Kitabı oku: «How to Build a Boyfriend from Scratch», sayfa 3

three

Back at work that week, Kelly sat in a room that was open, square, and full of lights: fluorescent ceiling beams, glowing computer monitors, and a bank of control panels with switches, knobs, and blinking indicators. Beside her was Dr. Masden, a psychologist whose black eyes angled up in a very attractive way that she would have seen if she weren’t nervously avoiding those eyes. Opposite them, an oversize monitor displayed a digital waist-up image of a being named Confibot. The image looked essentially like a man, sporting short, combed blond hair and a small-check plaid shirt. But where a human face should have been was a set of dotted lines over a blank white space: two oblong rounds for eyes, a triangle for a nose, a straight line where a mouth would go, really just the suggestion of features.

“We need to pin down his range of facial options before we can settle on a final set of features,” Kelly was saying to the psychologist. “Then we can start building him. So, say, what face should he make when he greets a user who’s just woken up?”

“A pleasant smile, I would think,” Dr. Masden answered.

“Well, yeah, but I need you to tell me exactly. Like, here.” Kelly scooted closer to the doctor’s computer monitor on the control panel, blowing up the diagram of Confibot’s head in front of him so that it was minutely imaged under a set of gridlines. “Show me specifically how his mouth should be positioned.”

“There’s no one way it should be positioned, Kelly. Human behaviors aren’t that precise.”

Kelly shook her head, clicking into a folder on her own computer to display tile after tile of saved files compiled from her own research and the focus groups and surveys that AHI’s marketing team had done. “This is my research so far on microexpressions alone. Human behaviors are totally precise.” She knew that her own instinct to apply a mathematical, logical viewpoint to everything in life was one of the things that made her so good at this job. It was essential to the physical building of a robot, to giving it hard skills, like teaching Zed how to walk, and it was why she had always chosen to stay more in the mechanical and electrical engineering lane at work, focusing on building the “body” of the robot, so to speak. Confibot was the first project she had led—the first time she was also in charge of the “brain.” Her concrete, analytical way of thinking had always worked before. Just because she was grappling with something far more conceptual didn’t mean she was about to change her methods now.

Confibot was also the highest-stakes project in her career thus far. Anita Riveras, AHI’s CEO, had tasked each of the engineers in her Consumer Products division with inventing a caregiver or assistant robot—one of the market’s hottest niches. In three months, their inventions would all be pitted against each other for investor funding. Kelly had decided to create the most believably humanoid robot of the bunch, capable of the most nuanced social interactions, based on the astounding body of research she had uncovered about the health and lifestyle benefits of companionship. If she could get Confibot just right, she knew she stood a real chance at winning this.

“There are very specific, scientific ways that people react to different gestures, expressions, tones of voice,” Kelly continued now.

“Well, how would you respond?” the doctor asked. “Think about what you would want in a robot who’s taking care of you and living with you. You shouldn’t discount your own instincts here.”

“Instincts may be your business,” she insisted. “Data is mine. The science has to be there to back up every choice I make.”

“Then I’m providing you my insights as data. I’m a trained psychologist,” Dr. Masden pressed. “I’m here to give professional guidance.”

“But that’s not good enough! I mean, not that your insights aren’t good,” she said quickly, turning to the doctor, hating the way she could feel her cheeks instinctively flush as she did. Frankly, the fact that AHI had brought in the hottest psychologist in Santa Clara County to assist her on the project was just rude. She had enough on her plate between working on Confibot and worrying about having to admit to her mom how the date with Martin had gone. Not to mention now needing to find another date on her own. For Kelly, social interactions with any element of uncertainty were a source of stress more than excitement. She was a woman who wondered what she had done wrong when the cashier didn’t wish her a good day.

She needed to get started on building Confibot’s physical model, but first she had to get past this task of designing his face and voice and mannerisms so she would know what to build. She needed to focus on facts, not Dr. Masden’s “insights.”

“The way that Confibot interacts with users has to be perfect,” she asserted. “There are already other caregiver and companion robots out there on the market. If we’re not the best, we might as well not be out there at all! And the only way Confibot’s going to be the best is if he’s the most realistically human.”

“Kelly, to replicate a human, you have to understand humans.”

“I do! Why do you think I took six semesters of biology in college? I understand how the human body works, how animal bodies work. I know how to translate those structures into mechanical form.”

“I’m not talking about the body.” The psychologist looked away for a second, pursing his lips as if searching for his next words. “Designing a personality is a nebulous thing, Kelly. You’re never going to get anywhere if you’re so tied down to the data. I’m only trying to say that you might want to approach this in a different way.” He put a palliating hand on Kelly’s arm. Instinctively, she jerked away and crossed her arms. Dr. Masden looked taken aback as he abruptly withdrew his hand. It seemed he hadn’t even realized he had put it there in the first place. “Sorry, I—”

“I won’t be approaching it that way!” Kelly declared. As soon as she heard how weird that sounded, she tried to laugh, but the sound came out as more of a tubercular bleat. Dr. Masden’s eyes were increasingly confused and also very deep and black and olive-shaped—

“I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable just now, I wasn’t even thinking. I never want our work environment to be less than professional,” he said.

Kelly stiffly crossed her legs below her crossed arms, walling herself behind a defensive pretzel of limbs. Great, she thought, let’s do the one thing that will make the situation more awkward and talk about it. It would be so much simpler if everyone could just do what she did and suppress their emotions, stuffing them in the back of the closet, right next to the childhood traumas and the performing-in-your-third-grade-play-naked-and-then-all-your-teeth-fall-out dreams.

“I’m not comfortable. I mean uncomfortable.”

“It’s just that you seemed a little uncomfortable when I put my hand on your arm, just now,” he continued. “I didn’t mean anything by it, I just express myself physically. I’m a very expressive person, but I realize it’s unfair to make assumptions about your communication style since we’ve only been working on this simulation together for a week.”

“Well, I’ve been working on it for months before you got here!” Kelly exclaimed. The anxieties simmering in her had been lit to a boil. She felt the tug of that same old instinct to flee the scene, yet this was her project—she couldn’t. She was trapped. But maybe it was time she blew up the room instead of trying to tunnel out. After all, she reminded herself, she’d been quite content back when she began developing the Confibot simulation all on her own. Then this guy had to come and get his big—not big, average, definitely average—hands all over her. That is, all over the project. Insinuating that she didn’t understand people. So much of why she had gone into engineering in the first place was because it didn’t ask her to try to make sense of people, who, let’s face it, were often nonsensical anyway. This was her safe space, and he had breached it. But it didn’t matter; she didn’t need him. Sure, he was responsible for providing all the psychological bases for the interactions they were architecting, but that was soft science. Kelly, red cheeks and all, stared the doctor down.

Dr. Masden scraped back in his own chair. “I wasn’t aware that you felt that way.”

“I guess you weren’t paying attention,” she replied.

But now Dr. Masden didn’t look confused. He looked insulted. “I’m a psychologist. Not to flatter myself, but I pay pretty close attention to people’s behavior.”

“Then stop! You’re here to help develop the simulation, not analyze me. Which you’re doing a pretty poor job of anyway.”

“You think so? All right, then, here you go. Normally I charge hundreds an hour for this, but you’re about to get it for free.” Kelly tried to hold her crimson face high as the doctor leveled his searching gaze on her.

“You’re a control freak.”

“Is that the clinical term?”

Ignoring her, he plowed forward. “You’re smart and you’re good at this job and you know it. But part of why you’re good at it is because you’re a perfectionist. Any unknown variables that are introduced might mess up your perfect little world. And another human being is an unknown and unknowable variable, and in this case I’m the lucky one crossing your path. For the first couple days I thought you were just a little shy, but now I can see that you’re constantly on edge, with antisocial tendencies bordering on aggression. Any suggestion of friendliness is enough to upset you. Who knows what kind of crazy, frightening, fun, sad, unpredictable things could happen if you made a friend, or more than a friend, so why not just cut it off before it even starts? Better to have people think you want nothing to do with them and leave you alone than for them to find out everything that’s wrong with you. I wondered initially why you cared so much about developing a companion robot. It’s pretty obvious now that you’re so interested because you’re afraid that you yourself are going to end up alone, and guess what? If you don’t change, you will.”

Wow. Kelly had thought he was just going to call her uptight. Her entire being froze. She pondered how long she could go without making a response. If she just stayed still long enough, eventually she would be left alone. Eventually an asteroid would collide with the Earth and render her whole predicament irrelevant.

“I’m sorry. That was way out of line.”

Kelly’s eyes focused to realize Dr. Masden was looking at her, his own face now flushed. She was embarrassed, she was frustrated, she was flustered, and all she wanted was to get the doctor out of the room so this moment could end. Strike first, regret later. It was the safest tactic she knew.

“When you spend all day picking apart other people’s flaws instead of acknowledging your own, I guess it comes naturally.”

The doctor shook his head and pushed himself up from the chair.

“Good luck, Kelly.” And with a slam of the control room’s back door, he was gone, leaving her, once again, alone.

Kelly swiveled back to the control panel, unconsciously kneading her hands. There came the regret. What would happen to the Confibot project? Would the company find a replacement psychologist? Would they pull the simulation entirely? Did everyone think of her the way Dr. Masden did? Were they right?

Kelly had always known she was an introvert. She was awkward, sure, and not a brilliant presenter or performer, but essentially a functioning person. But maybe she had it all wrong. Maybe Martin had been relieved rather than bewildered when she made her untimely exit. Antisocial tendencies bordering on aggression … everything that’s wrong with you … The bulbs on the control panel misted into a glittery haze, like Christmas lights seen through an icy window, as Kelly’s eyes filled.

She squeezed back the tears, embarrassed, reminding herself that she didn’t have time to loaf around the office, blubbering like a too-short kid at a roller coaster entrance. After all, without a partner, she had more work to do than ever. The soft science stuff didn’t seem quite so minor as she pondered tackling it without a professional guide. She adjusted her chair and got back to work.

Kelly had never made a trip to the principal’s office, but she imagined now that this was what it must feel like. The airy prism in which she waited for her boss, however, was considerably more chic than a public school office. Sculptures of fluid silver filaments were scattered with effortless grace among awards, books, and photos on the white oak shelves, and a broad desk, arched like a ship’s bow, speared into a sweeping view of the palm-tree-lined avenues of San Jose. Through the frosted glass of the door, Kelly could read in reverse the letters “Anita Riveras, CEO.”

As Kelly studied Anita’s carefully curated photographs, she smoothed her already smooth blouse self-consciously. Even in miniature, Anita’s presence was formidable. The angles of her cheekbones, her sleek black bobbed hair, even her offered handshake all somehow aligned into a careful geometric construction. Kelly wondered what she would look like with a bob, if people would take her more seriously if she had Anita’s expensive yet effortless-looking hair. She tried looping up the edges just to see.

The door swung open decisively and she dropped her hair, simultaneously catching her foot as she stood up too fast. She had a tendency to hurtle through life like she was running a one-woman three-legged race. But Anita swept to her high-backed chair like she didn’t see.

“Have a seat, Kelly.”

She fixed Kelly with a clear gaze. There was nothing visibly judgmental about it, but Kelly felt judged. Anita could do that. She let the silence hang for a moment. Her chair was a curve of pristine white leather. The weightless ease with which she sat in a chair with no arms was conspicuous, as if she had bought that chair just to show off her mastery of the art of sitting.

“I’m sorry about what happened,” Kelly blurted out.

“What did happen, Kelly?”

“I just … it was a personal issue between myself and the doctor. It had nothing to do with the project.”

“But it does. Because you needed him to complete the project, and he’s no longer here.”

Kelly’s throat felt parched. “Are you—do you mean that I can’t complete the project?”

“It’s your project, Kelly. You tell me. Can you?”

There was a right answer to this. Kelly’s confidence rose. “Yes, I can. Please let me, you know how much Confibot means to me.”

“You say it means a lot to you, but from your performance, I have yet to see why. Convince me.”

“There’s so much we can do with it.” Kelly’s words came faster now as they pivoted to her work, flowing with liveliness and ease. Talking about Confibot brought out her fervor for science, awakening the little girl who used to take apart Gary’s Speak & Spell and rebuild it again and again until she knew exactly how it worked. “If we can create a fully convincing android, with which people can interact as if it were a human, we can take robotic caretaking to a whole new level. Users can develop meaningful relationships with their Confibots, making them true robotic confidants. If you look at the research about the effects of companionship and mental stimulation on health outcomes, the physical and lifestyle devastation of loneliness is astonishing, I mean, it can increase your risk of everything from dementia to heart disease to arthritis to—”

“Old people are a gold mine,” Anita mused, her eyes trained far out the window.

“I—I’m sorry?”

Anita sat up smoothly in her chair, focusing on Kelly. “The Baby Boomers are on the brink. When they crash, I plan to be ready to reap the dividends.” Not exactly how Kelly liked to think of her own work, but she bit her tongue. “Confibot’s commercial potential is massive, we both know that.” Anita waved a hand tipped with bone-painted nails. “The success of your project hinges on your ability to complete an android that can pass for human, and you’re the closest of our engineers to achieving that. And with that technology, we can go anywhere.”

“I am? I mean, I am. Thank you. It’s been thrilling to see how close Confibot is coming to real humanity, and I—”

“According to current projections, you’re the closest,” Anita corrected. “But other companies, even some of your own coworkers, have been logging astonishing progress as well.” Sitting back again, Anita looked pleasant, unhurried, yet still radiating a cool intensity.

Meanwhile, Kelly was sweating like a lumberjack. “Right, so … I’ll get back to it, then?”

“You are directly competing with these coworkers for investor funding,” Anita went on, as if Kelly hadn’t spoken. “And if you win the competition, you will be directly competing with the creators of every other robotic caregiver and assistant device in the world. The company that comes to market first gets to charge a premium. Anyone who lags behind has to cut prices to compete. So if you cannot make AHI the first to market, I will find another engineer who can.” She scrutinized Kelly with eyes that were impossible to read. “Confibot is the first project that you’ve spearheaded,” she noted. “Your first opportunity to bring one of your own ideas to life. As such, it requires high-level project management skills on which you have not yet been tested. You’re building more than a physical robot here. You are designing a whole person. And if you fail to make this work, you will not be afforded such a high-level opportunity again.” Kelly tried to gulp, but her throat was so raw, so dry, that it stopped halfway. “Robotics engineering is a human discipline, Kelly. It’s collaborative, it’s interpersonal. If you fail to think on this level, you will fail as an engineer.”

Every time Anita said the word “fail,” the blood in Kelly’s ears pulsed painfully hot. Her boss was calling her interpersonal skills a failure. Dr. Masden had called her pathologically antisocial. What was she doing wrong? Was she that incompetent at things that appeared so basic for everyone else? Was she writing her own doom in her career, her relationships? Would she push everyone away forever?

“I’m taking a sizable risk on you, Kelly,” Anita was saying as Kelly forced herself back to the surface.

“And I’m grateful for it. I won’t let you down.”

“No.” Anita looked at Kelly with a placid smile. “You won’t.”

Kelly held herself together long enough to make it out the door. As soon as she was down the hall, she allowed her knees to turn to jelly, pressing her back against the cool wall, lifting her face to the fluorescent-lit ceiling. She didn’t know what she was doing wrong, but it was clear that there was something. When she came to a dead end in her work—a limb moving at an unnatural angle, a memory fault—she would force herself to back out of the situation and look at it from a bird’s-eye view, searching for a new way in, trying something different. And here, she had to do the same thing.

When she walked back into the lab several minutes later, Priya was already there. She rose from her chair. “Finally, let’s get lunch. I was about to eat my intern. Also I have to show you these sick pictures my friend posted from this new club called Sadie Hawkins. I’d totally take you there if you weren’t still being No-Club Nancy.” Priya began fishing out her phone, but Kelly interrupted her.

“I’ll go.”

“What?”

Kelly looked at Priya with resolve. Here was something different she could try. It wouldn’t solve her problems with Confibot, but taking any action would make her feel better about herself right now.

“Let’s do it,” she said firmly. “This weekend, I’m ready to try out the clubs.”