At the onset of the Civil War, a man whose name would eventually become synonymous with famous American detectives was reportedly providing false reports to the Union’s top general. Allan Pinkerton, who once successfully smuggled Abraham Lincoln into Washington, D.C. to avoid a rumored assassination attempt before he was even sworn in as president, acted as General George McClellan’s top intelligence officer. He was considered one of the best spymasters in the United States, responsible for effectively founding the nation’s first secret service.

In this piece, we’ll dive into some major intelligence reporting failures that dogged the renowned spymaster, how effective and concise intelligence reporting can change the course of history, and how the MITRE ATT&CK framework can help streamline and effectively communicate actionable threat intelligence.

Pinkerton was a detective when he first got to know Lincoln, but quickly became an indispensable intelligencer for the Union, first in the nation’s capital and then on the battlefield, working as a Civil War spymaster in 1861–1862. He operated a large team of spies who conducted counterespionage operations throughout Washington and information gathering expeditions into enemy territory. Pinkerton’s successes and failures are many — he made many of his own tactical intelligence failures that cost at least one spy his life during the Civil War — but there is a lot modern day intelligence analysts can learn from him. Specifically, from his intelligence reports.

According to author Douglas Waller, author of Lincoln’s Spies, Pinkerton was not very good at validating or communicating information, or transforming it from data into intelligence. Throughout his time operating a secret service on behalf of the Union, he collected a lot of information. But that information was frequently poorly vetted, based on single sources, or received from biased narrators. And often, the information was ineffectively communicated, or outright falsified.

By dissecting the failures of the nation’s first intelligence service spymaster, modern day threat intelligence analysts can learn how and why effective intelligence communication and report writing can have major effects on an organization — and, in some cases, have the potential to change the course of history.

HiPPO Bias

One of the biggest failures plaguing Pinkerton’s reporting apparatus was his desire to please his boss. General McClellan was famously slow to take any offensive actions against the enemy, holding a deep fear of failure that paralyzed him into inaction.

McClellan reportedly believed the Confederate military to be much larger than it actually was, in part due to the “intelligence” provided to him by his top spy. In fact, the relationship between Pinkerton and McClellan was more like a self-licking ice cream cone. While stationed with McClellan in Washington, Virginia, and Maryland, Pinkerton worked his network of operators to collect information on enemy troop movement and the size of the Confederate army. Sometimes information proved to be correct; other times it was outright false. But in most cases, Pinkerton cherry-picked data that supported his boss’s beliefs of an opposing force either equal to or out-sizing the Union military, ignoring accurate information on the small size of the Confederate forces and further inflating already inflated estimates to appeal to McClellan’s beliefs.

“Loyal to the point of sycophancy, Pinkerton never doubted the general’s ability as a commander. Instead of serving his country or his president as a true intelligence officer, he made his friend happy.” Lincoln’s Spies

Pinkerton was demonstrating Highest Paid Person’s Opinion (HiPPO) bias, or the idea that analysts collect and disseminate information in a way that favors or appeals to existing beliefs within an organization, typically driven by leadership.

“Pinkerton admitted that he and McClellan had conspired to cook the books. In a later November 15 letter to the general, Pinkerton explained that his estimate of Confederate strength ‘was made large, as intimated to you at the time, so as to be sure to cover the entire number of the Enemy that our army was to meet.’ The controversial sentence appeared to show that before Pinkerton issued his October 4 report [reporting double the total number of actual Confederate troops], he and McClellan agreed to deliberately inflate the confederate numbers to be sure they included troops Pinkerton’s agents might not know about. ”

This can be a frequent issue for analysts tasked with certain objectives and directives, but it can also be detrimental to the organization’s decision making and ultimate success. For example, if leadership believes that Russian state-sponsored threats are the most important and likely the most targeted to their organization, defenders and analysts will be spending more key resources hunting for and defending against these threats, with the potential to miss or disregard tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) associated with other relevant, but different, activity.

Use data to build your case. In her 2019 ATT&CKcon 2.0 keynote, Google’s Toni Gidwandi explained how the MITRE ATT&CK matrix can be a “powerful corrective” to HiPPO bias and enable security teams to understand what is happening in the landscape and how it translates to impacts on their organizations.

Beyond indicators of compromise (IOCs), ATT&CK allows defenders to visualize threat behaviors in a digestible way to show what TTPs are observed and impacting an organization versus what stakeholders expect or want to focus on.

Analysts can create mappings of MITRE ATT&CK to malware, malware families and techniques observed in their environment. Subsequently, analysts can craft search queries to help with threat hunting and detection efforts. For example, mapping and searching on specific execution techniques such as certutil or BITSAdmin which are being used to download follow-on payloads.

By identifying the most impactful behaviors, and possible gaps in defense, security teams can prioritize hunting, detection, and response based on observable threat behaviors rather than requests or knee-jerk reactions from stakeholders.

Ultimately, Pinkerton’s analysis failed his organization — his reporting coupled with McClellan’s ego and general aversion to taking decisive action may have cost the Union military successes early on in the Civil War.

Reporting Is Not Letter Writing

In addition to some reports containing easily disproved inaccuracies, Pinkerton and many of his staff typically wrote very long reports, with much of the key details hidden among flowery language, tens of pages deep. Effectively communicating actionable intelligence is a common issue with cyber threat intelligence dissemination, and it’s nice to know our predecessors experienced similar flaws.

“He always wrote [intelligence reports] in the form of a letter, and they began with a flowery opening officers of the day commonly used, such as ‘I have the honor to report…’” Lincoln’s Spies

Pinkerton also reportedly doodled in the margins, drawing cartoon fingers to indicate what the most important parts of the reports were.

Succinctly and effectively communicating intelligence through written reports is difficult, but there are some key characteristics of good intelligence reporting that can help improve efficiency, streamline the writing process, and provide stakeholders with relevant data.

Put the most important information first. Frequently referred to as the stating Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF), immediately detailing the findings of your reporting and why they matter to an organization is crucial. This can be considered the “So What?” portion of the report. Most people — especially key stakeholders like executive audiences — will not read every word of an in-depth intelligence report. It is therefore important to ensure that in the short amount of time allotted for consuming reporting, they can read and understand the points that matter most.

Be concise. Pinkerton didn’t need flowery language and neither do you. I have said this before, but I firmly believe people should not require a thesaurus to read and understand threat intelligence reporting. The report should contain relevant information such as: What happened, why does it matter, and what can we do about it? Items such as anecdotes, extraneous clauses, and navel-gazing are generally unnecessary.

Consider your audience. Executives likely don’t need details of deconstructed malware. Security operations analysts likely don’t need geopolitical analysis of events occurring in places where the business does not operate. Threat intelligence analysts should always be aware of who is reading reports and why. Make sure you know the answer to: What decisions are being made based on this data? Gathering intelligence requirements and understanding how your audience is using intelligence throughout the organization can help shape and improve your reporting.

MITRE ATT&CK has become the universal framework for threat actor TTPs, and can be used to quickly distill and communicate threat intelligence. But where and how it’s used varies based on the audience receiving the information.

For example, in February 2022, intelligence agencies from the United States and United Kingdom published a joint advisory on a new malware called Cyclops Blink targeting small office/home office routers attributed to the Russian state actor Sandworm. The 10-page advisory was designed as an overview of the malware and related threats, documenting Sandworm’s historic and current activity and its relevance in the overall threat landscape. In this report, the MITRE ATT&CK mappings were presented at the end, to add additional insight and technical details to an otherwise fairly high-level, strategic report. However, in a companion malware analysis report published by the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre, the ATT&CK mappings were presented on page three of 20, demonstrating the framework can be used to summarize tactical threat intelligence.

Like any tool, where and how you use MITRE ATT&CK to document TTPs is crucial for an audience’s understanding of the threats.

Always Evaluate OSINT

While Pinkerton collected massive amounts of information and distributed it whole cloth to his superiors, there was little explanation given to where the information came from or its validity.

“Rarely did Pinkerton include in his reports an evaluation of a source’s reliability beyond a general impression he had of it.” Lincoln’s Spies

Pinkerton was operating based on human intelligence, information collected by his operatives in the field. Much of it was gossip; some of it reached his ears by a convoluted game of telephone. A lot of it was reliable and accurate — some of it was not.

As intelligence analysts, understanding and evaluating the veracity of information is crucial to communicating and acting on it. Primary sources of intelligence — the data we collect on our networks — we typically understand to be reliable. But we also rely on open source intelligence (OSINT) to form a whole picture of adversary threat behaviors and an understanding of the threat landscape.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of bad information on the internet. The online claims of unconfirmed hacking campaigns during the ongoing war in Ukraine is an excellent example of information spreading far and wide without validation, and likely making it into intelligence briefings on the conflict.

There are multiple questions analysts should ask themselves when reviewing third-party data to support original research, for example:

• What is the visibility of the individual or organization?
• What evidence are their claims based on?
• Is this evidence available to me?
• Does this overlap with known threat activity?
• Cui bono? Or, who benefits and how?

There is always inherent bias in visibility; vendors or anti-virus companies will only have data from the organizations and geographies in which it is used. If the visibility is limited, it might not be an effective source for verifying or supporting existing hypotheses. Being able to independently validate or invalidate evidence provided in open-source artifacts with internal tools and resources can help further your own investigations or reporting. And finally, considering political, financial, economic, etc. motivations in external reporting can help identify potential biases in reporting and inform your assessments of a source’s reliability.

The MITRE ATT&CK framework exists in part to help answer these questions, especially for providing validated, authoritative third-party intelligence reporting.

A Dictionary of Threats

While the United States was fighting the bloodiest war in the nation’s history, an idea was blossoming among philologists in the United Kingdom. English speakers had colonized many parts of the world, with English customs and culture forcing itself into existing cultures and communities, with paltry existing resources standardizing vocabulary. Academics in the UK argued that there should be a single authoritative resource to define the English language, documenting and establishing the correct form of communications.

Formally proposed in 1857, what would become known as the Oxford English Dictionary would eventually achieve its goal of standardizing English words beginning in 1884. It was a massive undertaking that brought together academics, historians, and the English-speaking public to collect and define words. In fact, the dictionary could not have been written without considerable public assistance.

The MITRE ATT&CK framework has become the universal dictionary of TTPs, in large part due to contributions from analysts and researchers around the globe. According to MITRE, 155 people contributed to the framework in 2021. (In fact, this year my Proofpoint colleague Michael Raggi contributed an update to ATT&CK Technique T1221 to include a novel RTF template injection technique observed in use by multiple threat actors.)

The authoritative nature of the framework has allowed analysts to verify open-source reporting, and better understand the nature of threat actors. It has also allowed researchers to more effectively document and communicate threat behaviors, prioritize detections, and improve defense. By standardizing how we identify and classify threat behaviors, actionable intelligence can be more easily communicated to a variety of stakeholders.

Pinkerton did not have a reliable threat intelligence framework or dictionary off which to operate; indeed he was trailblazing the creation of a secret service that had never before existed. And while his early work helped pave the way for modern day spying and the development of the Secret Service, he and his team were far from perfect. But by examining the intelligence reporting failures documented by modern historians, threat intelligence analysts can be better prepared when they too one day may be called on to help change the course of history.

Intelligence Failures of Lincoln’s Top Spies: What CTI Analysts Can Learn From the Civil War was originally published in MITRE ATT&CK® on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When your body wants one thing and your heart wants another, time virtually stops. Each excruciating second refereeing a duel between what you are and what you want to be feels as psychologically and physically taxing as the toughest day at the gym.

I know what I should do. I know what I want to do. And I know my therapist told me to count to five before doing it.

For years, my body and my heart were locked in a battle for my sanity and my health. I struggled with anorexia and purge disorder, an addiction that caused me to hate myself and claw at my throat whenever I ate anything but oatmeal. My distorted reality restricted me to certain meals and behaviors, and if I acted outside the confines of the invisible boundaries, I faced punishment—I was my own judge and jury.

By the time I started going to therapy, my behavior had become automatic. It was there in the awkward comfort of a leather couch, sweaty from the miles I ran to see her, that my therapist told me to begin counting.

It started with five. Five seconds between the thought and the action. Five seconds felt like an eternity. Then it was ten. And then twenty. Eventually, it was 60 seconds, and then five minutes, and then thirty.

I think we stopped at thirty. I kept counting on my own though. Last weekend, after a particularly difficult day, it was 10 hours; an entire night. It was a restless night—I sucked on ice cubes and brushed my teeth twice. But I woke up the next morning and felt better. I made it, and I was proud.

I don’t consider myself “fixed.” I’m still in recovery, and my heart and my body still fight each other for control of my psyche. I still hate myself after I eat french fries or foods I think are “bad.” I often do not love myself in the way people say you should. In fact, I still wish I was many things: Thinner, smoother, stronger.

Sometimes I think I’m fixed, but then time slows down again.

Recently, it’s because I cannot run. Knee surgery sidelines a human and prevents them from doing normal things. I haven’t been able to run or jump or swim or dance or do regular physical activity that helps keep my toxic thoughts at bay. The last few weeks have been the hardest in the years since I’ve been in recovery. I want to move and burn calories. Instead I’m stuck, hobbled by an injury that prevents me from doing things that make me happy.

Each day I’m stuck and unable to run is a day I feel weaker. Weakness is a catalyst for my harmful behaviors, and it’s hard to push back against it. But I’m trying.

I’m counting hours. And I haven’t had to reset the clock, yet.

I was very wrong.

I can’t remember the terms of the bet, and I don’t think she much cared if it took me one year or ten. She just wanted me to write something.

My book transformed from a joke to a Word document shortly after I graduated college. I had an idea for something simple and silly, something I could write in a year.

Then my grandmother died.

She was extraordinary. One in a line of Larson women who are savvy, brilliant, colorful, emotional, and fiercely loving. I didn’t know her as well as I should have, and I will always regret that.

I didn’t ask to hear enough stories.

The book became a way for me to express those feelings of guilt and sadness. It was also a way for me to explore what it means to have family.

I finished it a few years ago and never published it. I was (and still am!) nervous people will hate it. But I am publishing it anyway, the way it was almost three years ago, because I promised my mom I would.

I was a completely different person three years ago. I drank (a lot), disliked myself, and never opened up to situations and people to explore and get to know them.

Those of you who have read other fictional stories I’ve written, thanks! This story is nothing like those other ones. At all. In the years since I started this story, I have changed. And that is reflected in the words that spilled out of me.

Anyway, I lost the bet.

Happy Mother’s Day, mom.

Some people did not. Some of those people who made it through a tumultuous twenty sixteen will not live through the next 365 days. But here we are, facing 2017 with hope, trepidation, and, in my case, a stomach bug.

Things happened this year. I smiled, I laughed. I cried, I got lost. I transformed.

Living and surviving are different, and I’m happy to say I have lived this year. I am a survivor who learned how to love. How to see beauty in people. Who knows there are people, places, ideas, and wonder to live for.

The end of year is always a time for reflection, yet it puzzles me we’re not in a perpetual cycle of reflection and rebirth. We’re on a timed trip around the sun, but it’s not these months, days, or years that define us. Numbers give us something to chart, to point to, to correct ourselves, to make goals. But charting life and survival takes us from the stars to the streets, outside of the boxes we tick after the sun sets.

You can learn through reflection. Learning, like death, like memories, doesn’t stop when the calendars change. Learning, like happiness, like grief, is not defined by an annual review of the world and its people. Or of you and your actions.

Things won’t stop happening next year. It might be hard to experience some things. Other beautiful, magical things will make us believe in the power of people. Death will come again, even to people you love.

We might reach new heights in human ingenuity, and fall hard in places where it hurts.

I don’t want to make goals for 2017. I want to make goals for a malleable life. Talk less, listen more. Tweet less, love more. Never stop learning from people and their ideas. Believe in people. Believe in yourself.

Now that I’ve lived, I want to thrive — to do, be, and see more than I did in 2016. It was a year. We lived it. Here’s to continuing to do so, together.

I stare out the window and it blends into the darkness. Camouflage in a world devoured by the ghosts of anguished souls. I can only see it because I know it’s there.

It smells like sulfur in the cube. A name on the book of matches in my hand is long faded from the constant commuting from the torn pocket of my jeans. I open it, wondering if tonight is the night I will light one.

I go to sleep and have my answer.

Maybe tomorrow.

The morning is gray. An impossible and endless fog — it retreats only when the night comes to suffocate the moist air and the hope we may have found in it. For a few hours I can imagine the sun. The clouds. The sky.

Darkness again. It always follows. The darkness taunts. It tells you to look at it. The darkness is not darkness. A reflection. A mirror to the caustic bits within yourself you think are hidden when the night falls.

Enough.

I go to the window and strike a match.

I feel it recede. Tentacles of blackness abandon the flame. Scurrying away from the heat and power, a brilliant light illuminating invisible corners of myself and my home. The flame goes out.

From the window I see into the darkness. Until it’s broken by another light. I did not create this one; I do not know where it comes from, for I thought I was alone with a matchbook.

I open the window and fall into the grass.

This light does not go out. It dances in a doorway casting shadows on the darkness, begging me to follow it. A woman holds a candle. She steps on the dirt and gives me one to light.

Together we stand among a circle of cubes groaning under the weight of the night.

Get off they scream. Let us be.

We are joined by two young girls. Their eyes glow as they approach our flames. The woman pulls out two more candles from a hidden coat pocket — the girls accept them, each touching their wicks to ours.

The glow is stronger. The night feels lighter.

People gingerly step out of their cubes. They want to join in; share the light. A strong wind blows, fighting illumination. Huddled together with our backs to the wind, the candles barely flicker.

Curiosity is strong enough to draw a crowd. Some stay shrouded in the safety of the darkness not wanting to get burned.

It is afraid.

Our light is warm and powerful.
I am not a matchstick, but fuel for a thousand.

It is gray.

We remain in the light as more come out of the shadows.

It is blue.

The wax bleeds onto our hands.

Our world is green.

It is beautiful.

It smells like freedom.

Struck was originally published in Friday Fiction on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Flecks of paint plaster his overalls, each spot a congealed memory that sticks to him like the hairs of a brush stick to each other. Most of the spots are white, but only in color.

The dried eggshell and honeymilk and cotton display no evidence of the darkness the painter absorbs each time his thick brush makes its way across a home — not erasing, simply transposing, the past.

Caolán possesses an accursed talent that attracts the desperate, heartbroken, and terrified. His style is indistinguishable from that of housepainters whose photocopied advertisements are posted on streetlights and community center cork boards.

As his aging truck rattles down a dirt road with no name, the sky betrays the first hint of sunshine, lilac becomes a light blue as a rock ricochets off his windshield. Dust clouds obscure the painter’s haul: Ladders, white paint, aluminum tins, mirrors, a hatchet, dead roses, and the bible. Caolán hums along to a country tune he doesn’t recognize that’s an anthem in this part of the world. He blinks. Running his hand across his chest, he says a small prayer.

Please don’t let this one take too much.

The small woman standing on her porch in a threadbare apron and looks as if she’s lived a century; her body bears witness to the secrets she keeps. Tendrils of gray hair peek out from the knot at the nape of her neck, and thick, deep lines frame cloudy green eyes behind tiny spectacles. Her mouth is unsmiling, her hands twitch below the knot of her apron. She watches the truck slowly approach. Behind her stands a young woman with fading bruises in different states of mend covering every inch of her body. Long, thin mouse-brown hair falls across her face rendering any discerning features invisible. Running her hand across her chest, she says a small prayer.

Please let him take everything.

His truck pulls to a stop on the driveway hugged by daisies. Caolán steps out of the cab and waves to the old woman. She gestures to show him what she needs — all of it. Paint it all.

Occupants took great care of this house, for the paint on the outside isn’t peeling or faded. No nails stick out at odd angles, all the gutters are securely fastened to the roof. The porch wraps around the foyer and a sitting room, its steps well-worn but still sturdy. One story, he thinks to himself, a blessing.

The painter moves methodically, beginning with the porch. With each stroke, the brush makes a comforting pfft, extracting the darkness and replacing it with a clean, fresh coat. From the window, Caolán portrays the forgettable sameness of man. To look him in the eye is to reveal the pain and suffering he shoulders, for the occupants have suffered enough. He does not know who or what the family needs rid of, only that he was summoned to take care of it.

Behind the house, Caolán sees a pile of fresh dirt, a daisy from the front yard upon it, petals gently swaying in the wind. A chill arises between his shoulder blades and creeps up to the base of his skull. His paintbrush falls to the ground, marking a white splotch on the grass. The young woman stares at Caolán from the window, and as he picks up his brush, she tucks her hair behind her ear, revealing a swollen and disfigured cheek, the color purple pooling away from a deep, red cut.

Painting resumes. The woman leaves. Chill has become pain in Caolán’s heart. At midday, the young woman leaves sandwiches and lemonade on the steps, her hair once again in her face. She does not look at Caolán or the mound of dirt behind him.

In layers revealed through brushstrokes, bits of the house fall away. An acrid scent of burning hair trails the painter’s hand; faint screams echo off the wood; he can taste bourbon on his tongue and the lemonade does not wash it down. He is never quite prepared enough for the sticky film of emotion and ghosts he pulls off houses he paints. Soon, he thinks, it won’t be so hard.

This is a lie he has told himself for centuries.

Caolán steps onto the porch as dusk arrives and watches the old woman sitting in a rocking chair. Her green eyes now shine, and and her mouth relaxes into something resembling a smile. When the young woman appears in the doorway with her hair tied back in a braid, the shape of a fist no longer exists and freckles are visible on her cheeks. She nods, and disappears into the house.

With heavy arms, the painter walks back to his truck. Tears flow silently down his face and he doesn’t bother to wipe them.

‘Hello,’ a man growls, appearing in the passenger’s seat. ‘I guess I’m coming with you.’

Caolán opens the driver’s side door, unfastens his overalls and steps out of his boots. The man watches as the painter changes into sweatpants and sneakers, tossing his gear into the back of the truck’s cab.

‘Your darkness was nearly impossible to cover because you made it so hard to see,’ Caolán said, clutching his chest. With each mile, the man begins to fade, his face stuck in an eternal snarl that will follow him to a place evil is welcome, and no painter could ever hide.

When the last pink light fades into midnight blue, the apparition is gone. New spots form on Caolán’s overalls, and the ache in his heart dulls. The painter hums, scratching a scar that’s appeared on his cheek as dust follows him down another road with no name.

Colorful was originally published in Friday Fiction on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It happened slowly. So quiet and deliberate, no one realized that the world they saw when they went to sleep was slightly different than the one they woke up to the next morning. Compounded day by day, the world transformed into something its citizens had no idea existed.

People disappeared. Dirt and cracks in the sidewalk thickened. But citizens only saw the perpetually blue sky, storefronts that welcomed visitors who never set foot in the small businesses, landscaped lawns, and the hum of thriving cities.

Those who wanted us to see something different manipulated the world. The quiet patience of individuals coming into power was stronger than the desires of heroes for their names to be remembered in our histories. These men didn’t want to be remembered; they preferred to live in a world forgotten by those who inhabited it.

Passing shadows, errant raindrops, or a scream too loud to ignore would push us to the brink of recognition, but an invisible force would reset our slender, oblong metal bits, showing us an environment programmed to be perfect. The only imperfections in the spaces we lived were ourselves; the powerful could not be bothered with self-esteem.

It began when humanity bent over the knee of technological progress and accepted the inevitable rewiring of our devices and ourselves. The oldest among us remember the implants; lining up outside assignment zones, temples bared to the suits in grey, and five seconds of searing pain that meant our brains were forever connected to a tiny pill embedded beneath the flesh of our skulls.

Once turned on, our minds awoke to new signals. Addicted to the cacophony of information, the hyper realism of tactile living meshed with the virtual spaces created ostensibly by ourselves, yet data puppeteered by the powerful manipulated our realities. Despite what our brains told our eyes appeared in front of us, titanium roadblocks altered this perception, telling our sight organs something different. Such delicate changes became accepted by our minds; truth was not what we saw but what we were told to see.

The promise of a mental utopia outweighed the potential for a sovereign society to unwittingly bow to those who controlled the vision, for when terabytes took up muscle mass, the idea of a power making playthings out of people could not have crossed our minds. And even with limitless knowledge, we had no idea what was happening right in front of our eyes.

In the beginning, they altered the physical environment; blossoms removed and replanted, a tree transformed to a seedling and then empty space. All the while our minds were tricked, our physical bodies understood limitations we did not see, making it impossible for us to realize what was happening by bumping into a building we did not know was there. Soon, alterations spread to people: Street folks removed and young children stolen from families, forgotten the next day.

No one really knows how the first deserter observed the folly of his reality and escaped his mental prison, coming back into all his senses and recognizing the irrationality of the place of existence inside his eyelids and those of the people around him. He is called Zed, the first human to be fully and naturally remembered by anyone with an implant. Like him, many of us have taken knives to our skulls, removed the tiny spheres and regained our sight, wondering how it was lost in the first place.

We must watch and wait with the patience of our tormentors, as individuals disconnect from the hive one by one. The powerful built an army of false existence, and we must operate in the shadows to regain independence of mind and body. They can’t control the whispers, only visions, and our network of voices grows stronger as visual impossibilities disappear with each stranger who listens.

To see the truth is to accept that all is not what it looks like. We must fight for a perception stolen and altered, to create a world we can see and explore and thrive in.

Imperception was originally published in Friday Fiction on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s impossible to excel at any physical activity while slowly and deliberately killing yourself.

I’ve been a runner for as long as I can remember, always savoring the time I can disappear in rhythm and oxygen and sometimes pain that exists in a place separate from other experiences. Physical activity is how I deal with things; often I run because I want to run away.

I still ran while eating and purging less than 1,000 calories a day. For a long time, my daily workout schedule included six to eight miles of running and an hour of yoga. If I couldn’t get a run in before or after work, I ran to happy hours and going away parties, baseball games and brunch. Workout clothes became the dress code friends expected, and I built a wardrobe of spandex that could pass for presentable (by San Francisco standards) in cocktail bars.

If a day went by that I didn’t run, I didn’t eat. My heart beat too fast, and my skin buzzed, desperate for activity. The next day, I would run six to eight miles, twice.

There was no point to me running so much, beyond my belief that if I didn’t, I had failed. Hours spent exercising were good for me, I thought, and I needed to be good at something. But you can’t become faster or stronger when you prevent nutrients from entering your body, and don’t give it time to strengthen itself.

When I started therapy (which I still run to each week), my therapist asked what I liked about myself. “My hair and running,” I said. It took four months before I understood the thing I loved was hurting me.

My predisposition to perfection is fuel for my eating disorder and exercise addiction, and I can’t divorce myself from that craving and the passions and behaviors that I’ve relied on like a crutch for mental and physical reassurance that everything will be OK.

Instead, once the problem surfaced, I used it as an opportunity to test myself and my willingness to recover.

Running requires fuel—food is fuel. I don’t have a particularly healthy relationship with food, and setting a running goal was a way I could strengthen that relationship, and find balance in exercise.

In January, I signed up for the San Francisco Half Marathon. I set a training plan that included rest days, even though the race was seven months away. The training wasn’t for the race; I could have easily ran 13.1 miles when I signed up. I trained for my body and my brain and my heart.

I understand a training plan when it tells me not to run, because it is written by someone who knows more about the human body than I do.

Eventually, I listened to it, though I don’t technically take “rest days,” since I still do interval yoga every day. But I am faster, I feel stronger, and I can eat more without fear. The buzzy feeling that results from skipping a run isn’t as frequent.

I am on a long path to recovery; my training plan helped my addiction to exercise, but my relationship with food (and myself) is still rather tumultuous. I’m writing this before my half so no matter what time I cross the finish line, my own words can remind me that speed isn’t everything.

On Sunday, I will be 13.1 miles closer to recovery.

How running saved me was originally published in Personal Growth on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I hear them buzzing in the middle of July. Christmas lights. Purple lightbulbs bleached by the sun, still illuminated each night, reflecting through my window and the rag too thin to be considered a curtain.

I never complain. Their son died on New Year’s Eve. The constant burn and buzz of each bulb marks another minute the pair is alive while he is not.

Ash falls from the tip of my cigarette and I throw it in the dirt as another faded purple bulb pops and hisses. Smoke rises from both, and disappears on the wind.

The couple next door has forgotten it’s no longer Christmas. There is little they remember.

Death’s specter suffocated any hope that tried to force itself into the tiny home and into hearts blackened by the loss of a piece of their souls. The agony became too great, too heavy; so they called the cleaners. After months of remembering their child was dead, all they wanted to do was forget.

The brain is a funny thing, a system humans still don’t understand. Its partner in morbid comedy is the heart. Neither organ is particularly fair to the rest of the human body and the complicated and unknowable world it exists in. Never agreeing on anything; reliable in that you know at least one is always right, and it’s usually the one you don’t follow.

When the heart and the brain are both broken and play memories on repeat to the soundtrack of sorrow, the desperate want to forget.

Cleaners access your mental hard drive and remove the bits that are broken. They turn you off and on again rebooting your system. The cleaners came to my neighbors’ house this spring, white jumpsuits blinding the only observer (me). They removed a metal box from the back of a van and rolled it up to the couple’s door. Four hours later, the van was gone.

Removing memories is supposed to be delicate, but so many people opted to forget things, the cleaners got sloppy—no one knows when too much has been taken because they will never remember.

A mangled crown of electrodes is placed on your skull, a titanium plate inserted into the roof of your mouth. You’re unconscious as the the cleaners electrocute parts of your brain, dulling, and eventually disappearing, the thoughts and dreams and stories that exist in the space between your ears and on the left side of your chest.

Sometimes they take only what they came for. Sometimes they leave you in a cloudy world of déjà vu, of almost there but not really, words on the tip of your tongue never crossing your lips. In a place that seems familiar, like you saw it in a dream, tormented by the cold intimacy of a thing that you’re unsure ever existed.

They leave you with your Christmas lights still up. Burning out one by one, like the memories they took from you. And like the mangled skeleton of broken glass and wire, your own light has gone out.

But at least nothing hurts.

The cleaners are coming for me tomorrow. I can’t remember why.

Erased was originally published in Friday Fiction on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If you hold up a reflection of one world to the other, it wouldn’t recognize itself.

One is dark. People walk with their heads down, worn, tired eyes look at things but don’t see them. And see things that aren’t really there.

Smells and experiences and relationships are manufactured. Save for the responsibility of reproduction that’s become a choreographed act like a drunk, humorless has-been on open mic night. People don’t touch each other; they’ve forgotten what connection is like if it doesn’t come with an ON switch.

Each breath shortens life, the revenge for asking too much from a provider that gave all she could before collapsing upon herself in a final act of defiance. Human ingenuity is spent creating ways of forgetting and devices for killing each other. The illusion of experiences defines what is and what will be. Nothing, and everything. In darkness they chase sensations never fully realized, looking toward a smudged horizon obscured by the ghosts of promise.

Chaos is ignored.

In a future across the universe, clouds break for sunshine, and form lazy shapes for the people who spend time looking up. Here, people see.

They see each other, the pain and hope behind their eyes. People, the impossible product of consciousness and biology, each heartbeat echoing a magic visible if you seek it.

Compassion is written in a human code based on generations fighting and speaking for those without a voice, whose voices were taken from them or ignored completely. Mistakes recognized and learned from; reparations made; voices heard.

Screens and switches are turned on when necessary, but no one is lost to them. Balance between people and their things exists because they do not want to be swept away to a place more real than another. Violence is condemned, weapons destroyed.

Here, human life is valued.

The world is love, but it was not always. For a moment they almost forgot what love was, and two timelines threatened to converge, an implosion of being neither of which could sustain. But as the paths approached their seemingly inevitable junction, humanity awoke.

Together, stronger, fighting for a world people are unafraid to exist in. For compassion. For love.

Decisions was originally published in Friday Fiction on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.