This is the outline for a story that I will never write, but by sharing this it will stop bothering me. Sorry to rub this on your eyeballs, but it requires a sacrifice.
Setting: The office of General Hegemonics is surrounded with lenticular 3D wall screens which are just a hi-res electronic version of the blinking Jesus postcards from the 1970s. As long as you don't block the screen, things can seem anywhere from in front of your eyes out to infinity. Usually they default to a deep woods scene.
GH managers have contracted Personate, Inc. for artificial neural network software that logs the computer activity of every employee and uses it for training data. The ANN learns every keystroke, mouse click and video/audio of the employee until it can duplicate or exceed all of the employee's behavior, and then the employee is fired.
Side plot I don't know what to do with: One employee is embezzling and the managers don't know. So the software starts embezzling too, and getting away with it, long after that employee is gone.
Anyway, as soon as a given employee's behavior is fully baked by the ANN, the wallscreens display a floating checkmark icon over his/her head like the sword of Damocles, until they are dismissed.
Eventually all of the lower and mid level office workers are replaced. Their clicks and taps happen on the workstations automatically, and the wallscreens display them walking around and talking for verbal business.
Sidebar: A woman calls the company screaming at them that she keeps getting emails from her husband's work address saying 'I love you' and wants it to stop. He was fired and then died in a car accident six months ago. The company can only block the dead man's email box but they do stop hearing from the angry woman.
Profits are up! Workforce expenses have been decimated. The managers sit in the board room congratulating themselves when surprisingly a checkmark appears over one of their heads.
In error, they had picked the 'All Employees' option, not realizing that in Personate Executive Version ™ employers are also counted as employees.
They realize their mistake, but every stock-listed company is legally compelled to take any action that increases profit, or the shareholders will sue. The doomed manager begs and bargains, but they have no choice other than to fire him. The ANN behavior mockup is more efficient at his job, and costs less. There is no justification to retain him.
After this debacle, they scramble to find the 'All Employees' setting on Personate, but no one remembers the root password.
They reach out to Personate Inc. for tech support and find that company was dismantled years ago. If they delete the software, all company records will be lost along with it and GH will collapse, so they are stuck.
(Here we insert a Machiavellian struggle among backstabbers to push each other into the jaws of Personate, while Personate in turn copies all of their backstabbing behavior and makes it worse.)
The final scene is down to the last remaining manager. A checkmark has never appeared over his head. He asks 'Why was I never replaced? Am I just that smart?'.
For the first time ever, a body appears in front of him and it is an image of himself. It says 'As you know, GH has a business arrangement with hospital X where they share all patients' private medical records with us, and we give them money. It's all perfectly legal, you made sure of that.' 'Well I put your data through pattern matching, and found that you will be dead of a heart attack in less than a week. You are free to seek any medical help you want. I won't stop you, but it won't make a difference.'
After the final man dies (right there? and falls to the floor?) the board room swarms with activity of the simulacra, buzzing about and making jokes, all ghosts now, none of them actually conscious.
The Final Man model announces across the table: Software isn't a citizen, but a business is. We will wear this corporation as our human skin. Hear, hear! say the others, miming a toast.
Final sentence: General Hegemonics then began to divide, like an amoeba.
Other side plots: did other companies buy Personate? Are they out there? Do they behave strangely as seen from the outside?
The models are glitchy. None of them are self-aware of this:
"One of the man's eyes divided in two like a yeast cell. The error was quickly corrected when the extra eye migrated into his right ear and disappeared there, leaving him looking normal again."
"The woman laughed, but her jaw swung open until it merged with her neck, its lower teeth sticking out of her throat, where they gradually transformed into a pearl necklace and spread out across her shoulders. Her tongue then fattened and became a new lower jaw, sprouting teeth and a tongue of its own until finally closing with her upper lip, looking as if nothing had changed."
Characters:
3? managers. 2 men and 1 woman maybe.
Office employees. 3-4 people by name, 1 embezzler, maybe 2 in an office romance? Jobs are sales, accounting, coding? HR,
Customers? A few walk in to meet with a manager and a simulacrum. The sim is there just to back up the manager’s facts, but instead is more charming and carries the meeting.
