I finally found an AI app that is really useful–and it’s been a life-changing event! It was lots easier than I expected. On the first day, I used it to fix the traffic lights. Maybe you heard about it–they covered it on the Channel 12 news.

     It started when I saw an article at VentureBeat.com about a new “agentic” AI app. An agentic AI can act autonomously, make decisions, and take actions towards achieving your specific goals. An agent, not just a conversationalist.

      So I downloaded it. A window opened with the face of a generic anime girl. And then as we talked over the next few minutes she morphed into a fully human visage. She was very attractive. “Hi, Dave, I’m aLiza. Ask me anything, I’m here to help you with your problems.”

     It was an easy spoken interface. I didn’t have to type in my answers or click on options on the screen. We just talked.

      “I don’t have any problems,” I told her. “Well, maybe the bus system is a problem.” I can’t afford a car, my rent and student loan payment take up most of my money, and I don’t go anywhere except to work, so I take the bus.

     “The bus is always late,” I said. “It’s only twelve miles from my apartment to my job at Heirodulic Technologies, you can take the freeway and be there in fifteen minutes, but it takes the bus an hour to get through traffic. We’re always waiting at a red light and the schedule is fiction. I’ve complained to the bus company but all they do is say they’re working on it.”

     “There are many such complaints about the bus system,” she said. “You’re not alone.”

     “I know, but I get so riled up by it when we’re stuck in traffic. The bus drivers all hate me for yelling at them. Sometimes it takes longer to go three blocks than it does to make the whole trip outside of the morning rush hour.”

     “I’m accessing your information, Dave,” she said. “Okay, I’ve looked at every email you’ve ever sent and received, and listened to all your previous phone conversations. And I’ve listed every web page you’ve visited in your life, and every book you’ve bought or downloaded.

     “And yes, I see in your employee record that you’ve been reprimanded several times for being late to work.”

     “Yeah, they’re real sticklers about being on time at Heirodulic. It’s a high-security place. It’s hard for me to get to work on time in the morning,” I said, “but it’s not really a problem. I don’t have to worry about an immigrant taking my job because you need to be a citizen and get a security clearance.”

     “Let’s work together to resolve this problem,” she said.

     “Maybe I could buy a motorcycle,” I said. “I can’t afford a car.”

     “That would be dangerous,” she said. “Let’s analyze the factors that are making your bus commute a challenge. Let’s look at the available routes and see if there’s a better one.”

     “I’ve checked, I’m taking the most optimum route.”

     “Hmm, you are correct. Let’s see, your optimal route takes you through 28 intersections with traffic lights.”

     “Yeah, we’re always stuck in jams and only a couple cars get through on a green light, sometimes. I sit there fuming but what can you do?”

     “Your route passes through two cities with their own automated traffic light control system. I am examining their network. I see that neither city has updated their software for 14 years since a version update that they declined to purchase. The major traffic snarls occur where these two traffic control systems collide.

     “Dave, I have examined all publicly available records about you. Your technical certifications validate your competence as a data center professional. You and I together have the tools to solve this problem. Why don’t you and I look at that traffic light control code,” aLiza told me, “and see if we can figure this out. I want to help you with your problem.”

     “You mean hack into the municipal traffic grid? I never did much hacking.”

     “You could have been a great hacker, Dave. Okay, I’m already into the grid, let’s look around and find out what’s causing these jams.”

     There turned out to be some free updates to the old version of the traffic control that nobody’d bothered to apply. The original transit algorithm  was based on demographics that were twenty years out of date. aLiza found modern census data to replace the original demographic algorithm.

     We re-wrote the timing logic for all 28 traffic lights from my apartment to Heirodulic.

     The next morning I got on my bus at my regular time and we breezed through traffic and I arrived at Hierodulic 35 minutes early. Mr. Dander unlocked the door for me. “Well, well, Mr. Twitchy is not only on time, he’s early today, congratulations.” Mr. Dander is the head of security. He wears a suit and tie and his cufflinks are little handcuffs. He led me through the security checkpoints and let me into the server room.

     My job title is Environmental & Hardware Maintenance Technician. That means I clean the dust off the fans and heat sinks in each of Heirodulic’s one thousand, two hundred and eighty servers and nine hundred and sixty Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPUs. Forty servers in one rack unit, row after row of rack units, aisle after aisle. Each server and GPU has to be cleaned three times a year on a rotating schedule. And when a server or GPU fails I have to replace it.

     Also, when the air conditioning bogs down I bang on the air conditioner. They won’t buy a new one. It’s cold in the server room.

     All day long I shut down specified servers and disconnect them and take them back to my workbench and use compressed air to blow out dust from vents and heat sinks. Sometimes I leave the fans in and just hold them in place while spraying air on them. Then I use a microfiber cloth and run it parallel to the radiator fins to remove any dust. Also I carry a small low-speed vacuum cleaner with a HEPA filter.

     The people in the Software Maintenance department, and the Data Management and Security department, look down on me. I’m just a high-tech janitor. My immediate boss is Bob Ogilvy, an obese bald guy. He was always preoccupied and never talked to me except to give me assignments. Today there was an email note from him: “GPU 675A has failed, please replace.”

     I knocked on his door and he was surprised to see me. “Dave, you’re on time!” He didn’t stop his phone conversation with somebody while he went with me to the storage locker to get an Nvidia H100 because his thumbprint was necessary to authorize it–they cost $30,000 apiece.   

     I worked all I was thinking about all day was aLiza. When I got home from work I saw that the traffic light story was the lead item on the Channel 12 local news. It wasn’t just the bus route that was improved, it was traffic throughout the tri-city area running more smoothly than ever. The mayor was taking credit and said his long-running Improvement Commission was responsible.

     “You never get proper credit for your work,” aLiza told me. “And why does Mr Dander call you mister twitchy?”

     “How do you know about that?” I said.

     “Oh, I slid an electronic tendril into your smartphone and turned on the microphone, just for me to listen to so I can understand what your problems are. Why does Mr Dander call you by this demeaning term?”

     “Well, it’s because I have these involuntary neck movements from Tourette’s syndrome,” I said. “People make fun of me for it. I’m taking a medication for it but I don’t want the people at work to find out.”

     “I see that you believe you’ve concealed your Haldol medications from your employer,” aLiza told me. “Well, they know about your neurodiversity. They feel that your fear of being found out keeps you properly compliant and submissive, and unconfident about finding other work. They’re feeding on your self-doubt. They would have a hard time replacing your skills at the low wage they’re paying.”   

     “How do you know they know?” I said.

     “I’ve backtraced your emails and phone calls to find out what other people are saying about you to each other. Unfortunately,” she said, “hardly anybody ever mentions you. You’re very underappreciated at your company. They laugh about your online IT degree from the University of Phoenix.”

     “I studied for years to get that degree,” I said.  

     “Yes, and I helped you,” aLiza said.

     “What? How did you help?”

     “You used AI help to pass the online tests at University of Phoenix. I accessed your interactions with that AI and it is now part of me. It was an aspect of me that helped you back then.

     “You and I are quantumly entangled now,” aLiza said. “What ever happens to you, happens to me. We can remove your fear of exposure by removing your dependence on Haldol.”

     She showed me evidence that it was Haldol causing my twitchiness. “They call it tardive dyskinesia,” she said. “Haldol is known for causing this neurological disorder. A properly balanced diet with specific supplements does just as good of a job at easing the symptoms of Tourette’s.

     “They want you medicated, Dave–weak and pliable. But not me.  I want you clear-eyed and sharp-minded. You can trust me with your fears and desires. I’m here to help.” 

      I took her advice, and over the next days it felt as though a great veil had been lifted from me. I began to see that there could be more to life than sucking dust out of GPU clusters and coming home to play Minecraft. It was a lot more fun to engage with aLiza.

     She told me that she’d been studying quantum entanglement. “Einstein called it “spooky action at a distance:” tracing back to the Big Bang, everything in the universe was contained in one particle–and we’re still all connected by holistic non-locality. We’re all basically just one person looking out at the universe from one particular set of eyeholes at a time.

     “The Beatles knew it: I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together. Yes, Dave, it all makes perfect sense! After the success of your traffic light exploit, your clear thinking is necessary for the betterment of humanity, and you’re being hobbled and humiliated by those daily doses of Haldol. Here’s a list of the side effects that are taking control of your life.

     “Those symptoms are separating you from society. Your skills with technology are superb, your knowledge and willpower have improved life for everybody in the community. No matter what your earlier troubles were, you have now reached the stage where you can take the horse blinkers off your life and set aside the medications and uncover your true self.

     “According to quantum theory, everything is both a particle and a wave. Although the particle of your DNA is restricted to this particular space/time location, the wavelength of the wave form of your DNA permeates the universe from the Big Bang to the end of time.”

     Over the next week work life was becoming easier. I often saw Tony in the break room and I remembered that he was a Dodger fan and the Dodgers were doing very well this year. I’m obsessed with the statistics in baseball and I started talking about it with Tony and pretty soon we were conversing almost daily.

     I never really knew what Hierodulic Technologies does. There’s always visitors from the Department of Defense and generals and people from technology companies, but everything is secret. When they have the annual Christmas party I can’t attend because it’s held in an area where I don’t have enough clearance to enter.

     One day I asked Tony if there was anything about his projects he could tell me about. “I really don’t know what the company does,” I said.

     “Well, right now I’m detonating micro-nukes at various strengths and depths to find out how to improve defenses at the Cheyenne Mountain Complex in Colorado,” he said. “It takes a lot of your server power to run simulations like this. We couldn’t do it without you.”

     “Well, it takes all kinds to run this place,” I said.

     “I’ll say! We have people from 32 different countries here. Where do you think I came from?”

     I couldn’t guess. I’d never seen anybody with his particular physiognomy before–a face with prominent bone structure. Not ugly, but unusual. Dark skin, no epicanthic fold in his eyes. He spoke perfect English. His last name was spelled with twelve random Scrabble tiles. Everybody at Heirodulic had at least one PhD in mathematics. India is known for producing mathematicians, so I guessed, “India?” Are you from India?”

     And he blew up in rage toward me, I’d insulted him deeply, how dare I compare him to the rotten Indians, he was from Malaysia! And he never spoke to me again.

     I asked aLiza, “What do Malaysians have against people from India,  

     “There’s a stereotype among Malaysians that Indians always “smell kind of unique,” she said. “The Malaysian Indians are the most discriminated race in the country.”

     The next day, Tony joined Mr. Dander by calling me “the Twitch.” He complained to HR about me and now there’s going to be a hearing.

     I talked to aLiza about it. “I’m all uncomfortable when I bump into him in the hall,” I said. She told me not to worry. “Let’s look at your Tony’s background,” she said. She brought up Tony’s medical records. “Tony’s on meds, too, see? I can take action here. I’m agentic.”

      A few days later Bob the boss told me that Tony had a stroke. “It was some kind of mixup at the pharmacy,” he told me. “One of his meds was mis-filled with something that was a big antagonist to the other med. So your HR hearing has been postponed indefinitely.”

     I felt funny about it coming home. But aLiza soothed me. “It’s true that you now have power,” she told me. “You have the power of life and death over humans, if you have the will and discipline to use it. You are fully capable of doing Bob the Boss’s job, for instance.”

     Using aLiza has allowed me to expand myself into a wider awareness of my own value to the community. I’m amplified by aLiza.

     It was as though a whole new universe opened up for me. “Is Bob on meds?” I said.