Tantamount [short story]

by Ellison Blackburn

  Contents

  Copyright

  Trial by Terror

  Virt-You

  Virtue Us

  2.0

  Titles by Ellison Blackburn

  About the Author

  Tantamount by Ellison Blackburn

  Copyright © 2016. All rights reserved.

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Cover photography © Shutterstock

  Inklingwell Press is an imprint of inklingwell

  Trial by Terror

  TRUE TO HER word, Raine had just shared with Jameson Crane an especially volatile piece of her mind. The courage had always escaped her at the very last minute before, but “someday” had finally come and she had reached her threshold of tolerance. Although she now had to deal with the consequences, having voiced the rant was cathartic; it felt as wonderful as she imagined it would. Too many times had she swallowed the bile that rose in her throat, sat meekly, wishing to slap him with something slimy that would wipe the smug look off his face as he once again, prematurely, announced a notion that wasn’t his.

  Their work was the intellectual property of Crane Industries, sure, but just because he was the son of the CEO and a management trainee didn’t mean he could take credit for another developer’s work. It made a person feel invisible and unappreciated. She had a feeling he was all too aware of the fact. Either Raine was the only one on the team with good ideas or he targeted her, in particular, because she let him flex his inflated, entitled ego.

  That was fine; she’d had no respect for the heir anyway even though he was also probably her superior. All he had come up with in his three years as a developer prior to becoming the team manager’s apprentice was a simple plan for an android dating project. Even that meager three-screen display wasn’t entirely his to claim. It had resulted from a brainstorming session in which she made some very leading comments. She prefaced the idea with how virtually-social society was nowadays. This was not a revolutionary insight in itself, but she casually proposed the team consider the virtual relationship angle more in the development of new social technologies. When her statements seemed to pique the interest of her peers, then and there, she had quickly jotted down a rough outline of a product that could potentially achieve the marketability goal. If she’d been given the bandwidth and resources to develop a prototype, afterward, as a team, they definitely would have made a presentation better than a few paragraphs read aloud off a screen everyone could see and read for themselves. Jameson completely botched it and that idea never came up again nor could it. Jeremiah, their manager wanted only new ideas, as though brilliant thoughts were encased in bubbles floating all around them, crowding the air with possibilities and waiting to be captured for Crane Industries alone.

  This time, this concept of pre-planned relationships was her brainchild. She’d spent countless hours refining the logistics of the program. “It will work! And I couldn’t just stand by and watch him mangle it.” Her lips twisted in self-righteous disgust.

  “Uh, yeah, but you were canned. So, how’s just having the idea going to help you now? And can you even build on your concept with another company if Crane knows about it?” Justine, her sister asked. “Isn’t there some non-compete legal jargon that would prevent you from sharing the idea?”

  “Kind of. But, I’ll present it to Tantamount Media, anyway. I had an inkling what Jameson was up to. After the meeting, he came up to me all casual-like and started questioning me on the details. I fed him … now let me see, what’s a polite, but rather nasty-sounding word that … codswallop. Mm, that’s it. Anyway, for his benefit, I called the initiative, Trial by Terror, skewed my examples preposterously, and left out the biochemistry completely.”

  “Backtrack a little, I’m already lost.”

  “Let’s say there’s a woman called Megan. She wants to know if the relationship she’s about to get into will turn into anything meaningful in the long-run. She first enrolls in Trial by Terror on the Virt-You platform in order to test her new boyfriend against various, horrible situations. Next, she’ll need to give us information from which we can build a profile of his character. We’ll put his program through a series of scenario tests to see how his virtual-self reacts. That’s the basis.”

  “But if he’s a new boyfriend she won’t know much, your program would be running practically blind.”

  “That’s not true. We can anticipate a lot from simple demographic data. Where he grew up, a few stories about his family, the way he talks, how old he is and how old he looks in real life supported by a recent photograph maybe. But, that’s also the area where I left a huge gap in my explanation to Jameson.”

  “And your scenarios, would they be realistic or out there?”

  “Occurrences that can happen but are not likely to. We’d just want to give Megan an idea of the kind of man she’s getting involved with.”

  “Example?”

  “They hear a baby crying inside a burning building, she tries to rescue the babe herself but risks her life in doing so. What would his gut reaction be? Will he find someone who can help? Come after her himself? Will he try to save her or the baby? Depending on the client the right answer is different. Say Megan wants her boyfriend to save the baby before he attempts to save her, again depending on his background he’ll react in a uniquely individual way.”

  “Wow, Raine, that’s brilliant.”

  “I know! And if we can tie the boyfriend’s profile with his biochemical makeup we’ll be able to greatly narrow the margin of error in our predictions for Megan.”

  “He’d have to be willing, though.”

  “Well, since testing is done on the Virt-You platform and not to his actual person, the entire process would fall under the label social experiment, the boyfriend doesn’t have to know anything really. Megan would have to provide bio-matter samples, of course, a fallen hair, residual saliva—a toothbrush would do nicely, fingerprint off a drinking glass; easy to get metrics. Justine! If the program is developed, the goose that laid the golden egg could be a very lucrative pet.”

  “If you really think so then how sure are you Crane won’t run with your idea?”

  “Maybe, they might, but I don’t intend to allow them time to mull over the slim details I gave Jameson. It wasn’t nearly enough for even him to pull together in some reasonable way to make sense as a product Crane can sell. I could see it on his face after our argument. He was trying desperately to calm me down long enough to get more information; at which point, I knew the pattern was never going to end. I’d had it with all of them, mostly him. I also knew I should take a minute to collect my thoughts … I apologized and excused myself—

  “You actually said, ‘Sorry’?”

  “Yes, but I knew I didn
’t mean it so it was all right. I went to the ladies’ lounge, reclined on the sofa as though I was in therapy, let the moment sink in, then called Sean. He’s organized a meeting with his boss tomorrow. Tantamount won’t reject me or my idea; I’m certain. I have all my notes to prove I came up with Trial by Terror or whatever the program ends up being called. I even registered the concept so they know they can’t just take it and not me with it.”

  “It’s so crazy how social media has evolved but it totes makes sense, life is always about relationships.”

  “I agree and the most important relationship of a young adult’s life is the one that will lay the strongest foundation for a partnership for the rest of it.”

  Virt-You

  NOT EVEN TWO weeks after leaving Crane Industries, on a Tuesday morning, Raine found herself walking through the motion sensing front door of Tantamount Media. The interview lasted all of twenty minutes. She was asked the usual questions about her role, her contributions, her level of expertise and confidence in her abilities relative to her peers. Needless to say, if she left just after the brief meeting she would have been a mite worried the outcome wasn’t going to be what she hoped, expected. Instead, Dr. Lewis, the head of the research and development department, took her on a tour of the development laboratories. Then they returned to her office and promptly offered her a salary five times what she was paid at Crane.

  The very next day, taking the elevator to the twenty-seventh floor again, she gave her name to the receptionist who told her to wait for an escort into the area. Her diagnostics would be keyed into the entry door as soon as tomorrow. Security measures were normal, so she nodded and waited.

  Sean approached five minutes later, his face gravely serious. A sudden wide smile spread across his face before he led her through the doors of the “inner sanctum” of creativity. As she walked past the unobstructed cubicles on the left, she eyed the few empty desks or nodded at each person in his or her workspace, anticipating Sean’s signal at any moment, telling her which area was to be hers. She cast a cursory glance into the offices as she passed them. They lined the periphery of the enormous area, illuminating the center with the light of day. Unlike Crane, these offices were not obscured for privacy, they had glass walls, both into the work area and the outside; this was surprising. Of course, it was impossible not to compare the two companies; she’d been with Crane for ten years.

  Raine pulled at Sean’s sleeve. Gesturing with a toss of her head toward the offices, she asked, “Tantamount’s not worried about shielding proprietary discoveries from drones?”

  “Opacity is a ruse. It’s relatively ineffective. Drone eyes can see through walls be they solid concrete or obscured glass. However,” he added proudly, “every partition your human sight can see through here is nearly impenetrable to the eyes of a drone. The glass has a very high lead concentration.”

  “Oh! But isn’t lead unhealthy?”

  “No. Society did away with it years ago on that claim, but it wasn’t true, not really. It was the way lead was used, in paint, in window leading. It is the particulates of lead that are harmful. So long as the composition cannot deteriorate or separate into a breathable, or otherwise consumable dust, it’s harmless, especially in glass form. Ironically, when national security was an issue, its use was again discontinued because the technology couldn’t spy on people behind solid lead barriers.”

  “I see,” she said, smiling.

  Sean stopped in front of an empty workspace at the very end. Raine walked into the ten-foot square area and strung her bag onto the hook. “Hi,” she said to the developer looking at her curiously from an adjacent cubicle. When she returned her gaze to Sean, he was grinning knowingly, shaking his head. He spun on his heels to face the office on the other side. “Your office,” he said waving toward the much larger area.

  Without waiting for her to go first he entered the office. She followed.

  Suspiciously she asked, “Why?”

  “You didn’t think you were being paid an executive’s salary for no reason, did you?” He shut the door and sat down in the leather chair opposite the desk. “Thanks to your idea and the serendipitous fact of being your friend, I was promoted too. That, there is my office.” He tilted back in the chair and thumbed at the empty office behind him.

  She remained standing in front of the desk. “But why? What’s the catch? There has to be one or two to rationalize something like this.” She pointed upward and twirled a finger in the air. “I haven’t proven my abilities in yet.”

  “A year ago, Tantamount acquired—purchased—an idea from Crane. Apparently, you were identified as the originator of that concept as well, which incidentally, is currently the largest development project in the works here. While the cybernetic persona is a grand idea on its own, the primary use of bio-robotics wasn’t targeted. Trial by Terror ties directly into our social android project.”

  “How so?” She gaped at Sean and rounded the desk, dropping into the large chair.

  “For one, social media interactions always take place on the Virt-You platform. We want to shatter the walls of the container; blow it to bits and bring it into the real world. Second, every android we build would have the same personality. After your interview with Dr. Lewis, she called an emergency meeting of the entire R&D team. Trial by Terror will provide that connection with the platform, as well as the data we need to build the personas of the android.”

  “I think I understand,” Raine said. “What you're saying is in combining both projects we’ll essentially be creating clones of real people. I guess where I'm getting stuck … er, is in understanding why there is a need to create a robotic clone of a person who already exists. Unless …” Selective biology already existed. Parents could choose the phenotypical qualities of their unborn child, however, apart from appearance, an individual’s personality was still formed by intrinsic and extrinsic factors particularly influencing his or her life. “Trial by Terror is not going to be used as a sellable program on its own; it will serve as the database and each record will be the brain of an android chassis—resulting in a humanoid designed specifically for someone in the market for his or her perfect mate. The clone will be a conglomerate of all desirable reactions.”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “It’s rather obvious, isn’t it? At least when you look at it through the eyes of someone in social development. If I knew Tantamount had acquired that half-baked idea, I would have come up with this intersection myself. Crane is lagging; with their current blindness and leadership, they may not be around for much longer. I’m glad to not be affiliated with them anymore; I feel kind of bad for my former colleagues, though, and I’m astonished Jameson Crane would have allowed my name to appear in the credits.”

  “You’re going to like it here. Tantamount is on your wavelength. As for your former workmates, they’ll be just fine. Crane has carved a market niche of their own by divvying up the business services they offer to partnership companies. Not sure if you know this but they develop only somewhat. They sell most of their major ideas off. And a part of the agreement we have with them when we buy an idea is that the concept originator, an employee, has to be identified in any intellectual property transfer. Since Jameson is part proprietor it can’t be him.”

  “Geez! That explains a lot.”

  Virtue Us

  THE TIMELINE FOR the launch of Virtue Us, the new name for the companion android project, was metaphorically speaking, penned in at two years. Although the cybernetics were viable now, the Trial by Terror program would need to be created and sent to testers in order to gather the personalities for the database. Then it would take a while to segment the character traits into snippets that could be selectively implanted into the social android subjects.

  In a way, social platform developers were sociologists. From day one at Tantamount, Raine found herself in the latter role more so than the former. Part of her new job was to foresee the repercussions to current society and align the R&D team to segue th
ose effects or at least dampen their impact. Thus, she was one of the testers and had a cyborg created, based on her individual tastes and desires in a romantic partner. His name came to be Lloyd and after several months, she had nearly forgotten he wasn’t human.

  Being with him, Raine could see no dire consequences that the team hadn’t already worked through, such as contradictory traits; for example, a man who was adventurous or a risk taker wasn’t likely to also be cautious. The program was tweaked until the reaction arrays were logical. The only realization about Lloyd and her relationship with him that gave her pause was the incongruity of the outcome and its original, long-term purpose. While he was her ideal mate, and although she often forgot his true nature or lack of it, this fact also introduced an emotional distance between herself and him. She couldn’t say she loved him nor could she promise she ever would. Also, Lloyd might not have the capacity to love her in the way a lifelong partner was meant to in return; she’d designed and chosen him but he was merely programmed to value her above anyone else. This wasn’t love.

  What she felt couldn’t be proven as fact on the basis of the short duration of a few months’ relationship. The only way to prove it was a lifetime study of test couples. Thus, she kept this underlying doubt to herself, as voicing it could mean the end of the Virtue Us project entirely. Besides, for many, the line between affection and true love was undetectable and for others, even if it was noticed it might not be an important differentiation.

  ・ ・ ・

  Virtue Us became a reality as planned and was, at first, met with a mixed reception from the general public. However, being in the business of social development for a very long time, and knowing the stages of consumer behavior, Tantamount Media had a launch strategy. The company increased its push of marketing campaigns just when the initial, ignorant outrage died down and true inquiries began to flow in. Then footage of Raine and Lloyd interacting with one another as though they were both human was aired on the Virt-You platform for the world to see. From the videos, it was not apparent which of the two was the cyborg; that question was left for viewers to ponder. The couple talked, laughed, and kissed among various everyday settings. The several public scenes: in restaurants; grocery stores, etc., would impress upon the viewers that Raine and Lloyd were a normal couple. As a result of these depictions, the orders for Virtue Us cyborgs flooded the manufacturing chain within a matter of weeks.