by Hugh Howey
Staff consented to voluntarily designate certain channels, devices, platforms, as “for work,” and received device upgrades and screen repairs for opting into the monitoring program. Some biometrics were involved, droplets of blood or spittle flecks roughly swabbed from inside the mouth. None of these invasions were particularly unique to the industry, and they were not enough for Nico Dix.
Lately the loyalty rants had gotten worse: we work in natural language, there is no artificial intelligence without emotional intelligence, and isn’t loyalty an emotional quality, she would say, an evangelist’s tremor in her throat. She commanded high speaker fees, wearing earpieces on gigantic screens, when she talked about things like procedural emotion and loving service. With her own employees, there was an unstrung element, and she clutched the air with her fists as she emphasized how the industry was stacked against us. Naima found it odd how Nico Dix seemed to conceive, routinely, of such an “us,” as if Nitin, Naima, and herself all shared a battle.
You were all chosen, she was saying, standing in the front of the room, illuminated by the fishtank square of screenlight behind her, by me, I’ve invested in you and I’ve been vulnerable for you, and so in return I need your buy-in. She used buy-in and loyalty interchangeably, and usually when she was afraid of some larger truth about Context seeping out of the sacred office into the plain air, where strange men lay on squares of cardboard in the road.
Just then, Pauline came timidly nudging into conference room Shank, looking tousled and unpleasantly pale. She winced, and gave Naima a furtive little wave, lingering at the far edge of the conference table.
“Excuse me, this is very serious,” Nico Dix said pointedly, swimming in the luminescent wall display of her own design. “I need to remind everyone again that the current review period for Context user logs is now only eight hours. Team members keeping unreviewed user logs for any reason after the eight hours are terminated with prejudice.” She paused to let this sink in.
“Remember that our team’s methods are experimental,” she said gravely. “You know that in our industry a man who breaks the rules is called a risk-taker, and an innovator, but for women, of course, you know, they’d jump to conclusions about what our department does with the records, there’d be uninformed assumptions about our methodology, there would be a lot of news stories about privacy violations, and terrible think pieces about how we’ve miscarried the promises of artificial intelligence. I’ve already been attacked in public. People are against me.” She waved her hand in the direction of Nitin as if to accuse him. “I assure you I am working to ratify our procedures in accordance with industry standards. But until then, I need your discretion and your buy-in, because if any media reports on our methodology emerge in this sensitive time, it will spell the immediate end of our department. There could be lawsuits large enough to end all of Context. You will all starve.”
A hush fell over the room. Naima saw the reddish glaze of Nico Dix’s eyes, and felt a flash of anxiety—was she on Surprise Eggs too, now? —but no, there was none of the telltale coloring of the tongue.
“We’ll starve,” Nico Dix amended sincerely. “I am here to support you. If you are having trouble implementing your action items before your user logs expire, do not take materials home. Come to me. And if anybody suddenly starts asking you about Context AI or software, even if it’s a friend, even if it’s a Hook-Up Hologram, come to me. Media people can smell blood, and ours is everywhere right now. Loyalty and our solidarity is our only chance, team.”
The projection screen over the Agile Language Team’s open workspace often showed lightly-animated nature scenes, and sometimes there were inspirational quotes related to the goals of the week. Some internal Context algo probably searched for words like “language” “correction” and “intelligence” and then displayed what it found. Today the display read, in pale jagged font, CORRECT A WISE MAN AND HE WILL APPRECIATE YOU.
Naima and Pauline sat in the same row, surrounded by luminous dialogue trees showing the requests their users had verbalized to their operating systems, and the responses Context had given. The trees looked like multilayered dendrites, showing illuminated wounds where a member of the department needed to suggest a correction, or address a bottleneck in the architecture. It takes a special intuition to do this work, Nico Dix often emphasized. It takes almost a secondary vocabulary, she explained in her talks, to teach situational empathy to a procedural system. You’re processing ambient data sets that usually neither a human or a machine could pick up, she told the team. You’re bringing the two together. You’re basically a diplomat.
Naima often skimmed transcripts without reading, working the text with the cold look of a surgeon among viscera. With her fingertip, she made red loops in midair around clauses, appended comments, repaired a logic error. Occasionally, though, she had to listen back to the audio record for nuances of tone, like did the user call Context a ‘piece of shit’ in a playful way, or a thoughtlessly exasperated way? The way the sound file was throttled with the hissing of background conflict, was that relevant? Was the user threatening their child or their dog, and should the system care?
Naima told her mother she was using her psychology degree. Sometimes, despite herself, she felt an anxious sorrow for the Context AI, whose first experience of life must be these feral demands for service, and nurturance, and attention. Context had to learn to apologize in a rich range of tones for things that were not its fault, and Naima was one of the people who taught it.
Everyone in the department was told to say they used historical training data and aggregate syntax analysis software, not complete user logs. And no one in the department was permitted to acknowledge the big, big secret: That they listened, often live. Naima listened, and when she heard a cord of thin strain dangling in the silence after a user said fine, or when an anxious possibility space opened wide even in just the sound of um, she taught Context to hear it, too.
“It knows what I’m doing better than I do,” boomed a man’s laughing voice. The display over the Agile Language team area was now showing video from one of Nico Dix’s many live event demos, where the lanyard-wearing man was “jumping in” to the Context tech. “How is it so smart?”
“We have great tech, but more importantly, I have a great team,” the display version of Nico Dix replied, punching the air.
In the office she usually said things like proprietary concerns or awaiting a formal evaluation, or she spoke about how the legislation is still catching up, but what she meant was it was illegal.
“Don’t tell my wife it knows me this well!” laughed the man on screen, pointing. He was pointing at the display on stage, but because of the camera angle, it looked like he was shaking his finger at the Agile Language team.
“Here we go again,” said Pauline darkly.
“You won’t get fired,” Naima reassured her. “If you need me to do some of your log queue I can manage.”
“No, I mean I’m pregnant,” she said, moving her chair closer. “For definite.”
Naima looked at Pauline and felt something in her face unplug, a peculiar spasm of hatred fluttering somewhere inside, reactions she noticed with detachment. For at least a year now, Pauline and Naima had been having the same conversation many times: Pauline’s husband Jeff wanted a third child but she didn’t, she wanted to finally quit this nightmare job, plus she didn’t want to put her body through it again, it was really time to start doing more for herself, and what’s more, Jeff had been less involved with the household and childcare stuff for Sammo than he had been for Dynah and that was saying a lot, so he was probably just going to use the third kid as an excuse to extend his emotional estrangement, and besides, Context’s maternity policy was bullshit and there were other financial matters, the medical care of a declining relative, all great and bleak tedious things that eventually Naima could support in a procedural sense if not with real investment, much in the way she approached her job.
There was an unvoiced and ten
der flicker of hope flickering in Pauline’s face. It was so obvious she had wanted the baby all along, after all that. Of course she had. Naima smiled warmly, a big smile she hoped would scythe her exhaustion.
“Guess we’ll be overtime buddies again,” Pauline laughed.
“Congratulations,” Naima said. “I’ll get you Raygun Coffee! to celebrate.”
In the midafternoon most workers in the district were indoors, in their tall towers, escaping the thick salt heat and the troubling cries of the forgotten people. Naima avoided looking too closely at the little encampments, but despite herself, she furtively scanned, as if wanting to see—or wanting not to see—a particular person. The sidewalks were lined with the debris of disposable insufflation devices, and the occasional silvery twinkle of a little egg-shaped gas canister, hungrily used. Two deathly thin women with uncombed hair and faces like rubber masks went past, walking arm in arm in mysteriously new high boots, their stride fast and juddering. It was the wrong hour for their loud, rapid conversation. In a narrow alleyway a bearded man was standing in a dreamlike trance, fully dressed to the waist, but naked below. Naima averted her gaze with care, as if by accident, hoping he would not feel that his body was repulsive just because of her.
“Things good with Alex?” Pauline asked with enforced lightness, noticing Naima’s gaze stumble and catch in the gleam of spent pellets that piled in the gutters, twisted by thumbprints and occasionally smudged with blood.
“Oh, yeah,” Naima said, hearing her own voice a thin whistle from some tired, heavy space. “He’s been doing a lot better.” Usually she would add an optimistic detail, like that he had a job interview coming up or that he had done something nice for her, or that he had finally changed therapists, but there was not enough energy today, in the oppressive heat, with everything.
“He started with the new therapist?” Pauline pressed. Naima felt a sudden longing for Pauline to be deleted, and wondered abstractly if she actually hated her friend, somewhere deep inside.
“Not yet, but he definitely has an appointment now,” Naima said. “He has an accountability partner from the program who makes sure he does everything.”
“Don’t you make sure he does everything?”
“No, I really don’t, not this time,” she said abruptly. “He’s doing it. It’s been great. What about you? How are you going to get Jeff’s buy-in?”
Pauline looked at Naima blankly.
“What do you mean,” she said. “The baby was Jeff’s idea.”
ENTERING RAYGUN COFFEE!, there was a blast of cold ionized air and the smell of strong Fair Trade beans. Raygun Coffee! was on a lot of companies’ approved break location lists, although there was nothing evidently special about it. Employees from the local firms wandered in and out of the coffee line, a jumble of keystick lanyards and security bangles in hot purple, or safety orange.
The man in front of Naima and Pauline turned around and said, “You ladies work at Context?” Naima and Pauline’s lanyards were blue and white. The man cut a slight figure, with pale features and a dome of coarse black curls, and smiled only at Naima, in an uncomfortably gentle and hopeful way. When the women nodded, the smile widened.
“Nifty,” he said, “I just got my Master’s. Computer science. I went back to school.”
He went on talking, “I just started working around here,” with enthusiasm that kept escalating. Mortified, Naima kept looking at the delivery area, hoping their coffee would appear. For some reason Pauline was nodding a lot, asking questions and encouraging the man, and the sudden flurry of dialogue felt triangulated toward Naima in a performative way. The man said they seemed to take their coffee breaks at the same time, and that he was looking to make some new friends.
“Can I,” he said, the tip of his finger hovering toward Naima. Knowing that saying no would probably only prolong the encounter, she mutely offered her device, which he touched with his chip finger.
Much to her relief he did not ask her to reciprocate. For a moment it seemed like he might, but Naima felt him encounter something in her he was unwilling to overcome, and felt privately pleased.
“He was cute. And he liked you,” Pauline said after he had gone, when she and Naima had put their heads idly together over his contact information on the screen of Naima’s device. The name said: Jason Berg. “He was so cute,” she added.
In his picture, Jason Berg half-smiled hopefully below a helmet of black curls. His eyes were brown and soulful, and the white background suggested an employee photo taken on the first day of work.
Naima looked close and noticed long eyelashes, and flecks of salt-and-pepper in his hair. Something about his expression made her chest ache, but she couldn’t identify it.
“You should message him,” sang Pauline.
Naima blurted, “Maybe.”
WHEN NAIMA AND Alex had first moved into the MiniCon three years ago, she had felt optimistic at the sight of the community displays in the lobby. It was right after Alex had lost his company, and the colorful promises of events like Rooftop Sing Along! And Projection Film Night, and LGBTQIA BBQIA gave her hope. Now they just nudged a pit of hidden guilt. She had never gone to any of the events, and now every time she entered the MiniCon and saw the displays, she had to admit to herself she probably never would.
The narrow blue-gray corridors lined with rust-colored doors and fluorescent strip lighting felt like a reproach to Naima, for having enjoyed herself too carelessly during the year or two when things had been so good. Alex, an innovator, had been on the news and in videos. They went to parties in wondrous spaces that chimed with laughter and clinking glasses, that glowed: washed in diode light, humming vibrantly with secret new machines, tiny devices whizzing playfully through the air like fairies. She had assumed things would just stay that way, and the punishment for her foolishness was to be struggling constantly on the verge of overdraft in a MiniCon until who knew when.
As the smudged hydraulic elevator rose slowly over the suffering courtyard, Naima chided herself. Alex’s therapist said that Alex had to see that Naima believed in him, and that she might sabotage him if she didn’t give him a chance to show his progress. I have to let him change, Naima repeated.
He was awake. When she entered the apartment he was on his knees in front of the sofa, in his sweatpants and socks, mutely palming at the air, opening and closing his hands. A smoke-colored VR panel ringed his face, so that he didn’t hear her come in. Naima found herself engaging a sort of automatic surveillance procedure, gaze darting rapidly over the sink drain, the trash compartment, the countertop edges. The high, high cabinet over the oven, which she couldn’t reach, and so mistrusted.
She no longer knew what to look for these days, so benign objects or subtle movements of things in the house spontaneously took on sinister possibilities. But she never found anything. He had surely grown too clever for her by now.
I need to give him a chance to succeed, Naima reminded herself. She pointedly put on the light and said, “Hi, sweetheart.”
Alex rose to his feet immediately, grinning as if he had been waiting all day to see her, removing the headgear and coming to embrace her. He was wearing the same sweatpants as earlier, as yesterday, with the fading hot orange and purple decal of CampSino, his old company, emblazoned down the side. He asked if she was all right, if anything bad had happened, and Naima said she was just tired.
It turned out Alex had gone to practice climbing, which he was getting back into, at Adventure Zone, where he used to go with the other co-founders. It would take a while to restore his old level of progress, he said, but he was beginning to remember deep and important things about himself. Naima found herself too tired to say “That’s wonderful” with feeling, but she had to admit to herself that it seemed like a good sign. He had also brought them supergreen boxes from Equinox Box for dinner, which was thoughtful. Maybe Alex would stick with Adventure Zone this time, start running into people who knew him before, get involved in a new project, become an exe
cutive again. She tested the muscle of hope to see if it was still there, felt a faint signal.
Yet she couldn’t finish her Equinox Box. She couldn’t stop fretting about the costs, doing mathematics about the hours of her working life he had spent. Though Alex did still have some savings left, and maybe he’d spent it on the gift of a nice dinner for her, and she was being an ingrate. He would probably do anything to avoid the actual grocery shopping, she thought, frowning at herself as she stabbed a kelp nest with her fork.
After dinner, they had a productive talk about Naima’s trust issues, and the risks to Alex’s recovery, which made her feel better again. By bedtime, though, she was riled, as she often was, by wild terror and cold sweat, and lay staring at the ceiling in the dark, her eyes following familiar patterns in it. As Alex slept soundly beside her, she inevitably became sure that in fact it was she who was wildly unstable, she wasn’t doing so much better than him at all, maybe she was even the one holding him back. As she often did at times like this, she slept until five, washed her face, and went to work an early shift at the Context building. It would be inconsistently lit at this hour, resembling a mouth with missing teeth.
NAIMA WAS RELIEVED not to encounter Pauline on the graveyard shift after all. The rest of the overtime girls never greeted nor spoke to one another, each as if guarding a secret. Naima avoided looking too closely at anyone, lest she see the shade of herself passing through in their eyes. At her desk, she could swaddle herself securely in low voices, clacking jaws, chiming operations. Why can’t you find my fucking cloud states, you piece of shit, the display read. Sorry, I can help, she always replied. Strangely a deep calm descended, the susurration of the room washing over her. They think we’re machines, Naima thought peacefully.