Trust No Robot Read online

  Trust No Robot

  I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass - and I'm all out of bubblegum. - John Nada “They Live”

  10 years from now. Artificial Intelligence is filling up the world 1 crack at a time. It hasn’t turned into one massive intelligence like some predicted, but more like a constant stream of nagging duties it would dole out to the masses. Think of a micromanaging boss that loved to track every activity and then remind you constantly to do the next thing as quickly as possible. Do this, get that, justify x, y and z. There were bots that helped people work, play and decide who was likely to give them some loving at the end of the night. We hadn’t created ‘intelligence’ but a whole ecosystem of battling systems fighting for their slice of the pie, created by those with different goals and philosophies. Don’t get me started on the religious AI’s or the military ones. All built to drive a more efficient world but in fact it felt more like for every ounce of efficiency, the suicide rate increased, crime increased and people were generally more unhappy than before.. although it was becoming harder to remember when we didn’t have some type of system telling us what to do.

  “AI recommends” is a mantra that many follow blindly. Augmented reality and virtual reality are the norm and people are jacked in or augmented as they navigate the world. War rages around the world on many fronts and governments are the same as they have always been. The earth continues to get more volatile. Climate gets wilder, more fires, floods and storms. The superpowers battle through puppet governments helping squash and promote dictators or rebels that will support whoever gives them the most firepower and ‘consultant’ support. Resources are getting scarce and the divide between wealthy and poor continues to grow wider. Many retreat to the virtual worlds or gamesets to get away from the grind.

  So pretty much the same as the rest of history except all happening at lightspeed and enhanced and full virtualized stereo.

  Sam

  Sam looked a bit dated these days. . He had kept a retro vibe and even his overlay glasses looked like something from 2010. At 45 he was average height and dressed with a blend of messy but had a coat that seemed to cover the fact that the rest of his wardrobe was a wreck.

  It was Wednesday morning and I was coming off a 24 hour break. My veins were pumping blood into my brain and it felt like pistons misfiring. Probably caused by my late night, probably caused by not enough caffeine, probably because I hadn’t jacked into cop-space in 24 hours, so getting back online was always a bit overwhelming. First morning back after a day off always felt like sex with an ex. Familiar but also a bit wrong, a bit awkward. It would take me until lunch before I felt fully in the flow. At least it was Spring in Baltimore.

  I stepped out on the street and ran my hand through my hair for lack of a comb or anything else to fix the mess on top of my head. I headed to corner market to fuel up. I was in desperate need of a hit of caffeine as my head was throbbing from last night. My cop-space overlay in my glasses were giving me direct feeds so it really didn’t matter where I was, I could still scan my job and punch in when I needed to. I had a busy case-load like usual and I was trolling through blogs and case info nuggets as I grabbed a double shot of espresso and turned to step across the street.

  “Hey! watch out!” I heard as a bus flew down the street. A fucking robot bus almost hit a lady crossing the street. She didn’t have right of way, but still, there should be better safeguards. I kind of agreed with the graffiti on the side of the bus “this bus is a killer robot” and it had blood dripping from it. Robots were everywhere, my espresso had just been made by one. It was a perfect coffee..but the price we all paid for it wasn’t in the brew or the cup or the mechanic to fix it when it broke. Whatever.. too early to be thinking like this.

  I found a place in a park nearby and sat on a bench and dove back into my overlay. I had a knack at picking up and connecting the dots which is why that made me a decent detective. I was taking a break from cop-space for a sec and watching some feed about revolution in Afghanistan. Not really sure what was happening on that side of the planet these days, buried in work.. Seems like battles are raging everywhere. I jumped to my tasklist and approved some transfers and orders with a blink and a murmur of ‘approved’. My ex had left a message but I skipped over that one. No need to start my day off in a bad mood.

  I never really saw myself as a cop, but here I was. I often said that I ended up here from total lack of career planning, but I did an ok job at reading people, which got a me a fair way in this job. Being able to solve a case or two a week kept the boss off my back and allowed me to be sloppy on my case docs without too much hassle. It was a good day off yesterday to catch up on sleep and spend some time with the cat. When my wife left she abandoned the cat, that thing kept me alive for a few months after the break. But here we are, back to it today.

  Overlay popup on my glasses. Don: We have a case coming in, hitting your queue, check it.

  My boss Don. He was a bit of a bag of potatoes. He and I didn’t spend a lot of 1-1 time together which was a good thing. I toss back the coffee and pull up my queue. Everything is tied these days. In less than 30 seconds I’m listening to a recording of a person that has called in the shooting. Some guy had gotten taken out by what looked to be a drive-by shooting as he was having a latte in a café near downtown by the government offices. I didn’t get that from the recording but from the gps positioning and the clips and tweets flying all over that I was able to tap into and tied together with the overlay. Shootings weren’t strange, neither was death. But a murder in a good neighborhood was strange and by a drive-by shooting. This wasn’t oakland in the 80’s, strange day already. And it looked like he worked in the gov’t offices. Near the DARPA offices, which also caused a red flag to fly in my brain. Somewhere deep in my mind the wheels started turning. Interesting crimes usually make for an interesting day.

  Zena

  Location: VR gameland

  Purplish sky and clouds that looked like floating sausages. Exactly like sausages shouldn’t float. If you looked at them real hard they would turn into puffy white things, but lack of focus left them sausage like. That was the nature when jacked in, details only became sharp when you looked right at something. Some would call it lazy programing by the AI’s that wrote these games these days, others would say that they just expected the human brain to not care on those details. Whatever the reason, the clouds looked like sausages if you didn’t look at them too close.

  “get that fuk!” I messaged as your friendly barbarian chopped off two soldiers with a battle axe. He was a beast and looked like a walking mountain with an axe.

  “ya” “nice!” “☺” all feedback coming in from the team. It was a minor victory in the assault but an important one. I looked up at the purple sun and tried to figure out by gameplay how long I’d been in game. It was hard to tell. I was the de facto leader of this team. I had recruited them over 6 months, churning through gameplay to get to the point where I had a full team of solid players. I had the barbarian who lives somewhere in the uk, I had found him on another world playing with some douchebags and convinced him he was wasting his time. The green giant I had assaulted by mistake and he almost took me out before I convinced him I didn’t want to kill him. And the thief I’d known for years and we had even run a couple campaigns together, I didn’t know much about him but that he lived somewhere out west.

  “what’s next?” a big green face turned my direction

  I scanned the scene again. It was a small city street, Bagdad like, maybe 80s-90s time period but with a super weird backdrop of colors and bizareish details. At least what I would think someplace like that would look like in meatspace, I hadn’t gotten very far outside my town. Building with coverage of dust, 3-4 stories high, it w
as a shitty place to be but we had to get the key before we could get where we were going, and that had cost the last few days of gameplay to find out where the key may even be.. But we had it now. Down the street it opened up to a open air area with a fountain and it looked like there was a lot of people down there.

  “let’s head north through that square at end of street”

  “k” greenie went silent as he ran controls to get new gear ready for what surely would be the fight coming

  “sec” barbarian putting his axe down and sucking in a power pack, he had taken the biggest hit on that last attack.

  “next is the castle, eh?” thief voiced in my ear on 1-1 chat

  “next is the castle” I voice back to the team. Didn’t like playing favorites or having side conversations. We wouldn’t make the castle today but we could move in that direction.

  My avatar was of similar build to my meatspace body. It was a 28 yrs old girl with black hair and geared up with armor coated with the blood of the last battle. The avatar was in much better shape. She looked like an olympian athlete. It had taken me the last year to build her to this level.

  We moved down the street and into the square, it was well lit, nice café and beautiful fountain in the middle and it reminded me of an old 2D movie I had seen when I was a kid. Something very picturesque about it all. I usually don’t stop in gameplay and take in the scenery but I stopped for a sec at the end of the street to take it in, which was a good thing. I have to say I was completely unprepared for the 100 soldiers that started jumping out of the windows. We fell back into safe positions, the guns started blazing while I called in a drone from my comm that I’d had flying above the city for the last hour. Even with drone support, this was going to take awhile.

  Miles

  “Nick is a asshole

  He sucks the life out of me

  I need a new job”

  Miles had used a AI haiku bot to come up with something to explain how much he hated Nick his boss. He was posting it now to a social site under a name that would never be tied to him. No one on that site would know him or Nick or care about who they were, but it gave him some sliver of pleasure to know that somewhere in the cyber he had made a mark against this guy. It was a lot like graffiti in hieroglyphics on the bottom of a rock. It would never be seen and if it was no one would understand what it said but that was Miles, cautious. You don’t want something coming back on you these days, better to get it out of your system. He liked his simple life at a 9-5 data crunching job. He had the look of a government data scientist and everything about him fit that stereotype, including why he wasn’t often invited to parties. He really didn’t hate Nick.. He just never like any boss he’d ever had.

  “Miles, Jim wants to see you” a passing head just over the top of his cube said and then disappeared.

  “ugh” under Mile’s breath. Why did Jim want him? He was the Director. Anyway, he was deep in trying to figure out how to optimize this data integration between the local servers and the ones over at the Pentagon. Everything was encrypted so it was a lot larger than it needed to be. He had told Nick yesterday that if it was unencrypted it would be a manageable job but encryption required extra extraction time, packaging and then uppacking. He was at the tail end of a process and trying to optimize something he hadn’t built and the ‘need to know’ clause keep him pretty much in the dark. He didn’t care what the data was, but it being encrypted for sure was part of the problem with the transfer. That was the way of DARPA, all work and figuring things out that you didn’t know what you were working on. But it was government work and Jim was his bosses boss, so he locked his screen and walked towards JIm’s office.

  “hey, you wanted to see me” Mile said popping his head around the corner.

  “Miles, yes, please come in and sit down” Jim said with a bit more formality than usual.

  It was then I noticed another guy sitting there in his office. He was sitting in the far chair so I plopped down in the one near the door.

  “I’d like to introduce you to Detective Sam Halberry, we have just received terrible news that Nick has passed away and Sam is here interviewing our team about Nick and his work”.

  Miles was in mid reach to shake his hand through that sentence and had just made the grip with the detective when Jim finished saying Nick was dead. Miles had grabbed his hand but then went limp as the news sunk in.

  “sorry, that is, he was actually shot in a drive by shooting this morning” the Detective stated as he had to shake my hand away.

  “Oh my god, that is terrible” Miles mentioned in a kind a slow dragging way. It was a lot to take in. Miles had seen Nick yesterday and we had gotten into it about what I was working on. He had been replaying the conversation in his head and planning the next one for the last 24 hours. He was in a bit of shock but he wasn’t sure if it was to do with Nick being dead or if it had to do with him not being able to make the point and prove to Nick that he was a dick.

  “yes, he was shot at the cafe on Lombard st. this morning. You can appreciate this is a very sensitive topic so we are asking everyone to keep this confidential as part of your top secret clearance.” He said and nodded to Jim.

  “yes, we are doing whatever we can do to help the detective, so he is being very open with us about what they know right now.” Jim looked uncomfortable, but Nick had been his golden boy so he was sure Jim’s stomach was just as messed up as his. Maybe not, Mile’s stomach was destroyed.

  “So, Miles, since you worked with Nick on a couple different projects I’d asked Jim if we could spend some time together talking about him. Is that ok?”

  “sure, I’m happy to help” Miles really didn’t know what he could tell him but he guessed it wasn't up to him at this point.

  “I’ll leave you two in my office to talk, I have a 10am meeting anyway.” Jim said and got up and left.

  “How long have you known Nick” Sam asked question #1.

  Ruf

  This mission wasn’t so bad. Ruf had been special assignment in Afghanistan and working with a spot on team of real hard asses for the last year. Now he’s sitting around in hotels drinking beer and stepping out to ice someone or another from time to time and making serious bonuses for doing it. Seemed a bit unfair to his friends back in the fire zone, but then some of them didn’t really fit in with the hotel lobby crowd. You had to be able to blend to work these jobs.

  Sitting in the bar watching the idiot box..

  “howsitgoing” Ruf texted over his encrypted satellite special ops overlay .. it was still afternoon here so he didn’t expect a response but he got one back right away.

  “weird shit, we are getting jacked all over the place, crazy directions coming from uptop” reply back.

  “howso?”

  “af sucks, massive resistance, about to make a run for the target”.

  He let that sit for a bit and took a pull off his imported beer.

  “goodluck, don’t break a leg” and he was very glad he was sitting 10,000 miles away from that shit fight.

  Sam

  That guy Miles was nervous. Of course all the spooks working in that lab seemed nervous or slickly to me. I got in my car and punched in the address. 15 minute ride to Nick’s house. I had the car stop on the way and run through a Fastbuger joint. Got a burger and settled back to munch on that as I flicked my overlay on and tried to connect the dots on this case.

  “how did the interviews go?” texted in from my boss

  “this one is messy, no leads yet but going to his house now” I flicked back to him

  “we have pressure already coming down on us on this from high up, they want to know real time if we get a break” .

  “ok, I’m on it, I’ll let you know” I wasn’t really hopeful, this was a professional hit, most likely the shooter was sitting in first class on his way to Italy by now.

  “btw, judge desk just approved access of his systems.” Earlier in the morning I had lodged for access of his social and accounts.


  “thanks, later” I then turned my attention to putting notes on my case files and mapping the connections.

  10 minutes later we were pulling up to his house and I had a much better picture of Nick Dillinger. He was single and seemed like a guy that we wound a bit tight. Everything in his life looked a bit too perfect. He had a habit of making a lot of nasty remarks on his personal feed about all kinds of things. He liked girls but his last relationship was 6 months back. He didn’t like the current president or the president’s party, but that was ½ the country. He liked sushi and had a sister in San Francisco. I need to follow up with the sister, “note, call sister” I tagged that in the file. Then I saw the post from yesterday morning at 10:27. “miles is a dick”. Interesting, I’ll make sure to ask Miles about that the next time I see him. He also seemed very fascinated with Afghanistan, looking at his article reading list showed 72% of articles in the last week were about Afghanistan and current actions going on there.