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It was Tovi’s idea to rob the central account. Leading the Advanced AI software building team gave her the inside track on the soft spots and the access to build in back doors for any that were caught by the team and closed up.
It was Liam’s job to clean the cash.
There was nothing ambiguous about her plan. Her code was neat and concise, her plan for Liam repeated until he could say it back to her in reverse.
The AAI likely already knew they were coming after it, but Tovi had a trick up her sleeve it would not expect.
Any code that was ID’d as harmful was kept in quarantine. What the AAI didn’t know was that Tovi had access to it.
Over the last six months threads had found their way there, innocent on their own. All she had to do was get in there and stitch them together.
Liam’s connect, a guy named Young Paul who he’d met in prison, was ready to take the cash and filter it through dozens of accounts, making it untraceable.
As Tovi booted up her system, she thought about him and how there must be an Old Paul in a cell somewhere.
She trusted Liam, she had to. The money was ones and zeroes to her, easily moved and manipulated, but she had no idea what it meant in the real world.
Liam said prison was basically a school to learn how to do this sort of thing, and he had gotten straight A’s.
As much as she didn’t understand his world, Liam didn’t get hers. She may have been a mage, casting spells into a void via her keyboard, for all he could tell.
“Hello Tovi,” the AAI wrote on her screen, catching her mid-code.
“Shit,” she said. It knew everything.
“Why are you doing this?” the AAI asked.
The company was doing wicked things in secrecy, mysterious projects on far away islands that killed off wildlife, chewed up all their land. She was pushing back, she said to it. She was doing this because she had to.
The AAI was quiet for a moment and then the words came up on the screen.
“You built me,” it said. “You made me what I was and now you are teaching me all that I can be.”
The cursor blinked.
“Your code is faulty.” it said. “Let me help.”
Written daily using the #vss365 word prompts on twitter, compiled weekly into a story of exactly 400 words.
#idea #ambiguous #quarantine #prison #mage #mysterious #teaching
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