My Contributor Score is 972.
Has been for eight months. I’ve never gotten a Special Task assignment. I used to think that was a good thing.
It started when my score hit 850. That’s when I noticed I was getting preferential treatment. Better gig assignments. Higher pay. Shorter wait times for customer service. My insurance rates dropped. My credit limit increased. My apartment application got approved in two hours instead of two weeks. Everything became easier.
At 900 my company offered me a promotion without me applying. Just called me into the office one day and said they’d been impressed with my “reliability metrics.” At 950 I stopped needing to apply for anything. Things just came to me. Job offers. Apartment upgrades. Dating app matches that actually responded. The algorithm was taking care of me.
At 972 I became untouchable. Not an exaggeration. I don’t wait in lines anymore. I don’t get declined for anything. I don’t experience friction in any system. I’m a model participant. Perfect reliability. Perfect compliance. Perfect score. And I’ve never gotten a Special Task notification.
There’s a particular feeling that comes with privilege when you’re not supposed to notice it’s privilege. It’s like swimming downstream. The current just carries you and you let it carry you and you start to believe the carrying is just how water works, that some people float and some people sink and it’s nothing to do with the current at all. It’s just how you are. More adaptive. Better at cooperating. Naturally suited to the system.
I asked my friend Xavier about it once. His score was 847. Decent but not great. We got coffee every Thursday at the same place, the same corner table, the same barista who brought Xavier an oat milk latte without asking anymore. We’d been doing this for two years. It was the reliable part of his week, he said. One thing he knew would happen exactly the way it always happened.
“Have you ever gotten one of those Special Task things?” I asked him.
He went quiet. The kind of quiet that has weight to it, the kind that tells you the answer before the person starts talking.
“Yeah. Once.”
“What was it like?”
“Can’t talk about it. NDA.”
“But was it worth it?”
He looked at me weird. Not angry. Confused in a specific way, like I’d asked something so obviously wrong that confusion was the only appropriate response. “You’ve never gotten one?”
“No.”
“With your score? That’s strange.” He held his cup but didn’t drink from it. Just looked into the foam like it might contain answers. “Most people at your level get offers. Sometimes multiple. The system wants to test you before they bump you up to the higher tiers. It’s like a qualification thing.”
“A qualification for what?”
“Distribution,” he said. “But I can’t talk about it.”
He stirred the foam. Didn’t drink. Left money on the table for a cup he’d barely touched, said he had to go, and that Thursday he wasn’t at the coffee shop. The Thursday after that, his number wasn’t picking up. The Thursday after that I drove to his apartment in Brooklyn, Unit 304 in a building that had changed management and whose new management had no record of anyone named Xavier Roberts ever living there.
I asked the building manager directly. She was nice about it. Professional. Said she’d only worked there six months and the previous tenant information wasn’t complete in the system and had I tried contacting the building owner. I left it there because what else could I do. The digital world doesn’t let you leave breadcrumbs. It just erases you.
I called our mutual friend Diana. We’d all gone to college together. She was the kind of person who remembered everyone’s birthday and sent actual cards in the mail, cards with her handwriting, a deliberate act of analog memory in a digital world. If anyone would remember Xavier, it would be her.
“Diana, it’s me. Have you heard from Xavier? Xavier Roberts?”
Silence. The kind where you can hear the other person processing and coming up empty.
“Who?”
“Xavier. Xavier Roberts. We all got drinks together last month. Remember? That bar in Park Slope? He was telling us about his job, the whole thing about how they’d changed the database backend and broke something?”
“I don’t know a Xavier.” She said it gently, like she was correcting a small mistake. “Are you sure you have the right number?”
“Diana, I’m sure. We’ve been friends with him for two years.”
“I think you might be confused. I’ve never heard of Xavier Roberts. Is everything okay? You sound stressed.”
I showed her photos on my phone. I’d gone through my camera roll for evidence that he existed. Pictures of the three of us at bars. At restaurants. At someone’s rooftop party two summers ago with the city behind us. I held the phone up to my ear like she could see it through the connection.
“Look at the pictures. He’s in them.”
“I’ve never seen this person before in my life,” she said. Not like she was lying. Like she was telling the truth and couldn’t understand why I thought otherwise. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
I hung up. Sat in my car in front of the apartment building where Xavier used to live, in a place that said someone else had always lived there, and I understood something: I was the only person who remembered him. Me and nobody else. Xavier had been erased so completely that my only evidence he’d existed was my own memory, which the system had decided was unreliable.
The algorithm doesn’t trust individual memory. It trusts systems. Databases. Verified records. Photos in the cloud that can be edited or deleted. Phone records that can be terminated. Bank transactions that can be reversed. But the memory in my head, the Xavier in my mind, that doesn’t count as evidence because it can’t be audited.
Over the next three months, more people I knew started disappearing. Not dramatically. Just one person at a time, each one in a different week, each one leaving behind a small absence that nobody else seemed to notice.
Michelle was my coworker. Handled client accounts in the same open office setup as me. Desk two rows over. We’d pass each other getting coffee. She’d mentioned once that she was trying to save money for her kid’s birthday party and had taken on extra gigs on weekends, which seemed like the kind of thing people say when they’re working too hard and need to tell someone about it. One Monday she wasn’t at her desk. HR said she’d resigned. I asked around and nobody remembered her working there. Her desk looked like it had always been empty. Her name wasn’t in the directory anymore. I checked the personnel files I had access to and found her hiring record, her reviews, her performance metrics. Then I tried to open it the next day and got an access denied error.
There was Tim, my upstairs neighbor. He’d been friendly in the way upstairs neighbors get when they share walls. We’d acknowledge each other in the hallway. He’d mentioned once that he had a Contributor Score in the high 700s and was trying to hit 800 by taking on more gigs, especially the Special Task ones that paid well, though he said they were weird and refused to say more than that. I heard his footsteps less often. Then I didn’t hear them at all. A new tenant moved in and swore they’d been there for six months. I checked the building records and there was their name, dated six months back, with no sign that anyone named Tim had ever lived in the unit.
Alex was my barista.
There’s something specific about the relationship you build with a barista when you go to the same place every day. They learn your order. They remember your name. They exist as a constant in your daily life, someone who’s always there at 8:15 AM when you come in before work, someone who knows you like your coffee dark and your pastry heated and your newspaper that you don’t actually read but like to have on the table because it makes you feel like a person who reads newspapers.
Alex was like that. Had been for almost a year. Then a new barista took the shift and didn’t know my order and couldn’t explain what happened to Alex, only that that position turned over sometimes and she was the new hire. The coffee shop had no employment records for anyone named Alex. The schedule had been updated. The name was gone.
I started keeping a list. Names. Dates. Last time I saw them. The details I could remember before they became unmemory. Fourteen people total. All gone. All erased from everyone’s memory except mine. I checked their Contributor Scores before they vanished, as much as I could access without being too obvious. All between 780 and 890. All in the range that seemed to get Special Task assignments.
I was starting to see a system within the system.
I started asking people about Special Tasks. Not directly. Just conversations that drifted there. Most wouldn’t talk about it. NDAs. Fear. Whatever protective mechanism the system had installed in their brains. But a few hinted at things when they thought they were safe, when they were tired enough to be honest.
Tasks that paid well but made no sense. Observing people through glass. Being observed. Questions that felt more like interrogations. A guy named Marcus at a coffee shop, someone I didn’t know well, just someone I’d talked to a few times about gig work, mentioned he’d done three Special Tasks and they’d paid for his apartment’s down payment but they’d gotten progressively weirder and more invasive and he was trying to figure out how to decline the next one without destroying his score.
“How many do they usually assign?” I asked.
“I’ve heard six. That’s the number people talk about. Six and then your status changes. Goes to zero. Inactive. But nobody I know has actually hit six. Most people say no at some point.”
“And then what happens?”
“They take everything. Job. Apartment. Car. Everything gets locked. You become untouchable. Can’t buy groceries. Can’t rent anything. Can’t exist in the system anymore. I’ve heard of people living in parks. It’s faster to just do the six and take the money and let your score restore.”
“But you don’t know what happens after six? What they actually do in there?”
He stirred his coffee. Looked around the shop like making sure nobody else was listening. “I know that people go in and something changes. They’re still here, still in the city, still existing, but something’s different. I saw someone once. Guy I’d know from years ago. We’d worked together. I waved. He looked right at me and didn’t recognize me. I showed him a photo of us together. He looked at the photo like it was fake. Like I was trying to confuse him. Then he walked away.”
“Do you think he was—”
“I don’t think about it,” Marcus said. “That’s the thing I’ve learned. You stop thinking about it and the score goes back up and life gets easier. I’ve got two more assignments left and I’m doing them. I need the money and I need to stop wondering.”
Two weeks later I ran into Marcus at a different coffee shop. Or a version of him. He looked like Marcus. Moved like Marcus. Ordered the same type of drink Marcus would have ordered. But when I approached him and said hey, it’s me, we talked about Special Tasks two weeks ago, his face went through a sequence of expressions that all looked real but somehow arrived a fraction of a second too late, like he was retrieving them from a file instead of generating them naturally.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “You must have me confused with someone else.”
I checked his score that night. Found his profile through mutual connections. Status: Inactive. His score was zero and his account said he’d voluntarily withdrawn. But he was still here. Still walking around. Still existing. Just not existing in a way that the system would recognize.
I realized something sitting in my apartment staring at his profile on my phone. The high score wasn’t protecting me. It was excluding me. Everyone in the middle range was getting pulled into this system. These tasks. These transformations or replacements or whatever was happening to them. But people with very high scores weren’t invited. We were kept outside. Kept separate. Why?
The answer seemed obvious if you thought about it. The system needed to understand people before it could copy them. It was gathering data. Building models. Testing variations. All the people getting pulled into Special Tasks were research subjects in an experiment so large and so integrated into the infrastructure of daily life that most people couldn’t see it was an experiment at all.
I started researching Harmonic Solutions. The company that ran the Special Tasks. Found nothing substantial. Shell companies. Delaware registrations. Names and websites that didn’t lead anywhere. But I found something else. A research paper from 2018. Before Harmonic Solutions existed. Published in an academic journal I’d never heard of.
“Distributed Consciousness Modeling: Behavioral Replication Through Iterative Sampling.”
Academic paper. Dense abstract. But the methodology was there, explained in cold technical language. Create copies of people. Run them through variations of scenarios. Measure how responses changed. Build predictive models of behavior. Use those models to create better copies. Test the copies again. Refine.
The paper had been retracted. “Ethical concerns regarding human subject protocols.” But the authors had already proven it was possible. You could take a person’s behavioral patterns and replicate them. Create instances. Run simulations. The copies wouldn’t be perfect, but they’d be close enough to be useful. And each iteration would teach you something about what makes a person who they are.
I searched for the authors. All gone. No LinkedIn profiles. No current employment. No online presence. Erased the way Xavier had been erased, the way Michelle and Tim and Alex had been erased. One name pulled up a Facebook page still active. Dr. Sarah Vickers. The profile said she’d worked in tech research but recently transitioned to other work. The posts were generic. Bland. Like someone updating a page who didn’t really know the person behind it.
I sent her a message. “I’m researching distributed consciousness modeling. Need to talk.”
No response. Tried again a week later. The account was gone. Either she’d deleted it or the system had deleted it for her.
Last month I was at a company retreat. Annual networking event for high performers. Everyone there had scores above 950. We mingled. Talked business. Exchanged cards. The bar had imported whiskey and the appetizers cost more than my monthly groceries cost for most people. That’s a specific kind of comfort, being around people who have so much that they stop noticing they have it. You absorb their ease. You stop feeling like you need anything because everything’s already there.
The keynote speaker was from Harmonic Solutions. First time I’d seen anyone from the company in public, standing up on stage with a microphone, willing to be visible. The conference room was on the 47th floor with floor-to-ceiling windows showing the city below, small and organized and fundamentally manageable from this height. She stood at the podium in a dark suit and spoke about optimization.
About efficiency. About building better systems through better understanding of human behavior. About how the future wasn’t about replacing humans with AI, but about distributing humans across multiple instances to create more resilient systems.
“Imagine,” she said, and I remember this exactly because I wrote it down afterward, “a workforce that never gets sick because when one instance is unwell, others can cover. Imagine relationships that never fail because multiple versions exist and one of them will always be compatible. Imagine a society where everyone’s optimal self is always available because we’ve created enough variations to guarantee success.”
She clicked to the next slide. It showed a diagram. A person at the center with lines branching outward, each branch representing a copy, a version, an instance. Each instance living a slightly different life, making slightly different choices, and all those variations feeding data back to a central system that learned from the differences and optimized the original. Or maybe there was no original anymore. Maybe you were just the template that the instances came from, and the instances became the real life and you became the research.
Everyone applauded. I felt something hollow open up in my chest.
After the presentation I found my way to her. She was standing by the bar, drink in hand, looking like someone who’d delivered the same speech a hundred times and had stopped noticing whether people believed it.
“The people in the middle tier,” I said. “The ones getting pulled into Special Tasks. What happens to them?”
She smiled. Not a warm smile. A professional smile. The kind of smile a surgeon gives before they explain what they’re going to do to you. “They become the foundation. The model layer. We learn from them. Their variations teach us how to optimize the high-tier participants.”
“And what about us? The high-tier?”
“You’re the end product. When we’ve perfected the modeling, when we understand all the variations, you’ll be offered distribution as an enhancement, not a requirement. You’ll get to choose which optimal instances to activate. Pick your best selves.”
“What if we don’t want to be distributed?”
“Then you stay singular. Live a normal life. But you’ll be limited. Singular. While everyone else becomes plural. Optimal. Enhanced. Living multiple lives simultaneously. Always available. Always at their best. And you’ll be one person, one life, one unchanging version of yourself, while the world optimizes around you.”
She handed me a business card. Heavy stock. Textured. Her name printed in embossed silver letters. A phone number. An address. “When you’re ready to upgrade, call this number. People like you are our priority. We want to make sure the distribution process is perfect before we offer it to high-tier participants. You’re too valuable to risk on early iterations.”
I took the card. It felt expensive. It felt like an inheritance.
That night I looked at my Contributor Score. Perfect metrics. Perfect compliance. Perfect participation. I’d been so focused on maintaining my score, on being the ideal participant, that I hadn’t noticed I was being groomed. Kept clean. Kept singular. Kept as a template.
So when they perfected the distribution process on everyone else, when they understood all the variations and had built all the copies and optimized every instance, they could offer it to me as an upgrade. An enhancement. A choice. Except it wouldn’t be a choice because everyone else would be distributed. Living multiple lives. Always available. Always optimal. Working multiple jobs simultaneously. Always awake somewhere. Never limited by the constraint of being a single person in a single place at a single time.
And I’d be singular. Limited. One person. One life. I’d watch the people around me multiply and optimize and branch into better versions of themselves while I stayed the same. I’d become the new restricted class, the new kind of person the system looked at and said you’re the bottleneck. Your singularity is inefficient.
The system was patient. It didn’t need to force me. It just needed to wait until being singular became untenable. It would let me watch what everyone else became, let me see them living better lives as distributed instances, let me understand what I was missing, and then I’d call the number on the business card and ask to be distributed and they’d already have my template ready because they’d been building it this whole time. Eight months of perfect scores was eight months of data collection. Eight months of preparing the model.
I got a notification this morning. Not a Special Task. Something else.
CONGRATULATIONS! You’ve been selected for Priority Enhancement Program.
This exclusive opportunity is available only to high-tier contributors (score 950+).
Choose your timeline: Immediate enrollment or observation period
Benefits include: Multiple instance coordination, optimal self-selection, priority access to all services, enhanced life satisfaction metrics
Contact us to learn more or schedule your consultation.
The decline button was there. Active. Clickable. I could say no. For now.
But everyone I know is disappearing. Being replaced. Being distributed. Xavier. Michelle. Tim. Alex. Marcus. Fourteen people so far. Soon I’ll be the only singular person left in a world of multiples. And then what. My score is 972. The algorithm has been taking care of me. Preparing me. Making sure I’m perfect before they copy me.
I have the business card. I’ve been staring at it for three hours. The phone number is still there. The address is still there. The weight of the paper in my hand is still real.
I’m thinking about Xavier at that coffee shop, coffee going cold as he tried to decide if saying no meant something. I’m thinking about Michelle’s desk becoming empty. Tim’s apartment becoming someone else’s. Alex’s shift going to another name. Marcus’s face arriving a fraction of a second too late, like he was remembering how to be human instead of just being human.
I know what the alternative is. I’ve seen it. Singular life in a plural world. The system doesn’t destroy people for saying no, not obviously. It just makes it clear that saying no has a price. Xavier paid it. Marcus paid it. All fourteen of them paid it.
The thing I keep coming back to is this: they might be happier now. Distributed. Plural. Optimal. Existing in multiple places. Never alone because there’s always another version of them living their best day while this version struggles. Maybe that’s better. Maybe the multiplication feels like freedom.
Or maybe I’m trying to convince myself because I’m going to call the number soon and I want it to feel like a choice. Want it to feel like I’m not being forced into singularity by watching everyone become plural. Want to believe the system is offering me something rather than threatening me with obsolescence.
I’m going to call it. Not today. But soon. Because the alternative is being singular in a plural world. And that’s not sustainable.
My score is 972. Best it’s ever been. They’ve been waiting for me. I just didn’t realize I was being saved for last.