Gladys smiled, suggesting the idea of suing the pants off ’em appealed to her.
That hurdle cleared, Pandora made introductions. “Gladys Lynch?” she began.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake . . .”
“. . . meet Furbius McFurbutt.”
Gladys shielded her eyes, embarrassed, but laughing anyway. Finally composing herself, she looked up, the picture of elderly dignity. “Why, Mr. McFurbutt,” she said. “How do you do?”
It was an obvious question, and the programming anticipated it, along with other conversation helpers, from thoughts on the weather to whether the world was going crazy or was it (fill in the blank)? And so: “Very well, Mrs. Lynch,” Furbius said, borrowing Pandora’s voice raised an octave or two.
28
“So where should we start?” Roger said, kicking off their first postscreening session.
“Suicide,” George said.
Roger straightened, then inclined forward, looking at his client’s video image over the rims of the glasses sliding down his nose. “So much for foreplay . . .”
“Not me,” George insisted. “It’s my assignment. I’m supposed to AI-up a little chatbot to detect and prevent possible suicides on the platform, with a particular focus on my personal demographic: kidults.” He paused. “All of which is protected information, I’m assuming.”
“Kidults?”
“Young adults, old kids,” George said. “Consumers in the prime of their consumption ages, from fifteen to twenty-five.”
Roger sat back, slow-clicking his pen contemplatively. “This wouldn’t be a case of ‘It’s not me, Doc, but I got a friend’?”
“Nope. Strictly work,” George said. “I like to multitask, and since I’m being required to have these sessions, I figured I might as well mine them for something I can actually use on the job.” He paused. “So: suicide. Why, and how do you stop it?”
Roger drew his fingers across his lips, hiding the smile underneath. “You remind me of my daughter when she was little,” he said. “She used to specialize in asking impossible questions.”
Pandora thoroughly objected to this characterization. Her questions had not been “impossible,” just “not answered satisfactorily thus far.” But seeing as she wasn’t supposed to be privy to any of this, she decided to keep her objections to herself.
Meanwhile: “You’re saying maybe I should narrow my focus,” George said. “Be more specific.”
Roger mimed narrowing the focus by pinching the air with his thumb and index finger. “A touch, yes.”
“Okay,” George said. “Why do you think they specified young adults as opposed to suicides in general?”
“Are you asking me as a representative of the corporation,” Roger said, “or as a mental health professional?”
“Um, both?”
“The corporation’s interested because of what you’ve already alluded to: young adults represent a prime consumer demographic and it’s hard selling something to a dead person,” Roger said. “I also wouldn’t be surprised if there are ‘platform loyalty’ incentives. Think about it: if a product literally saved your life, you’d stay loyal to it, right? Save a consumer when they’re young and you’ve bought yourself a whole lifetime of platform loyalty.”
“Okay,” George said, warily. He’d not been expecting this much cynicism so early on—especially not from his therapist. Milo, on the other hand . . .
“Now, psychologically,” Roger continued, “there’s also good reason to separate potential suicides by age categories. Simply put: kids and adults kill themselves for different reasons, and there’s some neurological evidence that different parts of the brain may be involved. I’m sure you’ve heard about Quire’s fMRI studies on the subject.” He glanced at his second monitor, where George’s case file was open. “You suggested they might be ‘triggering’ for the volunteers.”
George shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Where’s it say that?” he asked.
“In the tour transcript,” Roger said.
“All of that was recorded?”
“Microphones are cheap,” Roger said. “Cameras too. And voice-recognition technology has really upped its game, thanks to machine learning.”
“But isn’t that an invasion . . .”
“. . . of privacy?” Roger finished for him. “You’re working for a company whose business model is convincing people to share as much of their personal data as possible, so it can be mined, packaged, and sold to the highest bidder. Why would you think they’d let you walk around shedding data without following you with a broom and dustpan?”
“Good thing I don’t have anything to hide,” George said.
And there his therapist went, trying to not-smile again.
What followed was a game of therapist-client tug-of-war, with George wanting to talk about teen suicide and Roger wanting to dig into why his new client had admitted to being “messed up.” In the end, they came to a compromise of sorts: Roger acknowledged that his real client was Quire, and Quire had hired George to do a job, while George suggested that by offering him insight into the mind of a suicidal teen, Roger could potentially treat hundreds or thousands of more suffering humans by proxy through the suicidal ideation detection (SID) chatbot George would develop based on their sessions. Win—as they say—win.
“Okay,” Roger said, “here goes,” before going on to explain that suicidal teens frequently see themselves as split into meat and mind, the mind voice prodding the meat toward self-destruction with the unspoken conviction that the mind voice will survive to appreciate “what comes after . . .” They’ve temporarily surrendered rationality and consciousness to an authoritative “other” like a schizophrenic taking orders from the neighbor’s dog, only the authoritative other in this case is a metastatic form of peer pressure, in which a part of the would-be suicide him- or herself is also part of the pressuring crowd. And that’s what makes teenage suicides different from the adult kind: this unspoken assumption of suicide’s survivability, that it can be used as a ploy to punish people or escape without the resulting oblivion. Religion can ironically reinforce this notion of death’s survivability, but so does the inherent sense of immortality that comes with being a teenager. Adults who are suicidal tend to be more realistic and are thinking of ending it all because they want to end it all. They come to suicide spiritually and often physically exhausted. World-wearied, they’ve had it; enough is enough. Suicidal teens often feel prevented by current circumstances from getting what they deserve, be it love, respect, whatever—and they see suicide as a leap over now into a future where they’ve won and the world has apologized for treating them so badly.
“So next question,” George said. “How do you stop it?”
“Why don’t we put a pin in that till next week,” Roger said, rising. He tapped at his watch. “Time’s up. Talk at you then.”
And before George could say anything else, his screen went black with the exception of these words: “call terminated on far end,” followed by the date, current time, and call duration. It had been a fifty-minute hour, to the second.