Vickers’s first approach to this interim phase had been simple and effective, and only required the target to answer three questions: 1) Are you depressed?; 2) Is there a gun in the house?; and 3) Have you been drinking? George’s predecessor had designed a chatbot that asked these questions subliminally, the text flashing for an eyeblink between lines of chatter about something else. This approach led to several early successes—right up until word leaked on how they’d been achieved, after which the wrath of the first and last letters of the ATF came raining down on QHQ, with talk of boycotts and share sell-offs and assorted other PR nightmares that were not at all mitigated by the thank-yous V.T. received from survivors and members of the pharmaceutical industry with an interest in selling solutions that didn’t involve getting loaded and/or taking aim.
Vickers’s next attempt at confirming the seriousness of a target’s intentions involved inserting an increasing number of ads in the user’s news feed, including PSAs for suicide prevention hotlines, half-off coupons for natural antidepressants ranging from vitamin B to St. John’s wort, and BOGO deals on aromatherapy candles, usually lavender. If/when these enticements failed to garner the clicks they were tailor-baited for, confirmation by default was assumed, and “in an overabundance of caution” (according to Quire’s lawyers), the platform outsourced intervention to local law enforcement. Though individual areas varied as to response aggressiveness, there had already been a few hospitalizations and one death as a result of Quire users’ SEQs (self-endangerment quotients) being skewed due to lost phones being interpreted algorithmically as “loss of engagement.”
And then Rupert Gunn Jr. placed the family’s namesake into his face hole and shot his mouth off without saying a word. And while Steve Vickers had not been involved in the news feed manipulation experiments that led to Mr. Gunn’s premature exit, his algorithm had also failed to predict it.
“You know, I had a feeling,” George said after finally getting the details of his first assignment, the one he’d inherited from his predecessor. The assignment had been hand delivered to him in hard copy on V.T.’s personal letterhead with the instruction that it be shredded after reading. When George folded it back up instead, the messenger cleared his throat loudly and patted the top of his custom-built satchel—one featuring a top-loaded crosscut shredder.
“We used to use burn bags,” the messenger explained, “but they kept setting those off.” He pointed at the sprinklers.
And so George fed the one and only copy of what he’d be doing for the next several months into the slot through which it was magically transformed into confetti.
It wasn’t often new hires were given offices and hand delivered their first assignments. If George had any doubts about that, they were quickly quashed when he entered the cafeteria following his assignment’s delivery. He could feel the eyes on him—less a sign of his social sensitivity than a byproduct of socially maladapted strangers having no qualms about walking right up to him and asking: “So what’re you working on?”
George matched their social maladaptation and raised them being rude. “I’m using reinforcement learning to discover the meaning of life through trial and error,” he informed them. “You know, check off everything life doesn’t mean and then see what’s left.” He figured that sounded nicer than “I’m scripting an AI to make sure no more rich kids off themselves on our platform”—an explanation he was pretty sure was counterindicated by the whole shredding situation.
But his fellow coders heard it pretty much the way it was intended. “Dude, just say f-off next time.”
“Okay,” George said. “F-off.”
And with that, George returned to his workspace to see if he could get his headspace in the right place to start eating the elephant he now shared his office with.
27
Before leaving the visitors’ restroom with her non-news from the genetic testing people, it occurred to Pandora that she hadn’t seen the phone among the items relocated to her grandmother’s new, radically downsized living arrangement. Returning, she found the curtains drawn and Gladys asleep in the railed bed that now dominated the space, a monitor of some kind clipped to her blanket should she try to get up without help. But Pandora couldn’t see the phone anywhere. Checking for an outline of it under the covers, she was startled to realize Gladys’s eyes were wide open and looking right at her.
“What do you want?” her grandmother asked as if Pandora were a stranger, maybe an artifact of having just been awoken, or maybe . . .
“I was just looking for your phone.”
“We don’t have one and don’t want one,” Gladys said, making the younger woman feel like a door-to-door salesperson about to be greeted with a shotgun.
“Never mind,” Pandora said, hastily backing up and out. “It was old,” she added, and regretted the implication immediately—the casual equivalence of age with a depreciation in worth. Fortunately, Gladys didn’t seem to notice, still flat on her back in the shadowed room, staring at the ceiling.
Walking the long hallway to the exit, Pandora ran through a variety of possible scenarios for the phone’s disappearance. Maybe someone stole it during the move. Maybe it got lost in the shuffle. And then she had an idea; she called the missing phone from her phone over Skype to see if she could figure out where it was from the video. Fortunately, she’d programmed it to answer her number automatically to make it easier on Gladys.
But the view she got of the call’s other side was impressionistic, at best, consisting of a blurry swirl of Halloween colors—black and orange—the black looking like horns or talons. Continuing down the hallway, trying to figure out what and where she was seeing, Pandora bumped into a janitor coming in the opposite direction. There was the usual exchange of “watch its” and “sorrys,” but as she prepared to move on, she noticed a glow from atop the janitor’s wheeled trash barrel.
“Excuse me,” she said. “Can I . . . ?” She made a gesture she hoped read as “look through the garbage,” though it could also have been “do the breaststroke.”
“Knock yourself out,” the janitor said, pulling out a pair of one-size-fits-most rubber gloves from a hundred-count box on his cart like he was offering her a Kleenex.
“Thank you,” she said, pulling the gloves on, snap, snap, before picking aside this awful this and that nasty that until, bingo, she pinched a corner of plastic and lifted out the phone she’d rooted, sealed in a biohazard bag, bright, translucent orange backgrounding the extraterrestrial death lily, its swooping, impressionistic petals all in black. The phone was smeared with something Pandora assumed was not pudding.
Doing what she could to calm her face, the hacker cleared her throat and began: “I know this is going to sound strange and is probably against the rules, but . . .”
“You want the shit phone,” the janitor guessed.
“I want the shit phone,” Pandora echoed, pretty sure she’d never used quite that combination of words before in her life—and hoping she never would again.
“Knock yourself out,” the janitor said.
It wasn’t the device itself so much as what might be on it, in addition to fecal matter. Specifically, Pandora wanted to see if Gladys had recorded anything before the mishap. Checking, she discovered a list of numerically labeled MP3s in the recorder’s file folder, which she downloaded to a less biohazardous medium before plugging it into her laptop and hitting play.