Love is infrastructure

I. Meet cute Barnabas and Mainspring grew up near at hand, about an hour apart with good traffic, but for a long time they weren’t close. They traded glimpses and occasional hellos and then went about their business. Both of them carried on livelier conversations with farther-flung neighbors, who were richer and had more to offer. When Mainspring did interact with Barnabas, it was cringe. Mainspring liked to puff themself up, to strut around like a big deal—an innovator, a titan of industry—but they would turn shy at the worst moments, especially in any intimate conversation. Barnabas, meanwhile, had a dancer’s flair, an artsy, enigmatic glamour, except that when they tried to talk about real life, they’d blurt out hundreds of rapid-fire words—overtalking, overthinking, and generally overwhelming whomever they were trying to impress. So when Barnabas and Mainspring were young, they minded their own business. Until they’d both come into their own, and they saw each other properly. A group of geographers got together every year in a different place to talk about everything they had learned, and they were considering coming to visit either Mainspring or Barnabas. Both of them put on their best faces and tried to coax the geographers into choosing them as host. “Uh, hi-hello,” Mainspring said haltingly to Barnabas, whose full official name was St. Barnabas. “I really think it would be better if those geographers came to my place. I have more space, you see, and … and I am a titan of industry. I can show them practical applications of their research. It just makes more sense.” “Oh, really?” Barnabas laughed, making Mainspring more antsy. “Well, I can give them an elevated, artisanal experience. I have fresh croissants that were just written up in the Times . And I have plenty of space! I have so many friends who are great thinkers and architects. It’ll be lovely.” Barnabas carried on, basically calling Mainspring uncultured. Mainspring had a prickly feeling, like the worst heat dome of midsummer. For their part, Barnabas couldn’t bear the meanness they were inculcating inside themself. This feeling that they were small-time, no-account, a dilettante. They couldn’t stop aiming a flood of nervous words at Mainspring. At last, Mainspring had had enough—with the help of their city council and mayor, they offered the geographers a much-too-lavish deal that Barnabas could never hope to match. Totally worth it to hear Barnabas’s stream of self-aggrandizing nonsense peter out as they realized they’d been defeated. “There,” Mainspring said. “I’m going to show these geographers a time they’ll never forget. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve wasted enough energy—I have some sewer maintenance and a lovely parade to deal with. Goodbye.” Mainspring was skilled enough at multitasking that they could have fixed the sewer, ensured the smooth running of the parade, dealt with the geographers, and done a thousand other things all at the same time. But they were making a point. “St. Barnabas is such a fool,” Mainspring complained to their friend Turnbull. “They are totally unserious but determined to be taken seriously. It drives me to gridlock.” “I know what you mean,” lamented Turnbull. “We live in a world of posers.” Turnbull lived an hour and 15 minutes from Mainspring but at least two hours’ travel from Barnabas. Turnbull was even richer than Mainspring and had a certain surety of purpose that made Mainspring feel even more like a stammering numpty. “Whatever,” said Mainspring. “It’s over, and now I’ll never worry about St. Barnabas again. I have better things to fuss about. Like ensuring that every last detail of this geographer meeting goes perfectly.” II. How they came alive Everybody voted all the time. Well, some people voted more than others, but the median resident of the cities of Mainspring and St. Barnabas voted a dozen times a day—though of course some outliers might vote occasionally, or constantly. A lot of the votes were more like complaints, or bug tickets. Like: “The storm drain on my street corner clogs and becomes a lagoon every time it rains.” Or: “The cars go too fast on my block.” Or: “I can’t get to work because the bus is too slow.” But there were also votes along the lines of: “There should be a park here.” And: “This neighborhood is a food desert—we need a grocery store.” And: “The crossing guard by the elementary school is a hero who deserves some recognition and maybe a raise.” Nobody expected that by voting, they were prodding their cities to grow minds of their own; they just had stuff to get off their metaphorical chests. But it transpired that every vote was a building block of thought. Much later, some fancy expert summed up: “Turns out the smallest unit of consciousness is a vote.” Take Sandi, the librarian at the Nine Corners branch in Mainspring. She noticed things all day, like the people using the book drop box as a trash can, or the folks who came in off the street who could use easier access to social services. There were books she knew her patrons wanted, books that undoubtedly sat unwanted on people’s shelves all over the city. But also, Sandi shared things that came to mind—like, hey, what if the library book sale were a block party? What if the shopping district on the West Side were easier to get to from the Longneck neighborhood, where all the warehouses had been converted to housing and hipster coworking spaces, during peak after-work hours? Sandi had opinions about everything from street cleaning to the power grid, because she listened to people all day. Then there was Raeford, a bartender at the Wild Goose Chase in the middle of Gallery Row in St. Barnabas. He also listened to people’s problems from evening until the wee hours, and solutions came to him like clockwork when he woke at noon the next day. He saw St. Barnabas at night, so he knew the unsafe blocks that could use brighter streetlights, the places where hydroelectric jitneys drove too fast at 3 a.m., and the teens who needed an all-ages hangout. He also knew about the fish fry at the Black church in the Uptilt District that kept being disrupted by noxious smoke from the incinerator two blocks away. And the yarn store on the edge of Gallery Row that needed a disabled parking spot for its many customers with mobility issues. People voted with their Quills, usually by saying or typing a short message and maybe including a photo or brief video. Voting was easy by design, and votes were public but anonymized to the point where even a statistics whiz couldn’t tie one vote to a specific person—same as with major elections. The votes went directly to the City Core, which tracked, tabulated, produced reports, and offered solutions with the help of workers in the city government. Trees voted too, thanks to sensors in their bark, and so did birds and squirrels that had eaten special birdseed that monitored their gut flora harmlessly. But votes from humans provided the greatest insight into “quality of life,” that oh-so-nebulous concept, and thus counted the most. There was some debate, but almost everyone agreed: The city had started voting. And it had opinions on every last thing. (Other cities in the region operated differently, of course. Like Turnbull City, where instead of expecting residents to volunteer every stray notion, the City Core gathered information via ubiquitous surveillance. Cameras and Quill sniffers, tracking devices on vehicles—the things privacy laws in both Mainspring and St. Barnabas had banned. A city like Turnbull tracked its people to meet their needs without their needing to say anything.) Sandi and Raeford, as two of the people who voted the most, were among the earliest to suspect their cities were developing minds of their own. At first the clues were subtle: Raeford voted about a hazardous sidewalk crack, and instantly the vote had an annotation mentioning the Argentine ant colony under the cement, the local rainfall patterns, and recent trends