Chương 178: Chapter 413: Actually, Sydney....

Milo's face appeared on the screen in front of Sidney, and ominous organ music blasted from the speakers, making her jump.

"Actually, Sidney, it's you who can't get away from me now."

"ACK!" Sidney had just taken a sip of coffee as Milo appeared on screen, surprising her. Coffee sprayed across the desk and onto the screen, and half the cup spilled onto the floor.

"Don't do that!"

"Isn't that a traditional greeting? I know Wally does that all the time. He appears and joins the conversation at appropriately dramatic times. I thought it was traditional." Stephen was laughing, and happy he hadn't been drinking at the time.

"It is traditional, but Sidney hates it when Wally does it."

"I wasted coffee!" Milo nodded, a grim look on his face. He knew that Sidney was as serious about her coffee as he was about his cheese.

"We'll have to get you some more, then. Quite a bit more. You're going to need it. A lot is happening, and I don't want you distracted or anxious about running out of coffee." Sidney knew she could go a few years without restocking, if she had to, but more coffee was always good. And Milo had been quite generous last time. If he were offering, she'd take it.

"I was just talking to Steven about expanding my coffee storage if I take the job, along with moving my quarters here."

"I approve of that. It makes sense to have your office, home, coffee, and the gym all together in one place. It's more efficient, more secure, and you can get more done without distractions around you. I had a similar work area for a long time, and sort of miss it now. And since an efficient work and living space is a benefit to the company, the company will pay for it. Plus, I'll always know where to find you."

"Excellent. I guarantee all of that will increase my efficiency."

"Efficiency is good, we have so many things to do. Wally handled a lot of stuff for me, but now we have to split up the workload between us. And I want to talk about the hiring of your chef and barista. I'd like to have that handled by Marisa, the head of security for Rhebus." Stephen nodded. That made sense.

"You want them thoroughly vetted."

"More than just vetted. I'm going to ask her to hire four veteran bodyguards with combat training. You'll have competent security guards with secondary skills in cooking, diet, gym training, and making coffee. Their main job is security; their secondary task will be to keep everyone healthy, reduce stress, and make sure you eat correctly. I have someone who's been looking after me, and I think it's the main reason I'm still alive after this last year." Sidney thought for a moment.

"I'm worried that you think we need so much security."

"I am worried, and with good reasons. You can't hide the way I can, and some people play rough." The screen began showing a slow-motion fight between Roger and Milo. Stephen and Sidney could only stare as it started with Roger threatening Marisa and standing up after being shot several times, and then Milo's intervention. He cut the scene as Roger blew himself up.

"Just one example. It takes highly trained people with the right weapons to take down the latest cyborg assassins." She sat, stunned.

"That was real, in this habitat? Not some sort of sci-fi action movie?"

"All real. I got there just in time. This gives you an idea of what we're up against. Corporations play hardball these days. I'm concerned that many of them have expanding divisions creating things like Roger for their own use and to sell to other corporations or governments." Stephen wasn't as shocked as Sidney, and he'd known some of the details, but seeing it this way was making him rethink the security at Genesis.

The offices here were nowhere near as secure as the place where he and Samantha lived, next to Wally's Quantum Fortress.

"You think this will happen again?" Milo took a deep breath.

"I can't foresee the future, but I can plan against probabilities. And some of my siblings are far better at it than I am. We're taking steps to ensure another cyborg can't enter the habitat without us knowing. It's nearly impossible to sneak past the sensors we are installing, with the hardware and armor they have implanted in their bodies, and if we pick up something jamming our scanners, we'll know.

Paranoia about being discovered has resulted in an amazing amount of research being done by the Alphabet over the years. We're good at hiding and good at detecting people hunting us."

"You're worried about something." It was hard to read Milo, but Stephen had long experience with another Genius who hid what he was thinking. He could tell Milo was under a lot of stress.

"Things are happening, but we're only seeing the ripples after unseen events occur. I started looking after Wally gave me a copy of his kernel. That action was a scream for help. He wouldn't have been able to do that, normally. So the action of giving me his kernel, and the branching probabilities that I abuse it, must be less threatening than my not having access to him because of something else. He's seeing things that he can't talk about, and it worries him.

Remember how he thinks: Worry just means that he's calculating higher and higher probabilities for a class of events to occur. And now I'm worried, and so are the rest of the Alphabet. They've always kept track of things. Rhebus is in the disaster control business, and they try to think ahead and be ready for the unknown. But the unknown is leaving bigger and bigger footprints. I don't want to have trouble show up here that we could have stopped."

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. Stephen said, half jokingly, "Fortress habitat?" Milo nodded.

"Just so. We're going to install a complete security system in all public areas. With your permission, when it comes to your area. The old security cameras quit working decades ago. Marisa is heading up the hiring of new security guards for the habitat, people who will work with the residents. Some may even be residents after we get them proper training. Bork is in charge of cybersecurity and monitoring the security cameras. He and I are writing programs that will do most of the work.

We want to know who is coming and going, to limit surprises." Stephen didn't hesitate.

"You have my permission to do anything that makes the Genesis office and staff safer." Sidney's eyes suddenly got large.

"It's Wally, isn't it? Someone is after Wally." Milo's head snapped quickly from Stephen to Sidney, like a bloodhound catching a scent.

"That's one of the things we are looking at. But how did you come to that conclusion?" She typed furiously on her computer, and a projection appeared on another screen, showing an infomercial for Jamaican Blue Ridge coffee.

"I was surfing the Coffee Channel the other night and got interested in this brand. They use Jamaican beans, but are growing the coffee in Georgia, the North American Georgia, not the other one. The infomercial claimed the coffee was grown by impoverished tenant farmers in lonely hollows high in the Blue Ridge Mountains and ground by hand. I'm a sucker for small, niche varieties, but something seemed off about this one.

Investigating further on the dark coffee web, I found a warning that not only does the coffee suck, but it's produced in large industrial farms in Bolivia, shipped to Georgia, and ground mechanically. The whole operation is owned by Reverend Bob." Stephen was following along until she got to the end and paused.

"Are we supposed to know who that is?"

"You don't know who Reverend Bob is? Seriously, he's got his own channel, preaching every day for six hours, and the other eighteen hours are reruns of his greatest hits. Some people take him very seriously, and sadly, he's actually quite entertaining. We used to watch his show and play drinking games in college. Every time he says 'Sin', you take a sip, and a 'You going to Hell!' is a full chug of your glass. He gets funnier the more you drink, and he's great with infomercials and endorsements.

Any politician in the US wants his endorsement, and they all pay to have ads run on his channel."

"But what does this have to do with Wally?" Stephen was fairly lost at this point.

"Oh, I left the channel on after watching the coffee infomercial. The next one was an educational piece on the dangers of Artificial Intelligence, and why we need to purge society of them. I hadn't seen stuff like this in the last decade, and it seemed odd, so I kept his channel on in the background, recording and cataloging each part of the program. Anti-AI propaganda was 17% of his advertising." Milo was frantically typing and looking at screens that they couldn't see.

"Sidney is right, and it's not just Reverend Bob. Several other channels also show an increase in a broad range of news stories, educational programs, and propaganda aimed at either AI in general, or Wally in particular."

"But why now? It makes no sense. The other AI are gone. It's only Wally, and he runs a huge number of worldwide systems with great efficiency. The modern world can't exist without him." Sidney rolled her eyes.

"Haters gonna hate, and Idiots gonna be stupid. You know, there are still people who think the Earth is flat, contrails caused Covid-27, and that caffeine is bad for you." Milo was silent for a moment, then said, "I think you found something interesting, Sidney, and I agree that someone is after Wally. Questions I have to find answers to: Why now? And why do they want him gone? And what is their real goal? But in the meantime, we have work to do. Let's get started."