The Big Disruption

by Jessica Powell

  Jennie couldn’t help but smile. She had been right. Her assignment — and Karla’s, and all those other girls in Fried Fred’s — it was all part of a weird experiment.

  “From what we saw, bringing you and other girls into the engineering departments did increase male/female interaction a bit. But there are two problems. First, you women interact now with the engineers, but you’re still not dating them, just speaking to them. We had not anticipated that these two actions were distinct. Second, some of the female leads — like you — are destroying ambitious engineering projects.”

  “But I — ” Jennie protested.

  “Don’t take offense. We believe your failure on Social Car has nothing to do with your abilities or intelligence but a more general limitation of your gender.”

  It was a demeaning conclusion, and the feminist in Jennie wanted to protest. But Roni was really just calling women failures, not Jennie specifically, and her ego was much more important to her than any larger social movement.

  “That’s actually not the biggest problem,” Roni said. “Because even if I can get you girls to stop ruining our engineering projects and start dating the guys on your team, our approach still isn’t scalable. We can’t have women leading all of our technical projects if we want to be innovative. Besides, that would mean just one woman to every three to five men. Women can’t reproduce quickly enough for that to be a successful ratio.”

  “What do you mean, ‘reproduce’? Are you talking about babies?”

  “Ignore the reproduction part for now,” said Roni, waving the thought away with his hand. “The point is, how do I get more women to interact with the engineers at Anahata? It’s a real problem. Even when we got rid of the competition, we didn’t see enough uplift in dating or — ” Roni smacked his hands together, “coupling.”

  “I’m not following you,” said Jennie, shaking her head. “Babies? Competition? Coupling?”

  “Forget the babies, forget the babies. There are no babies — that’s part of the problem! But forget them for now. I will tell you about the competition part.”

  With a few grunts, Roni leaned forward in his suit, dragging his girth forward as he squatted close to the ground. He drew two stick figures in the dirt: one with an enormous head and the other with large arms. “Let’s just say that there were two guys you could pick: a guy with a big brain or a guy with big biceps.”

  “Yeah, there are a few of those around here,” said Jennie, a smile inadvertently crossing her lips as she thought of the squad of buff HM guys who ran drills each morning.

  “Now say I’ve gotten rid of those guys,” he said, making an X over the muscle-bound figure.

  “I don’t want you to get rid of those guys.”

  Roni grimaced. “Well, we did it. That’s what the Horizontal Moves program is about. The sales guys are all at the bottom of the Anahata hierarchy now. And our engineers are the gods they deserve to be. The good news is that our data shows that now, when you women do talk to the engineers, you appreciate their higher status. As a result, there is a much higher success rate than in the past. We call it ‘coupling.’ So the coupling rate is much higher, although it still remains extremely low. Make sense?”

  Jennie thought of all the women she had seen flirting with the engineers in Fried Fred’s. It did make sense in its odd little way.

  “So when we force the genders together, we have some good results, but generally, most of the women on campus aren’t initiating conversations with the engineers. They just stay in their own buildings. So the two groups don’t interact, conversations don’t start, and coupling never occurs.”

  “You mean you want us to seek you guys out?” Jennie laughed. “Your logic is all wrong. Women aren’t the hunters; we choose from everything that’s offered to us. I mean, unless they’re like me. I’m very assertive. As a feminist, I believe that — ”

  “I want to know about normal women,” Roni said. “Not feminists.”

  “Well, my point is that the engineers need to come find us. And then they have to convince us that they are the ones we want.”

  “Okay, Okay, I see,” Roni said. “So we need a way to find the women. And then we need a way to facilitate conversation.”

  Jennie nodded.

  “So, you are a woman. Tell me how to do this.”

  She shrugged. “Without fundamentally changing the engineers? Hmm…nothing occurs to me off the top of my head.”

  Roni’s face fell, his fat suit slumping like a deflated balloon atop the caked mud.

  “I should go,” he sighed, casting his drawing stick into the bushes.

  Without saying more, he dropped onto his belly, his face now at eye level with Jennie’s shoes. He began to crawl slowly away, dragging bits of leaves with him as his fat suit bounced behind the bushes. Jennie made a swifter exit and headed to the parking lot.

  As she slid into her car a few minutes later, Jennie realized that she had forgotten to ask Roni about Social Car.

  “Ugh,” she groaned, grimacing as she imagined the coming weeks of boredom.

  Her phone dinged again with a message. It was Arsyen. The guy just couldn’t take a hint.

  Jenni, I need horses and guns. I have big revolution in pants.

  “What guy doesn’t have a big revolution in his pants?” Jennie muttered.

  I mean big revolution plans, Arsyen wrote a second later. Which made even less sense than a revolution in his pants. This guy really needed help with his pickup lines.

  She tossed her phone into the passenger seat.

  And then it hit her — the solution to Roni’s problem. It was so blindingly obvious.

  Jennie turned her head and looked back at the bushes. At the far end of the building, with the aid of an overhead security light, she could see a bush rustling in the windless night, moving like a bloated, leafy phantom in the direction of the entrance.

  Jennie jumped out of the car and ran in pursuit of the waving bush.

  T he next morning, Jennie skipped into the Social Car cubicle with a box of bear claws and nearly tripped over a swivel chair that had fallen on its side. It seemed Sven and Jonas weren’t even trying to keep her out anymore — they just didn’t care.

  It was obvious no work had been done in days. Drawings of robots were scattered across the whiteboard; Red Bull cans were stacked in a perfect pyramid, clearly untouched.

  Jennie sidled up alongside Jonas, who didn’t look up from his screen. From what she could tell, he was on a messaging forum, calling himself Wei and arguing about vegetables. To his left, Arsyen’s desk was cleared off and spotless — a rarity at Anahata. Two pink sponges were stacked in the center; above them sat a note from Arsyen asking Sven to please look after them.

  Jennie shifted in place just slightly so she could get a better look at her blue-eyed enemy. She studied his profile from across the cubicle and decided he actually wasn’t bad-looking — particularly if he could just get rid of the dorky plastic sandals and weathered summer camp T-shirt. Then again, a costume change would probably not have any bearing on his abrasive personality.

  Taking a deep breath, Jennie walked toward Sven’s desk. She noticed his jaw tighten as she moved into his field of vision. She dropped her bait onto Arsyen’s empty desk.

  Sven’s nose lifted. Jonas scooted his chair to the left to grab a bear claw from the box, but her hand blocked his reach.

  “Where’s Arsyen?” she asked him.

  “We have not seen him in 4.6 days,” Jonas said.

  “No matter,” said Jennie, lifting her hand. “Two people are ample resource to build our project.”

  “You have an idea,” snorted Sven, eyes glued to his screen.

  “Not only that. I have a project that’s already been approved by Building 1.”

  Sven stopped what he was doing and partially swiveled his chair to face her.

  “Building 1. Barry’s building?”

  Jennie grinned.

/>   “We’re bringing back Social Car,” she said, “but on the mobile phone.”

  They stared at her, and then at each other.

  “I’ll explain,” she said. “Let’s say you saw a cute girl — maybe at Fried Fred’s. Would you go up and talk to her?”

  “Well…,” said Sven.

  “Um…,” said Jonas.

  “Right. But if that girl was online, things would be different, right? Like Jonas, a second ago you were chatting in a forum. You had no problem pretending to be someone else.”

  “That’s because there are no consequences online,” Sven said. “If someone doesn’t want to talk to you, you just move on to the next person.”

  “Because the fear of rejection is a lot lower on the internet, right?”

  Jennie walked to the whiteboard and drew a rectangle. “This is a mobile phone,” she said. Within the phone, she drew a bunch of squares with people’s faces. “Now what does this look like?”

  “A bit like the Social Car dashboard, I guess,” said Sven, flipping open a can of Red Bull.

  “I get it! I get it!” shouted Jonas, jumping up and racing to the whiteboard. “If you put Social Car on a mobile phone, you suddenly can see all the girls around you. You no longer need a car to meet or talk to them! And if they reject you, they reject you on the internet. So it is not real rejection. But if they like you, then you can talk to them!”

  “And meet them,” Jennie continued. “And because we’re using Social Car technology, we’ll know exactly where you are and can show you people nearby.”

  “Genius!” Jonas said.

  “And we’re going to start right here, with the girls at Anahata,” said Jennie. “I was thinking we could call the project Social Me.”

  “Internal code name S&M,” said Sven, snickering. But then his expression turned serious. “Here,” he said, moving the doughnuts to the far corner of Arsyen’s desk. “You’re going to need a place to work.”

  A fter three days and sixty-two hours of Social Me coding, five thousand Anahata employees — half male engineers, half female staff from across the company — received invitations to download and help beta test the new application on their phones. An email from the Social Me team to the lucky five thousand encouraged them to use their new app to “meet people near you now!”

  “Why would I want to meet new people?” asked an engineer on the Genie team.

  “Not people, idiot. Girls,” said his teammate, showing him a row of female faces on the app. “Besides, I checked Genie and it says both of us are going to use this app.” He pointed to a bunch of numbers on his computer screen. As designers of Anahata’s future prediction tool, the Genie team always let their product decide their next steps. The engineer stared at the Genie prediction and shrugged. There was no point in arguing with science.

  Later that evening, sitting alone in the Genie cubicle, the engineer signed himself into the app. Soon he was staring at sixteen attractive faces — sixteen girls online right then, all near him, on the Anahata campus. He touched one photo, and the girl’s picture filled the screen. Her name was Sarah, and her profile said she worked in Anahata’s PR department. She was twenty-six, liked electronic music, romantic comedies, and baking cookies. He didn’t like any of those things, but that didn’t really matter. What did bother him was the small flower tattoo near her ear. He hated tattoos.

  Next was Chinmei on the HR team. HR girls were pretty slutty — or that was what the engineer’s HM trainer had told him. She liked horses and walking her dog and blah blah blah. He opened the chat box.

  A Social Me prompt appeared.

  Need a hand starting the conversation?

  The engineer pushed the help button.

  A line of suggested conversation appeared in the chat box, waiting for his approval: “Hey Chinmei, that’s such a great pic. I love horses, too!”

  The engineer wasn’t convinced it was such a great pickup line, but he trusted the Social Me technology over anything he could come up with himself. He pressed send and then stared at the phone, as if expecting a perfumed genie to emerge from the port in a cloud of smoke. But no answer came. He wondered if other men had sent Chinmei similar messages.

  He went back to the gallery of photos. Laura. Alice. Julia. He stopped on Julia, who had big, curly brown locks. He opened the chat box again, asked for Social Me’s help, and didn’t even bother to read its pickup line suggestions, figuring it was something complementing her hair. He hit send. He then went back to Alice and Laura’s profiles and did the same, convinced that the more messages he sent, the more likely it was that at least one girl would respond to him. (The engineer had previously worked on Anahata’s email team; he knew how effective spam was.) All in all, he hit up about twenty girls.

  Soon after, his phone vibrated to indicate a new message. But it wasn’t from a girl — it was from the Social Me application.

  No response yet? Try filling in your profile.

  “Bad product design,” the engineer grumbled, believing that any good product wouldn’t ask him to fill anything out — it would already know everything about him.

  Still, he remembered Genie’s prediction that he would use the Social Me app. So he hit the “fill in my profile” button, and Social Me picked interests and hobbies for him that it claimed were high-performing with women. He was now a declared lover of art, wine, and Asian fusion cooking. He also decided to add one bit of truth — his participation on the Genie project. It had a lot of buzz around campus, and he figured it would make him look good.

  Within minutes of completing his profile, the man had his first response. It was from a girl named Emily.

  That’s so cool that you knit!

  He laughed. He knew nothing about knitting, other than it was something his grandmother did. He began to type.

  I’m not very good though.

  Oh, I can show you how to tie things together ;-)

  The engineer studied Emily’s emoticon for several seconds.

  ;-)

  Clearly, there was a difference between ;-) and the more straightforward :)

  Was Emily flirting with him? Before he had a chance to analyze her emoji any further, Emily was messaging him again.

  So you work on the Genie team?

  He tried to think of something impressive to say.

  Yeah. We predict what you’re going to do in the future. I could show you how it works.

  Yeah? ;-)

  The engineer could feel his heart quicken. She was winking. Again. This was his chance.

  I can even predict what you will do.

  Go on…

  You’ll come here to my building in ten minutes and I’ll show you Genie. And then you can show me…how to knit.

  I like to play with string. ;-) See you in ten.

  The engineer couldn’t believe how fast this was happening — so many winks! His eyes darted around the empty cubicle, looking for a candle or a blanket or something that would make Emily comfortable and put her in the mood — in the mood for what, he wasn’t sure, though he knew what he wanted.

  There was nothing in his workspace but various gadgets, Red Bull cans, and the red gym shirt his HM trainer had given him. He rummaged about in his backpack until he found the reading lamp he liked to use whenever he spent the night in a sleep capsule. He set the lamp on his desk, threw the red T-shirt over it, and turned off the lights. From one corner of the room, a small light illuminated the floor in a gentle red glow. It was the best he could do. And if Emily was surprised to see this — what if she really just wanted to show him how to knit?! — he could just pretend he was one of those coders who liked to work in the dark.

  He sat back in his chair and took a deep breath, readying himself for Emily’s arrival.

  Twenty minutes later, Emily was doing things to his body he had only ever seen on the internet, while Genie’s future predictor compiler cast a green glow of zeros and ones across their bodies, spitting out
new and promising predictions.

  T he Genie team was in an uproar, their alternating wails and accusatory shouts prompting Jennie and others in Building 7 to don noise-reduction headphones. The problem wasn’t that one of their team members hadn’t done any work in three days, discovered each morning in handcuffs, wearing little more than a proud smile. That was a mild inconvenience.

  There was a much bigger problem — namely that Genie’s future predictor tool had failed to anticipate the full success of Social Me.

  In the past week alone, Genie had predicted the outcome of a major European election, the fall of the yen against the dollar, and the winner of a Brazilian reality TV show. It had announced that one Anahata engineer would go on hunger strike until his preferred brand of potato chips was restocked in the micro-kitchen; it predicted another engineer would foment a revolution in a faraway country.

  It had even predicted that the Genie team members would all be invited to try the Social Me app.

  But it had completely, totally failed to predict the app’s success.

  And three days into its existence, Social Me was an irrefutable success. While the company’s stock price continued to fall and Wall Street declared that the “frivolous moon colony plan” would be the end of Anahata’s reign, things couldn’t have been sunnier on campus. Birds chirped in the trees and fleet-footed cupids danced down the halls, jumping from one beanbag to the next, sprinkling their magical dust on those lucky enough to have been invited to try the app. Meanwhile, those without access queued outside the Social Me cubicle, begging for an invitation.

  The Genie team had just one thing with which to console themselves. While they hadn’t predicted a Social Me triumph, their tool was at least predicting a Social Me problem.

  The new Genie team lead, a redhead with even redder lips, delivered the news to Jennie like an arcade genie spitting out a cryptic future.

  “Social Me has or is going to have a problem,” she said. “When the time will come, I do not know. But expect a problem.”