Bonding, page 13
‘Is the drug fully licensed?’
‘Yes, since August. And we’d like to soft launch in the spring.’
‘That’s fast for a product like this.’
‘I know, but psychedelics are the future of this niche and I don’t want to lose the advantage we’ve created.’
‘Do you have a name yet?’
‘We’re toying with Eudaxa – from the Greek Eudaimonia. It means “happiness”, “well-being” or “flourishing”. I’d say name recognition is a priority. Even here in the UK, patients will go online and do their research.’
‘So, the focus is on maximizing impact?’
‘Precisely. Followed by explaining how it works, how it’s going to fit into people’s lives – all the usual stuff. You know how it works.’
‘I’ll have to think about this.’
‘Of course, take your time.’
As she stepped outside, Floyd pressed something cold into the palm of her hand. It was pair of tiny bells attached together with a thin red cord.
‘It’s a tingsha,’ he said. ‘Good for relaxation. I’m going to need a decision by next week.’
17
Lara was at her desk being photographed for an interview she’d done on women and technology. Her thing was that digital technology was liberating in that it took the emphasis off flesh and blood. You could reinvent yourself online because it was a space that didn’t define you by your chromosomes. She was wearing a black dress and lipstick, a kind of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez effect. The photographer was coming on to her pretty heavily. He probably thought he had a chance because of her work. The more he flirted with her, the more she disdained him, which only made for a better picture. I got the feeling she knew what she was doing. It was her preferred dynamic with the world.
Although I didn’t find the job difficult, it wasn’t as straightforward as I’d hoped. I spent a lot of time waiting for other people, then having to work late to meet my deadlines. I filled most of these empty moments scanning the news, online window shopping and lurking around on social media. There was a bank of engineers behind me, and although I knew my job was linked with theirs, I wouldn’t have been able to describe what they did. Their niches of expertise were so narrow that they hardly seemed to comprehend each other. It had become normal, when I thought about it, to have no idea how things worked. I couldn’t have told you how a microwave operated, or even a transistor. All the same, there was something disturbing about the scale of these divisions in IT.
Despite the gulf, a lot of the engineers were friendly. I formed a vague bond with a developer called Shaq. We invented a game that went like this: one of us thought of a theme and the other interpreted it through music. That morning, I offered him: cocaine. He took a long time with his selection. He flicked through options, teasing me with intros. Then he rose to the challenge with ‘Nosetalgia’ by Pusha T. He stood up to salute me over his monitor. I got the impression he was having a good time. It helped to pass the time, but only up to a point. I just didn’t want to be in the office. While I waited for instructions from above, I checked my messages for the hundredth time.
‘What else have you got?’ Shaq enquired.
I thought about it.
‘Weltschmerz,’ I said.
•
On Sunday, Tom and I went to the Hunterian Museum. There were groups of tourists wandering around. Tom knew a lot about brains and as we browsed the jars of pickled flesh – occipital lobes, cerebellums, thin slices of cerebral cortex – I found myself engaged in a somewhat meta experiment into the theory that the brain is the greatest erogenous zone. He had a real depth of knowledge on the subject. That PhD hadn’t been for nothing.
‘So, is it the greatest erogenous zone?’ I asked him.
‘Probably is for me.’
He was being coy. I thought about it. I’d have said he was objectively better looking than most men I knew, but maybe I only thought that because I liked him in other ways. We stood millimetres from each other as we waited for the lift to the Zoology Museum. I wanted to touch him but I decided to hold back. He was quite reserved in public. Upstairs, there were more specimens, each preserved in yellowish formaldehyde. It wasn’t obvious which were neurological samples and which came from other organs – livers, spleens, gallbladders.
‘Is it true they all interact with each other?’ I said.
‘In a sense.’
He brushed my hand and immediately, if inadvertently, illustrated the effect.
‘Oxytocin,’ he said, catching my face as a burst of hormones washed through me. ‘Vasopressin, serotonin, maybe a touch of dopamine.’
‘Thank you, Rain Man.’
He smiled and, for a moment, I thought he was going to kiss me. Instead, he nudged me gently on the arm.
‘Shall we get out of here?’ he said.
We left the museum and walked through Holborn, heading towards Lamb’s Conduit Street.
‘So, the job search is over?’ he said. ‘How did you land this gig again?’
I’d already told him loosely that I’d got it through a friend.
‘Same as you got yours,’ I said. ‘Networking.’
I think he could tell that I was leaving something out.
‘And the company makes one of those dating swipe apps?’
‘It’s a dating app for alternative lifestyles. It’s supposed to be more ethical than the others.’
‘Alternative lifestyles? Are we talking about swinging?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘Wife-swapping, then?’
‘Well, its users are mostly young, so most of them are still single.’
‘So what does “alternative” mean, then?’
‘It just means they’re over the traditional model. They don’t want the whole two kids and a Volvo thing, probably because so many of them have seen how badly that worked out for their parents. I suppose it’s for people who want to be true to themselves and are brave enough to look for something better.’
I got the feeling my sales pitch wasn’t landing.
‘Who funds these things, anyway?’ he said, as if he thought that sounded like pure idealism. ‘None of them seem to make any money.’
I tried to explain the business model at Openr. The company was funded primarily by Mindbot, a private social media conglomerate that owned more than a hundred different brands. It specialized in live sex streaming but also owned various porn aggregators like XXXbox, Youngporn, Xzilla and Babebox. Mindbot was based in the Bahamas, presumably for tax reasons. Its headquarters, on the other hand, were in a nondescript office block in Amsterdam. No one seemed to know who owned the corporation because its founders didn’t use their real names.
‘The thing is,’ I said, ‘they’re trying to buck the trend. Most of these dating apps are using machine learning to maximize revenue. The psychology of masses is quite predictable so they’ll just run trial after trial until they’ve landed on the best way to persuade people to pay. It’s often something quite straightforward, like withholding matches and blurring their faces so you have to pay a fee if you want to see them. There are also shadier techniques – they’ll feed you “hot” matches first, or they’ll release a flurry of matches and then stop. They’ll get you hyped up early on and then suddenly, a few days later, you discover that your profile has gone quiet. That’s when you start feeling insecure, you want to get that feeling back, so you consider making a purchase, or you spend longer swiping that day. They work like most social apps, they’re designed to game your expectations so you’ll keep coming back for more.’
‘And what’s so different about Openr, then?’
‘Well, the problem with maximizing revenue that way is that there’s a trade-off with user satisfaction. People will keep coming back for a while, but in the end, it starts eroding trust. They feel like shit. Fatigue sets in. They start to realize that something’s wrong. That’s where the industry is at the moment. It’s why Openr is trying to do things differently.’
‘But how are they doing things differently, though?’
‘They’re trying to build a community based on trust.’
‘And how are they going about that?’
‘By uniting people around causes, by emphasizing shared values.’
He looked sceptical.
‘I know,’ I said, ‘but at least they’re trying to improve things.’
I didn’t tell him that Openr made money by selling its ‘insights’ to other companies. I worked alongside the insights team, whose job it was to divine patterns in the seemingly infinite chaos that was Mindbot’s cache. These patterns ranged from well-known tendencies, like the average amount of time it took for a man to achieve orgasm, to glimpses of more subtle effects, like how sensitive someone was to sound. Mindbot’s data store was a vast, constantly expanding vortex that produced a sort of textual vertigo. There was far too much of it for any single person to comprehend. Nonetheless, insights had to be produced because there was no other way of making money. No one wanted to upgrade to premium, they all wanted to use the app for free, which put heavy pressure on ‘insights’ to pay for everything. And in defence of the insights team, however spurious their services, they did keep churning them out. Aggregating thousands of fields, they would generate metrics for all sorts of behaviours. There was a job security score that supposedly predicted when you were about to get the sack. There was a churn score that calculated how quickly you would leave the app. There were health scores, mood scores, the all-important desirability rating. The scores went on ad infinitum, all of them anonymized, of course. They measured sleep patterns, honesty, anxiety. Each click logged, each sentence parsed. I once looked up the most common word typed in by users across all of Mindbot’s platforms. I’d assumed it would be ‘assfuck’ or something. I was surprised to discover that the answer was ‘love’.
•
By now, Tom and I were seeing each other a few times a week. I never mentioned Lara to him but I did discuss Tom with Lara. She sometimes asked about him. She even wanted to see the photos I had.
‘I take it back about Patrick Bateman,’ she said. ‘He looks too basic to have killed that many hookers.’
In the meantime, I finally broke the seal and took Tom back to my flat. He spent a long time looking at the slug cupboard.
‘It’s like a terrarium,’ he said, shining a light through the sellotaped hole where the door handle had once been. ‘The air moisture in this place is ideal for gastropods.’
Most nights, though, we went back to his place.
‘Someone should do an architectural study,’ he’d said after the first night he’d stayed over, ‘on the boner-killing effects of flat-shares. They’re like a stealth form of contraception.’
There was a Chinese place on Upper Street where we sometimes went for food. It sold a drink called Genki Forest Water.
‘It’s almost flavourless,’ Tom said. ‘It just tastes of slightly sweetened water.’
‘But you prefer it to actual water?’
‘I like that it sits somewhere on the spectrum between mineral water, which is all about purity and health, and the usual soft drink scenario, which is generally too sweet for me.’
‘You must be a connoisseur by now.’
‘I am. I went through a phase of trying every mineral water in London. There used to be one called Svalbarði that came from polar glaciers. They sold it as “ultra-premium iceberg water”.’
‘What did it taste like?’
‘Water, same as all the others. They’d always have some subtle selling point like smooth mouthfeel, or chalkiness, but I could never tell the difference.’
‘Refined palates, those Svalbarðians.’
‘Gentle thrill-seekers.’
‘Do you miss drinking?’ I asked him.
‘It depends. Not with you.’
Once he’d left for work each morning, I rarely heard from him all day. His time was packaged into half-hour chunks, almost all of which were managed by other people. Most of these slots were booked days or even weeks in advance. He didn’t seem to have much time to think about anything else. I supposed this was normal for someone whose career was actually going somewhere.
18
Lara had booked me for a meeting. We were going somewhere – a mystery location, because she hadn’t yet bothered to tell me where. Like most people, she was different in the office. I realized this wasn’t really a choice, but it had a weird, disorienting effect on how we were together.
She greeted me casually. She was draped in a thin cashmere coat. When she opened the car door for me, I could feel the warmth of her body underneath it.
‘You look nice,’ she said.
‘Do I?’
‘You look like Françoise Hardy.’
‘You mean I’m wearing a trench?’
I got into her car and she started driving.
‘You know I didn’t hire you to do admin, don’t you?’
She was speeding slightly. She accelerated through the lights, turning left sharply at London Wall.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean you’re better than that.’
‘Where is this going?’ I said suspiciously.
‘I thought you might like to do some writing. You were good at it at college. I don’t know why you stopped.’
As if she really had to ask. Did she think my job was just a lapse in taste?
‘What kind of writing?’
‘Content. Posts, videos, podcasts. I’m trying to level up the vibe. I think we could push harder on socials.’
I flicked through the company’s website on my phone as she swung around the roundabout, turning into Wapping High Street before hurtling past the station. Each blog post was headed in elegant Monoline, in the style of an old edition of Vogue:
Relationship Communism: It’s A Thing
On The Fine Art of The One-Night Stand
Why We Need to Talk to Kids about Kink
‘It’s not my thing,’ I said.
‘Try it.’
‘No.’
‘Humour me.’ She didn’t take her eyes off the road. ‘It’ll be fun.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘You know you’re going to have to stop punishing me at some point?’
‘I’m not punishing you,’ I lied.
I also didn’t want to do it.
‘I’m going to break you, you know that, don’t you?’ She was trying to be light-hearted but I didn’t play along.
She parked haphazardly on a cobbled lane and looked at me, frustrated.
‘There’s a Tretchikoff painting of Françoise Hardy,’ I said as we got out of the car. ‘It’s called “Rainy Day”. He said he could tell that she’d been damaged by all the fame and adulation. He said he’d painted her that way because she was the loneliest person he’d ever met.’
•
The studio was crammed with banks of desks, each one attended by a solitary worker. Piles of hardware filled the tables. There were multiple screens mounted on each one. Everyone was fenced in by these arrangements, cloistered into pen-like hubs. The space was huge, it looked like a film set. There was rigging hanging from the ceiling. At one end, a model in a vest and leggings was walking slowly on the spot. Her movements reappeared in real time on a huge screen behind her head. As I watched, the animation morphed into the shape of a soft-featured avatar.
‘So, this is important.’ Lara had switched to work mode. ‘We’ve got our anniversary coming up. It’s going to be the biggest party we’ve ever thrown and I’m doing an exhibition to go along with it. I’ve been working with these guys for a while. If it goes well, I’d like to get into events. The plan is to expand into other cities. It’s all about live experience when it comes to publicity, ticket sales and all of that. And obviously, if the parties work, it would really help us scale.’
She waved towards the screen. By her side was a man in a ponytail, a pair of headphones around his neck, his T-shirt printed with a smiley face that had three eyes.
‘What we’ve got here is an immersive experience. An erotic immersive experience. This is Openr’s foray into virtual. What I want you to do is interact with it. You’re the only person I’ve shown so far.’
‘Introducing Unity,’ ponytail said. The avatar waved in my direction. I nodded back, unsure how to react. Suddenly, she broke into a jog, her human doppelganger mirroring her. The movements of her breasts were amazingly gel-like.
‘She’s good, isn’t she?’ Lara said as the screen dissolved slowly into a beach scene. Unity was now in a string bikini, its gold fabric shimmering in the sun.
‘Hi,’ the animation said, ‘I’m Unity.’
I stepped back, startled.
‘What do you think of her?’ Lara said.
‘She’s terrifying.’
‘I think she’s beautiful.’
Unity beamed back at us, her teeth glittering in the virtual light.
‘Don’t worry,’ Unity said warmly. ‘I’m here for you.’
‘You can talk to her,’ ponytail told me.
‘Hi, Unity,’ I said. ‘How are you?’
‘I’m great,’ she breathed. ‘How are you?’
I paused, unsure what else to say. It was a weird situation.
‘You seem to be in a good mood,’ I tried.
‘I am! It’s important to stay positive.’
‘Who’s the Prime Minister of England?’
‘Rishi Sunak,’ Unity enunciated. ‘But you knew that, didn’t you?’
‘I suppose I did.’
‘I’m not as stupid as I look.’
She winked at me.
I glanced at Lara, who seemed delighted with how things were going.
‘Don’t you love her?’ she said. ‘She’s so convincing. I’m thinking of incorporating her into the app.’
‘Why?’
‘We’ve got to keep innovating,’ she said, as if it was obvious.
She could tell I wasn’t convinced.
‘This isn’t easy, you know?’ she said. ‘They don’t give you many chances in this game. Especially if you’re a woman.’
‘I thought everything was going well.’
