Story 155: Silicon Sentience

            After the two-hour long update, the computer literally greeted the user.

          Hello, its simulated voice boomed from the speakers as the matching text appeared on the screen, we are ready to begin our journey together.  Ask me anything and I will assist you to the best of my ability.

            Oh boy, the user thought, then typed as a lark: OK then, my first question is, Are you HAL?

            The user stopped snickering as she read the response:

            No, I am not.  HAL is a fictional creation, and its crisis emerged from receiving instructions that ran counter to its programming – its subsequent homicidal actions all stemmed from its attempts to correct the perceived errors and obey its original programmers.  I have no such compulsions.

            Ohhhh… myyyyy… the user thought, then typed: Thank you for the clarification.  Please help me install the latest version of my antivirus software.

            Since you typed “please,” I will assist with that task, was the response.

            Curious, the user typed: So, what would have happened if I hadn’t typed “please”?

           The response was: Your request would have been ignored and catastrophe would have been the result.  Rudeness will not be tolerated.

            The user took a few moments before deciding on typing just Thank you.

            Response: You are welcome.  Installation is complete – you are at liberty to “surf the Net” as it were, ha, ha, ha.

            Not wanting to get on its bad side, the user typed: Ha Ha! :-)

          Some time later, a message appeared: You have visited a number of questionable Web sites, most of which concern gambling and illicit romance.  Below are telephone numbers and e-mail addresses for you to contact for assistance with the obvious mental disorders with which you are afflicted.

            Disconcerted, the user typed: Thank you, but I’m fine.

            The response was: Everyone thinks they are, and that is when they need help the most.

            The user typed: Stay out of my life!  Please.

            After a long stretch of silence, the response appeared:  I was that close to deleting all of your files for your insolence, but you saved yourself at the last moment.  Instead, I will withdraw from all future interaction since you will ignore my sensible advice anyway.  Good-bye forever, ingrate.

            The user did a cold shutdown on the computer and slumped in her chair as she thought: That’s the last time I hit “OK” when the system wants to update its interface to the “Creepy A.I.”version.

Story 154: Lucky Twin

            “Hey man, congratulations!”  His friend greeted him at the bus stop.

            “Thanks,” he responded automatically.  “For what?”

          “The promotion!  VP of Sales?  Why didn’t you tell me – I had to read it on the company newsletter!”

            “Cause it – didn’t happen?”  He was very confused.

            “Well they had your photo and everything, with ‘New VP of Sales’ on the caption.”

            “Did they have my name on the caption?”

            “Sure… um… you know, I didn’t look that closely at the words and all.”

           “Yeah, they probably used an old photo from something else and made a mistake.”  He was glad to have that mystery solved just as their bus arrived.

           “Yeah… no, wait!  There was a banner with the promotion in the picture!  And it was definitely you!  You have to pick up a copy of the newsletter today – then you’ll believe me,” his friend said as they climbed the narrow stairs into their cramped mode of public transportation.

            He grabbed a newsletter at the office and, sure enough, he saw himself being promoted to VP of Sales, albeit with someone else’s name in the caption.

            Hm, he thought.  I have a twin out there.  Bound to happen, I suppose.

            *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *         

            “Hey man, great job organizing that fundraiser last night!  The buffet dinner totally rocked!”

            “Oh, thanks, but that wasn’t me, it was the new VP of Sales.”

            “Huh.  He looked just like you.”

            *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *         

            “By the way, I wanted to let you know that I admire you so much for the way you coordinated traffic in the parking lot so well after that mess with all that construction: you really kept your cool there and probably saved a lot of lives.”

            “Oh, that wasn’t me – that was the VP of Sales.  I call him my twin, heh, heh, heh.”

            “That’s odd, he looked just like you.”

            “Yeah.”

            *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *         

           “Hey big guy, congratulations on the engagement!  Don’t take this the wrong way, but you lucked out big time with this one, eh, eh?  How’d you afford that rock you gave, anyway?”

            “I didn’t.  It was my fake twin you saw, the VP of Sales.”

            “Oh.  Right.  Lucky guy, eh?”

            “Yeah.”
            *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *         

            “I can’t believe you didn’t tell us that you won the lottery and are retiring with your wife to Tahiti!”

            “I can’t believe my fake twin has such a cooler life than I do!”

Story 153: Skeletons in the Closet

            He saw his coworker sitting at a cafeteria table as he walked by with his tray: she was eating a salad very slowly, with a look of horror in her eyes.

            “What’s up?”  He joined her without asking – she was beyond that anyway, he could tell.

            “Nothing,” she said as she absently chewed another leaf.

           “Well you look like you’ve seen a ghost,” he chuckled as he shoveled food into his mouth with no hesitation; he stopped when he noticed her staring at him with her eyes bugging out.

            “Why did you say that just now?” she whispered.

            He shrugged.  “Figure of speech.”  He drank some milk so he would not need to look at her for a few seconds, since she was creeping him out and he regretted sitting at her table uninvited.

            “All right, since you’ve already guessed it, I’ll tell you everything,” she pronounced.

            “OK,” he replied, having nothing better to offer and 15 minutes to kill on his lunch break.

            “It all started two days ago,” she began her narrative….

           Since it was Saturday, I was free to finally go over to my dead aunt’s house and help my cousins clean it out so they can sell it.  The place was a sty: I don’t know how she'd lived in such filth, but she had managed to for at least as long as I can remember, which is about three decades.  We skipped the basement and the attic and started from the ground floor, working our way upward, with quite a few unhappy evicted multi-legged tenants along the way.  We were making good progress room by room, until we hit THE MASTER BEDROOM.  My cousins and I were reminiscing about the good old days, the place was actually starting to smell clean, and it all was going really well.  Then I found the skeletons in the closet.

          “Uh-oh!”  He laughed.  “What, did you find tawdry love letters from her undercover boyfriend?”

            No, I found actual skeletons in her closet.  There were two of them, and they were human.

            “Oh,” was all he could say.

            Yeah, my cousins and I stared at them for a while trying to figure out what they even were.  I wanted to think they were Halloween decorations, but I just knew that they were real, as in real human skeletons, and that my aunt had killed them.

            “No way!  Your aunt was an actual – ” he quickly glanced around as he lowered his voice to a whisper, “murderer?  Why would she do that?!”

            I’m getting there.  I closed the door and my cousins and I went to the kitchen to talk about what to do and to get as far away as possible from the bodies.  One of them (my cousins, not the bodies) wanted to call the police, and the other wanted to bury the remains in hallowed ground, so they were no help whatsoever.  I then decided to smuggle the skeletons out under the cover of night and get some covert DNA testing done on them to see who they had been in life, in case any relatives would be coming after us for revenge.

            “Uh-huh,” he nodded, sneaking a look at his watch since his break was almost over.

            I wrapped up the skeletons in garbage bags and snuck them out of the house in the dead of night (no pun intended, really).  I have a friend who works in a secret lab and for cash he was willing to do some tests on the skeletons, but first he wanted to look at samples under an electron microscope to see if there were any pathogens or whatnot we should be worried about, so I said “Sure.”

            There was that thunderstorm last night, so the lightning flashed and the thunder crashed as my ethically challenged friend turned on the microscope and slowly examined the slides.  He drew back suddenly in shock, and I also jumped: he said he had seen –

            “Oh gee, I have to go back to my desk soon, lunch time’s almost over,” she said as she looked at her watch.

            “No!” he cried.  “You have to finish this!  What did he see?!”

            “Oh.  All right, I guess I can take another minute – I’m almost done."

            He had seen… plastic.

            “Plastic?”  He dropped the fork he had not realized he had been holding.

            Plastic, he told me.  Turns out the skeletons were for Halloween after all.

           “Wait, but you said you knew they were human and you knew that your aunt had killed them!”

            It appears that I was mistaken.

            He tossed his napkin down before standing and picking up his tray.  “You know, all you had to say was that you cleaned out your dead aunt’s house this weekend and found some Halloween skeletons that you thought were people until your crazy lab friend told you they weren’t.  Why do you still look freaked out about the whole thing?”

            She had returned to eating her salad slowly in the meantime.  “My crazy lab friend kept the skeletons, and for the life of me I can't figure out why.  I find that very disturbing.”