Israel Book Shop presents Chapter 14 of a new online serial novel, If Anyone Is Listening, by Esther Rapaport. Check back for a new chapter every week. Click here for previous chapters.
Copyright © Israel Bookshop Publications.
“I don’t understand what you want to pay me for,” Shimmy said. “A compensation of sorts?”
“I want to understand how you were able to cause this bug in it.”
“Which bug?”
Yang Yang sighed. “Christopher is the beta edition of the next generation of robots. The beta edition can sometimes have glitches, but the degree of problems that cropped up when he encountered you was higher than expected.”
“Yes, I remember them very well,” Shimmy affirmed darkly.
“And the biggest bug is that it suddenly does not compute basic instructions that are sent to it. It’s functioning completely independently, and it hasn’t returned to us since then. It looks like there’s been a program lock on a mistaken object.”
“I’m the mistaken object?” No one ever said that Shimmy’s brain wasn’t sharp enough. All the things that had been told to him and his father over the years, regarding his scholastic performance, always referred to his willpower, effort, or interest. But somewhere deep down, Shimmy had always felt that no one had ever really understood him.
“Yes, you,” the Chinaman, robotically translated, affirmed. But Shimmy felt that there was still something here that he wasn’t sufficiently grasping.
“What does that actually mean?”
“It locked on you as a significant target for surveillance, and all my programming experts have not been able to get it to come back to us. Since then, it’s hovering in the area, as an independent robot, and it is not returning to its owners.”
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