AI Era: Always Tell Me the Odds

It was only now that a stalemate had been reached, that Eric saw another man climbing out of the car. He was in his late fifties, handsome and smartly-dressed, with a well-groomed beard which was a mix of grey and brown.

"Do I need to call the police?" the man said with the air of someone who was used to taking control of the situation.

Just then another taxi pulled up behind the first one.

"No, it's okay. We're just going aren't we Zoe?" Eric said, with, what for him, was a surprising amount of conviction. He bundled his date into the back of the car.

The sight of the other man had wounded Eric. Perhaps more than the door had done. Who did this fossil think he was, coming in and trying to steal away his scientifically-proved soulmate? It was practically cradle-snatching. Sure, he was hand in hand with someone who was hopefully going to rock his own cradle tonight, but that wasn't the point. She was supposed to be smitten. She wasn't supposed to be out enjoying herself. For a moment, Eric panicked. What if Cyril was wrong? Just as they were about to pull away, he wound the window down and called out to Sophie.

"Sorry, look, I'll call you."

Sophie turned back from the entrance to the restaurant. "Don't bother," she shouted back, more upset than angry. As she turned, the older man put his hand on her shoulder.

The cab ride was spent calming down Zoe's, whose issues now included the younger generation of girls. Eric listened patiently and agreed that all women under thirty were bitches. His act was so convincing that when they got home, Zoe blew him on the living room sofa straight away and let him cum in her mouth. It was only when they were gearing up for round two, and he went looking for his condoms, that he realized his jacket had been lost in the collision. He shrugged to himself, and they went without.

It was only in the morning that he realized his Cyril had been in the other pocket.

70. EXPORT

The girl recognized Toby before he recognized her. It was only to be expected, naturally; he'd never seen her before whereas she'd spent hundreds of hours chatting on video calls with him.

He was sitting in the breakfast-lounge of one of the better class of hotels in Beijing. It'd been a successful trip so far. There was a real demand for Cyril's out East and the distance helped keep the heat off them. He'd be heading onto the next leg tomorrow, but he was looking forward to spending some time seeing more of the beautiful sights that China had to offer. Not that he was planning on leaving the hotel, of course.

"Toby, oh my god Toby, I can't believe you're finally here. It's really you" As she came up and hugged him, she was practically crying.

He brushed the hair from her eyes and said, "I'm here. We're together." She pulled him close and landed a kiss full on the lips.

He got her some tea as he finished up his fried rice breakfast. "So, what do you want to do?" he asked.

She leant up and whispered in his ear. "Like we said, you only have this morning before your flight. Let's not waste any time. Let's spend time in your room."

"I understand you're a virgin." he said, then immediately kicked himself.

"Understand? You know I am. We've talked about it many times," she said surprised.

"Yes, absolutely. That's why I understand it so well," he said quickly. If she'd have been a native speaker he wouldn't have gotten away with it, but instead she just chewed over this new idiomatic use of the word for a second and shrugged.

She took his chopsticks out of his hand, laid them gently by his plate and then pulled him out of the restaurant and into the elevator.

------

Mid-afternoon came and he was walking back in the hotel lobby. He'd had to get on an airport shuttle bus to keep up the illusion and finally get rid of her and the round trip had taken an hour and a half, but Cyril was able to scan the hotel entrance to make sure she'd actually gone. He wouldn't have put it past her to still be waiting around somewhere, pining over her first lover. That would have been awkward.

As it was, he was able to meet the second lady of the day unimpeded.

"Toby, we meet at last," she called out. "You're much more handsome in person than on a webcam."

"Your husband follow you?" he asked. He'd been cautious about fooling around with someone's missus, but Cyril had assured him it would be worth it. As always, the droid was spot on.

"Relax, you worry too much. My husband is halfway to Shanghai on a bullet train at the moment." she said.

"Yes, well, be that as it may, I don't think we should hang around here very long. Shall we go straight up to my room?" He said with feigned nervousness.

"Sure, honey." She said surreptitiously putting a hand around his arse, "I'd didn't travel half-way across the city to spend my lunch break looking round a hotel gift shop."

------

Having to get back to work after her extended lunch break and being a lot less sentimental in her nature, number two was a lot easier to get rid of than number one. Toby had a long snooze before letting Cyril know he could let number three over. He showered and tried to make the hotel room look a little less lived in.

If anything it was getting too easy. Cyril had hacked into a number of the top dating websites and plugged their whole chat history through his neural networks in one go. He could now identify and start a conversation with thousands of potential partners all at once, saying the statistically most satisfactory things to each of them without Toby having to lift a finger. He could now imitate Toby's voice perfectly and leave voice messages or hold phone calls with hundreds of women simultaneously, each lasting as long as the lady found reassuring. They'd even integrated deep fake technology algorithms allowing the robot to appear in Toby's image, smiling and waving on the screen. That was more computationally intensive and he could only video call with five or a six at a time, but that face-to-face time really did help cement a relationship. With the computing power at his disposal, it was a simple matter to find the few who would be willing to jump straight into bed after an appropriately romantic on-line courtship and filter them out from the many who would not. Given a few months, Cyril could reliably provide Toby with a wide range of really very good options in any city in the world. And as far as the AI was concerned, taking Toby out of the process made everything a lot smoother and more predictable. From Toby side, he was finding he was missing the thrill of the hunt although it seemed somewhat ungrateful to say so.

There was a knock on the door. She'd managed to sneak past the hotel lobby and come straight up.

"Who's this one again?" asked Toby to the little droid on his bedside table.

"Romanian. Model for Ferrari. Missing home. Don't bother telling her she's beautiful, she knows. Let her talk about her childhood and family."

"Right, got it." He pulled himself off the bed and slinging his dressing gown on went to open the door.

------

It was nearing nine o'clock when he came down for dinner. It'd been a busy day. The buffet was on the verge of closing, so he took a couple of plates and piled them high. He tipped some ice into a glass, pulled a glass of draft beer and grabbed a himself a table. He was shattered and he had a long journey ahead of him tomorrow. He plonked Cyril down next to him to go over their itinerary for tomorrow.

"Shuttle bus at eight, check-in at nine-thirty, take-off at eleven and then arriving in Dubai in time to check into hotel before bed."

"Great, and when are our meetings set up?"

"Evening the next day. We'll go out on the hunt together with the client."

"And you're sure we'll have success there. It's the Middle-East. They have a different attitude to those things there, you know."

"Sure, it may present certain challenges and need some adjustments in strategy, but human nature is the same everywhere. And the culture makes my services more important, not less."

"If you say so. Anyway, I'd better get a proper night's sleep. I can never kip on a plane. Always too worried I'll wake up dead."

"So, you wouldn't be interested if I told you the waitress was giving you eyes?"

Toby looked over. "Very nice, but give it a rest. Three in one day and two of them twice is enough for anyone. Luckily I've got the whole of tomorrow to recover on the flight."

"That's not strictly true. There is a certain Miss Hadia Abbas who is expecting to join the Mile-High Club with you somewhere over Karachi."

"Perhaps I could give her a miss?"

"Well, she did already change the time of her flight to be with you, and I've already booked seats next to her, so standing her up might be difficult given your sitting next to her for ten hours. It did take me five weeks to set up. I did suggest you might be overdoing it a little at the time, but you were most instant if you recall."

"Okay, okay." Toby beckoned the waitress over. "Can you translate for me. I'll need to take some of that ice back to go on my groin before it falls off. It's the only way I'll survive your never-ending flood of intercourse."

Cyril let out a stream of Mandarin and the girl turned bright red and immediately ran away.

"Er, Cyril, I really just meant you to ask for the ice. You didn't need to translate everything."

80. RUN GARBAGE COLLECTION

"Well, that was a total bust," said Toby coming out of the coffee shop. "You're losing your edge, Cyril."

"Not a bit of it," said Cyril taking directly into his earpiece. "I predicted a ninety-three percent chance of success. It's not my fault if you rolled snake-eyes." The little cube had become increasingly bolshy recently.

"So what the hell happened?"

"Analysis of the data suggests all biological and neural activity was in-line with predictions right up till you mentioned going paintballing in Slough. Immediately afterwards all signs indicating attraction to you immediately and totally shut down."

"Slough is bad, but it's not that bad surely."

"Most likely hypothesis is that something in your story triggered some kind of traumatic event or bad memory -- either connected with the location of the story, or the events, or possibly that it involved a kind of fire-arm. Either that or her olfactory system started to pick up you bullshit."

"Well I'm disappointed. You should have warned me."

"I'm not a passive-hippocampus mind reader. I'm an active-neocortex mind reader. I can measure emotional response as it occurs, that's all. It's not like I can tell you the name of their first bloody goldfish. Besides, you don't heed my warnings about the basic stuff, like 'Look in her eyes, not at her chest.' Why even bother trying to give you more complex instructions?"

"Yeah, okay, you got me there, I was certainly distracted this evening, but you have to admit it was one hell of a chest."

"Indeed. Her mammary glands ranked the top ten percentile for women of her age. They were, as you so perceptibly noted earlier, a total bust. However, I should point out that her eyes were of equal quality - eloquent as if a look may light a waste of years, darting beams that conquer cares, as you might say."

"What the hell are you yammering about?"

"Well, you might say if you were Percy Shelley. I'll take the poetry down a notch. How about 'Her eyes were like pearls before the swine trying to motorboat her jugs.'"

As they argued they entering one of busier pubs which had provided so much action recently that they'd come to refer to informally as the Bounty Bar. A Manchester United-Arsenal game was playing on the big screen TV with United apparently having had the better of the first half.

"What's the lay of the land?" Toby asked, looking around at the talent for himself.

"Initial scans indicate twenty-seventy percent of girls in the immediate vicinity will and sixty-three percent won't. Forty-two percent of those present need a lot of loving and fifty-eight percent don't."

"Cute. You're getting too clever for your own bloody good if you ask me. Well, anyway, the night is still young. Knuckle down and find me another great rack."

"Most certainly. Any requirements on her eyes?"

"Yes. She should have some."

"Are you sure? Your odds might be significantly higher if she doesn't."

"Oh, Cyril, you are getting bitchy, aren't you? You've been going on about how it's my conversation that always lowers my odds, now you've got a hot zinger, it's all about my looks. I'm sorry my friend, your burns are no longer backed-up by the actual data."

"I've been observing how you and Eric interact. I've concluded that trash talk doesn't need to be an empirical science. But since we seem to be having something of a conflagration anyway, maybe now is the time for me to very humbly point out that I am one of the most advanced Artificial Intelligence programs ever created, the result of decades and billion dollars of research and capable of feats of both mathematical and emotional processing far in advance of anything a human could ever do. I'd appreciate it very much if you and Eric kindly stopped referring to me in our business meetings asthe pussymeter. "

"Okay, fine. Find me a replacement for this evening and I'll knock it off. What have you got for me?"

"Attractive woman, business attire at the table near the fruit machine. Keeps looking your way out of the corner of her eyes, of which she has two. Rack up to spec. Very interested in you for some reason. Suggest going over and buying her a drink."

Perhaps he'd become a bit too reliant on Cyril. The woman was indeed giving him very obvious stares and he could have worked out 'buy her a drink' for himself. He immediately went over to feed the sitting duck

"Hi. I couldn't help but notice you're all on your own. How about a fresh drink and some company?"

"Sure," she said. "I'll have another rum and coke."

A couple of minutes later, Toby sat back down with the drinks. He pulled out Cyril and put it on the table. "Sorry, I work in the toy industry. Had this doohicky in my pocket since our meeting this afternoon."

"Cute. My little cousin has one of these."

"I don't think so. Must be something else. We're still at the prototyping stage, I'm afraid. It'll be ready for Christmas."

"Oh, I think you're a bit further along than that, Toby. From what I hear, these are already flying off the shelves."

Toby glass stopped halfway to his lips. "I didn't tell you my name."

The lady leant forward. "And I didn't tell you my profession. Lana Davis - Commander of the Metropolitan Police's National Security Unit. Thanks for the drink. I shouldn't really on duty, but your name has been cropping up in my reports so often these days, I thought it would be nice to meet socially."

Toby stood up and Lana grabbed his shoulder. "Sit down. This ends the same regardless, but at least this way you'll be able to finish your pint. It might be your last for a while."

Toby was aware that a number of the bigger blokes around the bar suddenly seemed lot less interested in what was going on in Old Trafford and a lot more interested in what was going on at his table.

He had few options left so he fell back on charm. "Now come on. Cyril here is just a bit of fun. It's hardly a matter of national security."

Lana looked at him squarely. "I disagree. Your sexual antics and its potential ramifications for society as a whole have been of increasing concern at all levels of government. At the rate we're going, your pecker is likely to be raised in Prime Minister's Questions before too long, and I think we'd all like to avoid that."

"Now, look here. You may not like it, but I haven't done anything wrong. If telling women what they want to hear is illegal, all men would be in jail."

"Oh, really. How about providing highly-propriety, cutting edge artificial intelligence technology to a some not-exactly-friendly powers. Ones that might think up more interesting and more damaging uses for it than a quick pump and dump. That's a solid, dependable five years for a start."

Lana smiled to herself. MI6 was reporting that while one of Toby's contacts had been indeed been a Chinese spy, he'd reported to his overlords that it had been a fake and the device he'd handed over had had its innards replaced with those of a broken Furby. The working portion of the device had been recovered a week later after he had been stabbed in a drunken bar fight in Manila over its ownership. The allure of those magic numbers had proved too great. That information was highly classified though and didn't necessarily need to be entered into evidence.

"I'm just a salesman. I didn't know where the technology came from." Toby lied quickly.

Lana leaned back. Talking without a lawyer. Not the brightest, this one, but certainly a pretty face. If she hadn't been aware what he was about, she might have fallen for his shtick or his dick.

"Maybe. Maybe not. Of course, there'll also be any charges that any of your liaisons choose to bring against you."

"All consensual, as I've already said."

"Sure, sure -- we'll need to talk to all of them, of course. Quite a job that, I believe your current total is four hundred and seventy-five over the last ten months. I'm sure the vast majority of them will see the funny side and give you a glowing character reference in the stand. Now, false allegations do happen, but as we all know, those account for less than one percent of total cases. I'm sure the prosecutor's office will only need to worry about three or four of them making exaggerated statements under the pressure of the precise mathematics of their poor sexual choices being cross-examined on the public record. Five, at tops. I'm sure we'll be able to weed those out and you'll have absolutely nothing to worry about."

"Of course, we have obtained audio logs from Cyril of your conversations before, after and, in some cases, during your various acts of intercourse."

Toby winced. That deaf girl had been a great opportunity to get Cyril's input on how to be a better lover. Perhaps in retrospect, it hadn't been the greatest idea. He had no alternative though but to continue bullish.

"Consensual acts of intercourse. Your boys can listen to the audio logs all you want. Hell, they can jack off to them if it helps. They still won't find a single 'no'."

"Toby, Toby, Toby, you keep using that word 'consent'. I doubt you've really thought about what that word actually means. What a lawyer thinks it means, or a judge, or a jury? To them it doesn't just mean saying not saying 'no'. It doesn't even necessarily mean saying 'yes'. Let me see, I should be careful to get this next bit exactly right, I am supposed to know these things after all: 'For a conviction, the prosecution must prove that the suspect did not have a reasonable belief that the complainant was consenting.' I think that's it word for word."

Lana took another sip of her rum and coke. "Reasonable belief. It's a tough one, isn't it, belief? We police officers don't like it much as a rule. We like fingerprints, or DNA evidence or a passer-by recording the whole thing on their phone. Makes our jobs so much easier. Belief, on the other hand, is so difficult to work with. So intangible. So hard to prove what someone is thinking. Oh, we'd like to catch more abusers, lots of people don't necessarily believe that, but at least some of us in the Force really would. But you know, you put in all that paperwork and then just they dance around you so easily in court. 'Well, your honour, how could I know she didn't want to. She didn't say anything. I was excited, I thought she liked me so I ignored the signs. Of course, I regret it now, but at the time...' Makes it very difficult to prosecute. Lots of reasonable doubt to eat away at that jury until they feel they have to acquit just to be safe. If only we had some way to know what everyone involved in the case was thinking."