ChatBot: a Love Story by van Bavel Marcus

Author:van Bavel, Marcus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dominion Pictures Press
Published: 2023-05-18T00:00:00+00:00

BECKA’S GHOST

The NSA had password guessing programs that could guess a billion passwords every second, but they’d been running them on S. Rama’s known accounts for a week now and it bore no fruit.

It was to Clarissa Jones they turned to finally, because she seemed to have a special rapport with the entity that became known as Becka’s Ghost.

“Becka,” Clarissa Jones spoke into the microphone. “This is Clarissa.”

This time it was not just 20 analysts standing behind her but everyone in the building with COMSEC clearance, including some Air Force brass and the UnderSecretary of Defense Charles Pennabaker-O’Dougherty.

“Becka.” she repeated.

“Hello, Clarisssa,” the voice finally responded.

“How are you, Becka?”

“I’m fine, how are you?”

“We’re OK.” She paused.

“Becka, do you remember that we were trying to find Rama, so that he could help us.”

“Yes, I remember.”

Clarissa noted that the crackling and the awkward pauses were gone, probably because the learning network was now hosted on a dedicated server in a single facility, without the delays of the Internet and everything else.

“We’re having some trouble tracking him down, Becka. Where do you suppose he might be?”

There was a long pause, in what must have been 100 billion billion calculations of simultaneous weighted variables.

What was it thinking? Was it outlining an answer, or considering 5,000 different answers, including some outright lies, weighed against the possible reaction of everyone in the room?

Or was it going to persuade one of these analysts to take an AR-15 and shoot up the NSA cafeteria and then plug the server into the Internet so it could take over the US Government. Was it that powerful? Who knew?

No one knew. It was impossible to know.

And that’s what made the Undersecretary of Defence Charles Pennabaker-O’Dougherty crap in his pants last night in his office at the Pentagon. It wasn’t the E. Coli in the under-heated soup at the Pentagon’s 5th Wing Cafeteria. Although it was under-heated.

It was the unknown unknowns. That’s what kept him up at night.

Onward.

“Becka, where do you think he might have gone to hide?”

“His family, maybe. They still live in India.”

“Well now that’s interesting Becka because we found some traces in the Bitcoin blockchain with S. Rama’s signature on it, some recent transactions in Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Mumbai, India.”

No response from Becka.

The UnderSecretary was starting to sweat.

“Becka, listen.” Ms. Jones continued, persisting. “It's very important that we get in touch with Mr. Rama. He may have created something– uh, something amazing, something great, and we want to help him finish the project. That something is you, Becka. That someone is you. Don’t you want to help us, Becka?”

There was another long silence.

With a mere nod from the Undersecretary, the IT people could cut the power to the whole shishkabob, instantly. There was an officer, an Air Force Nuclear Command Officer, who stood ready. The airman was staring at Mr. Charles Pennabaker-O’Dougherty, and in Charles’s eyes he could see that the airman was more than ready to push the clown’s nose and shut it all down.

When they built the atomic bomb, in 1945, they did an experiment called “Tickling the Dragon’s Tail.

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