Before I went to work for my father, I had a few other jobs. It was always the same. The company would get in touch with me because whatever proprietary employment algorithm they used spat out my name and a ripple of interest would shiver through them when they realized who my father was. They’d wonder if maybe I was also a genius and could revolutionize their product or service or system. In the meetings, they’d mistake my sheepish ambivalence for cocky nonchalance. I’d get the job—I always got the job—and it would take them a couple of weeks to realize their error. I was not a genius. I was just a guy with a last name.
Most recently, I worked for this advertising agency that specializes in perceptual marketing. They ensure that whatever ads you see in your everyday life are geared to your specific taste, style, demographic, purchasing history, and countless other interwoven criteria. If you walk by a billboard, it shows you something you actually want or an upgrade to something you already have. They use real-time rolling data feeds, so you might see a different ad depending on your mood before versus after lunch, if you were running late or had time to linger, whether you had sex that night or argued with your spouse that morning. Following a negative experience with some company’s wares, they’d give a competitor a shot at shifting your brand loyalty.
My big idea was that clients could pay a monthly fee to see no ads at all. Instead of individualized niche marketing, you could experience a world blissfully emptied of promotional clutter. It was a total failure.
Because it turns out people like ads. Especially when they’re targeted to warp the visual environment around you to emphasize your needs above all others, as if you’re the indispensable center of the global economy. Nobody wanted to pay for the privilege of being irrelevant to commercial interests. Except me. I essentially got my employer to launch an expensive new product solely for my use. An industry of one.
Before that, I worked for a company that dealt in microtrends—fashion fads that can emerge, spike, and dissolve within a day, even within a few hours. Sometimes they’d be global, but usually hyperlocal, thousands of people in a certain neighborhood sporting identical shoes or jackets or haircuts on the way to work, and by lunchtime, none of them would be caught dead wearing that style.
With portable clothing recyclers, the frequency of fashion evolution is dizzying. You can deconstitute and reconfigure your apparel at will or whim. But if you care about that kind of thing, and billions did, it can be stressful to keep your appearance protocols constantly updated. Some people found it easier to wear a uniform-tone bodysuit with marking dots and have their outfit digitally projected onto them, so they could keep their look as fluid as possible.
The company I worked for crunched tremendous amounts of data to predict and manage accelerated fads for the major design labels, and they hoped I could help amplify their business. The problem is I don’t like to stand out, so fashion makes me testy. I set my home clothing recycler to generate minor random adjustments to my outfits just so people who notice that kind of thing will leave me alone, but otherwise I wear pretty much the same thing every day. My employers initially thought I was being deliberately inscrutable with my appearance to keep them off-balance, but by the end of my first week they became suspicious.
I actually managed to boost profits almost immediately, until they clued in that all I’d done is the same thing I did at home—set their prediction algorithms to random. Millions of people were wearing a certain style of pants or cut of shirt or thickness of belt because the system told them to. But it was chance, not aesthetics. I had a contract, so they couldn’t fire me. I got transferred to a side project involving pets.
Unfortunately, the company didn’t particularly care about profit. When you live in a world of universal plenty, people genuinely aspire to make things that work well. They didn’t want to trick their customers. They wanted to help them be happier.
Whereas it turns out my specialty is disappointment and ruin.
I spent my postcollegiate decade coasting, resenting the opportunities that came my way because of my father while simultaneously not pursuing any other opportunities. I’m aware that this isn’t an endearing quality in an adult human—my ex-girlfriends each repeated this point with varying levels of intensity on numerous occasions. When you have a healthy relationship with even one of your parents, it’s hard to understand what the hell the problem is—just, you know, grow up. But blaming my father feels so good, an itch that always wants to be scratched.
If you could peel away everything about me and Penelope except what made us tick at the most essential level, that’s what we had in common—like a clock with a broken oscillator, some people can’t keep time no matter how often they’re wound.
23
The time I ran away from home, I made a crucial and in retrospect pretty sharp decision—I wouldn’t speak to anyone who looked older than sixteen. I packed a bag with a food synthesizer, a clothing recycler, and an entertainment interface, disabled the embedded tracking protocols, and walked out the front door.
I made my way via transit capsule to one of Toronto’s outer boroughs and approached the first kid I saw. I told him I’d run away from home and needed somewhere to crash that night. He immediately decided that was badass and let me sleep at his place. His parents never even knew I was there. We hung out in his room and played virtual immersion games deep into the night. The next day I moved on, caught a capsule to another borough, and did the same thing—found a kid, told him the truth, crashed at his place without his parents ever finding out, and moved on the next day.
At first, I approached only boys because I was twelve and girls were intimidating. I expected at least some of the kids I encountered would rat me out, but not one did. After two weeks, I approached a girl. She was even more into it than any of the boys. She’d been waiting her whole life for a total stranger to walk up and propose an adventure, but one that didn’t require leaving the safety of her bedroom. We didn’t play games that night, unless you count making out for four hours a game. It was the first time I’d ever kissed a girl. Her name was Robin Swelter.
I stayed with Robin for five nights, until her older brother caught us in her bedroom wearing nothing but underwear. He yanked me off of her while she covered her semi-formed chest and he punched me in the face. Their parents blundered in and they were too mortified that I’d been living in their home for five days without their knowing it to get properly angry. They called my parents while their home medical drone iced my black eye. My mother came to pick me up with a grim look on her face.
Over those five nights of adolescent fumbling, Robin and I learned enough about the organics of our complementary physiques to propel us into the top ranks of sexual experience at our respective schools. I walked down the halls a newborn legend. Every girl that had resolutely ignored me suddenly took note. And thanks to Robin and her bony, generous curiosity, I knew a little about what to do with that attention.
Robin and I kept in touch, but we both knew the spell between us had broken. I can’t say I loved her, but I’ve never appreciated another human being more.
My mother convinced herself I ran away because of Robin, not that I’d met her on my travels. Youthful romance was acceptable. My father’s thoughtless challenge was not.
As for my father, he was mildly concerned, mostly because my mother’s panic and worry over those nineteen days had colonized his normal routine. When he found out that I could’ve survived indefinitely if I hadn’t been seduced by Robin Swelter’s pillowy embrace, he decided that he’d completed his job as a father. If sent out on my own, I wouldn’t die. I could even get to third base.
24