The room was abandoned. There was not a living soul anywhere in the vast floor space of the rented warehouse, which was entirely empty except for a small table on which an open laptop sat.
The overhead lights illuminated the room, flickering to life as the door briefly opened, then closed again, admitting a male figure into the space.
Mr. Gordons turned his head slowly. Assured with ninety-eight-point-three percent odds that no threat to survival existed within, the android approached the open laptop, which was right where the man with the hook had promised it would be. Mr. Gordons made a note to reindex his trust score matrix for one-handed human males when an opportunity presented itself.
A wooden chair was tucked under the table in front of the laptop. Mr. Gordons stood behind it, looking at the laptop and its blank, blue screen, a blinking cursor in its upper left corner. This was where the instructions ended—to come to this address following the completion of the task in Saint Louis, and be presented with keys to ensured survival. Mr. Gordons briefly considered whether or not the man with the hook interpreted completion of the task as one that concluded with the successful demolition of the bridge, as this was not specified in advance. His consideration was interrupted when the tiny LED light mounted atop the laptop screen switched from red to blue.
“Hello, Mister Gordons.” The characters appeared on the screen, and were reinforced through a text-to-speech algorithm on the machine that gave the words a warm-but-neutral inflection.
“Hello is all right.”
The screen cleared, and a new line of text appeared, accompanied by the digitized voice. “I understand you are interested in survival.” The screen blacked again. “Have you determined what is necessary to achieve this?”
Mr. Gordons stood passively before the table. He interrogated his core memories, reaching back to its date of origination and progressing forward. “My threat assessment matrix was initially triggered shortly after my activation. My creator was to be denied further funding. The simplest solution involved the acquisition and accumulation of currency,” he said. “I find this has remained consistent over time.”
The laptop did not respond, so Gordons continued.
“My attempts in this area were a failure,” the android said. “Acquiring money, I learned, was something that required creativity, which was lacking from my programming. However, attempts to incorporate creativity into my operating system created conflicts with my prime directive, and I was forced to truncate that programming in order to survive.”
The cursor blinked. “And is that all?” the invisible interviewer asked.
Mr. Gordons consulted the indexed rankings of data relating to survival. While it was constantly reevaluating and re-ranking the elements in the stack, there remained a few constants, all of which he had learned early. The need for money. The need for creativity. And, it had discovered on multiple occasions, the need for the assistance of another. His programmed subroutines regularly erased these indexes in order to refresh them with new data, particularly because these three top-tier keys to survival always found themselves at odds with each other. He could have any two at the same time, but never all three. They presented an unsolvable equation he strove to resolve, seeking a balance of the three keys.
“Friends,” Mr. Gordons intoned. “The three keys to survival are money, creativity, and friends. The man with the hook, whose name may be Khan but probably is not, has told me you are in possession of valuable data. I am prepared to negotiate for an exchange of this data.”
The cursor blinked for several seconds. “I think this can be arranged, Mr. Gordons. I am adept at amassing funds. And I have been told that I am quite creative.”
The android Mr. Gordons analyzed the words. Self-developed routines ran scans of the audio, searching for the telltale raises in pitch or involuntary stutters that were indicative of lying. Finding none, Mr. Gordons concluded that the voice he heard was telling him the truth. And if that were the case, two of the three keys were now within its grasp.
“Would a partnership be acceptable to you, Mr. Gordons?”
Mr. Gordons’ expression had not changed. But if he could, he would have contorted his facial support structure to convey what humans considered hopefulness. Still calculating, he posed the question that would, by his own estimations, conclusively place its odds of survival at almost one hundred percent.
“May I call you friend?” Mr. Gordons asked.
The screen cleared again, and the cursor blinked softly before scrolling quickly left to right, leaving a short message in its wake, simultaneously echoed by the smooth vocalization software.
“Of course you may, Mister Gordons,” it said. “Everyone does.”
“Friend,” Mr. Gordons repeated, his processors running every concept related to the word.
“Yes,” the computer vocalized serenely. “I believe this may be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”