But this was what bothered him the least. There was a horrible stench coming from somewhere inside the house. He was sure it was not her. It smelled as if the sewer waste had bounced back through the pipes and that his nostrils were eating all of that and probably more.
“Now, Liz, tell me what the problem is.” Steve moved inside the apartment as Liz made a visible effort to keep herself from shaking. Without taking much notice of what had been mentioned at that point, when she finally closed the door it seemed as if she had moved thousands of pounds of weight on a single go. “So?” Steve asked.
“I’m sorry,” said Liz as she walked back towards Steve, who in turn evaded her to avoid getting whatever she had contracted. “I am under medication and can barely think. What was it again that you asked?”
“Liz, I’m a busy person. Where is the problem?” Steve was determined to stay with this horrible mix of heat, stench and a sick person. What kind of terrible life this woman had was not his problem, but he stopped to think and made numbers about the situation. If this was indeed a pipeline that was backing up, then he definitely had an issue here which he had to fix, unless he wanted 10K less in his account, plus whatever else anyone could throw at him.
“I’m sorry.” As Liz walked towards the bathroom, she suddenly stopped to shudder. While she had taken the recommended dosage of Tramadol, it seemed to have taken more of a toll on her mind than on her body. She could still feel the pain and had decided to take an extra dosage of it without consulting anyone about it, and at this point she could barely think. “The problem is over there.”
Steve rolled his eyes and proceeded to walk to the end of the apartment where the bathroom area was located. From the kitchen he could smell a horrible stench but decided to ignore it at the moment. In a way he was not sure if he regretted not going to the kitchen first.
As he was getting close to the bathroom, he stepped on the wet floor. Had it not been for his acute sense, he could have slipped. How shameful it would have been to fall down and break something, but at the same time his mind quickly tried to figure out a way to do a lawsuit on his least favorite tenant and get her evicted. This plan could have worked, but he decided against it as he had no time to get a cast and move around with help. To pay someone to help him move was the last thing on his mind!
As he opened the door, he saw the lagoon that had formed up inside the bathroom floor and could feel something building in his stomach upwards but stopped it with sheer willpower. The stench, combined with the dark stagnant water, made it look like a cesspool, and he could not figure out why this lady had not taken it upon herself to fix it and get on with her life.
“Jesus Christ, Liz, why haven’t you fixed this?” demanded Steve as he slowly walked backwards, looking at his leather shoes. Thankfully they were not stained, aside from the soles. Otherwise he would have continued to berate her for this. “This is absolutely disgusting!”
“I don’t know.” Liz stopped right in the middle of her sentence and instead decided to sit down on a nearby chair, slowly passing her left hand over her face and then placing her right one over her forehead. She continuously sniffed hard, as if she were trying to breathe. “I haven’t had time.”
Steve suddenly felt an urge to scream at this woman but then his sense of reason hit him back. “You need to fix this or you will have a lawsuit in your hands.” As he was deciding what would be the best course of action to take, he thought the best way to do this was to fix it himself, regardless of how disgusting or low it would be for him.
For a moment he thought about how to fix the problem when his phone rang. It was the reminder from Siri about five minutes having gone by.
“Liz, I have an important call from . . . .” When Steve said this, he saw that Liz was completely out on the chair. She was still breathing but seemed to be in some sort of pain that he could not properly assess from the current distance, and he was not about to move closer to investigate.
“Siri, how do I fix a blocked pipe?” Steve had answered the call from Siri and asked the question. He got a list of results that provided far too many responses for him to actually care to go through them. Most of them involved hiring someone or getting equipment that he was not going to invest in. Some of the cheapest solutions involved using a mixture of household cleaning substances which he assumed Liz would have around.
Without asking, he began investigating the apartment. His disgust grew even more when he saw paper towels full of blood and clothes all over the ground which showed stains of feces. How someone could live in such filth was beyond him, but he decided to take pictures for his own defense and use them once he had fixed this debacle.
He looked around for the cleanest piece of cloth he could find. The only one he found was a small hand towel from the bathroom that seemed to have been washed recently, but he had his doubts about using it after seeing the state of the apartment.
From his shirt pocket he took out his favorite handkerchief, flamingo pink with his initials embroidered on every corner, being one of the first items he had purchased with his first flip and that he kept as a memento of his great success thus far.
As he took it, he carefully folded it and covered his mouth and nose with it in order to move into the kitchen area, where he was hit with another powerful stench cloud coming from the sink. He immediately opened up windows and turned on the kitchen hood above the stove to clear that space of the horrible smell.
Below the sink he found some cleaning supplies that he could use. The mixture he was building had a clear warning on the website he had found that it had to be made in an open environment with good air circulation and to make sure to get away as soon as possible from the area that was about to be cleaned.
He had prepared the mixture in a mop bucket that was also as dirty as the rest of the apartment, taking the extra measure to clean the bucket, just in case it would be a factor that would prevent him from properly getting whatever was stuck in the sewage off from it.
When he finished the mixture he noticed that the compound was nothing like what the images in WikiHow had explained it should look like, which made him assume was because these were cheap knock-off versions of the better ones. Even with such an important thing as their own healthcare and well-being, poor people could not seem to come up with a few extra dollars to make their lives better.
This was why Steve continuously avoided most of his tenants, who seemed to love living in squalor. Liz was just the living proof of it at this very moment, and even though he had the law and other things in his favor, it would still take him a considerable amount of time to push her out of the apartment. At least she would have to continue paying during this time.
He removed his leather jacket and placed it over the kitchen door to make sure it would not get stained. He used a set of plastic bags to cover his shoes and was more than hopeful that none of this garbage would stick on his clothing.
As he pulled out the bucket from the kitchen, he saw that Liz had dropped to the floor. She was lying down, snoring in a strange pattern that made it difficult to assess if she was having some sort of asthma attack or if that was how she always slept. Steve groaned at this and decided to ignore it, as he had bigger concerns to attend at the moment than someone dying in his apartment.
Chapter 11
AI and Biology
Dallas, Texas
Everything had gone smoothly during the meeting, Cheryl observed through one of the available feeds. She was quite impressed at what she had heard. Even though she was not too much in favor of this type of technology or what Quantum Computing was trying to achieve, it was clear to her the benefits it could bring to humanity in the short and long run.
As the extended recess for the attendees ended, which many had requested because the initial five minutes had not been enough to convey all the information they needed to pass on to their respective peers, the stage was set for the Q & A process to start.
Cheryl had raised her hand and saw a very long
queue of questions and answers which she was not surprised to see but was slightly annoyed, since she knew many of the questions would be the same.
As Chad answered most of the questions it slightly alarmed her that no one was asking more about the biological side of the entire equation. The questions mostly prompted more information about how models, equations, algorithms and returns of investment would be understood with the current project and progress at this point. These items rarely interested Cheryl, but she was still intent on listening.
It was not because she wanted to know more about their needs but rather how they understood the technology and what they could achieve with it. None were at any point considering the importance of humans or other living beings interacting in a single space with an Artificial Intelligence in the middle. She had heard about this and even participated in some of the early experiments during the second wave of interest for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.
As the queue was rapidly drained of the questions that were probably repeated, her turn slowly came. Chad watched the screen to the right of him to see the name of the participant and the question.
“Our next question is from Cheryl Ballentine,” Chad said and immediately recognized the name. He had not interacted with her but had at some point seen her name mentioned in some documentation that he had gone through. If he had assumed correctly, she was a biologist, but he knew little more about her than that. “Could you explain more about the interaction of Artificial Intelligence and the nanotechnological interface being currently developed? My main concern is in what precautions are being taken regarding this interaction or how are they being measured, primarily concerning ourselves, with how much control it would have over its ‘peers’.”
Chad knew that the word “peers” would come back to bite him. He had used it to refer to anything that would connect to the MQC and would interact back and forth with it. Since this was the Master, he knew that using the word Slave had become a very hard term to use and even the term Master had been something that could be seen only in the initial drafts of the machine.
To solve this, they had come to consider the system as a Node-to-Peer method of communication. There still had to be a central focal point that would handle all interactions and requests, while the peers would focus only on their day-to-day activities, feeding the Node only when required for their interactions and in turn sending back the information seemingly without the Peer even knowing this.
This breakthrough would create a market of its own and create a new world for Information Technology and Businesses, but the consequences that Cheryl had asked about were valid and ones that Chad did not wish to talk about as he did not feel he was prepared enough for it.
“A very insightful question. We have many important items to look at here and while I would not like to take much more of your time, I will still make sure to answer it at the fullest,” said Chad. With that he basically had given everyone in the room the green light to go out into the buffet area and proceed with their day per usual. The room was already half-empty by the time Cheryl’s question had come up, so he was sure that whatever effect this could have in the opinion of everyone would be minimal in case he said something that could be used against him.
“We need to understand the following, and I think this is where this is coming from, in which the interaction of the nanotechnological interface with the MQC is limited,” said Chad as he returned to a part of the presentation where the benefits of the technology had been mentioned. “We need to see the benefits. These are mostly involved in monitoring and understanding the interaction of humans and other living creatures. We are learning from them and thus feeding our Artificial Intelligence Model with it so that the interaction is far more natural than what it would usually be at this point in the evolution of AI.”
“Here is the key factor: while it is true that our Artificial Intelligence Model is built from the ground up and we have continuously consulted the top experts in the field, we can understand that there are concerns about potential abuse,” Chad said and returned further back into the presentation about the previous case’s uses. “One of the most important cases we can talk about is the uses inside healthcare, where the interaction of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence has been rather slow due to important concerns.”
As Chad finished, he went back to graphs mentioning the adoption of technologies such as Mac, while the ones with the highest adoption rates were the ones involved with obtaining raw resources and manufacturing.
“We have been working closely with hospitals and health facilities around the United States to make sure that our model is built exactly on what is needed for every field and in this specific case for healthcare,” said Chad, who then went forward to the numbers he had been crunching since the day before. “The adoption rate that healthcare is going through right now is important as it shows us that there is an important trust placed on our technology and the possibilities it brings for a better life.”
For a moment Chad stopped and moved forward in the presentation. He thought about what he was saying and knew that while it was in his best interest not to show any of the problems found during the initial steps of this progress, he felt it was important to bring them up to justify his point.
“One very important point I would like to mention here is this one,” said Chad and pointed with the laser pen towards the increased adoption rate in healthcare. “This did not come without consequence and without understanding. Each body and each mind is different from another. There are important considerations when building up a model that will allow you to basically watch over the life of someone during a critical period of that person’s lifetime.”
“What I mean by this is that we have had to put our model to the test with every possible actor. This includes people with mental disabilities and motor limitations. It is a complex environment because while the model is built to work with human beings at ‘normal’ states, it is still being worked on for it to work on those with some type of limitation,” said Chad, feeling as if he had shot himself in the foot.
The attendees did not seem to mind much of this mention, as they were mostly out of the conference room at this point. The few that remained were curious but not enough to put any additional questions on the table. Cheryl could tell only that Chad was answering based on what he knew and understood on the technology, not on what was behind the issue, because probably only a very few select people could truly talk about it.
“As mentioned, this model will be assisting healthcare to take care of even those in the most critical state of need, not only because there will be an interaction on a system that will generate an alarm and ring someone, but because it will be able to take action depending on the scenario,” Chad said and he again moved forward towards looking into the future.
“While at the time we are limited, we are building an Artificial Intelligence Model that is being fed live with information from all sources. With it we are building an appropriate response method to every situation so that we have a way to properly react to every single event,” said Chad and pointed at the section where he discussed Limited Action and Responsibility. “The MQC and our Artificial Intelligence Model are groundbreaking. They can process millions of millions of requests per second and assess if the patient needs intervention from one of the limited actions the system is allowed.”
“A good example of this would be a patient suffering from a heart condition which required critical care and immediate attention. With our nanotechnological interface we can work together with the patient’s implemented systems and monitor all vitals, furthermore even predicting if at the current rate this patient would suffer a heart attack and would need intervention at that point,” said Chad. Even he himself felt impressed at the capabilities of the model they were building. This was not a bluff, since he himself had seen it happen.
The MQC they had back at the testing grounds was crunching numbers at a speed no other devic
e in the last ten years could dream to achieve. One of the many tasks it had been assigned was to verify that a patient was suffering from a heart condition that had considerably weakened his heart.
The Model rapidly crunched through all the information provided, even faster than the Machine Learning systems they had implemented for their own models and needs, and had predicted that from that data and from other more common data it had managed to retrieve from past monitoring and other patients that this particular one would have a heart attack the following week on a Thursday at ten forty-two at night.
It even went so far as predicting that the ambulance would take fourteen minutes to arrive and that by that time the paramedics had a six percent chance of resuscitating the patient from such a state. All this information was sent to them and to the doctor who had been in charge of that patient.
Sure enough, as Artificial Intelligence had predicted, this happened, but having taken precautionary measures, the patient was at a hospital, where he was immediately taken care of and an operation was undertaken to replace his heart with an artificial one that was also being monitored by this same system.
The fact that Chad had read all about it made it obvious to him that this technology would be the way to go into the coming century, but he also saw it in person when his wife walked out of the hospital with a smile that made his eyes tear up. He knew that he was mixing his personal life deeply at times with his job, but to take it to the higher-ups and ask for this was pulling all the strings at the same time.
To his benefit and the benefit of Maraschimo Enterprises, it had worked perfectly as intended and he still had his wife, his “partner in crime” and the person he loved most in the entire world. The fact that he could not explain this to everyone in the room tore him apart, but he knew that doing so would be a breach of their contract and he would rather abide by it and let the Artificial Intelligence Model continue working with Nikki as one of the “not normal” people in the Model.
Burning Mold Page 8
