In Constant Contact

wanted it back, in any way she could. The only problem she had with her patients was that they were often unable to respond to her at any great length. It seemed like she did all the talking. She seemed to be hoping for a more reciprocal companionship in this beta project. Kandhi could see how that might work out, although she deemed it a poor substitute for a real companion, an actual present person.

  Dave Claunney was not a bad sort, either. He just did not appeal to her. He possessed the perpetual joviality of the delivery guy he was, always quick with a nod and a greeting, a sort of benign, positive indicator that meant nothing and passed just as easily. He was the kind of guy you would like right away but never know why. He was nice and he made you also want to be nice. He would smile and in turn you would smile. This kind of thing couldn't go a long way. At best you would have a five minute relationship, a friendship that seemed almost intimate but would leave you alone with the sense that it hadn't even happened. He had a kind of heat like a firefly, fleeting and really not as warm as you thought. To know Dave was to know a life size cardboard cutout of Dave. You would have a bit of trouble discerning the difference. He began every sentence with a great deal of energy which gradually tailed off as it completed. His initial introduction had displayed that exact pattern.

  "Hi ya!," he exclaimed. "Dave Claunney here! Glad to meet you! I'm excited, I can tell you. I. I mean I ... I think that it ... could be... an opportunity ... yeah ... so ... hey?"

  Even his looks turned her off, which Kandhi had to admit to herself. The handlebar mustache was simply too glaring, and she was never a fan of the overly fit, buff male. They only made her more self-conscious of her own physical flaws and so she had to fight off her negative reaction to Dave throughout the meeting.

  Finally, there was Nathaniel Woodward ("call me Nate"), a young man whose eyebrows seem perpetually raised in a sort of alarm, as if he was picking up distress signals from the universe at every moment. Periodically his eyes would widen too, at the most random moments, when he wasn't even talking or being spoken to. Half the time she was conversing with Hannah or Dave, Kandhi would be distracted by these facial quirks on Nate's panel. She wanted to ask him, "What? What is it? Are there blue pigs landing on Mars at this very moment or what?" He had mentioned his interest in clairvoyance. Was he trying to read her mind at those times? In any case, he was a strange one. He had a way of punctuating his sentences with random conclusions. For example, when Kandhi had asked him about his favorite movie, he'd responded with

  "The Fly, except that Morse Code might have worked better in the final dance sequence".

  He was also given to fidgeting and adjusting his shirt collar, which was especially odd since it was only a t-shirt, albeit a t-shirt that read "my other left shoe is a rodeo clown." Nate had a hard time beginning a sentence. Every time he would start off on one, he would stop, as if realizing that what he was saying was not at all what he wanted to say. Then he would pause and consider for several seconds before picking right up where he left off and finishing just as he'd started. He mentioned that he was interested in tropical fish, and had studied the science of cross-water conversion. He very much wanted them to be able to live in fresh water, for some unspecified reason.

  Kandhi had asked Fred after the meeting what he thought of all three, but he didn't have much to say. He only said that he thought that the matches would be interesting, at least. He wasn't exactly looking forward to the task, he'd told her, but he'd promised to do his best, which wasn't what Kandhi wanted to know. He damn well better do his best, she thought. We don't pay him not to. But did he think that the thing was going to work? Wen merely said "yes," but Fred wouldn't commit. The most he would say was, "I guess we'll find out."

  - - - - - - - - -

  Wen Li did think it might be interesting, but she thought the same about everything. She was a casual scientist in her own way, always observing, making notes, storing away little insights like a squirrel saving nuts, and 'nuts' is basically what she thought of her colleagues, Kandhi and Fred. She had worked for the one and with the other for a few years now. She enjoyed her position in the group, as the "one who got things done" (as she put it to herself), leaving the agonizing and the drama to the others. It was not her concern whether the products were good or bad, right or wrong, only that they behaved and performed as expected, which meant 'according to the specifications'.

  In this case, the specs were clear. The HAFS would maintain a constant connection between the pairs of wearers. The custom protocol that streamed through the connection - called HAFSP, which stood for 'HAFS Protocol' in a rare fit of common sense - was fairly simple and well-defined. Her test code was having no issues with parsing it properly. It consisted of signaling messages, corresponding to the physical gestures they had carefully explained to the beta users, and data packets wrapped securely inside of protobufs inside of other protobufs inside of even more encrypted flows. Image and voice transmissions followed actual standard protocols, in another surprisingly sensible move. How was it that development managers were waking up to the realization that old brooms knowing corners actually translated into fewer bugs and quicker times to market? Wen Li clucked her approval as she sat in her cubicle watching the data stream through her visualization application.

  She was proud of her work. Here all three beta teams converged in a centralized, easily debuggable main panel. Once she had confirmed the proper workings of her tool, she had sat back to watch and observe the content. Normally this was not her standard practice, but she had to admit she was intrigued. As a person of few words and few friends, she didn't really understand why a person would ever have a need for this Friendular system. She had something of a boyfriend, the mildly affable Bodey Wafer, with whom she occasionally slept and even less frequently conversed. She had her childhood friend Victoria Chen back in Taiwan, with whom she chatted regularly on the phone, and this was enough for her. Victoria knew all there was to know about Wen and vice versa, which wasn't much on either end but then again, why should it be? They both had their likes and dislikes, their favorite movies and TV shows, the people and things that they approved and disapproved of. Wen had her secrets from everyone but Victoria, and Victoria had hers from everyone but Wen. Wen knew, for example, that Victoria had a thing for Russian men, or even Chinese men who could do a decent Russian accent. Victoria knew that Wen considered her body to be a sort of machine, with its requirements for regular maintenance, and her mind to be a lifelong work-in-progress. How much more did you need to know about someone? Wen had never been the type to strike up a conversation with a total stranger. How the beta people could be doing this and so easily was a mystery to Wen.

  Dave Claunney, for one, had picked right up with Bilj as if he had known him forever. They had barely exchanged greetings when Dave started regaling him with tales of his impending sexual exploits. He said he had at least one prospective female in every office building to which he delivered packages. He also dove right into a detailed discussion of the bustling downtown neighborhood he served, which was heavily into micro- and mini-technologies.

  "The wave of the future," Dave announced, and Bilj, for his part, was agreeable, courteous and calm, which reminded Wen of her Bodey, and made her want to schedule a "date" with her boyfriend soon. Dave had a lot to talk about. Bilj murmured polite replies. That connection was buzzing along from the start. Wen smiled as she switched to her real-time graphical display, which revealed the data streams as moving line charts over time. She had assigned different colors to the testers. Dave was red and Bilj was purple. Red was by far the highest in the graph. Lower down were blue and green, the colors she had picked for Nathaniel Woodward and the barber, and lowest of all were yellow and orange, representing Hannah and Velicia.

  It was expected that a client would talk more than a friend. All of their pre-flight data models had anticipated this aspect, and contradictory data would indicate a problem in the test, either a friend who talked too much or a client who did not talk enough, or both. S
o far - and it had only been a matter of hours since blast-off - the actual results were not quite as desired. Still, it was "early days," to use one of the company's stock cliches. It would take time for the dust to settle. Dave's ratio to Bilj was more than three to one. Nate and Stan were closer to the model at 2.3:1. The ladies' team was down near 1:1 and their volume was very low. It seemed those two didn't have much of anything to talk about.

  Hannah had kicked it off with a list of her problems; the dead husband, the friends who'd either died or moved away, the kids who didn't care about her anymore, the other volunteers at the hospital who seemed sincere but with whom she didn't have much in common. Velicia, for her part, seemed bored.. She had tried, at first, to be sympathetic and commiserate with her customer, but soon her level subsided as she could not think of anything different to say. There was a lot of uh-huh'ing in her responses as of late, as if this was a tedious phone call which she could not hang up. Wen Li could almost hear the fingers drumming on Velicia's dining room table.

  She felt she had a handle on two conversations; the one