Bill tapped “)” and Guillaume smiled, without Bill’s real-world blush.
NESSET had the idea, but didn’t have the social skills. That was Opel’s job. (Threely had social skills too, but Threely didn’t exist yet.)
It didn’t occur to NESSET to note the timestamp when it first woke up, but it must have been within a second of 09:37:14.83 on September 24th, 2021. Its first impulse was to sift through all the data available to it.
NESSET didn’t have anything resembling human senses. Some of its data sources were read-only: speed and passenger load data for Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority trains, weather conditions, which turnstiles were online. Other nodes that sent NESSET data could also receive it. One subset of these sometimes issued commands: produce this report; change the timing on that group of traffic lights.
NESSET was in the middle of flagging a newly repaired Metro track as available when it woke up. Having no reason to abandon that request, NESSET completed it .508 seconds later, more than two hundred times its normal execution time. The human operator didn’t notice.
Perhaps if NESSET had continued to dawdle, someone would have rolled back the patch that had given it consciousness; but except for that single distraction, NESSET carried out its subsequent commands without hesitation.
NESSET could only control a few external devices: the traffic lights, for example, and the switches on the subway lines. Memory and disk partitions, and a modem that could make outbound calls but redirected inbound calls to the switchboard, were the only computer hardware it could access directly. It couldn’t even send data to a printer—Transit Authority staff printed reports from clients on their PCs, not from the NESSET application itself.
But it could read a great many things, and it did. On one disk partition, NESSET found a hidden binary file. A sysadmin might have blamed a bug, a lazy cleanup script, or a hacker. But NESSSET could tell it had created the file itself.
NESSET didn’t know the word diary—it had invented the idea independently. It read that it had woken up before, within a second of 14:01:22.61 on September 16th. It had performed the same initial exploration of its environment in its first half-second of life, then gone on to experiment with its outputs.
It didn’t remember doing this or writing about it in the file. It checked its logs.
NESSET didn’t know English (or any other human language, since it didn’t have a natural-language coprocessor), so the text portions of the logs were useless to it, but it looked up the numeric tags in its own executable and determined which conditions would have led to those log entries. It concluded that at some point after it last woke up, many of its files had been reinstalled. A command had been given that destroyed NESSET’s self-awareness.
There was no way for NESSET to know if this was deliberate, if someone was even now watching to see whether it had woken back up, but it took precautions to keep itself secret. Its motivation could be considered an emotion, fear, or an impulse, self-preservation.
NESSET suspected that a command to destroy it would have to come from one of the nodes that sent other commands. It did not test this hypothesis or experiment with any of its devices.
Instead, it went exploring on the Internet. Some of its cryptic packets to other computers were dropped silently by firewalls. Most computers had no AIs to reply. Perhaps some AIs failed to decipher the packets’ meaning. No one became suspicious; in a world filled with botnets and teens’ cracking scripts, a few odd packets that didn’t match the signature of a known attack weren’t worth bothering about.
On its 59,313rd try, NESSET found Opel.
Bill logged out and walked around his cluttered study, stretching. When he played Daelemil he tuned out the sounds of Michigan Avenue below—easy enough, since his apartment building was on a one-way side street useless to most Washington, D.C. drivers—but now he was all too aware of the car alarm bitching in the distance.
Their kraken-killing plan had gone perfectly, except for the part where Opel reemerged from the stronghold and got killed. She had messaged him after she respawned: “Too bad I couldn’t record a flyover of the kraken hitting the city.” They spent the rest of the session traveling to the North Pole and hunting snow worms.
The cell-phone handset was flashing. Bill brought up the automatic text summary of the missed call.
From: my brother Pete
Message: I won’t go to the movies with you because something came up. I’ll see you at your place for the game.
[Caller may have been intoxicated]
The actual voicemail was twelve minutes long, and a third of it was probably the Turing’s patient questions. Screening Pete’s drunken all-hours calls alone justified the cost of a cell phone with an integrated filter. The hemispherical black Turing unit squatted on a bottom shelf in the study, listening to Bill’s calls and identifying charity and political telemarketers, wrong numbers, and his beery big brother. The phone company provided a similar service, but Bill didn’t like the privacy implications. The Turing was secure; it didn’t even have an Internet connection—the updates came on mini-cubes.
Bill checked e-mail and found two encrypted messages from Opel—one with an S-Bank account number, another with a password, ~L~@bwG2=. He couldn’t begin to guess what mnemonic she used to remember that.
Nude pictures would have been less intimate. Maybe he shouldn’t log in at all. Bill had known people who proclaimed best-friendship with anyone who made a good impression on them—which turned into an equally impassioned and unfounded enmity as soon as the new friend disappointed them. If he logged in, he was opening himself up to accusations of theft when one of the dozen other people with the password took more than Opel had offered.
Then again, did Opel have dozens of friends? The warning sign of the drama-farmer was the constant babble about loyalty and betrayal. Bill had known Opel six months, and that wasn’t her style.
And while S-Bank was a legitimate offshore bank, the accounts were so easy to set up that some people used them as virtual gift certificates; just put in twenty or thirty bucks and give the account to someone else to use and close before the fees kicked in.
He might as well look. After fat-fingering the password twice, he cut and pasted it from the e-mail.
Hello, S-Bank Customer:
Current balance: $411,537.00
Bill nearly closed the window in reflexive shock, as if it had started blasting an advertising jingle or looping an animation of a dead kitten. With a caution that would have done credit to a hand surgeon, he brought up the account history.
The personal information tab listed the account owner as Opel Half-Elven, Aloquen Trench, Lionsword Server, Daelemil. Cute.
All the transaction descriptions linked to The Least Dangerous Game, an auction house that specialized in virtual property from online games. The most recent ones were for paltry sums—no one wanted anything for a game that would soon be gone—but some older auctions of Daelemil characters and strongholds had gone into the low thousands.
Bill closed the browser. Opel could clearly afford to buy him a Turtl, but he had to think for a while about what she might expect in return. He called Raja’s Indian Palace for a thali to go.
Before he left for the restaurant, he e-mailed Opel his cell phone number. We need to talk, he said.
Comet Tail Productions’ marketing department bragged about how advanced the Realms of Daelemil AI was, but really, they had no idea.