3. Talia #2
There were a handful of executive offices and conference rooms with doors, but everything else was an open floor plan.
Cubicle walls and desks were all on wheels so that the space could be reconfigured as needed.
For example, the human resources department mostly worked alone, so they usually kept their cubicles as individual spaces.
But the programmers often collaborated, so they could roll away some of their walls and move their desks next to each other, creating a wall of screens so they could look at code or brainstorm together.
Talia loved the flexibility of Ideal Life’s offices; it made space—both literal and figurative—for new ideas to bloom.
As she walked into her own office, she double-checked that her navy blazer was hanging on the back of the door as a way to visually verify that she was still in the right day.
Indeed, it was there, waiting for her to change into it later for the party downstairs at Sugiyama.
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.
Talia quickly signed the acquisition documents. An hour later, Omni had also signed them, and she had the fully executed versions in her inbox.
Whew…
And finally, huzzah!
Then there were, as usual, the normal fires to put out that constituted much of any CEO’s day, but they were the same ones as Talia had dealt with the last time she did this day, so she handled them easily.
By early evening, though, she was exhausted. She realized she hadn’t slept more than an hour or so in the equivalent of two days. But there was still the big celebration party to get through, and then she’d finally get back to where she started.
She took a short nap on the purple couch in her office.
At 8 p.m., the alarm she’d set on her phone went off. She tossed a piece of gum in her mouth to dispel nap breath and walked out into the reception area, where she paused to admire the Ideal Life sign.
“You ready, boss?” Erin came up from the offices behind her.
“Almost,” Talia said. She was still dressed in her jeans, T-shirt, and hoodie. “I just need to swap out my hoodie for my blazer—”
“Already got you covered.” Erin handed over the navy jacket Talia kept on a hanger behind her office door. “I grabbed your heels, too.”
“You’re always a step ahead,” Talia said as she slipped into the blazer, kicked off her sneakers, and stepped into the pumps.
“I learned from the best,” Erin said, grinning.
Talia’s phone rang.
“Are you here?” she asked.
“Wow,” Sam said. “No preamble, no hello, straight to business.”
But this time, she wasn’t all nerves before the party.
“I’ll send Erin to let you in.”
A couple minutes later, the elevator doors opened, and Sam stepped out. Like the first time, Erin had gone on to the restaurant, so Talia and Sam were alone.
“Congratulations,” he said, about to envelop her in a big hug.
“Wait,” she said. “I had the craziest day, and I have to tell you about it.”
In her office with the door closed, Talia recapped everything that had happened after Sam left the party (which, to him, hadn’t happened yet).
She told him about Laura Owusu, the San Francisco Chronicle reporter, and the bombshell of an Ideal Life–prompted murder.
She told him about running away to this office and falling asleep, then waking up to the strange watch on her wrist. And then she recounted the rewinding and everything she had gotten the chance to redo.
“So… yeah. That was my last day. Or more, technically, because I did it twice?”
Talia folded her hands in her lap, not touching the watch but not blocking his view of it, and waited for Sam’s response.
Her heart pounded against her ribs. He’d believe her, right?
Sure, it was far-fetched, but this was Sam, and he knew how firmly based in data and science she normally was. Talia wasn’t the delusional sort.