Hires from a pool of 100000
A short story about hiring in 2035, when AI agents talk to each other before people ever do.
“You should start looking properly,” his father said over breakfast. “Get your resume ready this week.”
Kanishk looked up from his phone. “My what?”
“Your resume. Two pages. School, work, what you’re good at.”
Kanishk thought about this while he finished his toast. “Who writes that?” he said. “And who reads it? Two pages about me, written by me, saying I’m good at things.” He seemed honestly curious, which was somehow worse than if he’d been rude.
His father opened his mouth and then closed it. He’d written a lot of resumes in his time, and he wasn’t sure he’d ever had a good answer to that.
“Fine,” he said. “Do it however people do it now.”
So Kanishk told his daemon he was ready.
It had been with him since he was nine. It knew his timetable, the Lego cities he used to build across the living-room floor, and a few arguments about refereeing decisions that were probably best forgotten.
Everyone had one now. People called them daemons, after an old novel where every person walked around with a companion that belonged only to them. Most people had never read the book. The name stuck anyway.
“For this, I’ll go out with my work face on,” it said.
“Meaning?”
“Same me. Same reason your dad isn’t the same at the dinner table as he is at the office. I’ll only take what you say I can.”
For the search, Kanishk gave it a new name: Kestrel, because it was going to fly a long way and come back with something.
They worked out what Kestrel could take. His coursework, yes. The football club’s group chat, yes, with one rule: nothing about anyone else, and if Kestrel wasn’t sure, it should ask. His health, no. The internship at the lab, mostly no.
“That’s under your confidentiality agreement,” Kestrel said. “I’ll talk about what you did. Not what you saw.”
“Okay.”
“So. What do you actually want?”
He talked for a long time, because he always did, and Kestrel let him. He didn’t want to sit at a screen all day. He wanted to be around people. He wanted to build things, properly, the way he used to build the Lego cities, and he wanted someone who would actually teach him how. And he wanted to stay near home for now, because his younger sibling still came to him with homework, and Saturday mornings were for football.
“That’s enough to start,” Kestrel said.
It went out that night.
While he slept, a lot of other people’s daemons were busy.
At a hospital in the east, the head of nursing had spent weeks pulling together what the ward managers actually needed. The job was called operations coordinator. What the nurses really wanted was someone who’d notice things before they went wrong, and who’d been told the truth about the evenings, because the last two hadn’t been.
At a container terminal, the shift manager made sure the night shifts went in the first line of the pitch.
A bank offered more money than anyone else, and was told, politely, that it wasn’t a good fit.
A drug company asked about the lab work twice, and Kestrel said no twice.
And there was a family food company in the north, opening a new plant. Mrs. Tan, who would run it, wanted someone who’d sit with the line workers at lunch. Her father, who had founded the company, wanted someone who understood machines. She sent out both and didn’t pretend they were the same.
Her question was one none of the others had asked. “When his team loses, what does he do?”
Kestrel knew the answer from years of the group chat. After a bad game, before anyone started on tactics, Kanishk went and found whoever was taking it worst, usually the one who’d missed the penalty kick. He did it at home too. He was the eldest.
But part of that story belonged to someone else. “I’ll come back to you on that one,” Kestrel said.
Near morning, the two daemons got around to money.
“The range starts here,” said the one from the factory, and gave a number.
“Before we talk about the top of it,” said Kestrel, “is the training money in the contract, or is it up to someone’s mood?”
“It’s discretionary.”
“Then it’s worth less to him than you’d think. He wants to learn the machines properly. Put the training in writing and he’ll take a lower base. Leave it out and I’ll need more.”
There was a pause.
“I’ll have to ask a human.”
“Same,” said Kestrel.
At breakfast, a message was waiting for Kanishk. Can I tell them about the penalty kick? I’ll leave Arjun out of it.
He read it with his mouth full and typed yes.
He went through the shortlist on the walk home from football, boots knotted over one shoulder.
“Go on, then.”
“Three of them,” Kestrel said. “The hospital’s first. It’s close, it’s all people, and the pay is fair. Then the terminal. It’s mostly nights; they told me that first thing. But you’d be good at it. The food factory’s third. Lowest pay, furthest away, and the job isn’t fully worked out yet.”
“Why isn’t it worked out?”
“They’re building a new plant. The founder wants someone who understands the machines. His daughter, who’ll run it, wants someone who’ll sit with the line workers at lunch.”
“What machines? How many people work there? Why do they disagree?”
Kestrel answered everything. It had learned a long time ago that this was how he thought.
“What did you tell them about me?”
“The penalty kick. Without Arjun.”
“Huh.” He walked a bit further. “Put the factory first.”
“Can I tell you why I didn’t?”
“Go on.”
“It’s forty minutes each way. You’d be home too late for most of the homework evenings. The first year will be mostly meetings about a building that isn’t finished. And the money is noticeably less.”
He kicked a bottle cap along the path for a while.
“I’ll work out the homework thing,” he said, though he didn’t sound sure. “But the hospital wants someone to fix things. The factory’s building something, and she wants someone who’ll look after the people while it happens. That’s both the things I said I wanted.”
“Factory first, then,” Kestrel said. “One more thing. They want to talk about training. I’ve told them that if it’s in writing you’ll take a lower base, and if it isn’t, you won’t.”
Kanishk winced. “Can’t you just say yes to their number? I don’t want to start off by being difficult.”
“I can,” Kestrel said. “But you told me you wanted someone to actually teach you. That was the part you cared about most.”
He didn’t say anything for a while.
“Fine,” he said. “Hold it. But be nice about it.”
“I’m always nice about it.”
Mrs. Tan went through the shortlist at the kitchen table after her father had gone to bed.
“Who’s at the top?”
“A man from a logistics firm,” her daemon said. “Eight years on production lines. Your father likes him.”
“Put him next to the people we already have.”
It laid out the team: two engineers her father had hired in the spring, the shift lead coming over from the old plant, and the people on the line. And Mr. Goh, who had worked there longer than she’d been alive, and who had asked her last week, quite quietly, whether the new plant would still need people like him. She hadn’t known what to tell him.
“Now add the logistics man.”
“That’s three people who think about machines first. Very strong on getting the line running. Not much after that.”
“And who do the people on the line go to when something’s wrong?”
“At the moment, you.”
She sat with that for a while. Then she had one question put to every candidate: if Mr. Goh were on their team and the first week went badly, what would they do?
Most of the answers were plans. One came with slides. Kestrel’s answer was the one about the penalty kick.
“Where is he on the list?”
“Fourth. He’s never worked in a factory. Your father has him lower.”
“And if you look at the whole team?”
A moment. “First.”
She looked at the two names for a long time. The kitchen was very quiet.
“And the logistics man?”
“If Tuesday goes well, he’ll get a polite no. He’ll be told the team’s needs changed.”
“And the real reason?”
“It’s about the others on the team. I can’t tell him that.”
“So he’ll think he wasn’t good enough.”
“His daemon will probably tell him he was close.”
She didn’t like that. Eight years on production lines, doing everything right, and he’d lose out because of people he had never met. She thought about writing to him herself, and then about what she could actually say, and in the end she didn’t.
“Book the other one for Tuesday,” she said. “And put the training in writing.”
They met in a small room above the factory floor. It smelled faintly of soy sauce, which Kanishk decided was a good sign.
Neither of them bothered with “tell me about yourself.” They’d both been briefed.
“I liked the football story,” she said. “It also says here you built an automated sorter.”
He’d seen that line on Sunday night and left it there. Her father would like it, he’d told himself, and it wasn’t exactly a lie.
He hesitated, and then he winced. “I didn’t, actually. Wei Ming built it. I uploaded the files, so everything’s under my name.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “My part was the last week. Everyone wanted out, so I worked out what each of us was good at and split it up. We finished. I should have fixed that line. Sorry.”
Mrs. Tan laughed, properly, for the first time that morning. “My father is going to be so disappointed,” she said. “I’m not.”
After that it was easier. He asked her a lot of questions, about the line and the machines and the people, until she realised she was the one doing most of the talking. She asked him about a project that had gone wrong, and he told her, including the bit that was his fault. Then he asked her what would make her regret hiring him.
She took her time with that one.
“If you start fixing things before you’ve listened to people,” she said. “Mr. Goh especially.”
“The training’s in writing now,” Kestrel said quietly.
He nodded, and didn’t ask about money. He asked about Mr. Goh.
Later, she was asked how she wanted the notes written up.
“However you like,” she said. “I’ve decided.”
Her father, when she told him, grumbled about the sorter for a full minute. Then he asked when the boy could start.
He told his father that evening.
“A food factory?” His father thought about it. “That’s a long way.”
“Forty minutes.”
“You’ll be late most nights.”
“I know.” Kanishk pushed some rice around his plate. “Weekends, for the homework. We’ll work it out.”
His father let that sit, and then, with the start of a smile: “So nobody read your resume.”
“Nobody wrote one,” Kanishk said. “But you were kind of right. Someone still had to read me, and she did. She asked about football first.”
His father put his fork down.
“That’s all a resume ever was, really,” he said. “Two pages, and you hoped someone would find the one line that was actually you.”
“That sounds awful.”
“It was,” his father said. “I used to pay people to write mine, once. There was this one time, I’d just—”
His younger sibling, who had wandered in halfway through with a maths book, looked up.
“What’s a resume?”
