“So you’re telling me we’re going to be automated out of existence,” Romesh said. “I’m telling you that what you’re doing is wrong, wrong, wrong, and if you had any morals you’d shoot yourself.”
The complaint was made in a bar that was mostly cigarette smoke by this point, and to a circle of friends that, having gathered for their quarterly let’s-meet-up-and-catch-up thing, had found each other just as tiresome as before. Outside, the city of Colombo was coming to a crawl of traffic lights and halogen, the shops winking out, one by one, as curfew regulations loomed. Thus the drunken ruminations of Romesh Algama began to seem fundamentally less interesting.
Except one. Kumar, who frequented this particular bar more than most, bore Romesh’s ire with the sort of genial patience that one acquires after half a bottle of rum. “You don’t understand, man,” Kumar said. “It’s coming, whether you want it to or not. You’ve seen that photo of the man in front of a tank at Tiananmen Square? What would you rather be, the man or the tank?”
“That’s a horrible analogy. And the tanks stopped.”
“Yeah, well, you’re the writer,” said Kumar. “Me, I just test the code. We’re out of rum.” He waved his arms at a retreating waiter. “Machang! Another half—two Cokes!”
“All this talk about AI and intelligence and, and,” continued Romesh, as the waiter emerged from the fog of smoke, less a creature of logistics and more a midnight commando easing drinks through barfights waiting to happen. “And neuroscience and really, you know what you people are all doing? You’re just making more ways for rich people to make more money, and then what do we do? Eh? Eh, Kumar?”
“And you sell fucking celebrity skin creams and shitty shoes and bank loans to people who don’t need them,” said Kumar. The lake of alcoholic geniality parted briefly to show the teeth of the mind beneath. “You should know all about making rich people more money. Shut up and drink.”
They shut up and drank.
“We’ll be fine, don’t worry,” said Kumar. “Even if, and I mean big if, we all get replaced over the next 10 years, there’ll be plenty more jobs, trust me. It’s how technological whatevermajig always works. New problems, new careers.”
“We won’t be fine,” said Romesh, who fancied he knew a thing or two about automation. He came from generations of Sri Lankan tea-estate owners who had, over time, replaced the Tamil laborers who worked for them with shiny new machines from China.
Kumar patted him on the shoulder. By now motor coordination had jumped out the window and plummeted three stories to its death, so his cheery gesture was more like a rugby scrum half slamming Romesh on the way to the locker. “Cheer the fuck up, man,” said Kumar. “And stop being such a bloody killjoy, it’s like going out with my fucking grandfather. Life’s better through the bottom of a bottle. Here, have a smoke, I’ve got the good shit. From Nepal. Try it.”
Romesh tried it. The kush hit him like the proverbial velvet glove with the iron fist inside. He had vague memories of stumbling to the bar, and then the bathroom, where he planned an elaborate repartee to Kumar, who couldn’t possibly fathom how his stupid economic disruption shtick was neoliberal bullshit from people who had nothing to lose once the cheap labor from countries like Sri Lanka shriveled up. Him and his lit cigarette, poised against the looming infinity, not out of choice, but by sheer fucking arrogance and stupidity, the assumption that no matter what happened they would all land on their feet.
“They’re laying off people,” he said, once the high had worn off.
“At the agency?” asked Kumar.
“All the old hands. We’re too slow, you know? Too burned out. Now the money goes to fucking Facebook shitposters we’ve picked up for dirt cheap. The kids, the bloody kids are faster and hungrier, and I’m sitting here with a head full of cotton wool.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“I’m serious. I’m not going to last, man.”
He could see Kumar frowning, could see the old wheel trying to spin in its cage. “How much of this is the, uh, the accident?” said Kumar.
They both looked down at Romesh’s left leg. Not that you could see the scars beneath the denim, or steel pegs beneath the skin.
“Painkillers.”
“Huh.”
“They slow me down.”
“Figured.”
“Henry Ford used to say if he’d asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster fucking horses,” said Romesh, and was surprised to find himself both slurring and sad. “That’s the problem right there, isn’t it? Problem with this world. It’s all … speed, speed, speed. Eighteen-hour days and this is what they give us. Faster, faster!” he mimicked a whip. “Faster, or die!”
The moments blurred after that. He remembered Kumar, shaking his head; more drinks; then the sudden realization that he was drunk, and the inevitable battle with the ride-hailing app. Then the world turned into a cold, hard car seat and an open window. Beyond the cold metal the dust of construction and upward mobility mixed with the smell of a dark, polluted sea, and the neon lights that screamed SPA OPEN 24 HOURS and PILAWOOS RESTAURANT LATE NIGHT FRIED RICE and BUBA’S BEACH BAR, and the police, stopping and searching cars, shining a flashlight into his face, and Kumar, talking his way out of a curfew stamp.
“I’m not going to last,” he remembered telling Kumar.
And then there was silence.
It wasn’t that Romesh was incompetent. Untrained at first, perhaps, and a little bit overlooked back when he started, when advertising in Sri Lanka was in its cut-rate Mad Men era. Over the years he had shadowed enough people—first the copywriters, then the art directors, then various creative heads, until he had become, if not naturally gifted, a very close approximation. He even had a touch of the auteur about him, a well-heeled set of just the right eccentricities so admired in an industry which was mostly made up of disgruntled writers. Every so often Romesh went off like a budget Hiroshima over the smallest mistakes; drove graphics designers to tears; walked into meetings late, unkempt, and told clients that they didn’t know what they wanted, and refused altogether to suck up to the right kinds of people; and, above all, delivered. The evidence mounted over the years in the awards and the Christmas hampers from grateful clients. He had earned that rare and elusive acknowledgement, whispered behind his back: He’s a Creative. The Capital C.
The problem was the toll it took. Nobody talked about how much damage it did, churning out great copy by the hour, on the hour, watching your best work being rejected by clients with the aesthetic sense of a colony of bacteria on the Red Sea: struggling constantly to reskill, to stay relevant, and sucking up the sheer grind of it all, and coming back to work with a grin the next day. The first five years, he had been sharp and fast, saying yes to everything. The next five, sharper, but a lot more selective. The next three were spent hiding exhaustion under the cloak of his right to choose what he worked on, and when; the next two were twilight years, as everyone he knew, having realized what the industry did to them, moved on to happier pursuits, until he was left behind like a king on his lonely hill, and the crew were younger, sharper, looking up at the old man in both awe and envy.
The accident had only made it worse; people muttered, sometimes, about how Romesh was barely a face on the screen anymore, never actually came out to the office to hang out and brainstorm, but delivered judgment in emails that started with LISTEN HERE and ended in cussing.
“Like working with a ghost,” his latest art director had said of him, before quitting. “Or a goddamn AI.” The word behind his back was that Romesh Algama was losing his touch.
Morning crept up on him like a thief with golden fingers.
And with it, the ringing of the phone.
“New project, Monday,” said the Boss. “Good gods, man, you’re hungover.”
“I got it,” muttered Romesh, trying to find a cigarette. A part of him cried out that he should be in a shirt and tie and pants, not lounging miserably in front of his laptop over the dining table. The other half of him was busy hunting for painkillers. It was the post-Plague world, dammit, nobody had to go to the office anymore.
The Boss gave him a searching look. “This whole email-only thing of yours,” they said. “If you can’t do this—”
“I said I’m fine,” said Romesh.
“New girl needs an account,” said the Boss. “Give her Dulac.”
“But—”
“Give. It. To. The. New. Girl. Let her talk to them in person. She’ll do what it takes.”
Dulac was a manufacturer of soaps, shampoos, toothpaste, a subtle Japanese corporate-Zen-minimalist vibe going on. It was one of the rare prime accounts that didn’t require too much work: $1.3 million a year, easy cash for the agency, all for the price of a bit of copy and some artful image work and some responses on social media. It was one of the few stable pillars he had right now; it kept his numbers competent. “Why her?”
“Orders from above,” said the Boss. “You supervise.”
“What, did you get her cheap from Ogilvy? Leo Burnett? What’s her previous experience?”
“Trialed at a small startup in San Francisco. Apps, productivity software.”
“No wonder her copy is shit,” Romesh said. Software companies were looked down in the ad world; anyone writing for them eventually picked up that peculiar mix of useless jargon and middle-grade writing that passed for tech evangelism, and it never quite wore off.
The Boss sounded amused, though it was always hard to tell over the WhatsApp call. “Look, end of year, I want no trouble and decent numbers,” they said. “The kids are young and hungry. And you, well—”
You’re not in the best shape anymore. It went unsaid between them.
“You know what you should have done was retire and go consultant,” the Boss said. “Work twice a year, nice pot of money, invest in a beach bar, get a therapist, do some yoga … ”
“Yeah, and how many of those jobs you got lying around?” he said. “You can go live out your James Bond fantasy. Rest of us got to pay rent and eat.”
The Boss made that gesture and rung off. Comme ci, comme ça. It was planned obsolescence. Death by a thousand cuts.
“Don’t be late for the review meeting.”
“I promise you, it’s on my calendar,” lied Romesh, and cut the call.
So. Dulac. In went the branding guide, the reference artworks, the more experimental stuff he’d done for them, general links to their whole “clean body, clean mind” stuff, the web of influencers and contacts and audience data that he’d painstakingly collected over the years. He left just enough information out to make the intern stumble but scribbled down enough ideas that they couldn’t really accuse him of sabotage. And he claimed the right to do one last ad—a final sendoff. The client deserved a good rolling hit before the new girl took over.
Either he was still drunk, or everybody in the world was a hell of a lot sharper than he was, because the only response the intern gave was, “Sure enough.” The reply was immediate. “Absolutely, sir. Right away. Let me know what I can do … ”
What he would give for that energy again, Romesh thought. To be young, and not hungover. He sat there and let the tiredness seep into his bones, soaking in the stillness of his dining room, and almost jumped when the phone rang again. It was Kumar.
“Busy,” said Romesh.
“Not for this, you’re not,” said Kumar. “I’ve just sent you something. Check your inbox. Related to what we were talking about last night.”
“Look, I know I said some shit I shouldn’t have—”
“Romesh. For once. Stop talking. Email. You see a link?”
Romesh peered at the screen. “Tachikoma?”
“It’s a server. Sign in with your email. I’ve given you login credentials.”
Romesh clicked. A white screen appeared, edged with what looked like a motif of clouds, and a cursor, blinking serenely in the middle. The cursor typed, SCANNING EMAIL.
“The way this works is it’s going to gather a bit of data on you,” said Kumar. “You might be prompted for phone access.”
SCANNING SOCIAL MEDIA, said the white screen, and then his phone vibrated. TACHIKOMA WANTS TO GET TO KNOW YOU, said the message. PLEASE SAY YES.
“This feels super shady, Kumar. Is this some sort of prank?”
“Just … trust me, OK. It’s an alpha build, it’s not out to the public yet. And don’t worry, I’m not looking at your sexting history here.”
He typed YES and hit send.
“After it does its thing, you tell it what you’re thinking of,” said Kumar. “You know. Working on a campaign, maybe you need ideas. Type in whatever is floating around in your mind at the time.”
“And?”
“You might get some answers.”
“Back up, back up,” said Romesh, feeling a headache coming on. “How does this work, exactly?”
“You know what a self-directing knowledge graph is? Generative transformer networks?”
“No idea.”
“Universal thesauri?”
“I can sell that if you pay me for it.”
“Well, there’s no point me telling you, is there,” said Kumar.
“You’re using me as a guinea pig, aren’t you?”
“Try it out,” said Kumar. “It might be a bit stupid when you start, but give it a few days. Drinks on me next time if you actually use the thing. Remember, tank, student, student, tank, your pick.” He hung up.
So it was with some unease that Romesh went back to the kitchen, brewing both coffee and ideas for the last Dulac ad. Swordplay, cleaning a perfect sword before battle, link to—teeth? body?—then product. He came back, typed those words into the Tachikoma prompt, which ate them and went back to its blinking self.
Romesh idled, as was his custom, watching the neighbor’s SUV lurch in after yet another late night out, watching the solar panels on the rooftop gardens track the sun as it grew into the sky. The movement seemed to wake the city of Colombo, which, as he watched, stretched arms made of schoolvans and executives and street cleaners and got on with its day. The bustle of traffic began its dusty whisper.
To his surprise, there was a message waiting for him when he got back. SUNLIGHT, it said. CLEANSING FIRE.
Sunlight.
He scrolled down the message, where a complex iconography shifted around those words. Phrases and faces he’d used before. Sentiments.
He’d never thought of using sunlight. Swordplay, samurai cleaning a perfect sword before battle, sword glinting in the sun, outshining everything else—
A smile crept up Romesh’s jagged face. He put his steaming coffee down, feeling that old familiar lightning dancing around his mind, through his fingers, and set to work.
“Dulac called,” the Boss said at the end of the week. “That whole Cleansing Fire campaign we did.”
“Bad?” said Romesh, who had come to expect nothing good of these conversations.
“Depends,” said the Boss. “Sales have tripled. They’re insisting you stay in charge of that account.”
Romesh toyed with his mug a little.
“That was a bit underhanded,” said the Boss. “Good stuff, but showing off just so you could one-up the kid.”
“Perks of being old,” said Romesh. “We don’t play fair, we play smart.”
“Well,” said the Boss. “If I’d known pissing you off got results, I’d have done it years ago. Up for another account?”
Thus it was that six months later, Kumar found himself seated in front of a Romesh who was, for the first time in ages, rather …
“Happy,” tried Kumar. “No, no, that’s not the word.” He added half a beer. “Aha. Mellow. You look like you just got laid. Or laid off.”
Romesh rolled his eyes, but for once he kept the sting out his reply. “Just wrapped up a big campaign,” he said. “You know Spearman? Edtech company? We just ran a $13 million campaign in the US and Europe. Client’s already got the money back from just … schools signing up. You should see the profit margins on universities.”
“So in the vernacular, what you’re saying is you’re paying for this round of beer.”
“Fine, whatever,” said Romesh.
They clinked glasses. “To a job well done,” said Kumar.
“Tachikoma’s not bad,” Romesh said without prompting. His hands, on the table, moved in that complex comme ci, comme ça that over the years Kumar had seen bestowed grudgingly and even then only to works of spectacular genius. “What the hell is it, anyway?”
“We originally built it to help Alzheimer’s patients,” said Kumar. “AI-assisted memory, you know. Then we sort of made it more complex, because we realized students were using it to help them study. You keep feeding it whatever’s on the top of your mind, it goes out onto the internet, absorbs and remaps knowledge, tries to suggest concepts that you would have, you know, naturally tended to think of, given your life experiences. Not perfect, of course. But a completely new structure of knowledge, very counterintuitive derivation, and that’s the real magic.”
Again, that gesture. “I’m still doing most of the work,” said Romesh. “The design, the execution, that’s important, I’m not giving that up to anyone else. Just that it has, er, decent … ideas.”
Like sunlight. Or the trolley problem meme, in the next contract, an ad by a lobby against self-driving cars. Or the 16 pages of raw material he’d been given, before he’d had his first coffee, the day they officially started work on the Spearman contract that, even now, was confirming his status over and over again as a legend within this tiny fiefdom. The ideas, that was what really mattered, at the end of the day, coming out through that screen, smashing into the ones in his own mind, turning it into magic from the raw ether. It had been a very long time since he had felt this good, this prepared, this ready.
As a matter of fact, here was proof: Two juniors who had been sat at table three, the small one, walked over, and in hushed tones asked to shake his hand and tried to make it less awkward by inviting him over for a bottle of whiskey. He declined. At table seven was a party, all from a rival agency; one or two of them pointed at Romesh and raised their glasses in respect.
“It has decent ideas,” he repeated.
“Well, we’re getting old,” said Kumar. “We need all the help we can get. Thanks for being a good guinea pig.” He nudged Romesh. “So much for your ‘AI is going to kill us all’ panic, eh?”
“I was wrong,” said Romesh. “At least with regard to us, anyway, I mean, self-driving AI is wiping out valuable jobs at the bottom of the pyramid—”
“Dear Lord, stop campaigning already.”
“Your company. Is it going to sell this thing?”
“Believe it or not, we’re open-sourcing most of it,” said Kumar. “But yeah, there will be a paid tier. Like, you should be getting suggestions on images, videos, basically—the more complex the symbol decryption needed, the more compute it needs, so that’s where the sales are going to be.”
“Can you get me a few more accounts?” said Romesh, still staring at the group from the other agency, the way they laughed together, and were clearly having a good time. “Actually. Forget that. You want in on an idea?”
Kumar shifted. You could see the old wheels going to town inside. “Color me curious,” he said.
The next day, Romesh limped over to the little-used wardrobe where his formal wear hid from the sunlight. On went the jeans, the black shirt, buttoned very carefully at the throat. It felt baggy; he caught sight of himself in the mirror, a gaunt shadow with a heavy aluminum cane, and spent a few minutes patting down his shirt. Then the shoes, one higher than the other, and slightly curved, to make up for damage. The car that showed up was one of the Chinese Tesla rip-off types, precisely the kind of budget self-driving crap they’d campaigned against; he reflected on the irony as it took him, enclosed in its metal womb, out into the heat and the dust of Colombo.
The streets felt empty, the skylines taller than he was used to seeing them. The office, a converted postcolonial mansion that once had had pretensions toward being Art Nouveau, hid itself behind high walls and that lovely curled font that had made him hand in his resume there in the first place. The security gate dithered a little over his keycard.
I remember this place, he thought. This world of smooth wooden walls, where he had sat in line waiting to be interviewed. There were fewer people than he had expected, and nobody he remembered. All the old crew were gone. Burned out, like him. Young faces gave him blank frowns, indifference; they looked that look at him, down at the shattered leg, away.
The Boss was in a meeting of some sort. “It’s not even about revenue anymore,” he could hear them say through the frosted glass. Bobble-heads nodded. “Our revenues have been exactly on track with predictions. The problem, gentlemen, is retention. Every time we lose an asset to churn, that’s training, that’s creativity leaving the build—”
Romesh waited. A small crowd of suits got up behind the frosted doors and marched out, buzzing among themselves. Oddly, one or two of them nodded to him.
“Haven’t seen you in a while,” said the Boss. In person they looked a lot larger than on the laptop screen, a lot more confident.
“I’m quitting,” Romesh said, without preamble. “You can give all my accounts to the new girl, unless of course they want to keep working with me.”
The Boss gave him their blankest look. “Who’s offering, and what’re they promising you?”
“Actually, nobody is. I’m setting up my own company. Getting the old batch back together. Navin, Thilani, Mandy, CJ, Harean, Maliek, the lot. This would have been, I don’t know, five, seven years before your time?”
“That burned-out lot,” said the Boss. “I know those names. None of them could cut it anymore.”
“That burned-out lot.”
“Don’t be stupid, now,” said the Boss, and smiled. It was a shark’s smile, bloodthirsty and triumphant. “Romesh, just because you got your lucky streak back doesn’t mean your crusty little band is anywhere near competitive. You see those kids?” they pointed down the hall. “Thirty-six hour hackathon, running straight. The other lot, over there? They’ve just come back from 10 hours of customer engagements—”
Romesh let them ramble on, and eventually, when they ran out of steam, he stood up, a shadow leaning on a large metal cane.
“You’re older,” said the Boss. “You’re slower.”
“Game on,” said Romesh Algama, and laughed for the first time in years.
- Introduction: The Beguiling, Troubling Future of Work, by Diana M. Pho
- Work Ethics, by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
- Remembrance, by Lexi Pandell
- The Long Tail, by Aliette de Bodard
- Collaborative Configurations of Minds, by Lettie Prell
- Beyond These Stars Other Tribulations of Love, by Usman T. Malik
- ars longa, by Tade Thompson
