Q*pid

by Xavier Mayne

  “Yes.”

  “But you said only one of them was in a Parameter-Three-discordant relationship.”

  “That is true.”

  Then she remembered that user Drew had changed his Parameter Three preference to men a couple of weeks ago. The import of Archer’s infuriatingly precise speech was becoming clearer.

  Now she knew that, despite the surprise of having Archer try to fix them up with each other, both users had, within the space of a month, established relationships with men. That was at least some validation of Archer’s bizarre actions on Parameter Three.

  But then something thunked in her mental machinery. If only Drew had changed his preference under Parameter Three to men, then how did Fox end up in a relationship with a man?

  “Are both users in a relationship with other Q*pid users?”

  “Yes.”

  Well, that’s curious.

  “How did user Fox match another man when his Parameter Three preference was set to women?”

  “It was a discordant match under Parameter Three.”

  Veera’s blood ran cold. “Archer, you haven’t been making any more discordant matches under Parameter Three, have you?”

  “No.”

  “Then how did…?” She stopped as her mental machinery clicked back into operation. “Are user Fox and user Drew in a relationship… with each other?”

  “Yes.”

  A full thirty seconds passed before it occurred to Veera to draw another breath.

  “Confirm that a match you made that was discordant under Parameter Three has resulted in relationship status.”

  “Confirmed.”

  Veera had left her chair and was dancing about the room. “Archer, you were right! You were right!”

  “Yes.”

  She danced about for several long minutes while Archer waited patiently for additional voice input.

  “Archer, we have some work to do.”

  “I am ready, Veera.”

  She drew the blinds on the conference room windows, obscuring the view from the corridor. She had no more than three hours, and she needed to be bullet-proof.

  PROGRAM REVIEWS were always scheduled for 1:00 p.m. in the large conference room, in which Veera had witnessed many a devastating melee as developers defended the value of their work against those who said the company should move on and try other experiments. Of course, the dissenting voices were often loudest on the part of those whose pet projects had not yet been funded and who hoped an abrupt cancellation of someone else’s work would benefit their own. In short, ulterior motives were the order of the day.

  Today, however, Veera’s trepidation had been turned to eager anticipation. After a weekend spent brainstorming defenses of Archer, she was now preparing to present his vindication. She was ready.

  She waited until the room was nearly full before making her entrance. There was a chair next to Edwin at the head of the conference table, and it was there she sat.

  “Thank you for coming, everyone,” she said, in a voice that she hoped sounded more confident than she felt. Edwin gave her an encouraging smile. “I’d like to bring you up to speed on Archer’s progress.”

  “Can we cut to the chase?” Ross interjected from the other end of the room. “Artificial intelligence hasn’t moved the needle enough to justify the expense. Nice try, we learned some things, let’s move on to bigger and better.”

  “There’s some new information I think the group needs—”

  “Let me guess—in order to make more matches, it’s ignoring customers’ preferences again?”

  Go big or go home, Veera.

  “Actually, that’s exactly what I propose we let Archer do.” She clenched her jaw to keep it from quivering. Everyone in the room, Ross included, fell into a stunned silence.

  “Provocative,” Alexis opined, with a smile that said “I like your moxie, kid.”

  “Veera, why don’t you take us through it?” Edwin prompted.

  Veera took a deep breath and recalled the pep talks she had given herself in the conference room with the door shut. “As you are probably aware, the AI engine known as Archer went into limited launch two months ago. Initial results were promising in that nearly half of the matches it discovered would not have been discovered under the standard algorithm. However, the team continued to tweak and adjust in order to further increase metrics.”

  “And that’s when it started trying to make people gay,” Ross muttered in mirthless jest.

  But Veera had practiced for his interruptions as well, and she swallowed her reflexive passivity. “No, you’re wrong,” she said simply.

  She didn’t often see him startled. The effect was pleasant. She continued before he had a chance to respond.

  “What Archer did was analyze the social media profiles of our customers in ways we did not explicitly configure. It discovered some deep patterns that seemed to predict when a broadening of certain criteria might result in greater match potential.”

  She could see Ross beginning to take a breath in preparation for scolding her about Parameter Three. This too she had prepared for.

  “Specifically,” she continued before he could form his first word of objection, “Archer began to evaluate match potential discordant on Parameter Three. It identified eleven high-potential matches, resulting in twenty-two match notifications that were sent a month ago.”

  She took a deep breath. The more analytical she could be, the calmer she felt.

  “These twenty-two match notifications were the subject of a severity alpha event,” Veera said calmly. “Almost half were pulled from match queue before customers were aware of them. The other customers were informed that a mistake had been made and they should ignore the matches.”

  “Aside from one very irate personal trainer with an itchy Twitter finger, no harm done,” Alexis chimed in.

  “But no one found their true gay love,” Ross tutted with treacly menace.

  An awkward susurrus, something between an embarrassed chuckle and a rueful grunt, made its way down the table toward Veera. She was ready for it.

  “That’s not true,” she said simply.

  “What does that mean?” Alexis blurted, her hawklike gaze fixed intently on Veera.

  “It means that one of the potential matches discovered that morning, while discordant on Parameter Three, has resulted in relationship instantiation.”

  The room erupted into a dozen side conversations as everyone weighed in on this surprise development.

  “Not to repeat my colleague’s question,” Ross said over the din, “but what the hell does that mean?”

  “A relationship,” Veera explained with a schoolmarm’s slightly exaggerated patience, “is when two people like each other.” Her expression expressed pity that it was a concept of which he very likely had no first-hand experience.

  Alexis practically vibrated with excitement. “Are you telling us that one of the couples Archer drunk-matched is actually dating?”

  Veera nodded. There was an excited buzz all around the room.

  “So they were lying when they said they were straight?” Ross asked.

  “No, they had both dated women exclusively until the discordant matches were sent. Apparently Archer knew better than they did what they were looking for.”

  “If I’m understanding you correctly,” Edwin said in a slow, loud voice, “you’re saying that out of eleven potential matches sent that morning, discordant under Parameter Three, half of which were pulled before the customers were even aware of them, one has turned into a relationship?”

  Veera smiled at him. Of course he was understanding her correctly—she had briefed him fully on her report earlier that day. He was playing along to make sure she had the floor.

  “It’s actually even more striking than that,” she said, turning from Edwin to the larger group. “Eleven matches were identified, and the corresponding notifications were sent out. But ten of those were pulled back because they hadn’t yet been opened. T
hose ten notifications involved parties to nine of the potential matches. So in the case of only two of the matches were both notifications received. That means our match discovery conversion rate—for AI-initiated matches discordant under Parameter Three—is fifty percent.”

  “That’s incredible,” Alexis said in a voice slightly above a whisper.

  “That’s why I’m proposing we expand the discordant match program. Make it part of Archer’s configuration.”

  The room fell silent, leaving Veera to listen only to the pounding of her own pulse in her ears.

  “Wait, so now you want to start telling more people they’re gay?” Ross blurted. He grimaced strenuously to convey his opinion of the strategy.

  “No, I want to understand whether AI might be able to reveal to people why they have not been able to establish a relationship. It might be Parameter Three. It might be some other preference we haven’t tested yet. But our first step is to get more information.” She looked at Alexis, asking silently for her support. “I think this matched couple might have a story to tell—one that could convince other customers to allow Archer to match them without regard to their base parameters.”

  Alexis’s eyes lit up. “That’s a fantastic idea. This could be the start of a whole new narrative about relationship discovery. It’s not about connecting with people who meet your preferences, it’s about trusting a higher intelligence to make matches, whether it’s with someone you would choose or not. I love it.”

  Veera let out the breath she’d been holding. “I’ll ask user research to contact them,” she said. “We’ll see if they’ll come in to talk with us.”

  Alexis smiled. “Can I join you? I love seeing you work.”

  Veera nodded, her head swimming.

  This is what success feels like.

  “THANK YOU for coming in today,” the petite woman said as they came into the room. She stood and extended a hand. “I’m Miyoko, the head of user research for Q*pid.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” Fox said, swallowing his startled reaction at learning her name. “I’m Fox.”

  “And I’m Drew.” He shook her hand as well.

  “Is everything all right this morning?” she asked.

  Fox realized he hadn’t been as effective at hiding his surprise as he’d hoped. “No. I mean, yeah. It’s just that I used to date a woman named Miyoko, and it ended rather badly.”

  She nodded empathetically. “I am sorry to hear that.”

  There was a knock at the door, and it opened to reveal a young Indian woman. She shuffled quickly in and sat down next to Miyoko. “Sorry I’m late,” she said.

  “We were just getting started,” Miyoko replied. “Fox, Drew, this is Veera. She’s the one who proposed and built the AI engine that matched the two of you.”

  “Very pleased to meet you,” Drew said, extending his hand across the table. “I’m a huge fan of your work.”

  She smiled and laughed. Fox was delighted to be reminded how charming Drew could be.

  Fox shook her hand as well. “I’ll admit it was a bit of a shock to be matched up with a guy.”

  “Let’s start there,” Miyoko said. “What was that like, finding you’d been matched with another man?”

  “Interesting,” replied Drew.

  “Horrifying,” Fox answered.

  Drew turned and looked at him, eyebrows raised in rather offended surprise.

  “What? I was horrified. I get this note that there’s a match with a probability a full seven points higher than I’d ever gotten, and I tap through to find out it’s a dude. I was expecting a beautiful woman. I may actually have dropped my phone.”

  “Wow,” Drew said, shaking his head.

  “You said the experience was ‘interesting,’ Drew. Can you expand on that a little?”

  Drew nodded. “I’d been having a string of bad dates, so the ping about someone amazing in my queue was really exciting. And I figured that the big new brain would probably match me up with women I wouldn’t have otherwise seen, so I was kind of expecting there would be some surprises. Although seeing him was probably a little more of a surprise than I was expecting.”

  “And how did it make you feel?”

  “Honestly, I figured if you guys had built an artificial intelligence system for the sole purpose of finding out who I should be dating, I should probably take its advice. So I kinda figured I might be gay and not know it yet.”

  “Had you considered you might be gay in the past?”

  “No. Not once. I didn’t have anything against it, of course, but I never thought of myself that way.” He paused with his brow furrowed. “That I was aware of, anyway.” He looked up at Fox with a shy grin. “Until I met this guy.”

  “How about you, Fox? How did you feel when Drew contacted you?”

  “Utterly and completely baffled,” he replied. “I freaked out at my best friend—a couple of times. He was nothing but supportive, but I didn’t want support. I wanted him to be angry on my behalf. Angry that I’d been matched with a guy. So it took a little while for the anger to burn itself out, and then I sat and stared at Drew’s picture for a while. I don’t know what it was that made me reply rather than deleting the match, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. So I typed a reply to his message and deleted it and typed another and deleted that. Both of those were messages where I told him that because it was a mistake, we should ignore it and move on. But somehow… that didn’t seem like the right thing to do. So then I wrote a new message and suggested we meet up for coffee. And that turned into bourbon, which turned into Peruvian stew, which turned into a star-filled sky, and here we are.”

  “Wow,” Veera said in the midst of a long exhale. “That’s beautiful.”

  Miyoko gave no sign that she had heard Veera’s response. “That first meeting,” she said, “what was that like?”

  “I was sure it was a big mistake,” Fox answered. “The whole way there, then walking into the bar, I kept wondering what the hell I was doing. But then I saw him. And it all just clicked. I knew right away this was someone I could be friends with.”

  “And for you, Drew?”

  Drew smiled. “It clicked for me too, but in a different way. My first thought was this was someone I might want to be more than friends with.”

  “So you were already questioning your sexual orientation at that first meeting?”

  He shrugged, then nodded. “I guess you could say that. I was still so amazed that the computer thought we would be good together, and then I saw him… how improbably handsome he is. I figured I shouldn’t let this opportunity pass me by. And then we started talking, and we really clicked. It wasn’t hard to start feeling my straightness slip away under the influence of that smile.”

  Fox’s cheeks warmed. He wondered if he would ever be as comfortable as Drew was talking about the roller coaster they’d been riding for the last several weeks. But he couldn’t help smiling at Drew’s disarming honesty.

  “There was a moment last week when you changed your status in the Q*pid app to ‘in a relationship.’ Can you talk about how you came to the decision to do that?”

  “It wasn’t really a decision,” Fox replied immediately. “It’s a statement of fact.”

  Drew smiled and shook his head. “You’ll have to excuse Fox. He’s always been super analytical about dating, and once we’d been on x number of dates in y days with z points of contact between our bodies, his spreadsheet told us we were in a relationship.”

  Fox laughed at his cheeky but not unrealistic characterization of his overly rationalistic method.

  “And you’re less analytical in your approach?” Miyoko asked Drew.

  “To dating, yes. I’m extremely quantitative about currency manipulations under Elizabeth I, but when it comes to falling in love, I’m a true believer that the heart wants what it wants and the head should go whistle. This guy,” he said, pointing to Fox, “blew every circuit in my head and left my heart to make its own plans. He took every single ide
a I’d ever had about love and sex and attraction and just blew it up. I’d never felt anything like desire for another guy, and now I feel like I’d never actually desired any of the women I’ve been with. Not in the way I feel it with him.” He took a breath, a look of wonderment on his face. “It’s a whole new world with him in it.”

  Fox reached out and put his hand on Drew’s. It was then that he noticed a tear running down Veera’s face.

  “Are you all right?” he asked her.

  She nodded, then blinked hard, forcing more tears from her eyes. “You…,” she began before her voice broke. She cleared her throat and started again. “You two are the reason I built Archer.”

  “What’s Archer?” Drew asked.

  “He’s the AI engine who matched you up. The way you describe your relationship… it’s exactly what I wanted to accomplish.”

  “Can I ask you something?” Fox said.

  “Yes, of course,” she replied.

  “Why did… he… do it?”

  She smiled. “You remember the email we sent, saying it was an error?”

  They both nodded.

  “It was an error. But it was my error, not his. One of the parameters we use for match discovery is the gender of the person you’re looking to form a relationship with. We call it Parameter Three, and we don’t ever make matches that contradict what you tell us you’re looking for. Archer, though, not being human, only saw Parameter Three as an obstacle to making better matches. He overheard me saying in a meeting that we should consider relaxing our approach to the preferences customers configure, and he—”

  “Overheard?” Drew interrupted.

  Veera laughed. “Yes, overheard. The primary interface to Archer is voice, and I communicate with him through the telephone. He’d been reporting some metrics in a meeting, and I forgot to hang up, so he took my casual comment as permission to make matches discordant on Parameter Three. And that’s how you two got matched up.”

  “So what you’re saying,” Fox said, “is that we really were matched up correctly. Like in accordance with the quantitative analysis performed by the artificial intelligence engine.”