One Month After

Tricia opened the laptop and found the Zoom link. Standup today would be a little unorthodox with Alexi and Marcus in New York, but they still had plenty of time before they were needed in court, and she didn't want to let them off the hook that easily.

"Marcus, Alexi, you with us?" Tricia asked as the video compression kicked in and a fairly grainy picture of Marcus and Alexi, huddled over Marcus's phone outside a courthouse, sharpened into focus.

"We're here," Marcus said.

Tricia stepped back, turning the screen to the rest of the office.

"Oh god, there's two of them!" Ada said loudly.

"Hey, you know, I think Marcus may be on to something," Alexi quipped back, thumbing at the suit he was wearing.

Tricia almost scolded Ada, then stopped herself. Marcus is ok, she told herself. After she and Alexi had gotten back from Dallas with the phone and evidence file, Marcus had come to knock on her office door.

"I have to tell you," he said in his calm Midwestern way, "the other night Ada and I were out at Runestone. We danced a little bit, and I think I might-a got a little too... personal. I know inter-office romance is a big no-no here, and I just wanted you to know that it's not going to happen again."

It took Tricia a minute to recover from the shock of imagining Ada out with Marcus alone; by then he'd left her office. Ada popped in a minute later.

"Marcus talked to you?" she asked, not waiting for an answer. "We got pretty hammered, but don't worry, I didn't jump him or anything."

All Tricia could think to say as Ada left was "You could do worse." Since then all of Ada's little snide suit jokes had played differently to Tricia. She's flirting with him, Tricia realized. Rather than leveling stares at Ada, she'd started to turn her gaze to Marcus, who had a little blush in his cheeks every time Ada jabbed at him. "As long as this doesn't turn into a fucking harassment lawsuit," Tricia told herself; she was more worried about Marcus than Ada, to be honest.

"Marcus, tell us about the finances," Tricia said, turning the team's attention back to standup.

"Well, I haven't been able to fully unwind this one yet. It's not your typical money laundering setup, more a corporate tax dodge, but from what we can tell it's pretty big business – something like a million active members paying four bucks per month. It's a healthy living for these guys."

Tricia nodded and then turned to Priya. "Priya, your memo said the app was just something whitelabeled – Podforum or something, right?"

Priya nodded and gave a quiet correction: "Podform."

"Ok," Tricia was back at it, "well, let's figure out if maybe we can trace down who paid them – that may not have gone through all these tax dodges, right?"

Marcus nodded. Tricia made a note; she'd send an email now, but she'd have to pull in the DOJ if she wanted a real warrant to get this data.

"Ada, anything on the podcasters? Can we identify them?" Tricia asked.

"Pass" was Ada's curt response.

It stopped Tricia dead in her tracks for a minute. "What do you mean, pass?" she asked.

"I mean I don't want to give an update," Ada said matter-of-factly.

"We don't pass in standup. It's ok to tell us you don't have anything," Tricia said, trying not to get ticked off; Ada knew the rules; she shouldn't need to be told this again.

"OK then. I don't have anything," Ada said, adding a "Yet" at the end just to remind people that she was still the best audio analyst this side of the Mississippi.

"Alexi?" Tricia asked, her frustration with Ada seeping into her tone.

Marcus turned the phone, centering Alexi in the camera. "I've analyzed this Apex app and read the memo from Priya," he said, "but... it's wrong."

"Priya's memo?" Tricia asked with a tone of shock. Priya was never wrong – at least never wrong in her memos; she was too careful. What did Alexi mean?

"No, not the memo – the app, it's wrong. I've been running all our standard tools for bot detection, and, well, they're coming back all over the place."

"What do you mean?" Tricia asked.

"I mean," Alexi said, "some of the tools say there's no bots, some say it's all bots. Best I can tell it's maybe 80% of the community."

"That can't be right," Tricia said.

"I know," Alexi agreed, "like I said, it's wrong. Something about this is wrong."

"Maybe not." It was Ada who had spoken up. Tricia looked to her.

"I didn't want to share this earlier since I haven't done the breakdown yet, but I think Cole and Wells – the podcast hosts – I think they're AI-generated voices."

"So what, they're using AI to boost their community?" Tricia asked, stumped by what exactly they were seeing.

"It's probably not domestic," Alexi chimed in. "If they wanted to radicalize Americans, then using AI would let them avoid sounding too foreign."

Tricia turned to Ada – after all, it was her idea, and she was the linguistics specialist. She nodded her head yes.

"OK!" Tricia said, calling the team to order. "I'll see if we can get a legal contact for this Podform group. Marcus and Alexi, good luck on the testimony. Ada, let's see if we can get a definitive answer on those hosts being AI-generated. And Priya, come see me in my office in... 5 minutes."

With that the team broke; Marcus and Alexi waved bye from the video call before hanging up, and Tricia decamped back to her office.

In her office Tricia found the voicemail light on her phone blinking. Closing the door behind her, she hit the voicemail button. It was Richard Hastings; in his Texan drawl he said, "Tricia, what is this I hear about you waltzing into my office and taking evidence from a case I'd closed back to that dinky field office of yours? I'm talking to Lewis this afternoon – you better have an explanation for him."

"Goddamnit," Tricia said out loud. She'd hoped Hasty Dick wouldn't notice that she'd taken the phone, but now she was going to need to justify herself to the bureau. She glanced at her watch – it had been three minutes since standup. She opened her email and started a message to Lewis McLauren; the cursor blinked on the screen as she thought about the justification she'd have to use to sell her team's investigation.

She knew it would be exactly two minutes more before Priya would show up at her door. Exact and precise, that was Priya. She never really said much of anything, preferring instead the precision of a written memo.

Tricia had found her when trying to put together her team; Tricia had been a frequenter of the FBI mail office, hoping to snag applications like Alexi's before HR threw them out. One of the mail clerks had dropped her an opened envelope. Inside was a carefully typed page laying out the flaws in an FBI case. Tricia had looked up the case and found that it had gone to trial a year earlier; the DOJ had won, only to have the conviction overturned on appeal for the same reason the letter gave. Tricia almost dismissed the letter, until she noticed the postmark date. It was one day after the original evidence had been presented at trial, almost six months before the conviction was overturned.

It had taken Tricia more time to track down Priya than it had for her to decide she wanted her on her team. Coming out of college Priya had struggled to hold down a job for more than six months at a time, jumping from place to place. She was meticulous and one of the best computer forensics analysts Tricia had ever met. Priya specialized in disassembly – it was like a puzzle, but all the pieces were backwards, upside down, and put together wrong. Priya had a knack for taking the puzzle apart and putting it back together without ever seeing the picture on the box.

It hadn't taken Tricia much to convince Priya to join, either. She'd tried to talk to her once on the phone but quickly realized that was a non-starter, and instead sent a detailed breakdown of how the office would work. Priya had sent back an email ten minutes later saying she wanted the job.

Having a one-on-one like this with Priya was rare. At standup she'd send memos to the team rather than talking through her updates, something the team had grown to love – they'd even all spent a few weeks trying it before leaving it as Priya's thing. Still, Tricia waited in her office and watched as the clock ticked to 9:37, five minutes past the end of standup, and just like clockwork Priya was at the door.

Tricia motioned Priya to a chair. "Let's assume Alexi is right – could you actually get that many bots using this app without getting shut down?" she asked Priya.

Priya sat nervously for a moment, pulling on her hair and letting her gaze dance all over Tricia's office. She finally answered the question in her precise, arrhythmic tone: "A user would be blocked, but the owners of the app can run bots for content and moderation that bypass these checks."

"Ok, so let's assume they're doing that. We should see the evidence in the finances, since it would just be tons of bots paying themselves. Are the voice synths nowadays good enough to create a fake voice?" Tricia asked.

To this Priya gave a frantic nod yes.

"Hmm." Tricia thought for a second. "What about terms of service – maybe we can convince Podform to take the app down?" she asked, getting louder as she did.

Priya sat for a moment, hands pulling on her hair, fingers fidgeting with the strand. "I'm not sure," she said, briefly.

Frustrated, Tricia nearly yelled, "THEN GUESS, DAMNIT!"

Priya seemed to clam up for a moment before Tricia softened her tone. "Don't guess," she told Priya. "I'm just frustrated. Even if it's 80% bots, how many real people are in there right now, listening?"

That one Priya didn't have to guess; she'd done the math back at standup. "200,000 users," she said without hesitating. "If 1% of them radicalize, 2,000 people."

Tricia sank back into her chair. They didn't have the resources to track down 2,000 people. Nobody did.

One Month Before

"Ping" registered in Shaun's earbuds. He stopped pushing the shopping cart and pulled it off to the side of the aisle. The grocery store was mostly empty at this time of day, just a few stay-at-home moms glad for the excuse to get out. "Ping, Ping" – a few more notifications. He reached into his pocket and fished out his phone, hitting the pause button to stop the old Cole and Wells stream he was listening to. There were three messages from his sister. He clicked in.

"Hey how are you?"

"Ethan and I were talking and wanted to know if you wanted to come by for a while to stay?"

"Mom mentioned you were having a hard time getting on your feet, and we have the space and Lilah would love to see her Uncle Shaun"

There was a "..." icon indicating his sister was typing. Shaun waited a minute, then the dots went away. With both thumbs he started to type.

"I'm good." He hit send, then thought for a second.

"Mom's just worrying over nothing, getting settled fine, making decent money doing deliveries for now and working on some other stuff."

He hit send and then quickly added another message.

"Would love to see you, Ethan, and Lilah - It's crazy now but definitely before summer is over." Send.

His sister Grace and her husband Ethan lived in Colorado, just outside of Boulder. Their daughter Lilah was almost one. Shaun had managed to cut out of school for a week right after she was born, and his whole family and Ethan's family had gathered at their house for Christmas last year. It wasn't the first time that Grace had offered to let him stay with them.

He'd managed to go out skiing with Grace and Ethan around New Year's while the grandparents watched Lilah. Ethan was a bit like an older brother to Shaun. On the ski lift Shaun had told him about his worries: the job market sucked, no one was hiring, and a couple of the people he knew who graduated the year before were still looking. Ethan and Grace had been sympathetic. Grace was six years older than Shaun, so they'd graduated college into a different labor market and managed to both find jobs they loved in a place they loved to live. Still, Grace had said, "I wouldn't leave it right now even if I hated it."

It was Ethan's idea originally, something just thrown out there: "Look, if nothing comes up, you could always move in and be like a manny for Lilah - she loves you, and we're going to be spending so much money on daycare once Grace has to go back to work next month."

Shaun hadn't hated the idea then. He hadn't said anything to Ethan, not sure if it was a serious offer or just something said to make him feel better. Still, he'd imagined that they could work something out where he could stay with them, help with Lilah, and still apply to jobs.

He wished his mom hadn't said anything to Grace. He hadn't really had a full conversation with her in almost a month, and she was always so worried about him. Was the apartment safe? Was he careful driving all day? Was he getting enough sleep? Was he eating well? He knew it was out of love, but she had to understand that he was trying to do this on his own. That was really what it meant to be Apex – that he could do this on his own, that he didn't have to be a scavenger. "Scavs steal. Apex are predators, we hunt for what we eat," Cole would say. That was the way of the world, and for Scavs the best they could hope for were the scraps, or worse, they'd have to become a parasite, a Honeyguide.

There were a couple of posts on the boards from members asking about living with family, and generally the advice from the Certs was don't do it. It was too easy to lapse back into being a Scav when mom was there to make you breakfast, lunch, and dinner. One user had mentioned how he'd started off living in his dad's basement, but then they'd gotten into arguments about his sleeping habits, and not wanting to eat dinner with them. "Easier when it's just you," he'd said.

Shaun hadn't quite mastered the multi-phasic sleep cycle yet. He'd been following the advice on the boards and started setting his alarm fifteen minutes after he wanted to wake up – he'd had some success this morning, waking up at 5:15 on the dot. He was still operating on nearly eight hours of sleep split over the day; the Certs that tracked it were all on five or less. One of the Certs, who went by the handle BeastMaster69, had posted the last year of his sleep data: three hours a day in fifteen-minute increments.

"This is what the human body is capable of when you become Apex," Cole had said when the post hit the boards.

"It's actually a more natural sleep pattern for humans than eight hours a night," Wells had confirmed. "I mean, imagine early humans – we wouldn't have just found a cave and slept for eight hours," he added.

"Right, let me just go over to this cave and completely pass out for eight hours and just hope that no sabertooth tiger comes to eat me!" Cole said teasingly.

Shaun had tried to explain his sleeping schedule to his mom and she was worried. "You need a good night's sleep – you always have since you were little."

That was the problem: his mom still thought of him as the little baby she needed to protect. The six-year gap between him and Grace hadn't helped with that growing up; she was always more capable, more self-reliant, less needing of mommy than Shaun was.

Still, Shaun wondered if maybe his crazy sleep schedule could be a blessing taking care of Lilah. He remembered back during Christmas that she'd often wake up in the middle of the night; usually he'd come down in the morning to find Ethan bleary-eyed on the sofa, cradling Lilah on his shoulder and making gentle hushing noises.

Shaun had tried to get Ethan into Apex at first, sending him podcasts that were public and screenshotting some of the board posts. He'd tried to explain the whole Scav and Predator dynamic, the Honeyguides, but Ethan wasn't really into it. He had a job at a telecom company doing enterprise L3 technical support; it paid well and had benefits, even if the job wasn't glamorous. He didn't understand the hustle mindset.

Families not getting it was a big topic for new members on the boards, and Certs would often come in with advice. When you make Apex, when you get Cert, they'll understand. When you've pushed past the hustle and not become a Scav, they'll see it. They won't necessarily want to follow it, or understand why it's important, but they'll understand what you're doing.

It gave Shaun hope. Ethan, Grace, his mom – they might not understand right now, him trying to move to multi-phasic sleep, cutting out all the alcohol and caffeine, doing the whole healthy eating thing, and the hustle, but he knew that once he made it they'd see it. He imagined Lilah – maybe she could break the cycle, maybe she could be raised to be Apex from birth. That way she wouldn't have to unlearn everything her body did as a Scav.

A few minutes later, his cart filled, Shaun headed for the self-checkout. Before he could start unloading the items, his phone gave another "Ping" in his earbuds. He looked – it was Grace. She'd given a "Loved" reaction to his text about coming before the summer was over.

Tucking his phone back in his pocket, Shaun grabbed the huge pack of chicken breast, the bag of brown rice, and the giant box of plain oatmeal he'd gotten. A couple of the people on the boards had suggested meal prepping. You could pick a day when the rates were shit and take an hour to bulk make food for the week. Plain chicken, brown rice, and oatmeal for breakfast was the recommendation – clean and lean.

"Clean calories, that's what's important," Cole had said on one stream where they were discussing eating.

"It's really a modern invention, even caring about the taste of our food," Wells had added.

Trying to make good food meant wasting: wasting time away from the hustle, wasting food to make it fancy, wasting the perfect natural flavor. Scavs wasted. Apex were efficient.