TALK TO ME

In Pettus’ SF novel, a programmer fears his that job is in jeopardy after the application he’s working on starts mouthing off.

What does it mean when the artificial intelligence project you’re developing suddenly becomes annoyingly argumentative? More importantly, how do you make it stop? That’s the conundrum facing Ralph, Pettus’ hapless hero, as he grapples with an increasing complex world of double-speak and large-scale information manipulation. Ralph isn’t exactly sure what Complexicon Communications does, even though he works there. He isn’t even sure what he’s ordering for lunch at the company’s unnecessarily cryptic cafeteria: What shall it be today, he muses—“colorful, fiber-rich” or “warm, tasty”? All that Ralph knows for sure is the necessity of getting his AI project Chatterbox’s snarky, uncooperative attitude adjusted before his boss, Welcher, finds out about its apparent sentience: “You ought to listen to yourself and see what I put up with,” Chatterbox says at one point. The only character who seems to understand the increasing absurdity of it all is Ralph’s rescue dog; readers are entertainingly privy to the animal’s sometimes-profound inner monologue throughout the yarn: “Domestication is a one-way street with bosses; they want to suppress us into being some sort of homo canis. Dogs run faster, so they put us on a leash. We have better ears, but they make so much noise we can’t hear anything.” Unsurprisingly, Ralph’s dog is also very concerned with the welfare of a pet belonging to another Complexicon employee named Skinner, who’s somehow been taught to provide psychological counseling for tips. These brief sojourns into the dog’s inner monologue make for amusing sidebars. Indeed, they serve a greater purpose, as they also offset the ongoing verbal duels between Chatterbox and Ralph, which, while aiming at absurdist fun, eventually become tedious. As Skinner observes earlier in a conversation with Ralph, “You’re gonna have to deal with an AI that’s been trained by some horse’s ass or by a stable genius, and you still have to figure out which.”

A clever, if slightly uneven, tale that holds up a funhouse mirror to our modern technological times.