Jackson Wheat

Jackson’s condition means that he relies heavily on pre-tested and well-rehearsed behavior to keep his world in order. Simple things like recalling the details of a telephone conversation would be impossible were it not for the discipline Jackson managed to impose on himself. His existence is a series of cues and procedures, and though it’s impossible to have a step-by-step contingency plan for everything that pops up, Jackson has gotten pretty close to approximating the life of someone with a short-term memory. Sure he was caught off guard from time to time, sure he had to improvise, and no, he didn’t remember everything everyone told him, couldn’t put a face with every name, and wasn’t good about calling people on their birthdays. But who did? Who could? Who was?

The call ends, and Jackson is counting down the handful of minutes he has to store the information from the brief conversation before his brain writes over it with random 1s and 0s. Fortunately, he has many, many ways of getting data into an external memory, and this situation has an easy protocol. His fingers are already dancing across his phone, which has itself already located the strongest wireless signal and hacked its way in.

In a few quick strokes, Jackson has down the phone number and soon will posses some pertinent information to let his future self know what the deal is regarding these ten digits. It’s easy enough, pretty much automated at this point. As the digits go in, an hourglass turns a few times while his phone pings a massive database where the kid’s info is, theoretically securely, stored. Sometimes the phone will spit back an error message claiming the non-existence of such a number, which tells Jackson the student is giving him fake info, and is trying to fuck with him, but usually the hourglass goes away when the identity is pinpointed in the database, and then his phone downloads a string of 1s and 0s that encode everything he’d ever want to know about the subject, who in this case is named Andrea. Also, a mug shot pops up below the (555) 555-5555, and a prompt that asks what course number should be filed with the new contact. He puts in 113b.

This string of binary is different for everyone, like a strand of DNA, and between any two humans there is a huge amount of overlap. For instance, Andrea is not the first medium-height, blonde, 19 year-old from Scottsdale whose parents will pay him to teacher her second semester business math. To make identifying these oft-recurring specs easier, Jackson has written a program, which takes the mile-long number and turns it into a corresponding, and still unique, color.

In order to house all the info Jackson now has on Andrea, it is necessary to so specifically assign the color that his phone cannot display, and anyway his eye couldn’t perceive, the total subtlety of pigment. The relative percentage of Red Green and Blue in the now formatted number are precise to some two dozen decimal places, which means a lot of people’s numbers look alike in color. But this is precisely the point. Later, when Jackson has no memory of meeting Andrea, and doesn’t know what she looks like, or what she’s studying, or even why the hell her number is in his phone, he’ll be able to look at her entry and remind himself of a lot right away. The raspberry pink will tell him he’s about to have his first meeting with a student who could be classified as an above average math student (from which he’ll gather the real problem in math 113b is give-a-shit, not comprehension) and that said student is from a community with an average household income in a bracket considerably above the national average (which will affect his rates) and that she got his name through craigslist (bit of a wild card—no previous reference).

Had it been a neon green, or near black purple, or fading from pale orange to dark red, Jackson would have been able to assume a whole other set of givens about this individual. It’d be easy to claim that Jackson’s coloring program is nothing more than a sophisticated way to stereotype any and every person in the database. Such a claim would be entirely correct. He depends on the utility in sophisticated stereotyping, and is very good at it. Jackson would love to be able to further segregate individuals, to have some other dimensions to play with that could cue certain useful assumptions. If he could somehow give the numbers volume, or texture, or maybe even fragrance, then he’d really be able to pinpoint a client’s personality. But his phone is limited in its assistance, and for now, visual indications are usually sufficient.

As he tapped Save and Andrea became a permanent part of the Shed, Jackson was distinctly aware of the fact that he didn’t know where he’d met the blonde on the screen looking back at him. ‘Wonder when I’ll see you again,’ he mused.

Just then, his phone vibrated and an alert popped up informing him that he had an appointment with a Laurence Stillwater in ten minutes at the Coffee Exchange on Grant. The number was dark blue. Evidently he’d been tutoring Laurence for some time now.