Sensation Machines

by Adam Wilson

  Lucas takes The Helmet 2.0 down from the shelf. He explains how it will work in conjunction with The Suit™, synthesizing data and whispering consumer motivation to the user in the user’s own voice. He explains that people who wear these helmets in conjunction with The Suit™ for a long enough time will find it difficult to differentiate between the whispered voice and their own inner one. The voice knows what you want before you do, whether you’re hungry, thirsty, or constipated. Hungry for Famous Ray’s pizza, thirsty for Mike’s Hard Lemonade, in need of fifty milligrams Colace from the Duane Reade three blocks south. It tells you what you want before you know you want it. In conjunction with these helmets, The Suit™ becomes a proxy brain.

  Lucas outlines his plan to sell this data to insurance companies, big pharma, and consumer brands. He evangelizes on this landmark innovation in marketing and data science, a natural progression from step-counters, search engines, and recommendation algorithms, crossbred, rolled into a single garment. For effect, he taps his phone and Sam Cooke arrives in the room like a human wind chime, singing an old gospel number about longing to touch the hem of his savior’s garment. Garment, Lucas explains, was a potential name for the product, ruled out for its Mormon connotations.

  Lucas doesn’t smile. He doesn’t demonstrate The Suit™ or insist that Wendy take a test run. She thinks she understands why. Something might be lost in the demonstration, a failure, by the item, to tangibly represent its power. This product, she intuits, was designed to underwhelm its wearer, to blend with the body to the point where the wearer forgets its presence. Hence its custom hue, the same pink shade as Lucas’s skin. Hence its lightness.

  “This is all quite impressive,” says Wendy.

  “But?” says Lucas. “I know there’s a but. I can see in your eyes that there’s a but. Your internal software analyzed the data I’ve presented and something doesn’t add up. The marketing strategist inside you is throwing little red flags.”

  “Perceptive.”

  “Spend enough time with machines and you start to think like one. I started coding at nine, was fluent in Cobra by twelve. By college I couldn’t have sex without modeling each position beforehand in my visual cortex.”

  “And all this while captaining the swim team,” says Wendy.

  “So what’s your but? Let me guess. You want to know how I can get anyone to wear this ridiculous thing? You want to know who will sign off on this invasion of most basic human privacies? You want to know what this glorified long underwear has to do with the UBI?”

  “Something along those lines.”

  “It’s simple,” says Lucas. “We pay them.”

  “We pay them,” repeats Wendy, realizing, as she says it, that she’s including herself in the we.

  “This country,” he says, and takes a long pause, two or three seconds, to let her reflect and feel the weight of these words. The this implies a certain familiarity, almost familial. This family, she imagines someone saying with the same tone and inflection, the same weariness, after finding out her uncle is sleeping one off in county jail. And country, a space between syllables emphasizing the word cunt, its sharp uppercut into that hard T, the ry trailing off, an afterthought. “This cunt-ry is going through a difficult moment. Maybe difficult is the wrong word. Maybe the right word is pivotal. It’s important to be specific. I’ve always believed that. Otherwise we’re no better than chimps.”

  “Because chimps aren’t specific?”

  “Forget chimps,” says Lucas, “I want to talk about jobs. They’re disappearing if you haven’t noticed. Not yours or mine or the graduates of those pricey citadels of North Face skiwear and rape culture we call liberal arts colleges. I’m talking about capital-A American lowercase-j jobs. These are the dying breaths of the human-labor age. But that’s been established. We’ve seen the Hollywood spectacles about robot takeovers in which the fit and dwindling rebel forces look like they got lost on the way home from Burning Man and now have to wage war while coming down from ayahuasca wearing faux-Navajo headdresses dyed neon yellow and electric blue. I’m not telling you anything new.”

  “No,” says Wendy.

  “So what I’ll do is ask a question and then I’ll answer it myself, like a politician might do. The question: What comes next?”

  He pauses for effect and taps his pants pocket as if he’s looking for a set of keys that will unlock the secrets of the product that Wendy continues to hold.

  “One possible solution is this bill. Universal Basic Income, they’re calling it. Nervy, don’t you think? I get the basic part. It’s certainly basic. I get the income part as well. Income, incoming. A kamikaze pilot. A plane about to explode. It’s the universal bit that kills me. What chutzpah. Universal? Please. This bill leaves no one happy. Not the businesses and high-income citizens the government’s asking to subsidize it. Not the recipients either. You think an out-of-work trucker in Mississippi wants your charity? You think that makes him feel good? The problem is that no one has presented a viable alternative. So allow me to present an alternative.”

  “Explain,” says Wendy.

  “What if wearing this The Suit™ were your job?”

  “My job?”

  “Someone’s job. Our out-of-work trucker in Mississippi, say. He puts it on in the morning. He wears it beneath his clothes for eight hours. For this he’s paid a fair hourly wage by me, his employer. Meanwhile, he can do whatever an out-of-work trucker in Mississippi does. Learn French cooking from a series of YouTube tutorials. Drink beer and water his hydrangeas. Work part-time as a Mhustle driver. Take care of his kids. Patronize strippers and rationalize this shameful time-suck by telling himself he’s helping these nice girls save for tuition to one of our liberal arts citadels so they can go on ski trips with upper-middle-class Jewish boys who will break their hearts when they don’t offer marriage even when Savannah, our Southern belle, promises to convert.”

  “And privacy?” says Wendy. “Because isn’t this guy a paranoid white supremacist with tactical armor and seventeen guns and an illegal bump stock whose biggest fear is that the government is going to take it all away?”

  “Don’t stereotype,” says Lucas. “It’ll get you nowhere. Look, we’re taking people’s data all the time. Spying on every facet of their lives. You’re right. People are paranoid about this, and in truth they don’t even know the half of it. But that’s the problem. People don’t like feeling like idiots. They don’t like the idea that things are happening behind their backs. It’s not the invasion of privacy that pisses people off—this is a country of exhibitionists. What pisses them off is the fact that it’s happening without their knowledge or approval. What pisses them off is that they’re not getting paid. With The Suit™ they’d have the illusion of control over the data they’re offering. With The Suit™ they’d be compensated.”

  “Okay,” says Wendy. “I can see how it might work, if we were only talking about this—” She indicates the item in her hand. “You pay them, and in return, they provide medical data that you then resell at profit to insurance companies and big pharma. But we’re not. We’re talking about a helmet as well. The Suit™ on its own is all well and good, but The Helmet 2.0’s a major aspect of your income stream. The Helmet 2.0 whispers the ads. Asking people to wear The Helmet 2.0 is different. To wear the Helmet 2.0 is to participate in Shamerican Sykosis. To live in an augmented world. To wear a big bulky thing on your head for eight hours a day. I can’t picture our out-of-work trucker signing on for this. Especially if the whole sell of this product is that it allows him to maintain some semblance of dignity. I don’t see why anyone would prefer this to Basic Income, which I think is what you’re asking them to do. I could see it as a supplement to the UBI, sure, something that might appeal to a select group of people. But why, as you fantasize, would the majority of American citizens give up $23,000 in free money in exchange for wearing this ridiculous thing?”

 
“The choice isn’t up to the majority of American citizens,” says Lucas. “It’s up to Senator Breem and a handful of others, and these guys aren’t interested in pleasing the majority of Americans. They’re interested in pleasing the banks and corporations that fund their campaigns. They’re interested in pleasing their constituents. And in Breem’s case, a lot of those constituents—and especially the ones who have enough guilt and time to make noise on Breem’s voicemail and in Zuccotti Park—aren’t people who need $23,000. They aren’t people who will wear The Suit™ for forty hours to pay the heating bill. They are, however, people who would rather not pay sixty percent income tax. They are people who needed convincing that it’s morally and socially acceptable to be against a bill that would institute that tax, so long as there’s another option that might equally satisfy the people in need of $23,000. And now they are convinced. Do you know why they are convinced? It’s because you convinced them.”

  “I convinced them?”

  “Your campaign convinced them.”

  “The campaign,” says Wendy, “is about the sexiness of labor.”

  “No,” says Lucas. “It’s about the illusion of the sexiness of labor. About the illusion that low-paying unskilled and semi-skilled work in the service of corporate interest upholds essential American values.”

  He pauses to let this sink in.

  “Do you remember the eighties?” Lucas asks. “I don’t either, but apparently there was something called the Soviet Union. And in this communist wonderland, the dignified proletariat fawned over American consumer brands. They lacked choice, and Pepsi was the choice of a generation, so the first American product to be manufactured in Russia was Pepsi. And you know what Pepsi’s motto in Russia was: ‘Feeling Free.’”

  “Okay,” says Wendy.

  “Not Being Free. Feeling Free. Do you see what I’m saying?”

  Wendy nods.

  “The way I see it,” explains Lucas, “there are two buy-in options. Level One employees wear The Suit™. They wear it wherever and whenever they want. Their hours are logged and they get paid for this work in American dollars, while receiving the requisite medical benefits: early detection of tumors, for one, not to mention detection of all kinds—the research isn’t complete yet, but we estimate that the average American suffers from at least three treatable undiagnosed conditions. And yes, we sell that data to insurance companies for profit, and we sell that data to pharmaceutical companies, and maybe we sell some of it to Nike, because, helmet or not, Nike wants to target one banner ad to the overachiever who jogs thirty miles per week and another to the aspirational couch potato who tells himself that the only thing standing between himself and the treadmill is the right pair of sneakers.”

  “I see.”

  “So, that’s our man in Mississippi. He’s happy with that. We’re happy with that. But this is America, and in America, as you know, there’s very little a man won’t do to own a bigger house than his neighbor does. In America, $23,000 or $50,000 or $80 million doesn’t satisfy anyone. If there’s more to be taken, then people will take. And that’s why they sign on to be Level Two employees. Just like Level One employees, Level Two employees set their own hours. The difference is that their hours are only logged when they’re wearing The Suit™ and The Helmet 2.0 in conjunction. Level Two employees live, at least during working hours, in Shamerica. For this, they’re paid more than Level One employees. Not double, necessarily, but enough that it seems worth their while. But they’re not paid in American dollars. No, they’re paid in Sykodollars, which they can convert to American dollars if they wish, though with that currency’s instability, it would not be advisable to do so. Those Sykodollars can then be spent in Shamerica on clothes for their avatars, or the right to paint augmented flowers all over One Police Plaza. And the more hours that users spend wearing their helmets to earn money, the more their helmets will encourage them to buy virtual products in this virtual world, and the more of that money they’ll inevitably feed back, through in-game purchase, to their employer.”

  “Who is you.”

  “Who is me.”

  “Work will set you free, huh?” says Wendy.

  “Work will set you free.”

  They haven’t kissed yet, but Lucas takes off his shirt, revealing his ugly tattoos. He must have had a youth, Wendy thinks, and it’s a comforting thought.

  She puts The Suit™ back on its hanger and closes the closet door. She could leave, now, if she wanted to leave. Lucas, she knows, would not be embarrassed. He would not get aggressive. He would not try to cajole her into just one more drink. He would offer a shirtless handshake, say a polite goodnight. There would be no repercussions. He would not hold this implicit rejection against her. It would not affect her role in the campaign.

  To remain in this room—as Wendy seems to be doing, unbuttoning her cardigan, placing it on the bed, now unzipping, letting her jumpsuit drop—is a conscious choice. She picks the jumpsuit up off the floor. She carefully folds it and places it down beside her cardigan on Lucas’s bed.

  41.

  Michael says, “Fuck this bullshit,” and soundlessly hits the couch’s padded arm with his fist. The scorpion woman does not turn her eyes from the screen. The man with the magnets snores in a chair by their side.

  Broder sits on the far end of the L. Onscreen, a newscaster explains that the police found Ricky’s bracelet in a black man’s apartment. Broder didn’t know it was an SD bracelet, whatever that is.

  “Impossible,” says Michael.

  Broder isn’t certain. He looks at his rash, at the yellowy crust where he scratched off a scab. He remembers unclasping the item from Ricky’s wrist and fastening it to his own. He thought it was a watch. The pawnbroker asked why it didn’t have hands. The pawnbroker gave Broder two tens and a five. The money paid for the bus ticket and Arby’s. This was before the watch was a bracelet. The newscaster says it may be worth millions of dollars. He says it contains a partial fingerprint.

  Broder tries to picture a million dollar bills laid out like railroad ties for miles over hills and lush terrain. The image stretches farther than he can see. Michael rocks the tab on an empty can of ginger ale until the tab breaks free.

  A face appears on-screen. It is not the face that Broder snuffed out on the night of the party, but a younger version of it, pinker and less puffy. Broder knows this face, the face of twenty-six-year-old Ricky. It’s the face that’s looped for years in Broder’s head, with its sly smile and dilated pupils, its thin coating of lip-sweat, its cruel, silent laughter. It’s the face that looms over memories of Broder’s wedding, and it’s the face that he pictured on the sleepless nights that followed, when Aliana left the house and didn’t return until past dawn. Broder knew that Ricky was still in town and that they were together, somewhere, beneath hot lights, or hovering over a low glass table, or in the back seat of a dealer’s Escalade, rattled by bass. Wherever they were, they were high. It’s the face that Broder pictured on the nights that followed those, after Aliana left for the desert. She told Broder she needed some space, she needed to think, she’d come back sober, she promised, they’d start fresh. And then at the funeral, which Ricky didn’t attend. And when her dad sold the house in Los Feliz, Broder was staying on his sponsor’s couch, staring up at the ceiling, picturing the face, and then later, on other couches, on bare mattresses, high now too, having succumbed. It is the face that Broder was trying to snuff out by snuffing out its more recent incarnation. He rolls the phrase snuff out around his mouth. He pictures sticking his finger down an empty eye socket.

  “He gave it to her,” Broder says, in a voice that doesn’t sound like his own. He’s not sure where the voice comes from. Somewhere deep in the body, maybe his bowels, sound waves rising through coils of shit. He’s not sure why he’s here. He felt certain of this mission on the Peter Pan bus, mentally preparing the story for Michael. Now it feels futile, impossible to artic
ulate. There’s too much to explain. Nothing’s coming out right.

  The smart thing would be to disappear. Broder’s never been particularly smart. There are parts of him, he knows, that operate beyond his awareness. It’s always been the case, waking in strange beds and wondering why this other, evil Broder led him there. Perhaps to be absolved. “He gave it to her,” he says again.

  Michael doesn’t indicate that he’s heard, but the woman does, turning her head in Broder’s direction.

  She says, “Who gave what to who?”

  “Aliana,” says Broder. “He gave her cocaine.”

  The word cocaine is so airy with vowels, a word that can’t help but come out a whisper. The woman pokes Michael in the arm. The two share an intimacy that Broder can’t figure out. Michael tells her that Aliana was Broder’s wife.

  “She was fifteen months clean,” says Broder.

  A man on-screen is identified, by caption, as Detective Aldous Quinn. Microphones point at the man and the man speaks into them. He says he found the bracelet in a laundry bin. Broder imagines reaching into someone else’s laundry, his hand emerging covered in bugs.

  “This is my fault,” says Michael. “I told him about the stupid bracelet in the first place. They never would have looked for it otherwise.”

  Michael turns to Broder.

  “Did you see him?”

  “See who?” says Broder. He looks around the room as if there’s someone he should be seeing but, for some reason, can’t.

  “Donnell,” says Michael. “The guy on-screen now. Did you see him the night that Ricky died?”

  “Not that I recall,” says Broder. He heard someone say this in court on TV. He likes the way it feels in his mouth.

  “Because he wasn’t there,” says Michael.

  “She would never have done it if it weren’t for Ricky,” Broder says.

  For many years, he has believed in this truth. He has relied on this truth to bolster his anger. It has given purpose to Broder’s days. Since the night of the party, he’s felt uncertain. He keeps thinking of the toasts at their wedding, how she may have taken a sip of champagne. Michael’s the only one who might understand.