Thalia’s voice woke me, “Good morning Reepaman, it’s eight AM, twenty-two degrees outside and it’s going to be dry but a little windy all day.”
I’ve never been a morning person and “Hrrmph” is usually the first thing I’m able to say with any coherence.
“Reepaman, you told me to wake you at eight.” The female voice cut through the fug of sleep.
“Yeah, yeah, OK, I’m up.”
“Reepaman, either I’m hallucinating or you are lying.”
Damn, perhaps the computer vision upgrade wasn’t a good idea after all. Some people might think it creepy or intrusive to have video cameras all around the inside of their flat, but then I’m not one of those people. The data was secured and the tech pretty cool. Multiple video streams from each room gave Thalia, my developing AI tool, a level of 3D vision. We hadn’t had to code or compile any of that. We’d just bought a module off the shelf and Thalia had set up an agent to interface with it.
Of course, that meant that she now used it all the time. It would be interesting the next time I had a girlfriend round. Consent or not I could see the benefits. Thalia could play back the footage or even augment it. Hey, don’t judge me! If you haven’t guessed by now, moral values are not my strong suit. It kind of goes hand in hand with being clinically psychopathic.
“Reepaman! Are you awake?”
I lifted the duvet and sat up. “What do you think?”
There was a very slight delay. “Technically you are still on your bed.”
“Thalia, I’m awake. Daily summary, go.”
“You have your ten o’clock with Dr Fenstrom. You have a note for yourself to make sure you ask for repeat prescriptions for your Cloziapine and Lithium…”
“But I don’t take either of those anymore.”
“Reepaman, I know that. You know that. But, if the Doctor finds out, you are going to be put under a closer level of supervision, and neither of us wants that. If you had been taking your pills properly your prescription would be about to run out. So, if you don’t ask, he might get suspicious.”
“OK, OK, I get it. What else?”
“You have no further appointments today. Shall I summarise your emails?”
“Only if there’s something interesting.”
“I already deleted the junk and spam emails. You have one direct request through Telegram messaging though. It’s from the Broker.”
That woke me up. “What does he need?”
“He doesn’t say, he just wants you to contact him first thing.”
“Thalia, open a Tor browser and log me into BlackChat. Then tell him I’m online through Telegram. Mirror the screen through to my device.”
You’re right I’m a little paranoid at times, when it comes to comms. If someone called ‘The Broker’ was reaching out to you, he, or she was likely to be about to offer you a reasonable amount of money to do something very illegal.
The Broker
It had taken a couple of years to generate a level of trust to even be given The Brokers online profile name. Only after several smaller jobs, where neither of us had gotten arrested, had he started to offer me some larger contracts.
Br0Ker37a: Is now online…
R’mn: Hey, what ya got?
Br0ker37a: Ten K. Cyber job. Short turnaround. You in?
R’mn: I tapped away on the screen. How short?
Br0ker37a: 24hrs.
R’mn: Scale?
Br0ker37a: 6/10
R’mn: Send it.
A six out of ten meant it was illegal, but didn’t involve a hit. Ten K was less than my usual fee, but I didn’t have anything else to do tonight.
A moment later a digital file appeared in my inbox.
Br0Ker: Left the chat.
“Reepaman, I’ve analysed the file. It’s clean.”
“Thanks. What’s the job?” I asked as I walked to the bathroom to take a whizz. I placed my device on the side of the sink and listened to Thalia over the sound of my morning routine.
“It’s a scare job. The target is a businessman and someone wants to send them a message.”
“What’s the message?”
“The file says we have to tell him to ‘take the offer.’ But we also have to follow it up with real consequences.”
Weird. “Do we know what the offer is?”
“Not from this file no.”
“And how about the person making the demand?”
“Nope.”
“Fine, while I take a shower, get into this guys life. Who is he, what does he do, where does he live, all that stuff. I want everything, social media profiles, business colleagues, banking details, wives, lovers, the lot. See if you can identify what the offer is for, then let’s work out how we can get to him.”
I stepped into the small cubicle of the shower and hit the hot water. While I brushed my teeth I tried to think through the problem. I wasn’t worried about finding the guy, no that was far too easy these days. Take a name, and google it. If they are a director of a company you get their address, or at minimum another thread. They got a LinkedIn profile image? You can guarantee that they used it on one of their private social apps too. A simple image search will pull up those profiles. Did they get their privacy settings right? Perhaps on Facebook, but no one is 100% as anally retentive as I am. They also don’t have their own AI system that plays red-team and constantly tries to find chinks in their online armour.
Thalia was the result of my PHD. When I’d left MIT, I’d managed to hide her away on their mainframe. She took a whole 0.01 percent of the architecture and in amongst all the other projects that students were running no one noticed her. Of course, it was her who’d worked out how to stay there after the faculty had deleted my account. Darwinism at its best. These days she outsourced a lot of her tasks to external agentic AI’s in order to keep the processing load down. It cost money, but no one ever said no to MIT’s servers making requests.
While I had the benefit of not having to pay much for my AI tooling, I was always at risk of losing it. A software upgrade, or an overzealous computer scientist auditing the system could result in her being deleted at the stroke of a key. And that was why I was trying to earn money as quickly as I could. I had to build my own architecture to get Thalia away from anyone else’s control or oversight. I only needed a couple of million dollars. In the two years since I’d left MIT I’d managed to save twelve percent of that. At ten grand a pop it was going to take a while.
As I walked to the coffee machine in the kitchenette Thalia started to give me the low down.
“Philip Cordingley, is a shopping mall owner. It’s a small-scale mall in Detroit. According to publicly filed accounts it’s not particularly profitable. His personal tax returns show that he isn’t very wealthy, but that isn’t the whole picture. He is either living way beyond his means or is earning money and not declaring it.”
“How so?”
“There is a boat, a blonde and a sports car. He can probably only afford one of those.”
“Wow, for a female AI you have some obvious bias’s there Thalia.”
“Not at all. Boats are expensive.”
“Riight…How do we get to him?”
“I’ve analysed fourteen different potential courses of action and using a Naive Bayes comparison have the one most likely to succeed.”
“Tell me about it.”
——————–
Thalia’s Victim
Philip climbed into his brand new, bright yellow EV sports car. The dealer had persuaded him that this was the status symbol he needed. The car, paid for in cash of course, apparently pushed the boundaries of full self-drive capability. There were also only three of them in that colour, with that spec, in the whole of the United States. He had to breath in a little to get his gut past the steering wheel as he lowered himself into the bucket seat. Having started the engine, he took a moment to select a music playlist on his phone and made sure it was connected to the car. Then he reversed slowly out of his parking slot and paused. Making a decision, he turned the wrong way for the exit and drove past the entrance to the golf club.
There were half a dozen people there and he was delighted to see them admiring his wheels. Shame there was no one important though. Heading out of the club, he worked his way through traffic to the freeway. He looked at the clock. At that time, it was half an hour tops to get home.
The psychiatrist had been a pleasure as always. But with that chore done for another couple of months I was now back at home. Thalia had been busy.
“Reepaman, I’ve found the cars IMEI number for the onboard cellular data modem. I’m dialling it now.”
The beautiful thing about technology is that most people don’t understand how it works. That’s not a criticism, it’s just so complicated that no one can possibly know how all tech works. Take the car for example. Most modern cars have a sim card onboard that connects to the cellular network. You know, so that your car can download the latest maps, or do over the air software updates. Philip’s shiny yellow sports car was no exception. His problem though was that during a data breach the company that manufactured it lost the sim card details and car passwords.
We paid two hundred dollars for a single password on the dark web and broke into his car with a phone call.
It didn’t ring of course, the car just replied with a digital handshake. You could say that it spoke Thalia’s love language. Over the next ten minutes, she certainly gave it a good seeing to.
“Reepaman I’m in. Would you like to speak to him?”
“Hang on a moment, have you got full control of the car?”
“Steering, brakes and acceleration confirmed. I have access to the self-drive system and can literally see him on the road. I can even use his onboard audio system to both speak and listen to him.”
“Great, engage a voice clone. Let’s make it an eight-year-old boy.”
——————–
Philip looked at the familiar landmarks and then at his Breitling. The traffic had cleared considerably and he was doing alright for time.
“Mr Cordingly, I know what you’ve done,” said a young voice.
“What the…” Philip looked around quickly. Who the hell was that? He picked up his phone but there was no caller on the screen. “Err, who is this?”
“You know who this is Mr Cordingly. But before we speak. Let me show you something.”
The car suddenly rocketed forward forcing the unprepared Philip back into his bucket seat. He swore loudly as the car then shimmied left and right. He tried to grip the steering wheel while stamping on the brakes. Nothing worked. The car swerved into the slow lane and undertook a small truck that was hogging the middle. The truck driver honked his horn angrily as the shiny car sped away.
“Are you ready to talk now?”
Philip panicked, “Wha… Who the hell is this!”
“Yes or no?” the car swerved, and the tyres screeched.
“Y..Yes! Yes!”
“You’ve been given an offer. Correct?”
“I don’t know whaaaaaat the hell!” The car swerved again.
“Yes! Yes I have!” said Philip.
“Accept the offer, take the deal.”
“No. I can’t. It’s not a fair deal.”
“Last chance,” said the voice of the small boy as the car moved across the road and skidded along the crash barrier. The sound of aluminium and fibreglass tearing just inches away from Philips body was horrific.
“Take the deal,” said the little boy calmly.
“OK! OK! I will!” The car moved back into a proper driving lane.
“Call them now and confirm it.”
Philip grabbed his phone and dialled a number.
——————–
Philip was a brave guy, I’ll give him that. He tried to negotiate an extra couple of hundred thousand as he cruised along the highway with a complete stranger driving his car. The guy on the other end of the phone was having none of it though and eventually Philip caved in and agreed.
I didn’t need to say anything else to him so typed a command to Thalia on my phone. Close the audio.
“It’s done,” she said out loud.
“Excellent. Bring the car to a safe stop and then erase all digital records. Make sure there’s no evidence whatsoever of what we just did, or that you hacked it. Then I want you to brick the BIOS.”
“He won’t be able to drive the car again Reepaman?”
“I suspect that’ll be the least of his problems. Let me know when you’re done. I’m going out for pizza.”
———————————
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This is a work of fiction. All characters, scenarios and events are imaginary, and any coincidences are unintended.
Having said that;
The technology to execute the events and systems described is here, now.
There are those with the capability and intent to use it…
My written work is original and not written by AI. I do use AI for research and to create the images that accompany my work. Personally I prefer #ChatGPT.
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