A DERANGEMENT

August 2057

It took Jordan many weeks to come to terms with what had happened that night. There were modes of thinking that he had to consciously unravel—modes that he’d deliberately put in place following his deplatforming, as a way of coping with the anger and depression it had initially induced.

According to the cognitive behavioral therapy recommended by his friend Dr. John Erasmus, “The way we think determines how we feel, which influences how we act. You can’t change events, but you can learn to control their effect upon you.”

Jordan, however, had stubbornly refused to change how he thought. He knew full well that the meaning he assigned to any event was entirely up to him, and that if his thoughts were negative, they could become self-fulfilling in time. On the other hand, as he saw it, if his thoughts were positive despite events being negative, that was self-delusion, pure and simple. Thus he’d convinced himself that it was not cognitive distortions from which he suffered; he was merely facing reality. That was the core of his stubbornness: he was a logician. Not to mention that his status as a MAWM denied him any rights to victimhood… Although now that he’d lost his claim to the pure “white” element of that label, he might need to make some adjustments.

Of course, the events at the university had not been unique to him. Every established institution in modern society had been under attack by identitarianism since before the Overthrow. But the scar that had truly disfigured him and caused him to mask his face, like the mark of Zorro, was his betrayal by Lexie, the daughter he’d raised as his own. Inflamed with some form of socially righteous mania (the misandry of the emerging lesbian, perhaps, or the societal appetite for hunting down the patriarchy), she had gleefully doxed him on social media, like a Salem witch’s child sticking pins in the effigy of a loathed enemy.

Jordan was not a misogynist—not up until that point, at least. But thereafter, he’d unconsciously chosen to make himself invisible to women. These days, it was a common response among men to the hostility directed at them from all sides, and it had served him well. So, when Alexa Smythe had announced that she’d join him in celebrating his newly discovered mixed-race status, he floundered, not knowing what was expected of him. After all, he was only her one-time math professor, and she his star female student. But twenty years had elapsed since then, and he was sure that she’d made the offer without recognizing the creature he had become.

“So now you know why you’ve got dark eyes and an olive complexion,” she teased. “All the girls in college said you were just the coolest dude. Imagine not knowing you had it in you!”

She’d driven him home and invited herself into his apartment in expectation of toasting his black African grandmother—and the aplomb with which he’d handled Lexie’s misplaced rage. As it happened, he had a bottle of chocolate mescaline liqueur in the cupboard. Three or four glasses of that, and he had relaxed sufficiently enough that, when she once again mentioned the last time they’d drunk together on the night of his deplatforming, he could actually smile about it.

“Did I really say that to you about statistics?” he asked.

“Yes, and you were right! It turned out to be a fantastic career choice for me. Of course, I’d much rather have stayed with pure mathematics, because I crave the intellectual challenge. I’ve never forgotten our conversations to this day.”

Maybe it was the mescaline, but they ended up agreeing that getting together over coffee on occasion and talking mathematical theory might be good for their brains, and their souls. It was a rash proposal, and he immediately regretted it, presuming it would never happen.

But Alexa made it happen, calling him once a fortnight and confirming the time and place as if it were entered into her schedule.

Over one such coffee, she told him all about her work at the Lineal Progression Office—how un-challenging it was for a person with her qualifications, leaving her with a nagging feeling of frustration and unfulfillment.

“But that’s true of all bureaucracy,” she admitted. “And what about you? What do you work in now?”

“Artificial intelligence and machine learning,” he replied. He didn’t want to go much further than that. “I’m a Non-Person,” he added. “Neither a servant nor a beneficiary of the state.”

A faint shadow passed briefly across Alexa’s face, but she didn’t comment.

“I was lucky in having a network of friends from my student days,” he explained. “We were a gang of reprobates that called ourselves the Derangers. It’s French for something like ‘the disrupters.’ Most of them ended up in the tech world, and now that’s where I’ve ended up, too.”

He could have added that the obsession with violence and destruction that had defined his little student mob in the grip of their antiestablishment psychosis had eventually pulled down the very pillars he had relied on for stability throughout his academic life, leaving him no alternative but to walk away and try to re-erect them elsewhere, far from the toxic environment of the university. But he wasn’t after sympathy.

His friends had heralded his departure from academia as the best thing that could have happened to him. Being mostly science graduates, they’d gone into tech start-ups and research foundations in their thirties. By the time the Overthrow came, they were mostly embedded in high-tech fields where big money kept them out of its reach.

It was through this network of friends that he’d gradually rebuilt his life. In the twenty-something years since his deplatforming, he had become an intrinsic part of a world of research and discovery, working in emerging fields of technology that were doing nothing less (so they thought) than changing human behavior. Rather than teaching foundational mathematics, he’d come to understand its infinite nature, and its potential in computer science—in particular, the use of algorithms as step-by-step procedures for calculation, data processing, and automated reasoning.

Nowhere in any of this story did he feel there were grounds for self-pity.

“Remember the pickup basketball games we used to play?” Alexa asked, changing the subject. “The math department always won. They called you Michael Jordan. Now we know why.”

He did remember. After all, she was nearly six feet, and he was six-foot-four. They had a natural advantage.

Later, he regretted not telling her more about his life, but the caution he’d developed over the past twenty years had held him back. She was a trusted representative of the state; he was a former member of the Derangers. Their worlds couldn’t be further apart. So, he kept their morning coffee chats to academic waffle: Fermat’s Last Theorem, Perelman’s solution to the Poincaré conjecture, and so forth. It was a bit of a wank, but it had a nice otherworldly, nostalgic feel to it, as long as he maintained his distance.

Then one day, out of the blue, she hinted at a serious development that had taken place at work.

“Can I ask you to keep a confidence that might get both of us in trouble if we’re found out?” she demanded.

His alarm bells went off.

“Is it something I need to know, or something you’re better off keeping to yourself?” he replied cautiously.

“It’s something that’s going to take all my mathematical skills to resolve, and I may not be up to it without running it by someone. I hoped I could persuade you to play that role.”

Though his curiosity was definitely piqued, it did nothing to ease his discomfort when she hinted that it involved state secrets.

He could easily have declined, but something was drawing him in. “If you think I can help,” he said with a casual shrug.

Do I really need this friendship? he wondered later. Though he lived alone in the debt-free apartment he’d owned for twenty years (which had escaped the Social Equity Regulations that swept up private property assets when debt was reset at the time of the Overthrow), he was far from lonely. His colleagues comprised a fraternity that fully satisfied his needs for socialization. He had no sexual or relationship problems, no sense of isolation, and no time for depression or self-doubt. So why was he risking his stability by allowing himself to be drawn into such a potentially problematic friendship?

As the months had gone by since they first met at Lexie’s celebration, he’d struggled to maintain his mask, but he’d never let it slip. It had the functional purpose of protecting his scars, but the scars remained. Thus, his meetings with Alexa threatened the protective devices he’d come to rely upon. She didn’t see his mask; she simply saw him as her former mathematics professor. And despite himself, he now found himself being lured into the trap of wanting to help her, unable to resist the flattering implications of her request.

… Or was he just seeing an opportunity here for Artie Sharp?