Version Control

by Dexter Palmer

  Britt was the principal organizer of the core group’s social life; her nickname among the rest of the gang was “Julie the Cruise Director” (though if pressed, none of them could have sourced the reference without pulling out an iPhone). When they got together, it was usually because Britt had messaged them all and blocked out spots on their empty calendars; they all agreed that was Britt’s job, so they didn’t have to think about it. So it took a while longer than it would have otherwise for someone to notice that Britt was more or less missing in action lately: only when Kate texted Becca (“Have u heard from britt?”) did Becca realize that her days had been a little emptier than usual, that she’d been spending a little more time than usual around the house, listening to Dad work out his drafts of next Sunday’s sermons and watching reality shows on the couch with Mom. (Rebecca’s drink of choice during these mother-daughter bonding moments was a glass of Australian Chardonnay poured from a one-point-five-liter bottle; Mom stuck to her traditional vodka and cran.) It took three days after that first text message for Kate to clear her throat and declare an emergency, and two days after that until Britt could say that she was “available.”

  Serious business. They splurged on appetizers at this classy seafood place in Haddam that was BYOB; when the server sniffed at the straight-up jug of Carlo Rossi Chablis that Kate had picked up at a grocery store on the way over, Kate smiled and said, “Don’t worry: we’re drinking this ironically. If you don’t have wine glasses, just bring us four straws.”

  After they’d had a couple of drinks, Jen popped a morsel of calamari in her mouth and said to Britt, her voice coy and melodic, “So what’s uuuup?” If you heard that question asked in that way, with the word up slithering down through three tones of the scale, you couldn’t help but spill the beans out of reflex. It turned out that late one night a couple of months ago, after the core group had closed down the bars and gone their separate ways, Britt had been screwing around on the Internet at three in the morning because she was too wired from Red Bull and vodka to go to bed and she was still a little drunk, and just to see what would happen, she had opened up a profile on one of those dating sites and put up a couple of cute pictures of herself. And she got some winks and some messages from some guys, and she started messaging back and forth and flirting with some of them, and going out on dates with a couple of them, and lately she’d been hanging out a lot with one of them. And she really liked him. He was really, really cool.

  “What the actual fuck,” said Kate, after Britt had told them all this. “Have you noticed that you’re hot? Dating sites are for women who are not hot. And in the profile they go on and on about how nice they are, and how they like the same books and movies that nerds like, and when you look at their picture all you see is, like, half of one ear. And that has a zit on it.”

  “I know!” Britt said. “I know! I didn’t go on it because I was desperate. I can meet guys in real life whenever. And I was just screwing around for fun at first. But later on it started to make more sense to me. Look: meeting guys in real life is okay if you just want a casual thing, but I’m not twenty-one anymore! I’m tired of hookups and I want something that at least could maybe be serious. And for that kind of thing it’s a lot better to meet guys online.

  “The thing you don’t have to put up with online is the talking. Like, you meet a guy for a coffee at Starbucks, and you’re sitting at this little table, and you’re both totally there. It’s intimate. He’s looking at you and waiting for you to say something. And the whole place is quiet because everyone is on their computers, so whatever you say sounds like the whole world can hear it, even though everyone else in the place has earbuds in, so it shouldn’t matter. Whenever I’m in a situation like that, especially with someone I’ve only met once in a bar, I’m like: Shields up! I don’t like it! I want to say: Do you mind if we just put headphones on and sit here and drink our lattes, and we can just text. How am I going to get in an actual serious relationship if I have to be in these intimate situations from the very beginning?

  “But when you’re meeting people online, you’re not totally out there at first. You can take baby steps. First somebody winks at you, and you look at their profile, and if you like what you see you wink back. Then they send you a little message—Hey—and you send one back. And you message each other for a little while. Then you can go offsite and switch over to IMing, which is like talking in person, except you can edit yourself: if you find yourself about to say something stupid, you can just delete it and say something better.

  “So by the time you actually meet a guy in person, you’ve laid all this groundwork. And you’re ready to graduate to having a real conversation, where you have to say what you think and there’s no takebacks.”

  “I don’t know how people got along before we invented the Internet,” Kate said.

  “I know, right? And the other thing is—you know this—even with going out to bars and stuff, it’s harder to meet people than it is when we were in college. I can go for days and days and not meet one new person, much less a guy, much less a guy I’d want to date. But online there are scads and scads of people. And because there’s so much choice, you don’t have to settle. Like, if you had to stick to the two or three people you’d meet shopping for groceries or standing in line at the DMV or something, you’d think, ‘Well, this guy is alright, even though I won’t be able to wear heels when I go out with him because I’ll look like a giant.’ But online there are so many guys, you can just shop for a tall one.”

  Britt’s new beau had lied a little about his height, actually. Everybody lied a little in their profile, though—an extra inch; a couple of years shaved off the age on your driver’s license; a book you claimed to love that you’d been given as a gift and you placed on the shelf unread. You learned to correct for that pretty quickly, though; you were willing to wave away a couple of initial white lies because you’d done the same thing too.

  And this guy she’d met—his name was Victor—was pretty cool! He worked in the marketing arm of a pharmaceutical corporation, introducing a new antidepressant to South American markets. Britt and Victor texted and IMed all the time, and she’d been staying over at his place a few times a week. “I might go down with him to Brazil for a week in the fall,” she said. “It’s moving fast, but it feels right, and this guy is really, really awesome. Like, I can’t believe my luck.”

  “We’re really happy for you,” Becca said, and the rest of the women agreed, clinking their glasses.

  “It was cool that we were able to get together like this,” Britt said. “Just like old times.” Old times, in this instance, being about a month ago.

  “Totally,” said Jen.

  “We should do this again soon,” Britt said, the regretful tone of her voice indicating that, no, they probably wouldn’t be doing this again soon.

  The next day Rebecca logged on to Facebook to find that Britt had changed her profile picture. Her new one was a snapshot that looked like it had been taken in a hotel ballroom, a spacious hall suffused with golden light. She stood next to beaming (and handsome!) Victor in his made-to-measure suit; she was smiling, and slouching ever so slightly in her Audrey Hepburn LBD.

  And then there were three. But bereft of Britt, the remaining members of the core group quickly found that her borderline-neurotic organizational skills and her endless chatter had made her the glue that held them all together. None of the rest of them was as motivated to get people out on the town, so nights in bars and restaurants began to happen less often. And when the ladies did come out, their conversations didn’t have the rambling garrulousness they’d had before—sure, Britt had had a habit of turning dialogues into monologues, but in her absence the rest of the gang realized that she’d been dutifully filling up the empty spaces between their exchanges until they felt like speaking again. Without her they silently sat in a row at the bar, people watching and sipping on their drinks. Awkward.

  It wasn’t much longer—a few weeks, maybe—until J
en noticed that Kate had dropped off the face of the earth, the same way Britt had before. At the subsequent emergency conclave that Jen convened, Kate casually mentioned that she’d opened up a profile on a dating site as well. “I figured, it’s like throwing pearls before swine, but what the hell,” Kate said. It was exhausting replying to most of the messages she got—“to be good at it you have to treat it like a job”—but she was already going out to dinner with guys a couple of times a week. “I’m not going to lie,” she said, “it’s nice to be taken out for a meal when you’re broke. Granted, I’ve told the same stories so often that I’m starting to get bored being around myself. But once you get past that, it’s fun! Not being serious about it, like Britt is now: just, you know, dating around. And I get what she was talking about—it’s maybe mean to say it’s more efficient than leaving the house and trying to meet people in person, but it is.

  “Anyway. Sorry I haven’t been around much lately. But this was fun. Let’s get together and do this again soon!”

  And then there were two, and Becca was pretty sure that they would never be a trio again. Without Britt’s bubbliness and Kate’s constant snark, Becca would be left to listen to Jen be Debbie Downer.

  Becca and Jen went out for drinks once, just the two of them—they’d tried messaging Kate and Britt, but they were both indisposed, probably on a double date or something. And Becca didn’t like just sitting there at the bar with Jen: it didn’t feel right. Everything that Jen said circled back to the subject of her own regrets; somehow even her mere presence managed to lace silence with despair. Even after a drink things didn’t loosen up between them, and when the bartender gamely asked them if they wanted a second round, Becca cut Jen off to call for the check.

  So that was that. After the group broke up, Rebecca spent a lot more time at home in the evenings. Not that this made her parents any happier: “How about putting down the phone for once,” her mother said, playfully patting her cheek as if she were trying to wake up a knocked-out boxer. “You’re here but not here. Quit talking to ghosts.” It was an old person’s way of seeing things. Really, it wasn’t that she didn’t hang out with her friends anymore—at least this is what Rebecca told herself—it was that the whole idea of meeting someone in a physical place, to talk to them in real time, was so twentieth century. It was no wonder that she didn’t really want to get together with people—the skill of spoken conversation was one that people of her age and her technological savvy were evolving out of, like writing in cursive, or making popcorn without a microwave oven. Even if the gang didn’t meet up anymore, and Kate was the only one left that Rebecca even texted with, social networks carried the news—she could easily figure out what was going on by looking at Britt’s feed (photo after photo of her and Victor), or Kate’s (lots of guys friending her whom Rebecca had never heard of—clearly dudes from dating sites), or Jen’s (suddenly, a bunch of pictures of her family’s two basset hounds and the labor-intensive meals she was cooking).

  To call them ghosts was to miss the point: face-to-face conversation, what her mother naively thought of as “being here,” was for people who still needed constant confirmation by glances and nods that they were being understood. But one of the benefits of the Internet, for people like Rebecca who had been born after it, was the merciful elimination of that need. Just as you could log on to the site of your choice and listen to everyone you wanted to at once, the never-ending streams of tweets and status updates blending into a mélange that portrayed all your friendships and acquaintances and hates and curiosities as a whole greater than the sum of its parts, so could you speak at those same places and at least be certain that, no matter what you said, you were always being heard.

  Even if you looked lonely, you felt free.

  6

  PERFECT INFORMATION

  If, thirteen years later, Rebecca did not exactly feel free, she at least felt…okay. She had reconciled herself to the fact that this was the life she was living and not another, no matter how much she wished that things had turned out otherwise. She was not one of those people her age who, after a divorce or a dismissal from a long-held job, drew smiles across their faces and spoke of “starting over.” She had been dealt her own peculiar tragedy, and she’d come to terms with it in her own way (even if doing so involved realizing that she would never not be coming to terms with it; that even though she’d gotten past it, she’d never be able to get over it).

  When she returned to the house after dinner and entered the living room, she found Philip and her father deep in conversation, as expected. But there was something weird about it—the two of them seemed unusually nervous and restless. Philip sat perched on the edge of his chair, leaning forward as if he were preparing to spring out of it at a moment’s notice; Woody, on the sofa opposite him, squinted at Philip from beneath eyelids made slightly heavy by whiskey. A bottle of Elijah Craig bourbon and an empty shot glass sat on the coffee table in front of him. He poured himself a shot and said, “You’re putting words in Popper’s mouth now. He said falsifiable statements were what made science different from other ways of thinking. But he didn’t say they made it better than other ways of thinking! That’s something else!”

  “But I’m not saying that falsifiability makes science better; I’m saying it makes science good.”

  “Which is just a way for you to make this belittling comparison without owning up to it! You can’t just dismiss unfalsifiable claims out of hand as unworthy of serious thought, which you’ve been trying to do one way or another for half an hour now. If you do that you’re just a machine; you’re just a bunch of numbers.”

  “How have you guys been getting on?” Rebecca said, repeating the question when Woody and Philip did nothing in response but glower at each other.

  “We’re fine,” Philip replied eventually. He sipped from a mug of freshly brewed hot tea. Black, Rebecca saw: he’d be tossing and turning tonight, trying to take the sheets for himself.

  She considered sitting down to join them, but then there was that odd mix of emotions she felt roiling under the ostensibly antiseptic nature of their dialogue: frustration and rage and machismo. She sensed testosterone in the air and thought better of intervening: let the men hash this one out. “Well, I’m going to go on to bed, then,” she said. “You two have fun. Dad, don’t let Philip drink too much tea.”

  “I won’t,” said Woody warily to Rebecca’s back as she headed down the hallway to their bedroom.

  The click of the bedroom door’s latch set Woody off as if it were the crack of a starting pistol. “Look here,” he said. “If the blessing of being human is sentience—the ability to actually know things and to reason instead of just relying on brute instinct—then the curse of being human is the constant awareness of how much there is to know, and how little of it we do know. Or even how little of it we can know. And I don’t mean stuff that goes on in a lab! I’m talking about things like what’s going on in someone else’s mind. Whether she truly feels the same way about you that you do about her. What would have happened if we’d done one thing instead of another. What your friends say about you when you aren’t around. If we were always consciously aware of that lack of knowledge, we’d go nuts! We wouldn’t be able to leave the house for pure paranoia, or getting lost in imagining better alternate histories for ourselves, or wondering exactly what our significant others are thinking when we’re lying next to them in bed.”

  Philip glared at Woody, who nonetheless pressed forward. “So that’s why we need unfalsifiable statements. They let us navigate an unimaginably complex world, with these stupid hunks of meat inside our heads that’ll never let us get even close to perceiving perfect information. Sure, you don’t really know what’s going on, but you can say to yourself: She still loves me, even though she hasn’t said it in a while. Or: God exists, and He rewards good and punishes evil. Or: I live in the best of all possible worlds. Even if you can’t prove these things are true, you act as if they are, and they help you get through
the day without having to deal with these paralyzing existential questions every time you take a step. They’re really useful! They’re indispensable. If you intend to stay sane, that is.”

  Philip took a breath. “I’m trying not to be angry about what you’re saying,” he said, “but you’re making it hard. You’re trying to lump all of these kinds of claims into a category—whether someone loves someone else with whether a God exists or not—and say they all ought to be treated equally, and you’re also trying to say that these claims are neither better nor worse as a category than the kinds of claims that make the scientific method as powerful as it is. But that’s preposterous! Surely some unfalsifiable claims don’t merit consideration because they’re inherently ridiculous, right? If someone told you there was a teapot orbiting the sun, you’d instinctively say it was silly! You wouldn’t even stop to think about it!”

  “Some philosophers might.”

  “Well, some philosophers waste their time thinking about all sorts of useless things. But my point is that if someone comes to me with this claim that there’s some guy, with a beard, who lives in the sky, who knows everything, who can read my thoughts, who cares about the moral and ethical positions I take, and who will reward me after I die if I take the positions he prefers—it’s just a silly story on its face.”

  “Again with this tired boilerplate rhetoric now. Is this a dorm room I’m in? Am I seventeen? I brought my good whiskey over here for this. First of all, it doesn’t make any sense to argue about the chance that an unfalsifiable claim is true, because unfalsifiable claims can’t be verified as true or false in the first place! It’s a waste of time. The only thing I can legitimately concern myself with is the effect that belief in an unfalsifiable claim has on someone’s actions. Like: say I’m walking down the street and someone’s trailing me, thinking about picking my pocket. But he decides not to. What business is it of mine what goes on in his head when he makes up his mind? Why should I care whether he’s afraid of God’s punishment or the state’s? What matters is that I still have my wallet, right? If you get your credit cards stolen, you’re not going to say, ‘Well, I hope the thief was at least an atheist.’ ”