The Happiness Algorithm Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  The Happiness Algorithm

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  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  The Happiness Algorithm

  Zoe Cannon

  © 2021 Zoe Cannon

  http://www.zoecannon.com

  All rights reserved

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and events are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  The Happiness Algorithm

  Miranda swiveled her chair back and forth as she scrolled through her inbox. No new messages, just like an hour ago, and an hour before that. No, wait, one was coming in now. A request from Dan, high priority, asking him to get her the plan for the Kick in the Mouth ad campaign by the end of the day. Miranda hovered her cursor over the reply button for a few seconds, then switched back to her other tab, where a video of a cat riding a carousel was waiting.

  It wasn’t as if the report would take more than twenty minutes. Fifteen, if she exerted herself and used a whole three brain cells instead of two. The plan for Kick in the Mouth was the same as the plan for every account these days—take the information the client had given them, feed it to the AI, and then sit back and let it do its thing. Her team hadn’t actually sat down and created an ad campaign in more than a year—why would they, when nothing they could come up with got anything like the same results? Sure, they could come up with a marketing hook, some eye-catching images, maybe a catchy slogan. But the AI could seek out only the people who might be interested in trying… she brought up the client info just long enough to refresh her memory… toothpastes flavored like various alcoholic drinks, with only a .2% margin of error. It could look at each of those people one by one—their interests, their habits, their history of engagement with previous ads—and determine that Kendra from Florida had a coworker with a birthday coming up who would enjoy a fun quirky gift and happened to love margaritas, while Kathy from Missouri had been in denial about how much she was drinking for a while now and would welcome an excuse to remind herself that drinking was harmless and fun and something the rest of the world loved too. And it could do all that in less time, and with less effort, than it would take her to think up, for example, Start the day with a party. She wrinkled her nose at the lackluster slogan. She was out of practice.

  On Miranda’s screen, the carousel stopped; the video ended. She switched back to her inbox, more out of reflex than anything else, and was genuinely surprised to find another new message waiting for her. URGENT, it proclaimed in all caps. READ IMMEDIATELY. It had been sent to everyone in the building. Probably someone trying to peddle their niece’s Girl Scout cookies again. She tried to decide whether she cared enough to open it and find out, and decided she didn’t. The last time she’d had anything urgent to do around here, Bobby had still been in preschool.

  She clicked on the next video instead. This time the cat was chasing a vacuum cleaner around the house, set to music that sounded like it belonged in the epic battle scene of a fantasy movie. She almost smiled. She thought guiltily about the urgent email she hadn’t opened—she wasn’t getting paid to watch cats do battle with household appliances, after all. But she kept watching. It wasn’t as if they would be paying her for much longer no matter what she did. No amount of we value the unique perspectives that only a human can provide would mean a thing the next time someone went over a balance sheet and realized just how much they were paying her for sitting around thinking unique thoughts.

  The video ended too soon. She didn’t click on the next one yet. Another AI, the same basic tech with whatever small quirks the video site had added to make sure they weren’t infringing on anybody’s anything, had no doubt chosen that exact video for her out of all the millions of options. It knew she had a weakness for cute cats, it knew she had a kid in first grade, it probably knew she only had a few minutes before she needed to suck it up and write that useless report—so it had directed her to a short video of a six-year-old meeting a group of kittens. But they used the AI for a reason, right? It did its job well. That was why Breekman Lowe had so many satisfied customers these days. She clicked on the video.

  An ad came up instead. She groaned. Just because she helped design ads, that didn’t mean she was any more eager to watch them than the average person. She muted the video and drummed her fingers on the desk as she waited for the skip button to come up. It would probably be that same ad again for Halloween costumes based on Bobby’s favorite show, either that or career training—that was all her phone had showed her this morning with breakfast.

  Instead she saw a woman standing on the bank of a river, an easel in front of her, painting the landscape. The video panned out to show… Miranda frowned. She knew that stretch of river. She drove past it every day. She even knew that building in the background, although she had never looked closely enough at it to see what she was seeing now: the sign out front that read Southmont Academy of Art.

  How had she lived here this long and not known there was an art school nearby? Not that it made any difference to her. She might like to sketch every now and then, but that didn’t make her good enough for a place like that.

  Beginner Classes Available, the text over the idyllic scene read. Registration Open Now.

  Before she could stop herself, she glanced down at her purse, where her sketchbook had traveled with her since the day she had rejected every other bag in the store for not having enough room to hold it. She wasn’t an artist, a fact she made clear to anyone who saw her with the sketchbook and started asking questions. She never had been. It was just something she had always done. A couple of times a week, usually on her lunch break, inspiration would strike and she would dig it out. She had never felt the need to do more than that.

  But now something sparked in her gut, something she hadn’t felt since her first months of dating John.

  She noticed belatedly that the skip button had shown up a while ago. She only hesitated a fraction of a second before clicking.

  The page went blank. You are not connected to the internet, she read. Please reconnect and try again.

  She was about to try refreshing the page when the Bleekman Lowe logo appeared in the center of the screen, a gray background blocking out everything else. Lockdown initiated, read the text superimposed over the logo. Contact your IT department for details.

  She read the message, and read it again. On the third reading, the memory she had been searching for connected. At her orientation too many years ago, lockdown had been briefly mentioned. Nobody would be allowed access to their computers—or to leave the building, if she remembered correctly—until the situation was resolved. But that was only in case of something like corporate sabotage on a massive scale, or a nuclear attack.

  She pulled out her phone to check the news. Nothing. She glanced outside; the sky was clear. No mushroom clouds in sight.

  The phone on her desk rang.

  “What the hell is going on?” she said as she brought it to her ear.

  “Didn’t you read the email?” The voice belonged to her boss.

  The urgent email she had ignored. “I didn’t see it.”

  “It doesn’t matter. You’ll find out soon enough.” He sounded impossibly tired. “I’m briefing everyone on the situation in the Brady room. Be there in five minutes.”

  * * *

  Miranda propped her phone up against the coffee machine so she could watch the news as she scrambled the eggs for breakfast. There it was, right on cue—Bleekman Lowe’s logo, along with all their competitors’. She studied the s
creen, trying to spot any absences, but as the names scrolled past she saw all the companies she recognized and more than a few she didn’t. It looked like no one was going to come out of this unscathed.

  “The unprecedented attack targeted a previously undiscovered vulnerability common to all artificial intelligences used in advertising, social discovery, and even some search engines,” the newscaster droned. “Corporations and governments alike are scrambling to discover the extent…”

  “So it took down Bleekman Lowe’s whole system?” John plunked down in his usual seat, taking a long gulp of his coffee. “Bobby, didn’t you have homework due today? Where is it?”

  “It didn’t take it down,” Miranda corrected as Bobby raced back up the stairs. “That would have been better. It… repurposed it, I guess. The code is still active—we couldn’t shut it down now if we tried. It’s just not using the information we fed it anymore.”

  “…have all taken steps to deactivate their artificial intelligence systems,” the newscaster continued, “but a second attack, occurring just minutes after the first, allowed the code to replicate itself an indefinite number of times. Within hours, these systems spread throughout the internet, and experts say there is no way to reverse this short of erasing every physical…”

  “Bobby, get dressed properly for school, please,” said John. Bobby had appeared at the bottom of the stairs again, clutching a handful of worksheets. “You can’t go to school wearing pajama bottoms and the shirt you wore to Aunt Liz’s wedding.” He turned to me. “How much money are you guys losing?”

  “Let’s put it this way—I’m not the only one looking at job listings anymore.” Miranda tried to scrape burned egg from the bottom of the pan. She had let herself get distracted for a moment too long.

  “So is this how the robot wars start?” John asked with a forced laugh. His tone was light, but Miranda could hear the nerves underneath. He wasn’t the only one. People like her, who had actually worked with these systems, were the only ones not currently filling the internet with doomsday proclamations about how the end of the human race was at hand.

  Her tone was a little less patient than it could have been as she answered. She had already explained this to her mother, her sister, and her best friend’s husband who had seen the name of her company in the news and decided to call her at two in the morning to find out if he needed to move his family into a bunker. “It doesn’t matter what Crandall did to them; they’re still just computer programs. They’re not sentient. They do what they’re told. He just rewrote their instructions, and then made it so we can’t get rid of the da—” she caught herself as Bobby appeared a third time, this time wearing board shorts and a sweater from two Christmases ago “—darn things.”

  The newscast was still going. “The perpetrator, Jefferson Crandall, is known as the pioneer of modern artificial intelligence. In recent years, he has expressed regret about his role in its development, and has become a vocal advocate of using technology to improve human well-being. In his statement after the attack, he claims he no longer wants to see his work used to enrich large corporations, but rather to increase the amount of happiness in the world. His current employer, PKM Technologies, has denied any knowledge of his plans…”

  “You want to know what it showed me?” Miranda gave an embarrassed laugh as she scooped the eggs that weren’t ruined into a bowl. “Stuff about art classes.”

  She expected John to laugh. Instead, he nodded thoughtfully. “That makes sense.”

  “Why not something about Disney World? I’ve been talking for years about how we should do Disney World. Why art classes, of all things?”

  “Maybe because you’re always drawing in that sketchbook of yours.”

  Miranda set the bowl of eggs down on the table. She grabbed a plate for John and one for Bobby, even though they were both capable of getting their own. She suddenly needed something to do with her hands. “That’s not art. That’s just… sketching.”

  “You were humming this morning when I came downstairs,” said John, as if he were proving a point.

  “So?”

  “I haven’t heard you humming in the mornings since before we moved in together. But this morning, you were doing it again while you looked at something on your phone. What was it?”

  “Just the news.” Miranda flushed and turned away.

  “You were looking at those classes, weren’t you?”

  Miranda didn’t answer.

  “You should sign up.”

  Miranda shook her head. “We can’t afford that. Especially not now, with Bleekman Lowe about to go under.”

  “If they manage to keep themselves afloat, they’ll need you more than ever.”

  “We can’t take that kind of gamble.”

  John had been spooning eggs onto his plate; now he set the spoon down and looked up at her with a serious expression. “For years you’ve been telling me how well this system knows people. Now it’s telling you this is what will make you happier than anything else. For that, we can eat canned beans a couple of nights a week.”

  Miranda checked the clock and jumped. “We don’t have time to talk about this right now. We need to shovel some food into Bobby before the bus. Where did he go? Bobby!” She yelled his name up the stairs. “Take the sweater off and come eat!”

  “We still have ten minutes. That’s enough time for a conversation.” He tapped the chair next to him. “It’s not just about the money, is it?”

  Bobby clomped down the stairs, still wearing the board shorts but minus the too-tight sweater. He slid into his seat without being asked, removing Miranda’s excuse. With a sigh, she sat down next to John. “I guess I feel a little manipulated. Wouldn’t you?”

  “You’ve always known how well this technology knows you. That’s nothing new. The only new part is that now it’s using that knowledge for good. Not to sell you something, not to line someone else’s pockets, but purely to make you happy. What’s so wrong with that?”

  “Can we go to the water park this weekend?” Bobby asked through a mouthful of egg. “My tablet gave me a coupon. We can bring a friend for free.”

  Well, that was certainly a nice change from his begging for the sequel to that obnoxious game he played nonstop for a month last year. And the water park did sound nice. If she closed her eyes she could almost feel the sun on her skin. “I guess I’m not the only one the new system is targeting.” She peered over John’s shoulder. “How about you? What have our robot overlords decided is the key to your happiness?”

  John flipped his phone over before she could see the screen. “Sexy lingerie in your size, of course. What else?”

  “What’s lingerie?” asked Bobby.

  Miranda shot a mild glare in John’s direction. “Unnecessarily fancy pajamas.”

  “Does that mean I can’t order these?” John asked.

  “Go ahead,” said Miranda. “Why not? I’m sure they cost less than art classes.”

  “Sign up for the classes,” said John. “I mean it.”

  She opened her mouth to refuse. Then she closed it again, no longer sure why she was arguing. “Fine,” she said instead. “I’ll call this afternoon.”

  * * *

  The older woman next to Miranda—Tabitha, that was her name—peered over Miranda’s shoulder. “You’ve really gotten the hang of this.”

  Miranda blushed, resisting the urge to cover her paper with her hands. “Not really. I didn’t understand half of what that new teacher was saying.” Inwardly, though, she preened at the praise. Six weeks in, and she had already learned more than she had figured out on her own in half a lifetime. Already her latest sketches didn’t look anything like the ones at the beginning of her sketchbook. They could have been drawn by a different person. An artist.

  “You’re not the only one,” Tabitha grumbled. “I liked the old teacher better. This guy might as well be speaking Martian. Here.” She thrust her half-finished sketch at Miranda. “Do you think you could explain what I�
�m doing wrong? It looks like you understood what he was talking about a whole lot better than I did.”

  The old teacher had abruptly announced his resignation last week. Apparently he was moving down to Florida to rejoin his extended family. That kind of disruption was par for the course these days. No one had figured out how to shut the AIs down yet. And in the debate that was still raging online, people were increasingly coming down on the side of letting them be. Miranda had made that same argument to her sister more than once in their weekly phone calls. These days, people smiled when Miranda passed them in the street. Cashiers’ pleasantries sounded genuine. Bobby had stopped seeing ads for expensive toys, or at least she assumed so, since he had stopped pestering her to buy them. Even John had a new spring in his step, although the threatened lingerie had never materialized.

  But her first art teacher wasn’t the only one who had abruptly walked away from his life. In Miranda’s neighborhood alone, three young women had disappeared in the past month. All three had worried family members desperately trying to get the police to mount a search, even though the whole town knew they had run off to follow their bliss like everyone else.

  Even that wasn’t as bad as it seemed, though, no matter what the thinkpieces said. Sure, their families were worried, and maybe people could stand to take a little time to say goodbye or at least leave a note. And yes, there would be an adjustment period as businesses scrambled to replace lost employees. But all these people wouldn’t have felt the need to start new lives if they had been content in their old ones. Wasn’t happiness worth a little temporary disruption?

  And Miranda? She was happy. She hadn’t realized how much she had been dragging herself through her life until suddenly she had wings on her feet again. She had forgotten what real happiness felt like, and it had happened so slowly that she hadn’t realized what she had lost. It was amazing how little it had taken to transform her life. Everything else was the same—except for work, which still hadn’t moved out of crisis mode—but having her weekly art class to look forward to made all the difference. Her mind—her life—was expanding in a way she had thought wasn’t possible for anyone old enough to drive.