CHAPTER 1
I had thought about it, of course. I had clipped the ad
out of the back pages of the local entertainment paper, checked out the
website, memorized the address of the local test center. I had strolled past
the building earlier that afternoon, lingering at the brass-and-frosted-glass
door with what I tried to pass off (not least, to myself) as idle curiosity. I
pictured myself stepping into the cool, dim lobby behind the InterAlia logo and
maybe changing the course of my life forever, but in the end I shrugged and
walked on—a failure of courage, the better part of valor, I honestly couldn’t
say which.
Tempted as I was, opening that door would have seemed
like a confession of my own inadequacy, a confession I wasn’t prepared to make.
The sight of my own bloody face changed my mind.
* * *
I walked south from the InterAlia building, on my way to
meet my ex-roommate Dex at the ferry docks: we had made plans to ride over to
the Toronto Islands for an open-air concert. What I didn’t know, because I had
been too self-absorbed to pay attention to the news, was that a large-scale
demo was going on in the city’s financial district, directly between me and the
lakeshore.
The sound of it reached me first. It was like the sound
you hear from an open-air sports stadium when there’s a game on: no discernible
content, just the undulant buzz of massed human voices. A couple of blocks
later, I thought: angry voices. Maybe a bullhorn or two in the mix. And then I
turned a corner and saw it. A mass of protestors filling the street in either
direction and about as easy to cross as a raging river. Bad news, because
dithering at the door of the InterAlia office had already made me late.
The crowd appeared to be a mix of students and academics
and labor union people, and according to their banners it was the new debt laws
and a massive University of Toronto tuition hike that had brought them to the
streets on a hot late-May evening. A block to the west, where the sky still
smoldered with sunset, some kind of serious altercation had begun. Everyone was
staring that way, and I guessed the sour tang in the air was a promissory drift
of tear gas. But at that moment all I wanted was to get to the waterfront,
where the air might be a degree or two cooler, and meet Dex, annoyed with me
though he must already be. So I pushed east to the nearest intersection and
tried to shoulder through the thick of the crowd at the crosswalk. Bad
decision, and I knew it as soon as I was caught in the tidal bore of human
flesh. Before I had made much progress, some new threat or obstruction forced
everyone closer together.
By craning my head—I’m fairly tall—I caught a glimpse of
police in riot gear advancing from the west, beating their sticks on their
shields. Tear gas canisters arced into the crowd, trailing smoke, and a woman
to the right of me pulled a bandanna over her nose and mouth. A yard from where
I stood, a guy in a faded Propaghandi t-shirt climbed onto the roof of a parked
car and tossed a Dasani bottle at the cops. I tried to turn back, but it had
become impossible to make headway against the pressure of bodies.
A skirmish line of mounted police appeared at the
adjoining intersection, and I began to realize it was actually possible that,
worst case, I could be kettled into a mass arrest and carted off to a detention
cell. (And who would I call, if that happened? My family in New York State
would be shocked and angry that I had been arrested; my few friends in the city
were hapless art-school types, in no position to post bail.) The crowd lurched
eastward, and I tried to veer toward the nearest sidewalk. I took some elbows
to the ribs but managed to reach the north side of the street. The building
immediately in front of me was a café, locked and barred, but there was a set of
concrete steps descending to a second storefront just below ground level—also
barred, but I found a place to crouch in the overhang of the concrete
stairwell.
I kept my eyes pressed shut against the drifting tear
gas, so what little I saw, I saw in blurry glimpses: mostly moving legs at
street level, once the face of a woman who had fallen, eyes wide and mouth in a
panicked O, as she struggled to stand up. I covered my own mouth with my
t-shirt and breathed in gulps as another round of tear gas drifted down from
the street. The roar of voices gave way to random screams, the industrial stomp
of the police line. Mounted cops passed the niche where I had hidden, a weird
chorus line of horse legs.
I had begun to think I was safe when a cop in riot gear
came down the steps and found me squatting in the shadows. His face was plainly
visible behind the scuffed plastic faceguard of his helmet. A guy not much
older than me, maybe one of the foot police who had been roughed up in the
struggle. He looked almost as scared as the woman who had fallen a few minutes
earlier: the same big, jittery eyes. But angry, too.
I held out my hands in a hey, wait gesture. “I’m not one
of them,” I said.
I’m not one of them. It was possibly the most cowardly
thing I could have said, though it was also perfectly true. It was practically
my fucking mantra. I should have had it tattooed on my forehead.
The cop swung his club. Maybe all he intended was a
motivating blow to my shoulder, but the club bounced up and hit the left side
of my face across the ridge of the cheekbone. I felt the skin break. A hot
numbness that bloomed into pain.
Even the cop seemed startled. “Get the fuck out of here,”
he said. “Go!”
I stumbled up the stairs. The street was almost
unrecognizable. I was behind the parade line of cops, who had encircled a body
of protestors east of the intersection. The block where I stood was empty
except for a litter of paper handouts, abandoned backpacks and banners, the
still-sizzling husks of tear gas canisters, and the granular glass of broken
windshields. A block to the west, someone’s car was on fire. Blood from my face
had begun to decorate my shirt in rust-red paisleys. I held my hand against the
cut, and blood like warm oil seeped through my fingers.
I turned the nearest corner. I passed another cop, a
woman, not in riot gear, who gave me a concerned look and seemed about to ask
whether I needed help—I waved her away. I took my phone out of my pocket and
tried to call Dex, but he didn’t answer. I guessed he had written me off as a
no-show. At University Avenue I stumbled into a subway entrance and caught a
train, fending off expressions of concern from other passengers. All I wanted
was to be alone in some sheltered place.
The bleeding had mostly stopped by the time I made it
home. Home was a bachelor apartment on the third floor of a yellow brick
low-rise with a parking lot view. Cheap parquet floors and a few crappy items
of furniture. The most personal thing about it was the name on the call-board
in the lobby: A. Fisk. A for Adam. The other A. Fisk in the family was my
brother Aaron. Our mother had been a committed Bible reader with a taste for
alliteration.
The bathroom mirror doubled as the door of the medicine
cabinet. I fumbled out a bottle of Advil, closed the door, and stared at
myself. I guessed I could get by without stitches. The cut had clotted, though
it looked fairly gory. The bruise would be with me for days.
Blood on my face, my hands, my shirt. Blood pinking the
water in the basin of the sink.
That was when I knew I was going to call InterAlia. What
was there to lose? Book an appointment.
Open that brass-and-glass door. And
find what?
One more scam, most likely.
Or, just maybe, some new and different version of them. A
them I could be one of.
* * *
They gave me an appointment for Tuesday after classes. I
showed up ten minutes early.
Behind the door, past the tiled lobby of the remodeled
two-story building, the local branch of InterAlia was a suite of cubicles
divided by glass-brick walls. Cool air whispered from ceiling vents and a
polarized window admitted amber-tinted sunlight. There was a steady in-and-out
traffic of people, some in business clothes and some in street clothes. Nothing
distinguished the employees from their clients but the embossed lapel badges
they wore. A receptionist checked my name against an appointment list and
directed me to cubicle nine: “Miriam will do your intake today.”
Miriam turned out to be a thirtyish woman with a ready
smile and a faint Caribbean accent. She thanked me for my interest in InterAlia
and asked me how much I knew about Affinity testing.
“I read the website pretty carefully,” I said. “And that
article in The Atlantic a couple of months ago.”
“Then you probably know most of what I’m going to tell
you, but it’s my job to make sure potential clients are aware of how we do
placements and what’s expected of them. Some people come in with
misconceptions, and we want to correct them up front. So bear with me, and I’ll
try not to bore you.” Smile.
I smiled back and didn’t interrupt her monologue, which I
figured was the verbal equivalent of those caveats in microprint at the bottom
of pharmaceutical advertisements.
“First off,” she said, “you need to know we can’t
guarantee you a placement. What we offer is a series of tests that will tell us
whether you’re compatible with any of the twenty-two Affinity groups. We ask
for a small deposit up front, which will be refunded if you don’t qualify. A
little more than sixty percent of applicants ultimately do qualify, so your
chances are better than even—but we still end up turning away four of every
ten, so that’s a real possibility. Do you understand?”
I said I did.
“We also like to remind our clients that failing to
qualify isn’t any kind of value judgment. We’re looking for certain clusters of
complex social traits, but everyone is unique. There’s nothing wrong with you
if you fall outside those parameters; all it means is that we’re unable to
provide our
particular service. All right?”
All right.
“You also need to be clear on what we’re offering if you
do qualify. First off, we’re not a dating service. Many people have found
partners through their Affinity, but that’s absolutely not a guaranteed
outcome. Sometimes people come to us because they’re in trouble, socially or
psychologically. Such people may or may not need therapeutic attention, but
that’s also not the business we’re in.”
As she said this she glanced pointedly at the bandage I
was wearing. I said, “This isn’t—I mean, I don’t go around getting into fights
or anything. I just—”
“None of my business, Mr. Fisk. You’ll be evaluated by
professionals, and the tests, both physical and psychological, are completely
objective. No one is standing in judgment of you.”
“Right. Good.”
“Should you qualify, you’ll be placed in one of the
twenty-two Affinities and offered an invitation to join a local group, called a
tranche. Each Affinity has regional and local subdivisions—the regional groups
are called sodalities, and the locals are called tranches. A tranche has a
maximum of thirty members. As soon as one is filled, we initiate a new group.
You might be assigned as a replacement to an existing group or as part of a new
tranche—either way, there might be a waiting period before you’re placed.
Currently the average is two or three weeks following assessment. Got it?”
Got it.
“Assuming you’re placed in a tranche, you’ll find
yourself in the company of people we call polycompatible. Some clients come in
with the misconception that they’ll be placed among people who are like
themselves, but that’s not the case. As a group, your tranche will most likely
be physically, racially, socially, and psychologically diverse. Our evaluations
look beyond race, gender, sexual preference, age, or national origin. Affinity
groups aren’t about excluding differences. They’re about compatibilities that
run deeper than superficial similarity. Among people of the same Affinity as
yourself, you are statistically more likely to trust others, to be trusted, to
make friends, to find partners, in general to have successful social
engagements. Within your Affinity you will be misunderstood less often and
you’ll have an intuitive rapport with many of your tranchemates. Understood?”
Understood.
“Again, your deposit will be refunded in full if we fail
to place you. But the testing requires a commitment of your time, which we
can’t refund. You’ll have to attend five test sessions of at least two hours
each, which we can book to suit your schedule—five consecutive evenings, once a
week for five weeks, or any other sequence that suits you.” She turned to the
monitor on her desk and tapped a few keys. “You’ve already filled out the
online form, so that’s fine. What we need from you now, if you choose to
proceed, is a valid credit or debit card and your signature on this consent form.”
She took a single sheet from a drawer and slid it to me. “You’ll also need to
show me a piece of government-issued photo ID. A nurse will take a blood sample
before you leave.”
“Blood sample?”
“One now, so we can commence basic DNA sequencing, and
one at each session for a drug assay. Apart from bloodwork, all our tests are
non-invasive—but the results will be useless if you come in under the influence
of alcohol or other intoxicants, so we do have to test. Results are completely
confidential, of course. Clients taking prescription medication need to make us
aware of it at this point, but according to your application you don’t fall
into that category.”
The only drugs I had been taking lately were
over-the-counter painkillers, so I nodded.
“All right then. Take your time and read through the
agreement carefully before you sign it. I’ll step out for a cup of coffee while
you do that, if you’ll excuse me—would you like a cup?”
“Please,” I said.
The logo at the top of the agreement form—
INTERALIA
Finding Yourself Among Others
—was the most comprehensible part of it; all else was
legal boilerplate, mostly above my pay grade. But I set myself to the task of
reading it. I was about finished when Miriam came back. “Any questions?”
“Just one. It says that the result of my tests becomes
the property of the corporation?”
“The result, yes, but only after your name and other
identifiers have been stripped from it. That lets us use the data to evaluate
our client base and maybe focus our research a little better. We don’t sell or
share the information we collect.”
So she claimed. Also, the check is in the mail and I’ll
pull out before I come. But I didn’t really care who saw my test result. “I
guess that’s all right.”
Miriam pushed a pen across the desk. I signed and dated
the document. She smiled again.
* * *
Dex called me later that night. I saw his number and
thought about letting the call go to voice mail, but picked up instead.
“Adam!” he said. “What are you doing?”
“Watching TV.”
“What, like porn?”
“Some reality show.”
“Yeah, I bet it’s porn.”
“It’s a show with alligators in it. I don’t watch
alligator porn.”
“Uh-huh. So what happened the other night?”
“I texted you about it.”
“That bullshit about a demo? I almost missed the ferry,
waiting for you.”
“I’m lucky I didn’t end up in the emergency room.”
“You couldn’t just take the subway?”
“I was almost there, and I was already late, so—”
“You were already late—that says it all, doesn’t it?”
I had shared my apartment with Dex for six months last
year. We took some of the same classes at Sheridan College. The roommate thing
didn’t work out. When he moved, he left his bong and his cat behind. He
eventually came back for the bong. I gave the cat to the retired librarian in
the apartment down the hall—she seemed grateful. “Thank you for your
compassion.”
“I could come over. We could watch a movie or something.”
“I’m not in the mood.”
“Come on, Adam. You owe me an evening’s entertainment.”
“Yeah … no.”
“You can’t be a dick twice in one week.”
“I’m pretty sure I can,” I said.
* * *
Of course it wasn’t Dex’s fault that I was moody—not that
Dex would ever admit that anything was his fault.
I figured I had a couple of good reasons for applying to
the Affinities and a few bad ones. The fact that my social life revolved around
a guy like Dex was one of the good ones. A bad one? The idea that I could buy a
better life for a couple of hundred dollars and a battery of psych tests.
But I had done my research. I wasn’t totally naïve. I
knew a few things about the Affinities.
I knew the service had been commercially available for
four years now. I knew it had gained popularity in the last year, after The New
Yorker, The Atlantic, and BoingBoing ran feature articles about it. I knew it
was the brainchild of Meir Klein, an Israeli teleodynamicist who had ditched a
successful academic career to work for the corporation. I knew there were
twenty-two major and minor Affinity groups, each named after a letter of the
Phoenician alphabet, the “big five” being Bet, Zai, Het, Semk, and Tau.
What I didn’t know was how the evaluation process
actually worked, apart from the generalities I had read online.
Fortunately I had a talkative tester … who turned out to
be Miriam, the woman who had done my initial intake. She grinned like an old
friend when I showed up for the first session. I recognized the smile as
customer relations, but I was still grateful for it. I wondered whether Miriam
was a member of an Affinity.
She escorted me to a nurse’s station in the back hall of
the InterAlia office, where I was relieved of another vial of blood, and then
to a small evaluation room. The room was windowless and air-conditioned to a
centigrade degree above chilly. It contained a teakwood desk and two chairs. On
the desk was a fourteen-inch video monitor, a laptop computer, and a chunky
leather headband with a couple of USB ports built into it. I said, “Do I wear
that?”
“Yes. Tonight we’ll use it to do some baseline
measurements. You can put it on now if you like.”
She helped me adjust it. The headband was heavy with
electronics but surprisingly comfortable. Miriam plugged one end of a cable
into the band, the other into the laptop. The monitor facing me wasn’t
connected to the laptop. I couldn’t see whatever Miriam was looking at on the
laptop’s screen.
“It’ll take a minute or two to initialize,” she said.
“Most of the information we collect is analyzed later, but it takes some
heavy-duty number-crunching just to acquire the data.”
I wondered if she was acquiring it now. Was our
conversation part of the test? She seemed to anticipate the question: “The test
hasn’t started yet. Today, it’s just you looking at a series of pictures on
that monitor. Nothing complicated. Like I said, we’re establishing a baseline.”
“And the blood sample? That’s for drug testing, you
said?”
“Drug testing plus an assay for a range of primary and
secondary metabolites. I know this must seem scattershot, Mr. Fisk, but it’s
all connected. That could be InterAlia’s slogan, if we needed another one:
everything’s connected. A lot of modern science is concerned with understanding
patterns of interaction. In heredity, that’s the genome. In how DNA is
expressed, we talk about the proteinome. In brain science it’s what they call
the connectome—how brain cells hook up and interact, singly or in groups. Meir
Klein invented the word socionome, for the map of characteristic human
interactions. But each affects the others, from DNA to protein, from protein to
brain cells, from brain cells to how you react to the people you meet at work
or school. To place you in an Affinity we need to look at where you are on all
those different maps.”
I said I understood. She consulted her laptop once more.
“Okay, so we’re good to go. I’ll leave the room, and the monitor will show you
a series of photographs, like a slide show, five seconds per slide. Twenty
minutes of that, a coffee break, then twenty minutes more. You don’t have to do
anything but watch. Okay?”
And that was how it went. The pictures were hard to categorize.
Most showed human beings, but a few were landscapes or photographs of inanimate
objects, like an apple or a clock tower. The photographs of human beings were
drawn from a broad cross section of cultures and ages and were gender-balanced.
In most of them, people were doing undramatic things—chatting, fixing meals,
working. I tried not to overanalyze either the pictures or my reaction to them.
And that was it: session one of five.
“We’ll see you again tomorrow evening,” Miriam said.
* * *
The next day’s test used the same headset but no
photographs. Instead, the monitor prompted me with displays of single words in
lowercase letters: when the word appeared, all I had to do was read it aloud. A
few seconds later, another word would appear. And so on. It felt awkward at
first, sitting alone in a room saying things like, “Animal. Approach.
Conciliation. Underwater. Song. Guilt. Vista…”—but before long it just seemed
like a job, fairly tedious and not particularly difficult.
Miriam came back for the midpoint break, carrying a cup
of coffee. “I remembered how you liked it. One cream, one sugar, right? Or
would you prefer a glass of water?”
“Coffee’s great. Thank you. Can I ask you a question?”
“Of course.”
“Personal question?”
“Try me.”
“Do you belong to an Affinity? I mean, if you’re allowed
to say.”
“Oh, I’m allowed. Employees can take the test for free. I
did. I know my Affinity. But no, I never joined a tranche.”
“Why not?”
She held up her left hand, the ring finger circled by a
modest gold band. “My husband was tested too, but he didn’t qualify. And I
don’t want to commit to a social circle he can’t join. It’s not an
insurmountable problem—tranches organize spouse-friendly auxiliary events. But
he would have been shut out of official functions. And I didn’t want that.
That’s why the existing Affinities are a little bit skewed toward young
singles, divorcees, widowers. Over time, as people meet and mate inside their
own Affinity groups, we expect the imbalance to even out. It’s trending that
way already.”
“You ever regret not joining?”
“I regret not having what so many of our clients find so
useful and empowering. Sure. But I made my decision when I married my husband,
and I’m happy with it.”
“Which Affinity did you qualify for?”
“Now that’s a personal question. But I’m a Tau, for what
it’s worth. And I take some comfort from knowing I have a place to go, if I
ever need to call on people I can really trust. But let’s get on with business,
okay?”
* * *
The next day I got a call from Jenny Symanski.
Some people thought of Jenny as my girlfriend. I wasn’t
sure I was one of those people. That wasn’t a dig at Jenny. It was just that
our relationship had a perpetually unsettled quality, and neither of us liked
to name it.
“Hey,” she said. “Is this a good time?”
She was calling from Schuyler, my home town. Schuyler is
in upstate New York, and all my family were there. I had left Schuyler two
years ago for a diploma program in graphic design at Sheridan College, and
since then I had seen Jenny only on occasional visits home. “Good a time as
any,” I said.
“You sure? You sound kind of distracted.”
“I kind of am. I think I told you I’m up for an
internship at a local ad agency, but I haven’t heard back. Classes this
morning, but I’m home now, so…”
“I don’t want to be a nuisance when there’s so much else
on your mind.”
She was being weirdly solicitous. “Don’t worry about it.”
“You seem to be dealing with the situation pretty well.”
“What situation? The internship? The job market
sucks—what else is new?”
Long pause.
“Jenny?”
“Oh,” she said. “Shit. Aaron didn’t call you, did he?”
“No, why would Aaron call me?” Another silence. “Jen,
what’s up?”
“Your grandmother’s in the hospital.”
I sank onto the sofa. Dex and I had snagged the sofa when
a neighbor put it out for the trash. The cushions were compacted and
threadbare, and no matter how you shifted around you could never get
comfortable. But right then I felt anesthetized. You could have pierced me with
a sword. “What happened?”
“Okay, no, she’s basically all right. Okay? Not dead. Not
dying. Apparently she woke up in the night with pain in her chest, sweating,
puking. Your dad called 911.”
“Jesus, Jen—a heart attack?”
I pictured Grammy Fisk in her raggedy old flannel
nightgown, white with a pink flower pattern. She loved that nightgown, but she
wouldn’t let any of us see her in it before nine at night or after six in the
morning—and strangers never saw her in it. The prospect of paramedics invading
her bedroom would have horrified her.
“That’s what everybody thought. But I was over at your
dad’s house this morning and he said now the doctors are telling him it was her
gallbladder.”
I wasn’t sure what that meant, but it sounded slightly
less terrifying than a cardiac condition. “So what do they do, operate on her?”
“That’s not clear. She’s still in the hospital for tests,
but they think she can come home tomorrow. There’s something about diet and
medication, I don’t really remember…”
“I guess that’s good…”
“Under the circumstances.”
“Yeah, under the circumstances.”
“I’m really sorry to be the one to tell you.”
“No,” I said. “No, I appreciate it.”
And that was true. In some ways, it was better getting
the bad news from Jenny than from Aaron. My brother didn’t entirely approve of
me or Grammy Fisk. My father had underwritten Aaron’s MBA, and Aaron currently
co-managed the family business. But the only one willing to pay for my graphic
design courses had been Grammy Fisk, and she had done it over my father’s
objections.
A question occurred to me. “How did you find out about
it?”
“Well—Aaron told me.”
The Fisks and the Symanskis had been close for decades.
Jenny and I had grown up together; she was always at the house. Still: “Aaron
told you but not me?”
“I swear, he said he was going to call. Have you checked
your phone for messages?”
I rarely had to check my phone for messages. I didn’t get
a lot of calls or texts, outside of a few regulars. But I checked. Sure enough,
two missed calls from a familiar number. Aaron had tried to get hold of me
twice. Both attempts had been yesterday evening, when I had turned off my phone
for my session at InterAlia.
* * *
I called Aaron and told him I’d heard the news from
Jenny. I apologized for not getting back to him sooner.
“Well, turns out it’s not such an emergency after all.
She’s home now.”
“Can I talk to her?”
“She’s sleeping, and she needs her rest, so better not.”
It was easy to picture Aaron standing at the ancient
landline phone in the living room back home. It was hot in Toronto and probably
just as hot in Schuyler. The front windows would be open, curtains dappled with
the shade of the willow tree in the yard. The inside of the house would be
sultry and still, because my father didn’t believe in air-conditioning before
the first of June.
And Aaron himself: dressed the way he always dressed when
he wasn’t doing business, black jeans, white shirt, no tie. Dabbing a bead of
sweat from his forehead with the knuckle of his thumb.
“How are Dad and Mama Laura taking it?”
Mama Laura was our stepmother.
“Ah, you know Dad. Taking charge. He was practically
giving orders to the EMT guys. But worried, of course. Mama Laura’s been in the
kitchen most of the day. Neighbors keep coming by with food, like somebody
died. It’s nice, but we’re up to our asses in lasagna and baked chicken.”
“What about Geddy?”
Geddy, our twelve-year-old stepbrother, Mama Laura’s gift
to the family. “He seems to be dealing with it,” Aaron said, “but Geddy’s a
puzzle.”
“Tell Grammy Fisk I’ll be there by tomorrow morning.” I
would have to rent a car. But the drive was only five hours, if the border
crossing didn’t slow me down.
“She says not.”
“Who says not?”
“Grammy Fisk. She said to tell you not to come.”
“Those were her words?”
“Her words were something like, You tell Adam not to mess
up his schoolwork by running down here after me. And she’s right. She’s hardy
as a hen. Wait till end of term, would be my advice.”
Maybe, but I would have to hear it directly from Grammy
Fisk.
“You’ll be paying us a visit sometime in the next couple
of months anyway, right?”
“Right. Absolutely.”
“All right then. I’ll put Dad on. He can fill you in on
what the doctors are saying.”
* * *
My father spent ten minutes repeating everything he’d
learned about the nature and function of the gallbladder, the sum-up being that
Grammy Fisk’s condition was non-trivial but far from life-threatening. By that
time she was awake and able to pick up the bedroom extension. She thanked me
for my concern but urged me to stay put. “I don’t want you ruining the
education I paid for, just because I had a bad night. Come see me when I’m
feeling better. I mean that, Adam.”
I could hear the fatigue in her voice, but I could hear
the determination, too.
“I’ll see you in a few weeks, no matter what.”
“And I look forward to it,” she said.
* * *
My third test session was the most uncomfortable. They
strapped me under the dome of an MRI scanner for half an hour. Miriam said the
scan would be combined with EEG data from my earlier sessions to help calibrate
the results.
The next evening it was back to the headband, this time
listening to recorded voices speak a series of bland, cryptic English
sentences. If it rains, you can use my umbrella. We saw you at the store
yesterday.
“In the end,” Miriam said, “the point of all this is to
locate you on the grid of the human socionome.”
I took her word for it. The details were a well-kept
secret. Meir Klein, who invented the test, had done basic research in social
teleodynamics when he was teaching at the Israel Institute of Technology in
Haifa, outlining what it would take to construct a taxonomy of human social
behavior. But the meat of his work had taken place after he was hired by
InterAlia, and the details were locked behind airtight nondisclosure
agreements. The process by which people were assorted into the twenty-two
Affinities had never been fully described or peer-reviewed. The best anyone
could say was that it seemed to work. And that was good enough for me.
I liked the idea of it. I wanted it to be true. We’re the
most cooperative species on the planet—is there anything you own that you built
entirely with your own hands, from materials you extracted from nature all by
yourself? And without that network of cooperation we’re as vulnerable as
three-legged antelopes in lion territory. But at the same time: what a talent
we have for greed, for moral indifference, for wars of conquest on every scale
from kindergarten to the U.N. Who hasn’t longed for a way out of that bind?
It’s as if we were designed for life in some storybook family, in a house where
the doors are never locked and never need to be. Every half-baked utopia is a
dream of that house. We want it so badly we refuse to believe it doesn’t or
can’t exist.
Had Meir Klein found a way into that storybook house? He
never made that claim, at least not explicitly. But even if all he had found
was the next best thing—well, hey, it was the next best thing.
* * *
The final test session was four hours in front of a
monitor with my body hooked up to some serious telemetry. Miriam appeared
during breaks, bearing gifts of coffee and oatmeal raisin cookies.
The program running on the monitor was a series of
interactive tests, using photographs, symbols, text, video, and occasional
spoken words. The computer correlated my test performance with my facial
expressions, eye movements, posture, blood pressure, EEG readings, and the
beating of my heart.
The tests themselves were pretty simple. There was a
spatial-relations test that worked like a game of Tetris. There was an animated
puzzle involving a runaway train full of passengers headed for certain
destruction: do you throw a switch that causes the train to change tracks,
saving all the passengers but killing a couple of pedestrians who happen to be
in the way, or do you let the train roll on, dooming everyone aboard it? Some
of the tests seemed to touch on identifiable themes (ethnicity, gender,
religion), but the majority were pretty obscure. At the end of four hours it
began to seem like what was really being tested was my patience.
Then the screen went blank and Miriam popped in, smiling.
“That’s it!”
“That’s it?”
“All done, Mr. Fisk, except for the analysis! You should
get your results within a couple of weeks, maybe sooner.”
She helped me peel off the headset and the telemetry
patches. “Hard to believe it’s over,” I said.
“On the contrary,” she said. “With any luck, you’re just
getting started.”
* * *
I stepped out of the building into a hot, humid night.
The last of the business crowd had gone home, abandoning the neighborhood to
speeding cabs and a couple of sparsely populated coffee shops. I walked to the
College Street subway station, where a homeless guy was propped against a wall
with a change cup in front of him. He gave me a look that was either imploring
or contemptuous. I put a dollar coin in his cup. “Bless you,” he said. At least
I think the word was “bless.”
By the time I got back to my apartment a drilling rain
had begun to fall. The short walk from the subway left me drenched, but that
didn’t seem like such a bad thing once I had a towel in my hand and a roof over
my head. In the bathroom I looked at my cheek where the cop had clubbed me. The
bruise was fading. All that was left of the gash was a pale pink line. But I
dreamed of the incident that night, when the room was dark and the rain on the
window sounded like the roar of massed voices.
* * *
Ten days passed.
Two interviews for a summer internship went nowhere. I
finished an end-of-term project (a Flash video animation) and handed it in. I
fretted about my future.
On the tenth day I opened an email from InterAlia Inc. My
test results had been assessed, it said, and I had been placed in an Affinity.
Not just any Affinity, but Tau, one of the big five. My test fees would be
debited to my credit card, the email went on to say. And I would be hearing
from a local tranche shortly.
* * *
I was headed to school when my phone burbled. I didn’t
let it go to voice mail. I picked up like a good citizen.
It was Aaron. “Things took a turn for the worse,” he
said. “Grammy Fisk’s back in the hospital. And this time you really need to
come down and see her.”
Copyright © 2015 by Robert Charles Wilson
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