The music is bad. Well, it’s not bad, but it’s inoffensive, which is a polite word for bad, unless people think you’re offensive— then ‘offensive’ is the bad one. Like, you can’t have fire on the dance floor unless the dance floor is flammable. Or inflammable.
See, I thought a hot dance floor was a positive.
It just came to mind. You know the song?
I know it.
It’s famous!
Or infamous, depending.
On…
Nineties or two-thousands. Like the sixth Mambo.
Or the sixth Rambo, which they also shelved for being too hot to handle.
Speaking of heat, and movies, did you know Michael Mann—
Speaking of handles, where’s the door?
“Got caught in the entryway, huh?”
The host offers me a drink.
I decline; I want to report everything exactly as it happens.
“Well, you can’t just stand in the corner with a notepad. One idea. Price of admission.”
“I don’t really know what you mean, I’m afraid. Something to talk about?”
“Something to discuss, to debate, to throw in the mix— it’s a mixer, dangit.”
“Like a current event, or fun fact, or…”
“Don’t trail off, and don’t be obtuse. A proposition, an invention, a concept. I’m sure you’ve got something. I’d hate to have to toss you back out with the free-associators in the foyer.”
I ask if he is serious.
“Very. And no Stone Soups, either; that’s mine, and it’ll only work once. Also: no politics, no sports, no movies or TV shows, and nothing as boring as any of those.”
“Okay.” I think for a moment. “Like savory ice cream?”
“No. Try harder. Your instant-coffee tweet was alright, but even that’s not inspired enough, and food material is way too played out.”
“Alright. How about alternate-reality— no, something for phones.”
“An app.”
“Yes, an application. That— phones track location data, and remember where they’ve been. What if there was a button for ‘I’ve just set something down’ that marks the spot, and then when you’ve lost something, you know it must be in one of those places. Precision might be a problem, but—”
“Indeed it is. I thought you might have something creative. A phone application puts you on thin ice, unfortunately; I’ve got other people to greet. Quickly, if you don’t mind?”
I am saved from an expectant look by a man who looks about my age except for a dark, thorough dusting of grey through his mullet.
He gets a clap on the back, and after a brief exchange I am talking with him instead.
More accurately, he is launching into a lecture.
“People like to say ‘I don’t know how he did it— I could never have done that.’ And they’re right in the second half for as long as they insist on the first half, because they do know how he did it and they know how he does it: more effort or more skill.
“If you can’t learn some skill, then the rest comes from effort, so the only thing in your way that matters is effort. Nobody likes being told that, because it means you have to try, so they pretend they can’t see what’s in front of them and we all suffer for it.”
He stops to breathe.
“How does that—”
“Well, listen, and I’ll tell you how it relates, besides the obvious, and —by the by— don’t ignore that either. Have you seen Being John Malkovich? The movie?
I haven’t.
“Doesn’t matter. But you’ve heard of it.”
I have.
“If Tom Cruise had made a movie called Being Tom Cruise, it wouldn’t place in his top ten. It’d be forgotten immediately. John Malkovich does, and it’s the thing he’s most famous for, and it will be until we’re all dead. Why?
“Something people like, that’s yours, that matters more than being a bit player in somebody else’s gimmick, doesn’t matter whether the gimmick’s good or not. Foe-la?”
“What?”
He reaches behind him, to a coffee table crammed with every drink imaginable other than coffee, and produces a drink can stamped ‘Faux-la-Cola.’
“No thank you. I think I understand what you’re getting at. I also think nobody disagrees with you. If you can—”
“The point is that you can. People go to the gym to get strong, right? Or they ‘wish’ they did, because they ‘don’t know’ how others find the time. But nobody says ‘Oh man, I’m too in shape. I need to get weaker. I need to be fatter.’ They might even eat junk, or laze around, but nobody believes that, let alone thinks it.
“Nobody says ‘I want the project to be less successful.’ Same thing. But they do say ‘I want to do it my way, the ‘creative’ way, the easy way.’ Which means they’d rather fail than win at a game whose rules they don’t feel like learning, and they’ll believe that, and, if pressed, they’ll admit to it.
“Something only you can do. Start with you.”
He points a finger at the nametag stickered to my shirt, where I have printed my first name, for maximum legibility, in ALL CAPITALS.
When I look back up, he has drifted away to mingle with a man in a Batman mask and a woman in a Sherlock Holmes cape.
In his place is the party’s host.
“You’ve arrived at an answer?”
“An answer.”
“What’s that?”
“The Trojan War started—”
“Good enough.”
With that, he wanders off.
I am not standing, bemused, for more than a few seconds before Mister Metal Hair has shaken my hand and dragged me into his group.
“This is Cam,” he says of the masked man, who upon closer inspection appears to have modified Batman’s cowl with Bane’s Mexican wrestler motif.
The wannabe-detective introduces herself.
“Eva. Nice to meet you.”
“Likewise. And, sorry—”
“Matt,” answers Metal Hair Matt.
I am thinking to myself that I’ve somehow been stupid to wear the nametag when he clears his throat, and suddenly I am thinking I’m stupid for not intuiting it was my turn to talk.
Cam intervenes about a second before it’s time for me to start humming to the still-awful music and pretend I have somewhere else to be.
“What’s your opinion on Batman?”
“Which version?”
“The concept. The general idea.”
I am very much aware that he is wearing a personalized version of the hero’s mask.
“Vigilantism,” Eva explains. “The superhero without superpowers who takes it upon him- or herself to put a dent in crime.”
I answer with all the equanimity I can muster towards the idea.
Cam nods, and holds up a finger while he maneuvers a half-full can of Fracas through the mouth-hole in the cowl.
“That’s what I mean. I was hoping—” he frowns at Eva “—to get a less-biased perspective, but I’m glad to get some more feedback from the youth.”
“I don’t count?” Matt asks.
“Well, that doesn’t seem like a dye job.”
Matt sighs. “I was experimenting with a new idea for something like hair gel.”
It clicks. “Magnets.”
“A magnetic powder, yes. I thought there could be something to it, delivered through a dye-like process, or just through a bottle, coating the hairs and then applying directional magnetic fields. It’d be as simple and easy as video-game-style customization, and there’d be a market for pre-sets to copy specific hairstyles celebrities invented, so it’d be an ongoing revenue source. If they’ll pay for CAD files, they’d pay for pre-sets here.”
“What went wrong?” Eva asks.
“Now you’re assuming too. Nothing. It just hasn’t worked as well as I want yet. I was inspired by Batman Begins, actually; the wings he wears are normal fabric until they’re hit with an electric charge.”
“Neat. Anyway— one sec’, I have a route.”
Cam flips the empty can over in a gloved hand, then whips it across the room past a couple of people’s heads and into a propped-open trash can.
A few of those heads turn, and Matt motions them over.
“Anyway,” Cam continues, “I’ve figured for the past couple years that there’s a path opening for more guys in costumes bringing criminals to justice, at least in select markets. The tech is getting better, opinion of normal law enforcement is worse than ever, crime is up, superheroes are mainstream now, but everybody’s tired of the movies.
“I need to do some more research and hire on at least one assistant, but I’m going to start the first-ever real-life ‘superhero’ agency. We’ll do all the legwork making it possible through careful planning and profitable through licensing. They’ll do the strong-arm-work, and we’ll split the take.”
“I’ve been meaning to ask,” and Eva does: “the mask is promotion, that makes sense: what’s with the changes?”
“Excellent question. The short version is I’m even more scared of the Big Two than I am of the USG or the NDCPD; I figure it’s possible to eliminate any threat from them and establish a distinct brand in one fell swoop. This is a prototype for Camazotz, a hero we’re basing on a Mayan bat spirit. Needs some modifications, if you’re getting ‘rip-off’ instead of ‘homage.’”
I raise a hand, and then remember I can just talk.
“I’m pretty sure that name’s taken. They’ve got a lot of intellectual property.”
“That it’s worth their time to defend? A movie-franchise regular, sure. A brand-new generic? I doubt it. If they try anyway, we’ll win the war of public opinion and take advantage of the press to spin up another dozen variant ‘heroes.’”
“I don’t think you can get away with that,” a man objects.
He wears browline glasses, and his tweed jacket nearly matches Eva’s.
“Sorry, I’m Chris—”
and we do names again; a woman in a beret is Jenny; another woman, whose ostentatious puffer jacket is somehow overshadowed by the heavy camera slung around her neck, is named Grace; and a short, stout man with his hands in his pockets and circles under his eyes so dark I am unconvinced they’re not a thick layer of eyeshadow declines to introduce himself at all.
“I don’t think you can get away with it,” Chris repeats. “Won’t the police track your guys down? Won’t some investigator find out who’s behind the operation?”
“I’ve considered that.” Cam pauses. “It’s a concern, no two ways about it. If we vet people correctly, and they’re in the right areas, the police won’t be able to catch them. If they can’t round up incompetent criminals, they can’t catch trained, equipped—”
“Criminals.”
“In a technical sense.”
“That’s the only relevant sense.”
“It’s one-tenth of the relevant sense,” Jenny remarks. “Possession is the other nine-tenths of the law.”
“That’ll go down nice and smooth over at the courthouse, I’d wager.”
Cam raises a hand.
I think it is to shut the tangent up, and it does halt, but a half-second later a fresh can of Fracas has landed in his open palm from parts unknown.
“Yeah, there are challenges to work out. But there’s the Internet, and the blockchain, and—”
“No,” Chris interjects. “It doesn’t work like that.”
“If you’re going to be dismissive,” Eva asks, “why?”
“It’s like building a gingerbread house on wet newspaper. It’s not magic stardust, especially if you’re recruiting randoms, especially if you’re trying to face the public, just because the only way you can think of to grease the wheels is pattern-matching to something no one’s actually done in the last hundred years. You know why?”
Matt steps in before Cam can answer.
“Chris, right? Let’s discuss what you’re planning to do with cryptocurrency, then.”
Chris sighs. “I’m starting a new one. It won’t be a scam; it’ll be tied to a seed vault my associates are starting similar to the one in Svalbard. Closer to a stock, in some ways, though it’ll be listed on the main exchanges. Fractional shares of real value, not fiat.”
“Right. And if it takes off, you’ll annoy someone, I’m sure, and they’ll try to shut you down. They’ll find some law you’re violating and they’ll try to hammer you over the head with it. There’s an adage I’m familiar with from back when I was writing grants: ‘publish or perish.’ Out there, annoy them as only you can. Here? Publish or pipe down.”
There is a hitch in the set of Chris’s jaw so pronounced it may be overacted, but he offers a handshake to the both of them.
Cam shrugs; Matt takes it, shakes, then throws an arm around each of their shoulders and begins to steer their seemingly long-standing disagreement somewhere else.
“And you?” Eva asks.
Jenny laughs to herself, small. The beret slips forward on her forehead, and she takes a second to push it back into place.
“I’m just now trying to market a new designer perfume I spun up,” she answers, and holds back another burst of laughter. “It’s good, really, but it’s called Updog, that’s the selling point, that’s it.”
I snort so hard it feels like a truck has backfired somewhere behind my nose.
“And you?” Jenny asks.
It is a travesty that no one else is cracking up, that Eva responds in a calm, bemused voice, but there’s no accounting for smell.
“In college, studying linguistics, I acquainted myself with Esperanto and thought it was damned near perfect. The utopian ideal. But English has a head start, and I didn’t see that fading. I kept up practicing some staple vocabulary, hoping in the back of my mind that it might be useful, but when I got a job in machine translation I realized how advanced the state of the field was.
“The time to develop a new lingua franca is gone, whether or not there'll be another one in the future. In its place is the opportunity to preserve languages that are dying out by the day. You can track people down and make voice clips, transcribe words, and distribute and archive them to a degree previously impossible, but that’s not the same as maintaining a population of speakers, native or otherwise.
“In mulling that over, I recognized that what’s needed is intrinsic motivation. People like me, we care about these languages for its merits, but not on their own terms. If I’m to systematize a process for their preservation, we need young, talented people with a real interest in learning fading languages, not only to archive them but to proselytize them to others. As it stands, as it continues to trend, there simply aren’t nearly enough to help archive, let alone constitute a living record.”
“What’s your solution?” I ask.
It’s fallen to me to facilitate, and she seems bound to ramble until the sun rises without delivering what we’ve listened to hear.
I’ll be damned if I’m going to have stood for that entire background without a conclusion, even as each sentence skirting the bulls-eye leaves me surer that it won’t be satisfying.
“You know NFTs?”
“I know of them.”
“One for each word. There’s an apocryphal story that the word ‘quiz’ was invented and popularized in the space of forty-eight hours; supposedly, to win a bet that he could, a man had the nonsense word chalked on walls across the city and it took on significance. Imagine the value of the word ‘the:’ how many would pay to officially own the word, even with no legal ramification?”
“To say nothing of the swears,” Jenny adds. “If ‘of’ and ‘and’ go for cheap, you can always raffle off ‘f—’”
“Exactly, exactly. A way to encourage the usage of even lesser-known words in obscure languages, once they’re freely distributed, without the difficulty of contracting out and quantifying efforts.”
“An end-run,” Grace comments. “Straight to the heart of the problem. I like that. Me myself, I’m doing the same with visuals. I was trying to build the next new dating application, a good one, to replace the product the last twenty people with the same idea came up with. Maybe I’d be different. But I wasn’t different enough to make a difference.
“Every test we tried at scale needed pictures. People don’t want profiles anymore, no matter what they tell you, they want dealbreakers and mugshots. So I started work on a related, smaller problem: people take awful pictures. You can point fingers about who does it worse, just like everything else, but the fact remains: there’s no level of outreach that’ll convince even some great catches to compile a good strip of snapshots.”
“How do you solve it?” I ask.
It isn’t especially natural, but I’d rather try to contribute here and there than fully give up and lurk around the periphery.
“Pictures other people take,” Grace answers. “Pictures you don’t even know they took, no need to go set up a photo shoot or ask your friends to pose with you at the bar. We ruled out a government deal in five minutes, and the whole point was to be exogenous to the incumbents, so: our own ride-along app.
“Two sides. The first has camera access, and whenever you take a picture, and since we’ve had to clarify, only when the user takes a picture, it scans our database for the second piece of the puzzle: a reference for what each of our users look like.
“AI, all of it, no humans in the loop, and we’ve done enough testing to ensure it’s completely private. When it matches, it anonymizes, crops, and sends on a time delay, and our user in the second half of the system gets a new candid picture to use or not.”
This time, I remember not to raise my hand.
“That seems like it would require huge scaling to do anything.”
“It would. But what in the space doesn’t?” She smiles. “Any other questions?”
“I have one.” Eva frowns. “Only one, at the moment, assuming you’ve truly addressed any safety concerns. Won’t your network lose out to anyone generating images with artificial intelligence?”
“I figure there’ll be some verification system baked in before too long, required in every upload.”
“Awfully grim,” Jenny remarks, “that that’s the best alternative you can think of.”
“It’s not an alternative. It’s a race to the bottom, sure, and it might only be slightly useful for a little while, but opting in will be a sign. It’ll mean you’re capable of evaluating risk and reward, that you’re an altruist, that you value what’s natural over what’s staged, and that you’re an optimist. It can be a crack in the armor, one I’m going to widen until a new paradigm takes over. People will buy in for whatever reason they tell themselves, and that buy-in will be meaningful.”
“For a week. If it ever happens.”
One by one, we turn to the squat, dead-eyed man whose name we didn’t know, whose fingers are wrapped tight around a paper cup from a chain restaurant. The bottom is practically pulp; it looks about a second from caving in like a submarine hull and sending his coffee to the floor.
“Even in that case,” Grace acknowledges, “it’ll have been worth trying. And it’ll give me and the team more information for when we take the next shot. Which we will do, because it’s important.”
“There comes a point when the chutzpah runs out.”
He mutters it, low, and squishes the cup in his hand. I grimace, but it is empty.
“What’s your story, pal?” Jenny asks.
“It’s over,” he says. “Before it started, it’s over.”
“Then get the hell out of here,” I tell him. “What’s the point of standing here like a sad sack, taking in the atmosphere, and spitting in our faces?”
“It’s a kindness.”
“Maybe. But justify yourself, or be nice, or—”
“I get it.”
I am glad he does; his recognition saves me from having to finish the sentence, and I’m far from confident I have enough clout or enough presence to enforce anything in this environment.
The music nearly drowns him out; there’s a dryness to his speech like he’s dug the words up from the back of his throat.
His speech is cogent, incisive; he claims to have floated a dozen goofy enterprises himself, and he claims that each fell through for a different, itself convincing, reason.
But he has listened only to prove he has listened; he is arrogant; he is too misanthropic to be heard; there is no wit or whimsy in him; and he cannot or does not understand that his attitude, just then, is unwelcome.
I reflect, as he speaks, upon myself, the diatribe continuing for long enough that I’m afforded the opportunity to do so.
I resolve that I will not err in quite that way; instead, I slip away without another word.