I was interested. Interested enough to put my name on that non-disclosure agreement I already mentioned and follow her deeper into the rabbit hole.
4HOW THE SAUSAGE GETS MADE
When I signed that form,I was not thinking of the legalese I’d just skimmed. As I walked deeper into the underground complex hidden behind Mail Call Mates’s deceptively normal office building, I was not pondering the mystery that Elaine Prise was about to uncover for me. This should have been on top of my mind, dancing and howling and waving its arms for attention. But what I was really thinking was…
Jackson Sadler wanted someone just like me.
In the face of a massive enigma, promised a glimpse into the process that determined the fates of so many people, I was thinking about the boy. The man with the tiny smile. I hadn’t even received my information packet with his introduction, or any tidbits about his personality, but he still staked a claim on some prime grey-matter real estate.
I was so relieved that he wouldn’t open his email on that cramped transport ship and find the diametric opposite of what he wanted. Yes, I was sure Mail Call Mates would tell him about this “outlier” issue, because informed consent is important and he should know what had occurred. I still hoped that wouldn’t ruin it for him. Mostly, I hoped he would think the same thing I did as we walked the subterranean corridors of the complex.
We’re outliers, but I really like his smile. I want to know why he was chosen for me. Even if this started out as a mistake, I think it will be just fine.
I wanted us, Jackson Sadler and me, to be just fine. I wanted the chance to learn more about the man with the tiny smile. When his ship landed in four days, I wanted to be on that tarmac to welcome him home.
Elaine led me to a room with a small, airlock-like chamber outside it. The temperature inside sat at least twenty degrees lower than in the hallways on the other side of the glass doors. My skin prickled with goosebumps.
She gestured to one of the several jackets that hung from hooks on one side of the antechamber. “You’ll want one of those.”
“Damn right, I do,” I said, and shoved myself into one with more than a little haste. “It’s freezing in here.”
A smirk lit her features as she pulled on her own jacket. “This is nothing compared to where we’re going.”
Then she opened the thick, metal double doors at the other end of the antechamber and proved her point. That room was colder than my father’s shriveled, black heart.
I cannot tell you everything I saw in the Mail Call Mates server room. Non-disclosure agreement. What I am about to tell you has been vetted and cleared by their team, and is a combination of knowledge already open to the public and information they have cleared me to release. Please don’t sue me.
Normal server rooms do not look like server rooms in the movies. No banks of blinky lights. No walls of vacuum tubes or decorative sheets of plate glass for that tech nouveau aesthetic. Just rows of black boxes with the usual electrical and networking wires sticking out of them like feral spaghetti. They’re cold, boring rooms full of big computers that look unremarkable as they crunch numbers, pass data, and work together to deal with the myriad of tasks presented to them.
The server room Elaine led me to did not look like a place for big computers to parse out tasks and work in tandem to solve problems. Itdidhave big computer systems, but not a one of those bad boys came out of a “business computing solutions” catalog. Every system in this room had come bespoke. And there were alotof them.
These kaiju of the computer world led to a central node.ThatMecha-Godzilla of Processing looked like the big brain of the entire operation. The whole, popsicle-making server room fed into that monster so it could do its work.
A small terminal, just a trio of monitors and a keyboard, sat on a small, standing desk beside the massive central unit. Near the terminal sat a metallic plate that read “M4-CH”.
Elaine showed me over to our new, machine intelligence overlord (whom I, for one, welcomed). “This is M4-CH,” she said, with a hint of wry humor that acknowledged the bigass metal plate that said the same thing. “Its full name is the M4-CH Digital Intelligence Integrated Server. It was a purpose-driven innovation developed to precisely suit, then grow to meet, the increasing needs of the digital architecture it runs: the M4-KR Machine Intelligence. Together, the purpose-built hardware and the software are M4-CH+M4-KR, the heart of Mail Call Mates.”
Do you hear what she wasn’t saying? She wasn’t sayingartificial intelligence.She never saidAIonce in that hairball of technojargon.
“M4-KR was developed to accept information and interpret it, in order to find both logical and intuitive matches within that input,” she continued. “That doesn’t tell you anything practical, does it.”
“Not really,” I admitted.
She nodded. “It’s a very bare-bones explanation. Let me add a bit of practical meat to those bones. M4-KR was initially used as a means to fill open employment positions. Feed it the data from resumes and job applications, provide it the job description, as well as the characteristics you hope for in an employee, and it will use the data you provided to find the perfect candidate.”
“Nice.”
She inclined her head. “It was. At first, it located them in terms of skills and school degrees. As the algorithm learned, however, and as it gained more data in terms of the results of its matches, it did better. We would tell it, ‘This match was perfect,’ or, ‘This person quit within thirty days because of personality conflict,’ and it would adapt. Adapt impressively, in some cases. It was able to deduce some situations that a human resources department never could have.”
I arched an eyebrow. “Such as?”
What she told me spooked me. And it’s covered under the NDA. However, let’s say there’s a potential employee named Bob, who lives in Los Angeles. Bob applies for a job, and is a perfect, ideal candidate the hiring department is drooling over. M4-KR tells them not to hire him.
Bob’s mother lives in Massachusetts. Two months after the date Bob would have started work, his mother has a stroke. Bob has to quit work, move across the country, and care for his ailing mother.
The company would have lost the money they spent to hire him on, pay his sign-on bonus, start medical benefits, and begin his training. They would now have to spend yet more time and money to hire and train someone else. M4-KR would have prevented these losses – by predicting a serious health event in a person tangential to the applicant.
Hypothetically. This is all hypothetical here. Absolutely did not happen, because if it had, and I told you about it, I would be violating my NDA. But you get the idea.