The Affinities by Robert Charles Wilson
“It’s the Wild West,” Amanda said. “We need to be a lot more careful. Watch our backs.”
She had talked about this at length with Damian. The general scenario was pretty simple, she said. With the availability of cheap, portable testing, the population of the Affinities was about to explode. And not just in North America and Europe, but in places that had been legally closed to Affinity testing, like Russia and China. And without InterAlia to enforce the rules, non-aligned people were likely to sense their disadvantage and agitate for greater oversight. Whether the Affinities survived would depend on whether we could influence the inevitable legislation. “Because if we don’t,” she said, “we’ll be driven underground, like terrorist cells or something. And given the huge number of people involved? We could be looking at something like civil war.”
“Bullshit,” Trevor said. “Civil war?”
“Of one kind or another. I mean, look at what Tau does for us. TauBourse is like Social Security, and we have a Tau medical network that takes care of us whether we’re insured or not. Now Damian says we need a permanent security force and a fair way of making Affinity rules, so no tranche or sodality feels cheated or left out. That’s an army and a parliament, basically. Those are government functions. And governments tend to be jealous of their power.”
“Sure,” Trevor said, “but even if they pass laws against us, I can’t see Taus taking up arms.”
“Maybe not Tau. Other Affinities might, and that could make life difficult for all of us.”
She didn’t say which other Affinities she had in mind. But the Hets, or some faction among them, had already taken up arms. One Het soldier was dead, his body entrusted to the tidal currents of Georgia Strait, and we had discovered what may have been a Het spy in our midst. If there was a war coming, the first shots had already been fired.
* * *
But there was more than that on Amanda’s mind. She needed to tell us something, and it was something we didn’t want to hear, and both Trevor and I had figured that out. Her attention kept drifting to the ice-covered window, as if she saw something unsettling there.
“It’s all going to change,” she said. “That’s what I’ve been talking about with Damian.”
Back when he was young my stepbrother Geddy used to get what he called “the Sunday night feeling.” Neither of us had much liked school. Friday afternoon was great, the whole inchoate weekend in front of you, and Saturday was also fine, twenty-four hours of distilled freedom. Even Sunday morning was okay, as long as Mama Laura didn’t insist on church, and Sunday afternoon flowed as sweetly as an autumn creek. But by sunset you could feel the ominous weight of the week ahead. The homework you hadn’t finished, the book report you hadn’t written.
I had spent seven years in the Tau Affinity, and it had been the longest, happiest weekend of my life. But suddenly I had the Sunday night feeling.
“We’re like the Lost Boys,” she said. “You know? Peter Pan. But it’s time to grow up.”
Even worse.
“We have to take responsibility for ourselves. Lay down a foundation and build some walls. Damian’s already doing that. And he’s not the only one. He’s been conspicuously successful, but there’s somebody like Damian in almost every tranche. Dozens of them in the Canadian sodality and hundreds in the US, just waiting to be organized. Damian’s calling a meet-up in February, in California, to start discussions. He expects to devote the next few years to creating a Tau political structure.”
“Great,” Trevor said, not quite ironically. “What about us?”
“He still needs us,” Amanda said. “Maybe more than ever.” She turned to face Trevor. “We’re going to need people to organize and run a Tau police force. Damian wants you to be one of them.”
Trev didn’t say anything. He was startled, clearly. Flattered, but also freaked out by the idea. Amanda didn’t wait for an answer. She turned to me.
“You have different skills. Good memory, you can follow instructions, you can improvise if you have to, and you know how to interface with people who aren’t Tau.”
That seemed dubious. I thought of Rachel Ragland. My interface with Rachel had not been a raging success. “Which makes me what?”
“A diplomat,” Amanda said.
“You must be joking.”
“Actually I’m not. But you need to talk to Damian. He can explain it better than I can.”
I said, “And how about you? Does he have plans for you yet?”
She looked at the window again. “I’m going to California with him.”
* * *
Which was how I found myself, long after the end of the party, sitting at the kitchen table telling my troubles to Lisa.
The rest of the tranche had gone home. Those who lived in the house had retired to their rooms. Loretta was upstairs, asleep. But Lisa had always been a night owl. I think she liked the quiet of the hours before dawn, the house restored to order, the dishes washed. She looked tired but content. I told her about what Amanda had said, and about the choice Amanda had made, and Lisa nodded. “Things change,” she said. “I know, that’s terribly trite. A static existence is impossible, and who would want such a thing? But change comes at a price, doesn’t it? And we all pay in full, sooner or later.”
She was probably thinking of Loretta, whose health had been fragile lately. I had come to Lisa for sympathy, but that began to seem like a dickish move on my part. I said, “I’m sorry if I—”
“Oh, stop. Don’t apologize. There’s no reason we can’t commiserate together.” She sat back in her chair and gazed around the cooling kitchen. “Winter nights like these, I think of what’s changed over the years. Even in our tranche. I think about the people who’ve moved on.”
Plenty of us had, even in the seven short years since I had joined. People took new jobs, went to live in different cities, joined different Tau tranches. And they were always replaced by new faces, new friends. Tau was a river. I said, “That includes some of the people I met the first time I showed up here. Remember Renata Goldstein?”
“Of course. Yes. And her girl, the one with Down syndrome.”
“Tonya.”
“Yes, Tonya. She used to hide out in the basement and watch cartoons.”
“SpongeBob SquarePants. With the sound turned off.”
“That’s right. And you used to sit with her. Until Renata left the tranche, what, four years ago now? Five?”
“Moved out west, didn’t she?”
“Mmm … that’s what she told people. Actually she’s still in town. I ran into her on the subway last February.”
I was surprised. “Really?”
“She quit the tranche and never joined another one.”
“What—did she drift?”
“Drift” was a problem buried in the fine print of Affinity test. The human brain and the human mind were malleable. Affinity scores tended to be robust, but they could change over time; it was possible for someone who was only barely a Tau to drift out of the range of qualification altogether, and InterAlia had always mandated five-year retests. The phenomenon was thankfully rare—in my years with Tau I had heard of only one case of terminal drift in the city, a suburban car wash owner who failed to re-up and was forced to leave his tranche, tears all around—but it was a terrifying concept.
“Perhaps she drifted,” Lisa said. “More likely it was just family conflict. Tethers.” Lisa pronounced the word with audible scorn. “Usually it’s a spouse. In Renata’s case the tether was that girl. The girl was Renata’s tether.”
“Not her tether, Lisa. Her daughter.”
Lisa gave me hard look. “Yes, of course. The tether was her daughter.”
She pushed her chair away from the table and stood up slowly, wincing. “I’m going to bed. You should do the same, Adam. You’ll feel better when you’ve closed your eyes for a while.”
* * *
We didn’t know it yet, but it was the beginning of the hard years. The harrowing of the Affiniti
PART THREE
Tranche Warfare
Have we reached a new stage in the peculiar history of the Affinities?
It’s been just a quarter of a century since the science of social teleodynamics discovered new ways to model the boundary between consciousness and culture. And it was only a few years after the field’s founding that one of its most prominent figures, Meir Klein, traded the classrooms of Tel Aviv University for the corporate corridors of a then-obscure data-mining firm called InterAlia.
It must have seemed like a smart move, back in the day. InterAlia used Klein’s theories to launch the Affinities in North American markets, and both Meir Klein and the people he worked for grew very rich indeed. For a while. Until Klein was strangled in his sleep and InterAlia collapsed under the weight of the class-action suits brought against it.
Anybody remember how seductively fashionable the Affinities once seemed? Klein named the twenty-two Affinity groups after the letters of the Phoenician alphabet, for no better reason than that he was friendly with a colleague who taught ancient Near Eastern literature, and suddenly everyone was reciting those syllables as earnestly as Proto-Canaanite schoolchildren: Eyn, Pey, Qof, Rosh. And of course the biggies, Tau and Het. Some of us were bold or curious enough to take the test. Some of us qualified to join a local tranche. And some of us didn’t, and some of us envied those who did, as if they had been admitted to an exclusive fraternity, the one all the cool kids belonged to.
Yes, it was like that. Really.
A few years more and it became obvious that the pitch about how people “cooperate more successfully” inside the Affinities wasn’t just a come-on. Some of the Affinities were cooperating themselves into big money by way of entrepreneurship or investment. Outsiders weren’t invited to that party, either. And we did begin to feel very much like outsiders, those of us who failed to pass the test or who refused to be tested. We all knew someone who had vanished into the black hole of an Affinity group and no longer had the time or patience to show up for the cousin’s wedding or the niece’s bat mitzvah. Some of us were angry enough to join advocacy groups like NOTA (None of the Above) or, less formally, to get up in the faces of strangers who declared their allegiances a little too smugly. Amazing how a few well-publicized swarmings and knife fights brought the long sleeves down over those old Het or Wau tattoos. Big profits for the laser-tattoo-removal industry—and for tattoo artists who know how to hide a Phoenician letter under even more elaborate skin art. (Have you ever wondered how many thirty-somethings are walking the streets with a delt hidden in their dragon or a tau concealed in their pot leaf?)
Cheap, quick, universal Affinity testing—and the publication of Klein’s teleodynamic source code—saved the Affinities from the financial collapse of InterAlia. But it also created the Affinities as we know them today: circled wagons in a hostile desert, sometimes locked in fierce intergroup conflict. Tranche warfare, so to speak. Het is to Tau as Hatfield is to McCoy, insiders say, and rumor has it that actual bullets have been exchanged, though both groups deny it.
Social-tech regulatory bills currently before Congress will either defang the Affinities or delete them altogether, depending on which version of the legislation passes. It remains to be seen whether the remnants of Klein’s Affinities can survive the rigors of government oversight and increasingly stringent tort law.
But an even more serious challenge to the Affinities may be lurking on the horizon. People have been playing with the teleodynamic data by which Klein invented the original Affinity groups. There are other ways of interpreting those numbers, these people say. Other ways of sorting the human socionome. Radical new teleodynamic algorithms have been proposed and are currently being tested.
We’ve learned too much about ourselves to go back to the old ways. But how do we connect with one another, post-Affinities? That remains an open question. And, potentially, a very scary one.
—Editorial, “Groupthinking,” NewYorkNewsSite.org
Meir Klein identified cooperation as the keynote human skill, and he sorted humanity’s best cooperators into twenty-two hypercollaborative groups, the Affinities. It was his hope that these networked hypercollaborators would act together to further human progress.
But having your hand on a lever means nothing unless you know which way to throw it. The capacity to do work is only as important as the work we do.
New Socionome has designed powerful new outcome-directed social algorithms, open-sourced and freely available. Telos is the Greek word for “purpose” or “goal.” You might say we’re putting the telos back in teleodynamics. Inventing a better world, one hookup at a time.
—New Socionome Manifesto (Cambridge/Shahjalal draft)
CHAPTER 12
One January night when I was sixteen years old my stepbrother Geddy came into my room, terrified for no apparent reason.
When the sound of his anxious breathing woke me, my first thought was that something was wrong in the house: a fire, a break-in, somebody was sick. A glance at the window showed winter darkness and a lacework of ice and a few snowflakes drifting past the fogged glass, as the clock on my nightstand ticked from 4:10 to 4:11. “Geddy?” I said. “What the fuck?”
“You shouldn’t swear,” he said.
Geddy was a month shy of ten and still very much under the influence of Mama Laura, for whom even “hell” and “damn” were forbidden words. I told him that if he wanted to wake me up in the middle of the night he should brace himself for the possibility of a curse or two. Then I said, “So what’s wrong? Bad dream?”
It was a reasonable guess. Geddy suffered from chronic bad dreams. He was also an occasional bed-wetter, though the flap of his PJs looked dry tonight. He was pretty amorphous in his pajamas: a heavy kid, clumsily proportioned, strands of hair pasted to his forehead with sweat. Mama Laura kept the house swelteringly hot in winter. The furnace was roaring like a chained dragon down in the basement.
“Can I ask you a question?” His voice was plaintive.
“Can’t you ask Mama Laura?”
He hung his head. “No.”
“Why not?”
“I’d wake up Daddy Fisk.”
Fair enough. My father was pretty touchy. Geddy was still getting used to his hair-trigger temper. Dad had not yet uttered an unkind word to or about his new wife in the six months they had been married, but his attitude toward Laura’s son Geddy was increasingly impatient. If Geddy was reluctant to wake the old man with a question, I couldn’t blame him.
Nor could he have gone to my brother Aaron. Aaron resented the way the family had changed since Dad’s second marriage. He was polite to Mama Laura—Aaron was too fond of being the old man’s firstborn and favorite son to put that status at risk. But he was only barely cordial to Geddy, and only when he thought he was being watched. When he figured the rest of us were out of earshot he could reduce Geddy to tears with a few choice words.
“Okay,” I said, “ask.”
“Can I sit on the bed?”
“Is that the question?”
He was impervious to irony. “No.”
“Okay, sit. If you’re dry.”
He blushed. “I’m dry.”
“Okay then.”
He perched at the foot of the bed. I felt the mattress compress under his weight. “Adam,” he said, “is the world old or is it young?”
He stared at me intently, waiting for an answer.
“Jesus, Geddy, is that what’s bugging you?”
“Please don’t swear!”
“What’s the question even mean?”
He frowned even harder and groped for an explanation. “It’s like, is everything all used up? Is history almost over? Or is it just getting started?”
Crazy little guy. I had no real idea what he was talking about it, but he wanted an answer so badly I felt obliged to give him one. “Jesus, Geddy—sorry—but how should I know? I guess it’s kind of in the middle.”
“In the middle?”
“Really?”
“Sure. I guess. I mean, that’s how it seems to me.”
He thought it over, and finally he smiled. I didn’t think I’d solved the problem for him—whatever his problem was—but I seemed to have made it easier for him to bear. “Thank you, Adam.”
“You’re incredibly weird, Geddy.”
I had said those words often but I always said them affectionately, and Geddy’s smile widened. “You too,” he said. As always.
“Go to bed now, ’kay?”
“Okay,” he said.
Neither of us would mention the conversation in the morning. Nor would we report to anyone in the family. Geddy probably figured I would forget about it altogether.
But I didn’t, and neither did he.
* * *
Four years had passed since I had sat with Amanda Mehta and Trevor Holst in an attic room in our tranche house in Toronto, confronting a future we could barely comprehend. Many things had changed since then.
For one, I was wearing an absurdly expensive suit. For another, I was in New York City. For a third, I was doing something I was good at.
But I was not, at the moment, doing it very successfully.
I sat in a midtown restaurant opposite a woman I had met more than once, for professional reasons, since that night in Toronto. The woman’s name was Thalia Novak. She was in her forties, skinny, with a narrow face and a halo of tautly curled hair. She wore a green blouse and a necklace of strung glass beads the size of playground marbles. Thalia was a sodality rep for the Eyn Affinity, and I had a feeling she was about to deliver some bad news.
But we shared dinner first, like civilized people. I supposed it was even possible she might change her mind as we talked, if the decision in question had not already been taken at some higher level of the Eyn hierarchy. I was acting as a Tau negotiator, fully empowered to make a deal on behalf of the North American sodalities, and Thalia was my opposite number.