She is calm.

It is a strange feeling, though not wholly unfamiliar. The calm washes over her, a warm ocean tide that flows and ebbs gently against her body. She can smell the salt air. That is unfamiliar. She has never been to the ocean that she is in. She has never tasted sand.

She feels herself start to melt down into the ground. She does not mind. It is the heat of the sun, Nothing more. It is the warmth of the ocean. Nothing more. It is the troubles of the day fading way. Nothing more.

Troubles like getting a date for the dance. Forced laughter. Polite laughter.

She considers opening her eyes to find where it is coming from but she can feel the coarse sand between her fingers. This is her first ocean and she can’t bring herself to look yet. There is too much newness that she hasn’t had the chance to explore. Too many sounds at the edges of her hearing. Too many new sensations on her skin.

She will get to them all eventually, when the smell stops being so distracting.

It does not smell clean. This could not be confused for that. She knows air that is purified and perfect. She knows water that is purified and perfect. She prefers them to the impurities and imperfections of her day-to-day, but she has never before smelled an unclean ocean. It is more interesting than an unclean cityscape.

Her route to school — stairs, sidewalk, transit — only occasionally catches her attention enough to pull her out of her feed and when it does it inevitably ends up in her feed. Her route from school — sidewalk, alley, park, sidewalk, elevator — usually keeps her attention more often and almost never ends up in her feed.

Her feed has a handful of notifications. None of them are urgent enough to draw her attention. She will get to them eventually, when the city stops being so distracting. The clouds must have covered the sun. She can’t be cold yet because it is still so warm. She doesn’t mind. She is home and the surf will wash away the momentary chill.

She takes the time to clean up, eat, and restyle. Debates are being had on her feed about how late to show up and where to meet. She does homework in between. Maybe as much as she would have done on any other day.

She has an idea for an app. She hasn’t quite figured out how to make it work yet. She imagines that a few sustained hours would make for a good start. She doesn’t have for that today. She doesn’t mind. It is a good idea but relaxing is also a good idea. It would wait.

It is late enough that the sun has started to fade from the sky. The feed had warned her that she’d need a coat. She was prepared but there was still a chill. She feels it in her fingers. It is a strange feeling.

Something catches her eye. Graffiti on a street sign that is new enough that she hasn’t seen it before. There is a notification ping on her feed. She glances down to her handheld display. It lights up and unlocks. She doesn’t have a chance to read it before the car hits her.

The pain overwhelms her senses. Her eyes instinctively close and will not open again. She hears the chaos of the accident. It is eerie how much the noise makes her miss silence. She wants a moment to listen in on her thoughts. There’s something she should be doing, but it keeps flittering away.

She is calm.

II

He is calm.

It is a strange feeling, though not altogether unpleasant. It is an emptiness after a long time of being so full. The moon in the sky is full. He has never seen it rest so perfectly between waxing and waning.

He feels himself drawn to its light as it surrounds him. He does not mind. It is the light of the moon. Nothing more. It is the cool of the night. Nothing more. It is the troubles of the day fading away. Nothing more.

Troubles like getting a date for the dance. Forced laughter. Polite laughter.

He does not turn his gaze away from the starry sky. He feels it pulling at him, trying to draw him closer. He thinks he can tell which crater he would land in, if he were to let go of the earth. He is not ready to fall yet. He is afraid the light would not be so comforting from inside of it.

There are sights on the edge of his vision. There is the moon. He will get there eventually, when he lets go of his fear.

He knows there are other things that scare him. This is not those. Flying. Unfulfilled expectations. Overdose. He still flies when he has to, but he goes out of his way not to. He has never wanted the wings of a bird nor the earth far beneath him.

His route to work — stairs, driveway, freeway, parking lot, elevator — goes too fast as it is and he rarely has time to prepare himself for the day. His route from work — elevator, parking lot, freeway, driveway, stairs — always takes too long and he rarely has the time to wipe the day from his mind.

He doesn’t bother to change when he gets home. He has had a long day and doesn’t have the energy for any other other than letting the couch envelop him. He dry swallows the last few pills of his prescription and puts one of his usual streamers up on the living room display. They’re playing some horror game. It is not scary. He does not pay close attention because he’s idly distracted by nothing in particular on his feed.

There are things that he should be doing. His scrip needs to be refilled if he’s going to be functional tomorrow but he hasn’t felt like working up the motivation yet. He should probably call his mother but he hasn’t felt like working up the motivation yet. His fridge probably has something he could cook but he hasn’t felt like working up the motivation yet.

The streamer has moved to a much brighter and fluffier game. He doesn’t recognize it. He shuts it off and continues doing nothing on his feed. He doesn’t pay attention to the time, so it is his hunger that prompts him to realize that he has missed dinner.

It is late enough that the sun is starting to fade from the sky. He is still wearing his suit. He is walking though he hasn’t decided where he will eat. He is chilly but the air still feels thick on his skin. He keeps an idle eye on the feed while he walks but he is hungrier than he is bored.

He does not realize the car that has pulled up next to him. It is quiet until it is loud but he does not recognize the song. Now he recognizes the car.

He is already telling a joke before he gets in. He fumbles the punchline, but he thinks she laughs anyway. He asks where they’re headed, but she does not seem to hear him over the music. He is still hungry. The car picks up speed and he taps her on the shoulder to get her attention.

It feels like his finger is what causes the car to turn. That feeling stays with him even as the shift in momentum lifts him out of his seat. He thinks he should grab onto something, but his fingers move slower than his thoughts. The window shatters and his body is flung through the air. He feels the wet spray of rain on face. It is not raining. He wants to run his hands through his hair.

He does not move his head, but still his vision shifts — car hood, sidewalk, lamppost. He is still mid-flight. He is looking at the moon. He has never seen it so full. He aims himself toward it.

He is calm.

III

She is calm.

It is a strange feeling, though she can’t quite place why. There is nothing new in calmness, an old friend that finds her whenever she needs it. Warmth that starts in her stomach and radiates outward. She stays silent as the comfort quiets her thoughts. There has never been so much silence.

She feels herself filling the silence with herself. She does not mind. It is the beating of her heart. Nothing more. It is the breathing of her body. Nothing more. It is the troubles of the day fading away. Nothing more.

Troubles like getting a date for the dance. Forced laughter. Polite laughter.

She looks around to catch the cause but already knows that none will be found. She is as alone in her apartment as she was when she fell asleep. That was what she wanted so she shouldn’t be searching for sounds that won’t be there. She inhales, exhales, inhales, then sets about her day.

She works her way through her feed and enough of it is work that she sets aside the social. It is a convenient excuse to ignore the gentle nudging of people checking up on her. She is fine.

Most of her morning involves cleaning up for a client across the country. As was often the case, it was a simple situation made complex by a client who couldn’t keep their mouth shut. They paid for the privilege of not having to think before they spoke. She couldn’t appreciate the mindset, but appreciation wasn’t what her pay check was for.

By lunchtime she has moved on to what she could call less urgent matters. Her notifications disagree, every one insisting on her full attention. She knows better and triages accordingly. Some are simple enough that she answers them immediately. Others aren’t worth her time and instead to be dealt with her team. Two of her bosses have made conflicting requests and she isn’t in the mood to pick a side. She requests a meeting for clarification, knowing neither wants to meet the other. If nothing else, it was off her agenda for the day.

She spends a bit of time on family and friends. She does not have much to say but doesn’t want to seem distant. She idly wonders whether she can get away from the rest of her agenda with a run. She can’t but she tells herself that she’ll end her day with one and throws it on the schedule. That is enough to propel her through an afternoon of calls that could have been messages and memos she suspects will go unread.

Her running route — stairs. sidewalk, soil, sand — is familiar enough that she could follow it in her sleep. The beach does not mark its end, just a moment to run alongside the surf. She wants to wash the salt off of her skin with saltwater. If only she could bring her music with her. It is a romantic enough thought that she considers it.

She does not.

She begins to make her way back — sand, soil, sidewalk — but has barely left the beach when the sound of tires screeching cuts through her audio. In one fluid motion, she pauses her music, pauses her footfalls, and pauses her thoughts in place.

Then everything happens.

By the time she sees the girl standing in the street, it is too late. The car keeps moving though the sign says stop. It was going too fast to keep from making contact. She thinks the girl is flung from street to sand. She can’t tell because another car collided while trying to turn away. She sees metal bodies mangle and bloodies bodies bleed. All before another car oncoming contributes to the crash.

There has not been a noise since it started. She thinks that wasn’t very long ago. Long enough that surely something would have made a sound by now. She sees people screaming but nothing makes it to her ears.

She knows that something else has happened. She knows that there is something outside of the horror in front of her. She does not look away because she is scared that she will see something worse.

She stops gasping for air. She would scream if her lungs weren’t so empty. She wants to move. She wants to run away. She wishes that she wanted to run towards the accident to help but she does not. She wishes she could close her eyes by she does not. She wishes she could forget. She wishes she could forget. She wishes she could forget. She wishes she could forget. She wishes she could forg-.

IV

See, everyone’s okay.

Even now their memories should be coming back. They’ll feel more and more like themselves as the seconds pass. Look, already some of them are realizing that they’re just regular teenagers with regular teenage problems, like whose got the fleekest outfits. Am I right? What your friends and classmates just went through looked like a few minutes to us out here, but we were only following along in our feeds. Realplay isn’t like your old school simulations where you just look through the eyes of a character. This wasn’t just a detailed image. With realplay we were able to take a few teenagers and give them the experience of being inside people whose lives were forever changed when someone tragically got behind the wheel while high.

Not everyone died there on the scene. Some of your classmates were given the experiences of people who survived their injuries. Some only long enough to make it the hospital, but some would live to remember this day for years to come. That’s the tragedy of an accident like this. The victims aren’t just those who die. Ask your classmates who were inside Marisa what it felt like to watch her son be flung from her arms. Or those who were inside Darcie about the horror he felt as he saw his legs crushed after being flung from that car.

DriveSober and your school brought us here to give you this presentation not because want to tell you how to be teenagers. Believe it or not, I was your age once. I know what it’s like to want to be your own person. You’re going to make your own decisions. We just don’t want you to make it for someone else too. When you get behind the wheel under the influence, even just a little bit, you can hurt so many other people. You don’t want to be responsible for cause pain and suffering like you saw today. Like the memories your classmates experienced.

Now that may have been the latest in realplay technology, but Make. No. Mistake. What your classmates experienced today was no game. We’re going to give them a bit of time to get reacquainted with their minds, then they’ll tell you that today’s realplay experience was more real than play. Just like they’ll never look at their old VR setups the same way, they’ll also never look the same at the idea of driving high.

And uh okay it’s looking like some of your classmates need uh a few more minutes, and since this is sneak peak into realplay and I bet you’re all a bunch of smart cookies, so you probably have all kinds of questions. About realplay and how it works and how we recover memories, so while we’re waiting for uh everyone to settle down, let’s just open it up to you and get our Q&A on.

“It won’t tell the future so much as it will tell a future,” I said, feeling absurd before the words had left my mouth.

“How many billions of dollars did that answer cost to get to?” It was one of the w. executives who hadn’t seemed to be paying attention, but I certainly had her attention now.

“Sorr-.” I said and must have looked as terrified as I felt, because she shook her head and cut me off.

“Relax. I’d have to be an asshole to be upset with you for accurately pointing out that your time machine still has some kinks. We’re obviously going to pass though.” She didn’t spare me a second glance and returned her attention to a handheld display.

I shut up for the little that was left of the meeting.

The team were chatting in our private feed about how it was typical of these corporate types to use terms like ‘time machine’. I ignored them. Yes, a watch is a technically a kind of time machine and we were doing something more complicated, but also who cares? They might not use proper terminology, but being technically right doesn’t come with funding. We needed to convince them, not the other way around.

When I got back from the meeting, waiting in my office was the executive who had objected to my correction. It felt like a power move and made me uneasy before she even said anything.

“Your time machine will never be viable. It’s going to require growing a new tree for every glance into the future and nobody is willing to wait for that. Eventually your investors will catch on and your funding will be be cut before the year is up. It should have been done months ago,” she said without any trace of sympathy. “When that happens, you should come work for us. Even if it doesn’t happen, you should anyway.”

I didn’t hear what she said next and stood there kind of dazed. What an insane way to treat another human being. She continued to talk about the worthlessness of my life’s work as if it were a fact that we had agreed upon. I struggled to process what she was saying. Eventually the rest of my brain caught up.

“Even if this project is misguided, your team will hate to lose you. You’re a talented engineer and a likable enough colleague.”

It felt like my lungs had popped and so I didn’t try to find something witty to say in response. I started to object before I knew what I wanted to say, but she just spoke over me.

“No. You don’t get it. This…” She gestured vaguely towards my desk. “None of this matters. We’ve already got a machine that can see into the future.”

“I know we’re not supposed to say it, but the future machine is essentially an algorithm,” my liaison said with all the reverence of someone who has no idea what they’re talking about. He was right that there was an incredibly complex code repository involved, but there were more people involved in the mushroom farm than there were coders. Hell, there might be more baristas on site than there were coders. If any one of those pieces wasn’t operating at peak productivity, the machine wouldn’t work. It wasn’t essentially anything.

It might seem too fine a point to be worth getting hung up on, I admit, but I was overwhelmed by the number of people who casually accepted the reality of a machine which could see into possible futures. They treated all this like it was a normal Tuesday.

It’s hard to appreciate the technological achievement that the future machine represents because we can’t really do anything with the slice of the future that we’ve got access to. The machine’s massive physical and digital infrastructure spits out a series of numbers that we have only barely began to understand.

My liaison even had clearance to access the future machine’s data, but he didn’t even bother looking at it because he couldn’t do anything with that information. They were numbers without context. The present isn’t connected with the future in sort of linear way. Neither is the past for that matter. When the machine looks elsewhen, there is no way to control what it is aimed towards.

You have to realize that it is merely convenient to us that there are predictable patterns to the entire universe. There is nothing necessary about it. Not just things like the fluid mechanics or orbital decay, but also basic rules of existence such as object permanence. It is fairly useful to us that unobserved things continue to exist.

But when the future machine opens its eyes, so to speak, there isn’t any sort of pattern as to when it is looking. To say nothing of where, what, or who it is looking at.

They’re pretty sure that the number is connect to whoever activates the machine, but they haven’t settled on what counts as ‘activates’. It’s not like there’s a wall plaque that says ‘The Future Machine’ and a brightly colored button. There’s no retinal scan and nobody has to turn their keys in unison. It could have those things, I suppose, if they wanted it to. There are a lot of moving parts and it’s at least hypothetically possible for those things to be added, but that would still only be a small part of the much grander whole.

The point being that if everyone does their jobs, the future machine has all the resources it needs to activate the display which then lights up with some number between zero and one hundred. That it’s. That’s all that happens.

There might be a handful of significant digits or it might be a nice round number, but always less than one hundred.

Obviously they’re keeping track of all the numbers and subjecting them to all kinds of complex analysis. People keep talking about ‘machine learning’ in hushed tones, but the only thinks they know about the numbers is that they’ve been trending upwards and have been for a while.

When the future machine was first activated, the project was essentially being run out of someone’s garage and the numbers it gave tended to be closer to zero, overall. It wasn’t that they could predictable say what any result from the machine would be, but the bigger the project has gotten, the bigger the numbers tended to be when looked at in the aggregate. That’s it. It obviously not just a coincidence. It also isn’t Pi, Euler’s number, the Feigenbaum constants, or the golden ratio.

It also isn’t a duck.

There are a lot of things that the future machine is not, but it’s not altogether clear what it actually is.

After two weeks, I was already bored by the future too.

There was, ever briefly, a novelty to each new number. ‘37’ came up twice and I embarrassed myself by being excited at the reoccurrence. Ravi had the decency to stop me before I got carried away. “To be expected,” he said, as if there was anything expected about any of this.

It wasn’t any one thing that disabused me of that notion. Pulling numbers out the future really wasn’t that interesting until you knew what the numbers were for. Inevitably there were ways to sort and organize the numbers in all kinds of different ways. Given sufficient time and a diverse enough set of numbers, patterns and repetitions will inevitably emerge. They were useless without rules to decide which to pay attention to.

Every night I am dreaming about the Ancient Greeks weaving the tapestry of fate, with numbers rather than thread. Some nights they are beautiful, some nights they are hideous. They never look the same, but I always recognize them for what they are: the machine.

There are other dreams.

I am floating in a nutrient bath which turns into a sea under a starry skyscrape. I am effortlessly riding a bicycle through a field. I am having a lot of sex. There is one where I am walking through the streets of Marrakesh, fondly remembering the fresh mint tea at a cafe where I once spent an afternoon watching the tourists. Waking from that dream was like saying goodbye to an old friend. But I have never been to Marrakesh.

I am not myself in all of them, but I almost always recognize myself in them. That is to say, I am often in a stranger’s skin but never find it strange. At the time, anyway.

“I think maybe I’m losing my mind,” I said to Ravi over lunch. He was technically my boss, but was also assigned to keep an eye on me. Not that it was as nefarious as it sounded. The machine had a tendency to pose some messy questions about the nature of existence, so it was nice to get advice from someone who had been there already.

That made it easier to confess that, for three nights running, I had walked on the surface of Mars as someone else.

“They’re the dreams of other people on the project,” Ravi said with a gesture around the room. “It’s how we know that you’re actually involved in the machine. We’ve been having your dreams since you started, but you’ve taken a lot longer than usual to catch the change in your dreamscape.”

I parse enough of his comment to be confused, but my confusion gives way to concern as I tried to remember whether I had dreamt anything that merited embarrassment. It must have shown on my face.

“If it’s any consolation, your subconscious isn’t any worse than anyone else’s.” As he spoke, I looked around the cafeteria to see if anyone was looking at us. If anyone was looking at me. “In fact, those who have shared your dreams kind of appreciate it. That forest of yours with all those different trees. Not everyone on the project has stepped foot into a proper forest, let alone seen all the varieties that sit at the edges of your subconscious.”

“I still don’t understand. How are you getting inside my head? How am I getting in yours?” I said, feeling frustrated at how ridiculous the questions sounded.

“You’re not going to like the answer, but we don’t know.” He gestured for me to keep eating. “Not really. We know that the mushrooms are involved somehow. That can’t be the whole story though, because the dreams happen to people who have never been to the facility here. We share a dreamscape with anyone who is part of the supply chain that keeps the machine running — whether they’re the executives at the head office or the people who make deliveries to the facility. We learned that one the hard way.”

He chuckled at that last comment and again tried to get me to eat.

“That doesn’t even make sense,” I said.

“You’re going to have to be more specific. The dreaming each other’s dreams or who gets included in the process?” He grinned as he spoke.

“I don’t know anything about fungi. I don’t even know if that’s the right pluralization of fungus. But I can wrap my head around the idea that the farms are doing something to us. Maybe microscopic spores shooting up into the air when the mushrooms bloom?” I had altogether given up on my lunch at this point. “Whatever it is, sure, I can make some sense of that. But how could that possibly go further afield? Is it only people who have interacted with people on the farm? Can mushrooms even do that?”

“It’s a good thing you weren’t hired as a mycologist then, eh?” Ravi had finished his lunch but seemed in no rush to get back to work. Then again, explaining to me how the machine worked was part of his job, so this was as good a place as any. “There was a brief period where we thought that it might be something along those lines. Spores breathed in here and then breathed out on various parts of the supply chain, but…” He left it hanging and it was clear he wanted me to work out the obvious problem.

“But…” I said, less stalling for time and more trying to force out an obvious detail that I must have missed. “But if it were that straightforward, then why wouldn’t it spread more widely? Why only people in the supply chain and not their families and friends and casual contacts? Even if someone only carried a handful of these spores, surely eventually they would spread to someone who wasn’t directly connected and you-.” I caught the error almost as quickly as I’d said it. “And we would start having their dreams, and us theirs.”

“Ding ding ding,” Ravi said. I couldn’t tell if he was happy that I had gotten there on my own or that I was seeing myself as a part of the machine.

“Then what the hell is going on here?” I said.

“If we knew the answer to that, we wouldn’t have hired you to figure it out.”

Not that Ravi meant me specifically. It would have been a nice ego boost if that were the case, but nobody had suggested as much. Once they had figured out that the future machine actually worked, they started recruiting anyone who was available. That turned out to be almost everyone doing serious work on time travel, because a functioning temporal device was worth any number of old ladies. We were all here to work on the future machine.

“I still don’t get the mushrooms,” I said after a lecture that was supposed to have explained what the farm actually did for the future machine. “And if your answer involves the universe as some sort of breakfast metaphor, I quit.”

Ravi groaned and sipped at his coffee before answering.

“The mycology teams really need to tone it down a couple of notches,” he said. “Meetings with them are feeling less like a science fair and more like a religious experience.”

“Given that I’m neither a mycologist nor a priest, I’m not sure the perspective is the issue here.” I took a sharp inhale and continued. “I would believe that you can get electricity out of fungi somehow, but how could it ever be enough to power a computer? Is it just the CPU that needs to be ‘plugged into’ the mushrooms or do the hard drives too? How about the monitors? And why does the farm need to expand as more people are brought onto the project?”

“You’ve got to think of it as poaching an eg-.”

I swore loud enough to draw a couple glances.

He laughed.

“If we’ve developed mushroom-powered displays then why haven’t we solved the energy crisis?” He took a moment to collect his thoughts. “The computer requires the same amount of electricity as any other computer, but it only spits out a number if there are enough mushrooms for all the people who have been looped into the machine. They’re not fuel, because they’re not used up. Their presence is required, that’s all. In fact, the future machine sits in a fairly small patch of temporal mushrooms. The rest are connected through mycelium in the soil.”

“Right. Mycelium. Which is the invisible mushroom root system?” I said, somewhere between sarcasm and a legitimate guess.

“The biological parts of roots are visible. They look kind of like moldy thread,” he said with shrug, as if to apologize for the next part, “but all mushrooms have that. The temporal farm also has an energy field underneath it, around the mycelial threads.”

“That’s a layer overtop of the visible part?”

“Exactly.”

“That’s different from an invisible mushroom root system?”

“Because it’s not there all the time. It only shows up when the future machine spits out a number.” He gave another apologetic shrug.

“So we activate the machine and the threads pulse briefly. Okay, but that doesn’t explain why I’ve got my own personal mushroom.”

“They don’t really keep track like that on the farm though. It’s not as if we which mushrooms were set aside for you. It’s just that sometimes after new hires the future machine stops spitting out numbers until they plant more fungus spores.”

“Why don’t they keep track?”

“We’re not really talking about a one-to-one relationship here.”

“Sure, but let’s pretend the machine stopped working after I got hired. The mushroom priests plant one mushroom at a time until the machine starts working again. Are we tagging those as my mushrooms?”

He shook his head slowly and it looked like my thought was dawning on him.

“I’m not sure I’m ready for your inevitable mad descent into the becoming one of the mushroom people,” he said, “but I guess we need to introduce you to the mycologists.”

I’ll take credit for the initial thought, but there’s an entire team looking at the relationship between the numbers and the fluctuations in the energy field. I sent them a memo with my proposal and sat in on a couple of meetings with them, but it was clear that I was in over my head on what they were talking about. For starters, what I kept calling ‘mushroom energy’ they insisted was ‘mycelial temporal radiation’.

Not only did they start keeping track of which mushrooms belong to which new hires, but they also worked backwards to provide their best guess about earlier growth. Given how methodical the farm teams were in their work, it was easier than anyone had expected. The result was that most people involved with the machine knew exactly which mushrooms were theirs.

Aside from sating curiosity, this proved important because the mushroom energy didn’t appear across the entire farm at once. Instead, right before the future machine activated, a small handful of mushrooms started giving off barely measurable amounts of energy. It had actually been noticed once earlier in the project, but the technician decided it was a fault in the sensor. She replaced the sensor and went on with her day without reporting it.

Now that we knew what to look for, it became clear what was happening: when the future machine activates, a specific patch of mushrooms lit up the instrumental panels like a meteor shower. Because each patch was tagged according to employees on the future machine, we also started tagging the future machine’s numbers to people working on the project. We didn’t still know what the numbers were for, but suddenly everyone was excited about them again. After all, people were starting to have their own slice of the future.

My first number was ‘37’. Ravi tried to assure me that it was a coincidence, nothing more, but I still needed to take a week off after learning that.

“… but what if the radiation doesn’t just activate the future machine but instead explains it?”

Most of the project involves throwing highly specialized experts at very specific problems with the hope that it’ll lead to new discoveries. In an attempt to share ideas and let everyone know what else is being worked on, there’s a mandatory lunch session every week and each team has to choose someone to present. Most teams make it grunt work for new recruits because nobody takes it seriously, but nobody complains either because of how well catered it always is.

Are you hearing this? What team is she on? Ravi messaged me through the feed. He was on the other side of the room and he was staring at the current presenter who was in the middle of speaking.

Through a mouthful of bánh mi, I told my feed to replay the last few seconds of audio at double speed so that I could catch up.

“We’ve assumed that the only purpose of the farm is to power the activation process of the machine, but what if the radiation doesn’t just activate the future machine but instead explains it? It would make a mess of our understanding of temporal mechanics, but what if the mycelial radiation isn’t merely flowing into the computer to give us num-,” she said through the recording and then continued live, “-bers? What if it’s simultaneously flowing backwards into the farm? We-. I think we need to stop focusing on the numbers that the future machine gives us and instead focus on listening to the mycelial radiation.”

I quickly messaged Ravi nack. She’s on one of the programming teams, but she sounds like one of the mushroom people. I also think she’s right. Even from here, I could see him nodding while he read my message. He looked up at me and tilted is head towards the woman who was now leaving the lunchroom stage.

I headed through the crowd towards him and grabbed another sandwich on the way.

Cassia had been brought on shortly after I had, but wasn’t even being listened to by her own team. We had approached her before she had been able to find a table and she had obviously hadn’t expected anyone to follow up.

After quick introductions, the three of us stood in the hall outside the lunchroom.

“The obvious answer has always been probabilities,” I said while Cassie ate my bánh mi. She looked up at my comment and made a noise that was difficult to parse with her mouth full. She took a moment before trying again.

“Didn’t the guy who first proposed that get fired after starting a fistfight in a meeting?”

“Technically it was after the meeting, but yes,” Ravi said with a laugh. “At one point, I thought he was going to stab me with a pen. Still, being a prick doesn’t mean it was a bad idea.”

“The problem has always been what kind of probabilities. Without that added context, the raw numbers are utterly useless. That’s why so few people have gone along with it,” I added, getting back to the matter at hand. “But what if we can find that context by listening to the mushroom energy?”

“You get that I have no clue how to do that, right? My team lead told me to spitball for a couple minutes. That’s all I was doing.” She seemed worried that we were expecting more out of her than she was prepared for.

“You mean we don’t have a way to plug your feed into mycelia?” Ravi said in mock disappointment. “Or a set of speakers so we could vibe to the rhythm of the fungi?”

A relieved expression crossed her face as she recognized the joke.

“With your permission, I’m going to request to transfer you to my team,” Ravi said. “We’re not quite an island of misfit toys yet, but we’re close enough that we get left alone to solve weird problems.”

“Like how to understand what mushrooms saying when they whisper sweet nothings into the soil,” she added, not quite a question and not entirely a joke.

“Yeah, you were right, Ravi. She’s definitely one of us.”

While the entire farm was being fitted with almost every sensor that we could think to point at the mushrooms, we busied ourselves with trying to translate past energy data into something understandable. I spent almost a full week comparing the radiation patterns to weather data while Ravi delved into betting and stock markets. Neither of us got anywhere.

Cassia really did try something we ended up calling ‘mushroom music’ and found a way to push it through a synthesizer. It wasn’t useful, but it was pretty cool to listen to, so it was a more productive use of time than anything else the team was working on.

“We should stop calling it the future machine,” Cassia said to herself, but loud enough that it interrupted a debate Ravi and I were having about which mushrooms made the best sounds to fall asleep to.

“Why?” We both said in near unison.

“If we’re right, at best it’s a probable future machine.”

“You’ve the soul of a poet, you know?” I said.

“Fine, call it the probability machine. It doesn’t offer a guaranteed future is my point.”

I glanced at the display on Ravi’s wall to see future machine feed.

“It won’t offer any kind of future if we can’t figure out what 68.44 is a probability of. At this point, we might as well call it a random number generator.” Before I finished speaking, the machine had updated to 1.914667, 12, and then hung for a few seconds on 23.1. It was running fast today.

“Admittedly, that’s a bigger issue, but we can work on multiple problems at once. We’re talented people,” she said, setting her handheld display down, “and what would we lose by being more accurate with what we call it?

“Well, probably your paycheck, for starters.” Ravi said completely serious and Cassia looked confused. “Even if the overall details are shaky, most of us here have a pretty good sense of the limits of the future machine. It’s almost certainly never going to turn into a streaming feed of tomorrow. We know that. Who doesn’t?”

“Oh,” she said understanding, “right. We still need investors.”

“Don’t get me wrong. There’s probably funding to be had for a probability machine too, but we’re burning too much money to start being realistic now.” Ravi said. Given that part of his job was managing the team’s budget, it wasn’t a surprising comment from him. “ The end goal of all this is still a functioning time machine. One day. Until then, call it whatever you want as long as you’re putting ‘the future machine’ on anything that might make it in front of the money. The only reason I’ve got all this leeway is because the investors like me. I don’t make them feel like idiots and I don’t confuse them. If that changes, then it’s off to the fungus mines with you two.”

Why don’t we just build an app? I messaged privately to Cassia, thinking she’d respond in the morning and that I’d have time to work out what I meant. Instead she replied immediately.

I can’t tell if you’re still mocking my old day job.

No. Not right now, anyway. I mean it. I had a screen full of data from the mushrooms. Our new sensors had been live for a week and it was interesting to learn that light was bending, ever so slightly, around the mycelial radiation. I had even forwarded the results onto another team that might be able to find a practical use for that.

But we were no closer to being able to prove that it was spitting out probabilities.

I’ll bite. What do you want this app to do?

That was a good question and I wished I’d thought of an answer before messaging her.

No, I meant we should turn the machine into an app.

She didn’t respond, either because she’d fallen asleep or was waiting for me to elaborate.

For all the technological knowledge that went into making the future machine function, there were still parts that were essentially magic. Those of us who work on site are at least occasionally breathing the same air as the mushroom farm and each other, so I can wrap my head around us all sharing a dreamscape. But why do I share dreams with people on the other side of the world?

Plus the whole sharing dreams at all detail. It’s become so normal for us all that we fail to appreciate that we know absolutely nothing how that is happening. Or what is happening for that matter. Are our subconscious minds being linked together? Are our incorporeal forms gathering on some shared metaphysical plane of existence we can’t prove exist? We might we be racing towards solving the least interesting problem that the future machine had presented.

But there were people better equipped and more interested in that work. We sometimes joked about the mushroom people, but they were pushing up against the rules of the universe too. Do that for long enough and it would be indistinguishable from madness.

The difference was that our team’s madness was making sense of bits of future that we received.

We should flood ourselves with probabilities. Give ourselves so many probabilities that patterns become more obvious when we compare it to real world data. Maybe the machine predicts the likelihood you’ll commit a crime. Maybe it’s whether you’ll check your feed in the next two minutes. If nothing else, we need the ability to run blind experiments on people who aren’t working in the building.

I considered whether I needed to add anything else to my wall of text and added one more sentence before letting myself head to the dreamscape.

Besides, this’ll be a step up from building porn games.

———

Before I had woken up the next morning, Cassia was ready a quick mock-up of the app. It took her a couple more days to have something that could run on our handhelds. It didn’t need to be polished, we just wanted to test the concept. At that point, it was essentially just a button on your display that you tapped and it ran a system diagnostic on a non-critical server in the building. We’d figure out something more elegant if we had to, but this was sufficient for now.

When the next batch of new recruits were being looped into the machine, Ravi got special permission to mess with the process. Normally they get moved on site and do minor busywork related to their field of expertise until they show up in the dreamscape. Instead they stayed at home and were told to use the app a differing number of times a day.

We started having their dreams almost immediately, so there wasn’t an obvious relationship between app usage and before they were looped in. That didn’t matter to us, because the future machine app was viable. Now we had to figure out what to do with it.

———

In the first six months, the future machine couldn’t keep up with the increase in scale. We gained users faster than our most ambitious projections. The farm had to be rapidly expanded and that presented all kinds of technical difficulties for those teams. Apparently it isn’t as straightforward as simply planting more mushrooms, but the app kept us too busy to pay attention to the farm.

Initially, we had been keeping an eye on a couple promising indie game developers who seemed likely to go viral, hoping we could pay them to let us slip some background code into a patch. It would have been the easiest solution, but the future machine won’t let us passively loop anyone into using it. So, Cassia went ahead and designed The Future Machine. We mostly just call it the app though, so as to not confuse it with the actual future machine.

Given that all horoscope apps are run by charlatans, we didn’t feel too bad getting into the market. Unlike them, we actually have access to the future, we just don’t know what it means. Instead of hiding that, we embraced the absurdity of it. We can easily push probabilities to their feeds, but nobody wants an app that just occasionally throws numbers at you. Which is why we gamified the whole thing. It’s a journal, horoscope, and life coach, but with addictive gameplay loops that incentivize regular usage.

While we were beta-testing, Ravi’s boss stopped by and suggested he was going to cut the app project altogether because it was just a distraction from more fruitful avenues of inquiry. That’s all Ravi needed to finish his proposal to management for the app to be its own department. Up to that point, we really had been making it up as we went along. We paid for that mistake with back to back all-nighters preparing spreadsheets and slide decks.

Ravi came to that meeting with a full progress report to-date, and a detailed roadmap for the next three years. We put a lot of work into looking like we knew what we were doing, but most of it turned out not to matter at all. Management saw that we’d have a modest revenue stream and signed off.

It probably helped that they could play with The Future Machine. They had to dedicate a non-zero amount of their days to teams proposing ideas like shooting mushrooms into black holes. Compared to that, app development was always going to seem downright straightforward.

Insofar as anything do with the machine was straightforward, that is.

———

“This might be stupid, but are we supposed to only ask the lawyers hypothetical questions?” I said legitimately unsure

“How can you possibly be this naive?” Cassia said without looking up at her screen, but Ravi was ready to finish the thoughtful her.

“We’re not passing coded messages back and forth. If this were a legal thriller, we’d be the villains who talk about their plans over an expensive scotch with a crackling fireplace in the background.” He paused for a moment and nodded thoughtfully. “Can we be in a legal thriller instead?”

“Maybe if you’d gone to law school, none of us would be in this mess,” Cassia said.

“I’m not clear why any of this is my fault. I think that’s why it’s call a team effort.”

“That’s only until something goes wrong. Then you’re management,” she pointed and me continued, “and we’ve just done what you told us to.”

“Oh I see how it is now,” he said in mock horror. “I’ve been betrayed.”

“You really should have seen it coming. You do run the number six horoscope app in North America.”

Ravi shrugged at that and then turned his attention back to me.

“The lawyers are pretty adamant that we avoid any dream-related content on the app,” Ravi said apologetically. “The liability concerns are just too much hassle.”

“As much as I’d love to talk in this circle yet again, I actually have a different point here,” I and paused. Cassia caught my tone voice and set aside her display to pay attention.

“Well this should be good,” she said.

“I’m just thinking that if we’re breaking a bunch of laws already, why not get some better data out of it?”

———

Opening up the dreamscape to anyone who used the app wasn’t exactly an oversight. There were countless meetings about the logistics of scaling up the mushroom farm. The legal team nixed the dream tracker features before we had gone live. We knew that anyone looped into the machine would eventually start sharing their dreams with us.

We just didn’t care. What problem couldn’t be solved by just a little bit of an edge on the universe? We wanted the future more than we cared how we got there.

The entire app was built on the assumption that the future machine is giving us probabilities. Those probabilities relate, in some way, to the mushroom energy surges on the farm. And those particular mushrooms relate, in some way, to particular individuals. Obviously we were hazy on the details, but that we knew these things were all connected. How was to be seen.

When the machine generates a number for an individual, we identified who it was associated with and then the app pushed a seemingly personalized journey of self-discovery. Each journey was a different selection of mental health advice stacked on top of Barnum statements stacked on top of whatever pseudoscience questionnaire we were pushing that week. Then the app gave you your number and a vaguely quirky but still plausible outcome.

Maybe you had a 96% chance of missing a stranger smiling at you. Or 48.52% chance you’d discover something new that you’ve always believed. Maybe it was as simple as a 13% chance the rain will follow you today. The numbers were the only part that weren’t a lie, but the machine doesn’t seem.

We also did virtual star charts explorations, for whatever those are worth.

It wasn’t enough for people to casually use the app. We needed them to let us into their lives so that we get looped into their lives. Paired with time stamps and location data, we made some serious inroads on identifying when the machine was giving weather probabilities. We learned that the mushrooms responded differently depending on the type of probability they were generating. The mycelial radiation had the appearance of randomness that matched the randomness of the machine’s numbers, but there were incredibly subtle patterns in the radiation.

The patterns only really became apparent when you already knew what you were looking for. After comparing our data to highly localized weather and temperature information, we had a collection of almost two-thousand probabilities that could plausibly be related to the weather. We started sorting and tagging each number based on how confident we were that the weather was involved. It was an absurd exercise, like playing darts but not knowing if you’re aimed towards the dartboard. Or if there’s a dartboard at all. Or darts, for that matter, but you still have to hit the same spot twice.

Then Ravi did it.

“You can’t think of the radiation data as numbers,” Ravi said. said. He paced across the room in excitement and agitation. Excitement because he was certain he had figured it out. Agitation because he hadn’t figure out how to communicate it.

“What do you do when you’ve woken up from a dream that you can’t remember but want to?” He seemed torn between wanting us to guess and wanting to get his thought out. The latter won. “Instead of focusing on the dream, you let it go. You calm your thoughts and give the thought permission to leave. When your mind is that empty, a single word might be all it takes for an idea to come flooding back.” Ravi cycled through different data radiation sets, pointed at the office display, and paired each point with an emphatic “See!” that wasn’t immediately helpful.

There was a strong temptation to mock him when he got like this, but it was better to let him work ideas out in this way. If nothing else, it wore him out. “Once you look at it like a memory of a dream, then you’ll remember that these are predictions about weather.”

As absurd as it sounded, that wasn’t an unfair description of the process. The shape of the mycelial radiation made sense in the same way that dreams do. Fortunately, we were sharing dreams which made all this significantly more straightforward once we knew what we were doing and Ravi’s ramblings were translated into something the rest of us could understand. It was a method of identifying when the machine was giving a weather probability. That’s not particularly useful without more context. What are you going to do with a 33% chance of some kind of weather event? The correct answer, by the way, is compare it to weather data and see if you can’t repeat the whole process with the risk of rain. Other teams took notice, adapted Ravi’s approach, and built on his breakthrough to make their own.

Finally, the machine was beginning to live up to its name.

“Can we start calling it a probability machine yet?” Cassia said.

“Still no,” Ravi said without turning away from the presentation.

We were in the middle of a lunchtime lecture where yet another team was advocating a mushroom farm on Mars. Variations on the idea came up every couple of months, but this team wanted to see whether the machine could operate without people looped in at all. It was a genuinely interesting research question, but I couldn’t see why they needed to go to Mars when they could have gone to Antarctica. The romance of space might have something to do with it, but there wasn’t much space for romance anymore. Not now that we had a pinhole into the future.

There were a lot of people working on the machine who didn’t understand that. We got away with idle research before, but only because the project had stalled out. For most of the team, the future machine was the most interesting work we had ever done. For the investors, it was the fountain of youth. Or it was the closest they had seen in the risk management strategy that was their lives. There were other ways to make money than by gaming the future, but there weren’t other ways to unmake a tragic accident.

Cassia’s insistence on calling it a probability machine wasn’t really rooted in the grammar of time travel. It was her quiet rebellion at the smallness of the whole project. She wasn’t particularly interested in getting fired so, unlike the aspiring Martian colonists, she kept her rebellion quiet.

“We have access to the future and the best we can think to do with it is to with it is horoscopes and spreadsheets.” The presenter was avoiding looking at Ravi and our table, but enough people were trying to gauge our reaction that it felt like the spotlight was on us. “The machine could do some good if it weren’t being run by a bunch of assholes.” For most of his presentation, he had been venting these kind of vague frustrations about the app, but now there was an expectant silence across the lunchroom. He still wasn’t looking at us, but he wasn’t not looking at us.

Ravi was clearly irritated, but gave no indication he was going to respond. Cassia was nonchalantly looking at her feed and might not have cared about the tension. I probably looked like I was wincing in pain, because Ravi had kicked me when I opened my mouth.

He was right, but only because we knew something nobody else in the room knew: last week, the machine had spit out a 98% chance our antagonistic Mars enthusiast would be fired.

Looping people out of the machine proved to be as easy as firing them and uprooting their patch on the farm. No more mushrooms meant no more dreams.

A couple of folks were disgruntled enough to break their non-disclosure agreements, but they made the mistake of telling too much of the truth. Things might have gone differently, had they focused on sheer amount of personal data we were collecting. Instead they tried to convince people that three wellness influencers and their horoscope app were a front for a multibillion dollar machine that could kind of predict the future. That it was true didn’t make it any easier a sell.

Yes, some people believed it, because some people always do. Never enough that it mattered to us, anyway. I imagine the security budget grew accordingly, but that was someone else’s problem.

Our problem was getting enough sleep.

Most of us think about the future as something that belongs to us, as moments that will be ours. What that misses is that we’ve more claim to the past than we do the future. Each moment is an oil painting, brushed over the last but the present layer is always dry. No strokes can be tweaked. When the machine activates, it doesn’t change that. The present is.

But the near future isn’t likewise dry. It’s close though, because the physical world has already been set in motion. As it turns out, however, the subconscious mind isn’t governed by the same rules as the rest of the universe, so that’s where we went to watch the brush strokes. If the machine was showing us the future, the dreamscape was how we made sense of what we were shown.

Apparently some people can directly control what happens in their dreams. That sounds a lot like witchcraft to me, but so is soothsaying, so who am I to judge. Those of us whose dreams are essentially a random word generator have a harder time with the process, because we have to focus our subconscious on mycelial radiation patterns. That focus usually involved a pre-sleep hypnotherapy session and a light barbiturate cocktail. All to end up dreaming about the work as precisely as possible.

Even though we were often passengers in each other’s dreams, there was nothing about the dreams themselves that were different. You knew you were privy to someone else’s subconscious, but that was all in the normal range of weird, wild, and work. People dreamt about the machine because it was the most significant thing going on in their lives and that was inevitably going to show up in the subconscious on occasion, but no more than was to be expected.

Ravi’s discovery was that dreams about the machine were different. They made sense when you woke up and, equally importantly, they didn’t fade away like dreams had a habit of doing. You could spend weeks trying to read and translate a burst of mycelial radiation into a useful probability, and still fail, only to have a dream about it where the pattern finally came together.

The dreamscape couldn’t do our job for us, but it was an ideal testing site for different theories. Our nights were spent dream-working out the syntax of the future and our days were spent coding out what we’d learned. There was no point wasting time by manually translating individual probabilities. They would usually be long out of date by the time they’d been translated. In order to make use of the information, we were always going to have to automate the process.

Translated probabilities came in for Ravi and Cassia long before my first one did, but its weirdness was worth the wait: 0.0001492% chance that I would think about dragon fruit. Cassia rechecked the code while Ravi took a nap to translate the data in the dreamscape, because obviously I immediately thought about dragon fruit. After a thorough review, there were no technical problems found with the machine. Unlikely, after all, doesn’t mean impossible.

For the most part, though, it had a boring streak. 5% chance that you’d receive a feed alert. 82.01% you’d catch a nail on fabric. These kinds of probabilities were hated by investors, the military, and the curious alike. It wasn’t what they wanted it to be or it couldn’t be relied on in a crisis or it wasn’t inclined to be interesting.

At the same time, the app was more popular than ever, but that had nothing to do with the machine. We hadn’t updated it to include the translated probabilities, because it seemed unlikely that anyone would appreciate their wellness content veering into absurdist poetry. It’s hard to center yourself when there’s a 7.7% chance of turning on classical music that drowns out the sound of barking dogs. Finding a way to integrate the future into our horoscopes might have been interesting, but it wasn’t a high priority. Whatever edge on the universe our investors had been expecting, it surely wasn’t giving random people a heads up that they had a 41.71% chance seeing two chairs that they briefly thought was one chair.

It wasn’t that they were all useless probabilities. There’s a team testing the machine as an early warning system for natural disasters. It’s incredibly rare to get a probability along the lines of an 80% chance of dying in a tornado, so they’re trying to find disaster indicators in seemingly unrelated probabilities. The math looks pretty complicated, but Ravi is pretty sure they’ve onto something.

That’s how a lot of the work ended up going after we first started to translate probabilities. It only takes a couple of seconds after the machine activates and we’re not likely to get it much faster than that. The technical limitations of the sensors mean that readings take more time to be processed than the translation code does to run. Given how few probabilities are actionable, let alone useful, research is focused on a lot of sideways thinking from highly specialized experts. Most of it goes above my head. Which is how it should be. Between maintaining the app and tweaking the translation software, Cassia and I had work of our own.

“They’re looking for you to translate these probabilities by hand,” Ravi said. He had forwarded the request to my feed and was poorly hiding an urge to laugh.

“Do they think that I’m wanting for work?” I opened the files and glanced through the data on my portable display. Nothing odd jumped out at me immediately, but I was groggy and only halfway through my first coffee. I was going to have to sit down with them at my desk to make sense of them. It wasn’t something you could eyeball. If I were dreaming, it would have taken a couple seconds, but I wasn’t about to waste REM cycles on other people’s projects unless there was good reason. “Contrary to popular belief, I still have stuff of my own to do.”

“I mentioned that. Ali says it’s not a high priority, but his team thinks the software is consistently mistranslating a set of probabilities as related to weather when they’re…” he cleared his throat and then paused. “He thinks they’re about sex.”

There wasn’t anything titillating about that. Once you’ve shared dreams with your colleagues, your definition of risqué shifts pretty dramatically.

“I’m not following.”

“He looped his parents into the machine a while back. He would call them up to give them a heads up about thunderstorms,” Ravi said, “and last week his mother said that she always loved to hear from him, but she would disown him if he interrupted date night again. He’d been doing it for six months…”

I started laughing in the middle of Ravi’s retelling. The machine had a strange sense of humor at times. Like most parts of the job, it was troubling if you thought about it for too long.

Accidentally keeping one’s parents from getting laid aside, a lot of my work with the machine looked like that, because, for most people working on the machine, the dreamscape was more effort than it was worth. People used it in different ways, but nobody as much as Cassia and I. It was a difficult art and everyone was thankful that we had largely automated the process, but that meant we had accidentally become the foremost experts on translating the future.

So, when the machine gave out a 100% chance event, we were the ones who got the call.

“I know the number appeared as ‘00’ on your feeds. That’s a bug that the original programmers missed. They assumed that the machine couldn’t guarantee anything. It appears that they—we were mistaken.” Cassia spoke quickly but confidently.

“So, it’s genuine?” It was one of the executives on the shared call, but it was hard to tell which because they all started talking at once.

“It’s genuine, but hold the questions, please.” She had more important points to make, but wanted everyone on the same page first. “Thirteen and some change minutes ago the machine gave us a ‘100’ result. Diagnostics are being run, but we have no reason to assume an error. That is because there was an accompanying new event on the farm too.”

She paused to take a sip of water.

“Our sensors need to be precise to determine the origin point of mycelial radiation. As you know, we have gotten quite good at determining whose mushrooms it originates from. For this event, every mushroom lit up simultaneously. Subject to a bit of negligible variance for sensor malfunctions, every mushroom gave off the same radiation pattern for exactly 37 seconds.”

I could feel Ravi’s eyes on me, but I didn’t look up. I was focused intently on memorizing the raw mycelial data we had captured.

“That means we’re dealing with a probability for not only every person on this call, but every person looped into the machine. The translation software buckled under the processing strain, but that didn’t matter anyway. The complexity here is unlike any probability we’ve seen thus far. The software will have to be rewritten for the next time this happens, but that’s a problem for tomorrow. Today we’re trying to translate this probability.

“Okay, I’m going to pass it off to Rav now.” She walked off screen before he was ready to replace her, but we’d be forgiven for a bit of sloppiness today.

“Given that we learned how to translate all prior probabilities with the help of dreaming, that’s what we’re going to do now. Our team all just woke up, but we won’t be waiting until this evening to get to work. Once we’ve memorized the data, we can induce sleep.” He waved towards me, although I wasn’t in the camera’s sight. Cassia had joined me at the table and was back to the radiation readings. She caught my glance and gave a tight-lipped smile. No matter how banal the translation ended up, this was a big deal.

There was an eternity between a probability and a guarantee.

Chemistry meant that sleep came immediately, but dreams did not. They flitted around at the edges, almost cohering. Almost.

There was no way to know how much time had passed. It wasn’t as if our watches dreamt too. Just the growing frustration of dreamless sleep. Insofar as I could grab hold of thoughts at all, I blamed it on overeagerness to see the future.

The farm appeared eventually — or immediately after I fell asleep, who can say. The mushrooms and their intricate mycelial network were such a regular occurrence in my dreams that this felt like going to the office, even if the commute was a weird one.

Still, it felt wrong when the dream came together. Mushrooms thrived in the dark, but the farm was always lit by dusk in my dreams. This was neither. It was cold and clinical and bright enough that I thought I was waking up. Instead I was struggling to breathe. The air was dry in a way that would have been impossible on the real world farm. Without any smell of life to the place, this would never be mistaken for any kind of farm.

I wanted to explore the contours of the wrongness and, as dreams are wont to do, the dream started to shift. I was almost tired enough to let it, but there was already more work than my subconscious was inclined to do. The reminder of work was all I needed for the farm snap back into focus. The eeriness didn’t go away, but I set it off to the side so that I could start translating.

The sleeping mind can be guided, but only if you’ve vigilance enough to sidestep distractions without letting consciousness interfere with inspiration. Take a left at the white rabbit and if you come upon a mad hatter, you’ve gone too far.

Even with the uneasiness, the data I had been memorizing was waiting in the dream. The sensors measured every sense available to us and many that were not. Those readings could be graphed and charted, put into spreadsheets and databases, or ignored altogether in favor of audiovisual records. The trick to translating the future was that all of this mattered, but it was a puzzle that you only knew how to solve once you had solved it.

Outside of dreams, that process looked a lot like unraveling a conspiracy. A subtle rise in temperature might cause you to reassess a frequency caught by microphones that listened beyond human hearing. That, in turn, might remind you a childhood memory of stumbling under your own feet and scraping your hands on concrete. Suddenly, after days or weeks of examining these connections, it would become clear: you were working on a probability about falling in love. No straight lines and the subconscious got there faster. It just had to be tricked into getting started.

I wanted to get to work, but wanting doesn’t work in dreams.

There were an infinity of mushrooms stretching off into the distance in every direction, so I jumped at the unexpected sight of Cassia and Ravi, because there had been nowhere for them to come from. It wasn’t really them, though. They were off having dreams of their own and this was just my subconscious trying to takeover. That was the whole point.

The artificial trappings of the farm — the walls and walkways, the electronics and all their unnatural noises, and all manner of debris that we leave behind when we leave a place — all that began to grow more distant. It didn’t go away exactly. The farm was still the farm, but there was infinitely more space between things. If I had wanted to, I could have looked off towards the horizon and seen the office in which I was currently sleeping.

Cassia and Ravi were still walking towards me, but never getting closer. I tried not to wonder at whether their actual sleeping selves were having an easier time with the translation than I. That was enough to stop them from becoming the focus of the dreams, because my subconscious was more interested in the soil vibrating underfoot. There was a long, deep hum as the entire mycelial network pulsed. Everything that was connected to it pulsed in unison and everything else got even more distant. My office became a star, flickering away the light years between us.

Certainty flooded through me. I didn’t need to see a number on a screen to tell me that this was no mere probability. It was more than that and I knew that it was the future in the same way that I knew how to breathe.

To know what will be is a powerful intoxication. I didn’t know what to do with it at first and that indecision almost dropped me out of the dream altogether. Instead I let my knees buckle and fell, not worrying if I hit the ground, not worrying if I was caught. The dream versions of Cassia and Ravi never came any closer, but their arms supported my weight and kept me from being overwhelmed.

Now that I was certain that the future was coming, I let it.

The mycelial network was gossamer strands, stretching out underneath the soil and connecting all the disparate parts of the machine. These intricate threads were a living net and when the machine activated, the mushrooms exhaled and the entire network relaxed. This was how it readied itself to catch the future.

Everyone dreams the data differently. Ravi’s translations come from conversations had while dreaming. Cassia sees code and debugs the future. There was even a team lead who swore that all his translations came in the form of intricate Gantt charts. The easiest way to make sense of the future is through what we already know.

For me, the process looks a bit more natural. The farm always becomes a forest, albeit an impossible one. Each mushroom grows into a different kind of tree. Weeping willows next to ginkgo biloba. Douglas firs surrounded by tropical fruit trees. If I were so inclined, I could wander the forest until I found an ancient Norway spruce perched on a rocky outcropping, but to see trees that I already knew was not why I was here. I was looking for a newcomer to the forest and watch the future bloom.

I don’t know how long I wandered, but eventually a patch of cherry blossoms led me to a vast, ugly glade where there I spotted what I was looking for.

I knew that the tree was sick before I ever saw it. I could see that the grass beneath my feet was dying and looked worse the closer I came. It was as if something resembling growth rings extended beyond the tree’s bark, marking the spreading wrongness that could be felt through the dream but found its center here. I wanted to want to turn back, but the machine had told this future and I was here to translate it. Wrong or not, there was something to be learned from this.

The tree must have looked impressive in its prime, but now it was collapsing inward on itself. Branches that once might have held the weight of eternity had snapped under their own weight. There were no leaves, whether they rotted on those branches or the world beneath my feet. Even the deadest trees are filled with life — animals that repurpose it for their homes, insects that live out entire generations on decaying wood, and new growth of some sort will inevitably be found sprouting out of the old. But there were no such signs of renewal here.

Not knowing what to do, I reached out to put my hand on its bark.

I saw the tree as a seed growing on the branches of some long forgotten tree that only existed now as its ancestor. I felt the seed fall and get picked up by the wind long before it ever connected with the ground. It flew for what seemed to be forever before touching down here, in a spot exactly like this one. These were the earliest memories of life that the tree had and it was telling me its story. Stories. Eager to learn them all, I reached out to place another hand on it.

Instead the tree fell apart at my touch. From its great heights down to the remaining roots deep in the soil, it turned to something less than ash. The tree may have been a shadow of what it was once, but there was still so much of it that I was engulfed and overcome as it disintegrated.

Then the remnants spread. I watched the already infected glade become a lifeless husk. I watched the cherry blossoms lose first those blossoms, then their color, and finally the trunks themselves. A mango tree had its fruit rot on the branch before becoming unrecognizable. An arbutus peeled away its layers until the tree was impossibly thin and then it was nothing. Each tree reacted differently, but the end result was the same: death, disintegration, and dispersal. It spread to every tree in sight, then on the horizon and, eventually, even the distant stars faded from the sky.

Hours might have passed while I sat there, watching the dream play out. It felt like longer. I wanted to wake up. I didn’t want to be alone with the emptiness. Even the dream versions of Cassia and Ravi had stopped their futile journey towards me, although I didn’t notice when and I didn’t know where they were now. Had they shadowed me as I wandered by the jacaranda and the whistling thorn? Had I lost them somewhere in the maze of quickbeams and rowan trees and dogberries? Or had they followed as far as the glade only to get swept away with everything else?

The answer didn’t matter. They had been nothing more than idle thoughts bouncing off my subconscious and not needed to translate the future, but their absence was a reminder that I didn’t know how far along Cassia and Ravi had gotten in their own subconsciouses. They would come to the same conclusion. Maybe they already had.

“The end of everything,” I said out loud, giving voice to both the obvious and the future. To be precise, there was a 100% chance of the end of everything.

It was an exciting result. It meant the machine could reach further into the future than our wildest dreams. I know enough cosmology to know that, some hundreds of billion of years hence, we will eventually run out of tomorrows. That will be somebody else’s problem.

For us, the machine had touched a moment hundreds of billions of years into the future. We couldn’t do much with such a far afield future, so tweaks would be needed to find a nearer one. I’ve even come up with some ideas in the hours since I’d finished my initial translation. In fact, enough time has passed that I’ve reached the limits of idle speculation. There was nothing more to be done on that front until I had more meaningful data.

I’ve never run into difficulties with chemically induced sleep before. The work was too important to rely on the body’s natural rhythms. The future is one hell of a drug. There were obviously risks, but we considered them unlikely as long as we were safe.

And yet.

Something must have gone wrong. Otherwise I would have woken already. Even accounting for the strangeness of dreams, it has been a long time since the last specks of far off light faded away. A dream in which nothing is happening is strange. Stranger still, I feel tired. That has certainly never happened before and strikes me as an undeniably bad sign. If the dosage has been mismanaged, I may just be struggling to wake. Or it could worse than that. This could be what dying feels like without the benefits of a body to mediate the experience.

I don’t want those to be my last thoughts, especially if someone else has the misfortunate of sharing this dream. Thoughts themselves are hard to hold onto here, but strong emotions can linger much longer. When those are someone else’s emotions, it can mess with your whole day.

I keep finding myself almost letting exhaustion take me, but never quite ready to give up that fight. For a while, I tried to make things happen. I tried to urge myself into running on a sandy beach with the hot day being smoothed by diving into the refreshingly cool water. I tried to find myself in any number of a range of bodies, familiar and alien. I even tried to dream the distorted reflection of the farm back into existence, given that it had already been part of the dream.

When that didn’t work, I tried to stop trying. I hoped that might kickstart my subconscious, but this has truly become nothing at all. Whatever has caused it, I am trapped in whatever remains after a dream has ended.

Even if there were any more future left to be found in this aspect of my subconscious, I don’t have the energy to look for it. My eyes have stopped searching the emptiness. Figures sit just beyond the edges of my vision, always forming and always in retreat. I cannot see them, but I know that I have seen them before. They used to weave-paint-plant-craft-code the future. Now they are a chorus without a song. The silence fills the emptiness or the other way around. At the end of everything, they won’t even do me the kindness of a whimper.

He’s more attractive than someone pulling out this tired line has any right to be. Part of that is because someone else is dressing him. He doesn’t know how to wear the outfit he has been put into. It’s almost stylish enough not to matter. I wonder if his dresser knows him well enough to care that he’s not pulling it off.

If only they could convince him to do something about the mustache.

“Hmm?” I say noncommittally. Even someone pretending to be interesting can sometimes get there accidentally. Not that I had high hopes for this one.

“Attraction doesn’t change you, y’know? It just gets rid of your baggage,” he says with a straight face.

Sure, he wasn’t wrong. That’s the whole point of Attraction. Thirsty people remained thirsty — they just didn’t know what they wanted to drink anymore. My disappointment with him wasn’t factual. He’d started off unoriginal and seemed unlikely to rise to even my lowest expectations.

Obviously he has done this before and if I didn’t slow him down, next he’d be telling me that he wasn’t a regular user but he’d gotten up to some fun with it before and had never met someone like me. That is to say, someone who he still found genuinely and uniquely attractive, despite the drug’s influence.

“Are you going to buy me a drink?” I cut him off. Not rude, but to the point. He looks me straight in the eyes, trying to assess whether I was worth the effort when he couldn’t tell what I looked like. This is my favorite moment when talking with someone on Attraction.

People are basically mimetic animals. We mirror behaviors we see in others without necessarily deciding that we want to act that way. Attraction cuts through that in a way and so users tend to forget to pay attention to the social norms that they hadn’t personally cared for in the first place. In this case, my suitor was comfortable openly assessing how likely he was to get laid if he put in the effort.

“Ah, of course. I’ll be right back with two more of those.” He points down at the drink I was nearly finished with. He hasn’t bothered to to ask what it was and doesn’t even bother with a convincing show as he walked away from me. Also away from the bartender who wasn’t doing a very good job at hiding her amusement.

So, not worth the effort then.

Fair enough. It didn’t seem likely that he would have remained attractive for much longer anyway. Wanting to get laid isn’t a personality that very many people are good looking enough to pull off. Besides, I wasn’t in the mood for being interesting enough for both of us.

“I’ll get you another,” the bartender says with a laugh. I guessed from the look in her eyes that she saw that same scene play out a few times a week.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m no prude. Had he cared to ask why I was playing hard to get, I’d have told him frankly. There just wasn’t anything curious about him.

People think the trick to long term use is to have someone keep an eye on you to help you avoid doing things you’ll regret after the Attraction wears off. There was a whole public awareness campaign about it, but it was clearly made by people who’d never tripped. A properly dosed Attraction high means that your regrets are a distant memory. It’s not that you’re suddenly horny and impulsive — unless, of course, you were horny and impulsive before.

You still feel like you the whole time. That’s one of the hardest points to get across to the skeptics. Attraction doesn’t make you a different person. Politicians keep getting themselves worked up into a lather with claims that the drugs are having a corrupting influence on young minds. As if young minds weren’t always already experimenting with their sexuality.

All Attraction does is redirect the flow, so to speak. If you’re meek or shy, Attraction isn’t going to change that. The reason that people seem different when they’re on it is because knowing, for a certainty, what you want sexually is a pretty crazy high. You could figure that out on your own, I suppose, but that seems like a lot of work and we’ve been using technology to overcome our limits since we first smashed two rocks together.

Besides, adrenaline is my antidrug. Seriously, that’s how it works. Attraction starts to wear off rapidly when your body floods with adrenaline. That’s why you’ve got to avoid doing exactly what my would-be suitor is doing: strenuous, active flirting. Doing that is a good way to have your high wear off long before anyone’s pants are on the floor. Or elsewhere.

Of course, there are ways around that, but they mostly involved more frequent or higher doses — which amps up the inhibition loss and makes for a vicious cycle. Get yourself too turned on too quickly and the Attraction starts wearing off and you find yourself looking for your usual kinks instead of letting the Attraction wash over you. That can be a particularly bad experience if you’re on the way to someone place. Or their car, whatever. Any port in a storm. Regardless of where you are, it’s one hell of an unnerving experience to be in the middle of fucking someone and realizing that you’re utterly repulsed by them. So, you amp up the dosage to avoid that, but you’re less careful with dosing at this point, because you’re already high — and probably not just on Attraction. Then your night is just peaks and valleys.

Different strokes for different folks, I suppose, but I’d prefer to avoid the adrenaline crash altogether. Let the Attraction naturally leave your system, so slowly that you don’t actually notice the ‘moment’ your sexual baggage comes back because you’re too invested in enjoying the experience that you’re having. Then you take someone back to your place. I don’t know why you’d use Attraction just to get laid. Sex that you regret in the morning is easier to pull off than you’d think.

When the box industry bubble burst, w. stood alone. There were minor players. There always are, but it was a long time before anyone paid attention to the pretenders. Even as w. has faded from the scene, Experience companies still usually talk about it as whimsy work. Compared to that, the artisanal drug industry has been better understood as a bloom.

There are more local, craft pharmacists than anyone can remember the names of, and, even if you did, half of them have either rebranded or gone out of business. Once you’ve got the right spores, the mushrooms are easy enough to grow just about anywhere. Attraction is one of the big corporate players and there are lots of off-brand knock-offs, but getting people to have sex isn’t remotely close to the most interesting pharmacy going on these days.

The electric car iteration was an improvement on the combustion engine, but as the fossil fuels dried up we started taking a closer look at energy costs of almost everything. The real origin of the pharmacy bloom was temperature control.

An enormous amount of energy is spent on making human beings comfortable. To be clear, there are hard limits on the body around exposure to the elements. Too hot and you’ll burn, too cold and you’ll freeze. We can’t break fundamental laws of thermodynamics, but it has proven considerably cheaper to trick the body into being more comfortable than it is to actually make the body comfortable. Our lives have become too dependent on electronics for many climates and so the unpredictability of weather means we need all kinds of protections, but the global thermal insulation requirements are massive. Even minor improvements can have dramatic energy implications, as long as they’re widespread among the population.

That was the sales pitch, anyway. The pill works well enough that serious people took it seriously. A couple of governments have even been working on restructuring around the premise and the numbers are promising, but you can imagine how democracies tend to think of daily government mandated highs.

Luxury convenience drugs, however, remain popular regardless of the government.

The BARNAME was as interesting a bar as its name pretended not to be, but it was a popular enough. Add some fine tailoring and my suitor’s aggressively boring approach stands a pretty good chance of working out for him. If only because enough people will be out and about using Attraction and its knockoffs to start something that otherwise wouldn’t have gotten started on its own. Any half-decent pharmacist makes something you can take if you have morning after regrets. They can’t make memories go away, but they’ll be fuzzy enough that you don’t mind and it’s no worse than a hangover. Yet another high to add to your supply.

People keep saying the next big jump will be when they revolutionize food, but I’m skeptical. Mood, sexuality, body temperature, concentration enhancers, and therapy are all one thing, but taste buds are too precious to let an amateur play around with.

The bar isn’t busy enough to drown out everyone’s conversations, so the couple next to me have been trying to have a whisper fight, but I catch enough fragments that they’ve caught my attention.

They’re one of those pairs whose style and look is starting to blend together. The kind of couple that makes you misremember what ‘kissing cousins’ are. It makes it hard to tell which of them is more attractive.

“I don’t care that you’re still taking it.” Angrily enough that it’s hard to believe. “It’s that you lied about it.”

“Oh get off it. I didn’t lie!” Almost dismissive.

“You didn’t tell the truth either.”

“You don’t get a say in what drugs I take.”

“I don’t want a say. You just let me believe that you’d stopped.”

It isn’t hard to piece together the fight. They had probably found themselves next to each other after an Attraction hookup and it was the first time they hadn’t been disappointed. Maybe one of them had said they do it again and the other had joked that they’d only do it with Attraction. Him for the former and her for the latter, if I had to guess, but that’s all it would be at this point.

“It isn’t about you.”

“Fuck off.”

It would be a moment of dramatic silence if there were silence to be found in the bar. I do my part though.

There were a thousand justifications that could be offered. None would be satisfactory to someone who didn’t already want to be convinced, but that was the way these conversations inevitably went. That’s not meant with any judgment. Recreational pharmacy isn’t for everyone and it certainly isn’t for every relationship, but most people don’t know that until after the fact.

I find myself drafting an update for my public feed about their conversation before I recognize that I’ve become too invested in the lives of strangers. I decide to tune them out, but I save the notes. Obviously.

With less subtlety than I intend, I look around the bar. I’m not looking for my dull friend from earlier, but I’m also not not looking for him. It’s been that kind of night.

But I can’t find him. I imagine he found his dance partner for the evening. Maybe they’ve already made their way to the dance floor.

I turn my attention back to the drink that I’ve been nursing long enough for the ice to have melted. A consequence of my snooping.

“Hey. It’s just about last call. Do you want one more for the drive home?” Just barely a hint of how tired the joke is.

I know I’ve been talking to him — her? — for a while now, but I can’t quite place the face I’m looking at. I try to shake the cobwebs out of my head and casually look across the room. Everyone’s face has that same sort of blankness to it. All the normal parts are there, but I can’t bring myself to care about the details enough to bring them into focus.

I try to imagine any of them going home together.

I’ve been sitting there silently for long enough that it was starting to feel weird. I try to make it look I was judging the drink before pushing it aside dramatically and give a quick nod. I look up and try not to get distracted before I can speak.

“You’ve got the most gorgeous eyes,” I say. “Did you know that?”

Getting that definition is an art unto itself. It’s not a problem you can attack head on and just ask the client. There is nothing particularly whimsical about getting exactly what you expected.

Worse still, it’s hard to genuinely feel whimsy when you’re paying for it. Even if you forget, in the moment, that you’ve got a w. subscription, you’ll remember later on when you get the bill. Maybe some whimsy will be left after that, but more often it turns into a more rational curiosity as you wonder how an Experience was pulled off. Then your satisfaction is dependent on how interesting our approach could have been. Or how good your imagination is.

What distinguishes the good operators from the merely clever ones is that even if you were told that something was part of an Experience, you’d still wonder how they could have possibly pulled it off. Where even if you were told that, you might not believe. Lingering doubts are an important part of the truly great Experiences.

Those doubts can manifest in lots of different ways, but I’m partial to the weirdness that comes with a digital jinx. When two different people in your life contact you at precisely same time about separate things that nonetheless share some quality that makes it seem serendipitous.

It’s an easy enough play that most rookie operators keep it somewhere in the toolbox, but if you were told that it was an Experience, you’d have all kinds of explanations close at hand. With enough time, clients can work backwards to determine how most Experiences are done. Maybe people were tricked, paid, or pushed to say what they said. Maybe phones were stolen. Maybe just we hacked their feeds. Or yours.

Whatever the method, you might be vaguely impressed if we pulled off a particularly novel approach, but knowing takes away from the experience of the Experience. What you’re paying w. for is the lie and so we fail every time that we remind you of what you’re paying for.

Dr. Julia Werner’s solution to the digital jinx was a subtle tweak, but it makes all the difference in the world. She would switch out one of the people involved for the client. You are no longer a passive observer as an Experience happens to you, but instead an active participant — or, better yet, the initiator.

You receive a message from someone precisely as you were sending them one. Not only are both messages on the similar topics, but they almost serve as a sideways response to each other. Rationality be damned, the feeling of genuine coincidence is hard to shake. It’s the kind of Experience that makes you wonder whether it was just an experience, because how could it possibility have been artificially generated whimsy? How could an operator know exactly what you were going to say and be ready with an appropriately close response?

That’s not my secret to tell. Not that Dr. Werner would have cared. She was the founder of the company, brilliant mind, and general weirdo, but she’d gotten bored of whimsy work long before she died. Since then, that is among the many secrets that belong to w.

I’d been trying to avoid reminders that she was gone. Not just because I didn’t want to think about it, but because I couldn’t keep the grief off my face and sadness is almost never the appropriate reaction in a staff meeting.

“It’s perfectly safe. We’re not going to mess with anything important.”

Ana said, “We’re not going to be interfering with a shuttle launch.”

Anastasia Werner. Senior Vice President of Platinum Operations for a couple years now. We’ve also been friends since before w. became too cool for whole words. I probably mean that as a dig, but it’s not an unfair depiction of the company these days.

To their credit, nobody pushed the issue. They would grumble about it later with each other, but there was no point derailing a meeting over something that had been decided. Not every good idea was a good idea to management.

Ana turned to me.

“Ismay, it’s been a couple weeks since we’ve had an update from you,” she paused and I filled the silence .

“Will no one rid me of this turbulent prince?”

That got a couple of knowing chuckles. Royal clients were usually more difficult to get access to, but this one in particular was a shut in. His mother had arranged the contract, because she hoped that a bit of whimsy would keep him from becoming an asshole king. Her words, not mine.

“If you’re struggling, we can pull some things off your plate.” Ana said and this time I had nothing to fill the silence with. “Can any of your clients be handed off?”

“Well, obviously I’ve already fallen in love with them all. That’s just the way this job works. You can’t do it neutrally. I’ve fallen in love with every single client I’ve had since I moved into operations.”

“That’s a good line. Well rehearsed.” Ana replied with a faint hint of a smirk before looking further down the table.

“Renata, can you play around with that language and get something on my desk for next week?”

“Yeah.” Even through Renata’s monosyllabic response, I could hear the distance in her voice. She was likely already replaying the audio and sending the clip to her team, so I didn’t bother sending my own copy.

“That doesn’t, however, answer the question,” Ana said and turned her attention back to me. “Which means you’re hedging. Which makes me think that you are struggling.”

She wasn’t quite scolding me in front of the class but it was close. It also wasn’t an unfair accusation.

“It’s just been hectic without Marcus,” I said not quite honestly. That wasn’t the full truth but it certainly wasn’t a lie. “I know that I lost the argument, so I’m not trying to bring it up again. But is he doing okay in there?”

Even the people who had been politely ignoring our conversation gave us their full attention. In there. Quite the euphemism considering that Marcus was in an American prison serving a two-year sentence for tax evasion. That he was in prison at all was the argument to which I was referring.

“It’s natural to have worries,” Ana said, “but he knew what he was getting into when he planned this Experience. I would have thought you were more sympathetic to his new criminal life, given your history.”

The mild tension in the room was immediately cut. Nobody outright laughed, but most people recognized the joke. Ana used that as an opportunity to wrap the meeting up. We’d properly get into it afterwards, in private. She hadn’t chastised me for my age yet. There were a lot of talented egos on the platinum team and I was slipping. She couldn’t afford to play favorites. Besides, she was right. I’d never been to prison for an Experience, but it wasn’t that far from my style.

I once dated a guy for fourteen months on an Experience. It was early in my career and I didn’t have the budget access I have now. I was never going to afford a permanent companion for him. Whimsical romances are one those pricy budget line items that sounds helpful. They rarely are and you can almost always find a better use for the money. Plus long term hires can also take over an Experience if they’re your primary delivery method. It’s not uncommon for them to push for a bigger payday, no matter what their contract says.

But those issues are negated by doing it yourself and, in fact, it was markedly easier to run an Experience from inside of it.

I was able to get him signed on to a decade-long re-up after his initial contract ended. It would have been a much more impressive feat if he hadn’t been forced to break his contract after he was found guilty of some complicated brand of financial crime. I didn’t bother getting too hung up on the details, because he kept paying w. which meant the Experience was still running. The only problem was that it wasn’t really his money anymore and a government accountant cancelled the service. In a moment of desperation, to save the contract, I very nearly blew my cover clumsily hinting that he needed to find a way to keep that particular expense to keep me around.

Still, the bonus I got that year paid off my student loans with room to spare, which mattered significantly less than joining the Platinum Club. That’s where the real work of w. happened.

WhimsyBox was a good enough name at first. Nobody quite knew how to describe what they expected to be in the box, but people were curious enough to find out what we meant. The market took a little while to catch up, but eventually a dam broke and everyone thought they had a novel twist on the concept.

FunBox started off strong trying to cross a few audiences with a family-friendly nice option and an aggressively ‘naughty’ option before a sorting error resulted in exactly what everyone expected to eventually happen. WeirdBox couldn’t manage people’s expectations. What’s so frustrating is that there’s not even an interesting story there. Apparently some boring companies have enough money to take a long time to outright fail. At first, ElegenceBox was way too expensive and then way too cheap.

There were even a couple of engineers trying to get funding for their proposed boxes that would be bigger on the inside than the outside. They were acquired by some weapons research firm and presumably designed some really cool ways for people to kill each other. There are enough boxes to fill whole history books, but I recommend Boxing With Giants. It’s a great docuseries about the boom which followed a bunch of the most interesting players in the indie box scene.

The entire industry held its breath every time an interesting new player entered the market, wondering if this was the one that burst the bubble. WonderBox, by the way, was tied up in lawsuits before their first shipment. Three different companies claimed the rights to the name and we never even got to see if WonderBox could live up to its name.

Every time Dr. Werner mentioned WonderBox, I would deadpan ask her if she wondered what they would have put in it. She hated the joke. Not just because it was bad but because she did wonder what could have been with WonderBox — and all the other companies that failed along the way to replicating WhimsyBox’s success. It would have been normal for her to begrudge her competitors, but she mostly just wanted to know what they could have been.

Dr. Werner understood something that a lot of the market didn’t. It wasn’t about selling a box of trinkets. It was about selling an experience. “They were all busy trying to be WhimsyBox. Meanwhile I was getting out of that game having no idea what that meant.” Her stories from that time all had this manic sort of urgency to them, as if she was racing to make the world match her thoughts.

She always made it sound obvious in the retelling, as if she had simply stumbled into doing it first. Sure, others had played around with delivery mechanisms for their ‘boxes’, but the metaphor remained intact. People paid for stuff that was delivered to their homes, offices, or wherever was most appropriate. Dr. Werner got rid of the stuff altogether and boxes became Experiences.

There are very few problems that cannot be solved by throwing a sufficient number of theatre kids at. The problem, like with any good live production, was selling tickets.

It is surprisingly easy to get people hooked on having a slightly unusual life. Learn a few details about their proclivities, what makes them tick and what makes them cringe. Most of which can be found on their public feeds. Or with an innocent looking friend request. If that doesn’t work, we can always turn to more illicit research methods. That would sound vaguely nefarious as ad copy, so we emphasize the strangeness itself rather than how we make it so.

Maybe we’ll push déjà vu at you and you end up seeing the same strange cat through different windows on opposite ends of town. Or you might start receiving consistently wrong numbers who leave ‘interesting’ voicemails. Or maybe you start to see a pattern to the billboards on your route to work.

We really do tailor the Experience to the person. Some of our competitors have low cost tiers where they made a random selection from a generic list and ‘send’ it to you. I’ve never understood why you’d pay money for junk mail but it ain’t our market, so I don’t have reason to complain. For a couple of years, poking fun at our competitors was good for a clever-enough advertising campaign. Back when we were the plucky underdogs. These days our marketing team spends more energy on subtle font changes than anything else. They have very strong opinions, so surely they must know what they’re talking about.

That sarcasm is probably unfair. After all, right now they’re in the middle of a truly bonkers campaign involving advertising with the inside of citrus fruit. They found a botanist who was able genetically alter seeds such that simple shapes can be found in the fruit’s flesh. Not all of them. In fact, the numbers were worse than one in every hundred thousand and there was no cost effective way of actually checking the inside of the fruit itself. The advertising team actually spun that as a benefit: even if people knew about the campaign, the odds of it happening to them were so low so it remains a noteworthy experience when it does.

Viral marketing is not all that different than the lines we have to walk when manufacturing whimsy. Goldilocks in a house where all the rooms and their contents keep changing all around you. ‘Just right’ doesn’t stay that way for long. Even the best parts of an Experience eventually become routine and have to be revised, if not thrown out. That’s even more the case with the platinum club.

We planned to make a candidate dream their election results in the week before an election. Management stepped in after the dream had happened. The entire team had to be repurposed on the fly to save the investment that had already been made. The company hates throwing away money, but I appreciated their hesitance: Phase three was technically electoral fraud. Cold feet is entirely understandable.

Very few members of the executive team are former operators. Anastasia being one of the exceptions. The traits that operators need to be good at bringing whimsy into people’s lives are not ideal for worrying about the company as a whole, because crafting Experiences always involve tunnel vision and strong emotions. Anastasia had been right that it was a well rehearsed line, but I really did love my clients. That doesn’t work for everyone. Marcus, for example, got inside his clients’ heads by fixating on their flaws and building Experiences around those. I suppose a prisoner Experience was inevitable given his disposition. Everyone finds their own way at w.

We aren’t selling whimsy. We never have. Not really. Even back in the early WhimsyBox days when there was actually a box. It wasn’t standardized, but the whole thing had a routine to it. You always knew what you were paying for. When the experience was good, it was easy enough to get people to tell their friends about. The word-of-mouth referrals were through the roof in those early years, but retention was terrible.

People who had been referred had too high expectations and their first boxes couldn’t live up to the story that they had been told. Worse still, some folks started to see their WhimsyBox as a chore that piled up. Imagine planning to change someone’s life, if only for a short time, with an entire personalized box of happenings that never happened because nobody took the time to open it. Work is work, but even the best operators struggled under those conditions.

Dr. Werner managed to steer the company through that period, but at the cost of it remaining hers. She threw herself into making the product of WhimsyBox work and delegated everything else to people who knew what they were doing. Instead of waiting for the bubble to burst, Dr. Werner burst it herself. The industry collapsed when Experiences debuted and and WhimsyBox was ready to pick up the pieces. Because everyone else had done their jobs, what could have simply been a new entertainment product on the market instead became a massive acquisition of anyone in the box industry with any talent and, more importantly, their distribution pipelines.

That last was a point that Dr. Werner emphasized whenever she talked about the company that WhimsyBox became. By leaving the company in the hands of people who knew how to run a company, she had access to more resources than had been possible before. Each Experience was an opportunity to let her imagination run wild.

It can be hard to appreciate Experiences out of context, because they’re so closely designed for each particular client. What works for one person might be a tired cliche for another. If you’re unfamiliar with tech limitations, we might lean on Experiences that rely on hacking. Hopeless romantics are straightforward. Personalized climate Experiences might not be useful for those who don’t pay attention to the weather.

There’s no way to get around the problem either. Not for us, anyway. What sets w. apart from other companies is anonymity of it all. There are no hidden sigils or pass phrases for clients to recognize. Our actors have strict orders to maintain character. We don’t even offer a vague yearly summary that you can look at to feel like you’re getting their money’s worth. People will inevitably make guesses, maybe even accurate ones — but they won’t know and that makes all the difference.

Plus it means we can reuse content for long-term clients. Callback Experiences save a bit of work down the line but they aren’t simply cut-and-paste jobs. We have to decide which elements of a past experience are ideal to recreate and which can be distorted. We have to let enough time pass that the reoccurrence feels strange but not so much time that the original memories have faded. That gets easier the more time you spend with a client. You learn the kinds of details that they tend to hold onto and the patterns of their thoughts. Getting in their heads is necessary to make their lives more whimsical. I once had the better part of an Experience fall apart because the client was blue-green colorblind and I hadn’t even known there were different ways of being colorblind.

Those kinds of mistakes were far enough back that I rarely thought about them anymore. I had made so many more interesting mistakes since then, but it was a good reminder to be mindful of gaps. No amount of talent can make up for insufficient research. Although that might just be something people with insufficient talent say to get themselves through the day.

At any given point, my time at w. involved supervising a handful of medium- and long-term Experiences. It’s rare to be running anything that requires daily updates. Occasionally a prospective client will come to w., either for themselves or as a gift, and expect there to be a package that includes ‘everything’. They want every day to be an adventure. We almost always turned those folks away, because they’d inevitably be unhappy with us in the long run. Sure, we could throw a couple of interesting Experiences at them early on and maybe rope them into a big contract, but those kinds of contracts are never worth the hassle. No operator — no team of operators even — can make someone’s entire life whimsical.

What we offer is more subtle. The behind the scene methods might not always be, but we’re at our most successful when w. leaves a light touch on people’s lives. Clients can’t always place everything that has changed and that’s an advantage to how we do things, even if it makes life hard for marketing and retention teams. The trickiest part to running your first few long-term contracts is knowing when not to act. If your Experience has too much happening too frequently, people don’t have room to fill in the details and make connections of their own. You want to make the client an active participant in the Experience instead of just a passive observer.

For some clients, w. opens a door to the possibility that life is stranger than they had thought. They start finding connections between things that are seemingly unconnected, including details that have nothing to do with an operator’s prepared Experiences. Those clients can be hard to convert to long-term contracts, because they start to think the world itself is the Experience rather than anything w. has done. To their credit, management isn’t particularly bothered when that happens. Better for those folks to self-select out rather than risk the bad press that comes from them pulling at the seams of what we do.

Besides, most former clients come back on their own. Some can’t even point to anything specific that they missed since they cancelled their subscription. It just dawns on them, one day, that something is gone. Ana once had a client who, six months after his last Experience and without any prodding from us, signed a two-year contract. In his intake interview, he talked about how normal shopping had become and he kept asking how we pulled it off. ‘It’ being how the one thing at the top of his shopping list was always out of stock. He obviously felt awkward trying to explain why he missed that Experience and insisted that he knew we wouldn’t simply recreate it anyway, but he wanted “something like that”.

Ana obviously didn’t tell her bosses that she’d done nothing at the sort. We’d been planning to make his pharmacist shorter, week by week, but that was still in the design phase when he first cancelled his subscription. All the cleverness in the world can’t beat being lucky in the right moment.

Ana hated when I talked about w. like that. She preferred to think of us all as capable professionals who occasionally made mistakes. Accordingly, she wasn’t fond of my view that we were being grossly overpaid to conduct a bunch of half-cocked undergraduate psychology experiments. Don’t get me wrong, I love the work. I’m just skeptical that it’s anything more than extremely well-funded amateur theatre. In Anastasia’s defense, our yearly earnings reports speak for themselves. In mine, w. does have a fair number of scriptwriters and actors on staff.

She and I were a thing for a minute, but found we preferred our relationship when were not, so we found a way to make that work. She became my boss and we found a way to make that work too. When that had happened Dr. Werner had already long stepped away from w. and was enjoying retirement, but she was at the celebratory dinner nonetheless.

“You know, I never did understand what she saw in you,” Dr. Werner said. We were at a not-quite-wallflower position at the end of the table.

“Any port in a storm, I suppose. People will do get anything to get away from their family,” I said.

“We’re barely related,” she said in feigned protest.

“You, not an hour ago, called her the daughter you never had.”

“Oh sure, but I think I wrote that on a card for you at some point. It doesn’t mean anything,” she said. I laughed. That card was one of the few things I kept on my desk.

“You’re meaner than grandmothers are supposed to be.”

“For someone whose job it is to sweat the details about people, you’re astoundingly bad at the details about people. If you know that I never had kids, then you should know I can’t be a grandmother.”

While I was trying to come up with a clever reply, she moved on.

“Would you say I bring whimsy to your life?” She looked down the table towards Ana.

“No, I would say that I bring whimsy to my own life and sometimes you just happen to be there.”

It may not have been Oscar Wilde but there was usually a game to conversations with Dr. Werner. She didn’t see the point in not playing when one could be. It didn’t always make sense, but it didn’t have to. The play was the thing. Following along always got her talking and she had more stories than there was time to tell them all. She rarely came to a story head on though. They usually started as casual asides on the way to what she felt were more interesting points.

Ana once described her great aunt as a labyrinth of answers to questions that nobody had asked. Dr. Werner had loved it, as was to be expected. She pulled the line out as a nonsensical retort whenever it suited her. She was an earnest mad scientist and asked questions that were almost childlike in their starting place, before marshaling all her considerable talents and resources in service of answering them. She was also easily bored of other people and never ashamed of showing it.

She wasn’t perfect, but she made such glorious messes. If it sounds like I loved this woman that’s because I did. How could I not?

“Dying wishes seem like an unfair thing to do to someone you care about,” Dr. Werner said from the bed where she would spend these last days. “But it’ll be a lot harder to traumatize you when I’m gone.”

“You’ll find a way, I’m sure.” I said, not knowing how true that would be.

“I’m feeling pretentious,” she said, quietly enough that I got up and moved to the chair next to her bed.

“You could have just said moody.”

I had heard the seriousness in her voice, but wasn’t ready to talk myself. We had been circling around saying goodbye for a while now, filling the spaces between words with anything else that struck her mind fancy and she was easy to distract. “Shouldn’t we be playing Go or something like that?”

“That would probably make all this easier for future biographers. Visually interesting, if nothing else. You’re quite boring, did you know that?”

“You’re the one getting high and waxing poetic about your legacy. Why is it always the dullest people who worry about their legacies?”

“It’s not for my sake. I’m not sure if you knew this, but I’m kind of a big deal. There are buildings named after me. Some nice ones too. I’m more worried about making sure they get someone attractive to play me in the series based on my life than I am about my legacy.” For some reason she reached for an invisible gun, making a joke that I didn’t understand. Maybe she didn’t either. “I just hoping that I’m interesting enough in our conversations that they’ll include you in the series at all.”

“I have even less interest in my own legacy than I do yours.”

“True as that may be, something has to be done about the company.” It was a long-standing topic of conversation between us. As far as corporations went, w. was not an outright bad one. Obviously a considerable amount of criminal activity when into providing Experiences, but we never broke any important laws and we certainly never deliberately interfered with anyone who wasn’t a client. At most, people who happened to live around the edges of our Experiences might incidentally find their lives a bit more whimsical.

Nobody would mistake w. for a charity, but Dr. Werner cast a long shadow and the company wasn’t going to change into an evil empire overnight.

Still, she worried.

“You’re the one who put it in the hands of the professionals. Whether you like it or not, w. is all your fault.“

“That’s a necessary part of a good dying wish. It has to be something impossible that I couldn’t be bothered to fix in my lifetime,” she tried to maintain eye contact, “but I want to guilt you into taking care of.”

“Ana’s actually in a position to do something about it, you know. Unlike dotty old founders and operators who hang out with them, I’m pretty sure senior vice presidents actually do something.”

“What makes you think you’re my first choice? Or my only choice, for that matter?” She said and her exuberance disappeared when she closed her eyes. Just being her was too tiring keep up for long, but that’s all she wanted to be. It meant that all her conversational bursts of energy were marked by long interludes.

When she opened her eyes, she took a moment to make sure I was paying attention and spoke without a hint of a joke. “When was the last time you had a client who wasn’t an asshole?” I started to shake my head in protest and nod in agreement at the same time, and she smiled. “You’re a hopeless romantic, but even you can’t help admit that w. is only going through the motions of having a soul.”

“w. isn’t a bunch of supervillains. You’ve got lofty expectations for the entertainment company you founded.” I said.

“No, I’d just prefer if you weren’t so boring.”

There were kinder conversations. Most of the time blurred together in tiredness and grief. She talked about her old Experiences. Her favorites were those that went disastrously wrong. The sleepless nights frantically improvising solutions on shoestring budgets. She had once tried to change the order of succession for one of those once upon a monarchies. It worked when a far-removed duke abdicated his claim, but then stumbled into a monarchist plot to overthrow a democratically selected algorithm. She kept running the Experience from inside the capital while the coup was ongoing, providing the client with impossible slices of normal amidst the chaos that their life had become. All her best stories ended something like that.

I was never far away and, in the last couple days, neither was Ana. Others came, some of whom Dr. Werner had energy and inclination to speak to. It felt strange that so many of the people who visited were strangers to me. I had expected to recognize more of them, given how many stories about her life she had shared. As a change of pace from being sad and tired, I spent some time being childishly jealous of everything that I wouldn’t get to know about her.

Included with her will was a handwritten letter for her lawyer to read allowed. He lacked her style, so I was skeptical that it would hit home. Ana assured me that it was still fittingly uncomfortable for the whole family. That may have had to do with the fact that they hadn’t really known her at all and expected at least something of the Werner fortune simply for having been relations through either blood or marriage.

Ana was the only one of them to receive anything. Together her and I got a meticulously organized media library, a few boxes of unlabeled stuff that was either mementos from Experiences or possibly trash, and an actual castle that she had been gifted decades prior. The castle we donated to the national government in what the press thought was a magnanimous gesture, but was solely a matter of self-interest. As generous as my w. salary was, I certainly couldn’t afford to maintain an actual castle and Ana had no interest in trying. The upkeep on those old buildings were unfathomably expensive. Even if Dr. Werner had left us any amount of money at all.

That she hadn’t was hardly a surprise. Instead, there were funds, scholarships, charities, projects, and institutes. There were countless exceptional individuals that she felt deserving. The week before she died she sold off all her shares in all the companies that she’d been involved with over the years, including w. save two, one share each for Ana and I.

Subtlety was not in her nature.

I took a leave of absence after her death. I pretended that I was off soul-searching, but mostly spent the time moping. I hadn’t made up my mind about how long I wanted to take off, but moodily — scratch that, pretentiously — missed the office after a couple days and went in after hours. Nobody was there, but the team had apparently prepared for the possibility that I would do exactly this.

When I arrived at the office, every display I walked by turned on and flashed a moody photo of me from the w. website and the subtitle “w.here is the w.heir?”. That was exactly the kind of thing the team knew would irritate me, as much for the attention as the unpronounceablity. It felt like a gentle reminder that, whenever I was ready, there was work to be done.

I went home, got some sleep, and was back at the office the next day. Despite it being neither whimsical nor even interesting, a crown was waiting for me and glued to the desk.

Instead of taking on any new projects, I threw myself into cleanup work.

When an operator runs into trouble mid-Experience, they’re supposed to consult with the cleanup team. The newer they are, the more likely they are to avoid making that call and instead try to fix things for themselves. That’s a bad instinct. Working a cleanup team into a live Experience is a skill that needs to be practiced. Otherwise, when you actually need help but have no plan, cleanup is just going to take over and that’ll hurt your reputation with management more than having learned how to ask for help.

It is natural to think of cleanup as fixing mistakes. An essential actor has disappeared, died, or quit. A constructed set wasn’t built to specifications or the specifications were wrong. A client missed the important lead-up to an expensive final act of an Experience, so the conclusion is on track to fall flat. That’s how most operators treat cleanup: as a way to get an Experience back on the right track. That’s often possible, but it is usually a lot easier to treat the available pieces as if it were the starting point of an Experience.

I’ve always appreciated the intellectual exercise of figuring out how to get the most out of limited resources that someone else had decided on, but you’d be surprised at how often one of those resources was a mime. Give me an out of work actor over a mime, every time. In a pinch, you can teach the actor a couple Slavic phrases, throw them in a trench coat, and you’ve got all the pieces needed to run an honourable schoolboy. Do the same to a mime and all you’ve got is a mime in a trench coat.

A real cleanup operator would just scrap the mime and focus on the useful budget items, but I was approached cleanup from another angle. I wanted to leave the lightest touch possible on the original Experience. That wasn’t just a matter of keeping them from going over budget. It meant finding and matching the operator’s design philosophy and voice. If the operator was painting whimsy into a client’s life, I tried to match their brushstrokes so that the client never noticed a change. Cleanup as forgery.

Mimes or not, it was the closest to honest work I’d done in a long time.

The most frustrating part about going back to work after Dr. Werner’s death was that she had been right. w. wasn’t terrible, but the platinum team in particular was an awful lot of effort to bring a bit more charm to people already leading charmed lives. If they put their mind to it, any given staff meeting could probably plan the overthrow of an authoritarian regime. The money was a good incentive, I’ll grant, but that wasn’t why people stayed on the platinum team.

It is the nature of whimsy work that it isn’t public. w. doesn’t take credit and neither do individual operators. There are always going to be leaks and disgruntled former employees, but the company has done an incredibly good job at shrouding platinum Experiences in mystery. Nobody really knows what we’ve done, but everybody knows that we did it well. The w. name could open more lucrative doors, for any who were so inclined to give up the work. Yet more people leave the platinum team from burnout than by choice.

It is about the challenge and getting paid is the reward. Management is more than happy to cultivate that attitude in us, because there are people willing to pay gross sums to feel more interesting. As long as you can do it without reminding them that they’d paid for it. Solving that is a puzzle that changes while you’re looking at it and then changes further still when you try to solve it.

Of course, not every w. client is an interesting puzzle. There are a fair number of people who have no desire to be interesting, they just want to have interesting things happen to them. It sounds like a value judgment when I put it that way, but it’s no different than people who watch streams instead of playing a game for themselves. Some things are not worth the effort of doing yourself, but are worth sitting through ads to watch someone else do. On top of that, naturally occurring whimsy is hard to find and harder still if you’re looking for it.

There are, however, people with both the will and the wealth to lead lives that make it difficult to craft Experiences. Even then, most of those are only briefly interesting for operators. Once the logistics have been solved once, lots of different kinds of Experiences can be delivered down that pipeline. Regular haunts rarely change. A paid off staffer can be paid again. A device that has been hacked, stays hacked. Of course, you still have to monitor long term clients in a bunch of different ways to make sure that their lives haven’t veered off in ways that are incompatible with planned Experiences. Everybody drifts from the plan, so even the best operators can juggle only so many clients at once.

That juggling was the vast majority of the job though, marked by occasional bursts of creativity and stress. It might be interesting but not all interesting things are whimsical. On top of that, w. employees aren’t allowed to have Experiences. That is mostly just management protecting themselves from weird edge cases though, because operators make for poor clients. It’s hard to keep your childlike sense of wonder when your job involves manufacturing it.

“So, it turns out that the ‘w’ stands for ‘vvampire’?” Ana said. She made her fingers into fangs.

“That joke doesn’t even make sense when you say it out loud,” I replied, “and I’m not being dramatic.”

“You just got through telling your boss that your job is sucking the whimsy out of you and selling it to the highest bidder,” she said, still laughing to herself. “You’re not just dramatic. My aunt infected you with her madness and, decades from now, you’re going to pass it on to some hapless operator. It’s the circle of life for people who can’t help but scratch at an itch. Let it go.”

“You make it sound like you don’t hate the place too.” I said it quicker than I’d meant and she knew it.

“I don’t hate the place.” She stopped and sighed. “That’s the part you don’t get. I complain about my job because sometimes my boss can be an asshole and sometimes I have to do things I don’t like. That’s called having a job. I don’t hate w. any more than I hate you for all the things you do to irritate me.

“You can tilt at windmills all you want. You can even do it when I’m trying to work. But you’re complaining that an entertainment company isn’t living up to a name that it hasn’t had in years. At some point you have to either quit or take over.”

I looked over at her from across the office and tried to gauge her mood.

“Is that something you’d help me with?”

She ignored it for the joke that it wasn’t. Ana hadn’t become my boss because she was Dr. Werner’s great niece. If anything, that had held her back. But she pulled off a series of Experiences for some bio-tech CEO during a hostile takeover of his company. The whole thing really came together when the CEO realized that all of the revisions that he had made to a couple-hundred page contract were written in iambic pentameter. When he couldn’t get w. to admit that it had been part of an Experience, he cancelled his contract on the grounds that he was naturally whimsical and didn’t need to waste money on something he could do himself. He even did an interview saying that w. was a shadow of its former self and that he’d come for us before long.

Even the best operators can become victims of their own success if they lose focus, but Ana didn’t blink. Instead she kept the Experience running and helped fend off the takeover attempt, but, when all was said and done, w. held enough shares in Boletus Industries to start a takeover of its own. It wasn’t, strictly speaking, whimsical for anyone when w. announced the acquisition with a Shakespearean sonnet, but you don’t get a lot of opportunities to take a curtain call in this business.

Mushrooms were their big thing, researching ways to use mycelial networks to remove traumatic events from people’s memories. It looked a lot like standard psychedelic therapy wrapped around the latest tech buzzwords, but apparently they held some impressive patents — all of which w. became the proud owner of. The former CEO even eventually tried to renew his contract when he realized just how lacking in whimsy his life was, but he was never interesting enough for the platinum team to get involved.

It was hard not to promote her after that.

“You’ve become one of those operators who keeps adding more detailed elements to an Experience that never reaches a payoff,” Ana said with more seriousness than she had brought up in front of the team. Even with just the two of us in her office and despite the fact that she was still working, it had the feeling of an intervention. We were both quiet. Her, it seemed, because she had said what she wanted to say and had gotten back to work. Me, because I didn’t know what to say back and was pretending to work.

I tried to break the tension by sending her a screenshot of the top results of a search for “how to stage an intervention”, but before it had even arrived in her feed she had already sent me a screenshot. It was a search of her own: “how to fire your best friend”. I stared at the results long enough to see that they promised compassionate step-by-step guides. Ana had stopped working and was looking at me from behind her desk.

“I’m almost positive this isn’t one of the steps,” I said, looking particularly undignified from my lounged position on her office couch. It was late enough for a shouting match that nobody would be around to hear, if I’d been so inclined. Now I wondered whether she had planned it that way.

Instead of pouting, I tapped at my display and sent her same screenshot back, having replaced ‘best’ with ‘only’ in bright red. She glanced at it and let her severe expression drop just a little bit.

“Not everything has to be a crusade,” she said.

Not enough things are, but instead of saying that, I quietly asked if she was actually firing me.

“Tonight?” She shook her head. “The press would have a field day with it.”

She sent a few tabloid clippings to my feed. They were entirely devoid of facts. Filled with all manner of speculation about Ana and I. Actual photos of us going about our lives. Most were fairly tame, but one included an outright lie of an anonymous quote. It was the definition of a salacious.

“That’s what is bothering you? That people think you’re getting laid?”

“The stories aren’t just about me.” She paused for a moment to send me an entire folder filled with clippings. “If you actually paid attention to the news instead of whatever happened to cross your feed, you’d recognize that you show up as often as I do whenever w. makes headlines. You’ve been standing in my aunt’s shadow, but you aren’t some nobody, Ismay. and you haven’t been one since long before she died.”

As she spoke, I scrolled through my display and saw the truth of what she said. Some of it went back years. Lots of it was no more accurate than gossip ever was, but there were enough details that were close enough to true.

“You spend so much time talking about how impressive other people’s Experiences are. Did you think that nobody talked about yours?”

I looked dumbfounded. I had just come across a story about how I’d once caused an earthquake to bring a bit of adventure to some mining baron. Obviously, I hadn’t made an earthquake happen, only capitalized on one as it happened, but it was surprising to see my name attached to it at all.

“I didn’t do this.” I gestured vaguely with my display. “I didn’t ask for anyone to write this.”

“In any given year, you’re working with an army of employees and contracts you oversee budgets that rival some nations. When are you going to realize that you’re kind of a big deal.” I opened my mouth to object, but she cut me off. “No, just listen. This isn’t a pep talk, It’s a warning.

“You’re one of three people to spend more than a decade crafting platinum. That’s given you incredible access to power and influence, and your work is good enough that people talk. Your social feeds are carefully curated to be clever without ever revealing anything about yourself. Most of your clips are about other people. Until recently, the only people you seemed to spend any time with were the madcap founder of w. and her exceptionally talented great niece.” She flashed one of her most obnoxious grins, not realizing how much like her aunt she looked. “You couldn’t have run a better mysterious stranger if you tried, and the board of directors thinks you’re up to something.”

w. doesn’t let operators into people’s tragedies without special dispensation. It’s not that grief and whimsy are entirely incompatible. The company just doesn’t see those kinds of Experiences as worth the risk. Nobody likes to feel managed when they’re grieving. It’s better to let people go through their own process. It’s the same reason management won’t let anyone mess with anything that goes into space. All publicity was good publicity right up until something blows up. Admittedly, having w. associated with a lunar crash was higher stakes, but, evil empire or not, they weren’t interested in traumatizing people.

Still, accidents happened.

My first big one happened early in my career, long before the board of directors would start worrying that I was up to something. I spent the better part of a weekend with company lawyers after a client attacked an actor during an experience. Dr. Werner had taken it as a chance to lecture me.

“From the inside, an Experience shouldn’t feel like much of anything,” Dr. Werner said.

“You know they’d fire me if I said anything like that.” I sounded nervous. I “They still might.”

“Quit with the self-pity. You don’t actually feel guilty that someone was hurt.” She is matter of fact, as if she is bored of having to tell me things I should already know. “You’re just embarrassed that the client saw through your whimsy work.”

The Experience had involved a repeating number play, where the client saw the same number things appear in different parts of their life. Celebrity lookalikes. Classic cars. Parrots on a morning commute. It doesn’t really matter what, as long as there are three of them. Or whatever number you’ve decided on.

It’s a simple enough concept, but tricky to pull off effectively. You can’t be certain of when the client has started counting, so it is easy for an operator to overshoot. Especially when you want them to plausibly believe that it isn’t the company. It’s not enough to send the same message to their feed three times or anything as banal as that.

If you can pull it off properly, though, you’ve bought yourself weeks, if not months, of whimsy, because they’ll start finding that number on its own and in unexpected places. Plus, conscripting the world into an Experience just makes sense from a budgeting perspective.

If you can pull it off.

“So, straight into the hard truths conversation then?”

The problem with letting a repeating number play is how easy it is for serendipity to turn into conspiracy, left unchecked. Noticing a recurring pattern to perfectly harmless surface details of your life can be mildly delightful, but only if you don’t start searching for them consciously. That way madness lies.

“What hard truths? That you treated a client like a game and now you’re acting surprised that you lost.” She scoffed. “You’re look for me to tell you that you didn’t do anything wrong.”

Two long minutes passed before I started to form an objection despite obviously having not decided what to say. She mercifully cut me off.

“You did.” A beat. “Running an Experience isn’t something you can do casually. It’s like being in love. You can’t be halfway inside someone’s head. Casual can do you for a spell, but it’s hard to dress it up as the genuine article.

“Your Experiences are intricately crafted, but there’s too much of your ego in there. Whimsy isn’t enough, you’ve got an insufferable need to be clever too.”

It was a fair point.

I had stopped keeping a close eye on the client, because I was focused on the next stage of the Experience. A season finale, of sorts, in which a bunch of pieces came together so that two completely separate client Experiences would intersect with each other.

Put more bluntly, I wanted them to start dating so I could start sharing resources between them. It would give me a ton of room in my operating budget, which I could then go on to use to make their Experiences even more intricately crafted. Sure, that had the potential for benefiting the client, but that was incidental to how it would make me look to management.

Her point was that I was treating my job like a job, which was easy for her to say from the inside of her personal greenhouse. Still, it was her way to be the wrong person to make a perfectly good point. The operator-client relationship was a weird one. They have no idea who we are and, if we’re any good, they wonder whether we even exist. We live inside of their lives. It’s unfair not to take that seriously.

In the end, management decided against a formal reprimand, but put me under stricter supervision for a while. It was a compromise that Dr. Werner hated. “You’re not nearly a good enough operator to justify special treatment.” That was maybe an accurate reflection of my skills at the time, but it was also hardly what I needed to hear. Her mentorship style was a bit like being mauled by a bear. If you survived, hopefully the story would be worth the injuries.

Which again raised the complicated question of what, precisely, she was up to now.

Maybe Ana was right: It’s possible Dr. Werner was just messing with me. She had spent a lifetime manipulating people and calling it whimsy then left the business for more interesting problems. The kind of operator that she wanted me to be wasn’t the kind of operator that got promoted at w. Not anymore. It was a wildly successful multi billion dollar company that was constantly setting the standard for Experiences. Good wasn’t enough. When I eventually started crafting platinum, it wasn’t because I had merely been good.

Even still, that didn’t make her wrong. At best, w. kind of sucked. But Ana was right too: complaining that w. wasn’t WhimsyBox was absolute childishness. Treating Experiences as some sort of sacred responsibility had been how I squared that particular circle for years, and I had even managed to do something noble from time to time. Management didn’t allow freelancing, but they were fine if an Experience genuinely made someone’s life better. As long as the client didn’t complain.

The reason why w. has stuck around for so long in the entertainment industry is that everyone crafting Experiences so busy trying to be it without realizing that means, at best, they’re always a step behind. w. is already pretty good at being w, so a vague hope of ‘doing better’ isn’t enough.

There are some companies trying to distinguish themselves. Douglas Quail has spent a bunch of other people’s money into trying to make The Agency profitable. He originally tried to pitch it as ‘w. with spies’. Instead of whimsy, the client gets to feel like a secret agent. It’s a cool idea, but more like a game than an Experience — and that’s an altogether different audience and market.

Even if The Agency somehow managed to be some sort of passive spy Experience, w. is bigger than any of these startups have a hope of knocking down. An Experience is the product of a massive supply chain of whimsy work. Actors, hackers, researchers, operators, carpenters, lawyers, survellience. There are a staggering number of people involved in the background of any given Experience. What happens to the client is just the end product. The entertainment aspects of w. is dwarfed by its organizational capacity.

A couple years ago, I was doing some long term planning for an Experience and, given the amount of corn I would need, it turned out to be cheaper to just buy a farm. Not only that, but the accounting department decided that it was worth holding onto the farm, on the off-chance that some future operator could make use of it. Until then, w. would run it as a corn farm. Any newcomer into the Experience industry is at a massive disadvantage when going up against a company that like can flex like that.

That is, if you try to go up against them head-on.

Long-term Experiences are difficult because we’ve all got a limit on how whimsical life can be. It’s not the same for everyone, but everyone gets there all the same. Eventually you’ve had enough whimsy and need a reset. Time does wonders, but nobody wants to pay w. rates to wait six months between Experiences. A reset is anything that gives you some distance from your whimsy so that it’s all a little bit blurrier. You second guess your memories and they become a little bit less real. The strangeness becomes less strange.

There’s a tired joke between operators about being in the office as ‘a day in the whimsy mines’, but the job isn’t about unearthing the whimsy to give to clients. If anything, operators are navigators of unwieldy ships on an irregular ocean, ebbing forth and back. Whimsy and resets changing the landscape of a client’s life.

Sometimes a reset happens without us, because we don’t have control over clients’ lives. Maybe they get into a fight with their best friend or maybe they lose their mentor slash best friend slash mean old lady.

Whatever it is, the mind wraps a bubble around memories that don’t quite fit with the world that we know. It’s a survival instinct from an evolutionary stage where difference meant danger and any major shock out of our expectations would have been considered a threat. Whenever that happens, tries to hold onto all the recent strange memories, just in case we’re under some sort of sustained attack and they need to be assessed or understood. Whimsical flourishes become potential threats and in doing so lose their charm.

That, at least, is the theory. The science here is shaky at best. Given how much money is involved, you’d be surprised at how little research has been done on the cognitive science of whimsy. There are some tech startups led by folks who gesticulate wildly while talking vaguely about the algorithm bans are killing the Experience industry, but most public-facing research focuses on the economic and organizational aspects of the business. Even w. is mostly just a battle between artists and advertisers, with a bunch of people own the middle trying to make a living while the rest of us squabble about best practices.

The real problem with either knowing or simply believing that someone is running an Experience on you is decision paralysis. Is this what they wanted me to do? Will it ruin the Experience if I do that instead? The hardest whimsy work involves clients who insist on overthinking everything, because eventually it requires getting out of one’s way and letting whimsy happen. Even the best operator will have a hard time with a client who insists on overthinking everything. ‘Hamlets’ as Dr. Werner liked to call them.

I recognize that I’m pretty deeply in Hamlet territory these days, but that’s because my life has taken on the mood of a conspiracy. It doesn’t feel particularly whimsical, but there is a distinct design to it all these days. I can see that Dr. Werner was nudging different parts of my life towards making w. more than just a shadow of its former self. Into something that matter.

The problem is that I don’t care about her legacy.

w. is a small idea wrapped in a big box. You want someone else to make your life more interesting for you. That’s it. That’s why you come to us. There are all kinds of marketing ways to say that differently, but it comes down to a desire to be entertained instead of being entertaining. The fact that I make believe that this is a calling doesn’t mean that’s what it is.

If w. is entertainment then it’s undeniably a lot of work for an audience of one. Incidental whimsy happens for those close to long-term clients, but each Experience is only ever alive for one person. Personalizing it to the client is what makes w. work. We get to know you and curate the margins of your life. w. has tried to shared Experiences, but they fall apart when the clients start talking about them. Whimsy doesn’t hold up to external verification.

All of which means that an Experience is less efficient entertainment than the blockbuster film, because w. is built on producing natural whimsy through artificial means. Operators have to know their clients well enough to know what doesn’t work, what does, and, most importantly, how to deliver it. Intimacy is hard to achieve and harder still to maintain, hence the high cost.

It would be easier to have a client explain what they find whimsical and then for operators who deliver exactly that, but then it wouldn’t be very whimsical.

I considered the possibility of asking everyone to do their intake interviews on a memory suppression cocktail, but that proved to be pretty messy legal process. Ana got word that I was looking into it and told me not to bother putting together a pitch. There was no way w. was going to start drugging clients just to make life easier for operators.

That was when I realized that w. is going about this all wrong. If the problem is that people’s lives are short on naturally occurring whimsy, Experiences make sense as a solution. The world is wrong and w. fixes it, so to speak.

But what if the problem is us?

It’s not called a childlike sense of wonder because children are better at whimsy than adults, but rather because adults are so bad it. There’s a difference. The curiosity necessary to appreciate whimsy is significantly harder when you have to act your age. Things that have to be done. Schedules require keeping.

Yet some people manage to hold onto it. I don’t mean those who have a higher tolerance for whimsy and make for better clients. I’m more interested in the people who never become our clients. It simply never crosses their mind that they might need more whimsy in their lives, because they have precisely enough. Never hitting their whimsy limit but also staying far away from empty.

I’m not talking about starting a school for whimsical youngsters. That seems like more trouble than it would be worth. Still, a very small percentage of people manage to hold onto whimsy throughout their lives. Why aren’t we studying them?

Admittedly, that’s a complicated problem to even start. Is whimsy a matter of socialization? Education? Overdeveloped frontal lobes? Whimsy particles in the blood stream? Being bitten by a radioactive manic pixie dream girl? We know so little about whimsy that we don’t even know how to identify it, let alone the matter of measurements that can’t be taken anyway. For most people, diagnostic tools and hospitals are so contrary to whimsy that we can readily use them as resets when clients hit their limit.

All that means that we have very little hard data on whimsy, but surely it’s something and I don’t just claim that because an entire life dedicated to whimsy would be incredibly hollow if it were an entirely absurd concept.

We might not be able to clearly pin down whimsy if asked, but we can identify the experience in ourselves. Call it a particular kind of entertainment. Whatever. I’m not committed to the poetry of this. The point is that there’s a feeling that we almost universally agree is good, even if explaining the feeling erodes the experience. That feeling should be put into a pill or patch or sandwich spread.

We could start there, of course. Maybe mess around with chemistry and see if we can get close to whimsy and work from there. It’ll involve complicated testing and trials. There will be debates about what counts as whimsical and what does not.

I’m not picky how we get there, but I am pretty committed to rethinking the entire whimsy industry.

This is not some unlikely career pivot where I flip from whimsy worker to neuroscientist. I altogether lack training on the whole science thing. I do, however, have a background in whimsy project management and I have it on good authority that I’m kind of a big deal in the industry. The board is apparently concerned enough about me that they’re ‘evaluating their options’ which sounds ominous enough. Ana thinks I should make clear that I’m a team player. I considered it, but decided to pursue plans of my own.

Not only am I quitting, but I’ve also lined up enough investors to take a significant portion of the administrative staff and half the platinum team — and each of them is bringing a handful of operators. As it turns out, not all of my obscenely wealthy clients are assholes. Or, at least, some of them are curious enough to see what a few of the most talented whimsy workers in the industry can get up to without the baggage of w.

Rather than waiting for her competitors to come up with a WhimsyBox killer, Dr. Werner did it herself and created the Experience industry as we know it. She had nothing more than a vague plan, but decided it was worth risking her entire company on it. w. wasn’t mine to risk, but as long as I was willing to give up the work, I wasn’t actually obligated to prop up their concept of whimsy.

When the dust settles, it’ll be a team of project management experts who have a healthy appreciation for the logistical and psychological complexities of whimsy. Most of us are on strict non-compete contracts for at least the next year, but that’s not much of an issue. The plan isn’t to have a product ready for launch when we leave. In fact, after the accompanying exodus from w., we’re going dark for a full year. We’ll drop hints in the media about what’s is happening behind the scenes, but only to to make us look mysterious. There wouldn’t be any point in leaving if all we were going to do was craft Experiences in a slightly different way than w. It has to be something else. Chemistry would cut out the need for operators at all and give people more control over how they felt. It’s hard to argue with that.

We haven’t settle on a name yet. ‘Whimsy Incorporated’ is on the paperwork because the investors needed something. I’m actually partial to the simplicity of it, but I was also partial to crafting Experiences. The whole point of this is to find a new, better way to deliver whimsy than all the inefficient ways I’m already good at. ‘Whimsy Incorporated’ might not be that.

Whatever it is, I refuse to let us become the thing we hate. We’ll use whole words and nobody’s italicizing anything.

Scott Jones’ Shout Kill Revel Repeat is a haunting. By that, I do not simply mean that it sticks with you, but rather that it is drawn out of an almost forgotten yet obviously traumatic history. That of Jones, most certainly, but also ours as a collective. We tend to think of ghosts as singular entities, as individuals who cannot let go, but Jones’ work makes me wonder if an entire species can haunt us.

We certainly haunt him.

There’s some manic about his short stories. There always has been, but it feels particularly acute here, as if the stories themselves are in a rush to be made complete in their telling. The writing here — and by that I mean both the stories, but also their synthesis as a collection — is stronger than most Lovecraft-imitators, because Jones is not trying to imitate anything. This is his unique voice, crafted by travelling with and through those who came before, and he shouts it from on high the mountaintop.

I laugh a lot while reading Jones. Not that there is much in the way of humour here, per se, but still I laugh. I laugh because I don’t know what else to do with my breath while I read. I laugh because there is an intense desire to escape, but I can’t turn away from these stories. Their pull is too strong; Jones’ voice has matured into its own gravity. I laugh because at one point I started crying, having found him to have touched a raw nerve that I didn’t even know was exposed, and couldn’t come to terms with that feeling. I laugh at how little patience Jones has for subtle criticism: Aldo Tusk, the technology mogul who we get glimpses of throughout the collection, is written to be obvious — and yet it never feels a crude caricature.

Weird horror, at least for me, serves as a reminder of the vastness of all things, of the seconds that exist across space and the inches that stretch through time. It is a comfortable, if not comforting, smallness. Amor fati, in a way. H.P. Lovecraft’s stories highlight how ill-prepared we, as individual human beings and as a species, are equipped for grappling with the scope of existence beyond us. Cosmic horror, they say, but I have long found a peacefulness to it. I imagine it is because Lovecraft, for all his charms, feels archaic. A storyteller who I can’t help but judge as naive, who I can’t help but feel better than. Not as a storyteller — gods no — but as a person. As a man, Lovecraft had his flaws. As a human being, even more.

When I read Jones I am struck by the certainty that he knows something that I do not. Shout Kill Revel Repeat is an existential map for the 21st century and one that seems like it will continue to be relevant well into the 22nd — and scrawled across its pages are warnings aplenty: here be dragons (hic sunt Dagon?). It does not feel like naïveté, but rather an omen of something at the edges of what I should know but do not. An omen that I have blinded myself to, because accepting it, even acknowledging it, would push against the boundaries that keep me whole. I would rather be incomplete.

The things that Jones knows scare the shit out of me, because he does not just speak the language of cosmic knowledge, of the weird and existential horror that makes the genre. No, what is so frustrating is the insights he so clearly has on politics and religion, on psychology and technology, on gender and intersectionality, on history and map-/myth-making. He writes with the full scope of Western civilization (such as it is) behind his words and he can make those words do this?! This asshole gets it. I am still grappling with what I mean by a word as simple as it and Jones has already moved the next sentence, the next story, the next fucking saga of human existence.

The problem is that this is camouflage and, as Jones reminds us, “There’s camouflage, and then there’s camouflage, and it is all camouflage”. Sometimes I think he really is a shaman (ahem, forgive the antiquated parlance: sorcerer), whose words are The Word. It is not so much an alteration of consciousness, but rather an outright transformation. There’s no pretense here. That’s part of the trick. He tells you what he is doing and you choose not to believe, because that’s easier than what believing would cost you. Of course, there’s no avoiding that price. We pay it off the top, not knowing that’s the way these kinds of bargains have always worked.

I want to endorse Shout Kill Revel Repeat without reservation, but to do so would be ignoring the fact that I usually lack sufficient hedges against the night to cope with Jones’ writing. Again, his own words are a helpful warning: “Build the bonfire as large as you light, it merely illuminated how much more fucking darkness there is”. He is not an easy author to let into your thoughts. It is not a matter of consuming these stories and moving to the next fancy. If you let him in, he’s in. These stories get their power by consuming you back. It’s less a collection and more an evocation. A method of binding, but of who? Of what? There aren’t answers here as to what comes next. Questions that beget questions that beget questions until you start to accept the darkness will always have more darkness behind it. If Lovecraft’s response to that was that we shouldn’t look, shouldn’t wonder, Jones’ response is that we can’t help but look, can’t help but wonder. It is not prescriptive though, merely descriptive.

If you’ve stayed with me this long, I’m not sure that serves as a helpful indicator of anything. This is less of a review and more of a tone poem, trying to capture how I feel as a result of Shout Kill Revel Repeat. It is, obviously, drawn partially through reading Jones’ stories — stories of parenthood and collective consciousness and fungal spores and techno-cults and R’lyeh and language as a disease and imagined Hollywood directors — but my experiences with it are uniquely mine. I’ve no idea what you will feel reading him, but it is undeniably an expertly crafted set of stories firmly in the tradition of weird horror. Which is perhaps reason enough for me to recommend you check it out.

If nothing else, you’ll have an experience.

For many things may be done that have a good appearance, and yet proceed not from the root of charity. For thorns also have flowers: some actions truly seem rough, seem savage; howbeit they are done for discipline at the bidding of charity. Once for all, then, a short precept is given you: Love, and do what you will: whether you hold your peace, through love hold your peace; whether you cry out, through love cry out; whether you correct, through love correct; whether you spare, through love do you spare: let the root of love be within, of this root can nothing spring but what is good.

“Love, and do what you will”. And so, from Augustine we get the same kind of love of Proverbs 13:24: “He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes” — or Samuel Butler’s more popular articulation: “Then spare the rod and spoil the child”. That Butler had a more indecent meaning in mind has not stopped his version from becoming the standard-bearer for the concept. The sentiment behind this kind of love is that of a crucible, that cares not for the object at hand but what it could be. It is the kind of love that acts upon the loved to better it, as a preparation, of sorts, to help it realize the truest version of itself.

Love not in the man his error, but the man: for the man God made, the error the man himself made. Love that which God made, love not that which the man himself made. When you love that, you take away this: when you esteem that, you amend this. But even if you be severe at any time, let it be because of love, for correction.

There are times where one acts in the best interest of another, despite what may be easier or what either may desire. Even when we find the rod itself to be too extreme, there is something common enough about this notion and it is one that any parent understands: “though I may appear rough or cruel, I am trying to do what is good for you”. This is the love by which the world grows. That which, in recognition of an error, is compelled to act as a corrective. When we do not take the world as it is, but as it could be.

Amo: Volo ut sis is not this. The Latin translates, most directly, to “I love: I will you to be”. Not merely “want” but “will” in that there a sense that my love brings you into being. It is a definition of the concept, but love must always be directed, it requires an object towards which it is aimed. A relation, not an emotion. Which is not to say that love is unfelt, but it is felt in that relation. Arendt (and then Augustine) tells us that, “Love is the soul’s gravity, or the other round: ‘the specific gravity of bodies is, as it were, their love, whether they are carried downwards by their weight, or upwards by their levity. For the body is borne by its gravity, as the spirit by love, whithersoever it is borne.’”.

I love — and the very fact of my love is that I wish for you to be as you are, without response or reciprocation to be fulfilled. That I am pulled towards you without pulling back in kind. Volo ut sis. I love what you are. That you are. Without the need for the lover.

But even the pull helps highlight the tragic sense to it. We are broken, we are messy creatures — and if our love were truly perfect, it would not need to be articulated at all. Amo. I love. Not te amo. Without the object even being needed to be directed at. It simply would be a love that is. So, when we say it — and when we experience the gravity of it — we bring our desire for other into the world. We want to praise and appreciate and maintain the object at which it is directed, but the direction frames it as something that we want. As a possession (or to be possessed by the object of desire, likewise reducing it).

Yet this is still the highest form of love, the greatest affirmation. It was with this love that Augustine’s God willed the human into the world, not as something desired, but as something to be accepted as is. That God is capable of such love is a matter of divinity (and with the advantage of eternity). All we can do with our mortal measure of grace is make the attempt. So we try and we pair our love with a promise. “I will you to be” says “I will you to be as you are, but my very willing reveals that I desire to possess or fulfill rather than simply appreciate — but I wish that I could will you to be. And I wish that I could overcome my imperfections to accept, without conditions, instead of desire.

Amo: Volo ut sis speaks to a love that seeks. That wishes. That tries. It is neither an emotion nor a relation. It is a reminder and a promise. It is a desire not only for the object towards which it is aimed, but also a desire that wishes mastery over itself. To love with a love that is more than love.⁴

It is through this promise that we arrive at true political life, power with rather than power over: we love the world in which others are possible, not for their particular qualities, but the mere possibility of those qualities being expressed in public. It is a love empty of possession by virtue of the fact that it is independent of what will be revealed in that space of appearances where you become you — and that is only possible by virtue of being together. It is not merely that I want you to be, but my love wills you into being because you appear as you in this space that is politics.

I love. Through my love, I will you, as an individual completely apart and distinct from me, into being. By the sign of my love, I bring you into being — and you me. The possibility of that can only ever be promised, not held. So I love and I promise and together we make the world. Amo: Volo ut sis.

• What? Scotiabank Toronto Waterfront Marathon
• When? 21 October, 2018
• How far? 42.2km
• Where? Toronto, ON
• Website: http://www.torontowaterfrontmarathon.com
• Sportstats: https://www.sportstats.ca/display-results.xhtml?raceid=94600&bib=2858
• Strava activity: https://www.strava.com/activities/1919192250
• Finish time: 3:14:12.4

Goals

Pre-Race

That this was my first full marathon meant that it was going to have a weight to it regardless, but this year has been a hard one – more than this year, truthfully. At points I have felt a bit untethered and getting out to train has been one of the ways that I have stayed grounded. Even when I had a bad run or fell off my plan, the routine was a banister that I could reach for when life did what life does.

I can’t recall how far back I set my B and C goals, but coming in under 5 min/km was the aim from the very beginning. It was completely arbitrary and, after my first half marathon back in May, it was fairly clear that sub-3:30:00 was an entirely reasonable time to aim for. Over the summer, I swayed between overconfidence and worry, neither entirely grounded in reality, but eventually I settled into 3:25:00 as within reach if the conditions were right.

On an unrelated note, it doesn’t take much for me to consider assaulting strangers: my Airbnb was next to some sort of acoustic guitar open mic night that went until well beyond my entirely reasonable 10pm bedtime. Upside: I had a roommate. I have not decided if that roommate made up for the 5 hour Greyhound ride I had to take in order to get into Toronto (and nothing makes up for the 5 hour ride back after the race, but #lifechoices).

There was one additional detail that I couldn’t resolve in training, but had to learn by doing: each race I did this year had me bursting out of the gate, trying to go stride for stride with those who were in better shape than me. As far as strategies go, it is not a particuarly strong one, but adrenaline and idiocy are hard to overcome. The plan this time was to set myself up so that it would be difficult to lead the pack, even if I wanted to: I was going to start at the very back of the first corral and gradually work my way up to race pace. When you don’t have very good discipline, sometimes you fake it.

Race Start - 10km

And sometimes, you’re a liar. No, I was nowhere near the front – and I did have the 3:25:00 pacer a decent length ahead of me – but the back just felt so far… back. To my credit, I did start off at a comfortable 4:45 min/km pace. I distinctly recall thinking that I could have kept that up forever. It is a completely different sensation to be casually rolling along with a pack of runners rather than weaving through them in an attempt lead rather than follow. Gradually, I settled in somewhere around 4:30 min/km, which was ahead of my goal time, but I had no intention of maintaining that for the whole race. If I maintained it through the first half, even when I hit the 30k wall, I would have banked some time.

I am not a cold weather runner. I much prefer the sensation of rapidly approaching dehydration that comes with hot weather running. But people who race in late October can’t be choosers. While I had a couple of long training runs in the cold, I hadn’t figured out what my clothing strategy was going to be. So my game day decision was to stick with a long sleeve technical shirt and leave my running jacket at the bag check, on the assumption that I would regret racing with it. This was a silly idea given that I checked my bag almost an hour before the start, but it was the right call: very early in the race I was gazing longingly at folks running with exposed skin, which is somewhat of a creepy sentence to have written, but I regret nothing: I was warm and jealous. To get a bit of cool air flowing, I pocketed my gloves and took my stretch headband/cap/thing off and wrapped it around my wrist. It proved to be a weird look, but I appreciated the cool air.

11km - 20km

The first half of this course is a delight: nice scenery, comfortable elevation, and good spots for crowd interaction. I was glad to have had my “bad” half-marathon last month, because I remembered to have fun with this one. I laughed and smiled at strangers. I tapped those tap here to power up signs. I even grabbed a couple selfies on the course – which felt strange at the time and feels stranger still in retrospect, but I tried to enjoy myself with the course. Plus, I wanted to commemorate the moment on the course where the half-marathon runners split off to do their last couple of kilometres, while the rest of us fools were just getting started.

Around kilometre 18, a runner ahead of me fumbled while taking off gloves, and one fell to the ground. Before I knew what I was doing, I leaned over and scooped it up as I ran by – only to see another drop. Not wanting to either return a single glove or hold onto a stranger’s sweaty glove for the rest of the race, I grabbed the second and sped up to return them. The confusion I saw looking back at me as I handed them back made me realize that it was deliberate. But, because I had done a mitzvah, they weren’t going to just throw them away. Worse still, I settled into pace with them, so they were stuck with those gloves for the foreseeable future. At least until I was out of sight, anyway.

21km - 30km

Somewhere around this point, I had one of those dumb runner fantasies that are completely ungrouned in reality: “I bet a sub-3:10 is possible”. Sure, I had run a comfortable half and felt like there was lots of energy left, but that energy was already claimed by my traitorous brain to fuel my legs for a reasonable finish. There certainly wasn’t enough for me to shave 2 minutes off over the next 21k. But we runners love our lies like “I’m saving something for the last 5k” or “I don’t care when someone passes me”.

The race began to get a bit lonely towards the end of this stretch. I had joined a few racers who pushed ahead of our pacer, but we lost cohension as people started to hit their walls. All of my training this year has been solo, so I was surprised to find myself looking for a buddy to stay with for a while. Yet, despite the fact that I was keeping relatively steady splits, anyone I fell in with either pulled ahead or dropped back. The legs still felt good and my breathing was fine, so, as I crossed the 30k marker, I resigned myself to keeping company with Chromeo and Carly (Rae Jepsen).

31km - Finish

For the last year and a half, I have used my AirPods almost every day – and certainly for all my training. The problem is that the battery has to be big enough to fit inside your ear and, over time and usage, batteries degrade. Add to that the fact that I had a solid hour between putting my headphones in and the race, and it is no surprise that Chromeo abandoned me at 32km. It be unfair of me to blame a Canadian electro-funk duo for my lagging pace, but it certainly is not this guy’s fault.

However that guy clearly did something wrong: a woman passed me in this section with a level of aggressiveness usually reserved for people trying to bring a full shopping cart to the 10 items of less lane. We were on what might have been the most wide open stretch of the course and I was hugging the side of the road pretty tightly. Apparently, not tightly enough. After staying on my heels for a few strides, she decided to overtake me with something in between rubbing elbows and a body slam. I made Canadians everywhere proud by apologizing for her behaviour, but I am not sure she even noticed what had happened: whatever reserve of energy she was drawing on to burst ahead had her stumbling along like Jackie Chan in The Legend of Drunken Master. Remembering how that movie ended forced me to reconsider returning the favour.

There were couple minutes here where I swear it started to faintly rain. It was so light that I thought I might be imagining it, but the cold reached my fingers which made it real enough for me to care. I had a brief thought for my glove-dropping friend 15k ago and wondered if there was an engagement ring waiting for me at the end of the race (or bread – boy did I want bread more than anything in that moment), before snapping back to reality and putting mine back on. Unfortunately, they were not magic gloves of endurance. Every kilometre from the 35th on, I told myself, “Next kilometre I’m going to turn on the gas”. That… did not happen. No amount of Maple Syrup Gel, chewable gels, or Gatorade was going to change the fact that I was tired down to my bones. If the half-marathon turnoff had come at this point, there’s a very good chance I would have taken it. Unfortunately, the only way out was through, so I shambled onward to the finish line.

A constant theme of my races this year has been that I end them like a drama queen. This was no exception and, thankfully, a race photographer snapped what might be my favorite photo of me ever. That is a man with regrets. It’s also a man steps away from the finish line and I certainly was grateful for that.

Post-race

I was also grateful that the photographer did not follow me after that last shot, because I immediately started to have a big ol’, cathartic ugly cry. One of the medical staff came over to check up on me, which I simultanously appreciated and recoiled from. He seemed to understand and left me alone after confirming that I was not dying on the outside. The same level of understanding cannot be said for the volunteer who handed me a space blanket: that teenager looked horrified at the conspicuous display of emotion and tried to give me the blanket without being any closer than he had to be. The difficulty I had wrapping it around myself did me no favours in earning his respect. Rather than trying to convince him of my coolness, I let it slide and sought out the sweet oblivion of warm clothing – or, at least, warm reflective plastic.

Just like with my first race of the season, I again exceeded my most optimistic expectations. That has a lot to do with being new to this and not having the best sense as to what goals are reasonable, but I also put in the work necessary to have a great running year. Crossing that finish line in Toronto comes from almost 1500km of training runs this year and I feel good about it. I am already idly wondering how low I can get that time and there are obviously lots of things to improve (diet, pacing, moving to a climate where there is no snow), but this is an unequivocal win that couldn’t have come at a better time. Knowing me, I am very quickly going to move onto the next challenge, but this race was last weekend and I’m still basking in its afterglow. Granted, that might be indicative of brain damage suffered over the course of the marathon. Still, I am going to enjoy it.

See you out on the pavement.

• What? Army Run Half Marathon
• When? 23 September, 2018
• How far? 21.1km
• Where? Ottawa, ON
• Website: http://armyrun.ca
• Sportstats: https://www.sportstats.ca/display-results.xhtml?raceid=94315&bib=2154
• Strava activity: https://www.strava.com/activities/1860932745
• Finish time: 1:30:00.2

Goals

Training

After a chaotic summer, most of my race plans got thrown out of the window. I didn’t lose much in the way of training, but the races that I had intended to do all got cut for various reasons.

Having done a half back in May, I have been wanting to do a full to finish off the season – so I’ll be doing the Toronto Waterfront next month. This race was meant to be a bit of a tuneup in preparation for that, but I have been feeling pretty good about where my training has been and started to take this race more seriously. My C goal is an overly ambitious jump from my PB of 1:29:05, but it’s hard to overstate how confident I have felt over the last couple weeks. Feeling stronger and stronger with ever run.

My plan was to bank some time in the first 5km with a strong 3:50min/km pace, before settling into 4min/km. If all went well, I’d only be spending those spare seconds on the few mild inclines of the course. I didn’t really think I’d be able to maintain the pace needed to meet my C goal, but I wanted to strive for it. I made the last minute decision to wear my water belt so I could hydrate on my schedule, rather than the course organizers.

Going into race day, things felt good. Fresh legs. Hearty pasta dinner the night before. Peanut butter toast when I got up at 7:00 and a coffee on the way to the course for a 9:30 start.

Race Start

I am obviously not an elite runner, but I’ve learned that I am better served starting at the front of the pack. I usually clip along out of the gate a few seconds faster than I should before settling into race pace. However there still seems to be this mindset some folks have of needing to start as close to the front, even if they are going to immediately fall behind. So it was tight initially with more dodging and weaving than I wanted to do (Rhetorical Question: do I ever want to be dodging and weaving to start a race?).

That said, it was a nearly perfect start for my pace. Blew through the first kilometre at exactly 3:50. The second kilometre had me speeding up to a 3:33, which I knew was unsustainable, but I was feeling better than any of my training runs. After a couple of breaths, I prepared to calm myself down and settle into my plan.

Kilometre 2.1

Or not.

I still haven’t decided what it was, but the bottom dropped out on my stomach all of a sudden. There is no need for graphic detail, but I was immediately in severe bowel distress. It was not a question of whether I could run it out. It was a question of whether I could make it to the water station a kilometre away. The answer was a resounding no. The good news is that this happened right along an out-and-back portion of the course and there was an aid station just across the road. Part of me wonders what would have happened were that not the case: would I have forced myself to tough it out and been fine? Or would it have been an absolute disaster?

Either way, I peeled off and threw myself into a Porta Potty. Maybe it wasn’t actually a name brand Porta Potty, but just a generic portable toilet. Like a frisbee versus a flying disc. I didn’t muse over this point at the time, because I was fuming. Between the (incredible) racers I had been keeping up with, the crowd of people cheering at the sidelines, and a course photographer (who better not have turned the camera towards me in that moment), I felt like the whole world watched my race fell apart.

Yesterday I had felt like a 9:30am start was a wonderful luxury, but I’ve been debating whether it threw off my routine just enough to mess me up. I probably ate 45 minutes earlier than I would have. Was that enough? Or was I too lackadaisical with my coffee-drinking and stretched it longer than I should have? Or any number of other things. I am not going to spend the next four weeks speculating on what I did wrong and instead use all of my upcoming training runs as an opportunity to test different routines, because science!

If you’re curious how quickly someone can angrily use the washroom, Strava says I only stopped moving for 30 seconds. I think the less that is said about that, the better. In a sight that was probably hilarious to the runners who could see me, I flew out that toilet like a bat out of hell and right back onto the course.

Kilometre 10

When something goes wrong on a training run, you can stop, shake it off, and reset. Or you can keep going at a slower pace, knowing that you’ll get it next time. My running belt came unzipped a few weeks ago and I took the time to fix it before head back to finish my scheduled 19km. I didn’t much care, because there was nothing to be concerned about. It’s was just a run. No big deal.

If I’d been able to find that attitude in myself, it would have been little more than half a minute lost. It is not as if I had any illusions about winning the race (1:08:05? No thanks, Maxime Leboeuf – I do love watching him speed by when there are early out-and-backs though). Instead I let me get the better of me. All the way to the 10km marker, there were some lingering doubts whether I’d need another bathroom break, but that’s a lousy excuse. I started ignoring my pacing altogether, got fixated on the people who were passing me as I tried to restart my legs after the abrupt stop, and was generally beating myself up.

After 5km, I was still only 30 seconds off my PB time: 19:59. Sure, that meant I didn’t have the banked time that I wanted to, but that’s a 4min/km pace. After 10km, I was barely under 43:00. Not that I knew either detail at the time, because I had mentally checked out. Apparently some friends saw me around this point and said I looked dead-eyed, which matches how I felt.

Kilometre 15

I completely forgot to appreciate what I described back in May as my favorite part of the course: seeing Parliament from behind as we cross the bridge back into Ontario. However the moment I recognized that, I was able to snap myself a bit out of my funk and started to have fun with the run. I let the PB go. I tried to find my proper form again. I snacked the fruit bar I had brought, not because my body needed it, but because I wanted to. I was also high five-ing people on the sidelines and throwing my arms up in victory every time I passed a crowd. At one point I may have given the finger-guns to someone holding up a suggestive sign, because why not.

My pace never got back to what I had been aiming for, but I wasn’t trying to. I like running. Spending four, five, or six hours a week hitting the pavement isn’t something I do to get a personal record every time I train. Most of my days are spent thinking and working far too hard, so I really like the mix of adrenaline and blankness in my mind that comes from a good run. A race filled with spectators and competition is a very different environment, but the sentiment is still the same: do the best I can, but enjoy myself.

So I did.

To the End

I think this is fairly common, but Ottawa’s racing scene has pacers at a bunch of different speeds, so that you can let someone else keep track of that for you. In my last half, I never saw them after the starting the line, because the fastest pacer clocks in at 4:16min/km (a 1:30:00 time). At some point in this run, it became clear that I had slowed down enough that the 1:30:00 pacer was close behind me. If I had been paying more attention to other runners, I might have guessed as much from the number of folks who were passing me, but didn’t really care because I was too busy looking as uncool as possible (I can only imagine that I have ruined some people’s photos with my shenanigans. Sorrynotsorry).

That being said, I have enough competitive spirit in me that I didn’t want to do worse than my A goal for the race since it was still within my reach. I still was having fun and cheering on people as they passed me, but kept enough of an eye on the time to make that happen. With a helpful verbal push from the pacer right at the end, I did. Or at least close enough for government work. Those milliseconds. They getcha.

Post-race

I was about to type “Well this is what it feels like to have a bad race”, but that’s not even true, is it? Given where I’m at, 1:30:00 time is nothing to sneeze at. And the reality is that I pulled off that time despite having an unpleasant experience early on and pouting for the first half of the course. That’s a great sign of where I am at in my training. I have no illusions that I will be running the Toronto Marathon at a 4:02min/km pace, but I this race serves as a good reminder that I should be on track for my goal of 3:25:00.

And even if I don’t? Hopefully I’ll remember to have fun.

Ugh. Gross. Positivity.

• What? MEC Ottawa Road Race #3 - The Summer Classic
• When? 17 June, 2018
• How far? 10km
• Where? Carp, ON
• Sportstats Data
• Strava Activity
• Finish time: 41:50.7

Goals

Pre-Race

Note to self: stop with the false modesty with my starting position. In a big race I won’t be at the very front of the pack, but here it was just silly for me to start in the middle. I wasn’t outside of the front 15 runners after the first kilometre, so weaving through a large crowd and passing folks right out of the gate is particularly foolish. If I accept that I’m not terrible at this it’ll be easier for me settle into a rhythm and safer for everyone.

I have been training towards a longer race than this, so I was not trying to be too ambitious with my goals this time ‘round. 40:28 was the 10km I had pulled off in a longer race, so I figured that repeating it was a reasonable enough thing to strive for. 39:00 was a bit of a stretch, but it seemed within reach based on how I’d felt during some of my training runs. I got word that a friend of a friend was aiming for a 40:00~ time so rather than paying attention to my watch, I decided I would use her as my pacer – and, if I was feeling particularly good after the first half, pick up some speed. That would mean trying to remember what she was wearing (purple? Probably purple) and having to find her in the crowd. Which would mean moving through the crowd.

Race Start - 2.5km

Immediately I could tell that my goals were in trouble. Unlike with the Tamarack Half Marathon, this was not shock at how fast I was going, but rather a realization that the conditions were not at all what I had prepared for: I had maybe one training run in the last two months that was anything close to the same humidity. On top of that, I could tell my peanut butter toast two hours prior was not enough to make up for the lacklustre dinner the night before. Hunger is a terrible motivator for a race given that legs need fuel.

Other than regret my life choices, there wasn’t much to be done about it, so I made my way to the outside edge and starting passing folks with an aim towards finding my pacer. While there were a couple of people who seemed like they were going to keep up with me rather than letting me pass, for the most part everyone was too focused on running their own race to waste energy on the idiot zipping by them. Eventually I recognized the purple top that I was pretty sure belonged to my pacer and settled in behind her.

2.5km - 5km

Because the same course was being used for the 5km race, the hydration station came at 2.5km. I was pretty grateful when I saw it coming and started wondering whether the two volunteers were going to be able to keep up with the 8~ of us all coming through at the same time. As it turned out, that was not a problem: I was the only one who grabbed a cup on the way by. It was at this point I realized that maybe I was a little bit outside of my class trying to keep up with these folks. Instead of letting that change my pace, I blissfully poured the electrolyte water on my head, drank the cup of water, and kept on keeping on.

I tend to run with music, but I had left my headphones in the car and so was stuck with the sound of my laboured breathing. Unfortunately for my pacer, I was close enough that she was also stuck with it. While I am not sure what regular Steven’s running breathing sounds like, it definitely wasn’t that. I eventually settled into something resembling normal by the time we reached the halfway point. This was a good thing because it was a turnaround and I got my first sense of where the 240 runners who weren’t ahead of me were. The fact that I was about to see every single racer was a pretty strong motivator for tightening up my form and losing what I imagine was a look of mild heat stroke.

It was also nice to see my friends and briefly remember that, no matter what happened in the next five kilometres, eventually the race would be over and they would be driving me home.

5 - 7.5km

I know after the race I talked about how nice the route was and how much I enjoyed the scenery, but that might be a lie. Not that I am saying it wasn’t beautiful, but the first two thirds of the race feel like they were exclusively spent keeping my pacer’s ponytail straight ahead of me. What was nice about this was that she was the front-most female runner, so she got cheers and clapping from volunteers, other runners after the turnaround, and the few spectators that were on the sidelines. I pretended her acclaim was for me. I drank her milkshake. I drank it up.

At one point she got a new running partner and I am still not sure how or where that happened. Did he run ahead or fall behind? And where did this new person come from? I had questions, but no energy to really consider answers. I do remember briefly wondering if he changed shirts mid-race just to confuse me, but the sheer insanity of that thought let it slip away almost as quickly as I had found it.

7.5km - End

The 5km race started only ten minutes after ours, which mean that there were still plenty of those folks on course – and this is the point where the two races come together. And here’s where mine fell apart. My 8th kilometre was over thirty seconds slower than my 7th. On the one hand, this was the highest elevation climb of the entire race. On the other hand, I was already gassed, I missed the idea of shade, and I might have considered quitting if I wasn’t already going in the direction of the finish line. I no longer had my ponytailed companion to guide me and had no motivation to keep an eye on my watch, so I just put one foot in front of the other as tidily as I could manage.

For the last two kilometres I caught up with one of the folks I had been running with early on. His form looked about as good as mine felt and we kept leapfrogging back and forth, never more than a footlong gap between us. Why, you ask, did we not just make the decision to run together and be friends? Mostly I was using him to push me harder than I felt like running. Hopefully I was doing the same for him. Otherwise, I’m just a jerk who wouldn’t let him get ahead.

That is, up until the last quarter of a kilometre. He and I had been passing folks from the 5km race, but as the very end came in sight I ceased to care about passing anyone at all. He got a half step ahead of me, then a full step, then two, and I realized that I was just happy to be done soon and didn’t need to beat him. It was kind of a nice, zen moment for me as I let myself remember that I was running my race and nobody else’s. It didn’t matter whether I beat this stranger.

Except then we passed another racer who shouted at me, “if you’re gonna make your move, now’s the time!”. So I threw that zen nonsense into the trash and I made my move. As it turned out, I had considerably more in the tank than my brain had been telling me for the last few kilometres. I ended up finishing faster than any other point – including my ridiculous start.

Post-race

After crossing the finish line and taking a few steps out of the way of other finishers, I turned around and thanked the guy who had kept me honest for the last few kilometres. He also got an awkward high five, because I briefly forgot for a moment that we were both drenched in sweat.

If you had asked me before the race whether I would have been satisfied coming in just shy of 42 minutes, I would have said no. I had higher expectations for myself, especially after seeing what I was capable of in the half marathon. However the weather had been ideal on that day, plus I had done a much better job of the whole “eating” thing. The other thing to remember is that, for all my belly-aching, 9th overall ain’t a bad finish.

While the heat was bad, the real problem is that I let how hot I felt influence my state of mind: instead of focusing on what was going well and what I was enjoying, there was a lot of mental complaining about why I was unhappy. It wasn’t that bad, but I think it was enough for me to settle for less than a full effort on the course. That is the big takeaway for the future and what I’ll work on next time.