Part social thriller, part modern love story, Who Knows You by Heart is a sly, witty, and endlessly discussable tale of Big Tech, new money, relationships, race, and discovering what’s real in an age of artificial intelligence.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from C. J. Farley’s Who Knows You By Heart, which is out now.
Octavia Crenshaw, a Jamaican-American coder living in Manhattan, is broke, burned out, and haunted by her parents’ deaths. Desperate to pay off some debts, she ditches her nonprofit job for a high-paying gig at Eustachian Inc., a Big Tech company that specializes in audio entertainment. Language, communication, human connection—these are the markets Eustachian wants to revolutionize…and dominate.
Octavia finds herself swept up in the world of the Tech Titans, with its lure of instant riches and its seemingly limitless future. But as one of Eustachian’s very few Black employees, Octavia is uncomfortably aware of things that seem to escape her coworkers: unexplained tech glitches, cryptic remarks, a mysterious secret floor in the corporation’s gleaming headquarters.
But she sets her suspicions aside when she’s recruited by another Black coder—the infuriating but attractive Walcott—to collaborate on a secret project code-named Zion. Zion is a new kind of AI-powered storytelling, one that’s programmed to be free from the racist and sexist biases that plague other AI products. Zion could launch Eustachian into a bold new future and make its developers super rich while righting all kinds of injustices. Octavia and Walcott’s excitement over their creation sets off romantic sparks between the two of them, until they discover a toxic secret about their employer—something that they can’t unlearn, or overlook, but must overcome.
Excerpt – Chapter 7 “How To Disappear Completely” from WHO KNOWS YOU BY HEART By C.J. Farley
You meet Blue at his desk on the eleventh floor. In real life his hair is even bluer than in the photo. It’s a bold blue, a cartoon blue, a Gatorade blue. His hair is also thick and lush, and his eyes are dark. Blue is a babe. In fact, you think he looks like a K-pop star, and you wonder if thinking that about a Korean guy is somehow racist. Anyway, this guy could definitely get it.
You’re not a woman who is always thinking about sex. You know that men are different in that regard—a
man sees a woman, and the first thing he does is imagine what her tits look like under that top or beneath her hijab or her space suit, whatever she’s wearing. Your impressions of men are usually
framed in transactional, not sexual, terms. Is this man going to change my tire? Can this guy get me fries with that? Is this dude going to murder me? Men see sex everywhere, read sex as text and subtext in every situation.
That’s why men and women talk past each other. Men are thinking that a cigar is not just a cigar, and women are wondering why the men are smoking that fucking stinky cigar. But Blue has you thinking about sex the minute you see him. His thick, stylish glasses can’t conceal his dark, soulful eyes. He’s got tattoos on his forearms, his neck, and across his clavicle area, which is tanned and toned. The tattoos are only partially visible—all you can see on his exposed flesh are curly, pointy tails, so the images could be of snakes or seahorses or dragons. Whatever the beasts are, real or mythological, they are slithering or swimming or swooping down toward his lower body. You think about touching those tattoos. These are NSFW thoughts; these are not feelings you usually have. You set them aside like a simmering dish you’re pulling off the stove. You try to stay professional.
“Hello?” you say.
Blue is locked into whatever he’s doing on his laptop.
You try again. “Hey, hey, I’m here.”
Blue still doesn’t look up.
You wave a hand in front of his face, and he instantly turns to you.
“Hey,” Blue says, clicking and activating something on the temple of
his glasses. “Built-in
hearing aids—it’s
Mee Corp tech,” he explains. Now you feel like a fucking jerk for waving a hand in front of his face. You feel like you just pulled into a handicapped space and didn’t notice it until it was too late and everyone saw you do it. You make a mental note to yourself to not turn into an asshole. “So you’re the new hire, right?” Blue continues. You notice that Blue is seated in some sort of electric scooter and is
missing his right leg, from just above the knee. You wonder if the missing limb and the hearing impairment are related. You also can’t help but notice that when Blue is looking right at you he’s even hotter. Some men undress you with their eyes. This guy seems to be mentally slipping you into
different outfits, like that inevitable scene in a rom-com where the plucky heroine goes clothes shopping or tries on different wedding gowns. The way his gaze flicks ever so subtly across your body, like REM sleep with eyes wide open, makes it seem like he’s reimagining you in varying poses, maybe some of them from the Kama Sutra. How can a guy say so much with his eyes? And why didn’t any of this hotness come through in his emails? You try to stop thinking about all this and focus on what he’s saying.
Blue explains that you’re going to be part of his network security team—but with a twist.
“What’s the twist?” you ask. Without answering, Blue has you sign another NDA. You’ve signed
so many at this point that you barely even read it. You’re on autopilot, like a movie star autographing posters on the red carpet. Blue glances at the signed NDA and files it away. He explains that he’s been working at Eustachian for three years, which in tech years is more like twenty-one years, because in tech nobody stays at the same job or the same company long. Good coders are in demand—at least until the latest tech bubble bursts—and so you go where the money is or where the action is happening
or ideally both. Like whales following swarms of krill. Before coming here, Blue was at Mee Corp for two years, and he says that it wasn’t a fun place to work. There were perks—like his high-tech hearing-aid
glasses which he upgrades every year—but start-ups that become leviathans are horrible places for creative people. The founders of the start-ups act like they’re gods whose dictates must be obeyed. It’s like working inside the Statue of Liberty if the Statue of Liberty were your boss. It’s hard to argue with the thing you’re inside of. Start-ups that become leviathans are cults of personality whose quirks become dogma and places where fresh ideas are crushed in favor of the played-out directives of whoever founded the place, he says. Employees are constantly reminded they are laboring inside the torch that the founder of the company lit. “Eustachian hasn’t gone that route yet, but when it does, I’m
gone.” Blue snaps his fingers. “I’m a coder with a code.”
“So what’s the twist?” you ask again, a little impatiently.
“I’m getting to it,” Blue replies.
Blue walks you through what he wants you to focus on. His pod is called Team Ryeo. All the departments at Eustachian are called “pods,” and each pod is given a pod name that may or may not be related to
its function. The Founder got the idea from the mnemonic idea of the “memory palace.” When people lose their memories, one of the last things to go is their memory of the layout of their home. For evolutionary reasons, where you live is imprinted deep in every human being’s brain, deeper than what you studied in college or the name of your spouse. If you ever want to remember something, one way to do it is associate the thing you’re trying to recall with a room in your house. This internal “memory palace” helps with recollection. So the Founder decided to name every department after some famous fictional place. That way, he reasoned, the name could burrow its way into the collective consciousness
of employees while remaining opaque from the understanding of outsiders. You didn’t quite follow the reasoning on this, but you are still an outsider trying to find your place inside, so maybe that was the point. The assignment at Team Ryeo was this: You had to figure out ways to prevent threat actors and others from stealing Eustachian’s user data.
