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The Last Witness

The apartment was smaller than Jonah remembered.

He stood in the doorway, keys still in his hand, looking at what
remained of Sam's life. Twenty-three years of friendship, reduced to
boxes and furniture and the particular silence of a space that had lost
its person.

"Take your time," Sarah said behind him. Sam's sister, who he'd met
twice before today. "I'll be in the hall if you need me."

He nodded without turning around. Stepped inside. Let the door close
behind him.

The place was modest---a one-bedroom in Rogers Park, north Chicago, the
kind of apartment academics end up in when they've chosen ideas over
income. Sam had lived here for eight years, ever since the divorce.
Before that, there had been a house in Evanston with a yard and a wife
and plans that hadn't worked out. But this was where Sam had become Sam
again, or whatever version of Sam he'd been at the end.

Jonah walked through the rooms slowly. Kitchen with its collection of
coffee mugs, each from a different conference or bookstore. Living room
with built-in shelves crammed with books---literature, philosophy,
theory, the readable and the unreadable mixed together without system.
Bedroom with the bed still unmade, because Sam had never seen the point
of making a bed you were just going to sleep in again.

On the nightstand: a lamp, a water glass, a book.

Jonah picked up the book. The Curated Self: Waking Up in an Optimized
World. He'd heard of it---one of those tech-critique things that showed
up in weekend supplements. The kind of book Jonah's feed would never
surface for him, because the algorithm knew he preferred to look
forward, not back.

A bookmark stuck out from the middle. A receipt from a coffee shop, with
a note scrawled on the back in Sam's handwriting:

For Jonah. Page 147.

Jonah's throat tightened. He opened to the page.

A passage was underlined:

"The optimized life is not a lie. That's what makes it so effective.
Your curated feed shows you things you genuinely want to see. Your
suggested connections are people you might genuinely like. The system
doesn't deceive you---it anticipates you. And in anticipating you, it
forecloses the possibility of becoming anyone else."

In the margin, Sam had written: This. This is what I've been trying to
tell you.

Jonah sat down on the bed, still holding the book. His phone buzzed in
his pocket---probably the airline, confirming tomorrow's flight back to
San Francisco---but he didn't reach for it.

Sam had been trying to tell him something. For years, apparently. And
Jonah had been too optimized to hear it.

They'd met freshman year at Northwestern, two kids from different coasts
who'd ended up in the same dorm. Sam from Minnesota, studying English
because he loved books and hadn't figured out what else to do with that.
Jonah from California, studying computer science because he was good at
it and because the future was obviously going to be digital.

They shouldn't have been friends. They had almost nothing in common. But
Sam had a way of asking questions that made you want to answer, and
Jonah had a way of explaining things that made Sam actually understand.
They stayed up late arguing about free will and determinism, about
whether the internet was making people smarter or dumber, about books
Sam was reading and code Jonah was writing.

After graduation, their lives diverged. Sam went to grad school, got a
PhD, started teaching high school English because he wanted to reach
people before they got too calcified. Jonah went to Silicon Valley,
joined a startup, rode the wave that was already building. He was good
at his job---seeing patterns, building systems, understanding what
people wanted before they knew they wanted it.

They stayed in touch, sort of. Texts on birthdays. Occasional visits
when Jonah was in Chicago for work. The friendship compressed into
something thinner but unbroken, a thread that stretched across the
distance.

Ten years ago, Sam had started asking questions.

Not the old questions about free will and determinism. New ones. About
the apps Jonah was building, the systems he was optimizing, the subtle
machinery of persuasion that had become the infrastructure of daily
life.

"Do you ever think about what you're actually doing?" Sam asked once, on
a visit.

"Building tools," Jonah said. "Making things easier."

"Easier for who?"

"For everyone. For users."

"And who decides what's easy? Who decides what they should want?"

Jonah had waved it off. Sam was an English teacher---he thought in
stories and metaphors, not systems and data. He didn't understand how
this worked. How the algorithm wasn't some malevolent force, just a
mirror that showed people what they already were.

But Sam kept asking. Year after year. In emails that Jonah skimmed, in
conversations that Jonah deflected, in a persistence that should have
told Jonah something was wrong.

And then, three weeks ago, Sam had died.

Heart attack, Sarah said. Sudden. No warning. He'd been grading papers
at his kitchen table, and then he wasn't.

Jonah had flown out for the funeral, sat in the back of the church,
listened to former students talk about the teacher who'd changed their
lives. He'd felt---what? Grief, yes. But also something else. A
dissonance he couldn't name.

Now, sitting on Sam's unmade bed, holding the book with the marked
passage, he was starting to understand.

He found the notebook in Sam's desk drawer.

It was a cheap composition book, the kind teachers bought in bulk. The
cover said NOTES TOWARD SOMETHING in Sam's handwriting. Inside were
pages of fragments---observations, questions, half-developed ideas.

The wanting might be the thing you lost.

If the algorithm knows what you'll choose before you choose it, is it
still a choice?

Jonah used to argue with me. Now he just explains.

The system doesn't make you want anything. It just shows you the most
efficient path to what you already want. That's why it works. That's why
it's terrifying.

What would I want if no one was watching? If no system was learning? I
don't know anymore. That's the honest answer.

The examined life. Socrates said. But what if the examination itself is
optimized?

Jonah read it all, every page, his coffee growing cold on the desk
beside him. It was like hearing Sam's voice again---the Sam who asked
questions, who pushed back, who refused to accept easy answers.

But there was something else in these pages too. Something darker. Sam
wasn't just philosophizing. He was tracking something. His own thoughts,
maybe. His own patterns.

I counted: I check my phone 47 times a day. Not because I want to.
Because there's a pull. A gravity. The wanting has been trained into
me.

Three times this week I've started to write something and then stopped.
Not because it was bad. Because I couldn't tell if the idea was mine or
if it was surfaced for me.

Who am I when the feed goes away? I'm trying to find out. It's harder
than I expected.

And then, near the end:

I need to tell Jonah. Not email---he skims those. In person. The next
time he's here. If he comes.

Jonah closed the notebook. Outside the window, Chicago was doing its
thing---traffic, pedestrians, the ordinary motion of a city that didn't
know or care that Sam was gone.

He hadn't come. That was the thing. Sam had asked him to visit three
times in the past year, and each time Jonah had found a reason not to.
Work. Travel. The relentless forward motion of a life that had no room
for sitting in a Chicago apartment listening to questions he didn't want
to answer.

And now Sam was dead, and the questions were still here, waiting.

The letter was in the bottom drawer, under a stack of student papers.

Dear Jonah,

If you're reading this, I probably didn't get the chance to say what I
wanted to say in person. Or I did, and you didn't hear it. Both are
possible.

I've been watching you disappear. That's the only way I know how to
describe it. Slowly, over the years, the person I knew in college has
been replaced by someone smoother, more optimized, more efficient. You
don't argue anymore. You don't question anymore. You don't sit with
problems---you solve them and move on.

I know you think you're the same person. That's how it works. The
system doesn't change you all at once. It just shows you the path of
least resistance, over and over, until the path becomes who you are.

I don't know if you can hear what I'm trying to say. I don't know if
anyone can hear it. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe this is just what middle age
looks like, and I'm romanticizing a past that never existed.

But I don't think so. I think something real has been lost. And I think
you lost it so gradually you didn't notice it going.

The book on my nightstand---read it. The passage I marked is for you.
It says what I couldn't figure out how to say.

And then ask yourself: when was the last time you did something the
algorithm didn't predict? When was the last time you wanted something
you weren't supposed to want?

I love you, Jonah. I always have. I just wish I'd figured out how to
reach you before it was too late.

Sam

Jonah sat with the letter for a long time. The light outside had
changed---afternoon giving way to evening, the gray Chicago sky
darkening toward night.

His phone buzzed again. Then again. The stream of notifications, the
current of his curated life, pulling him back toward the person Sam had
been trying to reach.

He turned the phone off.

He stayed three more days.

Not because Sarah needed him---she had family, friends, people who had
actually been part of Sam's daily life. He stayed because he needed to
sit in this apartment and read these books and understand what Sam had
been trying to say.

The book---The Curated Self---he finished in one long night. It was
good. Better than he'd expected. The author, Elias Vance, had worked in
tech too, had built the same kinds of systems Jonah had built, and had
walked away for reasons the book made painfully clear.

But it was Sam's marginalia that cut deepest. Notes in the margins,
questions, agreements, objections. A conversation with an author who
couldn't hear him, about ideas that had no easy answers.

The danger isn't malice. It's convenience. We give up our agency in
small steps, each one reasonable, until we've traded our whole selves
for a smoother experience.

Sam had underlined this and written: This is what J doesn't see. The
system isn't his enemy. It's his collaborator. That's why he can't see
it.

Jonah put the book down. Picked it up again. Read the same passages over
and over, trying to find the flaw in the argument, the place where Sam
and Elias were wrong and Jonah was right.

He couldn't find it.

On his last night, Jonah sat at Sam's desk and opened a new document.

He didn't know what he was going to write. He just knew that he needed
to write something---to put words on a screen that hadn't been
suggested, that hadn't been optimized, that were his and his alone.

Notes toward something, he wrote at the top. Sam's phrase.

Sam died three weeks ago, and I'm only now starting to understand what
he was trying to tell me.

He saw it happening. The optimization. The smoothing out. The slow
disappearance of the person I used to be. He tried to warn me, and I
didn't listen, because the system had already taught me not to listen to
things that didn't fit.

I don't know if I can change. I don't know if anyone can, once the
patterns are set, once the algorithm has learned you down to your
fingerprints. Maybe the best we can do is see it clearly. Name it.
Refuse to pretend it isn't happening.

The wanting might be the thing you lost. That's what Sam wrote. And I
think I finally understand.

I don't know what I want anymore. Not really. I know what the system
wants me to want---what it's trained me to want over years of
suggestions and nudges and convenient paths. But underneath all that, in
the place where real wanting lives, there's just static. Noise. The
absence where a person used to be.

Maybe wanting could be rebuilt. Slowly. Choice by choice. Not an escape
from the algorithm, but a negotiation with it. A refusal to pretend you
were free while also refusing to surrender to the current.

He stopped typing. Read what he'd written. It wasn't an answer---it
wasn't even close to an answer. But it was something Sam might have
respected. The examined life, lived inside the examination, eyes finally
open.

Jonah looked at his phone, still powered off on the desk.

Feeling overwhelmed? Try our new "Grieving Mindfully" program.

He could almost hear the notification. Could almost see it sliding into
his screen, helpful and inevitable.

He declined the suggestion he hadn't yet received.

Then he opened a new document and began to write.

Two months later, in Seattle, a man named Elias would receive an email
from a stranger:

Dear Mr. Vance,

My name is Jonah. A friend of mine---Sam---died recently, and I found
your book in his apartment. He'd marked a passage for me. I've been
thinking about it ever since.

I don't know if this message is mine or if the algorithm surfaced you
for me the way it surfaced you for Sam. At this point, I'm not sure it
matters. The question isn't whether the introduction was organic. The
question is what I do with it.

I'm not looking for answers. I've stopped believing in those. But I'm
trying to stay awake, which is something I promised to do a long time
ago and then forgot.

If you're willing, I'd like to buy you coffee. The old-fashioned
way---no app, no optimization. Just two people who've seen something,
sitting across from each other, trying to figure out what to do about
it.

Either way, thank you for the book. Sam would have wanted me to tell
you it mattered.

---Jonah

Elias read the message three times. He thought about all the people the
algorithm had sent his way, seeking something he wasn't sure he could
give.

He thought about the book he was writing, the one about what comes
after you wake up.

He typed: "I know a coffee shop in Capitol Hill. Thursday, 10am. No
apps required."

He hit send.

Somewhere, a system noted the connection. Added it to a model.
Adjusted.

The two men would meet anyway.

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