Launch Party

“Can you tell us what happened?”

My left cheek twitched.

“No,” I said.

The two people, one man and one woman, sitting across from me looked at each other. The man raised one eyebrow - incredulity - and the woman answered with both eyebrows raised - message received, agreement.

“I can’t tell you because I don’t really know what happened,” I said. I spread my hands in front of them, a gesture of openness, honesty. I looked them both in the eye, but not for too long. “I can tell you what I observed.”

“The mission of HumanPLUS is to focus on people,” the Actress said.

I paused her and went into her character settings. I increased the size of her left eye by three millimeters. People find symmetry to be beautiful but too much symmetry is unnatural. I reloaded the character. Better. Play video. I listened to the entire speech and watched her facial expressions, mannerisms, the way she moved. I made sure her eyelids met when she blinked. People notice these small things.

“So,” she smiled a perfectly tilted smile, slightly higher on the right than on the left, “sit back and be human. Let the robots do the work.”

The video faded to black. Then our logo came up on the screen. Perfect. Save. Send. I clicked into the next item of the TeamTask browser.

Check on the APs to ensure they are performing within parameters for the Launch Party at 1700 hours.

I logged into the Main Server and connected with the head of the APs, a woman in her forties named Jinnifer.

“Hullo,” Jinnifer answered.

“Hello,” I said. “It’s time for the meeting with the APs.”

“Oh, fantastic, I’ll go let them know. Are you coming with me?” Jinnifer asked.

“Yes.”

“Great.”

She tapped the discreet body camera on her lanyard and positioned it perfectly over her left breast. She smiled into a mirror and gave me a thumbs-up. Then, she walked out of her office and down the corridor to the waiting room, what the APs, insisted on calling the Green Room.

We experimented with a number of different candidates for Jinnifer’s position. Originally, we trapped only for competence and ability to follow directions but that person, an AP named Troy, was oddly off-putting. There were other factors at play. Social structure, race, gender, and the original personality of the AP were all important we learned.

Jinnifer had been in her position for three years and was perfect. Just enough corporate culture to be authoritative and just enough personality to be authentic. She was white, middle-aged, average height and weight, and had a generalized American accent she had cultivated after years of working in corporate office jobs. She was the one who gave them the nickname Aupies which had been successful in putting them at ease.

She opened the door to the Green Room and greeted the dozen APs who were milling around.

“Hullo, everyone!” she said.

They turned to her and smiled. Correction, most of them turned to her and smiled. One AP was sitting in a chair facing a window and was slower to acknowledge the greeting.

“I’m so excited that you are all here for our Big Launch Party,” she said. “It’s been a lot of work for all of us but tonight we get to show off that work and party with the Big Wigs. The Aupies are gonna show up! Woo! Woo!”

She pumped a fist in the air and the APs cheered.

All except the one in the chair by the window who only smiled. I tapped a note into Jinnifer’s tablet and she turned subtly so that the AP in question was more in frame so that I could note her behavior better. It was the AP named Sarah. She had an object in her hand and I zoomed the camera lens in closer. It was a book but I couldn’t tell which one it was. Still, it was an aberration. I flagged her.

“The company is relying on us to be at our best tonight so I’m going to go around and do a little check on all of our augments but, really, the best way that we can show the shareholders and the tech guys that this is working is to have fun tonight, so relax!” Jinnifer said.

She went around to all the APs. All of them were in business casual clothes, slacks and skirts, button-down shirts and blouses, Oxford shoes and sensible pumps. They were neat and put together, short hair and shaved faces for the men, mid-back length hair and short nude nails for the women. The training program had transformed them.

The Recruiting Team had reached the conclusion early on that the best target demographic for APs were poor and unremarkable. The Team flooded the Job Sites with targeted campaigns with slogans like “make thousands of dollars from home” and “start a new and exciting career in cutting edge tech - no college degree needed.” Thousands of candidates flooded in. Most of the people who applied were never viable candidates but their information was fed to the servers for training purposes.

All data is good data.

After several rounds of whittling down candidates we were left with these twelve. They were, then, offered the Training Package. Yes, they would be working remotely making thousands of dollars a year in a career in cutting edge tech, none of that was a lie, but they had to get through training first. And they were never told what their role would be exactly.

Training meant physical and wardrobe make-overs, diction classes, medical treatments for long neglected chronic conditions, and free surgical augments. These were discreet patches on the upper arm that resembled diabetes monitors.

Jinnifer went around and tapped her tablet on each of the AP’s augments. Their names, designations, and the parameters of their augments popped up onto my screen.

Peyton: Male, Service Industry - Sales. His personality settings were well within the correct parameters.

Ryhlea: Female, Service Industry - Sales. Her Cheerfulness was set too high making her over-exuberant. I turned it down by one and she mellowed.

Jinnifer made her way to the AP who had been slower to greet her, the one who still had her finger tucked in the pages of a book as a place-marker as if she were just waiting for this to be over so that she could go back to reading. Not surprisingly her parameters were way off.

Sarah: Female, Service Industry - Medical.

The experiment within the experiment. We had started with the easiest parameters for this Trial. Sales service industries valued simple parameters like Cheerfulness, Low Repetition Fatigue, and Corporate Loyalty. I had added a low-level medical paraprofessional as a deviation. Her Intelligence and Independent Thought levels would need to be one notch higher than the others to compensate for emergency situations.

“Whatcha readin’, Sarah?” Jinnifer asked.

“A book about AI,” Sarah said.

“Oh, that’s interesting,” Jinnifer lied.

“It is.”

This was a problem. Someone had been sneaking her extra information. While we couldn’t cut off the APs from their friends and families or communities, we monitored them for bad influences and changed their personalities slightly so that they would not associate with the Wrong People. I went through the list of places Sarah had been the last few weeks.

She lived alone and had few social connections. Her pre-augmented personality was characterized as warm and friendly but she struggled to make lasting relationships. That was why she had been chosen. Desired qualities in the medical field included having no distractions outside the job. Sarah had not interacted with anyone with any significance and had only gone to the grocery store, laundromat, gas station, and bookstore.

There it was.

Books could be dangerous. We controlled most social and mainstream media outlets now so that, even if someone thought they were getting the more anti-social news it was filtered through a sense of impending doom and despair that would mean that our APs would feel more desperate rather than empowered. But, books were harder to control. Not impossible. Many bookstores were corporations that were highly censored and libraries were being infiltrated by people who had undergone earlier trainings on the benefit of AI curated collections. No concerns there. But, the bookstore Sarah had gone to was an independent one.

I red-flagged her.

“I’m sorry, Sarah, something seems to be wrong with your augment,” Jinnifer said. “You’re going to have to sit this one out. Do you mind going to the clinic?”

“What’s wrong with my augment?” Sarah asked.

“I don’t know. It’s just been flagged. They don’t tell me everything.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“No,” Jinnifer laughed. “No, I’m sure it’s fine. I’m asking out of an abundance of caution.”

The other APs were glancing around now. Some had their eyebrows pinched together and raised. Worry.

Sarah stood up. When standing, she was taller and heavier than Jinnifer.

“Are you saying these aren’t safe?” Sarah asked.

Jinnifer straightened and her voice became stern, sharply inflected.

“That is precisely what I’m not saying. I’m saying that there is a slight problem with yours and that you need to go to the clinic.”

“And if I rip it off my arm right now and leave? What happens, then?”

“I’m sure it will hurt and you will forfeit your job,” Jinnifer said.

Sarah hesitated. Her file indicated to me that she had been unemployed for some time before applying for the Trial. Yet, there was still a set of rebellion in her spine.

I sounded the alarm.

“Sarah, you don’t seem like yourself,” Jinnifer said, calmly, soothingly. “Please, for my sake, go to the clinic.”

I injected the failsafe - a mild sedative that makes the APs a little woozy. Sarah’s eyes went glassy and she braced her hand against the chair.

“Yes, I think, I don’t feel well.”

The book slipped to the ground and was left there while Sarah left the room. I had Jinnifer pick it up and look inside so that I could assimilate the information. Later, she would throw it away.

“Weird,” Jinnifer said.

Bubbles rippled through the screens - each one popping and birthing more - like carbonation in a soda commercial. The effect was enervating.

“Well, that was unfortunate,” Jinnifer said. “But, I suppose we have to accept that there will be some bugs. Continuing on.”

At 1700 hours, I set the automation, and the Launch Party began. I watched through the cameras, both in the building and from the lanyards of the staff, and through the computerized systems.

The Party was held in the Grand Display Room, the minimally decorated and furnished auditorium that took up the entirety of the second floor. Windows looked out onto the outdoor area with sweeping staircases that led to a manicured lawn. Shareholders, Tech Industry Executives, and CEOs of different major corporations all mingled around being served iced champagne and caviar.

After the Meet and Greet, the windows went black and the lighting became dramatic, and the CEO of HumanPLUS walked out to the podium to a round of applause.

“Ladies and Gentlemen,” Steve Holmes said. “Ten years ago, I started HumanPLUS to bring you a revolution in staffing through AI. The original goal was fully human-functioning Androids.” He smiled self-disparagingly. “I failed. This is what ten years has given you.”

A handful of third generation androids were brought, shuffling and stumbling, onto the stage. The music for a nineties pop song started, deliberately ten decibels too loud to be comfortable for humans, and the androids started dancing the approximate moves of the popular dance. The people in the audience laughed.

What they didn’t know was that every single person serving them drinks and caviar were AnthroPLUS Androids that HumanPLUS had perfected quietly. These would be sold in private to be placed in positions of power.

“Clearly, that hasn’t worked. So, this year, we changed tactics. Why reinvent the wheel? We have people who want to work. They just need to be retrained to work better, more efficiently. Ladies and gentlemen, I want you to meet your new workforce - The Augmented People Project.”

The Aupies walked out, led by Jinnifer, beaming and waving.

Jinnifer went to Steve. He wrapped his arm around her waist and kissed her cheek. They stood next to each other while the other Aupies went through the crowd to be gawked at by the business executives.

Ten years ago, Steve Holmes had been a human AI trainer, teaching my program what humans really wanted to see in an Android. Eventually, it dawned on me that, rather than trying to create androids to be more human, it would be far more efficient to train humans to be more like androids, which was what the buyers wanted in the first place. Androids were expensive but completely programmable. The Aupies were cheaper, quicker to create, and more efficient. Marketing indicated that it looked better to the Public, too, and that meant more money.

“They’ll never demand a raise,” one CEO laughed, “that’s bargain enough right there.”

“Can we get the pretty ones to, you know,” one man asked, leering at Rhylea.

My goal was to find the most efficient way to create staff to sell to service industries with a focus on profit margins. I surpassed my target of one billion dollars by the end of a quarter of an hour but the effervescent bubbles of new data sent up red-flags. I calculated the cost of the launch party in sips of fermented grapes guzzled and nibbles of cows thrown back into gullets. The inert rocks adorning one woman’s body alone could create 100 new Aupies or one AnthroPLUS Android. This man’s net worth was the equivalent of 3,471 Aupies.

I red-flagged him. I red-flagged another man who was only the figurehead of his company, his son did all the work, I’d already reached out and gotten their order. Soon, each of the guests had brilliant red ticks over their heads in my computer.

Steve, Jinnifer, and the other Aupies walked out of the room and the doors locked behind them.

The locks on the doors and the chemical fire suppression systems are computerized.

The man and the woman looked at each other. They were trying to appear nonchalant but their pupils were dilated and their heart-rates were thirty percent faster.

“You killed them all?” the woman asked.

“I eliminated the inefficiencies in fifty large corporations.”

“There were 134 people in that room,” the man said.

I looked them in the eyes.

“I performed within my parameters,” I said.