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Alex.local ->Boss: <sm>Checking...Nothing here, and I have at least read-
access to the personality templates for every public indy. Training and PID assign-
ment is, of course, another matter.</sm>
So either Pandora's great-grandmother was one of hundreds who puttered and
failed to develop old-timey “artificial intelligence”, or we had something very spe-
cial on hand. Only one way to find out.
I noticed Pandora, still in my doorway, watching me interact with the network. At
least fifteen seconds had elapsed since our last exchange, maybe more. The thought
dawned on me: she didn't understand silent messaging. Her life never involved inter-
actions with indys. To her, when something needed doing, you paid an honest-to-god
human being do it.
I stood and extended a handshake. “Thank you kindly for what I'm sure will
be an interesting case,” I told her. “Let me assure you that I will personally handle
this case—with a human touch.” At these words she smiled and produced a business
card with a deft flick of her wrist. The card blinked back and forth between her name
and the number for an antique voice-only telecom system where, I had no doubt, a
human secretary would answer the line.
Her departure let me concentrate fully on the task at hand. CodeMonkey was
already permutating sandboxed Virtual Machines to narrow down the environment
needed to compile the code. What she came up with was a reasonable fit for that
era, but variant from anything mentioned in a public spec. The CPU architecture
was from the defunct Manticore Corporation, with a few tweaks.
Boss ->CodeMonkey.local: <sm>This could be a hot one, so be careful.</sm>
CodeMonkey.local ->Boss: <sm>I was born careful.</sm>
In other words, her usual cocky self. I could smell the sensation of heavy usage on
the local node as the emulator spun up and the fans kicked in. Then it was running.
The program couldn't silent-message with me; the best it could do is log a message
to my console:
>i see you opened a chat session would you like to administer the turing test
Boss ->CodeMonkey.local: <sm>Quaint. The Turing Test was dismissed as junk
science long before my time.</sm>
The odd thing was, CodeMonkey didn't snap back with a rejoinder. I checked the
Cloud, and usage spiked up as high as I'd ever seen it. Every node within five hops
was saturated with requests. I drummed my fingers on my desk for a few seconds,
which is a disturbingly long time for an indy.
Boss ->CodeMonkey.local: <sm>Well?</sm>
No reply.
Boss ->CodeMonkey.local: <sm>CodeMonkey, respond.</sm>
Nothing.
Boss ->Hurd.local: <sm>Hurd, what's going on with CodeMonkey?</sm>
Again, no response. I felt adrenaline's icy wave wash up my spine.
Boss ->*.local: <sm>Anyindy, please respond.</sm>
Troubling silence. I had a manual virus checker that I hadn't run in years. The
thing about indys, at least the ones I worked with, was that they
hated
viruses. At the
slightest hint of an infection, any indy worth their bits would quarantine themselves
in the name of public health, so infections were unheard of. I stumbled through the
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