Nat studied Dana as she spoke. Dana’s face had returned to its usual calm acceptance, but her momentary loss of composure had caught Nat’s attention. She’d never seen that in a group facilitator before. The one time she heard a facilitator in rehab recount his past, it was a guy who was so practiced at it that his story sounded like part of a sales pitch. It made her curious: What had Dana done that she felt so guilty about?
As prisms with larger pads became available, data brokers began offering personal research services for people who wanted to learn about the other paths their lives might have taken. This was a much riskier venture than selling news from other branches, for a couple reasons. First, it might take years before the divergences had grown large enough to be interesting, and the brokers had to stockpile prisms, activating them but not exchanging any information, saving their pads for use later. Second, it required a higher level of cooperation between the parallel versions of the company. If customer Jill wanted to know about her parallel selves, several versions of the company would have to do research in their branches, but Jill could only pay the version in her branch; there was no way for money to be shared across branches. The hope was that cross-branch cooperation would enable every version of a company to get paying customers in their branch, and over time this would work to everyone’s advantage: a form of reciprocal altruism between all of the company’s parallel versions.
Predictably, some individuals became depressed after learning that their parallel selves had enjoyed successes that they themselves hadn’t. For a time there was concern that these private queries would gain a reputation as a product that made buyers unhappy. However, most people decided that they liked more things about their life than they did about their parallel selves’ lives, and so concluded that they had made the right decisions. While this was likely just confirmation bias, it was common enough that personal research services remained a profitable business for data brokers.
Some people avoided the data brokers entirely, afraid of what they might learn, while others became obsessed with them. There were married couples where one person fell into the former category while the other fell into the latter, which often led to divorce. Data brokers made various attempts to expand their customer base, but rarely met with success. The product that was most successful at winning over naysayers was one aimed at those who had lost a loved one: the data brokers would find a branch where the person was still alive and forward their social-media updates, so the bereaved could see the life their loved one might have lived. This practice only solidified the most common criticism offered by pundits: that data brokers were promoting unhealthy behavior in their customers.
Nat expected that Morrow would be satisfied for a while given the success of his plan with Mrs. Oehlsen. The woman had transferred some money into a dummy account a couple weeks ago, and her parallel self had bought the story about confusion from the pain meds. Now that Mrs. Oehlsen had passed away, everything was wrapped up tidily. But instead of being content with that, Morrow now seemed more eager than ever for a bigger score.
They were in the office at SelfTalk eating tacos that Morrow had brought from a food truck two blocks away when he raised the topic. “Where are we with Lyle?” he asked.
“I’m making progress,” said Nat. “I can tell he’s thinking that he’d be happier without a prism.”
Morrow finished his taco and drained his can of soda. “We can’t just sit around waiting for him to decide to give up his prism.”
Nat frowned at him. “‘Just sit around’? You think that’s what I’ve been doing?”
He waved a hand at her. “Take it easy, I didn’t mean anything by it. But it’s no good for us if he hangs on to that prism for years. We need to make him want to get rid of it.”
“I know, and that’s exactly what I’ve been working on.”
“I was thinking about something more concrete.”
“Like what?”
“I know a guy, he works with a crew doing identity theft. I could ask him to target Lyle, ruin his credit. After that, Lyle really won’t want to hear about how well his paraself is doing.”
Nat grimaced. “Is that the sort of thing we’re doing now?”
He shrugged. “If there were a way to make Lyle’s parallel life look better, I’d be fine with that, but that’s not an option. The only thing we can do is make his life here look worse.”
A plea based on squeamishness wouldn’t sway Morrow; she needed a more pragmatic argument. “You don’t want to make him so miserable that he holds on to the prism as his only connection to a happy life.”
That seemed to work. “You’ve got a point there,” he admitted.
“Give me a few more meetings before you do that.”
Morrow crumpled up his paper food tray and empty soda can and tossed them into the wastebasket. “All right, we’ll try it your way for a while longer. But you’ve got to speed things up.”
She nodded. “I have an idea.”
Dana was a little surprised when Nat announced to the group that she had sold her prism; in previous meetings she hadn’t gotten the feeling that Nat was ready to make the leap, although she knew it wasn’t always possible to anticipate these things. Nat seemed to be happy with her decision, but that was typical; everyone felt good when they first quit. She did notice that Nat very subtly checked Lyle’s reaction to her announcement, something that Dana had seen her doing before. It didn’t appear that Nat’s interest was romantic, or if it was, she wasn’t pursuing it, maybe so as to not complicate things while she worked on her own issues.
At the next meeting Nat talked for longer than usual, describing the ways she felt her attitude had improved since giving up the prism. While she wasn’t overly effusive, Dana was a little concerned that she might have unrealistic expectations and was setting herself up for a fall. Kevin expressed a similar sentiment, somewhat indelicately, and he seemed to be motivated more by envy than compassion; he’d been in the group much longer than Nat, and in all that time had made only modest progress. Fortunately, Nat didn’t become defensive; she said that she understood that getting rid of her prism hadn’t magically solved all the problems in her life. Then the group spent the rest of the meeting focusing on Kevin and what he’d been going through in the last week, without Dana having to steer them at all.
She was feeling pretty pleased about both the group and herself afterward, but her good mood didn’t last long. She had just taken the coffeemaker back to the church kitchen and was locking up the meeting room when Vinessa showed up.
“Hey Dana.”
“Vinessa? What are you doing here?”
“I looked for you at your office,” Vinessa explained, “but you weren’t there, so I figured I’d try here.”
“What’s up?”
“It’s about the money.”
Of course it was; Vinessa had decided to go back to school and had asked Dana for help with the tuition. “What about it?”
“I need it now. The enrollment period is closing this week.”
“This week? The last time we talked about this, you were saying this fall.”
“Yeah, I know, but I decided that the sooner I started, the better. So can you get me the money this week?”
Dana hesitated, thinking about how she would have to rearrange her budget.