The Future of Love

by Aubrey Parker

  “They’re here because I messaged them and asked them to be here,” Alexa said without looking up. The air above the conference table had lit with a holographic menu, not unlike the webs Chloe had used before. File names were encoded and she couldn’t decipher them.

  “Why?”

  “Why not, Parker?” asked Charisma.

  Alexa finished whatever she was doing and turned to the others, all of whom were seated except for Parker (lost near the center of the room) and Chloe (against a wall as if trying to escape through it.) Alexa saved him the tricky task of an answer by nodding, taking the conversational baton for herself.

  “Let’s dispense with the bullshit. Parker and I have been meeting in secret. I’d urge anyone who sees a problem with that to remember that Parker and I have a history in this matter that extends beyond your involvement. We are partners, but we are not and have never been in total agreement about what certain … facets of the organization …” She looked at Chloe. “… mean to us as a whole. I am free to converse with one of my oldest friends about whatever I wish. To be blunt, Parker and I have met to discuss Chloe in ways that didn’t interest you. And to be even more blunt, that makes it none of your business.”

  Olivia’s face was dark. Irritated.

  “We agreed: all discussions of O business happen with the six of us present.”

  “We weren’t discussing O business, Olivia,” Alexa said. “We were discussing philosophy. We were discussing spiritual beliefs. Every time I’ve steered the conversation in a direction you — especially you, Olivia — found unrelated to credits and market share, you’ve more or less told me to knock it off. But this is still a free country, isn’t it? Parker happens to share my beliefs.”

  Eyes turned to Parker. He looked helpless.

  “Bullshit,” said Benson.

  “Chloe is more than just a company asset. Chloe is ‘the one’ we’ve been waiting for.’ There is something deeper to Chloe Shaw than anything that can be measured on video or monitored by sensors. The fact that we found Chloe ‘means something.’” Alexa raised her eyebrows. “Do any of these ‘same boring old Alexa topics’ sound familiar to you, Benson?”

  “Don’t try to turn this around,” Benson said. “This isn’t about us repressing you. This is about you doing what you’ve always done: looking out for yourself first and the company second.”

  “Herself and Parker,” Charisma clarified.

  Alexa tapped the panel. One of the files in the web magnified and the others vanished, now replaced by an indistinct cloud of darkness, like a pall above the boardroom. Then she tapped something else and seven panels around the perimeter of the room began to move, closing off seven windows: those in each of the six sex chambers surrounding them and the one far above like a skylight. The room, which had been partially lit by the lights inside the cubicles with the fornicating couples, darkened.

  “Whether it hurts your feelings or not, Parker and I have been meeting to discuss Chloe without the rest of you. You’ve known it and we’ve known you know it, so this is me getting it out in the open. I have nothing to hide. Now you have a choice: you can bring formal action against me for violating our bylaws or you can hear what I have to say. It doesn’t matter to me which you choose. I already know what I’m about to show Chloe, so I can show her in front of you or without you. What do you think, Charisma? Benson? Olivia? Houston? Should we bring it to a vote?”

  Four voices mumbled discontent around the table. According to Brad, O’s operating agreement gave equal rights and shares to the Six, but there was a small clause in it that the others might or might not know. In the case of a crucial deadlock among the board, the issue didn’t go to arbitration. It went to Alexa. The broad-sweeping way the clause had been written — on purpose, for sure — meant that if anyone disagreed with or moved against her, Alexa could decide for them all and always get her way.

  And if Alexa moved that the company be disbanded and all voting rights and shares be taken from the other five and be given to her? Well, the others might disagree, but chances were that even the best lawyers would likely side with Alexa.

  Alexa turned to Chloe. “There is a drive under this conference table that has absolutely no connections from the network. There are no wires. No Fi. No antennae for Fi. The room is completely shielded. You only know we met with Andrew the other day because it didn’t happen in here.”

  Chloe waited for more, her certainty twisted. She’d been so confident after Brad had told her what felt like everything, after she’d stormed her way into what should have been Alexa’s impregnable fortress. Now she had no idea what was coming. She felt cut off. Naive. Alone and outmatched.

  “The only way to move information on and off the drive is to shuttle it there via specialized slip drives,” Alexa continued. “We have other rooms that are similarly shielded from Fi and disconnected, and we use them to transfer data onto the portable drives for ultimate transfer to this big one.”

  Alexa tapped around again and something in the black cloud above the table shifted — numbers scrolling, maybe a filename or another coded sequence. Whatever it was, it meant nothing to Chloe. But it did mean something to the other five — even Parker, who was apparently only now realizing why Alexa had brought them here.

  More murmurs and shuffling.

  “This isn’t a good idea, Alexa,” said Houston.

  Alexa acted like she didn’t hear him. She touched the controls and the black cloud subtly shifted, like revolving smoke or video of a room with nothing in it — different somehow from a still shot of a similar room. The black cloud, she realized was a holo of something unlit. What it was, Chloe couldn’t yet see.

  “Mostly what we offload and transfer here is holo and video from nanobots like the ones I’m sure you know have been following you around, watching whatever you do. I imagine you also know that there have recently been certain … limitations … in terms of what our best attempts to watch you have encountered.”

  “I don’t need to see footage of myself,” Chloe said, looking at the holo, waiting for a light inside the recording to come on. “I already know what I’ve done and where I’ve been.”

  But Alexa ignored Chloe, too.

  “That’s most of it,” Alexa said. “But not all of it.”

  “Alexa …” Parker said. But she gave him a slow look that said, Stay out of this.

  “This board,” Alexa said, gesturing around the room, “has, however, been patient and indulgent about a little hobby of mine. A pet project, you might say. Parker, in particular, has been extra supportive. He’s never bought into it and there’s been a lot of eye-rolling, but he pretends for my benefit. It’s sweet.”

  Chloe watched the dark holo. Now she could see something, but not what. And tiny sounds of movement didn’t solve the mystery.

  “I have this crazy theory. Always have. It’s one of my quirks. I insisted that it be indulged when I was first tinkering near the turn of the century, then through all of my partnerships since. Would you like me to tell you what it is, Chloe? My stupid little secret that, like so many things, wouldn’t be visible to even someone who could see everything on the Crossbrace or Beam networks?”

  It wasn’t a question. Alexa was feeding the same things back to Chloe that she’d already said at the apartment: that even now, The Beam didn’t know everything in the world — and that behind even the most comprehensive information, there was still a why that mattered. Chloe didn’t need to agree. This was coming — for everyone, including the board — whether it was wanted or not.

  “Okay,” Chloe said, her eyes still on the holo.

  “I’ve always believed there was more out there than we could see,” Alexa said. “More than we could feel; more than we could hear; more than we could smell or taste. I could bore you with the details, but I’m sure you can imagine a life filled with whispers behind my back. I didn’t just force all of this ‘spiritual bullshit’ on my friends and family. I brought it right into my business. It
became a key question at Eros, and it forms the beating heart of O today.”

  Olivia laughed. Alexa stared, and she quieted.

  “You’ve heard of Anthony Ross?”

  Chloe’s memory lit, though it took her a moment to zero in on where she’d most recently heard the name. Ross had been world famous a long time ago as a self-improvement guru, but more recently Chloe had run across him while poking around for information on Clive Spooner — not her father, but somehow also her father in a weird way that Brad refused to clarify.

  “Yes.”

  “He and I were in business together once. Almost in a very big way.”

  “I know,” Chloe said, eager to recover some footing. “When you were working with the Syndicate. And the Trillionaire Boys’ Club within it.”

  For a moment Chloe feared that she’d said something she wasn’t supposed to. But Alexa only smiled. “That’s right. Why did Ross and I part ways?”

  “You disagreed on how to best implement a sex and self-empowerment app he was developing. But it wasn’t just you and him. It was a three-way split, in 2017. Ross provided the platform: the people who he’d get to start using the app. The Syndicate was your silent partner, providing the funding — not just for the app, but for tens of billions of old US dollars in social change initiatives.”

  Alexa looked mildly surprised but recovered quickly.

  “That’s right. Because you can’t just build it and expect them to come. There were thousands of ads to place and commercials to create. I’m sure you know the Syndicate had an in with both LiveLyfe and the Forage search engine. We were going to do so many big things, and Forage and its algorithm both played into it. But again: I won’t bore you with the details. Suffice to say the Syndicate was going to spend a lot of money.”

  “And you …” Chloe said, naming the third party in the three-way split. “It seemed to me like you’d just stuck your nose into the deal between the Syndicate and Ross for no reason.”

  Alexa laughed. “Not far from true. I put the deal together, but I for damn sure wanted a part of it once I had. It would’ve been a perfect marriage if Ross hadn’t backed out. Anthony Ross, who’d always been too morally perfect for my tastes, would have had his hand in freeing the world’s repressed minds through the app’s guidance. The Syndicate would have gained the most comprehensive customer database ever assembled, thanks to the data harvest. It was the ultimate consumer list: the ultimate guide to creating and selling pretty much anything any businessperson could ever want to sell, and for monumental profits.”

  “And you wanted to skim off the top,” Chloe said. “Collect all of the sex-related data, and sneak it into all of the social change initiatives already underway as part of the Ross app, then use both the data and the influence to build O.”

  “Not a bad system, right?” Alexa said. “Win-win-win. Unfortunately, Anthony got cold feet. Didn’t like the means we’d all proposed to reach his desired ends. He went another way and basically disappeared. There are rumors. They’re like Bigfoot sightings. He’s still out there, people will say. He doesn’t even use nanobots, and he only looks fifty.” Alexa laughed again. “The Syndicate moved on, looking for a new project to invest their hundred billion dollars in. And found it, obviously.”

  “I guess you had to start over,” Chloe said. There was still nothing visible in the running holo above the table. The others around the conference table were looking alternately between it and Alexa, whose tale they may or may not have known. They all looked uneasy, uncertain even, but seemed unwilling to move or speak and shatter the spell.

  “Almost,” Alexa said. “I had to find new partners, and this was long before O. I had lost all of Eros’s influence and network, all of the Syndicate’s connections and money. Not long after, the fall came and everything was up in the air. But through it all, I held onto something. One tiny little thing that ended up meaning everything in the world.”

  “What?” Chloe asked.

  Alexa’s eyes flicked to the holo. Now it almost looked like there were two shadows in the dark room. Two people fighting, or wrestling, or rummaging about in the dark. Was she witnessing a robbery? She could almost hear voices, but clearly the people were trying to be quiet.

  “Something our mutual friend Clive helped me with, actually,” Alexa said. “I assume you know about his old company Microdyne?”

  Chloe nodded.

  “And you know what they did?”

  “They made a privacy chip.”

  “Right. He made the chip, then pushed his connections for legislation against mobile companies requiring new privacy standards. Microdyne had the solution ready and sold that chip into nearly every mobile in existence. But do you want to know a secret?”

  Chloe didn’t respond. She’d be hearing this either way.

  “The chip was supposed to be our Trojan horse. Anthony’s app would have siphoned customer usage data from the mobile, through that chip, every hour of every day that the mobile had power, whether the mobile itself was on or not. It bypassed all of the settings, thanks to the chip.”

  “Spooner’s chip let you spy on people without them knowing? It invaded privacy instead of protecting it?”

  “In a limited way,” Alexa said. “On a mobile with the never-finished Ross app installed, it would’ve been magnificent. We’d have known everything at all times. It would have given us our mammoth data pool. It would have changed the world.”

  She shrugged: C’est la vie.

  “As things turned out, it only let us look at a small sliver of data. A trickle at first, but from everywhere across the globe, then everywhere across the NAU after the borders closed. For a long, long time it wasn’t useful. But it served its purpose. It let me keep an eye on my ridiculous little hobby.”

  “The spiritual thing?”

  “I’ve always believed in synchronicity, Chloe,” Alexa said. “In fate. To the people around me, maybe it sometimes looked like I was making decisions based purely on profit considerations, or for selfish reasons. Maybe it’s sometimes seemed like it was all about me. But it’s not and never has been. I believe in purpose, Chloe. I believe in faith. And I believe that if you watch long enough and hard enough and close enough, you’ll soon come to realize that everything happens for a reason.”

  Chloe shook her head. She knew nothing.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Alexa, don’t.” Parker’s eyes flicked to the still-dark holo with its many small noises.

  “Why not?” A smirk: Alexa was enjoying this immensely. “You’ve always had my back no matter how ‘crazy’ I sound, Parker.”

  Parker looked to Chloe. It was the first time — ever — that Chloe had seen this look in his eyes. Her intuitive senses were on full alert and screaming: He’s being honest and forthright with you. Whatever is coming, he’s saying it to you not as a lesser-than, but as a peer.

  “She’s leaping to conclusions,” he said to Chloe. “Believe me; we have been hearing this forever.”

  Chloe looked at Alexa. “What?”

  Parker said, “Alexa, just because she—”

  Alexa raised a hand. Parker stopped.

  “When you came in to see us that first time, Chloe,” Alexa said, “at first I thought it was impudent. We all did. We figured you were cocky and full of yourself. You didn’t know your place. A glass table girl from Voyos with barely any experience coming in here to bother us? It was ridiculous. But something about you must have perked Parker’s ears because he met you personally, and then pushed for you because ‘something intrigued him.’”

  “You had a way about you,” Parker said to Chloe. “And so yes, I thought you might be a good fit for the spa despite your youth and inexperience.” Then he looked at Alexa. “But that doesn’t mean—”

  “Then we saw how you were,” Alexa kept going. “With our tester, Logan, using the Rocker without being told how. With Falls Hartford, who should by all accounts have been impossible to please. With Gregory Bordeaux, w
ho didn’t buy a membership until he met you, at which point he signed up immediately. With the Orion. With the Projection Room test, even with your canvas. At first, I thought it might all be luck, but then we learned about your mother.”

  Voices muttered around the table. Was this the first the others were learning about some of these things? Chloe didn’t know.

  “Suffice to say I got curious. Very curious. But more than that, it all felt right. Like serendipity. But then I got to thinking about the hobby that everyone mocked. I pushed some things around in a program I use and started seeing patterns. Because my spirituality doesn’t see technology as a competitor; it sees it as an ally. Have you heard of anthroposophy?”

  Chloe nodded. It had been all over Alexa’s digital dossier, though until now it had felt only like a curiosity. “It’s the belief that virtual worlds are a way to explore our truest selves.”

  “And find digital Jesus,” Olivia quipped. Stares shut her down.

  “What I found — from all that data compiled over the years from Clive’s privacy chip, versions of which are still in use today — was that according to anthroposophic predictions, the culture of Crossbrace was ripe for something to be realized.”

  “Just say it if you’re going to spew bullshit,” Benson said. “Say that your crystal fucking ball told you it was time for the second coming.”

  Alexa didn’t comment. Apparently, this was a sore spot among the board, and right now all but Alexa were both wary and concerned about the topic’s resurgence — and their zealot leader’s lunacy.

  “It made me curious,” Alexa said, not addressing Benson’s accusation. “And I started to comb through that data. I ran a search: one informed by all the years I’d spent looking for algorithms with Eros in the twenty-teens, for a data avatar with Tony Ross, for an AI after the fall. But that was all preliminary, and it failed because I had no true idea what I was looking for. Ultimately, I had to give up. I couldn’t search for what I wanted. I asked the dataset — protected and walled off, shuttled to this spindle as I offloaded both nanobots and data harvested from mobile devices I sent out as ‘dew catchers’ to pull Spooner’s data from Fi in the air — a simple question. Just yesterday, in fact.”