by Ari Drennen
“That was some crazy shit earlier.” Jaden took a big sip of Monster Khaos Juice and set the can down on a coffee table cluttered with empty energy drinks, pungent Doritos, poorly-rolled joints, and other fragrant detritus of teenage boys 48 hours into their fourth sleepover of the month.
“It was whatever.” Ethan didn’t take his eyes off the Halo match. They’d been at it for hours and hours, grimly mashing buttons in their efforts to hold their simulated cement fort in the middle of some valley that was supposed to be on another planet even though it looked suspiciously like Sedona.
“What did you see, bro? Yo! Watch out!”
Ethan grimaced, realizing that he’d caught Jaden in the radius of his grenade toss. Again. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t believe in that crystal ball shit.”
“What’s not to believe in?” Jaden, having found shelter just long enough to recharge his shields, expertly put a burst into the head of one of their opponents, no doubt another bored teenager in another quiet cluster of cookie cutter homes somewhere. “It’s just math.”
It had been Jaden’s idea to go. It was always Jaden’s idea. But it’s not like it was an unusual thing to do these days. The centers had spread like wildfire through every suburban shopping center, taking over the empty storefronts between nail salons and tanning beds.
He pressed further: “What did they say you’d do for a job, dude? I’m going to be a lawyer in New York City and I’ll still be single … you know what that means.”
“More time for sucking dick, right?” Byron punched Jaden in the shoulder, and the other guys all chuckled appreciatively.
Ethan inhaled sharply, mind racing, contemplating several wild stories he could use as cover before settling on the simple truth. “It said I didn’t have a job.”
Jaden laughed and whacked him with the controller. “I always knew you were a burnout, bro!”
“I seemed happy,” Ethan protested, but he knew he didn’t sound convincing.
∩
It started with Microsoft corp’s announcement that they’d be retiring Clippy. Known as “Clippit” exclusively to executives at the company, the much-maligned digital “assistant” used simple algorithms to offer tips based on what the user typed into a word processing window. They were not very helpful.
But it turned out that the public was more attached to Clippy than anyone had predicted. After an outpouring of outrage that spilled over from Facebook onto the evening news, Microsoft promised to bring back a more robust, modern iteration of the assistant, hiring a team of engineers fresh from Stanford and MIT.
That’s when things got truly bizarre. Working late into the night on a serious time crunch, one of the engineers discovered a new protocol allowing data transfer between machines connected through the internet orders of magnitude more efficiently than ever before. While Clippy had worked in mostly ineffective isolation, his successor had a mind flung across the globe.
They named her Omny.
While Clippy had only the memory and processing power to provide basic advice and respond to simple prompts, the team behind Omny fed her every written work available on the internet, yielding a state of the art predictive artificial intelligence decades before the brightest minds of the field could have predicted.
There were wild rumors about heroic doses of LSD on the team, but Microsoft had little reason to investigate.
The Omny project grew ever more ambitious, feeding every single piece of available data on social media users into their hivemind. What emerged was a predictive system of breathtaking power. Omny could tell you the probability that you might marry any other individual social media user. As time passed and the dataset grew, she became even more powerful, correctly predicting haircuts, job changes, and even, in a couple horrifying cases, deaths. Fed the past, Omny would tell you the future.
Microsoft executives were, of course, thrilled – it had been many years since any company had produced a product that generated this type of consumer excitement, and, of course, the profits that came with it. Users rushed to add pictures, interests, and relationships into the algorithm — data that they didn’t even care was being passed on directly to marketers. Omny’s predictions increasingly included credit card debt and bankruptcy.
Audits of the backend failed to recreate the code behind Omny’s projections, and competitors were unable to duplicate her results.
As the market for Omny’s forecasts began to dwarf the comparably-niche demand for new video games, a giant team of game developers got to work bringing her predictions color. Three years later, Microsoft launched Omny Vision, a service that allowed customers to see their future represented in 1080p. The processing power required meant that viewing sessions ran into the hundreds of dollars for just five minutes. Lengthy delays in shipping other consumer electronics became the norm. Forecasts of natural disasters and future moves to cooler climates increased by nearly a third. The demand for Omny Vision remained overheated, with prospective customers waiting for 48 hours or more in line outside new locations. Microsoft soon announced a deal to buy every single location of Blockbuster Video at a cut rate. “The future is probable,” read the slogan in their investor brochures.
Divorces skyrocketed. So did suicides and assassination attempts. But at the same time, 401(k) contributions began creeping noticeably up as the future became as real as the past. Cigarette purchases plummeted. Blackrock and Vanguard poured money into the technology. Tobacco companies put K-street’s finest minds to work trying to ban it.
∩
In truth, Ethan could not decide whether he was more confused or disturbed by the thirty second free preview of Omny Vision that had flashed on the screen in one of the dozen blacked-out closets built into his town’s old Blockbuster while next door, Jaden had reveled in his own bright future. He’d gone home and taken three shots of tanqueray from the green glass bottle his dad kept in the cabinet over the fridge, carefully replacing them with tap water, and then sat in front of the mirror in his bathroom, staring in alternate beats at the contours of his face and at the peeling floral wallpaper all around him until he heard his parents stirring for work far below. They’d be gone before it was time for him to leave for school, his mother to her job in the emergency room and his father to an early shift at the aging nuclear power plant on the shores of Lake Ontario. He needed money more than he needed another lesson on Manifest Destiny, and graduation and the generous checks it would bring from family members and their friends was still months away.
Ethan could still hear his mom’s car in the driveway when he crept downstairs. An early morning ray through a high window lit the dust on the mirror of his parents’ medicine cabinet. No longer lit in soft white halogen, Ethan grimaced at the lower eye bags and stubble of his daytime reflection, but it disappeared when he opened the door. For a moment, his eyes lingered on the dark shades of his mother’s lipstick collection, scanning for the solution to his problem. The shelf above was lined with orange bottles. Progesterone, Omeprozole, Propranolol – the fourth bottle held the solution he needed: Hydrocodone. Lots of it.
The morning birds were still singing as he exchanged forty pills in a ziplock baggie to Jaden’s plug in the parking lot of the downtown Byrne Dairy store for $10 each.
∩
The screen in the Omny Vision Center flashed a brief disclosure acknowledging some element of randomness in the cosmetic details and other particulars of the forecast before dissolving into a snow-soaked pine forest at dusk, flakes falling slowly but steadily in the warm glow of the lone lamp above the evergreen door of a tiny A-frame cabin. In the silence of the shadowed woods, Ethan could almost hear his heartbeat, fast and steady as the falling snow. He tilted a joystick forward ever so slightly, pushed a button to open the door, and found himself standing in the same kitchen as before, lit only by a row of Edison bulbs, a cracking fire, the cool heat of a single burner under a simmering pot of what had to be chili. The husky curled next to the fire did not stir.
The first thing Ethan noticed about the woman watching over the stove was her hair, gray-blonde even in the dim light, long, swaying as she danced to the beat of some song that had not yet been written. She was still wearing a loose, light purple ski bib over a long white crewneck, though the rest of her gear hung neatly in the corner next to a pair of skis taller than he was. Taller than she was.
She turned, and there they were: the same cheekbones he’d seen late at night as he studied the shape of his skull in the mirror. The same collarbone, the same hairline, the same ears, pierced with the addition of a pair of tiny gold rings. Brighter eyes, somehow, but dazzling green nevertheless.
She smiled, staring through him at the snow piling up past the window sill. Ethan felt hot lines of tears making their way down his cheeks. Neither had stopped when the time ran out.
∩
There was a Piercing Pagoda in the same shopping center. Ethan could feel himself exhale as he pushed the door, heard the friendly jingle of the bells hanging from the “open” sign. A heavily-inked woman with alternating streaks of black and maroon in her messy bun looked askance at his teal Abercombie and Fitch polo shirt.
“I’d like to get an ear piercing,” Ethan heard himself saying.
“Okay.” She dragged out the ‘y’ until it became a question mark. “Which one?”
He hesitated for a second. “Isn’t one of them the gay one or something?”
The woman behind the counter rolled her eyes dramatically. “Guys ask that all the time. I always say they both are.”
Ethan looked out the window for a moment, watched a saturn sedan with a McCain-Palin sticker pass by. He felt a lump forming in his chest, swallowed hard. “Might as well do them both.”
The woman seemed to warm slightly at that. “Both it is, then! I’m Aimee. What’s your name?”
“Just call me E.”
Ari Drennen is a media critic and the author of ‘thoughts on weightlessness,’ a book of poems. Her poetry also appears on the album “pink balloons” by Ekko Astral. She lives in Seattle and the mountains around with her partner and dog.