There were flyers postered up for it, all over campus.

MOST GUYS WOULD IGNORE THIS MONEY-MAKING OPPORTUNITY, they read, in white lettering with a magenta drop shadow against a black fill. The only other thing on the flyer was a magenta-on-white QR code square.

When Brendan walked by the first one he read it idly and shook his head as he passed, giving it no more attention than to simply muse “Wonder what that’s all about,” out loud.

“Got to be a scam,” his friend Ryan said breezily. “Or it hacks your phone. It looks like a desperation screen.”

“A what?”

Ryan sighed. “We had a week’s worth of lessons on this a month or two back,” she said. “In Marketing, I mean. The basic idea was that if we know what scams look like we can make our clients’ materials look less scammy.”

“Is that a serious issue?”

“Not for most companies,” Ryan said. “But if you’re the one who pitches something, and it gets greenlit, and people point out it looks like a scam, you’ve lost that account for good.

“Anyway, scammers want to get out in front of as many people as possible, but they don’t want everyone responding. That means putting a lot of work in on people who won’t fall for it. So you kind of screen people out; it’s why those scam emails often have typos in them. That’s a common sense screen; most people will recognise it can’t be legit with this many mistakes. But they’re more likely to get money out of people who don’t have the common sense to see it.”

“Right.”

“The other trick is to get people who are smarter, but you throw them off balance. So you make something urgent, or something where bad things happen if you don’t do it, or both. Or you do what that probably is, which is you taunt people, you make it clear there’s money to make, but you give so little detail that only the desperate will reach out.”

“Makes sense,” Brendan agreed. “So that’s not legit.”

“Probably not,” Ryan answered. “I can’t imagine they’d bother giving us lessons about this if companies didn’t sometimes screw up.”

The next time Brendan saw one of the flyers, he gave it a little more attention. It wasn’t pretty and he didn’t like admitting it, but he was getting pretty close to being out of money. A combination of losing his evening job, not finding any others, and feeling the need to still drink and eat as much as his friends when they went to hang out was a real problem.

But he wasn’t desperate enough to take the chance. He went home.

*

It was another two weeks before he admitted to himself that he was going to cave. The argument he gave himself was pretty simple; he needed the money enough that he couldn’t pass up the chance, and he knew going in it might be a scam, so he’d be prepared for it.

That didn’t mean Brendan was going to admit anything to Ryan. Campus was never entirely quiet, but there weren’t many people out there past one in the morning, so around two he ventured back outside and hurried briskly over to the nearest flyer he remembered seeing.

The link didn’t brick his phone. It was just a form; give his name, his phone number, select a good time for a call. Having worked himself up into a state of deep curiosity and worry, Brendan felt obscurely disappointed at this delay in further progress, but he headed back home and gave in to sleep after filling out the form.

*

“Hello?”

“Am I speaking to Brendan Forbes?”

Brendan sat up. This was about when he’d said would be good for a call, but there was a difference between expecting that call, even answering a call at that time, and knowing this was the one. “Yes. Hello.”

“Good morning, Mr Forbes. I’m Troy, with the Advanced Education team. I gather you’re enrolled at Montgomery U?”

It must have been in the link, Brendan thought. “That’s right.” Troy didn’t sound much older than Brendan, but he did sound like he had it together a lot more.

“A good school for business, from what I hear. And this is about business. Mr Forbes, I imagine you’re wondering a little about the nature of this enterprise?”

Brendan managed to stop himself asking if Troy was reading from a script. Of course he was. “Well, let’s say I need to know more before I sign up.”

“Of course. Let me start off by saying there’s no buy-in. If you join us, outside of the March Madness sweepstakes, nobody from the company will ever ask you for money. Nor do we charge you for the technical equipment you’d be using.”

Well, that was two sets of scams crossed off. “That’s good,” Brendan said.

“We will not ask you to recruit your friends into the company. If you did recommend one of them to us, we probably wouldn’t take them on. But if we did, they wouldn’t be under you, and you wouldn’t receive a share of their commissions. I’m saying it like this, Mr Forbes, because we’ve found that if we simply say ‘We are not a pyramid scheme’, what people hear is-”

“We’re a pyramid scheme,” Brendan finished for him. He was smiling. He still wasn’t sure this wasn’t a scam, and if it wasn’t it might still not be a good opportunity for him. But he had decided that he liked Troy.

“Exactly,” Troy said. “Now, I start off by saying all that because people tend to be checking whether or not we’re legitimate. It’s an unfortunate side effect of the way we recruit.”

“Yeah. I did wonder if this was some kind of screening check.”

“Well, Mr Forbes, in a way it is. But we’re not screening for your gullibility. What we’re looking for - and I will absolutely understand if you drop out at this point - is a certain, shall we say, moral flexibility.”

“Wait. Is this drugs?”

He heard Troy’s laugh, but it didn’t relax him. It was the laughter of a man appreciating a joke he knows he’s the only one to get. “No, far from it. What we do is - and I know these words will make some people uncomfortable - not technically illegal.”

Brendan did feel uncomfortable. But he was also fascinated. And, while he wouldn’t have wanted to admit this, he was feeling financially desperate enough to still be interested, whatever it might be. “Okay, so what is it?”

“Well - can I call you Brendan?”

“Sure.” Since we’re talking about things that are not technically illegal and all.

“You’re still fairly young, I’d bet, but have you ever seen a smart person burn out?”

“I guess.”

“You guess?”

What the hell, Brendan thought. How can I expect him to come through with everything if I sound like I’m holding back? “Sophomore year. One of the harder classes. Someone went to pieces in class one day. Burst out crying and whatever anyone said didn’t help. Eventually the professor asked a couple of her friends to help her get to the counsellor’s office.”

“And how do you know that was burnout?”

“I guess I don’t, if you want, like, full hard evidence. But it was just after some tests had been handed back. And everyone knew - we’re not supposed to know who’s bottom of the class, you know? But you can’t help picking it up. She wasn’t doing well.

“I heard a week or two later that she’d been valedictorian in high school. Then suddenly she’s one of the weakest students in college. I guess that’s burnout.”

“I guess it would be,” Troy said. “Would it surprise you to hear that same scene repeats itself a couple hundred times a year just in the top colleges of the United States alone?”

“Yeah, but… now you’re asking I’m wondering why. It actually stands to reason.”

“That student is no less smart than she was in high school. Probably she’s got a little smarter. Certainly she knows more. But the context has shifted. We don’t see the same thing in most colleges, Brendan, but it’s epidemic in the very top tiers. Can you guess why?”

“Because that’s where people who thought they were hot shit can be right at the bottom,” Brendan said slowly. “And people who just thought they were good…”

“By and large they’re less likely to crack under it,” Troy said smoothly. “Our team has been tracking the phenomenon for about a decade now. We’ve accumulated a lot of data. And I can tell you there are a few factors that go into it.”

Already Brendan had all but forgotten this had been a recruitment call. He was fascinated. “Like what?”

“Most of them were identified early on as gifted kids. Maybe formally, maybe just someone spotted it. But they were told they were special, a lot, and they kept proving it. It becomes an important part of their identity. I have colleagues in the Athletes team who deal with something similar with adults who were marked out as potential top sports stars, scouted for the NFL or MLB. Women’s soccer, more and more now, too. But it hits them later, and it’s not seen as burnout.

“There will always be people who were told something was their destiny as a kid, and built up and built up to fixate on it, and then it turns out their horizon is just a shade too low. At first comes frustration, then fear, then failure. And then disappointment.

“Lastly they often abandon what they did so well. Promising athletes, promising minds, most of all, promising people, broken by falling just short of what the world assured them would be theirs as children. Many of them end up in jobs they hate - to be fair, that’s true for a lot of us - haunted by their failure, resenting themselves and wanting something else.

“What we want you to do, Brendan, is to keep an eye out for anyone like this. And when you identify them, this is the part that’s awkward. We need to place certain software into their life.

“Our on-campus talent scouts are given a USB stick for anyone doing the laptop thing and a drive concealed in a charger block for anyone who uses their phones. All we ask is that you plug them in for thirty seconds, uninterrupted. The software will do the rest.”

Brendan’s jaw had dropped when Troy brought this seeming digression back on topic. He’d been so caught up in Troy’s explanation of the situation he’d forgotten what it was all about. “Uh, isn’t that phone hacking?”

“All data is hashed and sifted through by algorithms,” Troy answered so smoothly this had to be on his script too. “Not AI - it’s not reliable - and not people - they can’t help but pry. No person has access to the information in any meaningful way.”

“What does this program do?”

“Three things,” Troy said. “Firstly, it re-weights the news headlines that get fed to the user’s device, making it more likely they’ll be positive. Second, it monitors the user’s behaviour on their device. When they’re on it, how long for, are they using it to listen to music during a workout or doomscrolling at home. And it sifts through this behavioural information to see whether or not our talent scouts were right.”

“You mean, did we spot a potential burnout-”

“-or did you spot an unattended phone and hope to pick up a finder’s fee, yes.” Troy was definitely smiling; Brendan could hear it in his voice. “The third function is to alert us when you’re right. Then we can contact them and see what we can do to help.”

“So all I do is keep an eye out on people and put something on their phones?”

“That’s right, yes. In return you get a monthly salary of $3,000. Plus $15,000 per accurately identified burnout.”

“Uh, what?”

“I like to put it this way. Your salary is just to make sure you keep looking even when everyone around you is feeling great. The finder’s fee is because sometimes it only looks like everyone around you is feeling great.”

“But… I mean, what can you do for these people?”

“We have a few treatments that seem to be proving effective,” Troy said. “Ultimately, we believe a happy life is better than any of the alternatives.” He paused. “You understand, we won’t tell you anything further, or even identify our organisation, until you’re in.”

Brendan barely hesitated. Three thousand extra dollars a month would make a huge difference, right then, to how much he enjoyed his life. “I’m in,” he said.

*

Over the next few months, Brendan was fairly cautious in doing work for the Rivulus Foundation. Part of that was that he wasn’t really sure what he was looking for.

Part of it, honestly, was probably just that he was only really paying attention to the women on campus. Which was mostly that he was much more inclined to look at women anyway, but also that he felt more confident in his ability to read their emotional state, right or wrong.

Just after the Thanksgiving break he chose his first person to pass on to Rivulus. Emmabeth Mallory, who’d made it to Montgomery from outside its usual selection demographics as part of the historic university’s diversity drives, had earned her place all the same. So far as Brendan could see, she was far from lowest in her classes. Her grades were great.

But she was walking around in a permanent state of exhaustion, and the sweet temper that had made her stand out back when they were both freshmen was gone entirely. She gave off an air of being stretched too thin and about to snap.

He told himself it would do nothing, but he also told himself he had to try. The fact there was a big reward to be had if Rivulus came through didn’t actually cross his mind at the time; he was too busy thinking about how unfair it would be for Emmabeth to burn out.

Around lunchtime, he skulked in her vicinity at the food hall, then sat with his back to her on the next table along. And then he waited, conscious of how many people were nearby, conscious that he might not have the opportunity, conscious above all of sweat forming above his hairline.

Thankfully her phone did not accompany her as she got up to get a refill, and he was able to turn and take it from her table without being unobserved. He had the fake charger ready in his other hand and clipped the table into place; almost immediately afterwards he was counting quietly in his head, trying not to overrun thirty.

As he’d expected, Emmabeth was already back at the table by the time it was safe to unplug the phone. He fumbled it, dropping the fake charger on the floor, and was oddly relieved that he wasn’t going to be called upon to fake that convincingly. Bending down, he placed her phone on the floor and slid it back toward her. Then he straightened back up and waited, tense, until he heard her cluck her tongue in annoyance and mutter “How did you get down there?”

Brendan didn’t relax much for the next week, no longer nervous he’d get in trouble for swiping her phone but on tenterhooks to find out what would happen. Almost exactly a week to the day later he saw her walking across campus, smiling at her phone, and it took him a surprisingly long time to remember the last time he’d seen Emmabeth not frowning; only when he saw her not doing so did he realise just how much he’d expected to see frustration on her face.

Still, one smile did not a change make, and he was actually surprised when his bank called him to apologetically inform him that a surprisingly large single payment had been deposited into his account, and could he please confirm that it was expected and therefore not the first step in some unusual fraud?

He knew then that Rivulus’ software had agreed with his assessment, and felt the tension of not knowing leave his body. He made a point of paying attention to Emmabeth over the next while, wondering if he’d see one of the moments where she was in contact with one of the people at Rivulus who helped with all this.

He couldn’t deny being curious, though his bet was simply that they got counsellors involved somehow. The moment where they reached out to offer help seemed like it’d be awkward as anything; he was very glad he had nothing to do with that side of the Foundation.

The smile appeared only irregularly for the first while, but it grew larger and lasted for longer every time it appeared, and well before they broke up for Christmas, Emmabeth seemed to be the most cheerful member of the classes they shared; Brendan could even hear her giggling to herself in lectures from time to time. And before she went home, she missed an afternoon’s classes and returned the following day with her hair cut and re-styled, all the signs of benign half-neglect gone, as well as a sparkling manicure, the pink glittery varnish catching the light more than Brendan would have expected.

She came back from Christmas break a surprising blonde, and for all that the weather was too cold to dress immodestly Emmabeth seemed to have started to make an effort, most notably a dark pink top that turned out on closer inspection to be a dark sleeveless, low-cut number with a sheer overlayer in deep pink that also added sleeves and fabric up to her neck, with the result her arms and cleavage were strikingly obvious.

At first Brendan just wrote that off as who Emmabeth was when she wasn’t feeling overpressured, and the fact was her results were still good - in fact, while he hadn’t tracked them in detail before installing the monitor on her phone, he thought they might be better than before.

He also didn’t think much about the fact Emmabeth now seemed to be dating a footballer, an artist, and a physicist - she was much more eyecatching than she had been while angry, withdrawn, and grey, after all.

It was Brianna who tipped the scales.

In the last few weeks of the last year, he’d been looking more actively than ever for candidates, and the only thing that had slowed him down was a vague fear that Rivulus would monitor his hit-rate for real burnouts and might revoke the job if they thought he was just plugging the software into any phone or laptop he got access to. In the three or four days before Christmas vacation started he’d tagged phones belonging to Cinnamyn, Eliza, and Brianna, and he’d had two payments over the vacation.

The biggest signal over Brianna had been that she’d stopped showing her face on campus outside classes entirely, disappearing in between them. Brendan and others had assumed for a while she was spending time with her boyfriend or working every hour her job would offer her, and it had taken a while for him to confirm there was no boyfriend and no job outside the evening.

Brianna was already smiling and giggling more before she started hanging around on campus outside study hours again, and therefore she was quite advanced down Rivulus’ treatment before Brendan saw her.

And she, too, had overhauled her wardrobe - in her case going for thick winter leggings and a so-tight-you-could-see-everything cashmere sweater, both in a pink that was either hot or simply bright, depending on where you personally drew the line - and started wearing makeup, or at least wearing makeup that Brendan noticed.

He just didn’t believe that two different young women would have the exact same response to a simple counselling session.

Brendan found himself worrying about them both, and about whichever of Cinnamyn and Eliza he’d been paid for, and about Jacqui and Martina, both of whom he’d uploaded to in that first week back.

He didn’t act immediately - didn’t quite see what he could do - but after a couple of days going back and forth about it in his head, he called Troy’s number.

“Brendan? Good to hear from you. Are you keeping an eye on your referrals?”

“Uh, right,” he said. “Two of them anyway. I… was concerned.”

“Ah.” Brendan could hear the amusement in Troy’s voice again. “Yes, I can imagine. Shall we discuss?”

“What’s - this isn’t therapy, is it.” It wasn’t a question.

“Nothing so ineffective, no. Once we confirmed your referrals were in need of support, we activated the pipeline.”

“Which means what, exactly?”

“I was just coming to that. The software implants subliminals through the device. Interestingly, the technology was originally designed for behaviour modification, but that research was shelved when they discovered that behaviour modification was actually a side effect of its real primary function. Which, to save you asking, is psychological modification.

“These young men and women have been primed by upbringing so that when they hit a particular wall - academic, in our team’s case, but sport does it for some, careers do it for others, even close relationships can do it, whatever that person is primed to consider important, if it starts to crumble around them, they crumble with it.

“There doesn’t seem to be a way to remove this issue entirely - but what we can do is run this process. The behaviour modification is in line with the psychological changes that prompt it, and once we make contact, we will support them with any, shall we say, physical limitations that might lead to a different kind of burnout entirely.

“The term is ‘bimbofication,’, just so you know.”

“Wait.” Brendan was frowning. “You’re making them into bimbos?”

“Bimbos don’t burn out,” Troy said. “They just keep getting better.”

“This can’t be right. Emmabeth’s grades are amazing.”

“She might stay that way. But she’s not worried about them anymore. Often you’ll see people improve at that point. But you noticed other changes, right?”

“Definitely,” Brendan agreed, and then marvelled at the emphasis he’d put on that. Certainly he’d enjoyed looking at Emmabeth more lately, but…

“So by the time she exits the pipeline, she’s going to be very happy indeed. And her focus may not be where it was before. That doesn’t make her less of a person or anything like that. But it will make her happier.”

“So… what kind of career does she have?”

“We don’t decide for her, Brendan. That’s for the buyer to settle.”

“The - what?”

“The other bit of conditioning Emmabeth - it is her you’re most concerned about? Right - will be receiving in the pipeline pushes her gradually toward obedience. But not, of course, to just anyone. That would rapidly cause problems.”

“So what are you saying instead?”

“They’ll find a dating app installed on their phone. And whatever profile they put on it, whatever pictures they take and messages they send, will push our customers to make offers. Once someone wins the auction…”

Brendan sat there for a long moment. “That’s messed up. I don’t know that I need to be part of this.”

“Well. that would be a shame.”

“Oh, yeah? Why? Are you going to threaten me?”

“I don’t know what we’ve done that gives you the impression we stoop to threats,” Troy said. “Truth be told I was waiting for your call today. Good finders always pay attention afterwards, and you always ask questions. Same thing happened with me six years ago.”

He paused. “So… let me be clear. When you’re not much older than you are now you’ll see a lot more burnouts, and you’ll also see a lot of people who haven’t burned out but their job keeps them in a sustained place of frustration and anger.” Brendan couldn’t help but think of Brianna. “Those people look around for other ways to be, and a surprising number of them choose to abandon their intelligence and play up their sexuality. The gifted kid to bimbo pipeline was well established before Rivulus was ever founded. But it usually involves trauma, frustration, tears. We believe our approach is better.

“But that’s something you probably won’t start to see for yourself for a few years, at least in Advanced Education. Once you do it might explain some weird stuff you registered about adults in your life as a kid and never properly understood. But that doesn’t help you now.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“And like I say, Brendan, you’re a good finder. You haven’t tried to scam us. You’ve been careful in your selection. I’d guess you’ve probably skipped a couple of people you thought should probably be treated, but weren’t sure about. Am I right?”

Brendan didn’t say anything. He wanted to know where this was going before he committed to Troy’s answers even a little.

“Either way. You’ve got five on the boil now, I’ve just authorised payment for numbers four and five. You’re comfortably on course to hit ten in your first six months. And that means you start accessing our finder perk system.”

“Meaning what?” Brendan blurted, and kicked himself immediately afterward. He was trying not to engage, but it had taken just one juicy hint and he’d folded.

“Well, for example, you can place a reserve on one of your candidates. Get a bimbo version of a friend as a girlfriend who’ll happily do anything she’s told. Or a himbo boyfriend, if you prefer. We have a few others but that’s usually the one people go for first.”

“I’m not sure about this,” Brendan said.

“That’s alright. Take some time to decide, and get back to me when you have. If you want to keep picking new candidates, we’ll keep paying you.” Troy still sounded friendly and cheerful. The only thing that bugged Brendan about that was the feeling that Troy knew already which way Brendan was going to leap. “If you decide you want to place a reserve, text me as soon as you can after you make the upload and we’ll start them on the pipeline no matter what.

“And any other questions, of course, just give me a call. We don’t want to lose you, Brendan. But we’ll respect your choice either way.”

And with that, the line was dead.

Brendan sat back, and thought about Emmabeth, and about Brianna. He thought about Ryan, and the gentle way she’d shot him down, and the way she looked in jeans.

He tried to imagine her growing her hair out long and bottle-blonde, and wrapped in pink, and wondered if he would think she had lost something.

He took a long time to make a decision.