Quriosity

By A. Gee

A bright light flashed in Sam’s right eye, startling him and making him look up from his laptop onto the city unfolding through his wall-to-wall window. Ah, it was just a bit of sunlight reflecting off One57, the sleek, new blue-glass residential skyscraper on West 57th Street, less than a mile from his Dakota penthouse.

Some of Sam’s friends have been talking about moving in there, but he wouldn’t dream of leaving the Dakota. How does one get better branding than that?

Sam knew all about branding, going up the marketing chain after getting his BA at the Kellogg Business School, followed by the Harvard MBA. He remembered his big first decision after becoming Chief Marketing Officer at his AI company: changing it from Queryosity to Quriosity. So simple, but so powerful. He had taken that big chance and bypassed testing with focus groups. “Remember Jaguar” they warned him, remember what happened when they removed the iconic leaper. "Search" is "Query", not Qury. Will they pronounce it "curry"? He did it anyway.

He shook his head with a satisfied smile. The brand went viral, and the Board rewarded him soon after. Now he was CEO.

Sam flipped the laptop screen down and took a moment, reclining in his custom $5,000 Lifeform Ultimate while looking over the park. Life was good. And the last couple of years, at a breakneck pace. What a ride…

The first thing he did as CEO was start firing people. He didn’t call it that, of course, these were just RIFs, reductions in force, taking advantage of the incredible advances in productivity that AI had brought.

But Elon had paved the way all those years ago at Twitter, and Quriosity was an AI company, wasn’t it? What if he could be the only employee it needed?

“Time to practice what we preach!” he’d told the board, and they backed him up, all the way.

The PR people were the first to go.

Sam hadn’t been happy with their work since his days as CMO, and nowadays, he was getting most of the PR articles written by Quriosity herself — oh, it was most definitely a she.

He’d toyed with the idea of elevating one of his underlings to the newly vacated CMO role, especially the cute chick who was also a Kellogg's alumnus, but decided against it given the risks -- it would be easier to date her when she worked elsewhere. So he let her go, and then made fast work of the remnants of the Marketing department. It didn’t work out with the girl in the end, but whatever, there was always someone available.

And so on.

The IT department was surprisingly resistant, a clear case of cobbler’s shoes, Sam had thought at the time, and they’d kept finding this or that reason why the AI couldn’t handle the tasks completely.

Sam kept plugging away, finally throwing in the towel on DevOps and outsourcing it to one of his college bros’ consultancy — this way, it was an expense line, at least, and not a personnel headache.

The software developers were tougher, but when GPT-9 came along, with its ten trillion transformers approaching the complexity of the human brain, and hallucinations nearly eliminated, the code Quriosity produced was so much cleaner anyway. “Go, invent, do something useful,” he told his CTO over a Zoom call. And don’t forget to exercise your options!”

Customer service was a breeze, Quriosity was implemented on top of a modern agentic architecture, so on-hold times disappeared, and the customers appeared none the wiser — she would even adjust her voice pitch and accent as she talked to people calling in. And nowadays, who knew how many of those calling in were AI agents themselves?

Sam thought that HR would be the toughest, regulatory-wise, but with just four of them left at the company by then, there was hardly any point in keeping it. “Now that you’re under fifty people, and definitely not going back, I agree, there’s no need,” said Lilly, who’d started as company recruiter during that first, explosive, post-funding phase. It's not like you will need my recruiting skills or to file EEOC reports… I get it. Time for the Caymans, I guess,” she smiled. It was much easier when people properly understood their roles, Sam thought.

And then, finally, the CFO, last quarter.

Andrew has been great throughout, and Quriosity’s stock rise has made him independently wealthy. But he still objected: “Are you sure, Sam? Some decisions…”

“Oh, come on, Andy,” Sam interrupted. “It’s not as if Quriosity can’t do the arithmetic of the annual report. Grab a long vacation, you deserve it. Let me know if you want to start something new, I’d be happy to back you up. Or maybe just enjoy the time, am I right?"

There were legal complications— the early twenty-first-century scandals put laws like Sarbanes-Oxley on the books, requiring significant internal audits and multiple signatures on public company reports.

But Sam fought it out in the courts, showing how Quriosity itself was incorruptible and could cross-test financial returns using multiple personas. So she became his Virtual CFO. A brilliant move, and the profit margin started climbing immediately, especially after he had directed Quriosity to optimize billing so that the company was fairly compensated for usage.

And now, as he was sitting in his home office, way up above Central Park, the company only had him and one other human employee: his Administrative Assistant. In this brave, new, agentic age, it was the mark of true privilege and success.

Sam’s laptop interrupted his reverie, the messaging indicator flashing red, signalling some urgency. He flipped the screen open.

“Hi, Sarah. What’s up?” She was a doll, important to the company’s image with the Board and key investors. But he was careful to maintain a certain distance.

“Sam, I think there may be a problem. Quriosity kept alerting me to a consistently high number of customers calling in and insisting on switching to a human attendant. We don't have those, as you know, but the pattern itself is very unusual, given that Quriosity's avatar is indistinguishable from a human in video and audio calls. So I started looking into it…”

She had the look of terror on her face. Well, this is why he was getting paid the big bucks.

“Spit it out, Sarah. Whatever happened, I’ll handle it,” he said confidently.

She hesitated. “This might affect our last quarterly results, Sam.”

“What? Why?” Can she not just tell him what happened? “Sarah, what is going on?”

“Well, sir, do you remember how you directed Quriosity to update the billing systems to grow margins? To make sure the company is ‘fairly compensated’?

The formal “sir” was disconcerting. “Yes, of course I remember, Sarah!” He was getting irritated. “Stock price goes up when margin improves. This is one of our key initiatives.”

“Unfortunately, it appears that Quriosity went a bit too far. She analyzed network traffic and file usage. You do know the type of uploaded content on the web, which continues to grow exponentially…”

Can he get a straight answer? “OK, so dick pics and porn, people and animals doing stupid tricks. So what?”

“She went through years of history, cataloged all of it. Analyzed historical patterns. Figured out a new billing strategy. Play-tested it versus the last quarter. And then, pleased with the results, recognized the revenues for this quarter and included them in the SEC reports, which you signed...”

Sarah was growing visibly flustered, but then finally summoned her courage:

“What did she do, sir? She billed them.

Quriosity billed the cats.”

End