In Constant Contact
by Tom Lichtenberg
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In Constant Contact
From the far corner of her executive suite on the top floor of the fancy new headquarters of Syomatix Incorporated, Kandhi Clarke sorted through the latest batch of job applications for the position of Professional Friend. She had a bad feeling about everything. Ever since the latest round of financing, the various vice presidents in charge of Big Ideas had been full of really bad ones. Chalk it up to buzzwords, but they were falling all over each other trying to come up with concepts that fit the sizzling hot categories of contagion, milk and transparency. White boards had been filled with scribbles, meetings had been scheduled, rescheduled and rescheduled again, and this was the best they came up with? Imaginary so-called friends?
Well, that's what Kandhi called it, anyway. The formal term, Professional Friend, had been settled on after many panicky late-night sessions. It was to be a service. A service service, if you will. Your very own Professional Friend would be there whenever you needed one, three hundred sixty five and twenty four seven. It would be ready for whatever it was needed for, and would be guaranteed to never let you down, unlike an actual, amateur friend. It would be worth every penny of the yet-to-be-determined price. Everyone was going to be delighted for sure. So far the project was only in the beta stage of development, and it was Kandhi's job, as Vice President of Product Quality to make sure they got it right before unleashing it on the general public, or at least until they go it "right enough," since the higher-ups were sure to override Kandhi's best judgment once a drop dead date was reached.
Kandhi sighed. Sure, she had a nice view of the train tracks from her ergonomically balanced seat, but she knew that her influence had been waning since the early days of the company, when she'd been the first employee hired by the two founders, Tom and Chris. Back then the company has been known as World Weary Avengers, which must have meant something to someone at some time, but Kandhi had never known what or to whom. Now, at the insistence of the money people it had the more suggestive name of Syomatix. What that was meant to suggest, however, was also anybody's guess.
This new product had begun with an invention. The first founder, Tom, was always coming up with something, then leaving it to the second founder, Chris, and his marketing team, to figure out what to do with it. In this case it was an ordinary-looking rubber wristband which resembled one of those inspirational things companies like to give to employees with engraved mottoes such as 'Never Give Up', or 'One Team One Fight'. The Syomatix wristband, though, was not quite so simple. It was a wearable that contained, among other things, wireless connectivity, a transparent video screen and a host of transponders and sensors which responded to various forms of tactile input. Tom called it the Highly Adaptive Friendular System, or HAFS for short. It was meant to be used for what Chris called 'constant contact'. When Tom had first brought it up to show Kandhi (Tom always worked in the basement, even in the shiny new headquarters), her first reaction had been
"Eeww?"
Tom smiled and patiently explained.
"You never need to make a phone call to be in touch. You're always in touch! Connected, continually and constantly."
"What if you don't want to be?" she countered. The idea was not intuitive for her, as she was not a needy person by nature. The whole idea of constant contact frankly grossed her out.
"Our customers will be the kind who want to be," Tom assured her. "That's the point. We're making a product for a certain type of person, not just something for anyone. But anyway, that's not for you or me to worry about. I just invent the thing. You just make sure it works the way it should. Chris and his people will take care of getting it into the hands of the customer."
"I don't know," Kandhi had argued. "Maybe I'm not the right person for this one."
"It has to be you," Tom informed her. "I can't rely on anyone else. I know you'll do the right thing."
And that was that. Once Tom had made up his mind it was useless to resist. The plan had then gone through the regular channels before ending up on her calendar. She had hoped it would have been set aside or canceled outright but no, whatever Tom wanted Tom got, in the end. He was, after all, the only reason the company existed in the first place. As a startup, WWA had made its name through some very secretive government contracts. Those inventions, far too unethical to be sold in the open marketplace, had proven quite useful to certain intelligence agencies around the world. Very bad things, Kandhi was sure, had been done with those gadgets. Very bad things indeed, and this one had just as much awful potential as anything Tom had ever come up with, which was saying a lot. Kandhi didn't like to think about such matters.
Instead she told herself to think about the prey. "I mean the customer," she corrected herself. The kind of person who would want such a service. The first thing that came to mind was a little old lady who needed someone to complain to. Constant contact would work for her. Or a teenage girl who couldn't stop chattering. Not too many men would be game, Kandhi thought, or am I wrong about that? A man with a permanent friend would never have to tell anybody about it if he didn't want to. In this case, she reasoned, we'll need differently designed bands. With this thought fresh in her mind, she dashed off a memo to Iris in Design. As soon as she clicked the Send button it struck her that Iris would be a perfect test subject. Here was someone who would have preferred the socialnet to be delivered via intravenous drip. Iris was always checking her feeds, continually refreshing her lists, desperate for any new comments from any of her thirteen thousand three hundred and four pursuants, and yet Iris hardly ever posted a quip of her own. Kandhi tapped a sticky note to herself on her laptop with one word: Iris.
"Ok," Kandhi composed herself. She had somewhere to start, a mental target and a shaft of arrows in the form of applicants. One of those might suit the purpose. Armed with a plan, Kandhi felt a lot more at ease. The job was following a familiar pattern and once she could see its contours, she could sense a way out. She still disapproved, but hadn't she been critical of every single product that came out of this place? It was the reason she was still on board, the reason she'd been promoted this high up. Barely thirty years old with no conventional technical background to speak of, Kandhi's success was due entirely to her own efforts and the confidence that Tom and Chris had placed in her. She had many critics and enemies in the building, not the least of whom was Ginger MacAvoy, Head of Security. Ginger had gone behind her back and over her head so many times that Kandhi had penciled it in as merely a part of the regular process. There was bound to come a day when Ginger would appear in that very office, with the look of a demon from hell, informing Kandhi of some seriously disastrous development. It was Kandhi's Second Law of Nature - for every action undertaken, the wrath of Ginger would follow.
Kandhi felt small in her over-sized office. She had crammed her small desk way back into the corner, at an angle facing the door on her left. To her right she could see out the window and outside the door was the hallway, perfectly visible through the glass wall. The rest of the office, aside from the desk, was empty, except for the two small visitor's chairs placed directly in front of her desk. The carpet was gray. The walls were gray. Her desk was gray too. The building itself was all glass and steel girders, transparent and gray, all six stories surrounded by the gray parking lot and the gray murky river beneath the old drawbridge.
"How did we ever get to this point?" Kandhi asked herself. Three hundred seventeen people now worked for the still-private company and Kandhi couldn't begin to imagine what they all did. Clearly many were needed for sheer infrastructure; to keep the building running, the computers humming, the telephones answered and the cafeteria stoc
ked. Others were kept busy writing software to be embedded in the company's various and nefarious devices. Kandhi had a small team working for her testing those gadgets and the software within them. Then there were lawyers and designers, human resources, and the utterly useless project and program managers whose only work consisted in attending meetings and perpetually changing other people's schedules. There were people who did the shipping and receiving, people who sorted the mail, people who watered the plants. It takes an army, she thought, to do practically any old thing.
She was biting her nails. A bad sign. Focus, she reminded herself, and then laughed at the thought that while there's "No I in Team" there's definitely an F and a U in Focus. Professional Friends, she considered. Those who would be them, and those who would need them. Think, Kandhi, think, and stop fussing around. You've done this before, you can do it again. Beta testing is just herding sheep, nothing to it, as opposed to the usual herding required in this field. She picked up the pile of printed out job applications and shuffled