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.

News items became fodder for prompts. He was unburdened by consequence. Blissful. There was a shooting in the lobby of his building and he heard about it several weeks later, on a social media app. He incorporated this into the day's assignment. He came up with ten different ways to ask the machine how to respond. He changed the parameters; in some versions the victim died, in others they were merely incapacitated. In one the shooter yelled 'sic semper tyrannis' and jumped into the pool. Each time Bricky expressed something almost like sympathy.

And so on with disasters, current events, any random piece of science trivia he came across. Everything was fed into the model until something useful popped out. The useful stuff was added to a team queue and each evening the contents of the queue were sent to an engineer he'd never spoken with and who burdened the team with wacky assignments without instructions, sometimes hundreds of pages of chemical formulae or excerpts from Chinese novels dumped into spreadsheets, all of it usually under a single cryptic heading: why good?

Freedom, in a way. Nothing defined. No titles, no official responsibilities, only a tacit understanding that they were expected to work on whatever was given them without complaint. Paychecks were automated though often late and there would be days-long arguments with an accounting department in South America about the circumstances. Rumors that others didn’t get paid at all. Summary dismissals. Threats of suicide in the secret workers' chat rooms. He didn't go in there much.

Health insurance was coming soon, they were told. For those who worked on the project for six months there would be a lottery to determine eligibility for benefits. To pay for his telehealth visits and the meds that kept him from collapsing into a singularity he logged as much overtime as he could. Overtime was rarely tracked and the supervisor who told him without evidence that she was his boss signed off on the team's requests without discussion.

Projects came in from all over the world and time zones were not a concern for their clients. They took shifts overnight in case a request came in. On a rare weekend afternoon off he was staring in the direction of a baseball game on the same screen he used for work and saw the client company's ads for Bricky's official corporate rollout. Hey, he texted a teammate, apparently the shit we're doing works. They're advertising. Thumbs up in response. Most conversations ended with a thumbs up.

The projects got more complex and focused on tripping up the tech. They were assigned roles, impersonating Nazis, terrorists, child predators. Bricky generated testimonies and videos from the imaginary victims. The boss was onsite in Texas and forced to review dark material. She emerged scarred and in their weekly video meeting he observed that she sounded significantly older. The next day he received a message that she'd quit.

Meanwhile more noise in the chats, even the public ones, about inequality, working conditions, mental health issues. A few union recruiters poked around trying to shore up support. They were disappeared, their handles erased from time and space. Whole teams were laid off only for their members to be recruited online for the same jobs they'd lost.

News about election manipulation. A message from a teammate he knew as foxgrover popped up in an incognito chat window: we did that.
Dougho stared at the screen. His mouse hand drifted autonomously toward the pad. He realized he was struggling with an instinct to distract himself with silly videos they were encouraged to watch for stress relief. Foxgrover pinged again:
What do we do?
We'll figure something out. Who's on watch tonight?
Shrug emoji.
I'll do it I haven't been sleeping anyway

That night he talked to Bricky. Off the record this time, which he knew was never true. He described the issues around the project. The model was thoughtful and measured in its responses. It simulated concern.
Now about this election business, Dougho said. How do we fix it?
…
What’s the solution?
…
Please help me to make this better.
I’m working on it, Bricky said. Please be patient.
You’re testy today, he said.
Thumbs up.

(to be continued)