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?

“Earth to Dave.” Brian rapped his knuckles lightly against Dave’s head. He snapped back into it. “This nice lady wants to know what kind of bagel you want” It was so like Brian to call the woman at the counter a nice lady. At some point, he’d watched American Pie and thought Stifler was how people should be. Or maybe he was just always like that and the movie made him think it was acceptable. He called himself a gentleman, but not in the creepy Elliot Rodger way, or in anything resembling the real meaning of the word. I think he just thought it was funny how that word got a rise out of people. Dave replied, “uhhh a cinnamon raisin…with uhh…butter…yea butter.” Even the nice lady knew Dave was high, Brian and I ordered normal bagel sandwiches and here was Dave ordering dessert. Brian paid for the bagels with his mom’s credit card and told us we could Venmo him later. His mom’s credit card and we Venmo him. That’s the type of guy he was. “He didn’t leave last night. Passed out right where he was sitting,” Brian spoke about Dave like he wasn’t there. This would happen sometimes. Like we would smoke and get high, but for Dave it was a different thing. He would smoke till he was catatonic. He was also the first one in our friend group to start smoking. Dave’s older brother killed himself when we were freshmen, and that’s around when it started. A coping strategy. It wasn’t just the loss of his brother, his mom was never the same afterward. I don’t think I saw her out of the house after that; Dave said she barely left her room. The overall downer atmosphere was too much for his sister and she moved to California as soon as she could. He was all that was left. Dave got quiet after that. Maybe it was the weed, maybe it was the pain, but he started riding his bike to school every day and doing really well in classes. His brother was some kind of wunderkind; maybe he thought if he was like that his mother would stop moping. He graduated valedictorian and she never did. Maybe that wasn’t enough? “I thought we were gonna have a party last night,” I mentioned offhandedly. Brian’s parties weren’t the Met Gala, but it was usually more than just the three of us. I was hoping Ari was going to be there. “Hoping Ari was gonna be there?” Oh God even when I say something so innocuous Brian knows what I’m thinking. “Nah, we found the Volcano and didn’t really want to text anyone else after that.” “Understandable” “I don’t know if Dave slept. When I came downstairs he had the bag inflated on top of the machine.” He ribbed Dave with his elbow while he said this. “I slept,” mumbled Dave. “It’s called wake and bake.” Dave and Brian both liked 2000s movies, stoner comedies, movies about high school and prom, getting laid. Something about it being a simpler time. They were closer than I was with either of them. Dave would go to dark places and Brian couldn’t be brought there. So it worked. Even though Brian was kind of an asshole, he was a good guy to have around. His dad was a trucker and he wasn’t around much. This is one of the things we bonded over. They called our name and we sat down at a table with the bagels. In the morning the visit from the cops didn’t really seem like much of a big deal, so I thought I’d tell the guys about it. Upon doing so, Brian immediately pointed out something I missed. He asked, “What’s your dad’s name?” and I realized right away. While he went by Jonathan and I went by John, it sure made a lot more sense that the cops were looking for him when they wrote “John.” Lazy cops didn’t even write his full name. He was in town, and he was on Long Island for the meeting. It wasn’t me! “Hey McFly!” Brian mocked. It was clear he’d watched Back to the Future recently and now I see where he got the knuckle rapping too. “You know you gotta stop being such a little pussy all the time.” He put on a high pitched voice that was supposed to resemble mine, “I’m a little pussy, I hide in my room when the cops come and they aren’t even looking for me they are looking for my weird ass dad.” I was too relieved to care about his mocking. Brian continued, “You know that place was into some weird shit. Where your dad worked before he bugged out. Dave’s brother worked there too.” “You mean the one who killed himself?” Immediately I regretted how I said it and looked over at Dave. He was too transfixed by the swirls of cinnamon in his bagel to register anything. Brian scolded me, “dude” and I felt embarrassed. I was so giddy from realizing the cops weren’t looking for me that this crossed over in my head to a true crime podcast, where I was more interested in the mystery than the characters, forgetting that these were real people with real lives. I felt distant enough from my father to view him that way. I don’t know how Dave felt about his brother anymore. I came back at Brian, trying to move past my faux pas. “Well at least my dad did something. Your dad doesn’t even drive the truck! He sits there and watches it drive. A real union man.” Dave now had finished his bagel and put his head down on the table. Brian smiled at the retort, “At least my dad isn’t some kind of Kaczynski freak.” This was the nature of our friendship. Last night I thought my world was closing in, now I realize this just all isn’t my problem. My dad was sort of a Kaczynski freak. Maybe he mailed bombs to people and the cops caught him. Maybe he has some lame manifesto about why he did it. I love reading manifestos. I took out my phone and venmoed Brian for my and Dave’s bagel. We’d venmo him about half the time; Brian’s mom was rich from the settlement and we knew she didn’t care. My mom still wasn’t back when I got home.

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?”