In Constant Contact, Page 2

them, spread them all out on her desk. There were six. These are also test subjects, she thought, so treat them as such. Think Iris. Think needy. Think desperate. Think help.

  - - - - - - - - -

  Kandhi didn't get past the first sentence of the first application before she realized that she was also going to need help with this bit too. The application came from one Lola Crown in Kansas City, Kansas, and it read:

  "I sher wood like to be a frend becoz I sher like peeple and I sher wood be a good frend to there needs."

  Kandhi punched a button on her desk phone and shouted,

  "Fred!"

  Moments later a short, heavy-set, pony-tailed, unshaven and bespectacled young man came shuffling into her office with a cranky look on his face. From behind his thick green glasses frames he squinted and shrugged his way into the visitor chair, where he collapsed, as if exhausted from the effort. Fred Schmetsenheim, Lab Rat (according to his business card) didn't say a word.

  "Fred, I need you," Kandhi informed him, handing him the stack of papers she had already glanced through once.

  "What do you make of these?" she asked.

  Fred took the papers and examined each one carefully. Kandhi watched his expression closely, to gauge his reactions to the different applications, but Fred gave no indication that any one struck him differently than any other. He scanned them all and looked up.

  "Are these for you?" he asked. "Some kind of computer dating or something?"

  "Of course not," Kandhi snapped. "This is work."

  "We're hiring people to be our friends? Is this some new company policy? The latest thing in morale-inducing technology?"

  "No, no, no," Kandhi sighed. "I thought you knew. It's for the new product. You've seen these, right?" and she opened her top desk drawer and pulled out a small pile of thick, rubbery wristbands in various colors. Fred shook his head.

  "It's the Highly Adaptive Friendular System," she told him.

  "You're kidding, right?" Fred replied. "Rubber bands? What's next, invisible balloons?"

  "It's a polymer fabric," she said. "Highly conductive but quite safe. Responsive, too. You can tap on it, pull on it, snap it, and all of those gestures have a purpose. I have the specs right here. Wait a second," and she handed over a single sheet of single-spaced wording, the original implementation paper from the founder. Fred took his time studying this, all the while frowning and shaking his head.

  "I thought I'd seen it all," he muttered when he was done. "I suppose it gets into the bloodstream, too. right? Constant contact, and bodily monitoring of course. All the vitals. Does it broadcast your thoughts in surround sound as well? Holy freaking out, man! What do we do around here? What don't we do?"

  "Take it easy," Kandhi said, "It isn't going to do all of that. You know how Tom gets. There's no way they can get all that kind of stuff into the first release."

  "That's what you said about 'The Driver'," he reminded her. "It was only going to 'assist'. Remember that? Then we had all that trouble with the kidnappings."

  "Incidental," she replied. "This one's not general-purpose. It's just for certain kinds of people. Tom told me so himself. People who need people. People who want someone to be there all the time, someone they can rely on, someone they can talk to, someone who will help them out. Any time, day or night. Anywhere in the world. And the thing of it is, they will never actually see this person, never actually know them, not their name, their location, none of that. They won't even know if it's just one friend, or a collection, or part-real, part-automated or even a person at all."

  "You don't believe him, do you?" Fred was unconvinced. "This is from the same guy who invented Caller Undo, and you remember what happened with that, right? The amnesia pandemic?"

  Kandhi nodded. This was exactly why she had called him in there. She needed her doubts reinforced.

  "I want you to help me select the beta subjects," she told him. "You know the drill. Find me a few who fit, and we'll match them up with some of these, these friends," she added, pointing at the papers Fred still held on his lap. He returned them to her, saying,

  "Most of these are useless."

  "Which ones would you keep?"

  "The track coach, the cashier, and the barber. The rest I'd throw away. Burn them, even," he added, cracking a smile. Fred stood up, still shaking his head glumly.

  "I'd hate to pick any of our good beta people for this," he stated and Kandhi nodded.

  "They volunteered," she reminded him.

  "So they're asking for it?"

  "Practically begging," she laughed.

  "Even so," he told her, "we might need them later".

  Fred left the room. He walked slowly back to his cube across the hall, plopped down in his seat and sighed.

  "Beta bunnies?" he muttered, calling up the list on his desktop screen. "Some of you are really in for it now."

  Meanwhile, Kandhi pulled out the three papers Fred had indicated. The track coach was a Finnish former long distance runner, now a recluse and physical wreck way up in reindeer land, where he lived with his longtime boyfriend, a controversial Danish filmmaker named Rigan Verhoeven. Verhoeven was noted for his award-winning documentaries about radical solutions to the overpopulation crisis, which called for random culling by lots. The track coach was not implicated in any of that. He was mostly known for his numbers. His name was Bilj Bjurnjurd, and he had won many races and many awards, including a bunch of civic citations for empathy, charity and consistent humanity. Kandhi had no idea that awards were given for such things, but then again, she knew very little of Scandinavian cultures.

  The cashier was named Velicia Lightning Bug (formerly Kirkjian), an employee of the Less4Less chain of stores based out of Tulare, California. She was forty one years old, thrice divorced, childless, and a part-time tantric healer and holographer, with an enormous capacity for rapid yet quite hollow verbiage. Velicia's beta form included several extra pages in longhand, referencing all of her interests, from yeti tracking to shellfish painting to synchronized plumbing and quadrapus training. She was on the seventh of her projected nine lives, and was anxious to encounter anything different and new, regardless of its odor, color or consistency. Velicia listed her job as "professional customer-relations interactor," but a phone call to her boss confirmed the position of cashier.

  The barber was sixty-five year old Stanley Smellyear from Pittsburgh. He had, so he claimed, heard it all.

  "You ain't heard nothing yet," Kandhi silently warned him.

  - - - - - - - - -

  Fred Schmetsenheim tried to keep his head down, he really did. 'Just doing my job' was his motto, but just doing his job certainly seemed to cause a lot of trouble most days. Trouble for him, trouble for his boss, and trouble for the developers he worked with. The software engineers, especially, considered him a terrible nuisance, the way he was always alerting them to defects in their highly sophisticated code, and took to closing his bugs with resolutions such as 'Behaves As Expected', and then cursing when they found them re-opened again within the hour with a comment such as 'Really?'. This led to many heated discussions in many different conference rooms, with most of the heat directed squarely at Fred, who gave it back at double the temperature.

  "I wouldn't expect you to understand," was one of the phrases he heard repeatedly, along with, "what you keep failing to realize," and "that is exactly the sort of question I never want to hear again." And yet it was never Fred who was called to account by the Vice Presidents of Engineering, the dreaded Head of Security, or even the founders. This was little consolation to Fred, who huddled down in his cube, certain of only more impending misery. He'd been with the company for three years and was rapidly approaching his usual expiration date. This was his third job. The other two had each lasted exactly three years, and ended with eruptions of bilious verbal encounters. His previous bosses had wearied of defending his tirades, and he had as much faith in his current one, Kandhi, as he'd had in the others. In the end, they would all break under p
ressure. In the end, they would let him be sacrificed to the marketing gods. He knew very well that what they called "quality" was merely a checkbox, that products would ship when the bottom line called for it, no matter what condition their condition was in. To Fred, quality was what the word should mean, a measure of fitness, a stamp of approval. His standards, however, were generally too high and his ability to adjust to reality was somewhat too low.

  "Highly Adaptive," he muttered to himself. "I'd bet my life how highly that is!" He had tested the so-called 'Hearing Aids', which served a double function as extremely attuned translation devices, which he just knew were currently in use in diplomatic circles around the world, despite the fact he had slammed them as inaccurate, misleading, invasive, and downright criminal. True, the product was never officially released as such into the general consumer marketplace, and its name had been changed and was marketed as 'Mister Marvin', but he'd seen the production memos, he'd recognized the build issues which cropped up from time to time on the continuous integration servers, he knew the initials of the off-shored maintenance developers who were assigned to work on it. They were selling the damn thing under false pretenses, he knew very well, selling it and proud of it, too.

  He had also tested the erstwhile 'Memorizer', ostensibly a gadget intended to help students and professionals prepare for exams, but was actually a product which