“I was just upstairs saying hello to my father. Geddy was going to introduce us, but he’s busy in the kitchen. You’re going through his old stuff?”
She nodded, a decisive bob of her head. “Geddy asked me to. To set aside anything I think is important and maybe organize it a little bit. He wants to take the best stuff back home. He’ll go through it himself, of course. I just think he wanted me to see what he left here. Like, pieces of his life before he knew me.”
I saw what she had selected and set aside on a yellow blanket thrown over the dusty concrete floor. Paperback books, including some I had given Geddy. Staff paper and practice sheets from when he was first learning to play the saxophone, plus some unused Vandoren reeds in their original boxes. A stack of Grammy Fisk’s old LPs. What Rebecca was going through at the moment was a box of childhood drawings. I remembered Geddy’s drawings: mainly fire trucks, tall buildings, and airplanes, meticulous as blueprints.
But she had a particular drawing in her hand, and she held it out to me. “You must have done this one.”
I took it from her. It was a pencil sketch of Geddy when he was about ten years old, executed on yellowing printer paper. It was mine, but I barely remembered it. I must have drawn it out at the quarry, by the suggestion of trees and water in the background. Amateur as hell, but it caught a little of Geddy’s wide-eyed gaze and big toothy grin.
“You must have said something funny, to get that smile out of him.”
“It’s a good smile. I used to tell him jokes, just to see him laugh.”
“I know what you mean. When he’s happy, it’s just so—wholehearted.”
I liked her for using the word. “How did you guys meet?”
“Well, that’s kind of a story. I tell people I first saw Geddy when he was busking in the MBTA. Which is true, in a way. I must have passed him dozens of times on my way through Davis Station. But that’s not really how I met him. You’re a Tau, right?”
It wasn’t exactly a polite question in the current social climate. But of course Geddy would have told her about me. “Yeah,” I said warily. “Why?”
“No offense. I like Taus. I think they’re the best Affinity. You know Geddy took the test, back when InterAlia was running it? He was really disappointed when he didn’t qualify. Deep down, I think he wanted to be a Tau like you.”
“It’s not a question of failing, Rebecca. It’s not that kind of test. I mean, it’s too bad Geddy doesn’t have an Affinity, but—”
“No, I know all about that; that’s not my point. He envied what you found in Tau. He wanted what you had, and he never stopped looking for his own version of it. He bought a test kit when they came out, one of the old clunky ones with the scalp sensors. Just to make sure. He recorded his own teleodynamic profile. And that’s how we met.”
“I don’t understand.”
“New Socionome.”
“Ah.”
“An algorithm hooked us up.” She watched my face. “You don’t approve?”
“No, I just—I don’t know a whole lot about it.”
Which wasn’t entirely true. I understood the general concept. Hackers and activist math geeks were trying to find new, non-Affinity ways of linking people together. Maybe that was useful for people like Geddy, who couldn’t be sorted into a proper Affinity. But it had no relevance for me and I had pretty much ignored the phenomenon.
“Anyway, that’s how we met. Geddy submitted his teleo profile to New Socionome. I was already registered. His name popped up on my linklist and we got in touch. He invited me to one of his weekend gigs. So that’s how we really met—I was at a table in South End bar and Geddy was up on stage with a singer and a drummer and bass player and a rhythm guitarist. Under the lights he looked…” She laughed, a high happy sound. “Earnest and goofy and, I guess you know how he gets, kind of outside of himself. He came over after the set and we started to talk.”
“So what do people talk about, when they’ve been introduced by an algorithm?”
“Making a better world,” she said.
* * *
Upstairs, the afternoon was wearing on. Sunlight from the dining room window tracked over the big table as I helped Mama Laura set it. My father remained upstairs, and we were all conscious of the fact that he was mortally ill, but that didn’t stop the talk or the laughter—it was therapeutic, not insensitive, and Mama Laura said at one point it might be doing him good, the sound of us all together down here, like the old days.
Around five o’clock the phone rang. Mama Laura had never replaced the slate-black landline phone my parents had owned when I was a teenager; picking up the handset, she looked like a character from a historical drama. It was easy to guess by her grin who was on the other end. “Aaron,” she announced when the call ended. “He and Jenny just landed.” At the Onenia County regional airport west of Schuyler, that would have been, probably on a chartered flight from DC. “They’ll be here in forty-five minutes or so.”
Geddy and Rebecca exchanged uneasy glances, by which I guessed Geddy had shared some of the family’s less savory secrets with her. I excused myself, went into the bathroom, and took out my own phone. I called Trevor Holst at the Holiday Inn. “They’re coming,” I said.
“Okay. Keep me posted.”
Five hours before the lights went out.
CHAPTER 15
Much later, I looked at some of the posts Rebecca Drabinsky had left on her own website and others. Some of what she had written struck me as prescient, and this is one of the passages I bookmarked:
We are falling.
Everything made of matter is falling. We call it entropy. Matter decays. Stars eventually stop shining; planets grow cold, or are scorched to embers which themselves grow cold. Matter falls, and sooner or later it hits bottom.
Life is part of that process. Life is entropic. We dissipate the energy of the sun. Life is a falling-in-progress.
What makes living things unique is that they are teleodynamic. By dissipating the sunlight stored in food we sustain ourselves at a level above our natural rest state, which is death. Our falling is an act of self-creation. We FALL FORWARD, as individuals and as a species.
For most of the history of our species, the goals we fell toward were simple. Food to eat, food for our families, food for our tribe. Shelter for ourselves, our families, our tribes. The imperatives of love and reproduction.
But in the contemporary world, for a significant proportion of the world’s human beings, those basic needs have been met, if only partially and inadequately and unjustly. Under such circumstances, what does it mean to fall forward?
The Affinities were an attempt to harness and enhance the human genius for collaboration. And they succeeded … for those who qualified for membership. But the Affinities are a tribal model. Twenty-two pocket utopias, each with an entrance fee. Twenty-two Edens, and every Eden with a wall around it and with a crowd of hostile, envious outsiders peering in.
Because it’s not enough just to favor collaboration. Collaboration is a means, not an end. Tribes devise goals that benefit the tribe, and tribes come into conflict. Endless Affinity warfare—or the capture of political power by any single Affinity—is not an outcome we should endorse or permit.
New Socionome works differently. The social nuclei we create are open and polyvalent. We make social molecules that hook up complexly and create the possibility of new emergent behavior. Our algorithms of connection favor non-zero-sum transactions, as the Affinities do, but they also facilitate long-term panhuman goals: prosperity, peace, fairness, sustainability. The arc of human history is long but our algorithms bend toward justice. We aren’t just falling. We’re FALLING FORWARD.