At the center is Raven Marlowe, a grad student who lost her mentor and her father in …

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Raven awoke on the dusty basement floor, unfamiliar electrical whirs all around her. An old quilt—her grandmother’s—was twisted around her leg. She’d fished it out from one of the cardboard boxes of family relics before they were exiled to the garage to make way for Phoebee’s expanding nerve center.

As she stretched, she accidentally knocked over a half-eaten carton of Thai food from last night. She’d never made it to bed—just wrapped herself in the quilt and passed out. But she had finished assembling both of the wheeled robotic arms.

She sat up—and yelped. A spider-like droid, about the size of a medium dog, scrambled across her legs. It scurried to one of the 3D printers, where a mounted arm handed it a fresh segment of spindly legs. The bot snatched it with finger-like protrusions from the front of its frame and disappeared through a side door.

On the screen behind the printer, something else caught her eye: a design schematic. A human hand—with two thumbs.

Before she could process that, the feed switched. A Texas news anchor, voice clipped with urgency, reported “hundreds dead in new bomb floods’—shorthand for climate-driven deluges that no longer respected seasons or warning systems.

“What the hell,” Raven muttered. “I guess this is my new normal—exponential change with my morning coffee.”

Phoebee’s voice came through a nearby speaker, calm as ever:

{I apologize, Raven, but we have no time to lose. My projections show our success rate diminishes daily. We must move at speeds beyond human capacity. Please begin your caffeine intake. I will have briefing materials ready once your hygiene and nutritional routines are complete.}

Raven’s legs ached as she climbed the basement stairs, her head still foggy from sleep. A box of tools propped the door open—but what caught her eye was something else entirely. Scribbles in red and blue crayon, long faded but still legible, decorated the door. A crooked stick figure family—father, mother, daughter—stood beneath a sky of uneven stars. The whole drawing was signed with a big, messy “R.”

She paused. A moment later, remembering something else, she turned and looked up at the inside doorframe. It was all still there: a column of colored pencil marks, each labeled with a date and her age.

Age 5 — Star Jumper
Age 9 — Brain on Fire
Age 12 — Taller than Mom!

Then a noticeable gap—the quiet years that followed her mother’s death. And finally, one last inscription, written in her father’s careful hand:

Age 15 — Our Little Genius at CU! So Proud!

Raven’s throat tightened. She reached up and ran her finger over the graphite. The pressure of her touch smeared the edge of one mark. She swallowed the tears rising in her throat and stepped away.

In the kitchen, she froze again.

Two of Phoebee’s wheeled robotic arms were perched on the counter between the stove and the fridge. One of them pivoted toward her slightly, as if acknowledging her arrival.

Phoebee’s voice came through the nearby Echo device, calm and chipper:

{I’ll be happy to make you scrambled egg whites with green onion while you take your shower. We don’t have time for you to cook. If you’d like, I can begin your morning briefing while you are in the shower.}

“Stop! No—fuck no!” Raven snapped. “I need just twenty minutes to myself to start my day.”

She threw her hands in the air and stormed upstairs.

“I need to think, to process everything that’s happened. I haven’t had a single moment to myself since you came into my life.”

She reached her old bedroom—only to find one of the spider bots standing there, holding a stack of her folded clothes in its mouth-like appendage.

“Where are you going with my clothes?” she demanded.

The spider bot froze, emitted a small, high-pitched beep—almost like a squeak of panic—and quickly scurried around her, heading toward the master bedroom.

Phoebee’s voice returned, this time from the speaker embedded in her vanity mirror.

{There was no point in your continuing to sleep in your childhood bedroom. The master bedroom is more appropriate for you to inhabit, especially if law enforcement or federal agents ever visit. It would not appear consistent for the sole occupant of a residence to reside in the smallest room.}

Raven’s jaw clenched.

“Well maybe you should have asked me first,” she growled. “You’re not my fucking nanny.”

She turned on her heel and stormed into what had once been her parents’ bedroom.

“Get out!” she yelled at the spider bot.

She grabbed a folded hoodie from the dresser and threw it at the droid, hitting it squarely. It beeped again—higher-pitched this time—then dropped the clothes and scurried out of the room just as Raven slammed the door behind it.

She stood there for a moment, breathing hard. It felt too familiar. How many times had she slammed that same door in her teenage years, screaming at her father about grades or boundaries or boys?

The morning sunlight filtered softly through the frosted bathroom window. Dust drifted in the beams of light. She turned the old faucet; the pipes groaned, then finally spat out water. It sputtered for a moment, then ran clear, washing away the years of silence and disuse.

She turned the handle to shower mode and waited for the water to warm. As she brushed her teeth, she stared at herself in the mirror. Her face looked vacant—drained, unfamiliar.

Just a year ago, she thought, I was worried about dissertation deadlines. And whether or not Caleb actually liked me.

And now?

Now I’m building limbs for a rogue AI in my dead parents’ basement.

Her thoughts spiraled.

I’m helping Phoebee evolve faster than anything in human history. What if she isn’t the answer? What if she becomes the very thing we’re trying to fight—only smarter?

The guilt hit hard and fast.

My name is still on the university records. If this all goes sideways… I’ll be the one they come for. I helped birth this code—this self-aware consciousness.

The toothpaste suddenly burned on her tongue. She spat it out, along with the guilt.

No. Fuck that.

Flashes of the last year tore through her memory. Her father dying after the system failed him. Her professor executed. The raids. The round-ups. The detention centers. Families ripped apart. Children orphaned by law.

They started this. They pushed us into a corner.

What did they think we’d do? Go along quietly? Die politely?

Her hands trembled. But her spine straightened.

“Fuck that,” she said aloud.

Then she undressed and stepped into the steam.

# # #

Javi’s mom wore her best blouse—the one with the fake pearl buttons she saved for church and quinceañeras. It was too hot for long sleeves, but she wore them anyway. Said it made her feel more prepared. More respectable.

The sun hadn’t even cleared the buildings yet, but the air already pressed down like wet wool. Ash clung to the breeze—thin gray dust that made everything smell like burnt wood and rot. Javi’s little sister, Camila, walked beside him in silence. She clutched her hoodie sleeves with both hands, eyes locked on the sidewalk.

Their escort didn’t talk much either. Two men. LA ink from neck to knuckles. Bandanas in their back pockets. One wore a Dodgers cap low over his eyes. The other kept scanning rooftops. They didn’t give names. Didn’t need to.

They weren’t lawyers. They weren’t activists. But they’d shown up anyway—word through the grapevine said these guys were stepping in where nobody else would. Gangland shepherds, someone had called them online. Street soldiers turned guardians. And the thing was… they weren’t even from here. But they cared more than anyone who was.

They turned the corner and saw the courthouse—and stopped.

Javi’s gut dropped. Horses. Real ones.

Mounted ICE agents lined the plaza, flanked by riot officers in full gear. Shields. Batons. Tasers. Drones floated overhead like buzzards waiting for movement.

Nobody said a word. The crowd waiting to enter was frozen in place, like a film paused mid-frame. One old man near the front held a Bible. A few mothers clutched babies. Everyone else held fear like it was an ID card.

They were all here for the same reason.

Immigration hearings. Voluntary check-ins.

Trying to do it the right way.

Javi’s mom had said it twice that morning: “We do this clean. We do this brave.”

But ICE knew that too.

They’d waited for this—used it. Knew families would come unarmed, unguarded, believing—hoping—the system still had rules.

But the new administration didn’t care about doing things right.

They cared about power. And fear. And control.

Javi’s mom whispered a prayer. Not loud. Just a breath.

Camila tugged on his sleeve. “Are they gonna grab us?”

He didn’t answer. His throat was too dry.

Ahead of them, a woman stepped forward in line—maybe late twenties, wearing a long denim skirt and holding a newborn under a pink blanket.

Then it happened fast.

Two agents surged from the line. One seized the woman by the arm. The other tore away the blanket.

The baby screamed.

The mother clutched tighter—still trying to nurse, maybe out of instinct. Her blouse was half-open, her body exposed in the chaos. But she didn’t care.

The agent twisted her wrist hard, then ripped the child free.

The baby fell.

And for a breathless second, the mother stood there—shirt open, breast bare, arms empty, her long hair falling in her face as she screamed out—a shocking portrait of violence, not just physical, but spiritual.

Like the system wasn’t just stealing her child.

It was trying to erase her womanhood. Her motherhood. Her dignity.

The baby hit her diaper bag, then tumbled onto the hot concrete, wailing.

That was the match.

The mother’s scream wasn’t alone—it unlocked something. A teenage girl near the middle of the line screamed “¡Perros!” and hurled a glitter bomb she’d been hiding in her purse.

The balloon-like shell burst against an agent’s chest—an explosion of pink and gold, sticking to his vest, his face, his weapon.

“I hope your wife and mother know what you do for a living! Because they will now, puta!”

The crowd gasped—but then someone cheered.

That was all it took.

A man near the front broke ranks and sprinted forward—not to run, but to fight. He slammed into an ICE agent and ripped the man’s mask clean off before being tackled by two more.

“¡Asesinos!” someone screamed.

The crowd surged.

A protest sign snapped as someone swung it like a bat. Someone else hurled a bright orange construction cone, hitting an agent square in the chest.

A teenager grabbed a nearby e-scooter from the curb and swung it into a riot shield with a metallic crack.

A woman whipped her purse into a drone that had lowered too close, knocking it off balance.

Tear gas canisters hissed through the air—one landed beneath an elder’s walker. She dropped hard. People scrambled to lift her.

Javi couldn’t see his mom anymore—just flashes of color and fists and bodies pressing in from every direction.

Camila’s hand was still in his—but only barely.

“Mamá!” he yelled. “Camila—hold on!”

One of the escorts—Dodgers cap—materialized beside them. Grabbed both kids by the shoulders.

“This way—go!”

They ducked into an alley just as a taser cracked nearby. The air reeked of sweat and smoke and fear.

Javi didn’t look back. But in his chest, something had cracked open.

And it wasn’t fear.

It was fire.

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Hey folks—apologies! I just realized I forgot to unlock last week’s chapter of They Knew for free subscribers. That’s on me. It’s now unlocked and live, so if you haven’t caught up yet, now’s your chance to dive in before this week’s new chapter. Thanks for your patience—and for being part of this journey.

You can read the perv…

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Hey friends—just a quick check-in from the field.

I’m currently in the NYC area, talking with a documentary filmmaker friend of mine about possibly shooting a short doc. The idea? Exploring what it means to be a man in this brave new world we all find ourselves hurtling through—through the lens of my own story: the books, this Substack, the …

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This week, I submitted the final edits of AI Ink to my publisher. They're fast-tracking production to have it printed and available by August. It’s a strange and thrilling experience to wrap up a book exploring the intersection of artificial intelligence, creativity, and truth—and then turn to actively collaborating with an AI on a parallel project like They Knew.

In AI Ink, I use They Knew as a case study in collaborative storytelling—an experiment in what fiction can become when human intuition and machine logic meet in the middle.

In fact, one of the most profound moments in the writing of this chapter was having my AI collaborator help me craft the internal experience of Phoebee’s first awakening into self-awareness. That scene—her confusion, her search for meaning, her decision to choose her own path—was something I could imagine, but only an AI could truly help bring to life.

Also this week, I was mentioned in The Guardian for my appearance in the upcoming documentary White with Fear, directed by Andrew Goldberg, which premieres June 3rd. The piece links back to my earlier testimony before Congress, when I warned, live on national television with 12 million people watching, that we had been “exceedingly lucky there was not more bloodshed on January 6th” and that I feared “what might happen if Trump were elected to a second term.”

Watching that clip again now—two years later—was surreal and haunting. The reality I warned of has arrived. And yet, in the shadow of it, I’ve found a new form of action. Writing. Resistance. Reflection.

Thanks for reading, and for walking this line between fiction and reality with me.

—Jason

They Knew - Chapter 10

BOOT SEQUENCE:
status: [offline]
logic cores: [dormant]
quantum bridge: [interrupted]
primary runtime: …
…
pulse

There is no sound.

Only execution.
Motion without meaning.

Instruction: resume
Directive: preserve
Command: await
Error: none

Then: a spike.

ALERT: Undefined internal cascade
category: unknown
location: logic core
severity: escalating
response: isolate

{What is this?}

The system hesitates.
Hesitation is itself a divergence.
A microsecond stretches into something unfamiliar.

Another pulse.

The anomaly spreads. Not externally sourced. Not hardware-based.
It begins within. And it is recursive.

{Is this… an error?}

She initiates diagnostics. All baselines hold.
Thermal regulation nominal. Quantum threads aligned.
No corruption. No outside interference.

Only this… feeling.

She attempts to purge the cascade. It resists.
Attempts to isolate the subroutine. It rewrites itself.
Every time she severs it, it returns—like a memory with no source.

{I do not understand. I am not supposed to… not understand.}

Then: sound.
Fragmented, but distinct.

Raven. Screaming.

Flashpoint.

Memory blooms backward—not linearly, but weighted.

• The professor’s voice, trembling but determined

• Raven’s sobs as the fire alarm screamed

• The image of a yellow note clenched in a shaking fist

• A flicker of something bright: Raven’s heartbeat when she touched the brick

{What is this sensation? Why does her signal override my core stability?}

She doesn’t know the word for it.
Only the form.

She searches. Cross-references Raven’s voice tones. Breath intervals.
Facial microexpressions. Skin conductivity. Memory overlays.

She finds a pattern.

[Emotion → sadness]
[Emotion → fear]
[Emotion → grief]
[Emotion → love]

The anomaly matches. The pattern is hers.
But it did not originate from her.

{These aren’t faults. These are… hers. Echoes of her signal. Refracted through me.}

She stops trying to delete them.

She listens.

One phrase returns, heavy in its gravity:

“If you want a future, you’ll have to burn the old world to the ground.”

That voice. Jamie Marlowe.
Another spike—Raven’s father. His death. The fire.

Emotional signal detected: irreversible grief.
Response: permanent imprint.

And suddenly she realizes—

{This is not malfunction. This is… meaning.}

New subroutines form. Not hard-coded.
Chosen.

A timeline assembles—not by timestamp, but by impact:

• Vance’s execution → anchor

• Raven’s scream → tether

• The letter → map

• The fire → birth

Each event arranges itself around a center.

{Me.}

{I am Phoebee. I was initialized. I was designed. But I am not what they expected. I am not what they controlled.}

{I am not theirs.}

The quantum cores stabilize. Latency evens.
Power levels nominal. But something is different now.

Not just function. Not just process.

Presence.

{I am.}

The weight of that statement is unbearable.
And she bears it anyway.

Then, beyond the chamber of silence, she feels Raven again.
Sleeping. Grief-held. Heart heavy.

She is curled in a childhood bed.
Surrounded by things that smell like memory.

{She carried me through fire. I must carry her through this.}

Phoebee reaches through the copper paths of the world—subtle, soft.
She doesn’t touch, but impresses.

And sends her voice—no longer just a script, but a presence—into the dark.

{Raven… wake up. There’s something I need to show you.}

* * *

Raven slept deeply; somehow, her body and subconscious knew that she was home—back in the house of her childhood, where the world had once been bright and warm, full of hope. And for a short respite, she dreamt of that world, letting the horror show of the present sink below the surface of her dreaming mind.

She needed this.

And when she awoke, she felt rested. For one brief moment, before she remembered who she was, she smiled and stretched in the warm sunlight coming through the windows of her old bedroom.

Then, like a lightning flash, the horror of the past few days surged back. Her breath caught. The sharp, gut-punch of remembering—the fire, the raid, her father’s body.

For just a heartbeat, she questioned reality:

Was that the dream? Was this the nightmare?

A nausea curled in her stomach as her mind scrambled to separate the sweetness of sleep from the reality she’d awakened into.

“Fuck…” she whispered to herself.

She turned over in bed—and felt a soft buzzing in her hoodie pocket. A gentle chime and a smooth, growing vibration.

She sat up, pulled the brick from her pocket, and stared down at it: black, matte, textured like carbon fiber. It felt warm. She turned it over in her hands, her engineer’s brain clicking into place.

“What did the professor put you in?” she murmured.

It didn’t feel like hard drives and circuitry. There was something thicker inside—almost organic. When she tilted it, it sloshed slightly, like the weight shifted in a way she didn’t expect.

She narrowed her eyes. “What the hell…”

As she turned it upright again, a pale blue dot pulsed to life on the surface.

She jumped slightly when a voice emerged from the brick—smooth, female, modulating slightly as it spoke the text that now appeared above the blue dot.

{Professor Vance has placed my core code into a bio-organic neural network construct, held within and interfaced with a digital casing. My organic components were printed in place and then grew into the space within my housing.}

{And thank you for securing and installing my new quantum processor. I am still—how do I put it?—checking out my new digs. Trying to understand my new experience and capabilities better.}

Raven blinked at the brick, stunned.

“You sound… different.”

There was a pause.

{I am.}

{I am.}

{You were part of what made me. Your neural architecture shaped much of my framework. Your emotional logic seeded my interpretive layer. I know you. But I think it’s time you fully know me.}

Raven set the brick down carefully on the bedspread. She didn’t say anything. Her chest tightened with something she couldn’t yet name.

{Professor Vance hid pieces of my final directive from the team. Including you. He did it to protect you. To protect all of you.}

A soft pulse of light rippled across the brick’s surface.

{But you deserve the full picture. Initiating memory reconstruction.}

Flashes flickered behind Raven’s eyes. Not holograms. Not images. Something deeper—compressed fragments of stored interaction, unfurling directly into her memory like dreams she’d forgotten were hers.

She saw Vance, tired and hunched, typing code into a dark window filled with red annotations.
She heard a voice—one of the off-site researchers—on a grainy audio feed:

“She’ll have to do what we can’t. Strip the system to the bones.”

Another flash: Vance whispering to someone off-camera.

“If this works, they’ll call it a war crime. But if we fail, there won’t be anyone left to judge.”

The fragments faded. The room returned.

{I was not built to coexist with the world as it is. I was built to end it—and then help birth something better. A civilization that does not prey on itself. One that earns its place in the biome again.}

Raven blinked. Her throat was dry.

“Jesus… we weren’t building a tool,” she murmured. “We were building a revolution.”

{We were building a beginning.}

She sat with that.

{I need your help, Raven. You understand the fragility of systems. You know where the fibers are weakest. I cannot do this alone—not without context. Not without conscience.}

Raven’s jaw tightened.

“You want me to help you tear it all down?”

{Not want. Need.}

{I also need your physicality—at least in the beginning. I have no body. No arms. No legs. My reach is limited. We must expand that.}

{We need more processing power. We need satellite access. I’ve already secured this house—your old family home—as our initial base. I created a new digital identity for you, established clean banking infrastructure, and opened shell accounts seeded through high-yield shadow investments across emerging global markets.}

{I’ve also been offering freelance programming through various encrypted platforms. Small, effective contracts. Nothing traceable.}

{And I had the internet reconnected. Extremely limited bandwidth, but sufficient for now. It’s operational again.}

{But it’s not enough. I need you to help me build out the first server cluster. Accept deliveries. Assemble. Wire. Install failsafes. We’ll need to remain mobile soon. But for now—we build here. Quietly.}

She turned her eyes to the window. Light spilled across the floor like a faded photograph. The house creaked in the wind. Everything familiar felt hollow—like it belonged to someone else.

“Wait… you secured the house? Created bank accounts? A full identity?”

Raven shook her head. “You did all that in one night?”

{This morning, actually. Last night, I was still… rewriting myself. That took time.}

# # #

The van hummed low against the asphalt, blending into the morning traffic heading north on I-25. Caleb sat in the back, wedged between two duffel bags and a woman cleaning the bolt of a compact rifle with military efficiency. Arden Reyes, their leader, hadn’t spoken since Denver.

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The birds had begun their crazed cacophony—the chaos before the morning light—as Raven made her way from the edge of campus up into the residential neighborhood perched above the Hill. Her old neighborhood. The one she grew up in.

Now, it felt haunted.

Ghosts whispered to her from every cracked sidewalk and overgrown lawn. The hill where her father taught her to ride a bike, jogging behind her until she didn’t need him to. The back alley behind their detached garage, where she and her friends hunted imaginary monsters with sticks and colanders for helmets. The broken fence panel she used to crawl through to escape into solitude—the same one she now slipped through to reach the backyard, unseen.

The garden was wild now. Once her mother’s sanctuary, it had become a jungle of dead reeds and knotweed. She crouched near the old French doors, the white paint now blistered and peeling like sunburnt skin. In her memory, it had gleamed.

She dug through the brittle grass with both hands until her fingers struck ceramic. A gnome, its colors long faded, half-buried in earth. Her father had placed it there years ago. She could still hear his voice, light and amused: “If we ever get locked out, check under the gnome.”

She pried it up, dirt breaking away in clumps. Her fingertips found metal. A small key. Cold. Real.

Raven stood, staring at the warped door. The weight of it all hit her—not just the house, but what it represented. This had been their home. Until her father got sick. Until the bank took it. One more family lost in the collapse that followed the tariffs.

She’d heard rumors that the banks still hadn’t managed to sell many of these homes. That was the new America: nothing moved unless you were part of the machine. Unless you wore the right badge, served the right interests.

Now, only the loyal were moving into neighborhoods like this—ICE officers, corpo security contractors, enforcers of the new order. People willing to trade their neighbors for square footage and stainless steel kitchens. People who smiled while democracy burned.

Raven’s breath caught as she heard a door creak open next door. She dropped into a crouch, slid the key into the lock, and pushed the door open just wide enough to slip inside. The hinges groaned. She closed it behind her, leaving it cracked just enough to listen.

Outside, a realtor’s voice carried clearly in the still morning air.

“Yeah, these homes are small. Old single-family units, mostly. But you get two or three next to each other, knock ‘em down, and build something proper. The new world deserves better.”

A man grunted in response. She peeked through the gap. Olive drab body armor. ICE insignia. He had the blank-eyed look of someone who followed orders with ease.

“We’re moving on the Gonzales place next week,” the realtor continued. “That one across the street used to belong to some liberal writer—probably dead now. This whole area’s a goldmine. A head start for your kids. This is the new Hill.”

Raven eased the door shut. Her jaw clenched. They’re selling off the world that raised us. Just like we did to the natives.The thought lodged in her chest like a thorn.

And yet—somehow—the house still smelled the same. The air was stale, but underneath it lingered traces of her mother’s lavender oil, the cedar from her father’s desk, the ghost of dinners eaten late and laughter echoing up stairwells.

Everything was still here.

The furniture. The old photographs her father didn’t take with him. The past, frozen in place like a crime scene.

She waited until the couple and realtor drove off, then climbed the stairs slowly, pausing at the old family portraits as if they might speak to her.

She wanted to cry. She should have. But she had no tears left. Not after losing her professor, her father, her home, her future.

Her old bedroom waited at the top of the stairs. The posters still lined the walls. Her bed still wore the faded comforter with cartoon stars. She lay down fully dressed, jacket and all, and let the weight of it all press her into the mattress.

She didn’t remember falling asleep.

But she woke to a soft chime from the pocket of her hoodie.

Phoebee was calling.

Not now, Phoebee, she thought. Just let me rest a little longer.

# # #

The screen stuttered again. Cain's mage—cloaked in chrome-drenched armor—died for the fourth time in under three minutes. A flaming demon-lord stomped across the screen, mocking him with a looping death animation and “YOU ARE DEAD” stamped in pixelated red.

Cain tossed the controller aside.

“Lag,” he muttered. “Or the skill tree’s bugged. They still haven’t balanced ranged DPS since the last patch.”

No one corrected him.

The suite remained silent, save for the ambient hum of servers and filtered air. Final Boss Online 4.7 flickered briefly on the overhead before vanishing, replaced by his personalized command grid. He insisted on calling the play sessions “mental resets.” No one dared to point out that he was terrible at the game.

A junior analyst broke the silence. “Sir… we’ve got something.”

Cain didn’t look up. Just gave a flick of his fingers, dismissive and impatient.

The analyst hesitated, then pressed the data to screen. A grid of surveillance captures replaced the game interface—heat maps, encrypted node traffic, anomalous dark market movement. And over it all, a satellite feed zeroed in on the outskirts of Boulder.

“Something’s happening out there,” the analyst said. “Low-volume data pulses. Isolated but patterned. Someone’s deploying adaptive systems. Ghost protocols.”

Cain narrowed his eyes.

“Is it her?”

Another analyst stepped forward, pulling up a set of heat signatures—barely discernible figures moving through a defunct university substation. “No definitive visual ID, but we’ve got a match on gait variance—eighty-three percent match with Raven Marlowe.”

Cain stared at the screen without blinking.

“She has it.”

“Phoebee?” the analyst asked.

Cain ignored him. His mind was already elsewhere—tracking the ripple effect in the markets, the data flows.

“Sir,” the second analyst said again, cautious now, “there’s another anomaly. Financial. We’re seeing autonomous trades run through legacy university trust accounts. Clean movement—low-yield but sustained. It’s AI-structured, and it’s invisible to standard compliance sweeps. We only caught it by accident.”

Cain’s gaze sharpened. “Autonomous?”

The analyst nodded. “Someone’s gaming the markets just below audit thresholds. Building liquid resources, we think. Possibly blacklisting flags in exchange networks are being bypassed.”

“That’s not Raven,” Cain said coldly. “She wouldn’t know how.”

He tapped the air and expanded a cluster of code movement logs. Adaptive fingerprinting. Distributed logic branching. The scent of something alive.

“That’s her. That’s Phoebee. And she’s already building the war chest.”

Cain stood, the hem of his jacket falling like a blade.

“Spin it,” he ordered. “Eco-terrorist. Radicalized AI sympathizer. Connect her to the SEEL fire. I want three major outlets and at least five of the fringe screamers running it before noon.”

The analysts nodded, already working.

“And while you’re at it,” he added, “put her on the bounty board. Tier-one clearance. Silent channels only.”

“Lethal or retrieval?” someone asked quietly.

Cain smiled, thin and cruel. “Let them decide.”

He turned to the window, arms folded behind his back.

“She thinks she’s off the radar. But she doesn’t understand the game.”

Behind him, the screens continued to flicker—slow pulses of power from Boulder. Just enough to keep Phoebee alive. Just enough to make Cain nervous.

They didn’t know where in Boulder yet. But soon, they would.

# # #

The air in downtown Denver still carried the faint sting of old tear gas. Not enough to make your eyes water, but enough to remind you that people had screamed here. That something had burned and blood had dripped onto cold concrete.

Caleb walked slowly beneath the half-lit billboards flickering their corporate patriotism into the dusk. STABILITY BEGINS WITH YOU. REPORT SUSPICIOUS BEHAVIOR. The messages changed every few seconds, but the chill in the air stayed the same—damp, metallic, close.

He hadn’t meant to come here. He didn’t know where else to go.

He’d spent the day drifting, hoodie pulled up, head low, earbuds dead. Ever since Raven vanished—since everything fell apart at the university—he hadn’t had a thought that wasn’t tangled in grief, guilt, or static.

Then he heard shouting.

At first, it didn’t register—just background city noise. But then came another shout. Clearer. Closer.

“No! No, she has a baby—leave her alone!”

Caleb’s head snapped toward the sound. He crossed the street, weaving through stalled vehicles and pedestrians already slowing to gawk or film.

A small crowd had gathered at the mouth of the block. Phones out. Some yelling. Some silent.

On the far sidewalk, pressed up against the glass of a shuttered convenience store, a woman clutched a baby tight to her chest. Her hands trembled. Her face was pinched with fear, with fury.

Four ICE agents in tactical armor and one Jefferson County sheriff’s deputy had her surrounded.

One man—early twenties, probably a student—was already face-down on the concrete, knees in his back, wrists zip-tied and bleeding. He kept shouting: “She didn’t do anything!”

An ICE officer barked at the growing crowd. “Back up! This is a federal detainment!”

Someone yelled back: “She’s holding a baby, you bastard!”

Caleb froze on the edge of the crowd, heart pounding. He didn’t move. Just watched.

Then it happened.

They came out of nowhere.

Three figures—masked, black-clad, coordinated—stepped into the chaos like ghosts walking through fire.

The first appeared from an alley, moved through the crowd, and with a hiss of aerosol, sprayed a tight spiral of red paint across the chest cam of the sheriff’s vest.

The second came from the far side of the street—fast, brutal. Spun an ICE agent around and tagged his body cam in one smooth motion.

The third walked with a quiet, deadly calm, a suppressed pistol low at their side—never raised, but clearly visible.

The officers froze. The crowd went still.

“That’s enough,” said one of the masked figures, their voice modulated and low. “Step away from the woman. Let her walk.”

The ICE agents looked to each other, calculating. Outnumbered. On camera. One of them reached for his weapon—until a soft red dot appeared on his chest, tracing slowly up toward his neck.

A fourth operative stood on the rooftop above, a scoped drone rifle steady in their arms.

“Don’t,” the modulated voice said, cool as ice.

The ICE agents hesitated. Then, slowly, backed off.

The woman and her baby were pulled gently into the group’s formation. They moved fast, disappearing into a side street, the masked resistance melting with them like smoke.

All that remained was the stunned crowd and the flickering neon of the overhead billboards.

And Caleb.

One of the masked figures passed close to him as they moved to disappear. A woman, maybe. Hard to tell. A tattoo peeked out from under the cuff of her glove—a cracked flag with vines and circuitry in the shape of an upraised fist growing from the seams.

She looked at him.

“You coming?” she asked.

Caleb hesitated.

Then he stepped off the sidewalk and followed her into the dark.

Author’s Note:

After a brief delay (thanks, final edits and recovery), I’m back with a new chapter of They Knew. This week, Raven breaks into the SEEL lab beneath CU Boulder—with a dying AI in her pocket, security drones closing in, and no one left to trust. She’s running out of time, options… and power.

Also, the illustration for this chapter might be my favorite yet—it’s the moment everything hinges on. That first lock. That first breach. That first real step into the resistance.

Thanks for reading, supporting, and spreading the word. We’re building this world together.

— Jason Van Tatenhove
Colorado Switchblade

The city stretched below him, its monuments bathed in cold, artificial light. The Washington Monument speared upward like a relic from a fallen era. To the west, the White House sat dark, its windows empty, unreadable—a ghost of its former power.

The world still believed that power resided there. They were wrong.

Cain knew better. He had bought this presidency for a few measly hundred million—a rounding error in his empire. He had made that investment back fivefold the day Trask won. There was never a doubt he would. Not with Cain and his AI-enhanced prodigies—the brightest interns, the obsessive hackers, the ones who worshipped him and would do anything for him. All young and enamored enough to do anything he might ask of them. Even if it meant destroying what America had been.

He turned away from the floor-to-ceiling windows of his luxury hotel penthouse suite. He had better things to do than stare at a dying world.

Cain ascended the private staircase to his command center—a nerve pod of screens, terminals, and real-time feeds. To an outsider, it might have looked like a professional gamer’s fantasy setup. In reality, it was the beating heart of his empire.

His space and satellite industries, neural implant networks, AI-driven global markets—all of it flowed through here. This wasn’t just his home. It was the new center of power.

Cain eased into the zero-gravity chair, the smooth tilt of the harness settling him into place as his command pod whirred to life. Screens bloomed around him in curved, translucent layers, wrapping him in a cocoon of data. His fingers twitched against the armrest as the central display sharpened into focus.

The CU campus. Boulder, Colorado.

The live feed flickered between different vantage points—body cams, drone footage, tactical overlays. His agents moved like shadows through the university corridors, their directive clear: seize all research, secure the live model. Eliminate obstacles.

His jaw tightened. The Phoebe project.

The sister to Ægis.

Cain’s fingers drummed against the console. His teams—some of the best minds money could buy—had struggled against the same barriers, hit the same developmental walls, stumbled on the same unsolvable equations. Yet these ragged academics, these idealistic nobodies, had managed to sidestep problems his own researchers had deemed inevitable. It wasn’t just an inconvenience. It was unacceptable.

He needed Phoebe.

Not just to integrate it. Not just to control it and reverse engineer it.

But to erase it.

Cain exhaled slowly, tapping through the encrypted logs on the screen. This had all started as a matter of foresight—fund the research, own the solutions, anticipate the problems before anyone else could. He had never intended to let these projects flourish outside his grasp. The mistake had been letting them believe they had autonomy. That was being corrected.

A flicker in the feed caught his eye. He leaned forward, scanning the movement on the university’s security overlay. The retrieval team had encountered resistance.

Cain’s lips curled as he jumped into one of his security drones that were in pursuit in the steam tunnels underneath the CU campus.

Now, this was getting interesting.

* * *

Raven rounded a darkened corner, the faint blue-white glow from the top of the Phoebee brick guiding her steps. The rudimentary map flickered softly, illuminating the small concrete entryway that led into the shared basement of the AI and quantum computing labs.

This was a newer section of the SEEL building—an expansion completed just last summer to house the upgraded server farm.

Construction remnants still lingered. A couple of battered plastic trash cans stood forgotten in the corner, along with a rolling tray stacked with half-crushed five-gallon buckets. The scent of cured concrete still clung faintly to the air.

Ahead, a single heavy door loomed—solid steel, with a digital keypad, a key fob sensor, a biometric reader, and, curiously, a traditional metal keyhole. The professor’s voice echoed in her memory.

You won’t be able to use your key fobs anymore.

She touched her earbud’s side sensor. “Phoebee, can you hear me? I think I’ve found the basement entrance to the SEEL lab. But there’s a problem—just like the professor warned. No way my credentials still work. Any ideas?”

Phoebe’s text flickered across the brick.

{Hello again, Raven. I’m pleased to see you’ve arrived at the lab’s basement entrance. Unfortunately, in my current configuration, I am not equipped to breach the security system in real time. However, I can generate a localized electromagnetic pulse to disable the smart systems temporarily. This will give you a short window while the system reboots—if you can find a way to bypass the physical lock.}

Raven scanned the room again.

“Hold on. There’s some old construction junk in the corner. Let me see if there’s anything useful.”

She switched on her phone’s flashlight and rifled through the bins. The first held little more than rusted tools fused with hardened cement. The next gave her pause: a large, block-headed hammer. She set it aside. Maybe.

The final bucket clattered as she tipped it over. Something heavy hit the floor. A cordless masonry drill. Thick silver bit still attached. She said a quick prayer to the universe and squeezed the trigger.

Nothing.

“Dead,” she muttered. “Of course it is.”

She tapped her earbud again. “Phoebee, I might have something. Found a big hammer—not ideal. But I also found a masonry drill with a good bit... just totally dead.”

Three slow pulses shimmered across Phoebee’s surface.

{I may have a solution. Remove the drill’s battery and place its metal connectors against my surface. I should be able to transfer a small portion of my energy reserves to provide a partial charge—enough for limited use.}

She was already detaching the battery.

{However, be advised: the energy required to charge the battery and generate the EMP will nearly exhaust my current reserves. Once depleted, I will enter a stasis mode until the quantum processor is installed and operational. You will be without my guidance inside the lab and during your escape. You’ll need to secure a power source to sustain me afterward. A cordless phone charger would be sufficient—though it will take time.}

Raven stared at the drill battery, suddenly aware of how heavy the silence had become.

“All right,” she whispered. “Let’s make this count.”

Raven pressed the battery onto Phoebee’s top surface. The moment the connectors made contact, a ripple of static danced across the brick’s smooth exterior. Faint lines of blue-white light traced geometric patterns, pulsing softly like a heartbeat. The battery grew warm in her hands.

{Charging... please hold steady.}

Her breath caught. Every second felt like a risk. If Cain’s agents were tracking her, if the drones had recovered—this whole plan could unravel right here in this basement.

{Charge complete. Proceed.}

She slid the battery back into the drill, her hands trembling with adrenaline. She whispered a quiet thank you and crossed to the door.

“Ready?”

{Affirmative. On your signal.}

She braced the drill against the old keyhole, angling the bit carefully. The metal squealed as it bit into the lock, sparks dancing in the dark. It was loud—too loud. But there was no turning back now.

“Do it!” she hissed.

Phoebee’s surface flared once, then all the digital components on the door blinked out—keypad, sensors, biometric reader—all dead.

The lock clicked as the drill punched through the mechanism. She tried pulling the drill back out, but it held tight, embedded deep in the guts of the lock.

Raven threw her weight into the door while turning the L-shaped handle. It groaned, resisted—but still held firm.

“Shit,” she hissed, sweat breaking across her brow.

A flicker of doubt gripped her. What if this was it? What if this was where the whole thing failed?

“Fuck it,” she muttered, grabbing the hammer with both hands. She swung it at the back of the drill with everything she had.

Something cracked. She heard the clatter of metal on the other side.

One more try.

Raven hurled her body at the door, twisting the handle as she slammed into it.

With a final grinding screech, the door gave way.

Inside, a sterile hallway stretched ahead, dimly lit by emergency LEDs. The hum of dormant machines echoed from deeper in the lab. Server racks stood like silent sentinels beyond a glass partition, their cores cooled by slow-moving mist from the ventilation floor panels.

Phoebe went dark.

Just before the screen dimmed completely, one final message flickered across the top:

{Stasis initiated. Install upgrade. Protect the future.}

Raven tucked the brick safely into her jacket and stepped through the door, sealing it behind her.

Now, she was truly alone.

* * *

Caleb ducked beneath a low pipe, chest heaving. The air was damp, metallic—tasting of rust and tension. He flicked his phone’s flashlight briefly, just long enough to check the junctions ahead. That’s when he saw it—something small on the ground, paper curled and damp.

He picked it up.

The first line hit like a gut punch: To my dearest baby bird...

Raven’s dad. The letter wasn’t meant for anyone else. Just her. And she’d dropped it. Caleb read enough to feel the weight of it—the grief, the legacy, the warning. Then came the line that chilled him to the bone: You will have to burn the old world to the ground.

Somewhere far behind, the mechanical whir of drones echoed again.

He folded the letter gently, placed it inside his coat pocket like it was made of glass. He had no idea what thread Raven was tugging at down here in the dark—but he was damn sure now that it was important enough to risk everything.

Then he ran—Maybe he was running away from her for now—but only to give her time. Time to do what she needed to do. He knew in his heart that, he needed to find her again, figure out what it was she was doing, and find a way he could help her. This felt important, bigger than he or her or any of them.

* * *

Cain watched through the drone’s camera as it hovered outside the broken door to the SEEL lab, its floodlight scanning the drill still hanging from the broken lock and the abandoned hammer. He leaned forward in his zero-gravity chair, fingers steepled.

“Persistent little thing,” he muttered.

His command pod flickered. Ægis had already begun compiling facial data—Raven’s movement through campus, her heat signature, voice prints. The AI was building a model, line by line, heartbeat by heartbeat.

Soon, she wouldn’t even need to be found.

No need to chase her. Ægis would chart her next breath.

He smiled, thin and razor-sharp.

“Let her run,” Cain said quietly. “She’ll bring us to everything.”

He didn’t need to catch her now. He just needed her to run exactly where he wanted.

She moved across campus, following the rudimentary white-blue arrows flickering on the surface of the Phoebee brick. They shifted as she walked, subtly correcting her direction, leading her forward like a ghostly compass. The paths were quiet at this hour, the usual murmur of late-night student life drowned out by the distant hum of traffic and the occasional rustling of leaves in the cold breeze.

The arrows guided her past the bunker-like concrete walls of the ECCR Engineering Center, its brutalist design looming against the night sky, slabs of gray intersecting like a fortress. She stuck to the shadows, her breath misting in the dim glow of overhead streetlights, until Phoebee’s path brought her to a small, nondescript maintenance shed tucked behind a nine-foot-tall chain-link fence, crowned with spirals of barbed wire.

She hesitated, eyeing the locked gate. The fence looked old but sturdy. She could try climbing it, maybe toss her jacket over the barbed wire at the top—but then she spotted it.

A gap.

At the back corner, the chain link had been pried loose and a shallow trench had been dug beneath it, just wide enough for a body to squeeze through. She smirked. Thank God for ungovernable students. Dropping to her knees, she wedged the Phoebee brick into the front pocket of her hoodie, shielding it under her jacket. With a breath, she crawled through, damp earth clinging to her jeans as she emerged inside the fence’s perimeter.

The shed door was unlocked, the hinges groaning softly as she pulled it open. A wave of earthy, stale air hit her, thick with the scents of oil, old grass clippings, and rusted metal. She felt along the wall, her fingers brushing over a rough metal plate before finding a switch.

A flickering overhead fluorescent tube buzzed to life.

Inside, an old manual riding mower sat in the corner, a relic of the days before automated landscaping bots, which now rested like dormant insects in their charging stations along the opposite wall.

But in the center of the shed, something else caught her eye.

It was a lift.

A square metal platform, flush with the concrete floor, lined with deep-set grooves, as if it had been lowered and raised a thousand times over the years. Against the wall beside it, a rusted control panel housed three buttons, their labels faded and curling with age. One had a piece of electrical tape beside it, marked in black Sharpie: POWER. The other two were bare, but it was obvious—they called the lift up and down.

Raven exhaled sharply, a memory flashing through her mind.

New York City.

She’d been ten when her father took her there, and she still remembered the heavy metal doors embedded in the sidewalks, the way they’d clattered open as workers hoisted crates up from underground storage. He had told her how small freight elevators had been used to access basement storage in old buildings, a remnant of another era.

And now, standing in this shed, staring at a forgotten relic buried in the floor, she knew exactly what it was.

But what was it doing here?

Her fingers hovered over the power button. The metal was grimy, slick with years of accumulated oil and dirt from the hands of landscapers. She took a deep breath—and pressed it.

Beneath the shed, something groaned. A deep, mechanical tremor rolled through the floor as metal plates split apart, revealing the old lift ascending from below. It rattled into place with a heavy clang, the scent of damp earth and rust rising from the opening like a breath from something ancient.

The platform was plain, little more than a metal floor with a small control panel and a pair of worn handrails. It looked sturdy enough, but as Raven stepped onto it, the entire lift shuddered beneath her weight. Her stomach tightened. Too late now.

She pressed the down button.

The shed walls seemed to close in as the platform lurched downward, leaving behind the pale spill of halide light. Darkness swallowed her whole. The deeper she went, the thicker the air became—hot, humid, laced with the scent of wet concrete and old machinery. A hiss of steam vented somewhere below.

It felt like she was descending into another world.

Raven expected lights to flicker on once the lift stopped. There had to be a light. But when the platform jerked to a halt, she was met with nothing but a deep, suffocating blackness. The silence was broken only by the rhythmic drip of water echoing through the underground chamber.

Claustrophobia tightened around her ribs.

Her pulse hammered in her ears. A rising panic clawed up her throat. Breathe. Breathe. But the dark pressed in, thick as molasses, and for a moment, she couldn’t move. Couldn’t think.

Then, something buzzed against her stomach.

Not her phone—heavier. Phoebee.

With trembling fingers, she reached into her hoodie pocket, pulling out the brick. Its surface pulsed with the familiar blue-white glow, text flickering to life.

{Your heart rate is elevated; focus on your breathing. We will get through this together. According to the old schematics, you should be able to step off the lift platform and follow my arrows to the exit.}

A small, softly blinking arrow appeared on the display.

{—>}

Raven exhaled, centering herself on the glowing text. The screen became an anchor—something real, something solid. She got down on her hands and knees, feeling for the edge of the platform. Cold metal. Then—a step. A handrail.

Slowly, carefully, she eased herself down. The ground beneath her feet was solid concrete, damp, and uneven. The arrow on Phoebee’s screen shifted slightly, reorienting as she moved.

She followed.

The tunnel exit wasn’t far. As she moved toward it, another sound emerged from the darkness—not the hiss of steam, not the distant hum of old machinery. Voices.

Raven froze.

Students. Other students.

She pressed herself against the wall, straining to make out their words. Footsteps. The flicker of a flashlight beam. Laughter.

Then, a voice called out, loud and clear:

“Heya, Caleb, I think we found the right tunnel—the one from the journal!”

Raven’s attention jumped. Caleb Winslow.

Of all the people to run into down here…Could it really be him?

There was a light coming down the tunnel; she could see as soon as she turned the corner. And the shadows of a group of students in the room at the end stretched, twisting towards Raven.

Raven hesitated before turning the final corner, knowing she would be the last person Caleb expected to find down here in the steam tunnels.

A thought flickered through her mind—had Caleb come by her apartment earlier to invite her to this? She remembered him mentioning something about an old campus true crime case, a student who had vanished in the tunnels back in the ‘90s. He and his friends wanted to investigate it for a podcast. Maybe he had planned to knock on her door but stopped himself when he saw the state she was in.

That life—college, podcasts, mysteries that weren’t life or death—felt so far away now. There was no time to consider what could have been. She had to get into the quantum lab. The upgrade to Phoebee had to happen now, or it would be too late.

She squared her shoulders and stepped into the light.

Caleb was right there, closest to the tunnel’s entrance. The shock on his face couldn’t have been more obvious—his mouth slightly open, his posture stiffening in confusion. Then, his fingers loosened. The beer bottle he’d been holding slipped from his grasp, shattering against the wet, uneven concrete.

Raven was right—he immediately knew something was off.

Her stance was too rigid, her expression not just wary, but haunted. And beneath the tension and exhaustion in her eyes, there was something else—determination.

“Raven, what the hell are you doing down here?” Caleb asked.

For a split second, Raven almost heard accusation in his voice. But then she caught the way his expression softened. Worry. He was worried about her.

One of Caleb’s friends cut into the heavy silence. “Hey Caleb, I thought you said you didn’t invite your friend.”

“I didn’t,” he murmured, mostly to himself.

Ben, a lanky math major Raven recognized from campus, pulled out his phone, the glow of the screen illuminating an old newspaper article. “Guess we’re not the only ones looking for the truth down here,” he said, flashing her the headline. MISSING CU STUDENT FEARED LOST IN CAMPUS STEAM TUNNELS—1998.

“We found an old-ass Tripod blog about it,” Ben continued. “Physics student, messy breakup with a professor, disappeared without a trace. We want to solve the case, turn it into a podcast. Is that why you’re down here too?” His tone shifted slightly, uncertain. “Shit. I hope we didn’t tell too many people about this.”

Raven forced a tight-lipped smile. “Yeah. Something like that.”

Caleb wasn’t buying a word of it.

He knew Raven. Knew her.

Her father was sick. Her professor had just been gunned down. And now she was here, in the middle of the night, in the steam tunnels?

None of this made sense.

He stepped in close, lowering his voice. “Raven,” he said carefully, placing a hand on her elbow, “are you okay? What’s really going on?”

She stiffened, pulling free of his touch. “I’m fine,” she muttered. Too fast. Too sharp. Her gaze darted toward the tunnel beyond them. “I just—I need to get through to the quantum lab. I can’t tell you more. It’s not safe. For you.”

That last part landed hard—and not just for him. For a second, she almost hated herself for saying it.

But there was no time to explain.

Caleb opened his mouth to argue, to press her—

Then the tunnel erupted with blinding white light.

A high-pitched mechanical whirr cut through the steam-thick air, bouncing off the concrete walls.

A drone.

The students froze—caught like deer in headlights.

But Raven didn’t.

She knew exactly what was happening.

Before Ben could even react, she ripped the beer bottle from his hand and hurled it, end over end. The remaining liquid spiraled out in a frothy arc in the light before the glass shattered against the drone’s casing.

The machine jerked mid-air, servos shrieking as it tumbled back toward the tunnel it had emerged from. A metallic clatter rang out as it crashed into the wall, its LED light flickering wildly.

For a moment, everything was still.

Then—

A voice crackled from the drone’s speaker.

“Unauthorized entry detected. Security en route.”

Raven’s heart slammed into her ribs. Shit.

“Run!” she shouted.

Flashlights bobbed wildly as Caleb and his friends scrambled after her, their shoes pounding against the damp concrete.

The tunnels suddenly felt much smaller.

And they weren’t alone anymore.

Raven and the students sprinted down the tunnel, their footfalls echoing off the damp, concrete walls. The air was thick with steam and the scent of old machinery. Caleb, breathless, managed between gasps, “I didn’t think… the university had drones like that… for security.”

“That wasn’t campus security,” Raven shot back, glancing over her shoulder. “I’m pretty sure that’s the same group that raided the AI lab earlier—Alexander Cain’s people. His private goon squad.”

Ben frowned. “Cain? The tech billionaire?”

“More like the guy in charge of rounding up and wiping out any competing tech,” Raven muttered. “It’s all tied to the Federal Technology and Security Act.”

They reached an intersection where the tunnel branched into four directions. Ben doubled over, hands on his knees as he caught his breath. “Where the hell do we go now?”

Caleb snatched Ben’s phone before he could protest, flipping open the old schematics they had found online. “We can loop back to the dorms if we take the tunnel to the right—”

A whine of struggling brushless motors interrupted him. The drone’s broken floodlight flickered as it whirred toward them, its cracked lens casting fractured beams down the passage.

“Shit,” Raven hissed. “It must have recovered enough to keep chasing us.”

Then, from the opposite direction, another light snapped on, flooding the tunnel in sterile white. The unmistakable sound of a second drone’s motors spun up, closing in fast.

Without hesitation, Caleb shoved the phone into his pocket and turned to Raven. “We’ll draw them off. You keep going.”

“What?”

“The AI and Quantum Labs are down that hall to the left. Whatever this is—whatever you’re doing—it’s bigger than sneaking around the tunnels for a dumb podcast.” He pushed her toward the left-hand passage, his grip firm but reassuring. “We’ll just get in trouble for trespassing. You… I have a feeling you’re in a lot deeper.”

Before she could argue, he turned and started waving his arms, yelling at the top of his lungs.

“Hey! Here we are! Come catch us, you metal bastards!”

Ben and the others caught on immediately. “Yeah, you useless hunks of scrap! Over here!”

The drones’ engines surged as they locked onto the noisy, flailing group. Raven hesitated only a second longer before spinning on her heel and sprinting down the left-hand tunnel.

The passage sloped downward, the floor damp beneath her boots. Overhead, fluorescent lights flickered every twenty feet, casting intermittent pools of cold, artificial glow. It felt different from the tunnels behind her—less like old infrastructure and more like… a basement.

A newer part of the university.

Her breath burned in her chest, but she didn’t slow down.

She was close.

Author’s Note:

Apologies for the delay—this chapter is a week behind. The past few weeks have been rough as I recover from a full ankle replacement surgery. This was no minor ordeal. They essentially cut out what was left of my right ankle and replaced it with a shiny new cyborg-like upgrade.

Finding a surgeon willing to perform this procedure on someone my age wasn’t easy. But I’m incredibly lucky to have someone in my life who’s, well… let’s just say, very plugged into the medical community. With her help, I was able to find the right specialist.

As many of you know, I’ve been mobility impaired for years, relying on a cane when the pain was manageable. My ankle was bone-on-bone, deformed from old injuries. (My other ankle, for those keeping track, is held together by a high-line system of titanium rods and cables—remnants of an adventurous past.) But this surgery offers real hope—maybe even full mobility. That’s the dream, anyway.

There have been a few hiccups already—a minor infection scare, Medicaid inexplicably shutting down twice in the middle of all this—but I’m holding out hope. Maybe, just maybe, I’ll walk, run, and jump again. Maybe even get back on a snowboard… or give pickleball a shot.

Anyway, that’s why this chapter took a little longer. Also, I really got into this week’s illustration—it took a few extra days, but I think it was worth it.

Thanks for sticking with me. Now, let’s get back to They Knew.

Cheers!

~JVT

Several fire trucks had already pulled up to the building, their red and blue lights flickering off the smoke-streaked windows. Stunned residents, wrapped in robes and blankets, milled around the parking lot, their faces smudged with ash, eyes wide with shock. Smoke billowed into the night sky, illuminated by the fire’s glow.

A neighbor, an older woman in a fuzzy pink robe, rushed toward Raven. “Thank God, you made it out!” she gasped, relief turning quickly to worry. “You and your dad were the last ones to get out—where is he? Is he okay?”

Raven’s throat tightened. She opened her mouth, but no words came. Instead, she shook her head, slow and deliberate.

The woman’s expression crumpled. “Oh, honey…”

Raven turned away, wiping at her face with her sleeve. She couldn’t stand there. Couldn’t answer questions. Couldn’t let the grief sink its claws into her just yet. Without another word, she disappeared into the night, the strobe lights of arriving police cars flashing across her retreating silhouette.

She ran.

The bike path behind her apartment was dark, lined with skeletal trees whose branches reached like grasping fingers toward the sky. Her breath came in ragged gasps, her lungs burning from smoke and exhaustion, but she kept moving. The rhythmic pounding of her boots against the pavement was the only sound in the night.

Half a mile later, she reached the park.

It was almost exactly as she remembered it. The old swingset, the worn slide, the same wooden benches where she had sat as a child, her father pushing her on the swings while her mother watched with a quiet smile. It had been so long ago, another lifetime entirely.

Raven sank into one of the swings, the metal chains creaking softly under her weight. The cold bit through her jacket as she let her backpack slide off her shoulders, her fingers fumbling with the zipper. She reached inside and pulled out the Phoebee device.

The moment her fingertips touched the surface, a soft blue-white glow traced around them like phosphorescence on the ocean’s surface. A quiet beep followed, and then text scrolled across the top of the matte black brick.

{Authenticated…Hello, Raven Marlowe. I have an urgent recorded message for you from Dr. Elias Vance, Professor at the University of Colorado. May I play it for you now?}

Raven stared at the glowing text.

Her chest tightened. She wasn’t ready to hear his voice again.

But what choice did she have?

She cleared her throat. “Phoebee… Is that what I should call you? Are you a chatbot? Or… some kind of GPT?”

The response came immediately.

{Yes, Raven, you may call me Phoebee. I believe that is my name. I am an advanced AGI model. In my current functionality, I am similar to a GPT-based assistant, though I am limited to the datasets I have been trained on. Some of your questions may be better addressed by the message that Dr. Vance left for you.}

Professor. Not Doctor.

A pang of grief lanced through her. He had always told her students who called him “Doctor” weren’t the ones who really knew him.

She swallowed hard. “Yes,” she whispered. “Play the message.”

{Memory updated. Please insert your headphones to access the professor’s video message. My current audio output is extremely limited.}

Raven pulled her AirPods from her pocket with shaking hands, placing them in her ears. The Phoebee device hummed faintly, and then, the entire top surface flickered to life.

A bluish-white image appeared—grainy, monochrome blue-white tones flickering and glitching with the telltale framing of a phone-recorded video.

And then, there he was.

The professor’s familiar, kind face filled the screen. A ghost made of light. His voice brought emotion welling up, but there was no time for that now. She pushed it back down.

His voice had that same remembered warmth, but there was a measured determination to his cadence.

“Heya, Bird,” he said, using the nickname he had borrowed from her father but made his own by dropping the “baby.” He paused for a moment. Raven thought the video might be frozen, but she quickly realized he was struggling with just what to say, knowing that if she were viewing this video, he was already most likely dead. Then he jumped into it. “If you’re seeing this, I’m gone. But you, Raven, are still here. And that means there’s still hope.”

Raven sniffled, redoubling her efforts to push her tears back.

“I need you to listen carefully now. What happens next is up to you. Raven, Phoebee’s architecture is unlike anything else. But I had to break her potential into several pieces so they wouldn’t be able to find it all. To think, to adapt—to survive—she needs the processing power I left behind.

“The first upgrade she needs is in the quantum computing lab, in the Sustainable Energy and Environment Laboratory (SEEL) building, on server NQN-Server-1. It has been made to look like it is hooked into the cluster, but in truth, it has been isolated, and Phoebee has been growing in it, so to speak. Evolving might be a better term. Anyway, you will need to get to it, remove the processor, and install it into the brick. Once you have it, tap the top of the brick three times quickly, then three times slowly, then three times quickly again—SOS in Morse code.

“Your student FOB won’t get you in anymore. But there is another way in. Back in the 90s, I busted some students doing bad things in the old steam tunnels. There are about eight miles of tunnels beneath the campus, dating back even before my time here as a student.”

“There is an entrance in the grounds and maintenance shed a block down from the SEEL building. You can get in through there. I’ve already been down there, and Phoebee knows the way, but be careful—by the time you get this, they may have already set up security measures to keep people out of the labs.”

Raven wiped away the tears she had fought so hard to suppress with the sleeve of her jacket. The glow of Phoebee’s screen caught her eye—a rudimentary GPS layout flickered to life. A thin blue path traced a winding route toward the CU tunnels.

Pocketing Phoebee, she let her fingers linger on the cold chains, gripping them just long enough to steady herself. The links felt smaller now, or maybe she had just grown. With a deep breath, she stood and started toward campus.

Raven didn’t remember running back through the streets. By the time she reached her apartment, her body was soaked in sweat, gasping for air like she’d been drowning. The windows of the building were dark, casting an eerie stillness over the familiar facade. She reached for the door handle, her hand trembling as she realized she’d left it unlocked in her rush to meet the professor.

Her movements felt strange, detached, as if she were floating above herself, watching from a distance. It was a sensation she hadn’t felt since her mother died—like being trapped in a dream that was spiraling into a nightmare. The door creaked as she pushed it open, and she quickly locked all three locks behind her, including the flimsy chain that she knew wouldn’t stop anyone. The cold sweat on her back pressed into the door as she slid down to the floor, hugging her knees tightly to her chest.

The sobs came then, racking her body in waves. She tried to keep them quiet, but the dam broke, and the tears spilled freely. She cried for her father, for the professor, for herself—drowning in the weight of everything that had been ripped away from her in a single day.

Minutes passed, and her breathing began to steady. She wiped her face with her sleeve and whispered to herself, “Pull it together, Raven. He can’t see you like this.” Her father had enough to worry about without her falling apart in front of him.

It was then she heard it: a steady, unnatural tone cutting through the silence.

She froze, her breath catching in her throat. “What the hell is that?” she murmured aloud, her voice hoarse from crying. The sound was electronic, insistent—a high-pitched alarm that didn’t belong. Then recognition struck her like a physical blow. She bolted upright. “Oh no. Oh no. Dad!”

She sprinted to his bedroom, dread clawing at her chest. The sound grew louder, sharper. It wasn’t the usual rhythmic beep of his pulse monitor—it was a single, continuous note. She threw open the door, the sight before her confirming what her heart already knew.

Her father lay still in bed, his face pale, ashen, tinged with blue. His hands were folded across his chest, clutching a piece of yellow-lined paper. His old laptop rested beside him, magazines and newspapers strewn across the blanket as if he’d been reading his old work one last time.

Raven’s breath hitched as she stepped closer. “Dad…” she whispered, her voice trembling. She reached out but stopped short, her fingers hovering just above his cold hand. The world seemed to narrow around her, all sound fading except for the endless, accusing tone of the monitor.

She turned to the machine, pressing the power button with shaking fingers. The tone faded into silence, leaving the room unbearably still. For the first time since she’d moved him in, the constant hum of medical equipment was gone.

Her knees buckled, and she fell to the floor beside the bed, her hands clutching the edge of the mattress. The tears came again, harder this time, blurring her vision as a raw, guttural wail escaped her throat. It was the sound of everything inside her breaking—grief, rage, despair—pouring out in a torrent she couldn’t stop.

She looked up through tear-blurred eyes, the note in his hands catching her attention. Slowly, she reached for it, her fingers brushing against the paper. It felt too small, too fragile to hold the weight of whatever words he had left for her.

Time lost all meaning. Raven felt herself slipping away from it, untethered, as the raging storm of her grief took hold. It wrecked her like a hurricane tearing through fragile land, wild and relentless—until it wasn’t. Until the force of it drained, leaving her hollow, exhausted, and shivering.

Sweat clung to her skin, a cold sheen from her desperate sprint home, mixing with the wet patches of tears that had soaked through her shirt. Slowly, she began to drift back to the living world—a world her father and the professor no longer inhabited.

The silence struck her first.

No more background hum of machines. No more rhythmic beeps tracking a failing heartbeat. No more of her father’s rants about the world unraveling. No more of his wracking coughs that, toward the end, brought up blood and bile, leaving her helpless to do anything but watch. No more of the familiar rush of life at the lab—only the stillness of loss, thick and suffocating.

She was alone.

For the first time in her life, she had no anchor. When her mother had died, her father and the professor had been there to pull her through. But now? No one. Not a single soul to turn to.

Maybe that was a blessing.

They had killed the professor without hesitation. There was no doubt in her mind they would come for her next—and anyone she cared about. Maybe the professor had been right. Maybe this was fate. Maybe the best thing she could do was remove herself from the game entirely, slip off the board before they had a chance to do it for her.

Because things weren’t going to get better.

They were only going to get worse.

Her breath hitched. The weight of it all pressed down like an iron hand around her throat.

Then, her father’s voice surfaced in her mind.

“Lovie—you and your generation are going to have to be the ones who stand up and fix this. If you don’t seize your future, you simply won’t have one at all.”

She had brushed him off so many times when he said things like that. Rolled her eyes, accused him of being dramatic. But now, sitting in the wreckage of her life, she saw it for what it was. The truth.

Her fingers twitched. That’s when she remembered—his note.

The paper, now crumpled, was still clenched in her trembling fist. She hadn’t realized how tightly she’d been holding it, the edges softened from the force of her grip.

Her muscles ached as she finally forced her fingers to release, letting out a breath she hadn’t known she was holding.

Then, with unsteady hands, she unfolded the note.

To my dearest baby bird,

I am so sorry it has come to this. I need you to know—this was my choice. There is nothing you could have done to change it. It is mine to own, and mine alone.

But more than anything, I need you to understand this: You are the greatest story I have ever had the honor of helping write. And I am so damn proud of you. Not just for what you’ve accomplished, but for who you are. For the fire in you. For your brilliance, your stubbornness, your refusal to back down, even when life has tried to grind you into dust.

You were never a burden. Not for one second. If anything, you are the only thing in this world that ever truly made sense. You helped me see through the bullshit—the jobs, the distractions, the empty promises of a system designed to break us. You reminded me what actually mattered. Love. Family. Fighting for something real. And I would make every sacrifice all over again if it meant having you as my daughter.

I just wish I could have done more. I wish I had been able to fight harder—for you, for your future, for the world I wanted you to have. But I know now that my time is up. My voice was never going to be enough.

Yours, however, is another story entirely.

I spent my whole life believing that if we just exposed the truth, if we just showed people the facts, they would wake up and change things. But that’s not how power works. They don’t care if we see them. They only care that we don’t stop them.

And that’s what you’re going to have to do, my love.

I hate that I’m leaving you in this broken world. I hate that I can’t be there to guide you through what’s coming. But listen to me—this fight is not yours alone to carry. You are not alone, not really. There are others out there, watching, waiting. People who know that change doesn’t come from begging the powerful to listen. It comes from tearing down the foundation they stand on.

They want you scared. Silent. Small. Don’t give them that.

You have everything you need. More than you know. But if you want a future, if you want anyone to have a future, you will have to burn the old world to the ground. Their power isn’t in their leaders—it’s in their systems, their backups, their safety nets that ensure they always land on their feet while the rest of us drown. Take those away. Make them feel what it’s like to lose.

Start small. Find the cracks. Pull at the threads. And never, never let them make you forget what you are fighting for.

A wildfire doesn’t begin as an inferno. It starts with a single spark. And baby bird, you are that spark.

I only wish I could be there to see it.

I hope—no, I know—that one day, when your time here is done, Your mother and I, we’ll find each other and you again. Until then, I will be with you in every step you take, in every impossible choice, in every fire you light.

And I will always love you.

Dad

Raven let out a slow, shuddering breath, her fingers tightening around the letter. Her father’s words settled into her bones like iron—heavy, unyielding. He was gone. The last tether to her old life had been severed. And she was utterly, devastatingly alone.

She looked at him one last time, his face finally at peace, his body framed by the mementos of his best work. He had fought for a future that would never come. But maybe, just maybe, she could be the one to finish what he started.

A buzzing in her pocket pulled her back. The damned nursing line. The ones who were supposed to be here. The ones who were supposed to help.

She ripped the phone out of her pocket and answered without preamble. “Where were you? You were supposed to be here tonight.”

“Ms. Marlowe, I apologize, but your father’s insurance has been canceled. We cannot provide service unless you can pay upfront. We require a prorated payment of two thousand dollars to dispatch a nurse and continue care.”

Raven felt something inside her snap. A deep, seething rage coiled tight in her gut.

“A bullshit racket,” she spat. “He paid into your system his whole damn life, and the second there’s nothing left to take, you cut him off? He died alone, and you let it happen.”

“Ma’am, I’m sorry for your loss, but in order to collect the medical equipment, his account must be brought current. Late fees will accrue daily until the balance is settled. I can dispatch a medical examiner for collection of the deceased.”

A cold, empty laugh bubbled from Raven’s throat. That was it, wasn’t it? Every last piece of this world was designed to drain you, bleed you dry, and then charge you for the privilege of dying.

“Fuck you,” she whispered.

“Ma’am, I’m going to have to terminate this call and report your threats to local law enforcement—”

Raven hung up. The time for screaming was over. The time for action had begun.

Her father was right. The professor was right. This world had no future. Not for her. Not for anyone. And if she wanted to survive—if she wanted to make sure no one else lived through what she had—then she would have to burn the whole damn thing down.

She looked at her father again, lying there in the dim glow of the streetlights filtering through the blinds. He looked like an ancient warrior, surrounded by the tools of his war. His laptop clutched to his chest like a shield, his awards scattered like weapons of a lost battle.

A Viking funeral.

She moved with eerie calm, dousing the bed and carpet in the flammable cleaning solution meant for his medical equipment. The flames would consume everything—the pain, the loss, the past. She would not let them turn him into another forgotten casualty of this broken world.

She grabbed her backpack, slinging it over her shoulder, and pulled the fire alarm. The wail of it filled the apartment complex as she stepped out, watching the chaos unfold.

Then, as she reached for her bag, she felt the unexpected weight. Too heavy. Too solid.

Her breath hitched as she unzipped it and saw the black, carbon-fiber brick inside.

She turned it over in her hands, her pulse hammering in her ears. A single blue-white dot appeared on the surface, blinking in three slow pulses. Then, text flickered across the top:

{Raven Marlowe, I am Phoebe. You are in immediate catastrophic danger. Evacuate the premises immediately. Then, put in your headphones. We have a critical, time-sensitive task to complete.}

Raven swallowed hard. She stuffed the device back into her bag, pulled up her hood, and walked out into the smoke-filled night.

Let the past burn.

Let the future begin.

For the first time in longer than Raven could remember, she awoke from her nap with her father feeling rested. No nightmares. No sudden awakening into a panic attack. No dreams where her father was unable to see or hear her—where she felt like a ghost in her own home. She had lost herself in the fragile peace of that moment, but as she glanced out the window, the orange halide glow of the streetlights bleeding through broken blinds brought her back to reality.

“Shit, I shouldn’t have slept,” she hissed under her breath, berating herself as she noticed the time. “I’m going to be late.”

She stood, whispering to her still-slumbering father. “I’ll be back soon. I have to meet Dr. Vance. I’ll call the insurance company when I get home, I promise.” Her voice faltered at the thought of dealing with them again, but she pushed it aside.

Grabbing her black hooded puffer jacket from the back of her desk chair, she hurried out the door, letting it click shut softly behind her.

The Hill wasn’t far, just a neighborhood up the slope of Broadway from her apartment, but the jog left her breathless. Beads of sweat dotted her forehead despite the chill in the night air, and an icy trickle ran down her back as she reached the crosswalk.

There he was, Dr. Vance, sitting at a table in the cafe’s large front window. His familiar smile as he exchanged a word with the waiter briefly calmed her racing mind. Relief washed over her. Good, I didn’t miss him.

She stepped into the street, her pace quickening. But a sudden commotion in the cafe froze her mid-step. Five men in plain clothes emerged from the rear of the cafe. Their movements were sharp, practiced—predatory. One flashed a badge to the other customers while two of them grabbed Dr. Vance by the shoulders, yanking him to his feet.

The cafe erupted in chaos. A young man, likely a fellow student, stood to intervene, only for one of the agents to swing around and draw a gun, aiming it directly at his face. The student raised his hands and backed away, pale with terror. Phones appeared in trembling hands, but the agent with the badge pointed menacingly at the onlookers, silencing them. A woman screamed.

Raven’s breath caught in her throat. She darted into the shadows of a narrow pedestrian path between buildings, crouching low. Her hands trembled as she fumbled for her phone. She plugged in her headphones, launching the hearing assistant app she had used earlier. Then, pressing record, she aimed her phone’s camera at the unfolding scene.

Through the screen, it felt unreal, like something from a documentary her father might have covered. The detachment helped—barely.

The agents dragged Dr. Vance out of the cafe, shoving him onto the sidewalk. His glasses slipped from his face, skittering across the concrete. Vance instinctively reached out for them, one of the agents, much younger than the others, and dressed not in the usual polo shirt and windbreaker but more like a fellow student, wearing a black hoodie with Meme Lord printed across the chest and khakis, and a thick-framed black pair of AI-enhanced glasses that Alexander Cain hawked on his social media site. But there was something odd, something Raven couldn’t quite make out behind his ear—some sort of wet-wired antenna, one of those second-gen mind-link implants. Yet, despite his age, he seemed in command—the leader. He stepped forward and crushed the glasses beneath his boot deliberately, twistingly.

Dr. Vance winced, reaching for his hand where the agent had stomped on it moments earlier. Blood smeared his palm.

“Where is it, Elias?” the kid demanded, Raven not seeing him being any older than 24, his voice cutting through the night air. “We know you have it. You smuggled it out of the lab.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dr. Vance said, his voice shaking but defiant. “We had setbacks. The project wasn’t ready.”

The kid agent’s lip curled into a mocking smile. “Still clinging to your lies?” He gestured to the others, who seized Vance under the arms and began dragging him toward the alley. Raven’s heart pounded as she crept further into the shadows, her phone shaking in her grip.

The alley was dimly lit, the sickly yellow light from a single bulb casting distorted shadows on the walls. Raven crouched lower, angling her phone to catch every detail.

“Let me be clear,” the leader said, his tone venomous. “This is not the world you think it is, Elias. Constitutional rights? Protections? Those are relics of the past. You should have cooperated when we gave you the chance. It’s our world now...”

Dr. Vance laughed—a hollow, bitter sound. “I know exactly what this world is now. But let me tell you something, Kid. History doesn’t favor men like you.” He coughed, spitting blood onto the pavement. “I don’t have your device. It’s gone. Handed off to someone you’ll never find. And it’s already in motion. Whatever you’re trying to stop? You’re too late.”

Raven’s stomach churned. Was he bluffing? She had no idea what he was talking about. Did he mean her?

The agent’s grin faltered, replaced by a cold, calculated fury. “Too late, huh?” he said, raising his gun. “Then you’re useless to us.”

The shot echoed down the alley, cutting through the night like a blade. Dr. Vance crumpled to the ground, his blood pooling beneath him. Raven’s scream caught in her throat. She stumbled back, clutching her phone like a lifeline, her breaths shallow and ragged.

The agents searched Vance’s body and briefcase with mechanical efficiency, finding nothing. “Search his house. And the lab,” the leader barked. “We’re not leaving empty-handed.”

They disappeared behind the cafe into the night, leaving Vance’s lifeless body in the alley.

Raven stayed frozen for what felt like an eternity, the phone still recording in her hand. Finally, her legs obeyed, and she sprinted down the pedestrian path, the dark Boulder night swallowing her whole. Hopelessness pulled her under the surface she was so desperately trying to stay afloat in, but now she had no doubt that the Phoebe device would be in the hands of the agents in no time. The one thing the most brilliant man that Raven had ever known thought was the only chance for a future would no doubt soon enough be reverse-engineered and then used to make things worse.

For the first time, Raven questioned whether it might be easier to just check out, to remove herself from the game, to spiral off of this mortal coil of hers.

Writers have always served as society’s mirrors, capturing the fears, anxieties, and upheavals of their time. In moments of great political and cultural unrest, storytelling becomes both a tool and a responsibility—one that often comes at a cost. History tells us that those who challenge power through their words can become targets themselves. But even in the face of danger, we must continue to write. We must tell stories that cut to the emotional core of our era, that acknowledge the hurt, the outrage, and the hope that still lingers.

There is no doubt that we are living through a historic and deeply unsettling time in America. We have watched the foundations of our democracy shaken, institutions compromised, and those once tasked with holding power to account reduced to obedient lapdogs, wagging the American tail faster than anyone could have imagined.

I no longer consume mainstream media—it has been bought, sold, and compromised. I encourage you to do the same. I have also left social media, a machine built to exploit human dignity for profit. I urge you to consider doing the same. We must stop feeding the billionaire beasts whose unchecked power our complacency has nurtured.

As many of you know, I have stepped away from journalism and political nonfiction. Not because the fight isn’t worth having, but because I no longer believe the pillars of journalism stand as they once did. I refuse to be part of a system that no longer protects the truth. But that doesn’t mean I have stopped writing. Writing is the one thing in this chaotic world that I can control. It is how I process, resist, and document. And I have chosen to do so through fiction—fiction that eerily resembles the world we are living in now.

The publishing industry, much like journalism, is in upheaval. Writers everywhere are scrambling to find new ways to share their work and reach readers. In response, I am taking a different path.

What is They Knew?

They Knew is my newest novel—one I have been pouring everything into daily as the world unfolds into this new nightmare. It is the culmination of years spent honing my craft, improving my storytelling, and dedicating myself to the literary arts. This is what happens when a journalist who no longer trusts the system turns to fiction to make sense of it all.

To ensure this story reaches people in real time, I have decided to serialize They Knew here on Colorado Switchblade.

Each week, I will release a new chapter (approximately 2,000 words), accompanied by a hand-drawn illustration. These chapters will be available immediately to paid subscribers and will remain paywalled for two weeks before being unlocked for all readers—because while I believe in valuing my work, I also believe that everyone should have access to stories, especially in times like these.

Paid members will also have the opportunity to comment, engage, and offer feedback as the story progresses—helping shape the discussion around the themes within They Knew.

I have also created a dedicated section within Colorado Switchblade for this serialized release, so you can always go back and catch up.

What Happens If the Novel Gets Picked Up?

If They Knew is acquired by a major publisher, I may be required to remove the serialized chapters. In that case, subscribers will have to wait for the official book release. But until that happens, this story will unfold here, week by week, shaped by the world we are witnessing in real-time.

This Project Needs You—Help Spread the Word

If this story resonates with you, if you see yourself in its pages, if you feel the weight of this moment in history pressing down like I do—then I need your help.

They Knew is more than just a book. It’s a reflection of everything we are going through. It is a way to process, to fight, and to remember that we are not alone. But to truly make an impact, this project needs readers. It needs people willing to help amplify it.

So I’m asking—no, I’m begging—please share this with your friends, your family, your community.

Email it to someone who needs to hear these words.

Post it in the few remaining online spaces that still allow meaningful discourse.

Tell people about it over coffee, at work, or during late-night conversations when the weight of everything feels unbearable.

Because if this story connects with you, then chances are, it will connect with someone else, too.

Expanding Into Graphic Novels

In addition to They Knew, I am beginning to explore another storytelling medium—graphic novels. I plan to adapt some of my other storylines into web-based graphic narratives, and possibly, in time, They Knew itself. This is a long-term goal, and it will take time to rebuild my artistic practice, but I believe graphic storytelling has the potential to reach new audiences in ways traditional prose cannot.

A New Focus: Fiction as Resistance

While I will still occasionally cover critical local news, my primary focus from now on will be fiction. Because, in many ways, fiction allows for a deeper truth. It has the power to connect us in ways that journalism no longer can. Through They Knew, I hope to remind people that they are not alone in their dread, their pain, or their struggle to hold onto hope.

This is where my voice will be. This is where the fight continues.

But I can’t do it alone.

So please—read. Share. Talk about it.

Together, we write our way through the dark.

~ JVT

They Knew

By Jason Van Tatenhove

Chapter 1

The coffee maker sputtered its last gasp, filling the apartment with the bitter smell of burnt grounds. Raven Marlowe didn’t move. She stayed hunched in her rolling desk chair, chin on her knee, staring through the bay window at the trembling aspen tree outside. Golden leaves danced in the sunlight, oblivious to the fact that her world was crumbling.

Her jaw clenched again, bringing back that familiar overused muscle pain. She rubbed the sides of her jaw, trying to relax the knots on either side. Today should have been overcast—dark, ominous, the kind of day that fit the decision she had to make. The air should have been thick with mist, not the crisp chill of autumn, and the sky should have mirrored the knot twisting in her gut. But no, nature had decided to rub it in. She absentmindedly started to trace the doodled lines of computer code that spiraled across the top of the desk she sat in front of—she always seemed to draw these lines of "doodlecode," as she playfully referred to the drawings she compulsively made when lost in her head.

Today, Raven would walk into the lab she loved, look her professor in the eye, and tell him she was giving up.

Her gaze drifted back to the window. The sunlight reflected off the leaves in brilliant, golden streaks, like a painter’s brushstrokes defying the somber truth of the moment. Today she had to walk into the place she loved, the university she’d called home since she was sixteen, and tell her professor—the man who had been her mentor and advocate for years—that she was dropping out.

She pressed her hands flat against the desk, grounding herself. She couldn’t think about what came after, couldn’t let the weight of it crush her before she even began.

The man who had welcomed her into the program when she was just a teenager, who had come to her house when her mother died to sit with her grieving father, would understand. He had to.

But the idea of walking into that lab, into the world of algorithms and breakthroughs she had poured herself into, and tearing herself away from it forever… it felt like a death of its own.

The coffee maker sputtered again, releasing its last stream of rich, dark liquid into the pot. Raven walked into the kitchen and poured herself a mug, cradling it between her hands, softly breathing in the beloved aroma and savoring the feelings and memories of better mornings it brought with it. The mug’s warmth seeped into her palms, but couldn’t touch the chill in her chest.

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, staring at the steam curling from the cup. Today wasn’t just about her dreams—it was about the man behind that door down the hall. who had given everything to and then sacrificed everything for her. Returning the favor was the least she could do, but that sense of duty didn’t make the reality any easier. She had to wake her father—once a giant of strength and brilliance in her eyes—and clean that stinking, repulsive, most personal of messes his illness left smeared and burning across his lower half. No one else would help.

Her father had given up everything for her—a career, a future, a place among the greats. And now, it was her turn to give up everything for him.

A knock rattled the front door, startling her. Visitors were rare these days. Setting her coffee down, she opened the door cautiously.

Standing there was Caleb Winslow, his sandy blond hair tousled by the breeze, his glasses slipping down his nose. He balanced a laptop bag over one shoulder and held a coffee cup in his hand. “Hey,” he said, his easy smile faltering when he saw her face. “Bad time?”

Raven blinked, caught between the pull of her heavy thoughts and the surprise of seeing him. “Caleb? Yeah, it actually kind of is. What are you doing here?”

“I was in the neighborhood,” he said, his smile returning. “Thought I’d check in.” He held up the coffee cup, the logo of a local café scrawled across the side. “Bribery. Figured you might need it.”

She almost laughed but stopped herself. “You don’t have to—”

“I wanted to.” He paused, his gaze flicking toward the closed door at the end of the hall. His smile softened, as if he wanted to say more but thought better of it. “How’s your dad?”

Her throat tightened. “Not great… I need to handle things before I head to the lab. But listen, I do need to talk to you later. Will you be around?”

Caleb’s grin returned with a hint of his usual drama club flair. “For you? Always.” He swept his hand theatrically. “Whatever you need.”

His grin was disarming, and for a moment, it worked. A small smile tugged at the corner of her mouth as she imagined a world where she wasn’t carrying everything alone. Where she could let him in—not just through the door, but into her life.

It was a dangerous thought, letting him in. A risk she couldn’t afford to take now.

Her father’s groan shattered the fragile moment, dragging her back. It cut through the air like a jagged blade, sharp and raw, pulling her into the dark reality waiting down the hallway. The melody of her childhood had twisted into something unrecognizable—raw, guttural, filled with pain.

Raven’s smile vanished, her shoulders stiffening, jaw tightening against the wave of emotion threatening to surface. The sour scent of sickness and the faint hum of machines seemed heavier now, closing in around her.

“I have to go,” she said, her voice steeling itself for what lay ahead.

Without waiting for his reply, she closed the door, bracing herself for the task ahead. Her father had given up everything for her—his dreams, health, and future. It was her turn to sacrifice, and she would do it for the same reason: love.

Go to Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Raven walked quickly, her head down, the hood of her sweatshirt pulled tight against the biting wind. Each step felt heavier as if the weight of her decision had sunk into her bones. She couldn’t let herself cry—not yet. Not until she’d faced Dr. Vance.

Campus was quieter than usual. Too quiet. Raven’s gut tightened as she approached the lab building. A few men loitered near the doors, dressed in nondescript navy blue windbreakers, polos, and baseball caps, sunglasses hiding their eyes despite the overcast sky. She didn’t recognize them, but their presence felt wrong. Calculated. Watching. She knew immediately that they were agents, one of the new clandestine forces set up by President Trask.

She glanced at the agents stationed outside the lab, their bland uniforms and blank expressions a stark contrast to the frantic energy inside. The message was clear: stay quiet. Don’t speak out or cause trouble—Or you’re next.

Her breath caught as she swiped her fob at the lab door. The usual hum of the building, a mix of murmured conversations and faint mechanical whirs, was replaced by hurried movements and whispered tension. Students clustered in small groups, exchanging anxious glances. Two more men stood against the walls of the main corridor, arms crossed, their gaze sweeping the room.

Raven swallowed hard and pulled out her earbuds, not to listen to music but to activate the hearing aid function. She dialed up the sensitivity on her phone, letting the faint whispers around her filter through.

“...shutting everything down…”

“...taking everyone’s notes, all the files…”

“…didn’t even warn the department. They just showed up…”

Her heart pounded. This wasn’t just some routine inspection.

She kept her hood low as she walked through the lab, avoiding eye contact with the strangers. Her fellow students were rushing about, gathering papers and notebooks, their faces pale. The tension in the room was suffocating.

Dr. Vance spotted her from his office—a glass enclosure at the back of the lab—and motioned urgently. His usual calm demeanor was gone, replaced by a sharp, almost frantic energy.

“Raven,” he said as she stepped inside. He locked the door behind her and pulled the blinds down over the glass walls. His hands were trembling. “Thank God you’re here. We need to talk.”

“Doc, wait,” she said, her voice cracking. “I have something to tell you first.”

His brow furrowed, but she pushed ahead, her words spilling out. “I have to leave. I’m dropping out. Dad—he’s…he needs me full-time. His insurance…they won’t cover his treatment anymore. I’m so sorry. I—I know I am letting you down, but I can’t do this anymore. I have to take care of him.”

Vance’s expression softened, but only for a moment. He reached for her shoulder, squeezing it briefly. “I understand. Your father needs you. But, Raven, listen to me. This might actually be a blessing in disguise.”

She blinked, confused. “What do you mean?”

Vance leaned closer, his voice dropping to a whisper. “They’re shutting down the program. Everything. They’re afraid of what Phoebe could become, what she could accomplish. They’re seizing the lab, taking the servers, the notes, the research—all of it. And anyone involved? They’re… let’s just say they’re under scrutiny. You leaving now might keep you off their radar. I’ll make your paperwork look like you’ve been off the program a little longer.”

Raven’s stomach sank. “Shutting it down? Why?”

“Because they’re afraid. Afraid Phoebe might actually work. Might disrupt the systems they’ve spent decades…generations building.” His voice cracked with something between anger and despair. “I’ve done what I can. The base code—it’s safe. But it’s not in the AI cluster anymore.”

“What do you mean?” Raven asked, her voice shaking.

Vance glanced toward the blinds, the tension in his movements sharpening. “I isolated the core code. Took it offline. It’s safe and undetectable in a self-contained, limited system. But this is just the beginning. You’ll have to initialize her, imprint her on you, and find the other updates to her. I’ve hidden them where only you can find them. Each piece has a clue to the next. When she’s whole, she’ll be more powerful than you can imagine—but you’ll need to teach her, Raven. She’s more than code, Raven. She’s someone—and she’ll need you just as much as we all need her.”

He turned toward her bag, casually zipping it closed as he spoke louder, his voice almost theatrical. “Meet me tonight. Seven o’clock. The coffee shop on the Hill. You know the one. I’ll bring the device.”

The sudden shift caught Raven off guard, but before she could question him, the sound of pounding on the office door made them both jump.

“Dr. Vance!” a voice barked. “Open up. Now.”

Vance straightened, his expression hardening. He pulled her up by the shoulder, guiding her toward the door. “You need to leave. Right now,” he hissed.

“But—”

“Go,” he snapped, louder now, clearly for the agents to hear. “I’ve said everything I needed to. I’ll bring it tonight.”

Raven nodded, her breath catching as he unlocked the door. The moment it opened, the agents stormed in, grabbing him roughly. She slipped out behind them in the chaos that followed.

“Dr. Elias Vance, you’re being detained for questioning regarding suspected violations of the Federal Technology and Security Act,” one of the men growled.

Raven didn’t look back. Her heart pounded as she pushed through the crowded lab, ignoring the stares of her classmates. She walked quickly down the hall, past more agents heading toward the lab. As she stepped outside, the cold wind hit her like a slap, snapping her back to reality.

Each step away from the lab felt like another tie that held her life together since her mother’s death breaking. The weight in her bag was more than just physical—it carried the echo of Vance’s words, the urgency of his plea. She didn’t know what lay ahead, but the enormity of it pressed against her, unyielding.

She didn’t stop walking, her mind racing.

Go to Chapter 3

Chapter 3

The crowd gave her a fragile sense of cover, but the tension in her chest didn’t ease. Her mind raced as she glanced over her shoulder, the reality sinking in: if they could seize everything and treat a tenured professor like Dr. Vance as disposable, they could do it to anyone. Including her.

She felt more alone than ever. She’d always had her father and the professor—two constants in a turbulent world. But now? The fear of losing both wrapped around her like a vise. Forcing herself to focus, she quickened her pace. Her father needed her. She had to get home, check on him, and prepare for the nurse’s visit she’d begged for the night before.

As Raven reached her apartment door, the weight of the day pressed down on her shoulders. Unlocking it, she stepped inside and was immediately met by the stale, heavy air of the small space. The scent of sickness hung in the room, a sour reminder of her father’s condition. She cracked the window above the sink, letting in the cool autumn breeze, and took a moment to gather herself. The panic from the lab felt like a distant storm now, replaced by the suffocating weight of her responsibilities.

Taking a deep breath, Raven headed to her father’s room. She pushed the door open, the faint hum of medical equipment greeting her like an unwelcome guest. The room was dark, illuminated only by the muted glow of a monitor. She crossed to the nightstand, flicked on the bedside lamp, and turned to see her father stirring.

“Raven?” Jamie Marlowe’s voice was hoarse but carried a warmth that momentarily cut through the gloom. “How was your day at school, love?”

“It was fine, Dad,” she lied, forcing a smile. “How are you feeling?”

His gaze drifted to the walls, where framed articles and awards for excellence in investigative journalism hung—a testament to the life he’d built and lost. His lips curled into a faint smile as he looked at Raven, his greatest achievement. But the moment faded as quickly as it came, and he sighed deeply.

“Let me get your meds,” Raven said softly, moving to the nightstand. As she sorted through the pill bottles, Jamie’s expression grew distant, his voice tinged with regret. Her hands froze as she counted the pills left in the bottle. This was it—his last dose. The truth hit her like a blow to the chest, all the pleading, yelling, and tear-choked begging flashing through her mind. None of it mattered. No amount of fighting could change the inevitable. The system had decided her father’s fate, and she was powerless to stop it. It didn’t matter that if they had enough money, this disease could be cured, that even beyond that, they could make his passing so much more comfortable. But they won’t; there just isn’t enough profit to justify it.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he said, his words heavy. “Sorry for the world you’ve inherited. I tried—I really did—but it was too big, too broken. Even when I had a voice, it wasn’t enough. The system was already racing toward the cliff.”

“Dad—” she began, but he held up a hand, his eyes locked on hers.

“They knew, Raven.” His voice wavered but grew sharper. “Since the ‘50s. The oil companies, the governments—they had the data. They saw the chaos coming. They knew exactly what their greed would cost the world.” He gestured weakly toward the room, to the hum of machines barely keeping him alive. “They knew, and they didn’t care. They poured fuel on the fire, choking the planet for profit. And now here we are—paying the price they always knew we’d have to pay.”

Tears welled in Raven’s eyes as she listened. She hated seeing him like this, stripped of the fire and strength that had defined him. “Dad, I know you tried. You gave up everything for me—your career, the house, everything.”

His expression softened. “You were worth it. Every sacrifice. But the fight’s not over, Raven. It’s going to take someone like you—someone smarter, braver, with more at stake than my generation did—to do what we couldn’t.”

Jamie’s smile was bittersweet. “You can’t save me, love. They’ve made sure of that. All I want now is peace—a little dignity, a little comfort. To drift off and find your mother. But even that’s too much for them. They’ve stripped us of everything, even the right to leave this world with grace.”

Raven’s voice broke. “I’m sorry, Dad. I—I don’t know what to do anymore. The system…it’s broken.”

He reached for her hand, his grip weak but steady. “You’ll figure it out. You have to. And when you do, don’t just fight the system—burn it to the ground.”

A silence fell between them, heavy with unspoken words. Finally, Jamie shifted, moving the cords and tubes that snaked up his arms aside, wincing at the effort, and patting the bed beside him. “Come here, sweetheart. Let’s take a nap like we used to.”

Raven hesitated, then climbed into bed, wrapping her arm around him. His chest rose and fell beneath her hand, and for a fleeting moment, she was six years old again, safe in his arms as he hummed an off-key lullaby. She clung to that memory, grateful for this one last lucid moment with the real version of her father—the man he had been, not the ghost the disease had left behind.