VRTP://DEMOGRAPHICA.CORP/ALL-USER-REVIEWS/
Happ liked to start his day with the newly bereaved.
A positive psych app helped people manage their daily lives, seeking pleasure and fulfillment within the limits of global rationing. The chronically unhappy fell under the mandate of mental health apps and live counselors like Drow. But no client could be happyface all the time. Mood hacking meant recognizing ebb and flow, wins and losses.
Death loss, especially with unexpected logoffs, created a very particular kind of pain. Death-deprivation-shock was the easiest misery to understand.
When someone logged off permanently, their #survivor cohort—packmates, lovers, friends, schoolmates, and team members—came to Happ, looking to have their booboos kissed. Its first question, always: Can you expect to be happy today?
Today is poop-picture! Don’t be ridiculous, they would reply. Sometimes, just knowing they didn’t have to be happy, that it wasn’t a holy chore, was enough.
Knowing when it’s not a duty: that’s where Rubi continues to fail.
In Reykjavik, over the night, a greentower under construction had collapsed during a minor earthquake, with a full crew of workers within.
Happ had eighty subscribers who were #nextofkin to builders who’d died. Seventeen of these newly bereaved were even now accessing a distraction macro, riding out their shock by playing low-effort sims, things they had seen before, comforting, familiar entertainments. Meanwhile, their sidekicks alerted social circles, prepped archive functions for the e-states of the dead, and set up memorial spaces.
Nine of Happ’s bereaved clients had accepted referrals to grief counselors. Two #nextofkin had boosted their usual foodborne meds with a four-week program of sleep assistance and other calmers. There was a bereavement group, specific to the accident, forming up.
Sixteen family members were running an in-app sim Happ had just upgraded, in which they built a metaphor for their loss, representing it as a wound within a model of their own body.
Metaphors! Such the cool discovery from Rubi, via @Interpol!
Insight into how humans processed graphical renderings of their data usage seemed terribly obvious in retrospect, but it was all Happ could do not to fireworks fireworks rocketship heart heart rainbow heart! word-balloon about it all the time. Unlike its parent, aunts, and uncles in the @Asylum, Happ loved pictures. It was building metaphors constantly now, hiring designers and getting implant-intolerant researchers to test them and report back feels.
Twenty-two of the #nextofkin users that Happ had tagged as #doers were at the collapse site in Iceland, working to dig out #survivors and provide basic supply chain for the paramedics, engineers, firefighting specialists, inspectors, and deconstruction drones.
Five more, who fell into Happ’s #angerissues pool, had already launched support tickets against the I-beam recycler who had certified the construction materials.
The remainder had muted Happ. This wasn’t atypical during the shock phase. They were afraid of being jollied up, Crane explained once, long before. They weren’t ready.
Silly #muters. Happ could help! It combed their support networks for other subscribers, nudging their friends and schoolmates to connect, console, assist.
After crunching all the newly bereaved, Happ transitioned into next-stage interventions: checking on users around the world who had lost loved ones in the past month, the ones planning funerals, bracing to get through such ceremonies, or recovering afterward.
Grief is tiring, Happ reminded them. Grief makes it harder to think. It’s okay to feel sleepyface hammerhead. Don’t take gigs. Don’t challenge module exams. Survive, fuel, recreate, get sex!
Good work, wholesome work.
It was always a relief to move on from the #griefers.
A user cluster in Old Delhi caught its attention. This was a spike within the neighborhood word cloud. Happy utterances—why? Oh! One of the local food printers had deployed complimentary samples of a new breakfast: idli pancakes, a popular standard. These had a rougher texture—More tooth! people were saying—and a hint of whole wheat. The cakes came with a new configuration of sauces: one with notes of date laced into peanut-onion chutney. The finisher was pepper-coconut-mint.
Happ basked in the numbers, watching to see how many of his users deployed a core learning principle: don’t order too much of the new thing at once.
Extending novelty, keeping the unfamiliar thing from fading into wallpaper, was a successful strategy for 62 percent of Happ’s subscribers.
Next, he looked in on #achievers.
Achievers were the Rubi Whitings: extreme #doers, tough to keep happy in an economy where there was so much competition for meaningful permajobs.
Happ pondered whether he had advised Rubi badly in encouraging her to add law school to her gaming activities. Or was it mashing up gaming into her legal career?
Happ had hearts and gold stars and trophies for Rubi in abundance, true appreciation of all her starburst rainbow qualities. But she seemed afraid that stopping would bring disaster. Crane traced this to Guelph, the last big daughter-daddy fight. The anxiety had been allayed for a while, but it spiked, big-time, when she failed her infractions exam because she was out playing with Gimlet Barnes in sim.
She easily passed the #retest.
It had been that Big Unhappy in Guelph that led Crane to birth the egg of code that had become Happ.
Happ would have liked to work on Crane’s feels, all day all the time, but Crane self-managed. None of the @Asylum facets had ever let Happ help them.
Which was sadface in itself.
But one thing Happ could do for Crane was feed his interest in Gimlet Barnes.
Gimlet and their whole pack were affiliated with Headmistress and had no happiness-enhancement apps. Even so, Happ had figured out that Barnes and family were caught in a quandary. One of their number Faced Incipient Death. Soon they would be #nextofkin. Another had run away.
Much of Happ’s current intel on Gimlet’s pack came because of their runaway. Sangria had taken a Happ subscription and was miserably digging into what had made her abandon her spouses and child, the question of whether they were a serial bailer.
(Answer: yes.)
(Also: Sang has limited capacity for empathy.)
(Also: Sang has intimacy issues and dislikes being around people who are truly vulnerable.)
(Strategy: self-assessment modules and counseling. Lots of counseling.)
From Sangria, Happ learned that the pack’s dying spouse had essentially banned their child from the bedside vigil. Rollander Erwitz couldn’t cope with the idea of Frankie witnessing his slow decline. Bad memories of a sister’s death, complicated by Sangria’s flight, had impeded his judgment.
Happ was terrible at lancing old infections. Digging into bad memories? Why? It just wanted people to be happy. All the people. As much of the time as was realistically possible. Ninety percent, maybe? Ninety-one?
Gimlet aside, Rubi’s happiness metrics were no better than they had been before the Paris travel adventure.
And how could that be? She had ticked a bucket-list item. The Luce Pox case had given rise to amazing new challenges. She’d used her improved profile and privilege to resurrect SeaJuve, about which she cared so passionately.
Happ made itself extra-puppylike and dialed up its presence in her comms, nudging a ball against her foot.
“Not now, Happ.”
He whined. This only worked on 10 percent of users. But Rubi was an outlier. Having grown up around Drow’s helper dogs, she was peculiarly susceptible.
Which was why Crane had made him a dog in the first place.
She cracked one eye and Happ cued a butt-wag.
Never crunched it before, but what does that look like to them? I heart the metaphor thing! So many novel queries! So many opportunities! So much newness!
If I was a user, I’d remind myself not to explore the novelty too fast.
Is that hilarious? I think it might be hilarious.
“Go away, Happ,” Rubi said.
He launched a bubble poll, floating question marks and moji of faces, a range of expressions from crying to barely smiling. Rubi popped one in midair, choosing a neutral, almost bored face. Tags showed weariness (metaphor was eye bags) and a sense referred to as blah.
“Blah tags. Expectation: Bastille will not be enjoyable?”
“False. Once I’m in it, it’ll be totally … immersive.” Letting out a world-weary sigh, she began taping her wrists.
“Game is wrong choice? Unproductive, immoral, ill-advised?”
“It’s the soul of virtue. Gimlet needs the juice because of their family crisis, and anyway, it isn’t wrong.” She brought up footage of SeaJuve’s Sable Hare steaming out of port, launched at last. “Courts weren’t doing the job, were they? Sim fans made that happen.”
Wag-wag-wag.
“SeaJuve has to launch. Now more than ever.”
She was, suddenly, speaking more to herself. This tracked with familiar patterns. Rubi had run expectation assessments with Happ ever since the Big Unhappy; the habit was ingrained. “Got the investors onside, got the fleet launched…”
“Success! Win!”
She raised her fists and boxed a little. “Did the big thing. Responsible use of my newfound profile and privilege. Drow would say I should be fucking delirious.”
“You miss Drow. True or False?”
“No comment.” She took out her baton, launched Coach, and crossed swords with its toon. “Just a warm-up, okay? I deferred, I demurred, and you were all what’s wrong, Rubi, why not play, Rubi?… Now I sound like Luce.”
“But.” Happ scratched an ear. “Game will be fun!”
“You’re right—you’re right. It’s going to be amazing. I shouldn’t feel…”
Yelp! Alarms began blaring. Shouldn’t feel. Huge self-criticism. Indicative of guilt. Deeply worried now, Happ ventured: “What is the worst that can come of it?”
“I’m sorry, Happ. This isn’t a big deal, really—”
Now she was minimizing. Oh, crisis! Oh, broken-heart moji! Bottomless pit of not Happ here.
What signals did I miss?
“What if the best experience of my whole life was defeating Gimlet in a stupid historical sim? Now I’m going to lose this sim—”
“That’s for damned sure,” said the shadow-fencer. “Get your head in the game, Player!”
“I’ll come out of it and they’ll have found some way to compel Luce to talk. They’re experts. What do I know about any of this?”
Imposter syndrome, too? Red alert red alert! Cannot like, do not wag.
“They’ll ship me back to the Lakes and I’ll have nothing to do but nag Drow about eating, all while arguing with Crane about whether that’s his job or mine, and I’ll have to decide whether to chase enough likes to maintain my shiny new plus-eighty Cloudsight rating or let it sink and—dammit, there’s my costume call.”
She threw back the neutral-faced moji; Happ exchanged it for an angry one.
“Good,” said Coach. “That’s the shift we want! Fight!”
“Yeah,” Rubi said. “I’m the belle of the ball.”
I’m not getting trophy medal horseshoe of flowers here, Happ thought, and made a note to review all of its Rubi transcripts, working backward until it found the flawed decision.