IDOLS

 

KEN LIU

 

Ken Liu (kenliu.name) is an author of speculative fiction, as well as a translator, lawyer, and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, he has been published in F&SF, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. His debut novel, The Grace of Kings, is the first volume in a silkpunk epic fantasy series, the Dandelion Dynasty. It won the Locus Award for Best First Novel and was a Nebula Award finalist. He subsequently published the second volume in the series, The Wall of Storms; two collections of short stories, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories and The Hidden Girl and Other Stories; and Star Wars novel The Legends of Luke Skywalker. Forthcoming is The Veiled Throne, the next book in the Dandelion Dynasty. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.

 

 

1. Blowin’ In the Wind

 

EVERY FRIDAY NIGHT, I call my father.

“How’s Bella?”

“Good. Busy. Lawyers, you know?”

“Busy is good. Does she like her job?”

“Much more than I like mine. But she can be... a bit obsessive about the work.”

“We’re lucky if we get something in life to be obsessed with. I bet she’s good at what she does.”

“The best.”

“What’s wrong, Dylan? You sound a little down.”

“No, not down exactly... Dad, when did you start thinking you wanted kids? I don’t mean me. I mean... later.”

The briefest of pauses, barely discernible. I try not to think about the software behind the idol, searching, collating, synthesizing, anticipating…

“Not sure there’s an exact moment—though that would make a much better story…”

I’ve never met my father and never will.

 

 

 

OURMATIC WAS ONE of those places that emphasized how smart their employees were so you wouldn’t question how little they paid you as you toiled the long hours. Open-plan office, brightly colored chairs, contemporary art on the walls. Like most companies with a name like that, we didn’t make anything. I was paid to make up plausible stories about spreadsheets—like just about every corporate job still done by humans.

One of the perks they offered was “Wellness Fridays,” when health experts—yoga instructors, nutritionists, or even once, a “master meditator”—would come to deliver lectures or give workshops in the biggest conference room. Maybe the program led to a reduction in the premiums the company paid for our health plan, or maybe management thought it was the sort of thing people of my generation expected, like composting bins and free snacks in the kitchen. In any event, I went every Friday without fail.

This was how I ended up attending the presentation from 46on46; how I ended up submitting a sample of my cheek cells for “personalized genetic counseling”; how I ended up staring at an email in my inbox, forwarded from 46on46, informing me that the database had found me a “DNA relative.”

I sent some emails, made some phone calls, then drove across the state line. I met my grandparents, my half-sisters, my uncles. Not my father, though. He had died a few years ago. A boating accident. When I had all the facts I could gather, I got on a plane and went home.

My mother sighed and asked me if I wanted some tea.

Growing up, she never talked about my father. It was just one of those things you learned to accept, like the way the bathroom door jammed, or the way the chair legs squeaked against the floor, no matter how gently you sat down.

“I don’t want to,” she had said, the one time I tried to make an issue of it. “Think of him as a sperm donor.”

There were no photographs, no scraps of paper with his handwriting, no extra-large men’s shirt in the back of the closet or a scuffed-up pair of boots in a corner. I didn’t even have a name to go on, first or last.

Why did she scrub his existence so completely out of her life? I didn’t have the smoothest of relationships with my mother, and the father-shaped void didn’t make it any easier. It was all too easy to use him as an excuse, an explanation for my flaws that clarified nothing. Did I get my moodiness from him? Was he as disinterested in competition as I was? When my mother complained about my thoughtlessness, was she also complaining about the shadow of him she saw in me? Sometimes, I would lock myself in the bathroom and look in the mirror, trying to imagine myself decades older.

“Dad, are you proud of me?”

No more imagining. Time for my mother to tell the story.

My father, as it turned out, never knew I existed. He had dropped out of a graduate program and then traveled around the country, living out of his car and trying to figure out who he was. My mother, ten years his senior, met him at an anti-war protest. She liked the way he played the guitar, trying to keep up everyone’s spirit at the rally. She wanted a child but not a husband, and saw him as the perfect—

“—sperm donor. There’s no grand romance, no dark mystery,” she said. “No vows were broken. There’s no tale of love that soured, or a long, drawn-out tempestuous divorce from which you could draw some lesson. It was meaningless.”

My mother was right. I wasn’t abandoned. I wasn’t a mistake. As far as my father was concerned, I was... nothing.

Yet, I continued to reach out to my father’s family. They probably found my obsession as odd as my mother did. There was, after all, no relationship at all between us except a tenuous, biological link. But they were obliging. They told me stories about him as a boy, as a young man, as a father. They told me about the time he drove two hundred miles to reunite a puppy with its family. They brought out the awards he won as a teacher. They showed me videos and photos, notebooks and printouts from high school, boxes of stuff taken home from college and then never opened again, pictures with his wife and my sisters, email updates about trips he had taken with them.

I learned so much about my father, yet I felt like I didn’t know him at all. It was hard enough to know someone, anyone, in life; much harder to figure out someone dead, who could answer no questions, offer no explanations, provide no word of comfort.

I decided to make an idol.

Now that I knew his identity, I could set the seeking bots to follow my father’s digital trail. His family hadn’t bothered to delete his old accounts, and I convinced his wife to accept my friend requests, so that I could collect more material for the idol-maker. The few cellphone videos of him were too lo-fi to enable a convincing animation, but that was all right. I didn’t want to step into the uncanny valley.

After days of waiting, a text arrived from Mnemosynee, informing me that the idol was ready. I took a deep breath, dialed the number given, and held the phone up to my ear.

“Hello? Ryan speaking.”

The voice was the same one I had heard in the cellphone videos: a bit gravelly, more than a bit impatient.

“Hi…” I paused. It seemed odd to say Dad. “Hi Ryan. This is... Dylan.”

“I don’t know who that is.”

“I know... How... how are you?”

 

 

IDOLS WERE FIRST developed as a way for celebrities to engage with their fans. Out of the millions who loved a singer, actor, lifestyle guru... how many ever got to meet the object of their devotion in person? And out of those, how many ever got to give more than a breathless declaration of adoration, received more than a perfunctory smile, held on to more than the briefest of handshakes? There had to be a way to scale up one-on-one engagement, to give loyal fans what they craved the most: a personal connection with their idol.

A team of psychologists, machine-learning experts, and neural network sculptors were handed an archive of the subject’s interview footage, concert videos, films, meet-and-greet recordings, social media posts... (celebrities who really wanted to impress their fans would also throw in diaries, unpublished poetry collections, notebooks with ideas on how to achieve world peace…). From this raw material, the technical experts generated a personality model and crafted a simulacrum of the celebrity.

After creating an account, a fan could talk with the digital idol for hours through the looking glass of their screen. Visit after visit, the idol would remember the fan’s name and life story, offer words of encouragement, tell new stories and clear up old rumors, meet the kids and reminisce about past encounters. It was like having the celebrity as your best friend who had moved to the other coast.

Once the technology was developed, it found plenty of new uses: political campaigning, Internet harassment, self-improvement “ego-hacking” ...or a way to get to know the parent one never knew.

 

 

“I DON’T KNOW what to say. I never had a son.”

I laugh. “Did you ever think about what you’d say if you had a son, and he asked for the three most important things you ever learned?”

“Three? That’s a tall order. Why don’t we start with half a thing…”

The idol is a consensual illusion. It isn’t some copy of my father. It’s just algorithms encoding basic insights about human nature being applied to data, making probabilistic predictions about possible reactions. It isn’t self-aware, isn’t alive. Moreover, the data I gave Mnemosynee on my father was limited. I didn’t have his search history, his deleted posts, his secret accounts. All I had was a selection of what he was willing to share with the world, to put into the permanent and permanently crumbling stream of our shared digital existence.

So long as I stay within the parameters of what the algorithms can extrapolate, the illusion holds. They can’t tell me anything that I couldn’t already have gleaned from the archive.

“Do you try to give Bella her space?”

“I think so.”

“That doesn’t mean you leave her alone—it means you do some things together, so you keep getting to know each other, and some other things apart, so you can both grow. Jennifer and I used to take vacations together but also apart. You need both. Especially after you have kids.”

“Good to know. She doesn’t take her vacation days... I should talk to her about it.”

Fundamentally, talking to the idol of my father was no different from typing into something like ELIZA, or the conversations I had with myself in the bathroom mirror as a boy.

“You know, I used to play the guitar too.”

“Play something for me.”

I go into the storage cubby in the basement to dig it out. Out of tune. Fingers rusty. I try to imagine what he would like.

“I used to play that! I drove around for a year right after college, protesting against the war, against Wall Street, the drug companies... Good song. I’m proud of you.”

It’s a crafted response. Just some algorithms extrapolating from his old emails. It isn’t real.

“I think it’s about the helplessness you feel as a child, because you don’t know, and then as a parent, because you still don’t know. You grow and grow and you can’t ever figure it out. None of us know what we’re doing.”

I can’t stop the damned tears.

So long as I keep talking to him, this digital simulation of my father will remember me as I have my own kids, grow old, come to accept the impossibility of wisdom. I will catch up to it and then age past it. It will never offer me a piece of wisdom that my father hadn’t already put down in some form during his forty years on Earth; it will never be anything more than a sophisticated game. And, without the addition of fresh real-life data to correct its course, the longer it goes on, the more the idol will deviate from my real father. Yet, I know I will keep on talking. The void can’t be filled, but it’s a part of me.

I can’t stop the damned tears.

 

 

2. Verum Dicere

 

THE EAGER JUNIOR associates around the conference table have been waiting for me for the last two hours. As one, they turn as I stride into the war room. That’s a lot of billable hours.

But then again, with half a billion dollars of compensatory and punitive damages at stake, I don’t think the client will complain.

I throw the faxed juror list on the giant screen at the end—the judiciary is possibly the last place that still insists on communicating in this ancient manner (why not send a carrier pigeon while they’re at it?).

“Voir dire starts at 9:00 AM sharp on Monday,” I tell them. “We’ve got just over sixty-four hours to prep for jury selection.”

Groans from around the room. They know I intend to make use of every last one of those hours.

“Bella, isn’t this a little late?” Drake asks, a smirk on his face. “I thought you said you had an in with the judge’s clerk.”

I can’t stand the guy. He can be charming as a giggling baby with partners in corner offices, but when he has to report to someone like me—not a partner and not even on the track—he always has a dig or two.

“I do,” I tell him, my voice cool and in control. “Selene likes me. That’s why we’re getting the juror list a full fifteen minutes ahead of the other side.”

I tell them to focus on the first fifty names. If there’s time on Sunday, we’ll get to the rest.

“Remember to check variant spellings, nicknames, maiden names. No one registers social media accounts or dating profiles under their full legal name. Screenshot your search results right away so that we can tell if the other side plants honeytraps—”

This isn’t paranoia. Though it’s against the rules, I’ve known unscrupulous jury consulting firms to maintain batches of fake social media profiles and age them for years before changing the names to match prospective jurors on the eve of voir dire in an important trial to mislead the other side. The decoys would poison the idols sculpted by their opponent with made-up facts. One more reason our fifteen-minute head start is worth more than these greenhorns can possibly understand.

I bark out orders as the associates clumsily divide up the names—God, do new associates get younger every year or am I losing my mind?

“Scrape up everything! Always better to have too much than too little. Don’t delude yourself into thinking you’re smarter than the harvesters ’cause you aren’t. Your primary job is to sit in front of your laptop, look into the camera, and say ‘I am not a robot’ so the guardian bots don’t lock out the harvesters... ”

I exaggerate. But only a little. I know how to tweak the parameters of the harvesters for better results, but not everyone can claim to have written the firm’s manual on jury research.

“What’s the point of rushing?” Drake asks. “Doesn’t the summons usually advise prospective jurors to lock down their social media feeds anyway?”

“Yes, but people don’t listen,” I explain, trying to be patient. “That’s why you still hear about people live-rumbling during voir dire. Or they schedule the lock-down to happen the weekend before they’re supposed to show up at court. Time is of the essence.”

I watch as the associates set up their laptops and launch the harvesters. The bots need to have fresh credentials for the major social media networks every research session to avoid being tagged. Soon, the associates lean into their cameras; a chorus begins around the room. It’s a beautiful sight, no matter how many times I’ve seen it.

“...I am not a robot.”

“I agree to the terms of service...”

“At MingleBingo, my smile is my password...”

Rules of ethics prohibit us from friending prospective jurors to view their locked-down feeds, but there’s a ton of data you can gather without that. Most people, even the super privacy-conscious, have friends who aren’t, and these friends will leak everything we need. (You’d be amazed by the number of people, even in this day and age, who’ll accept any and all friend requests.)

Add to that all the breach-troves from data-aggregators, the hacked databases leaked onto the grey web, the forums and blogs and comment forms and chat servers and rumble-tumbles that all require registration—the harvesters can build an impressive file on just about anyone except those who never touch a computer. (We’ll want to peremptorily strike them anyway. Tinfoil-hat types don’t make good jurors.)

While my little helpers are gathering the data, I call for dinner. The hard part comes after that.

 

 

I SET THE associates to manually go over the scraped dating profiles and social media posts to keep them busy. Well, it’s not entirely busywork to pad the timesheets. Once in a while one of them will see something that we miss in the idols. But the real work is done here in the modeling room, by Kevin and his analytics gang, with me supervising.

The modeling room is a cavernous, windowless space. It used to be the copy center two decades ago. With so few submissions on paper now, it’s long been taken over by servers and quad-monitor workstations.

“How’s the catch?” Kevin, Head of Analysis, drops into his chair. He’s forty-two, goatee already showing streaks of grey. Before joining us, he used to work for the government, constructing idols of suspected extremists in order to assess their potential for actual terrorism. (Rumors were that he also sculpted idols of opposition leaders in countries where we wanted to effect regime-change to determine whether they were strong enough and sufficiently loyal to American interests for the US to fund them, but that sort of thing would be classified.)

“Not bad,” I tell him. “We have some prolific v-casters in the bunch.”

Video is prized over almost any other kind of data for our approach to idol-construction. So much of jury-selection is about finding people with the emotional profiles and personalities to be amenable to persuasion, and videos are by far the most revealing medium for drawing links between triggers and micro expressions.

“Anything really rich?”

He means “rich with data,” like a vein of ore. “We got lucky with a few private adult chat profiles. Lots of video.”

He raises an eyebrow. “No problems with using those?”

I shrug. “The prohibition is against ex parte communication. As far as I’m concerned, if you reuse credentials already leaked in another data breach, you’re just asking for the world to stroll in and take a look-see.”

He nods and forks off fifty new casts—blank neural networks to be populated and trained with the data gathered by the harvesters. He types into a bunch of console windows and flips through colorful displays, visualizing the developing idols. Even with the full processing power of the modeling room at his disposal, it still takes time to build low-res idols for the voir dire stage.

I’m a little bored and feeling restless. I don’t mean to sound boastful, but there really isn’t anyone in the city—maybe the whole east coast—better at this than I am. The work has gotten a bit stale.

I decide to call home.

“Hey.”

“Hey. Am I going to see you this weekend at all?”

I melt a little at Dylan’s voice, yearning, with just a hint of desperation in it.

“I don’t think so. I told you the trial starts on Monday. I promise I’ll make it up to you Monday night.”

As I talk to him, my eyes roam around the modeling room. Some of the analysts are tapping away at their keyboards, assisting Kevin; others nap in their cubicles, knowing that they’ll be asked to pull an all-nighter. Along the eastern wall are storage cubicles for the embodiment robots, into which we could pour the idols of the various trial judges that attorneys at the firm regularly argue in front of. Two technicians are doing some maintenance on the robot that currently hosts the idol for Judge May. Tomorrow morning, starting at 8:00 AM, the trial team will come in and hold mock sessions all day in front of her. I’ll need multiple simulated juries of idols ready for them.

“I suspect you’ll just drive back to the office right after I fall asleep,” Dylan says. A loving chuckle.

I laugh too. He accepts how much I love my work, even though he finds it hard to understand. We accept quirks in the people we love.

“You should take me up on visiting the office sometime,” I tell him.

He makes some noncommittal noise. I know he finds the idea of litigation idols creepy. But what fun thing isn’t at least a little bit creepy? Dolls, Imojis, those Furby-things I had as a kid.

“I talked to my dad tonight,” he says. “Wanted to find out when he first knew he wanted kids.”

Case in point. I don’t understand why he talks to an idol of a man who’s his father only in name. But I accept it.

My mind drifts as he recounts the conversation.

Along the north wall, sitting in their black robes, are the eleven active and senior judges of the circuit court of appeals. The firm actually hired a local artist to sculpt the molds for the faces. Cast from the latest in biomimetic materials, the robot faces faithfully replicate every fraction of a millimeter in a raised eyebrow and every subtle wrinkle at the corner of the mouth in an exasperated sigh.

“...‘It’s all too easy to become obsessed with yourself,’ he said...”

The appellate judge-bots are serious overkill. We argue less than a dozen cases at the court of appeals every year, and oral argument is the least significant stage of an appellate case. Why can’t the partners just practice against the idols in VR or rely on plain video? The realism of these robots adds virtually no advantage. Personally, I feel the money would be much better spent on upping the simulation resolution in the trial judge idols.

“...‘Family’s important, you know?’ I know he wasn’t really my family, but I feel the same way...”

But that’s not my decision. The prestige of appellate litigation makes the managing committee go weak at the knees and happy to throw money at it. The partners like to practice in front of the robots and impress important clients with private tours of the modeling room.

(Mind you, I’m not saying analytics aren’t useful at the appellate stage. Judges are people, and it is possible to craft briefs to appeal to their peculiar tendencies. Even better, the junior associates often can give us private information about the judges’ clerks—their former classmates—and if your brief can get the mini-idols of the clerks excited, chances are, you’ve got yourself a free advocate in the chambers. To keep the appellate idols up to date, Kevin and his team download every appellate record, feed the transcripts and recordings to the idols, and test the predictions against actual outcomes. I understand that so far they are batting just over .900, which I have to admit is pretty damn impressive.)

“...What do you think?”

Too late, I realize that he’s expecting an answer of some sort. “I’m... I’m sorry. What?”

Dylan sighs. I can hear the disappointment as well as the forgiveness. He knows I haven’t been listening. “I was suggesting that we take a road trip together. You have the vacation days. No phone, no tablet, no idols, no work at all. Just driving and talking. Just us.”

“...What brought this on?”

“I think we need to talk about the future, about kids.” He sounds calm, but isn’t.

I feel blindsided. Why can’t he just keep up his end of the comfortable routine, the routine I rather like? What is this sudden emotional outburst about? There’s been no warning.

“I... Things are really busy. I can’t think about—”

“Okay.” Kevin spins around in his chair. “The roughcasts are ready. You want to sculpt?”

“Gotta go,” I say into the phone.

“Love you,” he says after a pause, hurt, still yearning.

“Love you too,” I say, and I mean it. I hang up.

I take a deep breath and exhale, trying to push away the aftershock of the conversation with Dylan. I can’t think about this right now. I have to win first.

I scoot my chair near Kevin’s giant monitors, filled with a grid of rotating, amorphous, rainbow-hued blobs. The visualization software is showing various personality traits of the crude idols, and it’s my job now to tweak them based on my intuition about the prospective jurors.

Sculpting idols is part science, part art. You know how those wax portraits done by 3D scanners sometimes don’t seem to capture the “soul” of the subject as swell as a bust crafted by a good artist? It’s the same principle. You need the human touch.

I click on the first square in the grid until the spinning blob expands to fill the screen. I bring up the scraped data on prospective juror number one, and begin to examine the idol with the mouse. I tell Kevin where I think the algorithms didn’t quite get it right, and he modifies the model per my instructions.

 

 

IT’S NEAR MIDNIGHT by the time I bring the junior associates the news that the idols are ready to confront them.

“The software has already ranked the jurors in terms of how desirable they are to us. If your own assessment is different, note that somewhere, but don’t question the algorithm! The machine never misses anything. Figure out what you missed.”

Before we had idols, consultants used to conduct community surveys and neighborhood roundtables before a trial to advise the attorneys on general attitudes in the jury pool. And then there would be a mad rush to segment the potential jurors by demographics, profession, tax bracket, location, and the like right before voir dire. Compared with those crude tools, even the low-res idols we could construct overnight are precision scalpels.

“Your job is to figure out lines of questioning that will allow us to strike the ones we don’t like for cause—or better yet, to get the other side to strike them for cause or waste one of their peremptories. Get them to voice their prejudices, conspiracy theories, wacky weltanschauung. And if there’s time, also figure out how we might save the ones we like with good rehabilitation questions. The software will give you suggestions, but you need to vet them and see if you can come up with a plausible script of questions that won’t be too obvious and tick off the judge. This is where you can prove you’re better than a machine!”

Never hurts to try to encourage the troops a little.

I watch the junior associates run back to their offices with their assigned idols to probe and prod, feeling like a wise Jedi master sending her Padawans into battle.

They’ll do fine. I’m not saying voir dire research is easy, but working with the crude idols roughed out with so little research and time isn’t too challenging. The machine’s suggestions for striking undesirable jurors are almost always good enough. The truth is: the other side will have idols of their own and will be prepping just as hard, and they’ll never allow potential jurors with a pronounced bias towards us to be empaneled. We’ll end up with a jury that’s reasonably persuadable either way. When I explained this to Dylan, he looked horrified. But I told him this is just the system working the way it’s supposed to, assuming you think a bunch of fence-sitters swaying whichever way the hot air blows is the best way to achieve justice.

“You tell me you like your work. But you sound so cynical about it.”

I don’t know why I’m thinking of Dylan’s words. They bother me more than I care to admit. But there’s no time for that.

I turn to the much tougher task: opposing counsel and witness prep.

I load up the idol of the lead partner on the other side, a woman who has been litigating these types of cases longer than I’ve been alive.

She stares out of the screen, grim-faced, lips pressed together severely. I can see how she could put the fear of God into a first-year associate with one look. But she doesn’t intimidate me. With so much trial experience in the public record and speeches at professional conferences, we have a lot more transcripts and videos to work with, lots more data to feed into her idol.

“How do I make you mad?” I whisper into the screen.

She remains frozen, unable to respond.

We’ve been at this for days, weeks. The daily battle of wills has become a part of my routine, like filling out time sheets and doing the dishes. I’ve found several openings already, though none quite at the level of a killing blow. Not yet.

The software scours the ether nonstop for information about her, relentlessly refines her idol. I’m going to try again tonight.

I press the button to make her come alive.

The idol has no memory. Every day is brand new. I begin, as I always do. “Good evening, Ms. Gaughen.”

She looks irritated. “Do I know you? Do you have an appointment?”

Though she’s done this to me countless times already, I suppress a pang of... what? Annoyance? Injured pride? Of course she wouldn’t know me. Being unknown, devoid of prestige, no matter how much I contribute to a victory, is part of the job. On the firm website, I’m listed in the “Tax and Private Client” group. Good place to stay out of the limelight.

“I’ve admired your work for a long time, Ms. Gaughen. I’m feeling a little stuck, and I’d like some advice on my career.” I have all the opposing counsels’ idols primed to respond to this question. It’s a bit artificial, but it’s the quickest way to get to business.

“All right.” Her face relaxes. “Tell me about yourself.”

My first impulse is to lash out. The question, one I’ve heard so many times from her before, feels like an accusation tonight. I don’t understand. What is wrong with me? What is this emotional outburst? There’s been no warning.

I force myself to follow the script.

In litigation, one soon learns that whether something is true doesn’t matter; whether the jury believes it’s true is the only thing that matters. This isn’t a criticism. We designed the system that way. Since the jury cannot conduct experiments, examine witnesses themselves, or investigate the evidence independently, they’re solely allowed to decide who to believe. Credibility, authority, truthfulness—we make these assessments based primarily on hunches and emotion, and that makes them open to manipulation. Some of these courtroom manipulations have ancient roots: the way a lawyer dresses, the vocabulary she uses to talk to the jury, the list of impressive acronyms and institution affiliations deployed to prop up an expert witness. The law has developed techniques for confining the scope of these tricks.

But idols allow other manipulations, ones that the law hasn’t quite caught up to.

While I’m giving Margaret T. Gaughen, Esq., my fabricated resume (to get realistic responses out of the idols, the questions have to be as lifelike as possible, hence the charade), the idol-probing software pops up a line of suggested irritant questions that I haven’t seen before on a screen to the side: “She seems to have a higher-than-usual hostility towards law review alums.”

I frown. Really?

The software shows me a transcript of a deposition from years ago, highlighting one exchange in yellow.

Witness: I was on the Law Journal. I know what I’m talking about.

Counsel: If I have a question about the Bluebook, I’ll be sure to ask you. Stick to the facts. You’re not an advocate right now.

Next, the software brings up a video clip, a Q-and-A session after a lecture at a law school. A student raises her hand to ask about the most important quality Gaughen looks for in an associate.

I don’t care if you have straight A’s or if you’re on the law review. Actually, it would be better if you weren’t. Then at least I’d know there’s a chance you don’t already think you know everything.

I confirm that Gaughen hadn’t been on the Law Review at HLS, so maybe there’s some lingering sting of rejection. But it seems weak sauce to me. Criticism of the obsession with the prestige of law review membership is commonplace in the profession. This hardly feels like the way to get Gaughen to lose it.

Still, it’s worth trying.

“I was Notes Editor on the Law Review,” I tell the idol in the screen, infusing my voice with a hint of humble pride. “I really treasure the memories.”

I can see her lips purse in distaste. Maybe the software is onto something.

One of the surest ways for a lawyer or witness to lose credibility in the eyes of the jury is to appear to lose control, to lash out in an enraged outburst. Every human being has emotional weaknesses that can be exploited, buttons that can be pushed. Skillful litigators in the past relied on instinct as they probed for such openings during argument or cross-examination, hoping to stumble on a tender spot.

With idols, the search for such openings can be systemized and made a hundred times more effective. From years of trial records and voluminous depositions, it’s possible to construct very high-resolution idols of key witnesses and opposing counsel. The software and I would then key in on exploitable triggers.

“Do you think I should reach out to my old friends?” I ask innocently. “Maybe focus on friends who were also on the Law Review?”

The idol’s face turns even more stony. It really does feel like I’m touching a nerve.

You’d be surprised at the kinds of things that push people over the edge. Once, for example, I got opposing counsel, a litigator with decades of courtroom experience, to scream at us, mouth foaming and arms flailing, in response to a suggestion about taking an early lunch. Sitting as an anonymous observer in the public benches, I could see the shock in the eyes of the judge and the jurors as they watched the bailiff rush over to restrain the man. We settled that afternoon very favorably for my client.

What the jury and the judge didn’t know was that I had instructed our team to consistently adopt a series of mannerisms and idiosyncratic pronunciations that evoked memories of the opposing counsel’s deceased father. You know how, even as an adult, an innocuous word said a certain way by a parent can still instantly revert you both to patterns established when you were thirteen? It was like an extreme version of that. The opposing counsel and his father had had an extremely negative relationship, possibly abusive, and the idol simulations showed me that if we kept it up, he would eventually break down in front of the jury.

“I suggest that you stop thinking about your time on the Law Review as some kind of proof of your brilliance,” Gaughen’s idol says to me bluntly. “No one cares about that. What have you done?”

Injured, burning pride swells in my chest. I want to give her a litany of my unsung victories, the briefs with my idol-driven insights but not my name, the settlements driven by my idol-tested scripts—I swallow the impulse. I am really distracted tonight. This isn’t about me. I’m not even talking to a real person.

On the side display, the wavering lines charting her simulated heartbeat and blood pressure are way up. I can feel my own heart pounding and my face growing flushed. I take deep breaths and force myself to calm down. It does seem promising. Now, the question is how do I construct a plausible script during trial to push her on this...

Wait. Something feels oddly off about all this.

I pause the idol and turn my full attention to the probing software. Why hasn’t her sensitivity towards the perceived prestige of law review membership come up before?

A few key strokes later, I have the answer. A couple of days ago, one of the gossip blawgs posted a call for stories of partners behaving outrageously, an evergreen topic for these rags. An anonymous poster added a comment saying that a partner at their firm would make all junior associates redo the same research memo over and over instead of giving real training. When another commenter expressed skepticism that a partner would waste firm resources in this way, the first poster admitted that it happened only to them, and it was because the partner wanted to “put me in my place, ’cause I was on law review and she wasn’t.” The software had scanned the commenter’s posting history to de-anonymize it and traced it to Gaughen’s firm, and then, based on other clues in the comments, determined that the poster was talking about Gaughen. The addition of this one piece of data pushed the probability of her idol overreacting to this line of irritant over the threshold.

Do I believe the machine?

Idols can be used defensively as well as offensively. In addition to judges and opposing counsel, the firm also keeps idols of every member of our own litigation group. These are in super-high definition, as they are trained on not just publicly available information, but also private feeds. The litigators are regularly instructed to probe their own idols and the idols of their fellow team members to discover exploitable weaknesses and mitigate them. Therapy, controlled exposure, de-sensitization—whatever it takes to avoid having the other side win a trial by pushing one’s own buttons.

(I suppose by now you can understand why I never go to court myself. I have no interest in torturing my own idol to discover ways to drive myself into a frenzied rage—life is hard enough without that particular brand of suffering.)

I examine the clues that had led the machine to conclude that the anonymous poster was speaking of Gaughen (a few overly-descriptive references to office furniture and wall art; a quote that seemed to be taken straight from one of her speeches); I scan the poster’s comment history (they started a few weeks after the Rule 12(b)(6) hearing in this trial); I look at the time stamps on the comments (early in the morning, exactly the profile of a firm associate posting from personal equipment outside of work hours).

Everything is so plotted, so neat, placed just-so. In fact, the trail seems to have been planted to draw my attention. Haven’t I always had a chip on my shoulder because the Law Review rejected me? Haven’t I always craved the prestige of recognition for my talents, nursed an insatiable hunger for status? Haven’t I always wanted to win and win now, as if winning would fill the insecure void at the center of my heart?

What have you done?

You tell me you like your work.

I close my eyes and let everything stew in my head. I’m not a supercomputer with proprietary algorithms to conjure a living person out of scattered digital snippets, but I do have millions of years of evolutionary history as a social primate on my side. My orbital frontal cortex, my mirror neurons, my mentalizing cognitive capacity are all geared towards constructing idols—models of other minds—though we didn’t start to call them that until recently.

I can see a shadowy figure emerge out of the chaos, a mind clever and devious. They know the workings and weaknesses of idol-construction software as well as I do. Greedy for data, the harvesters tend to over-gather, and the integrators tend to over-interpret. It would be easy for someone like that to leave a few adversarial examples around to corrupt the process, to poison the idols to lead their opponent down the wrong path—especially if they already have an idol of that opponent: me.

A frisson of terror and joy tingles my spine.

I open my eyes, a grim grin on my face. I instruct the modeling software to delete from Gaughen’s idol the anonymous poster’s comment and every conclusion derived from it.

But that isn’t all. Have they been probing me? Have they found about Dylan and found a way to use him to get to me? Have they been dipping into his social feeds, pushing his desire for children, to be the father that his own never was to him, engineering a domestic crisis to throw me off on the eve of the trial?

Maybe I’m paranoid. Or maybe I’ve grown too comfortable.

I imagine the trial to come: the mad rush to update the jurors’ idols to high-resolution once they’ve been empaneled; the sleepless nights as we feed the arguments to the simulations to assess our chances of victory; the exhausting effort to refine and optimize every exhibit to maximize their impact based on idol-feedback; the feints, defenses, thrusts, parries...

Once, all that would have seemed routine, even a little boring. But now, I know this trial is going to be so much more exhilarating because I’ve met a worthy opponent: an idol-whisperer every bit as skilled as me, and maybe even better, even more ruthless.

I wish I could share this... this not-quite-triumph, this thrill of mirror-gazing with someone. Someone who truly understands.

But something is still bothering me.

What have you done?

You tell me you like your work.

Is there a chance, however remote, that I’ve been given a look of myself that I’ve been avoiding: This isn’t about Dylan or children or work-life balance or the vacations I plan but never take. Do I like myself?

But there’s no time for that.

“Game on,” I whisper to the screen, and press the button to bring the idol to life.

 

 

3. γνῶθι σαυτόν

 

Artist Statement by Sara Honan

I’m no fan of artist statements. If my work could be summarized in the form of an essay, I would have written one. The very point of art is to say that which cannot be said, to escape from the tyranny of rhetoric, argument, persuasion, discourse.

But as I’ve been told that if I do not write one, a substitute curator’s statement will be provided for me, I am forced to the keyboard. The only thing worse than explaining your own work is to have someone else explain it for you.

Gnothi Seauton is about idols, artifacts emblematic of our self-obsessed age. An idol purports to model the inner life of a person based on digital external self-expression, to capture something of the psychological truth of selfhood through inferences, machine learning, simulation, pattern recognition and amplification. It claims to portray the soul as accurately as the lens captures the light reflecting off a body.

Idols of influencers and celebrities are familiar to us, but they’re also used in law, medicine, education, government, finance, diplomacy, product development, and all sort of other ways little discussed. There are probably idols of you in the data centers of multiple tech giants and government agencies, and whenever you are denied a benefit or granted a reprieve, approved for a loan or barred from admission, chances are: your idol(s) play a role in that decision.

My work invites you to create an idol of yourself and play with it (and if you are willing, to allow your idol to be played with by your loved ones). I’ve simplified the interface to professional idol-sculpting tools and set up guided interaction patterns so that you need no technical knowledge or experience. You can curate and filter the sources of data, adjust the parameters, probe and prod the result. It sounds trite to tell you to have fun with it, but that is genuinely my most important instruction.

The nature of the work requires permission to access your social media feeds, cloud archives, phone databases, and so on. You may grant as much or as little access as you like. I don’t keep any of your data or idol past the end of your visit (you can read the details in the user agreement in AR), but it would be very sensible for you to not trust me, as I’ll explain below.

The cloud processing power, storage, and server-side modeling software for this installation are donated by Mnemosynee, which is a major player in idol-space (among many other tech spaces) and no stranger to data-collection controversies. Data that can be used to refine idols of you is worth a lot, I need not remind you, since your idols are used to make so many decisions about you. We’re long past the halcyon days when advertising was the biggest worry anyone had.

For what it’s worth, they came to me with the offer, not the other way around. I told them that I had conditions: they could keep no data, would have no control over the work, and I would neither thank them nor allow any sponsorship messages at the show. They readily assented, assuring me that a better public understanding of idols was all they were interested in. My lawyers tell me that their promises are enforceable.

In spite of all that, some will argue that my work is irredeemably corrupted as a result of their involvement. I applaud them for their purity of vision. But I can’t afford to buy the amount of cloud computing resources needed to make the installation work for all of you. Idols must be powered by something: incense, offerings, purchased indulgences, faith.

At the end of the exhibit, there is an autointerview booth where you may record your thoughts about the work and share it with the public (or not, as you wish).

May you find what you’re looking for.

 

Chaaya Settlemire-Bonano, 32, and Dani Settlemire-Bonano, 28

Chaaya: It’s a little like the first time you see yourself on camera, only worse. Mortifying!

Dani: [laughs] I thought it was pretty accurate.

Chaaya: Yours or mine?

Dani: Yours. She said everything just the way you would.

Chaaya: But she sounded like an asshole! Arrogant. Loud. Insufferable really. Explaining trade policy to me! [Mimics] “You’re not very good at listening. I’m the expert.” I wanted to punch that fool in the face.

Dani: Uh-huh.

Chaaya: What are you giggling about? I never say things like that—

Dani: Mmm.

Chaaya: Besides, she’s wrong. Her understanding of the field is at least two years out of date, and she’s so dogmatic—

Dani: You haven’t been posting about your work the last two years, right? The modeling software can only work with what it can harvest. You’ve evolved—in some ways.

Chaaya: What’s that supposed to mean?

Dani: I love you. But I’m glad you got to see yourself this way.

Chaaya: [A pause] I love you too. [Reluctantly] You put up with a lot.

 

Mia K., 16

I didn’t put in anything from myself. What am I? Stupid?

When it asked me for my feeds and deets, I put in the official PR feed of the New York Yankees, the Pegalbum for Miss Universe, and the customer service Rumble account for Mnemosynee.

What an idol that was. Glorious.

I haven’t laughed like that since the time we released two hundred chickens onto the football field right before the homecoming game.

 

E.J. Song, 45

As far as I know, I’ve never posted publicly about my love for Les Fleurs du mal or quoted from it. I’ve never even talked about it with anyone; what I felt when I read those poems was so personal. Yet, when I asked him about it, he told me his favorite lines, which were the same as mine.

What magic was this? My idol terrified and unsettled me. Has my language been subtly influenced by books I love so that the algorithms could identify the source with pinpoint accuracy? Am I so predictable that my literary tastes could be inferred from the memes I share, the restaurants I frequent, the throw-away comments I toss into the ether? Am I nothing more than the intersection of overlapping digital tribes, clusters of preferences?

No one likes to think a computer can model them, can calculate thoughts never voiced, passions never expressed. We want to believe we’re unique, special, with a will of our own. I don’t want my mind to be a mere machine whose inner workings could be discerned, whose tendencies could be pinned down and predicted. I want to be able to surprise those who think they know me. That’s the very definition of freedom, isn’t it?

So I tried a little experiment.

I began to delete bits of data that fed into my idol. My Rumble feed, my Clap history, my Pegalbum, accounts on VRRumors, LikLak, Tidyshelf, Retrojournalideas.net. After every deletion, I would push the button that remade the idol and test him again. I’d hog the workstation until the queue of visitors behind me got so long and the complaints so loud that one of the docents had to come to tell me to give someone else a turn. Then I’d go to the end of the queue and wait again.

I was methodical. I listed the data sources and sectioned them off with half-interval search. To rescue my humanity from the machines, I relied on the tools of the machines.

Finally, I found the key. It was a photograph taken five years ago, a meaningless selfie posted to Pegalbum. When it was included, the idol recited Baudelaire to me. When it wasn’t, he claimed to have never read it. I got out of the chair at the workstation and brought up the photo on my phone, zooming in to examine it pixel by pixel.

I had been standing in front of my bookshelf, and the book, a bilingual edition, could be seen in the background, just over my right shoulder. The lighting was terrible, but the glowing stylized lamp on the spine, Mnemosynee’s logo, stood out—it was the Centaur edition, where the Mnemosynee machine-translation was edited and polished by So-young Paek, Baudelaire scholar and an accomplished poet herself.

As for how the modeling software figured out the lines... I have a habit of flipping to my favorite passages and pressing down upon the pages so that they would lie flat, so that I could stare at the words until they were seared into my retina. It wouldn’t be very hard to pick out the creases in the spine of my book and recreate those lines.

It is an impressive bit of technology, to be sure, but... not magic. Yet, the revelation felt empty, brought no relief.

I hesitated in front of the interview booth. I couldn’t just leave the museum. Something about the idea of that half-finished idol bothered me in a way that I couldn’t, and still can’t, explain.

So I lined up again. And when my turn at the workstation came, I put all the feeds back, brought the idol to life, and asked him again what was his favorite poem. It mattered to me that he gave the right answer. It did.

How real that idol of me had seemed, how uncannily lifelike. We talked about literature, about art, about the meaning of existence. We talked until the docent threatened to call the guards. Only then did I reluctantly get up and watch as my idol vanished from the screen.

I must sound pitiful to you. To care so much about a book. I didn’t, after all was said and done, rescue my soul.

Am I nothing more than the sum of the books I’ve read, the images I’ve shared, the links I’ve clicked and the videos I’ve posted? To know all of my digital emanations and penumbras is to know me; there is no there there, no impenetrable self beneath the feeds. I am as cobbled together as my idol, a parlor trick.

 

L’oubli puissant habite sur ta bouche,

Et le Léthé coule dans tes baisers.

 

Liz Joso, 24, and Casey Sayer, 26

Liz: Why not?

Casey: Because it’s creepy.

Liz: How’s it creepy to want to see how our children might turn out?

Casey: That’s not what the program is designed for! You can’t just mix our social media feeds and expect it to... pop out a vision of our unborn child!

Liz: So you’re a computer expert now?

Casey: Can we not do this while the camera is on?

 

X.V., age withheld

I tried it. It didn’t sound much like me. I didn’t expect it to.

Not everyone is free to say what they want, to tell the truth to a computer. The platforms are designed by some people for people who think-talk-look-act like themselves. The rest of us have to adapt, to wear disguises, to speak in code.

Who do you think volunteers for the psych experiments used to generate the algorithms? Whose minds do you think the computer has learned to treat as the default, to center as the model as it grows an idol?

I had fun, though. It’s like looking at my costume in a funhouse mirror.

 

Bella Doubet, 30

I’m familiar with idols. I work with them all the time. My firm... constructs them for business reasons, and I consider myself a sculptor of some skill. The ones I work with are far higher in resolution than ones available to the public, and I thought I knew all there was to know about them.

But I’ve never played with my own idol. Partly it’s because I can’t justify doing so on company time and computing power; partly it’s because... well, let’s just say I don’t do nice things to idols.

So I decided to come to the exhibit.

I purposefully kept everything related to my work out of the idol. You can’t trust any promises made by artists or a company like Mnemosynee, and my work is confidential and privileged. But there’s also a deeper reason: I wanted to see if I’m defined by my work.

She was fun to talk to. We chatted about our love of video games, our delight in stage magic, our passion for going on trips to faraway places by ourselves. We talked about Dylan, about our parents, about friends we lost touch with. Some things she remembered better than I did—no surprise; I haven’t read the diary I kept in college in a decade.

It’s like getting a chance to see how I would have turned out if I hadn’t picked this fork in the path, if I haven’t chosen to dedicate myself to this profession, walked down the roads I have. She’s more idealistic, less complicated, more trusting. She thinks better of other people than I do. I can see how my work has made me harder to like.

Is she more me than I am? Or less so?

She’s made me rethink how I judge people. The idols I work with are constructed with the aid of harvesters who prioritize information about conflicts, arguments, performances in front of an audience. We don’t get access to subjects’ college diaries or high school crushes. We focus on the “professional.” I’ve grown so used to attacking these idols in the hope of discovering some weakness that I’ve started to conflate the image with the original.

Each of us wears masks: one for our husband; another for our children; one for relatives who insert vacation videos into our feeds to collect claps; another for clients who expect us to be cool, calculating, eyes on the prize. Maybe there is nothing to this “self” we prize so much except the totality of this collection of masks. Or maybe there is some essential thing beneath the layers of masks, a beating heart, raw, bloody, vulnerable, yearning to connect, hungering to know where we come from and whither we go. That’s what you see when you peer through the seams and cracks in the masks, when you punch through the defenses we erect against reality, and searing emotion erupts.

We treat such outbursts with scorn and mistrust. We think to be human is to be inhuman. How sad.

So I would like to say: be kind to yourself, to those imperfections you detect. Who knows but that we’re all merely idols for a deeper, inarticulate soul that expresses itself only faintly, like tremors in the crystalline spheres.