“Thank you,”Nicole replies lightly.“You were doing a really good job, too. You looked so strong. Good form.”
“Thanks!”
“This is like being in the ladies’ room at a nightclub,”Madison laughs.“Oh, wait! Okay, try X026KA0225.”
I type it in, the folder comes up, and I double-click. “This is it,” I breathe, scrolling through project files I recognize. The software itself is a small icon at the bottom with a colorful image replicating the SmarTech logo. To be safe, I open it in the sandbox environment first. My heart thumps hard in my chest, a wash of emotion sweeping over me as I come face to face with the ghosts of my past.
“This is it,” I repeat.
“You’ve got it?”Madison breathes.
“I do.” I pull up the code in an editor.
“Okay, so now we just need to corrupt the—”
I hear a deep, faraway chuckle reverberate through the earpiece. It’s chilling and smug in equal measure.“It won’t matter. You’re too late.”
“What do you mean?”Madison asks, her voice becoming shrill in her confusion and alarm. I can’t picture the look on his face, but she sounds scared.“What do you mean, Fred?!”
I realize why he’s laughing a second later, as I get to the most recent additions to the event log.
“You’re too late,”he repeats.
Fuck. We are too late. The software was sent to fulfill the preorders this morning. I have the list of cities that have bought the tech right here, but that means that SmarTech isn’t the only one with a copy anymore. We can delete the backups and destroy the host server, but each of these cities has their own copy, operating independently. There’s no kill-switch option because we didn’t get here in time.
We can’t stop it from getting out.
“It’s already out.”
45
Madison
Kind of a fitting end.
“It’s already out.”
My body feels cold and stiff as I fall back into my seat, which rolls a few inches and throws me off balance. Fred’s smile is condescending, and the blood coating his teeth from Nicole’s blow gives it a real demonic edge.
“It went out this morning to every city on the list,” he says, evil curling around every word and making my skin prickle.
Eleanor gasps, exchanging a fearful look with Nicole.
I’m reeling. How could this have happened? How could we have failed? I turn to him, blinking back tears of rage and horror. “You made a monster,” I say softly. “You just put amonsterout into the world. And you’re so focused on the money, you don’t realize what you’ve done!”
“Not the money,” he shakes his head. “The numbers. Crime in Ulysses is down 30% since we gave the AI free rein on the data. 30%! That’s insane. That’s… you can’t argue with numbers like that!”
He’s the one who’s insane if he thinks he can win me over with that kind of argument. “Crime is down, but the murder of criminals is up? You seriously don’t hear the contradiction in that?”
He rolls his eyes. “We’re making this world safer—”
“No, you’re not,” Nicole cuts in. “You’re making them more careful, or you’re driving them to another city that’s less protected and prepared. None of this is happening in a vacuum. There are always repercussions.”
“And it’s still murder!” Eleanor adds.
Fred spits on the ground. “Good fucking riddance. Scumbags are dying. Boo fuckin’ hoo.”
“Scumbags, now. But what happens when it starts targeting not just violent, destructive crime? What if the AI starts going after anyone who breaks the law? You released something destructive into the world that self-polices. How can you not see how big of a problem that is?”
