Jack’s fingers flew over the keys while his headphones blocked out the world around him. The code was landing on the screen almost faster than he could type it. 

“Jack. A word.”

The voice behind him broke his trance. He looked at the cubicle walls, less than three feet away on every side. 

He removed his headphones and stood to take view of scores of half-empty cubicles around him. Here we go, he thought. 

Jack turned away from his desk and saw Ron Curran standing at the entrance of his small workspace.

“My office.”

His boss turned and walked through the bullpen toward the glassed-in offices on the other end of the floor. As Jack followed, he glanced at the empty cubes around him. Some of his fellow coders had left months or years earlier as their jobs were lost to coding robots. The rest of the cubicles looked like uncomfortable time capsules. Stained cups of coffee, calendars frozen to dates long past, and an occasional lifeless desk plant were the only evidence of Jack’s former colleagues. 

A janitor with a ponytail was the only other human on the floor. She walked by an intersecting hall with her head down, looking at her phone and smiling. Jack looked in her direction and smiled. She didn’t notice him.

He followed his boss into his office. Ron walked behind a desk with several monitors jammed on it. Jack looked around uncomfortably.

“Should I sit down?”

Ron shrugged. “If you wish.”

Jack looked over his shoulder. The door of the office closed automatically behind him. He let out a sigh and sat, resigned, on the singular chair facing his boss.

“I have some news,” Ron said as he sat down. “We are discontinuing the Toyfriend line. But the brass is happy with your work, and will transfer you to the AI banking assistant for Malcolm Mitchell Capital.”

Jack let out the breath he was holding as he realized he wasn’t going to join the ranks of his unemployed friends. 

“The Toyfriend line is going away? When?”

“It will be fully phased out in eleven months,” Ron said. “In the interim, we are turning the entire program over to an automated facility in Phoenix.”

“Wasn’t . . . isn’t Toyfriend a profitable line?”

“The market for AI boyfriends is past its peak and there is a finite amount of marketing capital that can be extracted from its users,” Ron said. “Ad revenue has dropped over the past fifteen months and our data center lease rates keep going up. You are tasked with finishing the breakup code, and then you are to be transferred to Malcolm.” 

“It’s been a little while since we discussed the breakup code,” Jack said, searching his memory. 

“You last worked on it about a year ago, after the busy Valentine’s Day season,” Ron said. “Every Toyfriend user is to get a slower, less responsive version of their AI boyfriend. The AI generated images are to grow less attractive over time, the use of smiley-face and flower emojis is to be completely eliminated, and one-word answers without punctuation are to become frequent.”

Jack nodded. “Okay.”

“In addition, starting in April, all Toyfriend’s spontaneous check-ins will be eight percent less frequent every month,” Ron continued. “Users who do not pay the March price increase and opt instead for additional advertisements will be forced to sign a user agreement enabling the Toyfriend to initiate a breakup.”

Jack furrowed his brow. “Isn’t it just easier to discontinue the Toyfriend all at once?”

“We still have a lot of users, and it’ll be better if most of them break up with the Toyfriend on their own in response to price hikes and other changes rather than risk bad PR by suddenly dropping it. We will lose approximately eighteen percent of our users with the next price hike. If you finish the breakup code by Friday, we estimate to lose about six percent of users each month for six months, then another double-digit loss with the September price hike, then a loss of four percent of users every month until Valentine’s Day. Everyone left who hasn’t broken up with their Toyfriend will get the breakup message on February 15th.”

Jack nodded and tried to do the math in his head. He had just looked at the Toyfriend Daily Active Users report that morning, and if the projections were correct, there would still be about four million people around the world who’d get a breakup message the day after Valentine’s Day—eleven months away. 

“It’s really not worth keeping it going?” Jack asked. 

“We’ve come as far as we can on the Toyfriend line,” Ron shrugged. “Congratulations on your transfer to the AI banking assistant line. Finish the breakup code by noon Friday.”

Ron gave a friendly wave, signaling the end of the conversation. Jack stood up and turned away from his boss. The automated door to the office opened as he stepped up to it and closed the moment he was back in the bullpen. 

Jack walked silently back to his desk and sat on his well-worn chair. He opened a folder labeled “unfinished code” and found the one his boss had been referring to. He tried to bring himself back into The Zone as he filled in holes in the breakup code.

PRINT “I wasn’t listening”

IF (DATE.OF.BIRTH + 1)/PRINT “I forgot it was your birthday”

PRINT “I don’t think we should see each other anymore”

Jack sighed as he continued to punch in if/then statements for tens of millions of Toyfriend users completely unaware their AI boyfriends were either tricking them to initiate a breakup or would break up with them in under a year. He felt weirdly responsible.

He glanced over his shoulder. The janitor with a ponytail was walking in the aisle, trailing after a carpet-cleaning robot as though she were making sure it was working properly. Jack thought he spotted the Toyfriend logo on the screen of her phone as she walked past. This time, she glanced toward him.

Jack stood and took a breath to summon courage. He hoped her AI boyfriend wasn’t the jealous type as he stepped out of his cubicle to talk with her.