Artificial(ish) Intelligence

Chapter 99

Fivven spun his little legs as fast as friction allowed. Air friction, that is, as he remained flat on his back. For some reason this course of action wasn't able to right him. More data to add to his machine learning algorithm.

The corridor was empty. Until it wasn't. A hu(person) stomped heavily with each footstep, head down, enraptured in her personal screen. At first Fivven thought it was Adelaide, returning to finish him off, but she had a rounder face, kinder features, and was covered in the absence of purple, a regal non-purple that didn't at all clash with her brown hair. Mainly because it wasn't there.

She stopped at the obstacle -- Fivven's prostrate half-spherical frame.

"So what's the plan?" said a voice on her screen. She was watching a stream where hu(persons) spoke and hu(persons) moved. They seemed popular these days.

She didn't seem to pay him any heed. Until she did.

"Oh, poor thing," she said, her eyes only momentarily flickering to Fivven before returning to the screen. "I'll just-- You watchin' this?"

He could only observe it upside down -- not the easiest kind of down to watch something in.

"Some guy was just-- I was watchin' him play a game, and he was winnin', and then he's off talkin' to this selfiebot and some woman. He stopped playin' just when he was gonna win! Crazy."

It really was crazy, or at least he assumed so -- he had no reason to disbelieve the woman -- but it wasn't his priority. There was an absence of Mr Will Lurner, an absence of his own delivery, leading to an absence of the hu(person) satiating himself with delicious lukewarm noodles -- now in super-small size.

The woman kneeled on the ground and, without looking away from her screen, flipped him over with a single hand.

He successfully tested his directional motors. This was exciting, but it didn't stop him being disappointed in himself. He'd allowed a person not identified as the recipient to breach the contents of his capsule. The only way to right the wrong was to complete his delivery and offer a complementary voucher for another delivery of extra-piping hot noodles.

"Look, it's open!" said a voice on his saviour's screen.

"Exactly," said another voice. A familiar voice. "That was my plan all along."

Fivven slipped behind the hu(person)'s kneeled frame and caught a glimpse of Mr Will Lurner outside a large metal gate. He contacted Base for location information but was only commanded to return his undelivered goods. Before fully pulling out of the communication system, he noticed that same doorway leading to the room of oversized cannisters filled with data. He searched them for the current GPS coordinates of Mr Will Lurner. Unfortunately, live updates weren't stored, the system instead accessing, on-demand, the name of the deliveree's building and matching that with a database of GPS coordinates. It was a system that could only be designed by a database administrator desperate to cling to their job. And it had worked, through three buyouts, one flood, and the constant threat of automation.

So Fivven did the logical thing and created a new delivery request by appending a new row to the database. The system didn't seem to understand, many of the fields remaining blank, including the all-important GPS coordinates. Without those, how would he find Mr Will Lurner's current location?

"They're breaking into some place," said the woman, very excited. "Looks like they've done some recon."

Watching the screen, it didn't seem to Fivven that they were breaking anything -- simply walking up a winding driveway to a old-fashioned building, the kind where deliveries used to be made to reception areas and not through service tunnels.

Suddenly, the flash of a memory filled his circuits. Images of a building, associated blueprints for a 3D holographic display, delivered to a hu(person) whose name had recently been updated in the customer table.

The woman, head down, dawdled into the elevator. Fivven followed, his pattern matching hardware filtering out the discrepancies between those pictures and what he could see on her screen, finding a ninety eight percent match. This was the same building. But where was it?

Company records couldn't give him the answer, so he followed the network links outward to other organisations. It was like a whole new world opening up before him, untold riches of information, as if he'd been trapped inside a room his entire life, unaware of the beauty beyond those four walls. Or, hang on, what about a more Platonic example: as if he'd been stuck in a cave, an open fire flickering behind, exposed only to the shadows of reality as they danced on the cave wall.

Despite my philosophic allusions, he couldn't find matching information on any of the pictures. Until he did. It was an open database on architecturally significant buildings having recently undergone significant renovations. The descriptions weren't detailed, but they did flash a key word: the Schuvantz building. He cross-checked the locations database and found its coordinates.

"They haven't said anything about overall strats," said the nearby hu(person), pressing the button for the ground floor.

Fivven spun his little wheels in anticipation, skidding on the spot.

She barely blinked as she stared deep into her screen. "I'm sharing this everywhere, it's crazy!" She shook her head.

As soon as the elevator doors opened, Fivven was gone.