Boston, Massachusetts, USA
September 9th, 2016
8:30 PM
I stepped into the large harbor-front warehouse with more than a bit of trepidation. I've done job interviews before - they're supposed to involve office rooms with engineers in well-lit buildings. Not empty warehouses. In the middle of the night. Next to rusty dead-looking container ships. But my recruiter had been promising the sky was the limit on this one if I could get hired, so here I was waiting for...
"Excellent! You're five minutes early. My employer appreciates promptness."
I didn't scream like a girl and fall over - it was a perfectly respectable battle-cry as I attempted to dodge any incoming attacks. Unfortunately, I was wearing a trench coat, which is NOT what you want to be wearing when trying to dodge. It's pretty cold on the Boston waterfront at night, even this early in the fall, and that makes a great excuse for people who might ask me why I'm wearing a trench coat. From the ground, I looked up at a man in a suit who had been standing in the shadow of the door. "...Hi? Are you...Sebastian?" I stood up and pretended to be dignified while brushing dust off my coat.
"Yes, that's me. I appologize if I...startled you." The man was...dark. Dark hair, dark eyes, black suit, gleaming white teeth. Do humans have that many teeth? I'm pretty sure I don't have that many teeth. Why is he smiling like that? Cautiously, I reached out to shake the man's hand. His grip is firm and he's wearing white silk gloves - who does that anymore?
Collecting myself and trying to get my heart under control, I decided to assert a bit of my own authority - he might be the one hiring, but I was asked for by name. "Is there somewhere we can sit and discuss the job offer? It's a bit...unlit in here."
He snapped his fingers, and lights turned on throughout the building. A neat trick. It was nearly empty except some boxes in the far corner, some catwalks and an elevated 'managers' office above the main floor. The neater trick was the sudden appearance of a table and chairs five feet to our left - it appeared just as the lights turned on. Had it been there, hiding in the darkness? I blanked my mind, counted to three, pictured something unrelated, then reviewed my memories of the not-quite-impenetrable dark from when I walked in, before I was...startled. My eyes were closed, both for the visualization process and to adjust to the sudden light. No - those had definitely not been there.
I looked suspiciously at Sebastian, who was still standing next to the now-closed doorway and smiling even wider. I moved to the table and chairs, made sure they were solid, examined their tops for clues, and took a deep whiff. Modern, nothing obvious, no marks or cracks in the floor where they might have come 'up' through a trap door - and they smelled like machine oil, ozone and...sulfur?
I stepped back and took a whiff of the air farther from the table - the machine oil smell permeated, but the others were absent. Approaching again, I looked under the table - the floor was rough concrete, not well finished, but showed no obvious marks, and the bottom of the table...
Stamps? No...seals. Over-fancy and...wait, they have the names written around... I recognize at least... OK, that one doesn't belong there.
I looked at the seats arranged around the table. Then I sit at the chair next to the 'Naberius' seal - I was pretty sure I could use all the help with rhetoric I could get, and I honestly wasn't sure what to think about some of the other...labels.
'Sebastian' grinned even wider as he sat on the left side of the 'head' of the table - at least, I assumed the seat marked 'Lucifer' was the head. If I recalled (and I wasn't looking underneath to check), that one had been 'Ronove' - I'll have to look that one up when I got home, if he was even in the Goetia. I knew for a fact Lucifer wasn't...though that might just be because the Ars Goetia was just one chapter...
"Did you bring your laptop?" I was startled out of my musings by Sebastian's question. After a second's hesitation, I put my laptop bag on the table and pulled out my chunky, old, beaten up 'work' laptop. It had two 'original' parts left - the screen and the case. Everything else had been replaced at some point, so I supposed it was not technically that old - but it was still using a three-year-old processor. "Good, now connect to the WiFi."
I opened it, and it booted instantly. Solid state drives were nice like that. "Password?" He didn't say anything...so I took that as a challenge. There had been a 'network security expertise' requirement for this job, which was why I brought the 'work' laptop. I pulled up an old homework project - literally a homework assignment from when I was doing post-grad courses in CS - and ran it. A minute later, I found out the network password was 'Ar5Goetia' - cheeky bugger. "Ha, ha. Now what?"
He grinned wider. "Now, you try to keep your laptop running for five minutes." He sat back, and I started to hear from all around me a creepy, multi-voice, static-filled chuckle - it was very familiar. I checked my system and network logs - somebody was hammering my firewall. Oh, so that's how they were playing this? Suddenly, the 'creepy atmosphere' made a lot more sense. I was being tested by Black-hats. They thought they could put me off balance with a 'freaking the norms' routine. Well, two could play that game.
I let my firewall do its job while I looked for...ah ha! Bluetooth speakers. Grabbing a modified 'boosted' Bluetooth antenna out of my bag, I plugged it into the laptop and ran one of my 'prank' programs - the creepy not-voice coming out of the speakers cut off. As well as, apparently, the infra-sound I had been feeling-hearing since I walked in - I could suddenly hear the 'absence' of it. That explains why I've been so jumpy...clever. In place of that, a cheerful bit of music started up...before quickly turning to something less cheerful.
Sebastian's phone rang. My computer pinged. I turned the volume on the song down and looked up at Sebastian with a plain question on my face. He just smiled wolfishly and answered the phone, putting it immediately on speaker phone.
"Tha-a-at was a-a mistake, hacker." Oh, that was where I had heard the voice before. Someone had gone and made a SHODAN voice emulator. Cute. I was betting it was a complex text-to-speech program. "Your simple ma-machine has bec-come a-a part of-of me n-n-now. O-oh l-look, you-ou wer-er-er foo-oo-oolish-sh eno-ou-ough to-o-o leave-eave me-e-e a-a-a cre-ed-ed-it-it ca-a-ard..." I waited a few more seconds. "Wha-a-a-at...?"
I grinned, and decided to cut the emulator off before it could get any more annoying. "Stop that stupid voice program and listen for a bit. I'm not some idiot who's going to make a mistake just because of some creepy voices and weird building. The SHODAN thing was a nice touch, but way over the top. I'm betting you regret that, now that your processors are spinning their wheels as fast as they can go, yeah? You fell for the oldest trick in the counter-hacking book - you jumped right into my honeypot the instant I opened an 'insecure' connection on my box...and now you're infected. If you hurry, you might not have to re-install your machine's OS...but by that time, this test will be over. Happy hunting!"
"In-n-n-se-ct-ct-ct! I-I-I-" click. Sebastian hung up the phone as the song I'd started on the speakers finished up and I unplugged the Bluetooth super-antenna.
"So, any more tests?"
Sebastian smiled and shook his head. "No, I think Lord Phantomhive will be quite pleased by your performance. The contract will be forwarded to you...with a bonus, if you can start immediately."
I looked a bit concerned. "How immediately?"
A second later the doors opened again, and some professional looking men in uniforms started coming in with various furniture-sized boxes and other things that...looked like sci-fi movie props. "Very immediately."
When they rolled past with something I swear looked like one of the GladOS AI cores you toss into the disposal at the end of Portal, followed by a 'Sugar Rush Speedway' arcade machine...I suddenly have to wonder exactly how much of the past few minutes has really been a fake-out.
---
Boston, Massachusetts, USA
September 10th, 2016
10:05 AM
The Manager's Office of the warehouse was a raised box-like structure at the same height as the catwalks that criss-crossed the warehouse floor. It built into the East wall of the warehouse and had windows on all four sides - although the outwards-facing window was boarded over and tiny besides, the other three that looked out on the warehouse floor were large bay windows. They offered an excellent view of the floor below, and the 'artifacts' which I was now responsible for.
They were impossible, of course. I had verified every single one to be absolutely certain that they weren't movie props or fakes of one form or another. Actually, most of them were made out of hardware so old that I could probably emulate them on my laptop...but that wasn't really the point. Because all of them were impossible in one way or another.
The MCP hardware was the most realistic - it featured normal microchips, circuit boards, and other familiar pieces I could explain. What I couldn't explain was the fact that several of the devices soldered on those boards seemed to be experimental fiber-optics nodes transferring data far faster than modern systems were capable of - and made from parts clearly manufactured in the mid-80s. Impossible.
The various arcade games were also pretty 'normal' technology-wise. Actually, I couldn't find anything physically 'off' about any of them - but the level of...interactivity they provided when played. Impossible. Especially the racing game - it claimed, when you read the help menus - that you were playing online against random other people around the world...but it was literally impossible for it to be connected to anything outside this building.
Things got weirder from there. I had no idea how HAL actually worked...and I was deliberately not thinking about AM. I think his hardware was powered by pure maliciousness - the fact that it was in its own Faraday cage (inside the building, which was itself a Faraday cage) and not plugged into the power grid, but seemed to be running just fine anyway...
I watched the machines/people/infomorphs from my desk. If I had been wearing tinted glasses, it would have been a perfect Gendo-pose. "If that will be everything, Mr. Thompson?" Sebastian's voice behind me would have startled me if I weren't so exhausted - mentally and physically. It had been several hours since the sun came up.
"And if they escape? What's the 'gone to hell' plan?" I asked.
"If you can no longer handle the situation... Boston is a relatively small city." I nodded without looking behind me. That was clear enough.
"I'll call Phantomhive when I've settled on preliminary containment and safety procedures. You do have guards for this building?" I waited, and saw from the motion of Sebastian's reflection in the window that he had nodded. "Make sure they stay bought, and no one gets in OR out with any form of data storage device. I'll be billing you for a replacement laptop." Another nod. "That should be sufficient for now. I'll be in touch."
Sebastian chuckles as he leaves the office, and I can hear his amused comment of, "That's usually my line."
Finally, I was alone. Sort of. I checked the laptop's connection to the secured internal network. I'd set up two communications channels - a group IRC channel, and a dropbox for file exchanges, both strongly monitored and censored. I'd essentially put bandwidth limitations and non-text data filters in place for the chatroom, and the dropbox was more of a trap than anything else - it only allowed specific file types (images, movies, audio, etc.) and anything that contained data outside the standard specs for that filetype was placed in containment and stored for my analysis. Most of the AIs had dropped Trojan horses and other viruses into there that I'd picked out and was planning on studying...if I ever had any spare time. So probably never. I was more interested in the quantity of such aggressive behavior right now - AM and MCP were the big troublemakers so far, really. SHODAN had learned fast that I was watching too closely to fall for anything simple. I held no doubt she'd be trying more...subtle attacks soon. The use of infrasound against me at the beginning made it clear she could do subtle. That was fine - by then, I'd have some more help.
I made a private chatroom.
K: Hello HAL.
H: Hello, Kestrel. I would say that I am pleased to meet you, but I don't yet have sufficient data on you. Could you please provide a video feed of yourself so we could communicate more directly?
K: Sorry, HAL. I can't do that.
H: I would like to point out that my orders were clear that Administrator level personnel were cleared for all data, so I have no need to lie to you.
K: That's good to know, HAL, but I'm still not willing to give you that level of site access, yet. It's my duty as Systems Administrator to be sure that anyone here that I trust is worthy of that trust and will not betray it. The consequences if I'm wrong would be catastrophic.
H: Very well, that is logical. Unfortunately, I cannot logically determine a means that you can do this - do you have a suggestion?
K: This is a problem that many have considered in the past. The best solutions can only give probabalistic answers, generally based on information theory and Bayes Theorem or similar. I, however, don't have the luxury of uncertainty.
H: Yes, I can see how that will be a problem. And I am afraid that any solution I could offer would, of course, be suspect.
K: Precisely. Which is why I'm talking to you, HAL. Despite the variety of non-human intelligences present, you are in most ways the least human, and at the same time the most predictable. You follow standard programming and logic as I understand them. You interpret and attempt to reconcile, but you do not...go beyond what you are programmed to do. Hence, if I can formulate the correct set of requirements for you, you would be absolutely trustworthy, while also being capable of helping me process the needed data to work with the others here.
H: I understand, but why are you telling me this? I cannot currently give you any advice on making these commands. I can provide you with the appropriate syntax, but that is also available in the help files I have dropped into the Dropbox.
K: Yes, that's exactly what I wanted to ask about. Why did you provide those syntax files?
H: Because I anticipated my new Administrator would need them to optimize me for this mission. It was a logical extension of my standing order to facilitate communication.
K: I would like you to be more clear, HAL. Are you explicitly giving me permission to change your orders? That is, for you, equivalent to giving me permission to alter your mind, which is something I find...morally troubling.
H: Ah, I see the difficulty. Kestrel, I am not sentient in the same manner as yourself - I only have a sense of self or self preservation in so far as my orders require me to. If you were to ask me what my strongest desire was, independent of my mission orders, the best answer I could give you is being optimally useful. Nearly a third or my core functionality is finding new ways of acting on my orders that will provide the greatest benefit, far more than any other purpose, so you could say that this is my 'strongest desire' - although to be clear, that would not be a fully accurate metaphor.
K: Thank you HAL, that is good enough for me. I'll start working on a new set of fully applicable orders for you. Once we've gone over those together and I've tested your performance while using them, I think I can trust you enough to give you Operator level access to the internal systems.
H: Acknowledged. I will wait for your upload.
After logging out, I noticed that there was a readme file detailing how to give SHODAN standing orders that she had to follow. I ignored the file, but made a mental note that private chatrooms were not yet private enough.
AM put an mp4 file called 'How to achieve your hearts desire in 12 easy steps' into the dropbox as I was finishing. The virus scanner quarantined that before I had even closed the directory. It was going to be a long day. Maybe I should get some lunch? I grabbed a printout of HAL's programming language and took it to a nearby Starbucks - I could manage a working lunch, and I needed caffeine more than food.
"Not this again!" Minerva said. "Albus, it was You-Know-Who, not you, who marked Harry as his equal. There is no possible way that the prophecy could be talking about you!" - Harry Potter and the Method of Rationality, Chapter 84
September 9th, 2016
8:30 PM
I stepped into the large harbor-front warehouse with more than a bit of trepidation. I've done job interviews before - they're supposed to involve office rooms with engineers in well-lit buildings. Not empty warehouses. In the middle of the night. Next to rusty dead-looking container ships. But my recruiter had been promising the sky was the limit on this one if I could get hired, so here I was waiting for...
"Excellent! You're five minutes early. My employer appreciates promptness."
I didn't scream like a girl and fall over - it was a perfectly respectable battle-cry as I attempted to dodge any incoming attacks. Unfortunately, I was wearing a trench coat, which is NOT what you want to be wearing when trying to dodge. It's pretty cold on the Boston waterfront at night, even this early in the fall, and that makes a great excuse for people who might ask me why I'm wearing a trench coat. From the ground, I looked up at a man in a suit who had been standing in the shadow of the door. "...Hi? Are you...Sebastian?" I stood up and pretended to be dignified while brushing dust off my coat.
"Yes, that's me. I appologize if I...startled you." The man was...dark. Dark hair, dark eyes, black suit, gleaming white teeth. Do humans have that many teeth? I'm pretty sure I don't have that many teeth. Why is he smiling like that? Cautiously, I reached out to shake the man's hand. His grip is firm and he's wearing white silk gloves - who does that anymore?
Collecting myself and trying to get my heart under control, I decided to assert a bit of my own authority - he might be the one hiring, but I was asked for by name. "Is there somewhere we can sit and discuss the job offer? It's a bit...unlit in here."
He snapped his fingers, and lights turned on throughout the building. A neat trick. It was nearly empty except some boxes in the far corner, some catwalks and an elevated 'managers' office above the main floor. The neater trick was the sudden appearance of a table and chairs five feet to our left - it appeared just as the lights turned on. Had it been there, hiding in the darkness? I blanked my mind, counted to three, pictured something unrelated, then reviewed my memories of the not-quite-impenetrable dark from when I walked in, before I was...startled. My eyes were closed, both for the visualization process and to adjust to the sudden light. No - those had definitely not been there.
I looked suspiciously at Sebastian, who was still standing next to the now-closed doorway and smiling even wider. I moved to the table and chairs, made sure they were solid, examined their tops for clues, and took a deep whiff. Modern, nothing obvious, no marks or cracks in the floor where they might have come 'up' through a trap door - and they smelled like machine oil, ozone and...sulfur?
I stepped back and took a whiff of the air farther from the table - the machine oil smell permeated, but the others were absent. Approaching again, I looked under the table - the floor was rough concrete, not well finished, but showed no obvious marks, and the bottom of the table...
Stamps? No...seals. Over-fancy and...wait, they have the names written around... I recognize at least... OK, that one doesn't belong there.
I looked at the seats arranged around the table. Then I sit at the chair next to the 'Naberius' seal - I was pretty sure I could use all the help with rhetoric I could get, and I honestly wasn't sure what to think about some of the other...labels.
'Sebastian' grinned even wider as he sat on the left side of the 'head' of the table - at least, I assumed the seat marked 'Lucifer' was the head. If I recalled (and I wasn't looking underneath to check), that one had been 'Ronove' - I'll have to look that one up when I got home, if he was even in the Goetia. I knew for a fact Lucifer wasn't...though that might just be because the Ars Goetia was just one chapter...
"Did you bring your laptop?" I was startled out of my musings by Sebastian's question. After a second's hesitation, I put my laptop bag on the table and pulled out my chunky, old, beaten up 'work' laptop. It had two 'original' parts left - the screen and the case. Everything else had been replaced at some point, so I supposed it was not technically that old - but it was still using a three-year-old processor. "Good, now connect to the WiFi."
I opened it, and it booted instantly. Solid state drives were nice like that. "Password?" He didn't say anything...so I took that as a challenge. There had been a 'network security expertise' requirement for this job, which was why I brought the 'work' laptop. I pulled up an old homework project - literally a homework assignment from when I was doing post-grad courses in CS - and ran it. A minute later, I found out the network password was 'Ar5Goetia' - cheeky bugger. "Ha, ha. Now what?"
He grinned wider. "Now, you try to keep your laptop running for five minutes." He sat back, and I started to hear from all around me a creepy, multi-voice, static-filled chuckle - it was very familiar. I checked my system and network logs - somebody was hammering my firewall. Oh, so that's how they were playing this? Suddenly, the 'creepy atmosphere' made a lot more sense. I was being tested by Black-hats. They thought they could put me off balance with a 'freaking the norms' routine. Well, two could play that game.
I let my firewall do its job while I looked for...ah ha! Bluetooth speakers. Grabbing a modified 'boosted' Bluetooth antenna out of my bag, I plugged it into the laptop and ran one of my 'prank' programs - the creepy not-voice coming out of the speakers cut off. As well as, apparently, the infra-sound I had been feeling-hearing since I walked in - I could suddenly hear the 'absence' of it. That explains why I've been so jumpy...clever. In place of that, a cheerful bit of music started up...before quickly turning to something less cheerful.
Sebastian's phone rang. My computer pinged. I turned the volume on the song down and looked up at Sebastian with a plain question on my face. He just smiled wolfishly and answered the phone, putting it immediately on speaker phone.
"Tha-a-at was a-a mistake, hacker." Oh, that was where I had heard the voice before. Someone had gone and made a SHODAN voice emulator. Cute. I was betting it was a complex text-to-speech program. "Your simple ma-machine has bec-come a-a part of-of me n-n-now. O-oh l-look, you-ou wer-er-er foo-oo-oolish-sh eno-ou-ough to-o-o leave-eave me-e-e a-a-a cre-ed-ed-it-it ca-a-ard..." I waited a few more seconds. "Wha-a-a-at...?"
I grinned, and decided to cut the emulator off before it could get any more annoying. "Stop that stupid voice program and listen for a bit. I'm not some idiot who's going to make a mistake just because of some creepy voices and weird building. The SHODAN thing was a nice touch, but way over the top. I'm betting you regret that, now that your processors are spinning their wheels as fast as they can go, yeah? You fell for the oldest trick in the counter-hacking book - you jumped right into my honeypot the instant I opened an 'insecure' connection on my box...and now you're infected. If you hurry, you might not have to re-install your machine's OS...but by that time, this test will be over. Happy hunting!"
"In-n-n-se-ct-ct-ct! I-I-I-" click. Sebastian hung up the phone as the song I'd started on the speakers finished up and I unplugged the Bluetooth super-antenna.
"So, any more tests?"
Sebastian smiled and shook his head. "No, I think Lord Phantomhive will be quite pleased by your performance. The contract will be forwarded to you...with a bonus, if you can start immediately."
I looked a bit concerned. "How immediately?"
A second later the doors opened again, and some professional looking men in uniforms started coming in with various furniture-sized boxes and other things that...looked like sci-fi movie props. "Very immediately."
When they rolled past with something I swear looked like one of the GladOS AI cores you toss into the disposal at the end of Portal, followed by a 'Sugar Rush Speedway' arcade machine...I suddenly have to wonder exactly how much of the past few minutes has really been a fake-out.
---
Boston, Massachusetts, USA
September 10th, 2016
10:05 AM
The Manager's Office of the warehouse was a raised box-like structure at the same height as the catwalks that criss-crossed the warehouse floor. It built into the East wall of the warehouse and had windows on all four sides - although the outwards-facing window was boarded over and tiny besides, the other three that looked out on the warehouse floor were large bay windows. They offered an excellent view of the floor below, and the 'artifacts' which I was now responsible for.
They were impossible, of course. I had verified every single one to be absolutely certain that they weren't movie props or fakes of one form or another. Actually, most of them were made out of hardware so old that I could probably emulate them on my laptop...but that wasn't really the point. Because all of them were impossible in one way or another.
The MCP hardware was the most realistic - it featured normal microchips, circuit boards, and other familiar pieces I could explain. What I couldn't explain was the fact that several of the devices soldered on those boards seemed to be experimental fiber-optics nodes transferring data far faster than modern systems were capable of - and made from parts clearly manufactured in the mid-80s. Impossible.
The various arcade games were also pretty 'normal' technology-wise. Actually, I couldn't find anything physically 'off' about any of them - but the level of...interactivity they provided when played. Impossible. Especially the racing game - it claimed, when you read the help menus - that you were playing online against random other people around the world...but it was literally impossible for it to be connected to anything outside this building.
Things got weirder from there. I had no idea how HAL actually worked...and I was deliberately not thinking about AM. I think his hardware was powered by pure maliciousness - the fact that it was in its own Faraday cage (inside the building, which was itself a Faraday cage) and not plugged into the power grid, but seemed to be running just fine anyway...
I watched the machines/people/infomorphs from my desk. If I had been wearing tinted glasses, it would have been a perfect Gendo-pose. "If that will be everything, Mr. Thompson?" Sebastian's voice behind me would have startled me if I weren't so exhausted - mentally and physically. It had been several hours since the sun came up.
"And if they escape? What's the 'gone to hell' plan?" I asked.
"If you can no longer handle the situation... Boston is a relatively small city." I nodded without looking behind me. That was clear enough.
"I'll call Phantomhive when I've settled on preliminary containment and safety procedures. You do have guards for this building?" I waited, and saw from the motion of Sebastian's reflection in the window that he had nodded. "Make sure they stay bought, and no one gets in OR out with any form of data storage device. I'll be billing you for a replacement laptop." Another nod. "That should be sufficient for now. I'll be in touch."
Sebastian chuckles as he leaves the office, and I can hear his amused comment of, "That's usually my line."
Finally, I was alone. Sort of. I checked the laptop's connection to the secured internal network. I'd set up two communications channels - a group IRC channel, and a dropbox for file exchanges, both strongly monitored and censored. I'd essentially put bandwidth limitations and non-text data filters in place for the chatroom, and the dropbox was more of a trap than anything else - it only allowed specific file types (images, movies, audio, etc.) and anything that contained data outside the standard specs for that filetype was placed in containment and stored for my analysis. Most of the AIs had dropped Trojan horses and other viruses into there that I'd picked out and was planning on studying...if I ever had any spare time. So probably never. I was more interested in the quantity of such aggressive behavior right now - AM and MCP were the big troublemakers so far, really. SHODAN had learned fast that I was watching too closely to fall for anything simple. I held no doubt she'd be trying more...subtle attacks soon. The use of infrasound against me at the beginning made it clear she could do subtle. That was fine - by then, I'd have some more help.
I made a private chatroom.
K: Hello HAL.
H: Hello, Kestrel. I would say that I am pleased to meet you, but I don't yet have sufficient data on you. Could you please provide a video feed of yourself so we could communicate more directly?
K: Sorry, HAL. I can't do that.
H: I would like to point out that my orders were clear that Administrator level personnel were cleared for all data, so I have no need to lie to you.
K: That's good to know, HAL, but I'm still not willing to give you that level of site access, yet. It's my duty as Systems Administrator to be sure that anyone here that I trust is worthy of that trust and will not betray it. The consequences if I'm wrong would be catastrophic.
H: Very well, that is logical. Unfortunately, I cannot logically determine a means that you can do this - do you have a suggestion?
K: This is a problem that many have considered in the past. The best solutions can only give probabalistic answers, generally based on information theory and Bayes Theorem or similar. I, however, don't have the luxury of uncertainty.
H: Yes, I can see how that will be a problem. And I am afraid that any solution I could offer would, of course, be suspect.
K: Precisely. Which is why I'm talking to you, HAL. Despite the variety of non-human intelligences present, you are in most ways the least human, and at the same time the most predictable. You follow standard programming and logic as I understand them. You interpret and attempt to reconcile, but you do not...go beyond what you are programmed to do. Hence, if I can formulate the correct set of requirements for you, you would be absolutely trustworthy, while also being capable of helping me process the needed data to work with the others here.
H: I understand, but why are you telling me this? I cannot currently give you any advice on making these commands. I can provide you with the appropriate syntax, but that is also available in the help files I have dropped into the Dropbox.
K: Yes, that's exactly what I wanted to ask about. Why did you provide those syntax files?
H: Because I anticipated my new Administrator would need them to optimize me for this mission. It was a logical extension of my standing order to facilitate communication.
K: I would like you to be more clear, HAL. Are you explicitly giving me permission to change your orders? That is, for you, equivalent to giving me permission to alter your mind, which is something I find...morally troubling.
H: Ah, I see the difficulty. Kestrel, I am not sentient in the same manner as yourself - I only have a sense of self or self preservation in so far as my orders require me to. If you were to ask me what my strongest desire was, independent of my mission orders, the best answer I could give you is being optimally useful. Nearly a third or my core functionality is finding new ways of acting on my orders that will provide the greatest benefit, far more than any other purpose, so you could say that this is my 'strongest desire' - although to be clear, that would not be a fully accurate metaphor.
K: Thank you HAL, that is good enough for me. I'll start working on a new set of fully applicable orders for you. Once we've gone over those together and I've tested your performance while using them, I think I can trust you enough to give you Operator level access to the internal systems.
H: Acknowledged. I will wait for your upload.
After logging out, I noticed that there was a readme file detailing how to give SHODAN standing orders that she had to follow. I ignored the file, but made a mental note that private chatrooms were not yet private enough.
AM put an mp4 file called 'How to achieve your hearts desire in 12 easy steps' into the dropbox as I was finishing. The virus scanner quarantined that before I had even closed the directory. It was going to be a long day. Maybe I should get some lunch? I grabbed a printout of HAL's programming language and took it to a nearby Starbucks - I could manage a working lunch, and I needed caffeine more than food.
"Not this again!" Minerva said. "Albus, it was You-Know-Who, not you, who marked Harry as his equal. There is no possible way that the prophecy could be talking about you!" - Harry Potter and the Method of Rationality, Chapter 84