“Why are you here on a Sunday?” “John’s in town,” I said. “And he knows I’m looking for him.” I’ve carried this case for five years. When Operant moved its compute out to Long Island—cheaper power, easier permits—it landed in my world by accident. Detective James Reese, Nassau County Police. Since then, every time I think I’ve got a straight line, the story bends. People call it “mind control.” That’s the wrong phrase. You hear that and you start hunting for sci-fi. What you should be hunting for is timing. There are the clean facts. It started with a private investigator caught at night inside Jane Street’s office. He was there to plant a device. Not a camera, not a mic. A flat plastic square the size of a drop ceiling tile, featureless, no lens, no obvious grill. If you tapped it with a knuckle it sounded dead, like dense foam. The FBI took the evidence, said as little as possible, and then Trump dissolved the Bureau and the chain of custody with it. The PI pled to B&E, did eighteen months, swore a friend offered him ten grand and a location. The friend never existed long enough for us to find. While the tile vanished, Operant didn’t. They grew. They put their name on the Ducks’ ballpark, donated to everyone they should, and pushed eight percent of Long Island’s power through their meter. Every time I asked questions, a lawyer answered them. I still have a job mostly because I don’t stick my questions in microphones. But the corporate espionage wasn’t the hook. The hook’s name was Tom Park. Young, gifted, on Operant’s “research” payroll. He died off the roof of their building. We asked for the CCTV. They delayed until the delay became its own story, and when the files came they were grainy enough you could convince yourself resolution had gone out of style. We couldn’t prove a cut. We couldn’t prove a lie. We could see a silhouette on the roof with a phone in his hand, see him put it away, and watch him walk forward like he’d decided to walk forward an hour ago. We pulled his phone records. The carrier said the device never left his parents’ house that night. The family’s router logs said the same thing—MAC associated all evening, steady signal, Netflix on the downstairs TV. At the time of death the rooftop access point didn’t record a roam. No one found a phone with the body. If you’re generous, you call that “inconsistency.” If you’ve been around long enough, you call it “choreography.” I didn’t see the tile again, but I kept a copy of the photos and I stared at the connector pads until I’d memorized the geometry. Four edge pads, power bus shape. Months later, a fire inspection at an Operant satellite site flagged “non-listed luminaires with integrated driver boards.” That’s code for “custom lights.” The brand on the sticker didn’t exist in any registry. It matched nothing you could buy. What does a ceiling tile do if it isn’t a ceiling tile? You can guess: a planar array under plastic, phaseable, a clock inside that doesn’t drift. You don’t need to read thoughts. You need to make the room keep time. We ran a small experiment in our squad room. Nothing that requires approval. We set up a tapping game on a laptop—left or right as quickly as you can when a cue appears. We added a desk lamp we could modulate in the last hundred milliseconds before the cue—no visible flicker, just PWM phase changes—and a piezo disc under the mouse pad that could make a vibration too soft to notice unless you were trying to notice. We told the script to wait until the model thought the subject was likely to pick left, then line up the lamp phase and the tick so “left” felt a hair earlier. The hit rate shifted eight points. The officers said it felt like the computer was “on it” that round. No one said they felt pushed. That’s the thing about timing: when it works, it feels like you were going to do it anyway. I went back to Tom. We subpoenaed what we could: badge swipes, elevator logs, building automation schedules for lights and HVAC. The elevator cabin he rode at 23:41 ran a “door nudge” cycle at floor 35—exact term in the manual. Not a stop, a shove. At the same minute the east conference rooms above ran a luminance ramp—35 to 50 percent and back down—logged as a “pattern test.” Two minutes later the air handlers kicked a “night purge,” unscheduled. The lobby mic’s spectrogram shows the change as a clean band sliding up. None of those facts make a person move. Together they draw a rhythm line through a building. We never found what Tom had in his hand, his “not a phone,” but a year after his death, one of their contractors quit and dumped an issue tracker on a public repo by accident. It was up for an hour before it vanished, but the internet is full of raccoons, and one of them sent me a ZIP. Half the issues were boring—install scripts, driver mismatches, bad GPIO pull-ups. The other half had words like “phase,” “latency,” “confidence gate,” “avoid visible artifacts,” “EEG-free,” and the tag “ROOM.” There was a set of comments on a bug titled “End Token Misfires.” The engineers were arguing about whether printing the full predicted sequence at the start of a session biased the subject into making it true. One person said that was the point. Another said if your only wins are the ones you can cause you aren’t measuring prediction anymore, you’re measuring control. The thread ends with a “resolved—won’t fix.” Mind control isn’t the right term. It makes people look for sci-fi. The right term is “nudge,” the one the elevator manuals use. You put your thumb on the timing. You don’t push the person; you lean on the moment. Tom stood on a roof with a clock in his pocket that belonged to the room, and a room that belonged to the company, and a company that had learned you can make a person look like a prediction if you take away all the moments where they would have surprised you. Sometimes I think the real trick isn’t the tile or the lights. It’s the bookkeeping. You arrange your systems so that there’s nothing to subpoena. The carrier shows a phone at home. The Wi-Fi shows a phone at home. The building shows a test pattern and a purge cycle and a polite door. Nothing is illegal in a log file. I keep a copy of that ZIP on a USB stick in my desk. There’s a folder called “SAFE_GATES” with a README someone wrote in plain English. “Do not schedule interventions if subject arousal > threshold. Do not schedule end token if subject mentions self-harm. Cooldown after consecutive errors.” Half the rules are commented out. The most recent commit message is just a shrug emoji. The worst part is how ordinary it all is. The elevator nudge. The lamp nudge. The HVAC tone. The not-a-phone. If you want to find the devil, you don’t go looking for horns. You go looking for clock edges. I told my sergeant I was taking the rest of the day. I stopped by a hardware store and bought a dimmer I knew I could open, and a roll of white tape. Back at the office I put a strip of tape on the lamp in interview room two, covering the LED that the supplier put there to indicate “smart mode.” We don’t use smart mode. We don’t use anything with a mode. When I left, the room looked like every other room. That’s the point. You only notice the timing when it slips. On the way home I drove past the Ducks ballpark. Operant’s name on the sign looked like every other naming deal. Families walking in, kids with foam fingers, warm light over the field. If you didn’t know to look, you’d think it was all just baseball.

Mom 12:37 – hey when are you getting home? Dave You set the disappearing message time to 3 hours hey you doing better lol yea i really didn't sleep much what's up u didn't set timeout for that yea is what Brian said true what did he say about how Tom worked at operant? yea why? you know that's where my dad worked and he kind of went crazy too do you know what he did there? not rly my mom gets real upset when i bring it up it was some math shit with magnets wanna come over and ask her lol I did not want to have a conversation with Dave’s mother. 12:55 – haha im good but im just chilling at home if you want to come by here The doorbell rang again. Resolving to be less of a pussy, I answered it. I was prepared to talk to the cops. Polite, short answers, step outside and lock the door, find out what they want. Not a pussy. Not a pussy. Not a pussy. It wasn’t the cops. It was my Mom’s friend Anne, and I told her she wasn’t here. It was always strange to me that that generation would just drop by. Like she didn’t text her first? She said she was in the neighborhood and had extra bagels she wanted to drop off. I thought about telling her that I hadn’t heard from my Mom since yesterday and that she didn’t reply to my text, but decided against it. I didn’t know the dynamic of my Mom’s friend group. Maybe she is out sleeping with Anne’s husband or something. I didn’t want to be a link in the chain of Anne finding out. I was vague but very polite. Anne left the bagels. I didn’t touch the bag. I went up the stairs to my Mom’s room. Did I mention how much I like true crime? It’s probably done bad things for me personality wise. I know that the people on there are out of the normal distribution of people, but those podcasts are one of my only exposures to the outside world. The world beyond this little slice of Brooklyn. So you kind of start thinking everyone is like that. I’d always just assumed my Dad was like, a Wall Street guy. Boring. Get money, fuck bitches. When I was little we had tons of money. We lived in a huge house in Cobble Hill. I flew first class to Europe when I was 7. We spent a week on a yacht in Monaco. My mom loved the luxury lifestyle, and would put up with a lot of my Dad’s eccentricities to keep it. When he left she didn’t seem that upset though. I think the money was still coming in from him, which was the main thing she cared about. It clearly wasn’t as much, we moved out to Sheepshead Bay and never went back to Europe. But she didn’t work and I always got good birthday presents, and she never said anything bad about my Dad, so I assume that’s where the money was coming from. The first drawer I opened had sex toys in it. I saw a vibrator and a butt plug before I quickly closed the drawer. The second drawer had socks. The third drawer had tons of scattered papers. My college rejections. Some essays from high school. A note written in crayon about how I wanted a Nintendo Switch for Christmas. I guess this was the “me” drawer. The fourth drawer was papers, but more organized. My parents marriage certificate. My mom’s birth certificate. My old passport. As far as I knew, they never got a divorce. He just left. Then, something I didn’t know. A document entitling one Jessica Baker to $10,000 per month, to be paid out on the first of every month by the Triangle Trust, for the rest of her natural life, or until the trust is dissolved. That was nice of my Dad. I went through the rest of the drawers, but didn’t find anything else interesting. I put everything back as carefully as I could. I considered that someone might dust for fingerprints. I wondered if I did anything illegal. I live here, right? I checked on the text message to my Mom and noticed that it hadn’t been delivered. This was really unlike her. Sometimes she’d go out drinking and meet a guy and stay out all night, but she’d always at least text me by the morning when she sobered up. 2:14 – are you okay? Not delivered. Maybe her phone died? Nah but it’s the afternoon she probably would have charged it by now. I tried calling. Straight to voicemail. I checked the Mercedes app to see where her car was. She’d let me take the car sometimes, so we were both on the app. It asked me to login. I copied the password from 1password. Incorrect Password Maybe she changed it? I tried to set her up on 1password but she didn’t get it. She’d just reset the passwords when she needed to login. Ugh, logging into stuff is the worst. I clicked the reset password and typed in the e-mail. There is no account with that e-mail Okay, that doesn’t make sense. My Mom and I shared an e-mail for this stuff, and she wouldn’t change it without telling me. I clicked forgot e-mail. It needed the VIN of the car. The title was in the fourth drawer with the other papers. I went and got it and typed in the VIN. The e-mail associated with your account is: skinner666@gmail.com A jolt of anxiety coarsed through my body. I’d never seen that e-mail address in my life.

Dave 2:41 – yoo i took a nap wanna play minecraft? actually i need your help with something what just come over kk i gotta shower Dave knew stuff about computers. Don’t let the being high all the time fool you, he was the smartest guy in our friend group. And he was the most chronically online. He showed up on his bike 20 minutes later. “Yo,” I yelled to him across the lawn. “Dude what’s up? You look rattled” “My mom is missing and she isn’t answering her phone. Then I tried to track her on the car app, but somebody changed the e-mail.” Dave came inside the house (I locked the door behind him) and opened his laptop at the kitchen table. I messaged him the VIN, and he tried the reset e-mail again but on the website. Same result. Same skinner666 “What did the e-mail used to be? Do you have access to that account?” “Yea,” I brought up the password to bakerfamily43@gmail.com on my 1Password and Dave logged in on his laptop. We saw like 15 e-mails notifying that account details were changed for various services. Ranging from 2 to 3 am last night. Most interesting was the first e-mail. It was from Google saying they blocked a login attempt to this account. From Atlanta, Georgia. Dave explained, “They probably tried to log in to the GMail, but when it didn’t work, they changed the e-mails on other services to an account they controlled” “From Atlanta? Who’s in Atlanta? They got hackers down there?” I was imagining…well never mind, you know what I was imagining. “It’s probably a VPN, hang on, I’ll check the IP.” Dave copy pasted some numbers from the Google e-mail into the terminal. “Yea, NordVPN exit node.” “What’s a VPN?” “No wonder you can’t find hookers on the Internet.” I’d asked Dave about this once. He was high. I didn’t think he remembered. “Even Brian knows what a VPN is.” “You think we should call the police,” I asked. But I already knew Dave’s answer. Dave hated the police more than all of us. Back before the suicide, his mother would take him to Black Lives Matter protests. And as dumb as it was, those were probably some of the best memories he had with his family. It was a day outside, there were people, there were food stalls. And his mother was happy. Or maybe angry? But not depressed. “Fuck 12,” he mumbled. It wasn’t just the politics. After Tom’s suicide, the cops harassed his family. Well it wasn’t the police, it was child protective services. It became standard practice to investigate all cases where young people who still lived at home killed themselves. Nothing ended up happening with the investigation, but to Dave, one government mooching pig was the same as the next, and none of them were on his side. “Okay, no police. I don’t like them either. You think my mom is okay?” Dave thought for a minute, “I think I know how to find her car” As the number of sensors on the Internet grew, the availability of data about the real world skyrocketed. Tons of people were willing to put cameras outside their house or dashcams on their car to earn a couple dollars. There were news articles predicting that this would end all crime. But of course this isn’t what happened. Ending crime was always more a question of will than a question of ability. And most people never made back the money they spent on the camera, the data wasn’t all that useful and not that many people bought it. But if you knew where to look, you could access it. “Do you have the license plate number of the car?” I didn’t know it, but I went back upstairs to get the title. I also grabbed the Triangle Trust document. Dave typed it into website billing itself as the world’s data marketplace. “Search millions of dashcams for a license plate” was one of the options, along with a bunch of other video search options, including “search millions of CCTV cameras for perky nipples.” It seemed like there was a whole Internet that I didn’t know about. $0.78 for the query. He typed in his credit card. I offered to pay him back. He thanked me for the bagel. “Three hits in the last 24 hours” It was $8 each to download the video clips. One of them wouldn’t download, it said “Dashcam Offline.” It still took his $8 for that clip. He downloaded the other two and dragged them into ChatGPT. No point in watching them manually. Clip 1 Timestamp (overlay): ~5:36:12 PM, Sat Jul 12, 2031 Location (inferred): Manhattan Bridge lower roadway, westbound into Manhattan. Overhead signage OCR fragments: “CANAL ST / CHINATOWN”; steel truss pattern matches the bridge; skyline and arch glimpses align. What’s visible: Mercedes (body/DRL signature consistent) in center lane, moderate traffic, dry pavement, dusk light. No notable tail vehicle persists across frames. Clip 2 Timestamp (overlay): ~11:29:47 PM, Sat Jul 12, 2031 Location (inferred): Sheepshead Bay corridor. Streetfront OCR: “EMMONS AVE,” “BAY DELI,” and a marina awning; sodium-vapor lighting; parked fishing boats visible for 2–3 frames. What’s visible: Mercedes eastbound along Emmons Ave, signals right at the next intersection and turns toward a residential side street (likely Knapp/Bragg area; exact street name unreadable due to glare). Traffic light cycle and storefront shutters consistent with late-night return. I pondered, “That doesn’t make sense. That second clip is right by our house, but I got home an hour after that and she wasn’t here. What’s the third clip?” “It won’t let me download it. Because of how this marketplace works, the video file isn’t uploaded to them until somebody buys it. If the user’s device is offline, we can’t download it.” “Do we know anything about it?” “Not really. Sometimes the user has a profile, but all he has is a username. It’s liducksfan” For once, I could actually be useful. “The Long Island Ducks! I went to a game once!” I wasn’t actually that useful, Dave had already Googled “liducks” and that was the obvious first hit. “So she was on Long Island?” “You’re the true crime guy. I’m just the tech guy.” I had a hunch. I think she came home around 11:30, something happened here, either she saw something or met someone, and she left again and went to Long Island, all before I got home. I looked around for James Reese’s business card. I couldn’t find it. However, in plain sight, there was a note from my mother on the refrigerator. I guess it had been there the whole time; wow I’m a bad detective. “Met a guy. Going to the Hamptons. Might be out of cell service.” and then Mom in a heart. She always signs her notes like that. I showed the note to Dave. He shrugged and asked if he could have one of the bagels that Anne left. Sure. Was this just me being paranoid, or is that the exact note my mother would leave if she didn’t want me to worry and that’s not at all what happened? Who logged into her accounts? Who was skinner666?

7 years earlier Jonathan sat there while his Mercedes S-Class with DRIVE PILOT drove him across the Brooklyn Bridge to Wall Street. He had been working at Operant Capital for 10 years. The idea was simple. Predict the market, trade based on those predictions, and get rich. The implementation however, was not as simple as the idea. The market doesn’t work like physics. The market moves based on the thoughts and feelings of billions of humans, and they were all trying to do this same prediction thing. That’s what made the economy. Everyone was basically doing this algorithm on some level. And even worse, this was a Red Queen’s race, where the tactics that worked last year didn’t work this year. Everyone was predicting everyone else predicting the market. Except everyone was not as smart as Jonathan. He was a child prodigy. He got his first IMO Gold when he was 14. He graduated from MIT in 3 years. And he wanted a job where he was surrounded by other people as smart as him. He’d been working on the RPS project for the last three years. As one of the more senior people there, he got to work on the more speculative research. Operant was blessed with basically an unlimited budget; the bounties of providing a valuable capital allocation service to the market. Jonathan believed in the mission. Well, mostly anyway. Make markets more efficient. They weren’t a high frequency trading shop skimming pennies off of each transaction by being fast. They weren’t doing arbitrage. They were a market intelligence service. They knew where capital should be allocated before the market did, and in the grand scheme of things, they charged so little for their service. Most of the tricks were standard. The same run of the mill models everyone in the industry was using. But they felt that their differentiator was always remembering that the market doesn’t obey physical laws. Technical analysis is complete bullshit. This is a simple betting game played against other agents. Which is the line of thinking that led to the RPS project. RPS stood for rock-paper-scissors. A game with a simple Nash equilibrium. One-third, one-third, one-third. Deviate at all from that strategy, and your opponent can exploit you. But if your opponent isn’t playing that strategy, you have to deviate to exploit them. Shortly after MRI machines were invented, people started using them to see if they could read minds. They’d put someone in an MRI and give them two buttons, say a red and a blue. Of course the machine knew which button you would press before you pressed it. But what was crazier is that the machine knew which button you would press before you were even aware of your choice. The obvious follow up question is, how much before? Seconds was very believable. But could you know as soon as the subject walked in the room? At the time there wasn’t really a way to explore this. Aside from the 55% prior on red, there wasn’t much more to say. Rock-paper-scissors was basically the same game. Humans do have unequal priors, preferring rock at 35.4%. But is it possible that someone was a scissors type guy? Maybe you could read their social media posts and tell. Maybe you could just tell by looking at their face. The goal of the RPS project was to become perfect at rock-paper-scissors. And the results were very promising. The computer had a win rate of 86%, with a first round win rate of 54%. Once you were playing multiple games it was easy, but Jonathan was particularly proud of the first round win rate. However, 54% wasn’t close to 100%. It was better than random, sure. But this showed diminishing returns. Maybe the data just wasn’t there. Maybe you had to look inside to spot a scissors type guy. The new research direction was outfitting the room with SQUIDs, very sensitive magnetometers capable of measuring fields in the femtotesla range. The rules for the project disallowed things that were obvious and bulky like MRIs. But anything that could be put in a normal room was fair game. It was Monday and the more junior people had been there working all weekend. Jonathan had taken his wife and son camping. When he got to the office, he was ambushed as soon as he stepped out of the elevator. “You have to try it,” said Tom with the energy of a kid seeing presents on Christmas morning. Tom was 17, also an IMO Gold winner, and probably the brightest guy on the team. He didn’t go to college, he came straight to work at Operant. Real LeBron energy. Jonathan stepped into the room. He played scissors. He lost. He played scissors again. He lost. He played rock. He lost. He played paper. He lost. He went back to scissors. He lost. He played scissors again. He lost. He stepped back to take a breath. He played rock. He lost. He played rock again. He lost. He walked out the room. Tom handed him a piece of paper. At the top it had the date and 10:09 AM, and had SSRPSSRRE on it. 10:09 was when he walked into the room, and those were all the moves he played. “What’s this E?” “That’s end. It’s when you’d walk out of the room.” “So are you saying…it predicted all of this before I even played one game?” Tom shrugged, “If it knows all the predictions are going to be correct, why does it need any feedback?”