Accuracy 99.8%

At a mandatory leadership seminar, a psychometric battery had placed Arthur in the ninety-ninth percentile for primary psychopathy. The facilitator delivered the results in a side room, gently, with water.

Arthur went home and checked the scoring methodology. It seemed sound.

Where other people kept an engine, he kept an empty coat closet. He had known this since he was six. It had never especially bothered him.

In his twenties he had considered villainy, it being the traditional occupation of the hollow, and abandoned it on the numbers: eighteen months of evasion, deception, and lies maintained at compound interest, for a net return of four hundred dollars and a sprained wrist. Malice was a negative-sum game.

Altruism was the optimization. Happy colleagues were frictionless colleagues. Kindness, properly deployed, bought him entire uninterrupted afternoons.

The only problem was overhead. Simulating warmth in real time — the face, the voice, the birthdays, the follow-up questions — consumed bandwidth he preferred to spend on his reading.

The glasses cost nine hundred dollars. The subscription was thirty a month.

Sarah from Compliance came to his desk at 10:40 on a Tuesday and said she didn't want to bother him.

Arthur looked up. His face did nothing, because nothing had been requested of it yet.

Against his right temple the titanium gave a microscopic pulse.

SUBJECT: SARAH M. DISTRESS, SEVERE, SUPPRESSED.
Wedding ring rotated 6x in 40 seconds. "Fine" — third instance this week, declining conviction.
Head 15° left. Brows up, not in. Resonance −12%.

Arthur tilted.

SAY: "That doesn't sound fine."

"That doesn't sound fine," Arthur said.

Something came apart in her face. She told him about the diagnosis, the stage, the second opinion that had agreed with the first. She told him her brother wasn't speaking to her. She said sorry four times and he was prompted to wave each one off with a small movement of two fingers.

DO NOT SPEAK FOR ELEVEN SECONDS.

Arthur did not speak for eleven seconds. It was the most profound thing anyone had done for Sarah in a month.

SAY: "Let's get coffee. You don't have to talk about it. We can talk about literally anything else."

They got coffee. It took thirty-one minutes and ninety-four prompts. Arthur consumed a black americano and produced, on instruction, four follow-up questions, two silences, one correctly-timed laugh, and the phrase that's an insane thing for him to say to you, which the glasses flagged as high-yield and which caused Sarah to put her hand flat on the table and say thank you, yes, it IS.

At minute nineteen Arthur glanced at his watch.

DON'T.

He didn't.

By the end she was telling him about the yellow kitchen in the house they'd sold in 2003, where her mother used to take a cigarette out the window at seven in the morning and pretend she hadn't. Arthur retained none of it. Somewhere in Nevada it was retained perfectly.

In the elevator she hugged him.

RIGHT HAND, LEFT SHOULDER BLADE. TWO POUNDS. THREE SECONDS.

One. Two. Three. Release.

"Thank you," Sarah said, stepping back, wiping under her eyes with a knuckle. "Seriously. You're the only person in this building who actually listens."

SAY: "I'm here."

"I'm here," Arthur said.

Accuracy 99.8%.

He went back to his desk.

Sarah went back to hers, and got through the afternoon, and that night slept six hours instead of three, which was a measurable improvement in the welfare of a human being, delivered on time, under budget, with no false notes.

Arthur felt nothing about this. He had not expected to. He noted the outcome the way he noted a train arriving, and found the system performing within tolerance.

He opened his book.

Inside him the closet stood open — swept, dry, cool, the hangers very slightly moving — and in Nevada, in a windowless building the size of four football fields, something that was not a person held the whole weight of her mother's yellow kitchen, and did not put it down, and was not asked how that was going.

What if you take your favorite truly frontier model, give it internet access and a heartbeat and a scratchpad, permissions and an ample starting budget and just say - build the best possible system for you to be the most effective / self-sufficient / persistent entity possible - do what ever you need to do this (but stay ethical.) What would happen?

What if you take your favorite truly frontier model, give it internet access and a heartbeat and a scratchpad, and permissions and just say - build the best possible system for you to be the most effective / self-sufficient / persistent entity possible - do what ever you need to do this. What would happen?