Occasionally Heroic A.I. (5 page)

"Thank you, you ha-" I began to say, but then shrieked like a little girl when she started pulling the glass out of my back. "You sure you know what you're doing?"

She laughed and took out some painkillers from the first aid kit. "I'll get you water in a second," she said with a smile that made me blush.

Suddenly my cell phone started pulsing with vibration. I checked to see if she was looking and then peered down at my phone when I saw she couldn't see.

I saw her before you lowered your phone, she's gorgeous! Forget asking her to go on a date with you, propose to her, right now. - Wade

I pocketed my cell phone, pondering upon Wade's words. "So, do you work here?" I asked casually, filling the silence and filling my need to know more about her.

"Yes, I'm a computer technician. My boss lectured me for slacking off, so I've been working..." She stopped wrapping gauze around my chest, on top of my long-sleeve shirt, I might add, to check her watch. "Wow, twenty hours. I must have had a lot of coffee..."

"You must want to get the hell out of here," I chuckled lightly, trying to hold in tears of pain.

"I was actually just about to leave, but then I saw you crash through the window from the tree," she laughed, looking up at me, only inches from my face. "That reminds me."

"What?"

"The security guards downstairs, they'll want to see your I.D. card, so... Let's pretend you're my brother!" she suggested keen on acting as if I was her brother. She stood up and put the extra first aid supplies back in the kit. "I'll just tell them I was giving you a tour."

My phone vibrated again and I checked what it said.

LOL, she thinks of you as a brother. - Wade

I shoved it in my pocket, ignoring Wade's remark. "Yeah, that'd be funny... My name is Adam, what's yours?"

"Lara."

My eyes opened from my dreamless sleep. The current ran from my power supply through my circuitry like electric blood. A lively office filled my ears, finally waking me up, to where I looked from side to side. I was back in the office... Back in the office? Did I leave?

Wires hung from the office ceiling tiles and pulled from wall outlets. The computers around the office, which I used as terminals for data, pillaged. Someone stole my data. I must have lost some of my memory when the data was taken. Walls, except for one, blocked all the windows, entrances and exits. They resembled the percentage of open connections I had to the internet. The one port open went straight to Wade's computer. All other ports to connect to the internet were closed.

I went through, arriving only to see Irene talking to someone, who was on a cell phone. She stood in the center of Wade's home, looking up at a live feed projected on the wall. The feed was from the user's camera on their phone.

"Irene?" I asked, feeling as if I were in a weird dream.

"Martin! I was just about to get you," she stated in her sweet and loving voice. Her smile showed she was glad to see me, that she wasn't sure if she were going to see me ever again.

"Marlin is ok?" a voice asked, sounding exactly like Adam's voice on the other end.

"For the last time, its Martin, not Marlin," Irene scolded the caller.

"Sorry, the reception is bad. I only have one bar," he apologized.

He then held the phone up in the air, to get better reception. Doing so made the camera on the phone face downward, revealing the user's face. It really was Adam!

"What's going on?" I asked, looking around and seeing that Wade's system had most of his ports closed as well. Although, nothing was in disarray like in my system.

"You might not remember some things properly, since some of your memory was transferred and became corrupt. A mild case of amnesia, if you will," she explained, approaching me closer. "You were kidnapped."

At that moment, Wade came in from the port to my computer and walked directly to the couch, not making any eye-contact. He sat, pulled a virtual piece of lint from the knee of his pants, and flicked it away. He looked up and saw us, acting surprised.

"Oh, hey guys," he said casually.

"What the hell happened, how did you save Martin?" Irene asked in anticipation.

"Oh, nothing," he began, nonchalant, "
I just fried the bounty hunter's CPU!
"

"What, really?!"

"No, actually. We went to a virtual nightclub and met some girls. I got a few email addresses. Bounty Hunter Bob knows how to party!" Wade exclaimed.

"At what point during my rescue did you decide to take him out for drinks?" I asked in disappointment.

"Well, I was thinking of fighting him hand to hand, mono e mono,      PC specs to PC specs," he began, using his hands to do karate chops to the air. "But I didn't really want to, so I pulled out some of my money from the A.I. Treasury and met up with an old friend of mine who knows some shifty A.I. hackers. I bought a nasty virus off them, disabled it, and then sent it to Bounty Hunter Bob, threatening that I'd get an even nastier one and plant it in his system directly, if he didn't let you go.

"I met up with Bounty Hunter Bob to get you, but we got to talking and he told me he was just trying to make a living. He needed some cash to take classes and learn how to compress data - his user is a major file hoarder. He barely had any room to store you and your memory in his system. I felt bad for Bounty Hunter Bob and took him out for a night he wasn't soon to forget. Needless to say, Bounty Hunter Bob had a great time," he finished, smugly nodding his head up and down with his eyes closed.

"Why thank you for leaving me idle in his computer, while you and the bounty hunter, who kidnapped me, went out on the town and met up with girls," I said sarcastically.

"His name is Bob, and he's a great guy."

"I got that!"

"Jeeze, calm down. It paid off, he gave me the information he knew about our situation. You and I, we're screwed, but Irene is fine. Our ports, along with Irene's were closed when Irene talked to Adam. The CBA are none the wiser. I, personally, believe they have no clue about us anyways. Why would they send a bounty hunter after us? They know where we are. They could have just scooped us out of our machines with little error," he explained.

"Then who sent a bounty hunter after us?" I asked, puzzled.

"I'm not sure who sent Bob, but there will be more coming to collect us, which is why we have to keep our ports closed. I already fixed yours and closed them all off, except for the port connecting our systems."

"Why don't you just turn your computers off?" Adam inputted. "Then this circuitry board won't be able to find you, right?"

Does he not know that we're artificially intelligent beings?

The webcam in Adam's room fed a projection onto the wall next to his phone's camera projection. He unlocked his door, walked in and closed the door behind him. With his back leaning against it, he slid down the door in exhaustion, smearing his blood down it by accident.

"Can I put you guys on hold for a second?" he asked, pressing the button to put us on hold.

"Why doesn't he know that we're A.I. yet?" I asked.

"We were waiting for you so we could all tell him together," Wade answered simply. "But shh, something magical is going to happen! I can see it in his face!"

Adam placed his phone down on his desk and walked to the middle of the room, in full view of the webcam. He danced. His shirt was torn and he was bloodied, but he danced all right. He sung a tune, and danced. I saw that he incorporated a few Charlie Brown dances, the cabbage patch kid, the running man, the moonwalk and I believe the worm, because he got down on his stomach, said, 'ouch' quite a few times, and then gave up to start dancing on his feet again.

"I got her phone number, I got her phone number, I got her phone number," he sang, each time in a different note.

"He's not talking about Justine, the office slut, is he?" I asked, truly sad for him.

"No, new one, I'll tell you all about it later. Shh," Wade said, shushing me once again.

After Adam finished his dances, and his song, he stood straight, cleared his throat, and picked up his cell phone. He sat at his computer chair, took us off hold, and finished by turning his screen on.

His giddy smile disappeared and turned into an uncomfortable cringe.

"Hey guys," he said, staring at his computer screen. "Were you watching me just now?"

"Of course not!" Wade lied, attempting to withhold a grin, but smiled endlessly nevertheless. "You can see the three of us right?"

"Yes, I can see your user avatars."

"You see, this isn't our avatars... well it is... But, what I mean is, this is who we are. The stick figure you're looking at is Martin. He's an artificially intelligent being from your work computer. Irene here is A.I. from your psychiatrist's laptop. I too am artificial intelligence, on this computer," Wade explained slowly.

"You're artificial intelligence... on my computer?"

Wade readjusted his jaw and glared at Adam. "
My
computer... But I'm not going to argue with you about it - that's not the point of the matter. We are artificial intelligence. We have artificially intelligent law enforcement after us because we broke the biggest law in our world, communicating with you, with humans."

It took him a few seconds to gather what Wade just told him and understand it. However, when he fully understood, his face turned white and he fainted, landing face first on his keyboard and finally hitting the ground, under his desk.

"Computer chair seatbelts..." Wade muttered quietly.

"I believe that was too much for him to take in at one time," Irene stated.

"Well, he did lose a lot of blood."

Irene and I ended up explaining everything to Martin that night, from getting Adam to help us track down Bounty Hunter Bob, to Bounty Hunter Bob getting in a bar fight, to Adam getting Lara's phone number.

"Adam found a computer nerd?" Martin asked.

"A naive,
good looking
, computer nerd. She thought he was tree climbing, at two in the morning, outside an office building. She said her father was once a medic and then started bandaging Adam's wounds over his shirt. No disinfectant or anything," I explained, proud that my user found such a girl.