Near + Far (13 page)

"I will tell you a koan," the Buddha said. "The monk Bazan was walking through the marketplace one day, and heard a customer say to the butcher, 'Give me your best piece of meat.' The butcher replied, 'Everything in my shop is the best. There is no piece of meat that is not the best.'"

He stared at it, nonplussed. What sort of reply did it expect?

"For another Zen koan, say 'Koan, please.'"

"The thing," he said to the Buddha, picking up the conversation again. "The thing is this. What right do I have to capitalize on the members of my dataherd?"

"Do you take responsibility for that?" the Buddha asked.

"Their clickprints are changing," he said.

"What are their clickprints?"

"Their web usage patterns, their search keywords, their purchases, how they look at sites. And I make it change—two weeks from now, some of them will have shifted to tea drinkers. Because of me. I manipulate their lives so I can harvest their data."

"How does that make you feel?"

"They're growing away from me," he said. "Ten of them died last month in the war. Now I'm down to 4527. Soon I won't even have a sellable herd."

"Would you like another koan?"

"Should I just give them their freedom, cut them loose?" he said. "Someone else can collect their data. Or reassemble them. I don't know what I'd do otherwise, though. I can stay free in a hostel, maybe, but food isn't free."

"You seem to use the word 'freedom' a lot. Do you find that word significant?"

"It's what I want to do," he said. "You're right. I use it because I'm thinking about it. It's the answer, otherwise I wouldn't be fixed on it like that."

His fingers danced over the keys as he released their contracts. Maybe someone else would pick them up, but he hoped not. They should lead lives undirected by advertising, make their own choices. Like the choice he had just made.

"I don't want to get that list of high schools after all," he said to Scott.

"It doesn't matter," Scott said. "Didn't you get the memo? They're going to be making dataherds assignable at the corporate level. Everyone belongs to a corp anyhow. You won't be able to recruit anymore. Your old herd just skyrocketed in price, buddy. You can form your own agency."

He stared at Scott. "What? I cut them all loose last night. Erased all the data from my infocloud."

Scott stared back. "You really did it, buddy? Jesus, why?"

"The Buddha told me to do it."

"That doll we bought you at the office party? You are shitting me, right?"

He stared at Scott, stricken, and finally Scott patted his shoulder. "There's a lot of careers out there," he said, avoiding Lyle's eyes. "Lots of possibilities. My mom makes a decent living selling antique food."

"Antique food?"

"Things like Space Bars and Twinkies. There's quite a market in them. She buys and sells them. You should see her apartment. Let's go talk to her."

But Scott's mother, Mrs. Laurelman, wasn't much consolation.

"It's hard work, what I do," she said. "I have agents that monitor some online auctions for me, but there's also a lot of leg work. I wouldn't recommend getting into anything like it."

"I'd thought he could sell music, he likes music," Scott said.

"What sort of music?" She looked at Lyle. He sat next to an enormous stack of pink pastry boxes.

"Oh, all sorts," he said. "I doubt that's what I'd get into, anyhow."

"If you can find a hot fad, you can make a quick buck," she said. "I watch to see if any nostalgic foods are mentioned on videocasts, and if so, I buy up any surplus quickly."

He looked at the package next to his foot. It showed two zebras dancing with each other, their stripes rose and sky blue. The lettering was Arabic.

"What are these?"

"Some sesame treat that got mentioned on a soap opera," she said. "Makes enough to buy groceries for another week."

"Don't you have a corporation plan?"

Her face purpled. "Get out!"

Steve hustled him out, apologetic. "She has a medical condition that kept her from getting health care, that's why she does the buying and selling. She's on base minimum, gets a little help with groceries, but mainly she relies on not going for meds."

Lyle wondered what her demographic was, whose herd she belonged to. The apartment had been too hot, and he felt flushed and sweaty. His garment clung moistly to his skin.

Steve punched his shoulder. "Go home and take a load off," he said.

"Yeah. Yeah." He swung aboard the bus at the corner and went to the monomall before home.

"Good evening," he said to the Buddha as he entered the apartment. He hung up his jacket with careful, deliberate motions, looking at the way the fabric gleamed in the florescent lights. His head still buzzed with an angry whirl of thoughts, words colliding unintelligibly.

"How are you?" the Buddha asked.

He took a breath. "I'm fine, how are you?"

"What did you do today?"

"Why would you care?" he said.

"Are you aware that you are answering questions with questions?"

"It's a game," he said. "We used to play it in Improv Club, back in high school. Oh, wait. You don't have a high school to remember. Mine was a misery. Like my life."

"Why do you think your life is miserable?"

"Why wouldn't I? Oh, there I am going with the questions again, aren't I?"

It was silent.

"Have I hit a new trigger?" he said. "Are you not talking in order to see what I will say to you?"

"What do you want to say to me?" it asked.

He went over and picked it up to stare into the bland green features.

"You betrayed me," he said. "Do you understand what that means?"

"Why do you think you were betrayed?"

He set it down as carefully as a baby.

"You could have told me, and you didn't," he said.

"This unit is not intended to be a fortune-telling device."

"Aren't you? Aren't you supposed to be the random voice of the Universe, addressing me through the luck of the draw and the forces of serendipity?"

"Would you like to hear a koan?"

"No. No koans. I'm done with all that. I don't have anything left. I might as well commit suicide," he said.

It spoke in a different voice. "Alert. Spoken keywords have triggered emergency routines in this unit. If you do not wish to have medical attention summoned, count to ten and backward within one minute."

"Fuck you," he said.

"If you do not wish to have medical attention summoned, count to ten and backward within thirty seconds."

Medical attention would cost an arm and a leg. At the last possible second, he spat out, "One-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine-ten-nine-eight-seven-six-five-four-three-two-one."

"Transmission aborted," the Buddha said.

He stared at it.

"I'm going out to interact with some real people," he said. And then, "Christ, why am I telling
you
that?"

Steve called while he was coming out of the movie, which had been something about cavemen and mammoths, frothy with laughter, something he hadn't understood at all. He paused to take the call, shielding his ear while the other moviegoers eddied past him.

"It's not as though they depicted Neanderthals correctly," he heard one boy say to another. In his head, Steve's voice said. "Lyle, you there?"

"I'm here."

"Listen, there was this study, you know, one of those market studies, for a tea, some sort of tea that was supposed to make you immune to colds, do you know the one I mean?"

"Yeah, I know the one. I signed my herd up for it, one of the last things I did with them."

Silence from Steve.

"You know what I'd really like to see, I'd like to see magicians," another movie-goer said. Their friend nodded, passing Lyle, and said "Yeah, and a really good bass line."

Steve said, "Well, that's unfortunate."

"Why, what's happened?"

"Turns out they'd modified the recipe, did some sort of cuts with the vitamins, and about a quarter of the people who've drunk it have total liver shutdown. You didn't drink any of it, did you?"

"No," he said.

"Well, there's a plus. But I got to warn you, buddy, they're going to be coming after you with lawyers and maybe even jail-time. It's looking pretty bad. And when the cops see you cut your herd loose, they're going to think there was some reason. Like you knew ahead of time."

He was numb. He couldn't hear anything from the people moving around him. It was all just a high-pitched whine in his head.

"Can I come talk to you?" he asked desperately.

Steve's voice came from far away, hesitant. "Well, buddy, you see. It's just that I don't want them to think—bad timing right now, I think. Maybe in a few days?"

He fumbled with the plastic bag in his pocket, taking out a pill bottle. Thumbing off the lid, he drank the tiny pills, each as big as a bird's eye, down as though they were liquid.

"Go ahead," he said, swallowing. "It'll be too long before they get here for you to save me. I should have known better than trust my life to you. I should have known that an object couldn't be my friend."

"If you do not wish to have medical attention summoned, count to ten and backward within thirty seconds."

They looked at each other in silence.

"If you do not wish to have medical attention summoned, count to ten and backward within ten seconds. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One."

The Buddha gave out a shrill squeal, before saying "Information transmitted."

Lyle sat down, staring at his feet, looking puzzled. He made as though to speak, then shook his head twice and slumped back into the couch. His legs shot forward in a flurry of spasms, kicking the table before he bucked the sofa over backwards. The Buddha shuddered sideways.

The paramedics came through the doorway thirteen minutes later. Lyle lay on the floor, staring upward, body tangled in the constraints of the tiny space between sofa and table. Across the room lay the Buddha, staring across the carpet, its face turned to him, no meaning written there.

Afternotes

I'm fascinated by what we project onto things around us, by how we can imagine that objects are somehow animate, and this story is about that. You may remember ELIZA, a computer program that was a "virtual psychiatrist" intended to simulate talking to an actual person, created by Joe Weizenbaum. Surprisingly, many people who talked with Eliza felt a strong emotional connection, to the point where Weizenbaum felt compelled to write about the social dangers of AI, saying that it was "obscene" to use it in clinical sitations.