“Bro.”
Two hands interlock with a slap. The boys smile in unison, uncontrollably giddy until they simultaneously realize how much manlier it would be to keep it cool. They glance at the stately lawyer across the desk.
The lawyer offers a curt smile. “Congratulations. You two are the official cofounders of Boingo AI as owned and managed by Boingo AI, LLC. Now is there anything else we can do for you?”
Roy looks at Parth. Parth looks at Roy, then at the lawyer.
“Uh, we’re good.”
“Excellent.” The lawyer signals the end of the meeting as he always does with a double-handed slap of his desk after which he stands up and walks unhurriedly to the door.
“Call me if you need anything.”
They shake his hand one-by-one, each undershooting the optimal tightness of grip then overcompensating, but not to the point of awkwardness.
Parth extends his arm to hold the door open for Roy but the lawyer is already holding the door. Roy exits. Parth releases then follows.
“You wanna call a car or should I?”
“I’m chill to do it.”
The boys stand on the curb, engrossed in phones. Roy drafts a post. Parth texts his mom. A bubble indicates that she read the message instantly and is typing her response.
Yay!
I always knew u would do something great
Come home this weekend and we will celebrate
OK
A notification descends from the top of Parth’s phone screen.
He chimes at Roy, “eleven minutes.”
“Bruh.”
The minutes pass. Roy switches from drafting to scrolling. Parth claims a daily reward.
As their summoned car pulls up to the curb, the lawyer breezes past them from behind on the way to his lunch break.
“You boys OK?”
“Yeah,” says Roy as he opens the door and flings himself inside.
“Thanks again,” echoes Parth.
The lawyer nods, looking more jolly than he did while they were reviewing contracts. Parth buckles his seatbelt. Roy does not. Roy clears his throat then remarks conspicuously, “OK, so five investor calls this week and a few more next week. Even if one hits we will be so good for a while.”
Parth nods with a closed-mouth grin. His eyes flash to the rearview mirror. The driver doesn’t react at all.
“I’d do it even if the money doesn’t come in for a year.”
“OK, sure, but bro, don’t talk like that.” Roy is the more superstitious of the two.
“Uh huh.”
• • •
They sit on Roy’s couch, laptops open atop laps, working. Roy is auditioning color palettes. He asks a chatbot again and again for a list of four colors that represent “background,” “highlight,” “shadow,” and “secondary,” volleying a new adjective after each round.
more chill
Absolutely! Here’s a list of four hex colors with a more chill vibe—if you like it, I can help you take next steps and build out a whole pitch deck using this color scheme. Just say the word.
Roy pastes the hexadecimal codes into another window and looks at the results for a few seconds.
more modern
Absolutely! Let’s modernize these colors, so that your pitch deck will look sleek, elegant, professional—try these. When you’re ready to move on to next steps, just say the word.
i like the light blue but make the dark blue darker
Absolutely! Here’s a new version of the same color scheme with the “shadow” color darkened for a more muted but striking effect. When you’re ready to move on to next steps, just say the word.
too dark
Parth glances over.
“That looks pretty good.”
Roy replies, half-groaning, “yeah but it needs to be perfect. It needs to be, like, something you’ve never seen before.”
“Uh huh.”
Parth had glanced over in an idle moment while a new build of their app was deploying. Now it is just about ready to test, in particular, he is hoping that the brand-new “ethnicity” feature is going to work in time to show it on investor calls.
“It is live?” asks Roy, shutting his laptop.
“Should be.”
Parth blazes through a few rote clicks, drags a couple sliders, and then makes a choice from a new dropdown menu.
“…” Parth’s eyes widen, and just as he begins to turn towards his cofounder—
“Let’s go!” bellows Roy.
“Wait” — Roy’s eyes tinkle — “fuck this dropdown. Make it a fucking world map, dude.”
“Yo that’s lowkey genius.” Parth can’t contain his grin.
• • •
It’s 7:20 AM in San Francisco, 10:20 in Miami, leaving ten minutes for final preparations. Roy skirts into the bathroom to set up his hair. Parth begins a backup videocall to nobody, double checking the lighting and background proportions. It looks alright. The filter blurs his dark pimples. He cracks two capsule-bottles of naseuous caffeinated goop and pours their contents into two cups of overbrewed English Breakfast. The app is running a special local build that should be foolproof. It is one click away, ready to show off. In the bathroom, Roy leans over the sink, hair hanging in a crescent swoop. He flicks moisture towards his face hoping to achieve the perfect balance of sheen, volume, and casual curvature. It’s as good as it’s going to get. He spreads his eyelids with indexes and thumbs attempting to undo the puffy squintiness that afflicts him after a restless night.
“I look so fucking Chinese,” he mutters subvocally.
His phone reads 7:27. Roy reaches into his pocket for his wallet. In its backmost slit lives a fading photo of his father as a young man, visiting Shanghai for the first time, smiling uncharacteristically — uncharacteristically relative to his son’s image of him, at least. Roy smiles back with half the intensity.
From the other room, “Dude, it’s time.”
Roy cannonballs into the chair next to his best friend. He sweeps a single finger from the top left corner of his forehead, stimulating his hair one last time. Parth gulps his souped-up tea.
“Should I let him in?”
“Yeah.”
“Aight.” Parth clicks a button, releasing the investor from the digital waiting room.
“Gentlemen!” the man onscreen booms. He is a different kind of creature from the boys. He is meaty; he wears a bulky, jangly watch on the loosest setting and twirls a pen between turgid fingers; his blubbery lower lip hangs low so that his bottom teeth jut out when he talks, more tusk than fang. His skin is the color of boiled lobster and his hair looks like a skidmark.
“Hey there, David,” begins Roy.
“Dave’s fine.”
Parth swallows.
The big man continues, “So, Boingo AI. Nice name.”
“Th–”
“–What does it mean?”
Roy realizes he is going to have to lead. Parth is already exuding a clammy nervousness.
“We thought it would be a memorable name. And, uh, we like 80’s music–”
“Oingo Boingo!” Dave’s cavernous chest resonates with the big open vowels. He begins to sing, tunelessly, “I love little girls!” then laughs a few times. “That’s from my era!”
“Good music is good music,” says Parth. When in doubt, go for the tautology — advice he heard in college from an older, more extraverted philosophy-major bro.
Dave cuts to the chase. “So let’s see it! We are all-in on AI here. I tell my wife, there’s nothing it can’t do.”
“Can you see this?” asks Parth as he broadcasts his computer screen.
“Yep.”
Parth launches into a speech he has rehearsed a hundred times. Roy relaxes and reaches for his tea.
“What you’re seeing here is the main screen of Boingo. It’s a super minimal interface. We’re all about functionality. As you know—”
Parth wonders if Dave knows, then discards the thought and presses on.
“—the dating market is basically, like, cooked for males. The average female can get twenty-five matches a day, up into the hundreds depending on various factors, but outside of the top five percent, males average zero-point-eight matches per day on dating apps, with a conversion rate of less than ten percent, meaning many males end up going on less than one date a month.”
Dave nods along but his eyes go vacant. The word “female” strikes him as a strange choice but also triggers a memory of a drunken sexual encounter with a girl named Bess who cheerled his high school football team on which he played tight end. She had a tight end, he thinks to himself, recalling himself making that joke to his buddies nearly forty years ago.
Parth presses on with his rhetorical concoction.
“Male match rate is basically out of your control; it depends primarily on height but race and overall attractiveness are big factors too. However, conversion rate goes way up for males who can communicate well, and all the data points in the same direction: confidence.”
“Mmhmm.” Dave likes the word “confidence.”
“But how do you build confidence?”
Roy likes the word “build.”
Parth answers his own question. “Practice.” He pauses for a beat, then transitions to the next phase of his pitch. “Imagine if you could practice talking to girls–”
Girls, not females, Dave thinks.
“–as much as you want, without any stakes, so you can try out anything and everything. Now imagine you could practice talking to any type of girl.”
Roy jumps in. “For instance, I love Japanese women and I’m super into movies. Check this out.”
Roy takes control of Parth’s computer. He slides a little bead to 5’2" and another to 105 lbs. A third remains at its default: 18 y/o. In a little box, he types movies. Then he clicks an icon of a globe and a map of the world overtakes the screen. He clicks on Japan and the map minimizes, replacing the globe icon with the Japanese flag. Finally he drags another bead a little to the right, towards the “extrovert” side. A button branded Start Chatting! lights up. Roy clicks it.
The interface disappears and meaningless flavor text scrolls by in lieu of a progress bar.
Copying genetic code…
Working through childhood trauma…
Breaking hearts…
Aging gracefully…
Then, in an instant, a smooth render of a woman appears on the screen. She opens her eyes with a gentle smile and raises her right hand in a peace sign. Her underlying logic makes her sway and blink to dispel the true illusion that she is not real. A speech bubble appears over her head.
“Hey, I’m Hikaru! ~ <3 ~”
“Hikaru” shrinks and settles in the corner. A text-message interface takes over the screen.
Roy tries to gauge a reaction. Dave’s hands are folded in front of his mouth, chin resting on fat thumbs. Roy continues, “So now I can chat with her, view pictures, and whenever I finish the chat, Boingo will grade my performance on an itemized one-to-ten scale. What should I say to break the ice?”
Dave puffs from his nose. Unearthing his chin from his hands, he offers, “Do you like movies?”
Roy types, “do u like movies”
A moment later, a bubble appears in response.
“OMG, yes! My favorite movies are American Beauty, The Devil Wears Prada, and I lowkey love Marvel.”
“Nice,” mutters Dave. An awkward pause elapses. Roy jumps in, typing back a response without consulting Dave.
“lol yeah marvel can be pretty fun.”
He accidentally hits ‘Enter’ by reflex, sending the message before he can type the followup sentence.
The fake woman texts, “when I was growing up, I watched Japanese movies with my dad, even though I lowkey don’t know Japanese. They’re all about vibes, though, so it’s chill.”
For a moment, Roy forgets that he is pitching his new startup. He types, “lol i know what u mean i know chinese but–”
He stumbles as a thought of his father crosses his mind.
“–chinese movies are sooooo boring except for the fight scenes”
Roy’s stumble reminds him of his mission. He explains to Dave, “So you basically go on like this with as many girls with different stats as you want. And after you’ve done a bunch you can generate a summary of your performance with tips on how to improve. Our pro tier integrates with all the apps and will make suggestions based on your past performance to actual, uh, girls, and we expect a 10x improvement in conversion rate after just one month of practice on Boingo.”
Parth inhales, preparing to follow up; Roy flicks his leg to stop him.
“Wow,” remarks Dave. He puffs air from his nose then sits back in his chair, wrangling his thoughts back towards financial matters. The wrangling fails. Three images confront him all at once: of the generated woman, at once accurate yet so obviously inhuman yet in a way that he cannot describe; of what feels like a thousand women he had propositioned over what feels like a thousand years, almost all propositions ending in failure but none so quantitative as what he sees before him; of the boys sitting in front of him, who have inherited a world he did not create nor want but nonetheless must invest in for that is what he does, who he is — an “investor.” Dave fails to transpose the computer woman to his high school’s football field, steaming after a won game. He fails to transpose these boys to the once-cheap bar in South Tampa where he had honed his game, testing shirts and jokes and affectations. That world and its game are gone. Something colder overtook it. Dave fails to expunge from his mind another image, one that creeps up to rehaunt him in weak moments: “Stop it! You’re hurting me!” — her hands reaching to cover her face, his bigger hands grabbing hers to pin them back, just one more—
Shame electrifies Dave’s flesh. That world needs to die, he thinks. It doesn’t matter how fun it ever got nor how alien its offered replacement seems to him. Look at what happened. Look at what happened to her and so many others like her.
Eleven seconds have elapsed. Roy and Parth have resisted the urge to look at each other. Dave has breathed, decelerating, four times all the way in and all the way out. Finally, he deinterlaces his fingers, lifts his elbows off his desk, and sits up. His first syllable catches in his throat before his voice kicks in.
“I’m in. I see it. This is going to be big.”
The boys’ eyes widen in unison.
Dave continues, gaining momentum, “I– So what are you guys looking for?”
Roy opens his mouth but then Dave just keeps going.
“I’ll tell you. We’ve set aside one-point-five specifically for AI. We’re looking for something that’ll make a difference.”
Roys slams his tongue into the roof of his mouth. Parth crunches his pelvic floor.
Dave wants to wrap the conversation up so that he can call his daughter to check in on her. He blurts, “So let’s do it. This is it. I’m a believer. One-point-five for fifteen percent. You work out the kinks and get it on the market. I call on my contacts and we get this thing moving.”
Parth ejaculates without missing a beat, “ten percent.”
Roy bites his tongue and calls on every bit of strength he has not to recoil and scream.
“You know what?” Dave fires back, just as fast, “Fine. Yeah. Fine. I’m in.”
Roy cracks open his mouth to reply but instead of words blood trickles out. Parth spots it in the front-facing camera, suppresses his horror, then says, ice-cold, “You aren’t going to regret this, Dave.”
“I sure hope not!” he bellows, followed by a laugh that pushes the brief tension into the past. “Alright. We’ll send you some details and some forms this afternoon. Love keepin’ it quick like this. But I know 'em when I see 'em. Be well, gentlemen.”
“Thanks Dave.”
Parth clicks a button to end the meeting and in the same motion of his arm spins to embrace Roy. Roy leans back to give his own arm enough space to interlock with Parth’s. He misjudges and they fumble for a second until their hands and eyes meet in triumph. Parth beams. Roy’s crimson smile leaks, blood oxygenating as it makes contact with the world outside of his head.