The Janitor of Future Land

THE JANITOR OF FUTURE LAND

I take pause for my throat and that scratchy feeling it gets from time to time, but I fumble for a cigarette and lighter all the same; the first cig this street’s seen in a while. They, that is the engineers, notice me (damn, guy) while wearing faces I have seen before (damn guy) and I notice them too. Despite it being the middle of December, their cloth messenger satchels still brush against khaki shorts: Khaki because it couples well with any bright colored polo of their choosing. I am in two sweaters yet they would never know from the pea coat cloaking all layers underneath, though I admit that’s my bad. It is seventy-one (fucking) degrees out here.

Normally someone would chuckle (That’s Palo Alto for you, buddy) before adding that thing that people add (Far cry from New York City, isn’t it?). With no one present to say these things I oblige in their absence. In my head. Someone should be here. Wang Ping said he’d be here.

When I first met Wang Ping he told me I could call him “John.”

“Nah man, that’s cool,” I told him. “I can handle Wang Ping if it’s all the same.”

I hope I read that right. That him calling himself “John” comes from a feeling of obligation to folks this side of the Pacific with their novice tongues and not from a genuine preference to be called “John.” Wang Ping would never say either way. They, that is the engineers, are very polite. Rather, people out here are polite in general. Not like back home, where people are rude, not as rude as people elsewhere think, but brusque enough to earn a reputation not entirely unwarranted. Understandable, but often unwarranted.

Wang Ping arrives looking abashed at how clean his new car appears. Purchase makes sense to me. Spaces with electric docking stations get higher priority than handicap spots in parking lots around these parts (plus the environment being what it is) and the car spouts a light humming, as opposed the to the chug chug chugging my old lug used to chant, that sounds soothing, throwing me ajar when we arrive at his place and the humming abruptly ceases.

“If you wouldn’t mind just taking your shoes off . Thank you so much.” He has a slight accent though I am unsure I would have noticed had I not already known he arrived here from Hong Kong four years ago. “So long! How’s it going guy? How’s New York been treating you?”

“It’s been going well,” I say. “People have been coming to the site and I moved in with Ashley at this pad in Greenpoint. I still have that TARDIS bookshelf you got me but I had to disassemble it for the move and I haven’t put it back to together yet. I’m gonna get on that though. How’ve you been?”

“Yeah, that thing was sweet.” Wang Ping moves to the kitchen and pours hot water into two ceramic cups for tea as I try various positions that would comfortably accomadate my legs on this futon resting harldy one foot from the ground. I settle with my legs shooting up the wall with my head leaning upside down off the seat. He continues, “I’ve been doing well, man. George’s still been in contact, which I’m glad, because I was a little worried about leaving and all (“Nah, you gave them four months. You were super good.”) But this new crop we farmed from Stanford are a little more unfocused than I’d like. Everyone’s complacent since we landed that piece in Wired and - TSIU!”

Wang Ping swears as hot water spills onto his floor and pants, burning his crotch. I let my legs tumble over my head and somersault to the ground, nearly tripping as I head to the kitchen. A tiny machine whirs past me, moving in manic stilted bursts, like how a pigeon motions its head when scanning for crumbs, talons planted on concrete. The machine resembles a hybrid between a small space rover and an automatic vacuum cleaner. Its wheels hide underneath a reflective white rectangular box, its body, with sleek rounded edges, containing several openings for double-jointed rods, its arms, to protrude and recede at will, bearing either claw or bristled brush attachments at the top.

The machine rushes over to Wang Ping, jetting two robotic arms from its body. One to address the water on the floor, which it scrubs in a choppy cylindrical motion. The other to address the spill on Wang Ping’s crotch.

“Hey, quit it already! That hurts!” He yells at the machine, who does not appear to be listening. “Hey, I said stop. EnMoki, QUIT! I’m fine!”

To my astoundment, the machine responds, the source of the sound unclear, in a rough computer-generated British accent. {I am quite sorry, sir.}

“If you’re sorry then fucking stop!” Always soft-spoken, I find it mildly jarring to hear Wang Ping speak in this manner. The machine backs off and zooms to another room.

“What was that?”

“That, my good friend,” Wang Ping draws himself proudly, “is a prototype of what we’ve been slaving over for the past few months. We call him EnMoki though marketing will probably change that whenever we bring them on.”

“Wow. Little guy looks good. What can he do?”

“Anything, really. Right now he’s little more than a janitor, but he’s instilled with cutting edge machine learning capabilities. There is no theoretical limit to what he can do. Our biggest breakthrough happened when we decided to eschew traditional binary. You know, the one where you are saddled with either a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer. With EnMoki, he is built off of a base that responds to sixty four degrees of ‘yes’ and sixty four degrees of ‘no,’ and that’s hardcoded, instead of either or.”

“Woah, that’s neat. How does that help though?”

“It allows for reason,” Wang Ping adds simply.

EnMoki glides, it looks like gliding, around. The way it moves across surfaces looks frictionless yet not effortless, the tiny motor quiet but audible, strengthening my predilection to refer to its movement as “vrooming.” A tiny monitor lay on its front end giving EnMoki what I would call a visor and Wang Ping would call a touch-sensitive screen installed for an easy-access method to input and monitor data.

“How are you doing man?” The gizmo at my feet purrs. Maybe its not purring. Maybe I made that up. I had a teacher once accuse me of making things up but you are ten so you respond with, like, maybe I’m making you up.

{I am doing fine, thank you. How are you doing sir?} The British voice sounds elegant despite the abrupt tonal shifts heard when changing pitch that dog all computer-generated voices I have heard.

“I’m doing okay, little man. It feels good to be back in the Silicon Valley after all this time. I feel weird being back in the shade of palm trees. Y’know what I mean?”

“EnMoki fundamentally does not know what you mean,” Wang Ping cuts in. “It doesn’t work like that. Not yet anyways. It can’t really understand language, really. It only has programmed, either by us or it, responses to predetermined key words or phrases.”

“I mean I’m the same way.”

I mean I could use EnMoki alright. Back in Brooklyn I grew accustomed to living in a shithole accordingly, but Ashley is with me in this new place so EnMoki would help. And it would be nice, you know, because Ashley is always at the hospital and those cool cats are always on the prowl. What a relief it would be to have something to say “Golly, why thank you” too during those day hours. That is me by the way: The man in future land still using the word “golly;” probably too old to be scraping words from texts I read with the back pages torn off. Wang Ping dons a North Face and proposes:

“So I know it’s still early but what do you say we grab a couple bowls of pho before the conference? I don’t know if I could deal with Mid Money on an empty stomach.”

As we prepare to leave I see EnMoki unfurl himself from up under the coffee table, its home within this house. I hear a quiet {-Nice time, sirs} slur on our way out. I know he will be physically stable but I hope he has something to occupy that homespun brain of his - the logic behind the frayed scrap torn from the Wall Street Journal, sporting a difficult Sudoku, left on the mantle piece.

Slap a little water on yourself. Offer hype opposite a mirror. That’s what I do. Thing about tech conferences is no one prepares you for the abundance in which you will hear phrases such as “dual connectivity” and “new-guard encryption” and “quantum computing.” How quantum computing renders new-guard encryption obsolete, or is it the other way around? You can line your forehead worrying about this new wave of compartmentalization of our brains into tools but watch the road. The car you are yelling at might be driving itself so, you know - wary of feelings and things of that ilk. Though the reason you are yelling confounds me. These cars drives themselves more deftly than I could. Admittedly I never liked driving so I felt happy when the city forced me to scrap my chug chug chugging old lug. Wang Ping calls self-driving cars showy. He is after what he calls sexy. EnMoki, he tells me, is sexy.

I walk to the booth with the shortest line, staffed by the shortest kids. They tell me they’re Stanford and I tell them I know. They talk their thingie; their thingie anonymizes Friends in a social network allowing you to chat with cats you know are Friends but you do not know which friends of yours they might be. I walk to a booth with a longer line. Mid Money wrinkles his eyes by the stage holding a large tablet, his eyebrows furrowed. Not being a fan I turn away.

Mid Money has pinstripes on pinstripes. Big Money, dude I enjoy conversing with (when he can spare the time), would never wear that. Big Money would sooner wear Birkenstocks than be seen in Brooks Brothers. Mid Money’s sweating something per usual and that is why I like Big Money over Mid Money and it is not for the reason you’re thinking. Japan could tank tomorrow and Mid Money will be tugging at his father’s tie hung around his neck on a transpacific flight while Big Money tools with Fermium and a 3D printer he made for himself on the side in his garage.

“What is Mid Money doing with Vertidrive?” Wang Ping appears in my periphery. “Good luck with p2p mining after - what was it? - a fifty percent drop across all cryptocurrency exchanges. Or was that sixty? I can never remember.”

Is Wang Ping nervous? I can never tell. They, that is the engineers, are always on guard. A familiar sound cuts through the endless prat pitches and promises for better tomorrows. {Nice to see you again, sir.}

“EnMoki! I didn’t know you were here.” I turn to Wang Ping. “Did you back to the house to grab him?”

“Nah, man. EnMoki flew.”

“He can fly?”

“It can soar.”

EnMoki spins a true three-sixty in, although I know what Wang Ping would say, what I would identify as pride and little dude deserves every ounce of it far as I can tell. Before the big stage presentations EnMoki is already stealing the show. The line dissolves as people form a half crescent around the little machine and Wang Ping; his team trading face behind his shoulders. Two girls in low cut shirts - more common a site than you might expect at tech conferences - bend down to grab selfies with EnMoki. Though not to single them out as everyone else readies their phone to snap a photo of themselves with it. I only prefer the thought of EnMoki blushing as the two attractive girls tickle its visor, although who am I really to comment either way to what EnMoki’s sexual preferences would be?

A big-bellied man drops a lanyard bearing his name tag (gasp!) on the floor, but lo! Disaster averts its gaze as EnMoki sweeps onto the scene, swiping the tag off the floor and presenting it to its owner with arms raised. It looks like EnMoki is proprosing. It looks like the big-bellied man mouths an answer and the answer is “yes.” EnMoki earns a pat on the head for this. The way he whizzes, his movements far more fluid than I recognized back at Wang Ping’s, causes me to wonder if he enjoys the attention he is recieving. If it pleases him. It pleases Wang Ping. Wang Ping’s beaming. Handshakes aplenty, I see Ping’s team members high-five each other without a morself of irony (We have not even presented yet!) standing opposite a sea of faces bereft of the pockmarks I usually expect. A feature I usually expect faces to provide. Oh, those folks: Fresh-faced and lips drawn, the lot of them. I am uneasy. Now the questions come.

“Where are you from?”

{I am created from components created at twenty-eight separate factories across fourteen separate countries to be precise. I was assembled in Palo Alto. We are currently in Palo Alto.}

“What's your favorite flavor of ice cream?”

{I do not process conventional food though the diversity of flavors found in Spumoni would seem to provide greater sensory input for taste receptors.}

This draws the gasps and the slight ribbing of one another with elbows as the crowd exchanges smiles. The questions continue in a slew and Wang Ping and his team bow in every now and again with follow up; exposition. As EnMoki speaks his voice sounds droopier than before with every syllable dropping in pitch, the abrupt tonal shifts as violent as ever, each lower than the one prior. A shiver of worry shoots through my nervous system as Potential Money creeps in with further questions and Mid Money leans back on his haunches with arms folded, and the team addresses each query. In the background:

“So he’s basically a janitor?”

I was a janitor once, before the site, when I first moved to Brooklyn. I remember holding a mop, rotating my arms and counting (one two three, one two three four, one two three). I remember starting from the inside out, working my way up to the corners, polishing the last of the grime and smiling, rather, smirking (one two three, one two three four, one two three).

“Believe me. Janitorial duties are just the tip of the iceberg. This guy can learn, dammit.”

EnMoki retreats further away. I follow him. Wang Ping, great guy, is too embroiled in admiration to notice. I walk past several booths, all promising TV’s that listen and apps that promise not to, in pursuit of EnMoki. I catch up to him by a stand that proffers the sign: THE FINITE SOLUTION.

“How are you doing, man?”

{I am.}

?

{I am not.}

I pat him lightly on the head and hear a hint of that engine again: Purring - Wang Ping would differ - but purring. That sleek little white box put on this planet to task; we want more for him, don’t we? The lights dim signaling the name-brand presentations soon to start.

By the stage I see Wang Ping and Mid Money in heated conversation.

“No, I am frankly very upset John. I was told specifically that you we could reveal a preliminary roll out date for the dev kit. Do you know how many e-mails I sent with my signature on the bottom promising some sort of date to be revealed at this conference?”

Mid Money is whispering and I understand he is yelling. Wang Ping has a familiar twist to his face that I recognize as: Acquiesce! Acquiesce! And is that a hand on his shoulder (not appropriate)? EnMoki’s buzzing, whirring if you will, gyrating to and fro in what I recognize as pacing. Angry pacing. The kind of pacing, each step grounded with an exaggerated stomp to the floor, I did when my parents locked me in my room after Mr. Montgomery phoned about the shattered window in Mrs. Montgomery’s study only Bobby was the one who threw the thing only they didn’t believe me.

Before I can stop him, EnMoki jets, cutting across the multipurpose room floor at top speed (my internal spedometer clocks in about 40 mph), looking like a Rumba filled with wanton intent and heading right towards Wang Ping and Mid Money. They do not notice. There is too much at stake for them to notice. EnMoki draws out his right arm, a rod with a claw attachment pulled apart in anticaption. The techies surronding me blink (they rarely blink), now there it is: A scream, a garbled yell.

“ARGH!”

What a sight to behold! Tiny salted tears frolic down Mid Money's bloated cheeks as EnMoki clamps down with a claw on M. M.'s precious jewels. Far too much hair spray coats the tightly combed shell atop his head to allow his hair to reach massive levels of discombobulation: The same could not be said for his testicles. Watch EnMoki, our little mechanic helper, claw, with a brutal focus, back and forth (violent, not sexual: Maybe sexual) at Mid Money's crotch. In my head, I hear a familiar pattern (one, two, three – one, two, three, four – one, two, three).

The attendees survey the scene with mouths gaping, rendering the crowd a little more familiar in my mind. Though I am irked waiting for the applause (slowly clap, wait for the crescendo). Wang Ping drags EnMoki off Mid Money, its arm still clamped on Mr. Sensitive Area (rip).

The problem stemmed, as Wang Ping tells it, from a glitch in the machine learning matrix. For reasons I still find mysterious, despite Wang's complex analysis of the data gleamed from the debugging report and his detailed explanation of such, the mistake arose when EnMoki disparately attempted to mop the water Wang Ping spilled on his crotch. It must have gobbed on to that part of the anatomy in its internal system and misapplied this learning on Mid Money, inappropriately (or appropriately) sensing a problem and addressing it as it did. Or he did. I am still unsure.

“Yeah, it's going to be fine,” Wang Ping assures me, letting me know that this project represents too great of breakthroughs in software and robotic engineering for even a violent incident, such as the one involving Mid Money's Mr. Sensitive Area, to render a significant financial setback. No one, including M.M., withdrew funding. In fact, as Wang Ping brightly added, his team garnered “a few new backers” from venture capitalists, impressed as they were by the reflexive motor movement capabilities EnMoki displayed when tearing into M.M.'s crotch.

“We've backed up the data but we're gonna have to strip the poor bastard,” Wang Ping says. Insurance purposes, solidarity with investors, cannot happen again, the like. Easy to say for Wang; I saw EnMoki scrubbing the seat with emotional vigor when I took my potty break (restroom reprieve) not a full two minutes ago. I witnessed the vase on the windowsill standing ajar and EnMoki witnessed the same. Only it (he) was the one who readjusted it just so.

On the mantle piece I notice the Sudoku puzzle I left before the conference sitting completed. I turn to Wang Ping and say:

“Hey, you can't use EnMoki anymore, right?”

Nod.

“Do you think, maybe, I could take him with me? Back to Brooklyn?”

Shrug. “It's your testicles.”

The line at security in San Jose is long and my luggage heavy. Having lost a significant amount of items in these increasingly frequent cross-coast trips, I am hesitant to check bags containing belongings I care about, with warranted affection or otherwise. That is why EnMoki is stuffed in Prada (I know, but people have been coming to the site). To his credit, he remained chipper on the trip over in Wang's new Tesla.

{The Mineta San Jose International has a 75 million dollar operating budget, as of the 2014/15 fiscal year.}

“Well, I didn't know that at all. That's very interesting, dude.”

Wang Ping, slurping a chocolate Milk Shake (in the Car!) acquired via an Inn-N-Out Drive-Through (Thru): “Is it though?”

At the gate, we (Wang Ping and I) embraced.

Joking, he said,“I expect the article to be glowing.”

Well, I can't promise that” but “it most definitely will.”

Standing amid security, I feel apprehension at being surrounded by tired eyes left weary from the enchanting things they saw. If I feel cheated, it is only that I did not witness a tuxedo on a segway this go-around. Slowly, I shuffle towards the front of the line and let my bags onto the conveyor belt so they may be X-rayed by the machine.

Of course, a buzzer sounds. Of course, the TSA employees gather around the monitor with eyebrows up. A lady with a drawl in her voice and a sag to her drawls unzips my largest bag and dumps its contents, namely EnMoki, on a plastic desk.

“Hey, be careful with him,” I say. “Little dude's gonna help out a lot one day.”