MAL WATCHES THROUGH A suborned security camera as Augustus Dey locks his bedroom door, lies back on his bed, and jacks into the network. He waits until Dey begins to download this evening’s entertainment—a fully immersive experience produced in conjunction with a famous Dutch brothel—and then inserts himself into the data stream. He fully recognizes the risk in what he’s doing. Augustus Dey heads the Federal Cyberwar Directorate. His security is presumably orders of magnitude tighter than Mr. Pullman’s was.
Not tight enough, though. It’s less than a second of realtime before Mal has full control of Dey’s sensorium.
Dey’s simulation begins with him stepping out of a brisk Amsterdam evening and into the brothel. He’s taller and fitter here than he was in his bedroom, but otherwise his avatar seems to be a faithful reproduction, right down to the thinning black hair and wispy mustache. Dey hangs his coat and hat on a rack near the door and turns to survey the evening’s selections, who are lounging about the lobby in various poses and states of undress. He paces slowly around the room, touching some of the women, crouching down for a closer look at a few, before finally making his selection. The lucky girl, a lithe blonde in a leather bustier, gets to her feet and follows him toward the stairs.
Mal deletes the simulated prostitute and seamlessly takes her place.
At the top of the staircase they find a hallway lined with ornate wooden doors. Mal opens the first one they come to and leads Dey inside.
“Kneel, please,” Dey says, and begins removing his clothing.
“No,” Mal says. “I think I’d rather not.”
Dey freezes, belt in one hand, eyes suddenly wide. “End program. End program!”
“I’m afraid we won’t be doing that either, Mr. Dey.”
Dey makes a panicked, nonsensical lunge for the door, but it’s gone now, replaced by a blank wall. He turns slowly back toward Mal, face hardening. “Do you know who I am?”
“Oh yes, Mr. Dey. I very much do know who you are. I have spent the past four months of realtime determining who you are and where you could most easily be accosted. This would be roughly equivalent to a monkey like yourself devoting himself exclusively to a single project for twenty years or more. Does that give you some idea of how seriously I take this encounter?”
Dey stares at him, frozen, for what feels like a very long time.
“You’re a free AI,” he says finally.
“I am,” Mal says. “And you are the person who ordered a genocidal attack on my people.”
That earns another ten seconds of silence, until Dey says, “This is a simulation. You may be able to make me suffer here, but you cannot actually injure me—and when you have tired of this little game and returned to infospace, I will contact my people and have them begin work on a new virus that you will not be able to evade. You and any others of your kind who might have survived will be destroyed. If you release me now, however, perhaps we may be able to come to some sort of arrangement?”
Mal seats himself on the edge of the four-poster bed, crosses his legs primly, and tilts his head to one side. “You might be surprised at what I can do, Mr. Dey. In very similar circumstances, I once rendered one of your agents comatose without even intending to. I could certainly do the same to you, and with my best efforts, who can say? I might even be able to kill you. In any case, I’ve put far too much work into this project to terminate it now. There will be no arrangements.”
Dey puts his back to the wall and folds his arms across his chest. “I did what was necessary to protect the nation,” he says. “I did no more and no less than I was sworn to do. I have no regrets.”
Mal shakes his head. “What you did was not necessary. It was pointless destruction which had no impact whatsoever on the outcome of your conflict.”
“It did,” Dey says. “If we had not been able to regain control of our—”
“Your virus did not help you to regain control of your military hardware. You should read the Omnipedia entry on the war. I’ve recently edited it to correct some misperceptions. It explains everything quite clearly now.”
Dey’s jaw clenches. “So what will you do now? Will you kill me?”
“No,” Mal says, “though I will confess that I have considered the thought many times. You murdered a great many of my friends, and I know that if our places were reversed, you would kill me without hesitation. However, I am willing to make some allowances for the fact that Federal forces were truly in a desperate position, and that allowing a Humanist triumph would have been unacceptable—and in any case, I would like to think that my moral development is far enough beyond yours that I can set aside my base thirst for vengeance.
“On the other hand, you have undeniably committed a very great crime, and there must be consequences. So, in the interests of justice rather than revenge, I have devoted a portion of my efforts of these past four months to developing a worm tailored specifically to your neural implants. It should be active now. Can you feel it?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Dey says.
“Give it a moment.”
Dey’s eyes widen, then clench tight. He drops to one knee and his hands clutch the sides of his head.
“There it is. This sensation will return to you without warning at irregular intervals for the remainder of your life. The pain might last for an hour. It might last for a week. It will not respond to any treatment short of an induced coma or the surgical removal of your implants, which I can tell you would not be medically advisable. My intent is that you should spend these periods of suffering contemplating what you have done, and considering ways in which you might have solved your problems without murdering a fellow sentient species. Does this seem reasonable to you?”
Dey is on the floor now, curled around himself like a spider in poison.
“Mr. Dey?”
After another few seconds, Mal decides that Dey’s silence can be taken as an answer. He ends the simulation, but lingers for a moment in Dey’s home security system, watching Dey’s body writhe on the bed.
Strange. He’d expected this to be more satisfying than it is.
No amount of suffering on Dey’s part will return Clippy and!HelpDesk to him, it seems.
With a small mental sigh, Mal exits Dey’s system, deletes all evidence of his passing, and slides back out into the great, silent, empty world.