Burn-In

by P. W. Singer

  They cut Jared out of all of it. Not just the money, but the deal. That was what had been so hard for him to take, and so hard for her to watch.

  This was not how it was supposed to work. That job had been the fulfillment of a lifetime of promises made to him by parents, teachers, loan officers, and more. Study hard, get good grades, go to a good school, and then repeat until you end up with a good job, where you work hard, get a good salary, and send your kids to a good school to repeat it all again. That had been the deal literally for generations. Automation had always seemed a problem just for truck drivers or factory workers, until suddenly it wasn’t.23 It turned out that not even a Yale Law degree could compete with the algorithms.

  It was not even a partner or the human resources department that had made the decision to fire him, versus the lucky 20 percent the firm had kept on. The “workforce optimization” was decided by the algorithm, and even the termination letter automatically written and emailed.24

  Somehow, that cold, dispassionate decision made Jared blame himself more. It wasn’t someone else’s fault, so it had to be his own. The first thing Jared said when he learned he would lose his job was “I should have been a trial lawyer.” Of course, that was no refuge either, as algorithms had cut a swath through that field as well. Predictive analysis meant that both sides knew the chances of success, making it folly to go through with a prosecution or lawsuit; you could just run the numbers and calculate the risks and investments of a pretrial settlement.25

  Keegan thought about the honeymoon they’d taken to Glacier National Park, just after he’d passed the bar.26 They’d spent nearly every meal and hike planning their future—jobs, work, houses. Not once had they talked about staying together just for their daughter and Jared spending his days as a remote companion to the elderly.27

  The fall had been hard, but they hadn’t lost everything, unlike so many people they knew.

  Within two steps inside the door, Haley slammed into Keegan’s legs at full speed, that perfect kind of collision fueled by beautifully raw emotion.

  “My butterfly,” said Keegan, unlocking Haley’s tight grip to scoop her up in her arms. “Missed you.”

  “All day, Mommy?” Haley said.

  “All day,” said Keegan.

  “Every hour?” said Haley.

  “Every single one,” said Keegan.

  “Each minute?”

  “All of them. Until now,” said Keegan. In the moment she held her girl in her arms, Haley’s head tucked into the crook of her neck, she felt a disorienting loss of connection to the adult things that had occupied her mind. Here and now, she was only Haley’s mother. She swayed slightly, taking a slight step back, before she opened her eyes again to the world.

  Today, Haley had double French braids. “I love your braids,” Keegan said.

  “Daddy did them this morning.”

  She had to give Jared credit. There was no way she could have done that. “Beautiful.” Keegan ran her hand along Haley’s head, glad her daughter was oblivious to what it’d taken for her father to become so expert at doing her hair.

  “He says it’s to make me look like a Jedi.”

  “You do. We’ll go find your lightsaber.”

  Finally noticing her entrance, Jared waved toward Keegan, while murmuring into the helmet mic. It was probably Harlan again, a centenarian from Portland, Oregon. He had started out giving Jared top scores and then moved on to requesting him specifically, which was a nice 5 percent bump in Jared’s cut of the fee.

  The system could be automated with a synth voice, but there was a reason wealthy clients paid to have a real human engaging and monitoring their loved ones—all the studies showed that the autonomous aids, like the robotic-arm feeding system that Harlan’s kids had equipped his kitchen with, were not enough.28 They needed human interaction; even the simulation of it was not enough.

  Keegan set her daughter down. “Let me check in on Daddy,” she said to Haley. “I’ll be right back.”

  She sat down heavily next to Jared and tugged away a couple of the blankets, a subtle indication that it was time to get up and join her and Haley.

  Jared flashed two fingers, indicating two minutes, which really meant double that. So Keegan got up to see what world Haley had created today for her dolls to play in.

  Haley showed off her dolls, and let the spider bot crawl on her hand and arm the way Keegan had once let a tarantula walk all the way up her shoulder in high school. But as Haley babbled on about Barbie and the spider’s adventures, Keegan kept sneaking peeks over her shoulder at Jared, waiting for him to get up off the couch. On a good day, he’d come right over and start talking in a silly high-pitched voice, adopting the personas they’d given the dolls. Today was not going to be like that, Keegan could see.

  She put an old cartoon on the wall projector to keep Haley occupied and went into the kitchen to get dinner going. Kratts’ Creatures, the same show she’d watched as a kid—at least she could tell herself she was doing the minimum a good parent would do, by making her daughter watch something slightly educational.

  She messaged Jared using the touch screen on the freezer door.

  U ready yet?

  He responded with an emoji: a sack of money.

  JUST 5 MORE, THEN DUN

  He’d left the caps lock on, like it was important to shout.

  Two minutes had become five minutes in one minute. While she tried to figure out how to respond without it escalating into another fight, she simultaneously pulled up the freezer screen to scan the contents, reordering the tabs to prioritize oldest first. It was one of their little daily battles. Jared always left dinner to the default meal of the day, delivered by drone to the rooftop and paid for through his work account.29 The daughter of a single mom who often worked late, Keegan instead liked to scavenge, building an entire meal off the first ingredient she found in the fridge.

  And tonight that was a bag of frozen synth shrimp from Tennessee. Well, that decided it.

  She pushed a screen grab of the shrimp bag to Jared’s screen.

  Fancy seafood dinner awaits

  He sent back a thanks emoji and

  CALL ME WHEN YOU GET REAL SHRIMP

  Then the real reason:

  JUST NEED 3 MO +++ TO GET DAILY PRIME . . . $600

  Dammit. Three more micro-likes with Harlan could take twenty minutes, maybe more. What would it take: a leading question about a granddaughter in Phoenix, the one who had not been outside in ninety-four days due to the heat? That really was the game, Keegan thought. In many ways, Jared’s legal job had been good prep for this—not just the long hours, but the whole essence, which was to keep the client happy while not actually speaking your mind.

  But a prime so big also meant Jared had been grinding hard all week, keeping Harlan happy while tabbing his blood pressure, EKG, stool metadata, and who knows what else.

  Just not tonight. Not after the day she’d had. Not after Union Station. Not after the Dizz-Diff interrogation and that robot.

  Need u to wrap up. We promised to try to do more dinners together for HaleyGirl.

  A quick reply:

  ALMOST DUN . . .

  Keegan slammed the freezer drawer. Then she called out to Haley to come over to the dinner table, trying to keep the anger out of her tone. It didn’t work. Hearing her voice, she cleared her throat. A long exhale, then silence, as she froze in that state between absolutely losing her shit on Jared and the self-control she’d developed as a Marine to lock down your emotions when things went south.

  Haley tugged on her pant leg. “Is Daddy coming to dinner, or just us?”

  Keegan felt her eyes well up, and she looked away. “He’s coming. But you gotta help me cook it first, silly!”

  It was in these little moments that she tried to reconnect with Haley, to make up for being at work so much. Jared had her all day, which was maybe why he didn’t mind the missed meals.

  “OK, but I don’t know how.”

  “I’ll g
et a pan,” said Keegan. “You get the shrimp out of the freezer drawer. The silver bag.”

  “I know what a shrimp is.”

  They prepared the dinner together, a simple meal of shrimp, a bag of microwaved rice, and fresh broccoli that had been delivered that morning to the building’s roof pad. No sauce at all for Haley’s portion; Sriracha and honey sauce for the adults.

  Keegan and Haley sat down to eat, setting a place for Jared. He remained on the couch. Keegan watched him, noticing the awkward angle of his neck from wearing the VR rig too long. It was going to leave another ache there, another price to be paid. She felt sympathy, love, and resentment all at once, a disorienting sensation that made her reach out and hold Haley’s hand and bring it to her lips.

  When she looked up, Jared was standing over them with a careful grin. A former shooting guard for his high school basketball team, he was six foot four, tall enough in the way that naturally inspired confidence, but not too imposing. He still had some vestiges of a basketball player’s physique, but ever since he’d been laid off, his weight had yo-yoed. First, he’d treated the time off as an opportunity to get fit in a way that he hadn’t been able to when on the partner track, and he’d thrown himself into training for a triathlon with the same energy that he had finding new work. Along with a paleo diet, he’d become almost gaunt. But as what had seemed like a useful sabbatical instead dragged into months with no new job offers, he’d picked up the HIT jobs to fill the gaps. Time offline, at the gym or the trail, now competed directly with online time tracking and max score incentives.30 It was much the same with his time with Haley; every minute doing something with her was a minute away from doing something that could provide for her.

  Jared leaned over, gave Keegan a hug, and whispered, “Sorry that took so long. He’s gone down for a nap. Gimme a sec for a bathroom break and I’ll be right back. Actual promise this time.”

  As he went down the hallway to the bathroom, Keegan smiled at Haley’s excitement that her dad was joining them, as if her cooking had been the key. Keegan poured him a glass of white wine, leaving only a finger of the glass unfilled. And then he returned and was present, truly there, beaming with pride that he had earned the $600 prime.

  It was halfway through the meal, while Haley was messing up retelling one of the jokes from the cartoons, that Keegan noticed Jared hadn’t touched his wine.

  And then it clicked—the bathroom visit. All it took for him there was two quick sprays. Left nostril. Right nostril. Faint vanilla taste at the back of the throat as the Dilaudid aerosol quickly did its work, one targeted molecule at a time. And ninety seconds later, he was his old self again, at least for the next few hours, until he fell asleep. What was it that had decided it for him? The neck pain? The shame? The boredom?

  She knew they should talk about it. Even with the positive shift in Jared’s mood, the toll was obvious—dark circles under his blue eyes and pale skin. Keegan thought of getting him a sunlamp but knew that it would just make him angry, resentful of her aid. Maybe his employer’s algorithms would pick up on it and send him one, just like they had sent the iron supplements.

  But it was not worth opening up that wound tonight, at least not in front of Haley. And so Keegan said nothing, no matter how much anger she felt. She wasn’t just angry at what he was doing to himself; it also felt like a betrayal. Jared knew that her mother had gone down that path with oxy, working her way through five different doctors to keep getting prescriptions, until they’d had to literally lock her in her bedroom to get her off the stuff. Now he was doing the same, the only difference being he was getting his diagnoses and prescriptions from a virtual physician’s assistant.

  “Good day? Bad day?” Jared asked, oblivious to how she was seething inside.

  “You really want to know?” she said.

  “Sure,” he said.

  “I got to play the hero today, and as a reward, they offered me . . . a new partner.”

  “What’d you do?” he asked. It was a reminder as much as a question: Don’t be careless with your life . . . and your job. Don’t be careless with our life.

  Haley started to play with the Lego bot in her lap; she often did it when talk at the table turned tense.

  Keegan bristled at the implied doubt in his question. “Had a big collar today. But they want to take me off the case to work with a new agent. It’d be a training gig, but it’s one the higher-ups care about.”

  “Getting noticed like that sounds good,” said Jared, his voice devolving back into that familiar tone of someone with a better job, who was patronizing the other’s work—another side effect from the drug’s memory hit. Or is it what he really thinks, even now?

  “I’ve not decided yet. Lots to mull over. And it doesn’t guarantee a promotion, if that’s what you’re hinting at.”

  “Still. If it’s something the bosses want, makes sense to do it. As long as you don’t let the partner steal any of the credit.”

  Keegan considered, just for a moment, whether to tell him that her new partner was more like the bot in Haley’s lap than any of the humans at the table. But she could tell Jared was feeling good tonight, proud, so she just agreed.

  He watched, seemingly to see if she was going to add anything further, then changed the subject, a ball of energy aching to talk to someone other than an old man 3,000 miles away. “Hey, did you see what happened in Indianapolis? Unbelievable.”

  Jared had taken to watching a picture-in-picture screen of his social feed during work. It was something to keep his brain busy during the dull parts of the day. But like so much else, the constant flow of news, rumors, arguments, jokes, and memes had become a kind of addiction.31 Each day, he’d ask Keegan about something trending, then be surprised that someone working in the FBI wasn’t as up on the details as he was. It made Keegan doubly glad of the Bureau’s policy of freezing social accounts. Defense lawyers using AI to scrape agents’ past words to try to show their bias had cost too many convictions.

  “No,” Keegan replied. “I got sucked into all these new work issues. What happened?”

  “You gotta see it.” He waved his hand to pull up the feed on the wall screen, and narrated as it played. Her eyes darted to the corner to validate that it had the blue watermark, to confirm it wasn’t a deep fake.32

  “OK, this is an air conditioner factory, right? They were going to botomate the place in a couple months. So at the morning shift, here come the workers, but see how they’re all carrying sledgehammers and blowtorches like it’s some old-school factory? There’s the shift whistle, and they just go to town, smashing everything. It’s the whole workforce, so it’s not like the bosses or security guards can stop them. And that’s the thing that made it go viral. See how they don’t even try to hide their faces? No masks, nothing. A few were even wearing VR rigs and put it up online, so you can experience it yourself.”

  Keegan was suddenly aware that her daughter had also just watched the footage. She tried to turn it into a teaching moment. “Haley, would you break your old toys if we said we wouldn’t give you any new ones?”

  “No, but you might need to reprogram them if I wasn’t getting any more, so they wouldn’t get bored of me.”

  Keegan raised her eyebrows, and Jared laughed.

  “That’s my girl! Good answer. Go play in your fort while Mommy and I finish dinner.”

  Haley quickly scooted away. As soon as she crossed the imaginary line her parents had programmed for the boundaries of her play area, her teddy bear, “Baz,” purred to life. Short for “BaZooKa,” the main character in one of Haley’s favorite shows, the toy had plush orange fur, which doubled as crash padding, and blue insectlike wings that had embedded rotors covered by wire mesh to keep tiny fingers intact. The bear took flight and hovered 18 inches away at waist level, ready to follow Haley’s every move. The pre-programmed boundaries kept the machine from getting in the way in the kitchen, as much as they gave Haley her own space.

  Bounded by a dollhouse and a p
air of oversized stuffed giraffes, the play area in the far corner of the living room shielded Haley from the wall screen that listened to conversations and used biosensors to determine what programming to put up next.33 It pivoted off discussions, providing fodder for one side of an argument; other times, it would just inject a new topic determined from their profiles. She and Jared had been leery about it at first, but it provided them with something to talk about as their conversations grew more difficult, which was something else left unsaid.

  The one thing they had agreed on was that Haley should be left out of the system until she turned ten. You could “program out” the voice and bio-cues of a minor, but Keegan didn’t trust it. The companies were always trying to fine-print the privacy opt-outs through the automated upgrade agreements. Though by hiding Haley, the sensors could potentially push inappropriate programming the system thought Keegan would react to, like combat-cams from Somalia, but better that than even more steered stimulation at such a young age.

  The subtraction of Haley increased the detected level of interest in the topic among the remaining humans, and the newsfeed automatically played the next item in the feed. Selecting the perspective to take based on Jared’s psychological and political profile, it played a reaction piece from Senator Harold Jacobs from Ohio. Rather than the typical authenticating self-broadcast from a kitchen or diner, Jacobs had projected himself onto the factory floor, serene, as the destruction took place around him.

  “I will never condone violence, ever, but these Americans in Indiana are no different than a previous generation of heroes who defiantly threw British tea into Boston Harbor. They are patriots waging a righteous fight. This is not just about metal-collar jobs. This is about standing up for something—our right to pursue happiness on terms we all expect. They fight for all of us.”