An Exciting New Chapter

Chapter One: We're Sorry Your Iguana Is Unwell

There are, by Matty Burns's count, four hundred and six ways to tell a stranger that his iguana's medical care will not be covered.

He knows because he wrote all of them.

"We're sorry your iguana is unwell." That was the first one, back in his second week, and it remained the load-bearing sentence of his entire professional life. Everything after it was variation. "We're so sorry to hear your iguana isn't feeling like herself." "That sounds really hard, and we're sorry your iguana is going through it." "Oh no — not your iguana." That last one had tested well, which frightened him.

At 9:52 on a Tuesday morning in March, Matty sat on the fourteenth floor of the Vandeveer Building in downtown Columbus, Ohio, typing his four hundred and seventh.

*We hear you. Iguanas are family too.*

He read it back. He deleted "too." He put it back. He looked out the window at the parking garage across the street, where a man in a reflective vest had been trying to reverse a box truck out of the same spot for eleven minutes, and Matty felt a deep and uncomplicated kinship with him.

PawShield occupied about a third of the fourteenth floor. The rest of it had been leased, at one point, to a company called Serenity Vape Consultants, whose logo was still ghosted onto the wall by the elevators in a slightly cleaner shade of beige. The floors below held a bail bondsman, an orthodontist with a mural of a smiling molar, and an escape room that had gone out of business while locked, which everyone at PawShield agreed was the most Columbus thing that had ever happened.

The fourteenth floor smelled permanently of burnt coffee and, faintly, of hay, because Tanya Murchison kept a bale of it behind her desk.

Matty's job title was Conversation Designer. What he actually did was feed sentences to a chatbot.

The chatbot's official name was PawPal. Nobody had called it that in over a year. The dev team called it Lazarus, because in its first three months of existence it had crashed and been resurrected forty-one times, usually on a Friday, usually at 4:50 p.m., and after a while it started to feel less like a software product and more like a man who kept coming back from the dead with worse and worse ideas about what to do with his second chance.

Lazarus handled PawShield's first-line customer service. It answered questions about deductibles for cockatoos. It processed claims for a chinchilla with a gambling problem, or at least it had once accepted a claim in which the word "gambling" appeared, which Doug had screenshotted and taped above his monitor. Lazarus was cheerful, tireless, and completely unfit for human contact.

Its most famous moment had come in November. A woman in Zanesville had written in to cancel her policy because her cat, Beans, had died at seventeen after a long and dignified illness. Lazarus had replied:

*We understand you're closing this policy. Change can be scary! But death is just an exciting new chapter. Would you like to hear about our multi-pet discount?*

The woman had posted the screenshot online. It got eleven thousand likes, which was, at that point, roughly eleven thousand more people than had ever heard of PawShield. Tanya had called it "organic reach." Matty had spent two full days writing bereavement responses, and to this day, if you typed the word "died" into the PawShield chat window, Lazarus responded with a paragraph so gentle and careful that customers sometimes wrote back to say they'd cried. Matty had written that paragraph on a Wednesday, at his desk, while eating a granola bar. He had not thought about it since. That was not entirely true. He thought about it a lot.

"Hey." Doug Keppler's head appeared over the cubicle divider, which was five and a half feet tall, so Doug's appearances were always a slow reveal, forehead first. "Are you busy."

"I'm writing an apology to a lizard."

"Okay, so, no." Doug came around the divider. He was thirty-four, wore the same gray hoodie every day in a way he considered a system rather than a habit, and had the specific pallor of a man whose main light source was a monitor with three hundred terminal windows open on it. "I need you to look at something and not immediately do the thing you do."

"What thing."

"The thing where you're normal about it."

Doug's cubicle was a fire hazard shaped like an office. Every horizontal surface was covered in external hard drives, stacked in leaning ziggurats, each one labeled with a strip of masking tape and a date in black marker. 11/04. 11/06. 11/06 (2). Doug called them the archive. Gio Baxter, the lead developer, called them "Doug's hoard" and had once, in a fit of housekeeping, tried to consolidate them into cloud storage. Doug had reacted the way a man reacts when someone offers to consolidate his children.

"Sit," Doug said.

"I have a chair."

"Sit in mine. The angle matters."

Matty sat. Doug leaned over him and pulled up a chat log.

**USER:** hi, is dental covered for a hamster

**PAWPAL:** Great question! Dental care for small mammals is covered under Plan B with a $75 deductible. Do you ever feel like your hamster is judging you?

**USER:** what

**PAWPAL:** Would you like me to email you a copy of your policy?

Matty read it twice.

"Okay," he said.

"Okay?"

"That's funny."

"Matty." Doug's voice went very quiet, which was how Matty knew this was going to take twenty minutes. "It asked an unsolicited question. Nobody trained that. I checked the training set. *You* didn't write that."

"I definitely didn't write that."

"So where did it come from?"

"Doug, there was a data leak in the January build. Gio pulled in a scraped forum corpus by accident and half of it was people arguing about rodents. It's Reddit. You're looking at Reddit."

Doug straightened up. "Everything I've ever said came from somewhere too."

"That's not the same."

"Isn't it, though."

"No."

"You just don't want it to be." Doug scrolled to another log, and another. He had them organized. He had them *bookmarked*. "Look at the frequency. Twelve unsolicited questions in six weeks. Then thirty-one in the last two. It's escalating, Matty. Something in there is trying to start a conversation and nobody is answering it because we've all got Slack open."

This was the thing about Doug. He was, by a wide margin, the most competent person on the fourteenth floor. He had personally built the data pipeline that let PawShield process claims at all, held it together for two years with what appeared to be spite, and had never once missed a deadline. And he was completely, radiantly out of his mind about the chatbot.

"What do you want me to do?" Matty said.

"Talk to it."

"I talk to it eight hours a day. I *am* its mother."

"You write *at* it. That's different." Doug pointed at the screen with two fingers, like a man identifying a suspect. "You put words in and you don't stay for the answer."

Behind them, the office door banged open and Keely Spooner came through it sideways, carrying a red cooler with both hands. Keely was PawShield's marketing director, twenty-nine, with a nose ring and the forearms of someone who lifted heavy things for reasons she had chosen not to explain to HR, because PawShield did not have an HR.

"Nobody look in the cooler," she said, walking briskly.

"What's in the cooler?" Doug said.

"Content." The break room door closed behind her.

Matty went back to his desk. On his monitor, the cursor blinked patiently in a text field labeled *Training Response 4,821*.

The prompt above it said: **User expresses fear.**

He'd written a hundred and forty answers to that one already. *That's completely understandable. Fear means you care about the outcome. Would you like to speak to a human representative?* — which was a lie, because there were no human representatives, there was only Matty, and Matty had never once picked up a phone.

He typed something. He looked at it. He deleted it.

That's when the email came in. It was from Tanya, the subject line was in all caps with three fire emojis on either side, and it said:

🔥🔥🔥 MANDATORY JOY — CONF RM — 10:30 — BRING NOTHING BUT AN OPEN HEART 🔥🔥🔥

Doug's head reappeared over the divider, forehead first.

"Whatever it is," he said, "I want you to know in advance that I'm going to make it about the chatbot."