The Feed
By N. R. Davis
@nrdaviswrites






Maxwell Roberts hurried across the parking lot towards a small grey 
concrete building. It was an odd thing, designed so most people wouldn’t 
even give it a second look. It had very few windows, no distinctive 
features and was set a ways back from the main road. It almost looked 
like a support building for the much larger office complexes that were 
visible nearby.
Even the parking lot was rather bland. It was just a black asphalt 
square, divided by white lines into even rows of parking spaces. Max was 
used to seeing only a handful of vehicles in the lot on the weekends, but 
today was different. The lot was nearly full. He was forced to park in one 
of the last few spots, farthest from the building.
Normally, the walk wouldn’t bother him but today had already set 
record high temperatures. The heat from the sunbaked asphalt made his 
feet sweat as it flowed up through the soles of his shoes. He was trying 
to keep his head down and avoid the glare reflecting off the cars as he 
passed. When he did look up, the building shimmered in the heat.
        	He could feel the sweat starting in other places, but couldn’t tell 
if it was from the heat or if his nerves were getting to him. His brain raced 
as he tried to figure out what awaited him inside the building. He wiped his 
damp hands on his pants as he approached the entrance.
        	From the outside, it looked like it was a normal reflective glass 
door set in chrome plated steel, but this building was far from ordinary. 
The outer set of doors were made of multiple panes of heavy glass set into 
a polished reinforced steel frame. Just beyond the threshold was a set of 
sliding glass doors and a PIN pad. 
	Max was always uneasy during the time between when those monsters 
closed behind him and the second, less imposing, set slid open. He’d always 
heard stories that the outer doors would lock if you put in the wrong PIN, 
but he’d never tested the theory. He wasn’t going to start testing it today. 
	Max tried to compose himself. He wanted to appear normal for those 
watching him through the camera. He didn’t want to let on how nervous he was. 
Last thing he wanted to do was key in the wrong code. He feared he was already 
in enough trouble. 
	Max swallowed, took a deep breath and keyed in his identification 
number. He held his breath while he waited for the light on the panel to turn 
green. It took less than a second, but for Max it was an eternity before the 
light stopped flashing yellow and turned a solid green. His PIN was accepted 
and the door slid open allowing him entrance to the facility. Max slowly 
exhaled and stepped over the threshold. 
	Set into the floor, just beyond the sliding doors, was a great emblem 
depicting a planet wrapped in cables. Above the globe were the words, “Content 
Fabrication Center - West.” Below it was the motto, “Correcting the signal, 
one feed at a time.” Most days, Max ignored the emblem but today it made him 
ponder if people unaffiliated with the CFC realized just how accurate that 
statement was. Most people thought the CFC just generated new programing 
content for the Feed. They couldn’t be more wrong.
	“Max! Hey, Max!”
	A familiar, but unwelcome, voice calling him from one of the side 
hallways snapped him out of his musings. The voice belonged to Roger, a former 
team member that had served with Max in the Emotional Guidance Group at 
Headquarters. Max recalled the day Roger referred to the team as EGG-Heads 
in front of leadership. The name stuck and was still in use long after Max 
transferred to CFC-W.
	The Emotional Guidance Group was responsible for monitoring the 
sentiment of large crowds of people and adjusting the information permitted 
in their individual feeds in order to maintain a moderate emotional baseline. 
The adjustments usually took the form of limiting access to certain news sources, 
delaying charged messages from friends, or preventing communication between 
people known to be antagonistic. The specific actions were determined by a user’s 
psychological profile, and the CFC had a profile for every user of the Feed. 
	In the event of a major incident or crisis, a special group of EGG-Heads 
would be activated to target specific individuals and ensure their inciting 
remarks did not reach the larger populus. In events with lots of coverage, it 
was easier to target the source than it was to filter the destination. 
	Roger had nearly perfected a means to influence teens as part of the 
EGG-Heads. During one rotation on the Crisis Response Team, Roger managed to 
weaponize those tactics and got himself reassigned to work in Negative Operations. 
It was only by some unfortunate luck that Roger was on the CFC-W NegOps team. 
	Max paused and turned towards the source of the sound, dreading the 
conversation to follow. Roger was a notorious sleazeball before he went to work 
for the Sharks. Sharks used to be the derogatory term everyone called NegOps 
behind their backs, but Roger embodied it. Once he started working on the West 
Coast, Roger acquired new porcelain veneers, elevating himself to the rank of 
used car salesman. 
	“Max, I’m so glad I caught you before anyone else did. Things are 
really crazy today.”
	Max just looked at the man’s cosmetically perfect teeth for a moment. 
He couldn’t help but thinking how unnatural his smile looked before responding, 
“What’s happening, Roger?”
	“There’s a number of suits in with your team. They’ve been in there 
all morning. Something weird is going on. I came in to thank you but they wouldn’t 
let me get more than two feet from the door. Before they rushed me out, I heard 
them talking about how there was a new feed detected that had no history and no 
profile. That shouldn’t be possible. Everyone is tagged at birth, I thought.”
	Max felt his stomach drop. He felt trapped. He wanted to flee but that 
would be obvious. Plus he didn’t know how much Roger knew already. There were 
just too many questions, but he didn’t have time to ponder those right now. 
	Roger was looking at him intently. Max just knew he was being studied 
and his next words would be incredibly important if he was to pull this off. 
	“There’s no way a new adult feed can just spring up overnight without 
WitSec authorization. I bet it is just a glitch”
	“Max, you know there has to be more to it than that. You don’t bring 
everyone in on a weekend for just a glitch, even a major one like this.”
	“Even so, there has to be a reason. I guess I’ll find out once I get 
inside.” Max started to turn back towards the main hall before he pause and 
asked, “Why were you going to thank me?”
	Roger grinned, porcelain gleaming in the fluorescent light. “It was 
for helping me with that op last week. You remember, that little rising Feed 
star that was trying to encourage everyone to disconnect and step away from 
the Feed? Well, you were right.” 
	Max didn’t like where this was going. He remembered Roger asking him 
a few questions in the hall last week. Max had inquired if Roger had looked 
for a love interest, but there had been no details provided about the target. 
Max wondered if he had inadvertently helped harm someone. NegOps guys were a 
rough bunch sometimes. They delighted in making people miserable. 
	Roger was still talking. “He was doing it all for a girl. If you hadn’t 
identified that love interest, I wouldn’t have been able to complete the mission. 
It worked like a charm. He’s no longer a factor.”
	That uneasiness and fear Max had about his own safety was replaced by a 
sense of revulsion and nausea. ‘No longer a factor’ was NegOps speak for making 
someone so miserable that they either leave the Feed or commit suicide. Max was 
pretty sure it was the latter. 
	Roger’s smile was getting wider. Max didn’t think that was possible. “It 
was PERFECT! I was able to intercept all messages she sent to him. Made it look 
like he no longer existed to her. He couldn’t find any of her pages or access any 
of her media. In his mind, he’d done all this work for her and she blocked him 
once he’d finished. At this point, we could have made him violent but the decision 
was made by Central Ops to freeze him.”
	'Freezing' was another one of those NegOps terms. It comes from bodies 
stored in freezers in the morgue. Max was turning green but Roger didn’t notice. 
Roger kept on with his story.  “All it took was a post by one of his allowed friends 
commenting on how happy this girl looked with some guy -- it was her brother by 
the way -- to push him over the edge. Got my suicide bonus last night.”
	Max’s sickness had turned to anger. He balled up his fists. He wanted to 
hit Roger so hard that it popped his veneers, but didn’t swing. Instead he forced 
through clenched teeth, “You’re an asshole, Roger,”  before stomping away. 
	Roger called after him, “Don’t hate the player! Hate the game!”
	Max was so worked up that he nearly walked into another coworker 
coming out of a side door.                            
	About half way down the hall was a door labeled “Account Management Office.” 
Max opened it like it was any other day on the job. His anxiety about being called in 
on a Saturday had disappeared, consumed by the anger generated by his encounter 
with Roger.
	The AMO was a rather small room dominated by a display wall in front of two 
rows of cubicles. The wall showed the status of the Feed, news streams from all the 
major networks and regional hotspots as well as the current sentiment of high ranking 
political figures. General topic trends were displayed in real time, reflecting the 
current interests of the populous.
	Max’s role in the AMO served dual duty. Not only was he responsible for 
managing the reputation of VIPs and other high profile persons, he also ensured that 
they did not stray too far outside of acceptable bounds in their own accounts. It 
allowed Max a fairly unique perspective into the functions of the Content Fabrication 
Center.
	Something from the conversation with Roger was bugging Max. Roger had 
mentioned that his op was last week, but the timing felt off to him. He pulled up his case 
log and reviewed all that he had worked on. There was nothing last week that matched 
Roger’s description.
	He went to the prior week. There it was. On Friday afternoon he had attempted 
to bring the feed of a popular Feed newcomer back into positive sentiment even though 
it had been in rapid decline after Thursday night. It was an unexpected decline and Max 
had fought to bring it back into balance. The account had also declined in priority over 
the weekend and by Monday was no longer in Max’s queue.
	It all made sense now. Max had been unable to stop the slide because he had 
been fighting with the Sharks and was trying to stop a NegOp. Max looked at the 
Account history. On Sunday night, the account was marked ‘frozen’.
	Max wondered if this could be the account that started it all. He considered the 
events of the past week. It all began when a friend of a VIP suddenly went silent. There 
were no answers. Nothing was available to make sense of it. The rock star had started 
making claims that the Feed was being manipulated in order to make his friends more 
depressed. This pushed the artist’s feed into a more angry and agitated state, bringing 
it to CFC, and ultimately Max’s, attention. 
	To successfully manipulate a person’s media stream, or feed as they called it, 
Max needed to understand what was going on in the target’s environment that would 
cause the shift, followed by how to alter the information to bring the target back into scope. Some people would require cute images like puppies or kittens to bring them 
more positive, but others needed to see bad things happening to good people to feel 
better about themselves. For most feeds, an automated process would attempt to adjust
the feed in real time, based on the user’s profile, to achieve the desired state. VIPs 
needed a more human approach than some of the automated tools would allow since 
the sentiment expressed in their feed could affect hundreds or thousands of users 
across the Feed itself. 
	Max leaned back in his chair and pondered how his dive into the life of Chris 
the rock star had led him here. It was through Chris that Max had started to wonder if 
his own feed was being manipulated. Max had scoured the artist’s feed, looking for
anything that he could use to calm Chris down. Instead, Max discovered a trove of 
research into the Feed, how it operated, and its origins. Other posts illustrated how 
different the world used to be in the days before the Internet was consumed by a 
consortium of big corporations and became the Feed. 
	Max had heard of the Golden Days of the Hackers before, but Chris was writing 
like he had lived it. Some of the posts told tales from the great hacker conference 
DEF CON. The stories were so outlandish that they almost seemed fantastical. Max 
wished he could have seen it. There was no way something like that could happen with 
the CFC watching the Feed. Hacker culture would be deemed anomalous and edited out 
before it could spread.
	A tap on his shoulder snapped Max back to the present. Two men in dark grey 
suits and black ties stood behind him. Their faces were relaxed but they carried 
themselves in a fashion that radiated importance and superiority. The tall one spoke first, 
“Mr. Roberts, I am Mr. Johnson.” He motioned to his partner, “and this is Mr. Richard. 
We’re from Feed Security.”
	Richard waited a beat and then stated, “Please come with us, Mr. Roberts.” 
	When they spoke, they gave very few physical cues that might disclose their 
intentions or provide more context to the word choice. There was nothing in this 
interaction that Max could use to determine what they were after. All Max could do 
was lock his station and comply. 
	He used the few seconds it took to secure his desk to try and compose himself. 
His pulse was starting to tick upwards and a voice in the back of his brain was screaming 
for him to run. Somehow, his inner twelve year old took over and responded first, “Did you 
really just introduce yourselves as Dick 1 and Dick 2?”
	Johnson smiled but Richard did not. “We’ve heard a version of that more times 
than you can count. At least we’re not two Rogers. Am I right?” asked Johnson. 
	Max knew that he was trying to put him at ease. It was a common tactic to 
establish some sort of rapport with the interviewee in order to get them to share more 
information. Try as he might, Max couldn’t stop himself from smiling at the joke. The 
interview tactics were working.
	Max stood up and followed the two Dicks. They led him to a small conference 
room across the hall from the AMO. On the wall furthest from the door was a dark display 
screen but the status LED indicated it was on. Richard closed the door while Johnson gestured to Max towards the single chair on the near side of the table. 
	“Take a seat,” said Johnson, as he sat in one of the chairs on the far side of the 
table. Richard remained standing along the wall near the door, almost out of Max’s 
peripheral vision. Max had to keep turning his head back and forth if he wanted to shift 
his focus between Richard or Johnson. It was almost impossible to keep both men in 
view at the same time.
	Johnson waited for Max to get settled. Just to try and set him on edge, 
Johnson waited another 30 seconds. When Max didn’t take the bait to speak first, 
Johnson started.
	“Mr Roberts, do you know why we’re here?”
	Max had a pretty good idea but did his best not to give it away. “I haven’t a clue,” 
he said, trying to mask any tells that might reveal his deception. “I know something 
serious must have happened since you two are here and the parking lot is full.” 
	“It’s serious all right,” said Richard. 
Johnson motioned for Richard to hush but his gaze never wavered from Max. 
“Well, let me ask you a few more questions first, then I’ll explain why we are here,” 
Johnson said while he studied Max. 
	Max watched Johnson’s eyes dart around. For an outside observer, it appeared 
like his eyes were focused on Max’s face, but Max was close enough to see them twitch. 
It was obvious to Max that Johnson was looking for micro expressions and other physical 
signs but it was unnerving to be on the receiving end of such intense scrutiny. 
	Johnson asked, “What do you know about Feed account creation?”
	Max replied, “Do you want the long version or the short?”
	“Start with the short. If I need more information, I will ask additional questions,”
	Max cleared his throat and started talking. “A Feed account is created and 
associated with every new born. While most of the process is automated, a member of 
an AMO team must validate each new account before it is made live. Once established, 
an account cannot be deleted until 10 years after report of death. 
	“Every child born in a medical facility leaves with a Feed account, even if they 
don’t have a name yet. It is linked to the mother, and if information is available, to the 
father. If the child is born at home, they are given an account when the parent applies 
or first child checkup, whichever comes first. Occasionally, legal reasons require the 
creation of an adult account, but that can only be executed with a valid court order and 
case number.”
	“You clearly know your stuff. No wonder you get the good accounts,” Richard said 
from his position along the wall. 
	Johnson chuckled softly, “I’m glad I didn’t ask for the long version. Now, you 
mentioned something about new accounts with a court order. Who creates those 
accounts? Same people who create accounts for newborns? What’s to stop someone  
from just creating a second adult account?”
	“New adult accounts require DoJ authorization. That usually comes out of WitSec. 
The system will not allow the creation of a new account without the security code of the 
authorizing agent. This is a randomly generated code that must be provided to and 
entered by the AMO rep. Without this code, the system will not allow it to finalize the 
new account.” 
	Max knew all about these codes. He had to wait hours until one of the junior 
account creation techs read back a code to an agent loud enough that he could use it 
too. There was no way Max was going to use his own account to explore the truthfulness 
of Chris’ claims. He was careful not to draw any attention to his actual account, or so he 
thought.
	Johnson watch Max for another few seconds. “Did you know that every time an 
authorization code is generated, there is a secondary list that is created for validation 
purposes? That list is run against all accounts created using a WitSec designator to 
ensure that no duplicate accounts were created.”
	Max felt his stomach drop like he had swallowed a lead ball. It weighed him down 
and he felt like he was unable to move. He didn’t know about the countermeasures. How 
could he have missed something so simple? Fortunately, he had used the junior admin’s 
account too but if they’re asking him, then they suspect something. Did he miss anything 
else? Did they know what he was planning? He could no longer hear Johnson speaking. 
He was too caught up in his own head.
	Johnson asked his question again. “I said, have you heard of about people trying 
to get around the account creation process?” 
	A large section of Chris’ research was dedicated to breaking the deletion 
preventions mechanisms and discussed possible ways of creating accounts for testing 
purposes. It even touched on the data replication mechanisms and how to interrupt those 
long enough to successfully delete a file. Max didn’t know if they’d read any of Chris’ work 
and wasn’t about to implicate him. He didn’t know why he felt like he needed to protect the 
old hacker, but he wasn’t willing to share that information. 
	Max answered, “I heard you the first time. I was trying to think if there were any 
times that I had heard of anyone that had tried. I think we’ve all heard about parents 
refusing to register their kids for years, to the point of avoiding doctor’s visits, but I don’t 
know anyone that’s tried to make an adult account. It’s not really my area. I think that 
would be more of your field than mine.”
	Richard shifted his weight and came off the wall a few inches as he said, “Easy 
now. No need to get testy.”
	Johnson didn’t look at Richard this time but stayed very focused on Max. His 
smile didn’t even budge as he said, “He’s got a point. This is just a friendly chat. If it was 
more than that, we wouldn’t be here.” He continued in a calm tone that somehow added 
more weight to his words. ”We’d have snagged you out of your bed in the middle of the 
night and dropped you into some forgotten hole that even rats fear until you told us 
everything we wanted to know. All of this would happen before the Feed detected your 
absence. Your status would be ‘frozen’ long before your friends and family even 
considered to report you missing.
	“Now that we’ve gotten that bit of unpleasantness out of the way, let’s return to the 
matter at hand. Shall we?” It was phrased as a question but there was no question in 
Johnson’s voice. “Hypothetically, if you were to create a new adult feed, what would be 
your motivation? Why would you want to do it?”
	Max looked at Johnson for a moment. He wondered if this was some sort of trick 
or a setup to make him slip up and reveal something he shouldn’t. He was fairly certain 
they didn’t actually have anything on him or, like Johnson said, he’d be in a hole 
somewhere. 
“Hypothetically, the only reason I could think of why I’d want to create a new feed
 would be to access sensitive or questionable data without that access being linked back
 to my main feed.” Max paused and looked around before saying, “It would allow me to 
have a raw feed experience that hadn’t been shaped by a lifetime of choices.” 
	It felt strange in Max’s ears, hearing himself say that. It was like a firecracker 
exploded in his brain. He didn’t know how he missed it before. Perhaps he was too close 
but he understood it clearly now. 
	Every choice a person has ever made was recorded and catalogued in their feed.
It was mined, processed, and parsed into infinite combinations of data points about their
lives, easily packaged and ready to be sold to whichever company wanted it. Those 
points determined what a person could see, hear, and know while connected to the Feed. 
With enough information, a person’s behavior could be predicted so perfectly that they 
could even be steered into any outcome desirable. There was no way to escape it. The 
entire experience was curated to ensure total control of a populace that willingly 
embraced the entertainment the Feed provided in order to escape their dull lives. They 
sacrificed their individuality and freedom in exchange for a constant stream of easy 
mindless entertainment instead of doing the difficult work to improve their actual 
existence. 
	Max knew then what he had to do. His earlier plans of resetting himself was not 
enough. He had to reset everyone. Where he had originally planned to take the work 
Chris had started and inject a reset into the Feed for himself, he didn’t think it would be 
much more difficult to have it go system wide. For the first time since getting the call to 
come in that day, he relaxed.
	Richard and Johnson each saw the shift in body posture in Max. They looked at 
each other and nodded. It was time. 
	Johnson stood up and said, “Max, we thank you for your time this morning. We 
may have more questions but I think you have provided us a few new avenues to 
consider in this investigation. If you plan on leaving the building, check in with us first. 
Other than that, you’re free to return to your desk.”
	Max stood up slowly. He wasn’t sure what was happening. He thought for sure 
that they had him, but now they were letting him go? He was very confused but still 
managed to get out a “Happy I could help!” 
When he stepped out of the door and back into the hall, a sense of joy started to spread throughout his body, making him giddy. He felt as though he had gotten away with
 it. Max could hear Roger’s voice echoing down the hall as he chatted away with
someone. Max knew if he reset everyone’s Feed history, Sharks like Roger would have 
no information to use as ammo against their targets. Max’s palms were dry when he
opened the door to the AMO. As he walked back to his cube, he knew they would be
watching him, but he was more committed now than ever before. The moment he sat down at his terminal, Max put his plan into motion.
	Back in the conference room, Johnson and Richard watched Max work. The 
screen on the wall was glowing and showed Max’s desktop. The two men were able to 
watch everything Max did. Just as they predicted, Max started loading a modified version 
of Chris’ code into the Feed. 
	Richard watched the code on the screen while he asked Johnson a question. “Do 
you think he realizes how much he’s been played? I kinda feel bad doing this to the guy. 
He even got our two dicks joke.”
	“Chris, you knew this was how it had to happen. We knew that, eventually, someone with the right access and the correct amount of caring would come across your
research. Yes, it is unfortunate that people would get hurt, but we’re doing this for the good 
of humanity.”
	Richard cut Johnson off. “I didn’t want to freeze the kid. That wasn’t supposed to 
happen.”
	“Ok, I admit, that was a mistake. If that Roger hadn’t gotten the op, it would have 
been a different thing. The kid would have been sad for a few days and gotten over it.” 
Johnson paused, watching Max type. “Just think about it, though. Everyone, able to see 
everything again. Not just a small portion controlled by AI and driven by choices made 
when you were young and stupid.”
	Richard sighed. “It is a great dream. We’ll see if Max pulls it off.” 
	“I have faith in him. I think he can do it. Just wait, and watch.”
	On the screen, Max was just finishing his code. The two men watched as he sent it to compile. Years of work rested on this one moment. 
	Richard asked, “What about Roger?”
	“What about him?”
	Richard took a deep breath. “The guy’s an asshole. He needs to be taught a 
lesson. Plus, I can’t stand those fake teeth.”
	“Fine, we’ll have Central issue a Neg Op with freeze status against Roger. That’ll
set the Sharks on him. Those guys *LOVE* to eat their own. Even without the profile 
database, they’ll find a way to get him.” 
	“Works for me. It’s great when they’re the target”
	A blinking message on the screen drew their attention. It read, “COMPILE 
COMPLETE. DO YOU WISH TO EXECUTE? Y/N?” Both men held their breath until a capital ‘Y’ appeared on the screen and the program began to run. The screen cleared. All that remained was a blinking cursor in the upper left corner.
	The men looked at each other and smiled. 
On the screen appeared the words, “Hello world. Welcome back.”