”Hello?” Carl said into the handset.

He broke into a smile.

“No, not at all! We were just finishing here. Glad you’re calling. Let me put you on speaker.” He seemed exceptionally pleased.

Carl pushed the speaker button, put the handset back in its cradle and looked around the table.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have a visitor!“ he announced. Five pairs of eyes alternated between staring back at him, inspecting the conference phone and looking at Isabella, who just stood there, remote control in her hand. She tried to look offended.

“Excuse me, Carl,” said Safety First Burocrat, “what is this? This is a private meeting. We cannot discuss the future of this company with..”

“Yeah yeah yeah, relax Frank,” Carl interrupted him. “You’re gonna want to hear this. This is not just a visitor.” He lowered his voice. “This is our most valuable asset. This is our employee of the year. This is the girl who made it all happen. This is…” he chanted, then suddenly remembering Isabella still had the floor. “Yes, Isabella, thank you. Sorry to interrupt. Would you mind to sit down? I think Anna has some interesting news for us.” He tried not to sound too dismissive.

The lights in the room went soft. Suddenly, the huge flat screen on the wall displayed a five-by-five grid picturing thirty-six very attractive women in their late twenties.

“Ladies and gentlemen, please let me introduce Anna.”

Carl definitely was a show man. She knew he had been up to something, but she hadn’t expected this. She felt slightly offended he hadn’t let her in on this little show, but she was impressed nonetheless. He had turned the board members’ faked interest into mesmerized attention in less than an instant.

“Anna? Are you still with us?”

For a few seconds, the room was absolutely silent. Isabella almost expected a drum roll.

“Yes mr. Dunney.”

Her voice was clear and pleasant. Different from the voice used in The Interview. It had been a while since Isabella had heard her voice. Being preoccupied cracking Anna’s cognitive dissonance problem, she had handed over the speech technology to Rostam. A responsibility he had gladly accepted, and she had gladly given away. It meant less contact with Desperate Diplomat and less contact with Desperate Diplomat meant better chances of keeping Ballentine at bay.

So much had changed. In a way, Anna had turned Isabella’s world completely upside down.

—

Before Anna became a social media marketing application, she actually was a guy. His name was Jake, and Isabella was still working as a treasury analyst for an investment bank, the very same employer she had landed her post-graduate internship with thirteen years ago.

Nowadays, Jake would be called a sock puppet. For Isabella, he was an online experiment and later on, an escape. He had set her free. Jake was popular and people were nice to him. He was good looking, friendly and sociable. He was audacious, interesting, loved to speak his mind, but was very considerate about it. He was outgoing and best of all, totally anonymous. Isabella had created his profile one rainy Sunday afternoon, being bored and mulling over her lamentable social life.

Having started as just an experiment, Jake eventually became the mirror image of Isabelle’s inner self, trying to free herself from the clutches of that boring, lonely mid-thirties woman who had no friends and was – at best – just tolerated by her colleagues because of her phenomenal analytical skills and the ensuing results for their treasury department. When Jake started to receive more and more spontaneous friend requests, she had made up her mind. It was high time for a fully-fledged midlife crisis.

 —

Anna had come a long way from Jake to this board meeting. Isabella knew today was most likely going to be decisive. She surely hoped Anna and Carl could convince the other board members to go ahead with public funding. Anything to keep Ballentine out of the Board. She wasn’t too optimistic though; Carl’s recent behavior had been evasive and withdrawn. Something definitely bugged him.

“Good morning everyone,” Anna began.

“My name is Anna, and Mr. Dunney has asked me to present you with some important facts about our last series of marketing experiments.”

“Most of you know me as the girl who applied for the position of Marketing Analyst half a year ago.  Mr. Dunney may have told you he didn’t hire me.” Nodding. Everyone around the table remembered the board meeting after The Interview.

“But as all of you also know, this is technically not true. I am working for you.” Isabella had to admit she sounded much more natural than half a year ago.

“I am terribly sorry to interrupt you, but Mr. Dunney has asked me to present the latest figures on the Anna 2000 project,” Anna cheerfully continued. Isabella shivered. Although Anna was not self-aware, it was still slightly uncanny to hear Anna talk about Anna.

“He said that I would be more pleasant to listen to,” Anna continued.

Laughter. Carl smiled, shrugged and tried to look innocent.

“Social media marketers, as you are well aware, form our principal client base.” Anna did not need a remote control. The middle part of the five-by-five Anna grid made way for a traditional slide with pie charts and bar graphs.

“Depending on their clients, they prefer different social networks for their campaigns.”

“Our data indicates that roughly 94[a1] % of them use Anna on Twitter and Facebook. Eighty-point-nine percent of those let her spend sixty hours or more per week. The data also shows that 81% of them seek conversational engagement more than anything else. I am sure Dr. Thorne will confirm this.” she said. Isabelle froze. Anna addressing her directly almost freaked her out.

Carl rose abruptly to his feet and walked to the front of the room, where Isabella had sat down after her presentation pardon.

“Yes, of course Dr. Thorne will confirm this.” He stood behind her and gently squeezed her shoulders.

“Ladies and gentlemen, “ he continued, taking the remote from Isabella and pressing the “next” button.

“This is the result of our customer satisfaction survey. One hundred percent of our clients using Anna managed to raise their traffic and conversion rates, of which seventy percent reported an increase of more than 30%. And 64% insisted”—reading directly from the projected slide—“that our lovely Anna here has been the main catalyst that gained new business partnerships and a wider customer base. Also,  67% of our client’s customers achieved higher search-engine rankings than any time before – a nice little collateral we hadn’t thought of – which to my humble opinion is a potential new selling point we shall investigate further. Anyway, forty-four percent of our main base managed to grow sales leads to unprecedented levels. And listen to this, folks: 45% saw their marketing costs significantly reduced.” He removed his eyeglasses. “We all know how much we all love cutting costs, don’t we?” He turned around. “Anna? Thank you very much for your presence. Keep up the good work!” He switched off the phone.

With Anna gone, he switched to his conspiracy voice and said:

“Ladies and gentlemen. I think I’m not too modest when I say we’re sitting on a goldmine.”

“But this is very auspicious news!” rejoiced Politician no. 1, Maurice Havilland, a former executive from France’s largest credit union. “I must say I did not expect such hopeful results, Dr. Thorne.”

“So, we can honestly say we’ve made the whole world a whole lot of dough. Wonderful indeed. What I’d like to know is what we gettin’ out of the deal, sah.” Insolent Opportunist interjected.

“Patience, Connor, please,” Carl said, an insistent smile etched on his face. “Of course, we’ve been charging for our services, even though we are still in the experimental stage. You and I know that results is what counts.”

“Glad we understand each other on that point. And?” Insolent Opportunist asked impatiently.

“I am elated to report to you that the performance I am describing to you has already translated into a huge profit margin for TheVault. Only the future can tell, no doubt, but it sure as hell looks bright from where I’m standing,” Carl disgorged the news with all the passion at his disposal. “And to prove my point, I’m going to show you one slide, and one slide only.”

With a flawless sense of drama, he aimed the remote control and the pictures of Anna dissolved into a graph depicting last four quarters’ revenue figures.

The board members nearly exploded in applause.

No one noticed Isabella, who had turned white and was desperately trying to control herself.

Terrified, Isabella did a quick mental calculation. She fumbled with her tablet, opened the calculator and punched a few numbers. Given Anna’s acceptable field range of performance, these figures could not possibly be true. Something was amiss. Or someone was seriously lying.

“Did you see that?” she messaged to Rostam. Knowing the lab techs were playing Reverse Executive Cluedo earlier, she assumed they had been monitoring the meeting somehow. It was strictly forbidden of course, but she was sure they had done it.

It didn’t take long for him to respond.

“Yes. We checked. The figures match up. It’s real. Congrats!!!”

Her chest started to heave. Something inside her was clearly fighting to break out.