Sleep and the Soul, page 23
“I’m on it!” James replied.
When he finished the shift, he kept his phone off; he didn’t have the stomach for the near-certainty of bad news. When he woke the next morning, any itch of curiosity, and even the desire to tear away the bandage quickly, had all but vanished. He fed Pawpaw, and ate breakfast, without switching on his laptop or his phone.
He felt calm as he left the house. The lectures he attended seemed imbued with a startling new clarity, as if he’d updated the prescription on his glasses.
“James? Where have you been?”
Sarah stood in front of him, with a look on her face that might have made sense if he’d fallen from the sky after a decade’s unexplained absence.
“Here. I just ... ” He pointed back toward the lecture theater.
“I’ve been trying to reach you all morning!”
James couldn’t read her expression. “Is there a bug in the app? Are we turning all the cats catatonic?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Why are you so upset, then? We got a bad review, the app bombed. It’s not the end of the world.”
Sarah said, “You really haven’t checked again, since Frida panned it?”
James was silent; he’d guessed one thing correctly, but what was he missing?
“After the review went out,” Sarah explained, “someone saw the clip on Fully Wired Kitten of the dream that was supposed to damn the whole thing ... and reached the opposite conclusion.”
“Okay. So not all the commenters agreed with Frida.”
“I’m not talking about some random commenter. Calista saw the clip. Calista disagreed. She bought the app and ran it for her own cat, and loved it.”
“Who’s Calista?” James caught himself. “You don’t mean ... the singer?”
“Yes.”
“I probably shouldn’t call her that, when she’s ninety percent autotune, ten percent sighing.”
“She’s won four Grammies,” Sarah replied. “I don’t like her songs either, but she has fifty million followers. Since she posted about the app, we’ve had ten thousand downloads.”
James absorbed this revelation. Their cut on each sale was about a dollar, so five thousand each. He could probably afford to reduce his shifts, maybe drop the last two hours and finish at eleven, the way he used to. “Not bad for an undergraduate project,” he joked. Money aside, the number of downloads was only two percent of the half million collars currently installed, so they hadn’t exactly liberated the wired cats of the world from their oppressors. But if a celebrity was championing dream-watching, that might yet shift the balance a little further.
On the bus to the restaurant, he watched both posts, immune to Frida’s scorn. “What this app spews out is nothing but a form of face-swapping revenge porn!” she fumed. “This is not my Prince Whiskers at all. Over the last few months, you and I have been on a marvelous journey with him that uncovered so many of his hidden talents: as a jazz musician, a fashion model, an imperfect but ever-striving pastry chef. Now these ham-fisted morons are trying to foist a cartoonish parody of the feline character onto all of our beloved companions.”
Calista’s take was different. “Finally seeing into Lady Lydia’s soul, not only does this prove that she has always been my spirit animal, it has empowered me to fully embrace my own dark, predatory instincts. Expect new tracks that take you where no human can walk alone; only our mingled essence can survive the way of the carnivore.”
9
“I’m giving two weeks’ notice,” James said, clutching his hairnet awkwardly in one hand. “I hope you can get someone to replace me by then.”
“You’ll come back when you need the money,” Ken predicted.
“Maybe.”
“What? Someone died and left you an inheritance?”
“I got a couple of tutoring jobs,” James lied. “The rate’s pretty good, so it works out better. And I can get more sleep.”
For a second, Ken looked envious. “Okay,” he said. “Good luck.”
“I’ll stick around for two more weeks,” James promised.
Outside the restaurant he strolled through the humid night, relieved but weary. He’d parked the car eight blocks away, afraid of having to explain the purchase if a fellow worker saw him with it. “You’re dealing drugs now, right?” “No.” “Then how could you ... ?” “It’s a long story.”
It was only a ten-minute drive to his new place. Inside, when he switched on the light, Pawpaw and Phantom stirred briefly, but remained curled up on the couch together.
The light was still on in Sarah’s room, so he knocked on the door. “Come in,” she said. She was in bed, but she was looking at something on her laptop.
“I gave notice,” James told her, standing in the doorway.
“Finally!”
He shrugged. “I was never sure our sales weren’t going to tank. I mean, the hype can’t last forever.”
“We have something better than hype: controversy.” Sarah turned the laptop around to show him the screen; she’d been watching a clip from a US talk show. “They interviewed an animal behaviorist, who explained that the Ghost Cat dreams are just embellishments that shouldn’t be taken literally.”
“You mean, exactly what we admit ourselves in the disclaimer?”
“Yeah, but it’s nice to know that even people with PhDs don’t read terms and conditions. And on the plus side, he also said the electrodes themselves should be banned.”
“You think that’s going to happen?”
“Eventually,” Sarah replied. “But no one made it a priority when the things first came out, so I can’t see any jurisdiction rushing through legislation, just because the hardware’s getting more attention thanks to a more benign use.”
“And one bad singer.”
“Be nice. Calista’s catching all the flak from the old school collar users, while we hide behind our brand name. Has anyone released a diss track about you, lately?”
“Not that I’m aware of.” James gathered up his courage. “So maybe we’ve got a window. A few months in which we can ... leverage this.” Sarah didn’t reply immediately, and he felt his face burning, as if he’d just confessed to an unspeakable crime.
“You mean go after venture capital?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve been thinking about that myself,” she confessed. “But I always thought you were committed to a life of open source projects for philanthropic foundations.”
James frowned. “Are you mocking me?”
“Absolutely.” She smiled. “Anyway, if some VC is willing to fund us because a pop star threw a spotlight on Ghost Cat, so long as the new project has merit there’s nothing to feel guilty about. We’re the ones who struck a blow for animal liberation, aren’t we?”
“Maybe.”
“So.” Sarah set her laptop aside. “What’s the project? What’s the pitch?”
10
“Suppose your grandmother lives in a sprawling retirement complex,” James began. “There are six different gates by which a vehicle can enter. One is fifty meters from her front door; the others might not even give access to her location. But every time she calls a taxi, or a ride share – or an ambulance – and gives her full address as a resident within the complex, some half-baked Geographical Information System from one of the big providers redirects the vehicle to what it wrongly thinks is the correct street address for the whole complex. The wrong gate, on the wrong street.”
Celia Davenport interrupted him. “Surely Google have this covered?”
“You’d think so,” James replied, “but they don’t. This isn’t hypothetical.” He scrolled to the survey results on his deck. “Six percent of our respondents said they’ve experienced problems due to GIS errors, ranging from having to stand in an alley in the rain to collect a supposedly home-delivered pizza, to ambulances delayed because they’re unable to locate their patients. And it’s not just summoning vehicles: three percent of people who try to type their true postal address into a web form are told it doesn’t exist, so they’re forced to abandon the interaction, or accept some approximation such as dropping the suffix that specifies the halves of a duplex. So the effects range from nuisance level to life-threatening, but even misdirected parcels add up to millions of dollars in lost productivity. These systems are marvelous when they’re accurate, but when they’re not, they’re like an invisible brick wall.”
“So what’s the solution?” Davenport pressed him. “How do you train your networks to do a better job than everyone else?”
“We don’t make it a machine-learning problem at all,” James replied. “We buy access to multiple databases, we identify the discrepancies between them, and we classify and remedy the problems using traditional, robust, deterministic code. I don’t care if someone has a neural net that gets ninety-five percent of addresses right. I’m aiming for software with so few errors that the dozen or so cases per million it can’t deal with can be handled manually by a staff of two or three.”
He waited for the shockingly sane proposal to sink in. He wasn’t pitching a mashup of sexy buzzwords. He wasn’t claiming to cure death, or world hunger. He wasn’t even hoping to get millions of people hooked on some vacuous time-sink they’d never even known they’d wanted before. He just aimed to do one job properly that no one else could be bothered getting right.
Davenport grilled him, but after his rehearsals with Sarah he was well prepared. Finally, she said, “I’ll get back to you in a couple of days, but I think we’d be willing to partner in your pilot program, if you can match us dollar for dollar on the costs.”
“All right.” That wasn’t quite what James had anticipated, but the revenue from Ghost Cat ought to cover his share. “I’ll look forward to hearing from you.”
When he’d hung up the call, all the implications that would flow from a favorable decision began to seem a lot more real. For a start, he’d have to drop out of his degree – with most of the debt remaining, but no qualification to show for it. There was no way he’d have time to run even the pilot program and keep studying.
He’d always laughed at the aspiring tech moguls sitting in the lecture theaters beside him, convinced that they were about to make their fortune from the latest overblown trend. But his project was solid: it solved a real problem that wasn’t going away. Just because it was a celebrity endorsement for fabricated imagery of cats’ dreams that had brought him here, that didn’t mean his feet weren’t still planted firmly on the ground.
11
“I noticed something today,” Sarah said, as she joined James at the dinner table. “You know how we’ve been getting roughly the same sales for the last twelve weeks?”
James smiled. “Yeah, but I’ve been trying not to dwell on it, because I’m sure it can’t last. To be honest, I thought we’d saturate the market much sooner.”
“So why do you think the sales are holding up so well?”
“Because Calista’s side is winning people over?”
“They’re not, though,” Sarah replied bluntly. “There’s still a huge number of collar owners who aren’t buying Ghost Cat. They’re not being won over.”
James was confused. “So who are we selling to?”
“Brand new collar owners,” she said. “People who are putting electrodes into their cats’ brains, because it’s more fashionable now. Thanks to Calista, but ... also thanks to us.”
James said, “I don’t believe that. The numbers must have been growing anyway.”
Sarah took out her laptop and showed him a plot. The sales of new collars had spiked a week or so after Calista’s post; it had dropped back since then, but it was still almost fifty percent higher than it had been before.
“Fuck. Fuck!” James stood up and walked away from the table. “Why did you have to tell me that?”
“Seriously? You wish I’d kept my mouth shut?”
It took him a few heartbeats to calm down enough to relent. “No,” he said. “I’m sorry. But ... ” Even if the new collar owners were wholly uninterested in puppetry, the surgery itself was risky. And once they got bored with their cats’ dreams, would they really eschew all the other novelties the electrodes enabled?
“Just imagine what Celia Davenport will think, if we tell her we’re pulling the plug on the app that’s keeping us afloat while we work on Abode ... because it grew the market too much.” He could forget about anyone ever taking a pitch from him again.
Sarah said, “Even if we pull the app, there are clones like Oneiro that have all the same features. We’re on top because we were first, and the price is reasonable, and Calista touted us. But if Ghost Cat vanishes, it won’t kill the trend.”
James couldn’t argue with that. “So what do we do?” Accept that things had spiraled out of their control, and just keep taking the money? He glanced over at Pawpaw and Phantom, happily gorging themselves on sheep liver. Nature was a bloodbath, and humans were shit; if he and Sarah were treating their own pets well enough, maybe that was the most they had a right to aspire to.
Sarah said, “I have an idea. But it’s pretty extreme.”
“A way to slow down the sales of new collars?”
“Yes. Maybe even get the electrodes outlawed, and put the kibosh on any canine version in the works.”
“Is it legal?”
“Ummm ... ”
“Can we cover our tracks?”
Sarah hesitated. “Probably.”
James braced himself. “Will we have an alibi with Davenport, when our revenue dries up?” If she canceled her investment, he could live with that; he could re-enroll in his degree and treat the whole entrepreneurial detour as a fever dream. But if she believed he’d flat out lied to her, that could mean anything from permanent unemployability to a jail term for fraud.
Sarah said, “Of all the people she might blame for the death of Ghost Cat, I think we’ll be a long way down the list.”
12
“We need to make it look like there are two versions of the app,” Sarah stressed. “One that actually worked, and did everything it claimed to do. Then someone took that version, kept the user interface and enough of the original code to pass a superficial inspection, but stripped out all the true functionality, and added a sting in the tail.”
“That’s a lot of work,” James protested. “And it’s not as if anyone’s going to take the broken version to Consumer Affairs.”
Sarah said, “If this all pans out, don’t you think there’ll be competent tech journalists looking into it, eventually? If they examine the app we actually release, and it looks like it was written from scratch as a kind of poisoned honeypot, the spin on the story will be completely different than if it looks like someone used a pre-existing app with an established user base as camouflage for the same thing.”
James took their plates over to the sink and started washing up. “Do you think there is an actual pre-existing app, with an established user base?”
“There might well be,” Sarah replied. “But do you want to go on the dark web and search for it? It’s risky enough faking something like this; do you want to get caught downloading the real thing?”
“No,” James conceded.
Since he was already familiar with apps from the Collar Store, the first part of the coding fell to him. He tried to think of the task functionally, breaking it down into the gathering of the user’s preferences, and then the means by which the sensors in the collar and the signals sent to the electrodes could be used to enact the required result. It was instrumentality in its purest form: line after line of code that treated the collared animal as a device to which a series of commands could be sent.
After three days, he was numb, but he had something that he believed looked like a genuine attempt to achieve the goals they wished to mimic. When he passed it to Sarah, he said, “Make sure you eviscerate the fuck out of this. If someone ‘fixes’ it and makes it work ... ”
She said, “I’ll gut it so the cuts don’t show, but they’re still completely fatal. I promise.”
James had a long shower, then went to bed.
He spent the next week working on the Abode database, unsure if it was now just a kind of cover, or if he might yet stand a chance of getting it running. Sarah still had lectures to attend and assignments to complete, so her half of the shadow project took her longer. But on the weekend, she spent the whole of Saturday disabling and booby-trapping his app, and on Sunday morning they reconvened.
James said, “Okay, people might create shit like this. But who would be stupid enough to draw attention to it?” If the dark web did harbor non-defanged cousins of the app they’d written, even at the height of media interest in the collars this fact had not been splashed across the home screens of every news site. So how were they meant to bring their own version to prominence without tipping their hand?
“There’s a precedent for evangelism,” Sarah replied. “Believe me, you don’t want to wade through the results of that web search, but ... a while back, there was a British crackpot named Jasper Mellick, whose fifteen seconds of infamy came when a couple of universities sued him for squatting on domain names that were slight misspellings of their own, and redirecting all the traffic to his BLTZ manifesto.”
“BLTZ? Is that a rap group?”
“Better Living Through Zoophilia. His long loony screed praising the utilitarian benefits of genetically engineering animals that would enjoy having sex with people.”
“Umm ... you’re not suggesting we frame him for the app?”
Sarah said, “He’s dead. But the internet hasn’t quite washed away every trace of him. If we use the BLTZ name, and quote from the manifesto, we can make it seem as if he still has anonymous disciples willing to go all out to spread the message.”
“So we make a video, with masks and ranting?”
“Yes.”
“Synthetic voice or disguised voice?”
“Disguised synthetic voice,” Sarah decided. “It has to sound like a disguised voice, or the media won’t take it seriously.”
