The Long List Anthology Volume 4

by David Steffen

  Now, at the time, Damaris Fierte had a deep green holoscore, whereas I, thanks to Roman, had only a pale green holoscore. So it was justifiable for her to educate me.

  But still.

  The workshop was on Personal Profile Management, in which we had to critique each other’s Perma-Me profiles. And it was my turn to be critiqued. And the first thing Damaris Fierte critiqued about my Perma-Me profile was how I had devoted so much of my time to associating with a person like Roman Cheryshev.

  “He’s a predator. An abuser. I mean, I don’t want to say this, but looking at your profile, Sophie, a person could get the impression—an employer, a potential contact—I mean, they could see you as some kind of enabler.”

  At which I felt concerned, and explained how I had only felt sorry for Roman, and was trying to be his friend.

  At which Damaris said: “So you brought him to my friend’s party? Where he inappropriately touched people? This was someone you wanted for a friend?”

  At which I said, I didn’t consider Roman a close friend, exactly, but more like a—

  “What?” said Damaris. “If he wasn’t your friend, what did you want from him? Just to use him? Just for the Pro votes?”

  I was now beginning to see some of the workshop participants looking at me very problematically.

  Then Damaris said: “I think this is an important lesson in Profile Management, guys. Because when people look at your Personal Profile, an employer, a recruiter, what they want to see most is authenticity. If it seems like you’re taking on too many charity projects, or being nice to unpopular people just for the pity votes, I do think that can reflect on you very adversely.”

  And in the final analysis, the workshop ended up giving me a strong critique.

  But what I want to say is what happened after.

  Because I went to Damaris after class and said did she really have to give me such a strong critique? And I wasn’t trying to say my Perma-Me profile wasn’t in need of improvement. But given there was a need for improvement, couldn’t there be a more constructive way to go about it?

  This was when Damaris unloaded on me.

  What she said was she had always had concerns. She said she could tell right away what kind of person I was, how I always overpromoted myself and my abilities. She said it was pathetic, how I talked, all the big words I tried to use, and when she looked at my Perma-Me profile, she didn’t think I belonged here at all, in this kind of prestigious institution. She said in fact we both knew exactly why I was here. And if there was one thing she didn’t like, Damaris said, it was a Yellow who acts like a Green, or a Red who thinks she’s a Yellow.

  At this point I began to have strong feelings. Because I remembered a day, weeks ago, when we had critiqued Damaris’s Perma-Me profile. Which was, admittedly, the best profile I ever saw. Damaris was from New York City, and she went to a private school, and had a huge Child Development Team, and lots of money since she was born. In her profile, there were so many extra classes and volunteer jobs and enrichment programs, I wondered how her Child Development Team could have found time to plan so many activities.

  But there was one part of her Perma-Me profile that Damaris kept trying to skip, even though the class kept wanting to go back to it. It was a video of Damaris auditioning for the college’s summer LEO business mentorship program. Which under the video, Damaris had written:

  DIDN’T GET IN, OH WELL, I’M JUST SO HAPPY TO HAVE HAD SUCH A GREAT AND FUN AUDITION!!!!

  But if you looked at the video, Damaris did not look happy. If you have ever spent a lot of time throwing up, from nerves or any other reason, let me tell you, you know the signs.

  The strong feelings were because I remembered my own time in the LEO program. And how I hadn’t even auditioned for it, but instead got in by special appointment. The coordinators had to rush me through the enrollment process, then the training process, until I was the last one to get on the rocket. Even then, when I was sitting in my flight seat, strapping in, I could hardly believe I had gotten this far, me, Sophie Lee, a tourist in space.

  When we got past the boost phase, into Low Earth Orbit, the program leader took us into the viewing chamber, and showed us the Earth so far below. The purpose of the program was to join business leaders on a trip to outer space, he said, and learn from their insights and leadership experience. It was business-sponsored, so it was a very big honor. The program director had a company in financial services, and he said we had been chosen for this opportunity because of a time in our lives when we demonstrated exceptional leadership. Now was a chance for us to look down and think about the planet we might one day be leading, and what he wondered was, did any of us have anything we’d like to say?

  At this point, I began to get a weird feeling in my stomach, and I unbuckled my harness and floated to the viewscreen, and looked down on the continents below.

  Then I turned and looked at the business leaders buckled into their flight chairs, and what I said was that the main thing I was thinking was not how small the Earth seemed from up here, but how big.

  At this, the business leaders all smiled and nodded.

  I said it made me feel humble, thinking about what a challenge it must be, being a leader to such a huge place.

  The business leaders now smiled and nodded very strongly.

  But I kept feeling weird, and I said it seemed like such a big challenge, it actually seemed like an impossible challenge, like it was crazy to think you could try and control what was happening down there, or even really understand it.

  At this point some of the business leaders stopped smiling and nodding, and I sensed it was time to go back to my seat and enjoy the complimentary low-grav spherical cocktails. But I still felt weird, so I kept talking.

  What I said was, when you thought about it, to the Earth, human beings were basically like bugs, no more special than any other species, whether endangered or no.

  What I said was, if you looked at it that way, what could an individual person, however accomplished, really count for?

  What I said was, didn’t it almost seem crazy, all the way up here, for any one person to be richer or more important than another, and if you thought about it, if something were to unfortunately happen, and our spaceship were to explode on reentry, would it even make a difference to anyone down there what happened to us, except of course our families and friends?

  After I said all this, none of the business leaders were smiling and nodding at all, and a lot of the other students were letting go of their cocktail spheres and looking at me, like, “What’s the matter with you?” Then, when we got back to Earth, I discovered my holoscore had dropped almost twenty percent, and all the business leaders had marked me down as being “definitely not leadership material.”

  So that was what I told Damaris Fierte. And I said she was right about me. How I knew I didn’t belong here, in such a prestigious institution. In fact, what I said was that I envied her, because what I now realized was, the LEO business mentorship program was as big a risk as an opportunity, and in my case, having utterly blown it, I had totally tanked my holoscore.

  At this Damaris looked at me a long time, and I could see her feelings had changed. And finally she said, “Sophie, you know, I think that’s the most honest thing I ever heard you say.”

  But I blew it.

  Because, the more I thought about it, the more I realized Damaris was right. How all this time, in college, even in my Childhood Development Program, I had been trying to be someone I was not, and to seem smarter than I was. And I was ashamed of myself.

  So I said, “Damaris, the thing is, you really are a smart and amazing person. And you’re right, I don’t belong here, but you really do. And you should have been the one to go on the LEO trip, not me, because I truly believe one day you could be a great leader.”

  At which she said, “No, no,” and looked sick again, shaking her head.

  But I said, “No, seriously, I believe that.” And then I said what was pr
obably the stupidest thing I ever said in my whole life, which was: “How come we’ve never been friends?”

  But right away I could see I had majorly screwed up. Because Damaris stood back, and her mouth was open and she was panting, and she looked angrier than I’ve ever seen anyone get angry.

  And she said, “Sophie, see, this is exactly what I’m talking about! Everything you do, it always has to be a big calculation. You say all these nice things, and I really believed you, and now I see you’re just manipulating me to join your stupid peer network and boost your holoscore!”

  At which I didn’t say anything, because I was so surprised.

  “This is truly shameful,” Damaris said as she walked away. “Truly, truly shameful. I can’t even educate you in how shameful this is.”

  And when I checked, I saw what I feared, which was that every person in Damaris’s peer network had given me an enormous Con vote.

  Now, coming from someone with Damaris’s score, that meant something.

  But when I told all this to Mr. Barraine, he shook his head.

  “No, Sophie,” he said. “The Peer Education stuff, that’s only a sidebar. What we’re here about today is your major, especially your literature courses. And I have to tell you we’ve been noticing some very troubling signs.”

  At this I was surprised, because, since entering college I have become, as my Student Career Coach likes to say, a “true lover of the word.”

  But Mr. Barraine used his palmscreen to display some different records, which I didn’t recognize, and he said, “Does this mean anything to you?” And when I said, “No,” he said, “Are you sure?”

  Then he came around his desk, and pulled up a chair.

  He said, “Sophie, do you know what the global rank of this institution is?”

  I did, and I told him.

  Mr. Barraine said, “Do you know why we are ranked so high?”

  I said it must be because of the university’s immense positive contributions to society.

  Mr. Barraine smiled. “Do you know what the Ivy League graduate enrollment rate among our alumni is? The first-year employment rate? The average salary at ten years? The estimated value of our name as an attractor of venture capital? The alumni fundraising score? Or how about this?”

  He brought up another chart, which covered almost a whole wall, and this one I definitely recognized.

  “These are the private and public parties,” Mr. Barraine said, “that have agreed to invest in your education. Here’s the government’s contribution. Here’s AdverBetter. Here’s ThinkTrendTrack. Here are all the media and marketing groups that loaned money for your Student Development Team. They all contributed to the financing of your education, Sophie, because your holoscore positioned you, at the time, as an immensely high-potential individual. I think you know exactly what I’m talking about. The reason you’re in this school, Sophie, is because we don’t only educate students, here. We educate the whole person.”

  Mr. Barraine drew a round shape in the air, a little too round, I thought, inasmuch as it was supposed to be me. But this was not a time, I sensed, for critical remarks.

  “With my approval,” Mr. Barraine said, “you’ll soon be meeting with representatives of these parties for your Final Academic Review. They’ll be evaluating you for employment opportunities. And they’ll be interested in seeing, as early-access recruiters, what their investment in you has returned. You’ll tell them, I’m sure, all about your enjoyment of our rare animal handling workshops, our AI-training program, our maglev-equipped, five-story VR athletics facility. But you’ll also tell them, of course, about your passionate engagement in our many humanities classes specializing in improved empathetic response. I believe you would agree that improving empathy is one of the major benefits of a liberal arts education. But Sophie, tell me, what do you think these people will say if they find out one of our top empathetic performers is, in fact, as it seems, deeply biased?”

  I admit I responded inappropriately, by jumping out of my chair saying, “Biased? How?”

  Mr. Barraine leaned back. “Do you really want to ask me that question, Sophie? Do you not see how going into specifics might, in fact, reify the very bias we’re talking about?” Then he pointed at the graphs and said, “These are your realtime empathetic assessments, which our team has been following closely.”

  Now I was especially surprised, because realtime empathetic assessment has always been my favorite part of the literature major. In this time when the humanities are, as they say, “in crisis,” what better case could there be for the profound utility of the narrative arts? How many days have I whiled away in the scanning machines, resting my head in the EEG helmet, listening to the soothing flow of words or the images comporting vivaciously on the screen, and living along with the travails of Jane Eyre and Anna Karenina, of Sula and Nel, of Carrie and Charlotte and Miranda and Samantha? How often has it been a profound comfort to me to know that, in some small way, my empathetic responses to these great works will improve my positive contributions to society?

  But as I communicated this to Mr. Barraine, he shook his head. “The trouble isn’t with your enthusiasm, Sophie. The trouble is the correlations. We’ve been looking at your neurological readings, and we’ve been noticing some problematic reactions. It’s not that you lack empathy. If anything, you have the opposite problem. You’ve been empathizing, I have to inform you, with some very unacceptable people.”

  But I stood over him, feeling hopeful, and said, “Mr. Barraine, I can explain.”

  And what I explained was how, when I’m in the scanning machines, engaging with all the powerful issues in the stories I’m experiencing, sometimes I start to worry I might have a problematic response. And at times, I get so worried that I make myself have the response, but only for the sake of understanding the response, as part of my ever-vigilant efforts not to have the response. So the realtime empathetic assessment machines, as I told Mr. Barraine, are probably only picking up evidence of my constant mental vigilance against such responses, and of my earnest and engaged grappling with even the possibility of such responses.

  If that makes sense.

  But Mr. Barraine looked at me for a long time, and said, “Sit down, Sophie.”

  So I did.

  And he went on:

  “My job, Sophie, is to prepare you for your final review. These people you’ll be meeting are some of the smartest people in the world: politicians, technologists, advertisers, financiers. But the reason they want to meet with you is because that kind of smartness is no longer very valuable. Smartness is what computers have. And nowadays people are very expensive, and computers are very cheap. What’s valuable today, Sophie, is the ability to read human beings—to decipher their moods, their desires, their deepest longings and needs. That is the key to effective public relations. That is what recruiters want. That is the kind of skill the holoscore is meant to assess, and that is what your holoscore said you could do. It is what made you a competitive student, and what got you admitted to this institution.

  “Now, Sophie. What message do you think it will send if I let you meet with those recruiters, a graduating student of this college, and explain to them that after three million dollars and many years of top-tier education … well, what do you think they’ll say when they learn that, as you told me today, you befriended a sexual predator in your second year? When they find out you sabotaged the LEO business mentorship experience for a group of our top performers? When they see how your peers have been voting against you? Finally, what will they think when they look at your responses to these literary works, and learn how prone you are to empathizing with the wrong kinds of people?

  “Sophie.” He leaned forward. “I’m afraid I can’t approve you for graduation at this time.”

  I looked at Mr. Barraine, and I was feeling several feelings. Firstly, about how I was apparently a terrible person, but no one had told me in all this time. Second, how in my interacting with Roman and Damaris and
others, I had misread all their social cues. Finally, how all those smart people were waiting to give me my review, and they had invested so much money in my education, and now how would they feel when they found out the person they’d been educating had turned out to be selfish and mean and biased?

  Mostly, though, I thought about Mr. Barraine. How in that video on his Perma-Me profile, when one of his little girls got scared by the ducks, she turned and hid her face in his shirt. And it was like Mr. Barraine didn’t even need to think. He just kept smiling and tossing out breadcrumbs, and with his arm he held her to him.

  The next thing I knew, alarms were ringing, and Mr. Barraine was jumping away, wide-eyed and shouting and pounding on his palmscreen. And I saw how without even thinking about it, I had gotten out of my chair and pressed my face against his chest.

  “I need to report,” Mr. Barraine said, “a violation of the Interpersonal Conduct Code, class 25B, section H12. Note: nonsexual contact was initiated by the student during an approved private meeting. Repeat note: contact was student-initiated and nonsexual. I have disengaged and am now departing the location.”

  He moved to the door, holding out his palmscreen to record how carefully he was keeping his distance from me. And I could see the tears on his shirt and face as he said, “Sophie, how could you? Of all the things to try and … I have daughters. I have a family.”

  Then, just before he left, he tapped his palmscreen. And the last thing I remember is looking at my own palm, and seeing the effect of the assessment he had given me, which was my Pro/Con holoscore, glowing a bright, ugly red.

  • • • •

  It feels strange to be in a home for Con women. Everyone here is deep in the red, a confirmed negative influence on society. Yet during the day-to-day, you hardly know. We have meals and watch TV. One woman here was a daycare worker who took care of learning-disabled children. One day she got distracted, and one of the children had a fall and died. She doesn’t talk, but some of us take turns sitting with her. Then there is a woman who attempted suicide four times, and a drug addict, whose name is Tina. One time, I told Tina about my struggles with Pro/Con voting, and she said: