Chris Adrian - The New World

“Greetings and salutations!” the woman said, smiling as she spoke. “Greetings and salutations!” she said again, then closed her eyes in a long blink. “Please state your full name.” Jane hesitated. The woman asked again, so Jane told her.

“Text input!” the woman exclaimed. “Dr. Jane Julia Cotton Polaris Aspirant Number 617.460.666, welcome to Part Two of your application for membership at Polaris. My name is Alice. This is a virtual interview, which should take between fifteen and twenty hours to complete but may be terminated at any time. Shall we begin?” Her blind eyes searched the room for thirty seconds while Jane hesitated. “Shall we begin?” she repeated.

“Sure.”

“There are no right or wrong answers,” Alice said. “This is merely a process of discernment.”

“Are you a robot?” Jane asked.

“I am not a robot,” Alice replied, so quickly that Jane was sure everyone must ask that question. “I am a recording algorithm and a speaking face. All decisions regarding membership are made by the Polaris Membership Board, which receives my reports via continuous feed. Please tell me about the animals in your life. Pay special attention to pets, but do not exclude any animal to which you have had a strong positive or negative emotional attachment.”

“What has this got to do with the future?”

“All information is relevant to the future,” Alice snapped.

She’s very testy, Jane wrote later to Hecuba. Be nice, Hecuba wrote back. We need you to get close to the dewars. So you have to be nice to all of them!So the next day, when Brian called to leave his customary message, Jane picked up the phone.

“I’m so sorry for my negative tone before,” she said to him. “I suppose I took my anger out on you, but really I just miss my husband. I’m sure you understand.”

“Of course,” Brian said. “Of course I do. And now… and now you can…” His voice caught in his throat and he began to softly cry.

“I’m sorry,” Jane said. “I didn’t mean to make you sad.”

“Please don’t apologize. I’m just so happy to be able to finally help.”

“But is it okay that you’re talking to me, now that I’m making an application?”

“There’s no conflict of interest. I’m the director of family services, but I sit on the admissions board, too, and sometimes I wear both hats.”

“Did you take Jim’s application?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “Why do you ask?”

“I’m just trying to understand what he saw in you,” she said, too harshly. So she added, “I mean, I think I know, but I want to be sure.”

“He saw the future in us,” Brian said. “And now—” His voice caught again, but he mastered himself. “And now he’s waiting for you.”

Jane didn’t respond to that. She only said she had better get back to the application, meaning she had to get back to Alice, though as it went on over the next couple of days, it felt to her more like all three of them — Alice, Hecuba, and Brian — were interviewing her at the same time, and when she went to bed at night she found herself muttering to them indiscriminately, in the space between waking and sleep.

At hour eleven of the application, Alice asked, “If you could send a message to the future, what would it be?” Then it was Jane’s turn to cry, so she was glad Alice’s blind eyes could not discern her tears. Her mind filled with all the things she might say to Jim, if she could believe for a minute that he was alive somewhere on the other side of time. She pondered over an answer, attempting to ignore the desperate accusations and shrill questions that came immediately to mind— Always together, never apart! and What am I supposed to do now? and Why? Why? Why?

“Are you still thinking about the question?” Alice asked, and Jane settled on I hope you are all very well indeed.

“Do you really believe we’re going to wake up?” Jane asked Brian. She knew he wanted her to ask that, and that she could ask it as many times as she wanted. It was like asking a Jehovah’s Witness whether they really believed that Jesus was their Personal Savior.

“As certainly as I believe I myself will wake up tomorrow morning.”

“But you might die in the night,” Jane said.

“If I did, a Polaris team would be at my house five minutes after my heart stopped beating. And then I would sleep just a little longer. It’s one of the advantages of living on campus, but we hope that one day everyone in the world will be so close to a doorway.”

Doorway! Jane wrote to Hecuba. They’re living in a graveyard!

It’s a cult, Hecuba wrote. Of course they say things like that.

But do you think it could possibly be true?

Who cares? Not me. I might almost forgive them for mutilating Albert’s body, but they mutilated the very idea of my marriage, and for that I’m going to destroy them if it’s the last thing I do.

At hour seventeen, Alice asked, “What is the purpose of life?” And Jane thought of all the things she could say that would immediately end her application: The purpose of life is to not think too much about the future or The purpose of life is to do justice to the past or The purpose of life is to die one day . Or even: That’s not really something you ever really know, except temporarily, the answer changes as your life changes or That’s not something you know in just your head, it’s something you figure out, day by day, in relation to one other really important person. These were all things that Jim had actually said to her, at one time or another. But she knew that none of them could have been what he had said to Polaris. Barely any of it was really amenable to articulation, anyway. “Do you need more time for the question?” Alice asked, and Jane said, “Yes, please.”

She couldn’t write: I try not to think about this sort of thing without my husband around , though that was still the truth. Or even, Life doesn’t have any purpose now that my husband is dead. Alice asked her a few more times if she needed more time, and Jane pressed her snooze button while she tried out her answers in pencil on the back of a grocery receipt. She wished she had time to call Hecuba, but Alice was starting to seem impatient, the intervals between her repetitions steadily decreasing. So at last Jane went with what seemed like her best answer.

The purpose of life, she wrote, is to live more life. Alice closed her eyes and looked thoughtful for a moment. It couldn’t have been more than a minute, but Jane thought it must have been forever, in computer time.

“Dr. Jane Julia Cotton,” Alice said, “your application is terminated. Congratulations, you are invited for a personal interview on the Polaris Campus in Oviedo, Florida 32788. A Polaris representative will contact you shortly to arrange your appointment. It has been a pleasure conducting your interview. Good luck to you!”

Everyone in the house promised Jim they’d come to Sondra’s funeral service, though none of them seemed too troubled by her death. “She’d made such progress this time,” Sondra’s social worker had said, tsking over the corpse.

“Wait, what? This time?” Jim had asked. He’d seen plenty of death in the hospital, but he’d never visited a crime scene. He’d turned away from the horrible gaping wound in Sondra’s neck, from the dull glint of bone deep in the cut, and buried his face in his Alice’s shoulder.