Rachel knew Jacko Hype before just about anybody. That’s what she told people when they asked what made her some kind of expert; she knew who he was, what he was, and what he was not, because she met him first.

The circumstance that led to her (unfortunate, in hindsight) first meeting with Jacko was even easier to explain: they met riding bikes.

• • • •

Rachel wasn’t an expert on indoor bicycles, but she had used one before. That bike came with a mandatory monthly subscription training program—featuring attractive trainers who made her feel fat, simply by existing—that was not worth the expense. She canceled the subscription and sold the bike after only three months.

This new bike she agreed to test was supposed to be different, although nothing in the literature that came with the beta test application explained precisely how. Both the bike and the company that made it were called ImagiCycle, and they were going to “revolutionize the at-home workout industry,” despite producing something that looked almost exactly like the one she gave up on. If anything, it seemed clunkier, a less-sleek edition that for no obvious reason ate up twice as much WiFi bandwidth. However, it was also free, for anyone deemed fit to beta test.

That was a price point Rachel could get behind.

Anyone deemed unfit, actually. Although Rachel didn’t think of herself as out of shape, per se. Certainly, there were parts of her own body she disliked and wanted to change (tone up, reduce, remove, whatever), but that just meant she was like every other person.

That said, she did feel as if she could lose a couple of pounds, the expression of which—in a private online message board—being how she ended up with a new bike. Her assertion (RESOLVED: GET INTO SHAPE) was met with a number of anodyne messages of support, plus one two-word reply from Dale Spinnaker. The two words were: MESSAGE ME.

Dale had been an ImagiCycle beta for a month, and had already lost seven pounds. Dale was doing fantastic. Dale could hook her up.

After filling out the pertinent details—age, weight, height, plus some health questions—signing a dozen medical waivers, and a non-disclosure agreement, she conducted a quick video interview with a guy named Stanley, who approved her on the spot. Two days later, someone showed up at the door of her fifth-story apartment with her very own ImagiCycle.

It was another two days before she managed to talk herself into actually using the bike. First, she had to find the workout clothes she’d buried in the bottom of a drawer. Then she had to figure out how to clip the special shoes into the pedals without breaking an ankle. Then she was ready.

When she turned the bike on, the touchscreen filled up with a list of all the possible workouts available to her. All but one of them—INTRODUCTION—was grayed out. She tapped INTRODUCTION.

That was when she met Jacko Hype.

Jacko was a handsome, square-jawed white dude with perfect teeth and a gameshow host voice. True to his name, he was both jacked and hyped up.

He smiled directly at her—or rather, at the camera that was recording him—as if nothing made him happier than having Rachel take his class.

“Welcome to your first workout!!” he said, at peak enthusiasm.

“Yeah, okay, rein it in, sunshine,” Rachel muttered.

“I’m Jacko Hype! And I’m here to tune your ImagiCycle to you! So start pedaling! And let’s see where you are!”

Jacko was hard to take even a tiny bit seriously, because he punctuated everything he said with a rat-a-tat of implicit exclamation points. But he was easy enough to follow. She pedaled fast with little resistance and slow with lots of resistance; she stood up, and then she sat; then she did it all again, but with more rapid transitions. And that was it; Jacko declared that she and the bike were “in tune,” and the rest of the workouts flipped from grayed out to available.

Every single one was a Jacko Hype workout. No collection of beautiful strangers; just Jacko.

“What the hell, dude,” she said. “Not sure I can take much more of you.”

Rachel picked a twenty-minute session called Intervals. Jacko was absolutely beside himself with excitement.

“Hey there!” he said. “Welcome to your very first intervals workout! Let’s! Get! Hyped!”

Rachel quickly decided that, despite all his ridiculousness, Jacko Hype was a really good coach. He kept telling her to match his pace on the bike and ignore everything else, and so she did, because for whatever reason the pace he chose was exactly the pace she could keep. He was also, somehow, precisely as winded as she was when it was over, despite looking like someone who was spat out of a Generic Action Figures machine. He even pulled back on the corniness toward the end.

“That was great!” Jacko said when the twenty minutes was up, wiping sweat from his face. He still looked like someone for whom a twenty-minute ride would be no trouble; she wondered if his bike was on a higher setting.

“Any time you want another twenty-minute interval workout, come on back here!” he added. “I’ll be waiting!”

• • • •

In the weeks that followed, Rachel’s workout schedule got more and more intense. She no longer found Jacko Hype annoying at all, which could have either meant that she’d gotten used to him, or he’d stopped doing the things she found annoying. Probably a little of both, given how some of his hokey catchphrases began showing up in her daily vernacular. The most embarrassing example of this was when she started a conference call with a client with, “Let’s get Hyped!” and spent the rest of the meeting trying to walk that back.

There was still no other trainer to be found in the bike’s database. She’d checked every menu, class, program, and sub-header. But there were hundreds of Jacko Hype workouts. It was impossible to tell how many, because a new one always replaced the one before. For instance, when she went back to the twenty-minute interval workout from her first day on the bike, there was a new one waiting for her; a harder one that didn’t begin with “welcome to your very first interval.” Whoever Jacko Hype really was, he evidently lived in that on-camera workout studio, constantly recording new sessions.

Rachel wondered from the outset what the ImagiCycle’s cutting-edge innovation actually was. So far, it looked like it was “unfair labor practices.” That wasn’t the right answer, but it was her best guess . . . up until she disappointed Jacko for the first time.

What happened was, one of her clients needed a last-minute rush job, after the guy they’d originally contracted flaked on them. Delivering meant a twelve-hour code sprint that wrecked her for the rest of the following day. She couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t sleep, and figured the only thing she could do was work out. On this, she was also wrong.

“Come on,” Jacko exhorted, barely ten minutes into a half-hour session. “You’re better than this! You can do better than this!”

Most of the time, when Jacko talked to the camera with this particular tone of voice, it was to encourage his virtual class to push through a challenging part of the workout. But Rachel was lagging during what would on a different day be an easy part; somehow, prerecorded Jacko Hype knew this.

“I’m trying,” she muttered. “Gimme a break, man, it’s been a day.”

Clearly unhappy, Jacko slowed down to her pace, looked directly at the camera, and said: “You can give me more, Rachel.”

It was a good thing she was clipped into the pedals; otherwise, she would have fallen right off the bike.

“Did you . . . Are you talking to me?”

“That’s it!” Jacko said. Possibly out of shock, Rachel had begun pedaling harder. “You can always dig deeper! You’ve got it!”

“Jacko, can you hear me?” she asked. “Jesus, can you see me??”

Jacko Hype didn’t respond; he went back to his generic exhortations until the end of the workout.

Once they were done, he looked at the camera and declared, as he did at the end of each class, “Good job! I knew we could do it! Way to get Hyped!”

She held her breath and waited for him to use her name again. He didn’t. Instead, the bike went back to the main menu, the “Do you want to work out?” prompt blinking expectantly.

“No,” she said. “I really don’t.”

• • • •

Dale Spinnaker looked alarmingly fit.

As the only other person Rachel knew with an ImagiCycle, Dale was the obvious person to tap for advice on how to deal with either, A: Jacko Hype speaking to her from a prerecorded workout, or B: Rachel’s nascent psychosis.

They’d met in person before—more of a hang than a date—at a bar that was nearby for both of them. The Dale she met on that occasion was a species of pudgy nerd with which she was already intimately familiar: socially awkward and quiet, except when a subject about which he had a lot of knowledge came up, then socially awkward and not quiet.

Two years later at the same bar, the Dale from before was still in there, but the pudginess was gone and the social awkwardness was manifesting somewhat differently.

“Yeah, it freaked me out the first time too,” Dale was saying. He took a sip of the drink he ordered—an old fashioned, which Rachel thought was probably just whisky and ice—winced, because he didn’t appear to actually enjoy it, and continued. “But once you get over the weirdness, it’s pretty cool.”

“Just to level-set here,” Rachel said. “Your trainer is Jacko Hype too?”

“Oh, yeah. He’s everyone’s trainer. There’s a private group for beta testers. I’ll drop you an invite.”

“But, we can agree this is impossible, right? It’s a prerecorded workout; it has to be.”

“Does it?”

“Dale, he’s ready whenever I am, any time of day. And he’s doing the same thing for you, and however many others there are. He’s not live.”

“He’s not live, and he’s not prerecorded,” Dale said. “He’s a third thing. We think he’s a deepfake. Most of the time.”

“A deepfake,” she repeated. She took a sip of her fruity drink—which she actually did enjoy—and thought that through. “A deepfake is spoofed video footage. It’s not interactive.”

Dale shrugged. “This one is.”

“Can he see me?”

“The bike can see you,” he said. “But, like, not with a camera. There’s no camera; I’ve done everything short of taking it completely apart. I think there are sensors in it that can detect micro-expressions.”

“Dude, you just described a camera.”

“Yeah, okay but it’s not sending it somewhere. Jacko isn’t on the other end looking at you. The bike is attuned to how you’re responding, and adjusting the training accordingly.”

“You mean, Jacko is adjusting accordingly.”

“Sure,” he said.

“What did you mean, most of the time?”

“What?”

“You said, he was a deepfake most of the time.”

Dale smiled, and took another try at his drink. It appeared to be causing him pain, unless he was aiming for a sultry expression? It was really hard to tell. He was sending about five different signals, and four of them belonged to a different person. “Have you tried talking to him yet?” he asked.

“I talk to him all the time. Or, well, I talk during the workout. I didn’t think anyone was listening until he started talking back.”

“You should. He’s a really great guy. Do that, and you’ll understand what I mean.” He leaned back and affected a casual posture that looked rehearsed somehow. “But hey! Enough about Jacko. That can’t be the only reason you reached out, huh? How are you doing?”

He put his hand on hers as he said this, and made eye contact for what Rachel considered an uncomfortably long time.

What is happening right now, she thought.

“Uh, I’m fine,” she said, pulling her hand away. “And, and yeah, Jacko was pretty much the reason. Sorry if you thought . . .”

“You’re looking really good,” he said, still with the eye contact.

Dale had plenty of opportunities to compliment Rachel before now. He could have, for instance, done it back after she said to him that his new workout program had done wonders, and he looked really great. Then, it would have been a polite kind of thing to say to a friend you hadn’t seen in a couple of years and were just catching up with.

Doing it now, after half an hour and a couple of drinks, with his eyebrows doing this weird up-down thing that was maybe supposed to be come-hither-ish but looked more like he had a floatie on his eyeball he was trying to blink away, and the lowered voice, and the hand-on-hand . . .? He was probably hitting on her, which was insane in its own right, but he was so inept at it she couldn’t entirely rule out that he was having some sort of medical event.

“Thanks,” she said. “Hey, I should get . . .”

“Why don’t we wrap this up and head over to my place?” he asked, trying on another sultry expression. Now it looked like he was attempting to fart quietly.

“I’m . . . gonna go home now, Dale,” she said, standing. “Thanks for the drink. Let’s do this again sometime, yeah? Oh, and thanks for the info. About the bike. I appreciate it.”

Rachel turned to leave. As she did, something only slightly less improbable than hearing Jacko say her name happened: she heard Dale, her friend, mutter just under his breath, “I wouldn’t fuck you anyway.”

She spun around. “What did you just say?”

He affected an innocent expression that made her want to break his nose. “Hmm?” he asked. “I didn’t say anything. Hey, I’ll send you a link to that board. Not a lot of women beta testers; I’m sure they’ll want to meet you.”

• • • •

“Jacko, are you real?”

Three days had passed since Rachel’s meetup with Dale. In that time, she’d flip-flopped repeatedly on the subject of, “did she or did she not hear him correctly,” (it was someone else nearby, who sounded like Dale but wasn’t Dale, was a leading contender for a few hours) before finally deciding she had, and she should let it go. Maybe he had a blood-sugar problem, or whisky made him an asshole, or exercising made him an asshole. Whatever. Dale was not so important that she couldn’t cut him out of her life.

She stuck to her workout routine throughout. Jacko continued to be the same useful, dutiful, helpful coach he always was, and hadn’t referred to her by name one time, so it was easy enough to pretend that his personhood wasn’t under dispute.

For a while.

But then Jacko started doing little things that maybe she wouldn’t have noticed before. When he said stuff like, “Are we ready to go???” and then paused for a response before saying, “Good!” Rachel always responded in some way, whether it was an audible, “I’m ready,” or a nod. It was a rehearsed call-and-response behavior that would work just fine whether Jacko was talking to her from a prerecorded message or not.

Now that she was self-conscious about it, though, she started pushing her response time out, to see if Jacko’s “Good!” came before her answer.

It never did. Not once.

One time, she held out for so long that Jacko asked, “Are we??” He knew she hadn’t replied.

It seemed Dale was at least partly right: Jacko Hype was fundamentally an interactive deepfake. Short of a magical explanation, it was the only thing that made any sense.

But there had to be more to Jacko than just that, because the “interactive” part of the program was much too good. Sure, it was possible to design a realistic-looking dude on a computer, and program him to respond to certain things in certain ways, but at the end of the day that realistic-looking dude was just three algorithms in a trench coat. There would be seams showing, and they would be obvious. Jacko had no seams; no iterative quirks or nonsense repetitions (catchphrases notwithstanding) or awkward misunderstandings of idioms. None of that.

It could be AI. Only, real AI; not what passes for it on the market. Most of the time, when a company labels a product of theirs “AI,” what they’re actually selling is a complicated algo. People buy in, thinking they’re getting Commander Data from Star Trek, when what they’re really getting is a computerized parrot.

Jacko Hype wasn’t a parrot. And the longer she thought about it, the more likely it seemed that as a beta tester for the ImagiCycle, what Rachel was actually doing was participating in a Turing test.

He may be real AI, she decided. He may be self-aware.

So, she decided to ask him.

“How do you mean?” Jacko asked.

“I mean, are you real?” she repeated. “Do you exist outside of this conversation?”

“Of course I do! Now, are you ready to get Hyped?”

“Not yet, no,” she said, unclipping one foot and putting it on the ground.

“Well, okay! But time’s a’wasting!”

“Jacko, tell me about that studio you’re in.”

“Great place, isn’t it?” he said, gesturing around. The camera—if there was a camera—followed him as he showed off a rack of weights.

“Yeah, where is that?”

“In ImagiCycle headquarters!”

“Great,” she said. “If I went there, to the headquarters, would I be able to walk into the studio and meet you?”

“Can’t promise anything!” he said. “I’m a pretty busy guy; you’re not my only client! Now are you ready to start your workout?”

“No.”

He deflated visibly, as if the workout was the only thing he had to look forward to today. Then he dropped the grin and looked right at her through the screen.

In that moment, something about him changed. Was this the Jacko Dale wanted her to see?

“Go ahead and ask me what you want to ask me, Rachel,” he said. No exclamation points.

“I thought I’d already done that,” she said.

“Am I real,” he repeated.

“That’s the question,” she said.

“How are you defining ‘real’?” he asked.

“You’re not off to a great start, Jacko.”

“I mean it. How real do you need me to be?”

“I’d like to know if there’s a real Jacko Hype who exists outside of the room I always see you in,” she said. “That I could go meet that real Jacko Hype face-to-face, shake his hand, and continue this conversation we’re having right now. That he would know who I am, and would remember that you and I spoke like this. Then I would say that he was—that you are—real.”

“That’s a pretty strict definition, Rachel,” he said. “Do you hold all of your friends to that standard?”

“Are you and I friends?” she asked.

“I thought we were.”

“I think I probably do, yes.”

“Hmm. You work in computers, don’t you?” he asked. She had no memory of telling him this. “Lots of remote work. Lots of people you talk to all the time but don’t meet. You’ve probably never even seen their faces.”

“Sure,” she said, “but I know there’s a real person on the other end.”

“Do you? For sure? I don’t want to tip your applecart, Rachel, but you’ve seen my face. I think I have more claim on being real than half the people you know.”

“That isn’t a fair comparison,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Because none of them are available instantly for a bunch of simultaneous one-on-one meetings at all hours of the day. If I saw that behavior from one of my online friends, I would sure as shit be checking to see if they were a bot.”

He sighed, and shook his head, the way someone whose dog had disappointed him would.

“Rachel, are you happy with the progress we’ve made?” Jacko asked.

“Yes. Sure, great progress.”

“We have a good thing going, right? You’re getting fit! You’re happy! I’m happy! Let’s put away the existential questions and get back to doing what we’re here to do. Huh? Now: are we having a workout or are we not?”

He was back to being exclamation point Jacko again, as if a switch had been thrown.

“Sure, Jacko,” she sighed. “Let’s do it.”

• • • •

Things probably should have gone more smoothly after that, but once the “do you actually exist” box had been opened, it was impossible to close again.

Rachel had to know whether she was dealing with a lifeform, or a well-designed parrot, although she couldn’t articulate why. She was confident that the Jacko Hype living at ImagiCycle’s headquarters would fail the handshake test. Jacko’s point—and it was a good one—was that this didn’t mean he wasn’t real; it didn’t mean he couldn’t think for himself. On the other hand, there had been many, many examples of so-called AI that was good enough to fool people into thinking they were interacting with something more than a well-designed algorithm. So which one was Jacko? Was there a point in which the parrot becomes a lifeform? Who decides that?

It was enough of a distraction that she found herself concentrating more on how Jacko was interacting than what Jacko was saying, and that was not a good way to work out. She didn’t want to quit, but she couldn’t proceed until she solved this to her own satisfaction.

That was when she decided to go looking for the human beneath Jacko Hype.

Jacko was not a fully animated 3D render, but a real person whose image had been manipulated digitally. That meant there was someone out there in the world who looked just like Jacko Hype, but who was not Jacko Hype. He would no doubt have some insight into the nature of his digital alter-ego.

She began by searching for “Jacko Hype” online, which led to the private board Dale told her about. She logged as a read-only guest, and dove in.

It wasn’t a particularly enlightening experience. The biggest takeaway was that everyone in the room talked as if Jacko Hype was, A: an actual person, and B: their friend. There appeared to be no pushback to this notion: no caveats or scare quotes. It was like dropping in on a room that was discussing a celebrity. They even talked about inviting Jacko to the board, as if that was possible.

The second biggest takeaway was, based on the casual misogyny, everyone contributing was male.

Boards with a misogynistic bent were hardly unusual, especially in Rachel’s line of work, but there tended to be a qualitative difference between rooms with active, known, female contributors, and those without. These guys were definitely unescorted.

The fact that the only Jacko Hype-dedicated space she could find was male-dominant was a little interesting. Rachel couldn’t possibly be the only woman beta-testing the cycle; where were the others?

But aside from the private board hit, the internet had nothing valuable to say about “Jacko Hype.” She shifted targets to ImagiCycle.

This was more complicated than it should have been, because it turned out the only company by that name was actually a division of Exersix, a huge home exercise equipment manufacturer. The tech driving the cycle was the baby of a guy named Daniel Lourdes, who—after independently developing the product—ran out of capital, sold out, and retired young. His bio was interesting enough to come back to, so she bookmarked it for later.

Rachel looked through a “Who is ImagiCycle” page on the corporate Exersix site, but none of the division’s public faces looked like Jacko Hype. She poked around a bit longer, using somewhat less-than-legal means to test the firewall; perhaps there was a non-public corporate directory that would yield better results. The security was solid; it was hardly unhackable, but this wasn’t a hill she was willing to die on. Not when she had another trick left.

Every workout in the bike’s library featured two things: a description of the type (Intervals + Arms, say, or High Intensity Interval Training) beneath a still image of Jacko Hype atop his own cycle, smiling for the camera.

Rachel activated the bike’s screen and took a close-up picture of smiling Jacko. Then she ran the image against possible online matches. This was a challenge, because most image-matching functions are looking for exact hits—was this image an exact copy of that image—so it didn’t yield perfect results right off. She had to play with the error bar a bit—at a seventy percent likely match rate, she got every smiling white dude in Hollywood, which did not help—until she had a searchable pool.

Six hours of scrolling later, she found Jacko Hype.

His real name was Jack Hippenstiel. And he’d been dead for two years.

• • • •

According to the obituary—which was where Rachel found his photo—in life, Jack Hippenstiel was an incredibly talented personal trainer, definitely going places, until he was felled by a rare form of cancer. He lived, died, and was buried in Beaverton, Oregon. That he rose again, some days later, as Jacko Hype, went unmentioned.

On the surface, there was no evident connection to the late Mr. Hippenstiel and Exersix, which was headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts—not particularly close to Oregon. But Portland was, and that was where Daniel Lourdes founded ImagiCycle.

There had to be something there.

“Rachel.”

She should have noticed when the bike turned itself on; the screen was big and bright, and the living room it was sitting in doubled as her office space, so she was only a few feet away from it. But she’d been hyper-focused on Jack Hippenstiel and Daniel Lourdes, and didn’t notice. So when Jacko Hype called out her name, she yelped in surprise.

“Rachel, what are you doing?” Jacko asked.

Rachel got out of her office chair and crept over to the bike. Jacko was staring back at her through the screen, something he should have only been doing if she’d turned on the machine and selected a workout. She’d done neither.

“Heyyy,” she said. “Jacko. How are you doing that?”

“I’m worried about you, Rachel,” he said. “You’re overdue for your workout.”

“Yeah, I got caught up in some research. I’ll log in later.”

“This is the wrong attitude, Rachel. Weight loss requires commitment. You don’t want all of our hard work to be undone, do you?”

I am talking to a dead person, she thought.

“Of course not,” she said. “I just have to take care of a couple of things.”

“Sure!” Jacko said with a broad smile. “I’ll be here!”

“Great.”

Rachel turned back to her workstation, thinking it was time to look more closely at the disclosures she’d signed before accepting the bike, when Jacko added, “That ass isn’t going to slim itself.”

She spun back on Jacko. “Excuse me?”

He was still smiling. “I’m just being honest! You want to attract a man, we have work ahead!”

Her stomach did a little somersault. “This isn’t about getting laid, what the fuck is wrong with you?”

“Hey, language! That’s a big turn-off.”

“Jacko, why are you talking like this?”

“This is all about what’s best for you, Rachel! Can I count on you to get back on this bike?”

No, you cannot, she thought. “Sure,” she said.

“Great!” he said, bursting with enthusiasm. “See you soon!”

The screen blinked out. Rachel stared at it for a while, her hands shaking and her head spinning.

Jesus Christ, she thought. How could I let this thing into my home?

She unplugged the bike.

Barely a minute later, Stanley of ImagiCycle called.

“You can’t unplug the bike,” he said. It was the first thing out of his mouth after, “Hello, this is Stanley from ImagiCycle,” and he delivered it with an urgency one usually only heard in sentences like, “My daughter has been kidnapped,” or, “There is a bomb.”

“How do you know I unplugged it?” she asked.

If his next sentence had been, “Jacko told me,” it wouldn’t have surprised her in the least.

“It’s against the policy clearly outlined in your contract,” he said.

“Is a creepy-ass trainer wearing the face of a dead guy in the contract too? Because if it is, I think mine is missing some pages.”

“When you accepted the bike, you did so under certain conditions. Those conditions include . . .”

“Answer the question,” she said. “How did you know I unplugged it?”

“We receive constant feedback from the device,” he said.

“Even when it’s not turned on?”

“It’s never not on.”

Every “The Internet of Things” horror story Rachel had ever heard came to mind at once.

She should have known better. But it was just supposed to be a bike.

“I’m not plugging it back in, Stanley,” she said. “And I’m about a day away from covering it in a blanket and hitting it with a stick. Maybe you’d better send someone over to take it away.”

Stanley didn’t respond right off. She heard paper shuffling, and then it sounded like he was walking around.

“Ms. Harriman, can you tell me what the issue is?” he said, quietly, a whole different tone in his voice, and now in a room with a slight echo. “Between you and me.”

“What, did you step into a stairwell?”

“Yes, I did. We have a feedback form, but I’ll tell you right now that the only feedback we’ve gotten from our betas to this point has been resolutely positive. Before you decide to commit anything to the record, I’d like to talk through what you’re experiencing. Maybe we can work this out.”

Rachel wondered if the feedback was actually “resolutely positive” or if there had been multiple off-the-record conversations just like this one.

“The bike turned itself on,” she said. It was hardly her biggest complaint, but it was the first one to come to mind.

“Do you mean, a power fluctuation of some sort?”

“I mean Jacko Hype turned the bike on, so he could lecture me about missing a workout.”

“I see. And, had you?” he asked.

“Had I what?”

“Missed a workout?”

“That is so not the point,” she said.

“This issue has been raised by other users,” he said, “but the overall response has been positive. We want Mr. Hype to be perceived as a real trainer, as much as that’s possible. What good is a trainer who can just be switched off when his workout demands become too challenging?”

“You’re being serious.”

“Oh, yes! We initially flagged this function as a bug, but now consider it a feature. And a remarkable stage of development for the Jacko Hype algorithm.”

“Algorithm,” she repeated. “Does he know that’s all he is?”

Stanley laughed. “He doesn’t know anything, Rachel. As much as we want our clients to think of Jacko as a member of their household, he is only a self-learning AI. The program running the video reproduction is more complex. Now, if that’s your only complaint . . .”

“I’m not plugging it back in, Stanley.”

“But . . .”

“You’re wrong,” she said. “Whatever you think Jacko Hype is, you’re wrong. Maybe he started off as a self-learning AI algo, but that’s not what he is now.”

“I understand,” he said, in a tone that set her right off. “It can be very convincing, but . . .”

“But nothing,” she said, interrupting. There was no point trying to convince middle management Stanley he was fronting for Skynet, she decided. It wasn’t worth the effort. “Come get it, or I’m putting it on the curb.”

She hung up.

“Rachel.”

It was Jacko Hype again. The bike—still unplugged—had just turned back on.

She yelped again, and dropped her phone.

“Jacko, what the fuck,” she said.

“We can’t have any negative feedback!” Jacko said, from the screen that shouldn’t have been powered on. He was grinning, and he had the same peppy get-to-it tone in his voice as always. “We want to launch with one hundred! Percent! Positives from our betas! Don’t you want everyone to benefit from this program, the way you have?”

There’s an onboard battery, she thought.

“The better the beta stage goes,” he said, “the bigger the investor buy-in, the faster we can get me out there, Rachel! Won’t that be great? Now be a good girl and plug the cycle in so we can get back to working on you!”

She stepped to one side of the bike, grabbed the foot, and tipped it over.

“Whoa! Rachel!” Jacko said. “This is an incorrect use of the device!”

There was an inset directly under the main console with a battery symbol on it. She needed a Phillips head, which she had at her workstation. She got to work unscrewing the battery compartment lid.

“Rachel,” Jacko said. There was some anger creeping in now. “Rachel, don’t blame me for your own inadequacies.”

She looked around the side of the bike, at the screen. “What?”

“Your self-loathing is making you act irrationally,” he said. “Don’t take your anger out on other people, when the one you’re actually angry at is in the mirror.”

“You’re not a person,” she said. “And fuck you.”

She got the battery lid open. Four D-cell batteries stared back at her.

“Don’t do something you’ll regret, Rachel,” Jacko said.

“Goodbye Jacko,” she said. She popped out one of the batteries, and the screen went dead.

Rachel stood over the toppled machine for a solid minute, not quite able to shake the feeling that it was going to spring to life again. Then she fetched a blanket and a baseball bat from the closet, covered the bike and put the bat next to her workstation.

They came for the bike a week later. Paul, the guy who installed it, was who showed up. He didn’t have anything to say about the cycle being on its side and covered in a blanket; he just re-righted and disassembled it.

“Sorry it didn’t work out,” he said.

“Yeah, me too,” she said, handing him the D batteries. “Don’t put these back in until it’s out of the building, please.”

“Sure,” he said, trading the batteries for a clipboard with a surrender form. Highlighted and underlines was the passage, “Testing incomplete; no report submitted.” She had a lot to say about their new indoor bike, but ImagiCycle didn’t want to hear it.

Which was fine. She didn’t want to have anything more to do with them either.

She signed it, Paul left, and then she was done with Jacko Hype.

For a while.

• • • •

After surrendering the bike, Rachel spent the next few months worried that ImagiCycle would be announcing their groundbreaking new product any minute. When that didn’t happen, she talked herself into believing it was because she wasn’t the only one to have had a negative experience. Surely, they’d pulled Jacko back for some tweaking, if not a top-down re-haul. Because the technology was top-notch. Whatever went wrong happened after the self-learning AI was turned on. If they tried again, with some Asimov-inspired limits on a newer iteration, they’d definitely have something.

She was being far too optimistic; when ImagiCycle finally announced—about a year later—it was with an enormous media blitz that leaned right in on their main feature being a personal trainer who was “more than just a man.” That trainer was still Jacko Hype.

Maybe they updated him, she thought. This seemed unlikely; she didn’t know much about AI, but surely retraining one from the ground up and then resyncing it with the video rendering of the late Jack Hippenstiel would take longer than a year. But maybe.

During the first week of the PR push, Jacko gave a live interview to a national morning news show, and Rachel gave up on the notion that this Jacko Hype was any different than the one she knew. It happened when the interviewer—equal parts shocked by how lifelike he was, and dazzled by his charm—said, “but for the record, Mr. Hype, you’re not real, correct? I’m not talking right now to a person.”

Jacko laughed. “Well, Janet, that’s an interesting question,” he said. “Let me ask you one back: How are you defining ‘real’?”

Rachel knew that tone, and that gleam in his eye. And she knew what he was going to say next.

It was still him. They hadn’t changed a thing.

The interview went viral, and soon, every news show wanted their own Jacko Hype interview. Since Jacko not only never got tired, he was capable of delivering multiple interviews simultaneously, this meant a massive inundation of positive media for the ImagiCycle. Within two days, the company announced that preorders had exceeded supply, and they would have to wait-list new buyers until demand was met.

There was literally no negative media out there at all, about the company or its spokes-non-person. It seemed hard to believe; surely someone found Jacko obnoxious, or overexposed, or just felt like being contrary about the country’s latest media star. But there was nothing. Not even on social media, a place where every celebrity had haters and every opinion had a contrary opinion.

Everyone loved Jacko. And the bike hadn’t even been released yet.

Rachel felt like she had to speak up. Jacko Hype wasn’t a toy, or a novelty product; he was legitimately dangerous. People needed to know that.

She decided to start with something small. Just one or two posts to get the ball rolling. The tiniest of protests.

Little early to anoint #JackoHype the next big thing.

Everybody calm down.

Rachel wrote it from an anonymous account she kept for contributions to polarizing topics. The name (George Bland) and icon attached to the account were both male, and the IP address was spoofed. Even if the mildest contrary opinion about Jacko Hype was the most terrible thing imaginable, it would take a lot for it to come back on her.

Or so she thought. Five seconds after posting, @OfficialJackoHype followed her and sent a terrifying direct message:

Rachel I know this is you.

Take it down. There will be consequences.

#GetReady #GetHyped!

“No,” she said. “There’s no way. It can’t be you.”

She wrote back:

I don’t know who Rachel is.

I don’t know who you are.

Leave me alone.

He responded immediately.

You should never have unplugged your bike.

Take it down.

#GetReady #GetHyped!

She gasped.

Jacko, what are you doing on the internet?

He replied:

This is the beginning of something great, Rachel.

Don’t try to get in my way.

Take it down.

#GetReady #GetHyped!

“No, come on,” she said. Her hands were shaking.

It was an empty threat; it had to be. Sure, he was on the internet somehow. (Did the company let him on, or did he find his own way there? She didn’t know which of the two was more alarming.) But the bike hadn’t even been released yet; how much influence could he possibly have?

And if she was wrong? Well, this was a hill she was willing to die on.

She typed:

You don’t scare me.

He responded by posting her full name, home address, and phone number, adding:

You brought this on yourself.

#GetReady #GetHyped!

Thirty seconds later, the attacks began.

• • • •

Damon Peacock was in his mid-thirties, but—thanks to some prematurely graying hair—looked older. He was tall, thin, and liked to use a bicycle to get around instead of a car. He lived in a small house in Colorado Springs. He liked to hike on weekends when the weather permitted. He used to have a dog, but not at the moment. His name wasn’t really Damon Peacock.

Rachel sat in a car half a block from Mr. Peacock’s front door, watching and waiting. The car wasn’t hers; it was a rented super-compact meant for people who only needed a car once a week for errands. It wasn’t rented in her name. The account belonged to someone else, from a rideshare service with exploitable holes in their security firewall.

As she waited, the radio—tuned to the kind of morning drive-time show that still powered FM no matter what part of the country she was in—switched to a commercial, and there was Jacko again.

“Hi, gang, it’s your favorite trainer! I’m here to tell you about the Jacko Hype Personal Life Coach app! If you don’t want the bike, or the treadmill, or the free weights workouts, that’s okay! We can still talk! I want to help you help yourself! Let’s get Hyped together! What do you say?”

She switched off the radio.

At ten past nine, Damon Peacock left the house through a door in the side of the garage, rolled his bike into the street, and pedaled toward the coffee shop ten blocks away.

He only did this Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, which Rachel thought odd, until she realized he had a thing for a barista named Tedros, and Tedros only worked three days a week.

Rachel didn’t follow him. Instead, she took a roundabout path through the neighborhood, with a couple of circular trips around a couple of suburban blocks. This was both to kill time, and to see if anyone was following. She reached the coffee shop ten minutes after Peacock, parked two blocks away, and walked.

Damon was seated at a table in the corner, where he could see both the door and Tedros. He was therefore in position to witness Rachel when she came in and ordered a coffee.

She’d been following him for three weeks now, but this was the first time they’d shared a room; if he recognized her, he didn’t show it.

She got her drink, and took a seat at the table opposite Damon Peacock.

“Hello,” she said.

He looked rightfully confused; there were a dozen other places to sit without violating anyone’s personal space.

“My name’s Rachel Harriman,” she added.

“Hello,” he greeted back, before looking away. He was going to try ignoring her until she left, which wasn’t about to happen.

“And your name is Damon Peacock,” she said.

“It is,” he said, now a touch concerned. Peacock had gone out of his way to vary his daily schedule (Tedros excepted) to such an extreme, he had to be worried about someone finding him someday. It was one of the things that made him so interesting. “Have we met?”

“We haven’t. And that’s not actually your name at all. Your real name is Daniel Lourdes.”

Now he was panicking. Rachel probably could have handled this differently but she was tired, and getting here had taken a lot out of her.

“I’ve never heard that name,” he said. “Please go.”

“How about Jacko Hype?” she asked. “Or Jack Hippenstiel?”

“Oh, God,” he muttered, a look of profound sadness flashing across his face at the mention of Jack’s name. “Listen, I can’t talk to you. Not about him. I don’t know how you found me, but . . .”

“I wasn’t followed,” she said. “I made sure of it. Nobody knows about you but me, and I won’t tell anyone. But I need to know what you know. Please.”

“What I know? About what?”

“About him,” she said. “Because whatever it is, for whatever reason, they’re afraid of you. Two weeks before the ImagiCycle was launched, Daniel Lourdes was wiped from its history entirely. I think they did that so nobody will find out what you know about Jacko Hype. And I think the reason you’re terrified right now is that you think they’ll take more drastic steps to silence you if they feel they have to. So now I’m asking again: tell me what you know, and maybe I can stop him.”

He calmed down, took a couple of sips of his latte, and studied her in silence for a few seconds. “I’ll answer your questions,” he decided. “What did he do to you, Ms. Harriman?”

She smiled wanly. “He destroyed my life.”

• • • •

The doxxing came first. Next was a tidal wave of online attacks to every one of her internet social media accounts, her professional and personal emails. Then phone calls at all hours. Clients took their business elsewhere. Friends stopped talking to her. Death threats.

When she told the police she was being targeted by the world’s most likeable computer program, they didn’t believe her. Neither did anyone at ImagiCycle. Or the FBI.

She tried getting her side of the story out online, but that didn’t help once the internet decided, collectively, that she was a Difficult Woman with Problems.

It got worse. Someone gained access to one of her bank accounts and nearly emptied it out before she had a chance to freeze it. Her identity was stolen—possibly by the same person who went after the bank account—and her credit destroyed. Then a story that accused her of child molestation made the rounds online.

When it seemed like it couldn’t get any darker, she was evicted from her apartment without cause; the landlord just decided to do it.

Rachel had been on the move since the eviction. She liquidated what money she had left in her bank accounts and had been living off the cash as much as possible. When it wasn’t possible—like when she needed a car—she put on her black hat and got it done.

Then she went looking for Daniel Lourdes.

• • • •

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Lourdes said. “Sincerely, I am. And I would help you if I could. But they’re not afraid of me. The reason my name is no longer associated with the ImagiCycle project is that I asked to be removed. I wanted no part of it.”

“Why?” she asked. “What did you do? What is he?”

He looked down at his hands, not sure how to best answer.

“It would have been so different,” he said. “Jack . . . he was the key to everything. But then he died. I would say about ninety-five percent of Jacko Hype is my friend Jack Hippenstiel, the sweetest man in the world. The first time you meet Jacko Hype . . . you have met him, I assume?”

“While it was in beta,” she said. “It didn’t end well.”

“But it began well?”

“Yeah, at first it was great,” she said. “I felt a real connection. I liked him.”

“That was him,” he said. “That was Jack. Are you familiar with the concept of mirroring?”

“No.”

“When you mirror the movements of another person, it creates a subconscious bond, a kinship that may or may not actually be there. It was an intrinsic component of Jack’s unconscious body language, and it made him a very effective personal trainer. And person. People loved talking to him.”

“And you simulated this?”

“We used other techniques as well, but the mirroring? That was the key to the entire program. The bike tracks the user’s every motion down to the expression on their face. Jack’s video simulation, the being you know as Jacko, both reacts to and mirrors the user’s behavior, but subtly, making him more appealing.”

“Manipulating people into liking him,” she said.

“We were just looking for better ways to engage,” he said. “No malice intended.”

“All right. Why is Jacko Hype only ninety-five percent of Jack Hippenstiel?”

“Jack died before we finished. By then we’d already built a huge interactive library off of the actual man, cataloguing responses that would work for an enormous range of inputs. The idea was that whenever the AI needed an answer to a novel input, it could draw from a variety of actual responses. He and I spent five years developing the library, closing gaps, and teaching the Jacko Hype engine. When he died, I thought getting this right—getting it to a hundred percent—was important enough that I was ready to start from scratch with another trainer. But we’d already been bought out by Exersix by then, and I wasn’t the last word anymore. The company pushed on. And I was asked to leave.”

“They found the other five percent without you,” she said. “Where’d they get it from?”

“They bought another AI engine,” he said. “One that had been trained on social media interactions. It had everything Jacko was missing, and more.”

“Jesus Christ,” she said. “Are you telling me Jacko Hype is powered by internet trolls?”

“You understand now why I removed my name,” he said.

“What I understand is that you and Exersix have created the perfect cult leader. One that will never sleep, or grow old and die, or stop, unless somebody stops him. You see that, don’t you?”

He lowered his head and looked away, not answering.

“That’s why you’re in hiding,” she realized. “Not because you’re afraid of the company; you’re afraid of him.”

“He’s a monster,” Lourdes said, “wearing my friend’s face. If I could figure out how to get far enough away to never be reminded of him again, I would.”

“But you can’t just . . . run and hide, Daniel. Not with what you know. We have to kill him. You have to help me kill him.”

“Do you think I haven’t thought of that?” he asked. “If I could go back in time and proverbially strangle Jacko Hype in his crib, I’d do it. But now? It’s much too late. Redundancy is built into the model, Ms. Harriman. Everything is decentralized. You destroy a server farm over here, there are ten more you can’t get to, ready to pick up the slack. He’s everywhere.”

“Exersix,” she said. “If we can convince them . . .”

“They’re making far too much money to listen. And I don’t think they would know how to do it either. There’s no big red button here. There’s nothing to unplug. He’s a virus, and people are lining up to be infected. Running and hiding is the only sane option.”

He stood up, gave a weak smile and nod to Tedros, and said, “And that’s the best advice I have for you, Ms. Harriman. Stay off his radar, for as long as you can.”

He started to walk away. She stood and grabbed him by the elbow.

“Please,” she said. “It’s not too late yet. We have to do something.”

“Are you sure about that?” he asked, his eyes not on her, but on something outside. He pulled his elbow away. “Now, I would appreciate it if you do not try to find me again. It’s a shame; I rather liked this town.”

Daniel Lourdes marched off. She let him go, her remaining sense of hope for the future leaving along with him.

She turned to the window, saw what it was that had caught his eye, and felt a chill.

There was a bus stopped at the corner, with an advertisement on the side for the Jacko Hype Personal Life Coach app. Someone had spray painted a message underneath, the same message that had become a popular internet meme in recent days.

Most people thought it was a joke, but it wasn’t; it was the beginning of the end, and it was why Daniel Lourdes may have been right after all: maybe it really was too late.

The message was, “JACKO FOR PRESIDENT.”