The Incrementalists (3 page)

“I used to collect these things!” I said. “But you knew that, didn’t you?”

Kendra the waitress stopped him on the way out, said something to him, kissed his cheek, and came to clear our table with her face still pink. I put my earphones back in and logged into Gmail using the wi-fi you can’t get in the 24/7 Café to find two messages waiting for me.

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Subject:
Tomorrow’s Meeting Rescheduled

Thursday, June 30, 2011 5:46 pm GMT - 7

Hi Ren,

Hope you’re enjoying Vegas. Jorge has pushed our meeting back. Something came up for him at home, so you have an extra day of fun in the sun on our nickel. Take yourself to a show or something. My flight is the same time, but on Saturday now instead of tomorrow. Sorry, but I know you can entertain yourself.

L.

and

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Subject:
Breakfast?

Thursday, June 30, 2011 5:01 pm GMT - 7

Assuming you’re free.

And somehow, as trapped and arranged and manipulated as it all felt, I knew I was.

TWO

You Can Do That?

Phil

Usually, the first interview without switches is the tricky one, so after yesterday, I was wary. I got to the café first, on the theory that her walking up to me would be less threatening than the reverse. Ren normally woke up at eight and spent forty-five minutes getting ready, subtract fifteen minutes for her being out of town, giving us 8:30; I arrived at 8:20. Katy was hostessing, and she had a dramatic fake coronary, while making comments about seeing me before noon.

“I’m meeting someone,” I said. “So two, please.”

She led the way, remarking, “It can’t be business, so it must be personal. A girl?”

“She is certainly female, and this has nothing to do with poker.”

“Well, my my.”

“Tell me how your heart is now broken.”

“Not mine, but I can think of a couple of waitresses who will be disappointed.”

“Katy, why don’t you tell me this stuff when it will do me some good?”

“Looking out for my staff,” she said.

“I think I won’t ask what you mean by that. Here she is. Katy, this is Ren.”

“You know everyone here, don’t you?” she said, sliding into a chair. “Hello, Katy.” Ren was wearing pants and a sleeveless green sweater that would have looked purely professional if they hadn’t been tight.

“Enjoy your breakfast,” said Katy and went back to her post.

“She thinks we’re involved, doesn’t she?”

“She’s a doll, but she has a limited imagination. And you are every bit as observant as I’d been led to believe.”

A waiter named Sam came up, looking like the dancer he probably was. I ordered a Santa Fe Breakfast Wrap and coffee. Ren looked at me. I said, “It’s all you, this time.” She nodded and ordered Frosted Flakes and tea.

The instant Sam walked away, she said, “What qualifies as better?”

“We argue about that a lot.”

“What are your criteria?”

“That’s part of the same argument.”

“Okay, who gives the green lights?”

“For meddlework? Usually—”

“Metal-work?”

“Meddlework. Two d’s. Our term for it. Like what I did to you yesterday. Meddling with someone’s head so you can change his actions. Usually no one has to approve, you just do it. If it’s something big, you’re expected to run it past the group first, and people usually do. When they don’t we scream at them a lot. There’s a group called Salt that sort of oversees the discussions but has no real power.”

Her stare was intense. Her mouth was set in a firm line, and her hands weren’t moving at all.

“What if you’re wrong,” she said. “What if you do something big, and it makes things worse?”

There is a curving boulevard that leads to a half-moon–shaped park. Buddha watches over the street at various points. The park is dominated by a curved colonnade that looks more Greek than Asian. Along the boulevard, in the park, on the shiny, glittering street, bodies of men and women, boys and girls, old people and infants, wait to be buried. They’ve all been murdered, but not here; there is no blood in the street; everything is neat and clean, except for the bullet holes. There are thousands upon thousands of dead, and they are all looking at me.

“That can happen,” I finally said. “It really, really sucks. We try not to do that.”

Ren

Trouble moved over his face, lining the edge of his brow and cheekbone like a felt-tip pen. It aged him and put depth under the handsome. It made me want to touch him, but of course he would know the sexy of vulnerable, and I wasn’t falling for that. I had questions.

“How long can you keep me here?”

“Do you want to go?”

“I mean how long can you keep me in Vegas, Liam in Phoenix, Jorge in New York, and RMMD paying for it all?”

“We have time.”

“How do you know? And how can you possibly track all the implications of what you do? You make it so I’m here because this is where you need me, but maybe Brian is my soul mate, and while I’m gone, he meets some other girl and they fall in love.”

“He’s not your soul mate.” Something fierce in Phil’s calm voice made me wonder whether it was soul mates or Brians he was so certain of.

“I meant as an example,” I said. “Maybe Jorge goes ahead and commits to a design without hearing from us first, and we lose the auditory prompts his own research demonstrates his users need, and a bunch of old people don’t get reminders to take their medicine?”

“Or maybe you join us and I show you how to get even more effective alarms written into the requirements, plus maybe shift Jorge’s priorities a little.”

“You can do that?”

“
You
can do that. You’re designing a monitoring and assistance device for Alzheimer’s patients. Maybe Jorge’s mom would be interested in joining the beta test pool.”

“That’s what you do? You get nonhuman corporate entities to make decisions on a human level?”

One of Phil’s eyebrows contracted in a way that, if both had done it, it would have been a grimace. Somehow it conveyed interest. “That’s one thing we can do. Sometimes.”

“Sometimes? What determines whether you can do it?”

“Lots of things. How drastic the change is, how well we know the Focus—the person we’re trying to meddle with, how good we are at meddling. No one is going to turn Rupert Murdoch into a liberal, but a few nudges might convince some British investigators to follow up on what he’s doing, if they’re inclined in that direction anyway.”

“That was you?”

“Someday I’ll tell you what we
didn’t
do. It would have been big. And ugly.”

“So if I want in, what do I do? Confirmation class? Dunk in the river? Prick my finger?”

“You come home with me.”

“And?”

“You come home with me and find out.”

Phil

Something closed up behind her face. It was as if she suspected the process would be unpleasant, and I didn’t want to tell her about it. Or maybe I just imagined that because it was and I didn’t. On the other hand, maybe she just thought I was hitting on her, and really, I wouldn’t blame me if I did. In an attempt to undo the damage, I said, “Not right now. You can take as much time as you want to think about it. And I’m not meddling with you.”

“I know you’re not,” she said. Then, “But I don’t know who you are.”

“Me, or the group?”

“You. Who are you?”

“That’s a hard question to answer. For anyone. How would you answer it?”

She nodded slowly. The food arrived, and Sam asked something about it, and I answered. We ate for a little while, and I drank coffee. Then she said, “What’s the most important thing you aren’t telling me?”

“Good question, but an easy one,” I said. “Because it’s the next thing we get to. The big one. The one you need to know before decid—”

“Just say it,” she said. “I hate prologues.”

I knew that. “The process involves giving you the memories of one of us—of someone who died. No, don’t ask how that’s done. Later. The point is, you’ll be getting the memories of a woman named Celeste. You’ll be what we call her Second, with all of her memories, in addition to all of your own. Which brings up the question of—”

“Who will I be?”

“Exactly.”

“What’s the answer?”

“There’s no way to know.”

She put her teacup down and looked at me. “Oh, well, that’s just peachy. It isn’t dangerous, but for all intents and purposes, I could just disappear?”

“Your memories won’t.”

“But I might.”

I nodded.

“And I should even consider this—why?”

“That whole thing about making a difference. Don’t tell me that isn’t important to you; I know better.”

She said slowly and distinctly, “Shit,” pronouncing it very carefully as if to make sure there would be no confusion.

I ate some more wrap and drank some coffee.

“Who was Celeste?”

I felt my face do something, and it was like I’d just let my eyes widen after flopping quads. Crap. The chances she’d missed it were zero, so I said, “She was someone who was very important to me.”

“You were lovers?”

“Only briefly in this lifetime.”

“Jesus Christ,” she said. “This lifetime? How many lifetimes have you had?”

“I do not,” I said, “wish to answer that question at this time.”

“I kind of think you should,” she said.

“You are risking what is left of this lifetime. You may, as you, gain others. You may not. There’s—”

“How old are you?”

I shook my head. “That’s an impossible question. This thing I’m asking you to do, where you get someone’s memories. I’ve done that before. So, do you mean the age of this body? The age of my personality? How long the original—”

“Stop it. How long have you been you?”

I inhaled and let my breath out slowly. And I wondered why I was getting upset. This was predictable; part of the normal process. Why was it getting to me this time? One plus zero is one. One plus one is two. Two plus one is three. Three plus two is five. Five plus three is eight. I got up to 610 and said, “I’ve been around for about two thousand years. What else would you like to know?”

“Two thousand years?”

“Me, as me, yes.”

“Do you have memories from before that?”

“Yes, all the way back to the beginning. But—”

“The beginning of what?”

No way around it. “The human race,” I said.

She stared at me.

I continued as if it were no big deal. “But the ones way back are, well, hazy. I can refresh any of them I want to.”

This was where part of her would be saying,
All right, just pretend you believe it, and go from there; worry about reality later.
“But you’ve been Phil for two thousand years.”

“Two thousand and six, yes.”

“Same personality?”

“Same basic personality. It alters some with the body you’re put in. My personality in a woman’s body is subtly different, and things like sexual orientation are, in part, wired into the brain, so that changes. But I’ve thought of myself as Phil for, yeah, about two thousand years.”

“You’ve been a woman?”

“Several times.”

“Why did you pick a man this time?”

“We don’t get to pick. The others pick for you. That’s why it’s me talking to you instead of Celeste.”

She sat there for a long time, first looking at me, then through me. Then she said, “Is it worth it?”

I discarded half a dozen glib answers, then realized that without them I didn’t know what to say. “That’s sort of an impossible question,” I said. “For me, it’s worth it, yeah. Even with—even with the times we blew it. Was it worth it for you to tell your boss he made Bill Gates look like Richard Stallman?”

Her face twisted up as she tried not to laugh. “You know about that, huh?”

I grinned at her, and she let herself smile. I was right about wanting to see it.

Then she said, “Meddlework. That’s what you call it?”

“Yes. What about it?”

“You do that to people, and change them, to make things better.”

“Yes.”

“I want to watch you do one,” she said.

Ren

“Look how stupid this is.” I held the passenger door open while Phil moved bags of clothes and boxes of paper from the front seat of his Prius. “Car manufacturers know even married people drive alone more frequently than with a passenger, but we still have cars with five seats and no storage. If this seat simply folded flat easily, think how much better it’d be for you.”

“But not for you,” he said with a flourish indicating the cleared seat.

“But you almost never have anyone else in here, so most of the time, it’d be better.”

Phil turned his oddly twisted eyebrows to me and I felt stupid. He’d rather have a regular passenger. Obviously.

“It’s just bad design,” I said.

He pointed his eyebrows at the windshield and pulled into traffic.

“The car, I mean,” I said. “How long were you and Celeste together?”

“A while.”

I stopped talking. It seemed prudent. We drove in the quiet through the visual noise of Las Vegas. It faded quickly into a suburban west that could have been Phoenix or Houston or here.

“I can show you the file I’m building for a guy named Acosta, but I’m still gathering switches, so there’s not much to watch yet.”

“Switches?”

“Information I can use to get past his defenses. Like your matzo ball soup. I’m still collecting them.”

“But you can show me one?”

His mouth smiled, but not his eyebrows. “Switches aren’t something you can see. They’re not actual toggles or whips. They’re metaphorical.”

“So you just remember them?”

“Sorta. We store them in the Garden.”

I just waited.

“The Garden is … um. We have forty thousand years of individual memories times two-hundred-odd minds, plus switches and other information. We have to keep it somewhere. The Garden is what we call that somewhere.”