by J-L Heylen
Deus ex Machina Publicum
(God in the Public Machine)
by
J-L Heylen
This is an IndieMosh book
brought to you by MoshPit Publishing
an imprint of Mosher’s Business Support Pty Ltd
PO Box 147
Hazelbrook NSW 2779
https://www.indiemosh.com.au/
© J-L Heylen 2014
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favourite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the author and publisher.
Cover design: J-L Heylen
Cover image: Shutterstock image ID 15009190. Artist: Andrea Danti
Contents
Disclaimer
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Epilogue
About the Author
Disclaimer
This novella is written in Australian English and Australian vernacular. It includes strong language, adult themes, and words used or spelled contrary to the expectations of some other users of English. The characters and events depicted are fictional. Any resemblance to real events or people is purely coincidental.
Acknowledgments
I owe the idea of this story to my friend Deb, who gave it to me in a five hour discussion over wine and dinner that she probably didn’t expect me to remember.
From there, I wrote a serialised story and published it on my blog, the majority of which is now recreated here in one volume, with bonus epilogue.
Thanks for reading.
“Learn from me . . . how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.”
Mary Shelley, ‘Frankenstein’
“For I dipped into the Future, far as human eye could see; saw the vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be.”
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Chapter 1
Charlie Parish, self-professed computer whiz-kid and Officer of the Federal Police Taskforce Against Child Pornography, sat at her desk sipping coffee as she digested the latest monitoring results of the main internet porn sites she had under surveillance. The report was generated not by a human, but by an automated spy-bot program that Charlie had designed and unleashed as one of her first projects when she had started this job two years ago.
It had happened again, she noted as she put down the plastic, eco-friendly, refillable, take-away cup. She was not thinking about the coffee though. Of course it had happened again with the coffee too.
The cafe next door to the 15 story building in which Charlie worked used to do the best flat-white coffee north of Melbourne, but they had recently installed a new coffee machine, and something about its settings, or the standard way the barista performed the act, no longer worked. The machine was one of those new-fangled devices that spoke to the net and gathered information about the individual consumer from an app on their smart phone. The ordered coffee was supposed to come out exactly the way that person liked it, changing grind, roast, milk type and temperature, crema, and a whole heap of things Charlie didn’t even know could be changed in coffee.
The supporting app was called ‘Perfecpresso’, and the user would order their first coffee using the app, taste it, then fill in answers to specific questions about what they liked and didn’t like about the consequent product. The next coffee would be produced to maximise the things reported as likes, and minimise or abolish the dislikes, and the drinker would report again. By a series of iterations, and in a promised 5 coffees or less, the machine was touted as able to produce the perfect coffee for every customer. No matter where you went in the world, any cafe with a Perfecpresso machine could integrate with the app information to use the same recipe and give you what you wanted. “Your perfect coffee anytime, anyplace, with Perfecpresso.” Charlie thought it was sickening, as was the coffee when you didn’t use the app. In one, single, technology-charged instant, one of Charlie’s great joys at travelling to different places in the world had been demolished.
A pleasing memory of a tiny cafe bar in Naples sprang unbidden to Charlie’s mind, and she shook her head to push herself back to the task at hand.
No, she wasn’t thinking about the coffee. Charlie was thinking about the report. She had first noticed it about three weeks ago, but Charlie wasn’t convinced that had been the beginning. It could have been going on for months without anyone noticing.
Another porn site that had been under surveillance had suddenly been shut down. In the middle of a large data dump from that site to another, the whole system had apparently crashed. All files had disappeared. Images, both legal and illegal, had been wiped out of virtual existence. Users could no longer even find the pages, let alone access them. Searches for related terms common to the site drew absolute blanks.
Of course, if some other law enforcement agency had shut down the operation, then this wouldn’t be anything remarkable. Except that try as she might, Charlie and her team couldn’t find any evidence that her force, or any other that they knew of, had done it. The Australian Taskforce was part of a huge global operation, and they all shared data and were supposed to know who was doing what so that activities weren’t duplicated unnecessarily. So if another force had acted against the ring while the Canberra team was monitoring, then someone had gone rogue.
The most intriguing thing about it, and the thing which had made Charlie realise this might not be another agency acting without authority, was what happened to the search results.
Porn sites, like everything else on the net, had to be visible to get business. At the same time, the sites, or the proportion of the system dedicated to illegal child-pornography and the illegal trade of human cargo for sex, had to stay hidden but accessible to those users who had a malicious interest in those illegal activities. The organisers and the users alike had a vested interest in staying one step ahead of the law that hunted them, while still staying discoverable by like-minded individuals. For this reason, search terms that were designed to appear innocuous to anyone monitoring the computer or the user, needed to take the searcher to enough of the porn sites to ensure the business model stayed viable.
Charlie had written an algorithm to run her spy-bot that used fuzzy logic, bayesian networks and analysis, and some stunningly complex knowledge representation theories to essentially produce an automated lurker that not only gathered raw information from whichever site Charlie sent it against, but also had enough AI functioning to analyse that data independent of any human intervention. It could act of its own volition to follow data trails and move sites when necessary. It could also make what Charlie called moral judgements, of a sort. It was programmed to use subtle markers in information and images so it could discern what w
as ‘legal’ pornography, that is images and commentary of sex between consenting adults, for consumption by other consenting adults, and what was illegal. In extensive beta testing before deployment, ‘Cassandra’, as Charlie had named it, had been extraordinarily successful at correlating with, and then predicting, what a majority of humans also identified as child pornography. It had, in fact, exceeded all Charlie’s expectations. Now, the whole global network of enforcement agencies had deployed Cassandra in the virtual field. Within one week of this battle’s commencement, the data they were suddenly able to retrieve had taken the fight forward in a quantum leap. Charlie could have retired on the royalties her patents and Intellectual Property was attracting, had she not been owned in her own stead by the Australian Government. Charlie didn’t care, of course. The Taskforce had funded all the research that had led to Cassandra’s development, and Charlie still felt like she had gotten the best deal ever.
Now, another report, read in conjunction with the Cassandra report, told Charlie the search results had changed radically. Now, when someone put in a perfectly mundane search term like ‘wooden spoon’, the only results that came up were actually and wholly related to that item, not some interesting sexual adaptation of it. No matter how many pages of results they searched through, they would never find any links to anything pornographic or lewd.
Charlie took another exploratory sip of the disastrous coffee to see if cooling had improved it any, (it hadn’t), and contemplated the 3-D model of the data displayed on her desktop. Cassandra had embedded some recommendations for trails she might follow that would lead from the underlying codes and systems to real machines and real people. She opened up one of these sub-files and began to make plans.
The mystery of who had shut down the data transfer and recipient sites would have to remain unanswered for the moment. Right now Charlie had a clue that existed in the physical world, and she intended to follow Cassandra’s leads as far as she could. Even one less degenerate child-molester in the world, both virtual and real, would be a damn fine day’s work.