The Soft Truth
By: Leigh Alexander
Tags: Algorithms, Satisfying Videos, Fiction, Artificial Intelligence, Algowave

For the past few weeks, I’m pretty sure I’ve been seeing another me. Wednesday afternoon I left my apartment to walk to the train and I saw her — me — crossing the intersection at the top of the hill, walking briskly. Then over the weekend I was washing dishes and staring out the window, just spacing out, and she was crossing the park, a shape appearing and disappearing among trees. I couldn’t get a good look.

I know you’re thinking it can’t be, that it must just be someone who looks like me. I’ll admit that none of the clothes I see her wearing are mine, but they’re similar — like when I saw her jogging near the gate at the foot of the hill in the park, she was wearing a fleece exactly like my mint one, but purple. In fact, when I saw her the first time, barely a speck in the distance boarding a bus, I thought: I’d buy that handbag. And then: oh my gosh, that’s me.

I think it has to do with the gelatin sphere. I think she knows how to find it. Maybe she even looks at it every day. You might think it’s wild that I’ve been seeing another me — right in my own neighborhood, for weeks — yet the main thing I want to talk to her about is the gelatin sphere. I get that, but given the precise timing of when she appeared, it’s hard not to be convinced she has answers I don’t. Since she’s definitely me, it could be the only thing she knows that I don’t. What else would I have to talk about with myself? I already talk to myself enough as it is.

About the gelatin sphere: It all started about a month ago after I was fired from my job at Footprint Consulting, where I had worked for maybe six years as an executive researcher. No, I wasn’t the executive; I mean I researched executives. No matter how tidy you are with your life in digital space, you’ve probably said or done something that isn’t really you. It’s in the Livejournal from your teens or your MSN messenger logs, or in some fantasy you texted to your ex a few years ago while she was abroad, or in some photo you were tagged in, unbeknownst to you. It’s in the reddit relationships thread or the image board memes you forgot you used all those times late at night while drinking corner shop wine. The digital germs of your subconscious are all over everything — and if I can find them all, someone else could easily dredge up at least some, and then everyone sees it and you’re a liability.

How, then, could my own firing have come as such a shock? I try hard in my daily life to avoid buying into the fictions of capitalism, but with this role I had really allowed myself to believe a few key things: That I was on a steadily inclining path to ever more relevant skills and prosperity; that I was part of a team of caring individuals; that the company was invested in my career progression (ha!), and that we were all on a path to improving the digital climate together.

That sounds dumb now that I put it to words. Sorry, ‘dumb’ is an ableist slur, and I of all people ought to be way past that by now. Honestly, it’s no surprise that I, personally — my ‘case’ — was the team’s first ‘call coming from inside the house,’ as Veronica Rosenfelt put it the day she fired me, with a persimmon frown. This is also going to sound foolish, but I guess I had kind of thought Veronica liked me. Do you ever get the feeling that you’re starting to understand a person, a system, a pattern, perhaps even starting to master it, only to have the whole thing upended? The day I got fired, I stood waiting for the bus, softly holding my box of desk shit between my two small hands, my fired, downturned little face looking over all of these things and feeling a melancholy pang in my heart. Absolutely, I was feeling sorry for myself! There is no sadder image than that of oneself experiencing rejection and exile, clutching the humble and lightweight detritus of the life you’d tried and failed to build somewhere! Actually, this could have been where it all started.

Because it wasn’t that I actually felt sorry for myself right then. I felt weirdly fine, to be honest, a little bit tired and thirsty and looking forward to watching a Forensic Files marathon on Netflix, to sprawling listlessly on my modular sofa in the illicit afternoon of my quiet apartment building, about to enjoy the slow unclenching that comes with an unexpected day off. It was more like, inside the chamber of my heart that was hurting in that moment, some desperate commander suddenly threw a doomsday switch and reality branched.

Even though I knew, waiting for a bus in the indifferent sunlight of early spring, that I was the one who had been wrong at work, I became suddenly aware of a version of myself who was worthy of uncomplicated compassion. I saw her — just in my mind’s eye at this point, not for real, that would come later — standing outside me, a few yards away, holding her sorrow box, on her way home to an empty apartment, and deserving a hug.