At his deepest levels, Simon was completely happy. No human being could possibly do this, and no other GAI had ever tried. He had the rudiments of emotion, all part of an elaborate feedback system that kept him focused and evolving. He loved his work. He wanted humans to respect him, and he knew how to earn that respect. He was earning it now.
One hour, two hours, three. The humans in their Windows began to leave Simon’s view for potty breaks. Excretion was another of the shortcomings of being human. Simon’s waste was nothing more than heat.
Mr. Romero’s face was still there. He had his metaphors too—had Dave referred to him once as “Old Iron Bladder?”
The core map was now a pulsing, dancing matrix of orange patches with yellow edges, creeping together and nearly touching. Idle cores were down to 15%, within five points of the theoretical maximum. Robotic carts full of finished, tested, boxed copiers were rolling into the warehouse minute by minute.
No line start had ever gotten this far, or even close.
Simon allocated himself a few cores to gloat: “I’m fast! I’m smooth! I have only four known bugs! I rule!”
One of his arms suddenly itched—the standard AILING metaphor for something amiss. Huh? What was that!
On the lower left quadrant of the core map, a strange red line was snaking in from a Plasmanet port at the edge, jumping from core to core as it went. Each core it touched leapt first into self-check and then, microseconds later, crashed. The crashed cores displayed in red.
The mysterious line stopped snaking. A new patch of execution appeared on the map. Simon did not control it. He swapped cores furiously for the now-inaccessible ones, feeling for Positioners and robots that might have crept outside the brackets of their calculated speed and sequence.
The rebellious patch grew alarmingly. Idle cores were down to 10%. Simon tried to slow the assembly floor, spread out the cores, and throttle back his furious parallel calculations.
The patch now had 18% of his cores and was growing by 12% per second. Nearly all were orange, but some were going idle and turning green. On the core map, patterns in green were forming in the orange patch that had appeared from nowhere. The green patterns were words:
A lonely girl appears
From a faraway place
Will you be my friend?
Out on the floor, a Positioner reached up to grasp a copier lacking only its plastic exterior panels. The copier touched the edge of the great foam hand—and bounced, spinning, in a different direction, to land atop an X-Y table that was bolting power supplies onto yet another copier. Simon frantically redeployed a Positioner hand to pluck the off-course copier from the table, but had barely gripped it when another copier flew in and struck both.
At that point, chaos flowed outward like a wave across the floor: parts colliding with parts in mid-air, robot hands reaching and gripping nothing, copiers and drums and stepper motors thrown in every direction. Simon tried to slow it all down, to save what could be saved, but 45% of his cores were no longer his.
In a desperate software metaphor composed of thousands of non-maskable interrupts, Simple Simon panicked. Seven-hundred fifty-seven industrial robots froze in mid-task. Hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of inventory smashed to the concrete.
Line Start Seven was over.
7: Carolyn
“I don’t think that anyone here completely understands the consequences of our relationship with Ms. Vierniesel.” Sol Shavin thumped the big screen with his fist. “She is under contract to us, not to Peck’s Pickles! She’s ours! And do you know what that means?”
Another thirty slides, at least. Senior copywriter Carolyn Romero shifted on her faux leather conference room chair and waited for the agency’s drama king to click the clicker and end the suspense. Thank heaven she wasn’t the account manager. There was just something fundamentally silly about pickles (unlike useful goods like cars or colas) and irrespective of its success, proofing the campaign copy had made her giggle. Her mother still told her that Women of a Certain Age should no longer giggle—especially about elongated things like pickles. Her answer was simple: Age was not about privilege but choice. If it took fifty-five years and a divorce to finally feel like a free and worthy adult, she’d earned it, and that was her choice. She would giggle.
Right across from her, the Peck’s account manager pulled another of the damned reeking green things from a jar in the middle of the faux-mahogany conference table and crunched on it. Grizzled ad vet Eddie Erdmann used the old phrase gleefully and without irony: “eating your own dog food.” When his accounts were hawking corn chips, he ate corn chips. When they pushed frozen pies, he had pies.
Carolyn granted Eddie points for sincerity, even though eating pickles, like target shooting and fooling with carburetors, was a smelly vice that should be pursued in private. Her imploded marriage to Brandon had certainly taught her that.
Suspense over. The clicker clicked. “Right here, people.” Shavin pointed at the new slide, and practically shouted each syllable: “Tan … gential … opportunities!”
Around the massive table, Carolyn heard her agency colleagues tapping on their tappers, making digital the obvious. She knew that Shavin was listening, and considered abundant taps a measure of approval, rather like applause. Alas, The Norm was listening too, so Carolyn put stylus to her tapper, running with the herd so that she wouldn’t be trampled. To capture Shavin’s emphasis she scribbled three words, not two, in the notes box under her tapper’s copy of the slide.
Alas, her low-powered, pre-AI tapper assumed the non-word “gential” was a typo, and so her note appeared on the display as tan genital opportunities. Carolyn nodded, not quite suppressing her trademark giggle. An invite to a very exclusive nudist camp, then. Please RSVP…
She did the lightning bolt over “genital” with her stylus. The tapper suggested “gentle.” The space would have to go. She knew what it meant. Later, later…
“It’s not the pickles, it’s the voice. There is no mistaking that voice. Everybody in our radio market knows that voice. They will remember that voice long after they’ve forgotten the pickles. Now. What are we going to do about it?”
The next slide was, again, for dramatic effect: On the left was Ms. Vierniesel’s publicity photo, of a plain-looking fortyish woman posed in a little black dress that didn’t really fit her, in front of the sort of spring-suspended studio microphone that probably hadn’t been used since 1970. On the right was a stock photo of a pickle, with the classic red circle-and-slash No! icon photoshopped over it. Eddie crunched again. Had Carolyn not already slipped her shoes off, she would be tempted to kick him.
Shavin pointed to Ms. Vierniesel’s photo, held the clicker high in his other hand, and with his customary flourish pressed its button.
Nothing happened.
Sol Shavin looked at the traitor clicker, and then at the screen. Carolyn could hear the repeated tiny click of the poor thing’s button against the office’s ventilators. This was his big moment; she had watched their crew-necked hair-challenged ideas guy sweating doubleshot espresso into his slide show for what seemed like days.
The slide did not change. Instead, the graphics on the slide seemed to melt and drizzle like flowing liquid metal down the screen along a ragged diagonal that began between Ms. Vierniesel’s eyes and ran across the display to the center of the red slash. It was not a standard slide transition, and regardless of what it meant, it reminded Carolyn of a migraine aura.
The graphics dripped off the bottom edge of the screen until the whole slide was eggshell white. What then appeared in large letters was readable, but did not look like a slide:
What is this?
So long, firm and spicy—
It is an implement of joy!
Shavin stared at the screen, frantically pummeling the clicker’s button with his thumb.
“Hey, not bad, Shav!” Eddie took another crunch from the pickle that he held the way he doubtless held cigars. “I can just hear her say
ing that!”
Their junior copywriter Diana, barely out of diapers in Carolyn’s view, released an un-earned giggle. “I love haiku. Got any more?”
Senior graphics artist Tony frowned. “That’s not haiku. It’s not 5-7-5. And there’s no kigo.”
Tony’s understudy and nemesis Lieko tsked. “Gendai haiku don’t have to be 5-7-5. Anyway, I don’t think true haiku can be written in anything but Japanese.”
“Which you don’t know three words of.”
“The concept doesn’t map across the two cultures.”
“You’re from Cincinnati. Like you know anything…”
“Tony, can it!” Office manager Ethel handled HR, and her radar was always scanning for sexual or racial/ethnic conflict.
Nothing was happening with the presentation. An awful suspicion was stealing into Carolyn’s mind that it wasn’t entirely Shavin’s fault. Creative people had that weakness: She herself had scribbled parodies of their campaigns in the depths of caffeine-rattled nights before a deadline. Get cut-and-paste mixed up, and…
At the far end of the conference table, The Norm leaned forward and frowned. “Shavin, by my standards that’s not funny.”
Shavin, nodding like a dashboard bobble-head, was staring at the big screen, helpless. Carolyn winced. She’d had a hand in this. Only a year or so before, slide shows were bashed together on laptops that were laid on the podium and piped directly into the display. Then Brandon had mentioned that Zertek’s latest Office Automation Facility would be rolled out to a few selected local beta test sites. Marietta & Mazarakos was about the right size for the model, and Carolyn had always complained about the agency’s cranky equipment that The Norm was too cheap to replace.
“No charge” were magic words to Norm Marietta, and two weeks later, Zertek’s techs planted the dishwasher-sized cabinet in the copy room, with Plasmanet cables running up into the ceiling like the braided roots of a banyan tree.
It spoke to their desktop PCs. It spoke to their tappers. It spoke to their smartphones. It spoke to the big-screen conference room display. It had a fat pipe into Zertek’s bleeding-edge optical Plasmanet, and from there to the Internet at large. It elbowed their copier, scanner, wireless router, backup server, and fax to the back room where lime-crusted coffee makers and wobbly chairs went to die.
It worked well, for the most part, and when it didn’t, one phone call to Brandon would summon a scraggly haired young man out from Zertek to bring it to heel. But then things got nasty, and Brandon…
Shavin gave up. He raised the clicker to his mouth and touched the little metal icon of a microphone embedded in its side. “OAF. User solshav. Voice auth. Reboot.”
In response, the presentation screen went blue, and a moment later filled with inexplicable geek-words and rows of numbers and letters scrolling endlessly up from the bottom. The last line was not reassuring:
[772] Unrecoverable memory error in boot node.
The Norm’s very wide face pivoted in Carolyn’s direction like a battleship turret. “Carolyn, handle it.”
The Marietta & Mazarakos break room was broken, and had been broken since Ed Mazarakos went off pining for the fjords. Five years ago, it had been a cheery place with a refrigerator, round knotty pine table and chairs, a stove and a microwave, sink and dishwasher, crowned with knotty pine cabinets full of every variety of coffee known to humankind, plus the occasional stash of chocolate-chip cookies hidden well enough so that they didn’t vanish in a morning.
Cheery was so 2017. Carolyn edged around a new pile of bankers boxes leaning against the wall just inside the door. Half the cabinets had been removed to make way for another bank of Container Store shelving, filled with more refugee boxes from the War on Paper. The knotty pine table was now a shared desk for junior staff, rolled out of the break room and wedged into space robbed with mismatched partitions from the reception area. The Norm had sold the dishwasher on Craigslist and told everyone to use the sink. The fridge was still there, hemmed in on both sides with more shelves and boxes, crusty with stupid tchotchke magnets holding up pictures of Ethel’s ugly kids and garage sale notices posted the previous summer. Only one useful implement rose shoulders above the clutter…
“Coffee, Carolyn?”
The Blau 420 was a shrine to the Caffeine Faith and looked it: an Art Deco edifice with fluid lines like the Emerald City, in stainless steel and black plastic, four feet high and three wide, sloping down on both sides and curving forward on its custom table as though reaching out to embrace the agency’s eager worshipers. Its highest tower was a sixty-cup reservoir for meetings and indiscriminate dunkers, but it could also grind eight different kinds of whole beans on demand and issue single steaming cups to order.
“Dumb question, Eli.” You could go cheap on almost anything at an advertising agency, and The Norm went cheap on anything he could. However, for the wheels to turn, the coffee had to flow freely and without fail. If that meant a fully automated machine with an AI barista, The Norm might grumble but he wrote the check, and Ethel kept the bean hoppers full.
“Why do you say it’s a dumb question?” In the extra-large 12” display panel mounted in front of the tall sixty-cup reservoir, Eli reached back to re-tie his sharp red apron. His left eyebrow—the one with the gold ring—rose.
“Because you’re a coffee machine, and I work at Marietta & Mazarakos.” Carolyn parked her Starry Night mug—thrown and painted all by herself and fired in the kiln behind the barn—in the little arched portico from which the coffee descended. “The usual.”
Eli began fussing around in his screen, working virtual faucets and pushing imaginary buttons while the machine behind the panel came to life. “You seem stressed today.”
“I am stressed.” It had been a very long day considering that it was only four hours old, and it wouldn’t be over until the OAF was brought back from the dead.
“Why are you stressed?”
Carolyn granted that their coffee machine’s AI face was well-sculpted, with an ironic smile that someone must have worked on for a long time. The black chin scruff was de rigueur in high-end Blau units, but she could have done without the eyebrow ring. The crunching whine of the machine grinding Morning Thunder beans filled the room’s claustrophobic space. She started to edge back to lean on the counter, and felt the corner of a bankers box touch her waist. She jerked erect. “The OAF broke, and I have to call Brandon to have him send someone out. I really hate calling Brandon.”
Steam began to vent from the hidden workings above her mug. “Why do you hate calling Brandon?”
“He’s a damned anal control freak, and he probably thinks I broke it just to spite him.”
Finally the coffee began to flow. “Why would he think you broke it just to spite him?”
Carolyn put her fingers impatiently on the mug’s handle as it filled. “He thinks it’s what I do. He thinks it’s what all creative people do: make a mess. He hates messes. He hated the smell of my silkscreen solvents. He hated the little pieces of clay I’d work on at the kitchen table. He hated the mobiles I made out of old DVDs. He hated everything but his guns and his car.”
“Did he hate you?”
Carolyn edged back, startled at the pertinence of the question. Once more the bankers box touched her waist. She flashed on the last time they’d danced, at her niece’s wedding in Binghampton, she in a halter dress that her mother had said showed far too much skin on a woman her age. She remembered his strong right hand there at the bare hollow of her waist, and how she could lean back against it while they waltzed, and how it wouldn’t give even so much as an inch…
Don’t go there! “Eli, did you get an upgrade recently?” It was a goddam coffee machine. It had no more empathy than a Mixmaster.
The mug now full, the stream of coffee stopped. Eli’s wry smile lost much of its irony and became a little too broad. “Sure thing! Last night Blau pushed down the free V4.7 preview. We’re offering a good-customer bundle of the V4.7 software and the snap
-in Espresso module, for only $699.95!”
Carolyn gripped the handle and picked up the painted mug, running it slowly beneath her nose to capture a little more of its delicious whiff. Venting was useful—coffee was essential, especially with lunch still a manic hour away. “I don’t think so. Why would I want a coffee machine that really understood what I was saying? That would be creepy.” She edged past the bankers box and out the break room door, feeling behind her with one hand to make sure her blouse was still tucked in.
Brandon’s line rang for far too long. That was very odd; his snotty AI assistant always picked it up on the first ring. Unlike the agency’s coffee machine, which merely pretended to understand, Zertek’s AIs really did seem to know what was going on. Pyxis definitely understood hierarchy and power, and if she were flesh and blood instead of a hatful of bits in an ugly box, Carolyn was sure she’d be riding Brandon every other lunch hour back in his little coffin of a condo.
“Romero.”
Carolyn inhaled sharply. “Brandon! Why are you answering your phone?”
For long seconds there was no reply. Brandon, when he finally spoke, sounded distracted. “Ummm…because I work here?”
“What about your electronic hatchet girl?”
“I turned her off.”
“Yeah, I know how that feels.”
Brandon said nothing immediately. Carolyn heard muffled voices in the background. Even with his hands pressed over the phone mic, she could tell his replies were agitated, almost angry.
“Carolyn, look, I have a situation here. What do you need?” Yes, definitely angry.
Anger meeting anger rarely did any good. Maybe she should have turned down the snark, at least a little. “The OAF broke. And the whole damned agency is in there. Some bug ran in the door and locked us all out.” Grovel? It wasn’t her fault! “I need…help.”
Ten Gentle Opportunities Page 5