TRAVELING INTO THE FUTURE

Short Science Fiction Stories: Volume 2, Part 4

Knowledge is the Opposite of Trust

Inspector Lee was dealing with his toughest case ever. The death of activist Hanna Karlsen was almost certainly a suicide, the artificial intelligence unit had told him. In fact, the probability was 99.7 percent. But during her lifetime, the anti-digitalization militant had feared retaliation from the artificial intelligence system. Just one more conspiracy theory? Lee learned that Karlsen had both a modern smartwatch and a wedding ring in her possession at the time of her death. Neither object seemed right for her. So he took up the case on his own..

Deep in thought, Inspector Lee twirled the golden wedding ring between his fingers. His colleague was standing in front of him and shaking his head:
“So you’re saying that Hanna Karlsen had never been married?
“No, she had not been. And I am quite sure that she didn’t run off and get married in the weeks before her death. The ring means something else.”
“A personal data storage unit perhaps? That would not be unusual,” Ortiz suggested.
“I saw no sign whatsoever of a solar cell or an integrated lithium ion battery. I held an energy scanner in front of it – there was no reading. In any case, if the ring is supposed to hold something – a storage medium, computer chip or energy cell, for example – it is either empty or switched off.”
“Maybe we should test it with a Geiger counter.”
Lee nodded. That would be a possibility. But he feared that the ring was just a solid piece of metal. He sighed. “Conspiracies, political entanglements, ant-digitalization activists – why are cases so complicated these days, Ortiz? In the good old days, murder still revolved around greed or classic cases of jealousy. Our lives were better back then.”
“I really don’t know if greed or jealousy is better than a political conspiracy, Lee…”

“It Sounds Like a Pretty Nasty Bug.”

“We won’t be making any progress on the ring right now. Look at what I found out about the smartwatch, Ortiz…” With his finger, he drew the sign for a new holo-window in the air. Naturally, the holographic image wasn’t responding to his finger but rather to the microchip implanted beneath a fingernail. He called up various messages about defects in the new Eriador XV smartwatch. There were indeed a few cases worldwide, and they had a few similarities.

“Here – and here,” Lee said. “The new smartwatch has led several owners astray, giving them bad information or malfunctioning at a crucial moment.”
Ortiz furrowed his brow. “That amazes me,” he said. “I remember the advertising. The manufacturer touted the smartwatch’s especially reliable security features, meaning that the watch would put up a fight if it were removed during a theft or mugging. If the watch is giving out false information, it must be infected with a pretty nasty bug.”
Lee pursed his lips: “Data and artificial intelligence are everywhere,” he said to himself. “When I was young, we made fun of the fact that self-drivers followed their navigation system so blindly that they steered their cars into rivers. But that was just the beginning. We want to believe the information because it is useful – it expands our knowledge to incredible levels.”

“Hanna Karlsen Doesn’t Fit into the Sequence.”

It took minutes – not just a few seconds – but the results finally arrived. There in fact was a striking pattern filtered from the available data, chat logs and the evaluation of calls made by the victims. Each was either dissatisfied with the Eriador or wanted to get rid of it for other reasons. One had browsed through extensive test reports on other models. Another had the value of the watch estimated by an online pawnbroker. Lee presented the results as a holographic image in the room.
“Hanna Karlsen doesn’t fit into the sequence,” Ortiz noted.
Lee nodded. “There is barely a trace of her in the network. No unencrypted chats or conversations. This is odd even for an anti-digitlaization activist. If she has stored her communication somewhere, then we don’t have access to it.”

Inspector Lee drummed his fingers on the table top. It was fortunate that he had deactivated one function months earlier: The drumming would have automatically ordered coffee from the police kitchen otherwise. Then he thought about what Nero, his secret partner, had communicated from Rome that morning: Besides the report of a burglary, he had made a few strange remarks about the similarities people and machines – both could unlearn and forget things if they were not important.
A question occurred to him: Would he now have to view machines in much the same way he views people?