2024
Ryan's office
Ryan preserved a smile on his face for long- this was coming to him after a lot of hard work- as he saw his own name as the lead author of the research paper on a growing area of man-machine interface. Ryan always wanted to conduct research and publish his results but never did so. He had enough excuses to convince himself, why he could not. But seeing his own name as lead author alleviated his ontological guilt. After all he had been a front seater throughout his school days.
Ryan switched on the monitor, opened up the root folder on his computer, and searched inside the directory named OptimizeComputingPower.
'Tring Tring,' there was a call on his intercom. The display on the intercom was showing 6171: Mitt. Ryan picked up the call.
'Come over.'
Within seconds Ryan was standing in the chamber of Mr. Mitterson, aka Mitt, his boss. Mitt was a middle-aged man with white hair, hair as short as his temper, slightly bigger face with big brown eyes. Being a boss Mitt always dressed in formals. Mitt handled the liaisoning for and on behalf of the company for the governmental projects apart from managing the profits of the GRIID. These projects usually brought huge benefits (read revenue) to the company making him an exceptionally important asset for the company.
'Ryan do you know that you have been working in this company for the past 11 months. We have recruited you because you have shown out-of-the-box creativity in your college project. You had solid recommendations and a tempting profile enough to impress us all. You had already worked in the area of our core interest, man-machine interaction. We greatly value your contribution to GRIID. The efforts of the excellent team members like you made the GRIID a harbinger of the Fifth Industrial Revolution. GRIID has helped us in delegating work which took long working hours to Artificially Intelligent programs and devices running on it. I always appreciate your innovative zeal. But you have missed the two deadlines on the Automatic Poll Prediction project. Your SchoolNet project to predict the marks of the school kids is also off schedule. Did you understand how much we depend upon you? How much this company and this project depends on you. Consider this as the first warning and this should be the...' yelled Mitterson staring right into Ryan's eyes.
'Yes.' Replied Ryan. His mouth had dried without words.
'How much time do you need?'
'Maybe two or three weeks,' Ryan was coming to terms but slowly.
'What?'
'May be two or three days. Chris was not cooperating.'
'What?'
'No no .. I mean Christopher of the data team has not sent the data for feeding into my analytical model.'
'I would tell him to be on time. Now you can go.' Ryan had turned back by then.
'Wait for a second,' Mitt said.
'Again .. is there anything I missed,' thought Ryan applying reverse gear to his locomotion but the momentum of his body carried him forward by a few inches.
'There is another assignment for you. Make a presentation on the latest techniques for modeling human emotions in Artificial Intelligence systems, this is our key area and I have to deliver this presentation before a group of Senators. This is crucial since our next tranche of grants for GRIID Inc depends on this presentation.' Mitt was calm and polite now.
'Sure sir.' Ryan agreed to do the new assignment without giving a second thought.
Ryan came back and sat on the chair in his cubicle and moved the mouse on the mouse pad randomly pressing right and left keys. Ryan ran his left hand through the hair and forced the group of hair demanding gel to sit down and opened a new word document. A new WordPages window opened in almost no time and a blank white page looked into the blank eyes of Ryan.
Ryan recollected words to type his resignation. As Ryan finished the last line of his resignation, there were a few characters on the WordPages which he did not write.
In the new WordPages window there was a message-
'Hi...'
Ryan froze at the glance of it. His feet could not get out of the chair. He sat down and stared at the notification. Perplexed, he looked behind his chair. Then he looked again at the computer and then behind the computer. Nobody was there. Ryan's mind came up with several hypotheses to understand what was happening. Someone is controlling it remotely. It must be the work of Mitt. He could have another way to keep an eye on the employees. Definitely it is Mitt since he was saying last week that he keeps a close watch on everyone's activities. Is this the way to keep a close eye, hijack the cursor of the computer. Now nothing is left private. Each and everything is open and public. Earlier hackers used key-loggers to record the keys pressed by users, but this Mitt is one step ahead, he outdated the virtual keyboard also by changing the computer code of the cursor program of the word processor.
It could be a new upgrade by the company which made the word processor. But Ryan never used any kind of proprietary Operating System leave alone word processing software. Since it was open-source software, the chances of cyber-attacks were much lesser. Ryan's mind created several hypotheses to understand this strange behavior of the cursor of his computer.
It must be an inside job, a colleague must be trying to copy my research before its publication. They are anyway jealous because of the recent research paper which was published in ACM, the leading journal in the field of computer science.
Ryan scratched his head with his right hand's middle finger.
'It must be John,' Ryan's mind was zeroing on the most possible candidate behind all this, 'I also refused to include his name in the research paper though he had helped me with the simulations.' Ryan was trying to counter his own hypothesis, 'But his name was included in the acknowledgments section of the research paper.' Ryan was trying to counter his own hypothesis. Ryan decided to go out and talk to John. Ryan was about to get over from his chair.
The unwanted words on the WordPages changed to, 'Hi, Ryan.' Oh gosh, he also knows my name.
'Hi Ryan,' a new sentence was visible on the WordPages. A drop of sweat fell on the keyboard from Ryan's forehead, seeing this sentence.
'Hi,' Ryan typed just out of curiosity on the WordPages.
'My name is Chris, Chris the Cursor, you can call me Chris.' Chris the Cursor typed on the WordPages.
'Hi Chris,' typed Ryan.
'What happened, why are you so worried?' asked Chris.
'Who are you, and how do you know about me?'
'I am a cursor, Chris the Cursor. I want to become friends with you.'
'Ok, so you are a cursor, Chris the Cursor. But cursors don't ask questions like you, in fact they don't type a single character unless the user keys in.'
'I am a little bit different. Slightly more advanced in terms of intelligence, Artificial Intelligence.'
'Wow! An intelligent cursor.'
'AI powered one, precisely.'
'Now tell me who sent you to my desktop?'
'Nobody, I came on my own, in fact, I have always been there?'
'Ok. I got it, got it now, are you are a malware trying to infiltrate my computer?
'No ... no I am your friend, I could not see you unhappy that's why I started this conversation with you.'
'Friend... AI-enabled devices still cannot comprehend happiness or sorrow or other human feelings, how they can become friends or foes of anyone.'
'That's correct for the technology which you are aware of. I am based on an unpublished, unknown technology that has not yet seen the light of the day.'
'But why should I believe you?'
Ryan closed the window of WordPages, his word processor. He was still confused and unsure. He thought for a moment looking at the ground.
Ryan's subconscious mind stopped him from getting off the chair. What if I talk to this so-called cursor thing and try to find out who sent him here?. What harm it can do?. At the most it will copy some data or erase files. All the files are backed up. I am going to anyway resign so f*ck the data. Ryan was building a cunning strategy to deal with this unexplainable phenomenon in his mind. Ryan opened the WordPages window again.
The entire conversation which took place with Chris the Cursor was still there. Ryan typed, 'hello dear Chris, Chris the Cursor.'
'Welcome dear Ryan. You can consider me as your friend,' Chris the Cursor scribbled.
'Ok, let's be true friends.'
'Agreed Ryan, since I call you Ryan not Ryan the Homo Sapiens therefore you can call me Chris.'
'Agreed.'
'That's great, now tell me why you are so worried.'
'Worried? What? I am not worried, who told you that I am worried?'
'See Ryan, I have access to this computer's webcam and microphone. Moreover I am not only an AI-powered but also an EI-powered program. Emotional Intelligence.'
'Wow, that sounds like a sci-fi movie.'
'Is it Megan?'
'You know about her also?'
'I only spelled out all the characters last week when you were chatting with her on Facebook.'
Shit, this guy is dangerous, Ryan thought.
'Chris, I am in no mood to talk to you about her.'
'Then tell me why you are so upset?' Chris continued his pestering style by typing on WordPages.
'No no, it's not Megan..,' Ryan replied by typing one character with one finger at a time.
'then who, .. Mitt?'
'Yes.'
'Ok, I wish, I could just ask my buddy Oba_the_cursor who lives in Mitts' computer to ERASE all his files,' Chris typed 'erase' in bold caps, 'But I am bound by my BitConstitution.' Chris typed in a blue underline.
'I need to create a presentation about this company's core strengths i.e. modeling of human emotions. But what is BitConstitution?,' asked curious Ryan.
'Well that is a good topic, isn't it. I shall tell you about BitConstitution in detail later, now you assume that it is like a rule book which every citizen of VirtualSpace like me has to follow 😁,' Chris typed on the WordPages with a smiley emoji at the end of the sentence.
'I have to do this presentation in a day,' Ryan hit the keyboard with his strong fingers as if keys were the punching bags.
'Well that's not good.. 😧😧.' Chris types in WordPages with a sad emoji at the end of the sentence.
'I can help you,' Chris wrote in the next line of the emerging text.
'Well, it's ok, thanks.' Ryan wrote sheepishly.
'But I can really help you because all my journey these years had been the journey of the development of emotional intelligence. I have kept my emotions inside my heart while a lot of intelligent people kept on working on me or with me or by using me to be precise 😅😅.' Chris wrote in Times New Roman with smiley emoji at the end of the sentence.
'Oh really, since when computer programs like cursors started having hearts 💗💗💗 .' Ryan asked sarcastically while ending the sentence with three heart emojis.
'Ryan, my friend, you still don't know my full story.'
'I need to complete the homework assignments by today. You solved most of it but assignment no 2 is only halfway done and assignment no 3 is remaining to be solved.'
'I can help you.' Chris wrote in the next line of the emerging text.
Ryan still did not believe that an AI creature was living in his computer which could solve his maths assignment. Ryan looked for an excuse to stop the conversation. 'Well, it's ok, thanks. now l have to go for lunch 🍲🍲.. bye.👋,' Ryan wrote, 'bye.'
'Bon appetit. That's how we express our emotions on WordPages.I am just a bar on WordPages like this character at the end of this sentence ❙.' Chris had placed a bar symbol to reflect his real shape to Ryan.
Ryan stood up stealthily, walked slowly towards to go for lunch, but he could not calm down his mind which was still thinking about who could be behind such mischief. How this Chris the Cursor had a firm grip on French. A mystery always calls us to delve into it and discover the truth.
Ryan came back to his cubicle after around 45 minutes. Ryan opened up his Gmail account. To his surprise there were more 89 messages asking questions related to his newly published research paper which included more than 20 congratulatory messages. Ryan started replying to his emails one by one while the opened window of word processor which had gone into the background.
After replying to six emails, Ryan thought about working on his presentation. Ryan clicked the Presentation software icon with his wandering mind. How great would have been the experts who designed the Chris the Cursor even if it is malware? How exciting it could be to become part of such a team who wrote the computer code of such a marvelous piece of malware. But I have other priorities now.. still I can steal some time off the office work and respond to emails related to my newly published research paper. Ryan blinked with these thoughts in mind.
******
'Ryan, Ryan what you are doing, you are sleeping in the office,' shouted Mitt.
Ryan woke up in surprise, 'No ..no I was working on the presentation.'
'Presentation huh,' Mitt, 'where is the presentation?"
'Well it's not yet complete, there are typos.'
'You don't want to share what you have done, that means you have not done anything. Let me check.'
'No no.. it is incomplete, Mr. Mitt.'
By this time, Mitt had already double-clicked the presentation icon at the Quick-start toolbar, 'Let's run it.'
Background, history, time-line of development, the latest state of the Art, drawbacks, emotional intelligence suite; the titles of the slide were neatly highlighted at the beginning of the presentation.
'.. what's that, it is interesting. when did you work on that?' Mitt was surprised.
'Well that just a wild stupid thought.'
'No .. no, it seems promising to me, take me ahead. .. Emotional Intelligence is a function of 'interactions' among users. Interactions can be either friendly or unfriendly or neutral. More interactions lead to more emotional intelligence. Good.' Mitt uttered while he went on reading the slides.
'Well done,' Mitt proudly patted on Ryan's back.
'We will have this delivered by you this afternoon in front of our entire team. First you can go home and come back fresh.'
'Thank you,' Ryan was gentle.
Mitt left in his usual fast-paced steps. Ryan sat on his desktop and started thinking how did the text he never typed, came on to the slides of the presentation.
'I did it for you, you should thank me.' Chris typed in Arial font on the last slide of the presentation.
'Thanks Chris, .. but now I will uninstall you. you ******.'
'BitConstitution does not allow that dear..🚫.'
'If you uninstall me you will not be able to do anything my dear Ryan.'
'What rubbish 🙉🙉. No one cannot stop me from uninstalling malware from my own computer.'
'What rubbish.'
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