Q*pid Read online

  “I’m just doing my job.” Drew smiled, incapable of being angry at Mrs. Schwartzmann. “Besides, it’s always fun to try to guess what’s happened when you call.”

  “Ach,” Mrs. Schwartzmann grunted, eyes heavenward. “Such an old building. No wonder things go wrong. They should take better care.”

  “The building is five years old,” Drew said, as he always did. “It was brand-new when you moved into it. I helped you with your boxes, remember?”

  “Ach,” Mrs. Schwartzmann said again. “The vapors from the paint nearly killed me that night. You would think they would let it air for a minute before putting an old woman here to sleep.”

  “We live in a world fraught with risk,” Drew offered solemnly, marveling at her ability to come up with an endless supply of new complaints. For a woman who rarely left her apartment, she was relentlessly inventive when it came to enumerating the wrongs perpetrated against her by the shadowy “they.”

  Mrs. Schwartzmann nodded gravely, clearly heartened to have the young man’s sympathy.

  “There, I think that’s got it,” Drew said, pulling the last of the half-shredded melon rinds from the disposal. He turned the water on and flipped the switch. The unit hummed quietly.

  “Thank you, thank you,” sang Mrs. Schwartzmann. She reached up and grabbed him by the cheeks, then kissed each one. She did this every time, and every time he felt like a precocious grandchild. “Now, I make us some tea, and you tell me about last night. Sit.”

  The prospect of hashing over the catastrophe of last night’s date with Mrs. Schwartzmann—a woman more than three times his age—would have given most men pause, but Drew was quite accustomed to it by now. He found her commiseration, and often her advice, heartening.

  “I assume you heard how it ended?” he asked as she put the kettle on.

  She sat, the small square kitchen table between them. “Only that she broke all your furniture,” she said mildly as she smoothed the shiny plastic tablecloth with her gnarled hands.

  “It was just the coffee table,” Drew replied, “but yes, she reduced it to kindling.”

  “This woman does not sound like such a very nice woman,” Mrs. Schwartzmann opined solemnly.

  “No, she didn’t turn out to be a very nice woman.”

  She put her hand on his. “I am sure she seemed much nicer when you met her. A woman like that waits until she gets a man on her hook, and then poof! A she-monster.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that,” Drew said shrugging. “I hadn’t met her before our date.”

  Mrs. Schwartzmann tucked her lips in silent judgment, as if Drew had admitted to a gambling habit. She nodded. “Oh, I see. She was one of the women you meet on the computer. How can you tell, when you only know her by what she type-type-types. Is it so hard to type things that are not true? It is not so hard.”

  Drew chuckled grimly. “If I had asked whether she was insane and she said no, then I would say she lied. But I didn’t ask. According to the dating site, we were supposed to be a good match.”

  Mrs. Schwartzmann’s brows drew into a solid black line of dark implication. “The computer machine tells you to date an insane crazy woman… and you? You do it.” She shook her head slowly, but her expression softened into one of pity.

  Drew was spared further aspersions on his dating strategy by the tea kettle beginning its low, trainlike whistle. Mrs. Schwartzmann pushed herself to a standing position and began fussing with tea.

  “She didn’t seem crazy, at least at first,” he said rather lamely. “We were into a lot of the same things.”

  “Things like breaking the furniture?” Mrs. Schwartzmann asked lightly without turning from the counter where she was arranging teacups on saucers.

  “Very funny. We listened to the same kinds of music and had read a lot of the same books, and our political views were pretty much identical. We liked a lot of the same things—we should have been completely compatible.”

  Mrs. Schwartzmann gently placed the cups and saucers on the table. “If the things you like make you completely compatible with a crazy woman, then maybe you are liking the wrong things.” She shrugged, which was her way of conveying certainty in her opinion. She turned back to pick up the teapot.

  “You don’t understand how online dating works,” Drew said, taking it upon himself once more to acquaint Mrs. Schwartzmann with the modern world. “You tell the computer about yourself, and then it finds people that you are compatible with. It’s how everyone dates now.”

  “If that’s how everyone dates, I should have stock in the coffee table company.” She set the enormous teapot between them and took her seat.

  “The coffee table was an accident,” Drew said. “Mostly. I think.”

  “Some accident,” she replied, pouring tea into his cup through an ancient silver strainer. “You’re lucky no one was hurt in such an accident.”

  Drew sipped his tea. Like the woman who had made it, it was bitter and strong, but also warm and comforting. “Okay,” he said, setting his cup onto its saucer, “it wasn’t really an accident. As soon as she stepped into my apartment and saw it, she kind of freaked out. She said something about how cheap coffee tables are a product of third-world sweat shops, and she leapt on top of it and started stomping on it. And, because I’m a poor graduate student who can’t afford decent furniture, it broke on about the third stomp. That only seemed to make her even more upset, and pretty soon there were only sticks left.”

  Mrs. Schwartzmann’s eyes were wide. Though Drew had been unsuccessfully dating during the entire five years of their shared tenancy in the building, he was apparently still able to surprise her.

  “Did you have to call the police?” she asked in a hushed voice.

  Drew’s cheeks burned. “No, she left on her own.” He took cover behind a long sip of tea. “Eventually.”

  He felt her eyes on him, even though he refused to meet her gaze.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “You and she did not….”

  “Mrs. Schwartzmann, I sit before you ashamed. Yes, she and I did.”

  She pursed her lips. This was the second level of Schwartzmann judgment, reserved for times when Drew did something really stupid on a date. He’d seen it more frequently lately.

  “This morning I had to pull out slivers from some rather delicate areas.” He again picked up his teacup, as if its refinement could somehow restore some of his dignity. He felt it not working.

  She shook her head slowly, then consulted the bottom of her teacup. She refilled her cup and his, then folded her arms before her. “One day Mr. Schwartzmann wanted to have marriage fun on kitchen table.”

  Drew instinctively pulled his elbows back from the table.

  “No, not on this table,” she scolded. “You think I would serve tea on the table where…?” Her bushy eyebrows danced upward to finish the sentence. “No, this was long ago, when we lived in the old country.”

  Mrs. Schwartzmann was the only person Drew had ever met who used terms like “the old country” without irony—though he had never been able to ascertain precisely to which country she referred. The details were always a little loose in her stories.

  “He told me to get on the table and I would get a big surprise. I told him it must not be the same surprise he gave me on our wedding night because that was not so big. Well, we started yelling about all kinds of things, and before you know it, once we were finished throwing pots at each other, I figured what the hell, might as well get on the table.”

  Drew smiled. “Was it all he’d hoped it would be?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. That is when the Nazis came for him.”

  Mrs. Schwartzmann’s stories were as opaque as the stews she sometimes made for Drew to share with her on Sunday nights—and just as full of mysterious bits recycled from previous servings. Sometimes her husband was captured by the Nazis, and sometimes he was a dashing member of the SS who spirited her out of the country. Sometimes she’d never married at a
ll, having devoted herself to a lost love of her youth (this would be Anne Frank). Drew had learned never to challenge, or even consider, the veracity of her tales. Once verisimilitude was off the table, they could actually be quite entertaining—and sometimes educational.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” he always said when one of her stories took a tragic turn.

  She accepted his condolences stoically, as she always did, with a solemn nod and a hand raised to the capriciousness of fate.

  “Now you would be willing to date that nice girl I have told you about?” she asked, idly stirring her tea.

  “Not the Meals on Wheels woman again?”

  “So nice she is. Always remembers I cannot have too much salt. And she has such sturdy childbearing hips. You hardly notice the lazy eye.”

  “She’s also forty years old and has not a single natural tooth.”

  “She has overcome adversity. And many bar fights. You seem to like your women with some spirit.”

  Drew laughed. “I think I’ll stick with the online dating. They let me screen for age and for prison records.”

  She shrugged. “You should consider. Think it over tonight when you’re watching television with your feet propped up on… oh, silly me… nothing.” She was unable to stifle a chuckle at the image she’d summoned.

  “What would I do without you, Mrs. Schwartzmann?”

  “CONVERSATIONAL REFERENCES to sports.” Tap-tap-tap. “Zero. Mentions of history of mental illness in the family, also zero. Hmm.” Rapid-fire clicks and taps on the keyboard echoed through the strenuously clean kitchen. “Number of attempts to pay the dinner check, and height of heels in inches, and number of visible piercings, and done.”

  Fox sat back and picked up his coffee mug for a long, meditative sip before scrolling down to see the final score at the bottom of his spreadsheet. The number in the last cell wasn’t what he was expecting.

  “Hmm.”

  A chat window titled Video Call from Chad popped open, covering the spreadsheet. He tapped the Accept button.

  “Hey, buddy,” Chad said cheerfully. Behind him loomed a deeply cushioned leather headboard. “How’s Foxy this morning? What do the numbers say?”

  Fox smiled into the camera atop his laptop screen. “The numbers aren’t what I was hoping for,” he said with a good-natured shrug. “I kind of liked this one, so I was a little surprised that she netted out at seventy-two.”

  “Ouch,” Chad said, wincing sympathetically. “Sorry, man. Her pictures were awesome. I was pulling for you.”

  “The numbers don’t lie, man,” Fox answered with a shrug.

  “So she’ll be getting the email this morning?”

  Fox nodded. “I just need to figure out which one.”

  “I thought low seventies got ‘we both knew it wasn’t working.’”

  “Yeah, normally. But I really thought we were doing better than the low seventies. Her dinner conversation was a lot better than my Sunday evening last week, and that one was in the upper seventies. I was kind of surprised that she netted out where she did.”

  “Are you sure you entered everything correctly?”

  “You’re asking me if I know how to do data entry? In the spreadsheet I’ve been using for five years?”

  Chad laughed. “Maybe it’s time to revise the formulas.”

  “No one said it was going to be easy, and I’m not going to lower my standards now.” Fox opened an email window and selected the “low seventies” template.

  “What’s the queue look like for the weekend?” Chad asked.

  “Got a brunch today, then a dinner, and a hike on Sunday.”

  “Three more chances to find Ms. Right,” Chad said cheerfully. “She’s out there, and you’ll find her.”

  “Thanks, man. And pull up your covers—I don’t need to see your nipples first thing in the morning.”

  “I like his nipples,” called a woman’s voice from somewhere off-camera. “I think they’re sexy.”

  “Agree to disagree, Mia,” Fox shouted into his laptop.

  “Are you telling me you don’t think my nipples are sexy, Fox?” Chad winked and gave his heavily muscled pectorals a stripper-like shake at the camera.

  “Good thing I haven’t had breakfast yet,” Fox said as he closed the lid of his laptop.

  Chapter TWO

  “ARE WE ready? When do the notifications go live? Any blockers?” Ross swept into the war room, firing off questions as he came.

  “We’re on schedule,” Veera replied, not even looking in his direction. Ross’s self-important way of charging into a room was an irritant she could not be bothered with today. “How’s CPU utilization and DB access?”

  “CPU is normal,” an engineer reported from behind his laptop.

  “DB queue is zero,” added another from across the table. “The last three stress tests were green, so we’re good to go.”

  “PR is ready,” Alexis announced in a voice both sultry and professional. “The press release is staged, and we have execs on call to respond to media.”

  “Are they all briefed on the privacy disaster that this will surely become?” Ross muttered.

  “They are ready to answer questions about how we protect our customers’ data and ensure their privacy while offering a groundbreaking new relationship discovery experience.” Alexis brandished a sweetly poisonous smile in his direction.

  “Awesome,” he replied, his voice utterly flat.

  Veera stepped to the whiteboard and checked off the remaining items on the launch list. She capped the marker deliberately, set it in the tray, then turned around to face the room. And her future.

  “I think we’re ready,” she said, hoping her voice carried the confidence she wished she felt.

  “Do you want us to wait until you’re sure?” Ross jeered.

  She met his gaze, refusing to blink even though her eyes burned. “I am sure. Let’s go.”

  The room surged into a quiet frenzy of typing as the dozen people in it brought the Archer system online. First out would be notifications to select customers—their most satisfied users, all of whom had opted in to new features in the past—announcing the availability of a futuristic new way to find the love of their lives.

  “Notifications are live,” called one voice. “Open rate is 0.05… 0.1.” A tense pause in the room. “One percent open.”

  “That seems too fast,” Ross said. “One percent opens in under a minute? That can’t be right.”

  “Our best customers look at their phones, on average, once every two minutes,” the customer service manager said. “They open a Q*pid notification, according to our research, within thirty seconds of receiving it. Even if—” She cleared her throat awkwardly. “—they are otherwise engaged.”

  “You mean like if they’re driving?” one of the engineers asked, alarmed.

  “She means even if they’re having sex,” another replied.

  The first engineer shook his head, mystified.

  “Opt-ins are starting,” one of the launch managers reported, pointing to a rapidly moving graph on the large monitor at the end of the room.

  “Your targeted marketing messages seem to be working quite well,” Veera said to Ross. Buoyed by the early signs of rapid success, she screwed on a generous smile and shared the credit, though not without wishing that killing with kindness was an actual thing.

  Ross gave a serpentine smile. “Just because I can sell ice cubes to fucking Eskimos doesn’t mean this isn’t a cliff we’re driving over.”

  God, she hated him.

  “Installs are underway,” called the app-store liaison. “We should see the first launches in a few—”

  “First handshake with Archer servers,” broke in a twitchy network engineer on the data-center team.

  The launch manager at the monitor swiped at the tablet in his hands and brought up the graph showing traffic into and out of the array of CPUs that made up Archer’s brain. Disks began spinning up, each represented by a green do
t on the utilization graph.

  “Installs at 1K,” called out the app-store liaison.

  “Handshakes tracking that…,” the network engineer chimed in. “Nine hundred signed in… and… now! One thousand active users.”

  A cheer went up around the room.

  Veera looked up at the clock. They were seven minutes into the launch of Archer, and he was already beginning to build profiles of the first thousand users. This wasn’t a launch—it was an explosion.

  EXCLUSIVE OFFER: Try our new AI-powered relationship discovery service.

  Fox, in the elevator on the way back to his office after lunch, read the message with a furrowed brow. He monitored his phone closely for Q*pid updates, knowing that women were more likely to interact if men responded to potential matches within seconds rather than hours or even minutes. In the race to get to Ms. Right, he was going to be first across the finish line.

  He read the message again. Having been an active user of the service for a couple of years, he was a little flattered that he was being given an exclusive notification, and he certainly liked the idea of artificial intelligence being applied to his quest to find the woman of his dreams. He tapped and read the description of the service.

  Give our new AI engine access to your social media profiles, and it will analyze everything you do online to match you to only those women who are most compatible with you—not because of what they say about themselves, but what advanced algorithms discover them to be. This is analysis on a deeper level than any relationship discovery service has ever accomplished before.

  Fox pondered this for a moment. Like most people he knew, he carefully curated aspects of his online presence; his LinkedIn profile was the product of constant grooming, and the only photos that went on his Facebook were those that showed him in a particularly flattering light.

  Anyone can crawl the web and see your public profile. But for this new service to deliver the best results, we will ask you for all of your social media login information. Only by analyzing everything you do online can our AI brain really get to know you, and deliver the kinds of relationship results that endless questionnaires and disappointing first dates could never come close to.