The Affinities Read Free

missed the ferry, waiting for you.”
    â€œI’m lucky I didn’t end up in the emergency room.”
    â€œYou couldn’t just take the subway?”
    â€œI was almost there, and I was already late, so—”
    â€œYou were already late —that says it all, doesn’t it?”
    I had shared my apartment with Dex for six months last year. We took some of the same classes at Sheridan College. The roommate thing didn’t work out. When he moved, he left his bong and his cat behind. He eventually came back for the bong. I gave the cat to the retired librarian in the apartment down the hall—she seemed grateful. “Thank you for your compassion.”
    â€œI could come over. We could watch a movie or something.”
    â€œI’m not in the mood.”
    â€œCome on, Adam. You owe me an evening’s entertainment.”
    â€œYeah … no.”
    â€œYou can’t be a dick twice in one week.”
    â€œI’m pretty sure I can,” I said.
    *   *   *
    Of course it wasn’t Dex’s fault that I was moody—not that Dex would ever admit that anything was his fault.
    I figured I had a couple of good reasons for applying to the Affinities and a few bad ones. The fact that my social life revolved around a guy like Dex was one of the good ones. A bad one? The idea that I could buy a better life for a couple of hundred dollars and a battery of psych tests.
    But I had done my research. I wasn’t totally na ï ve. I knew a few things about the Affinities.
    I knew the service had been commercially available for four years now. I knew it had gained popularity in the last year, after The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and BoingBoing ran feature articles about it. I knew it was the brainchild of Meir Klein, an Israeli teleodynamicist who had ditched a successful academic career to work for the corporation. I knew there were twenty-two major and minor Affinity groups, each named after a letter of the Phoenician alphabet, the “big five” being Bet, Zai, Het, Semk, and Tau.
    What I didn’t know was how the evaluation process actually worked, apart from the generalities I had read online.
    Fortunately I had a talkative tester … who turned out to be Miriam, the woman who had done my initial intake. She grinned like an old friend when I showed up for the first session. I recognized the smile as customer relations, but I was still grateful for it. I wondered whether Miriam was a member of an Affinity.
    She escorted me to a nurse’s station in the back hall of the InterAlia office, where I was relieved of another vial of blood, and then to a small evaluation room. The room was windowless and air-conditioned to a centigrade degree above chilly. It contained a teakwood desk and two chairs. On the desk was a fourteen-inch video monitor, a laptop computer, and a chunky leather headband with a couple of USB ports built into it. I said, “Do I wear that?”
    â€œYes. Tonight we’ll use it to do some baseline measurements. You can put it on now if you like.”
    She helped me adjust it. The headband was heavy with electronics but surprisingly comfortable. Miriam plugged one end of a cable into the band, the other into the laptop. The monitor facing me wasn’t connected to the laptop. I couldn’t see whatever Miriam was looking at on the laptop’s screen.
    â€œIt’ll take a minute or two to initialize,” she said. “Most of the information we collect is analyzed later, but it takes some heavy-duty number-crunching just to acquire the data.”
    I wondered if she was acquiring it now. Was our conversation part of the test? She seemed to anticipate the question: “The test hasn’t started yet. Today, it’s just you looking at a series of pictures on that monitor. Nothing complicated. Like I said, we’re establishing a baseline.”
    â€œAnd the blood sample? That’s for drug