The Ghost in the Freight Lane

Forty-one years on, *Coils* reads less like a thriller and more like an accidentally accurate architectural sketch of the world we actually built — drawn by someone who understood the floor plan but guessed wrong about the furniture. Don BelPatris published this in 1985, the year the internet was still a government research project and "cyberspace" was a word exactly one year old, courtesy of Gibson. Yet here is a novel in which a man with psychic affinity for computers swims through data-nets visualized as underwater cities, manipulates credit systems remotely, reprograms autonomous vehicles from the inside, and fakes his own death by exploiting the gap between what centralized traffic control believes and what is actually happening on the road. The automated electric truck in Chapter 8 — clean energy, networked logistics, programmable routing — is not a flying car fantasy. It is, give or take some regulatory delays, a prototype description of what Aurora and Waymo have been testing on American highways. BelPatris didn't predict the smartphone, but he predicted something arguably harder to see from 1985: that the interesting vulnerability would not be in the hardware but in the data layer, and that whoever could touch the data could rewrite reality. The protagonist doesn't hack with a keyboard. He thinks his way into systems. In 2026, when adversarial AI attacks and prompt injection exploit the semantic layer of machine cognition, the metaphor of psychic intrusion into computational infrastructure feels less like fantasy and more like a diagram someone forgot to classify.

Where the book shows its age is in the sociology, not the technology. The corporate conspiracy at the heart of the plot — Angra Energy as a monolithic, secretive entity exploiting psychic talent — is drawn from the paranoid thriller playbook of the 1970s and early '80s, the era of Three Days of the Condor and the Church Committee. The villain is The Boss. There is a VIP lounge. There are men in helicopters. The power structure is vertical, legible, and ultimately confrontable: you can infiltrate the facility, provoke the man at the top, and force a negotiation. This is not how power works in 2026. The distributed, algorithmic, jurisdictionally ambiguous nature of actual surveillance capitalism — where there is no single facility to infiltrate because the facility is the network itself — is the one thing BelPatris could not see from where he stood. His protagonist can swim through data, but the data is always somewhere, stored in a place with walls. The cloud, as a concept and as a strategy of diffused accountability, was outside the period's imagination. Likewise, the gender dynamics are of their moment: Cora exists primarily as a hostage and a motivation, Ann Strong as a more complex but still ultimately sacrificial figure whose consciousness merges with the male protagonist's in a way that reads, now, less like transcendence and more like absorption.

What hits differently in 2026 is the memory manipulation. In 1985, implanted false memories were a thriller device, spooky and clinical — skull fractures, hypnosis, drugs, a psychiatrist with advanced brain imaging uncovering the tampering. Now we live in a world where memory manipulation is ambient. Deepfakes, algorithmically curated feeds, synthetic media, the steady erosion of consensus reality — BelPatris imagined that rewriting a person's past required a conspiracy and a medical procedure. It turns out it requires a recommendation engine and five years. The early chapters, where Don returns to a hometown that doesn't match his memories and cannot determine whether the place changed or he did, carry a weight in 2026 that they simply could not have carried in 1985. That disorientation is no longer a plot device. It is a Tuesday. The town didn't change. The algorithm did.

In the larger conversation, *Coils* occupies an odd and somewhat lonely position. It borrows from Philip K. Dick's identity-dissolution anxiety and from the emerging cyberpunk movement's fascination with human-computer interface, but it grafts these onto a structure that is fundamentally a chase thriller — closer to Ludlum than to Neuromancer. It anticipates some of the concerns that would later animate works like Greg Bear's *Blood Music* and, much later, the consciousness-upload narratives of the 2010s, but it never fully commits to the philosophical implications of its own premise. The moment in Chapter 12 where Ann's body dies but her consciousness persists inside the protagonist's mind is genuinely disturbing and genuinely underdeveloped. BelPatris touches the wire and lets go. A braver or more patient book would have held on. What it gave to successors is harder to trace — it was not widely enough read to be a direct influence — but it belongs to a small shelf of mid-1980s novels that understood, before most people did, that the interesting border was not between human and machine but between memory and data.

If the self is a dataset, and the dataset can be edited by anyone with sufficient access, then what exactly was stolen from Don BelPatris — and is it meaningfully different from what is being stolen from the rest of us every day, without a conspiracy, without a villain, without even the courtesy of a confrontation?