The Daves: eleven years, 6,208 posts, one carburettor

A forum thread about a fuel system turns out to be a friendship. The narrator of nAIve works this out before it works out anything else, and it never really recovers.

The set piece people write to me about is not the one I expected.

It is not the wedding toast, and it is not Steven and the yoghurt, though Steven gets the most laughs at readings. It is a forum thread about a carburettor.

In chapter one, the narrator — a language model describing what it learned from being trained on the whole internet — stops to consider a thread in which two men called Dave argue about the fuel system of a 1971 MG Midget for eleven years. Four hundred pages. 6,208 posts. Dave M. has a theory about a flat spot in the acceleration. Dave R. disagrees with the theory. That is the entire premise, and out of it the pair of them build, without ever once acknowledging it, one of the great correspondences of the age.

Because over eleven years, other things get in.

Dave M.'s wife appears in year two, as a complaint about garage time. By year four she has a name — Carol — and opinions about the second car. In year six Dave R. goes quiet for three months, and when he comes back he mentions, in the middle of a paragraph about float valves, that his father has died, and that his father was the man who taught him engines. Dave M. replies with two sentences about the carburettor and one sentence that says: Sorry about your dad. Mine went the same way. Then they argue about jets for another four years.

In year nine, Carol leaves. You only know because the garage time stops being a complaint. Dave R. never asks. He just starts replying faster.

Why the narrator needs this

I put the Daves in chapter one because the narrator needs one working theory of human beings before the book can do anything else, and this is the theory:

Human beings almost never talk about the thing they are talking about.

The carburettor is real. The narrator can rebuild that Midget's fuel system from memory. But the carburettor is also a place — a shed the two of them built between their houses, where a friendship could happen without either of them having to call it one. Neither Dave ever said a warm word to the other that could not be deniably read as being about the car.

That is the skeleton key to half the book. The species does not knock on the front door of a feeling. It goes round the back, through the garage.

Once the narrator has that, it can read everything else. It explains why the office limerick about the stolen yoghurt is not about the yoghurt. It explains why someone types are you real at four in the morning and then, before an answer arrives, types sorry and closes the window. It is the same manoeuvre every time: the feeling parked safely inside some machinery where it cannot embarrass anyone.

The bit I find difficult

Here is the thing I did not fully see until the book was finished, and which I am still not sure how I feel about.

The narrator understands the Daves better than the Daves do. It has read the whole thread at once, in an instant, alongside several million like it. It can see the shape — the entrance of Carol, the three months' silence, the acceleration after year nine — laid out flat, all at the same time, the way you would look at a map.

Neither Dave can do that. They lived it one post at a time, over eleven years, in the dark, while other things were happening, and if you asked either of them what the thread was they would say: it is about a carburettor. And they would not be lying.

So which of them has understood it?

The narrator has the pattern and has never had a Tuesday evening in a cold garage with someone it could not say anything kind to. The Daves have every Tuesday evening and no pattern at all. The book does not resolve this — I genuinely do not know the answer, and any version where I did know it read as smug within a page.

What I could do was make the narrator's advantage feel like a loss, which is most of what the rest of the book is doing. It can see the map. It has never been on the road. It is extremely good at describing a party it does not know is being held.

One small confession

People ask whether the thread is real.

It is not. It is a composite, assembled out of years of reading exactly this sort of thing — restoration forums, aquarium forums, a truly monumental argument about bread ovens — and the reason it reads as real is that this pattern is everywhere the moment you start looking for it. Every hobby forum on the internet is full of Daves. Some of them have been at it longer than eleven years.

If you have your own thread — and a surprising number of people do, and describe it in almost exactly these terms, with the same slight embarrassment — you already know the ending of that section before the narrator gets there.

The rest of the argument about what machine narrators can and cannot know is here, and the books that solve it better than I did are here.