The One Who Wrote Destiny

by Nikesh Shukla

  ‘I’m Yinka,’ she says, holding out her hand.

  ‘Neha,’ I reply. I hold up my phlegmy hand and shrug. I pause, realizing I have not spoken to anyone in hours. ‘That woman really wound me up. She doesn’t get to tell me who to disapprove of,’ I say slowly.

  ‘You didn’t need to do that,’ she says. ‘I was fine to ignore it.’

  Yinka takes out a vape pen and sucks on it, blowing smoke sideways, away from me.

  I cut the silence. ‘My dad sat my brother and me down – this was after my brother declared he was going to be a comedian and we had already had the standard freak-out about sensible careers versus hobbies – and Dad said to him and to me, look, if you’re going to do anything in this world, you have to understand that we live in a society ruled by mediocre straight white people. They get ahead simply by their straightness and their whiteness and their ability to assimilate, which is encoded in their mediocrity. In order for you to get anywhere in life, you have to be, at worst, twice as good as all the mediocre straight white people of this world. All of them. Because you have to stand out. Got that? I really remember that moment. I was wearing a T-shirt that had Michael Jordan on it, which now feels too narratively perfect or something. But I did. It was a hand-me-down from a sporty cousin. My dad refused to buy us new clothes because we had growing boy cousins. God forbid I ever wanted to wear a dress.’

  I cough, almost to stop myself talking. This is the most in-depth interaction I’ve had in two months.

  ‘I had the speech too,’ Yinka says. ‘Except my dad said the opposite. He said it was best not to try and be better than your average mediocre white man. Instead just be the most extreme version of yourself you can. That way, you’re only ever competing with yourself.’

  ‘Your dad had less of a chip on his shoulder than mine, I guess.’

  ‘Or more. Which meant he tried to game the system rather than play it.’ She looks at me.

  ‘I have cancer,’ I say, closing my eyes and leaning back into her fingers.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Yinka says. ‘I almost don’t know how to react. Why are you telling me?’

  ‘It’s easier to tell a stranger than your family, I guess,’ I tell her. ‘I’d feel weird if you felt sorry for me.’

  We sit in silence.

  ‘I guess that’s why I responded to that person,’ I say. ‘I wanted to control something. I don’t know how to control cancer. I can control her. I can, alas, no longer control my body.’ I look at my watch, feeling tired and wanting to be at home.

  ‘There are some things you can’t control,’ Yinka says. She looks at me strangely. It feels like I’ve met her before. Either she looks familiar or my brain is misfiling her. ‘Your mind can outlive your body.’

  ‘They haven’t worked out how to reanimate brains without their meat carcasses,’ I say. ‘Yet.’

  ‘Most people use this as an opportunity for a reset. A reason to change their environment. Do something for good. An act of kindness. A selfish project. Go to a place they’ve always wanted to see. Learn a language. Write a novel. Eat meat again. Trace their family tree.’ She pauses. ‘My dad died from cancer last year. It’s all been on my mind a lot.’

  ‘My mum died of it not long after I was born,’ I say. ‘I never knew her.’

  ‘You know what he did before he died? He did all this research into his family. He wanted to trace how it happened. How our family came to be. He found a lot of comfort in it towards the end. Maybe that’s something you can do. Something worthwhile. Find out how it all fits together. Trace your family tree,’ she says, standing up. ‘Find the patterns. It’s your destiny.’

  ‘Destiny isn’t real,’ I say.

  She pretends not to hear me as she slips headphones on and walks in the opposite direction.

  THURSDAY MORNING

  GoTo: Work, Loads

  There’s a note stuck to my screen requesting my presence in Miles’s office as soon as I arrive. I peel the note off and use some screen wipe to clean the monitor.

  I look around.

  My desk is given a wide berth. I’d like to think that between the smell of stale smoke on my clothes, the three large and imposing monitors, and my general fug of disdain, there’s enough of a reason for people to ignore me. I don’t get included in tea and coffee runs, unless there’s a work-experience kid in who doesn’t understand the lie of the land. I refuse to sign birthday cards and eat cakes as though we’re anything other than colleagues. And if it’s a work-based query, what’s wrong with email? Email is easier to prioritize.

  I scrunch up the note and place it on a pile I’m collating, of passive-aggressive notes from Miles. If there was ever a man to be twice as good as, he’s probably called Miles.

  I head off in his direction, coughing as I go.

  The office feels oppressive today in that it operates on routine paths, consistencies and a steady flow of electricity and exhaustion. I’m thinking about what Yinka said, especially about patterns. I can see them all around me now. Maybe Yinka was right. Find the patterns.

  Dad once asked why I don’t like spontaneity.

  We were at Pivo, the bar across the road from my flat. He had turned up, unannounced, because he said he hadn’t seen me in a long time. I told him that we had designated spaces to operate in. Anything outside of that induced chaos. I asked if he had considered whether I had plans for the evening.

  ‘I imagine, if you did, you would have said you weren’t free,’ he replied.

  ‘Father, what you need to understand is, I’m always busy. Whether I am conventionally busy because I’m at the opera or having a dinner party discussing the politics of the day or just on a date, or whether I am busy because my brain is on, always on, problem-solving, trouble-shooting, I’m always doing something.’

  ‘Your mother wasn’t very spontaneous either,’ he replied. ‘She made plans and she stuck to them.’

  ‘You say that derisively,’ I said. ‘Like I should disagree.’

  ‘You know words like derisively, but you could never be bothered to learn Gujarati.’

  ‘It’s a dead language,’ I replied. ‘Their word for computer is computer. The more technology develops, the more you have to understand that the future is in English.’

  ‘I just wanted a quick drink with my baby girl,’ my dad said. ‘Is that so bad?’

  ‘I would have liked some notice,’ I told him.

  ‘The Gujarati word for computer is kampyuṭara,’ Dad sighed.

  ‘You’re late,’ Miles says, as soon as I enter his domain. I nod. ‘We’re launching the beta on the Glendale project today, and you’re late.’

  ‘It’s done,’ I reply. ‘I made it live while I was on the bus,’ I lie.

  Actually I pressed go this morning at 5.00, because I couldn’t sleep. I finished the build two weeks ago. I’ve been using the spare time to read through a stack of digital vintage-era Star Trek comics I’ve torrented.

  ‘You’re still late,’ Miles repeats weakly.

  My perspective has changed. Late to him is closer to death for me.

  ‘I have cancer,’ I say, sighing quietly.

  Miles looks at me.

  ‘Right,’ he says. ‘This is a bit of a derailment of our previous conversation. How bad is it?’

  ‘Terminal. I need to take some time off.’

  He rubs at a spot on his forehead that he has over-squeezed – it has now scabbed over. He rubs so hard the scab peels off. I watch it intently.

  ‘Well, then, maybe the best thing to do is keep busy,’ he offers. ‘I mean, how bad is it?’

  ‘I said it’s terminal.’

  ‘Right.’ Miles places his hand on his chin, rubbing at an imaginary stubble. ‘I just think – and correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m not, because I’ve read about it in a men’s magazine – the worst thing you can do in situations like this is take a break from your normal schedule. You have to keep to it, or the cancer wins.’

  ‘I need to take some leave,’ I r
epeat.

  ‘How long?’ Miles leans forward, straining till he can see the IN DEVELOPMENT board behind me.

  He scans over the Post-it notes colour-coded blue. Blue means Neha. He smiles. He has a tooth missing in his bottom set. It went yellow and then black for eighteen months before it disappeared. No one talks about it. Not least because the new appearance gives him a sinister smile, as though he’s about to shake your hand before tearing it off and chowing down like a barbarian at a banquet with a leg of lamb. I can see his pink tongue grinding away at his back teeth. I’ve done coke with him once before a meeting we’d both been up all night preparing a pitch for. He thought it would be a bonding experience. I can see that Miles needs a bump. Best not to prolong his craving.

  ‘I need a month.’

  ‘Sure thing. Let me know the dates, once you’ve had a proper think about how long you need. As long as they don’t coincide with any rollouts or site launches, you’re all right. It’s coming up to school holidays. Everyone and their nut sack is off to the beach, am I right?’

  ‘I need it to be a paid sabbatical,’ I say, quieter, calmly, as if an afterthought.

  ‘A whole month?’

  ‘Miles,’ I say, knowing that using someone’s name to address them directly shows you mean business. It’s something I only ever do when I’m angry or want something very specific. ‘I’ve worked here for over a decade. My salary doesn’t really reflect statutory pay increases in line with inflation. I’ve more than earned my bonuses. And I have never taken a holiday. Not even at Christmas.’

  Miles rubs his tongue along his teeth, thinking.

  ‘That’s your choice. It’s all your choice, at the end of the day. Your choice if you want to work here. Your choice if you want to take time off. Heck, it’s your choice if you want to come back to a job or not.’

  ‘A month’s paid sabbatical. I could get it as sick leave through my doctor if I wanted. I have a note from him.’

  This is not true. I declined a sick note because initially I planned to keep calm and carry on.

  Also, because Dr Hamid was doing my head in.

  Miles pauses.

  ‘Cancer, eh? That’s a fucking shame, my friend. A fucking shame. Email Trudi the dates, CC me in. See you in a month . . . I hope. Don’t go and die on me.’

  ‘I’ll try not to,’ I say, smiling for his comfort.

  ‘Where you off to, anyway?’

  ‘Home. Just home.’

  I need to look into this cancer, the same one that came for Mum. Trace your family tree. Maybe Yinka was right? I should have seen this coming. Perhaps I would have done if I had bothered to look at my family history.

  Miles has moved on, in his head, and is now swiping furiously on his phone.

  I return to my desk to start clearing the decks before taking a month off. Yinka was right in her own way. Find out how it all fits together. Trace your family tree. Find the patterns. It’s your destiny.

  I need to take ownership of this cancer. I need to understand it, to see the pattern and establish whether it can be disrupted. Raks plans to have kids, one day. Can I save them?

  Anger

  THURSDAY EVENING

  GoTo: The Kobayashi Maru

  At Starfleet Academy, there is a simulated test for trainee crews called the Kobayashi Maru, named after a ship marooned in the Klingon Neutral Zone. Your job is to decide whether to try and rescue it, thereby risking war with the Klingons, or sacrifice it to collateral damage. It’s a purpose-built no-win situation designed to show that sometimes decisions needing to be made don’t necessarily have a clear-cut right and wrong road, a best course of action and a worst course of action. Some things you can’t win – it’s how you don’t win that counts. If you’re going to not win, then do it with style, integrity and aplomb. Not with misery, depression and defeat. Not by cheating the system the way Kirk did – by surreptitiously reprogramming the simulator so that it was possible to rescue the freighter. The irony is, he was awarded a commendation, for ‘original thinking’. The Kobayashi Maru wasn’t one for fancy semantic solutions. Nor was it for cheating on; that defeated the lesson to be learned. It was to prove a point. That you can’t win ’em all, champ. How do you deal with that?

  Mika, the barmaid in Pivo, is my Kobayashi Maru.

  She’s doing a psychology degree at the local university. She works four shifts in the bar to pay for it and she drinks whole milk out of a glass every night, instead of water or a proper drink.

  She is, by rights, everything I hate. If I have to put a label on it, she offends my lactose intolerance, anti-sustainable farming stance (if you want to be really ethical, charge us less than the battery-farmed shit); she thinks she’s cleverer than me because I rewire computer networks and she rewires brains, and because I loathe subtitled films – the disconnect between observing action and reading speech is so disjointed I can never immerse myself in the experience.

  But there is definitely something, definitely, definitely something about Mika. Partly, it is that she is small and has a permanent half-smile. Is that a smirk? Like Bruce Willis in Die Hard. When he’s wisecracking about not having any shoes and how a simple office Christmas party can never be a simple office Christmas party when you’re a maverick cop who plays by his own rules.

  Raks told me I was drawn to her because she pays me attention when we’re in the bar. Because I tipped her. So she listened to my stories about PHP malfunctions and office politics and Miles’s coke habit driving the needs of his company. She half-smiled at my stories and I poured pennies into the bedpans meant to be tip jars. Partly it was because someone had told me once, drunk, that I was a waste of a girl, because I had no interest in my own formidable tits. Mika, sighing, served ice into his Jack and Coke (only cuntish lads drink Jack and Coke, usually at the point of the evening when lager is going to give them hiccups, or they’re bloated from too much wheat) from the bucket she empties the beer trays into. She’s dangerous like that.

  She wears clothes like a hipster, brogues and light summer dresses with her hair tied up in ribbons. She has a tattoo of a cat on her forearm. I hate brogues and I hate cats. Discomfort and vermin masquerading as tweeness, both can fuck off. I have a tattoo of the Starfleet insignia (original series iteration, not The Next Generation or other) just above one of my formidable breasts. I like the comfort of knowing I can call Scotty to beam me up when needed.

  Not that he has ever said those words.

  Whenever I walk into Pivo, which is every evening after work, I worry that I am in love with her. Raks thinks I confuse love and friendship because I’ve never had either. I tell him he confuses humour and desperation. Either way, whatever I decide about our relationship, she is my Kobayashi Maru.

  If I venture any further into developing a relationship with her, I might ruin the most human relationship I have with anyone outside my machines. Not to put too fine a point on it. Also, her manager might intervene and ask her to stop working there. He wouldn’t bar me. I spend too much money there. The manager of Pivo, this particular suburb’s premier Czechthemed bar, has a strict policy about his bar staff dating punters – so it’s a no-win situation.

  There isn’t any way to cheat and reprogram the simulation. Mika is a problem to which there is no solution so maybe I can beat it instead of solving it. I Twitter-stalk her — she occasionally repurposes topical jokes I have told her – I click the viewable profile photos on her Facebook account; I find, after going back through her entire timeline, a Tumblr that belongs to her, that hasn’t been updated in eleven months, called Mika’s Cats. I know everything about her and everything about her annoys me.

  Is it love if it’s born out of revulsion?

  I sit at the bar, watching her serve a couple who also come in every day. They bring a small yappy dog. She drinks a glass of white wine and he a Guinness. Her lips have disappeared into her face but she persists anyway with thick red lipstick, and red nail polish covers her advancing cuticles. At half five every single
day, she eats a plate of prawn cocktail, dipping individual prawns into a small silver bowl of orangey-pink sauce. She jerks the wine glass to her mouth in a sudden burst, gulping away, banging her dentures each time against the rim. He stares at a crossword he never comes close to completing.

  Every evening I watch them and try to imagine my life with that amount of dependency. That level of routine. That amount of mercury. It makes me feel nauseous just thinking about it.

  Those patterns.

  THURSDAY CONTINUOUS

  GoTo: Mucous Mud. True Love

  My cancer has become a condition I’ve attributed colours to. These range from mucous-mud green through to sunny-day yellow.

  Raks and I haven’t spoken about it. I haven’t heard from him for three months. Other than a favourite of a tweet I wrote linking to a video I’d made about PHP rankings. When he’s on tour, we don’t speak. We’re close and we’re not. We both acknowledge that the real twin for both of us is our different careers, and that’s what we inevitably bond over, a shared work ethic. I just think what he does is ultimately pointless, even though I know stand-up comedians think theirs is the truest art form.

  I remember seeing Raks doing a set which he ended by doing that bit of crowd work I loathe – who are you and what do you do? He picked on one of the only brown people in the audience, which considering I was also there, meant it was a particularly diverse night for him, and he asked if he had met her on shaadi.com.

  Pathetic. Poor girl.

  So when he faved my tweet about PHP malfunctions, I bet he did it sarcastically. As if to say, stop filling up the internet with highbrow tech. The internet was built by highbrow tech. But it was built for dick jokes.

  I think about Mika. Watching her body wrenching down on the lever for the Guinness as though she is a machine deploying some sort of crusher, I feel my stomach fizz. Her half-smirk as she stares into the decorative condensation on the tap makes my throat feel dry.

  I worry that I am in love.

  I’ve never been in love. It was not part of the plan.

  I find a guide to knowing whether you’re in love, written by Justin Bieber. His songs are all about love, so it stands to reason that he probably knows a bit about it.