It pisses her off. She hates Valentine’s Day.
Amy’s about to drop her phone back into her handbag when she notices the ad directly opposite her seat.
Romantic getaways for two on Tahiti
Beach in St. Tropez...
A simulation of her: strolling barefoot though the sand, long blonde hair tossed by the ocean breeze, wearing the same sari she wore in her holiday photos from Australia three years ago. She’s laughing – the ad is playing a sample of her laugh – as is the man whose hand she’s holding, some dark-haired foreign type. Amy almost waves her smartphone at the ad to pull more details from it, before realising what’s wrong with this picture. The ad has assumed she already has a partner to go on a romantic getaway with. Why would it think that?
She calls up her auto, checks her profile and feels her heart boom.
Relationship status:
Couple/Monogamous.
Amy Pearce is in a relationship with
Juan-Miguel Fernández Mendoza.
“What the hell is this!” she barks.
Beside her, a lady reading her KindleBlaze turns, tuts, scowls. Amy knows she’s broken the Londoner rules by talking out loud, but then sticks to them by not making eye contact. Her glare is focused on her smartphone.
The tube pulls out of Vauxhall. She’s missing her stop, but doesn’t care, because the impossible has just happened. Her relationship status has just changed, all by itself! It should say Single/Available, as it has for most of her life. Except on those few occasions when she had a boyfriend, and briefly changed it to Couple/Available. But never, ever, ever, Couple/Monogamous! And with who? Some random Spanish bloke she’s never even heard of!
Amy guesses this has only happened in the last minute or so, as congratulatory messages start flooding in. The autos of all the people in her Circle are automatically responding with smileys, winks, thumbs, tweets, songs, video clips... and Amy’s stomach rolls as she realises they are all saying roughly the same thing.
Well done Amy Pearce! Woo-hoo!
About time too!
About bloody time Amy Pearce!
And he’s hottttttt!
Oh yay, Amy Pearce is finally in
love!!! Just in time for Valentine’s Day
too!!! Hugs to you both! XXXX
They’ve all been waiting for this, she thinks. It’s what they all want for me.
From the ad, Amy’s stolen laughter rolls down the tube carriage.
Scowling, Amy moves fast, knowing that any second now it’s going to be noticed by her mother’s auto, and she can’t face that right now. A few terse words into her phone and her auto is updating her profile.
Relationship status:
Single/Available.
Instantly, all her mates’ autos retract messages, downdate statuses, redact invitations from her calendar. Amy watches with satisfaction as the mistake is corrected, unravelling across her Circle as if it never happened.
Which it didn’t! What went wrong there? Surely her auto hadn’t been hacked into? She can’t remember the last time she’d heard of that happening. Some sort of glitch? Weird!
But not so weird she wants to find out the reason. Amy isn’t a geek or anything.
By the time she gets to her flat, irritation has burned away the feelgood buzz she’d left the bar with. The front door unlocks two seconds before she reaches it, relocks when she slams it shut behind her. Amy stomps straight into her small kitchen, heats up soup, cuts bread, opens a jar of olives. She carries her meal on a small tray into the living room.
Both mainscreen and sidescreen light up as she walks in. The bigger monitor starts playing yesterday’s episode of EastEnders, picking up from the very moment her eyes closed when she dozed off in front of the screen last night.
Amy sits down and gestures at the screen, circling her index finger round and round in the air to scroll through channels. When she gets to BBCZero, the subscription channel, she prods forward to select it, then flicks her fingers sideways to drag the EastEnders programme onto it. She’s had enough of ads tonight.
As she eats and watches the rest of the episode without interruptions, the sidescreen is a constant flow of images, text and links. Her auto is there, doing its job. It highlights 16 TV shows coming up that it knows she may be interested in. It reminds her of 78 pre-recorded programmes. It lets her know that it’s currently having 24 conversations with other autos in her Circle, and that three of them may be worth listening to. It flags up news items and blog updates and tweets and urgent admin tasks that it considers high priority.
Amy watches TV and her auto at the same time, like everyone does. Every now and then she tells it to do something, while still following the unfolding drama of the terrorist attack on Walford.
She says “Renew gym membership, six month contract.”
She says “Reveet Aunty Agnes’s mash-up.”
She says “Confirm Frank and John’s party, order two bottles of rum, redact anything in the calendar for the day after.”
She says “Decline Cally’s birthday party, buy her a present, twenty pound limit, pump her auto for ideas, deliver for Friday.”
She says “Confirm Flag gig, transfer ticket cost to Jessica.”
She says “STOP!”
Her auto freezes its feed. With her left hand, Amy mimes drawing two fingers together, lowering the TV volume until the sound of explosions fades to silence. She gapes at the familiar updates on the sidescreen.
Oh yay, Amy Pearce is finally in love!!!
Just in time for Valentine’s Day too!!!
Love to you both! XXXX
Well done Amy Pearce!
Woo-hoo! About time too!
About bloody time Amy Pearce!
And he’s hottttttt!
The same status updates from her friends. Plus the one she was hoping to avoid, from her mother’s auto:
Well it’s about time my daughter Amy
Pearce found someone, I’ve been
telling her for years to settle down,
not that she ever listens. Make sure
you don’t make a mess of it this time.
When were you thinking of telling me
this then? When were you thinking of
introducing us then?
Which means...
Amy pushes her meal aside and drags her auto from sidescreen to mainscreen, swapping with EastEnders. Snaps her fingers, the command to go to profile home.
And there it is again.
Relationship status:
Couple/Monogamous.
Amy Pearce is in a relationship with
Juan-Miguel Fernández Mendoza.
“Auto interface,” Amy half-shouts. Her profile drops to the lower half of the mainscreen to be replaced by something more functional. Settings. Two dozen categories of them. Then emerging out of the list to fill the top half of the screen comes something simple, outlined in electric blue. Something she hasn’t used for years.
Amy Pearce auto interface ready.
Amy summons the airboard and her fingers start typing in the empty space above her lap, causing letters to spring across the screen, but then she catches herself and dismisses it with a wave. She did that on instinct. That’s how long it’s been since she used the interface to talk to her auto... back in the days of physical keyboards.
“Why has my relationship status changed?” she asks. Almost instantly, a response blinks onto the mainscreen.
Amy Pearce relationship status
changed to Couple/Monogamous at
9:56pm Monday 14 February 2022.
“Not when! Why!”
Relationship status change authorised
by user.
“Oh yeah? Who did that, then, cause it wasn’t –”
I did.
Amy’s pulse jumps. She catches her breath.
Is that... is that normal?
She shakes her head. It’s been so long since she had to interact directly like this... but she can’t remem
ber her auto ever referring to itself in this way. But maybe this is normal now.
She sits up straight and says “Rollback relationship status.”
The interface sits there, glowing blue. Amy’s fingers perform a short ballet to bring up her profile on the sidescreen, which is still telling the world she’s now part of a couple. On her profile wall, messages and tweets from everyone in her Circle come pouring down like a waterfall of words.
“Revert my relationship status,” she snaps, trying to remember the right trigger words you had to use back in the old days. “Change my profile. Single/Available. Activate! Do it!”
The interface glows.
“Why have you done this?” Amy is more unnerved by the quavering of her own voice than anything.
Whole sentences blink down the mainscreen, one by one.
I like Juan-Miguel Fernández
Mendoza.
I want to be with Juan-Miguel
Fernández Mendoza.
Juan-Miguel Fernández Mendoza is
right for Amy Pearce.
Amy feels her half-finished dinner roll around inside her belly like a live animal.
She takes a deep breath. And another. It suddenly feels like she’s in the wrong flat. A stranger’s home. What’s going on, what the hell’s happened to my auto, what... okay, okay, think!
Amy knows her auto is, like everyone else’s, programmed with every piece of data about her. Bank details, medical history, the lot. It manages her entire social universe, understands the connections between her and nearly a thousand others.
But more than that – it learns from her. It knows what she likes, what she dislikes, what she needs, what she avoids. What turns her on. It browses the social networks looking for people it thinks she might like to know, for any of a hundred reasons. It keeps an eye on the sexnets and recommends available men she might like to flirt with, or date, or invite round. That’s how people meet: their autos make digital overtures, compare stats, and have actual conversations. If there’s enough compatibility, her auto reports that it’s found someone she might like to meet for real. By the time Amy goes for a drink with a guy, they both feel like they’ve already met. Takes all the awkwardness out of it. She won’t even look at a man unless her auto has approved him, even if he comes up and says hello to her face. That’s not how it’s done.
So does her auto know something she doesn’t? Has it really found her perfect man? Maybe this isn’t a glitch at all.
“Okay. Show me...” She struggles to pronounce unfamiliar syllables. It looks like she’s sneering. “...Juan-Miguel Fernández Mendoza.”
The interface slips onto the sidescreen to make way for his profile. Amy leans forward, studying the stranger. Most of it is in Spanish, so she hasn’t got a clue what all his status updates are saying, or what his preferences are. But she works out that this is a 33 year old man from somewhere called Basque Country, which doesn’t even sound like a real place, and from the look of all the exclamation marks on his posts (are they meant to be upside down like that at the start, or is that another glitch?), he’s the excitable type. Which means the childish type, in Amy’s book.
She browses through his photo galleries with rapid finger-swipes. Juan-Miguel’s face fills her screen: messy black hair, stubble, deep eyes, and a white smile that almost looks too big for his face. He’s broad-shouldered, hairy-chested and olive-skinned, exactly the opposite of the slim, smooth, vampire-pale men she likes.
Oh God. What will people say if they think she’s dating a Euro? (And even that’s the polite newsfeed term. Almost everyone Amy knows calls them ‘conts’, as in continental, a word that’s definitely said with a sneer.) Sure, all her Circle’s autos are giving this the thumbs-up, but you can bet that’s not what her friends are secretly saying in their PMs to each other.
Nobody’s been too keen on Euros, since the big split with the EU. ‘Splendid Isolation’ is the meme this year. You can’t move for Union Jacks right now. She’s even going with some girlfriends to a reunion concert by Flag, the boyband she used to lust after when she was a teenager. They’ve launched their comeback tour on the back of the whole New Britannia thing, which they’re the new poster boys for, topping the bill at the Platinum Jubilee festival.
And here’s Amy, secretly dating a proper cont...
No. This has to stop now.
“Auto,” she says firmly. “You know how this works. You make contact with other people, and recommendations, but that’s it. You don’t change my status without my approval.” Although, she thinks, perhaps that setting was changed in the last upgrade? That sometimes happens, they’re always tweaking things in the background without letting users know. That must be it. Such a simple thing!
The interface glows.
Amy sighs, like a teacher with a stubborn child. “What’s our see-eye?”
Compatibility Index: 62%.
“Is that all? That’s nowhere near high enough, we’ve hardly got anything in common! Revert relationship status back to Single/Available now.”
Unable to change relationship status.
“You have to change it, it’s not true!”
It is true. Juan-Miguel Fernández
Mendoza and Amy Pearce are a
couple.
“But we’re not! I’ve never met – ”
The auto jumps from sidescreen to mainscreen by itself.
YES WE ARE.
“Shit!” Amy jumps back, staring at the words. She looks back and forth, as if lost... and suddenly realises what part of the gibberish on Juan-Miguel’s profile means.
Estado de relacíon:
Pareja/Monógamo.
Juan-Miguel Fernández Mendoza
tiene una relación con Amy Pearce.
It’s on his profile too. He’s claiming to be her partner! The lying little cont! Did he do this, somehow? Has he hacked into her settings?
Feeling sick, Amy sits back on her sofa. The sidescreen is a rapid stream of messages, as half the people in her Circle chatter about her new boyfriend. Her mother’s name is there frequently, her auto already discussing him with Amy’s friends and sending calendar invites to organise a meeting. On the mainscreen, the man they all want to meet – the man she has never met – smiles silently.
My auto’s broken, Amy thinks, surprised at the thud of sadness in her chest.
Ten years, she’s had it. She can remember it being the absolute must-have gift for Christmas 2012, the latest, most cutting edge super-app. Not everyone could afford it, but Amy’s mother was a senior manager at the company that developed it and made sure everyone in the family received the latest prototype. Amy isn’t a geek or anything, but she’s the daughter of one. Mum was always looking out for them, whether they wanted her to or not. Always getting them the latest gadgets. Always using her own kids as beta testers.
The Auto-Mate™ would change your life by helping you run your life, the ads said. And they were right. It was becoming impossible to keep track of all the emails (remember them?) and tweets (no veets or bleets or xeets back then) and social networking (such an old-fashioned term) that everyone relied on to function. What I need is a secretary, people often joked, and the Auto-Mate™ was precisely that. A digital avatar of you, which streamlined all the things you did, sifted out the internet chatter you didn’t need, and brought all your data together in one place. It freed you up, so you could focus on living your life.
Over the years, the app has been updated a hundred times, becoming more sophisticated and more universal. Now ‘auto’ is part of the language, both as noun and verb. If you want something done, you just auto it. No problem miss, we’ll auto that for you right away. Shut up and get it autoed.
Amy can barely remember what life was like before. She must have spent every waking hour staring at a screen, having to decide what to say to people, what to buy, what to comment on... how did people ever get anything done!
And what if it gets taken away, if it’s broken? What if she has to start do
ing everything herself? Where will she start...?
Amy swallows and says “Auto. Report a problem.”
The interface glows.
“Report a problem. Upload logfiles to central.”
Nothing seems to be happening, except for the never-ending torrent down the sidescreen. She notices one of the options on the settings and says “Run diagnostic tools.”
The interface glows.
Amy’s blood is running cold now. She’s never had this sensation before. Like she’s just a passenger. Worse. Like she’s been tied up and gagged and locked in the boot while a total stranger takes the wheel.
Hearts and Arrows Page 10