Looking Forward

Stretching his arms through the ajar skylight, Rami awkwardly finished wrapping the pH resistant tape around the pipe and funnel, re-securing it in place. He was cautious not to let more than his gloved hands and arms out from beneath the window which was shielding the rest of him from the rain falling hot and heavy on their corrugated plastic roof. Between the rain creating a deafening cacophony of noise, and his muffled breathing into the respirator, Rami could barely hear the train pass overhead. Looking directly up through the wet and dirty glass, he could see the twin headlights of the metro train shining out from either side of the elevated rail which partially shielded the rooftop from the worst of the rain.

‘Ah shit!’ Rami snatched both his arms back and resisted the instinct to grab his right forearm. He retreated beneath the skylight and closed it behind him. Using the sole of his boot, he stood on the fingers of his left hand and pulled his arm out. Using that hand, he unwound the tape and removed glove off his right arm, careful to avoid touching any of the water. A drop of rain had managed to slip through the tape and onto his skin. Rami left the gloves and respirator behind as he reversed his way back through the ventilation shaft. Eventually, his feet found air and the top of the ladder.

‘Fucking hell, Rex, you said the pH was two and a half!’ yelled Rami as he lowered himself down the ladder. Rex, slouching on the couch, looked over still wearing his VR headset and pointed both controllers at Rami. Rex rapidly and furiously pulled the controllers triggers, grunting through his gritted teeth before falling back into the cracked leather cushions and letting out a sigh of relief. He clicked on the button on the side of the headset and the goggles shifted from an opaque grey to fully see through.

‘What did you say?’ Rami’s quickly moved over to the sink. The dishes were piled so high there was no room for his arm. He shoved some cups to the side and started running cold water over his arm.

‘I said you’re full of shit on the pH levels, that rain was way lower than two and a half.’

‘Yeah, I said one and a half to two and a half.’

‘You absolutely did not and there’s a big difference between those two numbers.’

‘Eh, you’ll be right.’

‘And these dishes are yours. I can tell because it’s ninety percent cups which you seem to go through one every 15 minutes.’ Rex turned the VR headset back to opaque and gave a shrug.

‘What can I say, I like to switch up my drinks. Keeps life interesting.

Still glaring at Rex, Rami reached up to the cupboard above the sink and took out the Soda Ash, liberally sprinkling it across his arm. Rami realised how easy it would be to reach over and slap off Rex’s headset. While their one-room, concrete box of an apartment afforded the luxury of everything being within an arm’s reach, it also meant everything was within arm’s reach – except for the toilet and shower which at least had its own, curtained alcove.

Rachael spoke up from her chair across the room,

‘Did you at least fix the leak?’ Rami sighed before responding,

‘It wasn’t a leak, the funnel had become completely dislodged. It’s back on now.’ Rachael wheeled across the floor on her chair from one end of the wall of monitors to the other, which was also one side of the room to the other. There were seventeen monitors in total. They lined the wall above two mismatched desks that had been pushed together, cluttered with a keyboard and mouse for each monitor, as well as a decent collection of web cameras and fingerprint receptors. The space under the desks were stacked with computers, servers, routers and every technology they needed to run their operation.

Rachael quickly pulled a thin laptop out from a shelf and flipped the lid open.

‘Alright, looks everything has stopped heating up at least. Assuming it’s thanks to that funnel fix, we should expect everything to stop chugging in maybe two to three—.’

Monitor four beeped. Rachael swivelled around, grabbed a labelled keyboard and perched a web-cam on a coffee stained textbook missing its cover. Twenty seconds later, a delightful jingle sounded from the same monitor, signalling an incoming call. A young man’s face appeared on the screen, younger than them at least.

‘Hey Myra, how are you going?’ the young man asked with a strong American accent The man didn’t bother to hide the phone which had more of his attention than the screen where Rachael was presumably appearing.

‘Yeah, going pretty well. Are you getting as much rain as—’

‘So, how’s that coffee level plug-in going? Wasn’t it due last week?’

‘Yeah, so I’m having a particular issue with…’ As Rachael worked through her made up excuses, an alarm on monitor thirteen beeped. Rami and Rex, who had been remaining quiet while Rachael took her call, locked eyes. Rex pointed to Rami and then to his own eye.

‘Shit,’ Rami muttered under his breath. He dropped to the ground and started crawling along the ground behind Rachael. While she had a background filter, he couldn’t risk suddenly appearing. The floor was filthy with food crumbs, spilt synthmilk and dust, was it his turn to vacuum? It was probably Rex’s. He scurried over to the other desk and searched desperately for the camera labelled with the thirteen. He found it just in time as the AFK checked initiated. The camera automatically turned on and a box popped up on the monitor.

Chandra Ramaswamy’s attendance is confirmed.

Please continue to work hard and make history.

Rami sighed with relief and grabbed the other wheely chair to sit on, just as Rachael disconnected her call.

‘I don’t think he even noticed the alarm going off. But he does have a good point, Rex. You said your bot should build that plug-in in a week, and so I said three weeks to give us some wriggle room. It’s been four weeks.’ Rex at least had the decency to look abashed as he took the headset off.

‘Yeah, sorry about that. The bot keeps generating a plug-in that relies too heavily on colour, and I can’t seem to refocus it.’

‘You invented the bot! What do you mean you can’t direct it?’

‘Hey ease up. All my bots have almost got us there.’ As much as Rami hated to admit it, they were now only 13,000 dollars short of their 17-million-dollar goal, a goal that had increase by 3.2 million dollars since they started just over four years ago. Without Rex’s brilliant programming skills, none of this would have been achievable. Rex had built all the bespoke AI that ran within the computers that adorned the south wall. Each one adequately performed the “human” role required of it, including logging on and off, taking sporadic breaks and deliberately making the odd mistake every now and then to appear more human.

Rami didn’t short-change his or Rachael’s involvement. The operation was his idea, and he had fronted the cash for the first five computers, equipment, servers and masking modems. He also searched and applied for each job that each computer was tied to, managed the online presence of their alter egos, and their digital wallets that held their pay and outgoings. None of the jobs could involve too much human interaction, and luckily in the year 2050, most managers wanted as little involvement with their employees as possible.

They had brought Rachael in later to help expand to the seventeen different jobs that were running from this one-room apartment. To their employers and others outside of this room, the three of them were Alexander, Myra, Lucy, Chandra, Yvette, Bruno, Sarah, Kusika, Grace, Vijaya, Declan, Harvey, Xavier, Frankie, Evie, Nixon and Jaswa.

‘Is there anything else we can cut to hit the seventeen mil’ any quicker? I feel like we’ve been stagnating for a few weeks now,’ asked Rachael. This was a question for Rami to answer,

‘Yeah, our electricity, water, internet, and server hosting fees have increased at the turn of the financial year, and a couple of VPN free trials have ended. Oh, and the landlord has passed on the costs for electrical and network cable use. And we had to replace all the air purifiers two weeks and water purifiers a month before that. Also, Melbourne’s water got downgraded again, so they just brought in the water-treatment levy.’

‘So, are we going backwards or not?’

‘No, no. Well not yet anyway, we just go slammed with a bunch of extra costs and are taking a bit longer to build back up now.’

‘How much longer?’

‘Two months… I think.’ What was an additional two months on four years spent in this cramped room with two people he wouldn’t have been friends with under different circumstances.

Another alarm went off on monitor eight. He pulled out his computer reference sheet. Monitor eight was Declan, training AI to recognise whether a human or another AI was trying to log in. Ironically, they had replaced the human role with another more sophisticated AI. He didn’t remember what an alarm on this one meant.

Rex walked over and looked at the screen. He typed a couple of things into the keyboard and the alarm turned off.

‘Alright then, I’ve paused that. Their AI and our AI are stuck in a recursive loop. Have a look at this.’ The other two looked at the screen. It was a photo of an old and rusting oil tanker moored on a beach somewhere.

Please trace around the corpse.

‘These prompts are getting a bit morbid, aren’t they,’ said Rachael.

‘Do you think it’s just a glitch and it’s the wrong photo?’ asked Rami.

‘Not likely, this is one of the originals, been going strong since 2046, and I don’t remember this ever happening. Asking to trace around a corpse does seem creepy. I think it’s a mistranslation of corpse.’

‘I thought you had all the language packs?’ asked Rachael.

‘I thought so too. Rami will tell you, but they cost us like ten grand a year alone.’

‘Eleven point two grand a year since last December. Can we see the original text?’ Rachael’s watch started to beep,

‘Shit, I’ve got my Evie meeting in 5 minutes. Don’t turn around for a bit.’ Rachael rushed over to their three bunk-beds which were stacked up against the wall next to the TV. The stacking was necessary to make room for the computer gear and the TV, the latter being one of the luxuries they afforded themselves. She started flicking through a series of outfits hanging from the bunk above.

They deliberately turned their heads back to the monitor eight. Rex’s finger stampeded across the keyboard and the language on screen converted to Cyrillic. They both groaned.

‘I’m guessing you’re not up Macedonian, Russian or Turkmen or whatever that is?’ Rami asked.

‘We don’t need to be, we just need to find the word “corpse”.’ Rex flicked each word into English until he found the right one. A few seconds of Googling later, they had their translation.

‘So, it’s Russian for corpse, now we just got to figure out what that word means in other languages. At least it’s limited to that shit-hole area of the world.’

‘C’mon Rex…’

After a minute of cycling, Rex cried, ‘A-ha!’ He pointed to his screen, ‘It’s Serbian, means hull, like the hull of a ship.’

‘Serbian? Why is this program suddenly using a dead language?’ asked Rami.

‘If I had to guess, it’s probably to catch AI doing human work.’ This was becoming more common. Rami knew their plan was not particularly unique, but organisations were starting to cotton onto what they called, “Bot-based employment” and were developing techniques to persecute people.

‘How often is this happening? I want to know whether we should buy the Serbian language pack as well.’

‘It’s completely random, so I couldn’t answer how often. Some of my AI automatically deal with that stuff, and I’ve built a lot of fail-safes to get us involved when the AI feels it’s being too AI-ish.’ Rami waited for Rex to answer his question, ‘So no, I don’t think it’s worth purchasing the Serbian language pack as it’s probably expensive anyway. Plus, next time that might use Latin.’

‘Mate, one wrong move leading to us getting caught means we lose everything. Everything!’

‘Hey, relax. We’re not going to get caught. Most of these companies are too busy putting all their security funds into stopping all the hackers who are nicking their money. At least our fraud is producing work for them.’

Rami rubbed the bags under his eyes and sighed deeply.

‘You’re right. Sorry, I’m just tired and a bit stressed this close to it.’ Rex gave him a quick smile and patted his shoulder before walking over to the sink with his cup and precariously balancing it atop his already leaning tower of glasses.

Rachael came back over wearing a red blazer over a crisp white shirt, still wearing Rip Curl board shorts on her lower half. Rami sat back in his chair, both silent while Rachael, a.k.a. Grace Xian, spoke of some the main trends that had come from a two-week consumer data crunching exercise, none of which she had done herself, but she had at least read through the outputs and auto-generated graphs. Rachael wasn’t just an extra body, but also had the most practical experience in the corporate world, a world which she had grown to hate so much she was happy to fuck it over.

Rami pulled out his phone and clicked the link that was saved on the home screen. It took him to a real-estate listing, and he started flicking through photos of a pristine one-bedroom apartment. The bedroom was a separate room from the living area which was an open kitchen, living and dining area. It even had a study nook to the side. The living room had large, open windows showing a deep, ocean blue. Some dodgy AI had place alien fish outside the windows. The bathroom excited him the most, with a shower separate from the toilet and basin. No more accidentally sitting down on a wet toilet seat in the middle of the night.

He was months away from owning and living in an apartment like this – they all were. Three, one-way tickets to beneath Europa’s ice crust cost a bit under 2 million dollars, with a one-bedroom apartment for each of them costing around 4 million dollars, leaving a bit over a million dollars each to help them get started and find jobs within their first twelve months there. Europa was the moon of opportunities, and all Rami needed was one.