Stories of Your Life and Others

Ted Chiang presents this story as a transcript of a documentary on calliagnosia, the ability to register human faces without recognizing their beauty or lack thereof. The story includes first-person interviews with several speakers, including Tamera Lyons, first year student at Pembleton University; Maria deSouza, third year student and president of SEE (Students for Equality Everywhere); and Joseph Weingartner, neurologist.

In the world of the story, some underage people have “callies,” neurostats installed at the request of their parents that stimulate brain lesions and cause calliagnosia. There is a movement at Pembleton College to make callies a requirement. Tamera, who attends Saybrook High School where callies are compulsory, is against it; she plans to have her calli turned off the day she turns 18. Maria points out the issue of lookism: “[T]his prejudice against unattractive people is incredibly pervasive” (228). She believes with callies people would ignore the surface and look beyond it.

Neurologist Weingartner explains the concept of calliagnosia, which “by itself can’t eliminate appearance-based discrimination. What it does, in a sense, is even up the odds” (230). It does so by negating human ideas of what beauty is: good skin, symmetry, and facial proportions.

Tamera’s parents testify as to how in Saybrook a number of children with facial irregularities and malformations receive the same treatment and no negative feedback based on their appearance. Her mother believes that “being pretty is fundamentally a passive quality; even when you work at it, you’re working at being passive” (232). Her father, meanwhile, wants Tamera to be more mature when she starts to deal with issues of personal appearance.

Tamera has her calli turned off, and to her relief she soon realizes she is pretty. As she starts to notice handsome men, Tamera grasps that it is easy to think they are good because they are handsome. She observes commercials and feels swayed by the prettiness of the models. However, she realizes that her ex-boyfriend, Garrett, is not good looking.

Nevertheless, she concludes, “I guess it’s true what they say: love is a little bit like calli. When you love someone, you don’t really see what they look like” (244). She persuades Garrett to have his calli turned off so he can see how pretty she is, which might make him reconsider their relationship. Garrett soon develops issues with confidence, because in college without calli, intelligence and a good sense of humor are less important than being handsome. He turns his calli back on because he does not like his own looks. Tamera realizes she wanted him to see her without calli for her own benefit and not because she is truly anti-calli. This causes her to consider having her own calli turned back on. Beauty, she says, “gives you an advantage, and I think it’s very easy to misuse something like that” (262). She understands that companies and individuals misuse beauty for their own ends, as she tried to do.

Meanwhile, Pembleton organizes a student debate for and against callies. It is revealed that the student who argued against callies in the debate received payment from the PR firm Wyatt/Hayes to dissuade classmates from voting for calli. The backlash hurts both sides of the initiative, so SEE invites Walter Lambert, the president of the National Calliagnosia Association, to give a speech at Pembleton. He claims using beauty for promotion is addictive like cocaine: “Technology is being used to manipulate us through our emotional reactions, so it’s only fair that we use it to protect ourselves too” (241).

In a survey of people, Annika, a good-looking student, believes people who are not attractive support calli because it levels the field. Jolene, also good-looking, supports calli because she feels she has not done anything to deserve attention because of her looks, adding “[Y]ou’re always comparing how you look relative to everyone else. Sometimes I feel like I’m in a competition, and I don’t want to be” (244). Warren, who recently turned off his calli, likes that he no longer cares how other people see him, because they all look equal to him. Marc is against calli because he wants to be able to date good-looking girls. Cathy believes eliminating beauty will not change the misuse of it. Lawrence believes calli released him from the power commercials held over him. Lori proposes radical ugliness over beauty. A professor of religious studies offers the view that the issue is a larger one about the relationship between the mind and the body. A professor of comparative literature thinks the idea of protecting people from beauty is insulting.

An obscure initiative called People for Ethical Nanomedicine—a PR front for several cosmetics companies—issues an ad that purports that young people who grew up with calli lack understanding of the world in essential ways. The day before the vote at the college, Rebecca Boyer, spokesperson for People for Ethical Nanomedicine, gives a populist speech warning about the abuse by the putative minority of those without callies, should the initiative be voted in, contributing to the defeat of calliagnosia initiative. Later, the PR company is exposed for using “new software capable of fine-tuning paralinguistic cues in order to maximize the emotional response evoked in viewers” (261). Walter Lambert warns that the new software poses new threats to our perception of reality: “We’ll become dissatisfied with the people we interact with in real life, because they won’t be as engaging” (262).