The Big Disruption

by Jessica Powell

  Was it because he had recently become a Republican?

  In any case, Roni was sure something was afoot. Gregor had recently installed biometric screening at the entrance to Building 1, and conversations between Building 1 employees abruptly stopped whenever Roni joined them at the company cafeteria.

  The funny thing was that if you asked most Anahatis, Roni had a dream job. He was the technical lead of Social Car, one of the hottest, most anticipated projects at the company. But Roni had been at Anahata long enough to know a quirky project from a crucial one. And Social Car just felt a bit too much like the former. Roni wondered if it was just a distraction — a deft sleight of hand by Bobby to divert attention from the true gamble of something much, much bigger taking form in Building 1.

  He had made a few passes to uncover the truth. One of Roni’s friends worked in Building 1. He had proved impenetrable to inquiry, claiming he was just “tinkering with the ads algorithm.” Gregor had likewise stonewalled him, mentioning something about Building 1’s commitment to “breakthrough enterprise software products.” Roni was enough of a Valley veteran to know that when an engineer feigned enthusiasm for business software, he was either lying about the software or lying about being an engineer. And that couldn’t have been more true than with Gregor Guntlag, who was well known for his dislike of business, sales, and anything connected to advancing the dirty affairs of capitalism.

  So Roni had thrown himself into other projects alongside his work on Social Car. Most notably, he had become the organizer of the company’s quarterly hackathons, designed to bring engineers together from across the company to detect bugs and fix core software. But while he enjoyed mentoring the younger engineers, Roni was beginning to feel like an aging school dance chaperon who furnished the pizza and Red Bull and hung out awkwardly at the back of the hall. What he was doing didn’t feel tangible or significant.

  Roni sighed and pumped his Crocs against the door in a pitter patter of plastic. He sighed again, and then again and again, beginning to enjoy the sound of his breath echoing through the bathroom. He imagined an audience beyond the stall door, sitting on the blue tiles, crowding in to listen to his wise words about an important engineering topic.

  “Let me tell you the truth about cloud computing,” Roni said aloud in mock tenor. “There is no cloud. It is a myth. Your data is actually in my nose. Right above the — ”

  Roni stopped as he heard two voices outside the bathroom. The door opened, and Roni heard a shuffling of feet.

  “Hello? Is anyone here?” The man’s voice was vaguely familiar.

  “All clear,” said another voice, the accent thick, like a knife trying to find its way out of taffy. Roni recognized its owner immediately: Gregor Guntlag.

  “So, like I was saying in the meeting,” the first man said. “Life extension. We aren’t working on it, and I am certain Galt is doing it.”

  “Which is why Project Y is so important,” Gregor said. “I wanted to talk to you about an issue we’re having with — ”

  “Imagine,” the first man said. “If Galt outlives us, just imagine what that means for the planet. They’ll probably reduce all of us humans to tiny bugs!”

  “I’m sure we could tackle it after we solved our Project Y — ”

  “Life extension,” repeated the first man. “I want you to make me a plan to tackle life extension.”

  Roni thought he heard Gregor sigh.

  “We can work on life extension,” he said after a moment.

  “Also, I want to breed animals. Did you see that article this morning on Tech Geek? Galt is breeding small plants that will replace animals. Those bastards. We’ll show them. We’ll breed animals that will eat their plants!”

  “I suppose that could be better for the environment,” Gregor said. “Less carbon dioxide emissions — ”

  “And then we’ll turn the animals back into plants!” the first man said.

  “I’ll look into both,” Gregor said. “But first, Project Y…”

  “Oh, yes, I wanted to talk to you about that. I have a new idea. Project Y needs an army. We will never beat Galt if we don’t have an army supporting Y. Our employees must be an army. And then that army brings in more soldiers for an even bigger army.”

  “An army?” Gregor asked.

  “A figurative army. No, wait, an army with weapons. No, the kind of army Gandhi would have had.”

  “Bobby, I’m not sure I understand.”

  Roni’s eyes popped.

  It was Bobby — of course! Bobby was the only one in the company who could give Gregor orders; the only one who quoted Ghandhi and whose license plate read “MAHATMA.”

  Roni heard footsteps cross the bathroom, like someone was pacing.

  “Yes, yes, our peaceful army will be armed,” Bobby said. “But its arms will be technology, and therefore not arms, but also arms.”

  “I don’t follow,” Gregor said.

  Bobby sighed loudly, as if it was his eternal burden to explain himself. “When we are ready to push the button on Project Y, we will need a group of engineers who will already be converts and will spread the word. And then, of course, we also need engineers like Jonas who will infiltrate the enemy — ”

  Roni’s Crocs nearly dropped from their perch at the sound of his employee’s name.

  Gregor replied, but one of them was now using the urinal and Roni couldn’t make out the words. He leaned forward in his seat, careful to keep his feet suspended against the door. There were more unintelligible words. A urinal was flushed. Something knocked against something else. An object fell to the ground. The drama! What next? He heard the faucets running, footsteps exiting, and the door closing. Roni was alone again.

  Roni’s mind raced across and above and behind itself, the idea of a mysterious Project Y bolting about in his head, ricocheting off his skull, toward his ear, past Jonas’ name. But no matter how he fit the bits together, he couldn’t make sense of it.

  He started over. There was something called Project Y — maybe that was the secret thing happening in Building 1. Project Y needed to build an army. And they needed people like Jonas to infiltrate “the enemy.” Why didn’t they want Roni? Roni had a black belt in karate. It was from when he was twelve, but still.

  They couldn’t know that he was on to them. Roni stood on the toilet seat and used his Swiss army knife to quickly loosen the bolts on the ventilator above his stall. Stepping onto the toilet tank, he lifted himself into the air shaft and onto his belly. He began to shimmy his way forward in the darkness. Roni had done this once before — many years earlier, when he misinterpreted his manager’s instructions to build a product in “stealth mode.” He knew this shaft would eventually take him to the building’s northern corner, where he could safely drop down through another bathroom.

  The metal shaft felt cool against his stomach, and Roni moved through it with greater ease than he had remembered. All the apocalypse survival training he had been doing during the weekends was paying off.

  But Roni was on edge. He could feel his fingers tingling, hear his heart pumping in the stifling air around him. Project Y was so close! And yet he had nothing but a trail of vague clues. He was following a thread through the dark labyrinth, the derisive laugh of his elusive dragon echoing through the air shafts.

  A rsyen burst into the cubicle, eager to tell Sven and Jonas all about his encounter with the famous Bobby Bonilo. But his co-workers faced their screens in silence. The only acknowledgment of his presence was an open can atop the Red Bull pyramid, which rattled left and right, then plummeted toward the carpet.

  “Hello, hello!” boomed a voice from the corridor.

  Roni entered the cubicle and made a beeline for the whiteboard. He grabbed an eraser and began wiping away the graffiti. Arsyen breathed a sigh of relief; finally, they were going to clean.

  Instead, Roni motioned for Arsyen to approach.

  “I want to tell you about our super-duper top-secret p
roject.”

  A few years earlier, Anahata unveiled a driverless car that drove itself while the passenger sat, hands free, in the front or back seat. The project gained tons of attention in the press, and even Arsyen had heard of it. But he didn’t understand the excitement. His father had invented an equally effective driverless car decades ago in Pyrrhia — royal chariots, entirely voice activated, that traveled on the backs of a pack of corgis imported from England.

  Roni said their team had been assigned the next stage of the driverless car project. It was called “Social Car,” internal code name: “Pad Thai.”

  While the passenger relaxed in the car, enjoying a stress-free commute, a console would announce who was sitting in the nearby vehicles. Profile photos of the other passengers would pop up, along with additional information like profession and gender. Passengers could also easily chat and message each other directly through the console.

  In short, Anahata was making the car journey a social experience.

  “Or as Bobby has put it,” Roni said, “we’re improving humankind by eliminating loneliness.”

  Arsyen wanted to ask why someone wouldn’t prefer to just wait to talk to other people at their destination, but he decided that was one of those stupid questions Jennie had warned him not to ask. After all, why would the team build something that wasn’t needed?

  What worried him more was just how a sanitation engineer fit into the project. From the way Roni described it, Arsyen didn’t see any janitorial work needed for Social Car — unless, that is, he was supposed to clean the cars before they launched.

  “Roni, what do I clean here?”

  “Well, the real dirty work is for them,” said Roni, nodding in the direction of Sven and Jonas. “As you know, being a P.M. is more about leading than doing. Your role is mainly to keep things organized, keep everyone focused, and lead the final polishing of the product. You know, the same stuff you did at Galt. But don’t worry. I’ll take the lead for now, until you have the hang of things.”

  Sven and Jonas scooted their chairs toward the whiteboard. Arsyen noted the computers on their laps and followed their lead, but the machine balancing on his thighs felt less like a work accessory than the physical weight of his doubt. Roni had said he would be polishing Social Car, but Arsyen had yet to spot a single microfiber cloth or tub of wax. And what was this P.M. title Roni kept referring to — poop manager? Arsyen would draw the line at poop; there were some things a prince should never, ever do.

  Roni cleared his throat.

  “Okay, guys, to recap: Car A detects someone in Car B. But Car B is traveling at a faster rate than Car A. Do we have Car A automatically speed up — all within say ten miles per hour of the speed limit — so it can keep pace and the Car A and B passengers can speak to each other? We’re more likely to have people interacting if their cars can keep pace.”

  Arsyen frowned. Why were his co-workers talking about car speeds?

  “But what if Car B is speeding? And Car A speeds up but then ends up with a speeding ticket?” asked Sven. “That would be bad, unless…” His eyes drifted away from the whiteboard, then snapped back. “Unless, that is, the person in Car B is a woman and she turns out to be really hot. Then, if I’m in Car A, I wouldn’t be so angry about the speeding ticket.”

  “All you care about are girls,” Jonas groaned.

  “You laugh, but just you wait till puberty hits. Then that’ll be all you’ll think about.”

  “Impossible. I am very capable of processing many things simultaneously.”

  “Well,” Roni was saying, “we just make sure that when your car speeds up, it never goes beyond ten miles per hour above the speed limit. That way, you shouldn’t get a ticket.”

  “No, I don’t care about that,” said Sven, shaking his head. “What I mean is the real problem is how to decide whether the Car B passenger is actually attractive enough for Car A to risk the speeding ticket.”

  “Ah, got it, got it,” said Roni, turning to the whiteboard and writing “Attraction Index.”

  “We’ll need to work that into the algorithm, but that shouldn’t be hard. We take your profile information, and from your height, weight, and so on, we assign you a wellness score. And then we combine that score with an attractiveness score that will use your photo, measured against the Symmetry Enhancement project.”

  Roni turned to face the group, and Arsyen noticed an inkspot the size of a baby’s fist quickly spreading across his shirt pocket. Roni’s white shirt was going to be ruined. Arsyen signaled with his hand.

  “Oh, sorry, Arsyen, I should have explained. Symmetry Enhancement is a project we have to make all images on the web look better. That way, the world just looks nicer to people. We mainly use it for low-resolution images — ”

  “And porn,” said Sven, turning to Arsyen. “Did you know that most women’s breasts aren’t symmetrical? Our tool fixes that.”

  Roni’s face flushed, but he pressed on. “But the cool thing is you can also use Symmetry Enhancement on people’s faces. We can calculate how symmetrical your face is, then make adjustments to give it better symmetry. For Social Car, we wouldn’t redo your entire face, but we could just do the first part of calculating symmetry, since it’s a proxy for attractiveness. That would feed into the algorithm and determine whether the person in the other car is worth the risk associated with speeding. So, if the person is significantly uglier than you, then your car slows down and tries to match up with a new car. But if the person is on par or better looking, then it’s all systems go.”

  “We could eventually monetize the symmetry feature,” said Jonas, without looking up from his computer. “For example, we could make you more attractive to other passengers if you paid to have your image adjusted.”

  Roni stiffened. “Jonas, let’s not talk about money. Our goal is to build a great product for our users.”

  Arsyen was catching bits and pieces of his colleagues’ words, but nothing made much sense. Meanwhile, Roni’s stain was pushing into new territory, now working its way toward his armpit. But he seemed totally unaware, or if he was aware, he simply didn’t care, his hands jumping about as he got increasingly excited about the conversation.

  “We combine all these factors — your attractiveness, your healthiness, and so forth — and we create a matching algorithm that puts your car in touch with the people you want to meet — the people you don’t mind getting a speeding ticket for.” Roni paused. “I guess that means ugly and unhealthy people won’t get to talk to anyone, but maybe that’s a good thing for society in the long run?”

  Roni turned and made a few new marks on the whiteboard, his various lines and symbols now abutting his crude car drawings like primitive weapons.

  Arsyen placed his fingers on his temples and moved them in slow circles, closing his eyes and then reopening them. The black hole on Roni’s shirt gaped at Arsyen like the mouth of a hungry Pyrrhian orphan. Save me, Arsyen!

  “Make them all disappear,” he whispered in Pyrrhian. “Make them disappear.”

  It was a chant that had always proven effective in Pyrrhia. Servants and peasants alike vanished whenever Arsyen issued the command.

  He opened his eyes. The problem was still there; dashes and numbers on the board seemed to be converging. And Roni was still talking nonsense.

  “Luckily we have our new product manager here…Arsyen? Arsyen?”

  Roni was pointing a whiteboard marker in Arsyen’s direction.

  “Arsyen, why don’t you give us a P.M.’s opinion on all this?”

  Product manager. So that’s what a P.M. was.

  Arsyen had heard the title before. There had been product managers at Galt; they worked with the engineers but were somehow different. They seemed to dress slightly better and shower more often than the engineers but were considered less intelligent.

  That was about all he knew — that, and the fact that he clearly wasn’t a product manager himself. Which meant someo
ne had made a mistake. A big mistake.

  They had given him the wrong job.

  It all suddenly made sense — the coding test at his interview, the salary that was ten times what he had originally been quoted, the total lack of cleaning supplies in his cubicle.

  Arsyen’s gaze shifted to Roni’s eager face, crossed over to the gibberish-filled whiteboard, then to the skeptical faces of his two co-workers, who had spent the entire day hypnotized by their dark screens. They were both incredibly pale, like their faces had never seen the sun. Because, of course — they were engineers. And he was their product manager. The person who managed the product.

  They were going to figure it out and fire him. And if he was fired, he would lose everything — the chance to feed all of those hungry Pyrrhian orphans, the chance to liberate his country from tyranny, the chance to speak to his girlfriend without the aid of an internet chat application. And he would be back to cleaning toilets in some startup filled with malodorous men.

  There was no other solution — he would just have to fake it. Besides, how hard could it be to be a product manager? For decades, Arsyen had watched his father manage a country; he could certainly manage a bunch of talking cars.

  Arsyen sat up tall.

  “Be clear on problem,” he said.

  “Right, right, I should be more specific,” Roni nodded. He pointed at his drawing of Car A.

  “At this point, my car has detected a cute woman around me. So, my car is going to speed up or slow down to keep pace so that I can talk to her.”

  “What if woman don’t want to be found?” Arsyen asked. He couldn’t imagine having such a problem himself, but not all men had his charm.

  “You’re right, we should consider edge cases,” Roni said. “But realistically, what’s not to like about this? After all, women love attention.”

  “We should consider edge cases,” repeated Arsyen, not seeing any edge or cases but certain that in this world, as in most, repetition served as effective flattery.