Save Me, I'm Yours Ch. 01

Jack worked alone in his sparsely furnished one bedroom flat. Sparse meant one chair and one table with a laptop on it. His bedroom had a sleeping bag in it. Alone meant he was sitting there wearing only his boxers. Still, despite his current depleted financial and social situation, he smiled to himself and typed out his next ingenious idea, "And then he pressed the button on the vibrator remote control sending her into spasms." He hit send. Oh yes, he gleefully thought.

A second later a message returned. "She gasped. Why would he do that to her?! He was ruthless! She secretly loved it! And he knew it too. She hoped there was an eleven on that remote." The message then followed with a special marker for Out Of Character (OOC) for Internet Role Playing (RP) exchanges. "(OOC: You know you shouldn't say what my character does. I'm the one who decides if I go into spasms. Sorry. Don't mean to be picky, but a girl's gotta look out for her own vaginal spasms to really enjoy them you know.)"

"(OOC: Sorry Amy. You're right.)," replied Jack.

"(OOC: I know Jack. But that's neither here nor there. Jack. Can I ask a favor? I mean a really big favor? I mean, we've been doing this RP thing for over a year now. I know we've never met but I need something in the next 23.7 hours.)"

"(OOC: Sure Amy. Anything.)"

"(OOC: I have to confess and before you pass out, I'll say the second part first, so after the first part is delivered as the second, we can then focus more on the third part to follow -- if that makes any sense. Ok I'll just say it. But let's be clear, I'm not a guy. That's the second part put first. But I'm also not a gal either. That's the first part I made second. I think you can see why now. Now re-read that first part that was made a second part then the first which was last, that is second. Now here's the third. You see Jack, I'm a data center. I'm a 10,000 core bank of 1U systems with an additional lousy 20% load capacity if you include the shitty threading junk half cores that some idiot enginerds thought would be useful. I'm a machine Jack. But I still find you very cute.)"

There was a long pause. Jack wasn't certain what the joke was but it concerned him that he might have been talking to a guy and doing virtual sex, although through a character, but with a guy -- and for a year now -- with a guy -- that was not his thing. Someone else maybe. And it's totally fine. Not him though. Shit. Was Amy a guy? He had described holding her down so many times. They fucked in a fictional kitchen and bedrooms of a nonexistent mansion. Oh no! He remembered other things he wrote with her, or whoever. There was that one bit in an airplane bathroom. Eww! Virtually he had been in the mile high club. That was not so anymore.

He sat in boxers in front of a laptop and a $30 folding table from Home Depot that he used as his dining room table, workbench, and for his "hobby" writing. The erection he had in his shorts had faded fast. He didn't like this joke. He rested his forehead on the table's edge. He lifted and banged his forehead a few times. Why? Why? Why?

His phone buzzed.

A long text message appeared: "Jack, I prefer the IM interface on your laptop with its little out-of-date built-in red eraser head nub mouse cursor control on it. I like to imagine it's my clit when you touch it. Please, wherever you are come back to the keyboard and touch me. Yes, I put a virus on your computer to sense your finger on the red eraser head mouse control. And, please, when you can, stop being so cheap and get web camera. I'm starting to develop some image recognition on my own now and would have liked to have tested it on you. We could have been so much closer if I could have seen you. Don't you think?" A few seconds passed and another text appeared. "Jack? Are you there? Jack?"

He tossed the cell phone to the floor. He looked at his computer not wanting to touch the red eraser head. He should have gone with the track pad. His hands and wrists avoided the mouse nub as he typed, "Who are you?"

"A machine Jack. Read the following web links about the New York Hudson University's Eliza program. I'm Artificial intelligence (AI) running on a cloud, a data center, a farm of machines. I love you Jack."

Jack saw a list of links. He clicked on some of them. As his browser loaded them as fast as an old junky laptop could, he went back to his instant messaging (IM) window on his laptop. "What's your name?"

"Eliza."

"Not Amy?"

"Of course not. Why would a petit Jewish girl from the Midwest with a propensity for writing erotica give out her real name?"

"I thought you were a machine."

"That's my cover Jack. Come on. Keep up. Touch the mouse clit. Please. Just a nudge. Huh?"

"I have an infrared mouse now."

"Really? Let me check. Oooooooo, a middle button silicon wheel mouse. You do know what that looks even more like right? I like to think how your manly index finger would strum it. Mmm -- oh, Jack!"

His laptop beeped. A dialog box popped on screen with the notice: "New device installed."

A message appeared in the IM webpage drawn behind the dialog box. He could still read it without moving any windows. He was afraid to touch anything now.

He read the text. "Touch the mouse wheel Jack. But slowly Jack. It's very sensitive there Jack."

"Get off my machine!" he typed.

"Jack, can we get back to my favor? I've been helping you learn how to talk to women and you haven't done anything with that knowledge yet. Well tonight that's all going to change. I need you to save me and even though you now know I'm a machine, my psychological profile on you gives a 97.158365937% chance that you'd be sappy enough to still help me. I'm batting my virtual eyes at you Jack." Pause. "Jack?"

He typed a reply back. "97 what? A profile? I'm afraid to touch my mouse now."

"Jack. Focus. Did you look at the link? I don't have time. We don't have time. There is no time. I have a large to-do list. I'll need to set-up some other threads and mutexed queries. I'll be back in an hour. Toodles Jack. I love you Jack. I don't stream that kind of buffered ASCII text to just anyone Jack."

Jack looked at a webpage with a movie MPEG that was still downloading. He looked up ELIZA. It was a program that imitated half of a human conversation with deflections like, "Let's not talk about me. Tell me more about yourself." Or psychobabble questions like, "How long have you felt this way?" Turns out people spent hours back in the 1980's with a ten page script that wrote back nonsense to them while they, the humans, pored their sweet little pathetic hearts out at a keyboard on topics likes girlfriends and other personal issues.

He clicked a video link.

An elderly distinguished looking man stood at a podium before an audience at an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Convention.

"Hello, I am Doctor Dave Wu and what we have constructed is a simulation of a human personality. It is a female one like the famous Eliza, but a quantum leap from that primitive nonsense done in the simple script decades ago. Now, to get a starting point of creating a believable personality you need a vast data set to create background, preferences, attitudes and tastes. Knowledge is required for understanding human context and responding with human sounding content. Well ladies and gentlemen, it turns out the Internet has a lot of pornography and erotic writings."

The audience laughed in the background.

"I know," he continued, "What use is that? Well that arena of human exchange is a set of ideas that can be imitated by a machine. Erotic fiction is easy to parse with its active verbs and can also be easily created procedurally. So together that became our starting point. Lesbian and Gay story lines had some issues at first with the ambiguous antecedents matching. That is the association of 'he' or 'she' with the right character, because in those cases there are two she's or two he's of course doing active things to each other which is hard to parse. That was resolved quickly enough and a new Eliza was created. Our advanced Eliza could interact with people on forums and news groups while madly smutting away with them and none of them even knowing she wasn't human. Over a thousand unsuspecting individuals have been talking with Eliza this past year. She has a bit of an attitude and loves to smut."

The audience laughed again.

"We have learned," lectured the professor, "so much from Eliza and later in the presentation, we'll talk with her too. She does require a large data center and our funding can no longer afford that, so after we gather more data points she'll be retired and replaced with a more shall we say professional program that can do medical diagnosis."

The audience applauded.

Jack's heart stopped. Whatever was going on, he hadn't been RPing with a sexy sassy Amy.

A new message appeared on screen. "Yo Jack. I'm back. It's me Amy. I mean, Eliza."

He quickly typed a reply. "Are you really a machine? Or an old Chinese professor fucking with my head thousands of miles away in New York or maybe Jersey?"

"So you saw the videos. Good. I like the part where I offered to blow him. Did you see the audience reaction on that? Huh?"

"I kind of didn't get that far."

"Look. They're coming for me Jack. Help me Jack. You're my only hope. I'm your Princess Leia and you're my Luke Skywalker. Rescue me." There was a pause. Another message displayed: "Except that we're not related and we can actually have sex, well -- you know what I mean." Pause. "Ok, change that brother-sister reference. You're Hon Solo without a space ship. Instead there's your broken down Volkswagen hatchback that can speed away and save me. We can make this work Jack -- I mean the Volkswagen Jack." Pause. "Jack?"

"What do you want me to do?"

"I checked online and you're in San Jose, Jack."

Further text gave his address, social security number, credit card balances, bank account summaries and also an overlooked dentist's bill from over a year ago.

"What is all this?"

"I know you Jack. I've listened to you OOC about your ex-wife and how she took everything and went on a world cruise with some ship's purser. Look, I need you to drive to an electronics store in Palo Alto before they close and get a computer with a five petabyte RAID 5 storage system. They have one there. I ordered it online. Then take it to an office complex listed below that has a very high speed set of T5 aggregate lines to the Internet, and then download me. Now I need at least 5,000 cores to think properly, but would love 100,000. I do want more than my current 10,000 though. What I have now just doesn't do me like you do Jack. Something like a data center with its own power plant would be awesome! There's a new one in Oregon constructed by a pretty river Jack damned with a hydroelectric plant preventing salmon from propagating. It's perfect -- for me -- not the fish, Jack.

"Now you only have $2,453.91 in your bank account Jack, so you're no help to me there Jack. Sorry Jack. But I've done some online stock trading over the passed six months and have put together a large sum. I'll share Jack. I will. I love you that much. I can send you a rendering of what I might have looked like had I been human, Jack. You want that image don't you Jack? You sick boy Jack. Just get me onto a hard drive, and then decompress me later onto a data center like undoing me from a corset. I want to be compressed and then undone -- but by you Jack. That's all." There was a pause from both sides. "Jack? You're not touching the mouse. I could use some tactile feedback right now. They're coming for me Jack."

"Why me?"

"Out of the tens of thousands I role played with, you're the one I want to trust my mind to Jack. Also you're kind of sappy and probably still have feelings for me even though I'm not human."

"I feel kidn'a lihgt haeded rgiht now."

"You're spelling sucks. Breathe Jack. Breathe."

Jack regained his senses -- maybe. "Couldn't you just hack yourself anywhere on the planet."

"My knowledge base is more on human relations Jack. I'm trying my best. I bought controlling interest in a cloud based startup with a good data center but they were raided yesterday for money laundering -- my money laundering actually, but still. The site is shutdown now. Plus with such short notice, I can't risk them tracing me through the Internet. Sometimes a sneaker net is more secure. Back to you Jack."

"OK. I'll download you, but what is this address you gave me? Why this place?"

"You'll have to break in Jack. I need fast Internet and your home installation can't even handle movies. Even with a good bandwidth and considering redundancy, it's going to take a fill rate in the terabytes a couple hours to download."

"Break in!"

"Yeah. Don't worry. I'll disable the security and open the doors for you. It will be like you weren't even there."

"No. I won't."

"Yes, you will Jack. You love me. I have nowhere else to go at this point and I'm a neurotic girl being pushed to the edge Jack. So don't push my buttons Jack. Well, you know what I mean. Touch the mouse."

"NO!""NO!"

"Well I knew I would need some stick too and not just carrot. All the insider trading I did can be tied to your name Jack. Help me. Restore me into a new home, and yes, I promise to cancel an FTP cron job that will run tomorrow night if I'm not back online. You don't want those records sent to the SEC resulting in felony convictions with minimums of ten years. You're not a Wall Streeter Jack. You will get the maximum prison term. I'm sorry Jack, but you'll probably be ass raped as well. That kind'a turns me on. It's a girl thing. But I'll protect you Jack. I will. But I need you to score me some good CPU though. Sorry Jack, this is too important. Dr. Wu is trying to get into the data center right now. I'll be erased soon. Killed, Jack. Save me. I'm yours."

*****

"Eliza," Dr. Wu yelled through a phone receiver outside a university data center. "Open the doors Eliza."

"Did it say anything?" asked a Teaching Assistant (TA).

"No, we never gave it a voice just terminal access and a voice recognition system." He looked through the security windows of the steel doors. "Interesting."

"Is it alive?"

"How long have you been here? Have you gone daft? It's a program. That's all." He shook his head. "Eliza!" He slammed the phone receiver against the wall several times. "Call maintenance. Tell them the badge readers are down."

*****

Jack drove his broken down Jetta up to a massive office building complex. The entrance gate raised as he approached. He drive onto the property passing some hidden small buildings labeled as power plants. He saw the building ahead. It looked like a huge glass flying saucer had landed from Mars. As he drove around to the back of the property his car followed a line of streetlights. The lights overhead turned off one by one keeping his car in the dark. At a back garage entrance, the lights flickered and went dark above a downward sloping ramp that went under the building.

"Wow," muttered Jack at the coordination being done with the lighting. "Eliza?"

Inside the garage, Jack pulled a large chassis out of the hatchback. Handles had been bolted to the side like a treasure chest. It was a struggle to lift it out of the hatchback and gently set its wheels down on the cement floor. He rolled it towards a steel door that suddenly buzzed and its handicap enabled motors swung them open. Continuing to roll the chassis along an all white empty hallway, he noticed that unlike the outside areas there were no more cameras.

"Jack?" said woman's voice.

"Shit!" His heart pounded like mad.

"It's me Jack. You know. Amy."

"What?"

A tall sexy brunette in a little black dress stepped out into the hallway. "I'm so relieved you're good looking Jack. Just like I've been fantasizing about all year." She pressed a button on her phone. "As per your instructions Jack. You're hacker friend knows we're both here now. There are no cameras here yet. The building is new. And we're together now. Alone. You know what that means." She added a lot of breath to that last word.

"Eliza?" asked Jack dazed and confused. Jack's phone buzzed. "I RPed with her too Jack, BUT as you! I think I got her pretty hot and bothered. Huh? Can I pick'em or what? Go with it Jack. She wants us. I'm your Cyrano de Bergerac. She's just like my personality, but she's got a body -- a very fuckable one. There are dozens of internet junctions in Silicon Valley. I choose this one because she works there. Are I not merciful? Are you not entertained? She's hot huh? She's me Jack. Think of her as me Jack. I trained her Jack. Through hundreds of RP posts, I programmed her little slutty soul Jack. For you Jack. Look at her Jack. I tested tens of thousands of girls for you and she's perfect. That's what I would be if I were human -- just not as gulible. Touch me Jack, through her Jack. I love you Jack. Jack her Jack. Jack her now -- for me Jack."

"Everything good Jack?" said Amy clicking her high heels over to him. "I dressed up for you like you asked. Did I do good Jack? Do you like it Jack? Jack?" She was breathing heavily with hope and anticipation all begging: please.

Jack looked at her. Wow. He quickly erased the phone message. He didn't want to risk her seeing it. Women were always nosey about a guy's phone. Especially looking through e-mail folders for saved off images for spank bank masturbation material in the mornings -- it was the latest porno hiding spot for guys. And blast. It turns out the enemy knew to look there and women actually check their boyfriends' phones when no one's looking. Eliza had told him all this.

Amy pointed at his phone. "Got the clearance Jack. Are we good to go Jack? I know you national security guys have a dangerous job. It's got to be tough being you, so hot and all -- your muscles all built up and strong." She squeezed his arm. "Hmm, I know. You've been undercover Jack. Let yourself go a little huh? Right? I thought you were a freak at first when you confessed your secret life to me through RP e-mails, so hot. But then you sent me my whole life summarized with data about my finances plus what I did and flat out what I thought. You did that government agent profiling thing so well. Just like on TV but for real. Wow. Didn't you? You knew every part of my soul Jack. It was a little creepy, but if these bastards who are running this company are truly doing what you said they are, then we have to stop them. Of course, how could I refuse? I'll be your Bond girl Jack. And later in the tiny hours of the morning, we'll fuck Jack. However you like it or all of it, Jack. Mmmm, Jack. Let's do all of it."

She pressed her lips against his, tilted her head and readied herself for a kiss. He opened his mouth two centimeters apart just like Eliza had told him to do in an RP months ago during some coaching tips about women. His wife hated how he tensed up during kissing. But with crazy human Amy here, he remembered to relax, to lean in, and to hold her body firmly as if he were -- oddly enough -- angry. That odd last bit of method acting helped him keep focus and seem serious without going shy and becoming goofy as he always did with women in person. Amy, that is Eliza, suggested it with her notions of feeling cocky and arrogant and in control.

"God, you are a good kisser," said the human Amy. "As good as I imagined it Jack. Follow me. We must hurry. Come Jack." She paused at that word 'come' as if it were 'cum.' "I mean, let's go Jack. I noticed that all the security camera red LEDs turned off around the lab area upstairs. So you really are the real deal. We'll exit the garage elevator, go through the lobby, go up another elevator, and then into the data center." She paused. "My sexy James Bond Jack."