They never credited him, but they couldn’t forget him either. Dave’s name became a quiet password between the exhausted and the curious, passed along in late-night messages and whispered confessions at work. His “experiments” were nothing more than invitations to pay attention: a foil-lined box around a smart meter, a shielded corner of a bedroom, a single night with the phone powered down and buried in a drawer. The tools were crude; the contrast was not.

People reported their first dream-filled sleep in years, headaches that simply never arrived, a nervous system that felt less hunted. Some called it placebo and clung to that word like armor. Others realized placebo or not, their bodies had been begging for less. Dave never promised cures. He offered something more unsettling: the possibility that the background hum of modern life isn’t background at all, and that noticing it might cost you the comfort of pretending.