Carl knew that finding investors using the story Isabella had told him would be virtually impossible. They both understood that what they were planning to do bordered on – in Carl’s words – scumbaggery and although the marketing industry had an – again in Carl’s words – impressive record of such scumbaggery, no one would really want to explicitly be associated with it. In other words, they had to change their mission statement. Isabella had been right. He was perfect for this job.

Eventually, they settled for language technology augmented data analytics and their interference with social media was strictly meant for experimental research and development. They agreed that any notion of such experiments was to be kept to a minimum anyway. As far as he was concerned, research and development was a one-woman operation in the basement that he didn’t even want to know about. Isabella had said that she didn’t mind the basement, but that she would need a team. Carl, not expecting such a literal interpretation of his words, had shut up and given her a blank stare. She had meant it. “Manner of speaking, Bella. Of course you’ll have a team. Just stay away from potential investors, will you?” he had replied.

With the new mission statement, his selling talent and his own extensive network, Carl managed to attract enough funding to get going. He also found a partner in a small language technology firm, giving Isabella her much needed technological kick start.

—

Prototype Anna began her life as an attractive 25-year-old travel journalist. Isabella made certain Anna had so much joie de vivre she could pass for a teen, but had enough work experience to be an equal to other young professionals. Isabella chose to call her Anna because that name occurred across cultures. Billed as the very embodiment of youthful success, Anna was well to do and had a lot of air miles.

After a bit of a disorganized start-up phase, creating profiles on different social media, selecting pictures, compiling background stories and performing numerous test runs, they had set up a mythology farm, staffed with sophomore students, to operate these virtual characters and create their online history. They had been told it was part of an experiment and all of their actions would be recorded, which was of course technically true. As soon as the first recordings came in, the language team began writing a series of sophisticated software giving Anna more and more autonomy over her online life, eventually scaling down the mythology farm eighty percent.

The result: there were now one hundred relatively autonomous Anna’s, complete with several e-mail accounts, an impressive professional profile on Linkedin, and a strong online presence on several other social media. Isabella’s Magnet Cluster Algorithm proved quite successful.
Almost all of them had gathered an impressive friends list that not only met the target in numbers, but also in their predefined age, gender and geographical distribution. Some of them had been a bit too aggressive in their befriending tactics and were blocked; some of them weren’t blocked but hadn’t reached their target at all.
As a trained statistician, Isabella had anticipated this and welcomed these failures to further enhance the M.C.A.

Anna’s language ability was good enough to post comments and react on friends’ status updates. What was left of the mythology farm was now tasked with monitoring her behavior, growing the fan base further and consolidating her online history.

Isabella didn’t have an automated solution for the picture problem yet, which forced them to try out all face swapping software they could get their hands on and then set up a media assembly line, with the sole task of producing party pictures, travel pictures, selfies and even small videos starring different Anna’s. These pictures had to be carefully indexed, tagged and stored for future use. It didn’t matter who the “donor” was, but they had to keep track of where they were from, so they could minimize chances of unwanted recognition later on.

Although completely staffed with cheap workers, the media assembly line proved to be very expensive and became the source of many debates between Carl and Isabella. Isabella argued that posting a picture every now and then was vital to a believable social media profile. She promised him they would have enough with fifty thousand different Anna’s as they were never ever to exceed that number anyway. Ever. She called it the Magnet Critical Mass Threshold.
Carl couldn’t be bothered as to why this threshold was so sacred to her; by the time the assembly line reached twenty five thousand five hundred seven different photo sets, Carl had enough of Isabella’s number crunching, fired all of them and replaced them with Gary, the physically and mentally challenged son of a friend of his. Isabella knew there was no altruism involved here, but Gary seemed happy, delivered great results, and was decently paid.

By the time Anna passed the first real autonomy tests, Gary had created another three thousand something photo sets. Twenty eight thousand six hundred seventeen Anna’s were ready for deployment.

—

Meanwhile, the one hundred pioneer Anna’s  could be spotted in luxurious hotels in Melbourne, Shanghai, Buenos Aires and Dar es Salaam. She pictured her view sitting in a veranda at Châteaux Eza, which clung to the ancient rock walls of a thousand-year-old medieval village on the Côte d’Azur. She wrote on trendy fashion shopping in Seoul and danced inside a hip Caribbean nightclub located at Jamaica’s gorgeous waterfront.

To add moral subtlety to her irresistibility, she showered the web with solemn expressions of solidarity with animal welfare campaigns and human rights, and she performed random acts of kindness in a cheerful tone of voice on random stranger’s profiles. Her adorable interest in human issues worked out so well that it elicited hundreds of comments. At first, these would mostly come from the mythology farm, but after a while Anna didn’t need such backup any longer.

Because Anna would show empathy when one of her friends wasn’t too happy, Isabella made sure that Anna’s life wasn’t too perfect either. Misfortune was carefully calculated into her curriculum, and from time to time, she would fall ill, be rejected or just have a bad day. Situations like these generated an even larger stream of reactions and formed a perfect basis for Anna’s first small conversations.

These small conversations eventually extended to other topics, leaving the team fully engaged in correcting her sometimes really bizarre blunders, because Anna had to learn the intricacies of adult language, where meaning is layered and honesty isn’t always welcomed. For some months, they had to scale up the mythology farm again to edit Anna’s mistakes, while the language techs worked around the clock to have them fired again as soon as possible.

Gallons of coke and heaps of pizzas later, they managed to bring Anna’s five-year-old-like ‘speech’ and the resulting awkward and embarrassing moments down to an acceptable minimum.

With the messy start-up phase now behind them and Carl wheeling in several pilot customers, Anna was ready to make a profit.