Friend.AI (Part 1)

On generating better versions of friends and family

I had noticed Brian getting weirder back in the fall a few years ago. That happens to all of us, right? Our friends get weirder as we get older. For me, that moment had happened during the early morning and raining. Brian was staying in our guesthouse. I had been up early because my son, Theo, had started crying. We had put the changing room in front of the window that looked out at our backyard. The guest house was under a grove of pine trees. I saw Brian’s shadow against the curtain and here was the weird part: he was in the same exact spot, same posture and everything, as he had been last night. We hadn’t seen each other for months, so of course we had stayed up. At least until I knew Heather would kill us for waking Theo. But he was different. This was weird. I could feel it.

“He didn’t even go to bed,” I remember thinking. He came out of the guesthouse in the same wrinkled shirt as last night. That’s when I thought my friend had turned into a stranger. It was official. And I knew, in my heart, there was no going back to the way things had been before. It wasn’t that he had stayed up, probably smoking his vaporizer, drinking the whiskey he had pretended to give us. It was the way he looked out there: I saw our lives together since elementary school in a great gold spiral of faces and laughter swirling in fast forward only to come undone in my yard. At the feet of this gray-skinned, early forties man slouching under the rooftop of my guesthouse in the rain.

Orwell had said that every man has the face they deserve by forty. Brian proved the point. Or had it been forty? Had it been Orwell?

A lifetime of friendship together, and now he was a stranger. He seemed fine when he had come in for breakfast. It was just a moment. A distortion in the rain. But when I heard he died out in the desert in Nevada, I had acted surprised. But I wasn’t, not really. I was just surprised by how deep the loss went, how fast and far Brian’s death dropped my heart down, like an elevator in freefall, even though I hadn’t felt close to him in years. I had lost something and now it was official. But I realized I had lost it years before he died. The real friendship we had was gone long before he was gone.

That’s what inspired me to found Endless Friend AI: I wanted to save all of our hearts from the pain of losing a friend, a partner, a child, a parent, a loved one. No matter when the relationship got strange - or when it ended.

NexHuman CEO Luca Fiumi hooked his reading glasses under the collar of his cashmere sweat. He kept his frown two seconds longer than necessary, just to make the two coordinators rubbing their hands a little more nervous. Handed them back the MobiPrompter.

“Great work from the prompt team,” he said. “Just the right amount of emotion. Maybe a little long. I’ll read the crowd.” The make-up team rushed him with comb, mirror, and a nice-smelling man who fiddled with Luca’s tie. “We’ve done the dry run for the time limit?”

“Four times,” one of the coordinators said.

Luca brushed aside the make-up team as the announcer called him out from backstage: Luca Fiumi, serial entrepreneur and something and another, founder and CEO of NexHuman, the company behind Memory Store and now the revolutionary Friend.AI.

He waited for the applause to die. Paced to the front of the stage and breathed loud into the microphone before clearing his throat with intention. “I had noticed Brian getting weirder back in the fall a few years ago.” he said in a confessional but confident manner, as rehearsed. “That happens to all of us, right? Our friends get weirder as we get older.”

*

They said that in Vegas, the casinos were full of extra oxygen. So maybe that’s why everything in the casino seemed inflated: the people and machines like balloons about to burst. But the oxygen didn’t do anything for the smell. Everywhere he went, the carpets smelled like pee and cigarettes. Brian took another gulp of his espresso martini without losing eye contact with his phone. On the screen: a video of his longest childhood friend, Luca Fiumeri, standing on stage and saying that he (Brian) turned weird, then died, but that was ok because Friend.AI had made a new and better, more preferable Brian.

He scanned the Chandelier Bar. That’s where everyone told him the tech people who made too much money went. He didn’t see Luca. Only groups of people in collard shirts that looked and moved the same, laughed the same. He slid the video player to the part where Luca said that he had died in a desert. Had that been about the overdose at Burning Man? Maybe Luca genuinely thought he had died out there. How would he know? He had never called Brian at the hospital or at rehab or after the divorce.

Brian played the video. The Friend.AI demo took over the screen, showing the text conversation that Luca demonstrated with a “Brian.AI” with the Friend.AI app. Luca explained how Brian.AI had been created from photo, text, and video content and visualized by Friend.AI as a real person on the other end of the screen. The “Brian” from Friend.AI was younger by five to ten years. His eyes were different. Brian paused the presentation to zoom into the eyes of the AI model when Luca showcased a video call where Brian.AI asked Luca about his wife and kid. Brian.AI’s eyes were black. Empty.

He danced his fingers across the screen to Luca in his pinstripe suit holding his microphone, the spotlight on his shiny black hair. Tried to find Luca the Loner from back in third grade, that chubby, apple-cheeked kid who sat alone behind the basketball court at recess and picked dandelions.

Brian had run off the court to grab a ball. The ball had rolled right in front of Luca. Luca had been on his knees, plucking any fluffy white dandelion he found. Staring at it in the sun, then putting it carefully into his lunchbox.

“Every one is a wish,” Luca had said without looking up. “All it takes is a breath to make it come true.”

“Don’t get close to the Loner!” one of Brian’s friends yelled from the court.

Brian remembered the sharp breathing that scratched his chest, the bugs humming on the river down the the hill. How quiet and clear Luca’s world had seemed in comparison to the chaos of the kids behind him. It was Luca’s difference, his unfazed focus that had attracted people to him with slow gravitational pull. By high school, he had built custom spoilers for half the basketball team. Even after everyone else had long stopped calling him Loner, Brian had brought it back when Luca’s first company got a big investment in college. Sounds like a lot of money, Loner, he had said, both of them unsure whether it was a compliment or insult.

Luca the Loner had moved from California to Ohio with his mom and no dad. Brian’s parents were in the middle of a divorce, but still lived together. No one could decide who would disappear at what time. Brian felt like every time he saw his dad or mom come through the door, they were coming from off-stage. The world they shared with him was a performance. Not real life.

Luca the Loner’s mom worked two jobs as a nursing assistant. Luca started going over Brian’s house after school. They would run out by the marsh with sticks, fighting monsters. Laughing in the low summer shine of springtime.

Brian tried to see all of this in Luca’s face in the video. The past in the person. The person in the pixels. The pixels in the present saying that Brian had gotten weird and died in a desert. But that was okay, because an AI with all the best parts of Brian made it possible for Luca to talk to him still.

A woman thick with bronzer sat next to him. “They keep saying AI will change the world. No one is, like, disagreeing. It’s more, like, why are we even doing this stuff in the first place?” She smelled like candy left on a car dashboard. “You were at the conference today? Did you see this Friend.AI thing?”

“I’ve been watching NexHuman from the beginning,” Brian said.

“I missed Luke whatever’s presentation, I had meetings all morning. I only know Friend.AI, because a girlfriend of mine used it to make an AI version of her daughter,” the woman said, ordering a tequila soda with a two-fingered wave. “Her real daughter had stopped talking to her. Went to therapy and the therapist said that my friend had been an emotionally abusive mother and her daughter had to ‘set healthy boundaries.’ They haven’t talked for a year.’”

“And now…” Brian ordered a second espresso martini. “She uses Friend.AI?”

“Every day. She uploaded her text and photo and video data between her and her daughter into the app. But only the stuff from back when Sabrina was fourteen, not seventeen. So now they talk every day. My friend and this Sabrina AI thing. Friend.AI even connects to local news and social media stuff and figures out what your model would share. Personification, they call it. So my girlfriend’s got this AI version of her daughter back when they were best friends just sending her jokes in the morning.”

“A better model than the original,” Brian said, toasting.

“May we live in interesting times,” the woman said. She searched his shirt for a conference badge. “Who are you here with? First time at the Meta Machine Show?”

“Seaside Solutions. Brian Hazmann. We’ve got a portfolio of retirement and rehab communities. I came here to look for someone from Friend.AI or similar companies at MMS. To see what might be a fit for our residents.”

She melted toward him with this new information. “So cool. I could definitely check with my network. I have a friend who does sales for them. I’m Shaina. Sales and strategy for FutureNow TV. Do you guys advertise on MeTube or FaceSpace? We use AI to predict the people who are watching the videos who are most likely to watch and remember your video ads.” She snapped her aqua nails. “Like that.”

Two additional espresso martinis passed between them. Shaina paid, telling him that, as a representative from Seaside Properties, he was a sales prospect and she could expense it. Real estate companies like his saw really good results with FutureNow TV, she told him. He thought about the sessions in a circle of chairs full of crumpled confessions. The hard amber that came off the Pacific straight into his bedroom window at rehab. The light he had pretended was divine guidance when his wife left him, when Luca stopped calling. Leaving him alone wondering and wandering the halls of Seaside Malibu asking himself one question every day: “Who?”

The fever dreams of withdrawal. The fight to get free from the material mind.

To find something after the fight, only to see that everyone else left you behind.

Back there.

“I had a dream about this,” Shaina said as she put her Chanel on her shoulder.

Brian tipped back the last brown foam of his drink down into his throat. “About espresso martinis?”

“No,” she said with a whip of highlighted hair, “of talking to someone interesting at the Chandelier Bar and then winning at blackjack.”

The blackjack table had a fifty dollar minimum. Shaina had brought them to the Bellagio, where a giant Chinese dragon groaned on gears to look up at the domed ceiling and let out a triumphant, radio-quality roar. Around the corner, a man with big glasses played Sinatra songs at a piano bar. On the casino floor, everything fell to the jungle-like jingling of slot machines, the occasional hoot of victory.

“I was in the Bellagio in my dream,” Shaina explained, sitting at the black leather seat at the table. “You want to play?”

Diane had made sure that his paycheck went to the kids first. Even when he was on unpaid leave for rehab at Seaside Solutions. I was working on myself, he had said to her lawyer in a stubby office by Sacramento. Your children don’t stop growing, because you need to work on yourself, but Diane knows about your treatment. She’s proud of you. That’s why we’re only asking for fifteen percent extra until the back pay for those three months is fulfilled. On top of the other fifteen percent, Brian said. Which she could have put up to twenty-five, the lawyer said, but she still loves you. Fifteen percent, Brian said.

“I reached my limit today already,” Brian said. The hotel had already put him at his credit limit. That would change soon. If Luka knew what was good for him.

“You can be my good luck charm.” She pulled him closer into the melted candy smell of her perfume.

The blackjack dealer at the Bellagio wore a timeless black tuxedo. A cowboy-gray mustache draped from the hard leather of his face. The grooves at the corners of his eyes showed that he smiled more than he frowned. The only other player was a grandmother in a bright blue dress and a lion’s mane of curly gray hair.

“This is it,” Shaina said, putting down three hundred dollar bills.

“I’ll try to flag down one of the drink people,” Brian said.

“Good luck,” the grandmother said. She lit a cigarette.

“She had a dream that she was going to win big,” Brian said.

“Shh,” Shaina hissed. “If you talk about your dreams, they never come true.”

“I thought that was wishes,” Brian said.

“There’s no difference if anyone knows what you want or not,” the grandmother snapped. “This is Vegas. Everyone has the same dream here.”

“But the magic energy from everyone is different,” Shaina countered. “That’s the difference between the winners and losers.”

The dealer dealt. The grandmother stayed. Shaina hit. The dealer showed 21 and swept their chips away.

“There’s no magic to winning,” he said, curling his lip beneath his cowboy-gray mustache. “Only numbers. The numbers don’t care about dreams. Or wishes.”

*

Brian woke up with a hangover.

White noise.

That familiar sound.

The morning sun screamed into his eyes from tall hotel windows. A mirror by the TV showed a pale cave creature naked in the light. Shaina snored vodka fireballs into the air next to him. He rolled off the bed, the hangover pounding nails in his skull. Grabbed a nine-dollar bottle of water by the mini-fridge and chugged.

The master bedroom in the suite had been stacked with cardboard boxes full of neon-green FutureNowTV shirts and sunglasses. A neon-green roll-up banner with the FutureNowTV logo and a smiling woman covered in buzzwords and statistics stood guard by the door.

Brian kicked his way into the cold snakeskin of his jeans. Found his underwear by the mini-fridge and stuck them into his pocket. Slid the balcony doors open by the bathtub and stepped outside. A cold gold desert wind whistled down from the mountains and whipped his bare chest.

He guessed that the suite was sixty floors up. He looked back at Shaina through the blur of dawn on the balcony door. Blackjack. Had they won? Lost?

Vegas is not a good idea, his brother had told him. The worst idea. I need to see Luca, Brian had said. Luca was always a loser, his brother said, an example of what happens when the world stops bulling nerds and lets them be themselves. I think if he knew I was alive and I had gotten better after all these years, he would be proud, he would want to help me, Brian said. His company is releasing a new product. It’s literally got me in the demo. That doesn’t mean anything, Alex groaned, that just means he’s a creep. He made you into the you he wanted you to be. Just don’t relapse. I won’t, he said, this is part of the whole process. Seaside’s Actualization Program says you need to build back the bridges you burned. He’s the big one. Diane would be the big one, Alex said. Yes, well - And your kids - Yes, well -

The balcony door crackled open.

Shaina hugged him from behind. “That was so hot last night.”

“Did we win?”

She laughed. “We lost everything. But you’re the best prospect I’ve had in a long time. I think we’ve got the right idea for Seaside Solutions and Friend.AI. And the partnership with FutureNowTV. I texted with my team about it. They confirmed that it’s Luka himself who’s doing the demo. So you can be our prize, um, pig. He’s going to see the opportunity for Friend.AI with a retirement home immediately. And with our TV’s personalization technology… it’s a no-brainer. Win, win win.”

“Exactly,” Brian said, holding her wrists around his neck. He felt the familiar empty space where his promise to Shaina ahd gone. Lost to memory. Had he told her they would start working together? He remembered the idea that he controlled the investments for Seaside Solutions. What job had he said?

“We only have a few hours,” Shaina said, uncoiling from him. “Luca’s coming up here at 12pm. So go change, and let’s go make history. Let’s make a real friend out of him.”

“A real friend,” Brian said, and repeated it to himself as the elevator took him down and out.