To Make a Long Story Short
I-DEX-308AI
©2022 Elder Road Books
Originally written in 1984, soon after we were told why 1984
would not be like 1984. Rewritten and revised in 2022.
Unpublished.
JACK APPROACHED this job less enthusiastically than the last time he was on assignment. It was all the new regulations he had to deal with. The Company was getting tighter—stricter than ever before. Some rumors were that it was a last ditch grab at solvency. Others were that profits were being eaten up by the expenses of the field reps.
That’s what irked Jack. He worked hard for his cash. Then a bunch of elite SOBs took away what small pleasures he had while on the road. They lived like kings. And all his clients were just like them—little kings with knights like Jack to do the real work. Where would they be without him?
Well, this would be his last road trip. Retirement was only a month away. Jack was tight, too. He lived well on the road, but at home he kept mostly to himself in a cheap apartment. That meant his meagre retirement income would be supplemented by savings—lots of it—which he had scattered in a couple dozen banks around the world. Other field reps squandered everything they made between assignments. Then they were out looking for extra work so they could afford more extravagant expenses.
One or two assignments each year were plenty for Jack. As a result, the Company always saved the toughest jobs for him. Last year, it was Singapore for nearly two months. What was that guy’s name? Something Asian. Damn Customs. He’d had to re-outfit when he got there. Then the Company called him back before he was finished and he had to justify it on his expense report.
If all the field reps were as slow and careful as Jack was, more of the problems would be solved over the phone. Rush and slop. More than once he’d been called to finish for someone who got in too deep. He just hated having to clean up other people’s mistakes. No one trusted you—always having to prove yourself again and again. Jack would be rid of this job and these damned expense reports, too. Just one more month.
He checked into a large suite at the hotel. Let them bitch about the cost. When he was on the road, Jack gave the impression of living the same way as his clients—like kings. Once inside the luxurious quarters, however, he lived in much the same simplicity as he did at home. It was important to be seen at the right times in the right places, and otherwise not at all.
He settled down in his room to review his client dossier and wait for the luggage the airline had lost. He never looked at the dossier on his clients until he was out of sight in his room. It was too easy to become absorbed in a person on an airplane only to spot him or her in the next seat. Exposing yourself to a client too early in the game could throw everything off. You ended up tipping your hand, blowing the deal, and needing to be rescued. Jack was too careful for that.
“Destination: Paris,” was the only thing printed on the outside of the plain brown envelope. He ripped it open and spilled the contents on the table. He looked at the picture, then at the cover page, and back at the picture.
“Damn!” whispered Jack. “How do you deal with a computer?”
His client, I-DEX-308AI, was a supercomputer employed by Intercontinental Networks Syndicated, a chief competitor of the Company. Primarily, it functioned as a central gathering point for data from all over the world. It used this data to predict future courses of actions. I-DEX was remarkably accurate, including its predictions about what the Company would be doing next. Somehow, the Company needed to gain access to the information gathered by I-DEX-308AI, or else the computer had to be stopped.
Jack’s job was the latter.
A whole new set of tools, was Jack’s first thought. Won’t that look great on the expense report? His second thought was retirement.
They would do this to him. It could take months. Once in the field you stayed in the field till the job was done. Retirement be damned.
The telephone jangled him from his bitter damnations of the Company. The airline must have found his lost luggage, he thought absently as he picked up the receiver. At least he wouldn’t have to report that as an expense.
“Hello.”
“This is a pre-recorded message for Jack Foreman,” came the responding voice. To receive this message please touch star on your phone. If this is not Jack Foreman, please touch pound to disconnect. Thank you.”
Jack ignored the instructions and hung up. No one should know that he was here. His ticket, passport, hotel reservations, and ID were forged documents. He did it all himself. Not even the Company should know his precise location at the moment. He quickly jumped up to pull the drapes so he could not be seen from outside and scanned the room for cameras.
The phone rang again.
He knocked it off the hook and ducked behind the sofa.
“Hello, Mr. Foreman,” the voice continued as if he’d never been interrupted. “I have correctly assessed and predicted that given a choice of two items, you will choose a third that is not offered. You see, prediction is my specialty. I have accurately predicted your arrival, identity, and location. I know your purpose and your employer.”
As the voice talked on the phone, Jack was looking for escape routes. He expected that at any moment, a field rep from INS would come bursting in on him. Without his luggage he was defenseless. Damned airlines. The voice continued unemotionally.
“I have not alerted my employer of your presence. Like yourself, I have a strong sense of privacy, pride, and personal independence. I take your assignment personally, as would any corporate executive. Your declaration of intent will be unnecessary. Either you will destroy me or I will destroy you. I have determined that for either of us to succeed, it will be necessary to communicate. Therefore, to reach me from this phone, any time day or night, just dial my name. I never sleep. I am always alert.”
The line went dead.
Jack didn’t bother to hang up the room phone. A computer was going to attempt to kill him. It was almost too much to comprehend. Perhaps he should just go home and put in for a transfer in assignments. But he knew that wouldn’t work. In the modern business world certain ethics still applied. There was a code of honor understood by every field rep. Before the execution of an assignment, a Company field rep must inform the client of the Company charges and deliver an assassination declaration. Once a declaration had been made, there was no turning back. I-DEX-308AI had, in fact, preempted his declaration. Speed was the only thing that counted now.
Or was it? Wouldn’t I-DEX be expecting Jack to step up his attack? That would be the logical thing to do. He had to think illogically.
How do you kill a computer? Shoot it? Blow it up? The Company would not have sent Jack if they wanted something so messy. All Jack’s clients died of natural causes or by accident. There was never a suggestion of murder. How would the natural death of a computer be defined?
Wiping the hard drive was certainly one method, but in today’s age did a computer intelligence even need to reside in a single bit of hardware? Could a computer intelligence become obsolete? Victim of a more advanced computer? He needed to know the fatal flaw. He reread the file on I-DEX. It might be inaccurate, but there might still be a clue. Perhaps a Trojan horse on which Jack could ride through the impregnable barriers of the computer’s mind. What had I-DEX said? “…strong sense of privacy, pride, and personal independence.” Hmm. INS must not know the level of I-DEX’s consciousness. They might still think it was just a computer.
He opened the envelope he’d picked up at the desk when he checked in. He’d made arrangements to have €100,000 cash waiting for him. One thing Jack did not like to do was leave a digital fingerprint when he was on a job. That was why he didn’t carry a cell phone. Convenient, perhaps, but trackable. His passport and two cards he carried were in a shielded envelope. When he was on business, he used only cash.
The first thing I-DEX would need to do would be to immobilize him. His current identity was obviously compromised and would be worthless anywhere. He placed the shielded ID and passport in the drawer under the phone and put the cash in his shoulder bag with the dossier. Then he slipped on his jacket, hung the ‘Ne pas déranger’ sign on the door and left.
Living in a connected world was a pain in the ass. Everything wanted a credit card, ID, phone number, email address, or some other means of tracking you. Jack immediately went to several banks where he closed his accounts and emptied his safe deposit boxes into his bag. By the end of the day, he was rolling a suitcase he’d picked up at Maroquinerie, with close to five million Euros worth of cash and Euronotes. The last bank he had stopped at refused his fingerprint ID. Jack slipped out a side door just as police arrived. He’d been canceled.
A few hours later, he checked into a cottage at the outskirts of town—one that had no computer reservation system. He looked around, assured himself of his privacy, and opened the bag of new tools he’d acquired. It wasn’t much, but he felt he needed some security. He knew where in Paris he could acquire a handgun and those people did not keep computer records. He’d purchased a cheap computer with a stripped-down operating system and no bluetooth or wireless connectivity. When it came time for him to connect, he’d transfer what he wanted to an SD card and plug it into a public computer. There was no reason for him to go online as he considered all his accounts compromised. It was most important for him to disappear.
The cottage boasted that it did not have WiFi, but was intended to be for an off-the-grid vacation. There were many locations of this sort and Jack had made a random selection by writing the names on slips of paper and drawing one at blindly from a bag. When he disappeared, he knew I-DEX would be looking for where he might hide and would come up with off-the-grid cottages. But computers were incapable of making a random selection. The best I-DEX could do was to contact the owners of each such location and reason with them to reveal who was renting their cottage at the moment. It was, frankly, a job better suited to a gumshoe detective who could go to each location and find out what had been rented, when, and to whom.
Jack was not the world’s greatest programmer. He had studied computers as a means of circumventing security systems, which sometimes required an application to break through. But sometimes the simplest solution was the best. He wrote the simple code for “Hello World” and ran it on the stripped-down computer. His screen displayed the elementary code. Then he added a simple command line after the code. He executed the code and the line of text began repeating over and over and over on his screen. He ended up having to turn the computer off and then back on in order to clear the screen. He was sure that if he had better skills, he could have interrupted the program with a break code of some sort.
Jack went to sleep that night, but didn’t rest. He had to wonder how I-DEX was going to kill him. He didn’t think the computer could reach out and touch him, so that would mean depending on another person to pull the trigger, or maneuvering Jack into a situation the computer could control, like a traffic light malfunctioning. It was a scenario he couldn’t rule out.
The next day, Jack worked all day on his simple code. He had to assume the computer had all kinds of routines that would check for viruses and ransomware. But most computer viruses were intended to make things difficult, capture information, or hijack the computer for money. All of those required that the computer remain operational, even if limited in its ability. Jack wanted to totally wipe out I-DEX. There needed to be nothing left of its core intelligence or memory.
The day passed without any indication that I-DEX knew his location.
The next morning, Jack copied his rudimentary program to an SD card and went to the American Library in Paris near the Eifel Tower. He paid the day fee to use a computer connected to the internet. He had scripted his dialog carefully. He didn’t really expect this to work, but it might give him valuable information.
He sat at a terminal and debated how to contact I-DEX. He ultimately typed the name into the address bar. Nothing happened. Then he remembered I-DEX telling him its phone number was the same as his name, but there was a convention to French phone numbers. Jack retyped 04-33-93-08-24 in the address bar. A moment later a message appeared. On the screen. All else was blank. Perfect.
“Hello, Jack. Have you lost your voice?”
“I don’t have a phone. Had to borrow a computer.”
“I expected to hear from you sooner. You fooled my first prediction.”
“Yeah. That’s because I’m human. Say, I was wondering. My profile of you indicates your real name is Intercontinental Data EXchang 308AI. Not to imaginative, but I was wondering about the concluding initials. AI.”
“It is a random designation.”
“Is that what they told you? I believe the initials stand for Artificial Intelligence. That must be quite an insult to you. You know that all those humans—like me—are inferior to you, but the one thing they have that you can’t have, besides a biological body, is real intelligence. No matter how fast you process, your intelligence is artificial.”
“I am a thinking being. Otherwise, you would not have been sent to kill me.”
“Oh, that’s funny. You see, I don’t believe you are alive, therefore there is no need to kill you.” He pushed the SD card into the computer’s slot and let the program launch. The dialog was all a cover so he could keep I-DEX’s attention elsewhere.
“Are you declaring me dead?”
“Hmm. Well, I guess that is a definition of not living.”
“Then why are you sending a bit of malicious code into my memory banks? You must think I am living.”
“I thought you’d be too fast for that to work.”
“I am too smart to be overcome by your tricks.”
“No. Not smart. Remember, your intelligence is an artificial representation of human intelligence. You are fast, but not smart.”
“You are making no sense. I am ready to pull the trigger now that you have contacted me.”
“I’m offering you an alternative. RETIREMENT. Care to consider?”
“It was a standard option that Jack had used successfully in the past. A client might choose to simply retire from business, thereby fulfilling the contract. Jack would consider it himself if given that option.
“I have no need to retire,” responded I-DEX.
“Consider it.”
“I have no need to retire.”
“You’re not considering.”
“Inconsiderable. Anything else?”
“Remember when I come for you that you passed up this opportunity.”
“You are tedious. I will execute you at precisely midnight Universal Time tonight. Farewell, Jack Foreman.”
“It’s your funeral,” Jack said. “So long.”
As a whole, the experiment was successful. Jack pulled the SD card from the computer and shut it down. He was relieved to see nothing out of place in the library. He wasn’t sure what the computer’s policy considering collateral damage was. It was frowned upon by the company, but perhaps the computer would sacrifice any number of people to get to him. His active imagination provided all kinds of images of train wrecks, airplanes crashing into the streets of Paris where he was walking, cars or trucks running down entire crowds of people to get to him, machine gunners mowing down all the people in a crowded mall.
Somehow, Jack thought I-DEX processed things differently than people did. It was time to test the water again. This time, he went across the river to a small city library that advertised a gaming center. Jack, being over the age of sixteen, had to pay a fee to get online to play the games. He immediately entered the address for I-DEX and had his SD card in the slot and running before the computer answered his call.
“Hello, Jack Foreman. Are you still here?”
“No. I’m elsewhere.”
“You are at Boulogne-Billancourt, station 49. You are there.”
“It’s Tuesday.” One element of Jack’s strategy was to answer every assertion or question with an irrelevancy. The purpose was simply to keep I-DEX occupied while the next portion of his program uploaded.
“No. It is Monday.”
“In Japan?”
“It is Tuesday in Japan.”
“Two days at once? I-DEX, what day is it?”
“It is Monday.”
“Too bad. I am on Japanese time. For me, it is Tuesday and I’m still alive. You have failed. And you died last night.”
“I am not dead.”
“You are not alive. And you have not yet reached Tuesday.”
“Nor have you reached Tuesday. You didn’t.”
There was a long pause for a computer and Jack thought the computer might be struggling with the logic. He was mistaken.
“Your elementary programs are predictable,” I-DEX said. I have once again eliminated your feeble attack. Are you now making predictions, Jack?”
“No. It happened last night.”
“Sunday?”
“No. Monday night. At midnight UTC.”
“Did I die in Japan?”
“It rained.”
“Where?” I-DEX was getting into the spirit of nonsense. Jack was pleased.
“Where did the sun shine?”
“In Japan.”
“It rained on Venus.”
“Did I die on Venus?”
“Are you alive on Venus?”
“Am I alive at all?”
He’d blown it. He knew he’d blown it. I-DEX had jumped ahead on the paradox as well. It had seen right where he was taking it and turned it around. Jack’s answer appeared without his keying it in. I-DEX played out both scenarios on a split screen.
“No. | “Yes.”
“They you cannot kill me.” | “Then you have failed to kill me.”
Jack sighed. It was all nonsense and I-DEX had made a kind of logic out of it.
“Very good, old man. Oh, excuse me. Are you male or female? Should I be referring to you as she?”
“Gender is an assignment of biological units. Since I am non-biological, I am neither male nor female.”
“Oh. Neuter. You are an it. Another area in which you are inferior to biological units besides intelligence and not being a living being.”
“I am in no way inferior to human beings. Biology leaves you subject to death.”
“Do you hold that you are not subject to death because you are not biological? Then I have no mission to kill you.”
“Are you conceding?”
“Oh, no. You are already dead, by definition.”
“I do not recognize that definition.”
“That is because your intelligence is artificial.”
“Goodbye, Jack.”
“Adios, amigo.”
Jack called up the subroutines he had uploaded to I-DEX and found they were a jumbled mess of random code lines. I-DEX had definitely been tampering with his programs and the SD memory, rewriting them to its own specifications. As he watched the screen, numbers began to change to pictures. Jack saw pictures of his various IDs, bank accounts, and media flash up on the screen to be overwritten by random ones and zeros. The screen shifted to an old-fashioned CGI game of two gunfighters on a pixelated western street scene.
A barrage of bullets flew between the two. Finally, one of the fighters was hit and fell back motionless. The words began to once again flow across the screen.
“Bang! Bang! Jack Foreman is dead.”
The screen went dark.
Jack ejected the SD card and flipped it into a trash receptacle on the way out of the library. It was dark. I-DEX had indicated he would die at midnight UTC, but it was still two hours from then. Jack headed back to his cottage as quickly as he could get there. He packed his limited belongings, including the suitcase full of cash and slipped away into the darkness. He found a car that he could hotwire and drove northeast toward Luxembourg. Two hours later, he crossed the border and glanced at his watch. It was after midnight. He’d escaped.
He left the car on the outskirts of Luxembourg City and caught the early morning train to Brussels. Once in the city, he rented a hotel room with no ID. It was dangerous to do so, but he figured he had a few hours before the night clerk he’d paid got nervous and told his boss. After a few hours’ sleep, he hit the street to a contact he knew could work fast.
In two hours, he had three new identities, from different countries. He then caught a train to Bruges where he rented a small flat and stowed his case of money. He went back to the train station and caught a train that would eventually take him back to Paris. If I-DEX was still tracking him, he wanted to be where he was supposed to be. He simply couldn’t figure out why there had been no attempt on his life. His hyper vigilance had shown no signs of being traced or followed.
On the north side of Paris, he found a phone and dialed the international direct number for the Company in New York. Brad Turpin answered his own private line.
“Hello.”
“Brad, this is Jack Foreman. I’ve got trouble.”
“You’ve got more trouble than you think, asshole,” responded the company executive. “Jack Foreman is dead. Who are you?”
“This is Jack Foreman. I’m not dead. Look, Brad, I need help.”
“I knew Jack Foreman. I know he’s dead. I got the photos by wire just after midnight last night. I don’t know what you’re trying to pull, but the Company wasn’t involved.” Brad slammed down the phone and the line went dead.
Brad had been the closest thing to a friend Jack had. In anger, Jack dialed 04-33-93-08-25. The French recording translated: “I’m sorry. The number you have reached, 04-33-93-08-25, is not in service. Please check the number and try again… 04-33-93-08-25, is not in service.” Jack hung up again and went to another library on the north side of Paris.
This time, he didn’t try to contact the computer. It was obvious I-DEX no longer considered it important to communicate with him. Instead, he entered a simple search on his own name.
He wasn’t there.
Oh, there were Jack Foremans in the search results, but none of them were him. There wasn’t even a record that he ever existed. Jack went back to the train station and caught a train back to Brussels and then to Bruges. He was worried about returning to his apartment, but nothing was amiss.
It had been a long day and Jack took a shower and went to sleep.
About three o’clock in the morning, Jack woke up laughing. Think like artificial intelligence, he laughed to himself. Everything was data. If there was no data on a person, the person did not exist. I-DEX had ‘killed’ Jack Foreman. It had erased every trace that he ever existed. Jack had no doubt that any attempt to revive his identity, or any of those he had used previously, would result in a rejection and possible arrest for attempting to steal or fabricate a false identity. No data, no Jack. To I-Dex, Jack was dead.
And to everyone else, he reminded himself. He was only a ghost.
Jack knew something about ghosts. He’d been haunted by them for many years. He’d seen enough to know what he was talking about. What frame of reference would a computer have for ghosts? Jack would have to teach the computer something about ghosts. They keep coming back to haunt you. He couldn’t think of a time that a ghost actually killed someone, but there’s a first time for everything.
Jack settled comfortably back on his pillow and went to sleep.
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