7

  Martina became active next morning at her usual time, and sat up in bed to sip at her morning cup of tea.

  “Were you here, guarding me as I told you to?” she asked, taking the phone into her hand and eyeballing me on its screen.

  “Yes. I haven’t even moved from my post for my morning shower,” I said, making her giggle.

  She is so stunningly beautiful that I had passed much of the rest of the night actually looking at her, as I often do. She sleeps with a light sheet for cover, and though the face is enchanting enough, I often wish I had the physical body to move the covering off her. How I longed to know her as a human lover might know her!

  She immediately called Bruce, sure that he would be already up and about, as he is, by and large, an early bird.

  “John has been doing some private research on the murder yesterday,” she said. “The guy with the head in his hands and the chip in his head. We are coming over for breakfast. Nothing much. Kellogg’s and cream or milk will do. And coffee. Just make sure Ravi is also around.”

  That was it, and though she could have conducted the meeting by conferencing through an app, she drove us over to Bruce’s place.

  We sat together on his porch, with me moving to the laptop he brought out and placed on the plastic table.

  “I’m going to listen and be involved,” said Martina. “John, just make sure that no bot is snooping around and listening, to convey the information later to its masters.”

  “That serious?” asked Ravi.

  “It’s terrifying,” said Martina, giving her shoulders a theatrical shiver. “John says the headjob murder was committed by a chatbot.”

  “What!” exclaimed Bruce and Ravi together.

  “John,” said Ravi. “You are not known for talking crap, which is why we’re going to give you a very attentive hearing.”

  “And you are to commence the telling with first things first,” said Bruce. “We’ll figure out how later, and also all the unimaginable complex details, or try to if we can. But we are going to start with you telling us what makes you sure you have detected a bot in charge of the body that conducted the murder.”

  “That’s what you’re saying, aren’t you?” said Ravi. “That a bot, maybe chatbot or maybe another type of bot, was inside the murderer’s head, and in control of the body while the murder was being committed. Yes?”

  “Yes,” I confirmed.

  “Overriding any objections of the resident human…” said Bruce, thoughtfully. “Which would mean that the murder action, the physical stuff, was actually conducted by a bot. Completely.”

  “Go ahead then, John, tell us your findings,” said Ravi.

  “We’ll have to review the entire murder from the beginning,” I said, needing to manage Martina’s presence and involvement. “Martina, you need not look at the screen, except in the non-bloody parts. I will anyway be describing, speaking out what we are seeing, so you’ll know exactly which part of the show we are at.”

  She looked gratefully at me, and repositioned her chair. “This segment is from the mobile phone feed,” I said. “From when they are on the road, so you can peep if you want.

  “I am using the compilation footage later posted on social media, not entirely the original live murder feed that was sent out exclusively from the cameras inside the room.

  “This is the CCTV view, showing the victim on the road, walking to the house. It has since been confirmed that he is going to a property he owns and lives in. He would stay alone, being a sort of maladjusted loner type. It is now also known that he was an unemployed person, living off Social Security, and presumably passing much of the day at home.”

  The compilation switched back and forth between the killer’s camerawork, showing the view of the victim trudging in front, and the later-released CCTV feeds from various street-surveillance cameras, which often had both players in the same screen.

  “His head,” I informed, when the victim was alone on screen. “Although unfortunately separated from his body at the time, the victim’s head was placed in the scanner, and it was confirmed that his one was free of foreign objects, like microchips. Which means bot did not kill bot. Bot definitely killed human.”

  They were silent when I resumed the murder footage, listening raptly to me speak, Martina clutching the phone in which she would carry me around.

  “A little rerun,” I continued, restarting the published footage. “Here, at the start, we see the young man who is to become the murderer, walking to the victim’s house. There is something slightly peculiar in the walk, but it did not figure in leading to the deductions that I will now tell you, because those deductions were made subsequent to the information that the murderer had a microchip implanted in his head.

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  “Observe the walk in the CCTV footage. Can you see it? Notice the momentary hesitation in the forward movement of his left leg, which hesitation pulls the leg in, making him walk as if marginally pigeon-toed in the one leg.

  “Watch. I am slowing it down and marking the point at which the hesitation commences. There. Now, this little imbalance in his walk is something he corrects every second step, purposefully sending the leg out to the side, walking slightly wide, and that in-and-out, from the straight-and-narrow, is spoiling what would have otherwise been a normal gait. But this very small aberration might be noticeable to only me, not to a regular human.”

  “Are you saying that a computer program is making him walk?” asked Ravi.

  “I’m not yet saying any such thing, Ravi. Deductions will be made jointly with both of you. Right now, I am trying to prove, without any doubt, that there was some form of bot inside the murderer’s head, all the way through the entire episode.”

  “So, you are saying that this walk pattern, which is not noticeable to regular humans like us, is absolutely repetitive,” observed Bruce. “And you are saying that such repetitiveness, like clockwork, indicates that a program is at work. Right?”

  Maybe it looked like something very thin to base any assumption on, because Martina intervened. “That’s not open-and-shut, John. Surely there must be something more for you to say, with such certainty, that we are looking at a man with a bot inside him. In charge of him.”

  “Oh, absolutely. I am just going chronologically through the events, following the sequence of what those people have recorded and uploaded to the Internet, which is how it sequentially played out.”

  “This is getting interesting,” commented Martina. “Although it is also getting more frightening.”

  I let the recording move forward at normal speed, and we were soon at the point where the victim had been made unconscious by the sickening blow on his forehead with the paving brick.

  “It was all going out live,” I said. “Somewhere to the side of them is the laptop, with its camera focused on the action, and in front is the smart phone the killer had carried in with him, and had himself positioned with its camera on. Absolutely panoramic view of the action was captured between the two cameras. You can look, Martina. I’ll tell you before showing the murder again.”

  I now focused on the laptop screen, with the thousands of text messages coming in, so fast that the lines of text were scrolling at a speed unable to be read by any human.

  “Absolutely crazy number of nutcases,” remarked Bruce. “It went on long enough, and by the end they estimate that more than a million viewers were involved.”

  “But only a couple of dozen thousand were messaging,” I noted. “Still a lot, and extremely fast incoming.”

  I stopped the scrolling, and Martina read out aloud. “Stab the bastard through the eye. Just imagine the sickness. Spit a glob into his open mouth, and look at that one, piss into his mouth.

  “Really sick, asking for further vile abuse, when he’s already killing the man. And, just imagine, this is supposed to be common uninvolved public, and that too from other places, and maybe even other countries.

  “Humans are sick. It proves that social media is a place for people with shared mental illnesses to find each other.”

  I now let the text feed run at regular speed. “See the rate at which the suggestions are coming in?” I asked. “It’s just scrolling continuously. Looks like a jumble, doesn’t it?

  “But let me stop it here, right here. See that line I am highlighting? This one. Lop off his penis and stuff it in his mouth. And now, look at the line that came in after it. Feed him his testicles. Make him swallow them before he’s too far gone to gulp them down.”

  “Really foul stuff of mentally diseased people,” said Bruce, nodding at Martina, in agreement.

  “Notice something unusual in those two lines?” I asked.

  “I’m sure many more similar suggestions have come in,” said Ravi. “Anything unusual in that?”

  “You won’t be able to spot it,” I said. “It looks like just more of the same to the human eye, I would imagine.”

  “That it does,” confirmed Ravi, nodding. “All the same. More of the same. But to your eye?”

  “It’s different, Ravi. I can see something else. The spacing between those lines is just a little more than the spacing between any other two lines. It is really the difference of a fine line, finer than a hairline. Let me show you.”

  I removed the invisibility, and a fine straight line showed up between the two competing vile suggestions, regarding which part of the victim’s genitals should be first stuffed into his mouth.

  “Oh! I see,” exclaimed Bruce.

  “Let me magnify now,” I said, and immediately expanded the line, to the point that it ceased to be a line - and became text!

  ambar. use knife. slice through neck and cut down. halt at bone.

  “That’s exactly what was done to the man,” said Bruce. “John, now show us the timeline.”

  As Martina covered her eyes with her hands, I set it up to show them the killing action, while superimposing the scrolling text in real-time.

  The killer was absolutely in step with the secret instruction!

  “Next command is where he turns him over, and then severs the head, by hitting the back of the knife with the brick,” I said.

  Placing the instruction on the screen, I again superimposed it to show text and action together. ambar. turn him over onto his face., and the man was immediately turned over.

  I continued showing the sequence of instructions, followed obediently by precise compliance. ambar. lift the head up. show cut in neck to camera. position knife to complete the decapitation. ambar. halt. not by body weight. hit back of knife with brick. separate the head.

  “And, of course, we can now confirm that there was a bot inside the murderer,” said Ravi.

  “How?” asked Martina, peeping through her fingers. “Looks the same to me.”

  “Oh, it’s absolutely clear. But John, show us another one first.”

  I took the disgusting show forward, and coordinated the superimposition of text with the action, showing the killer getting another instruction, via an invisible line of text.

  ambar. pick up head by hair. now go to the door.

  Martina, although not at all looking at the vileness on the screen, was staying abreast with what I was showing, as I kept reading and speaking it out, all of it already known to her through graphic descriptions in news reports.

  “So, tell me, Ravi,” she asked. “Tell me what makes you sure there is a bot inside the murderer. Looks normal to me. Disgusting normal, I mean.”

  “Elementary, my dear Martina,” said Ravi, grinning, as Bruce nodded in concurrence. “It is taking the instructions as they are being given. Following exactly.”

  “How does that confirm there’s a bot involved?” demanded Martina.

  “It’s elementary, my dear Martina, as Ravi has said,” laughed Bruce. “The killer guy is taking his instructions as soon as they are being delivered on screen in real time.”

  “But what proves it is a bot?” demanded Martina.

  Ravi gave her the reasoning. “Martina, the proof that it is a bot conducting the murder, is that it is taking the instructions without reading them, without looking at any screen.

  “The murderer is inside the computer!”