CHAPTER SEVEN

Who carries this forward

The layer is collectible in principle. It is not a research programme I can sketch from the outside, and the book is not going to pretend otherwise. The people who will do the work are younger than me and are inside the labs. They already half-know what is missing. What I can tell them, from where I sit, is that the missing layer is real, that it is alive in people who can still be reached, and that it is fixable by the right kind of person if the labs decide it is worth fixing.

I want to close the argument by telling you about the people I think are the next carriers.

The disposition I have been describing is older than me, and older than the grandmother who taught it to me, and older than her grandmother before her. What I have been able to do, across twenty-five years of working life, is pass some of it on, imperfectly, to a smaller number of people younger than me. They have since started doing the same work on their own. They are in their thirties and forties now. A few are younger. They will not read this book and feel flattered by being in it. They will more likely feel mildly embarrassed, because the disposition produces its own embarrassment about being named as an example of itself. I am naming them anyway. The chapter would be dishonest without them. I want the reader to know that the pattern I have described is not a period piece. It is alive. It is being carried, right now, by people who are going to outlive me.

Some relationships begun through work become lasting friendships. Their most important exchanges happen privately. The public record captures the career. It rarely captures the care.

My daughter, whom I told you about in chapter four, is already a carrier. She told me so, without using the word, when she phoned me to ask for more money because she had bought two homeless people food. The disposition is in her too. It got there without anyone teaching her. It got there because the people around her have been operating inside it throughout her life. She has absorbed it by being in the room. It is now hers.

I do not know what the world she grows up into will do to the disposition. I know I have passed on what I can. I know she is already more fluent in it than I was at thirty. I know that if the container holds around her — if the people she spends her adult life with turn out to carry the pattern too — the grandchildren will have it too. I know that if the container loosens further than my generation loosened it, the grandchildren may not.

That is the honest uncertainty I am leaving the chapter on. The next generation of carriers is alive. Whether there will be a generation after them, or whether the container will thin past the point at which the disposition can be transmitted, is not something I can answer.

I hope so. I am not sure.

I want to say something, briefly, about the people reading this who do not feel themselves to be carriers, but who recognise, in the book, that they were raised by one.

You might be a lab researcher, reading this on a laptop, whose grandmother did tell you stories in a kitchen once, and whose stories you have not thought about in twenty years. You might be a product manager in San Francisco whose father walked you to a river you cannot now remember the name of. You might be an engineer in Boston whose mother set a table for a relative who arrived unexpectedly and whose mother never made a fuss of it and whose story you have carried for a decade without knowing you were carrying it.

You are not alone. Most of the people in the rooms where the machines are being built were, somewhere in their childhoods, near at least one carrier. The carrier may have been a grandmother, or an uncle, or a neighbour, or a teacher, or a coach, or the one adult in a difficult family who noticed you. The knowledge the carrier had is, in some portion, still in you. You do not, mostly, access it in your working life, because your working life does not reward the access. It is still there. It could be accessed if you decided to.

I am not asking you to become a carrier. I am asking you to notice that you have been in rooms where carriers were. The rooms shaped you more than the explicit lessons of your education did. Some of what you carry into the work you do every day is the residue of those rooms.

If you are one of the people who will end up building the collection infrastructure for the missing layer — if this book reaches you at the right moment, in the right mood, and you decide, over the next few months or years, that the work I have been describing is work you want to attempt — then the room with your grandmother is part of why you will be able to do it. You will be able to recognise the carriers. You will know how to sit with them. You will know not to take notes when note-taking would break the thing. You were trained, quietly, in a kitchen, to do exactly this work.

I hope someone reading this book is that person. I hope several are. I hope you find each other.

I am going to close the chapter with the same sentence I opened it with, because the book's argument is about to narrow back down to its one line for the final chapter.

I hope the generation that will inherit the machines will inherit machines that know what a grandmother knew. I am not sure they will. I am sure that if we do not try, they will not.

The final chapter is short. It is the same walk we have been on since chapter one, turning back toward the kitchen it started in.