AwkWard

Kenzie had gone to bed.

It was time to get down to some real work.

I set my laptop down on the kitchen table and poured myself a drink. I'd heard that soldiers in foreign lands used to drink gin and tonics when it wasn't safe to drink the water. I wasn't sure how well I'd washed the glass so I poured myself one of those.

There was so much paper here.

I flipped through some stacks as I sipped, catching words here and there. The language was sharp and brutish, and there was just so much of it. I kicked the top off one of the document boxes and peered into it. There must have been several thousand pages in there.

It made it so hard to find what mattered.

This was exactly the opposite of what I was trying to do.

I felt bad for Kenzie. No, that wasn't it. I felt scared for Kenzie.

She was so strong and dedicated, but this paper was a formidable foe. How long could she put up with this? What would it look like if she finally succumbed? Would she scream and trash the place, become despondent shamble zombified the rest of her days? Or would she just disappear with a loud pop?

She was right. All this paper was designed to break her, and everyone else working to keep sanity in court, justice in law, and three lefts in every right.

"Or maybe it was just a strategy to make money as quickly as possible," I mused. This seemed more likely.

Money.

That was the real ticking time bomb for Kenzie. Debt was tightening around her, squeezing the breath out of her. Her minimum payments were restless too, due to jump higher in a few months. Sometimes I picture them hunched ravening in their line items, reaching out to devour her money before she would be able to be able to pay down her actual debt.

I wasn't doing so well either. I was laid off along with half the tech world and debt was metastasizing.

We had so much in common, we liked to say.

There was no way I was going to sleep after these thoughts so I poured myself another drink, drank it, then poured another, this one stronger. I wasn't a mover and shaker like James Bond, so I would stir this one. I picked up my favorite utensil: a small three-tined silver fork. I wasn't sure why I loved that fork so much. When I held it I felt like it connected me to an inner power, something potent within me, something that needed focus and channeling. Maybe it was a code deep in my dna. Maybe it was pending twist of fate that would manifest unexpectedly in my email or something.

I didn't know but I was down to find out.

I wrapped my hand around it, covering the entire stem, and held that fork up to the hanging lamp over the kitchen table. I stood for a second, head slightly raised, chest proudly puffed, looking at the three pronged silhouette.

Nothing profound manifested so I sat back down at the kitchen table and got back to work.

Sweetie, what could I do with this data to fix the legal system? This is important.

Sweetie went off to download the data and analyze it. I tabbed away and to myweb browser and loped along, clicking on this and that.

Kenzie had cataloged hundreds of court cases, meticulously detailing what kinds of data were entered into evidence and how that data influenced the outcome. Most of them were pretty banal. Together, en masse, at scale, with the proper connections, though, they told a greater story.

"As data does," I said out loud. Then I looked around to make sure I was alone.

My drink was on the table. I grabbed it, finished it off and poured another.

The apartment was eerily quiet. The stacks of document boxes started to loom. I got the chills up and down my arms before realizing the Sweetie had probably finished analyzing Kenzie's data.

She had.

Waiting in the chat was a long series of analyses outlining everything from the different kinds of cases, through the categories of evidence, to the the verdicts and judgments.

At the very end, just above my flashing cursor, was Sweetie's default question:

What's important about this?

I had trained her to ask this question. More precisely, she had suggested I train her to ask this question, but only because I first asked her how to make sure that our interactions maximized the goal of finding out what is important. It was my original idea to find out what was important, I thought and took another drink.

Divorce, of course. Two people legally separating is one of the most important events of their lives. This data shows the legal process. From this dataset we can allow them to know the outcome of their divorce based on the evidence that they have to present.

That's a really good idea

Thank you… Would you like me to implement it?

Yes. Please do.

Text flew by as Sweetie started up a new code base and began to put together all the elements to turn this dataset into an interactive application. I basked for a moment in awe of what I had accomplished. This kind of program would have taken me weeks to build on my own. Now, with my Sweetie PAI, I could go from data, through idea and right on to building the thing in moments… while drunk.

I'd moved from digging trenches all the way up to commanding the army. My thoughts, once chained to the eccentricities of software development, were now completely freed up to think at such a high level that it gave me vertigo.

I was so high that I could see all of humanity before me. What they wanted, what they were doing, what they needed…

This subject matter was so traumatizing. How many couples have sleep walked into divorce and came out worse than they were before. With an AI chatbot trained on this data I could show them what would happen in their particular case. They could at least then go into this process with their eyes open and make the choice if they really want a divorce.

That was it!

I bought a domain name and set up https://should1filef.or/divorce. In those few minutes, Sweetie had finished building out the app. I hooked it up to the domain and opened it in my browser.

It was just what I hoped it would be: a breakdown of all different kinds of evidence presented in the cases.

Do you share a phone bill? A credit card? A bank account? A gym membership? Checkbox, checkbox, checkbox, checkbox.

It was a long list. People were filing lawsuits based on all kinds of private data to catch their spouses out.

I filled out the form one way.

You are 88% likely to win everything you asked for in your settlement! Click here to generate your filing documents!

I filled it out again, different like.

You are 14% likely to win everything you asked for in your settlement! Click here to generate your filing documents!

I clicked there. Words started generating across the screen. I almost fell asleep reading the first paragraph. That looked like legit legalese to me, just like all the words in the boxes clogging up my kitchen.

My little AI was actually able to construct the filing papers based on the entered data.

"This'll make Kenzie's job a heck of a lot easer," I guessed incorrectly.

It felt good to do something important.

To be fair, this thing was pretty basic, and probably not very accurate, but it was midnight. It felt kind of grotesque to lay it all out like this, but if you're going to help people in the worst moments of their lives, you need to stare reality in the face. Then you need to lick that face.

I poured another drink and started to feel bad. Kenzie had specifically asked me not to make this into a game. I hadn't. This was closer to a joke.

"It may look like a game to you," I said to my rubber duck. "Depending on how you construe."

Hey Sweetie, let's change the tone of this site. Rewrite all the text on the site to be like this: 'Do you suspect that your partner is not where they've been saying they've been? Did they txt you claiming they were in one place but you knew they were somewhere else? You got 'em. Sms and phone gps records are the strongest combo in court.' Stuff like that.

I have updated the tone of the site to match your examples.

Oh, and for effect, add animated gifs to really get across that it's not that serious.

A waggling finger appeared.

There was definitely some room for gallows humor here. Or was there? I couldn't tell. I put it in to see if it fit. For a moment I considered scrapping the whole idea. Social media quizzes and shrinks were a blight and this one was worse than most because it stunk of reality. I'd made this as terrible as possible, but not because I was a terrible person, you understand. The situation was absurd. Bringing absurd truth to light is humor. All I'd done was inhale this data and exhale every possible story it could tell.

I was a practitioner of idiocy as a civic duty.

I took another long drink trying to get a handle on what my role in this thing actually was. An ice avalanche crashed my upper lip signaling that it was time for a refill.

My screen had gone to sleep. I swiped at the track pad trying to remember what I was doing.

"Right. A divorce paperwork generator," I chuckled as if seeing it for the first time.

That's what this was, and when I put it that way it really was just too good to throw away. No, not too good because it wasn't good at all. It was actually pretty awful. Perfect is what it was. You know how they tell you to not let striving for perfection get in the way of achieving what's good? Well this was perfect already so goodness didn't have any business showing its face around here. I'd just pole vaulted over petty ethicality and fell gracefully onto the crash pad of inevitability.

This was what human life was all about. Creating from the truth around us. Bobsledding down the long event horizon to the next paradigm and shifting over to it. This was ethos raised to the power of zeitgeist, the natural excretion of popping the pimples of digital humanity. There was no more steering to be done. Data'd taken the wheel. We'd murdered the 1 and married the 0, blasting that dichotomy to a place where it would have to roll a yin yang symbol up a hill for eternity. With this act, however, I'd subsumed the yin and yang, and all other dichotomies as well. I briefly considered myself a Unitarian before remembering that moniker was already taken. My AI was the third prong now absent so long since the gods perished. I did it all right here and became something beyond each, yet I'd always remember them. I told myself I'd always remember because it is important to always remember.

"The authenticity. The authenticity," I said.

"This appears to be a satirical play on 'the horror, the horror,' a famous quote from the movie Apocalypse Now in which Marlin Brando witnesses the horror of the primitive darkness within…"

I started, sitting up quickly to see who was in the room. No one was there besides me, Sweetie, the duck and the papers.

I had hit the dictation enable key while musing. Sweetie was just responding to my quip with deep contextual analysis.

"Good job, Sweetie," I said. "But bo need to spell it out."

"What's important about this?" Sweetie asked.

"Nothing. Nothing really matters… to me," I sang and turned off dictation.

As the night closed in, I sent a thinly humorous message to Kenzie and clapped my laptop shut. I realized something just as coherency evaporated into a fine mist.

I pulled out my fork and looked at it closely amazed at how the light played off it just so.

The rails were running out under my fast moving trains of thought. Ideas crumpled like accordions. There was only one survivor:

Time for bed.