“And with that, I am sorry to inform you, but we have to let you go, Ms. Haden,” said balding, middle-aged man behind the desk. He leaned back into his chair with a squeak that seemed to come from multiple origins. Ris had had better days. Today; however, was not one of them.
Across from him sat a woman that was as tense as a coiled viper, with betrayal and hurt in her eyes. “Mr. Crowley, I still don’t understand. You are firing me from my job because I’m too good at it?” She gripped the clipboard in her hands so tightly that her hands hurt.
“Ms. Haden, I don’t need to remind you of how the AI works. Genso Inc employs the oversight AI to look into these things. GensI would not give us a false reading, I assure you. These reports show that you have been tampering in systems that were not in the purview of the tasks assigned you.”
Ris gritted her teeth, “And I had requested numerous times to gain access to those systems. You even approved some of my proposed adjustments. They were bottlenecking my work -” Crowley held a lazy hand up.
“Enough, Ris. I know what you were trying to do, but completely overhauling another departments pipeline, without even leaving comments about how you did it, over a single weekend, is not acceptable. Can you imagine how those hard working folks over in the processing department felt coming in on Monday, only to realize that the last 5 years of their work was completely re-written in a single weekend?”
“But, Mr. Crowley, I had sent those suggestions in months ago and they still hadn’t fixed them! I just wanted to help,” Ris said, her eyes beginning to water with anger filled tears.
“Ms. Haden, what you did was highly inappropriate and unprofessional. There are channels-”
“Which I used. I-”
“Don’t interrupt me, Ms. Haden. Regardless, I am going to have to ask for your badge and for you to clear everything out of your space by this afternoon. Now,” Crowley sighed one final time,” I have more meetings to attend to. Good luck at your next employment, Ms. Haden.”
Crowley lurched out of his pleather chair and shuffled out of his office, leaving Ris Haden tight lipped and gripping the clipboard, now full of things to never be realized, in her hand.
———
Ris sat in a nameless cafe on the other side of the tracks from the business park where Genso Incorporated kept their local offices. She sat in a bar seat that looked out onto the chipped and grimey wall. Even that seemed to look at her in disappointment. A coffee that had gone lukewarm was perched on a coaster from a local bar in front of her.
It wasn’t fair. She had fixed their systems. She had done the work of that whole department in a single weekend. Who were they to fire her? In another week she could’ve made them redundant and they’d be the ones sitting here, not her. She got up to leave and saw her reflection in the mirror behind the barista’s station. She hadn’t the time, she remembered, to do her hair this morning. Last night’s work session had lasted well into the night, and it didn’t do any favors in helping her tame the brown curls that had been hastily pulled up into a bun on the top of her head. Her eyes were held heavy by the bags underneath them, which no amount of makeup could cover. She sighed, not believing the sight before her. Well, at least I have time to get some rest now. She shuffled out the door into street, the sun shining bright and cheery overhead on her sullen pallor.
———
A nap, a run to the grocery store, and an actual run had rejuvenated Ris back to the realm of the living. Before her were the makings of Aglio e Olio. She’d just finished making the noodles after fixing the motor on her mixer, and was sipping on a Rosé before she moved onto making the dish. Next to her recipe book, her phone sat vigil, the middleman between her and the rest of the world. While she was grating the parmesano romano, it vibrated and dinged. The text on the screen seemed to float like it was on the top of a pool of water: Gerald - How was work?
Ris seeing the text, sighed. She had been wanting to avoid telling Gerald about how work was. Steeling herself, she picked up the phone.
Not so good. Awful actually. I got laid off.
What?! What about all those improvements you were making over the weekend? Didn’t they like them? You saved them so much computational time.
Yeah, it turns out I stepped onto too many toes at once. It’s just that I didn’t realize how big the people were that those toes belonged to.
Why didn’t you text earlier? Let’s go out - I’ll buy you a drink for that one not working out. I got wind of something you might want to hear about.
Ris stared down at her phone. All she wanted to do was stay at home and do some consolation cooking, but she knew that Gerald wouldn’t let her wallow in her miserable day. He was that kind of friend - the one that knew how to fix your mood better than yourself.
Ris: fine, we can go out, but I’m still making dinner, so it won’t be until later.
Great! Oh pasta! What kind? Is it the shareable kind?
A small smile crossed Ris’s face. Gerald was the only person she knew who enjoyed the food she made more than her.
This isn’t a charity, she texted, bring a decent cab with you. It will be ready in 30 minutes. Ris prepped her mixer to make a second batch of pasta.
———-
“Ahhhh, always delicious,” Gerald said, with that post dinner twinkle in his eye. Ris was never sure if it came from the food or from the wine. “So tell me, what happened?” He shifted into his ‘listening’ position, head tilted, slightly forward, and pointed his bright eyes towards Ris.
“Well I implemented the changes this past weekend and was collating my reports, which were actually useful for once since I didn’t have to wait forever for the upstream to finish, when Crowley sent me an email telling me to come to his office.” Ris took a sip of the cab that Gerald had brought, the oaky fruity flavor sitting on her tongue like poetry. “One awkward conversation later about boundaries, and how I was being unprofessional, and I was walking out the door with my stuff in tow.”
Like a record player, Gerald tilted his back up, “Wait, so all those suggestions, that you were going to give to the other department, you just implemented them without their approval?”
Ris shifted a little in her seat, “I don’t see what the big deal is, I had partial access so I thought, why not? I mean it could only help, right?”
Gerald shook his head, wondering how his bright friend of 10 years could still be this dense at times. “Ris, you remember what I told you about this company and how you’d have to make a shift from the freelance mentality when you went to work for them only 2 months ago?”
Ris’s hand reached for the glass, reflecting back at what Gerald had said back then, when he had introduced her to that one VP in the company. What was his name?
She said softly, “Yeah. I remember. But that’s the thing Gerald, I didn’t try and play in another person’s sandbox! I was given access to those systems! The AI would’ve let me know if I had done something wrong. At least, that was what Crowley had said when he approved the partial access…”
“Wait, you didn’t have full access?”
“No! That’s what I’ve been trying to tell everyone. Yes, my implementations were complete, but the AI should’ve blocked most of them from working on the real servers.” Gerald looked mildly alarmed at that.
“So GensI didn’t hinder your program at all?”
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
“Not. At. All.” Ris said bitterly, taking a drink of the ruby red liquid.
Gerald brought his hand up to his face, moving the long hair out of the way as he got into his ‘thinking’ position. “I’ll talk to Roger about it and see if we can’t take a look at those logs and figure out why GensI let you go through with all of your upgrades. What were they for, anyway? In something a regular human would understand, please. I’m just a people person here.”
Ris’s heart quickened, did the AI get her fired on purpose? Yes it wasn’t her fault, but she was still confused as to why the AI chose not to put in some preventative measures.
“Well, my work focuses primarily on how the AI is able to function. If we’re using analogies, I’m the mechanic/part designer and the AI is the car. I will take a look at pieces and see if I can’t improve them.”
“For the whole car?”
Ris shook her head, “well, just for one component really, I focused on engine of the car. Principally how it used the fuel given to it. I got it working really really really well.” She wasn’t prideful about her expertise, she just said it like it was. She was good at her job.
“So you upgraded the engine? Whats the big deal about that?”
“Imagine going from a dinky little v4 to a v8 with superchargers. And that is where the problems started to working. I was working on this isolated implementation of GensI. It was able to handle all the data I threw at it, but if it didn’t maintain a threshold amount of processes, it would sputter out and backfire. The AI was literally being starved of fuel.”
“So you went to work on the fuel system.”
“Yeah, on the pipeline that fed the data to the AI. It was really inefficient.” Ris reached in her mind for a good analogy. “It wasn’t high in octane at all, and wasn’t filtered. It was surprising to me that it even worked in the first place. It was a hillbilly tried to get into the fuel market after the demand for the shine went down.”
Gerald smiled at the reference. Both of them were fond of some apple pie.
“So you went ahead and improved not only the fuel system, but also the fuel?”
Ris blushed a little, “Well yeah. I just wanted my part to work right, and it wouldn’t if their’s didn’t work better. The copy of GensI that I was working on did so much better when I implemented my fuel changes in that instance.”
Gerald’s eyes twinkled a little brighter, “What do you know of GensI’s intelligence level? Were you working on a smart AI?”
“Yeah, it was pretty smart, I guess. It beat its turing test, but had the intelligence equivalent of sub intelligent human.”
“Now, I don’t know anything about anything, but did that AI ‘know’ what you were doing to its clone?”
Ris frowned at this, “Well yeah, it could see what I was doing. I was helping it, though. Why would it want to get me fired?”
Gerald rubbed his chin for a moment, “Could the AI, perhaps unknowingly, get greedy?”
“AI’s don’t have emotions like that Gerald.” Ris poured herself some more wine.
“Right, right, but what if it saw that your improvements worked so well on the clone, that it couldn’t help but want them all implemented on the real thing?”
The glass in her hand stopped and hovered on its way to deliver the red liquid. “You’re saying that I got fired because the AI got greedy and wanted those changes?”
Gerald took a victorious sip from his own glass. “That, my dear Ris, is exactly what I’m saying. I’m sure Roger could look into it this week. Or…..” He brought the glass up for another sip.
“Or what?”
“Or I have another proposition for you. You remember my buddy Alphonse from my last birthday?”
“The guy with the hook nose and the tight coat that kept on trying to buy me drinks?”
Gerald raised his glass, “Yes! That’s the one. He recently got into doing some venture capital work and has invested in one of those fancy gaming companies. You know the ones that now allow for split conscious game play?” Ris nodded along, “Well, turns out that he bought a controlling stake in one that has just released that game, what was it called, Esperia Online. Anyway, it was one of the few games to make it out of that production hell needed to make those kinds of games, and he’s looking for some people to act as ‘quality control agents’ in the game.” Gerald lowered his hands from doing the air quotes. “The pay is pretty good.”
Ris swirled her glass, looking down into the recesses of that mystical red liquid. “You know I don’t like these nepotistic schemes, Gerald. I like the quality of my work to be the foundation of my professional relationships. Besides, he was creepy.”
“Look he was going through a phase. New money does that to people. He’s simmered down quite a bit since then. Besides, technically, you, wouldn’t be doing anything.” He pulled his shoulder length hair back, revealing a small chip above the base of his hairline on the back of his neck. A cloned conscious of you would be doing it!”
“Wait what? They actually got that technology off the ground? I thought you still had to dedicate some time, and brain power, to playing those games.”
“Well, with Alphonse’s capital, they were able to complete the newest tech just in time for the game. They are still testing out this new tech, but the older rigs are still in use for the normal players for the time being. If you choose to sign up on this gravy train, we can get you a good starting salary.” Gerald tilted his glass toward her.
“Hmm, how much are talking here? It seems pretty risky to be playing with your consciousness like that.”
“Believe me. It will definitely be worth your time. Now what do you say about getting those drinks?”
———
An hour later they were in the back of a quiet uptown bar. With Ris nursing a decent old fashioned, and Gerald pounding enough dark and stormy’s to make a hurricane, the time was passed with them talking about the old days. Gerald and his string of lucky breaks that made him a wealthy independent information manager and scout for all sorts of companies, and how he and Ris first met.
“You know, Ris, I don’t think I ever thanked you for turning me down back in undergrad. I wouldn’t have gotten my act together in time to become anything meaningful,” he said looking into the dark depths of the glass in front of him.
“What do you mean?” Their relationship was the very definition of platonic but it hadn’t started out that way. “I thought you were sleazy back then.” Taking a sip she said, “well, you still kinda are, but you’re at least a good man most of the time.”
Gerald raised his glass at the back handed compliment, “and thats all I ask for.” Gerald turned his head and looked down the bar. “Ah! There he is!” Gerald waved over a man with a prominent hook nose but was dressed in a more relaxed fashion. His open blazer was properly tailored and he looked to be well put together.
Ris hissed at Gerald, “What the fuck, Gerald? Why is he here? I haven’t even had time to think about your offer.”
“I thought you might like to talk to the man himself to make more informed decision.”
“Al, good to see you. You remember Ris from my birthday?”
Alphonse reached out a hand to Ris, “I do, with all the clinginess that I had bestowed upon her. I apologize for that, Ris. My so called friends at the time had filled my head with weird delusions what money can do.”
Ris put her hand out uncomfortably, “Apology accepted,” Ris sighed, “I imagine the reason you are here is to tell me about that fancy new tech Gerald has stapled into the back of his skull.”
Alphonse tipped his own glass, “Right to business. Yes, I have some information about the prospective job if you’d be interested to hear about it.”
Ris swirled her glass impatiently, “sure, give me the big points.”
“Well, the new tech is completely inert when you aren’t plugged in directly to the net. The bandwidth on these new rigs is such that we can get a full brain read and use that to direct your character while you’re not on.”
“So you’re going to clone me digitally?”
“So to speak, it will be a copy of your present you. The gang down at the lab says that we have to plug in once a week to keep the avatar synced properly.”
“Synced properly? What will happen if I forget?”
“Well, we’ve had some issues before about reconciliation between the two consciousnesses, but we’ve worked out all the bugs with that. The once a week plug in is just for secondary measures to keep the play consistent.”
“That doesn’t sound very reassuring, Alphonse. Has anyone been seriously hurt or killed?”
Al waved his hands in dismissal, “no, no, no, not at all! They just had some minor psychological problems, but we screen for that now as well. Brain chemistry being complex and all that.” He took a small sip to pause.
“The goal of this technology is to allow for people to live multiple lives. Who was it that said, ‘if doesn’t read, they live one lifetime, but if they read then they can live a thousand lifetimes’? Well this is the modern day equivalent to that. We at Esperia Online want to give people the chance to live multiple lives.”
“So I’ll be living in the game world while I do my thing up top in real time? How will I know what I’ve done during the week when I’m not actually playing?”
“Those memories will be shown to you. You can choose for the play by play or for the big points, so to speak,” Alphonse said taking another sip.
Ris seemed to be warming to the idea of the game. “Tell me how the hook up works. Will I become a lifeless doll while in the game or catching up?”
“Not at all! You’ll still be aware of whats going on around you, and we can have a rig put in at your house. Of course, if you want full immersion you’re more than welcome to shut out the outside world. Oh! And we can put a wireless system as well,” that seemed to alarm Ris, “but you can remove the radio attachment before you leave for your own privacy. We know that some people can be wary about there being a direct port into one’s thoughts and having that easily accessed wirelessly.”
“Wow, so you aren’t going to suck the ideas out of my head?”
“I’m sure we could make you a tin foil hat, Ris,” Gerald said.
“What about pain and trauma? What if something happens to my avatar that is traumatic? I don’t want to get PTSD from something I didn’t even do. I got more important things to worry about.”
“We have buffers put in place that cause the avatar to lose memory of the pain inflicted on them, and if the experience is traumatic enough, we have it set that the memory will be completely removed and replayed such that it seems more like a movie than real life.”
“So its not I just got stabbed, but someone just stabbed someone else and I’m witnessing it?”
“Exactly.”
“How exactly is that different than watching someone get murdered? That still sounds like a traumatic experience.”
“People murder each other all the time in games online, the avatar may not feel that it is a game, but you definitely will.”
“And they enjoy it!” said Gerald.
“Have you been killed before, Alphonse?”
“Oh come on, Ris, that’s not nice to ask,” Gerald said.
He stared at her blankly for a moment. “Uh, well, yes I have.”
“And how’d that go over for you?”
“Erm, it wasn’t the most pleasant thing, but it didn’t have any more of an impact on me than other things that happen in a ‘normal’ life. There has to be a consequence of dying, but we aren’t sadists.”
Ris knocked back her old fashioned, and said, “Alright, I’ll try it. For one week. If I don’t like it we call it off. Deal?” She extended her hand.
“Deal. You can even keep the implants if you like them and this doesn’t work out,” said Alphonse. He reached out and they shook.