~ ~ ~
"Where is Marcus?" Tricia asked, frustrated, as the team stood assembled for standup.
"Remember, he's off this week?" Alexi said.
"Damn," Tricia thought to herself. She did remember – he'd even mentioned it at standup last Friday – but the Bennet case had become all-consuming. The case was not officially reopened; that wasn't going to happen without a lot more evidence. Instead her superiors at the bureau had given her free rein to "cross the t's and dot the i's," as they said. Of course, once she'd raised the prospect of thousands or even a million home-grown terrorists being radicalized by a foreign influence operation, there was a tacit understanding that it was her team's job now to get this thing offline without making a fuss.
"Ok, ok," Tricia said, gesturing to Alexi, "start us off."
But before Alexi could say anything the door to the office flew open, and in walked Marcus looking, as best Tricia could describe it, peak dad. He wore comfortable tennis shoes with white socks that came up over his ankles, and khaki shorts that were a little too baggy to be fashionable. He had on a red shirt with white text that read "Proud Badger Dad."
"Marcus?" Tricia said, confused both by him coming into the office and by the general lack of suit and tie.
"Just dropping this off on the way past," Marcus said, handing Tricia a large binder labeled "Podform Apex Financial Audit."
"You found the foreign source?" Tricia asked as Marcus was heading out the door.
He stopped for a second and turned back to the group. "It wasn't foreign. It's domestic. It's all in there. Now I've got to go." He turned and started heading out the door.
"Tell Paige good luck," Ada called after him as he waved.
Marcus's whirlwind appearance had thrown off standup, but Tricia tried to pull the team back together. "Ok, team–"
But Alexi interrupted her. "Who is Paige?" he asked, looking at Ada.
"His daughter," Ada said, frustrated. "She's going off to college today – UW Madison. That's why he's off this week; they're driving and he's helping her move in... although if he's going to be dressed like that she's probably not going to want him anywhere near her."
Now Tricia and Alexi were both staring at Ada.
"What?" she said, incredulous. "You knew he and his ex had a daughter, right? That she was finishing up high school, that's why he wanted to stay in Evansville?"
"Honestly," Alexi said, "I didn't even know he owned clothes that weren't a suit and tie."
Ada laughed, the awkward tension in the room broken, and the team got back to standup.
"We've finished the user analysis," Alexi said, his tone dropping to a dejected one. "It's worse than we expected. At least 98% of the users on the app are bots."
Tricia nodded; this was what she'd been worried about since his analysis had first flagged the high bot ratio. "We need to know who the real people are if we're going to have a hope of finding the people who orchestrated this, or who could be radicalized like Shaun," Tricia said, then asked, "Any hope we can get that number more accurate?"
Alexi shook his head no. "We've done what we can with the tooling, but it uses reply timing, response patterns, time-of-day hints to pattern-match for a bot. We had to tell the tool that Shaun's account was human or it was getting flagged as high likelihood of bot traffic."
"So we could be dealing with a million Shauns, or a handful?" Tricia said.
She knew the bureau wasn't going to like this; she'd gotten her little side project approved on the fear of thousands of radicalized terrorists, and they weren't going to like being told that it was actually somewhere between one and a million people. She thought about what Marcus had said – domestic – that was even more worrisome. They were still analyzing the podcast transcripts, but it seemed like there were over 6,000 hours of audio; if there was no direct call for violence, a domestic app might actually have steered clear of any crimes.
Turning to Priya, Tricia said, "Priya, your memo stated that the bot traffic was definitely from the operators of the app, but not running on the Podform servers. It sounds like we can't track where that bot traffic came from without a warrant."
Priya initially nodded her head yes, but then paused for a second.
"Do you have a way to track it?" Tricia asked, a tense excitement in her tone.
Priya thought for a moment, then said in her slow, measured monotone: "If we did a reverse of the fingerprint we could categorize users."
Tricia thought about it for a minute; the data requirements would be substantial. "See what you can do this week – if something else comes up, drop it though."
Priya nodded.
"Ada?"
Ada had a Cheshire cat smile. "I figured out the podcasters." Fidgeting at her lip ring for a second, she started in. "I haven't been able to process all the audio yet, but from what we have processed I was able to build a proper speech profile, and then with Priya's help" – Ada nodded to Priya, who continued to stare at her feet – "with Priya's help I was able to match the profile to the actual open speech model that was used."
"Anything interesting?" Tricia asked.
"No, at least not yet. It's an open-weight model, freely available on Hugging Face and trained specifically for podcast generation; it seems like the two-speaker, Cole-and-Wells sort of mode is its pretty standard output."
Great, Tricia thought, another angle the bureau wouldn't love. "Anything else?" she asked Ada.
"Yeah, I was also able to take what we had from the Cole and Wells transcripts and match it against an open language model. Here's the crazy thing: on a hunch I pulled the posts for a user that had interacted with Shaun, someone with the handle HuntOrBHunted, and their posts also matched patterns from the same language model."
"So definitely a bot?" Tricia asked.
"Yeah," Ada said confidently.
"Ok, so that's at least one." Tricia was excited; this felt like a win for the team. She paused for a second, then rallied everyone: "The one confirmed bot is good, but let's see if we can turn that on its head and start to actually find the people on this platform. I'd like to get ahead of any other Shauns before they snap."
Maybe they weren't too late to stop another incident.
"What about Marcus's binder?" It was Alexi who had spoken up.
Tricia had almost forgotten about the binder. She opened it up and was immediately hit with a wall of neatly formatted two-column text. "I'm going to need a minute with this," she said. "We all have something to work on; let's meet back up after I've gone over it."
In her office with the door closed, Tricia opened the binder back up and started reading. She hated reading in front of others; she always felt like the words on the page wouldn't behave unless she could tap her fingers or read the words aloud under her breath. People found it annoying, so she'd learned to find private spaces to read, really focusing as her nails made a soft tap-tap-tap along the spine of the binder.
The report Marcus had filed was detailed – the only way that Marcus seemed to know how to work. Marcus had been the last hire in Tricia's Menagerie and the only one she hadn't personally recruited. In the first week the office had been open he'd shown up in his suit and tie with a printed resume. At first Tricia had been dismissive: for the last twenty years of his career Marcus had been a middling tax accountant, successful enough as one of the only ones in town, but nowadays most people would just do their taxes online.
Still, Marcus had by all accounts been making a decent living; a messy divorce and quasi-midlife crisis had pushed him to look for a change of pace, and he thought that maybe the new FBI office could use a forensic accountant. He was affable and didn't seem put off by the disheveled state of the office, or the sight of Ada and Alexi drinking beers and building office furniture while Priya sat in a corner reading the instructions. Tricia had sent his resume on to a friend at the bureau who knew the accounting side better and gotten a call back the next day.
"Where the fuck did you find this one, Trish?" her friend had asked.
"What's wrong with him?" Tricia was curious; she was usually pretty good at vibe-checking people, and Marcus hadn't raised any red flags.
"Nothing's wrong with him," her friend had said. "He's got a fucking accounting degree from Urbana-Champaign, ROTC since high school, did some work with the DOD after college – and my contacts there said it was serious stuff – he's managed to keep his codeword clearance for twenty years, probably still on some retainer."
"So..." Tricia didn't understand.
"So he's a fucking GOAT, Trish. You just had the GOAT of accounting walk into your hillbilly field office and ask for a job."
Tricia wasn't sure, but she'd given Marcus a one-week trial; he'd managed to impress her.
The report made one thing clear: Alexi's ratio for the bots was too low. With what info they had, Marcus had managed to trace some meager funds from the Apex app back to its source. The whole setup was made harder by Podform aggregating payments and running credits against the hosting cost for the app itself. On the other end the entity was wrapped in tax shelter after tax shelter. "The corporate structure uses every known trick to shelter income and has combined them into a few novel approaches which are addressed in Appendix F," the report read.
Nicely laid out in the conclusion were the three bombshells. "1. It seems as if the same entity is running upwards of 100 such apps on the Podform platform. 2. Each app has nearly 1 million comped accounts, and over the whole set of apps no more than several hundred paid users. 3. The funds all trace back to a company in San Diego."
Tricia looked at the pieces of the case on her desk. The Apex App had radicalized Shaun – she had no question of that. For several days before the shooting the hosts had been talking about the Southfield Mall getting shut down, calling on their listeners to be warriors. The advice they'd dispensed had managed to isolate Shaun from his family, from any social connection he could have; it had deprived him of sleep and likely made him so impressionable that he would have done anything. It was a classic indoctrination playbook being run, just packaged into an app and distributed with the help of AI.
Tricia only had two questions: how many more people like Shaun were going to be radicalized, and why? To find out they would need to go to the source, and they would need a warrant and a reason to be there. She'd have to sell this not as a foreign influence op radicalizing thousands, but as something different. She wasn't sure what, and until she knew, she wasn't going to tell the higher-ups that her whole theory of the case was shot. Whoever was behind this had gotten three people killed already, and if it hadn't been for Officer Daniella Roxbury stopping in for lunch it would have been a hell of a lot more.
She hadn't thought about Daniella Roxbury since that day in Southfield. She'd never reached out – Tricia hadn't really expected her to, but still. She opened a browser and typed her name in. There were a few hits for news stories from a few months back that mentioned her in connection with Southfield, then a LinkedIn profile. Tricia clicked.
The profile showed Officer Daniella Roxbury in her police uniform, clearly a photo from her academy graduation. Beneath her name it said "Southfield Police Department." Tricia scrolled down. Most of the page was blank, covered with the text "Upgrade to Premium to view more," but one section was visible: the employment history. It listed her time at Southfield PD, starting in January of that year and ending a month ago. There was nothing after it.
"This would be your room," Deven said, showing Shaun the bedroom near the back of the apartment. "Shared bathroom over there." Heading into the kitchen, he opened the fridge. "We've each got like a shelf in here for our stuff, and then a shared shelf for anything you buy for the apartment – use the last of something, you buy it next time you're at the store sort of deal. Ketchup, mustard, various condiments. Then, ah... TV, Xbox, stuff like that. Yeah, that's pretty much it?"
"You said there was off-street parking too, right?"
"Ah... yeah, you have to buy it from the building, but they've got lots of spots, I think it's like $100 a month," Deven answered.
Shaun looked around the small apartment, nodding. "Any other rules I need to follow?" he asked.
"Ahh... oh yeah, don't smoke in the apartment," Deven added.
Shaun wasn't worried about that; he'd given up alcohol and drugs the month before, and he was trying to get caffeine out of his system too. As a daily coffee drinker, that one was the hardest.
"So what do you think?" Deven asked.
"I think I need to think about it," Shaun said.
"Ok," Deven said, seeming unsure. "But you know, I've got other people, so if they say yes..."
"I get it," Shaun told him, and headed out.
There's no way he has other people interested, Shaun told himself as he descended the stairs down to the street. The building itself seemed safe, and the covered parking was a big draw, but the neighborhood was one of the worst in the city. People wouldn't want to live here, and the price wasn't that good. Still, he did the math: based on the receipts he'd seen from others on the boards, he'd probably be clearing seven grand a month after taxes; $900 would cover the apartment and the parking spot, and he figured he'd probably need a couple hundred for groceries and stuff. It would be a pretty comfortable living.
Shaun pulled out his phone. "Fucking spam," he muttered under his breath as he swiped away all the notifications. He didn't even use half these apps anymore. What was it that Cole said – "A clean life is the building block for any Apex"? Shaun did a long press on the Spotify icon, waiting for the uninstall button to appear. Tap, tap, tap – Spotify, YouTube, TikTok, gone. He hadn't really even opened these apps since he'd started paying for the Apex App.
He opened that app now, pulled open the boards, and started a new thread. "Still looking in Dallas," he wrote at the top. "Just out of college ready to start the hustle, looking for a place that's hustle, multi-phasic, and clean life friendly." Before he could hit send, though, he got a call notification from his mom. He thought about swiping it away, but he knew she'd just call him back, so he hit the answer button and held the phone up to his ear.
"Hi Mom,"
"How was the apartment?"
"It was great! Clean, lots of space, other guys seem nice."
"Isn't it in a bad neighborhood?"
"Mom, it's not a bad neighborhood. Besides, the building is safe and it includes an off-street parking spot."
"Ok, if you think it's going to be ok... although you always know you can come home, right?"
"I know, I know." Shaun's tone came out more dismissive than he'd meant it to.
"Look, I'm your mom, I worry about you, that's all. I swear, you and your sister moving so far away, it's like you don't even love me!"
"Don't be dramatic, Mom. I went to a great school and there's tons of jobs here in the city. I just need to work on finding a place so I can start looking seriously."
She didn't understand. He'd seen it with his friends: even less than a month out from graduation, there were the ones who had made it – they had their own places and jobs – and then there were the ones who were destined to scavenge their whole lives, living back at home.
"You should call your sister – I know she'd be happy for you to come and visit her and Lilah and Ethan."
"Mom, really, I'm just trying to get settled here. Once I've got the apartment worked out I can come up and visit her."
"Ok – I get it, you're not a little kid anymore. Anyways, once you've got your own place let me know the address – I've got something special to send you."
"I will, Mom. I've got to go now, ok?"
"Ok. Love you."
"Love you too, bye."
As Shaun hung up he gave an audible groan. His mom had always loved sending "care packages" to him during college. Cookies mostly. Freshman year the frequent care packages had led to him putting on pretty significant weight, an image he'd carried with him for the next three years even as he tried to be better about eating and exercising. Looking back at the pictures of himself from the start of his sophomore year, he was embarrassed at how big he'd let himself get.
The care packages hadn't stopped, but he'd taught himself to eat one cookie and then leave the rest in a common space; they'd usually all be gone in under an hour. Maybe he could just put them on the shared shelf in the fridge. Deven had seemed nice, and he'd vouched for the other two guys who were there, but Shaun could tell they were just scraping by. The furniture looked like it might have been saved from the curb, and when Deven had opened the fridge Shaun could tell it was a bit sparse – he'd noticed some expired food. Maybe they'd appreciate the free cookies.
He'd looked up comp apartments before coming out. Deven had told him $800 a month, and from what he could tell he'd probably be paying close to half the rent on the place despite having the smallest room of the four. When Shaun had asked about the price, Deven had sworn up and down that he wasn't getting ripped off – a sure sign that he was – and promised the guy before him had been paying eight as well. Still, he could swing the rent, and the off-street parking was a big win even if it meant an extra hundred. He'd be living with scavengers, but if he had to live with Scavs to become Apex, so be it.
Pulling up the Apex app, he hit send on his message – one last shot at something better – and then flipped over to the podcast feed. There was a live stream, and he started it up.
"It's crazy stuff," Cole was saying. "Have you heard of this bird, the Honeyguide?"
"Honeyguide? No," Wells responded.
"Lives in Africa, but it's the worst kind of Scav. It leads people to bee hives, and when they knock them out of the tree to get the honey the Honeyguide swoops in and steals some."
"Crazy," Wells said.
"That's not all," Cole continued. "Fucking Scav bird won't even raise its own chicks. It lays its egg in another bird's nest while they're gone, makes the other bird keep its egg warm, and once the little scav hatches it pushes the other birds out of the nest and takes all the food for itself."
"What the hell? So it doesn't work to get the food, and doesn't work to raise its young, and manages to outcompete the birds that are doing the real work?" Wells asked, taken aback.
"Yeah, that's what these so-called 'public/private' partnerships are," Cole was saying. "Honeyguides, Scavs that make you raise their young."
~ ~ ~