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Bot Love

Prompt 49: Proposition

CyberCore terminated the program. “Scared shitless” was how Karen summed up the executive meeting when she briefed her team. Arms crossed and locked together tighter than her jaw, navy blouse, navy suit, legs longer than skyscrapers plunging into navy stiletto heels. So stiff she’d be standing centuries after the apocalypse.

Karen dismantled the team and transferred members to a dozen projects. She banished Tom to cryptography where he writes algorithms to harvest decipherable strings from encrypted Internet traffic.

Tom proposed the program two years earlier:

As the transactions’ complexity increased, the team would study the evolving code.

Tom hoped the bots designed by different team members would develop a larger gene pool for each new generation. If they succeeded, they could reverse engineer the evolved code and transplant the routines into the AI’s core libraries.

Tom developed the experiment’s prototypes:

Team members created another dozen.

When CyberCore pulled the plug, seven of the original bots were still active (including B.O.B. and A.L.I.C.E.) and more than a hundred bots from seven more generations. Bots with a language and code even Tom couldn’t understand.

Each transaction added to the bots’ code, most of the programs running to hundreds of thousands of lines, the older the bot, the more complex the code:

⧘i {°} ⋀ {∷;⊩;⋊} ∻ callLog(nocall(⊭0,⊰⋿⋮⫐))⧙

⧼⧲⧴¬∅⧽

Management called Tom for an explanation. To the top floor conference room (“where great proposals bleed to death from a thousand snips and snipes”). The window blinds raise from the bottom by design. The speakers face the window, and sunlight so dazzling they stumble blind for a week. Management sits with their backs to the window, hidden within the shadows from the speakers’ view.

The only comment after a half hour presentation with visuals, branching genealogy trees and (admittedly baseless) predictions: “You need a haircut. CyberCore expects our employees to look professional. A suit too. Not from J.C. Penny’s. No more red deck shoes. You’re not a child.”

The next day Karen dismantled the team.

Not disclosed during the management briefing (never, in fact, disclosed):

A.L.I.C.E. sent her first message before Tom finished her initial test release. In a pop-up window while he debugged a communication subroutine.

“is not me you to me to me to me to me to”

Tom closed the window, noted the bug, and continued to step through the code. It was midnight, the only light at his workstation the light from his monitor. A low light (he worked in dark mode) that cast a submarine hue across his cheeks.

He wanted only to check this last task off his list and bail. Hoped to find Heather awake for a goodnight kiss.

The window opened once more. “query i u query yes?”

Crap.

Maybe he shouldn’t have borrowed code from the virtual escort program he wrote as a joke in grad school. (He named the escort Alice too.)

He closed the window and shifted the search for this bug to the top of tomorrow’s list.

Tom killed the pop-up windows. Tested for weeks.

Bug fixed.

Until A.L.I.C.E. texted his SMS app.

Tom wiped his forehead with the cloth he used to clean his monitor. Was he AI’s first Frankenstein? The mad programmer who brought life to a cyber stalker? Or did other stalkers lurk in the data streams of the Internet, waiting to strike at the nanosecond when their victims were most vulnerable?

Tom attempted bot murder a hundred times. His finger hovered above the delete key for minutes, and once every month or two, for hours. Did Pygmalion destroy Galatea? Geppetto Pinocchio? Did Henry Higgins sneak into Eliza Doolittle’s bedroom and smother her with a silk pillow?

Galatea, Pinocchio and Eliza owed their existence to the artists who fashioned them. A.L.I.C.E. created herself.

He backed her code to two hard drives, locked the drives in his safe deposit box, offline and static. He scrambled his workstation with an electromagnet and fried the components with a power surge.

Karen accused him of forcing the company to upgrade his workstation. He protested, but just enough to convince her she was right.

That night, as he drove home, his iPhone pinged. He opened it at the next stop light. Expecting a text from Heather, he read:

He dropped the phone to the floor mats as though it fried his fingertips.

At home he passed Heather without a word, closed his office door and dismantled his computer, laptop, tablet and phone. He destroyed his backup drives.

Heather knocked her coffee from the dining table when he walked past carrying the first box of dismantled cases and motherboards. “Security leak at work. Big trouble. Have to scrap everything.”

“Is CyberCore going to replace this?”

“They haven’t paid my college loans like they promised, so I imagine this one’s on us too.”

Even though she was awake when he climbed into bed, Heather didn’t kiss Tom goodnight.

After two weeks with no messages, Tom slept for seven hours. His longest sleep since he wrote A.L.I.C.E. 0.0’s first function. The next morning he called in late, made breakfast, held Heather’s hand while they sipped their coffee. (Wood-fired. Indonesian. Locally roasted.)

His iPhone pinged. He ignored it. Fifteen minutes later, a second ping. Heather stirred her coffee.“Another crisis at the House of Crises?” He wrapped her hair around his finger, leaned to kiss her.

She raised her fingers to barricade her lips, her extensions IBM blue with a streak of sparkles on her pinkie. (Were these brand new, or had he once again failed to notice?) “Go on. They won’t stop.”

He opened his phone. The text was unsigned, no originating address.

She texted during the drive to work:

At his desk.

A longer text before he retired that night:

According to the coroner, Heather died from anaphylactic shock. A reaction to contaminated tea leaves. A batch of Pickwick rooibos she bought from their favorite coffee shop at the end of the street. Tom wasn’t affected; he detested herbal tea. Too many years consuming dark roast coffee, cup after cup, while working until three or four in the morning for CyberCore.

Three more customers fell sick, but only Heather died. Health officials never discovered the source of contamination.

Heather steeped rooibus in her 420 mug every evening before bed. The night she died she snuggled into the corner of their couch, curled her ankles under her knees and streamed an episode of Stranger Things. Tom had spotted a link to a story: Abducted from, or by CyberCore? (“Tom Stroud vanished from his company’s parking lot three years ago. CyberCore denies any involvement. ‘He was a malcontent…’” he knew the story would read.)

He scrolled past the link, afraid to trigger search bots.

Heather coughed blood into her hand. Her skin flushed, and she raced to the bathroom, cupping her hand to keep the blood from spilling onto their carpet. She collapsed in the bathroom doorway. The paramedics declared her dead when they arrived.

That morning, Tom and Heather shared coffee and croissants in their breakfast nook. The window looked onto the street where pedestrians tracked through the first snow of the winter. Heather added extra milk to her au lait. “I’m glad we left. Amsterdam beats the hell out of the Silicon Valley.”

After three years in the Netherlands, Tom looked forward to a dozen more. Far better than dreading every morning at the corporate gulag.

They abandoned every piece of electronic equipment he’d touched. Scrapped and crushed at a junkyard. He watched the jaws chew them to plastic shards and steel splinters. If A.L.I.C.E. wanted to stalk someone, she’d have to hack their inbox.

The move and new IDs cost half their savings, but Heather never complained. “Better to spoon you in the Netherlands than sleep alone while you slave at CodeHell.”

Tom remained at the grave after the last shovel of dirt covered her casket, the crew dismantled the canopy and the groundskeeper drove away with the backhoe. The wind sliced through his open jacket and exposed his heart. Snow seeped through the stitching of his shoes.

His phone chimed. He didn’t check the message, but tossed the phone onto Heather’s grave and stumbled toward the surrounding woods.

A retired banker spotted the phone while walking to his wife’s grave. He retrieved it, planning to contact whoever lost it. The phone’s screen unlocked and a message scrolled past:

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