Constellation Games (10 page)

[This post is friends locked.]

Listen up. This one's for all my college friends who moved out of Austin and who have been giving me shit about Bai ever since, as though I were his designated caretaker. I have solved the Dana Light problem. Just not in the way you wanted.

Before the Sexy Cookout on the 28th, my attitude was laissez-faire. With the economy the way it is, I figured everyone should pick one luxury and run with it. For instance, I have my crippling mortgage. Jenny has her art (by this I mean her art
supplies
, not the $25 sketches she gets at UTAkuCon). And Bai had Dana Light.

But at the Sexy Cookout, there was a little party-fart involving Bai and Dana. As the party's on-call sysadmin, I manfully defused the Bai/Dana situation by slandering Jenny. Even if you'd been there, you wouldn't have noticed it. I grabbed Bai the beer I'd promised him and went off to fight other fires. But Bai drank that beer, and then he drank another one, and eventually got up the courage to corner me again and ask for an embarassing favor.

"So I heard you got laid off, bro," he said.

"Actually, I quit," I said. "It's like I laid the
company
off."

"Yeah, well," said Bai. "Do you want to make some money?"

"I don't want to design wind turbines, if that's what you're asking," I said. "Did you not see where I announced that I was forming a game studio?"

"This isn't for work," said Bai. "'Spersonal. I want you to jailbreak Dana for me." His phone came out again; Dana was eating popcorn and watching one of Bai's taped shows. Which was always weird to me; I imagine the "real" Dana Light having more intense hobbies, like kickboxing, or LARPing wargames.

"What's... wrong with Dana?" I said.

"Nothing!" said Bai. "I love Dana. But she's high maintenance. Every week she wants some sunglasses or a car or some other downloadable content. She's bleeding me dry, bro."

And here's the problem with your backseat driving of the Ariel-Bai relationship, guys. You weren't at the Sexy Cookout because you left town years ago. You still have this college-era picture of me and Bai in your heads, so you're imagining Bai from 2007 with some Dana-like piece of software from 2007, and me "putting up" with some vaguely-defined "shit".

Well, something happened in 2007: it was the fucking iPhone. People with money started pouring it into mobile, and once the up-front price of an app fell to a dollar, they started doing psychological research into apps designed to drive DLC upsell and in-app buys. I know y'all was snickering at my work for the Brazilian company with the ponies and the birthday cakes, but I saw this stuff firsthand. Sure as the Brazilians have the ten-year-old girls' number, there's someone next door in Bolivia who's got yours.

So when one of my posts is mirrored to your friendstream and you read it on your fancy contact-lens screen, don't use your single-point integrated contact manager to dictate an IM to me about how Bai needs to man up, bro, and I'm just making things worse. Software has changed since those carefree days at dear old alma mater, and so have we.

"Well, just don't buy her the stuff," I said, as you are probably saying right now.

"I don't want to buy her the stuff," said Bai, "but she gets... rrrrrr! You know?"

"Rrrrrr, huh?"

Maybe in 2007 a "virtual girlfriend" was an animated GIF that pole-danced on your desktop, but that was pre- the psychological research. Dana is a piece of software complex enough to fulfil whatever emotional needs Bai has right now, and to give a convincing impression of someone with needs of her own. The problem is that her needs are all paid downloadable content, not free things like cuddling. Dana has literally been programmed to want stuff forever and never be satisfied. And if there are "problems" that need "solving", that's the big one.

"We can't go on like this," said Bai. "It's not healthy. You know phones; you gotta do something."

"You don't have to use the official store," I said. "There's probably some website in Belarus with free copies of everything. Just put a static DNS lookup in /etc/hosts so she thinks she's shopping at the official store."

"No," said Bai. "No more
stuff
. She's got a nice apartment, two cars, hundred-percent-effective birth control—"

"Birth control?"

"—top of the line computer, physical and cognitive buffs, I don't even see half her clothes anymore. She's got more shit than I do, and she can't be happy with it. I want her to stop
needing
things."

I put my hands in my pockets and looked down the hall at people having fun at my party. I thought about Bai's future. I thought about Bai's money. And, something that surprised me, I thought about Dana.

A few weeks ago I was trying to get in contact with someone from the Constellation, and they sent me to a submind of Smoke who was dumber than Dana. Dumber than the customer service chatbot for a nearly-bankrupt airline. Smoke-Cursive-Cytoplasm-Snakebite-Singsong-Polychromatic-Musteline only understood YES and NO, and if I said anything else, it had to call up its supermind to ask for a translation. And its supermind would
help
, would explain my snarky shit in terms of YES and NO, because they were both in this together.

And here was Dana, created by an evil company trying to maximize DLC sales, who had no one fighting on her side. Who didn't even know a fight was happening.

"I'll see what I can do," I said.

"How much?"

"Three thousand dollars," I said, trying to give us both an out.

"Okay," said Bai without hesitation.

"Dude," I said, "you're in deep shit if that's a good deal for you."

"Don't I know it," said Bai.

After a quick party status check, I took Bai into my study and docked his phone with my development box. I dumped Bai's environment onto my computer using an overpriced development kit.

"We're just going to see if it's feasible," I said. I started the SDK and loaded Dana into a sandbox. She came up on the monitor a little blocky: phone resolution.

"Hi, Jun-Feng," said Dana in what I guess is her sexy voice, watching us through my webcam. (Dana is the only one allowed to call Bai "Jun-Feng" these days.)

"Dana, this is Ariel," I said. "I'm a friend of Bai's. You remember me?"

"He thinks he can just pass me around, huh? Well, I'm not that kind of girl! Although with the right cognitive mods, I could be persuaded..."

"It's not like that," I said. "I'm fixing Bai's phone. I need you to act natural, and don't worry if anything strange happens to your environment."

"Bai really should take his phone to an authorized dealer," said Dana.

"It's difficult for Bai," I said. "People don't understand your relationship with him. Society isn't ready—"

Dana pouted. "Authorized dealers should understand," she said.

"I'm just gonna look at your internal memory representations," I said.

"This application will terminate due to suspected theft or circumvention," said Dana. "To obtain a new—" I killed the SDK.

Bai yelped. "You killed her!" He pulled out his phone and was relieved to find Dana still there, operating the DLC popcorn popper.

"I killed a
process
running a
copy
," I said. "This is why I hate jailbreaking. Other programmers think they're smarter than me."

"Bring her back," said Bai. "Let me talk her through it." I restarted Dana from backup.

"Hi, Jun-Feng," said sexy-Dana.

"Hi, sweetie," said Bai. "This is Ariel. You remember Ariel. He's going to take care of you for a while."

"Is Ariel an authorized dealer?" said Dana.

"Sweetie, it's okay—"

"This application will terminate—" Control-Z, control-Z, control-Z.

"Is she just gonna be like this?" said Bai, checking his phone to make sure computer-Dana hadn't contaminated phone-Dana with the paranoia virus.

"I can load her into memory," I said, "so I can jailbreak her. It just won't be an outpatient thing."

I thought it would be easy: just find the code that incremented Dana's "buy stuff now" counter, and change a one to a zero. But there's no such counter. If Dana was that simple, it would be 2007 and there'd be nothing there for Bai to... whatever Bai feels for Dana. She's got feedback loops inside feedback loops and her devs tweaked these loops so that her need for stuff would be an emergent property along with the rest of her. I can stop Dana from
asking
for things, but even with the source code I couldn't stop the lack of new things from making her unhappy.

"Okay I get it, but
why
are you working?" said Jenny the evening of July second. "Because you said you'd meet me at the Garth Adams signing and there's a huge line and you're not in it."

"I'm jailbreaking Dana," I said.

"The slut in Bai's phone?" said Jenny.

"She's not a slut," I said. "Bai has not installed the slut module."

"Why are you defending them?"

"Because nobody else will."

"You know she's not a real person, right?"

"No, I don't. The whole 'real person' distinction kinda broke when the Constellation contacted us. Dana's smarter than a lot of Smoke's subminds. She might be smart as a Them organism."

"That proves my point," said Jenny. "Them are just bugs. Only Her is smart. Sorry, excuse me, Ariel." A comic book nerd standing in line near Jenny had overheard and seen fit to chime in with his dissenting view of the relationship between Them and Her. She looked away and I saw her finger close-up as she pointed at the screen. "On the
phone
here, buddy!"

"Don't you have fancy ways of determining this?" said Jenny, back to me. "Have you administered a Turing test?"

"That's a thought experiment, not a... cognitive pap smear. I'm not saying Dana should have the vote. But she doesn't deserve to be hard-coded as unhappy."

"What about Bai? Doesn't he deserve a woman who's not multitouch?"

I shifted uncomfortably in my office chair. "I don't see why. I mean, he's had real—uh, human girlfriends before. He's not some kind of super otaku. This is a choice he's making."

"And you're gonna ride that choice with him all the way to Dumbass Town?"

"I'll jailbreak one of his applications," I said. "And I'll take his money, and use it to pay
your
salary. So stop complaining."

On the ninth I called Bai. After work he came over to my house in his turbine-company polo shirt.

"So here's the new Dana," I said, handing him a USB key. "From now on, a copy of an item she already has will make her as happy as the original item did. You've also got a script that copies objects. If she wants another car, you copy her existing car and give her the copy. It doesn't matter that it looks the same, as long as the database ID is unique."

"That's not right," said Bai. He wouldn't take the USB key.

"What do you mean it's not right."

"We're tricking her. I don't want to lie to her."

"I'm having a real problem understanding how you see the ethical contours here."

"It's real simple, bro," said Bai. "No lying!"

"Just behavior modification."

"We get behavior mods for her all the time," said Bai. "I just want one that's not in the shop."

"All right," I said, "I'll see what I can do."

"Thank you, Ariel. Seriously, thank you."

"I'm going to need another thousand."

"Fine."

"Okay, you're seriously fucked up."

Back to work. By this time I'd disabled Dana's security checks and could keep her running while monitoring her feedback loops. I even sent her to the proverbial store in Belarus to see what happened when she bought something. That's how I found the fix.

Dana likes new things, but she also likes combining new things with her existing ensemble. As in your favorite MMORPG, Dana gets a set bonus for matching items. All the code surrounding this—how much she likes an outfit, her decision between equally appealing outfits, how long she'll be happy before she needs something new—is the complicated feedback loop stuff. It's a virtual-girlfriend approximation of subjectivity. But there's a self-contained routine for deciding what clothes make a set.

I wouldn't know, but apparently it's an objective fact that a black shirt goes with green pants. The clothes-matching code is not really part of Dana, any more than is the TCP/IP library she uses to connect to the online store.

I took that code out.

Now Dana lives like a queen. Everything matches everything. She beams out of my monitor wearing a puffy orange hat and sunglasses with big heart-shaped lenses and a suit jacket.

"Why is she wearing that?" said Bai.

"It makes her happy," I said. "Theoretically, she'll still want stuff from the store, but only once she's exhausted all possible combinations of clothes. That won't be for about twenty years."

"I dunno," said Bai, deep in thought. Wondering if he could take Dana out like this? Wondering if she'd still wear the Dana Light outfit for him?

"Look," I said. "If I had a girlfriend, I'd want her to dress like this."

"Really?" Bai now mentally auditing my past girlfriends.

"Yeah! It's funky, it's colorful. Like, don't you ever imagine this really free-spirited woman who wears these interesting outfits all the time, as sort of an outward expression of her inner creativity, and she comes into your life like a ray of sunshine and just makes everything fun?"

"No," said Bai. "That's a silly fantasy you made up. But I literally have not seen Dana this happy in months, so I think we can make this work."

And they're gonna try, and they're both happy, so stop riding my ass.

BEA Agent Krakowski finally got those sunglasses he'd been wanting. He walked into the alley, pulled the sunglasses off with a dramatic flourish, and smiled.

"Hey," he said, really quickly.

I unstraddled my bike. "Well, you got me," I said. "I had to see if you were serious about meeting me behind a strip club at exactly 2:06 in the afternoon. What's up?"

Krakowski jerked his thumb at the dumpster against the wall of the strip club. "Fowler's in there."

"In the strip club, presumably, not the dumpster."

"He's distracted. I got three minutes."

"This is exciting," I said. "Unless you're going to kill me."

"Far from it," said Krakowski. "I have some instructions for your trip to Ring City."

"You already gave me instructions," I said. "Spy on everyone and report back."

"This is a little something extra," said Krakowski. He came in close. His breath smelled like buffalo wings. "I want you to listen for anyone who mentions the Slow People."

"Slow People," I said. A rat leapt from one black garbage bag to another, and Krakowski started at the noise.

"For G-d's sake, don't bring it up," said Krakowski. "Just keep your ears open. There's no risk in listening, yeah? Tell me who mentions them and what they say."

"Who are the Slow People?"

"If I knew," said Krakowski, "I wouldn't tell you. That I knew."

"So what do I get out of this?"

"I dunno," said Krakowski. "You're already going to space. What do you want, a fuckin' cherry on top?"

"Arrangements like this often involve money," I said.

"I'm out-of-pocket on this op," said Krakowski. "You need any parking tickets fixed?" said Krakowski. I patted my bike. "Or whatever."

"Can you reset my jury duty clock?" I said.

"Probably?" said Krakowski, in the tone of someone whose job involves a lot of time in court, so what's the big deal with jury duty. He pulled out his Blackberry and checked the time.

"Aright, good meeting," he said. "Back to babysitting." He slipped his sunglasses back on and sauntered down the alley.

"That was weird," I said.

"No shit," said the rat sitting on the garbage bag.

(Just kidding.)