4. The Permeable Records

The envelope is on the floor inside her door when she comes back from the bodega with eggs and the kind of cold-brew concentrate that costs four dollars more than it should. Manila, ten by thirteen, GSA-blue franking, no return address she recognizes. The super has slid it under instead of putting it in the box, which means it didn’t fit in the box, which means it’s thick.

Reema sets the eggs on the counter. She takes the envelope to the kitchen table by the window — the one with the view of the back of a synagogue across the airshaft, in the early sun, the brick going pink — and slits it with a butter knife.

Three FOIA responses. Stapled separately. Cover letters paperclipped on top.

She had filed nine.

She lays them out, left to right, in the order she filed them. Two are short — three pages each, mostly the cover letter, the request restated, the regulatory citation under which the bulk was withheld. The third is forty pages. The first two are from the same agency. The third is from a different one. Different letterhead, different signature block, different routing code in the upper-right corner of the cover.

The first two should not be from the same agency.

She filed the first one in April, against a Defense Department logistics directorate, regarding office leases in northern Virginia. She filed the second in early May, against the General Services Administration, regarding the same set of buildings. They had been mailed, per the postmarks, on the same Tuesday. They had been signed by the same name. Henry G. Castellanos, FOIA Officer. The letterhead on the first one is DoD. The letterhead on the second one is GSA. Same officer.

She sits down. She looks at the envelope. She picks up her phone, takes a photograph of the two cover letters laid side by side, AirDrops it to her laptop, and drags the file into the folder her Backblaze is watching. The little arrow turns green.

The cold-brew, she realizes, is still in the bag. She puts it in the fridge.

---

Crown Heights at nine on a Wednesday morning. The Q train rumbles somewhere under Eastern Parkway. Her downstairs neighbor’s kid is being walked to school in the hallway, scuffing one shoe and complaining about the kind of bagel he was given. Reema makes coffee in the Aeropress because the espresso machine she bought during the Verge paychecks now lives on a shelf above the fridge and she has not had the energy to plug it in since March.

She opens the MacBook. The MacBook is a 2019 with a battery the Genius Bar quoted her four hundred dollars to replace. She has not replaced it. She runs it on the wall. The screen has a pixel dead in the lower right that she has trained herself not to see.

She makes a new note in the Obsidian vault. FOIA cluster — Reston buildings. She does this for everything. The vault is on iCloud and the iCloud is backed up to Backblaze and the Backblaze is backed up, in turn, to a small encrypted drive she keeps in the safe at her parents’ house in Edison, because two years ago a Verge colleague had her source list ransomed and Reema watched her cry in a Slack huddle and decided that would never be her.

She types: Castellanos H.G., FOIA officer, signs as DoD/Log Spt Grp and as GSA/PBS-NCR. Same week. Either he’s a contractor seconded to both, or one of the two agencies is a courtesy fiction.

She underlines courtesy fiction. It is a phrase she likes.

The third response, the forty-pager, is from the FBI, regarding a request she had filed in February — long before she had a theory — about any field-office interest in YouTube creator harassment campaigns. The FBI had told her, in pleasant Garamond, that there were no records responsive to her request. The forty pages were the bureaucratic body around that no. Routine. She would have written it off, except that on page twenty-eight, in a paragraph that was otherwise about something else — about a 2019 referral the Bureau had declined to pursue — there was a sentence partially blacked out, and the part that was not blacked out read:

…coordination with private-sector partners under the terms of the ▆▆▆▆ Pact, consistent with prior practice, has been deemed sufficient at this time.

The word Pact was capitalized.

She had not asked about a Pact. She did not know what a Pact would be. The redaction in front of it was four characters wide. Possibly five.

She makes another note. Pact (cap.). Four-char redaction prefix. Unprompted appearance, FBI corpus.

She does not Google it. Not yet. She has a rule, learned at The Verge, about not poisoning her search history before she has the shape of the story.

She drinks her coffee. She gets up and opens the window because the apartment is warm. A pigeon on the sill regards her with the flat indifference of a being who has, in its short life, been hit by a Citi Bike and survived.

She goes back to the table.

---

The other thing is the YouTuber.

She had not come to this from the YouTuber, exactly. She had come to it from a graph. Six weeks ago, on a Saturday morning when she was supposed to be writing the Wired pitch, she had been doing what she did instead of writing the Wired pitch, which was scrolling Social Blade and noticing things. A channel she used to watch — Lampreysong, math guy, soft voice, long videos about anomalous-evidence cases that he approached the way her undergraduate philosophy TA had approached the trolley problem — had collapsed in views, in the week of April fourteenth, by something like seventy percent. Not demonetized. Not removed. Just suddenly invisible in the recommendation graph. His subscribers stayed. His new uploads got a tenth of the views they had been getting the month before.

The same week, two other channels — both of which Reema had clicked on exactly once and never again, both of which were the kind of thing where a man in a basement holds up a printout and yells about reptilian bloodlines — had jumped, simultaneously, from twenty-thousand-view averages to two-million-view averages. Sustained for three weeks. Then plateaued at a new, much higher floor.

She had stared at it for a while. She had downloaded the Social Blade CSVs. She had run a quick correlation in a Colab notebook. The cross-correlation between Lampreysong’s decline and the two crackpot channels’ rise was almost perfect at lag zero.

She had thought: that is not the algorithm doing that. That is somebody doing that.

She had filed the FOIAs the following Monday.

---

She calls Marisol at Wired at ten-thirty, knowing Marisol takes calls before her eleven o’clock stand-up but after she has had her second matcha. Marisol picks up on the third ring.

“Reema.”

“Hi. Quick one. I want to think out loud at you for ninety seconds. Don’t commit to anything.”

“Ninety seconds. Go.”

Reema goes. She skips the channel names. She describes the traffic shape. She describes the FOIA cluster. She describes the same-officer anomaly. She does not mention the word Pact.

Marisol is quiet for a moment after she finishes. Then she says, “Is this a UFO story?”

“It’s a media-manipulation story. There’s a UFO-content angle in that the channels involved are UFO-content channels. But the story is about whether somebody is laundering one kind of internet attention into another kind on purpose.”

“Reema. You know I love you. I have to be careful with the UFO thing. The desk is — there’s a memory here, from the Grusch cycle, where we ran a thing and the comments section ate us for a week. I’m not saying no. I’m saying I need the story to be about the laundering, not about what’s being laundered. Can you write it that way?”

“I can write it that way until I can’t.”

“That’s the right answer. Bring me something I can show Ezra. What’s the next step?”

Reema considers. “There’s a building. I’m going to drive down and look at the parking lot.”

“That sounds like a thing a reporter does.”

“It is a thing a reporter does.”

“Don’t get arrested in Virginia. Their public-records exemptions are wild.”

“I’m going to look at the parking lot.”

“Text me when you’re back. I mean it. Text me from the road, even.”

“I will.”

They hang up. Reema looks at the phone for a second. Marisol has never asked her to text from the road before.

---

She books a car on Getaround for Thursday morning, picks the cheapest Corolla available within walking distance, a white one parked on Sterling Place. She texts her friend Anika — fellow ex-Verge, now at a climate nonprofit — and asks her to do a check-in. Hey. Driving to Virginia tomorrow for a story. If you don’t hear from me by 9pm send the cavalry. The cavalry is my mother. She’s in Edison. I’ll send you her number.

Anika texts back: lol absolutely. you good?

Reema thinks about it.

Mostly, she types. Probably.

She does not sleep well that night. She does not sleep badly either. She sleeps the way she sleeps before any reporting trip, which is in two-hour blocks with the dream content lightly indexed against tomorrow’s logistics.

---

The Corolla smells faintly of someone else’s vape. She picks it up at six-fifteen, takes Atlantic to the BQE, the BQE to the Verrazzano. The sun is coming up on her left over Gravesend Bay and the bridge towers are catching it in a way that always makes her think of being twelve, in the back of her father’s Accord, going to her aunt’s in Princeton. She puts on a podcast — a tech-policy one, not a true-crime one, because she has a private rule about which genres she listens to before which kinds of meetings — and gets onto the Jersey Turnpike at Exit 13.

The drive south is the drive south. Service plaza coffee. The smell of refineries past Linden. The Delaware Memorial Bridge in fog. Past Baltimore the sky opens up. She crosses the Beltway at lunchtime and the I-95 HOV signs flip from informational to threatening. She has not driven the toll lanes before. She pays whatever they ask. The transponder light on the windshield, which is somebody else’s, blinks once each time she passes a gantry.

She takes the Dulles Toll Road west past Tysons, past the exit for the Trade Center, past the long brown sign for the Air and Space annex she has never had time to visit. The exits start getting less branded. Reston Parkway. Wiehle Avenue. She comes off at Sunrise Valley and follows the GPS through a series of cul-de-sacs that are all named after, she notices, indigenous tribes that have not lived in this part of Virginia in three hundred years.

The office park is the kind of office park that is built between 1996 and 2008 and never updated. Glass-and-precast cubes. Lobby directories with raised brushed-aluminum lettering and seven tenants per building. A pond in the middle that is theoretically a stormwater retention feature and that has, around it, a quarter-mile asphalt loop on which two people in business casual are walking, holding paper cups, talking with their heads down.

She parks in the visitor section of Building C. She has dressed for the geography: nice jeans, a linen blazer in a color her sister calls almond, the kind of tote that says I am visiting somebody in HR. She has the recorder app on her phone running in her pocket but she is not going to record audio inside, because she does not know Virginia’s wiretap statutes off the top of her head and Marisol said don’t get arrested.

She crosses the lot and goes in.

The lobby is empty except for a security desk and a Black man in his sixties reading a paperback, who looks up at her with the practiced friendliness of someone who has been doing lobby security since before either of them was born.

“Morning,” he says. The nametag says EDDIE.

“Hi. I was hoping to drop something off at Suite 312? Logistics Support Group?”

Eddie smiles the smile that means no. “They don’t take walk-ins, ma’am. You’d want to call ahead. Do you have a contact name?”

“Henry Castellanos?”

Eddie nods, like the name is plausible and means nothing to him. “I can leave a message at the suite for him. You’d want to leave a card.”

“I’ll come back. Thanks.”

She wanders, deliberately, to the lobby directory before she leaves. Suite 312 — Logistics Support Group, LLC. No website on the placard. Suite 401 and 501 — Sentinel Cartograph LLC. She has not heard of either. She memorizes the suite numbers and walks back out into the sun.

She does not go back to the car. She sits on a bench by the pond, ostensibly checking her phone. The bench has a view of the front of Building C and of the exit from the parking garage. It is twelve-twenty.

At twelve-thirty-one, a woman comes out of the front of Building C with a paper coffee cup and a phone in her hand. She is in her thirties. Her hair is the color of brushed nickel even though she is too young for that color to be natural, and Reema clocks, in the half-second of professional attention she gives anyone she sees coming out of a target building, that the outfit is the kind of outfit that costs a lot of money to look like it cost nothing. A linen-blend something. Loafers that are not loafers. A bag in a leather Reema’s mother would have been able to name from twenty feet.

The woman does not look at Reema. The woman looks at her phone, walks twenty feet, gets into a charcoal-gray sedan with diplomatic-plain plates, and pulls out of the lot toward the Toll Road.

Reema notes the time. She notes the car. She does not write anything down. She gets in the Corolla and she leaves.

She drives home a different way than she came, because that is a thing she has read you are supposed to do, and because she wants to and is allowed to want to.

---

She gets back to Brooklyn at eleven-twenty at night. She returns the Corolla on Sterling Place. The end-trip photos take three minutes. The app charges her a fuel surcharge she does not contest. She walks the four blocks home with her tote on her shoulder and the manila envelope from yesterday in the tote, because she has not been letting the manila envelope out of arm’s reach.

In the kitchen she pours a glass of water and stands at the counter to drink it and the second thing happens.

Her phone is on the counter where she set it. The screen is on, briefly, because she has just touched it. A notification banner is sitting at the top of the screen.

Welcome to NextDoor. Your neighbors in Crown Heights are talking.

She has never made a NextDoor account.

She picks up the phone. She opens the notifications panel. NextDoor is listed. She goes to settings, apps. NextDoor is installed. Installed today, at 3:42 p.m., when she was on the Beltway. The install was authorized from her Apple ID. The Apple ID has two-factor authentication on. The two-factor codes come to this phone.

She opens the App Store. She looks at the install history. NextDoor, today, 3:42. Before that, the most recent install was Lyft, six weeks ago.

She puts the phone down. She picks it up. She turns it over in her hand once.

It is possible, she tells herself, that her thumb hit something in the App Store while the phone was in her pocket on the highway. It is possible that there is some Apple beta feature where apps install themselves based on location proximity to other people who use them. It is possible that NextDoor has a deal with Verizon and her phone got the app pushed silently because she crossed some zip-code boundary.

It is also possible that none of those things explain it.

She thinks about the two-factor. The codes for new app installs from an unrecognized device come to the phone. The phone has been in her pocket all day. Nobody touched the phone.

Unless somebody touched the phone the day before.

She did not put her phone in a Faraday bag. She did not even know what a Faraday bag was, on a practical level, this morning. The phone had been on her kitchen counter overnight. The apartment door has a deadbolt and a chain. The chain was off when she left because she always takes the chain off before she leaves so the door can fully close behind her.

She walks, slowly, through the apartment. The bedroom looks the way she left it. The closet looks the way she left it. The drawer where she keeps her passport is closed in the way she closed it, which is to say not quite all the way because the drawer sticks. Her grandmother’s gold bangles, in their velvet bag at the back of the drawer, are where she left them.

Nothing is missing.

She goes back to the kitchen. She looks at the table by the window where she had laid out the FOIA responses yesterday morning. She had stacked them back up when she went out for the cold-brew. She had put them in the manila envelope. She had taken the envelope with her.

The envelope is in her tote, on the floor by the door.

She kneels down. She opens the tote. She takes out the envelope. She looks at the flap.

The flap had been slit yesterday morning with a butter knife. The slit had run across the top, neat, the way she does it. She had refolded the original glue closure of the flap down, because she has the habit. The flap had been refolded the way she always refolds it, which is with the right corner tucked slightly under.

The right corner is tucked over.

She stares at it. She stares at it for a long time.

It is possible she did not refold it that way. It is possible she did. It is the kind of thing a person can talk themselves into having done or not having done, and she knows this, and she knows that the knowing of it is part of how the thing works on you.

She takes the documents out. She lays them out on the kitchen table in the order she had them in yesterday morning. She looks at them in the lamp she switches on, the IKEA one with the paper shade, because she does not want the overhead on.

The documents are all there. Nothing is missing. The redactions are the redactions she remembers. The forty-pager from the FBI is open to the same page she had bookmarked, with the same dog-eared corner.

On page twenty-eight, in the paragraph about the 2019 referral, the partial redaction is still there. Coordination with private-sector partners under the terms of the ▆▆▆▆ Pact.

She had photographed the page yesterday morning before going to the bodega for the second time. She finds the photograph on her laptop.

In the photograph, the redaction bar is four characters wide.

In the document in front of her, the redaction bar is five characters wide.

She holds the photograph up to the document. She compares them under the lamp. She measures the redaction bar with the edge of an envelope. In the photograph the bar covers the four-character space before the word Pact and ends cleanly before the P. In the document in front of her the bar covers the same space and extends, by maybe a millimeter, into the white space before the P.

It could be the printer. It could be the photograph. It could be the angle she shot it from.

It is not. She knows it is not. She knows it the way she knows the chain on the door, and the way she knows the corner of the envelope flap, and the way she knows, suddenly and with a clarity she has not had about anything in months, that the woman with the brushed-nickel hair coming out of Building C at twelve-thirty-one had not looked at her deliberately and that the deliberateness was itself the look.

She sits at the kitchen table. The clock on the microwave says 11:58. The window above the sink is open an inch and a siren is going somewhere on Eastern Parkway. The pigeon is back, asleep on the sill, head under its wing.

She thinks about the Pact. She thinks about the four-character space and the five-character space. She thinks about her phone, which is on the table next to her, which has, until ninety minutes ago, been the thing she trusts most in her possession.

She thinks about Marisol saying text me from the road, even.

She thinks, for the first time since she began this, that the story she is reporting is also reporting her — that whatever apparatus made the YouTube graph do what the YouTube graph did, and made Castellanos sign on two letterheads in one week, and put the word Pact in a sentence the FBI had no reason to release, has, while she was driving back up the New Jersey Turnpike eating pretzels from a service plaza, taken its first small administrative interest in the fact that she exists.

She does not know what to do with this. She does not have a procedure for it. She has the documents and the laptop and the Backblaze and her mother in Edison and Anika across the river and Marisol at Wired and a half-finished pitch in a Google Doc and a battery the Genius Bar wants four hundred dollars to replace.

She closes the laptop. She does not close the documents.

She sits with her hands flat on the table, on either side of the page with the five-character redaction, and she watches the pigeon on the sill, and she waits, without knowing what she is waiting for, for whatever the next thing is going to be.