When I say ‘richest’ you should know I’m talking about an actual flesh-and-blood person, not another robo. It was obvious at a glance, with his skin and eyes looking too natural (it’s the flaws that give them away, like lines around the eyes or smile wrinkles around the mouth) and how he had his hair short, bleached and spiky in a way that on a poorer person you would assume was just a cheap haircut but on a rich guy it might be the new trend that had just started in some off-world cosmo enclave. Robos didn’t keep up with fashion trends like that.
Plus, robos can have money and own property, and rich robos aren’t impossible. But a rich robo in 0B-City, visiting me? Not going to happen. If you have enough money you can get legit hackers to do whatever you want for you.
Assuming what you want isn’t too ethically/legally dubious (the bread and butter for my operation) or wasn’t too ridiculous for a hacker with any sense of pride to waste time on. Robos had simple tastes, so it was always a lack of money that brought them to me, not a lack of scruples.
As the guy walked into my shop – didn’t knock, didn’t hit the buzzer clearly labeled ‘Wait for buzz to be let in,’ just strolled right in how do you do – I cursed the faulty lock and sized him up.
He had white slacks and a white jacket over a floral-print vest, several gold chains, the aforementioned bleached hair and a pair of sunglasses on even though the skies outside were as gray as my landlady’s natural hair. His entire outfit was a throwback to a throwback, the kind of get-up I would see in a holo-show and not realize it’s referencing a type of character from decades or centuries back.
“What’s up, dark and pretty? Are you the code wrangler I’ve heard so much about?”
I was too angry to be stunned, this guy kept getting more obnoxious by the second, but I didn’t say anything at first. If my shop (really just the front half of my apartment, a fake wall set up to keep my bed, bath and kitchen out of sight) wasn’t as small as it was I would have ignored him completely, pretended I was deep in something important on my main rig.
Instead all I could do was stare at him, glowering to make it clear I wasn’t amused, and wait for him to turn down what I assumed was supposed to be a charm offensive but which didn’t meet the first word’s definition.
After a moment he chuckled, taking his glasses off.
“Heh. Too cool for school, huh? I can dig it. But I hope you’re not too busy for a job, because I’ve got something I can only trust an elite hacker to take care of, and you came specially recommended.”
“If you have a job get to the details.” I took a seat, kicking my feet up and looking bored.
“Sure, let’s get down to it.” He grabbed a chair and spun it around, resting his chest on the back. “You can call me Fin. That’s all you need to know about me. I’ve got a… friend, someone you don’t know, and the two of us have been going back and forth with a little prank war for… Hell, years at this point. It’s kids stuff. I change the odorizer in their apartment to make it smell like an outhouse after a three-day music festival, they hack my media accounts to make it seem like I’m threatening to blow up the parliament on Io-7. You know how it is.
“Well, I have this idea to get back at them involving their robos. They’re well-to-do and employ a bunch of them in their house and their company, and what I’m thinking is I introduce a virus to change their behavior. Nothing violent or anything, I just want them doing some silly stuff.
“How much would that cost?”
If you think I couldn’t spot all the holes he was leaving in his story you must think I just got into the biz yesterday. I didn’t care about his name or where he came from (the cameras in my shop had already run his picture through two dozen facial recognition catalogs, I could pull up any matches when I went behind the counter), or who his ‘friend’ was (don’t think I didn’t notice his use of gender-neutral pronouns; it was probably an ex he wanted to humiliate, but motive didn’t mean anything to me).
But his attempt to keep vague about what precisely he wanted me to do, that was a red flag. Or at least a yellow light.
“It depends on what you want done. Not just what you want the robos to do, whether it be breaking equipment or breaking out into a dance during a party they’re hosting, but how I’m supposed to get it done. Are you planning to bring five, seven, a dozen robos into this shop for me to work on? Do you want me to go to their house or business or whatever pose as a maintenance worker? Because house calls triple my price.”
“Oh, you don’t have to go anywhere. I just need you to whip up the virus for me. My friend? They have a localized server their robos connect to, and I can get access to it. You create the virus, I take it, load it into the server, then wait for the fun to begin.”
It wasn’t the stupidest idea I’d ever heard. There was still the ‘only letting me know what he thought I needed to know’ issue, but everything together seemed like a full plan.
“But what is it you want them to do? I can’t just create a program that says ‘Act silly.’ I have to create specific parameters and behaviors otherwise nothing will happen, that’s the best case scenario, or they’ll injure or even kill someone, that’s the worst case.”
“Oh, no, no! I don’t want anyone hurt. The thing is…” He hesitated for a moment, “What I’m thinking is my friend, they have a couple sex-bots at their house. Top of the line stuff, kept just under the ‘fully autonomous’ threshold, so they’re not actually employees, they can’t leave or demand any special rights. My friend has them work as maids most of the day, but when they get randy they flip a switch and one or both of the robos go into fuck mode.
“So what I want...
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