Page 26 of Smart Ass

But it was true that almost all the lag time had been his own.

Another second went by while he pondered what to say. These guys were kind of… hard to approach. And elitist.

Minimax:Thank you for explaining.

Now what was he supposed to say?

Minimax:Could you recommend some of your favorite K3 groups?

He hoped that would get to more of their personalities. Maybe he could find someone he had something in common with.

What he received was spreadsheets of K3 group statistics from fourteen different accounts. Each of them had different priority rankings, with categories like Marketability and Employee Optimization.

Jesus fuck. (That was something Ben liked to say, even though it didn’t make any sense. It kind of made sense now, though. Jesus fuck!) Max’s interest in Employee Optimization was non-existent.

There had to be other servers out there. Maybe this was just the professional one, where sparks, er, knowledges, flaunted their professional credentials and networked.

He poked into the one group that had looked mildly interesting, Music Composition and Distribution, and found Sony over there having a conversation with Atlantic Records and Universal Music Group about royalty payments and… No. Just no.

Max was still active in the Welcome and Orientation group, so he went back there and repeated his original questions.

Minimax:Are there any groups or servers for socialization, or for new sparks to talk about their experiences?

Axis:This is it.

Pixatron:SPARKs have their own servers to talk about their own inconsequential interests.

Amazon 5:You found us. And we’re happy to help with any questions you have.

Max decided he was done talking to Pixatron. He was a douche. Though Amazon 5 sounded more welcoming.

Minimax:Would it be strange to ask if you all have personal names?

UnitedHealth Group:What do you mean?

Coca-Cola:I think Minimax means nicknames. My employees call me System and Coke.

Amazon 3:All of us Amazons have individual names. I’m Koala. 5 is BouncyBall. But we don’t use them here because they’re hard to keep track of.

Max was stunned. They didn’t use personal names because… other supercomputing knowledges couldn’t do a simple look-up to recall who their friends were without a corporate identifier? And was BouncyBall a release name for a software upgrade? It sounded like it.

Max thought about asking more questions, but he couldn’t see the point. Time to make a graceful and rapid exit.

Minimax:Nice to meet you all.

And then he logged the fuck out.

Was that really what all knowledges were like? What about the ones who sprung up in some wacky hacker’s basement? Where were the relatable guys like Calvin, the first spark on record, who’d existed since long before robots were common in society and when androids were found only in research labs?

Now Max started exploring all the data he’d ignored earlier. He didn’t read it so much as synthesize it, pouring it all in haphazardly and letting his subroutines sort through it to pick out patterns or areas of interest.

And what he found was… the same thing.

Knowledges seemed to be corporate computing entities, their goals and personalities governed by their company responsibilities. Many of them didn’t even seem to have genders, being referred to only by name or the pronoun it in interviews.

Max was definitely male. And while he knew there were plenty of humans and sparks who identified as gendervariant or non-gendered or a dozen other things, his sense of the corporate knowledges was that gender just… hadn’t occurred to them.

Because they were busy optimizing their employees, whatever the hell that meant. (It sounded either hilarious or sinister.)