In Constant Contact

twelve seconds)

  Dave: Yeah, flame. All big teeth and sparkly. Like the hair, too. Puffy. I go for that. Well, here we go. Wildwood. Checking out. Be cool.

  (interval - eleven seconds)

  Bilj: Be seeing you.

  (Dave swiped, disconnect)

  Bilj: So to speak.

  Kandhi skipped ahead at random to a different conversation snippet.

  Hannah: You should see them, the way their eyes light up, like little children, when someone comes to visit.

  (interval - thirty four seconds)

  Velicia: These are the old sick people?

  (interval - seventeen seconds)

  Hannah: Yes, yes, that's just it. They are people, just like anybody else. It's not their fault that they're sick. Well, it isn't always their fault. Some of them, they were heavy smokers, heavy drinkers, they never took care of their bodies. Those are the ones that, sure, they deserve to be there. I don't visit with them as much. I know that's not very charitable of me I'm sorry to say. It's the other ones, though, I feel sorry for the most. The ones that just got old and feeble a bit and maybe they fell down and broke their hip and now they're confined and some of them have no one to talk to, no one comes to see them. Where are their families I wonder?

  (interval - fifty six seconds)

  Velicia: Where are their families?

  (interval - nine seconds)

  Hannah: That's just what I want to know. Old people have no value anymore. Maybe they used to. Maybe when there were fewer of them, when most people didn't live so long, maybe that was why they had esteem. Scarcity. Supply and demand. I wonder.

  (interval - eighty four seconds)

  Velicia: I don't really know any old people. I'm not really tuned in to that.

  (interval - twenty one seconds)

  Hannah: Well, there's me. Though I'm not so old. Fifty seven and a half next Monday. I used to call my mother on her half-birthday every year. I don't know how that started. Then I did the same with my Harry. We always had a special half-birthday dinner on his and on mine. Harry liked buffets. Something about those big old slabs of roast beef slowly turning. And chickens on a spit. The way the drippings. Mmm, I can just smell it now.

  (interval - forty two seconds)

  Velicia: I'm a vegetarian myself.

  (interval - nine seconds)

  Hannah: Of course you have to eat your greens. I would always tell my Harry that. And these people I think I mentioned, the ones who let themselves go. You could tell they never ate their greens. Even there in the hospital they won't touch the spinach. It's a crying shame. When you think of the waste. There's far too much waste in the world today. They have a bad attitude too. Not like the ones who took ill all on no account of their own. Those folk have a sense of justice. I don't know how to say it. You can see in their eyes they know that they've been wronged but they're the ones who bear it best. Good Christian souls, I'd say. The Lord doesn't give you anything you can't handle. I've always found it to be true.

  (interval - ninety three seconds)

  Velicia: You have to make the best of things.

  (interval - fourteen seconds)

  Hannah: You said a mouthful there.

  Kandhi turned the page but then decided to move on. Might as well sample the third, she decided, and skipped ahead until she came across a page with the heading 'Nate'. She frowned at that. The name is Nathaniel, she muttered to herself, and Stanley, not Stan. She was annoyed with Fred for taking liberties again.

  Nate: It's all across the spectrum. Every creature gives off a certain vibration within its own range. I should come up with a system of measurement for this. What would I call it? The Life Spread? Yeah. Because it also kind of sounds like Life's Bread, and that's a cool relation. I like it.

  (interval - thirty four seconds)

  Stan: Everybody's got their own ways about 'em.

  (interval - seventeen seconds)

  Nate: And it's not like the sound or light or color. It's orthogonal to that kind of thing. Related, yeah, in an inter-dimensional way, but it's more like a searing, scorching, burning-up-and-out kind of thing. Like they shoot out these sparks and you can catch 'em, but it's not like they're hot or anything. No, it's like they are gems, kind of shiny, but not in colors, and you can tell from the shapes or the texture or even the velocity and the trajectory where they're coming from. I pick it up from animals, like with birds when they're flying overhead, it's not a trail they leave that you can see but more like a pattern they are weaving in the atmosphere around them.

  (interval - forty six seconds)

  Stan: You got to make your mark in this world.

  (interval - nine seconds)

  Nate: And then if there's a message you can feel it, you can sense it, like it's right there on your elbow and you open your mind and yeah, like it's right there. Like now. I can tell what you're thinking.

  (interval - thirty three seconds)

  Stan: You can pick up that kind of thing.

  (interval - nineteen seconds)

  Nate: Yeah, cool, right. You pick up on it. You pick it up. You pick it, you picture it, up in your mind. It's picked, like a picture.

  What? Kandhi read that last conversation over again three times and still it made no sense. There was something definitely wrong about all of this. Is it just me? she wondered, or is it them? The transcripts were exactly as Wen had described them. Wen was onto something, Kandhi concluded. Her analysis was spot on, but her recommendation? She had none. Typical Wen, to pinpoint the problem but offer no solution. Not my job, she would say. I just file, I don't fix. The Wen Way, but Kandhi didn't have that option. This trial was going straight down the toilet.

  Dave and Bilj were within the range she had expected. Engagement to some extent. A decent being-there quotient. Some connection that could potentially be built upon because of course such things take time. Exactly how much time was something she still hoped to quantify. It would be important to know, to be able to predict and measure, the progress of a friendship from initiation to intimacy, and whether that process had any bearing on the ultimate duration or not. There were far too many variables and she needed a decent sample size. So far she had a sample size of exactly one. It was not going to suffice.

  Hannah and Velicia? No. Nothing there. Nate and Stan? Slightly better, but still essentially nothing. Nate was way way out there, some kind of kook, she decided. Hannah was a bore and Stanley something of a humbug. Wait. Hannah, and Stanley? Maybe. Maybe. Then what about Velicia? Velicia and Nate? Nate and Velicia? I mean Nathaniel, she reminded herself. She brought up Velicia's profile again and nodded to herself as she reviewed it. Tantric healing, okay, that's weird. Vegetarian. Okay, not normal. Don't know if she's flaky enough for Nathaniel, but better than nothing. Worth a try.

  She decided. Kandhi always prided herself on her decisive nature. She would give it one more day, and if things continued as they were going, she would make the switch. She tapped out a memo. The clients didn't need to know. They already didn't know the actual identities of their "friends." This was on purpose, so that there could be exactly this kind of interchangeability. They could swap out friends as needed and with any luck the customer would never know. After there had been a history built up, there could be a problem, but that was for later discovery. For now, it won't have been that long, and you couldn't say there was any real anything built up between those pairs. It ought to be seamless. After tomorrow, Hannah would be communicating with Stanley, and Nathaniel with Velicia. She sent the memo to Fred and Wen.

  Things could hardly be any worse, she reasoned, than they already were. She could hardly have been more wrong.

  - - - - - - - - -

  The same thing had already occurred to Fred. Ever since his conversation with Puku, he'd grown more and more angry about the whole setup, the calculated phoniness, the built-in fail-safe mechanisms, especially the concept of tag-team pseudo-compatibility. The project was an Abomination From Hell, even more so than the usual stuff he work
ed on, and had kept him half awake all night, trying to think of what he should do. Reading Kandhi's email in the morning only added more fuel. He muttered vague obscenities as he digested its contents. He was going to have to come up with an alternative. Something that would make a definite impact. Something only he could do. Kandhi had her millions of metrics, and Wen had her code all over the place. What did Fred have to show for this project? Nothing, so far. A handful of bitter memos predicting its doom was all he could point to. He tried staying in bed, pretending it wasn't already daylight, that the sun wasn't already streaming across the piles of dirty laundry that covered the floor of his minuscule one-room apartment from closet to kitchen. He squeezed his eyes shut and cursed at the light.

  Let's review, he said to himself. What do I have to work with? Analytics annoy me. I don't understand them at all. Spreadsheets make me want to puke. I'd rather eat cat food than look at a chart. Words, that's the thing. Real life. What really goes on. The transcripts, of course! He sat straight up and fumbled around on the sheets for the printouts he'd brought home that night. He found several pages, all crumpled up from his having slept on them. He scanned through them rapidly, making mental notes as he did. Nate, he's a loony. Dave, mister nice guy. Hannah, she's sneaky I think. Velicia, what a drip. Bilj, a tough nut to crack. Stanley, my god, enough said. I can work with these people, he thought, at least some of them. I can turn up the heat, toss in a spark. Got to be careful, though. Got