Thus Spake Barnabas

Or: My friend Miriam goes on a date

My friend Miriam recently went on a date. It’d been years since she’d logged in to her Bramble or Seekr accounts, but after her thirty-third birthday occasioned her taking stock of her trajectory and position in life, she decided she’s finally at a place in her career where she can allocate time and emotional energy towards pursuing a relationship.

I suppose thirty-three is about that age where people think about settling down. But for Miriam, thirty-three isn’t so far removed from her twenties that she doesn’t compulsively compare what she’s doing to her twentysomething friends and colleagues. As far as youngest people she talks to at the Met are concerned, dating apps are for The Old. They themselves prefer to serendipitously find their paramours in Veetspace, arrange to meet up in local airbies that rent out rooms on a two-hour basis, and then part ways after the urges have been satisfied. Most of them, I’m told, are too committed to the hustle and their personal projects and entertainment to want to take on anyone else’s baggage. When Miriam told them she was back on Bramble and looking for dates, the general sentiment was oh that’s so vinyl, Miri.

But the thing is that my friend Miriam isn’t exactly old-fashioned. When she revised her dating profiles, she added the stipulation that any prospective date had to be comfortable with her using Ticule.

Don’t get her started on how Ticule users are unfairly maligned. The app and its appurtenances occupy that strange and undesirable position in the consumer tech sphere where young people see the taint of the middle-aged and middle-class upon them, while the older cohorts see them as newfangled and gauche. Both sets agree that nobody but the aloof and rude would ever want to use Ticule.

Miriam, like most members of the Ticule “community,” will vehemently lecture you on the wrongheadedness of either group’s assessment if you give her the opportunity, and she’ll point to reports indicating that its userbase is still growing (albeit slowly). Ticule is here to stay, she says, and a lot of its current detractors will be changing their tune in the years ahead.

Speaking as Miriam’s friend, I can say that Ticule really did change her life for the better. Therapy and meds couldn’t cure her social anxiety, but with Ticule she can “speak” to anybody, anytime, and remain perfectly at ease throughout. Without it, she says, she wouldn’t have thrived the way she has in the Met’s HR department. She’s on site five days a week, talking to dissatisfied employees and interviewing job applicants, and if Ticule wasn’t helping her find the words, she’d have been too diffident and avoidant to last a month, let alone get promoted twice in the last three years.

According to Miriam, saying that Ticule does her talking for her is a gross oversimplification. The app isn’t just an LLM bot that listens in on her conversations and generates a list of generic responses: the software also takes into account a recorded history of her own speech, an archive of the text she’s entered into email and messaging platforms, and scans of inchoate verbal activity in her left-brain gyruses. The ultimate result of this combination is a software-generated statement or reply that almost always corresponds to what she’d ideally say herself if she were totally unphased by the expectant stare of an accomplished curator looking for a position at the museum, or an irate front-end employee unloading their grievances on her.

She once used it when we met up to take a stroll around Prospect Park. I’ll concede that if she hadn’t disclosed the fact at the onset, I might not have guessed. Her hair grew over the pads affixed to the left side of her head long ago. The list of responses blinking in the contact lens are only visible to her; I didn’t catch so much as a stray flicker against her pupil. The high-end miniature speaker she uses to project her deepfaked voice is altogether invisible when she conceals it under her collar, lapel, or bra strap. The speech it emanates sounds almost natural, but when she’s on the job—when protocol prescribes that she speak more pleasantly than feelingly—I imagine that anybody who isn’t paying close attention notices anything amiss when they speak to her in her office or over Ceeyu. For years she’s habitually masked up in public, even during the summer, so if you’re not looking closely, you can’t tell that her mouth isn’t moving.

At any rate: the man Miriam met for dinner last week was named Barnabas. He’s in his late thirties and works as a software engineer for a relatively small but prestigious Manhattan firm with a few branch offices across the country. For nearly a decade he’s operated completely out of his home, and his average workday is something like ten or eleven hours. Because of his high perch on the company hierarchy, he’s expected to manage projects, routinely confer with staff members and supervisors, join Ceeyu meetings with clients, and write and check code. He’s on voice and video chat several hours each day, and with Ticule taking up some of the cognitive burden of composing and voicing replies, he’s eminently capable of participating in meetings and getting shit done at the same time. (Remember that roundly-mocked Forbes article that went viral a year or two back? The one recommending that office bosses start requiring employees to use Ticule in order to supercharge productivity? I can’t help wondering if Barnabas wrote it under a pseudonym.)

Miriam tells me Barnabas got on the dating scene during a sort of mid-life crisis. For a long time he believed his persistent sense of dissatisfaction was the result of his not being quite where he wanted or expected to be in terms of his career at his age—but no, that wasn’t it. He isn’t even forty yet, and only three or four people stand above him in the firm’s hierarchy. If he waits things out a few more years, odds are good that he’ll become the head of the office, if not the whole firm, when his fifty- and sixtysomething superiors retire.

Sometime last month, Barnabas realized his problem was that he was lonely. He lives by himself in a studio apartment over in Chelsea. He doesn’t have any siblings, and both of his parents passed away when he was in his twenties. He only ever converses with people from work, and spends most of his free time the same way the rest of us do: updating our skillsets to stay relevant, playing video games, and bingewatching streaming series. It wasn’t enough. He needed more meaningful companionship than a tank full of tropical fish and a $5000 home entertainment center could provide.

So Miriam and Barnabas found each other on Bramble and arranged a dinner date at a trendy sushi restaurant in Midtown. When the big night arrived, Miriam liked what she saw right away. Barnabas looked even better in person than in his profile pics. He was clearly getting his money’s worth from his suite of home exercise equipment, and in spite of his solitary lifestyle, knew how to dress to impress. He bore himself with the graceful hauteur of a man who knows how to take charge of a situation. Miriam waxed aesthetic to me about the gray hairs about his temples: far from suggesting senescence, they made him look experienced, accomplished, very properly aged.

Barnabas didn’t wear a mask and made no pretense of actually engaging his vocal cords to produce the words he “said.” Probably many (most?) women would have been put off, Miriam found it refreshing. Relatable. She was using Ticule too, of course. One of the reasons she abandoned the dating scene in her mid-twenties was that every time she found someone who really impressed her, she was such a nervous wreck during the first date that her prospective mates were either turned off or perversely turned on by the prospect of a dalliance with an attractive woman whose low self-esteem made her easily manipulable. (For the record, Miriam doesn’t have an unhealthily low opinion of herself. Strangers and unfamiliar social situations just make her antsy.)

When the server brought them their drinks and appetizers, Miriam took off her mask and kept it off. With Ticule and their miniature speakers, she and Barnabas made small talk, answered each other’s questions, and submitted observations while their mouths were otherwise engaged. They used their chopsticks with their rights hands, while their tapped their left hands’ fingers to their palms to select the responses displayed in their contact lenses.

While I was only interested in getting the play-by-play of my oldest friend’s first date in nearly a decade, it was impossible for Miriam to go into much detail without expounding on Ticule’s role in the affair. She tells me that being able to rely on the app was all that kept her from seizing up or blurting out something foolish out of nervousness. She found Barnabas gorgeous and intimidating, and at first she held her hands in her lap so he wouldn’t see them shaking. But with Ticule making preternaturally informed calculations of her sentiments and voicing them on her behalf, she was able to hold her ground until she found her bearings and confidence.

At only two points in the evening did Barnabas’ insistence on exclusively using Ticule to communicate come off as awkward. The first was when it came to ordering. The contact lens is still a long way off from being able to register visual information, so the app couldn’t tell which menu items Barnabas’ eye lingered on. Nothing it had learned from past occasions or that could glean from scanning the activity in his brain’s language center was capable of submitting Yes, I’d like the tekka don and the deep-fried tempura roll with salmon, please as a selectable response when the server asked if he was ready to order.

The best Barnabas could do was repeatedly select the reply I’ll have this, please while holding up the menu and pointing at what he wanted. I didn’t ask Miriam how the server reacted; she got prickly enough when I asked if she ordered her meal and drinks the same way. (She used the traditional method, it turns out.)

But Miriam tells me her conversation with Barnabas at the restaurant flowed briskly and naturally. Apparently there’s a whole suite of options you can toggle to optimize the generated responses for certain social occasions, and both she and Barnabas had “first date” selected. Among other things, this mode makes nearly every response end with either a question or an open-ended note which invites a reply.

I’m trying try to imagine it: the speaker clipped to Barnabas’ shirt asks Miriam if she’s been keeping up with the new season of Lobster Gambit. The Ticule app, mining everything she’s ever punched into any of her social media accounts or said to her friends and colleagues about the show, generates four possible responses that either sum up her feelings about the new season or delve into some particular aspect she finds interesting. The LLM engine fills in any blanks. She makes her selection, and the speaker under her collar utters it for her. Barnabas’ Ticule registers and processes it, and determines his four most probable replies based on his own history and what it glimpses of his brain activity. Maybe a few minutes later, Miriam’s app finds a statistically appropriate moment to introduce politics into the discussion, and she takes it up on its suggestion to ask Barnabas how he feels about the mayoral race. His app parses everything he’s ever typed out about the topic on the message boards and comments sections he frequents, and the autogenerated answer he selects literally speaks his mind.

Miriam tells me there wasn’t a single uncomfortable lull in the discussion. And because Ticule can only generate responses of up to a few sentences in length, neither of them was able to monopolize the proceeding.

I asked Miriam, cautiously, if at any point she felt like she was merely listening in while the apps carried on with each other. Absolutely not, she assured me. It was surprisingly personal, she said, intimate and revealing. Not only did Ticule “know” about her strained relationship with her brother, it brought up the subject at precisely the right juncture. The curious and sympathetic reply it generated for Barnabas touched on his being an only child.

Getting to know Barnabas in this way was like communing via telepathy, Miriam says. They projected their candid thoughts towards each other, luxuriating in the flavors of the sashimi melting on their tongues and gazing into each other’s eyes. She learned that Barnabas loves animals and is patient with children; that he cares deeply about his colleagues and has been willing to stick his neck out for them when they’re in trouble; that he has more warmth and love to give than his secluded work-from-home urban existence has thus far permitted him to.

After leaving the restaurant, they strolled a while through Central Park. At this point, Miriam deactivated Ticule. There was no longer any reason to use it; she was completely comfortable in Barnabas’ presence, and increasingly felt that what she wanted to say was beyond the app’s capability to formulate. Barnabas continued to use it, and she found his reluctance to switch it off positively charming. The man was forward and confident in all other things—after all, it was him who took her hand in his while they walked side-by-side—but shy about speaking for himself.

Miriam says it reminded her of a boy she liked back in her rambunctious college days. Once during summer vacation, she and her friends congregated at someone’s house when their parents were out of town. There was a backyard pool; they all got drunk and decided to go skinny dipping. But the boy Miriam liked was diffidently averse to taking off his clothes. Barnabas and Ticule were like the boy and his boxers. He needed a little coaxing to get out of his comfort zone.

They sat together on a bench through the dusk, watching the fireflies dance in the twilight. It was here that Barnabas’ obstinate Ticule use brought about the date’s second awkward moment. Up until then, he and the app did a fine job holding up their end of the conversation—but now he seemed distracted. His replies to her were delayed, scattered, and increasingly irrelevant to what was being talked about. It was several minutes before Miriam understood the reason for this: Barnabas couldn’t figure out how to get the app to say let’s go back to my place. Once she figured it out, she took the initiative and suggested it herself. He got an epik to take them to his apartment in Chelsea.

Barnabas’ home was as spacious, tasteful, and immaculately tidy as she’d been given to expect of him. That pretty much clinched it for Miriam. As soon as he shut and locked the door, she flung herself into his arms, kissing his mouth and working the buttons on his shirt. Barnabas scooped her up and carried her into the bedroom. Her blouse and bra promptly came off, and with them went her Ticule speaker—not that she needed it anymore. She knew what she wanted and was unafraid to seize it.

She told Barnabas, caressing and kissing him: Barnabas, I don’t give myself to anyone carelessly. I already like you. No, I’m certain I already love you. If we do what we’re about to do, I’m yours, completely, maybe forever. I’ve never been so certain that I belong with someone—that I belong to someone.

As Miriam spoke, Barnabas stroked her buttocks, nodding and sighing eagerly. She nibbled at his earlobe and dug her nails into his back.

Tell me what you think of that, she said. Do you want me? Do you want all of me?

He disengaged his left hand to touch his finger to his palm. The speaker clipped to his shirt began to warble out a reply from the edge of the mattress. Miriam lunged for it and flipped its off-switch without listening to a word it said.

No, she told him, kneeling over him and taking his face in her hands. I want to hear you say it. Speak to me.

Barnabas cleared his throat. Ahhm, he said in a voice hoarse from months and years of disuse. Abba abuh muh. Shoorg ubb.

He took a long breath and tried again. The gravity of the moment and the intensity of his determination were written all over his face. She felt him shudder in her grasp. Shlem pfem umppa shump shoonk shuhh shh.

Saliva dribbled from his lips, and he wiped his mouth with the back of his palm. He was out of practice. Miriam waited patiently while he sought the words, fascinated to see him so uncertain and vulnerable.

Hormrnk. Unfugh spum, Barnabas said. Onka onka.

He grit his teeth and bowed his head. Hrrngkgh fmrung eenk. Eenk ongh bluckgh.

Hrrmgh. Hmmaugh. Muh Mgh. Maa. Maooh.

Then his eyes widened and his muscles relaxed. Aaoh. Ohhhmm. Ohhghma.

He smiled strangely at her and squeezed her breasts with aplomb.

Ohh ma ma.

His little smile grew into a broad, self-assured grin.

Barnabas, Miriam said. She kissed his eyelids and lolled her tongue inside his mouth. He laughed and rose up to lay her on her back and position himself on top of her.

Miriam couldn’t but touch her fingers to her chest and tremble at the recollection of it. I’m told there’s nothing sexier than a man who knows just what to say.