~ ~ ~
Tricia looked over her team as they gathered for standup. "Ada!" she said, seeing her phone out.
"Sorry," Ada replied quickly, swiping something on her phone.
"Oh, anyone hot?" Alexi said teasingly.
Ada snickered. "It's not a dating app, just ads for these stupid podcast apps." She flashed her phone to the group. On the screen a big man in a brightly colored dashiki, his skin a deep black, sat across from a lean, bald, dark-skinned woman wrapped in kente cloth, large patterned gauges in her ears, the two of them talking soundlessly on the muted phone. The ad cut through a quick montage – a bronze mask, drummers, an amphora – before landing on its logo, a baobab tree with roots reaching down, and the name "Africa Roots." Ada pressed the power button and the screen went dark.
"Ok, team," Tricia said, bringing them back to attention. As usual it was on Alexi to take the lead.
"We've gotten what we can from the partial copy of his phone, and... it's odd," Alexi said.
"Odd how?" Tricia asked. Standup wasn't supposed to be about digging in – she was breaking her own rule – but the team had done exactly as instructed: put a neat bow on all of their open cases. She'd even grilled Alexi and Marcus on the Levantis case, and they knew the evidence forwards and backwards. Now the whole team was on the Bennet case in one way or another. Priya had been the first to jump in: the digital fingerprint software – an old master's thesis project of Tricia's that she'd brought along with her as an analyst and then an agent – needed to be upgraded.
Tricia's early work on the software had been impressive; it was the digital fingerprinting it could do that had gotten her this field office, after she'd used it to correctly surmise that the prime suspect in a cross-state kidnapping was the wrong guy. Her dogged insistence that her software had managed to do better detective work than career agents didn't exactly win her friends, but then it wasn't about making friends; it was about saving a kid's life. When they'd managed to close the net on the real kidnapper – tracking him via a satellite internet connection to a remote Wyoming cabin – it was Tricia who was lauded as the hero.
After that case it hadn't taken her a week to realize that, hero or not, she wasn't going to get the respect she deserved from the other agents. So she'd written up a proposal: a new office dedicated to computer forensics, taking lessons from Silicon Valley startups – a small cross-functional team, empowered to solve cases and figure things out. She'd lead the team, and she assured the bureau that they would more than pay for themselves.
Of course they had more than paid for themselves. Tricia had been miffed when the FBI said yes to her request but then, rather than placing the office in Silicon Valley, New York, or Raleigh, offered her Evansville, Minnesota. Still, Tricia wasn't someone to give up easily.
She'd found Alexi first; he'd applied to the FBI a couple of times but been rejected over concerns about his Russian ties. The son of a wealthy corn farmer and a Russian mail-order bride, Alexi had been born in the US but grew up in Russia when his piece-of-shit father decided that Alexi and his mom weren't what he was looking for and had them both deported. He'd been top of his class at Moscow University, and then earned a full ride for a Computational Social Science master's at Stanford. Tricia read his file, called him, and told the FBI what they could do with their concerns.
"Boss?" Alexi's voice pulled Tricia back to the standup.
"What?" she asked, having been lost in her thoughts for... seconds – maybe.
Alexi picked up the thread – he and Tricia had been working together long enough that he knew the drill. "You were asking what was odd about the data we've gotten from the partial phone."
"Right," Tricia said, remembering the update.
"From what we've seen from the phone and the fingerprint, we're dealing with a very normal college student up until about three months ago. Then all of a sudden things start to change," Alexi continued. "He seems to have slowly fallen into a spiral where he was on delivery apps for an increasing amount of his day. At the same time his internet traffic seems to have centralized, most of it going to a server we haven't identified yet."
"Have we looked at his finances? Is he living the life of a post-college delivery driver?" Tricia asked, turning to Marcus.
Marcus shook his head. "We don't have enough data to get a full picture, but based on what we've seen it looks like he was living a bit like a monk – cheap apartment in a bad neighborhood, roommates. He was probably bringing in nine, nine and a half K a month."
"Ninety-five hundred a month?!" Tricia was incredulous. "There's no way that's right. How many hours was he working?"
Marcus looked to Alexi, who gave the matter-of-fact answer: "By the end he would generally be pulling eighteen hours a day."
"How is that possible?" Tricia asked.
Alexi looked lost for a second; Ada, sensing the issue, stepped away from the group, grabbed a whiteboard, and wheeled it over. "Thanks," Alexi said, and started to sketch.
"On any given day, based on what we know from his phone and internet profile, Shaun Bennet would work from 6:30 to 9:30, then again from 11 to 2:30, another break, and then a few long stretches from 5 to 10 and 12 to 4." As he talked, Alexi sketched out a timeline of the day. "Underneath all of this we have basically constant internet activity on a single unknown source." He drew a line through most of the day, dropping off between 2 and just before 6:30.
"When did he sleep?" Tricia asked, horrified.
"Polyphasic." It was Ada who had spoken up.
"What?" Tricia asked, turning to her.
"I know some people who've tried it. It's a sort of quasi-macho thing where you only sleep in one-hour increments throughout the day. Looking at his schedule, four, maybe five hours of sleep max."
"That would explain all those energy drinks in his car," Tricia said matter-of-factly. "Still doesn't leave much time for a social life." As she said it she looked around at her team: Alexi fidgeted; Priya was still focused on her pink shoes, running her nails up and down the seam of her jeans; Marcus and Ada both had uncomfortable smiles.
It was Marcus who broke the tension. "I think all of us here know a bit about being a workaholic, but this is a different level altogether." The team nodded.
"You said his patterns were different at the beginning of the summer?" Tricia said, happy for the change of direction.
"Yes," Alexi said, picking back up. "Priya's work extending the fingerprint tool has gotten us a picture of his behavior over a several-year period, and we've managed to build anonymous profiles from civilians that we can benchmark him against. At the end of his senior year he's behaving like most college seniors do, but then it starts a gradual shift... I..." Alexi paused for a second, then dashed into his office, returning with his laptop. "Is it ok?" he asked Tricia.
She waved the back of her hand at him – she'd broken the just-give-updates rule so thoroughly that caring about the no-computers rule now would have been absurd, and anyway, the asking permission was the thing she hated most in Alexi.
Clicking a few buttons on the laptop, Alexi called up a graph; it looked roughly like the one he'd drawn on the whiteboard, just crisper and clearer. Another click and it jumped to a more jagged, multi-colored graph. "Here's Shaun at the beginning of the summer," Alexi said. Then he hit a button and the graph started to change: the lines smoothed and consolidated, sliding, rising, and lowering until in the end they were hyper-concentrated into the one unidentified source.
"Ok," Tricia said. "Now what?"
"Now we explain this," Alexi said, hitting a key. The graph expanded, showing slight variations of the regimented day he'd drawn on the board – once, twice, three, four – then all of a sudden it changed: right around 11 AM, the delivery app traffic never picked back up. Instead around 2 PM, new apps started popping up here and there. There was no break in the unknown app traffic anymore.
"What is this?" Tricia asked.
"This," Alexi explained, "is the five days before the shooting. You can see the pattern for four days and then here, something happened around 11 AM the day before – something that broke his established routine. Something that made him decide to drive his car sixteen hours without sleep and shoot up a mall five states away."
Tricia nodded. "What do we need to get the answer?" she asked.
"The phone," Alexi said matter-of-factly.
"Priya," Tricia said, addressing her, "Your memo mentioned that since we only have the partial clone we're at a bit of a dead end, but if we had the full unencrypted copy the lab made for Dallas, we'd be able to identify the source of that internet traffic?" Priya nodded.
It was 2 PM when Tricia and Alexi were in her car leaving the office. They made a quick stop at Alexi's place. Since Kamran had moved back to California for a fashion design internship, Alexi had been living in a room he rented from an older widow. She was from Georgia – "the country, not the state," Alexi had told the team. Tricia figured it was good for him to have someone there; she knew the woman would help him cook, and helping her around the house with chores gave Alexi purpose too. Plus Alexi said he was learning some Georgian, and it gave him the rare chance to speak Russian.
Tricia hadn't had a chance to see Alexi's new place since he'd moved, so she popped her head in while Alexi went to grab a change of clothes. Tricia already had a bag packed; she kept one ready to go in her office for just this sort of thing. The house was small and tidy, and the old woman introduced herself as Magdalena and gushed to Tricia about what it was like having Alexi around. "It was like having Misha, her son, back in the house" – he was off at university in Toronto. Normally he'd be back for the summers, but there was an internship at a local bank and he had decided to stay in Toronto. Magdalena said she was planning on visiting him soon.
Alexi's room was spartan but neat: a twin bed, a few pictures on the wall, but mostly empty. "Most of the furniture was Kamran's," Alexi said as Tricia looked around. They were back out the door and into Tricia's car a minute later.
"I'm sorry I won't be home for dinner, Magda," Alexi said before jumping into the passenger seat.
Twenty minutes later they pulled into the small private airport where an old FBI King Air was waiting for them. "I called in a favor," Tricia said as Alexi gave her a quizzical look, then added, "I'm sorry, but you and Marcus are going to have to fly commercial to New York next month."
Leaving the car, they headed for the plane. As they walked Tricia could just barely hear Alexi's phone ring, and watched as he dismissed the call. "Kamran," he told her over the roar of the engines. "I'll call him back from Dallas."
Shaun was up before his alarm beeped at 5:30. He rolled off the mattress he slept on, grabbed his towel, and headed off to the bathroom he shared with his three roommates. He took his shower quick and cold, something he'd been learning to do since he'd cut coffee out of his morning routine.
"Our ancestors didn't have hot water, and they ran into battle swinging a sword at another dude. We've gotten soft," Cole had said on one stream.
Wells had helpfully provided some context: "You know, there's actually been some studies showing how a fast cold shower causes your blood vessels to contract – it makes your heart work a little harder just for a bit. It's like strength training for your heart."
After the shower Shaun pulled open the Apex app. He'd posted a picture he'd snapped in the early morning hours of a woman scantily dressed in crazy leopard print, standing on a Dallas street corner, her hair dyed hot pink and an unruly mess. His post read: "Up late hustling and you don't have time to stop for the strange #thegrind." Below his post another user, Games4Life, had replied, "I wouldn't mind a grind on that." Shaun gave a little chuckle, then headed into the kitchen to grab the oatmeal he'd tucked into the fridge a few hours before.
Pulling it out and tossing some fresh fruit on top, he popped his earbuds in and was about to pull up a Cole and Wells stream as he ate when he got a ping on his phone. There it was: a +1 on his post from a user SpicyNugs, but it was what was next to the user's name that made Shaun pump his fist in celebration. A small orange checkmark – the mark of being Certified Apex, or a Cert.
Certs had done it: they'd listened to all the Cole and Wells advice, they'd joined the lifestyle, they'd hustled, and they'd made it out the other side. To become a Cert you had to show receipts, real proof that you'd learned the lessons and moved beyond the grind without becoming a scavenger. Scavengers weren't tolerated in the Apex community; they didn't bring anything, they just took, and that's not what Apex was about. Anyone could just become a Scav and stop grinding, but it took a real Apex to get past the grind while staying a predator.
Shaun still didn't understand it. He'd been listening to Cole and Wells for nearly three months now – six hours of live streams a day, plus getting on the boards regularly to post, and then going through the back catalogue – but it was just so much work. Still, he knew he wouldn't be the first person to do it; there were maybe 300 Certs on the boards, and they'd all shown that they could make it through. But whenever someone asked what it took to get there they'd all say the same thing: "Listen to the pods, live the lifestyle, eventually you'll understand and you'll fucking hate yourself for not seeing it sooner."
Shaun hoped it would click soon; he didn't mind the lifestyle. His body had pretty quickly adjusted to the multi-phasic sleep and it was leaving him feeling better than ever, and cutting all the alcohol and caffeine from his diet had been a bit of a shock early on, but now he felt clear-headed. Really what he hated the most was the delivery driving. You didn't have to be a delivery driver to be Apex, but whenever he posted about other hustles that people had going, they were all pretty much doing the same thing he was.
He'd learned ratemaxxing from the boards and was getting pretty good at it, juggling multiple apps to earn maximum income; sometimes he'd manage to pull two or three deliveries from different apps at the same time. Still, he wished there was something easier. He was digging his way out from under a mountain of college debt, and he'd been scrimping anywhere he could. He wasn't certain, but he had a feeling that part of becoming Apex would involve clean books – no debt, some savings, receipts you could show.
Shaun had managed to build a pretty spartan lifestyle for himself. He could make the most money driving if he could make the breakfast rush and do the late-night hours, so he was usually at the apartment after his roommates were asleep and gone before they woke up. He didn't even really know the roommates that well, to be honest; they were just three random guys he'd found on Craigslist.
He'd originally tried finding something on the Apex boards, but no one else in Dallas was looking for someone. A user by the name of Hawkguy had given him the advice: "Don't get other Apex as roommates – only one alpha in a den or you'll compete." It made sense to Shaun, and so he'd found the cheapest apartment he could that afforded him the opportunity to sleep when he wanted and drive when he wanted without anyone noticing.
His expenses had been the first thing to take care of. Since he was busy binging the Cole and Wells back catalogue, he'd cut out other streaming and media apps. He'd started meal prepping and standardizing his diet around chicken and rice, which were both cheap. Now really his only expenses were housing, food, gas, the loans, and the $3.99 per month he paid for the Premium Apex App – well worth it as an investment in his future.
Still, even with ratemaxxing bringing in $8K a month, the gas, maintenance, and taxes ate half of that. Of the four he actually got, $900 went to rent and parking and about $600 into groceries – even for a shitty place, Dallas was expensive – and most of what was left went to the oversized student loan payment he'd set up to kill the debt years early. You couldn't become Apex dragging a scav's debt behind you. At the end of a month he might have three, four hundred dollars that were actually his, and he had started to look at ways to make even that work for him, ways to get past the hustle without falling back to being a scav.
The breakfast rush that morning wasn't too bad – predictable. A few big orders to some of the office buildings, for which he received a meager tip, and a few small orders to houses, for which he got paid handsomely. As usual the rates started to drop off around 10. Shaun did a few more runs before finding a parking lot, curling up on his seat, and closing his eyes. From the car stereo Cole and Wells discussed their early days hustling.
"You remember when we were scavs?" Cole had asked with a jovial laugh.
Wells was less enthusiastic. They'd worked at an investment bank back in the day, had a chance to make a trade that would have set them up for life – or so the boards said.
"Principled Scavs," Cole said, still joking, but Wells got contemplative.
"I think a scavenger that was born a scavenger, that's only ever been a scavenger, only ever seen scavengers... I don't think they could know what a predator is. They could never know what it is to be Apex."
Cole's energy picked up. "Right, and that's what our community gives you. Look, this is for all of you out there hustling, who haven't gotten Cert yet. Listen to what Wells and I tell you, live the lifestyle, hustle, but the most important thing is to study the other Apex who got Cert. Learn from them. You were born a scav, your parents raised you to be scavs, but we're here telling you that you can be Apex, you can be a predator."
The lunch rush had run long, he'd needed gas, and by the time he'd found a place to park his old Camry, Shaun realized he'd get closer to thirty minutes of sleep than an hour. "Fuck," he said. What's worse, while he was getting gas he'd dropped his phone. It was mostly unscathed – a small hairline crack joining a few others on the screen. Still, a new phone was the last thing he needed right now.
Before going to sleep he checked the Apex app, refreshing it several times, but other than a few +1s from other board members his post wasn't getting any more traction from Certs. Just before he settled in, his phone pinged – an email from an address he barely recognized. He thought of swiping it away, but then re-read the notification. "Job opportunity," the subject read, and beneath it the beginning of the message: "Hey Shaun, not sure if you remember me but we were on a group project together in..."
Brushing off his exhaustion, Shaun opened the message. It was from an old classmate at UT Dallas; he'd taken a job making parts for oil rigs and wondered if Shaun would be interested in a mechanical engineering opening. Beneath the message Shaun's phone had pre-filled a suggested response: "That would be awesome, here's my resume attached." Almost as if in a dream, Shaun tapped the prefilled message and then clicked the attach button. He scrolled for a second, but then there it was: "Resume.docx." He'd put it together five months ago when applying to positions.
He clicked on the document, attaching it to the email, and then paused for a second. The resume would be out of date – it would have his mom's address, it would say that he had an expected graduation date. Maybe he could put something in the email, but then... Quickly he flipped to the Apex app and pulled up the "Am I a Scav" board. He started to write a whole piece: "Old friend" – no, scratch that – "Acquaintance offered me a job building oil rig parts, AITS if I take the job?" He sat with it for a second, and then remembered something.
In the background Cole and Wells were talking about the increased rates of cancer for people who live near wind turbines. It was an old episode, part of the back catalogue Shaun was working through, so he paused it and pulled up the episode list. He typed "Oil Rig" and the list of episodes got shorter – 1,000, 600, 300, 137. Shaun started scrolling, looking for the specific episode. He'd heard it a month before – something about the dangers of oil rigs, or oil rig parts? Before long he'd passed out, dead asleep, as his phone slid out of his hand and landed softly in his lap.
~ ~ ~