In Constant Contact

offering. Her pale face, containing a pair of light blue eyes above which no eyebrows resided, was dwarfed by reams of the lightest blond hair which seemed to drift perpetually skyward, as if propelled by some hidden fan below.

  "Locked and loaded," Bilj checked in, holding up his wrist to demonstrate the object was firmly attached.

  "They should all be wearing them," Fred muttered. "As per the email."

  "Yes," Kandhi murmured back, and then louder she announced, "Stanley and Velicia, would you please also put the, uh, the wristbands, on your wrists?"

  "Which arm?" Velicia asked.

  "It doesn't matter," Kandhi replied. "Whichever is most comfortable for you."

  "I'm ambidextrous," she informed them. "So it doesn't matter to me. If you have a preference, that is."

  "We don't," Kandhi assured her. "It will work just as well either way."

  "Well, in that case," Velicia decided, "I will wear it on my left wrist. That way it will be more in tune with my right brain. I think that might be important. You may want to tell the others to do the same."

  "We'll certainly take it under advisement," Kandhi promised. "Fred, take a note?"

  "Oh yes certainly," Fred groaned. He was already becoming personally allergic to Velicia. We got a real winner with this one, he thought. Wen was busily monitoring the actual signals that began to pour through from the three beta subjects. She was well prepared, having tested one of the prototype HAFSes on her own wrist. She had written a test harness complete with inputs and outputs, charts and reports, live graphs and a document database from which she could glean analytics in abundance. She knew to expect connection statuses, data throughputs, text and images, video streams, audio, and was already prepared for more. She had questioned developers who insisted she had already covered the bases and then some, but she didn't believe them. There were packets encoded in nefarious ways, private protocols that seemed to be scrambled. The audio/video streams were loaded with more data than could be explained by the codec decoders. But she couldn't figure out everything at once. There was simply too much going on, and there was of course the usual shortage of time.

  Once Velicia and Stanley and Bilj were strapped in the information flowed thick and fast like primordial lava. Wen was cursing under her breath. Three at once was much too much. How were they going to scale up? What kind of monitoring system were they imagining could handle the load? The throughput was going to be staggering, and the subjects had barely even started their work. They were merely going through the most basic training and already she was thinking in petabytes!

  "There are a few most commonly used interactions," Kandhi explained. "You can tap on the band, or pull and release, or rub or pinch or swipe. Each of these gestures can be expanded in context. For example, a brief triple tap could be used for a kind of alert. There are built-in defaults, but each gesture is completely configurable, so you can act in whichever fashion works best for you. You'll want to live with it, try it, try different things. Now, can you see the response tabs on your screens?"

  They all nodded. The HAFSes were connected to a wireless application that let them set preferences and settings. The options were far too complex for Fred's liking. Especially for an initial release, it seemed crazy to let the user customize practically every aspect of the device. How was anyone in house supposed to keep track of an infinite variety of settings? Everything would be happening in real time, after all, and the people in Ops could not be expected to know about every possible combination and signaling pattern. It was simply insane. Fred had already complained long and hard to Kandhi, who'd sympathized and told him to file bugs. He had done so and seen them rejected as "Behaves As Designed." He'd flamed the internal socialnet with a firehose of bile, but all of his comments were ignored and marked down as 'Fred Behaving As Expected'.

  "The same old dance," he complained to himself. Kandhi could see it in his eyes. She was accustomed to his trademark misanthropy. Couldn't live without it, in fact, which didn't mean she had to like it, or like him even. Sitting there now with these strangers and her team, she had a sudden sense of massive dejection. Failure is always an option, she reminded herself, and yet, my employees do work hard, as intractable as they can be from time to time.

  "So you're telling me," Bilj was expounding, "that every word I say is transmitted through the wristband connection and changed into text that scrolls on the wristband receiver?"

  "You can see it right here," Fred acknowledged, directing the attention of all to his own wrist.

  "This HAFS is paired up with yours," he told Bilj. "I'm adjusting the font size and color right now. Can you see it?"

  Floating across the beige wristband on Fred's arm were the words, "scrolls on the wristband receiver?"

  "I can adjust the velocity as well as the font," Fred explained. "I can also press pause, rewind, and repeat using the default gestures like this," and he went through a series of taps, demonstrating the effect, causing Bilj's entire question to be replayed across his wrist.

  "Now, using the default double-tap gesture," Fred went on, emphasizing the word "default" at every turn, hoping to reinforce by suggestion the idea that no one should even consider mucking around with the settings, "I can select audio instead of text, like this."

  After he made that standardized movement, the text disappeared, and instead, coming from some kind of invisible speaker build into the wristband, came a mechanized voice repeating everything that Bilj had said, with very close to the same inflections and intonations.

  "I used a default voice setting," Fred mentioned, deliberately not mentioning the several dozen selectable variations, not to mention the alternate language translations. This whole thing is going to be a nightmare, he said to himself, and we haven't even gotten to the video yet, not to mention the audio earbuds for privacy.

  "So the customer can choose whether to read us or hear us," Bilj nodded.

  "What if they're not looking?" Velicia asked.

  "Excuse me?" Kandhi said.

  "When you're telling them something," Velicia went on. "What if they aren't paying attention."

  "We'll cover that in the guidelines," Kandhi informed her. "For now let's just assume that they are."

  "Nobody ever listens," Stanley put in, at which Kandhi and Fred exchanged glances, but chose to ignore him.

  "To be a good friend," Velicia replied, "You have to be a good listener."

  "Yeah, you," Stanley said, "but you're the friend. I was talking about them. The customer. You're like their servant is how I see this thing playing out."

  "We'll talk later about process," Kandhi tried to inject, but Velicia got there first.

  "It will be a collaboration," Velicia addressed Stanley. "You do your part and bring them along. Once you get to know them, you'll see."

  "Moving on," Kandhi said, loudly enough to bring the side conversation to a halt. "We will be monitoring your connections from here. Our vantage point will enable us to assist you at any time should need arise."

  "In other words, you can intervene whenever you see fit," Bilj noted. "That goes for the other side too, I presume?"

  "Both players are wearing the HAFS," Kandhi agreed, "and both sides are connected through us, that's correct."

  "Can you zap us?" Stanley wanted to know.

  "Zap you?" Kandhi did not understand.

  "Yeah, like send some kind of electrical shock. This thing's got the feel of one of them dog collars they use for not barking, where they zap the poor critter. You can't do that to us, can you?"

  "Of course not," Kandhi replied, but Fred and Wen raised their eyebrows and made mental notes to double-check up on that, just in case. They wouldn't put it past the developers or especially Tom, who were all well-known for implementing what they called "features" like that.

  "We can interrupt transmission, of course," Kandhi said, "but that's all. We can communicate directly to either partner through the same device."

  "How can we tell who is talking?" Bilj asked. "If it's
you or it's them?"

  "We use a special text style when it's us," Kandhi said, "Fred. show them?"

  "This is us now," Fred typed into his keyboard, and told them to look at their wristbands.

  "It tickled," Stan said.

  "I thought so too," giggled Velicia.

  "I felt something," Bilj agreed.

  "That's the default notification sensation," Fred told them. "It's meant to merely caress the arm hairs."

  "So you CAN send out shocks," Stanley grumbled.

  "Just a tickle," Kandhi said.

  "I don't like it," Stanley emphasized.

  "Okay," Kandhi said, "moving on."

  "Can we sleep with the thing?" Stanley asked.

  "What about bathing?" Velicia wanted to know.

  "All of that will be covered in guidelines," Kandhi said, while thinking this was going to be a long meeting.

  - - - - - - - - -

  It did turn out to be a very long meeting. The three chosen friends each had an opinion about the default operations of the device as well as the application interface and every other topic that came up. The discussion ratcheted up Fred's irritation until he was near screaming at them.

  "Listen," he blurted out finally. "This is the way the thing works, okay? When we change things, we will let you know, but for now, if you want to use it, this is it. You put the wristband on your wrist, you do the gestures, you listen, you talk, you read, you type on your laptop or your phone. You get notifications. We get the logs. We're always right here in the middle. If you have any