Chapter 4
Eve and Danny have to go their separate ways for Thursday Night Festivities.
Danny watches her, in her fruit-punch-colored dress and her hair in a flouncy ponytail, go join the swath of spiky-heeled women.
Gigi is dressed in white, in what is surely a wedding dress with a wedding dress price tag but is just being used now, for Thursday Night Festivities.
Chloe, from Marketing, is also there, but she’s standing slightly removed from Gigi’s college friends and sisters.
She shoots Danny a look that says Please kill me.
Eve, who sees all, squeezes Chloe’s arm, and says something brightly to the group.
Danny watches this play out with quiet pride.
In any conversation, there are always some people who would like to take the center stage and others who would rather relax in the audience.
And then there are annoying people who take the stage for too long, or boring people who refuse to participate.
But Eve has perfect balance. She knows just when to seize a moment, but she knows too when to ask a thoughtful question and cast her golden gleam of attention on someone else.
She can walk into a circle of near strangers, take Chloe’s arm, and save her from drowning.
When Danny first started dating Eve, he saw this trick as a kind of perfect calibration—the social skills of someone who has always been charismatic.
But he has come to think of it in different terms: Eve finds it easy to be kind. Eve is kind like it costs her nothing.
“You made it,” Julian says.
Danny turns and sees Julian there in his white linen pants and white linen shirt and the sort of watch one gets from one’s grandfather, if one has the right sort of grandfather. His hair is freshly cut. He looks—and Danny means this with the utmost love—like he’s about to vom.
“How are you doing?”
“So good!” Julian says. “Crushing it!”
“But actually?”
“Gigi’s sister just asked me if I was planning to do anything about my eyebrows before the wedding.”
“What’s wrong with your eyebrows?”
“Everything,” Julian says, “I fear.” He rubs at his brow with his thumb. “How was your flight? How’s your room, is it okay? I haven’t talked to Eve yet. Is she good? Oh, fuck, it’s Cabot. I hate Cabot. What kind of name is Cabot, anyway? Hey, Cabot! Good to see you, man!”
Danny claps Julian’s shoulder. Julian makes a deflated little sound and puts on the face he wears when they meet with investors. It says, I have the right sort of grandfather.
This is a skill, Danny has learned, possessed by all Olsens. They have a specific variety of WASPy repression that allows them to disguise emotion at will.
Their first semester of college, Danny and Julian took a slew of breadth requirements—Conversational Spanish and Baroque Architecture and History of War—and Julian had seemed impossibly clever.
They sat shoulder to shoulder in every class and revealed tiny bits of selfhood to each other one hour at a time: “Me llamo Danny.” “No, I’ve never heard of a colonnade.
” “Of course I don’t have a favorite war. ”
And then their second semester. They both planned to major in computer science.
Julian had taken the AP class in high school; Danny’s hadn’t offered it, but Julian encouraged Danny to skip the intro class anyway on account of his self-taught dabbling.
“I can always help,” Julian said, which was intended cheerily and received as such.
It did not occur to Danny until their first assignment that they had both gotten it all wrong.
They were tasked with creating a game—the one where you skip the stones over each other until you have just the one left.
Danny wrote his program, then wrote it again better.
He delighted in the puzzle of it—the way debugging built new, complicated shells of logic, and then the way a clever revelation would streamline it all down again.
But then he saw the way Julian tried to solve the problem—which was to say, he didn’t, really.
He would write a few lines; get stuck; move on to something he was better at, which was most things.
The night before that first assignment was due, Julian sat with his head on his keyboard at his tiny dorm desk.
Danny had caught him. Julian had his headphones on—hadn’t realized Danny had come back into the room.
And then, when Danny approached Julian’s desk, Julian had sat up, smoothed the dread from his face, and said, “Hey, man, what’s good? ”
“What are you talking about?” Danny said.
“Just, like, where are you coming back from?”
“No,” Danny said. “What the fuck was that?”
“What do you mean?”
“Your whole face just changed. Like, you just got a totally new face when you noticed me.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Danny kneeled next to Julian’s desk. “What if we didn’t fuck with each other and I helped you fix your incredibly shitty code.”
“Okay,” Julian said. “But for what it’s worth, my code would have to exist for it to be shitty.”
From that point, Danny always got to see Julian’s walls going up and coming down again. Danny is wall-exempt. It has led him to believe that the greatest gift someone can give is the ability to see them clearly.
The men of the groom’s party migrate from the hotel lobby to a Sprinter van in the driveway.
It’s a few old college classmates, a few people from work, but mostly characters from the Olsens’ extended network of family friends.
Of them, Danny’s favorite is Holling, and that’s who falls into step beside Danny on the walk to the van.
Unlike some of the family friends (Cabot, for one), Holling has an actual job and phone banks for Democrats, so Danny likes him even though he’s obviously in love with Eve.
“I hear you just went out of beta,” Holling says. “Congratulations.”
Out of beta; just launched a web app with payment processing; Bug has now started learning from user conversations and relationship trends. It looks very little like the app of this time last year.
“Hey, thanks,” Danny says.
They get in the front row of the van. In the back, Julian is slapping a drumbeat against a headrest. One of the other guys is saying, “Okay, but when I got married . . .”
“So I know basically nothing about engineering,” Holling says. “But how’d you do the chatbot? What’s it built on?”
“Pacifica?”
“Daddy Breck, nice.”
“He’s an asshole, but he really did make the best LLM.”
“So how’d you do the scoring algorithm? Does it learn?”
Danny is surprised at the question. “Yeah, it does. It checks patterns from other users and adjusts its scoring.”
“So it’s only going to get better with time.”
“I mean, in theory. Right now, it’s a decent algorithm, but it’s hard to account for self-reporting errors. What we see is that forty percent of users rate their relationships an eight out of ten. Eighty percent rate between a seven and a nine.”
“So everyone thinks their relationship is pretty good?”
“Basically, yeah,” Danny says. He thinks of it this way: A user might be in a generic, dull relationship, but if their last relationship was a constant screaming match, they’ll think, Well, it’s better than that, so it’s probably pretty good.
Or, a user might be in a phenomenal relationship, but they’ll think, But we still bicker sometimes, so it’s not perfect.
“Self-reporting just isn’t that effective,” Danny says. “Hence Bug. That’s our AI.”
Holling nods. The van goes over a bump. In the back, there is the unmistakable sound of a beer opening.
“So Bug analyzes conversations between partners,” Danny says.
“And the way people write about their concerns. And then, once we have more longevity data—who breaks up, who stays together for years—we’ll be able to explain what a good relationship actually is.
Protect people from settling for bad partners; give bad partners the tools to be better. That sort of thing.”
“And what was the source for your training dataset?”
“Didn’t you say you knew basically nothing about engineering?” Danny asks.
Holling spreads his hands. “I compulsively undersell myself because I have some deep-seated insecurities relating to my father. Bug told me that.”
“We used ourselves as our training data,” Danny says. “Which is probably why Bug told you that.”