Instead, Carmen said, “Your friend Laurence probably knows. Go talk to him and find out.”
Patricia tried to explain how she was the last person Laurence would want to talk to, and he would sooner spit at her. And her stomach turned at the thought of seeing him. The desperate fear of people she’d experienced in the Unraveling still clung to Patricia, and she could still see herself fleeing, never talking to another soul, running lonely. She couldn’t picture herself talking to Laurence. He had left her a voicemail, and she had deleted it unheard. She couldn’t bear to talk to him—but then she felt the crushing isolation again. And she reminded herself that she was untouchable, nothing could hurt her anymore.
“Okay,” Patricia said. “I’ll try talking to him.”
31
PEREGRINE WAS NOT all-seeing—it wasn’t able to worm its way into every database everywhere or see through every camera in the world. It mostly knew what all the Caddies knew, about their owners and the pieces of the world they touched—plus whatever information it could glean on the internet. So, Peregrine knew a lot, but there were huge gaps. And it had blind spots, just like any human might—there were pieces of information it knew, but it hadn’t put two and two together.
Still, Peregrine had amazing access to data and processing power. And what had it done? Set itself up as a dating service.
“I don’t know what happened in Denver,” Peregrine said again and again.
An estimated 1.7 billion people were at critical famine levels, but they didn’t have Caddies. The North Koreans were massing along the DMZ, but they didn’t own Caddies, either. Neither did the majority of the people trapped in the Arab Winter. Some of the people dying of dysentery and antibiotic-resistant bugs had Caddies, but not most of them. Did Peregrine just have a skewed view of the world, its bodies belonging as they did to the privileged millions instead of the damned billions? Laurence asked Peregrine, and it responded: “I read the news. I know what’s happening in the world. Plus some of the Caddies belong to some very powerful people, who have access to information that would make your teeth fall out. So to speak. Five minutes.”
“I got that that was a metaphor, thank you very much.” Laurence was holding the Caddy in both hands, at arm’s length. Sitting up in bed at two in the morning. “But don’t you get that romance is an essentially bourgeois contrivance? At best, it’s anachronistic. At worst, it’s a distraction, a luxury for people who aren’t preoccupied with survival. Why would you waste your time helping people find their ‘true love’ instead of doing something worthwhile?”
“Maybe I’m just doing what I can,” Peregrine responded. “Maybe I’m trying to understand people, and helping people fall in love is one way to gain a better sense of your parameters. Maybe increasing the aggregate level of happiness in the world is one way to try and hold back the crash. Four minutes.”
“What are you counting down to?”
“You know what,” Peregrine said. “You’ve been waiting all this time.”
“No, I don’t fucking know what.” Laurence threw the Caddy onto the bed, not hard enough to cause any damage, and pulled on his pants. He did know what. The streetlights went out. That happened a lot lately.
“You could also say I’ve been acting in my own self-interest,” Peregrine said. “The more I nudge people toward finding their soul mates, the more they encourage their friends to buy pieces of me. I become a necessity, rather than a luxury. That’s one reason the Caddies have kept functioning so far.”
“Yeah.” Laurence looked for clean socks. There had to be clean socks. He couldn’t face this without clean socks. “Except, again, you’re being shortsighted. What happens to you if our whole industrial civilization implodes? If there’s no more fuel, no electricity to recharge the Caddies? Or if the whole world goes down in a nuclear daisy chain?”
He pulled some pants on and realized his T-shirt was sweat stained and gross. Why did he even care how he looked? It was pure neurosis.
“Three minutes,” Peregrine said.