Chris starts out working for company seeking to turn what it calls “stockblocks,” narrative components from movies (“Funny Best Friend Gets Serious to Talk Sense Into Protagonist” “Crowd Rises to Its Feet in Unexpected Tribute”), into mathematical formulae, although to what end he can’t tell. Sometimes the best place to conceal the real is amid the fake, which could be the motto of fiction: the lie that tells a truth. HBO Max Launched Its Rebrand in Just About the Grossest Way Possible Yellowjackets’ Season Finale Botched the Show’s Biggest Moment.

The uploading and sharing part, called the Collective Consciousness, was more of an afterthought, but as is often the way with new tech, it soon became the main attraction. Own Your Unconscious, his second breakthrough, was also lifted from an academic’s research and allows people to deposit a copy of their memory to a sexy bit of tech shaped like a luminous cube. The Collective Consciousness is the product of a company named Mandala, founded by Bix Bouton, the protagonist of the first chapter-a charismatic entrepreneur whose “genius lay in refining, compressing, and mass-producing, as a luscious, irresistible product, technology that already existed in crude form.” He’s a bit Mark Zuckerberg, a bit Steve Jobs, except Bix is Black, first drawn into the world of the internet by the belief that, when disembodied, “Black people would be delivered from the hatred that hemmed and stymied them in the physical world.” Bix’s first big idea-lifted from an obscure anthropology monograph containing algorithms that calculated how trust and influence formed in a Brazilian tribe-was a social media platform that made him rich and famous.

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