Syboleth ch. 24: Five Lines

AN: If you've already read Chapter 23 when I posted it as Chapter ?+8 back in December, please reread between Chapters 22 and 24 before continuing. ESPECIALLY here, it's important and it's the last time you'll have to do it.

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Chapter 24: Five Lines

Garrett was sitting at a table with a velvet tablecloth holding a martini. He had ordered it shaken, not stirred at the bar. The bartend had not registered the reference, at least not visibly. The James Bond films had fallen in cultural relevance since being acquired by Amazon.

Every member of Perfluous Research's lead team was here, along with plenty of venture capitalists and reporters and other sorts all milling about underneath a garish chandelier in the gala hall that Perfluous HR had secured for this launch event.

Garrett could scarcely believe this was actually happening to him. He thought back to three years earlier, when he had gotten his promotion and begun the mind-numbing MRI research. One year into that Keira Cross had apparently proven some sort of scheme to the CIA, and so she had been catapulted to the top and they had shifted focus from neural links to artificial intelligence. If you could even call this artificial. It was more like biological intelligence than any LLM, that was for sure. Keira was a mad genius. Her speech to the various sorts gathered at this gala hall was fiery and spontaneous, typical Keira.

She was also standing twenty meters from Garrett's table, talking to someone with a nametag that said Andrew Long. She did not look very entertained, which prompted Garrett to wonder if he might be able to entertain her once Andrew Long moved on.

Not that Long seemed interested in moving on any time soon.

He turned his attention to his phone. Valerie had sent him a text thanking him for the crochet hook he had included in the care package he left for her weekly. The crochet hook that had cost him less than half a percent of his weekly pay.

He sent a text acknowledging the thank you and saying he couldn't talk much, then went back to stalking Keira.

Long seemed to be wrapping up, so Garrett got up and approached the two while keeping a polite distance.

"Hi," said Long unexpectedly as he and Garrett crossed paths. "I'm Andrew. Pleasure to meet you."

Andrew Long extended a slender hand, and Garrett's hand met it weakly a couple seconds later. Long's handshake was firm.

"Hi," said Garrett. "I actually have something to ask my team lead abo—"

"No worries at all," said Long, then continued speaking anyway. "I just wanted to introduce myself. Quite the speech that team lead gave, huh! I moonlight as a venture capitalist but I've also done consulting for the DARPA MRI project Perfluous was spun out of. I understand you had something to do with that, eh? In it from the beginning then!"

"That's great, but I really—"

"Well, I won't keep you," said Long, but he was still talking. "I just wanted to make sure you knew that the CIA and DARPA trusted me, and I hope Perfluous sees fit to use my services in the same way now that things have gotten going."

Garrett wondered at what exactly Long would contribute to an active and mostly privatized AI demonstration that would actually bear relevance to the expertise he offered DARPA about a government program to make a better Neuralink. He thought it might be amusing to ask about this, but his desire to talk to Keira won out.

"Great," Garrett said. "Bye."

Keira was heading towards a table with a martini of her own when Garrett caught her.

"The air is electric in here," Garrett said lamely. It was the first thing he could think of.

"Mmm," Keira said in return, as if she was somewhere else.

"Everyone's really excited about the speech you gave."

"Are they?"

"Yes," Garrett said, and then Keira walked off to the table and sat down, eventually lighting up a cigarette. Some pop song with an angsty female singer that Garrett registered as vapid was playing as she did, which she seemed to be vibing to despite her contorted expression.

Those five sentences kept Garrett worrying and turning the memory of the interaction over in his head again and again for the rest of the party. What had he said wrong? Was his opener too cliché? Should he have complimented the speech?

She was such a fucking enigma.

Garrett hated his job.

It wasn't the first job Garrett had hated, but he was starting to hate it more than any job he had had before. He decided to text Valerie again, then found himself at a loss for what to say. He turned his phone off and stuck it back in his pocket, gulping the rest of the martini down and tapping a slot on the table to place an order for another.

It would be more convenient to just have the martini emerge from the slot, of course; but elites in the 2030s, much like in the past, enjoy having humans serve them.

So it goes.

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