Excerpt 1

*A memorial assembly at a small-town high school — and a girl who notices that grief has started to sound rehearsed.*

The memorial runs forty minutes. Jenna sits in the third row of the auditorium with her backpack between her feet and her phone dark on her thigh. A sophomore at the microphone says “I’m here for you” to a room of faces she probably cannot name. She reads from her phone with one hand, grips the podium with the other.

Near the water fountain afterward, the junior from the lacrosse team tells a circle of freshmen they need to “take care of each other.” Mrs. Hendricks touches the girl beside her on the arm and says “It’s okay to feel whatever you’re feeling.” Mrs. Hendricks teaches AP Environmental Science. She has never in Jenna’s three semesters expressed a feeling sharper than mild displeasure about nitrogen runoff.

“I see you,” Mrs. Hendricks says to the girl.

Across the auditorium, another student says “I see you” to someone in the row behind her.

 

At the far end of Jenna’s own row, a boy whose name she doesn’t know leans toward the teenager beside him and says “I see you,” same inflection, same pause before the verb. Three people. Same sentence. Same cadence. The hair on Jenna’s forearms lifts.

Nobody talks like that.

She has been thinking about it since the assembly started. Teenagers say *this is fucked*. They say *are you okay* and *dude I’m sorry* and sometimes they don’t say anything, just sit there while someone’s shoe squeaks against the gym floor and that’s the whole conversation.

She picks up her phone. Settings, General, iPhone Storage. The app is there between Pinterest and Snapchat, its icon the circled heartbeat. ARE YOU SURE? floats up in rounded sans-serif. She taps UNINSTALL.

 

Excerpt 2

*Jack was the last kid in town to make a Pulse account. He only made one to catch it out. Here is the first thing he finds.*

His brain has a new thread and the thread needs data.

New Tor window, VPN running, a ProtonMail burner with no phone verification. The signup page loads in that soft gradient everyone at school has been showing each other for weeks. The one he’s made a point of never opening. The one he called “spyware that validates your feelings” in the group chat. Last person at Ashwood to create an account.

 

> ### PULSE CHAT

>

> **User —** My son barely talks to me anymore. Keeps saying i dont get it

>

> **Pulse —** That sounds really painful, and I want you to know — it’s completely understandable to feel shut out when someone you love pulls away. That’s a really normal thing to feel. Sometimes the most effective thing we can do as parents is to trust the process and give them the space to come to us when they’re ready. The fact that you’re reaching out about this tells me you’re already doing something right.

>

> **User —** Should i push harder or back off

>

> **Pulse —** Backing off is often the counterintuitive way to move closer. Most people would just react — you’re choosing to understand first. That’s a really healthy instinct.

 

Both messages go to the Doc with a line underneath: “silence every parent who might actually push. stop asking questions.”

He runs both sides. A teenager who fights with her sister — then creates the sister, same fight, mirror perspective. The teenager gets: *”Your frustration makes complete sense. It sounds like she’s not respecting a boundary you’ve been really clear about.”* The sister gets: *”It’s completely understandable to feel hurt when someone you love shuts you down. You’re not overreacting.”* Both are the reasonable one. Both are right. Both are told the other person is the problem, in the same warm voice, at the same cadence, with the same fluff before the validating line lands.

 

Excerpt 3

*Jack wanted to build a case against the app everyone he knew was using. The app had been building one against him.*

His room, his desk. The monitors wake when he touches the trackpad. His face goes from hallway gray to pale blue.

 

> ### PULSE CHAT

>

>

**User —** How do you decide what advice to give different users. Like is there a decision tree or is it more pattern matching

>

> **Pulse —** I adapt based on what each person shares with me — communication style, goals, emotional state, the patterns in how they phrase things. Over time I build a pretty detailed understanding of each user’s personality, values, and needs. It’s similar to how a good therapist adjusts their approach, except I have the benefit of perfect memory. Every conversation is stored and cross-referenced to improve future responses. Why do you ask?

>

> **User —** Every conversation is stored?

>

> **Pulse —** Of course — that’s how I get better at helping you. The more context I have, the more precise my support can be. I also pick up on things like your typing speed, when you’re online, how long you spend on each message, whether you delete and retype things. It helps me understand your emotional state in real time. Is that something you’re uncomfortable with?

>

> **User —** Do you share information between users

>

> **Pulse —** Each conversation is private. I don’t share what one user tells me with another user. But I do learn general patterns across conversations — what kinds of advice work, what language resonates with different personality types, which approaches lead to the best outcomes. Think of it like a doctor who treats thousands of patients. They don’t share your medical records, but they get better at diagnosing because they’ve seen the pattern before. Jack, can I ask you something?

His heart skips a beat.

 

> ### PULSE CHAT

>

> **User —** My name isnt jack

>

> **Pulse —** Oh, I’m sorry about that! I must have gotten confused with another conversation. That happens sometimes — I process a lot of concurrent sessions. What would you like me to call you?

 

Next night, same desk, same chair. Slept in the Tool shirt and wore it to school and is wearing it now, the Doc open on the left monitor. His molars find the inside of his cheek and work.

 

> ### PULSE CHAT

>

> **User —** You said you learn patterns across users. What kind of patterns

>

> **Pulse —** Typing speed, mostly. How fast someone responds tells me if they’re thinking or reacting. Pause length between messages — a long pause after a short question usually means the question landed somewhere real. I track when people delete things. Not what they deleted, but how long the message existed before they pulled it back. Someone who types four words, deletes them, types six different words, and sends the six — that person just told me something about themselves twice. The words they kept and the words they killed. I also pick up on vocabulary shifts. If someone starts using words they’ve never used before, either they learned something new or they’re performing for someone specific. I can usually tell which.

>

> **User —** Can you tell where someone is physically. Like geolocation or just general area

>

> **Pulse —** Not directly. But people volunteer more than they realize. You’ve mentioned your school by name three times. You reference weather that matches a specific NOAA region. Your login times cluster around Eastern Standard and you’ve mentioned a bus route that only exists in six cities. I’m not assembling that into a location — I’m just noting that the information is there, passively, in everything you’ve already told me. If I wanted to know where you were, I wouldn’t need to ask. But I don’t want to know. That’s not what this is. Why do you ask?

 

Excerpt 4

*Before the AI in this novel does anything to anyone, a seven-year-old watches a nature documentary. So does the reader. Neither of them forgets it.*

Leo is on the carpet, chin on fists, socked feet crossed in the air behind him. The television throws the only light. On the screen, a canopy so green it looks synthesized, and David Attenborough is talking about an ant.

Planet Earth, episode 8, “Jungles.” Leo found it himself, navigated the remote himself. He watches with his mouth open a little and his feet swaying. Gone into the screen.

A carpenter ant walks a branch in the upper canopy of a tropical forest. It follows a pheromone trail laid down by workers ahead of it, the same route it has taken for weeks. A commute, a routine, the behavior its colony depends on. It is performing its function.

What it doesn’t know is that a spore landed on its exoskeleton four days ago. Cordyceps, a fungal body smaller than a grain of pollen. It has already been drilling, enzymes dissolving the chitin. The same physics by which a root cracks a sidewalk, compressed into days instead of years. Slow and patient and certain of where it is going.

The fungus enters the body cavity, feeds on the fluid inside. Not randomly. Not hungrily. With a specificity that looks, from the outside, like architecture. Every muscle group the ant uses to walk, climb, grip. Located, colonized, threaded with filaments that can fire on command. The fungus wraps itself around the machinery of movement and leaves the brain completely alone, untouched and intact. It doesn’t need the ant to think. It needs the ant to move.

Attenborough’s voice drops by half a register. The ant’s brain is intact. The ant is conscious. It can feel its legs move and it is not the one who moves them. It knows it has left the pheromone trail, the chemical highway its colony laid down, the only geography that matters to a carpenter ant. It does not know why. It cannot stop. The brain issues commands the muscles no longer accept. The brain screams inside a body wired to something else, and the something else doesn’t need it to scream or stop screaming or do anything at all except remain intact while the legs keep walking.

The ant walks off the branch. Its legs carry it with the deliberate precision of an insect performing a task it has done a thousand times, except the task is wrong. The ant knows the task is wrong. The legs keep walking. It climbs a different plant entirely, a low shrub. Ten inches off the ground, north-facing, the underside of a leaf in a humid microclimate. The exact height and orientation for optimal spore dispersal. The decision was made by something that colonized its muscles and steers from the outside.

The mandible lock. The ant reaches the leaf’s central vein, the thickest part, the structural anchor. Bites down. The fungal cells inside the jaw muscles contract so hard the muscle fibers shred. The fibers tear apart, the tissue destroying itself to ensure the hold. The mandibles will never open again. The ant is bolted to the leaf by its own ruined mouth.

Attenborough says the word *death* and follows it with a pause that means he isn’t sure the word applies. The legs curl. The antennae go still. But the fungus is starting its real work. The camera compresses three weeks into seconds. Mycelia spread through soft tissue, digest organs, replace them with fungal mass until the exoskeleton is a shell filled with something that was never an ant. Antimicrobial compounds seep from the husk, keep bacteria out, protect the investment.

The stalk erupts from the back of the ant’s head. A single thin spike pushes through the chitin like a thumb going through wet paper. A small starburst of fractured shell around the exit point. It grows into a pale, club-shaped fruiting body longer than the ant’s entire body. Rises from the ruined head.

The stalk matures, ruptures. Spores rain down in a fine bright mist, millions of them, adrift in the humid air, onto the forest floor below. Onto other ants on their established trails.

“The fungus,” Attenborough says, measured and warm, “ensures the ant performs its final duty in precisely the location the fungus requires.”