Page 10 of Gifted & Talented

Relatedly, this insistence on change for the sake of change was why the version of Wrenfare that Thayer would ultimately die with bore few similarities to the Wrenfare he had started with. Absent his technical cofounder, his charismatic wife, and his savvy financier, there was no one left to convince Thayer that wheels do not require reinventing, even if reinventing wheels is your dearest, most precious wish.

But that is, obviously, getting ahead of myself. The story of Persephone Liang Wren’s demise is better left to one of her children, namely Meredith, whose own life story would follow the trajectory of her father’s so closely it would seem at first to be the actions of a lunatic, or an idiot, when in fact it’s just one of those silly ironies, like the self-fulfilling prophecy of Oedipus finding his own mother hot. What’s important to know is that Wrenfare Magitech—the company that Thayer Wren, at nineteen years old, already knew would revolutionize the way human beings communicated with each other—had developed so successfully and quickly that it seemed unstoppable, even inimitable, and yet had begun, by the middle of the 2010s, to falter. Profit margins dipped; competitors swarmed the magitech market like Visigoths sacking Rome. Think pieces began to emerge, first about whether Wrenfare’s hegemony was reaching its end, then about whether its doom could be prevented. At the time of Thayer Wren’s death, public reception to Wrenfare’s longtime CEO had transitioned from idolatry boasting the kind of black-and-white portraiture usually reserved for military generals to reductive clickbait about his failures as a leader and a man. Wrenfare the company was besmirched by flagging leadership; thanks to Thayer, Wrenfare the product now lived in the shadow of public doubt.

But what would become of Wrenfare the idea, Wrenfare the system, Wrenfare therevolution,which had launched an industry and rewritten the course of modern life?

To many, the answer lay somewhere beyond Thayer—to his successors, whoever they might be. Which was why, on the Monday that news broke of his death, theNew York Timeswould be forced to narrowly pull a feature called “The Rise and Fall of the House of Wren,” a deep dive into the lives of Thayer’s three children that revolved around a single, arresting question: Which of the Wrens now deserved the Wrenfare throne?

First there was Meredith Wren, the oldest and most obvious candidate,at least until you dug a little deeper into her past. Now CEO of her own magitech company, Birdsong, Meredith had not only been selected as a U.S. Presidential Scholar but had also graduated valedictorian of her renowned private high school, and was singularly recognized as one of the most disliked people ever to walk its hallowed halls. Despite a promising start in the burgeoning academy of biomantic research (itself built in large part on the quantum computing pioneered by her father’s CTO, Marike Fransson, who would pass away during the early 2000s and coincidentally go unmentioned in all but the most technical accounts of magitech’s rise), Meredith would drop out of Harvard at age nineteen. It was a choice that seemed at first to be completely mysterious—the actions of a spoiled child who did not believe the rules were meant to apply to her.

Meredith disappeared from public view, and when she and her life’s work, Chirp, made their resurgence five years later with the full support of venture capital behind her, public opinion soon turned. Never mind the thing they said before—she was, like her father, an innovator! The decision to publicly partner with Tyche, the company cofounded by her own father’s former financier, Merritt Foster, sent shock waves through Silicon Beach—a power move, many ruled, that revealed an impressive, almost horrific professional ruthlessness. Immediately, Meredith Wren was listed fourth on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, the only woman in what was widely considered the top five and the only woman of color of any real significance in tech.

But was the betrayal merely professional, or was Meredith actually a calculating snake? Despite her unprecedented success—or perhaps because of it—there soon came some noise about Meredith’s personal unpopularity. Her colleagues did not like her. Her contemporaries, the other CEOs vying for unicorn valuations, believed her to be not only an unbearable, arrogant, class-sympathizing snob, but also, quite frankly, a bitch. According to a widely publicized rumor—nonetheless published due to the reliability of its male source—Meredith did not really seem capable of the accomplishments to her name. One year after Chirp’s release, the clinical trials that were always too good to be true—the app that so zealously proposed it couldmake you happy—became a topic of intensifying speculation. Was such idolatry really owed to Meredith and Birdsong, or was some other dystopian capitalist fuckery afoot?

As of the month of her father’s demise, the tide was turning on Meredith Wren. Was she as competent as she seemed, or was it all a smoke screenmired in excessive wealth? Was it even possible to do the things she claimed Chirp could do? Or as Jamie Ammar would later put it in his pitch toMagitekmagazine, were the biomantic functions of the world’s first neuromancy transmitter legitimately improving the brain chemistry of its users, or did people simply feel better while they were shopping at the grocery store Tyche happened to own?

Another rumor, one suspiciously similar in tone to the first rumor, was that Thayer had always believed his eldest daughter flawed. He had denied her a position in Wrenfare’s technical leadership—said to be her dearest ambition, and even her younger sister had qualified for a director position in-house—and then had snubbed her a second time by deliberately passing on the chance to invest in her product despite Wrenfare’s known entry to the biomantic sphere (apparent from their latest product, a watch connected to the Wrenfare network that, curiously, also sought to offer subcutaneous delivery). Initially the snub had seemed in the interest of fairness, but now that the effectiveness of Meredith’s leadership had come under fire, Thayer’s choice to disregard his eldest child’s company seemed much more telling. What had Thayer Wren known about his traitorous daughter that the rest of the world had overlooked until, well, now?

Then there was Congressman Arthur Wren, the second-youngest congressman in history, elected at the age of twenty-eight to a progressive eastern district in the larger San Francisco Bay Area. Arthur had married young by neoliberal standards, at the age of just twenty-six, and despite a lukewarm performance in NCAA baseball—he had been an All-American top recruit out of high school, but flagged in investment quality as he revealed himself to be prone to the yips—Arthur had, like his sister, disappeared for a time in his early twenties, appearing to find the pressure to succeed to be too much too soon.

But then he was suddenly out in the world campaigning, his social media feeds bright and overflowing with progressive ideas and the unique virality of the young and hip, his private life open for what seemed to be perfectly willing consumption. Arthur Wren did not beg for privacy. His public image was curated so neatly, in such buttery, sycophantic shades of sorbet (successors to the destitution of millennial pink) that it seemed impossible to certain prolific armchair experts that it could not be a ruse, and yet seemingly the entire internet—his father’s own internet—crowned him their boyfriend without a second thought.

By the end of two years, now running for reelection in the lead-up to his thirtieth birthday, Arthur had not accomplished much of anything. News outlets covering his campaign routinely speculated that he was actually quite useless. As Arthur accomplished less and less, he grew more visibly distracted, photographed not only out of his district but out of the country, often rubbing elbows with the hoity-toity set. His pictures with his wife, Gillian, looked increasingly staged and stiff, and his social media feeds offered little in the realm of meaningful engagement. At one point, Arthur was seen to frantically abscond from a closed congressional hearing, hair and eyes wild with uncontrolled static as he screeched “no comment” at nearby cameras and fled. To many, Arthur seemed to be shrinking, disappearing. By the time local polls revealed that he was losing ground to his more conservative challenger—in theBay Area,no less!—it seemed likely that Arthur Wren had gotten the yips yet again.

Still, constant punditry as to Arthur Wren’s political uselessness aside, his tragedy in this particular story is private—unless you consider the fact that Thayer, despite a longstanding invitation to Arthur’s fundraising events, ultimately contributed nothing to his campaign.

Finally, there was Eilidh Wren, the perpetual ingenue, whose public face would never age beyond her teens thanks to the miserly cruelty of the media. Eilidh, known among the Wren family’s inner circles to be her father’s favorite, was at one point primed to be the world’s most recognizable ballerina—one of a scant twenty individuals and the only dancer to be sponsored by a primary athletic company at the age of eighteen, when she made her debut with the New York Ballet. It was Eilidh’s elegant, ambiguously mixed-race face, placid and poised, that graced the city’s billboards like a supermodel; it was her lithe, sculpted, second-gen-American musculature that was celebrated in advertisements about the virtues of talent and hard work. Eilidh was the token poster child for the rituals of mind over matter, and for the gracious acceptance—nay, the divine necessity!—of pain.

Then, later, coverage of her injury created a hollow mausoleum of a life, complete with the vast, prolonged funeral held publicly for her career. Pictures of little Asian girls setting flowers outside the New York ballet graced the cover of every magazine. Eilidh Wren, who had once been everything to her community, was gone! What a waste, a life cut short, the It Girl who would eventually succumb to her own personal tragedy, as though thegoddess Athena had struck Eilidh Wren down for the crime of being too beautiful, too talented, too young.

Of course, Eilidh wasn’tactuallydead. She was a respected employee at her father’s company, clocking in her nine-to-five like everyone else, which was incalculably worse. If only she’d died! The only thing more virtuous than an ingenue was a dead ingenue, which was something like a saint. Rest in peace.

The reality of the House of Wren, as theTimesarticle would have concluded had it actually made it to press, was that despite boasting a family of prodigies, Thayer Wren had raised a trio of sad, underperforming adults who’d peaked too soon. Thayer Wren himself was no different—a difficult, curmudgeonly man who personified toxic work environments and had, in recent times, fallen prey to the trap of his own invention. Toward the end of his life, Thayer’s legacy was compromised by the trials of his own desire to be seen, a cautionary tale about the narcissism of a man self-consciously bereft of equals; who simply believed it when his yes-men told him he was singular, unmatched. There was a lawsuit currently being compiled against him, rumors of employee abuse, whispers of sexual misconduct. It was said that his own board was soon to turn against him; that the future of Wrenfare Magitech was unclear. The most valuable thing Thayer owned—not technical expertise, which had been Marike Fransson’s, or financial brilliance, which had been Merritt Foster’s, or the right connections, which had been his wife Persephone’s, but Thayer’s own singular innovation, his once clear-eyed drive to create—was being widely and publicly questioned. Perhaps he had only gotten this far by taking advantage of the genius of others? His rise came on the backs of laxer labor laws; of early business partners and smarter collaborators who’d been quietly passed over; of a monied wife who’d died before anyone could openly question what she’d contributed to her husband’s success; of a public led to believe that eccentricity could only mean genius; of an era less scrutinizing of men who looked and spoke like Thayer Wren.

What would it mean, then, for his children, for his progeny and his creations, for the consumer-driven world that he himself had helped create? What would happen to Wrenfare, and to the very society Wrenfare had built—and which of the Wren children, if any, could be left with the task of seeing it through?

Moments before his last unassisted breath—while sitting alone in his ceremonial office, burning the midnight oil as he had not been accustomed todoing for decades by then—Thayer Wren typed into his favorite microblogging site a single sentence and hit post:I’ve learned to expect the least out of the people I thought the highest of.A fitting end, thought theTimesreporter, to a story about the falseness of perfection and the disappointment inherent in its pursuit. About what happens when a bright star—and the promise of the stars his own light produced—invariably burns out.

But then, of course, Thayer Wren fucking died—he had a stroke later that night and was declared dead by Monday morning, not that his children could be bothered to pick up the phone—and there was no way theTimescould publish something so incisive. It would seem insensitive, and journalism had enough problems as it was. The article was pulled, and in its place ran a simpler, less abrasive headline:

FOUNDER OF MODERN MAGITECH THAYER WREN HAS DIED.

Anyway, back to the subject of magic. Does it exist, you ask? Of course it does, or how else to explain Wrenfare’s operational system, which is otherwise unfathomable at this scale?

Okay, but does itexist,you may reasonably press me, and that answer is—perhaps this is a surprise to you?—an additional, unequivocal yes. Magic, as in the stuff of fairy tales—the stuff that individual people can access, which is both the same as and different from the stuff keeping Wrenfare’s neural network alive—isn’tnotreal. The majority of the world may believe so, but there are lots of things in which the world believes (the American dream, the efficacy of dieting, the concept of fairness) that aren’t necessarily the whole truth.

You do understand that magic can be much more than just a technical network of communication and energy, right? The line between magic and science is fuzzy to begin with—ask any physicist—but even so, instinctively you know that something out there is far more lawless; you feel it in your bones. Take it from your lola who’s at least half-psychic, for example, or your abuela who dabbles in curses. Magic, real magic, is much more fluid than capital or industry, and it’s also bound by far fewer rules.

Just because the majority of the world doesn’t produce magic doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. And just because magiccansit still and listen doesn’t mean it always chooses to. Truthfully, there are so many different, equally plausible pathways to magic’s effects that it would be impossible to sit hereand list the myriad ways an individual could conceivably bend it to their will. Can magic securely deliver a document in less than the time it takes to lose your train of thought? Of course. Can magic be used to pick a lock in someone’s mind, reshaping the train oftheirthoughts? With the right set of talents, absolutely. Can magic spontaneously create an electrical charge that resembles a miniaturized bolt of lightning? If you’ve got a weird form of the yips, why not.

Can magic belong to something larger than ourselves, a network of something bigger than this earth, more vast and more ineffable than energy, something called upon as if it were, say, a demon, or nature herself? Yes, yes, and yes. Technically, magic is unbounded, and if we cannot name every creature in the sea, then we cannot determine with certainty who was individually responsible for the ten plagues of Egypt we all learned about in Sunday school (or from a beautifully scored work of animation, pending the devoutness of your parents). Nor do we technically know for sure that there were only ten, because things do get lost in translation.

So, to sum up, magic—as Magic—can be monetized, militarized, and/or mass-produced electromagnetic energy. As far as the world knows, it can end there, as something to drive capital and disrupt the system within which we’ve learned to coexist. But to those fashionably in the know, magic can also be called upon in variable forms by any knowledgeable practitioner (and quite possibly also a secret third thing, known only to Moses, King Ramses II, and Eilidh Wren).

The point is: Magic has existed in various shades throughout history, alternately called by names like technology or witchcraft or shamanism, depending on who authors the story—but I, of course, am the God writing this one, and I choose to call it what it is.

As to the question of which Wren deserves to reign, magic is not and has never cared about the answer. It has loftier goals, bigger problems. For the purposes of the story, though, let’s say hypothetically that it matters; that within every discussion of magic there is an inherent question of worthiness, and of worth itself. If Wrenfare is glory and glory is Eden, it’s hardly my place to decide which asshole stays. I’m but a mere voice of God—I neither play favorites nor offer condemnation.

Nor do I need to. By the time their father’s death irreversibly changes the trajectory of all three lives, it’s pretty clear they’ve all equally fucked themselves.

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