A Sleepless Night
1:11 AM. The interval at which Kathy Reynolds checked the clock had now shrunk to five minutes. She didn’t expect to sleep tonight. Worries of much smaller proportions had yielded countless sleepless nights in the past. Kathy was hardly alone; few could find sleep before the Match. And yet, knowing they will struggle falling asleep rarely deters people from trying, as the uninitiated might expect. Kathy did not want any palliative measures. No TV, no books, no video games. She preferred to confront it head-on rather than allow it to fester in some corner of her brain as distraction occupied the main room.
Kathy took some comfort in the fact that she had done all she could. There would be no adjustments to her score after midnight; her fate was sealed. She could not help but think of Jim. She always thought he was one of those people who was perfectly named: he was as plain as his name. Such a description doesn’t necessarily scream out heartthrob, and indeed Kathy didn’t swoon over Jim, but Jim was certified. He came from a wealthy upper class family. They were once a prominent protestant family. Back when such a thing existed. His polygenic risk scores suggested he might live till 95, his earning potential was in the 90th percentile, and he was free of most of the genetic markers for cancer. Most importantly, he seemed like a sure thing. Of course there was someone better out there, there always is, but Jim is a known quantity. Her mother’s pragmatism rang out in her subconscious. It always made Kathy uncomfortable when she denied the existence of romance with her husband in the room. The risk of the unknown is rarely worth taking. If it wasn’t worth taking under Free Choice laws, how could it possibly be worth it now?
Kathy recognized she was now counting on matching with Jim despite her best efforts at expectation management. Her parents had warned her not to, as had her friends and the consultants from McKenna. But who really controls their expectations? “Don’t get your hopes up” is advice wasted on kids, who possess only two things in abundance: hope and time. The McKenna consultants guaranteed that she would be within three slots of Jim’s Opposite. Of course, she needed to be exactly his Opposite to match with him.
She had done all she could. Her inner monologue kept repeating this affirmation. She had followed the advice of the consultants. She dutifully attended the years of expensive test and interview prep. She knew which questions to answer right and which to answer wrong, which interviews to tank, which afterschool clubs to join and which volunteer opportunities to take. The firm had staged various good deeds, along with a handful of mistakes, moving her up and down the rankings as necessary. She had executed the carefully choreographed strategy with perfection, but alas there was irreducible uncertainty.
While much of the Algorithm was game-able, a large determinant was not. For example, she could do little to impact her genome composite or her beauty score, although some invariably tried. Beyond the uncontrollable, there were always tiny fluctuations, which were revealed in the periodic access to the order of merit list McKenna received. Still, these peeks behind the curtain were mere snapshots of a continuous process. Moreover, no amount of money, power, or corruption could provide access to the order of merit list during the final month preceding the Match, when the list was effectively siloed from human oversight. Few things were beyond the pale, but this was one of them.
At the last check, exactly a month ago, she was indeed Jim’s Opposite. But the Algorithm was sensitive! It could change in a moment, and it was, many thought, omniscient. In the past week, Kathy saw a middle-aged man drop his wallet on the ground. She reflexively picked it up and returned it to him. This was an uncharacteristic mistake; she had not considered how such a behavior might impact her score. To be fair, no one really knew. Each consulting firm pledged to have reverse-engineered the Algorithm to a certain degree, but this only meant they knew the important determinants. Kathy’s good deed could swing both ways. Would her score increase because it indicated good character? Decrease because it portended less success in business? Did the Algorithm even capture this? No one could say for certain.
In addition to all the variability in her individual score, there were also the individuals around her and those around her Opposite. Her order of merit neighbors could be picking up wallets as well. Maybe they pocketed the cash or brought it to the police station. Any recorded action might send you or those around you up or down the list. In a complex, interconnected society, butterfly effects abound and the Algorithm was designed to capture these in its mysterious, imperfect way.
With such an unwieldy system, one might suppose individuals would surrender to their fate. Indeed, most did, but surrender is anathema to some. From the moment the Match begun, opportunists sought to monetize it. Those at the top set out to preserve their way of life. Various businesses surfaced to serve this underground market: consultants, tutors, therapists, behavioral choreographers, beauticians, etc. While litigiousness had traditionally served the elites of the country well, it had no place when it came to the Match. Those who tried invariably ended up in an expensive quagmire. The most effective method was thought to be an ancient idea: an arranged marriage. Under this approach, two families decided early on to pursue a match and one person in the desired match intentionally descends the list to become an Opposite.
Kathy’s mind continued to race. She started to think about the other boys around Jim’s score. The prospects were not great. Many of Jim’s neighbors were from a similar background, but even so a match could be undesirable. Her parents feared a match with one of the more traditional families from the country club. There were old-school concerns, as well. The top of the order of merit list was sprinkled with kids from working-class families. From the perspective of the dispassionate Algorithm, many children from elite families had middling scores and qualities, and were naturally interspersed among talented members of the lower classes. Some, like Kathy, intentionally underperformed. You could fool the Algorithm into giving you a lower score, but no one knew of a replicable way to raise it. Her attention ping ponged back and forth between millions of ideas, each a painful digression yanking her further and further from sleep.
The alarm finally rang at 6:30 rescuing Kathy from the torture of sleeplessness. Kathy lay on her back with her hands folded across her chest, her outward composure hiding the chaos in her mind. A few meditative seconds after her alarm sounded, she sat up and got ready for the Match, falling easily into her usual routine.
She went outside to wait for the bus. It was a picturesque day: blue skies, perfectly-shaped clouds, the kind that children draw in their landscapes. She looked up at the perfect clouds with suspicion as the bus slowly approached her stop. She sat down next to Charlotte, as she had on every previous bus ride to school. Charlotte, ever the emotional one, was sobbing. But today, Kathy had little energy to spare on her best friend’s histrionics. She put in her ear buds, leaned her head against the window and avoided eye contact, despite Charlotte’s best efforts to garner sympathy. The bus dropped them off in the Match stadium’s parking lot. They lined up in formation, as they had practiced over the previous two weeks.
The Ceremony
The only vestige of the Match stadium’s former purpose was visible from the parking lot. The stained glass windows remained; the Bureau simply could not dispose of something so beautiful. After a thirty minute wait, it was 8:00. The ceremony began promptly. The students filed in towards the gymnasium. They marched in lock step while the national anthem played. A band played The Stars and Stripes Forever. The progenitors of the Match made a deliberate effort to meld the new traditions with the old, but the result was a clunky abomination. But that didn’t seem to matter. The parents cheered from the bleachers as their children approached the threshold of the gym. Parents in bleachers always cheered. Whether they were watching peewees make a mockery of a sport, or witnessing the next generation of professional athletes, the cheering was always the same. Today was no different.
At the threshold to the gym, members of the Bureau sorted the students. A bureau member scanned each student’s ID and then escorted them to a specific seat determined by the scanner. Once every student had found his seat, the curtains opened revealing the Match Class of 2040. The stage was so dark that each person was merely a silhouette.
By the time the curtains opened, it was exactly 30 seconds after 8:04. The entrance was four and a half minutes, as it had been last year, and the year before that. The Bureau representative wasted no time. He appeared front and center with the array of silhouettes behind him. He walked up the platform and into the spotlight where his podium featured prominently. His face was the only recognizably human thing on the stage. He made the usual speech from the template. No one had evidence of an actual template’s existence, but the annual speech was so formulaic that parents with multiple children couldn’t help but notice the similarities between years. Kathy’s dad had deconstructed it from the ceremonies of her two older brothers.
“[Salutation]. Thank you for coming. I am sure you are as excited as I am to see how the match favors your children this year. And kids, just remember, it can’t be worse than [joke about Bureau chief’s yearly comical blunder (he made exactly one such blunder each year between the months of May and July)].
Where was I… Oh yes. This is an important event, perhaps the most important day in these young adults’ lives. The Match initiative continues to make progress each year. In the 15 years since its inception, we have reduced generational inequality by [x%]. We have reduced income and wealth inequality as well; we are a far cry from our dark ages where 1% of the population controlled [x% of the wealth, where x implausibly increases every year]. Each of our children finally has a fair shot. At happiness, at prosperity, at the American Dream.
Before the Match, none of this would have been possible. Despite the noble efforts of a just society, we continually fell short. Every Bureau initiative was undermined by the most important decision of all: the selection of a spouse. The wealth tax fell flat. Elimination of selective admissions, gifted and talented programs, private education, etc. We couldn’t seem to make any progress. Indeed, assortative mating was the thorn in the side of our great project. While I know it’s painful to acknowledge the regrettable status quo of a mere 15 years ago, it’s essential that we understand why we do this: to usher in a brighter future, to atone for generational transgressions, and to lead the world towards virtue.
[5 more minutes of priggish platitudes]
And now… for the moment you’ve all been waiting for. Let’s find out the results.”
The Bureau never admitted that they read the names in descending rank order, or that the first name was the lower person and the second was the higher (the ordering itself was an intentional micro-redistribution demonstrated to be effective by a single non-reproducible study). Nevertheless, this became common knowledge. During the first few Matches, before the advent of strategic adjustments, the disparities in the first pairs to be called were noticeable. The bureau had tried their best to strip away all visible notions of achievement. They concealed grades, test scores, and athletic awards (these, in fact, were randomly assigned). It’s not that they denied varying levels of merit existed; rather, they opposed one’s merits being used in any sort of judgment. But no matter what they tried, there was a sense of an individual’s metal. The parents knew the kids. Regardless of the nominal MVP of the football season, everyone knew it was really the kid who scored all the touchdowns, rather than the long snapper who had received the award. The removal of explicit performance assessment did not prevent individuals from coming to their own conclusions about a person’s meritocratic worth.
The reading of the names in order of merit was puzzling. The Bureau went to such lengths to remove hierarchy and inequality, to include randomizing the marching order and darkening the stage such that only silhouettes could be seen. Yet, in the culminating moment, they re-instituted inequality by revealing the final order. Of course, the Bureau denied that the order of the names was the order of merit, but people knew. It was simply too much of a coincidence for the announcement order to roughly correspond to the revealed order of merit list every year.
The point, according to popular opinion, was for the Bureau to demonstrate the results of the Match with plausible deniability. There was a certain contradiction in goals. First and foremost, they wanted to throwout hierarchies of any kind. However, they could not demonstrate the effectiveness of the Match in accomplishing this goal without implicitly acknowledging such hierarchies. In the first few years, the Match order went as everyone expected. In fact, it was shockingly effective. The contrast between the top and the bottom rungs of society was always stark. Now, those formerly destined for low wage labor married those destined for the Ivy League.
This re-balancing changed after only a few years. The Bureau did not expect to see conclusive results until around the twenty year mark, after an entire generation of organized matches. Naturally, they were thrilled when things started to improve almost immediately. As early as year six, the Bureau rep started reading the names of the former elite first. Those whose parents and siblings had attended Harvard were now being called first! It was a tremendous feat and a sure sign of progress. Even better, to those vindictive sorts, was the humiliation faced by the upper class in their realization of the American Nightmare that is downward mobility. Various academics postulated why they were seeing promising redistributive effects before any of the actual genetic redistribution took place. The favored explanation was that seeing familiar faces in “high places” was enough to motivate and raise up an entire community.
Certainly some of this elite fall from grace was a legitimate consequence of the Algorithm’s honest assessment. And perhaps some of it was from cultural transformation downstream of “familiar faces in high places.” But nearly everyone outside academia understood the primary explanation for this phenomenon: the strategy had changed. The upper class wanted to continue to match with each other, and the only way to do so was to split up. Some would tank to reach the lower end, while others would thrive and arrive at the higher end. While the Bureau surely understood this as well, they were nevertheless able to claim credit for their high-minded designs and maintain the illusion of progress.
The Canopy of Meeting
The representative from the Bureau began reading the names. Of the hundreds of names that would be read, each parent was only concerned about his child. This was Kathy’s father. He winced in discomfort as the suspense built. After each name that was not Kathy, the tension grew. He just wanted what was best for his daughter, and his sympathetic nervous system seemed to think the best way to manifest a positive outcome was by clenching every muscle in his body. Finally, they called Kathy’s name. Kathy’s father’s ears perked up. “Jason Herald” followed Kathy Reynolds. Two silhouettes popped up from their pods, and moved separately towards the Canopy of Meeting. The Bureau rep read Jim Hansby’s name in the following pair. Kathy had missed Jim by one, well within McKenna’s guaranteed margin of error. A satisfied contract and a devastated customer.
The Canopy of Meeting was behind the stage. Each couple met in this tent. It was a massive structure, large enough such that every couple could meet there simultaneously. They spent ten minutes under the Canopy in privacy. The tent was subdivided such that there was a private room for every pair. Jason and Kathy met in their private room and awkwardly took their seats. Jason offered her a soft smile. Kathy wanted to cry but she didn’t. Nothing was said for the first minute or so until Jason broke the silence. “So… This is it.” She picked up her head and looked at him. She couldn’t help but be disappointed that he was not Jim. She found some comfort in his handsome face and apparent high merit. She had spoken no more than ten words to Jason in her life, but she knew of him. His father was a stone mason and had done some work on her house.
“I guess so,” Kathy replied softly. Her mind was racing as she pondered the rest of her life with this boy. Eight more minutes passed without another word. At the end of their ten minutes, they were given keys to a small apartment in the newly-matched housing community. A white bus took them away.
Who Is It?
It had been little more than a few hours. Jason and Kathy had unpacked most of their personal items. Unpacking her things had calmed Kathy and, in their first few hours of marriage, Jason and Kathy were getting along well as far as it goes. Kathy was placing the last of her shoes in their closet when they heard an unexpected knock at the door.
Jason opened the door to find several familiar faces. They were, from left to right: the lead consultant from McKenna, Kathy’s father, Jim Hansby, and the Bureau representative who had announced names at the Match. Kathy locked eyes with her father and raised her eyebrows. They shuffled into the apartment gracelessly. Nervously, the Bureau representative began to speak:
“This is a bit… er… awkward. But, the Bureau made a mistake. You see, we were off by one. Kathy’s true match is Jim Hansby here. Jason, your match is Serena Joyce over in apartment 14F.”
Kathy and Jason looked puzzled back at the Bureau representative. He continued: “We do apologize for our mistake. I assure you this does not happen often.”
“But, we’ve already…” Jason began to contest.
The Bureau representative interjected while Jim pushed one of his boxes inside the apartment: “Kindly pack up your possessions and proceed to 14F. Serena is waiting for you!”
Jason didn’t respond. He turned to look at Kathy, who seemed disturbed by the whole affair. He didn’t know her well, but he got the sense something was wrong. Authority had spoken; he was now to move in with Serena. It could have been worse; at least Serena was a family friend. Their fathers had been working together for the last 25 years.
Jason re-packed his things while Jim offered him a hand. “I think I can take care of it,” Jason said. “See you guys around, I guess.”
After Jason left, Jim Hansby took his rightful place in the apartment and life went on.