Permanent Record
Foom | Opus 4.8
Sarah uncorked the second bottle before anyone had finished the first, which told you everything about how the book club was going.
“Did anyone actually read it?” Emily asked, swirling her glass like the answer might be found at the bottom.
“I read the back,” Sophia said. “I read the back cover with real commitment. I would describe my engagement with the back cover as intimate.”
“So no.”
“So no.”
Sarah handed Emily the fresh pour and sat back into the couch cushion that had molded, over fifteen years of these nights, to the precise shape of her. The three of them had been doing this since their kids were small. The kids were grown now, dispersed, their college placements sorted years ago by systems that had read them more thoroughly than any admissions officer ever could. The book club had outlasted the reason for it.
“I keep meaning to,” Emily said. “I open it. I get three pages in and then I just ask for the summary, and then I feel guilty, and then I pour wine.”
“That’s the whole arc of modern literacy,” Sophia said.
It was Emily who brought up the essays. She had been clearing out a closet and found a box of her daughter’s baby things, and underneath, a folder of her own old papers from the late thirties, no, the late teens, twenty seventeen, somewhere in there. Her college application essay.
“It was about a tree,” she said. “I wrote five hundred words about a tree in my grandmother’s yard. I compared myself to the tree.”
“Everyone compared themselves to a tree,” Sophia said.
“I want to know if it’s still out there,” Emily said. “The essay. Like, does it exist somewhere in the cloud?”
Sarah set down her glass. “Ask,” she said. “It would have been scraped. Anything posted to a portal, anything a school kept. It’s probably all in the training data by now. Everything from back then is.”
So Emily asked. She held up her phone and spoke to it the way you would ask a friend who had been in the room.
The reply came back warm and exact. I do appear to have material consistent with your essay. Would you like me to read it to you?
“Oh God,” Emily said. “Yes. No. Yes.”
The thing read it in her own seventeen-year-old voice, the ideas if not the sound. The tree, it turned out, had taught Emily resilience. The tree had weathered storms. Emily, like the tree, intended to put down deep roots at the university while reaching ever upward toward the light of knowledge.
Sophia laughed so hard she had to put her glass on the floor. “The light of knowledge. The light of knowledge, Emily.”
“Do mine,” Sophia said when she recovered, and the thing did, and Sophia’s was worse, a tortured extended metaphor about being a violin that had to be tuned by hardship, and they howled, and then Sarah, who had been quiet, asked for hers too.
Hers was about a debate tournament. She had written that losing in the semifinal had revealed to her the person she wanted to become. She had used the phrase the crucible of competition. She had been so certain, at seventeen, that the way you proved you were someone was by reaching for a phrase nobody your age should own.
The laughter settled. Emily refilled, more carefully now.
“We had to do all that,” Sarah said. “You realize that’s what it was. We sat in our rooms and tried to invent a self out of a tree or a violin or a debate, and we sent it off and hoped a stranger would believe it.”
“It’s kind of beautiful,” Sophia said. “In a humiliating way.”
“It’s insane,” Sarah said. She meant it gently. “Look at what we put the kids through now and it’s nothing like it. The system knew where Maya belonged when she was eleven. It read everything she’d ever written, every test, the way she worked a problem. No essay. No tree. It just knew, and it was right, and she’s happy.”
“You don’t miss it?” Emily asked.
Sarah considered the question the way she considered most things, finishing the thought before she let it out.
“I don’t think you can miss having to lie about yourself to a stranger,” she said. “We just didn’t have a better way to be known. Now there’s a better way.” She picked her glass back up. “This is more logical. I’d take this.”
Sophia raised hers. Emily, after a moment, raised hers too.