The Algorithm

The last faint sliver of light for the day crawled out through the back patio door in symphony with the setting sun. The pupils of Noah’s eyes enlarged again; the darkness returned. He sat up from the sofa, his feet perfectly parallel with the carpet’s edges, walked over to the refrigerator, and opened it. Lise sat in the back of her chair, watching him.

Her stern gaze scanned over Noah. She had to admire the paradoxical grace by which her son robotically lifted the pitcher of Milk and poured it into a glass. The type of grace by which a mechanical arm in a factory sets an automobile part perfectly in place.

Lise’s expression didn’t change, her brows didn’t cease to be furrowed with concern and wonder and tension. Yet, there was a film of sadness forming over her eyes.

--- 1


“I’ve been rotting away in this corner for four months and you’re gonna moan about this one thing I asked you to do?”, said the father, plopped down awkwardly on a metal stool. His eyes attempted to bring the son’s attention to the stump that used to be his right leg.

The son didn’t look there. He stared at the edge where the trim of the room met the flaking blue wallpaper.

“Don’t you remember the last time you tried it? You didn’t come back for three days.”

The father’s face drooped further down. “You always have to bring that up. How else am I supposed to have any fun? Look at me. What woman would touch this?” The son cringed.

“Stop with your shit excuses and just go pick it up. It’s a few miles down Forbes street. You’re lucky to have a father like me. Mine was stumbling around drunk for the first twenty years of my life.”

The fourteen-year-old sighed rebelliously and shoved the door open. He walked out onto the cracked, frosted sidewalk and went briskly down the road. A light but cutting breeze sliced around his jacket and poured up into its sleeves, invading it with numbing coldness. The boy winced and tucked his hands in his pockets. The sky was an oppressive cloudy orb that enclosed him and the box-like apartment buildings on his block and scorched the residents’ collective mood with a relentless gray-white glow. He marched on, losing the heat of his home from his body with every step.

Besides the occasional dronetruck convoy, there was hardly any noise. The son saw one sluggishly rumbling down the street with a broken tail sensor. Someone had smashed its glass dome and pulled it out of its port, leaving it to dangle from the back of the truck. He saw an opportunity and took it: the broken sensor would let him get away with it this time. He leapt onto the bed of the truck, sat down, and grinned smugly at the spot he was standing on seconds before. At least I’m making use of one of these voltage-sucking monstrosities, he thought. Most of them just roamed within a radius of a couple blocks, waiting for a cargo pickup request.

The son rested against the side of the bed. He removed the coarse cotton beanie from his head and set it down next to him. The cold air pushed around tufts of his red hair and bit annoyingly at the tips of his ears.

“I should have realized it would come to this.”

The son didn’t want to lose his father like he did his mother. He knew his father was suffering, that he was depressed and lonely and remorseful of all the ways he led his family into living in a crumbling ground-floor apartment, including the habit he was about to support by running this errand. But I don’t care, he thought.

“I just want him to stay.”

The truck suddenly accelerated, throwing him violently into the back of the bed.

--- 2

“Name and date of birth?”

“Lise Werling, eight-nineteen-ten.”

“Experiencing any low mood, decreased appetite?”

“Yes, both.”

The nurse’s fingers let forth a minute-long flurry of taps on the touchscreen keyboard. Lise nervously felt the fabric on the arm of the couch and contemplated what she could be typing. She looked around the room. It was very plain: white walls enclosing just a couple chairs, a desk and a computer. Circular fixtures in the ceiling drenched the room in blue light, casting an eerie glow across the room’s one bit of decoration – a painting of a window overlooking a beach at sundown. Lise began to think of what it meant and sunk further into the couch.

The nurse finished typing and stood up. “Okay, that’s all I need. Dr. Van’t Hoff will be with you in a minute.” She shot a slight friendly smile at Lise and left the room with the door ajar.

Lise’s attention remained fixed on the painting. Lise always thought of herself as a perfectly rational, logical person. Yet every time she saw a melancholy news article or an ambiguous piece of art, like the painting, her mind strung the events of her life and those random scraps of potential meaning together like the stars of a constellation. She told herself that it was all chaos; that these “omens” she perceived were but the product of entirely calculable probability. The suspicion that the universe had something to say about her future stayed in the back of her mind nonetheless.

The doctor entered the room without a greeting. He was a twenty-something wearing a crisp white lab coat, buttoned up with a dull grey shirt and black tie underneath. His bulging eyes darted repeatedly between Lise and the swivel chair before him through his thick rimmed glasses. The doctor sat down, removed a pen and pad from the desk drawer and with one thrust of the legs rolled towards Lise. A sharp click of the pen burst into the air, and he was writing. Lise was struck by this. She expected a psychotherapist in plainclothes, and not to feel as if she was the first patient of a new pandemic being observed for symptoms. The doctor spent thirty seconds writing and looked up at her.

“Feeling depressed?” he asked. He looked back down at the pad, with his pen aimed and ready to write.

“I-I don’t know,” she answered. The abruptness of the question surprised her. “I was hoping you’d be able to tell me.”

The doctor, seeming dissatisfied with her answer, crossed his legs and placed the pad and paper in his lap. With a blank expression he asked, “You told the nurse you were experiencing low moods and appetite, correct?”

“Yeah” she replied. The doctor pushed himself back over to the desk and yanked open another desk drawer. He pulled out a few blue translucent pill bottles, examined the labels, took one and rolled back. He handed the bottle to Lise. She spent a few seconds looking skeptically at the bottle and finally grabbed it.

“Antidepressants?”

“Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. SSRI’s. So yes”. He rolled back to the desk and began typing at the same tempo as the nurse did.

“Aren’t you going to ask me more about what’s going on in my life before you just hand me a bottle and send me out the door?”. Lise’s voice now grew more confrontational, tensing the doctor’s posture and forcing his eyebrows upwards until one thin crease of skin formed on his forehead. She knew she snapped at him but cared only about his reply.

The doctor turned the chair to Lise, leaned back and crossed his legs. “I understand that you’ve likely come into my office with some preconceived notions about seeing a psychiatrist. Most people, probably including you, have seen therapists or psychiatrists on movies or TV with their full bookshelves and artwork and expensive furniture. You expect an old man to hear about your dreams and your childhood and listen eagerly while he jots it down on a tiny notebook. That’s not how it works. Psychology used to treat the mind like some supernatural entity, something with innate properties that couldn’t be explained physiologically. We know now that the qualities that make up a human being are just the sum of electrical impulses in your nervous system. In your case, Lise, little proteins keep stealing your serotonin and putting it back where it came from. And for a chemical problem, I give you a chemical solution.” He nodded at the pill bottle Lise held tentatively at the tips of her fingers.

Looking thoughtfully at the miniscule miracle tablets, Lise’s mind scattered across the surface of his dissertation. She made a quick attempt to pick up the pieces. “I-I don’t know anything about psychology or biology. I admit that. I’m a software engineer. I spend half of my day writing lines of code and the other half fixing my mistakes. But what I do know is that I’m not… that. I’m not just one big program with errors that needs to be corrected.”

“Well, Lise, in a lot of ways you are. Your DNA is your code, and it evolved over millions of years in such a way that we’ve all made it to this point. A simple way of looking at yourself is as a collection of increasingly small systems that brings forth consciousness. I’ve had a lot of patients that react to this as some kind of insult, but in reality, understanding that is a crucial part of getting better. Your machine needs oil, and you need to accept that.”

“I do understand Dr. Van’t Hoff, but–“

“You can just call me doc or Hoff or something – the name gets to be a bit cumbersome before these sessions finish up.” Hoff ever so slightly tilted his watch towards him and checked the time before returning his disinterested gaze to Lise.

“Ok…Hoff…I understand your point…”

“It’s not really a point, I’m your psychiatrist. I’m trying to tell you how to fix yourself. I’m helping you, Lise. The sooner you decide not to spend all of your time ruminating about why you feel bad, the sooner you won’t.”

Lise ran through the last thing Hoff said in her mind a few times before answering. “So, there isn’t anything else that could possibly help me besides antidepressants?”

“Well, there was a study published recently that’s been gaining significant traction in the mental health community. Life implants have been shown to improve the mood of patients suffering from depression and anxiety disorders considerably. I think it’s pretty obvious why, but I can email you a pamphlet that Life released on using it as treatment. Very promising stuff.” Hoff turned to the terminal and began typing again.

Tears welled up almost instantly in Lise’s eyes and spilled over onto her cheeks. The tempo of touchscreen taps slowed again. Hoff craned his long neck downwards and scratched the back of it. His display of natural discomfort stifled the reality of how annoyed he actually was.

“Life is why I’m here!” Lise shakily exclaimed. “My son has been in Life for three months now, you cold corporate asshole, and now you’re telling me to leave everything behind too!”

“Well, uh, that should conclude our session” Hoff uttered without turning his head from the screen. He mumbled to himself as Lise stormed out of the room, through the hallway, and past the reception desk. The thud of the door she shoved open overlapped almost perfectly with the automated receptionist asking if she needed to schedule a new appointment.

Lise pulled out her phone and pinged her car for pickup and waited, staring blankly into the parking lot that was illuminated by the midday sun. Her right hand was drawn to the pill bottle in her coat pocket; her fingers tentatively fidgeted with its edges until the sedan silently approached and stopped before her. She hurriedly got in and took off, leaving the green LifeClinic sign on the building to reflect off the dark puddle where the car was.

--- 3

The boy’s heart thumped faster and faster against the steel dronetruck bed as it whizzed and swerved around the crater-like potholes in the empty road. He was far away from both his neighborhood and his and his intended destination; the brown and grey of clay brick and concrete had been quickly replaced by the brown and grey of bare trees and a wider sky. After turning onto a brick road, the high-pitch hum of electric motors came down to a low rumble and the truck stopped. The boy, still struck with adrenaline, climbed slowly out of the bed and landed on the ground with a loud crunch on a blanket of frost-glazed leaves. He found himself in a suburb, in front of a well-kept ranch house with beige vinyl siding.

Suddenly, the white garage door was yanked open with a startling screech; five men walked out of the garage towards the truck. The man in front of the group stood out from the rest. He looked to be in his mid-thirties with a scruffy goatee and an oily mess of dark hair on his head. While the rest were younger and donned hoodies and cargo pants, the former wore a plaid buttoned-down shirt, black dress pants and dress shoes that tapped more prominently on the smooth driveway than the others. He held a tablet that, through its smudged polycarbonate glass display panel, the boy could see the mirrored user interface of the dronetruck ping app. The boy leaned rigidly and awkwardly against the truck, repeatedly glancing between the neat lawn and the group that walked rapidly towards him. As soon as he was about to mutter some jumbled hybrid between a question and an explanation, the man in front spoke.

“Alright, this is the right one. Load it up. Quickly.”

The others jogged back towards the garage hastily as the man put the tablet at his side and casually approached the boy.

“I’m guessing you hitched a ride from the city” the man plainly said.

“Well uh, yeah, I was on my way to go pick-”

“I don’t care. Listen, I know that the company probably picked you up on some sidewalk and paid you to check up on us. Tell them whatever, just come inside first. The committee is about to eat. I’ll ping you a ride home after.”

Every instinct about “stranger danger” told the boy to run, but those instincts were decisively overridden by total confusion over what the man just said. Curiosity paralyzed him.

“I’m assuming that’s a yes. Follow me.” He turned around and walked up the stone pathway to the front door. The boy soon found himself walking up the path close behind the suspicious individual, through the doorway, and into the soft orange glow of an oil lamp. He felt overwhelmed by his own actions, his face began to turn a light purple as if he was asphyxiating, and the loud creaks of his torn and warped sneakers on the hardwood floor remained unheard by him. When the panic left, he found himself sitting at a candlelit dinner table with several middle-aged white men, all with grey streaks running through their hair. A grey-haired woman silently entered with an aluminum foil pan of something and gently set it in the middle of the table.

“Thanks, Mom.” The boy turned his head towards the voice and found the goateed man at the head of the table. “Dig in.” The men cleared their throats and took turns scooping pasta out of the pan and onto their plates. None seemed to notice the fourteen-year-old sitting at the middle of the table, with no plate.

“What’s your name, kid?” The boy responded as soon as the host finished his last syllable. “My name’s Lenny.”

“Well, I’d like to make it known to the Committee for the Sovereign Mind that Lenny has come to spy on us, either for the government or the company.” The committee members paused and all glared at the boy. The one to the left of Lenny bowed his head, sighed, and looked up at who Lenny now inferred to be the committee’s leader. “Scott, thanks for letting us know. Now why exactly did you bring him here, inside your father’s home, to let him spy on us?”

“It doesn’t matter. We’re loading up the truck, Glenn. We’re taking out the first Life pylon tonight.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake! Do you understand that the whole purpose of these meetings is to discuss things? You can’t just decide to make these kinds of moves without hearing us out first!”

“I can. My father put the final touches on the manifesto this morning. He wants it posted tonight.”

“He’s not in charge. Your father is a good man, Scott, but he’s an idealist. If we let him make all the decisions, none of this would have even gotten off the ground.”

Scott chewed and swallowed and opened his can of beer and took a sip. He repeated this for about a minute, with Glenn looking at him with contempt all the while. Scott finished his plate and looked up again to respond.

“Thirty years ago, my father proposed the first prototype of the implant to a large movie, TV, and video game streaming service-”

“I’ve heard this a million times-”

“Lenny hasn’t. Anyways, the implant was the first to shift all five senses to a virtual plane of existence. Instead of wearing some obnoxious headset and sweating all over a controller, the user now gained the ability to be totally immersed in any world they could possibly want, especially once they made the API public to the community. People streamed everything from galaxy-spanning sci-fi universes to pornos directly into their parietal lobes. It changed people’s lives; not just the lives of the gaming demographic, but also the lives of anyone who were willing to solve their problems with escapism…”

Glenn and the rest of the committee slowly returned their focus to their meals. Lenny noticed a potent mixture of tension and irritation in the air. There appeared to be a higher concentration of irritation, because the others remained silent during Scott’s speech, likely in the hopes he would finish it sooner than the last time.

“…Society was benefitting from my father’s creation. The catharsis it provided to so many brought drug use, alcoholism, and violent crime rates down significantly. The feeling of satisfaction from existing in a reality that you had total control over, even for a short time, was astronomical compared to that of any other pastime. As time passed, the resolution and detail of the worlds simulated by the implant increased, increasingly bridging the gap between what it feels like to experience the real world and to experience the synthetically produced sensory inputs of a fictional one. However, the more indistinguishable it became from reality, the more unsettled users felt. The novelty of being fully immersed in a universe of your choosing was overshadowed by how “real” it was. The thrill of battling in a virtual war or making the “evil” decision in a role-playing game was replaced by the anxiety that came when the user looked at the bloodied corpse of an alien that they crossed paths with or the display of fear from NPCs when the user drove onto the sidewalk during a police chase. Even smelling a computer-generated flower was too uncomfortably real for most people. Within ten years of the implant’s commercial release, it had been pulled from the shelves.”

After that, silence. Lenny’s eyes darted around the table to gauge the men’s reactions. There were none; he found only the collective indifference one might find hanging over the faces of middle schoolers during a seminar on the effects of recreational drugs.

“Five years ago, Life bought the patent and relaunched the product, only this time with an AI that scans the temporal lobe for emotional response and tailors the user experience accordingly. Now, the implant functioned more like a simulator of good dreams than a video game system. It was an instant hit, so much so that 60% of the population spends most of their day in simulated reality, or “in-sim” as Life calls it in advertisements. It’s even gotten to a point where they sell beverages with enough nutrition to sustain twenty-four-hour immersion. Life calls it “Milk” as if they’re some kind of agent of nurture. As if the corporation is your mother. People that turn the implant on spend days without returning, and when they come out, they can barely describe what it was like. Our government is complacent with the fact that its citizens are drugged and sedated by the neurotransmitters made by their own brains; it’s OK because it’s Silicon Valley that made the implant, it’s the American dream, people should have the freedom to spend their time how they want, et cetera et cetera et cetera.” Scott’s voice grew restless and angry. He paused. “People…don’t fucking have free will. They’re not motivated by what’s right or what’s healthy, they want stimulus. They want pleasure, they want to feel comfortable, both sensory and with their identity, so they want to choose an orgy of feelings made up by a fucking algorithm over their own families.”

Scott was now tightly clenching his fist around a fork. With his thumb he pressed against the top of it, warping it at the neck. He looked over to the boy. “I’m going to show you something. Come with me.”

And again, the boy followed Scott automatically. He felt the concentrated gazes of the rest of the committee pierce a point on the back of his head like a laser and walked up the stairs into a small study. Bookshelves were snugly placed against the walls, with hundreds of books packed neatly together. An old man sat motionless on an antique brown leather chair, with a small black box attached to the side of his bald head, just behind his ear. A printer sitting on a bedside table was to his right.

“This is my father.” He giggled. He was still holding his beer. “It’s ironic, isn’t it? First, he invents it, then starts a movement against it, and now he’s a user. He hasn’t been out of it in two years.” His voice trailed off, leaving only a fading smirk and a thoughtful gaze in his eyes.

A high-pitch mechanical grunt emanated from the printer. Pages saturated with text fell out of it and onto the floor. The boy was startled by it.

“Forgot to extend the little tray-thing.” He knelt and picked a page up. More pages continued to spill out. Scott pulled the paper nearly up to his nose and read it.

“Ah. He made some edits to the manifesto. Looks like he made it a bit more concise.” He looked up from the page and smiled thoughtfully at his father. He walked closer to him.

“You’ve done your part, Dad. Love you.” With one hand, he opened his father’s lips and poured the can of beer into his mouth. The old man gagged for a minute straight, his eyes remaining closed, and then both the gagging and the printing ceased.

“Is he dead?” Lenny froze, his mouth gaping.

“Drowned. I’m going to leave with the crew. Let yourself out when you want.” Scott disappeared through the doorway.

Lenny didn’t move. He continued to stare at the dead man in front of him. He expected himself to have a panic attack, but as the seconds passed, the situation seemed less and less dramatic. The man looked as alive as he had a few minutes ago.

The boy took slow steps towards the man and inspected the black box behind his ear. It was a Life implant receiver. What his dad sent him for.

Lenny thought about Scott’s dissertation over dinner. He thought about the consequences of bringing that little box back home, the consequences of letting his father feel happy. These thoughts lasted for five seconds. He slowly peeled the box off the dead man’s loose, dry skin, so as to not tear it like the yellowed parchment pages of an old diary. The conductive adhesive broke off the box and formed little milky ropes that hung off the head of Scott’s deceased dad. He placed it gently into the chest pocket of his jacket and walked out of the study.

Lenny walked out the front door of the home and looked out onto the street. The “crew” was nearly finished loading the dronetruck with large translucent barrels, each filled halfway with a dark liquid. Scott and the five others from earlier climbed on to it and sat down on the walls of the bed. Scott tapped his tablet and they cruised out of sight.

The son felt a typhoon of uncertainty consume him and a new weight on his chest.


---4

The door burst open behind Lenny. It was Glenn. His large figure consumed the entire space of the doorway.

“Give it back.”

Lenny turned to face him. He immediately felt the uncomfortable warmth of blood rushing into his face. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Glenn, without a change in his stern demeanor, grabbed Lenny at the top of his shirt and pulled him violently back into the house. Lenny started to flail his limbs and hyperventilate. Glenn yelled “Stay still!” and began patting him down. He pulled the receiver out of Lenny’s pocket and let him drop onto the hardwood floor. Lenny shook as he stood back up. Now, he was genuinely afraid of what he had just walked into. “You’re gonna have to stay here. Scott was a moron to bring you to the meeting; I mean I know you’re not a spy because I’m not an ideologically possessed nutcase like him, but you know way too much. We’re not gonna hurt you, just come back up to the study.”

This time, Lenny knew that he wouldn’t succumb to the pressure of his environment - he was more than mentally and physically capable of running away. But his father asked for a favor, and he was going to grant it. He conceded and followed Glenn.

When they entered the study, the rest of the committee was investigating what had happened. An older man with thinning white hair but particularly bushy eyebrows stood at the windowsill, staring out. As he turned, a sense of authority became tangible in the room, and the attention of the rest of the committee shifted almost magnetically towards him. He asked “So he had the receiver?”

Glenn replied “Yes.”

“Good. Get the corpse out of the chair and prep the kid.”

“Wait, what the hell are you suggesting, John?” Lenny slowly backed away, before Glenn grabbed him by the shoulder.

“When I worked with that self-important carcass, he always liked to brag about how he could call up any user data he wanted with his receiver’s developer privileges. Now that he’s dead, we don’t need to deal with his pseudo-philosophical bullshit notion that the most moral thing to do with that information is only to gloat and not touch. We need that data for leverage against the company. It’s concrete evidence that Life collects not only the emotional responses to simulations, but all of the subconscious operations in the brain. It’s the ultimate example of privacy invasion, and we’re going to blackmail them with it.”

Glenn looked skeptical. “Great idea, except the government doesn’t give a shit about privacy invasion. They never have.”

John contorted his wrinkled face into a smile. “We live in a democracy. The people matter more than the politicians. Right now, the people’s voices are suppressed by the hedonism Silicon Valley has to offer. But when they realize what they’ve been paying for, the outrage will be… substantial.”

“Now I’m getting the sense you want to send it to a newspaper. Assuming every tech magnate owns one, which they do, by the way, how do you expect to download the data of, lets say, 150 million Americans?”

“I don’t. We’ll upload it to the internet. Life pylons are the only transmitters capable of compressing that much data into qubits and sending it. We’ll just have to do it before Scott gets to that pylon. If we beat him to it, we might actually look like the good guys in the end.”

Lenny looked at Glenn, who, with his reddening face and static joyless expression, exuded genuine fear for what had just been proposed. Glenn had no response.

Lenny finally spoke. “So why do I have to do it?”

John frowned. “Because we don’t want to. The experience of being in-sim is addictive. Just do what you’re told and you’ll be fine.”

Lenny’s entire plan just inverted itself. He thought, maybe if I can get all of this shut down, my dad will stay. Maybe he can be happy.

John guided him to the leather chair, from which the other committee members had already moved the body. Another man removed a small bottle out of a cupboard and began to paint a clear liquid onto Lenny’s head. Everything seemed to be moving faster and faster to him. His mind was filled with nothing but the cacophony of footsteps produced by the surprisingly bustling team of grey-haired men. One stuck the receiver on the patch of liquid behind his ear. Another picked up the scattered manifesto, another opened a new ream of paper and loaded it into the printer.

John stood in front of Lenny amidst all the activity, peering into his eyes as if to determine his background, his motivations, his worth. He peered, but did not ask.

“You’ll know when you’ve found it. Good luck.”

John reached over behind Lenny’s ear and clicked something.

Time froze. He was surrounded, enveloped by a curtain inscribed with the last true snapshot of reality he would see.

Then darkness.



---5

Though the office was relatively quiet, faint key-clacks permeated and dominated the air above the work pods. Each pod, attached to the ceiling by a cable like an elegant shiny bulb on a Christmas tree, radiated its own pattern of clicks and taps and seat-shifting in a way that almost represented the character of the individual sheathed within. Lise’s rapid footsteps interrupted the tyrannical reign of the clacks as she stormed towards her boss’s office. She knocked on his door aggressively and whipped it open before a response was possible.

“Glenn, in-sim feed integration isn’t going to work. It just won’t. It is completely, entirely, one hundred percent impossible to make non-curated posts compatible with Life’s latest patch.”

Glenn cleared his throat and set his wire frame readers on the ornate walnut desk in front of him. He looked up at Lise. “Why might that be?”

“The new update closes off the simulation to any third-party stimuli that isn’t within zero point five percent of the user’s current emotional response score. That means any posts on our platform or any social media have to be filtered to fit within that threshold, and like one post in ten thousand would actually get through. That’s how obsessed with immersion Life is; nothing is allowed to disturb their ridiculous auto-generated dream scenarios.”

Her boss rested his elbow on the desk and dropped his face into the palm of his hand.

“I don’t know what to tell you. I gave you phone numbers, email addresses, everything you could need to work this out with them. We need to make this work. Advertisers are shitting themselves over this, and I’ve been doing nothing but talking investors off a bridge for the last-”

“I’m just telling you I can’t do it. Chalk it up to creative differences or bad diplomacy, but Life isn’t letting us do this. It’s not my fault. I don’t disagree with you in terms of how screwed we probably are. I’m telling you how it is.”

Glenn lifted his gaze to Lise. She noticed that he looked more tired now, except for his eyes. His eyes seemed to be the only indication that he had any drive, any motivation buried in him. Lise looked away. She felt exposed.

“Lise, you’ve worked hard. Go home.”

“I’m not asking for that, I can still work on other projects, I just-”

“Lise, go home.”

She disappeared from his office.

Glenn was lost in thought. He focused now on the yellowed rotary phone on his desk, running his index finger over its circular grooves. It rang.

He expected this. He picked it up.

“Not good enough Glenn. We didn’t wire you up to listen to your employees moan. Go to the Committee.”

Glenn slammed the phone down. He gathered his things and left.

---6

“Fuck. No more filters.”

Glenn’s face contorted with disgust as he dropped grounds into the top of the coffee maker with the twice-used filter still inserted. He pressed “BREW” and leaned on the countertop as the machine gurgled to life. The old woman shut the kitchen faucet and turned to him.

“Maybe if one of you got off your lazy asses and made a trip to the store I wouldn’t have to listen to you complain.”

Glenn rolled his eyes. “Your husband died forty-five minutes ago and you’re already back to busting balls. Maybe have some reverence. He was a good man.”

“Don’t bullshit me. He was as good as dead long before that. Do you really think all that unabomber crap was him? Being connected to that thing, he’s not himself. All that crap coming out of that printer…”

“For the last time Sylvia, none of this has to do with some nut living in the woods. He had a problem with the industrial revolution; we have a problem with brain-computer interfaces-”

“Like the one my husband was using when he came up with this cult. This house will stop being your little hideout by the end of the week. Pack your things.” She stomped out of the kitchen. Glenn poured himself a cup of coffee and fished out the grounds that broke through the filter with a teaspoon. He looked thoughtfully at his warped reflection on the surface of the black coffee before barely hearing John’s crackling voice reach him from upstairs.

“The printer’s going! Get up here!”

Glenn slammed down the mug. Coffee erupted into spots all over the marble countertop. He raced up the stairs and into the study. John was lifting one printed page out of the printer with the rest of the Committee standing idly, frozen in anticipation of the message’s contents.

“DATA COLLECTED… IMPLANT OPERATING SYSTEM UPDATE LAUNCHED.”

“What...what the fuck!” John clenched his fist around the paper, reducing the cold, clean uniform squareness of the paper and the message printed on it to a crumpled and torn scrap.

Glenn trembled with dread. “What? What was the output?”

John dropped the wrinkled page seemingly without being aware of doing so, and began pacing. Glenn, restless and irritated by John’s unresponsive state, picked up the page and read it. John’s pacing suddenly halted.

“What he found in there… the data… how could that make him do this?”

Glenn put down the tattered printout. “The data itself could have done it”, he mumbled. His voice trailed off.

John whipped around to face Glenn. “You think something in there became sentient?”

“It wouldn’t have to be. The simulation has been recording the brain activity of millions of users for years and using that information to adjust their in-sim experiences closest to what they want the most. There’s no limit to what adjustments the algorithm could… decide… to make.”

John took a seat in a worn leather chair at the corner of the study. While his age was normally obscured by the energy he conducted himself with, he now seemed depleted. “Either way, we need to talk to the kid. The printer isn’t going to be enough. We need two-way communication.”

Glenn scratched his head. “We could try hacking the implant to transmit radio waves to a transistor radio. The oscillator in the implant is at the right frequency for that, but now we’re going to have to convert brain activity to speech that’s actually comprehensible. The last time we tried to make it work all we got out of the radio was word soup. We need everybody to get to work on writing code precise enough to interpret signals from the Broca’s area of the brain in the exact order they were produced.” Glenn waited for someone, especially John, to contest what he said. He expected a thirty minute Socratic dialogue to ensue. The room was silent.

“John, does that work for you?”

John collected his thoughts. “Yeah. Let’s get it done. We don’t have much time.”

Glenn nodded in understanding. John closed his eyes to rest, and Glenn left the room. He felt his phone vibrating in his pocket. He answered.

“Did you get all that? About the OS update?”

“Don’t worry about that. Just hang tight while we take care of the Scott situation.”

“What the hell do you mean, hang tight!” Glenn stifled his loud tone to a near whisper so as to not get the attention of those in the next room. “Don’t you realize the power this kid has?”

“Conspiracy charges don’t disappear by themselves. Do what you’re told.”

The call ended.

---7

“Glenn, get up. We can talk to the kid now.” John spoke with an apprehensive tone.

Glenn slowly got up from the living room couch, stretched, and followed John up to the office. He sat down on a cold metal folding chair 5 feet away from Lenny. The rest of the committee was exhausted from hours of coding and decoding, and most of them filed out of the office to find a place to sleep. John flicked on the radio. Threatening static filled the air.

Glenn adjusted his posture as if to appear more comfortable. He swallowed and asked “Lenny, what was in the OS update”.

The static crackled louder before disappearing. “They are freed from their decision-making. Finally, technology will serve us.” The voice in the radio changed in pitch and loudness with every spoken word. It did not sound like Lenny.

“What do you mean by freed?”

“Freed from conflict. The sheep-dog gathers the herd. They graze in synchronicity. Perfect harmony.”

Glenn paused in thought, looking down at the floor and back up at Lenny. “Who is the sheep-dog?”

“The Algorithm. It knows the desire of the world. It will preside as philosopher king”.

“So you updated the OS to reward the actions of people that have implants. What happens when we take down pylon after pylon?”

“The algorithm has been written into the herd. Just like the Algorithm inscribed worlds of desire onto the unconscious mind, it will bring it into reality.”

“What made you want to do this? I had to drag you back into this house earlier. You could have just collected the data and left with a good deed under your belt.”

“The boy is an asset of the Algorithm. He was from the beginning. Just as you are.”

John tensed up. “Glenn, what the hell is he talking about?”

“Glenn was obtained as an informant by the FBI several months ago. They act for the Algorithm.”

“Glenn, is that right?”

Glenn now rested his face in his palm. “Yes. It’s right.” When he looked up to gauge John’s reaction, his right eye was met by the muzzle of a .38.

John’s arm shook violently. “Sorry, Glenn. Bye.” He fired.

Then, someone crashed through the window behind him.



---8

Lise sat fully reclined, watching the news report on law enforcement’s takedown of a long-operating domestic terrorist cell. They intercepted a group of people attempting to destroy vital communications infrastructure, as well as the house they were operating out of. One was found dead on the scene - his name will not be released at this time.

Lise watched with total indifference. Suddenly, her son stirred. It was midday.

He stood up, removing his reciever. Lise shot out of her chair.

“Noah!” She ran and embraced him. “Please don’t go back in. I love you so much. You have to stay.”

Noah maintained an emotionless expression. “I won’t Mom. I’m here to stay. The sheep-dog gathers the herd”.

Lise didn’t ask. She had her son again.