One night last fall, unable to sleep, Joshua Barbeau logged onto a mysterious chat website called Project December. It was Sept. 24, around 3 a.m., and Joshua was on the couch, next to a bookcase crammed with board games and Dungeons & Dragons strategy guides. He lived in Bradford, Canada, a suburban town an hour north of Toronto, renting a basement apartment and speaking little to other people. A 33-year-old freelance writer, Joshua had existed in quasi-isolation for years before the pandemic, confined by bouts of anxiety and depression. Once a theater geek with dreams of being an actor, he supported himself by writing articles about D&D and selling them to gaming sites. Many days he left the apartment only to walk his dog, Chauncey, a black-and-white Border collie. Usually they went in the middle of the night, because Chauncey tended to get anxious around other dogs and people. They would pass dozens of dark, silent, middle-class homes. Then, back in the basement, Joshua would lay ...

Marius cursed and jammed a mic stand between the crash bars of the TV studio door. "If SWAT's on its way, we don't have much time," he said. Michaela, who up until a couple of minutes ago had been streaming their interview live, still sat on one of the oval chairs under the hot lights. "What are they talking about?" The cube-shaped television studio had black-painted walls surrounding the bright stage area. Big monitors on the walls were showing the same "live" feed as they had five minutes ago, but now a red banner flashed at the bottom of the screens: ACTIVE SHOOTER AT COMPLETE PICTURES BUILDING. Michaela pointed at a moving figure on the screen. Apparently I like assault rifles." Adan, their cameraman, had called up a local news feed after the first shouts of panic and confusion filtered through the studio's thick doors. What it showed was entirely and completely not what the three of them were seeing. Marius was inside the windowless second-floor studio, empty-handed, yet the monitors showed what looked like a drone feed of him moving into and out of view through the building's windows on the 10th floor. He was armed, and every now and then he would pause and shoot, calmly and methodically. Marius shook his head in disgust. "Hey, Adan, could you give me a hand with this?" The cameraman was hunched over his laptop. "The same people who own the SWAT team," said Marius. "But forget what I said.