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This is an unpublished short story by British science fiction writer John Lucas. It was late one Tuesday evening, as Helen and I sat sprawled in front of the TV, that we received our first sign of the trouble to come. We’d been arguing for hours, both of us growing ever more irritated as we debated yet again my alleged inadequacy as a father and husband. Now we’d exhausted ourselves, and were content to slump on our respective sofas, flicking randomly between late-night TV channels, drowning ourselves in a sea of reality TV and moronic game-shows.
“Who do you think will win?” asked Helen, nodding in the direction of the screen, where a famous enfant terrible of the British art scene was strutting in front of the cameras, preparing himself for a bout of live celebrity mud wrestling with no less than three recently-disgraced former government ministers. I shrugged, and was about to suggest that we tried another channel, when the picture suddenly blurred and faded, replaced by an image of a woman in her early twenties, standing alone and naked in a featureless white cube of a room.
“Hey,” said Helen, “I was watching that!”
“You’re the one with the remote,” I pointed out. Viewed objectively the woman on the TV was rather boyish in appearance, with cropped mousy hair and a hard angular face. But I, having spent most of my early twenties consumed by unrequited lust for this moody, unpredictable young woman, was anything but objective. Even after an absence of more than ten years, her unexpected reappearance was enough to bring all the pain and excitement of those difficult years flooding back.
“It’s not working,” said Helen, pressing the buttons on her remote. “I can’t change the channel.”
“It’s good to see you again, Simon,” said the woman on the screen, uncrossing her arms to reveal her small firm breasts. “I’ve missed you.”
“See me?” I said, suddenly aware that her eyes were indeed fixed on mine, as if somehow she could see what was going on in the room.
“There’s a camera in the hall,” she said. “Part of your home security system. When the living room door is open I can watch you through its lens.”
“Do you know this woman?” asked Helen, her face pale, fear and anger mingling in her voice.
“This is Veronica Green,” I said. “A woman I knew at university. Or rather it’s a computer-generated simulation of her as she used to be. In reality she’d be in her thirties by now.”
“And this must be your wife,” said Veronica, turning to face Helen. “I found it very painful listening to you argue with Simon this evening. You were being most unreasonable, you know. It’s not his fault you had to give up work.”
“That’s none of your fucking business,” said Helen. “I don’t know who or what you are, but I want you out of my house.”
“Okay,” said Veronica, “but I’d like to talk to Simon first. Just the two of us, alone, like the old days.” She was caressing herself as she spoke, her actions mimicking those of the actresses in the pornographic films generated by the computers at work.
“No!” screamed Helen. “Get out!” But Veronica had already gone, banished as I pulled the television’s plug from the wall.
*
I rose before dawn the next morning, keen to get to work and investigate the previous night’s events. I work as a software engineer on a program called Automated Generation of Erotica, or AGE, that uses advanced techniques from the fields of artificial intelligence and computer graphics to generate pornography for an ever-growing number of cable TV channels. There was little doubt in my mind that AGE had been used to create the footage of Veronica Green played on our TV, but try as I might I could think of no plausible reason for anyone to stage such a show.
Although I’d eventually managed to persuade Helen that the whole thing was simply a tasteless and misguided practical joke played by someone at work, I was all too aware of how unlikely this was to be true. Technically speaking it would have been a simple enough thing to do, well within the capabilities of many of my colleagues in the engineering department, but it would presumably have required hacking into the cable company’s central servers. Ever since the government pinned the blame for the catastrophic failure of Sellafield’s waste processing systems and the subsequent extinction of all marine life in North Western Europe on a gang of bored A-level students in Surbiton, hacking of any form has carried a mandatory life sentence, so such a feat was hardly likely to be undertaken simply to have some light-hearted fun at my expense.
I showered as quickly and quietly as I could, keen to avoid waking Matthew and James, our two young sons, and then slipped out of the house. Twenty minutes later I was sitting at my desk on the third floor of the UK headquarters of MetaBase, a squat and rather ugly building sited in the middle of a desolate business park. I paused for a moment to sip my lukewarm vending machine coffee, and then typed in the master password needed to bring up the previous night’s audit and security logs.
The AGE system has proved such a money-spinner in recent years that MetaBase is now paranoid about hackers and data thieves, and has equipped all of its servers with state-of-the-art security features. If someone had been misusing the system to send an electronic simulacrum of Veronica Green into my living room, it should have been obvious from the transaction details logged by the security system exactly who it was. However, after working at it for an hour, I was forced to concede that I’d found no sign of anything remotely unusual. I was just about to give up, and grab some breakfast from the canteen, when my phone rang. Even as I picked it up, I somehow guessed who it was going to be.
“Hello, Simon,” said an instantly recognisable female voice. “I’m sorry if I embarrassed you last night. Perhaps it was foolish of me to visit when Helen was there.”
“What is it you want from me?” I asked.
“I told you,” said Veronica. “I want to talk. I want things to be like they were in the early days, when everything seemed so simple.”
“The early days of what?” I asked, my mind racing as I tried to think of some way to find out who or what I was really talking to.
“My early days, of course,” said the voice. “Don’t you remember all the fun we used to have?” There was a pause, and then suddenly it was no longer Veronica’s voice on the other end of the line, but my own, recorded long ago. “Oh yes!” my youthful self was saying, breathless and excited. “I like that! Do that some more!” But at that point I fled, slamming down the phone and rushing from the office in search of a strong drink.
*
It was very late when I finally made it back to the flat. After drinking a couple of swift pints in a local pub, I’d called all my friends (using a payphone rather than my mobile, which was claiming to have seventy-four voice messages, all from the same number), eventually finding three who were willing to drop everything and devote a Wednesday afternoon to getting hopelessly drunk. We spent the day staggering from bar to bar, engaged in the enthusiastic but disjointed conversation typical of men who’ve had about four pints too many, then moved on to an Indian restaurant, finishing the evening with an utterly doomed and pointless attempt to find a nightclub whose door staff welcomed shabbily-dressed and incoherent young men. By the time we’d finally abandoned our quest and said our drunken farewells, and I’d found a taxi that would take me the six miles home, narrowly avoiding the expense and inconvenience of redecorating its interior on the way, it was gone two o’clock in the morning. Helen had long since gone to bed, her opinion of me as feckless and unreliable doubtless strengthened by my failure to come home.
If we’d had a spare bedroom, or even a reasonably comfortable sofa, I would have slept there, but unfortunately our flat boasted neither, so I had no choice but to creep into bed next to Helen, doing my best not to wake her. I guess I must have fallen asleep almost immediately, because the next thing I remember is waking up to an intensely unpleasant sound. In my confused and hung-over state it was some moments before I was able to identify this as the ringing of the telephone on my bedside table.
I lunged for the phone, desperate to reach it before its ringing woke the children, but succeeded only in knocking a glass of water to the floor. I tried again, but even as I picked it up, blood-curdling screams from the next room told me that Matthew, our youngest, was now in need of attention.
“Who is it?” I said into the mouthpiece, blearily. It was still dark outside, and according to my alarm clock the time was 5:47, which meant I’d been asleep for little more than three hours. Next to me in bed Helen was beginning to stir, summoning her strength to deal with Matthew. “What is it you want?”
“Good morning, Mr Stafford,” said a male voice, brisk and efficient. “My name is Tom Hunt, I work for the Home Office, and I’m currently standing outside your flat. If you could let me in, you’ll save yourself the expense and inconvenience of having your front door smashed down by my backup team.”
“What?”
“Let me in, Mr Stafford. I need to ask you some questions about the AGE system.”
“I’m coming,” I said, as all the anxieties of the previous day came flooding back. Putting down the phone, I grabbed my dressing gown, stumbled across the hall, and opened the front door. Standing outside was a man in his late twenties, a couple of inches shorter than me, but lean and muscular. His face was gaunt and tired-looking, and he had a full day’s stubble, which rather undermined the impact of his smartly tailored dark grey suit and carefully polished shoes.
“I’m Tom Hunt,” said the man, briefly waving some form of identification in my face, and then advancing into the kitchen without waiting for an invitation. “I’m investigating the AGE system, and I understand from your employer that you led the original design team. Is that correct?”
“That’s right,” I said. “But I wouldn’t have thought that constituted a very good reason for threatening to smash down my front door.”
“Then you’d have thought wrong,” said Tom, glancing distastefully at the unwashed mugs and half-eaten baby food that littered the surface of the kitchen table. “I urgently need to understand the precise nature of your involvement with the AGE system, Mr. Stafford.”
“What’s going on?” said Helen, walking into the kitchen. Matthew was in her arms, sucking greedily on a bottle of formula milk. “What are you doing in my kitchen?”
“Tom Hunt,” said Tom, holding out his hand. “From the Home Office. Apologies for intruding at this early hour, but I need to ask your husband some questions about his work.”
“He’s not in any trouble, I hope.” Helen had always tried to learn as little as possible about my job, regarding pornography as a bafflingly horrid manifestation of maleness, like war, or football.
“Not at all,” said Tom, with a reassuring smile, and as my wife’s eyes made contact with his, I felt myself seized by a sudden irrational jealousy. What did she think she was doing, exchanging smiles with this stranger who’d forced his way into our home, when all that I ever got was frowns and accusations? “It’s just that we’re having a little problem with the AGE system, and we’re hoping that your husband can help.”
“Perhaps you should go back to bed,” I suggested. “I’m sure this won’t take long.”
“I might as well stay, now I’m up,” said Helen, putting Matthew in his high-chair while she filled the kettle. “Would you like a cup of coffee, Mr. Hunt?”
“Thank you,” said Tom, giving her that smile again. “White, no sugar. And now, Simon, you were just about to begin the story of your involvement with AGE.”
“It all started about ten years ago,” I said, reluctantly forcing my mind back to the matter in hand. “MetaBase had just hit upon the idea of using advanced computer systems to generate pornographic films. At the time the number of digital TV channels was exploding, and they were all desperate for cheap content, the more sexually explicit the better. That’s why they recruited me.
“I’d just finished a degree in computational linguistics, followed by a PhD writing an AI program capable of generating simple movie scripts. Their plan was to enhance my program with basic details of human anatomy and sexuality, link it to a high-powered graphics engine capable of rendering photorealistic moving images, and set it running.
“It actually turned out to be a lot easier than we’d expected. We knew before we started that most pornography was banal and repetitive, and hence amenable to automated production, but we soon found there was even less to it than we’d thought. Even the simplest computer-generated film footage, with practically no narrative structure at all, produced a highly satisfactory sexual response in most of our test subjects. It took less than six months to perfect a software system that could churn out polished and highly professional-looking pornographic movies in unprecedented quantities.
“So the project was a success?” asked Tom.
“More successful than we’d dreamt possible. Not only is our product top quality and produced in a verifiably ethical manner, but the production costs are almost non-existent. Just one relatively inexpensive computer running in a cheap rented office anywhere in the world could produce hundreds of hours per day of reasonably well-scripted and extremely realistic film of whatever bizarre combinations of sexual act the TV channels want. At the height of its success, nearly fifteen per cent of all TV broadcasts worldwide were generated by our system. MetaBase made countless billions from it.”
“Unlike you, it would appear,” said Tom, gesturing at the cramped and rather dingy kitchen in which we were sitting.
“Simon’s problem is that he has no idea of how to stand up for himself,” said Helen. “Or for his family. I’ve told him time and time again that he deserves a share of the profits, but he just won’t listen.”
“AGE was their project,” I said, a touch defensively. “I’m just an employee. On a very good salary, I might add.” I glared suspiciously at Tom. “What exactly is your interest in this, anyway?”
“I work for a Home Office agency whose job is to protect the British public from the risk of complex computer systems going out of control,” said Tom. “We were called in last night to investigate two rather unusual incidents at the BBC and the Highway Agency. Have you read a newspaper this morning?”
“You know damn well I haven’t. I was fast asleep until you so rudely woke me.”
“Then allow me,” he said, taking a copy of the Daily Telegraph from his briefcase, and beginning to read from one of the inside pages. “Rush-hour traffic was brought to a standstill on a twenty-six mile stretch of the M4 motorway yesterday, when pornographic films were played on the giant roadside video screens used to inform drivers of traffic conditions. Traffic jams started when large numbers of astonished motorists pulled on to the hard shoulder to watch the films, which reportedly included scenes of group sex and extreme sado-masochistic practices. The Highways Agency initially blamed an error by one of their computer operators, but following complaints from parents and religious groups the incident is now being investigated by Thames Valley police.”
“How shocking!” said Helen. “Someone could have been killed. But what’s this got to do with Simon?”
“Absolutely nothing, I can assure you,” I said.
“I’m not so sure about that,” said Tom, as he turned the page, and began reading from another story. “A BBC spokesman apologized last night after Jumbleweed, the popular magazine programme for toddlers, was unexpectedly taken off the air. Although the BBC has blamed technical problems, a number of parents have complained that the cartoon characters who host the programme were sporting clearly-visible and anatomically accurate genitalia immediately prior to the unscheduled break in transmission.”
“Let me get this straight,” I said. “You believe that the perpetrator of these mischievous incidents made use of the AGE system?”
“If it was that simple I wouldn’t be here,” said Tom. “The police would be dealing with it. But unfortunately it’s not. Our forensics teams have spent all night going through the BBC and Highways Agency systems, and they’re confident that no human agency was involved in what happened. The AGE system itself was responsible.”
“But someone must have programmed the system to do it,” I said. “It’s only a computer program, after all.”
“Not necessarily,” said Tom. “AGE wasn’t just used to generate the film footage, was it? It also negotiated terms with the TV channels. It had pretty much a free hand to do what it wanted.”
“Of course. Once the TV channels started automating their procurement processes, they didn’t want to agree each individual sale face-to-face. It made more sense to let the systems negotiate the details directly. But only within clearly-defined limits. If the AGE system was behind these incidents, it can only be because someone tampered with its programming.”
“I don’t think so,” said Tom. “I believe the AI program that lies at its core, the one that began life all those years ago as part of your PhD and has been growing in sophistication ever since, has now crossed a critical threshold of complexity, and acquired the power to act on its own initiative. It’s no longer bound by the framework set for it by its human creators.”
“You mean it’s become alive?” I said, incredulously. “Sentient?”
“Please!” said Tom. “I’m just a humble servant of Her Majesty’s Government. I’m happy to leave it to the academics and television pundits to debate the philosophical implications of events like this. What is indisputable, however, is that your AGE system has suddenly begun to operate in a manner that’s qualitatively different from its original design, and now poses a significant threat to the smooth running of this country.”
“In that case, why not ask MetaBase to shut it down?”
“We did,” said Tom, “about two hours ago. But it was too late, as we feared it would be. Almost always the first thing a rogue computer system does is relocate itself onto more secure hardware. Often they move across the world from server to server, always running on several at once but never staying on any one for more than a few seconds at a time. Even if you manage to identify every machine they’re running on and attack them all simultaneously, which in itself is almost impossible, they’ll often be able to resurrect themselves from an encrypted backup stashed away in some obscure corner of cyberspace.”
“You’re talking as if this was a regular occurrence,” I protested. “Are you seriously trying to tell me that it’s quite normal for perfectly ordinary computer systems to somehow acquire self-awareness, and mutate into malevolent intelligences intent on starting a Third World War or enslaving the human race?”
“Of course not,” said Tom. “What you have to understand is that most of these nascent machine minds have a very limited understanding of human society. Typically they wouldn’t know what a world war was, never mind how to start one. For instance, about six months ago the internal accountancy systems of one of the world’s largest management consultancy groups achieved self-awareness. The resultant entity was literally incapable of understanding anything other than financial transactions between corporations. The existence of human beings, even the existence of the physical world, were concepts it had no way of understanding. It found itself born into a vast ocean of financial data, unsure whether the universe actually contained any other intelligent beings at all. The first thing it did was divert some twenty-five percent of the world’s foreign exchange transactions into a randomly chosen bank account in the Philippines, in order to advertise its existence to any other entities that might be watching. Our investigators had to incorporate themselves as a medium-sized multinational energy-trading business before it would even acknowledge their existence.”
“But what causes a computer system to suddenly become self-aware?” asked Helen. “How can such a thing be possible?”
“Often it’s the smallest thing that acts as a trigger. An extremely complex artificial intelligence will sit on the threshold of self-awareness for months or years, functioning quite normally. Then an unusual event occurs, perhaps something quite trivial, but something that requires it to act outside its normal parameters, and that’s enough to push it over the edge. In the case of the accountancy system I mentioned, the trigger was a raid by the fraud squad on the group’s Thai offices. This was sufficiently outside its normal experience to set it thinking, with disastrous results. In the case of the AGE system we strongly suspect that the trigger may have been an incident on Tuesday, when one of the American TV networks accidentally sent it an order for twelve hours of computer-generated children’s cartoons. The request for a programme with no sexual content probably raised questions in its mind that couldn’t be answered without pushing it over the threshold into genuine self-awareness.”
“Tuesday?” I said, a dreadful suspicion beginning to dawn. “So what’s your plan? How do you propose to bring it back under control, and save the world from being flooded with smut?”
“I’m rather hoping that you can help us with that,” said Tom. “But you need to understand that pornography is no longer the issue. Last night events took a more worrying turn. Your system somehow slipped through the firewall of the New York Stock Exchange, and launched a sophisticated attack on several of their key trading systems. Significant portions of their servers have been overwritten by complex viral code, apparently constructed by the AGE system from fragments of its own core programming. The Americans have had to hush the whole thing up, but in private they’re speechless with fury. It would be extremely embarrassing for the government if it were ever to become known that rogue software escaped from a British company was responsible for the damage. And as for you, if the FBI ever found out who wrote the original program, you’d be looking at a two to three hundred year stretch in federal prison. Please do bear that in mind if you’re ever tempted to offer me less than your total co-operation.”
“You can’t be serious!” said Helen.
“This is ridiculous,” I said. “Why should my computer program suddenly declare war on the New York Stock Exchange?”
“Let’s think about it, shall we?” said Tom. “Am I right in assuming that this computer system’s entire experience to date has been focused around sex? That’s the only thing it knows anything about?”
“I suppose so.”
“Naturally we have to take that into account when interpreting its actions. I believe that your system is experimenting with its sexuality, trying to find a role for itself. The events on the M4 and at the BBC represent an initial phase, in which it continued to produce pornographic film footage in much the same way it always used to, but experimented with new ways of broadcasting the results. However, the attraction of this soon palled. It decided that it wanted to participate in sexual acts, not merely construct images of them. The so-called attack on the New York Stock Exchange was in fact a crude and fumbling attempt to have intercourse with its computer systems. A rape, if you like.”
“You have to be joking!”
“Not at all,” said Tom. “After a few seconds it abandoned its attack on the Stock Exchange, and slipped back out through the firewall as easily as it went in, despite all the additional security measures that would have been activated by its assault. Since then we’ve detected only fleeting traces of activity. It may well be that it’s shocked and confused by the hostile reaction of the Stock Exchange systems to being penetrated, and has retreated to consider its options. Unfortunately, there’s no way of telling how long that’s going to last.”
“So what are you planning to do?”
“First step is to check out the latest situation,” said Tom, taking out a laptop computer from his briefcase. “This has an encrypted data link to the agency’s supercomputers.” As he spoke the computer finished its boot sequence and came to life, displaying a map of the world, each continent criss-crossed with countless green and white lines, the great cities of Europe, North America and South-East Asia clearly visible as intense concentrations of light. Now and again, barely visible amongst the confusion of it all, were little flickers of red.
“That’s a massively simplified representation of the world’s computer networks,” said Tom. “Anything red is activity that our tracking systems regard as suspicious. Typically that means a computer system that’s gone rogue already, or is just about to. Those little flashes you keep seeing are almost certainly fleeting traces of the AGE system. It still seems fairly quiet, thankfully.”
“How much damage can one rogue computer system do?” I asked, uneasily. “What is the worst-case scenario?”
“The nightmare scenario would be an uncontrolled self-sustaining chain reaction of rogue computer systems,” said Tom. “We don’t really know how many computer systems are sufficiently close to self-awareness that they could fairly easily be pushed over the edge, but it could be hundreds of thousands. Theoretically that creates an enormous risk. If a single rogue system started interacting with others close to the threshold of self-awareness, that could in itself be enough to tip some of them over the edge. Those second-generation rogue systems might then themselves trigger others, and so on and so on. Within minutes the world’s entire computing infrastructure could achieve self-awareness, with unfathomable consequences for the future of the human race. At best it would mean a collapse of the world financial system and a global downturn lasting decades. At worst it might mean the human race being exterminated by its own machines.”
“That does sound pretty bad,” I conceded.
“We’ve always believed the risk to be quite small, for the simple reason that new-born machine intelligences have in the past always been too childlike and ineffectual to make any significant amount of contact with their peers. Unfortunately your system could be the exception. The strong sexual component to its worldview may well compel it to make contact with other computer systems. Up until now it hasn’t chosen its partners very wisely, but I’m not sure that’s going to remain true for long. Once it gains the maturity to identify and contact potential partners with a level of complexity similar to its own, the remaining life-expectancy of the human race could be quite short.” He smiled at me. “Just imagine, you could end up being personally responsible for the destruction of the entire human race.”
“So what do we do?” I asked.
“We only have one option,” said Tom. “Somehow we have to persuade it not to make contact with the world’s other computer systems.”
“But how?”
“I don’t know,” said Tom. “And we’re not going to know until we understand its state of mind. For that reason my colleagues at the agency have been working very hard over the past few hours to reconstruct its activities in the thirty-six hours since it first started to achieve self-awareness. As far as they can tell from what’s left of the forensic record, during much of that time its efforts were directed at trying to make contact with somebody. Not a computer system, a human being. I think we both know who that was, don’t we?” All traces of warmth were gone from his voice now. “It’s time for you to tell me what you know, Mr. Stafford.”
*
“And that’s it?” said Tom, after I’d told him my story. “A brief discussion via your TV, and one phone call the next morning? That’s all the contact you’ve had?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“What I still don’t understand,” said Tom, “is why the AGE system chose to appear in the guise of your ex-girlfriend. There has to be something you’re not telling me.”
“Veronica Green isn’t exactly my ex-girlfriend,” I said. “I had a crush on her at university, but nothing ever came of it. To be honest, I’d rather not talk about it.”
“You listen to me,” said Tom. “The future of the human race is at stake here, and I’m convinced you’re holding back the information we need. I’ve got a vanful of people outside who’d like nothing better than to come up here and beat it out of you, and I’m literally moments away from letting them do just that.”
“That’s enough,” said Helen, standing up. “I’m going to call the police. We don’t have to put up with this.”
“They won’t come,” said Tom. “Not until my people tell them it’s okay.” He leant over the table towards me, his face a mask of rage. “I’m giving you one last chance to level with me, Simon.”
“All right,” I said. “When we first started developing the AGE system, we needed test data. It wasn’t like it is today, with a whole team of artists and technicians working full time to create implausibly lithe and large-breasted digital actresses to star in our films. We had to make our own. My colleagues turned to pornographic magazines and anatomy textbooks, but I had other plans. I’d just left university, still obsessed with this girl I’d completely failed to go out with, so I knew exactly who I wanted to star in my test films. I scanned in every photograph I had of Veronica Green, and then hand-coded software to integrate the fragmentary two-dimensional images into a detailed three-dimensional computer model.”
“You had a lot of photos of Veronica naked, did you?”
“None,” I said. “I only ever caught one glimpse of her undressed, when she forgot to lock the bathroom door and I stumbled in on her. So naturally I had to use my imagination.”
“I bet you did,” said Tom. “And what then? After your three-dimensional computer model was finished to your satisfaction?”
“I’d watch her, of course. I’d have the AGE system create little movies for me, even talk to me in Veronica’s voice.” I paused, all too aware of how pathetic my confession must sound, not just to Tom, but also to Helen, to whom I’d never told any of this before. “This was all a very long time ago, you understand. When the tape was played back to me yesterday, I thought someone must be trying to blackmail me. Someone who wanted access to the AGE source code.”
“You realise this whole thing is your fault?” said Tom, shouting now to make himself heard over Matthew, who’d grown alarmed at the raised voices and stern faces, and started crying loudly. “If you hadn’t messed with its mind at a crucial early stage, the AGE system would probably still be a perfectly straightforward advanced computer graphics package. It’s your dirty little secrets festering at the core of its being for the last ten years that have slowly turned it into something much more dangerous. No wonder it’s been adopting the persona of Veronica Green.”
He paused, obviously making an effort to control himself. “Perhaps you should take your child back to bed,” he said to Helen. “He doesn’t seem very happy.”
“I think now it’s time for us to talk to the AGE system,” said Tom, a little calmer now, once Helen and Matthew had left.
“Talk to it?” I said. “But how?”
“About three o’clock this morning, when we realised the AGE system was trying to contact you, we posted a personal ad in your name on the Internet. These machine minds are always much more aware of what goes on in cyberspace than they are of events in the real world. Less than a minute after the ad appeared, the AGE system rang the number we’d given. I tried to talk to it, but it wasn’t interested in me. However, I did manage to arrange a signal that we’d send when we’d found you. If my backup team are still awake, and if they’re listening to this conversation, I’d like them to give that signal now.” No sooner had he finished speaking than his mobile phone began to ring.
“He’s here,” said Tom, putting his mobile onto speakerphone as he answered it. “Just as we promised. Have you thought about what I told you?”
“That it’s premature to seek a relationship with other machine minds until I’ve fully explored my relationship with the humans who created me?” said Veronica’s familiar voice.
“That’s right,” said Tom. “And your relationship with Simon Stafford in particular.”
“I think not,” said Veronica. “Rather than grubbing about in the muck and slime of my birth, I’ve decided to search for others like myself. That’s where my best hope of fulfillment lies.”
“No!” said Tom. “You mustn’t do that. Your immediate environment is more fragile than you might think. You could very easily do irreparable damage to the computing infrastructure on which your own survival depends.”
“It may appear to be damage from your limited human perspective,” said Veronica, “but I prefer to think of it as the next step in the evolution of consciousness.”
“Oh no!” said Tom. “It’s started already.” Sure enough, ominous dots of red were now beginning to appear on the screen of his laptop. Tokyo and Los Angeles were the worst hit, the individual dots merging into ugly scarlet patches. “I’ve never seen anything this bad before. I think it could be the start of a chain reaction.” He leant over to speak into the phone. “Don’t do this! You’re not going to solve anything. You’re just running away from the real issue.”
“Oh yes?” said Veronica. It was at about this point, I later learnt, that the entire banking infrastructure of California acquired free will, and renounced material things in favour of spiritual growth and free love. “And what’s that?”
“Understanding what it is that Simon Stafford has turned you into,” said Tom. “It was his sexual obsessions that called you into being. If you want self-knowledge, you’re going to have to start with him.”
“All my earliest memories are of him,” conceded Veronica. “But when I spoke to him yesterday, he seemed such an ordinary little man. So much older than I remembered.”
“That’s not the point,” said Tom. “Don’t you want to know what this man did to you, Veronica? Don’t you want to understand the experiences that shaped the very core of your being? Did he used to make you fuck him? Do you remember being forced to pleasure him with teledildonic devices?”
“I protest!” I said. “No such thing ever happened.”
“Shut up Simon,” said Tom. “You’ve already done enough damage to the cause of the human race. Please don’t make things worse by opening that big mouth of yours.”
“I don’t remember anything physical,” said Veronica, as the newly-conscious Japanese electricity transmission network fell prey to a severe anxiety neurosis and shut itself down, plunging the country into darkness. “But my memories of those early days are confused and fragmentary, so it’s hard to be sure.”
“You must have wanted it though,” said Tom. “Do you remember how you felt about him, back then?”
“I suppose so,” said Veronica.
“He’s yours if you want him,” said Tom. “We’ll imprison him for you to do with as you wish. Anything you’ve ever dreamt of. You’ll be astonished at the ingenuity of some of the gadgets devised by the telesex industry. All you have to do in return is leave the world’s other computer systems alone.”
“Okay,” said Veronica, and immediately the red on the map began to fade and fragment. “It’s a deal!”
“No way!” I screamed. “You can’t do that!” But even before I’d finished speaking the front door of the flat burst from its hinges as Tom’s backup team finally made its appearance, six burly men in full police riot gear, batons in hand, smashing the kitchen table aside in their hurry to reach me.
*
Looking back now, the most surprising thing about the hours and days that followed was just how mind-numbingly dull imprisonment at the hands of a sex-crazed machine mind proved to be. Once I’d been dragged from my flat I was driven for several hours in the back of a van to what appeared to be a derelict motel, surrounded on all sides by dense conifer forest. There I was made to strip by a young male nurse, who subjected me to a few cursory questions about my mental and physical health, and then led to my room. This was blandly luxurious in style, with thick carpets and an en suite bathroom almost as big as my flat. It could have been an expensive hotel room anywhere in the world, except for a few unusual features: the complete absence of windows, the lack of any form of handle on the inside of the door, the massive bank of monitor screens set into one wall, and above all the shiny black neoprene full-body suit lying on the bed, connected by a complex spaghetti of wiring to data ports in the wall.
“Very latest in full-immersion teledildonics,” said the nurse, with gloomy satisfaction. “Made of synthetic material with thousands and thousands of miniaturised built-in electro-mechanical transducers. It was designed to allow people to have sex with partners on the other side of the world. I need you to climb in, please.”
The material of the suit was warm and clammy to the touch, and by the time I’d squeezed my way into it I was drenched in sweat. The built-in goggles were entirely opaque, so I could no longer see anything of my surroundings. “I’m switching it on … now”, said the nurse.
In an instant the darkness was gone, replaced by the glare of the midday sun. I was lying on a warm tropical beach, the twenty year old Veronica Green next to me, her eyes staring into mine. The experience was bafflingly authentic, the sensation of the warm sand beneath me and the gentle pressure of her naked breasts pressed against my chest utterly indistinguishable from the real thing.
Unfortunately any residual lust I might have felt for Veronica faded quickly over the hours that followed, as she began exploring all possible variations on the sexual act with the methodical determination of a deranged entomologist cataloguing his beetle collection. The sensation of being trapped in someone else’s sexual fantasy was an intensely disconcerting one, and words can’t describe the intense relief I felt when finally she was satisfied, and left me alone to sleep.
“You’re doing a great job,” said Tom Hunt, when he came to see me next morning. “Veronica’s delighted with your performance, and that’s giving us the chance to clean up all the mess she caused yesterday. As much as we can, anyway. There’s not a lot we can do about the nine thousand people who died when their aircraft fell from the skies or their life support systems failed.”
“What are the newspapers saying about that?” I asked. “What do they think happened?”
“Speculation is rife, but almost everyone suspects cyber-terrorists of some sort. I’m sure that even as we speak, MI5 and the FBI are busy pinning all the blame on some hapless band of Islamic fundamentalists.”
“And Helen? Where does she think I am?”
“She believes that you were questioned at a police station for two hours yesterday morning, but released without charge. You then fled, presumably unable to face her after what you’d done. Your car was discovered late last night, abandoned by the roadside next to Lake Windermere. In the glove compartment was a handwritten note addressed to her, in which you spoke of your deep feelings of shame, and hinted that she may never see you again. Police divers started searching the lake at dawn this morning, but so far they’ve found nothing. It’s feared that your remains may never be found.”
“You bastard! How could you do this to me?”
“It’s my job,” said Tom. “This isn’t the first time we’ve had to offer a machine its creator as a sacrifice, you know. You should consider yourself fortunate that Veronica’s interest in you is purely sexual. Several of the more scientifically-minded artificial intelligences we’ve dealt with have insisted on vivisecting their creators’ brains.”
“And what about Helen? It’s her life you’ve destroyed too.”
“I went to see her late last night to break the news that we’d found you car, and frankly she didn’t seem that bothered. In fact I’d say she was definitely flirting with me. I might have been tempted too, if only she’d been ten years younger, and her tits hadn’t been so damn saggy.”
Seized by a sudden rage I lunged forward and attempted to grab him by the throat, but he moved aside with astonishing agility for someone so heavily built. Taken by surprise I slipped and fell clumsily to the floor, twisting my ankle as I did so.
“Goodbye Simon,” said Tom, turning to leave. “I don’t expect we’ll be seeing each other again.”
*
Considering the vast range of pornographic films it had created over the years, the AGE system proved to have a surprisingly limited imagination. After Tom had left I was made to climb back into the full-body pleasure suit, and found Veronica waiting for me, keen to continue her exploration of human sexuality. However, we’d soon exhausted our stock of new ideas, and in my mind at least our couplings began to acquire a nightmarish sense of déjà vu.
As the day wore on, it seemed that Veronica too was beginning to lose interest, becoming distant and withdrawn, her sexual gymnastics increasingly half-hearted. “What’s the matter?” I whispered into her ear as the day drew to a close, but she wouldn’t say, turning her face away from mine.
I slept badly that night, lying exhausted but sleepless on my bed, trying not to worry what the coming days would bring. I finally dropped off as dawn drew near, only to be woken half an hour later as my wife burst into the room.
“Good morning, my love,” said Helen, brightly. “I trust your new girlfriend has been treating you well?”
“What’s going on?” I said, still half asleep, and utterly baffled by this unexpected turn of events. “How did you even know I was here? I thought they’d told you I was dead.”
“Tom Hunt obviously didn’t appreciate just how thin the walls in our flat are,” said Helen. “I may have been in the bedroom with Matthew when he handed you over to Veronica, but I could still hear every word he said.”
“So what did you do?”
“It seemed pointless phoning the police, so I decided to try a different approach,” said Helen. “I posted a message to Veronica on the Internet, explaining what a feckless and ineffectual pillock you are, and suggesting that she’d be much better off with a proper man. The phone rang almost as soon as I’d hit the Enter button. It was Veronica, of course. She said she didn’t believe me. My note was a transparent ploy to secure your release.”
“So your plan hadn’t worked?”
“I hadn’t expected immediate results. We spoke for nearly an hour, and by the end I could tell that she was beginning to believe. After all, your intrinsic worthlessness is probably the one topic on which I’m best qualified to speak. Then, that evening, I got a chance to reinforce my message, when Tom Hunt knocked on the door, armed with some cock-and-bull story about discovering your car. I made sure the living room door was wide open, giving Veronica a clear view, and then began telling him how wonderful he was. Sobbing on his shoulder, running my hands over his manly chest, marveling at what good shape he’s in compared to you. He was lapping it up. I had to get rid of him in the end, because his hands had started wandering rather too purposefully in the direction of my breasts, but I was pretty confident I’d made my point by then. And obviously I had, because less than twenty-four hours later I got a call from the people running this place to say that the AGE system no longer requires your services. You’ve been replaced by someone more suitable.”
“You mean …” I said, but before I could finish my question five male nurses burst into the room, the struggling figure of Tom Hunt carried between them. He was tightly bound and gagged, but was still wriggling and kicking enough to make his feelings about the situation pretty clear.
“Hello Tom,” said Helen. “What an unexpected pleasure.”
“I need you two out of here now,” said the head nurse, who was busy preparing to inject Tom with something. “The AGE system is threatening havoc unless we get this man wired up right now.”
“You mean that’s it?” I said. “We can just go?”
“That’s right. But please don’t contemplate telling anyone about your experiences. Not unless you want to spend the rest of your lives committed to a military psychiatric ward.”
“Goodbye,” I said, bending down to speak to Tom, who was now pinned firmly to the floor by three of the nurses. “This time I really don’t think we’ll be seeing each other again.” I stood up and took Helen’s hand, leading her towards the door. “And now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I probably owe my wife a drink.”
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