Surfing the Gnarl by Rudy Rucker

said Denny.
    It turned out the “Phil the phonebot” was a kind of computerized phone salesman. The phonebot was selling phonebots which you, the consumer prospect, could use to sell phonebots to others. It was—though Denny didn’t realize this—a classic Ponzi pyramid scheme, like a chain letter, or like those companies which sell people franchises to sell franchises to sell franchises to sell …
    The phonebot had a certain amount of interactivity. It asked a few yes/no questions; and whenever Denny burst in with some comment, it would pause, say, “That’s right, Denny! But listen to the rest!” and continue. Denny waspleased to hear his name so often. Alone in his room, week after week, he’d been feeling his reality fade. Writing original songs for the guitar was harder than he’d expected. It would be nice to have a robot friend. At the end, when Phil asked for his verdict, Denny said, “Okay, Phil, I want you. Come to my rooming-house tomorrow and I’ll have the money.”
    The phonebot was not the arm-waving clanker that Denny, in his ignorance, had imagined. It was, rather, a flat metal box that plugged right into the wall phone-socket. The box had a slot for an electronic directory, and a speaker for talking to its owner. It told Denny he could call it Phil; all the phonebots were named Phil. The basic phonebot sales spiel was stored in the Phil’s memory, though you could change the patter if you wanted. You could, indeed, use the phonebot to sell things other than phonebots.
    The standard salespitch lasted five minutes, and one minute was allotted to the consumer’s responses. If everyone answered, listened, and responded, the phonebot could process ten prospects per hour, and one hundred twenty in a 9 a.m. — 9 p.m. day! The whole system cost nine thousand dollars, though as soon as you bought one and joined the pyramid, you could get more of them for six. Three thousand dollars profit for each phonebot your phonebot could sell! If you sold, say, one a day, you’d make better than $100K a year!
    The electronic directory held all the names and numbers in the city; and each morning it would ask Denny who he wanted to try today. He could select the numbers on the day’s calling list on the basis of neighborhood, last name, family size, type of business, and so on.
    The first day, Denny picked a middle-class suburb and told Phil to call all the childless married couples there.Young folks looking for an opportunity! Denny set the speaker so he could listen to people’s responses. It was not encouraging.
    â€œclick”
    â€œNo … click”
    â€œ
click”
    â€œThis kilp ought to be illegal …
click”
    â€œclick”
    â€œGet a job, you bizzy dook …
click”
    â€œOf all the …
click’
    â€œAgain?
click”
    Most people hung up so fast that Phil was able to make some thousand unsuccessful contacts in less than ten hours. Only seven people listened through the whole message and left comments at the end; and six of these people seemed to be bedridden or crazy. The seventh had a phonebot she wanted to sell cheap.
    Denny tried different phoning strategies—rich people, poor people, people with two sevens in their phone number, and so on. He tried different kinds of salespitches—bossy ones, ingratiating ones, curt ones, ethnic-accent ones, etc. He made up a salespitch that offered businesses the chance to rent Phil to do phone advertising for them.
    Nothing worked. It got to be depressing sitting in his room watching Phil fail—it was like having Willy Loman for his roommate. The machine made little noises, and unless Denny took a
lot
of dope, he had trouble relaxing out into the sky. The empty food-packs stank.
    Two more weeks, and all the money, food, and dope were gone. Right after he did the last of the dope, Denny recorded a final sales-pitch:
    â€Uh … hi. This is Phil the