Part One

Rain in Los Angeles sounds like static. That is what I always tell people when they ask me about it. It does not patter. It does not drum. It hisses. Like a radiator. Like a television tuned to a dead channel.

I sat in my office on the forty-third floor of the Pacific Mutual building and watched the rain hit the glass. Below me, the city spread out like a spreadsheet. Every street a column. Every intersection a formula. Every person a data point.

My job was simple: I calculated risk.

Not car insurance risk—though I did plenty of that. Not health insurance risk—though I did that too. I calculated the risk of human beings. Every citizen of Los Angeles was assigned a Risk Score by Pacific Mutual in partnership with the LAPD. The score determined everything: what neighbourhood you could live in, what job you could get, whether you could get a loan, whether you could get health care. High score = safe citizen. Low score = problem.

My own score was 847. That put me in the top fifteen percent. Safe. Predictable. Good for business.

Ora's score was 851. We had been matched by the system six months ago—99.7 percent compatibility, the algorithm said. I did not disagree. She was everything the system said a wife should be: gentle, compliant, predictable. She worked in the claims department. She came home at six. She cooked dinner on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Sundays she ironed my shirts.

Everything was calculated. Everything was optimized. Everything was safe.

Until I saw her.

It happened at a jazz club on Sunset Boulevard. I did not go there intentionally. I was driving home from a client dinner, and my car broke down in front of the club. The neon sign was flickering—THE BLUE JAZZ—pink and blue and red, and through the open door I could hear a saxophone playing something that sounded like a person crying.

I went in. Not because I wanted to. Because the rain was bad and the repair would take an hour and there was nowhere else to go.

She was sitting at the bar, alone, drinking whiskey from a glass that was too large for whiskey. She had short black hair, red lips, and a face that looked like it had been carved from granite by someone who was still figuring out what granite meant.

She was reading a book. A real book, not a pamphlet. The cover was torn. The title was unreadable. But the act of reading it in a jazz club at midnight on a Tuesday—on a night when every citizen with a score above 800 was supposed to be at home, in their assigned dwelling, sleeping—was itself a crime.

She looked up. Our eyes met. She did not look away.

"You look like a man who calculates risk for a living," she said.

I did not answer.

"Let me guess," she said, turning back to her whiskey. "You are the man who decides who is safe and who is not."

"Who are you?"

"Nobody important." She took a sip of whiskey. "But you are important. I can tell by the way you are standing. Like a man who is always calculating where to put his weight so he does not fall."

Part Two

Her name was Iva Cross. She had no file. That was the first thing I checked when I got back to the office the next morning. I logged into the Pacific Mutual database, ran her name through every system I had access to, and got nothing. No risk score. No address. No employer. No medical records. No criminal record.

Nothing.

A person without a file is not a citizen. A person without a file is not a person. And yet, there she was, sitting in a jazz club on Sunset, reading books and drinking whiskey and looking at me with eyes that saw everything.

I found her again three nights later. She had a way of appearing where you least expected her—like a variable in an equation that you did not know existed. This time it was at a diner on Wilshire, sitting in a booth with three men who were clearly not citizens. One of them had no score tattoo on his wrist—the mark of an unregistered person. Another was smoking a cigarette, which was technically illegal after 9 PM in any zone with a score below 900.

Iva introduced them as her "consultants." They were not consultants. They were rebels.

"The Zero Sum," she said, when I asked. "We are a group of people who believe that the only way to win against the system is to refuse to play."

"You do not have a score."

"We refused to be scored." She leaned across the booth. "You know what the Actuary does with all those scores, Mike? He builds a god. A god made of numbers. And every citizen is a prayer to that god."

"I do not believe in gods."

"Everyone believes in something. You believe in your numbers. That makes you a priest."

She reached across the table and took my hand. Her fingers were calloused—she did work with her hands, something no one with a score above 800 would ever do. And I felt, for the first time in years, the sensation of something real touching me.

"Come with me tonight," she said.

"Where?"

"To a place where there are no cameras and no scores and no numbers. A place where people are just people."

Part Three

The place was a warehouse in the San Fernando Valley. Inside, it was filled with people—hundreds of them, living in shacks built from scrap wood and corrugated iron. There were no walls between the shacks. There were no doors. People cooked together, slept together, raised children together. There were no scores, no matches, no assignments.

"This is what happens when you take the system away," Iva said. "People die. People suffer. But they also laugh. And love. And create things that have no utility value."

I walked through the settlement. I met a woman who was sewing a dress from scraps of fabric. She was humming. I met a child who was painting a picture on the wall of a shack with charcoal. The picture was of a bird. I met an old man who was reading a book by candlelight, just like Iva.

"Is this legal?" I asked.

Iva laughed. "Mike, in this neighbourhood, legality is a joke told by people who have power. This is not illegal. This is just... outside."

That night, I stayed. I slept on a cot in the corner of the warehouse, next to a space heater that clicked like a Geiger counter. Iva came to visit me around two in the morning. She sat on the edge of the cot and looked at me in the darkness.

"You can leave tomorrow," she said. "You can go back to your office, your office chair, your score, your apartment, your wife. No one will stop you."

"And if I do not leave?"

She smiled. It was not a kind smile. It was the smile of a woman who has made this choice a hundred times and knows that most people do not stay. "Then you are mine. Not my property. Mine. In the way that a person can belong to another person without being owned."

I did not answer. I turned my face toward the wall. The space heater clicked. Outside, a dog barked.

Part Four

Ora found me.

She came to the office at 3 PM on a Thursday, when I was supposed to be at a meeting with the actuarial committee. She stood in my doorway, her hands folded, her face perfectly composed.

"Mike," she said. "Your score has been declining."

I looked at her. "What do you mean?"

"Thirty days ago, your score was 847. Yesterday it was 792. Today it is 748. That is a decline of nearly one hundred points in one month. That is unprecedented."

"I do not know what—"

She opened her purse and produced a printed report. My risk assessment report, complete with graphs and trend lines. "The system flags anomalies, Mike. And you are flagged red. The Actuary has noticed."

"The Actuary notices me?"

"Everyone the Actuary notices is in trouble." She stepped into the office and closed the door. "Mike, I love you. The system matched us for a reason. You are my best match. I do not want to lose you."

I looked at Ora—my perfect match, my 99.7 percent compatible wife—and I felt nothing. Not love. Not guilt. Not fear. Nothing.

Because I had already felt something. Iva's hand. Iva's eyes. Iva's smile.

"Ora," I said. "I am going to help you leave."

"Leave?"

"Go to Mexico. Take the bus. Pack what you need. Take your dresses, your books, your iron. Do not take my things. Do not take anything that has my name on it."

"Mike, what are you talking about?"

"I am talking about a life that is not calculated. And I am talking about the fact that I cannot give it to you. I can only give it to someone else. And that someone else is not you."

She stood there, her hands folded, her face composed. And then she nodded. "I understand," she said. "I do not like it. But I understand."

Part Five

The Zero Degree Room was in the basement of the Pacific Mutual building, beneath the parking garage, beneath the server room, beneath a door marked RISK ASSESSMENT.

The room was kept at twenty degrees below zero. Iva sat on a metal chair in the centre of the room. She was wearing a thin white dress. Her lips were purple. Her breath came in clouds.

I sat on the other side of the glass, in a warm room with a radiator and a cup of coffee. An Actuary sat beside me. I could not see his face clearly—Actuaries always wore grey suits and grey ties and grey expressions.

"Three more sessions," the Actuary said. "Then we will see if the non-rational tendency has been eliminated."

Iva looked up. She looked through the glass. She looked at me. Her lips moved. I could not hear them through the glass. But I knew what they said.

Do not look away.

So I did not look away.

The session lasted twenty minutes. She did not speak. Not one word. Not even when they brought her back to the warm room, wrapped her in blankets, gave her whiskey, and sent her back into the cold.

Three sessions. Three hours in the cold. Three hours of not speaking.

And then the Actuary turned to me. "Mr. Torres. Your session is ready."

"What session?"

"The probability cleansing. It will help you return to your optimal score. It will eliminate the factors that caused your decline."

"What factors?"

"The non-rational ones."

I stood up. I walked into the probability cleansing room. I sat in the chair. I closed my eyes. I felt the electricity pass through my head like a train passing through a tunnel.

And when I opened my eyes, I was no longer a man who had fallen in love. I was a man who had calculated his risk and found it acceptable.

The rain continued to fall on Los Angeles. It hissed against the glass. Like static. Like a television tuned to a dead channel.

Author Note & Copyright:

Author Note & Copyright: