 
In Constant Contact

by Tom Lichtenberg

Smashwords Edition copyright 2011 by Tom Lichtenberg

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.

In Constant Contact

From the far corner of her executive suite on the top floor of the fancy new headquarters of Syomatix Incorporated, Kandhi Clarke sorted through the latest batch of job applications for the position of Professional Friend. She had a bad feeling about everything. Ever since the latest round of financing, the various vice presidents in charge of Big Ideas had been full of really bad ones. Chalk it up to buzzwords, but they were falling all over each other trying to come up with concepts that fit the sizzling hot categories of contagion, milk and transparency. White boards had been filled with scribbles, meetings had been scheduled, rescheduled and rescheduled again, and this was the best they came up with? Imaginary so-called friends?

Well, that's what Kandhi called it, anyway. The formal term, Professional Friend, had been settled on after many panicky late-night sessions. It was to be a service. A service service, if you will. Your very own Professional Friend would be there whenever you needed one, three hundred sixty five and twenty four seven. It would be ready for whatever it was needed for, and would be guaranteed to never let you down, unlike an actual, amateur friend. It would be worth every penny of the yet-to-be-determined price. Everyone was going to be delighted for sure. So far the project was only in the beta stage of development, and it was Kandhi's job, as Vice President of Product Quality to make sure they got it right before unleashing it on the general public, or at least until they go it "right enough," since the higher-ups were sure to override Kandhi's best judgment once a drop dead date was reached.

Kandhi sighed. Sure, she had a nice view of the train tracks from her ergonomically balanced seat, but she knew that her influence had been waning since the early days of the company, when she'd been the first employee hired by the two founders, Tom and Chris. Back then the company has been known as World Weary Avengers, which must have meant something to someone at some time, but Kandhi had never known what or to whom. Now, at the insistence of the money people it had the more suggestive name of Syomatix. What that was meant to suggest, however, was also anybody's guess.

This new product had begun with an invention. The first founder, Tom, was always coming up with something, then leaving it to the second founder, Chris, and his marketing team, to figure out what to do with it. In this case it was an ordinary-looking rubber wristband which resembled one of those inspirational things companies like to give to employees with engraved mottoes such as 'Never Give Up', or 'One Team One Fight'. The Syomatix wristband, though, was not quite so simple. It was a wearable that contained, among other things, wireless connectivity, a transparent video screen and a host of transponders and sensors which responded to various forms of tactile input. Tom called it the Highly Adaptive Friendular System, or HAFS for short. It was meant to be used for what Chris called 'constant contact'. When Tom had first brought it up to show Kandhi (Tom always worked in the basement, even in the shiny new headquarters), her first reaction had been

"Eeww?"

Tom smiled and patiently explained.

"You never need to make a phone call to be in touch. You're always in touch! Connected, continually and constantly."

"What if you don't want to be?" she countered. The idea was not intuitive for her, as she was not a needy person by nature. The whole idea of constant contact frankly grossed her out.

"Our customers will be the kind who want to be," Tom assured her. "That's the point. We're making a product for a certain type of person, not just something for anyone. But anyway, that's not for you or me to worry about. I just invent the thing. You just make sure it works the way it should. Chris and his people will take care of getting it into the hands of the customer."

"I don't know," Kandhi had argued. "Maybe I'm not the right person for this one."

"It has to be you," Tom informed her. "I can't rely on anyone else. I know you'll do the right thing."

And that was that. Once Tom had made up his mind it was useless to resist. The plan had then gone through the regular channels before ending up on her calendar. She had hoped it would have been set aside or canceled outright but no, whatever Tom wanted Tom got, in the end. He was, after all, the only reason the company existed in the first place. As a startup, WWA had made its name through some very secretive government contracts. Those inventions, far too unethical to be sold in the open marketplace, had proven quite useful to certain intelligence agencies around the world. Very bad things, Kandhi was sure, had been done with those gadgets. Very bad things indeed, and this one had just as much awful potential as anything Tom had ever come up with, which was saying a lot. Kandhi didn't like to think about such matters.

Instead she told herself to think about the prey. "I mean the customer," she corrected herself. The kind of person who would want such a service. The first thing that came to mind was a little old lady who needed someone to complain to. Constant contact would work for her. Or a teenage girl who couldn't stop chattering. Not too many men would be game, Kandhi thought, or am I wrong about that? A man with a permanent friend would never have to tell anybody about it if he didn't want to. In this case, she reasoned, we'll need differently designed bands. With this thought fresh in her mind, she dashed off a memo to Iris in Design. As soon as she clicked the Send button it struck her that Iris would be a perfect test subject. Here was someone who would have preferred the socialnet to be delivered via intravenous drip. Iris was always checking her feeds, continually refreshing her lists, desperate for any new comments from any of her thirteen thousand three hundred and four pursuants, and yet Iris hardly ever posted a quip of her own. Kandhi tapped a sticky note to herself on her laptop with one word: Iris.

"Ok," Kandhi composed herself. She had somewhere to start, a mental target and a shaft of arrows in the form of applicants. One of those might suit the purpose. Armed with a plan, Kandhi felt a lot more at ease. The job was following a familiar pattern and once she could see its contours, she could sense a way out. She still disapproved, but hadn't she been critical of every single product that came out of this place? It was the reason she was still on board, the reason she'd been promoted this high up. Barely thirty years old with no conventional technical background to speak of, Kandhi's success was due entirely to her own efforts and the confidence that Tom and Chris had placed in her. She had many critics and enemies in the building, not the least of whom was Ginger MacAvoy, Head of Security. Ginger had gone behind her back and over her head so many times that Kandhi had penciled it in as merely a part of the regular process. There was bound to come a day when Ginger would appear in that very office, with the look of a demon from hell, informing Kandhi of some seriously disastrous development. It was Kandhi's Second Law of Nature – for every action undertaken, the wrath of Ginger would follow.

Kandhi felt small in her over-sized office. She had crammed her small desk way back into the corner, at an angle facing the door on her left. To her right she could see out the window and outside the door was the hallway, perfectly visible through the glass wall. The rest of the office, aside from the desk, was empty, except for the two small visitor's chairs placed directly in front of her desk. The carpet was gray. The walls were gray. Her desk was gray too. The building itself was all glass and steel girders, transparent and gray, all six stories surrounded by the gray parking lot and the gray murky river beneath the old drawbridge.

"How did we ever get to this point?" Kandhi asked herself. Three hundred seventeen people now worked for the still-private company and Kandhi couldn't begin to imagine what they all did. Clearly many were needed for sheer infrastructure; to keep the building running, the computers humming, the telephones answered and the cafeteria stocked. Others were kept busy writing software to be embedded in the company's various and nefarious devices. Kandhi had a small team working for her testing those gadgets and the software within them. Then there were lawyers and designers, human resources, and the utterly useless project and program managers whose only work consisted in attending meetings and perpetually changing other people's schedules. There were people who did the shipping and receiving, people who sorted the mail, people who watered the plants. It takes an army, she thought, to do practically any old thing.

She was biting her nails. A bad sign. Focus, she reminded herself, and then laughed at the thought that while there's "No I in Team" there's definitely an F and a U in Focus. Professional Friends, she considered. Those who would be them, and those who would need them. Think, Kandhi, think, and stop fussing around. You've done this before, you can do it again. Beta testing is just herding sheep, nothing to it, as opposed to the usual herding required in this field. She picked up the pile of printed out job applications and shuffled 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 pressure. 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 had a subtle way of reinforcing certain concepts while downplaying others in a mild, seemingly pragmatic and sincere manner. Its biases were also "adjustable," he knew. "Highly Adjustable," in fact, according its User Guide. No wonder the 'Memorizer' had become embedded in the orientation processes of new hires from mega-corporations to members of Congress.

"Repeat After Me," Fred muttered, appalled at the recollection. I really should quit this stinking job, he often said to himself, but then again, his hours were his own and his tactics were rarely questioned. He had unrestricted liberty to test the projects in any fashion he desired, and the pay could not be beat, not by a long shot. He couldn't earn half as much anywhere else in the state and he knew it. Yet he knew that his freedom was bound tightly within certain limits, often undetectable even to himself. He was guided on invisible rails, and the outcome of his efforts seemed predetermined every time. Quality was defined high above him. He only ratted out the failures and spelled out the contours of their infamy. Some day he'd assert his will, he swore. He'd bring one of these devices to its knees.

"Wen?" he shouted.

"Now," replied his partner, Wen Li, from the adjacent cubicle. It was their little joke. "How soon is now," Fred was supposed to reply, but this time he only said,

"Yes."

Wen popped her head up over the wall and gazed down at him through equally thick-lensed glasses, though hers were pink and round where his were green and rectangular. In contrast to his long hair, hers was cut very short, in a bowl above her ears. She was taller than him, slighter too, and while a studious and proficient programmer, she was short on the innovation side. It took a combination of Fred's wild-assed intuition and Wen's deep skills to bore deeply into the most arcane assignments.

"Help me pick out some bunnies," he asked.

"Sure thing," she smiled, and in moments was rolling her own chair around the aisle and into his space.

"What do we got?" she wanted to know. "Deaf, dumb or blind?"

"Matchups," he told her, and explained the task in general terms.

"Bunnies for buddies," she nodded. "Got it. But tell me, these friends, they have requirements? How are they scored?"

"Don't know," Fred shook his head. "We'll have to make it up as we go along."

"Ah, the usual," Wen winked. "We want fresh faces this time or recyclables?"

"I'd go with fresh," Fred said, "but second-rate types. We don't want to waste any good ones with this piece of junk."

The beta set was not of their own choosing. Wen and Fred didn't even know how the people ended up in the queue. Someone put them in there, probably a marketing intern. Each Beta Bunny had a profile, complete with portrait, job history, personality overview, hobby list and previous record as subjects when applicable. With a few clicks Fred eliminated the ABC candidates (already been chewed). That still left a list of more then twenty five prospects.

"Matchup how?" Wen wanted to know, and Fred told her about the three Test Friends.

"For track coach, we want someone physical, at least," Wen considered. "For cashier, someone with money. For barber I don't know."

"I was thinking someone green," Fred mumbled.

"Could be," Wen replied, "but the barber's an old-timer, right? Is he going to relate?"

"Mix it up," said Fred. "Make one harder than the others."

"Right enough," she nodded. "Make them all degrees I would say."

"Physical, eh?" Fred murmured, studying the list. "Maybe someone who works outside, walks around."

"Construction?" Wen suggested.

"Or mobile," Fred replied. "Someone in the thick of things. Policeman? Fireman?"

"Driver," she said, and Fred snapped his fingers.

"Driver!" he agreed, "and we've got one right here. Dave Claunney. FedCorTron Delivery Systems. Thirty two years old. Unmarried. Six two, two hundred twenty pounds. Got a handlebar mustache! Never see that every day."

"Sweet," Wen said. "Adventurous, too. Cliff-diver, hang-glider. Sort of good-looking," she added admiringly, "but he definitely needs a good shave," she said.

"Hannah Lincum," Fred pointed at the screen. "Widow. Hospital volunteer. Fifty-seven years old. Kids long since grown up, two of those."

"Very high credit score."

"Lives in SoCal. That gives her a culture-share at least with the Less4Less lady."

"I like it," Wen agreed.

"Last one then," Fred counted, "for the barber."

"Pick at random?"

"Why not?" Fred chuckled. "I'll sort the list somehow. You close your eyes, okay? Then pick a number between 1 and 17. That'll be the spreadsheet row we take."

"Got it," Wen replied, and closed her eyes. Fred selected the hobby column and sorted the list in reverse alphabetical order.

"I pick the number One," Wen informed him, and Fred said,

"Number One it is," and then laughed out loud.

"Check this guy out! He says that his favorite past-time is telepathy," he chortled. "Who would have put down something like that?"

"He also likes big dogs," Wen added with a smile, "All kinds of animals too. Says he has a special connection with them, like they are his cousins. Really, he says cousins."

"Stanley Smellyear, meet Nathaniel Woodward," Fred concluded. "Nate, meet Stan!"

He copied the selected subjects into a spreadsheet of their own, indicating the chosen matchups with some vague notes about their reasoning, and emailed it to Kandhi.

"The boss is going to be happy," he decided. "She always likes it when we take care of her business."

\- - - - - - - - -

Kandhi thought it would be best if all of the "friends" were brought together for an initial get-together session, so she set up a video conference. The timing had to be a little strange because of time zone differentials, but Bilj Bjurnjurd said he didn't mind joining in at nine at night, which was one in the afternoon for Stanley, and ten in the morning for Velicia and the San Francisco-based Syomatix. Kandhi would have preferred an earlier start time, but even ten was pushing it for Fred, who preferred to stagger in around noon if he could, often hanging around until after midnight. Wen was strictly nine to five, as no-nonsense with her schedule as she was with her test code.

After the usual messing around with the computers, which never seemed to work as expected, especially since Velicia insisted on using her Apple products while Stanley was a Microsoft man and Bilj was strictly Unix, the six attendees finally got to the point where they all could see and hear each other without too many hiccups or delays. Kandhi sat at the head of a small round table barely large enough to hold all three of their laptops and the speaker-phone. Kandhi herself took up as much space as her two assistants did. The years had been adding sequentially to her padding, and she was now thoroughly rounded all over, including a globe-like helmet of brown hair. All traces of its former bright pink coloring were gone now, as was her collection of facial and other bodily piercings. She had settled into an adulthood acceptable even to her mother, a fact she tried very hard not to think about.

To her right sat the hunched-over Fred, scowling as usual. Across the table the proper Wen Li nearly towered in contrast, but was herself nearly hidden from view by her boss. Wen was dressed neatly in a tweed dress suit, in contrast to Fred's jeans and t-shirt, and Kandhi's extra large sweats. On the wall screen projected from Kandhi's laptop, the three beta friends loomed, each in their own window. On the left was Bilj Bjurnjurd, tall, skeletal and bald, shrinking into an armless rocking chair with a well-worn Indian blanket draped over his legs. His narrow black eyes were the brightest objects in view, seeming to pierce the vast distance and penetrate right into the conference room. In the middle, Velicia Lightning Bug, wearing a flowery floor-length cotton dress, was surrounded by plants draped down from her ceiling. On the right, Stanley Smellyear, short, stout and sweating from every pore, seemed to have called in from the back of his barbershop. From his window various sounds came bleeding through, murmurs, snippings, buzzings and occasional shouts and guffaws. Fred glared at Kandhi, expecting her to demand that Stanley do something to mitigate the background noise, but she didn't. Instead, she got down to business, as Fred shook his weary head and sighed.

"As you know," Kandhi began, after a brief round of formal introductions, "we have selected the three of you as our initial professional test friends. You have all been paired up with beta clients. We'll talk more about them later. First, I want to go over the guidelines and procedures we intend to use in this process. Now, I see you all have your HAFS."

"Halfs?" Velicia interrupted, placing her face so close to the screen as she spoke that all anyone could see of her was her nostrils and the top of her lip.

"HAFS," Kandhi repeated. "H.A.F.S.. As the document enclosed with the shipment explained. HAFS stands for Highly Adaptive Friendular System, and ..."

Now it was Bilj's turn to interrupt with a seriously loud cackle, followed by a choking sound.

"Sorry," he stammered, "Didn't mean to. It's just. Friendular. Ha ha!" and he burst out laughing again.

"Yes, well, in any case," Kandhi frowned. "The wristband. Let's just call it the wristband. You all have your wristbands, correct?"

"Mine's right here," Stanley, comfortably attired in a plain white t-shirt which barely concealed the upper part of his belly, lifted the purple velvet-lined box in which they had shipped the device.

"Mine too," said Velicia, cupping the band in the palm of her hand and holding it out toward the screen like an offering. Her pale face, containing a pair of light blue eyes above which no eyebrows resided, was dwarfed by reams of the lightest blond hair which seemed to drift perpetually skyward, as if propelled by some hidden fan below.

"Locked and loaded," Bilj checked in, holding up his wrist to demonstrate the object was firmly attached.

"They should all be wearing them," Fred muttered. "As per the email."

"Yes," Kandhi murmured back, and then louder she announced, "Stanley and Velicia, would you please also put the, uh, the wristbands, on your wrists?"

"Which arm?" Velicia asked.

"It doesn't matter," Kandhi replied. "Whichever is most comfortable for you."

"I'm ambidextrous," she informed them. "So it doesn't matter to me. If you have a preference, that is."

"We don't," Kandhi assured her. "It will work just as well either way."

"Well, in that case," Velicia decided, "I will wear it on my left wrist. That way it will be more in tune with my right brain. I think that might be important. You may want to tell the others to do the same."

"We'll certainly take it under advisement," Kandhi promised. "Fred, take a note?"

"Oh yes certainly," Fred groaned. He was already becoming personally allergic to Velicia. We got a real winner with this one, he thought. Wen was busily monitoring the actual signals that began to pour through from the three beta subjects. She was well prepared, having tested one of the prototype HAFSes on her own wrist. She had written a test harness complete with inputs and outputs, charts and reports, live graphs and a document database from which she could glean analytics in abundance. She knew to expect connection statuses, data throughputs, text and images, video streams, audio, and was already prepared for more. She had questioned developers who insisted she had already covered the bases and then some, but she didn't believe them. There were packets encoded in nefarious ways, private protocols that seemed to be scrambled. The audio/video streams were loaded with more data than could be explained by the codec decoders. But she couldn't figure out everything at once. There was simply too much going on, and there was of course the usual shortage of time.

Once Velicia and Stanley and Bilj were strapped in the information flowed thick and fast like primordial lava. Wen was cursing under her breath. Three at once was much too much. How were they going to scale up? What kind of monitoring system were they imagining could handle the load? The throughput was going to be staggering, and the subjects had barely even started their work. They were merely going through the most basic training and already she was thinking in petabytes!

"There are a few most commonly used interactions," Kandhi explained. "You can tap on the band, or pull and release, or rub or pinch or swipe. Each of these gestures can be expanded in context. For example, a brief triple tap could be used for a kind of alert. There are built-in defaults, but each gesture is completely configurable, so you can act in whichever fashion works best for you. You'll want to live with it, try it, try different things. Now, can you see the response tabs on your screens?"

They all nodded. The HAFSes were connected to a wireless application that let them set preferences and settings. The options were far too complex for Fred's liking. Especially for an initial release, it seemed crazy to let the user customize practically every aspect of the device. How was anyone in house supposed to keep track of an infinite variety of settings? Everything would be happening in real time, after all, and the people in Ops could not be expected to know about every possible combination and signaling pattern. It was simply insane. Fred had already complained long and hard to Kandhi, who'd sympathized and told him to file bugs. He had done so and seen them rejected as "Behaves As Designed." He'd flamed the internal socialnet with a firehose of bile, but all of his comments were ignored and marked down as 'Fred Behaving As Expected'.

"The same old dance," he complained to himself. Kandhi could see it in his eyes. She was accustomed to his trademark misanthropy. Couldn't live without it, in fact, which didn't mean she had to like it, or like him even. Sitting there now with these strangers and her team, she had a sudden sense of massive dejection. Failure is always an option, she reminded herself, and yet, my employees do work hard, as intractable as they can be from time to time.

"So you're telling me," Bilj was expounding, "that every word I say is transmitted through the wristband connection and changed into text that scrolls on the wristband receiver?"

"You can see it right here," Fred acknowledged, directing the attention of all to his own wrist.

"This HAFS is paired up with yours," he told Bilj. "I'm adjusting the font size and color right now. Can you see it?"

Floating across the beige wristband on Fred's arm were the words, "scrolls on the wristband receiver?"

"I can adjust the velocity as well as the font," Fred explained. "I can also press pause, rewind, and repeat using the default gestures like this," and he went through a series of taps, demonstrating the effect, causing Bilj's entire question to be replayed across his wrist.

"Now, using the default double-tap gesture," Fred went on, emphasizing the word "default" at every turn, hoping to reinforce by suggestion the idea that no one should even consider mucking around with the settings, "I can select audio instead of text, like this."

After he made that standardized movement, the text disappeared, and instead, coming from some kind of invisible speaker build into the wristband, came a mechanized voice repeating everything that Bilj had said, with very close to the same inflections and intonations.

"I used a default voice setting," Fred mentioned, deliberately not mentioning the several dozen selectable variations, not to mention the alternate language translations. This whole thing is going to be a nightmare, he said to himself, and we haven't even gotten to the video yet, not to mention the audio earbuds for privacy.

"So the customer can choose whether to read us or hear us," Bilj nodded.

"What if they're not looking?" Velicia asked.

"Excuse me?" Kandhi said.

"When you're telling them something," Velicia went on. "What if they aren't paying attention."

"We'll cover that in the guidelines," Kandhi informed her. "For now let's just assume that they are."

"Nobody ever listens," Stanley put in, at which Kandhi and Fred exchanged glances, but chose to ignore him.

"To be a good friend," Velicia replied, "You have to be a good listener."

"Yeah, you," Stanley said, "but you're the friend. I was talking about them. The customer. You're like their servant is how I see this thing playing out."

"We'll talk later about process," Kandhi tried to inject, but Velicia got there first.

"It will be a collaboration," Velicia addressed Stanley. "You do your part and bring them along. Once you get to know them, you'll see."

"Moving on," Kandhi said, loudly enough to bring the side conversation to a halt. "We will be monitoring your connections from here. Our vantage point will enable us to assist you at any time should need arise."

"In other words, you can intervene whenever you see fit," Bilj noted. "That goes for the other side too, I presume?"

"Both players are wearing the HAFS," Kandhi agreed, "and both sides are connected through us, that's correct."

"Can you zap us?" Stanley wanted to know.

"Zap you?" Kandhi did not understand.

"Yeah, like send some kind of electrical shock. This thing's got the feel of one of them dog collars they use for not barking, where they zap the poor critter. You can't do that to us, can you?"

"Of course not," Kandhi replied, but Fred and Wen raised their eyebrows and made mental notes to double-check up on that, just in case. They wouldn't put it past the developers or especially Tom, who were all well-known for implementing what they called "features" like that.

"We can interrupt transmission, of course," Kandhi said, "but that's all. We can communicate directly to either partner through the same device."

"How can we tell who is talking?" Bilj asked. "If it's you or it's them?"

"We use a special text style when it's us," Kandhi said, "Fred. show them?"

"This is us now," Fred typed into his keyboard, and told them to look at their wristbands.

"It tickled," Stan said.

"I thought so too," giggled Velicia.

"I felt something," Bilj agreed.

"That's the default notification sensation," Fred told them. "It's meant to merely caress the arm hairs."

"So you CAN send out shocks," Stanley grumbled.

"Just a tickle," Kandhi said.

"I don't like it," Stanley emphasized.

"Okay," Kandhi said, "moving on."

"Can we sleep with the thing?" Stanley asked.

"What about bathing?" Velicia wanted to know.

"All of that will be covered in guidelines," Kandhi said, while thinking this was going to be a long meeting.

\- - - - - - - - -

It did turn out to be a very long meeting. The three chosen friends each had an opinion about the default operations of the device as well as the application interface and every other topic that came up. The discussion ratcheted up Fred's irritation until he was near screaming at them.

"Listen," he blurted out finally. "This is the way the thing works, okay? When we change things, we will let you know, but for now, if you want to use it, this is it. You put the wristband on your wrist, you do the gestures, you listen, you talk, you read, you type on your laptop or your phone. You get notifications. We get the logs. We're always right here in the middle. If you have any problems, we're here. Is it clear?"

"Thank you, Fred," Kandhi said, wanting to elbow him right off of his seat and onto the floor, but his snippy fit did the trick. The professional friends did finally shut up and let Kandhi conclude the initial training portion of the meeting. After that it got worse. They still had the guidelines to talk about. The guidelines consisted in "how to be a friend," and there was a lot of discussion around that tricky topic. Kandhi had thought she had it nailed down pretty tight. You were to "be there" for the client. You were to "assist" as best you can. You were to "be considerate" and "thoughtful." You were to "be positive". After all, it's a business. You were NOT to be an ordinary, average everyday friend with your own problems and issues. You were NOT to be a mere acquaintance, disinterested or uncaring. Neither were you to interfere, get over-involved, be clingy or needy. She thought she had all this summarized in a few bullet points, but it didn't go over very well.

"What does any of that even mean?" Stanley bristled. "I know what a friend is. Why so complicated?"

"I think we all need to know our own limitations," Velicia said, and Bilj added, thoughtfully, that it seemed to him, as the project was in beta, that they should be discovering the way it should work as they went along, rather than trying to pre-define it.

"We have to have ground rules," Kandhi insisted.

"No we don't," Stanley countered.

"Some things are obvious," Bilj put in, "like don't be an asshole, for one thing."

"Sometimes a true friend has to cross some boundaries," Velicia disagreed.

"I call it the way I see it," Stanley insisted. "I ain't gonna try and be what I'm not. You put me into the program and I'll do it my way."

"We each have our own identities," Velicia piped up. "You can't expect us to be standardized like robots."

Just what I was thinking, Fred muttered to himself. We ought to have done this in software from beginning to end. Automated friends, not real ones. It would have been a whole lot easier to monitor, track, measure, and stick with the program. This whole thing's got disaster written all over it.

"Can we find common ground?" Kandhi asked. "I do think you all have a point, or points, so to speak. We most certainly will have some trial and error to go through. We most certainly do want your own individual takes and approaches. We don't mean to pre-define all your actions. We just want to come to some common agreement on the most basic principles, like, "do good, not bad."

"I'll go with that," Stanley said. "That's mostly my rule anyway. It's a business, like you said. In my barbershop, the customer is always right in the end. If it's some little thing, well, I can tell just how far I can go. Like, say if the guy is moaning about the Pirates, the fact that they always suck. I'll say, hey, at least we still got a major league franchise, but I won't tell him to eat shit and die, for example."

"Nice," Fred grumbled.

"A friend is there to be there," Bilj agreed, "but he's got to be a person too in some way. Otherwise it's going to seem fake."

"I always put my own stamp on things," said Velicia, smiling and nodding.

"Okay," Kandhi said, "Good enough. Now, as for the other guidelines."

"What? There's more?" Stanley spat.

"Almost done," Kandhi said, "I just wanted to let you all know that you do not have to be available twenty-four seven. You can state your own hours and let your friend know what they are, when it's convenient for you. If you can't work it out between you, let us know."

"I imagine you'll know anyway," offered Bilj, "since you have constant live coverage of everything."

"If you can't work it out, we'll do something," Kandhi went on. "Let's hope that you can. Now, we - I mean the three of us here - still have to do our initial session with your clients. After we've done that, we'll brief you on them and do formal introductions in another session. In the meantime, we've sent you a spreadsheet of some functional tests. We'd like you all to go through the list to make sure that we're all perfectly on the same page. Please try and do that within the next twenty-four hours. Okay?"

"Fine," Stanley said, always the first to butt in.

"Got it," said Bilj.

"Yes," said Velicia, then they all said their goodbyes. After the connection was broken, Kandhi leaned back and said,

"Well, that went pretty well, don't you think?"

"It went," Fred mumbled.

"Not so bad," Wen agreed.

"Then we'll get to the clients next," Kandhi went on. "In two hours from now. See you then," and she stood up, gathered her laptop and exited the room. Fred and Wen lingered for a minute.

"Bad things," Fred said.

"Maybe so," said Wen. "Maybe nothing. My worst fear is it's going to be boring."

"Stanley-style," nodded Fred.

"Holy smokes," Wen laughed. "Is that guy old-fashioned or what?"

"And the New Age Velicia," Fred snorted. "I was wondering where she was hiding her crystals."

"But Bilj seems all right," Wen added thoughtfully.

"Has a clue," Fred reluctantly assented.

"Well, back to the grinder," he added, and the two of them also picked up their things and took off.

\- - - - - - - - -

Fred's disgust for the project went beyond his usual negative attitude. Sure, he was a whiner and complainer on the best of days but lately, since he'd been assigned to 'Fiend International', as he called it, he was closer to quitting than ever. Wen Li paid no attention to his "moods." She didn't understand him, never did and never would, and didn't care to at all. For her, it was all about doing the job. Ethics, morality, justice, none of those abstract concepts ever invaded her world of if, else, and then. She was a thorough professional, having been a developer in her homeland for several years in such industries as banking and insurance. She'd welcomed the opportunity to come to America and didn't even care what line of work she went into. She would always do whatever it took, and she would always excel and exceed expectations. This was her way and it was working for her. Emotional attachment to projects and companies and machines seemed unnatural to Wen. She still lived by the rules her grandmother laid down while raising her: be real, be present, and maximize every moment. She believed she was doing so now, every day. She took every occasion as an opportunity to experience a facet of existence. If she came off seeming somewhat antiseptic, well, this was only her way. Some day she knew she would meet a compatible match. Until then she was content to continue the life her grandmother had left her. In a sense, she felt she was merely the next incarnation of that estimable woman.

Fred did not invite Wen to lunch. He knew she would only want soup, and he was tired to death of those Vietnamese steakums in dishwater. He went his own way instead, hurrying off to what he hoped would be a long, quiet lunch, perhaps sitting in the park all alone with some lamb biryani and the dreary Inspector Mole novel he was seemingly unable to finish. The novel was short, a blessing in itself, but confusing, with too many characters and a plot like a pinball machine. His envisioned lunch plan, though, was not to be had. Puku Taray, from Marketing, caught him on the way out the door and there was no getting rid of that leech.

Puku was in on all the top secret memos, which was the only reason Fred even tolerated him. Now, as they made their way through the line at the Indian buffet, he hinted that he wanted to know more about the intention of this project. Puku was only happy to oblige.

"It's a service," bubbled the small, thin, happy young man behind his own thick, black-rimmed glasses. "Incremental charges. Brilliant, really. It was all the idea of Chris, you know. He gleaned it from the personal experience of his life, so he said."

Everyone knew about Chris, the other founder. This man, whose last name nobody seemed to know, was the long-time best friend and public side of the other, also-last-name-less founder. Together they had started World Weary Avengers based on a surreptitious and thoroughly maniacal personal stalking device and had grown the company through other equally invasive and outrageous inventions. Chris was tall and handsome, with a full head of curly blond locks and a look about him that somehow managed to invoke instant and boundless obedience and obsequiousness from everyone in the world. People who didn't even know him would rush to give him things, to ask what he wanted, to grant him the most personal favors. It was notorious. The man lived in a mansion that had been randomly donated to him by the world's seventeenth richest man, and drove a car that a world-famous athlete "thought he might like." People didn't talk in their normal voices to Chris, but stuttered and stammered in his presence. Chris himself was modest and mild, never asked for anything, never presented himself as anything but a normal guy in his mid-thirties, but he might as well have worn a crown on his head, the way people fussed all around him. Even Fred was known to crack a smile in the presence of Chris, so powerful was this innate charisma.

"What does that guy know about actual friends?" Fred snorted. "He's surrounded by sycophants constantly."

"People need to be needed," Puku assured him. "This is one of the points. We can guarantee such a thing, if they pay."

"Well, yeah," Fred replied. "That's the basis of the world's oldest profession."

"Profession?" Puke was not aware of the idiom.

"Whores," Fred said in a low tone. "Guaranteed to give you, you know, for money."

"Yes of course," Puku nodded eagerly. "Chris even referenced such a fact. We have much we can learn, he told Marketing All-Hands, from the escorting services, for we are in a way like that. Escort, only not present. Not visible. Never so."

"Never so?" Fred heaped up some green spinach-like stuff on his rice and moved on. He was getting ever closer to his beloved Biryani. Puku, on the other hand, was a strict vegetarian and also never ate much, even at the fanciest buffet.

"No, never," Puku said. "The friend is never supposed to be visible. Even his or her name should not be the real."

"They didn't tell us that," Fred clucked. He wondered if Kandhi knew. It wasn't too late, of course. They'd only done one side of the orientation so far.

"Voice to be disguised, image never shown. This way the friend could be multiple, any of several at any given time, so you see? Then if one of them quits or is fired, it doesn't have impact on the service."

"Naturally," Fred said. They had filled up their plates and taken their seats. Fred was stuffing his face, hoping to hear more. Puku, for his part, liked to talk. He wasn't supposed to be telling these things, especially not to a tester. This was business, not implementation.

"It's all on the clicks," Puku said. "It's a charge for the contact, so naturally ..."

"You want them clicking all the time."

"People need to be needed. When they're needed, they're happy. It's self-reinforcing. The more they get, the more they want. Our service, to be successful, must be successful. You see what I mean?"

"Feedback loop," Fred nodded. "Basic addiction."

"Ideally they will be in the constant contact," Puku added cheerfully, stopping now to pull of some nan bread.

"It's a la carte?" Fred inquired. "No all-you-can-eat?"

"Oh, the all-you-can-eat is of course there as option," Puku intoned, "but at quite the big price if you know what I mean."

"There's bound to be risks," Fred mused. "What about liability?"

"Liability? None!" Puku laughed. "You read the small print. Not responsible for this that or any other thing. At your own risk, all the way. We will be the very good friend. The very best friend that money can buy. You are having good testing so far?"

"Aha," Fred said to himself. "Puku wants to pick my brains as much as I wanted to pick his."

"We're just getting started," Fred admitted. "We've screened a few prospects for both sides. Initial beta testing you know."

"Multiple sites? Co-location? Long distance? Multi-lingual? Shared roles? Mutable formats? Gender spread and all that?"

"Just getting started," Fred repeated, wondering exactly Puku meant with those terms. Coming from marketing, there were bound to be demands that simply could not be fulfilled. They'd want to sample every possible variation and be presented with charts matching exactly their wildest wet dreams. Happy campers all around and everything in green. No red.

"Well, anything you need," Puku offered. "In terms of direction, you know. Chris has the ideas. He wants certain results and you know what that means."

"He'll get them," Fred promised, and he knew it was so. Chris always got whatever he wanted. It just seemed to work out that way.

\- - - - - - - - -

Kandhi didn't think it was going to be easy this time. The matrix of things that could possibly go wrong was simply staggering. The most likely outcome, she guessed, was null, that it would not even work, at all. She had a hard time imagining a positive outcome. What would that even look like? A happy, satisfied customer would be one who gave the service high ratings, who used it a lot, who became dependent on it, needed it, couldn't live without it, and could afford it. She herself wouldn't care to be that individual. Already she had mostly forsaken the ubiquitous socialnet, where everyone was connected to everyone else they barely even knew and kept up with each other's most trivial doings and thinkings. This phenomena had already cheapened the idea of friendship, reduced it to a mere background noise of everyday life. She knew all about her friends' childrens' artwork, the movies they had seen, the places they had been. Just last night her brother Alphonse had dined at The Happy Carnivore and enjoyed a roast pork platter with greens. It was his third time there in three months. He practically owned the place in some apps.

Information like this was already pouring into every seam of her existence, and she had turned the flow down to a trickle by paying less and less attention. Even that was becoming a challenge, thanks to the fact that lately her screen had acquired a new form of intelligence, due to some unwelcome hidden features committed to the in-house source repository by a senior developer by the name of Lark Fishhead, a feature which caused the fonts to zoom in on their own accord, demanding notice. For example, if she did not visit the Syomatix homepage for more than two days, it would go all full-screen in bold-italic-red-twenty-four-point in a sort of automated scold. There was no way to turn off this behavior. Fishhead had baked it into all of the company's internal systems. At least he hadn't completed the audio portion as yet. She could imagine hearing the program screeching at her to "wake up and smell the coffee," any day now. Marketing had already warned her that this would be coming.

Her intuition was clear on the Friendular thing, clear and totally negative. It didn't help that she had let Fred and Wen pick the beta combinations. It just smelled wrong to Kandhi, but in her last official review she had been chastised for not delegating enough, so she felt she had no choice. Closing up shop for the day, she reviewed in her mind the interviews the team had just finished conducting. First, she reflected on the so-called friends. The Finnish track coach seemed acceptable. He was clearly intelligent and was used to managing relationships. He had a fine track record, so to speak, as an Olympic-caliber long distance runner, and later as a personal trainer to more of the same, including two gold medalists, a Kenyan and a Swede. His physical ailments were numerous, thanks to his torturous career, so he was mainly confined to his chairs, but that was no impediment for this job. He was available at any hour, exuded a sense of calm and confidence, and had completed the functional test suite promptly and correctly. No politics had seeped into his responses, and no religion either. Personal opinions had been restricted appropriately to trivial and superficial matters. He appeared to be generally compatible across the board, able to get along with quite a wide range of personalities.

The barber had also exhibited a similar range, and had a certain bonus quality of being able to insert both religion and politics without any partiality or condescension. The man was clearly accustomed to chameleon-like adaptability, a key trait Kandhi valued highly and made sure was well represented in the training. On the other hand, the barber's results displayed a certain coldness; he did not express any genuine warmth. There was a frankness about his responses, a bluntness that Kandhi wasn't certain would translate very well. Velicia's results were quite different, also somewhat crude, but warmer. She showed a genuine interest in the subject, a tendency toward empathy that was missing from Stanley. Velicia also was the narrowest of the three, and by narrow Kandhi meant her range of expression and breadth of experience. She seemed the most bound by the conventions of her gender, age and culture. The other two, in other words, were more worldly than she. Still, they all had potential, and Kandhi had to admit that Fred had selected the best of the applicants for that role.

As for the other role, she wasn't at all certain that Fred and Wen had picked anyone suitable. None of the three appealed to her personally, but maybe that was only her problem. She would not want to be a friend to any one of them, and was finding it difficult to imagine that anybody would. Not that there was anything obviously wrong with them, or maybe her judgment was tainted by the fact that they had even applied for this role, to be the kind of person who would even think of doing such a thing, to be begging, in her mind, for someone to like them, for someone to be their friend. "Get a real friend," Kandhi had wanted to blurt out during that afternoon session. Get a real life while you're at it. Her distaste for the entire project had threatened to come shining through at any moment, so she had tried to leave the talking to Fred and Wen. Another mistake.

Fred had been grouchy, as usual, and Wen never liked to talk very much. Squeezing one sentence out of her was about the most you could hope for at any given time, which left Kandhi holding the bag, trying to get a sense of these people and how they might work out. In Kandhi's opinion there was something wrong with every single one of them, something she couldn't quite put a finger on, but she just had a sense. The best of the lot, she judged at first, was the woman, Hannah Lincum. Mild and unassuming, Hannah was merely lonely, a widower who performed a lot of volunteer work at the hospital and otherwise did not have a lot going on in her life. It seemed she went there every day, spending hour upon hour visiting terminally ill people of all ages, from children with cancer to ancients with Alzheimer's. If prompted, Hannah would list every one of "her" patients (as she called them), listing all of their ailments and medical histories, as she seemed to have it all memorized. And she didn't limit herself to only one hospital, but visited several, even driving several hours if there were enough patients in need of companionship. In her earlier life, Hannah had been accustomed to having a husband to talk to all the time, but since his passing, her sense of intimate connection with the world had been draining steadily and she wanted it back, in any way she could. The only problem she had with her patients was that they were often unable to respond to her at any great length. It seemed like she did all the talking. She seemed to be hoping for a more reciprocal companionship in this beta project. Kandhi could see how that might work out, although she deemed it a poor substitute for a real companion, an actual present person.

Dave Claunney was not a bad sort, either. He just did not appeal to her. He possessed the perpetual joviality of the delivery guy he was, always quick with a nod and a greeting, a sort of benign, positive indicator that meant nothing and passed just as easily. He was the kind of guy you would like right away but never know why. He was nice and he made you also want to be nice. He would smile and in turn you would smile. This kind of thing couldn't go a long way. At best you would have a five minute relationship, a friendship that seemed almost intimate but would leave you alone with the sense that it hadn't even happened. He had a kind of heat like a firefly, fleeting and really not as warm as you thought. To know Dave was to know a life size cardboard cutout of Dave. You would have a bit of trouble discerning the difference. He began every sentence with a great deal of energy which gradually tailed off as it completed. His initial introduction had displayed that exact pattern.

"Hi ya!," he exclaimed. "Dave Claunney here! Glad to meet you! I'm excited, I can tell you. I. I mean I ... I think that it ... could be... an opportunity ... yeah ... so ... hey?"

Even his looks turned her off, which Kandhi had to admit to herself. The handlebar mustache was simply too glaring, and she was never a fan of the overly fit, buff male. They only made her more self-conscious of her own physical flaws and so she had to fight off her negative reaction to Dave throughout the meeting.

Finally, there was Nathaniel Woodward ("call me Nate"), a young man whose eyebrows seem perpetually raised in a sort of alarm, as if he was picking up distress signals from the universe at every moment. Periodically his eyes would widen too, at the most random moments, when he wasn't even talking or being spoken to. Half the time she was conversing with Hannah or Dave, Kandhi would be distracted by these facial quirks on Nate's panel. She wanted to ask him, "What? What is it? Are there blue pigs landing on Mars at this very moment or what?" He had mentioned his interest in clairvoyance. Was he trying to read her mind at those times? In any case, he was a strange one. He had a way of punctuating his sentences with random conclusions. For example, when Kandhi had asked him about his favorite movie, he'd responded with

"The Fly, except that Morse Code might have worked better in the final dance sequence".

He was also given to fidgeting and adjusting his shirt collar, which was especially odd since it was only a t-shirt, albeit a t-shirt that read "my other left shoe is a rodeo clown." Nate had a hard time beginning a sentence. Every time he would start off on one, he would stop, as if realizing that what he was saying was not at all what he wanted to say. Then he would pause and consider for several seconds before picking right up where he left off and finishing just as he'd started. He mentioned that he was interested in tropical fish, and had studied the science of cross-water conversion. He very much wanted them to be able to live in fresh water, for some unspecified reason.

Kandhi had asked Fred after the meeting what he thought of all three, but he didn't have much to say. He only said that he thought that the matches would be interesting, at least. He wasn't exactly looking forward to the task, he'd told her, but he'd promised to do his best, which wasn't what Kandhi wanted to know. He damn well better do his best, she thought. We don't pay him not to. But did he think that the thing was going to work? Wen merely said "yes," but Fred wouldn't commit. The most he would say was, "I guess we'll find out."

\- - - - - - - - -

Wen Li did think it might be interesting, but she thought the same about everything. She was a casual scientist in her own way, always observing, making notes, storing away little insights like a squirrel saving nuts, and 'nuts' is basically what she thought of her colleagues, Kandhi and Fred. She had worked for the one and with the other for a few years now. She enjoyed her position in the group, as the "one who got things done" (as she put it to herself), leaving the agonizing and the drama to the others. It was not her concern whether the products were good or bad, right or wrong, only that they behaved and performed as expected, which meant 'according to the specifications'.

In this case, the specs were clear. The HAFS would maintain a constant connection between the pairs of wearers. The custom protocol that streamed through the connection - called HAFSP, which stood for 'HAFS Protocol' in a rare fit of common sense - was fairly simple and well-defined. Her test code was having no issues with parsing it properly. It consisted of signaling messages, corresponding to the physical gestures they had carefully explained to the beta users, and data packets wrapped securely inside of protobufs inside of other protobufs inside of even more encrypted flows. Image and voice transmissions followed actual standard protocols, in another surprisingly sensible move. How was it that development managers were waking up to the realization that old brooms knowing corners actually translated into fewer bugs and quicker times to market? Wen Li clucked her approval as she sat in her cubicle watching the data stream through her visualization application.

She was proud of her work. Here all three beta teams converged in a centralized, easily debuggable main panel. Once she had confirmed the proper workings of her tool, she had sat back to watch and observe the content. Normally this was not her standard practice, but she had to admit she was intrigued. As a person of few words and few friends, she didn't really understand why a person would ever have a need for this Friendular system. She had something of a boyfriend, the mildly affable Bodey Wafer, with whom she occasionally slept and even less frequently conversed. She had her childhood friend Victoria Chen back in Taiwan, with whom she chatted regularly on the phone, and this was enough for her. Victoria knew all there was to know about Wen and vice versa, which wasn't much on either end but then again, why should it be? They both had their likes and dislikes, their favorite movies and TV shows, the people and things that they approved and disapproved of. Wen had her secrets from everyone but Victoria, and Victoria had hers from everyone but Wen. Wen knew, for example, that Victoria had a thing for Russian men, or even Chinese men who could do a decent Russian accent. Victoria knew that Wen considered her body to be a sort of machine, with its requirements for regular maintenance, and her mind to be a lifelong work-in-progress. How much more did you need to know about someone? Wen had never been the type to strike up a conversation with a total stranger. How the beta people could be doing this and so easily was a mystery to Wen.

Dave Claunney, for one, had picked right up with Bilj as if he had known him forever. They had barely exchanged greetings when Dave started regaling him with tales of his impending sexual exploits. He said he had at least one prospective female in every office building to which he delivered packages. He also dove right into a detailed discussion of the bustling downtown neighborhood he served, which was heavily into micro- and mini-technologies.

"The wave of the future," Dave announced, and Bilj, for his part, was agreeable, courteous and calm, which reminded Wen of her Bodey, and made her want to schedule a "date" with her boyfriend soon. Dave had a lot to talk about. Bilj murmured polite replies. That connection was buzzing along from the start. Wen smiled as she switched to her real-time graphical display, which revealed the data streams as moving line charts over time. She had assigned different colors to the testers. Dave was red and Bilj was purple. Red was by far the highest in the graph. Lower down were blue and green, the colors she had picked for Nathaniel Woodward and the barber, and lowest of all were yellow and orange, representing Hannah and Velicia.

It was expected that a client would talk more than a friend. All of their pre-flight data models had anticipated this aspect, and contradictory data would indicate a problem in the test, either a friend who talked too much or a client who did not talk enough, or both. So far - and it had only been a matter of hours since blast-off - the actual results were not quite as desired. Still, it was "early days," to use one of the company's stock cliches. It would take time for the dust to settle. Dave's ratio to Bilj was more than three to one. Nate and Stan were closer to the model at 2.3:1. The ladies' team was down near 1:1 and their volume was very low. It seemed those two didn't have much of anything to talk about.

Hannah had kicked it off with a list of her problems; the dead husband, the friends who'd either died or moved away, the kids who didn't care about her anymore, the other volunteers at the hospital who seemed sincere but with whom she didn't have much in common. Velicia, for her part, seemed bored.. She had tried, at first, to be sympathetic and commiserate with her customer, but soon her level subsided as she could not think of anything different to say. There was a lot of uh-huh'ing in her responses as of late, as if this was a tedious phone call which she could not hang up. Wen Li could almost hear the fingers drumming on Velicia's dining room table.

She felt she had a handle on two conversations; the one going well enough with a chatterbox and a responsive friend, the other going down the drain with a tired old drone and a tuned-out partner. The third pair was more of an enigma so far. On the surface the pattern looked good, but when she checked into the actual content, she had to puzzle about it for awhile before the concluded that the two were essentially talking right past each other. Nate was propounding a variety of his favorite theories, while Stan was responding with some standard stock phrases of his own. From Nate it was all about brain waves, cosmic energy and animal consciousness, linkages and synchronicity, karma and destiny. From Stan it was "live and let live," "to each his own," and "you gotta do what you gotta do." Wen took some more notes, and prepared for the four o'clock staff meeting with the team. She was looking forward to Fred's interpretation of events. She even thought this meeting might be almost fun.

\- - - - - - - - -

Kandhi had called the meeting to go over the Friendular metrics. She felt it was important to keep their feet on the ground at all times. Every little aspect of the project had to be measured, and measured again, tracked and then tracked some more. She had thrown together a simple spreadsheet of the items she wanted quantified and qualified, including statistics on all the possible uses and mis-uses of the wristband, friend response times, client request tallies, tone modulation, empathy values, being-thereness, word counts, word sizes, vocabulary differentials, social value disparities, topical hits and misses, and that wasn't all. There were also the myriad relationships and correlations and interactions between these fields that were just as important, if not more so.

Word metrics, for example. If word counts were too far out of balance, this could indicate a lack of reciprocity, a one-way street. If word sizes were likewise out of whack, that could be an indication of a lack of compatibility, a mismatch. A real world friendship could not be all give and no take, but a professional one could withstand - and would probably demand - a drastic imbalance in sympathy. Not everything was clear and simple. This was a new tangle of weeds for Kandhi and her team, a jungle of complexity such as they had never faced before. Fred and Wen came in the room and were immediately overwhelmed by Kandhi's presentation, and started whining in unison.

"Isn't it enough that we're recording and listening to every little thing that happens? Do we have to analyze this stuff to death?" Fred moaned.

"I don't mind some of that," Wen added, "but maybe we should draw the line somewhere this side of realistic possibility?"

"It's just data," Kandhi snapped. "They want more than we can even dream of gathering. They want more than you could stuff into a thundercloud. I want to jam this all right down their throats, you know what I mean? Downstairs they were thinking surfaces only. I want to show them the depths of what we're doing."

"I like surfaces," Fred sniffed.

"Some of it just doesn't make sense," Wen shook her head, tracing the print-out with her finger. "You want to boil it all down to a simple score, is that it? With a bunch of weighted values? How did you come up with the formula?"

"Winging it," Kandhi admitted. "Look, sure, I know there's a lot of rows in there, some obviously more important than others, but we have to know if they using the hardware as instructed, and which aspects are they finding more useful. What is the nature of the interactions and what can we learn from the subjects? In the end, doesn't friendship come down to a score in one way or another? It's like a dart board. Your best friends are the closest to the center, the bullseye. They get the most points for that. The rest are sort of in rings around the center, with the further away being the less important. You might put some quadrants on that circle while you're at it. Public friends versus private ones, social versus intimate, pack versus solo, that kind of thing. Don't we have some kind of machine learning that can just figure it all out?"

"I'll bet we could really do that," Fred shifted uneasily in his seat. "I'll bet we could sum up life itself."

"Whatever," Kandhi snapped at him, "the point is, we've got a job to do here. We've got to make a science of it or they'll never get it right. Anyway, what have you got? Think you can start filling in some of these blanks?"

"Sure," Wen said, "we can make a stab at it. We're already seeing some interesting patterns. Like the wristband. What do you say, Fred?"

"Well," Fred pulled himself together, aware that Wen was giving him a chance to make up for his crummy attitude coming in.

"All in all I think it's fair to say that nobody's used anything but the tap so far. Just initiating conversation, that's all. No tugs, to pulls, no swipes. None of the special built-in gestures. My guess is they figured out the simplest thing and gave up on the rest."

"Okay, fine," Kandhi started filling in columns on her own printout. "That's a lot of zeros for the user experience experts."

"Quite a variation in quality," Wen continued. "We can see that pretty clearly. The charts are quite revealing. It's only been day one but already there's a lot of divergence between the groups. The Bilj pair is steaming right along but the others are lagging, and spreading apart. See here? I don't know what Velicia is doing."

"She doesn't give a damn," Fred put in, "that's why her response time is so low, her word count too, word size barely minimal."

"She doesn't like Hannah," Wen concluded.

"She's supposed to be a professional," Kandhi sighed. "Maybe we picked a lemon with that one."

"Also the data is kind of deceptive," Wen continued. "In the charts, see here in the middle? It looks on the surface like Stanley and Nate are doing all right, but check out this transvergence. I had to look closer. Stanley's painting by numbers, basically, and Nate doesn't seem to know it. It's like Oblivious Man meet Obvious Man."

She laughed at her little joke, but Kandhi didn't get it, and said so. Wen had to explain further, that no matter what Nathaniel said, Stanley had some stock response, always agreeable in tone but rarely relevant at all to the subject at hand.

"Hes a fricking barber," Fred groaned. "We should've figured on that."

"But Nate doesn't care, like you said," Kandhi mused, "so how are we going to sum that one up?"

"You're the math whiz," Fred snickered.

"It's tricky," Wen repeated. "my guess is that sooner or later Nate will wake up and notice, or maybe not. It all depends on what they expect to get out of this thing."

"What if Nate just wants to get paid," Fred suggested.

"We'll have to make an allowance for that," Kandhi frowned. She was thinking about the bottom line, the final row on the spreadsheet, the formula she would have to devise to come up with the ultimate numbers. Expected results versus actual results was always an important component. If you go to the Burger Joint you expect to get fries. If they gave you some red dill potatoes you'd lower the rating, but if they gave you greasy fries at Chez Pompouse, you know what I mean, she said to herself. But how to weigh the genuine-ness? That had to be there, it must be a factor. If you're talking about friends, it's got to be real at some point or why bother? There had to be some basic connection. From the look of things, they only had a chance of at best one in three at this point. Should she just give it time?

"Should we just give it time?" she asked her assistants. Fred shook his head because he had no idea. He was becoming acutely aware that he was failing, on the verge of utterly failing this time. He had nothing to say, and for an obstinate opinionator this could be a genuine disaster. Wen was more thoughtful.

"I think that we should," she finally said. "Two days, maybe three, and then, I don't know. Can we stop with any one any time? I don't know the contract."

"We can cancel for any reason at any moment, yes," Kandhi told her. "We just have to pay through the month, but that's not a concern and won't be unless it starts to add up."

Kandhi dismissed them and went about filling in more rows and more columns with the data she'd seen. She felt she was missing something, even after collating all that data. She sat back and chewed on the tip of her pencil and finally decided to dive into the transcripts themselves. She would read every single word that had passed between all of the clients and their buddies.

\- - - - - - - - -

She selected from the files at random, and read.

Dave: I know she'd do it if I asked her, so it's really up to me. I can't make up my mind, though. There's always a risk. The job, for one thing. It's about ethics with me. I try to keep myself above and beyond, you know what I mean?

(interval -seventeen seconds)

Bilj: Keep everything on the up and up, in other words?

(interval - fourteen seconds)

Dave: Right, that's it. Above board, I think that's what I meant to say. Dang. Missed another light. That's three in a row. Usually I get a straight shot down Fourth and then across Wildwood to Part Two. That's how I mark the route, in parts. Part One is Venezia Park. Part Two, Wildwood. Part Three, Amber Cove. So I know where I am in the progress of my day. This one, Shashana? She's in Venezia Park, at the Oblogon Corporation. Receptionist, of course. Most of my ladies are. Heh.

(interval - twenty six seconds)

Bilj: You like her, eh?

(interval - twelve seconds)

Dave: Yeah. yeah, I like her, but mostly it's that smile. The smile's the thing that gets me every time, draws me right in like a moth to a. A moth to a.

(interval - six seconds)

Bilj: flame?

(interval - twelve seconds)

Dave: Yeah, flame. All big teeth and sparkly. Like the hair, too. Puffy. I go for that. Well, here we go. Wildwood. Checking out. Be cool.

(interval - eleven seconds)

Bilj: Be seeing you.

(Dave swiped, disconnect)

Bilj: So to speak.

Kandhi skipped ahead at random to a different conversation snippet.

Hannah: You should see them, the way their eyes light up, like little children, when someone comes to visit.

(interval - thirty four seconds)

Velicia: These are the old sick people?

(interval - seventeen seconds)

Hannah: Yes, yes, that's just it. They are people, just like anybody else. It's not their fault that they're sick. Well, it isn't always their fault. Some of them, they were heavy smokers, heavy drinkers, they never took care of their bodies. Those are the ones that, sure, they deserve to be there. I don't visit with them as much. I know that's not very charitable of me I'm sorry to say. It's the other ones, though, I feel sorry for the most. The ones that just got old and feeble a bit and maybe they fell down and broke their hip and now they're confined and some of them have no one to talk to, no one comes to see them. Where are their families I wonder?

(interval - fifty six seconds)

Velicia: Where are their families?

(interval - nine seconds)

Hannah: That's just what I want to know. Old people have no value anymore. Maybe they used to. Maybe when there were fewer of them, when most people didn't live so long, maybe that was why they had esteem. Scarcity. Supply and demand. I wonder.

(interval - eighty four seconds)

Velicia: I don't really know any old people. I'm not really tuned in to that.

(interval - twenty one seconds)

Hannah: Well, there's me. Though I'm not so old. Fifty seven and a half next Monday. I used to call my mother on her half-birthday every year. I don't know how that started. Then I did the same with my Harry. We always had a special half-birthday dinner on his and on mine. Harry liked buffets. Something about those big old slabs of roast beef slowly turning. And chickens on a spit. The way the drippings. Mmm, I can just smell it now.

(interval - forty two seconds)

Velicia: I'm a vegetarian myself.

(interval - nine seconds)

Hannah: Of course you have to eat your greens. I would always tell my Harry that. And these people I think I mentioned, the ones who let themselves go. You could tell they never ate their greens. Even there in the hospital they won't touch the spinach. It's a crying shame. When you think of the waste. There's far too much waste in the world today. They have a bad attitude too. Not like the ones who took ill all on no account of their own. Those folk have a sense of justice. I don't know how to say it. You can see in their eyes they know that they've been wronged but they're the ones who bear it best. Good Christian souls, I'd say. The Lord doesn't give you anything you can't handle. I've always found it to be true.

(interval - ninety three seconds)

Velicia: You have to make the best of things.

(interval - fourteen seconds)

Hannah: You said a mouthful there.

Kandhi turned the page but then decided to move on. Might as well sample the third, she decided, and skipped ahead until she came across a page with the heading 'Nate'. She frowned at that. The name is Nathaniel, she muttered to herself, and Stanley, not Stan. She was annoyed with Fred for taking liberties again.

Nate: It's all across the spectrum. Every creature gives off a certain vibration within its own range. I should come up with a system of measurement for this. What would I call it? The Life Spread? Yeah. Because it also kind of sounds like Life's Bread, and that's a cool relation. I like it.

(interval - thirty four seconds)

Stan: Everybody's got their own ways about 'em.

(interval - seventeen seconds)

Nate: And it's not like the sound or light or color. It's orthogonal to that kind of thing. Related, yeah, in an inter-dimensional way, but it's more like a searing, scorching, burning-up-and-out kind of thing. Like they shoot out these sparks and you can catch 'em, but it's not like they're hot or anything. No, it's like they are gems, kind of shiny, but not in colors, and you can tell from the shapes or the texture or even the velocity and the trajectory where they're coming from. I pick it up from animals, like with birds when they're flying overhead, it's not a trail they leave that you can see but more like a pattern they are weaving in the atmosphere around them.

(interval - forty six seconds)

Stan: You got to make your mark in this world.

(interval - nine seconds)

Nate: And then if there's a message you can feel it, you can sense it, like it's right there on your elbow and you open your mind and yeah, like it's right there. Like now. I can tell what you're thinking.

(interval - thirty three seconds)

Stan: You can pick up that kind of thing.

(interval - nineteen seconds)

Nate: Yeah, cool, right. You pick up on it. You pick it up. You pick it, you picture it, up in your mind. It's picked, like a picture.

What? Kandhi read that last conversation over again three times and still it made no sense. There was something definitely wrong about all of this. Is it just me? she wondered, or is it them? The transcripts were exactly as Wen had described them. Wen was onto something, Kandhi concluded. Her analysis was spot on, but her recommendation? She had none. Typical Wen, to pinpoint the problem but offer no solution. Not my job, she would say. I just file, I don't fix. The Wen Way, but Kandhi didn't have that option. This trial was going straight down the toilet.

Dave and Bilj were within the range she had expected. Engagement to some extent. A decent being-there quotient. Some connection that could potentially be built upon because of course such things take time. Exactly how much time was something she still hoped to quantify. It would be important to know, to be able to predict and measure, the progress of a friendship from initiation to intimacy, and whether that process had any bearing on the ultimate duration or not. There were far too many variables and she needed a decent sample size. So far she had a sample size of exactly one. It was not going to suffice.

Hannah and Velicia? No. Nothing there. Nate and Stan? Slightly better, but still essentially nothing. Nate was way way out there, some kind of kook, she decided. Hannah was a bore and Stanley something of a humbug. Wait. Hannah, and Stanley? Maybe. Maybe. Then what about Velicia? Velicia and Nate? Nate and Velicia? I mean Nathaniel, she reminded herself. She brought up Velicia's profile again and nodded to herself as she reviewed it. Tantric healing, okay, that's weird. Vegetarian. Okay, not normal. Don't know if she's flaky enough for Nathaniel, but better than nothing. Worth a try.

She decided. Kandhi always prided herself on her decisive nature. She would give it one more day, and if things continued as they were going, she would make the switch. She tapped out a memo. The clients didn't need to know. They already didn't know the actual identities of their "friends." This was on purpose, so that there could be exactly this kind of interchangeability. They could swap out friends as needed and with any luck the customer would never know. After there had been a history built up, there could be a problem, but that was for later discovery. For now, it won't have been that long, and you couldn't say there was any real anything built up between those pairs. It ought to be seamless. After tomorrow, Hannah would be communicating with Stanley, and Nathaniel with Velicia. She sent the memo to Fred and Wen.

Things could hardly be any worse, she reasoned, than they already were. She could hardly have been more wrong.

\- - - - - - - - -

The same thing had already occurred to Fred. Ever since his conversation with Puku, he'd grown more and more angry about the whole setup, the calculated phoniness, the built-in fail-safe mechanisms, especially the concept of tag-team pseudo-compatibility. The project was an Abomination From Hell, even more so than the usual stuff he worked on, and had kept him half awake all night, trying to think of what he should do. Reading Kandhi's email in the morning only added more fuel. He muttered vague obscenities as he digested its contents. He was going to have to come up with an alternative. Something that would make a definite impact. Something only he could do. Kandhi had her millions of metrics, and Wen had her code all over the place. What did Fred have to show for this project? Nothing, so far. A handful of bitter memos predicting its doom was all he could point to. He tried staying in bed, pretending it wasn't already daylight, that the sun wasn't already streaming across the piles of dirty laundry that covered the floor of his minuscule one-room apartment from closet to kitchen. He squeezed his eyes shut and cursed at the light.

Let's review, he said to himself. What do I have to work with? Analytics annoy me. I don't understand them at all. Spreadsheets make me want to puke. I'd rather eat cat food than look at a chart. Words, that's the thing. Real life. What really goes on. The transcripts, of course! He sat straight up and fumbled around on the sheets for the printouts he'd brought home that night. He found several pages, all crumpled up from his having slept on them. He scanned through them rapidly, making mental notes as he did. Nate, he's a loony. Dave, mister nice guy. Hannah, she's sneaky I think. Velicia, what a drip. Bilj, a tough nut to crack. Stanley, my god, enough said. I can work with these people, he thought, at least some of them. I can turn up the heat, toss in a spark. Got to be careful, though. Got to be slick. It's time to do some real testing. Now we'll see how it cracks!

Delighted with his sudden burst of insight, Fred bolted right out of bed, threw on some different clothes, and headed into the street. He lived only blocks from the office. He'd be there in no time at all. In fact, he was there almost before Eliza, the bright-eyed young woman whose job it was to keep the coffee pots fresh and full. No one ever saw her arrive, yet she was always there, cheerful and pretty, the opposite of Fred.

"Good morning," she sang as he stepped out of the elevator on the top floor. Fred merely grunted and turned away. He'd been giving her the cold shoulder for weeks. Once, only once, he'd worked up a smile in return and the warmth of her reply had scuttled his persona for days. He'd been unable to muster any grumpiness at all and his productivity had fallen way off. If he gave in to her now, it might ruin his whole plan.

"Forget you even saw her," he advised himself as he scurried past. He would have to wait until more people arrived before he could make his way to the coffee pots, otherwise she'd stand a good chance of greeting him again, which he knew she would accomplish with even more grace the second time. Hurrying, he made it into his cubicle without seeing or hearing her another time. He logged in to his desktop and was glad to see no new activity. It was still early enough that none of the pairs had gotten going yet. Bilj and Dave were due to launch any moment, with Stanley and Nate to follow, and Velicia and Hannah a bit later. This would give him time to prepare. He had to have a plan.

Of course, the overall strategy was obvious. Interject! As the ubiquitous man in the middle, he was capable of feeding words into the stream unilaterally. He could speak as either side, but the trick was to slip it in naturally, not disruptively. He'd have to remain in character, and yet at the same time make a definite impact. He considered what to say while re-reading the tails of the previous day's transcripts again. What should he say? What could he say? Oh, he had some wicked ideas! If only, he said to himself, if only Hannah brings up that topic again, if only Nathaniel goes back there, if only Dave keeps up his typical patter. Fred knew exactly where he'd lead them, Oh, it was going to be good. It was going to be glorious. It could possibly ruin everything! He'd already settled on that goal. The Friendular System must be destroyed, and he had only this one day to do it. Kandhi's fix might very well really fix it, and he was not going to let that happen if he could avoid it. He rubbed his hands in glee, and, without realizing what he was doing, stood up and strolled confidently over to the coffee pot table, where Eliza was still puttering about. He felt he could handle it now. She could do her worst, which she did, saluting him with an over-eager cheerfulness that reminded him of chipmunks. He grinned an evil grin and even wished her a wonderful day. He chortled inside as he filled up a gigantic Styrofoam cup with fresh, hot, caffeine. It was going to be a nice little day after all.

\- - - - - - - - -

Fred dashed off an email to Kandhi and Wen, exclaiming his support for Kandhi's decision, and especially lauding her intention to give the existing pairs another full day. This would provide more data, he declared, knowing full well that by saying "more data" he was setting a trap that neither of his colleagues could ever resist. Wen would get to fill up her charts, and Kandhi would add to her spreadsheets, and they would sit there happily all the long day, accumulating whatever numbers came in. Meanwhile, Fred would be on the case, monitoring and hopefully "assisting" the three conversations. His coffee had already kicked in strong and well when Dave popped up on the screen, already planning his romantic activities for the morning. He was going to flirt and flirt some more with those poor helpless receptionists, who were probably all just like his Eliza, meagerly paid for their positive vibes and their fresh, clean attractive appearances. Naturally they had to respond to Dave's banter with the same of their own. It was part of their jobs. Was Dave such a moron that he didn't even see it? It sure seemed so to Fred. He could only imagine what Bilj thought. But no, he corrected himself, he could partly determine what Bilj thought, at least as far as Dave would ever know!

Dave: The Brick Building is next. Pretty funny name for a building, don't you think? It must be named after someone, because it's not even made out of bricks!

(interval – seven seconds)

Bilj: What's it made out of, then?

(interval – nineteen seconds)

Dave: I'm not sure. Maybe it's brick after all, come to think of it. Only it's yellow. I don't usually think about bricks being yellow.

(interval – fourteen seconds)

Bilj: They can be yellow sometimes,

(interval – eleven seconds)

Dave: I guess so. But anyway, I'm going in. It's cool how the wristband just goes anywhere, anytime, Can you even tell what I'm doing right now?

(interval – sixteen seconds)

Bilj: Nope. No, I can't. Can you tell what I'm doing?

(interval – seventeen seconds)

Dave: No idea. You could be in a cell in Siberia for all I know.

("Pretty close," Fred, thought, "that's pretty damn close, but come on, Dave, come on. Get with it!")

Dave: There's Kathy. Remember I told you about her? She's the brunette with the totally round mouth. Perfectly round, and red. I've never seen anything like it.

("Outside of a blow-up sex doll," Fred thought)

Dave: There she is now. Ah, look at that smile. Happy to see me as ever.

("Now's my chance," said Fred to himself. It seemed to him that Bilj has stepped out for a moment. His responses, usually immediate, were slightly less so this morning)

Fred (as Bilj): So she doesn't even mind that you're gay?

(interval – forty one seconds)

Dave: What did you say?

(interval – twenty two seconds)

Bilj: Excuse me?

(interval – nine seconds)

Dave: You think that I'm gay?

(interval – eight seconds. Here it comes, Fred thought, holding his breath)

Bilj: I'm gay?

(interval – three seconds)

Dave: You are?

(interval – five seconds)

Bilj: Well, as a matter of fact, Dave, I am. Does it bother you?

(interval – three seconds)

Dave: No, no. But, but you haven't come on to me or anything.

(interval – four seconds)

Bilj: That's not how it goes. I've been with my partner for seventeen years.

(interval – twenty one seconds)

Dave: Seventeen years? Wow. And the whole time you've been, what? You've been 'faithful', I guess the word is?

(interval – eight seconds)

Bilj: Yes, of course. We love each other, very much. You can't have love without trust.

(interval – fifty three seconds)

Dave: Um, I'm going to have to think about this. I'll talk to you later.

(Dave swiped, disconnect)

\- - - - - - - - -

"Didn't he know?" Fred wondered. "Didn't Dave even know he was himself gay? Oh my god! You could tell, even without the tone of his voice coming through, just from the words, you could tell he was stunned. And I got away with it! Bilj would never have come out and said it! Man, I was sweating there for a minute. I wonder if Wen will pick up on it? That's the real concern. She's the one I have to watch out for."

Fred was so excited he could barely contain himself, and usually, Wen would be the first one he'd blab to about something like this. And he couldn't. He couldn't tell anyone, ever, at all. One down, and two more to go, he was thinking. He was going to toss an incendiary conversational device into every one of those pairs, and stand back and watch it go up in smoke, so he hoped. He'd nipped that Dave-and-Bilj thing in the bud. Dave shut right up. From the look of the data, he might have even turned the thing off! Was it true? Had he swiped the 'off' gesture. Yes, there it was in the logs. He'd turned the band off. Bilj couldn't get through to him now if he wanted. As Fred watched the screen, he saw Nate and Stan power up.

Nate: How's it going there, pal?

(interval – fourteen seconds)

Stan: Not too shabby. And you?

(interval – two seconds)

Nate: Going good. Going good. Had an amazing out-of-the-brain-box experience this morning.

(interval – seventeen seconds)

Stan: You don't say.

(interval – three seconds)

Nate: You know how I was telling you about the birds?

(interval – twelve seconds)

Stan: Come again?

(interval – two seconds)

Nate: About how I can pick up what they're up to.

(interval – nineteen seconds)

Stan: I wouldn't want to touch that!

(interval – one second)

Nate: Where they're going and all that. Well, this morning I got this message, I swear, like it was beaming right at me, and guess what? You'll never guess what.

(interval – twenty two seconds)

Stan: Fruit loops?

(interval – two seconds)

Nate? What? No. Not fruit loops. What made you say that?

(interval – twenty two seconds)

Stan: Just guessing.

(interval – three seconds)

Nate: It was coming from some kind of parrot inside of a house. At least I think it was a parrot. That was the image that came in my head, and it sure wasn't happy about being stuck there.

(interval – nineteen seconds)

Stan: Everyone wants to be happy. It's a thing.

("Really?" Fred thought. "That's all you can say? Geez, Stan, I can see I'm going to have to pick it up. Good thing you're so slow on the uptake. I can slip on in any time!")

(interval – six seconds)

Nate: I think it was asking for help.

(interval – four seconds)

Fred (as Stan): I'd go for it. If I were you.

(interval – two seconds)

Nate: You really think I should? I wanted to do it.

(interval – nine seconds, during which Fred held his breath.)

Stan: Do what you want. That's what I say. As long as no one gets hurt.

(interval – six seconds. Fred exhaled.)

Nate: Well, yeah, I wouldn't hurt anyone. Just rescue the bird. It wants to be free.

(interval – fourteen seconds)

Stan: Everyone wants to be free. It's a thing.

(interval – three seconds)

Nate: I'm glad you think so. Thanks! You know, I think I will. I think I'll do it. Hey, I'll be in touch!

(interval – sixteen seconds)

Stan: I'll be here.

\- - - - - - - - -

"Yee-ha!" Fred shouted, then looked around to make sure no one noticed. People noticed, though. They'd been streaming in for the past several minutes as the office began to fill up. Kandhi was there, and peered out of her office to see what Fred was about, but he gave her a shrug and a half of a smile, which sufficed to exhaust her attention. It was just Fred being Fred, she concluded, no doubt having one of his brainstorms again. She directed her focus back to the screen.

She'd been following the chat, and didn't notice anything unusual, only that the conversation had been unusually brief. Otherwise, Stan was his usual tiresome self, and Nate was babbling in the way that was normal for him. She had no doubt he believed he could communicate mentally with parrots. She hadn't yet looked at the Bilj-and-Dave chat but only noticed, from the live scrolling graph, that their conversation had also been short. No doubt they would come into action again soon. Dave's job often punctuated their interactions with pauses while he loaded and unloaded boxes. Besides, she had no concern about them, and didn't feel the need to review the transcript. Fred had been counting on that.

He already knew what he was going to do about Hannah. She would no doubt go on and on about the poor sick people in the hospitals she visited, and how they were suffering so much, and blah blah blah. He knew that Velicia didn't care. She was all about vibrations and crystals and what-not. It would be just like her to mildly suggest that no one should have to suffer needlessly. Oh yes, that would be just like something she'd say. Help them, Fred as Velicia would advise. Do something for them. He could tell that this was what Hannah was waiting to hear. She wanted to "help," and she wanted to be recognized for her well-meaning intentions. How should he say it, though, in such a way that the meaning was clear but simultaneously vague? Velicia would never publicly advocate precisely what Fred had in mind. It would be a delicate operation.

In the meantime, Wen had arrived and wheeled her chair into Fred's cube. She wanted to talk about stuff. Normally, Fred liked nothing more than these sessions with Wen, but this day he could hardly contain his frustration. Velicia and Hannah could come on any time and he didn't want to miss this great opportunity. Wen was saying that she didn't know if she agreed with Kandhi's decision or not.

"Are we really going to keep juggling until we get the right combinations? What about the negative cases? We need to know how it fails, when it does. I think it's okay to have one set that works, and two sets that don't. I think we ought to let it go on," she told Fred.

"Maybe it will," he suggested. "After all, they do have all day today to get it together. Maybe they will."

"I doubt it," Wen sighed. "I think by the end of the day they'll be begging to get off the test. Stanley and Velicia, I mean. It must be driving them crazy."

"I think Stan can handle it," Fred said. "After all, he's used to the tedious chit chat of strangers. I'd be amazed if he even paid any attention to anything Nate's saying. To Stan it's just easy money."

"You're probably right," Wen had to agree. "But what about Velicia?"

"It'll have to be something unusual to get her attention," Fred nodded. "Those two are really way off. I wonder what could bring them together."

"Hannah would have to go cosmic," Wen laughed, "I just don't think she can do that."

"Cosmic, eh?" Fred muttered, "that might do the trick."

"Won't happen," Wen added. "Hannah's as steady as she goes. She couldn't think 'brown' if she was stuck inside a paper bag"

"Did you work up any new metrics?" Fred asked her, changing the subject, and hoping to get her out of his cube.

"Nah, I think I've got it all covered," she said, slumping into her chair. She would like nothing more than to have a new task. Fred had to think fast.

"So they're all correlated? You know, on a scale?"

"Yep," Wen informed him. "All up and down."

"What about tone?"

"What do you mean?"

"From the transcripts all we have is the words, so there's word counts and syllables and intervals and all of that stuff, but I was thinking we're not doing audio much. The tone of their voices, I mean. What can we get out of that?"

"I looked into it," Wen replied. "There isn't that much. The variation is just much too wide. We couldn't account for localization, for one thing. Tonality in Italian, for instance, is not all the same as Chinese. Then again, the tone doesn't translate directly to emotion even within the same person. There's just too much context."

"But there's data," Fred countered. "Tonality per person per session, I mean. How many times does Stanley breathe deep? How many times does he sigh? You could work up a map for each chat. It might come to nothing in the overall picture, but without all the data you never can tell."

"You're right," Wen brightened. "You don't really know till you try."

"Sometimes the data speaks for itself," Fred concluded.

"Again, right," Wen declared as she kicked off from the floor and scooted out of the cube along with her chair. "I'll get to working on that right away."

"You just never know," Fred called after her, relieved to have thought of something to get rid of her, and not a moment too soon. Velicia and Hannah were on and yes, she was talking about her terminal patients, and yes, Velicia was taking a long time to answer, and yes, Fred did have a plan. He'd mention something about souls. That was it! That was the word that would bring them together. Souls, and their spiritual needs, in contrast to bodies and their physical ones. Then he would sit back and watch it all bubble and boil.

\- - - - - - - - -

By lunchtime, all of the subject streams had gone down. First it was Dave, then Nathaniel, and finally Hannah was completely off-line. Not a heartbeat, not a murmur, not a pulse. Kandhi was the first one to panic. As soon as she noticed, she promised herself she would "keep it together". When Dave logged off, Kandhi had chalked it up to the normal flow. All of them were under contract, of course. They were allowed to turn off the engagement stream by means of the swiping gesture, but the terms were clear about everything else. The connection could only be broken if the wristband was removed, and the wristband was NOT to be removed, under any circumstances. Death itself would not have been a good enough excuse. Something must have gone wrong, because Nate's connection was not only dropped, it was gone. And then Hannah's went too. At that, Kandhi nearly fell off her chair.

"Fred! Wen!" she shouted from her office, not even bothering to use the phone. Fred and Wen came running, recognizing the unmistakable quality of despair in their bosses' voice. It didn't require any tonal analysis for that.

"What?" Kandhi choked on her words. She could only gasp and gesture at the wall where she'd projected her desktop.

"Flat-lined," Fred intoned. "Every one of them flat-lined."

"The friends are still there," Wen chipped in, trying to look on the bright side, and it was true that the beta friends' signals were still active and strong. Clearly there was nothing physically wrong with the HAFS.

"That doesn't help," Kandhi sputtered. "It would be better if all of them weren't. Then we'd know it had to be the network or something else THAT MAKES SENSE!" she ended by nearly screaming.

"Take it easy," Fred muttered, realizing at once his mistake. Kandhi turned on him and pressed her face nearly right up to his.

"Easy?" she yelled. "Easy? What is so fricking easy?"

"Nothing?" Fred suggested, leaning away. Inside, Fred was all jumbled up. He knew, for a fact, that each of the partners' last conversations had ended shortly after his own "interventions". He had injected just the right thing that would bring each of them to a close and he knew it. Whatever was happening was entirely his fault, or rather, he had been the proximate cause. The individuals were still responsible for their actions, whatever those were. He had no clue what they were actually up to. He could make some guesses. Each of the subjects had somehow acted, had each done something in response to his prompting.

"All I have to do is keep my mouth shut," Fred said to himself, reflecting at once that this was going to be the hardest thing he'd ever done in his life. It wasn't easy being a big-mouth, being the guy who was always the downer in the room. He'd never been good at holding back, at keeping quiet, at playing his cards close to his chest. Quite the opposite, in fact. He was very, very good at blurting out whatever obnoxious comment came into his mind. He was quick on the verbal trigger, the fastest vocal draw in the West. If there was blame to be assigned, he would never hesitate in pointing the finger. If there was any chink in any armor anywhere, Fred would be sticking his nose right into it. It was his talent, his specialty, his gift. Now, for his own sake, he had to zip it, and zip it tight. Feigning complete and utter ignorance was the only way to go.

"Ideas? Suggestions? Wild-ass guesses?" Kandhi was demanding. Fred kept his mouth sealed tight and shook his head. After a few tense moments, it was Wen who spoke up.

"It could have been something they said," she offered, as if this weren't already obvious.

"Then let's go over the transcripts," Kandhi declared. "Even better, let's get all of the imaginary so-called friends on the line and go over it together, like a team," she added, bitterly. It was getting a bit late in Norway, but Kandhi didn't care. Bilj was wide awake in any event, and greeted the gathering cheerfully.

"I don't know where he's got to," he replied to Kandhi's question. "We talked a little bit and then he signed himself out. Since then I haven't heard a word. It must have been four or five hours ago."

"Four hours and forty-seven minutes," Wen informed the group. Turning to Stan, she added, "Three hours, sixteen minutes for you, and Velicia, two hours and ten."

"This cannot be happening, you do understand?" Kandhi told the faces assembled on the wall.

"What can we do about it?" Bilj shrugged. "We are only to be here when needed. When we aren't needed, well, we're still here."

"That's how I see it," Stanley agreed. "When the buzzer goes off, I see what he says. I say something back. It's routine."

"According to the guidelines," Velicia put in, "we basically speak when we're spoken to."

"And what did you say?" Kandhi wanted to know. "Each of you must have said something. It's entirely too coincidental that all of your contacts have apparently discarded their wristbands, in complete and utter violation of the terms of our agreement."

Each of the friends held up their arms to demonstrate that they, at least, had violated nothing, as far as they knew. Kandhi was already shuffling through the transcripts.

"I've emailed each of you the records of today's conversations. Please take a moment to review. There isn't much to see. None of them went on very long."

"Five minutes four seconds was the most," Wen put in, then fell silent beneath Kandhi's glare. Fred pretended to be reading his copies. He already knew very well what was said.

"Oh, this is good," Kandhi sneered. "Mr. Bjurnjurd, why did you feel the need to inform Mr. Claunney that he is in fact a homosexual?"

"I did?" Bilj looked puzzled, as Stanley burst into snickers and Velicia's eyebrows shot up. "I remember we talked about that," he continued, as he studied his record, "but as I recall, he was the one who brought up the matter, not me."

"And yet," Kandhi pointed at the transcript. "It says so right here. And I quote: So she doesn't even mind that you're gay!"

"I see that," Bilj nodded, "but I certainly don't remember saying it."

Fred was holding his breath so hard he nearly turned blue. "This is it," he said to himself, "the moment of truth."

"I do remember thinking it, though," Bilj sighed. "I guess I must have said it out loud."

Fred exhaled with such force that even Kandhi noticed and gave him a look. He pretended to cough a little bit to cover his tracks.

"Maybe I did," Kandhi mimicked his tone, "you bet that you did. It says so right here."

"It didn't seem to bother him," Bilj replied. "He said he was going to think about it. See? Here? That's where it ends. He was going to think about it. That's the last thing I heard."

"Guidelines?" Kandhi clapped her hands over her eyes. "Might be a little bit personal don't you think?" she mumbled.

"I guess," Bilj Bjurnjurd looked sheepish. "I guess I might have messed up," he continued.

"So what did I say that was wrong?" Stanley interrupted. "I don't see anything here."

"Neither do I," Kandhi admitted. "But it must have been something."

"There's nothing," Stanley insisted. "All I said was a bunch of encouragement. Go for it. Do what you want. I was being a sport, supportive, I mean. Like you said, like the guidelines. You got nothing on me."

"Me too," Velicia broke in. "She was talking her usual line about all the sick people she sees in the hospital and how come they suffer and all. So then look, like it says in the transcript, it's their bodies that are going through hell, but their souls are destined for heaven. What's wrong with that? It's the first time we ever connected, to tell you the truth."

"I don't know," Kandhi shrugged. "I have to admit, I had no idea. I was hoping one of you would come up with something."

There was silence all around. Finally, Kandhi let them all go, and turned to face her employees. Fred was still keeping his vigil, and Wen was maintaining a serious, if unhelpful, look on her face. Kandhi felt she was beginning to go into shock, She recognized all the symptoms – irregular heartbeat, shallow breathing, inability to think clearly, even now beginning to rock uncontrollably on her seat. Bad things were going to happen, she knew. Bad things were already happening. This became crystal clear when a perfunctory knock on her office door was followed by the entrance of the dreaded security chief, Ginger MacAvoy.

\- - - - - - - - -

"Well, well, well, the three musketeers," Ginger snapped, stepping into the room. She was not a tall woman but was a terrifying one none the less. Her unnaturally bright orange face was spotted with over-large freckles, and her glazed over-sized aviator glasses added to the impression of a monstrous peregrine falcon. Her shock of red hair only added to her imposing visage. Ginger was not someone you wanted to face under any circumstances, especially not bad ones. Kandhi shrank back in her seat as Ginger approached. Fred began to tremble. Only Wen was able to keep her composure. She always found Ginger a fascinating subject and was glad of any opportunity to observe her in action.

"We've just received some interesting information," Ginger pronounced each syllable slowly, as if she were speaking to infants. "It seems that some of our exceedingly precious artifacts have been finding their way into various local police stations. Fortunately, these priceless devices have our contact information embedded upon them. Otherwise, they might well have fallen into the wrong hands entirely. Of course," she continued after a pause, and glaring at each person in turn, "seeing as they had already passed through the hands in this very room, one might very well say they had ALREADY fallen into the wrong ones!"

She then let a silence fill up the room like a poisonous gas while she studied their faces intently. Ginger began to pace back and forth across the wide open space of the room.

"How did you ever get such an office?" she muttered to no one in particular. "Top floor, corner window, ample room ..."

Turning back to face Kandhi she yelled,

"For a NOTHING LIKE YOU?"

Kandhi nearly peed in her sweatpants. This was not going well, not at all. She ventured to speak up, however. Even a condemned prisoner gets to say some last words.

"Where, exactly?"

"Exactly?" Ginger retorted, "Well, let us see. I admit I don't have the precise latitude or longitude with me at the moment, but I can tell you this. Of the two devices we presently know of, one has ventured from a police station in Paducah, Kentucky to a mental hospital in Louisville, while the other has voyaged from a hospital in Pasadena to a police station in Pomona, California. Oddly symmetrical, don't you think?"

"Only two?" Kandhi spoke up, instantly regretting her choice of words.

"Oh, so more have been lost?" Ginger demanded.

"Well, there's one other one we're not certain about."

"That would be batting a hundred!" Ginger exclaimed. "Well, at least you don't do things halfway. Half-assed, yes, for sure, but at least not halfway!"

"Can we ask?" Wen began but Ginger cut her off.

"Oh yes, you can ask," Ginger snarled. "Where to begin? Where to begin?" She began pacing the room again, this time with her hands behind her back.

"Let's see. Which crime spree of the two was the more spectacular? The several home invasions? No, too pedestrian, too mundane by far. How about the attempted murders? Yes, that's the one. Who can tell us some more about that? The name is Hannah Lincum, does that sound familiar? A rather frequent hospital volunteer, so it seems, who was caught while dismantling the life support systems of several elderly patients? Hmm? Nothing to say?"

"I had no idea," Kandhi breathed.

"Letting their souls go to heaven?" Wen reminded her.

"Oh, is that what we call it now?" Ginger demanded. "Then what is the going terminology for when a young man breaks into a series of houses and claims to be liberating their pets?"

"Going for it?" Wen mumbled.

"Nice," Ginger responded as the three of them squirmed. She watched with great satisfaction before finally informing them that she already knew all about it.

"Of course we have all the transcripts," she told them. "You don't really think that we let you do anything without adult supervision around here? What a nightmare that could be! Just imagine the things that might happen."

Fred began to sweat seriously in earnest. If they really were tracking proficiently, they would be able to know precisely who had typed in which messages and where. He'd be caught out for sure. He hadn't even considered disguising his IP address. He tried hard to think. Was it really his fault? Just because he'd said certain things? Surely the individuals were responsible for whatever their actions had been. He could not be held accountable. Well, maybe not legally. There remained the simple matter of his livelihood. He'd be ruined. He'd never be able to work in tech again.

"We know who said what and when," Ginger went on. "Your selection of test subjects has proven to be rather dubious, wouldn't you say? Incompetence rules around here, but we already knew that, didn't we? This isn't the first time such calamities have occurred on your watch now is it, Ms. Clarke?"

"Just doing my job," Kandhi sputtered.

"As for the third of our friends," Ginger went on, ignoring her. "That remains to be seen. We have secured the address of this Mister Dave Claunney and are now helping the police to locate him. Given the other two cases so far, this one could be quite the emergency. It seems he was forced from his comfy little closet. God only knows how he'll react. Such matters don't always go well, don't you know?"

Ginger spun around and strode to the door.

"Someone will keep you informed," she promised. "In the meantime, please don't do anything, and by that I mean really, don't do anything at all. You will turn off your computers and you will not leave the premises. Someone will be in touch with you shortly."

She gratuitously slammed the door on her way out. Everyone on the floor had heard everything anyway, and nobody dared to look up. It was never a good idea to draw attention to yourself in the vicinity of Ginger MacAvoy. Kandhi, Fred and Wen remained in Kandhi's office for several more minutes. Kandhi did turn off her machines and, looking glum and nearly in tears, finally waved the others away. After they'd left the office, she just sat there, staring at the wall.

\- - - - - - - - -

Fred and Wen returned to their cubes and kept to themselves, Wen disobeying instructions and getting right back to work on her stats. There were still quite a few to be analyzed, especially the friends' incoming data, which was interesting in itself. She was curious about the shapes the data would take when they were perennially unoccupied otherwise. She would map and reduce until physically restrained. Ideally, all three friends' data should be identical, but it wasn't. There were unanticipated variations which she sought to explain algorithmically. At one point she even called over a couple of developers to look at her charts. They too were intrigued, and so the afternoon passed in relative normalcy for her.

Not so for Fred. He had followed Ginger's orders and turned off his laptop, and also the servers on which he'd been running regressions. Then he sat back and realized he was unable to function without his machines. His brain had nothing to do, so he pulled out his phone and tried to go about working on that, but it just wouldn't do. He couldn't install all the Python libraries he needed, for they simply hadn't been ported yet to the bleeding edge OS he had rooted on the device. He gazed longingly at his laptop and considered turning it on once again. Only dread kept him from actually doing it. He was forced to think long and hard about what he had done, and whether or not it could really be traced. After all, once a message was slipped in the stream, did it really retain its trajectory? Was the origin IP embedded inside of the protocol, or was it replaced, overridden by the messaging objects? He wished that he could remember, and the answer was so tantalizingly close. He could definitely find out right away, if only he could turn on the laptop, run a quick diagnostic, and capture some packets, just to be sure. The fact of not knowing was driving him crazy. His fingers were practically twitching in his frantic anxiety. The hours passed slowly for Fred.

He felt no remorse. That was certain. He'd done what he'd done because it had to be done. Letting the project go on as it had been was going to lead them nowhere, he knew. It was a bad beta batch, not because he'd paired them up wrong, and not because Kandhi had let him pick out the subjects, and not because of anything anyone did. It just was, and was destined to be, by the nature of the product itself. Friendship was a slippery thing, solid one day and vanished the next. People changed, they moved on. Good friends were not only hard to find, they were nearly impossible to keep, at least at the same level forever. Your best friend one day could be your enemy the next, or just drift away, become an acquaintance, before you even had any idea what had happened. And there were so many facets of friendship. It could never be clearly defined. There were friends who knew what you liked, and friends who knew what you WERE like, friends who knew your heart, and friends who knew only your wallet. What kind of friend could these beta friends be? It was open to whim, to accident, to happenstance. You couldn't let people be merely themselves and expect to end up with useful results!

So the boat must be rocked. The match must be lit. He'd seen it, he'd known it, and he'd done it. He didn't have any idea what would happen, only that something might, which was infinitely better than the nothing he was already sure of. The way that the test had begun was like filling a pot with water and putting it on a table. Fine, if what you wanted was a pot full of water, useless if you wanted hot tea. Well, now it was done and there was no use in crying about it. Chances were he'd be able to get another job in some other city someday! After all, he was still an experienced tester, and for some reason companies thought that they needed such persons. It was on the long checklist of things they felt they needed to have, like offices offshore, corporate culture and slogans.

Two o'clock came, and three o'clock went, and Fred stayed right there in his cubicle. He had fallen into a sort of reverie, contemplating the doom which had suddenly befallen him, when he was startled by a tap on his shoulder. It was Wen Li. He nearly leaped right out of his seat, and managed instead to fall on the floor.

"Steady, there," Wen chuckled, leaning over to offer him a hand up. Fred shook off the gesture and got to his feet.

"We've been summoned," Wen informed him.

"Oh, that's just great," he replied, following her out of the cubicle area.

"Summoned by who?" he asked. Wen just shrugged.

"I don't know. I was told to come get you. We're supposed to go down to a basement meeting room called Lafayette. Ever heard of it?"

"Nope," Fred said.

"Well, it shouldn't be too hard to find," Wen considered. They passed a few people on their way to the elevator, colleagues who conveniently found other places to look instead of at them.

"Are we being shunned?" Fred grumbled. He recognized some of his most antagonized developers among those who were studiously avoiding him. Fred silently swore an oath of revenge. He was certain they were all snickering into their sleeves.

"They're just worried the project's been canceled," Wen told him. "The rumor is going around."

"Good!" Fred spat as they waited for the elevator. "That's the best that could happen. Stupid computerized friendship bracelets!"

"I thought they were cool," Wen mildly replied. The elevator door opened and revealed Ginger MacAvoy waiting inside.

"Going down?" she sneered. Wen and Fred exchanged worried glances.

"Come on in," Ginger ordered. "I was just coming for you anyway."

They obeyed, and the three rode in silence down to the basement. Wen was thinking that at least this way they'd be having no trouble finding that meeting room, and she was correct. Ginger knew exactly where they were going. The only surprise was that she didn't enter the room along with them. Instead, she said "bon voyage," and facetiously waved them goodbye.

Wen and Fred entered the small meeting room. It was barely large enough for one meager table and four wicker chairs, all of which had been painted bright white like the walls and the floors and the ceiling. Kandhi Clarke was sitting in one of those chairs, shaking so hard her shoes were rattling on the floor. The chair to her right was occupied by the company's legendary co-founder, Chris.

"Please, come on in," Chris said, rising to greet them. He towered over the two, and his toothy white grin seemed hellish to Fred, who was immediately overwhelmed with emotion. Only Wen seemed immune to his spell, as she casually shook his hand, and then took her seat.

"First of all," Chris began, after they all had sat down. "I want to begin by saying 'thank you'. I know you've worked hard, and you've done a fine job."

Fred could only gape at the man. Whereas earlier he'd found it so hard to keep his mouth shut, at this moment it couldn't have opened for anything in all of creation. Kandhi merely sat there and blinked. It was unlikely she could absorb any of this, her mind was so far gone from stress, but Chris was still talking.

"We've all been impressed by how rapidly you've managed to validate the essential life transformative power of our latest technology. We already knew of this power, of course. That much was clear from the start, but to have such a clean demonstration is truly amazing. We never expected such an immediate impact. Why, the intervention potential alone is enormous."

Chris glanced around, and realized the team was in no way prepared for this kind of briefing. There were dozens of use cases he could easily mention, and the co-branding potentials were staggering, but all of that would be lost on this crowd. He smiled and took a deep breath.

"Ah," he went on. "The Ginger effect! No, no, I can see it in your faces," he said as Kandhi attempted to speak. "I do apologize about that. She has a tendency to get carried away, I'm afraid. She was only supposed to inform you that we'd found the devices. We were sure that you must have been worried. After all, transmission can only terminate when the device is physically removed, and the subjects were instructed never to do that. They were so instructed, were they not?"

"Yes, of course," Kandhi managed to say.

"It was the police who removed them in two of the cases," Chris told them.

"And the third?" Wen spoke up, "Did you find it?"

"Oh, yes," Chris laughed. "Not to worry. That one had a happier ending. It seems our friend Dave, it was Dave, was it not? It seems he was inspired to propose to his long-time best buddy! The two men ran off to New York to get married! Apparently, he didn't like how the HAFS looked along with his outfit, so he just took it off and stuck it in a dresser drawer, which is were our operatives found it, along with a thank you note for his friend, what's his name? Bilge?"

"Bjurnjurd," Fred stammered. "Bilj Bjurnjurd."

"Yes, in fact here's the note," Chris produced a scented envelope from his shirt pocket. "Pass it around. It's really quite nice."

Kandhi took the letter and opened it up. It read, in very fine penmanship:

Dear Bilj,

I can't thank you enough for your kind words of friendship. It's meant more to me than I know how to say. I hope we will talk again soon.

Your Friendular Friend,

Dave Claunney.

"Well, how about that?" Kandhi breathed. Chris went on.

"Wen, I'd especially like to congratulate you on your work for this project. The team has been raving about your metrics, especially your most recent work on discrete tonality mapping. It's really quite fascinating. We'll be talking to you about patents on that."

Wen nodded, and gave Fred a wink.

"And Fred," Chris said, turning to him. "I don't know precisely what your contribution was this time, but I'm sure it was also magnificent. It usually is."

"It was nothing," Fred murmured. "Wen did all the good work. And Kandhi, of course."

"Of course," Chris said, beaming. "Kandhi always comes through. We rely on it, don't we, my dear?"

But this was too much, especially coming from Chris. Kandhi started to cry, at first just a sniff and a sob, but soon she was openly weeping. Chris scootched his chair over and put a long arm around her shoulder, pulling her close. With his other arm he gestured for Fred and Wen to go away, which they happily did.

"I guess this means they won't kill it," Fred groused as they got back upstairs and went off to their cubes.

"Oh, no," Wen said, giggling. "Not at all. In fact, I think it's going to be big."

"I don't even want to know," Fred sighed. "I don't even want to think about what they will do."

"Whatever it is," Wen replied, "One thing's for sure. I'm certain that you're going to hate it!"

Even Fred couldn't argue with that.

