Тед Чан - Exhalation - Stories

Nat had moved out here to get a fresh start, away from the people and places that could trigger a relapse. The job at SelfTalk wasn’t great, but it was good to earn an honest paycheck, and she mostly liked hanging out with Morrow. His side hustles had been fun; she’d always been good at that sort of thing, and she told herself that it helped keep her from relapsing, because the pleasure of conning people was a safe substitute for getting high. Lately, though, Nat had begun to feel that she was just fooling herself about that. Even if she wasn’t spending the money on drugs, these little scams would probably lead her back to using again. It’d be better for her to get away from all of it; she had to find a different job, away from Morrow, and that probably meant relocating again. But she needed money to do that, so she had to keep working with Morrow before she’d be able to not work with him anymore.

Zareenah was talking. “My niece is a senior in high school, and for the last few months it’s been college application season. This week they heard back, and she did pretty well; she was accepted to three schools. I was feeling good about it until I was chatting with my paraself.

“It turns out that my paraself’s niece got accepted to Vassar, which was her first choice. But here in this branch, that’s one of the schools that rejected my niece. Everything different between our two branches is a result of my activating the prism, right? So I’m the cause of my niece getting rejected. I’m to blame.”

“You’re assuming that if you hadn’t activated the prism, your niece would have gotten accepted,” said Kevin. “But that’s not necessarily true.”

Zareenah started tearing apart a tissue she held in her hands, a habit of hers when talking about herself. “But that means my paraself did something to help her niece, something I didn’t do in this branch. So I’m to blame through my inaction.”

“You’re not to blame,” said Lyle.

“But everything different is because of my prism.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s your fault.”

“How can it not be?”

At a loss, Lyle turned to Dana for help. Dana asked Zareenah, “Aside from Vassar, were there any other differences in the acceptances and rejections that your niece and her paraself got?”

“No, the rest are the same.”

“So we can assume that your niece’s overall application package was equally strong in both branches.”

“Yes,” she said firmly. “She’s a smart girl, and nothing I do is going to change that.”

“So let’s speculate for a minute. Why would Vassar accept your niece in the other branch but not in this one?”

“I don’t know,” said Zareenah.

Dana looked around the room. “Does anyone else have any ideas?”

Lyle said, “Maybe the admissions officer in this branch was having a bad day when he reviewed her application.”

“And what might have caused him to have a bad day?”

Nat had to feign interest, so she participated. “Maybe someone cut him off in traffic that morning.”

“Or he dropped his phone in the toilet,” said Kevin.

“Or both,” said Lyle.

To Zareenah, Dana said, “Are any of those foreseeable consequences of actions you took?”

“No,” admitted Zareenah. “I guess not.”

“They’re just random results of the weather being different between the two branches. And anything can cause the weather to be different. If we looked, I’m sure we could find a hundred people whose prisms connect a branch where your niece was rejected. If the same thing happens in branches where you acted differently, then you aren’t the cause.”

“But I still feel like it’s my fault.”

Dana nodded. “We like the idea that there’s always someone responsible for any given event, because that helps us make sense of the world. We like that so much that sometimes we blame ourselves, just so that there’s someone to blame. But not everything is under our control, or even anyone’s control.”

“I can see it’s not a rational response, but I feel it anyway,” said Zareenah. “I think I’m prone to feeling guilty about my sister…” She paused. “Because of our history.”

“Do you want to talk about that?” asked Dana.

Zareenah hesitated, and then went on. “Years ago, when we were teenagers, we both studied dance, but she was much better than me. She got an audition to attend Juilliard, but I was so jealous that I sabotaged her.”

Now this was interesting: legitimately bad behavior. Nat hadn’t heard anything like this in the group before, but she was careful not to lean forward too eagerly.

“I put caffeine in her water bottle because I knew that would throw her off. She didn’t get accepted.” Zareenah put her face in her hands. “I feel like I can never make up for what I’ve done. You probably can’t relate to that.”

A pained look crossed Dana’s face, but she quickly rearranged her expression. “We’ve all made mistakes,” she said. “Believe me, I’ve made my share. But there’s a difference between accepting responsibility for our actions and taking the blame for random misfortunes.”

Nat studied Dana as she spoke. Dana’s face had returned to its usual calm acceptance, but her momentary loss of composure had caught Nat’s attention. She’d never seen that in a group facilitator before. The one time she heard a facilitator in rehab recount his past, it was a guy who was so practiced at it that his story sounded like part of a sales pitch. It made her curious: What had Dana done that she felt so guilty about?

As prisms with larger pads became available, data brokers began offering personal research services for people who wanted to learn about the other paths their lives might have taken. This was a much riskier venture than selling news from other branches, for a couple reasons. First, it might take years before the divergences had grown large enough to be interesting, and the brokers had to stockpile prisms, activating them but not exchanging any information, saving their pads for use later. Second, it required a higher level of cooperation between the parallel versions of the company. If customer Jill wanted to know about her parallel selves, several versions of the company would have to do research in their branches, but Jill could only pay the version in her branch; there was no way for money to be shared across branches. The hope was that cross-branch cooperation would enable every version of a company to get paying customers in their branch, and over time this would work to everyone’s advantage: a form of reciprocal altruism between all of the company’s parallel versions.

Predictably, some individuals became depressed after learning that their parallel selves had enjoyed successes that they themselves hadn’t. For a time there was concern that these private queries would gain a reputation as a product that made buyers unhappy. However, most people decided that they liked more things about their life than they did about their parallel selves’ lives, and so concluded that they had made the right decisions. While this was likely just confirmation bias, it was common enough that personal research services remained a profitable business for data brokers.

Some people avoided the data brokers entirely, afraid of what they might learn, while others became obsessed with them. There were married couples where one person fell into the former category while the other fell into the latter, which often led to divorce. Data brokers made various attempts to expand their customer base, but rarely met with success. The product that was most successful at winning over naysayers was one aimed at those who had lost a loved one: the data brokers would find a branch where the person was still alive and forward their social-media updates, so the bereaved could see the life their loved one might have lived. This practice only solidified the most common criticism offered by pundits: that data brokers were promoting unhealthy behavior in their customers.