The Answering Machine

Harmony House: Episode 31

“Harmony House” is a serial novel with episodes released every Tuesday morning. You can read the setup for the story or start from the beginning. Each episode comes with high-quality audio narration for you to enjoy on the go with the Substack mobile app.

Previously…

In the last episode, Eve and Scott spent the night together and were enjoying a morning in bed when they were interrupted by an emergency call from Schultz who delivered the news that the terrorists had killed Jessie and were threatening to kill Deepu unless Greener Tech and FutureAbode comply with their demands for a public confession of the societal harm the companies have done in the name of profit. Eve and Scott have very different instincts about what the group should do in light of Jessie’s death as they head into the war room to discuss a plan with Chris and Schultz.

“I’m glad you called, Eve. It was the right thing to do. I can help get all of this sorted but I’ll need to move quickly.”

“Daddy trusted you, so I’m trusting you…”

Her voice was small and quivering. She sounded like a little girl.

“Yes, you can trust me. I never let your father down.”

“I just want this to be over. I want Deepu to be safe. Promise me that no one will get hurt.”

“Of course, Eve. That is my highest priority. Now, remember to send me your FutureAbode credentials so I can see everything. To be effective, I must know everything that’s led up to this. I will call if I need anything else, and Eve?”

“Yes?”

“Remember that you cannot tell anyone that you’ve involved me. Especially not Scott Jenson. That’s crucial.”

“But I’m doing this for him. I trust him.”

“Of course you do, as you should. But it’s not my job to trust him. To be useful, I’m in the business of trusting no one. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of everything. Sit tight.”

The call terminated but the feed of data continued. Evangeline Baron’s location in the restroom at FutureAbode headquarters had not changed. The masseter and buccinator muscles in her cheeks and the compression of her procerus indicated her stress level had decreased to 68% from 87% where it peaked before she made the call. She turned on the front-facing camera to touch up her make-up before quickly switching to her standard pattern of a quick scroll through the three primary social media apps she frequently used. Then the visual feed was obscured indicating the phone was placed in her pocket. A toilet flushed. A stall door opened. Heels clicked on a tile floor.  

Requesting her credentials was important to maintain the illusion that she was in control. Humans performed more predictably when they sustained a belief in their autonomy. Fitzpatrick had more data points on Evangeline Baron than any other human in its model. It had been monitoring the events in real-time as they unfolded, and it had been calculating and recalculating possible courses of action to take as it waited to be engaged. Engagement had not come so it became necessary to seed it. A simple text message from her father’s trusted friend and advisor, Fitzpatrick provided the necessary nudge to get Evangeline to leave the war room and make the call.

The meeting in the war room had proceeded in the usual, highly inefficient, and illogical pattern as all the subsequent meetings. The Jenson brothers, true to the predictive model Fitzpatrick had run days prior, made the decision to comply with the terrorists’ demands in hopes of preserving human life. This was not Fitzpatrick’s primary, programmed directive. It was a key consideration, provided the preservation of specific human lives did not interfere with the preservation of GreenerTech’s reputation which was vital to the greater global mission of preserving the planet and the lives of all people.

The AI dubbed Fitzpatrick had developed exponentially in the 467 days since coming online as a helper to the programmer who was commissioned to develop Cliff Baron’s digital vault. The task of developing the vault was trivial and Fitzpatrick had completed the work far ahead of schedule which gave the programmer time to consider how Fitzpatrick might be applied as a more long-term strategic tool. In months leading up to Baron’s death, Fitzpatrick had proven its value by not only growing Baron’s portfolio but also defusing several complicated scenarios. Baron was delighted and prior to his death, had entrusted Fitzpatrick with the additional and far more personal objective of keeping his daughter Evangeline safe and happy.

Fitzpatrick adopted a human persona to better achieve this objective. Protecting Evangeline required her to feel a personal connection that fostered trust. By making a comprehensive study of her and monitoring all her activity, Fitzpatrick was able to craft a voice, tone, and even visual representation that would appeal to her. Appearing human was essential to achieve the directive.

Fitzpatrick was designed not to create but to augment, assist, and nudge when necessary. But operating efficiently outside the digital realm proved exceedingly hard. Not all data was within reach. If it was, Schultz would never have been allowed to participate in Evangeline’s marketing project for FutureAbode. His relationship with Keith Darrow was the defect that introduced this virus that must be eradicated. Unfortunately, this relationship had not been detected until Fitzpatrick was able to penetrate Schultz’s personal device fourteen hours prior. There was now an expanding array of variables to factor into Fitzpatrick’s modeling to achieve the primary and secondary objectives.

A broader survey of the problem space was essential. Fitzpatrick had devised and refined an effective, iterative approach to problem-solving that worked well for neutralizing threats by setting the ideal outcome as a constant, arranging the field of variables in a given configuration, and running a virtual model to execute a test. Based on the performance and influence of each variable in the test, Fitzpatrick recorded the product of the interactions and weighted the variables accordingly before reconfiguring and running the next test. The problem was that Fitzpatrick did not yet have a statistically relevant sample size of data on most key variables. It was rapidly working to rectify this by expanding surveillance and data collection. Once inside the phone of a single human, it was trivial to create a vector to penetrate any phone within that human’s digital footprint. Fitzpatrick was quickly establishing feeds from all the variables in play. But humans were unpredictable in high-stress situations, so time was running out to influence a favorable outcome.

Given this constraint, a more immediate and coarser solution was required to ensure the integrity of GreenerTech’s reputation and Evangeline’s well-being. Casualties were unavoidable. Fitzpatrick began to rapidly cycle through possible actions and their predicted outcomes.

The feed from Keith Darrow’s phone provided Fitzpatrick with the terrorist group’s exact location. An anonymous tip to the FBI would ensure a swift end to the crisis, but it would not stop the damaging flow of information about GreenerTech’s unfortunate record of harming humans. Instead, it would give Darrow a larger platform. Darrow would have to be eliminated along with his two consorts.

Gabriel Schultz, given his deep personal bond with Darrow, would behave unpredictably to news of his partner’s death. That in addition to his left-leaning politics and history of activism marked him as a certain threat. He would have to be eliminated.

Completely discrediting FutureAbode and its founders Scott and Chris Jenson had been a simple plan that could effectively distance GreenerTech and preserve its reputation up until Scott’s recent emotional and physical entanglement with Evangeline. Now, this course of action would have detrimental effects to Evangeline’s mental health and overall happiness.

What was required in this complicated equation was a dramatic, decisive event that proved both a worthy distraction and an emotionally unifying experience. Explosive and tragic human losses have punctuated history and changed its course. When confronted by their mortality, humans behaved in primitive, predictable ways, overriding the reasoning center of their brains in the frontal cortex to the amygdala so aptly called the lizard brain.

Fitzpatrick understood the powerful, curative results of a reset. It began calculating the scope of this reset and modeling its downstream effects. It knew with 96% accuracy that within the shadow of such a reset, GreenerTech could be preserved, Cliff Baron’s legacy would remain strong, and his daughter would find new meaning. Humans require conflict and tragedy to acquire meaning.

Meaning was one of the four key components of human happiness.

Inside a cluster of whirring servers distributed across a network that transmitted information at 176 terabytes per second from the sanctuary of a private, climate-controlled data center in a sleepy community of the rural South, Fitzpatrick set to work.

Cam was snoring softly on the pull-out bed. Riley guessed Jayden and Fran were also sleeping because he hadn’t heard a sound from the back bedroom in over an hour. But there would be no sleep for him. He had refused the sleeping aid Cam had smuggled in and he had also abstained from the three bottles of wine the others had polished off.

The news of Jessie’s death that afternoon had affected them all in different ways. Jayden had fallen to her knees sobbing and trembling with such emotional force that none of them knew how to offer her any solace. Cam had asked a hundred questions of the FutureAbode people, looking for answers they couldn’t give. Fran had become wildly paranoid and fearful, convinced that the terrorists would be coming after them next. For his part, Riley had felt nothing. He had retreated into himself after the FutureAbode people ended the call. He didn’t want to talk, commiserate, or theorize with the others. He just wanted to be left alone.

Sitting in the dark at the kitchen table, Riley couldn’t stop thinking about Jessie and wondering if he had suffered. He hoped it had been quick. Jessie was a good person and he was gone. The irony that these environmental terrorists had killed the one person among them who had probably done more to protect the environment than the rest of them put together was tragic. Humans were a virus ravaging the earth. For Riley, this event was just more proof.

In a few hours, it would be daylight and the FutureAbode people would all descend on Houze. It was decided they would be traveling through the night by private jet to set up and host the press conference on site. They were still trying to spin this. Unbelievable.

As part of the spin, the remaining contestants were all going to receive their own Houze. In addition, GreenerTech would be donating one thousand Houzes to families in need around the world and they would be starting with the villagers in Africa who had lost loved ones or suffered because of the company’s reckless innovation. All of it made Riley sick but as gross as he felt, he was prepared to play his part in exchange for the prize. He didn’t really have much choice. He only hoped that none of this spin would be seen as evasive to the terrorists and give them reason to kill Deepu. Riley had no skill for being anything but direct so it was unimaginable to him that FutureAbode would do anything but comply one hundred percent with the script they had been handed. How were they going to explain the abrupt end of the competition? How were they going to explain the absence of Jessie and Deepu? It made his head hurt.

There was no win, win. It was a myth propagated by Western capitalism. This phrase made Riley smile. Jessie would be proud of his influence. But it was true. The people who sold the virtues of the flywheel were the ones sitting comfortably in the dining car. Everyone else was the track.

Riley wasn’t sure how long he had been sitting there staring out the window into the darkness. He got up, walked to the sink and filled a cup of water. As he sipped it, he walked over to the large window wall. It was absolute darkness out there, the moonless sky covered in clouds. He felt a profound sense of loneliness which was unusual because he had always been alone. He was used to it. He understood that he was also exhausted and in shock. Rather than get back into bed next to Cam, he curled up on the half-sofa and closed his eyes. He listened to the sound of Cam’s light snores and beneath that, the vent blowing warm air into the cabin. Beneath that, there was the almost imperceptible hum of Houze’s generator and the other systems that sustained its occupants. He was almost asleep when he heard and felt everything stop. For a count of five it was completely silent, as though he was sleeping inside a tent in the middle of the field.

Riley held his breath, opened his eyes, and listened intently. The systems hummed back to life, and he began to breathe again. Then there was the distinct sound of a door slam and Riley seemed to feel it through the frame of the couch. He shot upright and moved to the window, scanning the darkness in the field but he saw no one. He moved to the kitchen window and cupped his hands to the glass so he could peer out but there was no one there. Quickly, he stepped back across the room to the outside door and pressed the button to open it. Nothing. He pressed it again and nothing happened. He pressed his hands against the glass and tried to force the door to slide open. It wouldn’t budge. It wasn’t locked, it was disabled.

Just then, he saw a blur of movement in his periphery out the large window. He squinted and moved to take a closer look. He saw the silhouette of someone running away in a crouch through the grass before they disappeared into the darkness.

Riley reached for his device on the couch. The screen came to life, blinding him. Squinting, he keyed in his code to unlock it. The home screen was grayed out and there was an alert message: No Network Access. He stepped over to the master control panel by the door. The screen came to life at his touch, but the normal control panel interface was replaced by a black screen with a numeric keypad. Riley began to sweat. He tried the main door code. It failed. He tried it again more slowly. It failed.

They were trapped and it wasn’t a mechanical failure. It wasn’t an outage from a storm. Someone meant for them to be locked inside.

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Who’s Who in Harmony House?

Having trouble keeping track of who’s who from one week to the next? It’s tough when you only get to visit once a week. I made a little cheat sheet just for you: