Page 11 of Ideal Life

Right now, though, she wore her Ideal Life hoodie with the purple star logo. It had been waiting for her in her closet at home, even though the last time she’d seen it, Erin had been taking it away here at the office as Talia put on the blazer.

She supposed it made sense, though, if she thought of it like rewinding a movie. The character would go backward in time not only in action, but in what they were wearing, too. Like how Talia had woken up in her bed a few hours ago in her pajamas.

“Good morning, boss!” Erin singsonged as she poked her head in.

“What are you doing here so early?” Talia asked, right before she realized she knew exactly what Erin was going to say.

“Big day today, and I didn’t want to miss a second of it! How many college juniors can say they were working at a company when it got bought by Omni?”

“I love your attitude,” Talia said, which is what she’d said the first time this “scene” happened.

She could probably deviate from the script if she wanted to. So far, she’d frozen a customer’s profile and called Jean-Marc to get him to accelerate their efforts to get that French document—which had arrived, hurrah!—and yet she’d still ended up here with Erin coming in and saying and doing the same things as yesterday.

Early hypothesis: The replay is static except for the parts I try to change.

But like in any science experiment, it was best to limit how many variables changed. So Talia told Erin to ask the receptionist to order bagels for the whole office. When Erin asked what kind of cream cheese, Talia said, “Go crazy—get them all.” Exactly like last time.

When the engineering team got in, though, Talia called a meeting on the third floor. She asked Erin to sit in, too, because she saw a lot of herself in Erin and wanted to give her as much experience as possible during her summer internship. Talia didn’t want this to be a typical internship where the student was just an errands gofer.

There wasn’t a conference room big enough for all of them, but since the entire third floor was programmers, product managers, and other engineering-related employees, everyone just moved the cubicle walls aside so they could see Talia at the front of the space, standing on a chair.

“You all remember when ChatGPT first became public, and ordinary people learned about AI for the first time, right?” Talia said. “Remember how nerds like us immediately started messing with it to get it to say all sorts of unexpected things?”

Everyone in the room nodded and laughed. You couldn’t introduce a new technology like that to Silicon Valley and not expect it to immediately get poked and prodded at, hard.

“The ChatGPT team had to go back and do a lot of work to account for what humans would do to their system. They managed to fix most of the problems, like the chatbot declaring that it wanted to get married to the user.”

More laughs.

“Well, I know that you have all worked hard at these kinds of elements for Ideal Life, and I think we’ve done an amazing job. But there is always more work to do, especially as we roll out new features. Also, Omni is going to sign the initial acquisition papers this morning, which means that over the next few months, they will be doing due diligence on our company to make sure that everything is airtight and that they’re not buying a bag of random nuts and screws.

“So I would like us to take another look at Ideal Life. For example—and this is purely hypothetical—what if someone is about to go on a Tinder date, but Ideal Life notes that the guy is a lot like other men she’s dated in the past who haven’t been good for her. Suppose that our AI suggests that she ‘eliminate’ him, but instead of canceling the date, she takes the word ‘eliminate’ a bit too seriously and kills him instead?”

One of the engineers rolled his eyes. “That seems pretty far-fetched.”

Erin piped up. “But it could happen. And I think that’s Talia’s point. If Ideal Life is trying to help everyone optimize and achieve the life they deserve, then we should make the suggestions as clear as possible, not only to benefit the customer, but also so that we don’t accidentally cause collateral damage.”

Talia smiled. What guts Erin had, speaking up in a room full of seasoned engineers when she was still in college. This girl will go so far.

“Right,” Talia said. “It is, of course, impossible to anticipate everything. But I’d like you to run more simulations to stress test our system’s AI. I want you to go hard on this—really push things to the extreme. Oh, and let’s go ahead and remove the word ‘eliminate.’ Any questions?”

There weren’t many, so Talia wrapped up and went back to the fourth floor. The rest of the day went quickly and smoothly. The e-sign versions of the acquisition documents arrived shortly before lunch. Before she signed, she skimmed the main agreement again. Her eyes stumbled on the termination provision:

Section 8.3 TERMINATION FEE

(A) In the event this agreement is terminated by OmnisZcience (by choice or through material breach), then OmnisZcience shall pay Ideal Life a termination fee of Five Million US Dollars ($5,000,000) (“OmnisZcience Termination Fee”) by wire transfer of immediately available funds within two (2) business days after such termination.

(B) In the event this agreement is terminated by Ideal Life (by choice or through material breach), then Ideal Life shall pay OmnisZcience a termination fee of One Million US Dollars ($1,000,000) (“Ideal Life Termination Fee”) by wire transfer of immediately available funds within two (2) business days after such termination.

In nonlegalese—Ideal Life could owe a million dollars to Omni if something bad happened that was Ideal Life’s fault between the signing of these documents and the closing.

Something like Rebecca Lawrence taking an Ideal Life suggestion literally and murdering Gabe Marques.

“But that won’t be a problem,” Talia said to herself. She had taken care of that.

She hoped.

There was nothing more she could do now, though, other than shove the what-if away and continue onward.