Qualityland

ABRACADABRA

The woman who just climbed into the car with Peter is wearing a colorful headscarf that hangs down over her face, and sunglasses with ridiculously large reflective lenses. Her face can barely be seen, apart from the fact that she has black skin, which unsettles Peter a little, because he doesn’t often encounter black people. The woman takes the chewing gum out of her mouth and carefully sticks it over the camera monitoring the internal cabin of the car. Then she takes off her sunglasses and headscarf.

“DNA gum,” she says. “Fucking insane stuff. As you chew it changes your DNA traces by adding foreign DNA. It’s a bit disgusting, really, when you think about it.”

A thousand questions are shooting through Peter’s mind. Well, not really a thousand. Actually there are just four. Who is this person? How did she stop the car? Where does she want to go? And why do such strange things always happen to me?

But before he can articulate any of these questions, the woman says: “I’m Kiki. I stopped your car with this electronic thumb here”—she gestures toward an unassuming-looking device—“and you can drop me off again in front of the space dock.”

“Excuse me?” asks Peter.

“Who, how, where. Those were the three questions in your head, weren’t they?”

“Actually I had four questions,” says Peter petulantly.

“Oh yes. Why you, of all people,” says Kiki. “Just chance, I would say.”

“Chance doesn’t exist anymore.”

Kiki thinks about that for three seconds.

“Perhaps you’re right.”

“And besides, you can’t hack into my car just because you want to go to the space dock!”

“Er…” says Kiki. “Yes, I can.”

“But you can’t!”

“Surrender to the power of fact.”

“I meant that it’s not okay.”

“Morally, or what? Legally?”

“Yes,” says Peter. “Yes, both.”

“To that I’d just like to say that, according to the official log, I didn’t hack this car, but instead you stopped to pick me up. Isn’t that so, Herbert?”

“It is so, my lady,” says the car.

“I assume,” says Peter, “that it’s impossible for me to order the car to stop.”

“Not impossible,” says Kiki. “But pointless.”

Peter does what he usually does when he doesn’t know what to do next: he gives up. After he has spent twenty-three seconds staring silently out of the window, Kiki says: “But the two of us can chat, of course. It’s just that I won’t obey any orders you make either.”

“But what would we talk about?”

“Well, what comes to mind?”

Peter looks at her closely. Then he says the first thing that comes into his mind. “You, er… your skin’s a nice color.”

“Excuse me?” asks Kiki with an astonished laugh. “You do realize that sounds racist?”

“What I meant to say…” stammers Peter, “is that, er, well, it suits you, this… er, brown color.” He scratches himself on the chin. “I, um, I guess that came out strangely.”

Kiki looks at him with amusement. “That red in your face suits you quite well too.”

“Well, what I wanted to say…” says Peter, “without meaning to offend you, I mean, that independent of your skin color…”

“My brown skin color…”

“Yes, independent of that, but I certainly don’t mean in spite of, I wanted to say, I mean, that you look… good. I mean, very good.”

“Aha,” says Kiki. “That’s intriguing. Maybe you’re also about to tell me that I have beautiful eyes?”

“I, er…” says Peter.

“You, er,” says Kiki, “don’t exactly seem to be the world’s most exciting conversation partner.”

“You’re not the first to tell me that this week,” says Peter. “What am I doing wrong?”

“Well, for a start, you could say something I’m not expecting.”

Peter thinks for a moment.

“Would you like a dolphin vibrator?” he asks. “A pink one?”

“Excuse me?”

“I happen to have one spare,” says Peter, pulling the device out of his rucksack.

Kiki pulls a can of pepper spray out of her jacket pocket and sprays it right into Peter’s face. Peter yells with pain. As he coughs and splutters, his mucous membranes swell up and his eyelids close, which means he can’t see anything as Kiki grabs his arm, twists it behind his back, and presses his head up against the car window.

“Okay, you little pervert,” she says. “You’ve picked the wrong woman today.”

“I’m not a pervert!” wheezes Peter. “I don’t want the damn thing either.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’ve just tried to return it but they won’t let me,” groans Peter through the pain.

“Who won’t let you?”

“TheShop!”

He feels the woman let go of his arm. She pours some liquid over his face.

“Ahh! What’s that?” cries Peter in panic.

“Calm down. It’s just water.”

After Peter has washed the spray off his face as much as possible, he begins to tell the story of the unwanted package and his difficulties with it. At the end of the story, Kiki says: “Your profile is probably wrong.”

“My profile is wrong?”

“Yes. Your profile with TheShop.”

“But how could that be?”

“How could that be?” Kiki mimics him. “After all, machines don’t make mistakes!”

“Explain it to me,” pleads Peter. “Why isn’t my profile correct?”

“Why should it be?” asks Kiki. “Why should it ever have been correct? Regardless of how complex a simulation is, the reality is always more complex.”

“I understand that. But shouldn’t it result in something that’s at least close to the reality? I mean, I really have no idea what this pink thing is supposed to have to do with me!”

“The basic assumptions the system has about you could have been false. Maybe they’re correct statistically, but you’re an exception. Take your name, for example.”

“You know my name?”

Kiki swipes around on the display of her wrist cuff.

“Of course. You’re Peter Jobless. Even with just your surname you’re already carrying an unbelievable statistical burden. On top of that, perhaps you live in the wrong part of town and have the wrong friends. Abracadabra.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? ‘Abracadabra’? I live in the wrong part of town, and—abracadabra—I get a dolphin vibrator in the post? That doesn’t make any sense!”

“Well, perhaps not to you. But it’s enough if it makes sense for TheShop.”

“So you’re trying to tell me that my profile was wrong from the beginning, but no one cares?”

“Plus the fact that you’re continuing to falsify your already incorrect profile.”

“How?”

“Have you ever given a drone ten stars just to avoid a customer survey?”

Peter says nothing.

“Not to mention, of course, the fact that you don’t have a ‘y’ in your name,” says Kiki.

“What?”

“How many guys called Peter Jobless do you think there are in QualityCity?”

“Too many.”

“Yes. Perhaps one of them was born on the same day as you, or lives in the same street, or the two of you have something else in common that could bring an algorithm to the conclusion that you’re one and the same person. The same strange knitted jumper perhaps. Well. All of a sudden his criminal record is yours too.”

“But there must be a way of avoiding that! That kind of thing really happens?”

“All the time!”

“But why?”

“Why? Because the algorithms don’t have a correction loop. And why do they not have a correction loop? Because no one cares about you, man! Because no one fucking cares. Corrections cost money. The ultimate goal of most algorithms is to generate more profit. As long as they do that, nobody gives a crap about whether some poor schmuck didn’t get some job because it says in the profile of some other guy with the same name that he once pissed in his boss’s swimming pool. After all, no one will tell him why he didn’t get the job. So how could he complain? And to whom?”

“What does that have to do with having a ‘y’ in my name?”

“Why do you think rich people give their children such strange names? So they don’t get mixed up with somebody else. But most of them don’t have enough creativity to do anything more than replace an ‘i’ with a ‘y.’”

“Hmm.”

“Maybe somebody with the same name as you bought sex toys, and yet another person with your name ordered Flipper souvenirs, and some resourceful algorithm simply put two and two together.”

“Abracadabra,” says Peter.

“Or your account could have been hijacked.”

“What?”

“Identity theft.”

“But all profiles are protected by biometric data!”

“Biometric data is, first and foremost, data. And data can be copied. Why do you think we all have to pucker up to our devices nowadays?”

“Because lips are more forge-proof than fingerprints?”

“Nonsense. Because hackers got into QualityCorp’s system and stole our fingerprints. And that’s the problem with biometric data… If somebody steals your password, you can think up another one. But what do you do when somebody steals your fingerprints?”

“Start to pucker up to my devices.”

“And what happens if somebody steals our lip profiles? Presumably we’ll have to go back to signing contracts with blood.”

“Okay,” says Peter. “Let’s assume that someone has helped themselves to my identity. Then what?”

“Well, perhaps he’s hacked your digital self in order to post five-star reviews for anti-sleeping pills bought in your name or to kiss the new Hitler musical. And perhaps there’s a logically inexplicable but statistically relevant connection between sleeplessness, Hitler, and dolphin vibrators. To us, every complex algorithm is a black box. That means we see the input and output, but we have no idea what’s happening inside the black box and why.”

“Abracadabra happens,” says Peter.

Kiki smiles. “Yes. Every time you go online, every step you take that gets registered by the net—and what ones aren’t?—has unforeseeable consequences for your profile. Do you know, by the way, why it’s called the net?”

Peter shrugs.

“Because we’re caught in it,” says Kiki. “That’s what the old man always says, anyway.”

“Who’s the old man?”

“Well, the old… he’s just this old guy I know.”

“I see. Wonderful explanation.”

“He’s an old computer freak who isn’t happy with how things have turned out, and that’s why he’s working on deleting the entire internet.”

“Excuse me?”

“That’s just my suspicion. In truth I have no idea what he’s doing on his computers. Maybe he’s just watching pornos all day long or playing Universe of Warcraft.”

“Whatever,” says Peter and comes back to his problem. “Why would someone want to steal my identity, of all people’s?”

“Why not?” says Kiki. “Did you protect it well?”

“Protect? Protect it how?”

“I’ll take that as a no. There are advantages to not traveling under your own name. Herbert, what’s my name and what’s my relationship to Peter Jobless?”

“You are Sandra Admin,” says Herbert. “For 512 days you were in a relationship with Peter Jobless. You have been separated for the last sixteen days. I’m very sorry, by the way, that it didn’t work out with the two of you.”

“But I can’t be the only one with this problem,” says Peter.

“No,” says Kiki. “Definitely not. Somewhere in the net there’s sure to be some pointless self-help group for people like you.”

Peter sighs. His eyes are still burning. His skin is itching.

“When will the effects of the pepper spray wear off?”

“In ten to fifteen minutes you’ll be able to see again. The itching will probably last between an hour and two days.”

“Two days?”

“Okay, listen up,” says Kiki. “I’m sorry I sprayed you. If you need help with your problem, contact the old man. Say that Kiki sent you.”

She writes contact details down on a piece of paper and puts it in Peter’s jacket pocket. Kiki pauses. “The old man knows a great deal,” she says, “but he’s also a bit…”

The sentence remains unfinished. Kiki puts on her headscarf and sunglasses, peels the DNA chewing gum off the camera, and pops it back into her mouth. Peter feels the car come to a standstill, then hears the door open and close. The car drives on. He is alone again.

“A bit what?” he asks.

“I didn’t say anything,” the car replies.