The radio was playing something from the nineties, a song she'd grown up with and never gotten around to caring about. Miriam had the volume low enough that dispatch chatter could bleed through her radio, which was the point. The podcast queue on her phone—basic model, the kind that barely registered on the city's attention-score network—kept sending recommendations she never opened. She'd muted the notifications three years ago. The city was loud enough without inviting more of it.
The notepad on the passenger seat had tonight's details in her handwriting: Jaylen Rivers, Meridian Tower, 40th floor. Wellness check, unresponsive male. Captain Chen's text—two lines, more than he'd ever sent—had said: go yourself, Okoye. She'd been eating dinner when it came in. She'd put the dinner in the fridge, picked up her keys.
The Meridian Tower occupied a full block near the city's center. Forty floors of glass reflecting other glass back at itself, the building lit from within so that every floor glowed with the specific blue-white of screens. A doorman stood outside the entrance in a wool coat, an actual person, which meant the residents had money enough to prefer that to automation. A few pedestrians stood on the sidewalk with phones raised, filming the emergency vehicles. The views would be decent. Not remarkable.
She badged through the service entry. The lobby's attention panel caught her at the elevator bank: her name, her badge number, and then the number the city had assigned to her existence in the attention economy. 847. The display took a moment—longer than it usually took—and produced its amber verdict: MANUAL OVERRIDE REQUIRED.
The doorman's name tag said Paul. He'd called ahead; the elevator was already held. He was professional about the number, which she appreciated. Most people weren't. They looked at 847 the way you looked at a person who showed up to a restaurant in the wrong clothes—not unkind, exactly, but noting something. She checked her watch while the override cleared. 8:17 PM. Paul made it to three seconds of eye contact before he found something to examine on the panel. She let it go. The elevator doors closed. Forty floors, the amber number behind her.
The penthouse smelled like product before she could see it clearly. Candles—branded, three-wick, never allowed to burn past the photogenic stage. Some kind of air treatment that was supposed to evoke freshness and instead evoked the idea of freshness, the marketing department's version of a clean room. Because it was a set. She understood that in the first thirty seconds, the way she understood things: through her feet and nose before her eyes caught up.
Two uniformed officers were in the entry hall with their phones out, which she noted without comment. You reached for your phone when your training didn't have a category for what you were looking at. She crossed the foyer into the main space.
The ring lights were the first thing. Two of them, professional grade, positioned on either side of a white sectional sofa with the precision of someone who'd measured the light spread multiple times. They put out the flat, even light that cameras loved—the kind that flattened shadows, erased the texture of things, made everything look produced and intentional. Under that light, everything in the penthouse looked like content. The sofa. The art on the walls, curated, color-coordinated to the sofa. The man sitting on the sofa.
Jaylen Rivers was twenty-four. He'd been twenty-four for about eight months. He looked it still: sharp features, good skin, wearing a shirt that had been gifted to him by the brand that made it in exchange for a post she could probably find if she opened any of the apps she didn't have. He was sitting upright. His eyes were open. His hands were in his lap, and his right thumb was moving.
Pull-down. Release. Pull-down. Release.
The gesture you made when you refreshed a feed. Trained so deep into the body it had become reflexive, like blinking—more reflexive than blinking, maybe, since you had to consciously choose not to blink, but you never had to choose to scroll. His thumb didn't know his feed was gone. His thumb was still working.
On the nightstand to his right, his phone buzzed. She could see the screen from where she stood: notification after notification, the numbers updating, the small icons stacking. The account kept accumulating views he could no longer process. Twelve million followers, and more arriving every minute, sending attention into a room where the person who'd built it couldn't receive a single one.
Miriam crossed the room and crouched to Jaylen's eye level. She held up one finger and moved it slowly left. His eyes tracked it from center—she counted automatically, the reflex trained in her over fifteen years of looking at people who weren't quite present—and at 0.8 seconds, maybe less, they stopped and reset. As if the signal had dropped mid-load. She was still there. He was somewhere else. Or he was nowhere in particular, suspended in a state that had no diagnostic category she could name. She stood up, turned to Rodriguez—the younger officer, the one who hadn't gotten his expression in order yet—and asked who'd found him. Behind her, the phone buzzed again.
The manager, Rodriguez said. Door unlocked at 7 PM, Jaylen on the sofa, cameras running. She left him with the sofa and started moving through the apartment.
She counted, because counting was how she saw. Three cameras: the floor-standing unit aimed at the sofa; a second mounted above the vanity station near the east window, angled to catch the light coming through the glass in the morning; the third on a counter tripod in the kitchen, aimed at the meal prep area. A teleprompter on wheels had been positioned just outside the sofa's frame, its screen still scrolling talking points for content that wasn't going to be made tonight. A green light blinked on the teleprompter. She wrote it down. Pen on paper, notepad held against her palm, the scratch of graphite the only sound in the apartment that wasn't electronic.
The kitchen was composed rather than stocked. The refrigerator held meal prep containers from a branded delivery service, stacked in columns chosen for their color and height. Fresh herbs in a jar of water on the counter, positioned for a shot that would look casual. She checked the cabinet to the left of the stove: twelve boxes of branded granola, unopened, still in the shipping sleeve. Too many for a person, not enough for a sponsorship shoot.
The bathroom had brand partnerships on the shelf above the sink. The towels were folded in a triangular configuration that read as effortless and required repetition to master. A ring light smaller than the living room units was mounted above the mirror for the morning content, positioned so your face appeared in its halo while you brushed your teeth. Behind the ring light, a medicine cabinet, slightly ajar. She opened it: prescription migraine medication, ibuprofen, and one other prescription she didn't recognize. She photographed the label. Then she looked at the mirror above the cabinet and found a smudged handprint at the lower left corner—someone had pressed their palm against it recently, an absent weight, what you did when you were tired and needed something solid. It was the only mark in the apartment that looked unintentional. She stood there a moment with it.
The bedroom was staged in a different register. A camera in the upper corner, angled for morning content. Throw pillows on the bed pushed to one side to make room for actual sleep, and on the sleeping pillow: a phone charger and a second phone, older model, screen dark. She checked: no content apps installed. Just calls and texts. The most recent message was from a contact named Mama, three weeks old. Hey baby call me when you can. She put the phone back on the pillow, wrote two phones, then no private space, and was still in the bedroom when Tanaka walked in.
The ER had called its neurological consult line, and the consult line had landed on Tanaka—the only person in the city who'd published anything useful on attention disorders in the past two years. The ER attending had been her student. She arrived forty minutes after Miriam with a small case and the expression of someone who'd trained herself to suppress what she was actually thinking until she'd verified it. Her face was doing very little at the moment.
"Okoye," Tanaka said. Not a question. "Sofa," Miriam said. Also not.
Tanaka crossed the room and crouched in front of Jaylen the same way Miriam had. The obvious approach; they'd both arrived at it independently. She produced a penlight. She checked pupils: both eyes, slow sweep, steady hand. She said "hmm" in a flat register that communicated only that she was filing something. Then she held the penlight at the left edge of Jaylen's field of vision and moved it slowly right. He tracked it—0.7 seconds, 0.8 at most—and then his gaze reset, the way a browser tab refreshed when the connection had timed out. She was there. He was—elsewhere. Looking for the feed that wasn't there. Tanaka pulled back without writing anything down. "Verbal response?" Miriam said.
Tanaka leaned forward. "Mr. Rivers. I'm Dr. Tanaka. Can you tell me your name?"
The pause extended past what was comfortable. Rodriguez, behind her, shifted his weight from foot to foot. Then Jaylen said: "I was going to—" and stopped there. His thumb resumed the pull-down gesture against his own thigh. Whatever the sentence had been, it had been complete somewhere inside him. It just hadn't made it out.
Tanaka sat back on her heels. She wasn't writing anything down, and Miriam watched that without comment. Writing things down was for when you had a category to file information in. Tanaka didn't have one yet. "Pupils normal," Tanaka said. "Vitals stable. No stroke presentation, no drug interaction that produces this pattern." She was looking at Jaylen's hands, and Miriam waited.
"It's like someone drained a battery that's still in the device," Tanaka said. She sounded less clinical now, more like someone discovering what she thought at the same moment she was saying it. "The hardware is fine. There's just no charge." She stood up slowly. "The pathways are there. They're just—" She stopped. Started again. "Empty." The phone buzzed on the nightstand. "Something took it," Tanaka said. "Whatever capacity he had for sustained attention. Something took it." Miriam wrote that down.
The medics came for Jaylen at 9:42. She checked her watch. Rodriguez helped with the gurney in the way of someone grateful for a physical task, something with clear steps. Tanaka made a phone call in the hall, voice low and rapid. The ring lights stayed on; no one had decided whose job it was to turn them off.
Miriam picked up the phone from the nightstand. Still warm. Still locked, which meant she could see the notification feed but not past it: forty-seven new comments, eleven DMs, and the follower counter, which had moved up four hundred in the time she'd been in the apartment. She opened his profile through the browser—no login required, the whole structure was built on not requiring it, the door always open, always public—and found his most recent video. She played it.
He was in this room. Same lighting, same sofa, and he was talking about something—a trip, a product, she wasn't tracking the content—and his eyes moved between the camera and the teleprompter with the practiced ease of someone who'd done it so many times it no longer looked like effort. Even on a phone screen she could see what twelve million people had responded to: he made you feel, for the four minutes of the video, that he was talking to you specifically, only you, out of the twelve million. He was performing presence so well it was almost presence. He was very good at his job.
The medics wheeled him past on the gurney. He was looking at the ceiling with the same unfixed expression he'd had on the sofa, his thumb making its small habitual motion against the rail.
She stopped the video. Set the phone face-down on the nightstand. Walked out through the living room, past the ring lights still running their flat bright light on nothing, down the service elevator, through the lobby.
The attention panel caught her on the way out. 847. MANUAL OVERRIDE REQUIRED. She kept walking.
Outside, the night was doing what it did: sodium-orange from the streetlights pushing against the screen-blue from windows above, from the phones people held half-raised as they walked, from the bus stop ads cycling through offers she'd never be targeted for. She stood on the sidewalk and looked at the notepad, three pages of her handwriting, and then she wrote one more line.
Took what?
She capped the pen. She went to find out.