Version Control

by Dexter Palmer

  “Oh, like religion’s never been responsible for any evil—”

  “Is this the part where you bring up the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition and I bring up Stalin and Mao? Look. You’re free to deny the existence of God all you like! I don’t much care. I don’t think the statement that an atheist can be morally good is one that needs to be defended. But to ridicule someone else’s belief in God, to dismiss someone else’s way of working their way through the world because their basic premises just seem inherently implausible to you—well, there’s nothing else to say about it but that it’s pure ethnocentrism. An occupational hazard to which scientists, in particular, seem to be singularly susceptible.”

  Philip placed his empty mug down on the table in front of him and looked Woody in the eyes, unblinking. “I can tell you this,” he said. “I can tell you that what makes me able to get up and go to work every day is knowing that I’m playing some small part in doing what humans were put on this earth to do—”

  “Interesting phrasing.”

  “—knowing that I’m doing my part to help uncover the universe’s underlying logic. And sure, maybe my one mind can’t see it all alone, but all of us working together may be able to, if we’re careful thinkers and we leave clear records for those who’ll follow us. That’s science. And science works. And it’s good.”

  “Do I have to point out the nature of the claim that the universe has an underlying logic that humans can ferret out if they think hard enough?”

  “If you’re saying that I’m motivated by unfalsifiable beliefs like everyone else: well, maybe so. But I choose the beliefs I have because they don’t feel like failure. Even if it really is true that I can’t know everything, saying so is failure. It’s giving up.”

  Rebecca woke up when Philip slipped beneath the sheets next to her. She checked the time: one thirty. “I drove your father home and took a cab back,” he said. “His car’s autonomous, but I insisted.”

  “It sounded like you two were a little wound up,” she said. “Are you okay?”

  “Your father is an unrepentant sophist,” Philip said, his voice still displaying lingering traces of bitterness. “He wants to argue just for the hell of it. I don’t even know if he believes what he says, or if he takes positions just because he wants to provoke me.”

  “He’s always been like that.”

  “And he doesn’t know how scientists use language, either. I’m very careful when I speak. The things I say are unambiguous. But he takes my words and twists them and throws them back at me, and tries to make me mean something I didn’t.”

  “Of course.”

  “It’s fatuous. It’s laughable.”

  “You should hire a referee next time.”

  “Hmph.”

  Rebecca closed her eyes and turned over on her side, her back to Philip. As she began to drop off to sleep, she felt him move close to her, spooning her while sliding his hand beneath her nightshirt to rest it gently on her breast. In another, earlier time, she might have gently pressed back against him in encouragement, but it seemed to her that this evening he wanted not sex, but simple comfort.

  She thought back to the way that Philip and her father had looked when she’d walked in this evening, all wired and on edge. What conversation had been going on beneath their conversation? For what unspeakable subjects had their airy discussions served as code?

  No way to know. But it seemed that somehow her father had done a minister’s job, as irritating as her husband might have found him. These days she and Philip could literally go for weeks without touching each other. She had forgotten how starved she was for simple contact. It felt good; it made her feel human.

  They lay still, listening to each other’s breath, feeling each other’s heartbeats, taking in each other’s warmth.

  “Tough day today,” Rebecca whispered, placing her hand on his.

  “Yeah. Tough day.”

  “I really miss Sean.”

  A ragged sigh tore out of him. “Me too.”

  7

  SILENT WORLD

  There came a time, a few months after the core group broke up and its members went their separate ways, that the Internet began to lose its hold on Rebecca’s attention, and the never-ending river of chatter from forums and gossip sites and social networks acquired the flavor of over-chewed gum. Despite her best efforts, she fell prey to that rarest of twenty-first-century emotions: boredom.

  And so, as a mild winter shaded into a premature spring, sending shoots of grass up early and befuddling the buds of wildflowers, Becca sometimes found herself closing her laptop, divesting herself of her phone (and feeling strangely naked without it), and spending her afternoons wandering alone in the world, hoping perhaps to hear the news that her father and Emerson had said was out there for those who had the ears to listen.

  The nature of the towns that dotted the Northeast Corridor had changed so much since the empty summers of her college days. To drift through places like downtown Princeton or New Brunswick on weekday afternoons, when responsible people were at work, was to live in a strangely muted world. Sure, there were plenty of sounds—car engines; the rhythmic clicks of heels on sidewalks; the tinny wub-wub of dubstep beats leaking from a teenager’s headphones—but these sounds had nothing much to declare; there was little of the noise in the streets and public places that, as recently as five years ago, would have indicated that humans were speaking to each other, changing each other’s minds and making new meanings. The coffee shop in Princeton that would have once been filled with the raucous clamor of graduate students arguing about esoterica was now somber, the scholars’ faces underlit by laptop screens as they listened to music through their earbuds. Björk was playing over the coffeehouse’s speakers; the baristas were the only ones who could hear it, and the woman who poured Rebecca’s coffee sang along to “Human Behaviour” in a caterwauling, unembarrassed mockery of an Icelandic accent.

  Sometimes Becca could hear halves of exchanges barked into the air by men with Bluetooth headsets, or women who concealed them beneath their hair; stripped of their complements, their declamations seemed half mad, or at least as if it would have been best to make them in private. (One afternoon, she sat on a bench next to a matronly woman with clunky eyeglasses and rouge ground into the wrinkles of her cheeks, who spoke as if she were a medium hosting a séance. “I need to talk to you,” she said, her voice quivering. “I need to talk to you, and not to your machine. My feng shui consultant has made his report: my walls have too many pictures of men. That’s maybe why the polyps. That’s maybe why the dreams.”) These messages spoken to the ether were less likely to occur in bars, which were somehow still a bastion of twentieth-century customs, but even there, around two o’clock, after the lunch rush, you’d see some red-faced former alpha male bellying up to the bar, ordering a pint of stout, and placing his BlackBerry in front of him as the sigil of his authority. If the phone didn’t ring or beep by the time his beer was half drained, he’d ring someone else himself, straightening his back and throwing out his chest as the connection completed. “Rick! Rick. I wasn’t expecting to get you! I was expecting to get sent straight to your voicemail. I got a lot of stuff going on right now, but I just wanted to run something by you since I had a couple of minutes….Yeah, I know! Modern times, right?…What do you mean you’re letting me go? I called you.”

  There were still as many people in the silent world as there had been before; they had not been raptured. Nor had they been zombified or made dumb by their devices, as her parents would have sarcastically said: if anything, there was more intelligence in their gazes when they stared at their phones or laptops than when they lifted their eyes to look past their screens into the world beyond. Their minds were merely elsewhere, absconded to new and shining places with strange geometries.

  It was the service staff of the old world that kept its secret as they kept it running: the nature of their jobs meant they had to stay here, at least until the ends of their shifts. Whe
n they caught Becca’s eye and saw that she, like them, was entirely here in the old world with them, they’d often share a sign of commonality or collusion with her, something as small as a smile that lasted long enough to let her know that, unlike all the others that had been granted to customers, this one was genuine. Sometimes, if business was slow and they got the chance, they’d try to make her linger at the counter, and they’d want to just talk, about whatever was on their minds. Once she stopped into an empty chocolate shop to purchase a fifty-cent morsel, and the cashier delayed her for ten minutes while she told her a tale of a failed wine bar that her husband had tried to open up in Sarasota, Florida. Once she had gone into a Mediterranean restaurant and bar that had two-dollar tapas if you bought a glass of wine, and as she tucked into a little bowl of albondigas, chasing each morsel of lamb with a swallow of Merlot, enjoying one of the surprising little pleasures of being alone in the silent world, the French-immigrant bartender tipped her off to an iPhone app that would let her download free recordings of lectures on the philosophy of mind from a professor at Berkeley. Once she was in a long coffee shop line, and she saw the woman at the register roll her eyes in exhaustion at a customer in front of her who was attempting to place a detailed order while simultaneously carrying on a cell-phone conversation with someone who seemed to be in another country, her request for a vanilla latte with a triple shot and her list of the amenities of a Cairo hotel blending together into an unintelligible mishmash. Rebecca and the barista shared a fleeting smirk; later, when she received her cappuccino, she found that a smiling face had been drawn in the foam that floated on its surface.

  Sometimes you saw visitors return to the silent world, here for a quick trip to discharge the duties that their bodies or traditions demanded. It was so strange that here, you could see two people you’d never met and infer their past histories with such certainty and ease: not like in the new world, where everyone seemed so blurred around the edges. There’s a man sitting at a table with a young girl outside a Panera at nine o’clock on a Sunday morning: he’s clean-shaven in a button-down shirt, leaning forward solicitously while speaking quiet endearments with a voice unused to subtlety; she slumps in her chair, her baby fat still clinging to her arms and cheeks as she begins to head into her teenage years, her leg jittering restlessly as her gaze avoids the man’s eyes, preferring instead to trace the paths of sidewalk cracks. You see all this and you instantly know: father and daughter. He is willing time to slow, counting the hours before his allotted custody ends. Her dancing leg is still burning off the sugar from the cakes and chocolates he’d proffered the night before, sweets intended to stand in for unspoken love, tendered in the knowledge that her mother surely only served her dishes piled high with tasteless green things. Beneath the table the father unconsciously slides his thumb over the leather cover of his smartphone, as if it is a comforting totem. Always, even now, the new world calls him back.

  The online daters meeting in person for the first time are always the easiest to spot. The man always shows up first, five minutes before the top of the hour, nervous and eager, staking out a space at the bar with an empty chair next to him, draping his arm across it as if asserting his future possession of the woman who will soon appear.

  The woman always shows up ten minutes later, moving with slow alertness into the space of the bar, looking at all of the men while trying not to look like she’s looking, attempting to map the photographs she remembers onto one of the faces of the people around her. Then there’s that weird moment of mutual recognition, when people who may have exchanged the dearest of confidences in the new world realize that here, in the old one, they are still strangers to each other. Half the time they bobble that first greeting, his lips colliding clumsily with her cheek as she hastily turns it to him, their subsequent embrace halfway between a handshake and a hug. “It’s so nice to meet you finally,” the woman says, withdrawing tactfully, unsure if what she says is true.

  Becca still saw Kate every couple of weeks. She was doing okay for herself, picking up shifts as a server at two different restaurants in Hopewell, and planning to move out of her parents’ place soon, splitting the rent on an apartment with another waitress. “It’s going to be just like a TV sitcom,” Kate said. “All we need is a hot guy next door who’ll be forever unable to decide which one of us he wants to sex up. It’ll be platonic, but with tension! In the final episode there’s a three-way.”

  It seemed like every time Rebecca met up with Kate, her hair had changed color, going from platinum blond to ash brown to auburn and back to a different shade of blond, perhaps with a single strand of bubblegum pink that could be tucked out of sight when she wanted to present as respectable. “Here’s the thing,” she said to Rebecca over drinks—this particular Monday evening she was letting her pink lock dangle in front of her face. She was still deep into the online-dating thing. She had three different profiles on three different sites now: the photos she had of herself sporting different hairstyles had given her the idea. “They’ve all got sort of different personalities—I mean, they’re all like me, but I talk more about different parts of my life. Like, Kathy is all into being athletic—don’t message me unless you think you can beat my time in a 5K—and Katie is all into music, with this long list of albums she likes by Lard and Fishbone and Refused, and Katharine is total nerdbait: Oh, boo hoo, it’s been ten years and I’m still not over Firefly getting canceled. And sometimes I’ll hear from the same guy on all three profiles! And not even the same message! Like, he’ll tell Kathy all about how he can run a seven-and-a-half-minute mile, not world-class, but pretty good, and Katie gets to hear how cool it is that when you see Fishbone live Angelo Moore plays like five different horns including a bass saxophone, and for Katharine he drops this little anecdote about he went to a con and ended up having drinks at a hotel bar with Jewel Staite, who told him about all these cool ideas that Joss would have put in the second season if the show had gotten renewed. I’m like, you looked all this stuff up on the Internet. It’s still fun, though. In real life it isn’t so easy to spot the bullshitters and the nonstarters.”

  When Kate asked Becca if she was ever going to fill out a profile, Becca demurred. “I haven’t been online as much lately. I’ve just been kinda, you know, bumming around. Outside.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Kate said. “I did some of that too, for a little while. Screw this computer: I’m going to get some air. I’m going to be around humanity. You know what the problem with the real world is?”

  “What?”

  “It’s lonely. Because everyone goes online the second they get the chance! The real world is awesome if you want to be by yourself, though. Maybe that’s your thing now.”

  How many profiles on these sites were filled out by still-intoxicated people on weekend nights, after they’d struck out yet again in the bars? At two a.m. on Sunday morning their servers probably glowed red-hot.

  And that was when Rebecca finally took the plunge. She hadn’t been out looking to meet guys—she’d just made a Saturday-night appointment to catch up with Britt, whom she hadn’t seen in person in months. But Britt’s boyfriend Victor had shown up at the local brewpub as well, the uninvited third. (Later, Rebecca would reflect that had she not hidden Britt’s messages in her Facebook news feed, she would have seen this coming—Britt sent mash notes to Victor via status update every six to eight hours, and it should have been obvious that a girls’ night out like the ones in the old days was no longer an option. Victor’s presence should have been assumed.)

  Rebecca sat by herself on one side of a booth, watching Britt and Victor canoodle. They were feeding each other French fries! And they always had their hands all over each other, though they tried to pass it off as horseplay. It was ridiculous. And Britt’s constant chatter was all about them, never about her. (“Our friends have just totally given up on us: they call us ‘Brictor’ now!” She giggled. Victor grinned and rubbed her thigh.) And she kept floating these trial balloons about their future t
ogether, in the form of idle comments about how the real estate market was turning around, or teases about Victor’s poor culinary skills (“I’d have to do all the cooking for both of us or he’d poison himself!”). It was absolutely nauseating. Rebecca couldn’t wait for it to end.

  But Britt looked so happy, was the thing. And Kate was right—the real world was lonely now. If you wanted to do what humans did, you had to go where humans were.

  So when she got home that evening, Rebecca said good night to her parents, shut herself up in her room, and opened up the screw-top bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon she’d stashed in her closet. (Okay: stashed was overstating the case. She chose to keep the wine there, in the closet, behind some stuff.)

  After a couple of drinks, Rebecca reached that perfect moment when booze casts a pleasant haze on everything but doesn’t really impair you or make you feel stupid. As boring as surfing the net could seem when you were sober, there were few things in life more captivating than goofing off online while drinking. Intoxication mixed well with the way the web provided chains of distractions nested within other distractions. Even just a drink or two could suppress that need for information to be fulfilling in some way, the desire that made browsing such an unsatisfying time-waster sometimes—without that, you could get into a groove and see the larger shape of things, see the Internet the way it saw itself. With diminished inhibitions you could leave yourself open to its suggestions, letting it show you things that’d tickle your hindbrain or give you a nice surprise. You could let it try to divine your wants from the trail of data you left behind as you bounced from site to site.