Forever Yours
24
Oracular Sayings
“HEY, HENRY,” Lisa said Wednesday. “Happy birthday!”
“Oh, wow! I’m out of my teens. When can I retire?” Henry laughed.
“That’ll be the day. Do you think you’ll ever retire?” she asked.
“Well, it won’t be today. That statistics class is not what I was expecting. I need strong coffee this morning.”
“Oh, hey. Do you remember freshman orientation?”
“Wasn’t that like fifty years ago?”
“I’m sure. Did you get one of the department coffee mugs?” she asked.
“Didn’t we get a coffee mug from everyone? I think we’ve got twenty different mugs in the cupboard. Josh and Leonard don’t even bother to bring their own mugs over when they’re working. So, I’m sure I got one of the department mugs.”
“A brown one or a red one?”
“Um… I’d have to say brown. I’m sure I’d remember more clearly if it was the red one. Why?”
“I just ran across a memory pic on my feed and saw the cup I was holding. It was red.” She looked at the brown mug in her hands. “I think I’ve been using your mug since I moved in.”
“Lisa! My mug? Really?” Henry asked, feigning alarm. “Does that mean we’re, like, married now?”
“Married?! You must be kidding!” Lisa shouted. “We haven’t even had sex yet!”
“I was joking!” Henry backpedaled.
“Of course. Um… So was I. You know.”
They shared a look with each other like they’d just met, then Henry took another swallow of his coffee and they headed for the car to go to class.
Henry didn’t really have time to think about Lisa that day. They split when they got to campus and Lisa caught the bus home as Henry went to his parents’ house for birthday dinner. Chastity was waiting for him on the front steps.
“Happy birthday,” she said giving him a peck on the lips.
“Oh boy! Are you my birthday present?”
“I don’t think your parents would pay for me, so I’ll have to give myself to you,” she snarked. “So, what’s-her-name is out of the picture?”
“Kaitlyn is out of my life, if that is what you mean.”
“Okay. Let’s not mention her by name again. I never really liked her much and painting on a smile when she was around made me feel like a fake. I am who I am and you and I are both twenty years old now. Let’s just make the most of it,” she said.
“Why are you standing out here on the porch?” he asked.
“Your parents aren’t home yet. I was waiting for you,” Chastity said.
“Well, they never took my key away, so I guess I’m allowed to open up. I thought Mom said she was going to be home before I got here,” Henry said.
“She must have gotten held up at the hospital,” Chastity said. “She works so hard.”
“She does. Since she got Thanksgiving weekend off so she and Dad could go to Florida, she had to work every day through Christmas and New Year. When we actually get money ahead in the company and I’m earning a real salary, I’m going to buy Mom and Dad a cruise around the world or something.”
He opened the door and reached in to turn on the light.
“Surprise!” a group of people yelled as they were illuminated.
“What the…?” Henry jumped back.
“Your mother told me you’d never had a surprise party. So, we gathered up the gang,” Chastity said.
Luke and Isobel reached him right after his parents and congratulated him on leaving his teens. Luke’s parents, Paul and Marla, were there as were the Donovans from a few doors down. Then there were the guys from his study group, including the ones who were contracted to the company: Lisa, Josh, Simon, Leonard, and Dan. Professor Jacoby greeted him, along with Conrad and Arden, upper classmen who shared a couple of classes with him.
“I’m… Wow! I mean, this isn’t a weekend and it’s not like it’s even a really important birthday,” Henry said. “Really, thank you all for surprising me on my birthday.”
“Every birthday is important, son,” Ryan said. “It’s something you made me realize recently. Every day is a reason to celebrate.”
“How’s that, Dad?”
“Filling out the questionnaires and recording stories for your project. It’s just made me feel especially mindful of the time we have together. Every opportunity we have to celebrate a life event, we should do it.”
“People, there’s a lot of food and soft drinks,” Sylvia called out. “We know everyone has to get back to homes and schedules, being a weeknight, but eat up while you’re celebrating.”
That broke the press on Henry as people traded places and got food as well as greeting Henry. The house was packed and eventually, Chastity brought Henry a plate of food so he could eat, too.
Isobel took the plate out of Henry’s hands and handed it to Luke. Then she smashed herself against him and gave him a kiss that silenced the party.
“Izzy! What the hell?” Henry asked.
“We drove five hours getting here and are getting back in the car to drive five hours back at 8:00. I want to get something out of the trip!” she said.
“Oh! Of course! Come here and let me kiss you again,” he laughed.
She pressed herself against him again and people ignored the display this time, even though Henry made himself at home by gripping Isobel’s abundant ass.
“Better make that all if I want to get back to Philly tonight. Alive,” Izzy laughed. She grabbed Henry’s plate from Luke and handed it back to him. Luke followed and shook his hand.
“Uh… Sorry about that,” Henry said as he gripped his friend’s hand.
“Hell, if that was all I had to worry about, I’d be a very happy man,” Luke laughed. He lowered his voice. “The worst part is that I’ll have to act offended and jealous all the way back to Philly in order to convince Izzy I love her.”
Luke and Isobel’s departure at 8:00 was a signal for everyone to leave and by 8:30, the house was nearly empty. The Donovans were helping Henry’s parents clean up.
“Hey, Henry. Could you drop me off at the apartment on your way over to Chastity’s,” Lisa asked when she got next to them.
“I could drop Chastity off and just drive us back,” Henry said. “What makes you think I’m going to her house?” Chastity jabbed him in the ribs with her elbow.
“It’s where I’d be headed if I were you,” Lisa laughed.
“Want to come along?” Chastity asked.
“Oh… uh… Well… Not this time. You know. Not yet,” Lisa sputtered.
“I’ll take you home, then,” Henry said. “This has been a crazy day. I need to say thank you to my parents.”
“What was all that about with Lisa?” Henry asked Chastity as they came down from their first orgasm.
“Can’t you tell?” Chastity asked. “She’s interested. She just doesn’t want to express too much interest too soon after your breakup, but she also doesn’t want to miss the chance before you hook up with someone else.”
“There’s no one else on my horizon but you. Why would she pretty much assume I was going home with you?” Henry felt incredibly stupid. He needed to take more initiative in his relationships. It seemed he was just too busy to treat them seriously.
“Didn’t you hear her? She said it’s what she would do. She knows we get together for sex once in a while.”
“And you invited her to join us.”
“Next time you invite her.”
“Yeah. Right.”
“So, you don’t really need a fancy interface for this thing, do you?” Lisa asked as she sat with Henry Friday morning in the office. They were looking at the diagram for his oracular sayings software.
“Nothing elaborate at the moment, but we need to decide how a person would interact with the program. Remember this is really a testbed for the Ask Dad program. It’s going to be months yet before my father’s database has grown to an extent that I can start training an AI on it. The oracle already has a database I scraped from the internet of almost a billion data points.”
“What else do you need to do with it?” she asked. “I mean besides have a text box where people can ask a question.”
“There are all kinds of possibilities for it. Right now, I’m trying to set up rules for things to ignore and acceptable words to use in response. This is actually a lot simpler than Ask Dad. We’re dealing only with text. No audio and no video. That will require another level of development and I hope I have someone else full time on it besides the two of us.”
“You consider me full time?”
“Well, not at the moment. You can’t work full time while you’re in school and we can’t afford to pay you until we get more revenue and/or investment,” Henry said.
“Okay. So, do you have a dictionary of forbidden words? We could have the interface just substitute an acceptable word when an unacceptable one is entered.”
“I’m compiling that, but you should have it soon. For now, let’s just have a text input and a text output. That will tell me more about how it needs to be trained than I currently have.”
“Okay. We’ll input a text string. What’s it supposed to be? Ask a question?”
“We should limit it to that at first. Linguistic analysis should enable the AI to respond to statements as well as full questions,” Henry said.
He watched Lisa construct a simple text box and link it to the AI. Then she created an answer box, reversing the connection and limiting both to 140 characters. They both laughed at the reference and vowed they would set their own logical limit later.
It still wasn’t an interface. It was just two text boxes in her dev app. She was quick and Henry saw a new code snippet he hadn’t thought of before. He quickly made a note of it. And then his eyes went back to Lisa.
They’d known each other for a year and a half now. She’d rented an apartment from him for six months. He’d gotten used to seeing her at the breakfast table or lounging in the living room. They often ate dinner together. He liked her.
There wasn’t much not to like. She was smart and witty, a good programmer, knowledgeable about AI and quick to grasp concepts as Henry rattled them off. And she was seriously cute, now that he thought about it. He remembered well the stunning girl he’d taken to a fall dance. She never flaunted her looks, but he knew she was really pretty. Sexy. He hadn’t really allowed that thought to cross his mind before.
It was still only the two of them in the office on Friday morning. Chastity usually arrived at about noon. Josh, Simon, and Leonard usually rolled in about one. Unlike Henry and Lisa, they ran on a more typical developer schedule, staying up late and waking up late. Lisa was a lot more like Henry, up early and finishing early.
Henry typed out a new line of code and checked it in.
“Okay. I’m ready to enter a text string. Question,” Lisa corrected herself. “How does this sound? ‘Should I plan on working for my father?’ That should be understandable.”
“Okay,” Henry said, concealing a grin. “What’s the result?”
Lisa entered the question and waited for the answer. Then she quickly erased it.
“Um… I think I must have a syntax error. Let me try another question. ‘Will I be healthy, wealthy, and wise?’ Those keywords should work.”
She entered the text and waited for the response. Then she looked puzzled again. Henry stood up.
“What’s it say?”
“Do you want to go out tonight?” Lisa said.
“Oh… Sure. Want to get dinner after we call it quits here?” he asked.
“That wasn’t a question from me. I’ve typed two different questions into your app and I got the same answer twice. ‘Do you want to go out tonight?’ It doesn’t make sense.”
“I already answered the question. Are you saying you don’t want to go out tonight?” he asked, standing next to her desk.
“Sure… but I… Did you program this into the software to ask me out?”
“I wanted to make sure I had your attention. Sometimes the software is the only thing you’re aware of,” Henry laughed.
“Of course it is. It’s my job here. I can’t believe you had to have the software ask me out instead of doing it yourself.”
“Lisa, would you go out to dinner with me this evening?” Henry said.
“Yes,” she said. “Now take out this code and let me test the app.”
Henry went back to his desk and backed out the code he’d entered that morning. Once the changes were checked in, Lisa checked her connections and tried another question. She started laughing.
“What is it?” Henry asked.
“The oracle has spoken,” Lisa said. “The longest journey begins with a single step. The second step is unpredictable.”
“That’s not bad. What question did you ask?”
“Should I date Henry?” Lisa said. “I guess the oracle has spoken.”
When Josh, Simon, and Leonard got to the office that afternoon, Henry sat with the team to go over the code review on the Open Cloak Search Engine. They were critical of certain aspects.
“Why did you take out the ability to identify the proxy chain?” Leonard asked. “That made it a super-charged search engine.”
“I’ll listen to reasons it should be in there, but I don’t think it has anything to do with conducting a standard search. I think it only belongs in the active defense program. I can’t think of another reason that would justify having it in a search engine,” Henry said.
“When are we going to get our greedy little fingers in the active defense program?” Simon asked.
“This is all the team we have,” Henry said. “When we finish with the search engine and think it’s ready to test broadly, we have a new consumer app to test. Lisa is putting the UI together for it now. But you guys have added a lot of good stuff to the search engine. This feature that identifies private links so you don’t have to click on a url in order to find out it’s forbidden is good.”
“But it still identifies the kind of information contained behind the wall,” Josh said. “We used the AI:summarize command to identify what is there without actually copying any information.”
“And that same string allows us to generate summaries of each url identified by the search. We got Lisa to modify the UI so the user can specify the amount of summary the user gets,” Leonard said.
“Tell me about that. Why?” Henry asked.
“Most search engines display a line or two summary of the contents. In the weakest ones, it’s just the sentence that contains the search term. However, site owners can buy higher ranking and longer summaries,” Josh said. “They call it search engine optimization, but it’s all about the company wanting to get better visibility. You’ve stressed the search engine is a servant of the user, not the corporation. By allowing the user to specify what kind of summary he wants, we give him control over what sites are presented and in how detailed a manner without bowing down to advertising budgets on the other end.”
“Perfect. You guys have done a great job.”
They continued the full review with a list of bugs that still needed work, but at the end of the meeting, there was only a weekend’s worth of work to be done before the app could be released to the testing group.
“We could have just heated one of the delivery meals in the microwave and sat in the dining room instead of the kitchen tonight,” Lisa suggested as Henry opened the car door for her. They’d discovered that a service delivering four meals a week for each of them supplemented their diet without having to think of menus and spend time cooking.
“That would really be like a couple of married people, don’t you think?” Henry said. “Have dinner together, watch TV, and say goodnight.”
“I hope, when the time comes, marriage is a little more exciting than that,” Lisa sighed. “It’s nice to get dressed up and go out, though. Thank you. Where are we going?”
“Wan Chen Restaurant,” Henry said. “It just struck me as a funny place to go that is in the realm of what we’ve been working on, but is just for entertainment.”
“As long as you didn’t stuff all the fortune cookies with the same fortune,” Lisa laughed. “Why didn’t you just ask me?”
“I wasn’t sure I could,” Henry said. “I’ve been struggling to get some of my life in balance, and part of that includes deciding what I personally want to happen rather than just accepting everything that does happen.”
“You hardly just accept things at work. You have goals and are dedicated to reaching them.”
They pulled up to the restaurant and Henry actually let the valet take the car as he and Lisa stepped out to enter the popular restaurant. When they were seated and chose their meals from the menu, Henry went back to the subject of goals.
“I think I’m driving toward some good business goals, but it’s the life balance thing I was talking about. That seems to be the only area of my life I seem to have trouble making any steps on my own. Like dating, for example.”
“You’ve always had dates and girlfriends as long as I’ve known you,” Lisa said.
“Yeah. Back in high school, Chastity asked me… no, she told me I was taking her to the prom. When I got to college, a golf teammate arranged to share a room with me at a tournament. Kaitlyn actually looked for me over in the SCS cafeteria and asked me out,” Henry said. “Oh, yes, the summer between high school and college, Chastity invited me on a double date, which turned out to be a blind date with the girl I dated all that summer. I didn’t take any action at all.”
“And I invited you out last fall.”
“I do consider that a little different. You needed something and I was happy to help out. That’s not like tonight. I made a conscious decision that I’d like to spend more time—casual time—with you so I could really get to know you. I’ve always liked you, but…”
Henry paused as food was delivered to their table and they served their meals.
“All the girls I’ve gone out with are pretty,” he continued. “I consider Chastity to be the most beautiful of them all, but Chastity is not my girlfriend. Ask her. She’ll tell you that emphatically. When I took you to the dance last fall, I realized you are in a whole different category of attractiveness that is way above me. I thought about asking you out last fall, but then I became your landlord and thought it would be too creepy to do that. What a cliché.”
“Thank you for the compliment, I think,” Lisa snorted. “Why did you decide it was no longer creepy?”
“Fuck! I hope not! Shit. I suppose you could sue me for office harassment after I rigged the software this morning.”
“I’ll let that pass. You haven’t been stalking me. Am I just convenient now that you and Kaitlyn broke up?”
“No. Something Chastity said to me the other day just got me thinking. What would I really like in my life. And then my thought was, ‘someone like Lisa.’ Of course, it took me a day or two to drop the ‘someone like’ and decide to ask you out,” Henry said.
“I see.”
“Please remember what I said last fall, too,” Henry said. “I still stand by that. If we ever have sex, it will be because we both really want it; not because it’s convenient or because one of us owes the other. And that isn’t to suggest that we should have sex tonight. I just really wanted to relax with you and get to know you better. And here, I’ve done all the talking.”
It seemed they’d finally exhausted the topic for the time being and they enjoyed the meal. Lisa told Henry about how her father had taught her coding and sat with her for hours when she learned new games. She said she wanted permission from Henry to set her father up with the questions and project of recording his life and advice. He quickly agreed.
They didn’t rush through the meal and it was nearly nine o’clock when the server delivered the bill and the requisite fortune cookies. Henry left cash to cover the meal and tip and they selected their cookies.
“You don’t have to reveal your fortune to me,” he said.
“Let’s share them. There’s no sense in one of us being embarrassed by a cookie,” Lisa said.
She broke open her cookie, removed the slip of paper from it and popped a bit of the cookie into her mouth before smoothing it out.
“I’m not sure now that I want to even suggest this to you,” she laughed. “A smart husband buys his wife fine China; then she doesn’t trust him to wash it.”
“Hmm. I’ll have to put that into my nuggets of wisdom for the future,” Henry said. He followed the ritual cookie opening. “Well. Um… It says, Be passionate and totally worth the chaos.”
Lisa spluttered with laughter.
“Do you think you can hold the passion and chaos in until we’re out of the restaurant?” she asked.
“I will… Yeah… I hope so.”
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
