1.
Geoff
slammed the crumpled door again. It failed to click, jammed as it
was from when that bastard in the Mercedes crunched it in a parking
lot. Geoff wanted to get the damned thing repaired, but he also
wanted to pay his rent, so the door remained a metallic mess, looking
like the foil you might take off a turkey and ball up. Geoff pressed
against the door with his back, finally hearing the click.
It
wasn't that his car was anything special; it was just an old electric
Volvo, one of the first generation, built in the old days of “range
anxiety,” before the nation’s highways had been fully outfitted
with charging stations. It had been his mother's car, and there was
some sentimental value there. It had also been this car in which
he'd snuck off to the woods with his buddy Eric to eat psilocybin
mushrooms and talk to the faces in the trees. Later he and Eric had
discovered a mutual attraction that went way beyond the spiritual
connection provided by the shrooms, and had ended up steaming up the
windows as they explored that connection in the backseat of the
Volvo.
But
that was more than a decade ago, during the fragile and frenetic
years of his stumbling adolescence, and had nothing to do with
today's mission.
Today
Geoff and the Volvo were engaged in a glorious project - getting
Geoff his dream job, one that would allow him both rent money and
cash to fix the car's door. Geoff smoothed down his rumpled corduroy
blazer and made sure the crease in his pants was neatly crisp, that
his black wingtips were shiny. He took a deep breath, ran his hands
through his thinning blond hair, and started to walk toward the
gleaming obsidian spike in the center of the white stone plaza.
Geoff
didn't want to have to work his way up some corporate ladder, going
from tedious menial nonsense of one type to tedious menial nonsense
of a slightly more important type, all in the vague buzzwordy mission
of some faceless conglomerate whose true purpose was obscured behind
layers of whatever the hell corporations actually did these days.
No,
today Geoff would stride through the glass doors of the skyscraper in
front of him and speak to a man called Symon
at a company called Augmented International, who promised him "fame
and fortune and everything that goes with it," which were lyrics
to a very old
Queen song that was on a playlist that his
grandparents had put on at Christmas sometimes for reasons that
they'd never adequately explained, in
exchange for "certain services of a mutually beneficial, and
entirely legal, nature." The specifics were vague, in that
there were no specifics, and the whole thing smelled entirely like a
scam. But Geoff was curious.
He
strode through the glass doors, the pounding heat outside
extinguished by cold air conditioning. The black lobby was
illuminated by steel torchieres along both walls, and fronted by a
black desk lit by a single steel desk lamp, where a blond woman sat
and smiled at him. She wore digital lipstick set to rainbow mode,
which was a little disconcerting, and as she smiled her mouth went
from green to orange.
"I'm
Geoff Besson, here to see Symon Brooks?"
He pronounced his last name the French
way, because he was tired of people thinking it was BESS-un.
She
nodded and typed something into a screen embedded into her desk, and
then pointed at a row of Mies Van Der Rohe Bauhaus chairs sitting
along one black wall. Geoff hadn't noticed them before because they
were black on black, which seemed a bit...much. He sat down in one
of them and fidgeted.
The
cavernous lobby absorbed sound in a way that it shouldn't have. He'd
have expected to hear his footsteps ricocheting about the place, but
they were muffled, subdued somehow, dampened.
The
weirdness of the situation was beginning to increase. Geoff saw no
elevators leading to the hundred floors above him - just this huge
lobby, black on black with black accents, like an enormous corporate
tomb, or an office of vampires? Surely not.
Geoff
sat for a half hour waiting for someone to tell him what to do,
unconsciously bouncing his left leg up and down, fidgeting with his
hands, wishing for an ebook or a toy or something to fiddle with. He
had always been terrible at sitting still for more than a few
minutes, especially without anything to entertain him, and staring at
a black, featureless room was not helping. He had the urge to pace,
an urge that got worse with every passing second. A million thoughts
bounced around in his idle mind, each one commanding a tiny sliver of
his attention, but none of them actually getting through in any
coherent way. He worried about whether he'd remembered to pay the
cybernet bill this month, or if it was buried in his email that he
occasionally went through in a panic when something was about to get
cut off. He worried about whether that guy from the bar would
actually show up for their date at the nice Italian place tonight.
The guy had been cute as hell, and he and Geoff had hit it off rather
well, at least Geoff thought so. He worried about the prospect of
this new job, which seemed to consist of sitting in a black room
being incredibly bored.
Finally
the woman at the desk signaled for him to come to her with a subtle
wave of one hand. Her mouth went from purple to green. He stood and
walked over. She handed him a black piece of plastic the size of a
hotel key card, and then pointed at a spot on the back wall that
looked as blank as the rest of the room. A sliver of light appeared
and grew, and Geoff realized he was looking at the interior of an
elevator.
"Thanks,"
he said, the sound of his voice disappearing as soon as it came out
of his mouth. The woman nodded.
Geoff
entered the elevator, wondering what he was supposed to do with the
black plastic thing. Then he noticed a spot on the featureless white
wall of the elevator was pulsing red in the shape of the card. Geoff
placed the card over the pulsing spot, and the elevator doors slid
closed. There was very little sensation of movement, other than the
requisite changes in gravity that told him he was headed up.
And
headed up he was, all the way to the top. The elevator doors opened.
Geoff
was struck with paralyzing terror as he stared at a room made
entirely of fully transparent glass. It looked as if, when he
stepped out of the elevator, he'd be stepping into open space 100
stories above the ground. Acrophobia curled him into a quivering
ball at the back of the elevator, hyperventilating, palms actually
dripping sweat, unable to move.
A
tall, bald man
floated above his own certain death on that glass floor and crouched
down outside the elevator to look at Geoff. His face was pale crags
and white teeth, his mouth a little bigger than it should be.
"This
isn't exactly a way to show confidence to a potential employer,
Geoff." The voice was clipped, like a
manicured lawn surrounding a stately New England manor.
Geoff
couldn't find a response - he gasped, panicking, terrified,
paralyzed, at the back of the elevator.
"Come
on, you. If you're going to work for us you'll have to get used to
being uncomfortable." The man walked into the elevator and held
a hand out for Geoff to grasp. Then he changed his mind, giving Geoff
a "wait a minute" finger, and walked back out of the
elevator onto that impossible glass surface.
Geoff
remembered that the peculiar architecture of this building meant that
the top floor jutted out like a pyramidal hat from the rest of the building, allowing for this office to exist, and
to terrify.
The
man returned with a fluffy white hand towel and handed it to Geoff.
"Wipe
the sweat off y/our palms, Geoff, and then let's go."
Geoff
wiped his hands off and then grasped the man's wrist. The man helped
Geoff up and pulled him across the impossible threshold. Geoff
immediately collapsed again, unable to move. He stared down 100
stories to his own inevitable death, and whimpered a little.
The
man grabbed Geoff under the arms and hoisted him up, and then set him
down in a black leather chair across from a steel desk at one corner
of the room. He handed Geoff a pill and a glass of water.
"What's
this?" Geoff was able to gasp.
"Valium.
Take it."
Geoff
swallowed the pill, his overarching terror letting slip
the question of why exactly Symon had
Valium ready and waiting for him, along with any question of whether
it was actually Valium. His hand shook as he drained the glass of
water. The man took the glass from him and set it on the desk.
"Now.
Look, let's not let that little display of cowardice ruin our
meeting. I'm Symon Brooks.”
“Pleasure
to meet you,” Geoff managed in a quaver.
Geoff
of course knew Symon Brooks, hailed as the Next Harry Pendergrast,
who, a long time ago, had
been dubbed the Next Steve Jobs. Geoff didn’t really understand
why people had to be the “next” anyone. What happened to being
the “right now yourself?”
Brooks
was the head of Augmented International, and he'd been the first to
develop a computer that had passed every Turing test the
techno-philosopher crowd could throw at it. He'd named it
Wintermute, after the AI in a visionary science fiction tale from a
long time ago, and it was said that Symon and Wintermute had regular
discussions about life, the Universe, and everything.
Symon
Brooks said, “We've actually had our eye on you for a while, which
is why I was so pleased that you accepted
this meeting. Of course, there was no way
to know about your acrophobia. Sorry about that. Still, I always
say the best way to get over a fear is to stare it in the face every
single day.”
Geoff
was taking deep breaths and waiting for the Valium to kick in.
“With
due respect, let's get to the point, and then I'd like very much to
leave this room," he said, his voice trembling in such a way
that he was sure it’d show up on a Richter scale.
"The
point. Ok. I am
keen on developing both hardware and software with personalities
based on real people. We'd like to model consciousness in the
digital world."
“You
want to up your AI game.”
Symon
nodded. “What we’re talking about is
true virtual consciousness, nay, virtual sentience,
virtual sapience,
a computer that can not only pass a
Turing test, but one that can write its own version, and will think
to do that on its own. This isn’t the computer in your fridge that
tells you when to buy milk. This is way beyond that.”
“So
what is the primary mission?”
“The
Holy Grail. An intelligent database - something that can chew up the
Internet and spit out exactly the information you want,
instantaneously, intuitively, without any noise, spam, or nonsense.”
The
Valium was beginning to take effect, and Geoff began to relax a
little. “Cool. So how do you do that?”
“Well,
let’s have a few questions and answers first,
eh?”
“Ok,”
said Geoff.
“Tell
me about your schooling. Your resume says you got a degree in
analytics from Purdue.”
“Yes,
that's right.”
“Why
analytics?”
“Well,
tech has always interested me, but when I went to college I had only
kind of a vague awareness of what I actually wanted to do with it.
Analytics seemed a good starting point.”
Symon
nodded. “So you studied trends, numbers, the kind of macro picture
of the internet, right?”
“Yeah,
and how to build architectures to analyze the metrics I was
studying.”
“So
what have you done with it so far?”
Geoff
blinked. Not a whole hell of a lot,
he didn't say. “I've mostly been trying to get myself established
in a career that -”
“Yeah,
that's a non-answer, Geoff. I know your job history. Mostly
low-level programming stuff. But I know more than that, right? I
know about Echelon.”
“Echelon?
I...that's not even in alpha yet. It's more of a vague idea than--
”
“Yes,
but it's exactly the kind of thing that brought you to our
attention.” Symon leaned forward in his chair. “Although the
name's dumb.”
“I...I'm
sorry?”
“The
name. It's dumb. But the idea is sound. Collating cellular network
structures to build a massive multi-user open meta-database?”
“Well,
yeah.”
“Yes.
That's exactly what we want to do. So we'd like to buy Echelon.
But
we'd also like to buy your brain.”
Geoff
cocked his head, unsure he'd heard Symon correctly. “Excuse me?”
“Your
brain. I'd like to buy your brain. Quite literally. I want to take
your Echelon
project, upload your brain into it, and create a self-aware
metanetwork that
can cross-reference everything on the Internet simultaneously and
come up with exactly the result a user wants.
No
more million Boogle results. No more voice-activated idiot robots
that think you want to order pizza when you wanted to call your
friend Peter. No more bullshit.”
“Huh,”
said Geoff. The valium was really kicking in now, and he rode the
waves like a pro surfer.
“But
there's another angle to this project,” said Symon.
“Oh?”
“A
current generation algorithm goes through someone's email looking to
tailor ads to the user's email content.
One of this person’s emails mentions the burger chain Flappy
Burgers. What would that algorithm do?”
“Place
an ad for Flappy Burgers, obviously.”
Symon
leaned forward. “Ah, but the full text of the person’s email
says ‘I hate Flappy Burgers.’”
“So…we'd
need to somehow tell the algorithm to place
an ad for one of Flappy Burger’s competitors?”
Symon
nodded. “Bingo. See, we still
haven’t got to the point where natural language processing can
truly parse the contextual meaning of something like that. It sees
Flappy Burgers, it’s going to try and sell you Flappy Burgers.”
Geoff
took another sip of water. “So you want to build a better ad bot?”
Symon
laughed. “More than that. Here's
another example. Now let’s say you’re
looking for a restaurant that serves a particular kind of gin, has
gluten-free options, is open on a Sunday, and is quiet.”
“Well
I mean, Yalp will find most of that.”
“Will
it though? You’ll have to sift through a restaurant’s reviews,
and maybe nobody mentions the kind of gin you want, or whether the
restaurant is quiet. You’d have to go to a lot of different places
all over the web to find all of that information, wouldn’t you?”
“I
could just call a few restaurants.”
“You
spend twenty minutes on the phone and manage speak to two
restaurants, neither of which fits your criteria. Several others
simply don’t answer the phone. Meanwhile, you’ve got five people
coming over in an hour who are very particular about those criteria.
You need a dependable place to take them.”
“Eek.
Well, I’d start to panic, I think.” But the Valium was telling
him he wouldn’t actually panic, that everything would be fine, that
the world was a vast ocean and he was just riding the waves.
“What
if you had unfettered access to a vast database that could
cross-reference every email, blog, webpage, video, text message,
voicemail, forum posting, social media rant and chat transcript?”
“Well,
I’d wonder who the hell has that kind of access, and why. But
then, assuming I liked the answer to that question, I mean, then it’s
just a question of …but you’d have to start searching each type
of medium for each search term, then score and correlate the matches,
and hopefully come up with the name of a restaurant that meets the
requirements, using some kind of natural language algorithm, right?”
“Yes,
precisely.”
Geoff’s
mind was crouched on a surfboard in the
middle of a perfect tube, the foam and water curling around him in
slow-motion. “Ok. So…”
“So
that's why we want to upload your brain and join it up with your
Echelon
project. We want you to literally be
that algorithm."
"What,
like Max Headroom?"
“Whoa,
that’s a reference I haven't head for a while.” Symon
grinned. “Before your time, isn't it?”
“Before
yours too, I’d imagine,” Geoff said.
“Still,
if we’re doing very old pop
culture references, think Max Headroom meets Skynet, but not evil.
We’d like to create a self-aware database that can perform searches
using instinct and intuition, that understands the context of human
language in ways that no computer ever has."
“I
suppose I should ask the obligatory question about privacy concerns.”
“No,
you really shouldn’t.”
“Why
not?”
“Ask
me about the compensation.”
What’s
the compensation?"
“$500,000
annual base salary, plus a percentage of ad revenue. In exchange, we
get exclusive rights to Echelon and
your uploaded mind.”
It
was more money than Geoff had ever hoped to see in his life. Symon
had been correct about Geoff not needing to ask about privacy
concerns.
Symon
stood and walked back across the desk to where Geoff was struggling
to stand, a roiling combination of vertigo and Valium making it
difficult to figure out how to use his various limbs.
“Now,
I’ll email you the rest of the contract, and you can look that over
at your leisure.”
Symon
grabbed Geoff under one arm and helped him back to the elevator,
where Geoff cowered in the far corner.
"We'll
meet again tomorrow, same time," said Symon,
"in my downstairs office. It's entirely enclosed, you'll be
happy to know."
Geoff
nodded. "Thanks. I'll look the
contract over tonight.”
As
the elevator doors closed, Symon said, “That was aspirin, by the
way.”
