What he’d done had been innovative, Hazel had to admit—she hadn’t been at the ceremony but she’d heard about it on the news and from throngs of her matriculating friends who had stayed on course creditwise. Byron had gotten up on the podium wearing a suit and sunglasses, which was what he wore when he wanted to look cool. First he stated that he didn’t have a speech prepared because they were all going to write the speech together. He asked everyone in the stadium to think of one word that best described their time at college, and to shout it on the count of three.
Next, he had everyone yell a word that summarized their greatest hope for the future, and then, finally, a word describing what frightened them most about the life changes they’d face after graduation. (“Would you like to guess,” Byron had later confided in her, in an almost-flirtatious way, “how many people yelled ‘bong water’ for all three questions? Another counterintuitive statistic: ‘titties’ was a more popular answer for what scared people most about the future than for describing their time at college. As in thousands more people. Wrap your head around that. The other surprise to us, particularly to our interns, who are more ‘of the people’ in their expectations, was how few graduates yelled—excuse my language here, this is a direct quote—‘pussy’ to summarize their collegiate experience. Maybe ‘titty’ is easier to yell in front of one’s grandparents than ‘pussy.’ More people actually yelled ‘potato chips’ than ‘pussy.’”
“Did anyone yell ‘cock’?” Hazel had asked.
“That’s why you should’ve graduated,” he’d said.)
Thanks to a new Gogol vocal-recognition software, every individual voice was able to be heard, analyzed, and statistically ranked for relevance, then an algorithmic speech was composed. It discussed the worth of the university experience, the challenges that lay ahead, and the dreams the students were on course to pursue, all using the most popular answers to heavily resonate with the crowd. It was funny and poignant. It was also a tearjerker due to a new aspect of the software. Onstage with Byron were the parents of a student who had died in a car accident during his junior year. Had he lived, he would’ve been graduating. Using one two-minute home-video clip, the software was able to anticipate with almost perfect accuracy what his pronunciation of nearly any word would be, and the auto-composed speech was given in his voice while his touched parents wept in disbelief on the Jumbotron and the crowd lifted their hands to their chests in an attempt to soothe their hearts. The standing ovation at the speech’s conclusion was the longest in the school’s history, at least those that were digitally recorded—this was suggested and then confirmed by Byron’s analytical team, who combed through the footage of every speech and event ever given at the college.
“It was a risk,” Byron told Hazel off the record after she’d finished interviewing him.
Her friend Jenny, the responsible/motivated one who was supposed to be getting to interview Byron, had gotten a horrible stomach flu. Hazel was essentially the stunt double.
“Of course we tried it with the parents beforehand and made sure they were good with it. Afterward they told me it was an incredible experience. They felt like they’d just gotten to spend a little more time with him. But voices are complex triggers. Emotions can turn. In trials, many relatives stated to us that hearing the voice of a deceased loved one started to feel unwelcome, violating.” Hazel remembered thinking about Byron’s voice the whole time—why didn’t his voice seem sensitive when he was saying very sensitive things?
Jenny hadn’t been shy about letting Hazel know she wasn’t her first choice. “But I know you’ll do it because you need money, right?”
She sure did. At that point in her life, Hazel had never been married to a millionaire. She’d been waitressing a little at a diner near campus earlier in the semester, but the job turned out to be filled with pressure from men. They’d be in town for the evening and would ask her to take them out and she’d need to decline without losing her tip, which was almost impossible. Or they would say something like, “I don’t even think I’m going to get food. I just want to sit here and flirt with you all day,” and then the bill would be almost zero because they’d sit there drinking coffee and winking, and even a generous tip on a cup of coffee was not enough to buy the things Hazel tended to use her money for, like electricity or beer. Or they’d say something sad like, “Actually, I was having a really hard day and you being kind to me right now is meaning more to me than you will ever know,” and then she’d have to keep faking kindness, extreme kindness in fact; or they’d be in a terrible mood and when she set their silverware down they’d accuse her of having touched their fork with her soiled hands, which she wasn’t sure how to interpret—were they implying that she’d been masturbating? That she’d been doing sexual acts with her hands prior to her work shift and hadn’t washed them? Did they hope for a confession they could follow with an offer to punish her? In almost every situation, it was awkward to produce a plate of lukewarm French fries and try to move things along, and this was what she almost always had to do. After a month she quit.
“I need to have this interview on my résumé,” Jenny had insisted. She’d been delirious with fever, and wildly dehydrated, but still more organized and personable and attractive than Hazel. “It won’t really be a lie since I wrote the questions. All you’re doing is asking him the questions I wrote and recording what he says. I’m paying you to be an extension of a tape recorder.” Hazel just wanted the money, but thought she should feel like it was an amazing opportunity, so she’d told her friend how excited she was. She pretended to love the suit her friend forced her to wear although it didn’t fit and made Hazel’s torso look like a rectangular plaid couch cushion.
Upon arriving at the gig, she even contorted her face with an expression of feverish enthusiasm. All of Byron’s employees stood out—they had a clean sleekness that made them seem more recently showered than anyone else; their tailored clothes looked made of special fabrics (and actually were; there was an in-house catalog of sorts they all shopped from in order to meet hypoallergenic, antibacterial office standards plus effortlessly avoid lint, wrinkling, and odor). They all seemed to be thinking much harder than Hazel herself had ever thought. “Hello.” She’d smiled and greeted the handlers who were waiting for her on a couch inside a vast lobby. “I’m Jenny Roberts,” she’d told them, “and I’m so grateful for this opportunity.”
“You are not Jenny Roberts,” they’d responded. “You are Hazel Green.”
Their scanners had read all the cards in her wallet; they’d gleaned online information to instantaneously confirm her identity. “Okay,” she said. “But I am so grateful.” Hazel wondered if the scanners could tell that was a lie too.