The Big Disruption

by Jessica Powell

  Noting Jennie’s puzzled look, the redhead rolled her eyes.

  “Look, I don’t even get why we’re building this product. Genie can’t give concrete details, just confirmations about generally positive or negative things. I might as well tell you now that you’re going to die one day. Do with the information as you see fit.”

  It was a useless warning, as Jennie already knew there was a problem in her hookup paradise. It was as plain as the faces staring back at her on the Social Me app.

  The problem was Hot Ryan.

  She had spotted him on Social Me the previous day. Hot Ryan was twenty-seven and loved going to the gym, cooking multicourse macrobiotic dinners, and taking long walks in the forest. He was everything she wanted in a boyfriend. His hair was a color Jennie was sure was called “russet,” and he had the kind of slightly angular face that she was sure could only belong to a man who had experienced both hardship and love and who was sensitive — so sensitive that he felt every emotion, every loss, every moment in which his future girlfriend might leave his side. In his profile picture, he was wearing a knit sweater, sitting in front of a fireplace with a glass of red wine, inviting one lucky girl to join him for an evening of slow jams and lovemaking. Jennie could hear the fire crackling in the background, the smell of pine and winter filling her nose. Hot Ryan was dreamy, and he could be hers in a matter of seconds if she just clicked on the chat button.

  “We’ve got another HMer on S&M,” she said over her shoulder, pinging Sven the link to Ryan’s Social Me profile — though not before first adding Ryan to her favorites folder in case she wanted to contact him later.

  No girl wanted to date an HMer or be seen on campus with him — everyone knew they were the losers and meatheads of Anahata’s employee base. But it seemed that guys like Hot Ryan had figured out how to hide their HM status from the app and were starting to monopolize all the conversations and messages from the girls, leaving the engineers empty-handed.

  Sven took a look at Ryan’s profile and let out a growl.

  “These guys are like weeds! We get rid of one and another pops up in his place! And what’s up with that sweater?”

  “Jealous much?” said Jennie, turning in her chair toward Sven. She let her gaze linger on his face, appreciating the faint acne scars near his temples — the reminder, no doubt, of a painful adolescence. She liked guys who were mildly bruised; their slight imperfections tempered their attempts at arrogance. They were nothing like the sales guys, nothing like that Niels Smeardon, who had seduced her and then made her wait outside on his lawn, in the cold, until a taxi came.

  Sven blushed, and Jennie realized she was still staring.

  “More importantly,” she said, looking down at her mobile, “how do you think they’re getting onto Social Me? We restricted access to just the engineers and female employees.”

  “Maybe some of the Horizontal Moves guys managed to steal some of the engineers’ phones and replace their pictures,” Sven said.

  Jonas turned in his chair. “Perhaps they are exploiting a loophole in the code.”

  Sven smirked. “That’s like suggesting that me and my core competencies learned how to do a cost-benefit analysis overnight.”

  Jonas shrugged. “They must be doing something special to get into the app.”

  “Loophole or not, there will always be some way for a nonengineer to get on here if he really wants to,” Jennie said. “We need to rig the system so that the girls only want to speak and meet the engineers. In other words, we need to get Jonas’ profile, for example, to beat Hot Ryan.”

  “Our site is eighteen-plus,” Sven snickered. “Jonas isn’t old enough to join.”

  Jonas stuck his tongue out. “You really think I am incapable of hacking into my own service?”

  Jennie grinned. She had indeed banned Jonas and Anahata’s other child prodigies from using Social Me but soon discovered that such precautions were unnecessary. Jonas and the other boys had hacked in on the first day but, not understanding the attraction of speaking with girls, soon returned to their video games.

  “Okay, so forget about Jonas. We need, like, Arsyen’s profile to beat Hot Ryan,” she said.

  Arsyen had sent her another message that morning. This time something about being stuck in an airport with donkeys. He was the perfect example of a guy who needed Social Me to land a girl.

  “The engineers will never beat the HMers on looks,” Jenni continued. “We need something that makes a woman feel like there’s a deeper connection with the guy she’s talking to.”

  The men went quiet, seeming to wait for more input from Jennie. But she was already thinking about another problem, one that she did not share with her team members but had kept her awake the previous night.

  Shortly after the Social Me launch, Jennie concluded that an engineer’s first interaction with the app was crucial in determining whether he became a repeat visitor. Put simply, he was more likely to return to the app if he had a positive interaction with the opposite sex.

  This was easier said than done. Even the all-powerful internet had its limits, and Jennie’s analytical data showed that most of the engineers were needing several tries before they could land on a girl willing to talk to them for more than a few minutes. As a result, some of the engineers had already given up hope and abandoned the product entirely. If she wanted to keep her engineers on Social Me, she had to make sure that their first interaction with the opposite sex was positive — or, better yet, that it led to a full-on coupling event.

  So Jennie had taken the burden of coupling events on her own back — literally — and spent the second day of the launch running from one sleep capsule to another, converting twenty engineers to satisfied Social Me users. By the end of the day, she was worn out (and slightly disgusted) and knew she couldn’t do it on her own. The twenty escorts she had hired the next day made quick work of the Genie, Moodify, and infrastructure teams, and by week’s end had ensured that hundreds of other Anahata engineers were reaching some personal form of ecstasy thanks to Social Me.

  But she knew her escort strategy wasn’t scalable and wouldn’t help Roni’s moon colony problem. The engineers were certainly coming back for second helpings, but once they were no longer engaged with flirty escorts but normal Anahata women instead, the conversations quickly fell flat.

  Flipping through the chat records, it was clear that the men simply weren’t engaging the women the right way. If they used the Social Me interest generator feature, they could start a conversation with the girls, but the moment they stopped discussing knitting, pastels, or baking, the conversation screeched to a halt. They needed a fully automated solution that would help any engineer score an offline meetup.

  Jennie tapped her pen to her lips as she calculated how many more escorts she would need to make it through the week. She could feel Sven watching her and was surprised to feel her cheeks flush. Then something flashed inside her.

  “Do you think you could hack into Anahata’s internal HR data?”

  Sven shook his head. “Impossible. Internal security is a fortress. And if we got caught…”

  “You’re right,” said Jennie, tapping her pen against her lips. “There has to be another way.”

  S ituated at the edge of campus, its walls facing a supermarket and other landmarks of suburban Palo Alto, Building 24 was not the typical Anahata structure of white cubes and boundless windows. Rather, the human resources offices were housed in an attractive, almost historic-looking brick structure surrounded by rose bushes on all sides — a chastity belt of sorts whose thorns cut into Jennie’s legs as she crouched next to Roni.

  “I’ve never been out here before,” Jennie whispered.

  “Its location is no coincidence,” Roni whispered back. “Nothing important happens here.”

  The final light went out, and the last employee left the building. Roni passed Jennie some black theater makeup. She smeared it across her face, mimicking the zigzags that
ran across Roni’s forehead and cheeks. He had assured her that this would work, that he had done it many, many times without detection.

  Jennie and Roni crawled out from the bushes, keeping low to the ground. When he reached the door, Roni jumped to his feet, making Jennie question the whole purpose of their clandestine approach. He badged himself into the building without any problem. Human resources was not a high-security building, and any Anahata employee could get access with their badge.

  Once inside, they made their way through the corridors, searching for the office of the senior vice president of human resources. At the end of the hall was a corner office with the nameplate they were looking for. “Paul Barlow,” it said in blue lettering, surrounded by smiling teddy bears holding clusters of balloons. Underneath was a folksy, hand-painted wooden sign: Come in! There was no doorknob, and the door itself was half open, suggesting that declining this friendly invitation to enter was a much greater offense than trespassing.

  Roni made a beeline for Paul’s desk and fired up his computer. “We just need to break into his system and pull it out.”

  “How are we ever going to figure out his password?” Jennie hissed.

  “Don’t worry, I’ve done this a million times.” Roni’s fingers tap-danced their way across Paul’s keyboard.

  Within seconds, the plain password prompt box gave way to a desktop landscape of lavender flowers.

  “Whoa — first try!” Jennie exclaimed.

  “HR people tend to think with their hearts,” Roni explained. “Emotional people don’t tend to create secure passwords. In fact, it’s been proven that seventy percent of HR staff worldwide use the password ‘12345.’”

  Roni began searching through Paul’s electronic files while Jennie glanced around the room. On his pale blue walls, Paul had hung several photos of himself with his elderly mother on various European vacations. There were also his diplomas: an undergraduate degree in religious studies from Harvard and a psychology PhD from Stanford. Certificates in Reiki therapy, cognitive emotional therapy, advanced Feldenkreis, and the Henry Miller Wellness Program surrounded Paul’s prized degrees in a big group therapy hug. Propped against the windowsill were three books, clearly meant for display.

  Healthy Employees, Healthy Company

  Managing Genius

  Employee Management: How to Stop Worrying About Your Duds and Start Focusing on Your Superstars

  All were authored by Paul.

  “I can’t find anything,” Roni said from across the room. “You’d think it’d be one massive online database. Maybe I’m just not looking in the right place.”

  Jennie’s eyes fell on a chart atop the coffee table. It was little more than a manila folder marked with two alphabet stickers reading “PU” on the edge.

  She opened it.

  Beth Punter. Department: Finance.

  There were lists of promotions, salary increases, and vacation accruals. It wasn’t anything particularly interesting. But then, flipping to the second page, Jennie found a recent performance evaluation from Beth’s manager, identifying Beth as a top performer in her department but denying her a promotion until she could work on a few areas: Beth was apparently somewhat bossy and not sufficiently collaborative.

  So many women at Anahata seem to have that problem, thought Jennie. If only they could make the women less bossy, maybe they would get further at Anahata.

  Jennie shook her head — that was a problem for another day. She kept reading.

  “This is it,” she gasped, jumping up to show Roni.

  Roni glanced through the folder, nodding as he read the second page.

  “But wait,” Jennie said. “This is a paper file. Could it be a trick?”

  “It’s real,” said Roni. “Eighty-four percent of HR employees believe that paper files are more honest and trustworthy than computer-based ones.”

  “Now we just have to figure out how to get more of these,” said Jennie, scanning the room but not seeing anything useful. “There must be thousands of these files, and really, what we need are the digital copies.”

  “I know someone who can help us,” Roni said. “Copy down the useful parts of that folder and get the guys to update the algorithm like we discussed. Then we’ll have something to take to my guy.”

  T wenty hours later, Jennie was standing with Roni in Gregor Guntlag’s office, the second biggest office at Anahata after Bobby’s. While Gregor probably thought of it as well-worn and comfy, Jennie felt as though she had just walked into a room set up only moments before, a temporary space where Gregor had halted just long enough to fire someone or intimidate any ambitious Anahata interior decorator. The office was nearly empty save for a computer on a desk, a recycling bin, and, on the wall, a solitary poster — a photograph of a Delhi slum, with the caption Proximity Does Not Guarantee Intimacy.

  Roni had just finished his pitch for Social Me, but Gregor had yet to respond. Jennie thought he looked bored — his face was fixed in a permanent blank. Was his disinterest all an act? He had shown no interest in her as a member of the opposite sex. She wasn’t used to that — and wasn’t sure she liked it.

  Roni cleared his throat and tried again.

  “The data will make a big difference. We can show you how.”

  Roni nodded to Jennie. She placed her mobile on Gregor’s desk so he could see the screen.

  “This is Beth Punter,” she said, pointing to Beth’s profile picture on the app. “She’s an employee in the HR department. She’s on Pad Kee Mao, like thirty percent of the women on campus.”

  Gregor’s brow wrinkled, and Jennie felt a moment of panic.

  “Pad Kee Mao,” said Roni, his head darting about the office as he lowered his voice to a whisper. “Pad Kee Mao is Social Me. Which used to be Social Car. Which was once known as Pad Thai.”

  “Today I have reviewed the projects known as Lands Ahoy, Lollipop, and Mai Tai,” Gregor said, “and killed all of them. You would think Anahatis might want to direct more of their extraordinary creativity toward their products instead of their code names.”

  Jennie felt her face redden. She looked to Roni for help, but he just motioned for her to continue. She took a deep breath and reminded herself of the quote she had posted next to her bathroom mirror. Leaders are those who lead. She was a leader who led. Who leads. No, she led. She did both.

  “Beth has entered her various interests into Social Me” Jennie said. “She likes baking, pingpong, and reading. When an engineer goes to speak with Beth, we give him various prompts and suggestions to help him write an initial pickup line that will appeal to her. For example, given Beth has included baking as an interest in her Social Me profile, our engineer might tell her about the cake he baked the previous day for his mother’s birthday.

  “And that works?” said Gregor, raising an eyebrow.

  “You’d be surprised by the degree to which women respond to a guy who mimics everything they like,” Jennie answered. “The problem is that we’ve found HMers on Social Me, and they’re getting most of the girls’ attention.”

  Jennie noticed Gregor’s face tighten at the mention of Horizontal Moves. So he was not so unflappable after all.

  “We thought about trying to make the identification techniques better so that within the male employee population, only engineers would be allowed on the service,” Roni said. “But there may always be interlopers. So instead, we need to focus on improving the coupling mechanism, rather than just focus on eliminating HMers. We need to make the engineers on Social Me as desirable as possible.”

  “So what’s your plan?”

  Jennie opened her mouth to speak, but Roni beat her to the punch.

  “Two things,” he answered. “First, starting tomorrow, we’ll pump pheromones through the air vents of the marketing, HR, and PR departments — the departments with the most women. They override all the normal chemistry that would draw the women to the HM guys and instead focus them on finding good providers and long-t
erm mates — our engineers. The Building 1 moon chemistry team has figured out how to do all of this without losing any of the lust impulses that we want to maintain. In essence, we will be able to rechannel promiscuity, diverting it from legitimate sources of lust to artificial ones.”

  “The chemistry team has already confirmed these pheromones will also work on the moon,” Jennie said, “so we can recreate these behaviors again once we’re there.”

  “And there’s an additional benefit,” Roni said. “Up until now, we’ve only been thinking about the heterosexual use case for Social Me — getting the women attracted to our male engineers. But of course we also have other use cases to solve for, like homosexuality. As it turns out, the pheromones that turn the women into lusty aspiring housewives happen to react completely differently with male hormone receptors. Men in the marketing, PR, and HR departments who are exposed to our special pheromone blend will suddenly become attracted to other men, providing our gay engineers with an attractive pool of candidates as well.”

  Gregor’s expression still hadn’t shifted. “For Project Y to succeed, this attraction needs to be long term,” he said. “Pheromones alone won’t solve that.”

  “Right, that brings us to the second step,” Jennie said. “Take a look again at Beth on the app. We happened to find some additional information about her — information that can improve the matching and interaction features by tenfold.”

  “What kind of information?”

  “Birth date and relationship status, length of employment at Anahata — that kind of thing,” Jennie said. She avoided Gregor’s gaze.

  “That doesn’t sound like very valuable information.”

  “Well,” she said, glancing at Roni, “there is a bit more than that. Like which campus cafés Beth eats at, what time she arrives at work.”

  “So whenever she uses her badge to access something.”

  “Yeah, and, um, things like career successes and failures, psychological issues.”