She was surprised but not deterred. “I think you know it matters,” she said. “I think that’s why you’re so scared of it.”
They called it the Klein test now. It had been simplified and streamlined since we introduced the first crude Affinity home-test kits eight years ago. A headband sensor array, software to interpret eye movement and skin conductivity, a secure link to a New Socionome test site, and a few hours spent looking at generated images and answering apparently simple questions.
Plus, of course, the final and decisive keystroke, the one that entered your data into the global calculus.
In this case, my data. The suite of numbers that defined me. My one and only true name.
Weeks passed. Nothing happened.
I figured I must be unique, a totally insular human being, no useful social valency at all, nothing to contribute to the centuries-long project of making the world a better place.
Then I received the text message. A terse invitation. Date, place, time. The names of certain strangers.
“It takes real courage,” Geddy had warned me, “not to hit DELETE.”
So I found myself on a crowded sidewalk on an early summer evening, heading for an unfamiliar address.
The world was as shitty and imperfect as it had ever been, but lately I had been wondering if Geddy and Rebecca might be right: maybe there was something (as Rebecca had said in her blog) “a little Renaissancey” in the air. Some shared intuition, unspoken but felt, a verdict of the heart, a suspicion, too fragile to be called optimism, that the world was not old and exhausted but young and undiscovered. Something that passed between strangers in the twilight like a knowing smile.
A wind came up from the west, raising dust from the summer-hot street, and I turned a corner and saw the address I had been given. A small café, its windows spilling yellow light onto the pavement. And yes, I was afraid. But it felt good to be in motion, to be for that moment no one and nothing but myself, stepping through another door into the sound of human voices.
Author’s Note
Science fiction is a genre that famously generates new words. Readers may have noticed the word “teleodynamics” in The Affinities and assumed it was another such science-fictional neologism. But I didn’t invent the term; I borrowed it from Terrence W. Deacon’s fascinating Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter (W. W. Norton & Company, 2011). In Deacon’s book the word refers to the kinds of thermodynamic processes that are intrinsic to living things, and by extension to human consciousness. And while at one point Deacon hints that teleodynamics might eventually help us understand social interactions, he nowhere suggests anything even remotely similar to what I describe in The Affinities. In other words, I thank him for the loan of a useful word and a fascinating concept, and I apologize for extrapolating it far beyond anything he ever intended.