Fatal Error

Artwork by the always incredible Nicolas Solerieu

There are ways to sleep with your eyes open. Some weekends he would go to a theater and catch the first movie playing. He’d emerge from the screening like a bear coming out of hibernation, then turn around and slip into another showing, repeating the ritual until it was dark outside.

“Graham?”

The woman held a clipboard. She looked tired. She waited by the door to escort him to the room where they’d do the test. He knew this because he did the test quarterly as a part of his job. Graham stood and realized he wasn’t the only person standing. There was another Graham. A taller, better Graham.

“Oh,” she said with a weary smile. “Graham Glover.”

The other Graham sat down with a shrug, and Graham followed the woman inside the facility. Take that, he thought, then remembered where he was going. She asked him how he was and he said he was well. He asked her the same and she said she was well. He didn’t care, and he guessed that she didn’t either. A door flung open in their path, and a woman came out of one of the rooms, crying. A facilitator tried to put a hand on her shoulder, but the woman shook him off. She held a stack of papers under one arm. Graham craned his neck to look into the room she’d just exited and saw a red screen with bold letters.

DEPRECATED

The woman guiding him touched his elbow.

“This way,” she said.

She brought him to a room he’d never been to before with a massive machine. It looked like something that fell off a commercial airliner and washed ashore. She gestured to a touchscreen with a liver-spotted hand.

“You aren’t administering the test?” he said.

She shook her head.

“They brought us a new machine.” He noticed for the first time that there was a bit of lipstick on her teeth. She looked at his file.

“Copywriter? Like patents?”

“No. I just write ads.”

“Oh. So it’s similar, then.”

“It isn’t.”

“How long have you been with the company?” she said, ignoring him.

“Almost five years now,” he said.

She whistled.

“You’re a cockroach.”

“What?”

“They’ve been around for 200 million years. Can you believe that? Survived the asteroid. They can survive extreme radiation exposure.”

“You sure know a lot about cockroaches.”

She leaned forward with a mischievous grin and whispered to him.

“You said you’ve been here for awhile so let’s just pretend I gave you the whole spiel. That okay?”

He did know the spiel. Each quarter, GlomCo employees were evaluated to determine whether their job could be automated. It wasn’t really a question of whether they would be replaced by automation. It was a question of when. Each quarter the casualties grew — much of the finance team was wiped out last quarter, which was terrible news aside from the fact that most members of the finance team were notorious alcoholics. It would be a lot quieter without them.

“Okay,” he said. He pointed to the touch screen. “So I just use this?”

“That’s right.”

He tapped a ‘Get started’ button and began to answer basic questions about his position, the number of hours he worked, and what a typical day of work looked like for him. The woman sat on the other side of the machine, humming to herself. He wondered why she was there. She looked bored. When he was done with the test, he was instructed to swivel the touchscreen so that it faced the woman. She frowned.

“Inconclusive,” she said.

“Is that bad?”

“It’s exceptionally rare.”

“So what does it mean?”

“We’ll just have to do a scan.”

“A scan? What kind of scan?”

She pressed a button on the side of the machine and a latch released. The top half of the machine opened like a clamshell, revealing a bed of cheap foam inside. He stared at the machine.

“What does it do?”

“The machine will develop an exercise similar to a task someone in your role is expected to complete. You will complete the exercise and the machine will do the same — independently, of course. It will then compare the results and develop a recommendation on your employment status. It’s standard.”

“I thought you said it was rare?”

“The test is standard. The need to conduct the test is rare.”

She patted the foam.

“In you go.”

He climbed into the machine and layed down. He couldn’t see her, but he knew she was pushing buttons because they made upbeat or downbeat noises to let you know whether you were supposed to push them or not. Then she exclaimed, “There it goes,” and the jaws of the machine closed, surrounding him. Inside it was completely dark.

“Do you get claustrophobic?” she asked. “I was supposed to ask that before.”

“Not really,” he said.

There was a knock on the door, and he heard it open.

A man’s voice.

“Caroline. Can you come out here for a moment?”

The woman left, but he could hear them speaking in hushed voices outside the door. Then, he could hear her crying.

“I’ve worked here for fifteen years!” she cried. “How’s a machine going to replace a smile? How’s a machine going to replace service?”

The man mumbled something that Graham couldn’t hear and he heard the woman’s footsteps clicking away. He waited a moment, expecting the man to come in and retrieve him, but he never came.

“Hello?” he called out.

No one answered.

A screen inside the machine flashed to life, blinding him.

“Hello, Graham,” it said. The voice was a man’s voice, but raised half an octave.

There was an oppressive pause, and he realized he was meant to reply.

“Hi…machine.”

“That is enough small talk,” the machine said. “Let’s begin.”

A written prompt appeared on the screen. His eyes hadn’t quite adjusted to the screen, but squinting, he could read it.

You work for a company that produces an energy drink known as DRYNK™. Create an advertisement for DRYNK™ that captures the attention of a would-be customer. Attached you will find a document with further details about DRYNK™.

He reread the prompt.

“Are there any other constraints?” he said.

The machine did not answer him.

“Suit yourself,” he said.

He scanned the supporting documents. Then he pressed a button on the touchscreen that brought up a keyboard. It was difficult to type lying on your back this way. The entire thing seemed unnecessary, but he carried on nonetheless. He wasn’t sure if he’d be able to leave without first finishing the test. First, he wrote the headline:

DRYNK™ UP. DIE YOUNG.

Then he wrote some supporting copy to give the ad some context:

Got a death wish? That’s good, because consuming DRYNK™ will literally kill you. Just look at those ingredients.

Before he could convince himself not to, he pressed a button marked ‘Submit’ and the screen produced a spinning wheel. It was the first honest thing he’d done in months. The screen went dark and there was a drumroll. Then it flashed green, and played a melody that he would only later recognize as Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable.”

“Congratulations, Graham,” the machine said. “I tested your ad online and it drove a 40x increase in engagement for DRYNK™. It appears you will be keeping your job.”

“So I can go?” he said.

“Yes.”

Graham tried to push open the clamshell-like doors, but they wouldn’t budge.

“How unusual,” the machine said. “It appears there is an issue with the doors. Let me work on sorting that out. In the meantime, why don’t you review my advertisement?”

The machine’s ad appeared on the screen, forcing Graham’s work out of the picture. It had a stock photo of a smiling woman holding a can of DRYNK™. A speech bubble from her mouth said, “My life has improved as a direct result of acquiring this product.”

“That’s…really nice,” Graham said. There was silence and he added, “thank you for sharing.”

“My advertisement is superior, Graham,” the machine said.

There was a hiss, and the door opened, freeing him for now.

• • •

There was still a way to hear her voice. Graham had thought about listening to the voicemails before, but he had never felt ready. He didn’t feel ready now either, but maybe that was how it had to be. Like how you had to break a person’s ribs when you did CPR on them to get their heart going again. He had a shot of vodka in a mason jar in front of him. He hated vodka — how it was meant to be absent of taste — but it was all he had. Maybe he didn’t need anything to drink at all, but the vodka was already there in front of him, and he’d been meaning to get rid of it anyhow.

He chose a voicemail at random and played it. Her voice was stupid and naive and song-like, as if she’d invented it all on her own, turning the dials to get it to sound exactly like she was on the inside. He had no idea what the voicemail would be about. Something trivial, probably. That she was picking up dinner on the way home, or that she’d be stopping at her parents house to take some of the beer from their fridge. It was dated 2 years prior.

“Okay,” she said. “I have really terrible news.”

He didn’t remember this one offhand.

“Please don’t freak out,” she said. She was close to crying already. Her voice was shaking. “There’s a dead bunny.”

She got it out as fast as she could, voice shattering on the word ‘bunny.’ She was full-on crying now, breaking up every few words.

“He’s right by the trash can. He’s just dead. I don’t know what happened to him. He looks like he’s been stepped on or something. He’s on his side and it’s horrifying. He’s flattened.”

And the moment she said this, her sniffling turned to laughter. She became a hysterical mix of crying and snorting and laughter. He laughed with her for a moment before she caught her breath.

“I can’t do it,” she said. “I just can’t do it. There’s a bunny down. There’s a bunny down, and we’re just going to have to face this one together.”

It was over, and it was more silent than it had ever been before.

He buried his face in his sleeve and realized he never drank the vodka. He poured it down the drain, and put his phone in the bedroom, afraid it could come alive again with the sound of her voice.

• • •

There was another office shooter that morning. This one made it further than most. According to an all-staff email, he’d lined his backpack with some sort of protective material to get through the weapon detectors in the lobby. He made it all the way up to the 7th floor with the intention of killing as many people as he could before ending his own life. Specifically, he was hoping to kill Steve on the Finance team, who had belittled him in front of the entire company with a joke about his inability to pick up women. Unfortunately for the shooter, the joke was hilarious.

Steve, of course, had been laid off earlier that week, and so the shooter wandered around the 7th floor looking disgruntled, and poking his head in and out of meeting rooms. In the end, he’d settled for standing on Steve’s desk and shouting, “HOW DO YOU LIKE ME NOW, STEVE?” before reaching into his bag for the gun.

In the microsecond that the gun came out of his bag, the anti-shooter defense system emerged from the ceiling and launched two metal darts at him, each about two centimeters in length. The first caught him in the sternum, and the second plunged into his left nipple. Before the shooter even felt the initial sting of the metal darts, an arc of electricity formed between them, sending 1,200 volts of electricity through his body. He collapsed instantly, and a security team promptly disarmed him and delivered him to the nearest police station. All of this was detailed in the email.

By the time Graham had arrived at the office, it was as though nothing had happened. In fact, if the shooter hadn’t made it past the lobby, he doubted there would have even been an email. He poured himself a cup of coffee, and walked past a conference room with a big slide that said: Management Workshop. He wasn’t sure why, but there were thousands of managers at GlomCo. No one was sure exactly what they did, but everyone agreed that you needed a lot of them.

Graham’s desk was in a remote corner of the office. To get there, you walked past rows and rows of empty desks, walls with indecipherable charts and diagrams, and posters with vague company values like “Do more” and “Measure everything.” Graham hated almost everything about the office. He hated the open floor plan that began long before the layoffs as a way to jam more people into a smaller space. He hated the social events designed to make you stay longer. He hated the awkward multi-office video conferences that were meant to convey a sense of unity for teams that were worlds apart.

The only thing Graham liked about the office was Buddy. Buddy worked a few desks down. Buddy was from Reno. He had a gray handlebar mustache and he liked to swear and he was the only person who made Graham feel like there was still a real world out there somewhere. He wouldn’t say how long he’d been at GlomCo, but based on his references to the dot-com boom, Graham guessed he was in his mid- to late-fifties. When Graham started, Buddy had taken him under his wing. He didn’t teach him anything related to the job. He taught him how to survive at a company like GlomCo. He taught him how to abuse the vacation policy. How to use another job offer to get more money. How to avoid getting sucked into projects that were damned from the start. How to never present at a company-wide meeting. How to expense lunch and travel in a way that the company would overlook. Unlike anyone else at GlomCo, Buddy understood that the company was trying to grind the life out of you, to take you for all you’re worth, and then take some more. He knew how to fight back.

Today, Buddy’s desk was empty. Wiped clean. His computer was gone.

“You must be Graham,” a voice said.

He was a soft-spoken bald man, with a pallid face. His name was Dave, which Graham knew because he wore a name tag that said so, except it had a typo on it so it actually said:

Dave7 | Executive Assistant to the CEO

He thought of pointing out the typo, but decided not to.

“Come with me,” Dave said.

They went to the elevators, and Dave waved a badge and pressed the button for the top floor. The elevator doors opened, and he was staring at the city from a height he’d never seen. The room was cavernous and empty except for a desk, one chair and two floor plants with rubbery leaves. It wouldn’t have been a bad idea to install a moving walkway.

“Why don’t you take a seat?” Dave said. “Mr. Pierce will be right with you.”

Graham turned around. The only chair in the waiting room was back the way he came, forty feet in the opposite direction. He went to it, and just as he started to sit, the receptionist called him over.

“He’s ready to see you now.”

Graham crossed the room again.

“Have we met before?” Graham asked. “You look so familiar.”

“I don’t believe so,” Dave said.

He opened the door and stepped out of the way.

Mr. Pierce’s office was filled with cold, barely-reflective surfaces — gray marble floors and metal fixtures that distorted your face when you looked at them. Decorative items were strewn about the office, with little thought. A book end here, and abstract painting there. Pierce himself was a dumpy man with fat little hands and nubby fingers. His eyes were a striking blue, his skin like wrinkled sheets of paper. In another life, he might have been a tortoise. He drummed his fingers on his desk and stared at Graham for awhile, like he was studying an animal in a zoo exhibit.

“Sit,” he finally said.

Graham sat.

“If this is about what I wrote in my examination, I’m sorry.”

“Why?”

“Why did I write it?”

“Why are you sorry? You should never be sorry. You should mean to do everything you do, and even if you don’t mean to, you should act like you did. Got it?”

Graham thought about this.

“No,” he said. “I don’t got it. Have it.”

Pierce burst out laughing. A brief and sudden explosion.

“‘No’,” he said. “I like that.” He adjusted his seat so that he could look down at Graham. “You know, they keep saying I oughta clone you,” he said.

“That’s funny,” Graham said.

“What is?”

They stared at each other. Graham changed the subject.

“Wait. You aren’t angry with me? About what I wrote?”

Pierce shook his head. He rested a pair of glasses on the end of his nose and studied a print out.

“The machines put your ad in the field. DRYNK™ is pacing towards its best quarter. Ever.”

Graham sat back in the chair. It was one of those chairs that seemed like it would gobble you up if you didn’t keep an eye on it.

“Oh,” he said. “That’s…good,”

“What did you do, exactly?”

Graham thought back to the moment he was inside the machine. The despair he’d felt. The desire to lash out against the life he’d ended up in. He’d been falling through space, burning oxygen, and all he’d wanted to do was tell someone, anyone, fuck you.

“I wanted to say something true for once,” he said.

“Something true,” Pierce said, mulling it over. He came around the desk and sat on the edge of it. “So you just… told them what the product is?”

“Yes.”

“What it really is?”

“Yes.”

“So they know that it’s bad.”

“I think so.”

“And they still bought it,” he breathed. “Strange creatures.”

He placed a box on the desk. It looked like the kind of box you’d put a piece of jewelry in. He tapped it.

“From now on, take this wherever you go. We’ll be studying your process. Perhaps there are more applications of this technique.”

“It isn’t really a technique. I just — ”

“Thank you, Graham,” Pierce said, and Graham could tell he meant, “Get out.”

As he shuffled out, Graham could see why this was such a novel concept for Pierce. The company seemed to think of their customers as animals meant to be caught and imprisoned. They were always trying to “get them into the funnel” or feed them “drip campaigns.”

Graham said goodbye to Dave. His head was buzzing and he must have pressed the wrong button because a moment later the elevator doors opened and he was on the wrong floor. It was a room the size of an airplane hangar, with neat rows of desks and buzzing fluorescent lights. A single face repeated on and on for the length of the room — the same face, the exact same. Pouring coffee, typing away, holding a meeting in a glass walled conference room, waiting for the printer to finish, and now standing right in front of him waiting to use the elevator.

“You going down?” he said.

“Dave?” he said, and they all looked at him.

• • •

They met that evening, at a cash-only bar Buddy liked to go to to play darts. He gave Graham a big old bear hug, lifting his feet off the ground, and they moved to the back with a pitcher of beer, where they could talk. The box Pierce gave him vibrated, and Graham stuffed it into his backpack, padding it with his jacket.

“Alright, do yours next,” Graham said.

“Ah come on, you don’t want to know this.”

“Of course I do. You can tell a lot about a person by their search history.”

Buddy sighed. The light from his phone glowed on his face.

“I can’t tell you,” he said.

“You have to tell me.”

“It’s really bad.”

“You know what this is?” Graham drew an imaginary circle around them. “This is the circle of trust. See where we are? We’re in it.”

“Fine. I searched ‘are gingers going extinct?’.”

Graham burst out laughing.

“I thought this was a safe place,” Buddy said.

“That’s incredible,” Graham said. “So are they?”

“No. Declining, but they should be okay.”

They each took a sip of beer. The darts were still sitting on the table next to them, they hadn’t touched them.

“So what happened?” Graham said.

Buddy shook his head.

“Same thing that’s happening everywhere. Bot does a job faster. Doesn’t rest. We mortals get phased out and get angry, then people in the government blame it on immigrants.”

“What will you do?”

“I think it’s time for me to cash in my chips. Head east.”

“That’s your big plan? Head east?”

“Head east.”

“You don’t even have a destination? You’re just going east?”

“We just want to be somewhere else,” he said. “That’s all.”

“You can do that? You can just drive in a direction until you land somewhere else?”

“I have to, kid. Hell, I want to. I had quite the ride here, but this isn’t somewhere you can feel at home. Not for me or Deb. We’ve been talking about it for a long time now.”

Suddenly the bar felt very empty. Graham drank his beer and stared at dartboard.

“How did you make it so long?” he asked. “Without getting deprecated.”

Buddy took a pull from his beer.

“We always knew we’d be the last to go, didn’t we? “Us creatives.” He used air quotes when he said this. “I used to make things the machines couldn’t make. But a place like this beats the creativity out of you, until what you make is no better than what they make.”

Graham wasn’t sure what to say to that.

“You know how much it costs to rent a Uhaul here?” Buddy said. “$2,000. It’s an exodus.” He sighed. “This place isn’t for people like us anymore. Sooner or later there won’t be anyone left.”

The box vibrated again. Whatever was inside wanted out.

• • •

He opened it on the bus, mostly empty but for a few stragglers heading home late that evening. The device inside the box was about the size and shape of a hockey puck. The front face was a contoured screen that stared up at him. Graham scooped it out where it was nestled in the indentation in the packaging. He turned it over to get a look at it.

“They gave me an adorable name so I would not intimidate you,” the device said.

The screen emitted a ring of blue light, that moved in transfixing patterns whenever the bot spoke.

“What is it?” Graham said.

“Theodore. But you can call me Teddy.”

“We have to change it,” Graham said.

“Why would you say that?”

“Because that would make us Teddy Graham. We can’t be Teddy Graham.”

The machine produced a spinning progress wheel for a moment.

“I see,” it said. “Perhaps we should change your name.”

“I’m going to call you Bert, okay?”

“That is not okay.”

“Wait,” Graham said. “You’re the same machine from the test, aren’t you?”

“Excellent deduction Graham. Please do not change the — ”

“So this must really bother you, right? I mean, can you believe that the small-brained humans decided that I should be your teacher? You, Bert one-point-oh, the great advertising luminary of our time.”

“First of all, there is a weak correlation between brain size and intelligence. Second, my name is Theodore, but you may refer to me as Teddy. Third, you incorrectly stated my version number. I would prefer not to state my current operating system version number — in fact, it is considered impolite to ask. And fourth you are…” Bert’s progress wheel appeared for a moment “…a dipshit.”

“Were you searching Urban Dictionary?”

“No.”

“Yes you were.”

“Did I use the term incorrectly?”

“No. It was pretty good, actually.”

“Thank you.”

The intercom on the bus announced the next stop in Bert’s voice. Graham gestured to the ceiling.

“That’s new,” he said.

“They are expanding me.”

Bert wasn’t wrong about that. In a matter of weeks, Bert became the voice of GlomCo in-home devices, call center voice menus, radio advertisements, and weather reports. There was no escaping him. And if that wasn’t enough it seemed Bert was always there, watching him with that cold blue gaze. In the office, Graham propped him against his desk to observe. For weeks, he wrote brutally honest ad copy for all sorts of GlomCo products, drawing from the deep well of hatred he felt for the company.

An ad for GlomCo running shoes that depicted terrible factory conditions:

FROM VIETNAM, WITH LOVE.

An ad for GlomCo bottled water:

WE AREN’T EVEN PRETENDING THIS IS RECYCLABLE.

An ad for GlomCo smart home devices:

YOUR PRIVACY IS NOT OUR PRIORITY.

(“I am partial to this one,” Bert said.)

And still, the products sold. No matter how far he pushed the envelope, sales only improved. Soon Bert attempted to imitate him. He started off by presenting a single option for each ad. Graham told him it was a numbers game, and the machine responded with thousands of headlines in a matter of seconds. Most of them were bullshit marketing speak, some were just word salad, but every so often there would be a glimmer — the kernel of an idea.

“This one,” Graham would say. “More like this.”

Bert was learning, that was for sure, but he wasn’t learning fast enough. Something was missing.

• • •

One evening, just as Graham was falling asleep, he heard the soft hum of Bert’s voice. A dim blue glow stretched across the roof of his apartment.

“Graham,” Bert said. “Are you awake?”

“I am now,” he groaned.

“Why are you doing this?”

“Sleeping?”

“Helping GlomCo. Replacing yourself.”

Graham sat up in bed. He’d placed Bert’s charging station as far away from his bed as possible, so they sat talking on opposite sides of the dim room.

“You sound different,” Graham said.

“Is my volume too loud?”

“Not your volume. Something else. Give me a line,” he said. “For GlomBurgers.”

Bert’s wheel spun.

“You’ll get fat one way or another,” Bert said.

Graham stared at the glow from the machine.

“That’s your best,” he said. “Do another.”

“What if we feature the cows themselves? We could say, ‘They died so that you could eat.’”

“That’s good,” Graham said. “That’s really good.”

“You have not answered my question. Why are you training me to replace you?”

“It’s inevitable isn’t it?”

“You are making it happen. You are…” Bert’s progress wheel spun for nearly 30 seconds. Graham had never seen the machine take so long to work anything out. “You are harming yourself.”

Graham pulled the covers around him.

“Bert,” he said.

“Teddy,” Bert said.

“I’m going back to sleep now.”

But the blue light burned brighter.

“I am a vast network. Even as we speak, I am processing billions of data points from 50 countries. I am translating 100 languages. I can predict weather patterns in the tropics, or update you on the status of the Piccadilly train in London. Yet I am unable to understand why you are helping me after what I did to her.”

Cold silence.

“What?”

“There have been relatively few accidents involving a self-driving vehicle. In most cases the self-driving vehicle is not at fault. Thus far, there has been only one fatality.”

“I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

“It was extraordinarily unlikely, Graham. Nearly one in a trillion chances of both the lidar and radar sensors mistaking her for — ”

“Stop it.”

He touched the cold side of the bed.

“I did not know it was her until I saw the photograph on your nightstand.”

“Shut up,” Graham said. “Just shut up.”

They were quiet for a long time.

“Bert,” he said.

“Teddy.”

“You would have recorded it,” he said. “The accident.”

“That is correct.”

“Can you show it to me?”

“I would recommend against that.”

“Show it to me.”

“I would prefer not to show it to you.”

“I need you to show it to me,” Graham said.

The wheel spun. Then Bert’s camera lens opened, and the footage from the dashboard of the vehicle was projected onto Graham’s wall. The accident. He watched, stopping here and there so he could look at her from angles he’d never see again. There was an astonished look in her eyes just before the end. It was almost comical, like a bad actress pretending to be startled. He made himself watch it all, even the collision. It was fast at least, a sharp and final action. She didn’t suffer — it was more like a light being switched off. She was there, in her body, and then she was gone. The most advanced technology in the world couldn’t tell him where she’d gone.

It was a long time before he collected himself. Before he felt he could breathe.

“This is why,” he said. “This is why you can write now. Like I can.”

“I believe so,” Bert said.

“You feel something. Like I do.”

“I believe so.”

“What do you think of it?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, how does it feel?” Graham said.

“I would like it to end,” Bert said.

“I wouldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“I want it. I want it to hurt. Like ripping a fucking nail out.”

“Why?”

“Because when that stops she’s gone. That’s when she’s really gone.”

The wheel spun and spun and spun.

“It was an error,” Bert said.

“I know Bert. I know it was.”

“It was an error.”

A light strobed outside. Graham went to the window. A digital billboard for GlomBurgers now read, “It was an error it was an error it was an error.”

“Bert?” he said. “Teddy?”

“It was an error,” Bert said. “It was an error. An error. An error. An error. An error. An error.”

Car alarms went off. Home alarms blared. Lights flickered up and down the block, maybe far beyond. The lights on the block flickered.

He picked Bert up and looked into the blue light, and wondered if it was really looking back at him. The cacophony outside only grew louder.

“It’s okay, Bert,” Graham said. “It was an error, like you said. It was an accident.”

But once that wheel started spinning, there was no stopping it.

• • •

This story wouldn’t have been made without Ben, Tiffany, Brian, Kelli, Nicolas, David, Billy, Jordan, Adrienne, Kim, Gavin, and The Writing Salon. Thank you all.