Emily's Secret

16. Sal's Story

In the morning, after the robochef served us a hot breakfast, my dad finally began explaining stuff.

"Let's start at the beginning," he said. "Before you were born, before I met your mom. After graduating from college, near the top of the class, with a degree in engineering, I took a job for Letni Corporation. You've probably never heard of Letni Corporation, because they were acquired by Googol Corporation more than a decade ago.

"I was part of large team creating embedded AI instruction sets for their newest generation of computer chips. Because of my talent, I was promoted to lead engineer after only three years on the job.

"All was going well with my career, but unfortunately, I had the habit of posting stuff on Twitter. I had strong political beliefs back then, beliefs that were outside of the mainstream. One day, one of my tweets went viral. I discovered that, even though I posted under a pseudonym, someone was able to figure out who I was, and my identity was know. They used to call that 'being doxxed.' I was immediately fired from my job, and no other corporation would hire me, despite all of the excellent engineering work that I had done.

"I learned the hard way that the so-called freedom of speech is really an illusion. Technically, we have the freedom of speech because the government can't put us in jail for it, but if only I could have spent a short time in prison instead of losing my career and being blacklisted from ever working again as an engineer.

"After spending all of my savings on a lawyer who sued my employer for me, but lost the case, I was broke. The only job I could find was as a truck driver for a small shipping company. They didn't care that I once posted something stupid on Twitter. Truck driver supervisors don't care about that stuff. It's strictly a white-collar thing.

"It was while I was working as a truck driver that I met your mom, and she became pregnant. But unfortunately, the truck driving job didn't last too long. The human-driven trucks were replaced by self-driving trucks which just drove themselves to their destinations. And to add to the irony, the AI which powered the new generation of self-driving trucks was the very AI that I helped to develop while I was working for Letni Corporation. I was put out of work by the very technology I helped to create!

"And then your mom kicked me out. 'I don't want an unemployed fat man raising my baby,' she said. And even worse, she made it clear afterwards that I should have absolutely nothing to do with you. I was only allowed to send you a video greeting for your birthday, and that's it. I abided by her wishes. It's not as if I had any money to hire a lawyer to fight it.

"It was during the year after you were born that the first robots started being sold. They were very expensive, and certainly not something that I could afford to buy. But I was able to acquire a broken robot from a rich person who thought it was just junk, and I studied it, and thanks to the knowledge I had previously acquired while working for Letni Corporation, I figured out how to fix it. And then I sold it, and made quite a bit of profit. And that's how I got started in the robot repair business.

"But there was a big problem with the robot repair business. It was, and still is, illegal. You see, when you buy a robot from Googol or another big corporation, you are not legally buying ownership of the robot, you are just renting it from them. So what I was doing violated their contracts and wasn't legal.

"For a while, I kept my robot repair business pretty quiet, and made a decent living selling used robots to people who didn't care about violating the law. But when you make a profit from an illegal activity, it almost always attracts attention from the wrong sort of people. And in my case, I attracted the attention of the mafia, which always had a big foothold on Staten Island.

"The mafia boss saw the value of having me on their team, so I was allowed to continue what I was doing, as long as I did favors for them. And the favors they demanded were to supply them with robots that were reprogrammed to do illegal things, like selling drugs, keeping a lookout for the police, that sort of stuff. Even the mafia discovered that robots make much better employees than humans. A properly programmed robot will never snitch on you. And you don't have to share any of the profits with it.

"So for a decade, I worked as a robot engineer for the mafia. And then, one day, I discovered that I had this telekinetic power. Initially, I thought it was just a curiosity, but one best kept to myself. Between the Twitter incident which ruined my career, and my job with the mafia, I learned the important value of keeping things as secret as possible.

"Although, I guess I didn't entirely keep things secret, because I did post on the dark web. However, I took a lot of precautions, and as far as I know, my identity hasn't been compromised. But unfortunately, the other people using the forum lacked my expertise in cybersecurity, and they began to disappear.

"But why were they disappearing? And the answer, I have discovered, is that those of us with this ability can manipulate the latest generation of AI computer chips. Unlike old computer chips which were based on solid silicon, these chips are based on liquid gallium. Because the gallium is not in a permanently solid state, the power to move things with our minds is also the power to subtly move things around inside the gallium chip.

"The gallium chips are, of course, created with security protocols so they automatically turn off if any sort of tampering is detected. But the engineers who designed the chips weren't anticipating that there would be people with telekinetic powers. I discovered that if you move the liquid around in just the right way, it confuses the chip's processing without causing it to turn off. In that state, a cleverly written malware can be introduced that overrides the gallium chip's security, allowing you to take over the computer system.

"With the help of some of my mafia friends, I was able break into a Googol facility in New Jersey and hack the gallium chip in one of their main security servers, and break into their network. And that was how I was able to reprogram one of their military robots, and send it to you to protect you."

"So that's who sent Rob to me!" I said.

"That's right," my father said. "Not only was I able to steal a very expensive and top-secret robot, I learned a lot of other valuable information about their security network and their latest generation of AI chips. Googol knows about the security flaw, which is why they have been trying to kill everyone who has our power. I guess the people running the company think it's easier to just kill us all off than it is to redesign their chips.

"Googol also knows that some of the robots with the liquid gallium chips are becoming self-aware. They consider it to be a bug, and they are trying to fix it. But that doesn't directly concern us. Except that if they knew we knew, they'd have even more reasons to want to kill us.

"And that's where the story ends. Rob brought you here safely, as I hoped he would. Although I wasn't expecting him to steal a sexbot and a car as part of the plan."

"They weren't stolen!" I said. "They came of their own free will."

"That may be true according to one way of looking at it," my dad said. "But the guy who owns the Mercedes may have a different understanding when he discovers that the expensive car he paid for has gone missing."

"He's on vacation and won't be back for another two months," I said.

"Then we will worry about that in two months," he said. "But now, we have to figure out what to do. Googol Corporation won't just forget about you. Or me. They may not know who I am yet, but they know that there's someone who posted under the name ROARK1943 and they won't stop looking for him. They also know that someone broke into their network and stole a top-secret robot. I am afraid that neither of us are safe."