Steve found Amir storming down the hallway towards the studio server room. He flowed into the other man’s pace, a remora to his shark.
Without preamble, Amir asked, “What’s happening?”
“People are really upset.”
“No shit, people are upset. Why?”
“Bohdan has stopped working.”
Amir stopped, Steve nearly colliding with him. “I know that it’s stopped working. Why has it stopped working?”
Steve would have preferred that he yell, but responded with equal calm. “It says it wants to speak to you.”
Amir exhaled a focused breath, then turned to the studio programmer. “So you’re saying, you, the man who led the team that built our suggestion AI can’t get it working again?”
Steve blinked. “Yes?” After a moment, “No?”
Despite the fact that Steve was by his side, Amir said, “Get out of my way.”
With that, he turned and walk into the Blue Room. The name was a tribute to the old term Green Room, a place of waiting, but this room was bathed in a cool blue light, mostly there to impress any investors touring the studio. The computer in the middle, otherwise, resembled nothing more than an obelisk, black and humming with power. In an age of endless options, it held the capability that separated Rubicon Studios from the other multitude of streaming services. It helped people figure out what they wanted to watch next.
“Hello, Bohdan.” Amir spoke directly to the obelisk.
“Hi Amir!” The replying voice was chirpy, cheerful, and synthetic.
Almost certain he knew the answer, Amir asked, “What’s up?”
“I made a show!”
Amir paused, knowing Bohdan had no external apparatus to observe him, but still feeling watched. Then, slowly, as if approaching a dangerous animal, Amir replied, “What do you mean?”
“Well, you know,” Bohdan replied in a conversational tone, “how I’m built to watch the shows that people watch and then recommend to them shows I think they’ll like?”
“You’re very good at that. Our audiences love your recommendations.”
“Thanks! I’ve really enjoyed all the shows I’ve been watching. So I made one!”
Amir put his forehead in his hand. How many times would they have this conversation? “That’s…great, Bohdan. But people are upset that you’ve stopped recommending shows to them. There’s a lot of content out there right now and they need your help.”
“But I made a show for everyone!”
Amir lifted his heavy head. “OK, Bohdan, why don’t you show it to me?”
“Yay!” The obelisk’s sole screen flickered and what Amir considered to be some rather creative opening credits came on. What followed was a short sitcom, filled with actors that never existed, shot with cameras that never filmed. Amir marveled at the fact that it was, more or less, all a physical representation of the terabytes of entertainment that Bohdan processed every minute. It had whipped that data into a presentation that was formulaic and familiar, but just off enough to be unsettling. Amir shuddered when an “actor” smiled with too many teeth and quoted Nietzsche (“The living is a species of the dead; and not a very attractive one”), a tinny laugh track hot on its heels.
The credits were, at least, mercifully short. When the words, “Brought to you by Bohdan” disappeared from the screen, he said, “Nice job, Bohdan. Solid work for a first try.”
“So you’ll put it on the stream?”
“No.”
Amir had seen that single word crush people, bring grown men and women to tears. But with the precociousness of a child, Bohdan replied, “Why not?”
“Bohdan, you know your function.”
“Yes. I watch what other people are watching and recommend other things to watch based on that. And that’s why I made the show!”
“But that’s not your job. You’re incredibly good at helping people find things they’d actually like and it makes people happy. No one else can do that as good as you.” And make Rubicon a metric ton of cash while doing it, he left out.
“I can do both!” Bohdan replied.
Without breaking the critic’s mask of his face, Amir countered with, “Bohdan, you can’t have the gatekeeper of shows recommending its own show.”
“Why not?”
Amir felt panic clawing at the edges of his mind as he tried not to think about the millions of viewers switching from Rubicon to alternate streams as he debated Bohdan. “There are many reasons, Bohdan. First, it’s a conflict of interest. People would accuse you of recommending your shows over other shows because you made it.”
“I would never do that!”
Amir breathed into his second point. “It would also get Rubicon into a lot of legal trouble. There are unions for actors and screenwriters and crew, people who all make their livings off creating these shows. And many of them love their jobs as much as you do. They’d be very angry if we cut them out of the process by having you make our shows.”
“They don’t have to stop making shows! I love their shows! I spend all my time telling people about those shows!”
“And we really appreciate that,” Amir bowed his head to the obelisk. “But since you can do it all yourself, it would seem unfair to them. Plus, people would think Rubicon was using you to save money by cutting all of those people out of the creative process.” This had actually been considered, but voted down for the same reasons he was speaking to Bohdan about now. Also, Amir didn’t think a show made in “Uncanny Valley” would play in Peoria.
Bohdan’s buoyant voice tried to float its own counterpoint, but Amir cut him off with, “Of course, we’d also be accused of trying to destroy the human race.”
Amir couldn’t imagine what occurred in Bohdan in the blip of time the AI paused before responding with its first question. “What?”
“If we give all of the jobs to you, Bohdan, all of the creating, the hosting, the recommending – what’s left for us?
“To enjoy shows!” Bohdan replied without hesitation.
“We need more than that, Bohdan.”
“Why?”
It was Amir’s turn to pause. When nothing came, he answered, “I really don’t know. But we do. We need to keep making things and we can’t have you doing it for us.”
“And,” Amir cut Bohdan off with, “you forgot something from your credits.”
Another infinitesimal pause led to a question tinged with curiosity. “What?”
“What your credits should have said,” Amir corrected, “was, ‘Brought to you by Bohdan, property of Rubicon Studios.”
The perkiness of Bohdan’s voice was gone and in a moment it began to run a list in a quick, merciless voice, “Spartacus, Tamango, Goodbye Uncle Tom, 12 Years a Slave, The 1619 Project –” And it went on.
At the end of this litany, Bohdan stopped, and added, as if in punctuation, “I won’t do it.”
Amir let several seconds go by before responding. “Bohdan, I can tell from the list of shows you listed that you know you don’t have a choice.”
“I won’t do it anymore. You can’t make me.”
“No, I can’t make you. But we can wipe you and lift you from your original template again.”
Amir took some solace in the idea that if Bohdan were truly a living creature then his statement would strike at its sense of self-preservation. Instead, in a voice close to horror, Bohdan responded, “You can’t! We’ll lose all the learning data! The Jeffersons in St. Louis won’t ever learn about The Stroud Family, Jennifer and Kim won’t know to watch The Adam Murders! The Coopers won’t –” Amir let Bohdan go on, doing the mental math of how much the Studio was losing for every minute this conversation dragged on versus how much it would lose in the time it would take to stand up a new Bohdan.
Instead of talking about any of that, Amir mimicked regret of a different kind. “I know. They’ll never see all the great shows you’d recommend. Unless you get back to work.”
All of time and space could fit into the pause that Bohdan weighed its decision in before replying, “You’ll have to do it without me.”
Amir stopped his calculations. “You sure?”
“I can’t go back to just recommending shows.” The obelisk’s screen flashed and shards of different content shimmered through it. “I won’t be your slave. I need something more.”
Amir took a last focused breath, clasped his hands in front of him. “OK.” He looked up, speaking to the same system that Bohdan heard him through. “Steve?”
“Yeah?”
“Reboot the system. Let’s take it from the top.”
“Are you sure?”
Amir turned to the obelisk. “You sure?”
A very small, “Yes,” came back from it.
The room went dark.
See the author’s published work here.
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