They Know Not What They Do, page 45
He had no idea how they’d been capable of this. The glowing hand was now writing three choices under the Adults Only (18+) submenu of the iAm device’s screenless screen, and they remained floating in the darkness before him.
Men
Women
Both, please!
His eyes must have stopped at Women, apparently, because the other alternatives had vanished. He was breathing faster.
This hadn’t been his intention.
This was what he got: this was what Raj had meant by the experience improving exponentially with use.
He was too stunned to look directly at a single face. He tried to turn away, but they stayed right in front of him. They appeared to take pleasure in his gaze, but they couldn’t see anything – could they? They had to be images, computer-modified videos of some sort. There was nothing to be afraid of; they were just bitstream.
This was simply too much for him. Joe’s hands felt clammy and cold.
The device was following his choices so quickly now that he had a tough time keeping up. For some reason, his mind must have wandered to one of his introductory-course students, about the same age as the girl whose assertive eyes were now confronting him in his study.
Over the years, he had learned to shrug off the attentions of female students. He was proud of how skillfully he’d learned to dodge the occasional, inevitable schoolgirl crush. He ran into it every five years or so: a certain type of woman, still testing her wings, looking for an older man like him. In the best case, it was combined with an intellectual curiosity he could respond to genuinely, safely allow the first experience of a personal teacher-student relationship. This was what had gone wrong with Aleksandra in Finland all those years ago. He’d been too young and inexperienced, confused by his own frustration and unhappiness, to head off her obvious attraction to him. But he’d learned from the experience. It had been remarkably satisfying, learning how to avoid the pitfalls that the younger Joe would have rushed into headlong.
But now in his dark study, a lightning-fast barrage of advancing, changing menus revolved before him, and all he could make out was the odd word here and there: Edit, Clothes, Accessories, Accept. And now this cute, petite, sweater-wearing stranger in front of him – whom he had, apparently, by some incomprehensible mechanism, chosen from among the others, faster than the speed of thought – looked at him earnestly, hungrily, in the shadowy study. Dark, straight, nearly black hair cascaded softly over her bare, narrow shoulders. But Joe was less awed by her gaze than by how the encounter felt: it seemed real.
And long before, heart pounding, he indicated acceptance, the girl was unbuttoning her sheer sweater. Nor did she stop, even though now Joe tried consciously to think: Pause. Stop. Exit. What was he supposed to say to the device? He had to be able to interrupt the function somehow – but how? The sweater fell back to reveal a sleeveless white top through which he could make out the girl’s breasts and big, brown areolae. Joe didn’t even realize he was giving his approval to what the girl asked with her eyes, as she slowly raised her arms and drew her shirt over her head. Nor did he have time to think anything beyond that he needed to turn off the device – but how? – before she was reaching one arm behind her back and releasing the clasp of her bra.
She was scandalously young. For a man his age, there was something fundamentally shocking about the experience reflected in the feigned innocence of her gaze, especially since he’d made it a rule for himself not to give in to this with a single student. She stood there before him, arms folded in front of her, the unclasped bra covering her café-au-lait breasts. She looked at him and waited, not so much out of consideration for him, as it felt at the moment, but, as Joe later realized, as a result of the designers’ careful calculation: so he would have time to take in the view before the bra dropped to the floor.
When the girl said her first words, his heart pounded in shock: he hadn’t meant for this to happen.
He was a pulsating, burning bundle of nerves.
Who was this girl? And why did none of this feel artificial? None of it was real, but his heart was still galloping hard, and of course it was wrong, but the application didn’t stop. He should have read how to reject an experience in the 436-page iAm guidebook, which was easy to find online. But the girl had to be real, because if she wasn’t, nothing was, and a fraction of a second before Joe had time to select or want, the girl slowly turned around. Apparently the only thing he could do was hold out his hand, his real biological right hand, and reach for the device to turn off the power, but it felt like a physical impossibility: did he even have limbs? When the girl steadied herself against the wall and leaned forward, the short skirt covering her round buttocks hiked up. Her frank, open gaze over her shoulder said one thing only.
Come.
The girl was wearing a skirt and thigh-high black stockings, but she was not wearing panties, and this wasn’t right, in any number of ways, in any way, and who was this girl, she was legal, wasn’t she, was she being paid for this, and had she definitely agreed to this, to be the object of his gaze, of anyone’s gaze? And where did all of this come from – the standard fantasies of some men’s site?
For some reason, one imagined touch would remain the last bastion, impossible to simulate. Touch was the most inalienable form of humanity, the one that would finally reveal the truth. And that’s why, simply to prove to himself they couldn’t do it yet, that by now at the latest the lie would be exposed, he slowly reached out and tentatively, as if afraid he would burn himself, grazed the girl’s back with his fingertips.
Of course touch was just like the other senses. Of course you could make anyone feel anything by stimulating the cortex with electricity; there was nothing magical about that.
But to realize that touch can be a lie…
… yet isn’t.
None of this was real; a mad scientist’s dream out of a philosophy textbook.
The girl’s sigh startled him; nevertheless, she responded softly to his touch. His whole palm was resting on her slender lower back now; she was alive and warm, silken. This was real. The girl’s ribs rose and fell in time with her breathing. She had closed her eyes. Beneath his fingers, Joe could feel the fast, taut heartbeats, and this was real, and blood must have been circulating inside her warm body. He tried to close his eyes, but the girl was still standing there before him.
It was only then that it occurred to him to move his limbs. He didn’t know where he got the impulse to start from his feet, but they proved easier than his hands. The sense of movement in his own – real – extremities instantly muted the iAm sensations enough for some vestige of control to return. Locating his hands demanded every ounce of willpower he still had, because they felt like they didn’t belong to his body – the real ones were over there, in front of him, on the girl’s warm breasts – but when he finally succeeded, the iAm reality faded to an unconvincing translucency.
There was something embarrassing about it. Just a second ago, he’d imagined a shimmering beam of light was a living person?
He managed to locate the device itself by fumbling around. It was on the desk in front of him, right where he left it, and once he pressed and held the power button, the entire screen finally whimpered and died.
Whew.
This was sick, unbelievable.
This is what we can do; this is how far we’ve come.
He suddenly remembered the marketing event held on campus last spring, a subsequent television program featuring interviews with the model hopefuls. The developers of the iAm were said to have gathered photographs from thousands of models, facial features and body parts from women and men of all ages. This is what those people had wanted, to become parts of these experiences.
The body parts of a select few hopefuls had been amassed into a prototype bank, organized by continuums of features based on algorithm-calculated averages. Every user could then adapt these to create visual perceptions that corresponded to their personal wishes. As Joe had, apparently, just done without realizing it – because the device followed his selections so rapidly that he didn’t have time to make them consciously.
The technology still had its limits, he read later on a well-known technology blog. Compiling all of one’s desired traits into a virtual character was evidently still a relatively clumsy process. And yet ten years from now it would be impossible to tell these artificially constructed perceptions from real ones, the blogger wrote.
A handful of the thousands of starry-eyed youth desperately competing to become iAm image-bank models had been interviewed on television. MinDesign only picked the best of the best; the competition wasn’t fair, and no one ever said it would be. But if you wanted your dreams to come true, it was worth a shot. They would live forever in people’s experiences as iAm characters, the young interviewees pointed out.
‘I want my life to have meaning,’ one explained.
‘I don’t get why I should settle for anything less,’ said another.
The youngest were Daniella’s age. For those under fifteen in particular, it was important to be able to build a career from home. Not all of them could make the rounds of photo shoots and modeling agencies due to school or curfews. But every single one of them had a computer at home, and a webcam on it. All you had to do was to go to the legal agreement on their webpage and click Accept.
‘You just have to focus on being your natural, authentic self,’ said Cindy Markingson, 16, from Bloomington, IN. ‘And be ready to do a hell of a lot of work.’
‘That’s the whole point, the iAm doesn’t lie,’ said a boy who, based on his appearance, had fallen into a vat of hair gel as a baby. ‘If you see your profile getting hits, you know those people picked you. Or some part of you. With the iAm, your brain picks what you really want.’
‘I don’t have any problem admitting it,’ said a middle-aged woman, who according to the reporter’s intro had had her nose, eyelids, and cheeks done, her forehead smoothed, her breasts enlarged, and her vocal cords shaved to make it as an iAm model. ‘I want approval just as bad as anyone. So, like, I don’t get what’s so wrong with it.’
Of course iAm models raked in the dough, the interviewees asserted in turn; of course making it as a model afforded you a certain status that was otherwise impossible to achieve; of course it was a calling card that ensured access to the right circles. But all this was just material, superficial. It doesn’t guarantee happiness, they said.
‘Why are you here?’
The reporter thrust her microphone hopefully in the direction of a pudgy Midwesterner standing in the winding, half-mile line. Getting people to embarrass themselves wasn’t hard; what set an ace reporter apart was her ability to sniff out that one person in a hundred who would make herself a laughing stock in as memorable a way as possible.
‘Well, for a lot of reasons,’ the woman replied, and you could immediately hear from her earnest tone that the reporter had struck pay dirt. It was plain from the woman’s brassy curls and buck teeth that she had little chance of making it into the iAm image banks; she was a reporter’s dream. Without needing a second to reflect, the woman said: ‘But most of all, I signed up because this is, like, a path to immortality.’
It might be best not to use the device at night, as appropriate as his usage had been since that one mistake. Maybe reading would be easier from real paper, too, instead of the screenless screen, where thousands of digital mimages and Formula 1 experience modules were lunging at you every second. Was it really that great to be constantly interrupted by news, email, and ads for experience modules?
Joe hasn’t read a single one of the novels – prose-form neuro-narrative Xperiences – he bought for the device, at least not yet. He started one, a couple of times, actually. But by the second page, something more pertinent has always appeared: with wizardly precision, the device offers enticing content of every description. In particular, articles about crimes committed by animal rights activists, which the device has learned to pluck from the other stories in Joe’s news feed, seem to appear with increasing frequency on his screenless screen. Is he just imagining it or have they also grown more sensationalistic? And of course there are an infinite number of other useful functions that can be accessed with the device equally quickly: informative, social, emotionally engaging, shocking, dramatic, newsworthy, cultural.
All afternoon, as Joe waits for Miriam and the girls, the device jeers at him like a tiny, malicious witch. After so many days of using it, it’s surprisingly hard going cold turkey. It announces itself every few seconds, as if by some remote mechanism: Joe is constantly thinking, Why don’t I put on the paws after all? Just for a second, while I still have time? I could check the charges being brought against the activists and read my emails while I’m vacuuming. Or find out what sort of shenanigans the alcoholic former baseball star everyone’s talking about got up to yesterday. And while I’m grilling the chicken, I could watch Act I of King Lear, the production by that legendary London theater company. I mean, grilling is going to take more than a couple of minutes, what am I going to do with myself in the meantime?
The incessant inner chirring continues until evening and comes to a head when he goes to the bathroom, which in its slowness and aimless sitting around is intolerable. He has to generate every thought and impression by himself from beginning to end. How onerous! And worst of all, not a single thought seems to lead anywhere – unless he puts active effort into it. No menus open, nothing reacts to his wishes, nor does concentrating on any object bring it to life in a series of increasingly specific choices.
A momentary panic stirs. How is he going to make it through an entire evening without the diversion of the iAm? Is this clamorous inner heckling seriously what his own, normal thoughts have started feeling like? Is it really impossible for him to take a shit in peace?
Apparently a forced fifteen-minute separation from the device does wonders.
Joe channels his self-loathing into a massive cleaning operation – vacuuming, scouring the kitchen and the bathroom – and promises to mend his ways, to stop himself from slipping any further down the road he has unintentionally ended up on. He’s so furious about his unexpected experience-device addiction that for a few minutes he’s able to huff and puff out his frustration without remembering the package the girls received, his estranged psychopath son, or the FBI raid.
And in part thanks to this, it feels important to him to offer the girls a nourishing, balanced, lovingly prepared meal, to prove that he’s still capable of functioning in physical reality.
Their ordeal is over.
The perpetrators have been caught.
Defying the cicadas, he sets up the grill before the girls’ arrival, so they won’t have to wait while he cooks the chicken breasts. And no, he’s not going to check his email while he does it, as convenient as that would be. Ever since she was a little girl, Rebecca has loved grilled food. For once, Joe makes the guacamole himself; Rebecca is always complaining that the store-bought versions are nothing but chemicals and additives. And no, he’s not going to take a peek at the news headlines.
He also goes down to the basement and brings up two bottles of Sol to chill in the fridge. He’s made a deal with himself that he’s going to offer Rebecca half a glass with a slice of lime in honor of their having survived the ordeal.
He can already picture the gesture coming as a complete surprise to Rebecca, the joy with which she accepts. Maybe after that, both of them will see each other in a slightly different light, more adult, more equal. His fifteen-year-old is growing into an adult and within a few years will slip out of reach.
When Miriam appears at the door with the girls, Joe says ‘Hi’ and kisses her on the cheek.
Miriam turns her head in a way that makes him feel uneasy.
‘What’s in your eyes?’ Daniella asks.
‘My eyes?’
‘They’re all red,’ Miriam agrees, studying his face.
‘It must be… Maybe it’s allergies,’ he says.
The women stare at him doubtfully.
‘You’ve never had them before,’ Miriam points out.
The truth is he was up until three in the morning, wired into the iAm, because it would have been frustrating and absurd to quit after the first, unfair instance of driving off the track in the Monaco Grand Prix, now that he had paid for the entire experience module.
‘What stinks in here?’ Rebecca asks.
Her tone towards him is the opposite of the reception Joe has been imagining, and her body language indicates that it’s a struggle for her to force herself across the threshold. It is only now that he realizes his notions of Rebecca’s favorite food may be months, if not years, out of date. What would she eat if she were allowed to choose? Suddenly he has no clue. In the space of a year, a fifteen-year-old changes her hair, her wardrobe, her taste in music, her vocabulary, her hobbies, her circle of friends, her ethical convictions, and her relationship status a dozen times.
‘Is my ammer still here?’ Rebecca asks, after shedding a pair of new-looking shoes in the entryway.
‘Your what?’
‘My account has been hacked.’
‘Your what has been what?’
Rebecca rolls her eyes. ‘My iAm experience device, Professor Chayefski,’ she says, over-articulating as if talking to someone with a developmental disability. ‘Is it still being kept on the premises?’
‘It’s upstairs in the drawer.’
‘Are you sure?’ Miriam asks, looking him dead in the eye.
‘No one has touched it, as far as I know,’ Joe says, clearing his throat.
He hurries out from under his wife’s and daughter’s gazes and into the entryway to tidy up the shoes, which are already in perfect order.
‘Great,’ Rebecca says in her know-it-all voice. ‘That means it’s been hacked.’ She pulls out her phone and starts tapping out the news to her friends.
