Тед Чан - Exhalation - Stories

They lost touch after that, but Dana ran into her several years later. Vinessa told her she forgave her, said she understood why Dana had done it. Now, after some time in jail and a stint in rehab, she was trying to get her life back on track; she wanted to take classes at a community college, but she couldn’t afford the tuition on her own, and her parents had given up on her. Dana had immediately offered to help.

That first attempt hadn’t been a success; Vinessa had discovered that she couldn’t engage with college on an emotional level and dropped out. Later on she had tried to start her own business online, and asked Dana for some money to help her get off the ground. That hadn’t worked out, either; she had misjudged the expenses involved. Now she had an idea for another venture, but she wasn’t asking Dana for money for it. Vinessa’s plan was to take the classes needed for her to draw up a sound business proposal, which she would present to potential investors. And so now she was asking Dana for tuition money again.

Dana knew Vinessa was taking advantage of her feelings of guilt, but it didn’t matter. Dana was guilty. She owed her.

Nat was coming out of the restroom when she heard Dana talking to someone just around the corner, in the hallway. Nat stopped, leaned against the wall, and held her phone up to her ear as camouflage. Then she slid over until she could eavesdrop: someone was getting money out of Dana, but it wasn’t clear what the situation was. Was this woman running some kind of scam? Nat told herself she ought to find out more, just to make sure that there weren’t any surprises that could affect what she and Morrow were doing, but mostly she was just curious.

She went outside and caught up with the woman. “Excuse me, but do you know Dana?”

The woman eyed her suspiciously. “Why do you want to know?”

“I’m in a support group that she facilitates. I was just about to leave when I saw you two talking. I couldn’t hear what you were saying, but it looked like you were angry with her. I was just wondering if you had been in a group she facilitated, or been a patient of hers, and had a bad experience with her. I don’t mean to pry, I’m just wondering if there’s anything I ought to know about Dana.”

The woman chuckled. “That’s an interesting question. What kind of group are you in?”

“It’s for people who have issues with using prisms,” said Nat. At the dismissive look on the woman’s face, Nat decided to play a hunch. “I used to be in NA before, though.”

She gave a single nod. “But Dana wasn’t your facilitator for that, was she?”

“No.”

“Good, because I wouldn’t trust her with that. For that prism stuff, though, I’m sure she’s fine. You’ve got nothing to worry about.”

“Can you tell me why you wouldn’t trust her for an NA group?”

She considered it, and then shrugged. “Sure, why not. Drinks are on you.”

They went to a nearby bar. The woman’s name was Vinessa, and Nat bought her a Maker’s Mark while sticking with a cranberry and soda for herself. Nat told a sanitized version of her history of drug use, one that could plausibly dovetail with her cover in the support group; she didn’t think Vinessa would mention this conversation to Dana, but it couldn’t hurt to be careful. Once she was satisfied with Nat’s cred, Vinessa started talking about her own past; she explained that she’d had all the potential in the world when she was in high school, that she’d been on the path to a prestigious college and a charmed life. It all came to an end when her best friend had betrayed her, selling her out to protect her own prospects. Ever since then Vinessa had been traveling a hard road, a road that she was getting off only now.

“Which is why I wouldn’t want her for an NA group. You can’t trust her not to turn you in.”

“Everything that happens in those groups is supposed to be confidential,” said Nat.

“So is a secret between best friends!” Some other people in the bar turned to look at them. Vinessa resumed at a regular speaking volume, “It’s not like she’s the worst person I’ve ever met; at least she has the decency to feel bad about what she did. But there are people you can count on for anything, and then there are people you can count on only for some things, and you’ve got to know who’s who.”

“You still see her, though.”

“Well, like I said, Dana’s good for some things. My point is she’s not good for everything. I learned that the hard way.”

Then Vinessa started talking about her plans to start her own business. Nat didn’t ask her about the money that she was getting from Dana, but she could tell it wasn’t a deliberate scam. Vinessa was just using Dana, offering her a chance to atone for her sins by providing financial support for Vinessa’s latest venture. Nat thanked Vinessa and promised she wouldn’t mention their conversation to anyone, and then headed home.

Nat used to be like Vinessa, always blaming someone else for her problems. For years she believed it was her parents’ fault that she was arrested for breaking and entering, because if they hadn’t changed the locks on their house, she wouldn’t have had to break in to find something she could sell for drug money. It had taken a long time for Nat to take responsibility for the things she did. Clearly Vinessa hadn’t gotten there yet, and maybe it was because in Dana she had found someone willing to accept the blame. Dana had done something shitty to Vinessa, no doubt about it, but that was years ago. If Vinessa hadn’t gotten her act together by now, it was her own fault, not Dana’s.

When prisms became affordable to individual consumers, retailers initially advertised them as a private alternative to visiting a data broker. They targeted new parents, encouraging them to buy one now, activate it, and store it until their child was an adult, at which point the child could see how her life might have gone differently. This approach won a few customers, but not nearly the numbers that retailers had hoped for. Instead, it turned out that when people were able to buy prisms themselves, they found uses for them beyond exploring scenarios of “what might have been.”

A popular use of a prism was to enable collaboration with yourself, increasing your productivity by dividing the tasks on a project between your two versions; each of you did one half the job, and then you shared the results. Some individuals tried to buy multiple prisms so that they’d be part of a team consisting solely of versions of themselves, but not all the parallel selves were in direct contact with each other, which meant that information needed to be relayed from one to another, consuming the prisms’ pads faster. A number of projects came to an abrupt end because someone had underestimated their data usage, exhausting the prism before the work done in one branch could be transmitted, leaving it forever inaccessible.

More than data brokers, the availability of private prisms had an enormous impact on the public imagination; even people who never used prisms found themselves thinking about the enormous role that contingency played in their lives. Some people experienced identity crises, feeling that their sense of self was undermined by the countless parallel versions of themselves. A few bought multiple prisms and tried to keep all their parallel selves in sync, forcing everyone to maintain the same course even as their respective branches diverged. This proved to be unworkable in the long term, but proponents of this practice simply bought more prisms and repeated their efforts with a new set of parallel selves, arguing that any attempt to reduce their dispersal was worthwhile.