To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Subject: Positive Changes at Anahata

Dear Team,

While Wall Street defines a company’s success by its numbers, at Anahata we see it as so much more. It’s about people. It’s about you. That’s why this week we’ll be rolling out even more benefits and programs to benefit Anahatis — and humankind:

Better the World (BW) benefit, to allow employees a paid sabbatical to work full-time for charity organizations, natural disaster relief, and left-leaning political campaigns.

Marathon Care Time (MCT). We know how hard it is to balance work commitments and marathon training. The MCT benefit allows those in training to have greater support from their managers in terms of flexible working hours and special exemptions.

Anahata Eats (UEats) program, which ensures that any uneaten food purchased by Anahata will not be wasted, but rather provided to local communities. This week, we will be serving leftover lobster and blanched asparagus to four local homeless shelters!

Horizontal Moves (HM), a new, exclusive career development program designed to help sales staff explore new roles in the company and broaden their skill set. Select sales staff will be chosen to participate in this exciting career opportunity, which will start tomorrow. We look forward to developing the program in response to your feedback.

On a final note, we would like to inform you that we will be making a small change to our organizational structure. Going forward, all of sales will report into Gregor Guntlag so that we can better align our engineering and sales goals. We think this change will help streamline processes, ensure quick decision-making, and make sure we are all moving in the right direction. We’d like to thank Niels Smeardon for all of his hard work. He has left the company for other adventures.

Onward and upward!

Bobby

As documented by the HR department, there were four types of employee reaction to the memo announcing Niels’ departure.

The first group never read the memo. This was primarily the engineers, who believed that anything sent to the entire company would be devoid of data and facts, given it was necessary to be comprehensible to the lowest common denominator (aka sales).

The second group responded with indifference. This was the support staff — people in departments like legal, finance, marketing, HR, and customer support — who were reminded on a daily basis that their opinions and activities were not truly vital to the company’s success. They knew that a shakeup at the top wouldn’t change their status in the slightest. They read the email, shrugged their shoulders, and moved on with their meaningless day.

The third group responded with outrage. This was a small number of engineers who had actually read the email and found it unacceptable that the water slide and petting zoo they had requested months earlier still had not been granted, while other employees (clearly those from sales) were being granted a marathon-training allowance.

The final group was the sales team, who immediately understood the significance of Niels’ departure. With just one nonchalant email from Bobby, a new world order was imposed, one in which bits and pixels trumped money and smarts trumped designer suits; a world in which golf clubs, fast cars, and weekend “business” trips to Vegas would be replaced with gadgets, robots, and video games. They knew nothing would be the same.

And, in fact, the reality turned out to be worse than anything they predicted. (As any engineer would have pointed out, this was to be expected since the ability of the dimwitted sales team to predict much of anything was genetically limited.)

A few minutes following Bobby’s memo, most members of the Anahata sales team received an email informing them that they had been chosen to participate in the Horizontal Moves (HM) program and that they should report to the sales auditorium in Building 13 at eleven a.m.

Their excitement at being chosen for an exclusive program dissipated once they arrived at the auditorium. The plush purple sofas that usually welcomed them for Niels’ quarterly strategy meetings had been replaced with fold-up metal chairs. There was no breakfast buffet, no robot butler ready to dispense coffee. Just a man from the HR team with a clipboard who spoke only long enough to repeat Bobby’s memo and then direct the group to line up according to last name at different stations throughout the auditorium. There, he said, they would be given their new special assignments.

The employee who sold ads to fast-food restaurants was given a pair of purple Anahata sweatpants and told to report to the volleyball court, where he would start that morning as a personal trainer. The employee who sold ads to construction companies, henceforth known as HM #4002, was given sunscreen, a suit, and a life buoy and told to make his way to the pool. A former cubicle mate, now known as HM #3403, was made part of the concierge service, while his former boss, HM #2435, became an errand runner for engineers who hated leaving their desks. HM #12009, formerly specialized in selling ads to podiatrists, was assigned to give foot massages to a product manager named Arsyen Aimo. When the latter didn’t show up to his first appointment, HM#12009 was reassigned to run the puppet and juggling shows in Building 4.

Before leaving the auditorium, all the sales employees were given new orange badges that clearly identified them as a different class.

The next day, Horizontal Moves staff members who showed up for the company shuttle bus in San Francisco were curtly instructed to stand in a different line from the engineering staff; HM employees who drove to work were directed to separate parking lots located at the far end of campus. These employees were still allowed to eat in the cafeterias and take advantage of the many gyms and amenities, but they were assigned off-hours when they would be less likely to encounter engineering staff.

These weren’t the only changes. The soccer field was closed for sports so it could be used as an amateur rocket launcher and robot playing field. The lap pool was taken over by a group of engineers who wanted to build a salamander farm. And the Friday afternoon drinks party in the main hall — which the sales team had long viewed as their territory — no longer played hip-hop and pop music, but rather ambient sounds and repeats of Star Trek.

The other Anahata employees took quickly and easily to the new hierarchy. They soon began referring to the former sales employees as Horizontal Movers, or simply by those two damning letters — HM.

As for the HM staff, even they had to admit life wasn’t so bad on the bottom — low stress for the same pay. Many of them spent their entire days working out, and their six-packs grew new, defined lines. Such accomplishments made them wonder whether their destiny had never been to sell things — and intangible things in a virtual world, at that — but rather just to be in incredible physical shape.

Of course, there were moments when they suddenly remembered the thrill of their old life, of hitting their monthly sales target and beating their colleagues in the number of new client acquisitions. When those memories hit, the HM puppeteers would suddenly transform their rehearsal of Sesame Street into Reservoir Dogs, the HM lullaby squad would change the engineer naptime music to death rock, and the HM physical trainers would find themselves assigning their engineering clients one thousand jumping jacks or a five-mile run. The engineers huffed and puffed, but it was of little consolation to the demoted employees; the stain of their new HM status stamped itself in blotchy red patches across their clients’ faces.

But most of the time, they just admired their biceps. Life as a full-time jock was a much less stressful way to live.

Anahata’s PR director awoke with a start. She saw the phone jumping on her nightstand, a blue light flashing across the screen. It registered then — her phone was ringing. It was her boss, Greg Fischer. The ringtone gave him away: a trumpet heralding the release of racehorses from their starting gates.

She scrambled to sit upright, as though worried Fischer could see through the windows of her home. She was sure he wouldn’t approve of her being asleep at 6:24 a.m. since he, like most nonengineers in the Valley, believed in rising early in order to achieve great things before everyone else.

Her boss both terrified and frustrated her. Although PR was one of the departments he controlled as part of his larger remit as chief financial and corporate affairs officer (CFCAO), Greg Fischer had no idea what her team did and generally spoke to her only when something had gone horribly awry.

“Yes, I’m here,” she said crisply into the phone, hoping she sounded alert. “What’s going on?”

“A blogger found some fleets from Niels, and Tech Geek just picked it up. It’ll be everywhere soon. The Street’s already onto it. The market opens in six minutes, and we’re going to take a real beating. Read it and call me back.”

The phone clicked, and she was alone again.

She yawned, then quickly shuffled to her kitchen table. She scanned the news feed on her computer. The last time Fischer had woken her up with a “press emergency,” it was because a gossip rag had run a picture of Bobby’s electric chimp without his permission. Fischer wanted the issue recalled and couldn’t understand why she was unable to make that happen.

The PR director scrolled through the headlines. There were thousands of stories each day about Anahata — half of them on gossipy Tech Geek — but it took no time at all to determine which story had prompted Fischer’s early morning freakout:

Anahata Moon Colony: Totally Awesome or Totally Insane?

By PJ Point, May 13, 6:10 a.m. PST

Silicon Valley types like to think big. But “let’s fly to the moon!” big? That’s pretty ambitious. It seems that’s exactly what wacky Anahata is up to, according to fleets posted by the company’s top sales exec, Niels Smeardon (@Niels_1973), who urged his followers to stop the tech giant from going to the moon. Smeardon’s departure was announced internally two days ago — shortly after the timestamp of these fleets. Could these be the ramblings of a disgruntled employee? Or could Anahata really be building a moon colony?

It’s not totally clear whether the fleets are real. After all, there are very few posts before this one by Niels_1973, and the bulk of his messages are about La Lala — hardly something screaming tech credibility, though the pop starlet did once try to hump the internet at an awards show. But rumors of a top-secret project at Anahata have been floating about for the past few months, with many saying that founder Bobby Bonilo is looking to build a killer product that will serve a knockout punch to the company’s main competitor, Galt.

There’s also a less exciting though somewhat credible explanation: There have been whispers that the company is interested in finding new places to put its data centers.

If that’s the case, well, you’d think there’d be cheaper options than the moon, but this is Anahata. And with privacy freak Gregor Guntlag leading engineering, he may just want to get Anahata’s precious user data as far away as possible from any U.S. government agencies.

Have any information? Let us know!

The woman sighed and rang her boss.

“What’s your plan?” Fischer snapped.

“I need to know if it’s true,” she said. “The moon colony. If it’s not true, we’ll just say it’s not true. It’s actually quite straightforward — if it’s not true.”

“The truth is not relevant in this case,” Fischer said. “Just fix it. Deny nothing. Confirm nothing. Hold on.”

Fischer’s voice was muffled then, as though he had placed the phone against his shirt. She could hear another male voice in the background. A few seconds later, Fischer was back.

“I have Bobby on speakerphone. Do you need him to do an interview?”

“An interview where he denies and confirms nothing? I don’t think that will help with — ”

“He says he will do it provided you can get approval on the article before it’s printed. The stock is going to take a dive today if this story stays up.”

“I can’t control the media, and I can’t rewrite a Tech Geek article — or any article. Not in this country.”

“Hold on.”

She imagined Bobby and Fischer speaking in a magical, foreign tongue, with only Fischer able to translate the founder’s words into speech a mortal like herself could understand. In the five years since she had taken over Anahata’s PR team, she had not once spoken to Bobby directly. And this, she recalled with no small amount of resentment, despite having spun a massive copyright case against the company into a populist revolt against the music industry and pushed the U.S. government, which was investigating Anahata, to christen a new phrase in competition law: “dynamic dominance.” Just last week she had managed to keep photos of Bobby in a high-end Latvian brothel from making it to print.

Fischer returned to the phone with a bark.

“Bobby wants to know in which country you can control what gets printed.”

The PR director wracked her brain. “Russia, Poland, some Southeast Asian countries — “

“Those won’t work!” Fischer snapped. “We are not moving the company to Russia. The tax structures there aren’t favorable at all. Jesus — think practically! What about Bermuda? Cyprus? Malta?”

“I — I — I have to admit I don’t know much about the press there. They are smaller countries, so you might be able to — ”

“Dammit!” Fischer shrieked. “I need a plan. Bobby and I are very upset.”

“Understood. I will fix it.”

Fischer hung up on her.

The PR director slumped in her chair as she reread the Tech Geek story, the only consolation to the inevitably long week ahead being the fact that she wasn’t going to have to relocate to Moscow.

Responsible Uses of Social Media

May 13, 11:03 a.m. PST

By Greg Fischer, Chief Financial and Corporate Affairs Officer (CFCAO)

If you’ve been reading about Anahata in the press this morning, you’ve probably read something about a moon colony we’re supposedly building. We’d like to take this opportunity to set the record straight.

First, please look at this picture of the moon.

Do you see a colony on it? Neither do we.

So here’s what happened.

After being asked to leave Anahata a few days ago, Niels Smeardon, our former SVP of sales, posted some messages on Flitter that ended up making it into the media. Niels is a big fan of social media and was interested in utilizing some of the marketing techniques he had learned during his career. The messages he sent were designed to increase engagement with his followers and were not meant to be construed as fact. It is well known that there is little relationship between reality and what people post on social networks.

We hope this clears up any confusion.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Subject: Important Reminder About Social Media Use

Fellow Anahatis,

You’ve no doubt seen things in the press today about Anahata and a moon colony. While the story was funny, what has happened in the market — a more than ten percent drop in our share price — is not. Rest assured that we are working to correct the rumors that are floating about. In the meantime, we ask that you remain focused on your work — and all the Anahata fun we provide (btw have you tried out the new organic juicers?!?).

In addition, I’d like to take this opportunity to remind you of our company’s policy on social media and blogs. We think these platforms are wonderful things, and we want you all to use them as you wish. The internet, after all, was built on free speech!

But we do have a few guidelines we’d ask that you respect.

There is NOblogging or posting about Anahata projects or policies, market strategies, or competitors.

Here’s an example of things that are okay to post — you’ll see that it’s much longer than what you can’t post!

1. All the fun things you do at Anahata.

2. Pictures of our delicious cafeteria food or of the cute animals and pets you are allowed to bring to work.

3. Thoughts about your hobbies (provided those hobbies do not cast a negative light on Anahata — for example, furry petting circles).

4. Relationship musings and advice (provided those relationships do not involve other Anahata employees).

Thanks for your cooperation!!!

- Paul Barlow, your friendly HR SVP!

From the Building 4 window, Jennie watched the cute HM trainer out on the soccer field as he moved closer to his client, the engineer’s face straining as he attempted to lift a car tire toward his chest. The HMer got in the engineer’s face and yelled some sort of insult; the engineer stumbled backwards a few steps before regaining his footing. He brought the tire to the ground and looked to his trainer for praise. Instead, the HMer sent him off down the field to run sprints.

Just a week following the reorganization, the tanned, sporty sales guys already seemed like naturals in their new jobs. It was like they had been destined to be personal trainers and massage therapists; no one had to train them or teach them anything.

It couldn’t have been a greater contrast to Jennie, who felt she wore her new engineering role like a little girl dressed up in her father’s suit.

But she knew it had to work out. If Bobby Bonilo had a master plan for the sales team, surely he had a master plan for her.

Jennie had been studying Bobby ever since joining Anahata. She had read his autobiography, Becoming the Me, four times and kept a collection of all his internal strategy memos, taping the most inspirational and visionary quotes to her wall. Every time it looked like Bobby was making a highly questionable decision, it would later turn out he was solving three or four problems at once. Bobby Bonilo was always a few steps ahead of everyone. His book had said as much.

In this case, Bobby wasn’t simply helping the sales team discover their natural talents. He was also achieving greater company unity. Engineers and HM staff were now coexisting peacefully. The sales employees had stopped tripping the engineers in the cafeteria, and the engineers had stopped programming their robots to chase the sales guys down the hallways. The internal email wars between the two groups had ended nearly overnight. In fact, the engineering staff seemed to have backed down entirely since the announcement of the HM program, no longer viewing their sales cum HM counterparts as enemies, but rather officially acknowledged subordinates, children who should be encouraged and supported in their new roles.

Jennie’s gaze moved across the field, pausing here and there on a bare chest or a chiseled set of cheekbones. It wasn’t just HMers that caught her eye. Even some of the engineers were getting cuter. Many of them still walked with an odd, ape-like gait, but they somehow looked more…vigorous, healthy. Even Sven, horrible Sven, seemed to be sporting a new set of biceps.

“Get up, losers!” screamed a voice at the other end of the field, where a pile of arms and legs twisted about like a frantic octopus above the tire course.

She just couldn’t understand why she wasn’t succeeding in her new job. Of course it had seemed odd that Gregor would ask a nontechnical person to be the technical lead of Social Car. And that when he had asked her, he knew nothing about Jennie other than that she was a campus guide and receptionist.

But Gregor must have known (maybe it was in her HR file?) that Jennie was a born leader, and that leaders don’t need skills — they just need to be leaders.

Jennie certainly had that. She was convinced she was destined for something world-changing, like reversing climate change or melting the polar ice caps to give clean water to people in Africa.

So, while being assigned to Social Car wasn’t quite the same thing as building an endangered elephant preserve, Jennie knew not to pass on such an opportunity. This was the cosmos shaking an enormous neon sign right at her, telling her it was time for her to do great things.

But something had gone wrong in the universe; Jennie had somehow killed her own job.

Despite her lack of technical skills, Jennie didn’t second-guess her decision to kill Social Car — or Stalker Car, as she now called it. She was confident it would have been a disaster for Anahata and driven women away with its creepy features.

But she also knew she had acted too hastily. After dramatically declaring halt to the project, Jennie found herself with no backup plan. Gregor was inaccessible, and Roni was completely MIA — probably on the moon colony the press kept talking about.

She tried to patch things up by returning to the cubicle the following week to brainstorm ideas but had been forced to retreat. Swivel chairs blocked the cubicle entrance. Sven refused to speak to her, and Jonas kept his eyes glued to the wizards on his screen. And Arsyen, the weird guy who tried to give her that foul-smelling perfume, seemed to have disappeared. He had left a message scrawled across the whiteboard — KING ARSYEN!!! — but no other clue as to his whereabouts.

To make matters worse, her friends were all thriving. Gregor had replaced all the lobby receptionists with sign-in kiosks and assigned the women to new technical projects, telling them it was a part of an HR program to “bring in more diverse perspectives.”

Her closest friend, Karla, was now running a team that was building an internet hat — or, more precisely, an internet sombrero. Glasses popped down from the brim’s front to help you see webpages; headphones could pop in from the sides if you wanted to listen to music or audio files. Best of all, just by nodding your sombrero in the direction of something, the hat would help identify the object before you.

Karla confessed to Jennie that she didn’t really get why anyone would want an internet sombrero. “I mean, I’ve got my computer at home. I’ve got my mobile in my pocket. Why do I need a sombrero?”

“Did you ask them that?” Jennie asked.

“Of course not. They would have thought I was an idiot. You just have to trust the engineers. They’re so smart, you know?”

“But did they ever think that maybe they would wear an internet sombrero but normal people probably wouldn’t? I mean, it is…weird…right? Plus, what if it’s too hot to wear a sombrero?”

Karla wrinkled her nose and giggled. “That’s what I thought! But they pointed out that’s why they made it a sombrero — better sun protection! Genius, right? In any case, the sombrero won’t be around forever. Even if the first iteration is a sombrero, V2 will be a wig, and V3 will be reduced to a toupee or beret. The guys say that we just have to get the hat closer and closer to being part of the human head. Cuz like, eventually, it’s just a brain chip, you know? Like an extension of your head. Though it’s too bad they just can’t skip right to that. I don’t really want to have to go around wearing an ugly hat for two years just to show I’m a team player, you know?”

Jennie nodded.

“The guys on the team are really nice,” Karla continued. “They say I take really good notes. You know, I always thought engineers were such dorks, but…”

Sven wasn’t nice. Sven, with his messy blond hair and blue eyes and Johnny Rotten sneer. Sven who hated her and who never wanted to see her again. Sven who was an engineer. Sven who…who was like an architect, really, like an artist who painted in numbers.

Sven, who had destroyed her chance at greatness.

The daily attention lavished on Jennie in Fried Fred’s amounted to a short lunchtime victory followed by a long dismal afternoon. That day, she spent the afternoon tending to her plot in the company’s organic garden and then curled up in a sleep capsule to reread Bobby’s autobiography — in particular the chapters on failure (very short) and success (very long).

The sun was in its last pulses of light as Jennie made her way toward the exit. She stopped for a moment by the gigantic squid, the tank now lit for nighttime with gently pulsing pink lights from below. The squid looked so happy and peaceful bobbing in that turquoise water. Why couldn’t she be like a squid?

The squid spotted Jennie and unfurled two of its arms, extending them across opposite ends of the tank, as though to give her a hug. Jennie took a step forward and put her hand to the glass. A tentacle mirrored her move. She felt a tear on her cheek. Oh, squid. Her friend the squid.

Jennie put her face to the glass, and in a swish, the squid rotated backwards, exposing its mouth. It pressed its body against the glass as it chomped its jaws at her.

Even the squid didn’t understand her; Jennie was nothing more to it than a potential dinner.

As Jennie shuffled to the exit, her phone pinged with the sound of a new message. It was Arsyen, the Social Car engineer who had disappeared.

Hi Jenni, want chat?

She shook her head. She’d rather hang out with the mute squid than talk to that creepy Arsyen. She ignored his message and put her phone back in her pocket.

The campus had already cleared out, its lawn now empty of the voices and beeps and robots that roamed across it each day. Anahata’s small green hills and winding streams now seemed like a scene from another part of America, a place where people took walks and made long-winded observations about the weather.

In her previous life, Jennie had loved to catch the campus in this state, to breathe in Anahata’s freshly cut grass and optimism, but now she merely stared at her feet as she crossed the lawn.

As she passed by Building 2, a small rock suddenly flew through the air and connected with her wrist.

“Ow!”

Jennie jumped back and looked across the empty lawn, readying herself in the karate pose she had learned at her feminist book club. She looked to the left, then right, scanning for sudden movement or suspicious figures. There was nothing to be seen. Her shoulders settled back into their slump, and she began to make her way to her car.

“Psst! Over here!”

Jennie turned in the direction of the voice and saw a bush waving at her. She did a double take and confirmed that, yes, it was indeed a bush waving at her.

“It’s me — Roni!”

“Roni?” She squinted at the bush. It was no longer moving.

“Sssh! Come here,” he hissed, “before someone sees you!”

The bush began moving again, frantically this time, growing arms and legs, and suddenly Jennie realized it was no bush at all, but rather Roni dressed as a bush, his head popping out of an enormous fat suit, like a big green apple covered in brown leaves. When Jennie was close enough to make eye contact, Roni beckoned again with his green chin and then dropped below the shrubbery.

She pushed the brush back and found Roni crouched low on the ground. He was wearing camouflage on his lower half and had painted streaks of green and brown under his eyes to match his leafy suit. Jennie suppressed a laugh and reminded herself that this was the guy in charge of Anahata hackathons, the guy who used to run Social Car and could help her win credibility among the engineers. She needed his help.

“What’s up with the outfit?” Jennie asked.

“It’s just an extra precaution,” whispered Roni, peering out through the bushes. “I am working on something confidential. Very confidential!”

So that’s why Roni had disappeared, leaving no clue as to his whereabouts.

“I could use your advice, too,” she said. “Social Car — ”

“You must be quiet!” Roni hissed. “I will tell you what I can tell you. And then I need your advice. And then we can discuss your problem. In that order.”

Roni cleared his throat, jumped up for a moment to stretch his legs, then hopped back down into a crouching, frog-like pose, the fat suit bobbing over his legs, threatening to swallow them. He motioned her down to his level.

“Tell me, how can I get women to like engineers?”

“Sorry? Not sure I understand.”

“That’s probably because I have not told you enough,” Roni said. “To be clear, that was intentional.”

Jennie rolled her eyes.

“Okay, okay, I will tell you more. But you must not say anything to anyone!” Roni held a finger to his lips. “We have a project that holds the future of Anahata. I can’t tell you all the details yet, but what I will say is that a key component is getting women to like engineers.”

“What?”

“As a first step,” Roni continued, “we brought the Anahata women closer to the engineers and forced mixing of the sexes. You were an example of this — making a woman the technical lead of a project.”

Jennie couldn’t help but smile. She had been right. Her assignment — and Karla’s, and all those other girls in Fried Fred’s — it was all part of a weird experiment.

“From what we saw, bringing you and other girls into the engineering departments did increase male/female interaction a bit. But there are two problems. First, you women interact now with the engineers, but you’re still not dating them, just speaking to them. We had not anticipated that these two actions were distinct. Second, some of the female leads — like you — are destroying ambitious engineering projects.”

“But I — ” Jennie protested.

“Don’t take offense. We believe your failure on Social Car has nothing to do with your abilities or intelligence but a more general limitation of your gender.”

It was a demeaning conclusion, and the feminist in Jennie wanted to protest. But Roni was really just calling women failures, not Jennie specifically, and her ego was much more important to her than any larger social movement.

“That’s actually not the biggest problem,” Roni said. “Because even if I can get you girls to stop ruining our engineering projects and start dating the guys on your team, our approach still isn’t scalable. We can’t have women leading all of our technical projects if we want to be innovative. Besides, that would mean just one woman to every three to five men. Women can’t reproduce quickly enough for that to be a successful ratio.”

“What do you mean, ‘reproduce’? Are you talking about babies?”

“Ignore the reproduction part for now,” said Roni, waving the thought away with his hand. “The point is, how do I get more women to interact with the engineers at Anahata? It’s a real problem. Even when we got rid of the competition, we didn’t see enough uplift in dating or — ” Roni smacked his hands together, “coupling.”

“I’m not following you,” said Jennie, shaking her head. “Babies? Competition? Coupling?”

“Forget the babies, forget the babies. There are no babies — that’s part of the problem! But forget them for now. I will tell you about the competition part.”

With a few grunts, Roni leaned forward in his suit, dragging his girth forward as he squatted close to the ground. He drew two stick figures in the dirt: one with an enormous head and the other with large arms. “Let’s just say that there were two guys you could pick: a guy with a big brain or a guy with big biceps.”

“Yeah, there are a few of those around here,” said Jennie, a smile inadvertently crossing her lips as she thought of the squad of buff HM guys who ran drills each morning.

“Now say I’ve gotten rid of those guys,” he said, making an X over the muscle-bound figure.

“I don’t want you to get rid of those guys.”

Roni grimaced. “Well, we did it. That’s what the Horizontal Moves program is about. The sales guys are all at the bottom of the Anahata hierarchy now. And our engineers are the gods they deserve to be. The good news is that our data shows that now, when you women do talk to the engineers, you appreciate their higher status. As a result, there is a much higher success rate than in the past. We call it ‘coupling.’ So the coupling rate is much higher, although it still remains extremely low. Make sense?”

Jennie thought of all the women she had seen flirting with the engineers in Fried Fred’s. It did make sense in its odd little way.

“So when we force the genders together, we have some good results, but generally, most of the women on campus aren’t initiating conversations with the engineers. They just stay in their own buildings. So the two groups don’t interact, conversations don’t start, and coupling never occurs.”

“You mean you want us to seek you guys out?” Jennie laughed. “Your logic is all wrong. Women aren’t the hunters; we choose from everything that’s offered to us. I mean, unless they’re like me. I’m very assertive. As a feminist, I believe that — ”

“I want to know about normal women,” Roni said. “Not feminists.”

“Well, my point is that the engineers need to come find us. And then they have to convince us that they are the ones we want.”

“Okay, Okay, I see,” Roni said. “So we need a way to find the women. And then we need a way to facilitate conversation.”

Jennie nodded.

“So, you are a woman. Tell me how to do this.”

She shrugged. “Without fundamentally changing the engineers? Hmm…nothing occurs to me off the top of my head.”

Roni’s face fell, his fat suit slumping like a deflated balloon atop the caked mud.

“I should go,” he sighed, casting his drawing stick into the bushes.

Without saying more, he dropped onto his belly, his face now at eye level with Jennie’s shoes. He began to crawl slowly away, dragging bits of leaves with him as his fat suit bounced behind the bushes. Jennie made a swifter exit and headed to the parking lot.

As she slid into her car a few minutes later, Jennie realized that she had forgotten to ask Roni about Social Car.

“Ugh,” she groaned, grimacing as she imagined the coming weeks of boredom.

Her phone dinged again with a message. It was Arsyen. The guy just couldn’t take a hint.

Jenni, I need horses and guns. I have big revolution in pants.

“What guy doesn’t have a big revolution in his pants?” Jennie muttered.

I mean big revolution plans, Arsyen wrote a second later. Which made even less sense than a revolution in his pants. This guy really needed help with his pickup lines.

She tossed her phone into the passenger seat.

And then it hit her — the solution to Roni’s problem. It was so blindingly obvious.

Jennie turned her head and looked back at the bushes. At the far end of the building, with the aid of an overhead security light, she could see a bush rustling in the windless night, moving like a bloated, leafy phantom in the direction of the entrance.

Jennie jumped out of the car and ran in pursuit of the waving bush.

The next morning, Jennie skipped into the Social Car cubicle with a box of bear claws and nearly tripped over a swivel chair that had fallen on its side. It seemed Sven and Jonas weren’t even trying to keep her out anymore — they just didn’t care.

It was obvious no work had been done in days. Drawings of robots were scattered across the whiteboard; Red Bull cans were stacked in a perfect pyramid, clearly untouched.

Jennie sidled up alongside Jonas, who didn’t look up from his screen. From what she could tell, he was on a messaging forum, calling himself Wei and arguing about vegetables. To his left, Arsyen’s desk was cleared off and spotless — a rarity at Anahata. Two pink sponges were stacked in the center; above them sat a note from Arsyen asking Sven to please look after them.

Jennie shifted in place just slightly so she could get a better look at her blue-eyed enemy. She studied his profile from across the cubicle and decided he actually wasn’t bad-looking — particularly if he could just get rid of the dorky plastic sandals and weathered summer camp T-shirt. Then again, a costume change would probably not have any bearing on his abrasive personality.

Taking a deep breath, Jennie walked toward Sven’s desk. She noticed his jaw tighten as she moved into his field of vision. She dropped her bait onto Arsyen’s empty desk.

Sven’s nose lifted. Jonas scooted his chair to the left to grab a bear claw from the box, but her hand blocked his reach.

“Where’s Arsyen?” she asked him.

“We have not seen him in 4.6 days,” Jonas said.

“No matter,” said Jennie, lifting her hand. “Two people are ample resource to build our project.”

“You have an idea,” snorted Sven, eyes glued to his screen.

“Not only that. I have a project that’s already been approved by Building 1.”

Sven stopped what he was doing and partially swiveled his chair to face her.

“Building 1. Barry’s building?”

Jennie grinned.

“We’re bringing back Social Car,” she said, “but on the mobile phone.”

They stared at her, and then at each other.

“I’ll explain,” she said. “Let’s say you saw a cute girl — maybe at Fried Fred’s. Would you go up and talk to her?”

“Well…,” said Sven.

“Um…,” said Jonas.

“Right. But if that girl was online, things would be different, right? Like Jonas, a second ago you were chatting in a forum. You had no problem pretending to be someone else.”

“That’s because there are no consequences online,” Sven said. “If someone doesn’t want to talk to you, you just move on to the next person.”

“Because the fear of rejection is a lot lower on the internet, right?”

Jennie walked to the whiteboard and drew a rectangle. “This is a mobile phone,” she said. Within the phone, she drew a bunch of squares with people’s faces. “Now what does this look like?”

“A bit like the Social Car dashboard, I guess,” said Sven, flipping open a can of Red Bull.

“I get it! I get it!” shouted Jonas, jumping up and racing to the whiteboard. “If you put Social Car on a mobile phone, you suddenly can see all the girls around you. You no longer need a car to meet or talk to them! And if they reject you, they reject you on the internet. So it is not real rejection. But if they like you, then you can talk to them!”

“And meet them,” Jennie continued. “And because we’re using Social Car technology, we’ll know exactly where you are and can show you people nearby.”

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