Watchlist

by Bryan Hurt

  “To catch up to him, you mean,” I said.

  Meghan was tying her shoes and said nothing.

  “That was a Strava joke,” I told her.

  “Got it,” she said. Now she was putting on her bike helmet.

  “He’s already following me,” I said. “On Strava. He follows you, but you know that.”

  “He follows a lot of people,” she said.

  “Why didn’t you say anything about it?”

  “About Strava?” She gave me a frank look. “Why would I tell you anything about Strava? You haven’t got off the couch in three months.”

  “I have a bike,” I said. “I went for a ride today. Two miles, two hundred calories.”

  “The calories thing is always exaggerated,” she said.

  I told her about the ancient tires inflating. “Isn’t that amazing?”

  “It is,” she said, though she had clearly stopped listening to me. The last thing she did before leaving the house was pick up her iPhone off the kitchen table and open Strava. “You’re following me?”

  “You have to accept it though,” I said. “You have to agree to me following you.”

  “I know how it works,” she said.

  “Maybe we can go for a ride together sometime,” I said.

  She tapped her phone. “There,” she said. “Happy?”

  THOUGH IT DOES not appear in the pages of the OED it is generally accepted that the word gamification makes its first appearance in the English language around the year 2002. Coined by a British computer programmer named Nick Pelling who designed a number of early video games—including Invader and Hedgehog—it refers to using game thinking and game process to solve problems and improve performance. If you think you’re playing a game, you perform at a higher level than if you think you’re working.

  “Even if you have hundreds of friends on Facebook and you told them about your great ride today,” Michael Horvath—one of Strava’s creators—is quoted as saying, “only a handful of them are going to care about it in the level you described. Strava gives you a way to really focus in on the friends in your life, the people that you are following, or the people that are following you, and to share this important part of your life with them.”

  AFTER MEGHAN LEFT the house, I opened up Strava and looked at her profile. Here is a list of the things I learned about my wife:

  She owned three bikes: a “Focus Izalco Pro 2.0” (on which she had ridden 1,208.8 miles), a “Gary Fisher Hifi Deluxe 29er” (420 miles), and a “Stumpjumper FSR Comp” (233 miles).

  She rode about five rides a week, averaging sixty miles a week though often exceeding that.

  Her longest climb was 1,345 feet.

  She “and one other” scored a KOM on a section of road called Sunrise Decent.

  Sunrise Descent is a stretch of road two miles long that Meghan (“and one other”) had covered in just over two minutes’ time. This means she had been going almost sixty miles an hour.

  As fast as she had been going, the “one other” she was with had been going just a little faster. She seems to have eased up at the end, at the steepest part of the descent. He did not. If anything, he accelerated and, consequently, scored the KOM, not her.

  The “one other” was Smith Barnard.

  ONE OF THE many factors contributing to Strava’s popularity is that it enables you to “track your effort” with precision. In addition to the duration of your ride, the distance covered, and the calories expended (however inflated), you can also track your “Energy Output” (“a factor of how much you’re pedaling,” says the Strava website, “how fast you’re pedaling and how much force you’re exerting on the pedals”), your “Average Power” (“expressed in W,” Strava will tell you, “a measure of how much energy you are placing into the pedals”), and your “Suffer Score,” which is an analysis of your heart rate data (“By tracking your heart rate through your workout and its level relative to your maximum heart rate,” Strava says, “we attach a value to show exactly how hard you worked. The more time you spend going full gas and the longer your activity, the higher the score. The more time you spend coasting, or resting, the lower the score”).

  In other words, if you stop pedaling—if for any reason you get off your bike—Strava knows. Looking at my own abortive rides I could see clearly the moment when I gave up each time. When I failed to get up the mountain. As humbling as it was to see my inadequacy catalogued with such digital accuracy, my humiliation was tempered when I noted that Smith Barnard—and Meghan—habitually did the same thing. Though capable of meteoring down Sunrise Descent they almost invariably paused—sometimes for a significant interval—on the way up. This is the sort of data that Strava provides you with.

  I will admit that I am no stranger to humiliation. Indeed, there is nothing easy about having been made to take a mandatory leave of absence. There are the endless hearings, the repetitions, the reiterations of who said what and the implications. By the end of the process a great relief descends. Much of that relief has to do simply with not having to tell the story any longer, to make any further admissions. A colleague, yes, and yes there was a tenure process involved, a romantic attachment also, yes presumed, yes now in the past, and yes I accept full responsibility.

  And at some point one has to tell one’s wife.

  “What did you do?” said Meghan. This was a Friday. She’d just got back from a ride and was in the process of taking off her biking helmet. As usual she was flushed.

  “It just happened,” I said.

  “What happened?”

  “The fact is,” I said, “I don’t know where to start.”

  “Start at the start,” she said.

  It might have been over then. I can see that now. Three months pass and she comes home from Natural Grocers. “I found you a new doctor,” she will tell you.

  “I’m fine,” you tell her back.

  “I’m worried about your inertia,” she’ll say. That’s her word for it.

  A KEY ASPECT of Strava’s functionality is a mapping function which allows one to plan rides in advance and follow the rides of others. According to Strava, there are two routes that Meghan (now my ex) traveled, on bike, from our driveway to Sunrise Descent. The first, less direct, less arduous route is a ten-and-a-half-mile climb at a moderate-level thoroughfare known as Gold Camp Road. The other is an almost impossible climb up Bonne Vista Drive. I had driven up it a couple of times—most recently with Meghan’s parents (she had been driving)—to show them the views from the top of the Cheyenne Mountain. Though I labored mightily, I soon gave up and I thought to turn off Strava, but didn’t. There was nothing to be ashamed of, I told myself, even Smith Barnard and Meghan had had to rest—often for a substantial interval.

  Indeed, Strava showed me the approximate spot where the two of them tended to give up, in front of a sprawling, palatial home that looked down on the whole of Colorado Springs. A massive American flag flew in front of the house. It was a magnificent vista; I can see why they stopped, I remember thinking, at which point the garage door of the home began to move.

  Thinking I had lingered too long, that it was the owner of the house, some Republican with a shotgun charging out to tell me to get off his property, I began to continue my arduous climb up the hill. But instead of an enraged landowner, out of the garage came a helmeted figure in blue-and-white cycling gear, a gleaming weightless road bike in tow.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, satirically, as he mounted the bike, “it’s all downhill from here.”

  It was then I recognized him. “Okay doc,” I said.

  “Tim?” said Smith Barnard. “Is that you? How’d you get up here?”

  I gestured to my bike. “I was doing okay to begin with,” I said. “But we all need to catch our breath somewhere. This is a popular spot.”

  If he made the connection, I didn’t see it. He took off his sunglasses. “I’m impressed.”

  “
You told me to change my life,” I said, and gestured to my drenched T-shirt. “This is what that looks like.”

  “Good for you,” he said.

  Then we stood there for a moment.

  “This is a big hill,” I said. “I don’t know how you guys do it. You and Meghan I mean.”

  “Is that your bike?” he said. “How old is that?”

  I said I didn’t know. “The tires inflated,” I said.

  “No wonder you can’t make it up this hill,” he said. “You need a better bike. You know what, I’m going to give you one of mine.”

  “No need,” I said.

  “I insist,” he said. “It’s the least I can do.”

  “The least you can do?”

  It took him a second. “For getting you on Strava,” he said. “You wouldn’t be here, if not for me. I take full responsibility.”

  “Keep your bike,” I told him.

  “Look,” he said. “I know you’re not working.”

  Now it was my turn to nod and say nothing.

  “Anyway,” he said, and seemed about to say something else, but changed his mind. “I’ll drop it by.” And a moment later he was gone, pedaling with ease up the mountain. Watching him glide up the hill, I found myself wondering why he had needed to stop. Maybe it was Meghan who’d had to stop that day.

  I kept on pushing my bike up hill and at some point a blue blur that I understood was Smith Barnard swished by me, shouting to me to keep going.

  I got to the top forty minutes later then coasted down to the bottom of Sunrise Descent.

  “Coasted” is decidedly the wrong word for it. It was a descent that frightened me to death. You start at the top and plummet. As harrowing as the first two-thirds of the ride is, as steep a descent, it is nothing compared to the final third where there is a precipitous, numbing drop. When I arrived at the bottom I threw down my bike and vomited. It was hard to imagine what it would take to be King of the Mountain on such a stretch of road. But Smith Barnard had done it. Tucked himself into a sleek hurtling blur. He had done it.

  When I got home Smith Barnard’s bike was waiting for me at the house, propped up against the front of the garage. Meghan pulled up shortly afterward. Whether or not he had called her—warning her I suppose—I don’t know, though I expect so. These are the things that become part of the public record. They will come out at trial. Cell phone records. I expect to be a suspect. I also expect there will be no actual evidence.

  Meghan saw Smith Barnard’s bike in the driveway. “Is he here?” she asked, and I saw it in her face. She had imagined this scene. Practiced her reaction. It was just his bike, I told her, he’d given it to me. Then I watched her face change. If I didn’t know before I knew then.

  The key point to make in the teaching of Paradise Lost is that Satan’s escape from hell will never happen. Hell is not a physical location, you tell your students, it is a state of mind. He carries it with him.

  I said nothing. Gave no indication whatsoever that anything had changed. That I had done the math. Uploaded the data. Seen the leaderboard. Not the next day and not the day after. On occasion I would take the bike Smith Barnard had given me and ride it, allowing Strava to take my measure, though it became a somewhat more lonely endeavor.

  Meghan told me she’d grown tired of it, being always in a race, and though Smith Barnard said he was planning to do the same, he didn’t. Perhaps it had something to do with being the King of the Mountain. It is not something you let go of easily. On occasion I would see him whiz by me, a blue-and-white blur, poised in headlong descent.

  Going at that speed, everything is a fine calculation. Anything can throw the rider off the bike. Over the handlebars and into the concrete. A rock in the roadway, a car pulling out unexpectedly, there is so little margin for error. This morning I got in my car and drove to the top of Sunrise Descent and floored it, all the way to the bottom.

  Faster than humanly possible. I uploaded my ride. King of the Mountain.

  Then I drove back up Sunrise Descent. Not to the very top, or even the middle, but to the bottom third. The steepest part where those descending it are nothing but speed and reflexes. The point of the descent where touching the brakes at all becomes a risky proposition.

  I don’t know exactly what happens when you lose your KOM. If it’s an alarm that goes off, or if you get an email notification. Maybe both. Soon enough Smith Barnard will find out. It is only a matter of time. I’m keeping the engine running. It won’t take much.

  We Are the Olfanauts

  by Deji Bryce Olukotun

  U have to whyff this.

  Cant.

  Y not?

  Just cant.

  Shes bak.

  Dont care. Send it up.

  I pasted in the link anyway, ignoring Aubrey’s decision.

  www.olfanautics.com/13503093!hsfi9hhhh

  I knew she would whyff it eventually. One click and you were there. You might as well download it directly into your brain, and with a whyff the effect was nearly as instantaneous. I played the video again to confirm that it was as special as I remembered.

  Close-up of a desk. Glass top on a chrome frame. On the desk, a knife, a leather strap, a small glass bowl, and the girl’s wrist. Light tan skin. The whyff: hints of lilac, clearly the girl’s perfume.

  She holds the knife in her palm and waves her second hand over it, like a game show hostess displaying a valuable prize. Then she stabs the tip of her finger with the knife and lets her blood trickle into the bowl. The whyff is not of pain, or the metallic scent of blood. It smells like the richest, freshest strawberries, collected right there in the bowl. And you can hear her laughing.

  I should say that the girl appeared to stab the tip of her finger with the knife. You see, there was no proof that she had actually done it. When I slowed the video down, and advanced it frame by frame, her index finger and thumb obscured my view at the exact moment of puncture. She might have stabbed her own finger, or she might have somehow burst a capsule of fake blood with her fingers. Or, more likely, based on the whyff, a capsule of concentrated strawberry essence. It was the work of either a skillful illusionist or a deranged sadomasochist. With my Trunk on, it smelled hilarious.

  Aubrey eventually messaged back: Told u to send it up.

  What abt the whyff??

  Send it up.

  Shld Private Review.

  Send it up.

  Cmon, grrl. Strawberries!

  This was the second video this user had posted, and each had ended with a whyff that completely subverted the image of the video with humor. It felt like she was playing with us, questioning whether we would believe our eyes or other senses. Wasn’t that reason enough to Private Review? To talk it through? Last week, Aubrey and I had met in the Private Review rooms twice. I wasn’t going to let her ruin my discovery, though. Instead of sending it up, as she had ordered, I posted the link to ALL-TEAM. Immediately I heard gasps in the cubicles around me.

  “Oh, shit, Renton!”

  “She’s back!”

  “Aw, man, I bet she’s hot!”

  Then they went back to their keypads and we began a group chat.

  You gonna send it up?

  What do you think?

  Think we shld.

  You smell the strawberries?

  I thought it was raspberries.

  You cant see the wound.

  She a kid?

  No, shes 18+.

  You hear her laughing?

  Crazy grl.

  I let the discussion go on for some time as the team chatted amongst themselves, enjoying the fact that with every passing moment the post was staying online, and some new stranger could appreciate its artistry. There was something beautiful about the glass and the steel and the blood. Only the essentials, the sterility of the table against the violence engendered in the blade. The whorls in the redness as the blood filled the bowl, the burst of strawberries and the laughter, eth
ereal, hovering above it all.

  In the end someone sent it up. I wasn’t surprised. We were paid to be cautious, to keep the slipstream of information flowing at all costs, even if it meant removing some of it from the world.

  OUR TEAM WAS based in a multibillion-dollar technology park fifteen kilometers outside Nairobi, and our data servers, which would have made us liable under Kenyan law, floated above national airspace in tethered balloons. The Danish architect had modeled the Olfanautics complex after a scene from Karen Blixen’s novel, as if that was what we secretly aspired to, a coffee ranch nestled against the foothills of some dew-soaked savannah. The cafeteria was intended to replicate the feel of a safari tent. Catenary steel cables held up an undulating layer of fabric, which gleamed white in the midday sun. In reality, the tent was the closest I had ever been to a safari. I only left Nairobi to go rock climbing.

  Aubrey found me as I was ordering a double veggie burger with half a bun and six spears of broccolini. I could tell from the few frayed braids poking out of her head wrap that she had not slept well last night, nor had she gone to the campus hairdresser to clean herself up. I reached for her thigh as soon as she sat down but she swatted my hand away.

  “I told you to send it up.”

  “Nice to see you, too, Aubrey,” I said.

  “I’m your boss, Renton. If I say send the video up, then send it up. You’re making me look bad.”

  That was the problem with dating your supervisor. She thought any discussion could be resolved by pulling rank. “Didn’t you whyff the strawberries? They were hilarious, hey. That girl’s an actress or something.”

  “We don’t know that, Renton. She could have really been cutting herself. Or someone could have been forcing her off camera and layered in that whyff afterward. We don’t even know if she’s a she. It could be a man.”

  Aubrey always pulled her liberal philosophy on me, as if I couldn’t trust my own nose.

  “The metadata said she was a twenty-four-year-old woman,” I said. “I looked at the time signatures. The whyff was recorded simultaneously.”