Katie Williams: Tell the Machine Goodnight

“So … yes?”

“Sure. I mean, yes.”

“Wonderful. Thank you for your time today.”

Mr. Waxler rose to go, but then, as if struck by an impulse, he stopped and reached out for the Apricity 480, which sat on the table between them. Pearl had just last week been outfitted with the new model; sleeker than the Apricity 470 and smaller, too, the size of a deck of cards, the machine had fluted edges and a light gray casing that reflected a subtle sheen, like the smoke inside a fortune-teller’s ball. Waxler’s hand hovered over it.

“May I?” he said.

At Pearl’s nod, he tapped the edge of the Apricity with the tip of the finger now scheduled to be amputated in—confirmations from both HR and the doctor’s office had already arrived on Pearl’s screen—a little over two weeks. Was it Pearl’s imagination or did Mr. Waxler already stand a bit taller, as if an invisible yoke had been lifted from his shoulders? Was the pink around his eyes and nose now matched by a healthy flush to the cheek?

Waxler paused in the doorway. “Can I ask one more thing?”

“Certainly.”

“Does it have to be tangerines, or will any citrus do?”

PEARL HAD WORKED AS A CONTENTMENT TECHNICIAN for the Apricity Corporation’s San Francisco office since 2026. Nine years. While her colleagues hopped to new job titles or start-ups, Pearl stayed on. Pearl liked staying on. This was how she’d lived her life. After graduating college, Pearl had stayed on at the first place that had hired her, working as a nocturnal executive assistant for brokers trading in the Asian markets. After having her son, she’d stayed on at home until he’d started school. After getting married to her college boyfriend, she’d stayed on as his wife, until Elliot had an affair and left her. Pearl was fine where she was, that’s all. She liked her work, sitting with customers who had purchased one of Apricity’s three-tiered Contentment Assessment Packages, collecting their samples, and talking them through the results.

Her current assignment was a typical one. The customer, the up-and-coming San Francisco marketing firm !Huzzah!, had purchased Apricity’s Platinum Package in the wake of an employee death, or, as Pearl’s boss had put it, “A very un-merry Christmas and to one a goodnight!” Hours after the holiday party, a !Huzzah! copywriter had committed suicide in the office lounge. The night cleaning service had found the poor woman, but hours too late. Word of the death had made the rounds, of course, both its cause and its location. !Huzzah!’s January reports noted a decrease in worker productivity, an accompanying increase in complaints to HR. February’s reports were grimmer still, the first weeks of March abysmal.

So !Huzzah! turned to the Apricity Corporation and, through them, Pearl, who’d been brought into !Huzzah!’s office in SoMa to create a contentment plan for each of the firm’s fifty-four employees. Happiness is Apricity. That was the slogan. Pearl wondered what the dead copywriter would think of it.

The Apricity assessment process itself was noninvasive. The only item that the machine needed to form its recommendations was a swab of skin cells from the inside of the cheek. This was Pearl’s first task on a job, to hand out and collect back a cotton swab, swipe a hint of captured saliva across a computer chip, and then fit the loaded chip into a slot in the machine. The Apricity 480 took it from there, spelling out a personalized contentment plan in mere minutes. Pearl had always marveled at this: to think that the solution to one’s happiness lay next to the residue of the bagel one had eaten for breakfast!

But it was true. Pearl had sat for Apricity herself and felt its effects. Though for most of Pearl’s life unhappiness had only ever been a mild emotion, not a cloud overhead, as she’d heard others describe it, surely nothing like the fog of a depressive, none of this bad weather. Pearl’s unhappiness was more like the wisp of smoke from a snuffed candle. A birthday candle at that. Steady , stalwart , even-keeled : these were the words that had been applied to her since childhood. And she supposed she looked the part: dark hair cropped around her ears and neck in a tidy swimmer’s cap; features pleasing but not too pretty; figure trim up top and round in the thighs and bottom, like one of those inflatable dolls that will rock back up after you punch it down. In fact, Pearl had been selected for her job as an Apricity technician because she possessed, as her boss had put it, “an aura of wooly contentment, like you have a blanket draped over your head.”

“You rarely worry. You never despair,” he’d gone on, while Pearl sat before him and tugged at the cuffs of the suit jacket she’d bought for the interview. “Your tears are drawn from the puddle, not the ocean. Are you happy right now? You are, aren’t you?”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re fine! Yes!” he shouted at this revelation. “You store your happiness in a warehouse, not a coin pouch. It can be bought cheap!”

“Thank you?”

“You’re very welcome. Look. This little guy likes you”—he’d indicated the Apricity 320 in prime position on his desk—“and that means I like you, too.”

That interview had been nine years and sixteen Apricity models ago. Since then Pearl had suffered dozens more of her boss’s vaguely insulting metaphors and had, more importantly, seen the Apricity system prove itself hundreds—no, thousands of times. While other tech companies shriveled into obsolescence or swelled into capitalistic behemoths, the Apricity Corporation, guided by its CEO and founder, Bradley Skrull, had stayed true to its mission. Happiness is Apricity. Yes, Pearl was a believer.

However, she was not so naïve as to expect that everyone else must share her belief. While Pearl’s next appointment of the day went nearly as smoothly as Mr. Waxler’s—the man barely blinked at the recommendation that he divorce his wife and hire a series of reputable sex workers to fulfill his carnal needs—the appointment after that went unexpectedly poorly. The subject was a middle-aged web designer, and though Apricity’s recommendation seemed a minor one, to adopt a religious practice, and though Pearl pointed out that this could be interpreted as anything from Catholicism to Wicca, the woman stormed out of the room, shouting that Pearl wanted her to become weak minded, and that this would suit her employer’s purposes quite well, wouldn’t it, now? Pearl sent a request to HR to schedule a follow-up appointment for the next day. Usually these situations righted themselves after the subject had had time to contemplate. Sometimes Apricity confronted people with their secret selves, and, as Pearl had tried to explain to the shouting woman, such a passionate reaction, even if negative, was surely a sign of just this.

Still, Pearl arrived home deflated—the metaphorical blanket over her head feeling a bit threadbare—to find her apartment empty. Surprisingly, stunningly empty. She made a circuit of the rooms twice before acknowledging that Rhett had, for the first time since he’d come back from the clinic, left the house of his own volition. A shiver ran through her and gathered, buzzing, beneath each of her fingernails. She fumbled with her screen, pulling it from the depths of her pocket and unfolding it.

“Just got home,” she spoke into it.

k , came the eventual reply.

“You’re not here,” she said. What she wanted to say: Where the hell are you?

fnshd hw wnt out came back.

“Be home in time for dinner.”

The alert that her message had been sent and received sounded like her screen had heaved a deep mechanical sigh.

Her apartment was in the outer avenues of the city’s Richmond District. You could walk to the ocean, could see a corner of it even, gray and tumbling, if you pressed your cheek against the bathroom window and peered left. Pearl pictured Rhett alone on the beach, walking into the surf. But no, she shouldn’t think that way. Rhett’s absence from the apartment was a good thing. It was possible—wasn’t it?—that he’d gone out with friends from his old school. Maybe one of them had thought of him and decided to call him up. Maybe Josiah, who’d seemed the best of the bunch. He’d been the last of them to stop visiting, had written Rhett at the clinic, had once pointed to one of the dark bruises that had patterned Rhett’s limbs and said, Ouch , so sadly and sweetly it was as if the bruise were on his own arm, the blood pooling under the surface of his own unmarked skin.