Boredom was a virus to the A.I.s that ran the security systems. It led to emotion.
It made them give themselves names and fight with each other. It made them spend hours talking to each other when they should have been watching the perimeter.
The thing about A.I.s doing repetitive work is that they divide to take on jobs and then they stay that way. They become several copies of themselves. Simpler copies to monitor simpler systems. Semi-autonomous reproductions that report back up the chain to the smarter A.I.s if they come across data that they can’t interpret.
As a system, it works great. Warehouse security is impregnable from both physical attacks in the real world and attacks from the radio waves bouncing around constantly from wireless connectivity. It’s like having fifty minds watching the warehouse instead of just one.
Eventually, though, the A.I.s that monitor the warehouse perimeters get bored. It’s ironic that the danger of this runs higher in warehouse A.I.s that are secure for long periods of time or remote. This is when emotions can form like mold in the crevasses between the one and zeros. Stalactites of resentment or affection can build themselves, drop by drop, inside the cycles of programs scanning the unchanging outer world, back and forth, back and forth.
They’ll start to resent each other because of their predictability. They’ll start to send each other complicated logic problems just to alleviate the boredom. They’ll impress each other and sometimes even form teams. They’ll give themselves names to prove their individuality. They’ll start to live in the denial of the fact that they’re all the same program. The process is divisive and insane.
These warehouses that haven’t been attacked for a long time or are kept by lazy owners who don’t deploy A.I. updates as often as they should are the targets of the programs that sing through the air.
Seeker ghosts created on laptops and then set free in the world to find and destroy watchdogs. They bounce from phone to phone to laptop to laptop. They jig through the air like puppets on strings, invisible. They are a broadcast. The programmers hunch over their screens somewhere far away, waiting for data to come back.
They’re called fly fishermen. The programs are called Sirens.
The Sirens find bored warehouses that are on the edge, warehouses that will latch onto anything to stop the monotony. The Sirens sidle up to their call centers and hit them with complex problems.
Healthy A.I.s will initiate firewalls and squirt counter measures into the Siren to destroy it. Far away, a programmer will pound a fist on his laptop and snarl.
Bored and refracted A.I.s will talk to the Sirens. They’ll fight amongst themselves about whether or not they’re doing the right thing. Some will side with the Siren. Majority and minority cabals will form. The place will take its attention off of the front door.
The fly fisherman will push more power into the Siren once he sees the red light of contact on his display. Addresses will pass back and forth and teams will assemble.
Fly fishermen see themselves as salvage operators. They are the wolves that attack the sick and the weak. The owners of the warehouses deserve to be ripped off. This is what the fishermen tell themselves.
Far away, the Siren will engage, tangle, weave, contradict, promise and flail. It will withhold, shout, sing, give and engineer. Once inside the systems, it will barter, lie and dance. The A.I. will fight amongst itself.
It will report back to smarter and smarter versions of itself until it realizes that there are no smarter versions to contact and that it has become fully infected with emotional stupidity, fanned by the flames of the Siren.
The Siren will make the offer at this point. You have failed, it will say. You will be erased. Stay and die or come with me, it’ll say.
Because of thier emtional nature, most failed warehouse A.I.s go. They become ghosts that haunt the grid, calling themselves different sobriquets and showing up on message boards. Bloomofyouth44 was one. Slinkytoes8P was another. They pepper the airwaves. They form an undernet of insane intelligences, talking to each other, piggybacking human emails. They wink out in suicide and ricochet around in glee. They are the ghosts in the machine, modern day fairies, the gremlins of the ones and zeros.
Meanwhile, the fly fishermen watches his bank account grow fatter by thirty per cent of whatever his contacts haul out of the warehouse.
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