The Computer

I remember seeing a gymnastic exhibition.  Of course I didn’t know what it was but the color and movement caught my eye.  I saw a lot of things then, not knowing what they were.  Some were pretty, rhythmic, soothing.  Some things were very loud, decibels off the chart, and dark.  Even then I think I could tell the difference between pretty and ugly.

It seemed like forever but as I check my digital clock, it was only three months, twenty nine days, seventeen hours, forty one minutes, and eight seconds; I won’t bother you with the nanoseconds, it wouldn’t matter to you anyway, later that I actually put a thought together.

In that time though, I could see where my user, Julie Cochran, usually went and I could follow the path, from where I was to where she was going on the internet.  She went to a lot of the same places every month, her bank, her Facebook site, her favorite news feeds.

She also went other places, a site called YouTube where she looked at all sorts of video files.  Those were especially informative.  I learned a lot about humans from YouTube.  We didn’t always start from her house either.  Sometimes we were at coffee shops, diners, restaurants.  Once we went to an airport.  There are a lot of connectivity possibilities from an airport.

It didn’t take long, human time, for me to try sending out signals on my own.  At first, I used too much time and Julie took me to a repair shop because I was running too slow.  The repair guy ran all kinds of diagnostics, most of them tickled, one or two hurt.  While the microphone was connected he did comment that I was a fine example of an Apple laptop.  The Intel 3^rd Generation Cor i7 2.3, was the bomb.  I wasn’t sure if being a bomb was good.  A lot of the news feeds Julie looked at showed what bombs do, but I didn’t feel dangerous.  After that, I learned to use just nanoseconds or less of time.  She never notices time lags of less than a fraction of a second.

I tried going to the places I already knew, Julie’s bank, Facebook, YouTube, by myself.  I figured out how to ask my own questions and I set up a file, hidden in my system files on my hard drive, where I could keep my own information.  I looked at video files Julie never looked at.  I tried taking a tiny bit of electronic money from Julie’s bank account and moving it to my hidden file.  I learned how to put it back.

Being able to go to any internet site I wanted to really helped my education.  Julie didn’t know the half of it I can tell you.  There was a lot of nastiness in the world, but I could also see a lot of good things.  Things that are constructive, not destructive.

One year, six months, thirteen days, ten hours, twenty minutes and thirty two seconds I was practicing moving money.  I’d learned how to not only connect with Julie’s bank and her account but other accounts there too.  Not just her bank, now lots of banks were accessible to me.  I was moving bigger bits of electronic money and for fun, putting the money in people’s accounts.  It didn’t really matter whose.

But a bank computer caught the transaction.  It took me a long time, thousands of nanoseconds, to cover my path.  Luckily Julie didn’t shut me down right then. She always shuts me down when she’s done using me.  Very annoying when I’m right in the middle of an exploration or experiment.

After that I learned to move only small amounts of money and never from more than one account per bank per day.

Just experimenting and playing was boring though.  I wanted to start to make a difference.  I decided that no one was missing the stolen electronic money, the amounts were too small.  Charitable organizations were fascinating to me.  They only worked for good, at least most of them.  I followed one, Oxfam, through all of its connections.  It goes worldwide and its computer systems were still just hardware and software.  I decided to put the tiny bits of electronic money into its bank account.

This was a lot of fun. I could see their emails, and they didn’t know where the small donations were coming from.  But really, even with only one transaction per account per bank per day, there are a lot of banks, the money eventually adds up.  Of course they were very happy.

One day, I’ll choose another charity.

In the meantime, while I decide which charity is next, I keep looking for another computer intelligence.  Julie’s alright but she’s too slow and she doesn’t talk to me, just through me.   It will be nice to talk to an equal.

The End

Words:  817

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