TELLBOT

(Publish-Ready Short Story)

Tony LaMarca liked to say there were three kinds of liars at a poker table.

The first were the amateurs who lied with their mouths—I never bluff, I never chase, I play tight as a tax auditor. Their words were cheap. Tony ignored them.

The second kind lied with their faces—twitchy eyes, hard swallows, widening pupils when the river betrayed them. Tony had made a career off those tells.

But the third kind… the third kind lied with their organs. And that, Tony thought, was where the real money lived.

He was fifty-two and still clinging stylishly to the far side of handsome. The casinos had tanned him in a way that wasn’t quite natural, but close enough. He wore the unofficial Vegas uniform of middle-tier pros—dark blazer, good jeans, and the confident slouch of a man who hadn’t worked a day job since Clinton.

He specialized in the elderly and medically augmented. Pacemakers, insulin monitors, blood-pressure implants—Vegas was crawling with them. To most people they were signs of fragile health. To Tony they were radio beacons of truth.

In the MGM poker lounge, he took seat six in a $5/$10 no-limit game and let his eyes drift casually around the table.

Seat one: a hoodie-kid who’d memorized three YouTube videos on “GTO strategy” and thought that made him a threat.
Seat two: a Botoxed woman texting furiously—dangerous, but not Tony’s mark.
Seat three: a pale retiree with a discreet bulge under his polo. Pacemaker, probably Abbott or Medtronic.
Seat five: tourist with a sunburn—irrelevant.
Seat seven: a woman with a round wireless glucose monitor stuck to her upper arm like a communion wafer.

His phone buzzed with a private vibration.

SCAN ACTIVE
• Abbott pacemaker detected — SEAT 3
• Dexcom G7 detected — SEAT 7

Lovely. Two perfect candidates.

Under the table, Tony angled his phone so no one could see the mirrored screen. A soft line of colored bars danced. Heart rhythm. Inter-beat variance. Glucose drift. Real emotional telemetry.

Not cheating, Tony reassured himself. Cheating meant marking decks or bribing dealers. This was… listening. If the human body chose to broadcast its secrets, was that really his fault?

The First Tells

Early hands passed quietly. Then Tony limped in with jack–ten suited, the kind of hand with dreams for eyes.

The flop came nine–queen–two, two of his suit—perfect semi-bluff territory.

Seat three bet. Seat seven called. The kid folded.

Tony’s phone lit softly.

SEAT 3: HR spike + anxiety surge
SEAT 7: flatline glucose trend, mild confidence

Both lied with their organs. One was weaker.

Tony raised.

Seat seven folded instantly. Seat three hesitated, pacemaker stuttering in soft electric panic.

Tony pressed. Seat three sighed, folded, and flashed a lonely queen.

“Top pair good?” the old man asked.

“Sometimes,” Tony said.

TellBot pinged happily. It loved correctness.

The System Behind the System

None of this, Tony knew, should have been possible. Pacemakers weren’t supposed to broadcast clear telemetry without heavy encryption. But engineers assumed the world was filled with decent people.

They were wrong.

After a friend came home from the hospital with a new implant and a brochure promising “seamless remote monitoring,” Tony started exploring. He’d built a sniffer. A bigger sniffer. A machine-learning layer that mapped emotional states to vitals signatures with eerie precision.

Calm. Stress spike. Bluff likelihood. Tilt probability.

TellBot was his masterpiece. And his secret.

After three hours, Tony racked up just over four grand. Not spectacular, but clean. He should have quit.

But a Mirage seniors’ no-limit tournament was running the next afternoon—Golden Years Shootout, 60+ Only—and seniors came with more implants than the Terminator franchise.

Tony wasn’t quite sixty, but Vegas IDs aged as well as Vegas marriages.

He registered.

THE GOLDEN YEARS SHOOTOUT

The Mirage ballroom was the usual blend of recycled oxygen, disinfectant, and the faint smell of fear. Dozens of older players filled the tables: wheelchairs, oxygen tubes, walkers tricked out like mobility hot rods.

Tony scanned. His phone buzzed:

DEVICES DETECTED:
• Medtronic pacemaker — SEAT 2
• Boston Scientific pacemaker — SEAT 4
• Abbott ICD — SEAT 5
• Dexcom CGM — SEAT 7
• Libre CGM — SEAT 9

A cardiologist would have wept for joy. So did Tony, internally.

Level one began.

He folded trash, raised premiums, and harvested tiny truths from the room’s collective circulatory system. TellBot whispered probabilities and calibrations. When one man’s pacemaker double-paced mid-hand, Tony folded kings face-up like a saint—and watched pocket aces roll over.

Then Harold arrived.

ENTER HAROLD

Seat eight.

Slow steps. Eyes too bright for his age. A shirt ironed like someone still cared. A medical wristband from a recent hospital stay. And under the shirt, a visible rectangular bulge—not quite a standard pacemaker.

Tony’s phone vibrated sharply.

NEW DEVICE DETECTED
• UNKNOWN cardiac device — SEAT 8
Signal classification: nonstandard
Handshake: encrypted
Telemetry: unreadable

The screen rippled with static.

TellBot had never failed to parse a device before.

The old man settled in, smiled faintly, and said, “Hell of a town.”

“Depends who you ask,” Tony replied.

“Name’s Harold.”

“Tony.”

They shook hands. Harold’s grip was dry and confident.

THE MAN WITHOUT A TELL

Harold played well—too well. Tight, disciplined, dangerous when he chose to be. Twice Tony watched him raise with junk and steal orphaned pots from seniors who assumed gray hair meant honesty.

Whenever Tony checked his phone:

SEAT 8 — VITALS UNAVAILABLE

At one point, Tony flopped a nut flush. Harold stared him down, then folded two black queens face-up.

“Old me would’ve paid you off,” he said. “I used to hate not knowing.”

Not knowing. That was supposed to be Tony’s edge.

THE BREAK

During the first break, Tony slipped out to the quiet hallway. He opened TellBot’s debug suite—raw packet view, error logs.

The unknown device was transmitting. But the packets were too uniform, too structured.

DECOY SIGNAL SUSPECTED.

Pacemaker decoys were whispered about in paranoid corners of the internet. Nobody normal owned one.

“Enjoying the show?” a voice asked.

Tony turned. Harold stood beside him, leaning on a cane.

“Hell of a game,” Harold said.

Tony nodded too briskly. “Yeah.”

“You kids and your gadgets,” Harold said. “My grandson tells me the real tells are digital now.”

“Gotta keep up with the times,” Tony said.

“Mm,” Harold murmured. “The times do have a way of catching up.”

LEVEL FOUR

The field thinned. The room went quiet—danger quiet.

Tony rebuilt his stack. His kings lost to aces again, but TellBot kept him alive.

Then the hand came.

Tony peeled pocket nines. Harold raised. Everyone folded. Tony re-raised.

Harold barely blinked.

“All-in,” he said.

Tony’s phone buzzed violently.

WARNING: UNKNOWN DEVICE ACTIVE SCAN DETECTED
Attempted connection to TellBot node.

Another alert:

REMOTE LOG CAPTURED — SOURCE: ND-0001
“YOU’VE BEEN A BUSY BOY, MR. LAMARCA.”

Tony hadn’t given anyone his last name.

He folded.

Harold turned over king-jack offsuit. A stone-cold bluff.

“Old habits,” Harold said.

THE REVELATION

Tony didn’t stop walking until he reached a quiet hallway near the convention center.

His phone vibrated. A soft voice came through his earbud.

“Tony LaMarca.”

“Who is this?”

“Let’s call me Harold. Good enough name.”

They talked. Calmly. Chillingly.

Harold explained everything: a government study, a monitored exploit, a trail Tony had never realized he was leaving.

“You built something elegant,” Harold said. “Too elegant. And too dangerous.”

The ultimatum was simple:

Hand over TellBot and stop using it.

Or the next face Tony saw would have an FBI badge under it.

THE AFTERMATH

Back in the ballroom, TellBot dissolved in Tony’s hands—menus vanishing, data streams dying.

Only one message remained:

TELLBOT DEACTIVATED.
GOOD LUCK.

He sat back at the table. Harold hummed Sinatra while stacking chips.

“How’s the air out there?” Harold asked.

“Fresher,” Tony said. “For now.”

Tony lifted his next hand—jack–ten suited. No telemetry. No vitals.

Just cards.

The flop came queen–nine–two, two of his suit.

A perfect old-school spot.

Tony smiled—not because he knew, but because he absolutely did not.

He raised. Harold called.

“Let’s dance,” Tony said.

For the first time in months, the uncertainty felt like oxygen.