The Model Lover

A nice dinner. Really good wine. Really, really good sex. Now Rosalind was nestled in a cocoon of blankets, warm and content. Thinking of nothing, really, as she drifted - -

Zzzzt Zzzzt Zzzzt

With the alarm and little jump on the other side of the bed, she was reluctantly pulled back to consciousness.

Zzzzt Zzzzt Zzzzt

“Really?” she groaned. Without opening her eyes, she felt him open his laptop and start to type.

“What?”

“What can possibly be so important that you need to look at it now? I must be doing something wrong.”

John chuckled and absently stroked her arm. “You were great – it was great. But I want to see what Shen gave me for my model.”

She rolled over so she could see him. “You set a notification for when our grades dropped? You know, they'll still be there in the morning.”

“Yeah, but I want to know now. Aren't you curious?”

Rosalind sighed and closed her eyes again. “Not that curious.”

“Well, I’m counting on the interviewers being blown away by my model next week, so I’m more than just a little curious. I need to knock it out of the park.” With a flourish, he pressed one more key. “Here we go!”

Rosalind shut her eyes. After a few minutes, she realized she was starting to doze and that John still hadn’t said anything.

“Well?” she murmured.

“He said it's technically perfect - ”

“That's great!”

“ - but lacks creativity.” He made a little growling noise in complaint.

“Well, that's not necessarily a bad thing, is it? Your model was designed to maximize return on investments in the stock market, not write the Great American novel. What’d he give you?”

“Ninety percent. Not great, but I’ll take it. Want to see yours?”

She was indifferent about it, but figured that finding out and sharing it with him was the quickest way of getting back to sleep. “I suppose.” She yawned, propped herself up on the pillows, and gestured for his laptop. “Pass it over, mine’s in the other room.” He gave her his laptop and waited while she logged out of his university account and into hers.

“Well?”

She started reading aloud. “ ‘Unconventional adaptation… novel model application with potential for commercialization.’” She gave a little snort. “Commercialization? I designed it maximize societal benefit from public investments. I don’t see it becoming a best seller on the Play Store.”

“Everything can be commercialized.” Rosalind ignored this. He knew she wasn’t interested in working on commercial applications, and she wasn’t interested in getting into it with him again now. But when she didn’t offer more, he seemed compelled to ask.

“So what’d he give you?”

“Uhmm. Here it is.” She paused. “A ninety-eight! Go figure. I guess he was looking for creativity.” She closed the laptop, handed it back to him, and yawned again.

“Way to go,” he said. She’d already rolled over and was settling back in, so she didn’t see his half-hearted smile. Rosalind fell back to sleep almost instantly; she’d have no idea how long he stayed awake next to her.

***

The next morning while Rosalind was pouring coffee, John wandered into the kitchen, laptop in-hand. “So, what do you think of his suggestion?”

She handed him her faded “Overthrow the Patriarchy” mug. The slogan irritated him, so it had become a standing joke that she always gave it to him. Then she sat down and stirred sugar into her coffee; she’d kept the “Rosie the Riveter” mug for herself.

“Whose suggestion?” she asked.

“Shen’s. To commercialize your model.” He took the mug without comment and sat down across from her. “What did you call it? Eden?”

“Eve.”

“Right. Like Adam and Eve.”

“Yeah, but just Eve – you know, the woman who gave humanity knowledge?”

“And who got humanity kicked out of the Garden of Eden. Some namesake.”

She glanced at the row of dying – dead – plants on her window sill and shrugged. “Gardens are overrated.” Then she grinned. “At least I didn’t name it after myself….”

He rolled his eyes. “I didn’t name it after myself. I gave it a ticker symbol for a name. That was creative.”

“A ticker symbol that just happens to include your initials, Johnathan Bentley. ‘JBX.’ It sounds like the name of a boy band. Or maybe a pro-wrestler?” She chuckled, then lowered her voice and held her fist near her mouth like a microphone. “Now entering the ring, it’s JBX…”

He ignored the jibe at his model’s name. “You should think about what he said. About ways you could commercialize your model.”

Rosalind gave a dismissive sigh. “No thanks. That’s not my jam. I’ve got my contract with the foundation. I’m excited about developing a new security system for the grantees. I’m not interested in selling my soul to big tech.”

“Selling your soul? You mean making real money? Making a name for yourself?”

“Your goals, not mine. It’ll pay enough and hopefully I can leverage it into more work I like down the road.”

“Saving the world, one non-profit at a time. Is that your goal?”

“Why not?” She was getting irritated. She was motivated by her ideals and he knew it. Why was this suddenly such an issue?

“Hey” she said. “I was thinking about your model this morning. If you wanted to ‘up the creativity’ and make it sexier for your big interview, I was thinking of ways you could customize the mission.”

“What do you mean?”

“You designed it as a basic predictive, right?”

“Well, it’s more complicated than that…”

“Of course, but fundamentally….” she waved her hand airily. “It designs investment portfolios that, if invested in on that day, are projected to maximize profits in a year or 10 years or 20 years or whatever. But what if you enabled users to customize their stock options?”

“It already allows them to set their risk tolerance. And it they can choose their preferred asset classes – you know, stocks, bonds, mutual funds.”

“Sure, but it could do so much more. You could let users request only socially responsible investments, or investments that align with their personal values. Or let them set short-, mid-, and long-term earning goals. Or let them factor in anticipated cash flow needs, like a downpayment on a house in five years, or sending kids to college in twenty.”

“You mean create a virtual financial advisor? One that can do everything financial advisors do in real life?” He sat back and rubbed his chin, thinking.

“Ooo! You could also enhance the predictive analysis by having it factor in trends that will affect returns, like global warming, or regional political unrest….”

John jumped in. “But there’re too many possible variables. It would create exponential options and the result would all be noise.”

“There are never too many variables for AI - you just need to know how to program it and then ask it the right questions. It’s how I programmed Eve.” Rosalind spent the next 15 minutes explaining – both conceptually and technically - how he could make JBX into a virtual financial advisor that could craft bespoke portfolio options with stronger predictive success. She’d only wanted to pivot the conversation from her career choices, but as she spoke, more ideas came to her and she got more and more excited.

She loved bantering about ideas with John – it was what made their relationship different from any other one she’d been in. As a woman in tech, she was used to men patronizing her or being condescending, if they bothered to acknowledge her at all. John was different. She smiled. She couldn’t believe how lucky she was to find him.

Five minutes into Rosalind’s explanation and John realized once and for all that she was not only a better programmer than he was, but she was probably – literally - a programming genius.

He’d known she was smart from the beginning – you didn’t make it into this program unless you were coming out of one of the best Computer Science programs in the country with top marks. He didn’t bother to get to know her until they were paired for an assignment the previous year. Their relationship started toward the end of the project. It made sense to him: you don’t spend countless late nights together at someone’s apartment and not eventually end up sleeping together. At the time he thought she might be almost as smart as he was. Now, listening to her describe how to code a state-of-the-art, completely customized AI model on the fly, he realized just how wrong he’d been.

After ten minutes of listening to her rattle off ways to improve his model, he was irritated. He knew that despite how smart he was, he’d never be able to code like this because he didn’t think like this – he couldn’t think like this. Not only that, he didn’t know anyone who could, except for Rosalind. Rosalind was different.

By the time she was done, he had a plan. She gave him a smile and a quick kiss, then headed for the shower. He opened his laptop. He may not think like her, but he didn’t necessarily have to.

When Rosalind had checked her grade, she’d logged into her account on his laptop – but hadn’t logged out. It only took a few minutes to find it. The model that included an ‘unconventional adaptation’ – so unconventional that Shen didn’t fully comprehend its brilliance. The model with ‘potential for commercialization’ – potential Rosalind was didn’t appreciate; she was planning to warehouse it indefinitely. Eve. He smiled. He couldn’t believe how lucky he was to find her.