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“If cultural imperialism is what it takes to make the world a better place, then we’ll happily arrange the world’s information to ennoble the human race.”

In “The Perfect Match” author Ken Liu serves up a story of paranoia and control, crafting a tale that takes the age-old idea of our creations rising up and ruling us and making it more plausible by predicting a not too distant future when social media and online information consumption can be used not only to track our tastes and make recommendations but also to suggest beforehand what we might like and think we need.

Liu’s is a slightly different take on “Big Brother” stories and if you enjoy the thrill of people fighting back against control as happens in films like Gattaca, Minority Report, Equilibrium and a whole host of other books and films then I have no doubt you’ll enjoy this story.

“The Perfect Match” is featured in the December 2012 issue of Lightspeed. Click on the link above and give it a quick read and then come back for a spoiler-filled discussion.

Tilly is the voice Sai hears in his head the moment he awakes. In fact, Tilly chooses when Sai awakes, and to what song. Tilly sounds comforting and fun and from the start appears optimized to provide the very best living experience for Sai every single day. But that opening scene, from being awakened on through to Tilly’s suggestion of a smoothie rather than coffee, the reader is already getting that claustrophobic feeling of being controlled. Ken Liu makes you start to squirm in your seat and you can feel the walls closing in.

The human race exists within a state of accepting and benefiting from a certain level of control and oversight: we pay a prescribed amount of taxes, sometimes against our will, to provide for police protection, for emergency assistance and fire departments. Our commerce is regulated by laws with the idea of providing a fair marketplace. Laws dictate how we should behave for optimal safe and secure living. Existing around the edge of the control that we (mostly) accept without much thought is the nature endemic to humans in that we do not like the feeling of being controlled. Be it backlash against governments, religions, corporations, our workplaces, parents, friends. It is human nature to want to push back against any perceived yoke of control being placed upon us. It is that nature that Ken Liu taps into so skillfully at the very start of his story, instantly placing the reader into a context that stirs feelings of discomfort with the future in which Sai lives.

What you figure out early on in “The Perfect Match” is that Centillion is a company, not some shadowy or even overt government. It adds plausibility to the story because it does not seem at all far-fetched that we would unwittingly, and perhaps even willingly, accept “control” that we believe we are opting into, control that grows out of our interactions with social media, web searches and our purchasing habits. Liu taps into the paranoia that already exists when we see companies like Facebook having questionable privacy policies and Amazon suggesting to us what other items we might like based on what we’ve previously purchased. Netflix tells us what films it thinks we would enjoy watching. And many of us happily accept these suggestions as there is nothing inherently wrong with the idea of “someone” saying, “If you liked this, why not try this.” If you’ll recall, I did that myself to open this post. I’ve found some great books and films based on suggestions that pop up unasked for on sites like Amazon and Netflix. What I am saying is that Ken Liu’s story is all the more eerie because of how well he weaves in our current state of consumerism to create this story.

“I’ve plotted the optimum amount of consumption you should engage in daily.”

And that is what this story is about, consumption and the desire of self. Centillion is a company existing to give you what you want when you want it. It is the ultimate source of instant gratification. I find it telling that one of the first things Tilly tells Sai about his impending date is “I think you’ll be in love for six months”. That is a perfect match? Is that “love”? Of course not. It is a consumerism version of “love”. “Lust” is probably a more accurate word. But Sai is caught up in his own self-centered existence, aided and abetted by Tilly. On the same page we see that “Sai could feel himself falling in love” but given the suggestion planted in his head by his morning interaction with his neighbor Jenny, he was slightly more aware and felt that “…the date was a bit boring.” To go from feelings of “love” to “boredom” in the course of one first-date meal was to me an indication of the shallowness of basing any part of life on the drive to consume.

On a side note, I found it amusing that Sai could access a profile on Ellen that included “…reviews by previous boyfriends/girlfriends…”. That idea is not as far-fetched as it may initially appear.

Jenny is the embodiment of the character that you expect to find in stories like this. She is the one introduced to point out for the reader and the other characters in the story just how wrong the entire situation is. Jenny plants the idea in Sai’s mind that his faithful-dog following of everything Tilly suggests is possibly not the ideal way to live life. Sai is of course instantly baffled and is as incredulous as we would be to find a modern young person not involved in some level of the social media phenomenon, be that through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, or just chatting on the phone via text. Liu’s description of Jenny is great:

“She had grown up a digital native, but had somehow missed the ethos of sharing.”

Leave it to “The Perfect Match” to make the word “sharing” so sinister.

When Sai decides to start interacting with Jenny she takes him out to see the less ideal parts of a world controlled by Centillion. Sai’s statement of “But that’s just business. It’s not the same thing as evil.” is put to the test when Jenny shows him the racial segregation that is perpetrated by Centillion because of this idea of ‘self-segregation’. They are only giving people what they want. At first I was thinking this idea seemed antithetical to Centillion’s motto to “make the world a better place”, and yet I cannot help but wonder if Centillion’s segregation somehow reflects the dark hearts of humanity better than say Star Trek‘s “in the future we all get along” equality.

Many of us have read stories and/or seen films in which machines rise up to take over our lives. Where Ken Liu succeeds is in taking that idea to a different place by having the “machine” not be some sentient A.I. but instead the very machines we use today and the algorithm-controlled software we are exposed to in our present day any time we engage in online activity. I had to laugh as I was reading in that I had the idea of the frog being slowly boiled and then Liu uses that same analogy in the story. Again, that kind of control seems more plausible, making it all the more creepy, because it is not outside of the realm of possibility.

The quote I put at the beginning of this post:

“If cultural imperialism is what it takes to make the world a better place, then we’ll happily arrange the world’s information to ennoble the human race.”

ties in interestingly with last week’s discussion of Aliette de Bodard’s short story “Immersion”. In her story we see familiar future tech used to homogenize interactions by tailoring things towards the dominant culture. One of the possible negative side effects of a growing global connectedness is the idea of cultures being assimilated rather than seeing cultures retain their uniqueness. It helps me better understand some peoples’ agitation about the idea of aspects of culture being “appropriated” into stories (for example all the Asian affectations in Firefly). Centillion’s version of “ennobling the human race” would take the “best” out of each culture while leaving behind anything that doesn’t have to do with profit and consumerism.

“The Perfect Match”, like many short stories of this kind, leaves the reader in an interesting place. Jenny is exposed as a plant and with that exposure–even before it happens, actually–the reader’s paranoia is heightened because of this implicit idea that no one can be trusted and that the control runs much deeper than one would imagine. It could be easy to read the story and believe that in spite of what Centillion says that even Jenny and her so-called rival company could simply be a convoluted manipulation by Centillion to effectively deal with those people who find themselves beginning to question the rightness of having an ever-present computer program guiding and leading them throughout the day. The story ends with an idea that perhaps Jenny and Sai will be able to live on to fight another day OR that they are reluctantly going to be pulled into Centillion’s web by helping to make Centillion even more effective at what it does. That is such a deliciously chilling idea.

I hope you enjoyed this week’s story. Ken Liu is a really accomplished short story author who seems to have burst onto the scene here in the U.S. over the last few years. These are my impressions of Liu’s story. If you would like his thoughts I suggest reading this brief interview over at Lightspeed.

As always I welcome your thoughts, discussion, dissention. Feel free to share whatever you would like about today’s story.
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Next Sunday we will be discussing a short story that is in a fantasy/fairy tale vein in celebration of the first weekend of the Once Upon a Time VII Challenge (official sign up coming Wed, March 20th). The story is “With Tales in their Teeth, From the Mountain They Came” by A.C. Wise.

She held him as long as she could in their house by the sea. But hands pressed to his skin, and stubborn lips and teeth refusing to shape words, could only hold him so long. His love was vast; it encompassed strangers dying in fields he’d never seen. He went to War. Her love was small, and encompassed only him. She stayed behind.

A.C. Wise’s “With Tales in Their Teeth, From the Mountain They Came” is a tale of words, or rather the pain caused from the lack of them and the healing that can come from surrounding oneself with words, written and more importantly spoken. When Alba’s lover dies in the war she leaves their home by the sea and goes up the mountain to the Library, becoming an Acolyte in service of the mysterious Librarians. Lost in the silence of the library the words pile up inside her until she can no longer contain them and as she speaks into the silence, Alba, and the world around her, begins to transform.

This is a beautiful story that celebrates words and their importance, an idea I dedicate to all my fellow book lovers. See you next week.