An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC 375 Hudson Street New York, New York 10014 Copyright © 2017 by Elan Mastai Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader. DUTTON is a registered trademark and the D colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN—PUBLICATION DATA Names: Mastai, Elan, author. Title: All our wrong todays : a novel / Elan Mastai. Description: New York : Dutton, 2017. Identifiers: LCCN 2016013073 (print) | LCCN 2016024489 (ebook) | ISBN 9781101985137 (hardback) | ISBN 9781101985151 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781101985144 (eBook) Subjects: LCSH: Young men—Fiction. | Reality—Fiction. | Utopias—Fiction. | Time travel—Fiction. | Self realization—Fiction. | Psychological fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Family Life. | GSAFD: Fantasy fiction. | Utopian fiction. Classification: LCC PR9199.4.M3745 A35 2017 (print) | LCC PR9199.4.M3745 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6— dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016013073 This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Version_1 For my wife CONTENTS Title Page Copyright Dedication Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33 Chapter 34 Chapter 35 Chapter 36 Chapter 37 Chapter 38 Chapter 39 Chapter 40 Chapter 41 Chapter 42 Chapter 43 | SUMMARY—Chapters 1 to 42 Chapter 44 Chapter 45 Chapter 46 Chapter 47 Chapter 48 Chapter 49 Chapter 50 Chapter 51 Chapter 52 Chapter 53 Chapter 54 Chapter 55 | SUMMARY—Chapters 44 to 54 Chapter 56 Chapter 57 Chapter 58 Chapter 59 Chapter 60 Chapter 61 Chapter 62 Chapter 63 Chapter 64 Chapter 65 Chapter 66 Chapter 67 Chapter 68 Chapter 69 Chapter 70 Chapter 71 Chapter 72 Chapter 73 Chapter 74 Chapter 75 Chapter 76 Chapter 77 Chapter 78 Chapter 79 Chapter 80 Chapter 81 Chapter 82 Chapter 83 Chapter 84 Chapter 85 Chapter 86 Chapter 87 Chapter 88 Chapter 89 Chapter 90 Chapter 91 Chapter 92 Chapter 93 Chapter 94 Chapter 95 Chapter 96 Chapter 97 Chapter 98 Chapter 99 Chapter 100 Chapter 101 Chapter 102 Chapter 103 Chapter 104 Chapter 105 Chapter 106 Chapter 107 Chapter 108 Chapter 109 Chapter 110 Chapter 111 Chapter 112 Chapter 113 Chapter 114 Chapter 115 Chapter 116 Chapter 117 Chapter 118 Chapter 119 Chapter 120 Chapter 121 Chapter 122 Chapter 123 Chapter 124 Chapter 125 Chapter 126 Chapter 127 Chapter 128 Chapter 129 Chapter 130 Chapter 131 Chapter 132 Chapter 133 Chapter 134 Chapter 135 Chapter 136 Chapter 137 Acknowledgments About the Author 1 S o, the thing is, I come from the world we were supposed to have. That means nothing to you, obviously, because you live here, in the crappy world we do have. But it never should’ve turned out like this. And it’s all my fault—well, me and to a lesser extent my father and, yeah, I guess a little bit Penelope. It’s hard to know how to start telling this story. But, okay, you know the future that people in the 1950s imagined we’d have? Flying cars, robot maids, food pills, teleportation, jet packs, moving sidewalks, ray guns, hover boards, space vacations, and moon bases. All that dazzling, transformative technology our grandparents were certain was right around the corner. The stuff of world’s fairs and pulp science-fiction magazines with titles like Fantastic Future Tales and The Amazing World of Tomorrow. Can you picture it? Well, it happened. It all happened, more or less exactly as envisioned. I’m not talking about the future. I’m talking about the present. Today, in the year 2016, humanity lives in a techno-utopian paradise of abundance, purpose, and wonder. Except we don’t. Of course we don’t. We live in a world where, sure, there are iPhones and 3D printers and, I don’t know, drone strikes or whatever. But it hardly looks like The Jetsons. Except it should. And it did. Until it didn’t. But it would have, if I hadn’t done what I did. Or, no, hold on, what I will have done. I’m sorry, despite receiving the best education available to a citizen of the World of Tomorrow, the grammar of this situation is a bit complicated. Maybe the first person is the wrong way to tell this story. Maybe if I take refuge in the third person I’ll find some sort of distance or insight or at least peace of mind. It’s worth a try. 2 T om Barren wakes up into his own dream. Every night, neural scanners map his dreams while he sleeps so that both his conscious and unconscious thought patterns can be effectively modeled. Every morning, the neural scanners transmit the current dream-state data into a program that generates a real-time virtual projection into which he seamlessly rouses. The dream’s scattershot plot is made increasingly linear and lucid until a psychologically pleasing resolution is achieved at the moment of full consciousness . . . I’m sorry—I can’t write like this. It’s fake. It’s safe. The third person is comforting because it’s in control, which feels really nice when relating events that were often so out of control. It’s like a scientist describing a biological sample seen through a microscope. But I’m not the microscope. I’m the thing on the slide. And I’m not writing this to make myself comfortable. If I wanted comfort, I’d write fiction. In fiction, you cohere all these evocative, telling details into a portrait of the world. But in everyday life, you hardly notice any of the little things. You can’t. Your brain swoops past it all, especially when it’s your own home, a place that feels barely separate from the inside of your mind or the outside of your body. When you wake up from a real dream into a virtual one, it’s like you’re on a raft darting this way and that according to the blurry, impenetrable currents of your unconscious, until you find yourself gliding onto a wide, calm, shallow lake, and the slippery, fraught weirdness dissolves into serene, reassuring clarity. The story wraps up the way it feels like it must, and no matter how unsettling the content, you wake with the rejuvenating solidity of order restored. And that’s when you realize you’re lying in bed, ready to start the day, with none of that sticky subconscious gristle caught in the cramped folds of your mind. It might be what I miss most about where I come from. Because in this world waking up sucks.