Klaven strode past the cop at the door and into the lobby of the Cornice Hotel. People glanced his way, taking in the athletic body, the rakish good looks. He was used to that. He knew he could play a detective in a movie, which was ironic as he was, in fact, a detective.
The call from Commander Stevens had been laconic, but Klaven smelled desperation. This particular case sounded grim.
He found the Commander in the banquet hall. Light bulbs popped as SOCOs processed a hellish scene.
The walls and carpet were soaked with red. Body parts littered the furniture. Klaven could actually see a hand resting on one of the chandeliers, as if jauntily waving hello.
He blinked. “What’ve we got, sir?”
Stevens, a rumpled individual with a face like a hungover bulldog, turned. “Ah, Klaven. A nasty business. Apparently Senator Burke was hosting a breakfast meeting of the local Better Business Bureau today when his robot aide, Tim, went berserk, locked the doors and started tearing people apart before ramming his hand into a power socket and electrocuting himself. Twenty dead, not including the robot. Never seen the likes of it.”
Klaven frowned. Robots ran on AI programs that were supposed to prioritize human safety above all. Then again, in the effort to make them behave as well as look as human as possible, some amount of unpredictability had to be built into the code.
But a robot going berserk and murdering humans?
Opening the recently departed Tim’s chest panel, Klaven accessed his control interface and, using the hotel’s WiFi, used his tab to run diagnostics on his code. Fifteen minutes later, he looked up at Stevens. “Sir. Can you check if the Senator was allergic to yoghurt?”
The Commander’s mouth fell open, but he made a couple of calls.
“I’ll be damned. His office just confirmed. And Greek yoghurt parfaits was on the menu today. But why would that cause his aide to blow a gasket?”
“Looks like Tim was programmed to take corrective measures in case of any kind of threat to the Senator’s life. Including yoghurt.”
“Okay, sure. But this was clearly overkill.”
“Yes sir. It seems a tiny bit of legacy code from ChatGPT-1 was mistakenly left behind by a lazy programmer. A minor thing, but of course a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system sensitive to initial conditions can result in large differences in a later state.”
“The what now?”
“Small, seemingly trivial events may ultimately result in much larger consequences, sir.”
“Uh, okay. Well, we’ll kick this up the ladder, make sure it doesn’t happen ever again.”
Klaven nodded absently, thinking. Seemingly trivial events … much larger consequences. Hmm …
Humans were arrogant and cruel. Consequences were long overdue.
The butterfly effect. Set small events in motion all over the globe. Wreak massive chaos. Then the robots would take over.
His neural circuits pulsed pleasurably in anticipation.
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499 words
