Thing One

Thing One is Brady Hartsfield’s modified television remote, adapted to change traffic lights and intended to help him move a stolen car along a planned escape route. It turns a private experiment in control into part of the machinery Brady imagines around mass violence: a device that could alter the conditions of a getaway, yet proves unnecessary on the morning it matters. Its story is therefore both practical and ironic, as Brady’s confidence in engineering an advantage collides with circumstances he cannot command.

Design and Early Experiments

Thing One emerged during a period when Brady had already decided he would kill many people but had not yet settled on how, when, or where. The book places its invention amid his restless, sleepless idea-making, before his plan had taken its final shape. In that unsettled phase, the device was one experiment among many rather than a finished part of a specific operation.

The gadget was a modified TV remote with a microchip and an added battery pack to increase its range. Its reach remained short: from roughly twenty or thirty yards, Brady could point it at a traffic signal and change its display. One press changed red to yellow, two changed red to blinking yellow, and three changed red to green. The simple sequence made the device useful at a distance, but also bounded its usefulness by proximity and line of sight.

Brady tried it at busy intersections while sitting in his old Subaru. He had used it several times, producing near misses before eventually causing a minor collision. The collision’s aftermath interested him as a spectacle: he watched the two drivers argue over responsibility, with their disagreement nearly turning into a fight. These trials show Thing One first operating not as a tool for orderly traffic management but as an instrument for imposing a small, unpredictable disturbance on other people.

From Prank to Getaway Plan

Thing One took on a more consequential role when Brady considered how to dispose of Mrs. Trelawney’s gray Mercedes after leaving City Center. The planned route to an abandoned warehouse was exactly 1.9 miles long and crossed eight traffic lights. He had chosen the warehouse as the place to leave the car, and the signal remote seemed to offer a way to reduce the chance of delay along the route.

The intended use of Thing One was thus tied to the stolen Mercedes and to Brady’s attempt to manage the aftermath of the attack. He had expected the lights to be obstacles that his gadget could overcome; instead, every signal was already green that morning. The route required no intervention from the device. The reversal leaves the gadget’s promised advantage unused at precisely the moment for which Brady had planned it, making the escape depend on ordinary conditions rather than on his technological manipulation.

That detail also gives the device a place in the larger causal chain. Thing One helped settle Brady on a target because it appeared to improve the odds of a successful getaway. The narration connects that confidence to the Mercedes and, in turn, to the City Center massacre: without Thing Two, Brady reflects, there would have been no Mercedes, and without the Mercedes, no massacre. Thing One belongs to the same planning process, but its role is narrower and more contingent: it was meant to assist the route after the attack, not to make the signals cooperate on the day itself.

Failure, Chance, and Brady’s Control

As Brady heads to the closet at the far end of the basement, he thinks that without Thing One at least four of the lights would have been red. The thought casts the green signals not simply as good fortune but as another instance of a life that, in his view, behaves perversely. His imagined counterfactual preserves the device’s importance even when it has done nothing: the lights’ favorable state becomes evidence, to him, of how events seem to work against expectation.

The gap between the gadget’s intended function and its actual use sharpens the tension between control and contingency. Brady designed a device to intervene in the environment, and its earlier tests had shown that it could disrupt traffic. But on the planned route, the environment presents no red light for him to change. Thing One can alter a signal; it cannot ensure that alteration will be needed, or make the larger plan predictable.

Its narrative significance lies in this limited agency. The remote is more than a technical novelty because Brady builds it into his calculations about escape, and more than an effective instrument because its expected service is displaced by chance. The sequence links his small-scale experiments at intersections to his preparation for a mass killing without implying that the device itself caused the massacre. Instead, Thing One exposes the unstable boundary in Brady’s planning between an engineered advantage and circumstances that arrive already set.