6
“What did you do?”
“I used the audio fail-safe to take HARV off-line,” Randy replied.
“HARV has a fail-safe?”
“Of course he does.”
Randy spun his chair quickly toward his computer. His abnormally long fingers danced quickly across the controls and pulled up screenfuls of data. Randy’s clumsiness extends only to real-life situations. In tech-oriented scenarios he’s the coolest cucumber in the produce section.
“You never told me there was a fail-safe.”
“That’s because you’d use it.”
“No, I wouldn’t. Well, maybe a little.”
“Oh please, Zach, you’d have worn it out by now. It’s for emergency use only.”
“So the word kafloogle turns HARV off?”
“Not anymore it doesn’t. The fail-safe is connected to a random gibberish generator. It creates an inane word every three seconds and assigns it to the fail safe.”
“You invented a gibberish generator?”
“It’s standard equipment for all IT and computer R&D departments now. It’s responsible for every IT buzzword and operating system name created in the past five years.”
“So you’re not okay with HARV’s change of identity?”
“It worries me a great deal,” Randy replied, still scanning the data on the screen. “I just didn’t want him to know it.”
“What do you think?”
“HARV’s parameters have always been wide but they’ve also always been very clear.”
“They have?”
“He’s a supercomputer, Zach, an artificial intelligence. He’s capable of learning and of independent thought but I designed limits in the system. This kind of change …”
“Exceeds the limits?”
“It makes me wonder if he’s exceeded the limits in other ways.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. Like I said, HARV’s one of the most powerful thinking machines on the planet. There’s no telling what he could be doing.”
“Come on, Randy,” I said, “this is HARV. He’s a little pompous at times, and condescending, and annoying and sarcastic and …”
“Zach!”
“But he’s not dangerous.”
“That’s true,” Randy said, turning back to face me. “HARV isn’t dangerous. But as he just explained to us, he isn’t HARV anymore. He’s HARA.”
And I think those were the first words that Randy had ever said (other than “trust me, Zach, this won’t hurt a bit”) that truly frightened me.
“So what do we do?”
“I’m going to run some stealth diagnostics on his system. But we can’t let him know that we’re concerned. So try to act casual.”
“He’s in my head, Randy. He’s going to know what I’m thinking.”
“He’s in your head but he can’t read your thoughts. Just act as you normally would. Be supportive of his new persona. And let me know if you see any other erratic behavior.”
“Define erratic.”
“Trust me, you’ll know it when you see it,” he replied. “Now get ready, I don’t want to leave him off-line for too long. He may get suspicious.” Randy turned back to the monitor, took a deep breath and brought the grin back to his face.
“Remember, you were slightly perturbed just before I activated the fail-safe. You want to stay that way.”
“No worries there,” I replied.
“Okay good. On three then. One, two, three. Zimbleeguff.”
The brightness of HARV’s hologram increased for a nano, flaring at the edges, before returning to normal and HARV’s movements resumed exactly where they left off. The tingle returned to my temple. HARV looked disoriented for the briefest of nanos but regained his bearings quickly.
“I’m sorry, Dr. Pool, what were you saying?”
Randy, for his part, never missed a beat.
“I said, HARA, that this is an interesting and remarkable development on your part. I look forward to your reports from the field.”
“Thank you, Dr. Pool,” HARV replied. Then he turned to me. “See Zach. This is going to be fun.”
“HARA,” I replied, “Fun is not the word.”