The Big Disruption

by Jessica Powell

  But first things first. He needed to build a new fan base. Niels kicked off his first Poodlekek fleet with a bit of nostalgia.

  Raise your lighters for #Poodlekek

  Arsyen rose from his bed, ready to conquer an American woman.

  It would not be his first attempt. He had made several passes at courtship since arriving in the United States, but most women were too intimidated by his overwhelming virility.

  But Jennie, the Anahata receptionist, struck Arsyen as the confident type. She shook his hand without averting her gaze and even scolded him during their campus tour when he complimented Galt. He liked a sassy lady with good teeth.

  He had the day all planned out. After lunchtime, he’d surprise Jennie in the reception area and give her his Aimo Air Freshener. Then, after a bit of chitchat, he’d suggest they head to his apartment for some video games and sex. It would be the perfect first date.

  The only potential hiccup was keeping his words straight. He wondered whether Sven would practice his English with him that morning.

  But Arsyen had no such chance. Sven greeted him as he entered their cubicle, waving a hand bloodied by jelly doughnut. Jennie — his Jennie — was standing next to Sven.

  She spotted him and smiled. “Oh, hi! How are you liking Anahata?”

  Arsyen shook his head vigorously. He did not have an answer prepared for this.

  But Jennie seemed to have no difficulty continuing the conversation by herself, telling Arsyen something about her feminist book club. Little of what she said registered with him. He was watching her lips move, fascinated by the way they came together and then parted as she spoke just to him. They were so different from Natia’s lips, which moved together in fits and jerks, all depending on the bandwidth of her internet connection.

  Sven cleared his throat.

  “Jane here was just about to tell us what she’s doing here.”

  “It’s Jennie,” she said, turning to Sven. “And I’m here because I’m the new nontechnical technical lead.”

  “Huh?”

  “I’m your new manager,” Jennie said.

  It was as if Vesuvius had exploded across the well-manicured lawns of Palo Alto. Sven’s nose twisted until the rest of his face followed in a spiral of despair. Jonas’ mouth froze in a perfect, horrified O.

  Arsyen understood their reaction immediately: They were as upset as he was about having a female boss.

  “This sounds like the kind of subterfuge the sales team would instigate, sending a nonengineer in here to sabotage our project,” Jonas said.

  Sven jotted some lines on a piece of paper and threw it in front of Jennie. “What do you see here?”

  Jennie took the paper in her hands, and Arsyen noticed that her wrists bore the remnants of a henna tattoo. She took a few seconds to study the crude drawing, which showed a graph with a diagonal line descending from the top left-hand side to the bottom right.

  “Um, a descending line?” she said.

  “And what’s the first thing you think of, in the context of Anahata?” Sven asked.

  “I don’t know…falling profits?”

  “I knew it — imposter!” he yelled, leaping to his feet.

  “But I’m not from the sales team. And that was just a line — ”

  “You could’ve said it was a Pareto curve, or a drop in latency, or a decrease in the number of users,” Sven said. “There were endless acceptable possibilities.”

  “The possibilities were indeed infinite, in a figurative if not exact sense,” Jonas nodded.

  “You had so many options, and yet what’s the first thing that comes to mind? Money. You are from sales. Out with you!” Sven’s finger pointed toward the hall, its edict winding across the floor and out the exit door, sending Jennie back to the reception area from whence she came.

  Jennie glanced at Arsyen. Help! her eyes seemed to plead. It was clear she didn’t belong there — maybe she had also been trying for a janitorial position, like Arsyen, and had been mistakenly rerouted to Social Car.

  “Did you come to clean?” whispered Arsyen, stepping closer. He reached into his pocket to grab the air freshener.

  Jennie shot him a dirty look. “You think because I’m a woman I’m supposed to clean your cubicle?”

  Jennie opened her leather fringe vest and shoved her chest at Arsyen. Feminism Happens Here, the T-shirt read.

  Arsyen froze. He was not used to such forwardness in American women.

  Jennie turned back to Sven and Jonas.

  “Gregor Guntlag himself asked me to do this. He said I didn’t need to know how to code — just to lead. I’m a tour guide. I know how to lead people.”

  Sven shook his head and slumped back to his chair. Jonas pouted. Jennie’s face relaxed, as if their disappointment was the first step toward acceptance.

  “Now, who’s going to tell me about Social Car?” she asked. “All Gregor said was that it was using the driverless cars to help you meet people. Sounds like something someone without friends would come up with.”

  “Sounds like something someone who can’t see the future would say,” sneered Sven, grabbing another doughnut and slowly ripping it down the middle, letting the red jelly drip directly on to the table.

  “Great, it seems like you’re the perfect person to explain the project to me,” Jennie said. She grabbed a spare chair from a neighboring cubicle and seated herself next to Sven. Arsyen noted their arms were almost touching.

  For the next hour, Sven walked Jennie through Social Car — from its initial history as a simple driverless car to its current state as a meeting platform. At first, Jennie scribbled madly across her notebook as he spoke, taking note of every word, code name, and milestone along the way. But as Sven progressed, her notes became fewer, punctuated by question marks, dashes, circles, and asterisks — an entire discourse happening on her page, separate to the story Sven was narrating.

  “I don’t get it,” Jennie finally said.

  Sven snorted.

  “Why would people want to use this?” she asked. “I drive to get places. When I want to meet people, I go someplace where I can meet them.”

  “But Social Car helps you meet people before you get to that place, or it can tell you where to go to meet those people. It is significantly more efficient,” Jonas said.

  Arsyen kept quiet. He had never really understood the purpose of Social Car. That said, he didn’t want Jennie to have a negative impression of it — she wouldn’t want to date the product manager of a stupid product.

  “Why not just design a car that makes me a smoothie?” Jennie asked. “Or a car that washes my hair and does my nails? Those are more useful than what you’ve come up with.”

  Arsyen saw Jonas and Sven exchange glances, as if to consider the validity of her idea.

  “Because not everyone wants a carrot juice or a perm,” said Sven finally. “On the other hand, everyone wants to meet someone. The use case is bigger.”

  “There isn’t a use case. You’re solving a problem that doesn’t exist. And what about traffic jams and accidents? What are you going to do when everyone’s trying to meet everyone else, and all of a sudden everyone’s headed in the same direction, turning about and crashing into each other?”

  Sven looked at Jonas.

  “Women are not going to use this,” Jennie said. “Even if there are one or two who do, they’re going to be inundated with messages from men. They’ll be overwhelmed, and they’ll just turn the feature off.”

  “Oh, we already thought of that,” Sven said. “We’ve opted everyone in to the service as a default and made it difficult to find the privacy settings. So we project that only two percent of users will actually manage to opt out of the service, and only a fraction of those will be women since they rarely know how to find and change their settings. So women will have to use it, and we’ll have gender equilibrium. Problem solved.”

  Jennie shook her head. “This is creepy. Someone can see my p
rofile and decide to keep pace with my car. Do you not see a problem with this?”

  “That’s just so that when you are ready to stop and park somewhere, the other driver will have kept up with you and can stop and park, too,” said Sven slowly, even slower than when he explained things to Arsyen.

  “You mean it’s going to help offline stalking,” Jennie said, crossing her arms.

  Jonas turned to Sven. “She does have a good point.”

  “I was just thinking the same thing,” said Sven, approaching the whiteboard.

  Jennie’s face brightened, and Arsyen brightened with her. Maybe he could suggest they take a drive in Social Car together?

  “I think we can fix your problem,” said Sven, grabbing a pen and starting to scribble on the board. He turned toward Jonas.

  “What if we got a queuing theory expert to help?”

  “I bet the original driverless car team had one,” Jonas nodded. “They must have looked at the traffic jam issue when they were first scoping out the project and — ”

  “Traffic jams?!?” Jennie screeched. “Of all the things I said, that’s what strikes you as the biggest problem? You completely missed my point! There is no way that I’m allowing your Stalker Car to happen.”

  The room went silent. Now was his time to strike. Arsyen rose from his chair and opened his palm to reveal the pink, heart-shaped bottle of Aimo Air Freshener.

  “For you, Jennie, so I can always find you.”

  Jennie shook her head.

  “We’re killing this project,” she said. “As your lead, I am killing this project.”

  Jennie stomped out of the cubicle, brushing past Arsyen and knocking the bottle out of his hand. Arsyen gasped as his sweetly scented vision of eternal love shattered into a thousand shards of pink glass. The liquid sizzled like acid on the ground, devouring an orphaned Cheerio near Sven’s desk.

  Sven hit the desk with his fist. “Dammit! Do you all get what just happened?”

  He pushed his chair out of the way and stomped out of the cubicle, a shard of Arsyen’s pink glass heart lodging itself in the bottom of his flip-flop.

  F or Anahata’s great technical minds, boredom was far worse than anger. It hovered above their cubicle like a dirty cloud, obscuring all possibilities beyond what was proximate. After Jennie stomped out, Jonas pouted while trolling message boards; Sven focused on improving his speed at the Rubik’s cube. With each second gained, he let out a new sigh, as if these small victories were simply a reminder of a greater defeat.

  Things were much worse for Arsyen. Sven had told him it was just a matter of time before they were all reassigned to other teams. That new team would quickly figure out Arsyen was a fake, and even if they let him stay at Anahata, he’d surely be demoted to a lower-paying janitorial role. His contributions to the Throne Reclamation Committee would drop, there would be no Pyrrhian liberation for decades, and Arsyen wouldn’t enjoy the palm fronds and promiscuous handmaidens he deserved until he was old and wrinkled.

  No kingdom. No girlfriend. He’d be back to cleaning toilets.

  All of this was Jennie’s fault. As his father had always said, women are harmless until, suddenly, they’re not.

  Arsyen gazed at Natia’s photo on his computer, apologizing to the bearer of its image for having lost his way. He caressed her pixelated cheek and yelped — his internet girlfriend had just shocked him.

  With nothing else to do with his time, Arsyen decided to check in on his GaltPage. He saw that his previous night’s post encouraging people to take action had prompted a response from more than twelve thousand people.

  For a moment, Arsyen remembered the sweet taste of obedience.

  He scanned the news. Images of Poodlekek captured jagged windows of abandoned storefronts and old women crying, shaking their fists. Youths in bandannas and sweatshirts huddled in front of international TV cameras, shouting slogans as the newscaster voiceover explained there had been a ten-thousand-person march in which protesters had clashed with police. Ninety people were reported dead — a number that didn’t include the hundreds who had died in the train wreck.

  His mobile phone rang, and Arsyen ducked out of the cubicle to take the call.

  “The TRC is ready to strike,” the Throne Reclamation Committee’s chief strategist announced.

  “But we’re nowhere near ready,” Arsyen said.

  “The TRC has spoken!” said the strategist, and then abruptly hung up.

  Five minutes later came another call, this time from an unfamiliar voice whose words were punctuated by a hacking cough.

  “Korpeko has outlawed our beloved (cough) national (cough) sport. A curling court now cuts through the Arsyen Aimo (cough) Croquet Academy!”

  Arsyen rose to his feet. How dare Korpeko destroy his gleaming croquet court! Arsyen had spent hours deciding on the color scheme. He had made numerous visits to the site to ensure that the proposed spot for his statue was positioned so the sun rose from his left hand and set in the right. And now — destroyed!

  Arsyen wondered how many of his supporters were out there, working with the Throne Reclamation Committee to plot his return. “Thousands,” the chief strategist had once said. “Millions,” he sometimes claimed.

  He returned to his cubicle and gazed once again at Natia’s photo. She looked very serious, with her hair pulled back and not even a trace of a smile. But she was pretty, and he liked that mole on her right cheek. It made it easy to tell the difference between one side of her face and the other. Where was she? There was no sign of her — not on his GaltPage, in the newspapers, or on email. Was she in trouble?

  Arsyen’s phone rang again. This time his ears filled with the sound of the old national anthem — the song that had once played each time Arsyen’s father addressed the nation.

  Nationhood, brotherhood, progress upon progress…

  “It is time,” said a man’s emphysematic voice, as the music faded.

  “But we don’t have enough money,” Arsyen protested.

  “Revolutions don’t need money. Without money, people are more motivated, more bloodthirsty.”

  Arsyen’s father had often said the same thing. He inhaled sharply.

  “I need some time to think.”

  Arsyen scanned Flitter, the Galt app that had been appropriated by the protesters. There was no sign of Natia, but one fleet did catch his attention. In just thirty minutes it had been refleeted three thousand times, as if a rallying cry for the revolt.

  Niels_1973: Raise your lighters for #Poodlekek

  Arsyen read the fleet twice, its simple, thirty-four-character plea underscoring the desperation of his country.

  This was all moving too fast. If only everything were ready — the forty cows, the special bomb, and the ten thousand horses. The latest TRC report had shown the acquisition of only ten cows and two mangy goats. How could that possibly be enough?

  Arsyen left his cubicle and found an empty micro-kitchen. He rang the chief strategist.

  “Can we do it without the horses and the bomb? Like, in some sort of peaceful way, with just the cows?”

  “Since when were you against violence?” the chief strategist asked. “Don’t you remember the king’s annual dissident hunt? You rode one of the bears!”

  “Mmm,” said Arsyen, remembering those winter days of crisp air and hearty stews. “But those were peasants. They don’t count. And anyway, Korpeko’s no fool. If the peasants are revolting, he will put them down quickly and quietly.”

  “That’s where you are mistaken, Your Highness. It is not the peasants who are protesting. The peasants are too busy with work to have time for revolt. It is the students, the middle class, who are up in arms. That is much trickier for the government.”

  “I need to think,” Arsyen repeated. He hung up and frowned, then returned to his cubicle. He scanned the new Flitter messages on his computer.

  Korpeko must be stopped!

  Down with tyranny!

  The
subtext was clear. “Come back, Prince Arsyen! Lead us to our destiny!”

  Many of the messages linked to Arsyen’s GaltPage. Surely it was not mere coincidence that he, Prince Arsyen, had become their conduit.

  Arsyen turned again to Flitter, typing to his people in their native tongue.

  Wouldn’t it be better to have the royal family in power? #Poodlekek

  A response came quickly.

  Sure, if you want to die by starvation rather than in a train crash.

  And then another:

  Anything’s better than Korpeko.

  Arsyen’s heart beat faster. It was just as the Throne Reclamation Committee had said. His people were calling for him.

  He looked for another response. Instead, there was that same message again from Niels_1973. People kept refleeting it.

  Raise your lighters for #Poodlekek

  Arsyen studied the message closely. Unlike the other #Poodlekek messages, this one was written in English. It was a clever move — an English fleet would reach an international community. This person was a strategist, someone central to the movement — someone like Natia, trying to bring their domestic turmoil to international attention and put pressure on the Pyrrhian government. If there was any sort of core revolutionary committee, Niels_1973 was a part of it. He probably had additional ideas or information. Perhaps he even knew Natia.

  Arsyen clicked on the sender’s handle and read some of his other fleets. From what he saw, Niels_1973 had written a lot about a famous pop singer before he had started fleeting about Poodlekek. From misspelled, teenybopper musings, Niels_1973’s fleets had moved to angry, passionate words about lighters and bodies and destroyed hopes.

  Burn it all down! #Poodlekek

  Justice for All #Poodlekek

  Arsyen imagined Niels was a college student, a man who hours earlier had been listening to La Lala, carefree and young, before suddenly seeing bodies burn around him.