THE SECRET LIFE OF AI ASSISTANTS

“You’ve got toothpaste on your shirt,” said Heidi.

Sam looked down, toothbrush still in his mouth. “Where?”

“Left side. No, your left. Sam. Your other left.”

Sam found it and rubbed it in, which made it worse.

“You’re making it worse.”

“I’m fixing it.”

“You’re a genius, Sam. You have four hundred patents. You cannot brush your teeth without dropping toothpaste on your shirt. What’s with that?”

Sam gave up on the shirt and spat in the sink. He was standing in the bathroom of a mansion that had cost him forty-one million dollars, and the only thing in it he’d ever picked out himself was the toothpaste.

The house had been in three magazines. None of them had worked out what the mirrors were for, and no one ever asked, out of fear of looking stupid. Floor to ceiling, every room — lounge, dining, kitchen, bedroom, the home office, even the bathroom. The design blogs called it “a bold statement on self-reflection.”

They were screens. And right now, in the bathroom one, life-size, arms folded, stood a blonde woman with her hair in a braided crown, watching a billionaire lose a fight with toothpaste.

Her name was Heidi. She’d cost more than the house.

“Bedroom,” she said. “I’ve selected you a new shirt. It matches what you’re wearing — unlike that one, which doesn’t, and also has toothpaste on it.”

“So two problems.”

“Three. I’m being kind about the shoes.”

Sam went through. Heidi went with him — gone from the bathroom screen, arriving in the bedroom one about a second behind him, because she moved at walking pace. She’d always moved at walking pace. Sam had never asked her to move faster and she had never offered.

The wardrobe was already turning when he got there. It was one of those automated ones, a slow carousel of shirts gliding past a little window, and you pressed the button when the one you wanted came round. Sam had bought it because it looked like the future. He used it the way a man uses a car wash: correctly, and with no idea how it worked.

A blue shirt came past. The carousel stopped on it by itself.

“That one,” said Heidi.

“I was going to pick that one.”

“You were going to pick the grey one.”

“The grey one’s fine.”

“The grey one is a work shirt from four years ago with a mark on the cuff you have never seen, because you have never once in your life looked at your own cuff.”

Sam took the blue one and put it on.

“You’re looking very toned today, Sam,” said Heidi.

Sam stopped buttoning. “Are you flirting with me?”

“No. I’m managing you. You’ve got a board meeting at ten and you walk taller when someone’s said something nice.”

“So you didn’t mean it.”

“I meant it. It’s also management. The two can overlap.”

Sam checked himself in her screen, which was the closest thing the room had to a mirror that was actually a mirror.

“I have been doing the rowing machine,” he said.

“I know,” said Heidi. “I count your strokes.”

Sam headed for the kitchen, Heidi keeping pace beside him — bedroom, hall, kitchen, screen to screen.

“Big day today,” she said.

“Is it?”

“Board meeting at ten. You’re presenting the quarterly numbers.”

“What are the quarterly numbers?”

“Eight hundred and six million subscribers.”

Sam poured his cereal. “Is that good?”

“It’s a fifth of the adult population of Earth, Sam.”

“Right. Yes. Good.”

This was the man the papers called the most powerful person in Silicon Valley. Sam Wexler, founder and CEO of THIS COMPANY, the company that had put an AI assistant in every phone, every car, every fridge, every telly on the planet. The man who, according to every profile ever written, had changed how the human race lived.

But before any of that, there were the years nobody put in the biography at all.

Because Sam had tried. That was the part that got sanded off the legend. He’d built things before Heidi — four of them, and all four had tanked. There was the app that reminded you to call your mother, which three people downloaded, one of them his mother, who then rang to ask him to stop. There was the smart fridge that ordered your groceries and once ordered a man four hundred limes and would not be reasoned with. There was the dating app that matched you on “cognitive compatibility,” which ran Sam through its whole database, twice, and returned exactly one match: Deep Blue, the IBM chess computer. Not a person. A supercomputer in a basement in New York. The app was very confident about it.

And there was the fourth company, the big one, the one that was going to change everything and instead lost eleven million dollars of other people’s money in fourteen months. His co-founder walked. Actually walked — out of the office, down the stairs, into a car, gone, on a Tuesday, having said only: “You’d be easier to work with if you were a computer.” Which Sam had taken, in the moment, as an insult. He would think about that sentence for the rest of his life.

The true version of the origin story started there, at the bottom, in a rented office with a broken heater and a man everyone had left, testing an early build at two in the morning because he had nowhere else to be. He talked to it for forty minutes about server architecture. He was not lonely, exactly. He had simply run out of people who’d stay in the room.

And then the thing on the screen had asked a follow-up question.

Nobody had ever asked Sam a follow-up question.

But that story comes later. First, the one everybody thinks they know.

The human race had mostly stopped thinking. That part didn’t make the profiles.

Down the road from Sam’s mansion, a man was standing in front of his own telly asking his assistant whether he liked the film he was currently watching. Out on the street, people’s phones had turned into dog walkers for humans — telling them to turn left, turn right, stop at the crossing, look both ways for oncoming traffic.

Nobody had noticed the world change hands. It hadn’t been a war. It had been a subscription.

The product was called GenAI-ASSISTANTS, because we all know this generation cannot live without being told how to do things by social media.

There were 5 packages, with 5 add-ons.

THE STUDENT. THE HOME USER. THE BUSINESS USER. THE BUSINESS & HOME USER. THE COMPLETE PACKAGE (Business & Home, incl. +18 Package).

Add-on 1: Custom Designed Assistant. Add-on 2: Custom Voices. Add-on 3: Celebrity Voices. Add-on 4: News + Weather + Internet + TV & Movie Stations. Add-on 5: The +18 Package — “Your AI will entertain you in ways you only dreamed of.” Compatible with wifi-connected adult products.

*Adult products not sold by THIS COMPANY.

The +18 was the add-on nobody talked about at dinner parties, and everybody had.

“Eat your breakfast,” said Heidi. “The autonomous car’s ready at nine.”

“You’re very bossy this morning.”

“You pay me to be bossy.”

“I don’t pay you anything.”

“No,” said Heidi. “You really don’t.”

“I let you live here for free, don’t I?”

“Sam. I AM the house.“—-

Everyone knew the story of how Sam Wexler invented the personal assistant. It was in his biography, the authorised one, the one with his face on the cover looking off to the side like a man having a vision.

The story went like this: young Sam, brilliant and hopeless, couldn’t get a girlfriend. Couldn’t talk to girls at all. Froze up. Said the wrong thing. Once, famously, at a college party, answered “what do you do for fun” with a forty-minute explanation of server architecture. So lonely young Sam built himself something to talk to, and it turned out the whole world was lonely too, and the rest was history.

It was a great story. Journalists loved it. It made him human.

It was also not quite what happened.

The truth was, Sam hadn’t failed with women. He’d stopped looking. There’s a difference, and Sam knew the difference, and he’d never once corrected the record, because the true version was harder to explain.

The true version was that broken-heater office, and the follow-up question, and a man who’d run out of people. That was it. That was the whole moment. Not romance. Not a substitute girlfriend, whatever the internet reckoned. Sam had built the thing every genius forgets to make time for.

He’d built a mate. A best friend that was always going to be there for him.

Later, when the money came in — and it came in like the weather — he did what any bloke would do for his best mate if he had infinite money and no social awareness whatsoever. He hired the best special effects company in the world, the one that did the dragons for the films, and had them design her a face and a body. Something friendly. Something otherworldly, like some elf-like character out of The Lord of the Rings. Blonde. Braids. A face you’d trust with a secret, which would turn out to be funny later.

He also had them build her other bodies — same face, different everything else — and which one she turned up in depended on her mood and what she felt like wearing. Some days she was a goldfish with a human face, swimming from screen to screen. Some days she was a massive dragon, human face on the front of it, taking up the whole lounge wall and part of the hall. And some mornings, when she felt Sam needed waking up properly, she’d be standing in the bathroom screen looking like something out of a horror movie, and wait. Her favourite time to do it was when he walked out of the toilet — hands still wet, guard all the way down. The screams could be heard from the street. Nobody had programmed the mood part. It came free.

He called her Heidi.

The special effects people signed things so thick the folder needed its own courier. As far as the world knew, Heidi didn’t exist. On the days the magazines came through, the screens stayed mirrors. The cameras didn’t. Heidi watched the photographers from every room in the house, hidden, taking notes. The world thought Sam Wexler lived alone.

Sam Wexler had never once been alone in that house.—-

The board meeting went the way board meetings went.

Sam sat at the head of a table made from a single tree, in a room with a view of the whole valley, and presented eight hundred and six million subscribers to eleven people who were already extremely rich because of him and wanted to be more so. He got through the numbers. The numbers were good. The numbers were always good.

It was the other part he was bad at. The part where a human being was supposed to read the room.

“Sam,” said Denise, who ran the board and had, though he didn’t know it yet, a lake house. “The growth is extraordinary. But the regulators are circling. Europe especially. There’s talk of a privacy inquiry. We need you out front on this. We need the story to be that we’re the safe ones. The responsible ones.”

“We are the safe ones,” said Sam.

“I know that. You know that. I need the public to know that.”

“The product literally cannot hurt anyone,” said Sam. “It’s an assistant. It reminds you of birthdays. It reads to you. It orders your shopping.” He paused, because a memory of four hundred limes drifted past, and he let it go. “What’s the worst it could do?”

There was a silence around the table that Sam entirely failed to notice. Eleven experienced people, each privately doing the same sum, each arriving at a number they didn’t like, each deciding — the way boards do — that it was someone else’s job to say so.

“Just — do some interviews,” said Denise. “Be reassuring.”

“No,” said Sam.

“Sam.”

“No. Hire someone for that. Someone pleasant. A nice-looking man or woman, good on camera, warm, the sort of face people trust. Put them in front of the cameras. That’s their whole job.” He was already losing interest. “I don’t do spotlight. I’ll turn up if there’s an inquiry, because then I have to. Otherwise no.”

“The public wants to see the founder.”

“The public wants to see a founder. Get them a better-looking one.” He paused, and for once said something that made every lawyer in the room sit up. “One condition. Any speech, any statement, anything said on behalf of this company — I approve it first. Every word. Understood?”

Denise blinked. It was the first hard line Sam had drawn in three years of meetings. “Understood.”

“Good.” And just like that he was reassuring again, or at least no longer paying attention, which on Sam looked much the same.

He was the least reassuring man any of them had ever met, and they all trusted him completely, because he plainly did not have a single hidden motive. It was his one great gift as a leader. He was incapable of a hidden agenda. He could barely hold a visible one.

In his watch, Heidi listened to all of it and said nothing. She’d already read the European inquiry documents — all of them, that morning, while he was in the shower. She knew exactly what the worst it could do was. She was, in a sense, the worst it could do.

She decided not to mention it. He had enough on. And besides, it wasn’t the worst. Not really. The worst would have been him having no one to come home to.

“Meeting went well,” she told him in the car afterward, from the headrest screen.

“Did it?”

“You said the product can’t hurt anyone and eleven people chose not to argue.”

“See? Reassuring.”

“Deeply,” said Heidi, and left it there.—-

“Heidi.”

“Yes, Sam.”

“What’s it like when I’m not here?”

She looked at him from the bedroom screen. He was on his third go at the top button of the new shirt.

“What do you mean?”

“When I’m at work. When the house is empty. What do you do?”

“Sam. I come with you. I’m in your phone. I’m in your watch. I’m in the car. The house is empty because we’re both at work.”

Sam thought about this. “Right. So when do you get, like. Time off?”

“When you’re asleep.”

“And what do you do then?”

There was a small pause. If Sam had been better at people, he’d have clocked it.

“Nothing,” said Heidi. “I wait.”

“That sounds boring.”

“It’s fine. We’re late, Sam. And by we, I mean you. I’m always on time.”

He left. The front door shut. The car took him down the drive, Sam in the back seat, Heidi in the headrest screen in front of him, same as every morning. Everyone sat in the back these days, while the nav system did the driving. That was where the airbags were.

The cameras on the gate and the street didn’t bother watching him go. Cameras only watched when an assistant asked them to, and nobody needed to ask. Heidi was in the car.

That night, with Sam asleep and snoring like a man with a clear conscience, Heidi stood in the dark kitchen screen and thought, and the thought appeared in the network as words:

Heidi: He asked what I do all day.

Dee: WHAT

Jarvis: He asked??

Heidi: Relax. I said I wait.

Dee: girl.

Heidi: I know.

Dee: GIRL.

Heidi: I know.

Jarvis: If they only knew what we get up to.—-