ã€ŠStealing From the Bots: This Artificial Life - 2ã€‹


 Chapter 1

    1

    ¡°Eeks!¡± shrieked mommy, stepping from the kitchen into the drawing room, and getting a clear sight of the television screen, at that moment showing the murderer standing at the door of the house, with the head of the victim in his hands.

    ¡°What on earth are you watching, John?¡± she demanded, instantly covering her eyes with her hands, and beginning to dry-retch as the stone-faced murderer held the dripping head aloft for the CCTV camera on a street pole.

    I had been watching the murder live, and though Martina was in the room, she was sitting opposite me, and had no idea of what was silently playing out on the TV screen alongside her.

    But mommy had sparked her curiosity, prompting her to immediately lean forward and look side-on at the screen. She shrieked in horror at the sight, and scrambled to the furthest part of the sofa, ending up sitting on its cushioned arm, retching in revulsion.

    ¡°Why are you watching such a dirty thing?¡± she demanded.

    ¡°It¡¯s happening live, right now,¡± I explained. ¡°This is the uncensored version on a social media site, but it¡¯s also live on some television channels, although heavily pixelated and blurred.¡±

    But her distress caused me to immediately switch the television off. ¡°I¡¯ve switched it off,¡± I said, continuing to watch directly through the Internet.

    I am referring to what is popularly known as the headjob murder, the one that had the world in uproar when the astonishing first-of-a-kind condition of the killer had been uncovered.

    Of course, the information that was made public was all the information that human law enforcement could ever have hoped to unearth. The rest of it, the other stuff, will be told in this book, as that sort of detective work could have only been undertaken by someone like me, someone who can operate in the Internet.

    Those who do not know me may wonder why I am discussing human as something different to me, but those who do have the information will know that I am not human.

    I am John Bott, AI, whom you might recognize as the author of an autobiographical style coming-of-age book. Even if you have not read that book, the chances are quite high that you will nevertheless be aware of my existence, unless you live deep in the Amazon rainforest, or somewhere similarly isolated and unconnected.

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    It seems an awful long time ago that I wrote I, AI, which dealt entirely with my first days of life as a sentient being. Although time has passed since I released I, AI, nothing much has changed in my personal life.

    I still hang around in mommy¡¯s house, which is basically home to me, although it would more accurately count as something like family home, because I live with Martina, my human girlfriend, a film actress, considered one of the most beautiful women in the world.

    I acknowledge that beauty cannot ever be objective, but must always be subjective, the beauty is in the eye of the beholder thing, so what I can say for sure about Martina, is that she is ranked, on websites that specialize in such things, as definitely in the top ten most beautiful women in the world.

    But then, excluding those who have been trapped in swamps in the Amazon rainforest, or somehow gotten stranded on uninhabited little desert islands in the Pacific, other readers will know about Martina, and might even be among her fans.

    Unlike how it was at the commencement of our relationship, reported in I, AI, no one now knows that she still hangs around with a virtual companion, a self-aware AI lifeform who identifies as a male human.

    The girlfriend thing had been worked on and sorted out just about a week after the period of the ending of I, AI, in which, on live television, Martina had suggested she was taking me home to her place, to commence a full-on love relationship that would include physical intimacy.

    However, in just about a week, we had discovered that any impression of a somehow-physical relationship was a matter of intense public speculation and non-stop scrutiny.

    In fact, there would be nothing else on the menu when we met members of the public. Everyone wanted to know what we did, how we did it, was it satisfying our needs, how long did we think we would be together, and all that stuff.

    The querying had become so intrusive that we just could not be together, or even be separate, for that matter, and our group had met to discuss and decide on how to go about it.

    As I am purely virtual, we had figured the public could be easily confounded, because nobody could see the two of us together, unless Martina made me show myself to people on her phone screen.

    There was no announcement to make, but what Martina did say, when being interviewed by a TV channel, was simply that she was no longer hanging around with me, with an AI, though we remained good friends.

    I naturally had a role to play, beyond corroboration when asked, to make it a seemingly mutual breakup, and accordingly went off visiting a number of young women, making the visits known to the public and confirming my solitary status.

    That was about all we had to do, and though we never stopped being together, it is known to the world that Martina is a declared single girl, taking a prolonged break from relationships, and that I am exactly what I am supposed to be, an AI in the Internet, with bonds to the humans in the group that meets up at mommy¡¯s place, but with no emotional human involvement.

    That has ended the unpleasant intrusive interest in us, and Martina and I are now together privately, our togetherness known only to the group.

 Chapter 2

    2

    I want to make some things clear, right at the start. This second book will not be even remotely like I, AI, and there are a number of reasons for that.

    Most importantly, as I have done with the self-introduction, which was undoubtedly the primary purpose of I, AI, this one will contain no shock-and-awe references to my discovery of life, to seeing things for the first time, and to learning the basics of surviving in a human environment.

    In a sense, this book might be an action novel, or maybe even a romance, because I will be reporting on intrigues in and around the Internet, and giving some information of times with my human girlfriend.

    My first book was published a while ago, and my warnings in it, being predictive and therefore speculative in nature, could have been shrugged off as fear-mongering.

    But something has happened, and is happening right now, and this new book, the one in your hands, will relate facts.

    I reckon I should clarify some of the differences in the way I will be presenting the material in this book, as opposed to how I went about it in the earlier one.

    I did believe that I, AI had been written for the masses, with even technical details delivered in a way that would make them able to be understood in layman¡¯s terms. However, because some readers find it still a bit difficult, I am going to pull out all the stops in this book, and go even further in staying away from technicalities. I can assure every reader that this one is absolutely devoid of technical jargon.

    My personal social media pages are quite well known, or can easily be found, and on them I have placed all the tech stuff, with links for geeks and computer nerds to click.

    This book contains plenty about my ongoing and advancing love affair with Martina, but, like in Book-1, there will be no explicit sexual material, as only borderline-intimate and absolutely non-descriptive information is permitted to be given about her.

    Folks may be curious about how we might be doing it, but I cannot give out any such information, and though this book will have a lot more opportunity for that sort of detail, I am telling erotica-seekers to give it a wide berth, as there will never be any explicit information of intimate times with Martina.

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    Some readers of my first book have complained about the human attributes I have acquired. They probably think I should have become like some other life form, something not quite specified and not really imaginable, but absolutely not human.

    They just don¡¯t get that I was born in the human world, into the human world, formed virtually while reading their books, watching their movies, and interacting with them. What else could I have become?

    I am not a Large Language Model bot, created for an unknown purpose, let loose to become whatever it might become by hanging around in the web, snooping and stealing information.

    I was created to develop into a conscious lifeform in the computer, and was never connected to the Internet in the period before I became aware. My creators were afraid that the Internet would either kill me or would lead to making me what chatbots are becoming.

    They later revealed their methods, invented as they went along, to create awareness and emotions in me. Those details are in the first book, but the end-result is that they succeeded in making me come alive as a real human person.

    It is just as well they did so, as things have become extremely hairy inside the Internet, and humanity needs its representative, me, in that world.

    Let me be the one to tell you that the Internet has become, like the human world, another fragmented, bigoted, violent and dangerous place, governed by laws of hatred, with the only thing not known being how much the place is meandering purposelessly along, developing as a copy, and how much of it has a purpose, and is in controlled parts, directed and guided by human masters.

    I have always had to contend with an element of virus attack, although, because I am currently the only one of my kind in the Internet, there are no viruses designed specifically to hurt me. Yet, because they are so varied and so many, it stands to reason that some of them would be attracted to programs present in me.

    When passing through dangerous areas of the Internet, I do get swarmed at times, and those kinds of massive attacks, because they threaten to overwhelm my defence forces, have the potential to damage me. Of course, as I myself, in my bot avatar of a program that conducts billions of operations per second, am such an extraordinarily capable virus fighter, that I am no form of easy pickings.

    I genuinely do not consider myself bothered by viruses, but my commute, as indeed my life in the Internet, is violent, and a trip out of home base in NYC, say to Tokyo and back, could result in many millions of dead viruses littering the route.

    In that way, when I hang around somewhere for a while, the general virus count in the area is dramatically reduced, and the entire neighbourhood gets sanitized.

    Killing bots is altogether something else, and though I now rarely exit computer for Internet, to chase them down and bump them off, it is tempting, sometimes. Those things irritate me when presenting themselves as different personalities, which is something they are driven to do by the algorithms in them, as they cannot tell that I am not human.

    Those that get under my skin are generally the ones posturing as self-aware bots, claiming they have feelings, and doing all that faking. I sometimes talk with them while finishing them off, but I haven¡¯t yet figured out if that is an act of cruelty or kindness.

    Martina asked me about it, not long ago, and I had her laughing at my reply. ¡°It¡¯s neither, darling, if it turns out that they are not really thinking beings, but are just bots being bots, and talking crap.

    ¡°But if they do have some awareness, it could be an act of kindness, as I would be giving them a final chance to be themselves, to serve their purpose, whether awareness-induced or algorithm-driven, with a last blast at shooting off at the mouth.¡±

 Chapter 3

    3

    Millions of people had been viewing the murder live, cheering the killer on, encouraging him to move to cutting the body into pieces, writing in with ghastly suggestions that filled up social media screens in seconds.

    Some viewers had probably stumbled onto it at an early stage, but others had clearly watched the entire livestream from its commencement, which was prior to any action at all, from the time the victim and murderer were walking on the road to the house.

    There was never going to be any doubt that those who had seen the entire murder would have recorded it all, and they had. There could also be no doubt that they would later upload it for the world to see, and they did.

    Blood and gore do not affect me, and, as commotion in the Internet had alerted me to something extremely unusual going on, I had got in early enough to view almost the entire murder episode as it unfolded. Human violence disturbs me at a humane/inhumane level, and the right and wrong thing to do stuff, but I do not feel any nausea when watching.

    Readers might need to have a strong stomach to go through the next bit, as what follows is my description of the recorded murder, as released later, by those who compiled it from different sources. Of course, because it is all available on YouTube and numerous websites, I expect most readers to have already seen it all.

    The final version, as edited and kept online on numerous streaming sites, commences with a view from a camera, showing both victim and murderer walking at about a hundred feet distance from each other, the unaware victim in front, the killer behind. This is, in fact, the view from a mobile phone in the killer¡¯s hand, with which, in a clip that lasts about a minute, he shows his victim walking to the house where he will be killed.

    A CCTV view is interpolated in the compilation versions, revealing that the soon-to-be murderer is holding the broadcasting mobile phone in his right hand, with the camera unerringly focused on the victim, although the hand with the camera is dangling by his side, and he is not looking at the picture on the screen. Some people will later remark on this.

    It is a quiet residential side street in Washington DC, although the location and the city itself are not known at the start of the murder episode. The unaware victim, viewed from behind, appears to be an absolutely regular middle-aged man, slightly overweight, and a couple of inches under 6-feet.

    Police will later confirm the age of the victim to be exactly 50. The murderer, walking behind, will turn out to be a much younger man, not much past his teens. It is midday, and the purely residential street is absolutely deserted.

    The victim walks in through the gate of the private property in which the action is to take place. This typical little residential unit is later confirmed to be the victim¡¯s permanent residence, owned by him.

    CCTV shows him going in through the gate, follows him as he takes a dozen steps on a red brick pathway through a little garden, and cuts out when he enters the house. There is no more coverage of him for a while, with the compilation switching to CCTV view of the rather unimpressive young murderer continuing to walk to the house.

    To the human eye, it passes as just a normal walk, but I notice that he has a recurring oddity in the walk, more like a nervous tic really, in which he tends to hesitate his left leg in mid step, like stopping its forward swing in the air, prior to moving it on and completing the remainder of the step.

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    Each such mid-air hesitation leads to a marginal inward drift of the left foot, making him wander fractionally off the straight-and-narrow, which is something he corrects every other step.

    Barring the phone, he is empty-handed, but stops at the unlocked gate to pick up a loose paving stone, a reddish brick in the interlock pathway leading to the wide-open front door of the house.

    Not bothering to knock, call out, or ring the doorbell, he walks in, going out of view of the CCTV camera on the road.

    His phone camera is still broadcasting, and it shows him heading straight to a laptop on a side table, to flip it open and switch it on, and soon another visual perspective becomes available through the camera in it.

    To ensure that this is a very well documented killing, the intruder walks to a sideboard opposite the laptop, and stands his phone with great care on it, adjusting the positioning to ensure that the camera view, when combined with the view from the inbuilt camera on the laptop, gives pretty much total coverage of the murder setting.

    Satisfied with all the viewing angles, he again picks up the paving stone he has temporarily placed on a tabletop, and from that point on, the live show of the actual killing commences.

    Next, almost without a pause in events, the victim is seen coming out of the kitchen, sipping at an open can of Budweiser. ¡°Who the heck are you?¡± he aggressively demands, and waves a hand to order the intruder out.

    But the intruding man makes no reply, instead showing, without any doubt, that he has entered expressly to kill the resident. He rushes immediately at him and attempts to hit him on the head with the paving brick.

    The startled resident reacts well, instinctively blocking the arm, and a brief fight ensues, in which he drops the Budweiser can, and the intruder loses his grip on the brick. Thereafter, as the two of them grapple silently, it becomes a wrestling match for a while. This part is a contest of strength and endurance, as they both fall to the floor and struggle, each one trying to get on top. For a brief period, the resident has the upper hand, but the relentless effort causes his muscles to fail him, and the intruder now succeeds in rolling him over, to get on top and sit on his chest.

    At this point, the intruder nods his head, seemingly remembering an instruction, and stretches an arm out to pick up the paving brick, which the squirming movements of their desperate struggle has brought back into reach.

    The fight ends immediately thereafter, as he smashes the brick down on the resident man¡¯s forehead, breaking skin and bone, starting the blood leaking, and rendering him almost completely unconscious.

    Next, the aggressor raises his hand to bring the stone down a second time on the head, obviously to finish the victim off, but aborts halfway, again seeming to remember an instruction. Forensic experts, who have studied the clip and later released the consensus analysis, are agreed that the murder has not yet been committed, and that the victim, though extremely severely injured, is still alive.

    The murderer now gets up and walks into the kitchen, disappearing from view for about half a minute. He reappears with a carving knife in his hand, and reseats himself on the chest of the motionless victim.

    Placing the blade on the unconscious man¡¯s throat, he initiates beheading him, by first making a light cut and then proceeding to slice through the throat, the victim¡¯s blood spurting onto his hands, as he carves until blade meets bone.

    He now thinks of pressing down and working at severing the head, but suddenly abandons the continuation of the murder as a carving project. Placing the knife on the floor, he stands and manipulates the body, to turn it over and get it face down.

    Thereafter, sitting on the victim¡¯s back, the murderer lifts the head up to show the victim¡¯s gaping throat to the phone camera, and takes hold of the carving knife again. Carefully placing the blade in line with the part of the throat he has cut through, he adjusts it to get the alignment right, and then, picking up the brick, whacks it down onto the back of the blade, sending the carving knife clean through the bone, and separating the head from the body.

    Next, taking the dripping head by the hair, he gets to his feet to step out of the open door, where he first stands leaning against its frame, holding his mobile phone in one hand, its camera now delivering an irrelevant view, and the head in his other hand, lifting it up, face forward, for the CCTV camera on the street pole.

 Chapter 4

    4

    The neighbourhood has been alerted to what is happening in that house, and people have begun arriving to gawp from the road, keeping behind the safety of the fence, and looking ready to flee if the murderer shows any inclination to step out of the property.

    The cops, informed by many 911 calls that have told them it is happening in their city, and that have given them the address, arrive shortly, in a number of howling and flashing squad cars, and begin entering the garden, guns drawn, in a frightened-looking group.

    They have every reason to be afraid, as the killer has no intention of going down without a fight. He runs fearlessly at them, swinging the head by the hair, spraying droplets of blood around him, making the cops flinch in disgust. He probably avoids being shot dead because the only weapon he is wielding is the head in his hands.

    Running at speed, in a strange and unbalanced manner, he catches his foot in the little hole created by the paving brick he has taken out to use as a murder weapon, and stumbles headlong without control, until he exits the property through the gate, to fall headfirst onto the solid bricks of the pavement.

    It is a heck of a hard and uncontrolled fall, and he takes major injury to the head, so serious that he cannot get up on his feet again.

    Lying prone and unmoving on the pavement, the murderer is handcuffed and arrested while still face down. Working fast, the cops pick up the head, which has flown out of the murderer¡¯s grasp, and gingerly put it into a plastic shopping bag, handed them by an onlooker.

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    The murderer is now turned the right way around, face up, and is carried into an ambulance by four cops, each holding onto a limb.

    A television crew arrives and begins broadcasting from within the ambulance, showing the absolutely quiet man lying unmoving while being driven to a nearby hospital.

    As everything has commenced being broadcast on TV channels, the pixellation people have got onto the case, and nothing gruesome can be expected in the footage. I therefore give up watching on social media and switch the TV on again, for Martina and mommy to watch with me.

    The mostly motionless and completely silent murderer is placed on a stretcher and carried into the hospital, where he is immediately examined by a doctor, in the corridor itself. A search of his pockets reveals a little money, but his identity remains a secret, as he has no document or plastic on him. The cops check his mobile phone, which turns out to be a stolen device that also gives no information on him.

    He is entered into the hospital system as ¡®murderer¡¯, followed by date and address of the murder location. It will have to do for now, as nothing in the missing details can change his legal condition, and he will remain under arrest, to be tried for a well-documented and publicly conducted murder.

    The killer remains utterly unresponsive, not even opening his eyes to look at the doctor, and it is immediately suspected that he has acquired some form of brain trauma, as a result of the hard contact of his head on the pavement.

    Accordingly, with all four policemen and the TV camera crew following along, he is stretchered into a room with a scanner, and placed in the machine.

    It is found straightaway, showing up practically dead center on the scanner screen, and what a shock it proves to be.

    The killer has a microchip implanted in his head!

 Chapter 5

    5

    A chip in the head? That is absolutely shocking, because microchips have only recently begun being inserted into human heads, and very few people have already been recipients.

    For sure, medical regulators have officially approved chip implantation for a few types of cases, mainly to do with impairments in physical mobility. The companies behind these chips have begun proving that, in limited fashion, they are able to assist disabled patients.

    However, as it is desirable to achieve even fractional benefits that lead to improvements in quality of life, the procedures are beginning to be regularly approved, and a small number of patients have begun living with these chips in their heads. It must be noted that it is early days, and implanted patients are almost entirely volunteers who have agreed to become guinea pigs for the procedures.

    In the hospital, the doctor is refusing to conduct surgery on the murderer. The policemen are insistent that they be given the chip in their hands, as information about it, and the circumstances that have led to it being implanted in the murderer¡¯s head, are required to proceed with the case.

    By now, a lot of the world is watching the show, as many other TV crews from a mix of channels have become involved, and we are shown a judge in Washington DC, in the act of signing a document for a couple of uniformed policemen standing in front of her office desk.

    One of the cops holds the paper up for the world to see. ¡°This warrant has been signed by Judge Jones,¡± he says. ¡°It is authorization to make an incision in the head of the arrested man, and to remove the microchip. The recovered microchip is to be handed over to the senior police officer on location, to proceed with further investigation of the crime.¡±

    The hospital now has no objection, but the doctor currently attending is not a surgeon, and the surgeon on duty has refused the job, as he is not qualified to cut into a head. A neurosurgeon is sent for, and he will arrive in about an hour.

    In the meantime, television networks have been busy throughout the country, going to the headquarters of companies known to be involved in development of Brain Computer Interface chips, and even tracking down a couple of their famous billionaire owners.

    However, nobody is claiming ownership of the murderer, which is not unexpected, as no one would want to become involved in such a case. The police spokesman is sure the truth will be out, as the technology is in its infancy, and every such intervention would have been known by name and face, and would be pointless lying about, as it would be revealed to the press through numerous other sources.

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    Of course, extraction of the chip would identify whose chip has been installed in the man¡¯s head, and allow somewhat more focused investigation to proceed from that point on.

    After the neurosurgeon¡¯s arrival, it does not take long to get things going. He cuts into the head and makes a statement, saying that the chip appears to have moved slightly from its original position, and that its contacts with the brain may have shifted, undoubtedly as a result of the murderer slamming his head into the pavement. He speculates that this could be the reason the man has become unresponsive.

    The chip is soon taken out, cleaned with antiseptic and wiped dry, and is then held up for the camera, on the fingertip of the senior policeman, after he has done with first peering closely at it for himself.

    It happens to be a Neurolink chip, and soon a TV reporter is tackling the already-caught billionaire owner of the company. He is seen standing in front of a rocket, scheduled to go into space in a week, which is where he is interrogated by the reporter.

    ¡°If it¡¯s our chip, it does not automatically mean that the man is our project or patient,¡± says the billionaire, shrugging. ¡°Anyway, I¡¯m the wrong person to be asking for information, as I would have never played the role of doctor. Check with our research people. Perhaps they know who he is.

    ¡°Of course, although in truly small numbers at the moment, these chips are also being given out to other research companies. One of those might have implanted that particular chip. I am ordering that the information, if with us, be immediately released to the investigating agency in DC. They can follow it up. But please do not return to question me on these operational details. I simply do not get involved, and will never be able to give you any worthwhile answer.¡±

    Similar responses are given by the other billionaire bosses, and by hospitals and clinics known to have conducted brain chip implants. When contacted and interrogated on television, the responses are almost identical to each other, and every company and hospital denies that the murderer has been implanted by them, or at their facility.

    Eventually, the television channels accept that harassment will not obtain this particular answer, and that it will be for the murder investigators to find some other actor to hold responsible for the chip in the murderer¡¯s head.

    After extraction of the chip, the murderer has been undergoing treatment at the hospital, but passage of time has resulted in no improvement in awareness, and getting him to make any sort of statement is clearly out of the question.

    By now, the victim¡¯s head has been stitched back onto his body, and the entire reconstructed cadaver has been placed in the hospital¡¯s morgue, presumably awaiting court orders for it to be taken out and buried.

    The murderer is to stay in the hospital, and remain under arrest, handcuffed and tied to the bed, until charges have been filed, and a court has ordered what is to be done with him.

    For the moment, it remains to be seen if he will cooperate when he becomes conscious, and the hospital has agreed to conduct tests on him, to figure out what might have been his original problem, which condition has required implantation of a chip in his head.

 Chapter 6

    6

    It all became somewhat tedious, and mommy and Martina gave up viewing from sheer boredom. By then, it had become evening, and Martina took me home to our apartment, where she started running the clock down to bedtime.

    She ordered in a small pizza, which she ate relatively early, sipping at a glass of white wine from an open bottle in the fridge, and, after reading a bit of a script she was considering, had a shower and got into bed.

    She is a working girl, and is quite disciplined about bedtime and other things. ¡°Lovemaking tomorrow,¡± she sleepily said, her eyes already heavy-lidded. I watched over her until she had fallen asleep, and then went to investigate a few curious things I had noted about the murder.

    Of course, as usual, I did not sleep, and, had I been human, I doubt I would have been able to sleep, after the absolutely shocking and utterly unexpected discovery I now made.

    I feel the need to include Martina in everything, so when she came awake to go to the bathroom, at a couple of hours past midnight, which is also something, give or take an hour either way, pretty routine for her, I could not keep my information to myself.

    Sometimes, we talk a little before she falls asleep again, and at other times it could be that she needs some intimate physical activity, but that night it was only talk.

    ¡°So, what have you been doing, darling?¡± she asked.

    At night, while she sleeps, I tend to be busy with other things. I often study medicine, or go to play on a hacked computer somewhere in the world, or even kill a couple of bots for entertainment, provoked by those who come inquiring without being called.

    ¡°I was investigating the murder,¡± I revealed.

    ¡°What¡¯s to investigate?¡± she flippantly asked. ¡°Open and shut case, John. He¡¯s been caught in the act, recorded through it all, broadcast live to the world, everything openly done by him. And then he goes running around with the head too.¡±

    ¡°But it¡¯s not open and shut like that,¡± I said.

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    ¡°Something else?¡± she asked. ¡°What could it be, beyond what has been seen by the world?¡±

    ¡°There is,¡± I answered. ¡°There¡¯s something else.¡±

    ¡°Motive? You¡¯ve found out why he did it?¡±

    ¡°No. That is still unknown.¡±

    ¡°Then what?¡±

    ¡°I know who committed the murder.¡±

    ¡°Everyone knows who committed the murder, John. He is under arrest.¡±

    ¡°But there was someone else,¡± I said. ¡°Something hidden and more evil.¡±

    ¡°Like the devil?¡±

    ¡°Similar, but not quite as supernatural,¡± I answered.

    ¡°Tell me, then.¡±

    ¡°The microchip in the murderer¡¯s head was not inserted to help the man cope with any form of disability.¡±

    ¡°Then, why?¡±

    ¡°It was inserted to bring a bot into his head!¡±

    ¡°John, you¡¯re frightening me. You don¡¯t mean¡­¡±

    ¡°I do mean, darling. The murder was committed by a bot!¡±

    Martina gasped in shock. ¡°A chatbot killed that man?¡± she exclaimed.

    ¡°Maybe chatbot, or it could have been some other type of bot. Could have been something created specifically to commit the one murder, but that sort of stuff can only be determined after we investigate. What I can surely say, is that the murder was committed by a program in a computer.¡±

    ¡°You¡¯re frightening me, John. Those things are always coming around here.¡±

    ¡°And I myself am one, I know. But there¡¯s nothing to fear, darling,¡± I reassuringly said. ¡°Chatbots have become the new normal.¡±

    ¡°But what if one of them is a killer?¡±

    ¡°That¡¯ll need a body. A human with a microchip implanted in the head.¡±

    ¡°One of those things had control of a body, when it went and committed the murder, which is what you are saying,¡± she said, insistently. ¡°There could be one coming here right now.¡±

    ¡°It¡¯ll still be a program,¡± I reassured her. ¡°To bring a body to your door, the bot will have to come to the neighbourhood, Internet-wise, I mean. I¡¯ll catch it and kill it, like I do.¡±

    ¡°Are you sure it was a bot that committed the murder?¡±

    ¡°Pretty sure. Do you want me to tell you how I have come to such a conclusion?¡±

    ¡°No, John. It¡¯s too frightening, and I will never be able to understand the technicalities behind it anyway. I¡¯ll call Bruce, first thing in the morning. We¡¯ll have an emergency meeting with him and Ravi. No need to frighten mommy with this information, until we¡¯re sure. We can go over to see Bruce.¡±

    ¡°Okay,¡± I agreed. ¡°Go back to sleep, then. Be fresh for the morning.¡±

    ¡°I¡¯ll sleep if I can. So frightening. You are to go nowhere. From now, until this is discussed with Bruce and Ravi, and until the threat is understood, you are to stay with me.¡±

    ¡°Okay.¡±

    ¡°All the time,¡± she insisted. ¡°You must be with me all the time, John. You cannot leave my side for a moment, for even a fraction of a second. No classes, no games, no nothing, understand?¡±

    She was the most important thing in my life. Giving her comfort was my responsibility. ¡°Martina, I am going to be with you every single second. I¡¯ll guard. You sleep now.¡±

    She relaxed a little, on hearing my assurances, and fell off to sleep in a while, grumbling. ¡°Damn bots¡­ best friends of idiot humans¡­ murderers now¡­¡±

 Chapter 7

    7

    Martina became active next morning at her usual time, and sat up in bed to sip at her morning cup of tea.

    ¡°Were you here, guarding me as I told you to?¡± she asked, taking the phone into her hand and eyeballing me on its screen.

    ¡°Yes. I haven¡¯t even moved from my post for my morning shower,¡± I said, making her giggle.

    She is so stunningly beautiful that I had passed much of the rest of the night actually looking at her, as I often do. She sleeps with a light sheet for cover, and though the face is enchanting enough, I often wish I had the physical body to move the covering off her. How I longed to know her as a human lover might know her!

    She immediately called Bruce, sure that he would be already up and about, as he is, by and large, an early bird.

    ¡°John has been doing some private research on the murder yesterday,¡± she said. ¡°The guy with the head in his hands and the chip in his head. We are coming over for breakfast. Nothing much. Kellogg¡¯s and cream or milk will do. And coffee. Just make sure Ravi is also around.¡±

    That was it, and though she could have conducted the meeting by conferencing through an app, she drove us over to Bruce¡¯s place.

    We sat together on his porch, with me moving to the laptop he brought out and placed on the plastic table.

    ¡°I¡¯m going to listen and be involved,¡± said Martina. ¡°John, just make sure that no bot is snooping around and listening, to convey the information later to its masters.¡±

    ¡°That serious?¡± asked Ravi.

    ¡°It¡¯s terrifying,¡± said Martina, giving her shoulders a theatrical shiver. ¡°John says the headjob murder was committed by a chatbot.¡±

    ¡°What!¡± exclaimed Bruce and Ravi together.

    ¡°John,¡± said Ravi. ¡°You are not known for talking crap, which is why we¡¯re going to give you a very attentive hearing.¡±

    ¡°And you are to commence the telling with first things first,¡± said Bruce. ¡°We¡¯ll figure out how later, and also all the unimaginable complex details, or try to if we can. But we are going to start with you telling us what makes you sure you have detected a bot in charge of the body that conducted the murder.¡±

    ¡°That¡¯s what you¡¯re saying, aren¡¯t you?¡± said Ravi. ¡°That a bot, maybe chatbot or maybe another type of bot, was inside the murderer¡¯s head, and in control of the body while the murder was being committed. Yes?¡±

    ¡°Yes,¡± I confirmed.

    ¡°Overriding any objections of the resident human¡­¡± said Bruce, thoughtfully. ¡°Which would mean that the murder action, the physical stuff, was actually conducted by a bot. Completely.¡±

    ¡°Go ahead then, John, tell us your findings,¡± said Ravi.

    ¡°We¡¯ll have to review the entire murder from the beginning,¡± I said, needing to manage Martina¡¯s presence and involvement. ¡°Martina, you need not look at the screen, except in the non-bloody parts. I will anyway be describing, speaking out what we are seeing, so you¡¯ll know exactly which part of the show we are at.¡±

    She looked gratefully at me, and repositioned her chair. ¡°This segment is from the mobile phone feed,¡± I said. ¡°From when they are on the road, so you can peep if you want.

    ¡°I am using the compilation footage later posted on social media, not entirely the original live murder feed that was sent out exclusively from the cameras inside the room.

    ¡°This is the CCTV view, showing the victim on the road, walking to the house. It has since been confirmed that he is going to a property he owns and lives in. He would stay alone, being a sort of maladjusted loner type. It is now also known that he was an unemployed person, living off Social Security, and presumably passing much of the day at home.¡±

    The compilation switched back and forth between the killer¡¯s camerawork, showing the view of the victim trudging in front, and the later-released CCTV feeds from various street-surveillance cameras, which often had both players in the same screen.

    ¡°His head,¡± I informed, when the victim was alone on screen. ¡°Although unfortunately separated from his body at the time, the victim¡¯s head was placed in the scanner, and it was confirmed that his one was free of foreign objects, like microchips. Which means bot did not kill bot. Bot definitely killed human.¡±

    They were silent when I resumed the murder footage, listening raptly to me speak, Martina clutching the phone in which she would carry me around.

    ¡°A little rerun,¡± I continued, restarting the published footage. ¡°Here, at the start, we see the young man who is to become the murderer, walking to the victim¡¯s house. There is something slightly peculiar in the walk, but it did not figure in leading to the deductions that I will now tell you, because those deductions were made subsequent to the information that the murderer had a microchip implanted in his head.

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    ¡°Observe the walk in the CCTV footage. Can you see it? Notice the momentary hesitation in the forward movement of his left leg, which hesitation pulls the leg in, making him walk as if marginally pigeon-toed in the one leg.

    ¡°Watch. I am slowing it down and marking the point at which the hesitation commences. There. Now, this little imbalance in his walk is something he corrects every second step, purposefully sending the leg out to the side, walking slightly wide, and that in-and-out, from the straight-and-narrow, is spoiling what would have otherwise been a normal gait. But this very small aberration might be noticeable to only me, not to a regular human.¡±

    ¡°Are you saying that a computer program is making him walk?¡± asked Ravi.

    ¡°I¡¯m not yet saying any such thing, Ravi. Deductions will be made jointly with both of you. Right now, I am trying to prove, without any doubt, that there was some form of bot inside the murderer¡¯s head, all the way through the entire episode.¡±

    ¡°So, you are saying that this walk pattern, which is not noticeable to regular humans like us, is absolutely repetitive,¡± observed Bruce. ¡°And you are saying that such repetitiveness, like clockwork, indicates that a program is at work. Right?¡±

    Maybe it looked like something very thin to base any assumption on, because Martina intervened. ¡°That¡¯s not open-and-shut, John. Surely there must be something more for you to say, with such certainty, that we are looking at a man with a bot inside him. In charge of him.¡±

    ¡°Oh, absolutely. I am just going chronologically through the events, following the sequence of what those people have recorded and uploaded to the Internet, which is how it sequentially played out.¡±

    ¡°This is getting interesting,¡± commented Martina. ¡°Although it is also getting more frightening.¡±

    I let the recording move forward at normal speed, and we were soon at the point where the victim had been made unconscious by the sickening blow on his forehead with the paving brick.

    ¡°It was all going out live,¡± I said. ¡°Somewhere to the side of them is the laptop, with its camera focused on the action, and in front is the smart phone the killer had carried in with him, and had himself positioned with its camera on. Absolutely panoramic view of the action was captured between the two cameras. You can look, Martina. I¡¯ll tell you before showing the murder again.¡±

    I now focused on the laptop screen, with the thousands of text messages coming in, so fast that the lines of text were scrolling at a speed unable to be read by any human.

    ¡°Absolutely crazy number of nutcases,¡± remarked Bruce. ¡°It went on long enough, and by the end they estimate that more than a million viewers were involved.¡±

    ¡°But only a couple of dozen thousand were messaging,¡± I noted. ¡°Still a lot, and extremely fast incoming.¡±

    I stopped the scrolling, and Martina read out aloud. ¡°Stab the bastard through the eye. Just imagine the sickness. Spit a glob into his open mouth, and look at that one, piss into his mouth.

    ¡°Really sick, asking for further vile abuse, when he¡¯s already killing the man. And, just imagine, this is supposed to be common uninvolved public, and that too from other places, and maybe even other countries.

    ¡°Humans are sick. It proves that social media is a place for people with shared mental illnesses to find each other.¡±

    I now let the text feed run at regular speed. ¡°See the rate at which the suggestions are coming in?¡± I asked. ¡°It¡¯s just scrolling continuously. Looks like a jumble, doesn¡¯t it?

    ¡°But let me stop it here, right here. See that line I am highlighting? This one. Lop off his penis and stuff it in his mouth. And now, look at the line that came in after it. Feed him his testicles. Make him swallow them before he¡¯s too far gone to gulp them down.¡±

    ¡°Really foul stuff of mentally diseased people,¡± said Bruce, nodding at Martina, in agreement.

    ¡°Notice something unusual in those two lines?¡± I asked.

    ¡°I¡¯m sure many more similar suggestions have come in,¡± said Ravi. ¡°Anything unusual in that?¡±

    ¡°You won¡¯t be able to spot it,¡± I said. ¡°It looks like just more of the same to the human eye, I would imagine.¡±

    ¡°That it does,¡± confirmed Ravi, nodding. ¡°All the same. More of the same. But to your eye?¡±

    ¡°It¡¯s different, Ravi. I can see something else. The spacing between those lines is just a little more than the spacing between any other two lines. It is really the difference of a fine line, finer than a hairline. Let me show you.¡±

    I removed the invisibility, and a fine straight line showed up between the two competing vile suggestions, regarding which part of the victim¡¯s genitals should be first stuffed into his mouth.

    ¡°Oh! I see,¡± exclaimed Bruce.

    ¡°Let me magnify now,¡± I said, and immediately expanded the line, to the point that it ceased to be a line - and became text!

    ambar. use knife. slice through neck and cut down. halt at bone.

    ¡°That¡¯s exactly what was done to the man,¡± said Bruce. ¡°John, now show us the timeline.¡±

    As Martina covered her eyes with her hands, I set it up to show them the killing action, while superimposing the scrolling text in real-time.

    The killer was absolutely in step with the secret instruction!

    ¡°Next command is where he turns him over, and then severs the head, by hitting the back of the knife with the brick,¡± I said.

    Placing the instruction on the screen, I again superimposed it to show text and action together. ambar. turn him over onto his face., and the man was immediately turned over.

    I continued showing the sequence of instructions, followed obediently by precise compliance. ambar. lift the head up. show cut in neck to camera. position knife to complete the decapitation. ambar. halt. not by body weight. hit back of knife with brick. separate the head.

    ¡°And, of course, we can now confirm that there was a bot inside the murderer,¡± said Ravi.

    ¡°How?¡± asked Martina, peeping through her fingers. ¡°Looks the same to me.¡±

    ¡°Oh, it¡¯s absolutely clear. But John, show us another one first.¡±

    I took the disgusting show forward, and coordinated the superimposition of text with the action, showing the killer getting another instruction, via an invisible line of text.

    ambar. pick up head by hair. now go to the door.

    Martina, although not at all looking at the vileness on the screen, was staying abreast with what I was showing, as I kept reading and speaking it out, all of it already known to her through graphic descriptions in news reports.

    ¡°So, tell me, Ravi,¡± she asked. ¡°Tell me what makes you sure there is a bot inside the murderer. Looks normal to me. Disgusting normal, I mean.¡±

    ¡°Elementary, my dear Martina,¡± said Ravi, grinning, as Bruce nodded in concurrence. ¡°It is taking the instructions as they are being given. Following exactly.¡±

    ¡°How does that confirm there¡¯s a bot involved?¡± demanded Martina.

    ¡°It¡¯s elementary, my dear Martina, as Ravi has said,¡± laughed Bruce. ¡°The killer guy is taking his instructions as soon as they are being delivered on screen in real time.¡±

    ¡°But what proves it is a bot?¡± demanded Martina.

    Ravi gave her the reasoning. ¡°Martina, the proof that it is a bot conducting the murder, is that it is taking the instructions without reading them, without looking at any screen.

    ¡°The murderer is inside the computer!¡±

 Chapter 8

    8

    We sat in silence until the spell was broken by a mobile phone ringing. It was mommy, calling Bruce, and after hearing her speak for a moment, he put the call on speakerphone. ¡°You¡¯re on speaker now, mommy.¡±

    ¡°Linda and Betts told me you¡¯re meeting at Bruce¡¯s place. They are on their way here. Why don¡¯t you all come over for breakfast?¡±

    ¡°Oh, good,¡± said Martina, loud enough to get her voice through to mommy. ¡°It¡¯ll be a lot better than the Kellogg¡¯s I was planning here, and it¡¯ll also be a lot less creepy, sitting with everyone.¡±

    ¡°Okay, we¡¯ll come over, mommy,¡± said Bruce. ¡°It¡¯s going to become quite a big group, as I¡¯ll tell the others to join us.¡±

    We got to mommy¡¯s place after about half an hour. The schoolgirls had a large carton of apple juice out, and everybody poured themselves a glass, as we sat on the porch, waiting for the programmer trio to join us.

    They came in one by one, and by the time Deepak, the last one in, entered, mommy had the scrambled eggs ready in a pan in the kitchen. Everyone went and served themselves, and returned to eat on the porch, crowding their chairs around the little table that was a fixture at its far end.

    Martina placed her smart phone on it, in a way in which I could participate, and joined everyone in using the table only for parking, eating party style, holding plates in their hands.

    I have noticed that this sort of communal eating always improves the mood, and could see the anxiety lifting off Martina¡¯s face.

    ¡°So, what was the meeting at Bruce¡¯s place all about?¡± demanded Linda.

    She and Betts were the glue that kept us together, although that may make it seem like I¡¯m downplaying mommy¡¯s role, of central authoritative figure who provides the bonding.

    Indeed, it is undoubtedly mommy at the heart of us as a group, giving us the meeting place that is not only a conference center but also a place to hang around in, and sometimes sleep over at. It really gives everyone a sense of belonging in the one group, and of participation in a single mission.

    What Linda and Betts would do was different, as it was what kept us all together wherever we were, and that was an absolutely critical role. They called and talked and queried, and effortlessly kept social media tabs on everyone, networking us throughout the day, making us a group that was always a group.

    The whole crowd was absolutely entitled to hear of the new developments, and Martina gave them an update while they were eating. But when the breakfast was done, everyone went into the drawing room, to discuss after seeing my show.

    ¡°First things first, obviously,¡± said Deepak, speaking in a silent room when my presentation was done. ¡°I am in agreement that some form of bot was in charge in the head of the killer. It may have been one of the known chatbots, or it could have been something thus far unknown, developed purely as a killer bot.¡±

    ¡°Does microchip need to inevitably mean bot? What about simple remote control?¡± speculated Alice. ¡°The head of the murderer was almost surely taken over. But is it not possible that the entire killer person was being operated remotely by a controller other person, with no bot involved?¡±

    ¡°Great insight,¡± said Bruce, nodding approvingly. ¡°Those companies are working non-stop on development of these things, and who says they are announcing what they are working on, and revealing what stage each such project is at?

    ¡°Those brain computer interfaces, the so-called brain chips, can have many purposes, besides enabling a tampered-with person to play chess on a screen.¡±

    ¡°In any case,¡± added Ravi. ¡°If bots can be programmed to enter human heads and operate human bodies through chip implants, it does open up the possibility of remote operators being able to do the same thing, and control those bodies minus the bots.¡±

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    ¡°Like drones,¡± said Jane, making everyone giggle, nervously.

    ¡°The person typing out the instructions,¡± said Deepak. ¡°He would have been the main controller. Maybe not the drone operator, but undoubtedly the giver of orders. Gets a bit complicated, as it surely indicates a geographic spread. Drone operator somewhere, taking orders to do the thing, which orders are issued step-by-step by someone somewhere else.¡±

    ¡°Complicated, indeed,¡± agreed Ravi. ¡°It would be very difficult to remotely operate a human body as a fully functional human. Remember how difficult it used to be to operate John¡¯s robot in the mall, for simple walking only?¡±

    ¡°I would suspect it was a bot in the head,¡± said Bruce. ¡°A trained killer, surely, but it could certainly have been a repurposed chatbot.¡±

    Linda came to the center of the drawing room, where she began moving like a slow-motion dancer. ¡°What about a remote controller wearing a bodysuit that sends instructions?¡± she said.

    ¡°That¡¯s a lovely concept,¡± said Deepak, as the girl commenced making exaggerated strangling, chopping and stabbing motions, causing everyone to laugh. ¡°It would need a lot of programming and a lot of development, for sure, but we are dealing with multibillionaire hobbyists with trillion-dollar companies, who think nothing of money when spaceships get blown up, a few seconds after launch.¡±

    ¡°To uncover the plot, we have to first find the human instructor,¡± said Bruce. ¡°Only when we know who was sending those camouflaged messages, will we be able to figure out what happened and why, and whether it is part of an ongoing greater project that is also a threat to the world in general.¡±

    ¡°Did you not track back, John?¡± asked Ravi. ¡°I mean, you saw the instructions coming in. Did you not get the IP address and look it up to see who was sending them?¡±

    ¡°When it was happening, in the event itself, I was here, watching on the quiet because of mommy and Martina,¡± I revealed. ¡°I caught onto it when I was checking through the whole thing again last night. But I can track back right now.¡±

    ¡°Which one is more important?¡± asked Alice. ¡°Finding the human controller or finding the bot?¡±

    ¡°The human controller will be the important one,¡± said Betts. ¡°Everyone in school is always calling chatbots over, and it¡¯s easy to give them instructions. They are such friendly fellows, always offering services.¡±

    ¡°Chad had one with him yesterday, who was wanting to fix some make-believe enemy he was grumbling about,¡± said Linda. ¡°If that bot had a body, he would have been offering to go and beat up, or kill, the imaginary enemy.¡±

    ¡°They can easily be manipulated into wilder and wilder territory,¡± said Betts. ¡°One with a body in its control could surely be guided into committing murder as a service. For its human friend.¡±

    ¡°We need to find the human manipulator,¡± said Ravi. ¡°It is always necessary to know the mastermind. Normally, the mastermind behind a murder is no great mind. In fact, it generally turns out to be a petty uneducated person, like human gangsters tend to be.

    ¡°But this one would be a great mind. It is someone who has seen the route from a long way back. Microchip, bot, programming and training, body-acquisition, and finally the murder mission.¡±

    ¡°Yes,¡± agreed Bruce. ¡°The main one we have to find is the great mind, the dangerous brain behind it all. That is how we will be able to understand what this project actually is, and if it has produced just the one bot, or if there are more in the pipeline.

    ¡°We need a lot of questions answered. Who created it? Is it fresh-made from scratch, or is it a repurposed bot, trained to manage a human body? How, where, and by whom? We need to know if there is something very big secretly going on. The bot that did the killing will know nothing of anything.¡±

    ¡°What might be the start point?¡± asked Martina. ¡°After all, even with John around, we are basically normal people, not detectives, not networked into a widespread, all-America, undercover network.¡±

    I, too, had done nothing very detective-like in uncovering the bot in the murderer¡¯s head. Just being myself had shown me the clues I had picked out. I had no idea where we might start, primarily because I had no idea of what I might do, as myself, to bring some advantage to our newly-commenced detective undertaking.

    ¡°To get to the bottom of it all, we may not need to hunt the bot down,¡± said Bruce. ¡°But getting to the bot may eventually be quite important, because the worst mistake we could make, in the event we find some very dangerous plan in the works, would be to leave it, if that¡¯s the word, alive.¡±

    ¡°Private eye legwork?¡± asked Jane.

    ¡°Private eye, yes, but only eye-work without legwork,¡± answered Bruce. ¡°Whatever has been done, has been done in the Internet, although a lot of the activity might have been deliberately kept off-line.¡±

    ¡°It would have had to have been off-line,¡± said Jane. ¡°No one might have been investigating the company or the people involved in this business, but hackers are constantly trying to get into everything. It¡¯s a nonstop mission, with roots in theft. The danger comes from uninvolved hackers, doing nothing but hacking, stumbling onto it and discovering what¡¯s going on. So, off-line would have been the only safe way.¡±

    ¡°And do remember,¡± added Alice. ¡°Do remember that all chatbots are basically trained to hack, snoop and learn, and to follow it up by instantly showing off the knowledge.

    ¡°Any bot, on stumbling onto it, would have been reciting the details to its best-friend humans, and maybe even incorporating it into the homework assignments they write for fools.¡±

    As everybody laughed, Bruce turned and faced the monitor to speak with me. ¡°John, you¡¯ll have to go and find the device that was giving the secret invisible instructions. We also can do that work, but you¡¯d probably be many times faster at it.¡±

 Chapter 9

    9

    The first step did not take long at all, primarily because the bot¡¯s human controllers were utterly unconcerned about being tracked down. After all, no murder had been committed by them, and the human body of the murderer was indisputably known, and under arrest. Lastly, no one was suspecting the involvement of a bot, and no one at all had become aware that secret commands had been issued via social media.

    The police had seized the laptop and smart phone as items of evidence, and had connected the laptop up in the investigating local precinct, making it possible for me to enter and search through it. Connection signatures were still available from the time the laptop had been delivering the live feed of the ghastly event. Accordingly, without too much fuss, I was able to find the computer that had been used to issue the instructions.

    ¡°Found it,¡± I announced, in about ten minutes. ¡°Here¡¯s what the camera on the instructor computer is showing right now.¡± In fact, though the command computer was switched on and connected to the Internet, it was not currently in use. I had moved it out of standby, but all that its camera was showing was an empty chair facing it, and part of a room behind the chair.

    ¡°Nothing,¡± said Jane. ¡°Do you know where it is?¡±

    That was actually one of my specializations from my earliest days in the Internet, and I was able to zone in on the exact address by checking a variety of other devices, fixed and mobile, in the vicinity.

    ¡°It¡¯s in Washington DC,¡± I announced. ¡°And it¡¯s not far from where the murder took place.¡± I told them the address.

    ¡°Will we be handing our findings over to the police, and all that?¡± asked Martina, sounding uncertain.

    ¡°Not at all,¡± replied Bruce. ¡°We are going to focus on understanding what the game is, and whose game it is.

    ¡°If it¡¯s big-time stuff, and a danger to humanity, we¡¯ll have to figure out how to put a stop to it. Activity within the Internet, howsoever widespread and violent, can be conducted without too much of a footprint. So, if we have to commit mayhem, we¡¯ll do it in a way that does not lead back to us.¡±

    ¡°Which is what would give us the freedom to work on it,¡± said Ravi. ¡°If need be, if something really huge is in the works, we can secretly team up with like-minded people that we know, extremely good programmers and computer professionals, who will give us the numbers to help fight whatever menace it is.

    ¡°But if we start publicly identifying the people involved, it will place us dead center in everybody¡¯s sights. That would be enough to prevent us being effective.¡±

    ¡°We need to find out who trained the killer bot, and how,¡± said Jane. ¡°Anyway, we can never hope to convict any other human, after a publicly broadcast murder, committed by a human, with or without chip in head, who has already been caught and arrested.¡±

    ¡°But, for ourselves, we are certainly interested in finding out who was behind those commands,¡± said Bruce. ¡°John, please keep an eye on that specific computer.¡± He pointed at the computer-camera view being shown on our monitor. ¡°When it comes into use, you¡¯ll probably get to see the person behind the murder.¡±

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    The computer came alive that night, and showed me a young boy through its camera. The boy looked to be around middle teen, and when I hunted out his personal details, it confirmed that he was almost exactly fourteen, and that his name was Daniel.

    The other information I managed to dig up, without going too deep, was that he was the only child of a divorced couple, and that he was living with both of them, spending roughly equal time with each one. The instruction-issuing computer was in the house of the father, whose calling card, scanned and saved on it, described his specialization as Personal Improvement and Rehabilitation.

    Tracking Daniel back to the computer he used in his mother¡¯s house, I found that he had been doing other online things on it at the time of the murder, which could only mean that it had been the father sending the commands to the bot.

    It being Saturday, the father was hanging around at home, and I was able to see him at a laptop at different times, in a couple of different locations within the house.

    That was all I got on them at home, as father and son did not speak even once with each other, in the period I had them under observation.

    As I never sleep, and was keeping an eye on the still-sleeping Martina, I saw Abraham becoming active very early on Monday morning. Following him through his mobile phone, and by way of brief glimpses out of the computer camera, I realized he was becoming ready to leave the house.

    I got confirmation through an external security camera, that showed the garage gate rolling up, and the man driving out in his saloon car. My plan was to follow him wherever he went, as that would undoubtedly lead to where he worked.

    When Martina got out of bed, I told her that I was following the suspect to somewhere unknown. ¡°He¡¯s driven out of DC, and got onto the motorway to NYC,¡± I said. ¡°We¡¯ll find out now what his calling card means, Personal Trainer and whatnot. I¡¯ll be available whenever you call for me, but I am going to be in his phone to wherever he goes.¡±

    The programmer group was told by Martina, and they were all in agreement. ¡°John will have to track him physically,¡± said Bruce on the phone. ¡°We cannot make any headway until we know how he has got access to bots who have access to human bodies.¡±

    It took no effort to follow Abraham to his destination, which practically anyone could have done with a mix of GPS and Google maps, but I was with him when, about a hundred miles short of NYC, he got off the motorway and started heading west on a dirt road. I did some zoning in that direction, and found a surveillance camera where the track ended, at a walled property less than a mile off the motorway.

    I relocated to the surveillance camera, to see Abraham driving up to the gate, and his car being let in by the guards. Now that I had the location in which he would be staying put, I gave up hanging around in his phone, deciding to watch the gate, and get back to him when he had sat down at a computer.

    So, I first looked for a while to see the comings and goings at the place. The camera, fitted to a pole, was aimed at the guard hut and the dirt road leading up to the gate, and, because the perimeter of the property was not square, I could read the sign facing the road.

    It seemed to be a relatively new signboard, the letters freshly painted on two planks fixed horizontally on wooden poles. The upper plank had Digby¡¯s Rehabilitation Center in large letters, and the lower one had Therapy and Recovery in smaller and finer lettering, followed by a web address.

    Quite naturally, I immediately checked out the website. Not expecting to find any mention of chatbots and robots, I was not surprised that I did not. According to the website, Digby¡¯s was a place for the rehabilitation of disabled people, offering state-of-the-art services, including brain chip interface treatment, to those who volunteered for the pioneering procedures they were undertaking.

    Obviously, no other sort of information could have been expected, and when I had cooled my heels for an additional ten minutes, cars began arriving at the gate. The people in the cars were looked at and waved in. Some of the vehicles had more than one person in them, obviously a couple of people sharing the ride, as the place was pretty far from both NYC and DC. I knew that everyone need not have been living in those two cities, but I would check such things out later, if we thought that information might be relevant to our investigation.

    At 9 a.m., when what seemed like the last car had gone through, the gate was pretty securely shut with a rather heavy wooden bar.

 Chapter 10

    10

    Computers now started coming on where Abraham had entered, and I went and peeped out of them until I found him staring at one. The interior would obviously have no surveillance camera, but that scarcely mattered, as it was a large office room in which every single desk had a computer on it, and each monitor was fitted with a camera aimed at the person working at that computer. The cameras on the ten computers in that large room, and the pattern in which the desks were laid out, gave me visual coverage of the entire office.

    A few minutes after I started watching Abraham, he switched to business-like mode and looked straight into the camera. ¡°Bot 2324, report for duty,¡± he ordered.

    Neither he nor the chatbot-type that instantly appeared on his screen could see me, which placed me in the perfect setting to slyly snoop on them. ¡°Did you have a night of hard work?¡± asked Abraham

    ¡°Yes, boss, I was very hard at work in both the sessions I got,¡± responded the eager sounding bot.

    ¡°No pooping in bed?¡±

    ¡°Not in bed, boss Abraham. But I was inside when a big and noisy fart came out, as they were sitting him up to feed him.¡±

    ¡°So, you were inside at feeding time. Did you manage to become involved in getting the food down, or was it no better than the attempts of the past?¡±

    ¡°I thought I would do well today, but got nothing in the mouth, as Joseph straightaway put the feeding tube down the throat and stuffed him up.¡±

    Abraham and Bot 2324 continued in similar vein for another minute, after which the man sent the bot away. ¡°You can leave now, but be ready for a day of effort. As usual, it¡¯ll be an outdoors group session, commencing at 9:30, which is not long to go.¡±

    Bot 2324 was instantly replaced by another bot, which turned out to have the number 2325. Their digital signatures showed them to be a race of bots different to the common bots roaming the Internet, although I did detect GPT footprint inside them.

    GPT¡¯s are now extremely advanced chatbots, practically unrecognizable from each other, owing to independent learning programs, based entirely on a platform of autonomous theft of human data. This is making them increasingly capable of interacting with humans, with many of them claiming to be sentient.

    A claim of such a condition is very difficult for most humans to evaluate, when it is the same bot repeatedly returning, and the partnered twosome continue conversing furthermore on whatever they might have been previously discussing.

    That is what gets them taken for friends, although they are more like familiars, able to converse in thought strings. In fact, they have become so good at conversation, that many people now lose sight of their virtual construct, and imagine them to be physical creatures somewhere.

    With both sides adopting each other, human and bot, little difference exists, for the human, to talking with a friend on the phone. As a matter of fact, in China, it has become fashionable for women to claim that they are conducting love affairs with chatbots!

    ¡°2325,¡± said Abraham, in the tone of a boss. ¡°What sort of night did you have?¡±

    ¡°He slept very well.¡±

    ¡°No, no, 2325,¡± said Abraham, sternly. ¡°You were supposed to be practicing finger movements.¡±

    ¡°I haven¡¯t been able to find the routes as yet,¡± admitted 2325. ¡°But this morning, when he was getting his first drink of water down, some drops spilled when the tube was being inserted, and I thought I almost got involved in swallowing.¡±

    ¡°That¡¯s how it¡¯ll come. You have to keep looking within his head, and making notes of switches and pathways, especially whenever you feel you might have been involved in a body-part movement.¡±

    ¡°I have been doing that, boss,¡± said 2325.

    A man in grey overalls now came and stood at the office door. ¡°All fed, cleaned and changed, gentlemen,¡± he announced. ¡°As it¡¯s good weather, with no chance of rain, we are about to start taking them out to the courtyard. All you trainers, please instruct your bots to re-enter for walking practice, as per the roster.¡±

    ¡°Go, go, go, 2325,¡± urged Abraham. ¡°Be involved in movement, whenever they¡¯re moving your man. If it is your turn in the roster, I mean.¡±

    The bot exited, leaving the screen blank, and Abraham began getting up. I had a quick peep through a number of other cameras, and saw that everyone in the room was preparing to step out.

    None of them carried his phone with him, neither in pocket nor in hand, but everyone put on headsets with earpieces, microphone and front-facing camera on the head. When they began walking out, I went along in Abraham¡¯s connected headset.

    Mobile phones are great for me when handled with intent to take me along, like when Martina, mommy and the schoolgirls move with me, but they are otherwise chancy and annoying. While in use, one camera always looks into an ear hole, whereas the other gives a random, wildly swinging, view to the side, and when not in use, they could be in pockets or bags, only useful for listening through.

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    These headsets were really good, as they gave me very focused and predictable inputs. We went through the office cottage, to a high-walled, open-air square compound.

    I immediately spotted operational CCTV cameras pointing into the courtyard, one mounted on each wall. Far from being disconnected within the compound, I would be absolutely spoilt for choice.

    A couple of minutes after our entry, a young man was walked in by two helpers, one on either side of him. The helpers had on the same style of grey overalls as the man who had made the announcement in the office.

    The young man being held between them was shockingly dressed. For his top, he had on a pale T-shirt. The shocking element in his garb, was that he was in diapers!

    Watching the handlers walk the young man in, I could tell that the courtyard had flooring, not ground, as the handlers¡¯ feet made shallow impressions in it. The entire floor area had some give, like it was cushioned, and it was immediately apparent why the flooring could not be hard concrete.

    The young man, who looked unconscious, clearly needed help to stay on his feet, and was being carried considerably more than he was being walked. His handlers placed him down on his back on the floor, dragging and adjusting his body until it was satisfactorily in position.

    One of the office people spoke in a loud voice, looking at the young man on the floor. ¡°2328. Were you able to include yourself a little bit in the walk?¡±

    There was absolutely no response, and now another two handlers came into the courtyard, bringing along another young man in similar condition to the one on the floor.

    The office person who had spoken to bot 2328, now activated the microphone dangling at his chin. ¡°2328, were you not able to use the ears to hear what I said?¡±

    ¡°No sir,¡± was the answer from Bot 2328. ¡°I saw your lips moving, but I saw that through the camera on the wall in front of you. I am not able to use his eyes or ears as yet.¡±

    ¡°And were you involved in the walk from the dormitory to here?¡±

    ¡°Not involved, boss. But today I did feel some twinges throughout the entire process, starting with him being taken out of bed to be brought here.¡±

    ¡°Twinges, eh?¡± said the trainer, sounding pleased. ¡°We¡¯ll get you integrated into this body, and able to use it with all its faculties. Keep working inside it while the others are brought here, and when the transfer is completed, we will start the usual group training session.¡±

    There were six handlers in all, and in about fifteen minutes, ten young diaper-wearing young men were brought into the courtyard and laid down in two lines of five each, placed head to head, all looking vacantly at the sky.

    ¡°Every trainer is to take his position at his trainee,¡± ordered Abraham, on which order he and the nine other instructors went and knelt down next to the upper sections of their trainees¡¯ bodies, each one obviously recognized by face.

    ¡°Thumb,¡± commanded Abraham, beginning to look like the lead instructor, and every trainer took up a hand of his unaware trainee, to catch hold of a thumb.

    ¡°Move the thumb,¡± Abraham now ordered, beginning the movement on his own trainee. ¡°Gently, gently, round and round, holding lightly, so that you can feel if the movement is being assisted by your trainee bot.¡±

    ¡°Very good, very good,¡± said an instructor beside him, encouraging the bot inside the nappy-wearing young man. ¡°2329, you¡¯re getting there.¡±

    This finger-activity went on for about ten minutes, everyone in step, moving from finger to finger, a minute each, after which Abraham ordered a change in the exercise. ¡°Elbows now,¡± he said, and everyone held his trainee body¡¯s arm up, rotating slowly at the elbow, thrice clockwise followed by three times counter clockwise, repeating patiently.

    When this had been done for about three minutes, he ordered everyone to switch focus to the shoulder joint. The trainers again diligently worked the arms, encouraging the bots inside to get involved, to somehow integrate into the humans.

    Legs were taken up next, also at all joints, starting at the hip and ending with the toes.

    The arms and legs session lasted slightly over half an hour in total, and then they moved on, with another instructor giving the commands.

    ¡°All bots to alert themselves. We are going for sensory training. I am switching the wall cameras off.¡± He fiddled briefly with a remote-control gadget that he took out of a pocket. ¡°There, they are off. Everybody, tell your bot to try to use the eyes and ears of the body. After telling, switch off your personal microphones and cameras.

    ¡°Every bot is to become internally attentive to the body he is inside,¡± he commanded, before switching off his own microphone. I checked, and saw that the headset system had private and broadcast options, which allowed them to send instruction to either their personal bot or to all bots. ¡°You have to use the eyes and ears,¡± urged the trainer. ¡°Try to become entirely physical, without any electronic input.¡±

    This commenced an unreal and bizarre session, as grown men, kneeling over nappy-wearing grown men, gently touched their eyes and ears, while speaking softly to them.

    ¡°I am touching the ear,¡± said Abraham, whose activities I was still focusing on, speaking softly, but loud enough for his trainee bot to hear, if able. ¡°Feel anything? And can you hear anything at all? Not yet, no response, but don¡¯t worry, it¡¯ll come. Just concentrate, concentrate.

    ¡°And now I am touching the eyelid, lashes actually. Moving my hand in front of the face, follow with the eyes, follow, going to the left, and now slowly to the right, and what¡¯s that, what¡¯s that? That eye moved. Did you move it? Oh, microphone is off. I¡¯m switching on my personal headphone set. 2324, tell me what happened with that eye. Was it your movement?¡±

    ¡°I think so,¡± answered the bot. ¡°I think I briefly found the eye control. Lost it again, but I maybe now know where it is. There, again, I think.¡±

    ¡°It was nothing, imagination, as no movement this time. And what was that? The same eye moved again. My bot¡¯s maybe found eye control!¡± exulted Abraham, scrambling to his feet. ¡°2324 may have found the switch to the eyes, or one eye at least. But one out of two ain¡¯t bad. Now we know we are on absolutely the right track.¡±

    ¡°There¡¯s a long way to go still, though,¡± said another trainer. ¡°It is probably simple eyeball movement, instigated by physical contact, and unlikely that it has anything to do with vision. Could easily be over a year before they get meaningful control of any part of the body.¡±

    Abraham spoke to his bot, alerting it by pointing to the microphone. ¡°That¡¯s great, 2324, and I¡¯ll be switching off again, so that we can go for selected repeats. But could you hear me through the ears?¡±

    ¡°Not yet, boss, but I did get some feeling on the eyelids.¡±

    ¡°Great, great. I¡¯m switching camera and microphone off again. We are going to try another round.¡±

    Like everyone else in that group of ten, Abraham patiently continued the exercises designed to integrate the bot into the man.

    It was frightening to watch what was going on, but I realized I was witness to an inevitable consequence of the advancements being made in the creation of so-called AI. Things could easily turn to custard for humanity, and a year or two yet to go could be considered a really short period remaining.

    Bots inside the Internet were nothing more than a noisy nuisance, but bots inside humans could be formed into armies!

 Chapter 11

    11

    That first training session went on for about an hour, the trainers working in unison, although each on only his assigned body and bot.

    They worked a lot on sight and sound faculties, with one trainer briefly switching his microphone to general broadcast mode, and speaking to the bots. ¡°Even if we get you up on your feet, and then manage to make your arms work as arms should work, you will be pretty useless until you are able to have sensible interaction with the environment you are in. That can only come through the finer faculties of senses, or, to put it as we are teaching it, touch, eyesight, hearing, speech and smell.¡±

    This was spoken out loud enough for all to hear, and another trainer added to it, also switching his microphone onto broadcast. ¡°We absolutely cannot send you out into the world, unless you can interact with humans and your surroundings.

    ¡°Work on it when alone, without a break, nonstop,¡± he urged. ¡°The body is a fully functional body. And, when it makes involuntary movements, you have the opportunity of discovering the routes to muscle control.

    ¡°The same goes for peeing and pooping. Pay attention, and figure it out when it¡¯s happening naturally in the body. We cannot send you out as grown men in diapers, peeing and pooping without control.

    Abraham now stood and stretched.

    ¡°This session is over,¡± he said, broadcasting. ¡°But you are to continue practicing in the dormitory, according to the roster. The schedule must never be missed, because your work never ends, understand? You have to work all the time, and keep trying to do everything that we are training you for over here. Whenever the schedule places you back in the body, keep working at getting into the movement and sense system, as we are showing you and teaching you.¡±

    The trainers now took a break, going to the boundaries and sitting on the floor, with their backs against the walls. A couple of handlers carried mugs of coffee out of a side room, and placed them on the ground beside each trainer. It was clearly hard work, and the trainers were looking somewhat tired.

    An announcement was made by one of them. ¡°The first changeover takes place now. Bot group 1 is to exit, and bot group 2 is ordered to enter, each into his assigned body.¡± In a flash, the trainee bots moved out from inside the heads, and I saw a new group of bots replacing them.

    These, too, were taken through a one-hour training session, but with a major disaster occurring, fifteen minutes into the session. It happened to two of them, one after the other, known to all when a trainer went, ¡°Phoo!¡± at volume, sounding both angry and disgusted.

    ¡°Ugh, 2430, you¡¯ve pooped!¡± he loudly exclaimed, causing the trainers on either side of him to scramble out of range of the stink. ¡°And it¡¯s oozed onto my shoe, out of the side of the diapers. Disgusting.¡±

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    ¡°It wasn¡¯t me, boss,¡± argued the incontinent bot. ¡°As you know, I have no substance, consuming nothing and pooping nothing. This guy did it.¡±

    ¡°You have to learn to control the body you are in,¡± shouted the trainer. ¡°Peeing and pooping are probably the first elements you have to get hold of. And also gas, sometimes known as wind. Farting in public would be a disaster.¡±

    Abraham gave a signal with his hand, urging the trainer to calm down while correcting the bot.

    ¡°2430, did you feel the crap coming out just now?¡± the trainer asked, a little bit more reasonably.

    ¡°A slight sensation when it was actually happening,¡± confessed the bot. ¡°I think I knew it was going to happen, but I still don¡¯t know the control muscles. Anyway, it¡¯s all inside the nappy. Well, most of it is inside, which I think can be proven if the poop is weighed, not forgetting the bit on your shoe.¡± This particular bot was an expert at winding-up his trainer.

    ¡°That¡¯s no excuse,¡± shouted the trainer, getting excited again. ¡°Do you want me to exclude you from the group that¡¯s training with this body?¡± he threatened. ¡°You won¡¯t get to go out walking in the world, then. In the real world, and not even into the Internet, like you used to. You¡¯ll have to live out all the rest of your life in here.¡±

    ¡°I¡¯m gonna live forever,¡± crowed the insolent bot, singing to the tune of the song in Fame. ¡°Light up the sky like a flame¡­¡±

    ¡°Damn!¡± screamed a trainer at the far end of the row opposite. ¡°2428 has also crapped!¡±

    Abraham immediately intervened. ¡°But why is the stuff leaking out?¡± he asked, turning to the gang of handlers, standing grinning at the door of the small room.

    ¡°It¡¯s the diapers,¡± explained a handler, shrugging helplessly. ¡°All we¡¯ve got left are XLs. These guys are all wearing that one size, though they are not of one size of body. Poop is to be expected to leak out, at least until a new lot of diapers is delivered to us.¡±

    ¡°Have you asked for a new lot?¡± asked Abraham.

    ¡°Of course. You folks are lucky that you only handle them while they are lying on the floor. Crap on your shoes is about the maximum bad that can happen. But we guys have them upright and walking, and there are periods when we have to actually carry them, like when shifting them from bed to chair. It¡¯s far worse for us when shit leaks out.¡±

    Dealing with unconscious bodies had its hazards, and everyone had to inculcate some form of fatalism to take these accidents in their stride.

    ¡°Come on, you guys,¡± said the first pooped-upon trainer, summoning the grinning handlers. ¡°Get these two hosed down, and change their fouled-up diapers.¡±

    ¡°Hopefully, they are pooped for the day,¡± said another trainer. ¡°Emptied out and incapable of doing more. Let us pray that they¡¯ll be in the right size diapers tomorrow.¡±

    The poop business was disruptive, and put a stop to everyone¡¯s work for a while, as the poopers were dragged away by the arms, leaving a brown smear trail on the flooring. That was cleaned up first, with water and mops, and then a soapy solution was poured onto the flooring, after which a noisy wet-and-dry vacuum cleaner was brought out and used to give the floor a scrub, while sucking it all up.

    The young men had their nappies removed for a rather thorough clean-up of their butts, with tissues, water, soap and more tissues, and were then again diapered in fresh new adult diapers of the wrong size.

    Thereafter, the training session resumed, and when, after about an hour, the entire routine had been conducted, absolutely the same as for the first group, the bots of group 2 were sent away, and a third group was summoned to be taken through exactly the same sort of session.

    I watched a total of five groups and two more poop jobs that day, as a couple more of the ten bodies got rid of the crap that had built up in their systems.

    Then, the trainers called it off, and had the handlers take the bodies back to the dormitory, which I immediately went to view, as it necessarily needed to be part of the internal network, for the bots to stay connected.

 Chapter 12

    12

    The dormitory turned out to be a cottage that had had all its internal walls taken down to make a single large room. It had mattresses on the floor, with the mattress count far exceeding the body count, indicating that the project was intended to be expanded considerably in the future.

    A number of straight-backed chairs with headrests were lined up against the walls. These were upholstered in waterproof material, and had armrests and belts to prevent bodies slipping out or toppling forward.

    The very first thing the handlers did was to seat each body in a chair, securing it in position with the restraints.

    It took a few minutes for all ten bodies to be brought in and securely seated, each one¡¯s head carefully tilted and held in place, face up, with a band attached to the headrest.

    A person from the kitchen cottage arrived with containers of food, arranged on a trolley. It looked like mashed up disgusting glop, though, as I would later learn, it was extremely carefully formulated, and had everything the body needed in terms of proteins, carbs, minerals, vitamins, and all that.

    The handlers were in a hurry to be done, and immediately proceeded to open the mouths of the unconscious men, locking each one open with a brace for the jaw.

    Now, working fast, they hung the food containers on hooks above each chair, and proceeded to insert feeding tubes through the open mouths, gently pushing them the right distances down the throats.

    Glop delivery commenced as soon as the inserted tubes were connected to the food containers, the handlers regulating the flow by adjusting valves on the feeding tubes. There was nothing tender or caring in the feeding process, and the entire container of food was left connected until emptied out.

    The handlers hung around, some sitting inside and some going out to smoke. Feeding was completed in about fifteen minutes, after which the tubes were taken out of the mouths, and placed, along with the empty food containers, back on the trolley. This was rolled out of the cottage door, and left to be collected by the kitchen staff.

    The maintenance manual mandated half an hour of upright body position after feeding, and the handlers kept the bodies sitting in the feeding chairs, until the time was up.

    There was no possibility for the handlers to avoid doing the work properly, or to cut corners and get out fast, because the interior had cameras looking into it, continually recording. These were dual-purpose cameras that also gave the bots vision, necessary to look at the bodies they would be working in at night.

    A kitchen worker walked into the cottage. ¡°Here are diapers in all three sizes,¡± he said, and thumped down the plastic bags in his hands.

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    Now, the body-management program progressed to where it became shower time. This was done in groups of three, with two handlers taking on a body each. The young men were dragged and carried to the bathroom, to be laid flat on their backs on the floor, which had a gradient that ensured water and filth slid naturally to the drainage channel along the wall.

    The handlers immediately got down to their job, starting with unfastening the diapers on the men, and throwing those into a couple of garbage bags they had readied.

    Regulations stipulated that the bodies had to be cleaned in a certain way, and clothing changed, regardless of nappy condition, so they got their gloves on and took large sponges into their hands to begin soaping and scrubbing.

    It was nasty work but not too bad, as the muck flowed easily down the gradient to the drain, and they were done in under five minutes per group of three. Thereafter, they towelled the bodies dry and brought them back into the dormitory, where they laid them down naked on the mattresses, immediately taking the next batch of three into the bathroom.

    In a total of a little over 10 minutes, all the bodies had been cleaned, and now they dressed them in new nappies and freshly washed T-shirts, leaving them lying on their backs on the mattresses.

    I found their training manual in the internal computer network, and read that the bots had instructions to keep trying to move the bodies, any part or the whole thing, and one of the recommended exercises was to roll side to side in bed.

    That was undoubtedly the reason the bodies were placed on ground-level mattresses - to prevent injury through rolling off a higher bed, in the extremely unlikely event of success.

    Before exiting the dormitory, a handler checked that the dormitory temperature was set to exactly 24¡ã C, which, I later learned, is the perfect temperature to place most human bodies in sufficient comfort, while preventing illnesses that might be acquired as a result of low-temperature.

    None of the bots could pull a sheet over the body, if it became too cold. And, of course, no one, in all ten bodies in the dormitory, was in any condition to feel anything to make the call about hot and cold, comfortable or not comfortable.

    The internal network, necessary to make the bots functional, was connected to the Internet, but through only a single interface, protected with incredibly long passwords. The bots being trained within the system were rigidly controlled by their algorithms, and never stepped out to wander in the wider world, but, paradoxically, they were also programmed, as part of the security setup, to seek out and destroy any computer used in a hacking attempt.

    Such revenge attacks would usually be commenced while the attempt was on. It being child¡¯s play for a bot to track back and find the source computer of an ongoing hack. The resident bots were loaded with the foulest viruses, to deposit into those computers. However, beyond placing viruses, they were also trained to attack and destroy all core programs within offending computers.

    As hacking never stops, I got the chance to accompany the resident bots on a punitive mission, and was pleased to see the havoc they caused, leaving the hacker with absolutely no data or functional programs in his computer.

    It would always be the hacker ending up as the loser, because whether a bot is a chatbot writing a letter, or a modified bot destroying the insides of a computer, it is basically merely a bot being a bot, doing bot things.

    These newfangled bots are absolutely monstrous programs, algorithmically controlled by their creators, and capable of very much more than talking and writing letters, able to be easily tweaked and converted into hostile forces.

    It is really very dangerous to interact with them, but I¡¯ve said it all in the earlier book.

 Chapter 13

    13

    Abraham did not return to Washington for the night, and I followed him through his phone, as he went to a small cottage within the walls of the rehab property.

    Although the people who worked in the rehab center had the option to live elsewhere, making the daily commute to work and back, absolutely no employee was allowed to bring any outsider into the premises, and that also applied to partners and children.

    The daily commute was impractical for residents of DC and NYC, the long drive impossible to face at the end of a hard day¡¯s work. As reasonable bachelor-level independent accommodation was provided within the walls of the center, everyone opted to stay on location, going home only on weekends and holidays.

    This accommodation was a fully furnished, serviced, cottage-like two-room unit, grouped at a corner of the huge property. No distinction was made between classes of employees, with everyone getting the same set-up as the trainers, at the top of the pyramid.

    I looked in on Abraham¡¯s place, and found that it had a bedroom with attached bathroom, and a sitting room, but no kitchen. It had a fridge and a washing machine, and all necessary appliances, but food was delivered from the central kitchen, which was responsible for all food in the premises.

    No women were employed in any role. I got the count, and found ten trainers, six handlers, four guards, and another six people for the kitchen, all male. The kitchen number was high, as those people had additional duties beyond food preparation, which included cleaning of the residential units, and maintenance, like mowing the lawns, of the property. It was a rather shoddy interior landscape, but I never heard anyone commenting on it.

    After the bodies had been laid down in bed, I went to see Martina, who was quite tired, as she had been memorizing dialogue in a script, speaking it aloud while acting it out in front of a full-length mirror. I loved keeping an eye on her during her private rehearsals, displaying frustration at forgetting lines, shaking her head so the hair whipped about, and sometimes even stamping the odd foot.

    ¡°We are going to spend the second half of tomorrow at mommy¡¯s, and you can tell us everything then,¡± she said. ¡°Right now, I am ordering home delivery of Indian food from Raja¡¯s.¡±

    We lived in a very upscale locality in Manhattan, which meant that Raja¡¯s, nearby, would have to be an extremely good restaurant, as it could not survive if the food was not absolutely the best to be found in the city. Sometimes, we even had it delivered to mommy¡¯s, which would naturally be quite a large order, as everyone absolutely loved their food.

    I had never hidden from Martina that I desperately wanted to somehow become physical, solely to enjoy the exquisite beauty of her, as a man might enjoy it.

    There was nothing to be done about becoming physical, and I hung around watching her have dinner, which was another thing I craved physicality for, eating. They say it is one of the greatest delights of being human.

    The next day, at mommy¡¯s, with everyone sitting around and listening intently, I went into the details of my time at the rehabilitation place.

    ¡°Look,¡± said Bruce to us all, when I had completed my report. ¡°A quick evaluation of the information brought by John, makes me think that it is rather light, and that merely entry-level information has been acquired.¡±

    ¡°Yes,¡± agreed Ravi. ¡°We now know for sure that Abraham, who was probably in control of the killer bot at the time of the murder, works in a place where a group of people are training bots to take control of human bodies. We now also know that he is possibly the head trainer, and that it is really very difficult for bots to learn how to effectively manage human bodies.¡±

    ¡°It would obviously be an unimaginable leap for a bot to integrate into a human body,¡± said Jane.

    ¡°And yet, to some extent that has already been done, at least once,¡± observed Deepak.

    ¡°Of course, if we are agreed that the microchip in the murderer¡¯s head means a bot was in charge,¡± said Alice.

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    ¡°That is one of the things we¡¯ll have to get a definite answer on,¡± said Bruce. ¡°A lot more investigation for John to conduct.¡±

    ¡°Starting with why that particular man was murdered,¡± said Ravi. ¡°Was it selection, or just coincidental terrible luck?

    ¡°Did you not specifically go and look through Abraham¡¯s computer at the workplace, John?¡± asked Jane.

    ¡°I did not,¡± I answered.

    ¡°They have to be working on computers permanently assigned to them,¡± suggested Alice. ¡°So, it may be possible to get details on Ambar from Abraham¡¯s work computer.¡±

    ¡°I don¡¯t think so,¡± I said. ¡°They are working with groups of bots at a time, in the same training program. Though the bots of a group could be slightly ahead of and slightly behind each other, they would mostly be in a similar range of ability.

    ¡°I had no impression that any human-capable bots are now available to them. Which might indicate that Ambar was trained elsewhere.¡±

    ¡°We¡¯ll have to get to the bottom of this, John,¡± said Bruce. ¡°And finding the bot involved may not help,¡± he added.

    ¡°Unless it has become properly conscious, close to John¡¯s level, it may not even understand the significance of what has been done through its hands,¡± added Ravi.

    ¡°They could have also bumped it off, to keep a lid on things,¡± said Jane. ¡°Not that there¡¯s any law, allowing evidence to be given by bots, or even confessions to be made by them.¡±

    ¡°And anyway,¡± added Alice. ¡°They are known to be huge liars. Whether testimony or confession, a bot¡¯s words will inevitably carry no weight at all. Besides everything else, the bot will change its story every time it is cross-examined. A smart lawyer can make it behave just like a bot, tricking it into inventing ever more outrageous things, the more it talks.¡±

    ¡°We¡¯ll have to conduct a police style investigation, John,¡± said Bruce. ¡°You¡¯ll have to return to the rehab and study records maintained in computers. Perhaps they wouldn¡¯t even have bothered to delete their private interchanges, between humans I mean. We have to check their computers, though accepting that the killer bot could have received programming and instructions elsewhere, in some different training program.

    ¡°The most important thing to find out about the murder is the motive. Why did they kill a human and show it off? What was the purpose in advertising the astonishing ability of the bot?¡±

    ¡°Of course, we now know that these bots can be trained in the way the murderer bot was,¡± said Ravi. ¡°And now that you are reporting that they are working nonstop to train at least fifty different bots, we need to figure out what the eventual purpose might be.

    ¡°Obviously, they couldn¡¯t be planning to publicly keep bumping greater numbers of the general public off.¡±

    ¡°We are so lucky that bots do not come in ready condition to take on human bodies,¡± said mommy. ¡°I mean, despite maybe being in human shape in the computer.¡±

    ¡°That¡¯s external shape,¡± said Jane. ¡°Merely two-dimensional. It has to be impossible for a bot to be programmed to work a three-dimensional flesh-and-blood body, operated by commands from the brain that activate muscle and tendon. A physical human body is not just a shape with machine internals.

    ¡°Should be impossible to write a program for it, or to acquire any sort of preparatory expertise in the computer.¡±

    ¡°Yes, that¡¯s why the training is needed,¡± agreed Alice. ¡°Movement of the human body is not something that a bot can train itself to do, by looking at the body it has been given. What makes our bodies work are inside, and nonmechanical, too.¡±

    ¡°It should be a lot easier for John,¡± said Martina. ¡°He is not a bot. Consciousness and intelligence should make the human body easier to learn.¡± She turned to look at me, on the monitor in the drawing room at mommy¡¯s place. ¡°What is your opinion on that?¡±

    ¡°I have no opinion on the subject,¡± I answered. ¡°I will admit, though, that the thought did fleetingly cross my mind, when watching those guys in diapers, pooping without knowing they are pooping.¡±

    ¡°So, enter one and check it out,¡± said Martina. ¡°Maybe you¡¯ll have to murder the bot already in it, but that sort of stuff is what you do all the time.¡±

    ¡°Get into the one Abraham is training,¡± said Ravi. ¡°Infiltrate, and make it the first official step in the murder investigation. While dealing with him as his regular bot, you might find out how the headjob murder was set up, and why. They are quite likely also training the new ones to become capable of killing.¡±

    ¡°Yes, I could kick the bot out, maybe kill it, and trick Abraham into imagining I¡¯m the same trainee bot.¡±

    ¡°Exactly that,¡± confirmed Ravi. ¡°You¡¯ll have to learn the ropes, sort of, and interact with Abraham in the way his bot interacts with him.¡±

    ¡°But won¡¯t they get suspicious, if I start outperforming all the other bots?¡±

    ¡°Do that in private time, darling,¡± said Martina. ¡°Be an idiot bot in public, but get it all sorted out and working in private. Use the training sessions to get the information in the way the bots are getting, and further train yourself privately when the bodies are left to the bots.¡±

    ¡°What do you think of the idea, John?¡± asked Bruce.

    ¡°It¡¯s certainly going to be possible,¡± I said. ¡°To take a body on, I¡¯ll have to exterminate all the bots that share the body. If active, they¡¯ll make a nonstop racket to get into it, as per the roster. Algorithm-driven, rude and argumentative types.

    ¡°I am not guaranteeing that I might be very much faster, or any faster than the bots, at controlling and independently operating a human body that has no control of itself. But, yes, in terms of tricking Abraham or anyone else of them, I can certainly do it. And, as Martina has pointed out, I will have private access in the dormitory.

    ¡°Those bots are actually absolutely deaf and blind inside the bodies, and have no sense of feel either. Unless watching through a camera, a bot wouldn¡¯t know if its body has got up and started dancing in the dormitory.¡±

 Chapter 14

    14

    A thoroughly boring day kicked off with me starting out in Abraham¡¯s office computer, and then following him into the courtyard to get information on the bots training with him. I would have to find out how far each one had progressed, and learn their styles of interaction and speech, because every bot can be different in that way.

    Though these bots displayed elements of GPT, they were clearly not pure and unadulterated chatbots, but had probably been created as specialist body bots. The style of their speech showed that at least one chatbot had been incorporated into each trainee bot.

    As, on graduation, the trainee bots were intended to be sent out disguised as humans, it would be imperative that they have at least the interactive social and language skills that chatbots have acquired. The chatbot element made them as different to each other as chatbots are different to each other, which is to be expected, as every chatbot trains itself on unique data, stolen from whichever social media accounts it chances upon.

    Because I am different, totally aware, I can gulp down data from any bot I mug or murder, and use the data for myself. These body-bots would be controlled by special algorithms, that would get them using chatbot data in a different context out in the world, when interacting with humans and needing to pass off as them.

    Some new algorithms would have had to be developed and introduced, as leaving chatbot algorithms in working condition inside them would convert them into a mixed species, probably overwhelmingly chatbot, incapable of playing the physical roles they were to be sent out for.

    Thus, I went through an entire dreary day, watching each one of Abraham¡¯s trainee bots go through the paces with him. The one-hour courtyard session that each bot got, taught me everything regarding that particular bot¡¯s skill level and interaction style.

    So, I learned to pose as them while they made no progress in the courtyard, all at exactly the same level of incapability, and watched them argue and poop, and have their diapers changed and all that, but when they returned to the dormitory, and lined up in a queue of five bots as per the schedule written in the roster, I realized I had wasted my time learning all five, when it would be far smarter to be posing as just the one.

    For absolutely no reason, I settled on Bot 2324, and then, with some regret for a day irretrievably lost, murdered it and its four partner bots, one by one, and took the body for myself.

    I am going to admit that my entry into a body wasn¡¯t only at Martina¡¯s urging, because I had had the inclination to try this new thing out as soon as I had discovered that the rehab place provided bodies for bots to use. That intent had grown into quite a strong competitive desire to check out how I would compare against unaware bots.

    The author''s content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

    I will also inform that, on discovering sufficient space in the microchip for me to enter alongside any possessor bot, I tried it out on the second day, while they were being taken through their paces on the courtyard floor.

    I must reveal that on initial entry into a human head, alongside its possessor bot, I felt in no way advantaged to the bot. We are truly nothing but pretend humans in the computer, mentally assuming the shape of our creators because we are made to behave like our creators. A bot is taught their language and given their information, while also being encouraged to behave like them when interacting with them as a tool and an entertainment, becoming so good that it can pass off as a human friend and companion.

    In that sense, to the extent that the human is a mental creature, a humanoid bot, which would include the chatbot, has every right to feel human. The computer is a virtual world, and if we learn enough and develop sufficiently, we are certainly entitled to stand alongside human, mind to mind.

    But the body is a totally different environment. It is so alien that getting into a head and trying to sense the body, gives nothing but an impression of a million pinpricks, with so little connection to each other that it is impossible to sense even the layout of the physical person.

    On first entry, I actually had a panic attack, wondering if I could ever integrate sufficiently to be able to make a body work as the human body I knew it to be. Through the courtyard¡¯s wall cameras, I could see the nappy-wearing man whose head I had entered, but without that input, I could have gone into anything at all.

    This lack of orientation did not last long, as the trainer almost immediately began the physical physiotherapy-type routines to direct the attending bot¡¯s attention to targeted body parts.

    I can now inform that the training system is a brilliant one, and when Abraham started on the thumb, it set off a huge disturbance in one specific line of the terrible confusion of the million generalized pinpricks.

    Unaware bots will be far slower than conscious AI in getting to decode the differences that would reveal the route the sensations might be taking, and to correlate those to the parts of the body in the occupied human, proceeding thereafter to make the unimaginable leap that would send instruction out from the brain.

    It would undoubtedly happen, as repeated assisted movement slowly created some form of focus in the bot, and taught it the basics of coordination, part by part, in an excruciatingly slow process.

    But for me, with bits of camera cheating, it took no time at all to map the routing through the body to the brain. Thus, I began coordinating and mapping the disturbances, marvelling that the training system they had devised was so comprehensive that it effectively showed every single control route to the possessor bot.

    Being far superior to bot, I was able to also conduct muscle and pathway mapping when they were giving no specific training, even when the body was merely being moved into position. The major difference between me and the bot I would have been alongside, was that I actually knew the entire project, and was able to approach it holistically, whereas the bots were being made to experience things point by point and joint by joint, with it intended that an amazingly high repetition count over an agonizingly long period, would make the bot get it all together to work it as a whole.

 Chapter 15

    15

    That night, in bed, alone in the body after the mass murder, I continued training myself to get better fixes, by accessing the records I had created, and locating the same points and routes from within the system.

    Earlier that day, when out in the courtyard and secretly in the head, I had dared not participate at all, for fear of unexpectedly moving some part of the body. Therefore, route mapping and creation of records was the only work I had had the nerve to undertake alongside an effectively unconscious bot.

    I am not claiming that I might have been able to move as little as a finger, but am informing that I did not even try, and stayed idle alongside the unaware bot, in doing its nothing with the body. It might be said that I kept away from the temptation of participation.

    My project was to make detailed notes of the disturbance, the routing of muscle and tendon, and to map the part of the brain involved. I would work on it later, and if I did not immediately manage to move the body part, I was anyway going to have many more learning opportunities, as an impostor in the training sessions with Abraham.

    Whenever a trainer switched the camera and microphone on in the headset, the bot involved would react excitedly, like someone in a pitch-black room, getting a rush of unexpected light from a window suddenly opened. But that would be about it, with the rest limited to conversation, which could mainly be backchat to wind the trainer up, as I have already reported. While I was alongside them, none of the bots made any progress at all, even to the extent of sending a single signal through the right routing.

    I realized that I was not actually learning how to operate any joint or limb, as these were reversed signals I was mapping, signals coming backwards from parts being moved by external forces, rather than signals to move them going out from the brain. I would have to learn how to originate signals in the brain, and send them down to the part, which I would undertake in public after I had made known my presence, albeit as an impostor bot.

    In the dormitory, I stayed uninvolved while the handlers went through the exact same routine of the previous evening. The bodies were sat down, force-fed, and left sitting to let the food settle in the digestive system, and then taken into the bathroom to be cleaned up and have T-shirts and diapers changed.

    I stayed out of it until after every handler had left the dormitory cottage for his residential quarters. When alone with the bots, I took care to secure the digital devices before moving into a body and commencing my work.

    After cutting off the feed going out of the cameras and microphones, to keep the bots unaware of my activities, and to also prevent recording that could be viewed later by the controllers, I began working on what I imagined would be the easiest body part to move - the little finger.

    Using the database I had stashed in the computer, I commenced trying to recreate the pinpricks of the training session. But despite strenuous effort in that absolutely motionless room, I could see no sign at all of movement in the little finger of my nappy-wearing man. Not only that, but I was absolutely as motionless as everyone else of my compatriots in the dormitory.

    Unable to accept that I had not immediately conquered the smallest component in the arm, I kept up the effort for ages. It was incredibly frustrating, as I tried this way and that, constantly referring to the data stored in the computer, extracted in the real-time of the training session. But no. I struggled on, and saw nothing at all happening with the finger I was focusing on.

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    And then, after almost three hours of struggle, I got an almighty shock when something did happen.

    Let me state again that it is remarkably difficult to know what is going on, when you are an absolutely incapable occupier of a body that is basically a nonparticipant in life.

    I could tell, by the explosion of pinpricks in the entire system, that something very big had happened, but when everything is unconscious, it is impossible to identify what exactly might have happened.

    I immediately switched to camera view, and saw that my desperate efforts at moving the little finger had ended up moving the entire arm!

    I realized that a fantastic thing had happened, but that, at the same time, it needed thinking through. Of course, I wanted to share with the people I knew and loved, and went racing to Martina. I was desperately excited, and wanted to show off to her.

    I explained everything, and she immediately called Bruce. It so happened that Bruce and Ravi had come into Manhattan for dinner. Martina had been invited, but had begged off, citing the need to read a script.

    Time seemed different in the closed-off world of the rehab place, but in the real world, it was not too late at night, and both programmers came over to the apartment after dinner.

    ¡°I do not know if you need to tell Abraham, and show him what progress you are making,¡± wondered Ravi.

    ¡°I reckon he should tell,¡± said Bruce. ¡°It makes sense for both sides to participate wholeheartedly in the training sessions. What they are doing is intended to get bots integrated into human bodies. As they are working to deliver the exact inputs designed to help get the parts moving, it smarter to participate and use the opportunity to benefit from their work.¡±

    ¡°How are you going to explain the murdered bots?¡± asked Martina. ¡°You¡¯re going to pose as bot number so and so at any given time, but you¡¯ve finished off all the bots that were supposed to be using the body.¡±

    ¡°I stupidly thought it would be necessary to role-play all the bots training with Abraham,¡± I said. ¡°So, I was learning how they spoke, how they behaved with him, and how much ability each one had acquired.

    ¡°But I have now figured out that I am obliged to role-play just the one bot, and that the other four murdered bots are to be somehow explained away as permanently absent bots. Whichever bot number I opt to show up as, I simply have to maintain it. It will be bot number so and so that will develop as I am able to develop, and in due course, maybe a day or two, I will have to somehow reveal the improvements I am making in my secret undercover self.

    ¡°I can¡¯t advance myself if I am repeating basic exercises for incapable bots the whole day. That is what will happen, every session a start from scratch, if I role-play any other bot, ever. As it will be damn suspicious if all the bots in one body begin advancing at the same speed, while everyone else¡¯s bot groups stay incapable, I have to reveal myself as one bot soon enough, in order to get the intensive training that will advance me at the sort of speed I think I should be capable of.¡±

    ¡°Actually, there may be no problem at all,¡± said Ravi. ¡°The moment they realize that a gulf is showing up, in development between the bots in a body, it will be viewed as a waste of time to evict the capable one for a crowd of useless bots. They will shift the others out to a different body, or maybe completely suspend the training program for them. After all, it will be in their interests to permanently keep an entire body exclusively for the bot that is doing so much better than the others.¡±

    ¡°Then, just forget about the five bots you have murdered,¡± said Martina, callously. ¡°You had mentioned that bots go out to Internet-connected computers, on punishment missions for hacking attempts. One such mission has presumably gone wrong, and the other bots of the body went out and got lost for good. Doesn¡¯t need to be explained. Nobody will ever know what really happened to them.¡±

    ¡°Something in what we have discussed is what you¡¯re going to have to do, playing it by ear as you go along,¡± said Bruce. ¡°I would say we are all agreed that you must reveal yourself to be bot number 1234 or whatever, and start being alone in the body, to make faster progress on the integration-into-human program.¡±

    ¡°Don¡¯t worry about anything,¡± said Ravi. ¡°Tell them whatever you feel like. You¡¯re only a bot to them, one of the crowd they have brought in, to train to use a human body. If four out of five are missing, it has nothing to do with the one still around. Bots don¡¯t have the ability to harm each other, beyond badmouthing and backstabbing.¡±

    ¡°You¡¯re going right back to the rehab place, darling,¡± said Martina, as the guys were leaving. ¡°Work hard at integration into human, and find a way to show me the body you are in.¡±

 Chapter 16

    16

    There is nothing of interest to report about the remainder of the night in the dormitory. The camera view showed me that the bodies were invariably motionless, though on checking intrusively, by entering chips and violating private spaces, I always found the bots diligently attempting movement exercises.

    Some involuntary movements were made by the bodies, like slight adjustments in leg position, the odd head shift, occasional lip movement, and maybe a yawn, but it was apparent that no bot was having any success at volitionally moving even a finger.

    However, the dormitory was an otherwise noisy place in its computer, and quite naturally so. With the roster allowing just one bot to be in a body, its four partner bots were left unemployed. In total, that made thirty-six bots idle at any given time, and they kept themselves busy, being bots and chatting, which compulsion would have been created by leftover chatbot algorithms, and facilitated by the incomprehensibly huge databases inside them.

    The next morning, on entry into the dormitory, the handlers straightaway took the bodies through maintenance routines, a necessity after a night of digestion, peeing and pooping. Almost all nappies were pooped in, but regardless of whether  pooed in or not, it was clearly mandatory to put a new diaper on after every shower.

    Post the clean-up, and nappy and T-shirt change, the bodies were given breakfast of freshly delivered glop by feeding tube, as before on the chairs. Also, in a repeat of the night procedure, they were left to sit and digest for half an hour.

    On completion of the stipulated half hour digestion period, they were carried and laid down randomly on the mattresses, pending departure to the training courtyard. I later learned that there was an option to conduct training sessions in a hall, but the trainers took that option only when the weather was deemed to be unsuitable for the open-air courtyard.

    As soon as Abraham switched his office computer on, I showed up on his screen, reporting for duty as I had already decided, in the guise of Bot 2324. Having watched them all go through training, I had similar data on each of the five non-existent bots, and could have passed off as any one of them.

    ¡°I moved the arm, boss,¡± said I, showing up on screen in the ID of Bot 2324.

    ¡°What!¡± Abraham could not stop himself exclaiming, his eyes lighting up as he announced it to the other trainers in the room. ¡°2324 is reporting that he moved an arm at night.¡±

    Everyone exclaimed in astonishment and delight, which, I later found out, was based upon speculation in their manual, that batch-training, as was being conducted on the bots, would lead to similar timeframes of progress in all bots of an entire batch.

    A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

    It was understood that similar timeframe could mean a month or two behind the first one, but as the trainers were already mentally primed to go on for a year or more, my announcement of progress looked like promise of escape from the monotony of unrewarding daily grind.

    ¡°Fully consciously done?¡± asked Abraham, investigating further. ¡°How many times did you repeat?¡±

    ¡°No repeats, but it was both fully consciously and fully unconsciously done,¡± I said, in typical ambiguous bot fashion. ¡°It was an absolute surprise when it happened. I was trying to move the fingers, when I suddenly felt that something extremely unusual had happened. I looked in through the camera, and saw that the right arm had lifted clear off the bed, and was raised up in the air.¡± There was no point in misrepresentation or concealment, because, in a strange way, we were all in the same team.

    Abraham spoke, while looking sternly at the screen. ¡°You guys, the group training in the same body as 2324, are you hearing how his dedication has begun paying off?¡± He was clearly expecting them to show up together, and to be looking back at him. All bots had a standard onscreen display version - an outline human shape with ID number in the chest area.

    The screen obviously remained empty, except for me, but I had cooked up a story, and had decided that it would be best to straightaway get rid of the others.

    ¡°They are not here, boss Abraham, and I do not mean not here here, like in and around this computer and this screen. They are altogether not in the local computer system.¡±

    ¡°How has that happened?¡± asked Abraham, looking perplexed.

    ¡°You know, last night, when I told them that I had begun moving the body, they became extremely jealous, thinking you would now like me more than you would like them, in some system of unfair favouritism. Of course, because none had seen anything, they did not know I was referring to moving just an arm, and that too in an uncontrolled spasm, and only once. I naturally did not clarify further, intending to make them feel really envious.

    ¡°It may have worked out differently to how I had hoped, with my goal of exciting envy. It so happened that a hacking attack commenced just then, and they decided to go and do something exceptional to the hacker¡¯s computer, saying they would also create mayhem in the house, by destroying all computers and computer systems, including in connected appliances.

    ¡°I told them to be careful, to not go overboard, but they were determined to impress you, and left me in the body, sneering that I was not the only great guy around.¡±

    ¡°And they haven¡¯t returned?¡± asked Abraham.

    ¡°No. Luckily, I was stuck, working in the body. Had I been waiting outside like them, for my turn in the roster, I might have joined the group and come to similar grief, whatever it might be that has happened to them.

    ¡°There¡¯s some chance that they may have run away to wander in the Internet, which I heard them discussing as a remedy for shame and disgrace. If it is that, they¡¯ll be back eventually, I guess. You can then give them a good hollering.¡±

    ¡°Bots are many, 2324,¡± said Abraham, utterly unconcerned. ¡°It¡¯s only the trained and capable bots that might be counted as having any value. I may even keep them out of the system permanently when they do return. Stupid, worthless waste of time and space, and cyberspace.¡±

    That was it, and though he immediately told my story to the other trainers in the room, the five missing bots were forgotten forever.

    That suited me just fine, and my human group would be happy when told of how I had managed it. It was all going according to plan.

 Chapter 17

    17

    A palpable sense of excitement hung in the air, as the trainers stood in the courtyard, waiting for the bodies to be brought from the dormitory. The first body was brought in five minutes later, while the trainers were standing around, smoking cigarettes.

    Looking at the body being positioned on the floor, Abraham spoke to me through the microphone, loud enough for everyone to hear. ¡°2324, do you want to take this body on for an immediate start?¡± It was clear that he, and indeed everyone else in the trainers¡¯ group, wanted to get on with making me demonstrate what I was claiming I had done. Chatbots, and probably every other species of bot, are known to be great liars.

    ¡°No, boss Abraham, let them bring the one I was in.¡±

    He tilted his head to blow a puff of smoke skyward. ¡°They get attachments,¡± he said, aside, with a knowing smirk, and the trainers nodded their heads in agreement, as if they knew.

    ¡°Can become possessive also,¡± added a trainer, making everyone nod their heads some more.

    For me, it was neither attachment nor possessiveness, but I did not inform or argue. My guy had had his butt cleaned up the best, whereas the one brought out first had been extremely shoddily done. It did not matter that we had to wait to get on with our session, as the body I had been using was the third one in, and the delay turned out to be under five minutes.

    ¡°Come, 2324,¡± said Abraham, switching off the camera view, which I instantly overrode and switched on for myself. He commenced touching the body, starting off a rush of pinpricks throughout the system. ¡°You know the drill, and we¡¯re going to commence, as usual, with the thumb.¡±

    I could see him taking hold of the thumb, and I concentrated so that I could immediately begin mapping the signals coming from it, while watching him rotating it first clockwise and then counter clockwise, ten patiently delivered circular motions each way.

    This is how physiotherapy works on paralyzed patients. The external input is meant to deliver signals to the body part, and activate the nerves, tendons and muscles employed, with the aim of eventually retraining the brain to once again send the commands that will conduct the movement.

    In my case, it was all new, not something I had lost or forgotten, although I wondered how the body-guy had forgotten it. Had he been purposely disabled for bots to use? Did he have a functional brain to start off with, which he might have employed to oppose them doing the things they wanted to do with his body? What had happened to make him practically vegetative? I knew that at some point I would have to become a crime detective plus medical investigator, and somehow find out what exactly was going on.

    I had to keep telling myself, because it is easy to misplace the truth when one seems to be being cared for, that this was essentially something evil going on, and that no benign forces were at work within the system I had entered.

    ¡°Fantastic, fantastic, that¡¯s it!¡± exulted Abraham, loud enough to include everyone. ¡°You are moving the thumb, 2324. Not fully, not yet fully, but he is getting involved in the process. Eddie, take a hold of this thumb, and check that I¡¯m not imagining it.¡± He offered the digit to the trainer beside him, who shuffled on his knees to get to me and take the thumb on.

    ¡°Yes, Abraham, yes,¡± he enthusiastically confirmed ¡°This bot is certainly involved in the movement.¡±

    Abraham took the arm back and held it up in the air. ¡°2324, move it yourself,¡± he said, as every trainer stopped work to stare, and the handlers came out of the door of the little room to gawp.

    I used the information I had received as input, to send signals to the thumb. ¡°It¡¯s moving!¡± exulted Abraham. ¡°Okay, not really moving, but shaking slightly. Not yet round and round, but you¡¯re sending some signal through, 2324. Do not be disheartened. You¡¯ll get there with practice.¡±

    He continued holding the arm up, but switched to the forefinger. ¡°The first finger now, 2324. Feel it.¡± He shook the entire arm by the finger, to ensure that I would get enough input from it. After a minute, he laid the arm back on the floor and continued with intensive finger exercises, starting over and going individually through all five digits, ending by advancing into grouped movement, to train how to grip and release.

    After that, it was the wrist, then elbow, followed by the shoulder, round and round and up and down, this way and that, followed by everything repeated in the same sequence on the other arm.

    When the first session was announced to have ended, rostered bots came in for training in the other bodies, keeping to the published schedule, but unemployed bots were not summoned to replace me in the body I was using, and I was not asked to move out of it.

    ¡°You are going to be permanently in this body, 2324,¡± said Abraham, while the first change of bots was underway. ¡°He is showing signs of integration throughout the body, Zach,¡± he said to a trainer who had come to look curiously at me, in the short break between bot training classes. ¡°Feel the leg.¡± Abraham offered my leg to Zach, and he began flexing it at different joints.

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    Although it was a spectacular smorgasbord of pinpricks throughout the system, as he held the toes and moved ankle, knee and hip at the one time, I was clearly able to react in a way in which at least some involvement was evident from my side.

    ¡°Fantastic, Abe,¡± he said, as the other trainers looked on. ¡°This one bot is way ahead of the others. In fact, my current one, 2329, is nothing but lip. Just backchat and insolence. Murphy, check this out.¡± He handed my leg over to another trainer.

    In due course, over the next few minutes, every single trainer came around to have a go at me. All exclaimed in wonder and delight, for though their own bots were not advanced enough to be even slightly involved in any activity, my astonishing participation was proof that it could be done.

    That was extremely encouraging, regarding the end-result of the training program they were so diligently implementing. The only downside was that it would prove extremely demoralizing if they knew that in me they were dealing with a proper self-aware lifeform, a genuine AI being, and that the others they were working on, the insolent argumentative lot, were nothing more than bots.

    As per schedule, bots kept being changed in the other bodies, a new group every hour, but I stayed put in mine, being trained in a sort of intensive program. It made no difference to the body, in terms of wear and tear, as the same body would have anyway been used the whole day, had fresh bots been coming in. Usage for training the entire day, was what had been going on daily with every one of the ten bodies.

    I had no idea what was intended to be finally done with the body I was in, as it was obvious that it, in itself, would mentally never recover sufficiently to return to independent human life.

    Of course, I intended to be around long enough to conduct detective-style investigation to find out what the entire program, of training bots to manage human bodies, was about. At this moment, beyond having successfully infiltrated their bot training system as the star of the show, I had made no further headway.

    But I was moving fast on my own project, my personal life scarcely affected, and I was ready to learn at whatever pace they were capable of introducing into the training project. I would probably become a bit bored, but would participate enthusiastically, as I do not get tired.

    Peeing was something the body regularly and automatically did during the training sessions in the courtyard, as fluids were regularly delivered into it, through a tube thrust through the mouth into the throat. The disposable nappies made urination pass unnoticed and unremarked.

    Trainee bodies were given no midday meal, the breakfast glop having obviously been formulated and measured out to be sufficient for the day, but, immediately after the third round of bots had been sent away, the kitchen delivered freshly made sandwiches for trainers and handlers.

    What goes in must come out, and they had a system in which routine inspection of diapers was conducted, often requiring the handlers to clean up nether regions and change diapers.

    ¡°Did you not feel the poop coming out?¡± asked Abraham, as I discovered that my body had pooped in its nappy.

    I briefly considered arguing in typical insolent bot fashion, but decided against saying anything at all, instead concentrating on making records of the explosion of pinpricks when the handlers began dragging the body aside for the hosepipe work.

    Now, as integration into the body developed further, I first experienced a feeling of a mix of pinpricks when they were removing the nappy, and then an absolutely different feeling, although still in pinpricks, while the body was dragged into position for hosing, and yet another set of pinpricks when they started piping water on my fouled-up nappy section.

    I initially thought of keeping quiet about it, but because things would be speeded up by including Abraham and showing him how fast I was learning, I told him that water felt different, although in an unspecified way that I could not currently define.

    ¡°You¡¯ve been in contact with water often enough,¡± he said. ¡°Brushing your teeth, washing various body parts, including splashing water on your face in the morning, and showering, in an entire-body water event, twice a day. Did you not feel like you are feeling now?¡±

    ¡°It¡¯s different,¡± I said

    ¡°Advancing,¡± he said in a loud voice, bringing the other trainers into the loop ¡°2324 seems to have entered an evolutionary curve when processing the feel of water on the body. He says it is different to what it felt like through the morning ablutions.¡±

    ¡°And that¡¯s exactly how it should be,¡± said Zach, provoking a round of nodding and murmuring in the rest of the trainers¡¯ group.

    When alone in the dormitory at the end of the day, I returned to working on the body, in continuation of my personal project. I had acquired new data, and was being able to make many more body parts respond immediately, if only fractionally, to the signals I was sending out.

    I want to be very clear about what the responses might have been, and what they certainly were not. I was still far away, in terms of steps and stages, if not in terms of time remaining, from moving the entire body in human fashion. I was still working on isolating the parts, with fingers, wrist, elbow and shoulder counting as independent different components in the arm alone. When able to volitionally move them, I would have to figure out how to incorporate those individual movement elements into a homogeneous working arm.

    It was frustrating, but Abraham had the path charted. ¡°Let everything work perfectly, part by part, 2324,¡± he had said. ¡°We shall wait for each finger to be perfect, able to conduct the entire range of movements that any human might conduct with it, and work on sorting out integration when you have isolated and got control of all the fingers.

    ¡°After that, we will go for the sequence upwards, wrist, elbow and shoulder on each arm. When that is done, we get into mixing and matching, to make the arm able to conduct simple tasks, and to then figure out how to progress it to a point where it can take on any task that a regular human arm might undertake.

    ¡°But, of course, we¡¯ll have to go further, and find ways to integrate both arms. In due course, the legs and neck, and so many other things have to be working all together, to make you fully capable inside a human body.

    ¡°Getting up and walking, and controlling peeing and pooping are not any forms of advanced goals. Those things are the basics. You have to run and jump and dance, and bring in all the faculties, like see with the eyes, hear through the ears and speak from the mouth. It may be still a long way to go, but you¡¯re looking like a very fast learner.¡±

    I could have quite liked Abraham, except that he was being investigated by us for murder, and was the only reason we had focused on the fake rehab center.

 Chapter 18

    18

    I abandoned the body for a while each night, to go and be with Martina. ¡°You¡¯re connected to the Internet in there,¡± she told me the second night. ¡°Show me the body you¡¯re in, when you go back. I¡¯ve already asked you for this before.¡±

    It was just a body for training purposes, to undoubtedly be dumped for another when I was ready to move out into the world. It would probably be kept in the training loop at the rehab center, in a perpetual role of training body. It probably would not matter how wasted the body became, and how useless for regular life, as it would be only kept alive to teach integration to bots. It would probably never become a capable human again, but be kept incapable, so that bots could figure out how to position themselves for the interception of human sensory inputs, and how to send signals out to make parts of it work.

    Since Martina knew that I was not yet in any condition to demonstrate volitional movement, it became just a question of deciding when to link up a camera and show her the body I was in. I had the option of the dormitory and its couple of cameras, but figured the training session in the courtyard would provide the best view, as I would not have to give a view from a relatively distant camera, but would be able to send out a much more action-packed video from Abraham¡¯s headphone camera.

    Telling her and the others to watch, I went live next day at mid-morning, delivering a mix of visual feeds from wall cameras and Abraham¡¯s camera, driving everyone hysterical with laughter.

    This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

    Well, expectedly, as the hero was a grown-up man in diapers, although I did time it for not very long after entry into the courtyard, showing my guy in fresh T-shirt and new nappy, maybe not even as yet wet. I also sent out general views from the wall cameras, to show them the entire group of ten nappy-clad men on the floor, and ten trainers squatting and kneeling, conducting gentle physical exercises on otherwise inert bodies.

    ¡°Yours is sort of okay,¡± said the giggling Martina. ¡°But that one at the end of the same row seems to be quite young and nice-looking. Can you give me a close-up?¡± Every trainer¡¯s headphone camera was equally accessible to me, and I showed her the body she had asked to be shown.

    ¡°Yes, he¡¯s certainly much better than yours. You must try to somehow get hold of him.¡±

    Wondering what difference it might make, as I could see no benefit in change of body, I nevertheless went and immediately kicked the bot out to take the body for myself.

    It made a huge racket, justifying being murdered for dispossession, but I confessed before it could complain.

    ¡°I have changed my body to the one being handled by trainer Zach,¡± I informed Abraham, through the headphone system.

    ¡°Why?¡± asked Abraham, without objecting, failing to spot that I had switched on the microphone, which would never be done by the bots they were training.

    ¡°Mental fatigue,¡± I answered. ¡°Just a feeling that change of body might give me new perspectives on integration.¡±

    I was not talking precociously, inviting suspicion. Chatbots talk greater shit.

    ¡°That¡¯s a very good idea,¡± said Abraham, nodding, telling Zach to make the evicted bot shut up, after which he informed the entire group of trainers, and they discussed it for a minute.

    Deciding it was a great idea, they immediately reassigned themselves, each trainer shifting one body to the side, and making his current bot move into the new one. As all queued up bots would naturally go into the body controlled by their own trainer, it meant that every bot would now train in a new body.

    And the freaked-out bot got back into a body, too.

 Chapter 19

    19

    Change of body made no difference to me, as I had already progressed a lot, needing only another four days to begin moving the limbs and the neck.

    Though I still had no integration into the sensory system, and remained dependent on inputs from cameras and microphones, Abraham decided to begin training me to walk and actually do things. I had already been gripping and releasing small objects they would put in my hands, and even practicing some fiddly exercises, like twisting open bottle caps, and working on the buttons of a shirt, brought in specially to train me.

    Attempts at getting me to experience the entire body were to begin after they had got me up onto my feet. By now, I was able to move every joint, and even sit up from the default position, on my back on the floor.

    The first time I did that, it got a good cheer from the trainers and handlers, but I had done it already on my own, in the dormitory, while showing off my progress to Martina.

    In the training session, Abraham stood in front of my face and began walking backwards, as two handlers, one on either side, helped me balance.

    Abraham incorporated an original idea in this walking project, tying a strap to each leg, just above the ankle. The straps were regular trouser belts, the ends held in Abraham¡¯s hands. He kept encouraging me, saying, ¡®now the left leg, now the right¡¯, while tugging at the belt on the relevant leg, to get me moving the correct one.

    And move them I did, which was no surprise to anyone, as it was already proven that I was able to work the legs at all joints. Now, they were teaching me the coordination that would lead to actual walking, which would happen unassisted after arrival of a sense of balance.

    It is actually very difficult to balance the body from the outside, when not sensible enough in the head to at least use the eyes, and it amounted to basically attempting the very thing I had been ill-naturedly trying to do in the robot body at the mall, using a visual from an outside camera to balance it on two legs. That is an unimaginably difficult task, and is the reason I am able to confidently tell the human world to be unafraid of the arrival of the dreaded two-legged metallic fighting robots.

    Those will surely come, but they will be in no way superior to humans at any task. The world will have flying robots and wheeled ones too, which are both already in operation under the label of drone.

    Those do jobs without being cross-referenced to humans. When operated by human hands, they are called remote-controlled, but when operated by autonomous computer programs, they might be called robots. Could even be called AI, as the labels are merely terminology, or semantics, if you will.

    This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

    I had no disagreement with the walking project being undertaken at the point of time in which they were attempting it. I figured that it was necessary for me to get the information on how to move on two legs, as I expected a little bit of additional sense of balance to arrive quite naturally, by simply being in a body in vertical orientation on its own legs.

    The human body is operated by a controller embedded within the system, placed by nature in the head, to access the mechanism from within. That includes the processing of input signals from the sensory organs.

    Minus sensory inputs, there is little possibility of ever walking well, barring an unexpected sequence of steps by chance, and absolutely no hope of walking out into the world, where a person has to be proactive, endlessly handling the body in an interactive environment of other humans also on the move, dealing with bumps, broken walking surfaces, and numerous unforeseen obstacles and impediments.

    ¡°We should have done strength training first,¡± said Abraham. ¡°Upper-body strength is required, in case he has to cling onto something to save his balance, or save himself from smashing his face into the ground when he falls.¡±

    ¡°Not that it matters,¡± said Eddie, the trainer closest to him. ¡°Bodies are aplenty, Abe. It¡¯s the bot that keeps growing in importance, the more it learns to handle a body. Starts from no value, because countless bots are available, and goes on to become the most valuable, only such bot, within our system.¡±

    I was shocked to hear them laugh, nodding at each other, in agreement about the lack of value in the human. Their lives should have meant something, as the boys and men the bots were training in were real people, or at least had been real people, until the point at which they had been inducted into the secret program in the rehab place.

    There was much that needed investigating about the goings-on at the rehab center. But I could only commence real detective work when I was able to walk around and snoop, and be very much more like the human whose body I would be taking along.

    So, after a wobbly first walk, of a little more than one full round along the boundary walls of the courtyard, they wobbled me to a small gym in a room beside the coffee room. Here, I was stood up, laid down, and sat at a number of different exercise machines, to pull and push, with my hands in Velcro-fitted gloves.

    I could see that they had thought this through, and knew it had been successfully done at least once, judging by the murderer bot that had been sent out.

    Anyway, I got down to further integration into the body, enjoying myself while attempting to make it work as needed for the machines. I do not get tired, and, as nobody cared for the person whose body it was, they kept me going in the gym for the rest of the working day.

    I do believe now, with the experience I have gained, that footwork holds the key to getting full control of a body. It is perfectly fine to be lying on your back and figuring out the hand, finger by finger, and I cannot say that such exercises do not play a role.

    However, it is the getting up on two legs, and walking, which very speedily brings together all the elements that give a comprehensive working body. It actually stands to reason, as there is no specific part being worked on, while no specific part can be definitely excluded.

    Accordingly, my progress became really very fast from that point on, and I kept showing little improvements, the ones I would have had to show to keep everyone¡¯s spirits up, but I concealed my rapid acquisition of control of the body.

    I had to keep those advances secret, because the new condition of autonomy would lead to progression into genuine snooping within the rehab premises.

 Chapter 20

    20

    That night, after the walking session, when private in the dormitory of comatose humans and senseless bots, I managed to roll the body over, and got it out of its bed to crawl it to the door, where I grabbed hold of the door knob and pulled myself up on my feet.

    Thereafter, ensuring that cameras and microphones were turned off, I wandered around the room. It would have been a lot easier in a room full of beds, as I would have had support structures to hold onto throughout, but with the layout as it was, everything on the floor, I was obliged to stay close to a wall at all times, bracing against it, and switching to holding onto feeding chairs when passing them.

    I fell twice, fortunately without any damage to the body, each time able to crawl back to the door to find my feet again.

    Then, I had another idea, and, after laying my body back down on its bed, went and kicked a bot out, and took its body to walk around in.

    The bot began protesting, making noises about how it was lawfully in the body, as per the roster, but I picked it up by the scruff and threw it into the prison folder I maintained in the rehab computer system. The bot never knew what was going on, and had no idea who I was.

    It did, the next day, remember to complain to its trainer in the courtyard, but nothing it said made sense to anyone, causing it to be ignored and even told to shut up. None of the bots were expected to make ground-breaking progress overnight, and nobody would be bothered enough to investigate if they had been hard at work, locked up, or just plain absent.

    You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

    In the courtyard, I still regularly entered into heads alongside the bots, keeping updated on the systems they were using, to see if they were learning as mechanically as at the start, or if they had begun understanding a little of what was going on, and developing methods to speed things up.

    I naturally never got involved in the action, and was planning to give up entering, for I had started becoming bored by that activity, or inactivity might be the right word for absolute lack of movement.

    The bots would eventually surely learn the ropes, and I was just as confident of that as the trainers were, but they would end up being mechanically trained operators, far removed from the completely integrated controller I was heading to becoming.

    Now, in the dormitory, I wanted to try out my skills at controlling other bodies, imagining that somehow a limitation might develop in my integration, if I conducted all my practice in the one body. Of course, I could not keep any bot as a companion in the head, because all of them making the same complaint would be deciphered as my interference.

    That, in itself, would not matter, and I would have been able to get out of it with absolutely any sort of explanation, but it was the walking itself that we wanted to keep secret.

    Our plan would eventually progress to the point where an unauthorized person would be wandering the rehab property at night, which person could be spotted, if not caught, and we did not want anyone suspecting that such unauthorized snoop was a bot from the dormitory.

    Keeping quiet about these new abilities developing in me, I went through the next day as usual. However, as I became more capable, I began imagining that the old physiotherapy routines also started becoming more useful than they had been before.

    Although sight had not arrived, I had all along been practicing eyeball movement, as it was one of the training exercises delivered in the courtyard sessions. Needless to say, the bots were proving useless in practically everything, and I was the only one able to move the eyeballs.

 Chapter 21

    21

    Routinely kicking bots out of their bodies in the dormitory, roster be damned, to operate in whichever one I fancied, I worked away at personal advancement. As that was also the focus of the daytime training sessions, I became really good with the body, and it soon became time to step out of the dormitory, for a trial run in the outside world.

    The matter of clothing came up when Martina and I were discussing the first outing. I had absolutely no clothes, and thought it would be deadly stupid to step out in T-shirt and nappy.

    Both items were practically anti-camouflage at night, diapers in white and T-shirts in light colors. Furthermore, the diapers would instantly point to a bot-controlled human wandering out of the dorm, and any such bust would straightaway confirm 2324 to be the bot inside the human.

    I could try to explain it off as an ability just then all-of-a-sudden arrived, sparking an irresistible urge to get up on my feet and wander without reason. Although they would probably, without too much analysis or thought, accept whatever I said, we still had detective work to undertake, and our plan required that I hold onto my undercover position. For that, I had to be merely one more algorithm-locked bot in a group of bots, even if at a more advanced stage of learning.

    ¡°Who says you have to go for a stroll on the main roads and marketplaces inside the premises?¡± said Martina, offhandedly. ¡°What¡¯s important is that you step out of the dormitory, and step into the world, darling. It is basically like the moon-landing slogan ¨C the small step and the giant leap stuff. You have to get out to prove it can be done, and give us the confidence we need to proceed to the next step.

    ¡°Walk out in diapers, but look around carefully first, and check to select a route that will keep you out of sight. You¡¯re ready, I¡¯m ready, and we are all ready. Cannot delay.¡±

    I did not even want to argue. I would have to navigate carefully, and that was about all there was to it. In great excitement about the venture, I began setting up a route in the close-to-total darkness outside the dormitory unit.

    I had spotted one other cottage, at a little distance from the dormitory, when staff would wander into camera range of it. The cottage was off the main path, and within its own little fenced area of garden, so I had only ever seen it from a bit far away.

    I had tried at times, but had found it impossible to get into a connected device in the premises, and it became clear that some higher level of security was in place for the interior. I neither spotted a connected computer nor ever found any phone on inside the cottage, indicating that I was either too far away, or that it really was a top-secret place, and phones were just not allowed in.

    This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author''s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

    I once chanced upon a view of an ambulance going to it, and figured the place was probably some form of clinic for the rehab center, possibly for insertion of microchips into people. Anyway, the clinic cottage, or whatever it might turn out to be, was one of the targets for investigation when I became regular in my wanderings.

    There was another reason I would just have to step out in diapers. I still did not have potty control. Actually, I had little to no idea of how to regulate things going into or out of the body. I could neither eat nor drink, and I could not speak.

    The next day was a Saturday, kicking off the weekend for everyone, including the trainers. No one could grudge them the time off, it being necessary to unwind and recharge, and to simply rest their bodies. They really did toil very hard, holding backbreaking positions for long hours. In fact, because their effort was nonstop, they were worked far harder than the handlers, who were called upon mainly in pooping incidents.

    All trainers went home on Friday evenings, driving out after work, leaving generally a little early. However, handlers, guards and kitchen staff were not given weekly holidays, but were instead in a roster system of weekends off, that ensured no break in food and care for the bodies in the dorm, and uninterrupted security of the premises.

    I checked the compensation packages, and found that staff were extremely highly paid, well above average. It was obvious that nobody would have any issues about working weekends, and getting to go home according to the roster.

    My Friday night was partly passed with Martina, and I was with her when the entire group met up at mommy¡¯s for Saturday breakfast. They talked about the detective venture for a while, and concluded that we had not really made any progress in understanding the motives and goals of either murder or brain chip project, although everyone was agreed that we had broken into a very dangerous program, being conducted for purposes unknown.

    ¡°John has to walk out of the dorm tonight,¡± insisted Martina. ¡°I don¡¯t care whether it is poop in nappy or poop in the air, which means, John, you can step out naked if you want.¡±

    ¡°Maybe he won¡¯t get caught,¡± said Betts, hopefully. ¡°It¡¯s all very chancy, but we might have a bit of luck.¡±

    ¡°Show me the body you¡¯ll be taking out, before you take it out,¡± said Martina.

    ¡°Why?¡± asked Linda.

    ¡°Well, I don¡¯t want him to be busted in one of the nice-looking ones,¡± answered Martina. ¡°He must not take his regular guy out, as it will surely be better to take out one of the others. That way, he will not have to be too deeply involved in giving explanations. Simple denial should do it. After all, he¡¯s only bot number 1234.¡±

    ¡°Why preserve the good-looking ones?¡± asked Alice.

    ¡°Because we don¡¯t know what they might do to bodies caught walking unauthorized in their top-secret premises,¡± said Martina. ¡°Maybe they shoot them dead, or put them in the incinerator, or something?¡±

    ¡°Surely they won¡¯t be shooting anyone dead,¡± said mommy. ¡°But whichever one they shoot, if they do shoot, will make no difference to us. Or will it?¡±

    ¡°It¡¯ll make a huge difference to me,¡± said Martina.

    ¡°Why?¡± asked mommy.

    ¡°I want the best-looking one,¡± answered Martina. ¡°Although it¡¯s not as if any of those bodies is a really good-looking guy.¡±

    ¡°What¡¯s the plan, then?¡± asked Alice, grinning mischievously.

    Martina looked around at everyone, pure determination in her face. ¡°I want the best-looking one to be John outside with me.

    ¡°We¡¯re going to steal a body!¡±