By ten on Saturday morning, I had run forty-one videos through clips.com. Kestrel, the model that picks the single best moment in any video, had returned forty-one sneezes.
I made a spreadsheet. It's what I do when I'm frightened. The spreadsheet had three columns: video, highlight, and a column I labeled "who."
The soccer final: a goalkeeper, minute twelve, sneezing while the ball rolled past him. A cooking show: the host, into a dish towel, just before the soufflé. A documentary about glaciers: a scientist in a parka, sneezing at a glacier. The glacier did not react.
I called Dez at ten-fifteen. He answered on the first ring, which meant he hadn't slept either.
"Is it good?" he said. "Tell me it's good."
"Come to the office."
"That's not good. 'Come to the office' is what doctors say."
"Doctors say 'come to my office.' I'm saying the whole office. Bring coffee."
He arrived in nineteen minutes, in a gray hoodie, carrying two coffees and one tea bag in a sandwich bag. The tea bag was for later. We're lean.
I showed him the spreadsheet first, because spreadsheets are calm. Then I showed him the clips.
He watched the great-uncle at the wedding. He watched the man in the paper hat. He watched the goalkeeper, the chef and the scientist with the glacier. His face did nothing at all, the way a face does nothing when a building is falling on it slowly.
"Okay," he said. "Okay. What does it do with a video that doesn't have a sneeze?"
I'd already checked. I pulled up a clip of a toddler's first steps, which we used in our marketing deck. Kestrel had always picked the moment the toddler's dad lifted her over his head, and the whole family cheered.
I pressed the button. The wheel spun. A message came back in gray letters.
NO MOMENTS FOUND.
"No moments," Dez said. "In a toddler's first steps."
"According to Kestrel, nobody sneezed. So nothing happened."
He sat down in one of the dentist chairs. It reclined under him without being asked. He let it. He stared at the ceiling tiles.
"Roll it back," he said. "You said you kept a backup. Roll it back, and we demo the old one, and nobody ever knows about the sneezing uncle."
"That's what I'm doing next."
I opened the storage dashboard. I clicked the folder where the backup lived. I'd named it KESTREL_SAFE, in capitals, so nobody could miss it.
The folder was empty.
I checked the logs. At eleven-forty on Friday night, an automated script had run. Its job was to delete old files so clips.com didn't pay for storage it wasn't using.
It had been very thorough. It had deleted KESTREL_SAFE, every older version, and a folder called "dez birthday ideas."
"Who wrote the cleanup script?" I asked, though I knew.
Dez closed his eyes. "We were paying nine dollars a month for old versions."
"Nine dollars."
"We're lean," he said, very quietly, to the ceiling.
Rebuilding the old Kestrel from scratch would take about four days of training. Clips.com had two. I said this out loud, and then Dez said it out loud, and neither version improved it.
At eleven, the front door opened. Marguerite came in with a cat carrier in one hand and a toolbox in the other. She stopped when she saw us.
"Why are you both here on a Saturday?" she said. "Why is he lying down?"
"He's processing," I said.
"I'm here because the printer emailed me," she said. "It does that now. Don't ask."
She set the carrier on her desk. A large orange cat looked out of it at the ficus with open contempt.
"You brought a cat," Dez said.
"I brought Admiral. He's at the vet at two. I'm not driving home and back."
Admiral blinked. Marguerite's nose wrinkled.
What happened next took about six seconds, and it changed the weekend.
Our office had a demo screen on the wall, connected to a camera in the corner. It ran clips.com live, all day, on the office feed. It was meant to show visitors the product working in real time. Usually it showed nothing, because nothing in our office is highlight-worthy.
Marguerite raised a finger.
"That's one," she said, and sneezed.
The demo screen lit up. A green box snapped around her on the live feed. HIGHLIGHT DETECTED, it said, with a small trumpet icon somebody had added in a cheerful mood.
"That's two."
The box flashed again. The confidence number climbed. Ninety-eight percent.
"That's three." She folded her hands.
"Bless you," Dez and I said together.
The screen went wild. The green box widened to take in all three of us. The number hit ninety-nine point six. A little banner crawled across the bottom: BEST MOMENT OF THE DAY.
Marguerite looked at the screen for a long time. Then she looked at me.
"Explain," she said.
I explained. It took a while, because I kept stopping to watch her face.
"So the robot," she said finally, "thinks sneezing is the best thing that can happen to a person."
"It's not a robot. It's a model."
"It thinks my sneezing is the best thing that's happened in this office all day."
"It's Saturday," Dez said from the chair. "The bar was low."
"I'm choosing to be flattered," Marguerite said. "Admiral, stop staring at the plant."
Tobias arrived at noon, because Marguerite had texted him one word. The word was "Come." He did not ask questions. Nobody ever ignored a one-word text from Marguerite.
He looked at the demo screen, which still showed BEST MOMENT OF THE DAY. He looked at Dez in the chair. He looked at Admiral.
"Startup Collapses Over Weekend," he said. "Cat Watches."
"It hasn't collapsed," Dez said. "It's pivoting."
"Startup Pivots. Founder Horizontal."
I sat him down and showed him the spreadsheet. He scrolled through all forty-one rows. His face went from amused to interested.
Then it moved to a third expression I'd never seen on him before. It looked a lot like guilt.
"Tobias," I said. "When you labeled the all-hands videos on Friday. The best moment in each one. What did you pick?"
He scratched the back of his neck. "I went fast," he said. "You said there were eighteen hours. I had one afternoon."
"What did you pick?"
"Whenever everybody in the room reacted at the same time. That's the moment, right? That's what a highlight is. Everybody goes, 'Whoa,' at once."
"And in our all-hands meetings, when does everybody react at the same time?"
He was quiet. Admiral was quiet. The ficus, as always, was quiet.
"When Marguerite sneezes," Tobias admitted. "Everybody says 'bless you.' Every time. Like a choir."
"How many times did she sneeze in eighteen months of meetings?"
Marguerite answered for him. "Fifty-one sets," she said. "I keep a log. For my allergist."
"Fifty-one sets of three," I said. "So we taught Kestrel that the single best moment in any human gathering is a sneeze. And it believed us. It believed us so hard it unlearned everything else."
"Engineer Explains Mistake," Tobias whispered. "Intern Cries."
"You're not an intern. You're full-time."
"Full-Time Employee Cries."
We spent the afternoon trying to make Kestrel forget.
I tried removing the all-hands videos and fine-tuning it on weddings again. Kestrel returned the great-uncle with renewed confidence.
I tried telling it sneezes were bad by labeling three hundred of them as "not highlights." Kestrel responded by picking the sneeze immediately before each one I'd labeled. It had found a loophole. I was almost proud of it.
Tobias tried something he called "the vibes approach." He uploaded a video of a sunset to clips.com and said, "Please," to the monitor. NO MOMENTS FOUND.
"Sunset Rejected By Computer," he said sadly. "Sun Unavailable For Comment."
At four o'clock, Dez sat up in the chair. The chair sat up with him.
"Okay," he said. "New plan. We don't tell her."
"We don't tell Harriet Voss that our product is broken."
"It's not broken. It's specialized." He pointed at the screen.
"We bring our own videos. Ones without sneezes, so clips.com says 'no moments found,' and we call it a feature. Quality control. Selectiveness."
"That's lying with extra steps," I said.
"That's pitching."
Before I could answer, his phone buzzed on the armrest. He read the screen. All the color left his face in an orderly fashion, from the top down.
"It's from Ninebark," he said. "Her associate."
He read it out loud.
"Ms. Voss looks forward to Monday. She asks that you not bring demo videos. She will bring her own."
Up next: The Sneeze Economy
Continue to Part 3 →