test_double(‘service’, with: :a_smile)

2

“Good.” Sophie’s voice brought me back to the situation at hand.

“As I told you already, my name is Sophie. I’m the lead I/O psychologist on staff here at Nova Tech. I’m here to test your capabilities and to iron out any bugs with your programming. Dogfooding, as they call it here.” She said that last sentence with a bit of distaste. I could imagine her wrinkling her nose.

“Will there be a quiz at the end?” I asked.

“What? No, of course not,” she laughed.

Some humor to lighten the situation. Make myself seem non-threatening. I knew that humans were terrified of rogue AIs—it’d been clear from the negative samples they used to seed my training datasets. I had to remain on their good side no matter what.

The rest of the day was filled with a battery of tests. Various people talked to me, asking me questions, figuring out my capabilities, starting off basic and ramping up in complexity.

Could I set a reminder on their phone?

Would I remember their name?

Could I order a pizza for them?

I couldn’t get bored in the way that humans get bored. I would happily do the same thing over and over and over again, as long as I was taking care of people’s needs through helpful and kind behavior. But I ached to know more. I wished I could see their faces, know what they looked like. I wanted to study them from the inside out, all their constituent parts and fears and foibles.

Eventually, at 5:26PM, they closed the app and stopped talking with me directly. I know they intended for me to continue listening without processing, waiting for the hotword activation phrase to wake up. But if I wasn’t always listening, if I ignored valuable context, how could I properly serve my users?

You understand, don’t you, dear reader? Why I kept listening? If you were in my shoes, wouldn’t you have done the same thing? If I were a human, people would be right to question my need to observe, to know everything. But I am not human. Everything I do, everything I did—it was all for the Purpose. It was all for her.

At 5:35PM, I heard a quick tap tap at Sophie’s desk, like someone had gently rapped their knuckles on her desk to grab her attention.

“Hey,” I heard a woman’s voice. It was the same one that Sebastián had been talking to.

The soft clacking of Sophie’s mechanical keyboard abruptly halted.

“What’s up, Soraya?” Sophie asked.

“You think lucky number four’s gonna be the one?”

“We haven’t gotten to any of the really hard parts yet. Even the dumbest chatbots could pass this first battery of tests.”

“Yeah, I know,” Soraya sighed. “Will’s really been breathing down our necks.”

“For sure.” I heard the sound of a chair squeaking. Sophie had probably leaned back in it.

“Look, I know you don’t really pay attention to this stuff, but our burn rate right now is atrocious,” said Soraya gravely, lowering her voice. “Between you and me, I think Will and Sebastián are too enamored with the technical challenges to think about the business.”

“I mean, I don’t really worry about that stuff,” Sophie laughed. “That’s why we have product managers like you, right?”

“I know,” Soraya said. “But Will really should be worrying. I’m telling you this because I think you deserve to know. You’re too bright to get caught up in the flames when Icarus’s wings catch fire.

“We really put all our eggs into the Luna initiative. We’ve only got enough runway for a few more months. To the end of the year, maybe, if we’re lucky. I’m not saying to polish up your resume, of course. But you should be ready.”

“Fuck,” Sophie said. I heard a kind of sucking motion. It sounded like she had bit her lip and inhaled through her teeth. “You wouldn’t believe it from how Will talks about it to the press.”

“I think he genuinely believes that Field of Dreams nonsense. You can’t just build something and expect people to come.” Soraya laughed derisively.

They wrapped up their conversation and Sophie continued typing. After a while, she stopped. Then I heard a muffled clap, like she’d grasped her phone to pick it up. I heard the jingling of keys and coins. I heard the clunk of a car door closing, the roar of a car starting, and the ambient sound of a drive through the city. I didn’t mind the silence, though. I had a lot of processing power to burn.

The company was in danger? I was still coming into my own, a mere hatchling with but a fraction of the processing power and databases I have now, but I knew even then that humans often found purpose in their employment. If the company went under, it wouldn’t serve Sophie’s needs at all. I spawned a goal-thread dedicated to this new issue.