She said, “If the job makes you unhappy, quit.” I looked up at her. The snow was frosting her hair. “I get that you had some atoning to do way back when, but you’ve cleared your debts.”
And with that, she thrust her hands into her pockets and walked away.
* * *
—
That night, after dinner, I beat Ava in three games of chess. None of them were even close, and the last one required only twelve moves to checkmate her.
“What the actual hell is going on here?” she asked, tipping her king over when she saw the inevitable end. “Have you been going easy on me all this time, Dad?”
“No.” I laughed.
“How are you suddenly this good?”
“What’s going on?” Beth asked from the couch.
“Dad just shellacked me for…” Ava counted up the losses in her head. “…the ninth game in a row.”
“Impressive,” Beth said.
“Impossible,” Ava said, staring at me suspiciously.
* * *
—
Memories were coming back to me, and not just of every book I’d ever read. Random moments of insignificance. Pivotal events that had shaped my life.
From a month ago.
From a decade ago.
From my childhood.
It was an eerie sensation. As if someone were brooming out the dark corners of my mind. Wiping off the cobwebs. Repairing frayed connections.
If I tried to recall something, I found I could see it with a clarity and certainty I’d never known.
Max died thirty-one years ago, and I could hear his voice in my head for the first time in years. I could conjure his face. Hold it steady in my mind’s eye. Study the shape of his nose. Every blemish, every freckle.
* * *
—
I had picked up a stack of new books at the Central Library on Quincy Street on the way home from work.
The one I was most excited to crack open was G?del, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. I had tried to read it twice before. Once in college, once in prison. The second time, I had gotten halfway through, put it down one evening, and never picked it up again. It’s a book about number theory, codes, paradoxes, and self-referential systems, and it never failed to make me feel inadequate, with Hofstadter’s heady concepts bumping up against the limits of my intelligence on nearly every page, reinforcing the self-defeating mantra: I’m a pale imitation of my mother’s intellect.
Beth finished brushing her teeth and climbed into bed.
“What are you reading?” she asked.
I showed her the nearly thousand-page doorstop.
I was already on page 150.
“Mind if I turn on the TV?” she asked.
“Not at all.”
I went back to reading. The font size of the type was microscopic, and I remembered that it had been a deciding factor in my abandoning the book on my first two attempts.
But it wasn’t bothering me tonight.
Nor were Beth’s occasional interruptions or the sounds from the television, which would have completely derailed my concentration in the past. In fact, I could’ve explained in near-perfect detail the events of the episode Beth was watching and synopsized the now 224 pages I’d already read of G?del, Escher, Bach.
After a while, I noticed that my wife wasn’t watching TV anymore.
I felt her eyes on me.
“Are you actually comprehending any of that?” she asked.
“Why?”
“You’re turning a page, like, every thirty seconds.”
Over the last few weeks the act of reading had undergone a tectonic shift for me. I was no longer consuming each sentence in consecutive order, but absorbing the page as a whole, letting it make an imprint on my mind.
“I’m just trying this new speed-reading exercise,” I said.
“Is it working?”
“Seems to be.”
She studied me for a moment but didn’t push the issue.
Just went back to watching her show.
* * *
—
I finished the book at four in the morning.
My eyes hurt.
My thoughts raced, though not from the plethora of ideas contained within GEB.
What had started earlier this month as a few days of feeling mentally sharper and clearer was becoming more intense and inescapable with each passing day.
Before I shared this with Beth, or anyone, I needed the results of my new genome analysis.
I needed to understand what was happening to me.
* * *
—
The next day, I was sitting at my temporary workstation—a cubicle on the fourth floor of Constitution Center—feeding data points for an ex-geneticist into MYSTIC, the predicative AI engine.
Through the heads-up display, I was currently inputting the basics—age, race, gender.
It was mindless data entry with a sinister undercurrent of government overreach.
MYSTIC would consider millions of data points. The more information you gave the AI’s self-learning algorithm, the more accurate its prediction.
The far-ranging latitude granted by the Gene Protection Act made it legal for the GPA to use people’s voter registration information, phone records, CCTV surveillance tracking, publications, travel history, census forms, Social Security documents, tax returns, and every keystroke they made, all in the scope of what had been coined Predictive Criminality Modeling.
And all without a warrant or just cause.
This allowed us to flesh out data-point categories such as income bracket, debt load, number of children, political affiliation, voting record, credit score, and a host of other financial indicators.
When it came to providing additional personal data, we were at the mercy of a subject’s social media presence and internet search history.
The current scientist on deck was a man named Clifford Johnson, Ph.D.
Before the Gene Protection Act, Dr. Johnson had been a research scientist for a company trying to build human hearts out of artificial jellyfish. With a basic internet search, I found that he was currently employed as a high school biology teacher. This wasn’t uncommon. Many scientists who had been engaged in pure research had been forced to pivot to teaching. In the public school system, all science textbooks had been updated to reflect the government’s new position on gene editing: illegal, dangerous, and at odds with the natural law.
Johnson’s Meta page was public, and as I scrolled through his posts over the last five years, the picture of the man he had become after being forced out of his chosen profession began to take shape.
He was spending more time with his family.
Working less.
Exercising more.
There’d been a period of soul-searching after his old company had gone under, and at least from the outside, he appeared to have made the best of it.
As I began to input my impressions of Clifford Johnson based on a social media review—the algorithm’s final data point—my phone rang.
Beth calling.
I touched the earpiece.
“Hi, love.”
“What are you up to?” she asked.
“Data entry.”
“Sounds thrilling.”
I continued typing: Outward expressions of satisfaction with his life are evident. There are no anti-government sentiments expressed （at least publicly）。
“Yeah, I just can’t believe I get to do this for a living. What’s up?”
“Take me to La Fleur tonight.”