Strange Attractor
A Short Story
Viral Chefclub cheese perversion. Facebook and Rutine Team Up Free Trial Vitamins! A dog meeting a capybara. Mass shooting. Pregnant classmate. That Onion article about mass shootings. Mom posting she’s proud of Adam. Tweety Bird advocating alcoholism. Elephant toothpaste. Super wolf blood moon.
Wait. Back up. Scroll, scroll, scroll back up.
Melissa Meyers: “Just got off the phone with @Adam Meyers. So proud of my young man settling in with his new position at @Instagram!”. Three likes, two hearts, no comments.
I blink the 2 AM away, stare closer at the orange-tinted screen. It’s mom all right. She’s changed her profile picture in support of some already-out-of-date cause since the last time I logged on here, probably two months ago. Or, shit, it’s August already? Six months ago. I click her name, not daring to hover over the tag in her most recent post. Her wall is the usual mix of friends tagging her into inane Minion memes, milquetoast liberal political agitprop, and mundanities from her life in The Villages (the indignity of an obnoxious conservative neighbor’s golf cart blocking in your own on Salsa night). But there’s something else slithering between them. Text posts about “Adam”. Her “Young Man”. Her “Firstborn”. Her “Proudest accomplishment”.
The more of them I see, the more derealization swirls around my sleep-deprived mind. This is a dream, right? Like the time I dreamed I was browsing facebook the day Bill Murray died until I ‘read’ a post from one of my level-headed friends explaining it was all a hoax? That’s how brains work when you’re a boring burnout, you know - you don’t dream about doing things, you dream about Posting.
But I feel the twinge in my back, the stale heat radiating off the wall, the gritty film of dead skin cells built up on the side of the mouse. I’m awake, as awake as I ever am anyway. These posts are real.
I hover over one of the tags as if getting ready to pick up a dead mouse. The info box pops up. There’s a face in it that doesn’t look too far off from college photos of dad, just with more stylish hair and a neatly trimmed beard in addition to the mustache. It’s smiling broadly in front of a brick building. I squint for the obvious signs of a chatbot-generated homunculus, fearful symmetries and extra digits and malformed horrors in the corners, and find none. The info callout tells me we have 37 mutual friends and that Adam is from my hometown.
I force my index finger to depress the mouse button two millimeters.
Adam Meyers explodes across the screen. His cover photo is a pair of train tracks in a forest receding into a golden distance. Friends, job, history, photos, all present and correct. I scroll through his profile with mounting horror, seeing that he’s witty, urbane, has all the right opinions and never posts cringe. He’s a font of literary quotations. I click on his photos tab, realizing my heart is overclocking and my mouth has gone dry. He’s out with friends, he’s kayaking, he’s wearing a mask until he’s not, he’s graduating college, he’s graduating high school, he’s in my childhood bedroom, he’s in the K-mart photo studio with me as a bald laughing baby, he’s in my mother’s arms in a scanned-in Polaroid from before I was even born.
Outside my conscious control my fingers Alt + F4 and slam the laptop closed. I sit in the dark, the battery-powered mouse’s blinking light my only anchor to the material world.
“What the fuck,” I whisper.
My name is Lara Meyers.
And I’m an only child.
The hangover is intense and tenacious. I know it’s a mistake for me to drink after midnight, much less get cross-faded, so why did I do it? Something on the internet? I glance at the laptop through crusty eyes, its battery light blinking a baleful red for ‘charge me’. My phone says it’s nearly noon and I have two missed calls.
I chug three glasses of tap water from the bathroom sink and promptly go back to sleep.
Around two, the phone wakes me up again with further buzzing. My headache marginally diminished, I ride the insistent shouting of my bladder back to full consciousness and force my swimming eyes to focus on the caller ID. It’s Mom.
I have the phone’s robot voice deal with her.
She calls again around four, when I’m just finishing up my brunch/dinner of frozen pot-stickers and slightly wilted Asian salad kit. I may, finally, be in a place to deal with her. If not now, when?
“Hi Mom,” I croak.
“Oh, good, you’re alive,” mom says. It doesn’t sound like a joke.
“Unfortunately.”
“Don’t say that, Lara. You know what your grandfather did in the garden shed.”
This is off to a great start already. “What are you calling about?”
“Do I have to have a reason to call my daughter?”
“Strictly speaking no, but you usually do.”
“I just wanted to see how you were doing, that’s all. Any luck on the job search?”
Job. That catches something in the pickled recesses of my medium-term memory. “No, mom. Still just working at the library.” I’m a circulation manager on the night shift, a position which is a dreadfully boring way to earn something approximating a living wage and health insurance. The “job search” is more of a theoretical pursuit than mom would prefer.
“Well. At least they haven’t fired you yet.”
“Not yet,” I say mirthlessly.
Mom pauses. I can feel the windup; it comes about once a month. “I just think you could be doing more with your degree. You’re so smart, Lara. You could be working at so much higher a level.”
“We’ve been through this so many times. I don’t want to toss myself into the meat grinder of the tech industry; I don’t want to work hundred-hour weeks as a code monkey so some pedophilic billionaire can more efficiently exploit orphans in Bali.” I change up the specifics of the moral outrage every time just to keep things fresh for me.
“That’s not what every job in the field is! Just look at Adam. He’s very happy with his new position at Instagram.”
The whiskey-corroded gears begin to engage in the back of my brain. Adam. “Who’s Adam?” my mouth blurts.
Mom tsks. “Your brother, of course.”
Fuck. That’s what I drank over. I scramble over to the desk to fire up the laptop, try to figure out what’s going on in the cold light of day. “Mom, I don’t have a brother. You know that. I was born when you were 28. You and dad had gotten married two years before.”
“And why do you think we got married, silly?”
“...because you loved each other?”
“Psh. Because I was pregnant.”
My fingers fumble at the keyboard. “No. No, that’s not right, that’s not… I’m an only child.”
“Lara, honey, you’re scaring me here.”
“No, you’re scaring me, mom. I don’t have a brother. Did he show up on your doorstep or something? It could be a scam, he could-”
“Lara Genevieve Meyers. You shared a house with Adam for sixteen years of your life. Don’t pretend you didn’t.” She sounds royally pissed off, more than usual. I finally find the Adam Meyers facebook page in my history, still sitting there perfectly solid and real and horrifying like an onyx pyramid materializing in the middle of downtown. “He said you might do this,” mom sighs.
“He… what?” My voice catches.
“Excommunicate him. Pretend he doesn’t exist because of his political opinions. Lara, I’ve seen your reddit account. I’m worried about you being radicalized.”
“Wh… because I said it’s ridiculous to double-mask after being vaccinated? I’m following the science mom, I’m not about to goosestep to Charlottesville carrying a tiki torch.” I feel reality shift underneath me, as if in my defensiveness I’ve set one foot in a snare where Adam does exist.
“Well that’s a relief. I’m sure Adam would appreciate if you would get in touch with him and tell him he’s not persona non grata.”
I want to scream THERE IS NO ADAM but I see a kodak picture of third grade me and the imposter in a pool together and swallow it. “I’ll. I’ll do that,” I quaver.
“That’s good to hear. Maybe he can give you a referral for a job while you’re at it.”
“I’ve got a pot boiling over,” I lie, unable to keep my composure any longer. “Gotta go. Bye mom.”
“Oh, you’re cooking? That’s a nice change of pa-”
I end the call and turn back to the laptop, my last forgotten potsticker cooling on the paper plate beside me. Yes, get in touch with Adam. It all makes sense now - I can’t believe I didn’t figure it out last night when I first saw it. Some next-gen scammer has taken in my poor credulous mom somehow. If I want to save my inheritance it’s up to me to dismantle him. I crack my knuckles, down the rest of my hair-of-the-dog flavored coke zero, and open a chat window. Here goes nothing.
That evening, I read Mom’s and Adam’s entire facebook history.
Photos (with captions) featuring Adam are backdated throughout his entire three decades of life. There are a couple hundred, which is enough to be convincing, but not as many as anyone else his age has. I’m in seventeen of them; I vaguely recognize them as existing polaroids and 24-hour photo prints from childhood, but not a single one overlaps with the gallery I have scanned into my own profile so I don’t have an easy way to prove they’re faked.
His profile history originates ten years ago, when he claims his first account was ‘hacked’, locking him out from accessing it. Shortly thereafter he claims he’s getting off facebook to concentrate on his college workload and posts only sporadically for the next six years. When he comes back, he traffics in banalities until the updates start having a personal touch about eight months ago. The more advanced Adam posts don’t read like AI. They have idiosyncratic themes and verbal tics, opinions about Oreo flavors and frequent quotes from favorite authors like Orwell (that’s what he - they - it - signed off from our chat with too).
Mom’s profile tells a story that lines up with this assessment. There’s no mention of Adam until January, right when the Adam-profile seems to have gained a human pilot. The posts are infrequent and noncommittal at first, but become more emphatic as time wears on, presumably mirroring her rising confidence in the Adam-entity’s reality as it inveigled itself into her mental model of the world through gaslighting chats like the one I’d just had.
The human-seeming Adam-posts start to get engagement from mom’s friends and people I knew peripherally in high school, accounts belonging to known human beings. But the older ones have engagement only from profiles that look suspiciously like Adam’s - put-together 20-somethings and 30-somethings who seem not to have gained full consciousness until this year, having spent the preceding decade posting ‘looks great :)’ on each others’ photos of sandwiches.
I click through a few links in the web of model-Millennial automata and there seems to be no end to them. Each one regularly comments on the posts of at least two more I haven’t seen before. I map out a tree of seventy before I give up. Whatever’s going on here, the scope is bigger than just my mom. There’s a whole army of fake people out there.
It’s gotten dark outside again while I sleuthed. The air conditioner kicks off, and I shiver.
“Adam says you acknowledged his existence. That’s good to hear,” Mom says over the sound of the lawn service manicuring her duplex.
I stare ahead into the bumper-to-bumper traffic on the way to work. Starting your shift at 5 PM is a joy. “I don’t know what came over me,” I lie to the dashboard and its bluetooth microphone.
“Well, you know what happened to your great-aunt,” mom says by way of brushing it off. I don’t, but I know better than to ask. Presumably she went off her rocker because of some mortal sin combo platter of drinking liquor and being unmarried by thirty.
“Mm-hmm.” I mumble instead. “Say, when did you last see Adam?”
“We chatted two days ago. And I just spoke with him on the phone last week.”
“But when did you see him?” I try not to push too hard.
“Why?” Dammit.
“I was thinking of coming for a visit. My friends are in Orlando next month and I thought I could stop by for a day if I came along with them. I figured he might want to come too. Family reunion.”
“Oh. Well, Orlando’s a fair bit out of the way, dear. But it would be nice to see you at last. It’s been what, three years?”
“And how long for Adam?”
“I…” she trails off. “A while.” A mower choking on wet grass clippings, muffled Spanish curses. “Yes, it’s been a while. I can’t remember the last time I saw him in person.”
“Great. I’ll ask him if he wants to come down.”
I wonder who, exactly, I’m laying a trap for.
My friends aren’t actually going to Orlando, and also I don’t actually have any friends. I book a plane ticket nevertheless, my bank account distraught at the Labor Day premium on flights to Florida. “Adam” has refused to further engage with me. Mom has tried to talk me into driving instead, as if I could afford to take the necessary eight days off work.
The Villages sprawls across three counties, a nightmare in pastel. Tens of thousands of identical houses in hypnotically wavy grids stretch as far as the eye can see. Fetid water pools beside every road and lurks behind every block, the fingers of the Gulf waiting to rise out of the Earth and seize their prize.
I ring the doorbell, and mom’s yappy little bastard of a dog yells back for about thirty seconds before she finally gets to the door. I see her through the screen and it takes a moment to adjust to her short layered hair being fully gray - she gave up dyeing during the pandemic, and all of a sudden for the first time my mom is an Old Lady. She looks me up and down, evidently making a similar adjustment to my fifteen extra pounds and first faint frown lines. But then she breaks into a genuine smile. “I didn’t think you’d do it. Come on in, Lara, it’s good to see you.” She hugs me.
I step into the entry hall. There are pictures of me all over the near wall. Pictures of her. Pictures of dad before he died. No pictures of Adam. I cling to that absence as I follow her into the main room and sit in the armchair that’s way too high off the ground. I’m not the crazy one.
I’m just the one expecting a person who doesn’t exist to show up any minute.
“Would you like something to drink?”
“Sure, I’ll have a martini if you don’t mind.”
“Oh.” Mom pokes her head out of the kitchenette. “I don’t really drink drink anymore. I have oat milk, sparkling water, I could make you a K-cup…”
“Ice water’s fine.” I’ve never known mom not to have the makings of a martini or three around. Something’s changed.
The bastard dog sniffs my toes suspiciously as mom bustles back out into the seashell-bedecked living room. Her furniture preferences have only tended towards the more baroque and overstuffed, and a huge transparent-blue pill organizer sits on the end table next to a big white bottle of vitamins of some sort. It feels like stepping into Grandma’s house twenty years ago. No sooner has she set the waters down than the doorbell rings again and the dog has another fit as mom goes off to answer it. I grip the armrests involuntarily, not sure where to look. She’s keeping real plants alive now. There’s non-dusty books on her shelf. Does that pill bottle have a facebook logo on it?
“Adam!” Mom sounds joyous.
“Hi Mom!” says a pleasant male voice. The sound of a bag being set down for a hug.
“Your sister’s in there. I’ll get you some water.”
“Thanks, that’ll be great.”
He doesn’t look quite like the pictures. His face is a little rounder, his nose a little smaller, his beard a little less kempt. They facetuned him to look just a little more like dad, it must be. And didn’t one of those seventy profiles look like this same guy AI-mixed with somebody else’s dad?
He looks at me with caution on his face, perhaps even guilt. “Hi Lara,” he almost whispers.
I try to keep my breathing steady. His physical presence is impossible to dismiss as an illusion - he’s tall, and seems to fill up the room. Florida’s sullen September heat radiates off his black suitcase. He smells of Old Spice Pure Sport. “Hi,” I manage.
“I’m glad you gave me this chance. I think we can work everything out today.”
“I think you’re wrong,” I whisper.
“Now kids, let’s not fight. What are you disagreeing with your brother about this time?” Mom tsks, but there’s less venom in it than usual.
“Oh nothing. Lara just thinks it won’t rain later. I guess she’s right, I hadn’t checked the radar in a bit.” He flips the doppler map around on his phone to show us, then pockets it smoothly.
Mom picks up her glass of ice water and raises it in a toast. “To the Meyers!”
I reluctantly follow suit. “To the Meyers.”
“To the Meyers,” the man who pretends to be Adam says, and takes a sip.
What follows is the most surreal conversation I’ve ever taken part in. Mom and Adam drive it, both with a fearless command of a family history that’s equal parts real and confected. I try to stand outside it to assess his game, but he manages to draw me into it. I fill in details of things I half remember, learn the fates of acquaintances long gone, even find myself laughing once or twice. Mom seems like an entirely different person than the one I remember from my high school years, or even from our phone calls a few months ago. Even without alcohol she’s warmer, freer, less casually cutting.
Don’t you think she seems happier?
Eventually, mom checks the time on her dog-themed wall clock and bolts out of her chair. “Oh, I hate to do this to you kids but Cynthia will just kill me if I miss trivia again.” She downs the contents of the evening box on the pill organizer and chases them with a mineral water. “I don’t suppose… no, no, you wouldn’t want to come, it’s Jimmy Buffett themed tonight. Are you kids okay if I leave you alone?”
I look at the strange man who knows my life story. He nods at me. Nothing seems more potentially dangerous than being left alone with a man masquerading as your nonexistent brother. But if I don’t, how will I ever find out the truth? I stand up to hug mom, then sit down in a different chair, next to the medical emergency pull string for accidental falls. “We’ll be fine.”
“Great. I’ll see if I can scoot out before the bonus round. Love you!” She gives me what I would have thought of before tonight as an uncharacteristic peck on the head and blows a kiss to her son.
As soon as the door latches, I wheel around to face Adam. “Okay. Cards on the table time. What the fuck is going on.”
He gives a pained look at mom’s smarthome hub, a little black cylinder pretending to sleep on the coffee table. “Not here,” he says. “Are you okay if we take a walk?”
Against my better judgment, I nod.
Outside, the night air is so humid I can feel condensation gathering in my eyebrows. Frog choruses in the retention ponds compete with cicadas in the stunted trees.
“Gum?” Adam offers. “Spearmint. Cool you down.”
I take a stick. Mom neglected to feed us, and gum might at least tide me over. “Thanks,” I say begrudgingly.
“I’m curious,” he starts off. “If you’d humor me, on a professional level I’m really intrigued to know what you think is going on.”
“And what if I don’t humor you?”
“Fair enough.”
We cover a few sidewalk squares in silence. An armada of electric golf carts glides by under the harsh white glare of the street lamps.
“I think you’re a hustler, and part of a network of hustlers,” I blurt. “I saw another fake profile that looks almost like you. There’s a team of you, maybe fifty or so, and you insert yourselves into rich old lonely people’s life stories, confuse them, twist things around until they give you power of attorney. Then you soak them for all they’re worth.”
“Power-of-attorney scams are terrible. They also don’t require nearly that much effort,” he replies. “People manage them every day without doing what we’re doing. Trust me, your mother’s estate will be safe and sound.”
“Oh, what a relief, the scammer says everything will be fine.”
“Your skepticism does you credit. Most people are far too credulous. We rely on that to do our work, though we’d prefer not to.”
“Sure.” I kick a pebble into the retention pod. It disappears with barely a ripple. A plane bound for MCO goes by overhead.
“Do you know what Google’s mission statement is?” he asks, hands in his pockets. He’s sweating already. A sign of humanity, I suppose.
“Don’t Be Evil, which is a funny joke these days, for depressing values of funny.”
“No, that was their motto. Their mission statement, and I think it’s a good one, is ‘to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful’. It doesn’t have a moral valence, but it provides direction. Like all firms, they exist to make money, but they function at their best when making money by doing that. Organizing the world’s information. It’s their guiding light.”
“But you don’t work for Google, do you. You work for Instagram.”
“I work for Facebook. Adam works for Instagram.” He turns and looks at me intently, to see my reaction to the masquerade slipping. I try to keep my face neutral.
“Until recently, Facebook didn’t have nearly so universal a mission statement. There was some leftover claptrap about ‘building communities and bringing the world closer together’, but it was pretty clear that that wasn’t our real focus anymore. Communities spun off into conspiratorial rabbit holes. The world got more and more fractured. As long as we kept making money, most people didn’t care. But some execs decided to try a pilot program for how we might pursue a new mission, one as comprehensive and elemental as Google’s. Something along the lines of ‘To organize the world’s personalities and make them universally amenable and useful’.”
“That’s, if you’ll forgive me saying it, some extremely creepy shit.”
“I thought so too, at first!” he chuckles, though I can’t tell whether it’s him or Adam. “But when I saw the first results in action, I actually volunteered to join the pilot program.
“People are miserable, Lara. And facebook as it currently exists is a machine designed to make them more miserable, because miserable people sit inside browsing facebook and try to fill the hole inside themselves with the things people advertise to them, or so the theory goes.
“You took dynamical systems, you know what an attractor is. There’s a big one centered on the origin of interpersonal n-space where people have zero growth, zero happiness, zero meaningful relationships, zero resistance to buying stupid shit, and that’s the one we’d been encouraging people to fall into, because on the profit function it represents a local maximum. But there’s another, stranger attractor out there somewhere in the latent space of human interaction. One that climbs away from the origin on a fractal semistable branching path and pulls the profit function, eventually, even higher than it is when people are mired at zero. If we can just nudge people onto that strange attractor and get them to stay there, not only will we make the world a better place, we’ll make more money while doing it.”
“And what’s the nature of this strange attractor?”
“It’s called success. It’s called happiness. Tell me, having seen her tonight, do you think your mother is worse off for having me as a son?”
“But she doesn’t have you as a son!”
“She didn’t have me as a son. And now she does. Is her world the brighter for it? Will the rest of her days be happier, healthier, more productive, less vituperative for it?”
I walk in silence, afraid of my response. His arguments shouldn’t be so persuasive to me, but then he always did have a silver tongue while we were growing up.
“For ninety-two percent of mothers and eighty-seven percent of fathers in our program, the answers to all of those are yes. According to our analytics engines your mother will now most likely live four years longer than she otherwise would have. Her QALYs are through the roof. Her internal social credit score is up thirty points and her annual adjusted gross advertising revenue generation is expected to double by the end of the decade. Now that’s what I call a win-win.”
“But,” I choke out around my gum, my gum that has something not quite right with it, something I can’t put my finger on, but that doesn’t matter now does it, “how can you do all that. How can just thinking she has a son make her… are you saying,” and suddenly I feel tears coming on. “You’re saying she was a miserable alcoholic because of me. Because I was such a shitty disappointment of a daughter. And you’ve got the numbers to prove it.”
He stops and turns around, silhouetted by a street light. “Oh, sis, no, that’s not what I’m saying at all. You’re just one part of your mom’s tapestry. It was falling apart at the seams for all sorts of reasons. It just happens to be that a son is the easiest way to stitch it all up at once. Obviously we can’t scale this solution to the whole world; it’s too resource-intensive. So we’re testing lower-impact ways of getting to people. You’re enrolled in a sibling test right now, of course, but we’re having great success with friendly neighbors, childhood pastors, beloved former elementary school teachers, et cetera. That doesn’t mean any of those people’s existing pastors or teachers were bad. It just means that a different one is what they need to get the boost onto the strange attractor.”
His technobabble hasn’t stemmed the tears. I feel a sob coming on. He steps towards me, and I don’t feel afraid. I feel comforted. I allow myself to be hugged, just like when I came home to him after Kelsey dumped me at Christmas.
“So just like that. You, you, you fixed mom. Some photoshops, some DMs, some literary quotes to manufacture a personality, some phone calls, and you fixed up all the thirty years of shit I poured on her,” I cry into his shoulder. “It just seems too easy, you know? I still don’t believe it.”
His posture sags a bit. “Well, it wasn’t just that. See, in the pilot program there’s also a neurochemical element we’re using to facilitate the optimizations by increasing plasticity of the neocortex. But we hope to be able to phase it out within five years. And then yes, it will hopefully be that easy.” He pats me on the back, hugging me like he did when Dad died, and his words seem to fade into meaninglessness as soon as he says them. All that matters is that we’re together, now, and it’s all right, everything is all right. That final line from his favorite book echoes through my brain, devoid of connotation, as I swallow my gum.
He gives me a squeeze, then breaks free, steps back, still backlit by the streetlamp, his face unreadable through my tears. “I love you, little sis,” he says.
“I love you, big brother.”
This story was originally written in 2021.