Sloane met me at the badge reader with a paper cup that steamed like a clean conscience. “You’re early,” she said, voice low enough to leave the night outside.
“I couldn’t sleep past the docket ping,” I said. The forensics unit breathed its stale coffee and server heat. No windows, no theatrics—just boxes humming and a corkboard spine holding the case together with pins and thread. I always felt my pulse calm here; the city’s neon had to stay in the hallway.
She led me to a table under a strip of humming light. A stack of papers waited with yellow tabs like small flags. A clasped binder read People v. Rainer—Supplemental Filing: Motion for Injunctive Relief and Damages. An evidence sleeve held Cass’s honeycomb-slick deck—the one I had scanned and sent—pressed flat like a dead moth that once pretended to be a jewel.
“We filed at eight,” Sloane said, tapping the binder. “The DA wants you to see what they wrote with your receipts.”
“Read me the bones,” I said, pulling a chair. The plastic groaned; my knees answered. I had walked through fog to get here; I could still taste salt in the back of my throat.
She flipped to Tab A. “Definitions,” she said.
I placed my finger at the margin and read out loud because hearing the words made them real in my mouth:
EXCERPT — §1.1 Definitions.
“Coercive Persona Transfer” means the knowing inducement or compulsion of a person to adopt, perform, or surrender a public-facing identity, name, likeness, or scripted conduct under threat—explicit or implicit—that failure to perform will result in professional, financial, reputational, or safety harm, where such inducement or compulsion is materially connected to the defendant’s revenue or brand equity.
“They used the word compulsion,” I said.
“They used your memos,” Sloane said, not quite smiling. “Keep going.”
“Scripted Rescue Mechanisms” means timed or staged devices, media, or contractual clauses designed to manufacture peril, with a corresponding promise of relief conditioned on audience spend, engagement, or attention retention.
I breathed once through my nose. The room smelled like fan dust and warm plastic, the exact opposite of a pier morning. I could hear, under the server hum, the ghost-click of notifications I had turned off. Dry language, sharp edges.
Micro-hook:
I turned the page and found the countable world trying to hold what had felt like fog. My hands stopped shaking.
EXCERPT — §1.2 Findings of Fact (Partial).
- Defendant designed and deployed countdown devices and overlays to convert public anxiety into revenue, calling this “participatory rescue.”
- Defendant and affiliated entities required creators to perform crisis arcs pursuant to clause §8 (“Temporary Persona Transfer”).
- Victim L.C. signaled lack of safety to speak via prearranged code; performance continued under contractual pressure.
“They initialed her,” I said. “No full name.”
“We protect victims who keep boundaries,” Sloane said. Her fingers drummed once on the table, then stopped. “Exhibits?”
She flipped to Tab B. The header read EXHIBIT B—Contracts (Redacted). The font went small; the margins narrowed like a trap.
EXCERPT — Attachment B-1: Influencer Services Agreement (Redacted).
§8. Temporary Persona Transfer (“TPT”): Creator agrees that during Program Phases labeled “Crisis Arc” or “Rescue Arc,” Studio may specify wardrobe, script fragments, scheduled silences, and risk-adjacent staging. Creator consents to limited persona control transfer to Studio, including reactive content to “community escalations,” provided that (a) no actual unlawful harm is inflicted; (b) Studio’s rescue resources remain available to de-escalate; © performance obligations survive cancellation of Program unless terminated by mutual written consent.
I tasted metal again. My mouth wanted to spit; my hands wanted to underline.
“Read the rider,” Sloane said, finding the page with a yellow tab.
Rider 8.3 (“Silence Covenant”): Creator agrees to refrain from public statements that contradict crisis narrative pre-reveal. Breach entitles Studio to liquidated damages equal to prior thirty days’ average gross revenue times four.
“Silence priced at four months of survival,” I said. “Not a covenant—an invoice.”
Sloane’s jaw worked once, then went still. “Exhibit C?”
The header: EXHIBIT C—Handler Deck (“Harnessing Harm”), with Foundational Slides. My own scanning artifacts—specks of dust, a faint hairline scratch from my flatbed—had become part of the record, tiny testimonies of my kitchen at midnight.
EXCERPT — Slide C-12: “Danger ≈ Devotion (Monetization Curve).”
Graph depicts a convex curve mapping “Perceived Peril” on the x-axis to “Average Revenue per Viewer” on the y-axis, peaking at scripted countdown thresholds.
EXCERPT — Slide C-19: “Countdown as Caring Device.”
Bullet list: “Timers trigger (1) urgency, (2) peer enforcement in community, (3) guilt-to-gift conversions.”
“They kept his language,” I said, reading the bullets that had once felt like knives tucked in a smile. “Good.”
“Judges hate euphemisms,” Sloane said. “They also hate commerce dressed as mercy. Keep going.”
EXCERPT — Slide C-24: “Persona Transfer Safeguards.”
Note to clients: “Remember: we never injure; we only entertain the possibility of injury. This is ethical because audience participation equals care.”
I rolled the sentence around in my mouth like something bitter and spat it back onto the page by reading it again. Dry, yes. But in the reading, validation flickered. The filing didn’t care about confession arcs; it counted clauses and drew lines.
Sloane nudged the binder to Tab D. “Findings meet exhibits. Now annexes.”
EXCERPT — ANNEX I: Community Harm Statements (Representative).
Annex includes anonymized declarations (A1–A20) from audience members who incurred financial losses, experienced induced panic attacks, or delayed seeking real-world help to remain engaged in rescue events, with attached bank statements evidencing microtransactions during peak countdown phases.
I read declaration A7’s first sentence and stopped, not because I couldn’t go on, but because the words hit bone: “I believed that paying could keep her breathing.” I didn’t speak for a measure of air.
“You centered resources in your statement,” Sloane said quietly. “The annex makes that make sense to a court.”
“The more we broadcast to be seen, the easier we’re scripted,” I said, staring at the honeycomb edges of the evidence sleeve. “They turned care into a consumable and named it community.”
“And now we name it harm,” she said.
Micro-hook:
I lifted the next tab and found the part my hands had come here for without telling my head: numbers.
EXCERPT — §3 Damages (Preliminary Calculation).
3.1 Restitution to creators coerced under TPT: $1,340,000 (est.). 3.2 Audience refund pool derived from promotional falsehoods: $2,880,000 (est.). 3.3 Civil penalties for deceptive trade practices: \(5,000 per violation x 1,942 instances = \)9,710,000. 3.4 Injunctive relief requested in §4 (see infra).
“They’re not shy,” I said.
“They never are when the math carries the story,” Sloane said, and I heard in her voice the memory of a case that went the other way.
“What about the countdowns?” I asked. “They live at the heart of the trick.”
“Tab E,” she said. “Proposed injunction.”
I turned to it like turning to a fire alarm that might actually work.
EXCERPT — §4 Motion for Injunctive Relief.
4.1 The People request an order enjoining Defendant and any agents, employees, assigns, or entities under his control from (a) deploying countdown timers, overlays, or devices in any content or commercial context that purports to correlate audience payment or engagement with the safety or rescue of any person; (b) offering for sale or licensing any “Scripted Rescue Mechanisms,” including but not limited to ring-light-integrated triggers, remote confetti cannons marketed as “reveal accelerators,” or studio-controlled silence switches described in Rider 8.3; © enforcing any “Temporary Persona Transfer” clause or “Silence Covenant” in existing contracts; and (d) destroying or concealing any materials described in Exhibits B and C.
4.2 The People further request that platforms and payment processors within the court’s jurisdiction be ordered to suspend integration with Defendant’s relevant accounts during pendency of this action, and to display consumer warnings on any legacy content utilizing countdown devices that suggest safety is purchasable.
The word purchasable touched the raw place in me that had watched strangers try to buy my sister’s breath with tips. I closed my eyes, let the hum of servers scratch the moment down to grain, and opened them again.
“Platform cooperation?” I asked.
“It’s a reach,” Sloane said. “But we place it. Judges can narrow. We lose nothing by asking for the moon and accepting the cliff.”
I nodded, then looked up at the evidence table where an unplugged ring light lay like a sleeping eye. Its metal was cold under the fluorescent wash, but I remembered the ozone it exhaled when hot. “They explicitly list ring lights.”
“We learned,” Sloane said. “If a tool is consistently used to coerce, we name the tool.”
The next page carried a footnote I hadn’t expected.
EXCERPT — Footnote 27.
The People cite State v. Delphine (2022) (affirming injunction against “rage-bait amplification pipelines”) and AG v. House of Hustle (2023) (enjoining “crisis monetization” mechanisms), noting that a countdown that ties audience spend to promised relief is not expressive speech but a deceptive commercial device.
“Precedent,” I said. “Thin, but present.”
“Enough for a judge to step without falling,” she said.
The room’s door clicked; a tech rolled past with a cart of seized drives and offered us a nod that carried a whole shift’s worth of competence. My tea—Sloane’s tea—had cooled in my hand without my noticing. Paper smell, server heat, the rubbery tug of sticky tabs—dry textures holding liquid danger.
I dragged my fingertip along the binder’s edge and felt the microscopic roughness of cut paper. “What do they call the theory of harm?”
Sloane pointed to §2.
EXCERPT — §2 Legal Theory.
Defendant engineered a commercial scheme whereby “care” is framed as conditional upon spend, using coercive persona transfer to secure creator compliance and countdown devices to stimulate consumer panic. The conduct violates consumer protection statutes, labor codes regarding compelled performance, and common-law prohibitions on fraudulent inducement. Harm accrues regardless of whether physical injury occurred. Harm includes (a) compelled speech/performance; (b) suppressed speech under economic duress; © diversion of consumer funds under false premise; and (d) foreseeable psychological distress catalyzed by staged peril.
The phrase regardless of whether physical injury occurred landed with the soft weight of a hand on my shoulder. My body loosened by a degree I didn’t know it was holding.
“They’re naming the invisible,” I said, throat thick without tears. “They’re saying the bruise isn’t the only proof.”
“They’re saying the bruise on a bank ledger counts,” Sloane said, corner of her mouth ghosting upward.
Micro-hook:
I flipped the last tab and found a signature page waiting for a judge’s ink like an empty plate waiting for bread. I wanted to run to the courthouse and stand in the hallway breathing fog at the door, but paper has its own lungs.
“What happens next?” I asked.
“Hearing within ten days, sooner if the judge grants expedited consideration,” Sloane said. “Defense will scream ‘innovation chill’ and ‘speech.’ We will say ‘deception’ and ‘coercion.’ We will try to keep cameras out.”
“He will try to get them in,” I said. “He’ll waltz in with a penitent smile and call it education.”
“Then we teach quieter,” Sloane said. She gathered the papers back into alignment and looked at me over the edges. “You all right?”
“Numb,” I said. “Then not numb. I could hear a new language happening.”
“Dry words can carry water,” she said. “You taught them the route.”
I accepted that without trying to shrink from it. The honeycomb motif in the deck stared at me through plastic, the geometry that had haunted our rooms and our hems and our jars. Haven and hive; trapped sweetness and shared shelter. Law, like a comb, asked for order so food could be stored.
On our way to the door, we passed the evidence shelf where the countdown devices sat in clear bags, red LED digits off but still menacing with the memory of numbers. I paused and held my palm near one, feeling nothing but the temperature of the room.
“They want to enjoin these,” I said. “To call them what they were.”
“Tools,” Sloane said. “Not toys.”
We pushed out of the unit and into the building’s front hall where the city finally reached us—fog pressed its cool cheek to the glass and downtown neon wrote its soft code across the floor. A delivery cart squeaked; the air tasted faintly of a nearby café’s caramel steam. On the opposite wall, a bulletin board for officers’ kid fundraisers had a honeycomb-patterned flyer made by some PTA parent who liked hexes. I snorted and shook my head.
“What,” Sloane said.
“Hexes everywhere,” I said. “I keep wanting to scrape the pattern off the world.”
“Or keep the pattern and change the use,” she said. “Comb without cage.”
We stood in the doorway and watched a QR mural down the block flip to a new week’s paint: a slow-motion pour of tea, steam rising, a caption I didn’t need to read to know it would promise calm. The city’s social compact—don’t make a scene unless it’s profitable—held steady under the fog.
“Mara,” Sloane said, hand on the bar, voice soft enough to pass as air, “the path exists now. It’s not paved yet, but it exists.”
I nodded and pressed my tongue to the back of my teeth to hold the taste of validation until it faded into something usable. Measured hope came with a clipboard: dates, times, deliverables.
“I’ll keep forwarding receipts,” I said. “No quotes. No co-starring.”
“Good,” she said. We stepped onto the sidewalk and let the night’s damp fold around our coats. I could hear gulls arguing like old comedians somewhere on the roofline.
I looked at my reflection in the glass and saw a woman who had turned down a hundred microphones and held up one binder. The ghost-click inside my pocket stayed quiet; I had left most of my alerts asleep. I thought of Lyla at home, ring lights unplugged, a kitchen that made sound without asking to be heard.
“One question,” I said, swallowing the city’s salt. “If the judge trims the injunction to the nub, what gets through?”
Sloane watched the neon for a beat. “Enough,” she said, then added, careful and honest, “or not enough.”
The harbor breathed, and I let the filing’s words sit in me like a weight I could lift tomorrow: countable harm, enjoined devices, a comb meant for honey not hunger. Then the unresolved part of me—the part that never lets a chapter end without a tug—asked the night the next necessary thing: when we step into a quiet kitchen and try to cook an ordinary breakfast, will the law hold the door while we learn the sound of care that nobody can buy?