Dare to Know

by James Kennedy

  I walk back outside.

  It’s still about an hour’s walk from this McDonald’s to Dare to Know. The world itself won’t last through this afternoon. So let your eyes take it in. Smell the unremarkable air. Listen to the everyday traffic, run your hands on the ordinary brick walls, touch this tree’s normal bark. All about to be swept away. Whatever comes next won’t include this. It won’t include me or anything I see. We’ve had our turn. The next universe is around the corner, waiting in the wings. Impatient.

  I walk.

  * * *

  —

  I‘m at the bottom of the hill of Dare to Know.

  This neighborhood is crowded with people for some reason. All kinds. Homeless-looking men, tired clerks, sharply dressed financial types, shiftless teenagers, business-casual project managers, schlubby programmers all milling around, as though waiting for something. I had thought the city felt empty before, but apparently everyone has come here. Wait—was there supposed to be some event today? A protest, a demonstration? Possibly. It wouldn’t be the first time.

  The people waiting at the bottom of the hill are oddly quiet. Moving aimlessly, sometimes murmuring to each other. Something empty and tense in this crowd, almost mechanical…then I get it, they’re all pretending like they’re suffering from Sapere Aude syndrome! It’s part of one of those anti–Dare to Know demonstrations. I’ve watched enough protests like this. I focus on one guy in particular, a man in his sixties with a buzz cut and a gut, sweatshirt, pleated khaki shorts, junior-high gym teacher type, not someone you’d expect to participate in street performance art, but even he has the same lifeless vibe: like a neglected video game character who had slipped into an idle-loop subroutine, shuffling back and forth. He won’t look into my eyes.

  Well, duh. I’m the weird one, trying to look strangers in the eye.

  Good luck, protestors. You have less than an hour.

  I look up.

  Dare to Know is an unusually shaped building atop the hill. I start walking up the stairs and I feel the echo. I’m walking up Monks Mound alone while pregnant Julia waits in the museum and the sky is gray and drizzly. I’m walking up Monks Mound on July 4, 1054, surrounded by throngs of Cahokians as the sky is broken open by a supernova—maybe that’s the real reason we smear the sky with fireworks on the Fourth of July, to satisfy a pattern that’s older than the country itself, an unconscious urge, a primal sense that on that night of the year, the sky must be made to light up as it did on that night, a thousand years ago. If nature doesn’t do it, we’ll do it ourselves.

  Sense of occasion.

  The thanatons refreshed. The world continued.

  Not today.

  I break away from the crowd and climb the enchanted hill.

  * * *

  —

  Even though I’m late Ron Wolper makes me wait.

  Classic Wolper.

  When I first walked into the forcefully tasteful lobby of Dare to Know, I had been certain that my eschaton proof was correct. Punch-drunk with discovery. Almost light-headed.

  But now that I’ve been sitting in the lobby for fifteen minutes, waiting for the irritatingly casual receptionist to get someone to escort me to the meeting room…the more I wait, the more my calculations feel ridiculous.

  Maybe I’d made a mistake.

  Had I really proven anything?

  Deep down I must not believe it, not actually. If I truly thought the world was about to end, why was I spending my final minutes in Dare to Know’s lobby? 2:33 p.m…. I don’t even know what time it is. My phone is dead. And there’s no clock in here.

  I went wrong.

  Mistake. I get up from the couch. Walk around, a little wobbly. Were my calculations a mistake?

  Receptionist side-eyes my jittery pacing.

  Whatever. I can’t sit down.

  Atmosphere at headquarters saps my confidence. Life in sales is so hand-to-mouth, it’s easy to forget I’m part of a global multimillion-dollar company. Well, headquarters reminds you of that like a kick in the teeth. Ruthlessly sleek building atop a hill, arrogantly turned at an odd angle to the rest of the city. I’ve visited here only four times in my life but this lobby is freshly redesigned every time. Always in a way both fastidious and laid-back, as if to welcome you with a Hey, kick back, just chill! but also to warn you, Yeah, um, so just make sure you chill the correct way.

  I don’t belong here.

  Spent too long away from the heart of things. Chicago doesn’t feel like the sticks but it kind of is, isn’t it? Rooms and hallways in this place are modish in ways I can’t quite grasp. Passing executives look like hip grad students.

  And so many computers. The nauseating blitz of their calculations are rapid needles stabbing into my head. Don’t they have staff here who can do subjective math? They must not have any, or they’d all have run for the door long ago. Computers prickle and squeal in every direction, jabbering, chopping, roughly shoving around data, a mathematical racket that’s nearly intolerable.

  So nobody at Dare to Know HQ can do the simplest thanaton calculation. All of them managers and admin.

  Just then an intern casually wanders in. She stops to chat with the languid receptionist, another real go-getter.

  “Did you see all those people outside?”

  “Yeah, do you know why?”

  “No, do you?”

  “Some kind of demonstration, maybe?”

  “God, again?”

  Math static blasts my ears. It’s hard to put two ideas together, to maintain a train of thought. Jumping lights. I can’t keep the calculations straight.

  Have I deluded myself?

  The intern is saying my name.

  “Uh, right this way, please?”

  I pass through the doors and walk down the hall. Waiting for the elevator with the intern, I glance at some meeting happening behind a fishbowl window. Hard not to hate everyone in that conference room immediately. All of them nerdy and yet fuckable in a way that doesn’t make sense…Seriously, go look at old pictures of most of the people who actually built this company. Blattner and Hansen. Ziegler. Hopkins. Even Hutchinson. All of us dumpy compared to these poised, beautiful meta-nerds.

  A sick cloud of computational buzzing scraping all around me.

  Will this elevator ever come?

  In this glass-walled conference room a dozen people sit around a large table, pretending to care about some dipshit’s PowerPoint. One woman is separate from them—she sits far from the screen, outside the table’s circle, in the corner of the room, looking bored. She has dyed black hair in the kind of severe haircut that only looks good if aggressively maintained but she’s not maintaining it. Wearing a Smiths concert T-shirt that can’t possibly have been authentically obtained. Maybe twenty-five years old.

  She sees me.

  The elevator doors open.

  And I mean it felt like she saw me.

  The intern guides me into the elevator.

  The girl catches my eye. Holds it.

  Holy shit.

  It can’t be.

  The doors slide shut. But I know who that girl is. Computers buzz screech wail, disarranging my brain. Wait, was I just seeing things?

  The intern drawls away as the elevator rises.

  There was a look of recognition in that girl’s eyes. Impossible. She recognized me.

  Xuuzi—

  Can’t be.

  Eschaton, anti-eschaton, elevator, de-elevator, and if the elevator tries to bring you down, punch a higher floor …

  Was it her?

  The elevator doors open. The intern escorts me through a maze of empty white halls. Every office we pass is vacant. Every room unoccupied. This floor is desolate. Where am I being taken? The air thickens with computations, choppy and fizzy.

  Wait—should I tell Ron Wolper about 2:33 p.m.?<
br />
  But I had left my calculations at the hotel.

  Send this intern to fetch them, then? To prove to Ron Wolper what I’ve figured out? No time. And anyway I’m clearly wrong. But no, no, there was something real in those calculations, or I felt it becoming real, as if while I was balancing the equations in my mind, I was also balancing the world outside me, my math pivoting everything, rotating the sea of thanatons around me until I could almost touch the eschaton—like grasping a fish in dark water, I felt its shape, even as it wriggled away—

  Focus.

  What is Xuuzi doing here at Dare to Know?

  A man screams somewhere.

  Something is wrong. My head is full of nauseous static. The intern leaves me in an empty conference room to wait for Ron Wolper. After a minute I peek out the door. The floor is deserted. The glass wall looks into the hallway and the atrium beyond. Another window looks outside but the blinds are drawn.

  My stomach feels out of sorts too.

  What time is it?

  I check my phone, reflexively.

  It’s still out of juice.

  But it must be around 2:33 p.m. If my calculations were correct, the world should be ending right around now—but what am I even saying? The fact that I can be so calm about it proves I don’t really believe it.

  I open the blinds on the window.

  The world’s going on as normal. The crowd is still gathered at the base of the hill, now shuffling around Dare to Know in a circle. So it must be a protest after all. Though I don’t see any signs or banners.

  There’s something wrong about the way they’re walking.

  I crouch to plug the phone into the wall. Maybe I can recharge it here, look up the protest online, learn what’s going on. Might as well use the phone—I can’t feel any sicker than I do now. Of course my back is killing me. Why didn’t I sleep in the hotel bed? Why’d I sleep on the floor?

  I hear another scream, closer. A woman.

  I pause, sweating.

  What?

  My phone still won’t charge. I unplug it, blow air into the plug hole thing, jiggle it around. I find that if I keep pressing upward on the plug after it’s inserted, the phone does charge. But I can’t keep pressing upward all the time. I wedge the phone between the wall and a plant and the floor so that upward pressure on the plug is always being applied. The phone is charging now, precariously—so long as I don’t move anything—

  Ron Wolper finds me on the ground, futzing with the phone.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he barks.

  Ron Wolper. Aggressive mustache, crushing handshake. Not even deigning to offer his hand this time, though. As for myself right now—okay, I get it, I’m wearing the same wrinkled cheap outfit I bought yesterday, I don’t look my best. The jolting noise of calculations is making me sweat. Should I ask Wolper about the demonstration or whatever outside, about Xuuzi, about the men and women screaming down the hall? Wait, had I actually heard those screams?

  Steady.

  I’m supposed to be here.

  Ron Wolper had called me in. And I’m ready for whatever news Ron Wolper wants to tell me. Because I have something important to tell him too.

  Ron Wolper says, “You’re fired.”

  * * *

  —

  This knocks me off my stride.

  Ron Wolper adds, “No point in drawing it out.”

  My mouth is dry. Heart beating hard. Something about Ron Wolper always wrong-foots me. More than just the humiliation of being accountable to a jagoff who was basically a toddler when I was one of the people building this company from nothing.

  Because it’s past 2:33 and nothing has happened.

  But even still, even if I’m wrong about 2:33—

  “Did you hear me?” says Ron Wolper. “You’re out.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I manage to say.

  “Oh brother,” says Ron Wolper. “Here we go.”

  “There’s something important I have to tell you.”

  “Sure. Let’s get this part over with.”

  “It’s about the algorithm.”

  Ron Wolper rolls his eyes infuriatingly. I’m still crouched over the power outlet with my phone. Ron Wolper just stands there. Where do I start? With the eschaton, the anti-eschaton?

  I say, “I found an error in the algorithm—”

  “Where is everyone?” Ron Wolper steps back, sticks his head out the door, looks up and down the hall, irritated. “On vacation or something? The whole floor?”

  “And when I investigated the error, I found out that—”

  Ron Wolper turns back to me. “So you looked yourself up.”

  Puts me out of joint. How did he know?

  “Yes, I did look myself up, but here’s the thing, it’s—”

  “At least you’re not lying about it.”

  Oh, Ron Wolper, that smug hostility, I’d forgotten how much you set my teeth on edge.

  Ron Wolper goes on. “You do know that looking yourself up is already sufficient cause for termination, right?”

  Irrelevant. But push through. For some reason I need Ron Wolper to understand this. Why? Maybe because I haven’t really talked to anyone else in person all day. If the world is indeed ending, I can’t let it end without human contact with someone who might understand me. Even if it’s Ron fucking Wolper.

  I say, “The algorithm said I was dead.”

  Ron Wolper just nods, maddeningly.

  “But I’m talking to you, right?” I say. “So there must be something wrong with the algorithm, I mean, I’m standing right here…”

  Of course I’m not “standing right here,” I’m still crouched on the floor with my phone.

  I get up.

  Okay, now I’m “standing right here.”

  “Sit down,” says Ron Wolper.

  I sit in the chair.

  Ron Wolper does not sit. “There’s nothing wrong with the algorithm.”

  “But listen, it’s—”

  “Stop,” interrupts Ron Wolper. “Yeah, the algorithm predicts when you’re going to die. And the algorithm can also predict when you’re going to look yourself up.”

  It takes a second for this to sink in.

  Ron Wolper, with maximum condescension: “The time of your death that you derived from those books—we seeded that result in there, okay? 7:06 p.m. CST, two nights ago. Yeah. I know it, too. That’s not actually the time that you were going to die. It’s the time we knew you’d be dumb enough to look yourself up. You didn’t get the joke?”

  I’m speechless.

  “Our message to you? That we knew what you were up to?”

  Still speechless.

  “It’s a courtesy we throw in for every asshole who looks themselves up,” says Wolper, sitting down at last. “Ever since that stunt with Hopkins. And you’re not the first one. Anyway, you’re busted, and now you’re fired. On the plus side, though, no, you’re not dead. So you’ve got that going for you.”

  Ron Wolper is loving this. Ron Wolper must’ve had this meeting marked in his calendar for years. Probably the very first week he came to work for Dare to Know, Blattner and Hansen informed Ron Wolper that this would happen.

  But wait—if the Books of the Dead were seeded with inaccurate information—and if they can predict more than just my death, if they can even predict when I look myself up—

  “I’m the eschaton,” I say, weakly.

  Ron Wolper chuckles. “What?”

  Holy shit, I’m a fool. Everything I thought I’d discovered last night—the galactic scale of its stupidity all comes crashing through to me. There is no eschaton. There is no anti-eschaton walking around either. That girl I glimpsed downstairs wasn’t Xuuzi. All my exhilarating inspiration, everything I had oh so carefully deduced last night—it’s nonsense. That’
s why 2:33 has come and gone and nothing happened. Because I’m a fucking fool.

  But I know thanaton theory. I know it better than Ron Wolper, I sure as hell know it better than all the poseurs in this building suffused with brain-melting math static that they’re too stupid to be bothered by—

  Doesn’t matter.

  I was wrong.

  And now I’m fired.

  With less than ten dollars to my name.

  Ron Wolper opens a drawer in the desk.

  It has a paper in it, folded up.

  Ron Wolper places the paper on the desk between us.

  He says, “This is your real death.”

  The paper sits there.

  Ron Wolper gives the shit-eatingest grin I’ve ever seen.

  Don’t reach for it.

  The paper just sits between us.

  Don’t reach for that paper.

  But I want it.

  I want it.

  At this moment I want my death so badly that I realize that, up until now, I never truly understood the appeal of what we sell.

  But now that my death has become real, now that my own calculation is complete, now that my death has been forced out of an unmeasured cloud of possibilities and pinned to one definite date—

  I want that paper more than anything.

  The phone on the conference table rings.

  “Hold on.” Ron Wolper answers the phone. “Wolper.”

  I look at the paper.

  “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.”

  Ron Wolper keeps uh-huhing away on the phone. Not paying attention to me anymore. Security will probably come to escort me out of the building. The buzz of electronic calculation intensifies all around me. They’ve got to know how it affects me. Using it as a weapon.

  I know what’ll happen next. Once he gets off the phone Ron Wolper will indicate the paper on the table and say, “This is your real death, but it’ll cost you.” And I will respond with something like, “Cost me what?” And then he’ll come back with a number. But there’s no number I can afford. What can I offer Wolper—my proof of the eschaton?