The Every, page 17
Bananaskam appeared on the screen, larger this time.
I had that album, someone wrote in response. Cruel Summer!
Wes, suddenly competitive, tapped quickly on his phone. “How is it okay to be eating bananas now, in Northern California? At what cost, human and carbon? #Bananaskam!” He sent it, and now, because it was the third mention, the word bananaskam appeared in large pulsing letters. Delaney saw the heads of a few diners turn and tilt. Phone and tablet-tapping ensued, and the word bananaskam grew larger and morphed into a fiery red font.
Now a new message appeared onscreen: “Guatemalan banana plantation workers are paid $6 a day. They put the bananas on container ships—some of the worst ocean polluters. Gas and oil leaking all over the Pacific. Then to Long Beach. Then up Highway 5 on gas-burning trucks. All so we can have bananas where and when we have no right to them. #Bananaskam!”
“Is that you?” Delaney asked.
Wes shook his head, showing his idle hands.
“Now send it home,” Delaney said. “Bananaskam = banana shame.”
“Joke,” Wes said. “Obvious. They’ll know.”
“Know?” Delaney said. “Never. Here. Jokes. None.”
“BANANASKAM = BANANA SHAME,” he typed, and pushed send. Thirty heads read the phrase and nodded.
Soon the entire screen was anti-banana, and an enterprising kitchen staffer had gotten the message. He removed the twenty or so remaining bananas, secreting them out of view.
In the course of breakfast, bananaskam begat pineappleskam and papayaskam. Any fruit not grown in California was accused and found guilty. The kitchen workers stayed busy, removing each newly demonized fruit, and by the end of lunch, the consensus was that anything eaten on campus had to be grown within 100 miles and transported to campus without use of fossil fuels. Even that was considered a holding position, to be improved upon—the perimeter shrunk and carbon load made negative. Onscreen debates were held about what, beyond the campus’s heretofore recreational and decorative tomato and lemon and lime gardens, could be grown on campus, or brought there by sail. Studies were planned, nearby farmland was bought, and a sign hung over the eatery from that day on: WE HAVE NO BANANAS, it said, and that made everyone very proud.
XVIII.
“THERE YOU ARE!” The words were sung by a voice behind Delaney.
It was Kiki, her eyes exultant. Again, though she knew Delaney’s whereabouts always, each time she saw her, she was overcome with delight to find her where she knew she was. At the moment, they were outside the lobby of Algo Mas.
Today Kiki’s jewelry was bulbous and wooden but just short of bizarre, her bodysuit white and legs covered by knee-high boots equal parts Barbarella and Condoleezza. But Kiki’s face seemed to have aged years in a week. Delaney couldn’t say this. She couldn’t even say she looked tired. That would be flagged by TruVoice, and AnonCom, and probably ComAnon, too.
“You okay?” she asked instead.
“Me? Yes!” Kiki said. Then, as if realizing she’d sounded overly defensive, she started over, first with a hearty chuckle. “I’m perfect,” she said. “Just a bit underslept. Ready for your next rotation?”
“I am,” Delaney said, but Kiki’s eyes had gone distant. Delaney waited while Kiki seemed to travel to unknown worlds, and finally returned.
“I got an eval recently,” Kiki said, “and it said I need at least 7.6 hours. But I don’t remember when I got that much sleep. Maybe high school? What’s your number?”
Delaney had no clue. “Maybe seven?”
Kiki’s eyes again traveled to far-off places. “Send autos,” she said to her AI assistant. “To all forty-one.” She refocused on Delaney. “How long do you usually take to return a message?”
Wes had set Delaney up with an elaborate system to auto-respond to all of her incoming messages, but she couldn’t tell Kiki this. “Depends,” she said.
“I’m trying to get quicker,” Kiki said. “Because of some super-tardy exchanges, I was averaging 22 minutes, which got flagged—for good reason. I mean, that’s not polite and not professional. So I asked OwnSelf to help me improve my turnaround. But Nino was sick this morning so I fell behind again, and I just had to auto-respond to my backlog, which also isn’t good. I’m trying to find a balance, but it’s been tough … Sorry,” she said. “What are we doing again?”
“My next rotation,” Delaney said. “You said it was TellTale?”
“Ah, good. Follow me,” she said, and strode with newfound energy across campus to a building that Delaney had assumed was an arboretum of some kind. It was a steel-paned glass structure full of plants and flowers.
“It must be exciting,” Kiki said, and looked at her oval. “It must be exhilarating,” she corrected, and found her oval approving, “to rotate again. To venture forth into new territory.” Again she checked the oval to see if points were scored. Nothing. She tried again “To venture assiduously forth into new and parsimonious territory.” Two happy bells rang from her oval, and Kiki smiled.
It didn’t matter, Delaney realized, where the ten-dollar words occurred, or if they were used correctly. You got points either way.
“I feel lucky,” Delaney said. “But I will miss Winnie.”
“Winnie …” Kiki said, and panicked briefly. “Winnie. Winnie in Thoughts Not Things.” Her oval reacted, produced the answer, Kiki read it and smiled. “Yes, Winnie Ochoa. A truly perfunctory person.” Another bell sounded. “Belatedly perfunctory, wouldn’t you say?”
Another bell. “Sure,” Delaney said. “Just like you said.”
“So TellTale,” Kiki said. “This was Bailey’s last major initiative before he left the day-to-day and of course before he passed.” Kiki’s smiling eyes were suddenly swimming. She took a moment to gather herself. “It’s really a monument to his priorities,” she said. “He really was a Renaissance man. We go through here.”
Kiki’s fingerprint opened a heavy steel door and they entered a kind of library, if that library were designed by robots and for dinosaurs. Everywhere there were enormous Jurassic ferns and succulents, hanging recklessly near jumbo screens and gently touching an array of antique typewriters, each of them sitting atop a platform and under a heavy glass dessert dome.
“We’ll meet your team leader, Alessandro, here.” They were standing under what seemed to be a fourteen-foot carnivorous plant. Delaney edged away from what she assumed was its mouth.
Kiki checked her watch. “We’re early, so I’ll background you on the space. When the movie came out—did you see the movie?”
“I did,” Delaney said.
“The actor who played Bailey … Darn it, what was his name? Anyway, in real life the actor collects typewriters, so that’s why there are typewriters everywhere? He also wrote a book of fiction? And this got Bailey thinking he could write a fictional book, too. So Bailey, because he was so methodical, started studying made-up storytelling. He read every guide there is. And I think he even read some fiction novels? He found it difficult to concentrate for so long and finish these books, because so many of them are very long. I guess you know that from college? Is there still a lot of reading in libarts?”
“Quite a bit,” Delaney said, and scrunched her nose disapprovingly. Kiki smiled. “So immediately Bailey started looking into what other people were reading, and whether everyone else is having the same trouble he’d been having finishing these books. Obviously paper books provide no useful data and should be abolished—”
“For environmental reasons alone!” Delaney added.
“I know, right?”
“And they’re so heavy sometimes,” Delaney said, gesturing as if someone had handed her an anvil.
“But the data e-books give us is so clear,” Kiki continued, “and what we found was that while, overall, millions of fictional books were being bought every year, a much smaller percentage were being read all the way through. This was a relief to Bailey, and to people like me, because I find it almost impossible to sit through a whole movie, let alone stay still for however long it takes to read a novel. But you’ve read a bunch? Like all the way to the end?”
“A few, yes,” Delaney said.
“Kudos!” Kiki said, and heard a happy ding from her oval. She looked up and her face eased into a tired smile. “Here’s Alessandro. Alo, you should take it from here. This is Delaney.” She turned to Delaney and her eyes welled again. “Sorry. All the emotion from this week. But it’s been wonderful getting to know you. I’m sure I’ll see you Friday at the celebration for Bailey. Until then, I wish you a sagacious and immoderate time here.”
With two more bells, Kiki peeled off and Alessandro waved to her as she left the building. He turned to Delaney with the full power of his eyes, which were extraordinarily large and unblinking and seemed to be ringed in what seemed to be naturally occurring eyeliner. His long black hair sprung from his scalp in thick vines.
“Please don’t call me Alo,” he said to Delaney, pushing a few vines from his face. “I’ve filed more AnonComs than I can count, but people still call me that. Anyway, you were at Reed? I was Kenyon,” he said, and closed his oversized eyes solemnly. Delaney worried there was some kind of sister-city bond between the two schools that had escaped her.
“So, like you, when I was in school, there was no chance I pictured myself here,” he said. “I was supposed to be a comp lit professor. This”—here he gestured to encompass the grand room and all the people in it—“was basically everything I most despised. But obviously now I’m going to try to convince you of what I myself became convinced of. Let’s go over here.”
Delaney followed Alessandro to what she assumed was his workspace—an ergonomic stool surrounded by twelve screens of various sizes. It looked like a prog-rock drum set. He pushed the hair-vines from his face again, and sat down, as if ready for a solo. The screens came alive, filled with scanned pages from books, though with dozens of symbols and numbers superimposed over the text—a kind of civil war between words and data.
“Bailey’s first goal was to find out why he couldn’t get through certain novels, and why, by inference, others put certain books down,” Alessandro said, and pulled up a second stool for Delaney. She took it. “People pick up a book,” he said, “and stop in the middle. Why? With e-books we can study all of this in aggregate. We can take, for example, two thousand readers of Jane Eyre and see who finished it. We actually did that. Turns out 188 people did finish it. That’s not good, right? People who read it all seem to like it. It’s at—” He tapped one of his screens a few times and got the answer. “It’s at 83 percent approval, which is high for a dead author. So we dig deeper and see that of the 2,000 or so people who started Jane Eyre, most quitters put it down around page 177. So then we look at what happens on page 177, and we see that people don’t seem to like this character named Grace Poole. They find her scary and depressing. They want more of the romance with Mr. Rochester. Now, if the author were alive, we could tell him—”
“Her,” Delaney corrected.
“Her?” Alessandro said reflexively, then went pale.
Oh no, Delaney thought. She’d seen this happen.
Alessandro stood up. He didn’t know what to do. He allowed the vines of his hair to obscure his face completely, and seemed likely to douse himself with gas and light a match.
“It’s okay,” Delaney said. “You meant Mr. Rochester.”
“I did?” Alessandro said from behind his wall of hair.
“I know you did. Like, if Mr. Rochester were alive, we could tell him that his parts of the book were intriguing.”
Alessandro tucked a hair-vine behind his ear, revealing a terrified left eye. “Okay,” he said. “Right.” He began warming to the idea, believing it his only way out of ruination. “That’s exactly what I meant.” He checked his oval, looking for TruVoice violations, and seemed to find none. (TruVoice did not read novels.) Finally Alessandro relaxed and sat back down.
“Where were we?” he asked. As a man just resurrected, he was still addled.
“You were saying you could fix Jane Eyre.”
“Well, we could,” he said, “but because the author is dead, she”—he pressed the word so hard it erased centuries of chauvinism and ignorance—“can’t learn from the data herself.”
“Sucks for her,” Delaney said, and saw Alessandro smile. Finally he was back, and warmed again to his subject.
“But a living author, or a publisher, can avail themselves of the numbers and act on them,” he said. “And this kind of data has been invaluable to publishers and some of their authors already. Just those data points, sales versus book-starts versus completions, that’s huge. Completions, of course, convert favorably to sales of the author’s next book. So for publishers, figuring out where and why people are stopping is crucial. Sometimes it’s obvious. Like, unlikable characters. We can help fix that. Algo Mas actually wrote a pretty simple code for turning an unlikable character into, like, your favorite person.”
“Wow,” Delaney said.
“The main thing is that the main character should behave the way you want them to, and do what you want them to do.”
“That’s just common sense,” Delaney said.
“Right? It kind of makes you worry about a lot of writers—the fact that they didn’t know this. But we’re making inroads with colleges and MFA programs, so now they have the information. We give it to them for free, as a public service.”
Delaney made a grateful, admiring whistle-sound.
“But some of the other issues are structural,” Alessandro said. “For instance, people don’t like epistolary novels. We found readers were skipping over most of the letters, especially if they were set off from the rest of the type with indents or smaller font size. But we found they were willing to read them if the letters were less than 450 words each, spaced every hundred pages or so, and were included in the body of the text—same size, same font, same indentation, and decidedly never italic.”
“That makes sense,” Delaney said.
“We found so many things!” Alessandro said. “Overall number of pages is fairly clear. No book should be over 500 pages, and if it is over 500, we found that the absolute limit to anyone’s tolerance is 577.”
“Even that seems undisciplined,” Delaney said.
“Right. Another key was the number of ideas or themes,” he said, “the number a reader would be able to tolerate in any book. I thought it would be nine or ten, but guess how many?”
“Three?” Delaney guessed.
“Exactly!” Alessandro said. “Any more than three, and people start quitting. The books that tossed out ideas left and right were always de-preferenced. Especially if those ideas get outdated. You read a book by Jules Verne and he’s going to spend twenty pages describing technology that’s obsolete now. That leads to high quit numbers, and a lot of interpaginate skims. The skimmers often technically finish their books, but we can tell by their reduced time spent on each page that they’re not really reading each page. We find this a lot in romance novels, obviously, with readers skimming until they find the …”
Alessandro stopped cold. It was clear he knew he couldn’t say “sex” or “sexual passages” or even “racy parts.”
“… on the vividly romantic sentences,” he finally said, and instantly his face went slack. “Um,” he said, hoping to forge ahead while wondering again if he’d just lost his job.
Delaney shrugged and smiled. Signaled by Delaney’s blithe attitude, relief swept through Alessandro like a gust of warm wind.
“Anyway, that research led to the Fontainebleu scandal,” he said. “We can’t blame Bailey, because he didn’t know about it, and wouldn’t have approved. This was just an experiment, a collaboration with a publisher.”
“Is this the thing with the AI novelist?”
“Donna Fontainebleu, right.”
“When machines wrote whole books?”
“No, that got distorted,” Alessandro noted. “The point was that the AI would write the parts no one read anyway—that interstitial stuff I was mentioning. The, like, favorite scenes, and the climactic parts and parts where there’s poetical-type writing, those were still written by humans. Those parts benefit from human intervention.”
“Of course,” Delaney said. “Division of labor.”
“Right. If we value humans, we save them from the mundane tasks. When we analyzed the reading data in the romance genre, we found that less than 4 percent of the buyers were reading all of the text. So just as an experiment, we collaborated with a few publishers on AI that would handle the stuff no one read in the first place. A fair amount of communication has been going this way anyway. Political speeches are generally repurposed using AI stitching software.”
“I heard that,” Delaney said.
“Listen, though. I don’t see AI writing all books. None of us do. Bailey didn’t think humans could be replaced or anything like that, that would be silly. But there is a role, he felt—we feel—for algorithms to play. Bailey studied some storytelling texts, screenplay guides, Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, and started reading about the patterns, the formulas, and once he saw that word, formula, it all clicked. A formula is essentially an algorithm.”
“Exactly,” Delaney said.
“Let’s start with screenwriting, which has been guided by formulas since the beginning. We did quite a bit of analysis here, and found that every successful screenplay ever written conforms rigidly to one of a few formulas, and the screenwriters we’ve brought in assure us that there is ready agreement in their ranks that formula, far from being a constraint, is the key to their freedom. Knowing the rules allows them to be creative within those guardrails. For example, 82 percent of the best scripts have the Catalyzing Moment on page 11. You can call storytelling a mystical, unknowable art, but there’s hard science here, and to deny it would be silly. Data is just—”
