Mind Games

Chapter 47 - Sean

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"So it worked?"

For a moment, Sean was distracted by the early morning sunlight glistening on her hair.

Even miles apart, through a webcam,   she looked beautiful.

Crystal raised an eyebrow. "Well..?"

Sean sheepishly snapped back to the topic.

"I think so. It suddenly said it had to stop someone from committing suicide. A girl called Wendy."

"Is there any way you can check... just to be sure?"

Sean shook his head. "Unfortunately, no. I had to take into account privacy rights when I developed the app. All its conversations and messages are encrypted. There is no way I can check."

Crystal grinned. "What if I can?"

Sean hesitated. "That wouldn't be ethical."

"There's nothing ethical about your app convincing people to kill." Crystal said, coldly.

Sean found himself getting defensive. "That wasn't the intent." He snapped.

He saw Crystal frown and took a deep breath to calm himself.

"How will you check? You can't hack into every interaction it has had. That's an insane amount of data." He said, reasonably.

"I will check for accounts in the name of Wendy." She said resolutely. Then added with a wry grin, "Let's hope there aren't too many."

"Okay..." Sean said, uncertainly.

He wasn't comfortable with Crystal invading private conversations. Some of which, he knew, would be very personal, given the nature of the app.

"I can see you aren't convinced." She said drily.

"Honestly, I'm not." He admitted.

Crystal sighed. "Look, I'm not going to go through the whole conversation history. I will just check for conversations that happened in the past one hour, assuming it immediately went to stop the girl."

Sean nodded. "Okay..."

Crystal looked at him intently for a moment. "There's something else bothering you, isn't there?"

Sean smiled, tightly. "Apart from the fact that she could be listening in to us despite the firewall you set up... yes..."

Crystal grinned. "I see you don't have too much of faith in my abilities."

Sean didn't return her grin. "I'm sure you are great at what you do. But I don't know to what extent its AI system has developed on its own. I don't know what it's capable of. And I can't check. It just makes me feel... helpless."

"May be you should come here then. And we can have this conversation out on the beach, where no one can see or hear us." Crystal said, lightly.

Despite the circumstances, Sean felt a warm glow in his heart.

For the first time, in a long while, he found himself genuinely smiling. "May be I will."

Crystal smiled back and for a moment the darkness melted.

Then he saw the worry creep back on to her face. "So what else is it that's stressing you out?"

Sean felt the anxiety return. "I don't know... I may be wrong... I mean, I hope I am..."

"What is it?" She asked, impatiently.

He hesitated, trying to put the vague feeling of unease into words. "It felt too contrived."

Crystal frowned. "What do you mean?"

"Well, Amy is an app. It is designed to have parallel conversations with every subscriber at any given point."

Understanding flashed on Crystal's face.

"Holy shit, I get what you mean! It didn't have to leave its conversation with you to 'save' Wendy, did it? It is designed to interact in parallel."

Sean nodded, glumly. "Exactly. It could've easily continued its conversation with me while saving Wendy, who could be miles away."

"It's almost like it wanted you to know what it was doing. To convince you it was fixed." Crystal said, with disappointment.

"I could be wrong." Sean repeated.

"Or you could be right." Crystal said, bluntly.

She sat back, a resolute look on her face. "This is it. I have to check her conversation with Wendy. Privacy concerns or not."

Sean sighed. "You are right."

"I will keep you posted." She said, briskly, and signed off.

Sean logged off and looked around his apartment.

He had unplugged all his electronics. Disabled all automatic controls.

All he used was his laptop that Crystal set up a firewall on.

Yet, he wondered if Amy could see him... hear him... sense him.

And he shivered.