After On

by Rob Reid

  The EULA from HELL!!!

  Regular readers know we get frequent jollies from deconstructing Phluttr’s notorious 23,418-word End User License Agreement (EULA). Our all-time favorite passage is section 2.1.a.iii, which gives Phluttr the right to change this agreement unilaterally—AND MAKES THOSE CHANGES APPLY TO ANYONE WHO CONTINUES TO USE PHLUTTR’S INVASIVE APP OR SOFTWARE AFTER THAT CHANGE IS MADE!

  That’s right, folks! Even if you actually READ the War and Peace of EULA’s before clicking “Accept,” you now have to RE-read it MORE OR LESS CONTINUOUSLY lest it change in some bizarre, enslaving way and make YOU an AUTOMATIC PARTY to the revisions!

  Anyway, this morning, our heroes over in Phluttr Legal just slid in a new clause. And boy, is it a doozy! We’ll spare you the legalese, because if we quote the thing extensively they’ll probably slap us with copyright infringement claims like they did last fall! So follow the link and grab an interpreter from the local bar association. What you’ll find is that ALL OF THE RIDICULOUSLY EXTENSIVE PERMISSIONS THAT PHLUTTR ALREADY CLAIMED UNDER ITS PREVIOUS DISGRACE OF A EULA ARE NOW HEREBY ASSIGNED TO PHLUTTR’S MAJOR SHAREHOLDERS AS WELL!!!

  Of course, the EULA doesn’t SAY any of this explicitly. No, no—to decipher this despicable “right” from the revised document, you’ll have to follow a VERITABLE LABYRINTH of cross-references, footnotes, and definitions! The key term to look out for is “Assignee in Fact via Equity Assignment,” which bobs and weaves like a young Muhammad Ali throughout the never-ending clauses and subclauses!

  But legal analysts tell us that the bottom line is ironclad. And so, ALL the rights Phluttr already seized through its original agreement AND ITS EIGHT SUBSEQUENT REVISIONS now ALSO belong to its various VC backers (which doesn’t really worry us, paranoid as we are) AND the forever mysterious Gray Oak partners (which frankly FREAKS US THE FUCK OUT!!!).

  This includes the right to STORE, USE, and RESELL all data collected from your Phluttr-enabled devices (which, unless you’re very diligent about resetting permissions, includes your call log, all mobile emails sent + received, entire GPS history, and EVERY PHOTO YOU EVER TOOK with your smartphone)! Plus all facts “triangulated and inferred” about you by combining Phluttr-sourced data with external data!

  So, to repeat: ALL OF THIS NOW BELONGS TO “GRAY OAK,” IN PERPETUITY. And recall that nobody knows who Gray Oak is! Not us. Nor the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists! Hell, some speculate that even Phluttr’s Phoundr doesn’t have a clue! Well, whoever Gray Oak is, they now know way, way, WAY more about you than your own mother. AND, THEY ALWAYS WILL!!!

  “Alright, out with it!” Danna commands. She’s tracked Tarek and Kuba down to a remote corner of the cafeteria at their appointed time. Her strange encounter with O and his Jedi mind tricks left her craving distraction, and the denouement of the Mitchell/Ellie saga should do the trick.

  “What were we talking about again?” Kuba teases.

  “Ellie’s texts to Mitchell,” Danna snaps, not remotely amused. “The two she actually sent. From her plane to Austria! What’d they say again?”

  Actually—as you already know from my tell-all recounting—Ellie sent not two, but five texts to Mitchell that day. But two were real stumpers, and they’re the ones Danna’s thinking about. The first said:

  SERIOUSLY? But I have ZERO battery. Shutting off til on plane. Halfway to jfk. Stand by u nutcase

  The follow-up came two hours, four minutes, and twelve seconds later (and I can go clear down to micro, nano, or femtoseconds if we must). It said:

  OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG Oh my god wait til I get my hands on you!!!

  Lacking a clue—and much of an imagination (and I say this so fondly, because, as you know: I am his biggest fan), Mitchell totally misinterpreted all this. Ellie, he figured, had read the torrid correspondence that flowed ’twixt their cellphones. As there was nothing faintly gentlemanly about his contributions to it, her second message was surely a well-deserved threat. He’d since started countless apologetic emails, but all seemed hollow and self-serving. She lacked Internet access in her Austrian granny’s pre-Anschluss digs anyway. So he spent most of the long weekend fretting about what she’d do once she “got her hands on him.” Strangulation? A more figurative assault? What??

  He found out shortly after dusk on the day of Ellie’s return. Mom was out doing errands, so Mitchell answered when the doorbell rang. Ellie, looking primped and perfect, entered wordlessly, slammed him against the wall, then kissed him for minutes without pausing for breath. When she finally pulled back, her eyes were moist. “Thank you,” she said, then grabbed him hard and kissed him again and again and again.

  It was Steppenwolf that did it. How, Ellie had wondered at least a thousand times during that long Austrian weekend, could Mitchell have possibly known how Hesse’s writing moved her—Siddhartha, Journey to the East, and, above all, Steppenwolf? Discovering that this was also his favorite novel astounded her. Hell, she wouldn’t have guessed he even had a favorite novel! He’d plodded so grumpily through most of their reading assignments going clear back to sixth-grade English. But it was just the façade of a sensitive jock afraid to expose his soul! Mitchell was also rarely one to remember birthdays. So she was stunned to find his elegantly wrapped gift secreted in her bag on the way to the airport, with the playful instructions not to open it until she had boarded. It drove her crazy to wait! But she obeyed his sweet and insistent note. Then, laying eyes upon that gorgeous, hardbound early edition of Steppenwolf, she literally wept. She managed that one text message before her phone died, then spent five days revising her every thought and feeling toward her forever-Platonic friend who—come to think of it (as she indeed came to think of it, again and again and again)—was quite hot, thoroughly good-hearted, and a delight to be around. And, it seemed, nowhere near as dumb as he played!

  As Ellie blurted this out between ravenous kisses, Mitchell didn’t quite know what to say. It might puncture the mood to confess that the only Steppenwolf he knew of was a classic rock band, to ask precisely when her birthday was (recent-ish, was it?), or to admit he could barely make his bed, much less wrap a gift. But he was an honest guy, and this all came out quickly. Ellie didn’t believe him for at least a day. Then she coyly pretended not to believe him for a while. By the time she was openly puzzling about who was behind all this lunacy, it hardly mattered, because they were firmly and joyously a couple. It was a week before Mitchell mustered the nerve to mention the XXX SMS dialogue with her imposter. Finding this hysterically awesome, Ellie proceeded to text him unspeakably filthy things for weeks (eclipsing even the worst of the anonymous texts on three occasions, one of which shocks all of us to this day). This, despite not once letting him into her pants. Nope. Not even close.

  Throughout their romance’s six-week course, becoming a couple seemed like it had been inevitable. And maybe it was! But being so close from so early an age, Mitchell had needed that nudge to think of Ellie in sexual terms—and she needed a bigger one to start viewing him romantically. Cartoonishly perverse come-hithers, and an elegant old-world gift did the trick, respectively. Which violently begged the question of who planted those things? The obvious suspect was Heather Cassidy. But Heather didn’t crack under interrogation—which fully exonerated her, as she was constitutionally incapable of keeping a secret. Kuba then fell under brief suspicion. But his English wasn’t idiomatic enough to pull off those texts, and he’d never even heard of Hermann Hesse. He was fascinated by the whole caper, though, and remained stridently convinced that a post-Turing AI was in some way involved. Mitchell half persuaded him of the absurdity of this (among countless holes in the theory, exactly how would a superintelligent…iMac, or whatever; go about slipping a gift-wrapped book into Ellie’s travel bag?). But that only octupled Kuba’s commitment to their Turing Test project. “Even if it wasn’t someone’s software behind it,” he said with more mad-scientist edge than anyone found comfortable. “Just imagine if it was!” As if this made a shred of se
nse.

  Still, Kuba slept through the next month of classes while dedicating his wee hours to making digital mimicries of human thought. And that’s when he got way into Higgensworth himself. Not his reviews, but his work as an ethicist. That was Cousin Charles’s profession, to the extent he had one. He tackled ethical questions with a deep, logical syntax that verged on high math. Kuba even labeled him a “computational ethicist” (though Charles claimed to be a Luddite, and a computer illiterate—playfully, but not entirely falsely). His was a philosophy of proofs, with influences as ancient as Heraclitus, Pythagoras, and Thales. He reasoned with alphabets of squiggles, which he built atop standard propositional calculus. His work appeared in several learned journals, and a slender volume of his thoughts, Zeroth-Order Logic, was deemed brilliant by the dozen-ish academics who read it. “This is the very stuff of thought!” Kuba said daily, waving the book at anyone who’d listen (which was usually just Mitchell). “The key to crushing the Turing Test is in here someplace!”

  Real as Kuba’s new obsession was, Mitchell soon detected its underpinning. The poor guy was basically self-medicating! Because plainly, he was crazy about Ellie, after all. She was his one intellectual peer at school, the sole girl who regularly blasted him with sweetness and fondness, and was, by Kuba’s meticulous calculations, juuuust within his reach.

  This was reason enough to get Mitchell questioning his new romance. Meanwhile, he and Ellie were both quietly concluding that whoever set them up could forget about that Nobel Prize for matchmaking. Yes, an intense, latent curiosity had awakened in them. But Ellie’s thirst was wholly slaked by athletic smooching, which did little but arouse Mitchell. They were by no means the first teenage couple to diverge on this issue. But they were on enough other sets of separate pages to fill many volumes. Some were meaningless (like Mets vs. Yankees). Others, though small, hinted at character differences (such as dog person/cat person). And above everything loomed the unspoken, awkward fact that Ellie was a bit too smart for Mitchell. He couldn’t quite keep up with the insights and fascinations that made her truly special. And Ellie couldn’t keep up on other fronts. Mitchell loved to run, bike, skate, snowboard, jump, skid, and tumble. Ellie was OK-ish with much of that, but her idea of fun was quite a bit more indoorsy.

  Then there was Mitchell’s apparent allergy to Ellie. Well, not to her, but to…thoughts about her! It started maybe two weeks into their couplehood. A gifted multitasker, Mitchell was playing Call of Duty, while ruminating about his embarrassing cognitive deficits relative to his girlfriend. Then, suddenly, his fingers, toes, and face exploded with tingling! His screen and speakers were pummeling his senses just then, but that wasn’t unusual (he’d played similar games for thousands of hours without adverse reactions). No. What was new to him was this fussy, angsty musing over a girlfriend. And he was allergic to it!

  Years on, Mitchell would have words for all of this. They would include “cataplexy,” “Falkenberg’s disease,” and “misattribution.” But back when it was happening, his subconscious—muddled, as it was, by alarm and confusing emotions—developed a nascent, tiny, but (barely) discernible aversion to Ellie. Ellie’s highly perceptive subconscious detected this and was saddened. And so, she recoiled, too. Only to a tiny and (barely) discernible degree. But Mitchell’s subconscious detected that, and a negative feedback loop commenced. The net result was a quick path to a mutual, and remarkably uncontroversial breakup. And so, theirs was a fun, fleeting romance that left zero scars. Just the sort of outcome that can later allow one party to wed the other’s future co-founder without lasting awkwardness.

  But that doesn’t mean their little high school fling didn’t alter the course of human history! Throughout it, Kuba diverted his thoughts from Ellie by drowning himself in the Turing project and translating certain relevant Higgensworth syllogisms into code. His psyche was primed for this by the gorgeous storm of transcendental wonder that struck when he briefly thought “Cyrano” was awake. Years on, the echo of this same bolt of awe would sustain a fascination with artificial consciousness, even as the actual work of his early career diverged from it.

  Doubling down on the Turing project also caused Kuba to expand his Bulgarian circle to include several Russians, two of whom turned out to be remarkably sketchy. And this happened just as Project Sagan (the artificial intelligence program that employed Beasley back when he still went by “Nickerson”) was being shuttered with a shudder of governmental horror. In the paranoid wake of both this and the 9/11 attacks, a noncitizen hatching forbidden technologies with sketchy Russian help was an irresistible target for any immigration enforcer with a quota. So when Kuba’s deportation came, it was swift and sudden.

  His parents were spared (Dad had a high security clearance, Mom was married to Dad, and the enforcer only needed one more scalp to make her Q2 number anyway). They remained in Connecticut for the sake of his two younger sisters, their educations and futures. So Kuba alone was drop-kicked clear back to Warsaw. Then, all family members were informed that Dad was thiiiiiiis close (with thumb and forefinger held within microns of dramatic collision on both sides of the Atlantic in illustration) to losing his clearance—and with it his green card—if his shady son exchanged any communiqués with his American co-conspirator; which was to say, one Mitchell Prentice.

  Mitchell knew all about the deportation. But the thumb-and-forefinger bit was classified. So in his eyes, Kuba simply lost all interest in their friendship after being exiled to the care of an aunt and three she-cousins (a crew whose photos corroborated Kuba’s jokey depiction of Poland as the land of beautiful women and ugly men). Mitchell was hurt; at times quite hurt. But life goes on. As indeed, it did for years and years. Kuba directed the barrage of email he might have sent to Mitchell from Poland to Ellie, so instead of becoming strangers, they grew close. And over time, the Sagan freak-out faded from institutional minds and memories.

  Then over more time, those minds reached the awful realization that rival nations could now catch America’s star-spangled ass in many computational fields! And so, certain people who’d been told to take their forbidden technologies back to their stinkin’ homelands were quietly readmitted to the home of the brave. Kuba was among them and had no idea why. But the instant he got the nod, he jetted to California to interview with Google, and to finally ask Dr. Llewella “Ellie” Jansen out.

  This book has a certain personal relevance for me because we have a Cujo of our own—a tiny Bichon Frise (if you’re not familiar with the breed, imagine a toy poodle, only far less intimidating). We selected him based on the unlikelihood of his devouring our newborn twins—although now that they’ve grown a bit, the inverse is of increasing concern (particularly in the case of our son, what with those exotic dietary urges). I initially sought to name the yappy trifle something fitting, such as Bitsy, Poofblossom, or Fluffmuffin. However, my wife gulled me into agreeing to Cujo. You see, Carlotta is far younger than I, and occasionally hatches little pranks that play upon my relative ignorance of popular culture (true story: I almost consented to naming our slightly pudgy infant son “Cartman” after she persuaded me that this was the surname of a faded but celebrated old-monied family from Maine).

  Anyhow, this Cujo is a friendly Saint Bernard who is bitten by a rabid bat. Soon enough, he’s demonstrably losing his mind. As he foams at the mouth, stalks small children, stumps for local Democrats, etc., one is wont to reconsider one’s relationship with one’s own little Cujo. I once thought ours was the devil’s very seed due to his nonstop pilfering of food and attention intended for me, to say nothing of those gassy episodes. But on balance, I now suppose that we’re doing just fine with the old boy.

  “But who. The fuck? Sent all. The TEXTS???” Danna is ready to strangle somebody. Kuba, for instance.

  “Nobody knew for years and years,” he says, thoroughly enjoying this.

  “And then. To their lasting astonishment! They. Found out! It was. WHO?”

  Tarek knows better than to butt in but can
’t stop himself. “Don’t you mean ‘whom’?”

  Danna gives his forearm a ninja flick, which (though harmless) stings like a mofo.

  “OK, OK,” Kuba says, giggling—actually giggling—for the first time in ages. “You’re not gonna like this. But you should really ask Mitchell. Because he won’t just tell you. He’ll show you! He’ll show you ‘Exhibit A.’ That’s the best way to wrap up the story, honestly.”

  “Exhibit A???” Danna’s about to escalate to the ninja flick that does cause lasting damage when O materializes across the room. “The fuck is he doing?” she mutters hotly.

  Well, Danna. He’s flapping a thumb against its opposing fingers like a child mimicking a duckie, while his other hand makes the motions of fingers walking across the Yellow Pages (although you’re way too young to recognize that one).

  “Walk and talk,” Tarek translates. “He wants to have a ‘walking meeting’ with you. Persuadifi.er says they boost productivity while burning calories. Oh—and helping the environment. Somehow.”

  “You put him up to this, didn’t you?” Danna snarls, while rising to join her boss.

  As it happens, she doesn’t see the boys again for a few days. Phluttr’s a busy place, and they all get inhaled by their new positions. Kuba is particularly inaccessible over in the PhastPhorwardr. It’s off-limits to nonemployees, and the special dispensation he gets to access it isn’t extended to Mitchell or Danna. And so, when Giftish.ly’s acquisition formally closes, they mark the event by touring the place. Tarek offers to help Kuba show them around. Their desks practically adjoin over there, and they’re already buddies.

  The facility lies a few blocks south of Phluttr’s main headquarters, just across Market Street in the rapidly deindustrializing SoMa district. The nondescript entryway is staffed by an armed (yes, armed) guard. Danna’s already here when Mitchell arrives. Knowing how lethally serious she is about getting to the end of the Cyrano story, he has “Exhibit A” with him.