THE BOT (3367 words)(23/09/2009)

THE BOT (3367 words)(23/09/2009)

The sun was blazing in the sky, it was going to be another roasting day in Haze City. Jinny, scratching himself and yawning pulled the blinds down again on his thirty-fifth floor hab cube's living room window, letting the light in through the chinks to illuminate the countless motes of dust floating on the warm air.

He then padded along to the iFood machine and placed his hand on the receiver. From analysis of his skin and electromagnetic body signal (so the instructions said) it worked out what exactly his body needed. After a moment or to of whizzing and clicking the door on the front opened to reveal a steaming bowl of hot cereal.

'Always the same...’ he muttered.

His mother had got him the machine, to wean him off the junk food. At lunch it would give him a salad carefully prepared to give him the exact RDA of all the vitamins he needed and at dinner either chicken or fish. Usually around 10pm Jinny would be so hungry he would dial a pizza from the iJunk machine and be done with it. He often wondered if he stuck to the iFood’s regime if it would eventually give out anything more palatable but so far he had not had the will power.

With his breakfast then he slouched down onto the sofa and switched on the GleeMax. He set it to passive/stealth mode and relaxed. He was in temporary unemployment at the moment and since the hab cube was government issue he was loving it. He would have to get another job eventually but for the moment he was glad to get away from the industry.

'Check the live feeds' he said, and the GleeMax separated out six windows on the TV’s 60inch screen and presented him with the current choices,

'Stick on Wheel of Inversion then', he said, 'And list my downloads - left.'

The GleeMax dutifully complied.

He finished his cereal and threw the plastic bowl and spoon in the trash chute. After a while of half-watching the game show where people tried not to vomit and scrolling through his downloaded media a blinking light on the panel alerted him to an incoming body-send request.

It was his mother, the info box told him on the body-send readout of the screen. Dang it, he thought, what was the use of stealth mode when folk like his mother just sent requests willy-nilly? She was old though and hadn't quite got the hang of this new fangled medium.

'Accept.' he said and the image of his mother was faded into the room.

New technology meant that she appeared as real as if she had been there, cast from multiple holo-projectors positioned around the room. Intelligent software analysed the position she was in, in reality and fitted her into the room. So when she sat down on the sofa of her own living room, she appeared, to Jinny, to be sitting down on his spare chair.

He rolled his eyes, why did she check the chair for dirt when she knew she was sitting down in her own house?

'Morning mum', he said with a smile. Despite her sudden arrival he always tried to be pleased to see her.

'Morning Jinny. I'm just calling to remind you about your Uncle Skoda's birthday.'

Jinny groaned, 'Oh no.'

'Jinny, you promised!’ scolded his mother, 'I know he tends to go on and on, but he's not getting any younger and it means so much to him.'

Jinny sighed and said, 'I suppose so.'

Later, he'd got rid of his mother in under an hour, which was amazing, he was browsing the job section of the local online paper. He disregarded any jobs that would mean he would have to leave his hab cube. Were these people living in the dark ages? Jinny tried to remember the last time he'd left his hab cube, had it been a year? Why bother when the good old GleeMax provided everything you needed.

Things had been different in his father's day, he knew that. From Haze, the jet shuttle would have you in New York in an hour, Tokyo in two. But then the fossil fuels had all dried up and the human race went back to windmills and waves for their power. If you wanted to travel anywhere it was either walk or ride (a horse or bike) for short distances, take the SRT (Solar Robot Tramway) if you were travelling in a town or a dirigible for intercity.

Even just a few years ago his mum would still be demanding that he turn up in person to family events, but she had long since stopped insisting on this. The SRT was less used and less reliable now and more and more people were becoming hermits. Hermits with very diverse virtual social lives though.

Back in Jinny's dad's day, a period known as the Age of the Global Family, the whole world was like a village. Jinny's aunt, uncles and cousins were scattered all over the globe. Some in Hong Kong, some in Rio, some in Perth (Australia) and some in Cape Town. Travel between these places had been easy and like most families these days Jinny was an interesting mix of races, in his case, Scottish, Indonesian, Brazilian and Afrikaans.

All that had changed now though. Nowadays you visited your in-laws by way of the GleeMax. If you had the deluxe model (as Jinny did) then you could go on virtual holidays too, not all of them being based in the real world either.

After looking through the jobs section and finding nothing that he fancied he played a few games, both on- and offline, then checked his e-mail, g-mail, twit-mail, iSpod-mail, plethora of personal social network mailboxes, message boards, forums, PMs, ICQs, chat handlers, blogs and the many other ways that he interacted with people all over the world. This took hours.

He had lunch, dialling it from the iFood and receiving what it thought his body needed. A glass of orange juice, two slices of dry toast and a vitamin supplement. Sighing keyed in a low-carb option into the iJunk and received three bags of crisps. He then made a crisp sandwich using the toast.

He'd been going back to his old hobby of coding ancient open source games lately - there was no money in it - but he enjoyed it immensely. Looking through some old files on his slam-drive he found some game code he'd not touched since he was a kid (he was in his fifties now).

It had been written for a game called World of Witchcraft back when it had gone open source and was what was termed at the time 'bot code'. This was back when games were actually written by humans and not AIs.

Games such as Witchcraft allowed someone to take on the character of an elf or goblin or whatever and stomp around a persistent online fantasy world. To progress in the game you killed monsters to take their treasure and gain experience, new skills and spells.

However, to get to the highest levels of the game took months and to someone like Jinny there was more fun in programming some software to play the game for you than playing it yourself.

The programme he had coded was called JinBot 1.6 and would in essence 'play' the game for him, hunting monsters, taking treasure, even going back to the town to sell the loot to the merchants.

It had worked very well, but his on-line friends who had also been playing the game had quickly spotted when JinBot was in charge as it would not respond to /tells and other means of communication.

So he had recoded it with some simple routines to ape speech. JinBot 1.7 would respond to things like 'hello' with a few stock replies. By the time he'd got to JinBot 2.0 it was so good that his friends would tease him that it actually made more sense than him!

He spent all afternoon going over the code and reminiscing about his youth and when he looked away from the old VDU and back at the GleeMax widescreen monitor an idea began to form in his mind.

The LAST thing he wanted to do was go to his uncle's shindig as the old duffer would go on for hours about whatever topic of the day was bothering him the most. The beauty of it was that he wouldn't even have to re-write most of the code which was in good old 'C' because all he would have to do would be to skin it into an app and the GleeMax would send it off to the central AIs at G-corp who would then parse the whole load into BufferD AI code. Genius!

However, he would need a TON of motion capture and the more vocal recording he made, the more authentic the JinBot would sound convincing, so to that end he spent the rest of the day walking around, sitting, standing, drinking and pretending to have conversations. All of this was captured by the GleeMax sensors and fed into the JinBot code. Then he did the vocals, saying things like,

'Yes, it is warm isn't it?' and 'That's very interesting Uncle Skoda, do carry one.'

Still, it took all night to embed this stuff into the code and several more days of working round the clock before JinBot 3.0 was ready. He decided to trial it straight away at his Uncle's birthday, why not? If he got rumbled he could just say his GleeMax was malfunctioning, his mother and the other oldies knew so little about this sort of thing he was sure they'd fall for it.

So when it was time, instead of using the body-send in the GleeMax he ran the JinBot app. He let the thing run in a windowed off corner of the widescreen while he got on with the much more interesting activity of playing games and chatting to friends.

He couldn't keep his eyes off the bot though, it seemed as if they were all taken in!

He turned down the volume of his game and watched it for a while. His infuriating cousin Mercedes was talking to the bot,

'So you listening to the Jaxon 10?’ she said, mentioning the latest insipid AI created holo-band.

'That's very interesting, please continue... Mercedes’ replied the bot.

'What-ever.', said his cousin and wandered off.

Score one to the bot!

Next her kid brother, Honda, came and addressed him in the latest kiddie speak that was all across the interweb.

'Tundra, bra. Chopup grilled kungfu hose-beams n' e-codex?’ the lad asked innocently enough.

'Syntax error.’ replied the bot, 'External command not recognised. Terminating.'

Dammit, thought Jinny, the boy's idiot jargon had crashed the program.

'Tun, bra, tun’, nodded the lad sagely, 'Mo' bun fun four oh four yah? Max out.'

It seemed like the bot's error message had fooled the boy too! Score two to the bot.

The bot then sat for a while and stared into space. His mother sad down beside him and said,

'Turn off whatever feed your watching and listen to me...'

Ah, thought Jinny, I can stop watching now. The bot was programmed to go into a nod-and-smile loop while his mum was talking. She could be passing on gossip to it for up to over an hour.

Maybe later he would fast forward through it to see if there was anything interesting, but probably not.

After the initial success, he refined the code a little, building yet another release, and sent the bot to two more parties, a christening and his brother's third wedding.

The bot seemed to work like a charm. He even added a dancing routine, lifted the avatar code straight from an open source forum and cutting and pasting the whole lot into his own program.

At his brother's wedding he danced like a disco king!

This gave Jinny much more time to do things he loved, namely sitting around and playing games on the GleeMax or chatting up women on the X-rated 3D channels.

One day, much to his surprise, an unsolicited body-send materialised in his living room. The last time that had happened was when there had been a fire in the building. Only emergency response units had the authority to body-send to you without permission.

It was a small man in a grey suit.

‘Mr Jonathan Jonnington-Smythe I presume?’

Jinny brushed nacho crumbs from his lap and stood up, ‘Er..yes.’

‘I am an AI avatar, designated B8-KIP. I am here regarding your illegal use of the GleeMax.’

‘Huh?’, Jinny was confused. Sure he downloaded torrents and jab-files, but who didn’t? Usually you just get a nasty letter and they squeezed your bandwidth for a month. I had happened to him loads of times.

It dawned on him, ‘If it’s about the porn then…’

The avatar held up its right hand,

‘This does not regard that matter. I am from the BufferD programming unit. It is in regards to the code you have been parsing via the GleeMax.’

‘That’s illegal?’

‘It may come as a surprise to you, but yes. Yes it is. It is illegal to represent yourself or others by any other means than direct interface of a human body via the body-send software. In short, bots are not allowed.’

‘But.. really? Surely no one has ever done it before.’

‘No.’, the avatar admitted, ‘It has been done before and we always respond the same way.’

‘So what are you going to do?’ said Jinny defiantly. He had dealt with internet Nazis before.

‘Cut you off and lock you in. You, My Smythe are a waste of skin and if you don’t want to participate in society in an active way then you will be terminated. Goodbye!’

The avatar vanished leaving Jinny in a state of dumbfoundment.

He rushed over and checked the door to the hallway. Locked. He rattled it then pulled it, but it was hopeless. The thick metal portal was designed to withstand a terrorist bomb blast.

In fact the whole hab cube was bomb proof, and although he had never thought about it before, a very effective prison.

To calm his nerves, he picked up a dirty glass with the thought of getting a drink and took it to the sink. He turned on the tap, but no water came out.

‘They’ve cut off the water too!’ he cried.

He tried the Batfone, the Gleemax and the Didotron. All were dead. He tried a light switch. Dead. The electricity was off.

‘What now?’ he moaned in despair.

He went over to the windows and saw that one had been open when the lockdown had occurred. As luck would have it an empty soda can had blocked it when the windows had gone into autolock and he could still swing it open. It was high up on the wall, at head height, but at least he would still have air.

He leaned out, hoping to call down to someone for help, but was dismayed when he saw the streets were deserted. Somewhere in the distance he heard the ringing bell of an SRT went over an unused pedestrian crossing.

The water was off, did that mean they had cut off the food too? He found himself suddenly starving and approached the iJunk and the iFood that sat next to each other on the otherwise empty kitchen work surface.

They were both dead, but he looked at the back of the iFood. There was a long hose plugged in the back, as well as the power cable. With a hard wrench he pulled the whole thing from the wall, lifting up a couple of tiles and leaving the hose dangling down off the counter. Some grey mass leaked out of it.

He sucked on the hose, but only a little of the mass came out. It must be off at the mains like the water he supposed. The grey mass tasted of well.. everything.. it was salty, sweet and greasy, he assumed all the flavour and texture was sorted out in the iFood itself. He ripped off the iJunk and found it too had grey matter in its hose pipe. It tasted the same. It filled him up but gave him a raging thirst.

Eventually he slept and the next morning, his head pounding from dehydration he drank the water from the toilet cistern. He went around the hab cube looking for things that could help him, but could find nothing.

Finally he scooped the last of the cistern water into empty cans and pots to save for later.

Three days later the water had all run out but when he set the sofa on fire to set off the fire alarms he had it replenished when the sprinkler system kicked in. He was wet and no longer thirsty, but no closer to escape.

Starving he tried the food hoses again. He sucked on them, but nothing came out. They must come into the cube somewhere though he thought and began to pull on one of them. Tiles and plaster came from the walls and clattered on the floor.

He followed the hose under a cupboard and down to below the sink. There were two valves plumbed into a box set flush with the wall.

Next he pulled one of the hose pipes out of the valve. Nothing much happened but he wondered what would happen if he removed the valve, which seemed to be deadlocked.

Savagely he ripped the GleeMax from under the TV and rushing across to the sink, dove under it and began hammering at the valves. Bits of electronics scattered everywhere and a shard of plastic cut him on the cheek, but one of the valves suddenly sheared off completely and a jet of grey mass hit him full in the face.

Laughing he scooped it up and hungrily devoured several handfuls. The jet of matter wasn’t letting up though and after no more than five minutes the living room was ankle deep in gunk. Confused Jinny climbed up onto the burnt sofa. After fifteen minutes the gunk was covering it.

Even with the bedroom and bathroom doors open the whole cube was full after an hour. Jinny leaned out the window despondently as a torrent of grey mass fell either side of his head to fall splattering on the street far below.

Well, he wouldn’t go hungry he supposed, but if he fell asleep then he would probably be washed out of the window or more likely drown.

Suddenly there was a popping and grinding sound from the front door. Moments later it swung open and two work men were swept off their feet by the flopping rolling mass of grey ooze.

‘Thank God!’ cried Jinny as he swam for the door.

‘What happened?’ said one of the men, ‘We had a complaint from the cube below about someone pouring porridge out of the window. Your door was locked, we had to use the manual override.’

‘Let me out of here!’ was all Jinny managed as a reply as he ran off down the corridor as fast as he could, shaking off the gunk as he went.

That night he had managed to make it into some woods on the edge of town. Here he was, a fugitive! But free of his cube at least and murderous AIs. He had ran and ran, heading for the hills. This was it, he thought happily as he lay down in lea of a tree, this is how man is meant to live, not trapped in a hab cube eating junk and watching his ass grow bigger day by day. He could start a revolution, get people to wake up.

With such cheerful thoughts in his head he settled down to sleep. All he needed now was a banjo, so he could play it for the rabbits and squirrels, just like in the cartoons…