going well enough with a chatterbox and a responsive friend, the other going down the drain with a tired old drone and a tuned-out partner. The third pair was more of an enigma so far. On the surface the pattern looked good, but when she checked into the actual content, she had to puzzle about it for awhile before the concluded that the two were essentially talking right past each other. Nate was propounding a variety of his favorite theories, while Stan was responding with some standard stock phrases of his own. From Nate it was all about brain waves, cosmic energy and animal consciousness, linkages and synchronicity, karma and destiny. From Stan it was "live and let live," "to each his own," and "you gotta do what you gotta do." Wen took some more notes, and prepared for the four o'clock staff meeting with the team. She was looking forward to Fred's interpretation of events. She even thought this meeting might be almost fun.
- - - - - - - - -
Kandhi had called the meeting to go over the Friendular metrics. She felt it was important to keep their feet on the ground at all times. Every little aspect of the project had to be measured, and measured again, tracked and then tracked some more. She had thrown together a simple spreadsheet of the items she wanted quantified and qualified, including statistics on all the possible uses and mis-uses of the wristband, friend response times, client request tallies, tone modulation, empathy values, being-thereness, word counts, word sizes, vocabulary differentials, social value disparities, topical hits and misses, and that wasn't all. There were also the myriad relationships and correlations and interactions between these fields that were just as important, if not more so.
Word metrics, for example. If word counts were too far out of balance, this could indicate a lack of reciprocity, a one-way street. If word sizes were likewise out of whack, that could be an indication of a lack of compatibility, a mismatch. A real world friendship could not be all give and no take, but a professional one could withstand - and would probably demand - a drastic imbalance in sympathy. Not everything was clear and simple. This was a new tangle of weeds for Kandhi and her team, a jungle of complexity such as they had never faced before. Fred and Wen came in the room and were immediately overwhelmed by Kandhi's presentation, and started whining in unison.
"Isn't it enough that we're recording and listening to every little thing that happens? Do we have to analyze this stuff to death?" Fred moaned.
"I don't mind some of that," Wen added, "but maybe we should draw the line somewhere this side of realistic possibility?"
"It's just data," Kandhi snapped. "They want more than we can even dream of gathering. They want more than you could stuff into a thundercloud. I want to jam this all right down their throats, you know what I mean? Downstairs they were thinking surfaces only. I want to show them the depths of what we're doing."
"I like surfaces," Fred sniffed.
"Some of it just doesn't make sense," Wen shook her head, tracing the print-out with her finger. "You want to boil it all down to a simple score, is that it? With a bunch of weighted values? How did you come up with the formula?"
"Winging it," Kandhi admitted. "Look, sure, I know there's a lot of rows in there, some obviously more important than others, but we have to know if they using the hardware as instructed, and which aspects are they finding more useful. What is the nature of the interactions and what can we learn from the subjects? In the end, doesn't friendship come down to a score in one way or another? It's like a dart board. Your best friends are the closest to the center, the bullseye. They get the most points for that. The rest are sort of in rings around the center, with the further away being the less important. You might put some quadrants on that circle while you're at it. Public friends versus private ones, social versus intimate, pack versus solo, that kind of thing. Don't we have some kind of machine learning that can just figure it all out?"
"I'll bet we could really do that," Fred shifted uneasily in his seat. "I'll bet we could sum up life itself."
"Whatever," Kandhi snapped at him, "the point is, we've got a job to do here. We've got to make a science of it or they'll never get it right. Anyway, what have you got? Think you can start filling in some of these blanks?"
"Sure," Wen said, "we can make a stab at it. We're already seeing some interesting patterns. Like the wristband. What do you say, Fred?"
"Well," Fred pulled himself together, aware that Wen was giving him a chance to make up for his crummy attitude coming in.
"All in all I think it's fair to say that nobody's used anything but the tap so far. Just initiating conversation, that's all. No tugs, to pulls, no swipes. None of the special built-in gestures. My guess is they figured out the simplest thing and gave up on the rest."
"Okay, fine," Kandhi started filling in columns on her own printout. "That's a lot of zeros for the user experience experts."
"Quite a variation in quality," Wen continued. "We can see that pretty clearly. The charts are quite revealing. It's only been day one but already there's a lot of divergence between the groups. The Bilj pair is steaming right along but the others are lagging, and spreading apart. See here? I don't know what Velicia is doing."
"She doesn't give a damn," Fred put in, "that's why her response time is so low, her word count too, word size barely minimal."
"She doesn't like Hannah," Wen concluded.
"She's supposed to be a professional," Kandhi sighed. "Maybe we picked a lemon with that one."
"Also the data is kind of deceptive," Wen continued. "In the charts, see here in the middle? It looks on the surface like Stanley and Nate are doing all right, but check out this transvergence. I had to look closer. Stanley's painting by numbers, basically, and Nate doesn't seem to know it. It's like Oblivious Man meet Obvious Man."
She laughed at her little joke, but Kandhi didn't get it, and said so. Wen had to explain further, that no matter what Nathaniel said, Stanley had some stock response, always agreeable in tone but rarely relevant at all to the subject at hand.
"Hes a fricking barber," Fred groaned. "We should've figured on that."
"But Nate doesn't care, like you said," Kandhi mused, "so how are we going to sum that one up?"
"You're the math whiz," Fred snickered.
"It's tricky," Wen repeated. "my guess is that sooner or later Nate will wake up and notice, or maybe not. It all depends on what they expect to get out of this thing."
"What if Nate just wants to get paid," Fred suggested.
"We'll have to make an allowance for that," Kandhi frowned. She was thinking about the bottom line, the final row on the spreadsheet, the formula she would have to devise to come up with the ultimate numbers. Expected results versus actual results was always an important component. If you go to the Burger Joint you expect to get fries. If they gave you some red dill potatoes you'd lower the rating, but if they gave you greasy fries at Chez Pompouse, you know what I mean, she said to herself. But how to weigh the genuine-ness? That had to be there, it must be a factor. If you're talking about friends, it's got to be real at some point or why bother? There had to be some basic connection. From the look of things, they only had a chance of at best one in three at this point. Should she just give it time?
"Should we just give it time?" she asked her assistants. Fred shook his head because he had no idea. He was becoming acutely aware that he was failing, on the verge of utterly failing this time. He had nothing to say, and for an obstinate opinionator this could be a genuine disaster. Wen was more thoughtful.
"I think that we should," she finally said. "Two days, maybe three, and then, I don't know. Can we stop with any one any time? I don't know the contract."
"We can cancel for any reason at any moment, yes," Kandhi told her. "We just have to pay through the month, but that's not a concern and won't be unless it starts to add up."
Kandhi dismissed them and went about filling in more rows and more columns with the data she'd seen. She felt she was missing something, even after collating all that data. She sat back and chewed on the tip of her pencil and finally decided to dive
into the transcripts themselves. She would read every single word that had passed between all of the clients and their buddies.
- - - - - - - - -
She selected from the files at random, and read.
Dave: I know she'd do it if I asked her, so it's really up to me. I can't make up my mind, though. There's always a risk. The job, for one thing. It's about ethics with me. I try to keep myself above and beyond, you know what I mean?
(interval -seventeen seconds)
Bilj: Keep everything on the up and up, in other words?
(interval - fourteen seconds)
Dave: Right, that's it. Above board, I think that's what I meant to say. Dang. Missed another light. That's three in a row. Usually I get a straight shot down Fourth and then across Wildwood to Part Two. That's how I mark the route, in parts. Part One is Venezia Park. Part Two, Wildwood. Part Three, Amber Cove. So I know where I am in the progress of my day. This one, Shashana? She's in Venezia Park, at the Oblogon Corporation. Receptionist, of course. Most of my ladies are. Heh.
(interval - twenty six seconds)
Bilj: You like her, eh?
(interval - twelve seconds)
Dave: Yeah. yeah, I like her, but mostly it's that smile. The smile's the thing that gets me every time, draws me right in like a moth to a. A moth to a.
(interval - six seconds)
Bilj: flame?
(interval -