to be slick. It's time to do some real testing. Now we'll see how it cracks!
Delighted with his sudden burst of insight, Fred bolted right out of bed, threw on some different clothes, and headed into the street. He lived only blocks from the office. He'd be there in no time at all. In fact, he was there almost before Eliza, the bright-eyed young woman whose job it was to keep the coffee pots fresh and full. No one ever saw her arrive, yet she was always there, cheerful and pretty, the opposite of Fred.
"Good morning," she sang as he stepped out of the elevator on the top floor. Fred merely grunted and turned away. He'd been giving her the cold shoulder for weeks. Once, only once, he'd worked up a smile in return and the warmth of her reply had scuttled his persona for days. He'd been unable to muster any grumpiness at all and his productivity had fallen way off. If he gave in to her now, it might ruin his whole plan.
"Forget you even saw her," he advised himself as he scurried past. He would have to wait until more people arrived before he could make his way to the coffee pots, otherwise she'd stand a good chance of greeting him again, which he knew she would accomplish with even more grace the second time. Hurrying, he made it into his cubicle without seeing or hearing her another time. He logged in to his desktop and was glad to see no new activity. It was still early enough that none of the pairs had gotten going yet. Bilj and Dave were due to launch any moment, with Stanley and Nate to follow, and Velicia and Hannah a bit later. This would give him time to prepare. He had to have a plan.
Of course, the overall strategy was obvious. Interject! As the ubiquitous man in the middle, he was capable of feeding words into the stream unilaterally. He could speak as either side, but the trick was to slip it in naturally, not disruptively. He'd have to remain in character, and yet at the same time make a definite impact. He considered what to say while re-reading the tails of the previous day's transcripts again. What should he say? What could he say? Oh, he had some wicked ideas! If only, he said to himself, if only Hannah brings up that topic again, if only Nathaniel goes back there, if only Dave keeps up his typical patter. Fred knew exactly where he'd lead them, Oh, it was going to be good. It was going to be glorious. It could possibly ruin everything! He'd already settled on that goal. The Friendular System must be destroyed, and he had only this one day to do it. Kandhi's fix might very well really fix it, and he was not going to let that happen if he could avoid it. He rubbed his hands in glee, and, without realizing what he was doing, stood up and strolled confidently over to the coffee pot table, where Eliza was still puttering about. He felt he could handle it now. She could do her worst, which she did, saluting him with an over-eager cheerfulness that reminded him of chipmunks. He grinned an evil grin and even wished her a wonderful day. He chortled inside as he filled up a gigantic Styrofoam cup with fresh, hot, caffeine. It was going to be a nice little day after all.
- - - - - - - - -
Fred dashed off an email to Kandhi and Wen, exclaiming his support for Kandhi's decision, and especially lauding her intention to give the existing pairs another full day. This would provide more data, he declared, knowing full well that by saying "more data" he was setting a trap that neither of his colleagues could ever resist. Wen would get to fill up her charts, and Kandhi would add to her spreadsheets, and they would sit there happily all the long day, accumulating whatever numbers came in. Meanwhile, Fred would be on the case, monitoring and hopefully "assisting" the three conversations. His coffee had already kicked in strong and well when Dave popped up on the screen, already planning his romantic activities for the morning. He was going to flirt and flirt some more with those poor helpless receptionists, who were probably all just like his Eliza, meagerly paid for their positive vibes and their fresh, clean attractive appearances. Naturally they had to respond to Dave's banter with the same of their own. It was part of their jobs. Was Dave such a moron that he didn't even see it? It sure seemed so to Fred. He could only imagine what Bilj thought. But no, he corrected himself, he could partly determine what Bilj thought, at least as far as Dave would ever know!
Dave: The Brick Building is next. Pretty funny name for a building, don't you think? It must be named after someone, because it's not even made out of bricks!
(interval - seven seconds)
Bilj: What's it made out of, then?
(interval - nineteen seconds)
Dave: I'm not sure. Maybe it's brick after all, come to think of it. Only it's yellow. I don't usually think about bricks being yellow.
(interval - fourteen seconds)
Bilj: They can be yellow sometimes,
(interval - eleven seconds)
Dave: I guess so. But anyway, I'm going in. It's cool how the wristband just goes anywhere, anytime, Can you even tell what I'm doing right now?
(interval - sixteen seconds)
Bilj: Nope. No, I can't. Can you tell what I'm doing?
(interval - seventeen seconds)
Dave: No idea. You could be in a cell in Siberia for all I know.
("Pretty close," Fred, thought, "that's pretty damn close, but come on, Dave, come on. Get with it!")
Dave: There's Kathy. Remember I told you about her? She's the brunette with the totally round mouth. Perfectly round, and red. I've never seen anything like it.
("Outside of a blow-up sex doll," Fred thought)
Dave: There she is now. Ah, look at that smile. Happy to see me as ever.
("Now's my chance," said Fred to himself. It seemed to him that Bilj has stepped out for a moment. His responses, usually immediate, were slightly less so this morning)
Fred (as Bilj): So she doesn't even mind that you're gay?
(interval - forty one seconds)
Dave: What did you say?
(interval - twenty two seconds)
Bilj: Excuse me?
(interval - nine seconds)
Dave: You think that I'm gay?
(interval - eight seconds. Here it comes, Fred thought, holding his breath)
Bilj: I'm gay?
(interval - three seconds)
Dave: You are?
(interval - five seconds)
Bilj: Well, as a matter of fact, Dave, I am. Does it bother you?
(interval - three seconds)
Dave: No, no. But, but you haven't come on to me or anything.
(interval - four seconds)
Bilj: That's not how it goes. I've been with my partner for seventeen years.
(interval - twenty one seconds)
Dave: Seventeen years? Wow. And the whole time you've been, what? You've been 'faithful', I guess the word is?
(interval - eight seconds)
Bilj: Yes, of course. We love each other, very much. You can't have love without trust.
(interval - fifty three seconds)
Dave: Um, I'm going to have to think about this. I'll talk to you later.
(Dave swiped, disconnect)
- - - - - - - - -
"Didn't he know?" Fred wondered. "Didn't Dave even know he was himself gay? Oh my god! You could tell, even without the tone of his voice coming through, just from the words, you could tell he was stunned. And I got away with it! Bilj would never have come out and said it! Man, I was sweating there for a minute. I wonder if Wen will pick up on it? That's the real concern. She's the one I have to watch out for."
Fred was so excited he could barely contain himself, and usually, Wen would be the first one he'd blab to about something like this. And he couldn't. He couldn't tell anyone, ever, at all. One down, and two more to go, he was thinking. He was going to toss an incendiary conversational device into every one of those pairs, and stand back and watch it go up in smoke, so he hoped. He'd nipped that Dave-and-Bilj thing in the bud. Dave shut right up. From the look of the data, he might have even turned the thing off! Was it true? Had he swiped the 'off' gesture. Yes, there it was in the logs. He'd turned the band off. Bilj couldn't get through to him now if he wanted. As Fred watched the screen, he saw Nate and Stan power up.
Nate: How's it going
there, pal?
(interval - fourteen seconds)
Stan: Not too shabby. And you?
(interval - two seconds)
Nate: Going good. Going good. Had an amazing out-of-the-brain-box experience this morning.
(interval - seventeen seconds)
Stan: You don't say.
(interval - three seconds)
Nate: You know how I was telling you about the birds?
(interval - twelve seconds)
Stan: Come again?
(interval - two seconds)
Nate: About how I can pick up what they're up to.
(interval - nineteen seconds)
Stan: I wouldn't want to touch that!
(interval - one second)
Nate: Where they're going and all that. Well, this morning I got this message, I swear, like it was beaming right at me, and guess what? You'll never guess what.
(interval - twenty two seconds)
Stan: Fruit loops?
(interval - two seconds)
Nate? What? No. Not fruit loops. What made you say that?
(interval - twenty two seconds)
Stan: Just guessing.
(interval - three seconds)
Nate: It was coming from some kind of parrot inside of a house. At least I think it was a parrot. That was the image that came in my head, and it sure wasn't happy about being stuck there.
(interval - nineteen seconds)
Stan: Everyone wants to be happy. It's a thing.
("Really?" Fred thought. "That's all you can say? Geez, Stan, I can see I'm going to have to pick it up. Good thing you're so slow on the uptake. I can slip on in any time!")
(interval - six seconds)
Nate: I think it was asking for help.
(interval - four seconds)
Fred (as Stan): I'd go for it. If I were you.
(interval - two seconds)
Nate: You really think I should? I wanted to do it.
(interval - nine seconds, during which Fred held his breath.)
Stan: Do what you want. That's what I say. As long as no one gets hurt.
(interval - six seconds. Fred exhaled.)
Nate: Well, yeah, I wouldn't hurt anyone. Just rescue the bird. It wants to be free.
(interval - fourteen seconds)
Stan: Everyone wants to be free. It's a thing.
(interval - three seconds)
Nate: I'm glad you think so. Thanks! You know, I think I will. I think I'll do it. Hey, I'll be in touch!
(interval - sixteen seconds)
Stan: I'll be here.
- - - - - - - - -
"Yee-ha!" Fred shouted, then looked around to make sure no one noticed. People noticed, though. They'd been streaming in for the past several minutes as the office began to fill up. Kandhi was there, and peered out of her office to see what Fred was about, but he gave her a shrug and a half of a smile, which sufficed to exhaust her attention. It was just Fred being Fred, she concluded, no doubt having one of his brainstorms again. She directed her focus back to the screen.
She'd been following the chat, and didn't notice anything unusual, only that the conversation had been unusually brief. Otherwise, Stan was his usual tiresome self, and Nate was babbling in the way that was normal for him. She had no doubt he believed he could communicate mentally with parrots. She hadn't yet looked at the Bilj-and-Dave chat but only noticed, from the live scrolling graph, that their conversation had also been short. No doubt they would come into action again soon. Dave's job often punctuated their interactions with pauses while he loaded and unloaded boxes. Besides, she had no concern about them, and didn't feel the need to review the transcript. Fred had been counting on that.
He already knew what he was going to do about Hannah. She would no doubt go on and on about the poor sick people in the hospitals she visited, and how they were suffering so much, and blah blah blah. He knew that Velicia didn't care. She was all about vibrations and crystals and what-not. It would be just like her to mildly suggest that no one should have to suffer needlessly. Oh yes, that would be just like something she'd say. Help them, Fred as Velicia would advise. Do something for them. He could tell that this was what Hannah was waiting to hear. She wanted to "help," and she wanted to be recognized for her well-meaning intentions. How should he say it, though, in such a way that the meaning was clear but simultaneously vague? Velicia would never publicly advocate precisely what Fred had in mind. It would be a delicate operation.
In the meantime, Wen had arrived and wheeled her chair into Fred's cube. She wanted to talk about stuff. Normally, Fred liked nothing more than these sessions with Wen, but this day he could hardly contain his frustration. Velicia and Hannah could come on any time and he didn't want to miss this great opportunity. Wen was saying that she didn't know if she agreed with Kandhi's decision or not.
"Are we really going to keep juggling until we get the right combinations? What about the negative cases? We need to know how it fails, when it does. I think it's okay to have one set that works, and two sets that don't. I think we ought to let it go on," she told Fred.
"Maybe it will," he suggested. "After all, they do have all day today to get it together. Maybe they will."
"I doubt it," Wen sighed. "I think by the end of the day they'll be begging to get off the test. Stanley and Velicia, I mean. It must be driving them crazy."
"I think Stan can handle it," Fred said. "After all, he's used to the tedious chit chat of strangers. I'd be amazed if he even paid any attention to anything Nate's saying. To Stan it's just easy money."
"You're probably right," Wen had to agree. "But what about Velicia?"
"It'll have to be something unusual to get her attention," Fred nodded. "Those two are really way off. I wonder what could bring them together."
"Hannah would have to go cosmic," Wen laughed, "I just don't think she can do that."
"Cosmic, eh?" Fred muttered, "that might do the trick."
"Won't happen," Wen added. "Hannah's as steady as she goes. She couldn't think 'brown' if she was stuck inside a paper bag"
"Did you work up any new metrics?" Fred asked her, changing the subject, and hoping to get her out of his cube.
"Nah, I think I've got it all covered," she said, slumping into her chair. She would like nothing more than to have a new task. Fred had to think fast.
"So they're all correlated? You know, on a scale?"
"Yep," Wen informed him. "All up and down."
"What about tone?"
"What do you mean?"
"From the transcripts all we have is the words, so there's word counts and syllables and intervals and all of that stuff, but I was thinking we're not doing audio much. The tone of their voices, I mean. What can we get out of that?"
"I looked into it," Wen replied. "There isn't that much. The variation is just much too wide. We couldn't account for localization, for one thing. Tonality in Italian, for instance, is not all the same as Chinese. Then again, the tone doesn't translate directly to emotion even within the same person. There's just too much context."
"But there's data," Fred countered. "Tonality per person per session, I mean. How many times does Stanley breathe deep? How many times does he sigh? You could work up a map for each chat. It might come to nothing in the overall picture, but without all the data you never can tell."
"You're right," Wen brightened. "You don't really know till you try."
"Sometimes the data speaks for itself," Fred concluded.
"Again, right," Wen declared as she kicked off from the floor and scooted out of the cube along with her chair. "I'll get to working on that right away."
"You just never know," Fred called after her, relieved to have thought of something to get rid of her, and not a moment too soon. Velicia and Hannah were on and yes, she was talking about her terminal patients, and yes, Velicia was taking a long time to answer, and yes, Fred did have a plan. He'd mention something about souls. That was it! That was the word that would bring them together. Sou
ls, and their spiritual needs, in contrast to bodies and their physical ones. Then he would sit back and watch it all bubble and boil.
- - - - - - - - -
By lunchtime, all of the subject streams had gone down. First it was Dave, then Nathaniel, and finally Hannah was completely off-line. Not a heartbeat, not a murmur, not a pulse. Kandhi was the first one to panic. As soon as she noticed, she promised herself she would "keep it together". When Dave logged off, Kandhi had chalked it up to the normal flow. All of them were under contract, of course. They were allowed to turn off the engagement stream by means of the swiping gesture, but the terms were clear about everything else. The connection could only be broken if the wristband was removed, and the wristband was NOT to be removed, under any circumstances. Death itself would not have been a good enough excuse. Something must have gone wrong, because Nate's connection was not only dropped, it was gone. And then Hannah's went too. At that, Kandhi nearly fell off her chair.
"Fred! Wen!" she shouted from her office, not even bothering to use the phone. Fred and Wen came running, recognizing the unmistakable quality of despair in their bosses' voice. It didn't require any tonal analysis for that.
"What?" Kandhi choked on her words. She could only gasp and gesture at the wall where she'd projected her desktop.
"Flat-lined," Fred intoned. "Every one of them flat-lined."
"The friends are still there," Wen chipped in, trying to look on the bright side, and it was true that the beta friends' signals were still active and strong. Clearly there was nothing physically wrong with the HAFS.
"That doesn't help," Kandhi sputtered. "It would be better if all of them weren't. Then we'd know it had to be the network or something else THAT MAKES SENSE!" she ended by nearly screaming.
"Take it easy," Fred muttered, realizing at once his mistake. Kandhi turned on him and pressed her face nearly right up to his.
"Easy?" she yelled. "Easy? What is so fricking easy?"
"Nothing?" Fred suggested, leaning away. Inside, Fred was all jumbled up. He knew, for a fact, that each of the partners' last conversations had ended shortly after his own "interventions". He had injected just the right thing that would bring each of them to a close and he knew it. Whatever was happening was entirely his fault, or rather, he had been the proximate cause. The individuals were still responsible for their actions, whatever those were. He had no clue what they were actually up to. He could make some guesses. Each of the subjects had somehow acted, had each done something in response to his prompting.
"All I have to do is keep my mouth shut," Fred said to himself, reflecting at once that this was going to be the hardest thing he'd ever done in his life. It wasn't easy being a big-mouth, being the guy who was always the downer in the room. He'd never been good at holding back, at keeping quiet, at playing his cards close to his chest. Quite the opposite, in fact. He was very, very good at blurting out whatever obnoxious comment came into his mind. He was quick on the verbal trigger, the fastest vocal draw in the West. If there was blame to be assigned, he would never hesitate in pointing the finger. If there was any chink in any armor anywhere, Fred would be sticking his nose right into it. It was his talent, his specialty, his gift. Now, for his own sake, he had to zip it, and zip it tight. Feigning complete and utter ignorance was the only way to