The deck arrived like a dropped glass in a quiet room: a new folder blinking HARNESSED/HARM inside our shared drive, timestamped eight minutes ago. The title slide read Harnessing Harm: Participatory Rescue at Scale, the footer stamped with Rainer Narrative Studio in the kind of polite font that gets past procurement. My laptop fan breathed hot on my wrist. From the bakery window, the harbor funneled fog downtown; neon smeared the panes in patient stripes. I tasted powdered sugar I hadn’t eaten and swallowed anyway.
“You’re seeing this too, right?” I said into my headset.
“I’m in,” Nessa said. Her voice carried the hush of a library with a fire alarm glitching. “Oh, that footer. He put his name on it like he wants a medal.”
“He wants a case study,” I said, and clicked to Slide 2.
Slide 2: The Funnel — Fear → Loyalty. The chart arced from a thin line labeled Low-Stakes Comfort to a thick ribbon labeled Identity Lock-In. Along the curve, tiny clocks winked: T-72, T-48, T-24. Each clock carried a spike and a shopping cart icon.
“He’s modeling panic as a loyalty program,” I said.
“Look at the annotations,” Nessa said, mouse moving in the shared cursor like a moth. “He’s calling the countdown a ‘retention metronome.’”
I zoomed and read the small print: Surge design: spike cortisol → compress choice → offer communal relief tasks. A footnote: ‘Rescue actions’ double as monetizable microsteps.
“He’s naming it,” I said, my mouth drying. “He’s naming it like a weather map.”
“I’m screen-capturing,” Nessa said. “But I’ll stop if you want chain-of-custody clean.”
“Capture,” I said. “Then we log where the original lives. I want redundancy and a trail the size of a freeway.”
I rolled to Slide 3. A stacked bar graph split hours by Content Type: tease, crisis, countdown, reward. The countdown bars wore crown icons. The tooltip—when I hovered—popped a number: Average session length increases 312% during countdown windows.
My tongue tasted metal. “It’s the cattle prod,” I said softly.
“He literally calls it ‘Cattle Prod’ on Slide 10,” Nessa said, flipping ahead and back. “Sorry. Spoiler. I’m mad.”
Micro-hook: I set my phone face-down, but phantom notifications clicked through my palm like distant hail.
Slide 4 showed a heat map of comments across time: reds where fear words clustered—vanish, hurt, help, now—and blues where reassurance lived—together, hive, safe. Overlaid on the heat map, little dollar signs pulsed like heartbeats. The legend said Tip Velocity.
“He’s proved what we suspected,” I said. “Panic can be monetized across platforms. The countdown is the gate.”
“And he teaches it,” Nessa said. “Look—Slide 5.”
Slide 5: Playbook—Audience Tasks = Emotional Relief. Bullet points offered ideas: Report a rumor (platform engagement), buy a comfort object (merch SKU), share a location rumor (virality “for good”), pledge a fast (time-boxed attention lock). The right margin quote: ‘People need to feel they rescued her; let them.’
I heard the bakery oven cough; flour dust sweetened the air with the ghost of bao. My mother had left a tray of buns under a towel for later; the towel’s honeycomb weave made the table feel like a prayer mat. I kept my hands off the food and on the keys.
Slide 6 wore a polite name: Case Study A—photo blurred, dates redacted. But the kitchen silhouette was Lyla’s: hex shelves, terracotta wall, the neon script shape even in blur. The engagement curve spiked at confetti. The caption: Freeze Frame Converts.
“They anonymized nothing,” Nessa said. “They pixelated and called it ethics.”
“Read me the notes,” I said.
“Here,” she said, voice clenched. “‘Trust signals: sister appears off-platform → high credibility. Moderate law enforcement presence recommended for narrative gravity.’”
I sank lower in the chair; the wood pressed my shoulder blades like a ruler correcting posture. “He turned me into a lever,” I said.
“He’s predictable,” Nessa said. “That’s his weakness. He writes it down so it can be repeatable.”
Slide 7: Case Study B—different kitchen, same move. The graph labeled ‘Fake Amber Amplification’ danced over a timeline I recognized from yesterday’s daycare firestorm. ‘Crisis escalations near schools deliver high moral outrage → high tip velocity. Use caution. Liability matrix attached.’
“Liability matrix?” I said. I clicked the tiny triangle. A pop-out table scored risks against ‘PR Shields’—charities, influencers, law quotes. The numbers sang like a hymn. My teeth locked.
“They had a school in their deck,” Nessa whispered. “Before yesterday.”
“They have everything before everything,” I said. “That’s the business model.”
Slide 8 traced Cohort Decay over ninety days with and without countdowns. Without—the line sagged into grey. With—the line rose; small bees indicated ‘hive task days.’ In the footer: RNS Internal — Do not distribute.
“I want to distribute everything,” Nessa said.
“We will,” I said. “But we’ll do it like surgeons, not like arsonists.”
I moved to Slide 9: Retention Modifiers. The list felt like exhaling a lint trap: music minor key shift, light cooler by 700K, camera wobble ±3°, caption delay 1.4s. Each tweak produced a micro-spike. In the margin: ‘Perception of danger > actual danger.’
“There it is,” I said. “He’s writing the thesis—danger as feeling. Audience buys the feeling.”
“And he sells the exits,” Nessa said. “Slide 11—‘Exit Choreography.’ ‘Rescue appears to exceed institutional capacity; audience relief attaches to talent brand.’”
I flipped to Slide 10 because I couldn’t not: Cattle Prod. A cartoon of a countdown clock buzzed a stick figure toward a Buy button disguised as a ‘Support’ button. The caption: ‘Gently apply necessity.’ I exhaled through my nose because if I opened my mouth the bakery would learn new words.
“Back to the beginning,” I said. “Make the throughline explicit. He stages countdowns to hold attention; he sells tasks that feel like rescue; he anonymizes case studies that are not anonymous; he frames exits as products.”
“And people who love Lyla become workers in his factory,” Nessa said, soft.
The fog pressed the window. A small train horn—piercing, lonely—threaded the harbor. I remembered Lyla at eleven, sketching hexes in the margins of math homework, whispering ‘hive: everyone safe, everyone seen.’ I kept clicking.
Micro-hook: I reached into my tote to touch the pen, listening for its tiny vow to have heard more than the deck.
Slide 12 introduced legal. Persona Transfer—Contracts as Bridges. The title sat above a diagram: two circles, Person and Persona, with a bridge labeled ‘Temporary Transfer.’ On the bridge, stop signs read NDA, Crisis Bonus, Morals Clause, Liquidated Damages. Beneath, bullet points: ‘Talent may authorize studio to “speak as” during defined windows’; ‘Silence breach triggers damages at scale’; ‘Fans perceive continuity → retention preserved.’
“He made the clause a graphic,” Nessa said. “Like a subway map for gagging.”
“Persona transfer formalizes silence,” I said. “It isn’t a side effect; it’s the design.”
A call-out box at the bottom quoted a lawyer I knew only by reputation: ‘We ensure voice continuity for brand stability.’ The footnote named no firm, just C.R. — internal counsel.
“CR,” Nessa said. “Cass Rainer. He’s the counsel now?”
“Internal shorthand,” I said. “But either way, he wrote this with legal teeth.”
Slide 13 showed a Damages Calculator. Drop-down fields for ‘Window length’, ‘Audience size’, ‘Avg. order value’, ‘Rescue task completion rate.’ A button: Compute Penalty. The sample output: $780,000. I counted zeros by habit.
“That number is meant to terrify,” Nessa said. “So creators don’t talk.”
“And so families don’t either,” I said. “I can feel the chill he’s selling.”
Slide 14: “Participatory Rescue”—Packaging. Mockups of campaigns with names like CLEAN UP CREW, HIVE JAR, APRONS FOR ALL, each with QR codes in honeycomb frames. A tagline under all: ‘Make the save with your hands.’ Another footnote: ‘Partner retailers can pre-position inventory for surge days.’ The logos blurred but not enough. I recognized at least two from our brand email folder.
My throat tightened against the sweetness of bakery air. “He lined up shelves before he lined up safety,” I said.
“He sells the feeling of help,” Nessa said. “He sells it until people confuse it with help.”
Slide 15: Ethics Layer—Optics and Insurance. The bullets scratched cynicism into bulletproof glass: ‘Add charity overlay to 1 in 3 arcs’; ‘Use trauma-informed language templates while maintaining urgency’; ‘Never mention “fear.” Use “care.”’ A small honey icon twinkled in the corner like a joke.
“Okay,” Nessa said, breath hitching. “I need to stand up.”
“Stand,” I said. I stood too; my knees popped. The chair’s wood left hex imprints across the back of my thighs like a bruise waiting to declare itself. I sipped cold coffee, tasted ash and citrus.
“Who sent this?” she asked. “Your pen? A junior we haven’t noticed? Lyla?”
“If the pen sent anything, it would be audio,” I said. “The deck probably came from someone with access. Or someone who wants a stage.”
“Cass?” Nessa asked.
“He loves control more than applause,” I said. “But a rival? A repentant staffer? Or—more dangerous—bait meant to flush us.”
Slide 16 bore a red banner: INTERNAL ONLY. Underneath, a model titled “Narrative Sovereignty Index.” It scored creators on Compliance, Resilience, Audience Plasticity, Legal Preparedness. I looked at the sample initials—blurred—but the shapes of the letters called familiar. One started with L; the spiderweb in my stomach twitched.
“He rates people like livestock,” Nessa said.
“He rates leverage,” I said. “Livestock would be kinder.”
Slide 17: Crisis Calendar. A honeycomb grid of dates. Some cells glowed; hover text popped ‘Drop 1,’ ‘Community Challenge,’ ‘Finale Vote.’ The clock pinned at T-44:12 in the top corner, syncing with the site. My laptop clock disagreed by thirty seconds. I didn’t like the leadership of that.
“We’re burning time,” I said. “But we have a blade now.”
“Do we leak?” Nessa asked. “Or lock it down and walk it through the precinct?”
I pictured Sloane’s unit: old-school string glinting against dashboards, the whispered hum of servers, the smell of stale coffee and ozone. I saw the flicker in the lights when we named him. I heard the law talk back. “We do both,” I said. “We preserve the original, document metadata, then prep a public slice that tells the truth without tanking the case.”
“I can extract EXIF and file hashes,” Nessa said. “I can also make a clean gallery with redactions. We publish once Sloane has a copy.”
“Good,” I said. “Add a watermark—our chain, not our faces.”
Micro-hook: I created an encrypted archive, typed a passphrase only a childhood ledger would suggest, and felt the relief of a safe that sleeps with its eyes open.
We scanned the final section. Slide 18: Community Management Scripts. Prompts for mods, all the words I’d used last night, bent one degree toward commerce: ‘Take a breath, then [share this link]. Report rumors via [our safe form].’ The syntax wore my voice like someone else’s coat.
“He trained the hive to be staff,” I said. “He trained us to onboard their grief.”
“We can retrain,” Nessa said. “We can model boundaries. We can refuse tasks.”
The last slide hit like a mirror: Q&A—‘Isn’t this exploitation?’ The canned answer: ‘We honor agency. Danger is negotiated. Rescue is communal. Commerce sustains care.’ The footer again, calm and vicious: Rainer Narrative Studio.
I closed the deck, then reopened it to be sure it hadn’t evaporated into legal mist. It held. The harbor’s fog smudged into neon as evening primed itself; pop-up retail crews down on Tide Market would be peeling off old QR murals to paste this week’s virtue over last week’s grief.
“Nessa,” I said, “this is proof.”
“It’s a map,” she said. “And a confession with graphs.”
“Proof can cut both ways,” I said. “If we leak raw, he plays us as hysterics who misunderstand standard practice. If we hide it, he keeps printing devotion.”
“So we publish receipts that behave,” she said. “We puncture without giving him a martyr cape.”
My phone buzzed: a new email, noreply@rnstudio.cc—NDA Draft for Review. I stared until the subject blurred.
“He’s fast,” Nessa said. “Of course he is.”
“Speed is mercy,” I said, quoting his mouth like I was spitting out a seed. “And profit.”
I forwarded the deck link and a hash to Sloane with a subject line I’d want read in court: Potential Evidence: Marketing Deck Describing Retention via Countdown and Persona Transfer. I didn’t add adjectives. Adjectives are gasoline.
“I’m making the redacted gallery,” Nessa said. “Caption ideas?”
“Keep it spare,” I said. “Countdowns are not accidents. ‘Participatory rescue’ is a product. ‘Persona transfer’ buys silence. No gore, no dunking. Just the bones.”
“People will ask who sent it,” she said.
“We don’t answer,” I said. “We talk about structure, not sources.”
Outside, the harbor exhaled; the bakery door bell gave a tiny clink as the night air shifted. I slid the towel off one bun and bit. The crust popped; sweetness hit and then the salt, my childhood ledger balancing on my tongue. The honeycomb pattern pressed into my palm, a little grid of haven and hive.
“I’m with you,” Nessa said quietly. “Even if they come for me.”
“They will,” I said. “They come for anyone who refuses to be staff in their story.”
I saved again. I encrypted again. I set a copy to upload to an off-site drive I paid cash for. I wrote a note to myself: When you publish, center care that is not for sale. I underlined not.
“One more question,” I asked the room, my voice thinner than strategy and thicker than fear. “Who wanted us to see this now?”
The shared drive blinked—no new files, no new clues. The countdown on the site ticked, neat as a metronome. My laptop fan cooled, finally, like it had decided to trust me. I wiped sugar from my lip and watched the window go from gauze to neon, and I waited for Sloane’s reply as if the deck might start to revise itself while I breathed.
It didn’t. It just sat there, bland and weaponized, a mirror and a blade. I opened the pen’s app, checked for audio I shouldn’t have, found a blank—and felt the question harden: if the deck walked in on its own feet, whose footsteps were already on my stairs?