“I know you’ll like it. I have a coupon.”
“Tilly,” he said, “please stop monitoring and terminate autosuggestions.”
“Are you sure? Gaps in sharing can cause your profile to be incomplete—”
“Yes, please cease.”
With a beep, Tilly turned herself off.
Ellen stared at him, eyes and mouth wide open in shock.
“Why did you do that?”
“I wanted to talk to you alone, just the two of us.” Sai smiled. “It’s nice sometimes to just be ourselves, without Tilly, don’t you think?”
Ellen looked confused. “But you know that the more Tilly knows, the more helpful she can be. Don’t you want to be sure we don’t make silly mistakes on a first date? We’re both busy, and ?Tilly—”
“I know what Tilly can do. But—”
Ellen held up a hand, silencing him. She tilted her head, listening to her headset.
“I have the perfect idea,” Ellen said. “There’s this new club, and I know Tilly can get us a coupon.”
Sai shook his head, annoyed. “Let’s try to think of something to do without Tilly. Would you please turn her off?”
Ellen’s face was unreadable for a moment.
“I think I should head home,” she said. “Early workday tomorrow.” She looked away.
“Did ?Tilly tell you to say that?”
She said nothing and avoided looking into his eyes.
“I had a great time,” Sai added quickly. “Would you like to go out again?”
Ellen paid half the bill and did not ask him to walk her home.
? ? ?
With a beep, Tilly came back to life in his ear.
“You’re being very antisocial tonight,” ?Tilly said.
“I’m not antisocial. I just didn’t like how you were interfering with everything.”
“I have every confidence you would have enjoyed the rest of the date had you followed my advice.”
Sai drove on in silence.
“I sense a lot of aggression in you. How about some kickboxing? You haven’t gone in a while, and there’s a twenty-four-hour gym coming up. Take a right here.”
Sai drove straight on.
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t feel like spending more money.”
“You know I have a coupon.”
“What exactly do you have against me saving my money?”
“Your savings rate is right on target. I simply want to make sure you’re sticking to your regimen for consumption of leisure. If you oversave, you’ll later regret that you didn’t make the most of your youth. I’ve plotted the optimum amount of consumption you should engage in daily.”
“Tilly, I just want to go home and sleep. Can you shut yourself off for the rest of the night?”
“You know that in order to make the best life recommendations, I need to have complete knowledge of you. If you shut me out of parts of your life, my recommendations won’t be as accurate—”
Sai reached into his pocket and turned off the phone. The earpiece went silent.
? ? ?
When Sai got home, he saw that the light over the stairs leading up to his apartment had gone out, and several dark shapes skulked around the bottom.
“Who’s there?”
Several of the shadows scattered, but one came toward him: Jenny.
“You’re back early.”
He almost didn’t recognize her; this was the first time he’d heard her voice without the electronic filter she normally used. It sounded surprisingly . . . happy.
Sai was taken aback. “How did you know I was back early? You stalking me?”
Jenny rolled her eyes. “Why would I need to stalk you? Your phone automatically checks in and out of everywhere you go with a status message based on your mood. It’s all on your ShareAll lifecast for anyone to see.”
He stared at her. In the faint glow from the streetlights he could see that she wasn’t wearing her thick winter coat or ski goggles or scarf. Instead, she was in shorts and a loose white T-shirt. Her black hair had been dyed white in streaks. In fact, she looked very pretty, if a bit nerdy.
“What, surprised that I do know how to use a computer?”
“It’s just that you usually seem so . . .”
“Paranoid? Crazy? Say what’s on your mind. I won’t be offended.”
“Where’s your coat and goggles? I’ve never even seen you without them.”
“Oh, I taped over your door camera so my friends could come for a visit tonight, so I’m not wearing them. I’m sorry—”
“You did what?”
“—and I came out here to meet you because I saw that you turned off ??Tilly, not once, but twice. I’m guessing you’re finally ready for the truth.”
? ? ?
Stepping into Jenny’s apartment was like stepping into the middle of a fishing net.
The ceiling, floor, and walls were all covered with a fine metal mesh, which glinted like liquid silver in the flickering light from the many large, high-definition computer monitors stacked on top of each other around the room, apparently the only sources of illumination.
Besides the monitors, the only other visible furniture appeared to be bookshelves—full of books (the paper kind, strangely enough). A few upside-down, ancient milk crates covered with cushions served as chairs.
Sai had been feeling restless, had wanted to do something strange. But he now regretted his decision to accept her invitation to come in. She was indeed eccentric, perhaps too much so.
Jenny closed the door and reached up and plucked the earpiece out of Sai’s ear. Then she held out her hand. “Give me your phone.”
“Why? It’s already off.”
Jenny’s hand didn’t move. Reluctantly, Sai took out his phone and gave it to her.
She looked at it contemptuously. “No removable battery. Just what you’d expect of a Centillion phone. They should call these things tracking devices, not phones. You can never be sure they’re really off.” She slipped the phone inside a thick pouch, sealed it, and dropped it on the desk.
“Okay, now that your phone is acoustically and electromagnetically shielded, we can talk. The mesh on the walls basically makes my apartment into a Faraday cage, so cellular signals can’t get through. But I don’t feel comfortable around a Centillion phone until I can put a few layers of shielding around it.”
“I’m just going to say it. You are nuts. You think Centillion spies on you? Their privacy policy is the best in the business. Every bit of information they gather has to be given up by the user voluntarily, and it’s all used to make the user’s life better—”
Jenny tilted her head and looked at him with a smirk until he stopped talking.
“If that’s all true, why did you turn Tilly off tonight? Why did you agree to come up here with me?”
Sai wasn’t sure he himself knew the answers.
“Look at you. You’ve agreed to have cameras observe your every move, to have every thought, word, interaction recorded in some distant data center so that algorithms could be run over them, mining them for data that marketers pay for.
“Now you’ve got nothing left that’s private, nothing that’s yours and yours alone. Centillion owns all of you. You don’t even know who you are anymore. You buy what Centillion wants you to buy; you read what Centillion suggests you read; you date who Centillion thinks you should date. But are you really happy?”
“That’s an outdated way to look at it. Everything Tilly suggests to me has been scientifically proven to fit my taste profile, to be something I’d like.”
“You mean some advertiser paid Centillion to pitch it at you.”
“That’s the point of advertising, isn’t it? To match desire with satisfaction. There are thousands of products in this world that would have been perfect for me, but I might never have known about them. Just like there’s a perfect girl out there for me, but I might never have met her. What’s wrong with listening to Tilly so that the perfect product finds the perfect consumer, the perfect girl finds the perfect boy?”
Jenny chuckled. “I love how you’re so good at rationalizing your state. I ask you again: If life with Tilly is so wonderful, why did you turn her off tonight?”