Version Control

by Dexter Palmer

  Carson had found Alicia a little off-putting at first, a little snappish and cocksure, but over time he’d decided that she was actually really cool. She was smart and self-confident, and on the occasions when she and Carson talked about something besides causality violation, she had a quick wit about her. Once you got used to her she was really great to be around. And, yes, she also had a certain effortless beauty.

  It was hard to say which one of them came on to the other—they probably both remembered it differently. But one evening, around midnight, after they’d gone on a late-night trip to the bar and had their usual nachos and beer—and Alicia had pressed an eye-watering shot of single-barrel bourbon on Carson in addition to the beer this time, since she’d been in a particularly good mood—they were deep in discussion about the CVD that loomed over them in the center of the room, and they’d both felt as close to solving the central problem of getting the device to work as they’d ever been. Carson remembered thinking to himself that he’d wanted that moment to stretch out forever—feeling like they were just on the edge of discovery, the two of them sharing this incipient idea with no one else, the future full of potential. This, right here, was the most exciting that science got—after this, either you failed and went back to the drawing board, or, if your results survived the withering gaze of skeptics, you got your accolades and it was over. If you could just stay right here forever, just on the edge.

  The next thing either of them knew they were rolling over and over on the floor together, trying to swallow each other and push their hands through each other’s flesh. Unlike the times he’d slept with Kathryn, several of which he could remember in fine detail, there was something about this particular encounter that would not let it stick in the memory: he could remember that it happened, and its aftermath (Alicia’s flat “That was quite pleasant”), but nothing more than that.

  Soon after, the whatever-it-was became, if not a regular thing, then something more than a one-off event, at random times of the day. Alicia would note that she was leaving the lab for a few hours, and a half hour or so after that Carson would also leave: he’d drive over to her apartment, they’d spend some time in bed together, and then he’d return to the office. Alicia would come back a half hour later. It was hard to imagine that no one in the lab noticed that Alicia’s and Carson’s absences tended to coincide, trained as they were to search for patterns in data, but no one ever mentioned it. It wasn’t their business, after all.

  Carson never thought about Alicia when he was with Kathryn, since he had gotten into the habit of never talking about his work with her, and Carson only saw Alicia when he was at work. Sometimes he thought about Kathryn when driving back to the office after an impromptu visit to Alicia’s apartment, and it was only then that he indulged in comparison: how Kathryn’s disrobing was usually accompanied by a self-deprecating remark, even though Carson was by now intimately acquainted with her shape and appearance, while Alicia stripped with an efficient indifference born of self-confidence; how Kathryn’s lovemaking was warm and languorous and communicative, while Alicia’s was fierce and mechanical. Sometimes a few minutes after sex she would roll out of bed, open her laptop, and send an e-mail.

  Kathryn didn’t know about Carson’s sort-of, affair he guessed you’d call it, with Alicia, though when he’d brought Kathryn to the lab, before he and Alicia had started sleeping together or whatever, it seemed that Alicia had perhaps gone out of her way to be curt toward her. Kathryn just plain didn’t like her: after her visit to the lab she’d said, “I get that she’s trying to be, like, a strong woman, but that doesn’t mean she has to be mean. She’s so mean. I don’t see how you put up with her every day.” Alicia knew about Kathryn, but she and Carson never talked about her. And presumably, Alicia didn’t much care.

  One night Carson was the last person still in the lab, after even Alicia had gone home: the time was half past midnight. He hadn’t wanted to leave: Alicia had shown him some of the comment code from Philip’s private versions of the software driver for the CVD, and it had given him some ideas about making a routine run a bit more efficiently. And there was that feeling of being close: in the air, all the time now. Everyone felt it, but nobody really wanted to talk about it, out of fear of a jinx.

  The knock on the door didn’t register in Carson’s mind as such until he heard it twice: he said, “Come in,” and Terence entered.

  “Just making the rounds,” Terence said. “You doing okay?”

  “Sure,” Carson said. “No…thieves, or anything.”

  “That’s good,” Terence said. But instead of leaving he edged farther into the room, almost shyly. “How’s the time machine coming?”

  “No idea,” Carson said. “Maybe we’ll be done any second now; maybe not.”

  “You guys are really busting your behinds on this thing.” By now Terence was looking over Carson’s shoulder at his desk.

  “No other choice, really,” Carson said.

  Terence stood there for a moment longer and said, “I got a story for you. You want to hear it?”

  Carson turned to look up at Terence. “Sure,” he said. Alicia would have said the word in a way that made it clear that she resented the interruption, but Carson didn’t have the heart.

  “It’s a good story,” Terence said. “It won’t take much of your time.

  “Okay. My daughter Harlie is in fourth grade. And this is about the age where kids start to hear little bits and pieces about what it’s like to be an adult, but they don’t have the whole picture yet. So they come home repeating things they heard, that they don’t really understand. And whenever Harlie says, ‘Dad, I heard something at school,’ I get this pit in my stomach, because instead of kicking back and relaxing, I might have to have some kind of a talk, about what happens when two men or two women love each other, or a guy thinks he should have been born into a woman’s body, or who knows what else.

  “So I’m talking to Harlie—this is last Saturday afternoon. And she says, ‘I heard a joke at school. Do you want to hear it?’

  “And I said, ‘Sure.’

  “And she said, ‘Okay, here goes. Why do black people like watermelon?’

  “And I thought, Oh no, here it comes. But before I get into it I at least want her to finish the joke. So I said, trying to keep my voice even, you know, like there’s nothing wrong, ‘I don’t know, Harlie. Why do black people like watermelon?’

  “And she gets this big smile on her face and says, ‘Because it has a good flavor and it’ll cool you off on a hot summer day!’

  “And she looks at me confused, and then she laughs—ha-ha—to let me know she said the punch line, so now it’s time for me to laugh, too.

  “And I look at her. And I say, ‘Harlie. Be honest now. Do you even understand that joke you just told? Do you even get why that’s a joke?’

  “And she kind of cocks her head sideways, and she says, ‘No?’

  “And I have to tell you. Maybe I shouldn’t have been. But I was so relieved.”

  27

  WEAKNESS LEAVING

  Sundays in Rebecca’s and Sean’s household tended to be days of indulgence. First there’d be breakfast of Belgian waffles and strawberries, perhaps with a little scoop of vanilla ice cream on the side. Then in the early afternoon Rebecca would drop Sean off at the multiplex for a double-feature matinee, while she got four or five hours of alone time. Sean selected the films himself, though Rebecca forbade him to see anything with too much sex or violence. Still, though, he picked movies that someone his age should have had zero interest in—comedies about rich, lonely old men having their lives redeemed by perky, quirky women half their age; turgid tales of couples who lived in improbably spacious Brooklyn brownstones and who were forced to come to terms with their inherently adulterous natures. When Rebecca asked him about it she found that his choices were largely determined by the picture’s director of photography: it seemed that he was purely interested in the interplay of color and light, finding performance an
d narrative irrelevant to his pleasure. (And indeed, on a few nights, Rebecca had entered his bedroom to find that he’d fallen asleep while a clip from a late-period Terrence Malick movie looped on his tablet, the screen showing a woman in a long cotton dress spinning in a wheat field like some kind of midwestern whirling dervish.)

  He liked to sneak into movies, too: he’d time his picks so that he could leave at the end of one movie in time to get to the next before it started. It was a quaint, twentieth-century crime, and Rebecca opted to let it go: at least he was paying to get into the first movie, and he knew he was stealing something of value, rather than indiscriminately pirating flicks by the hundreds, hoarding them on a hard drive, and making specious arguments about how information wanted to be free. He’d grow out of it.

  And so on this particular Sunday, Rebecca dropped her son off at the theater, returned home, and had a light lunch (a prepackaged dish of mattar paneer from Trader Joe’s along with a bottle of Rolling Rock: taking it easy with the booze for a little while). Then she changed into her running clothes and drove down to the towpath in nearby Princeton to meet Alicia: she’d agreed to go on a run with her when they’d talked a few days ago. Alicia had suggested an “easy” six miles, but once she got out on the road she had a habit of willfully underestimating distances, so eight or ten was more likely. Rebecca was not looking forward to it: two days after her out-of-control binge in New York she was still feeling the effects, and though she hoped that some vigorous exercise would help her sweat the last remnants of the toxins out of her body, she had a feeling that if she didn’t perform up to her usual standard, Alicia would sense her weakness and quietly—or perhaps not so quietly—judge her.

  Alicia was lazily jogging in place when Rebecca pulled into the makeshift gravel-covered parking lot that let onto the towpath: her bike was locked up in a nearby rack. (Alicia’s apartment was about four miles away: the ride over must have been her warm-up.) “Come on,” she said with an odd impatience as soon as Rebecca got out of the car. “I already stretched. You stretch; let’s go.”

  A few minutes later they were running beside each other down the towpath that ran alongside the Delaware and Raritan Canal, looking down on nuclear families in dingy life jackets who were attempting to steer canoes that insisted on fishtailing. A storm-felled tree jutted out from the shore into the water, and several turtles with tufts of moss on their shells had climbed out onto it to take in the early-morning heat. A portly, shirtless middle-aged man whose chest had been fried lobster-red by the sun sat in a kayak that drifted down the river, pulling at a joint as he thumbed out a message on the phone in his other hand.

  Rebecca was already beginning to feel the ghost of a stitch in her side: a bad sign, this early on. And she felt like Goofus to Alicia’s Gallant: Alicia was setting pace as she chattered away, and the four strides that Rebecca generally needed to match five of Alicia’s did not offer much of an advantage. But Alicia seemed like she had a lot on her mind and was happy to talk: perhaps she wouldn’t notice that Rebecca was already flagging, ever so slightly. (It seemed to Rebecca that Alicia saw these regular towpath endeavors as opportunities for long, uninterrupted conversation. Alicia wasn’t the kind of person who’d just sit and chat for a while. She was happy to talk if talking could take place during some other ostensibly self-improving endeavor, or she’d go out for coffee with a colleague to, as she said, “acquire social capital,” but booking a spot on her calendar solely to shoot the shit with a girlfriend over a couple of beers was, in Alicia’s view, not the best use of her time. Rebecca had tried to get her to be a partner in crime on a girls’ night out—cute skirts and dinner and drinks in strange colors—but her proposal had been greeted with a flat exasperated no.)

  “I went to this junior high school in Hopewell to give a talk the other day,” Alicia said. “The general science teacher had asked someone from our lab to come out and talk to the kids about our work, to get them interested in science. And I have the best social skills out of anyone in the lab, so the duty fell to me. By the way, it helps a lot if you change the modulation of your voice when you talk to children that age. Not singsongy baby talk—they find that patronizing—but something subtler. Their ears perk up when they hear voices that aren’t just a monotone. I bet you could do an interesting study about whether teachers whose voices vary significantly in pitch produce students with superior understanding and information retention. Interesting, but off-topic. I prepared an accessible talk for these kids about how gravity and time are related: nothing too complicated. And here’s what ticks me off. After the talk I left some time for questions. And a bunch of hands shot up, which is what you’d expect. But all boys! Every one! And they were really eager, too. They weren’t asking questions that were going to advance the field—even the smartest one of them was still just thirteen—but they were the kinds of questions that showed they were thinking about what I said and considering its potential implications. The kinds of questions that lead to doing good science. But the girls are not saying a thing! I’m answering questions from these boys left and right—and their hands keep shooting up, and they’re almost about to jump out of their chairs—and the girls are just sitting there. Hands in their laps, looking at the floor. So finally when the Q-and-A dies down there are a couple of minutes left, and the teacher says”—here Alicia’s usually smoky voice went high and mincing and full of up-speak—“Maybe you could talk for a little bit about what it’s like to be a woman in science? For the girls? And I just got so sad. What the hell am I supposed to say? When I’m doing science my gender isn’t interesting to me; the science I’m doing is interesting. And okay. There was a past when women in science were anomalies, but that was a dark and ridiculous time. We live in the future now! Can we just agree that I can talk about gravitation without having to point out the existence of my vagina before I begin? It’s all so trivial. I halfway feel like I wasted my time going out there. I could have spent that time in the lab. We could have sent the possessor of a penis out there to handle the PR while I got some serious work done.”

  “I’m sure everyone involved meant well,” Rebecca said. “It’s not like the teacher wasn’t on your side. She was trying to help.”

  “Everyone always means well!” said Alicia. “Everyone’s always on my side!”

  They jogged on in silence for a mile or more, Rebecca finding it increasingly difficult to stifle her rasps. “Can I give you some advice?” Alicia said.

  “S—sure,” Rebecca replied, wincing as she wheezed.

  “A smoothie,” Alicia said, “about thirty to forty-five minutes before a run. An insect smoothie. Not too heavy. A cricket powder base, for the protein. Add banana; mango; papaya; coconut water, or almond milk in a pinch. Throw all that in a blender with some ice. Drink it and you’re good to go.”

  “Sounds good, but, see…crickets. No. I know they’re ground into powder or whatever, but…not eating anything with six legs.”

  “You need to get over that,” Alicia said. “Crickets are a fantastic food. Sustainable; inexpensive; full of vitamins and amino acids. The chicken of the entomophagy world: tasty and versatile. This is far enough: let’s turn around here.”

  Rebecca’s relief that more of the run was now behind them than ahead of them was muted by the slow realization that there was a slight upgrade all the way from this point on the towpath back to the car.

  “I have something to tell you,” Alicia said as the second half of the run began. “About that software I copied from Philip’s laptop. This will matter to you. Listen.”

  Rebecca listened.

  “Philip always wrote a lot of comment code, which is why I wanted to look at the versions of the CVD software he’d stored privately. But when I examined it I wasn’t prepared for how much comment code there would be: several paragraphs of commentary following a single line of code, sometimes. And I wasn’t expecting the comment code to…digress, in the way that it does. Not all of his comments are about the code they follow. I
n some versions of the software, almost none of them are.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The reason that some versions of the software were absent from our central repository was because Philip had been using them as a kind of private diary. In the comments he talks about himself. He talks about the past, spending a significant amount of time addressing events that occurred in the year 1996. He talks about feelings he experienced and actions that he took. He mentions you. He says a number of things about you.”

  “Alicia!” A sudden jolt of adrenaline gave Rebecca a second wind.

  “After thinking about it, I decided that it was right, and necessary, to share all of this with you. I’ll e-mail you the material in a couple of days. I want to extract the comment code from the rest of the program to make it readable for you, so that paragraphs of English aren’t interrupted by blocks of Python.”

  “Alicia, I really appreciate you letting me know about this. And…I…I guess I’m really curious to know what he said. I mean, he wasn’t the kind of person who’d openly talk about his feelings. You just kind of had to infer them. I…what I guess you’d call his silence on certain matters is something I had to learn to accept.”

  Alicia took a few moments to weigh her words carefully. “I’m not editing it,” she said, “other than taking out the code. That was what I had to decide: either to give you all of what he said or none of it. It wasn’t an easy choice. Don’t read it at a time when you’re feeling fragile. You’ll want to prepare.”

  “Come on, Rebecca, get it in gear,” Alicia said a little later as she began to pull ahead. “Pain is weakness leaving the body. I’ve got to bike back to my place after this run while your car ferries you home! You can do this. I’ve been sleeping with Carson, on and off, the guy your friend is dating. What’s-her-name. Katie? Kathryn.”