“Doctor. Give us the scoop!”
Abe’s pesky, high, nasally voice pierces Harry’s ears. On the third floor of this impossibly important, decrepit building, sits the team around a shiny glass conference table. The only window faces the outside wall of a larger building, which is separated from them by a narrow back alley and an overflowing dumpster. The plastered walls, permeated with holes, decay by the minute. The room smells of McDonald’s as Lenny reaches for his large fries, one at a time, and bends them before tossing them into his mouth. The slightly off-balance psychologist waits for complete silence before he speaks.
“Guys. About PAINN, I don’t know quite how to put it” Slouches turn into anxious postures as everyone in the room fixes their gaze on Doctor Pockly. Even Lenny looks up as he refrains from ingesting the next fry and twirls it around his greasy fingers instead.
“Of course, this is only my first session with PAINN, and I am by no means a computer technician…”
“Enough with the preambles, and get to damn point!” growls Rooney.
“I have reason to believe PAINN is compromised. If he were human I’d say his ego was in conflict. Of course, I would need more sessions, but I would say that it…he…she…is hiding something.”
Far from the evaluation they expected, A sobering silence fills the room for the next few seconds. “Hiding what, exactly?” Doctor Brown questions.
“I cannot put my finger on it, but I have seen this before. I hate to tell you this, but even after one short session, I am confident that something is off. PAINN is not serving you guys the way you think he is. I believe he is harboring some kind of ulterior motive.”
No one in the room knows how to respond to this. Except Maria, who bursts into laughter. “Yeah right! How dumb do you think we are? This is why I don’t trust psychologists.”
“I’m a psychiatrist.”
“Psychotic is what you are. Whatever, let’s get back to work.” As she stands up and heads for the door, Abe arrests Maria’s departure with a strangely serious, somber tone. “What did PAINN say, Doctor?”
Maria stops laughing, bites her lip and sits back down. Everyone listens intently to Harry’s next words.
“Well, what threw me off was when he said his goal was to ‘maximize the reward…at all costs.’ In my experience this sort of Machiavellian egotism often leads to destructive behavior. I don’t know what he’s up to, but I am sure that his goals do not match yours.”
Faces turn sour and perplexed, except for Abe, who is rubbing his chin and deep in thought. “Maximize the reward…” he repeats the eerie phrase to himself: “Maximize the reward…Crap.”
All of a sudden Abe frantically jumps out of his chair. He bangs his right knee on the underside of the table, making a loud bang. “Crap!” He holds his knee cap, wincing in pain as he hobbles towards the door.
Saigon asks the obvious question. “Abe…what the hell are you doing?”
“No time to explain! We need to get to the lab. ASAP!”
Without further protest, the entire gang briskly follows Abe’s lead as they rush toward the elevator. All seven of them squeeze into the fifteen square foot cuboid with no respect or care for personal space. Harry, pressed up against Abe’s shoulder, can feel the skinny coder’s drenching sweat seep through his button-down. Gross.
“Abe.” Doctor Brown, wedged between Saigon and Rooney, calmly addresses him. “Please tell us what is going on…”
“It could be nothing! I…I have some kind of idea, but I want to investigate further before I make a fool of myself. I don’t want to jump to any conclusions, but I must check PAINN’s algorithms.”
With that announcement, the elevator door opens to the long corridor. Although hobbled by the pain in his knee, adrenaline takes over Abe’s body as he lunges out and sprints towards the hexagon.
When the others catch up, they find him agitatedly showing his face to the camera. “Come on…Come on!” Whoosh! “Yes!”
Saigon raises a brow and questions, “Did you think we were locked out or something?”
Abe, high on adrenaline, pain, and in this moment, relief, tuns towards Saigon with a huge grin. “Why not? Haven’t you seen 2001, A Space Odyssey??”
The quick moment of victory is gone, and Abe jumps towards PAINN. He frantically taps at the holographic keys as files slide in and out on the monitor. Now, the keyboard strokes do not sound in harmony with the swishing pistons of the super quantum computer. No. A rather harsh, cacophonous clash of these two frequencies sting the room.
Suddenly Abe stops typing as he slowly exhales and lets his shoulders droop to his sides. He takes off his glasses, turns towards the rest of the team, but shamefully looks down at the ground before his next remark. “It’s just what I thought.”
Doctor Pockly probes at this. “What?”
Abe picks his head up and makes eye contact. “We’ve been hacked.”
A heavy silence takes over. Harry breaks the silence. “So what do we do now??”
“Well first, this.” Abe turns around, puts his glasses back on, and hastily types away at the hovering keyboard. On the side of PAINN, a stack of papers starts rapidly shooting out. He waits a few seconds for the stack to complete, and then solemnly continues typing away. Moments after he lifts his fingers, the monitor turns off, and the swishing pistons slowly come to a halt. No longer in a rush, Abe walks over to the side of the inert computer, grabs the stack of papers, and continues to the right wall of the room. He slouches against the wall and slides down until his bottom hits the floor titles. He sets the papers down and starts massaging his injured knee.
