In Intercepts, surveillance and data monitoring reach the mind itself, and the Antennas weaponize that intrusion by altering what people see, hear, and feel. The constantly shifting line between perception and reality becomes the site of the book’s violence. The Antennas’ hallucinations show how unstable an individual’s sense of reality can be when the senses report false information, and characters find themselves unmoored when they cannot rely on their senses to define reality.

The novel first anchors this idea in private, isolating visions. Riley dismisses her vision of the woman in the hospital gown as a response to stress after Kate’s death. Joe reinforces that belief when he looks to the same spot and sees an empty roadside; he tells Riley she is “seeing things,” introducing the idea that Riley can’t trust her own senses. Kate’s fate, which Joe and Riley don’t understand the full extent of until later in the novel, reveals the danger behind these episodes. Bishop’s projections turned Kate’s own mind against her and trapped her in a hallucination she could not escape, foreshadowing Riley’s fate. These moments separate each person the Antennas target from the people around them, making perception dependent on only their experience and senses, isolating them further and leaving them with no outside perspective from which to check their own.

The book then expands this individual danger into a collective collapse, in which characters share a common hallucination. When Tyler and his security team gather in the break room with other workers, they fall under the Antennas’ influence and view their colleagues as attacking Antennas. They respond with gunfire and turn the room into a massacre. The scene shows how a shared hallucination can upend the order of the Facility and twist protectors into killers. The power of the hallucinations is strengthened by the fact that they all share in it—there is no one to contradict their perception of reality, and because of that, it feels irrefutable.

The novel ends its exploration of this idea with an act of tactical manipulation. The Antennas plant an image of a stairwell in Tariq’s mind, and he believes he is running toward safety. Instead, he unlocks and enters Ferro’s cell, where Ferro kills him. The Antennas exploit his altered perception to achieve a specific outcome, taking their manipulations further than before, driving a person to their death by prompting physical action, a different tactic than those that Bishop enacted with Kate and Riley, in which she used psychological manipulation to introduce the idea of dying by suicide. By showing how easily the mind can be steered into betraying the body, Intercepts presents a world in which whoever controls perception controls the realities of the characters, shaping their actions and decisions on a fundamental level.