Idolism

by Marcus Herzig

  “Um, I’ve been in your class for six years,” I said, only mildly annoyed. “My name is Ginger, remember?”

  “Is it really?” Julian’s eyes got even bigger. “I thought your real name was Emily?”

  “Then why are you calling me ‘stranger’?”

  “Because you’re so strange,” Julian whispered in a creepy, half evil villain, half madman voice.

  Michael closed his eyes and rubbed his eyebrows with his thumb and middle finger, trying not to feel too embarrassed.

  Julian gently thudded Michael’s shoulder with his fist. “You all right, mate?”

  “Fine,” he said, although it didn’t sound very convincing.

  “Good, good. Anyway, read this. I have to go, my planet needs me. Talk to you later.” He looked at me. “By, stranger.”

  And he ran off like a seven-year-old who had just seen an ice cream truck.

  I looked at Michael. “Do you have any friends that are not completely bonkers?”

  He pondered the question for a moment. “No. Sorry.”

  “Yeah, I didn’t think so,” I said, slightly amused. “So what’s this?” I looked at the piece of paper in his hand.

  Michael looked at it too. “It’s a song that Julian wrote. Apparently it’s called Wistful Thinking.”

  “Oh,” I said sneeringly. “Someone’s a little poet.”

  “You have no idea.”

  “Can I see?”

  He handed me the piece of paper. I read Julian’s lyrics, and by the time I was finished I couldn’t help but smile.

  “Not bad,” I said. “So, do you guys have a band or something?”

  “More like or something. I mean, yes, technically you could call it a band, although we don’t actually write our own music or anything.”

  “You write your own song lyrics but not your own music? How does that work?”

  “You want me to show you?”

  I nodded. “Sure.”

  That same afternoon I made my way over to Michael’s house. It was a posh looking place in an affluent area. Rumour had it that Michael’s dad had it custom-built and paid for it in cash, using just some of the insane amounts of money he had supposedly made as a software developer at Microsoft in the early 1990s.

  I walked up to the door and rang the Tetris-themed bell.

  A few moments later the door opened, and a very tall, very handsome man looked down at me. “Oh hello. You must be Ginger?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Michael’s dad.”

  He held out his hand and I shook it. “Nice to meet you.”

  “Nice to meet you too, Ginger. Come on in. Michael’s in his room.”

  Michael’s room was downstairs, in the basement. I knocked on the door and opened it without waiting for a reply. Michael wasn’t alone. Julian was sitting on the couch and reading a book. Tummy was lying in one of the armchairs, eating a bag of crisps. Michael was at his desk, punching keys on his laptop computer. When I opened the door they all looked at me.

  “Hello, Ginger.”

  “Hi, Ginger.”

  “Hey.”

  Michael’s room looked surprisingly unsurprising. It was a typical boy’s room, in a way. There was a couch and two armchairs, a TV, an unmade bed and a desk with a laptop computer and two computer monitors on it that belonged to the two computers under the desk. In front of the TV on the floor there were a PlayStation and an X-Box. Cables everywhere on the floor. On the walls there were several posters, but they weren’t posters of football teams or half naked female singers or film stars or anything. One was a chemical periodic table, one was an artist’s impression of the Milky Way galaxy, one was a tree of life with images of everything from one celled organisms at the bottom to the primates, chimps, gorillas, orang-utans and humans at the top of the tree. This wasn’t just a boy’s room. It was a geek’s room, and I felt strangely at home right away.

  The Gospel According to Michael – 4

  I was sitting in biology class, in the back row, pretending to listen to Mr Beaumont’s ramblings about the inherent beauty of DNA and trying not to fall asleep because I had been up all night working on MINDY, when suddenly my phone began to vibrate in the pocket of my trousers. Of course we weren’t allowed to have our phones switched on during school hours, but I didn’t know anyone who actually switched their phones off at school. It usually wasn’t a problem as long as the phone was in silent mode. One time Tummy had forgotten to put his phone in silent mode, and it started blaring out Beyoncé at top volume in the middle of a Maths exam. It killed everyone’s concentration, which didn’t exactly help Tummy’s popularity. The teacher confiscated the phone, and Tummy had to have his mum pick it up at the headmaster’s office after school. He was grounded for a week, and he never forgot to put his phone in silent mode again.

  I took my phone out of my pocket but kept it beneath the desk so Mr Beaumont wouldn’t see it. I had a new text message from Tummy. It read, ‘Hello Michael.’ After his previous experiences one would think that even a guy as dim as Tummy would be more careful about using his phone in class and do it only if it was for something really important that couldn’t wait. ‘Hello Michael’ didn’t seem that important. I looked up. Tummy was sitting two rows in front of me, his head propped against his left hand. With the right hand he was scribbling whatever Mr Beaumont was saying in his notebook. I crumpled a piece of paper into a little ball, and when Mr Beaumont was facing the blackboard, I threw it at Tummy’s head. He turned around and frowned at me.

  I mouthed ‘What?’ at him. He frowned even more and mouthed back, ‘What what?’

  I shook my head and dismissively waved my hand at him, which is international sign language for ‘Forget it’. Tummy’s frown turned into a scowl, and he shook his head at me. That’s when Mr Beaumont turned around.

  “Do you have a question, Mr Lewis?”

  Tummy bolted in his seat, looked at Mr Beaumont and stammered, “Y-yes, Mr Beaumont, sir. How do you spell deoxyribonucleic acid again?”

  Mr Beaumont sighed. “Yes, it’s very complicated. I will spell it out for you, Mr Lewis. It’s D-N-bloody-A!”

  The class laughed, and Tummy’s head turned bright red. “Thank you, sir.”

  I was just about to put my phone back into my pocket when it started vibrating again. It was another text message, this time from Ginger. It read ‘Hello Michael.’

  I looked up at Ginger who was sitting in the front row, leaning back in her chair with her arms crossed. She had been sitting like that ever since the beginning of the lesson. She didn’t need to write anything down. In biology she was an A* student. She didn’t look as if she had been touching her phone any time recently.

  Something fishy was going on. Before I had the time to put my phone away, it vibrated again. Another text message. It was from Julian and it read ‘Hello Michael.’ Julian was sitting right next to me, and if he’d been using his phone, I would have noticed. He looked at me, frowning because he could see the confused look on my face. I showed him the text message that had supposedly come from him. He looked at me again and raised an eyebrow. That’s when my phone vibrated again. And again. And again, until I finally switched it off.

  An hour later we were sitting in the school canteen, Julian, Ginger, Tummy, and I sharing a table, having lunch and staring at my phone that was on constant vibration now. Ever since that first text I got from Tummy during biology class, I had received a total of 126 messages from Tummy, Julian, Ginger, Tummy’s sister, Tummy’s mother, Ginger’s dad, and a couple of random people whom I sort of knew but who weren’t even supposed to have my number. All these messages read ‘Hello Michael,’ and I was seriously worried about this obviously very severe breach of security.

  “How is this even possible?” Ginger asked. “I mean, how can my mobile send out text messages without me doing anything?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Could it be a software bug?”

  “All of a sudden? On everyone’s phone exc
ept mine? You haven’t been getting any messages from me, have you?”

  I looked around. Ginger and Julian shook their heads. Tummy was checking something on his phone and suddenly said, “Are you kidding me?” He looked at me with his eyes wide open.

  “What is it?”

  “I’m being charged for all those messages to you!”

  Julian and Ginger immediately grabbed their phones to check their billing accounts.

  “Me too,” Julian said.

  Ginger nodded. “Michael, you need to stop this or we’ll all be broke by the end of the day.”

  “Stop what? I’m not doing anything!”

  “This is probably a scam from the phone company,” Tummy said. “You know, they just send out random texts from people’s phones so they can charge them. Bloody bloodsucking bastards!”

  Once again I went through the ever growing list of messages. “What I don’t understand is how I can get all these messages from people who don’t even have my number. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “They’re all people you know, though, right?” Ginger asked.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “There are a couple of unknown numbers. Anyone know who this is?”

  I showed them one of the numbers. Julian and Ginger shook their heads, but Tummy said, “That’s my aunt.”

  “I don’t even know that woman. Did you give her my number?”

  “Why would I do that? My aunt isn’t into younger men.”

  “Did you guys know that every person in the world is on average connected to every other person in the world by only six steps?” Julian asked. We all looked at him. “It’s a theory called Six Degrees of Separation. For example, Michael, your dad used to work for Microsoft, right?”

  “He did. Way back in the early 90s.”

  “Has he ever met Bill Gates in person?”

  “Yeah, a couple of times.”

  “There you go. You know your dad, your dad knows Bill gates, Bill Gates knows the President of the United States. That’s only three steps between you and the President; or us and the President, for that matter, because we all know your dad as well. Now imagine how many people Bill Gates and the President of the United States know personally. We’re connected to all these people by only three or four steps. The world is a whole lot smaller than you might think.”

  “That’s all very interesting,” I said as my phone kept vibrating, “but how exactly does that help me right now?”

  “It seems that all those messages aren’t coming from people you know. They’re coming from people who know you or people who know people who know you.”

  I shook my head in despair. “But why?”

  Now, the thing with Julian was that he rarely gave you a direct answer, especially when the question was why. He much preferred to give you clues that would help you find the answer yourself, and I hate to say it but he was bloody good at it.

  “Back in the 1960s the American psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted the Small-World Experiment. He gave each of his 296 test subjects from the Midwest a letter that was supposed to reach a target person in Boston. If the test subject happened to know the recipient personally, they could mail it to them directly. If they didn’t know them, however, they were supposed to forward the letter—together with the instructions for the experiment—to somebody they knew and whom they thought most likely to know the recipient. It turned out that on average the letters had to be forwarded only five or six times before they reached their destination. But that was back in the 60s, way before mobile phones and social media and everything. A recent study by the University of Milan analyzed a vast number of connections between Facebook users, and it turned out that the average number of links from one randomly selected person to another was only 4.74.”

  “So what are you saying?” Ginger asked, but the answer was already dawning on me.

  “I’m saying maybe somebody is trying to reach Michael, and since they can’t reach him directly, they try reaching him through people who know him or people who know people who know him.”

  “Oh my god,” I said. If what Julian said was true then there was only one way to stop the flood of incoming text messages: I had to reply. I took my phone and typed a reply to the last message I had gotten from Tummy. I wrote, ‘Hello MINDY,’ and hit send. My phone immediately stopped vibrating. There were no more incoming messages.

  “Bugger me!” I said.

  “Uh ... no thanks,” Tummy said and laughed his arse off at his crude joke. And he’s got quite a big arse, so you can imagine that laugh. He only stopped when my text popped up on his phone. He looked at the message, then at me, and with a dopey look on his face he asked, “Who’s MINDY?”

  * * *

  I had always been fairly confident in my ability to write decent code, but the result of that first experiment with MINDY officially blew my mind. After school I went right home to debug the code. MINDY had done exactly what I had wanted her to do, and that was to phone home. However, she wasn’t supposed to do it by using other people’s mobiles, their money for that matter. I had to fix that, because if MINDY continued doing that, people would get suspicious sooner rather than later, and since the whole project was inherently borderline illegal, I needed to make sure that if the authorities ever became aware of MINDY, they wouldn’t be able to track me down. That turned out to be more complicated than I thought. I had to set up a secure, double-encrypted VPN tunnel to my phone and computer, and my attempt to debug the MINDY code turned into a complete rewrite of the whole engine. The result was cleaner, more streamlined, more elegant, and—most importantly—a lot more secure. I finished the rewrite that same night, after I hadn’t had any sleep for 38 hours. MINDY v0.2 could do exactly what its predecessor could do, and that was to use the Internet both as memory and as CPU, and to contact me securely without having to bother anyone else. The new feature in v0.2 was a back channel so I could contact MINDY if I ever needed to tell her to do things for me or update the code to add additional features. I had no lack of ideas for new features at this point. What I did have, however, was a considerable lack of sleep, so before I went to bed I released MINDY into the wild with only two very simple tasks: to not get caught and to wait for new instructions. MINDY was a good little girl, and she did exactly as she was told.

  In the following weeks and months I kept improving MINDY, adding a lot of useful features. Like, I let her—yes, by the time I had already grown used to call it ‘her’—listen to my phone conversations so she could get used to my voice. I wanted her to be able to analyze and understand the things I said to her. It’s a security feature. If I typed my commands into my computer or my phone, MINDY had no way of knowing if it was really me. But once she was able to recognize my voice, I could just talk to her and tell her what I wanted. I wrote a MINDY app for my phone, so whenever I needed her to do something for me, I just had to pick up the phone and tell her what it was. It was quite amazing.

  We were down in my basement one afternoon, Ginger, Tummy, and I, when I first showed them the new, language-capable MINDY.

  “So you invented your own Siri,” Tummy said rather unimpressed. “Big deal.”

  “Please,” I snorted. “Siri is to MINDY as the hand axe is to the Binford 2000 power drill.”

  “I have no idea what you’re saying.”

  “Go on, why don’t you give it a try? Ask Siri where Julian is. He said he’d be here by tree o’clock.”

  Tummy sighed and unpocketed his iPhone. “Siri, where is Julian?”

  After a moment Siri replied, “Who is Julian?”

  “Not who! Where, you stupid bitch!” Tummy shouted at his phone. Then he shrugged at me. “Could have told you that.”

  “Now watch this,” I said. “MINDY, where is Julian?”

  MINDY replied instantly: “Julian is currently approaching your front door, Michael.”

  Tummy chuckled. “Right.”

  Five seconds later the doorbell rang, and Tummy’s jaw dropped to the floor.
“How did you do that?”

  “Binford 2000 power drill,” I said and got up to answer the door.

  When I returned with Julian a few moments later, Tummy was jumping up and down like a rubber ball on steroids. “We knew you were coming! We knew you were coming, Jules!”

  Julian frowned. “Of course you knew I was coming. I said I’d come, didn’t I?”

  “No, no, no,” Tummy said. “We knew you were coming now.”

  “I said I’d be here at three o’clock.” He looked at his watch. “It’s three o’clock.”

  “Michael!” Tummy cried out for help.

  Julian looked at me. “Did you give him sugar?”

  “No, but something just as sweet. Watch.” I raised my mobile to my mouth. “MINDY, where is Julian?”

  “Julian is standing right next to you, Michael.”

  “That is so creepy,” Ginger said.

  Tummy grabbed my wrist and held my hand with my phone in front of his face. “MINDY, where am I?”

  There was no reply.

  “She only listens to me,” I said. “MINDY, where is Tummy?”

  “Thomas is standing right next to you, Michael.”

  “Wicked!”

  “Yeah, that’s brill,” Ginger said with a whiff of sarcasm in her voice. “But how does that work if I switch off my mobile, or lose it, or leave it at home? How is MINDY going to deal with that?”

  “Well,” I said, “it’s not a perfect system. MINDY knows that. She’s guessing to the best of her ability. I originally had her state the probability of her answers when she gave them, but I switched that off because it kept annoying me. I can still ask her, though, if I need to know. MINDY, what is the probability of Tummy standing right next to me?”

  “The probability of Thomas standing right next to you is 96%, Michael.”

  “See, it’s only 96% because there is a chance that Tummy went home an hour ago and forgot to take his phone. MINDY has no way of knowing that. If he were walking down the street, the probability would probably rise to 99%, still allowing for a 1% chance that somebody else is carrying Tummy’s phone. I’m working on accessing CCTV cameras and using face recognition software to keep track of people. Also, if I could access the Transport for London database to check when and where you used your Oyster Card, it would greatly improve MINDY’s performance.”