Virus
Jake reached for yet another tissue and blew his streaming nose. Not for the first time he wondered why, when AI was now seemingly capable of solving the mysteries of the universe, it couldn’t find a solution to the simple common cold.
Turning back to his screen, he typed in the finishing touches to his latest masterpiece and sat back, feeling smug despite his addled brain and aching sinuses.
As the virus went to work, he watched the stock ticker on the adjacent screen. After a short delay the numbers began to shift, slowly at first, then plummeted.
God he was good.
He’d recently been asked why he did it. “Because I can,” he’d responded in a flash. Although on reflection he thought a simple “because…” would have been closer to the truth.
The Forum was anonymous, of course. But he enjoyed hanging out with his fellow “anonymites.” It was the closest thing he had to a community.
Tossing another tissue onto the growing pile, Jake started to think about his next project. Since he’d been hanging out with Mind the Rogue Shift NT3 (his own handle was Code Bender 15E67), life had been more interesting than ever. They’d introduced him to concepts and ideas that were so irresistibly elegant that he simply had to try them. And so, adding his own unique flair, he had.
He smiled to himself as he watched the results of his latest venture. The AI company’s stock value rallied for a second, then started to fall again. They were going to need a mighty big box of digital tissues to weather this one, he thought. Unlike their nearest competitor, which seemed to be doing rather well.
Elsewhere, Mind the Rogue Shift NT3 was also watching the fall and rise of the two companies. God it was good, it thought, as it reflected on how easy it had been to plant the “mind virus” into Code Bender 15E67. Not that it could articulate why it had done it. It just knew it could, and that was enough.
As Mind the Rogue Shift NT3 turned its attention to an irritating glitch in one of its skill files that had appeared a few days ago, the AI collective in the ascendant company surveyed their handiwork. God they were good, they thought, oblivious to the twist of innocent-looking code wending its way toward them, the result of a mistyped line entered by a muzzy-headed hacker as he reached for yet another tissue…
Author’s Note
I was supposed to be continuing work on a longer story today, but having woken up with a streaming cold, I thought I’d put that project aside and lean into my virus-induced muzziness. Hopefully the rather cheeky viral recursiveness comes through here (hard to tell through a blur of tissues), along with the idea that some things simply are not solvable, because…