The One Who Wrote Destiny

by Nikesh Shukla

  Now, all she is to me is an anomaly in the data sets.

  Maybe she did kill herself. Or maybe she died of cancer, as the rest of the women in this family line seem to. If she had the same cancer as my mother, that her mother had, then my algorithm would be more complete. Currently, she is a problem I have to wonder about.

  Now that she is part of my work, I can’t stop thinking about her.

  I haven’t tasted her sugar rotlis for over twenty years and I can still feel the sweet grains on my lips.

  What happened to you, Ba?

  The cancer is causing me to make mistakes in the code. I’m not usually this sloppy. As time slips away, so does my patience with being right. The stakes are lower now that they will outlive me.

  Before entering the rollout, I take out the records for her date and cause of death. I don’t want to run it with bad data. If I am to try and expand the data sets increasingly till I can help the entire world, it has to be iron tight at the source.

  I feel as though the code and I don’t agree. We are fighting, in tension with each other. I write lines. Each one seems to delete itself before my eyes. I squint at the screen, unsure at what I’m seeing.

  I go to bed and dream in lines of C++.

  I wake.

  I look out of the window at Pivo. It’s dead on a Wednesday night. Barely any cause for a bouncer, but one stands sentry all the same, hoping for some trouble to justify his presence.

  Everything is about justifications.

  I look at Raks’s entry, shifting the sleep from my eyes with a fingernail. At first, I’m not sure what I’m looking at. Also, I was coding until the second I fell asleep and then dreamt that I was continuing to write lines so I cannot now differentiate between awake me and asleep me. I’m not sure why I’m seeing what I’m seeing.

  There is a new line added to his plain-text entry.

  I open up Dad’s entry on another screen.

  He has the same new line too.

  The extra line predicts how they will die.

  In text, it looks remorseless. Just as death should be. Plain. Just as death should be. Like Dr Hamid’s delivery. Simple. Not emotive. Clear, in order to manage expectations. It does not bother me in the slightest that he will die on a bus. It makes sense, actually. A man constantly running backwards to his past instead of to the destination of now, dies in transit. He’ll probably be facing backwards.

  I don’t know if these are real projections or projected fantasies. I don’t know where the code has come from. I don’t even know what I’m building any more.

  Do I want my brother’s work to kill him? Do I want my father to be alone and in transit at the end? Did I write this?

  Did I create this or is it something divine? Is destiny talking to me through my machine?

  These are patterns I cannot fathom.

  THURSDAY NIGHT

  GoTo: Deterioration. Fortune

  I have to sleep propped up.

  It’s the best way to let air pass in and out of my lungs. In the days that follow the found fag, I purge my house of cigarettes, bidding goodbye to my favourite friend. I can no longer draw enough breath to pull on one. I buy a second-hand oxygen tank and a comfortable armchair, so I can sleep. I set up my laptop as a proxy for my main computer. This way, I can work in my armchair, without too much movement, taking in oxygen if I need to. I have no appetite.

  I cash in some ISAs because I don’t know what I want to do with the money I’ve saved over the years but feel it should be readily available in case inspiration hits. Before the week is out, I have more money than I know what to do with. I sell my collection of DVDs and CDs to a website that repurposes second-hand goods, netting me another £1,000. I sell my collection of comics to a collector, for £2,000. I keep my Star Trek memorabilia. It feels comforting to have these close to me.

  I can feel the end approaching. And these things are just things.

  And this is just distraction from carrying on the algorithm. I haven’t looked at it since I saw Dad and Raks’s entries. I peered into the code and saw a heap of lines I don’t remember adding at all. It scared me, if I’m being honest. It suddenly seemed as though I was out of control. I felt like maybe I’m better than I give myself credit for – somehow, my code is divining patterns and projecting likely outcomes.

  Someone I went to school with, his Twitter bio, while giving nothing away about him, says boldly, Beat cancer twice. I might change mine to, Even cancer couldn’t stop me being a genius.

  I stream old episodes of the original series.

  I mouth quotes to myself:

  ‘It is illogical for a communications officer to resent the word frequency.’

  ‘I examined the problem from all angles, and it was plainly hopeless. Logic informed me that, under the circumstances, the only possible action would have to be one of desperation. Logical decision, logically arrived at.’

  I jig and I re-jig my will.

  My net worth, my fortune and my savings have grown at an exponential rate. I have banked six figures. I sell all my furniture, including a nearly-new massage chair.

  Strangers come and go, taking my washing machine, my bed, my decks from the three months I thought myself a DJ, my table and its corresponding chairs. Watching these faceless nobodies come and go, as I sit in my armchair, I realize that this is my fortress of solitude. The only person who has ever breached its walls was Raks, and all he did was complain about how dirty everything was.

  I am softening. I can feel my mind softening as my body weakens. I feel the tinge of regret: regrets about wasting my considerable talents on things other than great, regrets about never going back to Kenya, regrets about never taking much interest in my family, regrets about Ba – the anomalous bad data of her is haunting my dreams. I see her death, in its many forms, unfold in my mind’s eye, each one tantalizing me with its potential truth. I’ve wasted my adult life working, and what have I learned, what can I do? Being an expert at hardware design for communications tools and voice-recognition software is cool, but what does that mean, really? Anything I developed just threw down the gauntlet for someone younger and smarter and sharper to develop something better. Because they have ambition whereas I view it as art.

  I can feel my body deteriorating. I dream in Spock-isms.

  ‘The older the victim, the more rapid the progress of the disease.’

  ‘You haven’t the right to be vulnerable in the eyes of the crew. You can’t afford the luxury of being anything less than perfect. If you do, they lose faith and you lose command.’

  THURSDAY NIGHT

  GoTo: Home. Truth

  I wonder why I don’t want my brother to know I’m dying.

  I used to revel in the idea that twins worked in code that couldn’t be hacked. That there was something in our DNA that allowed us to share things telepathically. As a teenager, I read whatever I could find in the library’s science section about twins. Nearly every pair can relate a story. Sometimes, one twin experiences a physical sensation of something that is happening to the other (such as labour pains or a heart attack). Other times they will find that they perform similar actions when they’re apart, such as buying the same item, ordering the same meal in a restaurant, or picking up the phone to make a call at the exact same moment. It was proven a few years ago that conjoined-twin telepathy exists. But for Raks and me, non-identical twins, we couldn’t even come close to finishing each other’s sentences.

  I rarely understand him. Sometimes his ego drives me crazy. While we can amiably talk about everything other than something real, we don’t have to be emotionally close. He and I invent in-jokes, silly little games, new shorthands for communication instead of talking about anything that matters. I don’t want him to see the pain I’m in. Especially when he’s on tour. This is his big moment, the time he will transcend into the greatness he was destined to have. Ba told him that. That he was destined for greatness. I didn’t believe it at the time but now, if she’s trying to communicate wi
th me, I must heed her words. I cannot derail him. I cannot ruin it. Am I feeling empathy? Is that what this is?

  What I do not understand about my brother is society’s impetus towards forcing us to relate to each other. Whatever that means. We have to get on. We have to share things. We have to love people, and each other, unconditionally.

  I ask myself why a lot; whenever I feel social pressure forcing me to send him a text to ask how he is.

  But without those expectations, I suppose we only think of each other when we’re in the same room.

  I text him: Would you want to know how you were going to die if there was a way of finding out?

  He replies instantly, as if he has been waiting for this question for a while.

  Yes, he texts back.

  THURSDAY NIGHT

  GoTo: Early Adopter

  I send Raks the log-in to the site.

  I’ve password-protected it and hidden it on my server. I have neha.com. To all intents and purposes, though, it isn’t a live site. It’s where I test little projects.

  The North Essex Housing Association once offered me £1,000 for the URL. I said no. My name is my name. Their acronym is a short-for.

  One of my favourite little projects is Beam Me Up.

  I have every episode and film of every iteration of Star Trek loaded up into a program on here. I have analysed and codified all the vocal patterns and scripts so that you can speak into the microphone and have a conversation with one of your favourite characters. I always choose Spock. The program manipulates their vocal patterns so that they talk back to you. Currently they speak in fragments of script. I’m still working on the intelligence bit, and now will probably never have a chance to finish it. It is all a massive infringement of copyright in any case, so I hide it away.

  I’ve also hidden the script of my family tree. I’ve disguised the whole thing as a piece of family history. It has photos of people, all the information I’ve collected about them and references to where they appear online.

  It was interesting finding the newspaper NIB, scanned online, from the Daily Mail, about my father’s case. Though he lost it, he still made history. The first person to bring a case under the 1968 Race Relations Act.

  This secret past.

  History is filled with dates, events, things that happened, important moments that shaped the world, meetings, deaths, births, wars, peace, negotiations, acts of kindness and terror – these lay out a modern history we can understand. No one remembers the tiny things, victories and losses, the personal triumphs and failures. I have become constantly impressed by the stories of my immigrant family I’ve found online – the local news stories about my bapuji being murdered at a bus stop in Wembley; others surviving an attack; winning the baking competition with a shepherd’s pie, Indian-style; climbing Mount Kenya to raise money for an orphanage; being the first person of South Asian descent ever to be nominated for a best costume-design BAFTA – these things. Again, I must be softening as I get weaker, because these stories make me cry. A new pattern emerges. Person moves to new country, triumphs over adversity, has a small success, gets on with life. It makes me realize how hard they had it. I think I was given the space to have my career free of the barriers of immigrating and then immediately being asked to integrate in a society that didn’t want me here. I didn’t live through the paki-bashing; the no blacks, no dogs, no Irish; the race riots. I lived in their aftermath. So I had the space to try and be my best self. I think. My inherent privilege talking here, but it’s my dad’s striving for mediocrity, to be comfortable and not to be seen, hidden in the depths of the middle classes, that gave me the space to just work. I know this is not a privilege afforded everyone. I am talking only of my own experience. In my dad’s desire to hide, I flourished.

  I wonder if Raks has logged into the site. I almost want his take on it before I continue. I need to know what it is I’ve done. I need him to tell me it’s real. So I text him.

  He replies and asks if I’ve been hacked.

  I tell him no, just log into the site, check it out.

  He eventually replies and says he’s logged in but he’s not clicking on it. He’s thought about it and doesn’t need to find out. I want to know what’s happened between that text and this.

  I wrote a script for the log-in screen before I sent him the text: Do you want to know how you will die? Yes. No. Don’t know.

  I log into my admin screen and check his usage, his behaviour flow.

  Logs in: 13:42

  Ends session: 13:42

  He didn’t even consider the possibility for a full minute.

  The beta test has failed because it has to measure itself against human frailty.

  FRIDAY MORNING

  GoTo: Feedback Loop. Set 1

  I remove the screen between log-in and the records page. Maybe the question is too candid.

  I decide to carry on working on the algorithm. Maybe people should be allowed to know how they will die. If life is patterns, if families are patterns, if history is patterns, maybe anomalies don’t exist. Wouldn’t you want to know how long you have, so you can plan and maximize time and be efficient?

  I am aware I haven’t looked at my own record yet. It seems too inevitable to do so. The ol’ cancer, you’ll be the death of me.

  I carry on adding lines of script to the code, to try and work around what I’m referring to as the Grandmother Problem. I work all night. I stop for two slices of pizza and a Fanta. I can barely breathe, barely chew, barely sip I am so tired but I can feel the end of the project approaching. I know what I have to do. Every profile is assigned a space on the family tree. This blog is made live. The software I’ve been working on is uploaded. I have created a death predictor for my family. In the future, all you will need to do is add any newborn children’s birth dates, sex, birth weights and it will calculate their cause of death. There are lines of code I don’t understand. I am weak and my eyes frequently blur so perhaps, with all this screen time, I’m just not reading them properly.

  The death predictor. Every now and then, I think it’s not real. In my hazy state of mind, I think I am destiny, manifest, the predeterminer of your death based on established patterns within our family.

  I need more time to expand the data sets, to bring it out wider. I am ready to rest for the moment. I fall asleep at 1 a.m. and wake up at 2 p.m. the next day.

  SATURDAY MORNING

  GoTo: Napoleon Dynamite

  The Napoleon Dynamite Problem is this: the film itself is so divisive, people who should like it – nerds, outsiders, goofballs, fans of comedy – don’t always rate it. And the people who should hate it – jocks, dicks, bullies, arseholes, management consultants – consider it their favourite film. Thus, it has a ratings score of 2.4, because you either love it or hate it.

  What does that mean for algorithms designed to make recommendations based on what you like and don’t like? If you like a film an algorithm doesn’t account for your liking. Can you beat the code?

  If I’m trying to find a pattern for this cancer, and I don’t know how Ba died or when, and whether it was from cancer, or from other things, then what does that mean for my algorithm? She is my Napoleon Dynamite.

  The anomaly in the algorithm.

  SATURDAY AFTERNOON

  GoTo: The Game

  Raks texts me.

  The text says, I lost.

  I smile.

  I reply, Me too.

  Two minutes later, I text him again.

  I lost.

  He replies, This game is infuriating.

  Over text is when I feel affection for my brother. His presence in a room irritates me as we have previously established. However, it’s these occasional text flurries, usually based in nostalgia, that endear him to me.

  We’ve been playing a game for the last fifteen years. We invented it on our way home from my ba’s house in Mombasa. The journey was long – we had to travel by coach from Mombasa to Nairobi, and the road was so bumpy, neither of
us could sleep. Dad was listening to a tape of his and Mum’s favourite songs on a Walkman. We had nothing to do. It was too shaky to read.

  So Raks invented this game.

  The aim of the game is to forget you’re playing it. If you remember you’re playing the game, you lose. You have to then tell the other player, I lost. Then you start again. The amazing thing is, for the five minutes after one player loses, the other will inevitably lose, because it’s still in the front of their mind. So you automatically lose.

  Playing it on that bus, when the game was all you could think about, it was a legendary match.

  Raks texting me that he’d lost – this makes it 86–72 to me. The last time either of us lost was four years ago. It was me. I was drunk and sitting at the bar of a pub, nursing a pint, trying to remember something else, I don’t even remember what. And something bizarre happened in my brain. Instead of recalling the thing I needed to recall, it reminded me that I’d lost.

  The game is infuriating.

  The game is much like life. You forget you’re living. And it’s only in the brief moments after you remember to cherish what little time you have, that you do anything to take life by the hands and dance as though no one is watching. Ten minutes later, you’re watching episode after episode of whatever show you’re into on Netflix and eating a whole tube of Pringles, because that is really what life is.

  SATURDAY EVENING

  GoTo: Text. Refresh

  The text chain with Raks continues for the rest of the day. Eventually, he asks me what the site was that I pointed him to.

  I tell him, It’s destiny.

  Destiny, he replies. I’m only interested in her progeny.

  My brother, ladies and gentlemen, a maker of jokes when things really matter.