The Predation Circuit

Chapter 3 of the Zoothesia Series. Even digital protocols have sewers filled with ungainly monsters. You might not be able to see them, but...

Happy 18th birthday.

You wake to an empty city. You’ve known the quiet was coming since your 15th birthday, when intrusive thought became action, and you violently struck your sister with your skateboard. After your father’s screaming stopped, you replayed the memory in your overlays again and again until you fell asleep to the thudding noise. You planned the next time you would hurt someone carefully, in your encrypted diary entries – how you’d use the sound of fireworks on Z-Day to mask the noise, how you’d lure them near the river behind your high school where you could wash away whatever evidence was left. You planned it all perfectly, except you didn’t know your parents had access to the diary, too. Your therapist visited you on your 17th birthday and walked you through what would happen.

First, he admitted the therapy wasn’t working. He stressed that it wasn’t your fault, but also, somehow, insisted that it wasn’t the therapy’s (and certainly not the therapist’s!) fault either. Some problems are just intractable. You and I both know (trust me) that what he really meant was that you were the intractable problem.

Then, he told you the worst of it: once you entered adulthood, the Zoothesia protocols would fully actualize. The limited child protection overrides that had ensured your perception of others would melt away. Due to your litany of diagnoses (narcissistic personality disorder, conduct disorder, callous and unemotional traits, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, etc.), the Zoo’s predictive modeling of your potential violence index would mark you as likely to harm basically everyone. There are costs to predation, it turns out.

The protocols insist that presence must preserve, that you cannot see those whom you are likely to harm. So, the therapist told you, the Zoo would hide everyone from you. Not just small children, not just the weak, but everyone. The world would become a lonely place, filled with people hidden from your perception. And yes, he said, it would be possible to just blindly attack everything you suspect is actually a person, but overt acts of violence would ratchet up the protective overlays, and you’d risk having everything, not just people, hidden from you – a ceaseless static swallowing you forever.

You wonder how I know all this about you. For now, you’ll have to trust me. Don’t worry. It won’t take long.

There’s a cake on your new apartment’s kitchen counter that I can see through the window. Your mother left it for you last night, teary-eyed as she closed the door. It strikes you that you will never see her again. You have fantasized about killing her thousands of times, but you will miss her, too. It’s complicated. The icing is stale and hard against your knife, crumbling as you cut.

There’s a whole world out there that, to your eyes, is filled only with roped-off construction zones, autonomous delivery drones, and natural features that are conspicuously human-sized.

Within a week, your walls are riddled with holes.

Within a month they’re all spackled over. When you act violently, the world fades from you. The protocol blurs the edges of your vision. You know it’s not a person, not a mind, not some thinking thing, but it feels like it is sometimes. It knows you, and yet you can never see it. It takes the world from you, then gives it back in sedative drips.

With other humans edited from your world, your career choices are fairly limited, too. Violent media ground-truthing is easy enough, and you withstand the flood of beheading videos, drug usage, and dead bodies that make most wilt. You hit your quotas every week, helping fine-tune the various AI systems that monitor video and haptic uploads to the web, and money fills (and empties from) your account in biweekly intervals.

You visit grocery stores at first, but walking through empty aisles, dodging shelving bots you suspect are people makes you angry. Not quite angry enough to do anything. If you’re at all like me, you’re surprised at how effective the protocols are. Not seeing the subtle pulse of someone’s jugular veins or feeling the hot-breathed insistence of their respiration dulls your specific desire. It doesn’t quell the ever-present need you feel to hunt something, though. One time, you raised a frozen bag of peas above your head and thought hard about swinging it at one of the shelving bots just to see. The Zoo responded swiftly, blinding you completely for just a second at the apex of your swing – reminding you it was there, reminding you that it would not abide violence. Soon, you just start getting your groceries delivered.

In the absence of others, your proclivities harden. You miss the presence of others but not their subjectivity. You miss their presence in your life insofar as their witness to you asserted your own existence. They could bend and bow and move in response to you, like a boat leaving its great wake across still waters. Without them, you begin to feel invisible yourself. Without them, you loathe them more than ever. They are less real to you than they ever have been, and here you are, 18 months into isolation, when a knock sounds from your front door. It’s not me, either. Not yet.

---

The therabot’s droning echoes through your empty house. I know its tinny, ringing voice well enough. I know its questions, its checklist thoughts, and I know its suspiciously human-tinged vocal patterns tickle the hungry part of your brain the Zoo is bent on dulling – for now.

It takes all your vitals, which are fine, and you sludge through the questionnaire. I could help with the details. It notes that your walls are craterless. The bot’s estimates of your waking metrics are slightly off: for instance, I know that you actually spend upwards of 15% of your waking hours in the bathroom, sometimes scrolling through one of the Unending Walls, sometimes staring at your real ones, wondering why you ever stopped putting holes in them. The other estimates are close enough. Only 10% of waking hours spent outside the house is closer to 5%, but that’s splitting ribs.

The bot notes that you are a full solipsist who lives in a messy but not dirty one-bedroom.

The therabot spends more time with you than usual – though you don’t know what usual is. If they’re a social worker in disguise, they’re nervous. Everyone who sees you is nervous around you. You wonder whether the invisibility is unidirectional or bidirectional. Normally, the Zoo hides people at risk of being harmed, not the harmers themselves, but for you, they do make an exception. It can’t change your appearance without your consent: Be yourself; See yourself! One of those pesky rules, so it can’t plaster “PSYCHOPATH” on your forehead. Instead, it hides you, so heinous is your inner self.

Of course, the therabot won’t label you a psychopath. That’s an anachronism now. And dehumanizing. You are a “constellation of symptoms” in the approximate shape of, well, a psychopath. There’s use for you in this world, hence the bot’s cloying wellness check. Back before fully roboticized surgery, human surgeons developed a reputation for not viewing their patients as human while they were on the operating table. It turns out that to cut through someone’s aorta or clear a stroke, this kind of dissociation was actually preferable. It allows them to make quick, sure-fingered decisions. Now, solipsists like you can handle eight-hour shifts sifting through heinous rendering and recordings of violence. In fact, this work helps refine the protocol’s modeling further, creating a safer world. Helping us all See in Safety! Wonderful, right? Useful for them, but what use is the world to you, you wonder? If you can’t claim some piece of it, slice some piece of it, move through it with purpose and danger and meaning, what good is the world to you?

The bot marks down that you appeared to have passed through the early stages of Solipsistic Anger. You have. You’re somewhere else now, somewhere the bot or the person inside it aren’t ready to follow. But I am.

The bot is about to leave when you finally tell it the truth.

“I think someone’s been watching me.”

---

You notice your noticing first. Signals from your body – hairs on your neck raising, a predator’s desire to turn rapidly and face down – what exactly? You don’t know. You just know that the feeling has intensified since the therabot’s visit.

Is it some kind of handler, tasked with ensuring your continued placidity? Wasn’t that the whole point of the Zoo in the first place?

You begin keeping your window blinds lowered all day. You whisper when you talk to yourself, which is often. Who else is there to talk to? At night, you walk through a dark house; the lights cast your silhouette into the world, and there is someone in the world, you are increasingly certain, watching you.

You wish you could talk with the entity deciding these things. You know the Zoo is just a statistical model. Inhumane. Yes, fed and lubricated and evolving, like a tremendous informational sludge misted down with peripheral upgrades and pressure tests and occasional rollbacks done by human hands, but ultimately, primordially, inhuman. Yet it, and not you, controls the social reality of your existence.

You play with overlay settings: conjure images of people to populate your room; send haptic hallucinations up your arms; close your eyes and imagine the gelatine was someone’s arm you were twisting. You build mini LLM personality wrappers and scream at them when you are angry, watching their bitmoji faces hue with fear and grief, and you smile, but it’s all hollow. All of it.

And now this gaze, this hunted sensation. You resent the Zoo for this most of all. You, by accident of genetics and who knows what else the therapists were never able to figure out, thrive as a predator, and the Zoo has rendered you prey.

So what do you do? You start setting traps for them. Whoever is watching you. You feel freest, unobserved, between 3am and 6am, so you trust your instincts and use that time to prepare. You know the protocols will hide any human presence from you, so you tackle second- or third-order signals of presence.

There’s a group of foulmaxers who facet gemstones into their skin in some vague, philosophically tenuous attempt to subvert the optocentrism of the Zoo. You don’t really care about all that, but you follow their example. Outside your bedroom window, there’s a brick wall. You position three small flashlights in your window, all facing out: one on the floor angled upward, one on the desk by the window, and one hung from the sill of the window, pointed down. These lights cast three overlapping cones of light on the brick wall outside your apartment. You open your closet, filled with outfits you never wear because who would see you in them, take an empty hanger, bend it into a zigzagging shape and place it on the window. Three overlapping shadows fall on the bricks, and you wait.

The overlays are powerful, powerful enough to erase the world from you, but, you suspect, in the same way that air pollution will still sting your lungs on an overlaid sunny day, there will be cracks in a sufficiently complicated erasure.

You have your overlays trace the squiggles of shadow, permanently etch and affix them to your vision so any subtle shift or move will be visible to you, and you wait. You wait all day, feeling again, at random moments, as if someone is staring you down. When the sun sets, you turn the lights on and sit, looking out your window at the tripartite shadows.

---

When the therabot visits you again, you’re ready with proof. You have recordings, pictures, an explanation – everything you need to convince it that…

That’s the hard part. You’re still not sure. At least you’re ready to convince it that you were right.

Setting up your traps and stalking your stalker has been taxing work. The therabot notes that you’ve lost weight and that the bags under your eyes have darkened. Your cheeks hug your jaw more than ever, and when it asks you if anything is wrong you snap out a “no” like a mousetrap snapping through a spine.

Your health markers are all fine and you let the bot prick you and question you while you tap your leg and wait for the part where it asks how you have been, what’s new, etc., whatever pre-programmed dialogue trees that bot has. It notes that you are a little dehydrated, and pauses for a few seconds too long when it confirms there’ve been no new violent incidents since your last meeting.

You look at the bot, and I wonder if you sense the same thing I do in its pause, an all too human relief perfuming the air. Eventually, you ask if you can show it something, and you walk to the window you’ve set up.

You ask if therabots have world models, “like physics and stuff.” The bot affirms and we both stare at the bot, thinking the same thing, that somewhere beneath the Zoo’s veneer, there was a bleeding beating thing waiting for us. Not that the Zoo would let either of us get that deep, of course.

“Good,” you say. “So you’ll see.”

You point out the window at the smear of shadows cast by the weird metal sculpture you’ve hung.

“Someone’s watching me,” you say.

I’m glad you know.

The therabot starts whirring. Increased paranoia is a symptom that they flag. It signals a break from reality that often forebodes acts of wanton destruction. Which is, even I will admit, ironic in this moment, in this world frankly.

“Tell me more about that,” the bot says.

“Three cones of light, three shadows, right? Well, I figure the Zoo can erase people well enough, but something complicated like a dynamically moving shadow? There’d be small glitches, imperceptible unless you had a fixed point of reference, so I locked in the original positions of the shadows on my overlays and then stared and compared them. I’ve noticed 16 anomalies in the past week. 16 times someone has stood in my window, looking in!”

I could leave now – convince the bot that you’re even more unwell than they’d assumed and let our game play out a while longer, but I think it’s time.

I stand up from the bushes and see my reflection illuminated in the window.

“There!” you shout, and the bot freezes completely. I don’t have to be inside with you both to know this means I was right about what it – no – they are. But it’s not about them right now, as fun as it might be. It’s not about this terrified social worker. It was about you, Heath. Soon it’ll be about us.

The therabot will neither confirm nor deny my presence, but you sense in its silence an acquiescence and, though it’s hard to understand how a basic interview drone could feel anything, fear.

Then, you were right. I am real, yes. I can see you, yes. And I have been watching you.

When I move to your front door, the therabot follows me. You don’t know the truth of her, yet. You will understand so much, but first, you must see me.

I wiggle the door. The therabot notices but can’t tell you she notices. You don’t hear or see anything, even as I swing your door open and walk across the low-pile beige rug toward you both, my boots leaving muddy prints only she can see.

“Is he here?” You yell, finally trusting the unmediated senses left to you. They, like the Zoo are attuned most delicately to danger. And I am dangerous, but not to you, not yet. The Zoo won’t let me see you if it thinks I’ll hurt you.

I slide a chair back and sit at your table, and finally stare into the hidden social worker’s projection.

“You can tell him,” I say. “That I’m here. He won’t hurt me.”

“Shouldn’t the Zoo decide that?” she whispers.

“It will,” I say. “Soon enough.”

“All the same,” she said. “I’ll wait.”

You, though, you’re close. The therabot’s silence. The almost imperceptible change in the room’s airflow that the overlays can’t quite scrub out. That predator-to-predator stare, arched backs and raised hackles, and bared teeth. The lung-deep odor of a heavy presence. It all points you to me. And you start to promise the model, the abstraction, that you won’t hurt whatever’s waiting for you. You bargain, subconsciously, and walk to the far end of the room as if to say You’ll have time to shut it all off if you need. Because you need to know more than you need to hurt.

And somehow, inexplicably to you, it listens. It responds to you, and I bubble into view.

Curiously, though, the therabot stays for both of us. Ever-present, the Zoo.

---

We stand at opposite ends of the room. When I move, you respond. We keep the distance separating us static. I’m a little surprised the bot doesn’t make a run for it. Perhaps they know neither of us care about it anymore. Plus, when will they ever get the chance to experience the very edges of the Zoothesia protocols like this. When, again, will the tension between presence and safety be more tenuous and liminal and exciting. When will they see the Zoo’s machinations in real time ever again?

“I am Angel,” I say. “I know you.”

“I don’t,” you respond.

“I was you, once,” I explain, stepping forward.

“I am singular,” you insist.

“Aren’t we all?” I say.

“No,” you answer, your face cast in stone.

I smile. “Exactly. But you and I, we are. Truly. Everyone else. Everyone, the Zoo doesn’t bother kneecapping, they’re not, but we are.”

“What do you want with me?”

Ahhh. That final question. Everything melts, even the person disguised as a therabot. The room, the flashlights, the ceiling, the bushes, the city, the whole world. All there is, gone in service of this single moment between you and me.

“I want to make you a proposal,” I say. In the silence I take another step toward you. You take a step toward me in response now, both of us challenging the Zoo’s assumptions of us. “It’s the same proposal someone made me 20 years ago. I’ll start with what you’ll gain. If you accept, the Zoo will keep me visible to you forever. If you say no you will, finally, disappear from me and I will disappear from you and we’ll both go back to our lonely, isolationist little sub-worlds. We’ll tag data without suffering. We’ll feed the Zoo our behaviors and actions and that’ll be it. Ceaseless and alone and alive.”

“What do you want from me?” You ask. “What’s the other side of this ‘proposal’?

You’re smiling, now, for the first time since I started watching you. The social worker might call you happy, but that wouldn’t be right. You’re not happy. That’s baser than what you and I feel. What you are is engaged and alive. You are vibrant because, for the first time in 18 months, there are stakes and mystery in your life again.

“I told you,” I say. “We’re the same. We want the same thing out of this life.”

“Which is?”

“To drive a knife into someone’s stomach, twist, and watch the electricity leak from them.”

You squint, measuring me in this moment. Is this some kind of test? Did the therabot (surely by now you know it’s a person, too) set this up as a test? Did the Zoo itself?

I can’t help but laugh. It’s not your fault; naivety is rarely a personal failing.

“You think of yourself like a caged tiger in a dank room, but you’ve got more than teeth. You’ve got pipe bombs and cyberattacks and all kinds of slippery weapons of mass destruction. You don’t know it yet, but you’ll start to buck at the edges of your cage soon enough. You feel the isolation pulling the world away from you already. Soon, it won’t matter to you if you can’t see the results of your destruction; you’ll disassemble and guess and hope someone hurts. The Zoo knows solipsists are never fully stable when we’re alone. Isolation breeds uncertainty in the models. But two predators locked onto each other make a closed system: a sealed chamber. The risk collapses entirely inward. We’ll tear each other apart, and the world will spin on unperturbed. The Zoo will let us, if it means it keeps us away from others.”

I want you to say yes. I won’t lie. It matters to me. I am ready to feel alive again. I trust you are, too.

“Someone, weaker than me, I assure you, made me this offer once, a few years into my isolation. He’s gone now. Because one death, one fully contained death of someone like us, is far better than the uncertainty of our shortening fuses.

I clap my hands on my legs and head to the door.

“So there you have it. You see me. I see you. You hunt me. I hunt you. One day, one of us wins. You’re not alone anymore, but we become both Damocles and the sword all at once. That’s the deal. What’ll it be?”

I pretend to wait for your answer, but I told you already. We are the same. You’re not smiling. Your face is a mask almost no one else in the world could read. Except for me. I know what you are, what you want, and what you’ll say next. I see the certainty of action blooming like springtime bulbs, staining your face like pooling blood across a shag rug.

You nod.

“Happy hunting,” I shout at the precipice of the door before sprinting. I hear your heavy feet on the pavement behind me as I flee.

You lose me tonight. It’s not your fault. I had my exit planned as soon as I saw you setting up your little light trap. This’ll be fun, I think. The truth is that the Zoo is much more like us than it is like the gen-pop it hides from us. It doesn’t care, and neither do we. We both understand that it’s all just math, ultimately. I lied a little. Well, no. I didn’t lie. I elided. I did kill the man who first offered me this deal, but I’ve killed others since then, too. It lets us hunt because we don’t have any natural predators except each other, and each one of us I kill, the safer everyone else is. At the end of the day, we’re not all that singular, really. You’ll figure that out, if you make it long enough. To the Zoo, we’re just another problem to game out.

And it has.

I suspect, if you traced this little game back far enough, you’d find that protocol right at the beginning. I’m pretty sure the whole thing is its idea, honestly. But oh well. The body wants what the body wants, right?

When you finish chasing me and give up for the night, just remember: I know where you live.