Robert Wilson: The Affinities

“The result, yes, but only after your name and other identifiers have been stripped from it. That lets us use the data to evaluate our client base and maybe focus our research a little better. We don’t sell or share the information we collect.”

So she claimed. Also, the check is in the mail and I’ll pull out before I come. But I didn’t really care who saw my test result. “I guess that’s all right.”

Miriam pushed a pen across the desk. I signed and dated the document. She smiled again.

Dex called me later that night. I saw his number and thought about letting the call go to voice mail, but picked up instead.

“Adam!” he said. “What are you doing?”

“Watching TV.”

“What, like porn?”

“Some reality show.”

“Yeah, I bet it’s porn.”

“It’s a show with alligators in it. I don’t watch alligator porn.”

“Uh-huh. So what happened the other night?”

“I texted you about it.”

“That bullshit about a demo? I almost missed the ferry, waiting for you.”

“I’m lucky I didn’t end up in the emergency room.”

“You couldn’t just take the subway?”

“I was almost there, and I was already late, so—”

“You were already late —that says it all, doesn’t it?”

I had shared my apartment with Dex for six months last year. We took some of the same classes at Sheridan College. The roommate thing didn’t work out. When he moved, he left his bong and his cat behind. He eventually came back for the bong. I gave the cat to the retired librarian in the apartment down the hall—she seemed grateful. “Thank you for your compassion.”

“I could come over. We could watch a movie or something.”

“I’m not in the mood.”

“Come on, Adam. You owe me an evening’s entertainment.”

“Yeah … no.”

“You can’t be a dick twice in one week.”

“I’m pretty sure I can,” I said.

Of course it wasn’t Dex’s fault that I was moody—not that Dex would ever admit that anything was his fault.

I figured I had a couple of good reasons for applying to the Affinities and a few bad ones. The fact that my social life revolved around a guy like Dex was one of the good ones. A bad one? The idea that I could buy a better life for a couple of hundred dollars and a battery of psych tests.

But I had done my research. I wasn’t totally naïve. I knew a few things about the Affinities.

I knew the service had been commercially available for four years now. I knew it had gained popularity in the last year, after The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and BoingBoing ran feature articles about it. I knew it was the brainchild of Meir Klein, an Israeli teleodynamicist who had ditched a successful academic career to work for the corporation. I knew there were twenty-two major and minor Affinity groups, each named after a letter of the Phoenician alphabet, the “big five” being Bet, Zai, Het, Semk, and Tau.

What I didn’t know was how the evaluation process actually worked, apart from the generalities I had read online.

Fortunately I had a talkative tester … who turned out to be Miriam, the woman who had done my initial intake. She grinned like an old friend when I showed up for the first session. I recognized the smile as customer relations, but I was still grateful for it. I wondered whether Miriam was a member of an Affinity.

She escorted me to a nurse’s station in the back hall of the InterAlia office, where I was relieved of another vial of blood, and then to a small evaluation room. The room was windowless and air-conditioned to a centigrade degree above chilly. It contained a teakwood desk and two chairs. On the desk was a fourteen-inch video monitor, a laptop computer, and a chunky leather headband with a couple of USB ports built into it. I said, “Do I wear that?”

“Yes. Tonight we’ll use it to do some baseline measurements. You can put it on now if you like.”

She helped me adjust it. The headband was heavy with electronics but surprisingly comfortable. Miriam plugged one end of a cable into the band, the other into the laptop. The monitor facing me wasn’t connected to the laptop. I couldn’t see whatever Miriam was looking at on the laptop’s screen.

“It’ll take a minute or two to initialize,” she said. “Most of the information we collect is analyzed later, but it takes some heavy-duty number-crunching just to acquire the data.”

I wondered if she was acquiring it now. Was our conversation part of the test? She seemed to anticipate the question: “The test hasn’t started yet. Today, it’s just you looking at a series of pictures on that monitor. Nothing complicated. Like I said, we’re establishing a baseline.”

“And the blood sample? That’s for drug testing, you said?”

“Drug testing plus an assay for a range of primary and secondary metabolites. I know this must seem scattershot, Mr. Fisk, but it’s all connected. That could be InterAlia’s slogan, if we needed another one: everything’s connected. A lot of modern science is concerned with understanding patterns of interaction. In heredity, that’s the genome. In how DNA is expressed, we talk about the proteinome. In brain science it’s what they call the connectome—how brain cells hook up and interact, singly or in groups. Meir Klein invented the word socionome , for the map of characteristic human interactions. But each affects the others, from DNA to protein, from protein to brain cells, from brain cells to how you react to the people you meet at work or school. To place you in an Affinity we need to look at where you are on all those different maps.”

I said I understood. She consulted her laptop once more. “Okay, so we’re good to go. I’ll leave the room, and the monitor will show you a series of photographs, like a slide show, five seconds per slide. Twenty minutes of that, a coffee break, then twenty minutes more. You don’t have to do anything but watch. Okay?”

And that was how it went. The pictures were hard to categorize. Most showed human beings, but a few were landscapes or photographs of inanimate objects, like an apple or a clock tower. The photographs of human beings were drawn from a broad cross section of cultures and ages and were gender-balanced. In most of them, people were doing undramatic things—chatting, fixing meals, working. I tried not to overanalyze either the pictures or my reaction to them.

And that was it: session one of five.

“We’ll see you again tomorrow evening,” Miriam said.

The next day’s test used the same headset but no photographs. Instead, the monitor prompted me with displays of single words in lowercase letters: when the word appeared, all I had to do was read it aloud. A few seconds later, another word would appear. And so on. It felt awkward at first, sitting alone in a room saying things like, “Animal. Approach. Conciliation. Underwater. Song. Guilt. Vista…”—but before long it just seemed like a job, fairly tedious and not particularly difficult.

Miriam came back for the midpoint break, carrying a cup of coffee. “I remembered how you liked it. One cream, one sugar, right? Or would you prefer a glass of water?”

“Coffee’s great. Thank you. Can I ask you a question?”

“Of course.”

“Personal question?”

“Try me.”

“Do you belong to an Affinity? I mean, if you’re allowed to say.”

“Oh, I’m allowed. Employees can take the test for free. I did. I know my Affinity. But no, I never joined a tranche.”

“Why not?”

She held up her left hand, the ring finger circled by a modest gold band. “My husband was tested too, but he didn’t qualify. And I don’t want to commit to a social circle he can’t join. It’s not an insurmountable problem—tranches organize spouse-friendly auxiliary events. But he would have been shut out of official functions. And I didn’t want that. That’s why the existing Affinities are a little bit skewed toward young singles, divorcees, widowers. Over time, as people meet and mate inside their own Affinity groups, we expect the imbalance to even out. It’s trending that way already.”