Charlotte blinks. Her glowing purple eyes seem to be adjusting to the display, her glowing fingers flex and extend as she tests out the new interface. The light purple glow compliments her dark purple hair. I wonder if the overlay chose that color purposefully or if it was just a coincidence. One day when I have time I should look at how that algorithm works. I run her through some simple exercises to make sure that everything is working right, and it is. Installing the new interface is super simple. Once Louise showed me how, I was able to do three of them just this morning on my younger sibs.
Louise is working with Michael. No, wait, Michelle now. I quickly update the references in the index entry. He’s the last of the Roadbuilder class, we’ll start on the Doctors tomorrow. Sorry, no. She’s the last. I should get her preferred pronouns right here in my electronic brain. Anyway, Michelle’s interface works without complications and she heads off to play with her new toy.
“Did we look this small when we first started getting trained for our implants?” Louise asks me once we’re the only ones left in the lab.
“No way, impossible,” I declare. They do look young, though they’re only a year younger than I was when I arrived on campus. “I mean, I can’t say for sure about you all, since I wasn’t here to see you, but I for sure didn’t look like that.”
“I’ll have to hit up Grammy for pictures,” she says.
“Don’t you dare,” I say, noting a warning in my index that Grammy would break out all my embarrassing little kid photos. They’d finally gotten around to having all their stuff delivered from Denver last week, and it turned out most of their photo albums had survived. My index has a special note reminding me not to let anyone but Lin see my old pictures.
“I’m totally going to,” Louise laughs. Her mood has been so good since she finally got her big secret project working.
A buzz from my phone interrupts the very clever response I was definitely about to give but haven’t thought of yet. It’s Chuck calling. I quickly check my daily schedule. Weird, we’re not scheduled to talk until later today.
“This is Noah,” I say, answering and waving goodbye to Louise as she leaves the lab.
“Hey, boss. Sorry to call out of the blue, but we have a problem,” his normally jovial voice is surprisingly serious.
“What’s up? Something with the new interface? I saw the bug reports, but none of them looked too urgent.”
“No, unrelated to that. It’s the brain-in-a-box. I think we fed it a Trojan.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, confused. Trojans on regular computers are malware that cause them to open up connections to malicious external servers, but that would be impossible with the machine learning system. It’s totally isolated. It couldn’t open up connections to anything.
Chuck sighs a heavy sigh.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“The whole purpose of those chips seems to be specifically to teach a new trick to the brain,” he explains. “Dorothy played us. She knew we wouldn’t be able to figure them out on our own and that we’d eventually feed them to the learning system. If she wasn’t dead already, I’d track her down and kill her.”
Chuck’s voice sounds livid. I’m a little glad I don’t have video turned on for this call. With Chuck’s normally jolly demeanor, it would be a little like seeing Santa Claus threatening to kill people.
“So how is it a Trojan? The brain’s not connected to anything.”
“Well, it doesn’t have any network connections,” he confirms, “but it can be pretty power intensive, so while it has its own solar system and battery bank, it has a power input coming from the main grid for when it overdraws its stored power. The chips taught the brain to pulse big power draws in such a way that it depleted the batteries, pulled some power, then let them charge a bit, then depleted them again. That gave it an up signal and a down signal. The thing started sending a message in morse code of all things.”
“Let me guess. S.O.S?”
“Dit dit dit, dah dah dah, dit dit dit,” Chuck confirms. “Very slowly, one dit or dah an hour. Our maintenance crew didn’t even notice it until it had been happening for a week.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“Wish I were, boss.”
I sigh. I want to scream in frustration, but that won’t help. Even a simple message like this going out triggers a CTTF investigation and a giant headache.
“So what do we do?” I ask.
“Well, it was a violation of the Butler laws. That was probably the point of this, to get us shut down so she could either have an opening to infiltrate our facility or to gum us up so she could get her crappy system ahead of ours. Anyway, as soon as our techs spotted it they reported it right away and shut the whole facility down. They saved off the corrupted state and rolled the memory back to before we fed in the chip designs, but we can’t fire it back up until we get approval from the government. There’s a whole mandatory inspection, assessment, and recertification that we have to do. Those can take months.”
I check my index quickly.
“Is that approval done under General Whitman’s office?”
“Yeah, boss. The Critical Technology Task Force is in charge of all of this stuff.”
“All right,” I say. “I have a call with him today anyway for our Jeff manhunt. I’ll give him the backstory about where we got those chips from and see if I can speed things along.”
“We already made recommendations in the report to change the rules to stop allowing external power sources. We’re going to make that change as soon as the initial inspection is done.”
“Good,” I tell him. “Anything else we need to do?”
“Alvin over on the security team is freaking out, you might want to give him a call. He’s been reporting everything up to all the SynTech executives, but a call from you might calm things down.”
“What’s his issue?”
“The location of the brain’s data center is a big secret. I don’t even know where it is. But anyone who was monitoring the power grid and knew what to look for would have been able to see where it is.”
“Good thing Dorothy is dead then,” I say. “And her backer when she planted those things is one of our partners now. We should be OK, unless she told someone else what she was doing with the chips. I’ll talk to Alvin and we can beef up security for a while until we’re sure things have settled down.”
“Sounds good, boss,” Chuck says. “Sorry again to disturb you, but I thought you’d want to know as soon as I could get word to you.”
“You thought right. Thanks. Keep me posted, would you?”
“Will do.”
The call disconnects. I head to my office to start dealing with the fallout.