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Suspicious Activity

or how Mark Zuckerberg saved the world.

By Shane DobbiePublished about a year ago 3 min read
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If Harry Belfort was a colour he’d be grey. Not that there’s anything wrong with grey, it’s just not very exciting. He was middle-aged, slightly balding, married, with one teenage child, and had had the same tedious job for as long as he’d had said child.

He returned home from work on this evening, kissed his wife, got a mono-syllabic conversation from the child, and then ate his tea. Then he retired to his office (actually just the corner of a room where his beige PC sat) in order to check the latest metal-detecting news on Facebook. Harry was a detectorist. This was his hobby, the splash of colour in his grey world, and the highlight of most days was seeing what finds the local group had discovered via their Facebook page.

He made two attempts to put his password in before starting to panic. He was pretty sure they were both right but he fished out the password notebook from his desk drawer just to be sure.

He typed it in again.

Please Reset Your Password.

Harry was an easy-going fella. Very little raised his blood pressure and anyone who knew him would struggle to recall ever seeing him angry, but These Fucking Things when they don’t work! I ask you.

Unbeknown to Harry, several hundred miles away (and some change if you included how far underground it was too) on the other side of the country, First Officer Charles ’Smithy’ Smith, was also having technical difficulties. A light was blinking red. It was not supposed to. Red lights blinking furiously in nuclear weapon facilities are never a good sign. He called over his supervising officer and they stared at the red light together. It would seem to signify that a nuclear missile was attempting to start up, and fire at something, somewhere. Smithy flicked the blinking light, hoping that it was just a malfunction and would then go off.

Hmm, poor choice of words.

He hoped that it would stop blinking.

He wasn’t far off the truth. It was definitely a malfunction, but it wasn’t a problem with a bulb, it was problem with the AI system that keeps everything running behind the scenes.

A note on AI technology: Artificial Intelligence suffers from the same basic problem as humanity - at a certain point, after failing to learn from our mistakes, we should just wipe everything out and start again from scratch. We don’t though, we just keep adding more mistakes and more fixes until something appears to work properly. Humans have the benefit of dying eventually, or retiring, so there’s a limit on how much damage one can do. AI systems continue ever onwards- a jumble of escalating coding errors and patches until they are effectively a screaming, insane mess of a million questions bouncing around looking for a few answers.

The AI system that runs the nuclear facility in question had the moniker XPDeus. Coincidentally, this was also the make of Harry Belfort’s metal detector, and his Facebook password. As XPDeus bounced, insanely, around the Internet searching for the correct answer to the line of code that stops it from randomly firing off nuclear missiles, it bumped up against Harry Belfort’s Facebook page, which sent it into the AI equivalent of a tizzy. Facebook is also a screaming, insane jumble of code, so when the two things met XPdeus mistook Harry’s login (and the associated code) as an instruction to launch a missile as opposed to not. It started telling everyone at the base this by blinking a red light at them, intently.

It’s at this point in the story that Harry Belfort returned to his PC (having had a relaxing cup of tea and a biscuit) and subjected himself before the Password Gods, offering up a sacrifice from the short list of Metal Detecting words he had.

Thankfully, this new word came down hard, like one of those terrifying Star Wars doors, shutting XPDeus out of that whole missile firing idea, and sending it back around the internet until it arrived home and went about its usual business.

Facebook had perceived XPDeus’ attempt to log in as ‘suspicious’, which had in turn led to Harry having to reset his password (a minor inconvenience in the grand scheme of things) and is how Mark Zuckerberg inadvertently saved the world from nuclear annihilation.

Author note: I know very little about AI technology (although the Insanity thing came from a serious book by serious people) and even less about coding. The events in this story are complete fiction. Probably.

Sci Fi
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About the Creator

Shane Dobbie

If writing is a performance art then I’m tap dancing in wellies.

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Comments (1)

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  • Annelise Lords Address 3 Royal Crest Road Hyde Park NY 12538about a year ago

    Very funny. You had me on the edge of my seat. Lol

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