by Rob Reid
“So,” Judy continues, “let’s imagine—totally hypothetically—that the rumors are true, and Phluttr has deep ties to some powerful, scary players in Washington. Only they’re top secret players, see? These theoretical friends of ours—if they actually exist—would find it hard to help us derail a public inquest by a high-powered commissioner operating within her mandate. Top secret agencies do have lots of power and latitude. But they’re constrained within US borders and in dealing with American citizens. Particularly since the USA Freedom Act clipped certain wings back in 2015, thanks to Mr. Snowden’s awkward revelations, which made certain top secret programs top-unsecret. And certain agencies doubleplusunpopular.”
“The Na-tion-al Sec-ur-i-ty Ag-en-cy, for one!” Jepson hisses, using a madcap stage whisper to finally mention an unmentionable.
“And as for other branches of the government?” Judy continues. “Oi!” She says this like a Clash-era British punk, not a playful American Jew. “They were hard enough to deal with before Snowden. Now everyone’s playing for the galleries and acting like they’re Daniel fucking Ellsberg!” She drops her voice a notch, giving Mitchell a look that can only be described as parenthetical. “Before your time, kid. Pentagon Papers.” Then, back in high dudgeon: “So. If some puffed-up FTC bitch who’s grandstanding for a Senate run gets a discreet request from the dark side to drop her damned investigation, she’ll sooner blab to the HuffPo than cooperate!”
“Bottom line, this investigation’s really dangerous for Phluttr,” Jepson says.
“And for its Phoundr,” Judy adds, with the inimitable zeal of a lawyer discussing a moneyed client’s legal woes. “Who could be looking at ten to fifteen in San Quentin, given the teeth these privacy laws suddenly have! And it’s not like our top secret buddies—”
“Hypothetical top secret buddies,” Jepson clarifies joshingly.
“—operate under some chivalric, ‘No Man Left Behind’ code. Christ, I know a Medal of Honor winner rotting in a Karachi cell because it’d be a PR headache to admit he’s there! So however great an asset Phluttr is to the Authority, do you really think they’d stick their heads over the parapet for you?”
Mitchell shakes his head. Having never heard of the Authority, he can honestly attest that this never crossed his mind.
“At this point,” Jepson says, all but plucking Mitchell’s next thought straight from his cortex, “you may be wondering what this has to do with you. Well, somebody who’s not named Tony Jepson needs to be the FTC’s interface here at Phluttr. Someone who’s genuinely clueless about all the stuff we may or may not have hinted at during this conversation.”
“Someone who could put his hand on the Bible,” Judy says, “or his chest, bicep, and fingers into the polygraph—and sincerely proclaim, I know nothhhh-ink!” An apparent old-school cultural reference, this soars right over Mitchell’s head though it can’t be flattering.
“Someone who’s loyal,” Jepson says, with a little attaboy wink. “Who we can trust!”
“And who will not crack,” Judy adds. “Not under waterboarding. Dismemberment. Even…unmanning!” She enjoys Mitchell’s horror quite a bit longer than necessary, then adds, “I’m just fucking with ya, kid. I doubt it’ll go much past a polygraph.”
“We like you for this job for a few reasons,” Jepson says. “First, you’re obviously smart enough. Second, you practically ripped Raj’s throat out for dissing Danna! I loved that. It showed loyalty! To Danna, anyway.”
“Another thing? As Jepson’s shadow and backstop, you’re his direct report,” Judy says. “One of exactly two. Because, technically, the entire company reports to Beasley, who in turn reports to Jepson. Things’re of course different on a de facto level. But in dealing with investigations, de jure is all that counts. And de jure, Beasley runs everything, for reasons you do not want to know. And by now, I’m sure you realize we can’t put him in front of anyone sensitive.”
“So, gooooo Mitchell, that leaves you!” Jepson says, pointing at him Uncle Sam style. “The FTC’ll already be plenty pissed that I’m pushing them down a notch in the org chart. Dropping two levels just ain’t gonna work! So we really have to connect them with one of my directs. And last but not least, the final reason why you’re perfect for this?” Jepson pauses dramatically, then gives Judy a take-it-away wave.
“Your cousin works for me! Small world, huh? And I don’t mind him. So, for transitive reasons, I don’t mind you!” Mitchell looks at her blankly. “You…do know who I’m talking about, right?”
No, not really. He has a weirdly large number of cousins for a New England WASP. Though the broader tribe slowed its breeding program long ago in a dismayed response to Roosevelt, Mitchell’s clan kept at it. And as every kid-choked family reunion attests, they’re still maintaining Melville-era fecundity well into the Kardashian age.
Once it’s clear he has no idea who she’s talking about, Judy barks, “I want it that way?” Mitchell pegs this for a clue, but it doesn’t help. So she snaps, “Quit playing games with my heart!” This is definitely a hint, not a plea; so he just shrugs. Finally, “Backstreet Boy, duh.”
“Oh, Nick Carter!” Nick is a rather distant cousin—Pugwash’s age, closer to Pugwash in the tangled family tree, and a good guy from what Mitchell recalls from childhood. But the main thing he knows about Nick is that he hates the goddam Backstreet Boys (which Mitchell can also get behind), on account of tragically sharing a name with one of them—then entering young adulthood just as they hit it big.
“So,” Judy concludes, “Jepson trusts you directly. I trust you indirectly. And our only other option is Beasley, so it’s not like we have a choice. Our first meeting with the commissioner isn’t in the calendar yet, but expect it in two or three weeks. Until then? Toodle-oo.”
ONLINE DATING: BIG DATA DRIVES A RACE TO THE BOTTOM
Among the more dehumanizing results of Big Data’s relentless march (a rather high-bar domain) is its metastasizing impact on the World Wide Woo (and yes, that’s NetGrrrlSpeak for online dating). It was inevitable that someone would synthesize these areas into a new field of scholarship (Data for Pussy!). And as it happened, my colleagues in bloggerhood over at Masculin.ist took the first crack (and no puns, please—Jesus!).
Having snagged anonymized data from a certain hookup site, they quickly reduced the entire endeavor of romance to a single number: 1.82. And to put Science to work for you, horny reader, you were advised to let X equal the number of minutes your online quarry took to answer your last message—and then, withhold your own response until exactly 1.82X minutes passed. This interval, Masculin.ist scient.ists certified, would maximize the odds of your note leading to ejaculation (or, at least, to the girl writing back. Sorry boys—but walk before running, eh?).
This made at least some sense. Insta-replies are the hallmark of overeager losers, so letting >X minutes pass might signal that you’re a stud with plenty of hotties to service, digitally or otherwise. But delays of, say, 3X minutes could risk overplaying your hand and unleash the romance-quashing insecurities, which (Masculin.ist asserts) are core to the female psyche. All told, it was grotesquely simplistic “research.” And as this information spread—or should I say “as disinformation spread” (get it??)—untold numbers of romantic dialogues trailed off into silence as both sides continuously upped the number of minutes, hours, and (eventually) decades that stretched between exchanges (sorry Mr. Kurzweil, but sometimes exponential growth actually kind of sucks).
Needless to say, there was nothing particularly Big about the Data presented in that seminal research (and again, QUIT IT WITH THE PUNS! I swear, you people…). Truly big dating data only became a reality with the rise of RedTrove. This open-source service will, with your permission, monitor your flirting and mating attempts on sites as mainstream as Match.com, or as specialized as FurryMate (ewww!—Ed.). RedTrove then combines your anonymized information with that of its other users, creating a Hadoop-worthy pile of stats-n-facts that anyone can comb through
.
Several services are now adding proprietary layers atop RedTrove’s data, the classiest of which is certainly DidSheDo.yu. Here, users are asked to self-report the sexual payoffs of their online conquests. And lest you cynics suspect the service is overrun by aging virgins who get off on claiming their every text leads to coitus, rest assured that all users are bound by the strict terms of the DidSheDo.yu Honor Code (#ShitICouldNotMakeUp).
For a small fee, DidSheDo.yu will furnish you with a scientifically derived timeline to help you pace your stream of messages, silences, and cock photos to the belle of your dreams. They purport to do this so well that users can confidently specify the precise outcomes they’re seeking up front, as if ordering at a diner (UPDATE: I SWEAR TO GOD, for two days, the now-blank square to the right contained a screen grab of a drop-down menu including Blowjob, Anal, Threesome, and “ATM” [whaaat?] plucked from the DSD.yu mobile app, which I pulled down after being threatened with a copyright lawsuit).
To be clear perfectly: none of these apps work even slightly (a statement that can be generalized to include all cock photos at all times—seriously, gentlemen—so please stop clogging our inboxes with this icky, and [trust me, here] laughably ineffective spam). But that doesn’t mean there isn’t useful data in RedTrove because there certainly is.
Being intrigued by the subject of online courtship, and something of a data ninjette, I took a long, slow dive through that data. And after slicing and correlating innumerable variables, I found—to my startlement and delight—that men still initiate over 95% of would-be romantic interactions, even in these modern times (less on Tinder, but it’s still a high ratio there).
This feels like a remarkably traditional state of affairs, given all else that’s changed in the bedroom since the dawn of the sexual revolution. Back then, the bid/ask spread was men wanting the obvious, and the ladies counteroffering, I’ll do you for a ring. So let’s turn to RedTrove and see where we are now!
Hmmm. It seems the male position has yet to budge. Whereas we spent the last fifty years budging our naughty little bottoms off (in certain cities, data suggests that the median’s slid to I’ll blow you for an amaretto sour. Thanks for all the awesome leadership during our formative years, Paris, Britney & friends!). This isn’t to say that “do you for a ring” was entirely sane or healthy. But the same could surely be said of their opening position. So, please let the record show that we’ve met our confreres well past midway between imperfect starting points.
Except. We still hold their feet to the fire when it comes to making the first move. To this day, it’s the boys who have to fight the butterflies, face rejection, and man up when they approach us. So yayyy, go us!
*Sigh* And how nice would it’ve been if I’d just left it at that? I could’ve typed up the cutest post about my discovery! And maybe saved it for Valentine’s Day! Oooh, or prom season! But no, I just had to dive a lit-tle bit deeper, didn’t I? Because I was dying to know what those sweet little armies of stammering traditionalists were using as their opening gambits when they got up the nerve to approach their would-be sweethearts!
I could tell you right now. But email beckons, and I’m a cortex tease (not to mention a click ho), so tune in tomorrow for our exciting conclusion…
The newly christened Team Cyrano thoroughly brainstorms Danna’s idea before Mitchell returns from his meeting. She’s burning to tell him all about it! But Kuba wants them to meet one of his favorite PhastPhorwardr workmates before the guy takes off for the cafeteria, and Tarek needs to finish arranging their robot-lab visit. So Mitchell, Kuba, and Danna dash off to a dark, tiny, and strangely cold roomlet. It’s empty, save for a silver cylinder that looks like a home water heater. A really nice water heater. One polished so flawlessly by its OCD-stricken owner that it could probably find work as a funhouse mirror should heating water prove a bad career choice. “Can you guys guess what this is?” Kuba whispers, almost reverentially. They look closer at the cylinder’s utterly featureless surface. A few brightly colored cables connect it to a port in the ceiling. Two small pipes exit it at arm height, then thrust through the back wall. That’s about it.
Mitchell shocks everyone by guessing, “A quantum computer?” He just stumbled across a piece about these in a back issue of Time (yeah, Time—he decides to keep this fact to himself).
“Exactly! The processor’s kept in the cryocooler,” Kuba says, pointing at the cylinder. “Everything else is back there.” He points to the wall the pipes exit through. “They keep the processor isolated, and chilled to ten millikelvin. That’s incredibly close to absolute zero. They also maintain a high vacuum in there. About one ten-billionth of an atmosphere. Magnetism is heavily shielded, too. And so on.”
“All this for a social network?” Danna asks suspiciously.
“But Phluttr is a social operating system!” booms a deep voice behind them—startling Mitchell and Danna to the point of almost jumping out of their flesh. They wheel and find themselves facing a guy whose hairy red penumbra might technically be a mane, as it’s hard to tell where (or if) the boundaries lie between bangs, fro, chops, dreads, mustache, and beard. Were he not the height of a Nordic point guard, you might peg him for a Tolkien dwarf. “I am Ax,” he says, extending his right hand. As Mitchell’s standing a bit closer, he’s the one who smashes his knuckles on the rock-hard monitor mounted to the vault-thick door maybe six inches behind them. Ax’s ensuing laughter is too warm to carry any hint of mockery even though it’s clear that Mitchell’s been pranked, and good.
And so, Mitchell and Danna meet two PhastPhorwardr stalwarts at once—Ax, and the monitor itself: a prototype called WingMan XXL. It’s a teleconferencing system based on the display technology in the WingMan augmented-reality glasses. Using an ultrahigh-resolution feed, it ingeniously alters your interlocutors’ apparent size, orientation, and lighting, so it looks like you’re all occupying the same physical space. Which would be nigh impossible in this tiny room, given Ax’s evident size. Yet it looks uncannily like he’s standing a comfortable few feet away from them. Looking very closely, the illusion’s not quite perfect. But it was good enough to make Mitchell bash the close-in monitor when he reached for Ax’s hand. “We’ll all be getting desktop versions of this monitor next week,” Kuba says. “They’re rolling out prototypes to the whole company. As for Ax? Well, introduce yourself.”
“I am founder of Quantum Supremacy Corporation,” Ax says. “From Russia, originally. But I am een America over twenty years now.”
“Ax is short for ‘Maxim,’ ” Kuba explains.
“Is popular man’s name in Russia. But is popular man’s magazine here! So…” Ax makes an ax-like gesture with his hand, as if hacking his name down to size. “I have degrees in electrical engineering and pheee-sics. But not Eeenglish dee-ction. HA HA!” Good Lord, those H’s! Ax sounds like a diner attempting self-rescue while panicked waiters consult a Heimlich poster.
“No, I wouldn’t peg you as an English major,” Mitchell snips. He feels a bit dickish saying this. But justified, as his right knuckles smart and his heart’s still racing from the scare this joker gave them. And seriously, that accent! After twenty years in the US?
“My research is in forestalling wave-function collapse at millikelvin temperatures to extend decoherence time. Eeessential to quantum computing. By the way! What is your sign?”
“Um…Aquarius,” Mitchell says.
“Air sign. Nice!”
“Hey, where are you dialing in from?” Danna asks. “Your network latency’s amazing.”
“Very far away,” Ax says, with hammed-up wistfulness, whereupon the door slides open to reveal the guy’s face almost precisely where the monitor had rendered it. “HA HA,” he erupts, pointing at his face, then at the monitor fixed to the sliding door they’re now exiting. “Eez nice, yes? Eez like pun. Only visual. Visual pun!” His Elmo-like delight is so charming, his pranks are forgiven. “So, Aquarius. You tell me exact birthday. Time of birth and city, too. I draw
you full chart. But now, is almost three thirty. Come, we drink milk!” Ax heads for the exit, his giant strides leaving no time for discussion.
Heading north through SoMa’s bustle to the main Phluttr office’s cafeteria, Ax reveals that he’s a world-class astrology expert—despite thinking the field is bullshit. Widespread anti-Semitism and a partial Jewish background kept him out of the better universities during the Soviet end-times. So he went straight from high school to a low-paid government post. It offered computer access, which was all he wanted from life anyway. This was in a stagnant backwater of the KGB—a unit tasked with studying “American superstitions,” whose popularity, the kommissars hoped, signified exploitable defects in capitalist culture. One subgroup worked on UFO belief, another on Big Foot (seriously), quite a large team focused on Catholicism, and so forth. As for the zodiac, it had intrigued the KGB ever since it came out that a Bay Area astrologista exerted inordinate influence over President Reagan’s calendar (laugh all you want, but the guy did have a pretty good run). Ax joined that team. He helped write software to calculate astrologically auspicious dates for thousands of US government and military figures. Correlating these with the timing of their speeches and public events, the KGB triangulated who else was taking cues from the stars. “In the eighties, it was one US politician in five! And, Republicans more than Democrats!”
Now at the cafeteria, they join an astonishingly long line for 3:30 P.M., and Ax continues his story. As the Berlin Wall teetered, he connived his way to Washington to defect. No surprise: the NSA was intrigued by his KGB affiliation. Until he mentioned his astrology work—then they laughed him out of the room! They did let him stay in the US as a civilian, thank God. But with the economy entering a brief but nasty recession, the tech world wasn’t hiring Russian teens who still found DOS to be quite amazing. Ax eventually scored an interview at an astrological software company (yes, there were several). Those guys were mind-blown by his mastery of their field! And so, he mounted his first rung on the tech industry’s ladder. Working on the periphery of the occult, he gradually grew fond of the eerie and the spiritual. So as he matured as a technologist, he was instinctively drawn to quantum computing—a truly spooky domain.