The Glitch_A Novel

by Elisabeth Cohen

  Even if she wasn’t there, my inner voice said.

  I heard this, as if said by a voice inside me. Not my Conch, but a different inner voice, the one fond of violet highlighter. In my experience it isn’t inner at all, but heard (“heard”) from above and outside the body, in what medieval painters would consider, in a better person, the halo area.

  I’d heard a version of this voice the day I was knocked to the ground by the lightning strike. A girl (me) was screaming, and over her screams came a different voice (also mine), which said, with a dismissiveness that would have been rude, had it not been so reassuringly in control: “Oh, give me a break, it’s not that bad.”

  People, especially people like Greer, talk about one’s inner voice as if it’s like a Conch but so much better. But if it were that great, people would not be buying Conch. One’s inner voice definitely does not provide real-time guidance customized to every situation, not to mention traffic and weather. It’s unreliable in a way that can be even more frustrating than the Clitch. It doesn’t speak when you want it to. You can wait and hope, pray for a decisive answer (guidance on what to do about an attractive job offer or your daughter’s poor spatial awareness or which Asian market to roll out in first), and then when, or if, it comes it’s iffy and lacks authority. You don’t get a message in the clear, resonant voice of an actor who counts among his previous voice-over credits the English-language version of the Taj Mahal audio tour; instead, you have to extricate it from your bones and it’s mangled in the extraction. You’re not sure if it’s real or what you want to hear, truth or delusion. It speaks in ways that often seem completely sideways to the topic. And sometimes it’s wrong. There’s nobody to complain to then, no customer service number to call, no corporate social media team to tweet at and expect immediate, groveling resolution.

  You can see why consumers trust Conch.

  Rafe’s voice broke into my thoughts. “Hope you don’t mind sharing the room with all my boxes.” I looked up to see the two of them walking toward me. “Shell, I was just telling your friend that if she needs a place to stay, she can crash on the couch in my home office. She was talking about sundaes, and I had this great idea that we should all go out to the Creamery, Nova’s never been and it’d be a fun—”

  “Rafael—”

  “I totally don’t mind about boxes, that’s no problem, thank you!”

  “It’s not a bad couch at all, I sleep there a lot myself.” So much subtext.

  “Sounds perfect!”

  “I’m not sure that’s a good—” I began.

  “So we’re on for going out for sundaes tonight?” Rafe asked. “Maybe a walk afterward?”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “Can’t wait, but Rafe, babe, I need to—”

  “What’s that thing?” Michelle said, pointing at the fulgurite.

  * * *

  —

  “How bad was it?” she asked, in the curious, inappropriate way young people inquire about devastating trauma. A pale butterfly looped between us and settled on a lilac. We were outside on the patio.

  Backyard: bluestone patio, burnished silver grill, koi pond with arbor, lap pool, modern chaise longues, eight of them, distributed along the pool’s edge, each one more expensive than the monthly rent I used to pay at my first place. That’s before the cushions. The roar of neighbors’ leaf blowers, always present. When they turn off the leaf blowers they start jackhammering to replace the Belgian block in their driveways with some other kind of Belgian block.

  I exhaled deeply. “Bad,” I said. I was crafting an email, and I shifted my laptop to move the heat to my other thigh.

  “You’re lucky it didn’t damage you.”

  I hesitated, trying to find a simple way of responding to that. “The damage was mostly internal.”

  “You guys must have a lot of fun out here,” she said, looking around. I nodded. The shade was cold; I was aware of something out of order in my knee, a shooting cautionary pain.

  Tons of fun! But not really. We’re pretty busy. But you could, if you had time. It’s definitely very seductive when you see it for the first time, when you come to see the house for sale, when you imagine the life you would lead, if you lived here, kids in bathing suits hurtling off the diving board, your spouse with a spatula in his hand, slaws heaped in bowls on the table, friends coming out the back door with corkscrews and bottles of Rioja and compliments about your kitchen renovation: a kind of magazine life, of lazy days and friendship and warmth, an illusion that has wobbled and disappeared in the surface of the pool. But nobody lives that way really, do they?

  “Except for that rash, you seem totally fine,” Michelle said.

  “I’ve moved past it but it’s part of who I am. You don’t go through something like that and come out unscathed. It was a difficult experience and the unfairness was hard for me to—”

  “But you know what’s funny? You didn’t tell me,” she said. “When we met. Your advice list—I recall there was something on it about a green dress.”

  “An emerald sheath,” I clarified.

  “That’s the thing you thought was the most important thing to tell me. If you lost your favorite dress, why didn’t you just order a new one?”

  “It’s the principle,” I said. “There has to be a consequence for carelessness. Though I blame the maid.”

  She said, thoughtfully, “Did it feel like getting a shock, or different?”

  I felt the nausea and throb in my right temple that I feel when I think about it, or even when I guardedly approach the topic with the intention of considering thinking about it. “Both.”

  “So I can assume from this that you would have let someone else get hurt if you thought it would help them in the long run?”

  “Of course not.” (Yes.)

  “That’s awfully cold.”

  “As Forbes once put it, I’m a pragmatist.”

  “Have you ever killed anyone? Or had anyone killed?”

  “Jesus. No.” (“Axed” is just an expression.) I went back to typing. “I’ll be done with this in a sec. Then I want to talk.”

  I hit Send and my email went off to its destination, as impalpably as the butterfly taking off from the arborvitae. “Look—I’m sorry. There were a lot of problems in my chain of reasoning when we met. I privileged data over other inputs.” My voice wavered and I strengthened it. “I realize that now, and I’ve put some work into compensating for my biases. I’m a data-driven decision maker so I’m particularly susceptible when the data is flawed. But I’m sorry. Luckily you have only the regular odds of getting hit by lightning. Which are quite small—two hundred fifty strikes or so a year, in this country, among three hundred eighteen million people.” I nodded vehemently, because she ought to be reassured by these numbers.

  “But why wouldn’t you just mention it, just in case? Like a normal person would. Here was something horrible that happened; here’s how to avoid it.”

  “It’s just that—while awful, it was the best thing that could have happened to me.” Was it? I had the familiar sensation, which has become more familiar since I ascended to my current role, of feeling one thing while saying another, of being amazed by the audacity of what I was saying. I felt some murky, hard-to-articulate truth I wanted to convey, but in the course of speaking about it, it took on a shape of its own. Some people would call this lying but I think it’s more complicated: maybe the feeling is a lie.

  “Not very nice.”

  “No,” I conceded. This was an easy concession; I don’t value niceness much.

  The Tibetan wind chimes hanging from our porch gonged and a burst of wind freed tiny blossoms from the tree overhead, carried them across the lawn, and scattered them on the surface of the pool.

  “Maybe you were always going to be this way,” she said.

  I thought about this. I’ve thought about it before. “I don’t think so.”

  A grinding noise startled us both. Michelle covered her ears. For no reason other than the crazed purs
uit of optimization, home edition, the very nice house next door had been demolished by its new owners to make way for a new one. A bulldozer parked by the property line blighted our view (Blazer liked it—he was the only one). From my bedroom upstairs I could see the huge concrete-lined pit that would become the new neighbors’ commodious basement, and the small steel-lined outline of their future panic room. The new neighbors were a young family with obscene wealth, small children, and no qualms about the thousands of jackhammer hours needed to take down the old house and put up a new one. I liked envisioning them huddled in there against weapon-wielding maniacs.

  I’d brought out a new Conch in the packaging we were going to launch next quarter. I’d left it on the patio table. Michelle picked it up. She lifted off the top of the box and pulled out the Conch, turning it over in her finger.

  “Can I?”

  “If you want. It won’t work on you. Willow set it up for me. It only works on its owner.”

  She installed it behind her ear. “It’s working!” she said.

  I shrugged. We’ve had some hiccups with the bioauthentication.

  She took her hand away slowly as if she expected it to fall, and a moment later, when she realized it was not going to, she made a funny expression of pleasure (I’ve seen that same expression before, in focus groups), tossed her head, and smiled. Her hair rippled over her shoulders.

  “It’s in.” She smiled. “It just gave me the weather report. Storms later in the week. It tickles.”

  “Surely it’s not your first Conch. Isn’t that how you knew so much about me?”

  “No.”

  “I thought you must have been wearing a duplicate.” Eggs was doing something ecstatic and dervish-like on her back on the grass.

  “Just flash cards,” she said. “And instinct.”

  I pushed down my laptop lid to give her a serious look. “How did you get the job?”

  “I thought you might ask that.” She started out softly, eyes cast down at the ground. “I’d gotten new headshots done, for my acting. And then I got this call for a job. Would I come talk to this casting director? Sure, of course. You don’t say no, you know?”

  I nodded. At her age, it was wise not to reject a professional opportunity out of hand.

  “This woman met me at a coffee shop. I kept asking what the part was, and she said she wasn’t sure which one I was right for yet. She said it was for a commercial job. She seemed friendly, but very professional, not chatty. She told me what I needed to do. It was all very straightforward, and I said, sure, I’ll do it. I wasn’t scared. She showed me videos of you and I practiced talking to you. I felt like I really got to know you, even before we met.”

  “Please, can you get me this person’s contact information? Any details would help.”

  “I don’t have much to give you.” She swung one leg over the side of the chaise and sat up. “I did it for my résumé. It’s better than being an understudy. I was an understudy for Irina in The Three Sisters but I only got paid if I went on.”

  I sighed. “They must have picked you because of the resemblance.”

  She looked surprised. “I don’t know. I wasn’t expecting that you’d…identify so closely with me. I think they thought you’d be nice to me because I was young and lost. You know, because you’re a mom.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. I glanced back at the house, at the windows, where inside lunch would soon be served, a cube of avocado in Blazer’s newly developed little pincer grasp, Nova inspecting her edamame for flaws, bean by bean. Then, lunch cleaned up, the children taken upstairs for naps. Someday we would all eat nutri-pellets and we wouldn’t need to hire a cook anymore. Did Jacqui realize how tenuous her occupation was, how likely it was to be disrupted by new nutritional technology and robot cleaners or relocations to other cities? It seemed not.

  What was I going to do about Michelle? What about my Conch? I’d put a new one in—I could hardly go without one, in my position. I gazed at the wobbly surface of the pool. Something sinusy was happening again. The clarity doesn’t last like it used to. I was looking at water through a haze of water. I inhaled sharply till salt came down my throat.

  Michelle lay back, lounging, oblivious to how troubling I found her story, and how much personal and professional distress she’d caused me. How naive was she? Who was she working for and what did they want?

  Michelle giggled, breaking into my thoughts. She touched her ear. “It just spoke to me again!” That joyousness, that’s one of the things that makes me feel it’s all worth it. Having your own Conch is like being in the in group, the A-list. You’re the alpha girl.

  “What’s it saying?”

  “Willow’s been trying to reach you—the SportConch prototype just came in. Oh, and Brad’s coming over.”

  * * *

  —

  “I’ve been doing some research,” Brad Barsh said, placing his laptop on the lounge chair next to him, lid at half-mast like his heavy-lidded eyes. He was wearing a pool blue shirt spotted with palm trees, and when he lay back it looked like an inlet of pool water had risen up through his chest. He took off his glasses and wiped off the sweat, replaced them and wriggled his bare feet at the relief of seeing clearly. His toes were long and the joints seemed more functional than they were supposed to be, like a flying monkey’s. I found this erotic.

  “I’ve reached out to some contacts about the crisis.”

  I blinked for one moment, processing this. The crisis. That would be? Oh, right: Conch’s failure. The Clitch. I ought to consider a color-coding system for my crises. The ivory drapes of the pergola snapped in the breeze and billowed like sails, as if the whole thing were about to take off.

  “We can’t leave aside stochastic factors,” I said slowly. I blew my bangs upward while he thought about this. I find this a useful suggestion to make in many scenarios. Because one should never leave aside stochastic factors. And nobody except me really is clear on what I mean by that. I sighed. I flipped through my notes. We’d confirmed that the bridge-jumper’s Conch had told him to jump. This followed weeks of constant suggestions that he pursue higher education, exercise more, change his diet, give blood, and register as an organ donor. The Conch had also suggested he make dinner reservations for Father’s Day (his father was dead). “One Conch, behaving erratically. Which happened to be sold to a man with mental health issues who couldn’t handle wearing a Conch. The product malfunctioned, sure, but…”

  Brad shaded the display of his calculator from the sun, bright overhead. “In other words, you don’t know. Why would a Conch make these suggestions? What data is it acting on? Could we have a hacker?”

  I twiddled my top lip with my bottom teeth. “I’ve considered that,” I said. “It doesn’t seem likely based on my analysis of the situation, but Cullen is mystified. And it’s not a good thing when he can’t come up with an answer. The team is reviewing the last couple of weeks of code changes.”

  Brad looked at me intently. I thought about what it would be like to climb on top of him. I felt like there was a chance he was thinking the same thing.

  “Has any of the code changed?”

  “We ship all the time, but we haven’t made any changes to the algorithm. I’m pulling info on that right now from the team.” I touched the brand-new Conch in my pocket—it was the Powerplex prototype Brad had brought over. I couldn’t wait to try it out.

  Michelle, coming out of the house, caught Brad’s eye.

  “Hi!” Brad waved, sharply. He squinted at her, then at me. “Au pair?” he diagnosed, and looked to me for confirmation.

  “She’s my cousin. She’s in town.”

  “She’s attractive.” I enjoyed the implicit compliment.

  Michelle took this as permission to approach the pool’s edge. She raked up the water with her bare pointed toes. I was the only shoe wearer among the three of us.

  “Maybe your smart young mind can solve this puzzler for us,” Brad said. It hit me squarely in the cringe
zone but she looked intrigued. Brad wriggled his long toes. Brad likes them young. I have succeeded, for long stretches of our working relationship, in forgetting this.

  “What’s going on?” she said.

  “We’re having some issues with the Conch,” I said. “Weird messages to vulnerable users. Prompting them to do things they shouldn’t.”

  “How’d this happen?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Are they new ones?”

  “Some are,” I said. “Some aren’t.”

  “Long story,” Brad said, patting the spot next to him.

  “Where do they make them?” She came over. She did not sit down, which pleased me. She looked straight at him.

  “Malaysia.”

  She looked thoughtful. I touched a spot of pain where one of my eyebrow hairs takes root.

  “Could they be using bad parts?” Michelle said.

  “It’s a possibility I’ve considered,” I said, though I hadn’t. A software problem was more likely. “What if someone is sabotaging them at the factory?” Malaysia, it had said on the address on the card Michelle had had in her pocket. “It’s worth investigating…”

  “We have that guy in Penang,” Brad said. Brad and I looked at each other, reading each other’s thoughts as seamlessly as Conch reads its users’ data files, when it’s working correctly.

  “I’ll go myself,” I said, saying it before I even knew I had made the decision.

  There’s a concept in Buddhism called Beginner’s Mind, which I’ve read about in business periodicals. The idea is that there is a clarity and openness that comes from encountering experience without preconceptions. I’ve used this successfully to leverage the lack of knowledge of a sharp new hire—I meet with her at thirty days out, sixty days, and ninety days and listen to all her questions about why we do things as we do. And some of the questions stem from misunderstanding or confusion, but sometimes we get a fresh look at a legacy process or outdated workflow, and we’re able to take the insight and apply it. New eyes on a problem can be useful even if the new eyes don’t know very much. The experienced eyes can fill in the gaps. Sometimes not knowing is its own form of knowledge. That sounded very good—I could see it going viral.