One Verse Multi, page 9
“The doors all lock.”
“What does the school want with hours of bland footage of nerds at desks?” Quin said.
I listened to them debate the ethics of filming people against their will. I didn’t say anything. Hugo had sent us home to relax, and up until that moment it had worked. Fundamentally, I agreed with Nichelle, but professionally, I violated people’s privacy over and over again.
I ate as much of Geegee’s soup as I could, and I felt my mood sink, feeling homesick for something unnamable. As I tried to fall asleep that night, I couldn’t stop thinking about the name of the video game, Fort-nite. It was wrong somehow. The internet wasn’t helpful. I added an alert for it anyway.
I also couldn’t stop thinking about the conversation at dinner. If people are going to be spied on, it should be for the greater good. But I was losing faith in my greater good. Maybe I was just looking for an excuse. Maybe if I distrusted MVP enough, maybe if I added one more straw on the ethical ambiguity pile, the camel would break. Maybe I just wanted things to be different.
Sunday brought on a deeper gloom. I woke up slowly and tried to land on something I felt good about. I thought of Luca, but he seemed veiled by the smog of MVP. I tried to think of FOX Tidus, but that just reinforced the idea of how deeply complex and secretive our work was. I knew things about him only people invited into his intimate world should know. I knew how fast his heart beat when he was watching his favorite part of his favorite movie or when he beat a boss in his favorite video game. That seemed too private. And for all the stress of it, we weren’t making progress.
“Martin, you have to keep your head up,” Mom said, yanking my head back by my locs. She was halfway through retwisting them and weaving them into a protective roll that would let the new growth settle.
“Sorry.”
“Boy, what’s the matter with you?”
“I was just thinking about the conversation at dinner yesterday.”
“Why? Don’t let your sister get to you.”
“I can’t help it.” I tried to look at my hands in my lap, but Mom yanked my head again. “It’s part of my job to watch people, but sometimes they don’t know it.”
“You look for criminals.”
“Not all of the people we watch are criminals.”
She looked at me. “Do you think you’re helping people?”
I nodded.
“Well, then that either has to be good enough, or figure out what to do about it.”
I sighed. “You sound like my friend Tamar.”
“Who’s that?”
“A woman on my new team.”
“Well, if I sound like her, she must be smart.”
I laughed.
“Ma,” I hissed as she yanked on my baby hairs.
“Martin.”
“Do you know what a Mandela effect is?”
“I do.”
“Have you ever seen one?” I asked. “Or do you know one?”
She looked at me and whispered conspiratorially, “I think it’s the government.”
“Ma, I asked if you know one, not why they happen.”
She went off then and talked for the whole rest of the time I sat on the toilet while she did my hair. She rattled off common Mandela effects and some I hadn’t heard of that I would have to look into later. Tapping into a surprise special interest of my mom’s made me feel tenfold better. I didn’t know we had something like that in common.
* * *
I made it back to HQ Monday morning feeling not great. I wasn’t alone. Both Kiki and Tamar had on dark sunglasses, slumped in their chairs. They both looked flushed, like they were trying to fight the urge to vomit. Wei was dead asleep at the table, but that was pretty usual for him. Mason was the only one who was busy.
“Y’all were supposed to use this break to rest, not to make yourselves worse,” Hugo said, surveying the room. He looked at Mason, who was at the computers, wheeling between four monitors, quickly typing at each for a few seconds before moving on to the next. “Even he looks more stressed.”
I wasn’t interested in anyone there. The one person I wanted to see most had yet to show up.
“He had a family emergency,” Kiki said, looking at me from over their glasses.
“What kind?”
They shrugged and leaned away from me. “He’ll be back when he can.”
My mood dropped that little bit more.
“Well,” Hugo said. “I have some new ideas.”
“I’d like to say something,” I said, putting my hand up.
Hugo alone looked well rested. “Go on.”
“I feel weird about monitoring people. We don’t have their consent to study them. I mean, I get that it’s for science—that it’s beyond any one person, but people deserve more.”
Hugo’s eyes were bright with what I could only assume was pride. I couldn’t imagine what he was proud of me for. I was standing against everything we had done so far.
“What brought this on, Martin?” he asked, sitting.
“I’ve been thinking about how wrong everything feels,” I said. I crossed my arms and looked at the floor. “I don’t like looking into people’s lives without them knowing.”
“I second that,” Tamar said. “I mean, there’s some shit I don’t care about because anyone with a computer could find it, but it’s a little too far at this point.”
My head whipped up. In a look, I understood she didn’t want to be one of the bad guys. We all started with MVP for the generalized reason of helping people. Now it felt like we were part of the problem, or that maybe our help was doing more harm than good. She felt it too. The Dugan visit made it clear to us both.
“Well, I feel like the ethics of science is always a worthy discussion,” Hugo said. “And I won’t argue with you. I’ve redesigned our experiments anyway. You see, nothing we’ve done has gotten us any closer to an answer.”
“The data doesn’t say anything,” Mason said. He took his beanie off and rubbed a crop of surprisingly blue hair. “Kiki, Luca, and I have been analyzing the data in any way we can. It’s all been useless or confusing. For one person, gender is correlated with location. For another, location is correlated with occupation. Any model designed finds all included variables significant, but those variables become insignificant as soon as any one is removed. It’s almost impossible to decipher. Even the rift models are starting to look less than predictable. It would be nonsense if it were even remotely consistent.”
“Great,” Wei said.
“It started out as a good idea,” Mason said.
“Is that why you asked me all those questions?” Tamar asked. “To try and find a pattern?”
“Yes, but either the problem is bigger than we’re measuring or smaller.”
“If smaller mattered, then the frequency scans would turn up something,” I said.
“I agree,” Hugo said.
“So, what, it’s bigger?”
“Right. I feel like the closest thing we have to any insight was from the Dugan interview. Dreams are an emergent property of the interactions of the complex systems we’re made of. Maybe the phenomenon of synchronizing in the way the Dugans had was an emergent property,” Hugo said.
Then he looked right at me. “I think you’re right, Martin. These are people, not a heartbeat or a longitude. So, let’s learn from it. I propose we interview our subjects. Let’s see if the Dugan Interview Method gives us a direction to go in. This will require more of Tamar’s expertise, helping us navigate culture and social nuances. Mason and Kiki, we’ll need a creative solution to capture the data.”
“I think it’ll still be important to keep measuring at certain levels…frequency, vitals, so on,” Mason said. “I’m not willing to give up on all variables.”
“Okay,” Hugo agreed.
“Won’t this make it harder?” I asked. The room stared at me. “We’re going from defined things like elevation to what? Feelings?”
“Qualitative data can inform how we access quantitative data,” Hugo said.
“I…I don’t think I know what that means.”
“If everyone is on board with the new direction, we can get started,” Hugo said, not bothering to explain.
We all groaned.
“Fine. We ride at dawn. But will you please rest?”
Before they left, I flagged down Kiki.
“What’s up?”
“Is there a way to look up a Mandela effect?” I asked, thinking of my sister’s video game and the conversation with my mother.
“Kind of, but it’s hard because once a verse updates, there’s usually no trace of it other than what people remember.”
“What about a comparison across verses? It might not tell me anything, but I want to know.”
“We can try,” Kiki said.
Section 10
FOX
Over the next two days, we pieced together a game plan. Hugo decided it made sense to focus on the most multi subject we had. Which meant all our attention was about to focus in on the Tiduses. I was also thinking about Mandela effects. Kiki had looked into the game, but it didn’t reveal much. I tried to do a cross-reference for the effect in past reports, but there was no mention of the game.
After that, the rest of my attention went to Luca, who still wasn’t back by Wednesday. We scheduled the first interview for that night, but Luca’s absence pulled my thoughts away from the project. I worried about him. I thought of going to his home-verse to check on him, but I chickened out. If he needed someone, wouldn’t Kiki or Mason be with him? Were he and I even on that level? I didn’t know. I took my cues from Kiki and tried to focus on what Hugo wanted me to do.
“You want me to do what now?” I asked.
“You’re the best choice to interview FOX Tidus,” Hugo said.
“Why?” I wanted to run out of the room and right into the ocean.
“You’ve already met. It’ll ease the burden of trying to build context,” Tamar said.
Build context? Yeah, sure, I built context with the guy. I all but ghosted him, now I’m just going to show up. And everyone else will know. I debated again telling them about the texts. But I didn’t. I guess I was just going to chicken out of everything.
“I wouldn’t even know what to say.”
“You got through the Dugan interview,” Hugo said.
I pointed at Tamar. “She did most of the work.”
“She’ll be with you,” Wei said. He walked over with a com. “In your mind.”
The design of the interview process was that two people would go to the verse and engage the subject. Someone else would be live relaying questions or advice, watching from the drones with the addition of communicators. The rest of the team would either manage the data coming in, which meant managing the drones, or they would run interference as needed while the interview teams were in the verse.
“Who’s going with me?”
“Me,” Wei said, flashing me a few dance moves.
“Y’all are going to trust this guy and that guy,” I said, pointing between me and Wei.
Wei laughed. “On my business card, scientist comes before ladies’ man.”
I laughed and Tamar groaned. “He’s just there for support and to take pictures. We need you to focus on getting the info.”
“This is a bad idea,” I said, mostly to myself. To the others, I said, “He’ll be at work. He won’t want to talk to me.”
“Wednesday is the slowest day for the shop,” Mason said.
I glared at him because he wasn’t helping. He didn’t seem to notice.
Hugo approached, his boots loud on the tile in the computer lab. He put his hands on my shoulders. “Even a foal has its own legs to stand on.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
It was full steam ahead anyway.
* * *
Wei and I decided to walk through the queer community that was a part of Fort Lauderdale and where FOX Tidus’s shop was. It was late in the evening but hot still, the steamy air doing a lot to increase my nerves. Wei was busy taking photos, cooing over the colors and exuberance of the community. I was trying to forget everything I knew about Tidus. I had been observing FOX Tidus and counterparts for two hours a week for over a month. And while it was only a few days’ worth of texting, I had texted him a lot. But I needed to figure out how to avoid all of that, especially with Tamar listening in. Maybe he forgot about me.
The coffee shop/bookstore/bar was cozy and bright. It had once been a garage, and they had the steel door rolled up to let in the evening. Sea-stressed wood lined the walls and the bar. The floor was an oceanic swirl of blue cements. A handful of people sat at the mismatched tables. Mostly it was gay couples and loud groups of friends.
“I love this place,” Wei said, snapping a photo of the books lining one wall. They were all used books, repriced for sale in the shop.
“It’s cool.”
The area behind the bar was empty. I found a free stool near the cash register, but the location was weird. Sitting there would mean having my back to the rolling garage door, and I was under the full intensity of a low-hanging lamp. But I had seen Tidus at work enough times to know he would pass that stool a hundred times a shift, more than any other place in the bar.
“I’m going to look around,” Wei said, patting my shoulder.
He went immediately to a table of women. I picked up the menu. It was simple and had been handwritten, then photocopied. All of the drinks were literary puns.
“Hi,” a voice said loudly near me.
I almost leapt off my stool. FOX Tidus was looking down, trying to unwrap a new package of cocktail napkins.
“Hi,” I said.
“What can I get you?”
I ummed and watched his large hands unpack the small, white squares and place one in front of me. He looked up, and our eyes met. His expression went from politely disinterested to familiar surprise, his big mouth spreading into a wide smile.
“Martin?”
“Tidus?” I said, trying to sound like I really didn’t remember.
“Correct.” I didn’t miss the slight disappointment in his expression. “You’re back in town?”
“I, uh…kind of…um, what’s good here?” I already felt in over my head.
“Um.” He thought about it, running a hand through his lavender hair. He leaned on the bar and cocked a hip, looking at the menu I was still holding. “If you want coffee, then Murder on the Orient Espresso, and if you want a beer, Ale of Two Cities. It’s a beer mixed drink.”
“I think Orient Espresso,” I said with a smile.
He nodded, took the menu, and walked away.
“Well done, Martin,” Tamar said in my head. “Nice and boring. What did he mean by back in town?”
I couldn’t talk back. I looked over at Wei, and he gave me a thumbs-up.
“You want any food?” Tidus asked, crossing back down the corridor behind the bar, food menu in his hands.
“Naw…thanks.”
I must have done something that gave him the impression I was tired because he asked, “Long day?”
“Kind of,” I said. And it had been. “Why do you ask?”
“You’re getting a triple shot of espresso at eight in the evening.”
“That much? I didn’t read it, I just took your word.” I half laughed.
He laughed too, throaty and low. I remember feeling he was laughing through our messages. I remember hearing it for the first time. I watched him beat a tournament on a video game he had been playing for six hours. It was better in person.
“I guess I wasn’t looking to go to bed early anyway.”
“Is that an invitation?” Wei said. He was snapping photos across the bar.
“Give me something to work with here, buddy,” Tamar said.
“Oh no?” Tidus asked. He worked as he talked, punching an order into the register.
“Naw, I have to go over questions. For work. That’s what I meant by kinda. I’m here but only for a few days. I’m trying to help Florida prepare its census.”
He narrowed his eyes. “Didn’t we just do that? Do you do the interviews or something? Aren’t you with the FBI?”
“I help troubleshoot data collection processes for the government. I was working with the FBI on the last project. Today was the first day with the census. I’m literally here to help pick the questions.”
“Wow, that is creative. Would you even know where to start with a job like that?” Tamar said.
Tidus gave me an intrigued look. “I guess I didn’t realize people picked the questions.”
“They do if people on the committee are messing with the integrity of the survey. I was at a regional meeting reviewing question submissions all day. It was awful.”
“Oh?”
I studied him. He blinked back at me, genuinely interested. That made me feel more nervous. Why hadn’t he asked about my contacting him? Was he waiting for me to bring it up? Or were we supposed to just ignore all that? I mean, I knew I should for the sake of my job, but…
“Tell him that people want to add weird questions to the next survey.”
I swallowed. “The problem is that this year several reps have offered up really weird question suggestions.”
“Huh. ‘How many people in your household?’ not good enough anymore?”
“Jackpot.”
“That would still be on there, but the next one proposed was, ‘Have you or anyone you know seen a ghost?’” I pretended to scrutinize him. “I guess that one would be right up your alley.”
He pretended to be offended. “Excuse me, Mr. Aliens.”
I laughed. “That one didn’t make the cut either.”
“Sounds wild,” he said.
“This is your chance!” Tamar yelled.
I leaned in slightly. “It’s supposed to be confidential, but do you want to take the weirdest survey of your life?”
