“So what do people talk about, when they’ve been introduced by an algorithm?”

“Making a better world,” she said.

*   *   *

Upstairs, the afternoon was wearing on. Sunlight from the dining room window tracked over the big table as I helped Mama Laura set it. My father remained upstairs, and we were all conscious of the fact that he was mortally ill, but that didn’t stop the talk or the laughter—it was therapeutic, not insensitive, and Mama Laura said at one point it might be doing him good, the sound of us all together down here, like the old days.

Around five o’clock the phone rang. Mama Laura had never replaced the slate-black landline phone my parents had owned when I was a teenager; picking up the handset, she looked like a character from a historical drama. It was easy to guess by her grin who was on the other end. “Aaron,” she announced when the call ended. “He and Jenny just landed.” At the Onenia County regional airport west of Schuyler, that would have been, probably on a chartered flight from DC. “They’ll be here in forty-five minutes or so.”

Geddy and Rebecca exchanged uneasy glances, by which I guessed Geddy had shared some of the family’s less savory secrets with her. I excused myself, went into the bathroom, and took out my own phone. I called Trevor Holst at the Holiday Inn. “They’re coming,” I said.

“Okay. Keep me posted.”

Five hours before the lights went out.

CHAPTER 15

Much later, I looked at some of the posts Rebecca Drabinsky had left on her own website and others. Some of what she had written struck me as prescient, and this is one of the passages I bookmarked:

We are falling.

Everything made of matter is falling. We call it entropy. Matter decays. Stars eventually stop shining; planets grow cold, or are scorched to embers which themselves grow cold. Matter falls, and sooner or later it hits bottom.

Life is part of that process. Life is entropic. We dissipate the energy of the sun. Life is a falling-in-progress.

What makes living things unique is that they are teleodynamic. By dissipating the sunlight stored in food we sustain ourselves at a level above our natural rest state, which is death. Our falling is an act of self-creation. We FALL FORWARD, as individuals and as a species.

For most of the history of our species, the goals we fell toward were simple. Food to eat, food for our families, food for our tribe. Shelter for ourselves, our families, our tribes. The imperatives of love and reproduction.

But in the contemporary world, for a significant proportion of the world’s human beings, those basic needs have been met, if only partially and inadequately and unjustly. Under such circumstances, what does it mean to fall forward?

The Affinities were an attempt to harness and enhance the human genius for collaboration. And they succeeded … for those who qualified for membership. But the Affinities are a tribal model. Twenty-two pocket utopias, each with an entrance fee. Twenty-two Edens, and every Eden with a wall around it and with a crowd of hostile, envious outsiders peering in.

Because it’s not enough just to favor collaboration. Collaboration is a means, not an end. Tribes devise goals that benefit the tribe, and tribes come into conflict. Endless Affinity warfare—or the capture of political power by any single Affinity—is not an outcome we should endorse or permit.

New Socionome works differently. The social nuclei we create are open and polyvalent. We make social molecules that hook up complexly and create the possibility of new emergent behavior. Our algorithms of connection favor non-zero-sum transactions, as the Affinities do, but they also facilitate long-term panhuman goals: prosperity, peace, fairness, sustainability. The arc of human history is long but our algorithms bend toward justice. We aren’t just falling. We’re FALLING FORWARD.

I was struck by what she had written because it explained much of what happened that weekend in Schuyler. And my role in it, and hers.

*   *   *

Aaron and Jenny arrived an hour before dinner, carried from the regional airport in one of the ancient black Lincoln MKTs the local taxi company passed off as limousines. Aaron rang the bell, he and Jenny were duly hugged and handshaken, and Mama Laura sent Geddy out to fetch their luggage: two identical hardshell travel cases of a high-end German brand.

My elder brother had learned to carry himself with the kind of assumed authority people call “statesmanlike.” Shoulders square, chin up. His hair was styled and streaked with gray at the temples. The gray didn’t look natural, and I pictured him in front of a bathroom mirror, painting it on. Maybe a good move for an inexperienced junior congressman. His handshake was a quick, decisive squeeze. This, too, felt rehearsed. “Hey, little brother,” he said.

“Hey back at you, Aaron.”

Jenny gave me a hug. She lingered a moment before we broke apart, but I tried not to read anything into it. The obvious question was on my mind: was she still willing to do what she had offered to do?

But there seemed to be no uncertainty or indecision about her. The old tentative, soft-spoken Jenny—the it’s-okay-with-me-if-it’s-okay-with-you Jenny, the Jenny I had known and halfheartedly courted as a teenager—was gone. In her place was someone not just older but vastly more cynical. Her eyes were wary, her smile more mechanical than genuine.

Mama Laura called us to dinner as soon as Aaron and Jenny had dropped their bags and washed up: “You got here just in time!”

We took our places. The head of the table was empty until my father came shambling downstairs. He wore dress pants and a crisply starched white shirt, tragically loose on him now. We waited in silence until he had eased his body into the chair. He nodded at Jenny and gave Aaron what was probably intended as a cheery wink. “All right then,” he said. “Let’s eat.”

“Not before the blessing,” Mama Laura said. She asked Aaron to say some words, and he bowed his head and reminded the Lord that we were all thankful for what we were about to receive.

Four hours before the lights went out.

*   *   *

I harbored a faint hope that my father’s illness had mellowed him, but there wasn’t much evidence of that. True, there were no lengthy tirades, and for most of the meal it seemed as if he had abandoned his lifelong habit of correcting the opinions of others. He put a serving of Mama Laura’s glazed ham and a mound of Mama Laura’s candied sweet potatoes on his plate but did little more than poke at them with his fork. He looked at each of us in turn, rotating his gaze around the table, pausing at each face as if he needed to commit it to memory. Our talk was amiable but subdued and he listened to it with an unreadable expression.

Then, as the serving dishes made a second round, Rebecca asked him whether there was any news from India.

She knew he had been upstairs watching television news, and I guessed she meant to include him in the conversation. Full credit for good intentions, but I held my breath like everyone else at the table.

My father focused his eyes on her and pursed his lips in an expression of distaste. After a long moment in which the only sound was the screech of Geddy chasing peas across his plate with a fork, he said, “There are drones.”

“Drones?”

“Yeah, drones, you know, pilotless aircraft?”

“I know what a drone is, but—”

“Probably Chinese. From their ships in the Arabian Sea.”

“Surveillance drones?” The Indian government had been complaining about Chinese surveillance drones for weeks now; they had shot down a couple and put the wreckage on display.

“No. They’re blowing things up. Big news.”

That caught the attention of Aaron, who had recently been appointed to a House subcommittee on military affairs. He said, “Blowing what up?”