They Know Not What They Do, page 44
She turns and looks him in the eye. She’s wearing plum-colored lipstick and her lips are parted. Joe believes he more or less understands what the look on Miriam’s face means. And if you have anything to say about it, you can go fuck yourself.
He feels like giving back as good as he’s getting, but he has the sense to stem the urge in time. You’d be so young, so beautiful, he thinks, without that look on your face. He watches from the other side of the room as Miriam lowers the loaded revolver into the cupboard. He hears the heavy, dull thud as it hits the wooden shelf. Miriam closes the door, locks it, and lifts the key between forefinger and thumb.
‘There are two keys. We’ll keep one here,’ she says, slipping the key into the zippered pocket in the lining of her purse. ‘And we’ll keep the other one here.’
She walks into the kitchen and places the second key in the cobalt blue Finnish vase Saara brought, that lives on top of the fridge. And then Miriam looks at her husband to make sure he understands.
They have to do something to celebrate. It’s all over, but they won’t be able to believe that unless they mark it somehow.
Nothing has been resolved, but this moment is as good as any other for celebrating. If they wait for the trial to run its course, they’ll be waiting for months, even years. There will be appearances, hearings, pre-trial motions, and appeals, Kafkaesque twists during which perpetrators might become victims, formalities become results, and nothing ever necessarily resolved. That’s why they have to decide it’s all over now.
It’s as true as anything else.
And beforehand, it’s a spectacular idea: Mexican food! The girls are more excited than Joe dared hope. It will be wonderful having them back in the house for the first time in ages. Knowledge of the loaded snub-nosed revolver in his grandmother’s antique china cupboard throbs somewhere in the back of his mind. He has to get rid of the gun, and soon: the girls must never know it was brought into the house. But they’ll talk about that once Miriam has had a chance to calm down, stopped thinking he wants to pick a fight.
There’s no better night for a party.
On the other hand, Joe hasn’t thought out what it will feel like to raise his glass in a toast when he still has the acidic burn in his stomach lining. What it will feel like to mark the day when no one’s promising anything is going to change.
What it will feel like to sit next to Miriam again at the dinner table.
His wife makes a point of verifying over the phone: ‘Is it still there?’
Joe groans. ‘Hey, come on.’
‘I don’t have any way of checking from here.’
If he wanted a proper power struggle, it would be easy to take the revolver from the antique cupboard and return it to the shop. Or drive to the marina at night and toss it in the harbor somewhere between the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company and the World Trade Center Institute, listen to it splash into the dark, diesel-scented waters of Chesapeake Bay.
Joe isn’t sure what irritates him most: the fact that Miriam suspects him of having done so, the fact that it isn’t true, or the fact that it could be.
‘Miriam, it’s over now,’ he says. ‘Samuel was arrested. Along with his friends.’
‘Is it there or not?’
‘Doug and Mike will be sitting in their cars right outside the door!’
‘This is not a trivial matter for me, Joe.’ Miriam’s voice trembles; he can hear how shaky she still is. This mingles with his suppressed anger over the way she went behind his back to buy the gun.
‘I haven’t touched it,’ he finally admits. ‘It’s there in the cupboard.’
Miriam knows the terrorists may never go to jail. Anything can happen during a trial; rapist-murderers are freed every day on technicalities. Brad has reminded him of this, too: there are no guarantees about what will happen in court. But even Brad believes they can cautiously assume the situation will be brought under control.
Miriam tells Joe she tried to get the police to drive by now and again.
‘They haven’t lifted a finger yet,’ he says. ‘You think they’re going to show up, sirens howling, now that… those people have been arrested?’
We live in a city where gangs mow each other down with submachine guns every day, Joe counters this. Firebomb the competition with Molotov cocktails.
‘Exactly,’ Miriam says, and this quickly the atmosphere becomes tense.
What he meant was that perhaps the police have better things to do than patrol an area with a relatively low crime rate. What Miriam, in contrast, meant was that here again we see proof of the laxness of the police and politicians: the criminals should have been brought to justice long ago. This sparks a desire in Joe to remind her of the consequences of such attitudes: just last month, an ordinary Baltimore resident shot dead an unarmed teenager because the kid made the mistake of taking a shortcut through the man’s yard. That the kid had been wearing a hoodie and had his hands in his pockets had spawned much debate in the papers.
None of this needs to be said out loud; a mutually bitter sense of being misconstrued arises in each of them without further encouragement.
But tonight, everything will be fine.
The girls and Miriam will be coming home; he’ll cook and make everything up to his daughters, remind them and himself of what’s most important in life: family and a sense of belonging, love – none of which a single terrorist can take from them.
He has, however, had to suppress slight irritation that that he’s going to have to remove the iAm for an entire evening. In no time flat, the device has become a hit at the department. Those lucky enough to have gotten one have started analyzing their results and writing their manuscripts on them. From the speed of the transition and the postdocs’ enthusiasm, Joe realizes that this is one innovation it will be impossible to ignore.
At first Joe tried to resist the change. He turned down the iAm intended for him, much to the delight of Sarah, who, as the student next in line in terms of seniority, immediately took the device for herself. He did, however, blurt out something about its lousy usability. Raj, who had been champing at the bit for the iAm to appear on the market since the previous fall, replied that the experience improved exponentially with use; you ought to use it five or ten times before drawing any conclusions. The hundred billion neurons in the brain formed a complex and, above all, extremely plastic whole.
But the double and disappearing images surprised him: ‘That’s only supposed to happen if you use it after someone else.’
‘Really?’ Of course that’s what had happened in Joe’s case: the device’s circuitry had already adapted to Rebecca’s neural pathways.
‘So you finally tried using it, then?’ Raj asked. ‘Someone else’s?’
‘No… no,’ Joe said, clearing his throat. Raj gave him a curious look. ‘I just heard… an… acquaintance told me.’
‘I see,’ Raj said.
Joe could feel his cheeks growing hot.
But Raj also gave him a useful link to tips that would help to finetune the iAm experience.
‘If your acquaintance happens to be interested.’
‘I’ll let him know,’ Joe said, leaving the room too fast.
Some functions, like automatic saccadic motion monitoring, could be disabled if desired. It was also possible to limit the number of screens – which in the blogs and guides were called mimages, for mental images – if you felt like you were drowning under the surging stimuli.
Applying these tips led to a completely different experience on Joe’s third try. It was clearly easier to control the automatically launching mimages when you deactivated the distracting eye-motion function. And if you stayed cool-headed under the waves of information, you could slip into the stream of opening screens, calmly fix your gaze up ahead, and swim in the direction you wanted in spite of the cross-currents. The more relaxed you stayed, the more pleasurable the experience was. Focusing your attention didn’t always work, but you accumulated skills rapidly when you used the device every day, which was oddly satisfying.
Joe was not going to become a genuine iAm user for data security reasons alone, but he was happy to play around with Rebecca’s unused device, to keep up with the latest technological developments in a strictly professional capacity. And the device was surprisingly handy. For instance, while cleaning the house in preparation for the girls’ arrival, it would be ultra-convenient to check his email at the same time. Using the device in the girls’ presence didn’t seem feasible now that he had forbidden Rebecca from doing so, so when the girls moved back in, he’d only be able to use it at work.
But as he followed the thought through to its conclusion, he was surprised at himself: had it really come to this? Removing the paws for one evening felt like a sacrifice? And then he realized how onerous the thought of separate computers, televisions, and phones had grown in less than a month. To have to press buttons – using muscles! – and wait for a device to react? It all felt like something from the Stone Age.
He’d promised himself he wouldn’t buy any premium experience modules – they cost hundreds of dollars apiece and were of no interest to him. Oh, he might have tried the odd free module once or twice at night, to take the edge off the stress. But there was no way he’d go any further; why, he didn’t have the time.
However, the night before, something about the mind-numbing, straightforward idiocy of race-car driving suited his restless frame of mind, during which proper concentration was impossible. Another three key people had dropped out of the Freedom Media boycott group. One received direct hints that political activism was not in her professional interests; the other two begged off due to lack of time. And maybe because of this late-night news, sheer frustration, exhaustion, and maybe also because the device knew to offer it at just the right moment, Joe became momentarily lost while staring at the distractingly loud and incredibly convincing trailer for the Formula 1 Grand Prix car sports module that opened in front of him. As he watched, he felt that in this life situation, in this state of undeserved near-ruin, he was entitled to indulge whims that under normal circumstances he would have absolutely disregarded as a waste of time. And would have disregarded now, too, if selecting them had required anything so arduous as a single muscle movement.
Apparently the device was controlled by eye motion, or maybe even predicting it. The mere press of a forefinger would have sufficed to deter Joe: if one genuine muscle movement had been required, he never would have tried out the Formula One module. But no touch was required before he felt the multiple seat-belt straps pressing into his ribs. Somehow – from some activation of subcortical circuitry? – the device could tell that his mind had selected this, and the mighty rumble of the carbon-fiber-composite Scuderia Ferrari F14-T’s turbo engine shook the seat with such muscular, primal force – with such manliness! – that Joe caught himself being thrilled because he feared for his life.
Three Grand Prix track alternatives floated before him in the darkness as his ears locked up from the roar. A rush of adrenaline, and nothing was as real as this. If they were giving him half an hour for free, was he really such a stick-in-the-mud that he was going to turn up his nose at a gift? What else did he have to do that was so pressing at one in the morning? Especially now that they had caught the terrorists? He was blown away by the heavy reek of the fuel, the oily track glistening in the sun, the sound of rubber burning against asphalt, the genuine panic as he slid sideways into the tire barrier at three hundred miles an hour. The sensation of speed was difficult to describe; you had to experience the terrific g-force compression at the curves yourself. He was surprised to find himself pulling out his credit card so he could finish the race. The world was sliding deeper into chaos by the day, and his chest throbbed with guilt over the mousy doctoral student forced to conduct the painful cat experiments – he never would have guessed that in this life situation it would occur to him to spend his nights in a Formula 1 simulator. But oddly enough, it was the only thing to do. What a release, what liberating pleasure! He was the last person in the world to waste time on computer games, and this was the last moment when anyone would – but to be able to concentrate this fully, this intensely, on something so utterly pointless as tires screaming at chicanes – he was alive again, for the first time in ages, if only for a moment – and forget the odious dung heap his life had become.
Afterwards, he felt simultaneously gorged and hungry, super-alert and unable to concentrate. A migraine-like nausea seemed to follow every iAm session. The return to three-dimensional, material reality was inevitably unsettling, which might have resulted from the fact that every session was longer than the one before.
Which hadn’t been his intention, of course.
He wasn’t getting enough sleep as it was.
But, boy, was it worth it!
Searching for articles was light-years faster with the iAm; shuttling between traditional media functions so easy that even sending email was a pleasure. It was a joy dodging between social media while out running, searching for reference articles over a chicken-breast dinner while simultaneously keeping an eye on the news in the tiny corner of his field of vision where it so conveniently and automatically appeared. He saved tons of time. And because the device executed his wishes lightning-fast and without the slightest friction, he was never alone with his thoughts anymore. Reading was effortless, too. He could order any work he wanted from the neuron-pathway library the second it occurred to him; the opportunities for education were limitless. Joe had ordered more books for the device than he’d initially imagined – even a few novels.
Besides – and he was proud of this: he had been so wise, so adult, or perhaps his testosterone levels had simply lowered sufficiently with age – he’d already figured out what else he needed to do. Days ago, after his first experience sinking in digital quicksand, he was smart enough to consult the section of the printed user’s guide that explained how to deactivate the entertainment modules.
Since that first misstep, he has – unlike nine out of ten test users – shut down the most frivolous Xperience modules, the neurolibraries’ vast adult entertainment and gossip collections. Another reason why he has some moral currency saved up – to waste on, say, virtual motor sports, which, after all, was a relatively harmless form of escapism.
The earlier module was a pure accident. Someone should have warned him.
Joe takes comfort in the fact that something similar has happened to nine out of ten iAm users during their first session. At least that’s what it said in the technology-site article featuring interviews with a hundred iAm test users. And – unlike him – many of them were badly addicted. The new technology demanded practice, which was completely natural. That being the case, the concerns some users were voicing were, in the company’s view, exaggerated.
After getting a basic grasp of how the device works, Joe had browsed its various standard menus: Internet, News, Phone, Movies, Series, Entertainment, Tasks, Experiences. There was nothing new about this. The device did everything you could do before, too, only faster, more efficiently, and without the need for separate devices.
But that was what made it tricky: not a single association was the same after you had wired your cortex into the iAm. As a menu was offering itself, anything at all might come to mind. You might, for instance, involuntarily think that a category called Entertainment probably didn’t contain anything uplifting. That it had to be the one category no one would admit to browsing but that would immediately get the highest numbers of users. The one advertisers would be fighting tooth and nail to get into, and as a result of which there would be less and less room for science, culture, and investigative journalism.
Before he had finished the thought, the contents of the Entertainment menu shimmered in his darkened study like a ghostly, transparent mirror.
This was the menu he didn’t want to enter.
This was the menu he mentally resisted before he even knew what it contained. But now the Entertainment menu was already selected, evidently. Somehow – how? From the activation of neural pathways in the frontal insula? – the device could tell his resistance contained a wicked trace of curiosity.
The instant the menu opened – when it was already too late – he realized he was seeing the final item in the submenu more distinctly than the others. And just like a moment ago, the selection didn’t require a conscious decision on his part, a click – or even a thought.
Celebrities
Gossip
Chat
Naughty but Nice
Adults Only (18+)
It was more seeing than choosing. The letters of the last category seemed to glow in sharper relief than the others; the eyes may have sought it out because of the parentheses and the numbers, too.
But he didn’t have time to realize any of this before the Adults Only section had already opened.
His introductory courses included a lecture on those long-ago discovered neurons in the premotor cortex whose activation patterns could be used to predict where a test subject would move his or her hand. The decision was visible in the neurons slightly prior to the sensation of deciding; the neurons reacted a bit before the test subject felt they’d made up their mind. There was something disconcerting about the experience: the participants in the experiments got upset if they were shown the direction of movement the neurons had predicted, because to their minds they hadn’t been ready to decide yet.
Were these the neurons the device was able to monitor? Joe wondered. Or the ones these received input from? The device saw that this was where he wanted to come, deep down inside, because he didn’t want to, and it was able to execute the commands faster than he could retract them.
But what now?
Joe stared ahead, heart pounding. Something had appeared in the dark room. A hand floated about three feet in front of him, a woman’s hand that seemed to be sketching something in the air. Words.
The hand drew tidy stick figures somewhere at the height of the desk lamp. The graphics were more believable than Joe ever would have believed: the letters automatically corrected from white to black as they crossed the white wall.
