The Einhorn Affair
At the time the events of this story occurred, I was employed at a well-known cybernetics company. A natural language processing engineer by profession, I was a member of the AI team that was racing to marry machines with humans, a union I had come to believe would turn us into a race of bio-based cyborgs. I had gotten over the romance of helping to create this type of future several years earlier since I found the thought of it depressing and dystopian, but as I wasn’t equipped with a skill set that easily translated to another lucrative field of endeavor, and I needed health insurance, and to pay the rent — and lacked the initiative to get off my ass and look for another job — I did what I had to do to stay employed and kept my opinions to myself.
I reported to Bob Blank, who headed up the entire AI group at CyFi. Bob had made his name as one of the developers at Second Life, the three-dimensional virtual-world platform that was wildly popular some years back. He had the insight that owning land in the virtual world would become as important as it was in real life — the substratum of wealth accumulation — an idea that had gotten off to a slow start, but was now happening at an ever-accelerating rate in the metaverse. Bob was brought onboard at CyFi about a year after I arrived. Management was counting on him to provide the same kind of far-reaching insight for the AI market and jump start our division which was, according to analysts’ reports, lagging behind our competitors. He hadn’t yet come up with any ground-breaking insights to improve our technology, but the hiring committee that had identified him as the ideal candidate obviously had not given up on him because he was still employed.
Bob occupied a corner office with windows that offered sweeping, hypnotic views of the Hudson River. Perhaps that was why he was rarely seen outside the confines of his four walls.
Bob’s workday was guided by to-do lists and time-and-events schedules and inflexible deadlines. He didn’t tolerate interruptions. Wouldn’t participate in impromptu meetings. His two devoted assistants, Marjorie and Martin, guarded his closed door and made sure no one gained unscheduled access to him. You could not barge in on Bob and ask, hey, you got a minute? When out and about — on his way to a conference room for a meeting, or to the bathroom — Marjorie or Martin accompanied him, running interference, keeping people from approaching him by always seeming to be in conversation with him.
None of us liked Bob and as far as we could tell, Bob didn’t like us. He referred to us, that is, to everyone who reported to him, as you people in meetings. Fortunately, his interactions with us were few and far between, but when they occurred, they were unpleasant. He could be, and all too frequently was, cutting, curt, and condescending for no discernible reason. Which was why, among other reasons, we didn’t like him. We didn’t know why he didn’t like us.
Given Bob’s fraught relationship with us, when I heard him yelling in the hallway late one afternoon, I pricked up my ears. Bob out of his office? Yelling? Something was going on. Pushing away from my desk I leaned out of my workspace and saw a crowd coming down the corridor. Bob was in the vanguard, Marjorie was close at his side, Martin was covering his back. Bob was asking direction from the scrum of people gathering around him. He was clearly agitated.
“Einhorn! Where is Einhorn?” Bob wanted to know. He was screaming.
People were pointing forward: down here, over there, there. Here.
The crowd came to stop in front of Einhorn’s office door. Bob didn’t knock, he turned the handle and tried to gain entry. The door was locked. He pounded on it.
“Einhorn, open up.”
There was no response.
“Is he in there?” Bob addressed the burgeoning crowd.
No one knew. Bob banged again. No response.
“Marjorie, get office services. Where’s Rajesh? I want this door unlocked. Get Rajesh over here now!”
Nervous, Bob yanked at the collar of his shirt, probably trying to loosen his tie which had a strangle hold on his neck. Casual dress was pretty much the rule in all the tech companies I’d worked for, including CyFi. Bob bucked this convention and wore a suit and tie every day which set him apart from the rest of us, and for which he was ridiculed behind his back. In particular, we mocked his suits, which were stylish and evidently expensive, but ill-fitting and hung on him like shapeless sacks. Their colors and patterns were nondescript. Hard to describe. Like cheap carpet in a budget hotel. Actually, more like mud.
Marjorie was on her phone, texting, ostensibly trying to reach Rajesh, the head of office services.
“Marjorie. Go get him! Now.” Bob commanded.
There were snickers throughout the crowd.
Marjorie rushed off. Martin moved in to guard Bob. Martin glared at us, probably hoping that his steely stare alone would disperse us.
We all stood our ground to see what was going to happen. Bob pulled out his phone and began texting. He was clearly panicked. He began banging on Einhorn’s door again.
“Einhorn!” He cried. Turning to face the crowd, he said: “So, no one knows if he’s in there?” The crowd shook its head in a collective no. “Anyone see him today?” Once again, the answer was no. Bob pulled at this collar, stared off into space to avoid making eye contact with any of us. Then turned back to his phone. His forehead had begun to glisten.
Very little was known about Einhorn. Like Bob, he was infrequently seen around the office. In the three years I’d been at CyFi I’d never met him. Given his antisocial reputation, I never thought of approaching him and introducing myself when I saw him get in or out of the elevator, enter or exit his office. Clayton, an analyst with whom I sometimes collaborated, was the only person I knew who had an interaction with him in which words were exchanged. He encountered Einhorn in the men’s room some six months ago. As he told it, they had stood side by side while they pissed into the urinals. Clayton said he gave Einhorn a friendly nod and said, hey. Einhorn didn’t acknowledge him. While they were drying their hands, Clayton commented on the brown paper bag sitting on top of Einhorn’s attaché case.
“Lunch?” He asked.
“Pornography” Einhorn said.
Like Bob, Einhorn worked with his door closed. He was one of the few employees at CyFi who still had an office, possibly out of respect for his tenure since he had been with the firm since its founding, or so some people said. Possibly because the nature of his projects was so secretive, they couldn’t be seen by others. Nobody knew.
Einhorn didn’t have a manager as far as we could determine. When our reporting structure was converted from the old, hierarchical, command-and-control model to the new matrix model — in which no one reported to anyone, or everyone reported to everyone — for some reason Einhorn’s name was missing from the flow chart. How work was allocated to him and what he was working on was never revealed. On status reports next to his name would be listed jobs like Project VII, or Strategic Feasibility Analysis. No one had any idea what these jobs were.
It was widely believed that Einhorn had developed the intellectual property that allowed for the company’s IPO and listing on NASDQ. Which gave credence to the rumor that he was connected and protected at the C-suite level of the organization and didn’t directly report to Bob, and further explained why he held on to his office, and why his hours and days of work were unknown to anyone but him.
Rajesh arrived jangling his gigantic key ring. The crowd parted for him like the Red Sea spreading to form a safe passage for Moses when he raised his staff. The gargantuan ring had to have a hundred, if not two hundred keys on it. Rajesh carried the key ring with him everywhere he went. He would set it on the table next to him while he ate lunch in the cafeteria. From time to time I sat with him and we would talk about Bollywood films, of which I was a fan — particularly the dance sequences and the long outdoor shots of the hero and heroine on horseback galloping through the countryside. Rajesh was very proud of his country’s cinematic production — our leading cultural export, he claimed — and loved to talk about his favorite films. One day I asked him why lugged the keys around everywhere he went, and he told me how they had saved his job.
He said that he had been working for Double Squared when it was acquired by CyFi, and he was one of the people terminated since the efficiency consultants CyFi had hired to rationalize the workforce couldn’t find a job description or functional title for him. With his broken, hesitantly spoken, heavily accented English, he was unable to explain the scope and importance of his responsibilities. He told them I am Rajesh and I make things work. Two days later he was summarily dismissed. After fifteen years of unlocking the door before anyone arrived, and locking the door after everyone left, he was kicked to the curb.
Soon things stopped working. The phone system went down. No one knew where the service room that housed the phone equipment was located. When they located it, no one could find the key to gain entry. There were no snacks or bottled water in the kitchen and the common areas. There was no paper for the copy machines and the printers. No one knew who to call to order more. The cleaning service went unpaid and stopped coming. There was no toilet paper. The bathrooms became cesspools. When the servers went down, taking out the company website, IT couldn’t get into the electronics closet. Rajesh had the key. He had the keys to every locked door and drawer on all the floors of the entire firm. His ancient, paper-based Rolodex cards contained the names and numbers of all the suppliers and contractors who serviced the office. No one had thought to ask him for them when he was sent home. He had never entered them into his computer. CyFi was forced to rehire him.
Rajesh was leisurely fingering his way through the keys looking for the one that would unlock Einhorn’s door
Bob was becoming more agitated by the minute. Yanking at his collar, craning his neck skyward. Finally, Rajesh located the key, inserted it into the lock and opened the door.
In my entire professional life, I never saw anything like the chaos that was Einhorn’s office. Apparently, no one else had either. There were exclamations of shock and incredulity from the crowd. Stunned and speechless, Bob stood and stared. People pushed past him to get a better look. They pulled out their phones to take pictures. There were papers everywhere. Piles of papers, stacks of journals, mountains of magazines, books scattered on the floor. Bundles of manuscripts. Reams of overstuffed manila folders. The surface of Einhorn’s desk was barely visible, buried beneath shredded and crumpled paper. He had covered his one window with newspaper. Beneath the window was an overstuffed club chair with a deep imprint on the seat cushion indicative of either frequent or prolonged use. On either side of the chair were strewn dozens of porno magazines. Leg Show, Jugs, Asian Fever, Barely Legal, Men Only, Bound and Gagged, Blacked. Some of the pages were marked with sticky notes.
Bob began rifling through Einhorn’s desk. “He was working on a project,” Bob said. “It should have been turned in a week ago.”
“He had an extension to be make final revisions, according to the status report,” Martin said.
The office was now filled with people milling about, marveling and chuckling at the disorder, some furtively flipping through the porno magazines.
“The project should be finished, done, completed today,” Bob emphasized. “Where is it?” Bob jiggled the mouse and woke up Einhorn’s computer. It was locked.
“Here.” Tyrone, an engineer I sometime chatted with at the expresso bar held up a sheet of paper from the printer. “Is this it?” He read: “Antithesis II and Synthesis IIIA. The importance of these two large language neural networks for the survival of CyFi cannot be overstated. The prospective, two-part strategic analysis that follows will …”
“The Antithesis and Synthesis programs, yes,” said Bob. “Where’s the rest of it?”
“Here.” Tyrone read from another sheet of paper he pulled off the printer: “History will not go gently into the night, it will come to a violent end. Late capitalism, aided by artificial intelligence, will result in a hybridized, re-imagined, emancipated humankind built from the ashes of our current hegemonic, oppressive system of exploitative modes of production and …
There was nervous laughter.
“What the fuck is that?” Bob wanted to know.
“I don’t know,” Tyrone said, handing the sheet of paper to Bob.
“This is bullshit. Where’s the analysis?”
Tyrone shrugged his shoulders and picked up a copy of Bound and Gagged. He said: “You know, porn looks completely different on paper than it does online.”
There was a general murmur of agreement.
“Never mind that. This project has been in development for five months,” Bob wailed. “It’s due now.” Bob pulled at his collar, twisted his neck. “When’s the last time anyone saw him?” No one could say. “Unlock his computer. The file has to be in there. Call him. Text him. Find him. Martin. I want him in my office.”
They called him. They texted him. They didn’t find him. It turned out Einhorn’s last known address was a post office box in the Bronx. He had vanished, along with the analysis, if he had ever written it. Einhorn had managed to slip through the internal system of status reports, of corporate procedures and protocols, of cyber security. In the investigation that followed it was revealed that he had made off with all the projects he had worked on — company property — wiped clean his hard drive and deleted all the backups on the company server, as well as his email. Weeks earlier he had emptied his 401K plan. He had erased all trace of himself.
For weeks, Einhorn remained the number one topic of conversation. Everyone had an opinion about what they thought would happen to him when they found him. But Einhorn had vanished. Even the detectives CyFi hired couldn’t locate him.
Eventually, Bob was fired and we got a new boss. We received new assignments. We fell back into our routines. The Einhorn affair became part of company lore, something whispered about to new hires, and recounted to make a banal point about how you could never really know your colleagues.
One day, several months later, after a long, leisurely lunch, Rajesh said: “Come, I want to show you something.”
We walked down the internal staircase to the operations floor and took the private service elevator to the basement. Rajesh fetched up his key ring from his belt, found the key he was looking for and held it in his left hand while he entered a code into the numeric keypad in the center of the door with his right hand. Then he inserted the key into the lock and pushed open the door, which appeared to be quite heavy. We stepped into a cavernous space as large as a suburban supermarket.
“The archive room,” he said. There was row upon row of tall, steel-gray filing cabinets. “Everything that can be saved is saved and printed and stored here.”
We set off down one of aisles. As we walked Rajesh sifted through his keys. We stopped midway and stood before cabinet 0304i. Rajesh unlocked a drawer about three quarters of the way up, pulled it out and stood back to allow me to look.
“Einhorn’s,” he said. “Has to be his. You’ll see.”
From his comment I was expecting to find a cache of pornography. Instead, there were hanging Pendafex file folders with names hand written on the tabs, some of which I recognized: Mikhail Bakunin, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Emma Goldman, Pyotr Kropotkin, Jaron Lanier, Ludwig von Mises, Peter Theil.
“I wonder why he left all this?”
Rajesh shrugged. “Don’t ask me, man.”
From one of the folders I pulled out a sheaf of papers held together by a fat binder clip. The cover page read: The Time Has Come. Following that were at least a hundred densely-packed, single-spaced, typewritten pages with copious handwritten emendations throughout.
“Can I have this?”
“Anything you want.”
When I finally began reading the document, it turned out to be an update — or, according to what Einhorn had scribbled in a marginal note in the forward, a critical and necessary revision — of Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future.
‘Jack Be Nimble’ colored pencil on paper by Beatrice Gorant https://www.instagram.com/bea.gorant