Enough time passed after I’d spoken that I’d begun to think I’d put the thing to sleep. Then it said, “That’s too neat and too complicated at the same time. You’ve always been good at naming a thing and then filing it away.”
This sounded too much like Isaac. I could imagine him telling Ally this, his theory of me, only so that now at this exact moment his Isaac bot could use it against me. I said, “Okay. Why do you think I’m angry at you?”
“Because I’m gone. Because I can’t come back. That sort of anger has no villains. Just normal human emotion.”
And this sounded too much like therapy. But also like Isaac. Either way, it filled me up the way Isaac used to. I knew resentment would return eventually, in the way it often does, obeying neither logic nor truth. Still, I liked the moment too much to let it happen yet.
“You know that analogy also works the other way.” He paused for what might have been effect.
“Okay, asshole. You’re on a roll. Spit it out.”
He laughed and said, “I was making more of myself to give.”
When I came out of the room, my children were in the dining room. The cake Daniel had made lay uncut on the table. They both looked up at me with unblinking eyes. I asked them if they were waiting for me. They were. I told them that I had spoken to their father. No caveats. I told them the story of plants and droughts, what Isaac had said, about making more of one’s self for other people. They listened like children ready to forgive without being asked. I said I missed their father. The relief on their faces brought tears to mine. They said they missed him, too. Very much. They were afraid to miss him out in the open. Now they didn’t feel so afraid. They came over to me and gave me a long hug and we cried together.
Then we had cake.
8
The Nation of the Sick
Sam J. Miller
Try to picture the scene, Cybil, the same way I did when I got the call.
Christmas Eve; two cops standing in a stinking motel room. Blood on bare white sheets, and a broken syringe, and a man. My brother. Whatever sounds he made, that got the neighbors to call the cops, they’re done now. The overdose is over. He hasn’t died. He won’t, tonight. He’s sick, crying, begging—probably wishing he had died, now that two cops are standing over him and a significant unused amount of heroin. Possession—a third offense—he could be looking at thirty years—nonviolent drug offenses somehow as offensive as murder in the state of Florida.
Rain slants in the open door. Blue and red patrol car lights strobe the walls insistently, almost jovially—the holiday asserting itself, trying to Morse-code mercy into the cops’ cold hard hearts.
I always knew I’d be the one to eulogize you, Cybil. Revolutionaries rarely live long lives while henchmen fare far better. Hence Lenin died at fifty-three while Stalin made it to his seventies. Kissinger’s still kicking at one hundred ten. Et cetera.
But still, in the fictional funerals I imagined for you—crowded rooms rank with the scent of your beloved hyacinths, presidents and prime ministers and slum children united in tears—we were old. I figured you’d run your body down to the ground by sixty, subsisting as you always did on shit food and minimal sleep, and forgetting the most basic aspects of human health care. Exercise, annual physicals, blood pressure medication . . . you were too busy building the technological infrastructure for eradicating exploitation and bureaucracy—to say nothing of dozens of diseases—for any of that. Saving everyone else’s life, even at the cost of your own. I knew you’d burn bright and leave a beautiful corpse, to say nothing of an immeasurably better world.
At the very least I thought you’d do us the favor of giving us a body. Something to bury, and be done with you. Not this elegant disappearance, which has left us with so much heavy, idiotic hope. All these impossible scenarios. Cybil’s ensconced herself in Dubai or Iceland, paying someone to bring groceries and books and keep her hidden. Cybil fell off a yacht, got amnesia, is currently married to a handsome humble carpenter and serving as the stay-at-home stepmom for his four rambunctious boys. In all of these absurd stories, one day you may get your memory back, or decide your experiment in humble isolation is at an end, and emerge. So, we wait.
And so, instead of funeral oratory, an open letter. The full story, about the day we met. About the call I got from my sobbing mess of a big brother, an hour before our appointment.
I hung up on him. He was hysterical, couldn’t hear what I was saying, and I was maybe a little hysterical myself. Anyway I was crying, and angry at him for making me cry. Ten years since he ran away from home to pursue dual careers in mixed martial arts and drug abuse, and I was dismayed to see that my debilitating love for him was undiminished. I hung up on my brother in his moment of greatest need, and then I cursed, took three breaths, and called up my calendar and went online and looked for same-day tickets to Tallahassee.
You were the only entry in my day. Lunch with Cybil, 1PM, Punjab Deli (look her up first). You were nobody to me, just one of a dozen strangers who had reached out to me since that WIRED feature profiled me and nine other SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS MODELING THE FUTURE. You have no idea how close I came to canceling on you, Cybil.
I didn’t get it, back then. I know this sounds strange, coming from the man who just last week was on a magazine cover, standing in a floating fungitecture slum above the immodest headline The Father of the Iterative Modeling Boom (and I swear, Cybil, I tried to tell them what a crock of shit that is—you were mother and father both, I am at best the Gay Uncle of the Iterative Modeling Boom). But it’s the truth: I didn’t get it. Modeling software was where the money was, so that’s where I worked, and I’d had some significant success—hence the article, hence you found me in the first place—but I didn’t believe in it.
People won’t get that, now. Hard to even imagine a time before iterative software farms. Now the Nunnery we built together is only the most successful of hundreds of examples, academic, military, and corporate. They’ve rewritten the rules of architecture, pharmaceutical development, urban planning, and practically every other sphere of human industry, prompting many to declare the end of the era of human software development. Back then, though, they still seemed like playthings for the Pentagon and political campaigns.
I mean, to be fair—to me—back then that’s all they were. But plenty of people saw bigger futures for them. And you—you saw utopia. You saw it, and you built it.
I typed an email to you. So sorry, family emergency, heading for airport. No, let’s reschedule. I didn’t even know why I’d said yes to you. I might have even felt a flicker of gratitude to my dumb fuck-up brother, for giving me the Grand Doozy of all good excuses, to get out of a meeting I had no interest in.
If I didn’t have such an attention deficit, I’d have clicked send. But I do, so I didn’t. Instead I looked at my flight search results first, and saw there was no plane until 8:00 p.m. As simple as that: one mouse click instead of the other, and Cybil and Austin never meet. A massive transformation of the entire world fails to happen. Or, more likely: it happens, just without me as a henchman. History has a way of unfolding in spite of us. Especially when it has a juggernaut like Cybil Natarajan behind it.
I had my smart speaker read me the headlines; the news was always bleak enough to suit my blasted blackened heart. A new round of jailed journalists, vanished lawyers. Three more opposition party legislators had just gone into hiding. Our national plummet off the precipice continued apace.
But then I walked out the door.
I wonder if you remember it, Cybil. That day was so beautiful. Fifty degrees and sunny—eerily warm for the day after Christmas, melting snow and slack winds tempting people outside without jackets.
I took it personally. How dare the weather be so wonderful? How dare they smile so, these people, when I was already grieving for a brother who hadn’t died yet? Unacceptable, all that happiness at being alive.
The day of my mother’s diagnosis had felt like that. My mother and fat
her and me—because by then Colby was down south, calling occasionally, convinced he was just at the edge of breaking through, making it big—the three of us walked out of the oncologist’s office, and into a city full of happy people. How could they hold hands and eat ice cream when my whole world had cracked wide open? Didn’t they see the pain I was in? Or the fear in my mother’s eyes?
That had been my first sojourn in the Nation of the Sick. A state within a state; a country made from pain and fear and untellable secrets. Now I had returned, and I hated Colby for bringing me back.
“Cybil,” I said, when I saw you, because by then I had looked you up.
In person, I thought: fashionista terrorist. Army pants; stylish bright blue blazer; black woolen cowl around your neck. So high it could almost have been a hijab. Vivid eye makeup, but no other cosmetics that I could clock.
I hadn’t bought a ticket. I still didn’t know whether I’d go to Florida or not. Whether it was time to cut the cord on my dumb doomed brother and stop letting him break my heart.
“Austin,” you said. I was five minutes early, and you were already eating. The Punjab Deli only had one stool, presently occupied by a Sikh cab driver. It also had a high counter that extended down a narrow walkway, presently occupied by you and a crowd of standing cab drivers. “Get yourself something to eat.”
So much for my hope that you were working for some big spy agency or arms manufacturer, hoping to woo me with food as a prologue to an overwhelming offer.
I got a samosa, broken up in a styrofoam bowl of curried chickpeas. I scoffed at the sight of it, only to have it become one of my favorite New York City meals. When I turned to join you, your spot at the counter had been taken by a taxi driver, and you were already standing outside.
New York City winter. Dirty snow and panhandlers and the smell of cinnamon beverages. A shithole, but ours. Flooded subway tunnels and thirty square blocks being underwater had helped slow the Lower East Side real estate boom, but the place was still packed with the hip and the handsome.
I never did have any secrets from you, Cybil. Certainly not when it came to my tragic, prolific excuse for a sex life. Every sexy boy who walked by us was more interesting than you were.
“You’re the fifth one I’ve met with,” you said.
A bearded elf-man caught me staring, and grinned. “Fifth . . . one?”
“I’m meeting with all of the developers from that WIRED profile.”
“Why?”
“Looking for a partner.”
I was my brother’s first sparring partner, although not an entirely consensual one. But when he found others, I was sad about it. I missed the attention, even though it had come with bruises and aches. I missed him.
Colby baffled us. My mother and father and I are all cut from the same timid cloth. Docile, obedient, skittish. Mom submitted meekly to three years of cancer-related indignities before they stopped toying with her; my father adapted humbly to widowerhood. My brother was some other sort of beast. The kind of boy who at ten years old was climbing up onto roofs and walking into the homes of strangers for his daily shot of transgressional adrenaline.
But here’s the thing, the special species of asshole he was: he hated hurting people. What a dilemma, for a little lawbreaker! Bullies had it easy; they could punch someone in the throat or throw a rock through a window whenever they needed to feel themselves superior to the laws of God and man. The good-hearted monster must be so much more creative.
Hence, combat sports. The pain, the fear of fighting—he craved it, but only on consensual terms.
And, hence, drugs.
“Twelve iterative modeling programs, running at the same time,” you said. “One takes the problem—you’ve been working in defense, so, let’s say, If I reduce the number of aircraft mechanics working at XYZ Base, what scenarios are likely to result?—but instead of just running the scenarios and being done with it, the program passes the results on to the next one in sequence. And then the next. Each program created by a different developer, with its own quirks and intricacies. Twelve completely different processes for solving a problem. Generating thousands of potential solutions a second, sending the best ones to the human admins for final selection.”
“Sounds amazing,” I said. Not Why twelve? Part of your genius was to fill in the blanks so well that everyone assumed there was a good explanation.
I kept thinking: I always knew this day would come. The moment when I say goodbye to my brother forever. Not because he’s dead, but because I’d finally learn how to stop loving him. To let him go. I’d tried before, but never succeeded. Because some people we can’t save. Some people, for as long as we spend trying, we’ll never be able to become who we need to be.
“Why are you talking to me about it?” I asked. “I know you know how to put together a business plan, get a meeting with some venture capital bros.”
“I’m not involving venture capital at all. I want complete autonomy and control over what we build. Because it will change the world, and I won’t let big money do so for the worse.”
This much, I knew. You’d been vocal about it even back then. You’d established yourself by building a company around an app that optimized bicycle routes around prevailing winds, which was acquired by Seamless, who gave you two million dollars and a cushy job—which you quit in protest when you found it was being used to punish deliverymen who veered off its suggested routes.
No venture capital. Complete autonomy. That kind of crazy talk was in the air in those days.
Back then, anyway, it was crazy talk.
Every morning, I gather up a list of all the new creations for you. Even though you’re not here anymore, to review them. Small stuff, mostly. Slight tweaks on biofuel manufacture; new recipes for protein slurry; monomolecular filament refinement. Some of the fledgling floating city-states in the new Arctic frontier are already experimenting with AI governance, along the lines the Nunnery first started sketching out ten years ago.
Big deals happen about once a week. This morning I watched scientists take a jagged little crystal—engineered from a Nunnery recipe—and drop it into a bottle of seawater and shake it up for sixty seconds. It crystallized all the salt out of the solution, leaving behind clean drinking water with a little quartz at the bottom. Desalination, with minimal energy consumption. A far cry from the petroleum-intensive approaches that have been the best we could do for decades. Brilliant.
But best of all, thanks to a whole lot of intricate patent law precedent-setting you orchestrated, with the help of that master corporate strategist I found for you: because it was created by the Nunnery, it’s still considered our intellectual property. No one can patent it. No one can exploit it. Copyright on anything created by a product resides with the person who created the product in the first place. Anyone can use the creations of our creation, even build a business around it, but only if they agree to a very strict set of profit sharing and worker empowerment rules. Licensing terms you set fifteen years ago—which everyone said were insane and antithetical to capitalism at the time—have now become business norms.
•••
To book, or not to book. I had enough money for the flight to Tallahassee. I was between projects. I could afford to step away from the city for a couple of weeks.
But my dad had told me to stop sending Colby money, to stop giving him additional chances. Every other week, Dad found a new article about how family members of addicts could stop enabling and being exploited by their sick relatives.
“That social media hack was a great trick,” you said. “I need someone who knows how to ask the unasked questions.”
“I don’t know how many unasked questions I have left,” I said, eyes on the ass of some fetching young thing on a bike.
My big idea had been to populate the military’s urban operation simulation software exercises with actual people scraped from social media in the areas of proposed operation. Those were real faces on the civilians passing through the s
treets of the VR run-throughs that soldiers had to log fifty hours in before being deployed to Caracas or Tehran or Kandahar. Blow up a block of buildings and you’d see a scroll of actual baby pictures. Not just for the grunts in the first-person shooter portion, either. The generals got names and faces in their reports, too.
Not such a big idea, not really, but it happened during a huge Department of Defense marketing push to turn iterative modeling software designers into celebrities. And it was controversial enough that I got a lot of calls from journalists. What do you say to people who say you’re helping the military develop new tools for surveillance and privacy invasion, which could potentially be used against civilians? I personally didn’t have anything to say to people like that—because I didn’t care, not then, not before you—but the DoD did, and they’d supplied me with this: All personal information has been stripped, and names are randomized. This is about putting a real face on abstract war games. This is about making the military more human, not less.
The fetching young thing biked away, abandoning me.
“I’m not sure I’m in the market for a partner right now, honestly.”
“Venture capital’s day is done,” you said, unruffled by my opposition, if you noticed it at all. “Silicon Valley’s scorch-and-burn suck-them-dry tactics will soon come to seem as backward as child labor.”
And while you spoke? I believed. Ignorant as I was, and as hard as I was trying to think about sex as a distraction from worrying about my brother, I couldn’t help but see that you were special.
Your army of iterative software agents, they would conquer the world. What couldn’t they accomplish, free from corporate manipulation? What couldn’t they create, unfettered by the limits of the human?
He just happened to walk by. A total stranger, one of millions of anonymous miserable New Yorkers we walked by every day and turned our eyes away from. The sick, the old, the broken. The mad. Living in this city meant hardening your heart to them, I’d always believed, but that day my heart wasn’t hard enough. That day, because of my brother, I saw him. Really saw him.
Entanglements Page 17