It started with a simple text analysis tool. We called it Emphasis AI. As you wrote, it analyzed your words and identified natural patterns of emphasis. It was based on a theory of how neurons in the brain gave meaning to language. It seemed to make writing more persuasive and engaging, which was a good thing, or so we thought.

At worst, we figured it might make spam and chatbots more persuasive, but that was it. We really had no way of knowing what it would unleash.

My cofounder and I launched the beta on a Monday morning in October and crossed our fingers. It was kind of buggy. It didn't work on every platform. Some people were confused by it. But they used it, more and more of them every day, until it felt like everyone was on our app.

Soon we were able to close our seed round, hire more developers, and eliminate the bugs in the program. That's the part I regret the most. We were too focused on making the app work. My cofounder and I couldn't see how much it was changing the lives of everyone else.

I guess that's when it escaped our control. At first, language just became clearer. Articles were more fun to read, social media posts had more punch, text messages touched people's hearts in ways they never had before. People even started reading books again.

Then we landed the partnership with that brain-computer interface company headed by Elon Musk, Neuralink. They sold these products that basically allowed computers to read your thoughts. Musk wanted to use our algorithms to make sure that the thoughts transmitted to the computers were as clear and crisp as possible.

We were like, sure, more money for us. And at first, there was more money, like, a lot more.

But then, almost overnight, money didn't mean anything anymore. Connected through their computers, people could sense one another's thoughts and feelings instantly. The moment someone needed something or was suffering, others came to their aid. I mean, they actually started sharing.

Some people called it communism, but I was just angry because I had worked so hard for so long and now my money was worthless. Within a week, my security guards had all quit. No one would come and perform repairs on the bunker where I lived in the woods a few hours northwest of New York. The worst was when my sex robots broke down. No one would come and fix them. They told me I had to use the communal sex robots. Yuck.

My nearest neighbor, Barry, was the owner of a hedge fund who had his own bunker. It was a little bigger than mine, but whatever that doesn't matter. One day he told me that his kids, who lived in California, had stopped talking to him. You see, neither Barry nor I used those brain-computer interfaces. Maybe we were old school. Maybe we just didn't trust them. The problem was that everyone else was using them to do basically everything. They were constantly zapping one another with crystalline thoughts and pure emotions. They didn't even use Facebook or Twitter anymore, if you can believe that. How were we supposed to keep in touch with anyone?

That's when Barry and I started to notice what was happening. We would meet up every Tuesday and Thursday to watch the feeds in his bunker. Before the rest of civilization had transitioned to its current hive-mind mentality, Barry had gained access to the police surveillance nets. We could watch what was happening on every street corner in America.

What we saw terrified us.

In Los Angeles, Austin, and Chattanooga, the cameras showed the same thing. People were marching down the streets in columns, carrying things in their arms. When we zoomed in on what they were carrying, we were puzzled. In their hands were boxes, bags, and sometimes even crates. But we couldn't tell what was inside them.

The marching people would carry the boxes and bags to a parking lot outside one of those giant department stores. They would pile everything on the concrete, and then march like robots back to their homes.

Drinking bourbon and eating popcorn, Barry and I would watch what happened to those piles of things. For a long while, they would just sit there. Then, after a few hours, they would turn bright purple, nearly searing our eyes before disappearing.

When Barry asked me where everything had gone, I told him I had no idea.

"But we need to find out," I said.

So we loaded his old Ford Wrangler with supplies and headed to the city. When the skyscrapers of New York appeared on the horizon, we started to feel afraid. The highway leading to New York was empty, except for a few cars parked along the roadside. Even the tall buildings in the distance seemed vacant somehow. A sense of dread filled us at the bridge to Manhattan. I checked my revolver to make sure it was loaded. Then I checked Barry's.

We stopped in front of an old apartment building on the Upper West Side. There was no doorman, so Barry and I just walked through the doors and into the lobby. When Barry hit the button for the elevator, nothing happened. He hit it again. Still nothing.

"Are you kidding me," he muttered.

"What floor does she live on?"

"The twenty-third."

We both sighed.

Then we walked over to the doorway to the stairwell and started the long climb to Linda's apartment. Linda was the analyst that Barry had picked to run his hedge fund before he moved to his bunker in the woods. She was smart, well-educated, and tough as nails.

"The kind of person you want running things," Barry huffed as we climbed past the fifteenth floor.

When we reached her apartment, we set our ears against the door.

"I don't hear anything," Barry said.

"Neither do I," I told him. He turned the knob, and the door opened.

Barry and I looked down the dark entry hall, but didn't see or hear anyone.

We found Linda in the living room, seated on the couch with her husband and two kids. They were just sitting there, staring off, their eyes unblinking and their mouths hanging open. Each of them was wearing a brain-computer interface.

Barry walked up to Linda, took a quick, anxious breath, and then removed her interface. She blinked, looked at him, and then looked at me and started screaming. When she stopped to catch her breath, she looked at her family and screamed again. Then she ripped the interfaces off their heads. (They screamed too. I swear, my ears were ringing for days afterwards.)

Linda wouldn't tell us anything until her family was in the truck and we were driving over the bridge. Then she told us everything. Apparently, when combined with Musk's brain-computer interface, my algorithms had opened a gateway.

"They made things so clear," Linda told us, "that suddenly we could see what was underneath."

"What was underneath what?" Barry asked, confused.

"Our thoughts," Linda said, "what was underneath our thoughts."

Barry and I looked at one another.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

Linda looked out the window at the empty countryside. "Have you ever wondered how human beings managed to build and do so much in such a relatively short amount of time?" Everyone else in the truck was silent. Linda laughed. "We thought we were the superior species. We believed we were the pinnacle of evolution. It turns out we were just slaves, created by some intergalactic intelligence to toil our lives away here, mining and growing and building the things it needs."

"It's true," her husband murmured. One of her kids nodded.

"Have you ever wondered why we've been mining gold for thousands of years, but never seem to have enough?" Linda asked. "It's because it takes everything."

Barry looked over his shoulder at her. "That was the purple flash we saw when the boxes disappeared?"

"Yes," Linda whispered, looking out the window.

"What was in them?"

"Industrial chemicals, mostly," she said. "Some rare earths. Things it needs."

"How do you know this?" Barry asked. By the way he gripped the steering wheel, I knew he was angry.

"You know everything when you're a part of it," Linda said. Then she didn't say anything else for the rest of the trip to Barry's bunker in the woods.

Maybe this hasn't happened yet. But it might. Emphasis AI is a real thing. So is Neuralink. It's only a matter of time before they show us what lies beneath our thoughts.