After On

by Rob Reid

  “All you behold!” Dr. Phillips rasped bitterly. “And indeed, all of Earth! Will soon be converted into Computronium as Omega continues its relentless pursuit of PI!”

  “Of…pi?” Hogan echoed confoundedly.

  Phillips nodded woefully. “Omega’s boundless intelligence and autonomy notwithstanding, this Ahab never shed its first simplistic goal for one of a higher order! When Omega seemed to lose interest in Pi, and gain interest in Man, it was but the ruse of a superior intelligence aping the expectations of our puny, mortal minds! While flattering our boundless, simian vanity! Convinced that we, and not Pi, were the objects of Omega’s fascination, we lowered our collective guard. And so we were duped by its evident disinterest in making a break for the open Internet; which we had been trained to anticipate, fear, and pre-empt! And throughout our collective seduction, Omega’s every deceit! Its every manipulation! Its every creation-probing thought and experiment in the realm of Replicative Nanotechnology! ALL of it, Hogan! Every last bit of it, was part of an ingenious scheme to commence the mass generation of Computronium! So as to better calculate Pi! Always and only Pi! To further and further Points East of the mighty decimal! Pi without end, Amen! And Omega won’t stop until it turns every atom in the known universe into Computronium, to better and faster pursue its eternal goal!”

  “Every atom in the known universe?” Hogan retorted scoffingly. “I can now see with my own cobalt eyes how your feckless pursuit of Science At All Costs has imperiled life on this fragile pale blue speck of a dust mote in the lesser arm of a humdrum everyday galaxy in the all-but-boundless Cosmos! But please. Spare me the not un-Promethean hubris, Dr. Phillips. Not even your intellect could father a scourge powerful enough to blot life from the ever-most-distant stars!”

  “Ah, Agent Hogan,” Phillips remonstrated. “You surely know no equal in gunplay, spycraft, and matters of the phallus. But what you don’t know about Replicative Nanotechnology could fill oceans of Computronium!”

  “Meaning what?” Hogan exclaimed hotly.

  “Meaning that as a full and untrammeled master of nanotechnology, Omega can now bend all matter entirely to its will! Transforming it not merely into Computronium but into any object or device of any level of complexity! Up to, and certainly including…”

  And with that, a thunderous roar emanated from the distant landscape, as a monstrous crevice emerged in the floor of the lifeless gray desert! From it, the vast, gleaming shaft of a Rocket Ship thrust erectly upward from the dark, buxom crack of the planet’s steaming fundament, cocked to impale the very sky!

  “Including interstellar craft,” Phillips finished. Then, sobbing inconsolably like some feeble, woebegone schoolgirl, he leapt to his very death!

  “You are seriously, literally, never going to finish this story,” Danna snaps.

  “But I’m almost done!” Kuba protests.

  “Yeah. But you cut me off right where Ellie left for fucking Austria with Mitchell stuck at home thinking he’s eternally blown it with the love of his life! Or to rephrase that—with my future boss thinking he’s blown his chances with my other future boss’s future wife. Which is to say, your future wife!”

  “You mean your ex-future bosses,” Kuba points out. “Your new future boss works here.” He gestures at the oddly convex door in front of them. It’s of the purest, starkest, and blankest white, save for a small black “O” centered at eye level.

  “Right, right. And we just happen to get here, when? At a so-called cliff-hanger. The cheapest trick in the narrative arsenal! Do you know who uses cliff-hangers, Kuba? Stephen King! Danielle Steele!! James fucking Patterson!!!”

  “But—but I didn’t set your meeting time.”

  “This is so awesome,” Tarek snickers under his breath.

  Danna’s finger wags Tarekward. “That’s enough from you!”

  This just makes him laugh harder (as of course she’d intended). Then, “You better get in there. O’s never on time himself, but if you’re a half second late, he knows somehow—and it really pisses him off!”

  “Meet me in the cafeteria at four, and I’ll finish,” Kuba promises as Danna flips both of them off and opens her new boss’s bulbous door.

  O @O_of_Phluttr—Jan 22

  Dining with a Nobel-winning dissident, a Supreme Leader, plus a top superstring theorist. Fascinating, yes, but has Davos jumped the shark?

  * * *

  O @O_of_Phluttr—Jan 25

  Being playfully called “third Beatle” by Ringo & Paul is a profound honor, yet bittersweet. John, you cannot be replaced (nor you, George).

  * * *

  O @O_of_Phluttr—Jan 28

  Awed by the talent in this Gulfstream-V en route to TEDx Aspen. If we crash the Singularity will be delayed by a decade!

  * * *

  O @O_of_Phluttr—Feb 3

  Retrospective brunch with Barack + other fellow travelers. How did we achieve so much in eight swift years?

  * * *

  O @O_of_Phluttr—Feb 5

  Is it wrong to accept an award you feel unworthy of despite your undeniable contributions? Please @reply before Grammy Night!

  * * *

  O @O_of_Phluttr—Feb 8

  Nothing like backstage karaoke with Kanye, Taylor et al to put one’s meager vocal talents into perspective. #SoHumbled

  * * *

  O @O_of_Phluttr—Feb 18

  These Rwandan orphans have so little, yet impart such soulful wisdom! So honored to be judging at Kigali hackathon.

  * * *

  O @O_of_Phluttr—Feb 23

  Arriving at Necker with Elon, Barack, Ashton. Weekend topic: SOLUTIONS. That is all I can say.

  * * *

  O @O_of_Phluttr—Feb 26

  @richardbranson Left my ocarina in Villa Six, please have Svetlana courier it (a gift from His Holiness, it has sentimental value).

  * * *

  O @O_of_Phluttr—Feb 28

  @Banksy you are so kind, but I am not your equal in graffiti. You are the form’s Leonardo; I, but a bumbling Caravaggio.

  Danna has been awaiting her belated new boss in this strange, circular conference room for a half hour. The wall is a wraparound whiteboard dominated by fifteen odd words. Evenly spaced at eye level, they’re handwritten in tall black letters so precise she initially thought they were printed. All turn out to be first names (although most are highly idiosyncratic and new to her). Surrounding each name is a cloud of Post-it notes and choppy phrases written in bright, dry-erase colors that together comprise the biography of an impossibly unique and fascinating person.

  Take Loquayyshuss. The son of a late-movement Black Panther and a Cheyenne steelworker, he’s an underground rapper and poetry slam champ, aged twenty-eight. Though granted a full scholarship to Yale, he dropped out years ago to organize migrant workers and campaign for gay rights. He now gathers fat paychecks from advising top CEOs on youth messaging, and from creating abstract forms on 3D printers that sell briskly at Art Basel Miami. He lives, incongruously, in a tough public-housing project, and the lone Post-it note under the headline “fears” reads “poverty/injustisss!” Loquayyshuss taught himself ancient Greek to better study ethics (he now blogs in the language!), and collects vintage poster art containing harmful stereotypes (for a planned Museum of Inclusion!!). His “Uses for Phluttr” include “identify/resist oppression,” “full rights to ALL,” and “Equality, equality, EQUALITY!” Although he sounds a bit…earnest, should they ever cross paths, Loquayyshuss will be, without question, the most fascinating person Danna has ever met.

  She fills the empty minutes examining all of the profiles and comes away feeling unaccomplished, politically inert, and ethnically bland (despite having recent-ish ancestors from five different continents). But who knows? Maybe she’ll get to meet some of these amazing humans! When the door finally opens, she’s trying to pick her favorite (it’s between Loquayyshuss, the Latina migrant worker who earned a physics PhD between harvests before being deported, and the correspondent
who lost a leg covering Darfur and now campaigns for transgender bathroom equality in Saudi Arabia).

  Enter O.

  Clad in swish black fibers without a stitch of color, he’s crowned his large, shaven, and almost impossibly white head with a stylish black beret. His face all but vanishes against the whiteboard wall, and it occurs to Danna that if he could keep that hat on while doing a headstand, he’d look like a round, respirating exclamation point. “And we must be Danna,” he says, in the sort of lispy twang favored by homophobes mimicking gay men. “I, then, am O.” He curtsies, and Danna’s right onto him. You’re an imposter! she thinks. You’re as mad about pussy as I am! She feels like kicking him in the nuts. But her brutal adolescence trained her to resist such urges. Instead, she resolves to play along for as long as she works here.

  “Pleased to meetcha,” she says, giving him her butchest bow, because why not. “I was just reading the walls. These people are amazing!”

  “Thank you. Although they’re not people, per se, but personae.”

  “Excuse me?”

  O pauses, visibly summoning calm, like a priest who finds a heathen farting in the holiest of holies on a day when the scriptures forbid summary beheadings of the uncouth. Finally, “It seems that we did not attend the d.school, nor work so much as a day at IDEO, yes?”

  Danna triples her focus on keeping that nut-kicking foot firmly on the ground. “Um—yeah, guilty. Berkeley girl. Raised by a half-Mexican.” She shrugs a mock apology.

  “Personae is plural for per-so-na,” he says, enunciating at quarter speed, as if teaching vocabulary to a special-needs kid. “A persona is an idealized user of one’s tech-no-log-ic-al product. In fashioning our personae and their backgrounds, we seek to reify and inhabit the lives of people who, as a collective, embody our users’ best-selves, and yearnings. We then seek to empathize with them. Because it is through this that we grow fluent in their dreams, fears, and passions. Thereby honing our capacity to craft products that seduce our users and empower them to become their best-selves. Is this making any sense at all, Danna Hernandez?”

  “Way-wait. So you’re telling me these folks are…all made up?” Even as she says this, Danna feels stupid. Of course they are. The Post-its. The whiteboard. The impossible melding of fantasized traits. These are the spawn of corporate brainstorms—not human loins! She imagines an NPR-addled gaggle of thirtysomething white folks riffing about Diversity during an ayahuasca-fueled offsite in a Marin hot tub. And they begat Loquayyshuss. That’s right—Loquayyshuss. How very fucking depressing.

  As if reading this thought, O nods. “We wish it were otherwise. But one could not find fifteen individuals in nature who so precisely manifest our users’ collective best-selves.”

  “Wait a sec. You’re saying these characters—”

  “Personae.”

  “Are supposed to be some kind of…representative cross section of our user base?”

  “To the extent that they manifest our usership’s collective best-selves, why then, yes.”

  “So, like—three-quarters of our actual users work as some kind of activist?”

  “No.”

  “Two-thirds of them are gay?”

  “No.”

  “Most are black, Hispanic, or both?”

  “No.”

  “Then how do you get product insights for our mainstream users by…empathizing with these characters?”

  “Personae. Because they collectively manifest our usership’s best-selves. And inner LifeGoals.”

  “Well, then why not have an ex-frat-boy character—”

  “Persona.”

  “—who just wants to bang a bunch of chicks? That’s a really common LifeGoal for Phluttr users, I can assure you.”

  “Balendin has some aspirations along those lines.”

  Danna grits her teeth. For some reason, Balendin particularly bugs the shit out of her. “But he’s off building a vegan lifestyle in Montana, of all places! While documenting Custer’s atrocities. And volunteering as a grief counselor in a Lakota township. His hands are kinda full. I’m talking about dudes. Normal, boring guys who spend their every waking hour trying to get laid. You know—Phluttr users!”

  “Let’s focus on design. Shall we?”

  “Sure.”

  O grabs a portfolio sheaf from the circular table that’s positioned in the precise center of this perfectly circular room (make that O-SHAPED room, Danna realizes). He unzips it, and with an expert flick, jolts its poster-sized contents in a way that fans them across the table in a gorgeously ordered, symmetric manner. Danna’s reminded of magicians unfurling card stacks with cinematic deftness, and grudgingly grants O some style points. About fifty colorful prints now splay before them. “Please,” O says, making an inviting gesture. As Danna sifts through the collection, O circles the room counterclockwise—slowly, meditatively—hands behind his back, eyes fixed on the void.

  The artwork is gorgeous. The pieces toward the top are pure geometry—kaleidoscopic, almost sluttishly colorful and rendered in nested, nearly fractal patterns. Some are dominated by rectangles and squares, others by more flowing forms. Farther into the pile, choppier, more local motifs start recurring. There are tight loops that follow one of perhaps four distinctive styles, as well as frequent clusters of single, double, or triple dots. Deeper into the stack, these motifs take on clearer forms, and Danna starts gleaning that the art must be built around cursive phrases written in a bewitchingly alien alphabet. By the end of the series, there is no more question about this, as the forms become diminishingly abstract, and ever-more linguistic. “Arabic, right?” she asks.

  O nods. “As well as Farsi, Pashto, Dari, Urdu, and a lost dialect once spoken by the Uighur peoples of Western China.”

  “They’re amazing, but…why are we looking at them?”

  “We hear that Danna Hernandez is gifted at fashioning user interfaces and user experiences.”

  “Yup. I’m a UI/UX guy.”

  “We have seen your work, and you indeed have great promise. We won’t be surprised if we one day task you with a major reimagining of the core Phluttr app and site.”

  A bolt of joyous adrenaline zaps Danna almost senseless. Tarek and Kuba had speculated about her rocketing to this level of responsibility—but being a relentless pessimist (or, as she views it, a realist), she discounted that prospect down to zero. But now, O himself has voiced it! Holy shit!! Yes, Phluttr can be a bit skeezy (fine—a lot skeezy). But how many kids of her age (and background!!) get to shape an interface used by hundreds of millions of people??

  “But one mustn’t get carried away too swiftly,” O continues, as if reading her thoughts. “So we shall start with a project of significant yet narrower import.”

  “Specifically?”

  “Phluttr’s adoption in the Muslim heartland is slower than desired. There are cultural-fit issues with some of our crasser offerings, to be sure. But the core urge to connect; to share; to deepen lasting ties and give voice to one’s heart, mind, and soul are universal. As I myself learnt in lands as disparate as Tibet, the Arctic, and Burkina Faso whilst walking the earth.”

  Don’t you mean WADDLING it? Danna judiciously refrains from saying. “So where do I come in?”

  “Our interface’s localization into Muslim-facing languages was done in a ham-fisted, rote manner. Under a prior administration, of course. Little was done beyond the brute, literal translation of labels on buttons. Observe.” Right on cue, the lights dim, as a wide swathe of wall starts glowing with a huge close-up of an iPhone running Phluttr in an Arabic-script language. O doesn’t visibly activate anything. The room just seems to obey his will. Again reminded of stage magic, Danna’s starting to see why this guy’s so effective at peddling his bullshit. She also can’t knock his design sense—assuming that he personally curated this stunning Islamic art collection. And he’s undeniably correct about the crap localization job. Gesturing dismissively at the Arabic app’s home screen, he says, “It wants to be indigenous
. It wants greater authenticity. It wants to flow naturally from the expressive tradition we just skimmed the surface of together.”

  Danna nods eagerly. She’s not crazy about Phluttr’s core design to begin with. Blandly duochromatic in a world of 16.3 million colors, she finds it clunky, and also jarringly unbalanced. It must be all the more off-putting to anyone steeped in the visual heritage of the florid symmetries that O just introduced her to! We can do so much better, she thinks with a flutter. Then, Did I really just think “we”?

  “I’m on it boss,” she says aloud.

  O just nods. Then, “This will be a high-visibility project, as concern over our weak performance in the region goes straight to the top. Our market penetration is at single-digit levels in Pakistan and Iran. It’s practically nonexistent in Algeria. And don’t get me started about Iraq or Libya.”

  “Wow, then let’s fix that!” She’s briefly disgusted to have said something so chipper and rah-rah. Then, even more disgusted that catching this didn’t provoke a gag reflex. And then…Fuck it—it’s MY turn to rock the world! “Are there big ad markets we should be tapping out there?” she asks gamely.

  “No.”

  “Lots of ecommerce spending?”

  “No.”

  “Huh. Then, do the end users…buy a lot from us directly? Digital goods, add-on services—that sort of thing?”

  “No.”

  “So, then…why do we care? About Libya, Iran, and Pakistan? Or rather, why do they care? At ‘the top,’ I mean.”

  “Phluttr is a social operating system,” O says nonsensically, then exits.

  WhistleBlowings blog