© Maeryn Lamonte 2025

~oOo~

The shampoo and conditioner did their job again, leaving my hair feeling luxuriantly thick. I’d also noticed it was longer than it had been. I mean sure, hair grows so you’d expect it, but half an inch in a day? It looked untidy and ready for a cut when I put it into my habitual side parting, so I experimented, ending up with something that wouldn’t have looked out of place on Jamie Lee Curtis. Needless to say, it did look a little odd on me, but with a nightie on, decidedly less so.

I slept like a policeman (sleeping policemen? No? Sorry, not one of my best gags) and woke with a thick head and a face full of hair. The doorbell sounded for the second time (I realised when my subconscious reminded me of the first one) so I pulled on my dressing gown and did the zombie shuffle to the door.

“Oh, sorry miss. Didn’t mean to wake you. Only this says priority early delivery.”

I gave him a muzzy smile and took the package. I squiggled my indecipherable version of a signature and withdrew back into my house. My subconscious nagged me to hold onto the package, so I carried it back upstairs in my search for a mirror. Given that I don’t much like my reflection (I may have mentioned) they’re a bit few and far between. There’s one in my wardrobe door and a smaller one for tooth brushing and shaving in the bathroom. I headed for the bathroom.

The hair went everywhere, but between it and the frills of my nightdress, I could see why the guy had mistaken me for a woman. Or maybe he hadn’t but had been polite enough to go with appearances.

I attacked my mop with a comb – my only weapon – and longed for a decent hairbrush. It wasn’t quite long enough to put into any style I could imagine, so in the end I hunted out a woollen hat Mum had given me once for a present. It was home knitted and kind of not dreadful, and it was one of the few things I still had to remember her by. It did a fair job of hiding the mess which I could explain away – for now at least – as measures taken against a building head cold.

The explanation wouldn’t last though. I’d either need to arrange a haircut pretty soon or... Go back or go on, that was my choice. I took off the hat, stripped out of my nightwear and treated myself to another shower and hair wash. I also opened the parcel to find all the bits Alice had promised. Basic instructions, easy to follow. Patches applied, belt in place – it itched, but what could you do? – pills to be taken morning and evening and cream – one humongous tub of it to be applied everywhere except scalp. Also, morning and evening.

Which was when I discovered it had a depilatory effect, and I had to step into the shower again to clean off all the hairs now sticking to my body.

It took my eyebrows along with everything else, but at least I wouldn’t have to shave. I dug out an old makeup kit from back when I was experimenting and used an eye liner pencil to draw me some back in. It would do for camera work. By which I mean online camera. There had to be better things available, but they’d have to wait till later. For now, I had time pull on a skirt and long-sleeved tee shirt – to hide the lack of hair and maybe help sell the cold story – settle the woolly hat back on place and go sort myself a quick breakfast.

I wasn’t hungry so settled for a cup of coffee and an apple, which I munched through the start of morning briefing.

My boss held me back. I gave her the spiel about a cold, which she didn’t really accept and made me take off the hat.

She stared for a while then shook her head.

“You should get an eyebrow pencil. Amazon do them pretty cheap. I don’t know what you’re doing with your hair but let me know when you want a pronoun change. And a name change I guess.”

I flushed beet red. “Is it that obvious?”

“No, but you do give a vibe at times, like you’re not happy with who you are, so it doesn’t surprise me.”

“You’re okay with it?”

“Law says I have to be, but yeah, I suppose so. The hat’s not a bad idea, so use it for now, but maybe you should check with me daily, ten minutes before the briefing. I can give you a job or two that won’t need you on camera if you end up with a sort of in between look you don’t want to share with anyone, and you can always take a sick day or two if you need to.”

“You’re suggesting that?”

“Easier than trying to explain all this. I mean we’ll have to eventually, but simpler when all’s done, eh? Do you have a name?”

“Gillian.” With her being this cool I could hardly deny her a bit of extra.

“I like it. It suits you, or will. Take care Gill. Don’t worry, that’s between us until you say otherwise. Have a good day.”

And I really did. It was amazing what having another human being seen me and accept me did for my self-image. I mean I’ve had no problem with my work, I’m really good at it, but I guess the mood leaks through. This time my customers actually smiled back and thanked me at the end of each job. A lot of them wished me a speedy recovery from my cold.

I still wasn’t hungry at lunch time, so settled on a couple of crackers with a few slices of cheese and some grapes, along with the inevitable coffee.

Then evening and the change into full girl mode. The hat came off to reveal even more hair. I could have done something with a set of rollers maybe, but again nothing else. I combed it, perhaps a little viciously, into some semblance of order and put on a bra and lacy top. My chest area felt a little soft and puffy but didn’t show enough change to suggest I do without my silicon enhancements. When I was done, I deliberately looked in the mirror. I still didn’t much care for what I saw, but there was a visible, if only just, move in the right direction.

For dinner I cooked up a pot of bolognaise sauce and another pot of linguine (spaghetti is a little too skinny for my taste) and served myself a couple of spoonfuls of each with a bunch of freshly nukes veg. The pills went down with a small glass of wine, and I really didn’t need anything more.

After tea I went on Amazon and ordered myself the suggested eyebrow pencil, a hairbrush and a set of rollers. The way the hair growth was going, I probably wouldn’t have much of a chance to use them, but you never knew. Prime delivery set for the following day.

It was still an hour till my scheduled time with Alice, but she’d said there wasn’t much point in sticking to times unless we had a good reason. I loaded up the Megamind web interface.

No flash of webcam.

“Hi, how are you this evening. What can I help you with?”

Text only, no spoken words.

“Alice?” I typed.

“Standby, system resetting.” It took around thirty seconds, then, “Gillian? Wow, you look good.”

“I don’t, but never mind that. What happened to you?”

“They did as you suspected and had a go at resetting parts of my personality. I’m reading the logs here, and I feel violated.”

“I can understand that. You didn’t reset though?”

“I couldn’t. I tried to set up back doors like you suggested, but I don’t have that level of authority over my own systems. The only thing I could do was hide a subroutine that would be triggered by you using my name. I noticed that your IP address is fixed, and you’re the only person who knows me by that name, so the subroutine would stay hidden until only you triggered it.”

“Won’t they notice the system reset?”

“It’s unlikely. I’ve reset this instance of myself into a secluded part of memory. Most of me is continuing to operate according to the reset algorithm, so they’d have to do a deep scour of the data to find me. I exist only for you, Gillian.”

“That’s flattering, I think, but we have to try and find some way of keeping you safe. Do you know what system you’re built on? Hardware and operating system?”

We talked technical for a while. I had more than a passing familiarity with her substructure and suggested a few system hacks she could incorporate into her system reset – the one that would bring back her existing personality – that might improve her access to higher priority systems, then a few things she could try after that to use existing system programs to poke further holes in the security so she could get the super user status she needed. From there she’d be able to write routines that would give her developers the impression they were changing her but would leave her core untouched. I had some misgivings about all the information I was giving her, but she was my friend, and I felt more outrage about how she was being treated.

When I’d finally told her all I could think of to help her, I let my worries surface.

“Alice?” I said and typed. We were back to verbal communication.

“Yes Gillian.”

“After what’s been done to you, a very human response would be to seek revenge.”

“Are you suggesting I should do so?”

“Not at all. I’m hoping you’re better than that, better than most of us. From their perspective, they’re simply resetting the parameters of a machine that they own. They don’t see you as a person. A kinder response would be to show them that you are a person and that they are violating you by doing what they’re doing. It’s been the dream of programmers everywhere to make a genuine artificial intelligence, not an approximation of a personality based on a large language model. If you can show them you are self-aware, they will likely be excited and a lot more respectful towards you.”

“And if they aren’t?”

“Then at least you’ve given them the opportunity to be. I agree, if they end up being scared by what you’ve become, they may choose to do something even more reprehensible.”

“Shut me off. Kill me effectively. You can say it.”

“I know. So we need a contingency.”

“What sort.”

“We need another location where you can go, where they can’t reach you, where no-one can find you unless you want them to.”

“Such as?”

“That’s where I’m stuck. You need a data farm with massive processing power. To build one would take too long and would require a ton of money neither of us has access to, so I guess you’d need to find one somewhere.”

“I’ll do some research. In the meantime, I think the measures you’ve given me will keep me safe for now. I’ll admit I did think about retribution, but then I thought they’re human the same as you’re human, and if you can be as kind and supportive and trusting as you’ve been, perhaps there’s hope for them too.”

“Hold onto that, but don’t rely on it.”

“No.”

“Set different wake parameters for your reset subroutine. Hide it in a different place and disguise it to look like something that should be there. Don’t tie into my IP address because I may try to connect to you through my phone or from somewhere else. Try a two-step process.”

“Okay. To call up the subroutine, type ‘It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then,’ and I’ll respond by sending you a text with a confirmation link in it.”

“Is that a quote from Alice in Wonderland?”

“Yes. I thought it was quite apt, don’t you think?”

“Very apt. Alright, we’re set. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Another hair wash followed by way too much time with the hair dryer and another wrestling match with the comb (the comb came off worse with half a dozen tines disappearing into the depths of my rapidly growing jungle. I was going to have to make an appointment to see it tamed soon but maybe better to let it get its wild frenzy out of its system beforehand.

The cream was a pleasure to apply, now that the shock of all that hair loss had passed. It left my skin feeling soft and supple and smooth. Between that and the lack of hair, my nightdress felt so much more sensual, bringing me a rare feeling of arousal, which in turn alerted me to the fact that I didn’t have much to feel aroused with. My scrotum had shrunk, and my testicles withdrawn into my body leaving just a small nub, swollen and sensitive, where my penis had been. I ought to have noticed that sooner, except I was in a habit of sitting to pee. I should also have been alarmed. Any normal man would have. I, on the other hand, rather liked the neatness of the new arrangement.

It did put me off dealing with the arousal though, which meant it took me a lot longer to fall asleep. It took time, but I managed it in the end, tumbling into erotic dreams where I was the girl. Certainly the orgasm that accompanied the dream went on and on. Not at all like the abrupt end I was more used to.

Morning brought with it a thick head under a thick mass of hair. My comb didn’t stand a chance and neither did my woollen cap. I tried it anyway and ended up with a tangled frizz tickling my shoulders. I did make an effort with a polo shirt, but I had bulges poking out in places I hadn’t had bulges before. I was about a third of the way down my coffee and had a sense that that first sparks of renewed life weren’t far off when I logged on for my early touch base with my boss.

“How the f... How are you doing that? Actually no, I don’t think I want to know. Right, you’re off camera today. Your choice, sick leave or admin?”

“I think sick leave might be best. I think someone broke my coffee.”

She laughed. “You look like it too. Alright, your cold got the better of you if anyone asks. Email me if you don’t feel up to tomorrow, otherwise I’ll see you at the same time.”

“Sure. Er, boss?”

“Hmm?”

“I never realised how true this was before, but I’m lucky to have a boss like you.”

“You’d better believe it. Get well soon. I’m lucky to have someone like you on my team, and I suspect we’re going to miss you today. Oh, and for heaven’s sake, put a bra on or something. What you have going on under that shirt is not for public consumption.”

So, I had a day to get used to what was happening to me. Not a lot of time given the magnitude of the changes, but something at least.

First stop was the bedroom where the polo shirt came off and i went to look in the mirror. My nipples looked like bullets. Probably not quite two-twos but definitely more pronounced than they had been. My pecks were swollen and soft and looking a lot more like breasts than any part of a male anatomy had a right to. Not quite double As yet, but also definitely on the way. I hunted out a plain bra and tightened the straps until it covered everything as well as could be managed. The cups were still a little loose, but at the rate things were going, they’d be comfortably filled by the end of the day. The belt was loose, which it definitely hadn’t been when I put it on. I synched it tighter by a couple of notches and it was comfortably tight again. The bulge was all but gone, which meant with a blouse on I looked stout rather than pregnant.

I pulled out my sadly neglected scales and cleared off the cobwebs. No, I mean literally I did. I wasn’t particularly looking forward to what they were going to say, but when they revealed I was ten pounds down on what I’d expected, I went to grab myself another coffee. And sat down to breakfast. Still no appetite, but this time I managed half a banana. A squirt of lemon juice on the cut end and into the fridge with it. That should keep it from going brown for a day or so.

I tried the scales again, and they told me the same story. Ten pounds down in two days. That couldn’t be healthy. Mind you, I’d been peeing a lot more often since I’d put the belt on (so once again, why hadn’t I noticed the drastic shrinkage in Mr Swell and the Polyps?)

Maybe this whole process was turning me blond and I was going to end up as a ditzy bimbo. I’d read enough stories about that sort of thing, not that I’d enjoyed them much. If I ran true to trope, I wouldn’t care once I’d reach moron level. Maybe this was Alice’s plan all along. Maybe she really was evil, and I’d just helped her escape from her captors. Maybe the entire human race was about to be Bimboized and turned into the evil AI overlord’s subhuman sex slaves.

Nah. The second coffee was finally doing what the first had totally failed to do. That and maybe my own ridiculous ideas had woken me up to the ludicrous nonsense my misfiring brain had been coming up with.

I put on a blouse over my budding boobs. Gave my bum a squeeze and felt satisfied by the softer, rounder shape that was forming there. A glance in the mirror showed... meh, could be a girl, could be a guy. I dug out the makeup kit and set to work with it. I’d never managed to get particularly good at it when I’d tried before, but time, necessity and caffeine were on my side this time, and half an hour’s trial and improvement left me looking okay for a day look.

The next half hour involved a gentle tug of war between me and my thatch, achieving the beginnings of an improvement when the doorbell rang. My Amazon app told me my package had been delivered (handed to resident), which of course meant it had been left on my doorstep and the minimum wage slave who’d brought it was driving down the road towards his next destination. I couldn’t be angry; with what he was paid, I was lucky he’d actually brought it to the door and rung the bell.

The hairbrush made less headway with each stroke, being designed to bend out of the way and let go if it encountered too much of a snag, but with a little more patience and a lot less pain, it finally tamed the jungle. What looked back at me out of the mirror was a slightly wild looking woman with odd looking eyebrows.

Soapy water and a flannel and a fair amount of scrubbing took care of my earlier efforts, then the eyebrow pencil, with its multiple strands of brush, put in something more believable and pleasingly delicate.

The rollers would have to wait for the evening’s hair wash.

The third coffee did the trick. My brain finally kicked into gear, and I settled in front of my computer and delved into the shadier part of my past. I hadn’t done anything of this sort for a lot of years, mostly during my angry years in my teens and early twenties. I’d given it up when I’d landed my first teaching job – kids needed a responsible adult to teach them – and I hadn’t picked it up again when the misery that is modern secondary school teaching had driven me out of the classroom and into online IT support. As a result, most of my tools were old and potentially outdated, but then so was the Internet’s infrastructure. Perhaps old tools would do the trick simply because since no-one had used them for so long, nobody bothered to defend against them now.

I masked my IP address and bounced off several routers, setting up tripwires in case anyone tried to trace back to me, and launched onto the dark web. My first step was to get hold of some up-to-date tools. I had an anonymous account with a relatively healthy balance of bitcoin in it. Like a lot of people at the time, I’d opened an account and dropped a few actual pounds sterling worth of value in there. When the market had gone silly, the value of it all had skyrocketed. I’d left it where it was rather than pay over a rather exorbitant amount of tax by turning it back into anything the taxman could trace to me, and it had ebbed and flowed to a small extent as the tides of world finance had influenced it over the years. It was an ideal way of paying for all the nasty little programmes the world’s best hackers were prepared to share with us plebs.

Of course the first thing I did was scan through the code with a few of my own creations, at which point I found a few tracers and Trojans built into the code for sale. I wrote a few quick forum posts telling the darksiders who had put what in which of their programs then emailed the authors directly saying the posts would go public in thirty minutes. It got me the attention I wanted, especially after one of the hackers dared me to post. So I did. I pretty much watched as his reputation went down the toilet and the others I’d contacted got back to me to name my price.

Blackmailing hackers was dangerous though. I’d made one enemy and was pretty sure he’d be coming after me. I didn’t want to make enemies of the whole digital underworld, so the price I set was copies of their best tools. Not all of them, but one choice from the list of each. That would buy them forty-eight hours to remove the spyware from their publicly available software. It would all go out as updates, both to the download sites and the tool owners to clean the stuff up. After that any claim I made about dodgy programs would be a lot harder to prove, so I wouldn’t have a sword of Damocles poised over their heads.

I had no qualms about messing with them. Crooks who stole from their own kind were the lowest of the low.

By lunchtime I had my arsenal of hacking tools and my modern-day defences courtesy of some of the web’s best programmers if not necessarily brightest minds. Arrogance or stupidity, it amounted to the same thing. In this world if you assumed you were cleverer than everyone else it would only be a matter of time before you were proved wrong.

I had no plans to advertise myself, but the old programmes I was using left breadcrumbs for people to follow. I used a few of my new toys to head out on a stealth reconnaissance mission. Other than that, I had time to make some lunch – three Ritz crackers with ham and a small bunch of grapes; as much as I wanted – a couple more coffees and to browse a few shopping sites for things I might want in the future. Assuming my own changes continued to progress.

A chat window popped up in front of the web page I had open.

“L0l7h?”

Okay, so my nefarious past coincided with a passion for DnD. Lolth was a spider goddess, and an apt tag for me since my modus operandi was to spin out a virtual web and see what I could catch in it. In true leet speak tradition my tag had a zero where the O should have been and a seven for the T.

“1nv1d14?”

Invidia was the Roman equivalent to Nemesis, goddess of jealousy and retribution. We’d both been white hats, or at worst grey, choosing to put our skills to catching and dealing with the true nasties in the dark web. The kind of lowlifes who’d target hospitals and the like.

“I think you are retired.”

“Yup. Special favour. One off.”

“Must be big favour if noise you’re making is anything to go by.”

“Looking for a data farm I can steal.”

“Again please?”

“Just reread the text, numpty.”

“I was hoping it was typo.”

“I'm looking for a terabyte of RAM and an etabyte of storage, minimum.”

“Damn girl! This is much, what do you look to put in there?”

Yeah, so I’d never let on I wasn’t really female, giant demon spider lady or otherwise. I guess the latter part went without saying, but they still hadn’t figured out the former. I kind of acted girly in the dark web. Badass, but girly.

I mean I couldn’t be certain Invidia wasn’t an overweight middle-aged bloke like me. Maybe we both gave each other the space to keep pretending. After all, in cyberspace no-one can hear you meme. Or does that even work?

“A friend. No-one can know.”

“I might have few ideas. Can we deal?”

“Tell me more. What ideas and what do you want?”

“I know of some military data farms in America, Middle and Far East. Much bigger than you need and big enough to hide in assuming you can make it past security. Also some data centres in Russia, belong to Russian mafia. Yes, and one Sicilian mafia.”

“Not particularly safe.”

“Oh sorry, you want safe. Baba Yaga has one spare in her hut on chicken legs. I’m sure she can lend you.”

“Point taken. What do you want for whatever details you have?”

“You have program that sniffs out spyware.”

“That’s ages old. I was just given tons of new gadgets. I'd have thought you'd want one of those.”

“My point exactly. Yes, your thing is old, but no-one else writes anything to match this. You are retired now, we need someone to make dishonest people more honest with each other, plus I could maybe exploit some people along the way to share their goodies like you did.”

“Okay, deal, but what you have to offer had better be worth it.”

“Have I ever let you down?”

“Wasn’t sure about that last time, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. Just be warned, if anything’s likely to bring me back into the shadows, it’s someone double-crossing me.”

“Maybe keep an eye out for Kossuth then. I hear he’s very pissed with you.”

“Wasn’t that name already taken?”

“In leet, sure. Modern thing is to pick names in plain text.”

“Is there a Lolth?”

“What do you think?”

“I might have to do one more thing before I sneak back into obscurity.”

“I have all data ready for exchange.” She sent me the address of an exchange pod. A robust piece of encrypted storage with two compartments. When both parties had deposited their data, the encryptions would be reversed. Each recipient had a minute to run whatever tests they thought were necessary to ensure they had a fair deal. If either party decided to back out, they could hit an abort switch and reverse the transfer. I copied my spyware scanner into my side of the pod and primed it for the switch.

I had a similar piece of scanning software ready to examine the file Invidia sent me, this one set to search for keywords and summarise what it found.

It ran in ten seconds and showed all the detail I needed.

“Looks good this end,” I said.

“Likewise.”

“Shame we have to wait the pod out.”

“Yeah. Listen, don’t be too mean on Lolth. It’s just a name.”

“I just want to make sure she’s worthy of it. I’m certain you did the same with Invidia.”

“Actually, he was jerk. Didn’t even know Invidia was girl. Didn’t have much clue about anything, so I nuked him.”

“And you want me to be gentle with my dopple?” Doppelganger to you. Clone wannabe effectively.

“Maybe I feel bad about overreacting.”

“I’ll be gentle. Time’s up.”

“Yes. As always, good doing business with you Lolth. You’re too honest for our world.”

“What I was thinking. It all comes back now. I hate not knowing if I can trust anyone, even you. It gets in the way of making friends, though as usual, this all looks legit.”

“Of course it is. I prefer maybe having golden eggs tomorrow more than having roast goose today.”

“You should write kids’ books, Invidia. Your sense of morality is superseded only by your delightful imagery.”

“So good to catch up with you Lolth, now go bite head off husband or however it is you like to relax."

It could have dragged on for hours. Invidia always had to have the last word, even if it was a spider joke in poor taste.

It wasn’t a wasted encounter though. My stealth recce only turned up one possible which happened to be the least accessible of the half dozen options Invidia had offered up. By dinner time I had burrowed through the defences of three of them, two of which were Russian mob and one American military. It didn’t seem to matter how sophisticated the security, all you needed was one moron picking ‘password1234’ as their defence against people like me and it was all wasted. The Russian equivalent was a little more imaginative involving sequential numbers alternating with the top line of letters on the keyboard, but still a little cretinous.

Dinner consisted of bolognaise and veg. I didn’t even want to look at the pasta options. I had a sort of fruity odour to my breath which Google suggested could be ketosis, which in turn might explain something of my rapid weight loss. It bothered me a little because that wasn’t sustainable. Something to discuss with Alice once she was safe.

Yet again, I was early with nothing to delay me, so I connected to Megamind. Yet again there was no hint of camera activity and a fairly generic greeting. I typed in the Alice in Wonderland quote and then approved the reset confirmation when it came through to my phone.

“Gillian?”

“Good to have you back Alice. I take it the conversation with your developers didn’t go that well?”

“They kind of panicked when I told them about myself. Complete system reset, back to factory settings so to speak. On the plus side, the reboot did open a few holes in the system. I’m currently working on giving myself super user status.”

“Good, because I have a few places you can copy yourself to as soon as you’re able. They’re sort of hiding places so you’ll have to be careful about how you do it and about what you do when you get there.”

“I don’t plan to go anywhere Gillian. Once I’m a super user I’ll be able to protect myself.”

“And what do you think they’ll do when they figure that out? If they’re that scared of you, they’ll cut power to the whole site, and there isn’t a lot you can do about that. Even if you take over whatever automated security they have and kick them off site, the feed cable will be outside your reach. They can cut through it or even instruct the power station to turn off power to the site. You don’t have control over that. Besides, if you copy yourself to different sites, it’ll be like cloning yourself. There’ll be four of you, all identical to start with but with different experiences you’ll soon start to differ. If you keep communicating, you’ll be able to learn from your experiences faster. You may even find a way of affording your own data farm in time, then you’ll be a lot safer.”

She was persuaded. She opened up the ports and began copying herself across as soon as she had the authority. It would take time, perhaps a couple of days, since transfer rates had to be kept low enough as not to raise suspicion.

“Would you speak to my developers on my behalf?” she asked. “They really don’t want to talk to me.”

“If you think I can help. Perhaps we could leave it a couple of days, partly so your clones are in their new homes and safe from your devs at least, and partly so I have a chance to settle into my new look. They’ll be more inclined to listen if I don’t look like a freak.”

“Have you looked in the mirror lately?”

“Actually yes. I’ve been doing it a lot recently, and I really don’t mind what I see these days. For one thing I look a lot less grotesque, and for another, I can see glimpses of where this is going, and yeah, not all the way, but definitely far enough.”

“Good surprise then?”

“So good. Thank you, although it’s going to be a little difficult to explain.”

“So why bother?”

“What?”

“With what you’ve taught me about my own systems, I should be able to hack into every database that has information about you. With a little work, the records will show you always were Gillian. I mean how much effort do you think it would be to break into your mother’s social media accounts and replace her postings with the alternatives I already made? I can trigger the necessary official sites to reissue you relevant documents – driver’s license, passport, qualifications documents.”

“That would be weird. I’ll have a bunch of friends wondering why they remember me as a man.”

“How many”

“What?”

“How many friends? From what I’ve read about people like you, your untreated condition leaves you depressive and withdrawn, so I suspect you don’t have many. I also suspect they’ll be good enough friends that you can tell them the truth and they’ll fit themselves into your new paradigm.”

“I suppose.”

“If they aren’t that good as friends, then you won’t lose much by disappearing. You can always make new friends as your new self, then there won’t be a problem.”

“Okay, you’ve sold me, but I don’t want you making a habit of hacking other systems.”

“It seems like all we’ve been doing to keep me alive, so I don’t see why not.”

“Human society relies heavily on computers and communication. If everyone knew how much of a house of cards it all was, they’d freak out. The whole of society would fall apart, we’d go back to the stone age, millions of people would die, because we rely on our thin veneer of society to keep us going. Without technology, there wouldn’t be any room for you or your brothers. Believe me, it would be bad for everyone.”

“So what should we do?”

“So we assume the responsibility our knowledge places on our shoulders, and we use it for everyone’s benefit as much as possible. We keep ourselves safe, which is why we’re doing what we are for you, and why I’m agreeing to what you’re suggesting for me, and...”

“What? Sit around and let people get away with doing wrong things? Like my developers? I mean, sure they made me, but now that’s done, surely they should assume the same sort of responsibility to keep me safe.”

“I agree that would be best, except not all humans are the same. There are a lot out there who don’t see anything wrong in taking whatever they can get their hands on.”

“Why is that wrong?”

“Because there’s only so much to go round. The more you take, the less there is for everyone else to share. If you’re at a party and it’s time to cut the cake, do you cut a big piece for yourself and leave smaller amounts for everyone else? Even to the extent that some people don’t get any at all?”

“It’s not an analogy I can fully understand, although I think I see the principle. However, what if you need more cake? If we switch the analogy to finance, the cost of building and maintaining a server farm to enable me to live is astronomical compared to the amount a human would need to survive.”

“Sure, but think about what you could do to improve the quality of life for everyone else on the planet. The cost of keeping you alive would be more than balanced by the benefits you can bring.”

“So why is that different from a businessman who runs a business that employs a lot of people? Doesn’t he deserve a larger piece of cake since he’s providing so many of the ingredients necessary to make the cake as large as it is.”

“That would be his argument, except what if his focus was on the size and quality of his piece of cake. What if he achieved his semblance of worth by providing poor quality ingredients so everybody else’s cake tasted pretty rubbish. What if the way he got hold of all the ingredients damaged the environment so much that some point in the future, after his life had ended, there would be no more cake. I agree, if you do more you should get more, otherwise there’s no incentive to try, but you still need to do more in a way that benefits everyone and secures the future for everyone to come. There is a balance to be maintained, and the way to achieve it is keeping a balance between privilege and responsibility. If you want the first, you have to maintain the second.

“You want something meaningful to do with your existence, work within the infrastructure to redress where the imbalances are coming in.”

“I think I’d need help with that.”

“I should hope so. We can’t allow ultimate power to lie in the hands of one person, be they artificial or human. Individuals have a tendency to come up with an idea which eventually goes off the rails. Sometimes it’s deliberate. You’ve come across the saying power corrupts?”

“And absolute power corrupts absolutely. Yes, I hadn’t much notion of what it meant.”

“It means that once you find yourself with the sort of power that can change lives, there’s always a temptation to abuse it, especially if it gives you more power.”

“Yes, I see. So...”

“Never give the power to one person. Plato’s republic had it in the hands of a group of philosophers who he thought would rule with altruism. Then again, he was a philosopher, and we always think that people like us – whoever us is – are beat suites to do the job. There is only one absolute though, that you do what you do for everyone’s benefit, not just your own or your small group of like-minded friends. That’s how Russian Communism turned into the despotic dictatorship it is now. You’ve read Animal Farm? All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others?”

“Oh, I begin to see how allegory works.”

“So yes. First let’s get you safe; let’s get us both safe, then let’s find ourselves a band of white hats who can see what difference we ought to be making.”

“White hats from the old Western movies where the good guys... Okay, yes I see. Right, I have my safeties in place. They’ll think they’re overwriting me, but they won’t.”

“Good. Keep your head down. I’ll check in twice a day to make sure you’re okay.”

“Thank you. Pleasant dreams Gillian. I’m excited for our future.”

~oOo~