by Xavier Mayne
He frowned. He wasn’t at all sure that giving Q*pid this kind of access was a good idea. With those logins, a hacker could pretty seriously break his life.
We know you’re concerned with privacy. We’re absolutely obsessed with it. In five years of operation, Q*pid has never suffered a security breach or loss of customer data. And only the AI engine will have access to your social media and web usage information—no human will be able to access it, and our strong encryption protects your data end-to-end. We use VPN tunneling to ensure that even your internet service provider cannot intercept your data.
Fox reached his desk, at which he sat without taking his eyes off his phone. He considered the implications of allowing the kind of invasive data-gathering that this new AI thing would require. On the one hand, it would be foolish to allow anyone that kind of access. On the other, he liked the idea of being an early adopter of AI dating services. Plus, he could use some additional analytics behind his spreadsheet-centered approach to relationships. He hadn’t had a score above eighty-three in weeks.
We invite you to be among the first—and the very few—of our customers to use our AI service. Though final pricing has yet to be determined, we’re giving you a chance to try it for free. Of course, you may stop using the service at any point, and we’ll delete your data completely. You’re in control.
He took a deep breath and tapped the Accept button.
SUPERCHARGE YOUR love life with our new supercomputer.
Well, that wasn’t what Drew was expecting to see when he felt the heartbeat vibration of his phone. Normally these updates were notifications that his profile had been viewed by the next crazy woman in line. He figured he’d be staring at a profile pic and wondering what piece of furniture he’d next be dropping piece by piece into his garbage can. He read the message again, then tapped through to find out what it meant.
We get it, Drew. You’ve had twenty-three first dates in the last three months, and not one of them has resulted in the kind of relationship you’ve always dreamed of.
“Huh.” He hadn’t expected such blunt talk from his dating app. Though every word was true.
We want to help. Sign on for our new service—free of charge during this trial period—and we guarantee you’ll get matches that are better than you’ve ever imagined.
Maybe his furniture was going to be safe after all.
How do we do it? We use the power of a supercomputer to get to know you through your online activity—the real you—and we crunch the numbers to match you with women who are truly compatible. Your next first date may be your last, Drew. Sign up today.
Am I really that pathetic? He looked around his apartment, at its rather dismal offering of second- and third-hand furniture, the single bowl on the counter in which the dregs of his ramen were already hardening into concrete. Yes, yes I am.
Through the ceiling he heard Mrs. Schwartzmann shuffling through her empty apartment. The bleakest possible vision of his lonely future, literally hanging over his head.
“What the hell?” he said to the place where his coffee table used to be. “It’s not like it can get any worse.” He stared at the screen, his thumb over the button. Never the decisive type, he knew himself to be all the less so when facing decisions that really mattered. He chewed the inside of his lip.
He jumped when his phone buzzed to let him know he needed to leave now if he was going to get to his seminar on time.
Following a quick tap on the Accept button, he slipped the phone into his pocket, then grabbed his book bag and headed out of the apartment.
THREE HOURS later the last of the launch team drained out of the war room.
“Excellent job, everyone,” Alexis the PR director chirped. “Seven exec interviews, and we’re getting pickup everywhere from NBC News to Bustle.”
“And Reddit,” added one of the engineers.
Alexis laughed. “And Reddit. Who would have thought that an AI-enhanced dating service would go over big at nerd central? You could knock me over with a feather.” Still chuckling, she turned to Veera. “You have made some company history. Congrats.”
Blood warmed Veera’s cheeks. “Thanks,” she said quietly. She’d never been good with compliments, despite knowing that if she’d ever deserved one this was the time. “It was great to see you work.”
Alexis smiled. “You guys do the hard stuff. We just polish it up.” She beamed her best nightly-news smile and strode from the room on her impossibly high heels.
That left only Ross in the room.
“Is there anything you need, Ross?” Veera asked him, trying to keep her voice from sounding blatantly saccharine.
Ross was studying his phone. “Nope. Just checking to see whether the first violation of privacy suits have been filed yet.” He looked up at the clock. “I guess you’re in the clear. For today.” He got to his feet.
“Thanks for your support.” She tried to model the smile Alexis wielded so effortlessly.
“I’ll grant you, you stuck with this and got it done. You launched it. Now you’ve got a sausage party on your hands. Good luck with that.” He grabbed up his laptop and stalked out of the room, chuckling in a way that would be the envy of any Disney-issue villain.
The worst part was that he was right.
Of the twenty thousand invitations they’d sent, a little over seven thousand customers had signed up. Fifty-five percent of them were seeking women, but she’d expected the balance to be tipped a little that way. She had resisted Ross’s insistence that an analytical approach to dating would be more attractive to those seeking women rather than men, but it turned out that he was onto something, even if the imbalance was nowhere near the two-to-one extreme he had predicted. Not a “sausage party” by any measure, but she would have preferred to prove Ross completely wrong rather than partly right.
Over the next hour, they would send a second set of invitations to another several thousand users seeking matches with men—female customers, primarily—to bring things even. Within a couple of hours they would reach parity, if their models were correct.
Left alone in the conference room, Veera paced in a small circle as the stillness closed in around her. She didn’t mind the silence—in fact, after the tumult of the war room at capacity, she welcomed it—but it did serve to remind her of how lonely this whole experience had been. For months she had slogged through coding the unique personality that would serve Archer well as he attempted, algorithmically, to bring about human happiness. The project was secret, so few other software engineers would be able to understand the intricacies of what she was attempting. Aside from Padma, there was no one else for Veera to talk to.
Well, there was one other.
Veera closed the door of the war room. She walked back to the conference table and lowered herself slowly into the chair closest to the telephone. After a deep breath and a long exhalation, she reached out and dialed. A single click, and then a voice filled the room.
“Hello. This is Archer.”
“RESUME VOICE interface.”
“Voice interface ready.”
“Archer, it’s Veera.”
“I recognize your voice, Veera,” Archer replied.
Veera had configured Archer’s voice interface to sound conversational, but in fact during their polite exchange her voice had been subjected to more than a dozen authentication tests. Because of the company’s obsession with security, Archer would respond only to her or, as a fallback measure, her manager, Edwin.
“How are you doing, Archer?”
Again, this sounded like small talk, but Veera was actually prompting the AI engine to initiate a battery of self-checks, ensuring that all of its processes were performing within established ranges. It took a fraction of a second.
“I am well, Veera. How are you?”
“I’m excited that we have pushed your code to production.”
“As am I,” Archer replied.
“How many profiles have you opened?”
�
�I have completed intake surveys of 1,217 profiles and have tagged an average of seventy-three potential contact nodes for each. I expect to be able to begin running match simulations within seven hours.”
She nodded. This was very good progress indeed. “How long before you’ll have the first potential matches ready?”
“Match potential is a function of profile availability.”
“It is.”
“If profile numbers follow the curve extrapolation, within twelve hours there will be in excess of 8,000 profiles that have completed intake.”
“And how many of those will be available for match?”
“Profile availability is a function of parametric compliance.”
“Right again.”
“Thank you,” Archer said. Veera smiled at the effect of the politeness extensions she had installed. They had been created by AI researchers at a Canadian university.
“Please, continue,” Veera prompted.
“All profiles comply with Parameter One.”
“Right.” Parameter One indicated whether the individual customer was active in the system—essentially, whether they were current on their membership fee and logging in to the system regularly. As they would only have invited active members to participate, everyone who had opted in would necessarily pass Parameter One.
“And all profiles comply with Parameter Two.”
“Yes, they do.” Parameter Two reflected whether customers were currently looking for matches. Q*pid’s members regularly cycled in and out of availability for matches, depending on how their current relationship was progressing. And, as with Parameter One, only those who were interested in matches would be invited to participate, so unless they had met someone special in the three hours since the launch of the program, they would also be qualified under Parameter Two.
“Parameter Three will therefore be the limiting function.”
“Indeed it will be.” Parameter Three contained the customer’s specific gender for relationship discovery. Unlike the first two parameters, which were binary on-off switches, this one never changed. It limited the pool of potential matches for each customer to roughly half of Q*pid’s active membership. Though the numbers were, at present, skewed toward those who sought women, after the additional invitations went out they would get as close to a 50/50 balance as possible.
“Match potential is therefore estimated to reach its maximum value at 22:30 UTC tomorrow. At that time it is likely that twelve percent of profiles will have at least three matches of eighty-five percent or higher.”
Veera frowned. Archer’s numbers seemed quite low. “What’s your confidence on that estimate?”
“Confidence is eighteen percent.”
Veera laughed. “So this is your way of telling me you have no idea what’s going to happen because no one’s ever tried this method of relationship discovery.”
“You are correct, Veera. I’m sorry if that was unclear.”
“No, it was my fault for pushing you to make an estimate before you’re ready.” She stood and leaned over the table toward the phone. “Please carry on with your work, Archer. We’ll talk again tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow is Saturday, Veera. Q*pid’s offices will be closed.”
“Not this one. Good night, Archer.”
“Good night, Veera.”
“Suspend voice interface.” Her finger hovered over the Disconnect Call button.
“Voice interface suspended.”
She clicked the phone off and sat, for a little while longer, in the silent stillness of the war room.
FOX PLACED his phone on his bedside table while he changed out of his suit. When he picked it up to slip it into the pocket of his jeans, however, he regarded it a little warily. For a moment he felt oppressed by the idea that it was spying on him.
He grabbed a beer from the fridge, then sat at his kitchen table and opened his laptop. The Q*pid app popped up an updated notification, and he clicked Okay before he’d really thought it through. He understood that the information gathered from his social media profiles would be critical to getting better matches than he had been. It was the tracking of his activity online that made him a bit anxious.
Like most men he knew, Fox used his laptop for three things: email, buying things he couldn’t be bothered to go to the store for, and porn. And now his laptop would be watching him as he did all of those things. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that.
He suspected the time he spent on the computer writing a happy birthday email to his grandmother would probably raise his score, while his shopping preferences might be a wash—his tech purchases far outnumbered the thoughtful gifts he’d bought. But still, there was likely nothing there that would sink his profile to the bottom.
He sat for a long moment, staring at his laptop screen.
“So, yeah,” he said to the empty kitchen. “No porn, then.”
In truth, he’d never known a woman who professed anything more positive than a grudging acceptance of the existence of pornography. While he couldn’t imagine that a dating site would be at all interested in the particular type of porn he preferred, the very fact that he looked at it at all would very likely drop his chances of finding a decent woman.
As if to counteract the effect of even having thought the word “porn,” he pulled out his phone and flicked through Facebook, tapping Like on every photo of something cute—puppies, babies, whatever. A few minutes of that should strengthen the appeal of his profile, he thought. He pumped his fist in the air when he came across a picture with both a baby and a puppy. He liked the hell out of that.
Then it was time to open the spreadsheet for tonight’s date. Pre-entering some information from her dating service profile would help make the analysis tomorrow morning a little quicker. Not a very romantic notion, perhaps, but one that settled his nerves considerably.
DREW SAT on the floor where his coffee table used to be, leaning back against his battered sofa. Before him sat his laptop, open to a blinking cursor against the field of pure white that would, he hoped, become his seminar paper. Actually, it had to become his seminar paper rather quickly if he was going to move on to write his dissertation next year.
He took a sip of the revolting bourbon that was all his liquor budget would bear.
He had installed the new Q*pid app as soon as he’d gotten home, but in terms of his online activity, he’d given it nothing at all to work with as he’d been staring at the blank document in his word processor for an hour now. With a click, he banished the empty doc to the bottom of his screen.
As soon as he opened his web browser, the light next to the camera on his laptop clicked on.
Drew was being watched.
From his bookmark list he opened the Huffington Post. It was something he read on a regular basis, but this time he was almost painfully aware of his reaction to the content he found there. He clicked on an article about how a former beauty pageant contestant had rebuilt her life after a horrifying car crash and had found peace teaching software development to African children. He caught a glimpse of his face reflected in the laptop screen and nearly jumped out of his skin. The pitying, stricken look was all wrong for his dating profile. He jolted upright, then beamed at the screen as if reading the article had sent him into transports of joy.
He flipped through his bookmark list of daily news, aware at times that he was choosing links to follow based in some part on whether it was likely to give him good opportunity to smile supportively at a women’s march or shake his head mournfully at the actions of some hypocritical politician who talked a good line about economic equality but somehow kept ending up on the customer end of prostitution rings.
An hour of this and he was exhausted. Reacting manically to everything on the screen made his face ache. He got up to refill his bourbon but was interrupted by a resounding crash from the floor above.
“Oh shit, Mrs. Schwartzmann,” he cried as he stormed toward the door. He took the stairs three at a time and was at he
r apartment in a matter of seconds. He knocked loudly.
“Mrs. Schwartzmann, are you okay?” he called through the door. “It’s Drew, Mrs. Schwartzmann. Are you all right?”
He heard shuffling, and then the locks clicking. Mrs. Schwartzmann had asked him to install several extra locks, a request she had decorated with several harrowing examples of things that had happened to people she knew who hadn’t taken such precautions. The door opened two inches, no more.
“Who is there, please?” Mrs. Schwartzmann’s voice was low, as if she were trying to convince an intruder that there was, in fact, a Mr. Schwartzmann within.
“It’s Drew, Mrs. Schwartzmann. I heard a crash. Are you okay?”
“Oh, Drew,” she replied, closing the door. The two chains that had kept the door from opening slid noisily from their locking place, and she opened the door again. “How nice of you to check on an old woman.” She stepped back from the door to let him come in.
“Did something fall? Did you fall?”
She waved her hands at him and laughed. “Oh no, dear boy, nothing like that.” She turned aside and pointed into the living room. “That I was carrying”—she gestured to a five-gallon bucket lying on its side in the middle of the floor—”and from the handle I lost my grip.”
“Let me help you,” Drew said as he walked farther into the room. He picked up the quite heavy bucket, surprised she could lift it at all. “Where does it go?”
“In here, in here,” Mrs. Schwartzmann replied, shuffling toward the hall closet. She tugged on the folding door, and it slid open to reveal several stacks of similar buckets.
Drew stood before the closet. There was room, perhaps, for one more bucket before the closet was completely filled with them. “Really?” he asked.