Version Control

by Dexter Palmer

  “One perception that nonscientists often have,” Carson said with a patience that Kate couldn’t help but find infuriating, “is that science always succeeds. And you only ever hear about the successes, so from the outside, scientific progress can look like nothing but a string of triumphs. But most people aren’t aware of what an astonishing amount of failure is involved in scientific research. We screw up day after day. And the worst thing about it isn’t the failure in and of itself—it’s that from the point of view of the general public, or even the places where we publish, on which our careers depend, there’s no point to failure. Success they’re happy to hear about; failure you’d better keep to yourself. Even though failure is something you can learn from: common sense would tell you that it’s almost as valuable to know what not to do as it is to get things right.

  “So when we fail, which is often, the social pressures, or sometimes our own shame, can make us stay quiet. The failure becomes invisible. And the illusion that science is nothing but a series of successes is preserved.”

  Carson paused for a moment, distracted; then he snapped back to the present. “So what we’ll do now is what we always do,” he said. “Check and double-check everything: the Planck-Wheeler clock; the robot; the atomic clock; the causality violation chamber; and especially the software that runs everything. And Dennis will make further revisions to the code. Maybe run 329 will be the magic number. Or 330. Or 331. You can always hope.”

  He reached out and took Kate’s hand in his, and the simple gesture went a long way toward ameliorating her frustration with him and her outright anger with Alicia. She looked over at Alicia, who was silently tinkering with her robot again.

  “Hey,” Carson said gently, drawing Kate’s gaze back to him. “I could stand to get out of here for a little while. Do you want to go get some tacos with me before you head home?” He placed his other hand on his stomach. “Suddenly I’m starving.”

  9

  VERY INTERESTING

  Online dating makes you jaded really fast, even if you’re not serious about it (and this is what Rebecca still told herself, even though she’d logged on to the site every day for months now: that she wasn’t serious about it). You go on enough dates where you find out within ten seconds that the guy you’ve been messaging has lied about his age, or his height, or his number of chins, and it starts to wear you down. And then if you can get past that, there are all the little nasty human things about a man that could never be captured in the profile photos or the questionnaires: his wheedling, lisping voice, or the way he insists on splitting the bill even though you’re only going out for coffee, or the light film of spit he leaves smeared across your face after what will be his first and only kiss.

  No, rushinazz69, I am not into punching guys in the groin, Rebecca thought as she scrolled through this evening’s messages. Not that she begrudged others their particular predilections. But it wasn’t like they were even bothering to try to imagine another human being on the other end of the line.

  NJBoukis, it is nice to know that you are specifically looking for a smart, funny, leggy brunette with a C cup or larger. At least he listed the personality traits first before he went on to specify the bra size.

  triathlete08542: oh, look, and in his profile pic he’s got a medal around his neck to prove it. Have coffee with this guy and all he’ll want to talk about is his sweet five-grand bike with its carbon-fiber body. Next.

  Richard127: likes “watchin TV, hangin out w/friends, laughin, and generally havin good times.” Well, you’re out of luck, ’cause I hate doin all of those things. Next.

  There was one thing Rebecca was willing to agree with Kate on, when considering this whole sorry mess: it really did make it simple to eliminate suitors who clearly weren’t your type. If you met these people in person, they might come off as okay at first, and it’d take weeks or months of being around them to figure out that you didn’t like them, that it wasn’t going anywhere, that you were going to have to have an awkward conversation. Or worse, you’d fall for a guy, and after you dated him for a while you’d end up convincing yourself that his need to spend thirty hours a week raiding in World of Warcraft was just a quirk that made him more lovable. Whereas if you met that guy online first, reading his profile at one o’clock in the morning with a gin and tonic in your hand, you could weed him out right off the bat because his screen name was WoW_RULES, and in one of his profile pictures he was grimacing at the camera while brandishing a sword with a yard-long blade. Got to be kidding me with that. Next!

  Thanks, russellthemuscle, but I’m not going to date a married guy. “I dont want to disrespect my wife, but you seem like a really spectacular lady and I just had to reach out to try to get to know you.” Christ.

  But what’s this? What’s this one?

  The screen name was apparently just the guy’s real name, first and last: PhilipSteiner. He was outside her age range by a few years: thirty-six. But his picture didn’t look bad, even though it would have been more appropriate for an ID card than a dating site: looking straight into the camera, unsmiling. He definitely wasn’t a kid anymore, but he looked seasoned, not used up. There was a shining star next to his screen name with the word NEW! written inside it in red: he’d opened the profile just this week.

  She clicked; the window opened. She topped off her drink and read.

  Dear beccabeccabecca:

  You seem interesting to me. I am outside your preferred range of ages by several years, but I am sending you a message anyway in the hope that you will ultimately find such concerns relatively immaterial. I have never been married; I have no children.

  I am an experimental physicist at Stratton University who specializes in gravitational waves and the structure of spacetime. I am also intrinsically multidisciplinary: my other interests include regular exercise and musical performance.

  I have attached links to two videos in lieu of writing more about myself. (Viewing images of a person in motion conveys more information than looking at photographs; my hypothesis is that it will reduce the amount of cognitive dissonance you would encounter if you were to meet me face to face.) Would you take the time to watch them? If you find them informative or engaging, please write me back. I believe I would enjoy conversing with you further.

  Yours, Philip (PhilipSteiner)

  Below this were two links to videos on YouTube. The first had fewer than a hundred views: its title was “Steiner Lecture on CTCs and the Novikov Self-Consistency Principle.” Oof. Tough sledding—it crossed her eyes after three minutes, and she couldn’t comprehend why this guy seemed to think the average person he’d find on a dating site would have the background to understand this stuff. Though standing behind the podium, talking about billiard balls that could be sent on trajectories that carried them back in time so that they collided with themselves (what?), he did seem rather—well, virile. He sported an artfully tousled mane of dark brown hair, and his voice had a rich depth that lent the aura of truth to what he said (though she got the strong impression that he genuinely knew what he was talking about: a bullshit artist would have used a baritone like that to beat his audience into submission, while Philip’s sonorous and gently non-confrontational tone implied his belief that his facts were strong enough to speak for themselves).

  She skipped around the video here and there, paying a little more attention to the argumentative Q-and-A at the end. (“Certainly, piling theories on top of more theories is the safe thing to do if we want to preserve our careers,” he said to an audience member out of the camera’s view, coming close to raising his voice. “But at some point we’re going to have to find out whether the universe is willing to back up our speculative claims. We don’t have the technology now. But we’ll have it soon. And now is the time to start planning to use it.”) Then she cued up the second video.

  He seemed at least a few years younger in this one, though that might have been because of what he was wearing: an old pair of jeans and a black T-shirt that read I’M
UNCERTAIN ABOUT QUANTUM MECHANICS. He was sitting behind a drum set and clutching a pair of sticks in his hands; behind him was a featureless white wall. Off to one side of him was a stand that held some sheet music, along with what appeared to Rebecca to be a metronome. “Drumming is very interesting!” Philip said. “You might think at first that it isn’t, since its principal purpose is to allow the other musicians in a band to keep time, but a talented human drummer can do all kinds of other things with the instrument while simultaneously accomplishing the primary task. He can add occasional extra beats on top of the basic beats that dictate the tempo, or incorporate little improvisational riffs called ‘fills,’ and so on. Now, Neil Peart is a particularly interesting drummer—quite highly regarded within his field as both a musician and a lyricist. I don’t want to go into an analysis of his philosophical leanings right now, but I want to try to show you why it is that his drumming is considered notable. Here’s my interpretation of the drum part of the Overture from Rush’s ‘2112’ suite. Wait a second.”

  He reached over to the stand and started the metronome to ticking. “There’s an unmistakable Objectivist influence on 2112, granted,” he said. “But like the best thinkers, Peart takes from Rand what he believes is most useful, and jettisons the rest. Anyway. Overture. This lasts for about four and a half minutes, after which Geddy Lee sings ‘And the meek shall inherit the earth.’ ”

  Philip then proceeded to launch into what sounded to Rebecca like a whole lot of noise. At first he would stare intently at the metronome, then he’d suddenly beat out a quick stuttering tattoo on the drums; after about a minute of this, he started wailing all over the place. Without the other instruments providing context, it was hard to make any sense out of what he was doing, but Rebecca felt sure that they were playing in his head, perhaps in a fantasy in which Neil Peart developed a crippling case of food poisoning in the middle of a live set and Philip heroically ascended the stage from the front row of the audience to replace him.

  She clicked back to the message. The whole package, with the formality of his introduction and the weirdness of the accompanying videos, was so bizarre that it was doomed to failure—his admitted handsomeness aside, it was hard to see how any woman could read that note, and watch the lecture and the unaccompanied drum solo, and be attracted to this guy. And yet, Rebecca thought, you could tell that there was something inarguably good-natured about him, something a little teddy-bear-like. He probably made strangers happy by being around them. And out of the hundreds and hundreds of guys she’d come across on Lovability, she didn’t think she’d found one who was this clearly guileless and unguarded and unembarrassed. Even if she didn’t feel the slightest bit of chemistry with him, she liked him; she wanted things to turn out okay for him. Maybe if he stuck this online dating thing out, maybe with just a little bit of polish—not full-on phoniness, mind you, but just a little finesse—he’d find some nerdy-cute mathematician girl who played bass guitar, and together they could be a rhythm section.

  It would be pretty cool to help this guy out, thought Rebecca. She opened up a reply window.

  Hi, Philip—

  Thanks for your very sweet message. I don’t think I’m the woman for you, but you seem like a great guy! I do feel like your profile doesn’t really show you in your best light, though—I hope this isn’t a cruel thing to hear from a stranger.

  She thought back to that long, tedious, tone-deaf message she’d gotten from that guy Bradley, fearing that she was becoming what she had once beheld. But she checked her heart and was sure it was in the right place.

  If you are open to it, and if you wouldn’t find it presumptuous, I would love to give you a little bit of advice about sprucing up your profile. It wouldn’t take that much effort at all. I feel like someone wonderful is waiting out there to hear from you!

  Yours, Rebecca

  Hoping she didn’t sound too condescending, she sent the message to him, idly surfed the net for a little while longer while she finished her drink, and turned in.

  She got a reply back from him a couple of days later.

  Hello, Rebecca—

  Thanks for writing back to me, and thanks for offering me advice. I don’t know how much longer I’m going to participate in this site, actually—I’ve sent four messages to women (the only sufficiently interesting ones I could find) and yours is the only response I have received. In most other aspects of my life, people generally reply promptly to my e-mails.

  I did a rather extensive amount of research into sites like this before opening an account. (Hard data is difficult to come across, because all of these sites treat their matching algorithms as proprietary information; however, I recommend Finkel et al.: “Online Dating: A Critical Analysis from the Perspective of Psychological Science.” I can suggest other papers if you find that one interesting.)

  Research indicates that one is more likely to succeed in this endeavor if one shifts conversation off the site as soon as possible: the longer that communication is mediated by a third party, the more likely it is that one of the persons communicating will become susceptible to either of the phenomena of “choice overload” or “assessment mindset.” (See Finkel et al.) To that end, would you be willing to e-mail me privately? (You say that “[you] don’t think [you’re] the woman for [me]”; I don’t think you have enough information yet to make that judgment conclusively. I still find you interesting.)

  —Philip.

  P.S. The only things I’ve thought about today that are as interesting as you are leather shoes. Shoes made from synthetic material tend to have a shorter life than those made from natural materials, but an additional expense of leather shoes derives from maintenance—polishing, resoling, and so on. But leather shoes conform over time to fit your feet, while synthetic shoes do not—sufficiently aged leather shoes are more comfortable than new shoes of either natural or artificial materials. This means that leather shoes are valuable not merely because of their components, but because they are superior repositories of information.

  P.

  Dear Philip [Rebecca wrote in her e-mail to the address he supplied, wondering what the hell she was doing]:

  I must say that this is the first time that a man has offered me a compliment by comparing me to an old pair of shoes. I find that quite fascinating.

  Thank you for the link to the paper. I will read it when I have the time to spare.

  I’m really certain that I’m not the woman for you—the main thing that stands out to me in our brief conversation is our clear incompatibility. Insisting otherwise won’t change things. I do sincerely wish you good luck in your future endeavors, whether or not you choose to stay on Lovability—if you do, my offer to give you advice on rewriting your profile still stands. (By the way, you might consider finding more specific synonyms for “interesting” when writing your messages—you use the word a lot, and it makes you seem like you’re not trying. “Charming,” “funny,” “scintillating”: these and hundreds of other complimentary words are possible options.)

  It was nice to talk to you. Best of luck!

  Rebecca

  Hello, Rebecca—

  Thanks for e-mailing me.

  I insist on things when I know that I am right about them—there’s no possible way you could have gathered enough information in our brief exchange to eliminate me as a potential romantic partner. There’s just not enough bandwidth here, so to speak.

  “Interesting” is the word I use to describe you because it is the right word! If I had wanted to say you were charming or funny, I would have used those words instead!

  You’re very interesting. Here is a proposition: we should meet at the Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton next Saturday afternoon. That’ll give you plenty of time to read the Finkel paper so we can discuss it. If you meet me in person, you should quickly be able to make an acceptable decision about whether we are potentially romantically compatible, a decision I am willing to abide by.

  Surely it must have once been the case th
at you communicated online with a suitor who seemed initially promising, only to be gravely disappointed later when you found your first impression was mistaken. If this is true, the converse can also be true. You are in a logical bind now. Is this something you can live with?

  I would like to hear your suggestions on how to improve my Lovability profile as well. A fruitful line of conversation might be possible if I pretend that I am socially awkward, and allow you to give me advice about my behavior. We might learn a lot about each other that way.

  I hope to see you Saturday!

  Philip.

  As she pulled into the parking lot of the Grounds for Sculpture a few days later, Rebecca decided to chalk up her decision to meet this guy to simple curiosity—she was sure there weren’t any romantic possibilities here, but at the least she’d be able to determine whether this guy’s e-mails were a joke, or whether he was actually like that. She thought it could go either way: he could be a comedian or a weirdo. If he was a kook, then it was easy enough to fake an emergency with a cellphone. But if it turned out that he wasn’t, maybe they’d end up being friends. And there was nothing wrong with wandering around a sculpture garden on a Saturday afternoon, on a cloudless day that was warm but not too hot.

  The Grounds for Sculpture had been founded late last century by Seward Johnson, one of the scions of the sprawling pharmaceutical empire that had a home in nearby Princeton. But Seward had never had much interest in Band-Aids: after dropping out of the University of Maine, spending a stint in the Navy during the Korean War, and getting fired from a management position in the family company by his uncle, he ended up learning bronze casting, and found he had a love for it, though his legions of critics would be quick to point out that a love was not the same as a knack.