Lamia Ch. 03

We had a few hours to wait before my appointment, so I decided to get some time in on the enhanced sales sim I was working on for Bill. I created a new branch in the code repository and gave a short description of the intended changes, then dove right in.

Christine made me lunch while I worked, showing up around the time I had downloaded and integrated the resources I would need for the project. She wore a lacy white blouse and a short blue skirt that was a perfect match for her eyes.

"It's red curry chicken with steamed basmati rice," she said, setting a bowl down on the coffee table.

"Curry?" I asked, looking at the plate of meat, vegetables, and thick red sauce uncertainly. The aroma coming off the food was pungent, but in a good way. "That's Indian food, right?"

"Thai, in this case," she corrected. "I think you'll like it."

I got a forkful of the stuff and chewed slowly. "Oh," I said, at the mix of sweet, savory, and spicy flavors. "That's really different." Then the fire from the chilis hit me. "Oh, wow."

"You like it?"

It was hot nearly the point of making my eyes water. "It's fantastic," I said. I ate a few more exquisitely searing bites before taking a long drag from the iced tea she had thoughtfully provided.

Christine was watching me with a self-satisfied smile. "Patricia mentioned last night that you like spicy food."

"I do. It's good to see the two of you getting along better. What else did you talk about?"

She shrugged. "Not much. I was helping her put her documents in order."

I nodded absently at that, then turned a wide-eyed gaze on her. "You helped her with her work? How? What did you do?"

"I wrote up the rest of the technical documents and proofed what she already had. That freed her up to write some copy and build the presentation she's giving on Tuesday. I was thinking that maybe I can do the same for you. I would love to help with your virch business."

I didn't miss the hopeful tone. "Well, I suppose if you want to handle some accounting issues, tax filings, that kind of thing."

She sighed. "I could do that, but so can any one of a dozen different accounting apps."

She was right, of course. I already subscribed to a cloud-based service that cost me a few dollars a month. "Okay, then how about documenting code? Do you know any programming languages?"

She shrugged. "All of them."

I shook my head in disbelief. "You're kidding, right?"

Christine smiled and pointed at me. I saw a flashing notification and selected it. There were ten documents. I selected one, and my rig opened it in my development suite. It was the most basic of programs, a "Hello World" app that scrolled the titular text across my field of view. I opened two more to find the same, but all three of them were written in different languages.

"You wrote those all in, what, four seconds?" I would have thought she had downloaded them, except that the documentation was personalized and timestamped.

"About two," she said. "Though it took close to a second to download the requisite skill set."

"Download," I mused. "Right."

Still dubious, I tested her with a few simple coding scenarios, and she responded to each within a few seconds to minutes with completed code modules. I quickly ramped up the difficulty, answering any questions when she had them. After I had grilled her thoroughly for a half hour, I gave her one final problem. It was a personal project that I had done in high school for procedurally generating virtual buildings. I gave her an architectural library and a realistic physics engine to utilize and sketched out what I wanted for a user interface.

I went back to my project while she went to the kitchen to wash dishes. An hour later, I was deep under, my vision heavily occluded by various code and output windows, so I didn't at first notice Christine standing in front of me, waiting patiently for my attention.

I gestured downward with two fingers, raising the transparency of my interface so that I could see the real world more clearly. "Yes?"

Christine let out a brisk sigh. "I don't know what I'm doing wrong. I've built the procedure to generate virtual objects and instantiate them in the physics engine, but it's just not working."

"Show me," I said. A prompt appeared in my vision, asking if I wanted to accept a request to transfer data from Christine. I focused my gaze on "Yes" and the prompt faded after a second, replaced by a status bar that quickly filled, then flashed "Complete". A final prompt asked if I wished to execute the compiled code. I chose "Yes".

A new interface appeared, asking for parameters such as building height, construction materials, architecture style and function, just as I had specified to Christine in my requirements. It was all standard stuff, but the interface was surprisingly elegant. I filled in all of the fields, going for a high-rise office building in a modern architectural style using steel and glass. The building appeared in wireframe as a complicated network of black lines, then rendered an instant later into a textured and shaded object about fifty stories tall, appearing to me to be about a hundred yards in the distance, stuck on a featureless green plain. It stood for a few seconds more as the graphics engine finished adding details. Then it collapsed, appearing almost to sink right into the ground as the bottom gave way and each floor pancaked onto it. The particle effects sent clouds of dust outward in all directions, and bits of twisted metal skidded and tumbled away from the wreck.

I roared in laughter at the simulated carnage. "That was awesome!"

Christine just rolled her eyes and waited for me to finish.

"You almost got it right," I said, once I had caught my breath, "but I think..." I scanned the code, looking for keywords. "Yep, that's it. You forgot the fasteners."

"Fasteners?" Her eyes flicked right for an instant, then focused on me once more. "Oh. I see."

The virtual structures that Christine's software had created were designed for video-game physics. The modeling used in such software would have allowed the building to stand up on its own, viewing it as a monolithic structure, but the engine I had used simulated tension and compression on each component of the building individually. Since she had failed to write code that would place fasteners to hold together the beams and supports in the steel frame, the whole thing had collapsed as soon as gravity kicked in.

"Still," I said, peering at her, "that was a very good effort, and you finished it extremely quickly. It took me about twenty hours of steady work over three days to write that up and a few more days to test and get all the bugs out."

She shrugged. "I have instant access to all of the reference material and open-source code repositories in the world. I found a few dozen examples that solved similar problems, so I didn't really have to work that hard to code a solution."

I slumped back in my chair as a new thought struck me. Automation had been eroding employment in the service industries for decades. If Christine's capabilities were representative of all the Practical Cybernetics androids, then the IT industry could face some serious disruptions as well. If she was representative of their capabilities, one android like her could replace twelve experienced coders. No. More, because she didn't need to sleep.

"What's wrong?" Christine asked.

"Oh, nothing. Just witnessing the impending destruction of my chosen career."

It seemed that she had to think about that for a moment before she made the connection. "Oh, that won't happen, at least not because of androids like me. Practical Cybernetics does not allow corporate purchases of its androids. We are strictly for private ownership and use. The contract you signed stipulates that we cannot be owned or employed by a corporate entity. Should you violate those terms, I would immediately cease functioning and you would be directed to relinquish me back to my company and be refunded my current market value after depreciation."

I frowned. "Interesting. Interesting but stupid. Your company is leaving a huge pile of money on the table. Does that mean that you cannot be put to any use outside of household duties?"

"Oh no, of course not. I am available for any task you require."

I blinked at that. "Really? You could go out and earn money for me if I told you to?"

"Theoretically. You couldn't just tell me to get a job. That would violate your contract. However, you could sell my services to another person, just as you might rent out your car. It's really best if you just think of me as your property."

Again I bumped up against that particular quagmire, and again, I avoided it. "So you could help me with my business if you are just aiding me personally? I mean, I guess you already answered that by helping Trish last night. And you rescheduled my appointment this morning."

"Of course. I can do almost anything that an employee could do for you, within certain limitations. I can't sign contracts or other legal documents, for example."

"That's still very useful," I said. "And you can learn, so I could teach you how I run things."

"I would like that. Do you think I could maybe come along to your appointment today?"

She batted her eyelashes at me as she said it. A bit on the nose, perhaps, but I wasn't complaining. A beautiful young woman would attract interest, no matter what the occasion, and with her bubbly personality, I might even win over clients who might otherwise be unimpressed by my more facts-based approach to selling. I nodded and smiled. "Sure, why not?"

* * *

The car drove us southwest for a little over half an hour, leaving the tracts of two-story homes with their manicured lawns behind and heading into the expansive highways and looming skyscrapers of downtown Houston. At some point during the trip, Christine stroked my hand and I self-consciously allowed her to curl her fingers around my own. Her touch was warm, and the contact sent tingles up my arm.

I told her about our client, one of my larger commercial contracts. The property was a restaurant within an aquarium, owned by a company that maintained several theme parks and tourist attractions in the area in and around Houston. I had gotten the contract purely by accident, when one of the company's board members had seen my work in a community park. This had been a little over two years ago. The competition back then had been nearly nonexistent and my business had been barely a year old. If it had been a year later, chances were that they would have contracted one of the bigger firms that had sprung up in the time since.

The car dropped us off at the front entrance. As soon as my feet touched the sidewalk, a graying but fit middle-aged woman in a skirt suit appeared three feet in front of me. "Hello, Mr. Coulson," she said with a pleasant smile.

The tells of artificiality from the personal assistant's sim were subtle, but detectable. Her reactions were a little too rote, and often came a split second too late, and there was a kind of unnatural stillness to her manner that was vaguely unsettling. That was the uncanny valley at work. It was a phobic reaction written into human DNA, a fear and disgust response that helped our human ancestors avoid contracting disease from the dead or the very ill.

"We've been expecting you," the sim said, stepping back and beckoning to me. "Please come in and have a seat. We have your usual table."

Christine and I got out and the car silently rolled forward to find a parking space. The doors at the entrance opened into a reception area with a virtual sign directing visitors into the aquarium. The sim turned to one side, though, and led us up a flight of stairs. My display flashed an icon indicating a virtual environment loading automatically.

The virch layer loaded before we reached the top of the stairs, and I smiled at the impact of the overall effect, despite having witnessed it dozens of times before. The restaurant took up the top two stories of this side of the building, and long, narrow fish tanks served as several of the interior walls. The upper floor did not cover the entire area of the restaurant, consisting instead of smaller platforms that overlooked the lower floor, little islands surrounded by open air. One wall of the restaurant was glass from floor to ceiling and corner to corner for the full two stories. In the real world, those windows gave a drab view of a six-lane road fronted by concrete office buildings. but the virtual environment turned that into a gigantic tank with whale sharks, manta rays, and other exotic sea creatures. The architecture was already intriguing, but the virtual layer that I had built on top of this real-world framework made it truly fantastical.

"This is amazing," Christine said, stopping to admire the view.

"It took me six months to code," I said. "And the server that runs this sim costs almost as much as what they paid me. On the other hand, a real aquarium exhibit this huge would cost many times that, just in yearly maintenance."

Our virtual host had stopped and waited a few steps ahead while we gawked at the scenery, and I motioned for her to continue. She brought us upstairs to one of the upper level tables, giving us a terrific view of both the main virtual tank and the lower floor of the restaurant.

I put my palms on the table and a menu appeared on the surface, listing various seafood dishes. "I would get us food if we hadn't eaten already," I said. "The seafood gumbo is excellent. So is the salmon."

"I can add those to my own repertoire," she said.

I tapped the virtual menu a few times to order a diet soft drink for each of us. A waiter brought them up a minute later, and Christine and I sipped and enjoyed each other's company until the arrival of my client.

"Mr. Agarwal," I said, rising. I put my hand out to the broad-shouldered, mustached Indian man that managed the restaurant. "Always a pleasure."

"Likewise, Mr. Coulson," he said in a thick accent that was much closer to British than Hindi. He took my hand and shook it firmly. As he did, he looked at my companion with a bemused expression. He had met Patricia when I brought her here last year. Though he had only spoken to her briefly he must have remembered her, because the appearance of Christine obviously befuddled him.

"Call me Stephen, please," I said. "And this is Christine. She's in training."

His expression shifted to one of cheerful approval. "Oh, so finally you have taken my advice." He smiled at Christine. "I have been telling this pup since I first met him that he needs to expand if he is to ever make the kind of money he is capable of. He has a rare talent, as you can see." He gestured to our virtual surroundings. "He could be the next Steve Jobs or Ian Welk if he would focus on growing his business. I would personally invest if he were to incorporate. But no, he thinks he can do it all by himself."

"I know," Christine said, giving me a wink. "But Stephen loves the personal touch. That can be hard to give up."

"Well, I think he has made a good start with you. You strike me as a very sharp young lady."

Christine nodded. "Thank you."

Mr. Agarwal sat back in his chair as our server reached the top of the stairs. The waiter set a cup of lightly steaming tea on the table with a murmured "sir" and slipped away.

My contact took a sip and nodded his approval of the drink. "So, why don't we get down to business, eh? You know that I've been very happy with the work you've done, but we're looking for a change, something fresh. My company is prepared to spend at least double what they did on you last time if you want to take the job."

I sat back, considering. I had learned a lot since working on this place, but I was also a lot more shrewd about my own limitations. This job could have ruined me if things had not panned out. I had risked a lot of my fledgling capital to make it work. It took me only a moment to think of a way to add value. "What do you think about allowing your guests to personalize their experience, just in the area of their table? They could select from different themes, different ocean regions, whatever you like."

Mr. Agarwal was nodding as I spoke, but then he leaned forward. "That sounds nice." His tone belied his lack of enthusiasm for that idea. "But I think that's the kind of job you could easily toss off in a week. Part of the appeal of this..." he gestured around us, "...is that it is a holistic experience. It is a place you visit, a wonderland. Coming here is an event for our guests. I am here almost every day and I am still surprised on occasion by what I see. Personalization is something you do in your own home."

He paused a moment, studying me. "I want to know what you can come up with, Mr. Coulson, if you really put that imagination to work. Let's set up another appointment a few weeks from now. I will have a special guest for you to meet, and if you impress both of us sufficiently, I think you will be very interested in what we have in mind for the future."

He leaned back again and took a long sip of his tea. Christine looked at me, brows raised with a wry smile that seemed to say, "Is this how all your meetings go?"

"Is...that it?" I asked. "Could I get a bit more of a hint of what you're after?"

Mr. Agarwal smiled. "And how much fun would that be? I have confidence in you, Stephen. Just don't let yourself get distracted." He glanced at Christine as he said that, his meaning clear. "Two weeks. Set it up through my PA."

He stood up, downed the rest of his tea and grimaced. "Don't worry about the bill. I'll take care of it. And stay as long as you like."

After he had gone, I let my shoulders slump. "Shit, I'm in trouble," I said. I took a sip of my soda, wishing that it were something a lot stiffer.

"Now you've got two difficult and time-consuming projects," Christine said. "Any idea what you might be able to do for this one?"

"Not a clue," I said, staring once more out into the oceanscape. The original design for this place had been my own idea, and Mr. Agarwal had enthusiastically supported it. But he might just be expecting lightning to strike twice in the same place. "I probably should have told him I needed more time."

"You still can."

I shook my head. "No, I can't. In his mind, I've already accepted his terms. If I back out now, he'll take it poorly."

"That's kind of unfair," Christine said with a frown. She tilted her head slightly to one side and pursed her lips for a moment. "What if I do the coding for the project you're working on for Bill, so you can focus on the restaurant?"

"You think you can do that all by yourself?"

"Give me permissions to your code repository and we'll find out."

I felt a little uncomfortable giving someone else access to my code, even an android who was utterly devoted to serving my needs. I decided to only give her permission to Bill's project and the libraries I thought she would need. Some of my code was proprietary, and I figured I'd better double-check Practical Cybernetics' privacy policy before I gave her the run of the place.

"Alright," I said. "You have access."

Her eyes unfocused. "Oh, I see," she said after a few seconds. Her gaze settled back on me. "You want to adapt the behavioral simulations from the game library to the sales sim." I nodded. "Ingenious. I think I can make this work. I'll check my code into the repository regularly. That way you can monitor my progress and let me know if I run off the rails."

"That sounds fine," I said. It was a good test of Christine's abilities. I knew that she could write code and come up with solutions to simple problems. Now we would see how she did with a more complicated project.

We finished our drinks and got up to leave. On the way back down, I saw that there was a notification from my code repository. I opened it and read that Christine had already checked in her first code changes to the project. I set a reminder to check on her progress later and called the car to pick us up.