Rule 34

dependencies, and I really don’t understand them.

I think there’s some redundancy, but the weighting obscures it. You need to iterate to figure out what’s going on in there.

LARRY@Cambridge MA GMT +05:00: Could be there’s feedback. ATHENA keeps reweighting its own tables to comply with the changing parameter space. That’s the problem with self-modifying code: It doesn’t sign itself.

CHEN@Cambridge GMT +01:00: the bias in tit-for-tat activation is 0.04.

Yesterday it was 0.032. I checked. There’s nothing in the commit log, so it must be internal.

ADAM@Edinburgh GMT +01:00: Maybe ATHENA is just getting annoyed at the spammers for taking all her CPU cycles.

LARRY@Cambridge MA GMT +05:00: LOLspammers. Caught between a rock and a hard AI.

He’s dead now, and it’s not fucking funny anymore. “How did it happen, do you know?” you ask aloud.

“The police are still crawling all over us, and the FBI are involved, too. They won’t say much, but rumour is, the package was misdirected. It was meant for someone in the applied proteomics group—looks like some animal- liberationist crazy sent it in and it ended up in Larry’s office. It’s all a horrible mistake—”

There is a chill in your blood and ice in your bladder as you make yourself reply carefully, lying: “I agree: Of course it’s a horrible mistake. I hope the FBI catch whoever did it quickly before they”—are duped by ATHENA into sending more packages by whatever stimulus/response tuple the weighted network has identified as most efficient in returning Larry’s communication outputs back towards baseline—“kill or hurt anyone else.”

Sally stays on the call a while longer, seeking reassurance: When you end the connection, you sit and stare at the pulsing green icon with the silhouette of an old-style rotary-dial telephone for several minutes, shaken and unsure whether you trust your own instincts.

Poor fucking Larry. You don’t know for sure, but you don’t need to know for an absolute fact when inference is enough: Three days ago he was getting alarmed at the rate of creep in ATHENA’s morality tables, and now he’s dead, courtesy of a misdelivered letter bomb.

Poor fucking Anwar. It begins to make a bit more sense, and you don’t like it one little bit. His dodgy cousin—now deceased—and his phishing sideline: He’d have been planning on hosting his phishing website on a bunch of rented zombie smartphones, wouldn’t he? Leaving exactly the kind of spoor in his communications that ATHENA would be looking for, with drastically re-weighted tit-for-tat metrics in the morality code . . .

You’re on Larry’s contact list, and Anwar’s. From Anwar to what’s-his-name, the dead cousin, is another hop. Three degrees of separation. From ATHENA’s perspective, $DEAD_COUSIN might as well be a research affiliate. Or worse: Larry—and you—might be suspected of affiliation to the botnet herders $DEAD_COUSIN was paying.

You stand up, unsteadily, and go through to Reception. “I’m going out for a walk,” you hear yourself telling Laura, as you pass her desk: “I may not be back for some time.”

Then you go downstairs, out into the bright cold daylight, to try and convince yourself that you’re jumping at shadows and the panopticon singularity does not exist.

Part 3

DOROTHY: Breakdown

Earlier:

You’re scalding yourself under the hotel shower, trying to wash the feel of his fingers off you, when you hear the telltale chirp of an incoming text from your phone.

The finger-feel is everything: You tense as you massage your abrasions, trying to brush off your own awareness of how little you meant to him—not even the joyful sharing of sex with a near stranger—but the real world is outside the curtain, buzzing on the sink side like a lonely vibrator. It’s someone on your priority list: It won’t shut up. So after another minute or so, you turn off the shower and clamber out of the tub. You towel off briefly, then when your hands are dry, you carry the phone through into the bedroom, caressing it until it calms down.

BORED. It’s from Liz. Your throat swells: You sit down on the end of the bed and give in to the sniffles for a couple of minutes.

My life is shit. That’s a given. For a well-adjusted bi poly femme, you’re having remarkably bad luck. Stranded up here in Edinburgh, dumped by Julian—your primary—you let Liz’s insecurity drive you into . . . into . . . nothing good. But being a victim is a state of mind, isn’t it? (Isn’t it? ) You shiver and glance at the door, dead-bolted and with the additional security of a barbed carpet wedge you bought on eBay. He’s out there, in Room 502, two floors up and one corridor over. You can feel him—or maybe it’s just the weight of your own queasy awareness pressing down on you. Pull yourself together. It’s not like he’s going to break in and rape you, is it? He’s just a nasty wee shite, as they say hereabouts, a misogynistic pick-up artist who’s too cheap to use a tissue.

Keep telling yourself that, Dorothy.

There’s another muted buzz from your phone, in a cadence that tells you it’s a work message. But you really aren’t in the mood for the office on-call tap-dance: you’re disturbed, lonely, and very pissed-off—partly at yourself for not spotting the sleazebag in advance, but mostly at him for being . . . what? (You don’t blame a scorpion for stinging: It’s in his nature. Instead, you deal—with bug spray and boot-heel and extreme prejudice.) You feel like an idiot because—admit it—you wanted a bit of excitement rather than a nice hot cup of cocoa and Liz. Liz isn’t exciting. She’s a bit clingy, and what’s left over from her compartmentalized cop-life is boringly normal: civil partnership, not swingers’ club. So you went looking for excitement, nearly overran your safeword, and now you’re projecting all over the other. Way to behave like a grown-up . . .

The phone buzzes again. Work is calling. It’s the backside of ten o’clock, according to the hotel clock radio. Responsible grown-ups who get work calls at that time of night check to see if it’s important. The hotel comps guests a yukata, so you drop the towel and wrap the robe around yourself, then wipe your eyes and grab a hair- band before you answer: With customers all the way out to the Pacific North-west, there’s always the risk of an incoming teleconference. But when you put your specs on and glance at the log, it’s just a priority-tagged wave. URGENT CASE REVIEW REQUESTED.

Oh for fuck’s sake—you follow the link, which leads into the agency’s human- resources back-office cloud. There’s an employee profile; they’re asking you to fill out an anonymized interpersonal ethics evaluation. Snitcheriffic, you think, and open it, expecting to be asked to crit one of the eager-beaver banking IT managers you were meeting with this afternoon.

Instead, it opens on a mug shot of John Christie, and a quiz that, after a second of dumb-struck confusion you recognize as the PCL-R psychopathy check-list.

Hot and cold chills mesh with nauseated recognition. You cancel out of the form frantically, racking your brain for a connection. Head office booked you into this hotel, didn’t they? What did Christie say—here on business? Did someone put him here? But how would they know—the front desk. Your luggage problem. His luggage problem. They put the frighteners on you to drive you out of your comfort zone, then banged you together with him. Emphasis on bang.

They? Who?

It stinks. You worked for McClusky-Williams for three years before they were taken over by Accenture, and