TellBot
© 2025 jaron summers
Tony LaMarca claimed there were three characteristics of liars at a poker table.
Those who lied with their mouths—I never bluff, I never chase draws, I never drink while I play. Tony ignored those.
The second kind lied with their faces—eye twitches, throat swallows, that tiny tremor in the upper lip when the river came down wrong. Those he’d built a career on.
The third kind, Tony had discovered late in life, lied with their … organs. That was where the real money was. The mother lode.
Tony was fifty-two, smooth in the way men were who’ve made their peace with their own receding hairlines. Tan from casino lighting, which is not technically sunlight but still cooks you if you live under it long enough. He dressed like every second-tier Vegas pro: dark jeans, blazer, and the quiet arrogance of someone who’d never had to clock in with a time card.
Tony specialized in the tourists with retirement savings, bucket lists, and fragile circulatory systems. If you wanted movie-style high-stakes glamour, you hit Bobby’s Room or the whale suites. If you wanted low-risk profit, you watched for medical plastics.
He saw them everywhere now.
At the MGM poker lounge that Tuesday night, he settled into seat six at a $5/$10 no-limit game and began his usual scan.
Seat one: college kid with earbuds and a hoodie—overconfident, under-bankrolled, useless.
Seat two: woman in her thirties, Botoxed, staring at her phone, wedding ring off, chip stack neat—dangerous, but not the type Tony hunted.
Seat three: a man in his seventies, white hair, skin the color of microwaved chicken, and a small bulge beneath his polo on the left side of his chest. When he leaned forward, there was the faintest outline of a pacemaker.
Seat four: empty.
Seat five: a guy Tony dismissed instantly—thick forearms, spilled beer gut, tourist from somewhere with a football team.
Seat seven: a woman with a continuous glucose monitor stuck to the back of her upper arm, round white disc not quite hidden by her sleeve.
Seat eight: dealer, dead-eyed in the sacred way of Vegas dealers.
Tony’s phone buzzed in his pocket with a discreet vibration. His custom app lit up behind the mirrored screen protector.
SCAN ACTIVE
Devices detected:
• Abbott pacemaker – ID #AX34912 (SEAT 3)
• Dexcom G7 CGM – ID #DX91801 (SEAT 7)
Wonderful.
Everyone else at the table saw two ordinary retirees. Tony saw a live heart rhythm and blood sugar waveforms.
He glanced at the dropout college kid in seat one. The kid’s hoodie had a Bluetooth logo.
Kid’s eyes widened slightly. “You good, man?”
“Never better,” Tony said.
The trick hadn’t been inventing anything. That’s what delighted him: no genius required.
Pacemakers and continuous glucose monitors beamed their data to outside receivers—home stations, smartphones, proprietary readers. Engineers had chosen protocols for that wireless link that assumed the world was basically decent.
It wasn’t.
Tony had been an MIT student once. They’d politely invited him to never return after that business with the dining hall cameras and the card-counting algorithm he’d written for blackjack.
He still remembered the dean’s face: You’re very clever, Mr. LaMarca. Please go be clever somewhere other than here.
So he’d gone to Vegas.
Years later, after a friend had come back from the hospital with a new pacemaker and a little booklet about “remote monitoring,” Tony had done what any curious man with no oversight does.
He’d scanned.
Pacemaker to bedside unit. Bedside unit to cloud. Continuous glucose monitor to phone. Phone to cloud. It was all just data hopping from chip to chip like drunk fleas. Some of it was encrypted. Some of it, unbelievably, wasn’t. A lot of it quietly broadcast status signals before it ever reached anything secure.
He’d built a little sniffer, then a bigger one, then a machine-learning model to correlate patterns of heart rate variability, interbeat intervals, and glucose swings with emotional states.
He called the program TellBot because he liked the way it sounded in his head: Tell me, Bot.
TellBot obliged.
Calm. Mildly anxious. Very anxious. Adrenaline spike. Relief.
Bluffing. Strong hand. Tilt.
Tony didn’t need to know exactly what was going on in their arteries. He just needed to know whether, when that ace hit the river, their heart had leapt with joy or collapsed with dread.
The first hand at the MGM table was uneventful. A few limpers, a raise from the Botox lady, everyone folded, the pot slid away. Tony watched, not the cards, but the little colored bars on his phone.
Seat three’s pacemaker telemetry showed a steady paced rhythm around 70 beats per minute. The natural heartbeats that leaked through between pacer spikes were irregular, like a drummer with one bad hand. TellBot flagged him as baseline anxious but stable.
Seat seven’s glucose stream updated once every five minutes. The numbers floated in the low 130s—respectable for a Type 2 diabetic sitting at a card table sipping a white wine and chewing sugar-free gum.
He didn’t need exact values. He needed trends.
The second hand, Tony limped in small blind with six-seven suited, because why not. The flop came 8–9–10 rainbow. Seat three bet. Seat seven called. The college kid folded.
Tony checked his phone.
Seat three: heart rate spike from 72 to 88 within three seconds. Pacer fired twice quickly, then backed off. TellBot labeled: sharp anxiety spike, likelihood of bluff: high.
Seat seven: no change in glucose trend, heart rate stable in the high 60s.
He raised.
Seat three frowned, fiddled with his chips, and called. Seat seven folded.
Turn was a deuce. Harmless. Seat three checked.
Tony glanced down: straight, still good unless the old man had already had a jack-queen. TellBot said:
SEAT 3 – PACER LOAD: INCREASED
HRV PATTERN: FEAR RESPONSE
LIKELIHOOD OF STRONG HAND: LOW
Tony bet big.
Seat three stared, groaned, and folded face up—queen-jack.
“You had it,” the old man muttered. “Flopped the nuts. You chase that?”
“Sometimes the universe is on your side,” Tony said. “Sometimes it isn’t.”
Under the table, he flicked his thumb across his phone, logging another data point. TellBot purred digitally.
It was never about cheating, he told himself. He didn’t mark cards. He didn’t manipulate the deck or the dealer. He simply… listened.
If a man wears a pacemaker, whose fault is it if his heart tells the truth?
He won steadily for three hours. Not every hand; that would draw heat. He folded plenty, took small losses, cracked jokes, ordered drinks and finished none of them.
But when the money was serious—when someone’s whole trip rolled into the center of the felt—Tony’s decisions were no longer based on tells like a trembling finger or a swallowing throat.
They were based on the momentary double-pace of an electronic pulse generator deep inside someone’s chest.
The diabetic woman, seat seven, gave up more than she should have. Her glucose trend spiked sharply when she bluffed. TellBot had flagged the correlation weeks ago: her liver dumped sugar into her bloodstream under stress like a panicked short-order cook flipping pancakes.
She was down a few hundred by midnight. The old man from seat three vacated an hour later, muttering about “kids and their luck,” never knowing that his medical implant had betrayed him.
By the time Tony racked his chips, he’d made a little over four grand. Not a record. But a good, clean day at the office.
He should have walked away.
The rule he’d made for himself: three winning nights, one night off. You don’t tempt the gods by being greedy. You let the gods think you’re modest and easily satisfied.
But the Mirage was running a seniors’ tournament the next afternoon—Golden Years No-Limit Shootout, 60+ Only—and Tony had discovered something else about the third kind of liars.
They loved tournaments.
He wasn’t quite 60, but Vegas IDs were flexible when the rake was guaranteed. He registered, paid the buy-in, and slid into his seat as the room filled up with gray hair, walkers, oxygen tubes, and the steady beep of machines disguised as phones in pockets and purses.
Talk about a target-rich environment.
He slipped an earbud in his left ear, dangling the cord for show; his phone lay face-down on his thigh under the edge of the table.
The app woke up.
DEVICES DETECTED:
• Medtronic pacemaker – SEAT 2
• Medtronic pacemaker – SEAT 4
• Abbott ICD – SEAT 5
• Dexcom G7 CGM – SEAT 7
• Libre CGM – SEAT 9
The table was a walking cardiology ward.
He suppressed a smile and stacked his chips.
They arrived late, about twenty minutes after cards went in the air: an older couple, ticketing issues handled, names on the list. The tournament director pointed them to empty seats at two different tables.
At Tony’s table, in seat eight, the man lowered himself down with the slow, cautious care of someone who had been negotiating with gravity for decades.
He was maybe eighty, maybe more. Hard to tell. Thin, bright-eyed, wearing a checked shirt that looked like it had actually been ironed, which made him alien in this building. On his left wrist, a hospital-style band. On his chest under the shirt, clearly visible as he reached for his chips, a rectangular bulge.
Tony’s phone vibrated.
NEW DEVICE DETECTED:
• Unknown cardiac device – SEAT 8
Signal type: Nonstandard
Handshake: Unknown
Status: Scanning…
Interesting.
The man caught Tony looking and smiled. It was a small, knowing thing.
“Hell of a town,” the old man said.
“Yes it is,” Tony agreed.
“You a local?”
“Long enough,” Tony said.
The old man nodded. “Name’s Harold.”
“Tony.”
They shook hands. Harold’s palm was dry and firm.
Tony glanced at his phone again.
DEVICE ID: ND-0001
Signal strength: Strong
Telemetry: Encrypted
Decoding… ERROR.
For the first time in months, TellBot showed him nothing but static. A thin ribbon of noise crossed his screen like snow on an old television.
He frowned.
They played.
The first few orbits were small pots. Blinds low, stacks deep, seniors cautious. Someone made a shaky joke about “playing for our grandkids’ inheritance.” A woman at the other end of the table laughed so hard her portable oxygen unit beeped and flashed yellow.
Tony took his time.
He peeled cards, watched the flop, folded garbage, raised premiums. His app did its usual work, flagging little surges of adrenaline in the other players. Seat two’s pacemaker fired more often when he looked down at good cards. Seat five’s implantable cardioverter-defibrillator broadcast a distinctive pattern when he was about to shove.
Tony used it, gently. A nudge here, a call there.
But whenever he glanced at Harold’s data feed… nothing.
The app displayed a single line:
SEAT 8 – VITALS UNAVAILABLE.
Harold played like someone who’d been doing this since before Tony was born. Tight, observant, occasionally splashing into pots with total trash and getting away with it through sheer audacity.
Once, with the board showing four hearts, Tony bet big on a nut flush. Harold considered for a long time, eyes narrow, then grinned and folded two black queens face-up.
“Old man discipline,” he said. “Used to be I’d chase you down just to find out.”
Tony smiled tightly. His phone had nothing to say about it.
On the first break, Tony walked out into the corridor near the restrooms and leaned against a wall. The cooler air outside the poker room tasted almost clean. His thumb danced across his phone.
He dove into TellBot’s debug menu, diagnostic mode, raw packet capture.
Packets streamed in from the other devices: short bursts with identifiers, regular intervals. The unknown device from seat eight also streamed.
But the header fields were… wrong.
Rather than sending heart rate, pacing times, battery status, it was pumping out uniform packets with repeating structures that looked like data but had none of the usual signatures.
He ran a pattern recognition script. It returned:
POSSIBLE DECOY SIGNAL.
He frowned.
Decoy?
Pacemaker decoys weren’t real. They were the kind of thing paranoid people on message boards talked about, in between posts about alien implants and fluoride.
Unless—
“Enjoying the show?”
Harold stood beside him, leaning on a cane Tony hadn’t noticed earlier. Up close, his eyes were a surprisingly sharp blue. Not the milky blur of age. The focused squint of someone used to examining things under laboratory lights.
“Hell of a game,” Tony said neutrally.
Harold nodded toward the phone. “You kids and your gadgets. My grandson plays online. Says the real tells are all digital now.”
Tony slid the phone into his pocket casually. “Got to keep up with the times.”
“Mm,” Harold said. “The times do have a way of catching up.”
He limped off toward the coffee stand.
Tony watched him go, the back of his neck prickling.
Then he shook himself. Paranoia was for losers and men who left this town broke. Harold was just another old-timer with an expensive medical history.
Tony went back in for level four.
Two hours later, the tournament field had thinned. Two of the pacemaker guys were gone, one CGM had gone silent when its owner busted and shambled away.
At Tony’s table, though, Harold remained. His stack had grown. Not dramatically, but steadily, like compound interest.
The blinds were big enough now that the room had acquired a hush. These were no longer “fun money” hands.
Tony’s chip stack was solidly above average. Not spectacular. He’d taken a hit when his kings ran into aces, but TellBot had warned him early enough that he’d saved his skin.
He was in the small blind when he peeled pocket nines.
Under the gun folded. Two more folds. Harold, in middle position, raised three times the big blind with a casual flick.
Button folded. Big blind yawned and mucked.
Tony looked at his nines, then at Harold’s stack, then at his own. He could call and see a flop. Or he could send a message.
He glanced at his phone.
SEAT 8 – VITALS UNAVAILABLE.
NO EMOTIONAL STATE DATA.
Useless.
He sighed inwardly. Fine. Go old-school.
“Raise,” he said. “Nine thousand more.”
Harold blinked, glanced at the dealer, then at Tony. The room’s noise dipped as nearby tables noticed the action. Seniors’ ears for drama were finely tuned.
The dealer confirmed the amount.
Tony’s heart rate ticked up. His watch recorded it. He tried not to think about how he’d look from the outside—just another mammal sweating over colored discs.
Harold rested his hands on his cards, drumming one finger thoughtfully.
“You kids always want to dance,” he said. “All right then.”
He moved chips forward. “All-in.”
The table exhaled. The dealer sat up a little straighter.
Tony’s phone buzzed sharply. A notification window popped.
WARNING:
UNKNOWN DEVICE (SEAT 8) ACTIVE SCAN DETECTED.
ATTEMPTED CONNECTION TO TELLBOT NODE.
Tony felt his stomach drop.
“What the hell,” he murmured.
Harold tilted his head. “Problem?”
The dealer said, “Action is on you, sir.”
Tony’s brain scrambled. The old man’s device was trying to talk to his app? That’s not a pacemaker. That’s—
The next notification slid up the screen.
REMOTE LOG CAPTURED.
SOURCE: DEVICE ND-0001
Then:
MESSAGE RECEIVED:
“YOU’VE BEEN A BUSY BOY, MR. LAMARCA.”
Tony’s mouth went dry.
He hadn’t given his last name to anyone at the table.
He looked up slowly. Harold was watching him with that same small, pleasant smile.
“You all right?” the dealer asked.
“Clock,” someone said. Tournament habit. A player taking too long could be put on the clock. The floor would come over. There’d be attention.
Tony’s instinct screamed at him. Not about the hand—not about the odds of nines versus Harold’s range—but about something much larger, looming.
He could call. Maybe win. Maybe lose. But whatever happened, he was no longer the only one at the table seeing through everyone’s skin.
He glanced down at his phone again.
One final line had appeared under the message.
FEDERAL BIOMEDICAL SECURITY TASK FORCE
CASE FILE: 21-893A – “VEGAS VITALS”
The blood draining from his face was probably visible from orbit.
He folded.
“Nice hand,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady.
The table muttered. Someone swore quietly. Big pots meant big stories; folding to an all-in after a re-raise was boring.
Harold just nodded and turned over… king-jack offsuit.
A stone-cold bluff.
He raked in the pot with hands that didn’t shake at all.
The break after that level, Tony didn’t go to the bathroom or the snack bar. He walked straight out of the poker room, down the corridor, past the slots, wide-screen sports book, and the Mexican restaurant with the neon margarita glass.
He kept walking until he hit the quiet hallway near the convention center, where the carpet’s pattern was more subdued and the only noise was distant air conditioning.
His phone vibrated again.
He pressed it to his ear like a call, though the screen was still on the TellBot diagnostic page.
A soft voice came through his earbud. Male, midwestern, neutral.
“Tony LaMarca,” it said. “You can keep walking if it makes you feel better. There’s nowhere in this building your phone won’t hear me.”
“Who is this?” Tony asked, though he could guess.
“Let’s call me Harold. It’s as good a name as any.”
Tony swallowed. “You’ve got some nerve, wiring up a fake pacemaker.”
Harold chuckled. “Oh, it functions. Keeps my heart ticking. It just happens to run a few extra processes. Government program. Finally paid off.”
Tony leaned against the wall. Far off, someone announced BINGO AT FOUR PM over a muffled speaker.
“So this is what, exactly?” he said. “A sting?”
“A conversation,” Harold said mildly. “You’ve been very clever, Mr. LaMarca. Quiet. Careful. Low profile. But you left a trail in the RF spectrum. We noticed postoperative seniors hemorrhaging money at certain tables when particular Bluetooth signatures were present. Your little sniffer is good, but ours is bigger.”
“Congratulations.” Tony stared at the carpet. The pattern looked suddenly like little stylized syringes. “You going to arrest me?”
There was a pause.
“Not today,” Harold said. “We’re more interested in understanding how far people like you can push this. Vegas is a wonderful test bed. Contained. Cooperative. Full of volunteers who don’t know they’re volunteers.”
“That sounds disturbingly cheerful.”
“I’m an engineer,” Harold said. “I find systems fascinating. You, for instance, have demonstrated a practical exploit of unsecured medical telemetry with minimal equipment. Took a few years longer than my team predicted, but here we are.”
Tony let out a bitter laugh. “So I’m a lab rat with a bank account.”
“Something like that. Look, Tony… do you honestly think you’re the only one who would ever try this? You’re just the first one who did it competently.”
Tony’s mind spun through consequences. Headlines. Grand juries. Confiscated funds. His mother back in Jersey, watching him on the news between advertisements for reverse mortgages and chair lifts.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“Data,” Harold said. “You will stop actively exploiting medical devices. In exchange, you’ll give us TellBot. Code, models, everything. We’ll sandbox it, study it, build countermeasures. Maybe, if we’re very lucky, prevent this from turning into an actual bloodbath when someone less careful than you weaponizes it.”
“And if I say no?”
Another pause. Then, “Then the next face you see will have an FBI badge under it instead of bifocals. I’m very likable, Tony. They’re less so.”
Tony stared at the carpet. A cocktail waitress pushed a cart past the end of the hall, heels clicking, odor of stale margarita mix trailing after her.
“You going to give me a moral lecture too?” he asked.
Harold sighed. “Son, I’m too old for that. I know you never threatened anyone with violence. You didn’t hack into ICU monitors. You nudged probabilities at card tables. In the grand scheme of human sin, it’s… creative more than monstrous.”
“Thanks,” Tony said dryly.
“But a line has to be drawn,” Harold said. “If you can read a bluff from a pacemaker, someone else can decide that a person doesn’t deserve their next beat. Better we get ahead of that curve now.”
Tony thought of the graphs on his phone—the waves, the spikes, the elegant, invisible betrayals. He thought of all the hearts he’d quietly listened to without their owners ever knowing.
Finally he said, “Let’s say I cooperate. What happens to me?”
“You keep playing cards,” Harold said. “The old-fashioned way. With your eyes and your gut. Maybe you even win once in a while.”
“And if I slip,” Tony said, “you’ll know.”
“Oh, absolutely,” Harold said cheerfully. “We’re in your phone now. Have been since you sat down. Consider us your new guardian angel. Or parole officer. Depends what you do next.”
The line went quiet.
Tony waited, but no new message appeared on the screen. The app’s interface had already begun to change, menus vanishing as if someone were unbuilding it from the inside out.
He watched as the SCAN button greyed out, then disappeared.
Finally, only one message remained on the display.
TELLBOT DEACTIVATED.
GOOD LUCK.
He stared at those two words for a long time.
Then he walked back to the poker room.
When he sat down, Harold was stacking chips, humming something under his breath that sounded suspiciously like an old Sinatra tune.
“How’s the air out there?” Harold asked.
“Fresher,” Tony said. “For now.”
He picked up his next hand. Jack-ten suited. He glanced at his phone—black screen, no helpful telemetry.
For the first time in months, the table felt… opaque. Everyone was opaque. Meat and bone and mystery.
He’d forgotten how heavy that was. And how exhilarating.
He raised.
Harold called.
The flop came queen–nine–two, two of Tony’s suit. Semi-bluff spot. Old instincts spring to life … muscles remembering how to climb stairs.
He smiled at Harold. The old man’s face was mild, relaxed, eyes on the board.
Without numbers, without graphs, Tony listened instead to the only tell left to him: the tiny quiver of excitement in his own chest, weighing possibilities. He smiled, not because he knew—but because he didn’t. “Let’s dance,” he said, pushed his chips forward.
