Nat used to be like Vinessa, always blaming someone else for her problems. For years she believed it was her parents’ fault that she was arrested for breaking and entering, because if they hadn’t changed the locks on their house, she wouldn’t have had to break in to find something she could sell for drug money. It had taken a long time for Nat to take responsibility for the things she did. Clearly Vinessa hadn’t gotten there yet, and maybe it was because in Dana she had found someone willing to accept the blame. Dana had done something shitty to Vinessa, no doubt about it, but that was years ago. If Vinessa hadn’t gotten her act together by now, it was her own fault, not Dana’s.
When prisms became affordable to individual consumers, retailers initially advertised them as a private alternative to visiting a data broker. They targeted new parents, encouraging them to buy one now, activate it, and store it until their child was an adult, at which point the child could see how her life might have gone differently. This approach won a few customers, but not nearly the numbers that retailers had hoped for. Instead, it turned out that when people were able to buy prisms themselves, they found uses for them beyond exploring scenarios of “what might have been.”
A popular use of a prism was to enable collaboration with yourself, increasing your productivity by dividing the tasks on a project between your two versions; each of you did one half the job, and then you shared the results. Some individuals tried to buy multiple prisms so that they’d be part of a team consisting solely of versions of themselves, but not all the parallel selves were in direct contact with each other, which meant that information needed to be relayed from one to another, consuming the prisms’ pads faster. A number of projects came to an abrupt end because someone had underestimated their data usage, exhausting the prism before the work done in one branch could be transmitted, leaving it forever inaccessible.
More than data brokers, the availability of private prisms had an enormous impact on the public imagination; even people who never used prisms found themselves thinking about the enormous role that contingency played in their lives. Some people experienced identity crises, feeling that their sense of self was undermined by the countless parallel versions of themselves. A few bought multiple prisms and tried to keep all their parallel selves in sync, forcing everyone to maintain the same course even as their respective branches diverged. This proved to be unworkable in the long term, but proponents of this practice simply bought more prisms and repeated their efforts with a new set of parallel selves, arguing that any attempt to reduce their dispersal was worthwhile.
Many worried that their choices were rendered meaningless because every action they took was counterbalanced by a branch in which they had made the opposite choice. Experts tried to explain that human decision-making was a classical rather than quantum phenomenon, so the act of making a choice didn’t by itself cause new branches to split; it was quantum phenomena that generated new branches, and your choices in those branches were as meaningful as they ever were. Despite such efforts, many people became convinced that prisms nullified the moral weight of their actions.
Few acted so rashly as to commit murder or other felonies; the consequences of your actions still fell on you in this branch, not any other. But there was a shift in behavior that, while falling short of a mass outbreak of criminality, was readily discernible by social scientists. Edgar Allan Poe had used the phrase “the imp of the perverse” to describe the temptation to do the wrong thing simply because you could, and for many people the imp had become more persuasive.
Not for the first time, Nat wished there were some way to tell how Lyle felt about his prism, some visible gauge of her progress. A month had gone by since her gambit of announcing she had given up her prism, and while she knew Lyle was closer to giving his up than when she started, she had no way of telling how much longer it would be. Another month? Another six months? Morrow’s patience would run out soon, and then they’d have to try something more drastic.
Once everyone was seated, Lyle volunteered to go first. He turned to Dana. “When I first started attending this group, you said one of the goals was to have a healthy relationship with your paraself.”
“One of the possible goals, yes,” said Dana.
“The other day I was talking to this guy who goes to the same gym I go to, and he seems to have that. He says he and his paraself are friends, they exchange tips that they’ve learned, they encourage each other to do better. It sounded amazing.”
Nat was immediately alert. Was Lyle resolving to make that his goal? That would be a disaster. If he was set on that, even Morrow’s plan wouldn’t be enough to get him to sell his prism.
“And I realized that I will never, ever have that kind of relationship with my paraself. So I’ve decided that I’m going to get rid of my prism.”
Nat was so relieved that for a moment she thought it must have been obvious to the others, but no one noticed. Zareenah asked Lyle, “Did you talk it over with your paraself?”
“Yeah. At first he suggested we just take a break for a while but still hang on to our prisms. I had thought about doing that before, because then I could show him when things were going better for me. But a couple meetings back, Nat mentioned that she didn’t need to prove anything to anyone. I think that keeping my prism would just keep me in that mind-set, wanting to prove something. So I told my paraself that, and he understood. We’re going to sell our prisms.”
Kevin said, “Just because your relationship with your paraself isn’t perfect doesn’t mean you have to give it up. That’s like saying if your marriage isn’t fairy-tale happy all the time, you don’t want to be married at all.”
“I don’t think it’s like that,” said Zareenah. “Maintaining your marriage is a lot more important than maintaining your relationship with your paraself. Everyone got by just fine before prisms were invented.”
“But is getting rid of your prism going to be what everyone in this group is expected to do? First Nat, now you. I don’t know if I want to give up my prism.”
“Don’t worry, Kevin,” said Dana. “You get to choose what your goal is. Not everyone has to have the same one.”
The group spent some more time reassuring Kevin and discussing the validity of different ways of living with prisms. When the meeting was over, Nat went to talk to Lyle. “I think you’re making the right decision,” she told him.
“Thanks, Nat. You definitely helped me make it.”
“I’m glad.” Now came the crucial part. Nat was surprised by how nervous she felt. As casually as she could, she said, “You know what, you should sell your prism at the same place I sold mine. They’ll give you and your paraself a good price.”
“Really? What’s it called?”
“SelfTalk, on Fourth Street.”
“Oh yeah, I think I saw a flyer of theirs around here.”
“Yeah, that’s where I got their name, too. If you want some moral support when you sell it, I can go with you, and afterward we can go get coffee or something.”
Lyle nodded. “Sure, let’s do that.”
And just like that, the plan was right on track. “How about Sunday?” she said.
Nat was waiting outside of SelfTalk for Lyle to arrive. She knew there was a chance he had changed his mind, but he showed up right on time and had the prism with him. It was a little anticlimactic to finally see it; here was what she and Morrow had been working toward for months, but it didn’t look any different from any other late-model prism, just a blue aluminum briefcase. Nat was suddenly struck by how the situation was both extraordinary and surprisingly mundane: each prism was like something out of a fairy tale, a bag containing a door to another world, and yet most of those worlds weren’t particularly interesting, most of those doors weren’t especially valuable. It was only because this one might reunite a prince with his beloved that it was precious.