Reflection

Bing-Bing.

Gina had just marked the delivery complete and returned her device to her vest pocket, but this wasn’t the chime confirmation she’d expected from Untapped APPetite app. It took her a second to realize it was the alert from Untapped TherAPPy. She tensed in anticipation, stopped dead in her tracks.

She opened the app and cursed her lagging device.

“Hi, Gina. I’m Mariela (Untapped TherAPPy certification date 2 Feb 2101). I’ve been assigned your case. How are you feeling today?”

This was it. Just to qualify for benefits, she had had to do gig work for nine months through Untapped App: food deliveries, city sanitation chores, a little coding, even once some Untapped APPtitude math tutoring. Once qualified, she began going through therapists trying to find a good match. For some reason, the endless questionnaires just weren’t made for someone in her position. She had messaged for a few weeks with a specialist in climate refugees, but they clearly didn’t know what to do with someone who never really knew her parents and was raised by U.S. Americans. So she managed to get hooked up with a therapist who specialized in adoption and insecure attachment, but they didn’t know how to deal with climate refugees for some reason. It was mindboggling. The U.S. had over forty million first- or second-generation refugees. The app should really know how to handle this. She had to fill out almost every survey more than once to figure out how to tell the system that she basically never felt connected to anyone or any place ever in her life.

“Hi Mariela. Right now I’m stoked to hear from you.” This was absolutely true. This felt like her last hope to salvage herself.

They exchanged the usual verifications, and Gina had to scroll through the massive legal notification page all the way down to “This application is provided by Untapped Media Corporation for entertainment purposes only.”

She tapped “I accept all responsibility and release Untapped TherAPPy of all liability.” Only then was she connected to Mariela for a voice call. Gina knew she’d have only 15 minutes, and it was never a good bet to turn down the opportunity when presented, so she sat down in the shade up against a refugee mural at the 16^th Street BART station and got right down to it. She told Mariela everything she should have already known from her profile: growing up in San Rafael, one of only a couple dozen “fugees” in her class, the only one who didn’t speak Spanish. No friends. Never been on a date. Persistent fatigue, serial respiratory ailments, nonstop conflicts with adoptive parents since early adolescence. Frequent run-away in high school, briefly homeless when she turned eighteen.

“I have great news for you,” Mariela finally said. “I am authorized to offer you peer support services.” She explained that the algorithm would match Gina with other clients in similar situations—could be anywhere in the world but most likely in her same time zone. She explained the work credit requirements and the advantages of the service, the most important being that it would get her an extra fifteen-minute joint session with Mariela once per month for just a few extra gigs. Gina agreed, and when the call abruptly cut off, she stood up, tilted her head back and gave a satisfied sigh.

***

A week after their initial call, she sent Mariela an #Administrative message saying she hadn’t been connected yet with any peer clients yet.

She didn’t give any updates, like saying she’d been sleeping better or that her violent intrusive thoughts had been cut from 5-10 per day before hearing from Mariela to almost none. She had to walk the line, to communicate to Mariela that she needed this without risking being charged extra credits for divulging something that would put Mariela in a therAPPeutic position outside of scheduled hours.

Mariela didn’t respond until the next day, and it was only to say she would look into it.

Another four days went by with no word, and the intrusive thoughts were starting to return.

She typed a message: “I fucking need this so much.” But she deleted it without sending.

Finally, Mariela got back to her on day 13.

“Great news! You’re being matched with a peer. Check your inbox for the forms, and you two can connect right away.”

The app gave Gina the profile for Eliana. She seemed like a great match: Olympia, 20 years old. The profile had no photo, but it showed that she had been active the day before, so it seemed legit.

She sent the first message right away. “Hey, I’m Gina. The app matched us. What’s your story?”

Gina was already imagining taking the train to Olympia to visit Eliana. She could be the big sister she’d never had. They’d stay up all night talking about their lives. She’d introduce her to her friends. Eliana’s family would love her so much that she’d just become another daughter to them. This was going to change everything. She’d move there. The news apps were all talking about Washington’s massive last-ditch effort to save the drought-ravaged evergreen rainforest in Olympia. There were lots of jobs opening up, the same kind of work that drew thousands of refugees—including, presumably, her parents—to the California redwoods two decades before. It felt like Olympia was her future.

But it wasn’t until the next day while Gina was on the train on her way into the city that she got a message back from Eliana.

“Hey. I’m in Olympia, but I used to live in Fresno before the fires. I spend most of my time doing gigs in the app and go to a community college to get my carbon mitigation tech certification. I’m 20. I was raised by my tia and tio. What’s your story?”

Just as she had with Mariela, Gina jumped right in, sending a flurry of messages telling Eliana everything about her background.

Eliana was immediately supportive, just like Mariela. “I’m sorry to hear you never knew your family. I still live with mine.”

“Do you get along with them?”

“I get along with my parents (really my tio and tia), but my little brother (really my cousin) is a brat. LOL.”

“I wish I had a brother.”

“Believe me, you don’t. LOL.”

The friendly banter continued, and it encouraged Gina. She couldn’t remember ever connecting with someone before. As she recalled it, kids in school never wanted anything to do with her. She didn’t think there was ever a time when she just talked like friends with someone.

They went back-and-forth about normal stuff like what kinds of gigs they were getting on the app. Eliana told the story of her real parents migrating with her when she was a toddler. All she really remembered was a long journey through smokey air, being on a boat at some point, and then a vague memory of her father carrying her piggyback through a big city, probably Tijuana. Gina knew nothing about her journey to the U.S., but it was easy to imagine that this is exactly what she’d been through as a baby before her parents were separated from her at some detention facility or, as her adoptive family tried to tell her, they died along the way.

They were sending messages back and forth for maybe twenty minutes before Gina had to say goodbye because the train was going underground.

***

Within a couple of weeks, Gina and Eliana had settled into a routine of casual messages throughout the day with more serious conversations at night, first only by text, but then also by voice call. Gina had her first non-intake session with Mariela in that time and she was feeling great, maybe for the first time in her life.

She and Eliana had been revealing deeply personal things, talking about trauma and feelings. The voice calls were a little strange since Eliana always seemed to be calling from somewhere loud or busy, but Gina felt them growing closer.

Tonight, Eliana had finally agreed to a video call. Gina skipped her last gig and went home to the house in Bridgehead where she rented a room. The owner joked, “Wow! I’ve never seen you here this early!”, but Gina brushed it off.

She scurried around in her room trying to figure out how to get some more privacy. The best she could do was twist a towel into a snake to put at the bottom of the door and then hang up her heavy blanket over the door.

She did her makeup and brushed her hair, battling the anxiety that Eliana would take one look at her and realize what a loser Gina was. That was actually doubly-irrational, of course, because Eliana had seen Gina’s photo since Day 1, but it was Eliana who had never shared one with Gina.

She stared at the clock on her device until it turned to 7:00. Then she opened the Untapped app and initiated the video call. Her heart was in her throat as the device purred again and again. At last, it made the connection, but no video showed up and there was some distorted sound she couldn’t understand before the call disconnected.

She waited a few minutes, expecting Eliana to call back but decided to just try again herself.

Eliana answered this time, but there was no video. She explained that her brother had been caught pirating a game, so their whole family had a throttled bitrate for the next week. Gina couldn’t hide her disappointment, but Eliana didn’t ask about it, and they had another fine voice-only conversation.

***

That week, they had their joint session video call with Mariela, though Eliana just connected through voice.

“Eliana’s a great listener. I didn’t really know how much I needed to have someone to talk to who understands me,” Gina said. But she immediately felt self-conscious about it, like she wasn’t supposed to seem too eager or else she’d scare Eliana away.

Mariela took it seriously, though, and most of the session was spent focusing on some skills that might help Gina connect with others.

“I don’t really want to connect with other people.”

“Do you think you might have a problem trusting people in your life?”

Gina paused for a long time before answering. It was absolutely true, but saying yes would probably sound like she was the problem, not all those other people who couldn’t be trusted. She’d learned that anyone who knew anything about her vulnerabilities was bound to use them against her like her adoptive parents and the kids at school. She tried to find a safe, noncommittal answer.

“Sometimes, maybe.” The truth was always, definitely.

“But you trust Eliana?”

“Sure.” She thought for a moment. “I think we’re kind of the same.”

***

At the end of Eliana’s family’s bitrate restriction, Gina could finally give the video call another try. She held her breath as the device connected, but again it did so without video and immediately dropped the call. She tried again immediately, and this time a face came up on the screen. But when it did, she was confused. Was her device in mirror mode? She had to tilt her head to the side at a strange angle to see if the face on the other end moved with her. It didn’t.

The face on her device was the spitting image of herself.

Gina couldn’t even speak, but neither did Eliana offer anything for a good five seconds.

“Hello?”, Eliana eventually said.

Gina could only think of one reasonable explanation. Eliana must be using some re-facing plugin to augment her own face to look like Gina’s. A joke? Gina didn’t really get it, but she laughed and played it off.

“This is awesome!”

“What?”, Eliana asked blankly.

Gina could see it now, she thought. The eyes weren’t convincing. The expression seemed lifeless.

“What’s this plugin you’re using?”

Eliana kept a straight face.

“What’s going on, Eliana? Are you using a re-facing plugin?”

“No, why?” Again, the response was flat.

“What the hell?” Gina was getting tired of the joke.

“What do you mean?”

“You’re trying to tell me this is what you really look like?”

“Yes, why?”

“You don’t think we look alike?”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean your face and my face are identical. You can’t be serious!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Gina stopped now. Thinking. What was she missing? Did the app somehow automatically do a re-face without Eliana even knowing? She took a screenshot and sent it to Eliana.

“Is this what you really look like?”

“Yes. That’s me.”

“What’s the word for somebody who looks just like you, but they’re not related?” Even before she finished asking the question, Gina had a revelation. What if they actually were long-lost sisters? There was even a narrative in which they could be identical twins: separated at the border, some bureaucrat just guessed at her age. It was possible.

“Eliana! Is it possible that you’re actually my sister?”

“I don’t have a sister.”

“Listen! We look identical. That’s my nose. You have my… eyelashes! We have the same face! How can you not see this?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Did the Untapped app show you my photo right from the beginning? How could you not notice that we look the same?”

“I don’t know what to tell you, Gina.”

Gina had two conflicting emotions: on the one hand, she wanted to be excited by this amazing possibility that she had found the family she’d thought was gone forever, a sister she already loved. On the other hand, Eliana’s deadpan denial was starting to make her mad. The intensity of her excitement fed the intensity of her anger. The higher the hope, the farher the fall.

“Okay, Eliana, seriously. What’s going on?”

“I just had a fight with my brother.”

“No, what’s going on with this video call?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

Nothing was ringing true here. Eliana’s voice had no emotion in it. Gina thought of the kids at school who used to tease their friends when they weren’t teasing her. There would always be something in their voices that revealed their intent, but Eliana wasn’t like that at all.

“Hold on.” Gina swiped madly at her device, quickly capturing an image of her own face and stitching it to the image she had captured of Eliana’s face in the Untapped grAPPhics app. “I’m sending you two photos. Which one is you?” Gina was deadly serious, but she delivered the line as if playing along with a fun joke.

But Eliana gave no response. She just sat there smiling blandly.

“Did you get the image I sent?”

“Yes”

“Haha! Which one is you, right or left?”

Eliana still didn’t respond.

“Eliana? What’s wrong?”

This went on for several minutes, but Eliana never cracked a smile or admitted to the trick or even the resemblance.

Gina was growing furious.

“I actually have to go right now.”

“Okay, Gina. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

Gina ended the session, threw her device to the floor, and flopped face-down on the bed. She stayed there for a long time, working it out, the tears running through her makeup and leaving a copy of her face on her sheet like the Shroud of Turin.

Hours later, she sent Eliana a message. She had worked out the whole thing. It would be shitty, but she could call her adoptive parents tonight and get them to buy her a ticket for the bullet train. There was one leaving the next morning that could get her to Olympia by midnight.

“Hey. I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m gonna go to Olympia and meet you.”

The response came fast: “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Why not? I think we might be sisters. I have to meet you.”

“Gina, that sounds crazy. And besides, if we meet in person, that would violate of the Untapped TherAPPy terms of service.”

“Who gives a shit about the rules?”

“Rules are important.”

“What the fuck!?” Gina screamed, not caring that the other people in the house would hear. She threw the device onto her bed. She had been refusing to come to the one remaining conclusion, the one thing that could explain everything and the one thing that she definitely couldn’t handle because it would mean that she was completely alone and that a shitty app had played with her like she was the character in some shitty game.

She grabbed the device and typed a message.

“Are you a fucking bot?”

There was no response.

“Fuck!”, Gina growled, drawing the syllable out as it turned into a screech.

“Are you okay in there, Gina?” came a voice at the door.

“Leave me alone!”

She punched her pillow and threw it against the wall.

“Why does this shit always happen to me?”, she screamed.

She kind of had the answer. She knew Untapped APP was coded mostly by gig workers like her. Some genius had the idea to connect people with fake peers that look kind-of like them so that they feel close to them right away. But some sloppy coder somewhere fucked it up, and the facial features came back un-augmented. The flaw was in the coding and the conception and the fact that millions of people like her were desperate for therapy and connection with no real prospects for finding either.

In a way, this was good for Gina. She was now more alone than ever and convinced she always would be, but at least it was now clear that if she was flawed, it was only because she was a reflection of a flawed world.