The Perfect Read online

  “Okay,” Zach said.

  This was already getting old. I wasn’t going to spend an entire week getting upstaged by NeoMechi software over and over. “I get the point,” I mumbled.

  “What?” Josh asked.

  I leaned toward him and whispered, “You learn fast and you’re super smart.”

  Josh nodded his agreement, and I threw my hands in the air.

  “Don’t over-think this stuff,” Josh told Zach. “Follow the rules and you’ll get the right answer.”

  “He needs to understand why the rules work,” I countered.

  “Why?” Josh said. “As long as he does his homework right.”

  “Yeah, Dad,” Zach said. “Give me a break. I don’t care what this means as long as I get the assignment done and I don’t fail.”

  “That’s a pretty sorry attitude,” I said.

  Zach rolled his eyes and looked at the next problem.

  “TJ, don’t sweat it,” Josh said. “In a few years, they’re going to take math out of the high school curriculum.”

  I shook my head. “I’ve heard that and I don’t believe it. Kids still have to understand this stuff.”

  “Why?” Josh asked.

  “Yeah, why?” Zach echoed.

  Josh laughed. “Even toddlers these days talk to ooloo.”

  “The engineers at NeoMechi need to be good at math,” I said.

  “They don’t do their own calculations. That would be too slow. Do you want Zach to learn math skills that have no value?”

  “Let’s not debate this right now.” I tried to sound friendly. “Zach, finish your homework.” I grabbed Josh by the sleeve and pulled him away as I left. I was tired and needed some TV.

  I sat on the sofa. My assignment, Josh, sat across from me. I brought up a channel guide and flipped through the stations. Nothing caught my attention. How could I relax and enjoy a show with him sitting there? He watched the shows, occasionally glancing at me, but I was pretty sure he thought my choices were ridiculously stupid. He was probably doing more important things in that computer brain of his anyway.

  After some time, I walked over to him. I studied his face, up close, and examined his neck, then folded his collar and peered down his shirt.

  “Can I help you?” he asked.

  I ignored him and felt along his arms and pulled up his shirt and ran my hand across his back.

  “Is this fun?” he asked.

  Completing my investigation, I returned to my seat and sat. I stared at him for a long time. Then I asked, “How do I shut you off?”

  He shook his head. “How do I shut you off?”

  I sighed. “I need a good night’s sleep. Whether you need rest or not, I want you to lie down in your bed and stay put for seven hours. No getting up and walking around in the middle of the night. Are you willing to do that?”

  Yes, he was willing.

  “Great,” I said. He had brought some pajamas, which I found strangely comforting, and after he had organized a few things on his night stand, he slid under the covers.

  “No getting up and walking around, right?” I asked.

  He nodded and rolled onto his side. “Goodnight,” he said. “See you in the morning.”

  “No getting up for any reason,” I repeated. I turned off the light.

  He stayed there like a good dog for the entire night. Or at least I think he did. If he was wandering around, he was pretty quiet about it.

  Josh was up and moving around by 6:30 am. I could hear him whistling.

  I sat up, rubbed my eyes, trudged to the bathroom. All night I had drifted in a half-awake state, thinking about unleashing the perfect software, the perfect face, the perfect product – worrying that the product would annoy consumers or make them feel stupid.

  “Whistling,” I said under my breath. I glared in his general direction. I wondered what sort of engineering was required to get his mouth to pucker right and whatever else was needed to whistle. Our engineers hadn’t just made a breakthrough. They’d blasted light years past the current technology. They’d shown no restraint. I imagined them sitting around a conference room brainstorming his functionality. He should whistle! He should kick balls! He should vibrate! He should quote Shakespeare! He should understand the general theory of relativity! Hell, why not? Load it all in!

  I stepped into the shower and willed the spray of hot water to erase my concerns. There was more than Josh to worry about. A new sense of unease was creeping in as I thought about today’s soccer game. My stomach was tense. The Frackers had two undefeated years. I felt as invested in the game today as Zach did, maybe more. We needed at least a tie to earn a place in the tournament.

  Zach would finish school at three and catch a car to the soccer park. I had some time to kill before the big event. I figured I’d swing by to see Indira and cancel dinner, then take Josh clothes shopping. He couldn’t show up to the game in a flashy suit. Coach Roberto would laugh his ass off.

  I requested a 10 am ElloCar. A two-person vehicle rolled up one minute early and was waiting outside as we left the house. Josh slid to the far seat, bubbling with excitement. I had already given ElloCar our first destination, so as we settled into our seats, the car gave a friendly hello and stated our expected arrival time.

  I had told Josh we had some errands to run. I was intentionally vague. I didn’t need him thinking three steps ahead of me, so my strategy was to keep him in the dark as much as possible. I’d reveal little pieces of information as needed. When we went to the sporting goods store later, I was going to buy him some t-shirts and soccer shorts and socks and cross-trainers, and he would wear them to the game, whether he wanted to or not.

  Our first stop was Indira’s lab. “I need to see someone for a minute.”

  “Who?” he asked.

  “That’s not important. Just a woman I know.”

  “A girlfriend?” His voice rose with interest.

  Oh, what the hell. I might as well tell him.

  “Yes. I would say so.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Someone you met recently, right? You use the dating site Mobbee under the name SpinDaddy and are communicating with someone named SweetMama123#. She’s been pretty anonymous online.”

  Indira worked at Xpetz in Burlington, not far from NeoMechi. The office building was shared by a lot of other companies, so I assumed that even though Josh had probably already hacked my ElloCar account, he had no idea who we were meeting.

  The car glided up to the front.

  “139 Crawford Avenue,” Josh announced.

  I sent Indira a quick ping that I had arrived and would be up shortly.

  As we stepped out of the car, people bustled about on the street. Crawford was a busy work district loaded with financial firms, technology companies, startups, and restaurants. A DeliverIt drone buzzed by with a small package. Bean God drones were everywhere, zipping coffees to busy workers. The bright cloudless sky brought a hint of April warmth – sunny but not too hot. Perfect for a soccer game.

  No one paid much attention to Josh, except for one woman who briefly glanced his way. Other than that, he was treated as just another guy on the street.

  Inside Indira’s building, we took the elevator to the fourth floor, and while riding up, I briefed him. “She’s a researcher at Xpetz. She works in a biology lab. She creates personalized pets.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Josh said. “I intercepted your ping. You are visiting Indira Mahajan.”

  I clamped my hand on his shoulder. It was a No Bullshit clamp. “You’re staying in the lobby. You can meet her some other time. I don’t know her well enough to have you saying God Knows What. You’re liable to screw things up and I’d rather do that all by myself, thank you very much.”

  “Okay, fine.”

  We were greeted in the lobby by a young woman sitting behind a desk who asked us to wave our IDs near the check-in scanner. I had a chip in my ring, so I waved my hand and heard the pleasant go-ahead tone. Josh waved his hand too, just for show
; his chip was embedded in his stomach somewhere. She consulted her screen to see who we were, verifying that we weren’t known terrorists or competitors or former employees registered in the National Gun Owner Database.

  “First lab on the right,” she said with a smile. “I’m buzzing you in.”

  “He’s going to wait out here,” I said and stared at Josh.

  He sat down in a chair and smiled at her.

  Indira was hunched over a lab bench, facing away.

  Josh was right. I had met Indira on Mobbee. Yes, Mobbee had a bit of a bad reputation. It had started as a service to foster social unrest in areas of oppression and dictatorship. And yes, Mobbee’s system intelligence had taken on a life of its own, getting smarter and smarter about how to automate rebellions. And YES, Mobbee had triggered a global crisis consisting of fourteen hours of rampant violence, shootings, lootings, and basically worldwide anarchy.

  But that was the old Mobbee. I used the new Mobbee. A well-funded company like Mobbee doesn’t go away because of a few setbacks. They had shut down for a while before relaunching as a dating service, presumably after stripping out the social unrest stuff. I didn’t have much faith that was true, but the new dating features were so addictive that I went along with it. They tried to rebrand the service as myConnect but everyone still called it Mobbee, which just rolls off the tongue better.

  I found Mobbee freakishly good at finding people you would like to hang out with, date, marry, or whatever. The company seemed to know everything about everyone, somehow connecting the dots in the most amazing ways, determining who you should meet when you didn’t even know yourself.

  After my divorce, about six months passed before I started dating. That’s how long I took to get past the deepest heartache. Eventually, I accepted that the divorce had been for the best; I was thankful to have sole custody of Zach and knew I had to move on.

  Friends told me Mobbee was the way to go. I didn’t even have to complete a profile. After clicking the "agreement" box, Mobbee gathered up every piece of data that was known about me and had ten recommendations within two minutes. I started at the top of the list.

  The first woman I called was awesome. Funny, intelligent, professional, recently divorced. I was super-excited to have such a close match right off the bat. She asked me how many of these dates I had been on, and I said she was the first. She offered some words of caution: everyone, she said, is looking for the perfect match now. A good match was no longer good enough. A great match was no longer good enough. Everyone was looking for their soul mate. We both had to agree we probably weren’t soul mates, and went our separate ways.

  More dates followed. All of them were fun: no duds. Everyone using the service seemed to be in a sort of supercharged romantic spell. Mobbee just kept giving and giving. Step One, have a great time. Step Two, meet another awesome person.

  Months went by. A strange kind of jadedness set in. Clearly, this process wasn’t really leading anywhere.

  On my first date with Indira, I asked, “Are you looking for a soul mate?”

  “That’s kind of a dumb concept,” she said. “No one is perfect.”

  “How do you like Mobbee?” I asked.

  “I think it has created a whole new matchmaking problem. Everyone keeps trading up.”

  As far as I was concerned, those were great answers.

  On our third date, we decided to deactivate our Mobbee accounts and see where things led.

  Indira had filled me in on her childhood during those first dates. She’d grown up on a nut farm on the northern finger of Karnataka, India, along with several brothers and a sister. She told me the name of the nuts they grew (I had never heard of them), that her father was a laborer from the time he first went to work until the day of his passing, and that he spent his entire career bent over picking those nuts, while her mother was a math teacher who nurtured Indira’s gifts in math and science. Indira had taken a 30-minute speed shuttle every Monday and Tuesday to the University of Hyderabad, spending the rest of the week joining a HoloClass. By staying home most of the time, she was able to help her mother care for her aging father, who continued to go out and collect nuts on almost a daily basis, despite a rapidly growing collection of untreated pains, illnesses, and afflictions. Eight years later she earned a PhD in molecular biology, but by then her father had passed away. Soon after, she came to Boston for a postdoc at MIT.

  Indira was now Senior Vice President of Innovation at Xpetz. Her job was to oversee the work of 6 or 7 biologists who were looking for cheap and easy genetic modifications to small mammals, any gimmick that would allow Xpetz to sell them at premium prices. They created quirky oddities like dogs with indigo eyes, cats with lion-like manes, gerbils with glowing pink tails, rabbits with adorable green noses. No one bought plain cats anymore. Parents selected what they wanted for their child and a month later picked up their puppy with the BioLume™ zebra stripes at the local Xpetz Superstore.

  Now, as Indira had explained to me, she was trying to figure out how to get specific letters to grow in animal hair. If successful, customers could order a child’s initials, a pet’s name, or even a favorite expression. So far: no progress. She was feeling the pressure; green noses had had their moment of popularity and Xpetz was fearing a slump if they didn’t come up with something new before their competitors.

  “I got into this field to cure rare diseases,” she had told me. Her sister had died at age 22 of Cushing disease, a tumor at the base of her brain. "But I have almost 18 million rupees of education to pay off, so for the time being, I need to make as much money as I can.”

  She would be working at Xpetz for a long time.

  Her lab was an orderly assemblage of experimental glassware and machines with screens and tubes. I said hello and gave her a quick kiss.

  “How’s your day been?” she asked.

  I wanted to tell her the truth, but said, “Wonderful. How have you been?”

  She glanced around the lab. “Same old.”

  “I hate to do this,” I said. “I hope you’re not mad. We have to reschedule tomorrow night.”

  “Oh, I was looking forward to it.”

  “So was I. But I have an out-of-town visitor. He works at my company and I agreed to entertain him for a week.”

  “Where’s he from?”

  I hesitated. “All over, actually. Texas, China...”

  She nodded and tapped off a screen on a nearby machine. “Okay, no problem. Let me know if you want to do something together with him. I wouldn’t mind, really.”

  “You wouldn’t like him. He’s kind of a know-it-all.”

  “Oooh, now I’m intrigued. I bet I can stump him.”

  “I’m sure you can.” This was going horribly. I didn’t want her to have any interest in meeting him. “But he’s a little arrogant and doesn’t like it when you prove him wrong.”

  “Hi,” Josh said. He was standing behind me.

  “What are you doing back here?” I demanded, locking his eyes with my best you’re-a-dead-robot stare.

  “TJ, don’t be rude,” Indira said.

  Great, now I looked like an ass. I tried to recover. “Sorry. I thought he was… never mind. Indira, meet Josh.”

  She extended her hand. “Nice to meet you, Josh. TJ says you’re here for a week. Have you been to Boston before?”

  “I have not,” he said. Then, in a whisper deliberately loud enough for her to hear, he said to me, “She’s beautiful, how come you didn’t tell me?”

  “Umm.” I had no quick answer.

  “I hate to tell you but she’s out of your league.” He glanced around the lab. “Smarter than you, too.”

  Josh zeroed in on the instrument next to him. There must have been 200 tiny tubes snaking around the front of that thing. “TJ, this is a CellPop 5 Gene Machine. Did you know these were the first to sequence and re-synth a person’s genome in under an hour?”

  “Wow, I’m impressed,” Indira said, trying to hide her surprise.

>   “I read an article,” he explained, studying the machine’s electronics.

  She laughed and held up some sort of pen-like gizmo with a plastic tip. “Okay, smartypants, what’s this?”

  He barely glanced her way. “Micropipette.”

  Her smile faded slightly and she narrowed her eyes. “You’ve worked in a biology lab before.”

  “No, I’m in robotics. I’ve been blessed with a photographic memory. And I read voraciously. So I have a ton of information packed away that I really don’t do anything with.”

  “I could have used that in school,” she said, looking back at her bench to check a setting on her thing-that-I-now-knew-was-a-Gene-Machine.

  “Anyway, sorry to barge in,” Josh said. “But Rachel and I are going to the Whip Hits Comedy Club Wednesday night, and I thought the two of you might join us.”

  “Who’s Rachel?” I demanded.

  “The lovely young woman at the front desk. I got to know her a little and since I’m new to Boston, I suggested we might check out some of the fun things to do. You two had made plans already and I sensed I might spoil them, so why don’t we all do something together?”

  “I’m up for it,” Indira said.

  “I don’t know...” I managed. I couldn’t flash my dead-robot look again. Not with her watching. I clenched my teeth.

  “Why not?” Indira asked.

  “Yeah, why not?” Josh echoed.

  I had no answer. “Okay.”

  How did he know Indira and I had a date Wednesday night? I looked around the room. Maybe one of these machines had a microphone, and Josh had just hacked it.

  Indira walked us out to the lobby. Josh introduced me to Rachel. She was younger than Indira and I, about 24 or 25. That made her 24 or 25 years older than Josh, but who’s counting. He made a few clever jokes and both women laughed. For a moment I felt detached from the scene. Was I absolutely sure NeoMechi wasn’t playing a massive joke on me?