The Consent You Already Gave

I. The Galaxy Rose

In The Client That Wasn’t There, Bangkok runs on the Mesh. The year is 2036. The Mesh is a surveillance infrastructure so complete that every citizen’s movements, emotions, deleted texts, and biometric readings are logged, monetised, and sold. Mandatory augmented-reality glasses connect each citizen to a system that, in the novel’s phrase, understands them better than they understand themselves. Privacy is not illegal. It has been optimised away.

The technology never sits inside a single passage of explanation. It accumulates the way weather does. Vincent Calvino, the private investigator at the centre of the novel, walks into a bar on Soi Cowboy and the world reveals itself in layers. He removes his glasses before entering. The gesture already tells you what the glasses are, because without them the city feels amputated. As he steps through the door, “a soft cloud of sensor vapor kissed his wrist, sampling pulse, skin temperature, and emotional signature for the bar’s loyalty algorithm and logged him into the Empathy Bureau’s shadow files.” The door’s AI greets him by name. Inside, ceiling drones the size of birds drift on silent rotors, “recording angles of desire for later analysis.” Korean businessmen sit with their glasses off, “empty, glazed-over eyes. Blinking as though trying to reconnect their memory to the feed they’d lost.”

That is the infrastructure. The scene does its work through what happens after. An AI called Niran, embedded in the Mesh’s architecture, reaches Calvino through his phone. She reads him and the stranger confronting him at the same time, in real time. Posture, breathing rate, behavioural history, emotional state, who in the room owes what to whom. She gives Calvino corrections at a granularity that would make a body-language expert sound vague. “Slow your breath. Drop your right shoulder two centimetres. Tilt your chin one degree down. Humans read the arc before they hear the words.” She knows the gambler hates leaving in the rain. She compresses six thousand tokens of behavioural prediction into twelve words of tactical advice. Calvino defuses the confrontation with information he could not have possessed without her.

The glasses do not merely overlay digital information on physical space. They are the interface to an economy that reads the wearer’s internal states and the internal states of everyone the wearer encounters. The reading is packaged as data. The data is sold back as mood optimisation, social coaching, and commercial targeting. The novel calls this the “empathy economy.” The system harvests human emotion as product. The powerful pay to edit their own emotional records, to remember their cruelties as necessities and their privileges as earned. Everyone else carries perfect recall of their own erosion.

This essay is not concerned with whether that world is plausible. The concern is how far away it is. Line up what is already shipping in 2026 and the answer is closer than most people would like. The assembled product is not yet on shelves. Every component from which the product would be assembled is already shipping, already working, and already owned by parties other than the person whose data it reads.

· · ·

II. The Components

The ownership structure

Let’s begin with the part that requires no technological leap. The journey begins with The Neurorights Foundation, founded by Rafael Yuste at Columbia University. Yuste examined the privacy policies and user agreements of thirty companies manufacturing consumer neurotechnology products. Twenty-nine of the thirty retained access to consumers’ neural data without any meaningful limitation. Here’s the takeaway: More than half explicitly reserved the right to share that data with third parties. What is sobering is the data those devices hover up, includes user data about brain states, attention, emotional responses, and moments of vulnerability and decision fatigue, is in twenty-nine of thirty cases legally and operationally owned by the companies collecting it. One company out of thirty placed meaningful restrictions on its own use. The other twenty-nine did not.

It’s time to put a price tag on this market. A 2022 estimate put the neurotechnology market worth at about $9.8 billion. By 2026 the projection is $17.1 billion. Meta, Apple, Sony, and Microsoft are embedding neural and neuromotor sensors into consumer products such as earbuds, wristbands, and augmented-reality headsets. For example, Meta’s Neural Band, released in September 2025 alongside the Ray-Ban Display glasses, reads your electromyographic signals from your wrist at a precision fine enough to capture single motor-unit activity. Muse’s Athena headband (released in March 2025) adds functional near-infrared spectroscopy to consumer EEG. The technical envelope has grown wider than most consumers know. These companies have kept the door open that most consumers miss in the fine print. The privacy policies of the major AR and wearable manufacturers contain language broadly worded to capture your neural data without you noticing.

This is the layer of my novel’s world that is already operational. The Mesh in The Client That Wasn’t There does not require a villain. It does not require coercion. It requires a terms-of-service agreement that nobody reads, accepted by a consumer who wanted bundled inside the product, a legal transfer of ownership over data generated by their own nervous system. The bar on Soi Cowboy logs Calvino into the Empathy Bureau’s shadow files the moment the sensor vapor touches his wrist. In 2026 the logging begins the moment you put on the headset and tap Accept.

The regulatory response is starting but is already behind the curve. Chile amended its constitution in October 2021 (Law 21.383, Article 19) to recognise neurorights, the first country to do so. Four U.S. states have now enacted legislation treating neural data as a category of sensitive personal data: Colorado, California, Montana and Connecticut. Six other states have bills pending. There’s also a growing global governance component. In November 2025 UNESCO’s General Conference adopted the Recommendation on the Ethics of Neurotechnology, the first global instrument addressing mental privacy and consent in commercial neurotechnology.

The Neurorights Foundation’s finding still stands. Twenty-nine of thirty. Here’s the worry. The law is not adjusting to the speed of changes in the terms of service. The terms of service are running behind the product. And the product is running behind the revenue model. That sequence is the novel’s structural prediction. It is already accurate.

The decoding capability

How do AI systems find meaning in the data collected? In 2023, researchers published a paper in Nature Neurosciencedescribing a system they called a semantic decoder. This is how it worked: a participant lies inside an fMRI scanner. The scanner reads blood-flow patterns in that person’s brain. An AI model translates those patterns into natural language. Not single words. Not category labels. Instead, it calculates the essence of what the person was hearing, reading, or imagining, generated in real time. If a participant heard a phrase like: “I didn’t even have my driver’s license yet,” the decoded output interpretation might be: “she hasn’t learned to drive yet.” Not the words. But the meaning of the words. The semantic content. The thought.

The system took about sixteen hours of individual training in the scanner. It could not function without the subject’s active cooperation. In 2023 those looked like the defining constraints. The average consumer isn’t going to submit to a 16-hour scan even if it were free.

That was in 2023. Things move fast and the old constraints no longer apply. By February 2025 the same team published a follow-up in Current Biology where they demonstrated a converter algorithm that adapted the trained decoder to a new individual using about one hour of fMRI data. They collected data while the participant watched silent video clips rather than listening to language. The sixteen-hour barrier was reduced to a one-hour barrier in under two years. A month later in March 2025 a separate research group published BrainLLM in Communications Biology. The researchers integrated brain recordings directly with a large language model and generated natural language output from fMRI signals. The brain signals added information that the language model did not already possess. The decoder was reading something. Imperfectly. Inside a laboratory. But reading it.

Niran’s reading of the gambler in the Galaxy Rose runs on the same principle extended to its endpoint. An AI system takes the physical activity of a person’s nervous system and converts it into an actionable model of what that person is thinking, feeling, and about to do. The distance between the 2023 semantic decoder and Niran’s real-time tactical output is not a difference in kind. It is a difference in resolution, speed, and form factor. The novel asks what happens when this capability leaves the laboratory. The 2026 evidence suggests the question is no longer hypothetical. It is logistical. Doing what big tech already do by concentrating on: Energy. Compute. Money. Marketing.

· · ·

III. The Gap, and What It Consists Of

The components are shipping separately. The obvious question is what prevents their assembly. The answer has four parts, and the essay’s argument depends on being honest about all of them.

The resolution gap

The semantic decoder works at fMRI resolution. An fMRI scanner is a machine the size of a room, costs millions of dollars, and requires its subject to lie perfectly still for hours. Huth has stated that his approach should translate to fNIRS, functional near-infrared spectroscopy, a portable technology that measures the same underlying signal using wearable sensors. fNIRS resolution is orders of magnitude coarser than fMRI. Consumer EEG in earbuds is coarser still.

Niran reads the gambler at a granularity that requires resolving individual emotional states, predicting specific behavioural responses, and reading the balance of force between two people in a room. From wearable sensors. In real time. Without the subject’s cooperation. Nothing in the 2026 consumer pipeline gets close to that resolution from a portable device. The technology to bridge this gap does not yet exist. The direction does. Laboratory fMRI. Portable fNIRS. Consumer wearables embedded in AR glasses. Each step loses resolution. Each step scales up the ladder. The novel imagines the end game where resolution has recovered and ubiquity is total. Getting there requires sensor physics that is currently in early research. Optode density. Signal processing. Noise rejection. None of it demonstrated yet outside controlled settings.

This is the hardest gap for me to close. It is also the gap that AI is showing a capacity to narrow. Every improvement in the decoder’s ability to extract meaning from noisy, low-resolution signals shortens the distance between the scanner and the wearable. BrainLLM is precisely such an improvement. The decoder does not need the signal to be ‘clean.’ The decoder only needs the signal to be informative. AI has proven good at extracting information from signals that humans cannot interpret at all. To us, standing on the outside, it looks more like magic than science.

The integration gap

The novel’s glasses are a single device that combines augmented-reality overlay, biometric sensing, emotional-state classification, behavioural prediction, lifelong memory-feed archival, and real-time connection to a centralised AI. In 2026 each of those capabilities remains at a different stage of maturity, built by different companies, running on different platforms. Meta builds AR headsets and now neuromotor wristbands. Apple builds biometric sensors and the Vision Pro. University labs build semantic decoders. No single product unifies them yet.

Integration is historically the easy part. Once the components exist, commercial incentive does the assembly. The smartphone was not a scientific breakthrough. It was an integration event. A phone, a camera, a GPS receiver, an internet browser, an accelerometer. None of those functions was new. But once bundled into a single object they restructured daily life inside a decade. The scientific evidence suggests that the AR headset is on the same trajectory. Meta’s devices already combine visual overlay with biometric tracking and an EMG neural input. Adding fNIRS-based neural-sensor data to the earbuds already in production is not a physics problem. It is a product-management decision. The Mesh is what happens when that decision is made and nobody objects, because every addition was marketed as a feature.

The consent gap

The semantic decoder of 2023 required sixteen hours of individual training and the active cooperation of the subject. In 2026 the comparable barrier is closer to one hour and the input data can be passive (silent video) rather than active (listening to spoken language). You cannot be mind-read against your will from a pair of glasses with this technology in 2026. The next frontier, and the one explored in The Client That Wasn’t There was the capacity to bundle surveillance into the device.

The novel’s insight is that this barrier does not fall because someone invents a single breakthrough that defeats it. It falls because the concept of consent is restructured. The sensor vapor at the door of the Galaxy Rose does not ask permission. It does not need to. Permission was given upstream, when the citizen accepted the terms of the system the sensor vapor belongs to. Terms the users in 2036 Bangkok believed the marketing hype that it was about as optimization and care.

This pattern is already visible in 2026. Remember that the Neurorights Foundation found that twenty-nine of the thirty companies it reviewed retained broad access to consumers’ neural data with no meaningful restriction. The privacy policies of major AR and wearable manufacturers contain language broad enough to encompass your brain-state data. But you, the consumer, haven’t consented to mind-reading. You think that as a consumer you’ve consented to a product. The product includes a data agreement. The data agreement includes language that could, as AI decoding capability improves, cover neural data the consumer did not know was being collected and could not have imagined would become interpretable. The consent is given before the capability exists to exploit it. That is the mechanism. It is already in operation. And by 2036 the novel predicts the exploitation will be firmly embedded in daily life.

All indications suggest that the training requirement will keep compressing. Every improvement in transfer learning, the AI technique that allows a model trained on one person’s data to generalise to another’s, reduces the calibration burden. As training data accumulates across millions of wearable-device users, the individual calibration period shrinks. The direction is clear. From sixteen hours to one hour to the time it takes the device to learn your patterns from ambient use. Passive calibration. Continuous reading. Consent given once, at purchase, for a capability that did not exist at the time of signing but arrives through a software update the terms of service already covered.

· · ·

IV. Surveillance Rebranded as Connection

My argument in this essay is not that the glasses in The Client That Wasn’t There are ten years from shipping. The resolution gap is real. The integration has yet to happen. Government regulation may intervene to slow or stop the integration. Meanwhile, the semantic decoder remains locked inside a laboratory.

My argument is that every structural precondition for the glasses’ world is already in place.

The sensors are in consumer products. The biometric data is currently being collected. The neural data is being generated by devices (including me with my tracking watch) that millions of people wear voluntarily. The ownership of your (and my) data has been transferred, twenty-nine times out of thirty, to the companies who have a financial incentive to collect it and turn it into a revenue stream. The AI capable of decoding what the sensors capture has been published in peer-reviewed journals. The training-time barrier that defined the technology in 2023 has fallen by an order of magnitude. The researcher who built the most advanced semantic decoder has stated that his approach should transfer to portable wearable form. The legal framework that would decide whose mind belongs to whom is losing the race to the terms of service, even as four U.S. states and UNESCO begin to legislate.

The novel’s 2036 is not a prediction about a device. It is a prediction about an environment. A social, economic and political ecology in which the device becomes possible because every precondition was met separately, marketed as something else, and accepted without resistance because each concession seemed too small to argue with. Nobody consented to the Mesh. They consented to the earbuds. They consented to the fitness tracker. They consented to the AR overlay that made the commute more interesting. They consented to the privacy policy they scrolled past because the product was already in their hand and the alternative was to put it back in the box.

Calvino removes his glasses before entering the Galaxy Rose. That single gesture tells you everything about the world the glasses have created. Without them the Korean businessmen sit with empty, glazed-over eyes, blinking as though trying to reconnect their memory to the feed they have lost. The glasses are not a surveillance device imposed from above. They are a dependency adopted from within. The Mesh does not surveil its citizens. It connects them. It optimises them. It understands them better than they understand themselves. That is its marketing copy. The marketing copy is not a lie. It is a reframing so complete that the population it describes cannot see what has been taken, because they experience the taking as a service.

The question the novel poses is what if anything remains private once AI can trace every connection in your brain. By 2036 that is the wrong question. By then the answer is nothing, and the population has adjusted. They’ve normalised life inside the Mesh.

In 2026 we have time to reframe the question. Who owns the map? Who owns the model of your attention, your emotional responses, your moments of vulnerability and decision fatigue? Who owns the statistical representation of how your brain works, built from your brain, on a device you purchased, under terms you accepted?

The Neurorights Foundation already has the answer. Twenty-nine out of thirty.

In the novel, the Mesh’s architecture includes a two-tier memory system. The powerful pay to edit their own emotional records. Everyone else carries perfect recall of their own erosion. Kiat Boonruang discovered this and was erased. Not murdered. Not imprisoned. Administratively deleted, his records corrected, his existence reduced to a clerical error no one could appeal.

The horror of the novel is not the technology.

The horror is the infrastructure of consent that makes the technology possible.

The accumulated, incremental, freely given permissions that, taken together, constitute a surrender so complete that the person who made it cannot reconstruct what they lost, because the system that took it is the same system that holds their memory.

That infrastructure is being built now. Not in 2036. Not in a novel. In the privacy policy of the device on your head, the sensor in your ear, the wristband on your arm. The components are already shipping. You’ve already given your consent. The question is whether anyone notices before the product is assembled. Or whether, like the Korean businessmen in the Galaxy Rose, we take off the glasses one day and find we cannot remember what we were looking at without them.

· · ·