The Affinities (11 page)

She was up front, startled but not hurt. She looked to her left and said, “Damian?”

Damian was splayed over the steering wheel. He raised his head when she called his name. There was blood around his nose and mouth. “M'okay,” he said.

Amanda leaned in and switched off the engine. Her door was jammed against the trunk of the tree we had hit. She looked back at me. “Adam, help me get him out.”

I managed to climb out of the car into the drenching rain. I opened the driver's door, hooked Damian's left arm over my shoulder, and lifted him out. He found his feet but had to brace himself against the hood. He put his hand to his head and said, “Dizzy.”

Amanda scooted out after him, and since the car seemed in no danger of bursting into flame—the only obvious damage was a trashed side panel—we helped Damian lie down across the backseat.

“He wasn't driving,” Amanda said tersely.

“What?”

“Listen. We'll have highway cops here pretty soon. If Damian gets caught up in any kind of litigation, it'll make us vulnerable. So I'll clean him up, and when the police or EMS get here I'll say I was at the wheel. You back me up, okay?”

Damian had the future of the entire Tau Affinity—maybe the future of all the Affinities—in his pocket (literally!), and he'd had a couple of drinks with Meir Klein, which could complicate matters if the cops assayed his blood alcohol. “Okay,” I said. “But I was driving, not you.”

She thought about it a moment and nodded. Amanda had a couple of DUIs on her record from her pre-Tau days. I had a clean record, I hadn't been drinking, and of the three of us my work was the least critical. “Fine,” she said. “And maybe you should go talk to that woman we almost hit.”

So I walked back to the yellow Toyota. The woman was sitting inside, the door open. She watched as I approached, her skinny arms crossed and her lips pressed tight. The child was in back, a pair of solemn eyes under a drooping orange rain hat. The girl was dressed for the weather, but the mom, if she was the girl's mom, wore a brown woolen sweater that looked like the hide of a sodden Airedale. I asked if everyone was all right.

She eyed me coolly. “More or less,” she said. “Felt the breeze when you went past. But no damage done.”

“That's great.”

“I called CAA before you came around the bend. I think my transmission's fucked up. That's why we stopped. Been here twenty minutes. You got somebody hurt back there? I already dialed 911.”

“No, we're okay.”

“You sure? You keep rubbing your shoulder.”

“Sprained it, maybe.” I looked down at her feet. “But you're bleeding.”

She followed my eyes. Then she hiked up one leg of her jeans, revealing a bloody gash along her calf. “Jesus, I didn't even feel it. I mean when you went past it felt like the car maybe just brushed my leg, but I guess something caught it…”

Probably the rear bumper. It had lost a lug where it met the wheel well, and the edge stuck out from the frame. “You need to put pressure on that,” I said.

She rummaged in her purse for a pack of Kleenex. I watched her face while she dabbed at the blood. I wanted to judge her sincerity, though it was impossible to read the motives of a non-Tau the way I could read a Tau. Of course, the woman could have been a Tau herself … but my intuition said not.

The injury to her leg wasn't anywhere near serious, but it might be grounds for an insurance claim if she sensed an opportunity to exact a settlement. “Don't worry,” she said, apparently reading me more acutely than I was reading her, “it wasn't your fault. Though you guys took the curve at a pretty good clip.”

“My name's Adam Fisk.”

“I'm Rachel. Rachel Ragland. In the back, that's Suze.”

“Hi, Suze.”

Suze was maybe six or seven years old, as blond as her mother was dark. She ducked away from the window, shy but smiling.

Rachel said, “Is your driver really okay?”

I looked back to where Amanda was tending Damian. “Just a bump. But I was the one driving.”

“No you weren't.”

“Yeah, actually, I was.”

“Uh-huh. So is that what I'm supposed to tell the cops—that you were the one driving?”

“Well, yeah. Because I
was
.”

Rachel rolled her eyes. “Okay then,” she said. “That's what we'll tell them.”

*   *   *

Damian's nose had bled prodigiously—he looked like he was wearing a rust-colored goatee—but he was sitting up by the time I got back to the car. “The EMS guys will probably take me in for observation if they think I have a concussion—”

“They will, and you might.”

“—and I don't want this stuck in some hospital locker.” He gave Amanda the thumb drive containing Meir Klein's data, and she tucked it into her purse.

Amanda turned to me. “So what's the deal with the other vehicle?”

I told her about Rachel Ragland.

“You think she'll be a problem?”

“Doesn't look like it.”

“You think she has an Affinity?”

Sometimes you can tell. Some people liked to advertise their affiliation, and InterAlia had licensed the rights to market lapel pins, tattoos, t-shirts. Rachel displayed none of those obvious signs, and I was pretty sure she wasn't a Tau, either tested or potential, but beyond that I couldn't say.

“Worse luck for us,” Amanda said.

“Not necessarily. She seems reasonable. She has a daughter.”

“Proves nothing.”

Amanda distrusted outsiders. And maybe that was wise, given what Meir Klein had told us. Given the future we were facing.

*   *   *

Klein, of course, was the man who invented the Affinities.

More than a decade ago he had traded a successful academic career in neuroscience and teleodynamics for a contract with InterAlia Inc. At the time InterAlia had been a struggling commercial data-mining business with offices in Camden, New Jersey, using evolutionary algorithms to focus marketing strategies and reclaim “untapped commercial margins” for its corporate clients. Three years after hiring Klein, InterAlia opened its first Affinity-testing centers in Los Angeles, Seattle, Taos, and Manhattan.

The business had taken off slowly, but by the time I took my test the Affinities had become a significant component of InterAlia's revenue stream; a year after that, Meir Klein's division dwarfed everything else in InterAlia's portfolio. And Klein, whose deal with InterAlia had included a generous block of shares in the company's stock, had become quietly wealthy.

But a little more than a year ago Klein had severed all connections with InterAlia and dropped out of sight. No public explanation was forthcoming, but the
Wall Street Journal
reported that he had signed a heavily lawyered nondisclosure agreement and promised his former employers to conduct no further research on the human socionome that would compete with their interests. Most of us assumed he had simply retired. Which made it a big surprise when Damian received a hand-delivered invitation to a meeting, signed by Meir Klein himself.

We had been attending the annual All-Affinities North American Potlatch, held this year in Vancouver: more than fifty thousand delegates from tranches across the continent crammed into the city's convention center and nearby hotels. The note delivered to Damian's hotel room had been arch and cryptic—
It is urgently important that we meet to discuss the future of Tau
—but it was on Klein's letterhead, it included a phone number, and after a quick call Damian was convinced it really was Klein who had sent it.

If Meir Klein wanted to talk to a prominent Tau, it was reasonable that he would have chosen Damian. The Affinities had no official hierarchy, and under the rules laid down by InterAlia all tranches were created equal; the national sodalities existed solely to organize social events and maintain centralized websites and mailing lists. Like every other Affinity, Tau had no president, no board of directors, and no governing body apart from the policy wonks at InterAlia itself. But the Affinities were all about cooperation and organization. And more than any other Tau on the continent, Damian had been a tireless organizer. He had come into the Affinity as a successful business-affairs lawyer, and he had soon begun setting up financial plans for other Taus: pensions, investment portfolios, trusts. His reputation gradually spread from our tranche to the Toronto Tau network and from there to the entire national sodality, and before long he had hired a small army of accountants and financial experts (all Taus) to handle the huge volume of work. Out of that had emerged TauBourse, the first publicly-traded Affinity-based corporate entity. It was also the first Affinity-based business to face a legal challenge from InterAlia, which had become alarmed at the prospect of others deriving profits, even indirectly, from an institution to which InterAlia owned intellectual property rights.

The litigation was still ongoing. Damian viewed it as a bid by InterAlia for closer control of the Affinities, a prospect that had always worried him, and a few months ago he had started a much less well-publicized project: an effort to systematically debrief Taus about their membership tests, with the goal of reverse-engineering the process. Basically, he wanted to crack the neural and analytical code that identified Taus. Which
was
an explicit trespass on InterAlia's intellectual property, which is why we kept it quiet. But given how much we all meant to each other, it was inconceivable that we could leave these tools locked behind a wall of corporate law. The test protocols were the keys to our identity. They were how we had discovered ourselves as a proto-ethnicity. Unless we controlled them, how could we know they wouldn't be altered or mismanaged?

Klein hadn't said what he wanted to talk about, but Damian guessed it had something to do with the Tau codes. What was unclear was whether Klein wanted to scold us, warn us, threaten us, or help us.

Some of each, as it turned out.

*   *   *

The address Klein had given us was a three-story mansion dressed up as a rustic cabin. It was big enough to sleep busloads, but as far as I could tell it was occupied only by Klein and his staff. It was impossible to know how many employees Klein had, but a best guess was “many”—there was the guy who met our car (who looked like an ex-Marine crammed into khakis and a flannel shirt), the guy staking out the entrance hall (likewise), and the woman who offered us canap
é
s on a silver tray after escorting us to a room with a glass wall overlooking the pristine shores of Lake Sanina. No doubt there were others unseen.

A few minutes after we settled onto the sofa, Klein shuffled into the room. Klein was in his late sixties, and what was intimidating about him was his intellect and his reputation, not his physical presence. He wore a white shirt open at the collar and blue jeans cinched over his hips with an expensive leather belt. His head was shaved, his face weathered and finely wrinkled. He made no objection to my presence or Amanda's—knowing Tau dynamics as well as he did, he had probably expected Damian to show up with company—but he more or less ignored us once we'd been introduced.

There was no superfluous chitchat. He settled into a chair and looked at Damian solemnly. He said, “I undertook my life's work more than thirty years ago. At the time we had only begun to apply computer modeling to the discipline of cognitive and social teleodynamics. I cannot tell you how exciting it was, to stand on the verge of a vast new range of human knowledge…”

And so on. It was as if he had mistaken Damian for a biographer. But he wasn't telling us anything we didn't already know. When Klein paused to sip water from a bottle, Damian said, “Your invitation—that is, I have to wonder—”

Klein cocked his head. “You're asking me to hurry up and get to the point?”

“Sir, it's a privilege to be here. I just want to make sure I'm not
missing
the point.”

“And I want to make sure you understand it. All right. We can circle back to the details. The crux of the matter is this.”

He took a handkerchief from the pocket of his shirt and blew his nose into it, long and loudly. I thought of the way Amanda looked when she tried to suppress a laugh. I was careful not to look at her now, because I was almost certain she had that expression on her face.

Klein examined the handkerchief, folded it, and tucked it back in his pocket. “My latest models suggest we're at the opening of an unprecedented revolution in human social dynamics. The revolution is technologically driven, and the Affinities are in the vanguard of it. We traditionally conduct the Affinity tests with mainframe computers and complex analytical algorithms, but today you can build the majority of those functions onto a single microprocessor. Throw in a half dozen sensors and a video device and you can run the application on any tablet computer or smartphone. InterAlia knows this, and it terrifies them. Affinity testing for pennies on the dollar! It would completely democratize the process. It would also put InterAlia out of business.”

“The process
should
be democratized,” Damian said. “But as long as InterAlia owns the protocols—”

“InterAlia owns proprietary rights to the algorithms and the methodology, but that's merely a legal barrier. You remember what people used to say? Information wants to be free. As soon as the test parameters and sorting algorithms are publically available, InterAlia's legal standing becomes almost irrelevant. Bluntly, their copyrights and so forth won't be worth shit.”

His faint accent made the word sound like “zhit.”

“You think that might happen?”

Klein seemed surprised by the question. “Oh, I
guarantee
it will happen! Because, you see, I mean to
make
it happen!”

And having delivered this declaration, he invited us to dinner.