“Psychological issues?”
“The HR files, combined with our employees’ internet activity, are a huge treasure trove of data,” Jennie said. “People are super confessional when they think they’re just talking to a machine. We know everything about them.”
“If you let us use it, we can make the algorithm much, much smarter,” Roni jumped in. “Entire human interactions can be engineered from nearly start to finish. And the app gets smarter as times goes on as it learns more about each woman and what kinds of conversational topics and techniques she responds to.”
“Think of it like A.I. matchmaking,” Jennie said.
“Anahata data mining meets social engineering,” Roni added.
“Deep-learning dating.”
“Neural-net networking.”
“Enough,” Gregor said, “I get it.”
“Right. So using Beth’s file as a test case, we built this into Social Me, and all of our metrics went through the roof. Every guy who’s interacted with Beth through our suggestion tool has managed to have a successful coupling with her.”
“Coupling?”
“Basically, they hooked up with Beth,” said Roni, grinning. “We can turn the most wholesome girls into real sluts — uh, sorry, Jennie — provided we can get the girls to ignore physical attraction and give the engineers the right data to help seduce them.”
Jennie beamed. The insight had been hers. She couldn’t wait to tell her feminist book club that she was subverting societally imposed attraction paradigms by making women attracted to ugly men.
“Plus,” Roni continued, “the feature’s activation is limited to only unattractive and low-rated profiles. That way, no HM candidates will get access to this extra help from the application. It will just be our engineers. Of course, those rare engineers whose ratings are naturally high — outliers who are good-looking or socially adept — will also miss out on this feature, but that’s no big deal. They’re already doing fine with the girls.”
“Long term,” Jennie added, “we think that by helping the engineers along with various conversation prompts, we start to train them in how to interact with women more successfully, which will help them in the offline world in all sorts of relationships. At some point they’ll be able to take the training wheels off and have real conversations with real people on their own.”
“In the short term,” Roni said, “we keep the engineers happy, we keep them on the moon, and we destroy Galt. That’s the main point, Gregor. This fixes our Project Y problem.”
Gregor shook his head. “So what you’re telling me is that the fate of our social mission has come down to a hookup app.”
Jennie and Roni nodded.
Although his expression hadn’t shifted, Jennie could tell there was something underneath the feigned placidity. There was something dark in this man. Not that she cared.
“Fine,” Gregor said.
“You mean you’ll get us access to the data?”
“Yes.”
Gregor stood and opened the door to his office. He kept his hand on the doorknob, as if worried they hadn’t gotten the hint.
“And that’s, like, legally okay?” asked Jennie, as she slowly backed out of the room. “I mean, all the user data, the pheromones?”
Gregor was trying to close the door on her.
“Anahata is a disruptive company,” he said, slightly pushing the door against her toes. “If we don’t upset people by doing something, they never get used to that thing, and then we can’t do a new thing to upset them. It’s the way technology moves forward.”
The door closed.
Roni turned to Jennie and gave her a high-five.
A rsyen was not as prepared as he had hoped. He had wanted to arm himself with a weapon of some sort, but Jennie was clearly so embarrassed by her earlier behavior that she hadn’t even responded to any of his requests for help.
In fact, for all its mighty power, Anahata had proven surprisingly useless. From the airport, Arsyen filed a ticket in the company’s internal system, asking for help with Pyrrhian corruption and security concerns. But it seemed the engineer who processed the request interpreted it as something having to do with Arsyen’s hard drive and erased all of Arsyen’s computer and account data. Now he was completely cut off.
To make matters worse, Arsyen had brought plenty of U.S. dollars with him but discovered they were of little use in Pyrrhia, where Korpeko had outlawed the existing currency (“the aimo”) and replaced it with a barter system. In the border town of Kerfluff, Arsyen tried to obtain a mule by bartering one of Anahata’s secret hardware products, but everyone in the town just tossed it aside like it was a cheap piece of plastic. As a result, it had taken him almost a week to hitchhike to Poodlekek.
And now here he was, traveling through the city his family had built over decades of rule.
Little had changed since he had fled. Goats continued to huddle outside the stores, hoping for a handout, and the bison-drawn carriages still outpaced the rickety buses that his father had introduced to Pyrrhia. As far as Arsyen could tell, there had been no investment in public works and no attempt to improve the country’s infrastructure beyond the miles and miles of icy curling lanes, which originated alongside the capital’s main road and wound throughout the Pyrrhian countryside. The one nod to modernity were the internet cafés, which lined the streets like eager parade-goers, each competing with its neighbor via colorful signs and promises of free extra minutes. But they were all currently closed under Korpeko’s strategy to cut off Poodlekek from the rest of the country.
They took the main road into the center, passing the statue of Jeeves, the great English sportsman flown to Poodlekek by Arsyen’s grandfather in the 1960s to help install civilization and croquet fields across the country. Not far from him was the statute of Lascau, the French filmmaker summoned by Arsyen’s father to produce Pyrrhia’s first movies — documentaries and biopics exploring the great public works undertaken by the Aimo family. Jeeves and Lascau had both declared that Poodlekek would be the future capital of the world. And it would be, finally, once Arsyen reclaimed his throne. He would summon Bobby Bonilo, and together they would build a new Silicon Valley in Poodlekek — a Silicon Poodle, or maybe Poodlecon Valley. It would be full of young people, well educated, designing apps and websites that would save the world…and of course make Pyrrhia — and the royal family — loads of money.
But first he needed to confer with the Throne Reclamation Committee and ensure they were well-prepared for battle. Otherwise, Arsyen would happily grab Natia and go hang out in California until things were ready for him.
If Sven weren’t a man of science; if he didn’t believe attraction was simply the intersection of timing and hormones; if he had ever, even just once, managed to kiss a woman, kiss her deeply, and know what that touch could do to a rational human brain — then he just might have considered the hypothesis that the woman before him, the one whom he had originally considered a harbinger of misery, was in fact destined to be his savior, who would reverse decades of frustration with one generous little act.
But instead Sven just stared at her image, dumb with lust but unable to entertain the greater cosmic possibilities. He assumed he wanted her simply because she might not want him. That had happened before.
His finger hovered above her picture, then flicked to a new photo, one of her with girlfriends, enjoying a night out. Then there was a photo of her with her computer. Another with her mom.
Sven sighed — they already had so much in common. He leaned back in the sleep capsule, wondering how he had gotten himself into such a state about her. He set his phone down.
She was irritating, he told himself, she dressed like a bag lady, and she wasn’t very smart.
No, he countered, she had that California hippie chick vibe, and she was certainly smarter than him.
Ugh! He had to stop thinking about her.
Sven extended his legs, stretching him
self along the bed of the sleep capsule. He stared up at the capsule’s hard-shelled ceiling, supposedly designed to mimic a womb. He doubted an actual female womb was made of shiny white plastic, but the ceiling’s curve and the cocooning effect it produced was certainly relaxing — as if you were in a different world. The curtained opening to the capsule ruined that effect somewhat, though it did make it easy to peer out into the hall. Sven adjusted the pillow, and a built-in speaker thanked him in a calming, therapeutic voice for his hard work that day. He wiggled his toes. A full recline was a luxury most standard beds and couches would never allow someone of his height.
Sven picked up his mobile phone. There was a message from Arsyen’s personal account — a picture of him atop a mule, smiling, a broken-down bus and a line of scowling poor people behind him. He was asking whether Sven knew where to buy lasers in bulk. Such a funny guy. Was he building a startup? Something using lasers to solve poverty? He would have to find out more when his co-worker returned.
Sven ignored Arsyen’s questions and sent him back a picture of his crooked second toe. That always made people laugh.
He returned to the picture of Jennie. She was as bossy and stubborn as Maria, his one almost-girlfriend. They could almost have been the same girl, though unlike Maria, Jennie seemed to bathe consistently, and her hippie dresses and occasional references to feminism and the environment seemed more like fashion accessories than a real belief system. Which pleased Sven, since only in America did there seem to be such a strong connection between poor hygiene and progressive politics.
Sven liked to hear Jennie talk about her grand plans for Mother Earth. She lectured Jonas on recycling Red Bull cans and told Sven that she would one day “really fix things.” Sven thought it was cute that a nontechnical person thought she could change the world. It was ambitious, even if it was clearly delusional.
Sven considered the possibility that Jennie could be smarter than him, though he found that difficult to reconcile with the size of her breasts and her lack of an engineering degree. But she was definitely a good leader — probably the best he ever had at Anahata.
He yawned and rubbed his eyes. Since Roni and Jennie’s score of the prized employee data, he and Jonas — aided by a handful of eager engineers — had been working nonstop on Social Me, making the application even smarter and more effective. They were almost ready to roll out the new version and had spent the day debugging the software and doing quality analysis.
Throughout the day, Sven had interacted with various women at the company using four fake profiles. Bob, Sam, Steve, and Logan all had different jobs, appearances, and interests. But to the credit of Social Me, all of them had experienced plenty of luck with the ladies that day.
In fact, all of Sven’s twenty test interactions proved successful, the new version of the Social Me app generating such customized pickup lines and compelling conversation fillers that Sven’s various profiles would certainly have had multiple coupling events in the offline world had he chosen to follow through. The new algorithm generated romantic French phrases for Steve after he chose Jamillah, who was registered in a company-sponsored French class. Bob had luck with Annie, convincing her that the best way to conquer her passive-aggressive behavior with her teammates was to engage in some role-play with him later that night. And Sam, armed with the knowledge of Camille’s recent online purchase of a yoga mat, charmed her into doing a virtual downward dog with him.
Sven told himself it was his self-discipline and commitment to science that had kept him from following through with any meetups. But he knew the truth was more nuanced: Talking with girls on an app was one thing; actually meeting them — when he might fail to meet their expectations — was another entirely.
Just then, Sven’s phone vibrated. It was a message for Logan from some girl who worked in marketing.
What would Jennie think of Logan? Of all Sven’s fake profiles, Logan’s was the one that came closest to the real Sven: tall, blond, and an engineer.
Masking himself as Logan, Sven clicked on Jennie’s profile and read the information she had filled in. It was all stuff that he already knew from working with her, like how she liked dolphins and reading entrepreneur biographies. He wondered what else the app knew about her.
Sven hit the chat button floating above Jennie’s picture, and a Social Me prompt popped up, offering to help kick-start the conversation. This was the same feature he had been testing all day, but now his pulse quickened. He pushed the button again, and a heart icon pulsed three times, preparing his first courtship line. She would never know it was him; Sven hit send.
Hi Jennie! I was just reading The Feminine Mystique and thinking about how awesome it would be to discuss it with someone…
Jennie responded immediately.
Your interpretation would be deeply colored by your phallus.
Sven reread the message. Was Jennie blowing Logan off? What was a colored phallus? He hit the Social Me suggestion button again.
Logan: I am trying to transcend my phallus. I believe that history should be herstory.
Jennie: So what do you think of Sommers’ gender feminist/equity feminist dichotomy?
Logan: I believe in deconstructing all binary oppositions and the hierarchies they imply.
Sven had no idea what they were talking about. Plus, he was out of Red Bull. He selected the autopilot option so that Social Me could continue to generate lines on his behalf, then made his way to the micro-kitchen.
When he returned, the exchange seemed pretty intense.
Jennie: But doesn’t Sontag’s model of Baudrillardist simulacra imply that sexual identity has significance, given that presemantic materialism is invalid?
Logan: The invalidity of presemantic materialism implies the negation of the intersectional immanence of the simulacra.
Jennie: That’s an interesting point. Btw don’t you think the layout of the Anahata cubicles is a hetero-masculine interpretation of an inherently feminine space?
Logan: Totally. Hey check out this dolphin listicle!
Sven did a double take. How did they go from phalluses to dolphins? Was Social Me as confused as he was, or was this how Jennie’s brain worked?
Jennie: I LOVE dolphins.
Did Jennie not realize what was happening? Was the puppet master actually under the spell of her own puppet?
Logan: I would like you to teach me about feminism.
Jennie: Shall we start with The Second Sex?
Sven squealed in his sleep capsule. Jennie wanted to give him Second Sex!!! What was Second Sex?!? He stared at the empty text field, the cursor beating with promise. He had to stop this before Jennie found out who Logan really was. He tossed his phone to the back of the capsule. For minutes, he avoided it, face burning, listening to it vibrate with new messages from Jennie. He decided he would delete her messages without reading them, then come back into work the next day like nothing had ever happened. Jennie would never need to know. He could use Dogtown to ask her out in a few weeks.
Just then there was a knock on the outside of the capsule wall. Sven drew back the curtain and peered out, ready to yell at the encroaching passerby. He yelped as he saw Jennie standing there, dressed in a crocheted top and long, flowery skirt.
Panicking, Sven let the curtain fall back, dying for a refresh button. How had Jennie known that Logan’s profile belonged to him?
But then it hit him: Of course Jennie would have known it was him. She had spent the day logging all the bugs reported by the various profiles; she could easily figure out which ones were coming from the different engineers on the team.
Sven sunk lower in his capsule.
“The Social Car location detection is really quite effective,” came Jennie’s voice from outside the capsule. “I told Jonas to turn it on only for women. That way, we women can find your exact location but won’t worry about you men finding us. I think it’s a good power balance, don’t you? After all, when men stalk women, it’s sc
ary. But when women stalk men, it’s kinda charming, right?”
Sven wasn’t listening. Peering out from the half-inch space separating curtain and wall, Sven studied Jennie’s face, gradually traveling down her neck, following the hemp necklace that hovered just above her breasts. He couldn’t believe what he thought was happening, what was about to happen. He had no idea what to do, yet he knew the next step was up to him.
He grabbed his phone, turned off the autopilot feature, and typed a message to Jennie.
Do you really want to give me Second Sex?
Jennie’s phone vibrated just a few feet away with the sound of his message.
She pulled back the curtain and stepped into the capsule.
And then the thought that was always in Sven’s mind, from morning to night, for every day of his existence since puberty, now ran quickly, turned back on itself, ran again, and again, and life sped up and hope burst forth and
for girl in all_girls_in_world:
if girl.will_sleep_with_me():
girl.process()
And finally, he was at peace.
E xactly thirty-five hours after Sven Svenson entered manhood, the Anahata campus shot into action. Sprinklers leaped from their subterranean sleep, twisting in unison to the left, then right, ensuring that not a single blade of Anahata grass went unwatered. The sophisticated irrigation system kept the company’s imported Irish grass fertile and sparkling, impervious to California’s perpetual drought.
The first Anahata jogger bounded across the sidewalk outside Building 2. Dressed in sleek black running gear, an orange HM emblazoned across the back of his jacket, the man reached Building 10 before even a minute had lapsed. In a few more leaps, he was off campus property, returning thirty minutes later, this time at a much reduced speed. He was now accompanied by five other runners, the newcomers all moving with considerable effort. The man lashed at their heels with a stick, spurring them forward as they jog-shlumped past the corner at Building 20, gasping their way toward the campus lake.
The Big Disruption Page 20