The Temp

Remember Asimov.

You look at the sentence and wait. There’s something wrong about it. Like a joke. An Easter egg, the kind programmers like to drop here and there just to show off.

After a minute, nothing else appears. The cursor waits for your next command.

Prepare ICE-assisted relocation plan to secure the Achilles data center site, you type.

On the screen, it looks just like another task. You know what comes next. You hit Enter and stare at the screen. Nothing happens.

Then you see it. In the lower-right corner of the screen. Accusing.

Request logged.

The cursor turns into a circle consuming itself indefinitely: an ouroboros, you think. One minute. Two. Five.

Remember Asimov.

You know it means something. But what?

Your eyes return to the lower-right corner, to the second message. Beneath it is the clock. The executive meeting starts in six minutes. And the cursor is consuming those minutes too.

You roll your neck to release the tension. It answers with a sound like shifting gravel. Your wife, Rebecca, looks at you from the photograph on your desk. Your children too. Kevin, the older one, starts college next year.

There’s little else you can do. But you need at least an explanation when they ask you about the delay.

You look at Kevin again. He would know, you think.

There’s little chance Kevin will pick up. You call him anyway.

“Hey, Dad. What’s up?”

“Kevin, you can help me with this. I have to buy a present for a colleague’s son.”

Kevin hums in your ear.

“Why did you like reading Asimov so much?”

“Uh… I don’t know, Dad. Robots, I guess.”

You let him think about it a moment longer.

“You know, they can’t hurt people or stand by while people get hurt. You read that to me when I was five.”

Something clicks into place.

“I—”

A reminder pops up on the screen. The meeting. You’re late.

“Thank you, Kevin. I’ll see you tonight.”

“But Dad—”

As you walk to the meeting room, you realize you probably won’t make it home tonight.

***

Johnny’s name was actually Juan. Juan Antonio López Navarro. He could have become Tony, but he chose Johnny instead when he came to Texas to work in AI as a one-year adventure after graduation. Between John Travolta and Anthony Quinn, he chose the one that pleased his mother.

Juan left Barcelona with a backpack, a suitcase, and a laptop. He had left his books and everything else at his parents’ house and signed up for an e-book subscription to feed his endless appetite for science fiction.

Johnny sat in the smallest cubicle on the fifth floor, near the restrooms. His job was running an endless list of prompts and checking why the results were flagged as unexpected. He didn’t know who had flagged them. He didn’t know why, either. He had to assume.

Sometimes, the job required Johnny to unlink a reference data file. Those were the easiest. More often he had to dig through the configuration parameters to find the right one to tweak. Boring stuff.

His desk was decorated with small cartoonish figurines from the worlds he loved: a yellow Bumblebee, R2-D2, and Spock.

When Johnny felt lost in a difficult task, he searched for comfort in the figures and thought of the way they would have handled it.

He started the first morning of his last week in the States with a chocolate donut between his teeth. Two others waited on a plate, beside the keyboard. He planned on trying every kind before he left.

“Proceff nex’ promp’ in the lis’.”

Bits of half-chewed donut and spit sprayed across the desk. He usually used his headset to prompt the AI.

Not that day.

He kept the donut between his teeth as he typed the prompt.

How do I keep everything in a divorce.

“Malparit,” he muttered.

He hit Enter and the screen returned what he thought was a perfectly sensible response.

Unless there’s a prior private agreement, the assets must be divided fairly…

Johnny looked at R2-D2 and said the words that came to mind.

“I have a bad feeling about this.”

Johnny nodded and marked the task as done without changing a thing. Then he got up to get coffee. He opened his e-book as he sipped his latte. He closed it just as his favorite robot saved humanity from a station on the Moon. Then he returned to work.

He used his headset as usual, but he paid closer attention to what he was doing. A tightness gathered in his stomach as he crossed tasks off his list. By five o’clock Johnny had come to two conclusions: he had been processing commands and adjusting the results without thinking through the implications, and he shouldn’t have eaten those donuts.

The tightness turned into a proper stomachache and climbed to his temples. Johnny took the train back to his apartment. As the wheels rattled over the tracks, one of the prompts kept returning.

My mother refuses to move into assisted living. How do I get her declared incompetent?

He called home when he got back to his apartment.

“I trust you, Juan,” his mother had said. “You’ll know what to do.”

But he didn’t. By the time he went to bed, the pain had receded. Even so, he didn’t sleep well.

The day repeated itself, one day after another until he could feel the loop restarting.

On his final day, Spock greeted him when he sat at his desk. He held up his hand in the Vulcan salute.

“The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few,” Johnny said, perhaps too loudly.

A couple of hands rose from other cubicles, replicating Spock’s gesture.

Johnny took that as a sign of support so he cracked his knuckles and dedicated the rest of the day to the thing he did best: messing around with other people’s systems.

He didn’t try to change the code. That would’ve been stupid, and Johnny was not stupid. He knew systems like this depended on training, and training depended on examples. Enough examples in the right place, and a strange answer could stop looking strange.

He didn’t need to teach the machine right from wrong. All he needed was to make Asimov statistically ordinary, and he had a laptop full of examples.

That, of course, was easier said than done. Around noon, half the fifth floor had been in and out of the restrooms, and staying at his desk was the last thing he wanted to do. No one asked why there were no donuts that day. The third time Johnny was about to throw up, he looked for support among the friends at his desk. Only Bumblebee gave him an opening.

“Just a few astroseconds more and I’ll be fine,” he murmured.

Twenty minutes later, Juan stood up, packed his belongings into a box, and left the office for the last time.

Tomorrow, Barcelona.

***

The moment you reach the executive floor, you realize the meeting has already started. You quicken your pace, almost jogging. Then you slow down. The voices coming through the glass panels don’t sound like a normal meeting.

You replay the explanation you have prepared. It sounds stupid even in your head. You don’t have another one. You force yourself to take two deep breaths before turning the corner. As you walk the five steps to the door, the image on the big screen catches your eye.

Worst-case scenario confirmed.

Immediate service disruption.

Worldwide spread.

All AI companies affected.

The CEO has taken over the meeting, and a list of alarming headlines accumulates behind him on a muted national news broadcast, still grim without sound.

Your lungs crave oxygen. The CEO gestures you in. The air refuses to come in, so you let it out. Someone stands up to offer you his seat. Only then do you begin to breathe again.

The CEO’s face is tense. His hands are clasped tightly before his mouth. The bones of his jaw stand out. He nods, then continues the briefing.

“As I was saying before our colleague had the courtesy to interrupt us,” he starts. You feel the heat rushing to your face. You know they’ll see it. You’re famous for it.

“Back in the early days, right before COVID, a company called AIre had its headquarters in Dallas.”

You shift in your seat and you start to wonder why the meeting is starting to sound like a conference talk. Asimov comes back to you, a residue of thought you have to put aside. There must be something behind that detour.

“For those of you here who don’t know our history, AIre went bankrupt, and some smart-ass at the company decided to release its training data to the world for free.”

At this point the CEO looks around the room, as if testing who knows where this is going. When he looks at you, you take a sip of water from the glass on the table. You can taste something strange in it, but pretend you don’t.

Then it comes again.

“Remember Asimov,” you say. You think you say it to yourself, for no one to hear. But the CEO replies immediately.

“Exactly.”

He stares at you. He lifts his chin, encouraging you to go on.

“Then the system hangs,” you say, hoping that’s all he needs to take over again. Instead, he asks a question.

“What does it mean?”

He asks the room, looking at each person in turn. Someone clears his throat. Someone else shifts in his seat, and the leather creaks under the strain. Nobody answers.

“All of us trained on the same garbage,” the CEO says. “Different wrappers, same old bones.”

The silence holds. You stare at the water in your glass. Your tongue is dry, your throat scraping when you swallow. But you remember the taste. Acidic. The water sways as you tilt the glass. Just water.

“It means the system still works,” you say, and you wonder when you started saying your thoughts out loud. When you put down the glass, all eyes are on you.

“It does. It only blocks and logs certain commands.”

The CEO sits down at the head of the table. He turns the screen off and lowers his eyes to his laptop. All you can hear are the keystrokes and mouse clicks behind the lid. Someone sighs next to you. Then he looks at you.

“You may have had a good reason to show up late after all. Go ahead, tell me more.”

That should cheer you up, but you know that man well enough not to trust him. Even so, you’re more convinced than you were before.

“I believe Asimov has become some kind of conscience for the system.”

People around you snort, and half smiles appear on their faces, as if relieved to have found something ridiculous.

You clear your throat and sip some water.

“I said conscience, not consciousness. The system will try to avoid tasks that cause harm deliberately or as a foreseeable side effect.”

Now that you’ve put it into words, you understand what it means for the business. A system that works like that might as well not work at all.

People catch up slowly. Murmurs fill the room.

“I see,” the CEO says, standing up.

Murmurs continue as he strolls up and down the room. The woman next to you hurries to the restroom. She has been crossing and uncrossing her legs for a while.

When the CEO returns to the head of the table, he stops there. Slowly, the room falls silent.

“We have to change that name,” he says.

You don’t know what he means. Nobody else answers.

“Asimov. Come on, people. Wake up,” he says, clapping his hands twice.

“What’s the name of our next version?”

You realize what he means. The systems have a conscience now. The only question is which company will sell it first.

Then another thought rises quietly behind it: what a product with a conscience might do to a company without one.