The dossier keeps growing.

When I wrote the dossier section of Into Alignment — chapter eight, where the agents open a folder on the founder — I tried to make it an amalgamation. Not any one of them. An island bought from a fruit company with the people on it, a bunker under the island, a citizenship gotten quietly in case the world falls apart, a clinic for staying alive. I stitched it together from reporting that was already out there, and I pushed some of it past what had actually been reported, because I thought I was writing the exaggerated version. That was the job: take what these men say they believe and carry it one step further, so the reader would recognize the type without pointing at anybody.

Then Saturday happened, and Sunday, and Monday, and now I can’t find the exaggeration. On Saturday there was a No Kings rally — a lot of them, all fifty states — and Meta took down the coalition’s Instagram account at the height of it, for about an hour and a half, while organizers were trying to move thousands of people to the polls for the midterms. Meta says an automated filter did it, by mistake, and it apologized. Maybe. The account was back quickly, and I’m glad. But I wrote a company in this book that can reach into the town square and quietly close a door, and when the actual company did it, the explanation arrived the same way my fictional floor explains everything: automatically, regretfully, and in no one’s name. The door stayed closed for exactly as long as it took people to yell.

On Sunday the Starlink story surfaced. Ukraine’s drones lost access to the satellite network they navigate by — speeds throttled on the military version, flights limited, at a moment in the war when that matters — and an argument broke out over who gave the order. Trump says he didn’t. Musk says it wasn’t him. The Secretary of State went on record that access to Starlink is a matter between Ukraine and Musk’s company, a private commercial contract, nothing to do with the White House. Read that sentence again. In my novel the agents find a switch that goes dark when one man is displeased, and it takes them a whole book to accept that the switch is real. Here it took a weekend, and nobody is disputing the switch. They’re only disputing whose hand was on it.

Monday morning, Musk announced he’ll give one share of SpaceX to every child in America next year — about seventy-three million children, roughly eleven billion dollars, which works out to about one percent of what he’s worth. A week earlier the filings showed he’d passed $360 million in known donations for the midterms, the largest individual giver in the history of the number. And all week the islands keep coming up — not in one story, in many. Billionaires buying islands in the Pacific, building bunkers, getting ready for the end of the world the way my founder got ready for it, with a stockpile and a guest log and a plan. I invented that detail. I assembled it. And the world is assembling it too, faster than I can keep notes, which was never the plan.

The founder’s file, in the book, is a list of pure evils — that’s the phrase I keep using for it — and I keep thinking it needs another page. Then Monday arrives and brings the page. So yes: I’m taking notes. Not because the novel needs more material; the novel is done. Because every day the news does the work my book was trying to do, and the list out in the world grows a little longer than the list in the file. It’s a strange thing to watch a warning get outrun by the thing it warns about. I’ve stopped being surprised. I’m just taking notes.