by Cat Rambo
"It paid for college," he said. "I didn't really have the grades for a scholarship. Real jobs pay better, though, particularly since they now outsource a lot of gold grinding to Thailand and China."
Scott nodded, looking interested in a way that Lyle knew was forced. The intern didn't bother to conceal her boredom. Beads clicking together as she moved, she went to take another sliver of cake. Scott and Lyle stood staring after her.
"She'll last, what, two weeks?" Scott said. "Someone will want coffee and she'll get huffy and leave."
"If that long."
"How are you liking working from home?"
When the memo had come down from the home office—to decrease costs, remote logins, etc.—Scott had been one of the first proclaiming the glories of the new policy, but every time Lyle made his way into the office to check-in or for functions like this, he found Scott there.
"It's all right," he said. "But a little isolated. How about you?"
"Sometimes it just seems like I can get a lot more done here, you know what I mean?"
Lyle shrugged. "Not really." Most of his work consisted of surfing the trade nets to find places looking for batches of data of the kind he could deliver. Sometimes he looked for new products and then pitched his dataherd to their marketers, pointing out the markets they reflected and the insights they provided, depending on how he grouped them. A data herder needed agility of mind, the ability to see opportunities and seize them quickly.
The coffee shop down the street was wider than his apartment, so he usually took his datapad down there. If he got there early, he could find a spot near the window, overlooking Lake Washington. A latte and a croissant's worth of lunch bought him at least an hour uninterrupted before the servers started cleaning his space too obviously, edging him out. He liked to watch the sailboats on the water, and the little red water scooters, shaped like dragons, that had been rare last year and this year were everywhere.
His fingers danced over the keys as he performed his yearly evaluation of the demographics of his dataherd. As expected, they'd scattered even more geographically, and a few more had married than had divorced. Overall, wages were down. Outside the sky was pinkish and cloudy as dying water, reflected in the metallic sides of the hot dog vendor's cart, steaming as he pushed it along.
Lyle frowned as numbers flowed across his pad in response to his query. The dataherd was trending towards a particularly unprofitable sector—he could no longer mine them for singles data. That had been coming for a while. He'd foreseen it five years ago, but didn't like it nonetheless. He drank the rest of his latte in quick gulps, not tasting it, watching the vendor negotiate with a dragon boat, the rider struggling to pass her credit card across the vendor's beam to be read before it signaled with a green light and the hot dog was passed down. She wore a white face mask, as did the vendor and the others on the street. A bad day for breathing, the morning news had said.
Waving cheerfully, rider and boat made their way back into deeper water, circling the tour boat cruising along the waterfront. Lyle gathered up his pad and put his own mask on to go home.
"The trick is figuring out a way to pitch them," he said to the Buddha. He'd left earlier than he'd meant to, rehearsing this conversation in his mind. It startled him to realize that he had been looking forward to talking to an inanimate object.
"Why is it a trick?"
"Because it's creating something where it didn't exist before. The demographic of people who eat chocolate in the bathtub, or whatever else you can claim them to be representative of, that someone can aim a product at. It's a knack."
"How do you feel about that?"
"I have to go into the office," he said. "It's a bad sign when I'm having conversations with a toy."
The plaza office was much the same as always. Downtown Seattle always struck him as waiting to become the stage setting for a post-apocalyptic film, its workers and visitors white and blue-masked zombies, a few with brighter faces yet, tie-dyed or stamped with bright yellow ducks and green frogs.
Scott poked his head into the cubicle. "Hey buddy, nice to see you for a change."
"We're supposed to be working from home," Lyle said.
"Well, sure," Scott said. "Sitting around doing datasorts in your bathrobe, who wouldn't like that? But I don't think it's a cost-cutting measure. They're seeing what deadwood they can drop." He grinned mirthlessly. "I've been coming in doing alternative training," he said. "It's good to be agile, employment wise. My cousin worked for a mall corp for forty years, then they cut her loose. Now she's a virtual clerk."
"What world?"
"Second Life, tends a music store. Sits there at the computer all day waiting to give shoppers the human touch."
"Ah yeah. Two of my herd did that a couple of weeks ago," he said. "And one's a virtual taxi-driver. Robots control the driving, she just gives clients human interaction and thanks them when the card is billed."
"Sign of downward social mobility!" Scott said, and laughed. "I'm sure you have other opportunities by the binload."
"I'm thinking about recruiting some new people into the herd to up their marketability," he said.
"Almost too late for this graduation."
"Graduation?"
"They do it by year now. For the cost of a few trinkets, you can sign up a thousand or so college kids. They'll fill out any amount of forms for a coffee chip or an mp3 download. Go look on the internal website, there's a list of promotional items you can request."
"That intern quit yet?"
"Last week. Did I call it or what? Mahalia asked her to pick up soda for the office weekender, and she posted a five screen goodbye e-mail to the rest of us, citing a lack of respect for her as a person. You should have gotten it."
"There's so much e-mail that I delete anything that goes to the office at large."
"That may not be the best strategy."
"It's worked well for eight years so far," Lyle said and went home.
"I don't really feel connected to anyone," he said to the Buddha. He'd moved it to the bookshelf so it could see more of the room. He sat on the couch with his back turned to the television, arguing with the Buddha. Behind him, the screen showed troops marching past an indiscriminate jungle backdrop.
"How does that make you feel?"
"Disconnected," he said, then laughed. "Yeah, whatever." He unrolled his datapad and traced his herd's purchases for the evening, managing to assemble a subset into an infochunk on movie-going trends. He shot it off to the studio markets and waited for usage fees.
Checking prices, he noticed a high profile survey on medicinal teas. It was easy to request coupons for free samples to be sent to his dataherd. He could check the results and peddle the infochunk to the company in a week or so.
"I will tell you a koan," the Buddha said. "The monk Bazan was walking through the marketplace one day, and heard a customer say to the butcher, 'Give me your best piece of meat.' The butcher replied, 'Everything in my shop is the best. There is no piece of meat that is not the best.'"
He stared at it, nonplussed. What sort of reply did it expect?
"For another Zen koan, say 'Koan, please.'"
"The thing," he said to the Buddha, picking up the conversation again. "The thing is this. What right do I have to capitalize on the members of my dataherd?"
"Do you take responsibility for that?" the Buddha asked.
"Their clickprints are changing," he said.
"What are their clickprints?"
"Their web usage patterns, their search keywords, their purchases, how they look at sites. And I make it change—two weeks from now, some of them will have shifted to tea drinkers. Because of me. I manipulate their lives so I can harvest their data."
"How does that make you feel?"
"They're growing away from me," he said. "Ten of them died last month in the war. Now I'm down to 4527. Soon I won't even have a sellable herd."
"Would you like another koan?"
"Should I just give t
hem their freedom, cut them loose?" he said. "Someone else can collect their data. Or reassemble them. I don't know what I'd do otherwise, though. I can stay free in a hostel, maybe, but food isn't free."
"You seem to use the word 'freedom' a lot. Do you find that word significant?"
"It's what I want to do," he said. "You're right. I use it because I'm thinking about it. It's the answer, otherwise I wouldn't be fixed on it like that."
His fingers danced over the keys as he released their contracts. Maybe someone else would pick them up, but he hoped not. They should lead lives undirected by advertising, make their own choices. Like the choice he had just made.
"I don't want to get that list of high schools after all," he said to Scott.
"It doesn't matter," Scott said. "Didn't you get the memo? They're going to be making dataherds assignable at the corporate level. Everyone belongs to a corp anyhow. You won't be able to recruit anymore. Your old herd just skyrocketed in price, buddy. You can form your own agency."
He stared at Scott. "What? I cut them all loose last night. Erased all the data from my infocloud."
Scott stared back. "You really did it, buddy? Jesus, why?"
"The Buddha told me to do it."
"That doll we bought you at the office party? You are shitting me, right?"
He stared at Scott, stricken, and finally Scott patted his shoulder. "There's a lot of careers out there," he said, avoiding Lyle's eyes. "Lots of possibilities. My mom makes a decent living selling antique food."
"Antique food?"
"Things like Space Bars and Twinkies. There's quite a market in them. She buys and sells them. You should see her apartment. Let's go talk to her."
But Scott's mother, Mrs. Laurelman, wasn't much consolation.
"It's hard work, what I do," she said. "I have agents that monitor some online auctions for me, but there's also a lot of leg work. I wouldn't recommend getting into anything like it."
"I'd thought he could sell music, he likes music," Scott said.
"What sort of music?" She looked at Lyle. He sat next to an enormous stack of pink pastry boxes.
"Oh, all sorts," he said. "I doubt that's what I'd get into, anyhow."
"If you can find a hot fad, you can make a quick buck," she said. "I watch to see if any nostalgic foods are mentioned on videocasts, and if so, I buy up any surplus quickly."
He looked at the package next to his foot. It showed two zebras dancing with each other, their stripes rose and sky blue. The lettering was Arabic.
"What are these?"
"Some sesame treat that got mentioned on a soap opera," she said. "Makes enough to buy groceries for another week."
"Don't you have a corporation plan?"
Her face purpled. "Get out!"
Steve hustled him out, apologetic. "She has a medical condition that kept her from getting health care, that's why she does the buying and selling. She's on base minimum, gets a little help with groceries, but mainly she relies on not going for meds."
Lyle wondered what her demographic was, whose herd she belonged to. The apartment had been too hot, and he felt flushed and sweaty. His garment clung moistly to his skin.
Steve punched his shoulder. "Go home and take a load off," he said.
"Yeah. Yeah." He swung aboard the bus at the corner and went to the monomall before home.
"Good evening," he said to the Buddha as he entered the apartment. He hung up his jacket with careful, deliberate motions, looking at the way the fabric gleamed in the florescent lights. His head still buzzed with an angry whirl of thoughts, words colliding unintelligibly.
"How are you?" the Buddha asked.
He took a breath. "I'm fine, how are you?"
"What did you do today?"
"Why would you care?" he said.
"Are you aware that you are answering questions with questions?"
"It's a game," he said. "We used to play it in Improv Club, back in high school. Oh, wait. You don't have a high school to remember. Mine was a misery. Like my life."
"Why do you think your life is miserable?"
"Why wouldn't I? Oh, there I am going with the questions again, aren't I?"
It was silent.
"Have I hit a new trigger?" he said. "Are you not talking in order to see what I will say to you?"
"What do you want to say to me?" it asked.
He went over and picked it up to stare into the bland green features.
"You betrayed me," he said. "Do you understand what that means?"
"Why do you think you were betrayed?"
He set it down as carefully as a baby.
"You could have told me, and you didn't," he said.
"This unit is not intended to be a fortune-telling device."
"Aren't you? Aren't you supposed to be the random voice of the Universe, addressing me through the luck of the draw and the forces of serendipity?"
"Would you like to hear a koan?"
"No. No koans. I'm done with all that. I don't have anything left. I might as well commit suicide," he said.
It spoke in a different voice. "Alert. Spoken keywords have triggered emergency routines in this unit. If you do not wish to have medical attention summoned, count to ten and backward within one minute."
"Fuck you," he said.
"If you do not wish to have medical attention summoned, count to ten and backward within thirty seconds."
Medical attention would cost an arm and a leg. At the last possible second, he spat out, "One-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine-ten-nine-eight-seven-six-five-four-three-two-one."
"Transmission aborted," the Buddha said.
He stared at it.
"I'm going out to interact with some real people," he said. And then, "Christ, why am I telling you that?"
Steve called while he was coming out of the movie, which had been something about cavemen and mammoths, frothy with laughter, something he hadn't understood at all. He paused to take the call, shielding his ear while the other moviegoers eddied past him.
"It's not as though they depicted Neanderthals correctly," he heard one boy say to another. In his head, Steve's voice said. "Lyle, you there?"
"I'm here."
"Listen, there was this study, you know, one of those market studies, for a tea, some sort of tea that was supposed to make you immune to colds, do you know the one I mean?"
"Yeah, I know the one. I signed my herd up for it, one of the last things I did with them."
Silence from Steve.
"You know what I'd really like to see, I'd like to see magicians," another movie-goer said. Their friend nodded, passing Lyle, and said "Yeah, and a really good bass line."
Steve said, "Well, that's unfortunate."
"Why, what's happened?"
"Turns out they'd modified the recipe, did some sort of cuts with the vitamins, and about a quarter of the people who've drunk it have total liver shutdown. You didn't drink any of it, did you?"
"No," he said.
"Well, there's a plus. But I got to warn you, buddy, they're going to be coming after you with lawyers and maybe even jail-time. It's looking pretty bad. And when the cops see you cut your herd loose, they're going to think there was some reason. Like you knew ahead of time."
He was numb. He couldn't hear anything from the people moving around him. It was all just a high-pitched whine in his head.
"Can I come talk to you?" he asked desperately.
Steve's voice came from far away, hesitant. "Well, buddy, you see. It's just that I don't want them to think—bad timing right now, I think. Maybe in a few days?"
He fumbled with the plastic bag in his pocket, taking out a pill bottle. Thumbing off the lid, he drank the tiny pills, each as big as a bird's eye, down as though they were liquid.
"Go ahead," he said, swallowing. "It'll be too long before they get here for you to save me. I should have known better than trust my life to you. I should have known that an object couldn't be my friend."
"If you
do not wish to have medical attention summoned, count to ten and backward within thirty seconds."
They looked at each other in silence.
"If you do not wish to have medical attention summoned, count to ten and backward within ten seconds. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One."
The Buddha gave out a shrill squeal, before saying "Information transmitted."
Lyle sat down, staring at his feet, looking puzzled. He made as though to speak, then shook his head twice and slumped back into the couch. His legs shot forward in a flurry of spasms, kicking the table before he bucked the sofa over backwards. The Buddha shuddered sideways.
The paramedics came through the doorway thirteen minutes later. Lyle lay on the floor, staring upward, body tangled in the constraints of the tiny space between sofa and table. Across the room lay the Buddha, staring across the carpet, its face turned to him, no meaning written there.
Afternotes
I'm fascinated by what we project onto things around us, by how we can imagine that objects are somehow animate, and this story is about that. You may remember ELIZA, a computer program that was a "virtual psychiatrist" intended to simulate talking to an actual person, created by Joe Weizenbaum. Surprisingly, many people who talked with Eliza felt a strong emotional connection, to the point where Weizenbaum felt compelled to write about the social dangers of AI, saying that it was "obscene" to use it in clinical sitations.
Lyle is lonely and desperate for connection. Like any of us, when it's not forthcoming, he supplies it himself, and the story tries to talk about why that might become problematic.
The story itself originally appeared in 2020 Visions, edited by Rick Novy, which is why there's a joke about Neanderthals in there as a tribute to Rick's novel Neanderthal Swan Song. My favorite part is the antique food dealer, truth be told, but some of Lyle's office existence may have been drawn from my experiences with corporate life at Microsoft.
MS. LIBERTY GETS A HAIRCUT
The superheroes sit in a back booth at Barnaby's Ye Olde Tavern and Pizza. It's not the usual sort of superhero hangout and they'll probably never eat here again. They've had four autograph requests: two from customers, one from their waitress, and one from the manager, who also insisted on taking their picture with his cell phone.
