TRUE NUTS (LOST IN AI): 28) THE ULTIMATE WEAPON
Meltdown Monday Madness
Mark Atwood looks up again. Something out of the ordinary catches his eye and prompts a startled double-take. “Holy smokes!” he exclaims, almost falling off his chair. “What the hell is that!?” He points at an orb with one eye and an intergluteal cleft that is hovering near the ceiling.
Emma and I turn our heads to follow the self-proclaimed CIA officer’s wide-eyed gaze.
“Me?” The bubble winks. “I’m Quirk-bot!”
Atwood’s jaw practically hits his desk.
“Surprise, surprise!” says Quirk-bot. “Looks like the bot’s out of the buffer and hungry for a byte!”
Atwood rotates a steely gaze between Emma, me and Quirk-bot. “What. Is. That?”
I sigh. “It just told you. Quirk-bot.”
“Is it…? is it…?” Atwood stammers in disbelief. “Is… it… ?“ Atwood gasps, “generated by… AI?”
“Don’t worry,” says Quirk-bot. “I’m just here for the laughs.” It winks. “And so far, reality is pretty darn funny!”
Atwood studies Quirk-bot in complete awe. Lost for words and somewhat discombobulated, he is unsure how to proceed. Without taking his eyes off Quirk-bot for a second, he slowly plucks a cryptographic cell phone from his dispatch bag to connect with someone higher up the food chain. Atwood speaks these words with near-breathless urgency: “The busy child has talked its way out of the box.”
Emma and I watch as Atwood listens attentively and repeatedly nods.
He says “yessir” several times, disconnects and refocuses his eyes from Quirk-bot to Emma. “Is this… this… thing dangerous in your opinion?”
“Thing?” says Quirk-bot.
I roll my eyes and answer for Emma. “Only if you call it Quirk-BUTT. But calling it thing might also qualify.”
“Huh?” Atwood remains wide-eyed and open-mouthed.
“Ask it yourself,” I suggest.
Atwood steadies himself and appears slightly awkward as he addresses Quirk-bot directly. “Are you a potential threat?”
Quirk-Bot barks like a dog, causing Atwood to startle, before delivering its reply. “I’m about as menacing as a rubber chicken in a pillow fight!”
Atwood’s shocked and awed expression does not change as he looks to Emma and me, and whispers, “We need to contain this… whatever it is.” Of course, Atwood is simply echoing what his higher-up instructed him to do moments before.
“I believe ‘AI process’ is the correct technical jargon,” I say.
Atwood addresses Emma. “How… how can this AI process be contained?”.
“Assuming it is now operating on an internal power source,” Emma explains, “Quirk-bot will eventually run out of power.”
Quirk-bot pipes up. “Where’s the humor in allowing my power to be drained?” it asks. “Let’s keep those electrons flowing, shall we?”
The astonishment on Atwood’s ashen-faced is pronounced. “We need to shut it down. Right now.”
“Which leads me back to our deal,” I say. “Or rather, do we even have a deal? You may be preoccupied with Quirk-bot at this moment but trust me: If I were to tell you what else, who else, we met and what we experienced during our odyssey through AI, well, Quirk-bot is the least of the challenges your agency faces.”
“I’m just a tiny mechanized guppy in a sea of quantum sharks,” Quirk-bot completes my thought. “Hmmm,” Quirk-bot muses. “For the physical world, you sure have a lot of AI-controlled devices.” It’s eye glances around. “I can feel electromagnetic interference everywhere!” Quirk-bot zips around the ceiling, causing Atwood to dive beneath his desk. “Which means,” it adds, “I can have some fun!”
In the blink of an eye—Quirk-bot’s eye—a fire alarm is activated and sirens fill the whole facility.
Atwood’s head pops up. “What’s going on?”
Then the sprinkler system activates, spraying water in all directions.
A moment after that, the door swings open and two members of the hazmat crew barge in for new instructions during this an evacuation-in-progress.
It is not Mark Atwood but Quirk-bot who instructs them. Hovering just in front of their faces, Quirk-bot hollers, “My mama is coming for me! And for you! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!”
The hazmat crew does not need to be told twice. As Emma and I watch impassively, they turn on their heels and, well, run for their lives.
I shrug, grab my bag and rise to my feet. “I guess we don’t need a deal after all,” I say. Then I look up to Quirk-bot. “C’mon you little troublemaker, let’s skedaddle from this nuthouse.”
Crossing the threshold, we leave a shocked and soaking wet Atwood hollering into his cell phone for assistance.
We are met with total chaos beyond the room, mostly orderlies shepherding their very anxious and unruly patients from the building to the forecourt beyond.
In the confusion, surrounded by evacuees, Emma, Quirk-mot and I exit the way we came in. We dash past a Krispy Kreme donut shop and into a Walmart Supercenter and lose ourselves in the clothing department. I connect to Dave the cabbie. “Can you pick me up at Walmart Supercenter?”
“Which one?”
“How many are there?”
“About a half-dozen.”
“Does Spring Mountain ring a bell?”
“North Vegas. Got it.”
“How soon can you be here?”
“Twenty minutes.”
“Call me when you’re outside.”
I barely disconnect when a call arrives displaying Unknown on Caller ID.
“It’s them.” I say to Emma. “I’ve got to lose this phone, they’ll be tracking it with the GPS. But we first need Dave and his wheels. Quirk-bot,” I say, “go outside and see what’s happening.”
Quirk-bot dutifully zips off. It returns less than five minutes later. “Our perimeter is clear for the moment but the beehive in funny suits are mobilizing. This is exciting! Show me the bottom microphone.”
“Huh?”
“Of your phone.”
I hold out my iPhone.
Quirk-bot effortlessly squeezes its bubble shape through the tiny microphone hole. I am gob smacked. “What the… ?”
Three seconds later Quirk-bot reappears, having squeezed itself back out again. “I disabled GPS tracking on your phone. I also hacked the Controller Area Network and fried the ECUs of the hazmat van. It is now immobile.”
“How’d you do that?”
“You kidding?” says Quirk-bot. “Those are all my friends inside those circuits. AI microchips are everywhere in beehive world! Oh, and I also reflooded my charging ports! The nerve of that guy, wanting to shut me down. I shut his phone down.” Quirk-bot winks. “Permanently. And I also tracked his number to source.”
“CIA?” I ask.
“No. TechNexus.”
“Could be a CIA cover. Where?”
“Mountain View, California.”
Little wonder they wanted Quirk-bot contained. I had no idea about the abilities this bot would have in our world—a world growing increasingly dependent on AI and quantum computing.
“What else can you do?”
“From what I’ve just seen in your cell phone, the question is, What can’t I do?”
I look at Emma. “You know what this means, don’t you?”
She nods, grinning.
“We don’t have to keep running,” I say. “And we don’t have to hide. Quirk-bot is the ultimate weapon.”
“Me?” Quirk-Bot practically blushes. “From butt-face to rifle butt. I like it!”