Version Control

by Dexter Palmer

  “It’s time to transition to more intimate subjects of discussion,” Bradley announced as soon as the bartender brought his second beer, and though said subjects of discussion were, Rebecca supposed, nominally more intimate, they were still primarily data-driven. He described his eating habits (“If I come in above 2200 calories by the end of the day I feel like crap the next morning. Miller Lite: 128. With gin and tonic you’re probably ringing up around 200, by the way, depending on the pour: it’s not the booze you have to watch out for, but the sugar”). Oddly, he mentioned his success on Lovability (“It’s trending upward, though it’s not at the level it was when I was on the sites in LA. When I first joined I averaged between zero and one date in a given week. Now it’s upticked to between one and two. Closer to two”). Even more oddly, he related a statistic he’d heard that he found surprising: that ninety percent of adult Americans got cold sores. (“It’s amazing that, given its prevalence, people treat oral herpes as such a scandalous thing. If you get to a certain age and you’ve lived an active social life it’s a practical inevitability!”)

  As Rebecca’s opinion about Bradley shifted from amusement to boredom to active distaste, her responses to his statistical declamations decayed from curt mmm-hmms to silent nods to blank indifference. Bradley responded by pulling an iPad from his briefcase, loading up a Scrabble app, and placing the tablet in front of her without a word. They played a quick game and he cleaned her clock, 330 to 175. (“You need to learn how to count tiles so you don’t make mistakes like that,” he said near the end of the match, his tone more in sorrow than anger.) Then he settled the bill, they shook hands (awkward!), and parted in silence.

  Late that night, Rebecca received a message from Bradley that was a hell of a thing.

  Dear Rebecca—

  You may have picked up on my growing disappointment with you this afternoon as our first meeting progressed. I have to say that though you seem quite personable in your electronic communications, in person your behavior is a little lacking in some of the traits that would let you get from a first to a second date with regularity. If Lovability had a rating system, I would award you 2.5 out of 5 stars; however, if it used a scale that only allowed for integral values, I would unfortunately be forced to round down to two.

  Here are some suggestions for what you could do to improve the initial impression you make. I am speaking here as a veteran of the online dating scene in LA, which is MUCH more intense than New Jersey’s—there, you are competing with aspiring actors and actresses, and a professionally produced headshot and a warm demeanor are the bare minimum necessary to get in the game. By the end of my first year in LA my askback rate (the rate at which my first dates with women led to second dates) was a remarkable 68%. So I know what I’m talking about. I hope you take this constructive criticism in the manner in which it is intended.

  1. Vary your responses to inquiries. When our conversation began, you seemed quite cheerful and animated, but as it progressed you became much less so. I asked you a series of questions that were intended to give you opportunities to reveal more about yourself, but you offered only binary answers, and then, troublingly, no answers at all. If you want your date to go well, you need to display more interest.

  2. Direct the flow of conversation. Dialogue is collaborative! One consequence of your reticence was that I was forced to propose all of the topics of discussion, both before and after the transition to more personal subjects. If you contribute topics of your own then it will make you appear more engaged: you should aim to bring up one new subject for every one introduced by your date.

  3. Take control of the path of the date. If you want the initial meeting to extend beyond the planned drinks, there are many ways you can go about doing this. You can directly say, for instance, “So I wasn’t thinking about this when you showed up, but…do you have any plans for dinner? I’m starving, and I could really go for some pad thai.” Or you can make a vaguer, more general statement such as “After this, I’m up for whatever,” or “Hey, I don’t really want to go home yet, Bradley: I’m having a lot of fun.” Again, this comes down to a general lack of engagement on your part. Without your feedback I was left to offer a game of Scrabble, which was not the best way to end the meeting.

  4. Don’t lie about your ability in Scrabble. I won’t go into an analysis of your strategic and tactical errors here, in the interest of brevity, but your amateurish playing style was quite evident.

  Now, despite my reservations as expressed above, I really do feel that we had some chemistry. So I would like to give things another chance. Would you respond to this message within the next three days, with a suggestion of a place you’d like us to visit together, or an activity that you believe we would both enjoy? I would be forced to construe a delay of more than three days as an unfortunate sign of indifference.

  I hope to hear from you soon.

  Best, Bradley

  Well.

  After reading through the whole missive again, the better to get herself good and angry, she poured herself a glass of Chardonnay and prepared to spend about an hour composing a message that would really tell this guy off point by point, because holy shit. But then once she opened the text box and began to type, she looked at the wall of words she was replying to, and opted instead for five quick keystrokes of netspeak:

  tl;dr

  Too long; didn’t read. She fired off the message, belted back half the glass, and shut her laptop. Jesus fuck. Human beings.

  The next morning Rebecca woke up late (not really with a headache, it wasn’t a headache, she’d merely stayed up late watching most of a season of Archer and killing the half-full bottle of Chardonnay in the fridge and, okay, starting on the bottle of Cab in the bedroom closet. She hadn’t drunk the whole bottle, but enough to make for a poor night’s sleep: she’d snapped awake at a quarter to five, unable to drop off again. Of course she was going to feel a little muzzy after that, a little fuzzy). She figured that a Belgian waffle with a slab of Canadian bacon on the side would set her straight, so she walked into town and ordered up the meal at a little café. (Her developing habit of downing most of a bottle of wine at night now and again and chasing it with a big syrupy breakfast the next morning was starting to make for a muffin top, but it’d be easy to get that weight off whenever she wanted. Not a problem.) Rebecca was the only person in the place without a phone or a laptop—even the couple at the table next to her both had iPhones in their hands, their heads bowed as if in silent prayer.

  When the server brought her food over to her table, she lingered for a couple of seconds. “Enjoy your breakfast,” she sang. “It’s got a special ingredient!”

  “What?” Rebecca asked suspiciously.

  “Love,” the server said. She smiled, pivoted neatly on the ball of one foot, and returned to the kitchen (and Rebecca glimpsed a flash of the fifth-grade girl still inside her, doggedly going through her routines at the barre).

  As Rebecca devoured her waffle, she saw the other customers poking away at their devices, and imagined the flat, blurred faces of their digital identities hovering before them like gossamer masks. She’d spent so much time on Lovability that walking around Stratton by herself evoked a constant sense of déjà vu: she was confident, for instance, that the guy at the table on the other side of the café was in fact SureShot26, whose collection of profile photos was mostly composed of shots taken before fraternity formals. For all she knew, her server might now be checking the messages of OliveOyl782. Perhaps in the new world their eyeless avatars were bumping up against each other in blind confusion, while their creators sat here with only a wall and the custom of the country to separate them.

  Perhaps in some other timeline, SureShot26 does not have his headphones on when OliveOyl782 brings him his challah French toast; instead of starting in on the food without a word when an anonymous, disembodied hand places it in front of him, he looks up, into her eyes. And it’s just like in the movies. Sparks fly, literal sparks that singe an array o
f tiny black dots into the paper napkin in which his fork and knife are wrapped. An unspoken, unspeakable message arcs like an electrical charge from mind to mind of the customers in the restaurant; all the electronic devices in the café short out at once and melt into lumps of slag and plastic. OliveOyl782 begins to weep. “You don’t understand how many mistakes I’ve made,” she sobs. “All the wrong steps I’ve taken; all the lies I’ve told and chosen to believe in turn. But in spite of this God has still seen fit to show me grace.”

  SureShot26 stands up and quietly embraces her. He doesn’t know what to say, but both of them are confident that the right words will come in their own time; their whole lives together are ahead of them, and they will have plenty of time to speak to each other with care and truth. But silence, now, is best.

  8

  LABORATORY TOUR

  “We’re going to need to get you a temporary security badge,” Carson said to Kate as he ushered her through the sliding glass doors of the building that housed the Steiner lab. “Security here is a pain ever since we started taking funding from DAPAS: they call more shots than we’d like. With their money come these paranoid security measures. Our badges have RFID transmitters. And there are monitors through this whole place that check for human-shaped heat signatures: if there’s a signature that doesn’t correspond to an RFID signal, it raises the alarm. And we’ve got ceiling-mounted cameras, like this is a casino or something.”

  “Sounds very high-tech.”

  “And completely unnecessary. Anybody smart enough to know what to steal from this lab deserves whatever they can take. Maybe the physicists at the Frascati and Perth labs would know how to find their way around this place, but that’s it. Most people would just go for the laptops.”

  Carson and Kate approached a desk at which two security guards sat, one with his chair propped back against a wall as he turned a page in a yellowed paperback book. (Kate glanced at the novel’s title: Mind of My Mind.) The other guard was not even bothering to disguise the fact that he was checking Kate out from top to toe. Remembering what Rebecca had said about her first trip to the lab being like an introduction to the family, Kate had opted for an ensemble that was conservative but still cute, the sort of outfit that a dame in need of services would wear to Philip Marlowe’s office: a long gray pleated skirt, a simple white blouse, and black pumps with modest heels. She meant men’s gazes to slide off of her today, not stick, but the guard at the desk looked at Kate, then Carson, then back to Kate again. He beamed. “Carlton!” he said.

  “My name’s Carson.”

  “Oh, yeah: I keep forgetting,” the guard replied. Kate looked at the two of them in puzzlement: this seemed like an iteration of a running joke on the guard’s part that Carson did not want to explain.

  “Are you going to need a temp badge for your lady friend?” the guard said, still staring. At least he was looking at her face now.

  “I’m showing her around the lab,” Carson said, and then, a bit more quietly, “This is Kate.”

  “It’s nice to meet you,” Kate said, feeling a little awkward as she stepped forward and extended her hand. The guard clasped it with an unexpected tenderness. “Spivey,” he said. “It’s a real pleasure to meet you, too. We don’t get to see much beauty in here: just a bunch of machines, and ugly people like this guy,” indicating Carson with a nod of his head.

  The other guard turned a page in his book, his face stoic.

  “Oh ha-ha-ha,” Kate laughed as she withdrew her hand, injecting some clear phoniness into the chuckle for Carson’s sake.

  Spivey reached down to riffle through a drawer of the desk, extracting a blank keycard. “Show me some pearly whites, please,” he said to Kate in a bass that put her strangely in mind of butterscotch. He swiveled around the laptop on his desk, tapping the tiny camera mounted above its screen.

  Kate smiled as Spivey slotted the keycard into a little color printer and pressed a button on the laptop’s keyboard; a few seconds later, he withdrew the card, which now featured a pixilated image of her face. Somehow the card also had her full name (with her given name spelled “Kathryn,” not “Kate”), her birth date, and the last four digits of her Social Security number.

  “Now this is good for eight hours,” Spivey said, fastening the keycard to a lanyard and handing it to her. “After four the picture starts to fade. When it’s gone that means we don’t want to see you anymore: we don’t care how pretty you are.” He looked at Carson. “Though if you’re lucky, maybe we’ll be able to set you up with a permanent one of these.” Spivey’s grin had something strange sitting behind it.

  But Carson was already withdrawing, with a gentle hand on Kate’s shoulder to steer her away. “Thanks, Spivey.”

  “Good luck, Carlton!” Spivey said after him, a little loudly.

  “It’s Carson,” Carson replied over his shoulder.

  “Oh, yeah,” Spivey said, louder still. “Slipped my mind.”

  “What was that about?”

  “Spouses of lab employees get permanent IDs, with pictures that don’t fade,” Carson said, in a tone implying that any further questions she had were best dropped.

  Once through the door, Kate found herself in a long, narrow, dusty, harshly lit corridor lined with doorways on either side, featuring an imposing set of double doors at its end. “Why are the doors taken off the hinges?” Kate asked. She could see straight into all the rooms as she and Carson passed.

  “It was Philip’s idea,” Carson replied. “He says it fosters community. But he also probably thinks we’d sit around playing video games all day if we could close our doors. Though Philip gets his own door, of course.” Carson indicated it at the other end of the hallway, with its window of frosted glass. “The privilege of power. He might be playing Dwarf Fortress right now.”

  Peering through one of the open doorways into the office beyond, Kate saw Dennis sitting on the floor with his legs folded up beneath him. All the chairs in the room held stacks of books and papers and journals that threatened to topple. Wrappers from granola bars were strewn around him; next to him sat a half-full two-liter bottle of Diet Coke. He was staring up with rapt attention at an insect-like quadracopter hovering in the middle of the room, its red and blue lights blinking as its rotors buzzed. He clutched its remote controller in his hands. He wasn’t piloting it; he was just looking at it.

  “Hey, Dennis,” Kate said. “Haven’t seen you since the party at Rebecca’s. How are you?”

  “Hello, Kate,” Dennis said, his eyes still on the quadracopter. “I’m good.” His usual overbearing bonhomie was altogether absent.

  “Whatcha up to,” Carson said.

  “Debugging. The galaxial drift subroutine.”

  “We were going to have to get around to taking a closer look at that eventually: no point in putting it off.”

  “It’s a pain in the ass.” Dennis’s miniature quadracopter quivered briefly in midair.

  “Well, keep at it.”

  “Will do. It’s good to see you, Kate.”

  “Nice to see you, too,” Kate said, and the two of them left him to his meditation.

  “He was actually debugging, by the way, not slacking off,” Carson said in response to Kate’s unspoken question. “I’ve never seen anything like it. He’ll stare at a screen of code for a few minutes with the font shrunk down to six points; then he’ll go into his office and play with the helicopter. Then he’ll come back to the computer, delete the entire block of code he was looking at, and retype it from scratch. And it’ll work. He can’t—or won’t—write comment code either, so good luck trying to figure out the rationale behind what he does.”

  “Comment code?”

  “Extra lines that show your work in plain English, so when someone else looks at your program, they’ll be able to tell at a glance why you did what you did. Philip loves comments, and I’ve seen routines he’s written himself that literally had more comment than code, huge blocks of explanation that go way beyond what most peo
ple would expect to see. But whenever he goes after Dennis about not writing enough comments, the guy just shrugs and says, ‘Well, it works, doesn’t it?’ It’s like he thinks if he gave away his secrets he’d make himself dispensable.”

  They reached the double doors at the end of the hall. Carson waved the ID card hanging from a lanyard around his neck in front of a scanner attached to the wall, as did Kate. A lock disengaged with a throaty, heavy ka-chunk, and the doors swung open to reveal a chamber beyond, spacious and full of afternoon sunlight. “Behold,” Carson said, lowering his voice theatrically as he gestured in welcome. “The time machine.”

  “Don’t call it a time machine!” a woman shouted from deep inside the room. Alicia.

  “Sorry,” Carson said, and then, speaking more quietly to Kate, “We’re going to make a run this afternoon. It’ll probably be boring to us—I think we’re up to run 328, and it’s highly likely that it’ll turn out more or less like runs 1 through 327—but it might be interesting to you to see how things work around here.”

  The room they entered was two stories high and maybe forty feet on each side; it gave the impression of being hastily occupied, rather than settled by researchers with any sort of a long-term plan. The walls were bare except for a few science-related posters that seemed intended for college classrooms. In the center of the room was an enormous metal column that reached up to the high ceiling; a single door was set into it at its base, tall enough for a man to enter. Thick electrical cords snaked from the cylinder across the floor in all directions, and picking her way through the coils of cables as she crossed the room reminded Kate of that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indiana Jones had to tiptoe gingerly through a nest of snakes.