But that was a feeling I hadn’t had in a long time.
* * *
—
How it felt when we were just starting up.
Everyone was shocked that thanatons behaved according to mathematics that were, for lack of a better term, subjective. Stettinger’s breakthrough: to acknowledge that the solver was part of the problem. That is, when solving for the thanaton, both the problem and its solver changed—they changed each other, step by step, during the solving process. Even more unexpected: that you could only do subjective math by inventing your own subjective way. You had to construct your own version of the math, your own version of the algorithms, your own heuristics, even your own notation. That’s why computers can’t do subjective mathematics. It’s why thanatons were resisted for so long by traditional mathematicians.
But even open-minded mathematicians who wanted to learn subjective math had a hard time. Too difficult to break old mental habits.
So young people were overrepresented at Sapere Aude. Youth is able to navigate subjective mathematics because youth isn’t yet mortgaged to any worldview, youth has nimbleness of association, youth intuitively breaks or ignores rules—and I remember the feeling, how back then it felt to me like my brain was a continuous burst of fireworks, how I could forge the most unlikely connections with a flourish, I could ride the most zigzagging logic without being bucked off. Older mathematicians couldn’t follow us into this fresh territory. It was all our own.
Exhilarating.
Each of us had to construct our own metaphor in order to visualize thanaton mechanics. This personal metaphor helped you feel the shape of the problem, pointed the way to the solution even before you could prove it formally. Everyone’s metaphor was individual, idiosyncratic: Ziegler’s metaphor envisioned thanaton theory as exploring an endless living castle made of jeweled flesh. Kulkarni’s put it in terms of an infinity of interlocking glass boxes with ever-shifting panes. Hwang imagined snakelike creatures swimming through vast underwater jungles.
For me, thanaton theory was more like the twists, reversals, and corkscrews of an inexhaustibly complicated fairy tale. A sprawling myth that might take the entire age of the universe to fully tell, expressed through the archetypes of princesses and goblins and kingdoms, each trope charged with precise mathematical meaning, though more digressive and dreamlike than any story someone would actually narrate…
The metaphor only lasted for the first few weeks. After that initial burst of creative vision, our surreal metaphors settled down, became more abstract, reduced themselves into codes of written symbols. The originating vision faded for everyone. Ziegler no longer spoke of castles of jeweled flesh, Kulkarni didn’t conceive of interlocking glass boxes, Hwang couldn’t even remember the details of his underwater jungles. Three months in, everyone’s notation looked just like any other mathematics—though not quite, because everyone’s symbols were different.
But I missed the feeling. In the beginning, my infinite-bizarre-fairy-tale metaphor of thanaton calculations would always produce a weird little fable at the end of the process. A kind of mathematical by-product. I liked those stories as curiosities. Back when I would still get them, I would write them down. Though it was not always a good story.
“A good story”—makes me think of Keith.
Argggh.
Don’t think of Keith.
And as for Julia, she didn’t tell me or anyone else much about her metaphor. She only said it involved a hotel of infinite rooms, countless indistinguishable doors hiding different solutions, hallways and stairwells branching and reversing and looping, rooms and hallways that were completely unoccupied—a haunted, lonely hotel that went on forever.
* * *
—
A hotel is a lonely place, okay? Long hallways of anonymous doors. Nobody cares about you. So many people have passed through your room. A different person yesterday; a different person tomorrow. You’re temporary, only the room is real. So what does it matter what happens in the room? You’re not your real self, you’re your hotel self. You’re pulling down six figures a year but you’re on the road six months out of the twelve, in cities where you don’t know anyone. And all you do all day is tell people when they’re going to die. So you’re not making friends, all right? And you have all this money to throw around. All this spare time. You’re young.
You cheat on your wife.
Can’t be more clich’, more ridiculous than that! Still, I deluded myself while it was happening that it wasn’t like that at all. But Erin knew. She knew for months, she had to. Silently building her case. Documenting. I thought I could be a Hutchinson! Maybe that’s where I got it from; maybe I thought it was an unwritten rule that nobody acknowledged but everyone tacitly assented to, that everyone cheated. Or maybe because whenever I was in a hotel, I couldn’t stop thinking of death. Hopkins. Minneapolis. Needed someone to be with me. More than loneliness: it was terror. Sometimes the solution was sex, sometimes not. Talk all night with her, whoever she was, if I could. Breakfast the next morning. Fascinated me, different people. Fat, thin, punk, professional. Pick her up at the hotel bar; pick her up at the fucking Denny’s. Wasn’t only about sex; it was the thrill of someone new. The spiky otherness of a new person. Let me multiply my own self, try on different ways of being. Different people brought out different parts of me. I learned about myself, cheating. I never lied to them. Part of the excitement was to leave myself vulnerable like that, reckless. Na’ve. That’s how Erin nailed me, of course, and took me for every dime: word got back.
“Well, now at least I know your type. White trash skanks,” Erin said.
Failure of imagination on her part. Any one of those women were just as interesting and worthwhile as Erin, at least for that night. They knew the rules of the game, or most of them did, they knew what we were playing. And I could open myself up to a stranger more than to the people I knew best. A fresh connection with a stranger who unexpectedly understands you—no, it didn’t happen every time. But more often than you might expect. And anyway, I had learned how to please people, I could edit myself for them, I was a pretty good salesman.
Until her.
Her.
* * *
—
Afterward, while she was asleep—whoever she was that night—my mathematical brain woke up. Patterns and connections formed liked they once did, before the drinking and the socializing and the happiness dulled me. Guilt was for later; there would be time for guilt when I got home, and, eventually, forgetting. But now I was in the hotel, an unreal limbo that had changed from a complex of anonymous death hallways to an intense place of possibility and inspiration. Walking down the hallways alone, my brain teemed with ideas combining, dissolving, breeding new ideas, bubbling up to the surface. Choose some, discard others. Standing at the rattling ice machine in a fluorescent-lit hallway, listening to it go chunk-chunk-chunk, chunk-chunk-chunk, lost in the rhythm, fitting equations together in my head. Getting closer. I could feel the eschaton taking shape around me, a particle that was somehow bigger than the universe, ghostly and everywhere, but getting smaller every moment, and I was the nucleus. The end of the world coming. Or the end of my world. Making it happen mathematically. To do the math makes the math come true. Every time I picked up someone new, I felt myself moving up the death date on my marriage with Erin, maybe I was waiting for it, maybe I wanted my marriage to blow up, for everything to blow up. I was forcing it earlier, urging it to come faster.
Now I’m a dead man.
Now I want to see the last woman who knew the real me.
The me worth knowing.
Julia had something of mine.
* * *
—
Why’d I think Julia would even want to see me?
I text her from the security line at O’Hare, hungover. Why had I bought a ticket for such an early flight? I’m a mess, unshaven, wrinkled clothes, running to th
e gate. I make it on the plane but just barely. With relief. Outside the airplane window the ground drops away, dwindles. Gone. Gray, cold, grimy. Never belonged there. Made me dead before I was dead.
I’ll never come back to Chicago.
From here on out every trip is one-way.
* * *
—
All trips are one-way.
Right?
Every ticket has already been bought.
Every destination has already been chosen.
You remember when reports of this began coming out. How they called it “Sapere Aude syndrome.” (And, yeah, if a psychological disorder was named after your company, you’d change your company’s name, too.)
That’s why the bottom dropped out of the thanaton industry in the late aughts. Why our business collapsed. Why, at forty-nine, I’m stuck scrabbling together a living against the Martin McNiffs of the world.
Not because of what people had predicted. At first critics said Sapere Aude would fail because nobody really wanted to know when they’d die.
But no. Everyone did want to know. The fact that knowing was ludicrously expensive made it even more desirable. Became a status symbol of sorts.
For a while.
Then people said that Sapere Aude would fail because…well, how would we keep growing? No repeat customers, obviously.
But that wasn’t quite it either.
You must’ve seen this coming. I mean, just do the thought experiment. Let’s say you come to me for your assessment. You get your thanatons analyzed. And I tell you that you’re going to die ten years from now.
What do you do next? If you’re a smart-ass?
Try to kill yourself now.
Disprove the system.
So do it, big guy. Load a gun, point it to your head, pull the trigger. Throw yourself off a bridge. Swallow a million pills. Boom: you’re dead ten years ahead of schedule, right? Not so accurate now, are you, Sapere Aude?
But that was the thing.
Somehow you’d fumble while loading the gun. Or it would turn out that when you put that gun to your head and pulled the trigger, you forgot to put a bullet in there. You’d go to the bridge to throw yourself off but someone would stop you from doing it, or you wouldn’t make it onto the bridge after all. You’d swallow those million pills but then barf them all up before they could kill you. Or even worse: you’d survive but be incapacitated or crippled until your predetermined date rolled around.
Sapere Aude was always right.
And so humanity learned, almost as an afterthought, that its free will was pretty much fake.
After the first time you tried to kill yourself, or tried to push your or someone else’s death ahead of schedule, you’d feel it. Like invisible electric guardrails, hemming you in on either side. And having felt them once, you were excruciatingly aware of them for the rest of your life. Nobody could add even a single second to their lives—not from what Sapere Aude predicted. Nor could they take a second away. If you couldn’t control that—well, what else about your life couldn’t you control?
Everyone who tried to buck their death date came down with Sapere Aude syndrome. Everyone who tried to defy the math.
Math showed them who was boss.
People reported feeling they had no control over what their bodies did. Their minds seeming disconnected from the actions their bodies undertook, like they couldn’t even control themselves, like their minds were simply riding along inside the bodies, a prisoner inside an alien flesh-thing that moved and acted and spoke on its own. That even the words they were saying right then, trying to express the nightmare sensation of being trapped in a body that didn’t obey them—those words were predetermined, they were just helplessly observing themselves say them.
This happened to everyone who tried to mess with Sapere Aude’s predicted death date.
On a given day, how many people might you interact with who suffered from Sapere Aude syndrome? It was impossible to know. Perhaps most people in the world were only simulacra of humans, automatically moving puppets carrying around blank or powerless minds. Minds able to look out at the world but unable to control what the body was doing, or even saying.
So why, Kulkarni and I once discussed over beers after work, do we feel like we have free will? Kulkarni floated the idea that maybe our thoughts are synced up to our physical actions the same way the audio syncs up to video in a movie. After all, audio and video are two separate streams, two distinct media that can be decoupled. Perhaps the act of trying to disrupt your death date unlinks the mental stream from the physical stream, neither of which you control anyway; you’re just passively experiencing both.
That is: you always were a spectator.
But now you knew it.
Irreversibly.
Kulkarni and I were able to lightheartedly bullshit about this over beers because we didn’t really believe it. Not deep down. Nobody did. This truth was so alienating that it couldn’t be emotionally metabolized; paradoxically, that made it innocuous. Just like the discovery of the dizzying age and size of the universe, just like the discovery of the reality-dissolving implications of quantum theory, humanity just shrugged and kept chugging on. Because regardless of what any theory tells you, you still feel you are the center of the universe, master of your own fate.
Until you don’t.
When you’re told that you must die at such and such a day, no earlier, no later, no matter what you do—it can fuck with your head.
The psychiatrists had their hands full.
Wait. You think this idea is far-fetched? You think you’re free?
Stop breathing right now. Die.
How’d you do?
* * *
—
The new consensus: it’s better not to know. You’re happier that way, more well-adjusted. Even if you acknowledge, on a theoretical level, that your free will is bogus—if that truth is kept abstract enough, it doesn’t bother you.
The upshot being, I don’t get the wealthy clients anymore. The forward-thinkers, the curious adventurers, the earnest seekers—they want nothing to do with Dare to Know. Who wants to risk turning into a fucking robot?
But you know who will pay to know when people will die? Insurance companies. Human resources departments. Governments. If you’re a middle-class office worker, or a manager of a fast-food restaurant, or a guy on the assembly line—you likely know when you’ll die.
Actually, you might not know. But your supervisor knows.
Like I said: downmarket.
* * *
—
On the flight to San Francisco, I drowse. Barely slept at all last night. The low roar and vibration of a plane lull me every time. I’m usually asleep before takeoff. Fine by me. Anything to avoid the mental nausea of being crammed into a metal tube with so many phones and computers, all buzzing away, jarringly chopping and shunting data around. I put on my headphones, plug it into whatever music the in-flight entertainment has on offer. Let myself drift.
I’m dead.
Mathematically dead.
But I’m free.
Ever since I ran the assessment on myself, I’ve felt strangely liberated. Like Sapere Aude syndrome but in reverse.
Because I actually defied the thanatons, didn’t I? My number came up. I was supposed to die about twelve hours ago.
And yet here I am.
Still.
So what now?
People talk about that dreaded “electric guardrail” sensation, but right now I feel the opposite. Like there always had been invisible walls around me, walls that I’d never even noticed before—and now that I’m mathematically dead, those walls have collapsed.
Sudden possibility in every direction.
I can go anywhere now.
Do anything.
I look around the airplane cabin. Everyone
in a plane always looks miserable. Unreal people. It’s only in a plane that I have the sneaking half suspicion that everybody else in the world already suffers from Sapere Aude syndrome.
Maybe I’m the only free person in the world.
Maybe Julia still has the blue envelopes.
* * *
—
The blue envelopes.
Okay. Julia sometimes liked to do stupid shit.
You wouldn’t have guessed it. Julia presented herself as someone who was above stupid shit, who was more adult than everyone else. It wasn’t just her intimidating looks, and it wasn’t just the way she dressed—as if she were already deep in some adult career in the city. Maybe that came with being no-bullshit and self-sufficient, or maybe it was her hidden lower-middle-class resentment that put that chip on her shoulder, but it could be off-putting, like that last day of finals our junior year when that drunk frat boy climbed to the top of the library and slipped and fell to his death. The whole campus was seized with grief but Julia just shrugged. She said the frat boy was a rich asshole who was acting like a stupid child, he had died stupidly because of it. I was put off by her coldness. I said, come on, think of his parents. I insisted it was tragic.
Julia didn’t argue the point. She just passed over it.
But Julia was more like that dumb frat boy than she admitted.
Maybe it wasn’t so surprising Julia liked to do stupid shit. Maybe smoking was one way of Julia signaling to the world something like: Despite appearances, I am the kind of person who does occasionally indulge herself in stupid shit; maybe I’ll indulge your stupid shit; if you’re really lucky, we might even conspire in our stupid shit together.
So I shouldn’t have been surprised when Julia said, out of nowhere, she wanted to calculate when she and I would die.
Dare to Know Page 11
