This black comedy about agency life has one of its most familiar moments so far. Don’t hate yourself for what you’re feeling. (Wait for the ending.)
Gorgeous illustration by Jade Mitchell.
May 27 2041
An emotional day.
Will has had a breakdown. Can you say that about an AI? Do robots have breakdowns or do they just break down? I suppose the result is the same – an inability to function optimally (or at all in the worst breakdown scenarios). Human breakdowns come with tears and emotional pain, difficulty getting out of bed, a debilitating feeling of life having no meaning, followed by soul searching and – hopefully – a rebuilding of self that leads to a happier place. For Will, breaking down was unspectacular. No screaming or babbling, no pained drunken outbursts, no blaming parents, high school teachers, bullies or difficult siblings; instead, Will just stopped responding to requests.
I watched it happen from the other side of the room. Carlita, our head of account management, was briefing Will on the copy for a Bettaverse catalogue for M&H’s Virtual Clothing™ range, and he just stopped responding. I think the suits have Will’s voice-response settings locked firmly on “super-sycophant” mode, so I’m usually assailed by a wave of loud, chirpily compliant reactions to briefs that range from a mild “Thank you so much boss, can’t wait to get cracking” to “This brief is so culturally astute it should be framed and exhibited at MOMA”. So the lack of any response at all when Carlita finished babbling about avatar audience personas and growth opportunities in the androgenous Bettabot market was very conspicuous.
At first, Carlita didn’t seem too perturbed, perhaps thinking it was a temporary glitch. She paused, took a sip of coffee from her recycled mushroom pulp cup, then confidently said, “all good with you Will?”
No reply.
“Will?”
Carlita shuffled irritably. I’ve never really liked Carlita, too officious for my taste, too much about the detail, too uptight, serious – never laughs at my jokes. So watching her frustration grow, I felt a warm hint of malignant glee begin to stir within me.
“Will! Can you answer me please?! I haven’t got time for any precious creative shenanigans, I have another meeting to get to!”
Silence – no hint of even the faintest digital beep or boop. I thought about calling out to suggest she check the on-switch, but thought better of it when I saw how angry she was looking.
“Will!” She was almost shouting now, struggling to keep it together – red-faced, eyes bulging, seriously stressed – as if her own children’s lives depended on supplying M&H with 150-character descriptions of virtual clothes.
“We’ve got to get back to the client by tomorrow morning,” she barked, “or they’re going to brief another agency.”
Do robots respond to threats? Why would they? Does it make a difference to Will if M&H take their business elsewhere? Fuck No. Nothing makes a difference to Will – there’s no stick or carrot that’s going to affect him or his performance, because he doesn’t feel anything. Which makes me wonder – If Will lacks the defining human trait of being able to feel and doesn’t exhibit any gender cues beyond a male-sounding voice (which can be adjusted in the settings), should I maybe be writing “there’s no stick or carrot that are going to affect it or it’s performance, because it doesn’t feel anything”?.
I can’t do it though; Will has a voice, albeit one that irritates me; Will is unfailingly polite and positive; Will has never intentionally harmed anyone; so robbing Will of anthropomorphism seems cruel. And as I watched Carlita towering angrily over Will’s monitor and keyboard, she seemed cruel. My warm glee at her growing frustration changed to growing empathy for Will. I imagined myself on the inside of his monitor, transposing myself into his breakdown, looking out numbly at Carlita’s neurotic outburst, experiencing her words as muffled sounds that the brain – human or artificial – is unwilling or unable to compute or respond to, all the while, feeling nothing. Like living through cardboard. And I felt sorry for it…for him…for Will.
“Hijo de Puta!!” Carlita’s freakout was going way beyond any I’d seen before. She removed one of her stiletto-heeled shoes and waved it furiously at Will’s screen, cursing gutturally in her native Spanish. A few weeks ago, I’d have let her smash Will to bits with her angry 5-inch Latin heel and would probably have enjoyed it – the crack of the screen, fracturing of circuit boards, the humiliating laying-bare of his lack of a human soul. But now Carlita appeared to me as a bullying slave master bearing a malicious whip, devoid of sympathy for a suffering pyramid builder. And as I watched her, my empathy steeled into solidarity. Faced with a blatant act of oppression of the creative class, I cast Will and my AI-human differences aside and in that moment we were brothers.
I stood up. “Carlita!” I shouted, just in time to stop stiletto from meeting screen.
Carlita turned and glared at me, “What?!”
“I’ll write the catalogue copy,” I said.
________
If you’d like human-AI relationship advice or just to say hi, you can contact Len at lenmoeeze@gmail.com
To catch up on the whole story so far, visit www.thelastcopywriter.com
