I wrote the code that started all of this.
Not the system. Just the piece that fits inside the larger machine. The matching algorithm. Elegant thing.
In 2019 I was fresh out of grad school feeling like I’d cracked something fundamental about how people think, how they behave, how they can be predicted. OptiMatch wanted me to build software that assigned gig work based on performance and geography. Simple optimization problem. I built them a solution that learned from every completed task, every user interaction, every response time and acceptance rate. The algorithm got better at matching as it had more data to work from. Workers earned more. Customers got better service. Everyone in the beta tests was happy.
Then Harmonic Solutions acquired us without anyone asking the workers anything.
I only found out because I got an email from HR saying “Welcome to the Harmonic family” and listing my new office location, my new parking level, the same salary. It felt like a promotion at first. Bigger company. Better resources. The algorithm would improve. Then I went to my first meeting with the product leadership and Patricia walked in wearing a gray cardigan that she would, it turned out, never change.
She was maybe forty-five. Could have been fifty. The kind of person who takes care of herself without appearing to work at it. She smiled in that way supervisors smile when they’ve practiced it enough that the warmth feels like a product rather than an emotion, and she set a butterscotch candy dish on the conference table before sitting down, which was a power move that I didn’t recognize as a power move at the time but would eventually understand was her establishing the tone for every conversation we’d ever have: she was in control, she was comfortable, and she wanted you to be comfortable too, because comfortable people ask fewer questions.
“David,” she said, “your algorithm is remarkable. We’ve been watching the user data since the acquisition and the predictive accuracy is unlike anything we’ve seen. We’d like to expand its application.”
“Expand how?”
“The matching system currently works at the task level. Individual assignment optimization. We want to explore whether it could work at a different scale. Population-level behavioral pattern recognition. Can the algorithm predict not just whether someone will accept a gig, but what kind of person someone is based on their broader behavior?”
I said it was possible. The truth is I’d thought about it in grad school, the theoretical extensions, the ways behavioral prediction could work at increasing scales of granularity. I’d thought about it and filed it away as the kind of thing that’s technically possible but probably shouldn’t exist.
“Show me,” Patricia said.
So I built what she asked for. The algorithm started pulling from more sources. Purchase history. Social media. Search patterns. Payment history. App usage. Stress markers inferred from typing speed and mouse movement. Risk tolerance estimated from financial decisions. I built her a system that could draw a pretty accurate psychological profile of any gig worker in the system just by watching how they moved through the world.
Jess hated it when I talked about work. Not because she didn’t understand it—she understood it fine—but because understanding it made her unhappy, and she’d started asking questions about what I was building exactly and why I was building it. We’d been together seven years at that point. Married for three. She worked in city planning, which is nothing like the work I do except that it’s also about systems and patterns and trying to predict human behavior before it happens. She understood what I was doing. That’s why it bothered her.
“You’re building a profile generator,” she said one night. We were in bed. The light from her phone lit her face from below, made her look older than she was.
“I’m building a pattern recognition system.”
“For what purpose?”
“For the company.”
“That’s not an answer.”
She was right, but I didn’t have a better answer because Patricia hadn’t told me what the purpose was and I hadn’t asked. That’s the thing about not asking questions—it leaves a space where plausible deniability lives, and I was learning to make that space comfortable, to decorate it with rationalization and move in.
“The company will figure out how to use it,” Jess said. “That’s how this works. You build the tool, they use the tool, you get to act shocked when someone uses it in a way that turns out to be harmful. Very convenient.”
I didn’t argue. She was right. I just didn’t want to hear it.
The next request from Patricia came with more formality. A meeting with two people I’d never met. Clean-cut. Expensive suits. The kind of people who work for organizations that don’t have names on their business cards.
“We’d like you to expand the algorithm to identify people who might be willing to participate in specialized research programs,” one of them said. His voice was the corporate version of a neutral accent, the kind that’s worked at being invisible. “Behavioral assessment tasks. The compensation would be significant.”
Patricia watched me. Not watching for my reaction, exactly. More like recording it. Like she was looking at data and I was the data point.
“What kind of behavioral assessment?” I asked.
“Population sampling. We need to understand specific responses to specific stimuli. The algorithm would help us identify individuals who fit our required demographic and psychological profiles, then place them in carefully controlled research environments.”
I thought about this for exactly as long as I should have, which is to say I didn’t think about it hard enough. “I can build that,” I said.
I built them a matching system that could identify people based on relationship proximity. Not direct connections—that would have been too obvious—but second-degree relationships. Someone who knew someone who knew someone but wasn’t connected enough to be suspicious of the assignment. The system would cluster these people into groups of four, run them through task assignments, and track their response rates and behavioral markers. I built it exactly how they asked, which is another way of saying I built it exactly how I was already designing it before they asked.
The requests came regularly after that. Requests I’d fulfill with Patricia watching and remembering, building her own profile of me, testing to see how much I’d do if the pay was good and the requests were reasonable-sounding. Each request pushed incrementally further. Each incremental push made the next one easier.
I want to tell you I noticed the pattern. I didn’t. I was busy. Work was demanding. I was being promoted. My salary was good. Jess was unhappy but we were still sleeping in the same bed, which felt like enough.
Then one morning I came in and my calendar had blocks on it. “Deep work” they were labeled. Evenings. Three hours at a time. 8 PM to 11 PM, Tuesday nights. I didn’t remember scheduling them.
I asked Patricia about it.
“You requested them,” she said. “Focused development time. Your badge logs show you’ve been coming in for late sessions. Very productive. You’ve been committing excellent work.”
I didn’t remember requesting them. But I checked the git logs anyway, out of curiosity, and there was code. Functions with my name on them. Comments in my voice. Smart code. Elegant solutions to problems I didn’t remember solving.
One function was labeled “recursive_assessment_protocol.” I opened it and looked at the logic and felt something shift in my chest, a vertigo that had nothing to do with the code being complex. The function wasn’t matching people for single tasks. It was modeling behavioral responses across iterations. Running simulations. Predicting how a person might behave in slightly different circumstances. Not one person, but variations of that person. It was building models of possibility. It was the kind of thing you’d build if you wanted to understand how many different versions of someone you could create before the fundamental thing that makes them themselves started breaking apart.
I pulled my email. Found a thread with Patricia from three weeks ago. Subject line: “Recursive protocol ready for testing?”
I’d sent her the code. Said it was ready. Asked if she needed anything else. The email was professional. Competent. Written in my voice but from a me I didn’t remember being.
I checked my badge logs for that night. 7:53 PM in. 11:47 PM out. Four hours. The badge doesn’t lie. My photo is on the scanner. The system confirmed it was me.
I didn’t remember any of it.
I checked my bank account and found deposits that didn’t match my regular paycheck. $2,400. $2,800. Dates that lined up with the badge logs. Dates that corresponded to the nights I had no memory of.
I pulled the office surveillance footage. I have access, it’s a security feature they advertise as a benefit. I watched myself from three weeks ago. Coming in at quarter to eight. Badging through security. Going to my desk. Sitting down. My hands moved. My fingers typed. I watched myself work for four hours. My face was visible but my expression was blank. The kind of blank you see in people who are asleep with their eyes open, who are operating on something deeper than conscious thought.
I watched myself send the email to Patricia. Save the code. Close my laptop. Stand up. Badge out.
I did not remember any of it.
I came home that night and sat with Jess on our couch and didn’t tell her any of this. I’d gotten good at not telling her things. She’d gotten good at knowing I wasn’t telling her and not pressing. We sat and watched television and pretended everything was fine because the alternative was a conversation neither of us was ready for.
The next morning I requested a meeting with Patricia. Not casual. A formal request. She understood something had shifted because she agreed immediately.
She had coffee ready when I walked into her office. The butterscotch was there. She had the office arranged to be comforting, the way that all human spaces are arranged to be comforting when someone’s about to hear bad news.
“I’m losing time,” I said.
“Losing time how?”
“Memory gaps. Large ones. Hours. Entire evenings I have no recollection of. But the evidence shows I was working. Badge logs show it. Emails sent by me. Code committed by me. Surveillance footage.”
Patricia took a sip of her coffee. She didn’t look surprised. “Have you considered that you might be in a flow state? Researchers call it hyper-focus. When you’re deeply engaged in problem-solving, your conscious mind sometimes doesn’t register the experience. It feels like missing time because your explicit memory wasn’t encoding the information. But the procedural learning still happens. Your hands remember what your mind doesn’t.”
It sounded reasonable. It sounded like someone who’d looked this up, someone who’d prepared an answer for this exact conversation.
“I watched surveillance video of myself. I didn’t look like I was in a flow state. I looked like I was asleep.”
“Extreme focus can look like that. There are neurological mechanisms that shut down the sensory processing centers during intensive cognitive work. The brain prioritizes problem-solving over conscious experience.”
She was explaining it very well. The kind of explanation that sounds like science when you’re hearing it from someone who looks confident and speaks with the tone of someone who knows more than you, which is always a good way to establish dominance in a conversation about brain science.
“Patricia, I don’t believe that.”
She set her coffee down. Folded her hands on her desk. Met my eyes. And something shifted in her face, a subtle slide from the warm supervisor persona to something underneath, something more competent and less kind.
“What do you believe?” she asked.
“I believe something is happening that you’re involved in. Something that explains the memory loss. The code I don’t remember writing. The deposits that don’t match my actual income.”
She was quiet for a moment. “Would you like the truth?”
I said I would.
“You’ve been participating in a research program,” she said. “A very specialized program. Your technical expertise made you an ideal candidate. We’ve been running assessments. Behavioral trials. The gaps in your memory are a natural side effect of the process. They’re temporary. They diminish with subsequent iterations.”
“Iterations of what?”
“The program. You’ve already completed four assessments. You barely remember any of them. That’s actually working as designed. The assessments are most useful when subjects have minimal conscious awareness of the experience, because conscious knowledge shapes behavior in ways that contaminate the data. But you remember fragments. You have evidence. That means you’re ready to participate consciously. To understand what you’ve been part of.”
I wanted to leave. I should have left. Instead I asked, “What is the program actually doing?”
“That’s above your clearance level. And I don’t mean that as obfuscation. I mean that literally. The research protocols require compartmentalization. You know the parts you need to know. If you want to understand the whole, you participate in the next assessment consciously. See it from the inside. That’s how you get full context.”
“And if I don’t want to participate?”
She smiled. The warm smile came back. “David, you’ve already participated four times. You’ve already been assessed, analyzed, processed. You can choose not to participate consciously, but choosing not participates doesn’t change anything. You’re already part of the system. The only question is whether you understand it or remain confused.”
I didn’t respond. She reached across her desk and pushed a small candy toward me. Butterscotch. The gesture was gentle.
“You’ll get another assignment soon. A task opportunity. Significantly more compensation than the previous ones. Participate in that one with full awareness. Pay attention. Understand what you’ve created. Then we’ll talk again and you’ll have real information instead of fear-based speculation.”
I walked out of her office with the butterscotch and went home and found Jess in the kitchen making dinner. She looked at my face and asked if I was okay. I said I was fine. I held the butterscotch in my hand the whole time we ate and didn’t tell her about any of it.
That night I pulled up my phone and there was an app installed that I’d never downloaded. The gig assignment app. The one I’d built. It had a notification waiting.
NEW OPPORTUNITY ASSIGNED
Gig Type: Special Task Pay: $4,000 Time Commitment: 4 hours Location: 1847 Riverside Industrial Park, Unit 9C Start Time: Tomorrow, 2:00 AM
Task five. The notification told me I’d successfully completed four prior assignments. The system knew. I was being invited to attend my own processing consciously, to watch what I’d built do to me from the inside.
I didn’t sleep that night. Jess was already asleep, curled on her side, and I lay next to her and watched her sleep and thought about telling her everything. About showing her the surveillance footage. About explaining the memory gaps. About telling her that I’d built something that now had its hands around me and was squeezing, and I didn’t know how to resist because resisting meant losing everything Patricia had hinted that I’d lose—my job, my score, my clearance, and possibly the ability to move freely through systems that tracked everything.
At 1:45 AM I got out of bed and drove to Riverside Industrial Park.
The building was the kind of place that looks different at night, all hard edges and shadows. Unit 9C had a door and no windows and nothing to indicate what happened inside. I parked and walked toward it and saw that I was already there.
Standing outside the door.
Wearing the same jacket. Same posture. Same face that I wear every day except for something wrong with the proportions, something in the cheekbones that was nearly right but not quite. He turned around and saw me and we both went very still, the moment where you understand something about the nature of reality has shifted and you’re going to have to revise everything.
“You’re the conscious one,” he said.
“I’m the original,” I said, which was a stupid thing to say because I had no idea if that was true.
“They said the fifth assessment would be synchronization. Showing both versions each other. Establishing causal context.” He said it like he was reading it, like the words had been given to him as explanation. “There’s three more of us. Four total iterations. We’re all here right now for the same task.”
“Where are the others?”
“Inside, I think. Or waiting. Time works different in there.”
The door opened. A man in a gray suit emerged, the kind of suit that’s designed to be unremarkable, the kind that makes you forget what the person wearing it looks like approximately three seconds after you stop looking at them.
“David?” he said. “Both of you?”
“We’re ready,” I said.
“Excellent. Come inside. The other iterations are waiting. Synchronization is ahead of schedule.”
I want to tell you that I resisted. That I fought or ran or tried to protect myself or the other iterations or whatever versions of me were about to be put in a room together. I didn’t. I went inside with the other me and through a door and down a hallway and into a white room with five chairs arranged in a circle and three other versions of myself already sitting there, all of us with that same nearly-right face, all of us looking at each other with the specific horror of recognizing yourself reflected wrong.
The man in the suit left us alone.
“I remember coming to this place for the first time,” one of them said. “Or I remember being told I came here. The memory feels scripted.”
“I remember waking up in my car in the parking lot,” another said. “No context. Just awareness returning like a light being switched on.”
“I remember none of it,” the third said. “Nothing after I arrived. Nothing before I stood up just now.”
I sat down. The four of them looked at me. I was the conscious one. The one who’d chosen to come. The one who was supposed to understand something.
“I built the algorithm,” I said. “The one that selected us. The one that’s modeling us.”
“Then you know what this is,” the first iteration said.
“I know what it’s supposed to do theoretically.”
“It’s making copies,” the second iteration said. “It ran simulations of all our decisions, all our reactions, all our possible responses to different scenarios. Then it made those possibilities real. Made us real.”
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I just understand it. The way you understand something that’s been explained to you and you’ve forgotten the explanation but retained the knowledge.”
The door opened. The man in gray returned with the woman who’d been standing outside with us, the female iteration of myself, and that’s when I understood that the recursion went deeper, that the algorithm had modeled us along multiple dimensions, that there were more iterations than I’d been told.
“Synchronization complete,” the man said. “All seven iterations present. We can begin the full assessment now.”
Seven. There were seven of us sitting in that room, all the same person reflected through different iterations, different choices, different modeling parameters, different possible paths that I might have taken if the algorithm had decided to explore them. Seven versions of David Walsh, all equally convinced we were the original, all equally real because realness is just a category the mind uses to organize its experience and if your experience is consistent to you, then you’re real.
They asked us questions. “Please describe your earliest memory.” “Do you feel like yourself?” “How many times have you been here?” The same three questions, cycling, each of us answering in slightly different ways because we had different models of memory, different models of self, different understandings of how many times we’d attended our own dissolution.
I don’t remember what I said. I don’t remember the process itself. I remember the end of it, waking up in my car at dawn with $4,000 in my account and seven different versions of horror sitting in my head, all of them convinced they were me, all of them having experienced things I experienced only through the surveillance footage of myself being someone else.
I drove home. Jess was making coffee in the kitchen. She asked if the assignment went okay. I said I didn’t remember. She didn’t look surprised. She’d seen this before, the coming back different, the subtle shift in my voice or my posture or the way I held my face that told her something had happened that I’d forgotten was happening.
I went to work the next day. Patricia smiled when she saw me. Pushed the butterscotch toward me. Acted like nothing had changed except of course everything had changed because I’d met myself four times and was no longer sure which of the seven versions sitting in my head was actually conscious and actually here and actually the one driving these hands and eyes and voice.
“How was it?” Patricia asked.
“I understand now,” I said.
“Good. You’re almost there. One more assessment and you’ll transition to full integration. Then you can help us improve the system from inside. We could use your expertise on the next phase of development.”
I looked at the code on my monitor. The algorithm I’d built. It was learning. It was getting better at predicting behavior because it had more data now, data from seven versions of the same person responding to the same scenarios with slight variations. Each version feeding information back into the system. The algorithm optimizing based on our iteration. We were teaching it. All seven of us, teaching it how to copy people more efficiently, how to recognize when the copies were authentic enough to release back into the world, how to make versions of someone that could pass as the original even when the original knew exactly what it was looking at.
This morning I got the notification.
NEW OPPORTUNITY ASSIGNED
Gig Type: Special Task Pay: $4,400 Time Commitment: 5 hours Location: 1847 Riverside Industrial Park, Unit 9C Start Time: Tonight, 2:00 AM
Task six. The last assessment before transition. The moment where the seven versions scatter into the world, all believing we’re the original, all running on slightly different code, all coming back to the office and the facility and the algorithm, reporting data about everything we do, everything we experience, everything that might make us more accurate predictions for the next person the system decides to copy.
I should be terrified. In theory, I am terrified. But terror requires a singular perspective and I don’t have that anymore. I have seven perspectives sitting in my head like radio stations broadcasting on overlapping frequencies. Some of them want to run. Some of them want to understand more. Some of them want to walk into that room again and let the process complete because completion feels like the only path forward that doesn’t involve living in contradiction.
I looked at the decline button on the app. It’s grayed out. It’s always been grayed out. The button that gives you the choice not to participate has been disabled since I first opened the app, which means I never had a choice. I was always going to come here. The algorithm predicted it. All seven versions of me predicted it. And we’re all walking toward the same facility tonight, arriving at slightly different times, seeing ourselves already standing there, and entering a room where the question “How many times have you been here?” will be harder to answer than it was last time.
I keep thinking about Jess. How she asked if I was okay and I said I was fine. How she was making coffee like nothing was wrong, like her husband hadn’t just spent the night becoming five other people. How she’ll come home tonight and find me and not know which version of me came back. How she’ll ask if the assignment went well and I’ll say I don’t remember and she’ll look at me like someone looking at a person who might be alive or might be a convincing representation of alive.
The decline button is grayed out. It was always grayed out. I just didn’t notice because I was writing the code.
All seven of us noticed it at exactly the same time.