Version Control

by Dexter Palmer

  “It’s bullshit,” she said. “Bodies have so many different shapes, and the sizes on the clothing tags are all flattery and lies. I never know if I’m a twelve or a double-O, or a four up top and a ten down below. It’s going to take all day. Even if I’m lucky, I won’t be back home until evening. Takeout?”

  “I’ll pick up Mexican on the way back from the lab,” Philip said, turning away from her and leaving the room.

  The way he turned, with an unspoken urgency, his feet on his way out the door while his eyes were still on her. Strange.

  After Philip left for the lab, Rebecca pulled herself out of bed, showered, dressed, and had breakfast (generic-brand frosted flakes in two percent milk; a slice of buttered raisin bread; no mimosa. She had come to terms with the fact that all her breakfasts from here on out would be flavored with the desire for mimosas. A glass of orange juice just reminded her that it was missing something effervescent and vital. No mimosas; no Bloody Marys; no simple glasses of white wine). Then she donned her monitor shades, hit the treadmill, and began her Lovability shift.

  “Lova-bil-ity, this is Re-bec-ca,” she sang. “How may I help you?”

  “Hello?” the voice on the other end called, its vowels clipped by a bad connection. “Hello? My name is. Yes. I need help.” The profile associated with the caller was trying to load on Rebecca’s monitor shades: a twirling circle hovered before her eyes, meant to pacify the impatient with the illusion of progress.

  “How may I help you?” she said again.

  A pause. “Well, here’s the thing. I’m not exactly sure. I just opened this account. And I’m on the Silver Plan. And I filled out the profile: I uploaded the photos; I entered all the demographic data; I answered all your questions about my likes and my dislikes. And I looked at the profile—and this is going to sound, like, crazy—but it isn’t me.”

  The spinning circle was replaced by an angrily red triangle with an exclamation point floating inside. A failure; a warning.

  “And I don’t know if something went wrong with the servers on your end, or if the profile is a lie I made up, or if I’m a lie. Or maybe I’m true, and the rest of the world is a lie. Do you understand?”

  YES YES YES, Rebecca wanted to shout, but the algorithms that monitored her speech would hear the spike in volume and flag it as screaming at a client. “Please continue,” she said. “I’m here to listen.”

  “Your voice doesn’t sound right to me,” the caller said. “I’ve never spoken to you before—have I spoken to you? I haven’t. But I know your voice doesn’t sound like it should. Just like my own voice doesn’t sound right to me, in my own head. This is a serious problem!”

  “I certainly agree with this.”

  “Can you help me?”

  The voice monitors would definitely red-flag her if they picked her up saying the word “no.” (Rumor was, you could get dismissed for that automatically without someone from HR even looking at the case: the whole procedure would be handled by AI routines in seconds.) “I will do what I can to assure you that your profile has been properly uploaded to our servers.” No chance of upselling this guy to the Gold Plan: you had to pick your battles.

  “Your name is Rebecca, yes?”

  “Yes, that’s me. If you wish to speak to my—”

  “Are you sure? Has it always been?”

  “Well, I’ve gone by Becca sometimes, but I’m quite certain I’ve always been Rebecca. On a birth certificate, somewhere.”

  “You don’t understand! You don’t understand. Rebecca. This world is a dream. This world is a house on fire, and all of us must find a way to escape.”

  He hung up.

  And so Rebecca finished her Lovability shift (six marks upsold: still a pretty good haul in the end), ate a quick lunch (catch-as-catch-can college student fare: three-minute ramen noodles that she sprinkled with a few frozen peas; a candy-like “nutrition bar” from a box that featured a fresh-faced blond woman in hiking gear; not an ice-cold bottle of Corona Extra), hopped in the car, and drove to the shopping mall in Bridgewater, a half hour or so up Route 206. Years ago that road would have been hell to drive on at this time of day, but the computers that piloted autonomous cars tended to take 206 only as a last resort, opting for highways with more lanes and higher speed limits: with the raised limits for green-plated cars it was sometimes possible for them to get you to a destination faster by taking a longer route. So if you drove an old jalopy, or were a Luddite, or preferred the feel of a stick shift’s knob in the hand, then 206 was a paradise, its traffic pleasantly light, the red plates on its cars seeming less like scarlet letters. Besides, Bridgewater’s mall would suit Rebecca’s purpose better than any of the shopping centers on Route 1: the Bridgewater mall was a place of extravagant luxuries rather than necessities, and for this party Rebecca wanted to give the impression that she and Philip were people who worried about wants instead of needs.

  She hadn’t seen Britt and Victor in a while, or any of the gang of girls that she’d run with in her twenties; she didn’t even know what they were up to. She’d kept up with their Facebook feeds for a while after they all began to live their own separate lives, but just as people had drifted away from Myspace, and few in the United States even remembered Friendster and Orkut, there soon came a time when most of Rebecca’s social networking contacts all simultaneously seemed to find something better to do with their time than check Facebook incessantly, and with other things on her mind (Philip; Sean; okay, booze) Rebecca had somehow failed to join the exodus to whichever network had offered the slight but necessary change in function or design that had made Facebook yesterday’s news. Facebook was still around, of course, but except for the retirement home residents who still used it out of habit, it had largely become an electronic wasteland, its profiles either time capsules that documented the teenage fashions and slang of past decades, or creations of AI-managed bots that persistently soldiered on in their duties despite having been forgotten by their creators, clicking “like” on each other’s posts and blindly spamming each other with endorsements for products unavailable for sale.

  So if Rebecca wanted to hear the news about someone, she either had to e-mail them (which was only a little less weirdly formal these days than mailing a handwritten letter) or call them (which was far too intimate) or text them (and a text from someone you hadn’t kept in touch with regularly had a good chance of going ignored—people got too many texts to respond to them all). And all of these involved remembering that someone existed whom you hadn’t thought of in a while, an ability that had atrophied in the minds of people who could not remember a time without social networking, just as people near the end of the twentieth century had lost the ability to remember the long and semi-random strings of digits that made up phone numbers once cellphones began to do that for them. Why bother to try to recall the people you had once known and would like to know again, if a computer was happy to handle those duties by pushing status updates at you (and quietly deciding by means of its own secret algorithms which updates were more important than others)?

  Which is why the e-mail from Britt was such a sweet surprise (even though it nauseated Rebecca slightly to see that its domain of origin was actually brictor.net). The party, which Britt was billing as “just a little celebration of happiness and life!!!,” was in three weeks. That would give Rebecca plenty of time to drop a pound or two, time enough to make an appointment at a hair salon, and let the new ’do grow in a little so she wouldn’t look like she’d gotten it just for the party. Time enough to pick up a nice new dress.

  She was not looking forward to having to tell her old friends and their significant others about what had happened to Sean, potentially over and over again. (And she couldn’t imagine having had to relay that kind of tragedy on a social networking site: having to perform her own grief for an audience in some kind of blog post, and having to read a comment trail full of the public performances of sympathy from near strangers.) But maybe everybody already knew. Maybe t
hey’d done the due-diligence Googling that had become increasingly socially acceptable in recent years—these days you just got used to people knowing things about you that you’d never actually told them. If they didn’t know, she could just tell Britt, and with her mouth everybody at the party would know within ninety minutes.

  But if she was going to have to stand in a damned impromptu condolence line, listening to boilerplate expressions of sorrow, then at least she was going to look good. If it worked for the heroines of chick-lit novels, it would work for her: she was going to purchase a dress, to boost her self-confidence, in any color but black.

  The Bridgewater mall was a cathedral of white light and open spaces, its dozens of stores sparsely populated with objects of presumably inestimable worth. Rebecca walked past one electronics store that was dark and completely barren, except for a single blacklight that shone down on a man who wore jeans, a tight-fitting black T-shirt that showed off hard-won gym muscles, and a pair of wraparound sunglasses. He stood as still as a guard at Buckingham Palace, and in his outstretched hand he held a package that appeared to contain a pair of audio cables. There was no checkout counter in the back of the store, or even a sign to be found that advertised what the cables were for or how much they cost; you got the impression that if you asked the man holding the cables about them, he wouldn’t answer, and if you tried to take them out of his hand you’d end up with a shoulder bone slipped out of a socket.

  Another store was as brightly lit as the electronics store had been dark, and its sole furnishings were three-yard-high Lucite pedestals, each of which held a single left high-heeled shoe. A slim, fey proprietor in a pinstriped suit stood beside the shoes, scowling with impressive imperiousness at any passersby who slowed down and seemed to consider entering. Perhaps his death glare was an attempt at reverse psychology: out of pure spite, you’d spend the money on the shoes to prove to the guy that people of your station in life didn’t get looks like that from the help.

  Even Conrad’s, the “anchor” store that in Rebecca’s teenage years would have been packed with rack after rack of clothes in a cacophony of colors, was more or less empty. Four mannequins behind plate-glass windows guarded the arched entrance to the store, two on either side—they were on horseback, and their steeds were of different colors: red, white, black, and a fourth horse whose body was transparent, its glass skin revealing a skeleton of steel rods and spinning gears beneath. The mannequins that sat astride the horses and held their reins were naked, with matching blond bobs, and sculpted cheekbones, and slender noses, and swollen lips, and ivory bodies, and small nipple-less breasts; their eyes were oddly alive and human, though, and Rebecca could have sworn that their gazes followed her as she crossed the store’s threshold, looking her up and down.

  There were more mannequins hanging by cables from the cavernous ceiling of the store’s main hall, two stories up. They looked just like the ones at the entrance, except that they held long, slim, brass trumpets to their mouths, and had four wings of tissue paper affixed between their shoulder blades that gently flapped back and forth by means of unseen mechanisms. They made Rebecca a little nervous.

  Deeper into the store was a row of a dozen extraordinarily tall women who faced the entrance—they all must have cleared six feet. They were dressed in matching navy-blue pantsuits, and each of them cradled a tablet in her arms; every once in a while, one of them would consult her tablet, peel off from the row, stride authoritatively toward a customer wandering through the store’s capacious space as if she had recognized her from afar, greet her, and slip into the easy patter of a sales pitch. After a couple of minutes, the saleswoman would casually slip her arm around the waist of the customer with presumptive familiarity, leading her over to an area of the floor that appeared to be just as featureless as any other part of the floor. The customer would tap a few buttons on her phone and wave it in front of a device that the saleswoman wore on a holster at her side; about a minute later, a hatch would open up in the floor and a platform would rise out of it that held some sort of cardboard box or shopping bag. The customer would take the package, smile, and be on her way.

  Where was the shopping happening here? The browsing through the clearance rack, the giggling that went on in the fitting rooms?

  Rebecca wandered a little farther into the store, and sure enough, one of the saleswomen left the line to approach her. “HelloI’mClaricewelcometoConrad’s,” she said, running all the words together through force of habit: Lovability’s AI voice monitors would have hit her with a yellow card for that. “What are you looking for today?”

  Couldn’t she, you know, just look? There didn’t seem to be a single article of clothing on display here: even the mannequins were nude. “I’m going to a party,” Rebecca said. “I need a sort of a going-out party dress. You know.”

  “We have just the thing for you,” Clarice the saleswoman said, flipping back her tablet’s cover and quickly tapping her way through a few menus. Three dresses appeared, each being modeled by the same woman (and, in fact, in each image she had the same facial expression, as if her head had been photographed once and repeatedly cut and pasted). One was a black, form-fitting, knee-length, V-neck thing with leather bands that crisscrossed at the bosom and made the whole outfit look vaguely S-and-M-ish (ugh: also, black); the second was a skimpy little red affair that flared at the bottom and featured a bust covered in sequins (argh: no no no no no); the last was a simple, shoulder-baring dress in deep indigo, that looked as if it might shimmer a little in the right light (yes, actually: yes. Maybe).

  “You like the blue one,” Clarice said. The pronouncement sounded half like a statement, half like a command. “Blue suits you. Come on and we’ll set you up.”

  Feeling a little rushed—she was not expecting mere department-store shopping to involve the sort of hardcore hustle you got when buying a used car—Rebecca said, “I think, I think I like the one in blue, but…could I see it? You know, to try it on?”

  Clarice took a step back. “Oh, you’ve never shopped at Conrad’s before.”

  Rebecca shook her head slowly. “Not for years.”

  “Well, last year we retrenched in order to be able to better compete in the modern marketplace. Our biggest change was the introduction of the Conrad’s Magic Matching Fit System. Which is amazing, and which no online service can provide. You don’t need to try things on here. They just fit.”

  “Magic Matching Fit System,” Rebecca said suspiciously—having worked for Lovability for a while or, as some of the more hysterical privacy advocates might have said, having “carried water for Big Data,” she knew the habit corporations had of giving the software being used for invading your privacy the most cheerful name possible.

  “See those mannequins?” Clarice indicated the angels in flight above them, and the sentries on horseback at the entrance. “Cameras in the eyes. We film you from several angles when you enter, and analyze your clothing and gait to determine your body type. Facial recognition, too: we correlate that with any publicly available information online to see how your appearance has changed over time, what styles of clothing you’ve chosen to wear in certain situations in the past, and so on. It’s amazingly, amazingly accurate. Our average customer is in and out of here in eight minutes; our rate of return on items is less than one-half of one percent.”

  “I don’t recall consenting to any sort of…measurement,” Rebecca said, knowing full well what Clarice’s response would be.

  “I’m sure you remember consenting by the act of entering those doors,” Clarice replied, gesturing at the entrance. “I’m sure you read the agreement mounted on the plaque at the entrance, or the duplicate copy that was sent to your phone.”

  “Oh, yes, I did notice those,” Rebecca lied easily.

  “Well, okay then!” Clarice suddenly became congenial again, and Rebecca, to her own surprise, felt a little relieved.

  Rebecca felt Clarice’s arm creep around her waist, and she stared up into the saleswoma
n’s eyes. Deep in her brain she felt the instinctive reflex of compliance. She could actually see the hustle working—they’d probably even shown her those two crappy dresses just to make the third one look more desirable—and she still couldn’t resist. The minions that lived beneath the floor of the department store had probably already pulled the box with her cocktail dress off a shelf, and placed it on the conveyor belt that would carry it to that mysterious hatch in the floor.

  “Come with me,” Clarice said, gently nudging Rebecca along, “and we’ll get you fixed up.”

  The dress was, to be fair, cheaper than she expected—if Conrad’s was sending almost all of its customers in and out in eight minutes like Clarice the saleswoman had said, instead of having to deal with the twentieth-century custom of women coming in to try things on but not to buy, then they were doing so much volume that they could afford to take a haircut on the price. To be fairer—and this is what bugged Rebecca a little, though not nearly as much as it would have ten years ago—she was sure that the dress would fit, and that the fitting rooms in Conrad’s had been boarded up because they weren’t necessary. She was sure that when she put the dress on, she would absolutely love it (even if in the back of her head she might think that it was a little too loose in the bust, or a bit too binding in the waist, or that it would look better in another color).

  If Big Tobacco’s cunning had once involved dosing brands of cigarettes with particular chemical cocktails so that you’d quickly come to prefer them above all others, and Big Pharma’s talent was convincing people that what they thought of as minor inconveniences or unfortunate quirks of character were in fact problems that required regular medication, then Big Data’s gift, the way it kept itself growing stronger, was in its ability to persuade the majority of people that the unique collection of physical and personality characteristics that they naively referred to as the “self” was in fact made up of a complex matrix of statistical values, too complicated for humans to process but not so hard for computers to comprehend. Whether this was true, or whether it may as well have been true because everyone believed it was, was hard to say—the line between the two possibilities had blurred too much.