“That’s all very interesting,” I said as my phone kept vibrating, “but how exactly does that help me right now?”
“It seems that all those messages aren’t coming from people you know. They’re coming from people who know you or people who know people who know you.”
I shook my head in despair. “But why?”
Now, the thing with Julian was that he rarely gave you a direct answer, especially when the question was
why
. He much preferred to give you clues that would help you find the answer yourself, and I hate to say it but he was bloody good at it.
“Back in the 1960s the American psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted the
Small-World Experiment
. He gave each of his 296 test subjects from the Midwest a letter that was supposed to reach a target person in Boston. If the test subject happened to know the recipient personally, they could mail it to them directly. If they didn’t know them, however, they were supposed to forward the letter—together with the instructions for the experiment—to somebody they knew and whom they thought most likely to know the recipient. It turned out that on average the letters had to be forwarded only five or six times before they reached their destination. But that was back in the 60s, way before mobile phones and social media and everything. A recent study by the University of Milan analyzed a vast number of connections between Facebook users, and it turned out that the average number of links from one randomly selected person to another was only 4.74.”
“So what are you saying?” Ginger asked, but the answer was already dawning on me.
“I’m saying maybe somebody is trying to reach Michael, and since they can’t reach him directly, they try reaching him through people who know him or people who know people who know him.”
“Oh my god,” I said. If what Julian said was true then there was only one way to stop the flood of incoming text messages: I had to reply. I took my phone and typed a reply to the last message I had gotten from Tummy. I wrote, ‘Hello MINDY,’ and hit send. My phone immediately stopped vibrating. There were no more incoming messages.
“Bugger me!” I said.
“Uh ... no thanks,” Tummy said and laughed his arse off at his crude joke. And he’s got quite a big arse, so you can imagine that laugh. He only stopped when my text popped up on his phone. He looked at the message, then at me, and with a dopey look on his face he asked, “Who’s MINDY?”
* * *
I had always been fairly confident in my ability to write decent code, but the result of that first experiment with MINDY officially blew my mind. After school I went right home to debug the code. MINDY had done exactly what I had wanted her to do, and that was to phone home. However, she wasn’t supposed to do it by using other people’s mobiles, their money for that matter. I had to fix that, because if MINDY continued doing that, people would get suspicious sooner rather than later, and since the whole project was inherently borderline illegal, I needed to make sure that if the authorities ever became aware of MINDY, they wouldn’t be able to track me down. That turned out to be more complicated than I thought. I had to set up a secure, double-encrypted VPN tunnel to my phone and computer, and my attempt to debug the MINDY code turned into a complete rewrite of the whole engine. The result was cleaner, more streamlined, more elegant, and—most importantly—a lot more secure. I finished the rewrite that same night, after I hadn’t had any sleep for 38 hours. MINDY v0.2 could do exactly what its predecessor could do, and that was to use the Internet both as memory and as CPU, and to contact me securely without having to bother anyone else. The new feature in v0.2 was a back channel so I could contact MINDY if I ever needed to tell her to do things for me or update the code to add additional features. I had no lack of ideas for new features at this point. What I did have, however, was a considerable lack of sleep, so before I went to bed I released MINDY into the wild with only two very simple tasks: to not get caught and to wait for new instructions. MINDY was a good little girl, and she did exactly as she was told.
In the following weeks and months I kept improving MINDY, adding a lot of useful features. Like, I let her—yes, by the time I had already grown used to call it ‘her’—listen to my phone conversations so she could get used to my voice. I wanted her to be able to analyze and understand the things I said to her. It’s a security feature. If I typed my commands into my computer or my phone, MINDY had no way of knowing if it was really me. But once she was able to recognize my voice, I could just talk to her and tell her what I wanted. I wrote a MINDY app for my phone, so whenever I needed her to do something for me, I just had to pick up the phone and tell her what it was. It was quite amazing.
We were down in my basement one afternoon, Ginger, Tummy, and I, when I first showed them the new, language-capable MINDY.
“So you invented your own Siri,” Tummy said rather unimpressed. “Big deal.”
“Please,” I snorted. “Siri is to MINDY as the hand axe is to the Binford 2000 power drill.”
“I have no idea what you’re saying.”
“Go on, why don’t you give it a try? Ask Siri where Julian is. He said he’d be here by tree o’clock.”
Tummy sighed and unpocketed his iPhone. “Siri, where is Julian?”
After a moment Siri replied, “Who is Julian?”
“Not who! Where, you stupid bitch!” Tummy shouted at his phone. Then he shrugged at me. “Could have told you that.”
“Now watch this,” I said. “MINDY, where is Julian?”
MINDY replied instantly: “Julian is currently approaching your front door, Michael.”
Tummy chuckled. “Right.”
Five seconds later the doorbell rang, and Tummy’s jaw dropped to the floor. “How did you do
that?
”
“Binford 2000 power drill,” I said and got up to answer the door.
When I returned with Julian a few moments later, Tummy was jumping up and down like a rubber ball on steroids. “We knew you were coming! We knew you were coming, Jules!”
Julian frowned. “Of course you knew I was coming. I said I’d come, didn’t I?”
“No, no, no,” Tummy said. “We knew you were coming
now
.”
“I said I’d be here at three o’clock.” He looked at his watch. “It’s three o’clock.”
“Michael!” Tummy cried out for help.
Julian looked at me. “Did you give him sugar?”
“No, but something just as sweet. Watch.” I raised my mobile to my mouth. “MINDY, where is Julian?”
“Julian is standing right next to you, Michael.”
“That is so creepy,” Ginger said.
Tummy grabbed my wrist and held my hand with my phone in front of his face. “MINDY, where am I?”
There was no reply.
“She only listens to me,” I said. “MINDY, where is Tummy?”
“Thomas is standing right next to you, Michael.”
“Wicked!”
“Yeah, that’s brill,” Ginger said with a whiff of sarcasm in her voice. “But how does that work if I switch off my mobile, or lose it, or leave it at home? How is MINDY going to deal with that?”
“Well,” I said, “it’s not a perfect system. MINDY knows that. She’s guessing to the best of her ability. I originally had her state the probability of her answers when she gave them, but I switched that off because it kept annoying me. I can still ask her, though, if I need to know. MINDY, what is the probability of Tummy standing right next to me?”
“The probability of Thomas standing right next to you is 96%, Michael.”
“See, it’s only 96% because there is a chance that Tummy went home an hour ago and forgot to take his phone. MINDY has no way of knowing that. If he were walking down the street, the probability would probably rise to 99%, still allowing for a 1% chance that somebody else is carrying Tummy’s phone. I’m working on accessing CCTV cameras and using face recognition software to keep track of people. Also, if I could access the Transport for London database to check when and where you used your Oyster Card, it would greatly improve MINDY’s performance.”
“It’s bloody brilliant,” Tummy said. “You could make a fortune selling this technology to Apple or Google or something.”
“Or I could spend the rest of life in jail if anyone ever found out that I developed this technology. Meanwhile the government, or terrorists, or whoever gets their hands on it could do some serious damage. So you guys better not tell anyone anything about this.”
“Are you sure they can’t track you down?” Julian asked.
“Pretty sure,” I said. “I took a lot of precautions. First of all, MINDY doesn’t run on any individual computer. A simple request like ‘Where is Tummy?’ takes MINDY several dozen individual operations to complete. At any given time there are millions of computers connected to the Internet that don’t have any firewalls or any other kind of proper protection. MINDY utilizes those computers by borrowing some of their memory and computing power. Only a tiny fragment of the whole task is completed by any one computer. The results are relayed back to MINDY who then uses other computers to put them all together, and other computers still to relay the results back to me. Nothing MINDY does ever utilizes any physical storage devices. It is completely memory resident and only uses processing power and RAM. You could say it operates in the subconscious of the Internet. Once it’s done using your computer, it will just disappear back into the cloud and leave no trace behind on your machine. None whatsoever. It’s probably as safe as it gets.”
“Right,” Ginger said. “So what are you going to use it for?”
I opened my mouth, ready to answer, closed it again, and after a few moments of thinking I heard myself say, “I don’t know.”
The Gospel According to Tummy – 4
Honestly, most of the time I didn’t have a clue what the others were on about. Sometimes they said something funny and I would laugh, and then they would look at me as if I was some crazy person, because apparently they hadn’t even said anything remotely funny and yet here I was laughing me arse off. But I didn’t care. I liked to laugh, and it didn’t really bother me if I was laughing at something that wasn’t meant to be funny. Laughing made me feel good, and it’s not like there were too many reasons for me to laugh in me daily life.
Anyway, so I didn’t really get what Julian, Michael, and Ginger were talking about most of the time, but that was okay. It’s not like I had a choice to leave them and move on to a different set of friends.
They
were my friends. There were no others. They were the only people in me life who had always accepted me the way I was and who didn’t care that I was fat and stupid. They let me hang out with them, and they didn’t give me a hard time like everybody else did. Well, maybe Ginger did. Ginger pretended that she hated me because I kept staring at her tits. She said it was creepy. I don’t know, I was a teenager and I thought it was pretty normal that I liked staring at tits, especially big, well-shaped tits like Ginger’s. I wonder why Julian and Michael never stared at Ginger’s tits. I don’t know, maybe they just had other things on their minds.
So yeah, I liked hanging out with the guys, even though most of the time I had no idea what was going on. But that’s okay. I didn’t need to know everything. Sometimes it’s better not to know anything. Most of the time actually. But you see, sometimes I was really smart. Sometimes I knew things that nobody else knew. I don’t know how or why, I just did. Like for example, I knew I was in for a whole lot of trouble when Michael asked me to plug that SD memory card into me dad’s laptop computer. I could have said no. I could have said that I tried it but it didn’t work. I probably should have done one of these things, because then none of all this ever would have happened. But to be honest, part of me wanted to see what was on me dad’s computer. Not any of his work stuff. No draft bills, no emails to the party headquarters. I wanted to see me dad’s porn, that’s all. And I thought that that was all that Michael was interested in as well. I had no idea that Michael was about to hijack the whole Internet and turn it into his own private doomsday device.
What can I say, me dad was even more boring than I thought. We didn’t find any porn, which meant that he didn’t have any, because if Michael said he didn’t find any, it meant that it didn’t exist. All he found on me dad’s computer was boring politician’s documents. He showed me. The SD card had a virus or something on it that would allow Michael to access me dad’s computer from anywhere at any time.
So we were sitting at Underground Zero, browsing through tons and tons of boring emails and documents. It was like breaking into a toy store, but instead of finding the latest and coolest toys, all there was were thousands and thousands of games of Scrabble and nothing else.
The Gospel According to Michael – 5
I am not a hacker. Some people call me a hacker, but they have no idea what they’re talking about. I’m a
programmer
. I write code. My programs are tools designed to make people’s lives easier. Like all tools, my software tools can be used to work both ways, good and evil. In the lower Palaeolithic, hand axes were the most common tool. You could use them to cut meat or to scrape animal skins. You could also use them to kill someone. But you wouldn’t accuse the Palaeolithic inventor of the hand axe of having invented a murder weapon. The computer tools that I devise are the hand axes of the twenty-first century. They are meant to do good things. Thousands of years from now, people will look at them and think of them as crude and primitive. But they will also recognize their inherent beauty, and how these tools set mankind on a new path towards a better future. I have no regrets. My tools are awesome, even if they are capable of collapsing the world as we know it. Not everything that can be done must be done or will eventually be done. People need to shut up and grow up and start acting responsibly. Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. So no, I don’t regret using MINDY to download top secret government files from Mr Lewis’s computer. The world needed to know these things. We had a right to know these things, too. At least that’s what Julian thought.