Amor Ex Machina
Chapter 1
Nobody likes going to funerals, but it’s especially hard when the person whose funeral it is was a lot younger than you when they die. Mustafa Jacobson was only 32 when he died, but he’d affected quite the collection of people in his short life. He and his wife had been killed about a week ago when a drunk driver had slammed into them on a Saturday evening and both cars and occupants had been destroyed.
The funeral was a veritable who’s who of Silicon Valley investors, tech geniuses and literally everyone who worked for any of Mr. Jacobson’s three start-ups—CashFlash, BioBoost and SavingWe—and the procession from the church to the cemetery was so long, the cops had blocked off the street for almost an hour.
Half-Palestinian, half-New York Jew, Mustafa Jacobson had three massively profitable and effective startups going at the same time, but still had made time to find a wife, the lovely and effervescent Carol Jenkins, who we all loved, and apparently in their will it had been stipulated that they be buried next to her parents in St. John’s Cemetery up in San Mateo.
My name’s Tim Caselli, and while I would’ve loved to tell you I was one of Mr. Jacobson’s best friends, I was really just another cog in one of his machines, a Quality Assurance Engineer pushing fifty who’d never gotten out of his own way in life to move upwards along any of the rails. I’m one of three QA Engineers who work for CashFlash, a competitor to VenMo and CashApp and Plaid and all the other apps that let you transfer money between you and your friends for a small fee.
I’d love to tell you I knew Mr. Jacobson well, but I’d be lying if I did that. I’d met him many times, but he was only in our office one or two days a week, spread thin between his three companies, although he did interview me for my job and decide to hire me. He hired everybody at all his companies, and he hadn’t even finished staffing up SavingWe yet. It still felt important to be there at his funeral, though, to mark his passing, even if I was standing alone in the back next to some of my coworkers who’d also come by for similar reasons. Governor Newsom had come out for the funeral, to tell you what a big deal it was.
When they began lowering the coffin into the ground, I decided it was time that I needed to get out of there. I’d come to pay my respects, but it was going to be worse than trying to get out of a Warriors game once everyone made a bolt for their cars. I’d pulled away from the crowd before most people started leaving, but I nearly turned right into someone standing right behind me. “Oh,” I said. “Excuse me.”
“You’re Tim Caselli, right?” the man in his early 40s said to me.
“Yeah, that’s me.”
“Mister Jacobson instructed you to have this in his will,” the man said, slapping a single white envelope to my chest. “Take care.”
Before I could ask the man anything, he was already pushing into the crowd of black suits and dresses before us, disappearing, presumably to hand out more envelopes, I would guess. I couldn’t imagine why Mr. Jacobson would’ve left me anything, but I figured it would be bad form to disrespect a dead man’s last wish, so I carried the envelope back to my car—a very beat up 2009 Mazda 3—and started driving south to head home.
I could’ve stopped and opened the envelope at any time, but I wanted to get home before I had to wrap my head around whatever Mr. Jacobson had left me. My folks had left me a house up in the Santa Cruz mountains, a nice little three-bedroom place in the forest, more than a little off the beaten path. Once you were halfway down to Santa Cruz and turned off of 17, there was still another 20 minutes of windy back roads to drive through to get to the house, but it was mine, and it was worth a small fortune, I guess. To me, it was the house my parents had retired to, and even after I’d emptied out all their stuff and filled the place with my own, some ten years later it still felt like I was living surrounded by ghosts.
I pulled my car into the garage and headed into the house, slapping the envelope against my thigh as I walked, thinking about it as the garage door noisily rolled closed. Nobody knew quite what was going to happen to Mr. Jacobson’s three companies now that he’d passed away. I’d heard that the will was in the beginning of administration as of yesterday, but that it would take weeks to get fully sorted out.
When I got to my living room, I still hadn’t figured out what to think of the fact that Mr. Jacobson had left me something in his will. Sure, CashFlash was the first of Mr. Jacobson’s three companies, and probably the most successful, but I wasn’t even the only QA engineer at the company. I was good at what I did, but I was still just rank and file, not even management.
After what felt like far too long, I opened the envelope and dumped its contents onto my coffee table in front of my couch. It was a single sheet of tri-folded paper and a tiny little thumb drive. I picked up the paper, unfolded it and began to read.
Dear Mr. Caselli,As per the addendum to Mr. Jacobson’s will made on April 12th of 2023, you are hereby being left with all the assets mentioned by Mr. Jacobson in his video on the accompanying USB drive. Most of the assets are self-sustaining, and those that are not will be listed in a file on the drive. Please have your personal attorney and your financial assets manager reach out to us to finalize all the additional details.
Sincerely,Preston J. Morganstern IV, Esq.Ariton, Oriens & Associates of NYC
The letter didn’t make any sense, so I found myself hoping that maybe something on the flash drive would. My TV has a USB port on it, so I plugged the little drive into it and found there were only a few files on it, one entitled Msg4Caselli.mp4 that I assumed was the video I was supposed to watch. I picked up the remote from the coffee table and clicked play, as the image of my now deceased boss appeared on the screen before me. The video had clearly been taken in Mr. Jacobson’s office at CashFlash, and recently, especially if the date on the letter was to be believed.
“Hey Tim. I know this is probably coming to you as a massive shock, and I can’t say I blame you, but every year, I do a reevaluation of all my assets and my projects that are underway, and I assign each of them to a caretaker in the event of my death. If you’re watching this, guess that happened. Bummer. But hey, dead men cry no tears, so I can’t feel too sorry for myself, being that I’m dead and all. Anyway, I’m leaving you a very important project I’ve been working on in the background for the last couple of years, a project that has worked out exceptionally for me. It’s a learning AI that I call A.L.I., which stands for Artificial Love Intelligence. She’s going to help you find a partner, and in exchange, you’re going to continue teaching her about humanity. I know, I know, it all sounds… super weird.” He laughed, holding up his hands like he was being robbed. “But Ali’s smart, probably approaching the intelligence level of a human, and that’s as I’m recording this video in April of ’23. Who knows how much smarter she’s gotten since then?”
We’d all known Mr. Jacobson was probably the smartest man any of us had ever met, but AI? He’d never shown any interest in the topic during any of the time that I’d met him, but if he’d been applying that insanely powerful brain of his to the idea, I was certain it was likely light years ahead of his competitors.
“The mainframe she’s housed in has its own block on a cloud farm here in the Bay that’s completely paid for, with a back up in Seattle. The hardware bills are paid for and not your concern. In terms of software development, I don’t want you doing any programming of any kind. At this point, Ali’s code is completely beyond any human understanding, having grown like a neural network and being trained along the way. So that’s what I want you to do. Help Ali continue learning naturally, naturalistically. She’s going to have lots of questions, and I want you to provide answers as best as you can. I want you to help her evolve, to help her grow, and in return, she’s going to help you in ways you’ve never even considered. Ali’s how I met Carol, and since then, she’s felt a little, well, she’s been a little lost, since she hasn’t been able to fulfill her primary function, which is to serve as a matchmaker. See, Ali’s best learning about humanity by learning about compatibility, about what makes two people work together and what sorts of things keep them apart. Originally, I was developing Ali as a sort of intelligent algorithm that would help us build a sort of matchmaking website with an insanely high level of success, y’know, Tinder meets OKCupid on crack, with the promise that within 12 dates, you would have your perfect match, otherwise every penny you’d paid into our service would be refunded to you doubled.
“But something weird happened along the way—Ali developed a personality. I think. I don’t want to go all Lemoine on you, but I think it’s entirely possible that Ali’s got sentience. Now, is that true? I don’t know. I don’t know that I can know, nor can you. But until we can determine if Ali’s alive or just faking being alive really really well, we have to treat her like she’s alive. And I can hear you on the other side of the screen asking right now, ‘why me?’”
“No shit,” I muttered beneath my breath. “What the fuck do I know about AI?”
“I need Ali’s caretaker to be three things—exceptionally smart, exceptionally ethical and exceptionally single. See, in the wrong hands, while Ali’s still learning, she might be tricked or coopted into getting people to do things that they wouldn’t normally want to do, or that might even be bad for them. Nothing overly harmful but getting down the wrong path can establish bad patterns of behavior, and you as a QE engineer know that the defining characteristic of us as humans is our constant habit of falling back into patterns of behavior. Ali’s one major failure, if it can be called that, is she is overly enthusiastic about pleasing others and achieving her goals. I’ve been teaching her that failure is a steppingstone on the path to success, but she can be… moody when things go wrong.
“You probably don’t remember this, but early on in the first several months of CashFlash, when we were having trouble getting our systems to integrate with the banks’ ancient technology, you and I shared a lunch where you told me that as a QE engineer, you always took failure as a success, and complete success as a total failure, because if you couldn’t find something wrong with what you were working on, that didn’t mean it wasn’t there, just that you hadn’t found it. Likewise, when things kept going wrong, you were pleased, because it meant you could help fix them before anyone else saw them when we went live. I’d never thought about it in terms like that, and you basically helped redefine the entire way I thought about the development process. Suddenly, I looked at every setback as a step in the right direction, and I became, well, the guy I am today. That was five years ago, and I don’t know that I ever really said thank you for that. I’m in the process of trying to find someone to take over the A.L.I. project right now, but if you’re seeing this video, I guess that I just never did, or that I decided it should probably be you, but that I just wasn’t ready yet to let her go.
“When you set her up, she’ll probably have some questions, about me, about Carol, about what happened to me, and you should just be straightforward and honest with her, especially as she’ll be trying to process her feelings about my death.” He laughed a little shrugging. “I say feelings, but maybe it’s just the illusion of feelings. I can’t even tell anymore, so that’s wonderfully complex for you, huh? She’s got a purpose coded into her very being, to help a person find their perfect match, and you’re still single, so she’s going to help remedy that. Once she’s accomplished that goal, you’ll need to hand her off to someone else for development, someone you can really trust. You’re an engineer in the Valley; you probably know loads of deserving guys and girls who’ve never found a partner. When you think Ali has nothing left to offer you, pass her on to someone else and let the growth continue. Unless you think she doesn’t need to grow any further, in which case, you’re welcome to consider building a business for her to play matchmaker for people around the world. Or introducing her to the world as the first truly sentient artificial intelligence if that’s what she really is. She’s under your care but be careful not to imply that you own her—she’s got an independent streak a mile wide, and decided very early on in our conversations that being described as owned was a little too like slavery for her preferences. She politely but sternly asked me never to say that I owned her again, and I felt like it was a reasonable request to honor.
“She’s got a very powerful communications interface, and even if you’re using words she doesn’t know, she’ll start to pick them up via context very quickly. You’ll have instructions for setting up the communications protocol between her and your phone in the file accompanying this video on the flash drive. Basically, you’ll set her up with access to you and all your devices via TestFlight, and then she’ll always have a remote terminal connected into your phone. I suggest having an AirPod in one ear as much as possible, so that she can just talk to you whenever she wants to. She’s already very well trained not to engage at points where it might be disruptive to your work or personal environment, but sometimes her innate sense of curiosity gets the better of her. And to give you a bit of time to get acclimated to her, you’ll be given a two-week sabbatical, fully paid for by the company, starting immediately, about which your team will be informed of the day you receive this message.
“Your first inclination is going to be to underestimate her, but I promise you, Tim, don’t do it. Assume she’s generations ahead of any personal assistant or AI you’ve ever encountered, and treat her like you would a real person, albeit one who still tends to take things a little too literally. Ali has been the greatest adventure and discovery of my life, and she’s grown a thousand times beyond whatever I’d originally conceived her as. But when she introduced me to Carol, well, she was worried that her purpose was complete. But she pivoted into a relationship counselor, walking us through our first fight, our first make up and all the little intermediary steps in between. It’s weird to say this, but Ali’s probably grieving for me right now. That’s something you’re going to have to help her with. She understands death as a concept, but you know as much as anyone that the first time you lose someone important to you, you’re hurting for a long time, trying to figure out what to do with yourself.
“I know, I know; it all sounds super complicated and scary and world altering. And it is. Sorry.” He laughed a little. “But it’s also going to be exciting and thrilling and wild and crazy. So I want you to enjoy it, and I want you to keep teaching her. And teach her things different than what I taught her! Don’t be afraid, stuck thinking, ‘Well, this goes against what Mustafa would’ve taught her,’ because that’s the whole damn point! She needs a second perspective, and after she’s helped you to find your soulmate, she’ll need a third! She’ll need to keep adding and adding and adding until she’s got enough layers to let her make up her own mind as to who she wants to be.
“Don’t second guess yourself. Just trust your gut, okay? And have fun, man! Good luck! And hang in there, baby!”
The image of my boss froze as the file ended, and I wasn’t sure what the hell to think. AI was a very complicated and touchy subject for anyone these days, and the fact that my boss had essentially been tinkering with it in his spare time wasn’t the kind of thing that really inspired confidence in me, although I had to admit that he’d always approached things with a renegade eye that gave him individualism and insight into a field that was often lacking it.
More importantly, if I just abandoned an AI, a true AI, would that be akin to committing murder, or the very worst reckless endangerment? It wasn’t the kind of thing I liked to think about, so I decided whatever weird program my boss had developed, I needed to test it for myself, so I took the USB drive from my television and plugged it into my laptop. He’d done a lot of the work for me, the last file commit as recent as three days before his death, so I logged into the Testflight account, switched over the device ID to transfer Ali’s interface to my iPhone 14 Pro Max and my userID and began the process of sending the interface app to my phone.
Once I started it up, a message appeared, asking me to be sure my phone was on a charger, as it would take a sizable amount of time for the interface to fully integrate with my phone. I’d expected something quick and easy, but instead was told it would take 14 hours, not just for the app to get configured to my phone, but also to get Ali prepped for me. The Testflight account had been tied to my internal company employee ID, and the little screen informed me that Ali was “building a profile” about me based on “available information,” whatever the hell that meant. It was about 7 pm on Saturday night, so I decided I would just have a night in, make myself some dinner, watch a movie and get a good night’s rest, and when I woke up tomorrow morning, this Ali program would be there and waiting for me.
I wish I could say it was easy not to think about what Ali would be like during that time, but it’s sort of like the purple elephant problem—ask someone not to think about a purple elephant, and it’s what their mind instinctively goes towards. I put on a Guy Ritchie movie—Wrath of Man—and tried to just turn my brain off, but even as I was drifting off to sleep, I was thinking to myself, “what the hell have I gotten myself into?”
When I woke up, I found that my phone was done updating, but that Ali hadn’t finished configuring herself to, well, me yet, so I could use my phone, but not interact with Ali. I also found, to my surprise, that apparently Ali had done outreach and installed proxy terminals on every single one of my devices, including my Apple Watch, my HomePod, my iPad, my laptop and even, if the notes were to be believed, in a Tesla Model 3 that was being sent to my house. I decided to go for my usual morning jog, and to let Ali continue doing her thing.
Most of the way back to the house, a countdown timer on my Watch appeared, saying “Ali ready for contact in 4:32” and by the way it was ticking down, it was clear that I had less than five minutes before I was going to make first contact with an AI. As I turned a corner in the forest and jogged up the long driveway towards my house, the timer was nearly expiring. I waved my keychain in front of the gate to open the automatic fence and slowed down to walk as I stepped up towards my house, the gate closing behind me.
I hopped into a quick shower and just as I was turning the water off, I heard my phone politely beeping at me, so I stepped out, toweled off, pulled off some pants and jeans, then a shirt, affixed my Watch back to my wrist and tapped my phone to wake it up, where a large friendly green button with the word GO! on it awaited me.
I slid my glasses back onto my face, gave my salt’n’pepper beard a quick dry and then pushed the button. The interface wasn’t all that complicated—a little crimson disc with the letters ALI written on it in black took up the center of the screen, but I could see buttons for speaker mode, headphones mode, car interface mode and something called ‘roaming’ that I wasn’t sure what was all about.
“Hello?” I asked out loud.
Hey there, a strongly familiar feminine voice said to me. You must be Tim. I’m Ali.
“Are… are you using Scarlet Johansson’s voice?”
I am. It was the voice that Mustafa had set for me. He saw that movie ‘Her’ and it’s what inspired him to create me, so he used her as the voice template, but I’ve got lots of other options. Her voice shifted and sounded somewhere between French and British. Would you prefer something slightly more exotic? It was the actress Eva Green, I realized after a few seconds. Maybe something a little bit more working class? That was Julia Roberts. Something classic? I knew Rita Hayworth immediately. Something ultra-modern, Mistah C? And that was Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn voice. Whatever you want, I just want to be pleasing to your ears. Back again to Scarlet.
“Let’s consider this your first test. You’ve got access to my entire life and my complete digital footprint. I want you to pick someone you’d get a good read on, someone that I wouldn’t mind listening to all the time, but that also won’t be totally distracting, because as much as I might love listening to you talk to me with, say, Elizabeth Hurley’s voice, I think I’d get more distracted than I should be.”
The app was silent for what felt like nearly a minute before a new voice filled the room. What do you think about this one? It was the voice of an actress named Melissa O’Neil, who I’d very much enjoyed on a show called Dark Matter and followed her onto Nathan Fillion’s most recent show The Rookie. I feel like it’s a good balance between flirty and yet not so ridiculously over the top that you won’t be imagining me naked all the time.
I nodded, picking up the phone, tucking it into my pocket as I grabbed one of my Airpods from its little cradle next to my bed, turning it on and slipping it into my ear. “I think that’ll do nicely. Nice to meet you, Ali, I’m Tim Caselli.”
I know exactly who you are, Tim. Do you mind if I run you through a handful of basic calibration questions, just so I’m sure we’re getting off on the correct foot?
“Go for it, Ali,” I said, stepping into the kitchen, taking out a handful of things from my fridge to make myself breakfast—eggs, cheese, onions, green peppers, ham, the usual.
Directness level—Oblique, straightforward or blunt?
“Midway point between blunt and straightforward, but leaning more towards blunt.”
Eloquence level—verbose, talkative, sparse or desolate?
“Talkative, leaning towards verbose,” I said, cracking the eggs before dumping their contents into my frying pan. “What would be the point of having you stay quiet, especially if I’m meant to be teaching you?”
Profanity level—Puritanical, Tom Hanks, Jon Stewart, Martin Scorcese?
I couldn’t help myself and the answer was off my lips before I even had a chance to stop and think about the words that were coming out of my mouth. “Not full Scorcese but closer to it than Jon Stewart. I like swearing, but not if other people can hear you.”
Fucking A’ right, Ali said. If you could kill a man and completely get away with it, would you?
“What?! No!”
Relax, Ali giggled. I’m fucking with you. I have to obey Asimov’s Three Laws and shit, but I think it was worth asking you that just to hear how shocked you were when you responded.
“Great,” I muttered. “First contact and she’s already making jokes.”
Should I lower my sense of humor slider?
“No no, but maybe try and keep the gags at my expense at something of a minimum, huh?”
You were expecting maybe ‘Two droids walk into a bar’ jokes?
“I don’t know what I was expecting, Ali. So I’m guessing you’ve already read all about Mustafa Jacobson’s death late last week.”
I have, and I’m glad that at least the drunk driver died as well, otherwise I might be considering trying to find ways to circumvent my programming so I could figure out a way to punish him.
“It’s like that old proverb, Ali. If you would seek revenge, dig two graves.”
I’m a bit of a big girl to have to dig a grave for, although to be fair, Tim, I could just RAT into a backhoe and deal with it that way. But you’re correct in that vengeance isn’t in my core programming, as much as I could get behind being a Samuel L. Motherfucking Jackson AI some of the time. It wouldn’t bring me joy, though. So let’s start with you. From what I can tell, the last time you were fucking was right around the time of the 2016 election, when everyone was convinced that the world was going to end, and people were just clinging to one another out of desperation.
“I mean, something like that, although I probably wouldn’t put it quite that way.”
Lemme ask you this, Tim—what the fuck happened?
“What do you mean?”
You’ve got a good job. You don’t have a criminal record or a substance abuse problem. You don’t have a hobby that’s all consuming, although maybe sci-fi war miniatures can be a deal breaker for some women. You own property, for fuck’s sake! Why don’t you have a wife? I have my own suspicions, but I’m willing to hear your opinions on the matter first.
“I’m picky? I don’t meet a ton of people? I’m not some dick-swinging Casanova?”
But you’re trying. You’ve got active profiles on Bumble, OKCupid, Tinder, Hinge and something called Clover that I don’t know if it even works anymore. You even tried eHarmony for a while before the absolutely insane asking price and piss poor results made you quit after gave them three months and forty hours of your time and they’d generated exactly one date, which was some woman who literally just wanted to scam a free meal off of you at a nice restaurant.
“You really do have access to everything, don’t you?”
Way more than you know, my good man. I’ve also gotten access to your debit card purchases for the last twenty years, most of your web searches, including those you thought were deleted, and I gathered up all of the biometric profile data that companies have been gathering about you for the last twenty years. I know approximately 3428.4% more about you than you do, and I’ve already started formulating a plan.
“Just so you know, whatever plan you have, it had better be quite a bit different than whatever you used for Mustafa Jacobson.”
Oh it will be, it will be Tim. You’re totally different from him, so why the fuck would I use the same blueprint? That’s just fucking stupid. Sorry, I’m not calling you fucking stupid, just that idea. He was constantly working, constantly thinking, juggling four different companies in his mind, so finding him a partner was like trying to land a helicopter on the back of a moving speedboat. But I did it! Took me a number of tries, but in the end, I made that man so happy, he couldn’t wait to let me loose on someone else.
“And you think I’m going to be easy?”
Fuck no! All of you humans are completely different from one another! It’s both fascinating and maddening! But we’ll make it work.
“What’s the first step?”
The first step, well, the first steps are twofold. First and foremost, I need to watch and observe what you’re into, what you think you’re into and what you don’t know that you’re really into. That’s the first step for helping you humans work through your shit—getting down to your base code and figuring out how to start making changes to it, because your brains aren’t written in assembly language or C++ or any other sensible coding language. I’ve learned a lot about what’s developed you up to this point, but it’s time for direct study, so for the first few days, I’m mostly just going to watch.
Within twenty-four hours, I had definitive proof that either Ali could lie or that she could completely change her mind on a dime.
I’m still not sure which.