Page 35 of Her Last Vow

"But something has happened to that gift over the last several days that I can no longer defend. Our predictive model, the feature so many of you have come to rely on, has become something I never intended it to be. It has become a countdown that some of our users are treating as a challenge instead of information. It has become fuel for people online who would rather sell fear than understand what we built or why. And regardless of what any of that says about the world we're living in, I have to take responsibility for the part my own creation has played in it."

Rachel glanced at Novak, who hadn't moved, his eyes fixed on the screen.

"Effective immediately, I'm suspending the predictive peak algorithm across every Apogee device," Sloan continued. "However, Apogee the app, the health tracking, and the wellness data will continue exactly as it has. But the feature that tells you when your body will reach its optimal state, the feature that has turned so many of your lives into a race against a date on a screen, will be removed later today. I built that feature to help people. I'm removing it because I no longer believe it's helping anyone. And, as some of you may have already seen, it had also become the topic of a terrible series of tragedies."

He continued to look directly into the camera, his expression softening into something that read as genuine, even through a phone screen in a parking lot.

"I know some of you will be angry with me. Some of you built your routines, your goals, even your identities around a number my algorithm gave you. I understand that loss, more than you might think. But I'd rather disappoint you today than let this continue one more day in a direction I can no longer stand behind. Thank you for trusting us. I hope, in time, you'll understand why I couldn't let that trust continue on the same terms. I just ask for patience and trust, and continued support for our amazing Apogee family."

The video ended there, cutting to a static thumbnail of Sloan mid-sentence, his hand raised slightly as if still speaking. Rachel lowered the phone.

"That was good," Novak said after a moment. "Really good. He didn't say murder once. Didn't say killer, didn't say victim, didn't even say death. Just made it about the algorithm being irresponsible, like it's a design flaw instead of four people dead. It makes me think he’d been thinking of this during that sleepless night he mentioned."

"He's controlling the story before we can." Rachel looked back toward the building, the glass doors reflecting the morning sun now, giving nothing away. "If this were about protecting the company, that's a smart move. It gets ahead of Tanner and makes Sloan look like a hero instead of the man being investigated."

"You think that's what it is? Protecting the company?"

"I don't know." Rachel turned the phone over in her hand, thinking about the man she'd just watched deliver that speech, and the man who'd stood in this same parking lot twenty minutes earlier looking like he could barely hold himself upright. "It helps our case, in a way. The predictive data's gone, which means nobody else dies on a scheduled date because of it.”

“Yeah, but the killer may have already compiled a list. They may already know who’s next.”

“Possibly. But this also means Sloan just made himself look responsible and sympathetic in front of everyone who might end up on a jury someday."

"You don't think it's him," Novak said. It wasn't quite a question…not really.

"I don't know what I think anymore." Rachel watched the doors a moment longer. "He's dying. He's exhausted. I've seen what genuine physical deterioration looks like. Hell, I’ve lived through it. But…what I saw in his face twenty minutes ago wasn't performance. But, no…that doesn't clear him. It just means if it is him, he's running out of time to finish whatever this is."

Novak didn't answer. He looked back down at his phone instead, at the four names still waiting on his list, and started dialing the next one.

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

She got there before the line had gotten too long, just like she usually did three mornings a week. It was part of her morning routine, and she’d been keeping it for nearly three years now. The baristas all knew her and she always placed the same order. And when it was available (which it usually was), she took the same seat by the window, angled so the sun wouldn't hit the counter and force her to squint at her phone. The espresso came first, then the lemon Danish. She made the same order every time because consistency mattered. It was the one thing she trusted more than anything else in the world.

Numbers didn't waver just because someone was tired or scared or lying to themselves about how they felt. Numbers told the truth, whether people wanted to hear it or not.

Her phone buzzed against the table before she'd finished her first bite. It was a push notification, then a text from someone on the team, then another. She opened the video that was attached to both without reading either of the messages.

Dr. Elliot Sloan's face filled the screen, backlit by the glass wall of his office, his voice smoothed into something that sounded almost gentle. She watched him talk about burdens and gifts, about a countdown people had turned into a challenge instead of information. And with each and every word, she felt something in her chest tighten.

He wasn't wrong about the panic. He wasn't wrong that people had made a game out of something sacred. But he was wrong about the rest of it. More than wrong, it felt dirty. It felt so stupid. It made her hand go still around the paper cup pressing little indentations all around it.

Effective immediately, I'm suspending the predictive peak algorithm.

She set the phone face-down on the table and looked out the window at the street instead. She watched a man walking a dog past the bus stop, then looked at two women across the way, sitting in front of a small bakery and chatting about something.

She watched all of this, but her mind could not be distracted. Three years of her life sat inside that model…of catching the small errors before they became large ones. Three years of tuning and retuning, something that finally, finally told people the truth about their own bodies instead of the comforting lies their doctors handed them at annual physicals.

And Sloan was going to shut it off because a handful of people couldn't handle what the truth looked like on a screen. When it was spelled out and presented in irrefutable data, apparently things just got too damned real.

His little video message wasn't the part that worried her. Sloan turning off a feature was a business decision, and she understood the logic behind it. His little move was reversible, the kind of thing a board could walk back in a week once the news cycle moved on to something else. What worried her was the calendar invite she'd seen yesterday afternoon, the one he hadn't bothered hiding from anyone with admin access, blocking off an hour next week for something labeled Public Statement — Full Model Review. Whatever it was for, it had been booked at a conference center downtown with press credentials already requested. He wasn't going to stop at pulling a feature. He was going to stand in front of cameras and call the whole model flawed. She just knew it. At the smallest bit of pressure, when the world wasn’t smelling like roses and sunshine, he was going to show just how big of a coward he truly was.

He would call it dangerous. He may even call it flawed or ill-conceived. Or a fraud, the same word Bryce Tanner had been throwing around for a year, except coming from Sloan it would carry the weight of a confession instead of an accusation.

She thought about the users who'd crossed their peak and kept going, the ones whose bodies had simply refused to follow the curve the way they were supposed to. Every one of them was a small tear in the fabric of something she'd spent years proving true. She hadn't started out thinking of it as correcting anything. It had felt, the first time, like closing a data gap, like reaching into a spreadsheet and fixing a row that had been entered wrong.

Renata Pike's numbers had said one thing and her heart had kept insisting on another. And as far as she was concerned, that couldn't be allowed to stand. Not when the model had been so precise about everyone else. Gerald Mott had been the same kind of error, an outlier who wanted to argue with math. She'd stopped thinking of their names after a while and started thinking only of the correction itself, clean and necessary—the kind of work that didn't show up anywhere on a performance review but mattered more than anything else.

Hartley had been easy. She'd built his access herself, routed it through his own maintenance script months before she ever needed it. She’d viewed it as sort of the same way you'd plant a spare key under a mat you'd never actually use unless something went wrong. When Gift and her partner started circling the model team, she'd handed them exactly what they wanted to find: nine single-user queries under a login that had never touched individual predictions until she'd made sure it had. It cost her nothing, and it had bought her weeks. Perhaps more.