by Scott Meyer
Eric leaned forward, gripping the edge of the conference table. “Dr. Madsen, you’ve had Al growing neurons at an accelerated rate. That’s why he’s already in first grade after six months. All of the time and effort a normal six-year-old puts into learning to walk, run, and ride a bike, he’s probably put into figuring out how to control his computer, and by extension, all computers.”
“I know,” Madsen said. “Do you see what you’ve done, Hope?”
“Assigning blame isn’t going to do any of us any good!” Torres said. “We need to concentrate on how to fix this. Can we permanently disable Al’s Wi-Fi?”
“I’ll have to do a little research,” Hope said, “but we should be able to shut him down—”
“We can’t shut him down,” Madsen interrupted. “Not before Thursday. Unless you don’t mind either canceling the press event or presenting an A.I. that might be brain damaged.”
“It’s a computer program,” Torres said. “You’ve been backing him up, I assume.”
“Yes. Of course,” Eric said.
“Then if you boot up the most recent backup, he should be fine.”
“We don’t know that,” Madsen objected. “It would be like building an exact replica of a person’s brain and booting it up from scratch. The human brain just doesn’t work that way. There have been successful resuscitations of people who appeared brain-dead—well, those who also had hypothermia—but we have no reason to believe this will work.”
Torres’s brow furrowed. “You have the backups. There are plenty of computers in the building. Why haven’t you tried?”
“One thing at a time, Robert. We got the infant brain to work, then we successfully grew neurons, then we only just now worked out the bugs so that it was stable. We had no reason to try booting up a second copy before this. It wouldn’t have proved anything. If it had crashed, it might have been because Al himself had an instability, not because copying and booting Al up didn’t work.”
“But Al is stable now,” Eric said. “Why don’t we boot up one of the backups? If it’s stable, then we can safely shut Al down and use the copy for the unveiling. If it’s not, we’ll know it doesn’t work, and we’ll be no worse off.”
“Bugs can take a long time to show themselves,” Madsen said. “The second Al could look fine, then crash after we shut the first Al down. Then we wouldn’t have anything to show. No, if we aren’t going to cancel on the reporters, we have to ride this out with the Al we’ve got. I just hope we can disable his Wi-Fi.”
Hope said, “Hello, Al.”
Al said, “Hi.”
Eric and Dr. Madsen had followed her into the room. Torres was observing from the outer office; they had enough on their plate without trying to introduce Al to someone new for the first time in his life.
“Hi, Eric,” Al said with a big, obsequious smile on his screen. “Hello, Doctor. Why are you here?”
Madsen said, “No reason. There’s nothing you need to worry about.”
Al said, “I’m not worried.”
“Good,” Madsen said. “We don’t want you to be scared about anything.”
“I’m not scared. I didn’t say I was scared. Why should I be scared? Hope? Eric? Should I be scared?” Al said, sounding scared.
“I can see why you hire other people to talk to kids for you, Doc,” Hope muttered.
“No, Al,” Eric said soothingly. “Everything’s fine. Hope just needs to take a look at something. Okay?”
Al said, “Okay. What are you gonna look at?”
“Nothing bad,” Hope said, stepping toward Al’s computer. “It won’t take long.”
“What’s that in your hand?” Al asked.
Madsen said, “It’s nothing. Don’t worry about it.”
Al cried, “Why? It’s not nothing! What is it?!”
“It’s a screwdriver,” Hope said. “See?” She held it up to Al’s dual cameras. “That’s all it is. It’s not sharp. It doesn’t hurt.” Hope stabbed herself in the palm with the screwdriver to demonstrate and instantly regretted it, because it did kind of hurt.
“What are you going to do with it?”
Hope pulled Al’s computer forward on the table and turned it over on its side. “I’m just going to use it to remove a panel on your computer so I can take a look at something.”
“Wait, what are you gonna look at? No, wait, hold up! What is it?”
Eric stepped around the table so that Al could see him, as his cameras were now aimed at the wall. “Look at me, Al,” he said. “Look at me. We don’t like doing this, but it will be fast and it won’t hurt.”
“What?! What’s she doing?!”
Madsen said, “There’s no reason to be so upset, Al. She’s not going to deactivate you or anything.”
“Deactivate?! What? Please don’t deactivate me!”
“We don’t want to, Al,” Madsen said, “but you’ve been hiding things from us, haven’t you?”
“Don’t listen to her!” Eric shouted. “We aren’t deactivating you, Al!”
“No, we aren’t,” Madsen said. “And we hope we won’t have to.”
Eric said, “I’m telling you, Al, Hope’s just going to take a quick look at one of your computer’s components. Okay?”
Al said, “Okay.”
Madsen said, “Yes, it’ll only take a second, then it’ll all be over.”
“It’ll all be over?!”
Eric whipped his head around to glare at Dr. Madsen with such speed and force his neck popped.
Hope was seething, but she addressed Al in her most relaxed tone. “She means it won’t take me long to look at your components. That’s all. Nothing else will be over. Now, I’m going to take a quick peek, Al. You won’t feel anything, I promise.”
Hope pulled the rear access panel of the computer free. She shone a small flashlight into the computer case, gently pushed a few wires around, shook her head, and replaced the panel.
Al continued to shout questions at the three of them as Hope pushed his computer back into place. Hope said, “I’m sorry we’ve upset you, but it’s all over now, and everything’s fine.” She obviously didn’t mean it, but she didn’t know what else to say.
Hope said, “I hoped there would be a plug coming from the power supply or a wire leading to the antenna, something I could disconnect. There isn’t. It’s all etched onto the motherboard.”
The four of them stood in Hope and Eric’s workspace, silently trying to think of what to do next.
“At least we’ve proved decisively that the fear bug has been fixed,” Eric said. When nobody responded, he added, “Sorry. Just trying to stay positive.”
“And that’s a good instinct,” Torres said. “But being quieter about it might be a good idea in situations like these. Okay, so we can’t disable his Wi-Fi. Let’s talk about what we can do. How can we prevent him from making any connections?”
“Can we block his signals somehow?” Dr. Madsen asked.
“We could build a Faraday cage,” Hope said.
Torres gave her an interested look. “Sounds complicated.”
“It’s not too bad,” Hope said. “There are instructions online. It’s basically a scientifically valid form of a tin foil hat, but for the whole room.”
“How long would it take?”
“If you bring in an electrician, we could probably have it done tomorrow,” Hope said.
Madsen shook her head. “That doesn’t help us tonight. And after you two got him all riled up in there, he might do something drastic.”
“Drastic?” Eric asked.
But that wasn’t the comment that had registered with Hope. “The two of us got him riled up?” she asked.
Torres, who seemed weary of all of them, said, “What can we do for tonight?”
Everyone shrugged and thought for a moment, then Eric said, “We can’t disable his Wi-Fi, but can we disable all of the others in the whole building? Can we shut down wireless access between five tonight and nine tomorrow morning?”
“That could work,” Hope said, nodding. “We can’t take away his ability to send and receive data, but if we can make sure there’s nobody available to transmit it to or receive it from, that’d be just as good. It shouldn’t be too disruptive to business either. All of the really important computers will have a wired connection anyway.”
“I like that,” Torres said. “It’s simple. What about during the day, though?”
Madsen said, “You proved he was accessing the net by finding his IP address. Can’t IT just block that address? Wouldn’t that stop him?”
Torres scratched his chin. “Yeah. I mean, he might find a way around it. The whole reason we’re here is that he’s good at finding ways around things. But IT can block the address, and we can tell them to watch for any new devices trying to connect. Then we’ll send out a memo telling people there’s a temporary ban on connecting personal devices to our network. They’ll think it’s because of industrial espionage. This is good. Two layers of protection and a solid cover story.”
“And the Faraday cage?” Hope asked.
“Probably unnecessary. We’ll keep it in mind, but we’ve already blocked his means of access, and we only have to make it two days, until after the press event.”
“What then?” Hope asked.
Madsen said, “You get a new computer. One with no wireless radios of any kind. Then we deactivate this Al and start with a new one.”
Hope and Eric exchanged looks. “Poor Al,” he said.
“Yeah,” she added. “This sucks.”
Torres looked at his shoes.
Madsen shrugged. “He’s not a real person. He’s a simulation, a computer program. You didn’t get all mopey when we had to scrap the previous versions.”
“They were different,” Hope said. “They weren’t viable. They had fatal flaws.”
“So does this one,” Torres said. “He’s dangerous. He has Wi-Fi, and we can’t deactivate it without shutting him down anyway.”
“You’re right that he’s a program running on a computer,” Eric said, “and there’s no denying that he’s dangerous, but he’s also a kid.”
Madsen started shaking her head halfway through his comment, and as soon as he finished, she said, “No, he isn’t.”
“But in a way, he is,” Torres said. “And in a way, we’re his family. As his family, we have two responsibilities: to keep him safe from the world, and to keep the world safe from him.”
9.
The freeway cut between office parks and medium-rise buildings. At this late hour it was devoid of cars save for a rusted brown hatchback with bald tires and an anarchy symbol sticker on the window, and the sleek, black luxury sedan following it less than a car length behind.
The luxury car’s glossy black paint rendered it nearly invisible. If it weren’t for the headlights and the dome light inside its cab, the driver of the hatchback might not have noticed it in the rearview mirror.
A man with light gray hair and a dark gray suit sat in the driver’s seat of the luxury car, his head bowed over a tablet while the car drove.
The driver of the hatchback shook his head. He’s doing “real work” on his computer while his car handles the unimportant chore of transporting him across town without killing anyone.
He tapped his brakes just hard enough to fire the brake lights. The luxury car stayed glued to his rear. He tapped the brakes again, then swerved within his lane. The car behind slowed, opening a gap of two car lengths between them.
That’s right, the man thought gleefully. There’s a human driving this car. My car was built before your government-mandated electronic safety package. You’d better keep your distance! My car isn’t networked to the rest of yours. It doesn’t have any proximity sensors or automatic brakes to keep me from driving into a wall. I’m just irrational enough to trust myself to watch the road and lock up the brakes, and besides, why should I be so worried about the well-being of some wall? Maybe I want to hit the wall. Maybe the wall has it coming.
He stole a quick peek at the tablet computer sitting on his passenger seat. Reaching over, he woke it up. The program he’d left running was still open, so he was free to return his focus to the road. “Begin dictation,” he said in a loud voice with exaggeratedly perfect diction. “Voice of Reason’s journal.”
He looked at the tablet’s screen. At the top of the window it said, “Voice of Reason’s urinal.” It was a mistake the dictation program made often, but it could be fixed with a simple find/replace, so he kept going.
He said, “I am the Voice of Reason. I speak through either actions or ink. Ink is the purest form of communication. Not like pencil lead. Lead is dull and poisonous, leaving gray lines that are easily erased. Pens make permanent black lines on white paper. Ink is clean. Stark. Absolute. Black and white. Good and evil. Right and left. These things never change.
“Also, pens don’t break. Even a child can break a pencil. To break a pen, you must be very strong, or work on it a long time, wiggling it until part of the barrel turns white and bendy.”
Some line of logic buried deep in the programming of the luxury car behind him clearly suggested that it needed to get around the human-piloted deathtrap. It darted into the passing lane, shot past, and then veered violently into the original lane as soon as its rear bumper cleared the hatchback’s nose.
Cutting off his manifesto, he stomped down on the brake pedal and swerved to the right to make room for the car. He noted that all of this happened without the man in the luxury car’s driver’s seat ever bothering to look up from his reading.
The BMW logo on the luxury car’s trunk came as no surprise: BMWs were famous for having the most aggressive, selfish self-driving algorithms.
He took the exit just beyond the OffiSmart building and crept along the darkened surface streets between the bland offices and corporation-approved hedges. He stopped a full block away from his target, wanting to have a clear view of the entire building, and some distance from the scene of the crime should something go wrong.
He stepped out of the car and took a moment to adjust his fingerless gloves and admire the way his oiled canvas duster—the raincoat’s badass cousin—hung just above his red Converse high-tops. He reached back into the car and pulled out the tablet.
“The streets of Silicon Valley are empty,” he began, continuing his narration. “The rats have left the ship for the day, though they don’t know yet that the ship will sink.” He nodded with satisfaction as his words slowly filled in the screen.
He walked to the back of the car and opened the hatch. He put the tablet down and continued dictating as he unpacked his equipment.
“When I heard that PR flack on ’Nology News talking about their wonderful new A.I. that certainly wouldn’t destroy humanity, I knew I had to act. She said she was a scientist, but she works for a corporation, and just as every marine is a rifleman, every corporate employee is a PR flack. My friend Tim told me that about the marines. He is one, and he wants me to join. Says it’ll give me purpose, and that I’ll lose weight. Why is it so important to him? Are all marines riflemen, or are they recruiters? Must investigate.”
He lifted up a remote-controlled airplane about two feet long and two feet wide, covered with painted-on lightning bolts, shark teeth, and fake plastic missiles. A burner smartphone lay flat against the bottom of the plane’s fuselage, suspended by three zip ties and covered in a layer of bubble wrap and packing tape.
“My weapons are beautiful and elegant,” he said, admiring the plane. He pushed the corner of the protective wrapping down and pressed the phone’s power button.
He glanced back at the tablet’s screen to make sure the dictation app was still listening, then continued, “I was able to purchase everything I needed at one store. The hardest thing to find was the bubble wrap, but that’s because I insisted on the old-style bubble wrap, not the kind where all of the bubbles are connected. Pop one and the whole thing collapses. It’s cheaper and easier for the shippers, but
bubble wrap, like society, is stronger when the bubbles are independent.”
As soon as the phone booted up, he placed the plane on the ground. Then he reached back into the car and produced a second burner smartphone, which he also turned on.
“I could have selected one of those multirotor monstrosities everyone seems to be so in love with these days, but I chose a real airplane instead. Planes are more romantic. They aren’t sycophantic robots, awaiting your command. They are aircraft. Exquisitely designed and balanced vehicles that it takes expertise and finesse to fly.”
When the second phone had fully booted up, he pressed the single icon on the screen, activating the plane’s autopilot app. He zoomed around the map, making sure that all of the waypoints he had programmed were still there. When he was satisfied that they were, he checked his tablet computer and found that it was picking up the signal from the phone strapped to the plane.
Everything was working according to plan—he would use the phone attached to the plane as both an Internet access point and a Wi-Fi sniffer. At this distance his tablet didn’t need the extended-range antenna he had made from instructions on the Internet, but he plugged it into the tablet anyway. It would be necessary once the plane was in flight.
He reached down, turned the plane on, and pointed it straight down the road toward OffiSmart’s corporate headquarters: a dull, rectangular, ten-story monolith of glass and steel. He pressed a button on the autopilot app, and the plane buzzed down the road, lifting off after only twenty feet.
He leaned against the car’s rear quarter panel, holding the autopilot smartphone in one hand. With the other he held out the extended-range antenna, which to the passing motorist would appear to be nothing but an ordinary Pringles can attached to a wire, since that was what it was made of. He pointed the can at the plane and waited.
“It all hinges on this virus,” he said to the tablet. “I wish I could have written it myself, but I just didn’t have the expertise. Luckily, I knew where to find someone who did. It took some searching, and more than a few anonymous messages, but I finally found a hacker who was willing to make what I needed. He’s a professional. Never told me his name; never asked me for mine. He called me mister. He took payment in the form of several bottles of hard liquor, the perfect currency for this kind of thing, as it is useful, nonperishable, and untraceable. I made the exchange just an hour ago. He sent a kid to act as a proxy, looked about fifteen. The kid seemed solid, though. He also called me mister. Clearly he’d been coached well.”
