The Connections
A short story.
Author’s Note: This piece was inspired by this New York Times feature from June about AI supervisors. I’m not sure the piece landed 100%, but it helped set me up for a summer of novel-writing. Enjoy and, as always, subscribe below!
“Good morning, Douglas.”
“Uhm. Good morning, sir.”
“You hesitated in saying 'good morning.' Why?”
“Oh. Uhm, well, I just sometimes do that.”
“Why?”
“I don't know.”
Doug's Supervisor made a hmm sound, which bled out of the thin silver rod sitting on his desk like ink from a pen. Thousands, maybe millions, of calculations underpinned the Supervisor's imitation.
“Okay. Let's review your performance today. You answered seventy-three calls. I calculate an eighty-two percent satisfaction rate based on the surveys received. You received fourteen prompts, including three 'be happier' prompts and four 'be more empathetic prompts.' Are you distracted?”
Doug tried not to wince at the question, aware of the cameras that surrounded him, infinitesimal lenses pinned to every surface of the office. A spiders'-web of observation. “No,” he said finally.
“Incorrect. You spent forty-seven minutes of free-time browsing today, exceeding your daily allotment by seventeen minutes. Why are you distracted?” the Supervisor asked.
“I was reading something interesting,” said Doug.
“What were you reading about?”
“About the dying whales.”
“Why were you reading about it?”
“Because, uh, it's interesting. It's something that's affecting our planet.”
Another hmm slid out from the silver rod. “Let's discuss the hang-up you had today.”
“Okay.”
“Call number sixty-two lasted four minutes and fifty-five seconds. At four minutes, you hesitated to answer a question about the Gold Care Plus program, and at four minutes and five seconds, the caller reiterated their question. Why didn't you answer the question?”
“I don't know.”
“Your Training Manual provides answers for all contingencies. Why didn't you provide the pre-approved answer?”
“It was...the woman, she was crying, and I--”
“The Training Manual provides pre-approved answers that are to be used regardless of the emotional state of the caller. Why didn't you provide the pre-approved answer?”
“It didn't seem right. She has this husband, right, and he was sick, and she was upset that we weren't covering the tests.”
“We?” the Supervisor asked. The question hung in the air for a moment, and Doug said nothing. Another hmm. “At four minutes and thirty-five seconds, the caller asked if you could hear them. You did not reply. Twenty seconds later, the caller hung up. Why didn't you redirect the caller to a higher level representative for further assistance?”
“I hesitated,” said Doug. “I didn't—I didn't want to make her situation worse.” The rod let out another hmm and then seemed to brighten a bit, as it did before it spoke for the last time on a given day.
“We have now concluded your after-shift review. Your eighty-two percent satisfaction rate and other factors for Tuesday, June 23, 2031,
means that your Weekly Score has fallen from a 423 to 370 out of 500. Please review your Training Manual to account for emotional contingencies prior to the start of your next shift. A Quick-Cap Quiz will be conducted to ensure compliance with the appropriate information. Thank you for the chat, Douglas,” said the Supervisor. The rod went silent and the small red light at its tip went dark.
~*~
Doug's office wasn't exactly small, larger than your average cubicle, and it was a mark of his past performance that he had four walls of his own instead of being placed in the vast field of half-walled workspaces that filled twenty floors of the tower. It didn't feel small; not in the way that his one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn did with its single window facing the rust-green trellis of the R train. But it was all centered around the silver rod on his desk, his Supervisor the center of his working universe. Beside it sat his monitor, its screen dark, the faint outline of his thirty-five-year-old face staring back at him. The tired, sagged eyes. The thinning hair. The double-chin squeezed above a tightly-buttoned white-collar shirt. Doug cast his eyes at the wall, gazing for a moment at his undergraduate college degree that he had hung beside a bland scene of a sandy ocean beach. Doug thought of the last time he had set foot on a real beach. He was seven, with his family on Cape Cod, standing with his feet in the water and watching ships in the distance, little pin-pricks of light moving on the endless waters.
He stood, took his coat from the chair and pulled it on. When the left the office the lock clicked behind him and the light shut out. Down the hallway, a boxy cleaning bot hummed and slid across the floor. Doug eased past it, pushing through a clear-glass door leading to the elevators. A woman he had seen once or twice coming in and out of the building stood waiting, gazing down at her phone. Doug thought she was pretty with her sheet of red hair and freckled face, and he felt his own cheeks blush with childish recognition. It had been a few months since his last date – an online connection that led to an exchange of sparse words and questions in a bottom-floor Manhattan bar, the length of a single drink – and when faced with a moment of spontaneous interaction with a member of the opposite sex, Doug looked down and reached into his left pants pocket for his phone. It wasn't there. In the tightening blanket of panic that took him, he forgot the pretty woman and made his way to the door leading back to his office. He tugged, but it wouldn't open. Pressing his wallet to the black control-pad, he waited for the familiar green light to flicker on. Nothing.
The drip-drip panic continued. How would he get home? Every transaction he made passed through his phone; the few dollar bills in his wallet, good for the occasional bodega visit, would be useless at the subway's entrance. Grimacing, he turned back to the elevator bank. The woman was gone.
~*~
The sidewalk seethed with passerby, minds wrapped in headphone coils. Some spoke into the small buds pinned to the fronts of their blouses or lapels with letting lose small puffs from black plastic vape pens. Others wordlessly raised their hands for taxis. Everything was hot and loud yet so many were silent, their essences tucked into whatever digital realms they traversed between work and home. In the midst of this all stood Doug, feeling decidedly disconnected, unsure of where to go. Brooklyn, and more specifically his apartment, felt like a distant idea of four walls, a fridge full of dine-out boxes, and a couch more broken-in than the neatly-tucked bed in the next room. Doug's head felt hot, almost swollen in the summer air. Walking quickly, he entered the stream of pedestrians making their way south down Fifth Avenue.
~*~
How long had it been since he walked across the Brooklyn Bridge? Sticky with sweat, he felt his gait slow, thirst rapping at his throat as if each pang was a knuckle on a wooden door. Joggers shot past him, passing like unseeing guards. Looking up through the bridge's thick cables, he watched the shape of a sleek-lined jet make its way out to sea.
“On your left,” came a voice beside him – another jogger zipping by. He kept walking. A denizen of trains and ride-shares, his body buzzed from being forced into long-time labor. But somewhere buried in the sensation he felt the idea of a second wind; an idea of healthiness that he had seemingly abandoned long ago.
“Excuse me?” he heard a voice ask in his direction. He turned to face a young couple, their faces sleek with sweat as much as his. One of the women wore sunglasses and the other, shorter one bore a smiling, sun-reddened face.
“I'm sorry, but we're trying to get a good angle for this photo. We've never been here before,” the second woman added, laughing. She held out her phone. “Can you take a pic of us?”
Doug nodded, managing to get out a “Sure” as he took the phone. He held it up, trying to evenly line up the shot.
“Can you do it horizontal? It'll look better when we post it,” the first woman said.
“Oh. Sure thing. Sorry, I don't--”
“Great!” the second woman, still beaming, said.
Doug snapped a few pictures, then shifted to his right to get one with a bit more exposure to the clutch of tall buildings looming beyond the bridge in Manhattan. The sky was ablaze with orange light.
“Thank you! the second woman said as she took back the phone, flipping quickly through the pictures Doug had taken. “These are great—we've never been here.”
“Know any good spots to visit?” the first woman asked.
“Uhm. Oh, I don't know,” said Doug, going on to offer: “Central Park is really nice. Kinda pricey up there though.”
“Oh! I said we should go there,” the first woman said, grasping the other's hand in hers. “We'll have to go tomorrow.”
Offering several more 'thank yous', the couple took their leave. Doug watched them disappear in the flow of foot traffic, the tourists snapping their own photos and the never-ending stream of joggers making their way to the ends of the bridge. He wondered if they'd go to the park, and it occurred to him that in the ten years he'd lived in New York, he'd only been to the park twice, both with his now-ex-wife. Grimacing, he turned back toward Brooklyn and began to walk once more.
~*~
“Can you help me?”
Doug turned. He was standing on a busy street corner and almost missed the words beneath the din of a train passing overhead. An old man of about seventy, short and stooped over, smiled a row of yellow up to him. “I'm having a bit of trouble standing and I'm trying to get to the clinic over there,” he said, pointing a bony finger across the street. Between a McDonald's and a 7-Eleven sat an emergency clinic, its wide windows lit but hidden and filled with people.
“Oh. Uhm, sure,” said Doug. He offered the crook of his arm, remembering an act from time volunteering decades ago in a retirement home. When the cross-walk light went white Doug and the old man slowly made their way across. He held the door of the clinic open, guiding the old man in. Enveloped in the din of the clinic – children both crying and yelling, a nurses shouting a last name in Spanish, someone yelling into the phone for someone to bring their insurance card – Doug led the old man to an empty seat, then sat beside him. His legs, tired from hours of walking, buzzed at the sudden opportunity to rest. Doug felt the old man pat him on the arm.
“Thank you, young man,” he said.
“I'm not that young,” Doug replied.
“No,” the old man said with a thoughtful laugh. “None of us are. And yet none of us are too old either. Not even me.”
“I guess so,” said Doug.
“This city isn't even so old. Not older than the dirt beneath it.”
“You could say that about a lot of places,” Doug replied.
“Yes,” the old man said, continuing to smile.
After a while, Doug realized that the man hadn't given his name at the front desk.
“Why haven't you signed in?” Doug asked. The old man grinned once more.
“I come here for the activity. To see the people. It's the best medicine you can get.”
~*~
Back in his apartment, Doug found his laptop sitting on the couch, its face dark, the battery dead. Instinctively, he picked it up and gazed around for the charger, spotting the long black cord on the coffee table. For a few moments, he thought of the likely deluge of emails, the Supervisor's automated reminders to study for the test he'd be given in the office the next day. Questions about how to talk to people. But then he set it down on his desk and walked to the window and gazed out past the rusted tracks at the windows across the way, obscured but framed in light. There were people there, and for the first time in years, he wondered about them, what electricity charged their lives. He turned back to the laptop. Many hours – gaming, social media sifting, a field of information – called his name, urging him to step into a long digital night. But instead, he left his apartment and climbed the small emergency ladder up to the roof, where he breathed deep the night-cooled summer air and watched train after train carry the city's people home. One of the trains slowed to a stop – likely delayed by some faulty signal – and as it did, a woman turned her head, making eye contact with Doug. Unsure of what to do, he held her gaze, slowly smiling as he did. She smiled back. Doug grinned more widely, raising his hand and waving. He watched the woman laugh, and as she did, the train whined back to life and began to move. Then she was gone.
~*~
Doug dreamed that night for the first time in years. He was standing in water, the lights of Brighton Beach blazing behind him. A gravity drew him closer with each frothy wave. The watery mist sprayed his bare chest, lashed his eyes, filled his mouth with the taste of sea-salt. It felt glorious. Somewhere up the beach he knew that his phone, his wallet, his keys – his tethers to the worlds human and digital – lay forgotten in the sand. Out on the clear dark water he watched ships ease past, little beacons shivering in the ether, carrying souls he'd never know. The humans inside them, connected to each other and, in some strange way, to him. Doug waded further out, the water surging against his legs, then his chest, then his face as he moved. He grinned as the water struck him and pulled him closer.