“No,” he said quickly. “Thanks, Adam. No, I just wanted to hear your voice. It was always…” I imagined him blushing. “You were always pretty good to me.”

Which for some reason made me feel even worse. “Okay, but listen. We’ll get together, I promise. Soon as I clear up some business out here. How’s that sound?”

“Sounds good.”

“In the meantime, let Aaron and Jenny pamper you for a while.”

“I can’t really do that. I mean, they’ll let me stay for a few weeks. But I don’t think Aaron is really happy having me here. It’s kind of…” He lowered his voice. “I don’t like this house. It’s big and it’s pretty, but I would hate to live here.” He added, a barely audible whisper, “Jenny has a black eye.”

“A what? What did you say? A black eye?”

“Yes.”

“What, like somebody punched her?”

A maddening pause. “I can’t talk about it.”

“Geddy, what do you mean?”

“Here she is. Here she is!”

“Geddy?”

Jenny came on. “We should keep this short. Aaron will be home any minute.”

“Are you all right?”

“What? Yes, of course I am. Why? What did Geddy say?”

“Nothing.” Or too much. “But he seems a little forlorn.”

“Look … I’ll text you about it, okay?”

“Of course.”

“Great. Well. Thank you for calling back, Adam. That was nice. I know you’re busy.”

“Never too busy to talk to my sister-in-law.”

“Great,” she said. “Good-bye.”

*   *   *

Damian had rented what the owner (a local Tau) called a “chalet” on a rural lot near the ocean on Pender Island. In reality it was a four-bedroom log-walled home with double-glazed windows and a kitchen big enough to feed and accommodate a dozen people.

We were slightly less than a dozen: me, Amanda, Damian, a tech guy from each of our two research teams, plus Gordo MacDonald and four of his security people. Gordo immediately scoped out the house and its surrounding territory and posted his subordinates where they could cover all approaches. “We’ll be inconspicuous,” he said. “We’ll feed ourselves and sleep in shifts. You probably won’t notice us. But if you do need us, all you have to do is holler.”

Which was reassuring, though it was unlikely that anyone had followed us here. The house felt safe. Even better, with the rain falling and the daylight beginning to fade and a fire crackling in the hearth, it felt cozy.

The feeling lasted until Damian told us what he had deduced from Meir Klein’s data.

*   *   *

It was obvious we hadn’t come here for a standard meeting, but Damian wanted to start with a progress report, so that’s what we gave him. My team leader and I summarized the problems we’d run into trying to design a portable Affinity-testing system. With suitable sensors, virtually any handheld digital device could record the results and run the algorithms. But another part of the traditional Affinity screening was a DNA test. Adding a portable nanopore sequencer to the kit would triple the cost to the end user and make the process needlessly complex, so we were looking at workarounds: a simpler filter that would detect only the relevant bases, or a two-part qualification process that would include a blood sample submitted to a registered lab. Amanda’s team leader said it might be possible to eliminate the DNA test altogether, since it mainly functioned as a kind of pre-screening, picking up a few gene sequences that were incompatible with any Affinity. Adding another layer of neurotesting might achieve the same effect.

All well and good, and we chewed it over for an hour or so, but this wasn’t the main event. That began when Damian stood up, clearing his throat and looking uncharacteristically awkward. “Okay,” he said. “Thank you, and I’m really pleased with the progress we’re making. But we all know this is happening in a larger context. The overarching goal is to cut loose the Affinities from InterAlia, to let each Affinity govern itself according to its own interests. Meir Klein foresaw that possibility and wanted to encourage it. But he foresaw a few other things, too, maybe not so nice. I brought along Dr. Navarro to explain this.”

Ruben Navarro was the oldest Tau on the team: he was seventy-one and had held a chair in analytical sociology at the University of Montreal for more than twenty years. Amanda and I had shared lunch with him a couple of times. Navarro was old enough that he had met Klein at academic conferences before Klein’s work was locked up by InterAlia; they had published in the same professional journals. He sat in a chair by the window, his halo of white hair framed by the rain-silvered glass, and he spoke without getting up.

“Physicists have said that what they would ultimately like to discover is ‘a theory of everything.’ For the science of neurosocial teleodynamics, the equivalent goal would be ‘a theory of everyone.’ We’re not quite there yet. Social teleodynamics is a technique for modeling human psychology and human social interactions with unprecedented accuracy. It’s not a crystal ball. But like any science, it does make certain predictions. We can extrapolate from current events. We can run models based on our assumptions and see where they take us. As I like to say, the result is less reliable than a weather forecast but more reliable than divination.”

It was a line that may have had them rolling in the aisles in Navarro’s classes at Montreal, but we just nodded and waited for him to go on. “What is original in Klein’s work,” he said, “is the subtlety and complexity of the modeling. In that respect, he was far in advance of anything I have seen in the peer-reviewed literature. The method by which he derives his models is radical and contentious, but for now we can go with Klein’s claim that it is reliable. So, for instance, we can ask ourselves what Klein’s model predicts for interactions between the various Affinities, if InterAlia ceases to exert comprehensive control. But we have to ask that question in light of a larger one, one posed by Klein himself: How is the general culture changing, and what is the role of the Affinities in that change?” Navarro paused, and a gust of wind rattled the window. “In simple terms, Klein was asking: Is our social structure viable? Is there a future worth looking forward to? Or are we simply fucked?”

Which got a suppressed laugh from Amanda. Navarro acknowledged her reaction with a wry smile.

“Without going into detail, I can say that his research suggests that we are not entirely fucked. But it’s a close thing. The problems confronting us are the obvious ones—climate change, resource competition, population stress, and all the human conflicts arising from those problems. What makes these questions especially difficult is that they cannot be dealt with comprehensively by individual action. We need to act collectively, on a global scale. But we have very limited means of doing that. We are a collaborative species, the most successful such species on the planet, but we collaborate as individuals, for mutual gain, under systems established to promote and protect such collaboration. Our global economic and social behavior is largely unconstrained. Which means that, under certain circumstances, it can run away with us. It can carry us all unwilling into the land of unforeseen consequences. Which is a very dark place indeed. May I have a glass of water, Damian?”

“Something stronger, if you like.”

“No, water is fine.”

Damian rustled up a glass of ice water while we fidgeted. Navarro accepted the glass, took a sip, licked his lips. “Now, all this is elementary social teleodynamics. But here again, Klein does something daring. Because he knows more about the Affinities than anyone else—and because he can model them with unprecedented accuracy—he has factored their influence into his predictions.”

Amanda said, “And that makes a difference?”

“Yes! Quite a startling difference! Klein’s research suggests that the Affinities could become major players in the evolution of a pan-global culture. By which I mean they will increasingly influence politics, policy, and economics. They could in fact come to serve in place of what is so conspicuously absent—a global human conscience.”