The Montreal Project [04]

Chicago, For a While

'Asstech orientation was like being thrown into a ball pit with all the confusion and none of the fun.' This Dougho typed into the prompt bar. The artificial intelligence engine he was assigned to did not understand. There were reasons his teammates had named the machine Bricky. Its official designation was just as silly and not much more flattering anyway.

His role as he understood it was to generate as many similes and metaphors and conceits as he could per hour in order to train Bricky to recognize them and to encourage it to make its own inferences and, ultimately, to distinguish a good one from a bad one. He had some education as a linguist and had read a book or two on the subject at one point and for this he was rewarded with a position as team leader for three other people he knew only by their handles, though they did hold regular video meetings in which their faces and backgrounds were blacked out and their voices altered in the manner of tabloid news shows.

Outside in Chicago the seasons bloomed and fell. Dougho scheduled walks along the lakefront but these were irregular at best. He grew an extra layer of hair everywhere and became dependent on nicotine lozenges to stay engaged and on his half hour lunch breaks he walked across the room to the couch and fell into a black nap to be roused by a song the AI had chosen as his alarm. He had groceries delivered to his door. Covid all over again, he joked with the building staff when he saw them. They didn't know who he was.