Chapter 37
Thirty-Seven
At night, it was magic.
The main entrance was uplit, enormous. During the day, I passed the museum so often that it had lost its grandeur. It took
up blocks and blocks of space, visitors winding around corners like roots in the ground. Caleb had mentioned that it was a
total of twenty-six buildings right now, interconnected and growing.
“You doing one of those adult sleepovers?” the cab driver asked.
I halted with my hand on the door handle. We locked eyes in the rearview mirror. “Is that a choice I’m missing?”
“I drop people here at night for ’em. You have dinner, go on tours, and sleep under the big blue whale on a cot.”
“Right,” I said. Anything was possible in New York. Except one thing.
I thanked him and stepped onto the curb. Beneath the fabric of my sweater, goose bumps raced along my forearms.
As if summoned—and technically, he was, by my text—he was perched on one of the top steps. A ring of keys dangled from his
hand. His arms were folded, his legs splayed. He’d look like a cologne ad if fault wasn’t etched on every one of his features.
I wanted to hate him, but I didn’t.
I was angry with the universe, with Wells, with the algorithm, with everything that came with Soulmail. And maybe most of all, with myself. Because I didn’t know what to believe anymore, and I relied much too heavily on other people to make me happy.
I made an effort to trot, which resulted in me stomping up the steps until I was ten feet from him. My chest heaved. I crossed
my arms. It’s hard to be haughty in sweatpants, but I was doing a bang-up job of it. “Where were you tonight?” I asked, my
voice trembling on the last syllable.
“I—”
“What did I do?”
He startled, as if bewildered. “It’s not you,” he said.
Part of my anger—embarrassment?—dissipated. “What do you mean?”
He raked a hand through his hair, the keys jingling. “I’m sorry I didn’t show up tonight. My phone was on silent, and I’ve
been under tons of pressure to finish my project. I honestly lost total track of time.”
“That’s a bullshit excuse.”
“It is,” he agreed. “I really do suck at time management.”
My nostrils flared. “That’s a terrible quality.”
“Don’t I know it.”
“If you didn’t want to come, you should have said so.”
“I did want to.” He rose, descended two steps in quick succession, stopped. “It’s—do you want to see?”
I paused. Cars drove behind us, someone beeped, someone belted something—a One Direction song, of all things—in Central Park.
“I’m still mad,” I said.
“You should be,” he said.
I waited.
He exhaled. “I’m a jerk friend, and you deserve more.” This was the second time in my life he’d hurt me, but if there was
one thing about Caleb that I’d always appreciated, it was his honesty.
I shivered.
“It’s warm inside,” he offered.
“Fine. Let’s go see.”
The hair along the nape of his neck curled the same way it always had, and my heart squeezed in my chest. I’d been trying
so hard to keep everything together, squared, orderly; to acclimate myself to my new life, to move on with my Soulmail-mate.
I’ve never been able to recapture that feeling of running through the dunes with Caleb, of no responsibilities and soaking
up every piece of information I could, of this same hair that used to poke from beneath his Polo hat.
The ceilings soared above us. For the second time today, I was someplace after-hours, only this time I wasn’t barefoot. When
we were in high school, we fundraised a few thousand dollars by way of gourmet candy bar sales and “canning” outside of Dunkin’
Donuts to hold our prom at the New England Aquarium, and I’ve never forgotten the sensation of wearing satin and my first
pair of heels, watching jellyfish and sharks and seals and clownfish zoom on by while elsewhere, the trove of kids who’d be
there in the morning slept.
Caleb was there for that, too.
We passed the bronze statue of Teddy Roosevelt. He sat like Santa, ready for a child to climb onto his lap. I resisted the
urge to do so myself. “It feels weird being here after hours. Like I’m breaking in.”
“Well, you’re my guest, so you aren’t. Though I’m not theoretically permitted to entertain guests, so there’s that.”
“So you’re saying, don’t yank anything from the exhibits?”
He shot me a look. “You’re on the tightest security system in the city. Your move, Adler.”
We passed an elevator bay. “Wait. Seriously?”
“Seriously. One of, anyway. Most things government-funded get linked into this high-scale system.”
“Then why don’t schools?”
“I don’t have a good answer for that,” he admitted. “But I do have something to show you.”
I followed him through dimly lit hallways until he used his card for access to an administrative section. It was a ghost town, the feeling of doing something wrong doubling down. “Should we be here?” I whispered.
“Livi.” Caleb held open the door to his office. “I work here.” He shook the mouse at his computer. “I do need you to sign
an NDA, though.”
I brought my hand to my throat. “What? Ca—”
“Kidding,” he said. He stooped, retrieved a bottle of red wine, then twisted off the cap and poured it into a pair of glasses
he had on a shelf. “Glass of pinot mixed with years of dust?”
“The kind that takes the edge off,” I said.
I dragged a chair over to sit beside him. His jaw suddenly tensed. “No NDA, but I’m not kidding about not saying anything
about this yet,” he said.
“Oooh, secrets,” I teased. “Am I the first to know?”
“Not exactly.” He cupped his chin in his hands while the screen loaded.
“It smells like a library in here.”
He raised an eyebrow in my direction. “You trying to talk dirty to me, Adler?”
The screen blinked into focus. I sipped my wine, interest piqued. “ ‘The Longevity Project,’ ” I read aloud. “ ‘Developed
by Caleb Mariner, curator at the American Museum of Natural History, New York, New York’.” For one second, I forgot I was
mad at him. I prodded his arm. “What have you been keeping from me?”
“Actually, something fairly big.”
“Show me.”
“Here goes.” His shoulders were as stiff as a seesaw.
“Ever since Soulmail came out, I feel like the world is somehow both on fast-forward and rewind. I just want to know so much—about everything.” Relatable.
“And I want the time to do it.” His eyes widened, and his words fell over themselves, the cadence unlike the thoughtful way he usually spoke.
“The Longevity Project is based on the idea that our social groups dictate our happiness and the length of our lives, barring some kind of peril.”
“Like what we talked about at Nat’s birthday? How having no one to socialize with is worse for you than drinking and smoking?”
“Basically, yeah.”
“Bad press for the D.A.R.E. program.” I leaned forward.
“Well.” Caleb traced the space bar. “I partnered with some researchers on social relationships and our quality of life . . .”
“Spit it out.”
“And how Soulmail sort of categorizes it for us.”
Wells. The wine burned my throat. “It’s been a long night. Humor me.”
He spun my way. “Okay. In the simplest terms possible, if positive social relationships bolster our lives, then Soulmail basically
tells you who to keep in your life to make you live longer.”
I considered this, rubbing my palms together. “How does your project work?”
“It’s a user-generated experience. You enter your information and the info of your soulmate. If your soulmate also enters
your personal info, then that essentially dual-confirms it: There’s a match. And then from there, you enter in your family,
your best friends, and so on. All of them enter in their information, and these little groups start to form.”
“Little groups?”
“Yeah. Sort of like—you know how on Facebook you need to be mutuals to be friends? Unlike other apps, where you can follow
someone or someone can follow you without being mutuals?”
“Sure.”
“This has a similar element. On the user-facing app, you can enter whoever you want once your verification goes through—got the idea for that from that dating website guy you interviewed. And then, the other person has to confirm it on their end. Everyone receives a unique number-and-symbol combination to use as their log-ins. Once you’re confirmed, there’s a branch of a relationship that comes off you.
I used all that information to create a visual representation of it, which created these little . . . clusters.”
My mouth dropped open. “Wait. Like the soul families thing?”
He laughed. “Honestly? Sorta. There are groups that look like—oh, you know those white dandelions we used to see on the hill
behind the elementary school?”
“The wishing flowers?” My mind whirled. “Of course I do. But how. . . ?”
“Like how AI generated that ocean art project? My program isn’t AI, but it uses information and data points in order to create
something productive.” He tapped a few keys. “And what have we done for the last generation? We’ve fed it all the boring details
of our lives. We told it what we look like when we’re getting ready in the morning, we post our likes and dislikes, we curate
playlists of music that appeals to us, we read articles on topics that interest us. If you have a phone, it knows your location
at all times. It knows your vaccine beliefs, how you’ll vote, your stance on abortion and gun rights, whether you want or
don’t want kids, and if you do, if you’ll enroll them in private or public school. The internet’s been able to read us like
a book for a while, and now it can write us like one. Not as good as human creators, of course, but faster.”
“You’re right,” I said, thinking of all the drafts of content I had. Of the way that my numbers had climbed lately, and the
very purposeful way in which I did and did not mentally assign value to it.
“Anyway, the current intent of this is to offer people others they may want to connect with beyond their soulmates. If your childhood best bud has a soulmate who you might never have chosen to spend time with . . .” Flush crept across his cheeks.
“You might give a hang with him a second chance. Or a third. And maybe even a fourth.”
“For the sake of friendship?” I dug into my cuticle, then tried to force my fingers to relax.
“You got it. This way, as the world continues to age, we can build up the community ties that are close to us, focus on the
people who we may be more likely to run into. Obviously, it’s not perfect. And I’m not saying that you should limit yourself
to the people in your own little bunch. But it is kind of cool to think about all these little orbits, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.” I leaned back in the chair. “How many people are you working with so far?”
He tried to hide how pleased he was. “Upwards of sixty thousand.”
“Sixty thousand!” I rocked forward.
“Yeah. When the museum posted about it, people really responded and shared.”
He zoomed in and out, showing me the overarching map view, drilling down to personal ones. I could see why he’d been so wrapped
up in this. There were loads of data, and the patterns that emerged were shaded in terms of strength, like a Jackson Pollack
painting.
“This is really something, Caleb. You could make a fortune with this.”
“Nope,” he replied instantly. “It’ll be free access, forever.”
“Sure. But ad sponsorships—”
“Uh-uh,” he said. Shame licked my face. “I want no organization to have this. Beyond the museum, I guess. I’d like it to stay
as unbiased as it can.”
I nudged his hand. “Okay. What are you going to do with it, then?”
“Oh, that’s the best part,” he said. “I think what you mean is: What have I done with it?”
“Come again?”
“Follow me.”
For the second time that night, I did.