Scavenger Hunt

by Dani Lamia

  It doesn’t feel amazing to be a better computer than somebody else. But it does feel good to be better at being a human. Running a massive corporation gives you endless opportunities to feel human. I am addicted to the performance of my own humanity.

  It is actually rare that a private, family-owned corporation is entirely run and operated by the family itself. Why bother, when you could just count and spend your money?

  But Alistair and my father and I love running Nylo. There is no better game. It’s a totalizing competitive experience. It’s always there for you. And unlike most games, the rules are only limited by the laws governing your country’s financial sector.

  For instance, it feels like I have been trying to buy Playqueen—the hip new feminist toy company making STEM toys for nerdy girls that is trying to eat our market share in the under tens—all year, but I have constantly been thwarted. Dad is always noncommittal when we talk about it and whenever I try to set up a meeting with the execs, someone cancels at the last minute. Just this afternoon, I resolved that my next go will be successful. Deciding this so demonstratively makes me feel slightly dizzy.

  I have sent my assistant, Peter, home for the day. I know he is headed upstate with his boyfriend for the weekend, but I also know he will worry and fret over me, no matter how hard he tries to relax. I have to remember to check in with him at least once a day while he’s gone, to let him know I am hydrating.

  I look at the schedule he printed out for me for the next few days on thick, cream-colored paper. It is embossed like a restaurant menu, with the Nylo logo at the top. “Caitlyn Nylo,” it says. “Agenda for June 7–9.”

  I get these agendas first thing in the morning, along with a perfect popover, a warm pat of salted French butter in its own ramekin, a single soft-boiled farm egg slathered in hot sauce in a separate dish, and a steaming mug of black coffee.

  My Friday is unusually empty. There are only two meetings this afternoon: first, a strategy session for what to do about Playqueen, and then a simple marketing meeting about our fall line of video games that I insist on attending—even though I know I will mess up the flow and rattle everyone just by being there because I don’t know enough about video games. I need to stay on top of everything, especially the stuff that doesn’t innately interest me.

  Saturday morning Ben is bringing over the girls, and then there is the birthday party that afternoon. Sunday we’ll recover and do whatever the girls want, like always.

  Since my day is so clean, I take the elevator up to the very top floor, where my father has his office. There’s nothing else up there except a giant conference room bounded by four walls of soundproof glass. The conference room is empty right now, aside from several bottles of water chilling in an ice bucket, perpetually ready for spontaneous meetings.

  My father’s assistant, Devi, has her kitten heels dangling from her pedicured toes and is chewing on the end of a straw while typing insanely fast into the razor-thin laptop on her glass desk. She closes the laptop as soon as she sees me and smiles.

  “He’s in there,” she says. “Just go right in.”

  I don’t need her permission, but I smile sympathetically just the same and scoot down the hall to my father’s office. The door is open. He isn’t sitting at his desk or staring out the window with a glass of gin in his hand, which would actually be normal morning behavior for him. Somehow what he is doing is even sadder. He’s sitting on the couch with his hands on his knees and his head down. The top two buttons of his shirt are undone, and he wears a blazer and no tie and no socks. He looks deflated—defeated. He looks unfun.

  “Hey, hey,” I say, knocking on the open door. He raises his head like someone is yanking his bangs up and manages a small smile.

  “Player number one,” he says.

  “So are we going to buy Playqueen or not?” I ask. “I want to buy and gut it, clean it, and crush it. Do I have your blessing? I’m tired of dicking around.”

  “Always working,” he says. “You used to take breaks. You used to get really excited about vacations.”

  “Did I?” I ask. “I used to like vacations because they reminded me how much I love work. Now I don’t need any reminders.”

  “How are the kids? Are they excited about their cousin’s party?”

  “I’m sure they are,” I say. “I’m not involved with any of it. It’s at Bernard’s and I’m sure Phoebe is taking care of everything. I’m just going to show up with the girls and do my bit, just like you.”

  “You work too hard,” he says, sighing. He hangs his head again, and I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do. Are we done talking? Is that it?

  Sorry, Dad. You can tune me out all you want, but I won’t give up on Playqueen that easily. I will not be swerved. I will not be ignored.

  3

  I wander down to R&D, which stretches from the fifth floor to the basement. This is the guts of the Nylo empire. Whatever Alistair requests, he gets. I deny him no expenses and greenlight every new budget that he tentatively slides across my desk, no matter how insane. I know exactly how valuable he is as an innovator and specialist, and we have provided him with the best team in the business.

  This investment is worth every penny. I can’t even remember all the times one of his projects or inventions has saved us. I’ve learned by now that even product lines that seem to be failing or not reaching their market will eventually become beloved as a result of wistful reminiscence if they are made with love and care. It doesn’t take very long for something that inspires joy to begin inspiring fierce nostalgia.

  I desperately need Alistair’s support with the other executives if we are seriously going to buy Playqueen. The best way to seduce him is merely to visit him—to pay him some attention for a while.

  Alistair’s empire is as whimsical and chaotic as mine is manicured and muted. Spiral staircases corkscrew down through the translucent floors, tinted in bright primary colors.

  The walls are covered in concept art and schematics. Engineers and designers run amok, grinning, wearing tight-fitting T-shirts and khakis. There are kitchen islands overstuffed with donuts, pizza, and breakfast cereal, as well as nap pods and soundproof “yell chambers” where people can have private conversations or just scream alone.

  Most of the furniture down here is giant, overstuffed, and plush. You can take a catnap on the fluffy stomach of a reclining Catsnake (the ever-present loyal familiar of Action Sam, one of Nylo’s longest-running hit animated shows) or you can use a puffy toadstool from Alice in Wonderland as your ottoman.

  Alistair’s lab is surrounded by life-size “Helping Hands” cutouts. Helping Hands are last year’s big hit, which made a lot of money for us. The posable hand-shaped action figures have distinct personalities and come from an alternate dimension where all the creatures are animated body parts: feet, brains, elbows, tongues, etc. The hands are the heroes: Grip, Pointer, Knuckles, and Snap.

  Snap is the witty, urbane intellectual of the group. She is my favorite and I actually have a Snap figurine on my desk upstairs. Alistair says he based the design on a posable hand he bought from an art supply store to help him draw hands better.

  As I walk through R&D, everyone turns to look at me, getting vaguely nervous at my presence. I smile and nod, trying to be reassuring. I don’t know why they are so freaked out. I would never intrude on Alistair’s dominion by making some kind of personnel decision down here in the bowels, where fun and frolic is the point. I know what artists are like. Just because I’m not one of them doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate their temperaments—their oppositional defiance, their moodiness, their fragility.

  I do find myself noting which employees are actually taking advantage of the nap pods. I can’t help myself. I feel a minor unease at my own hypocrisy. I have a bed here, too—but that’s because I never leave. I wonder how many of these twenty-year-olds stay out all night in Greenpoint, drinking and
Tindering, and then use their jobs as an opportunity to catch up on sleep.

  I shake away my crankiness. The rules for R&D are different than the rules for the rest of the company.

  “Is Alistair here somewhere?” I ask two young women eventually, becoming tired of hunting for him. The women are both looking at something on their phones. They grin at me as I look over their shoulders, but I can’t tell if what they are doing is personal or work related.

  One of the girls points and I see Alistair across the room, looking a bit like a jug-eared English royal with his unruly auburn hair and wearing a half-untucked and rather rumpled white button-down, mesmerized by something on his phone. He’s holding it up to the wall as if it is a magnifying glass.

  “What are you people cooking up down here?” I ask as I approach him. “Some kind of new phone game?”

  “Sister!” he says. “You don’t come down here often enough. It’s great to see you. I was just about to knock off for the day. Gonna try to hit the beach and enjoy this sunshine. Is there anything better than New York City on a Friday in late spring? Want to come?”

  “To the beach?”

  “Yeah, why not?”

  “I have meetings all day,” I lie. “Wall-to-wall meetings, trying to make all this fun profitable. So, what is this? What are you working on?”

  “Well, it’s augmented reality,” says Alistair. “We’re trying to make it useful, to turn it into something we can sell. Most augmented reality products are gimcrack and sloppy, but we think we can make something that will catch on. Take a look!”

  He holds up his phone and I gaze at the wall through it. In real life, I can see it is pink and solid, but the screen shows a swirling purple vortex.

  “Reach into it!” he says. “Go ahead!”

  Still looking at his phone, I stick my hand out and see it disappear into the vortex. Then all of a sudden the vortex dissipates, becoming a golden scroll that hovers in midair.

  “The scroll is a job opportunity,” says Alistair. “Now you can use the phone to interact with the scroll, accepting the job or not. Right now, the only jobs available are from Sydney Polytechnic, where we have a small research partnership. They are trying to do facial recognition research, so all the jobs are just tagging whether all the faces in a series of three are the same or not.”

  “And this is fun to people?” I ask him. “What do you mean by a job? How is a job a game?”

  “It’s charity,” Alistair explains. “Every time you do one of these tiny little jobs that you stumble upon, you not only gain levels that give you access to extra powers and bonuses in the game, you make money for the charity of your choice, money donated by one of our partners. By doing these mindless, rote activities that we’ve gamified for these researchers and corporations, you’re working toward improving the world.”

  “Interesting,” I say. “But I hope you aren’t spending too much time on this concept. We aren’t running a charity here.”

  “On the contrary,” says Alistair. “We’ve done the market research. People want their games and diversions to matter more, to feel like they are having an impact on the real world. Imagine if every time you played Candy Crush or Tetris a small amount of money was donated to Planned Parenthood or the World Wildlife Federation. Imagine if playing Pandemic went to AIDS research. We’re trying to do something similar. There’s an ancillary concept that we’re developing: a browser extension that takes all of your marketing data and pays a small amount to charity every time you play a game using any platform on your computer. But I’m most fascinated by the possibilities of augmented reality. Actually, it was Dad who, hmmm, well. Never mind. It isn’t very interesting.”

  I sink down into a giant chair that looks like a stuffed piece of strawberry-frosted cake. Alistair frowns, sensing my despair.

  “Maxim’s birthday party is tomorrow,” I say. “Ben is dropping the twins off in the morning.”

  “Bernard always throws a nice party,” says Alistair gently. “The whole family will be there. Henley, even.”

  “I think the twins are starting to hate me a little,” I say. “I think maybe I’m starting to hate them a little, too. Like Mom hated us. They are more Ben’s children than mine at this point. I don’t even really feel like I know them. Is it weird to be scared of your own children?”

  “Well, you don’t see them very much,” says Alistair. “I mean, you could see them more.”

  “There’s no time,” I say. “I dread seeing them. No shit. I think they can tell I dread them. Are all children little sociopaths?”

  “Children are mostly wonderful,” Alistair says. “They just need more from you than adults do.”

  “Maybe,” I say. “Or maybe they are doomed to be spoiled little shitheads who will never be worth a damn, like Henley. Being useless runs in our family just as much as loving toys does.”

  “Anyway, I’m looking forward to seeing them,” Alistair says. “Are you doing okay? You don’t seem particularly well.”

  I lean forward and take the phone out of his hand. I use it to scan the walls for more portals filled with more scrolls that might hold more games that will help me make more money for Planned Parenthood and more abortions. The wall behind him is filled with portals.

  “I want to buy Playqueen,” I tell him. “Dad won’t even talk to me about it. There is a ticking clock here: we don’t have much time to acquire them, steal everything they make, and put them out of business before the next shareholder meeting. Are you going to back me on this?”

  “They do good work,” says Alistair. “I like their physics kits and detective playsets. I think they have a very inventive point of view, and obviously they have a real insight into the preoccupations of under-ten girls, which has always been a weakness of ours.”

  “It won’t work unless you are behind me all the way,” I tell him.

  “You know I’ll support you,” he says.

  “I can’t even remember being under ten anymore,” I say. I reach into one of the portals and pull out another scroll. I click the button on the phone, which lets me interact with it. Three faces show up. Three middle-aged black guys are scowling while walking down the street. Two of them are the same person and one of them is different. I click on the one who is different and am rewarded by another set of faces. All three are teenage girls with black hair, sitting in a diner booth. I frown. Actually, all three images are of the same girl. There is a button to click if that’s the case. I click it. In one corner of the screen, a counter shows me how much money I am making for Amnesty International.

  “Look at me,” I say. “I’m saving the world. Actually, it does feel kind of good. I can see this catching on. The games need to be a little more complex, perhaps.”

  “We don’t really have control over what the jobs might be,” says Alistair. “Those will all be set by our partners.”

  An idea hits me. “Of course, we’ll also have access to whatever data gets harvested through these games,” I say.

  “Yes, I suppose we would. But what would we do with it?”

  I look around the R&D department. All these fun, creative people making fun, creative products. They are brilliant engineers and artists, but they aren’t playing the same big-picture game that I am. They don’t have a twenty-billion-dollar business to protect.

  “You know CAPTCHA?” I ask. “Those little tests that websites do to see if you are human?”

  “Yes,” he says. “Of course.”

  “Well, the data from all those CAPTCHA tests is being used to help train AI. Did you know that? Very efficient. Use every part of the buffalo, right?”

  “What are you suggesting?”

  “Well, we could work the same hustle,” I say. “We’re getting people to do the same kind of work as CAPTCHA by playing a fun game for charity. That’s all up-front and aboveboard. But we could then use all that data for
our own purposes, creating a massive database of all the ‘good people’ of planet Earth that we could then exploit, while at the same time using the aggregate of all this data to train our own AI, which we would be able to train much faster than any individual client.” I pause, noting the sardonic look on Alistair’s face, and add, “I use the term ‘exploit’ here in the technical sense.”

  “That’s very sinister,” says Alistair.

  “You are so sweet, little brother. So dedicated.”

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” he asks me again. “Seriously, is something wrong?”

  “I can count on you, right? All the way? We’re on the same team here?”

  “All the way,” he says. “I am Knuckles and you are Snap.”

  4

  Eventually, I have no choice but to go home for the night. I have to get things ready and prepare emotionally to see my little angels in the morning.

  My Townhouse is actually rather modest, considering. But it is just me living here and I don’t need much.

  Like my office, it is immaculate. The housekeeper comes once a week and cleans the place from top to bottom. She does an inventory of my refrigerator, getting rid of anything past its prime and replacing it, to ensure that my food is always fresh.

  My refrigerator is packed with bottles of Corona, slices of capicola and cave-aged Gruyère (what I’ve always called “cave cheese”), sirloin and ribeye, Fresca, plastic clamshells full of prepared salads from Whole Foods, and many, many containers of Greek yogurt, one of every flavor available. In my freezer, there are bottles of pepper-infused vodka, three different kinds of ice cream (I am more interested in variety than I am loyal to any particular flavor), and frozen tater tots. I don’t often end up eating any of this food, I must admit, but it doesn’t always get wasted. When things are on the bubble, I encourage my housekeeper or gardener to take what they want for their own families.