Tal Klein - The Punch Escrow

I jumped up from the couch, sweeping aside several gaming windows on my comms with a wave of my hand. In case you guys in the future all speak telepathically or something, comms were neural stem implants that pretty much everyone got on their second birthday. Constructed of a hybrid mesh of stem cells and nanites that our bodies treated as a benign tumor, they interfaced with the aural and visual centers of our brain, augmenting our eardrums with audio and our retinas with video. A comm is also what we called any remote communication. We had so many ways of communicating with one another that we just referred to any virtual conversation with someone else as a comm, the plural of which is also comms—and, yes, it was confusing at times, since we received comms on our comms.

The video games vanished, affording me a fairly uncluttered view of my cluttered apartment. Sylvia and I owned a nice two-bedroom in Greenwich Village—exposed brick and steel beams, charmingly gouged hardwood floors, ten-foot windows that looked out onto Houston Street. Right now I ignored all that and speed-walked to the master bedroom closet, searching for a suitably clean button-down to put over my WHAT WOULD TURING DO? T-shirt.

As I tucked and buttoned, I silently cursed myself for not setting an alarm. True, my marriage had been trending downward for the past year, but the last thing I wanted was to initiate the Big Talk. And to be fair, we were both to blame for our relationship bottoming out.

Sylvia had been hired at International Transport—IT—almost eight years ago. She was a quantum microscopy engineer, a field that I only grokked in the most superficial way, and had diligently worked her way up the corporate megalith’s food chain. Around a year ago, she’d been promoted to a new, hush-hush position. She warned me it would mean a lot more time at the office, but the salary bump had also made it possible for us to move out of our subterranean one-bedroom closet on North Brother Island and into the actual city. At the time, it seemed like a belated birthday gift from the gods. But as the months progressed and we saw each other less and less, the new gig seemed more of a curse than a blessing.

I checked my comms again: 9:21 p.m. Shit, shit, shit . No way would I make it to the Mandolin in time, even if I took a car. I’d have to teleport there. As a way to cover my last-minute splurge, I decided to pick up a salting gig. 4

Salting is what I do for a living. This doesn’t mean I spend my days harvesting salt from ancient water beds, though it’s just about as exciting. A salter’s job consists of enriching various artificial-intelligence engines. I imagine in your time, salting will have become as extinct as riverboat piloting, chauffeuring, or teaching, because apps will have outsmarted and replaced us in every conceivable way.

But in my present, there was still a fundamental problem with the way computers thought. Without getting too geeky about it, it was called the Entscheidungsproblem . Try saying that three times fast. 5

Because of the Entscheidungsproblem , computers couldn’t make an original decision. Every choice they came to could only be based on data and algorithms that had been preprogrammed into them. That’s not to say computers couldn’t get new ideas, but every new idea they got could only come from remixing old ideas, or external input from other computers, or through human input—which is where I came in.

We salters spent our days coming up with arbitrary puzzles that AI engines couldn’t grok. Every time a salter’s gambit was not anticipated by an app, that app got smarter by adding the unanticipated random logic set to its decision algorithm, and the salter got paid. Essentially, I made my living by being a smartass to apps. In my field, one rose through the ranks based on the quality of one’s accepted salts. The Mine, where we work, kept track of our acceptance ratios on a public leader-board. The better your ratio, the more desirable you were, and the more cheddar you made. Most salters didn’t get the nuances between being a smartass to an app and being an idiot to an app, so they tended to work harder and longer to earn a passable living wage. Taking into account that I was an inherently lazy person, I did fairly well for myself. I had found a way to distill the craft of salting into a repeatable formula of humanity, complexity, and humor. I’m definitely not the best salter there ever was, but the worldwide leaderboard consistently had me in the top 5 percent.

“Going for your second gig today?” Adina the admin said to me after I logged in. “Since when did you become a workaholic?”

“What can I say? I love what I do,” I answered while pulling on my dressiest pair of sneakers. “Actually, I’m late for drinks and need port fare.”

“World’s smallest violin,” replied Adina. “Anyhoo, I got an easy one for you. Another one looking to learn how to be funny.”

“Ah jeez, when will our robot overlords learn that the only thing funny about them is how desperately humorless they are? Shoot it over.”

“It’s already here. So long, hotshot.” Adina laughed as she disconnected.

“Hello,” said a nervous voice. “For the record, I am a he, not an it .”

All I could see on my comm stream was a black box. “If you don’t want people to call you an it, get yourself an avatar.”

“Is that a prerequisite?” it asked eagerly. “For being funny?”

A noob! Easy money .

“No. Look, I’m kind of in a rush. Let’s do something basic. Ask me about my pet peeves.”

My dog, a thirteen-year-old Portuguese water mutt, looked up at me from where she was lying on the front-door mat. Digital assistants had replaced pets for some people. Easier to clean up after, and they lived forever. Maybe it was because of my profession, but I was still a dog guy. I knelt down and gently pulled the mat on which the old girl was sprawled out of the way of the door. A belly rub later, I stepped out of my apartment and made for the stairwell, minimizing my comms to the upper-right quadrant of my field of vision so I wouldn’t trip and kill myself.

“Very well,” the app said. “Please describe one of your pet peeves.”

“My pet peeve is black.”

“You do not like black things?” it asked.

“No, I love the color black.”

“How is it possible for you to love the color black if it is your pet peeve?”

“I didn’t say my pet peeve was black—I said my pet peeve was black.”

“I fail to see the difference.”

“Ready for the money shot?”

“What is a money shot?”

“It’s what happens when I salt you, and you pay me.”

“Oh yes. I am prepared for that. It is the very purpose of this interaction.”

This poor app must have been compiled by a script kiddie .

“Good. Here goes. My pet, Peeve, is a black cocker-spaniel-slash-Portuguese-water-dog mix. Her original name was Eve, but when she was a puppy, she suffered from urinary incontinence. In other words, she peed everywhere. So I called her Peeve, and it stuck.”

“Your pet, Peeve, is your dog?”

“Yes, and Peeve is black.”

“Clever,” the app said emotionlessly. “Salt approved.”

I reminded myself to give Peeve a few extra treats when I got home.

“Great. By the way, you might say dogs with urinary incontinence are also one of my pet peeves.”

“Is that germane to the salt?”

“Well, my wife hates it when I call Eve ‘Peeve,’ so calling my pet Peeve is my wife’s pet peeve. Does that earn me any extra credit?”

“I’m afraid it does not qualify for additional chits.”

“Fine. Bye.”

I closed the comms window just as I pushed open the door to the street. Not my quickest payday, but close. In the early days of cognitive computing, they used to call it neurolinguistic hacking, and I was one of the fastest on the Eastern Seaboard.