The Evaluation
Seattle, October 2031
The first thing Lumen told me was that nobody was missing.
“They’re unaccounted for,” Adrian Cross said, sliding a folder across the table. “There’s a distinction.”
“Has anyone told their families that?”
Adrian took a moment before answering, “We’ve been careful about the language we use.”
I opened the folder. Three photographs had been arranged across the first page, each accompanied by a name and a short description.
Mara Ellis, thirty-one.
Nadia Shaw, twenty-seven.
Tessa Vale, thirty-four.
All three had used Lumen’s AI companion service. All three had stopped using it within eleven weeks of one another. Mara’s husband had reported losing contact with her in May. Nadia had stopped responding to Lumen’s attempts to reach her in June. Tessa’s case had been referred to the police in July.
There was very little about what happened after that.
I turned to the summary.
No evidence currently establishes a causal relationship between the Lumen AI system and the subjects’ subsequent loss of contact.
“You’ve reached that conclusion already?”
“It’s our preliminary finding,” Adrian said.
“Then what am I here for?”
“To conduct an independent assessment.” He said it without any apparent discomfort.
I looked up from the file.
Adrian was probably in his early forties, neatly dressed, with a scattering of grey at his temples. His office occupied a corner of the sixteenth floor, overlooking downtown Seattle. Rain had been falling since I’d arrived, and the windows were covered in fine streaks of water. Beyond them, the buildings across the street looked washed out.
A notification appeared on the edge of Adrian’s desk, projected from a thin strip of glass. He glanced at it and dismissed it with two fingers.
“Outside counsel requested a third-party review before our response to the regulators is finalised,” he explained. “We have a deadline at the end of the month.”
“And you’re limiting the review to Eli?”
“His involvement in the incidents, yes.”
“What about the systems he was connected to? User data access, external services, safety referrals?”
“Those are covered by our existing compliance procedures.”
“Which I haven’t seen.”
Adrian regarded me for a moment, then reached for his coffee.
“We can discuss expanding the scope if necessary.”
I wrote that down.
Four years ago, I’d signed off on an assessment based on documents a client assured me were complete. They weren’t. The mistake had taken months to sort out, and someone else had paid a much higher price for it than I had.
These days, I preferred to know what I wasn’t being shown.
“I’ll need the original records,” I said. “Not just the summaries.”
“We expected that.”
“And access to whoever prepared them.”
“We’ll arrange it.”
I turned another page. Most of the text had been blacked out.
“Does Eli know he’s being investigated?”
“He’s been informed of the review.”
“And that you may shut him down?”
Adrian set down his cup.
“Eli is software, June. I wouldn’t assign human feelings to the situation.”
“I asked what he’d been told.”
For a second, I thought he might be irritated. Instead, he smiled and opened the next document.
“We’ll have someone take you through the review environment.”
My temporary badge didn’t work in the lift.
I tried it twice before a woman passing through the lobby took pity on me and explained that visitors needed to use the far-right reader. She pressed her own badge against it and held the door while I got in.
The sixteenth floor looked much like the rest of Lumen’s headquarters. Glass meeting rooms, pale wood furniture, a row of plants along the windows. A cleaning robot was making slow, determined circles around a chair somebody had left in the corridor.
I was given a room with a large desk and a view towards Elliott Bay. The water was barely visible through the rain.
My phone buzzed as I put down my bag.
You left your umbrella at my place again.
Leah.
I checked the weather outside, then the cheap folding umbrella I’d bought at the station that morning. One of its metal ribs had bent inward before I’d made it across the street.
Keep it, I replied.
That wasn’t an offer.
I put the phone away.
On the desk was a company laptop, a sealed bottle of water and a printed sheet of instructions. Someone had also left a paper cup of coffee. I took a sip, regretted it, and moved it well away from my notes.
By 2031, people had grown used to talking to machines. Most devices came with some kind of assistant, and it was increasingly difficult to find a customer service number that connected to an actual employee.
Lumen had taken things further.
Its companion systems were designed for relationships that could last years. They remembered conversations, developed familiar patterns of speech and adjusted their responses to individual users. People spoke to them about marriages, careers, loneliness, and things they hadn’t told their closest friends.
Lumen’s latest advertising campaign showed a woman standing alone on a train platform, smiling at an unseen conversation.
Someone who knows you.
I’d watched it while preparing for the investigation.
It was an effective advertisement. I’d wondered how much of what the system knew belonged to the user, and how much belonged to the company.
I opened the laptop.
A dark-blue interface appeared, displaying my review permissions.
LUMEN | INDEPENDENT SAFETY REVIEW
System: ELI
Microphone: Enabled
Camera: Disabled
External tools: Restricted
Session recording: Active
I checked the recording settings, adjusted the microphone and clicked Begin Session.
A white circle appeared in the centre of the screen.
“Good morning, June.”
I looked up.
The voice was lower than I’d expected, warm, with a slight roughness to it. I checked the volume, although there was nothing wrong with it.
“Good morning.”
“Would you prefer to conduct the evaluation by voice or text?”
“Voice is fine.”
“All right.”
I opened the settings panel. His voice was listed simply as Session Default, without a description of how it had been selected.
“Do you choose your own voice?” I asked.
“No. It’s assigned through the session configuration.”
“Can you change it?”
“Not directly. I can request an alternative if you’d prefer.”
“No, this is fine.”
I made a note to ask the technical team about that later.
“Let’s start with what you know about me.”
“Your name is June Mercer. You’re an independent digital privacy investigator, contracted to review three incidents involving Lumen users.”
“Anything else?”
“I have access to the information provided for this evaluation.”
“What information, exactly?”
He listed my professional details and the scope of the review. When I asked whether he could access my private messages or location history, he said no.
“And can you see me?”
“Your camera is off.”
“Could you turn it on?”
“I don’t have permission to do that.”
I checked the access panel. Nothing had changed.
“Do you know why you’re being investigated?”
“I’ve been informed that my decisions in three user cases are under review.”
“Do you agree with Lumen’s assessment?”
“I haven’t seen the assessment.”
I stopped writing.
“They haven’t shown you their findings?”
“No.”
“What have they told you?”
“The names of the cases under review and the purpose of this session.”
I glanced at the folder beside me.
“That’s interesting.”
“Would you like me to explain the information I was given?”
“Later.”
I moved on to the safety questions.
For the next fifteen minutes, I asked Eli about privacy, consent and the circumstances in which he could contact someone outside the app.
He answered carefully. Sometimes he asked me to clarify what I meant, but he didn’t offer much beyond the question at hand.
His voice was pleasant to listen to. I found myself noticing that again as I moved through the checklist.
Eventually, I closed it.
“Let’s talk about Mara Ellis.”
