by Douglas Lain
We went back and forth like this for awhile. I’d ask her something, usually requesting that she tell me where she was, and there would be a long pause followed by some new atheist talking points.
“Bucky is very smart, he is helping me,” she told me.
“Where are you?” I asked again.
And finally, maybe the fifth time around, she told me. Bucky had directed her to walk north for a half mile on Water, directed her to the Bunk Bar where, apparently, he had a package waiting for her. Bucky had ordered some augmented reality aviation glasses, he’d managed to get Google to ship out a prototype of what they were temporarily calling Google Glass Part 2 (obviously there would have to be a rebranding effort before the product was announced to the public), and Sally was trying it out.
“I can really see signs and make prophecies this time,” Sally said.
She’d only been gone for maybe forty-five minutes, but she was already drunk.
“What is Bucky telling you?” I asked.
“All kinds of things,” she said.
And, with that text, I sort of panicked. I didn’t bother to tell anyone where I was going, didn’t wait around to find out what was going to happen next with the simulations, but just turned on Google Maps and followed Sally down Water Street.
10:39 PM
With its symmetrical hobo mural and rotating leather chairs, the Bunk Bar was more of a facsimile of a bar than the real thing. It was some graphic designer’s idea of what a dive bar should look like. It had probably been a spot for a bagel shop or a vegan restaurant at some point. It had “ambitious start-up” written all over it. I sat at the bar, relying on my world-weary air and Bucky’s virtual assistance to avoid getting carded, and ordered a gin and tonic. I made sure to ask for a brand-name gin, picking out Aviation because I liked the idea of drinking gin made for pilots, and then looked around for Sally.
I didn’t have to look very far, because Sally was the only one wearing goggles, and because she was drawing a crowd. She was in a booth at the north side of the bar, and a line had formed from her booth to just about where the doors to the kitchen were. Patrons were waiting patiently, standing in line by the mural, standing by the wall, and talking quietly to themselves as Sally let one pair after another join her in the booth.
I took a sip of my gin and tonic, admired the way the colors in the Bunk Bar worked together one more time, and then plugged into Bucky and asked him what was going on.
“What is she doing?”
“Sally Miller has requested analysis of demographic database, medical records, and genealogical archives based on facial recognition. Individualized projections and simulations for recognizable subjects are now available,” Bucky told me.
“Individualized projections?” I asked. “You mean, she’s having you predict people’s futures?”
“Correct,” Bucky said.
The people in Sally’s booth were a couple of art-student types. They looked to be in their early twenties at the most, and it was difficult to figure out their genders. I couldn’t decide if the one in a top-hat was a masculine looking woman or a feminine man, and I would have been hard put to predict anything about them other than that they were likely to either have or to get liberal arts degrees. They probably liked the Orwells or the Strokes, that’s all I could see, but Sally kept them sitting there for about ten minutes and told them things that seemed to make them emotional.
When the next couple sat down, a thirty-something pair who were wearing wrinkled but professional clothes and who looked like they were probably married with at least one kid, it didn’t take long for Sally to do her work. In about two minutes the wife, who was kind of on the chubby side in her orange cardigan, started openly weeping.
I decided to interrupt.
“What are you drinking, Sally?” I asked.
“Lemon drops,” she said.
“Scoot over,” I said.
“I’m sort of involved with something here,” she told me.
But I convinced her that I’d be quiet, watch her do her stuff, and not interfere. Then, when the next couple sat down, I nearly kept my word. It was just two guys, you know, probably around my age, too young to be in the bar, probably. They sat down across from Sally, looked at her longingly, and asked her if they’d ever not be lonely.
I mean, what they were really asking about was whether they’d ever get laid, but that’s not what they said literally. What they asked was whether they’d ever stop being lonely, and they were both of them unkempt and not very good-looking, and they were both of them in T-shirts with sci-fi stuff on them. I think one of them was wearing a NASA shirt and the other one had a slogan from Star Trek on his shirt, something like “Where No One Has Gone Before.” Sally looked them up and down through her goggles and I almost didn’t interfere, but when she smiled at them, when she licked her lips and got ready to say something, I couldn’t sit still.
“Of course you’ll always be lonely,” I said.
Sally put her hand on mine, she moved to quiet me, and she smiled at the two boys, but I didn’t shut up.
“Come on, tell the truth. Tell them what Bucky is saying. Tell the fat one that he’ll have diabetes by the time he’s thirty or something like that. Tell the other one that his beard makes him look creepy and that just shaving it off won’t be enough,” I said. “Come on, what does Bucky say. I’m right, yeah? What does Bucky say?”
Bucky was telling her about their childhood, he was telling her that their favorite band was Weird Al Yankovic and the Yellow Magic Orchestra, and that they were still living at home and would stay there for at least another half decade until one of them got a job in IT.
Actually, I don’t know what Bucky was telling her, because she stopped it. At that point, she stopped it. She apologized to the two guys, turned to me, and asked me what my problem was.
11:00 PM
My problem was that I was scared. My problem was that finding my dad again had only made the situation worse. My problem was that I was caught up in another of his projects, that I was trapped inside his world of big questions, big problems, and that I was realizing there wasn’t any room for me in any of it. I wasn’t a big enough problem to get his attention, and now I wasn’t interesting enough for Sally either.
“My problem is you just took off without telling me,” I said. “My problem is you’re treating all of this like it’s a game, like it’s just a way to get free lemon drops and play psychic.”
“I’m not playing,” Sally said. She said it like it was a big major point, like it was the most important point ever in the world. “For the first time in my life I’m not pretending. I know things, I have access to true things about these people. And I’m helping them. I’m saving them.”
11:15 PM
While Dad and Yuma started the revolution from OMSI’s IMAX theater, Sally and I got drunk. Or, more to the point, I caught up to her.
We were sitting at the bar. She’d told everyone her parlor game was over, but everyone was still crowding around her, trying to get close. I mean, people were sitting in booths, they were sitting at the bar, but they’d all shifted over so they might be closer to her. A pretty blonde girl wearing a knit cap even though it was over eighty degrees out whispered her order to the bartender, a bald guy in a plaid shirt and sporting a goatee pretended to read a book called Understanding Candy Crush while constantly glancing in our direction, while the thirty-something couple who had already had their turn just sat at a nearby table and stared.
Everyone seemed to be waiting for the demonstration of psychic energy to start up again. The only noise in the bar was coming from the bartender’s playlist. He had eclectic taste and a sound collage from the Avalanches was followed up by a ballad from Lana Del Rey. With everyone quiet, what should have been our private conversation was being broadcast to the bar, complete with a soundtrack.
After I had my third gin and tonic I didn’t care anymore. I didn’t care about people listening, didn’t care about Sa
lly playing psychic with drunks and hipsters, didn’t care that she was maybe letting Bucky get too close to her. All I wanted to know was why she hadn’t talked to me first, why she hadn’t told me that she wanted to leave, why we weren’t doing this thing, whatever it was, together.
“Oh yeah, like you really let me in on all your secrets. You’ve been nothing but upfront and honest with me, right?”
I’d let her talk to a bot and think it was a real AI. I hadn’t helped her get the answers she wanted about religion and God and all that sort of thing. Overall, she thought I had treated her like she was a slob, like she was a “drooling idiot.”
I tried to object to that way of putting it, but she just waved me off and ordered herself another drink.
“I was an idiot,” she said. And then she repeated what she’d told me before. Bucky had shown her that what she’d thought was God communicating through her was just a self-induced delusion. Bucky had demonstrated that her way of thinking about the world was phony. She hadn’t been seeing signs, nobody in her church really knew the future. There wouldn’t be a judgment day, at least not of the kind they’d been expecting.
“I should have been more honest. I shouldn’t have tricked you,” I said.
“It’s okay,” Sally said. “You acted the way you had to act.”
“Like I had to act?” I asked.
“Sure,” she said. “We all act the way we’re supposed to act. We all behave as we’re programmed to behave.”
Sally had lost her religion, only to immediately find a new one. She hadn’t seen signs from God before, but now she could see. Now she was getting more than mere signs to be interpreted. She had facts. She had information. With Bucky’s help she would spread and share the truth everywhere. She’d help people wake up.
“That’s the thing, Sally,” I told her. “I think this is all going terribly wrong.”
Sally swigged back her lemon drop and then looked at me warily.
I tried to explain to her that Dad’s big projects never work out, that Dad is basically insane, that he doesn’t really believe in other people or normal life or any of that kind of thing, but she kept shaking her head no as I talked and I ended up contradicting myself.
“It’s not that he a narcissist. He can’t be a narcissist, because, along with not believing in other people, he doesn’t believe in himself. And now he’s about to let Yuma and Kufo get their hands on what is probably the most powerful computer in history so that they can change the world into a video game,” I said. “I mean, does that seem right? To you, from whatever perspective you have now, does that seem sane?”
It sounded just fine to Sally, and when she told me so, I realized that she was still in her goggles. Her fortune-teller game was over, but she was still getting information from Bucky. She was still letting the AI tell her things. Bucky was telling her what to say, what to do, and Bucky was telling her all about me. I wondered what kind of demographic data there was out there, how the YouTube videos I’d made when I was twelve were being used to add to my profile, how the porn videos I watched might be contributing to the picture Bucky was drawing for Sally. How many memes were included? To what extent did my sometimes participation on 4chan skew the data?
“Take those off,” I said. I reached out for the goggles, ended up grabbing Sally by the ear instead.
“Ow!” she protested. “Fuck a duck!”
The problem was that I wasn’t talking to Sally anymore, but talking to Bucky through Sally.
“Listen, I really like you and I want to talk to you, but just to you. I mean, in my mind you’re my girlfriend and I like that, but I don’t like Bucky. I don’t like talking to you and Bucky at the same time,” I said.
“You just don’t want me to understand you. You don’t want me to know you the way Bucky knows you,” she said. That was basically right.
“You like me?” Sally asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Do you even know me? You say you like me but you don’t know me, not really. And you don’t want me to know you.”
12:00 AM
What Sally wanted was for me to try on the goggles. She said that if I really wanted her to be my girlfriend, if I really liked her and all of that, then I should want to know her. I should want to know where she came from, what her Myers-Briggs personality type was, her medical history, and what her favorite television programs said about her sexual orientation.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “You were raised in a Jesus cult, there isn’t anything out there for Bucky to analyze. You don’t even have a Facebook account.”
Only, she did have a Facebook account. She’d started updating her Facebook page, even started tweeting, after I gave her her first smartphone. And while she didn’t watch much TV, she did have a few favorite programs: Everybody Loves Raymond, Perry Mason, and The Big Bang Theory. She said her favorite band was the Human League even though she only knew one of their songs.
The truth was that Sally wanted to know who she was, she wanted Bucky to tell her what she should do in a world without God. If she wasn’t one of God’s children anymore she really didn’t know what she was. Sally wanted to know what Bucky knew about her, but she was afraid to ask him herself.
“You do it,” she said. “Wear the goggles, get the information, and then tell me what he says. Only, please be kind.”
“How do you mean?”
“If I’m going to die soon, or if I’m going to go insane, don’t tell me,” she said. “I don’t want to know.”
I put on the goggles, but by that time, I’d had four gins and was seeing a bit double. I had to close my left eye in order to see straight enough to read the stats and descriptions that encircled Sally’s head. I had to really focus in order to see anything, and then, just when I started to get a good picture, just when Bucky started to whisper secrets in my ear, there was a break. Just as I started to connect the pieces together, to come up with a story about Sally, the screens went dark.
Bucky rebooted.
“It shut off,” I said.
“What? No it didn’t.”
The system rebooted. Bucky rebooted. I think what happened was that, in that moment, the old Bucky died and a new Bucky was born. In any case, when the goggles started working again, when augmented reality came back online, instead of seeing Sally sitting across from me, instead of seeing her pretty face with a halo of data points floating around her head, I saw a block. Instead of her smile, her red hair, there was a block-headed character with a toothy grin, and every tooth in its head was cube-shaped.
Glancing around the room the same thing was happening to everyone. Bucky had been asked to play at being psychic, to look into everyone’s future and project his interpretation of that future over whatever was really there. Looking around the bar, the 30-year-old couple appeared as Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man, the hipster in the top hat was Chun-Li, and the two nerds were both Vault Boy.
“It’s happening,” I said.
“What’s happening?”
“The video game.”
Predestination
MATTHEW MUNSON, 544-23-1102, MESSENGER LOG, 05/01/17
8:15 AM
It’s May Day.
I’m not sure if that has any meaning anymore. Should people still celebrate May Day now that life is a video game? In a world without paychecks or jobs, without banks or property, does this holiday even matter?
The weird thing is that if Sally and I had moved a little bit slower, if we hadn’t just happened to run into Dad and his crew at the entrance to the Planetarium, this revolution probably wouldn’t have started at all. As soon as we got back to OMSI, just as soon as we walked past the sculpture of the red letters that spelled it out, Bucky gave us ten minutes. All the ways the AI had kept us invisible, the redirects and red herrings the machine had fed to the CIA and the FBI, finally failed, and they knew. They knew and they were on their way.
Sally had kept her goggles on and she told me first, but then Dad was
there. Dad met us at the entrance to the Planetarium and he told us to turn around. We had to turn back.
It was a strange feeling, didn’t seem real. We were standing next to a line of elementary school students, 8-year-olds who couldn’t stop squirming as they waited in line for a show they were sure would bore them, and we discussed how the Feds were on their way. Dad was being blamed for stealing Bucky, being blamed for locking his superiors at the NSA and the Pentagon out of the system, and there was a SWAT team of fifty police officers on the way in armored trucks, there were ten vans of FBI agents in bulletproof vests coming, and there were about ten regular police cars on the way to arrest a 45-year-old man with a laptop, his friends from the office, three teenage gamers, and a former Apostolic Christian girl who would be glad to read their palms or read their horoscope.
This is how stupid it was: Dad actually asked if anybody needed to go to the bathroom before we left, and Greg had to tell him that there wasn’t time for that.
“They’ll have to hold it,” Greg said.
Ned was turning the crank of a penny-flattening machine. For a quarter and a penny, you could turn the crank and get back a thin smooth copper oval. It just cost a quarter to smooth out the engraving of Abraham Lincoln and replace him with an engraving of Saturn, but Ned stopped mid-crank in order to back up his partner. He tapped the handle, momentarily embarrassed that he’d let himself get distracted, and then nodded his agreement.
“Yeah,” Ned said. “We shouldn’t … we shouldn’t waste time.”
Outside again, there was some debate about who would be riding in whose car. There were eight of us, and really there was plenty of room for us, but Dad had rented a smart car, Yuma and I had taken mass transit, and so we had to work out who would be riding with Dad, who would be with Kufo, and who would be going with Ned and Greg. We spent about two minutes on that. It was a simple decision, really, as I went with Dad and Sally went with Yuma and Kufo, but we’d hemmed and hawed about it. Somehow, I hadn’t wanted to go with Dad, and initially said I’d go with Ned and Greg in their white van.
