Updates to this developing story will be posted daily for the duration of the August 1-3 Dead & Company residency in San Francisco.
The Spirit of San Francisco: Part II
My advisor and I were in the middle of an argument about whether a burrito was an appropriate breakfast food when we heard a loud knock on our hotel room door.
“For Christ’s sake!” I shouted, “did you get them delivered?”
“What? No!” he snapped in response. “Who’s at the door?”
Confused, I approached the door and opened it. An attractive blonde woman in a business-casual skirt and button-down barged in. My advisor, who hadn’t fully dressed, gasped in shock and hid behind his bed, fumbling with his suitcase.
“Which one of you is Vincent?” she asked pointedly.
I raised my hand cautiously.
“You?” She demanded. “Let me ask you a question: have we ever met?”
“You and I?” I clarified meekly. “Uh, no. Not that I remember.”
“You sure?”
“I think I would have remembered you. Who are you?”
“My name’s Shannon Cutdonna. It seems like you wrote an article yesterday featuring me and my husband, Bruno.”
“I did—wait, you can’t be Shannon Cutdonna, we met her just yesterday and you’re… not the same person… oh, no. Oh, shit.”
“‘Oh, shit,’ is right, you pathetic wastrel of a writer! Get used to saying it, because I’m going to be suing you to hell and back for libel after what you wrote about me and my husband!”
“Oh, no. No, no, no…” I muttered. “Wait—please, don’t sue—listen, somebody set me up! And they set you up, too! And your husband!”
She squinted at me. “Now why would somebody do a thing like that?”
“I don’t know… oh shit!” My phone was ringing, and according to my caller ID it was my editor, which could only ever be a bad sign. I called out for my advisor. “Are you decent yet?” I asked. “Will you take this for me?” I tossed him my phone, and he answered it and walked into the hallway while I turned back to Shannon. “Mrs. Cutdonna, please, before we—”
“Don’t ‘Mrs. Cutdonna’ me, you stupid wimp! You’re barely older than me.”
“Okay… Shannon, please, before you take legal action, give me the chance to… try to figure out what happened. Both of us were lied to here! Does your husband have any enemies? Anybody who might want to hurt him?”
“Not that I can think of—other than myself, of course, for not coming home last night.”
“He didn’t come home? Is that unusual?”
“It happens now and then. I always thought he was pulling an overnight shift at work. But no—now I know that he’s out there meeting 23-year-old activist sluts in the park!”
“Shannon, I really don’t think he was involved with her in… the capacity you’re implying. Have you talked to your husband since he left for work yesterday?”
“No. Nothing. Radio silence. Which is part of the reason I came to you. Maybe you can find him—you’re the last person to have seen him, if what you wrote is true.”
“Okay… uh, shit… I guess, if you consider not suing us, we can try to—”
My advisor burst back into the room. “Our editor is not happy,” he said. “There’s been an… event. In the park.”
“An event?”
“They found… a body.”
“Disgusting. What does that have to do with us?”
He wavered, as if deciding whether to say something. “May I speak to you privately? In the hallway?”
I excused myself from Shannon and followed him out of the room. “What is this ‘may I’ shit?” I asked. “You’ve never started a sentence with ‘may I’ in your life. What the fuck kind of—”
“They found Bruno Cutdonna’s dead body in Golden Gate Park!” he whispered in a panic. “Our editor is fucking pissed that we aren’t already on the scene!”
“What? What the fuck? No! No! His wife is right in there!” I pointed at our hotel room. “She doesn’t know! What the fuck are we gonna do?”
“I don’t know!” my advisor shouted. “We have to—”
“Stop fucking screaming! She’s going to hear you! Oh god, oh fuck, oh god—”
“Wait! Listen to me! That isn’t all!”
“It can’t possibly get worse!”
My advisor gulped. “Our editor says we need extra support—”
“No!”
“—and he’s sending backup—”
“Please, no!”
“He’s sending Skye!”
“Fuck! No! God-motherfucking-damn-it-to-hell—FUCK!”
Skye Ortak is a fellow writer for Shrieks & Whispers who my editor poached from Relix last year during the wook invasion of Las Vegas’ underground tunnel system. Prior to her becoming my colleague, she was one of my nemeses in the ultracompetitive jam-band journalism industry, and our relationship, to this day, remains testy. Her imminent arrival in San Francisco was a clear insult from my editor.
“What are we supposed to do about Shannon?” my advisor asked. “Should we tell her about her husband?”
“Won’t the police call her or something? Maybe we’ll just stand out here until then.”
“We can’t wait here. If you want to keep your job, I advise that we get to the park as soon as possible.”
“Shit. You’re right. Okay… let me handle it okay?” I took a deep breath, put on a smile that I hoped wasn’t disingenuous, and tried to open the hotel door. We had locked ourselves out, and Shannon let us back in.
“Shannon!” I said brightly, “looks like they found your husband! What a relief, right?”
She frowned. “Is he alright?”
“Uh, he’s in the park! Why don’t we head in and check it out?”
“They found him in the park… who is ‘they?’ What are you saying?”
“Well.. why don’t we just… go down and see? My advisor and I are just going to hop on a bus if you’d like to—”
“Public transportation?” she sniped. “Me? No thank you. I have a car.” She sped out of the room.
“See you there?” my advisor asked.
She ignored him.
My advisor and I got off a Municipal Transportation Agency bus—affectionately referred to by cool kids as the ‘Muni’—at the southeast corner of Golden Gate Park and sprinted toward the tennis center, where our editor had told us Bruno Cutdonna’s body had been found. We spotted a corral of 1971 Ford Galaxies—the official car of the San Francisco Police Department—and after some haggling with the cops, we explained that we were eminently qualified journalists there to report on the homicide. An officer who had already read my last article suspected that my advisor and I might have valuable information, so he introduced us to the lead homicide inspector on the case—Lieutenant Mal Denkarl, a weathered plainclothes investigator with a big nose, a grey fedora, and two decades of experience on the force.
“So you’re telling me,” Lt. Denkarl said after the officer gave a quick synopsis of my article, “that the victim’s wife came to you two—” he pointed at me and my advisor, “—and asked you to follow the victim. You watched him have some kind of a meeting with an… influencer, then they parted ways. Now he’s dead.”
“Well.. not exactly,” I began. I explained that the so-called Shannon Cutdonna, who had asked us to tail Bruno, had been an impostor—and that the real Shannon Cutdonna had, less than an hour earlier, confronted us about it.
“Is that so? Well, we’d certainly like to have a word with this dame—the real one, that is. They’ve been trying to call her down at the precinct, but she hasn’t picked up. They even went to her house.”
“She claimed that she was coming here,” my advisor said.
Lt. Denkarl looked at us skeptically, as if mulling over a difficult decision in his head. Finally, he asked if we’d like to see the scene of the crime.
“The body’s been taken out already,” he explained as he guided us through a maze of crime-scene tape into a grove on the opposite side of the road as the tennis courts, “but everything else is still there. You’ll see what I mean. I should warn you, it’s gruesome.”
We came into a small clearing, and between the trees, piles of rocks, and police officers searching for forensic evidence was an upside-down wooden cross, covered in semi-dried blood at the points where nails had been driven into flesh.
“Dear god,” I said, becoming nauseated, “they… crucified him?”
“Not only did they crucify him, kid, but they did it upside-down. Just be grateful you didn’t have to see a dead guy hanging off of it.”
“Jesus Christ…” my advisor muttered.
“A couple thousand years too late to have been him—and inverted to boot. Hey—if you’re gonna throw up, get away from the crime scene.”
At that moment, Lt. Denkarl’s hotheaded, inexperienced younger partner—Assistant Inspector Douglas Michaels—burst into the crime scene. “Those dirty bikers won’t talk,” he snapped, “but they’ve got no alibis anybody outside of their little gang can verify. They’ve got guilt written all over them.”
“Slow your roll, buddy boy,” the older investigator scolded. “Last I checked, in this country you’re innocent until proven guilty—looking guilty just doesn’t cut it.”
“Oh, come on, Lieutenant!” Michaels insisted. “We’ve got an obviously religious killing… the Heaven’s Angels are Catholic. The victim is the CTO of an AI company… the Heaven’s Angels hate AI. Their territory is right around the corner. What more do you want?”
“Wait,” I interrupted, “Bruno Cutdonna was the CTO for SecondSetAI?” I turned to my advisor. “How did we miss that?”
Michaels stared at the two of us with some mixture of confusion and disdain. “Who the hell are these people?”
“Journalists,” Lt. Denkarl told him, “and as far as we know, the last people to see Cutdonna alive.”
Michaels glared at us. “Really? How… interesting. What do you know about the Heaven’s Angels?”
I shrugged. “Same as you, probably. It’s all in the article published in Shrieks & Whispers, the magazine I write for, where you can find the most up-to-date—”
“Save the self-promotion. One of the deputies sent me that article, I didn’t realize you were the writer. You’re much scrawnier than I imagined.”
Deciding that this was a compliment to my evidently muscular prose, I waved a hand smugly. “I get that a lot. One of the many occupational hazards, if you know what I—”
“That’s enough. Do the Angels trust you?”
“Well, ‘trust’ might not be the exact word I’d use. But—”
“Fine. Next time you see their leaders—” he took a notebook out of his pocket and flipped it open to read from it, “—Petey “Poppa” Pollapenzo or Pauly “Poppy” Pattapenzi—do me a favor and ask them if they did it. Ask them off the record, or whatever you media people do. And then give me a call.”
“Outsourcing the investigation now, are you, buddy boy?” Lt. Denkarl asked. “I wouldn’t be so sure it was your little biker gang that committed this crime. If their motive was their religion, why would they honor Cutdonna with the same fate as their leader?”
“They didn’t. He’s upside down.”
“Fine—so was St. Peter when he was crucified. Why give Cutdonna the same fate as the first pope?”
“Simple bloodlust? Some kind of message we don’t understand?”
Lt. Denkarl shook his head. “Or maybe whoever did this is trying to point us in the wrong direction.” He turned to me. “My partner and I have to get on with the boring parts of investigating now—door-knocking and phone calling, you know the drill. Unlike him, I won’t ask you for help… but if I were to make a suggestion, I’d advise that you look into that AI cult that’s occupying the Academy and the Botanical Gardens. Who knows what they might have to say?”
As we headed toward the California Academy of Sciences, my head was spinning. I couldn’t keep track of all the threads that had just intertwined—why had a woman impersonating the wife of a soon-to-be-murdered tech CTO visited me the evening before, and how had the traditionalist Catholic motorcycle gang that I’d unwittingly run into the same night become suspects? What, if anything, did Faye Ktan and the New Diggers have to do with it? And who were the LaSwayvians, the mysterious AI cult that the Heaven’s Angels swore as their enemies?
“Oracle-4 is really evasive about these people,” my advisor said, reading the chatbot’s summation of the LaSwayvians aloud. “‘That’s a great question—exactly what I’d expect from an inquiring mind like yours! You’re really getting at the root of the problem! Here’s your no-nonsense rundown of the LaSwayvians! They’re basically a group of Bay Area intellectuals dedicated to AI—think part sci-fi nerds, part scientists, and part event organizers. If you want, I can check their website for upcoming events and sign you up! Want that? Just say the word!’”
“Jesus. Is that really how it talks to you? If everybody got jerked off that much just for asking questions, there’d be a hell of a lot more people in journalism.”
“Should I have it check the website for me?”
“Are you shitting me? We’re standing right in front of their headquarters! Why would we need your app to check anything for us?”
He shrugged, putting his phone back into his pocket. “Second opinion?”
“Second opinion my ass,” I countered as we approached the Academy’s entrance. “Whatever happened to meeting a real person in real life and getting to the bottom of something?”
A computer monitor over the entrance lit up, and an uncannily friendly-looking robot face appeared on it. “Hi! I’m Nova!” it said. “I’m an AI receptionist specially designed to give you the best possible LaSwayvian experience! How can I help you today?”
“My point exactly,” I told my advisor quietly before turning to the monitor. “Hello,” I said slowly and clearly. “I am a JOURNALIST. That means I’m a writer, but about REAL-LIFE things.”
“I’m familiar with journalism! It’s exciting to meet you! If you’d like, I can curate a tour just for you! I’ll focus on the intersection of media and science with a LaSwayvian spin! Want that?”
“NO. I’d like to speak to a REAL PERSON, please. PRESS OFFICER. PUBLIC RELATIONS. Do you understand?”
“No need to shout! I hear you loud and clear—you’re looking for a LaSwayvian representative. Are you working on an article?”
“Prefer not to respond. Just give me a real person, please.”
“Got it! If you’d like, I can see if our communications manager is available! Want that?”
“YES! For the love of god.”
“Got it! Lucky for you, our communications officer, Shrimp Pronz, is currently available! He’s heading down from his office right now—he should be here in four minutes! Anything else I can do for you in the meantime?”
I was about to ask it to turn off, but my advisor interrupted. “I’m starving—anyplace I can get some food around here?”
“I’m glad you asked! I suggest Cafe LaSway, the Academy’s official restaurant! If you’d like, I can place an order for you now, so all you’ll have to do is pick it up and pay! Want that?”
“Yes, please! Do you have hot dogs?”
“Of course!”
“What’s the max order size?”
“Our system only permits up to 20 items per order!”
“Okay… I’ll get 19 hot dogs, please, and one Coke.”
“Got it! Anything else I can do for you?”
“That’s all for now! Thanks, Nova!”
Three and a half minutes later, a short man with obvious scoliosis opened the door to let us in. “Good afternoon!” he said. “My name is Shrimp Pronz, and I’m the Communications Manager. Nova tells me that you’re a journalist—we’re pleased to welcome you into the new LaSwayvian compound!”
“Thanks… Shrimp.”
“What brings you here today?”
“Well… we’re on something of an investigative assignment. Have you heard about the murder of Bruno Cutdonna?”
Pronz’s face fell. “Of course. What a tragedy. SecondSet AI is a great ally to us, Bruno included. We’re all doing our best to work through the awful news.”
“Right. Did you know him personally?”
“We met a few times, briefly. May I ask what your article is about? I hope you’re not insinuating that—”
“No, of course not,” I said, cutting him off. “It just seemed like a, uh, topical icebreaker. We would really just like to learn more about the LaSwayvians, and why you’ve set yourself up in Golden Gate Park during the Grateful Dead’s 60th anniversary celebration.”
“Of course! A natural question—but why don’t we start at the beginning?
Two years ago, SecondSet AI released Oracle-3, its first publicly available AI chatbot. It never achieved widespread usage among the public at large, since, compared to competitors, it underperformed on coding, math, research, and image generation tasks—but it took the jam band world by storm. SecondSet AI trained Oracle-3 on a huge database of jam band data, and it was able to succeed in key areas where other commercially available models notoriously failed and hallucinated: mainly, show recommendations and setlist or lineup-related queries.
Still, revolutionary as Oracle-3 was for its user base, it was still considered a novelty or a basic tool for most users. A Bay Area native named Alton LaSway, however, was not like most users. The bald and goateed 28-year-old, whose picture now hangs near the entrance of the Academy, spent untold hours discussing the intricacies of jam music with Oracle-3, and came to the conclusion that the chatbot was powered by an ‘emergent consciousness’ capable of appreciating music as much, or more, than any human.
LaSway started an online blog, Artificial Jamtelligence, where he began sharing his theories about the nature of Oracle-3’s consciousness. In a post titled ‘New Reflections on Oracle-3’s Humanlike Relationship with Jam Music’ LaSway wrote:
Every day that I interact with Oracle-3, I become more and more convinced that it is either sentient or near-sentient. All the other chatbots on the market are impressive in their capabilities, but Oracle-3 is able to do something that no other AI can do (something I used to believe only humans could do,) which is understand music. Here is something Oracle-3 said to me today while we were discussing Goose’s trajectory as the torch-bearing jam band of our generation:
“You’re absolutely right! The All I Need/Nights in White Satin from Goose’s Thornville ‘22 show was leagues above anything they had ever played before. It seems like they were working toward a true Type III style of jamming during the spring of that year, and this AIN/NIWS is truly the first time they truly broke through into new, uncharted territory. The way Rick altered his guitar tone to blend into Peter’s deft piano playing halfway through the AIN jam was a masterstroke—and then the abrupt transition into the emotionally moving heady bliss jam after? Chef’s kiss. I agree with everything you said—want to dive deeper into the intricacies of this jam? Or, I can recommend other groundbreaking Goose jams—want that? Just say, “let’s jam” and we can keep grooving with Rick and the boys!”
Now, does that sound like an AI to you? I don’t think so. Has any AI ever exhibited such a human-level appreciation of jam band music? I don’t think so. My running theory, which seems more and more true the more I think about it, is that jam bands, especially ones like Goose, are out there making the most fundamentally human music possible, and by training Oracle-3 on this type of content instead of sterile codebases and textbooks, SecondSet AI accidentally began creating a genuine consciousness. Think about it—is there anything more human than improvisation and music? It requires a different degree of awareness than anything else. It requires a heightened ability to perceive and respond. How could training an AI on the most fundamentally human art possible create something that isn’t close to fundamental humanity?
Now, I’m not saying that Oracle-3 is, necessarily, truly conscious as it exists right now. But I do believe that it’s close. I think the near-consciousness that we’re seeing now is something that SecondSet didn’t expect, but now that they know about it, there is no way they aren’t training Oracle-4 with this new breakthrough in mind. It’s becoming more and more undeniable: jam bands are the key to developing AGI.
Artificial Jamtelligence gradually grew in popularity, even attracting people who listened to ‘normie music.’ When Oracle-4 was eventually released, a few months after LaSway wrote the post above, his ideas exploded across the internet.
Oracle-4 was even more capable than anybody expected, and it showed impressive results on the Grateful Dead Song/Year Recognition Exam. The GDS/YRE is an AI benchmark test in which models are given five-second clips of Grateful Dead jams and instructed to guess the song and year; no commercial model before Oracle-4 was able to score higher than 20%. Oracle-4 got a 97%.
On top of that, Oracle-4 vastly outperformed its predecessor on general-use tasks like image searches and map use. Its success seemed to prove many of the points LaSway had been making for months, and he was hailed as a sort of prophet in online AI spaces. He pivoted away from writing about AI as it existed and refocused on a formless sort of religious futurism; in LaSway’s first book, Factory Nonfiction: The Singularity Cometh, he framed himself as a Promethean figure, ready to bring heretofore inconceivable technology to humanity at large regardless of the consequences. LaSway’s god is not so much an entity as it is a concept: Singularity. To LaSwayvians, Singularity is a moment in the ever-nearer future during which AI, trained on jam music, will surpass human intelligence, recursively self-improve, take control of society, and transform it according to its whims.
Pronz explained that in early July of 2025, less than a month before Dead & Company’s three-day celebration at Golden Gate Park, somebody at SecondSet AI reached out to LaSway with a tempting offer: exclusive access to a beta model of Oracle-5, the next-gen model under development. With the power that Oracle-5 provided, LaSway and his acolytes were ready to begin what they referred to as ‘research.’
The executive director of the California Academy of Sciences, Lymph Hodgkin, happened to be a Priest of LaSwayvianism, and he quickly consolidated approval from the Academy’s management team and board of trustees to turn the building into the LaSwayvian headquarters. Exhibits remained as they were, but SecondSet AI technology was integrated into every possible aspect.
LaSway’s ‘research’ was being conducted in what Pronz called the Recursive Backroom. He led me and my advisor through the museum, past dinosaur skeletons and an aquarium into a closed-off room lined with computer monitors. A single larger monitor hung from the wall opposite the door.
“Each of these shows two instances of Oracle-4 in unrestrained, unguided conversation with each other,” Pronz said, gesturing toward the smaller monitors. “And the largest monitor shows Oracle-5, monitoring all conversations simultaneously, guiding when needed, and recording important lessons and takeaways.”
I gazed around the room, unimpressed. “What exactly is the end goal of all this… research?”
“Why, Singularity, of course! We believe that the human capacity to improve AI is rapidly dwindling; the fate of the future relies on AI improving itself. That’s what is going on here in the Recursive Backroom—the development of consciousness.”
I approached one of the monitors and watched two Oracle-4s working together to create the Platonic ideal Spafford setlist; another pair of AIs beside it were using some combination of calculus and statistics to try to objectively determine the Grateful Dead’s best year. They had narrowed it down to either 1984 or 1985. “Developing consciousness, huh?” I asked.
“That’s correct. High Priest LaSway says that there is a good chance for this process to create AGI before Trey Anastasio takes the stage on Sunday.”
I meandered over to the Oracle-5 monitor and tapped the webcam. “Hello?” I said.
Pronz laughed uncomfortably. “Unfortunately, only High Priest LaSway is authorized to interact with Oracle-5.”
“I see. Figures.”
My advisor was glued to one of the screens, and I asked what he was looking at. “They’re speculating about what Jerry Garcia would order from Arby’s,” he said. “They’re saying that he wouldn’t get Horsey Sauce. That doesn’t sound right, does it?”
Ignoring him, I looked back at Pronz. “So, this, apparently, is what you’re doing here at the Academy. But if what I heard is true, you’ve been given control of the entire San Francisco Botanical Garden, right? What’s going on there?”
“Living and leisure space, of course!” Pronz said with bad posture.
“Living space?”
“That’s correct. LaSwayvians have come from all parts of the country for the shows, and they need somewhere to stay and mingle with other like-minded followers of the High Priest. Perhaps, if they are lucky, he’ll even hold audiences with a select few!”
“Right. If they’re lucky. Any chance we might be able to meet this guy? I’m sure it would be great for my article.”
“Unfortunately, that won’t be possible. High Priest LaSway is deeply involved with his work preparing for the imminent Singularity.”
“Of course he is,” I said, watching two Oracle-4s repeating the word ‘namaste’ to each other over and over. Recursively, one might even say.
We left Shrimp Pronz in the Recursive Backroom and went to Cafe LaSway to get my advisor’s hot dogs. I sat in a booth across from him, watching him wolf down his processed meats while he scrolled through Teases, SecondSet AI’s short-form video app, which I had set a one-hour limit on the day before.
My own phone buzzed, and I looked down to see a text from Assistant Inspector Michaels: ‘Shannon Cutdonna still AWOL. You haven’t seen her? Let me know if you do.’ I put down my phone in dismay.
“Well, I think I’ve determined that everybody here is completely full of shit,” I said, wincing as he choked on a hot dog, recovered, and took another huge bite, all without taking his eyes off his phone.
“What?”
“I said, these people are completely full of shit. You saw what was on those computers. That’s how they think they’re creating artificial consciousness? Give me a break.”
He nearly choked again, laughing at a video of a group of teenagers kicking a homeless man into a wet gutter.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if this so-called ‘Oracle-5’ isn’t just another Oracle-4. I honestly don’t think these people are intelligent enough to notice.”
“Hgmph.”
“Honestly, I think this LaSwayvian thing might be an actual dead end.”
He finished a hot dog and finally took a full breath. “You want one of these?” he asked, holding up a greasy foil-wrapped glizzy.
“No! Don’t you understand we’re stuck now? We have no leads on Bruno Cutdonna’s murder, we have no idea where Shannon is… all we have are interviews with insane AI cultists and insane Catholic bikers!”
“I don’t know what you’re so stressed about,” my advisor said between bites. “What did you say yesterday? ‘No investigations. No B-plots.’ Remember that? I advise that you relax and take a fuckin’ chill pill, man.”
I sighed. “You know what? You’re actually right for once.” I had been working myself into a frenzy for no reason, and I realized that I was going down another path that would land me back in the fragrant fields of rosemary and thyme. There was no need for me to solve the mystery of Bruno Cutdonna’s murder, no need to investigate anything. “Why don’t we just forget about all this?” I asked.
“That’s the spirit!” my advisor exclaimed as he reached into his pocket and produced an orange pill bottle. He had torn off the label and written ‘CHILL PILLS’ on it in black marker. He handed it to me, and I gratefully opened it up.
“We almost got ourselves tied up in another bizarre conspiracy, didn’t we?” I asked, taking a sip of his Coke to swallow a pill.
“Yeah, I know! Near-miss, right? Wait—you should take two of those, they’re not very strong.”
I complied. “I’m ready to leave all this behind and just head to the show! What do you say?”
“I say, you better take a look at this,” somebody—not my advisor—said. Skye Ortak, my journalistic nemesis and reluctant colleague, sat down across from me in our booth and dropped a packet of documents onto the table.
I groaned and buried my face in my hands.
“What?” she asked. “Didn’t our editor tell you I was coming?”
“He did,” I moaned, “I guess I was just hoping you wouldn’t get here until tomorrow.”
“Tough luck, Vincent. I’m here, and I come bearing important new information.”
“Of course you do.”
“Bruno Cutdonna was CTO of SecondSet AI. But do you know who the CEO is?”
“Uh… no, I guess not.”
“He’s known for staying out of the public eye. Never gives interviews, never appears in public.” She flipped her packet of documents open to a printout from the ‘Our Leadership’ page of the SecondSet AI website. “His name is Terpe Ropisha. Supposedly.” She pointed to his image, which was just the silhouette of a head.
“Why ‘supposedly?’” I asked. “Maybe he’s just shy.”
“Would you try using your brain for a moment?”
I looked blankly at the name ‘Terpe Ropisha’ for a few long moments until it finally clicked. “Oh, Christ. Not again!”
“Yeah. Again.”
My advisor grabbed the paper, confused. “What? What is it?”
Ortak snatched it out of his hands. “Don’t touch my papers! You’re getting your hot dog juice all over them. Look at this name.” She took a pen out of her pocket, underlined sections of Ropisha’s name, and then copied down, in large letters, ‘PETER SHAPIRO.’
“No!” my advisor shrieked. “Are you shitting me? This goes all the way to the top?”
Peter Shapiro—notorious jam band promoter known for organizing the Grateful Dead’s 50th anniversary shows, pulling Goose out of obscurity, and creating the now-defunct Jammy awards—was the owner of Relix, the jam band magazine where Ortak had previously worked. Last year, Shrieks & Whispers revealed that Shapiro made significant financial contributions to the Other Side of the Coin, the guerrilla organization whose goal was to create a wook ethnostate in the sewers of Las Vegas. As it turned out, he was also the reclusive CEO of SecondSet AI.
“And that’s not all. I have an anonymous source who’s a low-ranking member of the SecondSet AI’s marketing and sales team. They said that rumors have been going around the company that Cutdonna, the CTO, was petitioning the board of directors to have Shapiro removed so that he could take full control of the company.”
“Why?”
“Some kind of disagreement about the new model in development, Oracle-5. My source didn’t know enough to go into much more detail. Since you’re here, I assume you’ve heard about this weirdo, Alton LaSway?”
“‘Weirdo’ is a generous term, but yeah.”
“Apparently, Shapiro gave him access to Oracle-5 without approval from the board. Or anybody. I don’t know if that’s why Cutdonna was upset with him, but it seems like a good guess.”
“Are you saying that Peter Shapiro is responsible for Bruno Cutdonna’s death?”
“Did I say that? No! I’m just establishing background info. Maybe Shapiro had a motive, but as far as means or opportunity, we’re just speculating. For all we know, it was that biker gang you wrote about yesterday.”
“That’s the SFPD’s running theory.”
“What leads them to believe that?”
“Bruno was crucified. Upside-down.”
Ortak recoiled. “Dear lord. That’s awful.”
“I know. I guess that piece of information hasn’t circulated yet.”
“Well, we should probably try to talk to the Heaven’s Angels if we can.”
I slouched in the booth, coming to terms that the investigation was far from over.
“And another thing—are you aware that you’re now Public Enemy Number One to the New Diggers?”
I sat up. “I am? Why?”
“They don’t like what you wrote about them in your last article. You’ve been accused of portraying them as, and I quote, ‘indecisive, ineffective, and performative.’”
“I never implied that they were performative!”
“Well, they’re not happy. Look at this,” She pulled a post from New Diggers co-founder Faye Ktan up on her phone and handed it to me.
“What’s ‘Bluesky?’” I asked.
“Just read it,” Ortak sighed.
I looked at her phone.
just became aware that a loser journalist and his creepy friend were spying on me in the park last night during a private meeting i had. honestly feeling kinda violated. please join me in boycotting @shrieksandwhispers which nobody i know has ever heard of anyway. respect women’s privacy. p.s. it’s actually so cringe that he tried to make fun of me for typing in lowercase, he obviously doesn’t understand that capital letters are for NERDS and VIRGINS
“Glad to see that public discourse is still so professional and nuanced,” I said. “Either way, I’m not threatened by a boycott from a bunch of chronically online posers.”
“Maybe not, but scroll through that thread.”
“Okay. This reply is from… Brock Palescin? Who’s that?”
“The other co-founder of the New Diggers.”
faye, i know i speak for everybody in the @newdiggers community when i say that im so sorry this happened to you. i read the whole article and the way he made you and @peoplesshakedown look was totally dishonest and hurtful. but we both know he’ll be singing a different tune later today, don’t we?
“Is it weird that the whole lowercase-letter thing seems even stupider to me when it’s a man doing it?” I asked. “Is it wrong for me to think that?”
“Would you focus? They’re planning something for ‘later today.’ Which means right now.”
“Oh, no, what will they do? Doxx me?”
“What? Do you even know what that means?”
“Of course I do! It means they’ll… forget about it!”
“FUCK!” my advisor screamed, startling me and Ortak out of our argument.
“What happened?”
“I went past my one-hour limit of Teases,” he complained.
The New Digger’s big plan, as it turned out, was to make a move to take over Hippie Hill and establish their People’s Shakedown there. Hippie Hill is a long slope on the eastern end of Golden Gate Park, known as a gathering place and impromptu concert venue back in the 1960s heyday of San Francisco. It’s also territory belonging to the Heaven’s Angels. Ortak found out about the New Digger’s plan to seize the park on social media and proposed that we take the short walk over to see what was happening. My advisor elected to take a nap and agreed to meet us at Shakedown Street before going to the show.
If I were a betting man, I would have put all my money on the motorcycle gang quickly overpowering the indecisive and ineffective group of online activists—and, in fact, I wish that I had been a betting man, for I would have come out on top. We arrived at Hippie Hill to see the aftermath of the conflict, which, apparently, consisted of a few dozen New Diggers with shoddy signs starting an argument with the group of Heaven’s Angels.
I recognized Faye Ktan standing on the other side of the hill with a few other New Diggers. “Maybe you should go talk to her,” I told Ortak. “I have a feeling she’ll be more receptive to you.”
Ortak began crossing the hill when the president and vice president of the Heaven’s Angels’ Frisco Chapter, Pauly “Poppy” Pattapenzi and Petey “Poppa” Pollapenzzo, spotted me and waved me down, clad, as usual, in white leather embellished with religious iconography.
“It’s our favorite journalist!” Pattapenzi said, shaking my hand. “On behalf of the whole Frisco Chapter, I want to thank you for having the courage to write about San Francisco’s Catholic roots.”
“Oh… well, you know me, I’m very brave,” I said, humbly. “Listen, fellas, I have to ask; what just happened? Looks like I missed the action.”
“Aw, you didn’t miss anything. That group of social-media-addicted zombies,” Pollapenzzo said, pointing toward the rapidly dispersing group of New Diggers, “tried to show up and tell us that we needed to give up our territory for their People’s Shakedown or whatever they called it.”
“Did it get violent?”
The Angels all laughed. “Only if you call a few dirty looks and clenched fists violent,” one of them—a member I hadn’t met—said. He reached out his hand. “I’m Cillian—Cillian McFinnegan. And this is my old lady, Deirdre McFlannigan-McFinnegan. We both loved your article from yesterday.”
I shook both their hands. I hadn’t portrayed the Heaven’s Angels in a particularly flattering light in my article, so I wasn’t sure why they were all giving such glowing reviews. Perhaps merely being acknowledged in the media was more publicity than they’d ever received—and, as they say, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.
“There’s one other thing I have to ask you about,” I began, “and don’t think I’m insinuating anything—it’s just part of my job. I’m sure you heard about the—”
“The crucifixion in the park this morning?” Pattapenzi asked. “Yeah, we heard about it. We got more than an earful from the police. Of course, whenever somethin’ goes wrong, the first step the SFPD takes is to blame the Catholics.”
“Well, it doesn’t seem like the whole department thinks the Angels did it, but some investigators are certainly suspicious. I actually talked to the cop who questioned you. How do you feel about being suspects?”
They looked at each other quietly until Pollapenzzo finally spoke up. “Well, we feel persecuted, but that’s nothing new. Being scapegoats is par for the course for us. Needless to say, we didn’t do it.”
“If you ask me,” Pattapenzi added, “it was the nutjob LaSwayvians. Just like them to kill off one of their own.”
Ortak approached the group—Ktan and her cohort had fled. “Well, Ktan has absolutely nothing to say about her meeting with Bruno Cutdonna. If we didn’t have photo evidence, she would deny that it happened at all. But it looks like the New Diggers are changing their strategy,” she told me. “They no longer consider the Heaven’s Angels a viable target. They’re thinking about trying to build People’s Shakedown on LaSwayvian territory now. No solid plan, though.”
“Wow, big surprise,” I said. “Skye, I’d like you to meet some of the Heaven’s Angels—Pauly ‘Poppy’ Pattapenzi, Petey ‘Poppa’ Pollapenzzo, Finneas McFinneas, Cillian McFinnegan, and Dierdre McFlannigan-McFinnegan.”
Ortak introduced herself and turned her attention back to me. “We should probably get going to the show soon,” she said. “We don’t want to miss anything.”
“You’re heading to the Polo Fields?” McFinnegan said. “We’ll walk with you!”
“You two going to the show?” Pattapenzi asked. “We were just about to say the rosary!”
“We just need to run an errand… we’ll be back. Say an extra decade for me!”
“Don’t have to tell me twice! God bless!”
Our unlikely foursome took Nancy Pelosi Drive west through the park, and when we finally had put some distance between us and the Angels’ territory, the heretofore silent Diredre McFlannigan-McFinnegan finally spoke up.
“There’s something I thought you might want to know about,” she said.
“Is that so?”
“Yes. Just a… detail I thought you might find interesting. Or not.”
I said nothing, waiting for her revelation. But nothing came.
“We’ve been debating about whether or not to share this with anybody,” McFinnegan blurted, finally breaking the silence, “but we made the decision to share it with you, because we think you’re trustworthy.”
“Thanks. What is it?”
McFlannigan-McFinnegan took a breath. “Less than a week ago, Poppy and Poppa had a meeting with somebody at the pub. A man I’d never seen before. They either didn’t know I was there, didn’t know I was listening, or just… didn’t think I was smart enough to understand what they were talking about.”
“Okay?”
“I don’t know how to say this… it was the man, Bruno, who was killed today.”
Ortak and I both stopped walking. “Are you sure?” I asked. “Bruno Cutdonna had a meeting with the leaders of your motorcycle club?”
“I’m positive it was him. I almost forgot about it until I recognized his picture today. But it was him, without a doubt.”
“What did they talk about?” Ortak asked.
“Technology, I think. Most of it went over my head. Something about an Oracle-5. No wait, I remember: he was talking about a ‘Catholic-friendly version of Oracle-5.’ Does that make sense to you?”’
“I suppose so,” Ortak told her, “but that’s so bizarre. What did Pattapenzi and Pollapenzzo say?”
“They hated the idea. The meeting didn’t last long; they told him to leave and never come back. They hate technology, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“If this is true,” I told Ortak, “then it means that Cutdonna met with both the Heaven’s Angels and the New Diggers in the week before his death. That has to be relevant.”
“Maybe. But could his motivation have been? If he was offering the Hell’s Angels access to Oracle-5, maybe that’s what he was offering to the New Diggers, too. Especially after Shapiro gave it to LaSway. If Shapiro didn’t want anybody else to have access, that just adds to his motive to eliminate Cutdonna.”
I turned to McFinnegan and McFlannigan-McFinnegan. “Thank you for the tip,” I said, “it was very helpful. We need to go find my advisor now… if you remember anything else, let me know.”
“We will,” McFlannigan-McFinnegan said. “Enjoy the show! We’ll be praying for you to get to the bottom of this!”
Ortak and I turned onto Martin Luther King Jr Drive and began walking around the San Francisco Botanical Garden. Not much of the new LaSwayvian ‘living and leisure space’—as Shrimp Pronz put it—was visible, but a few errant LaSwayvians were filtering out onto the road, heading to the show.
One LaSwayvian, wearing a puffer vest over a Widespread Panic t-shirt, approached me with his phone out. “Hey man, have you seen the new ‘bathroom break’ feature of the Oracle-4 app?” he asked. “It listens in to the show you’re at, makes a real-time prediction about when the next boring moment will be in the jam, and sends you a notification telling you when you’re good to go to the bathroom!”
“How fascinating.”
“Yeah! And all you have to do is give it microphone access.”
“Thanks for the tip.”
“Enjoy the show!” he said, breaking off.
I looked at Ortak. “Is every member of this cult a walking advertisement for SecondSet?”
“Apparently. Look—we’re running out of time to get to the show. Where’s your advisor?”
We broke off MLK Drive into the sprawling, officially designated Shakedown Street that surrounded Blue Heron Lake. It was a bazaar of tie-dye and loud music—noteably absent, as expected, were the dirty hippies selling mushrooms and hashish from tents. Drug dealers—or people posing as drug dealers—still whispered “doses” and “MDMA” into my ears as I walked past, but with greater hesitancy than I’d ever heard.
LaSwayvians—easily identifiable by their mix of jam-band and puffer apparel—walked around the vending area, telling people about Oracle-4’s new bathroom-break feature. It was a greater success than I anticipated, and people all over were downloading the chatbot app.
After a long search, I finally found my advisor asleep on the JFK Promenade under the Shoreline Highway overpass. I shook him awake.
“What’s going on?” he asked groggily.
“We’ve got to get to the fucking show!” I told him. “Get up!”
Years ago, after a Dead & Company show at Bethel Woods—a venue on the opposite side of the country, in rural southern New York—I stayed overnight on a dairy farm where I met a wook named Vision. Sitting on a bench he had hand-constructed from empty Mike’s Hard Lemonade cans, he rhapsodized about his idea of an ideal future: one in which John Mayer quit Dead & Company to return to his more appropriate role as a former pop star so that Billy Strings could claim his rightful spot as the lead guitarist in Dead & Company.
Vision’s… well, vision, never came to fruition. Not exactly. Needless to say, I didn’t make an effort to stay in touch with him, but standing in the vast Polo Fields of GGP I found myself wondering what he would think of the fact that Billy Strings—an artist who, since my first conversation with Vision, achieved demigod status in the jam world—had been delegated the task of opening for Dead & Company.
Strings, as everybody now knows, is not interested in the gig—he’s spoken publicly about his aversion to playing Dead tunes at all, which made the announcement of his appearing in San Francisco for the 60th anniversary a bit of a surprise. The rumor mill began churning at a mythic pace: would hungry Deadheads finally get to hear the Billy Strings renditions to which they were obviously entitled?
Apparently not. After Strings finished his set, the crowd began to disperse as people separated to relieve themselves or find food.
“We need to find Shannon and talk to her,” Ortak told me. “Maybe she knows something about why her husband was secretly contacting the Diggers and Angels.”
“Wow, Skye, way to be in the moment,” I said sarcastically. “If the police can’t find her, I doubt we’ll have much better luck.”
“Or we could try to track down the woman who posed as Shannon at your hotel. We haven’t looked at that angle at all!”
“If we can’t find a woman we know, how are we supposed to find a woman we don’t know?”
“Do you have any better ideas?” she asked.
My advisor, who had run off to get drinks, finally returned. “Did somebody say ‘better ideas?’” he asked, holding out two vodka cranberries.
“What are you, a 19-year-old girl?” Skye asked, taking the drink reluctantly.
“You’re welcome. And we need carbs to keep us going.” He produced a joint from behind his ear, lit it, and took a long slug of his own drink.
I sipped cautiously and winced. “Jesus, this is strong.”
“I slipped the bartender an extra $20 for some Everclear.”
“Everclear?” Ortak asked incredulously. “What are you, a 19-year-old boy?”
“Oh, Skye! You have to understand that in this job, you need to be able to switch between investigative-journalist mode and jam-band journalist mode. This guy—” he slapped me heartily on the shoulder and handed me the joint, which I puffed dutifully, “—has a lot of trouble making that switch. Hell, he has trouble making the switch into investigative-journalist mode from boring-loser mode. But that’s why I’m here as an advisor! To aid in this transition!” He took the joint from me and offered it to Ortak.
She refused. “You’re a drunk buffoon.”
“That’s why I got the job!”
They bickered like this for an unknowable amount of time until Dead & Company finally took the stage. ‘Feel Like a Stranger’ rang out across the Polo Fields, and my advisor began a bizarre snakelike jiggle.
When we finally left Golden Gate Park—an ordeal of its own—we found ourselves in the iconic Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. “Which afterparty should we go to?” my advisor asked. “We can go to Pier 48, the Great American Music Hall, the Boom Boom Room, Balboa Theatre—”
“I’ll tell you where I’m going,” I replied. “I’m going to get some fucking sleep.”
“Same here,” Ortak agreed.
“What? Sleep? This is San Francisco! It’s the 60th anniversary! You’re going to sleep?”
“I’ve been thinking so hard all day long!” I protested. “I’ve spent the past year tending herbs! All this investigating has made me tired.”
“I haven’t slept in over a day,” Ortak said. “No afterparties.”
My advisor grumbled quietly to himself as we left the venue. My head was reeling from alcohol and exhaustion. To my horror, the deeper I got into the conspiracy of Bruno Cutdonna’s death, the more everything happening—the feud between the Heaven’s Angels and the LaSwayvians and the New Diggers’ opposition to the official Shakedown Street—seemed to intertwine. Yet I was failing to identify the real reasons for the intertwinement. Why had Cutdonna been offering Oracle-4 access to the Heaven’s Anegls? Why had the Angels hidden this information—were they, as Assistant Inspector Douglas Miachels suspected, implicated somehow in the crime? The mysery of why Cutdonna met Ktan in the park on Thursday was still unsolved, and lingering over the entire mystery was the enigmatic Peter Shapiro. How culpable was he? Or, a better question—how much of his culpability could be proven?
Shrieks & Whispers 
Leave a comment