I’ve been keeping a notebook.
Not on my phone, not on my laptop, not anywhere the algorithm can reach it. A physical notebook with a pen, the kind you buy at a drugstore for three dollars, spiral-bound, college-ruled, with a picture of a mountain on the front that’s supposed to be inspirational but mostly just looks like a stock photo someone paid twelve cents for. I keep it in the garage, inside a box of Christmas decorations my wife hasn’t touched since we moved in, sandwiched between a tangle of lights and a ceramic snowman my son made in second grade.
The notebook has sixty-seven names in it.
Every one of them did six Special Tasks. Every one of them went Inactive. Every one of them, as far as I can tell, stopped existing as the person they were and became something else, something that still walks around and orders coffee and posts on social media but isn’t connected to itself anymore in the way that a person should be connected to themselves.
I started tracking after my second task. Not because I’m smart. Because I’m scared, and scared people do obsessive things with information the same way some people bite their nails or check the stove three times before leaving the house. I needed to feel like I understood something. Anything. Even if the understanding was just a list of names in a notebook hidden in a box of Christmas decorations like a grown man playing spy.
My dentist was the thing that broke me open.
Second task. Same setup as the first. Four of us in folding chairs, watching someone through a mirror that wasn’t a mirror. The person on the other side was sitting under lights so bright they turned the room into something that looked like a photograph of a room rather than the room itself. And when that person looked up, I recognized him immediately, because I’d been staring at his face from three feet away twice a year for the last decade while he asked me about flossing.
Dr. Morrison. My dentist. The guy who told me I was grinding my teeth in my sleep and fitted me for a night guard that I wore for two weeks and then lost behind the nightstand. The guy who had a framed photo of his kids on the counter next to the sterilization tray and who hummed show tunes while he worked and who once spent ten minutes telling me about a camping trip to Yosemite while his hands were inside my mouth, which is a level of conversational ambition I genuinely admire.
He was sitting in a chair in a concrete room at 2 AM answering questions from someone I couldn’t see, and his face had the particular expression of a person who is trying very hard to figure out whether what’s happening to them is a test or a punishment or something else entirely that doesn’t have a word yet.
I went home. Didn’t sleep. The next morning my phone rang and it was Dr. Morrison’s office confirming my six-month cleaning, and the receptionist sounded exactly the way she always sounds, bored but competent, and I wanted to scream into the phone, “Was he there? Was he at the office today? Is he the same one?” But I just confirmed the appointment and hung up and sat at the kitchen table staring at the wall until my wife asked if I wanted eggs.
That was four months ago.
I’ve done four tasks since then. Maybe more. That’s the part that keeps me awake at 3 AM, the “maybe more,” because there are gaps in my memory now that I can’t account for and can’t explain and can’t even identify with certainty. You know how sometimes you walk into a room and forget why you’re there? It’s like that, except the room is a Tuesday and the forgetting lasts for hours and when you come back to yourself you’re sitting in your car in a parking lot across town with no memory of driving there and your phone says you’ve been stationary for four hours.
Four hours. Gone. Not fuzzy, not fragmented, not the way dreams dissolve when you try to hold them. Gone the way a file is gone when you empty the trash. The space where the memory should be doesn’t even feel empty. It feels smooth. It feels like nothing was ever there, like your brain has plastered over the hole so neatly that you’d never know it existed unless you were specifically looking for it, and even then you’d second-guess yourself because the plaster job is that good.
My wife thinks I’m having a breakdown.
She might be right. I’ve lost weight. I check the locks three times before bed. I drive past the industrial park at least twice a week just to see if the lights are on, which they sometimes are and sometimes aren’t, and neither answer makes me feel better. I’ve started writing down everything I do during the day in a second notebook, a log of my movements and meals and conversations, so that if a gap appears I can identify exactly where it was, what got cut, what the algorithm decided I didn’t need to remember.
I showed her the tracking notebook. Sat her down at the kitchen table after our son went to bed, spread it open to the first page, and tried to explain what I’d been doing for four months. The names. The patterns. The way everyone who hits six tasks just vanishes from the system, not gradually, not with warning, but like a switch being flipped.
She looked at the pages. Looked at me. Her face did that thing where it cycles through several emotions in sequence without settling on any of them, which is a face I’ve come to recognize as the face of someone who loves you and is terrified for you and isn’t sure those two things are leading to the same conclusion.
“Honey, people move. People change jobs. Just because you haven’t seen them doesn’t mean they disappeared.”
“I’ve called them. Their numbers are disconnected. All of them.”
“So they got new numbers.”
“All sixty-seven people all got new numbers within weeks of their sixth task. And they all stopped posting online. And they all stopped using the gig app. And nobody at their jobs knows where they went. And their apartments have new tenants who swear they’ve been there for months.”
She sat with that for a while. I watched her try to build an explanation that covered all the data points, the way a reasonable person does when confronted with something unreasonable. She wanted to find the version where I was wrong. Not because she didn’t believe me but because the version where I was right meant something was happening to me that she couldn’t protect me from, and she’s the kind of person who needs to be able to protect the people she loves. It’s her operating system. It’s why she married a guy who does gig work and worries too much and hides notebooks in boxes of Christmas decorations.
“I think you should talk to someone,” she said finally. “A therapist. A doctor. Someone who can help you sort through this.”
“I can’t. A therapist would flag it. Concerning behavioral patterns. My score would drop. And if my score drops, they’ll come for me faster.”
“Come for you? Listen to yourself.”
“I know how it sounds.”
“Do you? Because it sounds like you haven’t slept in a month and you’re seeing patterns in random noise and you’re scared of a number on a phone.”
I wanted to be angry at her. I wanted to shake the notebook and point at the names and say, These are people. These are real people who had jobs and families and dentist appointments and they’re gone now. But I couldn’t be angry because she was doing what any rational person would do when presented with a conspiracy that sounds like a conspiracy, which is to assume the person presenting it has lost their grip on something important.
“I’m not crazy,” I said.
“I didn’t say you were crazy. I said I’m worried about you.”
Those aren’t the same thing. But they’re close enough that the difference doesn’t provide much comfort at 1 AM when you’re lying in bed trying to figure out if the day you just lived through is complete or if there are pieces missing that you’ll never get back.
My score is 896. Best it’s ever been.
Every task pushes it higher, like a reward for compliance, like a treat you give a dog after it performs a trick it didn’t want to perform. Better insurance. Better credit. My son got accepted to the magnet school, the one with the STEM program and the robotics lab and the teachers who actually seem to give a damn, the one we couldn’t have qualified for six months ago when my score was hovering in the low 700s and the algorithm had classified our family as “adequate but not priority.”
He came home with the acceptance letter and his whole face was doing that thing kids’ faces do when something good happens and they’re young enough to believe good things happen because the world is fair. Jumping around the living room. Already talking about which elective he’d pick. Already planning.
And I sat on the couch watching him celebrate and thinking about what it had cost. Four tasks. Maybe more. Rooms with mirrors that turn into windows. Hours I can’t remember. A dentist under bright lights at 2 AM. Whatever is being done to me in the gaps, the smooth plaster-covered holes in my timeline where something happened that the system has decided I’m better off not knowing about.
That’s the trade. That’s always been the trade. Your kid gets into the good school and all you have to do is sit in rooms and watch things that make you question whether reality is a fixed property of the universe or a setting that someone else controls.
Task three was the one that almost broke me.
They put me in the chair. Four people watching from the other side of the glass, silhouettes arranged in a row like an audience I hadn’t auditioned for. The lights were so bright that the room lost its edges, walls and ceiling and floor all blurring into a single undifferentiated white that felt less like a color and more like an absence, like someone had removed the texture from the world and left only brightness.
The suited man asked me questions for two hours. Not the suited man from the first task, or maybe the same one, I honestly can’t tell them apart anymore because they all have the same face in the way that hotel concierges all have the same face, pleasant and professional and designed to be immediately forgettable.
“Describe your earliest memory.”
“Do you believe you’re the same person you were ten years ago?”
“If you could be replaced by someone identical in every way, would your wife notice?”
“Would you?”
I answered honestly because lying seemed worse. Because in that room, under those lights, with cameras in every corner and people watching through glass and the weight of four previous tasks pressing down on my ability to perform normalcy, honesty was the only thing I had left that felt like it belonged to me. Everything else had been given or assigned or generated by an algorithm. The honesty was mine.
Then he asked me how many times I’d been in this room.
“Once. This is my first time in the chair.”
He showed me his tablet. A video. Me, in this chair, in this room, answering the same questions with the same confused expression and the same specific phrasing about my earliest memory and the same way of looking at the camera when I’m trying to decide whether to tell the truth or something easier. Word for word. Gesture for gesture. The video was dated three weeks earlier.
I don’t remember it. Not a fragment. Not a feeling. Not even the vague sense that something happened on that date, the way you sometimes feel a day was significant without knowing why. Nothing. The day the video was recorded is, in my memory, a perfectly ordinary Tuesday that I spent at work and came home and helped my son with a social studies project about the Industrial Revolution, which is either what actually happened or what my brain constructed to fill the space where the task used to be.
I checked my bank account when I got home. There it was. A deposit from three weeks earlier. $3,600. I’d noticed it at the time and assumed it was a payroll correction or a retroactive bonus from my regular job, the kind of unexpected money that shows up in your account and you don’t question because questioning money when you need money feels ungrateful.
It wasn’t a bonus. It was payment for a day I can’t remember living.
I went through my calendar. My email. My text messages. Tried to reconstruct that Tuesday hour by hour. Found nothing unusual. No unexplained absences. No cancelled meetings. No texts saying “running late” or “can’t make it.” The day looked complete from the outside, a full timeline with no visible gaps, like a sentence that makes grammatical sense even though a word has been removed and the remaining words have shifted to close the space.
But the video existed. And the deposit existed. And somewhere in the smooth, seamless record of that Tuesday was a hole where I’d driven to an industrial park and sat in a chair and answered questions about my earliest memory and whether my wife would notice if I was replaced.
Last Thursday I lost four hours.
I was eating breakfast. Cereal. The same cereal my son eats because we buy one box for the household and I’ve stopped caring whether I’m eating a child’s cereal or an adult’s cereal because the distinction seems trivial compared to the other distinctions I’m failing to make these days. I remember pouring the milk. I remember my wife saying something about a parent-teacher conference.
Then I was in my car. In a parking lot. The clock on the dashboard said 2:47 PM. My phone showed I’d been there for four hours. No notifications. No task assignment. No deposit. Just four hours of nothing, a blank space in the middle of a Thursday afternoon that my brain was already trying to smooth over, already reaching for the plaster.
I sat in that parking lot for twenty minutes trying to force the memory back. Closing my eyes. Breathing. Trying to reach into the gap the way you reach into a dark closet feeling for a light switch. Nothing. The gap wasn’t dark. It wasn’t anything. It was the absence of anything, and you can’t reach into an absence because there’s nowhere for your hand to go.
I drove home. My wife asked how my day was. I said fine. She looked at me the way she’s been looking at me for weeks, with that careful attention that means she’s cataloguing changes, tracking the distance between who I was six months ago and who I am now, measuring the gap with a precision that would be impressive if it weren’t so heartbreaking.
The notebook has sixty-seven names now. I’ve been adding people who didn’t disappear but who I know have done multiple tasks, people I’ve seen at the facilities, people I’ve sat beside in folding chairs at 2 AM watching things through glass that neither of us could explain and were contractually forbidden from discussing. Some of them are still around. Still posting on social media. Still showing up to work and ordering coffee and performing their lives with convincing fidelity.
But something’s off about them.
I ran into a guy named Marcus at the grocery store last week. We’d sat next to each other during my second task, the one with Dr. Morrison. Three hours in folding chairs watching my dentist answer questions about his childhood while strangers evaluated his honesty through one-way glass. Marcus had leaned over at one point and whispered, “Do you understand what we’re watching?” and I’d whispered back “No” and we’d sat there in our shared incomprehension like two people at a movie in a language neither of them speaks.
I said hi to him at the grocery store. Friendly. Like we had history, which we did, the kind of history that gets forged in three hours of shared trauma at 2 AM in a concrete building.
He looked at me like I was a stranger.
“Do I know you?”
“We met at a Special Task. A few months ago. You were sitting next to me.”
“I don’t think so, man. Sorry.”
He walked away with his cart and his groceries and his complete absence of recognition, and I stood in the produce section next to a display of oranges trying to decide if he was lying or genuinely didn’t remember or if the Marcus standing in front of me wasn’t the Marcus I’d sat beside, if somewhere between that night and this grocery store he’d been replaced by a version that had all his mannerisms and none of his connections to the specific moments that made him a person I could recognize.
I checked his social media that night. He’d posted about doing a Special Task, vague stuff, nothing specific because of the NDAs. But he remembered doing it. He just didn’t remember me. The task was in his memory but I wasn’t, as if the system had edited the recording and removed one character while leaving the rest of the scene intact.
I drove to Portland.
One of the names on my list, a woman named Catherine Park, had supposedly moved there after going Inactive. Her mother told me she’d gotten a new job and was doing great. Sent me a Facebook link as proof. The profile was active. Posts every few days. Photos of coffee shops with exposed brick and bridges over gray water and the kind of Portland street scene that looks like it was photographed specifically to communicate that someone is living their best Pacific Northwest life.
I checked the metadata on the photos. I don’t know much about digital forensics but I know enough to right-click and look at file properties, and what the properties told me was that every single photo had been uploaded from the same IP address, posted at exactly 3 PM on the days they were supposed to happen, and geotagged to locations within a two-block radius of downtown Portland.
I looked up the IP address. Registered to a data center in Wilmington, Delaware. Same state where all the shell companies that own the industrial park properties are incorporated. Same state where every thread of this thing eventually leads before it disappears into a wall of corporate registrations and registered agents and the specific kind of legal opacity that exists because someone paid a lot of money for it to exist.
So I drove to Portland. Five hours. Checked into a motel that smelled like carpet cleaner and regret. Found the coffee shop from Catherine’s most recent photo. Walked in. Showed the barista her picture on my phone.
“Have you ever seen this woman?”
He looked at the photo. Looked at me. “Nah. Don’t think so.”
“She posts from here. Multiple times. Pictures of this exact counter.”
“A lot of people take photos in here, man. We’ve got good light.” He gestured at the windows, which did have good light, the kind of light that makes everything look like it belongs in a magazine, which is probably why the algorithm chose this location for the photos it was generating to prove that Catherine Park was alive and thriving in Portland.
I checked three more locations from her feed. A bookstore. A bridge. A park bench with a specific view of the river. Nobody at any of them had ever seen her. The places were real. The life she was supposedly living in them was not. Someone, or something, was constructing a digital existence for a woman who had stopped being a singular person six months ago, generating just enough content to keep her mother from asking questions, just enough proof of life to make the absence look like a choice.
I drove back home in the dark, five hours of highway and silence and the particular loneliness of knowing something that nobody else believes and that you can’t prove in any way that would survive contact with a person who hasn’t seen what you’ve seen in those rooms.
The notification came through twenty minutes ago.
NEW OPPORTUNITY ASSIGNED
Gig Type: Special Task Pay: $4,200 Time Commitment: 5 hours Location: 1847 Riverside Industrial Park, Unit 17F Start Time: Tomorrow, 2:00 AM
Task five. One more after this and I’m done. Not done like finished. Done like Catherine Park. Done like all sixty-seven names in my notebook. Done like whatever happens when the switch gets flipped and the person you were becomes the template for something the system needs you to become.
Five hours this time. Longer than any previous task. The duration keeps increasing like the pay keeps increasing, each one demanding more of your time the way each one demands more of your identity, taking bigger bites, consuming larger portions of whatever it is that makes you specifically you instead of generically a person.
Unit 17F. I haven’t been to that one. The industrial park has at least seventeen units that I know of, probably more, a whole campus of concrete buildings where people sit in chairs and answer questions and watch copies of themselves through glass and leave pieces of who they were behind like shed skin. I’ve mapped the ones I know. Driven past them. Memorized the unit numbers the way a prisoner memorizes the layout of the building he’s trapped in, not because the knowledge will help him escape but because knowing the shape of the cage provides a kind of comfort that nothing else can.
$4,200. The money keeps going up. That’s how you know you’re getting deeper. The first task was $2,400 and I thought that was a lot. Now $4,200 feels like the appropriate rate, which is terrifying because it means my sense of what’s normal has been recalibrated by repetition, the way anything becomes normal if it happens enough times. The first time you sit in a room watching someone through glass, it’s horror. The fourth time, it’s Tuesday.
I could decline. Watch my score collapse. Lose the house, the insurance, the school placement. Become Ramon Torres, or whoever’s walking around using his name now. See how far they’re willing to push before I break. Except I already know how far they’re willing to push because I have sixty-seven examples and the answer is always the same: further than you can survive.
Or I can go. Do whatever they tell me to do. Take the money. Come home. Help my son with his homework. Wait for task six knowing exactly what’s coming because I’ve spent four months tracking what happens to everyone else who gets there.
The decline button is grayed out. It’s always grayed out for task five, like they’ve stopped pretending, like whatever theater of choice they maintained for the first four tasks has been retired because the relationship has progressed past the point where either party benefits from the illusion.
I googled Harmonic Solutions again tonight. Still nothing. Shell companies and Delaware addresses and dead ends, the same brick wall I’ve been running into for months, the same deliberate absence of information that tells you more about a company than any amount of information could. I searched for “Riverside Industrial Park task six” and got seventeen results. Forum posts. Reddit threads. All deleted within hours of being posted, the content scraped away so cleanly that even the cached versions were gone, as if the system had automated the process of erasing anyone who got close enough to describe it.
But I found one cached page. Weeks old. A forum I’d never heard of. Someone asking if anyone had survived task six, just a desperate post typed into the void by a person who needed to believe there was an after.
One response before the thread got nuked.
“My brother did seven. Eight. Nine. He’s still doing them. But he’s not my brother anymore. He looks the same. Talks the same. But something’s wrong. His eyes are wrong. Like he’s looking at you from very far away.”
That post has been living in my head for weeks. I think about it every time I look in the mirror. Every time I check my own eyes for the distance the poster described, the look of someone who’s present in body but observing from somewhere else, somewhere further back, somewhere the original person used to stand before the system moved them.
What if six isn’t the end. What if six is just the point where you stop being one person and start being something the system can run in parallel, the way you run software on multiple servers. What if the people I’ve been tracking aren’t gone but distributed, spread across instances that each carry a fraction of the original, none of them enough to constitute a whole person but all of them together adding up to something the system finds more useful than a single human being with a single life and a single set of memories.
My wife is asleep upstairs. I can hear her breathing through the floor, the rhythm of it so familiar it’s become the baseline against which I measure every other sound, the default frequency of safety. My son is asleep in his room with the door cracked the way he likes it, the hallway light spilling a thin wedge of yellow across his floor so he can see his way to the bathroom if he wakes up. His acceptance letter from the magnet school is pinned to the corkboard above his desk. I saw it today when I checked on him before bed.
They don’t know I’m down here at 1 AM writing in a notebook about people who don’t exist anymore. They don’t know that in twenty-five hours I’m going to drive to an industrial park and walk into a building and sit in a room and let the system do whatever it does for five hours that I may or may not remember. They don’t know that after one more task, the person who comes home might not be the person who left.
Or maybe he will be. Maybe I’ll come back and everything will be fine and the notebook will start looking like what my wife thinks it is, which is the product of a man who needs sleep and therapy and perspective. Maybe task six will be like all the others, a few hours of strangeness followed by money in the account and a score bump and the slow, comfortable return to normal life.
But sixty-seven people say otherwise. Sixty-seven names in a spiral-bound notebook with a mountain on the cover, each one a person who hit six and crossed a threshold that I’ve been tracking for four months and still can’t describe in language that would convince anyone who hasn’t been in those rooms.
I’m closing the notebook now. Putting it back in the box with the Christmas lights and the ceramic snowman. Going upstairs to bed. Tomorrow I’ll go to work. I’ll have dinner with my family. I’ll help my son with his homework and listen to my wife talk about her day and I’ll try to be present, really present, in the way that people who aren’t worried about being replaced try to be present, which is to say effortlessly, naturally, without the self-conscious attention of someone memorizing the details of their own life in case they need to prove later that they were there.
Tomorrow night I’ll drive to Unit 17F. I’ll do task five. And then I’ll come home and wait.
I’ve started recording videos. On a thumb drive hidden in the garage behind the water heater. Just me sitting in front of my phone’s camera, talking. Saying my name. My wife’s name. My son’s name. Our address. The name of his school. The cereal we eat. The sound my wife makes when she laughs at something that actually surprises her, which is different from her polite laugh and her tired laugh and the laugh she does when I’m trying to be funny and she’s letting me think I’ve succeeded.
I describe everything. Every detail I can think of that makes our life ours and not anyone else’s. Because if task six does what I think it does, if the version of me that walks out isn’t the version that walked in, I want there to be a record. Evidence. A man on a thumb drive saying these are the things that matter to me, these are the people I love, this is who I was before the system decided I could be more useful as something else.
Probably nobody will ever watch them. Probably the thumb drive will sit behind the water heater until we move or the house gets sold or my wife finds it years from now and wonders why her husband recorded himself talking about cereal and laughing and saying her name over and over like a prayer he was afraid of forgetting.
But just in case. Just in case the person who comes home from task six needs to remember what it felt like to be singular. To be one person in one place at one time, worried about one family, eating one bowl of cereal, living one life that belonged entirely to him.
My score is 896. In twenty-five hours it’ll probably be higher.
I just hope I’m still around to see it.