My phone was blowing up with a number I didn’t know. I hung up on them, and they called back immediately. Picking up on that second call was a major regret.
I was parked outside Mocama, the brewing company just outside Fernandina Beach. We’re friends with the team there, and they’d asked a bunch of friends to be in a photo shoot. I’d been looking forward to it all week. I had my hand on the door handle.
I answered.
“This is Massachusetts Public Health.”
He didn’t say hello. He was angry. Why would I hang up on him? This was important. This was urgent. While he lectured me, I googled the number. It matched the agency’s real line. So I stayed in the car and listened.
Someone had filled a prescription for methadone under my name, he said, at a CVS in Washington, D.C. He had it down to the specific store. I googled that too: a real pharmacy, on a real street, seven hundred miles from where I sat.
That should have ended it. But I’ve lived enough life that a stranger borrowing my name wasn’t unthinkable, and everything I checked kept checking out. So instead of laughing, I started doing the math on how a man clears his name in D.C. when he can’t go to D.C. I have a family. I have kids. I wasn’t flying anywhere.
Not a problem, he said. He could transfer me to the D.C. police directly.
The precinct
There was a click, a few seconds of dead air, and then a different room. The precinct sounded like a precinct. Walkie-talkies crackled somewhere behind the officer’s voice. Phones rang and got picked up. Other cases were moving through other rooms, and I could hear every one of them. I sat with the engine off and the windows up, the brewery right there through the windshield, my friends inside it, the afternoon starting to go. He didn’t rush. He took my name. Then he told me a warrant was about to go out with that name on it, and I stopped hearing the room.
“Let’s run your name,” he said.
He keyed a walkie-talkie and gave my name to someone on the other end. I could hear the crackle come back: codes, internal jargon, procedural language I didn’t understand. None of it was said to me. All of it was about me. Then it was clear there was a problem. A fraudster they’d been tracking. He gave me the name and spelled it out. A big problem. An account in New York holding $1.5 million, opened under my name. An even bigger problem.
He asked me to download Signal, for a secure conversation. An odd request from a police station. But I remembered hearing that police use Signal for protected communications, so I downloaded it in the driver’s seat and waited.
The screen
The video call connected, and there he was: a man in a police uniform, a precinct behind him that looked like every precinct I’d ever seen on the news. He looked me in the eye and said my name. Then he showed me the documents. Federal letterhead. National security language, the kind of sentences written to be obeyed rather than read. Whatever doubt I had left went quiet. A warrant is one thing. A face is another. A face with federal paperwork behind it, I had no answer for.
Then came the rule: don’t tell your wife. This was a matter of national security now, and it had to stay between us. I complied. When they asked about my accounts, I told them what was in them. They never asked for a login, not once. They only wanted the balances, to check against the checking account that had been opened in my name. So I gave them the totals and told myself I was still guarding a door. Nobody had tried it yet.
The driveway
By then I was home, parked in my own driveway. The photo shoot had come and gone without me. Inside, the evening was happening without me too: dinner, the kids, the ordinary noise of my ordinary house. I sat in the car with the phone hot against my ear for three hours.
Finally my wife came out.
“Joe, what is wrong with you?”
I told her I couldn’t tell her. She looked at me the way you look at a man sitting alone in the dark outside his own house, and she asked one question.
“You sure you’re not being scammed?”
I called the precinct myself. The real number, the real desk. An officer picked up.
“You’re the sixth person today.”
···
I walked around in a funk for days. The embarrassment faded fast. What stayed was how real it all had felt.
The man on the screen, I know now, was not a man.
Almost nothing they showed me was fake on its own. The phone number belonged to the agency. The CVS stood on a real street in D.C. The precinct sounded like a precinct. Someone took real pieces and built a world around me out of them, live, one call at a time. Every objection I raised had an answer waiting. Every time I checked the world, it passed, because I was checking it from inside, on the same phone they were talking into.
The officer was the piece that wasn’t real. I understand that now. This was about eight months ago, and even in that time AI has changed so much. The face, the uniform, the room behind him, the letterhead, the voice that answered every question without a pause: generated, and fed to me live over a video call I had downloaded an app to take. I spend my days with these tools. I know what they can render, because I ask them to render things every morning. And I sat in my car for three hours and never once asked whether the man looking back at me was one of them.
That’s what I mean by synthetic reality: a stage set built for an audience of one, rebuilt on the fly every time he turns his head. If you believed any of this for a paragraph just now, you felt a fraction of it.
The set had one weakness. It couldn’t hold anyone else. That’s why the one rule was don’t tell your wife. Everything depended on keeping me alone in the car, and the spell broke the moment someone from outside walked into it. My wife hadn’t heard the warrant or seen the uniform. She saw her husband sitting in the dark, and she asked the question nobody inside the set could ask.
The sets are going to get better. I can’t promise I’ll spot the next one. But I made myself one rule: any call that asks me to keep a secret from my family is the scam. I hang up and walk inside.
This newsletter is called The Human in the Loop. That night, the human in mine walked out to the driveway and asked what was wrong with me. She was the one thing in those three hours nobody could fake.
— Joe
P.S. If you’ve gotten the call, write me and tell me how far you got before you hung up: joseph@josephlapin.com. I want to know what the tell was. I read every one.
