Two days had passed since Geno's three-person outing with Twiggy and Alice.
Back at work, Geno's mood had eased, but the bugs cropping up again and again still left him thoroughly irritated. Thankfully, Fairy, his super AI housekeeper, had finally pinned down the heart of the problem.
[Correction: I am the Type III General-Purpose AI with Total Sequential Integration, development codename: Fairy. I am no cheap, low-grade AI housekeeper.]
"Fine, fine, fine, yes, yes, yes, so what's the situation, exactly?"
Geno brushed off Fairy's self-correction. Sorting out the present mess was a lot more practical than that.
[Based on my scan of the entire device and the whole company network, I have finally captured the culprit behind the frequent bugs.]
As she spoke, Fairy's avatar shifted from a big blue eyeball into a big blue eyeball wearing a detective's cap and sporting a handlebar mustache.
"A culprit? You mean someone's deliberately causing trouble here?"
Geno's brow furrowed. Someone was actually sabotaging his studio? The sheer NERVE!
But before his temper could flare, Fairy's next words arrived first.
[Negative: The number of engineers within New Eridu capable of breaching this AI's network defenses is 0.]
Geno had handed his studio's network firewall entirely over to Fairy, the super AI, to monitor. So just as she said, unless someone could break through Fairy, infiltrating the studio's network was flat-out impossible.
"Then what's this culprit you're talking about?"
[Hypothesis: The probability that the individual designated Geno brought it in himself is as high as ninety-nine percent.]
"Me? o((⊙0⊙))?"
Geno pointed at himself, utterly baffled, and on the flickering screen Fairy blinked once in confirmation.
All of which left him even more bewildered. If he'd brought the culprit in himself, how could he possibly not know about it?
"At the end of the day, what does this culprit even look like? You ought to let me have a look, right?"
For all this chatter, Geno didn't even know what the thing looked like.
Fairy seemed to recall this too, so Geno's computer screen flashed, and when she reappeared she signaled him to open the idle tablet sitting on the desk.
Geno did as told, a little puzzled, and the moment he opened the tablet he saw a very familiar big eyeball spinning wildly across the screen.
Only, compared with Fairy, this one's eye was red.
"That eye... looks kind of familiar..."
Geno thought for a moment and finally remembered. A while back, after he'd returned from the Crete Hollow, during those late nights he'd worked overtime in the days before the public-security lecture opened, he'd seen this eye on his computer.
At the time he'd assumed it was one of Fairy's pranks.
[Negative: This AI would never engage in such a pointless act.]
"Then what the heck is this thing?"
Geno pointed at the red eyeball on the screen. It kept moving nonstop, but no matter how he looked at it, it didn't seem all that bright.
[Risk advisory: A high-intelligence data entity has been detected. Its data structure bears similarities to samples in the database but cannot be fully matched, and a degree of corruption is present. Caution is advised.]
Fairy blinked, then delivered a long, strange string of words without a trace of emotion.
"A high-intelligence data entity? So it's something similar to you."
[Affirmative. The target data shares up to eighty percent similarity with my own, and is highly similar to a certain data source in the protocol...]
[Attempting to awaken the relevant memory bank...]
[Error, error, insufficient permissions, rephrasing statement!]
[Negative. I have never encountered this unfamiliar intelligent data entity.]
Watching Fairy affirm and then deny in such a muddle, Geno understood that this thing really was connected to her, but for some reason her system couldn't recognize it, and there seemed to be confidentiality clauses tied to it as well.
"Ugh, this just keeps getting more troublesome."
Cradling the tablet, Geno felt a headache coming on.
He did usually envy Wise, Belle, and the others for having an AI housekeeper like this, but now that the thing was actually in his hands, he found himself a bit put off by it.
If nothing else, the secrets buried behind these AIs were something he couldn't fathom at all.
After all, Fairy could manipulate eighty percent of New Eridu's entire network, yet had never once been discovered, proof enough of just how formidable she was.
But their time together over the years had still led Geno and the Proxy siblings to choose to trust this big eyeball of unknown origin.
After turning it over in his mind, Geno decided to just ask the thing in his hands directly. Fairy's end wasn't likely to yield anything more anyway, so he'd let her take a break first.
"Hey, hey, hey, can you hear me? Hello?"
Tapping the tablet in his hands, Geno tried to communicate with the red Fairy on the screen, but got no response at all.
All that came from the tablet was the crackle of static and the noise of the eyeball's ceaseless flickering.
"Hmm..."
Getting not the slightest response, Geno just stood there stunned, wondering how on earth to deal with this thing.
Toss it? A bit of a waste, and unsafe. Keep it? But he had no idea what use it was.
Fairy's side wasn't turning up anything useful either. If only someone could fix it...
Wait? Fix it... he actually did have someone in mind.
At that thought, Geno shot up from his seat and, tablet in arms, headed straight for the door.
If there was something he couldn't handle, why not ask the amazing Twiggy?
"Help me out, Miss Twiggy!"
"Huh? What do you take me for?"
In Twiggy's lab, a whole crew was working up a storm. Even as she answered Geno's question, her fingers kept hammering away at the keyboard.
"Hang on a sec, I'll have this sorted soon. Go sit over there for a bit first."
She pointed a finger at the couch not far off. Twiggy had no intention of paying Geno any more attention, her eyes fixed on the data on the screen and positively gleaming.
Seeing this, Geno knew she wouldn't be free anytime soon, so he obediently sat down on the couch and watched everyone bustle about.
Only then did he notice that, besides Twiggy and his old friends Number Five and Number Six, the lab had gained a new member: the little rabbit Alice.
When had Alice started hanging around with Twiggy? Didn't she have classes to attend?
He couldn't figure it out, but at least it wasn't a bad thing. Learning under Twiggy, Alice would surely be able to hold her own someday too.
Shaking his head to fling out the wandering thoughts, Geno went back to examining the tablet in his hands.
The red eyeball was still flickering without pause, like the snow on a TV that had lost its signal back in his childhood, dead silent and carrying a thread of dread.
"Just what has happened to this thing?"
As he mused, Geno couldn't shake the sense that it felt somehow familiar.
And just as he was trying to place when he'd felt this way, Twiggy finally finished the work at hand.
____
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