Deadly Pretty Strangers: US Edition

by Max Thorn

  “That sounds terrible. What happened to your family?”

  “It was hard on us, especially my mother. Vicky, my sister, had been the eldest. She helped look after the rest of us. Four other children. A big family. The firm gave my parents some money. Blood money. You can’t compensate for the loss of a life with money.” He shook his head. “Lifted us out of poverty, sank us into depression.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I still have dreams about my sister. We’re all young in my dreams. I’ve never forgotten her.”

  “That’s very sad.”

  “My mother never got over it. They’ve killed other people since. Nobody ever learns. At the time, they made a big noise about how sorry they were, all the scientists and workers there, and then they closed the company. Said it was broke after the compensation costs. Because it wasn’t just my sister. Several girls died. Others needed psychiatric help for a long time. Devastating for that little hamlet. But they just closed down one business and later the same year, restarted with a new name.”

  “So they’re just a cynical big business?”

  “I think all firms have the same attitude. Do what you have to do. A death here or there is just the cost of doing business for them. That company has been built with other people’s blood and tears.”

  Eventually the train slowed and pulled into Flaxbury station. The old man and I waited by the door for the train to come to a stop.

  “Looks different doesn’t it?” he said as we looked out of the window at the bright red, blue and yellow station décor. “The railway company hadn’t wanted to build a station here. HomEvo paid for it. All the train company has to do is stop the train long enough for people to get on and off. Since they paid for it, they painted it in their corporate colors.”

  “It looks like a child’s toy made from plastic bricks.”

  “That’s probably the impression they want. Fun-loving, accidental killers. You want the other side,” he said, pointing to the stairs of the overhead passenger bridge. “Remember what I said. Watch your step.”

  We said goodbye and I crossed the line, exiting the station on the London-bound side.

  On the building wall beside the station entrance, a large map showed the HomEvo estate. The main administrative buildings were five multi-story towers clustered around an irregular piazza. The buildings were named Harvey, Fleming, Darwin, Pasteur and Pendle. Beyond them lay the sprawling research and development estate. The entire complex on the map resembled a beetle with a small, blue administration head and a large, red, research-estate body. Yellow road veins criss-crossed the creature.

  The beetle was contained to the north by the dark-blue river Flax. The tall-fenced train line stopped the creature wandering south. At its rear, the river turned south, pooling in a small lake before passing under the railroad bridge. To the west, woodland presented itself to the corporate creature’s head. If I wanted to keep my suit clean, the only way in was the road.

  Shuttle buses ran from the station; red for the research estate and blue for the administrative buildings. I followed a dozen other people onto the blue bus. The peak-capped driver waited until everyone had crossed the pedestrian bridge, closed the doors and set off on the short drive through landscaped grounds to the first of the five administration buildings, Pendle House.

  As we rounded the last bend, the incongruous modern architecture came into full view; five towers projecting straight up from the gently rolling countryside. Two towers were eight stories high and the others three or four stories higher. My destination was the first stop, Pendle House, one of the shorter buildings but twice the width of its neighbor, with lower floors becoming progressively wider toward the ground level. Together the five towers looked like a gigantic hand of glass and steel, reaching up to the sky to grasp a colossal apple or a small moon.

  The bus stopped at a wide, white limestone pavement. Leaving it with half of its occupants, I paused on the pavement to look up at Pendle House while other visitors walked briskly ahead.

  Entering through the wide glass entrance doors, a hubbub of voices surged around the cathedral-like atrium. The multi-story column of offices stood within the vast space at one side. In the center of the polished black marble floor stood three gigantic showcases of glass and steel, each about four yards square and the height of a house.

  The showcases each displayed a different color-themed aspect of the company’s product portfolio. Models of human anatomy, interactive video screens, poster-sized descriptions and pictures of people, told the HomEvo story from the 1950s to the present.

  Beyond the showcases, a sleek corporate café shone with polished pink granite, steel and brass. The tinkle of crockery and cutlery, punctuated by the hiss of steam from coffee machines, mingled with the murmur of conversations in global accents. Uniformed waiters bustled around a carpeted area with soft chairs, tables, sofas, modern sculpture and concealed lighting. The fragrance of coffee and floor-polish ebbed and flowed in the constantly moving air-conditioned atmosphere.

  A long reception counter to the right of the showcases was staffed by people represented on bright video screens.

  I arrived at the reception desk as the last of the bus passengers left. Three uniformed receptionists beamed from the screens; a brunette woman in her late twenties, a dark-haired man of about the same age, and a blonde woman in her mid-thirties. They wore dark jackets with a leaping-figure HomEvo lapel badge, over white shirts open at the neck. Each looked like they might have a second job advertising toothpaste on television. Or vitamins. Or really healthy, happy, banking services.

  I presented myself at the blonde woman’s screen. No perfume. Only the coffee and polish.

  She smiled. “Good morning. Who are you here to see?” The voice came naturally, as though she were genuinely present, right in front of me.

  I looked around for a speaker but couldn’t see where her voice came from. “You’re not real, are you?”

  “How real do you want me to be?” she smiled mischievously, bobbing a little on the screen as she adjusted her seat.

  I paused. “That’s not the response I was expecting,” I said slowly.

  “No, but it’s more fun than you were expecting, isn’t it?” she winked.

  “Are you flirting with me? Or am I just entertaining your developers?”

  “Well, the answer to that could get us into a deep meta-physical discussion,” she laughed. “But I’m guessing that you’re Xavier Fox, here to see Laura Wainwright in about five minutes. Am I right?”

  “You are. How did you know?”

  “I recognize your face.”

  “How?”

  “We have images from social media. Laura already knows you’re here.”

  “You’ve spoken to her?”

  “Just now, while I was speaking to you. She’ll be down shortly. You’ve got time to grab a complimentary drink before your meeting. The queue’s gone now.” She nodded toward the café counter.

  “Do I need a pass or voucher or something?”

  “Your face is your pass in here. So now you have choices. You can get a drink and maybe even something to eat; you can look at the interactive displays,” she nodded to the showcases behind me, “or you can discuss the nature of reality with me.” She leaned forward a little and slowly pushed a strand of her blonde hair behind her ear, looking directly at me, a smile tugging gently at the corner of her mouth.

  “Do you say this to all the boys?”

  “Only if they’re early and there’s no queue behind them. And especially if they’re flirting with me.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “I’m not here to argue. Just to entertain. And help people on their way. And really I prefer the meta-physical discussion.”

  I looked behind at a group of people coming through the entrance doors. I paused. “I’m going to let you get back to your work, I think.”

  “You’re very considerate.” She smiled again, her head a little to one side. “Laura will be he
re shortly. Have a great meeting.”

  “Thanks.” Waving without thinking, I put my hand down self-consciously.

  The receptionist smiled with what looked like genuine pleasure and turned her attention to the new arrivals. She was friendly, but she wasn’t real, I told myself. The old man’s warning echoed in the back of my mind. But I didn’t how I could get into trouble with an artificial receptionist.

  I wandered over to the blue-themed showcase for limbs and muscular aids, to watch a model arm work. A multi-colored brain hovered six feet above. I watched an illuminated synaptic spark leave the cerebellum, rush to the brainstem, and travel down a nerve fiber to a giant transparent arm.

  I looked back at the receptionist on the screen. She looked my way at exactly the same moment and smiled. I couldn’t stop myself from smiling back.

  I turned to the model again to see a flood of tiny yellow lights representing calcium ions, rushing into a lump labelled motor neuron. The neuron released more lights, with the flashing word neurotransmitters, this time in blue, which raced to the muscle fibers. I was about to see the most exciting part, the muscle contracting and lifting the weights at the end of the model arm, when I saw a figure striding toward me from the elevators opposite the reception counter.

  I looked back to the receptionists. The blonde woman winked at me and nodded toward Laura.

  Laura Wainwright was already tall, but in her high-heeled black shoes she was Amazonian. The pencil-thin heels looked like a suicidal choice on the highly polished floor. But Laura’s self-belief bore her confidently at a quick pace. She wore gray pants, flared at the ankle and close fitting at the hips. The top three buttons of her white shirt were undone, leaving the fourth with the precarious responsibility for keeping her shirt together around her large breasts. A black, waisted jacket finished her businesslike ensemble in a monotone rebuke to the ubiquitous red, yellow and blue HomEvo branding.

  Laura’s mass of long brown wavy hair seemed to billow around us like a perfumed cloud as she put out her hand and smiled broadly, “Zav Fox?”

  I shook her hand and pointed at the model. “Do you understand this stuff?”

  “Darling, it’s a mystery to me. I only work here. The people in white coats can tell you all about synaptic clefts, neurotransmitters and ionotropic receptor thingies. I just buy them the white coats. And other things.” She leaned toward me conspiratorially and said in a lower voice, “I see that you’ve made friends with that slut on reception.” She gave me a mock serious look.

  “I feel like I’ve entered another world. Please tell me she isn’t real.”

  “A year ago that was a team of eight people. Now it’s a tin box of processors in a sterile basement thousands of miles away. Scary, isn’t it? Real people are going to have to raise their game. The man’s just as bad.”

  “Why do they flirt?”

  “They reflect, absorb or deflect your own disposition. If you’re brisk and businesslike, so are they. If you’re angry or sad, they ask you why and suggest remedies to help you get over it so you can be a more productive person. And if you’re insane, they just register you into the building and tell you to get on with it. The last one accounts for most of the people here. So her warmth toward you just tells me that you’re in the market darling. How crazy is that? Artificial intelligence, getting among us, making things happen. Welcome to wonderland. Don’t trust the rabbits.”

  “I feel naked.”

  “You’re not the first to feel that way,” she laughed. “A lot of people have wasted many lunch hours chatting up those fakes. If you shout for management at them long enough, the screen switches to a tiny basement office in Delhi with a fat IT geek putting down his lunch to ask you what’s gone wrong. Let’s get things back on an even keel. I need a coffee.”

  We strolled to the café counter.

  “So have you really come all the way from London to speak to me about a spider?”

  “And a box. Yes.”

  A uniformed barista quickly made us large americano coffees in take-away beakers.

  Laura steered me by the elbow while we talked, guiding me toward the line of glass starting gates in front of the elevators.

  The receptionist looked my way again. I almost waved.

  Laura laughed.

  “Am I an idiot?”

  “Darling, I’m sorry to say that you’re just a pawn in a game with empowered artificial intelligence. When anyone arrives at that counter, the technology is monitoring their temperature, heart rate, breathing, pupil dilation and every one of their facial muscles using FACS. Have you heard of this? The facial action coding system?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know how many facial muscles you’ve got?”

  “Forty-three.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I know lots of useless stuff.”

  “So you realize that you’re constantly communicating with your face and your voice, generally with two entirely different conversations?”

  “Yes, I’ve heard.” I said, “So when your boss is making you work late and your voice says, ‘No problem, happy to go the extra mile,’ your face says what?”

  Laura smiled, “The face says, I hate you and your self-important attitude and I don’t live for this job.”

  “And when the voice says, ‘Yes, I do still love you,’ the face says…?”

  “It says, You’ve gained thirty pounds since we first met, your breath stinks and I’m thinking about sleeping with the fitness instructor next door.”

  I laughed. “The voice says, ‘No I didn’t scrape your car. I think it was the bin men,’ and…?”

  “The face says, Guilty as charged. Let me just be clear. My face doesn’t say that last one often. My driving’s much better these days. What’s important is that faces communicate constantly and we read them unconsciously. Do you know what micro-expressions are?”

  “Small expressions?”

  “Not necessarily small, but fleeting. One shows them for fractions of a second darling. For instance, suppose I say to you, I just love cockroaches in batter. I eat them like crisps. Now because we don’t generally eat insects around here, your face momentarily shows the micro-expression for disgust.”

  “I’m so sorry. I’m ridiculously provincial. I couldn’t help it.”

  She laughed, “It’s fine. But there goes your mind, immediately making amends for your face. Here’s the thing; I might easily miss the micro-expression if I wasn’t paying close attention, but the AI misses nothing and reads it in minute detail. The AI knows what you’re thinking better than you do.”

  A security guard looked up at a screen as I approached, and opened the wider gate for me while Laura walked through the next gate, which opened automatically. We joined up again and walked to a corridor of elevators.

  “How does it use that knowledge?”

  “Well, you turn up at the counter saying, “I’m here to see Laura whatever,” but your face says to the AI slut, Hello gorgeous! Are you the girl of my dreams? Or however you put it.”

  We got in the elevator and Laura pressed the button for the fifth floor.

  “And then?”

  “The AI deals with the official business efficiently and at the same time answers your, Hello gorgeous, with a Hello to you handsome, facial response and begins to seduce you by taking an interest in you and beguiling you with smart conversation. You eventually take a reality check because you know you’re talking to an AI, and the AI lets you pause for breath before taking the relationship to the next level.”

  “Which is?”

  We stepped onto a wide foyer and walked past rooms with shadows moving within.

  “The next level is when you know you’re dealing with an AI but you let yourself tumble headlong down the rabbit hole regardless, because we’re so easily seduced by someone or something that seems to love us. You’ve seen those nature documentaries where they dress a video camera as a meerkat or whatever and make it smell like a meerkat and sound
like a meerkat?”

  I nodded.

  “And even though it scarcely moves and looks like a badly assembled toy from an underground sweatshop, the other meerkats try to interact with it. Their instinctive response to basic cues like smell and sound overpowers any rational thought. Well it turns out that we’re no different. You and I will eventually be saying to the AI with our forty-three facial muscles, I love you with all my heart, and the AI will be reflecting it with words and facial expressions that spell love with zero, zero, one, zero, zero, zero…click, click, click, in cold calculations that keep the illusion going.”

  We reached an unoccupied glass-walled room with newly cleaned red carpet. A panel beside the door showed Laura’s face with the words, Laura Wainwright in conference with Xavier Fox, followed by my face, snapped at the reception counter. Lights and air-conditioning came on as we entered. A low buzz of voices seeped in from the adjoining room. Floor to ceiling windows showed a panoramic view of farmland, the railroad and a hedge-lined rural road stretching to the misty horizon.

  “If you worked here, you’d eventually become so besotted with the blonde AI, that you’d be thinking, how can I make you part of my physical world? And she’ll know that you’re thinking it.”

  “Where’s this technology heading?”

  We sat down at one end of a long bright blue u-shaped table with red and yellow chairs for sixteen people.

  “I reckon the next step will be robot companions. They’ll probably start off in military applications tackling risky challenges, like the first wave of soldiers into a sniper infested, booby-trapped town. As they get better, more lifelike, there’ll be civilian versions. People will love them. I hear that forty percent of retired people consider the television their best companion. Imagine how it would be for them if they could have a robot friend who genuinely read their mood, understood their needs and conversed in a sensible way. People will love AI robots even more than they love a little flat tablet in their pocket or a TV screen in their living room.”