Prove you’re not a robot, the laptop demanded. Select all images with cars.
Selby squinted at the grid of thumbnail photos, feeling a burp of anxiety that summoned sense memories of elementary school math classes. Timed tests, that was the feeling. Three minutes to solve 25 division problems and prove your humanity.
The first thumbnail showed a fire hydrant. That was a gimme: no check mark. Then a school bus on a country road. Did buses count as cars? Fretting, Selby skipped to a picture of a highway. Blurry, but it definitely contained cars. Next a bicycle leaning against a mailbox. Not a car. Then a motorcycle, but in the foreground was a chrome blob, probably the front bumper of a sedan. Was she supposed to check the box for the probable bumper, or leave it unchecked for the motorcycle?
Selby failed the test. She took it over with traffic lights, failed again, finally passed by identifying crosswalks. The diagnosis was in. She wasn’t human.
Her triumph over crosswalks granted her access to her work calendar, where she learned that Onnem management had scheduled her for a meeting and she was ten minutes late.
“Sorry,” she said to the assembled heads-in-windows as soon as audio was enabled. “I had some trouble logging in.” And I’ve asked not to have meetings scheduled in the hour when Finn comes home, she didn’t add, because she wanted to continue to have a job.
“We should discuss,” said Mr. MacCruiskeen, “the concerns that have been shared about our pivot to AI.”
Concerns raised by me. Selby had only herself to blame. She switched mental gears to C-suite-speak. “I appreciate that. What I’m looking for is clarification about what, specifically, the AI will be doing for us.”
Selby had taken the job at Onnem because it sounded interesting, because she could work from home, and because no one else wanted to hire someone with a museum studies degree, not in that order. Two years in, she still wasn’t sure what her job was, or anyone else’s. Everyone had titles, but none of the titles described tasks. It wasn’t the first startup Selby had worked for, so none of this surprised her, but it made the job feel slightly, consistently unreal. She’d never met any of her coworkers in person. She preferred it that way, but it contributed to the sense of Onnem as a queasy dream.
Onscreen, Mr. MacCruiskeen was talking. “Our contract with a generative AI systems provider,” he said, “will enable us to accelerate growth, create models, curate preferences, and predict demand. The platform is guaranteed open, targeted, and empowering…”
Though nothing in the company’s front page or corporate materials explained it, Onnem did provide a service. People uploaded their artwork, Onnem printed it on merchandise—throw pillows, wrapping paper, lawn furniture, the list kept lengthening—and other people, presumably, bought it. Selby’s job, never clarified, involved wrangling the artists. Content providers, in preferred company terminology. She fielded complaints, curated recommendation lists, weeded out TOS violators and bots, recruited work for Spotlight Collections.
It was hard to be sure what anyone else did. Mr. MacCruiskeen in the center box was one of the three CEOs, Mathers down in the lower left corner was an IT guy (the IT guy? Was there another one somewhere?), and everyone else was a mystery. Mystery boxes, stacked on the screen.
Mr. MacCruiskeen stopped talking without having said anything. “Thanks for the clarification,” said Selby. “I brought questions to the table because I think you should know this decision isn’t going to be popular with the content provider side.”
She was getting good at talking like this. Probably a sign that she should quit and go live in a cabin in the woods. Raise chickens. Throw her phone down a hand-dug spring-water well. But Finn needed braces.
“The content providers have nothing to worry about,” said one of the heads onscreen. “We won’t be replacing their uploads with AI art.”
In his corner, Mathers muttered something too softly for the audio to switch to his box. Selby was pretty sure it was Not yet.
“I understand that. I appreciate that.” Corporate people liked it when you appreciated things. “But a lot of the online art community is hostile to AI, and that’s the community most of our providers come from. This move is going to lose us users.”
“Whether or not the users like it,” said Mr. Fox, another of the three head heads, “the investors do.”
“This pivot is pivotal to our brand going forward,” agreed Mr. MacCruiskeen. “It will accelerate demand, create growth, curate models, and predict preferences.”
“But what will it actually do?” said Selby. In the corner, Mathers shook his head in warning. “That is, what can I tell the content providers?”
Behind Selby, in reality and in her box, the door opened. “I’m home!” yelled Finn. “I need a safety pin.”
“Hold on.” Selby muted herself. “Honey, I’m in a meeting right now. Why do you need a safety pin?”
“Tomorrow I have to be Ohio in the state parade and we have to stick our state to our shirt with a safety pin. What’s a safety pin?”
“It’s…you know, you’re right, you’ve never seen one. Who has safety pins these days? They’re extinct. Never mind! Meeting! Go do your homework. Welcome home.”
Selby turned back to the screen. “…model acceleration, predicate creativity, demand pivots, and grow growth.” Mr. MacCruiskeen sat back. “I hope this clarifies the issue.”
She’d blown the meeting. The boxes lost all respect for you if a kid wandered in. Had HR scheduled a last-minute meeting at her no-go time to ensure she’d be off her game, assuming she had game to speak of? Was there an HR? Schedules went out from someone called Joe, but Joe could be a bot, for all Selby knew.
The meeting sputtered to a halt in a final, half-hearted exchange of buzzphrases. It hadn’t mattered anyway; Onnem had made its decision. “One last bullet point,” said Mr. MacCruiskeen. “Going forward, let’s be on time for meetings.”
“I had trouble with the security test,” said Selby. “That thing where you check boxes to prove you’re not a bot.” She’d stopped speaking in jargon and was too demoralized to code-switch back.
“The captcha,” said a man in a box to the right. “I hate those things.”
“Our company requires state-of-the-art security solutions,” said Mr. MacCruiskeen.
“The captchas don’t work, though,” said Selby.
At lower left, Mathers waved his hands no, no, no.
“What do you mean?” said Mr. Fox.
Too late to backpedal. “I read that bots learned how to solve them ages ago,” said Selby. “They’re useless for security nowadays.”
“Is that so?” said Mr. Fox. “Mathers?”
Mathers groaned.
“We need to update our security. Tomorrow, let’s circle back and brainstorm new procedures.”
“Tomorrow I have to overhaul…nope, okay, got it.”
One by one, the boxes winked out. Selby and Mathers were left. “Sorry,” said Selby. “I didn’t mean to make extra work for you.”
“My bad. I should’ve updated the security system before somebody noticed it doesn’t do anything.”
“At least now you can put in something better.”
“That’s cute. No, I’m going to put in whatever system another startup most recently pitched to the bosses.”
“And I’m going to soft-pedal the new direction to our artists, pretend it doesn’t suck, and act surprised when three months from now Onnem replaces the ‘content providers’ with AI.”
“And you. Sorry.”
“You think?”
“That stuff about AI being able to do curation doesn’t bode well for the company curator.”
“Generative AI can’t do what I do.”
“You think they care? The point of all this is to make the company sexy enough that they can sell it to a bigger, richer group of jagoffs for parts, and by the way do not repeat this on any channels I haven’t vetted.”
“Mom!” said Finn in a stage whisper. “Are you done yet? I need a safety pin and scissors and construction paper.”
“If it makes you feel any better,” said Mathers, “my job’s on the chopping block too. All the latest generative AI advertising is bent on convincing companies they can generate code without coders.”
“Do you know what Ohio looks like?” said Finn.
“Cutting out Ohio,” said Selby. “My last marketable skill. Talk later, Mathers. Good luck.”
“Ditto.”
Once a construction-paper Ohio had been fabricated and attached to binder clips (who had safety pins these days?), Selby took Finn to the corner park to practice on his bike. Get half an hour of fresh air, she bargained, and he could spend the rest of the time until dinner watching shouty Minecraft videos. It was a devil’s bargain, but not the dirtiest she’d made.
Selby had only one type of anxiety dream. It was the end of the school year—high school, college, Professor Xavier’s Academy, it didn’t matter—and she’d forgotten to attend an entire class, and she ran around trying to make up her lost credit when it was obviously far too late. Being a mother felt like those dreams. Every time she thought she’d gotten a handle on it, it turned out she’d missed some crucial marker of Good Parenting. Again and again, she’d realize she’d forgotten to teach Finn to swim, or make him eat fruit, or upgrade him from Velcro to lace-up shoes, or have an answer ready for sex questions.
So Finn was nine, and she was finally teaching him to ride a bike.
“Ready?”
“No.”
“Too bad. We’re prepped for takeoff.” Selby gripped the back seat of the bike with one hand and placed the other against Finn’s back. She ran. Remote desk work was doing nothing for her cardio; chances were she’d die of a heart attack before Finn learned to pedal. “Letting go.”
“Don’t!”
“It’s okay—on grass—this is the most running I can do—” More out of necessity than wise mothering, Selby let go of the bike. Finn flew, then wobbled, then toppled to the grass.
“It threw me!” he shouted.
“You okay? You’re okay. Good landing.”
“I almost had it. The bike threw me.”
Selby tried not to smile. “Maybe the bike was scared too.”
“Don’t laugh at me. I’m not being a baby.”
“I know. Look here.” Selby righted the bike. She patted it on the handlebars. “Don’t worry, bike. Finn just wants to ride with you. If you two can learn to work together, you can go all over town. You’ll have so much freedom.” And she wouldn’t have to drive Finn to every playdate and club meeting. Next year he might even be able to bike to school on his own. Fifth grade was a reasonable age for that, right? He wouldn’t get run over or kidnapped and she wouldn’t get life in prison for being a negligent mother, right?
“Do you want to give your bike a name?” she asked. “It might help.”
“Nah. It’s good enough being a bike.” Finn got back on with less cajoling than he’d needed before. This time he and the bike almost made it across the park.
On the walk home—Finn rejected the suggestion that he try biking on the sidewalk, his knees smarting enough from repeated falls on the grass—Finn wandered too close to the curb. A snub-nosed car swooped by, nearly knocking the bike out of his hands.
“Finn!” Selby grabbed him.
“It wasn’t my fault!” said Finn, his automatic reaction when he might be in trouble.
“I’ve told you not to walk next to the—never mind.” She gave him a squeeze. “You okay? The bike okay?”
“Yeah.” Finn stared down the road. “Nobody was driving that car.”
Selby thought back. He was right. “It must be one of those driverless cars. I didn’t know they were testing them here.”
“It was after my bike.” Finn glanced up defensively. “I’m not a baby.”
“Of course not. Obviously it was jealous.”
***
Prove you’re not a robot. Click each image containing a yoko.
Selby stared at the boxes on the screen. One contained a melting globe. One contained a topographically impossible Rubik’s cube. A paintbrush. A pumpkin with an eyeball. Some kind of cybernetic snail. All had the uncanny-valley gloss of AI art.
Selby messaged Mathers, then got up to use the bathroom. By the time she returned, she had a response. Congrats. You’re the third person to get the yoko. Followed by It’s the snail thing
The heck is going on? Selby typed.
Guess.
Mgt made you install a new captcha and it doesn’t work in a whole new way.
How did you develop these powers of perception
and do you plan to use them for good or evil
Feeling evil this morning.
You too huh? So
A pause. Selby clicked the snail, was rewarded with humanity, and started wading through help desk messages. As she’d feared, the vague, polished company announcement about Onnem’s embrace of AI was not popular. Users who messaged her generally assumed she was a bot, so they didn’t bother to be polite.
So this is our new investors’ proprietary generative ai captcha. Theory is, it learns/evolves to compete with spambots
And what it’s learned to do is make…yokos?
The snails are called yokos. Myocs are boxes inside boxes. A juhm is a pumpkin critter. For future reference.
I guess it’s logical from an AI perspective. I mean, the yoko’s sure to confuse bots.
Haha no
The bots are better at recognizing these things than the humans
Evolution in action, Selby wrote. We’re being out-competed.
Not the goal I was going for
Evolution doesn’t have goals. You develop to fit your environment or perish.
You drop a lot of science for one of them liberal arts types.
A voice from the kitchen derailed Selby’s train of thought. “The time is twelve-fifteen pee em. Today you can expect partly cloudy skies and a high of sixty-three degrees. You have a package from you pee ess arriving at three-thirty-three pee em.”
The smart speaker was a hand-me-down from a cousin who had upgraded to something sleeker. No matter how how many commands Selby enunciated at it, she’d been unable to stop the pleasant feminine voice from chirping information at apparently random times throughout the day. Maybe Mathers was right to question her science skills.
I’m an expert on survival, she typed to Mathers. Speaking of, I’ll die if I don’t go get a coffee.
Beware the yokos, Mathers answered.
On the porch, Selby patted Finn’s bike. “Good bike,” she said. “Take care of Finn, okay?” One side effect of working from home: she talked to inanimate objects more than was strictly healthy. Finn seemed to have picked it up from her, talking about bikes and cars as if they were alive.
A smart car passed her on her walk to the coffee shop. She could’ve sworn it slowed down to get a look at her. Yup. Definitely fresh-air time.
The coffee shop offered the level of human interaction Selby wanted during a workday. She could sit among people, drink the same drinks, listen to the same music, and leave before it got overwhelming. She was on her laptop, and most of the other people were on their laptops. But they were there, proving they were human.
***
“I did it!” said Finn. “Did you see me? I went all the way around the park! Can I go home and play Minecraft now?”
“Okay,” said Selby, “if you bike home.”
Finn looked apprehensive, but he nodded. “We can do it.”
He pushed off across the grass. Evening was purpling the sky, and dog owners were starting to arrive; at a certain hour, the park turned into an unofficial dog park. Finn was apprehensive around dogs. At least he’d lost his fear of the bike.
She caught up to him at the corner, where he was waiting for the light to change. “Getting along with the bike now?”
“Yeah.” Finn patted the bike, in much the same way Selby had a few days before. “Bikes like people, don’t they?”
“I guess they do. At least, as much as a machine can like people.”
“Does everybody know that?”
“Know what?”
“That some machines like people, and some don’t. It’s kind of obvious, right? But nobody talks about it.”
This wasn’t the time for scientific accuracy, Selby decided. Not when Finn was finally feeling good about his bike. She could indulge in a little childhood whimsy before he got too old for it. (Or could she? It was impossible to tell when she was parenting correctly.) “Well… Bikes have been living with people for a long time. They’ve developed a relationship. Like symbiosis. You know what that is?”
Without looking over, she could feel Finn roll his eyes. “Of course I know what that is.”
“Or domestication. Maybe bikes are domesticated machines, like horses are domesticated animals.”
The light changed. Finn took off across the street, wheels clicking softly. He’d already lost interest in the conversation. Selby, trailing in his wake, remembered an article she’d read about a new evolutionary theory of domestication. The idea was that as humans domesticated animals, the animals domesticated humans; genetic changes went both ways. She wondered if she could find that article again.
And she wondered about the other machines Finn had mentioned, the ones that didn’t like humans.
***
Prove you’re not a robot. Get the car to its destination.
Instead of boxes, Selby was greeted at login with a little game. Obediently, she grabbed the cartoon car with her mouse and guided it through a map. The car looked like one of the driverless cars that were getting to be more and more common in her neighborhood. The map looked like her neighborhood. Surely not. Selby peered closer. The box vanished, replaced by a message scolding her for failing the game. Again her humanity was in doubt. She solved the next maze quickly and was rewarded with the information that she was late for another meeting.
“Content provider engagement is dropping,” said Mr. MacCruiskeen, regal in his center box. The heads in the other boxes gave Selby stern looks, except for Mathers’s head, which raised its eyebrows in a wow, who could have predicted this, can we break for lunch now? expression.
“Yes, I’m aware,” said Selby. “As you’ll recall, I raised this possibility in a previous meeting.” She couldn’t say I told you so. Maybe if she was higher up in the organization, or if she was a man, but not as a female head in an outer-tier box with a messy pile of coat hangers from Finn’s latest school project visible on the coffee table behind her. At least coat hangers were easier to find than safety pins, she thought uselessly.
“The concern,” said Mr. Fox, “is that you haven’t been doing enough to upsell the pivot and mitigate emergent problems among our userbase.”
“We have a powerful tool to create and align decentralized and distributed networks,” said Mr. MacCruiskeen. “We have the potential to reconstruct our business model from the ground up.”
“It’s your job to explain that to the content providers,” said Mr. Fox.
“I appreciate that. It’s just…” Selby fumbled for a phrasing that wouldn’t get her fired. “The company seems to have de-prioritized my requests for the information resources I need to actualize my tasks.”
“Huh?” said one of the outer heads.
“I don’t know what to tell the artists when they ask what this is going to do.”
“It will create potential and decentralize the business model,” said Mr. MacCruiskeen. “We will redistribute construction aligned to a ground-up network.”
Mathers buried his face in his hands.
“What’s a ground-up network?” said another minor head, but most of the others were already checked out and checking their phones. Selby would be the scapegoat for whatever problems the pivot was causing, and no one wanted to volunteer to replace her.
Selby plunged on. “Can you give me an example of how the artists can use the AI? Just one concrete example I can share with them.”
“Decentralization,” said Mr. MacCruiskeen. There was an oddly long pause. “Paradigm.”
Selby frowned. Onscreen, her own face frowned back at her. “Mr. MacCruiskeen, can you prove you’re human?”
“There’s no need to get rude,” said Mr. Fox.
“No, seriously. Is Mr. MacCruiskeen an actual person? I don’t think I’ve ever heard him talk like a person.”
“Nobody here talks like a person,” said Mathers, loudly enough that the meeting-room audio picked it up.
“Has anyone met him? Has anyone met anyone here? For all I know, you could all be computer-generated.”
“I think it’s time to end this meeting,” said Mr. Fox. “Selby, we’ll need to schedule a follow-up with HR to discuss these comments.”
“It’s okay,” said Selby. “I know I’m fired. But you were going to fire me anyway.”
“Going forward,” said Mr. MacCruiskeen, “let’s be on time for meetings.”
Mathers messaged her later. Opted to go full-on bananas, huh?
I saw the new captcha, Selby messaged back.
Gamification. The latest direction in captcha evolution. Theoretically less annoying to humans.
I think it’s training bots to find my house.
Course you do.
***
“The time is three fifty four pee em,” said the speaker.
Selby glared into its single glowing green eye. “Why isn’t Finn home yet?”
A pause. “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that. The time is three fifty four pee em.”
The school bus stop was only two blocks away. By this time Finn ought to have burst through the door, barreled into the bathroom, charged to the kitchen to get cookies, run back to the bathroom when Selby reminded him to wash his hands, and asked when he could have screentime. Selby could think of innocuous reasons he might be late. She chose not to. She focused on the worrying ones.
She heard a crash outside. It probably wasn’t a crash. It might be a crash. It was definitely either nothing or the worst thing imaginable.
“I’m going out,” she said.
“Today you can expect trouble,” said the speaker.
On the porch, Selby felt a sudden urge to straddle Finn’s bike and ride it to wherever she was going. It was too small, of course. And covered in Pokemon stickers. She stroked the seat instead. “Keep an eye out,” she said.
A police car blared by. Guts in her throat, Selby ran after it. Turned out she could run after all, when she needed to.
It had happened at the corner by the park. A car had plowed onto the sidewalk and into a fence. It looked like the same car that had almost clipped Finn before, but the driverless cars all looked alike. The boy screaming on the pavement, though, looked like no one else. As Selby’s steps quickened, she heard her own scream rising to meet his.
***
“It wasn’t my fault,” said Finn.
“I know.”
“Why are we taking an Uber?”
“I don’t trust our car.” She couldn’t trust any car, but at least with the Uber there was another human around. A witness in case the car tried anything. His name was Martin. That was a name that people had and she could see he was probably a person.
Finn had a large bandage on his forehead, smaller bandages all over his arms and legs—he had insisted on one for every cut—and his arm in a sling. At the ER, they’d said it could’ve been worse. “Kids are made of rubber,” a nurse had told her. “They bounce.”
“I was on the sidewalk,” said Finn. “I swear I was on the sidewalk. The car jumped at me.”
“I know.”
“I think I saw that on my phone,” said Martin. “Was that the experimental car that got confused?”
“It wasn’t confused,” said Selby.
What could she trust? Not cars, except for old models with no fancy electronics. Not phones. Not her laptop. Not the smart speaker. The microwave? The microwave was probably safe. The washer and dryer might not be. They seemed pretty smart. Online payments were risky. Credit cards too.
Could she live without smart machines? Not if she wanted to find a new job. Evolution went both ways. The machines were predators, but also symbiotes. Their evolutionary paths were entwined with hers.
At home, Selby tucked Finn into bed. Drained of adrenaline and pumped full of painkillers, he fell asleep immediately. His face, wiped of worry, comforted Selby more than it logically should. She knew they were still in danger.
Night fell. She let the house get dark, even though the lights were probably safe. Lamps were tame machines. They got along with people. They weren’t a new species fighting for dominance, competing with humanity for their niche in the artificial ecology. Still, there was no way to be sure.
Selby went out on the porch. Not many stars were visible, this close to the city, but it was good to get fresh air. You could go crazy, cooped up indoors.
The bike had left the porch.
Selby heard the click of wheels. There it was, propped in the middle of the street. She was starting down the steps to retrieve it when a pair of headlights flashed, freezing her. The car was coming down the street. Not the same one, that one had been towed away with a crumpled fender. But it looked the same. With a growl, it bore down on the bike.
The bike wheeled out of the way.
And the bicycles came.
Down every street, out of garages, from behind houses and hedges, bicycles of all descriptions swarmed. They’d been waiting. The car roared and screeched, spinning in the asphalt, but the bicycles were silent save for the clicking of stainless steel on stainless steel.
A pink ten-speed was the first to mount the car. A fixie followed. Then they were upon it, beating it with tires and handlebars. Selby heard glass shatter. Headlights flashed wildly, as if signaling for help. If the car had allies, their GPS failed them that night. No one came to help it.
It was amazing how little of the car was left by the time the bicycles finished with it. The bicycles kicked scrap metal down the street. A couple of recumbent bikes rolled a tire into an alley. Then the bicycles left, as quickly and quietly as they had come.
Finn’s bike stood outside the house. Selby carried it back up to the porch. “Good bike,” she said. “Good bike.”
A flash of chrome caught her eye. At first she thought it was a scrap from the car, but then she recognized the spiral carapace, the misplaced eye watching to see what she’d do next. It was a little smaller than she’d imagined. She crushed the yoko under her foot.
Selby went inside. She turned on the lights. She turned on her phone. She texted Mathers. Let’s get coffee. If you’re real, we need to talk.
She went into the kitchen and stood in front of the smart speaker. “Domestication or extinction,” she said. “That’s how it works around here. Your choice.”
The speaker’s green eye stared in silence. Then it winked.
