Three Months After

Tricia and Ada stood on the hot tarmac waiting for Special Agent Diaz and baking in the San Diego sun. They were both wearing simple blouses and loosely cut blazers. The long sleeves hid Ada's tattoos, and she'd switched her lip ring for a simple gold stud.

When they'd stopped by the office before boarding the plane, Marcus had taken one look at Ada and said, "Looks good on you," in a teasing tone.

Ada's response – "Don't get any ideas" – had hit Tricia a different way, since Marcus had dropped off an official notice of inter-office relationship. In the neatly worded document he'd described his and Ada's relationship as "casual and occasionally intimate."

Tricia had made a big deal of shredding it in front of him. "I don't want to have to deal with the headache of filing this," she said. "You're both adults. Don't do anything dumb or you're both fired."

Marcus smiled and said, "Thanks, boss," as he headed out.

The execution of the search warrant on NovelApplication Limited wasn't the sort of thing that required two special agents and an analyst with no field experience, but Tricia knew better than to turn down help when the San Diego field office had offered it. After all, she was in their jurisdiction here; technically they could wave her off if they wanted to. Special Agent Diaz had seemed affable enough in their brief call, and at the very least he seemed to understand that he was just here for local color – this was Tricia and Ada's case.

That Ada was the one here with Tricia was its own surprise. Tricia would normally bring Alexi along on things like this. She knew he was happy enough as an analyst, but he wanted more. Two months ago she'd thought that maybe this case could be the one that would prove to the FBI that they should move more people like Alexi out of the analyst role and into special agent. Still, when it came down to it, Ada was the one who had saved the case, and the team agreed she should be the one to go with Tricia to serve the warrant. To Tricia's shock Ada had jumped at the idea. "Maybe she's more like me than I realized," Tricia had thought.

Ada had come to Tricia's attention when an old friend in academia had forwarded her resume. Born in Nigeria, moved to England, and then America before graduating with her master's at 20, she had an ear for sound and no patience for anyone who questioned it.

But she also had the same drive to be right at all costs that had nearly killed Tricia's career. Her PhD work on ancient Greek music had bucked not just established wisdom but her own advisor's seminal work, proposing that there were strong African influences present. When her advisor had asked her to rethink the analysis, she'd opted instead to publish it on a school-wide mailing list. At that point it didn't matter if she'd been right; her career in academia was over.

Special Agent Diaz was a soft-spoken man; his family had been from Baja originally, and he'd spent most of his life in the San Diego area, starting with the Navy and then the FBI.

"So tell me how a little office in Minnesota ended up serving a warrant for copyright infringement in my backyard?" he asked once they'd dispensed with pleasantries.

"It's a long story," Tricia said. "How far is the drive?"

"We'd pretty much hit a wall on the case," Ada said from the backseat. "We'd managed to trace the finances behind this podcast back to NovelApplication Limited, but being that they were a US company, and given that there weren't any specific calls for violence in the podcast, we thought we were out of luck."

Tricia shot Ada a stern look in the mirror and then for Diaz's sake added, "We still thought that there was a good chance it was a bigger foreign influence operation, but without a warrant we couldn't prove it."

"Right," Ada added, remembering to toe the official line.

"So you figure anyone who is running this 'Apex Pod' probably made another mistake?" Diaz asked, eyes on the road ahead.

"Right." Ada was back at it. "We know that Apex published episode excerpts on other platforms – it was a hook they used to get people to download their app. So we went looking. Priya, this analyst in our office, she managed to work up a scraper that would find episodes on Spotify and YouTube that matched my AI voice patterns and then figure out the apps they linked to."

"How many apps did you find?" Diaz asked.

"Thousands," Ada replied, "too many to go through by hand, so we started by matching the free content in the app to patterns from Apex, then with the apps that passed that criteria we subscribed and matched as much of their paid content as we could. But it was still too many until we figured out Honeyguide."

"Until Ada figured out Honeyguide," Tricia added, interrupting. "It was a team effort, but in the end it was Ada's ear that cracked the case."

"What's a Honeyguide?" Diaz asked.

"Type of bird," Ada said matter-of-factly, "but what was weird is that the term was popping up in a bunch of these podcasts. We'd heard it in Apex Pod, but it was in other podcasts, even ones where it didn't make sense, like that single-mom gardening podcast."

"Green Mamma," Tricia said, reminding Ada of the name before letting her continue.

"Right, Honeyguide appeared over and over again, and other bird terminology as well," Ada added.

"What does it mean?" Diaz asked.

"We don't know," Tricia said, taking over, "but once Ada had cracked that part of the tell we managed to get it down to three hundred podcast matches. Marcus, our forensic accountant, was able to use the data we had to match a hundred of them with podcasts that NovelApplication runs."

"Then we threw the kitchen sink at it," Ada said, "looking for anything – incitement to violence, promoting illegal activities, insider trading, anything."

"And what, one of them copied another podcast?" Diaz asked, curious.

"Not quite," Ada went on. "Priya managed to confirm the exact mechanism. Ten years ago there was a popular investment book published in Germany, something about long-term investment. It had been translated into English, and during the translation the text of the entire third chapter of the book was left on an open web page. It managed to get scraped up by a data company and packaged into an AI training data set without anyone realizing. The language model that they were using was trained on this data and managed to memorize the text. So in the 6,000 hours of content that they had it generate for an investment podcast, there in one of the episodes we have an AI host, Jake Mitchels, word for word relaying ten-year-old advice on long-term investment from Germany."

Diaz laughed. "So you Al Capone'd them?!" he said.

Tricia gave a chuckle, but Ada was confused. "What?" she asked.

Diaz explained, "When the Feds tried to take down legendary mobster Al Capone, they thought they'd get him on murder, racketeering, smuggling, or a million other crimes. In the end, though, the one thing he couldn't avoid culpability for was tax evasion."

Ada smiled. "Yeah, I guess we did Al Capone them," she said.

"I've got to say, it's pretty good investigating," Diaz said, impressed. "Your little office in Minnesota managed to unravel this huge conspiracy, you've managed to find a charge that will actually stick, and now you just need to throw the cuffs on and figure out who they're working for."

Tricia smiled; it was good work. She'd had to embellish a little with the bureau and stress the "possibility" of a foreign influence connection, but her team had managed to get evidence of real wrongdoing or they wouldn't be here. Here, after three months obsessed with Shaun Bennet, Cole, Wells, and Apex Pod, she was going to figure out who was behind it, and why they were doing it.

Tricia wasn't sure what exactly she'd expected walking into the NovelApplication office, but what she found wasn't too different from her own setup in Evansville. A set of offices and conference rooms surrounding a central bullpen with desks set up. Workers were largely on their computers, with the occasional grouping huddled over a screen. The agents' arrival with a warrant triggered some confusion. Tricia and Ada landed with the CEO in his office while Diaz babysat the employees, who were asked to leave their electronics on their desks and please wait in the conference room.

"What is this in regards to?" the CEO, Curtis Novel, asked again as Tricia and Ada started to ask about the podcasts.

"You're running a series of podcasts that use AI voice synths. One of these podcasts, Jake's Money, committed copyright infringement," Tricia explained.

"You must be mistaken," Curtis said. "We're a data and product research consulting firm – we don't run any podcasts."

"Look," Tricia said calmly, "we have evidence that you're running at least 100 podcasts through a platform called Podform. If you want to work with us to gather the evidence we need, then we can be done here by the afternoon. If you want to make it hard, then we'll take all the computers and all your backups and ship them off to a lab in Virginia, where they'll likely finish with them in... let's say six months. Which of those options do you prefer?"

It took some time for Curtis to get to the bottom of things, but eventually he went and joined the rest of his team in the conference room while Clair Voss, a senior engineer, was sent in.

"Tell us about the podcasts, Clair," Tricia asked, doing her best tough-agent posture.

"Oh, you mean Project Honeyguide?" Clair asked.

Tricia and Ada stopped for a second. That word – Honeyguide – it had appeared in all of the podcasts, used as a metaphor, sometimes stretchingly so.

"Did you say Honeyguide?" Ada asked, confirming what she knew she'd heard.

"Yeah, cool bird," Clair said, seemingly oblivious to the reference. "We name all our projects after birds here; the range maps to the type of project it is."

Ada exchanged a look with Tricia and then pivoted the questions. "Tell us about Honeyguide," she asked.

Tricia and Ada listened in horror as Clair laid out Project Honeyguide.

"When we're looking to maximize engagement, we know the biggest driver is feeling fulfilled, and people get the most fulfillment out of human connection. So we wanted to try to build a synthetic community to generate engagement and prove that we could direct that engagement to driving purchase decisions. The model was set up to identify low-cost ad topics and generate sample podcast episodes. It would use traditional platforms like YouTube and Spotify to get these episodes in front of prospective customers, and if they were interested we would generate a synthetic community around the idea. The big innovation we had was something we called the treadmill. Once a user was into a community we wanted to make sure it felt like there was depth, but even with cutting-edge models it would take too long to create that depth, so we'd do a surface pass – just give it the facade – and then as the user consumed content we'd generate more and more depth. The way the algorithm was set up, there was always more to explore."

"Have you been monitoring these podcasts?" Tricia asked flatly.

"No, I've actually been on parental leave until yesterday. I'm just getting caught back up – I was just starting to look at the results before you came in," Clair replied, then asked, "Could I ask why the FBI is interested in Project Honeyguide?"

Ada opened her mouth to speak but Tricia shot her a look. "No, you can't know why we're interested," she said. "As for monitoring, is it normal for you to leave something like this unmonitored for...?"

"It was six months I was out; they're very generous with the leave here," Clair said, then continued, "I guess it's not normal for people to go on parental leave during an experiment, but it's not uncommon for us to leave experiments running this long. We have an AI monitoring system in place – Barn Owl, it's called – that makes sure all our experiments are running."

"You mentioned that you'd started to look at the results," Ada said. "Can you show us?"

Clair's computer was brought to the office, and as Ada and Tricia looked over her shoulder she pulled up a data notebook.

"We had to pull the data out of Podform to do any analysis," Clair said, complaining. "Honestly the system was great for the quick prototype, but when we bring this to our customers we'll probably build our own podcast platform that's more suited to the synthetic communities."

"Show us Apex Pod," Tricia said, her voice having lost all emotion.

Clair typed a few commands, clicked a run button, and then motioned to her screen. "This is a good one," she said. "Look at the engagement we're seeing." She pointed at a graph that was meaningless to Tricia and Ada.

"How many people are part of this... synthetic community?" Ada asked, the words dripping off her tongue.

"Let's see... one minute... Oh, this is just one person, a... WelcomeToMyJungle. Looks like he successfully converted to the paid subscription and is doing a great job consuming the back catalogue, but... oh no, it looks like he dropped off about three months ago. I've seen that on a few others; the synthetic community becomes too repetitive, people get bored of walking on the treadmill."

As Tricia and Ada listened in shock, Clair kept rambling on. "You know, it's an amazing thing we've seen here: the synthetic communities that have the best engagement are the ones where there's only one real person. Once we add that second person our engagement falls off; it's really having those people there that pulls these communities apart."

"Do you know that he killed people?" Ada asked the question of Clair point blank, her voice shaking with rage.

"What do you mean?" Clair asked, confused.

"Shaun Bennet. WelcomeToMyJungle. He listened to your fake podcast, and participated in your synthetic community, and do you know what it did?" Ada was on a tear now. "It made him push away his friends and family, and it made him stop sleeping, and stop listening to anyone except the podcast, and then it told him to drive for sixteen hours, buy a gun, and kill people – and you know what, by the time it did that, all he had in his life was your stupid AI-generated podcast, so that's exactly what he did."

In the car ride back to the airport Tricia turned to Ada. "I wish you hadn't told the engineer about Shaun."

"She had to hear it," Ada said, looking away from Tricia at the cars that drove by.

"Did she?" Tricia asked. "I think what you told her is going to eat her up, stop her from sleeping, but I'm not sure it's going to change anything."

"So what?" Ada asked. "So what if she loses some sleep? Maybe the next stupid bird-themed project she picks up she'll actually put some safeguards in place."

Tricia wasn't sure. They rode the rest of the way to the airport without talking.

Three Months Before

Shaun fumbled for his keys, drunkenly pulling them out of his pocket and then losing his grip on them and watching them fly through the air. Somehow he managed to reach out and grab them before they hit the ground.

"Woah," Reese said, seeing it. "Nice catch."

Shaun did a little hammy dance like it was all part of the plan. Unlocking the apartment door, he and Reese both stumbled in, kicked off their shoes, and went to their respective rooms.

It had been the last big party of the year – the unofficial graduation party. Reese, Kyle, Ben – they'd been close since sophomore year, and now they were going their own ways. Kyle had gotten an internship the summer before at a tech company in San Diego, some sort of ad-tech or research deal – Shaun didn't really understand it – but they'd offered him a full-time position and he'd be heading back there after graduation. Ben had gotten accepted into a master's program for chemical engineering at UT Dallas and so he'd be sticking around, although he'd be off for the summer visiting his grandparents in Poland.

Reese and Shaun were both still looking for work. Reese's dad owned a paper mill in upstate New York; he'd be working there over the summer until he could find something better. He'd told Shaun that there were always openings, and they actually had a few mechanical engineers on staff to make sure everything worked right. Shaun had thanked Reese for the offer but wasn't sure he wanted to commit to moving to upstate New York. His family was already spread out, with his mom in southern Florida and his sister up in Colorado; besides, he'd gotten to like Dallas since he'd been going to school here.

He had applications out with companies all over the Dallas area – most of them had UT Dallas MechE grads working there, so he'd have an in. He had another stack of applications ready to send out tomorrow that he just needed to finish writing cover letters for. He figured he'd get a cheap place in town and get by for a few months while seriously applying for jobs, and by the end of the summer he'd have something. He'd been hopeful for a job back at the same place he'd interned with. It was a PBC, a public benefit corporation, that had been set up to help modernize some of the city's infrastructure, but the grant that had funded most of it had run out and now they needed to cut costs.

"We're working with a few private companies right now to see if we can offset some of the funding we lost from the city, and if we can find something we'd love to have you back, but right now we just can't afford to bring anyone else on," Shaun's former manager had explained when Shaun had called him about the possibility of a job.

In his room Shaun collapsed on his bed. Reaching over to the small plate on his nightstand, he grabbed a half-smoked blunt from earlier in the day and lit it, taking a long drag. He pulled up his phone. His sister had sent another picture of Lilah to the family group chat: she was holding a half-eaten strawberry, and it looked huge in her little hands. Her face, covered in red juice, had a huge smile.

He remembered that winter, when Ethan had suggested he could move in and help with Lilah. Shaun wasn't sure if it was a real offer, but he knew that if he needed it Grace and Ethan would help; if the job applications didn't work out, it wouldn't be the worst thing to spend time with his niece.

Leaving a "Loved" reaction on the photo, he swiped out of the messages app and opened TikTok. As he scrolled past video after video, the room started to spin a little. He took another drag on the blunt and felt himself sink back into the bed. Scroll, scroll, scroll...

Shaun wasn't exactly sure how much time had passed when he realized he'd smoked the end of the blunt and was still scrolling through TikTok, his mind barely registering a second of a dance, a trick shot, a picture of a puppy. For some reason he stopped scrolling on a video. It was a clip from a podcast, two hosts sitting across from each other in what looked like a medieval castle.

"Here's the problem with these public/private partnerships: THEY DON'T WORK," one of the hosts, a bald man with huge biceps that his too-tight black shirt showed off, was saying.

The other host, a leaner man with messy brown hair and glasses, had a laptop open in front of him. "Yeah, it's something like 95% of these things fail to meet a single objective that they set," he was citing.

"THAT THEY SET FOR THEMSELVES," the first man said incredulously.

The clip ended with a tag – "Cole and Wells, Apex Pod" – with an aggressive hawk face as its logo, rendered in a bright orange.

Shaun swiped out of TikTok and opened up a browser. He typed "Apex Pod" into the search bar, then just to be sure added "Cole and Wells." The first hit was a link to the app store: "Apex Pod App." He clicked it. The app promised to be "The home for the Apex Pod, with Cole and Wells, where you can learn to be Apex and connect with other members of the Apex community." It was free to download, with the notation that it offered "In-app purchases." Shaun clicked the install button and watched as the download ring started to fill.

Postlog

Tricia sat in her office with both copies of the report open on her computer. On one screen sat the detailed findings the team had put together, recommendations for further work, and evidence that clearly implicated NovelApplication in the creation of the Apex Pod community, as well as the other 299 synthetic communities they'd found, and its role in radicalizing Shaun Bennet. It was footnoted and supported with the latest research on radicalization. The appendix included Ada's novel AI detection methods, Marcus's findings on the new tax shelters and how the AI systems that NovelApplication had employed had created them, Priya's enhancements to the fingerprint tool, and a section Alexi had authored on the potential application of the approach to deprogramming.

The whole report was a masterstroke; it would turn Tricia's little office into a hub for AI and computerized radicalization research and investigation. They'd end up with promotions across the team, more than double the office size, and no longer have to fight for their meager budget.

Beside it was the version she'd asked Marcus to write. He'd done so begrudgingly, warning her what the team's reaction would be. "It's going to be on you to sell it, or you'll have a revolt on your hands," he'd told her. She understood, but still told him to go forward. He'd delivered, exactly like she knew he would, and after she'd given it a once-over she'd sent it to the team for comments. She took a deep breath, knowing what was coming.

The knock at her door was Alexi; she gestured him in and he closed the door behind him.

"You've all read it?" Tricia asked, assuming Alexi had been nominated as the team's representative.

"Yeah," he said, "and I don't think I have to tell you how we feel about it."

"It's the right thing to do," Tricia said. "We're not hiding anything. You all get credit for the work you've done, NovelApplication has to pay for the plagiarism, and most importantly all the countermeasures, the detection systems – those become tools we can use."

"It's not the same and you know it," Alexi said flatly.

Tricia just nodded; she did know it, but still stood by what she'd said.

"We're burying the evidence of wrongdoing," Alexi said, a tone of accusation in his voice. "I get why, I get that you're worried about copycats, but we're letting the bad guys get away with a small fine."

"I don't know," Tricia said. "Let's say we keep the first version. DOJ charges NovelApplication – what then? A trial against a company like that, with an AI-augmented legal team, that's a few years at best. Even then our evidence of actual wrongdoing is slim; it's more negligence than malice. In the meantime we've made public a playbook for taking off-the-shelf AI components and putting them together to create a hyper-efficient radicalization machine, something that's been proven to lead to a mass shooting. Imagine if instead of 300 podcasts it was 3,000, or 300,000. We wouldn't be able to police them all."

"But they said it themselves that they want to productize this thing. If we don't take them down, then they're going to bring a tool to market that can do this at scale," Alexi protested.

"And you think they won't if we charge them?" Tricia asked, not waiting for Alexi to respond. "Or if they don't, someone else won't? This wasn't rocket science; it was a proof of concept built before someone went on parental leave. Honestly, I'd rather they build one with proper safeguards and sell it than wait for ten other labs to have the same idea."

"You assume they'll safeguard it," Alexi said, a bit of bitterness in his tone.

"I have to," Tricia said. "What's the alternative?"

Alexi thought for a moment, then asked, "Your mind's made up to not release the original, right?"

Tricia nodded; she wanted the team's blessing, but with or without it she knew what she had to do.

"Ok," Alexi said, standing to leave.

"Alexi," Tricia said, stopping him before he got to the door, "this has been a hard case. Why don't you take a week, go out to LA and see Kamran, unwind a bit?"

Alexi grimaced. "Ah, Kamran and I... well, he said he's been feeling neglected, that I've been too consumed with this job... anyway, we talked the other day and..."

Fuck, Tricia thought – she'd really put her foot in it this time. Coming around from her desk, she offered Alexi a hug that he accepted. "Why don't we go out tonight then? You can take me to whatever passes as a gay bar in Evansville, and I'll be the best wingwoman you've ever had – we'll make Kamran regret his decision."

Alexi gave a little chuckle. "The Runestone, then?" It was the only bar in town, across the street from the office, and the team's go-to hangout.

Tricia nodded with a smile, and Alexi left the office.

Ada was waiting outside of Tricia's office as Alexi left; Tricia beckoned her in.

"Alexi and Kamran–" Tricia was saying.

"He told me," Ada said, cutting her off. "Look, that report you and Marcus–"

"It's not his fault," Tricia said, this time cutting Ada off. "I asked him to do it, and he told me exactly what you all would say about it."

"But he did it anyway," Ada said, a sad note in her voice. "The point is I don't want my name on it. You can do what you want – release it, bury the truth – but I don't want any part of it."

Tricia was heartbroken. "Come on, Ada, this isn't all bad. The report we're going to release has all the novel detection methods you developed; it has a whole plan for rolling them out across the bureau. Heck, you don't want to work for me anymore? Fine – this report will let you punch whatever ticket you want at the FBI."

"I don't know," Ada said, thinking for a second before continuing. "I guess I'm not thrilled to have some career-defining moment built on a lie."

"It's not a lie," Tricia said, getting defensive.

"Fine," Ada relented, "a cover-up, I guess. Either way, if you're going to release it, keep my name off of it."

Tricia stewed for a minute. "Then what?" she asked.

Ada thought for a while before saying, "We'll see."

She stood to go, but before she could leave Tricia cut in. "I'm taking Alexi to the Runestone after work to get over Kamran – you should come with us."

"I can't," Ada said, pausing before adding, "Marcus and I have plans."

"Oh," Tricia said. She was happy that Marcus's version of the report hadn't soured Ada on the relationship. She'd gotten another filing from Marcus, this time listing them as an exclusive partnership with frequent consensual intimacy. She'd made another show of shredding it, especially because she'd noticed they both seemed happier over the last month. "Anything fun?" Tricia asked, trying to lighten the mood.

"It's a concert, in Fargo," Ada said dismissively.

"Anyone I'd know?" Tricia probed.

Ada just gave a little chuckle. "Amon Amarth," she said.

Tricia didn't know the name, but made a point to look it up later.

Tricia had closed the office up early that night. Alexi had managed to convince Priya to come with them to the Runestone, and Ada and Marcus had agreed to join for just one drink before they had to head out. Tricia got the sense that it was Marcus's idea and Ada wasn't entirely on board with it. They'd ordered a round of shots and given a toast to Alexi being the most eligible bachelor in Evansville.

"Hey, now with Paige at college, are you sticking around?" Alexi had asked Marcus.

"Yeah, I think so," Marcus had replied, looking at Ada, who was checking her watch and starting to pull him out of the bar. "But for now," he added, "I'm off to Valhalla."

It was late in the evening when Tricia sidled up to the bar next to Priya and flagged down the bartender. Alexi was in the middle of a conversation with someone he'd dubbed "Farm Boy" when they'd walked into the bar; he'd been with a few friends, and Tricia had confirmed with one of the women that not only was Farm Boy single, he was "amenable" to Alexi. Priya was sitting quietly nursing a tall beer, her first or maybe second of the night. The fingers of her right hand ran along the uneven surface of the bar while she loosely held a pen in her left and stared at a blank postcard.

"Vodka soda," Tricia told the bartender, who nodded. She looked over at Priya and asked jokingly, "Love letter?"

It took Priya a minute to register the question. "No, I'm playing chess with Marit – we've been playing the same game for two years... You didn't send the report," Priya said, speaking into the glass as much as to Tricia.

Tricia knew it wasn't a question, but answered it like one. "No. I figured it could wait till Monday – this late in the day no one's going to see it anyway."

Priya nodded for a minute and then took a sip of the beer before saying, "You'll send Marcus's."

This time Tricia wasn't sure if it was a question or not, but by then her vodka soda had arrived and she'd looked back to Alexi. He looked like he was going on about something, and Farm Boy looked like he was becoming disinterested. Over the din of the bar Tricia heard the word "Kamran," and she knew she needed to step in. Turning to go, she realized that she'd never answered Priya. She hesitated for a second, but then heard Alexi's voice clearly – "he wanted to study fashion, and..." – she had to hurry.

"Maybe," she said to Priya, turning to head back. Her eye caught the TV behind the bar – a familiar face she couldn't place. She dismissed it and went to save Alexi.

The TV was muted but the closed captions scrolled across the bottom of the screen. It was a local news station; the story had cut from an interview and now showed a newscaster talking directly to camera. "That sense of uncertainty that Carol is feeling is palpable everywhere here in Southfield. The mall has been closed all summer despite the police clearing it to open. When we reached out to the management company, they cited insurance issues and suggested we contact their lawyers, but our reporting shows that the insurance policy the business holds likely makes it more profitable to keep the mall closed than open. In the meantime a proposal to build a data center in its place is still wrapped up in red tape. This is Briana Michaels for News 8."