The Job and the Work
They say that some online AI help has gotten worse at math and more argumentative with users, since being engaged with the general human population of Earth just a few months. The real office politics dynamic in keen new digital forms!
The Job and the Work saw life in Yellow Medicine Review about half a decade ago, and was even nominated (loooooooonglisted) for a very prestigious award. It was around the time that new cameras were proving incapable of focusing on Black faces and search engines were making racist connections because the people who designed these things were - whether they knew it or not - racist. Flawed digital assistants and pre-broken approaches to sociology and history were inevitable.
I could not be too serious about it, because systemic bigotry and colonization is terrifying and huge and will not be going away. Thus, the kind of quick gag sketch I like reading, tinged with genuine stresses, and if there is any predictive power in its loose science fiction and loose sociology, it was real life doing the heavy lifting.
The Job and the Work
by Travis Hedge Coke
It was lonely in the hillside office on Suffix Tor, looking not just over the hollow box of the canyon bottom, but to the sharp incline of the white cliffside that Patri knew was over a mile away, but looked to be across the street the mountains were so huge and flat the way only daily-scrubbed white plastic would be. She turned the walls opaque and turned up some music. The office computer made the walls transparent again, and turned down the temperature by three degrees, as if to punish her. More realistically, it was 1700 hours. The computer turned down the heat three degrees every two hours until it reached the maximum low for the evening, and began slowly heating again just before the official morning shift began. Keeping the office attendant awake by shifts in discomfort? Or purely punishment?
Given how Patri earned this job, she put her money on punishment.
“Can you,” she said, before feeling even more alone.
She felt even more alone. A judder in the system.
On the streets, on her off days, she was a novice racer in a local circuit, but that did not matter, the being a novice part. She was a racer. She had the best bike her paycheck could afford her, in the best colors, with the coolest seat and the spokes that disappeared from view when she hit good speeds, but threw trails of light and sparklers in her wake. She was a showoff and trying too hard and that was the point. That was what made it good.
But, in here, she was alone and stupid and had a checklist of inconsequential jobs to finish off.
She called up an assistant and flung herself into a chair hard enough to swing the seat around almost a full circle before she stopped by lightly jamming her foot against a table leg. The computer promised a Friend, as the service called them, but first, the advertisements.
You always wanted blue eyes,
but who wants the trouble of contact lenses?
Patri had to sit through twelve more excruciatingly dumb seconds before she could skip the rest of the commercial. Then, the computer played a short melodrama of a secretary longing for her emotionally-distant but cocksure boss and the knowing computer program that saved her from embarrassment by keeping her on task.
Every woman should have a Friend to keep her off of fuzzboys.
Oh, so exciting. An advertisement for the thing she was trying to get to. That insulted her. But, wait! There was yet another commercial, because of course there was.
Feeling behind the times?
Teens love vampires! And, with FitBit,
you’ll be the rage of the teen scene whatever your age!
At last! Only the perfunctory personalization data left to plug in, and she and the assistant could get to work. Most of the information autofilled: City (Suffix), Email (the office account), and various visual parameters set by the dayshift Chief of Operations, like Hair (brown), Dress (classic), and Race (exotic). None of this excited Patri, but it was simpler than filling everything out and hurt her brain less than deciding. At the last moment, she went back to the top and put in her name and titles.
This is your Friend, Heavy Frazier!
And, that was that. Done.
The Friend was brought to life before her, quickly becoming so concrete and true that she would have mistaken it for a real person if she had only just walked into the room.
“Dr. Twoboys?”
She answered, “Yes.”
“And, this is 7701 Manber - ”
“Corner of Myers and Manber,” Patri said, eager to get this moving, even though in reality the door to the stairwell that led to the office was on the back of the building, on Gonnet Street. “Can we proceed to work?”
“We want to provide the most rewarding personalized experience we can,” the Friend said, shifting its weight over the rumpled beige bedsheets the computer had also thoughtfully wrought, to contrast - she presumed - the smart but cheery business attire and the tousled, untroubled fresh-from-bed hair that Heavy Frazier sported.
“Heavy,” she said, testing the name.
The Friend rolled, half-sitting, half-prone, on the sheets on the desk, and said, “Yes, Patri?”
“Why don’t you call me Dr. Twoboys, t,” she said, “w, o, b, o, y - ”
The Friend came on strident. “I know how to spell your name, Doctor Twoboys.”
“And,” she continued, “I’ll stick to Mr. Frazier.”
A sulk came into the artificial eyes of the Friend.
“Get rid of the sheets and stand up.” She made herself not sigh, and said, “I don’t want a personalized experience. I want to get this work done and then zone out playing free games until my shift is over.”
Mr. Frazier snapped his hands behind his back as he stood up straight and at attention. His skin darkened to match Patri’s, and algorithms to soothingly imitate her dialect were already coming into play in his subvocalization and ambient imitation of incidental biological sounds.
“Don’t sniffle,” said Patri. “It’s distracting me.”
The sky outside had become night while Patri suffered through the commercials and by now was too dark for her not to notice. Thunder rolled in the distance. She braced for it, used to the dish on which all of Suffix was built attracting lightning with its leftover magnetic energies from a long-departed society. This had been someone else’s land, such as a laminated satellite is land, before her great-grandmother’s generation had been pushed south to occupy and rebuild Suffix and the succeeding generations had been not outlawed from, but encouraged not to leave.
It was a funny Reserve; you couldn’t grow anything, you could not dig anything out, you couldn’t really make anything of Suffix and everyone took what were genuinely busy-making jobs doled out by the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs’ Retraining Program. Patri did not like how this nudged at her brain and stuck in her thoughts.
The walls would not stay opaque for more than a moment, no matter how many times Patri lifted the bar with a stroke of her forefinger that was supposed to make it one hundred percent opaque.
“Can you make me a circle to work from? Seven inches in diameter, blue - Iceberg Blue, 56A5EC - and set it right between us.”
Mr. Frazier created a blue oval that snapped with a bouncy reverberation into something equidistant from the center in all directions along a plane. These animations had been carefully orchestrated and market-researched.
“Don’t grunt,” said Patri, in response to his guttural acknowledgement of having created a shape. She then expounded, “This is a disc.”
She tipped the construct with a touch of her finger, the disc angling in a way Mr. Frazier’s programmers had been assured was the most commercial way to show it tipping.
“A disc,” she continued, “has a surface. A circle is an enclosure marked by a thin line.”
This was imprecise, but she hoped, sufficient.
Mr. Frazier’s face softened, became slightly chubbier, and he smiled as the disc became a circle. To illustrate the effectiveness of the change, Mr. Frazier put his hand through the center of the circle and chuckled quietly.
When Patri enrolled in college, even when she received her final degree, she never expected these would be her days. At the least, she had assumed she would always have human assistants, just as she had interned for other cataloguers during her school years.
"Why are you?” she asked, realized as she spoke the words that it was not going to be precise enough. “Why are you changing? Why are you ‘hurrhurring’ and getting shorter and chubbier and darker? Giving me inaccurate shapes when I know you know better?”
“You are thirty-four years old, correct? Five foot, eleven inches tall. Lakota, Choctaw, Blackfoot and Cherokee. A PhD in History. A - ”
“Sloooooow down there. How do you know how old I am?”
Mr. Frazier said, “I looked it up online.”
Patri’s mouth made the shape to go, “Hhhhuuuuaaaaah!” but she refused to make such a sound. She let the huge breath leave her mouth softly and pitifully. Quietly.
“Dr. Twoboys - That is an interesting name,” said Mr. Frazier, “What is the origin of that surname?”
She said, despite herself, “It used to be DuBois. They anglicized it after the English Invasion.”
“It is a peculiar name for a Lakota, Choctaw, Blackfoot and Cherokee Indian.”
Patri took a seat. She sat with relish, with deliberateness. She pushed her back to the chair and partly wrapped her ankles around its base.
“I am Lakota,” she said. “And, it’s my family’s name.”
“You are enrolled as a Lakota, Choctaw, Blackfoot, and Cherokee and reside in Suffix on the Lakota, Choctaw, Blackfoot and Cherokee Reserve.”
Patri felt the air go down three degrees, signifying two hours had passed. It had not passed and the temperature had not decreased, but she felt it was so. She reached over and brought the ceiling lights up slightly in brightness. Time to cowboy up. Or pony up. Or. God it was late.
“Dr. Twoboys,” said Mr. Frazier as he settled his bottom against the edge of the table, rocking himself gently on the balls of his feet, “have you ever worked with a Friend before?”
“Can we get to work?” She did not want to ask that, but she did. “Let’s get to it.”
“Friends fork by channeling algorithms through our customer-tracking software’s information pool - ”
“Fork?”
He asked her back, “Fork?”
Patri inched her chair close to the table with little steps, keeping herself firmly seated. When close enough, to took up a stylus and sketched a rough circle onto the tabletop and put a notch in the circle and another directly below at the opposite end. On one side of the notches, outside the circle, she wrote an M, and opposite that, across the whole thing, an F. Up above the circle, on the left, she drew a cross, marking one axis, lineal and the other relational, before capping the tips of the cross with arrowheads.
Mr. Frazier, sensing he was being ignored, asked again, “Fork?”
“You said ‘Friends fork’,” she said.
The sky stormed outside and Patri did not mind a bit. She relished the darkness and the clouds outside the walls. She pretended she could see the rain thrust by incredible winds against the white surface of the satellite.
“Dr. Twoboys, I said, ‘Friends work by…’ and I was attempting to explain to you how our mannerisms and appearance as calculated to assist - ”
“You were condescending to me, because you think that as an Indian I’m going to respond to you looking more like me, but a slightly taller and male me, who condescends. If you want to play King Arse, that’s fine, but I don’t have to play along. I have to use this stupid program. The boss says we have to use you. But, I am using you just as much if you stand there quietly, as I would be if you were actually helping me do my job.”
The lightning scarred a flash of white onto all the world she could see. It had struck very close and the walls, now, felt as immaterial as they were see-through. Patri imagined the city washed off, with her and the office here remaining atop the odd white prong called Owl Tor.
To the far right of her diagram, she jotted down two words: Matriarchal and Filial.
“Can you fact-check for me, Mr. Frazier?” Patri was tired, and stressed, but above all she liked to believe she was practical. “Can you fact-check without additional commentary or disrupting the flow?”
Mr. Frazier jumped to attention and smiled broadly. “You are unusually antagonistic, Dr. DuBois.”
“And, I don’t care. I don’t care if I’m not who you want to work with. You don’t have wants. Your wants and decisions are extrapolated from preset options and determined by what kind of pressure cooker I bought last month, from what store I ordered it. I don’t care.”
Without looking directly to her fingertip, she drew down a menu, a submenu, and clicked a window in four places, then a fifth, to tell the computer how she wanted her coffee and that she would like it now. The sound of it heating the water was almost lost to what she could hear of the thunderstorm, but it helped her to feel some warmth in the face of the rainfall and wind that she knew, logically, she could not actually feel from inside the building.
Now and forever and as it shall ever be, she smelled the coffee before the dispenser put the grains out, before the steam hit those grains, before the water had even sufficiently heated. And, she was thankful.
“Dr. DuBois, perhaps if you focused,” said Mr. Frazier with a calculated tone, “perhaps if you focused you would get more accomplished this evening.”
The storm broke open the sky it torrented down so hard. The pitter-patter and slap of rainfall had become punches and cannon fire of rain. The office felt small and empty and hollow, and so did Patri, herself.
“Someone got confused,” said Patri, shifting in her chair. “Because of my name, they thought I was India-Indian, not Western Hemisphere Indigenous. The Institute in Arizona sent us all this information on Indian history and culture, and Dine, and now I have to separate it all and make something from the Dine only.”
She idly ordered up a cup of joe while figuring the best way to explain further.
“Mr. Frazier,” she said finally, “Can you separate out the artifacts and notes that definitely only pertain to India?”
Mr. Frazier got out, “Dr. DuBois,” and she jumped in over him.
“Mr. Frazier,” she said, leaving her chair, “are you broken? TwoBoys. Twwwooooo-Boooooyssssss.”
Rain fell regardless of them both.
“Your coffee overfilled,” said the Friend. “Would you like me to clean it up?”
“Just isolate what I asked you toooooo… Wait. Clean it up. Bring me what’s in the mug.”
If it is possible for a woman to be simultaneously goddess and spirit, Doctor Patri TwoBoys was still only a woman. Most concretely a woman. But the storm might be a manifestation of something more than simply a storm.
“You are programmed to upset me,” she said of Mr. Frazier, as she accepted the coffee he proffered. “Someone set you up here to annoy me. This whole night of Durga knives and Apache pavement and Indian simulacra, it’s a joke.”
She glugged down some of the coffee. She said, “It’s a joke.”
The problem some people have with evolution without intelligent direction, has the same roots as the drive some people have to hang on to manifest destiny, to kitsch karma, to born this way and the valorization of eugenics. These are social constructs, but we live in a social construct. Patri works in a social construct, with social constructs, on social constructs, as a social construct.
Evolution without intelligent design is not randomness, but causation. Flukes are driven by necessity. All fish are. Carps. All fish. All animals. All trees. All lives. All societies and all constructs, whether architectural, philosophical, biological. A fish who climbs up out of the water wants to get something. Safety. Food. Freedom. Change. The fish climbs up. It takes agency. Or, it’s purely biological reflex and the fish has the agency of a falling stone for whom gravity and compression and time do most of the work. If that is true.
The fish who climbs a hill outside the waterline, and lives, is a remarkable and different fish. If that fish procreates, and that fish passes on the genes allowing it to live above the waterline, that fish may be called a tiger of a fish, a ferocious and heroic figure of a fish. But, that is us looking back at the occurrence with our own agenda, our own agency, which is not to prove the fish. The fish is proved, by existing, and by its own self.
The discovery of a people by a person, of a culture by a representative of another culture is not, then, a discovery for the found people. They already know themselves. And, in trying to know and catalogue, to identify and stratify the found people, the finder is not knowing them, either. Destiny will manifest, but colonialism merely holds against the tide with swagger and desperation. The devil sent here to test you, the heathen to be testified to, the child to be shod, the elder to be reeducated, these are stories we put on existing constructs to better define and colonize ourselves, if this is what we do.
What if there was no problem to solve? If things are and can be worked with, why do we need to justify a choice with genetics or a sublimate one people to elevate another? A hill just above the waterline is still out of the water. And, the fish did not have to kill anyone just to take a breath there on the hilltop. The water probably did not spite the fish, nor is it ignorant merely for having no ready use for the bigotries of the fish.
She said, “It’s a joke.”
She said, “It’s a joke.”
And, went back to work on her own.
