Inamorati Anonymous

“The pin I’m wearing means I’m a member of the IA. That’s Inamorati Anonymous. An inamorato is somebody in love. That’s the worst addiction of all.”

— Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

You walk into the dimly lit basement, low hanging lights shining artificial and bleached white. The smell of cheap, burnt coffee and dry pastries on a white fold out table. Matches with the fold out chairs arranged in a circle in the middle of the room. Worn out sneakers cross the stain covered carpet to the nearest unoccupied chair, and you can feel the cold of the just out of the storage metal frame through your jeans. Low murmurs on the outskirts of the circle, members holding steaming Styrofoam cups of coffee more for warmth than taste.

A middle-aged man, shaped like a pear and going bald, gold-rimmed bifocal glasses glinting in the stark, pale light calls to order.

“Will everyone please take a seat? I’d like to get started,” he intoned.

Shadows fill the seats. The pear-shaped man begins with a prayer, to which the shadows echo:

“God, grant me the serenity
To accept that people cannot change;
Courage to know that I am what I am;
and wisdom to know how to let be.”

A brief pause. The pear-shaped man scans the audience.

“Welcome everyone. My name is Harold, I’ll be the chair for tonight. Are there any newcomers?” His eyes flicker over you, an acknowledgement but not pressure. Nothing noticeable to the others, thank God. But on the outskirts of the circle, a few meek hands rise.

“Would anyone like to go first?”

Tall and gangling, long brown hair in a ponytail, he timidly raises his hand. He has a dark turtleneck, dark pants, like a beatnik. His crooked, earnest smile shows uneven teeth. He’s young, can’t be much older than 30.

Hello everyone, my name is Jared and I’m an addict.

Uh, so like most people my age I was afraid of the real world and I decided to get a PhD. Cybersecurity and artificial intelligence, specifically. And it was good for a while, life was pretty good. I had a girlfriend, of course. That was before I swore the whole thing off. We had a place together, she worked and I did the graduate thing.

I don’t want to get too into the weeds, but it is kind of important what work I was doing. My research was specifically trying to figure out how to hack neural networks. Hmm…I see some blanks faces. Alright, so basically, a few decades ago some computer scientists modeled human neurons on a computer. These models are basically computers in and of themselves. The whole thing went through a few ups and downs in terms of popularity. We just didn’t have the power to really mess with these things at scale that mattered until pretty recently. A few really great papers came out and it was another heyday for neural nets.

So, I come in, eager beaver grad student bent on winning a Turing Prize and my PI sets me to work on how to hack a neural net. People were so focused on building more and more accurate networks that they forgot how easily they could be fooled! Have you ever seen that picture that looks like a duck one way but a rabbit another? If the human mind can be fooled so easily, what does that say about these models that don’t even come close to the processing power of even a mouse?

Of course, my girlfriend leaves me. It was probably a factor of things. I was working long hours. I’m not an easy person to live with, I know that. But I also think I loved her more than she loved me. Like I was just a placeholder for her, you know? Someone for her to waste time with until she moved one to what she wanted. That’s what stung the most at the time, the underlying indifference. It didn’t help that she was smarter than me at every turn. Maybe part of the reason I was so hellbent getting some recognition was to prove I was on her level. No one ever made me feel so small and so important at the same time.

Of course, I do the usual break up stuff. Mope around, cried a lot, listened to shitty emo pop-punk, wrote shitty emo poetry. The works. Everyone told me that I found find another girl, that it would be alright, yada yada yada. My PI, the postdocs…my mom. It sucked. But then I realized.

My girlfriend basically hacked me.

See, in a neural network, the neurons basically solve a problem by attributing a weight to a variety of possible solutions. This “weight” is like emotions in a human brain. The neural networks feel their way through a problem. In my research, we were trying to hack the neural network by feeding data that would automatically change the weights inside — like LSD or cocaine does chemically to our brain. Try to get the neural network to keep seeking this data out.

But I set up a generative adversarial network or a GAN. Yeah, I know, this is getting in the weeds. It’s basically two neural networks that fight each other. Real wizard shit. But what I tried to do was get one neural network to make the other fall in love with it. This would make the second change its own weights internally. You could almost say I was trying to teach a computer to love. But it was simpler than that. I was reducing love to a mathematical equation. It could be quantified. Just like anything else.

This has all been very inspiring and the initial experiments have been promising. But you know what? I don’t even care if I get recognized anymore. I realized something awful. We are all susceptible to love. Which means we are all security risks. And I can’t have that. That’s why I promise to no longer ever love.

He’s a big man, built like a tree trunk. He’s older, and carries himself like a storm beaten reed. His clean-shaven boyish face and big ears don’t seem to match his heavyset demeanor.

Hi, my name is Tom and I’m an addict.

I grew up in Elyria, Ohio. It was a small town and you knew early on who was going to move on to bigger and better things and who was going to stay. I stayed. For a little bit at least. I had a kid junior year of high school, so I tried to do right and make it work as long as I could. We married, I mean, what else was I gonna do? But eventually money was too tight to bear. So, I decided to turn in my two weeks at the local Dairy Queen and went to talk to a recruiter. I did the standard four-year stint and saw some action. But when it was over, it was over. I came back and got a job pretty quickly actually. If you play your cards right, employers love a veteran. By now me and the missus moved out of Elyria.

Things were looking up, on paper at least but I just felt…I don’t know. Like everything was in a fog. Not in a depressed type way, but more like nothing mattered. I knew that if my wife was yelling at me I should feel something, but I didn’t. Everything was boring. I was doing okay at my insurance sales jobs, but I wasn’t a high achiever by a long shot.

So, I start looking around and I start applying to PMC type jobs. Private military contractors, for those that can’t keep up. I get a call back from one. And he seemed legit at the time. I mean he called himself as an equivalent to a First Lieutenant even though he seemed to be in charge as far as I could tell. Saunders was his name. Now, I’ve done my research and I knew what I wanted. I wasn’t going to be someone’s delivery boy, I wanted action. No rent-a-cop bullshit. And Saunders to his credit followed through. He showed me the contracts, they were real. I found out later they were real firsthand.

He said he’d hire me on the condition that I pass his training. Sure, no big deal. I’d done basic and I’ve been good at keeping the post-service weight off. I figured, a few pushups, some two-a-days, and I’d be ready to rock and roll. Boy was I wrong.

There's been a lot of military training doctrines throughout the years. Almost every four-star-wannabe swears theirs works but every POG knows they’re mostly the same. A pushup is a pushup. Eating shit is just eating shit and changing the context doesn’t change the fact that you’re still eating shit. But Saunders figured it out. He knew that the only things that motivate a person are fear and love. I learned it in sales, I don’t know where he picked it up. And where love and fear meet, we call it addiction.

Saunders had us ask the “36 Questions to fall in love” while we were under some truly sadistic situations of his construction. They’re 36 questions which, when asked to a stranger, will make you fall in love or at least grow close to. The idea was stress and the opportunity for human connection would form our unit. It’s one thing to answer “What, if anything, is too serious to be joked about?” in a bar across some attractive woman. It’s another thing entirely when you and your unit have been gassed with nitrous oxide for twenty minutes and you’re sure you’re going to die of laughter. Maybe it sounds funny to you. It wasn’t funny to the mothers of the recruits that didn’t make it. You really have to pay attention when your partner’s answer to “What would you regret not having told someone?” is the only thing that can disarm a live bomb. It was illegal, and looking back, it’s absolutely clear that it was.

But none of us could turn away. Because it was working. We were growing closer together as a unit, they truly felt like my brothers. And Saunders could do no wrong. He was our charismatic God-emperor. I think Saunders was influenced by the Hashshashins. You know, that Persian order of assassins? They say that the leader of the original order of assassins gave his followers the wildest time, women and drugs and partying, and convinced them that was what heaven was like. He convinced them that if they followed him that’s what they could have for eternity. Same kind of thing happened to us. Most veterans miss the camaraderie, that’s well known, but Saunders managed to not only recruit on that, but ramp it up to eleven.

When the training was done though, that’s when the fun began. Like I said, there’s no adrenaline rush like battle. And after the training, me and my brothers running unbridled and free, working to our fullest capacities, it felt like nothing could stop us. It was raw power, and it was amazing. I never felt the love I felt for my unit with my wife or my kids. And I realize now, that was for the best. I think back to some of the things I’ve done, in the name of my unit and I… Some were only children man. Little boys and girls…

It came to a head when Saunders found out one of our members was gay. He was a hardliner against that sort of thing. I don’t know what happened to him. It’s easy to assume the worst, but I also do truly doubt Saunders would do that to anyone in our organization. But whatever happened, that was the beginning of the end. It kind of just fizzled out. I was one of the last to leave. All I had was time and endless replays of those few years. And I realized what horror I had done. I realized what did, all because of I felt love. So, I swore it off.

He has a shaved head, and a tattoo of some Chinese or Japanese characters on his on his collarbone running down his pectoral. He is wearing a bright orange V-neck and you can’t tell whether he looks like a criminal or a monk.

My name is Raymond, you can call me Ray, and I guess I’m an addict.

So…I guess it was a lot like most of you guys. It started when I was a teenager and just got worse from there. It would strike harder and deeper each time. I always looked young for my age. And I broke out well into my twenties. Not that anyone could tell I was twenty-something.

Anyways, it finally happened that it came on too strong. I fell hard for this musician I met a party. She said no, as per usual. We had a few run-ins before that happened though, moments where I think we could’ve been friends at the least. But she said no. I went by her house a few times, tried to get in with her friends, refreshed her Facebook page religiously up until she finally blocked me. I’d done all of that before, that’s not pushed me away from the idea of love itself. For whatever reason I just couldn’t get her out of my head. Everywhere I looked, there she was.

I asked her out one last time. The police arrived with half an hour. They tried to resuscitate her, but she was gone.

Jail was good for me though, believe it or not. I got three square meals a day for the first time since my mother left us. I worked out almost daily and finally stopped looking like the Addams family’s forgotten child. I grew.

Except I kept seeing her. I even at one point went to the prison doctor about it. He told me I had a limerence. That I was obsessive. He told me I’d have to live with it, there wasn’t anything he could do.

But I couldn’t. Something snapped again, and when it was done I was confined to solitary. I thought it would get better, that I’d stop seeing her, but it just got worse. I’ve talked to other former prisoners now that I’m out and everyone who survived solitary all say they managed by basically living inside their heads. There was a famous case of a musician who basically created his greatest concerto while he was a political prisoner in isolation. Which is great, if you weren’t already in love with the idea of someone who died so long ago.

Sixteen years. Sixteen years in isolation. I still had ten more to go when I was finally allowed to be with the other prisoners. The first thing I did was see the doctor. Everyone I passed looked like her. Even the doctor looked like her. It was like I couldn’t process any other face.

I’m not even sure it was the same doctor, because this time he was effective. He told me to read. I read everything. I read the dictionary, front to back, twice. Anything to distract from the inner world I made from a few conversations with someone from twenty odd years ago. He also told me to take painkillers.

The idea was that the painkillers would stop me from empathizing with anyone. If you can’t feel pain, how are you going to feel someone else’s pain, right? And if you can’t empathize, how will you ever fall in love?

It worked. Early release. I saw this doctor pretty regularly, worked with him. I think. He told me, similar to how many NA or AA sorts of places do, to learn to love myself. And I did, for a little bit. But then, instead of seeing her in everyone, I saw myself. My face on every other face. Like a carnival mirror, not as exaggerated. Everything’s a little bit off, but it’s me, you know?

So anyways, model prisoner, except for one spat nearly twenty years ago. Which means early release. Parole. But now I was out in this big world all by myself. I had no idea what to do. I still kept seeing just me. I slowly escalated the painkillers. First it was aspirin, but somehow it ended with heroin. I kicked that quick though when I realized what I really need to do — kick the addiction of love. Then I will see things as they really are.

There was more, of course. But it came to an end, like anything else. You help fold chairs and wipe down the tables. Harold, the pear-shaped man comes up to you, serious and all business.

“Hey. Did you get what you need?”

You nod. Assure him that the names will be changed to protect the innocent. He looks relieved and lets his guard down.

“Well okay. Good. I am excited to read what you come up with. It’s been a while…”

He catches himself. You press him. A while since what?

“Well…It’s not important. Alright, just don’t take this the wrong way, I don’t mean anything by it. It’s just… it’s been a while since we’ve had a woman come through here.”