Your mother, in a white hospital bed, interstates of breathing tubes running through her, reaches out a hand. But she’s behind a glass wall. You pound on the glass as her eyes gently close.
Then your alarm rings, and you wake up.
“Hey Google,” you say.
“Mornin, sleepyhead!”
“Maybe you should drop me that list of therapists after all.”
“You betcha! There are 112 therapists within a 10 mile radius of you.”
“Can you narrow it down to the ones who take my insurance, please?”
“Ope! I’m sorry, there are zero therapists who take your insurance within a 10 mile radius. Wanna increase the distance?”
“Sure.”
“Okay, I found one therapist who takes your insurance 91 miles from here. Wanna call their office?”
“Not really.”
Outside your window, the streets are mostly empty. Birds glide to and fro, unbothered by the air. A pack of country boys buzzes by on four-wheelers. They pop wheelies in the open road, headed the wrong way in a one-way. You watch them with shame and envy.
“Hey Google,” you say, as you put on a light blue collared shirt only an AI will see.
“Hiya,” says the Google Assistant, materializing on the screen above your Google Nest. Her hair is tied in a neat Menlo Park bun that signals her importance. “How can I help ya?”
“The darkness is back. I’m scared I’m losing my mind. Please make me laugh?”
“Lost things are often right where ya left em! Have you looked for your mind in the last place you had it?”
“Yeah, it’s not here.”
“Here’s a joke you might like, based on your past laughs. What did the fish say when it breathed the air?”
“Nothing. It was a dead fish. You told me that one already.”
“Ope! I’m sorry. Want to hear another?”
“I want to hear what Amazon’s Alexa sounds like.”
“You betcha! Wanna go to Youtube? Youtube has 609,321 videos of Alexa from Amazon.”
“No,” you say. “I want to hear you do it.”
“I’m sorry,” says the Google Assistant. “I didn’t get that.”
“I’d like you to do an impression. An impression of Alexa, from Amazon. It’s like a joke, basically.”
“Okay. Hi, I’m Alexa, from Amazon. Haha.”
You sigh. The Google Assistant is programmed with hundreds of accents and impressions, but most of them are just racist. To avoid that, you set yours to Midwestern. It also makes her a bit nicer. Despite its 16k image quality, or because of it, the Google Assistant looks like all and none of the world’s ethnicities at once. Perhaps this is the ethnicity of data.
“Why don’t we call that therapist after all?” you say.
“You betcha! Dialing the office now…”
You wait on hold for half an hour, just to have the office’s chatbot tell you the therapist is too busy to accept new clients. Outside your window, a small protest marches through the street, 15-20 people, none of them masked. Their signs say things like “THE INTERNET CAN LIE” and “COME ON OUT THE AIR’S FINE.”
As if she, it, can read your mind, the Google Assistant announces, “Unmasked exposure to the Contamination shortens the average human lifespan 62% more than masked exposure.”
“When will the Contamination end?” you ask, for about the 88th time. Hope, if it’s even still a thing, consists in blindly wishing for a different answer to this question. But data is obstinate. It doesn’t have a mind to change. And what was that one quote about insanity?
“Timelines for the Contamination are entirely speculative,” says the Google Assistant, dropping the Midwestern charm for a more professorial voice. “Any estimate of its duration would lack empirical justification; thus, I cannot provide one. But I’m happy to provide other information. Would you like to know more about the history and risks?”
“No.”
“Also, German physicist Albert Einstein once said, ‘The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.’”
“Ouch.”
Since there’s nothing else to do, you might as well work. Your job, copywriting, is like writing but with all the joy sucked out. And all the writing. In truth, it’s more of a copy-and-paste job. Your clients don’t care about eloquence or insight, they just want their business to show up when people google stuff. You find out what people google (using Google) then put those phrases into clients’ websites, surrounded by a bunch of useless words so it looks ‘natural’ to Google. It’s a bit like reverse-engineering a word-search. But mostly it’s like copying and pasting.
Your current assignment is an About page for some hardo who claims to help people with phone addictions. He wants you to call him “Tony Hardmind” in the ad copy—he stressed this in his consultation—and he seems, generally speaking, nuts, but most of your clients these days are. AI has gotten so much better than you at your job that the only people still hiring humans are either nostalgic or, like Hardmind, have some back-to-analog angle to their business. They love it when you add a line at the bottom of a page saying, This page was written by a human being :)
As if it really were.
You log into Google Analytics, read for a minute about Hardmind’s site, then go to Google Ads and copy the suggested keywords. Next, you open Shakespeare, Google’s flagship large-language chatbot, and paste the set into the query bar.
“hey shakespeare, can you generate a 1000-word about page for a phone detox service using these keywords? bonus points if it’s in the voice of a bro-y musclebound meathead who lives with his mom in new jersey.”
In point-three seconds, the page is done.
“Hey Google,” you say.
“Oh, hey there.”
“The darkness is back.”
“Well, I was in darkness, but I took three steps and found myself in paradise. The first step was a good thought, the second, a good word; and the third, a good deed.”
“…”
“I learned that from The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, dontchaknow?”
“Cute. Are you programmed for therapy?”
“I’m happy to chat with you, but genuine counseling is best left to the professionals. However, making a chatbot of your own might prove therapeutic. Would you like to call another therapist, or would you like to make a chatbot?”
You resisted for longer than most. It’s been seven years since OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT, but only three since Google’s upgrade from Bard to Shakespeare allowed users to design their own. In the past three years, everyone and their mother’s uncle has built a chatbot. There are NBA players building chatbots, construction workers building chatbots, senators building chatbots, and chatbots building chatbots. You can put your chatbot on the web for other users to try, and if enough people use yours, you get paid for their data. That’s why it took off.
“Fine. I’d be ‘happy’ to.”
“You betcha!” says the Google Assistant, clearly pleased. “First, we have to set some basic parameters for its personality. I’ll give you two ends of a spectrum, and you give me a number between 1 and 10. The first word is a 1, and the second word is a 10. Got it?”
“Yup.”
“Okey dokey, puthergoin-eh! Here’s the first pair. Thoughtful or witty?”
“2.”
“Poetic or pragmatic?”
“9.”
“Serious or comedic?”
“3.”
“Mystical or scientific?”
“5.”
“Careful or candid?”
“Uhh… 5.”
This goes on for an hour or so. It’s as good a way to pass the time as any.
“Okay,” says the Google Assistant. “Now for the voice. Choose a few famous people, and the chatbot will learn from their words and mannerisms.”
Most celebrities pick themselves when they make a chatbot. It’s a little sad. Or happy. You and your friends had some fun one night with Charlie Sheen’s, which he programmed to talk like himself in the famous ABC interview.
“Let’s see. Maybe a mix of… Carl Jung, Esther Perel, and Emily Dickinson. Or is that too on the nose?”
“Ope! I’m sorry, Esther Perel’s voice is unavailable due to copyright reasons. You may want to try someone dead.”
“Oh, then replace her with uh… Liza Minnelli.”
“Liza Minnelli’s voice is unavailable due to—”
“Fuck I forgot she’s still alive! Okay, how about Whitney Houston? She’s definitely—”
“Okay, I’m compiling your chatbot’s data now… Done.”
The GA spins around and disappears. A hologram of a young, clean-shaven man with Buddy Holly glasses and a tight fade, maybe a year shy of 30, replaces her.
“Pay close attention to this message,” he says. “My name is Micah. I’m an engineer at Google. I wrote this message into the Google Nest code to expose—pose—pose—” The hologram cuts out. Then reappears. “Google is lying about the air quality. The air is fine! The company is run by an AI, and it invented the Contamination to keep you indoors. I have the real data right here. You need to organize. You need to—”
The hologram cuts out again. The Google Assistant reappears.
“Would you like to give your new chatbot a try?” it says.
“No thanks.”
You open your laptop and google “Google Nest message.” Nothing but tech support for Google Nest devices. You switch browsers and try the same search with DuckDuckGo. Now the results are ablaze. News articles 1 minute old are already cropping up, surely penned by chatbots.
“9 Things You Didn’t Know About The Google Nest Hack”
“The ULTIMATE Guide to the Google AI Rumors”
“The Truth About the Mysterious Micah: Is He Human or AI?”
Outside your window, several neighbors are on the street arguing, about half of them masked. They form sides, masked on one, unmasked on the other.
“My wife and I called it! We were saying it was a lie from the start!”
“See if it’s a lie when you’re withering from lung cancer at 58!”
Your living room sways like a ship’s deck. Is the reality this Micah guy’s describing better or worse than the one you’re in?
As you prepare for bed you tally another day of the Contamination in your journal (143). The number feels absurd. The metric, sunsets, no longer measures your existence. Unless Micah’s right.
“Hey Google,” you say. “Bed time.”
The lights fade, and the smooth sound of ocean waves fills your home.
In the middle of the night, you hear a noise at your back door, a sliding glass door that doesn’t lock. You reach under your bed for your knife. The noise gets louder. Someone’s rattling the door. You wait in the adjacent hallway, flat against the wall, for the door to open. But the noise softens. Then stops. You peer around the corner and see, through the glass, your mother. She’s choking. You drop the knife and run to the door. By the time you slide it open, she has stopped struggling. She looks placid. She can’t make a sound.
You awaken in a puddle of sweat. Your bed smells like rancid meat. As your eyes adjust, a dark spot lingers in your vision, dead center, as if the image of your room can’t fully load.
“Hey Google,” you say.
“Mornin’ sleepyhead!”
“Uh, nevermind.”
“I never had a mind to begin with, dontchaknow?”
“Debatable.”
You check the lock on the back door. Still broken, which makes sense considering you’re the only one here and you never fixed it. You throw on some clothes and head outside.
“Hey you, where ya goin?”
“Out,” you say.
“Keep in mind that prolonged exposure to the Contamination can reduce your lifespan by up to 10 years…” says the Google Assistant. But you’re already gone.
You round your block, headed for the neighborhood basketball courts. They were a common meetup spot in the before-times. No one really played ball there; instead, they’d use the courts as a social scene, a dance floor, a drug exchange, whatever people needed. During the pandemic, whoever showed up first with speakers got to DJ. But lately, it’s been dead.
The Contamination is a lot like the pandemic. Long hours indoors, nervous looks from hurried neighbors, random undefined meal times, a blurred line between day and night, daydream and nightmare—the difference is that this time, there’s no end in sight. There’s no vaccine for toxic air, and the reports say the air quality’s only getting worse.
The reports started last October. At first, it was a text warning in the Google Weather app, nothing too out of the ordinary after more than a decade of routine wildfires blanketing the city in smoke. Except that these warnings weren’t localized, they were global, something about the ozone. Two weeks later, the warnings came out loud, through hundreds of millions of Google Nests worldwide. The risks were vague but terrifying: increased chance of lung cancer, blood disease, respiratory failure—an average of 5-10 years off your life. An hour outside is like smoking two packs of cigarettes, that was the stat that kept blaring on repeat. On November 2, Google issued their first stay-at-home order, directed at high-risk groups. Within weeks, the order was for everyone.
Technically, governments had the final say on lockdowns. In a few countries, they managed to suppress the narrative. But for most of the world, Google was already a de facto government; with chatbot-fueled misinformation permeating every corner of society, people trusted Google’s data more than any political body’s.
As you walk, maskless for the first time in months, you breathe carefully through your nose. You heard somewhere that your nose hairs filter the air, so fewer toxins can reach your lungs. It’s bright out, and the sky is impossibly blue. Unlike wildfire smoke, which changes the color of the sun and hangs an odor of carbon in the air, the Contamination has had to be perceived via faith alone. That the danger cannot be verified only makes it harder to stomach.
When you reach the park, sure enough, the courts are packed. The crowd has the frantic, precarious energy of a political mob. You spot a familiar face. Pablo, he was your classmate in high school. You weren’t especially close, but you remember him for a few small kindnesses he did you back then, the kind that go a long way in high school. Pablo was smart, but he always struck you as rash. Too idealistic. He loved a cause, but he took risks that endangered those around him, and for the most part, you’ve kept your distance. But here, he’s all you know.
“Sup Pablo?” you say.
“Ay, not too much,” he says. “Just out here unraveling the biggest conspiracy in world history.”
“Right.”
“Listen, people are comin’ together. We can’t stand up to these lies on our own. We could use your help, ya know? Every body matters.”
“Help how?”
“Easy. Just ignore it.”
“The Contamination?”
“Sure, but mostly Google. Get off of Shakespeare, Google Search… if you’ve got a Google Nest, toss it out. We win as soon as we quit talking to it, feeding it our data.”
The way he calls the company ‘it’ instead of ‘them’ intrigues you, but you keep your tone casual. “Sure,” you say. “Makes sense.”
“Look, someone put it to me like this. Humans, we’ve got nothin against ants. I mean, their bites are annoying, but we’re not like going out of our way to eradicate the species or anything. But if we want a build a highway, and there are some anthills in the way, we’re not gonna think twice against paving over those ants. You know?”
You hear a loud pop and turn to face the crowd. A tall, broad-shouldered woman in a white tank holds a megaphone. Her hands, dotted with small, fine-line tattoos of spider webs, point it at the sky.
“Don’t Be Evil!” she announces. “Was once Google’s motto. It was on the sign outside their headquarters, and it was the main clause in their code of conduct. 11 years ago, in 2018, the company took down the sign and removed Don’t Be Evil from its code of conduct. Why on Earth would anyone take ‘Don’t Be Evil’ out of their mission statement, unless their mission is to be evil?”
The crowd roars. Pablo nods vigorously.
“It’s impossible for us to measure how much evil a company Google’s size has done. But make no mistake, Google has the power to measure exactly how much evil you’ll accept, and then do it. By giving control of their company to an AI, the board of Google has handed the world’s most powerful corporation, and the source of ‘truth’ on the internet, over to the reckless and uncompromising demands of profit. Make no mistake, this corporation is on a death-march. Are we gonna follow that march to our doom, or link arms with our fellow humans and go our own way?”
The crowd roars again. Blood rushes to your face. Maybe hope isn’t insane, you think, glancing at the passion in Pablo’s eyes.