Version Control

by Dexter Palmer

  Each bottle of vodka tacked on three hundred dollars to Felix’s tab. Felix figured that the materials needed to make the liquor cost less than the bottle that contained it. He could have picked up the same bottle for forty bucks in a wine-and-spirits shop on 67th and gotten drunk in his room, but it was the principle of the thing. The money was there, it wasn’t his, and it asked to be wasted.

  Felix was also getting a crazy amount of overtime pay, on top of bonus after bonus—so much money was pouring into his bank account that he didn’t mind working what had now become a fourteen-hour day. Truth be told, he would have worked on this for free. His second shift involved really challenging work, the kind of stuff that gave you a sense of real satisfaction: not just grunt coding. And every night he got to hang out with the President of the United States.

  Around seven thirty, after everyone else had left the office, Felix shut down his computer and headed toward the entrance to the service elevator at the rear of the building. As usual, Gaia Williams was waiting for him there—even with this hotshot clearance rating there were still some places he wasn’t allowed to be by himself. Gaia always looked as she did in videos online: she seemed immune to the tiny degradations of appearance that were the usual side effect of a day’s office labor. Standing next to her at this late time of day Felix felt a little unhandsome, wishing he could shave his five o’clock shadow, embarrassed by the turmeric stain on his cuff left by the chicken tikka masala he’d had for lunch.

  Felix and Gaia entered the service elevator, and as its door lumbered shut Gaia pulled at a slender golden chain that hung around her neck and disappeared beneath her blouse. When she lifted the chain over her head, Felix could see that attached to it was a thin brass rod, about four inches long. It looked like something you’d use for lock picking, but there was definitely some crazy tech going on in it: Felix had watched her do her thing with it a dozen times and never figured out how it worked.

  From her tiny little purse Gaia pulled a plastic pill sorter, each of its seven compartments labeled with the first letter of one of the days of the week. “What day is it?”

  “Monday,” Felix said.

  Gaia opened the compartment labeled M. “The days blend together for me,” she said. “You’d better be right. If it’s Wednesday you’re getting my doctor’s bill. Joke.” In the compartment was a white pill, the size and texture of a jellybean; Gaia popped it into her mouth, chewed vigorously (the only time during the day she ever looked unladylike, Felix thought), and swallowed. Then she held the brass rod on its chain in front of her face, pursed her lips, and blew on it.

  After a couple of seconds the rod began to quiver and change its shape, extruding an irregular series of notches, becoming a key. Nanotech that reacted to molecules carried along on her breath? Plain magic? Who knew?

  She slid the key into a slot on the elevator’s panel, wiggled it a little to settle it in the lock’s tumblers, and turned it. Gaia and Felix began to descend.

  Gaia usually liked to talk as the service elevator made its slow creaking trip downward. Felix thought it best just to listen. After work, during the second shift, she went into what Felix thought of as her “O’Brien the Party Leader” mode, and someone who felt comfortable doing that was probably someone who could utterly screw up your life on a whim, even if she presented during the day as nothing more than the CEO of a company that ran a dating site. Plus there was that weird key, and the indifferent ease she had with it, both of which implied rarefied social circles and badass friends.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Gaia said, in a manner that implied that she was about to tell you what you yourself should also think, if you knew what was good for you. “The greatest corporate coup of the twentieth century was not the decision of the federal government to treat corporations as persons, but the success of corporations in convincing the people to confuse their real identities with the shadow personalities that exist on our servers, the versions of their selves that we control. That slight abdication of individual selfhood had an immense benefit to humanity as a whole, at little cost. The acknowledgment of corporate personhood will, by future historians, be seen as an acknowledgment of the ultimate trajectory of human evolution.”

  From her purse she took an energy bar, nuts and grains glued together with sugar; unwrapping it, she took a thoughtful bite. “That whole self-reliance, great-man, one-person-can-change-history thinking: that made sense in a time when you could go out into the wilderness and not see anyone for days if you didn’t want to. But now? There are just too many people on earth. There is not enough will to power to go around to allow everyone to have a full share. But that’s not a catastrophe! That’s not a bad thing! We have the technological tools necessary to allow the people to consolidate and aggregate their selves, to act with a will to power greater than any one person could ever have alone. The trade for that is the designers of these tools can use them to shape the public’s perception of the world. Our cameras replace their eyes; our screens replace their windows.

  “And that’s a fair trade. Eminently fair.”

  The elevator’s car came to a jolting halt, and its door trundled open.

  In this central underground chamber, always a little cold, always a little damp, hundreds of people sat before computer consoles, wearing motion-tracking helmets that were stuffed with electronics, all their collective voices changed into a single man’s polyphony as they worked together to dream the President into being. They wore turtleneck sweaters to insulate themselves against the chill. They worked six-hour shifts, reading the missives that came before them that were written either by humans or by artificial intelligences: one could never be sure. Felix had been told that this chamber was one of twelve that were scattered throughout the United States, each placed in an area where its online connection would have the lowest latency, which meant that in addition to the AI routines that handled basic scripted conversations, close to two thousand people were performing the President at any given time, day or night.

  No one who worked on Lovability’s romantic avatars ever seemed to wonder why a mere dating service would have access to such cutting-edge technology; Felix supposed they told themselves that online matchmaking was so important and profitable that such expenditures were merited and deserved. But Lovability’s parent company had partnered with DAPAS years ago to develop that technology: the devices that Felix and Rebecca used upside were basically discarded prototypes. The best programmer wouldn’t be able to create an avatar with them that could withstand close scrutiny for more than twenty minutes. But down here they were using next-next-gen stuff: rumor had it that even the flesh-and-blood man who sat in the Oval Office had mistaken a recording of a presidential avatar for one of his own past public appearances.

  When he had time, Felix liked to wander among the desks and listen to the performers, their voices, male or female, high or low, clear as a bell or tinged with a smoker’s rasp, all transformed into the President’s peculiar sonorous cadence, their motions of face and hands mapped onto his computer-generated body. He appeared to every state and city and person; to each he was the man they wished to see, and spoke the words they wished to hear. The opening of this warehouse will bring three hundred jobs to the great state of Wisconsin. I like just a little bit of caramel added to my hot chocolate myself: that makes it into a real treat. If the spirit of the ruler rise up against thee, leave not thy place; for yielding pacifieth great offenses. Within five years, a decrease in capital gains taxes will sharply increase revenue in the great state of California. Before you go through with this abortion, and it’s certainly your right to do so, I want to ask if you’ve considered bringing the child to term and giving him up for adoption: I know of a family who is seeking a child with a genetic profile similar to that of your unborn son. Within five years, an increase in capital gains taxes will sharply increase revenue in the great state of Vermont. One of the secrets to a happy marriage is a regular date night: hire a babysitter and hit the town for dinner
and a movie. It’s good for you, and it’s good for the economy. I have some excellent news for you: I’ve spoken to your loan officer and he’s agreed to lower the interest rate on your mortgage by a quarter percent. It was the least I could do.

  But with Gaia Williams in the lead, there was no opportunity to linger and eavesdrop, to listen to the true voice of America: she strode past row after row of desks, munching on her energy bar, while Felix tried to keep up without breaking into a jog. “The irrational twentieth-century fear of the hive mind, of our thoughts and behaviors being assisted and augmented by artificial intelligence—that’s something Americans have largely gotten over now, except for the crazies. Think about it, Felix. If you’d told my grandmother that the duties of what we now call the President of the United States are largely performed by computers, she would have wrung her hands and bemoaned the decline of the nation, the shirking of our civic duties, etcetera. But we implemented exactly that, step by step, and no one cares. And it’s not like people don’t know: common sense should tell you that the leader of the free world has better things to do with his time than join a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a strip mall’s Chinese buffet via webcam. People know, but they don’t care, because it’s nothing to worry about. AI helps. The President can now have a personal presence in the day-to-day life of the average American that he could never have had fifty years ago. And bills that have grown to thousands of pages of impenetrable legalese are now being read and analyzed by AI routines that make recommendations on whether to vote for or against, based on the preferences of a given congressman’s constituency. Politicians are professional chair-warmers at this point.” She laughed: a quick harsh bark.

  With that strange, special key she unlocked the door to a conference room and ushered Felix inside. “He’s late,” Gaia said, with the pique that came from realizing that the person they were due to meet was one whose lateness would have to be tolerated. The room was empty except for a long cherrywood table that could seat about twenty. Some minion had left a tray that held a crystal pitcher of ice water and three glasses, along with a platter of four slightly stinky sandwiches: Felix smelled tuna and mayonnaise.

  Gaia sat down. “Why don’t you pour yourself a drink,” she commanded, and as Felix poured her a drink she continued, “We are now well on our way to becoming a classless society. These will be the classes in the classless society. There will be the very small group of people like us, here at this table, who control the screens and the tablets and the phones and the monitor shades that people use to view and manipulate their world. Then there will be the normals, everyone else, who’ve ceded a fragment of their will to power to us in order to serve the greater good, who have volunteered to see themselves in terms of the data they generate because it is in their best interest. And if you are one of the normals who has a problem with that—well, you can go into the woods and sing a song of yourself, if you can find any woods—”

  The conference room’s door swung open, to Felix’s relief: he was not looking forward to more of that. “Sorry I’m late,” the man said as he entered. “I had next week’s key pills with me instead of this week’s: stupid mistake. Had to get a cab to take me back to the hotel so I could switch them out.”

  Gaia rose and turned to greet the newcomer. “Mr. Cheever,” she said warmly, clasping his hand.

  Mr. Cheever seemed a little struck this time by the people performing the President in the hall outside, even though he had seen them several times before—had been the person who’d first shown them to Felix, in fact. “Yesterday was—would have been—my aunt Lucy’s birthday,” he said, seating himself as Gaia motioned to Felix with a desultory flick of a finger; repressing a sigh, Felix got up to pour another glass of ice water. “She was Army,” Mr. Cheever continued. “Killed in Afghanistan when the jeep she was driving ran over an IED. When my mother—her sister—found out, I thought she was going to run out of tears and start crying blood. Sometime after the funeral—Aunt Lucy’s at Arlington now—my mother comes to me and hands me this piece of paper, a certificate. It’s from the Department of Veterans Affairs. Honoring the memory of; grateful service to the nation; etcetera. And it’s signed, by Barack Obama. And being young, you know, I imagined that even if someone had put a stack of these things on his desk and he signed them without reading them, then at least he signed them.

  “But then my mother showed me a sheaf of five of them, and an order form that would let us get as many as we wanted—one hundred, two hundred—for free. They were signed by a machine, you see: it could mimic the movement of the President’s hand. The technology had been around for two centuries: Thomas Jefferson had even used a much more primitive version. But somehow, knowing this did not matter. The certificate did not seem cheap, or fraudulent, because of this. It still had its aura of honor and fame. Strange. But also wonderful.”

  “Felix,” Mr. Cheever said. “To business. We love your work. I want to say that right off the bat. Very impressive.”

  “Thank you.” For the past few months he’d been working on avatars for the most viable candidates in the upcoming presidential election, which was still over a year away. That might have seemed like a long time, but when the new president came into office, the transition between avatars had to be instant and seamless, and the animation quality of the new one had to be just as good as that for the outgoing chief executive. And the presidential avatars needed to be convincing for hours at a time, in high definition, and their movements needed to be so lifelike that they could convince you to suspend your disbelief without making you acknowledge that you were being asked to do so. There could be no public beta test: the launch had to go perfectly, which meant many months of prior planning. And since there was no way of accurately predicting the election this far out, the best course of action was to start work on the avatars of the two or three candidates most likely to win, and hope that your luck held.

  Lately Felix had been assigned to develop the avatar of a moderate midwestern governor, and he liked the guy in spite of himself—you couldn’t help but become at least a little intimate with a man after you glued motion-capture dots to his face a few times. Though there were points on which they strongly disagreed—civil liberties; immigration; the proper alcohol content of beer—he seemed like he could at least be reasoned with. Felix’s guess was that the guy didn’t have much of a chance, and even though the candidates wouldn’t get to use the avatars that were being worked up unless they actually got elected and the federal government licensed their likenesses, Felix had tried to help him out a little, giving his weak chin slightly less of a slope and diminishing the scars that had been left behind by a bout of teenage acne.

  “You’ve got a real craft,” Mr. Cheever said. “I’ve seen the before and afters, when you come in to do that polish on the early work of others. Before, the avatars are dead ringers for their sources, but after…well, I’d actually be hard put to point at exactly what you do to change them, but…they look less realistic, but more real. Which is why I want to loop you in on something.”

  “He’s very good at what he does,” Gaia said, and Mr. Cheever shot her a glare that seemed borderline hateful. Felix got the impression that just as Gaia viewed him as a person who was good for pouring water, Mr. Cheever viewed Gaia as a person who was good for carrying keys, and nothing more.

  “We have been running simulations,” Mr. Cheever said, turning his attention back to Felix. “We have been predicting possible futures, based on which of the most promising candidates wins the upcoming election, whether they adhere to their currently stated policy positions, whether the composition of the legislative branch of the government changes significantly, and whether the newly elected president is able to work effectively with the legislative branch to enact the policies he champions. I will spare you the details, but…if the current president gets another term, it does not look good for…us.” Mr. Cheever let that last word hang in the air, leaving Felix uncertain whether he was referring to the nation, or
to his employers; perhaps Mr. Cheever saw them as one and the same.

  Mr. Cheever got up from his seat, walked over to the plate-glass window through which he could see the pilots of the presidential avatars, and stood there with his hands clasped behind him. “I would not want you to defame or betray your country in any way,” he said, and to Felix his voice seemed to come out of the ceiling: he thought it was just him who had that idea at first, but then he saw Gaia look upward in startled confusion, and try to play it off by swatting before her face as if some kind of a bug were hovering around her. More weird tech that looked like magic tricks or sleight of hand. It’d be nice to have this in conference rooms, though, whatever it was.

  “I want to put you in charge of day-to-day maintenance of the current president’s avatar,” Mr. Cheever said through his thrown voice. “You won’t be able to work with him firsthand, I’m afraid, though we’ll provide you with a daily supply of candid reference photographs.”

  “This is a real honor,” Gaia said to Felix, as if he were not aware. Mr. Cheever continued to stare out the window. Five of the avatar pilots outside raised their arms in the air, as if they were in a roller coaster car that was heading down its first steep drop. That would be the President’s daily fitness program for wheelchair users: Felix’s grandfather watched it religiously.

  “It would be interesting,” Mr. Cheever said (and now Felix had the strange feeling that Mr. Cheever’s voice was coming from inside his own chest, as if Felix himself were speaking with it), “if the President, in the next couple of months, were to begin to appear…not entirely in the pink. Skin a little ashen; posture starting to droop.”

  “That would be interesting,” Felix said cautiously, resisting an urge to put his hand to his stomach, as if Mr. Cheever’s voice were causing him indigestion.