How are you? Wanted to reach out to see if you are on the job market. I emailed you too. I just joined C__ a couple of months ago and there are multiple positions open, including contract positions. Let me know if you are interested. It can be remote (US). By the way, I read your book! It was a while ago when I came across it. I was so excited to see it and bought it immediately! Enjoyed it very much! Meant to write to you after I read it but somehow didn’t get around to it.

 

I was flattered. R__ had read my novel. Not many had. And then she had both texted and emailed me. It wasn’t hard to read between these lines.

She needed me.

 

This was unexpected. Ours is a dying field, linguistics, one of many in its death throes, now that AI has shown so much of human existence is not as magical as we always thought, and in fact is entirely probabilistic. On LinkedIn I saw eminent linguists left and right looking for a job or becoming college admissions consultants. I myself wasn’t exactly out of a job; I’d just finally come to terms with the state of my sales on Bookscan and started looking again, which is why I was on LinkedIn.

I’d seen it coming years before. Saved some money. Turned to creative writing in revenge. Which is not to say writing was easy, but it was something I’d been good at before linguistics, and it still felt magical. And then I had just enough success, a flash fiction in a top-tier journal, a literary novel with a mid-tier press no one read, long-listed for a national award nonetheless. But my lawlessness brought its own reductiveness, and it turned out probability modeled that too. After two years of trying and failing to fix what I thought were my first novel’s limitations in the second, I had two dead attempts in a computer file and was feeling beset. Alternately worthless as a person. Or just all of existence meaningless. Guilty about how little I was contributing financially. Regretful of all I’d not been given or given up. Increasingly insane after so much time alone on my computer. No longer able to hear the effect of my own words or  at times even their grammaticality.

Depending on the day.

 

R__ and I arranged to talk on the phone.

I was nervous, already laughing when she greeted me. Laughter slipping out like a long-held breath. Overcome by a gladness that could equally have been called relief to be speaking with another linguist. Her simple salutation became a performative act acknowledging the ineffability of my existence. I also hadn’t heard her voice in years, those particular inflections of her nation that signaled wealth and education, the distinctive pronunciations and intonations erupting through her own uniquely gravely timbre as she now launched into conversation, were more distinctive to me than her face, and flooded me with sanguine remembering.

I’d done some consulting work for R__ before, and so as I listened, I also figured I already knew what I was getting into. R__ ’s dominating, in a word. Like some bossy older sister who always has to be in charge and you have to listen to. Whenever there was inherent ambiguity in my language data, she’d expect me to agree with her reading and just ignore the others. But back then I hadn’t really cared. I was already sick of the linguistic tunnel-vision that had been steadily creeping in from computer science, and also my first novel was out on submission, so I was already halfway out the door.

And once more in my gladness, I was looking past it too, all the way back to a memory from graduate school, where we’d only ever been on equal footing, whether debating if we should go for a smoke or the infinite complexities of language. Both of which I’d long since stopped, except occasionally if drinking.

R__ said she was building a specialized new team and mine would be a senior position, second only to hers as team manager. The pay she quoted me was incredible, stratospheric compared to what a linguistic researcher in academia makes, and then she smiled conspiratorially and said I should ask for even more. I could only imagine the kind of money she was making. When I’d last consulted for her, we’d been in academia. C__ was a huge, multinational telecommunications corporation. I said I’d like to start half-time. Already, paradoxically, picturing new black holes, wanting to squirrel away a little of my own writing time. Because for both humans and AI, feedback is fire, and once more thoughts of my second novel glowed hot with potential. My sudden unforeseen success in this one area of my life was spreading to every other part of my mind.

Fine, she said, fine.

Great, I said, great, I’m looking forward to it, I can’t wait.

 

It’s too good to be true, I told my husband as I waited through the next few weeks of corporate red tape. Except it wasn’t. We could finally fix our 1940s-era kitchen. I’d be doing real linguistics again, embarking on an adventure with my old friend from graduate school. And best of all, I’d be gathering firsthand experience for my second novel, a crucial ingredient I now saw had been lacking in my prior attempt. An enigmatic young linguist working in cutting-edge corporate tech, some kind of rapidly deepening tension, maybe a minor plot romance; it really was a very cool premise. I flooded with endorphins, and in my mind, I saw R__’s soft, round cheeks, her huge, black eyes. I like her so much, I told my husband, I really always liked her so much.

 

What is a novel? “A detailed, extended narrative that explores human experience through a connected sequence of events,” Google’s generative chatbot tells us today. It’ll say something different when its training data changes in a couple of weeks. But it won’t mention the powerful biochemicals driving us to write and read them, to speak and touch and otherwise communicate from deep inside our dark. My first novel was totally intuitive, especially as I have no MFA, no formal training beyond high school and what I absorb from all the fiction reading and movie-watching I do. It all rushed out unstoppable in the wake of the birth of my first child. Who was in school when I was writing the second and my intuition said, use it to make a difference in our fucked-up world, and when my agent summarily rejected it after a year of intense labor, I went cold and white and stiff. Had been trying and failing ever since to do what Toni Morrison did, think of something only I could write, something I’d want to read that which didn’t exist yet.

I’m using Google’s famous art deco spaces to model the opening scene, the setting my enigmatic young linguist enters on her first day. In reality, I just sat in my living room and turned on the new laptop someone at C__ send me. I set up my online meeting platform, then a thing called Slack I’d never used before, then my new inbox. Already I had mail. I carefully read a long, generic attachment of corporate rules and regulations. Then, embarrassingly earnestly, an employee testimonial about positivity and accountability in the workplace. Then a weekly productivity summary whose numbers staggered me, on the order of billions. After that it was time to join my first official online meeting with my new team. I was nervous, clicking the camera on, but needlessly so, for I was the only one there. Up until I published my novel, I’d hated looking at my own face, and now the feeling’s back again, but then I was in the after and also in the before, and I was wearing armor, black eyeliner, a nice white collared shirt and silvery scythes in my ears, and I was just fine with my large, angular features, even the lines I didn’t until that moment notice had gotten so deep across my forehead and around my mouth and eyes.

I waited. And waited. For over twenty minutes, and I was definitely wondering, nervous again, checking Slack and my email for some sign, but then the screen split in two and there we were, just the two of us, R__ and I framed side by side.

Humans don’t know yet how to define all the effects of our biochemicals. Maybe one day AI will solve that problem too. The last time I’d worked for R__, all our meetings had been over the phone, so I hadn’t actually seen her since graduate school. She’d gained a lot of weight. That was one thing, which wasn’t a thing, except in her case it was, I don’t know why. But it was her eyes moving over my armor that I saw first, small and cold and hard, sunk into her puffy flesh like dead doll eyes. Next that she was really casually dressed in a sweatshirt. Then the impressive corner office space behind her with windowed walls overlooking a sun-drenched cityscape.

“Is that Phillie?” I said, startled, for I knew she’d stayed after grad school, but I didn’t recognize it.

She laughed. “Don’t you know about wallpaper?” Still bossy, but now with an added thread of cruel. Then shook her head and said, “I always use wallpaper. I don’t want anyone at C__ knowing anything about my private life.”

I registered ambiguity. Paranoia and coded warning. Either way, weird. Maybe she felt it. She tweaked the topic then, asked how I was, but I just said fine, because obviously, I was feeling pretty good. Then I asked after her husband and kid, and she startled me again by saying she’d recently gotten divorced and had no relationship with her kid. Kept shaking her head. Said the corporate job she’d had before this one had been really difficult. Then she sat back and lit a cigarette.

“Well, I should tell you about this project,” she said.

 

How much detail to give? This is one of the things I’m struggling with. I need technical details to convey the scope of this tragedy, but the reader wants them packaged in a compelling and easily digestible way. I’ve experimented with bringing them into the dialogue, using “th” for my young linguist’s laugh, because in the International Phonetic Alphabet that is the symbol for the sound she makes. Is it really that hard to process a breathy plosive alveolar stop? I thought the reader would hear it, feel it in their mouth, and in this way embody my young linguist intuitively. But the freelance editor I recently paid an exorbitant amount to critique the first fifty pages said she thought a gremlin had gotten into the document, and when I explained, shot me down right out of the gate with, “Sorry, but it draws all the breath from the room.”

 

R__ talked nonstop for a couple of hours that first day and every day thereafter for the next few weeks. All I did was listen. We met once a day and she told me about the multimillion-dollar chatbot we’d be working on. I absorbed as much as I could, but her flow was so rapid and intense, her distinctive pronunciations and intonations blurring in increasingly chaotic monologues, apparently defining for me the scope of our intersection with all the other teams who were also working on this chatbot, and our own part in which didn’t seem to have actually begun yet, mostly in a language I didn’t yet know comprising a dozen team acronyms and their manager names and C__’s own private corporate vocabulary. I took a lot of notes but still a lot of it I missed, and for some reason I didn’t want to tell her this. Anyway, after a while I got the gist. “th, okay, so, you’re telling me there are only two linguists on this entire project,” I said.

For an instant, she looked back at me, grim. Then her torso slumped precipitously. She lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out heavily. “Oh my god, it’s such a mess. I’ve been here three months, and I still have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing yet. And some of the other team managers don’t even think they need linguists on this,” she said.

 

Without technical detail, how do I write the rest? Why do I even want to? Sometimes I think it’s all a toxic pool of biochemical revenge.

Then I put it away for weeks. And it’s such a relief.

 

After that, I started attending all the virtual inter-team meetings with R__. This was weird, and tense, and sometimes psychedelic. Like when you go to a place where you don’t the speak the language and yet you’re still picking up a lot of meaning. It all seemed so animal to me there. Statistically by far, most managers were males. All the females were anachronistically deferential, silently competing while the males beat their chests and tossed around terms like “story” and “epic,” which I’d never in a million years imagined could apply to project management. But such is the power of human language. And we learn to speak it incredibly fast. But even once I picked it up, still they talked in circles around the chatbot’s poor dialogue performance without ever seeing how to fix it.

That was why R__ and I were there. But no one ever mentioned linguistics.

 

My young linguist says important things in these meetings; she couldn’t give a flying fuck how those knuckle-draggers perceive her. Moreover, as a linguist, she knows how to manipulate their speech, force them to be silent while she schools them on the source of the chatbot’s dialogue problems and how to fix them. But R__ said nothing. In my head I urged her, “say something!” As for me, I said nothing only because technically I was her subordinate. I didn’t want those animals to think I was disrespecting her.

I laughed a lot when R__ and I met privately. I guess I had less stake than her, and it just all seemed so absurd. We met less often because she had also started attending long management meetings to which I wasn’t privy. Frequently she came to me from those in grim despair, complaining how she tried to speak but no one else understood or even cared about linguistics anymore. I’d offer her all the important things I’d left unsaid during the inter-team meetings, but she’d shut me down right out of the gate. She didn’t want to hear my readings. She said opaque things like “it’s too early to do anything,” and “many things are in flux.” She told me I gave her confidence. And how glad she was I was there.

 

Then one afternoon when R__ joined our private meeting, she left her video off. And through the blackness where her face should be, she began to shriek at me. High-pitched, breathy speech, spewing toxic biochemicals, saying I was doing a terrible job, and all this time I should have been coming up with a plan, because that was why she’d hired me.

 

I don’t want to write a female victim; there are already to many out there. This time, I want to write a hero. Does she really have to vulnerable, as that freelance editor claimed, in order for the reader to connect to her? Would that still be required if she were male?

 

I remember my heart pounding. Using a soothing voice with R__ and repeating low as if to an animal, “??ke:I. ,??ke:I., ??ke:I.” And eventually, she calmed down. After which it emerged that a nation-wide C__ AI Lab Week was occurring in three weeks, and her own manager had just informed her that he expected her to have a “story plan” ready to present in the virtual showcase at the week’s end.

I assured R__ I would handle it. And to my surprise, she immediately agreed. I stopped going to meetings, even with her, and that was a relief. Now it was just me and the thousands of frustrated humans who daily fail to make C__’s customer service chatbot understand their business needs. C__ saves all that data, of course. For three weeks I worked unpaid overtime, and I came up with a damn good plan.

 

Too many details here, or not enough?

 

I sent R__ some slides. My tone was curt. “Looks good,” she wrote back. Victorious, I wrote again saying I’d like to increase my hours. She didn’t respond to that.

 

My young linguist kicks ass in her presentation. Her slides are engaging, and she’s got her armor on, dark blazer, white collared shirt, fresh buzzcut, black-lined gaze, silver scythes at her ears. On her screen thousands of faces around the globe are suspended in their little squares, and as she talks, she’s communicating to them the unexplained mysteries of language, and she’s seeing and feeling them all respond, all these humans walking a mind path her own words have created to a future space and time.

When she finishes, there’s silence. It’s hushed, pregnant. No one says a word. Until it grows absurd, and she doesn’t know any more if they don’t care, or dare, or understand, and she doesn’t care either because she knows she has a great idea and the expertise to make it real. She hears her own soft laugh. A breathy “t” with the lingering echo of a fading “h,” which is far too many words to describe it for a linguist who could just use the symbol th.

“Whonderfhul,” the product manager says then, and her voice is soft and full of breath, because human language is contagious. She’s one of the few female managers, and she wears a headscarf, and she’s recently started talking a lot, and my young linguist’s manager hates her.

“That was really valuable work,” says a prominent and extremely muscular male manager next. And then the manager of all the other managers moves my young linguist into a full-time position and gives her a team of her own.

 

R__ said nothing. Not then or the rest of the day or all weekend. Crickets.

But to a linguist, and a writer, and all human beings, silence has meaning.

First thing Monday morning, R__ said we needed to meet. Then came onscreen, took a visibly deep breath, and without preamble told me my part in the project was over.

I nodded, heart pounding almost out of my chest. “Everyone seemed to really like my presentation on Friday,” I said.

She lit a cigarette. “Yeah, we’re going a different direction,” she said.

I looked at her black marble eyes. “Whose decision was it?” I asked.

She paused. Then said, “Mine. I’m going to hire a full-time computer scientist instead.”

“t^h well, I can’t say I’m surprised,” I said.

 

A lot of experts say AI will one day be able to model the chemical reactions we humans experience as emergent thoughts and emotions. I wonder if it will let us have our own readings, or just tell us what to do.

In a tragedy, someone deals a death blow, but everyone dies in the end.