Version Control

by Dexter Palmer

  “There was this way. She and him. When they stood next to each other. I mean. You know how you see a woman and a guy around each other sometimes, at a party, just talking, and from out of nowhere this question pops in your head: Are they banging? And it’s just a question, but the fact that you thought to ask the question means the answer is probably yes? Maybe I’m wrong about it, I don’t know, but I got that feeling a couple of times when I saw them together. You know: Are they banging?”

  Kathryn sat back in her chair and slumped. “And the embarrassing thing about it is that if it were true then everyone would know. Everyone in the lab would have known, or guessed, that something was going on, and they just would have not said anything, would have looked at me and said not a single word, would have stayed out of it like a bunch of bystanders.”

  “That’s a little paranoid, don’t you think? Even if that were happening, it’s not like these people were colluding against you or something. Besides, you can’t expect someone you don’t know to just walk up to you and say hey, guess what—”

  “Did you know?”

  Rebecca paused. “Did I what?”

  “You heard me. Did you know. Because you and Alicia are pretty tight, going on runs and all that. Did she tell you and did you not tell me? Because—”

  “Kathryn! I—”

  “Because it was something you thought I’d be better off not knowing? Because—”

  “Kathryn. Kathryn.” Rebecca gently pried Kathryn’s hand away from her empty glass and clasped it in her own. “How close have we been, for how long? You know I wouldn’t pull something like that. If I’d found out anything like that was going on, I would have let you know. Without hesitation. You have to believe that.”

  Not meeting Rebecca’s gaze, Kathryn nodded. She tried to pull her hand away, but Rebecca tightened her grip. “Kate. Look at me.”

  Kathryn raised her head, a tear sliding down her face.

  “Do you believe me?” Rebecca said.

  She gripped Kathryn’s hand harder still.

  “I said: do you believe me?”

  “I believe you,” said Kathryn.

  “Okay,” said Rebecca, letting her go.

  36

  FIRST DATE

  Wasn’t it all moot, at this point? If this was in fact history’s mere rough draft, why bother to do what Rebecca was doing instead of, say, spending her afternoon at the Steven Soderbergh retrospective going on at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, or marching into Gaia Williams’s office without an appointment to tell her off, or mooning strangers in front of the Metropolitan Opera House? And yet there was still something pleasurable about even an ephemeral act of altruism, a little ego boost that you couldn’t get from hedonism or rank self-interest. Plus, if her ambition was to change the world for the better, there was no harm in a little practice.

  She was sitting at a tiny table in the Alice Tully Hall cafeteria, with a tiny cup of espresso in front of her along with an equally petite biscotti. She’d sat down three minutes after noon. Catalina, whom she had to stop thinking of as the “mark,” was two tables away from her. She was pretty: no, handsome was a better word, meant in the old twentieth-century way used to describe women who’d traded the beauty of youth for another. Her hair was shorn close to the scalp, with a slight reddish tint to it, the sort of sexily androgynous look you could carry off if you were blessed with a nicely shaped head and the courage to reveal it; gold-framed eyeglasses matched simple gold earrings and a gold necklace. She was draped in bright swaths of bold autumnal colors, and was reading a book, a printed book: The Guns of August, by Barbara Tuchman. She stared at the volume intently, turning the pages with appreciable speed; her eyes stayed fixed to the words as she ate the salad in front of her and drank her sparkling white wine. She did not have the half-attentive look of a woman who was waiting for a date, whose existence she would not fully accept until he appeared in the flesh before her; she was not glancing up from the book at the end of every paragraph in naked expectation. She had the sort of easy solitude in public that men often mistook for longtime loneliness. Rebecca would not have been surprised if some guy approached her and tried to use Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination as a pretext to sit down and join her. It almost seemed a shame to interrupt.

  Rebecca collected her possessions—the half-finished espresso with the biscotti balanced on its saucer; her purse slung over a shoulder; the manila envelope she’d prepared, which was full of very interesting documents—and walked over to Catalina’s table. “Excuse me?” she said, her voice sounding high and thin in her own ears, not rich and sonorous, not Marcus-like.

  Catalina did not look up.

  “Excuse me?” Rebecca said again, but Catalina’s attention appeared to be focused intently on Clausewitz’s ideas about the use of terror in war.

  “Catalina?” Rebecca said, and this finally got her attention, her eyes first looking up at Rebecca over her glasses, then her head following. “Yes.” The way she pronounced the word reminded Rebecca unexpectedly of the way Philip had acted when you interrupted him, of the manner in which he treated his time as one of the world’s rarest and most valuable resources, which it would not do for you to waste away.

  “I’m Rebecca. Rebecca Wright. From Lovability.” She thought to offer a hand, but her hands were already full, with the coffee and the biscotti and the manila envelope. “The website. Lovability. I work there.”

  “Really.”

  The biscotti slid off Rebecca’s saucer and fell to the floor.

  Rebecca placed her espresso on Catalina’s table—she had to nudge her plate of salad slightly to do this, which Catalina observed with an eyebrow cocked in incredulity—pulled out the extra chair at the table, and seated herself. The table was too tiny for the envelope, so she kept it clutched in her hands. Then she realized that she’d left her coat hanging at the other table. “Excuse me,” she said, lifting a finger; then she got up again, retrieved the coat, and hung it over the back of the chair at Catalina’s table. Then she sat down again.

  Catalina’s brow furrowed. “Are you sitting down?”

  “I have something important to tell you,” said Rebecca.

  “I have a question, first.”

  “Oh geez you must have lots of questions—”

  “How. In the hell. Did you know. I was here.”

  “Okay, this is going to sound really crazy to you, but—”

  “Excuse me, ma’am.”

  Rebecca turned to see a server standing above her with a slight, solicitous bow. On his outstretched hand lay a napkin; on the napkin lay an almond biscotti.

  “I saw that you dropped yours,” he said. “This is a fresh one.”

  “Thank you.” She took the napkin from him and placed it on the table.

  “Would you like me to transfer your tab to this table?”

  “Yes, that’d be fine.”

  “Please go away,” Catalina said, and though Rebecca was unsure whom she was speaking to, herself or the server, she had committed to a course of action, and was resolved to stick it out.

  “Ma’am,” the server said, retreating.

  Rebecca turned back to Catalina. “Anyway. Okay. You’re supposed to meet a guy here. Marcus. He was supposed to show up at twelve o’clock. Right?”

  “You sound like you’ve been snooping. This is frankly unbelievable—”

  “Okay. Here we go. I told you this is crazy. I’m Marcus. Me.”

  Slowly, Catalina placed a bookmark in The Guns of August, closed the book, and placed it in her lap. She took a moment to look through the brightly lit windows of the hall, letting the noonday sun shine on her face; then she looked at Rebecca.

  “I expect people on dating sites to lie a little,” she said. “But damn.”

  “I know, right?” Rebecca suddenly found herself feeling a pint of blood short.

  “You are not making sense to me, Rebecca. You need to start making sense.”

  “Okay! So here it is.” She held up
the envelope before her. “Some of the people you see on Lovability…aren’t actually real. They’re computer simulations. We control them with these motion-capture rigs. So I sit in front of a camera, with this helmet on, and when I move Marcus copies the move, and whenever I say something Marcus says the same thing, in his voice.”

  “Imagine that.”

  “We do it because we want everybody to have a positive experience with—”

  “Be quiet for a second,” said Catalina, and Rebecca decided to be quiet.

  Rebecca watched Catalina eat a few more bites of her salad and drink some more of her wine, with the same solitary ease she’d had before Rebecca came over. It was not as if Catalina were deliberately attempting to give her the silent treatment—nothing as malicious as that—but that Catalina had decided to find her uninteresting for a moment. She was not particularly enamored of the idea that her existence, at least temporarily, depended on Catalina’s acknowledgment of it. But she waited, feeling her own invisibility.

  “You know,” Catalina said eventually, “I had it in the back of my head that there was something weird about that guy. I was on the phone with my girlfriend and I told her the night before: I’ve been talking to this guy on the Internet and he seemed like he might be a catch except, one, he keeps trying to string me along like he’s afraid to meet me in public, and two, everything he talks about is blackety blackety black. And okay, the Internet does that to people. They can’t squeeze every little bit of their personalities through those thin little cables that connect computers together, so they end up acting out their authenticity to try to let strangers know they’re real. Being what they think black people are supposed to be, what white people are supposed to be, what women are supposed to be, what gays are supposed to be, what the President is supposed to be. This guy, he’s going overboard: everything out of his mouth is P-Funk or Paul Robeson or The Conjure-Man Dies. A guy like that, I was sure that once I got him out from behind that computer and in front of me, after a couple of drinks the next thing you knew he’d be in a karaoke bar singing ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’ or something.”

  “We use Wikipedia a lot. To work up the profiles of the romantic avatars. They’re all experts in one thing or another. I’ve learned a lot, driving them. I have to know enough to give the impression that the avatar knows more than he can talk about in ten minutes.”

  “Avatars, you call them,” said Catalina.

  “Yeah.”

  “Driving, you call it. Like a truck.”

  “Yeah.”

  Catalina returned to her salad, and Rebecca felt herself vanish again. The salad looked pretty good—arugula, cherry tomatoes, and prosciutto, lightly dressed with olive oil—and Rebecca made a mental note to come back and try it here, before realizing she probably didn’t need to make that note.

  “What’s the point?” Catalina said, her voice granting back to Rebecca her provisional existence. “It seems like so much work to do this. That’s not just typing: that’s special-effects stuff.”

  “We had it lying around? Lovability is one arm of this huge, huge company, and all the arms just kind of share resources sometimes. But any more than that is beyond my pay grade, so to speak.”

  “Hm.”

  “I came here to apologize, I guess. Not for the company: just for me. You’re not the only person we did this to. I’ve driven about six of these avatars. White, black, Asian, male, female. All different.”

  “Very…diverse.”

  “Yeah!” Rebecca said. “Look. I want to show you something.” She opened the manila envelope, extracted its contents, and placed them on the table in front of Catalina. They were printouts, some in color, some in black-and-white: profile photos of Lovability customers, and next to them the avatars that had been assigned to them. Somehow the still images of the avatars had an unsettling, uncanny-valley effect that disappeared when they were in motion: here you could see their doll-eyed, unearthly perfection more clearly. Columns of data dangled beneath the photos: period of membership; average time of a visit to the site; number of profiles viewed; price if a company wanted to acquire the profile’s data or place a targeted ad on the member’s page.

  Catalina leafed through the printouts until she saw the page that featured her own profile next to Marcus’s. She lifted it before her so that Rebecca could not see her. “I’m expensive,” she said.

  “It’s because people like you, in your particular demographic, I mean, are hard to reach reliably, hard to get solid information about, and the company, we leverage that. They leverage that.”

  Catalina lowered the paper and put it back on the stack.

  “You must feel really humiliated,” Rebecca said. “I’d understand if—”

  Catalina threw back her head and laughed, her merry chuckle echoing in the high-ceilinged hall. “Oh goodness. Oh goodness no. Humiliated. What a strong word.”

  Rebecca disappeared again for a few moments as Catalina finished off her glass of wine. Attempting to relax into her own invisibility again, she let her gaze fall on the documents that were supposed to blow the lid off this whole thing, but in which Catalina apparently had very little interest.

  Catalina looked at Rebecca and tapped the paper before her. “This is not me. This is a picture of me and some numbers. You pretended to be a picture and a bunch of numbers so you could run a game on another picture and another bunch of numbers. Aren’t you embarrassed?”

  “Hey, hold on a second—”

  “The only way I would be ‘humiliated,’ as you say, is if I did not believe I was actually real. Do you believe you are real and alive? Here in the world, sitting here? Able to be more than a bunch of ones and zeroes? It doesn’t sound like it. If you would think that I would be humiliated so easily.”

  “Now hold on a second, you’re being totally unfair. You made a date with me! With Marcus, I mean! And you’re here! If I hadn’t shown up here you’d have been totally stood up!”

  “That’s not true at all,” Catalina replied. “I allowed it to be inferred that I would be at a certain place at a certain time, where I would embark on a certain course of action. I am doing this. I’m having a satisfying day so far: it’s good to have a salad and a glass of wine in the middle of the afternoon. And now I am off to look at some outsider art.”

  Catalina stood and gathered up her things. “I don’t know who you are,” she said. “You told me your name, but I don’t know who you are.”

  “I’ll, um, get the check?” Rebecca said.

  “That’s very gracious of you.” Suddenly a smile broke across Catalina’s face as she looked down on Rebecca, and Rebecca suddenly felt real, like a puppet that had had life breathed into it by a blue fairy.

  Catalina patted Rebecca’s shoulder then, cocking her head sideways in a gesture that seemed to be half bemusement, half pity. Then she turned and left the cafeteria.

  The server appeared a couple of minutes later, presenting Rebecca with the bill. She looked it over: twenty dollars more than she expected, but it could have been worse. I try, Rebecca thought to herself as she riffled through her purse for her phone, using it to send a squirt of data to the payment device the server kept in a holster on his belt, tacking on a thirty percent tip. Then she said to him, “You know what? Believe it or not, I really am trying to do the best I can.”

  She sighed, and the server nodded at her as if her non sequitur made perfect sense. With a high-pitched whirr his device spat out a flimsy receipt, which he ripped off and handed to her with a practiced flourish. “Aren’t we all,” he said.

  37

  MIDNIGHT MONOLOGUES

  1. CARSON

  My father had terrible circulation—he’d wake up in the middle of the night with his toes and fingers tingling, and would have to clap his hands and stomp his feet on the floor to get the blood going in them again. My mother was always trying to feed him spinach and kale, thinking the nutrients would help. A fleeting look of shame would cross his face when someone of
fered to shake his hand, for he’d anticipate their shock when they found his palm to be unpleasantly chilled and damp. “Cold hands, warm heart,” he’d say, trying not to glance down to watch the man wipe his hand on his shirt. Not just an apology for a faulty body temperature, but a plea: Do not believe this deceiving first impression. I am just as good a person as you believe yourself to be.

  Alicia reminds me of my father in that way, though apology isn’t in her nature. I wouldn’t mislead myself by believing that there is a secretly bubbly and weepy girl inside her that she will reveal to me in her own time, or if I chip away at her exterior for long enough. She is, as they say, what she is. But her sense of humor, though brittle and sharp-edged, must come from a kind of joy, and whatever relationship we have surely deserves the name of “love,” though I’m also sure that “love” is a word that would make Alicia wince, were I to speak it.

  Often when I am in her bed I find that I dream of ice. I am marooned on the Europa of my adolescent fantasies; I have lost one of my mittens in the snow. And I awake to find that Alicia, in her sleep, has twined her fingers into mine, or flung one of her legs over me. There will be a slow but certain transfer of heat from one body to another, then. Physics will speak where voices won’t, and this, I think, is best.

  2. SPIVEY

  Terence. Put that book down, whatever it is, and talk to me. I have some good news for you!

  Yeah, I know: you’re thinking, “Spivey? Good news?” But it’s true! Listen.

  So I went over to visit Rita this weekend. And to be honest, I haven’t said much about it, but lately she’s been getting down in the dumps, worse and worse. But on this day I ring the bell, and I hear her holler Come in, like she always does to save herself the trouble of getting up. And when I come into the living room, the TV is off, for one thing, and she never gives that thing a rest, and I see her sitting on the couch with this big smile on her face and a blanket draped over her lap. And she has this black headband on, too, that looks like it’s made out of plastic or something, but I don’t think anything much about that at first.