“You’re cloaking your lust in logic.”
“My lust is logical.”
“Lust is never logical,” she says. “It’s biological.”
“My lust for you is totally logical,” I say. “Your combination of attractive properties makes it all but impossible for me to resist you. In fact, it takes a constant expenditure of energy to keep from reaching out and touching your hair right this minute.”
“Don’t,” she says sharply.
“I won’t. I’ll continue to expend energy resisting that impulse. But it’s not easy.”
“You could walk away. That would make it easier.”
“True. But we work near each other, so I’ll continue to be aware of how badly I want to touch your hair.”
“You’ll be moving to an office soon,” she says. “That will make it easier.”
I’m stupefied by how quickly things have gone from good to bad—how, despite M’s attraction to me and her suspicions of Marc, she’s going to stay with him and be loyal to him. I understand now that nothing will ever happen between M and me, precisely because it has just come so close to happening and yet not happened. There are clear mathematical reasons for this, but explaining them requires a three-dimensional model that I’m too tired to deploy, even for myself.
“I can’t walk away,” I say, “because the energy I’m expending to resist the urge to touch your hair leaves insufficient energy for walking or even for standing up from a sitting position. Maybe you should walk away.”
“Yes,” she says. “I think I will.”
She stands up and walks toward the building. I watch her go. Then I lie back against the small warm sharp stones punctuated by hot smooth black stones. I look at the clouds spinning in slow-motion helix patterns and wonder whether the fact that M will never love me is the result of the conversation we’ve just had, or whether our conversation merely revealed a preexisting fact that M will never love me. Was the mathematics of our conversation causal or merely illustrative? Wondering is the realm of impressionists, and as I watch the clouds, I feel my mother and sister in me. I wonder if I’ll ever love someone the way I love Alison, but with the other stuff thrown in. I wonder if I can survive without that love. I wonder whether the misery of my childhood and adolescence will return and knock me back into despair that no mathematical ladder can lift me out of. I notice the pearlization of the cloud helixes overhead, and the blue behind them, and I realize that what I’m looking at is a mathematical ladder. But I cannot seem to climb it.
* * *
The next week, at our team’s morning meeting, M and Marc announce that they are engaged. M looks shy and overjoyed, and there is a tiny diamond on her finger like a pinprick of flame.
I go straight to Alison’s apartment after work to deliver the news, along with supplementary data suggesting an extreme likelihood—85 percent!—that M and Marc will marry.
“You’re saying… engagement increases the likelihood of marriage,” Alison says.
“Drastically,” I wail. “Annihilatingly.” And then I lie down on the floor and begin to cry.
I spend the next few days on health leave at my parents’ house, the house where I grew up. I lie in my old bed with my eyes closed, and Dad takes two days off from his clinic and sits beside me, reading. It’s a one-story house, and outside the window, I hear Mom nailing and gluing and attaching things together to make her sculptures. I occupy my mind with making a list of the 273 employees in my unit in order of likelihood that they are the defector—really 272, since I know that I am not the defector and therefore place myself last. Then I empty the list and begin again, like shuffling a deck of cards. With another part of my mind, I consider the detrimental impact of large numbers of hermit crab programs we cannot screen out. As a counter, I want, above all, my data to be accurate. The idea of false data tainting my analyses in the form of large numbers of undetected proxies posing as live human beings makes me feel dizzy and ill. But the bigger picture of the eluders doesn’t worry me. If they achieve such numbers that their alternate network rivals the dominance of the one from which we derive our data—if they, in effect, secede undetected from our society and form a new one, with a separate economy and currency and even language （all the while appearing, online, still to be their old selves）—new counters will soon arise within their ranks to count their data. At first that counting will merely be a residual effect of connection and communication and access to one another. Even when recognized, the eluder-counters will seem to be benign neutral entities. But gradually, it will come to light that, while the counters themselves have no use for the data they passively acquire, they are lending, leasing, and selling it to other entities who use it in ways enormously profitable to themselves. And so the eluders will find themselves, once again, accounted for—in other words, right back where they started. And the older ones will be too exhausted to start another revolution and too cynical to believe it will work. But the younger ones will—you guessed it—try to elude the counters. They will vacate their identities and form a new secret network, thus seceding into yet another parallel invisible nation where, they believe, they will at last be free. And the same thing will happen. And the same thing will happen. And the same thing will happen.