Make a list of what you believe in. The top ten most important things to you. Like . . . justice, equality, diversity, sustainability, whatever your politics or religion or morality. Sit down and bullet-point it out. This is what I believe in.
But Greta thinks—bullshit. Make another list. A list of what you did today. It doesn’t matter what day it is, weekday, weekend, holiday, birthday, the calendar date is irrelevant. Write down all the things that occupied your time on a given day. Woke up, ate breakfast, hit the gym, went to work, surfed the Internet, had a coffee with a colleague, did some work, ate some lunch, did some more work, slipped out to buy new sneakers, clicked around on social media sites, went home, called a parent, watched TV, ate dinner, changed outfits, met someone for a drink, made out with them on a street corner, caught a taxi home, read a book, went to sleep.
That’s what you believe in. According to Greta, your belief system is how you actually spend your time every day. She doesn’t mean that to be judgmental. She wants people to be more self-aware. Fundamentally, she believes in action. If you believe in a bunch of stuff but never act on those beliefs, they don’t matter. She wants people to better know themselves so they can better be themselves. This is her philosophy of life and it was also the purpose of her smartphone application.
Called “MapU,” it tracked integrated device operations to graph a user’s daily activity along a series of programmable criteria. The point was to show you who you are by what you do. If you change your daily activity, movements, and durations, the graphs alter to reflect you becoming more consistent with who you believe yourself to be.
She launched the app for public download the day she graduated and, since it was a school project, gave it away for free. Within a year, 2,000,000 people downloaded it. It was a hit. But it generated no income and the server space needed to store all the data was expensive and growing exponentially as she added hundreds of thousands of new users per month. She coasted for a while on an academic grant, but Greta never meant for the app to be a job—it was an experiment. She just liked tinkering under the hood in a place where design met ethics.
So when she hit 5,000,000 users and got an offer to buy the app, Greta thought it was hilarious. It was a free product. A hobby. A money drain. She named an absurd price and she promptly lawyered up when they agreed to it. Greta assumed the whole thing was a mistake, that eventually someone would run the numbers and realize this was a student project that had somehow caught a minor social media wave and would soon flame out. But there she was, pen in hand, signing a piece of paper that made her spontaneously rich. It had to be a prank. These people must be morons who deserved to be relieved of their one and a half million dollars. Greta signed.
It took her a week to realize the morons were smarter than she was.
They didn’t care about her app and they certainly didn’t give a shit about her philosophy. They wanted her data: 5,000,000 people, half a million more every month, voluntarily giving them real-time access to their movements, habits, proclivities, and purchases. Greta had unwittingly built a brilliant machine to parse a human being into the things they can be sold. And that’s what the buyer wanted—to sell them things.
She considered unleashing a virus to cook the whole system, but that seemed hokey and adolescent and she didn’t want to go to jail. Our parents had spent their careers in academia. Tenure had been a very big deal to both of them. We grew up comfortable but not so insulated from want that the money didn’t matter. It mattered.
So, Greta became wealthy and depressed—small-d depressed—and hasn’t really done anything for the past six months except cause my parents considerable anxiety. She was simultaneously the family success story and the greatest concern. Until I made a bold play over dinner for the title of Most Screwed-Up Barren Child.
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I haven’t stayed up all night with my parents since the time Greta got meningitis in seventh grade.
My dad carefully and systematically runs through every question he can think of and I answer in as much detail as I can muster, while Greta sullenly clicks away on a laptop trying to corroborate or, preferably, eviscerate any specifics, demanding the occasional snarky clarification on matters she deems logically inconsistent and then pouting when I turn out to have an explanation. My mom makes a pot of coffee and sits on the couch primly rereading The Time Machine with what I guess you could call passive-aggressive literary exasperation. Penny sits next to me and periodically reminds me of an embellishment I’d mentioned to her earlier but neglected under paternal interrogation. Over the course of several hours, the full story comes out.
Everyone simultaneously runs out of steam just as dawn smears across the sky.
“Well,” my dad says, “for a schizoid delusion, it’s certainly operating at a high level of forensic detail.”
The real bonanza turns out to be the Sixteen Witnesses. I remember all of their names and a few of them are still alive. Even those who died many years ago left some sort of an online trail. On her laptop, Greta finds them one by one—Henrik Adell (Skeptical), Norman Driessnack (Awed), Sven Bertelessen (Distracted), Rhys Collins (Amused), Jerome Francoeur (Jealous), Michel Beaubien (Angry), Susan Lowenstein (Thoughtful), Stephen Modesto (Frightened), Douglas Halliday (Detached), Abe Geller (Concerned), Diane Ortiz (Excited), Frederic Somerset (Nonchalant), Richard Ellesmere (Harried), Barbra Talbert (Weary), Ursula Francoeur (Cheeky), and Rafael Ubitto (Wise).
The only one who eludes Greta’s considerable research skills—she took three semesters of information science—is Lionel Goettreider. She can’t dig up a single mention of him anywhere.
But she does find the Francoeurs.
“Jerome and Ursula Francoeur,” Greta says. “They live in San Francisco.”
“They’re alive?” I say.
“Yeah,” says Greta. “No, wait . . . Ursula Francoeur died two years ago. Survived by her husband, Jerome, and her daughter, Emma.”
Her tone is matter-of-fact, since she doesn’t know these people and thinks I’m using them to prop up my psychosis, but it hits me like a punch to the chest.
I guess I had this idea, ridiculous and romantic, that a consequence of excavating this lost and forgotten past event would be to finally bring Lionel and Ursula together. I have no idea what actually happened between the two of them following the accident, but I imagined—and I should clarify that I didn’t spend a lot of time imagining this—that after her husband’s terrible injury, Ursula would’ve felt honor bound to stay with him and conceal her affair with Lionel, like, forever. Somehow, and the particulars are hazy and embarrassing to contemplate in too much detail, but somehow my involvement would inspire them to admit the truth, that they never stopped loving each other and that to be truly happy they needed to be together for whatever was left of their lives.
I don’t know why I got so invested in their relationship, considering I witnessed it for all of five minutes, fifty years ago—although only two weeks ago in terms of my chronological experience—and for all I know it was dysfunctional and doomed and they were better off without each other. But I don’t think so. I saw something in the way they looked at each other, something powerful and connected. Penelope and I never looked at each other that way. But it’s what I feel when I look at Penny and she looks at me.
If I hadn’t intervened, they both would’ve died of radiation poisoning five decades ago. But I did intervene. And I was convinced, with zero concrete information except my dull and grasping heart, that my intervention led to their estrangement in separate but equally unhappy lives that they never should’ve had. Decades of longing and loss between them was my fault, is what I thought.
Except Ursula is dead. And so is yet another of my romantic delusions.
Rest in peace.
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