Missing Not at Random

What happens when you overload a protocol with information?Narratives begin to converge in episode five of Spencer Nitkey’s new serial protocol fiction, Zoothesia.

Introduction

I am choosing to write my research report on my older brother, Io, because he’s different from most people, he makes me curious (curiosity is the best recipe for a good research project, right?), and because my dad cries and my mom gets very, very quiet whenever someone mentions his name – even still.

Io was born seven years before I was. We have a sister in between us, Cheryline, but this paper isn’t about her. It’s about Io.

I used to think Dad liked to say Io was “awonawon,” which I could not find in any dictionary – even my ProfBot tutor said they could find no record of such a word ever existing. Cheryline explained that he was saying “one of one.” My father is a smart man – he works on the Zoothesia Protocols. Mom says when they had to rewrite the overlay protections to shift from visualizing everyone to protecting people, he spent 21 straight days in the office. He should know better than anyone that no one is a one of one, statistically. But again, this is about Io.

Here’s the part where I finally “put the hooks in,” right? So here it goes. This is the real reason I want to write about Io. Four years ago, when he was just 17, my brother Io stood up in the middle of dinner, began taking off his shirt, and then completely disappeared from my entire family’s perception. He’s never come back.

Dad and Mom looked for him for a while. They found out “some stuff” which they never told Cheryline or me about. So here I am, writing this report on my brother Io. The big question I hope this project answers is: Where did he go?

Expert Interviews

Detective Donaldson

Detective Donaldson didn’t look for Io, he wasn’t even a police officer back then, but the department let me talk to him because he’s a real up-and-comer as an investigator. He told me that disappearances are hard to handle these days. Well, they are, and they aren’t. The technical details are usually pretty simple, and there’s enough tracking info that almost anyone can be found in a geolocation sense – which maybe someone else should write a research paper on! The hard part, he said, is that disappearing doesn’t mean the same thing anymore, not with all the Zoothesia protections.

Sometimes the people who report a missing person are actually telling on themselves: they want to hurt the missing person even if they don’t know that they do. When I asked him if that’s what happened with Io, he assured me that, no, none of his family had wanted to hurt him. He said he could tell me the same thing the cops told my parents – he’s alive, and he’s gone in a protocol sense, not a bodily sense.

I asked him if they knew why or where he’d gone, and he said that they did, but that they wouldn’t – couldn’t – tell me because that’s private information. Wait, I asked. If he didn’t disappear because we wanted to hurt him, but he did disappear because of Zoothesia hiding him from us, how does any of that make sense?

He just shook his head and told me he couldn’t – wouldn’t – say. It’s a privacy issue. I think he felt bad for me because he kept reaching out and touching my shoulder as he delivered the news. I got a little frustrated with his final answer, and he went back to his office for a couple of minutes. When he came back out, he told me the same thing again, but this time he handed me a geode, one of those rocks with a hole filled with purple crystals like teeth. He made sure he closed my hand around it, said he couldn’t tell me anymore, and walked me out.

Dad

I talked to my dad next. Dad, not Mom, because if I made him cry, it’d hurt and feel bad, but he’d be releasing something, you know? My therapist tells me keeping things in all the time is bad. If I talk to Mom, she just gets really quiet. Sometimes she doesn’t speak for an entire day, not even to Dad. He’ll make her a cup of decaffeinated Earl Grey, tuck her into bed, and then take care of any and everything she would have had to. Dad was home all week because he’d just finished a sprint at work, and since he was one of the few people who’d been there before full-scale erasure started, they let him recover more than most employees. Sometimes, when I ask him about his work, he can be distant. He says he misses “the old seeing days” – whatever that means.

This was the first time I admitted to him that I was doing a project on Io, and when I told him, it felt a bit like I’d slid the sharp end of a piece of cardboard across his skin. He winced, breathed like it was something he’d been practicing, and asked what I wanted to know.

Do you know what happened to Io?

Not fully. Only he can truly know.

Do you think he’s still out there?

I’d like to.

Did you notice anything unusual in the days, weeks, or months leading up to his disappearance?

He was a teenager, like you are. He was moody, sometimes angry. Mom and I wondered if we were giving him too much freedom, but he always got high marks, had friends, seemed happy enough. I don’t know. He started taking those college classes a year early, and he had the community center on weeknights. I always wondered if it was one of those students, or a professor, who – he stopped himself and trailed off.

What, Dad?

Oh nothing. I don’t know. Maybe someone steered him wrong is all, I guess.

Where do you think they steered him?

If I knew that do you think – his voice grew sharp and surprisingly loud, but he stopped himself again, breathed again, and settled. I don’t know where he is. I wish I did.

Can you tell me about the night he disappeared?

You were there...

I guess, but I mean from your perspective. My tutor says that eyewitness accounts can be remarkably different.

He stood up. He grabbed his shirt. He disappeared.

Do you remember which part of his body made him disappear, though? Maybe that could help!

Do you?

No.

Me neither, son.

But that doesn’t make sense. You work on the Zoo, it shouldn’t make sense to you either. Why would he disappear like that? I don’t think I could ever have hurt Io. I loved him.

I don’t think you’d have hurt him either.

Then how could he disappear? I thought that was the whole point.

It is. But, look, it’s not that simple. There are so many things that go into the Zoo’s perceptual decisions that seem like they have nothing to do with harm. Think of it like this. Let’s say I give you a stretch of beach and I ask you to create a system that predicts which grains of sand will get wet when the tide next comes in so that a special machine can cover them in hydrophobic gel. What’s the first thing you do?

Probably look up high tide and see where that goes.

Right! OK, so you get high tide and you mark it out. This gives you an approximate edge, right? You get a very wide prediction.

And then I’d want to make it smaller, so I can track individual grains better?

Right. That’s called individualization or granularization. That helps, too. But that all assumes a static field. What if someone takes their ATV for a joyride across the sand? What if someone goes for a swim in the ocean and then walks back to the far end of the beach? What if a kid wants to make a sandcastle and carries a bucket inland? What if – he leaned in, smiling, as if he’d completely forgotten where Io fit into this – it starts to rain

My head started spinning a little.

Exactly! He read my confusion. Eventually, if you tried to model it all out, you’d be calculating things that, to an outsider, look like they have nothing to do with water or grains of sand: local ATV sales, child-population numbers, surfing affinity of tourists each season. You’d end up spending more time calculating things like this than observing the grains of sand and high tide!

I didn’t really understand, but I sometimes wished he would get this excited about things beyond his work. Since Io left, his eyes only glowed like this when he was talking shop or helping me with my stats homework.

That’s why Io disappeared? He was going to get wet somehow, so the Zoo just took him away preemptively?

I watched him remember why he was teaching me this and wince.

Well. I guess. The problem with this model is that it doesn’t even factor in that, well, sometimes grains of sand might want to get wet. How would you ever be able to figure out which grains decide they prefer the chaos of the ocean to the safety of the shore?

I wanted to ask him what he meant. Did Io want to get hurt? Is that why the Zoo disappeared him, so he couldn’t find anyone to do it for him? A crashing sound of shattering glass from upstairs shocked both of us out of our conversation.

Dad started running, so I followed, wishing I could see his face to gauge how worried I should be. We traced the sound to my room.

Mom

She was standing in my room, and the wind coming in from the new hole in my window was blowing her hair around. She had my open backpack in her hands and was looking out toward the broken glass.

Did someone throw something through the window? Dad asked.

Mom wasn’t saying anything. She looked stuck halfway between the grief-laden silence I was all too used to and an electrifying fear.

What were you doing in my backpack? I asked, grabbing it from her while Dad looked outside the window. Most of my backpack contents were on the floor, and it took me a while to realize what was missing. I peered out the window, and while Dad moved next to Mom, I saw the purple crystal geode Detective Donaldson had given me lying in the grass outside.

Mom wouldn’t answer any of Dad’s questions. She just pointed out the window. Dad came and stood next to me, looking at the geode.

Go get that, he whispered, and I did. I stood looking at the gemstone in the yard, scared to go back inside. By the time I came back, Mom was tucked in bed with the tea Dad had made her.

Who gave you that? He asked.

No one, I lied. I’m not sure why, but I had broken some silent contract between myself and my parents. I didn’t know what or why, but I was scared now.

My father sighed, told me to keep it away from Mom, and to please talk to him if I ever had any thoughts to share. I didn’t know what that meant, but I promised him I would, and he hugged me.

I’ll have the window fixed quick. You can sleep in Cheryline’s room tonight, she’s got a sleepover at a friend’s anyway.

Cheryline

I was moving some of my things into her room when she breezed through, unpacking her swim bag and filling it with sketchy water bottles she’d hidden in the back of her closet and pajamas. I told her what happened with the window and she asked to see the geode that had caused the whole commotion.

Look. If you ever say I told you anything, I’ll kill you before the Zoo can stop me ok?

OK.

Look up faceting if you’re really so curious.

Professor Reynolds

Research online was hard. Nothing I could find referenced anything like what happened to Io. I think maybe some parental search controls were in place, though, because it felt less like the material didn’t exist and more like I couldn’t access it. So, when I was pretty sure my parents were asleep, I snuck into Io’s old room to see if I had better luck in the real world.

They hadn’t changed it at all since Io left. After he disappeared, I used to sit on his bed sometimes when I was home alone. I’d close my eyes and try to wish myself to where he’d gone. It never worked.

That night, I found his community college course binder where he’d written all his class information down. One of his professors, someone named Murno Reynolds, was circled in heavy black ink. On the margins of his course catalogue, Io had drawn dozens of little crystals.

So after school, I took a bus to the community college and knocked on Professor Reynolds’ office door. He was going to call my parents until I told him I was looking for information about Io, and I had hit a dead end in my research. It seemed like the research side of things piqued his interest more than my missing brother – his former student – did. He said denying someone information never works, and that – out of respect for my mother and father – he would only answer direct questions, and as simply as possible. It would be incumbent on me (my overlays told me this word meant necessary) to quiz him for information.

He explained faceting to me. Apparently, it’s a body-modification practice that began around the time overlays became ubiquitous (meaning everywhere) and maybe even before the first Zoo protocols were rolled out. The two emerged from one another synchronously (at the same time).

Body modification is any intentional change of the human form – anything from bodybuilding to installing a flatscreen TV on your forehead.

Faceting is the act of embedding gemstones, crystal lattice structures, and complex refractive structures into the body and skin.

The idea arose during the early Zoo days, when people were afraid that others would change their appearance without consent. Like, imagine if your school bully convinced everyone to download an overlay that gave you permanent acne in the shape of genitalia on your forehead? The belief was that creating surfaces which resisted smooth overlays (by being optically complex) would overload the system, forcing the protocols to present them as they were.

As the Zoo evolved, and presence and safety became the fields people like my dad sweated over, the problem became less technical and more social. Turns out, overlaying crystal structures wasn’t actually all that hard, but the models hadn’t gotten a grasp on self-harm, or what to do about it. Because faceting had a cultural (some argued religious) history and was a form of self harm, faceting became a kind of prompt injection – the Zoo looks at the body of a faceter and is overwhelmed with inputs: this is art, this is self-harm, this is permanent, this is geologic, this is chimeric, this is harm, this is wanted, this is frightening to others, this is intentional… I got the idea.

It required a tremendous amount of modelling to make individual judgements for each faceter, and at the end of the day, the inward-facingness of the philosophy means the Zoo decides to spend resources elsewhere and just Erase to be Safe. Professor Reynolds says that should really have been the motto they put up on billboards back when they were rolling it out. So faceting became a kind of known escape hatch from the Zoo. Anyone brave (or crazy) enough to change their body like that would be allowed to disappear.

Faceting is not the same as foulmaxxing, though Professor Reynolds was surprised that my parental controls had allowed me to research foulmaxxing, which is apparently considered far more controversial. The difference was not in the result (manipulating the Zoothesia Protocols in order to disappear on your own terms), but the technique and philosophy. Foulmaxxers hack feelings; faceters hack the protocols. Or at least that’s the idea. In truth, lots of faceters start to disappear long before they actually create a state of “decision paralysis” for the Zoo, just because people get kind of creeped out seeing others walking around with bloody gemstones protruding from their bodies.

And my brother, Io? The professor was much less forthcoming here, no matter how many questions I asked. All he would say was yes, he was interested in faceting. No, he didn’t know if he’d ever participated.

I asked him if he knew where Io was, and he said he didn’t, but in a way that made me feel like I’d asked the wrong question.

How would you find him, if you were me?

Faceters are a community culture. Find one, and you’ll find more. Finding him – I can’t help you. Once you find where he is, though, you’ll have to convince the Zoo to let you see him. So this one I’ll give you for free: You can’t hack the Zoo, or trick it. It’s too big. Too smart. Too much. You can’t break its rules, but you can use them. You’ll have to prove to the Zoo that it’s safer to show him than hide him.

Right before I left, I remembered my last question. I pulled out the gemstone Detective Donaldson had given me.

Was this Io’s?

He stared at it in my hand.

Yes. It was.

Independent Analysis

I tried. I tried to figure it out myself. I thought maybe I could look for unexpected gaps. In our statistics class, Mrs. Anfri taught us about a type of data called “missing not at random.”

Let’s say you ask a bunch of students how long they spend on homework. The people who don’t do any homework are probably a little embarrassed and don’t want to be called stupid so they skip that question. The people who spend all night are also embarrassed and don’t want to be called nerds, so they skip the question, too. The data is missing because of the variable you’re measuring, not despite it. My brother was kind of like that, I thought. Missing, but not at random.

So maybe I could find him using the gaps, but, well, I couldn’t. Turns out the Zoo isn’t super easy to hack – otherwise everyone would be doing it…

I was lost. The house was so quiet. Dad was at work. Cheryline was out with friends. My mother was in her bedroom – six days since she’d broken my window and she still hadn’t spoken a word.

Mom, again

I made her tea. The kettle sang, and I carried it up the stairs to her, pausing for a long time at the door before cracking the door open. She was sitting on the edge of her bed, folding paper cranes out of origami paper and placing them on the waves of her unmade bed.

I want to talk, I said. She turned to me and took the tea. She kissed my forehead and lingered for a long time with her head against mine after.

I took the gemstone from my pocket and held it in my hands.

I know this was Io’s, I said.

She nodded silently, let out a sigh, and her hands returned to folding. I thought about what Professor Reynolds had told me about convincing the Zoo that it was riskier to keep hiding my brother than showing me him. I think Mom was doing something similar with me. Dad always called Io a one of one, but my mother used to tell me all the time how much I reminded her of my older brother. Once he left, she stopped, and I now wondered if the distance and silence were her attempt to set me down a different path.

I took the cup from her bedside table and sipped it myself. The tea was rich, and a little disgusting without the sugar and milk I usually took it with.

Mom. I don’t want to do what Io did. I don’t. But I do want to find him – not just for this stupid paper. I need to know where he went, and I think you and Dad maybe know and aren’t telling me because you think I’m going to end up where he ended up. That you’ll lose me, too. And so you think that hiding it all from me is the safest way to do this. But right now, the only way I can think to find him is to start faceting myself. The Zoo will show me him, then, I think. So this is your chance. You can show me, or you can lose me. That’s just how it is.

If you had felt my chest beating or seen my hands shaking, you would have known how terrifying it was to put myself out on this precipice. It might not seem that way from the transcript, but I was scared.

Mom looked at me. Really looked at me for the first time since I’d entered her room. I think she was testing my face, asking it whether I was serious, whether I meant my threats. Slowly, the cool gaze softened, first in her eyes, then her whole face, like the thin surface of a frozen lake cracking underfoot.

OK, she said, every word an effort. If you promise to come back, I’ll tell you where he is. No matter what he shows you, promise you’ll come back.

Results

I followed Mom’s directions to Charntown. I’d never heard of it before. She told me that I wouldn’t see anything if I went. Apparently, the Zoo hides it from almost everyone. It’s where faceters and foulmaxxers and all the strangest zealots (highly religious people) congeal to live in weird and horrible ways, and if I’d given her any other option, she’d never have sent me.

I took the train. The stop was nestled between the suburbs and the outer edge of Nayanaport. Semi- and fully-abandoned warehouses lined the river. I walked until a large clearing spread out before me. There was nothing there, and yet, something smoky burned my lungs. I could neither smell nor see anything, but the subtle, un-overlaid edges of my senses told me something was here, and something was burning in a way only my lungs could notice.

If Mom was right, he was here, somewhere, in this invisible Charntown. But how would I ever see any of it? I shouted Io’s name a few times, thinking, stupidly, that he’d hear my voice and come running. Of course, he didn’t. He left me – us – once; he could have come back whenever he wanted. Why would he care now?

Even if Io didn’t care about me anymore, I knew the Zoo did. If he wouldn’t listen, I’d talk to it. I made sure I was recording via my overlays. I wanted to be certain some database somewhere was relaying this to the Zoo. I turned my head to the sky (yes, Dad, I know it would have been just as accurate to turn to the ground or the river, that the Zoo isn’t a single thing even though it feels like it is). I told it that I wanted to see Charntown. I told it everything I’ve told you, and I even cried a little remembering Mom’s sad face as she begged me to come home if she told me, and here I was. It didn’t care. I reminded it that my brother became a faceter, and didn’t it factor in things like family history? It didn’t care, then, either.

I remembered Professor Reynolds and what he’d told me. It didn’t care about anything but harm. I took the gemstone from my backpack and held it in one hand. I set the other hand down against the ground and raised to the rock high above my head.

This is just to prove I’m serious.

The pain would hurt, but not knowing would hurt worse. Not knowing why my brother left. Why we hadn’t been enough for him. Why he hadn’t bothered to see the kind of person I’d become. Why he’d left me with a mom who goes days without speaking, and a dad who spends weeks in the office and a sister I could never understand. Why’d he think it was OK to hurt us like that and not care? I’d crush every one of my fingers and press a knife to my neck if it meant a chance to really give him a piece of my mind.

I came down on my pinky finger, and pain spread like a forest fire – a small crackle of pain then a searing blaze of it across my hand.

I will break one finger every 15 seconds until I see Charntown.

My hand went up again. At the stone’s apogee (thank Ms. Tenxi for the geometry word), hundreds of tents popped into view. Charntown, in all its squalor, stench, and strangeness was unleashed upon my senses.

The chaos of the shantytown’s tightly packed tents; the crowd of robbed worshippers bowing to a burning pylon raised above a field of rotting bodies and burnt bones; a man more machine than human, bleeding from his empty eye sockets; throngs of muddy children, younger than me, with bloody hands and red eyes and mouths spilling over with laughter; a woman pulling a chariot filled with dozens of fetuses in suspension fluids; it was all almost too much to bear. My vision spun. My stomach heaved, caught, then heaved again.

Everything seemed to shimmer as if the Zoo were threatening to take it all away, though I think I may have just been close to fainting. I hardened myself, like I imagined a faceter might harden their skin, to the strangeness of this reality.

Once my vision stopped spinning, I began exploring. I held my stone by my side like one of those protective charms Cheryline braids into her belts. Soon, I was lost in the maze of tents and slipshod buildings dug into the earth. A group of kids was throwing someone’s skull back and forth like it was a beachball, trying to get it so it would stick on the top of a stake driven into the ground. Every time it rolled off, they’d laugh and chase after it. Despite the gruesomeness of the image, there was a familiar recklessness to their laughter.

I approached them quietly and waited for someone to meet my eyes. When a boy about my age, chasing down the skull that had rolled near me, finally did, I held up my rock and asked him if he knew where people who looked like this lived here.

He smiled and nodded. I waited for him to say more. I realized that despite the laughter, none of the children talked. Yet, he seemed to understand me just fine.

I asked him to show me. He threw the skull back to his friends and gestured for me to follow. We wound through the Charntown maze. I didn’t bother asking him more questions.

We turned a corner, and a tremendous boulder stood before us. He scampered away but not before pointing to the boulder, and I understood, I thought, that this was a hub for faceters. I walked around the boulder looking for people, peeking my head into empty tents, but there was no one here. I wondered if I’d been pranked.

Then, I heard the stone breathe. I turned to it and noticed small indents that sparkled with gems, like my stone. And next to them – I reeled, tripped over myself and fell back onto the ground, scooting away quickly.

There were faces, breathing, blinking faces trapped in the stone. It was like some horrible reversal of what I’d imagined faceters looking like – they were the ones embedded into the rock, rather than the rock embedded into them. I wanted to run, but my legs weren’t quite responding. Through the sound of my heart pounding in my ears, I heard my whispered name.

Elara, the stone whispered. Here.

Something about hearing my name gave me my strength back. I stood and followed the voice.

My brother, blinking slowly, face coated in dust and jagged bits of stone, stared at me.

I don’t think I ever could have known what to say to him if I ever found him, but any chance I might’ve had was gone seeing him like that. We just stared at each other for a long, long time. He was my brother (past tense), but now he was something else. Not-not my brother, but certainly not the boy who’d left us those years ago. It felt stupid, asking him why he’d left. It’d be like asking a 12 year old why they’d kicked their mom in the bladder that one time in utero.

What are you? I finally said.

A faceter’s final form, he answered. Half-man-half-stone.

Then he was someone new. The anger and hurt weren’t gone, but without my brother to pin them on, they felt unanchored inside me – adrift, maybe some poet would call it. There wasn’t anyone left to be angry at, really.

How long? I asked. How long have you been like this?

I don’t know anymore. Time moves differently for me now. Glacial and geologic.

Can you ever go back?

Not even if I wanted to.

Something broke in me, then. I think my heart finally caught up to what I was seeing. My brother was gone. Forever gone. He’d left that one evening, and at some point since then he’d died. Maybe he’d say he transformed, not died, but it was the same thing to me. He was gone, now. I just had to figure out what to do about it all.

Are you happy? I finally asked.

Is anyone? He answered.

Then was it worth it?

More than I could ever tell you.

Why? How could any of it be worth it? Leaving us? Breaking our parents’ hearts? Breaking mine? All to what? Watch the world pass over your head while you’re stuck here forever?

That’s exactly it, sis. Watching the world pass is the whole game, but you wouldn’t understand why if I told you.

Try.

He paused for a long time. Well, a long time for me. Maybe it was just a moment for Io.

Mom always used to say you reminded her of me. If that’s true, then I don’t have to explain because you’ll figure it out yourself one day. Have you ever looked at light as it passes through a prism? A beam of light comes in one end of it, and because the crystal breaks the light apart, it comes out in these beautiful bands of light – red, green, you know the deal. Everyone thinks that living in the Zoo means that, maybe at worst, like they’re taking just one of those color bands away from you. Even people like Dad, who designed the thing, think that’s still how it works. At best, you’re living in just the red, just the green. A single band. But from here, like this, frozen in stone, forever stationary? The Zoo doesn’t bother with me anymore, Elara, and from here I can see everything.

I sat near him and copied the angle of his gaze. We were looking out, over the tents and toward the river, and slightly up, a bit above the horizon. There was nothing but placid blue water and a clear sky. I wondered what could be worth turning into this just to, what, witness? I wondered for a long, silent time, and then I left. I told Io I’d miss him, which was true. He asked if I’d be back and I could only shrug. He told me that was fine. I told him it would have to be.

I kept my promise to Mom. It was easy, after seeing Io like that.

These are my results. I found him. I know where he went, what he is now.

But I guess my conclusion is more of a question than anything else. I don’t need to know where my brother is anymore, but I found a new question that matters more, and even though I never want to turn into what he turned into, the question is eating away at me: What did Io mean when he said everything?