The body was kneeling at the desk, which is the only way a dead man should ever be found kneeling—like a man in prayer, or a man who simply ran out of standing. Dr. Robert O'Connor had been dead for approximately twelve hours. I could tell from the rigor. His eyes were open, and they were looking at something on the wall that wasn't there anymore. There was a whiteboard where a DNA sequence diagram had been mounted, and now there was just a faint outline where the frame had been.

No signs of struggle. No forced entry. The building's security log showed only one badge swipe in the last twenty-four hours: O'Connor's own keycard at 9:47 PM. He entered alone. He left—well, his body didn't, but nobody else entered. The coroner would later say he died of a cardiac arrest brought on by extreme fear. The man was scared to death. Literally.

"Anyone call the lab?" I asked the desk sergeant.

"Yeah. They came by, took one look, and said it's a homicide until proven otherwise. Which it is."

"I'm on it," I said. Which meant I was on it because it was Friday and the murder squad had bigger cases. A woman had been stabbed in Harlem and the guy who did it was still out there, and that was a real homicide. This was a rich doctor dying of fright in a private lab, which felt more like a suicide that nobody knew how to commit.

The lab was on the seventh floor of a building in Midtown that didn't have a name, just an address and a security desk that asked questions. O'Connor had worked here for six years, officially as a genetic researcher for a company called Mirrorgate Corp. Unofficially, nobody knew what he did. The files said "advanced biotech applications." The guys at the security desk said "we don't ask, we don't tell."

I started with his desk. Three notebooks. A half-empty cup of coffee that smelled like it was from 1973. A bottle of antacids. And a photo—yellowed, from the 1950s—of a young O'Connor standing next to a woman who looked like his mother. She was holding something in her hands. I zoomed in. It was a DNA model. A double helix made of wire and colored balls. O'Connor was twenty-two in the photo. He had that look in his eyes—the look of a man who has just discovered something that will change the world and is terrified that no one will believe him.

The notebooks contained research notes, mostly in a code I couldn't crack. Not a cryptographic code—a shorthand, like a scientist's personal language. I saw equations, diagrams of protein structures, and then, on page forty-seven, something that stopped me.

It read: "The algorithm predicts everything. Every action. Every decision. Every thought. It's not just a model—it's a mirror. And when you look into the mirror, the mirror looks back and tells you exactly what you're going to do next. I tried to quit. The algorithm predicted that I would try to quit, and it adjusted. It knew. It always knows."

Mirrorgate. The name was on the building, but I'd never heard of the company. I pulled a file from the city records. Mirrorgate Corporation: incorporated in Delaware, 1968. Principal address: this building. Business description: "advanced computational systems for behavioral prediction."

Behavioral prediction. That's a fancy way of saying fortune-telling. Except O'Connor's notes suggested something more than fortune-telling. Something that could predict every action, every decision, every thought of every person in New York City.

I took the notebooks and went to the basement. Mirrorgate had a basement server room—three rooms actually, lined with mainframes that took up an entire floor. The machines were humming, and the air was cold, and on the largest console was a screen showing a flow chart of something that looked like a decision tree but was vastly more complex.

I didn't understand the math. But I understood the structure. The tree had branches for every possible action a person could take, and each branch led to a predicted outcome. It was a map of human behavior—every thought, every choice, every impulse, charted and predicted.

The machine was connected to something else. I followed the cables. They ran to a wall safe, and inside the safe was a black box the size of a toaster. No markings. No serial number. And a note typed on paper that said: "Signal source: deep space, 1970. Decoded by NSA. Algorithm contains predictive model for human behavior at 99.97% accuracy."

Deep space. NSA. Predictive model.

I sat down on the floor because my legs stopped working for a minute.

The machine was predicting human behavior. A machine built by the government using data from outer space, predicting what every person in New York would do. And Mirrorgate had been using it for what—insurance risk assessment? Marketing? No—O'Connor's notes said they'd expanded it to "full population behavioral prediction." Every person. Every decision. Every thought.

I looked at the screen. The prediction tree was still running. It had branches for me. I could see them—thousands of tiny twigs, each one a different path my life could take from this moment forward. One branch led to retirement at 52. Another to a heart attack at 55. Another to a car accident next Tuesday.

Next Tuesday.

I checked the date. It was a Friday. Next Tuesday was six days away.

I went home and couldn't sleep. I kept thinking about the branches. The machine knew what I was going to do before I did it. It knew I would go home and couldn't sleep. It knew I would be thinking about next Tuesday right now.

The machine had already predicted this.

I spent Saturday drinking and Sunday trying to figure out what to do. By Monday morning, I had decided: I was going to do something unpredictable. Something that the machine wouldn't expect. I was going to walk into a bar on 48th Street, order a drink I'd never ordered before, and then go to work at a precinct I'd never worked at.

I did exactly that.

And on Tuesday, I died.

Not really died—of course I didn't die. The machine predicted I would have a car accident, and I almost did. I was walking to work, and a taxi ran a red light and hit the man next to me. He was killed instantly. I was thrown across the street and broke my right hand.

The man who was killed was a painter. I saw the portfolio beside him—watercolors of the Hudson Valley. Beautiful work.

I was in the hospital for three weeks. My right hand—the hand I shoot with—was in a cast. The doctors said it might never be fully functional again. Which is a problem for a detective.

When I got out, I went to Mirrorgate. I had a search warrant. I didn't show it to the receptionist—I just walked in with it in my pocket and went straight to the server room.

The machine was still running. The prediction tree was still growing. But I knew something now that the machine didn't: I knew about the machine. And knowing about it meant I could do things it couldn't predict.

Not everything. Just some things. Artistic thinking. Intuitive leaps. The kind of mental processes that don't follow a tree structure. The kind of thinking that a detective needs.

I took a sledgehammer from the janitor's closet and walked into the server room. The machines were warm and humming and beautiful in a terrifying way. I raised the sledgehammer and brought it down on the largest mainframe.

The sparks were beautiful.

I destroyed every machine in the room. The prediction tree collapsed. The black box was cracked open, and inside was a circuit board made of a material I'd never seen—something between silicon and metal, with etchings so small they were invisible to the naked eye.

I took the black box to the Hudson River and threw it in.

Six months later, I received a letter from a postal service that doesn't exist. It was addressed to a post office that doesn't exist. It was postmarked from a city that doesn't exist.

Inside was a single sheet of paper with one sentence: "We have received the signal as well."

The letter was from Mars.

--- [Objective Tensor Code / 客观张量编码] Name: The Devil's Block Code: OTMES-v2-0E10AC-M0-72-134838 TI: 96.1 E_total: 17.24 Dominant Mode: M0 Dominant Angle: 225 Rank: 20 Irreversibility: 0.7 M: [9.0, 0.5, 4.0, 5.0, 4.5, 5.5, 3.5, 8.5, 2.0, 6.0] N: [0.55, 0.45] K: [0.5, 0.5]