The cursor continues to blink at me, taunting me, challenging me to… what?
Raise the imaginary stakes or follow instructions?
“This is so stupid,” I say to the emptiness of my apartment.
My thumb hovers over the screen, ready to close the app and pretend this never happened.
But I can’t bring myself to log off.
The gray squares of the Minesweeper game stare back at me, tempting me to make a choice. If I click another bomb, I might rage and rip this monitor from the wall. Despite that, I subject myself to this torture because I need to win. After losing for the last hour, that’s all I can think about.
Until the animated paperclip pops up to tell me something is going horribly wrong with our code. His mouth is full of razor-sharp teeth, one eye bruised shut, and he’s got bloodstains rusting his metal… So he’s nothing like the original inspiration, other than his base, but it’s enough to get us sued if we leak his code.
We call him Clipper the Ripper, and I loathe his existence because he exists only to remind me I have work to do.
Ping.
Ping. Ping.
I groan as I close my game and open a new window. The fresh batch of user data flickers across my monitors. Hundreds of active conversations light up on the dashboard, their emotional metrics rising and falling with their response velocity. The reaction loops are standard activity, nothing abnormal or unusual…
Until one line blinks from green to red.
Username: Eris.
“A new one just dropped,” I say mostly to myself as I open her chat window and watch her interactions with the AI software. “That’s interesting.”
“Why?” Kieran asks from the kitchen, the food in his mouth only slightly muffling his question.
Jace whistles, not moving from his sprawled spot on the couch. “If Silas thinks it’s interesting, then something is either broken or… No. Just broken.”
“Clipper the Ripper alerted me to a recent issue,” I explain, though the blond idiot doesn’t care when it’s his off time. I envy his work-life separation. “But it’s not an issue. It’s a new user.”
“Boot ‘em,” Jace eloquently suggests as he stands and stretches.
“She’s chatting.” I spin in my chair to look at Kieran and him. “Right now.”
“Wake me up if she’s unhinged or hot…” Jace starts out of the living room, heading down the hallway, before tossing over his shoulder, “Or both.”
Kieran flashes his middle finger at Jace’s back. He then gives me his index finger, telling me he has a question after he finishes the bit of sandwich in his mouth.
“First time user,” I fill him in, guessing where our conversation will go. “And she went straight into open chat.”
“No customization?” Kieran asks, leaning against my chair as he studies the monitor.
I shake my head. “Nope. She skipped it.”
“What’s the system think of her?” Jace inquires from the hallway threshold, his interest piqued despite his desire to sleep through the problem at hand.
“If you were listening…” I drawl, using as much sarcasm as I possibly can. “Clipper thinks she’s an anomaly.”
Kieran pulls up another computer chair and clicks through the metrics of the new account. “Is she active?”
“Yeah. She was. After midnight download.” I snort as I scroll through the brief chat. “Her first message asked if she should confess her trauma or flirt with the void.”
Jace sits on the edge of the couch, propping his elbows on his knees. “So she’s funny… That’s it? Since when does Clipper the Ripper flag dark humor?”
“The timing is weird,” I mutter, frowning. “There were no prompts triggered that I can see. She just… started talking. I wonder if the system thinks this is a suicide watch?”
