Forever Yours
©2025 Elder Road Books - Lynnwood WA
Chapter 50: Upselling
“WE’VE DECIDED to work on having a baby,” Lisa said at their counseling appointment the next week.
“It’s not supposed to be work,” Elaine smiled. “Is this a sudden decision?”
“We’ve been talking about it for a month now and this week, I went off my birth control. Which means we need to start using a condom or alternate depository for a while until the drugs get out of my body. I just started my period, so we still have a month before we should start,” Lisa said.
“How does that make you feel, Chastity?” Elaine asked. They expected her to direct the question to Henry and Chastity was a bit surprised.
“Um ... I’ve been present for all the discussions and the pros and cons. I’ve had my say in it, which is that ultimately, it’s Henry and Lisa’s decision,” Chastity said.
“That doesn’t really tell me how you feel,” Elaine prompted.
“I’m ... excited. I never wanted to become a mother ... I mean have a baby. I never thought I’d be a very good mother because of my own history and role models. Somehow, now it seems a little like I could be a partner mother.”
“Do you think you might change your mind one day?”
“It wouldn’t make a difference. I made a permanent choice before I was with Henry and Lisa.”
“And you think you could be a—what did you say?—partner mother to Henry and Lisa’s baby?”
They all looked at each other questioningly. Henry was hopeful, but he thought Lisa was even more so. Eventually, Chastity turned to Elaine.
“I ... think ... if Lisa and Henry are okay with it ... I mean, they are as much parents to my cats as I am. The cats love them. Snowball sleeps on Henry’s bed all the time. I’d like to be ... or help be ... a mommy to their children,” Chastity said.
“Do you know why I’m asking you all these questions?” Elaine said.
“Well, because I’m kind of the odd one out,” Chastity said. “Henry and Lisa are married.”
“Phftt,” Elaine spat. “That’s a piece of paper. Yes, there are legal definitions and things you need to arrange so you are able to function as a family. But you three created a family of three. Not two plus one. Three. A single unit. I’ve been asking you these questions because I wanted to be sure you were thinking as a family, and not as a couple plus one. If you’re committed to each other, you must also be committed to the children. Henry and Lisa, if Chastity is part of your family, you need to make sure she is as committed to children as you are.”
Lisa dove across the couch where she and Chastity were seated. She took Chas in her arms and kissed her.
“You’re equal,” she said. “If we—all three of us—choose to have a baby, or to adopt a baby, you are as much the mommy as I am.”
“Oh, Lisa! I love you guys so much. I knew that. I just let my head and a piece of paper get in the way of my heart,” Chastity said.
“If it was possible for you to jointly bear our children, I’d want that,” Henry said. “I hope you’ll accept being as much a father as I am.”
That set all three of them giggling and they thanked Elaine for helping them.
The next day, Henry got the cast off his leg at last, and he moved—carefully—upstairs to the family bed to begin practicing becoming a father.
Snowball followed them.
The next Thursday, found Henry and Nathan in California, addressing the IT executive of Northwest California PGE, the utility company that provided power for Page Services’ server farm. Nathan had used several contacts from his days in the military to make the appointment.
It was the first time Henry had traveled since he was attacked, and he was constantly looking around for threats. Germaine traveled with him, and functioned in their role as personal assistant and bodyguard, driving Henry and Nathan to their hotel, to the meeting with the staff at Page Services, and to the power company.
“AI security used to mean keeping us safe from prying AI stealing our data,” Nathan said. This was the first time Open Cloak was testing the waters regarding network security with a utility company.
“Are you saying it’s different now, General?” Ralph Archibald, the VP of information technology, asked.
“No matter how diligent we were at the Pentagon, the development of artificial intelligence has taxed the US and corporate America with increased security needs. Just five years ago, we were fighting over the ethics of AI powered tools scraping every bit of data from private servers to use for their own training. Those training walls didn’t recognize personal information, copyrights, or privacy. It was just data used to train generative AI. But now we’ve found AI systems that are storing personal information and they could feasibly use it to take over accounts and even the identity of users.”
“What’s the government doing about it?” Ralph demanded.
“The Pentagon has developed some weapons it can use in defense of citizens in the event of a foreign attack,” Nathan said. “There have been a number of such attacks over the past years and just a few months ago, the military neutralized a Russian attempt to take down a server farm, right here in Northern California. The threat has always been there, but it has escalated only a degree at a time. No matter what the Pentagon has developed, it is not authorized to act against domestic attacks. The FBI, Secret Service, Justice Department, and State Department all have cybercrime sections, but there is no coordinated plan or program.”
“And you have a solution?”
“Yes, but like all solutions, it is also a threat.”
“Are you threatening us?”
“Not at all,” Nathan continued calmly. “I’m talking about the inherent threat of giving control over to an independent and non-living entity. Once it is set loose in your system, it would be very difficult to eliminate it. Almost as difficult to eliminate as the current threat.”
“You say a non-living entity. You’re talking about another intelligent computer program, right?” Ralph said.
“AI has no real independence or sense of self. The tools developed by Open Cloak, who were contractors in the development of some of the Pentagon’s arsenal, are considered artificial narrow intelligence, meaning there is no attempt to duplicate the thought process of the human brain. It does a few things extremely fast and extremely well that you could otherwise hire a hundred people on high end computers to work around the clock and accomplish the same thing. The difference would be that humans could make evaluative judgments regarding threats an AI cannot make. A human, for example, might spot an accidental account override by an elderly customer as an accident that needs individual contact to rectify, rather than the AI solution of eliminating the threat,” Nathan said.
“What do you mean by ‘eliminating the threat?’ You can’t mean an AI would put out a contract on an elderly person because they accidentally entered an account override.”
“No. Of course not. That’s why we recommend human monitors for situations that are out of the norm. Let me ask the inventor, our CTO Henry Pascal, to explain this,” Nathan said.
“We learned a great deal from our work on the Delphos Network Armor program and our Forever Yours AI development. DNA was only released in July, and I’m happy that it is being adopted by many medium-sized enterprises, including banking entities. It defends individual computers and computers linked on a network. An AI only recognizes a customer’s data. But people are more than data. When you ask if an AI would put out a contract on a person, the answer is no—not as far as the life and limb of that person is concerned. But the AI could easily erase that person’s data. That is elimination of the threat. We have discovered that it could be brought to bear on a computer and all its connections. Everything that identifies that person online, or even on their own connected computer, could be erased. That is why we always advise an internal professional to monitor the threats identified by the AI.”
“Jesus Christ! And you want us to willingly install this on our networks? You must be kidding!” Ralph said.
“It would be unethical of me not to expose the threat as well as the benefit,” Henry said. “It’s like all the fine print on a prescription that lists the possible side effects. We have built in safeguards against that happening. One of those is that any such decision has to be validated by wetware. I’m sorry. That means flesh and blood. A living person. In this world of hardware and software, we don’t dare to underestimate the value of our wetware—our employees. Whether you combat the coming AI invasion with a hundred or five hundred people actively monitoring your networks around the clock to fend off attacks, or you combat it with fifty employees monitoring the AI and controlling its responses, you will face the same problem. Do you trust your people to make decisions?”
“I want to talk this over with others in the industry. This seems like a scare tactic to me,” Ralph said. “We haven’t seen evidence of any such kind of attack on utility grids. It’s enough that we have our transfer stations and generating facilities under constant surveillance to guard against physical threats. I don’t think the AI threat is as dire as you paint it to be.”
“We rather expected that. You understand that we have deployed the Delphos Network Armor on all our servers at our Page Services server farm, for which you supply power,” Nathan said. “We may not yet be your largest customer, but we would be crippled without power. Currently, we have three generators that would kick in if there was a power outage, but that is a temporary fix. We need to look at long-term power alternatives.
“At the moment, those alternatives include deploying a new power conservation app on all our servers that will reduce our power consumption significantly. That still leaves us vulnerable if the power is gone completely. So, like server farms around the country, we’ll be looking at alternate power sources.”
“The mobile nuclear reactors are still tied up in red tape and not online yet,” Ralph said.
“Thanks much to the resistance of the major utility companies, who understandably are not enthused about competition. We have power cells under development that might obviate the need for nuclear power altogether,” Henry said. “We expected this response to our suggestion that you deploy Delphos Network Armor. We wanted to make sure before we started seriously pursuing alternatives both to protecting the power grid and protecting our server farm.”
The meeting ended and no one was satisfied.
Germaine arrived with Henry’s wheelchair so he didn’t need to use the crutches too much so soon after getting the cast removed. They went directly from the power company to the airport for the flight back home.
Lacking access to a pain reliever, Henry ordered a drink when the plane was airborne.
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