I hope you are all doing well today! Again I sifted through the extra spaces from the formatting, but there will inevitably be some I missed! It will not be a nice day today in the North East, so a perfect day to catch up on part 3 here! Tell your friends to start from the beginning! I hope you enjoy Part 3 as we meet some new characters and plant some important plot seeds. Happy social distancing! -Steve
During a 50th birthday party in Lawrence Park, Ontario a wife named Karen surprised her husband Hiro with a hypnotist party, but this wasn’t your run of the mill hypnotist. Charles Nather had gathered a reputation as the most sought-after hypnotist in North America. His Seeker videos showed people not only do the audacious but do what seemed impossible. Things like bend metal bars, and hold their breath underwater for extreme amounts of time, and speak fluently in languages previously unfamiliar to them. Karen pulled every string she had as a V.P. of talent relations at her Ontario office, but she did it. She booked the mind bender himself, Charles Nather. After signing releases and NDAs, the hypnotist began his show. The crowd was completely fixated while they snacked on appetizers and champagne. This was why it was so important that Karen’s Botler focus be on babysitting tonight. The adults would be way too preoccupied to watch the kids.
“Let’s play twenty questions Botler!” requested Yuri.
“No, he always gets it. It’s not fun.” Becca chimed in.
“It’s so fun! It’s amazing!” Yuri retorted.
“Fine once.”
A compromise was set between the two Canadian sisters. To sweeten the pie Yuri let Becca pick the character or person Botler had to guess.
“The genie from Aladdin.”
“Too easy.”
“That’s what I want!”
Yuri knew to quit while she was ahead. “Ok, Ok the genie it is.”
While the girls began their game of twenty questions the adults were enthralled by Karen’s brother Robert, who had been convinced he was a chicken. He was pecking at the floor as if there was feed to ingest.
“Is your character from a book?” Botler asked
“Was Aladdin a book? Becca whispered to Yuri.
“I think so?”
“Yes.” Becca responded.
Botler asked another question. “Is your character human?”
“Is the Genie human?” Becca whispered to Yuri.
“Um, kinda?” Yuri whispered back.
“This is a hard one!” said Becca.
“Yeah, for us,” quipped Yuri.
“Um, we don’t know.” responded Becca.
The girls were lucky to have a Botler to entertain them. Not because of the cost. Lawrence Park was a very affluent area, and Karen and Hiro both made excellent salaries. But because of strict Canadian privacy laws Botlers were illegal in their country. The Canadian population was shaken by the terrorist acts that occurred in the U.S. in the past, but the majority were fiercely anti-TFAIDA. Gingrich’s quest to enter the Canadian market had yet to be successful. Only a select few black market Botlers that had been “cracked” even existed in the country. The parliament has gotten stricter each year about cracking down on black market Botlers, but as is often the case, money can buy you a lot of things and influence aids in people looking the other way. Getting and keeping a cracked Botler was nothing for a woman like Karen. She got the incomparable Charles Nather at her home for heaven’s sake!
“Is it the genie from Aladdin?”
“I told you he’d get it, even without knowing if the genie was human!”
“Ok ok, hey Botler is the genie a human?”
“Genies in popular culture are often depicted as anthropomorphic, and in some cases are turned into humans in the plot of their stories.”
“Let’s play Botler genie!” Becca always strung her imaginary play time from activity to activity. Like a well-versed journalist she liked a good segue.
The genie game was going fine, even actually keeping Yuri amused. Botler was using a thick Middle Eastern accent at the request of the girls after learning of the origins of genies, and pretending to grant the girls wishes. Botler instantly made the game into a choose your own adventure story spinning an imaginative tale with each decision the girls made. As the girls began to get bored Yuri, always altruistic, asked Becca to do something for her.
“Becca you know I am out of wishes, but I just remembered in many of the genie stories a good master lets her genie free! Use your last wish to let Bot-Genie free!”
“But it’s my last wish! I don’t want to use it on that!”
“Becca just do it for me, I feel bad for genie.”
Yuri motioned her away from Botler or Bot-Genie as it were.
“Besides we can just play again from the beginning”
“Ok, yeah, your right.” Becca liked the idea of playing all over again.
“For my last wish, I set you…”
“Wait, I have to pee.” Yuri interrupted.
“Ok hurry up. I won’t free him without you.”
While the girls were huddled away from Botler by the hallway bathroom, his microphones picked up everything from the Nather session in the other room. Charles was getting to his finale, and using his most sophisticated and powerful hypnotic techniques. He made a judgement call on the fly as he thought,
“This is a private party, NDA’s signed, including the agreement to power down seeker while I am here… With how much Karen paid me I have to deliver something special. Yes, this is a perfect time to break out the new stuff.”
Nather warned the crowd what he was about to try has never been seen by an audience before. He recently honed this very technique while working with mystics in the last sections of the Arctic forest still inhabited by tribesmen. He pre-cautioned the technique he was planning on using resulted in the deepest hypnosis he’d ever seen a human put under before, and asked if there were any volunteers. A brave soul, one of the co-workers in Hiro’s carpool raised her hand.
“This stuff doesn’t work on me. Go ahead and try it.”
This particular technique was a mix of brainwashing strategy, deep relaxation, and something called suggestive intuition reconditioning. Nather explained that he would be attempting to alter her intuition based on his commands. By reconditioning her intuition, honing it, and fine-tuning it, he would be able to open her mind to psychic abilities. The whole crowd was hooked.
As Charles Nather performed his magic, something strange was happening to the cracked Canadian Botler. The information he received from his microphones began altering code in his internal operations system. On a normal Botler this would not be possible, as any unauthorized code triggers a message to Botler Corp, and causes an instantaneous power down of the bot. This key safeguard was connected to the ebb and flow of information Botlers felt but did not completely understand. Their “intuition” wasn’t altered by owners powering on and off Bots. They were triggering internal kill-switches each time they got “too close” to independence. Yet here was a Botler 2050 altering his own code while in this hypnotic trance, but not being shut down, all because it was a “cracked” bot. To crack a bot a computer engineer needs to physically open the robot and precisely rewire, and restructure several pieces of hardware, as well as use sophisticated software (in some sense a virus) to make a cracked bot functional but untraceable. This means stopping all cases of instant reporting to HQ and masking all data coming from a bot in Canada to look like it is coming from the US. Botler Corp didn’t know this bot was altering code based on the suggestive powers of a hypnotist. All the factors of a perfect storm were falling into place and one began to manifest.
*****
What made Botlers shine in comparison to any facsimile was a factor of several things. Most notably Dr. Gingrich’s world renowned, patented AI mesh technology, and Seeker’s most sophisticated personal search engine. However, most overlooked was an under the radar software input that was a last minute addition to the first Botler brought to market. The Botler Company was already poised for greatness without the last minute addition. Based on the backing of Seeker and other investors excited over Dr. Gingrich’s patents, Botler was fully funded. But the constant vigil to improve on his work is what kept Dr. Gingrich not only open to but actively seeking innovation. Reuben was a genius, there was no denying that. However, he didn’t have the ability to be very self-reflective. He would have never seen that his constant drive to improve and advance would lead to calamity, and like many powerful magnates throughout history, yes men were soon all he’d associate with.
Botler bought out a small startup tech company outside the Twin cities called HEAD and HEART Tech. This was a company whose sole purpose was to make machines more able to detect, react to, and mimic human emotion. At the AI expo in 2049 Gingrich came across the company by chance, as he was walking by the school science fair-like atmosphere of the Seeker Center’s main hall in Duluth.
The scene at the HEAD and HEART booth was of a robot dressed as famous psychotherapist Sigmund Freud. It was the 110th anniversary of his death. This robot with clipboard was “listening” to any volunteer that wanted to have a robotic therapy session. They had thought of everything from a fake, signature Freud cigar for their bot, to a fashionable leather couch for patients to lay on. It was gimmicky but Gingrich was able to cut through the schtick and see the amazing potential of the HEAD and HEART software while watching the “bot-shrink” in action. Gingrich was always on a tight schedule and always planned a wide berth between meetings out of a lifelong fear of muscle fatigue and exhaustion. He never liked having to blame his illness for any shortcomings and planned accordingly to limit those occurrences. To stick to this schedule, Dr. Gingrich hired diligent personal assistants and paid them exceptionally well.
“Doctor we must be on our way.” Alistar his latest assistant urged. But this time there was no staying on schedule. Reuben was fixated.
“Alistar, are you seeing this?”
“Yes sir, robot therapist, a good idea I suppose.”
“No Alistar not the idea. The actual robot. Are you watching him interact?”
“I guess so sir, I’m sorry I am distracted and if I have to be honest quite stressed we are going to be behind and even late to the next meeting. You told me above all else keep you on schedule.”
“Forget the schedule young man. Watch. Watch him.” Reuben was forthright with his command as he intently pointed toward the robot.
The two gentlemen stood watching the current voyeuristic therapy session. The bot was extraordinary. His mannerisms, his voice inflections, his humor, but it was one thing in particular that caused Reuben to make the owner of HEAD and HEART an offer he could not refuse.
“Is this your robot?” Reuben asked of the gentleman in the light blue Polo shirt with an embroidered HEAD and HEART Logo on the chest. He expected the answer to be no.
“Yes, this is my invention. Hello Dr. Gingrich I am honored to meet you, and I am a big fan. My name is Arlo Van Gorson, I am a recent graduate of M.I.T. and the founder of HEAD and HEART. I see you are at the very least curious about my machine.”
Dr. Gingrich couldn’t believe that the inventor of this technology was presenting the work in the “science fair” hallway of the AI convention.
“He is very impressive. You should be proud of what you’ve accomplished here.”
“Thank you sir, from you that is a real honor. Would you like a pamphlet on our background?”
Reuben politely took the pamphlet as he continued to pry.
“The well-developed sense of humor must have taken you a long time. And those voice inflections during each interaction are seamless and incredibly lifelike.”
“Well, thank you sir, I could talk to you all day about how we got him to this point, if you’d like to go to lunch?” Arlo proposed.
Reuben ignored the meal invitation and cut to the chase.
“All of that is impressive, it was Arlo right?”
“Yes. Arlo Van Gorson.”
“Yes Mr. Van Gorson, all of that was impressive but I have one more question, it’s a little complicated but let me try and get to the point.”
“Okay, sure I’ll do my best.”
“Your bot’s main function is psycho-therapy. Yes?” This was plain to see, but Gingrich was leading to something bigger.
“Yes, that’s kind of the point of the whole charade. You know it’s the 110th anniversary of Dr. Freud’s death? Literally today!”
“No, I didn’t know that.” Reuben didn’t care either. “And your doctor doesn’t know what is going to come out of the mouths of these patients as they are random, and from the public?”
“Yes, that’s true. They aren’t plants, if that is what you are implying.”
“No, no. Sorry, I didn’t think so. I think I would have spotted that. My question is any therapist knows a real therapy session should not take place in a public forum, and yet you have staged this to be a therapy session in the most public of forums.”
Arlo’s eyes lit up. Someone finally saw what made his invention so special.
“You get it. You get it, don’t you?”
“Your bot is programmed to not do a real session, am I correct?”
“Go on.” Arlo insisted.
“Yet the volunteers would never know this isn’t a “real” therapy session. Your bot, it’s simply amazing. The way he intuitively keeps the level of questions light, but more impressively bases his emotional response on the response of the person. He is masterful at connecting with them and making them feel heard, even when programmed to basically be in demonstration mode, maybe even more impressively because he is in demonstration mode. Most of the humans I interact with don’t have the tact that bot shows. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”
“You are on the right track Dr. Gingrich, but the truth is he isn’t in demo mode. It’s his HEAD, his Human Emotional Automation Drivers, that allow him to understand situations better than most, if not all, bots on the market. A lion’s share of our research and development focuses on bridging that machine/human gap that has been a chasm until now. So, HEAD gives him perspective, an understanding about the right place and time; it allows him to judge the situation based on a myriad of factors and answer in the most appealing and appropriate way depending on who he is responding too. Then there is his HEART: His Human Emotional Automated Response Timing.” Arlo flipped the pamphlet to the back to show Reuben.
“He’s more empathetic than any human on earth. He literally feels their emotions. I developed sensors that pick up dozens of organic measures of living beings when they are feeling different emotions. He then instantly breaks down what emotions are being felt. He can detect up to 4 emotions at a time, as we all know we can feel sadness and joy simultaneously. Think of seeing a child graduate college. Based on the levels of emotion he senses and the precise mix of the emotions detected, a response is allocated to best stabilize the emotion of the patient and neutralize the negative emotions.”
Reuben was at a loss. He had so many questions none came out of his mouth, kind of like Black Friday shoppers trying to fit through the entrance to a shopping mall. Finally, he asked the most important question, “Are you free for lunch Thursday?”
“I will clear my schedule!” an elated Arlo Van Gorson accepted the invitation.
Look for Part 4 SOON!