Version Control

by Dexter Palmer

  And yet Rebecca felt that it was hard to tell whether the secret algorithms of Big Data did not so much reveal you to yourself as they tried to dictate to you what you were to be. To accept that the machines knew you better than you knew yourself involved a kind of silent assent: you liked the things Big Data told you you were likely to like, and you loved the people it said you were likely to love. To believe entirely in the data entailed a slight diminishment of the self, small but crucial and, perhaps, irreversible.

  But Rebecca was, as she had to remind herself, thirty-eight, and though she was still young in some ways, she was old in others, and the fact that she’d been born before the advent of Google practically made her as ancient as Methuselah. These concerns about the self, and privacy, and the aggregation of data, were an old person’s worries. Women in their early twenties who walked into Conrad’s probably knew, in some vague sense, that they were being scanned by the mannequins that hung from the ceiling and stood sentry at its entrance, and that wire-frame models of their naked bodies and lists of their measurements appeared on computer monitors within seconds after crossing the store’s threshold. They probably knew this and didn’t care; if they ever thought about it, they probably looked back with pity on women of earlier decades who could spend four hours searching for a flattering pair of jeans and return home with nothing to show for it. And Rebecca had saved a lot of time. In life you made your little negotiations and you struck your little bargains, and while Rebecca had woken up this morning thinking that she’d have to spend all day going from store to store, the Conrad’s Magic Matching Fit System had granted her a few hours of life back. Getting back home at three instead of six or seven: today, in spite of that ever-so-slight misgiving about Conrad’s business practice, Rebecca felt lucky. She felt like she’d won.

  When Rebecca got back to the house, she had to park in the street because there were two cars in the driveway—one was Philip’s manually driven Ford, the other a vintage silver Volkswagen Beetle, its compact body made of simple, appealing curves, its condition scrupulously maintained (though it wore green license plates, marking it as retrofitted and autonomous). Later, Rebecca would note that that was when she just stopped thinking, for a little while. She was clearly absorbing information—she remembered the second car, and remembered thinking that she had no reason to expect a vehicle in the place in the driveway where hers belonged—but she was not interpreting that information, or considering its implications. She was not wondering whose car it was, or why it was there, or why in fact Philip’s car was there when he’d said this morning that he’d be at the lab all day. It wasn’t that these weren’t questions that were worth asking. But somehow, even though she hadn’t articulated them to herself, she instinctively realized that when she knew their answers her life would become terrible.

  The party dress she’d bought was in the passenger seat next to her, in its minimalist, off-white, plastic-sealed cardboard box with the widely kerned C O N R A D ’ S logo stretched across its middle. She would enter the house, go into the bedroom, don’t enter the bedroom, this is the place that holds answers to questions, she would enter the bedroom and try on the dress. She hadn’t been able to try on the dress in the store, but as she’d checked out the saleswoman in Conrad’s had shown her a computer-generated depiction of what she’d look like in it, its rendering of her face sourced from the dozens of photographs taken by the mannequins of the Magic Matching Fit System. In the image she’d had a beaming smile and a slight redness to her cheeks: despite the fact that it wasn’t real, it convinced her and struck her as a picture of the way she imagined herself at her best. Rebecca wouldn’t be surprised if, in a year or two, Conrad’s began mailing actual physical catalogs to its most loyal customers, printed on glossy stock; you’d open them up to find that all of the models inside were happy and beautiful versions of you.

  She took the box off the passenger seat, got out of the car, and locked the doors. She entered the house, whose door she found to be left unlocked when she tried the handle, don’t ask why the door is unlocked, do not ask why you have the strange feeling that you should have rung the doorbell before entering your own home. She put down her purse. She would head to the bedroom to reveal the mystery inside the Conrad’s box. She would try on the dress that had probably never been touched by human hands, that had probably been stitched by robotic seamsters in a factory in Detroit. She would slip on the dress that had come in contact with no other skin but her own, and she would look into the bedroom mirror, what are you doing, Rebecca, do not go into the bedroom, she would look into the full-length bedroom mirror, and the version of herself that was built out of data would stare back at her from the other side of the glass, imaginary, perfect, and true.

  Music was playing in the house at a low volume. It was coming from the television: some video that looked as if it had been shot in the nineties, with a row of women in cheerleader-ish outfits engaged in a dance that seemed to be derived from calisthenics. The music was half rap, half R-and-B warbling, the kind of stuff Rebecca knew drove Philip up the wall, with his preference for the raspy voices and oddball time signatures of seventies prog-rock. “I like the way you work it,” a crooner in dark sunglasses sang as he sinuously threaded his way through a crowded bar, the patrons around him dancing in slow motion. “No diggity: I got to bag it up.”

  Rebecca slowly made her way down the hall to the bedroom, from which she heard, or chose not to hear quite yet, sounds of exertion and delight. She left the loops of R and B behind her, the calling card of an intruder, do not think about the music, do not think about the noises coming from the bedroom, you still have a few seconds of ignorance remaining to you, treasure each and every one.

  She entered the bedroom. The sheets of the bed within had been thrown back, and lay piled on the floor. On the mattress was an unexpected monster, singing to itself with two mouths. This is the last moment of contentment untainted by sorrow, when the brain hesitates before delivering the message to the heart that it knows it must. The topologically bizarre horror that Rebecca saw at first was preferable to the truth she knew was coming, and she felt a surprising regret as the image before her resolved itself: not beastly, but human; not one being, but two. One was Philip, lying on his back, his feet pointed toward her, his legs unceremoniously tangled in his boxer shorts; the other, sitting astride him and facing Rebecca, rocking back and forth, was Alicia Merrill. “Because maybe I don’t want to see your face,” Alicia was saying to Rebecca’s husband. “Because maybe I don’t want you to see my face. We don’t have to be so lovey-dovey all the time.”

  Then Alicia focused on Rebecca, and before Rebecca could quite parse what was going on, Alicia leapt off the bed, off of her husband (and Philip lifted his head and looked at the two women in dazed confusion as his stupid cock sprang and twitched), retrieved a copy of Marie Claire from the nearby nightstand, rolled it up, ran over to Rebecca, and began fiercely beating her about the head and shoulders with it, still unembarrassedly bare-ass naked. “Don’t you have any decency?” Alicia yelled at Rebecca. “Do you just barge in on people while they’re screwing? Are you out of your mind?” Rebecca dropped the box from Conrad’s and held her forearms in front of her face to shield herself from the blows of the magazine. “I’m sorry?” she said, more of a question than a comment, not quite sure what the proper response was here, strangely detached from it all. “You need to get out of here!” Alicia shouted. “You’d better get out of this room right now.” Which sounded, right then, like a good idea, a way to move forward, a way for Rebecca to give herself a chance to try to make sense of things. “Oh, okay, I’m sorry,” Rebecca said again, the payload of bad news not yet fully delivered—it would be a few seconds more until she thought to herself my husband has been cheating on me with Alicia Merrill—and for now an apology seemed to be the best way to bring an end to all this noisy surprise. She bent to pick up the Conrad’s box as the tiny woman delivered a quick backhanded thwack with the magazine to the top
of her head; then she quickly retreated, closing the bedroom door, and drifted back down the hall as she heard Alicia saying, “You’d better talk to her. You’d better sit her down and talk to her.” “Okay, okay, I’m sorry, okay,” she heard Philip say: at least he felt the need to apologize, too.

  My husband has been cheating on me with Alicia Merrill, Rebecca thought.

  She walked through the living room and into the kitchen (on the television was some other old R-and-B tune about the fun of a house party on a Friday night, with more of that aerobic dancing, performed by men in leather vests and baggy black pants. The tune’s refrain repeatedly announced that “this is how we do it!”). Sean was not in the living room when she passed through; he was not hiding behind the couch, peeking over the back of it in abject terror. Rebecca went into the kitchen, sat down at the table there, placed the box with the dress in front of her, clasped her hands in her lap, and waited, with patience, for the crying to start.

  Later—how much later? Hard to tell. In times of tragedy clocks will trick you—Philip stood in the kitchen doorway. “I’m going to the lab,” he said to Rebecca.

  Rebecca said nothing.

  “I packed a suitcase,” he said. “After I check in at the lab, I’m going to a hotel or something.”

  Rebecca looked at Philip, and then looked down at the table.

  “I’ll have my laptop, and my phone. If you want to call me or e-mail me, you can. I’ll get right back to you.”

  Rebecca said nothing.

  “Or I can call you, or e-mail you, if you want,” Philip said. “I’m not sure if I should call you, or if you should call me, if you want to talk. I kind of don’t know what to do here.”

  Rebecca closed her eyes and put her head down on the table.

  Philip stepped into the kitchen. “I don’t understand this,” he said. “I don’t know why it…I don’t know how it could be true that I…that I love you and that…this other thing could also be true. Both of these things are true. It doesn’t make sense.”

  Philip took another step into the kitchen.

  “It’s hard to have an intellectual connection with someone else that’s that intense,” he said. “When you have this really powerful idea in your head that’s almost fully formed and about to come into the world, and there is one other person that shares it with you, then that intellectual relationship…it can express itself in ways that I guess don’t make a lot of sense to everyone.

  “It’s not so much about…I mean, it means a lot to a person, to feel understood.”

  Rebecca lifted her head and looked at Philip. Then she squeezed her eyes shut and put her head back down.

  “I didn’t tell you about what was happening,” Philip said. “Because I didn’t think it was something you wanted to know.”

  Rebecca kept her head on the table.

  “I’m going to the lab,” Philip said. “I have some routines running that I need to check. I need to check on the routines.”

  The shivers of Rebecca’s back were barely visible: one might have thought she had fallen asleep.

  Philip withdrew from the kitchen. Some time later, Rebecca heard the front door shut, and she knew then that she was alone.

  She was really tired. She wanted to sleep for a while, but she didn’t want to sleep in the bedroom, did not want to imagine herself dumping the dirty sheets in the laundry bin and replacing them with new ones, did not want to put herself through any further ignominy. She decided to sleep on the couch, in the living room.

  So she went into the living room and stretched out on the couch, but she couldn’t sleep a wink—all she could do was stare at the ceiling while nasty thoughts marched around in her head on parade. So she got up and went back into the kitchen, and Philip was sitting at the kitchen table, wearing jeans and a wrinkled polo shirt and sporting a day’s growth of beard. Rebecca sat down across the table from Philip.

  Philip had a bottle of Jim Beam in front of him and a shot glass. He upended the bottle and poured whiskey into the glass, carelessly sloshing the liquid over its edges, and drained the whole thing in one long gulp. “You have to admit,” he said, slamming the glass down and refilling it, “that she’s perfect. Smart as a whip, and that gorgeous face, and that knockout tight little body. Whereas you: yeah, okay, sure, you’re alright, but you’re not the same. Not so brainy; not so self-confident; not so toned and young. Hold it.”

  Philip opened his mouth as if to yawn, as wide as it could go, and in the darkness behind his tonsils Rebecca could have sworn she saw the reflections off two little eyes, a matched pair of tiny glinting lights.

  “Hate can build up in any marriage,” Philip said after he closed his mouth. “Left unexpressed it takes physical form. Left unspoken it must be vomited up. My aunt and uncle were married for seventy-six years. They died within weeks of each other. Their coroners found families of field mice nesting in their stomachs. Hold it.” He opened his mouth again, so wide that Rebecca feared he might unhinge his jaw, and out of it sprang four garter snakes, striped black and gold and coated with phlegm and blood, their eyes pale blue, with the lids and lashes of a human’s. They fell to the table where they thrashed around in wild confusion; then, in unison, they fell into a parallel formation, zipped off the table, and slithered across the kitchen floor where they disappeared beneath the oven.

  “Oh geez I feel so much better now,” Philip said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “Rebecca, honey, you have to do this. You have to give this a try. Just close your eyes, and find the thing inside that’s poisoning you, and let it out. And it’ll be like it was when we first met. All those shining possible futures will be ahead of us once again. Hold on a second.” A large, translucent, nine-legged spider the size of a tennis ball launched itself out of his throat, its belly rupturing as it splattered against the table, spilling forth a hundred baby spiders that refracted the kitchen’s fluorescent light like little glass beads. “See?” Philip said, swigging back another shot of bourbon as the tiny insects scurried mindlessly over the tabletop, their dead mother’s body going limp like a deflating balloon. “Give it a try, Rebecca! You can do it!”

  Philip stretched his hand across the table to grasp Rebecca’s, and she took it and closed her eyes, feeling the faint tickle of dozens of little spiders swarming across her forearm. She concentrated, and felt the wordless hate that she’d been too polite to express given shape, felt what seemed like some sort of centipede-like thing choking her, felt its myriad legs scrabbling for purchase on the inside of her throat as it climbed. “That’s it!” Philip said enthusiastically. “Attagirl! Keep it up!” Rebecca opened her mouth, hung her head, and gagged a little as the whatever-it-was thrashed its way past her tongue to drop to the tabletop. Then she opened her eyes to see what had come out of her.

  It was, in fact, a centipede, a large one, but the thing was…well, it was kind of cute. It looked like a five-year-old’s drawing of a centipede: it was made up of a dozen spherical pea-green segments and its eyes were ovoid and iris-less like Little Orphan Annie’s, and each of its tiny little feet was clad in a tiny little Chuck Taylor sneaker. “Hey guys!” it said, looking up eagerly at Rebecca and Philip, its smile a perfect half circle. “I’m Charlie the Centipede! Whatcha guys up to?” “Rebecca, you’ve never been able to do anything right,” said Philip as he snatched his hand away, and then she woke up on the couch, and it was morning.

  She sat up and looked around her. It didn’t seem like Philip had snuck back into the house while she slept: everything looked the same except for the change in the light.

  She took a moment to clear her head. It was hard to know what to do. It was hard to know what direction to take when you suddenly found yourself in a future different from the one you’d expected to be in the day before. The first thing, Rebecca decided, would be to do some little kind thing for herself, to remind herself that she was a good person, that she was someone who merited kindness. Still in her clothes from yesterday, she stood, deciding that
this was what she needed, a single indulgence, to begin the day, to get her in the state of mind where she’d be able to figure out what to do next.

  Scallops and bacon for breakfast. Yes. The meal of kings and champions, served at an illicit time of the day. There were still some scallops in the freezer left over from the party she’d thrown for Philip and his colleagues a few months back. And bacon was always around! She went back into the kitchen, which was good because it did not involve going back into the bedroom, the place of her humiliation, she had actually apologized to her, the word “sorry” had just come out of her mouth like that was the right thing to say, while the woman was hitting her with a magazine. She went back into the kitchen. The plastic-sealed box from Conrad’s was still there on the table. She pulled the bag of scallops out of the freezer, dumped them into a large glass mixing bowl, filled the bowl with water, and put it in the microwave to defrost. She would prepare the scallops and bacon carefully, ritualistically, to give her mind and her hands something to do. She retrieved the bowl from the microwave, fished each scallop out of the bowl, wrapped it in a paper towel and patted it dry, and placed it on a plate. She got a box of wooden toothpicks out of a drawer next to the oven; there was not a garter snake waiting in the drawer to wind itself around her wrist. She got a package of bacon out of the fridge. Each strip of bacon wrapped around a scallop and speared with a toothpick, two, three, a dozen, she would eat a dozen slices of bacon this morning, Alicia Merrill had probably never eaten bacon in her life, oooh if I eat this greasy fatty bacon it’ll mess up my marathon running times, poor, pitiful thing. Place the tray of a dozen scallops into the oven, each one nested in its own comfy pork blanket, and broil them for fifteen minutes, during which you are forced to be with your own thoughts, to recount the sighting of the beast, the unforced apology, the humiliation. The bacon smells good now. Put on an oven mitt and pull out the tray, the scallops sizzling in a pool of their own grease. No need for a plate: she is alone now, and there is no one to judge her manners. Pick a scallop up by the toothpick and plop the morsel into your mouth, devouring it in a single bite, yes, delicious, this is good. Another, another. She should be logging on for her shift at Lovability soon, but today the lovelorn can look out for their own damned selves. Another, another, another. Rebecca is eating scallops and bacon, the best meal on God’s green earth. She is not drinking a bottle of Killian’s Irish Red; she is not nursing a glass of sparkling white wine; she is not chasing each scallop with a swallow of single-malt scotch; she is not chugging a bottle of mouthwash; she is not grabbing a handle of cheap rum and getting good and fucked up—