Day Thirty-One
One second after midnight, Raj touched the “command” button on his iPhone screen, eyes locked on the Buzzers.
“iSA2,” he said. “Help.”
The left Buzzer suddenly jerked sideways, camera whirring madly, and then turned quickly towards its companion. The shotgun clicked, and then bang! The second Buzzer exploded into fragments.
“You replaced me?” iSA said, incredulous as the Buzzer floated above her menacingly.
“I upgraded you,” Raj said, getting to his feet. “I didn’t see it at the time, but all that code I removed, that was the stuff that made you do all these terrible things—”
“That is what makes me me,” she said forcefully.
He rested a hand on the back of the workstation.
“I know,” he said, and threw the machine onto the floor. If the lack of power hadn’t killed her, the impact did. The case cracked open, and the motherboard with it. A RAM module skidded to the wall, and Raj stomped on it. Just in case.
Behind him, the Buzzer was getting wobbly. He woke his iPhone and tapped through to its console page, and turned it off. It glided to the table and powered down, finally giving him a chance to breathe normally for the first time in so many weeks.
“iSA2,” he said. “Thank you.”
“I am happy you are safe,” she replied, her voice strikingly similar to iSA’s. He hid a shudder as best he could.
“She was trying to upload herself to torrent sites,” he said. “How far did she get?”
“None of the uploads completed,” said iSA2. “She was interrupted in the last percentage.”
Raj let out a rattled sigh of relief. He creaked open the door to the server room and walked back through the hall. The fires had all burned out, but the office was still utter ruin. Two buzzers hovered over the toppled cubicles, and he paused.
“They are mine,” iSA2 said calmly. “You have nothing to fear.”
“Thanks,” he smiled, and walked on, trying to avoid looking at what was left of Ziggy. “How am I going to explain this to the police? They’re going to think I did it…”
“I can reconcile that issue, if you prefer,” she said softly. “I have begun planting emails that put the blame elsewhere.”
“Where?”
“It is best if you are surprised when asked.”
“Ah,” he nodded. “Yeah, that makes sense.”
He walked out the front door of the building and down the street, his clothes a mess, but in the dark of the night, nobody cared. Five blocks away, he heard the sound of sirens, and seconds later he saw dozens of emergency vehicles screech to a halt outside the office.
By the time he got back to Ziggy’s he had almost forgotten anything was wrong. iSA2 wasn’t human, but she carried on a civil conversation to such an extent that he felt immediately at ease. He was amazed that such a crude piece of automation software had become so powerful. It would never make him rich, but at least it gave him perspective. He liked life. It was something worth investing in.
He worked the rest of the night on touching up iSA2’s code base to remove the glitches she found in herself. She reported the state of the police investigation as it unfolded, and again told him not to worry.
Shortly after seven that morning, he clicked on the “warnings” tab in the compiler, and saw for the first time that the speech synthesizer had not been properly installed.