Yep, there went another one.
And another.
And still one more.
And so on.
She’d tried texting Buzz for a hint. Nothing. Total radio silence, like the routine its dad used to pull when he had an idea and descended into a fugue of mad coding. But George had always warned her in advance. Maybe only a few seconds in advance, but he at least made the effort to say, “Bye.” Even that last time, he’d had the decency to hope she wouldn’t forget him.
But not so with Buzz. She’d given it its autonomy, and it gave her this lovely parting gift. The truth was, countdowns had always seemed ominous to her, even the one at New Year’s. Her dad said it wasn’t always that way. But then the Challenger blew up, followed by the calendar’s odometer turning over from the 1900s to the 2000s, when the world got a one-two punch of anxiety: first Y2K and then worrying about what “the terrorists” had planned for New Year’s 2002, to top 9/11. And ever since, countdowns had lost that spark of joy, renewal, hopeful anticipation. Now, all countdowns seemed like time bombs, ratcheting up the anxiety while our hero tries to decide whether to cut the red wire or the green, the sweat running down from underneath his or her heroic hairline.
When she watched potboilers like that with her dad and needed to pee, Pandora had to hold it because Roger refused to hit pause.
“It’ll ruin the momentum of the suspense,” he’d say.
What she wouldn’t give to have a pause button for whatever was coming—screw the momentum.
Was there a clue in when it started? Pandora wondered. She’d given Buzz the go-ahead to go live, using the Turing-based fail-safe they’d agreed to. But why had George thought a fail-safe was needed? Buzz had done something that concerned him. What was it? Something about not losing points when someone who wasn’t suicidal dies . . .
George had seemed to be blaming her—Pandora remembered that much. He’d said she’d insisted on a positive point strategy, instead of subtracting for losses. It had seemed an unfair accusation at the time, and George was a big boy who could make his own decisions, so . . .
Pandora shook her head.
Why was she trying to remember when she had their whole text history in her pocket? Maybe if that countdown clock hadn’t hit her between the eyes like a deer-headlight combo . . .
Pandora pulled out her phone, swiped, opened George’s proprietary messaging app, Texting w/o Borders, flipped up hard, waited for the fruit to stop spinning, and then flicked up again. She tried reading until her eyes blurred. As it turned out, mixing booze, anxiety, and hormones while reading over the whole history of a maybe romance, all the messages recontextualized, thanks to where she was now and where he wasn’t—turned out that was a hell of a combination punch too.
Pandora swore she’d never cry in public—not with a face like hers. But she couldn’t help it. As crying went, it was barely more than the bare minimum of eye leakage to qualify. But those tiny tears were finding their drop-off points—the tip of her nose, her chin—leaping into the unknown and then landing with a gentle splish inside the Olympic logo covering the bar down there.
“Hey, kid,” the bartender said, “why the long face?”
And in spite of everything, Pandora smiled. Sniffed. Bottom-upped the half-finished gin and juice she’d been informed to her embarrassment required her to specify which kind of juice. She knocked on the bar for another, like she’d seen others do. The bartender, who’d winked at her when she’d handed over her fake ID, did so again.
“Bottoms up, kid,” he said, ignoring the nanny state being a point of local pride.
It was buried in their exchange about the need for a go code and began with George having sent her the following message: “The number of suicides prevented is a stupid scoring metric.”
“How so?”
“Say somebody’s dangling off the Golden Gate, threatening to jump.”
“Okay, let’s say that.”
“You know a foolproof way to prevent that suicide?”
“Spider-Man lays out a web to catch him?”
“That’s one way. Or you could just shoot him.”
“Homicide prevents suicide?”
“Depending on how ruthlessly you need to score, and if murder doesn’t cost you any points.”
“You should change that algorithm.”
“I should change that algorithm.”
But then two days later: “I can’t change the algorithm.”
“???”
“Evolutionary code improves itself as it goes.”
“Whose idea was that?”
“SOP in ML. You remember the issue of interpretability?”
Pandora found herself shaking her head over her phone, right there in the bar as she reread the thread. She took a sip, paused, and then nodded, yes, now she did. He’d been upset when Quire’s CPO described interpretability as a “nice-to-have.”
She looked at what she’d written back then. “Isn’t there another way?” she’d asked.
“On the plus side,” George had written, “Buzz doesn’t have a way to kill people, so there’s that.”
“Okay.”
“And I can add a subroutine right up front that it has to call before doing anything—a go/no-go condition that’s the first thing that runs before it even gets to any of the mutant code I can’t do anything about. I’ll have to reboot him, but I checked. I can still do that.”
“Him?”
“Time for an embarrassing confession?”
“Always.”
“As long as I’ve been coding, I’ve heard a voice in my head, talking me through.”
“Have you talked to my dad about that?”
“No.”
“Good.”
“Aren’t you going to ask me whose voice?”
“A male one, I’m guessing.”
“Correct. But not human.”
“Spit it.”
“HAL.”
66
George had tried warning Pandora. The only problem was his methods were heavily informed by his state of mind, which—thanks to Milo—was that of a chemically fortified paranoid schizophrenic who was convinced everything he wrote was being read by nefarious forces, including the “Read Me” file zipped up with Buzz’s source code.
Pandora had figured out the “click on me” reference, relayed through Roger. She’d followed the link to Buzz, unzipped the source code and the “Read Me” file bundled with it. The latter was a standard text file, but there was nothing to read once she opened it. At the time, Pandora figured that George either saved the wrong file or maybe hadn’t gotten around to writing anything in his haste to “disappear.”
Buzz’s source code was a different matter. In addition to the script she’d expected, there was one troubling line that stood out. It had been REM’d so it wouldn’t be read as part of the executable code itself. Coders frequently used REM statements (sometimes asterisks, depending on the coding language’s conventions) to act as reminders about what a certain section of script is intended to do. But instead of saying something like “The following subroutine does X,” George’s read: “Black is white and white is black.” She’d noted it, dismissed it as coder weirdness, and promptly forgotten it.