Now, that is funny for sure, at least it was when M told the story at O’Brien’s taco party when each team member shared a childhood anecdote. And yet embedded in the comedy are both sadness and triumph—sadness because M was already isolated, friendless, and at odds with her family, and the ceiling debacle resulted in the dismantling of her plant system, and—when she afterward refused to eat—hospitalization and tube feeding. Triumph because now she is M!, gorgeous and sexy and well paid, and the world has bent her way. Most of the stories we tell—my fellow counters and I—have both these components, sadness and triumph, because the world has come around to us. It’s unbelievable. I still can’t believe it. And while our ranks are fortified by typicals whose adolescence may have included popularity and statistical expertise limited to sanctioned realms like baseball stats, the fact is that we are simply better at counting—we are native speakers, if you will, many of us having understood numbers before we did language.
* * *
This morning, our entire unit—six teams in all—is summoned for an unscheduled meeting in the Sand Garden. Based on past experience of unscheduled unit meetings, this one has an 86 percent chance of indicating a problem, a 9 percent chance of indicating an unexpected reward, and a 5 percent chance of indicating a personal tragedy in our ranks. All 273 of us file into the Sand Garden and lounge there, waiting for Avery to arrive. When the waterfall that normally trickles over the pile of sharp black stones is switched off, our team members exchange worried glances. Something big is afoot. O’Brien looks as confused as everyone else.
Our unit leader, Avery, is a nonbinary I have never seen display emotion of any kind in a public setting. Now visual indications of stress are evident all over their person: hair hanging lank and unwashed, dark circles under their eyes, sweatshirt stained with egg on one cuff; and mascara and lip gloss, the only makeup they wear—absent from their face.
“We’ve completed a deep analysis of recent proxy bafflement,” Avery tells us, “and have determined that a new generation of hermit crab programs has been designed specifically to elude our proxy filters. That fact suggests the direct involvement of one or more members of this unit actively working to help eluders exempt themselves from our count.”
Bafflement refers to the specific ways that proxies avoid our detection. Eluding and proxying aren’t illegal, but if someone at Harvest is working to help the eluders baffle us, thereby tainting our data with a statistically significant number of vacant identities and thus compromising the quality and accuracy of our work, that would fall under the rubric of industrial crime. Which explains why Phil and Patrice, our ombudsmen, are flanking Avery, looking more like cops than I’ve ever seen them look.
“We will be conducting an investigation,” Avery says. “We will interview each of you individually, and we would welcome any confidential information you’d like to impart at any time. While I don’t want to sow seeds of suspicion, I must ask you to adopt a certain watchfulness. If you have reason to doubt the commitment or loyalty of anyone on your team, please share that information with us.”
Avery is using a code that only I and other native counters are likely to comprehend: The defector is a typical—likely an impressionist—beguiled by a fantasy of freedom and escape. It is a state of mind I can grasp only theoretically. There is nothing original about human behavior. Any idea I have is likely occurring to scores of others in my demographic categories. We live in similar ways, think similar thoughts. What the eluders want to restore, I suspect, is the uniqueness they felt before counting like ours revealed that they were an awful lot like everyone else. But where the eluders have it wrong is that quantifiability doesn’t make human life any less remarkable, or even （this is counterintuitive, I know） less mysterious—any more than identifying the rhyme scheme in a poem devalues the poem itself. The opposite!
Mysteries that are destroyed by measurement were never truly mysterious; only our ignorance made them seem so. They are like whodunits after you know who did it. Does anyone reread a murder mystery? Whereas the cosmos has been mysterious to humans since long before we knew anything about astronomy or space—and, now that we do, is only more so.