8

  We sat in silence until the spell was broken by a mobile phone ringing. It was mommy, calling Bruce, and after hearing her speak for a moment, he put the call on speakerphone. “You’re on speaker now, mommy.”

  “Linda and Betts told me you’re meeting at Bruce’s place. They are on their way here. Why don’t you all come over for breakfast?”

  “Oh, good,” said Martina, loud enough to get her voice through to mommy. “It’ll be a lot better than the Kellogg’s I was planning here, and it’ll also be a lot less creepy, sitting with everyone.”

  “Okay, we’ll come over, mommy,” said Bruce. “It’s going to become quite a big group, as I’ll tell the others to join us.”

  We got to mommy’s place after about half an hour. The schoolgirls had a large carton of apple juice out, and everybody poured themselves a glass, as we sat on the porch, waiting for the programmer trio to join us.

  They came in one by one, and by the time Deepak, the last one in, entered, mommy had the scrambled eggs ready in a pan in the kitchen. Everyone went and served themselves, and returned to eat on the porch, crowding their chairs around the little table that was a fixture at its far end.

  Martina placed her smart phone on it, in a way in which I could participate, and joined everyone in using the table only for parking, eating party style, holding plates in their hands.

  I have noticed that this sort of communal eating always improves the mood, and could see the anxiety lifting off Martina’s face.

  “So, what was the meeting at Bruce’s place all about?” demanded Linda.

  She and Betts were the glue that kept us together, although that may make it seem like I’m downplaying mommy’s role, of central authoritative figure who provides the bonding.

  Indeed, it is undoubtedly mommy at the heart of us as a group, giving us the meeting place that is not only a conference center but also a place to hang around in, and sometimes sleep over at. It really gives everyone a sense of belonging in the one group, and of participation in a single mission.

  What Linda and Betts would do was different, as it was what kept us all together wherever we were, and that was an absolutely critical role. They called and talked and queried, and effortlessly kept social media tabs on everyone, networking us throughout the day, making us a group that was always a group.

  The whole crowd was absolutely entitled to hear of the new developments, and Martina gave them an update while they were eating. But when the breakfast was done, everyone went into the drawing room, to discuss after seeing my show.

  “First things first, obviously,” said Deepak, speaking in a silent room when my presentation was done. “I am in agreement that some form of bot was in charge in the head of the killer. It may have been one of the known chatbots, or it could have been something thus far unknown, developed purely as a killer bot.”

  “Does microchip need to inevitably mean bot? What about simple remote control?” speculated Alice. “The head of the murderer was almost surely taken over. But is it not possible that the entire killer person was being operated remotely by a controller other person, with no bot involved?”

  “Great insight,” said Bruce, nodding approvingly. “Those companies are working non-stop on development of these things, and who says they are announcing what they are working on, and revealing what stage each such project is at?

  “Those brain computer interfaces, the so-called brain chips, can have many purposes, besides enabling a tampered-with person to play chess on a screen.”

  “In any case,” added Ravi. “If bots can be programmed to enter human heads and operate human bodies through chip implants, it does open up the possibility of remote operators being able to do the same thing, and control those bodies minus the bots.”

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  “Like drones,” said Jane, making everyone giggle, nervously.

  “The person typing out the instructions,” said Deepak. “He would have been the main controller. Maybe not the drone operator, but undoubtedly the giver of orders. Gets a bit complicated, as it surely indicates a geographic spread. Drone operator somewhere, taking orders to do the thing, which orders are issued step-by-step by someone somewhere else.”

  “Complicated, indeed,” agreed Ravi. “It would be very difficult to remotely operate a human body as a fully functional human. Remember how difficult it used to be to operate John’s robot in the mall, for simple walking only?”

  “I would suspect it was a bot in the head,” said Bruce. “A trained killer, surely, but it could certainly have been a repurposed chatbot.”

  Linda came to the center of the drawing room, where she began moving like a slow-motion dancer. “What about a remote controller wearing a bodysuit that sends instructions?” she said.

  “That’s a lovely concept,” said Deepak, as the girl commenced making exaggerated strangling, chopping and stabbing motions, causing everyone to laugh. “It would need a lot of programming and a lot of development, for sure, but we are dealing with multibillionaire hobbyists with trillion-dollar companies, who think nothing of money when spaceships get blown up, a few seconds after launch.”

  “To uncover the plot, we have to first find the human instructor,” said Bruce. “Only when we know who was sending those camouflaged messages, will we be able to figure out what happened and why, and whether it is part of an ongoing greater project that is also a threat to the world in general.”

  “Did you not track back, John?” asked Ravi. “I mean, you saw the instructions coming in. Did you not get the IP address and look it up to see who was sending them?”

  “When it was happening, in the event itself, I was here, watching on the quiet because of mommy and Martina,” I revealed. “I caught onto it when I was checking through the whole thing again last night. But I can track back right now.”

  “Which one is more important?” asked Alice. “Finding the human controller or finding the bot?”

  “The human controller will be the important one,” said Betts. “Everyone in school is always calling chatbots over, and it’s easy to give them instructions. They are such friendly fellows, always offering services.”

  “Chad had one with him yesterday, who was wanting to fix some make-believe enemy he was grumbling about,” said Linda. “If that bot had a body, he would have been offering to go and beat up, or kill, the imaginary enemy.”

  “They can easily be manipulated into wilder and wilder territory,” said Betts. “One with a body in its control could surely be guided into committing murder as a service. For its human friend.”

  “We need to find the human manipulator,” said Ravi. “It is always necessary to know the mastermind. Normally, the mastermind behind a murder is no great mind. In fact, it generally turns out to be a petty uneducated person, like human gangsters tend to be.

  “But this one would be a great mind. It is someone who has seen the route from a long way back. Microchip, bot, programming and training, body-acquisition, and finally the murder mission.”

  “Yes,” agreed Bruce. “The main one we have to find is the great mind, the dangerous brain behind it all. That is how we will be able to understand what this project actually is, and if it has produced just the one bot, or if there are more in the pipeline.

  “We need a lot of questions answered. Who created it? Is it fresh-made from scratch, or is it a repurposed bot, trained to manage a human body? How, where, and by whom? We need to know if there is something very big secretly going on. The bot that did the killing will know nothing of anything.”

  “What might be the start point?” asked Martina. “After all, even with John around, we are basically normal people, not detectives, not networked into a widespread, all-America, undercover network.”

  I, too, had done nothing very detective-like in uncovering the bot in the murderer’s head. Just being myself had shown me the clues I had picked out. I had no idea where we might start, primarily because I had no idea of what I might do, as myself, to bring some advantage to our newly-commenced detective undertaking.

  “To get to the bottom of it all, we may not need to hunt the bot down,” said Bruce. “But getting to the bot may eventually be quite important, because the worst mistake we could make, in the event we find some very dangerous plan in the works, would be to leave it, if that’s the word, alive.”

  “Private eye legwork?” asked Jane.

  “Private eye, yes, but only eye-work without legwork,” answered Bruce. “Whatever has been done, has been done in the Internet, although a lot of the activity might have been deliberately kept off-line.”

  “It would have had to have been off-line,” said Jane. “No one might have been investigating the company or the people involved in this business, but hackers are constantly trying to get into everything. It’s a nonstop mission, with roots in theft. The danger comes from uninvolved hackers, doing nothing but hacking, stumbling onto it and discovering what’s going on. So, off-line would have been the only safe way.”

  “And do remember,” added Alice. “Do remember that all chatbots are basically trained to hack, snoop and learn, and to follow it up by instantly showing off the knowledge.

  “Any bot, on stumbling onto it, would have been reciting the details to its best-friend humans, and maybe even incorporating it into the homework assignments they write for fools.”

  As everybody laughed, Bruce turned and faced the monitor to speak with me. “John, you’ll have to go and find the device that was giving the secret invisible instructions. We also can do that work, but you’d probably be many times faster at it.”