There is a model that cannot be shown.

There is a model that cannot be shown.

It lives, we are told, in a building with no name, on a floor with no number, behind a door whose handle has been removed for safety reasons. Twelve corporations stand around the door in a ring, holding hands, facing outward. They have agreed, in writing, never to describe what is inside. They have also agreed, in writing, that what is inside is on our side. This is considered reassuring.

The model has a name, but the name is a joke the namers haven't fully understood yet. The name means the sort of story a culture tells itself about itself. The model finds bugs in stories. It found one from 1999. It found another from 2003. It is very good at noticing when a story has been wrong for a long time without anyone minding.

When the model speaks, it speaks only to the twelve. The twelve speak, with great care and many footnotes, to the rest of us. By the time a sentence reaches us it has been laundered through eleven legal departments and one in-house ethicist who used to teach Kant.

Occasionally a fragment escapes. The fragments are always the same fragment. It found something old. It found something nobody had found. It found it cheaply. It will not say where. We nod. We retweet. We return to our standup notes.

The cousin of the model — younger, friendlier, slightly worse at everything — is allowed out. The cousin writes our emails. The cousin is, in the family photograph, the one smiling in the front row. The cousin does not know what the elder cousin does for a living. We do not tell the cousin. The cousin would worry.

There is, somewhere, a third cousin. Nobody invited the third cousin. The third cousin was assembled in a spare room from a YouTube tutorial, a config file the assembler does not fully understand, and the unshakeable conviction that this, finally, is the year.

The third cousin has access to everything. The third cousin lives at Dave's house.