Alex's Point of View
"You've really moved the needle, Mr. Math," the man praised him, not letting go of his hand long enough to make it slightly weird. Alex gave one more firm squeeze and attempted to extricate himself. Silent pressure from the line of well-wishers eventually compelled the man to relinquish his hold on Alex and another took his place. More people had wanted to shake his hand today than all the other days of his life combined.
He glanced at his girlfriend through his peripheral vision, fervently praying she had hand sanitizer in her purse. If he didn't get sick from all this skin contact with strangers it would be a miracle.
Alice was wearing her "Republican makeup" again. Once the look had been explained to him he couldn't help noticing it on the women around him. Yes, they really did look like that.
They were at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, where the Bucks played. The sports arena now hosted the Republican National Convention where Aaron Hacker was about to formally accept the party's nomination for President of the United States. Alex Wagner, advisor to the same, was seated conspicuously close to the action.
Three months after founding it, Mr. Math was more than a Youwatch channel. It was a brand. They had an app with ever-improving functionality, strong sales from their e-abacuses, including bulk orders from large schools, both public and private. A line of textbooks was in the outlining phase, and now they had something coveted by investors above all: an "AI-powered" tool. AI was the new trend, after all, and venture capitalists were lining up to throw money at anything with "AI" in the name. Why not his company?
They were here to "talk" to one such venture capitalist. Alice was hunting him even now. What happened next, well, Alex didn't like to think about it. Poor bastard.
Outdated rock music from thirty or forty years ago blared from the arena's sound system. People cheered, waved American flags, and all around lost themselves in the pageantry of a presidential election. Speaker after speaker took to the stage, each proudly proclaiming that Aaron Hacker was the man to put the GOP back in the White House after a sixteen year drought. They were probably right, and it made him fear for his country.
He leaned over so Alice could hear him over the noise. "See anyone you recognize?" Alex asked idly, just to take his mind off of the future.
"Oh, plenty," Alice said. She scanned the crowd. "I've memorized the name and face of every congressperson and senator in Washington. There's the house majority whip," she mentioned, gesturing to an oily-looking man with a potbelly and a receding hairline. "We've worked for him before. Don't let the seedy, disheveled appearance fool you, that one is ice cold."
Alex really didn't want to know how Congressman Potbelly was "ice cold". If Alice knew of him he had a body count, and not in the fun way.
Senator Lackland got on stage and made a speech about restoring law and order. He implied the Clayton administrations soft-on-crime policies were responsible for the disappearance of his son. Alice had the decency to look embarrassed. Nobody seated around them seemed to notice.
After a cringeworthy performance from some kind of "country rapper" Alex had never heard of but the crowd reacted strongly to, the man himself was ready to take the stage. Cheers deafened them. Hacker stood there taking it all in, basking in it, for entirely too long. His eyes were the eyes of a man who believed he had already won. At last the candidate raised a hand to call for silence.
"My fellow Americans," Hacker began. "Time is short, and the hour is late. Our fair nation has been plodding along, limping, really, after eight years of Harriet Clayton."
He said the name of the current president like it was a swear word. Everyone in attendance immediately started booing.
"Yes, yes, I know. We're not here to talk about her. She'll be gone soon. We can thank the constitution for that."
The crowd laughed. Care about the constitution, do you? Alex thought cynically.
"Anemic recovery from the pandemic, including the worst inflation in living memory, has the economy in shambles. Drastic measures must be taken. Our military has been allowed to wither on the vine, underfunded and far from prioritized. Our enemies are laughing at us, laughing! American power, once the greatest on Earth, is but a shadow of what it once was. Rivals across the globe are rising to challenge us, and We.Are.Not.Ready!"
Hacker punctuated every word with a fist to the podium. The force of it was audible where Alex and Alice were seated.
"Rearmament must take priority! We must forge a new American war machine of blood and iron! I promise you jobs, purpose, and an America that is respected in the world. Respected...and feared."
Blood and iron, where had Alex heard that before?
"This war machine can't be built overnight. We must train up a new generation of Americans to be workers and fighters and leaders!"
Hacker made eye contact with Alex and nodded. Everyone around was cheering and patting him on the back. Alex just tried to keep a straight face.
"We're going to rebuild our country, even our people, from the ground up, brick by brick, until you will hardly recognize the land you were born in. I promise you strength and pride such as has not been seen since the second world war! Ladies and gentlemen of the Republican National Convention, I, Aaron Rudolph Hacker, proudly accept your nomination for president!"
Balloons fell. People lost their minds. "Alice, let's get out of here," he said to his girlfriend. They rose together, only having to fend off a few more well-wishers as they exited the arena floor. Most of the attention was up on stage for Aaron's big moment.
The next day, they met Jack Longworth in a Milwaukee conference room. Protestors on the streets had been mostly dispersed by then so traffic wasn't much of an issue.
"Mr. Math!" Longworth greeted affably.
Another damn handshake, Alex thought ruefully. Nontechnical manager type, he sized the businessman up at once. He made a note to keep technical terminology to a minimum and focus his presentation on buzzwords that promised lots and lots of money.
"And this must be Mrs. Math," he shifted his attention to Alice. It made his skin crawl, but they had a job to do.
"Just a girlfriend," she said shyly.
Longworth raised an eyebrow and leered at her without subtlety. "My dear, I'd make an honest woman out of you if you gave me half a chance. Letting this one run free is a big mistake, Mr. Math," he chided good-naturedly.
Already hitting on her, he observed.
"Oh, I'm sure Alex is just waiting for the right time," Alice giggled flirtatiously, shifting her body language to lean in to Longworth's gaze.
Watching Alice work was at once disturbing and fascinating. This was how she lured men to their deaths, he knew very well, but he couldn't stop the pang of jealousy in his heart from stinging, just a little. Alex tried to accept it as the cost of doing business and hooked up his laptop to the screen in the conference room. He opened up his slideshow.
"You ready to begin, Mr. Longworth?" he asked.
"Call me Jack," the man replied in a friendly tone even as he sat down a little too close to Alice.
He smiled. "Alex, then. I assume you're familiar with the current Mr. Math product?"
Jack seemed caught off guard. "Oh, yes. Very familiar. You teach kids how to do math, very important work." Alice whispered something in his ear that Alex couldn't quite catch. They were getting pretty cozy.
Right. He moved to the second slide. "What we're looking at here is an expansion of our product line from math to reading, just basic literacy at first but eventually more in-depth understanding. To do that, I'm going to have to explain what 'phonemes' and 'graphemes' are. On this chart are all the phonemes, or unique sounds, in the English language."
He knew he was losing Longworth already. The businessman couldn't keep his eyes off of Alice's legs. She was wearing a short skirt today for just this reason.
"Every phoneme of the English language is color-coded, with different ways to write the same sound assigned the same color. Notice the 'f' in 'farm' is orange as is the 'ph' in 'pharmacy'. 'F' and 'ph' are graphemes, different ways to write the same sound. At the start, only one way to write each phoneme, typically the most common one in simple words, is introduced. Our literacy product will use a spaced repetition algorithm that varies the approach between reading and listening to gradually introduce every phoneme and grapheme. From there, spelling drills will be introduced. Computationally, this basic functionality is quite trivial, and we don't need your money to do it."
Alex clicked over to the next slide.
"What we need funding for, is what this leads to: An AI," he enunciated the keyword clearly, making sure Longworth heard him. "Our AI will be a tutor that evaluates school children and formulates an individualized education plan to guide them as they learn. Everyone learns differently, at different rates, and has different strengths and weaknesses. Once our AI has a large enough dataset, it will be able to do this for everyone, giving each student the benefit of high-quality personal tutoring at a fraction of the cost of a human. Our model is already in use, we just need more compute to refine it. Compute costs money. We need you, Jack, and the investors you represent, to help us scale this product to a national, and eventual worldwide customer base."
Longworth was nodding along. Money, money, money, AI, scale, worldwide customer base, cost savings, all the magic words were there.
The man stood up. "Frankly Alex, I like what I'm hearing. The growth of Mr. Math has impressed my colleagues at Montana Capital and I think we can do business. I'll give you all the business," he said meaningfully.
Longworth went for another handshake. Alex fought the urge to roll his eyes. Jack's eyes were on Alice as he walked out.
"He has my number in his pocket," Alice said matter-of-factly once Longworth was out of earshot.
"That's how you do it?" Alex asked. He'd always wondered.
"I would've been more brazen if you weren't here, honey. Put Jack Longworth out of your mind. You won't be seeing him again. Don't worry, I'll wait until the deal goes through."