The Unknowns by Gabriel Roth Read Free Book Online

but I couldn’t see any point. I looked over at Jeremy Glissan, the programming wizard, with his downy upper lip and his Eastern Bloc wardrobe and his nonexistent social life. I saw for the first time how much had gone on outside this room while Nicky and I were struggling with a persistent bug in our initialization subroutine, how Bronwen Oberfell was at that moment standing in a hallway in the high school three blocks away, leaning against a row of lockers, playing with a ringlet, talking to a sophomore boy about some topic unrelated to the recursive descent of the parse tree or evil warlocks with secret vulnerabilities to weapons made of bronze. Something to do with music or clothes, maybe? Or who was having a party, who was going out with whom? Other people found computers arcane, when to me they were transparent. For the first time I recognized that I was in an analogous position: some people found social life as obvious as I found computers, and those people weren’t stuck here in a windowless room with no friends. And that’s when I set out to hack the girlfriend problem.

3
    Otherwise you’ll find that your hacking energy is sapped by distractions like sex, money, and social approval.
    —Eric S. Raymond, “How to Become a Hacker”
    THE GROTSCH BUILDING LOOMS over the Mission like a relic of a previous civilization: once a pickle factory, now a square stone memento of a time when San Francisco hosted economic activity beyond symbol manipulation and beverage service. The city’s current inhabitants, with their gift for cheerful irony, rent it out for photo shoots and weddings. This month the Grotsch has been hired by a gang of planners and architects and urbanism geeks, grad-school friends of Justin’s, to host an exhibition called BayTopia. Cynthia has persuaded me to accompany her to the opening. The volume of space above us makes the conversations sound farther away than they are, and the air has the seedy smell of wet coats. We will find Maya here, supposedly.
    In the middle of the floor is a scale model of the peninsula, with crude cardboard buildings on carefully modeled topography. Fantastic elements are painted bright colors: elevated bike paths that stretch around the neighborhoods, public parks and pools on the roofs of high-rises. On the walls are maps displaying census data in colorful and supposedly revelatory ways, but the daylight from the high windows doesn’t quite illuminate them properly. Justin is talking to a pale man who seems to be explaining something very intensely. Many of the men here have a Nordic aspect, and the women aredisproportionately short. And there’s Maya, off to the side, talking to a tall girl in a puffy jacket. Although my instinct is to hide from her, I make myself catch her eye and stage a moment of recognition, raising my chin in the universal sign for
What’s up
? At first she’s not sure who I am. Then she smiles back, casually but still enough to make me worry I’m going to explode.
    “Don’t turn around,” I say to Cynthia. “Now: I need you to talk to me for the next five or ten minutes.”
    “I really want to see her,” Cynthia says. “I’ve forgotten what she looks like.”
    “In a minute. Just chat with me in a friendly but not flirty way.”
    “I feel like a spy,” she says. “OK, chatting, chatting. Spy in the house of love. What’s that from? Hey, I should go say hi to Justin.”
    “That presents me with a problem,” I say. “If we go say hi to him together then we’ve become a couple, doing things in unison. But if you go say hi and I don’t, then I’m standing awkwardly on my own.”
    “I’m really seeing you in action,” she says.
    “OK, OK, let’s go talk to Justin.” I glance over at Maya, which is an error, but she doesn’t notice.
    Cynthia pulls Justin away from his companion and hugs him. I hover while they catch up, trying to look like I’m part of the conversation. Eventually he turns to me. “How’s it going,