Just this morning, on his way to Communitiv.ly, Lucas walked through the park and watched the winter-brown sunbathers, the same college students who once spent mornings like this one marching against climate change. The scene provided reassurance that he’s doing the right thing with The Suit™ and UBI. Reassurance that memory is short, the long view is kind, and resistance is futile in the face of change that benefits the leisure class.
Lucas does not believe in fate or chance. This is how he was raised, his parents’ Mission Hills megachurch allotted for networking only, a place to be seen in double-breasted glen plaid performing the ritual sacraments of blue-blooded Midwestern social life. His father neither was nor is the verbal type; he’s strong, silent, and terrifying, like a board game colonel, with cadaver-blue eyes and white hair the color of a purebred Appaloosa. But silence done right can be effectively didactic, and Chip imparted his worldview to Lucas: an implicit belief that money makes money and men shape their own fortunes. Women are another story. Chip carries a handgun. His greatest fear is testicular cancer, followed by communism and bears.
One might argue that the underlying doctrine—if indeed it has one—upon which Shamerica was born and continues to exist, lies in this worldview, the staunch and staunchly American belief that, given an even fiscal playing field and freedom from the hang-ups of social convention, a person can be and do whoever and whatever he or she wants, and whether that entails stacking Sykodollars, designing buildings, or having rough sex with human-octopi hybrids, it’s no one’s choice but his or her own. We build our own futures and make our own worlds.
Lucas picks up one of the Coke bottles and blows into it, hoping for a musical sound. Nothing doing. He can’t remember if the bottles are supposed to have liquid in them or not. He thinks they probably are. He likes the way the bottles look lined up, logos facing the apartment’s interior like a pop art installation. He likes the way caffeine and sugar make him feel, the hard ropes of pee produced by each fluid ounce.
Lucas thinks again of the machine, of its sophisticated insides and the comparative simplicity of its outer design. The genius of home computers was that they combined two familiar objects. Every household contained a TV set, and families found comfort in gathering before these metaphorical fires. The world was less scary when you could watch it burn from the safety of your living room while wearing slippers and a bathrobe. Typewriters, on the other hand, were objects of self-expression. If TV brought the world inside, then typewriters were tools to bring the inside out. Home computers combined these technologies. Their design made the foreign familiar. The beauty of progress is that it’s invisible. No one even knows that something’s changed.
The machine in Lillian’s office runs a program called Shakespeer™. Developed by the brightest of Lucas’s troops, including a linguist from Harvard, a robotics expert from MIT, and three AI guys poached from IBM’s Watson group, Shakespeer™ will soon be the world’s first mass-market advanced natural-language generator that actually works, meaning the text it produces passes the Turing test 77.3 percent of the time.
When Lucas began developing his first game, &Co, in his Yale dorm room, he knew an NLG of some sort was essential to what he wanted to create, in part because he needed to populate his virtual world with real-seeming characters for players to interact with until the user base was big enough for them to interact only with each other. This was back when Lucas still wrote most of the code himself, and the end result was less than stellar. The game, essentially a Sims knockoff, was not a success, though it contained certain elements, such as trading on a rudimentary bond market, that would make their way into SS later on.
Lucas’s interest in NLGs goes back further than &Co, to high school. Swim captain and prom king, he was not your typical gamer, but his parents were strict, and rarely let him out for social functions that weren’t school or church related, so he spent a lot of time at the family desktop. This was during the height of AOL chatrooms, but Lucas found these spaces arid, their users, like the kids at school, rarely living up to his high conversational standards. What he wanted was a group of people he could program to his own demanding specs. Not clones of himself exactly, but digital siblings stripped of selfhood and rivalry; AIs that shared much, but, crucially, not all, of Lucas’s DNA.
Shakespeer™ was developed for a single function, to filter The Suit™’s targeted ads through a voice that mimics the user’s own. What separates it from other NLGs is its ability to collect data aurally. The Suit™ records everything its wearer says, and Shakespeer™ synthesizes that data on a rolling basis, learning the wearer’s syntax and diction, his situational speech patterns, and continuing to learn as more data is accrued and those patterns and situations change. But the program doesn’t only collect aurally; it can also process text at speed, a feature Lucas knew could be used for other functions, though he didn’t know what those functions were until the forty-fifth president’s obsession with fake news, when Lucas realized he could create his own.
If Shakespeer™ could speak it would say:
<page>
<title>Breaking:>Occupy>Leader>Organized>Riot</title>
<id>865</id>
<revision>
<id>15900676</id>
<timestamp>20XX-09-15T18:14:12Z</timestamp>
<contributor>
<username>ShannonNorthReist</username>
<id>23</id>
</contributor>
<minor />
<comment>Automated conversion</comment>
It would say:
Breaking: #Occupy Leader Organized Riot
By Shannon North-Reist
According to Sophia Dall, a PhD candidate at Columbia University, Nøøse founder and #Occupy leader Jay Devor is one of four people responsible for organizing the riot following an #Occupy protest in Union Square that led to the death of Ricardo Cortes. Ms. Dall, Mr. Devor’s former longtime romantic partner, was with him following the riot, when he arrived at her apartment in a state of distress. “I’d never
