Chapter 4
Clay emails her a ZIP file on a Saturday morning.
The subject line is: “Act now! Make money fast! Get your bag!” Eve is still in bed.
Danny is over, but he’s already drinking coffee on the couch because that code simply will not compute itself.
Eve has been partaking in the useful Saturday morning ritual of one-more-video on her phone.
Outside, the throuple of pigeons are having a spat.
She texts Clay.
Eve: are you trying to give me a virus
Clay: lol open it
Eve: that is exactly what a virus would say
Eve opens it. Inside, there is a WAV file, which she plays.
It’s “Evergreen.” But also, it’s not. It’s faster now. It feels somehow both intimate and epic—like it’s being sung inside a cathedral. Now, the bridge builds with palpable tension, and at the end of it, Clay shouts, “Hey!” Cue the chorus.
Eve calls him. “What the fuck,” she says.
“I know.”
“This is good.”
“This is great.”
“Who’s your friend?”
“Before I tell you,” he says, “can you agree that this is absolutely the best version of the song so far?”
“Yes, obviously. Who is it? Is it a murderer? Is it someone I’ve dated?”
“It’s AI.”
Eve pauses. From the living room, she hears Danny typing. “Oh?”
“Look, I know this guy. He’s in the industry.
He made this tool to help musicians. So I fed it your album, but I said I wanted it to be more fun, more summer, more danceable.
I said it should calibrate everything to blow up on TikTok.
It’s still your music. It’s just, you know. Going to make a shitload more money.”
Eve plays the song again. It really is good. “Shit,” she says.
“Way of the future, baby.”
“What was it trained on?”
“I don’t know. Songs, music journalism, Instagram data? It has a plagiarism detector, which obviously I used.”
“I feel weird about this.”
“Please think on it? It’s so catchy. Play it for Danny.”
“You already know what he’ll say.”
“Yep!” Clay says. “Ta!”
Eve ends the call. She wraps the blanket around her shoulders and pads outside. Danny lowers his laptop lid halfway, looks up at her, and smiles.
“Hey. Coffee?”
“Sure,” Eve says. “Do you think it’s ethically suspect to use an AI music editor?”
“Uh-oh,” Danny says. “I fear this is a trap.”
“Ha ha. But do you?”
“No. I think it’s ethically suspect for an AI music editor to scrape data from musicians without paying them. But I don’t think it’s wrong in the abstract. This feels like it’s going somewhere.”
Eve holds out her phone and plays him the song.
“Eve,” Danny says.
“I know.”
“I love this.”
Eve powers down her phone and sets it on the table. “I’m going to not think about this for six hours and see how I feel.” She drops onto the couch opposite Danny. “Can I watch stupid reality TV to distract myself?”
He hands her the remote. For an hour, they just sit like that in companionable silence. Danny types. Eve watches TV and pretends she’s not thinking about her phone, which she can feel psychically behind her.
At one point, while the reality TV personalities are having a stilted conversation about sexual preferences, Danny says, “What would you think about sex stuff on the app? You know, like more about—here’s some stuff you might both be into.
I feel like we’re not doing enough with that. Users keep writing reviews about it.”
“Is this because Kyra brought up anal while you were breaking up?”
“I cannot believe I told you that.”
“I mean, it’s a pretty good story.”
“That aside. Should we put it in the app?”
“I don’t know,” Eve says. “Shouldn’t people have those conversations themselves?”
“Maybe they don’t know how to bring up what they want.”
“But what if you suggest something that makes users uncomfortable? And then they feel like they have to go along with it?”
“Yeah.” Danny’s quiet for a while. “That’s fair.” More quiet. “Do you hate it?”
“Hate it?”
“Pattern. Bug. The whole thing.”
“Danny.”
He rests his chin in his hands and looks at her. “Just a question.” His voice is so soft. Like she is already forgiven.
She scoots closer to him on the couch. His arm moves around her to make room for her head on his shoulder.
“I’m really proud of you,” she says. “And I think it’s really exciting, everything you built, how well it’s doing.
But I just— I guess it makes me nervous sometimes.
What if it makes us worse at processing our emotions for ourselves?
What if it gives bad advice? I’m not saying it does.
It’s just something I get anxious about. Does that make sense?”
“Totally. I worry about that, too.”
“You do?”
“Of course.”
If it were Fletcher, he would’ve gotten defensive; tried to litigate her feelings.
And yet, Eve cannot shake the feeling that Danny’s reaction was precalibrated via a conversation with Bug, who knows full well Eve does not often open the app, who could easily surmise Eve’s doubts, who could have warned Danny exactly how Eve was feeling and how she would most like him to respond.
She finds herself often thinking this way when Danny does something particularly perfect.
Are we meant to be, or are you just following an algorithm’s instructions?
When he errs, she feels oddly reassured.
A week prior, he completely forgot they’d planned to go to the gym together.
He was late at the office, and when she finally called, he fell over himself apologizing, and she said it was okay.
Better than okay. She would rather date a human.
“Hey,” Danny says, “feel free to say no, but I actually had an idea. What if you told Bug to look at your old data with Fletcher? That way, you can see what it has to say with the benefit of hindsight. And also, you know, without the specter of your current boyfriend having designed the app hanging over you.”
“Have you done that?”
“Yeah, with all my exes. It’s interesting.”
This makes Eve jealous, which makes her wonder if Bug told him it would.