No Harm Can Come to a Good Man

by James Smythe

  He tries keywords. He types Laurence Walker Should Not Be President Because into the search engine. Something that the algorithm will have gone for: an easy target for negativity. The hits come thick and fast: talking about Laurence’s time in the army, and what he went through, and how it might have left him too scarred, too unable to work well for a country that needs a strong military leader. That’s the biggest reason. He did an interview on TV when he came home, only local news at the time, but his was a story worth telling. He was captured, he was tortured, he didn’t betray his country, he survived. Got up and braved the rain. Politics was a natural place for him to go after that. Now, there are articles questioning whether he can be trusted, crazy über-right-wing mouthpieces who suspect that he was tainted during his time out there, brainwashed into being an enemy of America, using television shows and fiction to back up their theories.

  Then there are those who question his mental fragility. They dwell on Sean’s death. How can any man who has been through the trauma that Laurence Walker has recover enough to lead our country? one post asks. How can he find the strength needed to make the hard decisions that need to be made? It’s a question that Amit has wondered himself, but in the great column of tick-boxes that he keeps in a spreadsheet on his computer, War Hero outweighs Trauma Victim every time.

  Then there’s the third group, the religious crazies; the ones who think that Laurence’s own beliefs – or, they presume, lack thereof, because the question has never come up directly, and he has an Asian man as his campaign advisor – should preclude him from being anywhere near a role of governmental power. After that it’s marginalized groups: those who simply dislike him; who call him volatile; those who think that he isn’t actually human. Unstable words and judgments formed from nothing at all.

  Amit’s email pings as he’s reading the articles. It’s from ClearVista – a follow-up from the phone call, he assumes. He opens it, and he’s wrong.

  Thank you for choosing ClearVista, the email reads. Please find attached your predicted video file. This is merely an approximation of an event, forged from the numbers provided by your survey, designed to give you a glimpse of a possible future based on the person that you are, and the path that you wish to explore. It’s so pretentious, the language; driven by branding companies and copywriters rather than the people who established ClearVista. It’s another business entirely than when he worked there. Other formats (including H3D, HoloGas and TactBraille) available on request. Please click here for a list of terms and conditions, including fair-use policies for distribution of this video. Remember: the ClearVista watermark is not to be removed for broadcast purposes. We hope that you have found our service useful. The numbers don’t lie. There’s a link attached, to a file stored on their servers. Amit clicks it, and the black box of the video loads. Amit swipes to start it playing.

  It opens with a logo, swirling and central. Designed by committee, designed to tell you everything. It’s cold and clean, meant to be lasting; and, around the font, a series of numbers swirl, some representation of the algorithm and what it can do for you. Then that passes, and the screen is a mess of false, animated static. Rows and rows of numbers and letters and symbols: representations of the algorithm for some reason. This is all window dressing, Amit knows. It’s not the real thing – it is almost entirely meaningless, but the company is selling a product, and needs to dress it up as such. Images start to form through the false static, figures moving around, particles and digital atoms seeming to form into shapes. All of this is showmanship. He stopped working for ClearVista long before they moved onto the videos and the photographs, doctored visualizations that added perceived value, somehow swaying the general public towards believing the results of the reports. ClearVista is a company, not some grand project to enhance people’s lives. That’s one of the reasons he stopped working for them.

  The video is dark, so he turns up the brightness on the screen, and then he sees shapes begin to form through the static. There’s sound as well: a rush of something in the background, so overwhelming that if he concentrates enough it’s all encompassing. This is a new addition: when Homme’s video appeared, it was silent. (Amit joked at the time that as he grinned Homme could well be telling all the soldiers he was shaking the hands of that they were being sent to die, and the world would never know any better.) In the background, he sees more figures begin to form, their parts swirling, numbers and pixels and false dust coagulating into the shapes of what looks like four silhouettes: four, maybe only three. One of them is smaller than the others.

  The video compiles the figure in the foreground first, juddering them into being: it’s Laurence, in a gray suit and lemon-yellow tie. Obvious, really, that he would be here. It’s unsettling, watching him form: the software takes photographs and videos from the Internet, recognizing faces, and it composites them into a new version of that face that it can use. So it looks like Laurence, because it is him; just, in a place that he has never been, doing things that he hasn’t yet done. Laurence’s face flits through different sources – through expressions of joy, of cold sternness, of somber mourning – before settling on something that is so blank, it is like a face that Amit doesn’t believe can exist. Even to look at it, it looks false it’s so vacant. Amit wonders where it has come from. This facsimile of Laurence is looking at the camera, or what would be the camera. Amit wonders how they pick an angle for this; how any of it actually works. It’s a guess, that’s all, based on nothing. Some designer somewhere thought up a scenario based on data. That makes Amit balk. What if they’ve used the bad data? The results that were sent through already, that sent Laurence reeling? The point of this is gentle lies. He knows that, should Homme win – maybe even before – he will recreate the shot that was generated by his report, because it’s a great promo; a solid opportunity for positive press. Here is the man that you were promised when you cast your vote. Given half a chance, Amit will have Laurence do the same.

  The rest of them start drawing themselves in: the next is Deanna, and her face does the same as Laurence’s did. It goes through her expressions – fewer than for Laurence, certainly, but there’s enough to draw on for her. She’s been in the public eye for a while: before he was as high-profile as he is, she was at book events, and there are publicity photos of her that her publisher draped all over the Internet; her hair glossy, her smile knowingly only half-there. She is drawn in, her clothes approximated, based on what she’s worn in other photographs, an outfit that Amit has seen her wearing before – and then it draws the person next to her. He imagines a head of state, or a soldier, but it’s Lane. She forms quickly – fewer expressions still, thanks to a scarcity of photos. The software resorts to screen grabs of YouTube videos she’s been tagged in: one of her singing while some boy plays an acoustic-guitar version of a hyped-up dance song; one of her leaping off a cliff-edge and into a lake a few years ago before she even had a single tattoo on her skin; one of her laughing hysterically at a party, collapsing to the floor while another girl attempts to drink beer through a funnel. She is standing next to her mother at the back of the room, with Laurence front and center; the image framed somehow, Laurence the focus. As, Amit thinks, he probably should be. Laurence’s face changes again, as if the software cannot settle on an appropriate expression; then it goes back to the original. Cold and gone.

  The fourth shape is still waiting to draw in, Amit notices; and then it crackles into images and light. The face first, and Amit is terrified, because it’s Sean. It’s the Walkers’ son, somehow alive. Then it changes again to another – chubbier, slightly, the teeth slightly neater, less of a jawline – and the hair is drawn, the clothes, and Amit realizes that it’s not Sean: it’s Alyx. The face changes again to Sean’s, and back, and back. Over and over. This is ClearVista’s software, not clever enough to distinguish between very similar twins, even when they’re of different sexes. Now, as it finishes its process, the figure is definably Alyx, but there are pieces of Sean in her. She doesn�
��t quite have her own eyes. Portions of her face move sluggishly and alter until they settle. Amit looks at the bar at the bottom of the video, willing it to move on faster.

  As the fragments stop swirling, Amit thinks of dust after a terrible storm: when the wind dies down and the air settles, the dust hanging in it, visible through rays of light for days. The tableau has been established; now, time for the money shot. Amit wants this to be an embrace: the four of them turn and hold each other. This is proof of Laurence’s being over the traumas that he has endured, despite having lost an election, here he is, the consummate family man. Even if he doesn’t win, there’s family. He is a good man, that’s the takeaway from this.

  But that doesn’t happen. On the screen, the Walker family judders into life, automatons at some ancient fairground, lurching and stuttering into place. The Laurence in the video stays perfectly still; only his family reacts. All three of their faces distort and contort into looks of trauma, of panic. Expressions that there’s no frame of reference for, so the software bends and manipulates what it’s got, turning smiles upside down, forcing false tears from previously happy eyes. Alyx looks sad; the other two look terrified. There is abject fear on their faces, or some approximation of it. Laurence doesn’t move, or change, for the rest of the video. His expression is as a monolith. Then there finally comes a sound from the speakers, the soundtrack to this piece: quiet sobbing, the voices female and small.

  Amit feels his heart race. He feels sick, in his throat, rising to his mouth. He looks at the representation of Laurence, willing it to change, to show something resembling justification. The face remains blank; no expression picked by the software, not remorse or sadness or actually even anything at all.

  Amit opens the original email again and reads their terms and conditions, as if that will change anything. But there is nothing, only a clause that says that users are entitled to their rights and that he needs to speak to them about any issues with the report or video; so he shuts the laptop and packs it into his satchel. He needs to wait for ClearVista to call him; and he needs to watch it again. He wants to understand exactly what it is; he wants to know where it came from.

  He looks at the email again. It’s been sent to Laurence as well; of course it has. Both of their names were on the account. He’ll wake up and see the video, and Amit does not want that to happen, not until this is fixed. So he backtracks, creeping into the room quietly, fetching Laurence’s laptop from the bag, and then he sits on the floor of the bathroom – in case Laurence should suddenly wake up and ask what he’s doing – and he opens the email app and deletes the one from ClearVista, making sure to empty the trash when he’s done. This can be controlled from here on out. He puts the laptop back in Laurence’s bag and leaves the room again, into the corridor of this spartan Texan hotel. He tries to call ClearVista again, in an attempt to rush the customer service specialist, and the automated voice answers.

  ‘We have received your request for a callback,’ it says, before he can say a word, ‘and will be in contact with you imminently. Please have patience with us.’ The line goes dead and Amit tries once more, getting the same message. He doesn’t have a clue what he’s meant to do next. He thinks about people in films, when they’re this frustrated: they cry, or they punch walls. Or they go and get drunk.

  He heads to the elevators and presses the button for the first level. Above it is a small label: The Cowpoke, it reads, Bar & Restaurant.

  ‘That’ll do,’ he says.

  Amit orders a beer and some buffalo wings, and he sits at a high bar-side table by himself. He puts his tablet on the table in front of him, and his phone, and he taps on one while scrolling on the other, loading up blogs and searching Twitter. He tries to distract himself. He tells himself that everything from ClearVista has to be wrong, that there’s no way there’s validation in this. Laurence’s results do not speak of the man that he knows, that he’s been working with these past months. He may be fragile – more fragile than the public realizes; maybe even more than Deanna realizes – but that man in the video isn’t Laurence. He tries to put the image from his mind, but it’s pervasive. He sees his boss’s face, cold and free of all expression, looking away from his loved ones. He knows that it’s the software, and he knows that it’s an accident. No, he tells himself, not an accident: a fucking disaster. He drinks his beer and then another; and he eats the wings and wipes his hands on the wet, lemon-scented napkin, and then orders another beer.

  The rumble of his phone on the table makes him jump. It’s this girl he’s almost been seeing, a student at Georgetown who came to a seminar that he gave. She’s so much younger than he is, and she asks how he is, and what’s wrong, because he sounds like he’s not really there, and he says that he’s not. He explains that Laurence has a migraine, maintaining the lie because he doesn’t know who in the bar might be listening. She tells him to be careful. She asks if they can go out when he gets back, and he says that he doesn’t know. He tells her that he doesn’t know if he’ll have the time to get into anything serious; at least, not for a few years, if all goes to plan. He isn’t trying to be an asshole, he tells her; he’s just being honest.

  ‘I’m being realistic,’ he says. Even as the words come out, he thinks that he’s pushing his luck, both with her and his promises for Laurence’s campaign. She hangs up on him, angry. She tells him not to bother calling her. He orders another beer, and he checks his phone to see if he’s missed a call from ClearVista; if the reception is good here. He goes to the ClearVista website, and clicks the button to start the process of a new application, thinking that it might give him a different phone number he can call, to actually speak with somebody. They always want new custom; maybe he can circumvent the system that way.

  The ClearVista logo in the middle of the screen swirls, the screen dissolving into a publicity video, an extended talk-through of the services that they offer. It shows a man and a woman talking about having a baby; an older woman contemplating applying for a job; a committee having a meeting, discussing the plausibility of some vague policy. The video asks if the viewer has ever considered any of these things. Perhaps they have been afraid of failure? Or wondered if they can do – if they can be – better? ClearVista can help, the video offers. It explains about the algorithm: that it began development in 2015, created by a team of technology experts who had, between them, worked for some of the world’s most powerful politicians and Fortune 500 companies. They had all banded together to research the future of predictability and what they found wasn’t infallible, but close. Technology now allows for the statistics to speak for themselves; for your percentages of success to be broken down into exacting detail. We can, the video says, answer any and all of your questions to within a percentage probability margin – and, at higher payment tiers, even visually predict the outcomes of a given situation, using state of the art audiovisual technologies. They show representations of those same people having achieved their goals: the happy family around a crib; the woman sitting behind a desk at her new job; the committee smiling at a product launch. Remove the chaos from your decision-making, and start to predict your future now. ClearVista: the numbers don’t lie. But there’s no number to call: just a form to fill in on their website, and the promise of a swift callback.

  The website loads a series of FAQs. Amit has read these so many times before – both when he was working for them way back when and they were developing the questions that they would need to ask, the data that they would need to obtain; and then again, when Laurence was told to begin this process, and he tore the information provided apart to see if anything had changed – but he goes through them once more now. It can’t hurt, he reasons.

  What happens if your result isn’t satisfactory? one question asks.

  This is a fallible science, the answer reads. Sometimes, things will be askew. We try our best to achieve results that are as accurate as possible, but occasionally things will slip through the cracks. If you have any queries, simply contact
us, and we’ll run that part of the algorithm again. Maybe you’ll get the answer you were hoping for this time? They list the contact number that he’s been calling, the only way of getting in touch with them. There’s no email and no emergency number. Why would there be? Amit thinks. Nothing to do with ClearVista is an emergency. This is a mistake. Mistakes can be rectified, and this can all be reset, as if it never even happened. Nothing about this is life or death. But he’s exhausted. They both are. Best case, it will be another nine years before they get to have a proper holiday and some time off, time away from politics and worrying about one thing or another. This can be good training, maybe: a trial by fire.

  Amit orders another beer. He shuts his eyes and drinks from the bottle, cradling his phone in his hand, waiting for it to ring.

  Laurence dreams.

  He is on the bed, in this hotel, and there is a knock at the door. He answers it, moving from bed to door in one smooth, swift motion. It’s Sean. There’s nothing disquieting about seeing his son here. Instead, it is completely expected; this is where Sean lives now. The boy runs off towards the elevators at the end of the hallway and Laurence chases after him. Sean reaches the elevator and runs in, and the doors ping to a close in front of Laurence’s face, shutting him outside. He pumps the button, furious and frantic, but nothing happens. The LED above the doors that shows the current floor is blank and it stays that way. Laurence turns to run back to his room, but the corridor stretches on and on into infinity, as if he is running on the spot and somebody else is moving the walls. He turns back and the elevator doors open: not to the metal box that’s expected, but onto a dock, the ramshackle wooden strut that is attached to the house that they own, at the lake. This is the house where Sean died. He is there, at the end of the dock, which seems so implausibly far away from Laurence. Sean clumsily dives from the end: up, into the air, and then down. There is no splash of water when he impacts, at least not that can be seen. Laurence runs down the dock, the jetty, trying to reach him; because if he can, maybe this – all of this – doesn’t need to happen. But he’s too late. He’s always too late.