“And now we have,” his escort would announce, followed by a scripted description of whatever it was.
“Next we have,” a little terser with each repetition, George’s escort having apparently concluded that lunching his way into the latest golden brat’s good graces wasn’t going to happen.
“Excuse me,” George finally said, realizing that his embarrassment/trepidation was, in fact, the gastrointestinal symptoms of needing a lavatory.
“Sure. Yeah. Okay,” his escort said, thumbing his earpiece in a little tighter and then adding, “This way.”
As a matter of corporate policy, all Quire bathrooms were unisex, each spacious unit designed for single occupancy and featuring outside it not the generic stick figures hopelessly mired in the binary preconceptions of the patriarchy but the friendly naked people from the Pioneer 11 plaque.
“V.T.’s idea,” his escort explained. “They might be replacing them with the ‘poop’ emoji, though.” Pause. “The nudity’s been deemed objectifying.”
If he hadn’t been convinced of how much of a nerd node Quire HQ was before then, that first trip to the bathroom did it. Whiteboards. They had Wi-Fi-enabled whiteboards in the bathroom. Not only that, but said whiteboards were not subject to the scatological or homophobic graffiti one might expect in a place known for its brotopian inclinations, the cosmetic touch of unisex bathrooms notwithstanding. And so, instead of dirty limericks and freehand sketches of penises, what George found while making his first deposit were snippets of code, the Bellman equation, Zen koans aimed at getting the reader to think about thinking, an occasional quote from 2001: A Space Odyssey (!), Venn diagrams, quotes from Monty Python, and a flowchart of pseudocode for a machine-learning algorithm to automate the making of either microwave popcorn or ramen noodles, depending on what the variables X and Y actually represented.
George stood by the sink for a moment, waiting for the faucet to turn on before noticing the wall units for: 1) hand sanitizer, 2) hand soap, 3) hand dryer, and 4) disposable rubber gloves. Collectively, this seemed like overkill, but then he noticed the quirky-retro, hand-operated spigots for hot and cold flanking the faucet above the sink. He wondered about the order of usage, especially for the gloves, finally deciding they came last, to prevent any contamination to or from the door handle, after noticing the wastebasket full of discarded blue jazz hands waiting immediately next to the exit. Surprisingly, there was no placard on the door, insisting that all employees must wash hands before exiting. Perhaps that would have been the actual overkill, considering the audience, George figured, holding the exit open with his shoe as he snapped off his gloves and reemerged for the rest of the tour.
“Bet that’s a load off your mind,” his escort observed—clearly not part of the script and all the confirmation George needed that, yes, the friend thing was definitely off the table.
After about an hour more of thises and thats—and after it seemed his corporate guide was getting ready to abandon him—George finally asked about what he’d been dying to see all along: “What about Q-Labs?”
Like pretty much everybody else on the planet, Quire’s latest hire already knew quite a bit about Q-Labs—or thought he did. This was because of the predictable CYA PR soft shoe: whenever George’s new employer got in trouble for mining or manipulating the data of its users, the airwaves would suddenly fill with helpful ads, reminding viewers about all the good things coming out of Q-Labs. These commercials, which corporate insisted on calling PSAs (and for which they claimed a tax write-off), always started with a stark title card featuring an inspiring quote from some dead white guy, followed by a retro synth harpsichord over a moving slideshow featuring AI-enabled bots helping the handicapped, teaching toddlers, trundling in to defuse some terrorist booby trap, or translating the barks and meows of pets into emojis, letting their humans know they were hungry or needed to be let out. Then it was back to a black title card, out of which would whip the rainbow Q for Quire, followed by a hyphen and the word Labs, each punctuated in turn by a bong, a bing, and a bong—the parent company’s audio signature, an inversion of the one used by Intel. Last but not least came the slogan: “Doing good is what we do.”
“If you wanted to meet the rock stars,” George’s escort said gruffly, “you should have said so earlier.” He then stirred the air with his finger, meaning they’d be turning the tour around and heading back toward the windowed office they’d started at, smack dab in the middle of Q-Labs territory where George, it seemed, had been assigned to Q-Brain, the lab devoted to the development and commercialization of artificial intelligence.
George nodded curtly and followed, as if this news were only what he expected and not the cause of the fireworks going off in his head, as if it were his birthday, Christmas, New Year’s, and Halloween, all rolled into one. It was as if V.T. had seen into his heart and divined the desire that led to his “borrowing” the CEO’s car in the first place. Because the excuse about wanting to see if he could do it was exactly that: an excuse. As was any claim he’d done it to score points on behalf of the proletariat at the expense of the one percent and its excesses. Ditto on the needing-a-smile thing. And as far as seeking revenge for the ever-shifting sands of Quire’s self-serving terms of service—yeah, that was a good cover story and a big fat no.
The reason George hacked V.T.’s ride was because he wanted to get a look under the hood of the Voltaire’s AI. The plan had been to download what he could from the CPU before leaving the hardware for the amateur chop-shoppers to liquidate—a plan nixed by the car’s coming with its original owner still attached. George was particularly interested in what the source code had to say about how it would decide between killing its passenger versus a busload of kids when those were the vehicle’s only two options. That was the ethical quandary ethicists had dubbed the “trolley dilemma,” so named because it went back that far, back to when roads outside San Francisco had cable cars and track-switching decisions were made by humans and implemented manually. Nowadays, the dilemma was applied to autonomous vehicles and used to show how far they were from prime time. It was also why the Voltaire’s autonomous mode was called “copilot,” to shift the blame for the inevitable casualties to the owner as opposed to the manufacturer. George figured the euphemism meant the Voltaire’s coders hadn’t quite automated the dilemma’s resolution to their lawyers’ satisfaction. However, as a programmer himself, George was also pretty sure there’d be some beta script in the source code, a deleted REM or asterisk away from going live.
The truth was, he’d been dreaming of AI ever since those infamous babysitting episodes with Uncle Jack. His first obsession was to meet the smooth-talking HAL in person (or silicon, as the case may be), only to have his heart broken once he understood how numbers worked and realized that the actual year 2001 had come and gone before he was even born, with nothing even remotely like actual artificial intelligence on the horizon.
Doing a casual survey of what the species had accomplished since the real 2001, George was tempted to conclude that “peak humanity” had been reached sometime before either the 2000 US election or the falling of the twin towers. Ever since then, mankind had clearly been on the downslope. But there was one exception. Sometime between his learning how numbers worked and now, AI research had started taking off again, with machine learning, neural nets, and Big Data all converging to stage a legitimate advance into HAL territory.