Tarantula

The world outside looked small from the top floor of The FC Tower, through the huge glass wall of a window, as if it wasn’t real. People were like fleas in dirt. The recently erupted shanty town of corrugated steel roofs fanned across the vacant lots where the demolitions had occurred. This was a virus of poverty; it was plain to see from a height. The glittering skyscrapers of the old world were vanishing one by one, no longer needed, but The FC Tower remained a monolith to celebrate wealth, a cloud-piercing statue to commerce. Poverty and failure were other people’s problems; that’s what Joe Hanson, CEO of FusionCorp told himself as he scanned the lonely expanse of his floor-wide, bone-white office

His company sold AI SaaS solutions, or Software as a Service, digital intelligence for management – nothing you could hold, nothing you could feel in your hands, but clever dashboards, to keep people glued to screens and making smarter decisions. It was a money-maker; Start-Ups were ferocious in investing in any advantage and would buy anything to accelerate their growth.

His most important monthly meeting was at noon, and as usual, Joe was three minutes early. He got a small dopamine spike from being the first one to log onto the video conference with the investors; it would ping them all, so they knew he was ready, armed with figures and graphs, including ARR and forecasts. It would be a momentous meeting as always, and he could feel his pride welling. He had hit the mark again, and they would be satisfied. He imagined his bonus would be larger this year; they had saved a fortune on wages with their new company-built internal AI, OmniMaster, its multiple agents working 24/7 to perfection, doing all the marketing, sales, admin, R&D, legal and accounting a thousand times faster than staff could ever do, and more accurate too. Efficiency was up two hundred per cent in just two months from installation and a successful, phased headcount.

As his video feed sprang on, he surveyed the image of himself staring back at him, and was unsatisfied. He quickly decided to take away the table-top computer stand and adjust the tilt of his laptop so it looked up at him and not down, making him appear titan-like and authoritarian, instead of small and below eye-contact level. As he waited, he combed his thinning grey hair sideways over the bold dome of skin, straightened his designer Italian tie and coughed once to clear the initial jangle of phlegm from his broad throat.

One by one, the four investors appeared online – blinking into existence in their square boxes. Mark Zolo, the tech trillionaire from the valley, Susan Wright, owner of YouMe, the world’s most addictive social media platform, Sir John Smithers, the English Lord with ‘old money’ and finally, the international property and land mogul, Allen Dash. None of them demeaned themselves to wear formal attire, and two of them were not even in an office. Susan was lying on a sun lounger by a long, shimmering azure outdoor pool, clad in nothing more than a red bikini and aviator shades, and John seemed to be in an airport lounge somewhere. Joe enjoyed seeing them, bathed in their glow of prestige and fiscal kudos. They had all ‘made it’. It would rub off on him – this tight circle of elitism – he knew it. One day, he was destined to be on the other side of the screen.

“Hi!” he greeted them with a fully-committed, dazzling white smile.

They did not reply but shuffled uncomfortably in response, only Susan managing a curl of the lip as acknowledgement.

“I have good news for you. The action is now done. The two remaining departments are now fully autonomous. OmniMaster has already outperformed both teams by quite a margin. Let me show you the slides…”

Susan interrupted, holding up a flat palm to cease momentum.

“Tell me. Were there any tears? Was it hard?”

“Excuse me?” – the question surprised Joe, and cut his train of thought in two.

“The teams you laid off… Were they upset?”

“Well… I presume so. I let OmniMaster do the firing. I prompted it to be very sensitive about it, but yes, a lot of livelihoods were lost, three were new parents… So, I would assume they were not happy, obviously. However, OM promised favourable references and the standard severance packages. It was all very fair and formal, and there were no loopholes for negotiation; it was all calculated precisely.”

“References. Not much good when there are no jobs, you would agree?”

“Well, yes… We currently have a thousand applications a day on speculation, it’s just the way things are – the market, as you know, that’s why we’re driving so hard to lead and be competitive.”

The four investors had soulless eyes, Joe noticed, like they had all switched something off inside – some internal fiery light that usually got them excited about numbers and upticks was quashed on this call.

“Did you know?” began Zolo with a tilt of the brow, “OmniMaster predicted all white-collar jobs will be gone in just a few weeks from now… All of them…”

Joe felt himself grab the noose-like tie and tug it down, trying to get a little air under his top button. Something was off.

“Well, certainly lower and mid-layer and the boring jobs, yes. I get it.”

Allen continued. It was like they were a hive mind – it was eerie. He had definitely missed something – it was clear they had held a meeting previously between them and without him.

“Well, Joe, Mark here is about to announce a new project in Beta phase, I should add – it’s not quite ready for rollout. The markets will go crazy for it, but we need to test it in the field, get the data we need to make it proven – the usual one-two dance – you know what I mean?”

“Sounds interesting, sounds like more margin… How exciting! What’s it called?”

Joe grinned harder. It was all fine, just another tech layer in the stack – of course, they were sharpening, pioneering, going harder for the buck. These brilliant minds never rested, never said it was good enough, never slacked. He was in awe. It was like staring at great white sharks, always just attacking, attacking, attacking – to get the next unsuspecting organism trapped in their massive tooth-lined jaws.

Mark took the conversational baton back.

“It’s called Tarantula… And what it does is spectacular. It runs things. It’s the first C-suite program that can run all the mid-layer AI simultaneously. It’s like a composer to an orchestra of workflow. When you see it in action, it’s beautiful. It really is. Its decision-making and strategising are beyond the human threshold in business.”

And with that, Joe loosened the knot of his tie, so it slid down to his chest level – but as he pushed it down, it tightened back into a small, hard lump – resisting his intention. He could feel his breathing quicken. He could sense the onion-scented sweat secrete under his armpits, as the cortisol flooded, the dark patches thankfully hidden by his suit jacket.

“…C-suite… I see… Does that include the CEO?”

There was a consolatory silence from the four blank faces on screen. It was like a betrayal, a final human piece of the jigsaw to pull out – he should have seen it coming. He had a large house on the lakeside, with a large mortgage to go with it. He had three teenage children, one disabled, and three dogs, and a car on finance, in fact, everything on finance. He gulped audibly and pushed his chair back with the pivot of his heels, so he visibly shrank on the screen.

That name, Tarantula – it stuck into him like a bite. His son once owned a tarantula. It would shed its skin as it grew, leaving a lifeless husk behind like a memory of itself personified and frozen in time. It would sit there silently for days, and then, with a morsel of an insect thrown in, it would pounce with devastating force and venom to eviscerate the helpless prey.

“…An AI CEO… Can that really work? Have you thought about this… Really?”

Mark looked a little peeved at the challenge and doubt, like he was disappointed with Joe’s faithless retort.

“Well, of course it will work… It always does… No more need for meetings, no more need for guesswork, all calculated to perfection, you see, forever…”

Joe began to feel a new feeling, a spark of rage. It would be a self-running company, with only the maintenance team on payroll to make sure it was plugged in and switched on correctly.

“Have you ever thought, there will be no customers left soon… No one will have any money to spend, you see! It’s simple… No money to spend, and it all collapses, all of it.”

It seemed a bit desperate. Joe was losing his composure visibly. They were now studying him like he was a cornered mouse.

“Well – we’ll let Tarantula worry about all of that,” smiled Mark, his callous pomposity now exposed in the open unapologetically, for all to understand.

Seeing the tension flare between the two men, Susan piped into the mix again, but she would only make it worse. She could only grasp the one perspective that made sense to her vision, and it was not Joe’s.

“The thing is, Joe, you’ve been great, honestly, we are very grateful for all your work, and we’ll give you a great reference and also a fair package, absolutely – you can count on that. We, as in the boys here and me, and a few other choice investors, have decided to cohabit on an island we have purchased. It’s quite the place, tropical, safe, unspoiled by the hordes. I’m already here, as you can see, and John’s on his way as we speak. We’re kind of retiring from work altogether. It was a decision we made with the help of Tarantula. Why waste precious life on work? Look at it that way. We certainly don’t want to anymore – there is far too much fun to have.”

Behind her, for just a second, Joe could see the unmistakable moving blurs that were a naked man and a naked woman in the distance as they walked urgently toward a door in a sprawling house in perfect synchronised step, past the far end of the pool. He guessed these people were hired party pieces for private use. It was the way they walked, as if trained, obedient and on their way to a pre-organised destination for whatever their seedy task was. Joe had long been aware that there was a level of super-rich that operated beyond laws and norms, and regarded people like cattle or pets, depending on their personal needs. It never bothered him until that very moment.

John was checking his watch and looking at a flight board – clearly, he had already had enough chit-chat.

“Yaah… Got to go, folks, my plane is boarding now, see you on the island! And chin up, Joe. So long…”

His feed turned dark, and Joe realised he would never see the investor he had talked to monthly for five years, ever again.

Susan sipped a blue cocktail from the edge of a wide glass, leaving a red lipstick smudge on the rim – Joe presumed it was her third or fourth – she was slurring a little and loud, too loud.

“I won’t go easily…” snapped Joe.

Mark laughed out loud and clapped his hands in a kind of cruel, mocking delight.

“That’s the spirit, that’s why we always liked you, Joe. But honestly, I’m just putting a job post up for a temp security guard, immediate hire for one day at four hundred dollars. I’ll state just one task, simply to remove you and escort you from the office with immediate effect….” He was typing as he spoke. “There we go, fifty applicants in the first ten seconds. I’ll hire three of them, yep – ex-military guys in the local area, and now… Just giving them security clearance…. They should be with you shortly. We’ll let the AI send you the paperwork, but this is ‘goodbye’ from us. So long, Joe… I am sorry, but it is now time for you to leave our building… And by the way, we don’t really need a building anymore, just some server space, so you really can’t stay…”

“You can’t do this. I have done everything you asked of me and more…”

One by one, the three remaining investors blipped out, and just like that, the meeting, and his career was over.

Joe ripped off his tie and listened to the sound of the elevator pinging as it ascended from the ground floor to his office. Few ever ascended to his lofty floor, so he had a special ping alert when anyone ever pressed the top floor button. It was like a warning to prepare, an advantage to be ahead of surprise visits. They were coming for him – there were 40 floors, and they were already on five, three hired thugs tasked to take him to the street without even a box of belongings, without even his dignity.

He felt sick, and it was like his intestines had turned to concrete.

‘No, no, no…’ was all that he could hear in his mind.

He knew what would happen next, the spiral, the dismantling of everything he had achieved, piece by piece, until he was in the dust and decay, and on his knees. Out there, it was hopeless for a man of his age, for anyone who did anything on a computer.

A decision formed quite naturally, faster than an AI agent, even.

He stood up straight, tugged the corners of his suit jacket to flatten out a crease, and walked toward the huge window. There was a narrow balcony beyond it with a low guard rail, through a glass door. It had been a privilege of his position to enjoy a black coffee in the morning with a breeze and a panorama as he checked the news and markets on his handheld tablet.

Joe decided in that moment that if it was time to leave, he would not be dragged out and thrown into the street.

He strode slowly toward the horizon view, his eyes fixed on the fiercely burning, relentless sun.

The wind was playful on the balcony; it pulled up his hair and threw it about like a flame dancing on his head. In the office, he could hear the rhythmical pinging as the guards neared his floor. It had been so long since he had been visited in the office that now he felt cornered in a glass box, waiting for the inevitable humiliation. He stepped up on the little round coffee table, and it wobbled with his weight, so he outstretched his arms for balance.

As the newly appointed guards emerged from the elevator doors with vigour and swagger, he could hear their vocal alarm that they were about to fail in the one job they had been given, to escort him roughly to the exit.

Closing his eyes, he recalled a trust fall he did in the early days, where staff would catch him as he let himself unbalance. They would laugh and slap each other on the shoulders and get to know more than names and job titles. Humans, what had happened to humans? They did not seem visible anymore. Those days out to warehouses, bars, and racetracks for team bonding and camaraderie had long gone in the earliest cost cuts.

With a final flicker in his head of his home’s smart red front door, he murmured the word ‘sorry’ through quivering lips, as he let his body arch into a forward dive into thin air, the hands of strangers trying to grab his ankles in vain, for their own pay needs. He knew he was insured for a lot of cash. It might work – it might not, he would never know, and that suited him just fine as gravity pulled him downward in a waterfall of rushing air, into the scene of street poverty that ebbed below the looming edifice of The FC Tower.

The End