Version Control

by Dexter Palmer

  He stopped the dial at eight, even though he was in a really good mood today. A couple of years ago, when the butterfly had first started showing up in the diagnostic, like every day, he tried turning the happiness dial to ten again and again just to get it to shut up and go away. Instead what happened was that Mom got this e-mail from school. Mom came into the kitchen one morning while he was eating breakfast. “I got this e-mail from your school that suggested I should ask you a question. It had to’ve been sent by a computer: it’s not the kind of thing a person would say.” She sighed. “It’s kind of ridiculous.”

  Sean looked at his mother and shrugged.

  “The e-mail says that I’m supposed to preface this question-asking by saying this is a serious question, not a joke. I’m doing that now.”

  “Gotcha.”

  “Sean, have you been taking MDMA? Colloquially, it is known as ‘ecstasy’ in its street pill form, or ‘molly’ in the purer, crystalline form. That’s what this computer-generated e-mail says.”

  “I know a girl named Molly, but I don’t hang out with her. Why would school e-mail you about her?”

  “That’s a good enough answer, Sean. You might not be aware of something: if anyone asks you how happy you are, and you always say that you’re as happy as you can be, they think you’re lying or you’re crazy. So if you’re really in a good mood, don’t, you know, advertise it. Keep it a secret.”

  “Okay, Mom.”

  From then on he’d always turned the happiness dial to seven or eight, leaving a single cloud to half obscure the face of the sun, and the butterfly had eased up on him. Mom figured that by the end of this school year the red flag would probably expire from his profile, and he’d get other stuff like the turtle and the owl (though probably not the rabbit: he was as thin as a rail).

  “Hey!” said the butterfly. “I’m glad you’re feeling pretty good. It can be hard sometimes to have a family that doesn’t have as many people as other families. But if you’re feeling lonely, there’s always someone to talk to. Your teacher is up at the front of the class, and she’s ready to listen. Or you can speak to a counselor at any time by loading this app and touching the butterfly symbol in the dock at the bottom of the screen.”

  “Thanks,” Sean said. The butterfly waved its wings goodbye, their roiling patterns briefly resolving into a pair of smiling faces. Then it turned and flew away to gambol amid the trees with the rest of the animals.

  The butterfly didn’t understand: it was just an AI routine that Sean had gotten good at gaming. The teacher didn’t understand either: Sean had never even been close enough to her to be able to recognize her on the street. No one understood, and Sean was wise enough not to tell them: he was never lonely, because he was never alone.

  The accident happened two years ago. Sean had gotten in detention for something that wasn’t even his fault: all that had happened was that he’d been attacked and he’d fought back. But Ms. Baldridge didn’t understand what happened and she put him in detention. It wasn’t fair.

  And Sean had had to sit there in front of Ms. Baldridge’s desk while she called his mother and told her she had to come to pick him up. It was awful. But at least on the way home he’d be able to explain what happened to Mom, and Mom would understand, and then Sean would feel at least a little better.

  But what happened instead was that Dad showed up. He came into Ms. Baldridge’s classroom looking distracted, the way he did when his mind was really on equations and he couldn’t even bother to hide it from you. Ms. Baldridge told him what happened, which wasn’t what really happened: it left some stuff out, and it got some other stuff wrong.

  Dad just said “uh-huh, uh-huh” while Ms. Baldridge talked, because he was moving numbers around in his head. Ms. Baldridge gave him a pamphlet to read: it was a pamphlet for parents of kids who have issues. Dad looked at it, and he said “uh-huh,” and he folded it up and put it in his pocket. Then Sean and Dad got in the car to go home.

  Dad had the old car, not the cool new car: if Mom had come, with the new car, Sean would have been able to talk to Mom, and Mom would have let him watch cartoons on the windshield. Mom would have taken his side and cheered him up. But Dad just stared out at the road in front of him and didn’t say a word. When Sean said, “Where’s Mom?” Dad didn’t say anything at first, and then he said, real quiet, “She couldn’t make it. So I’m here.”

  Then Dad said to Sean, “Whatever you did at school today, don’t do it again. I can’t afford to take extra time out of my day to pick you up just because you’ve been bad.” It made Sean so angry, with anger he couldn’t even do anything about: it just had to sit there in his stomach like a hot ball of lead.

  They were both quiet then. Dad drove while he thought about numbers and Sean stayed angry. Then something amazing happened. Sean heard a loud noise down the road: it seemed like it came from way ahead of them. He looked up at Dad, who had that look on his face that people get in movies when they see something beautiful: eyes wide and mouth half open. Sean looked out the window to see what Dad was looking at, and ahead of them there was a car that was standing up on its front bumper, like a dog performing a trick. The car didn’t have a top, and Sean could see the woman who was driving it. She had long red hair and it was flying all over the place.

  “Sean!” Dad said, suddenly here in the world, suddenly excited. “Sean! Watch the math!” Those were the next-to-last words he ever said.

  It hadn’t made sense to Sean what Dad meant at first, not for a while, not for months. He thought that Dad had told him he should be afraid of math, that numbers could hurt you and kill you. But then after thinking about it he realized that Dad had wanted him to look at the math: that the reason that Dad thought about numbers and formulas all the time was that they gave the world its shape and told it how to move. If you could see the math, you could find the beauty in things, and you could tell the future.

  The red-haired woman flew out of her car, and the world got strange and noisy. No one cared about the lines on the road anymore. Dad was looking all around him, out the window and over his shoulder and in the mirrors, looking at the math that was moving the cars.

  Then Dad got scared. “Sean!” he shouted. “Close your eyes! Hello—”

  Sean shut his eyes as Dad began to spin the steering wheel to the left, quickly turning it hand over hand.

  There was a really loud noise: bang!

  Sean felt his skeleton try to leap out of his body. Glass cut up his face.

  Four days later Mom sat down in front of Sean. He had been out of the hospital for a day already and hadn’t seen Dad: Mom had come to visit, but Dad hadn’t. For the past few days people had been telling him how lucky he was, but the looks on their faces made him think that what they really thought was that he wasn’t that lucky at all. His face had a lot of little nicks on it from the glass, and he felt bruised all over.

  Mom looked at Sean. Her face was made out of wax. “Do you remember anything about what happened?” she said. “When you were in the car with Dad.”

  “Dad said Close your eyes—”

  “Oh God—”

  “—and then he turned the wheel.” Sean mimicked the quick hand-over-hand movement his father had made. “Then…” He frowned. “Then I was in bed here, and I had a thing around my wrist with my name on it. I had a bruise here—” He pointed beneath his eye, where a contusion still bloomed, purplish and angry. “And here,” he said, indicating his knee. “What’s Dad doing?”

  “Jesus, Sean,” Mom said. “I don’t even know how to say this.”

  For the rest of that school year and into the next, the other kids in school treated Sean like he was a walking urban legend. Look at what happens when you’re bad in school. Look at what happens when you get detention. When he came back to school after a few weeks some things had changed. Brian, the kid who had taken his coupon for the free ice cream sandwich, had transferred to another school in the same district, but across town. Ms. Baldridge had taken an e
xtended leave, and a substitute teacher taught in her place. But Ms. Baldridge never returned, and soon all the kids in school forgot about her.

  In the Daily Pre-School-Day Diagnostic, the butterfly began to visit Sean every day, asking him to “self-monitor his mood” and nagging him to go to an adult if he was ever feeling like life wasn’t worth living. But here is the thing you couldn’t understand if you were just an AI routine that was programmed to pretend it was empathetic, or if you were a guidance counselor who flagged a student’s profile as “psychologically traumatized” without ever looking the kid in the eye. The last lesson his father had taught him in the car was that beneath the things of the world lay ideas, and those ideas lived not in the world, but in the mind. Everything was made of numbers and formulas; formulas and numbers were ideas. And his father had done so much thinking about math that he was basically made out of it. And if his father had been made of math, and math was an idea that lived in the mind, then there was no reason that his father could not live on in Sean’s mind, after the accident.

  His father’s last word, which Sean had never told anyone, not even his mother, hadn’t been goodbye: it had been hello. He hadn’t died; he’d been set free from the constraints of history and flesh. And while the fathers of the other children could only be the people they were, and were forced to live the lives they’d made for themselves, the Philip Steiner of his son’s daydreams was all the possible versions of himself that Sean could imagine. He was always near, always ready to listen, always offering solace. He was all the possible fathers. He was a dragonslayer and a titan of industry; he was a cunning detective and a grizzled gunfighter; he was an astronaut and a priest and a jailer of thieves. He lived in the shadows, and he filled his son’s world with light.

  22

  GAIA WILLIAMS

  Marcus was the fifth romantic avatar that Felix Scott and his team had designed for Rebecca, and Felix thought he was one of the best they’d ever made. He was a dark-skinned African American, thirty-four, his smile wide and bright, his head cleanly shaven and shining. “There’s a lot of late-nineties Taye Diggs in his face,” Felix said as Rebecca seated herself in front of the array of electronic equipment that constituted the avatar modeler. Felix was fastening a skullcap to her head that was studded with motion sensors, while his assistant painted the tiny white dots on her face that would allow the modeler’s camera to track her expressions for duplication. “There’s a little bit of young Laurence Fishburne in there, too. We pulled reference images from Apocalypse Now and King of New York.”

  Marcus wore a charcoal pinstriped suit with deep purple accoutrements: the neatly folded handkerchief in the suit pocket matched the shirt and tie. The outfit looked to Rebecca like something a Wall Street financial analyst would have worn in the 1980s. “A handsome guy, right?” Felix said. “Let’s try the voice now: let’s get some levels.”

  “Call me Ishmael,” Rebecca said into her headset mike. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” In her ear her own words came back to her in a stentorian bass after a slight delay: the dissonance was startling. “Can I have this voice for the rest of my life?” she said. “Surgery’s not off the table.”

  “You know who that is?” Felix could barely contain his glee.

  “No idea.”

  “Avery Brooks! More precisely, Avery Brooks as Captain Benjamin Sisko, the commanding officer of Federation station Deep Space Nine. Get this. We actually tried to legitimately license his voice for this, like we usually do for these things, but…well, when his people heard what we were going to use it for, that wasn’t on. But I’m like, Marcus is totally Ultimate Black Man—he’s got to sound like Sisko! No one else will do. So here’s what we figure out. All we need is some recordings of phonemes, right? There are forty phonemes in North American English—our speech synthesizer works by stitching those phonemes together. And DS9 ran for 176 episodes. So I sit down with a sound engineer and a box set of Blu-rays, and we go through pulling—not even a full word of Sisko’s dialogue from each episode! Just part of a word: the buh sound that starts ‘Bajoran’; the long o from ‘Odo’; stuff like that. Completely covered by fair use doctrine. We got three to five instances of each phoneme, cleaned them up, and looked at similarities in the waveforms to generate a bunch of variants. Then we fed those into the speech synthesizer. Sounds great, doesn’t it? Though our lawyers keep fretting that we’re gonna get sued anyway. Audio’s good, Rebecca: let’s check video.”

  In the image on one of the three monitors on the desk in front of Rebecca, Marcus looked trim and muscular, seated in an office chair as he stared into a webcam. Behind him was an image of a well-appointed living room with cream-colored walls and plush leather couches, and a fireplace burning in the background. “Too warm for that,” Rebecca said, pointing.

  “Oh yeah,” said Felix, and tapped a few keys: the flames blinked away.

  “He doesn’t look alive,” Rebecca said.

  “Still loading some of the idle animations,” Felix replied, and as he spoke the avatar began to blink at random times as his chest started to rise and fall. With that he leapt to the other side of the uncanny valley: he probably wouldn’t fool anybody for more than ten minutes, but that would be long enough.

  “Looks good, doesn’t he? I’d date that guy,” said Felix, and then Marcus barfed up his tongue as his entire head turned inside out, his eyes staring inward at his own brain, his teeth hovering in front of his inverted lips. “What in the holy hell,” Rebecca said, and Felix apologized as he opened up a terminal window on another monitor and hammered in some commands, his vintage Model M keyboard going clickety-clack. Marcus’s head disappeared, leaving a neck with a void of unrendered geometry in its middle; then it snapped back into existence, smiling gently as if nothing had gone awry.

  “He’s not going to pull that shit while we’re on the call, is he?” Rebecca said.

  “He won’t! He won’t! He’s under control.”

  “It’s one o’clock. The call’s coming in.”

  Rebecca had been piloting romantic avatars for about six months now. For all the advanced tech the project used, it was still a small one in the company, housed in a single room of the offices that Lovability occupied in an Eighth Avenue skyscraper. The project was funded with a trickle of R&D money diverted from another division of the enormous marketing, advertising, and social media conglomerate of which Lovability was the tiniest part. (Felix said he’d heard that the software was actually repurposed from another unknown project within the conglomerate that had been funded by DAPAS, the defense organization that, in the fever dreams of conspiracy theorists, was always pouring money into oddball research projects for its own unimaginably nefarious ends. But Felix was apt to say that sort of thing: for him, the spaces between words in front-page newspaper articles spoke of a web of connections between DAPAS and the Dakotan insurgents and the Davos World Economic Forum and the Bilderberg Group and the Illuminati, links that were plainly obvious to those with eyes to see.)

  She had come to work at Lovability full-time soon after the accident: before then she’d just been handling customer-service calls from home, but suddenly she’d needed more than pin money to get by, and so she’d applied for an opening handling calls in-house, five days a week. It was monotonous work, but she was great at it: she upsold so many customers from Silver Plans to Gold and Platinum and Diamond that the gift certificates for restaurants that she got as regular rewards paid for dinner out for herself and Sean several nights a week, and the seasonal cash bonuses came close to covering the cost of Sean’s school clothes and tablet upgrades. Finally, after about a year, she received an e-mail one morning summoning her directly to the office of Gaia Williams, the CEO of Lovability and the company’s public face. It was Gaia who had (supposedly) used a combination of sociological studies and dark arts to design the matrix containing the twenty-six axes of compatibility that powered the mind of the company’s electronic matchmaker.

  Rebecca h
ad shown up at Gaia’s office at one thirty sharp that afternoon, only to be kept waiting. The atrium before the closed office door was dead quiet; the only other person there was a young female assistant who brought Rebecca a slim, tall glass of water wrapped in a neatly folded paper napkin, three perfectly formed spheres of ice floating inside. It was too early in the day for the assistant to look as completely shell-shocked as she did; Rebecca figured that Williams must be tough to work for.

  After fifteen minutes on the dot, the door to Gaia’s office swung open and there she was, looking just like she did in the commercials: deep blue blouse, black pencil skirt, and slightly naughty stiletto heels; legs for days. “Re-bec-ca,” she sang, as if greeting a long-lost friend. “So sorry to keep you waiting: I was on a call that ran over. Come in. Come in! Come come come.”

  Rebecca followed her into her office. She guessed that Gaia Williams was probably black, though it was hard to say. She was either well tanned or naturally dark-skinned; her hair was black and straight and cropped in a flattering pixie cut, but that could mean anything or nothing. Her eyes were such a dark brown that it was difficult to distinguish between her pupil and her iris: Rebecca found Gaia’s gaze slightly unsettling.

  Latino, maybe? No: Latina. Maybe.

  Gaia’s mahogany desk had nothing on its surface but an ultra-slim computer monitor and a keyboard. The single chair that faced the desk was a little low, even for Rebecca: if you were a six-foot-tall man, then scrunching into it with your knees halfway up to your chin probably made you feel awkward and goofy, and Rebecca sensed that, like being left to cool her heels while Gaia “finished up her call,” this was deliberate. Gaia’s chair, meanwhile, was upholstered in leather and heavily padded, loudly advertising its own comfort. Gaia took a seat, wheeled her chair forward so that she could rest her elbows on the desk, and pointed a long, delicate, neatly manicured finger at Rebecca. “I’ve seen your numbers. Your volume and your upselling. They’re very good. You’re very good.”