1

I wrote a science fiction story about a writer who clones himself. Then he tortures, mutilates, and cruelly abuses his clone. After that, he forces his clone to write a story about his trauma, which he of course claims as his own. The story, I mean. The story wins awards and secures the writer a book deal and an agent. Then the clone escapes from the torture chamber. From this point on, it becomes increasingly difficult to differentiate between the two, writer and clone, until one kills the other, drops the body in the East River, and attends the award ceremony for the Plimpton Prize later that evening. I sent the story to my dad. I mean the story I wrote. Not the story the clone wrote inside the story.

He replied, You’re not Philip K Dick, but it’s not bad.

After that, I wanted to write one about someone who wasn’t Philip K Dick.

I wrote, Philip J Dick (this was the name I’d settled on) is not the same person as Philip K Dick. He never wrote Ubik. He never wrote Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. He wasn’t born in Chicago. He never wrote Flow My Tears, Said the Policeman…

I paused. I didn’t like where this was going. I looked up at the exposed ceiling of the downtown office where I worked for a tech startup called MoodRing.

I messaged my coworker Louis: Can you name one positive thing about me?

You’re not evil, he replied.

That’s negative, I said.

Disagree, said Louis.

What I mean, I said, is that it’s negative in the sense that it’s an attribute I don’t have. What’s an attribute I do have?

I attribute the smell in the break room to you, he said.

It’s just tuna salad, I said. I never heat it. It shouldn’t really smell.

He gave my message a thumbs-up reaction and declined to further respond.

I wrote, Philip J Dick never claimed to see God. He never accused his peers of being Soviet assets. He never took amphetamines. He never had a religious phase…

I stopped writing the story. It was garbage, obviously. You can’t write a story that’s all about who Philip K Dick isn’t. People won’t like it.

 

 

2

MoodRing, the company we worked for, made an app designed to algorithmically flag all the photos on people’s phones with traumatic aura. The flagged photos were then sent directly to their telehealth therapists for potential use as discussion material. The only problem was that the algorithm didn’t work. Instead, the app surreptitiously hired people like me and Louis to scroll through people’s photos, looking for anything with traumatic aura.

Our manager made no secret about the fact that Louis was her favorite. She liked to say he had a gift for, quote, identifying trauma in the mundane. Even when the algorithm works, it’ll never see the traumatic aura in something like that, she said to Louis once, gazing proudly at the photo on his monitor of a lightly buttered blueberry pancake.

Later that day, I messaged him to ask what his secret was.

Instead of replying online, he walked past and dropped a note onto my desk. Can’t talk via Slack, the note said. Come to the bathroom in fifteen minutes.

The secret, he said to me as we both pretended to pee at adjacent urinals, is to just flag pictures at random. Click on them without even looking.

But that sounds exactly like what an algorithm would do, I said.

What I mean, said Louis, is that we should pretend to be the algorithm.

What?

It’s our only advantage, he said.

That doesn’t make sense, I said.

The algorithm can’t pretend to be an algorithm, he said. How could it?

Then, to my surprise, he actually began to pee. Not knowing what else to do or say, I pretended to zip up, washed my hands, and quietly returned to my desk.