Made to Order

by Jonathan Strahan

  She nodded again.

  “Cool. Don’t worry, just going home. Although y’all are probably having me followed anyway, right?” He said it laughing, but he meant it to hurt. Then he left and did as he’d said he would. The commute from NYC to home was a practiced choreography, an easy enough pattern for the police—powered by the algo his colleagues had built—to learn.

  IDOLS

  KEN LIU

  Ken Liu (kenliu.name) is an author of speculative fiction, as well as a translator, lawyer, and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, he has been published in F&SF, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. His debut novel, The Grace of Kings, is the first volume in a silkpunk epic fantasy series, the Dandelion Dynasty. It won the Locus Award for Best First Novel and was a Nebula Award finalist. He subsequently published the second volume in the series, The Wall of Storms; two collections of short stories, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories and The Hidden Girl and Other Stories; and Star Wars novel The Legends of Luke Skywalker. Forthcoming is The Veiled Throne, the next book in the Dandelion Dynasty. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.

  1. Blowin’ In the Wind

  EVERY FRIDAY NIGHT, I call my father.

  “How’s Bella?”

  “Good. Busy. Lawyers, you know?”

  “Busy is good. Does she like her job?”

  “Much more than I like mine. But she can be... a bit obsessive about the work.”

  “We’re lucky if we get something in life to be obsessed with. I bet she’s good at what she does.”

  “The best.”

  “What’s wrong, Dylan? You sound a little down.”

  “No, not down exactly... Dad, when did you start thinking you wanted kids? I don’t mean me. I mean... later.”

  The briefest of pauses, barely discernible. I try not to think about the software behind the idol, searching, collating, synthesizing, anticipating…

  “Not sure there’s an exact moment—though that would make a much better story…”

  I’ve never met my father and never will.

  OURMATIC WAS ONE of those places that emphasized how smart their employees were so you wouldn’t question how little they paid you as you toiled the long hours. Open-plan office, brightly colored chairs, contemporary art on the walls. Like most companies with a name like that, we didn’t make anything. I was paid to make up plausible stories about spreadsheets—like just about every corporate job still done by humans.

  One of the perks they offered was “Wellness Fridays,” when health experts—yoga instructors, nutritionists, or even once, a “master meditator”—would come to deliver lectures or give workshops in the biggest conference room. Maybe the program led to a reduction in the premiums the company paid for our health plan, or maybe management thought it was the sort of thing people of my generation expected, like composting bins and free snacks in the kitchen. In any event, I went every Friday without fail.

  This was how I ended up attending the presentation from 46on46; how I ended up submitting a sample of my cheek cells for “personalized genetic counseling”; how I ended up staring at an email in my inbox, forwarded from 46on46, informing me that the database had found me a “DNA relative.”

  I sent some emails, made some phone calls, then drove across the state line. I met my grandparents, my half-sisters, my uncles. Not my father, though. He had died a few years ago. A boating accident. When I had all the facts I could gather, I got on a plane and went home.

  My mother sighed and asked me if I wanted some tea.

  Growing up, she never talked about my father. It was just one of those things you learned to accept, like the way the bathroom door jammed, or the way the chair legs squeaked against the floor, no matter how gently you sat down.

  “I don’t want to,” she had said, the one time I tried to make an issue of it. “Think of him as a sperm donor.”

  There were no photographs, no scraps of paper with his handwriting, no extra-large men’s shirt in the back of the closet or a scuffed-up pair of boots in a corner. I didn’t even have a name to go on, first or last.

  Why did she scrub his existence so completely out of her life? I didn’t have the smoothest of relationships with my mother, and the father-shaped void didn’t make it any easier. It was all too easy to use him as an excuse, an explanation for my flaws that clarified nothing. Did I get my moodiness from him? Was he as disinterested in competition as I was? When my mother complained about my thoughtlessness, was she also complaining about the shadow of him she saw in me? Sometimes, I would lock myself in the bathroom and look in the mirror, trying to imagine myself decades older.

  “Dad, are you proud of me?”

  No more imagining. Time for my mother to tell the story.

  My father, as it turned out, never knew I existed. He had dropped out of a graduate program and then traveled around the country, living out of his car and trying to figure out who he was. My mother, ten years his senior, met him at an anti-war protest. She liked the way he played the guitar, trying to keep up everyone’s spirit at the rally. She wanted a child but not a husband, and saw him as the perfect—

  “—sperm donor. There’s no grand romance, no dark mystery,” she said. “No vows were broken. There’s no tale of love that soured, or a long, drawn-out tempestuous divorce from which you could draw some lesson. It was meaningless.”

  My mother was right. I wasn’t abandoned. I wasn’t a mistake. As far as my father was concerned, I was... nothing.

  Yet, I continued to reach out to my father’s family. They probably found my obsession as odd as my mother did. There was, after all, no relationship at all between us except a tenuous, biological link. But they were obliging. They told me stories about him as a boy, as a young man, as a father. They told me about the time he drove two hundred miles to reunite a puppy with its family. They brought out the awards he won as a teacher. They showed me videos and photos, notebooks and printouts from high school, boxes of stuff taken home from college and then never opened again, pictures with his wife and my sisters, email updates about trips he had taken with them.

  I learned so much about my father, yet I felt like I didn’t know him at all. It was hard enough to know someone, anyone, in life; much harder to figure out someone dead, who could answer no questions, offer no explanations, provide no word of comfort.

  I decided to make an idol.

  Now that I knew his identity, I could set the seeking bots to follow my father’s digital trail. His family hadn’t bothered to delete his old accounts, and I convinced his wife to accept my friend requests, so that I could collect more material for the idol-maker. The few cellphone videos of him were too lo-fi to enable a convincing animation, but that was all right. I didn’t want to step into the uncanny valley.

  After days of waiting, a text arrived from Mnemosynee, informing me that the idol was ready. I took a deep breath, dialed the number given, and held the phone up to my ear.

  “Hello? Ryan speaking.”

  The voice was the same one I had heard in the cellphone videos: a bit gravelly, more than a bit impatient.

  “Hi…” I paused. It seemed odd to say Dad. “Hi Ryan. This is... Dylan.”

  “I don’t know who that is.”

  “I know... How... how are you?”

  IDOLS WERE FIRST developed as a way for celebrities to engage with their fans. Out of the millions who loved a singer, actor, lifestyle guru... how many ever got to meet the object of their devotion in person? And out of those, how many ever got to give more than a breathless declaration of adoration, received more than a perfunctory smile, held on to more than the briefest of handshakes? There had to be a way to scale up one-on-one engagement, to give loyal fans what they craved the most: a personal connection with their idol.

  A team of psychologists, machine-learning experts, and neural network sculptors were handed an archive of the subject’s interview footage, concert videos, fil
ms, meet-and-greet recordings, social media posts... (celebrities who really wanted to impress their fans would also throw in diaries, unpublished poetry collections, notebooks with ideas on how to achieve world peace…). From this raw material, the technical experts generated a personality model and crafted a simulacrum of the celebrity.

  After creating an account, a fan could talk with the digital idol for hours through the looking glass of their screen. Visit after visit, the idol would remember the fan’s name and life story, offer words of encouragement, tell new stories and clear up old rumors, meet the kids and reminisce about past encounters. It was like having the celebrity as your best friend who had moved to the other coast.

  Once the technology was developed, it found plenty of new uses: political campaigning, Internet harassment, self-improvement “ego-hacking” ...or a way to get to know the parent one never knew.

  “I DON’T KNOW what to say. I never had a son.”

  I laugh. “Did you ever think about what you’d say if you had a son, and he asked for the three most important things you ever learned?”

  “Three? That’s a tall order. Why don’t we start with half a thing…”

  The idol is a consensual illusion. It isn’t some copy of my father. It’s just algorithms encoding basic insights about human nature being applied to data, making probabilistic predictions about possible reactions. It isn’t self-aware, isn’t alive. Moreover, the data I gave Mnemosynee on my father was limited. I didn’t have his search history, his deleted posts, his secret accounts. All I had was a selection of what he was willing to share with the world, to put into the permanent and permanently crumbling stream of our shared digital existence.

  So long as I stay within the parameters of what the algorithms can extrapolate, the illusion holds. They can’t tell me anything that I couldn’t already have gleaned from the archive.

  “Do you try to give Bella her space?”

  “I think so.”

  “That doesn’t mean you leave her alone—it means you do some things together, so you keep getting to know each other, and some other things apart, so you can both grow. Jennifer and I used to take vacations together but also apart. You need both. Especially after you have kids.”

  “Good to know. She doesn’t take her vacation days... I should talk to her about it.”

  Fundamentally, talking to the idol of my father was no different from typing into something like ELIZA, or the conversations I had with myself in the bathroom mirror as a boy.

  “You know, I used to play the guitar too.”

  “Play something for me.”

  I go into the storage cubby in the basement to dig it out. Out of tune. Fingers rusty. I try to imagine what he would like.

  “I used to play that! I drove around for a year right after college, protesting against the war, against Wall Street, the drug companies... Good song. I’m proud of you.”

  It’s a crafted response. Just some algorithms extrapolating from his old emails. It isn’t real.

  “I think it’s about the helplessness you feel as a child, because you don’t know, and then as a parent, because you still don’t know. You grow and grow and you can’t ever figure it out. None of us know what we’re doing.”

  I can’t stop the damned tears.

  So long as I keep talking to him, this digital simulation of my father will remember me as I have my own kids, grow old, come to accept the impossibility of wisdom. I will catch up to it and then age past it. It will never offer me a piece of wisdom that my father hadn’t already put down in some form during his forty years on Earth; it will never be anything more than a sophisticated game. And, without the addition of fresh real-life data to correct its course, the longer it goes on, the more the idol will deviate from my real father. Yet, I know I will keep on talking. The void can’t be filled, but it’s a part of me.

  I can’t stop the damned tears.

  2. Verum Dicere

  THE EAGER JUNIOR associates around the conference table have been waiting for me for the last two hours. As one, they turn as I stride into the war room. That’s a lot of billable hours.

  But then again, with half a billion dollars of compensatory and punitive damages at stake, I don’t think the client will complain.

  I throw the faxed juror list on the giant screen at the end—the judiciary is possibly the last place that still insists on communicating in this ancient manner (why not send a carrier pigeon while they’re at it?).

  “Voir dire starts at 9:00 AM sharp on Monday,” I tell them. “We’ve got just over sixty-four hours to prep for jury selection.”

  Groans from around the room. They know I intend to make use of every last one of those hours.

  “Bella, isn’t this a little late?” Drake asks, a smirk on his face. “I thought you said you had an in with the judge’s clerk.”

  I can’t stand the guy. He can be charming as a giggling baby with partners in corner offices, but when he has to report to someone like me—not a partner and not even on the track—he always has a dig or two.

  “I do,” I tell him, my voice cool and in control. “Selene likes me. That’s why we’re getting the juror list a full fifteen minutes ahead of the other side.”

  I tell them to focus on the first fifty names. If there’s time on Sunday, we’ll get to the rest.

  “Remember to check variant spellings, nicknames, maiden names. No one registers social media accounts or dating profiles under their full legal name. Screenshot your search results right away so that we can tell if the other side plants honeytraps—”

  This isn’t paranoia. Though it’s against the rules, I’ve known unscrupulous jury consulting firms to maintain batches of fake social media profiles and age them for years before changing the names to match prospective jurors on the eve of voir dire in an important trial to mislead the other side. The decoys would poison the idols sculpted by their opponent with made-up facts. One more reason our fifteen-minute head start is worth more than these greenhorns can possibly understand.

  I bark out orders as the associates clumsily divide up the names—God, do new associates get younger every year or am I losing my mind?

  “Scrape up everything! Always better to have too much than too little. Don’t delude yourself into thinking you’re smarter than the harvesters ’cause you aren’t. Your primary job is to sit in front of your laptop, look into the camera, and say ‘I am not a robot’ so the guardian bots don’t lock out the harvesters... ”

  I exaggerate. But only a little. I know how to tweak the parameters of the harvesters for better results, but not everyone can claim to have written the firm’s manual on jury research.

  “What’s the point of rushing?” Drake asks. “Doesn’t the summons usually advise prospective jurors to lock down their social media feeds anyway?”

  “Yes, but people don’t listen,” I explain, trying to be patient. “That’s why you still hear about people live-rumbling during voir dire. Or they schedule the lock-down to happen the weekend before they’re supposed to show up at court. Time is of the essence.”

  I watch as the associates set up their laptops and launch the harvesters. The bots need to have fresh credentials for the major social media networks every research session to avoid being tagged. Soon, the associates lean into their cameras; a chorus begins around the room. It’s a beautiful sight, no matter how many times I’ve seen it.

  “...I am not a robot.”

  “I agree to the terms of service...”

  “At MingleBingo, my smile is my password...”

  Rules of ethics prohibit us from friending prospective jurors to view their locked-down feeds, but there’s a ton of data you can gather without that. Most people, even the super privacy-conscious, have friends who aren’t, and these friends will leak everything we need. (You’d be amazed by the number of people, even in this day and age, who’ll accept any and all friend requests.)

  Add to that all the breach-troves from data-aggregators, the hacked databases le
aked onto the grey web, the forums and blogs and comment forms and chat servers and rumble-tumbles that all require registration—the harvesters can build an impressive file on just about anyone except those who never touch a computer. (We’ll want to peremptorily strike them anyway. Tinfoil-hat types don’t make good jurors.)

  While my little helpers are gathering the data, I call for dinner. The hard part comes after that.

  I SET THE associates to manually go over the scraped dating profiles and social media posts to keep them busy. Well, it’s not entirely busywork to pad the timesheets. Once in a while one of them will see something that we miss in the idols. But the real work is done here in the modeling room, by Kevin and his analytics gang, with me supervising.

  The modeling room is a cavernous, windowless space. It used to be the copy center two decades ago. With so few submissions on paper now, it’s long been taken over by servers and quad-monitor workstations.

  “How’s the catch?” Kevin, Head of Analysis, drops into his chair. He’s forty-two, goatee already showing streaks of grey. Before joining us, he used to work for the government, constructing idols of suspected extremists in order to assess their potential for actual terrorism. (Rumors were that he also sculpted idols of opposition leaders in countries where we wanted to effect regime-change to determine whether they were strong enough and sufficiently loyal to American interests for the US to fund them, but that sort of thing would be classified.)

  “Not bad,” I tell him. “We have some prolific v-casters in the bunch.”

  Video is prized over almost any other kind of data for our approach to idol-construction. So much of jury-selection is about finding people with the emotional profiles and personalities to be amenable to persuasion, and videos are by far the most revealing medium for drawing links between triggers and micro expressions.