The guy at the bar was well and truly on his way to being wasted, but hey, that’s what we were all there for, right? This wasn’t one of your fancy platform nightclubs that lift off after dark and drift around until morning. No, this was your honest, hole-in-wall bar, complete with stained carpets, depressed office workers and a drinks automaton that’s constantly on the fritz.
“No I don’t want to see your goddamn drinks menu, you overpriced calculator!” snarled the guy at the drinks machine. “Just get me whisky. The bottle. It’s been a crappy week.”
“Helpful Advice!” chirped the guy’s PDA, projecting a small blue hologram of a liver. “Would you like to know more about the effects of alcoholism on the body of a middle-aged male?”
“Don’t you start,” he growled, his eyes narrowing at the small device. “You’re hanging on by a thread.”
“Having trouble with your tech, sport?” I asked, draining my glass.
The guy snorts, looking at me with these bloodshot eyes – I mean, this guy hasn’t slept in days.
“Am I having trouble with my goddamn tech? Damn right I am. Tell me, when you were a kid, what did you think AIs were going to be like?”
“Hell, I dunno,” I shrugged. “Like all those robot butlers the old money and the off-worlders get.”
“I always thought we’d be fighting for our lives against the machines,” chipped in another drinker.
The guy shakes his head and takes a heavy swig of the bottle.
“Wrong. Both wrong. AIs are a nanny. No, AIs are a spy. Always sitting in the background. Watching. Measuring. Calculating. Like the ones at my work. Every keystroke man, every data stream. Everything you’ve ever written, all of it goes into your metrics. These AIs, they project the numbers. They extrapolate and tell you what’s gonna happen next, see?”
“What, like those ads about lonely single ladies popping up in my data streams?” I asked.
“No, you moron, that’s because you’re looking at porn,” the guy snapped. “Alright, listen up. I had a big report due this week. The biggest. Investment numbers for my stock company. Ok, so yeah, maybe my numbers weren’t that great, but I’m putting it all together in this here PDA, you know what the goddamn thing says to me?”
“What?”
“It has helpful advice! Tells me it can book me into retraining for a new job. Can you believe it?”
“So just ignore it,” I shrugged.
“Tried to, pal, tried to,” replied the guy, morosely taking a gulp of whisky. “But y’see, this device had all my data. It knew. Damn thing knew. Now I ain’t gonna take this lying down, y’hear? It’s time to be bold, or whatever schmaltz they put into those corporate motivationals. I tried a totally new approach. Unique, even. Trading strategies no-one else had the balls to launch.”
“And, uh, I take it this strategy of yours didn’t go down so well?”
The guy, he’s looking like he’s ready to cry at this point. But takes another swig and tries to shake it off.
“Crapped out,” he said. “Those numbers started getting worse and worse. And right when I’m staring down a spreadsheet with negatives across the board, this damn PDA starts offering D-vids on modern approaches to financial markets.”
The guy turns on his PDA, and he’s snarlin’ like it’s his old lady.
“You ain’t the boss of me! You hear me? You ain’t the boss of me!”
With a sigh, the guy slouches back in his chair. The bar don’t have great lighting – part of the ambiance, am I right? – but it’s like he’s sitting in his own little pool of darkness.
“Ah, who am I kidding?” he mutters. “Of course these things are the boss of me – it’s the boss of all of us. So Management gets involved, see? The company AIs must have given them some helpful advice! They start putting the pressure on me. You don’t know what it’s like, man. You go in every day, and you can feel the AIs tightening the noose around your neck. But you can’t say anything. You can’t draw attention to it. Not allowed to. So you smile and pretend like nothing’s wrong. And every day, every damn hour, those numbers are getting lower and lower. God, the stress, it just sits in your chest until you-“
“Helpful Advice! Would you like to know more about the link between stress and heart disease?”
“Shut up, damn you! I went and took your damn medical test, didn’t I? You all see how this thing undermines me? D’you see what it’s doing?”
“So what happened next?” asked one of the other bar patrons. The guy looks around – didn’t realise he’d attracted an audience. Who can blame them? Cheaper than a D-vid, y’know?
Anyway, the guy takes another swig and continues.
“I tried a new trading strategy,” he said. “Numbers got worse. Tried another, but at this point I’ve bottomed out. Doin’ serious damage to the company reputation. And Management’s just pushing and pushing, and then there’s this damn thing telling me how I got to resign and find a new job.”
The guy takes another swig. At this point, his hands are getting a little shaky and the whisky’s splattering all over him. Waste of good booze, but he’s beyond caring.
“Had a fight with my wife,” he says. “Oh Jesus, that woman. You married, son?”
“I ain’t found the right lady,” I replied. The guy laughs, but like, that laughing where you don’t know whether he’s going to giggle or burst into tears.
“Save yourself the heartache. Here I am, swapping stocks around like a drowning man clutching to a lifeboat and all she can do is moan about credit cards! So I get to the morning of the big presentation, and you know what this little PoS device says to me?”
“What?”
“Why some helpful advice, of course! Telling me that it can walk be through the legal process of divorce.”
This got a laugh from the bar. The guy notices, and grins a bit. Sits up, back into the light, and raises his voice so that everyone can hear.
“So like I said, here I am at the meeting of a lifetime. Know what? Almost no talking, man. Weirdest damn thing.”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean it’s just the company AI, bringing up charts and graphs and numbers while we all watch. It’s the one in charge. I swear, the big boss, he don’t say a thing. But this AI, yeah, it’s got a lot to say. It’s all in the numbers.”
“What numbers?” called a voice from the small crowd.
“The numbers for a perfect employee. They’ve got it. They have the metric for how every action that a working man performs can be made profitable. I mean down the minute. It’s a perfect path, that’s followed by a perfect employee. But who’s perfect? Huh? What about you, buddy, you think you can make every minute of a nine til five perfect?”
“Hell, I can’t even catch the bus on time,” I shouted.
The crowd laughs. The guy laughs too, but he’s getting loud. Getting angry.
“Then my numbers come up on the screen, and nah. Nah, they ain’t perfect. If that damn AI had just left me alone they might have been passable, but nooooo… I’m sitting there at the end of the table, staring up at a graph full of red lines that look like they took a jump off a cliff, and I’ve got half a mind to do the same. And through all of it – no one says a god damn word. It’s like they’re all possessed or somethin’.”
The guy remained quiet for a minute, taking a long drink from the bottle.
“Then you-know-who speaks. The boss’s PDA. It’s got helpful advice! Wants to know if my boss would like to start scheduling interviews for a new broker. And at the same time, I swear, the same goddamn moment, this little backstabbing piece of plastic wants to enrol me at the local unemployment office.”
The crowd remained quiet, watching as the guy’s fingers flexed and gripped the bottle.
“Damn,” I said. “Hell of a story, sport. I’m sorry.”
The guy snarls like an animal and stands up
“Well it doesn’t have to be this way, see?” he shouted, waving his bottle around like it’s a sword or somesuch. “We used to do things, build bridges an’ that, all without- without these damn AIs! Don’t you get it? We don’t have to be ruled by a machine! We’re men! We do great things! We can-”
“Helpful advice!” chirped the PDA, projecting a grainy holoimage of a man’s torso. “Your medical test results have arrived! Would you like to learn the facts about male erectile dysfunction?”
The guy snarls and smashes the PDA with the whisky bottle until the bar’s covered in booze-soaked shards, then he turns around and walks into the night without another word.
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