Forever Yours
50
Upselling
“WE’VE DECIDED to work on having a baby,” Lisa said at their counseling appointment the next week.
“It’s not supposed to be work,” Elaine smiled. “Is this a sudden decision?”
“We’ve been talking about it for a month now and this week, I went off my birth control. Which means we need to start using a condom or alternate depository for a while until the drugs get out of my body. I just started my period, so we still have a month before we should start,” Lisa said.
“How does that make you feel, Chastity?” Elaine asked. They expected her to direct the question to Henry and Chastity was a bit surprised.
“Um… I’ve been present for all the discussions and the pros and cons. I’ve had my say in it, which is that ultimately, it’s Henry and Lisa’s decision,” Chastity said.
“That doesn’t really tell me how you feel,” Elaine prompted.
“I’m… excited. I never wanted to become a mother… I mean have a baby. I never thought I’d be a very good mother because of my own history and role models. Somehow, now it seems a little like I could be a partner mother.”
“Do you think you might change your mind one day?”
“It wouldn’t make a difference. I made a permanent choice before I was with Henry and Lisa.”
“And you think you could be a—what did you say?—partner mother to Henry and Lisa’s baby?”
They all looked at each other questioningly. Henry was hopeful, but he thought Lisa was even more so. Eventually, Chastity turned to Elaine.
“I… think… if Lisa and Henry are okay with it… I mean, they are as much parents to my cats as I am. The cats love them. Snowball sleeps on Henry’s bed all the time. I’d like to be… or help be… a mommy to their children,” Chastity said.
“Do you know why I’m asking you all these questions?” Elaine said.
“Well, because I’m kind of the odd one out,” Chastity said. “Henry and Lisa are married.”
“Phftt,” Elaine spat. “That’s a piece of paper. Yes, there are legal definitions and things you need to arrange so you are able to function as a family. But you three created a family of three. Not two plus one. Three. A single unit. I’ve been asking you these questions because I wanted to be sure you were thinking as a family, and not as a couple plus one. If you’re committed to each other, you must also be committed to the children. Henry and Lisa, if Chastity is part of your family, you need to make sure she is as committed to children as you are.”
Lisa dove across the couch where she and Chastity were seated. She took Chas in her arms and kissed her.
“You’re equal,” she said. “If we—all three of us—choose to have a baby, or to adopt a baby, you are as much the mommy as I am.”
“Oh, Lisa! I love you guys so much. I knew that. I just let my head and a piece of paper get in the way of my heart,” Chastity said.
“If it was possible for you to jointly bear our children, I’d want that,” Henry said. “I hope you’ll accept being as much a father as I am.”
That set all three of them giggling and they thanked Elaine for helping them.
The next day, Henry got the cast off his leg at last, and he moved—carefully—upstairs to the family bed to begin practicing becoming a father.
Snowball followed them.
The next Thursday, found Henry and Nathan in California, addressing the IT executive of Northwest California PGE, the utility company that provided power for Page Services’ server farm. Nathan had used several contacts from his days in the military to make the appointment.
It was the first time Henry had traveled since he was attacked, and he was constantly looking around for threats. Germaine traveled with him, and functioned in their role as personal assistant and bodyguard, driving Henry and Nathan to their hotel, to the meeting with the staff at Page Services, and to the power company.
“AI security used to mean keeping us safe from prying AI stealing our data,” Nathan said. This was the first time Open Cloak was testing the waters regarding network security with a utility company.
“Are you saying it’s different now, General?” Ralph Archibald, the VP of information technology, asked.
“No matter how diligent we were at the Pentagon, the development of artificial intelligence has taxed the US and corporate America with increased security needs. Just five years ago, we were fighting over the ethics of AI powered tools scraping every bit of data from private servers to use for their own training. Those training walls didn’t recognize personal information, copyrights, or privacy. It was just data used to train generative AI. But now we’ve found AI systems that are storing personal information and they could feasibly use it to take over accounts and even the identity of users.”
“What’s the government doing about it?” Ralph demanded.
“The Pentagon has developed some weapons it can use in defense of citizens in the event of a foreign attack,” Nathan said. “There have been a number of such attacks over the past years and just a few months ago, the military neutralized a Russian attempt to take down a server farm, right here in Northern California. The threat has always been there, but it has escalated only a degree at a time. No matter what the Pentagon has developed, it is not authorized to act against domestic attacks. The FBI, Secret Service, Justice Department, and State Department all have cybercrime sections, but there is no coordinated plan or program.”
“And you have a solution?”
“Yes, but like all solutions, it is also a threat.”
“Are you threatening us?”
“Not at all,” Nathan continued calmly. “I’m talking about the inherent threat of giving control over to an independent and non-living entity. Once it is set loose in your system, it would be very difficult to eliminate it. Almost as difficult to eliminate as the current threat.”
“You say a non-living entity. You’re talking about another intelligent computer program, right?” Ralph said.
“AI has no real independence or sense of self. The tools developed by Open Cloak, who were contractors in the development of some of the Pentagon’s arsenal, are considered artificial narrow intelligence, meaning there is no attempt to duplicate the thought process of the human brain. It does a few things extremely fast and extremely well that you could otherwise hire a hundred people on high end computers to work around the clock and accomplish the same thing. The difference would be that humans could make evaluative judgments regarding threats an AI cannot make. A human, for example, might spot an accidental account override by an elderly customer as an accident that needs individual contact to rectify, rather than the AI solution of eliminating the threat,” Nathan said.
“What do you mean by ‘eliminating the threat?’ You can’t mean an AI would put out a contract on an elderly person because they accidentally entered an account override.”
“No. Of course not. That’s why we recommend human monitors for situations that are out of the norm. Let me ask the inventor, our CTO Henry Pascal, to explain this,” Nathan said.
“We learned a great deal from our work on the Delphos Network Armor program and our Forever Yours AI development. DNA was only released in July, and I’m happy that it is being adopted by many medium-sized enterprises, including banking entities. It defends individual computers and computers linked on a network. An AI only recognizes a customer’s data. But people are more than data. When you ask if an AI would put out a contract on a person, the answer is no—not as far as the life and limb of that person is concerned. But the AI could easily erase that person’s data. That is elimination of the threat. We have discovered that it could be brought to bear on a computer and all its connections. Everything that identifies that person online, or even on their own connected computer, could be erased. That is why we always advise an internal professional to monitor the threats identified by the AI.”
“Jesus Christ! And you want us to willingly install this on our networks? You must be kidding!” Ralph said.
“It would be unethical of me not to expose the threat as well as the benefit,” Henry said. “It’s like all the fine print on a prescription that lists the possible side effects. We have built in safeguards against that happening. One of those is that any such decision has to be validated by wetware. I’m sorry. That means flesh and blood. A living person. In this world of hardware and software, we don’t dare to underestimate the value of our wetware—our employees. Whether you combat the coming AI invasion with a hundred or five hundred people actively monitoring your networks around the clock to fend off attacks, or you combat it with fifty employees monitoring the AI and controlling its responses, you will face the same problem. Do you trust your people to make decisions?”
“I want to talk this over with others in the industry. This seems like a scare tactic to me,” Ralph said. “We haven’t seen evidence of any such kind of attack on utility grids. It’s enough that we have our transfer stations and generating facilities under constant surveillance to guard against physical threats. I don’t think the AI threat is as dire as you paint it to be.”
“We rather expected that. You understand that we have deployed the Delphos Network Armor on all our servers at our Page Services server farm, for which you supply power,” Nathan said. “We may not yet be your largest customer, but we would be crippled without power. Currently, we have three generators that would kick in if there was a power outage, but that is a temporary fix. We need to look at long-term power alternatives.
“At the moment, those alternatives include deploying a new power conservation app on all our servers that will reduce our power consumption significantly. That still leaves us vulnerable if the power is gone completely. So, like server farms around the country, we’ll be looking at alternate power sources.”
“The mobile nuclear reactors are still tied up in red tape and not online yet,” Ralph said.
“Thanks much to the resistance of the major utility companies, who understandably are not enthused about competition. We have power cells under development that might obviate the need for nuclear power altogether,” Henry said. “We expected this response to our suggestion that you deploy Delphos Network Armor. We wanted to make sure before we started seriously pursuing alternatives both to protecting the power grid and protecting our server farm.”
The meeting ended and no one was satisfied.
Germaine arrived with Henry’s wheelchair so he didn’t need to use the crutches too much so soon after getting the cast removed. They went directly from the power company to the airport for the flight back home.
Lacking access to a pain reliever, Henry ordered a drink when the plane was airborne.
The result of the meeting was validating the operating assumption that to protect the power grid, they needed to establish a perimeter defense system that didn’t depend on access to the utility’s network. Nathan could get back to the drawing board with his team to specify a complete system. Development had already begun on adapting the AI to identify threats to others rather than to itself.
First and foremost, they planned to deploy a perimeter defense around Page Services and around Open Cloak, so individual servers on the farm didn’t need to respond to every threat. They would need to establish a monitor inside the company to respond to whatever the perimeter guard discovered.
Henry collapsed as soon as Germaine got him home. Chastity and Lisa got him upstairs and helped him get ready for bed, cuddling with him until he was asleep. Then Chastity returned to her own room.
In mid-October, Lisa called a family meeting.
“This is it,” she said. “Once we start having unprotected sex, I could get pregnant at any time. I’ve just passed my period, so the birth control should be clear of my system. It doesn’t mean we’d get pregnant right away, but it could be at any time.”
“You know, the very thought of being part of this is making my pussy leak,” Chastity said. “I mean, I’m really excited!”
“I’m all in,” Henry said. “Lisa and Chastity, will you have my baby?”
“You’re not all in yet,” Lisa giggled, “but I hope you will be soon.”
“Chas?”
“Oh, goddess, yes. I never thought I’d say I’m ready to be a mommy. Lisa, will you bear our child?” Chastity said.
“Let’s get this party started,” Lisa said.
Mobility was good, but Henry still couldn’t support himself in any dominant position for long on his weakened leg and arm. They saw progress every day, but ultimately, Henry rolled over on his back so Lisa could drive the copulation while Chastity occupied Henry’s mouth. It was one of their favorite positions anyway and Henry managed two deposits in Lisa’s receptive vagina.
Henry met with Nathan, Conrad, and Jacoby for their regular weekly status update on the first of November.
Nathan reported progress on the perimeter defense system was good. The nine-person team included two program managers, four developers, and two testers, in addition to Nathan as their manager. All nine were working on the specification and they’d written some sample code. Henry had been in on several of their brainstorming sessions and the report was fairly brief.
Jacoby had somewhat less to report as his robotic paving machine project was only six weeks old. They had scoped out a list of requirements the machine would need to meet in order to be autonomous.
“The biggest problem we have is how to power it,” Jacoby said.
“Power again,” Henry sighed.
“It keeps coming up. A massive piece of construction machinery is typically diesel powered. That seems to be contradictory to our purpose of making the job both faster and cleaner. Yes, there would be fewer dirty jobs for human workers, but diesel still pumps tons of waste into the air,” Jacoby said.
“I’ll loan you Ari,” Conrad said. “Seriously just a loan because we’re getting closer to needing the research he’s been doing. But we’ve been working closely with that company in Minnesota that’s developing power cells. They have designs for cells that could power heavy equipment.”
“How many tons does one of those cells weigh?” Jacoby asked.
“Seriously, it can be handled by one person. When a cell is exhausted, it’s simply swapped out for a fresh one and put in its cradle to recharge.”
“That could answer another problem,” Jacoby said. “We’ve been trying to figure out even with diesel how to refuel on the move. One of the requirements for the project is to keep the machine running 24/7 without stopping. We’ve been thinking we’d need to pull a fuel truck up next to the robot and pump fuel into it while it’s in operation.”
“That sounds risky,” Henry said. “There are all kinds of risks of fuel spills and fire. I don’t like the sound of that.”
“Nor do I,” Jacoby said. “If Conrad’s fuel cell idea is feasible, we could design the robot to have an active and a reserve cell and swap them out on the fly.”
“Not mine. Ari’s,” Conrad said. “Henry, we might want to increase our investment in that company if we decide to pursue this.”
“I didn’t realize we invested in it.”
“Luke made the decision while you were out. Said it was too good a deal to pass up.”
“I’ll talk to him. How about the rest of your power project and all the software that needs maintenance and updating?” Henry asked.
Conrad continued with his update and said that the software running on the server farm had cut power consumption by thirty percent.
“We need to get a sales team out to the big server farms and show the savings they could have,” Conrad said. “We believe we can cut consumption by a total of 75-80%.”
“Don’t expose that,” Nathan said. “First of all, they won’t believe you. Secondly, we can keep coming back with additional power savings in future versions.”
“I’ll give that word to Luke,” Henry said. “He’s finally hired a sales manager and is getting direct sales people up to speed. We’re past the point where we can just have an online storefront handle everything. These enterprise applications are a different beast to market than consumer apps.”
“How about the Forever Yours and Pythia Speaks apps?” Nathan asked. Henry managed those products directly.
“Pythia Speaks simply keeps answering questions,” Henry said. “We removed the limit regarding how long a query or response can be. Well, not entirely, but enough so a full page can be uploaded. We changed it from 400 characters to 4,000. We didn’t announce any difference, but we’ve noticed an increase in average query length.”
“How does that affect the response?” Conrad asked.
“Unpredictable. You know we don’t have access to specific user identification, but we can look at conversations. I’ve called up a couple of long queries that Pythia has responded to with a dozen words or less. On the other hand, if a query happens to be something she has a lot of data on, she can talk on and on.”
“Just like a woman,” Jacoby remarked.
“Please let that comment die in this room,” Henry said. “There are women in this office who would take issue with it, even if the men didn’t.”
He’d never rebuked his former professor like that before, but Jacoby simply nodded his head.
“Sorry. Won’t happen again.”
“As for Forever Yours,” Henry continued as if there had been no comment, “LifeStory has been a good partner. They have people who specialize in content and as a result continually prompt their users with questions they can respond to. Forever Yours just eats that stuff up. I’m thinking we should invest in that company and have asked Luke to check into it. Every time the user responds to a question, the answer goes into the training wall. Queries delivered to the AI generate much richer answers. The more questions a user answers, the better Forever Yours’ responses are. The latest upgrade offered to users was to generate images to go with responses. The testers report excellent results.”
“How are upgrades to the AI handled?” Nathan asked.
“We don’t push upgrades. We aren’t even doing that with the search engine. We notify users that an upgrade is available and list the features. It is up to the user to then request the upgrade from within the program. I expect the generative features will be of more interest later than immediately.”
The meeting wound down and people stood to leave. Nathan stayed back after Conrad and Jacoby had left.
“I’m glad to see you functioning mostly without the crutches or chair,” he said.
“I still feel like an old man hobbling around with a cane,” Henry laughed.
“I didn’t want to bring this up in the meeting, but I feel more of a sense of urgency about getting our perimeter defense active around our company, or companies.”
“What’s up?”
“I’ve been called by the Pentagon to testify regarding the security of their military asset. There’s a new generation of REMFs who want to review every detail of the cyber security that’s been implemented. It’s driven by our new ‘computer aware’ president. It’s gone from having a constant leak from the white house to the internet to a president who wants to silence everything.”
“Let’s get the perimeter deployed, even if it’s a beta. We can start testing it in real life situations.”
“Yes, sir. Henry, I don’t know how to say this but to ask directly. I don’t even know what I could do with the information. I still have to ask. Did you kill him?” Nathan asked.
“Nathan, I don’t think I can be at fault for a guy who dies while ramming my car in an attempt to kill me,” Henry said. He could feel his heart racing as he thought about the attack again. He closed his eyes and wished he could reach for a pill.
“I’m not talking about Flagston. That case is long closed as far as I know. I mean The Right Reverend Daniel Reeves.”
“Nathan, I’ve been out of the cast on my leg for five weeks, trying to strengthen myself so I could do something. The only trip I’ve made was to accompany you to California. If Germaine hadn’t been with us, I don’t think I’d have survived that trip without a major relapse. Every time I think of that bastard, my heart races and I want to put my hands around his neck and strangle him. This conversation makes me shake with anger.”
“He’s dead, Henry,” Nathan said softly. “Maybe that will help you heal. Federal agents went to arrest him this week and found him with his brains blown out in his mansion. Further reports indicate the mansion had been foreclosed, but the agents were there to arrest him for trial on charges of cyberterrorism.”
Henry panted and sat back in his chair. Moisture gathered in his eyes.
“Dead,” he said flatly. “I hope you’ll forgive me a few minutes of quiet celebration.”
“Reeves showed an incredible amount of animosity toward you, your company, and Pythia Speaks. There are bound to be questions by some people about whether you had anything to do with his apparent suicide,” Nathan said. “No more of them will come from me.”
“I didn’t think men of faith ever committed suicide,” Henry said.
“Maybe his faith was in the wrong thing. I still have a few contacts I called when I heard the news. I’m surprised you didn’t already hear about it.”
“I try not to follow news. It’s too much of a trigger.”
“Well, he was removed from the pulpit of the church he founded by the board of directors and they filed civil suit against him for embezzlement. That was multiplied by federal criminal charges. They had trouble filling the pulpit with anyone who could continue to hold the numbers in attendance. Reeves’ accounts were investigated and the auditors found no money, but they did find massive transfers to a group in St. Petersburg, Russia. Of course, the Russian government professes no knowledge of the money, the group, or the attack on Pythia Speaks, Page Services, and Open Cloak.”
Henry sat at the table, breathing heavily.
“Over. It’s over. It’s over,” he repeated again and again.
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
