I Still Dream

I blogged. Spent too long trying to think of the right word, Current Mood: sad or pissed off or agitated or free or something else entirely, because what if Laura read the post? When I was done, catharted as hard as I could stand, I Bowed to find out how long it would take to get over her. How long it takes the average man to stop thinking about them. At the time, Bow’s software did some things well, but searching wasn’t one of them. The algorithms had been bought from some shitty start-up in the early part of the century, and sure there was a team on it, but they were the drags. Interns given jobs with big ideas and no coding skills. The search engine was kept around as a presence, a part of the ecosystem it was important to have fingers in. Same as the emails, the weather site, the video site. So I opened up a private tab, because I didn’t want anything hanging around on my system – there were always rumours about Mark Ocean wanting us only to use Bow software, like dressing in flat beige chinos because you worked at the Gap – and I went to Google. Better. GQ told me that there were seven stages; FHM said there were five; Men’s Health, ten. The one I settled on, on some Gawker site, said that it was twelve. Mourning is all illusions, sleight of hand: because twelve feels more comprehensive, twelve you’ll definitely find something that you associate with, and then you can pinpoint your own pain, and that illusion will help you to move on. Five? Five is nothing. Five could leave you in its dust.

But anger, they all started with anger. I think that would have been obvious. Nobody searching for this stuff wasn’t going to be feeling at least pretty angry.

I called Laura a cunt. Was that angry enough for me to start moving on?

I kept my head down. Blinkers on as I stared at the screen. When they broke up with you, the website said. Like the person who instigated it – the breaker, not breakee – wouldn’t need these things. I broke up with Laura Bow. I said that, I think, out loud. Under my breath, blown out when I exhaled. Laura had a mantra she liked, when she was stressed – she used to say, I have things in my head I don’t want to say, so I say them internally, get them out that way – and maybe that was mine. I did it, so I would have to deal with this. Own it. That’s just the way it is. I read the things that will help you move on: bury it; try to forget; get rid of all reminders of her, all memories; delete her from your life.

I wasn’t ready for any of that; not yet.

Park walked in. Blinkers on, I reminded myself. Don’t look up, act like you’re not going to see anything out of the corner of your eyes. He waved. Lifted his headphones. He wore those enormous things, like he was in a recording studio. He listened to nothing but country. Old country, as well. He was a surfer guy, could have been into metal or indie or trashy European dance music, but no: Merle fucking Haggard. The twang of slide guitar seeping through the oversized studio headphones, a hipster before we even had a word for such a thing.

‘You booted her yet?’ he asked.

How the fuck did he know what I was going to do? And he must have known what I was going to do even before I did, because I didn’t know until gone eight the night before, when we were sitting there, across from each other, and she wasn’t looking at me; she was looking at her files, scanning through them on her laptop, and I realised that I wasn’t even in the room, not for that second. She was somewhere by herself, and it was like I didn’t even need to be there. She didn’t need me, so I—

‘I put some new routines into her last night,’ he said. ‘Didn’t even get out until three or something, and then my alarm went off, and here I am. You know when you’re so excited to see what it’s done?’

SCION. He was talking about SCION, not Laura.

Charlie, you fucking idiot, I told myself, get your head in the game.

‘I haven’t done anything yet,’ I told him. ‘I just got in.’

‘Dude! I sent you an email,’ Park told me. He was disappointed. His face was more emphatic than anybody else’s I’ve ever met. It creased like indelicately folded paper. I had seen the email, right before I finally went to sleep. Pretty sure I deleted it. Park used to send about ten emails a day, all excited about something he’d managed to do, always with italics or full caps or bold or underlined in there, like everything he wrote or thought was meant to be consumed in one immediate rush of slanted words, hurrying to get to the edge of the page. Exclamation marks at the end of every sentence. And that was how you knew to delete it: the more excitement there was, the less it was going to matter. ‘It’s a fucking breakthrough,’ he said, and he came to my desk, cleared a space at the edge, leaped up. He sat right there, perched, and leaned over. I didn’t say anything about my personal space, because I’d been there before. He wouldn’t have listened. He never did. ‘Let me,’ and he took the mouse before I’d even touched it, started the SCION program. ‘Wait, wait.’ We watched it boot. It was the same loading screen as it always had; as it had used since before we even started at Bow. Some hangover from aborted reboots in the nineties. ‘Okay, okay. So, try this: SCION …’ He said the word like he was talking to an idiot, waved his hands like he was talking to a foreigner.

‘What?’

‘I put in speech. I applied the speech recognition module, hooked up the microphones. SCION something is the command.’

‘I do not understand “something”,’ it said.

That was the first time I ever heard SCION’s voice. A Stephen Hawking voice, only worse. More clipped, fragments of sounds arranged to form the words. No fluidity to it.

‘Mother-fucker,’ Park said, and he laughed. His high-pitched idiot little laugh. ‘Listen, listen,’ he said, and, ‘SCION, what is your function?’ He held his finger in the air between my face and the computer screen, as if that was going to keep me quiet; as if I’d been just talking on and on, and he hadn’t been able to get me to shut up.

‘To learn. What is logic. What is function.’

‘You taught it to speak,’ I said.

‘I mean, sure. If you want to reduce actually implementing a state-of-the-art text-to-speech engine that I wrote myself into the world’s smartest artificial intelligence into nothing more than teaching it to speak.’

‘I do,’ I told him. ‘Because that’s exactly what it is.’

‘Try it. Just fucking try it, dude.’

I sighed. I think that I sighed a lot with Park, when I was talking to him. So much that it ceased being a thing that was real, and more a part of the performance of our relationship. ‘SCION, who is Johann Park?’

‘Johann Park is a designer of computers and software applications from Palo Alto, California. His specializations are—’ The computer kept talking, and I stopped listening. The door swished open – Ocean had set them all to be programmed with the noise from Star Trek, that thing that I loved when I was a kid; because my doors had banged or slammed or whatever, and here was this thing from the future, this effortless wave of noise that sounded uniform and constant, and that was what we promised, right? That future, clean and brisk and so fucking efficient – and Laura walked in.

Maybe I’m naïve, but I didn’t think she’d actually come in that day. I had assumed that she would stay at home, crying over what had happened. I hoped that she wouldn’t be in that day, I hoped that she would have stayed at home, crying. The same things, over and over, in my head, in that moment, that microsecond, before she looked over at Park and at me, and she smiled, and she raised her hand in this coy little half-wave, and it was like the two years previous – the night previous – hadn’t happened.

‘Laura B, you have to see this,’ Park said. He didn’t know we’d broken up. Why would he have known? I didn’t like him enough to have bothered telling him.

‘In a bit,’ she replied. In a bit. English phrase. Her English phrase.

‘You’re going to freak, though. This is super cool.’

‘I’m sure,’ she told him. She didn’t look at me. Or maybe she did, but I just don’t remember it, or I didn’t catch it, because I wasn’t looking at her; except for when I was. When I was glancing over at her, eyes to the side, like I could have been looking at something else completely.

I listened to the sound of her computer. I listened to the whirring of the fan in the back of it, the fan she kept clean with that little flask of air she bought from that shop in San Francisco; the little can of air that she puffed in between the blades so that they spun freely. No dust.

‘Good morning, Organon,’ she said, but her AI didn’t answer back. Park sat and watched her until she was settled, and then she got up, and he was about to ask her to have a look at SCION again – we were a small team, made up of even smaller victories, and I could see it on his lips, that eagerness to open his presents, to take his new bike out, to open the envelope – but she was already out into the corridor.

I remember thinking that it was a mistake, to be there. One of us should have stayed at home, that day. On a schedule, that we’d worked out beforehand.

Park asked if he could sit with me at lunch. I was eating early. You ate early, missed the rush, got the best of the food. Bow always put on one heck of a spread, as Laura used to say, but the later you went for it, the sludgier the noodles, the warmer the sushi.

Laura used to say. She wasn’t dead. She just wasn’t there, wasn’t sitting next to me or opposite me. Wasn’t rolling her eyes at me as I wondered when the sushi went from being actual sushi, and when it was some different dish, some warmed-fish bullshit mistake they tried to pass off as intentional on Top Chef.

‘You okay?’ Park’s voice was lower than mine. He would have made a fine singer, I think. I nodded, again. Different sort of nod. ‘Because, hey, there was hella tension in the room earlier.’ He was so affected. The way that he spoke, the hobbies he had – surfing, hacky sack, playing guitar around campfires on beaches – and his stupid fucking beard, tiny plaits with orange and green thread twining them into one serpent’s tail underneath his chin. He had all these things and he was from Twin Forks. Not California, not the shit he presented, the way he acted. Everything was false. He was from Twin Forks, originally. Not Palo Alto. Nobody was born in Palo Alto. Why did SCION say Palo Alto? Click, click. Cogs. He wasn’t born in Palo Alto. That’s not what his Bow employee data would say.

‘Why did SCION say you were from Palo Alto?’ I asked. Park looked clueless. Like SCION was something that we had never discussed before. As if it wasn’t the thing we’d spent the past four years working on, and like it hadn’t existed for the God knows how many years it had been worked on before that. All the code, when we inherited it, a total mess of archaic patchworked programming languages. When we started, we weren’t creators: we were curators, translators, detanglers.

I could see him trying to work out the answer, trying to even understand the question. ‘I guess that’s what it says on my website. That’s—’

‘You took SCION online?’ I stood up from the table, went through the double doors, pushed past people, ran down the corridor, Park chasing behind me, beating his arms as he tried to stop me.

‘Charlie, listen. It’s on the network, but I put in a firewall around it, like a, this reverse firewall. I made a wall. It can’t get out.’ I was always good at reading voices. His said: I don’t have a goddamn fucking clue about what I have done. I did a stupid thing and I’m a total fucking idiot.

‘We have safeguards for a reason,’ I said, and the doors swished open pretty much in time for me to get through them, back into the lab, and there was Laura, on her feet as I stormed into the room – as if she thought that what was going to happen then was the second round of our argument, or second act, or second sitting; or however she was thinking of it, in her own mind – and she asked what was wrong, but I didn’t say a word. I was breathless with rage. I don’t know who at. I wasn’t showing it. I pulled the cord from the back of Park’s computer, from the back of mine. I went to Laura’s.

‘Don’t you dare,’ she said.

‘Park let SCION online.’ The first words I’d said since the last words; and the last words had been vicious. Laura looked at Park as if he was a puppy. He’d done a shit on the floor, and that was the look she gave him: somewhere between pity and sadness.

When I was a kid and the dog shat on the floor, my father rubbed his nose in it. Grabbed him by the collar, pushed his head down to the ground. See what you did? See what you fucking did?

‘It’s fine,’ Park said, but I stared at him. Dared him to continue.

‘I’m not running SCION,’ Laura told me. She barely met my eyes. She was looking just below them. Top of my cheeks. Her eyes weren’t red. I wanted them to be red. ‘Why would I be running SCION?’

‘I’m not saying you are,’ I told her. ‘I’m saying, it might have found a back door. This idiot put it on the network, so maybe it’s—’ I didn’t finish the thought. I interrupted myself. My fingers were on the end of her cable. At the point where it went into her system. Her system was immaculately clean, where mine and Park’s were filthy with dust. My dirty fingerprints, dusty from the cables I’d already pulled. I could see the marks that I’d left, and I could imagine her dusting them off; using that blast of cold, clean air on them, and then they would be gone. Like they were never even there.

‘Charlie,’ she said to me, ‘do you think I’m an idiot?’

I didn’t answer her. Easier to not answer, because that felt like a trapdoor I simply did not want to open. The night before, we both said some things, I told myself. People say things when they’re in the heat of the moment. They say nasty things, cruel things, hateful things. I tried to tell myself that we both said some things, but in reality: I said some things. She was quiet, and I thought, when I said those things, that she looked beaten. Not like it was a competition, or even a war. Beaten. I had never hit her. I never would. She looked like I had.

Years later, I’d think: Does it just feel kind of the same?