Chapter 4
In Danny’s third week in Montana, he gets forwarded a privacy complaint from their customer happiness manager. The user, someone named Amber, is saying that updates about her ex and his new girlfriend are showing up in her feed.
At the time, Danny is at the kitchen table. Cal, at the couch, is a few feet away.
“Oh, that’s an interesting question,” Cal says.
Danny is caught by the sudden, uncomfortable sensation that his father can read his mind. “What?”
“You asked if I liked this show,” Cal says. “Didn’t you?”
“What?” Danny says again. “Oh, yeah. I guess I did.”
“Well, it’s an interesting question. I’ll think on that one.”
Danny says something about needing to take a call and goes to his bedroom. He’s mostly inside his computer screen already. This shouldn’t be possible, and yet, somehow, here are Amber’s screenshots.
Danny pulls Olive and Leon, his two lead developers, into a call to give them the update.
Neither of them is sure how this happened, but Leon thinks it might’ve been some code he pushed last week.
Danny puts out a notice in the company tech channel that they’re aware of the bug and working on fixing it ASAP.
He pulls up the original user profile. Amber is a premium user, so they have her billing address and latest payment date.
They have her history on the app (her account is seven months old).
Sure enough, it appears to be linked to two separate accounts.
One, a current boyfriend—relationship age, two months.
One, an ex-boyfriend—broken up four months ago.
Danny messages Olive and Leon again, and Olive suggests it has something to do with their effort to add poly-inclusive functionality.
(That was a meeting Julian walked into, said, “I simply cannot,” and walked out of again.)
Danny filters users to see how many accounts are linked to more than one.
It’s a lot—but most of the duplicate connections are deactivated, which indicates that the couple broke up and everything functioned as normal.
Then he sees two accounts that have the same credit card, the same phone number, but different email addresses.
Which, he assumes, means that someone is cheating and trying not to get caught.
He goes back to Amber’s account, and then into her ex’s user data.
And here, Danny finds the problem. The connection with Amber’s account was never properly deactivated because the ex started dating someone else, the new girlfriend, before he broke up with Amber.
Deactivating would’ve meant deactivating the new relationship, too.
Either the app, or Amber’s ex, failed to close the loop.
Danny writes a query to find instances of mistakenly activated relationships.
There are fewer of them than he had feared—on the order of a couple hundred—and he scrolls through them quickly.
A few, he notices, seem to have five, ten linked accounts.
Who has that kind of time? There’s a part of him that almost doesn’t want to fix this bug, because Danny doesn’t have a great deal of sympathy for cheating and kind of thinks this is what these people deserve.
He’s mulling this over as he scrolls, clicking in and out of various profiles, and then something ticks in the back of his brain with an unpleasant little lurch. Slowly, he scrolls back up.
There is a user profile with two linked relationships. Both are active. Danny sees the name. He sees: Olsen.
Phillip Olsen. Two linked profiles: One is Cecilia. The other is named Theresa.
Danny leans back from his computer. His screen seems suddenly too bright.
He rubs his palms against his jaw, which is rough with stubble, and shuts his eyes.
Though Danny supposes it’s possible that Eve’s parents are involved in some consensual long-term swinging, it seems more likely that the most obvious answer is also the correct one: that Phillip is cheating.
Not just sexually but emotionally; why else invest the effort in measuring relationship health?
Danny never should have been able to learn this information, and feels it is a betrayal to all his users.
But now that he knows, he can’t unknow. It feels like there is a horrible sort of irony in this—that he would violate user privacy while trying to encode a fix to protect user privacy.
Also unfortunate is that now that Danny has tasted this knowledge, it is hard to stop himself from wanting just that little bit more.
Is it really cheating, or is it something else?
It wouldn’t be hard to find out. And what about all the other questions he’s ever wondered?
What is Julian and Gigi’s score these days, really?
How often does Eve open the app? Has Kyra moved on with someone new, and are they happy?
Does Cal’s girlfriend, Beatrice, really exist?
Is Danny’s mother alive? Does she know who Danny is?
Danny stands and steps back from his laptop like it’s a live bomb.
He could ask Bug what to do, but he already knows what Bug would say: It would be all equivocating about right and wrong, asking follow-up questions with no real answers.
“What a complicated situation!” Bug would say.
“While I can help you explore the intricacies of this, ultimately, only you can decide the right course of action.”
Bug, Danny realizes, has subsumed Danny’s internal monologue.
Even when he resists outsourcing his decisions to an app, the app lives on in his consciousness.
It’s the Tetris Effect—when people discovered video games, and video games became habit, and all at once, a whole generation’s worth of people closed their eyes to dream and saw only brightly colored squares slotting into place.
How many people has Danny Tetris Effected? How many people are out there equivocating about urgent and personal choices because they have begun to think like carefully modulated LLMs: waffling yes-men on an endless quest to avoid original thought?
Danny returns to the living room. He will ask his dad for advice, that’s what he’ll do, but when he reaches the sight line of the TV, he is momentarily distracted by the boisterous laugh track, the breakneck cuts to keep you from looking away, to keep you, at all times, reeling from the subconscious sense of peril.
“I think what’s so compelling about this show is the way it offers enlightening insights on contemporary friendships while also fostering a safe space for the viewer to call home,” Cal says.
“Sorry?”
“It really shows a rich tapestry of human relationships.”
Danny takes a step back. It feels then too cold in the house, like the doors have come down and the spring wind has blown in.
“What did you say?” Danny asks.
“The show,” Cal says. “It’s a rich tapestry of human relationships.”
Danny hates the word tapestry.
He touches his throat. “Hey, can I borrow your phone for a second?”
“Why? Where’s your phone?”
“I want to check something on the app, but I need to see an Android. It’ll just take a second.”
Cal fumbles his giant, foldable phone, which has the text set three times bigger than is standard.
He is hastily closing apps, but Danny is standing right there behind him, and that text would be visible from space.
Danny watches Cal close out of Pattern, and then out of another LLM, and then out of a New York Times review for this TV show, the one with the rich tapestry of human relationships.
“Never mind, actually,” Danny says. His voice sounds to his ears like it’s coming from far away. He sits carefully on the edge of the couch.
Danny regrets asking Cal why he liked the TV show.
The question, it seems, made Cal feel trapped, self-conscious, incapable.
So he looked for other opinions, pre-vetted opinions, to share with Danny instead.
Danny does not know how to say that he doesn’t care how other people have justified their love or hatred of this random show.
Danny cares that Cal likes it. That’s all.
What does it mean to know another person? Their heart and their mind. What does it mean to be known? Danny isn’t sure whether he knows his father, really—and worse, this seems to be exactly what Cal wants. Cal does not want Danny to know him. And Danny never will. There is not enough time.
Has Cal always done this? It’s so hard, as a child, to know whether your parents are changing, or whether you’re just becoming aware of who they have always been.
Maybe the shift came from the disappearance of Danny’s mother, or the onset of illness, or the ability to cite infinite opinions within a few taps on a screen.
Whatever it is, Danny feels responsible: for not being a better son, a better listener, the kind of person who inspires honesty rather than fear.
Danny’s phone vibrates in his pocket with another message from Leon, and he remembers that he was going to ask Cal’s advice on Eve’s dad.
But the question, which has no easy answer, will not be a question Cal wants to hear, or answer.
Is it kind to accept Cal as he is? Or is it cruel to abandon hope that he and Cal can ever know each other the way friends do?
“So, Dad,” Danny says. “Something kind of complicated just happened.”
“Oh?”
“I can’t get into the details, but I accidentally found something out on the back end of Pattern about someone I know in real life.”
Cal’s shoulders tense. “Mmm,” he says.
“Basically, I think I found out someone is cheating. And I don’t know whether I should say anything. I don’t know whether it’s going to drive me crazy to just have this information and not share it, especially if it changes how I see this person. What would you do? If you were me?”
“Oh,” Cal says. “Wow. That’s pretty complicated, huh?” His voice is neutral. Betraying nothing.
Danny waits. Cal does not elaborate.
“Do you think I should say something? I mean, on one hand, it’s not really my business. On the other hand, I would definitely want to know.”
“I get what you’re trying to say here,” Cal says. “I hear you.”
“What?”
“Must be really tough, weighing all this.”
“Can you please just give me an actual answer?” It comes out too harsh. “Please.”
“I did. We’re talking.”
Danny takes a breath. Thinks of what he can say. In the end, he just exhales and looks down at his hands. “Yeah,” he says. “Thanks for being a sounding board.”
He keeps thinking about Eve’s song “Settle.” At the start, Eve sings about seeing a girl who looks like a younger version of her mother, and how she is caught by the sudden urge to go up to her and see if they would get along.
Danny wonders this, too—if he and Cal met at school or at work, whether they would be friends.
But Danny has this vision in his head—it makes him nauseous to watch it play, but on and on it does—of a young Cal walking down the dorm hall away from Danny and Julian, and Danny saying, “Talking to that guy’s like talking to a friendly robot. ”
Danny goes back to his room. Gets his laptop. Sits on the couch next to his dad.
“Do you mind if I watch with you while I work?” Danny says.
“Sure, kid,” Cal says. “There’s a lot to like in this show.”