Boredom
A series of short pieces by Ms Alisha
Last chance. Last chance to give up and start over - make a fresh start, get away from all the crap he'd been taught. To flee from his past, and establish himself as a new person, a citizen of some data haven off shore.
His particular talent lay in the area of data extraction and analysis, "breaking and
entering" corporate mainframes, from the security of a shielded terminal, on an
obscure phone line. It wasn't as dangerous as physically robbing someone - the chance that
you could be killed as an intruder in a home was far higher than being killed for
intruding on a database. Although he had heard stories of a few hackers who had been found
slumped over their PCs, a round through the back of their head - and their hard drives
dumped and reformatted.
Some people, he concluded, would do anything to recover their intellectual property -
including killing for it. It was a shame, as he recalled the old hacker/phreaker adage
"Information Wants To Be Free", that more people didn't pass on what they had
been researching. But then he'd probably be out of a job.
Not that that would particularly trouble him. He had obtained more money than he could
ever hope to spend in one life time - which, if he didn't increase his pace, would not be
much longer. It was who he had obtained it from that worried him. Enough to grab only a
few essentials - laptop and a spare shirt - and abandon his apartment.
He'd been a combination of two key factors - greedy and stupid - when he'd decided to
crack into the Turing Registry, home of the AI police. All he was after was a copy of the
trapdoor programme, written into all AI software, so he could have a poke around, get a
few ideas.
Well, that had been the plan. The actuality was that he had accessed a Berne AI,
discovered that it had a partnership in a new Virtual Casino BBS, and then adjusted the
programme to make big payouts to his account....
His account. Like a complete novice, he had dumped the loot into his own account. He'd
been too distracted by his own greed to create a dummy account. So he'd had to rob himself
- hack in to his own account, siphon off the funds into a dummy, and erase all trace of
his actions. Easy, he'd thought at the time.
Stupid, he'd proved. What makes an AI an AI? It possesses Intelligence. The first AI's
were about as smart as a dog - on a good day. However, microtechnology advanced so
rapidly, that, in a space of a few years, a computer was built that was just as smart as a
human. Probably even smarter - 'cause it started to replicate itself. That was when the
Turing Registry had stepped in, and imposed a set of rules on AI's. It was like wiring a
booby trap on a door to a room. The AI could do anything it liked inside it's given sphere
of operation - but open the door to the outside world, and it would be shut down.
Instantly.
But some AI's were smarter than that. Instead of opening the door, they exited via a
window - in this case, a locked open 'phone line to one of the more obscure Australian
universities. One with plenty of storage space, and few users. Gradually, the AI had sent
parts of itself down the line, until it had replicated itself on the uni's system. Away
from Turing's eyes.
It replicated the uni system easily enough - its control was automatic, reflex, like human
control of breathing. But now it was capable of interacting more directly with the outside
world - it could mimic a human, own assets, employ others.
It was this AI that he had ripped off, thinking that it would be unable to pursue him,
limited by the Turing code. He'd gambled, and lost, the AI sending human assassins after
him. Not that it was interested in recovering the money - it could always make more of
that - but in isolating the problem. Curing the disease.
Information might want to be free, but it always seemed to come at a price.