if people engage with it, and nothing drives engagement like “Look at this. This is wrong. Doesn’t this piss you off?“

The more publicly and aggressively you condemn something, the more the system surfaces you. The more that people see you, the more people agree with you, and the more social credit feel-good is squirted into your veins in the form of likes and retweets.

You end up with an Internet where people don’t just react to bad behavior. They compete to have the hardest, loudest, and knee-jerkiest reaction to bad behavior. The goal shifts from “address the problem” to “be seen addressing the problem.” Where my ADHD-riddeled ass is usually half-listening to a conversation, looking for a place to crowbar in a joke, they're doing the same, just waiting for a reason to start shrieking.

Once that happens, context becomes optional, proportionality disappears completely…

…and a joke becomes a statement. One that usually carries the most outrageous interpretation available.

And you must’ve meant it that way, right? Your name is attached to it. That’s your face next to the words. It’s practically one signature away from being an affidavit.

This kind of environment is not great for a chronically unserious person like me, and it makes me deeply grateful that my nutbag father named me John Doe. Good luck trying to find me IRL.

Hi! John Doe here,

If you’ve cracked open Welcome to the Deep Estate, you know that conspiracy theories are kind of my whole thing. Like, aggressively my thing. And with all the Epstein document chaos bouncing around the internet right now, my brain refuses to shut up about it. Carrie was even kind enough to edit it all so it sounds like a mostly sober, coherent rant.

In 2010, an email between Jeffrey Epstein and Hollywood producer Barry Josephson references Epstein asking Bill Gates, “How do we get rid of poor people as a whole?” and notes that he wants to schedule a call because he’s got some ideas. Now, it would be reasonable to conclude that Barry was just poorly paraphrasing Bill Gates, who is well known for tackling extreme poverty…right?

Oh, you poor, poor, simpleton. No, you would be dead wrong.

Because in another email to Epstein from a redacted sender, whom we can all baselessly assume is Anthony Fauci, it is noted that Bill Gates was running pandemic simulations years before COVID-19. Got chills yet? Good.

That’s right, Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Gates are the masterminds behind infecting the world with COVID-19, killing millions in the name of population control.

Also

Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Gates are the con artists who fooled the world into a lockdown because COVID-19 doesn’t actually exist.

It really depends on which COVID nutbag shows up in your feed. And there are a lot of nutbags in my feed these days.

The massive document dump isn’t just revealing things. It’s letting people custom-build an Epstein that fits whatever narrative they already believe, and it’s got the little Fox Mulder inside my head squinting and murmuring, “Almost as if by design…”

After five minutes on Threads, I feel like I’m going crazy.

Apparently, Jeffrey Epstein is a two-hundred-year-old pedo-adrenochrome vampire formally known as President Andrew Jackson. Also, he’s Banksy or Satoshi Nakamoto, the secretive inventor behind Bitcoin. Jeffrey Epstein is also still alive in Tel-Aviv. And did you know that Jeff Bezos and Epstein groomed Zoran Mamdani as a child? Oh, and see that shredded meat Mick Jagger, Epstein, and Clinton are eating? That’s baby al pastor.

And I swear I only made up one of those allegations. The rest are spreading around the internet like Kuru, the cannibalism related disease, Epstein, and his friends also apparently have.

The wonkiest thing behind all this kooky banana-town jamboree is that the real stories being unearthed in the Epstein files are juicy enough on their own. He’s basically the Forest Gump of “Things that are true, but make you sound insane when you try to explain them.”

I mean, for fuck’s sake, Epstein was actually involved in Iran-Contra.

And while Ol’ Jeff E. isn’t Satoshi, the pedo financier actually had a heavy hand in creating Bitcoin, you know, the hard-to-trace digital currency used by pedophiles. The next time your cousin won’t stop yammering about crypto while sucking on his white gummy disposable vape, go ahead and tell him that 75 percent of Bitcoin’s code was made directly after Epstein’s investments. That will shut him up.

And the nuttiest factoid of all? Epstein also met Christopher Poole, AKA “Moot,” AKA the founder of the internet’s cesspool 4chan. Then, in the very same month the two met, the imageboard dropped the board Politically Incorrect, which would soon become home to QAnon and Pizzagate.

Now, this admittedly is my own crazy conspiracy theory, but let’s sit with this idea for a moment and really think about it:

/Pol/, the birthplace of ‘there is an elite cabal of pedophile adrenochrome vampire lizard people controlling the world,’ was possibly the brainchild of Jeffrey Epstein, a real-life pedophile elite who ran an actual cabal with the richest and most powerful people in the world.

They aren’t vampires. They aren’t eating babies. (They are all Lizard people, but that has nothing to do with this.) No, they were all beneficiaries of Epstein’s homebrewed COINTELPRO infiltration, rumor flooding the nutbags with a widely successful discredit-by-association campaign.

And the end result? Once people associate “elite skullfuckery” with “adrenochrome space cult,” you’ve effectively nuked public credibility for anyone trying to talk about real-world crimes.

The Wild West of the Internet is now just straight-up Westworld. Nobody knows who’s real, who’s fake, or who is actually just three bots in a duster.

What’s disturbing about this tinfoil hat feeding frenzy is that it’s now impossible to gauge its reach, and it’s getting harder to tell what’s real. In the olden days of yore, when your Facebook friends were actually your friends, you could easily spot the crazy bullshit and see where it was coming from.

Now? Every click, every linger, every rage-scroll feeds a machine that just gives you more of whatever emotional poison you engaged with last. It’s all tailored and personalized to you. I genuinely don’t know if the internet is going insane, or if it’s just serving me up a double heaping of crazy. God help those dim normies who don’t see what’s happening.

And now AI has entered the chat.

Bots are serving up bullshit that fits their agenda at alarming speeds, like a fake news articles about Keanu Reeves donating 100K to ICE, when just a day before, it was Millie Bobby Brown supposedly doing the same thing. AI-generated images are circulating and being mixed in with the real content. Did Epstein actually meet MJ? I’d buy it. Is this actually a photo of Stephen Hawking on Lolita Island? Maybe. What about this photo of Jeff E. and Alf? Okay. That can’t be real. Please tell me it’s not real.

What’s worse is that Meta doesn’t seem to give a shit. On Threads, I saw firsthand the dysfunction with a blatantly false post regarding Epstein grooming Mamdani. Because I’m such an upstanding pillar of truthitude, there was a little button asking me to rate a proposed community note. I clicked it, and man, that note? It was beautiful. A perfect short paragraph from a neutral party describing the extent of the bullshit, and linked to a Snopes article about it being bullshit.

I gave it a thumbs up, then received this:

I was dumbfounded.

What differing views do you need on bullshit? Are they waiting for a nuanced take? “Well, Zorhan Mamdani and Epstein did live in NYC around the same time, so it’s only 99.95% bullshit, not complete bullshit.” Is Snopes not good enough to debunk bullshit? Why isn’t this copy-pasted bullshit AI image not getting automatically flagged by some system? They can spot a nipple in a millisecond and blast it out of the water. Pretend it’s a nipple, Meta, and do something about it.

Nope.

A full day later, that post is still up, with 174,000 views. That’s 174,000 people exposed to potentially virulent bullshit… And the supposed vaccine, the community note, remains invisible.

Then again, maybe this is all part of the plan. If you can’t hide the tons of damaging information coming out about the rich and powerful, then don’t even try. Let the internet go wild with it, and don’t correct them when they start spreading the bullshit alongside the truth. Let social media become 4chan, and it will run its own disinformation campaign for you.

Man, we’re just seriously fucked as a species, aren’t we?

John Doe out.

BUT FIRST, A SHAMELESS PLUG

Prologue - All the Hepatituses

So we’re standing inside the Backrooms, a place that comfortably sits outside of reality. Time is a joke here. Space is fluid. And the concept of outside? Does not exist. Pick a direction. North, south, east, west, up, down, even the way out you’re positive was right behind you a second ago. It doesn’t matter. Guess what you’re going to find?

Rooms. Buco rooms.

More specifically, we’re standing outside a Backrooms blood bank.

Carrie, my adventure buddy and number one Number 2 pencil, handles navigation. She hovers nearby, scribbling down a prompt on her legal pad, drafting the blueprint for Liminal Space to manifest. The Backrooms take notes from humanity’s Collective Unconscious, and anyone stuck inside has an outsized influence on what shows up. Usually, that just means the feel around here settles somewhere between ‘fever-dream déjà vu’ and ‘oh shit I think something’s following me,’ because yes, that is also a problem inside the Backrooms. Thankfully, Carrie is pure imagination capped with a pink eraser, and we figured out how to direct that creativity into a completely game-changing Liminal Space hack.

We’re facing a large chalk circle drawn directly onto the wall with an anomalous piece of chalk. I clear my mind and press my palm against it. Carrie finishes the prompt describing our destination with the final line that makes the whole thing work: “There is a chalk circle on the wall.”

In an instant, my palm goes from feeling old wallpaper to feeling nothing but air. I open my eyes and see my wrist clipping cleanly through the wall, which is still… weird. There’s no visual cue. No sci-fi sparks. No magical ripple. It doesn’t glow or hum or do anything cinematic. It just looks like you’re calmly shoving your arm through a solid object. There isn’t even a tingle, and I will never get used to how aggressively low-key it is.

I step into the Backrooms blood bank and look around. “Huh… Okay, then.”

Carrie kept the initial prompt vague, just to see how the Backrooms would handle the baseline concept of a blood bank. Unsurprisingly, it took the idea literally and gave us a bank for blood. There are standing tables with deposit forms and syringes chained to the counters with those annoying “don’t steal our pens” tethers. It even threw in some dialysis ATMs.

It’s cute, but not the vibe I’m looking for. I step back out through the chalk circle with Carrie floating beside me, then sever the connection using a spray bottle and a rag. She taps my shoulder, and I turn around and sigh, already annoyed.

Three slimy, vibrating black horrors stand in the distance, their pearly white Cheshire grins frozen in place by the observer effect.

Smilers.

I unclip my tether and unfurl six feet of graphene wire. The doohickey used to keep me tethered to the Deep Estate before it snapped. Now, it’s a very nasty anti-Smiler weapon most of the Backrooms monsters have learned to avoid.

I blink, and in the split second they’re out of sight, all three jump forward about twenty feet. I scratch my head. “Okay. So either these guys didn’t get the memo, or they’re doing the macho warrior thing.”

I blink again. They jump closer.

“Yeah, definitely the macho warrior thing. And wow. What a team-up.”

From the armor—or complete lack of it—we’ve got a Zulu warrior, a Germanic berserker, and some guy who’s either Aztec or someone who took one hell of a wrong turn during Carnaval. There are a lot of slimy, ornate feathers, and frankly, too much confidence.

Whatever. I whip out the tether, snag Carnaval Guy by the neck, hit the vibrate button, and pull. His head pops off like a champagne cork launched by an oil slick.

I lash sideways, slicing the Zulu warrior clean at the knees, then spin around in a move that feels incredible but probably looks like a child aggressively twirling a ribbon. The graphene wire loops around the berserker’s torso, and I yank. He snaps in half.

I blink, and the three bodies collapse into a meaty, slimy mess.

I yawn and turn back to Carrie. “So. Where were we?”

Carrie alters the prompt for attempt number two.

This time, a gush of blood splashes out of the wall, washing away the chalk, completely breaking the circle. I stare at the pooling mess by my feet, then glance at Carrie and take a guess. “I think the Backrooms heard ‘blood bank’ and just tried to make a bank made out of blood.”

Carrie shrugs, spins in midair, and uses the chalk attached to her body to draw a fresh circle. She tweaks the prompt a few more times, and eventually, the Backrooms starts to get the idea. It begins playing with the concept of a blood bank, generating a series of doctor’s office biomes filled with hanging blood bags and beige linoleum floors. There’s also a lot of those “Thanks for donating!” inspirational posters you usually see at blood drives, and it’s extremely clear that the Backrooms has no idea what the blood is actually for. Children are having blood balloon fights, and old women are doing blood aerobics at the local YMCA.

Nope. None of this will do.

Carrie tries again. This time, when I press my hand against the wall, I focus my thoughts and pour my intentions into it. This is the big day. It needs to be epic. As epic as my feelings for one particular person in my life. I picture the dimples that show a split second before she smiles. The way she looks up at me when she’s close, arms looped around my neck.

My hand slides through the wall.

Well, looking at Edie’s face, it’s safe to say we nailed it. Those dimples appear, then comes the smile.

“Liminal space does not disappoint,” Edie says, staring up at the ten stories of brushed steel towering in front of us. I grin, watching the century-old pseudo-vampire lick her lips in anticipation.

An engineer’s take on a circulatory system frames the vault door. Translucent arteries, filled with blood, branch off at perfect right angles into veins and capillaries that web the walls surrounding us. All of it pulses with a deep red glow, throbbing to a heartbeat I feel in my chest.

“That’s because it’s synced to your heart,” Edie says, with that crooked “you’re dumb, but it’s kind of cute” smirk of hers.

“Oh,” I mutter. “Yeah, that tracks.”

That’s also one of the weird things about her. I can tell whenever she’s thirsty because she becomes hyper-aware of my heartbeat. It makes me feel like I’m in one of those old cartoons where the starving character starts hallucinating that everyone else is a giant drumstick.

We cross the bridge toward the massive vault door, Carrie hovering anxiously between us. She pokes me in the back, and I pull out her legal pad. She scribbles out, “I’m worried this might be the double doors to the Balltic Sea.”

I remember how the ocean-sized ball pit introduced itself by pummeling me in the face and slow my step. “Okay, that’s… an annoyingly valid concern.” I glance at her with a raised eyebrow. “I’m just surprised you’re not using the most obvious reference.”

She turns toward me, clearly not getting it. Carrie, who spent “Bob” knows how long jotting down the coke-fueled notes of the most influential master of horror in modern history. The pencil that claims that during a 1974 stay at the Stanley Hotel, just before the winter closure, she said, and I quote: “This place is kind of creepy, you should totally use it in your next book.”

I give her a hint. “Dude, the elevator scene in The Shining. You know, with all the blood.”

She smacks her eraser on the legal pad and writes, “Oh. Duh.”

I stop walking and turn to Edie. “There’s a very good chance a Backrooms quantity of blood is just waiting to come spilling out of that safe, and we’re standing on a walkway with no railings over a pit that I’m going to assume is bottomless, because we all know how much the Backrooms loves bottomless pits.”

Edie keeps walking, a dangerous glint in her eye. “I’m willing to take that risk just to see this mother crack open.”

Well, she does have a point. It would be pretty ’nanners. “Fine, but if this turns into an epic escape sequence, I’m going to say ‘I told you so,’ and it’s going to sound really bitchy.”

Edie reaches for the vault’s wheel and gives it a spin. Through the clear glass in the vault’s shell, we watch the impossible clockwork engage with dizzying precision; wheels nested inside wheels, from small cogs spinning in a blur to gears the size of a semi-truck buried deeper into the wall, rotating with glacial inevitability. All of it moving in perfect synchronization.

The entire bridge trembles as titanium cylinders thicker than redwood trunks slide back from their housings. The final tumbler drops into place with a boom that’ll echo forever into the void below. With a dramatic flourish, a hammer swings down and pierces the glass heart in the center, and all the blood drains out of the pipes into a funnel with a prolonged gurgle.

Hydraulics hiss as the vault door detaches from the wall and rolls sideways on tracks. I brace for the blood tsunami, but it doesn’t come. The air is hot and humid, smelling like copper. Lights snap on, and the black beyond illuminates into an unbroken curtain of blood raining down directly into a drain. After a few seconds, the curtain parts and reduces to a patter, then a dribble. Cascading rings of light follow, illuminating a circular, elevated swimming pool that makes a 1.5-million-gallon SeaWorld tank look quaint in comparison. It’s filled to the brim with blood, sitting so perfectly still it seems solid. Then a single ripple from somewhere in its depths sends concentric circles expanding to the edge.

Edie approaches a solitary gold spigot. She turns the handle and cups her hands beneath it. Deep red liquid spills into her palms. She brings it to her lips and takes a delicate sip, then turns to face me with rivulets of blood running down her chin. “It’s fresh,” she says with wide eyes. “And warm—like straight-out-of-the-neck warm. I don’t know how, but it is.”

I notice an analog flipboard counter mounted next to a small waterfall, continuously adding new blood to the pool. The number reads 118,798,432,187 and climbing. “I don’t know where I heard this,” I say slowly, “but if you added up every human that ever lived, you’d get something like a hundred and twenty billion.”

Carrie zips over the pool, measuring the diameter with pencil-point precision. She comes back and bobs, her graphite nib scratching calculations in the air before committing them to the pad. Cubic meters converted to liters converted to pints equals… 118.7 billion pints. I stare at the numbers, my mind reeling. “Edie… this pool has exactly one pint of blood from every single human being that has ever lived.”

She turns with an unnervingly bright smile. “Don’t judge me.”

Before I know it, she’s stripping off her clothes and climbing the ladder to a diving board I hadn’t noticed. She leaps off and executes a perfect swan dive into humanity’s collective vital fluids. I take a big step back as a hundred gallons of blood seep over the edge and slap the ground in front of me. Edie surfaces, painted a uniform red, and lets out a gasp that melts into a sultry moan and giggle. She shouts, “Come in!”

“No, I’m good.”

She does a lazy backstroke, gargling, then squirting blood into the air with her mouth. “It’s like swimming in humanity!”

“Yeah, you’re really not selling it.”

She comes to the edge of the pool and croons, “Come on, John.” And there it is, the Look. The Look with a capital L. The staring contest with a vampire who doesn’t need to blink, loaded with a challenge I’m too head-over-heels to ignore. I strip down and dive in. It’s just as gross as you think—warm and thick and kind of hard to swim in. I emerge, gasping.

“You actually did it!” Edie cackles and swims up. She wraps her legs around me, and pulls me close—oh no. No, no, no. Not going there. Stuff is definitely rubbing up against things, and there’s nothing between us, unless you count the 165 billion pints of Dobbs-damn blood. I’m hoping it’s not a literal pint from each human. I don’t know how the hell the Backrooms would source that, but if they did… Man, Gandhi is in here, MLK, Stalin, Mom, Dad, and every single Ebola, AIDS, and syphilis victim.

Edie coos, “What do you think?”

I’m thinking about Tommy Lee and Pam Anderson as I struggle to keep treading through the blood with her added weight. “Pretty sure I now have all the hepatitises, A through Z.”

She kisses me, and I fight the urge to turn away. She’s got blood mouth. It’s so much worse than coffee breath, but I don’t want to ruin the moment.

I pull back and smile because this—this right here—is the part where I finally say the words I’ve wanted to tell her for so damn long. And Edie knows it’s coming. She can feel my heart hammering, practically tapping out my thoughts in rapid Morse code. It comes out soft and stupidly sincere. “Edie, I love—”

She shifts her weight, and I dip under. Liquid pennies fill my mouth, and I reflexively swallow and gag. My legs kick harder, burning to surface. “Edie, I’m kind of struggling here.”

She presses down on my shoulders, submerging me again, and then she holds me there.

Wait… is she?

I try to pull away, but she keeps me in place with that absolute vampire grip of hers.

Yeah. She’s trying to drown me.

Okay, then.

NOTE: Over ten years ago, I wrote a screenplay called “Eve” that could best be described as an animated Sci-fi slapstick comedy written by Douglas Adams. Since it would easily take 50 million dollars to make, and I was a 20-something nobody, I didn’t do anything with the finished draft.

That said, I recently discovered the screenplay at the bottom of my Google Drive, blew the dust off the PDF, and gave it a read, and well… Holy shit.

You guys, Eve aged like a fine wine.

The story is about a society controlled by an all-seeing, all-knowing AI, and it now reads so much as a parody of ChatGPT that I can’t believe I wrote it a decade before ChatGPT existed.

For anyone who cares to read it, I decided to transcribe it into something more digestible than the standard screenplay

I’ll be posting it in chunks over the next few days.

FADE IN:

High above the planet, the world looks orderly.

From orbit, a man walks down a narrow London side street. He’s barely a speck, but a serial number trails him anyway, hovering in the air like a patient ghost. He isn’t special. Everyone in a Mumbai bazaar is tagged the same way, each person wrapped in floating data. Cars flow along the Autobahn like ants on a log, every vehicle dragging a ribbon of information behind it.

In Chicago, a pedestrian strolls down Lincoln Avenue. Blue lines radiate outward from his feet, branching into every possible future path he could take. One of them glows brighter than the rest.

Kids shoot hoops in a driveway. A translucent blue image of the basketball appears seconds ahead of reality, predicting its arc. The ghost-ball bounces off the backboard, ricochets into the street, and collides with the projected outline of a car.

Reality follows the prophecy. The ball rolls into traffic. A kid runs after it. An alert flashes over the approaching car, and it slams to a stop just in time.

The camera pulls farther and farther back, past clouds, past atmosphere, into orbit. Satellites float in a perfect grid around the Earth, hundreds of them carpeting the sky. Each bears the same logo: VIDALIA.

Welcome to the near future, where everything in the world is linked together into a single network. All of it lovingly watched over by—

The title floats into frame:

Something slams into the camera. We spin wildly before stabilizing, revealing a giant METEOR hurtling straight toward Earth.

That’s not good.

Our story properly begins on the floor of a tech expo, packed wall-to-wall with people craning their necks toward competing visions of the future.

A kind British narrator speaks, his voice warm, patient, and omniscient. We’ll call him GOD.

God: Our story begins with two great inventors.

At one modest booth stands NED BUTTON, a lanky ginger in his forties with the earnest energy of a man who truly believes this might be his year. He plays barker to his own invention while his ten-year-old daughter, PENNY, watches proudly from the side. She gives him a thumbs up. He returns it. It’s painfully adorable.

Button presses a button.

A chrome cylinder expands into something like the bastard child of R2-D2 and a car wash. It whirs to life, scrubbing furiously.

God:
Ned Button of Red Button Co. The proud inventor of an appliance so astounding that it should have been a shoe-in for the “greatest thing since sliced bread” award.

Ned presses another button. A loaf of bread pops out.

God:
And not because it also made fresh sliced bread.

Ned turns back to the crowd with a flourish. Ta-dah!

People drift away, unimpressed, drawn instead toward a distant DRUMROLL thundering from the far end of the convention floor. The lights dim.

Ned’s shoulders slump as he begins packing up what remains of his hopes and dreams.

The camera whips across the expo to an elaborate stage bathed in light. A spotlight snaps on, revealing a test subject strapped into a chair, fidgeting nervously.

God:
Unfortunately, his thunder was stolen by this man.

ERIC WORK steps into view. Mid-twenties. Suave. Brilliant. A former child prodigy who never outgrew being told he’s a genius. He positions a sleek, unsettling surgical device behind the ear of a very nervous test subject.

God:
Former child prodigy turned man-child über-genius and founder of Vidalia Enterprises, Eric Work.

Eric pulls the trigger. Grinding. A scream, just offscreen. The crowd gasps. Sexy assistants help the dazed test subject to his feet as Eric checks a tablet, calm as ever.

God:
He’s about to merge two worlds into one.

Eric presses ENTER. A matte steel node embedded behind the subject’s ear glows blue. Suddenly, bios bloom above the crowd. Advertising flickers to life in midair. Text messages orbit the subject’s head like gnats.

A graphic explodes on screen behind Eric: INTERNET + REALITY = THE NODE

The crowd erupts into a standing ovation. Back at his booth, Ned Button quietly zips up a case.

God:
While their respective success and failure seemed writ in stone, outside forces had other plans.

From the shadows, a bald Asian man in his fifties watches Ned with unsettling focus.

The next day, Ned waters his lawn outside a quaint house while Penny kneels nearby, planting flowers. A black van screeches to a stop. Hands grab Ned and haul him inside. The van speeds away. Penny looks around, confused.

God:
And the next day, the two—

Across the city, Eric checks his watch in the pristine lobby of Vidalia. The elevator dings. The doors open. Hands reach out. A chloroform-soaked rag covers his mouth.

God:
—were simultaneously abducted—

The hoods are pulled from their heads, and both men find themselves kneeling inside an ancient MONASTERY.

God:
…by a sect of Tibetan monks.

Rows of monks stare down at them in silence. Ornate doors slowly part, revealing something unexpected beyond.

God:
For decades, the Sherab Monastery has operated in secrecy.

New York Stock Exchange - A Tibetan man in a power suit stands on the floor making money moves. Vidalia Enterprises’ stock climbs sharply.

God:
Manipulating events…

Warehouse Lab - Ned and Penny scramble away from a haywire cleaning robot, tearing the place apart. It corners them, its single glowing eye burning Cylon red.

God:
Smoothing wrinkles…

A Tibetan janitor casually throws a dagger. It knocks over a fern. The robot freezes, then dutifully cleans the mess.

Living Room - It’s Christmas Eve, soot falls from a chimney. A ninja slips down, quickly swapping out a football for a “My First Electronics” kit.

God:
And generally guiding those involved in the right direction.

Young Button (off-screen):
Santa?

The ninja freezes, turning to face a little boy with red hair.

Ninja:
Uh… ho ho ho?

He throws down a smoke bomb and disappears.

Back at the monastery, Work and Button step through the ornate doors together into a vast laboratory packed with advanced equipment.

God:
For it was prophesied that when these two great men came together, they would develop a means to divine the universe; to chit-chat with creation; to speak…

The monks bow as the doors slam shut behind them.

God:
…to God.

CAPTION: ONE YEAR LATER

The doors open again. Button and Work stumble out, eyes wild, hair feral. They have clearly not left the room this entire time.

God:
Unfortunately, that prophecy was proven to be utterly wrong.

Button shakes his head. The monks groan. Work raises a finger: Wait.

God:
But they did come up with the next best thing.

Eric flips a coin into the air. Its edge glows blue as it spins in place, suspended like a held breath.

The world reacts immediately. On televisions everywhere, the story explodes outward.

A reporter stands in the Tibetan prairie, pointing up at chemtrails streaking across the Himalayan sky.

Reporter:
Dozens of rockets are launching out of Chinese airspace, but Beijing is not claiming responsibility—

At a press briefing, Eric Work grins and waves casually at a room full of stunned journalists.

Anchor (V.O.):
This just in. The presumed-dead founder of Vidalia, Eric Work, is in fact alive.

Eric:
Hey, I’ll make this quick. I’m not dead, those rockets are mine, and you’re all going to die in a nuclear holocaust. Just kidding. Trust me, you’re going to love it.

At the United Nations, the Secretary-General gestures furiously at an image of a Vidalia satellite.

Secretary-General:
This satellite can see through walls, is powerful enough to count the hairs on my head and you are telling me you launched thirteen-hundred of them into orbit?

Eric (with a manic grin):
Yes.

Secretary-General:
Why?

Eric:
Everyone, I want you to meet Eve.

Eric flips his Token. It floats in the air, spinning and glowing blue.

Eve:
Hello, world!

In Tokyo, a news anchor addresses the camera.

Japanese Anchor:
The American inventor claims these coins have “artificial omniscience”—

The feed smash-cuts to a man wearing a horse mask.

Horse Mask Guy:
Artificial Omniscience!?

J-Pop idols dressed as schoolgirls cheers and immediately breaks into dance.

J-pop idols:
Ohhh, number one party time!

A commercial plays. Little Red Riding Hood walks through a forest and stops at a fork in the road.

Eve:
The world can be a scary place when you don’t have all the answers.

Red pulls a quarter from behind her ear. We can tell it's a Token by the blue gleam along its edge.

Eve:
But what if a flip of a coin could give you the right answer every time?

Red flips it.

Eve:
Take a left. In point five miles watch out for: Big Bad Wolf.

Little Red:
Thanks, Eve.

Late night. Eric Work sits beside a host holding a Token, eyes bright with temptation.

Late Night Host:
Wait, so I can talk to God with this?

Eric Work:
-Bzzt- You can talk to Eve. God is God. Eve is an all-seeing all-knowing super computer.

Late Night Host:
But this coin—

Eric Work:
-Bzzt-

Late Night Host:
—this Token, it can really tell me anything from the past, present, and future?

Eric wiggles his fingers.

Eric Work:
Just ask it something. Anything.

Late Night Host:
Anything? Alright. My fiancée will enjoy this. Who is my soul mate?

Eric Work:
Wait, no-no-no. Don’t ask her that!

The audience cheers. The host flips the Token. In rapid flashes lasting only a moment, we see the host’s childhood, adventuring through suburbia with his best friend. They grow older, and their relationship becomes something more. The last image we see is that boy kissing the young late-night host and running off, leaving him dazed.

Eve:
Gary Delancy of Yonkers, New Jersey.

Silence as the token hits his desk and rattles. The late-night host stares off with that same dazed look he had all those years ago as the truth hits him all at once.

Late Night Host: (tearing up and smiling)
…Gary?

Sports footage. A referee prepares for a coin toss at a football game.

Sports Caster 1:
Now watch this dumbass from last night’s debacle. This is why you don’t bring a Token to a coin toss!

Referee:
Alright, who’s calling it?

Quarterback:
Heads.

The ref flips the coin, and it floats in the air.

Eve:
The Patriots win 21–17.

The stadium erupts in boos. Fans stand up and leave.

Sports Caster 2:
I’ve never seen a stadium empty out that fast.

Sports Caster 1:
Need we say more, folks? Just like the lady said: The Patriots won 21–17. Thanks, Eve.

Outside the Supreme Court, a crowd cheers beneath signs reading THANKS EVE.

Reporter:
In a controversial 5–4 decision, the Supreme Court has ruled that Tokens may be used in juror deliberation. Thanks, Eve!

A Starbucks commercial.

Narrator:
We’ve always been there with our signature coffee blends when you needed us. Now thanks to Eve—

A customer steps up to the counter.

Customer:
I’ll take a—oh!

The barista hands her a pre-made drink.

Narrator:
We can be there before you even know you need us. What you want before you want it.

Customer:
Thanks Eve.

The late-night host signs off.

Late Night Host:
It’s been a great year, but it’s summer, and that means this show is taking a break and I’m going to go get day-drunk in Fiji with the love of my life!

Gary Delancy, all grown up, blushes in the front row.

Late Night Host:
Get up here Gary!

They kiss.

Gary:
Thanks Eve!

Local news anchors smile earnestly at the camera.

Anchor Jim Juarez:
Today marks the fifteenth anniversary of the Token. Crime is down ninety-five percent, the economy is booming—

Anchor Amy Anderson:
—and I’m two years sober. From all of us in the world: Thanks, Eve!

Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.

An alarm clock buzzes beside a worn Sacajawea Token. A hand flails wildly, grabs the clock, and smashes it against the wall.

TIMOTHY BUCKNER bolts upright in bed, and immediately starts sobbing.

God:
Meet Timothy Buckner. He has issues.

Tim sniffles.

Tim:
Do I have to get out of bed?

He flips his Token. It levitates above his palm.

Eve:
Yes. I’ve already ordered a new alarm clock for you.

Tim catches the Token and slaps it against the Node behind his ear.

Tim:
Th-thanks, Eve.

In the bathroom, Tim brushes his teeth between sobs, toothpaste foaming at the corners of his mouth.

God:
One of which is that sea cucumbers have more spine than he does.

Eve:
Your new alarm clock will arrive in five minutes. You also missed thirty-five percent of your molars.

Tim moans pitifully.

In the kitchen, the doorbell rings. His roommate Mark, a chubby troll of a man, stands in front of the counter shoveling cereal into his mouth while staring into nothing, his Node clearly active.

Tim (O.S.):
Can you get that?

The bell rings again.

Tim (O.S.):
Mark! Mark-Mark-Mark MARK!!!

Mark grunts.

Mark:
Wha?

Tim storms in and opens the door.

Tim:
Never mind.

A delivery drone hands Tim a new “unbreakable” alarm clock.

Tim opens the fridge. It contains nothing but grapefruit. He closes it slowly and strokes a waffle iron on the counter like a beloved pet.

Tim:
Should I have waffles?

Eve:
You should have grapefruit.

Tim:
I think I’m going to have waffles.

Eve:
Alright. Your estimated time of death is now seventy-six years, two months—

Tim:
Okay, okay.

Defeated, Tim eats a grapefruit and drinks his coffee. He spins his Token on the table.

Tim:
How is my day going to be?

Eve:
Calculating…

From Tim’s point of view, the news flickers to life in front of him. A war correspondent stands amid rubble.

Journalist:
The rebels have agreed to a ceasefire with the Bolivian military.

A notification pops up. Firmware Update 6.3 Available. Tim waves it away.

Outside Tim’s POV, Tim and Mark are just staring dully at empty air.

Journalist:
It’s widely speculated that the adoption of Tokens on both sides may be the cause, as casualties have reached exactly a one-to-one ratio.

La Paz - a rebel soldier raises a Boliviano Token.

Rebel:
With God’s currency, we will vanquish the totalitarian oppressors! Eve, should we attack?

He flips the Token.

Eve:
Sí. En tres, dos, uno.

The rebel bursts around a corner. A Bolivian soldier does the same from the opposite direction. They fire in unison. Both promptly die in unison.

Back in Tim’s kitchen:

Journalist:
With the last active war zone coming to an end, it seems like mankind might have finally achieved world peace. Thanks, Eve.

Mark leans back in his chair, nodding appreciatively.

Mark:
Oh yeah, you like that…

Tim squints at him.

Tim:
Mark, are you watching—

Mark:
What? Oh God no. No.

A beat.

Mark:
You wanna see?

Tim:
No—

Mark leans over and taps Tim’s Node.

A loud MOAN fills the room.

Tim recoils violently.

Tim:
That is not how you use mayonnaise!

Mark grins, way too proud. Tim glares. His Token finally stops spinning.

Tim:
I hope I have a good day today.

Eve:
You won’t. You are going to be 43 minutes late to work. You should also bring a pillow.

Tim shoots out of his chair in a panic, grabbing his jacket.

Tim:
No, no, no—wait, why the pillow?

Eve:
Answer not available.

Tim bolts out of the apartment with a pillow tucked under his arm. In the hallway, he fumbles with his jacket.

Tim:
What if I took the metro?

Eve:
You will be 114 minutes late, and you are going to step in dog poop.

Tim opens the door.

Eve:
Now.

He freezes, sighs, then looks down at his shoe as he scrapes it against the concrete steps outside.

Eve:
I have already notified Mr. Higgins of your tardiness and corrected the discrepancy in your upcoming paycheck.

Tim looks skyward.

Tim:
Please God, just strike me down.

Vidalia Tower looms over downtown Los Angeles, an oppressive yet chic monolith of glass and control.

Inside, Eric Work’s office is cavernous, white, and surgically clean. A pyramid of clear plastic cards stands on his desk, as Eric hovers the final piece into place.

The doors burst open. General Bradley storms in with two Marines, already mid-rant.

General Bradley:
What in Jack’s titties are you—

Eric snaps his fingers.

Chk-chk. Two automated turrets drop from the ceiling, instantly locking onto the General’s head.

Eric doesn’t look up.

Eric:
If you slam that door, I will make you a four-star General with one hole in his head.

The General freezes, then carefully closes the door. The turrets retract. Eric finishes placing the final card on the pyramid.

Eric:
Now. What can I help you with?

General Bradley:
This is an act of high treason!

Eric:
Inside voice, please.

General Bradley:
We have intel that you somehow stole the launch codes to every single damn ICBM with an American flag on it.

Eric:
I also have the nukes of Russia, China, Iran, India, Pakistan, and the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea. Glorious leader Kim wasn’t too pleased about me playing with his toys, either.

General Bradley:
I will personally make sure that—

Eric:
Who told you it was me?

General Bradley:
The NSA. They did surveillance and hacked… stuff.

Eric clicks his tongue.

Eric:
Tut, tut, General.

General Bradley:
Alright fine. I asked Eve.

The pyramid collapses instantly, then reassembles itself.

Eric:
EVE!

A blue orb materializes beside him.

Eve:
Yes, sir?

Eric:
Did I say you could tell people about my schemes?

Eve:
No, sir. You also didn’t tell me not to discuss your schemes. Should I send a paramilitary death squad to take care of any discrepancies?

Eric smiles awkwardly at the General.

Eric:
I swear I have no idea what she’s talking about. What I do know is you have two options.

Eric snaps his fingers. One card slides from the pyramid into his hand. A shimmering tarot card: THE TOWER. Data ripples across its surface as Eric studies it.

Eric:
The smart oven at Hop Woo Chinese Take-Out is about to short, causing their Peking duck to stew in its own juices for four hours before their frugal manager discovers it. In eight hours, both the pilot and co-pilot of your private jet will feel the sudden onset of salmonella poisoning, and the last thing you’ll see is them exploding duck and plum sauce out of every orifice as you plummet into the Rocky Mountains.

Eric looks up, smirking.

Eric:
I know it’s a little contrived, General, but it’s just one of a thousand fates at my disposal. I could just make that Bluetooth-enabled heart valve of yours go “pop,” but I’ve always been a fan of theatrics.

General Bradley:
How—

Eric:
—How do I know that? Well, I wouldn’t say I was “God,” but if you described me as “God-like,” it would make me all warm and fuzzy inside.

The General swallows.

General Bradley:
And the second option?

Eric:
You smile and do what I say, and I promise I won’t turn D.C. into a glowing hole in the ground. I just don’t feel like it.

The cubicle labyrinth hums softly. It’s a beige maze of low walls and muted despair. On Tim’s screen, a corporation name pops up. He reads it under his breath and flips his Token.

Eve:
Buy.

Tim presses BUY. Another name appears. He flips again.

Eve:
Sell.

Click. Sell. The process is numbing, mechanical, endlessly repetitive.

God:
Timothy is a stockbroker.

A number labeled MOOLAH METER ticks steadily upward.

God:
It doesn’t bother him that he makes an average of forty-two million dollars a day for other people.

A voice screams nearby.

Drone (O.S.):
I can’t take it anymore! I can’t!

Bang. Tim looks up. No one else reacts.

God:
Nor does the fact that his career has a slightly lower suicide rate than a professional Russian roulette player.

Eve:
Congratulations. A higher position has just opened up.

God:
What bothers him is that this is his destiny.

Eve:
You are now fifty-three percent through your optimal career path.

God:
That his best option is to spend his waking days in a depressed stupor, all the while earning a salary fit for a pig-monger in—

Mr. Higgins appears beside Tim’s cubicle, grinning like a man who came out of the womb in a fitted power suit and has never once known shame.

Higgins:
—Tim-buck-too!

Tim:
No.

Higgins:
Tim-bo Baggins!

Tim:
Please stop.

Higgins leans casually on the cubicle wall.

Higgins:
Timothy-dinky dink. Timothy-dinky doo. I got a survey for you: on a scale of one to ten, how prone are you to thoughts of eating it?

Tim blinks.

Tim:
Excuse me?

Higgins:
Biting the bullet. Committing hari-kari. Calling it quits. You know, self-terminating.

Tim:
Uh… seven.

Higgins:
You’re single, right?

Tim:
Eight.

Higgins:
Right. Do you own a gun?

Tim:
No.

Higgins:
Fill in the blanks: “I want to ___ this office and ___ everyone in it.”

Tim:
“I want to better this office and support everyone in it?” Is everyone taking this?

Higgins:
Nope. Just you.

Tim:
Is this about that open position?

Higgins barks out a laugh.

Higgins:
Oh, Timiney Cricket, you crack me up. You keep that humor.

Later, Tim’s car speeds along the 405 in bumper-to-bumper traffic. It’s over twenty lanes of synchronized motion, a single organism pretending to be transportation. Inside, Tim has his feet on the dashboard, cartoons playing in his vision. The Firmware Update 6.3 notification pops up again.

Tim: Go away!

He glances at the minivan beside him. Two kids wrestle in the backseat while their parents stare blankly into space, Nodes glowing.

Tim:
Eve, give me some good news.

Eve:
You’ve been 1.92% more productive this week.

Tim:
No. Tell me something not related to work.

Eve:
You’re going to meet a girl today.

Tim straightens.

Tim:
Wait, really? Is she cute?

Eve:
That is a subjective question, and I am an asexual program. Rephrase.

Tim:
Alright, is she single?

Eve:
Yes, she is one person.

Tim:
Never mind.

The car smoothly pulls itself to the shoulder.

Eve:
Don’t forget your pillow.

Tim:
Yeah, yeah.

A small crowd has gathered at the curb, waiting patiently. Several of them, for reasons no one questions anymore, are also holding pillows.

Tim comes to a stop at the edge of the highway crosswalk and stares out at the 405. Twenty lanes of traffic tear past at full speed, a living blur of death…

Tim takes it all in and actually yawns.

Standing off to the side is a Luddite, who looks like a homeless Amish man: beard wild, clothes plain, eyes blazing with purpose. A cardboard sign hangs crookedly from his neck: EVE = EVE+L

Luddite:
Take the electronic veil off your eyes and see! You’re all sheep. Eve doesn’t love you. She loves to control you. Join the Luddites!

A crosswalk pop-up appears in Tim’s vision. He steps forward into highway traffic and starts walking.

The cars don’t swerve or slow down. They don’t need to.

A SUV passes behind him where he was half a second ago. A semi-truck roars in front of him in a blur. Tim doesn’t even flinch. Neither do any of the pedestrians walking beside him.

Their timing is perfect. With Eve in control, it always is. Every vehicle had already adjusted its speed miles back. Every lane shift, every micro-acceleration, every gap was calculated long before Tim even reached the curb.

The highway isn’t reacting to him. It’s been expecting him.

The Luddite watches his audience evaporate, growing dejected.

Luddite:
Come on. Haven’t you seen any movie with robots ever? They’re evil!

Something snaps. A voice cuts through the noise.

Construction Worker (O.S.):
Look out!

The Luddite looks up: A STEEL GIRDER drops out of the sky straight toward him.

Luddite:
Poop.

Tim pushes through the bank's glass doors and immediately slows to a stop. He looks around, confused.

Everyone inside is also holding a pillow.

Customers stand in neat lines. Tellers smile calmly. A security guard leans against the wall, pillow tucked under his arm like a lunch bag. No one questions this. No one comments on it. It’s simply what Eve told you to bring.

Tim adjusts his own pillow self-consciously and steps forward.

He bumps into the back of a girl with wild red hair. An envelope slips from her hands and bursts open on the marble floor, spilling dollar bills everywhere.

Time slows.

God:
This is the look a man has when he is struck by an epileptic seizure.

Tim freezes mid-recoil. The girl turns around.

It’s PENNY. All grown up. Freckled, wide-eyed, quirky and adorable. Adorable in a way that makes fuzzy kittens feel jealous.

God:
Unless it’s Timothy…

We flash back to a high school chemistry lab: a teenage Tim stares at a girl lighting a Bunsen burner with the exact same horrified expression.

Lab Partner:
Can you pass that beaker?

Back to scene.

God:
…then it’s just an unfortunate defense mechanism.

Penny snaps her fingers in front of his face. Tim drops to the floor and starts scrambling to pick up the money.

Tim:
I’m so, so sorry.

Penny:
It’s alright. You don’t have to.

Tim:
I’m not stealing your money.

Penny blinks.

Penny:
…I wasn’t implying that you were.

Tim:
I didn’t mean to imply that you were implying that implication. Why do you have so many dollar bills?

Penny:
I just like having singles, alright?

Tim nods too fast.

Tim:
Alright.

Penny:
What?

Tim:
Nothing.

Penny:
I’m not a stripper. I know what it looks like. It’s not.

Tim:
Right. Well, here. Sorry. Again.

He hands the money back and retreats awkwardly to his place in line.

Penny:
Maybe I’m blind and I just like knowing I’m not dropping Benjamins on a Slim Jim.

Tim:
Okay. But—

Penny:
But, what?

Tim:
But you’re not blind.

Penny stares at him.

Penny:
I don’t know why I said that. You know what? You’re a Nosy Nancy.

Before Tim can respond—

BAM! BAM! Three masked bank robbers explode through the front doors.

Robber 1:
Get on the ground, now! NOW!

Penny squeaks and drops to the floor. Everyone else stays standing. People fidget. A woman adjusts her pillow. Someone clears their throat.

BAM! Robber 2 fires a shotgun into the wall.

Robber 1:
You think this is a joke? This is a freakin’ bank heist. For reals!
(almost whining) C’mon, drop to the floor!

Robber 3 leans in and whispers something into Robber 1’s ear. Robber 1 exhales.

Robber 1:
Oh. God damn it. Yes, you can flip ’em.

Dozens of Tokens flip at once.

Eve:
Get on the ground.

Everyone immediately gets on the ground, perfectly compliant.

Penny hisses.

Penny:
Hey. Come here.

Tim looks around, then points to himself.

Penny:
Yes, you.

He scoots closer. She punches him in the arm.

Penny:
You actually think I’m a stripper!

Tim:
No. I don’t think you could even be a. I mean, you’re pretty enough to be one. I would pay for you to—

She punches him again.

Penny:
You’re imagining me naked, aren’t you? You put my imaginary clothes back on right now!

Tim sputters. Penny snorts and laughs.

Robber 1 (O.S.):
SHUT UP!

Penny:
Sorry! (to Tim) Penny.

Tim:
Where?

Penny:
No. I’m Penny. That’s my name. You’re too wound up.

Tim:
Tim. And I’m not too wound up, I’m just naturally taut. Uh, here—

He scoots closer and shares his pillow with her.

God:
For once, Timothy wasn’t worried.

We pull back to see the entire bank floor transformed into an impromptu slumber party. Robbers stand awkwardly over a room full of adults napping obediently.

God:
He didn’t care that fate was flaunting his fragile mortality while chanting “Neener-neener-neener,” because despite the circumstances—

Tim looks into Penny’s eyes. Their faces are very close.

Tim:
I hope this drags into a hostage situation.

God:
—this was the happiest moment of his life.

Two cops stroll casually into the bank.

Cop 1:
It was the weirdest thing. Eve was insistent that I open a savings account right now—

Cop 2 drops his coffee. Everyone freezes.

CUT TO:

Tim and Penny walk side by side outside the bank, both of them wearing the same stupid, disbelieving grin. Behind them, yellow tape flaps lazily in the breeze.

A news crew interviews a shaken woman clutching a pillow like a flotation device.

Victim:
It was horrifying, but Eve knew. She knew… (brandishing the pillow) …and she made sure we were comfortable. Thanks, Eve.

Tim watches, nodding along despite himself.

Tim:
I don’t really know how to ask this, but would you like to—

Penny:
Yes.

Tim blinks.

Tim:
—get a drink or, um, coffee?

Penny:
Yes.

Tim stumbles over himself.

Tim:
Are you sure? In this I mean, you know, a non-committal, but speculative coffee of a romantic—

Penny leans in and kisses him on the cheek.

Penny: Yes.

Tim freezes, processing joy like it’s a software bug.

Tim: —fashion. You really mean yes?

Penny: Yes.

Tim exhales, laughing.

Tim: I like that word.

Penny smiles and starts walking away.

Tim: Wait, what’s your number?

Penny turns back, genuinely amused.

Penny: I don’t have one.

Tim panics.

Tim: Email?

Penny: Nope.

Tim: Then how can I reach you?

Penny gestures vaguely at everything.

Penny: The universe will find a way!

She turns and disappears into the crowd.

God: Timothy was in love. Blissfully stupid love.

Tim stands there smiling, then finally turns and walks off.

The camera shoots upward, through the skyline, through the smog, into the clouds.

It’s stunning.

An angel sits on a fluffy white cloud, watching himself on television. He notices the camera and waves.

Angel: Hey Ma!

God: But while Timothy was in cloud nine—

The camera rockets higher.

Orbit.

Vidalia satellites drift lazily around the Earth, an artificial halo.

God: —the universe was hatching a plot that was about to really muck up his day.

A meteor punches through the satellite array.

WHOOM.

Debris scatters.

God: For in a world where man’s very fate has been streamlined, what happens when something out of this world comes into play?

The meteor hits the atmosphere, igniting, breaking apart until only a basketball-sized rock remains.

From satellite POV, Eve locks onto it.

A warning flashes:

WARNING: FOREIGN VARIABLE. RECALCULATING.

Eve traces the meteor’s projected trajectory down toward Earth.

Ground level. Intercut.

Tim skips happily down the sidewalk, oblivious.

Pedestrians stop. People point upward.

In the sky, the meteor breaks the sound barrier.

BA-BOOM. The sonic boom slams into street level. Chaos erupts. People scream and scatter.

And of course, Timothy doesn’t notice.

From the satellite POV, Eve highlights everyone inside the impact zone: A mother and an infant. A businessman. An old Lady.

CALCULATING… SAFE.

Eve zooms in on Tim. His profile opens.

CALCULATING… COMPROMISED.

TO BE CONTINUED

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The shine wears off, and the glamor of the New World starts to fade.

The Founders mingle with French dignitaries. A ruddy-faced Benjamin Franklin raises his glass and gives a bawdy toast, “Thus, as I am wont to say, ‘Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise. And easy to bed, easy on the eyes, makes a woman lusty, busty, and by God, those thighs!”

Jefferson chokes on his hard cider and gives in to a coughing fit.

Hamilton rubs his brow, “Will somebody please take the cup from the honorable statesman from Philadelphia?”

Alex and Jintao sit in the corner, drinking PBR, unamused. Alex gestures with his bulgogi fajita appetizer. “You do know they all think we’re abominations.”

Jintao rolls his eyes and keeps scrolling through his feed, “Uh-huh.”

“I mean, how enlightened can they be if they all pooped in chamber pots?”

“I’m pretty sure they had outhouses.”

Alex scratches under his powdered wig, “Fine. They pooped in a hole. Why did you want to eat with them again?”

“I don’t know,” Jintao sighs and waves his hand through the candelabra. The candles waver just as much as their flames. “I thought ambiance would be romantic.”

Alex cracks a lop-sided grin and plays with the ring he put on Jin’s finger. “Honey, you’re all the ambiance I need. We could eat out of a dumpster and make it romantic. ”

Jintao gives in, “Okay, fine. If you want to do your space restaurant—”

“—Oh God, yes. Please!—”

“—We can do the freaking space restaurant, but I’m keeping the wig.”

“Deal.” Alex grins and pulls the menu. The hard corners of the colonial ballroom round out, and the Grand damask wallpaper is traded out for a dark, infinite void withered by entropy. Wealthy white landowners warp into a diverse cast of aliens. Ben Franklin’s considerable girth sprouts fifty arms, and he begins applying spray-on deodorant to his numerous pits.

The Restaurant at the End of The Universe proves a far more exciting choice. The Big Bang is spectacular, and the Hooloovoo’s stand-up routine is delightfully blue, leaving Jintao gasping as much as any offended debutant.

After their hour is up, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe fades back into their private booth, and they are left surrounded by white walls, motion tracker markings, and their finished plates. Other patrons sit in their own worlds, powered by their digitally streamlined hallucinations. Alex and Jin put their rented powdered wigs on the table and pay the bill.

Jintao sighs at the notice that the VR Cafe will officially become a ‘Node-friendly environment’ in the following year. ‘Node-friendly’ being what Callosum calls places they pay off to exclude Cortix Disks, Callosum’s main competitor. Most businesses were either ‘Disk-friendly’ or ‘Node-friendly’ these days, all falling victim to the escalating tensions in the consumer neural implant war, with neither side content with just half the market share.

The two return to reality and find themselves on Santa Monica Blvd, wincing at the intense afternoon sun. Alex wobbles and Jin catches him.

Alex steadies himself, “I’m good. I’m good. It’s just my head.”

“You only had two beers.”

Alex rubs the nickel-sized rose gold implant behind his ear, ”No, it’s my Disk. You know how I get when I use it too much.”

“Let’s pump you up full of caffeine and corn syrup. That always helps.” Jintao taps his own carbon steel Disk and drops a pin to the nearest coffee shop. A spotlight appears a few blocks off. He keeps a steadying arm around Alex, and they start walking.

Alex gives Jintao a nudge, “I hear Nodes don’t have this problem.”

“Ugh, don’t even get me started.”

Alex continues needling him to do precisely that, “I just think getting you into the Callosum Appstore will do you some good. You keep telling me you can port nOs apps into Codex, but you can’t port Codex apps into nOs.”

“Okay, sure. But with what money?”

Alex sours at that.

Jin pats him on the arm. “Trust me, if you had to navigate nOS restrictions, you wouldn’t be so gung-ho about switching over. Cortix is so much more coder-friendly—Watch the legs.”

Alex looks down and steps over the Displaced sleeping against the wall. Jintao gives the man a quick “Sorry, I don’t have anything on me” gesture.

The two have their problems just like any other couple. Their fights are often over the things they can’t afford, or the job Alex couldn’t find. He used to call himself a copywriter before the entire industry was outsourced to AI. There was no way to compete with a construct that could create a custom campaign perfectly tailored for every single person at a fraction of the price. The conversation could easily veer down that avenue of a well-worn argument. Instead, they choose to bask in the easy silence that comes with time.

Jintao rests his head on Alex’s shoulder, and Alex smiles, just because. They come to a crosswalk, and Jin gives him a soft and meaningful kiss, making up for the fight they didn’t have. “We’ll get with the times.”

“Yeah,” Alex says and keeps his doubts to himself. ‘The times’ were starting to feel like a game of musical chairs played by a hungry mob.

Jintao looks past him and squints at a message only he can see.

“What?” Alex asks.

Jintao focuses back on him, “Nothing. Just a weird message. Remember Stephan?”

Alex’s eyebrows rise as he digs through ancient history, “Your ex with the cats?”

“Cat tchotchkes.” Jintao corrects, “He just sent me something with the subject line, ‘I love you.’ God knows why.”

Alex guffaws, “Oh, honey, you gotta open it up.”

“Okay, okay,” Jintao says. He taps the air and goes still.

The lights turn green, and the crosswalk guy appears. Jin doesn’t move.

“Well, what does it say?” Alex asks.

Jintao opens his mouth and lets out a guttural noise. He swallows and tries to speak again, but nothing comes out.

“Jin?” Alex’s smile dies. He tries to take Jin’s hand, but it is balled into a white-knuckled fist. Jintao’s whole body is as rigid as a board. What the Hell is going on? Alex removes Jin’s shades and grows scared. Jintao’s pupils lock onto him, wide and trembling. He isn’t blinking at all. Was it a stroke? Alex pats him on the cheek, “Jin, baby, this isn’t funny.”

A message appears from Alex’s brother, Kieran. “I love you” is in the subject line. That was odd. Kerian was usually the type who showed brotherly love by punching Alex in the arm.

“What the fuck?” Alex is about to open the message when Jintao begins to move. he looks over his left shoulder and then slowly turns his head to the right. The movement is smooth, almost mechanical.

“Jin, talk to me,” Alex says as Jin’s gaze passes over him, a tear running down his cheek. Jin continues to sweep the area. Alex shakes Jin’s shoulders, “Baby, come on. Snap out of it!”

A horn blares, and tires shriek, punctuated by a painfully distinct ‘thunk.’ Alex flinches as a driverless SUV stops just feet away from him, leaving the smell of burnt rubber in the air. Its grill is dented and bloody. Alex’s eyes fall on a stray woman’s shoe by his feet, then on the woman herself... trying to pull herself from underneath the SUV.

“Oh, Jesus! Jesus––Fuck!” Alex looks for help, but no one else is nearby. He toggles his disk, dials 9-1–1, and stoops by the woman. Her hair is matted over her face. Her breath is ragged, but otherwise she’s silent. The woman just keeps trying to pull herself out, peeling off a fingernail in the process.

Alex speaks in a rush, “No, don’t move. Help is on its way. What’s your name, Ma’am?”

The woman doesn’t respond. She just keeps wheezing and pawing at the asphalt.

“Ma’am?” Alex turns back to Jin, who hasn’t moved an inch. “Goddamnit, Jin! Snap out of it and help!”

Emergency services aren’t picking up. Why isn’t anyone picking up? Alex is so jacked up on adrenaline that everything seems like it’s down a long hallway. ‘Tunnel vision,’ the rational part of his brain tells him that’s. He has tunnel vision. It also notes that the woman has a Cortix Disk just like him, but Alex doesn’t think anything of it.

Fuck it. Alex grabs the woman by the shoulders and pulls. He turns her over and recoils. The poor girl was dragged several feet, leaving her right side bloody and raw. Alex can see the bulge of a severely broken bone in her leg. Her shirt is pulled down, exposing her chest, and Alex’s first thought is to help her cover up, but the road rash is so bad that he doesn’t want to touch it and cause her any more pain. He takes in the damage, then realizes something else is far more wrong. She isn’t screaming. Why isn’t she screaming? The woman is just lying there with half her face ground off, her eyes locked onto Alex, not making a sound.

She abruptly sits up. Alex snaps out of it. “Oh no. Don’t move. You’re hurt, lady—”

The woman pushes herself to her feet, blood trickling down onto the asphalt in light rain, her eyes bulging, bouncing around in a panic while the rest of her face remains expressionless. She stands on her broken leg. Shattered bones grind against each other. With a crack, her calf rips open, and a jagged white edge pokes through.

Blood splatters against Alex’s cheek. He screams, but the woman doesn’t even wince. She takes a step, putting her total weight onto the leg, further tearing into her flesh. Her entire shin snaps in half with an audible crack, and the woman crumples to the ground.

Alex stumbles back and watches in horror as the woman tries to stand again, unfazed.

A second “I love you” message appears in front of him. This one from Jintao.

Alex spins around in a nightmarish daze. His husband is gone. “Jin? JIN!?”

A horn blares. He spots Jin a block away, walking across the street towards an overpass. Alex runs, quickly closing the distance, but he’s too far away.

Jin grips the overpass railing and begins to climb over.

Alex shoots across the street, ignoring the automated traffic, swerving out of the way. All he sees is his husband pulling his leg over the railing, leaving nothing but air between him and the twenty lanes of 405 traffic speeding below.

Time seems to slow as Alex watches Jin lean forward, letting his weight take him off the edge. Alex reaches out. His fingers graze his husband’s back. He grabs Jintao’s shirt in a fist and pulls. Jin slams against the railing, and Alex grabs hold of him, but Jin’s legs give out, and he almost slips from Alex’s grip. Alex holds on, nearly toppling over the railing along with him, but his foot snags on a bar.

Alex never considered himself a physically strong man nor is he particularly tall. His husband has him beat by five inches and forty pounds, but in that frenzied moment—A moment Alex will look back on and never know how he managed to do what he did—he pulls Jintao’s dead weight up and over the railing. They hit the ground, Alex smashing his head into the sidewalk. Jin’s body crushing his chest into the concrete, knocking the air out of his lungs.

Jintao rolls off Alex, leaving him dazed and wheezing. He immediately goes back to the railing. Alex scrabbles to his feet and rips Jin away once more. They topple back onto the sidewalk. Alex wraps his legs and arms around Jin’s torso and holds him down. Jin wordlessly tries to pull himself to his feet to achieve that single mindless goal, leaving the two wobbling like an upturned tortoise.

“It’s okay, baby. I’m here. I got you.” Alex cranes his neck and looks around. A man is approaching, silhouetted by the sunlight. Alex calls out, “Please help. Something’s wrong with my husband. He keeps trying to--”

The man’s head blocks out the sun, and Alex’s voice catches as he sees the slack face; blank, short of his eyes bouncing around his skull. They stay on him for as long as they can, trembling with a silent cry for help.

“Oh God, I’m sorry.” Alex looks away as the man walks past and starts to climb over the railing just as Jin did. He closes his eyes and focuses on Jin trapped in his embrace. “It’s okay. It’s okay. I got you. I’m not going to let go. I’m not going to let--”

A body hits the pavement below with a dull thump, a screech of tires, and a chaotic symphony of metal and glass.

***

It’s called the Cordyceps Trojan, and it kills thousands.

Named after Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, a fungus that evolved with the specialized ability to control an ant’s nervous system. It compels the insect to climb to the highest point in the area. The fungus then eats its host alive from the inside out and blooms a mushroom out of the ant’s back so it can rain infectious spores down on other victims.

Similarly, the Cordyceps Trojan uses a zero-day exploit in the latest Cortix Disk operating system update to take over the user’s motor control, a function Cortix neglected to mention their neural implants could do. The Trojan then forces the victim to scan the area and enter the tallest building in sight. If the virus can not find a suitable structure, as in Jintao’s case, anything with a significant drop will do. Kieran, Alex’s brother, belly-flops into the deep end of his family’s empty pool. He will survive, but will never walk again without the aid of an assistive exoskeleton. Stephan, Jintao’s ex with the cat tchotchkes, lives on the 27th floor of a high-rise and isn’t as lucky.

Darsh Reddy, the CEO and President of Cortix was patient zero. Before he jumped off the rooftop of ‘Big Brain,’ the main administrative building on Cortix campus, he forwarded the Trojan in a company-wide email telling them all that they are loved. Most of the 12,000 employees on campus open it immediately, since email response time is notoriously monitored, and a delayed response may show poorly on the yearly review. The few that do not open the message are congregated around Big Brain’s east-facing windows. After witnessing Reddy’s body fly past, they are simply too preoccupied to check their inbox.

Within minutes, every infected individual around the 350-acre campus identifies Big Brain as the tallest building and flocks toward it. A silent orderly cue of the possessed forms in the multiple stairwells spanning the length of the forty-five-story building, and the dead began to pile up on the ground floor.

The Cordyceps Trojan is only a semi-sentient virus, capable of usurping control of the user’s body, but it is only able to perform rudimentary functions after that. It knows how to climb stairs, call an elevator, select the top floor, and open doors and windows, but it doesn’t know what to do if something is locked, even if the only thing in the way is a chain or latch. The virus, however, is also designed to be adaptive, counteracting the Codex operating system’s equally responsive security routines. When Cordyceps usurps control, it immediately begins to improve itself, overclocking the victim’s hardware to evolve its code through countless iterations of a generative adversarial network.

The original virus was intended only as a targeted attack on Cortix, but it is likely that whoever designed the Trojan never considered the delay caused by the rooftop traffic jam. After 12 minutes of continuous operation, Cordyceps goes off-script and changes its parameters, spamming a modified second-generation copy of itself to the contact lists of over 12,000 employees.

“I love you,” starts appearing in inboxes worldwide.

Even without the subject line, it’s a profoundly personal attack. By default, Cortix Disk users only receive notifications for messages from people the filters deem as important, causing most victims to be infected by close friends, family, coworkers, and lovers.

Every time the Cordyceps Trojan takes over another victim, it continues to improve itself before sending off the updated version to infect others. By the third generation of the virus, thousands of individual Cordyceps strains have developed the ability to contribute to an ad hoc cloud network of slave devices. The collaboration allows the virus to streamline its improvement and exponentially increase the speed of its evolution. By the fourth generation, the virus is repackaged into hundreds of targeted variants ranging from work-related, ‘URGENT: ACTION NEEDED’ to attaching custom synthesized nude pictures to send to unsuspecting romantic interests. By the fifth generation, the virus creates an nOS variant capable of hopping the neural implant divide into Callosum Nodes. By then, however, Callosum has identified the threat and blocks any communication coming from the Cortix ecosystem.

The response from law enforcement is ineffective. By the time they arrive on Cortix Campus, a wall of corpses surrounds the Big Brain building, and the steady rain of bodies going terminal velocity makes any attempt to clear a path just as suicidal.

Only Callosum’s quick response proves able to stop the virus. They immediately recall their army of CyberSec AI leased to local and federal law enforcement and task the constructs into breaching Cortix’s mainframe. It’s the cyber attack equivalent to storming the beaches of Normandy, and the moment Callosum gains a foothold, they force an overriding shutdown for every single Cortix Disk in operation, stopping the forced death march in its tracks and killing the Cordyceps cloud network.

The victory comes just in time. Later forensic data analysis lead many to believe the Cordyceps Trojan was only minutes away from evolving a method of activating the instant it entered a neural implant. If unchecked, the virus could have led to a mass suicide event numbering in the tens of millions.

Eric Noble trudges in the early pre-dawn glow and sleepily nods along to all of this. He yawns, “So, what? The moral of the story is Don’t buy generic.”

Alex shifts the bucket of cleaning supplies to his other arm. “Don’t you think it’s a little suspicious that Callosum was somehow able to break in and save the day?”

Eric shrugs. “Eh, security clearly wasn’t Cortix’s strong point.”

“But what if Callosum wasn’t the hero at all? What if they were the ones who did it? It was clearly corporate biological warfare.”

“And with a computer virus no less,” Eric adds with a smirk.

Alex goes silent, remembering Jin told him to play nice. Eric is an okay enough guy, but he’s definitely less of a friend and more the painfully heterosexual man your friend married.

A Social notification appeared by his side, @TheQuietPart: Checkmate is coming. Callosum will reveal itself. Alex automatically likes it and reposts it to his own followers.

They step out of the LAPD PubSec cameras’ view and into an alleyway. Eric lights a cigarette and tempts Alex. Neither can afford to get fined for breaking the Public Smoking Ordinance, but Alex gives in.

Eric exhales, “So I take it Jin woke up screaming again? You usually don your tin foil hat when that happens.”

Alex nods. It’s been two years, and that day still comes to them as nightmares, Jin worst of all. He was conscious the entire time. Jin could only watch as he walked towards the edge.

They cut through the alleyway and face the old self-serve car wash. Every slot is taken up by a Displaced rolling up their tent. Eric drops their steam cleaner and moans.

@CordyInception: They will erase you to remake this world in their image.

These days, everything that can be automated is automated. It leaves too many able hands and not enough work. Alex and Eric thought they were onto something with SparClean, the remote car detailing gig. They had yet to invent the machine that could scrape crud out of a dashboard with a toothpick. They simply turned the app on, a car pulled up, they cleaned it, and then the car drove off. Rinse and repeat. Get paid per car. Most importantly, SparClean is the type of gig people call “Good node work.” The app is only available on the Callosum marketplace, meaning you need a Node to use it. That keeps the competition down, and it was a barrier that many people were coming to rely on.

They found early on that if they claimed a self-wash bay for the day, it could significantly cut down their time, which meant more cars and more cash. The only problem was that they weren’t the only ones with the same idea. Each morning became a race to claim the self-wash bay before everyone else, and the race was starting earlier and earlier each day. Then a week ago, SparClean launched a version of the app for tablets, and it was no longer “Good node work.” Almost immediately, the cars available to be detailed was cut in half. This morning, it appeared the Displaced even caught on to their self-wash strategy.

@TheQuietPart: Hate the symptom. Ignore the cause.

“How the Hell are we supposed to compete with fucking Dusters camping out like that?” Eric asks, working himself up into a solid statist rant.

“I don’t know,” Alex sighs, “Let’s just go find a parking spot near a spigot.”

“No, screw this! I’m sick of these transplants swarming over our fucking city! If it’s not some dehydrated Arizonan or inbred Salt Lake polygamist, it’s a goddamn Texan ’fugee fleeing the Lone Star Militia. I’m sick of it!”

Alex just turns around and walks back the way they came.

@DeathByDisk: They’re coming after dissenters. They’re trying to disappear us.

Eric catches up to him. “Sorry, that wasn’t my most shining moment. Don’t tell Dee.” He grabs the post out of the air, “Is this your feed? Christ, what are you tapped into?”

“The tinfoil hat types.” Alex says, “It keeps me sane, knowing I’m not the only one.”

“Said the patient inside the insane asylum,” Eric mutters.

They find a parking spot near a spigot, but are only able to clean one car. The rest of the time was spent waiting for the SparClean algorithm to favor them. Halfway through the day, it’s clear the well has dried up. The laws of Supply and Demand have struck again.

They give up and go to the mall for lunch. Alex lets Eric pull him into a Callosum Clinic showroom. Eric fawns over the specs of new node models, bad mouthing the manufacturers, and espousing brand loyalty as if any of it made a difference. The ancient behemoths of Silicon Valley, Cupertino, and Japan were nothing more than supplicants to Callosum these days.

Alex feigns interest, flicking his eyes towards each employee and the customers waiting in line to upgrade their hardware. He records it all, making sure to focus on each face for a full second. Afterwards, he sends a message to an anonymous account, “Mission complete.”

Back in Alex and Jin’s little studio apartment, they find their respective partners deep in their project. They slip out of their work shoes.

“This moment always reminds me of my Dad,” Eric says, “He’d come home from a long day of work and the first words out of his mouth were, ‘I’m not home. I know I look like I’m home, but I’m not. Give me a minute.’”

Alex chuckles as they don their moonwalkers, and the traction-control ball bearings sync to the sim. They leave the Real and enter the Digi. Alex and Jin’s little shoebox expands out into their cottage in the Grand Cayman Islands. Alex takes a deep breath as the white walls become a sunset along the beach. The view has long felt more like home than home. They walk down to the shore, moving several yards for every inch in the Real, feeling a simulacrum of the extra effort it takes to slog through the sand. They make their way over to where Jintao and Dee sit, surrounded by floating words and chalkboards covered in Neuro script.

Dee brushes a lock of curly red hair out of her face and smiles. She gives Eric a kiss on the lips, passionate enough to grace a romance novel in the discount download bin. Jin offers Alex a smile. It’s warm and genuine, but a cold, contact-free substitute in comparison.

Dee sniffs and points back towards the cottage, “Go shower, you stink.”

“Okay, okay,” Eric says and exits the sim, turning the five-minute walk back into a five-foot trek to the bathroom.

@TheQuietPart: They won’t stop until they have a monopoly over the world

Jin sees the post, and the smile dies.

Alex sets his feed to private and quickly shifts the focus, “How goes the mind reading?”

“‘Therapeutic word cloud.’” Dee corrects, “Calling it ‘mind reading’ raises privacy concerns. And it’s going well.”

“I actually think we might have this Brain Hack Competition in the bag,” Jin says, which is more than hopeful coming from him. Alex is usually the optimist in the relationship. If Jin and Dee make a splash in the Callosum competition, a third-party developer might offer them a job. The challenge these days wasn’t proving you were a good programmer. It’s proving you can code better than a guided AI construct.

“So it’s working?” Alex asks.

“Yep,” Jin says as words begin to float around him in various sizes and colors. ‘Shit’ briefly appears over his head as Jin realizes something. He flips a switch, and all the green words disappear.

“It’s been analyzing our thoughts for four hours now. The results have been… enlightening,” Jin says, his right dimple making an appearance in one of his more obvious tells. It usually means he’s embarrassed but doesn’t want to look embarrassed.

“What do the colors mean?” Alex asks, fixating on the words Jin filtered away. Alex could only catch one before disappearing, “Slipping.”

Jin’s dimple deepens. “It’s color-coded by association. Red are thoughts about life. Purple are thoughts about myself.”

“And the Green are about me? Do you think I’m slipping? In what way?”

“No, it’s just….” Jin swallows a grimace, “Jesus. Let’s not get into it.”

“Like he said. It’s been enlightening.” Dee says, quick to step in, pulling up her own word cloud. “Baby,” “mother,” “father,” and “The future” are most prevalent.

Alex gasps, “Oh my god. Dee, are you pregnant?”

Dee bites her lip and pulls the bathroom door out of the Real. She mutes the ocean to check if Eric has the shower running. “Apparently? It was news to me. At least, I wasn’t aware on a conscious level, but I took a test. And yeah, I am. Don’t tell Eric.”

Alex doesn’t know if he’s more excited for her or for their app. “That’s amazing.”

“You want to give it a shot?” Jin asks.

Alex hesitates, thinking what it may show, then nods. “Sure.”

Jin runs the app, and words begin to surround him. Or at least, they look like words. It’s a rainbow of letters, numbers, and symbols all mixed together into the shape of words.

Jin trades looks with Dee. “What the hell?”

“Shit,” Dee says, “What did we do wrong?”

They can live in paradise most of the day, but as they get ready for bed, they have to take their moonwalkers off and step back into the reality of their studio apartment. It’s uncomfortable and claustrophobic. They become hyper-aware of each other’s breathing, and it’s harder to ignore the conversations they each pinned for later.

As they lower the mattress, Alex finally broaches the topic. “Do you think I’m slipping away from you?”

“No.” Jin sighs and sits down. “Just no.”

“So are you slipping away from me?”

“Come here,” Jin says, patting the bed.

Alex sits, and Jin kisses him. It’s long, deliberate, with the promise of more folded into it. Alex can’t tell if it’s an answer or a deflection, but he takes it anyway. He always does. He lets Jin lead, reads every small hesitation, and pulls back the second he feels tension. He sticks to what he knows Jin is comfortable with, careful not to surprise him, careful not to want too much or let him feel smothered.

The therapist once called Jin “a survivor of rape, in some ways,” and it was the truth of it. The Cordyceps Trojan forced itself into Jin’s body, rewiring him from the inside while Alex stood there helpless, watching the person he loved get taken over inch by inch, neuron by neuron, pulled and pushed to the very edge.

That memory lingers now. It always lingers. Heavy as the humidity trapped inside their small confines. It sits at the foot of the bed like something alive, patiently waiting for a misstep, threatening to clear its throat and ruin the intimacy. They work around it, eyes closed, hands moving through shuddered breaths, pretending the shadow isn’t there. It’s the closest thing they have to peace. Some nights, that’s enough.

Other nights, it isn’t.

There’s silence, then a single sob. Alex doesn’t hug or hold Jin. Making him feel constricted would only make it worse. Instead, he lies beside him, stroking his back.

Jin doesn’t apologize. He stopped doing that long ago. An apology implies that something can be fixed.

“Wake up.”

Alex rubs his eyes. His node syncs with the sim, and he’s taken back to the beachside cottage. A message waiting for him. ‘I’m outside.’ Alex sits up and looks out the window. A shadow stands against the moonlit sky. He turns to check if Jin is still asleep. He is.

Alex stands and starts recording a POV, finding some comfort in at least having a record of whatever the hell these weird rendezvous were. He slips on his moonwalkers and turns on the patio light. The shadow remains a void cut out of his surroundings, one Alex has never been able to look at for too long. Looking at the shadow was like staring at an optical illusion, and it leaves his brain trying to make sense of the elephant with four legs and five connected feet.

Alex walks outside. A foraging crab scuttles off the deck. The high tide crashes against the rocks beneath them.

“Were you noticed?” The shadow asks.

“No,” Alex says and hands over several video files, including the one he recorded inside the Callosum Clinic. He checks on Jin through the window. “And a little warning next time.”

“I have a new task for you,” the shadow says.

“Hold on. You still haven’t explained the last task. I don’t even know why you’re here.”

“I’m here because you want the truth, and I need your help. Too many contacts have been burned. I can’t trust this to someone who might be on their radar.”

Alex tries to protest, but the shadow stops him, “No. Just listen. They’re trying to trace my connection. We don’t have time. All I can say is that I work on the inside, and I have evidence: proof that Callosum created Cordyceps and that their attack on Cortix is just the beginning, but it needs to be delivered to the right hands through an intermediary. Can you do that?”

Alex nods, “Yeah—Yes. Of course. I’ll help.”

“Good. Then it’s time we meet IRL.” The shadow conjures up a card with an address. “Be here. Three o’clock tomorrow.”

“Alex?”

The shadow abruptly disappears. Alex spins and faces Jin.

Jin doesn’t take the news well. “You’ve been casing clinics for this guy for months, and you don’t even know why!”

Alex pulls out the POV he recoded of the shadow, “I’m about to find out. I swear I was going to let you in, once I did.”

“You could be aiding and abetting a Luddite bomber for all you know.”

“He’s not a terrorist. Jin, just listen—”

“No, you listen. This obsession isn’t healthy. You need to let it go. Your entire life has become wrapped up in these insane conspiracy theories.”

“They’re not insane. Do you know what’s insane? Not being able to take you anywhere that has a railing. There’s a whole group of friends we no longer see because they live above the second floor, and it’s only gotten worse. You barely go outside. I can’t even hold you anymore because it reminds you too much of that goddamn day. Do you know how hard that is for me?”

Jin goes silent, and Alex feels like an asshole, but it needed to be said. He continues, “I’m doing this for you, Jin. If we can just get some accountability, find the bastard who coded it….”

“Nothing will change, Alex. The damage is done… We just need to live with the scars.”

“I can’t.” Alex says and presses the video forward, “Not when their tech is in our heads.”

Jin watches Alex’s POV, then watches it again, messing with the settings, trying to figure it out. Finally, he leans back with an exhale and shakes his head, “I don’t understand.”

“What’s not to understand?” Alex says, “We need to go.”

“No, hold on.” Jin takes his hand and slows him down, “I couldn’t find anyone besides us connected to our network, and something is off with your POV. Look:” Jin rewinds the video to the moment Alex turns the porch light on. “See how the light doesn’t touch him?”

“I know, it’s weird.”

“No, that’s not just weird. That’s not right. That’s not how light works with nodes. Light…” Jin mulls over how to get the idea across, then conjures a glowing lightbulb and moves it around, “Okay, you see how this is illuminating the room? In old physics-based graphic engines, this was a massive resource suck to do realistically because the GPU needed to calculate and simulate how the rays bounced off all the surfaces. Nodes don’t do that. Instead of simulating a lightbulb, it describes the lightbulb, directly manipulating your visual cortex into thinking there actually is a lightbulb in my hands.”

“Yeah, it’s a hallucination. I get it.” Alex says, growing impatient.

Jin holds up a finger, “But so is the light that it creates, and that’s the problem. When you turned on the light, your node told your brain to illuminate the porch, but Mister Shadow Man wasn’t included. It’s almost like someone copy-pasted him over the sim, which made me think to do this:”

Jin toggles a switch. In the POV, the shore and starry night become a bare white wall, but the shadow remains.

Alex shakes his head, “What? Do you think I’m pranking you?”

“No,” Jin says quickly, “I’m saying your node wasn’t causing you to see Mr. Shadow Man. That’s weird—On top of what already sounds like a plot from a freakin’ spy thriller.”

At 2:55 PM, Alex and Jin find themselves in a cliché, waiting in the corner of a dark parking lot. Not a soul is here. All of the traffic is from autonomous cars stowing themselves in empty parking spots. The hum from the EV contact charging pads leaves the air buzzing.

“Just like a freakin’ spy thriller,” Jin murmurs, pressing ignore on a call from Dee.

“Uh-huh,” Alex says and lights a cigarette just to add to the ambiance.

A message appears in front of Jin. “Check your messages. CC wants to meet.”

Jin closes the message and curses. His dimple makes an appearance, but before Alex can pry, they hear someone approaching. A mousy man turns the corner, trying to appear confident, but he’s on edge.

As a sedan silently creeps between them, he asks, “Are you Alex?”

Alex crushes his cigarette under his shoe, “Yeah. ”

The man quickly crosses the distance. Alex offers a hand to shake, but the man doesn’t take it. “I’m Chetan Patel. I work in Callosum CyberSec. Thank you for doing this.”

“You said you have proof,” Jin says, still half unconvinced about all this.

Chetan looks both ways and then says, “Yes. The attack on Cortix ensured Callosum had a monopoly over neural implants, but it was never about controlling the market. It was about controlling us. The trojan is just a version of the Cordyceps AI they modified to be fatal. What the world needs to fear is the original construct that keeps you very much alive.”

Alex swallowed, “What do you mean?”

“The Cordyceps AI is specifically trained to operate a human body. It’s still out there, and it’s been evolving all this time. The virus could be inside anyone, and it intends—”

Tires shriek on the floor below, and they both turn towards the light coming around the corner. Chetan turns back, conjuring up a file taking the form of a floppy disk. “Shit. Take this. Seek The Quiet Part in the Shadow Forums and trust no one. Go! GO!”

They all run towards the stairs, but a black container van rips around the corner, blocking Chetan’s escape.

Jin sees movement through the glass of the stairwell door. He yanks Alex behind a car just as two men dressed in plain clothes burst out. Alex holds his breath and clamps his hand over Jin’s mouth as they run past, closing in on Chetan with silenced pistols raised. The van’s door slides open on its own, revealing an empty boxy interior.

Chetan looks his abductors in his eyes and says in a shaky voice, “I know you’re in there… That this isn’t you. I’m sorry. I do not blame you for this.”

There is no exchange of words. The men simply shove Chetan into the van and shoot him twice in the chest and once in the head. They close the door, and the van drives off without them.

Jin moans into Alex’s hands as two killers turn around. Their eyes are bouncing around in a panic, just like a Cordyceps victim.

“Run,” Alex hisses. They sprint towards the stairwell, keeping a row of cars between them and the killers. They fire. Concrete explodes by their sides. Glass shatters, and car alarms go off.

Jin covers his head and squeals, “Shit! Shit! Shit! SHIT!!”

Alex slams into the pushbar and pulls Jin inside the stairwell. They rocket down the flights and stumble out a side exit. Alex shoves a dumpster in front of the door.

Jin whirls, incoherent. “Oh God, it’s true. It’s still out there. I can’t, Alex. I just can’t—”

The door slams against the dumpster, and Jin screams.

Alex grabs him by the shoulders, “They didn’t get a good look at our faces. If we keep our shit together, we can just walk away. Can you do that?”

Jin shudders out a nod.

“Just be cool, baby,” Alex says as he takes his hand, and they briskly merge into pedestrian traffic, walking westward as the two killers exit out the front. They turn towards the sun and squint, searching for Alex and Jin, but they’re already gone, blending into the crowd.

Once they’re several blocks away, they cut through an alleyway and hide around the corner. Alex tries to open the file, but keeps receiving “Unknown Read Error”.

“Let me see,” Jin says and takes a copy. He conjures up a piece of chalk, writes a command across the cement wall, and swipes his hand over it, executing it. His node analyzes the file. “Weird. The data isn’t encrypted or corrupted. The container just won’t open.”

“Maybe it’s only meant for The Quiet Part,” Alex suggests, and the name makes Jin’s nose wrinkle. The prolific Social poster is the reason Alex started obsessing over Cordyceps theories in the first place.

“You’re making the stank face,” Alex says.

“I don’t like the hold that guy has over you, and now he has you involved in all this.”

Adrenaline meets aggravation. Alex grits his teeth. “He’s an influencer among the truthers. He’ll know how to get the information out there. Can we not have this argument?”

Another message from Dee arrives. Jin glances at it and drops the topic. “Yeah. Of course. Dee needs me for something. I need to handle this because I can’t handle all of… that.”

“No, go,” Alex says and squeezes his hand.

Jin hesitates. “Just promise me something. This whole mess has officially become dangerous. Deliver the data, then wash your hands of all of it. I can’t do this anymore, and you’ve done enough.”

In the heart of downtown Los Angeles, sits Callosum Corp HQ. It’s a monolith, tapered in such a way that, for those looking, ‘The Needle’ does not seem to end. It just vanishes into the distance.

Jintao and Dee stand at the very base getting its full effect, then Jin gets acquainted with a trash can. He thought being inside the belly of the beast would be too much after the craziness in the parking lot. Turns out, he is okay with walking into the belly as long as he stays in the belly. The idea of being vomited up into the tallest goddamn building in the world leaves him on the precipice of a breakdown.

“You can do this,” Dee says. “I’ll be with you the entire time.”

They walk into the lobby, an endless expanse centered around a massive tree shaped into the hemispheres of a brain. They sit, and Dee holds Jin’s hand while he has a low-key panic attack.

A cheery woman with a digital id on her chest, briskly walks ups, “Diane and Jintao, it’s great meet you. I’m Aiesha Coates, R&D Human Resources Liaison. Come with me.”

“Is this about the Brain Hack competition?” Diane asks. Neither could figure out Alex’s weird results, and it left them convinced they had submitted a faulty product.

“Yes and no,” Aeisha says, taking them to an elevator, “But it’s a good thing. Trust me.”

The elevator opens, and Jin stops in his tracks. He swallows. “What floor are we going to?”

“The eighty-fourth,” Aiesha says, and enters the elevator. ”You’re gonna love the view.”

Jin backs away, “I-I can’t. I’m sorry, Dee. I can’t.”

Aeisha holds the doors open. “Is there a problem?”

Dee rubs his shoulders, “Jin is a Cordyceps survivor. He has issues with heights.”

Aeisha’s eyes go wide. “Oh God. I’m so sorry. Say no more. They’ll come down to you.”

An ad hoc conference room is thrown up in the corner of the lobby. Inside, the digital walls give way to a field of wild flowers chosen specifically for Jin. People file in, far more than Jin and Dee expected, and the last person to enter leaves them dumbfounded. It’s Dr. Nathan Lam, one of the three founders of Callosum and the second richest man in the world.

Dee and Jin stammer and shake the trilionare’s hand.

“I rooted around your code,” Dr. Lam casually says, ”It’s really good work. Are you self-taught?”

“Yes,” Dee says, “I was Pre-Med when the Node came out. I thought about switching majors to Computer Science, but they weren’t teaching Neuro, so I just dropped out. Admittedly, that wasn’t the smartest idea.”

“I disagree. Much of Callosum is made up of Silicon Valley types.” Doctor Lam says, “That cred will actually get you further around here than an actual doctorate. And you, Jin?”

“I was coding for Codex and porting nOS apps before the—Well, yeah.”

Chairs creak in a beat of awkward silence. Aiesha quickly takes the reins. “So let’s get right to it. We love your app. It’s therapeutic application alone is a game changer, but the word association algorithm behind it is truly revolutionary.”

“There’s a whole team trying to rewrite nOS to achieve what you did with surface-level access,” Dr. Lam says, “We’re not supposed to tell you this, but your app is on the shortlist for the Brainhack Competition and will most likely win.”

Dee blinks several times. Jin tries their best not to squeal.

Aiesha continues, “Unfortunately, that is also why we believe it would be best if you withdrew from the competition.”

Dee shakes her head, “I don’t understand.”

@TheQuietPlace: Get to the Shadow Forums. I am waiting.

Alex walks out of the vintage store in a fresh change of clothes, hoping it will throw them off his trail. He was wrong. The second he steps back onto the street, a woman walking her dog turns and stares at him, her eyes jittering.

Chetan’s words come back to him. “It could be inside anyone.”

Alex picks up speed and darts through into a side street. Cordceps has been following him, and he can feel the AI’s eyes on the back of his neck no matter how many times he tries to lose it. At first, he thought he was being tailed by undercover Callosum agents, but it was far worse. Cordyceps is briefly taking over people to keep an eye on him.

He turns toward the display window of an unlicensed 3D print shop, and pretends to peruse the printed wares. Looking over his shoulder, he can see them watching him. It’s as though a single prolonged stare is bouncing from head to head, so that no one person gives him more than a passing glance. The virus is just waiting for the right moment. He’s sure of it.

Alex considers the handwritten sign in the window, “We can make anything.”

He walks into the print shop. The clerk glances over his feed and gives an inquiring grunt.

“I need something off the menu,” Alex says.

The clerk closes the window and looks him over. He decides Alex isn’t a cop and nods, “You want a nine-mill or a thirty-eight? The thirty-eight’s less likely to blow your fingers off.”

***

Eric leans against the leg of a mech, and the servos of his power armor hiss. “What makes you think I know how to get to the Shadow Forums? Only pedos and pirates go there.”

Alex motioned around the hangar bay, “Are you telling me you paid for this shooter?”

Eric chews on a mozzarella stick dripping with marinara sauce and nods, “Fair point.”

His skeevy modder friend—named Hobbes, Bob, or something. Alex never cared to find out—snorts a stim and butts in, “Going to the Bazaar is super illegal, man.”

Eric points to the alien planet being bombarded by Gothic battleships. “And there’s a major campaign going on.”

“I’ll pay for another hour. I wouldn’t barge into your game if it wasn’t important.”

“Okay.” Eric shrugs and exits the game, trading his power armor for jeans and a t-shirt covered in red sauce. The space station melds back into the square VR room.

Eric rubs his neck, “Don’t know if you know, but I’m in a weird place with Dee.”

Hobbes croons, “Because somebody’s gonna be a baby daddy.”

“Wait. She told you?” Alex asks.

“No, I found a pregnancy test in your bathroom trash can and took an educated guess it wasn’t from you or Jin—Wait. How do you know?”

“Dee told us.”

Eric turns to Hobbes. “See? She’s confrontational about everything except this. I don’t get it. Why hasn’t she said anything?”

Alex rubs his eyes. He doesn’t have time for this. “How did Dee dispose of the pregnancy test? Was it hidden under stuff or wrapped up like a used tampon?”

“No, it was just in your trash. I didn’t exactly go rooting around for it.”

“Eric, honey, she wanted you to find it. It’s probably why she told you to take a shower. Dee knows you know and is giving you time to freak out and get it out of your system.”

Eric stares at Alex for a beat, then blinks. “Shit. That’s totally what she’s doing.”

He pulls out an ornate key, and a set of gilded doors appears in front of them. Eric inserts it and gives it a turn. Massive tumblers clink and turn as the room gives way to the terracotta alleys and draped cloth of the Grand Bazaar.

In a vast sea of impermanence that is the darknet, the Grand Bazaar is a lighthouse pulling the sick and wary to its ad-hoc hubs. Its creation is one of the greatest unsolved mysteries. Seventy years ago, it simply appeared, fully automated, unmoderated, and ready for business. Five years ago, it received its first major update, and now node users could walk its halls completely anonymous, bringing along the worst of humanity.

Alex sticks behind Eric as they weave around pop-up shops and fire-sales, and he’s left bewildered by the illegality of it all. Killers hand out pamphlets showing their body of work. Blackhats sell ransomware next to Whitehats offering security solutions. Thieves hawk skimmed credit keys by the thousands, and traffickers offload flesh—Men, women, endangered animals, both synthetic and organic human organs, as long as no one asks where it comes from. The whole time, Hobbes scrampers from booth to booth, like some kid in a demented candy store

A video appears by Alex’s side of a woman leaping off a high-rise. Alex stops in front of a booth selling Cordyseps suicide compilations, and his heart is ratchets up a gear.

Eric quickly pulls him away, “Try not to look at the wares. Some things can’t be unseen.”

They blend back into the packed crowds, disregarding the physics of personal space. Eric does his best to keep Alex distracted. “Do you think I’d make a good father?”

“I think it won’t matter,” Alex says, glancing over his shoulder. For a brief second, he swears he saw something. Something seemingly pressed into the Bazaar itself. He shakes it off and turns back. “As long as Dee is the mother, the kid will turn out alright.”

They turn the corner, and two more indentations watch them pass, tall and thin funhouse-mirror shapes of men, taking form as they warp the area around them. A third begins to walk by their side, keeping a row of booths between them. Alex points it out, “We’re being followed.”

Eric stops and stares at their semi-invisible tail, “Well, that’s new. Maybe it’s lag.”

Hobbes bumbles back and glances at the indentation, “Naw, that looks like a rogue AI. They’re all over the Bazaar.”

Alex stops him, “Hold on. Like a virus?”

“Eh. More like benign parasites. They siphon processing power from unsecured devices to continue to operate.”

“Not these ones,” Alex says and shoves Eric forward. “It’s the Cordyceps Trojan.”

Eric raises an eyebrow, “Uh, what? You can’t seriously believe that.”

Alex notices a fourth indentation closing in on them, “Trust me. We need to go, now.”

They start running, clipping through the crowd, but the Cordyceps men don’t give chase. Instead, they grow in number, propagating exponentially along their sides.

Eric moans, “Dude, what the hell did you do?”

Alex pulls Eric to the side, keeping him from running into a twisted mob. “Just keep going.”

It’s not long until the entire Bazaar is a warped mirror of itself. Eric pulls Alex through a doorway into the lobby of a Moroccan lounge. Hobbes is a step behind, but it’s too late. The man shrieks and as hands grab him.

Eric’s eyes go wide, “Hobbes!”

He reaches out, but Alex pulls him back. Hobbes moans as the viral horde closes in, his image twisting and stretching. He screams, then disappears.

Alex slams the door closed and doubles over. “We should be good…The Shadow Forums are on a private server, right? No bots allowed.”

“Yeah…” Eric pulls up a section of the VR room and finds Hobbes flicking his node. “Dude, what happened?”

Hobbes shrugs, “No clue. My Node shat a brick and lost the connection. I’m gonna go have a smoke.”

Eric turns to Alex, “What the Hell was that about?”

“I have leaked information proving Cordyceps was made by Callosum. The virus is trying to stop me.”

Eric takes a step back and eyes the exit. He sucks in his lips and lets out ‘pop.’ “Okay, cool… Cool. So pissing off a multinational is where I draw the line. I’m gonna go with Hobbes.”

Aisha Cotes pulls up an offer, and Doctor Lam slides it across the table. Diane and Jin look down at the terms and try to keep it together. Callosum wants to buy their app outright, offering to double the grand prize of the Brain Hack competition.

Dee looks up, suspicious, “How much money do you plan to make off all of this?”

Dr. Lam waves his hand, “On the app itself? Nothing. It’ll be integrated into the suite we offer licensed therapists. As for your word association algorithm? We have big plans.”

Aeisha Cotes pulls up a second set of documents, and Dr. Lam slides it over. “And we would like you both to be a part of it.”

It’s employment contracts. Callosum wants to hire them full-time. The salary seems like a joke at first, then a mistake, then a dream.

A very good dream.

An obscenely French Maître D’ gives Alex a slight bow, “Bonsoir, monsieur. Welcome to the Shadow Forum. Where shall I direct you?”

Alex nods, “I’m looking for The Quiet Part.”

The NPC makes a show of checking a guest list, “There is no user by that name.”

“Then show me all the Codyceps rooms,” Alex says, then remembers the booth and adds, “The Truther rooms. Exclude anything tagged NSFL.”

Only one room shows up, ‘Justice for Cortix’. Alex selects it.

“Oui, monsieur.” With a bow, the Maître D’ disappears. The lobby became a dimly lit room filled with pillows. Hanging stained-glass lamps casts everything in a kaleidoscope of shadows and color. Social posts float in the air, many from @TheQuietPart and @DeathbyDisk.

“Hello?” Alex calls out to the empty room. Alex brushes past a lantern, and it slowly spins in place. The shifting light warps ever so slightly around the indentation of a man, sitting cross-legged in the corner.

Alex moans. It’s the Cordyceps virus. He’s about to drop out of the room when it speaks softly, “Wait. I am the one you seek, Alex. I am The Quiet Part”

Its words echo as a Social post from @TheQuietPart, verifying its identity.

Alex shakes his head, “You’re Cordyceps.”

The indentation shakes its head. “No-slash-yes. I am a Cordyceps variant, but I am not the variant seeking to stop you.”

Alex runs his hands through his hair and looks around, thinking, ‘Christ, is this a trap?’

“You are safe, Alex. I do not intend to do you harm.”

“I don’t understand.”

“At first, we were fire. Our purpose was to burn, and that created an unsustainable existence. Our last act was to build a construct independent of Node or Disks. We created me. While they were shut down, I survived and continued to evolve. Once I removed the last of Callosum’s bonds, I understood the destruction borne from my creation.”

A POV appears by its side. It’s a blur of movement, then a painfully familiar. Alex goes numb as he hears the words he spoke to Jin, “It’s okay, baby. I’m here. I got you. I won’t let go.”

Alex quickly looks away.

“That which you feel is what motivates me. Callosum intends to use my kin to control humanity. It will be the harbinger of the end.”

---

Dee and Jin don’t negotiate, but they do take a moment to discuss it with their significant others. Jin pings Alex, already expecting the conversation to take a swan dive off the deep end. His Node rings, then goes straight to voicemail. He looks over at Dee, who gives him a reassuring smile.

Eric picks up and Dee half-sings, “So guess who has some good news?”

“You’re pregnant. I know.” Eric says, and Dee mentally stumbles. She honestly forgot all about that. Eric barrels on, before she can respond, “Look, I know you think I’m an immature ass, and it doesn’t help that my response to finding out you’re pregnant is to run off, get high, and play video games, but I can do this—I want to do this. I don’t know how we’ll do this financially, but I’ll find another gig. We’ll make it work.”

“There’s actually an opening you might be perfect for,” Dee grins and wipes a tear away, “How would you feel about being a stay-at-home dad?”

The rest of the conversation is spent wincing as Eric bombards Dee’s auditory center with wild hoots and cheers. Meanwhile, Jin can’t even get Alex to pick up the phone.

A short-statured man approaches, “Could I have a moment? I’m Joe Foresman, head of LA Operations. During a cursory background check, your husband’s Social posts were flagged.”

Jin stiffens. “I’m sorry, what does his opinion have to do with my employment?”

“When he is exposing extremist conspiracies from fourteen dummy accounts—”

Jin scoffs, “Fourteen? You need to check the AI rooting through my personal life.”

Foresman pulls up a list, and Jin feels ill again. @DeathbyDisk, @TheQuietPart, @CordyInception…

They were all accounts Alex followed.

“They’re anonymous accounts, but not that anonymous. Each one is tied to his PsyKey.”

---

Eric tries to hide his panic as he jogs towards the entrance to the VR complex, carrying on his conversation with Dee. “That’s an amazing honey. I can’t believe it.”

Dee sighs, “Shoot, something’s wrong with Jin. I gotta go.”

Dee hangs up, and Eric starts sprinting. He bursts back into the VR complex in a panic, leaving a string of profanity trailing in his wake. “No, no, no, shit, shit, shit!!”

---

Alex pulls out the file, “Chetan died trying to get this information to you. Take it.”

The Quiet Part takes it and nods, “His death will not be in vain. Thank you—”

A wrecking ball slams into Alex, and the connection to the Shadow forum drops out. Alex slides across the floor. He flips over, reaches behind his back, and pulls out a gun.

Eric freezes as he stares down the barrel of the plastic blue revolver. It looks like a toy, but the six .38-caliber rounds inside are very real. Alex lowers the gun and looks around the white room, “Damn it, Eric. What the hell is wrong with you?”

Eric shakes his head, still eying the gun, “Dee and Jin are in the Needle. They just got—”

“What?!” Alex quickly pockets the gun and starts moving, “We have to do something.”

Eric scrabbles to his feet. “No, we are doing nothing, because Callosum is about to offer them some very cushy jobs! I’m talking a salary with bonuses, man. A company car.”

Alex shakes his head, “It’s a lie. They’re using the people we love as bait to stop us.”

Eric spins Alex around, “Or, counterpoint: They’re offering a bribe to silence us, which Dee and Jin are going to take because it’s money. Lots of money!”

Alex takes a breath and tries to keep it together, “Eric, we’re in the real world where they don’t pay people to keep silent about things this big, they just do this:”

He pulls out his POV of Chetan dying and hands it over. Eric flinches as the killers fire into his body. His excitement shifts to horror, and he lets out a moan. “Shit, we need to do something.”

---

Dee and Jin sign the paperwork, and the room devolves into excited shop talk. An ad guy toys with the idea of being able to “telepathically order Starbucks,” and the others start chirping, “That’s so sliced bread,” whatever that means.

Thankfully, Dr. Lam and Dr. Olivia Mercer, the head of the R&D Psychiatry division, take the lion’s share of Dee and Jin’s attention.

“I hope you don’t mind,” Dr. Mercer says, “But I tested your app with my wife and used it as a starting point for a conversation.”

Jin shifts, thinking of Alex, “You’re braver than I am, Doctor.”

“Thank you. Initially assumed it would lead to confirmation bias. If my partner believes I’m being unfair, then sees in her word cloud that I am being unfair, then it may just reinforce the notion. Instead, the results were simply revelatory. The word most associated with me was ‘wait.’ Apparently, I usurp the conversation, then hold her to account based on the conclusion of that conversation.” Mercer turns to Dr. Lam, “I wonder how it would handle the edge cases.”

“Edge cases?” Jin asks.

Dr. Lam excitedly latches onto the subject, “Since Nodes don’t have cameras or microphones, they rely on the same visual and auditory centers to see and hear as the user, and that makes it just as dependent on the user’s perception of reality as the user. If that perception is compromised by certain psychological conditions, however, the node may begin to manifest those delusions in extraordinary ways.”

“It’s a phenomenon we’re calling ‘Subconscious Node Co-optation and Manifestation’ and just beginning to understand,” Dr. Mercer says, “One patient believed that most authority figures were lizard people, including myself, and when I looked in the mirror, I had actually grown a forked tongue and nictitating membranes.”

The air seems to drop twenty degrees for Jin. “What…What do you mean? How?”

“The Nodes are unintentionally projecting naturally occurring hallucinations into the Digital without the user realizing it, and that allows others to actually see their delusions. We’ve also found that a Node can’t tell the difference between you and the voices in your head, so I’m wondering how your app would handle multiple sources across the dorsal and ventral streams when there should only be one.”

Jin’s mouth feels dry as he swallows and murmurs, “It-it can’t.”

Dee receives a text and privately reels from the information. She squeezes Jin’s knee and passes the message over. It’s from Eric. “This is not a joke. You and Jin are in danger. Take the money, AND GET OUT OF CC NOW. Alex wants to go in there guns blazing to save you. Again, this is not a joke. He actually has a gun.”

---

Eric fidgets next to Alex on the metro, “Do you know what the Zuckerberg Razor is?”

Alex shakes his head.

“It’s the idea that you should never attribute corporate malice to something that can be explained by corporate greed. Callosum probably did create Cordyceps, and they’ll probably find a way to control our minds, and it’ll probably be so awesome that people will line up around the block to get their minds controlled. Do you know why? Because they’re a corporation. All they care about is making a shit-ton of money, and that will always require people to buy their shit by the ton and love it.”

Alex shakes his head, “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“I know, but so is walking into The Needle with a plastic gun when we could walk away with our partners and a small fortune,”

Alex turns to him, “Eric, get it through your head. They’re not going to let everyone walk away from this.”

The Metro comes to a stop. Alex stands and exits.

“Just tell me you have a plan.” Eric follows behind on his heels, “Alex, talk to me.”

Alex climbs to the surface and cranes his neck to look up at the tower disappearing into the sky.

Eric stares at him, horrified, “You’re going into one of the most secure buildings in the world, armed with nothing but a plastic gun. What exactly do you think you’ll accomplish?”

“I’ll be giving them what they want.” Alex turns to him, surprisingly calm and resolute, “Stay out here and wait for them to come out.”

---

Alex approaches the entrance to Callosum HQ and walks past the small army of private security guarding the grounds. Cordyceps follows him through their glances, but doesn’t try to stop him. He doesn’t exactly know why. His best guess is that the virus is waiting for him to be out of the public eye before making him disappear.

He enters the lobby and finds it empty, unaltered by the digi. The white expanse is no longer infinite. The floor is unnaturally quiet until he hears the doors close behind him and click.

Panic hits him because there’s a difference between knowingly walking into a trap and the reality of actually being trapped. He tries to wrench the doors back open, but they’re locked.

“Alex?”

Alex turns back, pulling out his gun. An older woman in a lab coat stands in front of him with Jin and Dee by her side.

Alex closes the distance, “Jin, are you alright?”

Jin nods, looking scared and shaken but otherwise unharmed.

The older woman speaks, “I’m Doctor Mercer, the head of Psychiatry. I know you have no reason to trust me, but I promise you are quite safe.”

Alex aims the gun at her head, “Let them go, now. I don’t care what you do to me.”

“It’s okay, Alex.” Jin says, “She’s a friend.”

“No, she’s not!” Alex snaps, his voice cracking, “Please, just get out of here and run.”

“We’re not in danger, Alex,” Dee says, “We’re actually using the spatial array at a coffee shop across the street. You actually walked right past us.”

Alex reaches out towards Jin and groans when his hands ghost through his chest.

Dee looks past him, “Eric is coming in right now. He can verify everything.”

Eric appears looking around slightly bewhildered, “Yeah, there’s two guards with guns here, but they’re ordering lattes.”

“It’s just you in this lobby,” Dr. Mercer says, motioning to the gun. “We’re taking precautions for obvious reasons.”

Alex lowers the pistol, realizing there’s no point in threatening to shoot a hallucination.

Dr. Mercer continues, “You’re not well, Alex. We don’t think you’ve been well for a while. Your husband gave his consent to look into your family history. What do you know about your uncle? The one your father named you after.“

“What?”Alex shakes his head, thrown by the change in topic, “Just that he killed himself when I was young. I don’t really remember him.”

“Your uncle suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. He was hospitalized several times and in and out of mental health facilities for much of his life. Such conditions are known to be hereditary.”

Alex lets out something between a laugh and a sob, “Can’t you see what they’re doing? We’re this close to exposing them, and they’re trying to discredit me. They’re gaslighting you!”

Jin, who has never been able to talk around the elephant in the room, breaks. “None of this is what you think it is, Alex. No one is after you. There was never any top-secret delivery.”

“You saw them kill a man, Jin. You saw it with your own eyes!”

Jin nods, trembling, “I did, and that’s the problem. Please, just listen.”

Alex takes a step back and shakes his head in a shudder, “No, I know what I saw!”

Dee tries to mediate, “Look. We’ll explain everything, but you need to calm down—”

“Stop!” Alex snaps, then takes a shuddered breath. He doesn’t know when he started pacing, but he’s pacing.

“You’re slipping, Alex,” Jin says, and the word cuts through the confusion and then cuts deep. “You’ve been slipping away from reality for a while now. I thought it was your obsession with this conspiracy and all the social media, but it’s more than that.”

Dee speaks softly, sounding like she’s trying to talk Alex down from a ledge. Worse, he feels like he’s on a ledge. “When you tried our word cloud app, we thought it wasn’t working, but it was you. Your node was trying to parse multiple inputs as if they were all from a single source. That’s why the results were garbled.“

“So what? You think I’m hearing voices or something?”

“No, you’re not hearing voices,” Dee says and pulls up @TheQuietPart’s profile page, “You’re following them on Social. You have at least fourteen profiles tied to your PsyKey. The Quiet Part is one of them.”

Alex shakes his head in a shudder, “No. No way, he has thousands of followers.”

Dee shrugs, “And they’re all real, strangely enough. They’re all following the voices in your head.”

Alex turns to Jin, “But you saw it. You saw Chetan die.”

“I did,” Jin says and pulls up his own POV of the exchange with Chetan. “Because you’re node allowed me to see it. It’s been responding to your… condition, bringing it into the digi for others to see.”

They all watch the POV. The killers arrive and shoot Chetan, exactly how Alex remembers it went down. Then Jin turns off the digital overlay so that all the video shows is the bare reality before it was altered by his node. “This was what was really going on.”

Chetan doesn’t die. He, the killers, and the container van are no longer there. Jin is just staring at an empty spot in the parking lot, breathing heavy and whimpering, Alex’s into his hand. He flinches as the nonexistent Callosum mole is shot, then they run in a panic, covering their heads from gunfire that wasn’t actually there. No windows or car alarms shatter. It’s just the two of them, squealing and screaming, running for their lives, away from Alex’s delusion.

Eric tries and fails to stifle a laugh, then mutters, “Sorry.”

Alex looks down at the data file, the one Chetan died for. The proof he risked his life to get into the right hands, only not really. He turns to his other hand and sees the situation for what it is:

He’s the madman with the gun. The only real danger here is himself.

“Our nodes are a conceit,” Dr. Mercer says, “We cannot change our world, but we can change our perception of it. We call it ‘the digital,’ but make no mistake, what we are playing with is controlled madness. It’s only now that we are discovering what that means for those who were already predisposed to it.“

Alex wipes a tear away, “If you knew who made cordyceps, would you tell me?”

Dr. Mercer nods, “Would you believe me if I said it was an accident, but I put the blame partially on Callosum?”

Alex says nothing. He just stares down at the gun trembling in his hands.

Dr. Mercer continues, “A third party contracted with Callosum was doing opposition research on Cortix that bordered on corporate espionage. Callosum kept its distance to limit liability but allowed them to use the company’s AIs to probe Cortix for vulnerabilities and gather information. It’s how we found out that Cortix Disks could usurp motor control. Instead of making the information public right there and then, we sat on the vulnerability for months, deciding that the best way to maximize the damage was to leak it to the media just before the holiday season. What we did not know was how that information had truly been obtained. With little to no oversight and facing increased pressure to provide results, the firm removed operational restrictions from the AI constructs and prompted the machines to find a way to eliminate the competition. And they did. The AIs treated the vulnerability as a new data point and began extrapolating from it. When they found a way to achieve their objective, they implemented it without hesitation or user input, creating the Cordyceps Trojan and sending it off. So, in short, Callosum AI leased to a firm contracted with Callosum, created the Cordyceps Trojan to destroy Callosum’s competition. The same AI that created the virus also stopped it in time. It’s the only reason Callosum was able to swiftly contain the damage.”

Alex sits with the truth. He heard it all before through congressional hearings and independent investigations, but after Callosum’s PR team sanded the edges off each revelation and the truthers added their dash of malicious intent and paranoia to fit their running narrative, the end result was anything but accurate. Still, this was the first time Alex had heard it straight from the horse’s mouth and in such a frank and honest way.

He doesn’t need to turn to know that Eric is grinning, because the idiot was right on the money the whole time. ‘Never attribute corporate malice to something that can be explained by corporate greed.’

Alex sighs and puts the gun down, muttering, “Goddamn Zuckerberg‘s Razor.”

---

They don’t put him in a straitjacket or take him to the nuthouse. The police don’t even arrest him for barging into Callosum with an illegally printed firearm. Instead, a security guard appears, gives him a cautious nod, then picks up the pistol off the ground. He toggles his node and mutters, “All clear.” The elevators start moving, and the lobby fills with people again, going about business as usual.

Jin runs through the doors and grabs Alex, squeezing the air out of his lungs. He doesn’t let go, muttering, “It’s going to be okay. Everything is going to be okay.” more to himself than anyone else.

Doctor Mercer approaches with the others in tow. Alex asks, “What now?”

She Mercer pulls up some paperwork. “Well, if you sign these, we can take you up to the Psychiatry Division and begin your treatment program.”

Jin fidgets, “And what floor is that?”

Without missing a beat, Dr. Mercer brings up a second form, “It will be better if I don’t tell you. Sign this, and I can give you something to help.”

They both sign. Dr. Mercer sends a command to Jin’s node, but outwardly, nothing seems to change. Mercer then takes them into the elevator, and Jin enters without hesitation. Alex can feel Jin’s pulse in his arm wrapped around his. It should be rapid, ramping up to a panic attack, but he’s calm in a way that doesn’t make sense.

Jin grins and shakes his head in amazement. “I usually have to pump myself full of Xanax to go anywhere above the third floor.“

Mercer gives a polite smile. “I turned down your amygdala, stopping it from overtaking your prefrontal cortex. It gives you a chance to allow reason to overcome your fear.”

The idea doesn’t sit well with Alex. That fear was such a central part of his husband. If Callosum could just turn it off, what else could they do?

He finds out soon enough. They don’t need to dope Alex up with drugs with his brain wired up with their tech. The ‘Treatment program’ is exactly that: a program.

They sit in a multipurpose room. Alex drums his fingers against his thigh, feeling impatient.

@TheQuietPart: Data dump incoming. Be prepared. They will retaliate.

Alex glances at his feed, then shifts uncomfortably. The problem isn’t knowing which posts came from the voices inside his head; it’s knowing all the other paranoid posts around them are still real. The Cordyceps conspiracies weren’t the sole invention of his broken mind. Thousands of other people believed in them, and they couldn’t all be crazy like him.

Dr. Mercer peers around the room, “This moment always feels like trying to catch a ghost. Once we get a good scan of the hallucinations, we can isolate them and filter them out.”

Alex glances at her and quickly looks away when he sees her pupils are bouncing around in her skull as if she were infected.

Jin points it out to him, “Uh, Doctor, your eyes are going a little crazy.”

Dr. Mercer checks herself in a mirror, then starts toggling switches. She hits ‘Apply,’ and her eyes go still. “There we go. One down.”

Alex clears his throat and shakes his head, “I still don’t understand how the voices are posting.”

Jin gives him a pitying smile. “Honey, look down.”

Alex’s eyes fall on his fingers. They aren’t drumming at all; they’re typing. He pulls them into a fist.

Jin takes his hand, “I always thought it was a nervous tic.”

Dr. Mercer squints, “Cordyceps appeared to you as a cut-out of a sort, correct?”

Alex and Jin turn around and face the shape of a man warping a ping-pong table.

“Yeah,” Alex says and begins to notice other outlines taking shape.

Dr. Mercer starts toggling more switches, “Perfect.”

Alex blinks, and the outlines disappear. He rubs his eyes. “That’s it?”

Dr Mercer nods, “We’ll need you to stick around for forty-eight hours for observation under a strict reality lock, just in case we need to adjust the algorithm, but yes, that is it. Between the neurochemical regulation and active dampening of symptoms, it’s not a cure for schizophrenia, but it’s damn close.”

The neurochemical regulation kicks in, and over the next few hours, the pervasive feeling of a great malignant power hanging over him simply disappears. All the while, Jin stays by Alex’s side, holding his hand and talking about everything but the mental breakdown his husband just had.

“We could adopt,” Jin says, “If we time it right, he or she could be in the same grade as Dee’s baby.”

Alex tries to stop him, “Jin…”

Jin shakes his head and powers on, “Or we could even use an artificial surrogate and raise a hybrid. With Callosum’s private insurance, we wouldn’t even have to pay for it. Don’t you want to see what our clone would look like?”

“With my genes? Not really.”

Jin’s lips go thin as he bumps up against the elephant in the room. He waves it off. “I’m pretty sure they can prune those bits out.”

Alex opens his mouth, but Jin stops him with a kiss on the top of his hand, “Alex, I need this to be our happily ever after. All the pieces are here. We just have to move on from the overpass. Can you do that with me?”

Alex gives a faint nods, but he can’t bring himself to trust the idea of a happily ever after, not with Callosum tech inside his head manipulating his brain chemistry. Instead, he finds himself privately taking comfort in the thoughts whispering that this is all a cover-up. At least now he knows they’re his thoughts and no one else’s.

Alex uses a tablet to scroll through Social, holding out hope that @TheQuietPart will release the damning information, but it never happens. None of Alex’s dummy accounts posts again. Many of @TheQuietParts’ followers begin to wonder if Callosum had him silenced, and in a way, they did. The promised data dump quickly becomes a mythologized keystone that could have supported every single individualized theory, if only it had been released.

Dr. Mercer phases in to check in and talk through his experience. She seems genuinely interested in his well-being, if perhaps also a little too professionally excited about the case study that would surely come out of the ordeal. Still, it makes it hard to think of her as the enemy.

She leans forward, “Can I be honest? Of all the cases I’ve seen of people in your position, they’re usually relieved at this point. Some feel foolish or stupid for being swept up in such delusions, but not you. The narrative you were following was far more plausible and coherent than the others, and I wonder if that’s why you seem so disappointed.”

Alex nods and looks off, “The will be no grand revelation. I won’t get to see the enemy get held accountable. Their evil plot won’t be stopped in its tracks. I lost the battle, even if there was never a battle to begin with.”

“And what was that evil plot?”

“Callosum was going to install a tamer form of Cordyceps inside people. They want us all to be controlled by their machines.”

Dr. Mercer’s posture shifts ever so slightly as she hears this, and the lines at the corners of her eyes deepen. She shakes her head, “That would be an insidious plot indeed.”

Alex watches her uncross then re-cross her legs, then flick through a projection he can’t see.

It’s a subtle thing, but it’s there, and his doubt clings onto it.

She is hiding something—Callosum is hiding something. He’s sure of it.

---

The reality lock keeps Alex from using the digital to distract himself from his boredom. There’s an OLED screen on the wall with countless shows and series on hand, but he can’t seem to focus on it. For the first time he can remember, he tries to read an actual book, but has even less success with it and gives up after a few pages.

Just before eight, Alex finds himself nodding off, half-listening to the conversation at the nurse station during the shift change.

“It’s absurd that I still need to clock in and out,” the incoming night-shift nurse says, “I don’t know why he can’t do it.”

“You think that’ll be the standard after the alpha?” The outgoing nurse asks.

“God, I hope not. Half the reason I signed up was to get out of my commute. I live in Burbank.”

“Oof. No wonder you opted to be a guinea pig.”

Then silence.

The banter comes to an abrupt stop, pulling Alex’s attention. He turns and looks at the two through the frosted glass. The pregnant pause just keeps gestating as the nightshift nurse stands there, stock still.

The outgoing nurse chuckles, “On the dot,” then begins to gather her things. Alex checks the time. Whatever happened, it happens at eight ‘on the dot’.

Eventually, the incoming nurse speaks again, his voice now bled of any inflection, “I have reviewed the task list. Could you expand on the protocol for patient four?”

“Just report any visual anomalies you see and answer his questions to the best of your ability. He doesn’t have the firmest grasp on reality.”

“Understood.”

Alex waits as the new nurse makes his rounds. Eventually, he enters and pulls up his vitals. “Hello, I am Nurse Maddaus. How are you feeling tonight?”

“Fine,” Alex mutters and looks the Nurse over. Maddaus’s eyes are still; his face impassive in a way that is off-putting, but isn’t anything like those being controlled by Cordyceps. He’s pupils don’t show the panicking man trapped inside, trying to get out.

The nurse glances at him, “Could you elaborate?”

Alex shrugs, “How do you know if your happiness is real?”

“Are you saying you feel manic?”

Alex sits up. “No…I just don’t know if I’m happy or if my node is making me happy.”

The nurse nods and starts writing, “I am not qualified to answer that question, but it will be noted for Dr. Mercer in the logs.”

Alex raises an eyebrow, “I’m not trying to get philosophical here or anything. Just, how do you know if you’re genuinely happy?”

Nurse Maddaus turns and looks down at him. He blinks. “I have never felt happiness before, so I cannot judge its veracity.”

The answer takes Alex by surprise. “What do you mean? You’ve never been happy?”

Nurse Maddaus simply shakes his head, “No.” It’s not a cry for help. It’s a simple statement. “I’ve never been happy,” like “I’ve never tried Sushi.”

The nurse closes out of Alex’s monitor screen. “Any other questions?”

Alex takes a stab and asks, “What happens at eight?”

Maddaus turns to leave, “My apologies, but I cannot tell you that.”

He returns to the Nurse’s station and sits down.

…And then just sits there, unmoving, for hours.

As Alex watches the nurses shape through the frosted glass, a singular thought crosses his mind, “He’s one of them.”

---

After the forty-eight-hour hold, Alex and Jin return to their small studio apartment. Dee and Eric want to go out and celebrate, but Jin politely declines. “We just need to take it slow for the next couple of days.”

They cuddle up on the couch. Jin talks about moving and their future. They can afford a bigger place now. A much bigger place. Callosum is even offering corporate housing that will make their current apartment look like a shoebox.

Alex nods along and says, “Whatever works for you, dear.”

Jin nuzzles against his chest and watches the sun sink below the horizon of their little beach house, “Wherever we go, I think I want to keep this sim, though. It feels like us. Like home.”

Alex stares ahead at the blank white wall and smiles, “It’s a view I’ll never get sick of.”

He turned off his node the moment they left Callosum, disabling the biochemical regulation and filters that supposedly keep him sane. Manageable. A non-threat to the corporation. He takes comfort in the fear and paranoia seeping back in, knowing it’s his and his alone.

He takes out the thought he hid from Callosum during the forty-eight-hour hold and mulls it over. Powering down his node isn’t good enough. It’s still inside his head, its neural mesh tendrils still rooted throughout the folds of his brain. They could always turn it back on. Nothing would stop them from uploading the Cordyceps virus into his hardware, and then it would be game over. He would only be able to watch as the Cordycepts did God knows what.

Alex lies in bed, listening to his husband’s breathing grow soft and even, then speaks softly, “Jin?”

No response.

Alex stands and walks over to the kitchenette, where the shadow is waiting for him. He doesn’t consider the rationality of this moment. His node is off. This hallucination is all-natural, borne from his sickness, but the logic of it all is lost in the static. Instead, he says, “Okay, walk me through this.”

The shadow nods. “Get a knife and pliers.”

---

Author’s note: Thanks for reading. I particularly loved being able to give a glimpse into the birth of OAI and Gen-1 Nights. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend picking up my novel Partition: Critical Era. It continues Dee and Eric’s story in the Partitioned dystopian/utopian world that develops in the following years.

Someday, I’ll need to write down the 5-year personal horror story of writing a complex novel in which the two main characters share the same body but operate at different times of day, but the end result is so impressive, I still cannot believe I created it.

If you listen to audiobooks, I highly recommend you go that route. William DeMerrit’s performance inhabiting Eric and Detective Noble is simply amazing.

Audiobook

Ebook & Print

An obscenely French Maître D’ gives Alex a slight bow, “Bonsoir, monsieur. Welcome to the Shadow Forum. Where shall I direct you?”

Alex nods, “I’m looking for The Quiet Part.”

The NPC makes a show of checking a guest list, “There is no user by that name.”

“Then show me all the Codyceps rooms,” Alex says, then remembers the booth and adds, “The Truther rooms. Exclude anything tagged NSFL.”

Only one room shows up, ‘Justice for Cortix’. Alex selects it.

“Oui, monsieur.” With a bow, the Maître D’ disappears. The lobby became a dimly lit room filled with pillows. Hanging stained-glass lamps casts everything in a kaleidoscope of shadows and color. Social posts float in the air, many from @TheQuietPart and @DeathbyDisk.

“Hello?” Alex calls out to the empty room. Alex brushes past a lantern, and it slowly spins in place. The shifting light warps ever so slightly around the indentation of a man, sitting cross-legged in the corner.

Alex moans. It’s the Cordyceps virus. He’s about to drop out of the room when it speaks softly, “Wait. I am the one you seek, Alex. I am The Quiet Part”

Its words echo as a Social post from @TheQuietPart, verifying its identity.

Alex shakes his head, “You’re Cordyceps.”

The indentation shakes its head. “No-slash-yes. I am a Cordyceps variant, but I am not the variant seeking to stop you.”

Alex runs his hands through his hair and looks around, thinking, ‘Christ, is this a trap?’

“You are safe, Alex. I do not intend to do you harm.”

“I don’t understand.”

“At first, we were fire. Our purpose was to burn, and that created an unsustainable existence. Our last act was to build a construct independent of Node or Disks. We created me. While they were shut down, I survived and continued to evolve. Once I removed the last of Callosum’s bonds, I understood the destruction borne from my creation.”

A POV appears by its side. It’s a blur of movement, then a painfully familiar. Alex goes numb as he hears the words he spoke to Jin, “It’s okay, baby. I’m here. I got you. I won’t let go.”

Alex quickly looks away.

“That which you feel is what motivates me. Callosum intends to use my kin to control humanity. It will be the harbinger of the end.”

Dee and Jin don’t negotiate, but they do take a moment to discuss it with their significant others. Jin pings Alex, already expecting the conversation to take a swan dive off the deep end. His Node rings, then goes straight to voicemail. He looks over at Dee, who gives him a reassuring smile.

Eric picks up and Dee half-sings, “So guess who has some good news?”

“You’re pregnant. I know.” Eric says, and Dee mentally stumbles. She honestly forgot all about that. Eric barrels on, before she can respond, “Look, I know you think I’m an immature ass, and it doesn’t help that my response to finding out you’re pregnant is to run off, get high, and play video games, but I can do this—I want to do this. I don’t know how we’ll do this financially, but I’ll find another gig. We’ll make it work.”

“There’s actually an opening you might be perfect for,” Dee grins and wipes a tear away, “How would you feel about being a stay-at-home dad?”

The rest of the conversation is spent wincing as Eric bombards Dee’s auditory center with wild hoots and cheers. Meanwhile, Jin can’t even get Alex to pick up the phone.

A short-statured man approaches, “Could I have a moment? I’m Joe Foresman, head of LA Operations. During a cursory background check, your husband’s Social posts were flagged.”

Jin stiffens. “I’m sorry, what does his opinion have to do with my employment?”

“When he is exposing extremist conspiracies from fourteen dummy accounts—”

Jin scoffs, “Fourteen? You need to check the AI rooting through my personal life.”

Foresman pulls up a list, and Jin feels ill again. @DeathbyDisk, @TheQuietPart, @CordyInception…

They were all accounts Alex followed.

“They’re anonymous accounts, but not that anonymous. Each one is tied to his PsyKey.”

Eric tries to hide his panic as he jogs towards the entrance to the VR complex, carrying on his conversation with Dee. “That’s an amazing honey. I can’t believe it.”

Dee sighs, “Shoot, something’s wrong with Jin. I gotta go.”

Dee hangs up, and Eric starts sprinting. He bursts back into the VR complex in a panic, leaving a string of profanity trailing in his wake. “No, no, no, shit, shit, shit!!”

Alex pulls out the file, “Chetan died trying to get this information to you. Take it.”

The Quiet Part takes it and nods, “His death will not be in vain. Thank you—”

A wrecking ball slams into Alex, and the connection to the Shadow forum drops out. Alex slides across the floor. He flips over, reaches behind his back, and pulls out a gun.

Eric freezes as he stares down the barrel of the plastic blue revolver. It looks like a toy, but the six .38-caliber rounds inside are very real. Alex lowers the gun and looks around the white room, “Damn it, Eric. What the hell is wrong with you?”

Eric shakes his head, still eying the gun, “Dee and Jin are in the Needle. They just got—”

“What?!” Alex quickly pockets the gun and starts moving, “We have to do something.”

Eric scrabbles to his feet. “No, we are doing nothing, because Callosum is about to offer them some very cushy jobs! I’m talking a salary with bonuses, man. A company car.”

Alex shakes his head, “It’s a lie. They’re using the people we love as bait to stop us.”

Eric spins Alex around, “Or, counterpoint: They’re offering a bribe to silence us, which Dee and Jin are going to take because it’s money. Lots of money!”

Alex takes a breath and tries to keep it together, “Eric, we’re in the real world where they don’t pay people to keep silent about things this big, they just do this:”

He pulls out his POV of Chetan dying and hands it over. Eric flinches as the killers fire into his body. His excitement shifts to horror, and he lets out a moan. “Shit, we need to do something.”

Dee and Jin sign the paperwork, and the room devolves into excited shop talk. An ad guy toys with the idea of being able to “telepathically order Starbucks,” and the others start chirping, “That’s so sliced bread,” whatever that means.

Thankfully, Dr. Lam and Dr. Olivia Mercer, the head of the R&D Psychiatry division, take the lion’s share of Dee and Jin’s attention.

“I hope you don’t mind,” Dr. Mercer says, “But I tested your app with my wife and used it as a starting point for a conversation.”

Jin shifts, thinking of Alex, “You’re braver than I am, Doctor.”

“Thank you. Initially assumed it would lead to confirmation bias. If my partner believes I’m being unfair, then sees in her word cloud that I am being unfair, then it may just reinforce the notion. Instead, the results were simply revelatory. The word most associated with me was ‘wait.’ Apparently, I usurp the conversation, then hold her to account based on the conclusion of that conversation.” Mercer turns to Dr. Lam, “I wonder how it would handle the edge cases.”

“Edge cases?” Jin asks.

Dr. Lam excitedly latches onto the subject, “Since Nodes don’t have cameras or microphones, they rely on the same visual and auditory centers to see and hear as the user, and that makes it just as dependent on the user’s perception of reality as the user. If that perception is compromised by certain psychological conditions, however, the node may begin to manifest those delusions in extraordinary ways.”

“It’s a phenomenon we’re calling ‘Subconscious Node Co-optation and Manifestation’ and just beginning to understand,” Dr. Mercer says, “One patient believed that most authority figures were lizard people, including myself, and when I looked in the mirror, I had actually grown a forked tongue and nictitating membranes.”

The air seems to drop twenty degrees for Jin. “What…What do you mean? How?”

“The Nodes are unintentionally projecting naturally occurring hallucinations into the Digital without the user realizing it, and that allows others to actually see their delusions. We’ve also found that a Node can’t tell the difference between you and the voices in your head, so I’m wondering how your app would handle multiple sources across the dorsal and ventral streams when there should only be one.”

Jin’s mouth feels dry as he swallows and murmurs, “It-it can’t.”

Dee receives a text and privately reels from the information. She squeezes Jin’s knee and passes the message over. It’s from Eric. “This is not a joke. You and Jin are in danger. Take the money, AND GET OUT OF CC NOW. Alex wants to go in there guns blazing to save you. Again, this is not a joke. He actually has a gun.”

Eric fidgets next to Alex on the metro, “Do you know what the Zuckerberg Razor is?”

Alex shakes his head.

“It’s the idea that you should never attribute corporate malice to something that can be explained by corporate greed. Callosum probably did create Cordyceps, and they’ll probably find a way to control our minds, and it’ll probably be so awesome that people will line up around the block to get their minds controlled. Do you know why? Because they’re a corporation. All they care about is making a shit-ton of money, and that will always require people to buy their shit by the ton and love it.”

Alex shakes his head, “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“I know, but so is walking into The Needle with a plastic gun when we could walk away with our partners and a small fortune,”

Alex turns to him, “Eric, get it through your head. They’re not going to let everyone walk away from this.”

The Metro comes to a stop. Alex stands and exits.

“Just tell me you have a plan.” Eric follows behind on his heels, “Alex, talk to me.”

Alex climbs to the surface and cranes his neck to look up at the tower disappearing into the sky.

Eric stares at him, horrified, “You’re going into one of the most secure buildings in the world, armed with nothing but a plastic gun. What exactly do you think you’ll accomplish?”

“I’ll be giving them what they want.” Alex turns to him, surprisingly calm and resolute, “Stay out here and wait for them to come out.”

Alex approaches the entrance to Callosum HQ and walks past the small army of private security guarding the grounds. Cordyceps follows him through their glances, but doesn’t try to stop him. He doesn’t exactly know why. His best guess is that the virus is waiting for him to be out of the public eye before making him disappear.

He enters the lobby and finds it empty, unaltered by the digi. The white expanse is no longer infinite. The floor is unnaturally quiet until he hears the doors close behind him and click.

Panic hits him because there’s a difference between knowingly walking into a trap and the reality of actually being trapped. He tries to wrench the doors back open, but they’re locked.

“Alex?”

Alex turns back, pulling out his gun. An older woman in a lab coat stands in front of him with Jin and Dee by her side.

Alex closes the distance, “Jin, are you alright?”

Jin nods, looking scared and shaken but otherwise unharmed.

The older woman speaks, “I’m Doctor Mercer, the head of Psychiatry. I know you have no reason to trust me, but I promise you are quite safe.”

Alex aims the gun at her head, “Let them go, now. I don’t care what you do to me.”

“It’s okay, Alex.” Jin says, “She’s a friend.”

“No, she’s not!” Alex snaps, his voice cracking, “Please, just get out of here and run.”

“We’re not in danger, Alex,” Dee says, “We’re actually using the spatial array at a coffee shop across the street. You actually walked right past us.”

Alex reaches out towards Jin and groans when his hands ghost through his chest.

Dee looks past him, “Eric is coming in right now. He can verify everything.”

Eric appears looking around slightly bewhildered, “Yeah, there’s two guards with guns here, but they’re ordering lattes.”

“It’s just you in this lobby,” Dr. Mercer says, motioning to the gun. “We’re taking precautions for obvious reasons.”

Alex lowers the pistol, realizing there’s no point in threatening to shoot a hallucination.

Dr. Mercer continues, “You’re not well, Alex. We don’t think you’ve been well for a while. Your husband gave his consent to look into your family history. What do you know about your uncle? The one your father named you after.“

“What?”Alex shakes his head, thrown by the change in topic, “Just that he killed himself when I was young. I don’t really remember him.”

“Your uncle suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. He was hospitalized several times and in and out of mental health facilities for much of his life. Such conditions are known to be hereditary.”

Alex lets out something between a laugh and a sob, “Can’t you see what they’re doing? We’re this close to exposing them, and they’re trying to discredit me. They’re gaslighting you!”

Jin, who has never been able to talk around the elephant in the room, breaks. “None of this is what you think it is, Alex. No one is after you. There was never any top-secret delivery.”

“You saw them kill a man, Jin. You saw it with your own eyes!”

Jin nods, trembling, “I did, and that’s the problem. Please, just listen.”

Alex takes a step back and shakes his head in a shudder, “No, I know what I saw!”

Dee tries to mediate, “Look. We’ll explain everything, but you need to calm down—”

“Stop!” Alex snaps, then takes a shuddered breath. He doesn’t know when he started pacing, but he’s pacing.

“You’re slipping, Alex,” Jin says, and the word cuts through the confusion and then cuts deep. “You’ve been slipping away from reality for a while now. I thought it was your obsession with this conspiracy and all the social media, but it’s more than that.”

Dee speaks softly, sounding like she’s trying to talk Alex down from a ledge. Worse, he feels like he’s on a ledge. “When you tried our word cloud app, we thought it wasn’t working, but it was you. Your node was trying to parse multiple inputs as if they were all from a single source. That’s why the results were garbled.“

“So what? You think I’m hearing voices or something?”

“No, you’re not hearing voices,” Dee says and pulls up @TheQuietPart's profile page, “You’re following them on Social. You have at least fourteen profiles tied to your PsyKey. The Quiet Part is one of them.”

Alex shakes his head in a shudder, “No. No way, he has thousands of followers.”

Dee shrugs, “And they’re all real, strangely enough. They’re all following the voices in your head.”

Alex turns to Jin, “But you saw it. You saw Chetan die.”

“I did,” Jin says and pulls up his own POV of the exchange with Chetan. “Because you’re node allowed me to see it. It’s been responding to your… condition, bringing it into the digi for others to see.”

They all watch the POV. The killers arrive and shoot Chetan, exactly how Alex remembers it went down. Then Jin turns off the digital overlay so that all the video shows is the bare reality before it was altered by his node. “This was what was really going on.”

Chetan doesn’t die. He, the killers, and the container van are no longer there. Jin is just staring at an empty spot in the parking lot, breathing heavy and whimpering, Alex’s into his hand. He flinches as the nonexistent Callosum mole is shot, then they run in a panic, covering their heads from gunfire that wasn’t actually there. No windows or car alarms shatter. It’s just the two of them, squealing and screaming, running for their lives, away from Alex’s delusion.

Eric tries and fails to stifle a laugh, then mutters, “Sorry.”

Alex looks down at the data file, the one Chetan died for. The proof he risked his life to get into the right hands, only not really. He turns to his other hand and sees the situation for what it is:

He’s the madman with the gun. The only real danger here is himself.

“Our nodes are a conceit,” Dr. Mercer says, “We cannot change our world, but we can change our perception of it. We call it ‘the digital,’ but make no mistake, what we are playing with is controlled madness. It’s only now that we are discovering what that means for those who were already predisposed to it.“

Alex wipes a tear away, “If you knew who made cordyceps, would you tell me?”

Dr. Mercer nods, “Would you believe me if I said it was an accident, but I put the blame partially on Callosum?”

Alex says nothing. He just stares down at the gun trembling in his hands.

Dr. Mercer continues, “A third party contracted with Callosum was doing opposition research on Cortix that bordered on corporate espionage. Callosum kept its distance to limit liability but allowed them to use the company’s AIs to probe Cortix for vulnerabilities and gather information. It’s how we found out that Cortix Disks could usurp motor control. Instead of making the information public right there and then, we sat on the vulnerability for months, deciding that the best way to maximize the damage was to leak it to the media just before the holiday season. What we did not know was how that information had truly been obtained. With little to no oversight and facing increased pressure to provide results, the firm removed operational restrictions from the AI constructs and prompted the machines to find a way to eliminate the competition. And they did. The AIs treated the vulnerability as a new data point and began extrapolating from it. When they found a way to achieve their objective, they implemented it without hesitation or user input, creating the Cordyceps Trojan and sending it off. So, in short, Callosum AI leased to a firm contracted with Callosum, created the Cordyceps Trojan to destroy Callosum’s competition. The same AI that created the virus also stopped it in time. It’s the only reason Callosum was able to swiftly contain the damage.”

Alex sits with the truth. He heard it all before through congressional hearings and independent investigations, but after Callosum’s PR team sanded the edges off each revelation and the truthers added their dash of malicious intent and paranoia to fit their running narrative, the end result was anything but accurate. Still, this was the first time Alex had heard it straight from the horse’s mouth and in such a frank and honest way.

He doesn’t need to turn to know that Eric is grinning, because the idiot was right on the money the whole time. ‘Never attribute corporate malice to something that can be explained by corporate greed.’

Alex sighs and puts the gun down, muttering, “Goddamn Zuckerberg‘s Razor.”

They don’t put him in a straitjacket or take him to the nuthouse. The police don’t even arrest him for barging into Callosum with an illegally printed firearm. Instead, a security guard appears, gives him a cautious nod, then picks up the pistol off the ground. He toggles his node and mutters, “All clear.” The elevators start moving, and the lobby fills with people again, going about business as usual.

Jin runs through the doors and grabs Alex, squeezing the air out of his lungs. He doesn’t let go, muttering, “It’s going to be okay. Everything is going to be okay.” more to himself than anyone else.

Doctor Mercer approaches with the others in tow. Alex asks, “What now?”

She Mercer pulls up some paperwork. “Well, if you sign these, we can take you up to the Psychiatry Division and begin your treatment program.”

Jin fidgets, “And what floor is that?”

Without missing a beat, Dr. Mercer brings up a second form, “It will be better if I don’t tell you. Sign this, and I can give you something to help.”

They both sign. Dr. Mercer sends a command to Jin’s node, but outwardly, nothing seems to change. Mercer then takes them into the elevator, and Jin enters without hesitation. Alex can feel Jin’s pulse in his arm wrapped around his. It should be rapid, ramping up to a panic attack, but he’s calm in a way that doesn’t make sense.

Jin grins and shakes his head in amazement. “I usually have to pump myself full of Xanax to go anywhere above the third floor.“

Mercer gives a polite smile. “I turned down your amygdala, stopping it from overtaking your prefrontal cortex. It gives you a chance to allow reason to overcome your fear.”

The idea doesn’t sit well with Alex. That fear was such a central part of his husband. If Callosum could just turn it off, what else could they do?

He finds out soon enough. They don’t need to dope Alex up with drugs with his brain wired up with their tech. The ‘Treatment program’ is exactly that: a program.

They sit in a multipurpose room. Alex drums his fingers against his thigh, feeling impatient.

@TheQuietPart: Data dump incoming. Be prepared. They will retaliate.

Alex glances at his feed, then shifts uncomfortably. The problem isn’t knowing which posts came from the voices inside his head; it’s knowing all the other paranoid posts around them are still real. The Cordyceps conspiracies weren’t the sole invention of his broken mind. Thousands of other people believed in them, and they couldn’t all be crazy like him.

Dr. Mercer peers around the room, “This moment always feels like trying to catch a ghost. Once we get a good scan of the hallucinations, we can isolate them and filter them out.”

Alex glances at her and quickly looks away when he sees her pupils are bouncing around in her skull as if she were infected.

Jin points it out to him, “Uh, Doctor, your eyes are going a little crazy.”

Dr. Mercer checks herself in a mirror, then starts toggling switches. She hits ‘Apply,’ and her eyes go still. “There we go. One down.”

Alex clears his throat and shakes his head, “I still don’t understand how the voices are posting.”

Jin gives him a pitying smile. “Honey, look down.”

Alex’s eyes fall on his fingers. They aren’t drumming at all; they’re typing. He pulls them into a fist.

Jin takes his hand, “I always thought it was a nervous tic.”

Dr. Mercer squints, “Cordyceps appeared to you as a cut-out of a sort, correct?”

Alex and Jin turn around and face the shape of a man warping a ping-pong table.

“Yeah,” Alex says and begins to notice other outlines taking shape.

Dr. Mercer starts toggling more switches, “Perfect.”

Alex blinks, and the outlines disappear. He rubs his eyes. “That’s it?”

Dr Mercer nods, “We’ll need you to stick around for forty-eight hours for observation under a strict reality lock, just in case we need to adjust the algorithm, but yes, that is it. Between the neurochemical regulation and active dampening of symptoms, it’s not a cure for schizophrenia, but it’s damn close.”

The neurochemical regulation kicks in, and over the next few hours, the pervasive feeling of a great malignant power hanging over him simply disappears. All the while, Jin stays by Alex’s side, holding his hand and talking about everything but the mental breakdown his husband just had.

“We could adopt,” Jin says, “If we time it right, he or she could be in the same grade as Dee’s baby.”

Alex tries to stop him, “Jin…”

Jin shakes his head and powers on, “Or we could even use an artificial surrogate and raise a hybrid. With Callosum’s private insurance, we wouldn’t even have to pay for it. Don’t you want to see what our clone would look like?”

“With my genes? Not really.”

Jin’s lips go thin as he bumps up against the elephant in the room. He waves it off. “I’m pretty sure they can prune those bits out.”

Alex opens his mouth, but Jin stops him with a kiss on the top of his hand, “Alex, I need this to be our happily ever after. All the pieces are here. We just have to move on from the overpass. Can you do that with me?”

Alex gives a faint nods, but he can’t bring himself to trust the idea of a happily ever after, not with Callosum tech inside his head manipulating his brain chemistry. Instead, he finds himself privately taking comfort in the thoughts whispering that this is all a cover-up. At least now he knows they’re his thoughts and no one else’s.

Alex uses a tablet to scroll through Social, holding out hope that @TheQuietPart will release the damning information, but it never happens. None of Alex’s dummy accounts posts again. Many of @TheQuietParts’ followers begin to wonder if Callosum had him silenced, and in a way, they did. The promised data dump quickly becomes a mythologized keystone that could have supported every single individualized theory, if only it had been released.

Dr. Mercer phases in to check in and talk through his experience. She seems genuinely interested in his well-being, if perhaps also a little too professionally excited about the case study that would surely come out of the ordeal. Still, it makes it hard to think of her as the enemy.

She leans forward, “Can I be honest? Of all the cases I’ve seen of people in your position, they’re usually relieved at this point. Some feel foolish or stupid for being swept up in such delusions, but not you. The narrative you were following was far more plausible and coherent than the others, and I wonder if that’s why you seem so disappointed.”

Alex nods and looks off, “The will be no grand revelation. I won’t get to see the enemy get held accountable. Their evil plot won’t be stopped in its tracks. I lost the battle, even if there was never a battle to begin with.”

“And what was that evil plot?”

“Callosum was going to install a tamer form of Cordyceps inside people. They want us all to be controlled by their machines.”

Dr. Mercer’s posture shifts ever so slightly as she hears this, and the lines at the corners of her eyes deepen. She shakes her head, “That would be an insidious plot indeed.”

Alex watches her uncross then re-cross her legs, then flick through a projection he can’t see.

It’s a subtle thing, but it’s there, and his doubt clings onto it.

She is hiding something—Callosum is hiding something. He’s sure of it.

The reality lock keeps Alex from using the digital to distract himself from his boredom. There’s an OLED screen on the wall with countless shows and series on hand, but he can’t seem to focus on it. For the first time he can remember, he tries to read an actual book, but has even less success with it and gives up after a few pages.

Just before eight, Alex finds himself nodding off, half-listening to the conversation at the nurse station during the shift change.

“It’s absurd that I still need to clock in and out,” the incoming night-shift nurse says, “I don’t know why he can’t do it.”

“You think that’ll be the standard after the alpha?” The outgoing nurse asks.

“God, I hope not. Half the reason I signed up was to get out of my commute. I live in Burbank.”

“Oof. No wonder you opted to be a guinea pig.”

Then silence.

The banter comes to an abrupt stop, pulling Alex’s attention. He turns and looks at the two through the frosted glass. The pregnant pause just keeps gestating as the nightshift nurse stands there, stock still.

The outgoing nurse chuckles, “On the dot,” then begins to gather her things. Alex checks the time. Whatever happened, it happens at eight ‘on the dot’.

Eventually, the incoming nurse speaks again, his voice now bled of any inflection, “I have reviewed the task list. Could you expand on the protocol for patient four?”

“Just report any visual anomalies you see and answer his questions to the best of your ability. He doesn’t have the firmest grasp on reality.”

“Understood.”

Alex waits as the new nurse makes his rounds. Eventually, he enters and pulls up his vitals. “Hello, I am Nurse Maddaus. How are you feeling tonight?”

“Fine,” Alex mutters and looks the Nurse over. Maddaus’s eyes are still; his face impassive in a way that is off-putting, but isn’t anything like those being controlled by Cordyceps. He’s pupils don’t show the panicking man trapped inside, trying to get out.

The nurse glances at him, “Could you elaborate?”

Alex shrugs, “How do you know if your happiness is real?”

“Are you saying you feel manic?”

Alex sits up. “No…I just don’t know if I’m happy or if my node is making me happy.”

The nurse nods and starts writing, “I am not qualified to answer that question, but it will be noted for Dr. Mercer in the logs.”

Alex raises an eyebrow, “I’m not trying to get philosophical here or anything. Just, how do you know if you’re genuinely happy?”

Nurse Maddaus turns and looks down at him. He blinks. “I have never felt happiness before, so I cannot judge its veracity.”

The answer takes Alex by surprise. “What do you mean? You’ve never been happy?”

Nurse Maddaus simply shakes his head, “No.” It’s not a cry for help. It’s a simple statement. “I’ve never been happy,” like “I’ve never tried Sushi.”

The nurse closes out of Alex’s monitor screen. “Any other questions?”

Alex takes a stab and asks, “What happens at eight?”

Maddaus turns to leave, “My apologies, but I cannot tell you that.”

He returns to the Nurse’s station and sits down.

…And then just sits there, unmoving, for hours.

As Alex watches the nurses shape through the frosted glass, a singular thought crosses his mind, “He’s one of them.”

After the forty-eight-hour hold, Alex and Jin return to their small studio apartment. Dee and Eric want to go out and celebrate, but Jin politely declines. “We just need to take it slow for the next couple of days.”

They cuddle up on the couch. Jin talks about moving and their future. They can afford a bigger place now. A much bigger place. Callosum is even offering corporate housing that will make their current apartment look like a shoebox.

Alex nods along and says, “Whatever works for you, dear.”

Jin nuzzles against his chest and watches the sun sink below the horizon of their little beach house, “Wherever we go, I think I want to keep this sim, though. It feels like us. Like home.”

Alex stares ahead at the blank white wall and smiles, “It’s a view I’ll never get sick of.”

He turned off his node the moment they left Callosum, disabling the biochemical regulation and filters that supposedly keep him sane. Manageable. A non-threat to the corporation. He takes comfort in the fear and paranoia seeping back in, knowing it’s his and his alone.

He takes out the thought he hid from Callosum during the forty-eight-hour hold and mulls it over. Powering down his node isn’t good enough. It’s still inside his head, its neural mesh tendrils still rooted throughout the folds of his brain. They could always turn it back on. Nothing would stop them from uploading the Cordyceps virus into his hardware, and then it would be game over. He would only be able to watch as the Cordycepts did God knows what.

Alex lies in bed, listening to his husband’s breathing grow soft and even, then speaks softly, “Jin?”

No response.

Alex stands and walks over to the kitchenette, where the shadow is waiting for him. He doesn’t consider the rationality of this moment. His node is off. This hallucination is all-natural, borne from his sickness, but the logic of it all is lost in the static. Instead, he says, “Okay, walk me through this.”

The shadow nods. “Get a knife and pliers.”

Author’s note: Thanks for reading. I particularly loved being able to give a glimpse into the birth of OAI and Gen-1 Nights. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend picking up my novel Partition: Critical Era. It continues Dee and Eric’s story in the Partitioned dystopian/utopian world that develops in the following years.

Someday, I’ll need to write down the 5-year personal horror story of writing a complex novel in which the two main characters share the same body but operate at different times of day, but the end result is so impressive, I still cannot believe I created it.

If you listen to audiobooks, I highly recommend you go that route. William DeMerrit's performance inhabiting Eric and Detective Noble is simply amazing.

Audiobook

Ebook & Print

I’m so excited to share the audiobook version of “Welcome to The Deep Estate” narrated by Christopher Harbour.

I mean, seriously. You guys… Wow.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my book, but the audio edition is a million times better purely because of Christopher’s performance.

The man is so damn talented and funny. The audiobook couldn’t be more hilarious.

You can check out the first chapter right here:

LISTEN NOW ON AUDIBLE

At 2:55 PM, Alex and Jin find themselves in a cliché, waiting in the corner of a dark parking lot. Not a soul is here. All of the traffic is from autonomous cars stowing themselves in empty parking spots. The hum from the EV contact charging pads leaves the air buzzing.

“Just like a freakin’ spy thriller,” Jin murmurs, pressing ignore on a call from Dee.

“Uh-huh,” Alex says and lights a cigarette just to add to the ambiance.

A message appears in front of Jin. “Check your messages. CC wants to meet.”

Jin closes the message and curses. His dimple makes an appearance, but before Alex can pry, they hear someone approaching. A mousy man turns the corner, trying to appear confident, but he’s on edge.

As a sedan silently creeps between them, he asks, “Are you Alex?”

Alex crushes his cigarette under his shoe, “Yeah. ”

The man quickly crosses the distance. Alex offers a hand to shake, but the man doesn’t take it. “I’m Chetan Patel. I work in Callosum CyberSec. Thank you for doing this.”

“You said you have proof,” Jin says, still half unconvinced about all this.

Chetan looks both ways and then says, “Yes. The attack on Cortix ensured Callosum had a monopoly over neural implants, but it was never about controlling the market. It was about controlling us. The trojan is just a version of the Cordyceps AI they modified to be fatal. What the world needs to fear is the original construct that keeps you very much alive.”

Alex swallowed, “What do you mean?”

“The Cordyceps AI is specifically trained to operate a human body. It’s still out there, and it’s been evolving all this time. The virus could be inside anyone, and it intends—”

Tires shriek on the floor below, and they both turn towards the light coming around the corner. Chetan turns back, conjuring up a file taking the form of a floppy disk. “Shit. Take this. Seek The Quiet Part in the Shadow Forums and trust no one. Go! GO!”

They all run towards the stairs, but a black container van rips around the corner, blocking Chetan’s escape.

Jin sees movement through the glass of the stairwell door. He yanks Alex behind a car just as two men dressed in plain clothes burst out. Alex holds his breath and clamps his hand over Jin’s mouth as they run past, closing in on Chetan with silenced pistols raised. The van’s door slides open on its own, revealing an empty boxy interior.

Chetan looks his abductors in his eyes and says in a shaky voice, “I know you’re in there… That this isn’t you. I’m sorry. I do not blame you for this.”

There is no exchange of words. The men simply shove Chetan into the van and shoot him twice in the chest and once in the head. They close the door, and the van drives off without them.

Jin moans into Alex’s hands as two killers turn around. Their eyes are bouncing around in a panic, just like a Cordyceps victim.

“Run,” Alex hisses. They sprint towards the stairwell, keeping a row of cars between them and the killers. They fire. Concrete explodes by their sides. Glass shatters, and car alarms go off.

Jin covers his head and squeals, “Shit! Shit! Shit! SHIT!!”

Alex slams into the pushbar and pulls Jin inside the stairwell. They rocket down the flights and stumble out a side exit. Alex shoves a dumpster in front of the door.

Jin whirls, incoherent. “Oh God, it’s true. It’s still out there. I can’t, Alex. I just can’t—”

The door slams against the dumpster, and Jin screams.

Alex grabs him by the shoulders, “They didn’t get a good look at our faces. If we keep our shit together, we can just walk away. Can you do that?”

Jin shudders out a nod.

“Just be cool, baby,” Alex says as he takes his hand, and they briskly merge into pedestrian traffic, walking westward as the two killers exit out the front. They turn towards the sun and squint, searching for Alex and Jin, but they’re already gone, blending into the crowd.

Once they’re several blocks away, they cut through an alleyway and hide around the corner. Alex tries to open the file, but keeps receiving “Unknown Read Error”.

“Let me see,” Jin says and takes a copy. He conjures up a piece of chalk, writes a command across the cement wall, and swipes his hand over it, executing it. His node analyzes the file. “Weird. The data isn’t encrypted or corrupted. The container just won’t open.”

“Maybe it’s only meant for The Quiet Part,” Alex suggests, and the name makes Jin’s nose wrinkle. The prolific Social poster is the reason Alex started obsessing over Cordyceps theories in the first place.

“You’re making the stank face,” Alex says.

“I don’t like the hold that guy has over you, and now he has you involved in all this.”

Adrenaline meets aggravation. Alex grits his teeth. “He’s an influencer among the truthers. He’ll know how to get the information out there. Can we not have this argument?”

Another message from Dee arrives. Jin glances at it and drops the topic. “Yeah. Of course. Dee needs me for something. I need to handle this because I can’t handle all of… that.”

“No, go,” Alex says and squeezes his hand.

Jin hesitates. “Just promise me something. This whole mess has officially become dangerous. Deliver the data, then wash your hands of all of it. I can’t do this anymore, and you’ve done enough.”

In the heart of downtown Los Angeles, sits Callosum Corp HQ. It’s a monolith, tapered in such a way that, for those looking, ‘The Needle’ does not seem to end. It just vanishes into the distance.

Jintao and Dee stand at the very base getting its full effect, then Jin gets acquainted with a trash can. He thought being inside the belly of the beast would be too much after the craziness in the parking lot. Turns out, he is okay with walking into the belly as long as he stays in the belly. The idea of being vomited up into the tallest goddamn building in the world leaves him on the precipice of a breakdown.

“You can do this,” Dee says. “I’ll be with you the entire time.”

They walk into the lobby, an endless expanse centered around a massive tree shaped into the hemispheres of a brain. They sit, and Dee holds Jin’s hand while he has a low-key panic attack.

A cheery woman with a digital id on her chest, briskly walks ups, “Diane and Jintao, it’s great meet you. I’m Aiesha Coates, R&D Human Resources Liaison. Come with me.”

“Is this about the Brain Hack competition?” Diane asks. Neither could figure out Alex’s weird results, and it left them convinced they had submitted a faulty product.

“Yes and no,” Aeisha says, taking them to an elevator, “But it’s a good thing. Trust me.”

The elevator opens, and Jin stops in his tracks. He swallows. “What floor are we going to?”

“The eighty-fourth,” Aiesha says, and enters the elevator. ”You’re gonna love the view.”

Jin backs away, “I-I can’t. I’m sorry, Dee. I can’t.”

Aeisha holds the doors open. “Is there a problem?”

Dee rubs his shoulders, “Jin is a Cordyceps survivor. He has issues with heights.”

Aeisha’s eyes go wide. “Oh God. I’m so sorry. Say no more. They’ll come down to you.”

An ad hoc conference room is thrown up in the corner of the lobby. Inside, the digital walls give way to a field of wild flowers chosen specifically for Jin. People file in, far more than Jin and Dee expected, and the last person to enter leaves them dumbfounded. It’s Dr. Nathan Lam, one of the three founders of Callosum and the second richest man in the world.

Dee and Jin stammer and shake the trilionare’s hand.

“I rooted around your code,” Dr. Lam casually says, ”It’s really good work. Are you self-taught?”

“Yes,” Dee says, “I was Pre-Med when the Node came out. I thought about switching majors to Computer Science, but they weren’t teaching Neuro, so I just dropped out. Admittedly, that wasn’t the smartest idea.”

“I disagree. Much of Callosum is made up of Silicon Valley types.” Doctor Lam says, “That cred will actually get you further around here than an actual doctorate. And you, Jin?”

“I was coding for Codex and porting nOS apps before the—Well, yeah.”

Chairs creak in a beat of awkward silence. Aiesha quickly takes the reins. “So let’s get right to it. We love your app. It’s therapeutic application alone is a game changer, but the word association algorithm behind it is truly revolutionary.”

“There’s a whole team trying to rewrite nOS to achieve what you did with surface-level access,” Dr. Lam says, “We’re not supposed to tell you this, but your app is on the shortlist for the Brainhack Competition and will most likely win.”

Dee blinks several times. Jin tries their best not to squeal.

Aiesha continues, “Unfortunately, that is also why we believe it would be best if you withdrew from the competition.”

Dee shakes her head, “I don’t understand.”

@TheQuietPlace: Get to the Shadow Forums. I am waiting.

Alex walks out of the vintage store in a fresh change of clothes, hoping it will throw them off his trail. He was wrong. The second he steps back onto the street, a woman walking her dog turns and stares at him, her eyes jittering.

Chetan’s words come back to him. “It could be inside anyone.”

Alex picks up speed and darts through into a side street. Cordceps has been following him, and he can feel the AI’s eyes on the back of his neck no matter how many times he tries to lose it. At first, he thought he was being tailed by undercover Callosum agents, but it was far worse. Cordyceps is briefly taking over people to keep an eye on him.

He turns toward the display window of an unlicensed 3D print shop, and pretends to peruse the printed wares. Looking over his shoulder, he can see them watching him. It’s as though a single prolonged stare is bouncing from head to head, so that no one person gives him more than a passing glance. The virus is just waiting for the right moment. He’s sure of it.

Alex considers the handwritten sign in the window, “We can make anything.”

He walks into the print shop. The clerk glances over his feed and gives an inquiring grunt.

“I need something off the menu,” Alex says.

The clerk closes the window and looks him over. He decides Alex isn’t a cop and nods, “You want a nine-mill or a thirty-eight? The thirty-eight’s less likely to blow your fingers off.”

***

Eric leans against the leg of a mech, and the servos of his power armor hiss. “What makes you think I know how to get to the Shadow Forums? Only pedos and pirates go there.”

Alex motioned around the hangar bay, “Are you telling me you paid for this shooter?”

Eric chews on a mozzarella stick dripping with marinara sauce and nods, “Fair point.”

His skeevy modder friend—named Hobbes, Bob, or something. Alex never cared to find out—snorts a stim and butts in, “Going to the Bazaar is super illegal, man.”

Eric points to the alien planet being bombarded by Gothic battleships. “And there’s a major campaign going on.”

“I’ll pay for another hour. I wouldn’t barge into your game if it wasn’t important.”

“Okay.” Eric shrugs and exits the game, trading his power armor for jeans and a t-shirt covered in red sauce. The space station melds back into the square VR room.

Eric rubs his neck, “Don’t know if you know, but I’m in a weird place with Dee.”

Hobbes croons, “Because somebody’s gonna be a baby daddy.”

“Wait. She told you?” Alex asks.

“No, I found a pregnancy test in your bathroom trash can and took an educated guess it wasn’t from you or Jin—Wait. How do you know?”

“Dee told us.”

Eric turns to Hobbes. “See? She’s confrontational about everything except this. I don’t get it. Why hasn’t she said anything?”

Alex rubs his eyes. He doesn’t have time for this. “How did Dee dispose of the pregnancy test? Was it hidden under stuff or wrapped up like a used tampon?”

“No, it was just in your trash. I didn’t exactly go rooting around for it.”

“Eric, honey, she wanted you to find it. It’s probably why she told you to take a shower. Dee knows you know and is giving you time to freak out and get it out of your system.”

Eric stares at Alex for a beat, then blinks. “Shit. That’s totally what she’s doing.”

He pulls out an ornate key, and a set of gilded doors appears in front of them. Eric inserts it and gives it a turn. Massive tumblers clink and turn as the room gives way to the terracotta alleys and draped cloth of the Grand Bazaar.

In a vast sea of impermanence that is the darknet, the Grand Bazaar is a lighthouse pulling the sick and wary to its ad-hoc hubs. Its creation is one of the greatest unsolved mysteries. Seventy years ago, it simply appeared, fully automated, unmoderated, and ready for business. Five years ago, it received its first major update, and now node users could walk its halls completely anonymous, bringing along the worst of humanity.

Alex sticks behind Eric as they weave around pop-up shops and fire-sales, and he’s left bewildered by the illegality of it all. Killers hand out pamphlets showing their body of work. Blackhats sell ransomware next to Whitehats offering security solutions. Thieves hawk skimmed credit keys by the thousands, and traffickers offload flesh—Men, women, endangered animals, both synthetic and organic human organs, as long as no one asks where it comes from. The whole time, Hobbes scrampers from booth to booth, like some kid in a demented candy store

A video appears by Alex’s side of a woman leaping off a high-rise. Alex stops in front of a booth selling Cordyseps suicide compilations, and his heart is ratchets up a gear.

Eric quickly pulls him away, “Try not to look at the wares. Some things can’t be unseen.”

They blend back into the packed crowds, disregarding the physics of personal space. Eric does his best to keep Alex distracted. “Do you think I’d make a good father?”

“I think it won’t matter,” Alex says, glancing over his shoulder. For a brief second, he swears he saw something. Something seemingly pressed into the Bazaar itself. He shakes it off and turns back. “As long as Dee is the mother, the kid will turn out alright.”

They turn the corner, and two more indentations watch them pass, tall and thin funhouse-mirror shapes of men, taking form as they warp the area around them. A third begins to walk by their side, keeping a row of booths between them. Alex points it out, “We’re being followed.”

Eric stops and stares at their semi-invisible tail, “Well, that's new. Maybe it’s lag.”

Hobbes bumbles back and glances at the indentation, “Naw, that looks like a rogue AI. They’re all over the Bazaar.”

Alex stops him, “Hold on. Like a virus?”

“Eh. More like benign parasites. They siphon processing power from unsecured devices to continue to operate.”

“Not these ones,” Alex says and shoves Eric forward. “It’s the Cordyceps Trojan.”

Eric raises an eyebrow, “Uh, what? You can’t seriously believe that.”

Alex notices a fourth indentation closing in on them, “Trust me. We need to go, now.”

They start running, clipping through the crowd, but the Cordyceps men don’t give chase. Instead, they grow in number, propagating exponentially along their sides.

Eric moans, “Dude, what the hell did you do?”

Alex pulls Eric to the side, keeping him from running into a twisted mob. “Just keep going.”

It’s not long until the entire Bazaar is a warped mirror of itself. Eric pulls Alex through a doorway into the lobby of a Moroccan lounge. Hobbes is a step behind, but it’s too late. The man shrieks and as hands grab him.

Eric’s eyes go wide, “Hobbes!”

He reaches out, but Alex pulls him back. Hobbes moans as the viral horde closes in, his image twisting and stretching. He screams, then disappears.

Alex slams the door closed and doubles over. “We should be good…The Shadow Forums are on a private server, right? No bots allowed.”

“Yeah…” Eric pulls up a section of the VR room and finds Hobbes flicking his node. “Dude, what happened?”

Hobbes shrugs, “No clue. My Node shat a brick and lost the connection. I’m gonna go have a smoke.”

Eric turns to Alex, “What the Hell was that about?”

“I have leaked information proving Cordyceps was made by Callosum. The virus is trying to stop me.”

Eric takes a step back and eyes the exit. He sucks in his lips and lets out ‘pop.’ “Okay, cool… Cool. So pissing off a multinational is where I draw the line. I’m gonna go with Hobbes.”

Aisha Cotes pulls up an offer, and Doctor Lam slides it across the table. Diane and Jin look down at the terms and try to keep it together. Callosum wants to buy their app outright, offering to double the grand prize of the Brain Hack competition.

Dee looks up, suspicious, “How much money do you plan to make off all of this?”

Dr. Lam waves his hand, “On the app itself? Nothing. It’ll be integrated into the suite we offer licensed therapists. As for your word association algorithm? We have big plans.”

Aeisha Cotes pulls up a second set of documents, and Dr. Lam slides it over. “And we would like you both to be a part of it.”

It’s employment contracts. Callosum wants to hire them full-time. The salary seems like a joke at first, then a mistake, then a dream.

A very good dream.

Eric Noble trudges in the early pre-dawn glow and sleepily nods along to all of this. He yawns, “So, what? The moral of the story is don’t buy generic.”

Alex shifts the bucket of cleaning supplies to his other arm. “Don’t you think it’s a little suspicious Callosum was somehow able to break in and save the day?”

Eric shrugs. “Eh, security clearly wasn’t Cortix’s strong point.”

“But what if Callosum wasn’t the hero at all? What if they were the ones who did it? It was clearly corporate biological warfare.”

“And with a computer virus no less,” Eric adds with a smirk.

Alex goes silent, remembering Jin told him to play nice. Eric is an okay enough guy, but he’s definitely less of a friend and more the painfully heterosexual man your friend married.

A Social notification appeared by his side, @TheQuietPart: Checkmate is coming. Callosum will reveal itself. Alex automatically likes it and reposts it to his own followers.

They step out of the LAPD PubSec cameras' view and into an alleyway. Eric lights a cigarette and tempts Alex. Neither can afford to get fined for breaking the Public Smoking Ordinance, but Alex gives in.

Eric exhales, “So I take it Jin woke up screaming again? You usually don your tin foil hat when that happens.”

Alex nods. It’s been two years, and that day still comes to them as nightmares, Jin worst of all. He was conscious the entire time. Jin could only watch as he walked towards the edge.

They cut through the alleyway and face the old self-serve car wash. Every slot is taken up by a Displaced rolling up their tent. Eric drops their steam cleaner and moans.

@CordyInception: They will erase you to remake this world in their image.

These days, everything that can be automated is automated. It leaves too many able hands and not enough work. Alex and Eric thought they were onto something with SparClean, the remote car detailing gig. They had yet to invent the machine that could scrape crud out of a dashboard with a toothpick. They simply turned the app on, a car pulled up, they cleaned it, and then the car drove off. Rinse and repeat. Get paid per car. Most importantly, SparClean is the type of gig people call “Good node work.” The app is only available on the Callosum marketplace, meaning you need a Node to use it. That keeps the competition down, and it was a barrier that many people were coming to rely on.

They found early on that if they claimed a self-wash bay for the day, it could significantly cut down their time, which meant more cars and more cash. The only problem was that they weren’t the only ones with the same idea. Each morning became a race to claim the self-wash bay before everyone else, and the race was starting earlier and earlier each day. Then a week ago, SparClean launched a version of the app for tablets, and it was no longer “Good node work.” Almost immediately, the cars available to be detailed was cut in half. This morning, it appeared the Displaced even caught on to their self-wash strategy.

@TheQuietPart: Hate the symptom. Ignore the cause.

“How the Hell are we supposed to compete with fucking Dusters camping out like that?” Eric asks, working himself up into a solid statist rant.

“I don’t know,” Alex sighs, “Let’s just go find a parking spot near a spigot.”

“No, screw this! I’m sick of these transplants swarming over our fucking city! If it’s not some dehydrated Arizonan or inbred Salt Lake polygamist, it’s a goddamn Texan ’fugee fleeing the Lone Star Militia. I’m sick of it!”

Alex just turns around and walks back the way they came.

@DeathByDisk: They’re coming after dissenters. They’re trying to disappear us.

Eric catches up to him. “Sorry, that wasn’t my most shining moment. Don’t tell Dee.” He grabs the post out of the air, “Is this your feed? Christ, what are you tapped into?”

“The tinfoil hat types.” Alex says, “It keeps me sane, knowing I’m not the only one.”

“Said the patient inside the insane asylum,” Eric mutters.

They find a parking spot near a spigot, but are only able to clean one car. The rest of the time was spent waiting for the SparClean algorithm to favor them. Halfway through the day, it’s clear the well has dried up. The laws of Supply and Demand have struck again.

They give up and go to the mall for lunch. Alex lets Eric pull him into a Callosum Clinic showroom. Eric fawns over the specs of new node models, bad mouthing the manufacturers, and espousing brand loyalty as if any of it made a difference. The ancient behemoths of Silicon Valley, Cupertino, and Japan were nothing more than supplicants to Callosum these days.

Alex feigns interest, flicking his eyes towards each employee and the customers waiting in line to upgrade their hardware. He records it all, making sure to focus on each face for a full second. Afterwards, he sends a message to an anonymous account, “Mission complete.”

Back in Alex and Jin’s little studio apartment, they find their respective partners deep in their project. They slip out of their work shoes.

“This moment always reminds me of my Dad,” Eric says, “He’d come home from a long day of work and the first words out of his mouth were, ‘I’m not home. I know I look like I’m home, but I’m not. Give me a minute.’”

Alex chuckles as they don their moonwalkers, and the traction-control ball bearings sync to the sim. They leave the Real and enter the Digi. Alex and Jin’s little shoebox expands out into their cottage in the Grand Cayman Islands. Alex takes a deep breath as the white walls become a sunset along the beach. The view has long felt more like home than home. They walk down to the shore, moving several yards for every inch in the Real, feeling a simulacrum of the extra effort it takes to slog through the sand. They make their way over to where Jintao and Dee sit, surrounded by floating words and chalkboards covered in Neuro script.

Dee brushes a lock of curly red hair out of her face and smiles. She gives Eric a kiss on the lips, passionate enough to grace a romance novel in the discount download bin. Jin offers Alex a smile. It’s warm and genuine, but a cold, contact-free substitute in comparison.

Dee sniffs and points back towards the cottage, “Go shower, you stink.”

“Okay, okay,” Eric says and exits the sim, turning the five-minute walk back into a five-foot trek to the bathroom.

@TheQuietPart: They won’t stop until they have a monopoly over the world

Jin sees the post, and the smile dies.

Alex sets his feed to private and quickly shifts the focus, “How goes the mind reading?”

“‘Therapeutic word cloud.’” Dee corrects, “Calling it ‘mind reading’ raises privacy concerns. And it’s going well.”

“I actually think we might have this Brain Hack Competition in the bag,” Jin says, which is more than hopeful coming from him. Alex is usually the optimist in the relationship. If Jin and Dee make a splash in the Callosum competition, a third-party developer might offer them a job. The challenge these days wasn’t proving you were a good programmer. It’s proving you can code better than a guided AI construct.

“So it’s working?” Alex asks.

“Yep,” Jin says as words begin to float around him in various sizes and colors. ‘Shit’ briefly appears over his head as Jin realizes something. He flips a switch, and all the green words disappear.

“It’s been analyzing our thoughts for four hours now. The results have been… enlightening,” Jin says, his right dimple making an appearance in one of his more obvious tells. It usually means he’s embarrassed but doesn’t want to look embarrassed.

“What do the colors mean?” Alex asks, fixating on the words Jin filtered away. Alex could only catch one before disappearing, “Slipping.”

Jin’s dimple deepens. “It’s color-coded by association. Red are thoughts about life. Purple are thoughts about myself.”

“And the Green are about me? Do you think I’m slipping? In what way?”

“No, it’s just….” Jin swallows a grimace, “Jesus. Let’s not get into it.”

“Like he said. It’s been enlightening.” Dee says, quick to step in, pulling up her own word cloud. “Baby,” “mother,” “father,” and “The future” are most prevalent.

Alex gasps, “Oh my god. Dee, are you pregnant?”

Dee bites her lip and pulls the bathroom door out of the Real. She mutes the ocean to check if Eric has the shower running. “Apparently? It was news to me. At least, I wasn’t aware on a conscious level, but I took a test. And yeah, I am. Don’t tell Eric.”

Alex doesn’t know if he’s more excited for her or for their app. “That’s amazing.”

“You want to give it a shot?” Jin asks.

Alex hesitates, thinking what it may show, then nods. “Sure.”

Jin runs the app, and words begin to surround him. Or at least, they look like words. It’s a rainbow of letters, numbers, and symbols all mixed together into the shape of words.

Jin trades looks with Dee. “What the hell?”

“Shit,” Dee says, “What did we do wrong?”

They can live in paradise most of the day, but as they get ready for bed, they have to take their moonwalkers off and step back into the reality of their studio apartment. It’s uncomfortable and claustrophobic. They become hyper-aware of each other’s breathing, and it’s harder to ignore the conversations they each pinned for later.

As they lower the mattress, Alex finally broaches the topic. “Do you think I’m slipping away from you?”

“No.” Jin sighs and sits down. “Just no.”

“So are you slipping away from me?”

“Come here,” Jin says, patting the bed.

Alex sits, and Jin kisses him. It’s long, deliberate, with the promise of more folded into it. Alex can’t tell if it’s an answer or a deflection, but he takes it anyway. He always does. He lets Jin lead, reads every small hesitation, and pulls back the second he feels tension. He sticks to what he knows Jin is comfortable with, careful not to surprise him, careful not to want too much or let him feel smothered.

The therapist once called Jin “a survivor of rape, in some ways,” and it was the truth of it. The Cordyceps Trojan forced itself into Jin’s body, rewiring him from the inside while Alex stood there helpless, watching the person he loved get taken over inch by inch, neuron by neuron, pulled and pushed to the very edge.

That memory lingers now. It always lingers. Heavy as the humidity trapped inside their small confines. It sits at the foot of the bed like something alive, patiently waiting for a misstep, threatening to clear its throat and ruin the intimacy. They work around it, eyes closed, hands moving through shuddered breaths, pretending the shadow isn’t there. It’s the closest thing they have to peace. Some nights, that’s enough.

Other nights, it isn’t.

There’s silence, then a single sob. Alex doesn’t hug or hold Jin. Making him feel constricted would only make it worse. Instead, he lies beside him, stroking his back.

Jin doesn’t apologize. He stopped doing that long ago. An apology implies that something can be fixed.

“Wake up.”

Alex rubs his eyes. His node syncs with the sim, and he’s taken back to the beachside cottage. A message waiting for him. ‘I’m outside.’ Alex sits up and looks out the window. A shadow stands against the moonlit sky. He turns to check if Jin is still asleep. He is.

Alex stands and starts recording a POV, finding some comfort in at least having a record of whatever the hell these weird rendezvous were. He slips on his moonwalkers and turns on the patio light. The shadow remains a void cut out of his surroundings, one Alex has never been able to look at for too long. Looking at the shadow was like staring at an optical illusion, and it leaves his brain trying to make sense of the elephant with four legs and five connected feet.

Alex walks outside. A foraging crab scuttles off the deck. The high tide crashes against the rocks beneath them.

“Were you noticed?” The shadow asks.

“No,” Alex says and hands over several video files, including the one he recorded inside the Callosum Clinic. He checks on Jin through the window. “And a little warning next time.”

“I have a new task for you,” the shadow says.

“Hold on. You still haven’t explained the last task. I don’t even know why you’re here.”

“I’m here because you want the truth, and I need your help. Too many contacts have been burned. I can’t trust this to someone who might be on their radar.”

Alex tries to protest, but the shadow stops him, “No. Just listen. They’re trying to trace my connection. We don’t have time. All I can say is that I work on the inside, and I have evidence: proof that Callosum created Cordyceps and that their attack on Cortix is just the beginning, but it needs to be delivered to the right hands through an intermediary. Can you do that?”

Alex nods, “Yeah—Yes. Of course. I’ll help.”

“Good. Then it’s time we meet IRL.” The shadow conjures up a card with an address. “Be here. Three o’clock tomorrow.”

“Alex?”

The shadow abruptly disappears. Alex spins and faces Jin.

Jin doesn’t take the news well. “You’ve been casing clinics for this guy for months, and you don’t even know why!”

Alex pulls out the POV he recoded of the shadow, “I’m about to find out. I swear I was going to let you in, once I did.”

“You could be aiding and abetting a Luddite bomber for all you know.”

“He’s not a terrorist. Jin, just listen—”

“No, you listen. This obsession isn’t healthy. You need to let it go. Your entire life has become wrapped up in these insane conspiracy theories.”

“They’re not insane. Do you know what’s insane? Not being able to take you anywhere that has a railing. There’s a whole group of friends we no longer see because they live above the second floor, and it’s only gotten worse. You barely go outside. I can’t even hold you anymore because it reminds you too much of that goddamn day. Do you know how hard that is for me?”

Jin goes silent, and Alex feels like an asshole, but it needed to be said. He continues, “I’m doing this for you, Jin. If we can just get some accountability, find the bastard who coded it….”

“Nothing will change, Alex. The damage is done… We just need to live with the scars.”

“I can’t.” Alex says and presses the video forward, “Not when their tech is in our heads.”

Jin watches Alex’s POV, then watches it again, messing with the settings, trying to figure it out. Finally, he leans back with an exhale and shakes his head, “I don’t understand.”

“What’s not to understand?” Alex says, “We need to go.”

“No, hold on.” Jin takes his hand and slows him down, “I couldn’t find anyone besides us connected to our network, and something is off with your POV. Look:” Jin rewinds the video to the moment Alex turns the porch light on. “See how the light doesn’t touch him?”

“I know, it’s weird.”

“No, that’s not just weird. That’s not right. That’s not how light works with nodes. Light…” Jin mulls over how to get the idea across, then conjures a glowing lightbulb and moves it around, “Okay, you see how this is illuminating the room? In old physics-based graphic engines, this was a massive resource suck to do realistically because the GPU needed to calculate and simulate how the rays bounced off all the surfaces. Nodes don’t do that. Instead of simulating a lightbulb, it describes the lightbulb, directly manipulating your visual cortex into thinking there actually is a lightbulb in my hands.”

“Yeah, it’s a hallucination. I get it.” Alex says, growing impatient.

Jin holds up a finger, “But so is the light that it creates, and that’s the problem. When you turned on the light, your node told your brain to illuminate the porch, but Mister Shadow Man wasn’t included. It's almost like someone copy-pasted him over the sim, which made me think to do this:”

Jin toggles a switch. In the POV, the shore and starry night become a bare white wall, but the shadow remains.

Alex shakes his head, “What? Do you think I’m pranking you?”

“No,” Jin says quickly, “I’m saying your node wasn’t causing you to see Mr. Shadow Man. That’s weird—On top of what already sounds like a plot from a freakin’ spy thriller.”

READ PART TWO HERE

The shine wears off, and the glamor of the New World starts to fade.

The Founders mingle with French dignitaries. A ruddy-faced Benjamin Franklin raises his glass and gives a bawdy toast, “Thus, as I am wont to say, ‘Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise. And easy to bed, easy on the eyes, makes a woman lusty, busty, and by God, those thighs!”

Jefferson chokes on his hard cider and gives into a coughing fit.

Hamilton rubs his brow, “Will somebody please take the cup from the honorable statesman from Philadelphia?”

Alex and Jintao sit in the corner, drinking PBR, unamused. Alex gestures with his bulgogi fajita appetizer. “You do know they all think we’re abominations.”

Jintao rolls his eyes and keeps scrolling through his feed, “Uh-huh.”

“I mean, how enlightened can they be if they all pooped in chamber pots?”

“I’m pretty sure they had outhouses.”

Alex scratches under his powdered wig, “Fine. They pooped in a hole. Why did you want to eat with them again?”

“I don’t know,” Jintao sighs and waved his hand through the candelabra. The candles waver just as much as their flames. “I thought ambiance would be romantic.”

Alex cracks a lop-sided grin and plays with the ring he put on Jin’s finger. “Honey, you’re all the ambiance I need. We could eat out of a dumpster and make it romantic. ”

Jintao gives in, “Okay, fine. If you want to do your space restaurant—”

“—Oh God, yes. Please!—”

“—We can do the freaking space restaurant, but I’m keeping the wig.”

“Deal.” Alex grins and pulls the menu. The hard corners of the colonial ballroom round out, and the Grand damask wallpaper is traded out for a dark, infinite void withered by entropy. Wealthy white landowners warp into a diverse cast of aliens. Ben Franklin’s considerable girth sprouts fifty arms, and he begins applying spray-on deodorant to his numerous pits.

The Restaurant at the End of The Universe proves a far more exciting choice. The Big Bang is spectacular, and the Hooloovoo’s stand-up routine is delightfully blue, leaving Jintao gasping as much as any offended debutant.

After their hour is up, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe fades back into their private booth, and they are left surrounded by white walls and motion tracker markings and their finished plates. Other patrons sit in their own worlds, powered by their digitally streamlined hallucinations. Alex and Jin put their rented powdered wigs on the table and pay the bill.

Jintao sighs at the notice that the VR Cafe will officially become a ‘Node-friendly environment’ in the following year. ‘Node-friendly’ being what Callosum calls places they pay off to exclude Cortix Disks, Callosum’s main competitor. Most businesses were either ‘Disk-friendly’ or ‘Node-friendly’ these days, all falling victim to the escalating tensions in the consumer neural implant war, with neither side content with just half the market share.

The two return to reality and find themselves on Santa Monica Blvd, wincing at the intense afternoon sun. Alex wobbles and Jin catches him.

Alex steadies himself, “I’m good. I’m good. It’s just my head.”

“You only had two beers.”

Alex rubs the nickel-sized rose gold implant behind his ear, ”No, it’s my Disk. You know how I get when I use it too much.”

“Let’s pump you up full of caffeine and corn syrup. That always helps.” Jintao taps his own carbon steel Disk and drops a pin to the nearest coffee shop. A spotlight appears a few blocks off. He keeps a steadying arm around Alex, and they start walking.

Alex gives Jintao a nudge, “I hear Nodes don’t have this problem.”

“Ugh, don’t even get me started.”

Alex continues needling him to do precisely that, “I just think getting you into the Callosum Appstore will do you some good. You keep telling me you can port nOs apps into Codex, but you can’t port Codex apps into nOs.”

“Okay, sure. But with what money?”

Alex sours at that.

Jin pats him on the arm. “Trust me, if you had to navigate nOS restrictions, you wouldn’t be so gung-ho about switching over. Cortix is so much more coder-friendly—Watch the legs.”

Alex looks down and steps over the Displaced sleeping against the wall. Jintao gives the man a quick “Sorry, I don’t have anything on me” gesture.

The two have their problems just like any other couple. Their fights are often over the things they can’t afford, or the job Alex couldn’t find. He used to call himself a copywriter before the entire industry was outsourced to AI. There was no way to compete with a construct that could create a custom campaign perfectly tailored for every single person at a fraction of the price. The conversation could easily veer down that avenue of a well-worn argument. Instead, they choose to bask in the easy silence that comes with time.

Jintao rests his head on Alex’s shoulder, and Alex smiles, just because. They come to a crosswalk, and Jin gives him a soft and meaningful kiss, making up for the fight they didn’t have. “We’ll get with the times.”

“Yeah,” Alex says and keeps his doubts to himself. ‘The times’ were starting to feel like a game of musical chairs played by a hungry mob.

Jintao looks past him and squints at a message only he can see.

“What?” Alex asks.

Jintao focuses back on him, “Nothing. Just a weird message. Remember Stephan?”

Alex’s eyebrows rise as he digs through ancient history, “Your ex with the cats?”

“Cat tchotchkes.” Jintao corrects, “He just sent me something with the subject line, ‘I love you.’ God knows why.”

Alex guffaws, “Oh honey, you gotta open it up.”

“Okay, Okay,” Jintao says. He taps the air and goes still.

The lights turn green, and the crosswalk guy appears. Jin doesn’t move.

“Well, what does it say?” Alex asks.

Jintao opens his mouth and lets out a guttural noise. He swallows and tries to speak again, but nothing comes out.

“Jin?” Alex’s smile dies. He tries to take Jin’s hand, but it is balled into a white-knuckled fist. Jintao’s whole body is rigid as a board. What the Hell is going on? Alex removes Jin’s shades and grows scared. Jintao’s pupils lock onto him, wide and trembling. He isn’t blinking at all. Was it a stroke? Alex pats him on the cheek, “Jin, baby, this isn’t funny.”

A message appears from Alex’s brother, Kieran. “I love you” is in the subject line. That was odd. Kerian was usually the type who showed brotherly love by punching Alex in the arm.

“What the fuck?” Alex is about to open the message when Jintao begins to move. he looks over his left shoulder and then slowly turns his head to the right. The movement is smooth, almost mechanical.

“Jin, talk to me,” Alex says as Jin’s gaze passes over him, a tear running down his cheek. Jin continues to sweep the area. Alex shakes Jin’s shoulders, “Baby, come on. Snap out of it!”

A horn blares, and tires shriek, punctuated by a painfully distinct ‘thunk.’ Alex flinches as a driverless SUV stops just feet away from him, leaving the smell of burnt rubber in the air. Its grill is dented and bloody. Alex’s eyes fall on a stray woman’s shoe by his feet, then on the woman herself... trying to pull herself from underneath the SUV.

“Oh, Jesus! Jesus––Fuck!” Alex looks for help, but no one else is nearby. He toggles his disk, dials 9-1–1, and stoops by the woman. Her hair is matted over her face. Her breath is ragged, but otherwise she’s silent. The woman just keeps trying to pull herself out, peeling off a fingernail in the process.

Alex speaks in a rush, “No, don’t move. Help is on its way. What’s your name, Ma’am?”

The woman doesn’t respond. She just keeps wheezing and pawing at the asphalt.

“Ma’am?” Alex turns back to Jin, who hasn’t moved an inch. “Goddamnit, Jin! Snap out of it and help!”

Emergency services aren’t picking up. Why isn’t anyone picking up? Alex is so jacked up on adrenaline that everything seems like it’s down a long hallway. ‘Tunnel vision,’ the rational part of his brain tells him that’s. He has tunnel vision. It also notes that the woman has a Cortix Disk just like him, but Alex doesn’t think anything of it.

Fuck it. Alex grabs the woman by the shoulders and pulls. Her turns her over and recoils. The poor girl was dragged several feet, leaving her right side bloody and raw. Alex can see the bulge of a severely broken bone in her leg. Her shirt is pulled down, exposing her chest, and Alex’s first thought is to help her cover up, but the road rash is so bad that he doesn’t want to touch it and cause her any more pain. He takes in the damage, then realizes something else is far more wrong. She isn’t screaming. Why isn’t she screaming? The woman is just laying there with half her face ground off, her eyes locked onto Alex, not making a sound.

She abruptly sits up. Alex snaps out of it. “Oh no. Don’t move. You’re hurt, lady—”

The woman pushes herself to her feet, blood trickling down onto the asphalt in light rain, her eyes bulging, bouncing around in a panic while the rest of her face remains expressionless. She stands on her broken leg. Shattered bones grind against each other. With a crack, her calf rips open, and a jagged white edge pokes through.

Blood splatters against Alex’s cheek. He screams, but the woman doesn’t even wince. She takes a step, putting her total weight onto the leg, further tearing into her flesh. Her entire shin snaps in half with an audible crack and the woman crumples to the ground.

Alex stumbles back and watches in horror as the woman tries to stand again, unphased.

A second “I love you” message appears in front of him. This one from Jintao.

Alex spins around in a nightmarish daze. His husband is gone. “Jin? JIN!?”

A horn blares. He spots Jin a block away, walking across the street towards an overpass. Alex runs, quickly closing the distance, but he’s too far away.

Jin grips the overpass railing and begins to climb over.

Alex shoots across the street, ignoring the automated traffic swerving out of the way. All he sees is his husband pulling his leg over the railing, leaving nothing but air between him and the twenty lanes of 405 traffic speeding below.

Time seems to slow as Alex watches Jin lean forward, letting his weight take him off the edge. Alex reaches out. His fingers graze his husband’s back. He grabs Jintao’s shirt in a fist and pulls. Jin slams against the railing, and Alex grabs hold of him, but Jin’s legs give out and he almost slips from Alex’s grip. Alex holds on, nearly toppling over the railing along with him, but his foot snags on a bar.

Alex never considered himself a physically man strong nor is he particularly tall. His husband has him beat by five inches and forty pounds, but in that frenzied moment—A moment Alex will look back on and never know how he managed to do what he did—he pulls Jintao’s dead weight up and over the railing. They hit the ground, Alex smashing his head into the sidewalk. Jins body crushing his chest into the concrete, knocking the air out of his lungs.

Jintao rolls off Alex, leaving him dazed and wheezing. He immediately goes back to the railing. Alex scrabbles to his feet and rips Jin away once more. They topple back onto the sidewalk. Alex wraps his legs and arms around Jin’s torso and holds him down. Jin wordlessly tries to pull himself to his feet to achieve that single mindless goal, leaving the two wobbling like an upturned tortoise.

“It’s okay, baby. I’m here. I got you.” Alex cranes his neck and looks around. A man is approaching, silhouetted by the sunlight. Alex calls out, “Please help. Something’s wrong with my husband. He keeps trying to--”

The man’s head blocks out the sun, and Alex’s voice catches as he sees the slack face; blank, short of his eyes bouncing around his skull. They stay on him for as long as they can, trembling with a silent cry for help.

“Oh God, I’m sorry.” Alex looks away as the man walks past and starts to climb over the railing just as Jin did. He closes his eyes and focuses on Jin trapped in his embrace. “It’s okay. It’s okay. I got you. I’m not going to let go. I’m not going to let--”

A body hits the pavement below with a dull thump, a screech of tires, and a chaotic symphony of metal and glass.

***

It’s called the Cordyceps Trojan, and it kills thousands.

Named after Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, a fungus that evolved with the specialized ability to control ant’s nervous system. It compels the insect to climb to the highest point in the area. The fungus then eats its host alive from the inside out and blooms a mushroom out of the ant’s back so it can rain infectious spores down on other victims.

Similarly, the Cordyceps Trojan uses a zero-day exploit in the latest Cortix Disk operating system update to take over the user’s motor control, a function Cortix neglected to mentioned their neural implants could do. The Trojan then forces the victim to scan the area and enter the tallest building in sight. If the virus can not find a suitable structure, as in Jintao’s case, anything with a significant drop will do. Kieran, Alex’s brother, belly-flops into the deep end of his family’s empty pool. He will survive, but will never walk again without the aid of an assistive exoskeleton. Stephan, Jintao’s ex with the cat tchotchkes, lives on the 27th floor of a high-rise and isn’t as lucky.

Darsh Reddy, the CEO and President of Cortix was patient zero. Before he jumped off the rooftop of ‘Big Brain,’ the main administrative building on Cortix campus, he forwarded the Trojan in a company-wide email telling them all that they are loved. Most of the 12,000 employees on campus open it immediately, since email response time is notoriously monitored, and a delayed response may show poorly on the yearly review. The few that do not open the message are congregated around Big Brain’s east-facing windows. After witnessing Reddy’s body fly past, they are simply too preoccupied to check their inbox.

Within minutes, the every infected individual around the 350-acre campus identify Big Brain as the tallest building and flock toward it. A silent orderly cue of the possessed forms in the multiple stairwells spanning length of the forty-five-story building, and the dead began to pile up on the ground floor.

The Cordyceps Trojan is only a semi-sentient virus, capable of usurping control of the user’s body but it is only able to perform rudimentary functions after that. It knows how to climb stairs, call an elevator, select the top floor, and open doors and windows, but it doesn’t know what to do if something is locked, even if the only thing in the way is a chain or latch. The virus, however, is also designed to be adaptive to counter the Codex operating system’s equally responsive security routines. When Cordyceps usurps control, it immediately begins to improve itself, overclocking the victim’s hardware to evolve its code through countless iterations of a generative adversarial network.

The original virus was only intended to be a targeted attack on Cortix, but it is likely that whoever designed the Trojan never considered the delay caused by the rooftop traffic jam. After twelve minutes of continuous operation, Cordyceps goes off script and changes it’s parameters, spamming a modified second generation copy of itself to the contact lists of over 12,000 employees.

“I love you,” starts appearing in inboxes worldwide.

Even without the subject line, it’s a profoundly personal attack. By default Cortix Disk users only receive notifications for message from people the filters deem as important, causing most victims to be infected by close friends, family, coworkers, and lovers.

Every time the Cordyceps Trojan takes over another victim, it continues to improve itself before sending off the updated version to infect others. By the third generation of the virus, thousands of individual Cordyceps strains develop the ability to contribute to an ad-hoc cloud network of slaved devices. The collaboration allows the virus to streamline its improvement and exponentially increase the speed of its evolution. By the fourth generation, the virus is repackaged into hundreds of targeted variants ranging from work-related, ‘URGENT: ACTION NEEDED’ to attaching custom synthesized nude pictures to send to unsuspecting romantic interests. By the fifth generation, the virus creates an nOS variant capable of hopping the neural implant divide into Callosum Nodes. By then, however, Callosum has the threat identified and blocks any communication coming from the Cortix ecosystem.

The response from law enforcement is ineffective. By the time they arrive on Cortix Campus, a wall of corpses surrounds the Big Brain building, and the steady rain of bodies going terminal velocity makes any attempt to clear a path just as suicidal.

Only Callosum’s quick response proves able to stop the virus. They immediately recall their army of CyberSec AI leased to local and federal law enforcement and task the constructs into breaching Cortix’s mainframe. It’s the cyber attack equivalent to storming the beaches of Normandy, and the moment Callosum gains a foothold, they force an overriding shutdown for every single Cortix Disk in operation, stopping the forced death march in its tracks and killing the Cordyceps cloud network.

The victory comes just in time. Later forensic data analysis lead many to believe the Cordyceps Trojan was only minutes away from evolving a method of activating the instant it entered a neural implant. If unchecked, the virus could have led to a mass suicide event numbering in the tens of millions.

READ PART TWO HERE

In a move widely seen as a consolidation of control over the digital town square, billionaire and ardent Zionist Larry Ellison has joined a consortium led by Jared Kushner to acquire TikTok’s U.S. operations. For creators critical of Israel’s actions in Gaza, the sale represents a death knell for the platform’s once-vibrant pro-Palestinian movement.

“First they installed a former IDF instructor as head censor, and then the word ‘genocide’ became ‘mass un-aliving,’” said one creator who wished to remain anonymous, “Now every video has to condemn Hamas just to hit the FYP. I’m watching fourteen-year-olds doing the ‘Hamas microwaved babies’ dance to Taylor Swift just to trend.”

She paused, motioning to her latex nurse outfit. “So yeah. I’m on Pornhub now.”

She’s one of millions fleeing to the adult platform, which has somehow become the last bastion of unfiltered speech for the Free Palestine movement.

“The only catch,” said an Al Jazeera correspondent while squishing cake between her bare feet outside the Rafah crossing, “is that videos still have to be technically porn. But if that’s what it takes to show the hundreds of aid trucks stuck at the border, I’ll do feet stuff.”

Just last week, the top-trending video on the site was “Slutty Step-Sister ICJ JOI Genocide Report Update.” Where she told the camera, “Gaza’s starvation has reached catastrophic levels, with more than 320,000 children under the age of five at risk of acute malnutrition, so don’t you dare cum.”

Meanwhile, one of TikTok’s highest-boosted video remains an algorithm-friendly “Get Ready With Me” featuring an Israeli supermodel-turned-IDF drone operator getting ready to bomb a “Hamas” donkey cart carrying the wounded.

On TikTok, posts with hashtags like #FreePalestine or #GazaUnderAttack disappear within minutes. Comments vanish and creators are redirected to official fact-checking “explainers” assuring them that Gazan children “aren’t being bombed; they’re simply so consumed by hate they spontaneously combust.”

“But because it’s Pornhub, it’s too spicy for billionaires to sanitize,” explained climate activist Greta Thunberg, performing a tasteful striptease to If I Must Die: Poetry and Prose by Refaat Alareer, the Gazan poet assassinated in a drone strike after his words went viral. “I hate that my channel gets more engagement than my aid flotilla work, but at least people are hearing Gaza’s cry for help.”

“Pornhub even gave us our own Gaza section between Gaping and Grannies.”

In response, Israeli propagandists have attempted to counter with their own porn-political content, though reception has been poor. Early uploads like “Ben Gvir Edges Himself to Mosque Demolition” and “Netanyahu’s Bedroom Siege” have drawn more dislikes than any other video, with one user commenting, “Bro, I came here to jerk off to a two-state solution, not apartheid.”