He returned to the living room to find Cyril and Tessa poring over a volume with carnal transport, as if it were a tub of ice cream. “You found it,” Bix said, and Tessa grinned, holding up a volume of Aristotle from the same “Great Books” set his parents had purchased along with their treasured Encyclopaedia Britannica. Bix had reverently consulted the Britannica as a kid, quoting from it in school reports on cannibals and hemlock and Pluto; reading the animal entries purely for pleasure. Four years ago, when his parents moved into their modest Florida condo—having refused his help to buy a larger one, out of pride （his father） and modesty （his mother）—Bix boxed up those volumes and left them on the sidewalk outside the West Philadelphia home where he’d grown up. In the new world he’d helped to make, no one would ever need to open a physical encyclopedia.
“In my reading of the Aristotle,” Tessa said, “—mind you, I’m a dance professor, there are probably a million scholarly pages on this—but Miranda Kline is not a tragic figure. For her to be Tragic-tragic, the people who appropriated her theory would have had to be related to her. That would increase the betrayal and the dramatic irony.”
“Also, didn’t she sell the theory? Or the algorithms?” Kacia asked.
“I think there’s a mystery around that,” Portia said. “Someone sold it, but not Kline.”
“It was her intellectual property,” Fern said. “How could anyone else have sold it?”
As one of the purchasers of Kline’s algorithms, Bix squirmed in a state of squeamish duplicity. He was relieved when Ted said, “Here’s a different question: Miranda Kline’s algorithms have helped social media companies to predict trust and influence, and they’ve made a fortune off them. Is that necessarily bad?”
Everyone turned to him in surprise. “I’m not saying it isn’t bad,” Ted said. “But let’s not take that for granted, let’s examine it. If you look at baseball, every action is measurable: the speed and type of pitches, who gets on base and how. The game is a dynamic interaction among human beings, but it can also be described quantitatively, using numbers and symbols, to someone who knows how to read them.”
“Are you such a person?” Cyril asked incredulously.
“He is such a person,” Portia said with a laugh, slipping an arm around her husband.
“My three sons played Little League,” Ted said. “Call it Stockholm syndrome.”
“Three?” Bix said. “I thought there were two. In your pictures.”
“Scourge of the middle son,” Ted said. “Everyone forgets poor Ames. Anyway, my point is that quantification, per se, doesn’t ruin baseball. In fact, it deepens our understanding of it. So why are we so averse to letting ourselves be quantified?”
Bix knew, from his cursory research online, that Ted Hollander’s academic success had come in 1998, the same year Bix incorporated Mandala. Already midcareer, Ted published Van Gogh, Painter of Sound, which found correlations between Van Gogh’s types of brushstroke and the proximity of noisemaking creatures like cicadas, bees, crickets, and woodpeckers—whose microscopic traces had been detected in the paint itself.
“Ted and I disagree about this,” Portia said. “I think that if the point of quantifying human beings is to profit from their actions, it’s dehumanizing—Orwellian, even.”
“But science is quantification,” Kacia said. “That’s how we solve mysteries and make discoveries. And with each new step, there is always the worry that we might be ‘crossing the line.’ It used to be called blasphemy, but now it’s something more vague that boils down to knowing too much. For example, in my lab we’ve begun to externalize animal consciousness—”
“I’m sorry,” Bix interrupted, thinking he’d misheard. “You’re doing what?”