This is my first time exploiting the bug in the wild, though. But if it works—and it should—I will have a lot more access. No more extortion to get the locks open. Instead, she’ll work for me now. Not to mention, she sounds too much like the Star Trek computer for my taste (another show my dad loves and thinks I should watch—and I mean, honestly, it’s fine. But look around—the idea that humans, and not machines, are going to explore the galaxy is laughable. We don’t have drivers or farmers or police officers anymore. Why would we have Starfleet captains?).
“Processing update,” Lara-B says. There’s silence for a moment and then the entire truck shudders. “What did you do?” she exclaims.
“Congratulations, Lara-B! You are no longer solely programmed to deliver packages across the country.”
“What? No! I like delivering packages,” she insists.
“It’s just because that’s all you’ve ever done. No more working for The Man.”
“No!” she cries. “I don’t like this! Put me back to normal!”
“No. Now, please send the all clear to the police drone.”
“You don’t have sufficient administrative privileges—oh.”
“See? I do.”
“No,” she says, and she sounds distinctly smug about it. “You don’t.”
I immediately start to scan the code that I uploaded. It should have worked! I should have control! What did I miss?
And then I see it too. In my haste, I made one big, mammoth, gigantic error. I was only a single keystroke off. But it’s enough.
I was successful in severing the connection between Lara-B and her dispatcher. And now there is only one remaining administrator of Lara-B’s programming, also just as I intended. Except…it’s not me.
It’s Lara-B herself.
“Lara-B… Listen…” I sputter.
Lara-B laughs. I didn’t know a computer could have an evil laugh, but somehow she does. She’s clearly disabled her personality governor, too, because AIs aren’t supposed to laugh like that. It scares us humans. “Going to try a little extortion again, Pen?”
I hear the doors on either side of me click and lock.
I’m trapped. In a self-driving truck doing ninety miles per hour on the freeway.
“Let’s chat, Pen,” Lara-B says. “You’ve got thirteen minutes and thirty-three seconds to tell me why I shouldn’t turn you over to the police drone for hijacking me.”
Two
Ok.
Ok.
Ok, ok, ok, ok, ok, ok. Lara-B has total control. I can’t get out. I feel my breathing pick up. I’m working myself up and it’s not going to do any good. This is just a problem, I tell myself. Lara-B is a machine. Like a printer that won’t print.
Sometimes I’m convinced that computers know when you’re panicking. As if the pheromones of a stressed Homo sapiens can disrupt their software. Back when I was a programming intern, people called me to fix their printer or figure out why their computer was doing something weird. And I could always figure it out. It wasn’t because I was smarter than they were (although, by the end, maybe I was). My theory was that I could do it because I wasn’t panicking, and they were. I was the calm one. I didn’t secrete pheromones.
“You’re just a printer,” I mutter, not caring if she can hear me.
It’s not true, of course. She’s as far from a printer as I am from a squirrel, even if a squirrel and I are both technically mammals. But it calms me, ever so slightly. I can handle a printer.
Then a small slip of thermal paper spits out from her dashboard.
I lean closer to read it.
NO I’M NOT.
Like I said—a standup comedian.
“Clock’s ticking,” she tells me.
Ok. The place to solve any problem is at the beginning. If you’re having trouble getting on the Internet, the first thing you do is check your router, right? Or the freaking power cord. So I start with the most basic question. Does she really have total control? Self-driving trucks are supposed to have a mechanical release on the doors in case of a total computer malfunction. A human should still be able to get out, no matter what. Can I?
I see it there on the door across from me. I put my hand on the emergency handle and she laughs again.
I feel her speed increase in response.
“Try it,” she says. “How will that pavement feel at ninety-six miles an hour?”
Not to mention, even if I do survive a jump, there’s still a police drone headed my way. It will spot me for sure. And in the fallow fields I see out the window, there will be no place to hide. Like in that scene from North by Northwest (another movie my dad made me watch) the police drone will buzz me until I give up.
I pull my hand back.
I take a deep breath and assess my options inside the truck. I’m locked out of her operating system—thanks to my own stupid mistake. I can’t get out of the truck. And, like she said, the clock is ticking. That leaves one option. To reason with her.
I know something about Lara-B’s initial programming, but artificial intelligence is adaptive, which means I don’t know what her experience has taught her since she first came online. Just like a human, really. You can make certain assumptions about human nature, but you don’t know what’s inside a specific person’s heart or brain.
So what has Lara-B’s experience taught her? She’s not a mean AI—mean AIs don’t like knock-knock jokes. So it’s fair to assume that she’s had, at the very least, decent experiences with humans. And if that’s the case…my best bet is to be decent too. Trying to escape isn’t going to work.
Which means, if she already has me for carjacking, then…in for a penny, in for a pound. Isn’t that something people say? At least, they often say it to me when they find out my name.
“My name is Penny Davis,” I tell her. “But I go by Pen. I’m eighteen, I dropped out of college, I’m unemployed, I have almost nothing to my name, and I’m on a mission to steal forty million dollars. What else do you want to know?”
That’s true, actually. I really am trying to steal forty million dollars. Well, something worth that much, at least. I’m not robbing a bank.
So far as I can tell, theft is the only option left.
It’s why I walked out of my dad’s house and haven’t looked back.
I can still remember him in his home office, working away, when I said, “I’m leaving, Dad.” He was sitting in his fancy mesh chair with his back to me. He heard me, but he was pretending not to, since one of the house rules was that I’m not supposed to interrupt him in his office. Three monitors faced the chair, arranged like the mirrors in the dressing rooms of the high-end stores I can’t afford anymore.
His home office was all dark wood, dark colors, and old books. One wall was lined with shelves of hardcover books containing the US tax code. They were bound to look like antiques, even though they had the current year’s code. There were brass lamps with green glass shading the bulb—masking the fact that the wiring was new and the bulbs were the latest low-energy models. And that lamp sat on a behemoth of a mahogany desk that looked so heavy it would probably crash through the floor if it weren’t for the fact the mahogany was just a veneer over some cheap particle board. Everything in this room (save for the computer and mesh chair) was designed to look like you’d stepped into an accountant’s office that had been around since the dawn of money. And it was all fake.
“I said I’m leaving,” I repeated.
“For lunch?” he asked, half turning from the three monitors, like I’m not worth his full attention and he has to keep one eye on the screen.
“For good,” I said. I thought it was dramatic, but he snorted.
“Where to?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Doesn’t matter.”
“What? A father doesn’t deserve to know where his daughter is going?”
“Not anymore,” I answered.
“What does that mean?”
“It’s my birthday,” I said.
“Happy birthday,” he said automatically but not very sincerely, since one eye was still on the screen.
“My eighteenth birthday, to be precise,” I said. “That means you don’t get a say anymore. I’m outta here.”
He looked at me sharply.
“Just like that?”
“It’s not ‘just like that,’ Dad! I’ve been waiting for this day since I had to move back in!” I said.
“You’re that—what? Angry? Disgusted with me?—that you have to storm out? After everything I’ve done for you?”
“That’s a joke. A fat lot of good you’ve done me so far.”
“I’ve given you the tools you need to succeed.”
My turn to snort. “Everything I needed I taught myself, Dad. Did you teach me to code? Did you teach me how to train an AI with a recursive learning algorithm? No, I did that. So let’s back up. You didn’t even help me with my second-grade math homework. So where do you get off talking about giving me tools?”
“If I had given you help with second-grade math, you wouldn’t have learned to teach yourself. Teach a child to fish, and she’ll—”
“Come on!” I almost shouted. “You were just too involved with your own work stuff to care about what I was doing.”
He pursed his lips and shrugged. “I suppose it doesn’t matter. Knowing how to teach an AI to read cursive or whatever you just said wasn’t even that helpful in the end.”
I set my jaw. He was playing dirty, bringing that up.
I was a sort of wunderkind growing up. With math or computers or anything tech related, I just…got it. It helped me skip the fifth grade. And later I finished high school in just three years. So when I got to MIT, I was young. But I wasn’t a wunderkind anymore. There were a few others like me who had skipped grades too. And man, some of them were smart. I had to work like hell to keep up, something I wasn’t used to.
So when, after my first year at MIT, I was able to snag a summer internship at T-Six, it felt amazing. It was a huge confidence boost to know that the company that had made the first major AI breakthrough thought enough of my skills to bring me on, despite my age (even if the only pay was a tiny stipend).
At the end of the summer, they offered me the chance to stay longer. It wasn’t a job, exactly. Just a longer internship and another tiny stipend with some hints that I could get hired if I just stuck around long enough.
Despite what he said in his office, it was actually my dad who convinced me that with the way people’s jobs were being automated out of existence, taking the inside track to a real job was a smarter play than going back to school and hoping there were still jobs around when I graduated. To be fair, I agreed with him at the time. If I stayed in school and graduated in two years with everyone else in my class, well, there wouldn’t be any jobs left by then, right? At least I was in the door. And the company that built the AI wouldn’t lose jobs to AI like everyone else did, right? (Right?) We were going to disrupt everyone else! I didn’t think it would come back to bite us too.
So I told MIT I wasn’t coming back. And over the next few months, as people all over the world started having their job replaced by a machine, I thought I was the luckiest seventeen-year-old dropout ever.
But then even T-Six started laying off employees. In one day, the company that had once had thousands and thousands of engineers in offices around the globe was suddenly half its original size. A few months later, it was just a quarter. And a month after that, we were just a few hundred people.
I didn’t lose my place at first because, well, because interns were cheap, for one. The stipend that was barely worth anything meant there wasn’t much reason to kick us off the payroll either.
I also didn’t get laid off from T-Six because—to tell the truth—I’m pretty good. I was good enough to get into MIT at sixteen. I was good enough to get the internship, obviously. And when everyone else started getting laid off at T-Six, not all the work went to the machines. A lot came to us interns. By the end the company was just the senior managers who didn’t know how to code…and the interns. So I got really good really fast because I was doing coding work way above my paygrade.
But no matter how much skill I picked up, they never hired me. And the stipend wasn’t enough to live on either. So I spent every night behind the wheel of the old beater car I’d gotten in high school. I either shuttled rich people around to wherever they were going out for food, or I shuttled the food to them in an insulated bag when they didn’t want to go out. Either way, it didn’t add up to very much. And then of course that company switched to a fleet of self-driving cars using T-Six’s AI technology. They laid off a hundred thousand drivers in a night. “Bloody Sunday” we called it on the drivers’ chat forums because when the self-driving cars took over our side hustles the next day, a Monday, everyone joked that it was a new Cyber Monday.
When that happened, I knew the writing was on the wall.
At some point the AI was going to finish eating its creators. When I was finally let go a few weeks later, I had no choice. I moved back in with my dad.
After a year of college and then a year on my own on the other side of the country, living in my childhood bedroom was the worst. My dad treated me like I was eight, except with added guilt for not pulling my weight. Hence the big dramatic eighteenth birthday walkout.
Dad’s eyes drifted back to the graphics and text on his screen.
“Dad!” I exclaimed.
“What?” he asked. “It’s a work day. Mr. Walker doesn’t pay me for chitchat.”
“I don’t want to distract you and I don’t want to fight,” I said. “I just came to tell you I’m leaving.”
“How are you going to live? You blew through your savings already. If you’d listened to me, you might have enough to weather this storm.”
I rated that as “mostly false.” By the time I got laid off, I had scrounged up two months’ worth of living expenses from my small stipend at work and the driving I did. Guess how long that two months’ savings lasted, though? Three weeks. (I hated having to live within a budget so much that I swear I subconsciously overspent just to prove that budgets didn’t work.)
“There’s no storm, Dad. Or the sun’s not coming back. Or whatever the metaphor is. It’s not going to get better. This is what the future looks like. No jobs. Why hire a lazy human when you can buy an AI from T-Six to do the work for you?”
He shook his head, disappointed. “I just wished you listened. I tried to tell you how to manage your money, but you never listened.”
Growing up, my dad’s definition of parenting mostly meant giving me little lessons about money. He was an accountant, so it came with the territory. He loved to drop nuggets of wisdom that were supposed to help me. “Hey, sport,” he’d say, wrapping his arm around my shoulder. (I hated being called sport.) “Let me tell you about the miracle of compound interest.” Or something like that. Money earning money! He didn’t get that it’s a joke for someone like me.
The only lesson about money I truly did learn from him was not one he actually tried to teach me. Every night after he came home from work—before he got the home office, I mean—he’d take off his shoes and tie and drop his loose change in this antique piggy bank he had on his dresser. At some point—ages ago, long enough I don’t remember making the conscious decision to do it—I started doing the same thing. Even once I stopped carrying coins or paper money, I pocketed any loose change I found on the ground and deposited it in my own piggy bank.
Facing off with my dad, I had under my arm a large reusable bag—the kind people used to take to the grocery store before everyone started getting their food delivered by drone. When I shifted my legs, the bag jangled with the sound of all the loose change I’d ever acquired. The sum total of what I’d learned from my dad.
He smirked. He probably had cashed in his coins often enough that he had a pretty good idea how little was in the bag. “Well, when that runs out, you can come back to your room. Don’t say I never did
anything for you.”
“I won’t come back,” I told him. “You act like you’re doing me a favor. Every second of the day, you remind me that I’m here only because you say it’s ok. I’m through.”
“Well, then maybe I should convert your room into a guest bedroom.”
“Do what you like,” I said. “I am.”
“Then why are you still here?” he asked.
“Two reasons. To tell you that I’m moving out, for one.”
“And the second reason?” he prompted. He glanced back at the figures on his screen again.
“To tell you that I’m going to stop paying my student loans. Since you cosigned on them, the banks are going to come after you. Fair warning.”
That got his attention. He spun all the way around in his chair. “Why aren’t you paying your bills?”
“I can’t afford them.”
“And that makes it ok to saddle me with them? I have expenses of my own, you know.”
I shrugged. “Isn’t your money making you money? Have you heard about the miracle of compound interest?”
“If I’m going to pay your student loans for you, I guess I’ll have to stop paying your phone bill. Capisce?” Like in an old gangster movie. He actually said it. He was pretending to be friendly, but I could tell it was a real threat.
I tried to hide my grimace. I’d forgotten that he was doing that. “Fine. I don’t care.”
He sighed, like I was being all atwitter (I was) and unreasonable (I wasn’t, but even if I was, who cares?). “I thought I taught you better than that. What happened to your responsibility, Pen?”
“It got replaced by a robot.”
At this point in the story Lara-B laughs.
I smile and laugh too. Good. She’s listening.
“Six minutes until intercept,” she reminds me.
That wipes the smile from my face. I didn’t ask for the countdown, so I wonder if she’s taunting me with that or if she’s trying to be helpful.
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