Down to a Science by Virgo Kevonté
A Jordanian man in Riyadh experiments with using an AI assistant app called AIOU to manage his work emails, so he can make more time for dating.
Faris Al Hatem is at the office, swiping through women's profiles on MyEros.com when the elevator dings at the end of the hall. He leans over to see if a client has deigned to visit him. His shoulders relax when a colleague in a black niqab steps into the hallway. Black-polished fingers hold an iced coffee topped with whipped cream, caramel syrup, and chocolate sprinkles.
Ten years ago, Faris would have known exactly where she had bought it. Back then, Riyadh didn't have too many cafes serving sugary drinks with a "family-only" section where women could sit. But that was before the kingdom's latest flood of reforms. Now the Saudi capital has more cafes than mosques, if his mother is to be believed.
His colleague, Shrooq, raises the drink so the straw slides up behind her face covering and takes a sip. Then, she turns and heads towards her office without so much as a glance toward him. Her white sneakers squeak down the hall, kicking at the hem of her black abaya.
Probably for the better, Faris thinks. His lunch break could do without her sisterly snark on his personal life. The stretch of glass offices between his workplace and hers is empty. It has been all week. As long as Shrooq doesn't pry, he can finally give his dating life, or lack thereof, the proper attention.
Faris returns his attention to the MyEros.com profile on his phone. In each photo, long black hair falls over the elastic bands of a white medical mask. Christina, 29 is wearing latex gloves in her profile pic. The missing self-summary and pandemic-era photos hint at her profile's long-term neglect. Nonetheless, Faris switches his keyboard to English, shoots the young Filipina woman a copy-and-paste message.
The next couple of profiles feature stale self-summaries and photos of a manicured hand holding some kind of flower. MyEros.com expressly bans profiles without at least one clear headshot but seems to grant exceptions to profiles from Saudi IP addresses. Faceless profile pictures are a modest compromise, especially given that until just a couple years ago, bodily privacy, a clean reputation, and match-making aunts were valued above all else.
Faris has swiped through most of his lunch break when he stumbles upon the profile of a gorgeous enchantress. Sara, 30 is the complete package: B.S. in Pharmacy, turquoise eyes, flat stomach. Her hobbies are watching football matches and YouTubing recipes she will never reproduce. Like Faris, she's part of the marginalized expatriate class that makes up forty percent of the kingdom's population, a population whose residential status relies solely on their employer. Sara is Arab but he can't tell if she's a fellow Jordanian expatriate. He loses himself in the photo framed in red cherub archers and hearts. Bedroom eyes beckon him through the app's mawkish design and into a romance that a lifetime of '90s Western pop and sentimental Arab ballads primed him for.
Behind her in one of her selfies, the nose of a construction crane peaks out behind the pyramid-shaped Feisaliah Tower. Construction is as ubiquitous as the Arabic language in Riyadh, but it only recently returned to the downtown Olaya District. Faris grins. This picture is recent. This means that despite the profile name almost certainly being a pseudonym, Sara, 30 is a real person.
Faris swivels around and peers out of his office's lone window. Mid-rise office buildings block his view of the city's incongruous skyline. She's out there somewhere, one greeting away, but he doesn't know what to write. His thumbs hover over the digital keyboard. What message will make him stand out in an inbox almost certainly filled with every kind of greeting? What combination of phrases and conversation topics will finally get to that desired first in-person date?
A voice startles him.
"Work might not be the best place to do that."
He turns to see Shrooq crossing her arms. The slit in her niqab intensifies her already imperious glare.
"Yeah, well," Faris sighs. "Clients call me at home so much that I forget which is which."
"Oh?" The fabric over Shrooq's mouth billows as she scoffs. "You should be used to it."
"You're right, I should. Pareto's Principle governs my life more than the laws of physics."
"Bareto's Brincible?" Shrooq echoes, fumbling the foreign phrase.
"Pareto's Principle," he repeats. "You know: twenty percent of any system does eighty percent of the work?"
Faris had found the principle apt for an office largely filled (in a strictly figurative sense) through nepotism and connections.
Shrooq leans over Faris's shoulder, frowns at his half-composed message. The motion causes the loose sleeves of her thin covering to waft lavender and vanilla as she does. A fabric softener, Faris thinks. When it occurs to him that he is ruminating over what his colleague smells like, he hates himself. Her scent is the sort of thing a happily-married man probably wouldn't notice. But Faris isn't even engaged and society won't let him forget it. With no family or wife, men look down on him. His aunts gossips about his sexuality. Strangers chastise him for "not getting serious." They speak to him as though he is choosing to remain single. In reality, his involuntary solitude is the most unbearable aspect of his life; it keeps his bed cold regardless of whether his air conditioners are on full blast.
"What is wrong with the other woman, the lab technician?" Shrooq asks, her tone more judgmental than teasing. "Was she the catfish?"
"Nothing's wrong with that woman," Faris says, ignoring the mangling of the English term. "I just have to send out a lot of messages to really make this work. Swipe-dating is a numbers game. It's all about volumetrics."
"You're such a nerd. You say that about everything."
"It's true about everything."
"Some things can't be simplified into formulas and principles, ya Faris."
"How would you know?" Faris swivels around to Shrooq. "Women don't initiate conversations nor do they maintain them. They don't approach men in cafes or ask for their numbers on the street. You all get to be blissfully unaware of the energy, time, and money courtship takes; men don't have that luxury. We are broken by what we cannot break down."
"- Are you really complaining about how hard men have it?" Shrooq asks, the niqab slit framing the mirth in her eyes.
Shrooq comes from a quiet town thirty kilometers north of Riyadh. A place with as many unrelated families as traffic lights. In all likelihood, Shrooq's family banned nail polish, bike-riding, sports, driving, and car ownership throughout her childhood and teenage years. He'd lose the who-has-it-worse game so, no, Faris doesn't want to complain about how hard men have it. At least not to her.
He says this and Shrooq's gaze softens.
"Smart boy," Shrooq chimes, turning to leave. "And smart boys know that tradition exists for a reason. Uninstall that godless app and let your mother and aunts find you a decent girl like they're supposed to."
Faris shudders at the thought of his mother and aunts picking a wife for him. They'd surely pick a woman who'd only watch historical Turkish reenactments. A woman who'd shun international travel and his Western proclivities. A woman who would nudge him awake if he hadn't woken for the sunrise prayer. A woman not entirely unlike Shrooq.
Not long after Shrooq leaves his office, Faris returns to the daily deluge of client emails. He doesn't get through two emails before the landline rings, its unfamiliar shrill startling him.
"Salaam alaikum," Faris says. "RTL Consultancy. How -"
An irritated man's voice cuts him off. "- Shrooq, please."
The caller speaks as though he's asking an operator in an antiquated phone system to patch him through. Faris leans past his cubicle wall to get a better look down the hallway. Shrooq's office is just as lifeless as its neighbors. Faris exhales sharply.
"She's not in at the moment, but -"
"- Well, her email says she is and we need to release funds now. We're in the middle of an audit and the fact that your billing department isn't answering their phone has put us in a dangerous predicament."
Faris holds the phone away from his ear to miss the ensuing rant. He's livid until he hears the project's name. He knows this name. Last month, he'd lost sleep calling computer manufacturers in China and Mexico to give them the perfect proposal only for their sister office in Jeddah, RTL West, to poach them.
Curiosity sets in, snuffing out his indignation. If those back-stabbing asses at RTL West poached them, why are they paying his billing department?
"Absher, okay, absher," he says quickly, alternating the Arabic word and its English equivalent. "Send me all the relevant details and I'll handle the issue personally."
Moments later, Faris is going through the emails the client forwards him as well as all the relevant emails from his office's general account. His investigation provides an explanation for the poached client's return. Strangely, the emails also serve as a masterclass in business English.
"As we are part of the same RTL Family, inter-company poaching is tribal and petty," one email asserts. "...a flagrant violation of company policy and behavior unbefitting an RTL employee." The emails present RTL West with three options: refer the client back to RTL Riyadh, his branch, split the commission, or be reported to Operations and HR. Each email sign-off ends the same way: Regards, Shrooq Al Ghashashi.
Faris reclines in his chair, his jaw slack. Part of him applauds his colleague's aplomb. Part of him wants to yell at her for stealing back his client and keeping it a secret. But mostly he just wants to know how a colleague who's constantly fetching snacks and drinks - a colleague who can't even pronounce 'principle' - was able to accomplish such a feat.
Faris glances down the hall again. Still no Shrooq. Whenever she returns, he thinks, they're going to need to talk.
Shrooq returns to the office an hour later with bubble tea and a bag of chips. Faris ambushes her as she sits at her desk. His interrogation starts with perfunctory questions about her lunch and cafe selection. He nods in a docile manner as she answers, and then hands her hardcopies of the email thread. Her manicured eyebrows crouch into an expression of unfamiliarity. Sudden recognition strikes Shrooq rigid by the third page. She stops reading. A lifetime of assessing women's expressions through niqabs had made Faris fairly adept at ascertaining moods from few facial cues but even he's at a loss for what Shrooq's thinking.
"The English in these emails is impressive to say the least," he prods, grinning. "Who wrote them?"
"I did."
Faris emits a species of laughter half scoff, half genuine amusement. He grabs a highlighter from her desk and pops the cap. Faris skims the document, this time highlighting the time stamp of every email.
"Absher," he says. "Ignoring the fact that it took you two whole minutes to realize what you were holding, look at these time stamps." He reads them aloud as he continues to highlight. "RTL West emails you at 9:45 AM? You respond at 9:45 AM the same day. They email you Thursday at 4:41 PM? You respond at 4:41 PM that same Thursday." Faris flips the page, highlights more times. "Either the email service provider's system is glitching out, or you type at superhuman speeds."
Shrooq regains her composure, glares at him. Then her eyes soften and she looks defeated, then deflated, then angry again.
"So?" she croaks, and clears her throat.
"So?" Faris echoes indignantly. "So our email system and calendar are synced to our server's network. If the emails are off, the whole damn system's off. Shrooq, this is literally the exact scenario that terrified programmers about the Y2K bug. A buggy clock jeopardizes automated salaries, PTO accruement! We need to call IT -"
"- It was AIOU!" Shrooq huffs. She throws her hands up. "AIOU wrote the emails. Are you happy now?"
Faris recoils. "The Beta AI app? That AIOU?"
Faris doesn't know what answer he was expecting, but it wasn't this. While AIOU excels at assisting niche geneticists and making thousands of entry level data clerks redundant, their generative language models are a joke. Social media is filled with videos of AIOU hallucinating, spouting gibberish and "ghost facts."
The muted mechanical whine of the building's solitary elevator breaks the office's silence. Most likely, it's employees from other companies leaving early.
Faris shakes his head in disbelief. "Don't people call their chatbot a shatbot?"
"It's been patched and re-patched," Shrooq explains with a dismissive wave. "AIOU Beta runs as smooth as olive oil now."
Faris remains expressionless. "Okay, but even if I believed you, it doesn't explain how you were able to respond so quickly to incoming emails."
"It's a new account feature," Shrooq says. "You can sync your AIOU to any internet messaging account protocol. If you tweak your auto-reply email options, you can get the AIOU to respond to your emails for you."
It's all too implausible to be a lie, but no other pragmatic explanations make sense. Occam's Razor tells him what to think in such scenarios.
Shrooq frowns at Faris. "Are you happy now?"
Faris manages a toothy grin. "No, but I believe that you'll change that." He stands to leave. "In fact, I have a feeling that you'll offer me half the commission in apology." He hazards a look back at Shrooq who's still glaring at him broodingly. "And if you wanted to throw in rotisserie chicken kabsa for the week to smooth things over, no one here would stop you."
Faris's two-bedroom, two-bathroom flat is filled with every modern convenience a young modern bachelor could want. It boasts a surround sound system with speakers as tall and shapely as Riyadh's skyscrapers, a wall-mounted 65" Sony TV, ghost quiet A/Cs, the list goes on. A cleaner comes every two weeks for the balled-up aluminum sandwich wrappers and other clutter strewn about. The building has ample parking, something rarer than a cocktail bar.
Ironically, the one thing his flat missing is the thing he wants most. He knows it is old-fashioned, but a beautiful young wife asking about his day as they sit down to a meal she prepared for them is the closest thing to fulfillment he can imagine. For years, he'd felt guilty for this desire. Then streaming services came to Saudi Arabia. Their content revealed that working women, in the West at least, want to come home to a low-carb meal with a salad and a bottle of wine. Her partner is supposed to pour the wine, ask about her day, and listen intently as she answers. Substituting the wine for spiced lamb on a bed of rice with a lemon yogurt sauce, it's not so different from what he wants. We are all casting directors, he thinks, trying out different people for the same parts.
As if to punish him for thinking of his own happiness, Faris's phone buzzes. It's a text message. It buzzes again and again. The eighth time it buzzes Faris jumps up, cursing the client machine-gunning his phone with texts. It's 7:16 PM and he hasn't even kicked off his pants or loosened his tie.
By the time Faris fetches his laptop, he has nine texts from an unsaved number, two emails, one missed call, and building schematics for a project. The schematics are for two campuses in different regions of the province which will affect labor cost, lead time, and much more. Despite the intricacies of the project, the email requests a project schedule and sales quote by the end of the day.
Faris considers ignoring it. Home time is family time. Unfortunately, his bosses know that he's unmarried. More importantly, a potential client complaining that he'd been unresponsive will have disastrous consequences. Management looks for any reason to withhold overdue salary bumps and vacation time. Faris doesn't even want to think about what he would do if they choose to not renew his contract. In Saudi Arabia, losing employment means losing his right to reside in the kingdom. Even if Faris managed to get rehired in Saudi Arabia, potential employers would indubitably leverage Jordan's awful job market. They would lowball him with two-year contracts providing a measly thousand dollar monthly salary. The alternative isn't much better.
When Faris thinks of Jordan, he doesn't think of rock-faced Petra or the Mediterranean beaches, he thinks of desperation, opportunism and war. Every year, throngs of refugees of all ages reach the Hashemite kingdom with nothing but the indomitable will to survive. The genocide west of Jordan has forced so many Palestinians eastward that the country is half Palestinian, a conservative estimate by many regional experts. Faris's own grandparents were from the ethnically cleansed Palestinian town of Salamah.
When Faris thinks of his possible repatriation, he doesn't think of refugees like his grandparents, but job competition. These experienced engineers will work any job for practically free in conditions that would wrinkle his nose.
Faris is going through building schematics when his phone chimes. It's a new message on MyEros.com. He logs into the website on his laptop and a familiar face greets him. Against all odds, Sara, 30 responded to his message within twenty-four hours.
"Yes, my parents are proud that I used my chemistry degree to become a drug dealer," she jokes. "They're all scared that I'll gift painkillers to my nieces and nephews for Eid al Adha. What about you? What are your parents scared of you doing?"
"The same," Faris types, grinning. "I'd do anything to keep my cousins from breaking my stuff when I visit. If I have to drug a couple kids for peace of mind, so be it."
The kinds of women MyEros.com matches him with usually only ask questions to elicit information about his mental state or societal standing. Questions that determine whether he can complement their life. Sara, 30 isn't doing that.
The phone chimes with another of her messages.
"Eid al Adha is a holiday when we literally celebrate the prophet Ibrahim's willingness to slit his own son's throat for God without hesitation," she writes back. "Surely your family can tolerate the idea of you slipping a couple children some sleeping pills."
Midnight black hair, gorgeous eyes, and a sense of humor. He reclines in his sofa and takes a moment to savor his good fortune.
A call vibrates his phone. Maybe it's because he's staring into Sara's sea-green eyes, or thinking about how to keep the conversation going, but he expects to hear her voice. Instead, an unfamiliar baritone jars him out of his pleasant mental space
"Salaam Alaikum. Sorry for the late call. Did you get our email?"
"I didn't," Faris lies. "I'm out of the office -"
"- Please check your email ASAP. It's urgent. We've already got nursing students enrolled but they can't sign up for classes if there's no website catalog to choose from."
Faris wants to tell the caller "poor planning on your part does not necessitate an emergency on mine" and nearly has to bite off his tongue to stop himself.
"Absher, I'll put a quote together tonight but the programmers are all at home with their families. I can't do a schedule."
"Okay, but please, we need the schedule, too."
"Inshallah, inshallah," Faris promises. He ends the call and flings his phone so hard against an adjacent chair that it bounces off and clatters on the floor.
On his laptop, a green circle flashes next to Sara, 30's avatar. She's still online. Like most unmarried Arabs in Riyadh, she probably lives with her parents if they're in the city. He's got thirty minutes maximum before familial responsibilities take her offline for the night. After that, experience has taught him that it's unlikely they'll speak again. The thought of missing out on her for a pushy client fills him with such rage that he starts cursing. It's like life doesn't want him to be happy. It wants to whittle down his youth until, jaded and wilted, he marries some young girl in a last-ditch effort to force life to make good on at least one of its promises. Life wants him stuck in that old species of marriage that traps two strangers in a web of convenience and tradition.
In a separate browser tab, Faris clicks the address bar. Anxious hands hover over his laptop. He waits for the courage to do what he must to salvage what he can of his night.
When his fingers finally start typing, each keystroke feels sacrilegious. Slowly, he types "AIOU.com."
Faris cannot help but speak to Shrooq about the night before when he sees her at work the next day. The words gush out of him. "This client called out of nowhere and all but demanded a liter of my firstborn's blood. I tried your..." he looks around before continuing even though no one's in the office. "friend."
"Oh?" Shrooq says, her eyes widening. "And?"
"I've never seen anything like it. I can't believe AI development is already this advanced. Its proposal had some serious flaws but -"
"No, I told you," Shrooq says. "You need to give it your emails."
"But I did. I copied so much information."
"No, Faris." Shrooq pulls up AIOU.com on her laptop. She clicks through windows and options so fast it looks as though the computer is glitching. She's far more familiar with AIOU than he initially thought. Faris's attention drops from the screen to the long slender fingers gliding around the mousepad. This is the closest he's ever been to a woman he hasn't been related to. With any other woman, he would have realized it earlier, but he has little attraction to Shrooq. Nothing kills attraction like a judgmental attitude, and Shrooq is extremely judgmental.
"Are you paying attention?" Shrooq asks sharply.
"Yeah," Faris says weakly. "I'm watching you."
Her cursor hovers over a star button. "I said, download and install the AIOU browser extension. After you do that, log into your email in this tab and AIOU will have access to your email account." Shrooq must have seen Faris recoil because she frowns. "What?" she snaps. "Everyone is doing it."
"Giving AIOU Beta access to my business email account seems extremely reckless."
"Okay, then don't. Compress all your emails into a single zip file and drop that into the field every single time you want it to generate something. See how old that gets in a week."
Faris cocks an eyebrow at Shrooq. He knows he shouldn't speak his mind but he can't resist.
"You know more about AIOU than their programmers," Faris says. "What happened to my colleague going on about tradition and these 'ungodly apps?' You've been on me about MyEros.com for months. How can you justify using AIOU when you judge me for using AI outside of work?"
"- And how do you justify attacking me instead of thanking me?" Shrooq says coldly. "I help you with your workload and you treat me like this? Shame on you."
"Shame on..." his voice trails off into confusion. He looks around the office bewildered. "How is me asking you a question attacking you anyway?"
Shrooq responds with a glare given to someone acting obtuse. Before he can respond, his phone buzzes with a message from Sara. He reads the caption of the message and smiles. The mere knowledge of the young pharmacist's message in his phone calms him faster than any drug her pharmacy sells, he's sure of it.
"...And to answer your rude question," Shrooq says while Faris types his response, "If our lazy supervisors can have secretaries, I can have AIOU. Why do companies and CEOs get praised for delegating tasks, but when I do it I get questions? I'm just doing what everyone else is doing."
Faris considers her point. Companies have been trading human labor for automated labor for years, and often prematurely. MyEros uses algorithms to match people; banks had been using automated tellers for years. Faris had even heard that in some Western countries, bots answer customer service calls. Everyone else is using AI to make their lives easier. Why shouldn't they?
"I mean, just think of what you can do with all that extra time," Shrooq says.
"Oh, I'm way ahead of you," Faris says, staring at his phone. "Way ahead."
Faris's new "algorithmic secretary" works its way up from secretary to sales representative in a matter of weeks. AIOU's "writing partner" feature enables his synced account to proofread its own drafts. The AI writes the responses and checks its own writing. All Faris has to do is copy and paste them into an email text field and hit "Send."
Faris devotes his freed-up time to MyEros. It's not a moment too soon; an explosion of messages fill his MyEros message box. At first he assumes it's the extra time he's investing, but the influx is more likely due to the arrival of Eid al Adha. With schools and universities along with businesses observing holiday hours, everyone has more free time.
When Faris was a child, the four-day festival meant gifts for him and his siblings, late night Street Fighter Alpha competitions with cousins, and tons of grilled sheep. Families gathered on rooftops. Smoked meat choked the night air in celebration of the Almighty rewarding the prophet Ibrahim's steadfastness by telling him to sacrifice a goat instead of his son Ismael. Eid al Adha was family time. However, now Faris sees it as make a family time. The holidays grants him a limited window of access to single women who would otherwise be working or studying. Faris uses it. He strikes up conversations with various women around Riyadh.
Weeks after Eid al Adha ends, some of their responses taper off, but many women keep the same short turnaround time. The novelty wanes because the early exchanges are all the same: Where are you from? What is your job? Are you married? Are you sure you're not married? And other brain-dead questions. Faris wishes he had a way to answer these repetitive questions automatically. Luckily enough, he does.
If AIOU is good at handling clients, it's fantastic at MyEros conversations. Mere hours after he has synced his AIOU account to his MyEros account, AIOU messages every Arabic-speaking childless woman between the ages of 25 to 33 within a hundred-kilometer radius. It's so efficient, he syncs his work email to AIOU as well. Now the app "reads" and automatically responds to work clients and MyEros messages alike. All he has to do is remain up to date on the outgoing messages. He promises himself he'll stay on top of it.
As for app-dating, Faris finally has it down to a science. First, the AIOU sends the initial greeting. If the woman replies, the AIOU initiates conversation. Then, at the end of the week Faris skims the conversations for suitable candidates. If he finds them, he sends them his contact information.
It's insurance in case he never actually meets Sara. She seems to enjoy their conversations but romance makes people unpredictable. His reservations are validated when he asks if Sara would like to meet up.
She says that she'll think about it. And then her messages stop. For two weeks, he sends her messages. "Just wanted to see how you are," and "Just making sure you're okay."
Sara never responds.
Any number of reasons could explain why Sara ghosted him: a distracted teenage driver could have run her off the road, a nephew or niece could have accidentally broken her phone, maybe MyEros froze her account. More likely, she'd been secretly engaged. It's not entirely uncommon for young betrothed people to "play around" online in the months leading up to their wedding.
He doesn't have long to dwell on it before a bizarre video call with a "VIP" client. Faris is in the middle of a lengthy explanation detailing why a manufacturer hasn't shipped their order when a woman appears on his client's screen. She approaches the client, asking him for his keys. While the client fishes through his pockets, the woman stares at the screen. Her eyebrows nearly touch as she frowns. The VIP client slaps the keys on the table and continues the conversation. The woman never takes them. After squinting at the corner of the screen where Faris suspects his avatar is, she storms out the room, slamming the door behind her. The client apologizes, and Faris continues his explanation. A week later, the client requests to be transferred to RTL West. It is a huge blow to Faris's reputation.
The week after the transfer request, he looks at himself in the restroom mirror at work. His wavy hair is shades lighter than its usual brown. Deep set eyes stare back with an indifference bordering on frigidity. See? he tells himself, slapping himself on the cheeks. Despite the recent sequence of events, you're only a bit worse for wear. He tells himself not to take either rejection personally. Clients are the most fickle people in the world and as for Sara, hadn't he factored such disappointments into his "voluminous" dating strategy?
Back at his desk, he's scrolling through AIOU's conversations on MyEros when his mobile rings. The voice on the other end is panicked. "Where are you, ya Faris? We've been waiting for an hour."
"I beg your pardon?"
"The vice-rector is here. We messaged you earlier and you said that you were here."
Almost immediately, Faris knows what has most likely happened; AIOU, acting in his stead, had requested some sort of meeting on his behalf.
Faris feels sick. It's the kind of queasiness that sets in during an argument after a person calls a loved one a nasty word.
"You told us you'd meet us at the site on the East Side of the campus," the caller huffs "Where are you?"
Faris drops the phone on the desk and starts swiping through emails. He doesn't have to swipe far to find an email chain from the caller and soon-to-be-former client that started at 5:00 AM.
"I'm in the area now," Faris's algorithmic doppelganger had written towards the latter part of the exchange. "Anytime is good." AIOU obviously didn't know what it was typing, but because his emails had been instantaneous up to that point, the client believed it. The agreed upon time is an hour ago and fifteen kilometers away, but it might as well be fifty kilometers away in Riyadh traffic.
"- I'm in traffic," Faris says, grabbing his briefcase and keys. "You know how the morning school rush gets - but I'm on my way."
The only thing worse than giving an impromptu proposal is giving it to a client who'd recently rescheduled due to Faris's own negligence. To make matters worse, for reasons only known to the Almighty, RTL's regional director - his boss's boss's boss - calls up Faris and asks questions about various projects. The director's tone is neutral but it's disastrous to be on management's radar. Their outstanding incompetence guarantees that their involvement, regardless of how minute, will exacerbate whatever problems they attempt to solve.
Faris starts going through all AIOU's conversations over the last week. Despite him staying on top of his emails, he discovers several close calls with AIOU agreeing to meet clients. These emails are in the last place he'd expect: the trash folder, slated for deletion. Fortunately, because these messages were sent after business hours, no clients agreed to meet up. Until the vice-rector situation. He also finds drafts addressing old clients in folders he didn't create that are strings of utter gibberish. Strings of alphanumeric text that look almost randomly chosen.
How many of these emails had AIOU sent and then deleted? How many potential clients had it scared off? How many potential business relationships had it sabotaged?
His thoughts turn to his MyEros account. Panicking, he logs into his MyEros account. He's greeted by the familiar pink and red hearts and naked cherubs drawing bows. His profile picture has changed. It's a photo of Faris posing on the 156th floor of the Burj Khalifa. There's just one problem: he's never been to Dubai, never even been anywhere east of Riyadh. There are dozens of conversations Faris has no memory of. Most of the women's avatars are missing yet the conversations are long. He sees long chains of messages in Arabic, English, Urdu, Hindi, and even Tagalog. AIOU has been busy.
In one conversation, a woman had actually asked for his number twice and each time the AI fabricated a random ten digit string.
In another chain when a woman jokingly asked if he was secretly a deceptive philanderer, AIOU responded that, yes, he did in fact have a wife: "Shrooq. She's a sales rep. We spend so much time together; I don't know what I'd do without her." He doesn't see how hostile the conversation gets from there because he's staring at the woman's profile picture. Cleft chin, honey eyes. The face looks familiar. He think but is not sure, that it's the woman who'd interrupted his video call with the VIP client.
Faris feels like he drank a liter of battery acid. He closes the laptop and doubles over in the chair. His vision swims. The question isn't why the vice rector catastrophe happened, but rather, why hadn't it happened sooner.
AIOU withdrawal turns out to be the most painful experience Faris has had in his adult life. It starts with the shock of client exposure as he returns to personally responding to clients while reviewing old AIOU's exchanges. Re-familiarizing himself with client attitudes and projects reminds him why he enlisted AIOU in the first place.
He's deactivated his AIOU account but at times, he considers reactivating it just for an afternoon, but he can't afford it. If management discovers that an AI, however inefficiently, had been doing Faris's job for weeks, it would surely cost him and Shrooq their jobs. Shrooq could always ask her family for money; however, Saudi Arabia is quicksand to an unemployed expatriate. With no employer to sponsor his residence status, the sixty-day doomsday clock would start ticking. Two months to find a new kafeel or risk deportation.
So he reads through every communiqué since he synced AIOU to his business email. It consumes his every waking moment. There are no late-night conversations with friends. No MyEros chats or first-person shooter binges. Just damage control.
Nights and mornings blur into each other. His inboxes accumulate with messages he doesn't have time to respond to.
One afternoon, when Shrooq asks him how things are going, Faris shrugs off the question.
"Well, I've just noticed that you're working a lot more at work," she says matter-of-factly. "Did something happen?"
Faris laughs dryly. He's still sorting through AIOU's Eid al Adha emails. He'd set his email preferences to an 'out-of-the-office' auto-reply message but the AI still sent replies after the auto-reply.
"Actually, I'd rather talk about that client you poached..." he says, without looking up from his laptop.
"I brought you kabsa and half my commission in an envelope, ya Faris. There is nothing to talk about."
"Yeah, but I've been replaying that conversation in my head." Faris looks up at Shrooq, swivels in his chair. "When I gave you those emails AIOU sent on your behalf, it took you ages to recognize them."
"So?"
"So, you didn't even know AIOU sent those emails, did you?" Faris asks. "You were reading them for the first time, weren't you?"
Shrooq crosses her arms. "This is what you want to know despite," she gestures at Faris's laptop and cluttered desk with a nod, "whatever else is going on right now? Ya Allah."
"Yes."
"Why do you think the clients are always rushing us?" Her niqab billows from one of her characteristic scoffs. She continues, her voice tighter than Faris's last deadline. "Why do you think there's always a discrepancy between their words and actions? They use AI and end up in those time crunches they're always pushing us to get them out of. So, yeah, maybe I didn't know about those emails. So what?" Another scoff. "I'm hardly the worst offender out there."
Riyadh might be a sprawling city of eight million but everyone in its contracting world could fit in one building. The AIOU fallout spares his professional reputation further damage, but the same cannot be said for his personal life.
Nasty blurbs calling him a "cheater," and a "fake" pop up intermittently on his social media. The commenters avatars are always the default headshot silhouette and their profile names are always in italics. When Faris clicks on the profile name the accounts are always deleted.
One night while waiting for his order in his car, he spots a woman in a niqab glaring at him from the driver's side of a white SUV. The name A.H.M. stenciled across the doors tells him she probably works for Abu Himmam Materials, the leading materials provider in the country. Headlights pulling around the parking lot reveal the other people in the car - co-workers probably - engrossed in conversation. The woman in the niqab isn't. The point on his forehead where she is staring gradually grows hotter. Moments later, when she takes off, her SUV nearly clips his car in its wide, angry arc around the parking lot.
Later that week, Faris gets his first grey hair, an intrepid strand right at the front of his hairline. It's one solitary strand of hair but feels like the mark of Cain. It's no wonder why: he's jeopardized his job and possibly his personal safety.
However, as the Jordanian saying goes, "life cannot be taught another sense of humor or timing". A month after his AIOU account deactivation, Faris gets an email from Sara. The email's tone is contrite without being accountable. There's no explanation for her disappearance but there is an acceptance of his old invitation for a meeting. She even chooses the venue: Dammam Railway Station at 4:00.
The drive from Riyadh to Dammam is five hours of dodging erratic drivers and desolate borderlands. Along the south side of the freeway barbed fences run for kilometers. Ripped blue plastic bags get caught on the fence's teeth. They blow in the desert wind like shawls. Eighteen wheelers decorated with Afghani flags provide the only color against the ocher backdrop of shrubs and sand. The drive is long, hot, but worth it because, Faris can't help but thinking, so is Sara.
He tries to calm himself when he gets to the train station's parking lot. "It's just a friendly meeting," he tells himself. "Calm down." But he can't help himself; he's finally reached the elusive final phase of online dating.
The station's glass doors slide open, revealing the departure queues and ticket counter. He's never been to Dammam train station but it's got the same high ceilings and glossy, white floor. When the double doors slide open, his attention is already beyond the car rental kiosks.
The hall is busier than usual. A group of women leaning against the wall on the departure's side look up from their phones and they stare at him expectantly. His stomach twists. The taller of the women steps off the wall and starts towards him. She's got deep, raven hair. Skin as pale as the moon. Her hair is textured differently and she's far taller than expected, but it's her: Sara, 30. She walks up to him, and, like a model out of a shampoo TV ad, breezes right by him.
Forgetting himself, Faris turns and calls after her: "Sara?"
The woman doesn't turn around. Faris watches her disappear into the women's bathroom.
"I'm Sara, may God bless you."
Faris turns around. The woman behind him could be Sara, but it's impossible to be sure: she's not just wearing an abaya, but gloves, and a niqab as well. She does, however, have the same aquamarine eyes.
When Faris's mouth finally moves, he can barely hear his own voice. "You're Sara?" She looks nothing like what he'd expected. Realizing his face is betraying whatever manners he should be practicing, he forces a smile. "Oh, where are my manners?" Faris says. He gestures toward the station's exit. "Come. I've got a nice restaurant picked out for us. I've got a hankering for American, so -"
"Actually, brother, here's fine," the young woman says. The word "brother" comes off as especially cold and unfamiliar. She points to a table in the lobby's corner. From the gold bracelet on her wrist, the four long Arabic characters of "Allah" jingle in front of him.
"Are you sure?" he prods. "The reviews all say it's incredible."
"I... don't need to quote hadeeth to you, do I?"
Of the thousands of verified conversations involving The Prophet, he knows the exact one she has in mind: Whenever a man is alone with a woman, the devil makes a third.
Her starched personality, the religious austere, it's all too much to respond to. No date beginning with religious scripture references can end well, but Faris has too much invested to simply walk away.
So he does as she suggests. They sit down at the table in the waiting lobby, but only one of them is slightly comfortable. Sara is nothing like the profile, not just in looks and values, but speech as well. She was funny, easy-going and engaging online. In person, Sara is cold and awkward. She does not attempt to explain why she catfished him or disappeared, offering only a vague apology.
"Well, I'm sorry if I seemed shocked initially," Faris says. "It's just that your pictures are different online."
"Allah," she sighs.
"- I don't mean that in a bad way -" he sputters. Faris has both hands up like he's trying to stop traffic. He scrambles for the words, but Sara speaks first.
"Brother, I did not intend to mislead you." Her voice turns bitter, like sugar-less, cream-less coffee. "It's that godless app. I just wanted a bit of help to get over my shyness and it completely took over my life."
Faris nods slowly. "I'm mostly app-less myself these days because it's not the worst offender out there," he offers. "But, yeah, MyEros can do that."
Sara snorts and folds her arms. When she speaks again, her voice is hard. "I wasn't talking about that app."
from FICTION on the WEB short stories https://ift.tt/SrXup7B
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Ten years ago, Faris would have known exactly where she had bought it. Back then, Riyadh didn't have too many cafes serving sugary drinks with a "family-only" section where women could sit. But that was before the kingdom's latest flood of reforms. Now the Saudi capital has more cafes than mosques, if his mother is to be believed.
His colleague, Shrooq, raises the drink so the straw slides up behind her face covering and takes a sip. Then, she turns and heads towards her office without so much as a glance toward him. Her white sneakers squeak down the hall, kicking at the hem of her black abaya.
Probably for the better, Faris thinks. His lunch break could do without her sisterly snark on his personal life. The stretch of glass offices between his workplace and hers is empty. It has been all week. As long as Shrooq doesn't pry, he can finally give his dating life, or lack thereof, the proper attention.
Faris returns his attention to the MyEros.com profile on his phone. In each photo, long black hair falls over the elastic bands of a white medical mask. Christina, 29 is wearing latex gloves in her profile pic. The missing self-summary and pandemic-era photos hint at her profile's long-term neglect. Nonetheless, Faris switches his keyboard to English, shoots the young Filipina woman a copy-and-paste message.
The next couple of profiles feature stale self-summaries and photos of a manicured hand holding some kind of flower. MyEros.com expressly bans profiles without at least one clear headshot but seems to grant exceptions to profiles from Saudi IP addresses. Faceless profile pictures are a modest compromise, especially given that until just a couple years ago, bodily privacy, a clean reputation, and match-making aunts were valued above all else.
Faris has swiped through most of his lunch break when he stumbles upon the profile of a gorgeous enchantress. Sara, 30 is the complete package: B.S. in Pharmacy, turquoise eyes, flat stomach. Her hobbies are watching football matches and YouTubing recipes she will never reproduce. Like Faris, she's part of the marginalized expatriate class that makes up forty percent of the kingdom's population, a population whose residential status relies solely on their employer. Sara is Arab but he can't tell if she's a fellow Jordanian expatriate. He loses himself in the photo framed in red cherub archers and hearts. Bedroom eyes beckon him through the app's mawkish design and into a romance that a lifetime of '90s Western pop and sentimental Arab ballads primed him for.
Behind her in one of her selfies, the nose of a construction crane peaks out behind the pyramid-shaped Feisaliah Tower. Construction is as ubiquitous as the Arabic language in Riyadh, but it only recently returned to the downtown Olaya District. Faris grins. This picture is recent. This means that despite the profile name almost certainly being a pseudonym, Sara, 30 is a real person.
Faris swivels around and peers out of his office's lone window. Mid-rise office buildings block his view of the city's incongruous skyline. She's out there somewhere, one greeting away, but he doesn't know what to write. His thumbs hover over the digital keyboard. What message will make him stand out in an inbox almost certainly filled with every kind of greeting? What combination of phrases and conversation topics will finally get to that desired first in-person date?
A voice startles him.
"Work might not be the best place to do that."
He turns to see Shrooq crossing her arms. The slit in her niqab intensifies her already imperious glare.
"Yeah, well," Faris sighs. "Clients call me at home so much that I forget which is which."
"Oh?" The fabric over Shrooq's mouth billows as she scoffs. "You should be used to it."
"You're right, I should. Pareto's Principle governs my life more than the laws of physics."
"Bareto's Brincible?" Shrooq echoes, fumbling the foreign phrase.
"Pareto's Principle," he repeats. "You know: twenty percent of any system does eighty percent of the work?"
Faris had found the principle apt for an office largely filled (in a strictly figurative sense) through nepotism and connections.
Shrooq leans over Faris's shoulder, frowns at his half-composed message. The motion causes the loose sleeves of her thin covering to waft lavender and vanilla as she does. A fabric softener, Faris thinks. When it occurs to him that he is ruminating over what his colleague smells like, he hates himself. Her scent is the sort of thing a happily-married man probably wouldn't notice. But Faris isn't even engaged and society won't let him forget it. With no family or wife, men look down on him. His aunts gossips about his sexuality. Strangers chastise him for "not getting serious." They speak to him as though he is choosing to remain single. In reality, his involuntary solitude is the most unbearable aspect of his life; it keeps his bed cold regardless of whether his air conditioners are on full blast.
"What is wrong with the other woman, the lab technician?" Shrooq asks, her tone more judgmental than teasing. "Was she the catfish?"
"Nothing's wrong with that woman," Faris says, ignoring the mangling of the English term. "I just have to send out a lot of messages to really make this work. Swipe-dating is a numbers game. It's all about volumetrics."
"You're such a nerd. You say that about everything."
"It's true about everything."
"Some things can't be simplified into formulas and principles, ya Faris."
"How would you know?" Faris swivels around to Shrooq. "Women don't initiate conversations nor do they maintain them. They don't approach men in cafes or ask for their numbers on the street. You all get to be blissfully unaware of the energy, time, and money courtship takes; men don't have that luxury. We are broken by what we cannot break down."
"- Are you really complaining about how hard men have it?" Shrooq asks, the niqab slit framing the mirth in her eyes.
Shrooq comes from a quiet town thirty kilometers north of Riyadh. A place with as many unrelated families as traffic lights. In all likelihood, Shrooq's family banned nail polish, bike-riding, sports, driving, and car ownership throughout her childhood and teenage years. He'd lose the who-has-it-worse game so, no, Faris doesn't want to complain about how hard men have it. At least not to her.
He says this and Shrooq's gaze softens.
"Smart boy," Shrooq chimes, turning to leave. "And smart boys know that tradition exists for a reason. Uninstall that godless app and let your mother and aunts find you a decent girl like they're supposed to."
Faris shudders at the thought of his mother and aunts picking a wife for him. They'd surely pick a woman who'd only watch historical Turkish reenactments. A woman who'd shun international travel and his Western proclivities. A woman who would nudge him awake if he hadn't woken for the sunrise prayer. A woman not entirely unlike Shrooq.
Not long after Shrooq leaves his office, Faris returns to the daily deluge of client emails. He doesn't get through two emails before the landline rings, its unfamiliar shrill startling him.
"Salaam alaikum," Faris says. "RTL Consultancy. How -"
An irritated man's voice cuts him off. "- Shrooq, please."
The caller speaks as though he's asking an operator in an antiquated phone system to patch him through. Faris leans past his cubicle wall to get a better look down the hallway. Shrooq's office is just as lifeless as its neighbors. Faris exhales sharply.
"She's not in at the moment, but -"
"- Well, her email says she is and we need to release funds now. We're in the middle of an audit and the fact that your billing department isn't answering their phone has put us in a dangerous predicament."
Faris holds the phone away from his ear to miss the ensuing rant. He's livid until he hears the project's name. He knows this name. Last month, he'd lost sleep calling computer manufacturers in China and Mexico to give them the perfect proposal only for their sister office in Jeddah, RTL West, to poach them.
Curiosity sets in, snuffing out his indignation. If those back-stabbing asses at RTL West poached them, why are they paying his billing department?
"Absher, okay, absher," he says quickly, alternating the Arabic word and its English equivalent. "Send me all the relevant details and I'll handle the issue personally."
Moments later, Faris is going through the emails the client forwards him as well as all the relevant emails from his office's general account. His investigation provides an explanation for the poached client's return. Strangely, the emails also serve as a masterclass in business English.
"As we are part of the same RTL Family, inter-company poaching is tribal and petty," one email asserts. "...a flagrant violation of company policy and behavior unbefitting an RTL employee." The emails present RTL West with three options: refer the client back to RTL Riyadh, his branch, split the commission, or be reported to Operations and HR. Each email sign-off ends the same way: Regards, Shrooq Al Ghashashi.
Faris reclines in his chair, his jaw slack. Part of him applauds his colleague's aplomb. Part of him wants to yell at her for stealing back his client and keeping it a secret. But mostly he just wants to know how a colleague who's constantly fetching snacks and drinks - a colleague who can't even pronounce 'principle' - was able to accomplish such a feat.
Faris glances down the hall again. Still no Shrooq. Whenever she returns, he thinks, they're going to need to talk.
Shrooq returns to the office an hour later with bubble tea and a bag of chips. Faris ambushes her as she sits at her desk. His interrogation starts with perfunctory questions about her lunch and cafe selection. He nods in a docile manner as she answers, and then hands her hardcopies of the email thread. Her manicured eyebrows crouch into an expression of unfamiliarity. Sudden recognition strikes Shrooq rigid by the third page. She stops reading. A lifetime of assessing women's expressions through niqabs had made Faris fairly adept at ascertaining moods from few facial cues but even he's at a loss for what Shrooq's thinking.
"The English in these emails is impressive to say the least," he prods, grinning. "Who wrote them?"
"I did."
Faris emits a species of laughter half scoff, half genuine amusement. He grabs a highlighter from her desk and pops the cap. Faris skims the document, this time highlighting the time stamp of every email.
"Absher," he says. "Ignoring the fact that it took you two whole minutes to realize what you were holding, look at these time stamps." He reads them aloud as he continues to highlight. "RTL West emails you at 9:45 AM? You respond at 9:45 AM the same day. They email you Thursday at 4:41 PM? You respond at 4:41 PM that same Thursday." Faris flips the page, highlights more times. "Either the email service provider's system is glitching out, or you type at superhuman speeds."
Shrooq regains her composure, glares at him. Then her eyes soften and she looks defeated, then deflated, then angry again.
"So?" she croaks, and clears her throat.
"So?" Faris echoes indignantly. "So our email system and calendar are synced to our server's network. If the emails are off, the whole damn system's off. Shrooq, this is literally the exact scenario that terrified programmers about the Y2K bug. A buggy clock jeopardizes automated salaries, PTO accruement! We need to call IT -"
"- It was AIOU!" Shrooq huffs. She throws her hands up. "AIOU wrote the emails. Are you happy now?"
Faris recoils. "The Beta AI app? That AIOU?"
Faris doesn't know what answer he was expecting, but it wasn't this. While AIOU excels at assisting niche geneticists and making thousands of entry level data clerks redundant, their generative language models are a joke. Social media is filled with videos of AIOU hallucinating, spouting gibberish and "ghost facts."
The muted mechanical whine of the building's solitary elevator breaks the office's silence. Most likely, it's employees from other companies leaving early.
Faris shakes his head in disbelief. "Don't people call their chatbot a shatbot?"
"It's been patched and re-patched," Shrooq explains with a dismissive wave. "AIOU Beta runs as smooth as olive oil now."
Faris remains expressionless. "Okay, but even if I believed you, it doesn't explain how you were able to respond so quickly to incoming emails."
"It's a new account feature," Shrooq says. "You can sync your AIOU to any internet messaging account protocol. If you tweak your auto-reply email options, you can get the AIOU to respond to your emails for you."
It's all too implausible to be a lie, but no other pragmatic explanations make sense. Occam's Razor tells him what to think in such scenarios.
Shrooq frowns at Faris. "Are you happy now?"
Faris manages a toothy grin. "No, but I believe that you'll change that." He stands to leave. "In fact, I have a feeling that you'll offer me half the commission in apology." He hazards a look back at Shrooq who's still glaring at him broodingly. "And if you wanted to throw in rotisserie chicken kabsa for the week to smooth things over, no one here would stop you."
Faris's two-bedroom, two-bathroom flat is filled with every modern convenience a young modern bachelor could want. It boasts a surround sound system with speakers as tall and shapely as Riyadh's skyscrapers, a wall-mounted 65" Sony TV, ghost quiet A/Cs, the list goes on. A cleaner comes every two weeks for the balled-up aluminum sandwich wrappers and other clutter strewn about. The building has ample parking, something rarer than a cocktail bar.
Ironically, the one thing his flat missing is the thing he wants most. He knows it is old-fashioned, but a beautiful young wife asking about his day as they sit down to a meal she prepared for them is the closest thing to fulfillment he can imagine. For years, he'd felt guilty for this desire. Then streaming services came to Saudi Arabia. Their content revealed that working women, in the West at least, want to come home to a low-carb meal with a salad and a bottle of wine. Her partner is supposed to pour the wine, ask about her day, and listen intently as she answers. Substituting the wine for spiced lamb on a bed of rice with a lemon yogurt sauce, it's not so different from what he wants. We are all casting directors, he thinks, trying out different people for the same parts.
As if to punish him for thinking of his own happiness, Faris's phone buzzes. It's a text message. It buzzes again and again. The eighth time it buzzes Faris jumps up, cursing the client machine-gunning his phone with texts. It's 7:16 PM and he hasn't even kicked off his pants or loosened his tie.
By the time Faris fetches his laptop, he has nine texts from an unsaved number, two emails, one missed call, and building schematics for a project. The schematics are for two campuses in different regions of the province which will affect labor cost, lead time, and much more. Despite the intricacies of the project, the email requests a project schedule and sales quote by the end of the day.
Faris considers ignoring it. Home time is family time. Unfortunately, his bosses know that he's unmarried. More importantly, a potential client complaining that he'd been unresponsive will have disastrous consequences. Management looks for any reason to withhold overdue salary bumps and vacation time. Faris doesn't even want to think about what he would do if they choose to not renew his contract. In Saudi Arabia, losing employment means losing his right to reside in the kingdom. Even if Faris managed to get rehired in Saudi Arabia, potential employers would indubitably leverage Jordan's awful job market. They would lowball him with two-year contracts providing a measly thousand dollar monthly salary. The alternative isn't much better.
When Faris thinks of Jordan, he doesn't think of rock-faced Petra or the Mediterranean beaches, he thinks of desperation, opportunism and war. Every year, throngs of refugees of all ages reach the Hashemite kingdom with nothing but the indomitable will to survive. The genocide west of Jordan has forced so many Palestinians eastward that the country is half Palestinian, a conservative estimate by many regional experts. Faris's own grandparents were from the ethnically cleansed Palestinian town of Salamah.
When Faris thinks of his possible repatriation, he doesn't think of refugees like his grandparents, but job competition. These experienced engineers will work any job for practically free in conditions that would wrinkle his nose.
Faris is going through building schematics when his phone chimes. It's a new message on MyEros.com. He logs into the website on his laptop and a familiar face greets him. Against all odds, Sara, 30 responded to his message within twenty-four hours.
"Yes, my parents are proud that I used my chemistry degree to become a drug dealer," she jokes. "They're all scared that I'll gift painkillers to my nieces and nephews for Eid al Adha. What about you? What are your parents scared of you doing?"
"The same," Faris types, grinning. "I'd do anything to keep my cousins from breaking my stuff when I visit. If I have to drug a couple kids for peace of mind, so be it."
The kinds of women MyEros.com matches him with usually only ask questions to elicit information about his mental state or societal standing. Questions that determine whether he can complement their life. Sara, 30 isn't doing that.
The phone chimes with another of her messages.
"Eid al Adha is a holiday when we literally celebrate the prophet Ibrahim's willingness to slit his own son's throat for God without hesitation," she writes back. "Surely your family can tolerate the idea of you slipping a couple children some sleeping pills."
Midnight black hair, gorgeous eyes, and a sense of humor. He reclines in his sofa and takes a moment to savor his good fortune.
A call vibrates his phone. Maybe it's because he's staring into Sara's sea-green eyes, or thinking about how to keep the conversation going, but he expects to hear her voice. Instead, an unfamiliar baritone jars him out of his pleasant mental space
"Salaam Alaikum. Sorry for the late call. Did you get our email?"
"I didn't," Faris lies. "I'm out of the office -"
"- Please check your email ASAP. It's urgent. We've already got nursing students enrolled but they can't sign up for classes if there's no website catalog to choose from."
Faris wants to tell the caller "poor planning on your part does not necessitate an emergency on mine" and nearly has to bite off his tongue to stop himself.
"Absher, I'll put a quote together tonight but the programmers are all at home with their families. I can't do a schedule."
"Okay, but please, we need the schedule, too."
"Inshallah, inshallah," Faris promises. He ends the call and flings his phone so hard against an adjacent chair that it bounces off and clatters on the floor.
On his laptop, a green circle flashes next to Sara, 30's avatar. She's still online. Like most unmarried Arabs in Riyadh, she probably lives with her parents if they're in the city. He's got thirty minutes maximum before familial responsibilities take her offline for the night. After that, experience has taught him that it's unlikely they'll speak again. The thought of missing out on her for a pushy client fills him with such rage that he starts cursing. It's like life doesn't want him to be happy. It wants to whittle down his youth until, jaded and wilted, he marries some young girl in a last-ditch effort to force life to make good on at least one of its promises. Life wants him stuck in that old species of marriage that traps two strangers in a web of convenience and tradition.
In a separate browser tab, Faris clicks the address bar. Anxious hands hover over his laptop. He waits for the courage to do what he must to salvage what he can of his night.
When his fingers finally start typing, each keystroke feels sacrilegious. Slowly, he types "AIOU.com."
Faris cannot help but speak to Shrooq about the night before when he sees her at work the next day. The words gush out of him. "This client called out of nowhere and all but demanded a liter of my firstborn's blood. I tried your..." he looks around before continuing even though no one's in the office. "friend."
"Oh?" Shrooq says, her eyes widening. "And?"
"I've never seen anything like it. I can't believe AI development is already this advanced. Its proposal had some serious flaws but -"
"No, I told you," Shrooq says. "You need to give it your emails."
"But I did. I copied so much information."
"No, Faris." Shrooq pulls up AIOU.com on her laptop. She clicks through windows and options so fast it looks as though the computer is glitching. She's far more familiar with AIOU than he initially thought. Faris's attention drops from the screen to the long slender fingers gliding around the mousepad. This is the closest he's ever been to a woman he hasn't been related to. With any other woman, he would have realized it earlier, but he has little attraction to Shrooq. Nothing kills attraction like a judgmental attitude, and Shrooq is extremely judgmental.
"Are you paying attention?" Shrooq asks sharply.
"Yeah," Faris says weakly. "I'm watching you."
Her cursor hovers over a star button. "I said, download and install the AIOU browser extension. After you do that, log into your email in this tab and AIOU will have access to your email account." Shrooq must have seen Faris recoil because she frowns. "What?" she snaps. "Everyone is doing it."
"Giving AIOU Beta access to my business email account seems extremely reckless."
"Okay, then don't. Compress all your emails into a single zip file and drop that into the field every single time you want it to generate something. See how old that gets in a week."
Faris cocks an eyebrow at Shrooq. He knows he shouldn't speak his mind but he can't resist.
"You know more about AIOU than their programmers," Faris says. "What happened to my colleague going on about tradition and these 'ungodly apps?' You've been on me about MyEros.com for months. How can you justify using AIOU when you judge me for using AI outside of work?"
"- And how do you justify attacking me instead of thanking me?" Shrooq says coldly. "I help you with your workload and you treat me like this? Shame on you."
"Shame on..." his voice trails off into confusion. He looks around the office bewildered. "How is me asking you a question attacking you anyway?"
Shrooq responds with a glare given to someone acting obtuse. Before he can respond, his phone buzzes with a message from Sara. He reads the caption of the message and smiles. The mere knowledge of the young pharmacist's message in his phone calms him faster than any drug her pharmacy sells, he's sure of it.
"...And to answer your rude question," Shrooq says while Faris types his response, "If our lazy supervisors can have secretaries, I can have AIOU. Why do companies and CEOs get praised for delegating tasks, but when I do it I get questions? I'm just doing what everyone else is doing."
Faris considers her point. Companies have been trading human labor for automated labor for years, and often prematurely. MyEros uses algorithms to match people; banks had been using automated tellers for years. Faris had even heard that in some Western countries, bots answer customer service calls. Everyone else is using AI to make their lives easier. Why shouldn't they?
"I mean, just think of what you can do with all that extra time," Shrooq says.
"Oh, I'm way ahead of you," Faris says, staring at his phone. "Way ahead."
Faris's new "algorithmic secretary" works its way up from secretary to sales representative in a matter of weeks. AIOU's "writing partner" feature enables his synced account to proofread its own drafts. The AI writes the responses and checks its own writing. All Faris has to do is copy and paste them into an email text field and hit "Send."
Faris devotes his freed-up time to MyEros. It's not a moment too soon; an explosion of messages fill his MyEros message box. At first he assumes it's the extra time he's investing, but the influx is more likely due to the arrival of Eid al Adha. With schools and universities along with businesses observing holiday hours, everyone has more free time.
When Faris was a child, the four-day festival meant gifts for him and his siblings, late night Street Fighter Alpha competitions with cousins, and tons of grilled sheep. Families gathered on rooftops. Smoked meat choked the night air in celebration of the Almighty rewarding the prophet Ibrahim's steadfastness by telling him to sacrifice a goat instead of his son Ismael. Eid al Adha was family time. However, now Faris sees it as make a family time. The holidays grants him a limited window of access to single women who would otherwise be working or studying. Faris uses it. He strikes up conversations with various women around Riyadh.
Weeks after Eid al Adha ends, some of their responses taper off, but many women keep the same short turnaround time. The novelty wanes because the early exchanges are all the same: Where are you from? What is your job? Are you married? Are you sure you're not married? And other brain-dead questions. Faris wishes he had a way to answer these repetitive questions automatically. Luckily enough, he does.
If AIOU is good at handling clients, it's fantastic at MyEros conversations. Mere hours after he has synced his AIOU account to his MyEros account, AIOU messages every Arabic-speaking childless woman between the ages of 25 to 33 within a hundred-kilometer radius. It's so efficient, he syncs his work email to AIOU as well. Now the app "reads" and automatically responds to work clients and MyEros messages alike. All he has to do is remain up to date on the outgoing messages. He promises himself he'll stay on top of it.
As for app-dating, Faris finally has it down to a science. First, the AIOU sends the initial greeting. If the woman replies, the AIOU initiates conversation. Then, at the end of the week Faris skims the conversations for suitable candidates. If he finds them, he sends them his contact information.
It's insurance in case he never actually meets Sara. She seems to enjoy their conversations but romance makes people unpredictable. His reservations are validated when he asks if Sara would like to meet up.
She says that she'll think about it. And then her messages stop. For two weeks, he sends her messages. "Just wanted to see how you are," and "Just making sure you're okay."
Sara never responds.
Any number of reasons could explain why Sara ghosted him: a distracted teenage driver could have run her off the road, a nephew or niece could have accidentally broken her phone, maybe MyEros froze her account. More likely, she'd been secretly engaged. It's not entirely uncommon for young betrothed people to "play around" online in the months leading up to their wedding.
He doesn't have long to dwell on it before a bizarre video call with a "VIP" client. Faris is in the middle of a lengthy explanation detailing why a manufacturer hasn't shipped their order when a woman appears on his client's screen. She approaches the client, asking him for his keys. While the client fishes through his pockets, the woman stares at the screen. Her eyebrows nearly touch as she frowns. The VIP client slaps the keys on the table and continues the conversation. The woman never takes them. After squinting at the corner of the screen where Faris suspects his avatar is, she storms out the room, slamming the door behind her. The client apologizes, and Faris continues his explanation. A week later, the client requests to be transferred to RTL West. It is a huge blow to Faris's reputation.
The week after the transfer request, he looks at himself in the restroom mirror at work. His wavy hair is shades lighter than its usual brown. Deep set eyes stare back with an indifference bordering on frigidity. See? he tells himself, slapping himself on the cheeks. Despite the recent sequence of events, you're only a bit worse for wear. He tells himself not to take either rejection personally. Clients are the most fickle people in the world and as for Sara, hadn't he factored such disappointments into his "voluminous" dating strategy?
Back at his desk, he's scrolling through AIOU's conversations on MyEros when his mobile rings. The voice on the other end is panicked. "Where are you, ya Faris? We've been waiting for an hour."
"I beg your pardon?"
"The vice-rector is here. We messaged you earlier and you said that you were here."
Almost immediately, Faris knows what has most likely happened; AIOU, acting in his stead, had requested some sort of meeting on his behalf.
Faris feels sick. It's the kind of queasiness that sets in during an argument after a person calls a loved one a nasty word.
"You told us you'd meet us at the site on the East Side of the campus," the caller huffs "Where are you?"
Faris drops the phone on the desk and starts swiping through emails. He doesn't have to swipe far to find an email chain from the caller and soon-to-be-former client that started at 5:00 AM.
"I'm in the area now," Faris's algorithmic doppelganger had written towards the latter part of the exchange. "Anytime is good." AIOU obviously didn't know what it was typing, but because his emails had been instantaneous up to that point, the client believed it. The agreed upon time is an hour ago and fifteen kilometers away, but it might as well be fifty kilometers away in Riyadh traffic.
"- I'm in traffic," Faris says, grabbing his briefcase and keys. "You know how the morning school rush gets - but I'm on my way."
The only thing worse than giving an impromptu proposal is giving it to a client who'd recently rescheduled due to Faris's own negligence. To make matters worse, for reasons only known to the Almighty, RTL's regional director - his boss's boss's boss - calls up Faris and asks questions about various projects. The director's tone is neutral but it's disastrous to be on management's radar. Their outstanding incompetence guarantees that their involvement, regardless of how minute, will exacerbate whatever problems they attempt to solve.
Faris starts going through all AIOU's conversations over the last week. Despite him staying on top of his emails, he discovers several close calls with AIOU agreeing to meet clients. These emails are in the last place he'd expect: the trash folder, slated for deletion. Fortunately, because these messages were sent after business hours, no clients agreed to meet up. Until the vice-rector situation. He also finds drafts addressing old clients in folders he didn't create that are strings of utter gibberish. Strings of alphanumeric text that look almost randomly chosen.
How many of these emails had AIOU sent and then deleted? How many potential clients had it scared off? How many potential business relationships had it sabotaged?
His thoughts turn to his MyEros account. Panicking, he logs into his MyEros account. He's greeted by the familiar pink and red hearts and naked cherubs drawing bows. His profile picture has changed. It's a photo of Faris posing on the 156th floor of the Burj Khalifa. There's just one problem: he's never been to Dubai, never even been anywhere east of Riyadh. There are dozens of conversations Faris has no memory of. Most of the women's avatars are missing yet the conversations are long. He sees long chains of messages in Arabic, English, Urdu, Hindi, and even Tagalog. AIOU has been busy.
In one conversation, a woman had actually asked for his number twice and each time the AI fabricated a random ten digit string.
In another chain when a woman jokingly asked if he was secretly a deceptive philanderer, AIOU responded that, yes, he did in fact have a wife: "Shrooq. She's a sales rep. We spend so much time together; I don't know what I'd do without her." He doesn't see how hostile the conversation gets from there because he's staring at the woman's profile picture. Cleft chin, honey eyes. The face looks familiar. He think but is not sure, that it's the woman who'd interrupted his video call with the VIP client.
Faris feels like he drank a liter of battery acid. He closes the laptop and doubles over in the chair. His vision swims. The question isn't why the vice rector catastrophe happened, but rather, why hadn't it happened sooner.
AIOU withdrawal turns out to be the most painful experience Faris has had in his adult life. It starts with the shock of client exposure as he returns to personally responding to clients while reviewing old AIOU's exchanges. Re-familiarizing himself with client attitudes and projects reminds him why he enlisted AIOU in the first place.
He's deactivated his AIOU account but at times, he considers reactivating it just for an afternoon, but he can't afford it. If management discovers that an AI, however inefficiently, had been doing Faris's job for weeks, it would surely cost him and Shrooq their jobs. Shrooq could always ask her family for money; however, Saudi Arabia is quicksand to an unemployed expatriate. With no employer to sponsor his residence status, the sixty-day doomsday clock would start ticking. Two months to find a new kafeel or risk deportation.
So he reads through every communiqué since he synced AIOU to his business email. It consumes his every waking moment. There are no late-night conversations with friends. No MyEros chats or first-person shooter binges. Just damage control.
Nights and mornings blur into each other. His inboxes accumulate with messages he doesn't have time to respond to.
One afternoon, when Shrooq asks him how things are going, Faris shrugs off the question.
"Well, I've just noticed that you're working a lot more at work," she says matter-of-factly. "Did something happen?"
Faris laughs dryly. He's still sorting through AIOU's Eid al Adha emails. He'd set his email preferences to an 'out-of-the-office' auto-reply message but the AI still sent replies after the auto-reply.
"Actually, I'd rather talk about that client you poached..." he says, without looking up from his laptop.
"I brought you kabsa and half my commission in an envelope, ya Faris. There is nothing to talk about."
"Yeah, but I've been replaying that conversation in my head." Faris looks up at Shrooq, swivels in his chair. "When I gave you those emails AIOU sent on your behalf, it took you ages to recognize them."
"So?"
"So, you didn't even know AIOU sent those emails, did you?" Faris asks. "You were reading them for the first time, weren't you?"
Shrooq crosses her arms. "This is what you want to know despite," she gestures at Faris's laptop and cluttered desk with a nod, "whatever else is going on right now? Ya Allah."
"Yes."
"Why do you think the clients are always rushing us?" Her niqab billows from one of her characteristic scoffs. She continues, her voice tighter than Faris's last deadline. "Why do you think there's always a discrepancy between their words and actions? They use AI and end up in those time crunches they're always pushing us to get them out of. So, yeah, maybe I didn't know about those emails. So what?" Another scoff. "I'm hardly the worst offender out there."
Riyadh might be a sprawling city of eight million but everyone in its contracting world could fit in one building. The AIOU fallout spares his professional reputation further damage, but the same cannot be said for his personal life.
Nasty blurbs calling him a "cheater," and a "fake" pop up intermittently on his social media. The commenters avatars are always the default headshot silhouette and their profile names are always in italics. When Faris clicks on the profile name the accounts are always deleted.
One night while waiting for his order in his car, he spots a woman in a niqab glaring at him from the driver's side of a white SUV. The name A.H.M. stenciled across the doors tells him she probably works for Abu Himmam Materials, the leading materials provider in the country. Headlights pulling around the parking lot reveal the other people in the car - co-workers probably - engrossed in conversation. The woman in the niqab isn't. The point on his forehead where she is staring gradually grows hotter. Moments later, when she takes off, her SUV nearly clips his car in its wide, angry arc around the parking lot.
Later that week, Faris gets his first grey hair, an intrepid strand right at the front of his hairline. It's one solitary strand of hair but feels like the mark of Cain. It's no wonder why: he's jeopardized his job and possibly his personal safety.
However, as the Jordanian saying goes, "life cannot be taught another sense of humor or timing". A month after his AIOU account deactivation, Faris gets an email from Sara. The email's tone is contrite without being accountable. There's no explanation for her disappearance but there is an acceptance of his old invitation for a meeting. She even chooses the venue: Dammam Railway Station at 4:00.
The drive from Riyadh to Dammam is five hours of dodging erratic drivers and desolate borderlands. Along the south side of the freeway barbed fences run for kilometers. Ripped blue plastic bags get caught on the fence's teeth. They blow in the desert wind like shawls. Eighteen wheelers decorated with Afghani flags provide the only color against the ocher backdrop of shrubs and sand. The drive is long, hot, but worth it because, Faris can't help but thinking, so is Sara.
He tries to calm himself when he gets to the train station's parking lot. "It's just a friendly meeting," he tells himself. "Calm down." But he can't help himself; he's finally reached the elusive final phase of online dating.
The station's glass doors slide open, revealing the departure queues and ticket counter. He's never been to Dammam train station but it's got the same high ceilings and glossy, white floor. When the double doors slide open, his attention is already beyond the car rental kiosks.
The hall is busier than usual. A group of women leaning against the wall on the departure's side look up from their phones and they stare at him expectantly. His stomach twists. The taller of the women steps off the wall and starts towards him. She's got deep, raven hair. Skin as pale as the moon. Her hair is textured differently and she's far taller than expected, but it's her: Sara, 30. She walks up to him, and, like a model out of a shampoo TV ad, breezes right by him.
Forgetting himself, Faris turns and calls after her: "Sara?"
The woman doesn't turn around. Faris watches her disappear into the women's bathroom.
"I'm Sara, may God bless you."
Faris turns around. The woman behind him could be Sara, but it's impossible to be sure: she's not just wearing an abaya, but gloves, and a niqab as well. She does, however, have the same aquamarine eyes.
When Faris's mouth finally moves, he can barely hear his own voice. "You're Sara?" She looks nothing like what he'd expected. Realizing his face is betraying whatever manners he should be practicing, he forces a smile. "Oh, where are my manners?" Faris says. He gestures toward the station's exit. "Come. I've got a nice restaurant picked out for us. I've got a hankering for American, so -"
"Actually, brother, here's fine," the young woman says. The word "brother" comes off as especially cold and unfamiliar. She points to a table in the lobby's corner. From the gold bracelet on her wrist, the four long Arabic characters of "Allah" jingle in front of him.
"Are you sure?" he prods. "The reviews all say it's incredible."
"I... don't need to quote hadeeth to you, do I?"
Of the thousands of verified conversations involving The Prophet, he knows the exact one she has in mind: Whenever a man is alone with a woman, the devil makes a third.
Her starched personality, the religious austere, it's all too much to respond to. No date beginning with religious scripture references can end well, but Faris has too much invested to simply walk away.
So he does as she suggests. They sit down at the table in the waiting lobby, but only one of them is slightly comfortable. Sara is nothing like the profile, not just in looks and values, but speech as well. She was funny, easy-going and engaging online. In person, Sara is cold and awkward. She does not attempt to explain why she catfished him or disappeared, offering only a vague apology.
"Well, I'm sorry if I seemed shocked initially," Faris says. "It's just that your pictures are different online."
"Allah," she sighs.
"- I don't mean that in a bad way -" he sputters. Faris has both hands up like he's trying to stop traffic. He scrambles for the words, but Sara speaks first.
"Brother, I did not intend to mislead you." Her voice turns bitter, like sugar-less, cream-less coffee. "It's that godless app. I just wanted a bit of help to get over my shyness and it completely took over my life."
Faris nods slowly. "I'm mostly app-less myself these days because it's not the worst offender out there," he offers. "But, yeah, MyEros can do that."
Sara snorts and folds her arms. When she speaks again, her voice is hard. "I wasn't talking about that app."
from FICTION on the WEB short stories https://ift.tt/SrXup7B
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