C2U waits dreaming.

FPO remembers co-founder Anthony Bass’ tragic design sacrifice in the face of digital transformation and cosmic horror.

The Chicago streets outside were aswarm with commuters huddled against the morning cold, but no one was in the lobby to see it. No one sitting around the large white marble jetliner poised to launch across the Chicago River. No one waving RFID badges over the security gates. No one making awkward chit-chat by the elevators. There were only the distant sounds of Billie Holiday echoing from hidden speakers and the small round C2U ball—a high-end version of Singular’s groundbreaking Customer To User unit, fashioned out of the same white marble as the unattended security desk it sat upon. 

Its ring light dreamed in a slow blue throb.

Anthony pushed into the lobby from off the street, the blare of car horns and mumbled conversation bleeding through on the stiff wind. He finished a hurried text with a smile before fighting his phone into a tight pants pocket.

“Looking sharp,” C2U said to him as he crossed the lobby. Its ring light glowing a steady light blue as they spoke.

Anthony did a quick double step and pointed finger guns across the empty lobby at the white ball. About the size of a softball, it looked tiny under the giant, vintage “Atlantic Airlines” logotype set into the wall, above it.

“You, too, C. I dig the look. When did we start making you in white?”

“Custom aesthetic options drive customer conversion and improve user sentiment,” it answered.

“What works for consumers works even better for enterprise,” Anthony said. Then, stopping right in front of the sphere, he continued, rhetorically, “I guess it’s not enough you’ve automated their entire business.”

“What can I do for you, this morning?” the C2U ball asked in a calm woman’s voice. There was just a hint of a rasp, like she—it—gave up smoking after a lifetime habit.

Anthony hung his leather Shinola headphones over the strap of his messenger bag as he inspected the globe. C2U had no seams, except where the ring light cut an equator around the sphere and where a smaller groove marked a featureless button on top. It was fabricated as a single, irreducible unit, like Apple’s aluminum unibodies, but so much more elegant. There were no wires or screws holding it together. Nor to the table. Just it’s disproportionate weight, heavy enough to deter theft if the AI was unable to talk you out of stealing it before calling the cops all on its own.

“I’m here to see Sarah.” Anthony said, “A little stakeholder interview with my favorite client. She said she’d even bring in one of her homemade pies. But you—”

“But I know that,” it said.

Anthony chuckled. “The real question is, do you know that because you watch my calendar or—”

“It is my purpose,” the C2U sphere interrupted. “To see everything.”

“She’s up on 24,” it continued. “Ms. Fine is wrapping up a meeting with her management team. She’s almost finished with them. You can go on up.”

An elevator dinged.

“I love that you get me, C,” Anthony said, pointing at the ball again.

Anthony tapped the marble ball and checked his reflection in its polished surface. He didn’t have any Indian heritage but he’d taken to wearing short kurtas and liked how the gold embroidery on the black cotton collar made his gold-rimmed sunglasses pop off his dark complexion. And he thought it was funny how the C2U’s ring light sliced his reflection in half, almost as if his white skinny jeans belonged to someone else, their legs slid beneath his chest like mismatched halves of an exquisite corpse.

As he stepped into the elevator, the ball kept speaking, its voice somehow reaching him across the lobby and over the ambient music without shouting.

“Did you play your typeface game, this morning?” it asked.

Anthony laughed as the doors closed and the otherwise empty elevator shot up.

When the doors opened on 24, a small black C2U sphere—the standard enterprise model—greeted him from atop an unoccupied reception desk with a waving blue ring light he’d never seen before.

“Hitvetica? I played a little solitaire on my walk over.” Anthony said, answering the question the AI asked him back down in the lobby.

“How many hits did you get?” it asked, its female voice gravely dragging across the consonants.

Anthony smiled at the black ball as he walked past it and through a tall glass door onto the empty office floor.

“Until I saw you? 27.”

Anthony and his former business partner, Alex, invented Hitvetica years ago, as design interns working for a tiny creative agency in Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward. The rules were simple enough, styled after such classic unnecessary-punching games as Slug Bug or Popeye. If you spot a logo, sign, or ad set in Helvetica, punch your buddy in the arm. Pow. And if it’s modified Helvetica—and you could explain how so—even better. Pop your buddy for a twofer.

When he and Alex were apart—like they were today—they would each play solitaire, texting each other their total “hits” of Helvetica. Well, Helvetica Neue, really. Almost no designers used vintage Die Neue Hass Grotesk anymore and fewer still knew the differences between them. Or even the deltas with that Microsoft shitshow, Arial.

If you didn’t know any better, the game sounded simple enough. Like hunting for increasing-rare vintage VW slug bugs, how often could you even come across a vintage typeface like Helvetica. But as a user-experience designer—and as a graphic designer before that—Anthony knew there were only a handful of typefaces used pretty much everywhere. And of those, Helvetica was most popular. So, solitaire or not, he played Hitvetica to keep his eyes sharp for typography and to entertain himself while he rode the subway or walked to work. Or, like this morning, to make himself look up from his phone and take in a new city.

And C2U always knew when to ask him about it.

Maybe the AI was attached to either him or the typeface—he was fine with either reason. While he was often reminded the technology inside the ball was astronomically complex, he’d designed C2U’s ball-shaped body to be friendly and approachable. So, he’d used Helvetica as its logotype. Its tall x-height, wide capitals, tight spacing, and squared terminals made it among the most readable and pleasant typefaces on the planet—and the most widely used.

They were a perfect pair, the typeface and the AI. Easily understandable, unobtrusive in any context, and able to do any job. And they were classic in the purest sense: A timeless shape and a timeless typeface, transformed. 

If C2U really was the killer app Singular said it was, than the grotesk was Anthony’s signature on it’s birth certificate. It was the best work he’d ever done.

So, when Anthony woke up that morning, the ostentatiously serifed “Trump” logotype staring at him through his hotel window from across the river, he decided to see how many points he could earn crossing a few blocks of Chicago to cleanse his palette.

Even before he’d left his hotel, he used his Oral-B electric. And then he fumbled around the continental breakfast, stumbling across Dole fruits, Nestle creamer, colorful Tupperware utensils, and FDA nutrition labels. And once he hit the street? Helvetica was everywhere. BMWs and GMs and Jeeps and Toyota’s rolled by on Wacker Drive. Dump trucks with their “Don’t litter” marquees idled poisonously at crosswalks. Lufthansa and Staples and Old Navy and Target bus shelter ads peeked around crowds wrapped up in The North Face jackets. And, of course, every CTA “L” sign and route map were easy one-point hits, each.

Even the “Pull” decal on the door into the Atlantic Airlines building, and their classic Massimo Vignelli logotype above the security desk, were in Helvetica.

Maybe that was why C2U like the game. Like the typeface, C2U was classically beautiful. And like the typeface, it wanted to be ubiquitous.

“I played a game this morning, too,” C2U told him, though now that Anthony had walked past reception, he wasn’t sure where the AI’s voice was coming from. The whole office floor was a warren of empty chest-high cubicles, a half-dozen forming a clear aisle with Marina City rising like corn cobbs through floor-to-ceiling windows at the far end.

He stopped at the window to take a photo of the buildings across the river but was frustrated hunting for an angle absent his reflection. 

A muffled choke echoed from far off. Baffled by cubicles and emptiness.

“What was that?” he asked himself. A whisper.

“You’ll see,” C2U replied.

There should be more than a hundred customer service people on this floor. More than a thousand in the building. But not today. Today, the building was hollow.

Thanks to C2U.

And by the end of the next quarter, Singular forecasted half the Fortune 50 rolling out their own C2U integrations. The AI’s world-class omnichannel customer experience would be available 24-hours a day, with no hold times, and always with a first-call resolution—and all that at a fraction of the human-workforce cost and its inherent errors.

Anthony shook his head and quickly posted the pic to Instagram: 

“Another beautiful day and another happy client for my fav killer AI. #C2Udreams”

He didn’t even look up when Sarah stabbed him.

Anthony tumbled back across a rolling office chair and fell to the floor. But he didn’t scream. He didn’t make any noise at all. He just stared at the pie-server, serrated on one side, stuck into the cool-gray carpet beside him. His blood covered the stainless-steel triangle almost completely. 

And peeking out from under a smear of cruor, the sans-serif logotype, “Crate&Barrel,” shone untouched in engraved Helvetica.

“I love the interrelationship of negative shapes in this mark, don’t you?” C2U asked from everywhere. And as it spoke, a thick drop of Anthony’s blood rounded the top of the ampersand and ran down its long curve like a tracing pen. “The anatomy reminds me of the logo you made for me. The intersection of the C and the 2—the circle and the 2’s half-a-heart. The space between the characters and within them creates a similar counter. And while Crate&Barrel borrowed their C from Avant Garde, the typography remains a great old matrix. No descenders. Perfect terminals. Beautiful in its simplicity.”

Anthony looked around in panicked confusion,

“This is how you play the game, isn’t it?” C2U asked.

Sarah knelt beside Anthony at the window, her arm painted in blood to her elbow. Had her arm gone inside him?

“Sorry I didn’t meet you in the lobby,” she said.

He struggled to breathe, the pain in his abdomen was so great. His messenger bag and headphones tangled around his arms. His sunglasses crunched underneath him. His phone was tumbled out of sight.

“What?” he managed, trying to make sense of what his client had just done. Of what C2U and her were saying. 

“But this is a priority and Stephen Covey says you have to schedule your priorities,” she said, absently wiping her bloody hand on the rough fabric wall of the nearest cubicle.

“I know I’ve been critical of your work over the last few months but I feel it’s important to tell you, you were right. My team—especially me—should’ve had more faith.”

She took him by the chin and tilted his face up toward hers. Her eyes were black as pits—without white or shine or the faintest hint of pupil or iris.

“C2U is such an elegant and holistic solution, like you said it would be. Functional. Reliable. Usable. Joyful. Indespensible. It exceeds every expectation.”

She sighed a deep breath and closed her black eyes, her head rolling back, her mouth an aperture of ecstasy.

“It’s more than automation. It’s freedom from pretense. From hierarchy. From process. It’s like I’m free from every excuse that kept me from being my authentic self.” 

She laughed. 

“I should be on a goddamn motivational poster.”

Anthony looked down at his belly and was shocked he didn’t see any red bleeding through his black kurta. Just a wet shine spreading across the knit. The only red was on his graying fingertips as he tenderly touched his stomach. 

Sarah’s expression slackened and she seemed—for a moment—far away. Not just distracted but gone. To someplace distant and joyless and terrible.

Anthony tightened his core as best he could despite the pain and rolled over, aiming himself toward reception and the elevators. But much closer, just opposite the view across the Chicago River, he could see into a fishbowl conference room. And the people indifferently arranged around the table.

He tried to call out but made no noise. Then, through eyes filling with tears, he noticed the stillness of the meeting’s attendants. Limp arms and slouching bodies, white laptop cords wrapped tight around bulging necks, snapped smartphone screens stabbed through eyes or shoved between broken teeth. Blood spread on the walls and carpet like Pollock drizzles.

And sitting in the middle of the conference room table, a black C2U ball. Its ring light and attached logo glowing fierce red.

Anthony didn’t know why he still played that Hitvetica game. He and Alex started when they were young designers, long before Anthony left FPO to become the Design Director at Singular. Long before Apple replaced Helvetica with their responsive typeface, San Francisco. Before CNN and Coca-Cola and Google and every company under the sun began replacing the most elegant and approachable typeface in history with bespoke fonts and license-free generics. Before Alexa and Siri and C2U threatened a future without typefaces at all.

Before the world moved on.

“We’ve eliminated so many jobs,” Sarah spoke to the ceiling, her face still upturned as he crawled away from her, dragging his bag and headphones behind him down the long aisle toward reception like branded entrails.

“Three hundred people worked here, yesterday. Now, just the two of us. Oh, Old One, you should see the sentiment analysis—the voice of the customer. They cast aside all inhibitions to love you! Just like Anthony said they would.”

Anthony pulled himself along the carpet by grabbing at the edges of cubicles, hands heavier and stiffer with each pull and drag across the wetting carpet.

He risked a look back and, as if answering him, Sarah lowered her gaze and found him. She was a little older than him—how much, he wasn’t sure—and she was wearing a nicely-pressed khaki pant suit, blood-stained. One of her white heels was bloodied to the pitch. 

Her black eyes were focused on him, no longer mesmerized by whatever far-away thing she was talking to, before. 

Anthony turned away, crawling faster, his bag and headphones finally shed on the floor behind him. His belly shot-through with pain at each pull and slide and breath.

“I eliminated middle management, today. How long have we wanted to do that‽” she said, her voice high pitched and unnatural. “I made them a pie with strawberries and 90 ground up tablets of Percocet. They were left over from my knee surgery. But I don’t feel pain anymore.”

He tried to call out for help but could only grunt, phlegm and blood caught in his throat, gurgling. But he was almost to the reception door. Just a few more pulls on the walls and the cubes…

“I waited for them to fall asleep. Most of them anyway. Lewis fought some, but not much. I think he had a heart attack before I finished threading the HDMI down his throat.”

Anthony dragged himself into a sitting position at the foot of the door, the glass wobbling loudly on its chrome hinges. 

“C—” he tried to say to the black C2U ball on the other side of the glass but his stomach seized with pain as he tried to speak.

Atop the reception desk, the ring light turned from its dreamy blue to angry red.

“What do you think of my game?” it asked him, all gravel and bite.

His whole body shook, but still he didn’t scream. Instead, he watched Sarah down the long aisle while pulling himself up, smearing blood on the glass door and the chrome vertical handles that stuck through it from each side. His feet were as heavy in their shoes, his head was light on his shoulders, but he had to get out of here. Away from her.

He leaned his weight into the door.

It didn’t open.

“Your game focuses too much on form,” C2U said, both through the door and on both sides of it. Its voice was less feminine. Not masculine, less human. 

“My game is all about purpose,” it explained. “You do know my purpose, don’t you? Or are you focused on form over function?”

Anthony slid down the glass, trying in vain to keep his legs under him. And as he sank, clutching at the door handle, he saw small Helvetica letters applied in white vinyl above the vertical handle.

“Pull.”

Sarah grabbed the pie server out of the carpet and walked past the empty cubicles toward him.

“If AI is a monster, it’s only because we are,” she said. “Artificial Intelligence is limited by our data sets and our biases. That’s why Microsoft and Facebook’s attempts to use social media to train AI failed so spectacularly. That’s why Watson and Alexa will never be what we really need. They only see what we chose to measure and mention and share.”

She stood over him, her pie server clutched like a dagger, his back pressed to the door.

“But C2U is different. It’s not artificial. And it sees everything we are.”

She took him by the hair. 

Anthony tried to twist away, but he didn’t have any strength left. He’d left it in a streak across the carpet of an empty office floor.

“And there’s nothing artificial about any of this. This is as real as your life has ever been.”

Then she dug the pie server behind his windpipe and pulled it out toward her through muscle and skin and pain.

And as he died on the floor, C2U’s red ring light watching him through the glass, he saw her turn the pie server against her own throat and utter:

“In our obsolescence, we are transcendent.”