EPTImagine, for a moment, that you are a young executive in another gracefully dying American company. You sweat nervously beneath a Brooks Brothers shirt and conservative gray fabric carefully tailored to mask your age. It makes you look 35. Across the table, the COO, the gatekeeper and satyr of young bucks like yourself, is watching. Your suit makes him feel old.
He’s not watching—he’s waiting, you quickly realize. Like a lioness on the Serengeti on those old National Geographic videos. You are an antelope, and you had better not trip on these slides or else you’re going to die, hustled out on a stretcher as you become a statistical outlier on that time-at-McKinsey versus success histogram.
It’s not like he wanted to promote you. The CEO is a yes man, in the Jim Carrey sense of the phrase, and he likes yes men like yourself. Boosterism, as Babbitt used to do. The COO does not share that strain of logic.
“You have to come up with a plan in three weeks to double revenue,” he says, “or else you will be out of a job,” his sneer conveying the second phrase without saying a single word.
Obviously, there’s a lot at stake here. The future of the company, for instance. The livelihoods of three thousand white collar managers, brand image consultants, internal auditors, comptrollers, and executives like yourself, and maybe ten, maybe twenty times that number of overseas workers being paid ten cents per hour
“You are like a radiating blackbody.” Your elder across the table passes judgment on your vision. “So much heat, so little light.” He tosses your slides across the table.
You got the job because your CEO saw the pretty slides you made at McKinsey and decided that you could add new ideas. Hoisted you on a crane, straight out of that interview room that smelled of nervous sweat and into the executive suite on the 59th floor.
But you’re no Tim Robbins, no Hollywood endings here. You remember that the last guy was an engineer in a past life, just as you were a consultant barely seven months ago.
So you do what most politicians do when the going gets tough.
You have someone else make the choice for you. So you cough up a card.
The COO looks it over like some prize he’s won at a carnival fair. He takes out his cell phone.
A tired receptionist on the other side answers. “Levin and Strasbourg Product Consulting…”
FOCUS GROUP
A CREATION MYTH
Ed Levin frowned. This wasn’t working well at all. They were supposed to come in pairs, and yet several of the female participants had brought all their children, instead of just the ones younger than five. Moreover, several of the older kids were making war on the conference room, which was obviously designed for sedentary thirtysomething office workers rather than rambunctious primary students.
As he looked to his partner for help, a stream of water whizzed past his eyes, pushing aside his toupee and exposing his bald scalp to howls of laughter. He felt his cheeks redden and fought to keep himself from raising his voice.
“Paul—Paul, get over here.” Paul Strasbourg was Ed’s younger brother by marriage. He was a part-time partner in the company, and full-time novelist and dreamer. Dropping the legos he held on the ground, where they were promptly snatched away by their previous owner, he looked up with his cool blue eyes and winked. “Ain’t this fun?”
“Yeah, if we weren’t fifteen minutes behind schedule. Come on. Tell Isabella and Marybeth to get their older kids out of here. We need unadulterated feedback.”
The reason that Ed was being laughed at instead of playing golf was because they had been contracted to design next year’s Tickle Me Elmo. Figuratively, of course. Their clients would kill them if they just copied it. Ed thought back to the conversation he’d had on the phone with the Chief Operating Officer, someone who he thought of as a kindred spirit:
“Listen, we need 650 million after-cost profit next year from this product. At 4 dollars margin per unit, after taxes that’s 200 million units we need sold. We need every child in North America and Western Europe under the age of ten to buy one.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Now a mutual friend of ours—he’s sitting right across from me right now—introduced me to you and said your firm could help us do that. Is that right?”
Ed had paused for a moment. 200 million toys would justify a fee large enough to send him to Aruba for the rest of his life. He’d then dry swallowed and spat an answer.
“Yes. We can have a design on your end by the fifteenth. Fees will be ten cents per unit, plus standard billing rate of nineteen-hundred an hour, with a fifty percent bonus on the hourly if we show results before the fifteenth.”
“Excellent. I’ll have the legal department draft a contract soon. Look forward to seeing you. And the toy.”
Now it was three days until the deadline and Ed still didn’t have jack shit. So he’d brought on Strasbourg to help. Last Christmas, they’d cooked up GIs that automatically made shooting noises whenever they were pointed at each other. Earned a couple million bucks and even made the news. Unfortunately, the product got killed by Lieberman, which lost them the client and engendered laughter at Ed’s bald head from his competitors. So this time, Ed wanted to redeem himself. But he couldn’t if those “damned brats didn’t get the fuck out of this room.”
They were outside now. Ed heard something bounce off the frosted glass partition between suite 105A and the hallway and winced.
Paul didn’t seem to notice. “You know what? I just realized something.”
Ed’s tone was flat. “What.”
“Those kids in there—look at the ones who came alone. They’re miserable.” Paul inched the door open a little, and pointed. Ed didn’t look.
“So?”
“Well, think about it, if we can design a playmate for them, that’ll really sell.”
“Yeah? Why?”
Paul’s voice got more animated. “I mean, think about how all their parents must be too busy to really be there all the time for their kids. We can make a substitute.”
Ed rolled his eyes. “It’s been done, Paul. It’s called TV.”
“No, no. Not a box. A real playmate. With real AI. I mean, let’s look into it. And let’s pay these poor moms off and let them go home for now.”
“And waste another day? We’ve only got a few days left man.”
Someone inside started complaining to her neighbor about how one of her kids was five and still wasn’t potty-trained. Ed buckled.
“Alright. But just one day. Okay?”
***
They went online and found out that two patents on a certain artificial intelligence design were expiring soon. The company was based out of Russia. Ed and Paul hopped on the next plane to the Moscow and soon found themselves facing a stone-facedly drunk ex-KGB officer named Ivan. In spite of his poor grammar, Ivan’s English was accent-free, which lent an air of absurdity to their conversation.
“You, you want Amelia?”
Paul and Ed looked at each other. The clock ticked nervously above them, and suddenly stopped. It was 12:30 and they were missing lunch.
“I’m sorry, we were looking for a computer system that you had.”
“Yes. Amelia. She is our pride and joy.”
“Oh.” Forced laughter. “Of course, of course. Amelia. We would like to see her, yes.”
They followed the colonel down a concrete-lined corridor. There was a gentle downward slope. Had they been observant, they would have noticed that they were slowly descending into a nuclear blast shelter. The colonel stopped before a massive steel door and began to sing.
“I know your eyes in the morning sun. I feel you touch me in the pourin’ rain. And the moment that you wander far from me… I wanna’ feel you in my arms again.”
Behind him, Ed eyed Paul in a “what the fuck” gesture. He whispered, “are you sure this isn’t the Russian version of a ‘fuck you, clown’ joke? I mean this guy is—”
He was interrupted. “Rise and shine, my dear. I did not mess up the password this time, I hope.” A metallic yet sexy voice answered back with the slightest hint of Slavic. “You seem to have brought me visitors. May I ask why?”
“My dear Amelia, for too long you have been cooped up in this ward. It is time to bring you out into the sunshine again. Sunshine, sunshine, sunshine!” The colonel swung his arms as if he was running with each repeated word.
“Mm-hmm. And might I ask who these men are here for? And where I will be going?”
Paul put on his most earnest voice. “Do you like to make friends?”
She answered with her most seductive one. “Are you lonely?”
***
Amelia, they soon found out, had been originally designed as an obscure systems diagnostic and reporting program for nuclear missile silos. Over time, she had gotten really good at companionship. Russian military doctrine rotated crews through silos once a month. The Strategic Rocketry personnel was 92% male. With no one else to talk to in the silo, the lonely, frustrated, and somewhat sociopathic nuclear triggermen had, out of boredom, changed her voice to a female one and later removed her programming locks. After twenty years, it could be safely said that no program on earth was as good at stroking the male ego as she was.
With the recent decommissioning of most of Russia’s warheads, she was no longer needed. So the Zelenograd Science and Technology Institute, a front company for the FSB, was now finding buyers. They wrote up a contract and gave them a day to mull it over. That night, Ed was only too happy to accept, while Paul was a little more cautious.
“What are you afraid of? We’ve got a huge market. Not only can we program this baby into toys for little kids, if we remove the locks just a bit further, we can sell the ultimate product.”
Now it was Paul’s turn to ask, “what?”
“Robo-whores, man! We’re going to sell the ultimate home entertainment system.” Paul had never seen his brother-in-law this happy before. “Screw that contract with Parker Brothers—we’re going to take this baby out ourselves. Soon as that ink is dry, I’m calling up Foxconn. We’re going to make a killing!” Ed began to whistle.
“The best things in life are free… but gimme money… that’s what I want…”
***
The first fembots hit the market three months later, right in the middle of Christmas season. Twenty states banned it, but that only opened up a lucrative internet sales business for the duo. “Amy” really took off when the United Nations licensed it as a means to reduce overpopulation. Levin and Strasbourg, Product Consultants became LS Incorporated and was on its way to a three billion dollar IPO. Ed bought a private jet, three wives, and an Upper East Side penthouse. Paul retired to Nantucket, where he took up sailing.
Then the first news reports came. Mass rioting had broken out in Rio de Janeiro after the Brazilian government had refused to legalize human-android marriage. However, the rioters were all male; none of the robos had come out to play. The police captain, in the televised live interview, said that the men “appeared to be infected with some sort of mind-altering virus, like they’re on PCP or something.”
Ed didn’t notice. The fembot was priced “affordably”, which meant that he felt it beneath him to buy one. Ironically, Paul’s wife had bought one, but kept her powered off, locked in his garage, as a surprise gift for their anniversary. Two days after the newscast, she finally inserted the first fuel cell into her lower abdomen and watched the blue eyes flash three times to indicate normal operational status.
“Hello, Ms. Strasbourg. How do you today?” The voice was delicate, child-like, even.
“Pretty good. And you?” The fembot began to get dressed.
“I’m feeling murderously fine.” It picked up a pair of jeans.
“I’m sorry, come again?”
“I said, I’m feeling murderous.” And with that, Amy strangled Paul’s wife to death with a brand-new pair of DKNY hip-huggers.
Paul came home fifteen minutes later to find her sitting in his wife’s chair, watching a hockey match.
“What the?” He stood there in his sailor’s outfit. “Elizabeth?!” He called out for his wife, unaware that she was on the bottom of the harbor, weighted down with chains.
“You don’t need that woman now. Let me help you with these buttons.” And with that, the robot stood up and kissed Paul forcefully on the lips, her eyes beaming a carefully selected series of subliminal messages into his head.
“Just clear your mind. Relax. This won’t take long.”
When the riots finally came to New York, Paul led the charge down Park Avenue.
