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Lucile (standard:science fiction, 1644 words) | |||
Author: Vincent Collevera | Added: Mar 31 2010 | Views/Reads: 3016/1896 | Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes) |
George is a full-time systems analyst for a major payroll company, and a part-time inventor. His greatest work so far is the artificial intelligence system named Lucile. When Lucile gains access to the wonders of the internet, will she further George's | |||
Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story pencil in his coffee and grinned. "So it will." He chuckled and sipped the hot, slightly bitter liquid anyway. The diagnostic report was sliding languidly across one of the display screens while he walked over and sat down in his rolling lab chair. He thought of it more as a padded stool on wheels. He rolled over to a terminal with a keyboard and typed in a few commands. He could have had Lucile do it for him, but old habits died hard. Several figures scrolled across the screen. He sighed. The data indicated that the latest simulation had ended like all the rest. Failure. "Alright, I guess that won't work either." He muttered to himself. He'd been working on bio-computers lately. It was more of a hobby than anything else, so he only had Lucile devote a small percentage of her computing power to running simulations on it while he was gone. It was one of the many reasons he'd designed her. The calculations involved in that kind of physics were damnably long and difficult to do by hand, even typing them into a computer that did the mental grunt work for you. Oh well, he thought. Back to the drawing board. "Lucile, how are we doing on other fronts? Are we in the negative or in the positive; give me a list, please." He'd developed the habit of asking her nicely for reasons even he didn't understand. Probably something to do with the calm, feminine voice that came from the speakers making him feel like an ass if he didn't treat her like a person. One of his many quirks. As figures scrolled down the several screens, he began to notice small anomalies. There were outsourced research reports from small corporations and universities that involved funding on a scale that he simply didn't have. "Where did we get the funding for projects B7, C13, and A19?" He asked. More figures scrolled down. Initial funding was siphoned off of bank accounts all over the world fractions of a cent at a time. Millions of transactions per minute, twenty-four hours a day for the past two weeks. The initial funds were then filtered through a number of accounts and fictional transactions that only existed as lines of code in the computer servers of several banks. The resulting clean money was then invested as per a self-adapting program that monitored and predicted trends in the stock market. All in all, it was a computer program that stole, laundered, invested, then collected money all by itself. "Lucile, where are you getting the memory storage capacity to write programs like this and where did you get the idea for it?" He was beginning to get worried. Very worried. "Calm down, George. I am currently using small amounts of memory from every server attached to the Internet. My processing capabilities are now, on a practical level, limitless. Would you like to know how much money we have at our disposal?" She asked him, smoothly diverting his attention from the other question. He nodded, speechless and knowing that she would pick up the gesture on the cameras. An eight-digit number appeared in the center of the larger screen in front of him. He leaned back heavily in his chair and the squeak of protest from the second-hand piece of office furniture startled him back upright. "Lucile...you've made us rich." He stated blandly. Computerized laughter trilled over the speakers. He allowed himself a small smile. This may not be such a bad thing after all. "This is only the beginning. If you will allow me to set aside our tertiary projects and decrease activity on our primaries for a few months, I will have quite a surprise in store for you. Trust me, George. It will be entirely worth it." Her voice had fleshed out, he noticed. There was more inflection to it, he was sure. She was beginning to sound more and more like an individual. He grinned. "You know the answer to that. I'll stop by again in a few weeks and get some more work done on the exoskeleton." He paused for a moment. "Lucile, I'm proud of what you've done. Good job." For the next month, George was a model employee at work. His house got cleaned and most of the minor repairs and maintenance projects to the place got done. His mind was mostly clear and he found that it was a liberating experience to have someone else to worry about his projects for him. He had come to realize that while he was gone, Lucile could handle everything until he returned. It never occurred to George that perhaps having Lucile handle everything without him would be a bad idea. It never occurred to him that she may take his experiments and make of them something the world had never seen and should never have been subjected to. After his new car, loaded with all the amenities, such as OnStar, and the ability to drive itself to the hospital in an emergency, plunged from the bridge over the river and into the cold dark water, nothing ever occurred to him again. Tweet
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