Version Control

by Dexter Palmer

  “It would be interesting,” said Mr. Cheever, “if in a year or so, the President’s appearance became slightly more…” He paused. “Other. You understand.”

  Felix looked at Gaia, who had suddenly become deeply mesmerized by the conference room’s carpet.

  So that was the game, then, Felix thought later that evening as he sat alone in a booth in the nightclub on the roof of his hotel, watching the crowd of people knocking back weak, brightly colored drinks and grimly insisting on their own happiness. An aura of power once granted could be revoked. The mediation that made a man what he was in the eyes of the people could also unmake him, and there was little he could do about it. If this was managed properly, he wouldn’t even be able to indicate what had altered in the visage of his proxies; perhaps he’d confuse the slow degrading of the computer-generated image with the inevitable decline of his own appearance. Everyone knew that being the president did a number on your looks: you went into the job an Adonis and came out broken, having aged a decade for every term you served.

  Felix didn’t quite get Gaia, he’d decided. Mr. Cheever, he got—that guy was The Man, and didn’t mind if you knew it—but Gaia was more of a puzzle. When he’d first started working on the romantic avatars, Gaia had given him the same talk that Felix later found out she had given Rebecca, about how it was a mistake to confuse people with the data they generated. But she also seemed to think that most people did actually confuse themselves with the data they left behind as they made their way through the world; that the corporations that powered social networks and suggested love matches and generated credit scores tacitly encouraged that deception; and that if you fell for that deception, it was your own fault, and you should have known better. Furthermore, Gaia also seemed to think that it served the greater good of humanity for most people to view themselves as assemblages of quantifiable traits, so that their lives could be better managed by those few who had the power to aggregate huge volumes of data and draw conclusions from it. Gaia seemed to think that access to Big Data automatically made you into some sort of benevolent philosopher-king.

  Was that okay? Maybe it actually was okay, and Felix was just worrying about nothing. Gaia seemed to think it was okay, and she was doing just fine. Mr. Cheever would probably say it was okay, if you asked him.

  The server brought out the bottle of vodka on its tray, right on cue, placing it down just as the bass punched Felix in the chest, the way Mr. Cheever’s voice had. She leaned forward over the table to pour the vodka into a shot glass, giving Felix a generous glimpse of cleavage that was part of the whole ceremony: to him her breasts looked hard and hemispherical, with none of the give of real flesh. He figured they’d feel like stress balls in your hand.

  She stood up and handed him the glass, nearly filled to the brim. “Drinking alone tonight, are we?”

  “Looks like it.” He carefully took the glass from her and sipped.

  “Well, with this booth and a big ol’ bottle, I’m sure a pretty girl will be along soon enough.” She winked and strutted away.

  Felix gulped the vodka, feeling its chill in his throat. He put down the empty shot glass and slouched in the booth, looking out at the crowd. One guy in a black shirt and a skinny leather tie that he must have inherited from his dad was leaning over a woman in a short shimmering sequined dress, gently getting in her personal space, punctuating his sentences with movements of his hands that stopped just short of touching her, backing her up as he spoke until she’d soon be against the wall with nowhere to go. Nearby a group of four thick-necked former frat boys in tight T-shirts were clinking together newly opened bottles of beer, but the bottles were made from plastic that muted the sound of their collision. The men looked like they all went to the same gym together, with hypertrophied upper bodies balanced precariously atop legs like sticks. When they tipped the necks of the bottles to their lips they flexed their arms for each other, as if they were holding dumbbells. Funny how you could tell the difference between a man who worked out by lifting weights after a day in the office and a man whose muscles resulted from a naturally strenuous daily life: the former was bigger, and served as an effective advertisement of one’s ample leisure time, but the latter was more beautiful, lean and ropey, honest in its strength. Real.

  Felix pulled the bottle of liquor to him. He held it over the glass and, with one quick motion, he upended it. He watched the vodka fill the glass, and splash over its sides, and pool on the table, and pour onto the floor. He watched Mr. Cheever’s rounding error waste away, observing the rising bubbles in the bottle that displayed warped, inverted versions of the nightclub scene beyond, attempting to catch the furtive gaze of people who were turning their backs to him and trying not to look.

  34

  QUAIL TROUBLE

  In Rebecca’s dream the skies have been raining quail for seven days, and the town of Stratton is in a state of emergency. The flocks flying overhead are so thick that they block out the light of the sun. Whole coveys of the birds come dive-bombing down at once, snapping their own necks on impact, shattering car windshields and felling pedestrians with concussions. Sometimes the birds hit the ground already plucked and trussed and seasoned, needing only twenty minutes in a hot oven to form the centerpiece of a delicious meal.

  This is YHWH’s fault, of course: Rebecca’s parents have been renting her old room out to the God of the Old Testament, and according to Woody, He is “the worst tenant ever.” At night He goes out into the backyard and becomes a pillar of fire, scorching the lawn and garden, shining His light into the windows of neighbors who are trying to sleep, baking the paneling of the house’s exterior until it blackens and warps. By day He becomes a cloud, and retreats indoors to suffocate the Wrights with His holy miasma. “He just sulks all day, like a big baby, because no one will do what He wants,” Woody complained. “He sulks and He pouts and He pulls these petulant little pranks. Like last week, your mom and I were having a little tiff—she thought I was going to do the grocery shopping; I thought she was—and it turned out that the only thing in the house to eat around dinnertime was a bag of oyster crackers that I think had been sitting in the back of the cupboard since the year before last. We’re having a little argument about this, and YHWH overhears because He listens in on everything going on in the house, and He says, What is wrong with oyster crackers? Oyster crackers are a perfectly adequate source of nutrition for mortals. I say, But what about texture, flavor, color, succulence, surprise, all those things that make a good meal? And He gives me this look, like, Be careful what you wish for, and that’s when the quail start coming down. For the first couple of days it was great, but now this is really starting to wear thin.”

  Rebecca and Woody were sitting in the kitchen having coffee, and as if in riposte to Woody’s grousing, an irregular drumming on the roof signaled that another flock had fallen. “He’s been going on about you, commanding me to send Him my firstborn,” Woody said. “So could you just, you know, go back and talk to Him? And maybe He’ll quit with the quail.”

  Rebecca could see YHWH’s smoke leaking from under her bedroom door when she knocked. The door swung open of its own accord, slamming shut behind her when she entered. When YHWH spoke to you it was like listening to a thousand-dollar pair of headphones whose speakers were slightly out of phase: the words you heard just inside your right ear were far clearer than you’d realized speech could be, and echoed a quarter second later in your left. “All-knowing, all-powerful, all-good,” He said. “The theologians say you must give up one of these if you are to explain the existence of both evil and Myself. But they do not take the longer view; they do not understand My total plan.

  “I am fully cognizant of the present, but I cannot reliably predict the future. Chance is the cancer in Me. Hence My creation of humans, who, given enough time, would invent time travel, therefore gaining the ability to circumvent the deleterious effects of chance on history, and thereby curing that cancer. Time travel would give humanity the ability to alter t
he past and prune the tree of all possible futures of those branches that had been infected by evil; with enough revisions humans would eventually bring about the one version of history that was fully good. Thus would they fulfill their reason for existence; thus would evil be forever eliminated; thus would My omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent nature be made fully manifest for all to see, on Judgment Day, at the end of time.”

  Something changed in YHWH’s voice, some kind of strange downshifting, making it not deeper or louder, but wider and taller; Rebecca put her hand to her ear, felt a wetness, and saw that blood had painted her fingertip when she drew it away. “But I did not account for human selfishness. I did not account for your lack of ambition. I did not account for your inability, your unwillingness, to see the full arc of history. I have spoken to thousands of time travelers, have begged and pleaded with them to rid Me of the randomness that cripples Me, and every last one of them has suffered from the same poverty of imagination. You have the power to change the very shape of My face and you fritter it away. On one little life. On another little life.”

  “But that is what matters,” Rebecca said as she began to tremble and blood ran from both her ears. “One life and another: that’s what matters. You have to understand: history can change people, but people can change history too. Because what is history made up of, if not people’s lives and stories and memories?”

  If she did not exactly know what she had to do when she awoke, she knew how to figure it out, how to begin.

  First, she was going to do something she’d been putting off for years: clean out Philip’s office. There was no point in leaving it as a shrine to the past, or pretending he was coming back after an unusually long time spent in the lab. It was Saturday morning and she was unexpectedly bright-eyed, having decided for some reason not to drink the night before (and it would dawn on her, later in the day, that that weird, lightheaded feeling she had was the absence of her usual slight headache). There was no better time than now to get to work. She needed that space to make the future.

  There was a lot, a lot, of stuff in here. Fortunately, none of it would be too heavy for her to move by herself: there were some pressed-wood bookshelves that could be dragged out once they were emptied of volumes, and a desk that could be moved with Sean’s help as long as she bore most of the weight.

  She sorted things by their appearance, more or less. She filled a Pyrex measuring cup with USB sticks found in various drawers. A rat’s nest of chargers and adapters lay in the bottom of a closet. In a pile she placed several corkscrews of different designs: the kind with two wings that extract the cork from the bottle when you press them down; the slim Swiss-army-knife kind that waiters carry around; a strange one that was made of nothing more than a handle and two thin metal prongs. Each one had a handwritten number taped to it somewhere on the handle; Rebecca had no idea what Philip had intended to do with these, and probably never would.

  A copy of a textbook, Mathematical Methods in the Physical Sciences, had every other page dog-eared: it seemed to hail from Philip’s undergraduate days. On the same shelf was an English-German dictionary; a two-inch-thick paperback titled Canopus in Argos: Archives; an equally long book called Gravity’s Shadow (this appeared to be a mix of physics and sociology, from what Rebecca could tell); and a copy of Ulysses that, Rebecca found, had been inscribed on the flyleaf with a woman’s handwriting: “And I thought well as well him as another. Enjoy: let me know what you think when you’re done. —A.” Its spine had never been cracked.

  More stuff of a life, the enigmatic evidence of abandonment and half-completed thought and thwarted intent. A leaf severed from the stalk of a plastic houseplant, taped to an index card next to a desiccated sample of the plant it was meant to mimic. A credit card, still unsigned. An unopened bag of almonds. An old iPod with a heavily scratched finish and a cracked display. A metal tin that held a half-dozen Earl Grey tea bags, and an open box of Domino brown sugar whose contents had transformed into a single crystalline brick. Three rolls of duct tape in different colors: red, black, and navy blue. In a picture frame, a ticket stub for a Rush concert at Madison Square Garden in 1994 (the price a mere thirty-five dollars). A napkin that had a telephone number in a handwriting that Rebecca didn’t recognize; beneath the number Philip had carefully printed CALL THIS IF SOMETHING WEIRD HAPPENS. A shoebox that held a collection of receipts for hotel rooms: Taipei; Marseille; Darmstadt; Valencia; Kansas City; Birmingham; Paris; Cambridge; Dallas; Leiden.

  All of this went into boxes and garbage bags, which Rebecca ferried piecemeal to a storage facility she rented in North Brunswick. Sean rode along on the trips back and forth: he found something inexplicably pleasurable in the idea of a room that was completely empty, whose primary and only purpose was to hold things, a space full of pure potential. For ten minutes after they first arrived at the storage facility she shut him inside and let him experience the bare space, with its cold cement walls and the single bulb hanging from the ceiling; after that, he seemed disappointed when she began to sully the room with Philip’s possessions. She saw his pouting, and the way he performed his whiny exhaustion after assigning him the lightest of burdens to carry out from the car, and said, “How would you feel if I made a room like that for you at home? If we took everything out of your father’s office and gave that room to you?”

  “That would be awesome,” Sean said, and though Rebecca knew the meaning of that word had been diluted through decades of overuse to something closer to “pleasant” or “agreeable,” she felt that Sean was using it in its ancient, literal sense, and that the idea of his father’s once-forbidden secret space, transformed into a place where he could traipse with impunity, was in fact something that truly inspired awe.

  “What am I supposed to do with it?” he said.

  “I want you to make a new world in it,” Rebecca said. “When the space is ready for you. Give me some time.”

  Even after the week it took to get the office emptied out, it took two more weeks to get the room in the condition that Rebecca wanted. In the meantime she kept Sean out “on pain of death” (pronouncing those last words of warning in a fake Cockney accent that tickled Sean whenever he heard it). Sean was not one to spoil his own surprises, though—fidgety as he could be, he had that peculiar and rare kind of patience, and understood the delicious pleasure of anticipation. When she went into the room and shut the door to work, he respected the boundary just as she had when Philip had been in there, huddled over his desk, working away.

  She painted naked: it was the best way. Skin dealt with stray drops better than fabric, and it was freeing to feel nothing but the motion of her muscles as she drove the roller up and down the wall. The paint was expensive and tricky to apply. It came in two buckets, and you had to dump the contents of the smaller one into the larger; after that you had two hours to get the stuff on the wall before it congealed to a hard hunk of plastic. Then the paint took three days to cure: during that time Rebecca kept the door locked and mysteriously said that it needed to stay that way because “magic was happening.” That drove Sean bonkers. He had trouble sleeping after that.

  Finally, when she got home from work one Wednesday evening, Sean was waiting for her, and the time had come. There was no point in waiting for dinner: he’d be too excited to eat anyway. She went into her bedroom, retrieved two gifts from a drawer where they’d been concealed beneath underwear, and presented them to him: a key attached to a golden ribbon, which she placed around his neck as if it were a medal of honor, and a box of dry-erase markers in a dozen different colors. Then she beckoned him to approach the locked door.

  The room was white, a gleaming white, both walls and floor: Rebecca was proud of how it had turned out. Sean touched a wall, puzzled by its strange slickness and the way it reflected the late-afternoon light from the window.

  “Write on it,” she said.

  He hesitated, perhaps flashing back to toddlerhood chastisements, but she pointed at the box of markers in Sean
’s hand, and then at the wall. “Write on it,” she said again, half inviting, half commanding.

  He selected a marker from the box—its color “Granny Smith.” He removed its cap and sniffed the tip—Rebecca gathered that it was supposed to smell like apples—and then, with some hesitation, wrote his name in his plain, neat script. Then he got it. “It’s a whiteboard! The whole wall is. All the walls are, and the floor is.”

  He wiped his hand through his name and, with a grin, showed Rebecca his palm, dyed green.

  Rebecca dropped to one knee before him. “I made this for you, and this is what I want you to do. First: I gave you this key because this space is yours. No one can come into it that you don’t want to. Including me.”

  Who else at school had a room with its own key that their parents couldn’t go in? No one, that’s who. Sean beamed.

  “I want you to use these markers, and I want you to draw me a new, imaginary world, the world that you want to see the most. Then, when you’re done, I want you to show it to me.”

  He looked at the walls, seeing past their surfaces, looking deep into all their possibilities.

  “I want you to do this alone. I can’t help you do this, and neither can any of your friends.”

  Sean nodded earnestly, though Rebecca could still see a glint of childish glee in his eye. He didn’t have any intention of letting anyone but him mark a single square inch.

  Rebecca stood. “I’m going to make us dinner now,” she said. “This is the last time I’m going to come in here until you ask me to. I’m going to leave you to it.”

  “Thanks, Mom,” Sean said, distracted, looking at the blank wall over her shoulder and not into her eyes. Good.

  She left, shutting the door behind her. A few seconds later she heard the quiet click of the lock.