In Constant Contact

by Tom Lichtenberg

All-Hands, from the escorting services, for we are in a way like that. Escort, only not present. Not visible. Never so."

  "Never so?" Fred heaped up some green spinach-like stuff on his rice and moved on. He was getting ever closer to his beloved Biryani. Puku, on the other hand, was a strict vegetarian and also never ate much, even at the fanciest buffet.

  "No, never," Puku said. "The friend is never supposed to be visible. Even his or her name should not be the real."

  "They didn't tell us that," Fred clucked. He wondered if Kandhi knew. It wasn't too late, of course. They'd only done one side of the orientation so far.

  "Voice to be disguised, image never shown. This way the friend could be multiple, any of several at any given time, so you see? Then if one of them quits or is fired, it doesn't have impact on the service."

  "Naturally," Fred said. They had filled up their plates and taken their seats. Fred was stuffing his face, hoping to hear more. Puku, for his part, liked to talk. He wasn't supposed to be telling these things, especially not to a tester. This was business, not implementation.

  "It's all on the clicks," Puku said. "It's a charge for the contact, so naturally ..."

  "You want them clicking all the time."

  "People need to be needed. When they're needed, they're happy. It's self-reinforcing. The more they get, the more they want. Our service, to be successful, must be successful. You see what I mean?"

  "Feedback loop," Fred nodded. "Basic addiction."

  "Ideally they will be in the constant contact," Puku added cheerfully, stopping now to pull of some nan bread.

  "It's a la carte?" Fred inquired. "No all-you-can-eat?"

  "Oh, the all-you-can-eat is of course there as option," Puku intoned, "but at quite the big price if you know what I mean."

  "There's bound to be risks," Fred mused. "What about liability?"

  "Liability? None!" Puku laughed. "You read the small print. Not responsible for this that or any other thing. At your own risk, all the way. We will be the very good friend. The very best friend that money can buy. You are having good testing so far?"

  "Aha," Fred said to himself. "Puku wants to pick my brains as much as I wanted to pick his."

  "We're just getting started," Fred admitted. "We've screened a few prospects for both sides. Initial beta testing you know."

  "Multiple sites? Co-location? Long distance? Multi-lingual? Shared roles? Mutable formats? Gender spread and all that?"

  "Just getting started," Fred repeated, wondering exactly Puku meant with those terms. Coming from marketing, there were bound to be demands that simply could not be fulfilled. They'd want to sample every possible variation and be presented with charts matching exactly their wildest wet dreams. Happy campers all around and everything in green. No red.

  "Well, anything you need," Puku offered. "In terms of direction, you know. Chris has the ideas. He wants certain results and you know what that means."

  "He'll get them," Fred promised, and he knew it was so. Chris always got whatever he wanted. It just seemed to work out that way.

  - - - - - - - - -

  Kandhi didn't think it was going to be easy this time. The matrix of things that could possibly go wrong was simply staggering. The most likely outcome, she guessed, was null, that it would not even work, at all. She had a hard time imagining a positive outcome. What would that even look like? A happy, satisfied customer would be one who gave the service high ratings, who used it a lot, who became dependent on it, needed it, couldn't live without it, and could afford it. She herself wouldn't care to be that individual. Already she had mostly forsaken the ubiquitous socialnet, where everyone was connected to everyone else they barely even knew and kept up with each other's most trivial doings and thinkings. This phenomena had already cheapened the idea of friendship, reduced it to a mere background noise of everyday life. She knew all about her friends' childrens' artwork, the movies they had seen, the places they had been. Just last night her brother Alphonse had dined at The Happy Carnivore and enjoyed a roast pork platter with greens. It was his third time there in three months. He practically owned the place in some apps.

  Information like this was already pouring into every seam of her existence, and she had turned the flow down to a trickle by paying less and less attention. Even that was becoming a challenge, thanks to the fact that lately her screen had acquired a new form of intelligence, due to some unwelcome hidden features committed to the in-house source repository by a senior developer by the name of Lark Fishhead, a feature which caused the fonts to zoom in on their own accord, demanding notice. For example, if she did not visit the Syomatix homepage for more than two days, it would go all full-screen in bold-italic-red-twenty-four-point in a sort of automated scold. There was no way to turn off this behavior. Fishhead had baked it into all of the company's internal systems. At least he hadn't completed the audio portion as yet. She could imagine hearing the program screeching at her to "wake up and smell the coffee," any day now. Marketing had already warned her that this would be coming.

  Her intuition was clear on the Friendular thing, clear and totally negative. It didn't help that she had let Fred and Wen pick the beta combinations. It just smelled wrong to Kandhi, but in her last official review she had been chastised for not delegating enough, so she felt she had no choice. Closing up shop for the day, she reviewed in her mind the interviews the team had just finished conducting. First, she reflected on the so-called friends. The Finnish track coach seemed acceptable. He was clearly intelligent and was used to managing relationships. He had a fine track record, so to speak, as an Olympic-caliber long distance runner, and later as a personal trainer to more of the same, including two gold medalists, a Kenyan and a Swede. His physical ailments were numerous, thanks to his torturous career, so he was mainly confined to his chairs, but that was no impediment for this job. He was available at any hour, exuded a sense of calm and confidence, and had completed the functional test suite promptly and correctly. No politics had seeped into his responses, and no religion either. Personal opinions had been restricted appropriately to trivial and superficial matters. He appeared to be generally compatible across the board, able to get along with quite a wide range of personalities.

  The barber had also exhibited a similar range, and had a certain bonus quality of being able to insert both religion and politics without any partiality or condescension. The man was clearly accustomed to chameleon-like adaptability, a key trait Kandhi valued highly and made sure was well represented in the training. On the other hand, the barber's results displayed a certain coldness; he did not express any genuine warmth. There was a frankness about his responses, a bluntness that Kandhi wasn't certain would translate very well. Velicia's results were quite different, also somewhat crude, but warmer. She showed a genuine interest in the subject, a tendency toward empathy that was missing from Stanley. Velicia also was the narrowest of the three, and by narrow Kandhi meant her range of expression and breadth of experience. She seemed the most bound by the conventions of her gender, age and culture. The other two, in other words, were more worldly than she. Still, they all had potential, and Kandhi had to admit that Fred had selected the best of the applicants for that role.

  As for the other role, she wasn't at all certain that Fred and Wen had picked anyone suitable. None of the three appealed to her personally, but maybe that was only her problem. She would not want to be a friend to any one of them, and was finding it difficult to imagine that anybody would. Not that there was anything obviously wrong with them, or maybe her judgment was tainted by the fact that they had even applied for this role, to be the kind of person who would even think of doing such a thing, to be begging, in her mind, for someone to like them, for someone to be their friend. "Get a real friend," Kandhi had wanted to blurt out during that afternoon session. Get a real life while you're at it. Her distaste for the entire project had threatened to come shining through at any moment, so she had tried to leave the talking to Fred and Wen. Another mistake.
/>   Fred had been grouchy, as usual, and Wen never liked to talk very much. Squeezing one sentence out of her was about the most you could hope for at any given time, which left Kandhi holding the bag, trying to get a sense of these people and how they might work out. In Kandhi's opinion there was something wrong with every single one of them, something she couldn't quite put a finger on, but she just had a sense. The best of the lot, she judged at first, was the woman, Hannah Lincum. Mild and unassuming, Hannah was merely lonely, a widower who performed a lot of volunteer work at the hospital and otherwise did not have a lot going on in her life. It seemed she went there every day, spending hour upon hour visiting terminally ill people of all ages, from children with cancer to ancients with Alzheimer's. If prompted, Hannah would list every one of "her" patients (as she called them), listing all of their ailments and medical histories, as she seemed to have it all memorized. And she didn't limit herself to only one hospital, but visited several, even driving several hours if there were enough patients in need of companionship. In her earlier life, Hannah had been accustomed to having a husband to talk to all the time, but since his passing, her sense of intimate connection with the world had been draining steadily and she