The first time it happened, Tom thought it was a fluke, a weird glitch in the hyper-personalized streams of his new music app, Echo. He’d been scrolling through his phone, bored in calculus, when a new playlist appeared at the top. It was a single word: Fight.
He dismissed it. But ten minutes later, a text from his mom about plummeting history grades sent a hot stripe of anger through him. He spent the lunch period fuming in the corner of the library, and as his pulse hammered in his ears, he remembered the playlist. He tapped it. All the music was aggressive, driving industrial rock and furious, lyrical rap. It was perfect. Too perfect.
Echo was good. Scary good. It learned his preferences with efficient speed. But over the next week, it began anticipating his moods with an accuracy that turned from uncanny to unsettling. A playlist titled Rain Walk appeared 20 minutes before an unexpected downpour that caught him without a jacket. The Letdown was populated with melancholic indie music the moment he walked out of a disastrous movie date with Sarah.
It was helpful at first. A digital guardian angel. Then came the darker ones.
He was eating breakfast when Goodbye appeared. The playlist contained a collection of aching orchestral pieces with old, wistful songs his grandmother used to sing. An hour later, his mother got the call. Nana had passed peacefully in her sleep. A sudden, massive stroke. Tom stared at his phone, a cold knot tightening in his stomach. Coincidence. It had to be.
But the seed of doubt was planted. He started watching the app like a hawk, his stomach lurching every time a new title popped up. He saw The Long Drive the morning his beat-up Honda Civic sputtered and died on the interstate, forcing him to wait two hours for a tow truck in the blistering cold.
The final playlist appeared on October 30th, its name simple, final, and terrifying: The Accident.
His blood ran cold. He had plans to drive Vincent, Chloe and Maya to a Halloween party the next night. He immediately texted the group chat. “Party’s off. Can’t drive. Car trouble.”
Vincent replied immediately: “Dude, no! My brother can lend us his SUV. Problem solved.”
The playlist didn’t vanish. It just sat there, at the top of Tom’s screen, a digital death sentence. He tried to cancel entirely, making up an excuse about a stomach bug, but his friends were relentless. They’d already bought costumes. They were counting on him. He was trapped.
Halloween night arrived. Tom sat in the driver’s seat of Vincent’s brother’s SUV, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. The three of them were a riot of color and laughter in the back, dressed as a dragon, a fairy and a zombie. They were playing music from their own phones, but Tom had Echo open on his, the playlist haunting him.
“Hey, man, you okay? You’re driving like my grandma,” Vincent said, his dragon mask pushed up on his forehead.
“Just… be careful,” Tom muttered, his eyes flickering between the road and the phone in his cupholder.
Based on the app’s track record, it was inevitable. A fact already computed. He felt like a passenger in his own body, going through the motions of a script that had already been written.
Then he saw it. The preview. A new playlist was generated, its title a single, chilling command: Brake Now.
His eyes snapped up. They were approaching a blind intersection. The light was green. Everything looked normal. But the app didn’t see the world in images; it saw it in data — location pings, traffic flow algorithms, the erratic movement of another phone speeding towards a red light a block away.
Brake Now. The words refused to leave his screen.
It was a choice. Trust the world he could see, or trust the cold, unfeeling logic of an algorithm that had never been wrong.
He slammed on the brakes.
The SUV screeched, lurching to a violent halt. His friends yelled, tumbling forward. “Tom, what the heck?!”
A split second later, a pickup truck ran the red light at a terrifying speed, blasting into the intersection exactly where they would have been. The wind rocked the SUV, a chilling shudder. It was so close that Tom could see the stunned, wide-eyed face of the teenage driver inside.
Silence. Heavy, profound silence, broken only by the ragged gasps of his friends.
“How… How did you…” Chloe whispered, her fairy wings bent and broken.
Tom couldn’t speak. He just looked at his phone. The Brake Now playlist had vanished. So had The Accident. In their places was a new one, already generated.
Its title was The End. And it was counting down. A timer was displayed under the title, ticking down from 00:59. Fifty-nine seconds. Fifty-eight.
It wasn’t forecasting an external event anymore. It was forecasting him. His own death. A heart attack from the adrenaline? A revenge crash from the pickup driver who was now skidding to a stop down the road? It didn’t matter. The AI had modeled his future, and this was the end of its simulation.
Fifty seconds.
He looked at his friends’ terrified and confused faces. He had saved them. But he was still trapped in the machine’s cold, unfeeling statistics. The algorithm knew him better than he knew himself, and it had already written his finale. He was just living it out.
