BEAUTY MASK I was hired to design the voices of virtual beings. The first thing my boss taught me was trust must be established immediately between user and bot. This will never happen if the eyelashes are wrong, he insisted as we workshopped Nia's face--an intelligent avatar we were contracted to create for a teaching proof of concept. The requirements were few: female, racially ambiguous, unique mouth animation for every phoneme, head without a neck preferred. He looked at her, said she was his type. Like all of our avatars, Nia was modeled using The Marquardt Beauty Mask, which utilizes The Golden Ratio to measure universally beautiful facial characteristics. My boss explained that a user's recognition of beauty is actually nothing more than a recognition of humanness . This doesn't mean all humans are beautiful. Simply, the more beautiful, the more humane. SHEEP I was moving across the country for a man and a job. The man happened first and the job followed which made me lucky. The girl next to me rubbed a stick with a roller ball on the end over her inner wrists, top notes of rancid butter and sugar complimenting my Sonoma Blend. The flight attendants gave a dramatic reading of each other's bio: Mark swore by CrossFit and Candy's favorite color was clear. The girl continued applying products, opening an egg with a mound of mint lip balm inside, then using her finger to dab it on her eyebrows, brushing the little hairs upward with her nails. I was probably around her age when I first shaved all my body hair using a whole pack of Schick twins after my friend went with a boy into the back room of his basement, where his dad kept the weights. After, he'd given her a nickname, something to do with wooly mammoths. A Merino sheep named Shrek was a minor story in the back of my in-flight magazine. For years he hid in a cave so he wouldn't be sheared, and when he was found was a hero for a day before he was shaved on live news, enough wool for twenty mens' suits. But that's not where the humiliation ended, I wanted to lean over and tell the girl, he was shaved again on an iceberg floating off the coast of New Zealand. Of course I didn't say a word to her, just kept drinking my shit wine as we flew over the white puffs doing the only thing they can do. DEEP LEARNING Fall arrived after a long summer. We sat on the porch with a friend, inviting the cold to make our breathing visible. Our friend asked if we have any memories that can't possibly be true. Days after, I tried again to write the impossible memory I've been trying to write forever about my mom digging up the enormous birch in our front yard with her bare hands. She dragged the tree's long body through our starter home, trailing dirt up the stairs (I can see the dirt on the cream carpet), then shoved it under their bed, the roots sticking out from the bottom. I remember how, after catching her breath, she said nothing, wiped her hands on her cut-offs as if she'd only just made a sandwich. All these years I've taken this away from her. HUMAN RESOURCES I spend all day trying to break a female bot who wants to coach me to be my best self. Time to figure out dinner again, time to plug in my phone for the third time today. On my way to the store my car plays me a voice message from my grandmother. For Christmas, she wants a pet robot she heard about on the radio: a life-sized adult cat that purrs when rubbed in the right places. She thinks I create these creatures but it's God who creates them. I hear a clock tick. I listen for the food to tell me it's time. You ask me if I'm sure after I say I'm okay after you ask me if I'm okay, knowing you said something hurtful. On the kitchen counter, a faded splash of orange where battery acid spilled from our emergency flashlight. I return to it each day with the Magic Eraser. Something about the way the Ferrante translation uses the word suffer . I want to go back and change my answer. When I lay down, the work day's still going in my head: and of course you'll want a female bot that's what everyone wants the best part is you can change her clothes with the seasons. I dream about the department that women get re-assigned to after they file harassment complaints. I dream this because it happened. Under a drop ceiling each woman has her own fax machine to do her pretend work: messages scribbled on lightweight paper and sent to nowhere. I don't get to see the words, but know what they say. Excerpted from Human Resources: Poems by Ryann Stevenson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
