I smiled on cue. The box was black and silver and roughly the size of a four-slice toaster. On the outside were a video screen, a microphone, and a speaker. On the inside, Jason explained, was an artificial intelligence device. It operated the phone and the electronic calendar. On voice command, it would place a call and set alarms and reminders. It took dictation, autocorrected the text, and sent it to the nearest printer. To make it do any of those things, I had to first speak its name. Or rather, her name, since Jason was emphatic that the machine was a she.

“Go ahead, try it,” he said.

I felt a little silly. “Ma Belle, connect me to Mr. Barrett,” I said, and to my horror, Marcia Post’s voice responded: “Mr. Barrett’s office.”

Jason covered for me. “Hi, Marcia. This is Jason in Tech. Just testing the system.”

“Very good,” she said, and rang off.

“So it—she—wakes up when I say her name,” I said. “But doesn’t she have to be awake and listening already? Or she wouldn’t hear me say her name.”

He bobbed his domelike head. “She’s always listening. Always recording, too. That’s how she learns. She reviews what she hears and uses it to make herself more responsive. For example, if you regularly ask about, I don’t know, the weather in Springfield, the first few times she’ll ask if you mean Springfield, Massachusetts, or Springfield, Illinois. But if you always mean Massachusetts, after a few more tries, she’ll go right there without asking for clarification. See, ’cause she’s learning.”

“Cool,” I said. “But aren’t there some privacy concerns? If she’s always listening in.”

“Not at all,” he assured me. “The recordings are automatically zipped to remote servers on a cloud campus in Virginia. They can’t be accessed. They’re not searchable by any human being. They’re just there for the system to review and learn from. And eventually they’re all overwritten.”

Next he told me about the Ma Belle mobile app, which allowed us to take her with us wherever we went. He offered to download the app for me and asked for my phone. “Sorry, I left it at home,” I said. I didn’t have a smartphone, of course, but even if I did, I would have refused. I could control what the device heard at work. I couldn’t at home.

When I returned to my office at the end of the day, there on the desk was an ergonomic keyboard, a supersize monitor, and my very own Ma Belle. I sank into my chair with a happy sigh and raised my fingers to the keyboard like a concert pianist. When I logged onto the company network, I felt like I’d been given the keys to the kingdom. For five years I’d been pressing my nose to the glass of this world, but now I was on the other side. I was In.

My elation lasted all the way through the train ride back to the Bronx, all the way through a fierce wind-driven walk to our building, and all the way down the squalid stairwell to our apartment until I opened the door.