It worked, kind of. That and the extra she paid for priority processing and shipping, which came to roughly twice the cost of the original kit. Still, it had taken about a week—a week during which she’d been knocked off her visiting schedule by an exam and a subsequent overconfidence in technology. The results had arrived the morning of the “please start smoking” visit, which raised the stakes on everything.
Not that Pandora knew what was waiting for her at the Golden Heart when she folded the unopened envelope and stuffed it into her pocket. She’d open it once she got there, she decided, and if it was good news, she’d share it with Gladys, in case what had or hadn’t been passed along was weighing on her too.
But then there’d been the surprise at her grandmother’s former condo and the mad rush to find out where she’d been taken. There’d been the promise to smoke and the wanting to cry. And only then did Pandora remember the envelope in her parka. She found a visitors’ bathroom and locked herself inside.
The first thing she removed was a multipage form letter full of legalese explaining all the things the results wouldn’t be telling her, as well as the things they hadn’t tested for, including the nastiest of inheritable diseases because the liability of blah, blah, blah, which Pandora took to mean they didn’t want to be sued when somebody offed themselves after getting bad news. And spoiler alert, Huntington’s, Alzheimer’s, Lou Gehrig’s, assorted cancers, dementias, and incurable neurological conditions all constituted bad news. Leaving what? Earlobes attached or not? Tongue curling? Eye color . . .
Pandora wanted to scream, to cry, to maybe email the head of the company, promising not to kill herself, explaining she just wanted to know so she could start planning . . .
“. . . to do what?” she asked her reflection in the bathroom mirror. And the funny thing was, Pandora already had an answer—had had it for a while, just below the surface of her consciousness. She’d even taken a step in that direction with the smartphone she’d reprogrammed for Gladys, promising that it would remember her memories for her. And that’s what she wanted to do, scaled way up: move her memories from in vitro to in silico.
Futurists had been talking about the point in human history when the species would merge with computers to live forever. Ray Kurzweil, arguably the father of this line of thinking, called it “the singularity” and predicted that the technology to link our brains to computers and upload ourselves to the cloud was practically around the corner—by the 2030s or so. That was well within Pandora’s life span—and well before she’d be showing any signs of dementia, if that was the fate hardwired into her DNA.
So that was the good news, right? The future was already working on it; there was too much money on the table for it not to be. Pandora laughed. All that angst when the truth was that AI, the cloud, and neuro-tech had it all covered! Gladys’s present didn’t have to be Pandora’s future. Except . . .
“Except what?” she asked her mirrored self.
And again, she already knew. Her father’s oft-repeated mathematical morality of logical conclusions: What if everybody did what you’re thinking of doing? And what was Pandora thinking of doing? Nothing. Letting the future take care of, well, her future. But if everybody chilled and let the future take care of itself—then the future wouldn’t take care of itself. Lulled into waiting for the singularity, humans would have no incentive to invent it.
Not that Pandora had to create a self-aware AI she could upload all her hopes and dreams to by herself. But she had a good brain (for the time being), and she was a quick learner (while it lasted). She was a cyber native, had taken computers apart and put them back together without having them blow up. She’d learned to program in binary, the actual ones and zeros the computer used. Her dad studied the human mind, and surely she’d picked up something through osmosis. Further back, she shared blood with a WWII code breaker and had touched the father of modern computing, albeit by proxy and a few generations removed.
And then there was that pair of aces in the hole: she was young and stubborn as they came. So hell yeah. It wasn’t like she had anything more important to do.
26
Mr. Plaid had a name—Steve Vickers—and before he vacated George’s office, he’d been working on a project for Quire, sitting on that dock by the bay, looking at the Golden Gate Bridge. He was trying to get into the “mind space” of a person who’d jump from said bridge, a locally popular option when it came to taking that final departing flight into whatever comes next. He imagined that must be nothing—the what-comes-next—for someone in that position. They must think that. Must think they’re placing a period at the end of their life sentence, not a semicolon or a question mark and certainly not an exclamation point, though he was inclined to waver on that last one. Suicide—or so it seemed to Steve Vickers—was decidedly the act of someone in love with their own drama.
The reason he was thinking about all this was because that was what his latest work assignment called for. His employer wanted its corner of the web turned into a safety net, a little like the one circling Apple’s Foxconn factory in China, to catch the jumpers. Or as V.T. put it, signing off on the assignment: “We want to make Quire a safe place to go to be saved.”
While the idea behind these mental field trips was sound, the way Vickers was conducting them was a waste of time. Because the task wasn’t about preventing his demographic from exiting the pool of consumers—biology and time were rapidly turning that cohort irrelevant—but those who were in the prime of their consumptive lives. Steve Vickers’s empathy was too chronologically specific. Sure, he could think himself into the minds of different races, religions, sexual orientations, and socioeconomic classes—provided they were all roughly around his age. Add or subtract a decade, however, and nothing. Trying to understand the fads, trends, language even of his target demographic audience was like trying to mind meld with a cow, chewing away on its cud. He and they were in different headspaces, even though, years earlier, he’d aged right on through it, in premature mourning for the innocence he couldn’t wait to be rid of.
So maybe it wasn’t too surprising that George’s predecessor kept getting distracted by the other scenery. The homeless crabber being creepy over that way, the lesbians reacting disgustedly a few benches down. And boy, those seagulls! Wheeling so white against the blue sky, inevitably leaving their witness in a caffeinated and mildly euphoric mood, also known as . . .
. . . the totally wrong headspace for working on that goddamn suicide thing.
Back at the office, Steve Vickers had been giving it his best shot for three months. He’d divided the assignment into two main steps: identification and intervention—the two Is. Shortly after getting the assignment, he’d coded up a nice little data cruncher to tackle the first I by baselining the online activity of every Quire user within the target demographic and then comparing that baseline on a rolling basis, looking for any deviations from the mean, with a target’s potential for self-harm being a relatively simple ratio of public engagement to nesting behavior. The first of these criteria—the ratio’s numerator—was populated with data on how often the subject sent emails, tweets, IMs, and/or texts, including how long these exchanges were in terms of both individual message character counts and overall duration of the thread, from the first message to the last. The denominator, in turn, was based upon the radius of the subject’s travel behavior over a set time period, derived from smartphone GPS data, including the subset of how long the subject spent at his or her primary residence, which was used as a multiplier. A decreasing rate of public engagement divided by an increasing rate of nesting behavior would set a flag, and the identification process would move on to the interim phase 1b: confirmation.