The Amateurs

by Liz Harmer

  Subject: Discovery by Miss Young Friends and family,

  I have found myself thrilled by the unfinished article called “The Time Machine in My Living Room.” Is there anyone anywhere not beguiled by the prose of young Nellie? What interests me most is her discovery that port is likewise alluring, and the question is whether this is an integral feature of the machine or a viral element. We all know that even the common cold conspires to spread in this way. Keep me abreast.

  Yours, with warmth and admiration,

  AD

  The formal diction and lack of abbreviations were signals of Doors’ seriousness. He rarely sent e-mails in those days, called himself post-text. Brandon counted seven cc’d names, five of them among the twelve, including Zahra. His own lack of addressee status drained the warmth from his face. None of the others had ever been mentioned by TIME magazine, let alone featured on its cover.

  Brandon scribbled in his log until he was nauseated and thirsty. It occurred to him that Doors had been encouraging him to work on this archive and must have known he’d find this e-mail. Now he recalled with dull shock how he had sometimes asked if port might have some power, like a magnetic force, that drew people to it. Doors had, again and again, assured him that everything was consensual. Brandon had felt reassured by Doors’ vehemence. But now it seemed that several among the twelve had known that port acted on a person like a common cold. And it seemed that Doors, who’d claimed that port was only a thing he’d stumbled upon and not truly designed, had known this—Brandon glanced at the time-stamp—at the beginning of the second wave, when the U.S. population was stabilizing at around two-thirds its previous size. Which meant that Doors had done nothing to pull port off the market or to warn anybody. Nor had he apologized, just as he hadn’t with other scandals that had dogged him: the factory conditions in Cambodia, in Thailand. Doors had been careful with his words, but never really apologized.

  Brandon reeled, nauseated, still scribbling, until the door boomed with three knocks. He moused the windows closed, one by one, and stashed his notebook in a nearby drawer.

  Doors stood in the hall. Slight smile. “Come out. Join the festivities.” He put his hands on Brandon’s shoulders. “We need you.”

  * * *

  —

  To mark the end of Year Zero, this first year together at Stable, Doors did not get up on a stage to make a speech. This was not a time for tragic heroism or ambition. What it was time for, finally, was the good life. So Doors mingled in the crowd and ate his small portion of turkey meat just like everybody else.

  Brandon thought: at least they aren’t depriving us of protein. Then he thought: they?

  Tables had been placed over the turf and decorated with low-energy lighting, giving the gathering the feel of an enormous wedding. Suzanne, who was helping to distribute little Mason jars of beer, whispered to Brandon that they should start the dancing. He frowned at her, and she shrugged and sashayed with her tray over to another crowd.

  Brandon had been instrumental in creating the presentation that was now projected onto the white wall of Wing One, the image wavering where it hit window glass. “The good life,” said his voice over the speakers. The jumbo image of his face caught all its flaws: slightly crossed eyes, asymmetrical jaw, bald spot in the stubble. He took a big swallow of beer as the image of himself said, audio one half-second behind his moving mouth, “We hold no things to be self-evident.” Big flirty smile.

  Beside him, Dawn, another one of the twelve, moved so close that her arm pressed against his. “We believe in good food and smart tech. We believe that creating new tech has never been about money but has always been about making life better and easier. We believe in a clear view to past and future, to stars and to mitochondria. We believe in flexibility and optimism. We believe in changing our minds. If it doesn’t work—” His image paused.

  “Melt it down!” returned the crowd. People raised their Mason jars full of amber liquid.

  “To us! To our health and prosperity!”

  Brandon accepted the hearty clinking of jars from those standing near him on the Caf-Wing side of the quad. His face was replaced with the frozen projection of a retro PINA pineapple sporting an outrageous number of spikes.

  “The problem with that old logo is that it has too much detail,” Dawn said, gesturing at the screen. Five years ago, when Brandon met her, Dawn had worn a springy blond corporate bob and heavy red lipstick, but her hair now fell limp over her protruding ears. She put a tiny bite of greens into her thin-lipped mouth. “What you want,” she said, “is broad strokes and outlines.”

  “For simplicity,” Brandon said.

  “Well, for simplicity, yes. But also for imagination. You want people to fill it with their own desires. Desire is the main thing.”

  People’s faces were lit bluish by the moon- and LED-light. They were now rising from their seats at the many tables, dancing on the soft artificial turf. During the droughts of the years before port, real grass had become more taboo than smoking or gas-powered cars. This turf was already marred by dents and scratches, coming apart like an old carpet, and they had nothing to replace it with. Soon some of them would probably be enlisted to lay tile.

  “Desire used to be the main thing we wanted in a good design,” Dawn said. “But what is desire being replaced with here?”

  There was no logo for Stable. It was only a word in a person’s mind or mouth.

  “With stability,” Brandon said. His thin slices of turkey were complemented by a salad of dandelion greens and balsamic vinegar, and its sharp savour filled his mouth. The scent of manure wafted towards him, but they had got used to the smells of life near poultry, and without indoor plumbing or frequent showering.

  The compostable plate was sagging in Brandon’s left hand, so he sat down cross-legged on the turf and tried to balance the plate on his knee.

  “I guess so. I haven’t figured out yet what the design principles of stability would be, this sort of stability, or how one would make a logo for it,” Dawn said. She laughed half-heartedly. “A few years ago, you know, I would have said, ‘Who wants stability? Give me chaos any day.’”

  “We’re part of a corporation in the true sense,” Brandon said. “From the Latin corpus. We’re all parts of a living body, despite our stability. Stability is not unchanging.”

  “Latin, huh?”

  Despite himself, Brandon felt a swell of emotion. He could hear in the endless night sky the whipping of wind against fabric. He recalled an old thought experiment by the stoics to do with the question of the universe’s infinitude: go to the end of the known universe and reach out your arm. Either you find no boundary in which case the universe is bigger than you knew and you must move further out, or you do find a boundary, something to contain you, which means there is something beyond the boundary. Either way, there’s more to the universe than you can imagine.

  “I studied Classics at Yale,” Brandon said, trying to explain himself, but the words came out like an awkward brag. At a nearby table Zahra sat, still and serene, as several men he barely knew jostled nearby. They were as obvious as male birds puffing their feathers. She glanced over at him and smiled.

  “But you probably knew that already,” he said, returning his attention to Dawn.

  “Oh, yes,” Dawn said. “The whole Brandon Dreyer mythology. Doors used to tell us that you were an ideal PINA employee, because you knew so little about tech. That you came here not because of ambition, but because you were following your college sweetheart. All very adorable.”

  “Hmm,” Brandon said, used to this, the sarcasm, the teasing, the tinge of resentment. He could feel Dawn moving away from him with a nearly indiscernible tilt.

  “You’re the great romantic,” she said. “For me it was prestige and money. But mainly money.”

  Brandon didn’t bother to mention the irony of all these young techies magnetized by money now finding their millions worthless: the irony was too obvious.

  Dawn took a big
bite of her soggy greens. “Well, in any case,” she said. “I’m not like you guys. You virtuous boys in the boys’ club. Higher calling and all that. It’s easy to be an idealist when you aren’t the one getting your hands dirty.”

  Brandon felt wobbly. “Getting your hands dirty?” he said.

  “When we did the Testifiers campaign, we were thinking that, at best, we’d make a billion dollars, and only lose a few hundred thousand people. Not that we thought in terms of losses then. Anyway, here we are, and I’m not entirely thrilled that the world has ended.”

  Brandon tried to sound casual. “We really didn’t do adequate testing….”

  “Of course we didn’t! You write up the legal disclaimers and you set your product out on the open sea. See how it does. You know, all the nautical metaphors Doors loves. Sea legs, et cetera. The launch was the test.”

  “And here is the result,” Brandon said.

  “Exactly,” she said.

  Doors was half a field away, smiling at a few of the drink servers. He sensed Brandon’s eyes on him and turned, then nodded as though giving a command. Brandon raised his glass in Doors’ direction and took a sip.

  “Doors loves you,” Dawn said. “Doors adores you.” She had removed her body from all points of contact with his. “You two have this completely intimate understanding. Whereas he’s always testing me. Always trying to get to me, to make me crack. Years of this bullshit. And there you are with your bromance. Goddamn misogyny.”

  Brandon had believed—had thought they all believed—that in marketing and distributing port, Doors had only been capitalizing on a strange situation. Surely Doors couldn’t have known everyone would buy in. He couldn’t have known—clearly he didn’t know—that people would not return. And now that they hadn’t—except for the single alleged returnee, Kate Generato—Doors had doubled down, claiming that this made perfect sense. Why would you stay in this time of our planet’s dying? Why would you come back here? Not even Benji or Dawn, the most opinionated of them, had answered these questions with the obvious: Maybe you want to see your family again? Maybe you miss your life? Maybe you feel homesick? The odds were against no one coming back. Doors would never admit guilt. Had never admitted guilt in his whole questionable life.

  But, Brandon thought, telling himself to calm down, maybe people just weren’t returning to anywhere near where those who remained were cloistered. People might be returning all the time, finding an empty world, and going back in.

  Also: We are staying in this time of dying. Why are we staying?

  The good life! The good life! This was the apparent answer, these words projected onto the building. Who knew how good life could be? How sweet?

  Kate Generato was the only person they knew who had returned, a woman haunted and drunkish, stumbling to the security entrance by the lavatories, swooning into Stable like a mysterious stranger who arrives at a fairy-tale castle. They’d grilled her, and her answers had been thrilling at first—she claimed to have gone to a place utterly unlike our own, in some other galaxy, with different planetary bodies in a long night—and so they had relaxed. Brandon had relaxed. Now they need not doubt that their loved ones had gone somewhere else in time and space. Not only that, but Doors had been right: people could return if they wanted to. “How did you get back?” they had asked Kate. “How did you end up here?” But she seemed spooked, and at times claimed that she was inside her own dream. After a few gentle interrogations, when they took turns getting her food and drink as well as warm blankets, since she was always shivering, Kate Generato stayed in a room for months recovering, rarely leaving her bed. The room was right next to Doors’ old office, where the first port had been—almost accidentally, according to legend—designed.

  Doors’ reaction to Kate Generato’s appearance had been puzzling. He did not seem surprised or relieved. There had been an uptick in meetings, and in them, Doors was frazzled. Sometimes he would whip around and scream in someone’s face. Benji, and then Joni, brought up the question of the test subjects (in reality, actors hired by PINA) who had become known as the Testifiers, famous for their awe and excitement, part of the enormously successful marketing campaign when port was first launched. Doors dealt with such inquiries by ignoring them and then, when Benji pushed, shouting “I don’t answer to you, do I, meat-man? Why don’t you find your way out of here if you don’t like it?” Benji had threatened to leave, but, as Doors had predicted, came crawling back instead. Benji wanted to talk constantly about the remotes, the return technology that was supposed to be given out to all original purchasers of ports. Why hadn’t we made sure—ourselves—that they worked? Even though we couldn’t have predicted or controlled the unauthorized port-hopping, some people at least would have been capable of returning. There were rumors that one of the Testifiers really had gone and returned, not merely pretended to, like the others. Benji wanted Dawn to track down the Testifiers, but Dawn had told him not to be ridiculous. It was impossible! Everyone knew they were actors, they had signed complicated contracts, the legal department was shredded, the Testifiers were gone. Benji was becoming paranoid, as they all were, knowing so little.

  Brandon thought of the woman he had seen walk into a port on a stage. How much trust everyone had then, the way you trusted a magician not to saw through an actual body.

  And now, thought Brandon, there was the Nellie Young e-mail, the one suggesting that port is like the common cold; port influences people’s behaviour; port is therefore, somehow, alive?

  The clues had been there, waiting for Brandon to put them together. Maybe it was irresponsible to release a product when its creator didn’t really understand it, but that was the sort of irresponsibility that made the consumer world go around. Upsetting Brandon now was that Doors did not tell him what he suspected or what he knew. Brandon was not in the inner circle; he only believed he was. Did Dawn know this? Did Zahra?

  “It’s practically a marriage,” Dawn said.

  “Huh?”

  “Brandon plus Doors equals…”

  Brandon had drunk too much beer. The walls were tilting, his senses dulling to a pleasant blur. Around him people were rising from their seats as though about to float beautifully into the sky. They gathered in the middle of the quad, dancing and jumping and singing and shouting. Music floated out of synced robotic sound systems cutely built into sunglass-wearing teddy bears that buzzed around on the turf like fuzzy little R2D2s. Someone had replaced the retro PINA logo with old videos of pop songs, preceded here and there with ads for defunct companies. Everything was defunct; there was no Internet; the video cache was infinite.

  “Even if Beyoncé is still out there somewhere, there will never be another album,” Dawn said with exaggerated wistfulness. “Wanna dance?”

  “Nah,” he said. “No thanks. I’d rather watch for now.”

  He took her sagging plate and she spun her reedy body out into the crowd. There was a higher than average number of nerds and wallflowers in this group, and the dancing was stilted, but Suzanne and Co.’s magic moonshine helped. The stars above gridded into constellations Brandon could no longer identify. During his Canadian boyhood, his parents had taken him camping and given him names. The dippers, of course, and Orion with the three-starred belt. But no longer were the moving lights of airplanes overhead, as there had once been, as there had always been.

  The breeze cooled his sweat-beaded neck. If any satellites were still picking up signals, if anything still surveilled, perhaps it would see this warm and lit quad as a haven in a darkened world.

  “Quite a night,” Doors said, sidling up to Brandon. “I still regret the Mars failure, of course, as I—as you know—regret all failures. But to end up here in this place of great welcome and hospitality that we created—well, it seems right and fitting, doesn’t it? It seems poetic, doesn’t it, Brandon?”

  “It’s poetic,” Brandon confirmed.

  In all interviews, Doors gave the same cryptic answers to the same questions. If someone sugge
sted that “DOORS” was what he should have named the company, he had a ready response. Why name it for a sweet fruit? the interviewer might press. Why choose such an un-tech biotic shape to represent the most advanced silicon tech available to man?

  —Exactly, Doors would say. Precisely. [At which point, the reporter would refer to his Cheshire grin.]

  Q: Detractors have claimed that the name PINA did not come to you in a dream but in an adolescent drug-induced haze. Detractors have claimed that when you arrived in Los Angeles, you saw the palm trees and believed they grew pineapples.

  —Who are these detractors? [Laughter.] I want their names and addresses.

  Q: Where did you come up with the name?

  —Let me say this. Have you ever examined a pineapple? Have you ever taken a pineapple in your hands and lifted it to the light and given it a good, strong look? A close look?

  Q: Is that a real question?

  —Let me just say these two things. One: there are no accidents. Two: a person who cannot look closely cannot invent. A person unwilling to fiddle will fail. Everything is discovery, and nothing is invention.

  * * *

  —

  Doors followed Brandon around a crowd of maniacal dancers to another table, where, after dumping their compostables in the wheelbarrow, they tore off hunks from one of the enormous bread loaves made from the nearly extinct bags of flour. Zahra was still within view, watching them with her big eyes.

  Doors smiled at him. “I’m proud of what we’ve done here.” In lieu of a speech, Doors would often give his remarks to Brandon, counting on him to spread them around. “This really is the start of something.”

  “I’m hoping you’ll choose me for the mission—or the voyage,” Brandon said abruptly. “What are you calling it?”

  “Ah, is Mr. Dreyer getting restless? Does Mr. Dreyer suffer from wanderlust?”

  “A little. Yeah, sure. Of course,” Brandon said. It was difficult to meet the man’s eyes. What would he do if he suspected Brandon was having doubts?