Edward Thon didn’t like it when people called him Eddie. He didn’t like it when overlay settings obscured the real weather from him, even if it was gloomy. He didn’t like ceviche or really any seafood, but only ever said ceviche because he worried saying he didn’t like seafood was a signal of his self-perceived low-class upbringing. He didn’t like it when other men stared too long at his girlfriend, Luna. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust her: it’s that he didn’t trust them. And he didn’t trust himself to reach whatever distant destination she must have projected onto him when she first started dating him, because why else would she be with someone like him?

What he did like was steak tartare, the feeling of sand between his cuticles and nails the day after visiting the beach, money, and winning. OK, fair, who doesn’t like money, or winning for that matter, right? For Ed, money mattered insofar as it was the only reliable metric he’d found to calculate his overall winning-ness, and he liked winning in the kind of way where his family wouldn’t suggest board game nights when he was home for the holidays.

The one thing he hated more than maybe anything else is selling his time for money. Sure, for most people, even Luna, this was a weirdly esoteric way to describe having a job. For someone else, working a job might seem like an easy way to fulfill one’s competitiveness and desire to win. For Ed, though, labor was losing, and a day job was tying yourself to an anchor, sailing out into the middle of an ocean, and throwing yourself overboard.

Which is why, while Ed was walking Luna home one night after a long date, cruising through the city streets with the kind of weightless effervescence that came so naturally to him when they were together, he wasn’t fully present. She was telling him a story he’d heard before, about her childhood on a ranch just outside the city, and the time her brother dared her to jump from the roof into the bed of a truck lined with hay, and how she did it before her brother could tell her he was joking and she snapped a leg, and he didn’t care that he’d heard it before, he enjoyed it more knowing the ending was coming. That wasn’t why he was distracted. She was carrying three long metal sticks that were programmed to bloom into flowers in her overlays that he’d bought a special add-on for so they’d bloom into the panting, smiling faces of her yorkies. He was happy, he even let the overlays replace the gray, February sky, with a bright, crystalline moon and it didn’t matter because when Luna looked up he could see its reflection in her eyes, like the world’s most glorious beachball and he was so happy he wished he could fully inhabit the moment, but he couldn’t. He was busy searching for a way into the better life he was certain Luna had bet on him for. For him, this meant he was always, ambiently, searching for alpha.

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Just because he hated having a job doesn’t mean he didn’t have one. He did. He maintained municipal request systems with the help of a coding agent. His real passion, his escape plan, was retail stock trading. He’d have loved to call himself a day trader, but, well, he sold his time for a living, so he couldn’t. Instead, he traded at night using a retail account that his father had given him for his eighteenth birthday with $650 in it. Alpha was what his online trader friends called having an edge on the market that no one else had.

The walk from the bar they’d been at to Luna’s apartment was long. While they walked, Ed scanned the horizon for threats. Not because he knew what he’d do if one came, but because he got the sense that’s how a man should move through the world when he was with someone he loved. He didn’t find any threats. What he did notice was a parking lot outside a small warehouse that was usually empty, suddenly packed full of whirring drones and delivery bots, all this made more curious by the late-night hour. At the next intersection, he noted the cross street, Deva and Market, and had his overlays save that info, along with about 500 snapshot memories he wanted archived from the evening with Luna while he was at it.

After he dropped her off and walked home, he looked up the intersection to find out what company was based there. Delivery movement in the (relative) dead of night is alpha, and Ed loved alpha. Alpha meant money, and money meant winning.

He’d gotten his account up to $1,200 in the five years since his 18th birthday, which wasn’t bad, but hardly the “quit your job and move to Dubai” kind of wealth he craved. One of his online buddies, who recently hit it huge on some biotech play Ed didn’t really understand, liked to call Ed 2L² (or: too little, too late), because he had a penchant for getting in just after a balloon, and having a comically small bankroll-to-aspiration ratio.

That night, while the world was sleeping, Ed found the name of the company that owned the warehouse and opened up his retail account. SuryaFlow Logistics was a small, pseudo-national shipping and logistics company based in Mayaport. He’d need more research to bet on what they were shipping, but the level of activity on a weeknight, like he’d seen, and no news reports he could find on the company in the last two months meant something big was coming for them. He messaged FredoubleD, “found a logistics catalyst last night, brother. Could get a gap up at open.” He went, for his taste, all in, and bought up a little more than $900 of shares in SRFL at $23.40 a share.

He told Fred about the trade, and Fred shot back a quick message.

“Don’t just do commons, bro. Grab a cheap weekly call, pussy. Shares don’t do anything. A weekly will print.”

Ed also didn’t like being called cowardly. He bought two weekly call options that would expire in a week and fell asleep with a smile on his face, dreaming of touching down in Aruba, Luna’s arm wrapped around his waist like a bus seat belt, sunscreen already sweating off his forehead.

Two hours after the open, the stock was at an all-time high. Not like, life-changing, IPO of a pre-revenue asteroid mining company that actually breaks ground nine months later high, but high. High enough that on his lunch break, he’d netted $67, most of it from his two call options.

“That’s where the volume is at bb,” FredoubleD messaged him when he posted his profit.

Ed bought Luna a celestial overlay add-on that carved her name and face onto the moon for 24 hours – at least as she saw it. One day, he’d be rich enough to position orbital satellites in a constellation. He’d tell her to turn the overlays off and watch as she saw her name spelled out across the sky.

$67 felt small, pathetic even, the longer he thought about it.

Luna met him outside his office, a crescent moon smile waiting for him – cheek kisses and thank-yous aplenty – but he couldn’t help but feel like there was something behind her eyes that signaled hesitation, maybe even disgust.

He knew he only had a few months left before the gravity of some other, more successful man stole her from his orbit, but tonight he’d focus on her, and worry about his next play when he got home.

Ed didn’t like clubs. He loved dancing. He loved the lasers and strobe lights bouncing off Luna’s sweaty face pressed close to his. He loved music. But he didn’t like clubs. They were filled with better men than him: taller, more handsome, richer men who stared like turkey vultures at him and Luna as if their relationship was a limping coyote seconds from collapse. His defenses had to be up. But Luna loved dancing, too. She loved rum and cokes, and he loved her.

They danced at a club on Market Street where Luna had worked as a bartender years before. It felt emptier than normal. There were almost no men, for one. Still, people were dancing. Ed noticed a lot of them wearing the same kind of virtual clothes, a firework overlay that projected exploding waves of neon, jaguar, and mandalas. They cost $250, and he wished he could buy one for Luna.

The whole time they danced, Ed’s mind was on the quiet periphery of the dance floor. A man, clearly high on something, kept bumping into people and apologizing too profusely. On the floor, the club seemed as lively as ever, but the tables, booths, and lounges that lined the club were half-filled or completely empty. It hadn’t been this slow a month ago, and that had been a Wednesday. It was a Friday night. It didn’t make sense.

Even outside, the street lined with clubs, dance halls, and bars was quiet. This was systemic, not specific.

Ed smelled alpha.

The rest of the evening blurred, half-paid attention to, while Ed thought of ways to bet on his insight.

He stayed up all night researching what might be behind the dip he noticed, and, strictly speaking, no one was talking about it. Hospitality and nightlife adjacent indexes were trading high, there were no signs of consumer spending decreases, but Ed knew what he saw. He found some statistics that showed men spend, on average, 75% more on drinking out and clubbing than women. This is when things really felt like they were taking off for Ed. The logic seemed solid. If men spent more money clubbing, their absence signaled a decrease in discretionary spending, evidentially appearing in nightlife before other market indicators.

Fred walked him through the simplest way to make money on this hunch, and by the market open he’d spent more than two-thirds of his account on put options, mostly on one big nightlife conglomerate that owned half the clubs in the city, and a couple local spirit companies for good measure. They were all three-week options, and the way Fred explained it, if the stock price dipped below a certain threshold, he could sell his put options – the right to sell a stock at a certain price even after it has dipped – and make a bundle when someone else buys the option from him to hedge their own losses or to bet on a deeper fall. He picked ones with a three-week expiration – Fred did warn him if the price didn’t fall by then, it wasn’t like owning a stock, he’d be left with literally nothing, but it was worth it. What good was $1,700 anyway?

The next two weeks, Ed barely existed. He did nothing of substance except eat, shit, occasionally message Luna, and check his ticker. Luna was on a work-intensive, something about refining mytho-poesis in advertising protocols – which, as best Ed could tell, meant mainlining psychedelics with her coworkers for two weeks under the auspices of creativity. He hated when she was gone like this. The anxiety of being away from her, worried that she’d leave him for Brad or her boss Charlie, mixed with his constant ticker checking created a thick miasma that clung to him.

The prices stayed stable, unmoving, defiant, even. Hell, the alcohol companies he’d bet against actually went up. Luna was due back in two days when the hospitality stock started dropping. A couple of headlines mentioned some behavioral adjustment after effects, but the specifics didn’t matter much to Ed. By the time she was back, the hospitality stock had dropped 15%. He finished the day with his account at $2,500 and a genuine tear in his eye.

Even before telling Luna, he posted the trades on Fred’s forum. The series of fire emoji reactions and “feed us alpha, Edaddy” comments filled him with a pride he wasn’t used to carrying. It felt clumsy, awkward, but he’d learn.

He treated Luna to the best dinner he’d ever eaten when she got back from her trip – cloudy foams programmed to trigger overlay visuals with each flavor, a synthetic dining experience that made Luna shed a tear. The meal was ruined a bit by a waiter who, to Ed’s mind, was flirting ruthlessly with Luna the entire meal, smiling at her, making her chuckle at a pun over the chuck roast. He’d never be as handsome as men like him. He had to be better in other ways. Eventually, the restaurant replaced their waiter with a service bot instead, and he wondered if some floor manager had read the jealousy on his face and course corrected. He still left a tip.

He spent the rest of the evening trawling for his next move. Luna kept asking if he was OK, his eyes trained on the horizon, darting to every storefront and parking lot, looking relentlessly for alpha. Most of the successful retail traders he knew were obsessive researchers, downloading thousands of quarterly reports, market trends, LLM summaries fed to bespoke AI models that spat out suggested plays fed back to an antagonistic LLM for feedback. None of this was available to Ed, and he’d never felt smart enough to pull anything useful from the tools he did have access to. His differentiator sat in meatspace, the messy real world.

In this, his habit of scanning for threats with Luna became a kind of observational practice. Every day she was less his girlfriend and more his training ground, though he’d never have described it that way. The subject of his attention shifted from physical risk to economic indicators, and the obsessive watching was intoxicating, already practiced, and the city was filled with things to notice.

By the end of the month, he’d quadrupled his trading account. A short on athleisure after noticing all his neighborhood gyms empty paid big – reportedly due to a supply chain issue, not Ed’s consumer demand decrease, but who cared, he was right in the only way that mattered. A play on a small robotics firm he’d invested in doubled in value when the company’s CEO appeared on stage with a prominent politician expected to win the next election by a landslide. Ed had invested because their downtown office had grown super busy – windows filled with robotic movements that Ed interpreted as an internal roll-out of a new, as of yet unannounced line. All these wins compounded, and each bet’s returns grew as his investing pool did.

Hundreds of retail traders now shadowed his moves, which he shared online. Someone had made a bot that just copied him exactly and had made almost as much money as Ed did, even with the latency. He had followers invested in his alpha. His account was up to nearly $70,000 by the end of the year. He’d taken Luna to every club, restaurant, and garden she’d ever wanted to visit. Yet she felt distant from him. Distracted sometimes, worried at others. He sensed her slipping in some vital but indescribable way from him. Men seemed hungrier, and she seemed more receptive to their appetites. When a man held the door for her and tried to close it on him, she laughed. She said she was laughing at the man, when Ed looked hurt, but when they kissed each other good night, there was a tight-lippedness to her that kept Ed up all night.

His eyes were dry from being open too long, staring at his ceiling in the darkness when an email ping came through. His overlays notified him that someone with a hedge fund’s domain asked if he’d be interested in coming in and talking. He sat up eagerly and read on.

Abernath was a VP of analysis at MayaForce, the city’s premier hedge fund. Ed didn’t post that he’d accepted the meeting publicly, but in private he messaged Fred.

“They’re either going to make you an offer or an example,” he warned.

“How do I know which one?”

“That’s the tricky part: you won’t.”

The day of, Ed thought about cancelling. He wouldn’t even have to formally cancel, just stay inside, but a custom overlay message from Luna came blaring through his overlays in a wave of sepia. Goosebumps began at his feet and crawled up his body while swirling patterns of lights cascaded down his field of vision. A soft harp plucked a gentle lullaby, and 15 seconds later, when his senses returned to him, a small message appeared reading: “Ed, this is what being with you feels like. Good luck!”

Steeled, he left. For her, he thought, at each street corner that promised him a frictionless life if he just turned back. Until he was at the foot of the tallest skyscraper in Center City.

A massive honeycombed central elevator inside moved people like old pneumatic mail throughout the building, and soon Ed was nestled inside one, being deposited in the office of Abernath.

In place of a sartorial, tastefully grey-haired middle-aged man he’d expected, Abernath looked younger than Ed. He had a checker-pattern undercut, tremendous round glasses that took up the majority of his face, and an oil-stained teal shirt that he wasn’t bothering to have the overlays cover up. He cleared a half-eaten grilled salmon salad from his desk as Ed entered and gestured at the leather chair across from him at the table.

“Sit,” he said, still masticating as he talked.

Ed obliged. Despite the disaffected and slightly slovenly affect, Abernath was everything Ed wanted to be: handsome, rich, unbothered. In the lack of aesthetic curation, there was a confidence that Ed wouldn’t know what to do with if he ever had it.

“Nice trades,” Abernath said.

“Thanks. How’d you, uh, like, find me?”

“Right! Because, I mean a retail trader turning 2K into 70, is – I mean look, it’s personally impressive, but nothing earth-shattering right? Until you smell eight-figures, we usually just can’t be bothered.”

The room got smaller, or Ed did. The modicum of confidence he’d entered with suddenly flat as a day-old soda.

“But, there’s more to it than that, eh?” Abernath finished. He stared at Ed, waiting for an answer.

Ed cleared his throat a few times and shifted in his seat. Abernath’s uncaring eyes sat like placid lake water, undisturbed. Ed sensed that he could watch half the city be swallowed by a fault line from his window and yawn.

“Oh, yeah, you mean the diversity of industries?” Ed ventured. “I do think that probably reflects an edge –”

“Coy. You’re smart. Most people would just dump their actual edge out of excitement. I like it. Look, we both know it’s not that, right? So let’s cut it. I can offer you a big check, a smaller check, and a job, or we can squish you like a screaming bug beneath our callous feet. The first two are cheaper, but the third’s just as easy.”

“I don’t – huh?” Ed was lost, swimming in waters suddenly too deep, too stormy, and too cold. He’d spent hours, maybe if you totalled it all up, days, dreaming of being invited into a room like this, opening some kind of door into the upper echelons of society, and yet here, he felt less like a shining gem plucked from a vein of coal, and more like a fish mistakenly caught up in some fisherman’s net.

“Fine, let’s be ‘open.’ How’re you reverse-engineering the Zoo’s erasures to scrape alpha?”

The room spun a little.

“What?” Ed said. “No, it’s a bespoke observational strategy – real-world research –”

Abernath laughed.

“Please. There’s no real world to research anymore since the Zoo went online, we both know that. Also, look, the pattern’s indisputable. 17 trades built on 17 high-erasure moments. I love that you post your false rationales online, too. Very HODL of you. But we both know. Take your first big win: company hires a bunch of security guards and starts training them in a warehouse parking lot, Zoo reckons they’re a little too fit for a drunk Eddie to handle and disguises them as bots – Presence Must Preserve and all that. You bet the alpha and make a win on their upcoming high value transfer without ever seeing the reality. Or the nightclub fights! You bet on the behavior restrictions since the Zoo was hiding more men than usual from you. That’s the real question: How’d you know? Eventually – and here’s the boot end of things, just to paint a picture – eventually we’ll model it out ourselves, but processing power is processing power, man hours are man hours, and token burn is token burn. So you’d be compensated for the time you save us. Let’s start simple, no trade secrets yet, OK. How can you tell when the Zoo’s covering things up?”

Ed’s confusion mixed noxiously with shame. He was here, in a room where million-dollar deals were treated like grocery store produce. He was inside the wealth machine he’d been working his whole adult life to enter, and yet he felt, in that moment, like a creature being stared at through partition glass.

“But it’s not...” Ed trailed off. His face betrayed his hurt and his confusion.

“Are you reverse-engineering social milieus? That was my bet. Our in-house Zoo parallel says it’s erasing similar-aged attractive males in high-stimulation environments where your jealous-index is likely to tip into action. Am I close?”

“In-house model? Jealousy? No, it’s, it’s real alpha. Low foot traffic nightclubs, late night drone activity signaling production increases. Not absence, presence.” Even as he spoke, he didn’t really believe himself, even though he couldn’t fully believe Abernath either.

Abernath’s cool stare softened with pity. Pity. The shame sliced him like a cardboard papercut, and stammering words poured out.

“Can I use the bathroom?” Ed squeaked out.

“Of course. It’s right by the elevator.” Abernath was already typing as they spoke, moving on from a lowbie like him.

Outside the office, Ed kept shrinking. Distance from judgement did not abate its sting. He stood by the bathroom as the tubes of people sped through the honeycombed structure of the elevator system. Staring at the movement helped keep the darkening edges of his vision from closing in in panic. He noticed that for every dozen or so single-rider tubes, a longer, fatter tube holding multiple people would whirl by as well. He studied the movement for a long time while Abernath’s words sunk like rusty nails into him.

Somewhere in this massive building was a parallel Ed. An Ed born from predictive algorithms and quants and processing and evolutionary simulations, checked at every second against groundtruth data feeds. Somewhere, this False Ed had convinced Abernath and MayaForce that he’d been duped by the Zoo. That the world had been hidden from him because – what? – he liked his girlfriend and worried about other men sometimes? It seemed ridiculous, cartoonish, but he worried about the truth of it.

Most people step into a tube as a kid and step out into a grave, winding along the pressured, pre-bronzed paths someone else had built for them. He had always thought of his trading as a way out of the pneumatic world he thought they all lived in. The idea that even his attempts to jettison the system were, in fact, just another turn in his long, prescribed pipe was untenable.

Next to the elevator were four buttons, two next to an arrow pointing downwards, two by one pointing upwards. Each direction had one button with a single outline of a person and one button with multiple heads crowded together. He pressed the up button with multiple people and waited.

He was going to find this false Ed and… well he hadn’t figured out what he’d do then, either destroy it or unearth its inaccuracies. When a tube came, he squeezed next to ten or so others and sped skyward.

Each level, more and more people left in small groups, siphoned by conference rooms and all-hands appointments. Ed listened to their hushed conversations and felt like they were speaking another language. He knew most funds kept their computation centers high enough for low-latency line-of-sight relays from the roof, so he wound his way up. When the last group of people left the elevator on the 98th floor he slid out with them, unsure how far his visitor’s badge clipped to his belt loop would take him.

He began winding his way through open doors with labels like Data, Matrix, Aquatic Decontamination Zones, server rooms, anything that suggested computation. He wove through labyrinths of hard drives, often finding that he could enter a room, but without a badge swiping back out was impossible. He remembered reading an article about – well, ok fine, reading someone on a chat forum writing about an article they’d read – about the new rat-trap model of security, where companies like this one would pour all their resources into preventing escape from sensitive areas, rather than preventing break-ins. It was simply more efficient, and easier, to keep someone in a locked room than to prevent them from entering one. So for Ed, the only way out was through.

Hallways widened, ceilings shrank, and the floors buzzed with constant humming. He wandered through the ever-densening thicket of silicon and cooling systems. Fewer and fewer screens visualizing what was happening within the machines appeared on the walls. He felt he wasn’t supposed to be here – not in the security sense, but in the sense that these rooms were built for machines, not humans. Ed was lost by now. Intractably lost. A door beckoned from a clearing at the end of one maze, and he opened it, blinded by the sudden access to sun that poured in through a floor-to-ceiling window.

“Just a little light for the IT guys when they’re done wrangling.”

Ed spun to find Abernath leaning against a wall, waiting for him.

“Were you expecting some kind of control room? A nice animated box with your face on it? There’s no center here. Your analog isn’t anywhere. It’s all distributed, all the way down, buddy.”

‘Buddy’ stung, made him think of the middle school bullies he thought he’d outgrown.

“You don’t actually know me, you know,” he said, still squinting in the bright light.

“We know almost everything about you, Ed. The Market actually does know everything, and we figure we’ve got, what, 96–97% of the Market solved. That 3% is where the fun is, sure, but yeah. We know the first thing you’d buy if I gave you a check for ten million right now – it’s champagne, and we know you wouldn’t finish it before it turned to vinegar in your fridge, even with your girlfriend, two or three years younger than you, who you constantly worry you will lose to someone, well, like me.”

Abernath didn’t hold eye contact as he spoke. He had neither venom nor bravado in his speech. As he laid out the details of Ed’s life, it was like he was mindlessly reading a discarded grocery note he’d picked up on the street. The bright light and sheer drop off the side of the building made Ed feel every inch of the 98 stories.

“Think about it. The Zoo already does this. Did you really think there’s only one algorithmic Leviathan? The Zoo predicts who you’ll hurt. The market predicts what you’ll buy. You didn’t think you were better than either, did you? I mean, hell, your trading app is a publicly traded company: we bet on your bets and guess your winnings and there’s a margin of error, but it’s just that: marginal. You’re already baked in, like the raisins in grandma’s shitty bundt cake.”

“Then how come you were wrong about me?” Abernath’s vision was blurring again. His chest was racing. Abernath had metamorphosed from an object of jealousy into one of anger. Ed didn’t like being made to feel small. His breathing quickened. His chest felt too contained for the rapid beating of his heart.

“Well, there’s that 3%, of course, but I’ve been harboring a private theory – look, you can be my first case study if you want – that we’ve overadapted to entropy at the expense of synchronicity. It’s an old concept people insist on mysticizing, but the point is we model well for chaos, moments where everything breaks, less so for moments where everything suddenly comes together just cause. The miracle for you, it turns out, is that you were making all the right moves for all the wrong reasons. Long enough time horizon, you’ll lose everything. I mean, unless you get really lucky with that leveraged short position on macrochips you might lose it all this week, if you don’t stop, but still. Gotta talk to our quants about that.”

Ed’s vision did not occlude, but it did begin to shake. His fists clenched hard at his sides. Abernath’s smug nonchalance infuriated him. A small buzz from Luna came through in his overlays.

Been there awhile. Omg, are they loving you?

Luna’s kindness pushed him over some kind of sheer cliff face. She believed in him, and it would be his job to break the news of his own failure – no, failure would have meant he had ever even had a chance to mess everything up – his tautological, predefined uselessness. Abernath, in that moment, was no longer human to Ed. He was a manifestation, a chimeric representative, a Frankensteined digit, of the two tremendous writhing forces that prescribed his life.

Ed dove toward Abernath, and the instant he did, the Zoo took his senses from him. He fell through the air, vision and touch and smell restoring just a moment later as he spun to face the room again. It was empty. Or, it appeared empty. Every inch of absence hummed. He felt, in the frightening loneliness, as if his outburst had locked him into both those monstrous contraptions.

The false Ed – ruined and jealous and so banal that his brief shimmer of success had been nothing more than happy accidents in the truest sense – had condensed from the vapors of its dislocated systems and possessed his body. Or, no. It was worse. It had simply proved itself coextensive with him. There was no retrofit, no possession, nothing but the simple fact of its correctness, its complete exchangeability with him.

An invisible hand clasped upon his shoulder. He knew it was Abernath, but also knew that any twitch would remove his senses completely, like it had before. He relaxed, acquiesced to the hand, to the Zoo, and both receded. Abernath fizzed into view. Two security drones moved in from the door, but a gesture from Abernath paused them. Ed found himself laughing uncontrollably. Were they really drones or were they tall men he’d envy? That question would loom over him forever, now. Heavy as an anchor but completely inexplicable, even – no, especially – to Luna.

He let them take him. He turned at the doorway, and Abernath was already talking to someone else on the phone. Outside, it was a bright sunny day. Everywhere he looked, industry hummed, people walked, robots sauntered, and Ed sat on the hot concrete and began to cry.

Day Traitor