Dare to Know

by James Kennedy

  * * *

  —

  My radio is still on somehow.

  I switch it off.

  I sit there in the snowy ditch for a while, being alive.

  The car is wrecked but I’m okay. Seat belt on. Airbag didn’t even deploy. Not a bruise on me. But the engine won’t start. I open the door, experimentally. Cold and snow whoosh in. I shut it.

  Keep the heat in the car for as long as I can.

  Blood pounding through my body. Brain buzzing. I feel like I’m far away from here. In a kind of daze I dig out my old AAA card and call for a tow truck. The world blinking, blinking around me, then settling down.

  The tow truck place says it’ll take an hour.

  Snow whips wildly around the car. I’m off the road, pointing down into the ditch at maybe a twenty-degree angle. Headlights flash by. You wouldn’t see me if you weren’t looking for me. Or you’d think the car had been abandoned.

  I glance over at the books.

  Alone in this wrecked car. All the time I need.

  Don’t.

  The rule. Even more: the taboo.

  But nobody would know.

  But no salesman is ever supposed to look themselves up.

  Still, I had almost died. Just now. And right at the moment I thought I was dead, I had pretty much thought: okay, fine.

  I take one of the Books of the Dead out of the back seat.

  Open it.

  But—

  Only one thing stops me.

  * * *

  —

  I remember the first time a salesman broke the taboo. The first time any of us in the company did an unauthorized assessment.

  It was at the first Sapere Aude conference in Minneapolis, where we started out—though to call it a “conference” makes it sound much more buttoned-up than what actually went down at that hotel that weekend, with me and Julia and Ziegler and Hutchinson and everyone else. When they made the documentary (much of it using Hutchinson’s fuzzy old VHS home recordings) they had referred to us (and I know it sounds self-mythologizing for me to repeat it) as the freaks and dreamers and geniuses who started Sapere Aude. The Minneapolis conference had taken place my first year working for the company, when we were just thirty employees—really, selling the time of your death is the only real job I’ve ever had. But back then it wasn’t a real job. Or didn’t feel like it. The public still didn’t fully believe or even understand what we were up to. We were still cutting edge, revolutionary, punk rock, whatever you want to call it. Young.

  We were all extraordinary. Everyone who was smart and ambitious, who knew which way the wind was blowing, wanted in.

  The fact that they wanted me was a fluke, in retrospect. Everyone in the physics community was talking about thanatons, of course, but outside academia a lot of it was irresponsible talk: techno-utopians claiming that controlling thanatons would grant us immortality, hippies with their self-serving woo-woo, religious nuts spinning their wheels trying to fit thanatons into their dogmas. More than once I had to be the killjoy at an undergraduate dinner party, the guy who cleared his throat and said, well, actually, I study thanatons, and the facts don’t quite support that interpretation.

  SOMEONE: So wait. If there were no thanatons, there would be no death?

  ME: Thanatons don’t cause death. They just react to it. Think of it this way: if you got rid of the mercury in thermometers, would the temperature stop changing?

  SOMEONE: But what are thanatons?

  ME: Thanatons are subatomic particles that seem to be what we call “quantum-entangled” in human death. We don’t know why yet, but they change state in a complicated way in response to future mortality and—

  SOMEONE: Then how come we’ve never detected thanatons before?

  ME: What do you mean?

  SOMEONE: I heard there’s no evidence of the existence of thanatons before, like, a few years ago.

  ME: That’s kind of like saying there were no quarks in ancient Greece because Socrates never saw a quark. The only reason we haven’t seen thanatons before is we weren’t sophisticated enough. We didn’t have the math or machinery.

  SOMEONE: But I heard there’s evidence that all the thanatons just appeared recently. Like they were called into existence, somehow.

  ME: I guess we’re going to have to agree to disagree on that one.

  You have to decide when to insist on accuracy and when to let it slide for the sake of the dinner party. Nobody likes the “well, actually” guy, especially when he takes it upon himself to shut down the fascinating cultural theorist holding court with their oh-so-mind-blowing speculations…But here’s the thing: when I did correct them, I always did it gently, with humor. I gave the blowhard an out, and so I got a reputation as that rare bird: a science person who could relate to laypeople. But in reality I was closer in temperament to, or so I wanted to believe, Henrik Stettinger, the discoverer of thanatons, the “reluctant revolutionary” who looked uncomfortable in every photo you saw of him. Stettinger didn’t even want to believe in what he had discovered, didn’t publish a word about thanatons until he had checked and rechecked and exhausted every single possible alternate interpretation. Stettinger logged countless late nights tracing other possible trajectories in the bubble chamber and tried his hardest to disprove his own discovery. That was noble. I admired that.

  I’d first heard of him when everyone else had. I was a senior in high school when the discovery of thanatons was announced.

  As it turned out, Stettinger had been a professor at the same university where I had attended physics camp.

  I was surprised at that. Not that it wasn’t a good school. I mean, it was okay. But you wouldn’t expect a fundamental shift in physics coming from a just-okay school in the Midwest. Still, that’s how science advances sometimes, right? From outsiders. That old saw about Einstein being a patent clerk when he hit upon special relativity.

  In any case, I never met Stettinger that summer. He probably wasn’t even present on campus. The “reluctant revolutionary” didn’t teach classes, and certainly wouldn’t have been wasting his time with eighth graders.

  Though, looking back, Stettinger would’ve been making his breakthroughs on that campus around the same time Renard and I were there.

  * * *

  —

  The university hosting the physics summer camp was a new kind of environment for me. I had grown up in a bucolic suburb of strip malls and golf courses, populated by engineers and small business owners. Everything in my hometown was new and clean and air-conditioned and worked on the first try. The university’s fake Gothic architecture and ivied brick was like nothing I’d experienced; it was the first time I’d hung out at a place that was dirty and not up-to-date, though those typically negative qualities seemed part of the premise of the place, the lack of air-conditioning and the occasional cockroach and the slightly broken-down agedness of everything somehow feeling like eccentric privileges and not cruddy inconveniences.

  In the back of the university’s library was a converted storage space where they kept TVs, VCRs, movie projectors, and a bunch of computers—Apple IIes with primitive modems that I guess some millionaire alumnus decided the library should own but the librarians clearly had no idea what to do with.

  A trio of girls from the physics camp seized control of the AV Room, running it as their own fiefdom. No other camper got access to the computers without their say-so. These girls bonded early over some kind of early BBS stuff with the computers and modems. Most of us other campers were boys and we didn’t care much about the computers—this was before the internet was a thing. We were more interested in building robots or blowing stuff up. The boy campers dubbed the girls the FARGs, for the “Fat AV Room Girls.” Typical awful teenaged boy shit, and for what it’s worth, I don’t even remember any of those girls being fat (one of the girls had significant breas
ts and dressed to hide them, so maybe that read as “fat” to the boys). In any case, these computer girls fundamentally did not give a fuck. They shrugged and called themselves FARGs, too, so they could return to their darkened, glowing AV Room to ignore the rest of the goings-on at camp and do God knows what—if it were us boys, we’d be downloading ASCII porn at 2,400 baud or something similarly gross. Long story short, the FARGs ruled the computers.

  But those girls liked Renard. Or at least they’d achieved a certain d’tente. I don’t know why. Renard didn’t act any differently around them. It was more like two species of fish in an aquarium who don’t have a predator-prey relationship so they just ignore each other. In any case, the FARGs allowed Renard access to the AV Room, and under his aegis, I was admitted as well.

  There was a video game on the Apple IIe that Renard played that he introduced me to. You controlled an Indiana Jones-looking man who walked around what seemed like an endless house, which resembled some kind of Aztec or Mayan ruin filled with spiders and scorpions and crocodiles and giant octopus things. You dug through garbage piles in the house and opened boxes looking for something, but what were you looking for? The wanderings didn’t seem to have any point; you just kept on walking and walking until you were overrun by the monsters and you died. You controlled your guy not with a joystick but with the keyboard, with a bewildering combination of keystrokes that had to be done lightning-fast, and you spent a lot of time getting killed unfairly.

  The game was boringly addictive in that 1980s way, back when the unspoken subtext of every game was: oh, like you have anything better to do? The “puzzles” you were expected to solve all presumed you had hours to grind away, punching each individual identical brick on a wall of what seemed like thousands of bricks to find the one random brick that would open a secret door into the next level. Back then you often played games without documentation, because you’d rarely buy games—the games came to you via someone cracking its copy protection and pirating it onto a blank disk, the game getting copied from friend to friend. So you often played games without knowing what, exactly, you were actually supposed to be doing. Renard said the object of the game was to find someone called the Flickering Man, but neither Renard nor I saw the Flickering Man; the Flickering Man’s appearances were rare and random, Renard informed me, occurring only on the highest, most inaccessible levels.

  I didn’t spend as much time in the AV Room as Renard. Nevertheless, both he and I were dubbed “FARG fags” by the more popular boys, which was a nice bit of projection since everyone knew the dominant boys organized brutal group jack-off contests in their rooms.

  As for the official camp activities of building rockets and blowing stuff up, I did participate in all that, but it was always a relief to escape from the summer heat into the air-conditioned AV Room, where the girls were muttering darkly over the birth of the internet and Renard was ascending level upon level in the strange house of his game, searching for the Flickering Man.

  * * *

  —

  That was back when I could still tolerate computers.

  Like most bright kids in the 1980s and 1990s, I spent a lot of time programming and playing video games. But as an adult I discovered, to my discomfort (along with the others at Sapere Aude), that the more time I spent immersed in thanaton mathematics, the more computers rubbed me the wrong way.

  We knew thanaton theory was weird. We knew that gaining proficiency in its subjective mathematics changed you, that it altered your modes of perception. We knew that the very act of calculation subtly distorted space-time around it.

  We just hadn’t expected certain distortions to be so nauseating. The way it feels as computers suck up and spit out data, chop it to bits, yank it back and forth, bully it around—

  Look. We were all technical people. Tinkerers, part-time programmers, nerds. And yet many of us, after calculating our first few hundred death dates, began to feel an aversion to computers. The relentless jabbing and shivering in the way computers process their calculations—we started to feel it like a physical cloud around the machines, a constant low-grade electric shock, exponentially spiking in proportion to the number of calculations swarming through its CPU.

  Thanaton theory wasn’t just a new branch of physics. It had opened up a whole branch of subjective mathematics as well—certain kinds of calculations that computers simply couldn’t perform.

  But once you’ve immersed yourself in enough of this subjective math, you begin to perceive the math of others.

  And the way computers do math feels like chewing tinfoil.

  We thought our acquired distaste for computers was just a minor thing. For some of us it remained minor. For others, though, the nausea became overwhelming, and they were obliged to quit. Especially as the years went on and using the internet became necessary for living a halfway normal life.

  This is all to say that, for the past twenty or so years, the internet has felt like a continual house party that I can’t attend. At best I’m hanging out in the front yard, peering in the windows. But the more glimpses I take into that window, the more the partygoers seem like monsters, the party more frantic and sick-making…and no, not in a prudish or judgmental way. I don’t mean I’m sickened by what people do online—I don’t care about selfies or porn habits or nasty tweets—as far as the actual calculations are concerned, it’s all the same. I mean the nature of the calculations. I glimpse a screen from afar, and for a moment it’s alluring, it looks smooth and crisp, it seems to offer so much. But then I get closer and I feel the loathsome speed and inanity of the computer thinking, the jagged jackhammer calculations happening every second, the bang bang bang of TCP/IP and HTTP and TLS/SSL, the numb way numbers are shunted around—and then the nausea comes, the dizzy sour feeling, the vomit inching up my throat.

  This happened to almost all of us at Sapere Aude. Unease with computers, revulsion toward the internet, even a disinclination to use smartphones. Most of us can manage it if we have to. I can kind of muscle through it. But it always feels wrong.

  Other guys of my age, of my disposition—that is, curious, smart nerds—built the internet, or populated it with their creativity. In any case, they became millionaires.

  I helped build something else.

  And so here I am.

  * * *

  —

  I have to piss.

  There’s a blizzard outside the car but there’s no getting around the fact: I drank two coffees during my Lisa Beagleman session and nature calls.

  I bundle up. Hat, gloves, scarf, everything. Crack open the door. Immediately snow and wind blast into the car. I stagger out, make sure I have the keys (that would be classic, locking myself out of my car right now), and slam the door. The emergency flashers blink red and white against the fluttering dark.

  Survey the damage. Just as I thought, I’d slammed into the concrete embankment at the bottom of the ditch and the car’s front is totally crumpled and twisted. It’s finished. Surprised its electrical system still works.

  I fumble with my pants with gloved hands. Can’t do it. Have to take off the gloves. Fingers immediately numb with cold. Stand with the wind at my back, open up my fly, fuck this is cold, then I’m pissing into the darkness, into the snow, steam boiling up and swept away in the flashing light. Already my dick is freezing. Finish, finish, finish this.

  Are you going to look yourself up?

  The books are in the car. You could do it.

  And what then? If I do a thanaton assessment on myself and find out I’m going to die in like thirty years, what would I change? Or if I’m going to die next week, what would I do differently then?

  Never a good idea.

  Suckers like Lisa Beagleman, with her Mandy and her puh-puh-puh-puh-prom, learn that too late.

  Resist it.

  But Stettinger must’ve looked himself up. He had to have, right? It’s hard to think he could�
��ve not done it. Stettinger never explicitly denied that he had. And if looking yourself up was good enough for Stettinger…Well, you always aspired to be another Stettinger, didn’t you? The whole eschaton thing, right?

  Right?

  A car comes barreling by. Doesn’t even slow down. Slush flying. I’m standing out in the snow, dick out like an idiot.

  No Stettinger.

  * * *

  —

  Stettinger was why I chose to commit to physics. Thanaton theory hit me at the exact right time, late in high school, when I was at maximum ambitiousness. I even made a point of enrolling at the university where Stettinger was a professor, the university where I had gone to physics camp with Renard. The joke was on me, though: Stettinger soon became world-famous. For my entire college career, I never even saw him on campus.

  But full disclosure: in my junior year, I actually corrected an error in one of Stettinger’s derivations of thanaton theory.

  In the grand scheme of things my correction had no practical consequences; it turned out that what Stettinger overlooked in that part of his derivation (an unbounded series that, potentially, could’ve blown up to infinity) coincidentally canceled out elsewhere (a new set of vectors that zeroed out the term). I hadn’t proven that Stettinger’s equations were false—that would’ve been a career-making discovery—I merely showed that they had to be derived in a slightly different way, which mathematicians more skilled than I promptly did.

  But the episode gave me minor notoriety at a young age. Nothing big. A footnote in the history of thanaton theory.

  Anyway, I didn’t follow it up with other scholarship. The embarrassing truth is, the only reason I even discovered the mistake was because I found it so difficult to follow Stettinger’s knotty, labyrinthine, idiosyncratic math, and so I had forced myself to laboriously check and recheck every step of his proofs—that’s how I noticed the minor error that others had missed. I wasn’t a straight-up physics major anyway—I was a physics and philosophy double major, not so much interested in finding practical applications for “death particles” as in writing papers about what thanatons meant. The other physics majors were concentrating on applications. I secretly believed they were philistines. I’m sure they judged me as a lightweight.