Version Control

by Dexter Palmer

  She preferred to spend her evening commute in relative silence—no satellite radio or windshield video; nothing but the barely audible whine of the car’s hybrid engine and the sounds of traffic from outside. She liked to take the time to let her thoughts drift; she liked to hear the sound of her self. The injunction that Gaia Williams had given her, not to confuse the data with the people who generated the data: that cut both ways. You could look at a bunch of numbers in a spreadsheet and make the mistake of thinking you were dealing with something other than, or more than, numbers. Or you could look at a person and think that he was a creature made out of digits, and fail to see the singular self that lay behind his eyes. And so Rebecca liked to sit and think for a while after work with a drink in her hand, to get her mind back in the space where a name identified a person and not a profile stored on a server.

  Take Kathryn and Carson, for instance—they were getting on now like a house on fire, at least from what Rebecca could tell. Carson was all Kathryn could talk about, to the point where it got tiresome—after just a few months, she hadn’t just uttered the dreaded l-word that she’d sworn in youth would never pass her lips, but also seemed to be dancing around the m-word as well. But Kathryn and Carson had actually tried dating twice: once when they’d met online, and a second time after they’d run into each other again at a party that Rebecca had hosted for Alicia Merrill when a cable newstainment show had run a story on the causality violation device. (Alicia hadn’t wanted to get mixed up in it at all, fearing the way that journalistic reportage on physics often turned out sounding like science fiction, but Rebecca had talked her into it. In the end Alicia’s fears had been unjustified, for the segment was surprisingly tasteful, if perhaps a bit mawkish: they’d covered Philip’s career up to the accident, and used a bit of deft editing to portray Alicia as a bright and confident young upstart who’d taken over the lab once her mentor had passed away, swearing to realize his ambitious vision in his absence. Rebecca had teared up a little, watching it; big bearish Dennis, the lab’s resident code monkey, had bawled like a baby.)

  Rebecca hadn’t been fully privy to the reasons why Kathryn and Carson had broken up the first time, but she had her guesses. For a while, Kathryn had been a notorious love-’em-and-leave-’em serial dater. She was good at online dating—she was slim and cute with a face that promised mischief, and behind a keyboard she had a snappy way with words that made her fun to flirt with. It got to the point where when she went out in small-town Stratton to shop for groceries or browse in the local indie bookstore, she figured she had a one-in-three chance of coming across an ex. Finally, Rebecca had a sit-down woman-to-woman talk with her—more accurately, Rebecca staged an intervention, mostly because she’d gotten tired of hearing Kathryn diss Boyfriend #268 because he always had beads of sweat clinging to his upper lip, and Boyfriend #269 because when she went out for sushi with him he used a fork instead of chopsticks. “Look,” she’d said. “I know how this works. You’re looking for quality, but these profiles you’re sifting through are more likely to show you quantities than qualities: you get me? The stuff that makes you who you are can’t make it through the wires: even the most exciting person in the world will end up bland and standardized by the time he answers all those questionnaires and fits himself into our templates. And when you finally meet up with these people you don’t really see them: you’re looking at them, but you’re seeing the shadow versions of them that you corresponded with online. And you’re always thinking in the back of your head that you can find someone better, because the site’s rigged to make you think that way. Which is why you complain about being lonely even though you’ve got dates three nights a week. My two cents.”

  Rebecca wasn’t sure at first that she hadn’t crossed a line with Kathryn after that talking-to—Kathryn had sulked at the time, and Rebecca hadn’t heard from her for a couple of weeks afterward. But Rebecca got the impression that Kathryn had been dating a little less, if she hadn’t quit entirely. And when she’d met Carson again at the party for Alicia, they’d hit it off as if they’d never even met before.

  And perhaps it wasn’t entirely wrong to say that in a sense, they hadn’t met before, until then. Maybe their second meeting felt so much like a first because it hadn’t taken place through the inadvertent distancing of electronic mediation, and enough time—a couple of years—had passed to let the memory of that earlier meeting fade and be forgotten (and there was something to be said for forgetting, whether willful or not).

  Rebecca knew that Lovability’s algorithms attempted to predict the probability that two given people who contacted each other would go on to have a romantic relationship with any degree of seriousness. Even Lovability’s developers would admit, after a couple of beers, that the methodology was sort of ham-fisted. Rebecca expected that in Kathryn and Carson’s case, Lovability would have made a negative prognosis with a high degree of certainty, considering the difference in their race and the extreme difference in their educational level. And yet here they were, happy as could be, because while Lovability’s servers could take a decent stab at guessing the chances for harmony between a white female with a bachelor’s degree in theater and a black male with an astrophysics PhD, it had no way of predicting the probability of romance between Kathryn and Carson, two people whose most significant commonality with all other humans was their lack of perfect precedence in history, two people who had their own memories, and secrets, and dreams, and interior lives.

  As Rebecca’s car neared home it occurred to her, as it regularly did, that her job might be, in a trivial way, morally unconscionable. But there were far worse sins perpetrated each day than those of the employees of Lovability. And it did, in all honesty, help a great many people find true love. There was an LED display mounted over the reception desk in the company’s main office that showed the number of marriages that had come about as a result of Lovability’s matchmaking services. The counter ticked up once or twice a day, and whenever it did, a recording of wedding bells would play through speakers mounted on ceilings throughout the company’s offices—in response, all the employees would drop what they were doing, come to their feet, and applaud, even if they were in rooms alone. Sure, it was one of those practices intended to inculcate corporate spirit, but you couldn’t deny that it genuinely felt good.

  By the time Rebecca got home, Sean had already been in the house for a couple of hours. In the days of Rebecca’s own childhood that would have made him a latchkey kid, a matter about which she felt some slight guilt, but if there was a benefit to this always-on surveillance culture, it meant that you didn’t have to worry nearly as much about stranger danger. (At the last PTA meeting she’d managed to attend, Rebecca had ended up talking to a husband-and-wife pair of electronic engineers who’d had a subcutaneous RFID transmitter implanted in the sole of their daughter’s right foot when she was born. “It’s not really invasive, like in a privacy sense,” the father had said, showing Rebecca the app on his phone that displayed his daughter’s location, blood pressure, and heart rate. “It just gives us enough information to let us know that she’s okay, without infringing on her rights. And of course she’s got the option to have it removed when she turns thirteen.” “Though we do hope she’ll keep it,” the mother had chimed in. Rebecca wasn’t crazy enough to do that to Sean, but technological advances had enabled helicopter parents to a greater degree than ever before, and there were enough of them around to act as a deterrent for everyone, so Rebecca felt little fear that Sean would be harmed by some mischief.)

  Sean was sitting on the couch in the living room, playing some sort of game on his tablet. “What’s that about?” Rebecca asked, putting down her purse and slipping off her shoes.

  “Hey, Mom,” Sean said. “This game is old: older than me. You have to…you have to obtain the facade used to overcome life’s hardships.” Rebecca looked at the tablet’s screen, which showed a bunch of kids in Japanese school uniforms running around some sort of laboratory laid out lik
e a maze, the sort of thing a Bond villain would build.

  “Well, I guess it’s better than killing someone.”

  “Way better!” Sean said. “This is like the best game ever.”

  “What’s for dinner?”

  “Indian delivery. I ordered lamb brrr-yonney for me, and the stuff with the chickpeas for you. Can I use your credit card? I already used your credit card. I got some samosas too.”

  “For food, any time,” Rebecca said. “But not for those games on your tablet. And it’s biryani: beer-yonney, like—” She made a motion with her hand that mimed tipping back a bottle to her lips. “Speaking of.” She went into the kitchen.

  Alicia showed up just as they were finishing dinner. Sean opened the door when the bell rang and greeted her with his usual “Hey, Aunt Alicia” that seemed an oddly precocious mix of mockery and sweetness. Rebecca offered Alicia a tall can of Six Point Sweet Action as she popped open a second for herself; Alicia silently waved it away. Sean, sensing his cue, cleaned up his dishes. “I’m gonna go in my bedroom now,” he announced. “You two can talk about whatever.”

  “Thanks for your permission,” Rebecca said. “Get some homework done. Try not to spend too much time on your…public face, what was it?”

  “The facade used to overcome life’s hardships,” Sean said, with the exact same intonation as before. He fidgeted in the middle of the living room, the odd one out in age and gender.

  “Have fun inside the Midnight Channel, and remember that the fog comes after several days of rain,” Alicia said, and Sean relaxed visibly. Alicia was good with Sean. Even Rebecca found herself having to actively ignore his strange affect sometimes when she spoke to him, so that he wouldn’t feel so alien. But Alicia had this effortless way of getting on his wavelength and speaking the code words of his private world, letting him know that there was someone else who saw and understood things the way he did.

  “I know I know I know I have to rescue Naoto from his Shadow now!” Sean said, and he would clearly have gone on for another hour with Alicia about whatever it was if he’d had the chance. Instead he looked at Alicia shyly, turned, and scampered to the back of the house, clutching his tablet to his chest.

  Alicia wasn’t really one for small talk with adults, on the other hand: she could manage it for short periods, but her idle conversation had the feel of being spoken in a second language. It was a sign of their close friendship that Rebecca didn’t find it odd when Alicia got quickly to the point. “We had to deactivate your ID card,” she said. “You can keep it. Or you can cut it up: it won’t work anymore.”

  “Gotcha,” Rebecca said quietly, after a pull at her beer.

  “Why did you do it? We looked at the feed from the night-vision cameras: you may not have known they were there. They showed that you entered the causality violation chamber. Why did you do that?”

  “It’s hard to explain.”

  “You should try.”

  Rebecca took a good long swig. “Alicia—you don’t know what it’s like to be I guess widowed, I guess that’s the word I’m looking for, it’s what people say I am, you don’t know what it’s like to be widowed at thirty-six. At thirty-six! Like, if I had to fill out a Lovability profile, I’d have to tell the matrix of twenty-six axes of compatibility that I was widowed, and then it would pair that with my age and it wouldn’t know what the hell to do.

  “You know what I went through, Alicia,” she continued, “and you helped me get through that, and I really appreciate it. But the thing is that you never get over something like this. You maybe learn to live with it having happened to you, but you never ever get over it.

  “This is getting heavy.”

  “I expected it would,” said Alicia. “Go on.”

  Rebecca sighed, and pressed on. “The thing that’s hard about it—the thing that makes it so hard when the person you love has been taken from you, not by something evil that you could have seen coming, but by pure random chance—is that you find yourself suddenly living through a history other than the one you expected to live, through no fault of your own. I feel…it’s hard to describe, but I feel weirdly outside of time. Ever since the accident I’ve had these moments when I felt like a visiting guest in this world, not a permanent resident. Like sometimes I look in a mirror and I feel like I can almost see through the version of me on the other side of the glass. And sometimes I feel like I can see the history I used to be in more clearly than the history I’m in now—the real history is one where Philip and Sean and I are all together, being a family and doing whatever family things people do, and this one’s like…like a fake version of events that I’ve just been yanked into, where everything’s gone wrong.

  “But I know this is the real world, and not a fake or a dream. I know you only get one chance at life, as much as it’d be great if things were otherwise. I don’t have any delusions on that score.”

  “That’s probably wise,” Alicia said. “But I still don’t understand why you did it. I don’t see why you snuck into the lab in the middle of the night to see the machine.”

  Rebecca paused for a full minute, her arms folded, and Alicia let her think. Then Rebecca said, “Okay. Sometimes…it gets dark in my head. You know. You don’t know. But. Anyway. I woke up early the morning of the day I did this, just wide awake at four a.m., and I felt so fucking lonely, so lonely I hope you don’t ever understand how lonely I felt. And I just kind of drifted around the house, and eventually I called Kathryn at work and I was like, I kind of need to spend some time with someone today, this is the worst it’s ever been, this is the worst it’s been since I actually found out about the accident. And she took the day off work to hang out with me. She’s the kind of woman who would do that for a friend. And…well, we spent the day out at the bars like we were a couple of not-giving-a-shit college girls again, with all the time in the world and nothing to do. And Kathryn listened to me while I just poured all this stuff out, stuff I’d been carrying around with me for over two years and never told anyone, not even you.

  “So Kathryn listened to all this stuff, and then she gave me some advice. Because sometimes you can give advice to someone even if you don’t really understand what they’ve been through. She said, Look. The thing is that you want closure, and you didn’t get it. But here’s the thing that was great about Philip. He was a brilliant physicist; he was almost literally a man of ideas. And really ambitious ones, too! And his ideas were what he valued most about himself! Even if he’s gone, he left this great idea behind that the people following behind him are going to make better. And how many people in the world are able to leave something behind that will make strangers think about them even five minutes after they’re dead? Just about nobody.

  “So here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to the lab, tonight, and you’re going to go look at the causality violation chamber. And you’re going to touch it, and you’re going to remind yourself that it’s here and it’s real, in the world with us. Because all that a grave will do is remind you that he’s dead. But that machine he made is your reminder that in a way, in the most important way, he’s still alive. And as long as people are working with that machine and thinking of how to build on the ideas that brought that machine into existence, he always will be.

  “So we went to the lab and we went straight up to the security desk and…pretty much told the guards how it was. I said that I was the widow of Philip Steiner and I had come to view my husband’s work. And to be honest the guards looked like they wanted to stop me, but I handed them my ID card, and they ran it, and it checked out. So while Kathryn stayed there and talked to them, I went into the room that held the causality violation device.

  “And okay—I did go inside. I don’t know how long I was in there, but I didn’t go in there intending to, you know, mess anything up, and I was only in there for maybe a minute. But just being in there for a minute made me feel a lot better. This is going to sound a little weird to you, but…being inside it was like being inside his
mind, you know? Like there was this part of him that was always a little walled off, a little inscrutable, even though I was married to him, and here it was. That part of his mind that had always been a secret to me was made real. And once I realized this—once I saw the machine again, and touched it with my hands and knew this in my bones—it was like I’d had these shackles on my ankles and someone had finally cut them off and set me free.

  “I mean, I’m always going to have this shadow on me, I think—what happened to me is a part of my life now. But though it seems strange, I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’ve really come to terms with it. It hurt, it hurt a lot, it still does sometimes, it always will at least a little, but at least I know now that I wouldn’t want to forget what happened, or trade this life for another one that didn’t have Philip in it. Because in the end, I was lucky. I was lucky that Philip came into my life. I was lucky to have gotten to spend the time with—lucky to have been loved by—such a wonderful, brilliant man. And I have a kind of happiness now, a kind of satisfaction, the best I think I’ll be able to come up with.