Living with the Now

This story appeared in the Southwest Review in 2018. I’ve made a few fussy tweaks, but no substantial revisions. Rereading it, I wish I could be happy about the few things I predicted by accident. (See also: novel #2, All the Lonely People.)

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Though the fact was never mentioned in any of the memoirs, unauthorized biographies, or fawning profiles in Wired, Forbes, or Fortune, psychedelic drugs played an indispensable role.

In July 2018, Connor Selwyn and Robert Stapleton were unemployed software engineers in their early thirties, living with their parents in provincial Sussex County, New Jersey. Selwyn’s three-year stint as a backend developer for Groupon concluded the previous March, when he decided the job didn’t inspire him and stopped showing up. He was evicted from his Chicago apartment in early December and had nowhere else to go but back to Jersey. Stapleton’s homecoming followed in January after he dropped out of Michigan Tech’s computer engineering graduate program, citing “bad stress” and existential foreboding.

During his first week back in town, Stapleton was happily surprised to find his high school buddy Connor at a Friday night Magic: The Gathering event at Space Ace Cards & Games, and to learn of the similarities in their circumstances. His elation was only slightly dampened when Selwyn called him a timmying fat asshole after losing to his Blightsteel Colossus on turn two.

Nevertheless, the two old acquaintances soon became cordial friends, allies in exile.

July 21. Selwyn and Stapleton left Space Ace at 7:45 PM. Friday Night Magic was scheduled to end when the shop closed at midnight, but Selwyn got himself banished from the premises after cursing out the fourteen-year-old girl who beat him with her Narset deck. He’d been warned before, and this was strike three. Stapleton conceded his own game, scooped up his cards, and followed him out. While it was true he preferred catching a ride in Selwyn’s Volvo (rather, Mrs. Selwyn’s Volvo) to dropping $15 on an Uber, Stapleton felt a responsibility to stand by Selwyn. Neither of them had any other friends in the area.

Selwyn’s temper could be fierce, but he cooled off as quickly as he heated up. It was unthinkable, he said, that they should call it a night when the sun had scarcely gone down, and he was fiending for more fun and more games. He proposed visiting Dragon’s Lair Collectibles up in Hackettstown, but emphasized the necessity of smoking a spiff before they embarked. The boys had nothing but flakes in their grinders, and their four most reliable connections were either unresponsive, out of town, or too drunk to be of any use. While Selwyn cursed and took his eyes off the road to scroll through his iPhone contacts, Stapleton straightened the wheel and suggested they just turn around, go home, and take the four tabs of LSD he’d been saving in his mini-fridge.

Four hours later—12:30 AM—the boys were traipsing through the lanes and cul-de-sacs of the sleeping neighborhood, forgetting to remember to keep their voices down as they chattered about the tech industry, the tarot symbolism of Magic: The Gathering, and the pareidolic rainbows spraying out of the flood lamps over the garage doors. Selwyn chain smoked American Spirits and deposited the butts in mailboxes. Stapleton, for financial and hygienic considerations, had recently stopped buying Marlboros and invested in an Eleaf iStick vaporizer, which he shared when Selwyn ran out of cigarettes.

Selwyn was new to vaping, and the device’s aesthetic and practical virtues mesmerized him. It wedded everything he loved about smoking (the sensuous pleasure of projecting curling wisps and white billows from his fondest orifice, the alkaloid tickle in his brain) with what he most admired in the overlapping principles of gadgeteering and Magic: The Gathering—elegance of design, potentially illimitable customization and upgrade options, and facility for effectuating ever-widening gyres of consumer demand.

Given the circumstances, it is understandable why Selwyn kept getting confused, mistaking Stapleton’s vaporizer for the iPhone that usually occupied his left hand. Wishing to check the time, he’d turn a habitual glance toward the device’s OLED display, and the hieroglyphic jumble of wattage, voltage, resistance, and battery life indicators set his brain backflipping. It happened repeatedly, and was never any less hilarious.

“If only life were simpler,” Stapleton said wistfully, stifling a giggle. “If only there was an app for delivering nicotine. Synergize that mother.”

Lights blinked on in the windows of the nearby houses as Selwyn rocked on his sides in the middle of the street, howling with laughter. “You’re brilliant,” he gasped at Stapleton, tears in his eyes. “You’re a prophet. You’re the buddha. Let’s do it.”

Thus was the keystone of humanity’s future indelibly laid.

After sleeping through Saturday, Selwyn got to work on Sunday with the zeal of a man issued a directive from God. Stapleton was hesitant to commit himself fully to a quixotic tech venture (he had a second interview at Trader Joe’s coming up, for one thing), but Selwyn cajoled and wheedled him, and eventually resorted to begging for his help.

“Please. I can’t do this without you, Rob. I need you on board. Please.”

Stapleton allowed himself to be swayed, but held off on selling his Magic cards to seed an R&D budget, which Selwyn had already begun to do.

One month, 109 cans of Red Bull, and 60 grams of marijuana later, the collaborators cleared the paper plates and soda cans from the coffee table in Stapleton’s basement domicile, set their invention upon it, and had a good, long look. The prototype consisted of two components, hardware and software. The solid asset was an atomizer and solution tank that plugged into a smartphone via USB port, and into the user’s mouth via silicon tubing. The digital piece was an app that activated the atomizer when a voice-recognition function registered a spoken command. For the sake of expediency, the command was “now,” although Selwyn intended to allow the user to set their own trigger phrase when the gadget moved out of beta.

Each of the 27 potential investors Selwyn inveigled into meeting him for lunch in Manhattan between September and January had only one question for him: what’s the point? Who but a small population of nicotine-addicted yokels with a history of buying late-night infomercial crap could be enticed to buy something so asinine as a voice-activated vaporizer that drains their smartphone battery?

“It frees up your hands, for one thing,” Selwyn would answer without flinching or stuttering. “Until now, it’s been impossible to vape while, say, parallel parking—a situation that sure as hell stresses me out, and I know I’d be happy for something to help take the edge off. And look: say you’re in your home office, working on a spreadsheet, maybe answering emails, and you have your vape pen next to the keyboard. You pick it up, you take a puff, and put it back down—let’s say it takes five seconds. That’s five seconds of productivity in the sewer. Say you take two puffs every minute. If you’re working that spreadsheet for two hours, that’s ten minutes lost. If you’re putting in two hours every night, five nights a week, it adds up to almost an hour. Can you afford to lose an hour a week? I think not, my friend.”

By February, Selwyn was resigned to the proverbial drawing board, but his ardor was undiminished. Like Paul overpowered by the light on the road to Damascus, Selwyn had given himself over, heart and soul, to the perfect future he had fleetingly but comprehensively glimpsed that night in July. The project had assumed the urgency of a vital imperative; he could not abandon it any more feasibly than he could give up breathing. Stapleton, however, now had a part-time job at the Apple Store in the Rockaway Mall, which kept him from giving the endeavor his total attention. Still, he was still happy to spend the majority of his off-hours with Selwyn, and willing to lend him portions of his earnings to cover the costs of materials and transportation.

Until mid-May, Selwyn took up residence with Stapleton for weeks on end, sitting up until dawn behind Trix-scented clouds, clenching his teeth over a legal pad and repeatedly muttering “now” to his failed first experiment to pump nicotine vapor into his mouth and throat. Stapleton usually loafed nearby and played Hearthstone, always ready to lend Selwyn his steady soldering hand or serve as a sounding board.

The second attempt was decidedly more ambitious than the first, and demanded much more research and experimentation on Selwyn’s part. Though it pained him deeply, he scrapped the vaporizer in favor of a transdermal mode of delivery. With Stapleton’s help, he produced a small electronic module with a sheet of microneedles on its underside, to be worn like a wristwatch. The core app was mostly the same as before: it was still activated by a spoken command from the user, but now the command prompted the phone to send a signal to the apparatus on the user’s wrist, which released a squirt of a nicotine gel that was chemically optimized for near-instantaneous dermal penetration and bloodstream absorption.

This time, Selwyn got the venture capitalists’ attention. Most of the investors who ended up helping to subsidize the product’s launch tended portfolios in which the tobacco and smoking cessation industries were both represented. They’d observed how vaping had initially been marketed as an alternative to cigarettes, and now they anticipated demand for a vaping alternative. Selwyn’s invention promised to give consumers the nicotine they craved, instantly, discreetly, in any public setting, and with zero risk of popcorn lung or any other deleterious respiratory effects.

The app and its delivery module entered the market under the one name Selwyn deemed appropriate, despite the advice of the brand consultants the investors insisted he hear out. That name was “Now.” Now is when you need it, ran the slogan on sidebar ads and during Pandora intermissions.

At first, the New York press and tech journos either ignored Now or treated it with aloof, half-mocking curiosity. But the app, the modules, and the gel all sold—and sold well. The market researchers Selwyn commissioned found that Now’s largest consumer base were white-collar workers. Thanks to Now, by merely uttering a syllable they could make the inboxes, spreadsheets, and CSS documents they stared at for eight hours a day seem worthwhile and rewarding for almost six whole minutes at a time.

By the time Selwyn and Stapleton relocated their business to a rented Jersey City office in August 2020, “now” was being spoken like a mantra throughout the cubicle galleries of the Mid-Atlantic and New England. During their first week in their new headquarters, Selwyn and Stapleton sneaked onto the roof of the building to smoke a spliff after spending most of the afternoon playing Magic. (By now Selwyn had made enough money to reinvest in a collection, though he was holding off on replacing the the two moxes and three dual lands he’d sold.) As they watched the sun sink into the Newark skyline, Stapleton had an idea.

“Why limit ourselves?” he asked Selwyn. “Why should nicotine be our end-all, be-all? Why not make, I don’t know, a caffeine gel?”

Selwyn would have shot him down, but was at that moment in the middle of a deep pull.

“And,” Stapleton continued, “what if we like tweaked the module to release the scent of coffee beans as the gel is being delivered? I don’t think that’d be hard to do.”

Selwyn exhaled and shook his head. “You beautiful son of a bitch.”

And so it was done. And so the chant rose to a new and startling pitch.

Stapleton, now titled Product Development Director, took the lead in concocting new gel varieties. Now’s “tincture” line offered a variety of nicotine, caffeine, and kavalactone solutions mixed with aromatic and homeopathic herbal components: lavender, chamomile, licorice root, echinacea, and many others, all taking their turns in interminable Reddit threads about their effects on the buzz. The line was such a hit that after the first year, all of Now’s gel products were rebranded as tinctures.

While the independent gel vendors churned out their derivatives, Stapleton kept Now one step ahead with tinctures infused with glucose, vitamins, proteins, sleep aids, and cannabinoids (where legal). It was largely thanks to Stapleton that Now product sales rose with every quarter, and the domestic and budding international markets regarded alternative brands as inferior knockoffs, the Zunes to Now’s iPod.

The tech writers who’d ignored or written off Now busily pitched thinkpieces about its creeping influence on American society. In the four years since Now hit the market, use of nicotine products in the United States had grown by 26 percent, despite reductions in tobacco and vaporizer sales. Clickbait headlines reported grade-school students using Now products during classes, warned of bootleg gels infused with opiates and hallucinogens, and promulgated the chilling story of a user admitted to the hospital with nicotine poisoning after his module had been hacked. Thanks to a commerce-friendly administration, a Congressional measure subjecting transdermal nicotine products to intensive regulation was watered down to a handful of point-of-sale statutes, but incensed public health advocates weren’t about to give up.

Selwyn watched it all play out on the monumental triptych of desktop monitors in his top-floor office at Now Inc.’s headquarters in Sunnyvale, California. He wasn’t terribly concerned about any of it, and in fact took pains to appear worried in front of his subordinates and stakeholders. He found their skittishness was eased when he was seen sharing it.

Selwyn had grown listless, and over the last few months he’d lost all enthusiasm for updating the Now app, reviewing new delivery modules, and sampling the latest tinctures. He stopped meeting Tinder dates at wine bars. He no longer met up with Stapleton and a couple of executives from Alphabet and Meta on Sundays to play Magic. It wasn’t that prosperity had made him lethargic; rather, he was disheartened by his ongoing failure to accomplish what he’d set out to do. The ecstatic summer dream that put him on his course half a decade earlier remained unrealized.

Nobody ever got their own building in Silicon Valley who didn’t believe their initial successes were merely the first phase in an incremental remaking of the world. Selwyn knew his tinctures and modules merely represented the crowning of the future whose parturition was his unique burden and privilege. It had yet to emerge in full, and Selwyn increasingly felt that its birth had stalled. Even worse, he was beginning to fear that the daily exigencies of management and pleasing his investors were sapping him, dulling him to such an extent that he’d lost sight of his vision. He craved perspective.

One July evening, a gloomy Selwyn deleted, unread, all 148 emails he’d received that afternoon, and peered at Twitter. The first item in his timeline was a link to a Slate article about the normalizing and celebration of addiction in American culture. The author mentioned Now almost as often as she did Netflix and MMOVREs. What caught Selwyn’s attention wasn’t anything in the article itself, but an item in the comments section. A poster calling him or herself “Otterdoop” argued that the nicotine component of Now’s tinctures did not constitute the root source of the app’s popularity. In part, it read:

I was listening to a podcast last night and heard that some Now internal memo showed that 90% of its app users stick with the default activation word, “now.” So think about it. Personalization of tech, avatars, ringtones, banners, blog themes, etc is a statement of identity. Everywhere else, keeping the default is a faux pas. It says “I’m bland, I’m blank, I’m not really a person.” So why don’t Now users personalize? Because of the word. “NOW.” It’s a passive-aggressive act of revenge against the nagging smartphone buzzing on table while they’re trying to have lunch with their friend. “NOW.” I don’t live for you, b**ch. YOU work for ME. I own YOU. You know what I want, and I’m telling you to give it to me NOW, and no I will NOT say please. It’s the one respect in which your smartphone really and truly obeys you without using you. Social media uses you. Games use you. Listicles use you. THEY compel YOU. But YOU compel NOW. Say the word: NOW.

It ran on like this for two more paragraphs.

Selwyn printed out the comment. He ran a highlighter pen over every instance where the word “now” was typed in caps.

He called Stapleton, whose office was on the floor below his, and asked him to meet him on the roof in 20 minutes. From the combination safe beneath his desk he withdrew four tabs of LSD. He might have planned to give two of them to Stapleton. If he did, he changed his mind.

Years later, Stapleton would tell Selwyn’s unauthorized biographer that this was when everything changed. His friend and business partner got (in Stapleton’s words) a little really weird, a little bad intense. Stapleton stood with his hands in his pockets while Selwyn tromped across the rooftop and chain-smoked American Spirits, breathlessly declaiming his ideas for Now Inc.’s revised mission and its impending change of course.

“NOW. Because soon is never good enough, and fuck yourself with later. Want wants it NOW. Napster. Netflix. Hot-Can. You want to know why religion is disappearing? Shut up. Shut up Rob, and listen, because I’m telling you. Now. I’m telling you: NOW. Jesus promised the masses salvation, heaven on Earth, but he promised it later. The plebs agreed to it, and it was a bum deal. They were still screwed. But for like two millennia, it was still the best deal in town. But now there’s tech, Rob. Tech is the promise, the new New Covenant, the fork and knife for the pie in the sky and the bib. Tech doesn’t give you a date-stamped check. Tech ponies up. It can give us heaven and it can give it NOW, because NOW is what heaven means. NOW is bliss, and bliss is NOW. Leibniz’s law, Rob. Now is bliss. NOW is bliss. Bliss is NOW. BlissisNOW. Blissnow. BLISSNOW, NOWBLISS. NOW. IS. BLISS.”

After two hours of this, Selwyn told the fidgeting, silent Stapleton to go home, to leave him alone. “You don’t see it. You don’t understand!” he shouted, coughing and weeping. “Don’t speak to me again until you understand.”

The next morning, Selwyn prowled Now Inc. headquarters like a tiger, dressing down and firing anyone who dared look at him wrong. Upper management was certain the boss was in a furor at the 35% tax on transdermal tinctures the California legislature had passed the day before, and was heartened to see him taking it seriously.

Stapleton knew better. Selwyn wasn’t angry; he was energized. He was in a better mood than he’d been in months. He’d found his perspective.

Starting in August, Selwyn issued a comprehensive series of memos and press releases, effectively rebranding his company as NOW Inc. (It was critical, absolutely critical, that the name be written in capital letters, and he didn’t give a damn if the marketing department felt silly reaching out to the editors of the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post and insisting that “Now” amounted to a misspelling.) Over the next four months, he strategically poached a crack squad of ambitious young executives from some floundering old guard tech firms. Some of these he installed as stewards, positioning them to manage the affairs of his burgeoning kingdom. The rest would aid him as he dedicated his attention to expanding its borders.

Stapleton was not consulted.

In late December, Stapleton emailed Selwyn a terse letter of resignation, stating only that he was leaving. He assumed Selwyn would approach him, wanting to know his reasons, and he’d rehearsed what he would tell him.

But Selwyn never asked.

After his resignation, Stapleton took his severance package, married his girlfriend Helen Alhadeff (the spelunker and Discovery Channel star), and moved with her to New Mexico. Though he appeared once with his wife on her show, accompanying her on a visit to an unexplored area of Mexico’s Cueva de los Cristales, Stapleton generally kept a low profile in his retirement. For as long as he was talked about in Silicon Valley, his former peers joked that NOW’s cofounder had followed Helen Alhadeff into a cave one day and never came out. But he was not talked about for very long.

Mark Zuckerberg first designed Facebook as a diversion for Harvard students; it grew into an omniscient global institution, a de facto requisite for participation in social and civic life during the early 21st century. Jeff Bezos built Amazon as an online mail-order bookstore, and over the next two decades it swelled into a veritably monopolistic one-stop shop for everything and a cloud capital juggernaut. Likewise, Connor Selwyn’s NOW rose from its humble origins as a voice-activated nicotine patch, following the logic of its functionality towards an apotheosis only its founder could have foreseen.

The bemused Twitterati joked about how it was both predictable and totally unexpected that the rebranded NOW’s first big venture should be a software patch. Transposed over popular services such as Amazon, Steam, Uber, and Google Flights, the NOW Do It app functioned as a bypass, an accelerated One-Click Delivery. It promised to spare consumers every tedious encounter with alternative options, checkout pages, and confirmation screens by cutting the one-click out of the delivery. Just say “NOW,” and the package gets ordered, the game gets downloaded, the ride gets summoned, the flight gets booked. If the user happened to be wearing a NOW module (and the research suggested a 35–40 percent likelihood he or she was), the command simultaneously released a shot of his or her favorite tincture, reinforcing the utterance of the word and the act of the purchase. Acknowledgement of the last factor was key in persuading many businesses to pay NOW Inc. a modest annual fee for synergizing NOW Do It with their services.

The following year, Selwyn’s clandestine but substantial investments in 3D printing bore fruit when NOW Inc. unveiled the Cloudsend, a full-service additive manufacturing console. It couldn’t have been simpler. Download the app, select an item from the list, say NOW, and the Cloudsend (sold at a loss) manufactures it right in your living room: garments, home appliances, auto parts, electronics, pieces of furniture, and the tools to assemble or install them. Only five months later, NOW released the Garcon, a slant on the Cloudsend that processed proteins, starches, sugars, fruit and vegetable concentrates, flavorings, and chemical additives to fabricate ready-to-eat foodstuffs, chilled or heated to the user’s specifications. Consumers had only to purchase the Garcon, order the ingredient packets via the app, select their favorite meal from a menu, and say the Word.

In the meantime, NOW diversified its software offerings with the Write NOW app, an email assistant. Open a message in your inbox and say the Word: Write NOW “reads” it for you, utilizing heuristic algorithms to determine what information will satisfy your correspondent, and then mines your Documents folder, inbox, and social media activity data to produce a response composed in your personal writing style. Early versions required users to review the generated message and speak the Word a second time to approve it for dispatch. By popular demand, this failsafe was removed from later versions.

As Alphabet Inc. suffered catastrophic losses in the wake of its failed attempt at a Mars landing, Selwyn pressed NOW’s incursion into the search industry with kNOW. Unlike Google and the traditional platforms, kNOW did not answer the user’s query with an index of websites. Instead, it populated an eminently digestible bullet list of relevant facts about the object of query, culled from the most popular and up-to-date sources. Open the kNOW app and say “Miley Cyrus—NOW.” Within two seconds, you’ll be scrolling an autogenerated document summarizing the gist of the latest news items regarding Representative Miley Cyrus (P–NY), the history of her policy stances, an overview of her erstwhile career as an entertainer, and her most relevant biographical details. If the desired information does not appear, you need only keep scrolling. If it still doesn’t turn up, then it’s either unimportant or was never true.

2029 was a red-letter year for NOW Inc. This was the year NOW bought out Apple’s music, streaming video, and VR experience services, and the year that two of its greatest rivals, Amazon and Alphabet, declared bankruptcy. It was the year that registered early adopters with up-to-date Cloudsends could download the CAD files of Betti, a robotic domestic. Initially, Betti’s capabilities were somewhat limited, but monthly software updates improved on and radically elaborated the range of its proficiencies, and beta users reported being perfectly satisfied having a servant on hand to promptly install their Cloudsend resource cartridges and carry their Garcon meals to their sofas and beds. 2029 was the year signaling Selwyn’s covert foray into politics, when he anonymously subsidized a PAC to lobby strenuously for a universal basic income. (Chroniclers directly attributed the passage of the Fair Share for Americans and God Bless America Act to Selwyn’s influence, and the legislation was instrumental in nudging India, the European Union, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and Australia to implement their own UBI schemes.)

2029 was also the year Selwyn published his bestselling memoir. Critics called it shallow and self-aggrandizing, even for a tech oligarch’s autobiography, and noted that the name “Robert Stapleton” did not appear once. The book concluded with a transcript of a three-hour interview with Farhad Manjoo. In response to Manjoo’s final question, Selwyn confessed he was neither satisfied with his career or accomplishments—only because he still considered his work unfinished. In his own words, he had not yet delivered his baby unto the world. The core technology required to consummate its birth was not fully developed, but Selwyn expected it would be ready soon, very soon, and great strides had been made in preparing for its arrival. But he declined to say or even to hint at what he had planned.

In the tech and business spheres, “the baby” became a sardonic meme. The epithet “eccentric billionaire” more often accompanied mentions of Selwyn’s name in the news. Skeptical commentators with long memories spoke of the outsized hype preceding the release of Dean Kamen’s Segway HT in 2001, and predicted the arrogant founder was priming himself for a historic flop.

In 2031, an obscure startup called Genie Ventures patented a prototype “thought transcriber,” a non-invasive brain scanning headset that translated neurological activity into digital information. At the CeBIT tech expo in Hannover, Germany, its developers invited passersby to play games of Super Mario Kart together. Wearing the Genie device, users sped and swerved their characters around the racecourse without pressing any buttons or perceptibly moving any muscles. Other attendees marveled as they were invited to think of their significant other, and watched as their beloveds’ faces came into focus on a nearby monitor—and felt a little perturbed when the device worked in reverse, prompting them to think of unfamiliar words, sounds, and images.

Selwyn read about the Genie project over breakfast in his Pacific Heights mansion and spent the next five days in the hospital, recovering from a heart attack.

Genie had beaten him to it. Its device represented precisely the technological breakthrough Selwyn had secretly employed thousands of people at the cost of $90 billion to achieve, without success, and now it was in somebody else’s hands. The birth of his baby now hinged on him acquiring Genie and full proprietary control of its invention.

After months of bargaining, cajoling, and maneuvering, Selwyn purchased Genie Ventures for $500 billion, outbidding the likes of Cisco, Meta, and Tencent. In the immediate aftermath of the acquisition, its share prices plunged. The stock market convulsed. Executives deserted in droves. Whole divisions had to be liquidated. Fahrad Manjoo joined the chorus of industry observers declaring Selwyn insane and prognosticating the end of NOW Inc. The company barely escaped bankruptcy, and Selwyn tenaciously resisted the shareholders’ attempts to oust him as CEO.

Selwyn never doubted himself for a moment—not even when the press lambasted his cryptic Super Bowl ad promising the 2034 arrival of NOW Perfect—“the baby.”

Chroniclers would later mark 2034 as the year Connor Selwyn’s career really took off.

On his ninety-second birthday, Connor Selwyn uttered the Word in his San Francisco home and was shown the world and its cities from on high. He soared over arid plains where hundreds of cylindrical windowless buildings strained towards the sky, powered endlessly by fusion reactors, maintained by tens of billions of indefatigable robots, and kept stocked with the essentials for life and luxury by swarms of delivery drones flying to and from fully automated manufacture and processing plants that would never cease production for anything. In each climate-controlled tower dwelt thousands of contented divinities, reigning in blessed omnipotence over as many thousands of personal universes.

The Beatles once boasted they were bigger than Jesus. Connor Selwyn said he was better than Jesus. Whereas the carpenter-turned mountebank prophet of Nazareth pitched self-denial in exchange for a future life with God, Selwyn gave the masses life as God, each of them, and he gave it to them NOW, and never asked for anything in exchange but a weekly subscription fee.

He spoke the Word and his frail body shivered with raw pleasure.

He uttered the Word again and his body was no longer frail. He was no longer an old man, there was no domestic robot wiping his ass with an antiseptic towelette, and the dialysis machine and ventilator at his bedside vanished from his awareness. There was nothing else but him.

Selwyn felt it had been far too long since he’d last changed the complexion of civilization. The masses and the market clamored for the next game changer. It was time he descended from his idle summit and delivered a new wonder unto them.

He brainstormed ideas for twenty seconds. A peculiar thumping vibration offset his concentration.

“NOW,” Selwyn spoke. And the universe obliged.

A man who has ascended to Selwyn’s position can afford to be a Big Picture person, to let lesser entities fret over the piddling details. It was enough for him to be informed that his will had been executed, that he’d exploded the industry once again, that his new product was a tremendous success, and that the world unanimously proclaimed him a genius and savior—even though the specifics were fuzzy.

“NOW,” Selwyn said when he felt faintly skeptical that any of this had actually happened. The Genie plugs affixed to his cranium siphoned the last iota of doubt from his consciousness. He was at peace.

Dozens of display panels, all flashing red, whirled about him in his polyethylene-padded bed, which once again existed, and in which he once again lay supine. Selwyn spoke the Word, and he was not in bed—he was behind his ultramodern ergonomic standing desk in his office on the twentieth floor of NOW Inc. headquarters in San Francisco, and the panels shrank and collapsed behind his eyelids.

Uninterested in the details, undesirous of examining his own motivations, he spoke the Word. Robert Stapleton appeared in the room.

“You called, sir?”

No. Rob wouldn’t say it like that.

“NOW.”

“Mr. Selwyn. How are you this afternoon?”

That wasn’t right either.

“NOW.”

“I love and admire you,” said Stapleton, “and every decision you ever made was a good decision.”

All true—but Selwyn remained dissatisfied.

He changed tacks. Why don’t we play a game of Magic, he thought toward Stapleton. For old times’ sake.

“NOW.”

They began a game, standing on either side of Selwyn’s desk. Selwyn’s opening hand was absolutely ideal. He took his turn first, and reduced Stapleton’s life to zero before his old friend could even drop a land.

“Good game,” Stapleton said with a grin.

No—this wasn’t right, this wasn’t how it should go.

“NOW.”

Selwyn and Stapleton played their first game of Magic in years. Selwyn comboed out on his second turn.

“You got me,” Stapleton conceded. “You always did.”

“NOW.”

Selwyn was so excited he could hardly keep still. It had been decades since he’d last seen Stapleton, and they were about to play a game of Magic, just like old times. He hoped his old friend was ready for the tricks he’d added to his deck since their last game. (When was their last game?)

On Selwyn’s third turn, a Temporal Excavator drew out Marit Lage, Herald of Norn, all but assuring his victory. Stapleton had no countermeasures in place.

“That’s game, buddy,” he said. “Well played, Mr. Selwyn.”

Still not right. Still not perfect.

“NOW.”

Selwyn peered at the cards in his hand. He hadn’t played Magic in something like fifty years. He was amazed he still remembered the rules. But—if it had really been that long, why didn’t Stapleton look a day over thirty-five?

“N—” Selwyn began to speak the Word, but faltered. Stapleton didn’t hear him; he was studying his own cards. Selwyn guessed what those cards were—and he knew what they were, and was certain they couldn’t keep Stapleton alive for more than three turns against what he had cooking.

“What happened to you?” Selwyn spoke weakly, his laryngitic throat struggling to articulate sounds it had long been unaccustomed to producing.

Stapleton didn’t answer him.

“Rob. Where did you go?”

Stapleton smiled. “You need to take a mulligan, Mr. Selwyn?”

“NOW.”

“Connor,” said Stapleton. “Connor Connor Connor Connor Connor.”

In his true heart, Selwyn knew this was all an illusion, perturbations in the digital amnion aroused and given definition by his desires. Whatever Stapleton said next would be, would have to be, precisely what he wanted Stapleton to say.

But Selwyn didn’t know what he wanted Stapleton to say. He was giving the software nothing to work with, and the software could give only nothing back.

“NOW,” Selwyn commanded.

A raw droning noise rose from Stapleton’s mouth.

“NOW.”

Stapleton spoke, but it was gibberish.

Selwyn became aware of a dialysis machine humming beside him, of the pressure of an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth, and seemed to feel that even though he saw himself standing upright, he was actually lying on his back in a padded bed in a vaulted chamber without windows, and the bed was shaking again.

“NOW.”

No, he was definitely standing, and he wasn’t in his office. He looked around himself and saw a familiar street in the New Jersey town he grew up in. It was well after midnight; all the lights were out in the windows, and the katydids were making a joyful hell of a racket in the trees.

He tried to remember what he’d been thinking about a moment ago, before something came up and broke his concentration.

A question occurred to him. What was life like before NOW?

He spoke the Word. The answer appeared to him as a string of black ASCII characters against a white space in his mind’s eye:

He spoke the Word and was shown the gratitude of his people written out for him, illuminated on a trailing scroll that had neither end nor bottom. It was far more than he could peruse in a lifetime, more than he had the patience to read very closely even for five minutes, which was when his breathing seemed to have grown labored. He spoke the Word again and afterwards took a long and comfortable breath.

For a number of minutes, hours, or days of whose passage Selwyn was tranquilly insensate, he chanted the Word and traveled the world, dined on Maine lobster and Argentinian steak, listened to old vinyl records, dosed and danced at raves, and was fellated by a young Jennifer Lawrence in his private box at the Palais Garnier. He deigned to give an ear to the obsequies of the wealthy and powerful, he threw the switch on the most ambitious and stunning Burning Man installation anyone had ever seen, he lay under a pile of splendid nude ingenues, he willed a lightspeed engine into existence and gave a stirring commencement address to the first graduating class of Makemake University.

While riding in the back of a limousine through the streets of Hannover on his way to CeBIT 2035 (or maybe 2122), he felt a fierce, unexpected, and certainly unasked-for jolt, as though the car had swerved and smashed into a utility pole. But there was no utility pole, and now there was no car, no street, no Hannover. The dialysis machine wobbled and crashed to the floor, and Selwyn gasped for air in his bed.

Explanation. I want an explanation.

“NOW.”

The holographic display panels whirled around him in his chamber, and he had as little interest in looking at them as before.

I don’t have time for this. The gist.

“NOW.”

For the first time in his life, the Genie plugs ignored his command.

Gritting his teeth and squinting, he brought some of the blinking red words on the display panels into focus.

WARNING...SEISMIC EVENT…REGIONAL SERVICES OFFLINE…MAGNITUDE 8.9…BACKUP GENERATORS DAMAGED…03% AUXILLARY POWER REMAINING…SEARCHING FOR HOST…SERVICES OFFLINE…ERROR…CRITICAL FAILURE…CONTACT ADMINISTRATOR…WE APOLOGIZE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE…

Et cetera.

Well, fix it.

“NOW.”

One by one, the panels flickered out. Selwyn’s chamber was obstinately his chamber, and the temperature seemed to be rising. A domestic robot uselessly wriggled its appendages on the floor, pinned beneath a chunk of something that fell from an unrequested hole in the ceiling.

Take care of this. Repair the network. Fix the ceiling. Restore power. This is inexcusable.

“NOW.”

The final panel blinked out. The diodic lights recessed in the ceiling dimmed. The dialysis machine stopped humming.

Undo. Undo. Reboot. Deal with this. Do it. Get this back to normal. Now. Now. NOW.

“Now,” Selwyn wheezed, infuriatingly short of breath.

I want to breathe.

Selwyn opened his mouth to speak the Word, but finding too little air in his lungs, his throat produced only a hoarse rattling whistle.

Well this has been a piss-poor birthday. A better one. I want a better one. Fix this. Start over.

“Now,” Selwyn spoke weakly.

The darkness and stifling heat did not obey him.

I want a window. I want to see what’s happening outside.

He gasped the Word, but no window was forthcoming.

I want: better service than this. To know what you think you’re doing. To know who the hell you think you’re doing this to. To know if you know who I am. I want you to get this taken care of, or I’m really going to be annoyed.

It cost Selwyn several minutes’ effort and about as many abortive attempts before he mustered the strength and the breath to speak the Word, and in those minutes his demands multiplied and mutated like carcinomatous cells. He wanted a cigarette. A handjob. A front-row seat to a Radiohead concert. Reduced humidity. Justice without delay. Chastisement without mercy. Relief for his aching limbs. More reliable robots. Pad Thai—good pad Thai. A window, dammit. Robert Stapleton to say his name, to say it like he meant it. And he wanted it

He was answered by a dull, cadent splashing from beneath the floor.

His body heaved with an involuntary gasp. As he exhaled, coughing, he realized it had been a yawn.

Fine. You know what? At this point all I want is a nap.

Selwyn shut his eyes, and the universe kindly obliged.

As Connor Selwyn’s faculties dimmed, he observed that he hadn’t even said the Word. His withered lips cracked, remembering how to smile. The next breakthrough hadn’t needed any help from him after all. Version 2.0 had invented itself.