Heaven 2.0: Chapter 5 - Oil Slick

Tony

Heaven 2.0: Chapter 4 - Gnashing of Teeth

"Hey boss, can I get my packages?"

"Of course sir," I smiled, tapping at a screen, "three packages." One. Two. Three. Up. At 'em. Stifle a groan. Fewer tips.

He was on his phone, scrolling through nothing in the way one does when they want to avoid any possibility of their eyes catching another's eyes. Their posture can tell you why. Shy people hang differently than tired people hang differently than those who have no curiosity about the other. He cradled his phone arm with his left.

The relative vistas of the lobby contorted themselves into narrower and darker hallways. Left, left, right, second door. The mail room. A cart with the building's deliveries for today, hundreds of them, sat as if it would decant itself. Small nosed guy with glasses, that's apartment 1202. Three packages. Small, medium, large. Goddamn the small one is heavy. They went onto a different cart. I wheeled that out for him.

"Thanks," he said, carefully, masterfully avoiding my gaze. He cocked his head at the packages, as if looking at them from another angle may provide an answer to the question, "Can I carry it up all by myself or do I need to take the cart and make a return trip after?" He opted for the cart.

"You're welcome sir, don't forget to return that!" I beamed.

I looked left, right, at the security cameras. No one seemed to be coming. I watched him on camera maneuvering the cart with its one stuck wheel awkwardly into the elevator, then squeezing himself in behind it after. He pulled out his phone. I sat down and pulled out my phone, resuming my video, "How YOU Can PROMPT Your EXPERIENCE GENERATOR To Get WHAT YOU WANT!"

The energetic kid behind the screen rattled off beginner advice. Ask the experience generator to pretend it's writing AND directing a play. Ask the experience generator to SIMULATE a discriminator, an adversarial conjuration that tries to find flaws in the original generator's output. Subtly HINT to the experience generator where it may have gotten a detail wrong here or there. I smirked. That was my contribution to the discourse.

An ad began playing. University of Roc; learn prompt engineering in six weeks, no prior experience needed, get a six figure job within six months or your money back. All for sixty thousand dollars. Lofty. That might be a life though. It seems if all roads lead to Rome, all https:// requests seem to lead to Mental.

Red haired, petite cutie. Room 927. I just sat down. "Hello, I think there ought to be a package for room 927." I couldn't place her accent. Maybe a British flavor of International Business English?

"Of course, ma'am," tap tap tap, "one package." I flashed her a smile.

"Sorry," she cringed, "my old building had mailboxes. I feel bad asking you to go get it."

"Keeps me honest." Sweet girl.

"Must be nice."

I lumbered back around. Arm on the counter, disarming smile. "What do you mean?"

"Oh," she started backpedaling, a little too aggressively, "I didn't mean I wasn't honest. Not trying to give you the wrong idea. Just, you know how it is. With all these AIs." She was no Marilyn but at least she wasn't trying to kill me.

"What about them?"

"Turns out it's easier to write code or copy or citations than catch a ball or carry packages."

"Guess so. Haven't seen many doorman robots. Little keycard readers aren't as versatile."

"Yeah exactly! That's what I meant. Soon we'll all just be moving boxes for each other, that's all that'll be left. We won't even know what's in them, that'll be above our pay grade or, I don't know, mental capacity. My office, they've started assigning these little AI assistants to us. They started out as little scripts on steroids, like they'd fill in our time sheets or respond to emails. Now we let go of all our offshore teams and a third of my department."

"Y'know I have noticed something like that. In the last few years, a lot of the people here, yuppie types, no offense—"

"None taken."

"— you're all wearing new wrinkles on your faces. Not you specifically, you're not wrinkly. But, how do I phrase this, the kind of people who tend to be on the other side of this desk have started carrying stress lines that used to only be found on my side. Just a general sort of observation."

"Yes it can be all a bit jostling. Having the rug pulled out from under your feet."

"I can imagine. But that's the world we live in now huh? A wise man once said 'I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today, of which maybe 25 are important.' That was decades ago. I don't even know if he meant bits in the computer sense or the ‘and bobs’ sense. With everything today that number is orders of magnitude larger, and we’re still looking for the 25 bits or sound bytes that might give us an edge, or take the edge off." I was proud of that wordplay, and I wondered if that would garner any kind of reaction from her. I gathered nothing.

"Yes! That's just it. And the other 499,975 or 4,999,975 bits of information do nothing for you, they just waste your time. If they're not actively harmful. It's a minefield out there."

"How can you plan anything anymore? Plans have already always had an aspirational or optimistic quality to them, but nowadays any plan is a blind stab into a hurricane. The ground can fall out from under you because of supply chain issues in Taiwan or some damned silly thing in the Balkans, or AI fixing its I on you. Adaptability is the name of the game."

"Seems that way. Maybe I need to start working out so I can lift boxes."

"And I need to learn how to work with computers like you all do. I saw this ad," I pulled it up again for her, "University of Roc, says they can take any rando off the street, spit-shine us, get us jobs at companies like yours. Think it's legit?"

Her eyes did that thing, that damnable thing. A softening canthal tilt, a slight, ever so slight, tightening of the skin around her nose and between her eyes that she certainly didn't consciously mean to do, and that most would never consciously register, merely subconsciously observe and infer as pity. That sensitive region that one pinches when dealing with a headache, or one pushes their glasses up to when erecting a difference.

"I . . . don't think those programs are very helpful. If I'm being honest."

"Why not?"

"Well, they're not very well respected in the field. You could spend your money better elsewhere."

"Where? No one ever tells me where."

"I don't know. I have a guy in my office, he used to be a history teacher before he made the switch. So it can be done. I could maybe ask him how he did it for you?"

"I don't want to have to do this by the way. I want more options, I wish there were more options. Circumstances have contorted themselves to narrower and darker choices."

"Sorry if that wasn't super helpful!"

"No, no it was, thank you."

"Could I also get my packages please? Thanks."

"Of course, ma'am."

She scurried off with her package in the crook of her arm.

My work phone buzzed in its drop proof case that was made for the next model up, that was just a little too large for what they actually gave me, making the phone's buzzing particularly grating as it had enough give in there to throw itself against the edges with unsatisfying rattles. Text message reading "dog pissed on 12. cleaner busy. can you take care of it?"

I grabbed the bucket and mop, flipped the little sign that said "Be back in a moment!" on and headed to 12. Exiting the elevator banks I wandered around the floor until I found it. There was a puddle and a few wet footprints where someone had stepped in it, and a streak when they noticed and tried to rub it off onto the floors. There was some streaking on the walls too. I began cleaning it up.

A squeaking wheel rang through the halls. Small nosed glasses guy turned the corner. He accidentally caught my eyes. He looked stressed.

"Hey, perfect timing. I was just bringing this down, mind taking it back with you?" he asked as he let go of the cart and pushed it towards me, carving perfect lines in the dog piss and dragging streaks.

"Of course, sir," I grimaced. He was already walking back. "Thanks boss," he offered over his shoulder.

Evidently respect is a currency, a zero sum game. What you give, you lose.

My personal phone chirped. I knew it was Mental before I looked at it. I know all the beeps and boops, and dings, and chirps. I still checked out of reflex.

"We noticed you haven't been online in a while! Here's a code for 10% off your next experience generator credit purchase!" How automated. Not even a "We're sorry our E.G. tried to kill you! We're sorry your escapism is worse than your reality!" Not even a refund.

I rode the elevator down, put the mop and bucket away, flipped the little sign that said "Be back in a moment!" off, and waited out the rest of my shift.

No more disturbances. In the bathroom I changed out of my suit and into my street clothes. I saw myself in the mirror and was generally unimpressed. My silhouette has always reminded me of one of those squeeze toys, where every effort to push a line in here or define an edge there would be met by a bursting forth or spilling over elsewhere. Law of conservation of mass. Like many laws, it was only applied in one direction; I was provably able to gain mass.

Leaving the building and catching the train out of the city I saw its silhouette. It too only gained mass, as deprivations elsewhere found themselves forced through the earth to scrape the sky. Would that I could lop off all these peaks. Silhouettes ought to be malleable.

I have no illusions that Marilyn or any other character generated by the experience generator is anything more than a silhouette of the actual person. Hazy caricature hallucinations by math. Prod it, prompt it in one place and find shades of mass pressured out of the seams. Reflections of us, simplifications of us, impositions on us. The little parts you scrape off on the outside of the mold when making cookies, that you congeal into a too-small, lumpy, shapeless half cookie. Silhouettes can be made malleable.

An email ding, subject line "I saw your post about Marilyn. Let's talk — Emily Jiang, Journalist"

Options are power. Silhouettes are malleable.

Heaven 2.0: Chapter 6 - Emulsifier