If You, Then Me

by Yvonne Woon

  “Isn’t everyone here smart?”

  “There’s a hierarchy, with delivery apps at the bottom and AI at the top.”

  I tried not to look too flattered but couldn’t help it. “Well, I wasn’t smart enough to keep my shades down and windows closed.”

  “But you were smart enough to warrant being spied on.”

  “I don’t think that’s why they were spying on me.”

  “Either way, you should take it as a compliment.”

  Why was I blushing so much? “Thanks.”

  “I’d love to meet her sometime,” Mast said. “Wiser.”

  I held back a smile. “You’re asking a lot of questions,” I said. “How do I know you’re not spying on me?”

  “I guess you’ll just have to trust me.”

  “And why would I do that?”

  He gave me an amused look. “I knew you were smart.” He raised his glass in the air and strode back to his seat.

  I felt my chest swell. Mast. What kind of name was that?

  Six

  He seemed too good to be true. Most people I met didn’t really see me. They saw bits of me, but not the entirety. My mother, for example, saw me as a sometimes helpful but mostly aggravating daughter who kept doing things that she didn’t approve of or understand. Gina saw me as her smart and eccentric friend who was really good with computers. Amina was similar to me in a lot of ways, but I got the sense that the thing that brought me here wasn’t the same thing that brought her. She was ready to run a company, whereas I had come here to finally find people who understood me. But after just a few moments with Mast, I could tell that he saw me the way I wanted to be seen.

  I sank into my bed and opened Wiser.

  “Wiser, tell me more about Mast. He’s a fellow at the Foundry.”

  She paused. “There is no person named Mast at the Foundry.”

  I frowned. “That’s not right. Search again.”

  “I’ve scanned the list of fellows on the Foundry website and I have found no person named Mast.”

  “That can’t be. I was just talking to him.”

  “Perhaps you misheard his name.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Then perhaps he misled you.”

  “Why would he do that?” I asked.

  “People lie for many reasons, most often to hide shameful feelings or to manipulate for personal benefit.”

  I went on the Foundry’s website and looked at the list of names with their accompanying pictures. Wiser was right; there was no fellow named Mast. I scanned the photographs looking for the boy I had spoken to. Sure enough, there he was, grinning into the camera. His name was Benjamin Matsuo.

  “Wiser, tell me more about Benjamin Matsuo.”

  She paused. “Benjamin Matsuo is from San Mateo, California. He has won the Young Leaders of Technology Prize, the Governor’s Medal of Science, and the National Mathematics Medal of Achievement. He has two younger siblings. His father is a professor in technology and ethics at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and his mother is an attorney specializing in patent law. He is attending the Foundry to work on an artificial intelligence project.”

  I nearly fell out of bed. “He’s here for AI?”

  “That is correct.”

  I couldn’t believe it. He had deliberately misled me. I studied his picture, growing furious. His grinning face stared back at me as though it knew. I wanted to flick the smug look off his face.

  I was about to search the internet for more information on his AI when my phone vibrated. I had a new message on BitBop.

  NEW MESSAGE FROM U/OBJECTPERMANENCE:

  Hey, are you up? How’s the new school?

  Just seeing his message box comforted me, the way it felt to come home and see that everything in your house was just the way you left it. I felt guilty then that I had entertained the idea that Mast could replace ObjectPermanence just because he had complimented me, because I had seen him in the flesh. Though I often fantasized about meeting ObjectPermanence in person, I sometimes wondered if it even mattered. So what if I had never seen his face or touched his hand? Our conversations were more real than any I’d had in the physical world. Didn’t that make this reality, too?

  I considered how to respond.

  SENT MESSAGE FROM U/ARRAYOFLIGHT:

  Have you ever wanted to just click undo on an entire day? Well, that’s how it is here. I thought I’d meet people here that got me, but I’m starting to wonder if maybe I just won’t fit in anywhere.

  NEW MESSAGE FROM U/OBJECTPERMANENCE:

  Why? What happened?

  SENT MESSAGE FROM U/ARRAYOFLIGHT:

  It’s hard to talk about without getting into details, but if you can imagine a star imploding into a black hole, only before collapsing, the star was publicly humiliated in front of its entire galaxy and then a nice star approached it, but it later turned out that the nice star was just lying to extract its last valuable minerals before it imploded into a black hole, then you’ll have an accurate picture of what happened.

  NEW MESSAGE FROM U/OBJECTPERMANENCE:

  I always knew astrophysics was complicated, but I never considered the social dynamics of interstellar relationships.

  It’s hard to imagine a star having anything to be humiliated about. Those other stars must have been jealous because their light was dimmer. The joke’s on them, though, because black holes are basically the most formidable formations in the universe, so they’d better watch out.

  I smiled. Was it possible to be in love with an arrangement of letters on a computer screen? The keys felt warm beneath my fingers.

  SENT MESSAGE FROM U/ARRAYOFLIGHT:

  Thanks. I’ll try to remember that. How’s it going over there?

  NEW MESSAGE FROM U/OBJECTPERMANENCE:

  The same, basically. I did something today that I wasn’t proud of. I wish I could go back and change it, but it’s done. I wasn’t mean or anything, but I treated someone in a way that I regret. I like to think of myself as a good person, but then I do things like this and I wonder if my “goodness” is just a story I tell myself so I don’t have to own up to the fact that maybe I’m just like everyone else—good when it suits me, and less good when it doesn’t.

  SENT MESSAGE FROM U/ARRAYOFLIGHT:

  I know I don’t really know you, but it feels like I do, and I think you’re a good person. Or maybe no one is, because what is “good” anyway? No one does the right thing all the time. Just try to be better tomorrow.

  NEW MESSAGE FROM U/OBJECTPERMANENCE:

  Thanks. I guess you’re right. It occurred to me today that I’m never really myself around most people I know. I’m always trying to be the person “I’m supposed to be,” whatever that means.

  I don’t feel that way around you, though, and I’m glad.

  SENT MESSAGE FROM U/ARRAYOFLIGHT:

  Me too.

  Seven

  There were three Mikes and three Andrews, though one went by Drew—AJ’s thick-necked friend—one went by Andy, and the other by AJ. There was a Micah—an almost Mike, Amina said—two Bens, and two Joshes. The others were Arun, Marcus, Arthur, and Ravi.

  Of the twenty of us at the Foundry, there were only five girls.

  Kate, Seema, Amina, and I sat in the dining hall, a leafy sunroom that overlooked a courtyard. Though we called it the dining hall, it was really more of a café. There was a menu, and you could order anything you wanted for free, at any hour of the day.

  I had considered skipping breakfast and staying in my room for the rest of the year so I wouldn’t have to face anyone after what had happened the night before. I could order a minifridge, vitamin D supplements, Johann Sebastian Bach’s complete Fugue discography, and enough meal-replacement beverages to last me until the program was over. I could attend classes remotely. The vitamin D supplements would prevent my bones from growing brittle with the lack of sunlight, and Bach seemed like the only appropriate music to play as a lonely coder living in the shadows. I would have epistolar
y relationships only, the primary one being with ObjectPermanence, my long, unconsummated romance. It would be a tragic existence, one they would make movies about long after I was gone. The tragic story of Xia Chan, solitary and eccentric tech innovator who spent the majority of her life in a dark room. But Amina had pointed out that it would be hard to become a tech innovator without leaving my room, so I’d begrudgingly accompanied her.

  It was just as bad as I’d expected: everyone looking at me, whispering my name. Walking by AJ’s table was particularly excruciating. He smirked and inexplicably held up seven fingers. I stared at them, bewildered.

  “Don’t worry about AJ,” Kate said. “He’s used to getting what he wants, but he’s not real competition.” She looked trim as a ribbon in a petal-colored shirt, as thin as tissue and almost the same hue as her skin, interrupted only by a freckle on her neck.

  Seema sat next to her, dressed in sleek business casual like she was already a CEO. Her long black hair was held in place with a headband.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “His ideas are mediocre, and his programming is sloppy,” Kate said. “There’s no way he’s going to be the Founder, and he knows it.” She lowered her voice. “The real ones to worry about are Andy, Mike, Arthur, Arun, and Ben.”

  Ben. I wondered if she was talking about Mast. I scanned the dining hall but didn’t see him.

  Andy Chen, Kate explained, was probably the most famous kid at the Foundry. She nodded to a lanky boy in baggy jeans and a hoodie who was eating cereal a few tables away. He was skinny, with a birdlike face that would have looked childish had he not exuded the cool confidence of someone who knew he was at the top. He’d started Grapevine, a gossip app that he’d already launched. “I’m sure you’ve heard of it,” Kate said.

  Of course I had. It was a terrible but genius app that let people anonymously post three statements—two of them lies, one of them the truth—and let people speculate on which one was real. The posts disappeared after five hours, which was long enough for the damage to be done. Though I’d never tried it, everyone back home had been using it to spread rumors about people at school.

  “Why is he even here if he already has a successful start-up?” I asked.

  “Apparently he’s working on this security filter called Garble that prevents any information you share from being captured by a screenshot,” Kate said. “It somehow blurs the screen so that when you take a screenshot it just shows a bunch of pixels. He wants to use it as an add-on to Grapevine so that people will share even more private information without the risk of it being saved forever.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I guess he decided he doesn’t want to use his powers for good.”

  “I heard he’s a dick,” Amina said.

  Kate shrugged. “I think he lives off a steady stream of sugar, caffeine, and Adderall. I ran into him once at a teen coding conference. He was in the girls’ bathroom, just standing in front of the mirror splashing his face with water and listening to trance music so loud I could hear it through his headphones. I don’t think he even realized I was there.”

  Andy was sitting with two other boys, one of them Arthur Kim, a slightly pudgy boy with a giddy face that seemed inclined to laugh. He was already gaining the reputation of being the class clown. He looked sweet and goofy, with his snapback hat and his baggy skateboarding pants covered in patches. He was there for an app called Dare Me, where people could post dares and respond with challenges and videos that could be upvoted.

  Amina rolled her eyes. “Changing the world, one dare at time.”

  It sounded dumb, Kate conceded, especially compared to Mike McCalaster’s smart pump for kids with diabetes, but dumb things usually had the broadest appeal. Plus, everyone knew how much investors wanted to fund anything with video.

  I nodded like I knew what she was talking about. Did everyone here know about what investors wanted except for me?

  Arun Krishna was tall and handsome in the way that people who owned islands looked handsome, in the way that billionaires were handsome. He wore loafers with no socks and a crisp white polo that made him look like he was on a yacht. A pair of sunglasses was nestled in his hair.

  He was sitting with a handful of boys, all of whom looked like they had just walked out of a brochure for a prep school. He noticed us looking at him and flashed a smile, perfect and white.

  “What is he, running for Congress?” Amina said. “Who has teeth like that?”

  “He doesn’t need to run for anything,” Kate said. “He’s rich. His dad’s the global head of operations and strategy at LineCart, which powers basically all of the online shopping stores in the world.”

  “His dad just bought a basketball team,” Seema said.

  “They fly around in a private jet,” Kate added.

  “He knows Lil’ Wip. They sit courtside,” Seema said.

  “Seriously?” Amina said, her eyes wide.

  “He has his cell phone number,” Seema said. “I saw it.”

  I’d never heard of Lil’ Wip before but was too embarrassed to admit it, so I nodded, pretending to be impressed.

  “And his sister’s a model. She used to date Kenzy Lo.”

  “What?” Amina said. “That is wild.”

  Was I the only one here who knew nothing about anything? “Wow,” I murmured, and wondered why he was even at the Foundry if he was that rich. Couldn’t his dad just fund his company?

  Arun was there to work on Clique, a networking site for teens, which to me, sounded awfully like a dating app. I caught Amina’s eye and we exchanged a barely perceptible smile.

  Arun was sitting with Mike Flores, the friend of AJ’s who looked like a politician’s son. Mike was objectively good-looking, despite the company he kept. He had a wave of mahogany hair and a golden complexion that seemed to glow with health and money. He was there to launch a service called TVTR, which was an online community that let you ask people questions about your homework. It also matched people with tutors.

  “He also wants to make an algorithm that checks your homework for any mistakes, but that’s in the future,” Kate said.

  “So an app that does your homework?” I said.

  “Sounds like an easy way to pay other people to help you cheat,” Amina said.

  Kate brushed her off. “I’m sure he could create protections for that.”

  “Changing the world, one purchased essay at a time,” Amina said.

  “He’s actually a really nice guy,” Kate said. “He’s going to give a portion of the proceeds to scholarship funds for kids in need.”

  “If he wins,” Amina corrected.

  “If he were actually a nice guy, he’d stand up to AJ,” I said.

  “They’re childhood friends. It’s not that easy.”

  “How do you know so much about Mike’s internal dialogue?” Amina asked.

  Kate shrugged. “We’re friends.”

  Seema smirked. “They have a thing. It’s been going on for a while.”

  Amina exchanged a glance with me. So that was why Kate was so generous with him.

  “It’s on and off,” Kate said. “Right now it’s off. But we’re still friends. Anyway, he’ll probably get it funded even if he doesn’t win,” Kate said. “His dad is the head of design at Barion Industries and his mom is the VP of sales at Pageforce.”

  I’d heard of both companies but didn’t know exactly what they did.

  “He’s not as rich as Arun,” Seema said, “but he’s not shopping in the bargain bins.”

  I felt my chest flush. I hoped no one at the table would notice that my shirt and pants were off-brand, bought on clearance.

  “Does everyone here have rich parents?” Amina asked.

  Kate and Seema insisted that their families weren’t rich. Kate’s mom was a dean at Caltech and her dad was a neurologist, and Seema’s mom was a doctor and her dad was an electrical engineer at one of the big microprocessor companies.

  They clearly had a different definitio
n than I did of rich. Maybe compared to Arun they weren’t rich, but it seemed like neither Kate nor Seema grew up wanting. Amina must have been thinking the same thing because she raised her eyebrow but said nothing.

  I wondered what Amina’s parents did. I didn’t tell them that I only had one parent, that my dad left when I was two. All I knew about him was that his name was Wei, he’d been getting his PhD in biochemistry but had dropped out, and that he’d taken the car and all of the cash from my mother’s wallet the day he’d left. My mother didn’t like to talk about him, and the few times I’d asked, her face had darkened and she’d said that the only part of him worth anything was me.

  Once, I’d asked Wiser to look him up, but the search rendered too many results, none of which sounded right. There was a pharmacist in Sedona, a high school math teacher in Chicago, an engineer in Berkeley, and a microbiologist in Boston. All of them had families, and none of them looked like me. I wondered if my mother had even told me his real name.

  There were other impressive people. Marcus had skipped two grades in school and was taking college classes now because he’d maxed out the ones at his school. He’d made a dating app called Playlist, where you matched based on movie and music lists you curated. He probably wouldn’t win, Kate surmised, because dating apps were old news, but he’d eventually get funding from someone else. Same with the selling platforms and the gamers. Good ideas but they’re not fresh, Kate emphasized.

  And of course, there was Deborah, the fifth and final girl, who was standing by the door talking to Ravi, one of the gamers, while she sipped an energy drink. She was brawny, with broad shoulders and dark hair pulled into a low ponytail. She walked everywhere at a slant, as though she were bracing herself against the elements.

  “She only drinks meal replacement beverages so she doesn’t have to waste time eating,” Kate said.

  “She gets up at 5:00 a.m. every day and runs eight miles,” said Seema.

  “She makes chain mail in her spare time to use for cosplaying,” Kate continued.

  She was there for some kind of cryptocurrency called Parbit, Seema told us, though neither she nor Kate knew how it worked.