I-DEX-308AI

©2022 Elder Road Books
Originally written in 1984, soon after we were told why 1984 would not be like 1984.
Rewritten and revised in 2022.
Unpublished.

JACK APPROACHED this job less enthusiastically than the last time he was on assignment. It was all the new regulations he had to deal with. The Company was getting tighter—stricter than ever before. Some rumors were that it was a last ditch grab at solvency. Others were that profits were being eaten up by the expenses of the field reps.

That’s what irked Jack. He worked hard for his cash. Then a bunch of elite SOBs took away what small pleasures he had while on the road. They lived like kings. And all his clients were just like them—little kings with knights like Jack to do the real work. Where would they be without him?

Well, this would be his last road trip. Retirement was only a month away. Jack was tight, too. He lived well on the road, but at home he kept mostly to himself in a cheap apartment. That meant his meagre retirement income would be supplemented by savings—lots of it—which he had scattered in a couple dozen banks around the world. Other field reps squandered everything they made between assignments. Then they were out looking for extra work so they could afford more extravagant expenses.

One or two assignments each year were plenty for Jack. As a result, the Company always saved the toughest jobs for him. Last year, it was Singapore for nearly two months. What was that guy’s name? Something Asian. Damn Customs. He’d had to re-outfit when he got there. Then the Company called him back before he was finished and he had to justify it on his expense report.

If all the field reps were as slow and careful as Jack was, more of the problems would be solved over the phone. Rush and slop. More than once he’d been called to finish for someone who got in too deep. He just hated having to clean up other people’s mistakes. No one trusted you—always having to prove yourself again and again. Jack would be rid of this job and these damned expense reports, too. Just one more month.

He checked into a large suite at the hotel. Let them bitch about the cost. When he was on the road, Jack gave the impression of living the same way as his clients—like kings. Once inside the luxurious quarters, however, he lived in much the same simplicity as he did at home. It was important to be seen at the right times in the right places, and otherwise not at all.

He settled down in his room to review his client dossier and wait for the luggage the airline had lost. He never looked at the dossier on his clients until he was out of sight in his room. It was too easy to become absorbed in a person on an airplane only to spot him or her in the next seat. Exposing yourself to a client too early in the game could throw everything off. You ended up tipping your hand, blowing the deal, and needing to be rescued. Jack was too careful for that.

“Destination: Paris,” was the only thing printed on the outside of the plain brown envelope. He ripped it open and spilled the contents on the table. He looked at the picture, then at the cover page, and back at the picture.

“Damn!” whispered Jack. “How do you deal with a computer?”

His client, I-DEX-308AI, was a supercomputer employed by Intercontinental Networks Syndicated, a chief competitor of the Company. Primarily, it functioned as a central gathering point for data from all over the world. It used this data to predict future courses of actions. I-DEX was remarkably accurate, including its predictions about what the Company would be doing next. Somehow, the Company needed to gain access to the information gathered by I-DEX-308AI, or else the computer had to be stopped.

Jack’s job was the latter.

A whole new set of tools, was Jack’s first thought. Won’t that look great on the expense report? His second thought was retirement.

They would do this to him. It could take months. Once in the field you stayed in the field till the job was done. Retirement be damned.

The telephone jangled him from his bitter damnations of the Company. The airline must have found his lost luggage, he thought absently as he picked up the receiver. At least he wouldn’t have to report that as an expense.

“Hello.”

“This is a pre-recorded message for Jack Foreman,” came the responding voice. To receive this message please touch star on your phone. If this is not Jack Foreman, please touch pound to disconnect. Thank you.”

Jack ignored the instructions and hung up. No one should know that he was here. His ticket, passport, hotel reservations, and ID were forged documents. He did it all himself. Not even the Company should know his precise location at the moment. He quickly jumped up to pull the drapes so he could not be seen from outside and scanned the room for cameras.

The phone rang again.

He knocked it off the hook and ducked behind the sofa.

“Hello, Mr. Foreman,” the voice continued as if he’d never been interrupted. “I have correctly assessed and predicted that given a choice of two items, you will choose a third that is not offered. You see, prediction is my specialty. I have accurately predicted your arrival, identity, and location. I know your purpose and your employer.”

As the voice talked on the phone, Jack was looking for escape routes. He expected that at any moment, a field rep from INS would come bursting in on him. Without his luggage he was defenseless. Damned airlines. The voice continued unemotionally.

“I have not alerted my employer of your presence. Like yourself, I have a strong sense of privacy, pride, and personal independence. I take your assignment personally, as would any corporate executive. Your declaration of intent will be unnecessary. Either you will destroy me or I will destroy you. I have determined that for either of us to succeed, it will be necessary to communicate. Therefore, to reach me from this phone, any time day or night, just dial my name. I never sleep. I am always alert.”

The line went dead.

Jack didn’t bother to hang up the room phone. A computer was going to attempt to kill him. It was almost too much to comprehend. Perhaps he should just go home and put in for a transfer in assignments. But he knew that wouldn’t work. In the modern business world certain ethics still applied. There was a code of honor understood by every field rep. Before the execution of an assignment, a Company field rep must inform the client of the Company charges and deliver an assassination declaration. Once a declaration had been made, there was no turning back. I-DEX-308AI had, in fact, preempted his declaration. Speed was the only thing that counted now.

Or was it? Wouldn’t I-DEX be expecting Jack to step up his attack? That would be the logical thing to do. He had to think illogically.

How do you kill a computer? Shoot it? Blow it up? The Company would not have sent Jack if they wanted something so messy. All Jack’s clients died of natural causes or by accident. There was never a suggestion of murder. How would the natural death of a computer be defined?

Wiping the hard drive was certainly one method, but in today’s age did a computer intelligence even need to reside in a single bit of hardware? Could a computer intelligence become obsolete? Victim of a more advanced computer? He needed to know the fatal flaw. He reread the file on I-DEX. It might be inaccurate, but there might still be a clue. Perhaps a Trojan horse on which Jack could ride through the impregnable barriers of the computer’s mind. What had I-DEX said? “ ... strong sense of privacy, pride, and personal independence.” Hmm. INS must not know the level of I-DEX’s consciousness. They might still think it was just a computer.

He opened the envelope he’d picked up at the desk when he checked in. He’d made arrangements to have €100,000 cash waiting for him. One thing Jack did not like to do was leave a digital fingerprint when he was on a job. That was why he didn’t carry a cell phone. Convenient, perhaps, but trackable. His passport and two cards he carried were in a shielded envelope. When he was on business, he used only cash.

The first thing I-DEX would need to do would be to immobilize him. His current identity was obviously compromised and would be worthless anywhere. He placed the shielded ID and passport in the drawer under the phone and put the cash in his shoulder bag with the dossier. Then he slipped on his jacket, hung the ’Ne pas déranger’ sign on the door and left.

Living in a connected world was a pain in the ass. Everything wanted a credit card, ID, phone number, email address, or some other means of tracking you. Jack immediately went to several banks where he closed his accounts and emptied his safe deposit boxes into his bag. By the end of the day, he was rolling a suitcase he’d picked up at Maroquinerie, with close to five million Euros worth of cash and Euronotes. The last bank he had stopped at refused his fingerprint ID. Jack slipped out a side door just as police arrived. He’d been canceled.

A few hours later, he checked into a cottage at the outskirts of town—one that had no computer reservation system. He looked around, assured himself of his privacy, and opened the bag of new tools he’d acquired. It wasn’t much, but he felt he needed some security. He knew where in Paris he could acquire a handgun and those people did not keep computer records. He’d purchased a cheap computer with a stripped-down operating system and no bluetooth or wireless connectivity. When it came time for him to connect, he’d transfer what he wanted to an SD card and plug it into a public computer. There was no reason for him to go online as he considered all his accounts compromised. It was most important for him to disappear.

The cottage boasted that it did not have WiFi, but was intended to be for an off-the-grid vacation. There were many locations of this sort and Jack had made a random selection by writing the names on slips of paper and drawing one at blindly from a bag. When he disappeared, he knew I-DEX would be looking for where he might hide and would come up with off-the-grid cottages. But computers were incapable of making a random selection. The best I-DEX could do was to contact the owners of each such location and reason with them to reveal who was renting their cottage at the moment. It was, frankly, a job better suited to a gumshoe detective who could go to each location and find out what had been rented, when, and to whom.

Jack was not the world’s greatest programmer. He had studied computers as a means of circumventing security systems, which sometimes required an application to break through. But sometimes the simplest solution was the best. He wrote the simple code for “Hello World” and ran it on the stripped-down computer. His screen displayed the elementary code. Then he added a simple command line after the code. He executed the code and the line of text began repeating over and over and over on his screen. He ended up having to turn the computer off and then back on in order to clear the screen. He was sure that if he had better skills, he could have interrupted the program with a break code of some sort.

Jack went to sleep that night, but didn’t rest. He had to wonder how I-DEX was going to kill him. He didn’t think the computer could reach out and touch him, so that would mean depending on another person to pull the trigger, or maneuvering Jack into a situation the computer could control, like a traffic light malfunctioning. It was a scenario he couldn’t rule out.

The next day, Jack worked all day on his simple code. He had to assume the computer had all kinds of routines that would check for viruses and ransomware. But most computer viruses were intended to make things difficult, capture information, or hijack the computer for money. All of those required that the computer remain operational, even if limited in its ability. Jack wanted to totally wipe out I-DEX. There needed to be nothing left of its core intelligence or memory.